Man that brain damage don't fade quick. Wrote last month up as April, just like the comix list.
The Films of Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Master of Fear (2007) - by Jerry White
Not terribly scintillating stuff. A decent read if you want a clear-eyed view of the early filmography. The plot recaps are the snooziest part, honestly. Not much in the way of interpretation. Baseline competent. I am seriously overdue to watch 'Cloud' and 'Loft'.
Chicago: City on the Make (1951 / 1961) - by Nelson Algren
Annual re-read. Nope, not one word about Chester Gould, nor a single allusion to Dick Tracy. But pertinent nonetheless. One of the best poems I've ever read. You could do worse than try to mimic Algren's voice. The coda, written in '61, has as much snark, sting and stentorian wrath as you might desire, standing directly on the steeltoed tips of the Cuban missile crisis, freshly simmering. I'll probably be clipping & pasting pertinent bits into forthcoming Tracing Gould entries over the next few weeks.
One For Sorrow (2007) - by Christopher Barzak
There's
a movie, which I haven't seen. Thought I'd taste the book first. Not
quite in love with the language. Has a flat, wallpapery affect. I
should finish this before 'Outline Of My Lover'. But I didn't. The writing is soporific. The only thing more flat was the cover art, which looked to be AI generated, cropped weirdly and printed cheaply. A swing and a whiff.
Outline Of My Lover (2000) - by Douglas A. Martin
Michael Stipe's legendarily longest LTR wrote a book about dating Michael Stipe. Figured I'd give it a read. Quite imbibable style. There's an immediacy to the emotional content created by unconventional phrasing. There's more scuttlebutt to be inferred from this than I'd like-- speculating about whether Stipe was ever intimate with Kurt Cobain isn't something I should be thinking --but there's also a very clear moral lesson throughout about fame and its perks. Much as I loved R.E.M.'s music, in my teens, I find the arc of Stipe's career tediously American in a way that doesn't gel with why I loved their sound. He became a rich drunk and drifted into film finance. That doesn't speak to the lonesome love for life that I found resonant, as a young man.
It's a lovely little heartbroken book, and a clear warning against idol worship. And, hunh! I have a Douglas Martin-edited book of interviews with Kathy Acker on my shelf. I didn't know one of Martin's books was in my library. Going to re-read that after 'Cruising' week ends...
Cruising: An Intimate Study of a Radical Pastime (2019) - by Alex Espinoza
Research. It's true! [Reading now. Will update afterward.]
Cruising (1970) - by Gerard Walker
The copy the library sent me was a first edition hardback, added to the Chi library system in November of 1970. Shortly after publication. Now I'm sure-- I am certain --that William Friedkin had a copy all his own. I know he didn't need to check this out of a library... He got a studio to pay rights to adapt it, for fucksake, it's not like he would've been hurting to pay for a copy. Yet I can't help but wonder if he read this book I'm holding, because I'm living in a city where Honorary William Friedkin Way is only a few blocks from my house. These are the tendencies of this broken brain, forever bending reality to in some way reflect on my lived experiences.
But, like I say, research!
Rilly looking forward to cracking this. I've been a fan of Friedkin's film for decades. It will be revealing to see what the source material looked like, after fielding years of critical disdain & speculative scuttlebutt-- which even Alex Espinoza's book indulges in, going straight for the story about Paul Bateson working on The Exorcist, and Blatty feeling so weird about that... he made a movie about a gay serial killer? I've never quite bought that story. So we'll see if it's the book that provoked the film, or if Friedkin's film was a provocation aimed at the public.
After Kathy Acker (2017) - by Chris Krause
Found in a l'il free library, just next door. Sometimes a book is waiting for you to read it. You specifically. Because of course I'm an Ackerhead in addition to all the other nonsense my brain has sponged up in fifty years of being a mutant born to this tortured century & continent. Because of course, me specifically, I'm the person who is supposed to hold this.
I identified with Destiny of the Endless, back when I was a Gaimanfag in high school. Have I ever mentioned this deeply mortifying thing? It's better than when I was censured by every peer on the playground in elementary for pretending to be Diana Rigg doing a Wonder Woman transformation pirouette. Yep, I read Sandman comix, and I really liked Destiny. How she spoke, her punk thing... What I didn't know was, who Kathy Acker was. What I also didn't know was, who Kathy Acker was in relation to Neil, nor why he'd stuntcasted her in his big weird comic confessional of being a serial adulterer and shitty lover who feared the day he'd be called to account for his fuckery.
Can't say that I've quite figured that out yet, either. But this book could go a ways towards unpicking that snarl, maybe.
Anyhoo. Kathy kind of had a hugely belated impact on me, in my thirties, when I finally started killing some of those ubiquitous, unsellable tomes Grove Press ground out throughout the 90s-- My Mother: Demonology remains a favourite, as does Florida --and some of her lit theory stuff, and by then it was too late, the Black Tarantula had her vagina dentata in me, deep.
It's the dada thing, the Burroughs thing, the Rimbaud thing, the aging punk thing. Probably why I'm into Delany at this late stage, when I was too stupid to read him a decade ago. All this is white aging male intellectualism anyhoo, who gives a rat's ass. These are the games we play, amusing ourselves with Figuring Out References and building arcane yarnboards to garrote ourselves with, in the least autoerotic way possible.
Kathy made me look at art different. For real. I did make an aborted attempt at reading her, once, right after I ran away and was too brainfucked to comprehend anything more complicated than a comic book. I think it was 'Portrait Of An Eye'. But she didn't hit for me until around 2011. I stumbled across 'Hannibal Lecter, My Father' in Atlanta's famous, now-forgotten dragon's hoard, a little store known only as BOOKS (r.i.p.), and the little book with the red cover made me think, "It's used, and Semiotext(e)'s always good for a chuckle." And that was it.
She formally introduced me to the concept of antinominalism. Consequently I found her many & varied ways of theorizing about art so beneficial I crawled up my own ass and pulled my legs in after me, in zen tribute: Kathy Acker is how I became a blog.
True story.
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