I have so many excuses for this. Unfortunately they are all not very convincing. Not a single one, actually. I haven't read on in Gravity's Rainbow for over a month now. Yes. I know. Shame on me. And shame, indeed, I feel. It also took me over 6 months to finish Infinite Jest, which holds a very special place among all of my other reading experiences now. And the last episode that I read of GR was really really good. Slothrop on his British-candy binge. Hilarious. Something terrible must have happened at that point in my life that prevented me from reading on. Is something good about to happen to get me started again? I will let you know.
Stuff that I bought in October:
Books:
Chuck Palahniuk, Haunted
Tama Janowitz, The Male Cross-Dresser Support Group
Zadie Smith (ed.), The Book of Other People
Gabriel García Márquez; Leben, um davon zu erzählen (Living to Tell the Tale)
Stuff that I read, watched, listened to, saw, attended, whatever, this month:
Bush (everything)
Jonathan Coe, The House of Sleep (to be contd.)
The Believer Book of Writers Talking To Writers (contd.)
Some (very, very few) of Immanuel Kant's Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of Judgement)
Jefferson Airplane, The Best Of
Lars Von Trier, Melancholia
Steven Soderbergh, Contagion
Giuseppe Verdi, La Traviata
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
Duncan Jones, Source Code
Dexter, season 6
Bored To Death, season 3
How To Make It In America, season 1
Some live-tennis, especially China Open and Istanbul Masters
I'm not ready to say something of value about Melancholia, so I will say something that is probably equally not of value about Jonathan Coe's The House of Sleep. To have bought this novel on a flea market a few months ago was a very unlikely move for me. I neither knew the author nor the book title and judged solely from its front jacket, which depicts a bed of nails, and its back jacket, which tells me about narcoleptics and film afficionados drawn together in a gothic manor, that it would make for a nice little read. And it does, kind of. Nothing more to be said about this one.
I don't have much time, so everything in telegram style from now on: Like new season of Dexter. Not so much as masterpiece first season. Bored to Death don't like George this season. His role too dumb now. Like women's tennis dresses. Source Code evil military propaganda. Death not enough for soldier to serve country. Wonderful afterlife awaits after death in military. Contagion real nice epidemic movie. Question Soderbergh leaves (intentionally?) open: What about highly aggressive mutated virus in Durban cluster? We (western civilization) just don't give shit and let poor people in South Africa die? Like Jefferson Airplane. La Traviata dumb opera. Opera's contemporary place only in other fiction as nice backdrop. Like Batman. Jelinek's Ein Sturz best play in long time. Get chance to c My Defense live? Go do it. Don't like hardcore but their gigs rock like fuck.
By the way: I bought Palahniuk's Haunted but didn't read it yet. One of the more powerful arguments for this decision - the buying, not the not-reading, was the rumor that about 5 dozen people fainted at readings of the included short-story Guts. As Wikipedia puts it:
While on his 2003 tour to promote his novel Diary, Palahniuk read "Guts" to his audiences. It was reported that over 35 people fainted while listening to the readings. On his tour to promote Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories in the summer of 2004, he read the story to audiences again, bringing the total amount of fainters up to 53, and later up to 60, while on tour to promote the softcover edition of Diary. The last fainting occurred on May 28, 2007, in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, where five people fainted, one of which occurred when a man was trying to leave the auditorium, which resulting in him falling and hitting his head on the door.
Does anyone believe this? I mean, come on, 60 people? Is there video footage of it on the internet? Are there interviews w/ the people who actually fainted available? Plain PR? Anybody know more about this, please comment here.
I found a Paris Review article about Centralia, that little town in Pennsylvania that is now burning underground for more than fifty years. And I wanted to write about it a couple days ago. Why would I want to do that? Because the movie version of Silent Hill used Centralia as its model for the town and shifted the whole background story of the videogame on this town of burning coal-mines and disrupted streets. And I liked that The Paris Review would do an article about it. But then I forgot or didn't have the time or just didn't bother too much.
But just about a couple minutes ago I received news (that are already four days old) that are intricately linked with the Centralia thing that I now have to talk about it. Well, Roger Avary, probably best known for co-writing the script for Pulp Fiction with Tarantino, also wrote the script for the first Silent Hill movie. And he also wrote the screenplay for Bret Easton Ellis's Rules of Attraction as well as directed the flick, which is the one really really good film adaptation of a Bret Easton Ellis novel that exists, and BEE loves Avary for that (as well as I do; well, on a whole different level, maybe). Just watch this little piece that introduces Victor Ward/Johnson into The Rules Of Attraction. Victor became later the protagonist of Ellis's masterpiece, Glamorama. Or this one, THE most amazing suicide scene ever.
Well, a lot of talk has been around if Avary would ever be able to raise the money for finally filming Glamorama, and it never looked very promising, because of 9/11 and are the Americans really ready for a movie like this and isn't it kind of too late now, anyway? But consider this tweet from Ellis, dated 10/13/11:
Just finished reading Roger Avary's adaptation of "Glamorama" which he will direct next year. Hilarious, horrific, sad. He's a mad genius.
So, this now makes top of my most eagerly awaited films list. In the meantime: Watch/Rewatch The Rules of Attraction. Avary really did the best job of his career with this one and if he had a hand in the casting as well, everything Bret tweeted is true: Hilarious, horrific, sad. He's a mad genius.
All right. I just watched, for the first time, Tarantino's Grindhouse edition of Death Proof. I have to specify: As you should know, Tarantino and Rodriguez did a double feature called Grindhouse, in about 2007, consisting of two feature films, Rodriguez's Planet Terror and Tarantino's Death Proof. Both of which are excellent movies. Death Proof is maybe Tarantino's best film yet, although Inglourious Basterds is close on second. Or first, maybe, I can't say for sure. And Planet Terror is a really good zombie flick that keeps very true to Romero in its political and sociological implications. I bought the Grindhouse BluRay because I never saw the double feature, including fake trailers, of which Machete eventually, you know, of course you know, blabla. Mentioning the fake trailers. I love Udo Kier, he is the German Christopher Walken, but on a much much higher level.
Well, I digress. What I wanted to talk about: There was no Grindhouse double feature in Germany, or the whole world other than the U.S., for what I know. Planet Terror and Death Proof were released in Germany six months apart as two 120 minute, stand alone feature films by two different directors. Even the marketing machinery made no connections between these two flicks. There were no fake trailers for Germany and no theater did a double feature without the trailers. But: the U.S. Grindhouse double feature is like exactly 3 hours long. That means that the U.S. version was about 23 minutes shorter per film than the German/European one (plus about 10/14 minutes that the fake trailers made up for). So tonight I, for the first time, watched the shorter, U.S., version of Death Proof.
And there is a whole lot to be missed! It is pretty easy to cut about 20 minutes from a film like this because it's whole aesthetics deal with missing and worn down film reels. But I don't understand the choices made (either way, if other scenes were cut, I would miss them, too, because there is nothing in this movie that deserves cutting). The two scenes that I missed most: 1) Vanessa Ferlito's lap dance for Kurt Russell. I knew that it wasn't in the U.S. version beforehand, and 2) The first meeting of Stuntman Mike with the second set of girls at a gas station. There are more beautiful close-upped feet in this one and a real good joke about female addiction to fashion magazines, with black and white scenes and everything.
I don't like to say this, but you American guys have been tricked. Somehow. And I think of something like the U.S. version of the first Silent Hill game had little ready-to-slay-children-monsters in it and for a German release they had to be replaced with little ready-to-slay-monster-creatures-that-don't-resemble-human-children-so-much because German censors don't appreciate violence towards children. But on the other hand, because Konami felt sorry for their European customers, we Europeans got a really nice making-of-and-international-trailers-DVD for and with Silent Hill 2, which the U.S. release didn't have. So, really. What I want to say. If you only know the U.S. Grindhouse double feature, try to get your hands on the European releases of Planet Terror and Death Proof as well. It is really worth the ride.
And the other thing is: Werner Herzog toured Germany last week because of the German theatrical release of Cave of Forgotten Dreams, which I am looking forward to so very much. And he was on Harald Schmidt and I had to realize, although I once idealized Schmidt as THE most intellectual German voice just a few years ago, that Werner Herzog is moving in another realm entirely. There is just no man, no father figure, of deeper knowlegde and wisdom around. Not even Ted Danson in Bored To Death. There is so much calm in everything Herzog says because he just emanates pure ethereal wisdom. And it doesn't seem to me to be a pure coincidence that Ted Danson mentions Klaus Kinski and Werner Herzog a couple of times in Bored To Death.
I have to admit that I never saw any of Herzog's movies. I stumbled upon his documentaries a couple years ago and they are just so good and heartbreaking, and wise, and terrifying, and melancholic, and, foremost, true. You just cannot see Grizzly Man and be the same person anymore. Or Encounters at the End of The World. That penguin, running about 80 miles away from his peers, just running and runnning, alone, into the distance, straight into his certain, lonely death, still haunts me. This part of the nature of being is so utterly, heartbreakingly sad and I fear it being at the central nature of all being. Just as Herzog considers brutality and cruelty at the very heart of nature. Watching Herzog always raises so much questions. I'm so looking forward to Cave of Forgotten Dreams. And also to finally watching some of the Herzog/Kinski films. And to connect the first topic of the post with the second, just watch this clip (that you pretty certainly already know; when I wanted to write about Herzog and Kinski a few nights ago, but didn't, I wanted to name the post I Shot Werner Herzog, but this now seems to be a much better title; to watch the full interview, click here):
Since I wrote about 90% of all posts from my former workplace (former, yes, indeed. But don't worry, they didn't fire me for blogging related reasons) there hasn't been much posting in the last couple months on my behalf. So I decided, like, today, that I at least give you little list-like impressions of what is, or rather was, going on in my literary, filmic, musical or otherwise musings once a month. This is less inspired than just kicked-off by Nick Hornby's monthly column "Stuff I've Been Reading" for The Believer, which I've been reading this month. Actually I just read it a couple minutes ago. Since I hadn't known at the beginning of the month that I would start such an endeavor at it's very end, I have to guess some of the stuff that made apparances this September of 2011 but failed to inscribe itself deeply into my memory. And since, quoting Bill Pullman in "Lost Highway", 'I like to remember things in my own way, not necessarily in the way they happened', don't blame me if any of the following, or preceding, for that matter, information is incorrect or fails to register with whatever fascist-mode of truth your brain is operating on. So, here it goes:
Stuff that I bought:
Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds, BluRay
Marcel Proust, Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Zeit, 13 Bd.
Sigmund Freud, Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse & Psychologie des Unbewußten
Ernest Hemingway, Tod am Nachmittag
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
The Believer, September 2011 issue
The Believer Book of Writers Talking To Writers (Revised & Expanded)
A ticket for the upcoming BUSH concert in Cologne on Nov, 8th 2011
Stuff that I read and watched and listened to:
Bush, The Sea of Memories
Daily Bread; Well, You're not invited
The Decemberists, Calamity Song
Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds
Lars Von Trier, The Element of Crime
Lars Von Trier, Epidemic
Lars Von Trier, Europa
Lars Von Trier, Breaking The Waves
Lars Von Trier, The Idiots
Lars Von Trier, Dogville
Lars Von Trier, Manderlay
Jorgen Leth, The Perfect Human
Lars Von Trier, The Five Obstructions
Lars Von Trier, The Boss of it All
Thomas Vinterberg, Dear Wendy
Seth Gordon, Horrible Bosses
John Michael McDonagh, The Guard
Californication, Season 4
some U.S. Open
Bernhard Schlink, Der Vorleser
Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close
The Believer, September 2011 issue (unfinished yet, it's a bathroom read)
The Believer Book of Writers Talking To Writers (same as above)
David Foster Wallace, E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction (in ASFTINDA)
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (not finished yet)
Well, what can I say? I was preparing for Lars Von Trier's Melancholia by watching all, almost, the stuff that I hadn't watched before and by rewatching all the stuff that I had watched before. And although Dancer In The Dark and Antichrist and Riget are not on that list, I pretty much got it all covered. I have to say that I was really surprised of the variety of his work. Especially his early Europa-trilogy is quite distinct from his later works in visual as well as in narrative style. All of them, The Element Of Crime, Epidemic, Europa, and Dogville at the very forefront, distinguish him as a master storyteller. And apart from the gut-wrenching border-crossings of the human soul starting with Breaking The Waves, he can just as easily pull off an extremely funny comedy like The Boss Of It All. Alright, yes. The last 15 or so years have been a constant tumbling down the rabbit hole of depression and we will have to see if Melancholia will be the end of that or just another apex in his CV. But even in this condition he is an extremely gifted filmmaker. I'm looking forward to everything he gets on the big screen.
Proust: I do not know when or if I will ever have the time to read him but this complete German edition of his À la recherche du temps perdu smiled at me from an 'each book 1€' flea market box. I got the whole bunch for 9€! Also, since I once owned the complete Freud Studienausgabe and sold it on eBay several years ago and now it costs like 100€ up and I'm trying to get my hands back at those books, I got volumes I and III for a euro each at the flea-market. The Hemingway I bought for my brother since he loved The Old Man And The Sea and The Sun Also Rises so much, but doesn't read English so well, hence the German edition. Death In The Afternoon was the only Hemingway I could find there and since there was the very last bullfight in Barcelona this week I thought it would be a nice gift. I mailed the book to him and he didn't respond whatsoever to this niceness of mine. Hm...
Today I bought the Salinger and Lolita. And this is probably the very first time in my life that I bought something for myself of which I have a perfectly good copy at home already. The Catcher In The Rye, that is. Actually there had already been two copies on the bookshelf, the other one belongs to my girlfriend. But I just couldn't resist the wonderful book jacket. It looks so graceful and dignified. I had to buy it. And then I had to think of that Mel Gibson flick, Conspiracy Theory, in which he owns a couple dozen copies of this very novel but can't give a reason why. Or at least I didn't get to know the reason, I never watched the movie, but know just that one scene. Weird, isn't it?
And I stumbled upon The Believer magazine, which is a part of McSweeney's, which, respectively, is owned and published by Dave Eggers, sort of, because of an interview with Don DeLillo and Bret Easton Ellis, so naturally I had to get ahold of a copy. There is also an interview with Jason Schwartzman in it. But this darn Ellis DeLillo interview is ONE YEAR OLD!!! It took place in Paris in October 2010 when both of them promoted their latest novels, Imperial Bedrooms and Point Omega, respectively. And since I'm an avid reader of DeLillo and Ellis interviews, there was about nothing new in it, because they told all that stuff to dozens of other interviewers already. That sucked. The Believer Book of Writer's Talking To Writers arrived a couple days later and at least I do not know so much of the contents of those interviews beforehand, because, frankly, I know just about half a dozen of the (three and a half dozen) writers featured in it. And that is a good thing. I like interviews with writers and those are quite interesting. They nevertheless never reach the quality or length of those featured in The Paris Review.
And the really big thing after Lars Von Trier: I, as you already know, started reading Gravity's Rainbow. I'm about 130 pages deep now and don't really have any words that I would want to W.A.S.T.E. upon this. Therefore I will end this post with the video for The Decemberists's Calamity Song. And I have to make that clear: It is the video, not the song that I like and appreciate for obvious reasons.
