There are seven references to Sidney Peterson and his experimental 1947 film The Cage in David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest.
1. Madame Psychosis–host of a nightly radio show on the semi-underground MIT station WYYY, FM-109 (“The Largest Whole Prime on the FM Band”)–is said to sometimes talk about her tastes in film: “Thumbs‐up on Peterson/Broughton and Dali/Buñuel and ‐down on Deren/Hammid.” (p. 185)
2. MIT post-graduate film-theory student Joelle van Dyne–securing the door of the bathroom she has entered in the middle of a party at the home of a friend and fellow film-theory student in order to freebase a deliberately suicidal quantity of cocaine–notices that the “business side” of the door is hung with “cut‐out photos of Kinski as Paganini and Léaud as Doinel and a borderless still of the crowd scene in what looks like Peterson’s The Lead Shoes.” (p. 234)
3. The home of the friend of Joelle’s who is hosting the party is furnished with fiberglass “chairs molded in the likeness of great filmmakers from the celluloid canon” including Cukor and Murau and Méliès–directors chairs, get it? Later we find that friend sitting in one that is “Sidney Peterson-shaped.” (p. 788)
4. The other four references occur in connection with Dr. James O. Incandenza, inventor, tennis-academy founder, and après-garde filmmaker. In his unreleased Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms That Utilize Every Centimeter of Available Space With Mind-Boggling Efficiency, Peterson’s The Cage is running “on a large screen behind the lectern” during the film’s “climactic lecture,” which consists of impenetrable academic-sounding gibberish delivered in a droning monotone while the lecturer soundlessly but steadily weeps, tears dripping helplessly down his gaunt face, in front of an audience of “undergraduates with their heads on their desks, reading their mail, making origami animals, picking at their faces with blank intensity.” (p. 911)
4. The other four references occur in connection with Dr. James O. Incandenza, inventor, tennis-academy founder, and après-garde filmmaker. In his unreleased Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms That Utilize Every Centimeter of Available Space With Mind-Boggling Efficiency, Peterson’s The Cage is running “on a large screen behind the lectern” during the film’s “climactic lecture,” which consists of impenetrable academic-sounding gibberish delivered in a droning monotone while the lecturer soundlessly but steadily weeps, tears dripping helplessly down his gaunt face, in front of an audience of “undergraduates with their heads on their desks, reading their mail, making origami animals, picking at their faces with blank intensity.” (p. 911)
5. Three of Incandenza’s own films appear to have been named after this film of Peterson’s, although it’s observed in a footnote to the filmography provided for Incandenza that “[w]ith the possible exception of Cage III–Free Show” his “Cage series bears no discernible relation to Sidney Peterson’s 1947 classic, The Cage.” (p. 986)
That “possible exception” is described as follows:
That “possible exception” is described as follows:
Cage III–Free Show. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions/Infernatron Animation Concepts, Canada. Cosgrove Watt, P. A. Heaven, Everard Maynell, Pam Heath; partial animation; 35 mm.; 65 minutes; black and white; sound. The figure of Death (Heath) presides over the front entrance of a carnival sideshow whose spectators watch performers undergo unspeakable degradations so grotesquely compelling that the spectators’ eyes become larger and larger until the spectators themselves are transformed into gigantic eyeballs in chairs, while on the other side of the sideshow tent the figure of Life (Heaven) uses a megaphone to invite fairgoers to an exhibition in which, if the fairgoers consent to undergo unspeakable degradations, they can witness ordinary persons gradually turn into gigantic eyeballs. INTERLACE TELENT FEATURE CARTRIDGE #357-65-656. In another place a character wonders whether “Peterson allusions notwithstanding,” there might not be “some hazy connection” between the fact that Incandenza “had made so many films titled Cage” and his “passion for hiddenness.” (p. 957)
7. Finally, a note concerning Incandenza’s Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms That Utilize Every Centimeter of Available Space With Mind-Boggling Efficiency points out that it’s unclear what the theme of the lecture being delivered by the protagonist could possibly have to do with the film playing behind him (here identified as “S. Peterson’s low-budget classic The Cage, which is mostly about a peripatetic eyeball rolling around”); perhaps its use there was simply due to “the fact that J. O. Incandenza loved this film and stuck little snippets of it or references to it just about anywhere he could.” (p. 1077)
“A peripatetic eyeball rolling around”? Never having heard of Peterson or The Cage, the earlier references passed me by, but that last one... caught my eye. I had to find out more, and for anyone who might find it interesting–for whatever intertextual light it may throw on Infinite Jest or simply for its own sake–here is what I found.
–Alan
The adventures of a detached eyeball. Resources limited, content almost unlimited. Most celebrated shot: artist with head in birdcage.
–The Film-Makers’ Cooperative On-Line Catalog
[A]n artist (played by two different actors) removes his eye in an attempt to stop seeing conventionally, and the result is a deranged romp through San Francisco that includes reverse motion, anamorphic squeezing, inanimate objects that move, and narrative ruptures.
–Fred Camper in Chicago Reader
A soundless film starts in a studio: an artist sits, a nude stands; a page burns, paper cutouts appear, images are distorted. The artist removes his eye; it falls from his hand, seeing images spin as it rolls. A man falls, objects in the studio falls on him, he's not the artist. A woman gets help from a man in a lab coat; he and the man on the floor fight over a shotgun. Outside, in the city, people and cars move backwards. On the street, those from the studio chase a woman who’s stolen leeks. In the backward cityscape, they move forward. They run toward a seaside amusement park. The artist follows, his head in a bird cage. He ends up with the woman who went for help; or does he?
–IMDb plot summary by jhailey
A painter, a painted face, painting a piece of bread, an eyeball, various distorted perspectives on painted subject matter, reality becoming cutouts or paper burning away to reveal words, some animated inanimate objects, art attacking the artist, some comedy in the studio, etc. A lot of inventive and playful sight-gags to explore the subject vs. artist fill the first half, then it turns to free-form associative imagery including snails on an eyeball, repetitive shots of a running nude model, running people in the street, distorted cinematography, scenery and human perspective, a head in a cage, etc.
–Worldwide Celluloid Massacre
Peterson’s slapstick sex symbolism may borrow from the frightening imagery and illogic of Man Ray and Jean Cocteau in its story of artistic vision gone awry–while also making extraordinary use of an anamorphic lens to tell the story of a painter’s rebellious, free-floating eyeball–but his sensibility is uniquely American, grave and kooky at the same time.
–Reverse Shot
The Cage begins with a picaresque theme, the adventures of a loose eyeball. This was to be filmed “with every trick in the book and a few that weren’t.” Peterson used all the camera times: slow, fast, normal, and reverse. Superimposition and stop-motion disappearances are employed. To these he added a few tricks of his own, such as a cut-out collage which moves to reveal the actual scene or the counterpoint of forward and backward motions (he filmed his actors running backward through a crowd and had the film reversed so the crowd runs backward and the actors forward).
He chose the student with the maddest expression as the protagonist. He could not have been too surprised when this schizophrenic-looking young man dropped out of school and deserted the film midway through the shooting. Peterson employed the same tactic he had earlier in The Potted Psalm: find a double and deflect the theme of the film. This time he could do it with more control.
He already had a shot of the first young man sitting on a chair, bent over thinking, with a patch on his eye. He put his new hero in the same position and then he dissolved the two shots within the camera, so that one blends into the other.
The construction of the film is so continuous that the viewer would never have been able to guess that the film did not proceed completely according to plan. In its final version The Cage describes the adventures of a “mad” artist. In a symbolic or real self-mutilation, he takes out his own eye, which immediately escapes from his studio and into an open field and then meanders through San Francisco. His blinding is accompanied by complete schizophrenia. He alternates with his double throughout the film.
His girlfriend, who is also his model, frightened by his mad groping around his studio for the lost eye, gets a doctor. The girl, the doctor, and one of the two protagonists then chase around the city after the eye. Throughout the film the perspective alternates between that of the pursuers and that of the eye itself. The eye’s vision is filmed through an anamorphically distorted lens.
The strategy of the doctor is to catch the eye and destroy it. To save the eye, the double has to thwart the doctor's attacks with darts and rifles. Eventually the eye is recovered, and the schizophrenic becomes the original young man. His first act as a reunited man is to knock out the doctor who otherwise would have ruined his recovery, and presumably, taken the girl.
In a deliberately parodic ending, the artist and girl walk off hand in hand. He embraces her in a field, and she flies out of his arms into a tree.
A snail crawling over the eye; the eye rolling into the mouth of a sleeping man, or onto the hatpin of a shoplifter; the eye caught in a wet mop; these are all images that create a virtually tactile response. The most vivid of them, the hatpin, fuses horror and humor in the best surrealistic style.
With The Cage and thereafter, Peterson uses an optically distorting lens. The device is simple and had been attacked as too “easy,” yet Peterson used it more intelligently and creatively than any of the numerous other film-makers who have tried before and after him. In his films the anamorphic lens opens an Abstract Expressionist space. Even though structurally he related anamorphosis to various forms of madness, his distorting lens offers an alternative to haptic perspectives.
In The Cage the distorted imagery clearly represents the perspective of the liberated eye. After the eye is dislodged, it remains for a while in the room. The protagonist chases after it while all the furniture flies over and at him in slow motion. Peterson skillfully pivots the camera in a circular movement. The flying furniture and the spinning camera are intercut and subvert our gravitational orientation. The episode ends, effectively, with a reverse motion shot of the flying furniture as the floor and the eye are mopped up. The illusion makes the fallen chairs, tables, easel, and so on return to their places through the action of the mop.
Peterson attempted so many things that the film is much more interesting than it is successful. Yet where it is successful, as in the dialogue of perspectives and their spaces, it is breaking new ground for a subjectivist cinema. It is specifically his use of radical techniques as metaphors for perception and consciousness (which is intimately bound up with the Romantic theme of the divided man) that elaborates upon Deren’s central contribution and paves the way for future refinements of cinematic perspective in the avant-grade.
There is a section in the film where the dialectic is especially effective. Just after the eyeball floats out the window, there is a shot of the girl sleeping on the couch in the studio, fully dressed, with the doctor’s foot by her head. The double of the hero lifts his patch and we see, presumably, what he perceives: his alter ego rushing through the streets of San Francisco with a cage over his head. The people of the city all walk backwards; the cars too run backwards. Then the shot of the sleeping girl returns.
This small episode attracts our attention because of its ambiguity. In the first place, it suggests a dream; what follows, or perhaps the whole film, might be the vision of the girl’s afternoon sleep, as in Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon. Then, within the dream, comes the set of shots which suggests that the episode is the interior reflection of the double.
The bird cage which gives the film its title appears first just after the dissolve connecting the double protagonist. The first is wearing it over his head. From then on, until he is made whole again and his caged self is buried in the sand on a beach (reverse motion), he wears it as a symbol of his schizophrenia. Obviously these scenes were shot before the theme of the alter ego entered the film, since it is the actor who disappeared who wears the cage. The specific use of the symbolism is simply a result of the film’s ultimate construction.
The second appearance of the cage comes at the end of a wild camera movement during the first scramble after the rolling eye when the cage lands on the head of a statue, that persistent archetype of the early avant-garde film. The statue emerges in the most ambitious subjectivist films as a desperate surrogate for basic human needs.
–(adapted from) P. Adams Sitney’s Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000
The Cage is included along with Peterson’s Potted Psalm (as well as works by Stan Brakhage and others) on the DVD collection Avant-Garde 2: Experimental Cinema 1928-1954 released by Kino International. You can get it through Netflix, as I did, and I can tell you it is worth the rental. Here is a review of the collection at senses of cinema and here’s another in the journal Reverse Shot.
You can also watch Peterson’s 1949 short The Lead Shoes on UbuWeb. A Japanese web page on avant-garde cinema says about this work, “The film erupts out of the improbable fusion of available props (including a diving suit and a kilt) with a thematic collage derived from ballads and pop culture. The comic vision proposed by the film is not at all funny.” Difficult to know quite how to take that. Another view is offered in this student essay on the film by Yoel Meranda, which concludes, “Peterson makes us aware that space and time are more complicated than we think they are and they should be experienced in a more open-minded way.” (Yoel Meranda also has a blog post on The Potted Psalm.)
What’s more, you can listen to Sidney Peterson interviewed by P. Adams Sitney (author of Visionary Film, cited above) on WNYC in 1976, thanks to UbuWeb.
Sidney Peterson bio and filmography on the website of Canyon Cinema distributors
Sidney Peterson on the Avant-Garde/Experimental Film Webring
Sidney Peterson, 94, Surrealist Filmmaker (New York Times)
–P.S. On my own blog, I examined DFW’s use of Bernini’s “Ecstasy of St. Teresa” in a series of posts at the beginning of March, which you can see if you scroll down to the bottom of that month’s archive.
“A peripatetic eyeball rolling around”? Never having heard of Peterson or The Cage, the earlier references passed me by, but that last one... caught my eye. I had to find out more, and for anyone who might find it interesting–for whatever intertextual light it may throw on Infinite Jest or simply for its own sake–here is what I found.
–Alan
The adventures of a detached eyeball. Resources limited, content almost unlimited. Most celebrated shot: artist with head in birdcage.
–The Film-Makers’ Cooperative On-Line Catalog
[A]n artist (played by two different actors) removes his eye in an attempt to stop seeing conventionally, and the result is a deranged romp through San Francisco that includes reverse motion, anamorphic squeezing, inanimate objects that move, and narrative ruptures.
–Fred Camper in Chicago Reader
A soundless film starts in a studio: an artist sits, a nude stands; a page burns, paper cutouts appear, images are distorted. The artist removes his eye; it falls from his hand, seeing images spin as it rolls. A man falls, objects in the studio falls on him, he's not the artist. A woman gets help from a man in a lab coat; he and the man on the floor fight over a shotgun. Outside, in the city, people and cars move backwards. On the street, those from the studio chase a woman who’s stolen leeks. In the backward cityscape, they move forward. They run toward a seaside amusement park. The artist follows, his head in a bird cage. He ends up with the woman who went for help; or does he?
–IMDb plot summary by jhailey
A painter, a painted face, painting a piece of bread, an eyeball, various distorted perspectives on painted subject matter, reality becoming cutouts or paper burning away to reveal words, some animated inanimate objects, art attacking the artist, some comedy in the studio, etc. A lot of inventive and playful sight-gags to explore the subject vs. artist fill the first half, then it turns to free-form associative imagery including snails on an eyeball, repetitive shots of a running nude model, running people in the street, distorted cinematography, scenery and human perspective, a head in a cage, etc.
–Worldwide Celluloid Massacre
Peterson’s slapstick sex symbolism may borrow from the frightening imagery and illogic of Man Ray and Jean Cocteau in its story of artistic vision gone awry–while also making extraordinary use of an anamorphic lens to tell the story of a painter’s rebellious, free-floating eyeball–but his sensibility is uniquely American, grave and kooky at the same time.
–Reverse Shot
The Cage begins with a picaresque theme, the adventures of a loose eyeball. This was to be filmed “with every trick in the book and a few that weren’t.” Peterson used all the camera times: slow, fast, normal, and reverse. Superimposition and stop-motion disappearances are employed. To these he added a few tricks of his own, such as a cut-out collage which moves to reveal the actual scene or the counterpoint of forward and backward motions (he filmed his actors running backward through a crowd and had the film reversed so the crowd runs backward and the actors forward).
He chose the student with the maddest expression as the protagonist. He could not have been too surprised when this schizophrenic-looking young man dropped out of school and deserted the film midway through the shooting. Peterson employed the same tactic he had earlier in The Potted Psalm: find a double and deflect the theme of the film. This time he could do it with more control.
He already had a shot of the first young man sitting on a chair, bent over thinking, with a patch on his eye. He put his new hero in the same position and then he dissolved the two shots within the camera, so that one blends into the other.
The construction of the film is so continuous that the viewer would never have been able to guess that the film did not proceed completely according to plan. In its final version The Cage describes the adventures of a “mad” artist. In a symbolic or real self-mutilation, he takes out his own eye, which immediately escapes from his studio and into an open field and then meanders through San Francisco. His blinding is accompanied by complete schizophrenia. He alternates with his double throughout the film.
His girlfriend, who is also his model, frightened by his mad groping around his studio for the lost eye, gets a doctor. The girl, the doctor, and one of the two protagonists then chase around the city after the eye. Throughout the film the perspective alternates between that of the pursuers and that of the eye itself. The eye’s vision is filmed through an anamorphically distorted lens.
The strategy of the doctor is to catch the eye and destroy it. To save the eye, the double has to thwart the doctor's attacks with darts and rifles. Eventually the eye is recovered, and the schizophrenic becomes the original young man. His first act as a reunited man is to knock out the doctor who otherwise would have ruined his recovery, and presumably, taken the girl.
In a deliberately parodic ending, the artist and girl walk off hand in hand. He embraces her in a field, and she flies out of his arms into a tree.
A snail crawling over the eye; the eye rolling into the mouth of a sleeping man, or onto the hatpin of a shoplifter; the eye caught in a wet mop; these are all images that create a virtually tactile response. The most vivid of them, the hatpin, fuses horror and humor in the best surrealistic style.
With The Cage and thereafter, Peterson uses an optically distorting lens. The device is simple and had been attacked as too “easy,” yet Peterson used it more intelligently and creatively than any of the numerous other film-makers who have tried before and after him. In his films the anamorphic lens opens an Abstract Expressionist space. Even though structurally he related anamorphosis to various forms of madness, his distorting lens offers an alternative to haptic perspectives.
In The Cage the distorted imagery clearly represents the perspective of the liberated eye. After the eye is dislodged, it remains for a while in the room. The protagonist chases after it while all the furniture flies over and at him in slow motion. Peterson skillfully pivots the camera in a circular movement. The flying furniture and the spinning camera are intercut and subvert our gravitational orientation. The episode ends, effectively, with a reverse motion shot of the flying furniture as the floor and the eye are mopped up. The illusion makes the fallen chairs, tables, easel, and so on return to their places through the action of the mop.
Peterson attempted so many things that the film is much more interesting than it is successful. Yet where it is successful, as in the dialogue of perspectives and their spaces, it is breaking new ground for a subjectivist cinema. It is specifically his use of radical techniques as metaphors for perception and consciousness (which is intimately bound up with the Romantic theme of the divided man) that elaborates upon Deren’s central contribution and paves the way for future refinements of cinematic perspective in the avant-grade.
There is a section in the film where the dialectic is especially effective. Just after the eyeball floats out the window, there is a shot of the girl sleeping on the couch in the studio, fully dressed, with the doctor’s foot by her head. The double of the hero lifts his patch and we see, presumably, what he perceives: his alter ego rushing through the streets of San Francisco with a cage over his head. The people of the city all walk backwards; the cars too run backwards. Then the shot of the sleeping girl returns.
This small episode attracts our attention because of its ambiguity. In the first place, it suggests a dream; what follows, or perhaps the whole film, might be the vision of the girl’s afternoon sleep, as in Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon. Then, within the dream, comes the set of shots which suggests that the episode is the interior reflection of the double.
The bird cage which gives the film its title appears first just after the dissolve connecting the double protagonist. The first is wearing it over his head. From then on, until he is made whole again and his caged self is buried in the sand on a beach (reverse motion), he wears it as a symbol of his schizophrenia. Obviously these scenes were shot before the theme of the alter ego entered the film, since it is the actor who disappeared who wears the cage. The specific use of the symbolism is simply a result of the film’s ultimate construction.
The second appearance of the cage comes at the end of a wild camera movement during the first scramble after the rolling eye when the cage lands on the head of a statue, that persistent archetype of the early avant-garde film. The statue emerges in the most ambitious subjectivist films as a desperate surrogate for basic human needs.
–(adapted from) P. Adams Sitney’s Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000
The Cage is included along with Peterson’s Potted Psalm (as well as works by Stan Brakhage and others) on the DVD collection Avant-Garde 2: Experimental Cinema 1928-1954 released by Kino International. You can get it through Netflix, as I did, and I can tell you it is worth the rental. Here is a review of the collection at senses of cinema and here’s another in the journal Reverse Shot.
You can also watch Peterson’s 1949 short The Lead Shoes on UbuWeb. A Japanese web page on avant-garde cinema says about this work, “The film erupts out of the improbable fusion of available props (including a diving suit and a kilt) with a thematic collage derived from ballads and pop culture. The comic vision proposed by the film is not at all funny.” Difficult to know quite how to take that. Another view is offered in this student essay on the film by Yoel Meranda, which concludes, “Peterson makes us aware that space and time are more complicated than we think they are and they should be experienced in a more open-minded way.” (Yoel Meranda also has a blog post on The Potted Psalm.)
What’s more, you can listen to Sidney Peterson interviewed by P. Adams Sitney (author of Visionary Film, cited above) on WNYC in 1976, thanks to UbuWeb.
Sidney Peterson bio and filmography on the website of Canyon Cinema distributors
Sidney Peterson on the Avant-Garde/Experimental Film Webring
Sidney Peterson, 94, Surrealist Filmmaker (New York Times)
–P.S. On my own blog, I examined DFW’s use of Bernini’s “Ecstasy of St. Teresa” in a series of posts at the beginning of March, which you can see if you scroll down to the bottom of that month’s archive.
*
p.s. Hey. Writer, d.l., and long-established master craftsman of of this blog's guest-hosted posts, Alan, confirms his gift for continually outdoing himself with this beauty. It's so up my alley, I'm feeling all hot and bothered over here in my passenger seat this weekend. Please give some of the next couple of days to finding out how it hits you, and, of course and please, give it and Alan some feedback, if you don't mind. Heavy gratitude to Alan, and the usual thanks in advance to those of you who feel attentive. It's back to work here in Brest this morning after kind of a day off yesterday, and so I'll begin now and scoot a little. ** Princess Agipoki (aka Steve The Spammer), Your legend precedes you, your highness. Weirdly, as I typed your name, the 'Monetize' option in my blog's internal workings highlighted itself and began to throb of its own accord. Your comment has completed my blog that way the razor completed Sweeney Todd's arm, and thank you and you're welcome. ** David, Hey. I think I like categories precisely because they're so bendable. They bring out the collaborator in me, and the 'hypnagogic' tag is probably as loose limbed as tags get. Definitely agree with you about Owen Pallett, as I think you know. Beautiful comment, top to bottom, thank you, D. ** Sypha, Even though Bret has long since proven the old 'Brat Pack' moniker moot and dumb, I think some of the residue of that dismissive grouping lingers for critics when it comes to him. And I know quite well from my own more limited experience that a book like 'American Psycho' carries a lot of fall-out with it. And, yeah, Bret stays rather mum in public about the seriousness with which he writes. All that put together probably explains the fact that his work has long since proven his detractors' smugness wrong. ** Alan, Big up one-on-one from me for the post. I don't need to tell you how custom made it is for my particular brain and interests. If you don't mind sending me that document, yeah, I'd be very, very interested and yet more grateful. ** David Ehrenstein, When I posited or wished that Rand Paul had cut his own throat, I hadn't heard that he has a double-plus digit lead in the polls. Jesus Christ. Well, the impact or not on his chances will be telling about something or other, I guess. The US is becoming the weirdest place ever. ** Davidc, Hi, David! Thanks for the nudge on sending your phone number. I've been swamped in the brain pan here in Brest. I'll send it to you as soon as I finish the p.s. today. Yesterday was the only day off, and it was really a day off for the performers, so no, it continues, but we'll all head off into our respective real lives at least for a while on Tuesday. ** Syreearmwellion, Hey, welcome. That's an amazing comment right there, gorgeous and a real boon. I just had a first look at your blog, and I love that 'probably will be ...' entry. Thanks for allowing me to discover you and it. It'd be great to have you back here if you feel like it. Everyone, new guy Syreearmwellion, author of a piquant, twisty comment yesterday if you missed it, has a blog that looks pretty fucking smart and good. Check it out. It's called 'Mercantile North', and it's here. ** Bacteriaburger Hi, Natty. All very well, I hope? Actually, here and there you do see Boards of Canada referenced as a forerunner of the H-pop stuff or, more usually, to Hauntology, the other and broader tag for pretty much the same 'movement'. Wouldn't surprise me if they end being attached to these bands kind of like Cocteau Twins were to Shoegazer. ** Bernard Welt, Mad Libs is a goner? ** The Man Who Couldn't Blog, Hey, Matthew! Thanks a lot, and it's always really nice and an honor to have you here. So great to have 'A Jello Horse' back in print and to see it getting more of its due. I'll go read the interview with Ariel Pink in a bit, thanks for that. Everyone, here's a link to an interview with Ariel Pink by Ross Simonini over at the always really excellent 'identitytheory' site. Have a look/read, and The Man Who Couldn't Blog gets all the credit. ** Killer Luka, Yeah, I remembered I spaced on sending your prize too. I think there was an LA trip around that time that must have erased the expatriat part of my memory. When I get back to Paris, it'll be rectification city. Sorry. ** Bollo, Great stuff on H-pop. I was hoping for that, ha ha. Yeah, I generally agree with you, except I do quite like The Skaters. I get the 80s thing, or at least I like the mental machinations that lead to finding that strain in the music, but it does seem kind of a red herring at least in the majority of cases. I think Hauntology is a more useful and lustrous notion of how to group all those guys and groups, but I'd guess that since -- at least in the Simon Reynolds version, which I think was the original -- the ideas inside Hauntology encompass more than rock/pop is generally considered able to bear by a lot of the music press types, that term's greater poetry and higher intelligence or something was probably too weighty to catch on a broad way. I don't know, blah blah blah. Point is, you made a ton of sense, and, on a personal note, you sent me headlong into getting some new to me stuff. Thanks a lot, Jonathan. ** Justin, Scary stuff: that Kentucky might give Rand Paul a fast track to the Congress. Nice about the sewing machine. What's your first test case? Oh, yeah, the Waiting for John blog is top notch. Mr. Waiting himself posted in the comments here for a most pleasant few days here last week. ** JoeM, Oh yeah, the 80s have been recycling via pop for a while now. Now we're already into the 90s revival, believe it or not. I wish I could come around to liking Culture Club more. They used to sound too adult contemporary for me, and they still do. I think I would have needed to be just a little younger and either less seriously interested in music or more interested in gayness in the 80s than I was to be able to differentiate them from, oh, Spandau Ballet. The BBC should do a movie about Boy George's doomed protege/ rival Marilyn. Now that would be interesting. ** _Black_Acrylic, My semi-day off was fairly pleasant, thankfully and thank you. Sure, no problem whatsoever on the Skinny deadline front. Everyone, _Black_Acrylic aka Ben Robinson is, as many of you know, one of the editors of the spectacular 'art fanzine' Yuck 'n' Yum, and the deadline for their summer issue is approaching. June 1st, to be exact. I strongly urge all of you to consider submitting stuff for the issue. Here's all the info in that regard. Hope Sidebottom comes through for you, for us. Such a splendid prospect. ** Chilly Jay Chill, I'm still moving from getting random tracks into buying albums. But here are a few I have and recommend: Ducktails' self-titled, the new Emeralds, which you have, James Ferraro 'Last American Hero', Washed Out's 'Life of Leisure' EP, Neon Indian 'Psychic Charms', ... I'm blanking out now. There are others, and I'll try to call their names up later. Things are better today on the theater piece front, yeah. We just needed to air some stuff, I think. The stressfulness is getting to all of us. The only previous situation like that was in an early stage of 'Kindertotenlieder' when the music was burying the texts, and there was a bit of a freak out, but it was just an awkward development stage, basically like the current issue will be, I hope. ** Misanthrope, There's drone happening in some of those bands' and artists' sound, sure. Drone purists would have all kinds of objections to the comparison, I'm sure. Pollard has every possible marking. You're asking the wrong guy, ha ha. ** Chris, Oh, good, yeah, let me know what's going on once you talk to Ish. If I'm going to be over there in August, I'll need to start planning how that's going to work and stuff pretty soon. Thanks, Chris. I'll bet Bradford might be into the music panel. If I get to meet and hang out with him at the AS gig as I hope to, I'll plant a seed. ** Inthemostpeculiarway, There's a lot to do in LA, yeah, but it takes anywhere from a half hour to an hour of driving to do most of it. No problem, though. I love driving. I was raised to. I did get to hear the Josie Cotton song, and, yeah, it's quite nice. I've only ever known that one hit of hers. I'll find out more. Thanks, man. Have you talked about Bendy's musical ambitions before? I think you did, but a while ago maybe. Hm, a newish interesting twist. What is his music like? Have you heard it? That's odd about your friend wanting to fuck 'your guy' You seem very calm and okay about that. I don't know if I would be. I hope your throat just needed some shut eye to start acting like your unobtrusive swallowing machine again. My day: It was ostensibly our day off, like I said. But Brest is no Paris, and I couldn't figure out what I could do all day, so I went over to the theater thinking I'd use the little office I have there to take advantage of the better internet signal. The hotel's is shitty. When I got there, Gisele and Peter and Shiro and Fujiko were there too. I guess they felt uninspired by the Brestian possibilities too. So we had lunch at an Italian place, and then we ended up working into the evening. But the performers took the day off, so it was just us doing some technical things basically. Gisele and I worked on the scene in the piece that stars the dolls. We figured out their costumes and the scene they're going to play, which basically depicts a bunch of boys who are camping and getting stoned in the woods then find a mangled dead boy in the river, who is kind of supposed to be Jonathan Schatz's character. So we set up that scene, and I think we nailed it. I took some pictures for the slideshow. Unfortunately, though, my camera's battery died while I was doing that, and it turns out I forgot to bring the charger with me from Paris, so the slideshow I'm going to put on the blog is going to be a lot more truncated than planned, which sucks. Then Stephen showed up, and we worked on the music and sound stuff for a while until I decided to go back to the hotel and do some writing. Mainly, it was a lot more relaxed day than usual, and I think we all feel a lot better now. I think the issues are all resolved. But today the work gets crazy again, so who knows. That was pretty much it. I wrote, watched some TV, ate some food I'd bought at the supermarket, and zonked out. Please live and then explain your weekend to me, and I'll do the same. ** Steevee, Worst comes to worst, let me know if you need me to get that album for you and send it over. I'm pretty sure I'm going to get myself a copy. ** Blendin, Tom Araya in the flesh in the real world? Wowzer. That's big. Oh, right, the Weekly thing. I was going to announce it and link to it, damn, but my head's been scrambled since I got here. I will on Monday. Awesome! ** Catachrestic, Hey, Jared! Oh, I've missed you and thought a lot about you too. Excellent! Yeah, if you can squeak the blog into your graduated life, I'd be your comments' humble servant, I promise. Here you can imagine my pep talk and enthusiastic thumbs up on the moving to LA idea. The nausea will pass. LA eats nausea for breakfast, I think. Yeah, hang out here, man. We needed you before, and we need you now. Lots of love from me, J. ** Kier, Your comment just made it in under the wire. Weirdly, there's a vent in the ceiling of my hotel room's bathroom -- I'm on the top floor -- and there's a seagull's nest right on top of it full of tiny new seagulls. I can see their little sort of while bodies flopping around through the grate and twigs when I look up, and they make a lot of high pitched noise except when I have the TV on, 'cos I guess it's like comfort ear food or something, and I strangely don't mind living with baddish French TV on 24/7. I hope the psych visit goes really well, of course. Can you feel those new drugs doing anything yet? Okay, pal, I'd better get my ass into the fray of the theater piece pronto, but take some love as I do. ** I'll see you guys on Monday, and let Alan's awesome post be your barometer until then. Later, gators.
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