Souls at Sea
A totally functional weblog entry: first, let’s note that Laurel & I had a lovely, if ill-timed and, in the end, perfectly nonsensical NPR radio interview publicizing Flickipedia on December 24th, on the Patt Morrison Show on KPCC Los Angeles, which you could, if you’ve resolved in ‘08 to subject yourself to hapless Christmas Eve malarkey, hear here.
Then, let’s note my next book, the cinephiliac essay collection Exile Cinema: Filmmakers At Work Beyond Hollywood due in March from SUNY Press, and, perhaps, this gingery nugget from crypto-cineaste/word-wizard Guy Maddin, writing about Brazilian psychotronologist Jose Mojica Marins:
By now, Coffin Joe was the Freddy Krueger of his day. And yet it was hard for the great bellowing maniac to attract the money for his newest Joe adventure (a real problem, sometimes, in continuing characters, as I have found in my fruitless efforts to fund a series of feature length episodes about Archangel’s Lt. Boles). But Mojica persisted, and came up with a truly bewitching – and not a little upsetting – concoction: Awakening of the Beast (1970). Again the soundtrack is composed of near-constant screaming (a daring gambit, ill suited to cross-promotion), and almost every shot seems to have been made with a different type of film stock. Brutal spankings are meted out to the female cast members! Flaccid bottoms are painted with faces! A mad hippie shepherd violates women with his crook! All this; and with that wet liver-slab of a lip convulsing in jollity, the world tilts a little further on its axis. Ha-ha-ha-ha! No one has ever made another movie like it, and no one ever will.
For whatever it’s worth, and because blog-scribes do this frequently enough, I’d like to tilt an Amazon cocktail to friends and cohorts of mine, and the books they’d be delighted to see you add to your shelves this cruelest of seasons, or soon, when they’re available:
• O editor and everyone’s better half Jessica Winter’s Rough Guide to American Independent Film (Rough Guides/Penguin);
• Believer editor and master biblioculturist Ed Park’s long-percolating debut novel, Personal Days, from Random House;
• of course, The Village Voice Film Guide: 50 Years of Movies from Classics to Cult Hits (Wiley), edited by Museum of Moving Image mover Dennis Lim, with what has become, in retrospect, a substantial helping of ambivalence;
• the second volume of jauntily allusive poetry from the ex-Jane Dark, Joshua Clover, from University of California Press: The Totality for Kids;
• the inestimable Chuck Stephens’s co-edited Japanese Movie Posters: Yakuza, Monster, Pink and Horror, which sounds like a law firm from, well, a Chuck Stephens riff;
• Laurie Sheck’s new volume of verse Captivity from Knopf (still haven’t gotten Io at Night out of my system);
• Jim Hoberman’s latest, The Dream Life: Movies, Media and the Mythology of the Sixties, from The New Press;
• roving filmhead David Sterritt’s last collection, Guiltless Pleasures: A David Sterritt Reader (Univ. Press of Mississippi);
• Bard prof Ed Halter’s From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games (Thunder’s Mouth Press), and the curiously unavailable Cinema’s Third Eye: The Evergreen Review Film Reader;
• Newsday critic, Sundance chronicler and erstwhile tippling pal John Anderson’s newest angle on the indie scene, I Wake Up Screening: What to Do Once You’ve Made that Movie (Billboard Books);
• old-school poet-prince William Heyen’s ten-thousandth volume, Confessions of Doc Williams & Other Poems, from Etruscan Press;
• Luc Sante, premier cultural excavator/commentator, has Kill All Your Darlings: Pieces, 1990-2005, from Yeti/Verse Chorus Press;
• Lincoln Center programmer and Film Comment gadabout Kent Jones’s overdue compilation Physical Evidence: Selected Film Criticism (Wesleyan);
• Promethean moviehead Howard Hampton's ever-awaited collection Born in Flames: Termite Dreams, Dialectical Fairy Tales, and Pop Apocalypses, by way of Harvard;
• and naturally Guy Maddin’s indispensible From the Atelier Tovar: Selected Writings (Coach House Press), as well as the foreward to Angela Dalle Vache’s Diva: Defiance and Passion in Early Italian Cinema (Univ. of Texas Press) – a book coming just in time with the March DVD release of gotta-be/gonna-be Maddin fave Diva Dolorosa (1999), by Dutch found-footagist Peter Delpeut.
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