p.s. Hey. Two different readers of the blog have recently asked me to reprint this very old post from the days when the blond/redhead extinction scare was in play and this place was simpler. I've added in the subsequent debunks for accuracy's sake, which kind of neuters and mucks up the scariness of the original post, however. So I'm not sure what it adds up to now, but there you go. Also, blog-wise, know that tomorrow morning I start heading back to Paris. What this means is that there won't be an interactive p.s. tomorrow, just a hey and an introduction to Wednesday's post. Thanks to magic of time zone differences, there won't be a new post here on Thursday since I won't get back to my Parisian pad, i.e. the internet until late morning that day, at which point I will fall lifeless and brain dead onto my bed. So after tomorrow's post, the blog will take a day off and return full force plus some jet lag-related whining, no doubt, on Friday. Does that make sense? ** Esther Planas, Hey, E. Yeah, I must have missed your comment. Sometimes with very late breaking ones, I do. I'll go into nesting/writing mode when I get back to Paris. Enjoy yours, and I'll try to do the same. ** Bollo, Like You-x, I love the sound of those performances you do. Very in the realm that I flock to. Are there are any documentations of the past ones anywhere? ** David Ehrenstein, Mm, okay, I'll try saying the menu words. I was thinking of going in the opposite direction and pretending I'm deaf and dumb, but you're right. 'Non Ma Fille, Tu N'iras pas Danser' had just been released as I was getting ready to head to the States, and I'm hoping it'll still be in at least one theater when I get back. I haven't really heard too much about it, buzz-wise, just some TV preview/hype stuff with clips and interviews. It looked really good to me, but I'm a Honore fan as you know. I'll see it, hopefully, or at least see what I can find out for you and me both upon my return. Oh, and thanks a lot for your permission on the photos. I'll find/create a good context here. ** JW Veldhoen, I was in and out of Florida in a flash. All I can really say is that the airport isn't anything special. Ha ha, actually, I get from 8 to 12 spam emails almost precisely like that one every single day. People say it's a particularly gmail plaguing problem. I just know that one of these days I'm going to knee jerk delete the real thing. ** Mark Gluth, Yeah, I hope Bjork cried in the, uh, good way. She didn't punch Gisele, if that means anything. Oh, how great of you to set up that Haiti relief buying plan on the book. Let me ... Everyone, I think you know the new book in my Little House on the Bowery series is Mark Gluth's amazing first novel 'The Late Work of Margaret Kroftis'. Well, you can buy the book, get it personally inscribed, and simultaneously help out re: the Haiti earthquake disaster by buying it from Mark directly -- the information on how to do that is right here -- because he will be donating the proceeds from these particular sales to Haitian earthquake relief. There were only seven copies left as of yesterday, so move fast. Great idea, Mark, and thanks a lot. ** SYpHA_69, The desert is really good for isolation and for a silence beyond silence. ** Misanthrope, I can't decide if it's cool or not cool that Bernard Butler seems to have refused to do the Suede reunion gig. Yeah, I mean, it's basically a 'selling out for the money' situation, but to do only one or two gigs and thus make the hardcore fans excited, what's the harm? I didn't even realize it was MLK Day yesterday until last night. Shows you how much this little Southern town gives a shit. ** Gjvnyc, Hey, man! It's really nice to see you. Thanks so much about 'Jerk'. I'm really glad you dug it, and that's very kind. Jonathan's incredible, right? I still don't know how he's able to do that every night. Great about your play hopefully going up in May. Maybe I'll get lucky and get to catch this one. Any news on that front would be most welcome. Take care, sir. ** Stan_cz, Good, good, good, about the apartment. That was pretty quick, all things considered. How much of your stuff did you bring with you? I imagine you being a deliberately few material possessions kind of guy. ** Steevee, My guess is having the Satanist stuff so on the surface takes the fun out of it for those guys. It would be interesting if they or someone tried to decode serious Black Metal for signs that it was secretly goody-goody or something. ** Oscar B, Lucky guess on the restaurant. I ate there a few months ago is why. Great you finally got to the magic museum. Very sweet, right? And I love that basement: the arched ceiling and columns and, of course, that it was originally Sade's. Things are very good here, yeah, and, whoa, I'll see you in just over two days! ** Adjoun, I'd have trouble putting all the fifty states in the right place, maybe even the Southern ones. The coasts are easy, but when it gets to where, say, Idaho and Ohio exactly lie, I go vague too. ** _Black_Acrylic, Freaking, right. So all those definitions of jack would work then. Nice. Wow, the Morrissey/Diana thing, ha ha. Thanks! Everyone, via _Black_Acrylic, The Diana-Morrissey Phenomenon. Surely I need say no more. ** Alan, Hey. I've had a few conversations with people who didn't get that Jonathan's nerves and shy, charming stuff at the beginning was a sociopathic structural device, and even when I explained how that worked, they haven't believed me. Weird, but I'm pretty familiar by now with how some people can't and won't accept the idea that content like 'Jerk's' can or should be complexly modulated. Yeah, I don't think the negative reviews ended up having much impact at all. By now, I just find the critical misunderstanding and defensiveness kind of exciting more than anything else. It's not easy these days to make work that evades the grasp and damaging effect of the media's spin, and I think in NYC, we kind of managed to do that. Exactly, on why it became 'quit'. 'P' is very hard. Ventriloquists rarely use words involving a 'p'. Jonathan tried for about a good week in rehearsals to say 'stop' without moving his lips, and he couldn't. There are quite a few word changes in that section for that very reason. We almost had to lose 'Jimmy Page', but he finally found a way to pronounce it in such a way that it sounded 'p'-like without any lip movement. ** Frank Jaffe, Hey. Yeah, Jonathan's amazing. Thanks a lot. Well, I think I kind of warned you on the mom front, ha ha. Trial by fire. I am flying out of Tallahassee, but I'm not going to have any time because it's a very early flight, and I'll be lucky to get these and through security on time. Sucks. Would have been great to meet. We'll figure out another occasion. You're still coming to Paris ere too long, aren't you? I don't think I'm going to see 'Antichrist' for quite a while. Like I said, I really don't like Von Trier's films, so it's probably going to take a very 'nothing else to do' day for me to give it a shot. ** Blendin, I'll have to try to figure it out and confab with Jim and Mark as soon as I get back to Paris. I don't know my exact LA dates yet. That's another thing I have finalize as soon as my traveling is over. Sorry for not being on my toes at the moment. Great that you're making work! I've been long awaiting that lovely bit of news! ** Inthemostpeculiarway, I'll try 'Repo' again sometime. We didn't seem to have the patience the other day. It started being too much about the girl for me, and I wanted more about the evil family. Don't go out of your way whatsoever to watch 'House of Bones'. It was just kind of surprisingly not awful considering it was a SyFy original film. I hope you feel a whole lot better really, really fast, like, say, by now. My day: Most of it was spent walking all over the town and taking lots of photos for the upcoming Colquitt blog post. The town prides itself on its murals -- I guess it's the official mural capitol of Georgia or something -- so we tracked them down. They were ... well, you'll see. Jesse showed me where he grew up, went to school, and all that. Checked out the graveyards, peanut factories, the town's very sad little bookstore, and so on. The place is quite depressing and alienating, and I don't know how Jesse can stand living here, and, well he can't stand it at all, but his friend, roommate, and surrogate mother figure Dale inherited the house, and she's out of work, and they have no money at all, so they're stuck here trying to get by for now. So, anyway, that town tour took most of the day. Then Jesse and I talked writing for a while, in general as well as re: his novel-in-progress and mine. Then we walked to the supermarket and bought then cooked frozen pizzas, and watched TV, mostly trashy reality shows because it seemed like the Southern thing to do: 'Intervention', 'Hoarders', 'Paranormal State', one about Repo men. 'Hoarders' was the most interesting to me. I think that's the day. It was very interesting, a learning experience, and all that, and Jesse's awesome, so just hanging out with him was the best part. So how were your ... three days, I guess, since I won't be sharing mine again until Friday? ** Killer Luka, Hey. The trip's been great, I have to say, yeah. Sad it's almost over. I like Honore's films, obviously, although 'Ma Mere' is a problematic one, yeah. I find Garrel's acting interesting, I'm not sure why, and I'm not attracted to him at all, which I think makes me a peculiar anomaly among his fan base. Hm. You stay double good and awesome, K. ** Creative Massacre, I was in Kentucky once as a late teen when I drove across country on a camping trip with a friend. I only remember the caves and the really green trees and grass and stuff. Yeah, I hope school is a good distraction. I guess school can be pretty good at that task if sometimes nothing else. ** Chris, I saw Page walking down the street in Nice in, mm, 1976. He saw me see him and immediately whipped around and walked the other way. I think he was in his junkie phase because he looked ghostly and skeletal. I feel like my 'read' list lines up fairly well with that of a lot of people I know since I seem to know a fair amount of fellow Francophiles, although it might be longer than many of theirs. Same with the 'to read' list too. I never thought before about that being a good or bad thing, so that's an interesting thought you had there, sir. All's well here. How about there? ** Justin, Oh, hm, I'll ask Jonathan what Bjork wore. He'll know. He knows and attends to that kind of stuff. But I might not see him until early February. I'll ask Gisele when we fly back to Paris together tomorrow. She might be able to take a guess. ** You-x, Hey. No, I've never met Bjork. I grr that I wasn't there on Saturday. Oh, I'm doing just fine and dandy really. Hanging out with Jesse is excellent. We've become close buds and have hung out a fair amount, but never in his literal neck of the woods before. He says hi back to you. I have to agree with whoever else -- I forget -- that going to UCLA is a great idea! Sounds like your school has a tasty cast of characters, and that can be enough sometimes. ** Alyssa Nolan, Yeah, I don't know what the Nielsen ratings obsession was about, although I'm still obsessed with ratings and movie box office tallies and things like that. It might be part of my general list fetish. The first poem I ever wrote in my whole life was about the original 'Mission: Impossible' TV show. It rhymed. I like your junior year bulletin board, no surprise. I wish I could zoom in on it and read the fine print. And I wish I could eat at Crispy Crepes Cafe. Are those pix of your school friends or of your friends whom you missed while you were at school? I had dogs when I was a kid. They all died young and tragically. Now I've totally lost the thing that makes people want to have pets. I can't imagine ever having an animal again. It's strange how foreign and uninteresting that idea is to me. But I like my friends' animals. Most of them. Well, maybe half of them. That is good news you're back in Boston. And so how are your started classes looking? ** Alec Niedenthal, Hey. I've read a couple of Badiou's books -- 'Metapolitics' and 'Being and Event' -- and of course essays here and there. Pretty interesting, yeah. I like his politics a lot. Curious to read the upcoming book he wrote w/ Zizek called ... 'Philosophy in the Present'? Yeah, I saw the email. I'll get back to you today. There are just a few little things. I always thing I come off incoherent whenever I see transcriptions of myself talking, but I've given up on worrying about that. I'm good. Sad to leave the States, happy to be able to see Paris again, the usual mixed blessing. ** Put The Lotion In The Basket, That focus group thing about 'Hostel' is very interesting. I can't imagine having either response, but I so don't read horror films with that kind of realness. The thing that interested me the most were the rich characters text-bidding on the potential murder subjects based on some kind of attraction they felt to their head shots. Awesome about the Jarman post, man. Thank you. Is it warming up where you are yet? ** Kier, Glad you liked the Savayre work. Curious what you'll think of the second 'Hostel'. And more and more love still to you. ** Uli, Hey. Yeah, all that stereotyping and so on is there, I guess, and gross, but I just took it as transgressive, ugh, romanticizing about some utopian frontier that exploited Americans' basic ignorance about Eastern Europe to try to get around implausibility as much as possible. But that perception is probably just telling re: my interest in the flexibility and inflexibility of the horror movie genre. Ha ha, I think it's cool that you chose the doctor based on the coolness of his/her name. How did that pan out? ** Tender Prey, Well, in the context of Paris, that restaurant is kind of a vegetarian holy grail, I guess. There's a restaurant people say is even better called Soya that's over near Pere Lachaise, but I haven't tried it yet. Interesting thoughts about the Soulages show. I think I agree with you. I guess what interested me most about the work apart from the inherent appeal of the relentless blackness and most of the paintings' plasticky surfaces was their long term tunnel vision and his unwavering dedication to a single, kind of small, limiting idea and approach more than anything. I have a tendency to knee jerk admire that kind of thing, although, as you kind of said, there wasn't much follow through, which is what ended up disinteresting me, I guess. ** Catachrestic, I kind of agree with you about Salvayre, although some of those problems submerge when you read an entire novel. Bernhard, sure, but I think the most interesting influence to me is Robert Pinget. She's a big Pinget fan, and I love Pinget enormously, and you almost never see younger French writers whose work is clearly and admittedly derived from his, and if you see her work through the filter of his work, interesting strengths and weaknesses become apparent in her fiction. ** Empty Frame, Hey, man. Great reading you're doing there, and your excitement about your own work and its progress is, well, infectious. Excellent news. I'm not that wild about Iain Sinclair's work, to be honest. Nothing big and specific against it. It just has never done much for me. I don't know St. Christophers Inn hostel. I'll ask around when I get back there. The hostel I know about and that people say is maybe the best one in Paris for whatever reason is Jules Ferry Youth Hostel, which is in/near Republique. No, the locals here don't have a clue about me, and I don't think that would be a good idea at all, no sir. Oh, any questions you want to ask me about process would be A-okay, of course, but, yeah, easier once I get resettled in a couple of days. Take care. ** Okay, so, like I said, I'll briefly meet and greet you with a nice post tomorrow, and then I'll be talkative again on Friday morning, Paris time. In other words, 'see' you tomorrow, and then really see you on Friday.