"Alfred Hitchcock's Tender Buttons"

Cat-antango

"Track 1b" of Dzyd B. Kite's Rivette opus is now up at Order of the Exile. Sample tantalizing footnote:

Since cats are such notoriously intractable, "undirectable," animals, filmmakers who clear a space for them, such as Rivette here or Vigo in L'Atatlante, are adopting a very particular posture toward the world, one which inherently abjures complete control and welcomes contingency as a collaborator. In this light, the cat-killing in Tarr's Satantango becomes significant indeed.

And Levi tips us off to some great Gorey reproductions at Caustic Cover Critic.



Googling uncovers that McGregor was a sleeptalker; with his permission, his roommate began recording his nighttime monologues, some of which are listenable online (though NSFW).

Kite — Hell — Doubles — Footprints

Williamsburghers! You have a rare chance to catch the elusive "B. Kite" in action!

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About how many things can it be said: “It came out of the gate finished”? —NYT

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Alan Gilbert vs. Alan Gilbert—who would win???

(The latter is blogging up a storm at Harriet, along with new Harrieteers Travis Nichols and Buffalo native Mark Nowak. Exciting!)

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Emily Warn: Can we think of "Footprints" as Christian conceptual poetry? (See Dzyd Rachel's original piece.)

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I am a stub. (UPDATE: No longer?!)

Freudian slip

From Dizzyhead Brent (whose two-part Rivette epic concludes in the latest Cinema Scope):

I LIKE
Coffee, cigarettes, pasta, pizza, De Quincey, Bresson, Astaire, Kinks, cats, the first and middle fingers

I DON'T LIKE
Most other food, Kieslowski, Updike, The Doors, insects, Freud, the ring finger

I LIKE DON'T LIKE
Nabokov, Beatles, dogs, people, thumb

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Bonus post—etymology of the day: "A 'rival,' for instance, is someone you are bickering with over river water rights." (A.E. Stallings at Harriet)

And: Over at the PEN America blog, David Haglund digs up a great George Plimpton memory, a name-dropper's delight in which a bit of advice from Steinbeck compels GP to address Jean Seberg while writing about going to a baseball game with Marianne Moore.

Psycho-obscurism

Remember B. Kite's pangaea-caliber lede for his Rivette piece? Here's Atkinson's appropriately mammoth-sized kickoff to his Bergman obit.

Another thunder lizard falls – over a half-century after what has come to be known as "the art film" emerged onto postwar American screens, the Greatest Generation (semi-irony siren, please) takes another hit with the passing of an 89-year-old Ingmar Bergman, at once a dinosaur, a one-man New Wave, a mammoth formal influence, a pioneering pop existentialist, a despot in his own nation of cinematic currency, an unexploitable navel-focused artiste who did not bow to the world’s entertainment will but instead made it bow to him, an unestimable provider of cultural fuel to the rise of college-educated counter culture between 1959 and 1980, and, let’s face it, an astonishingly adventurous sensibility that embraced virtually every stripe of expression available to him, from melodrama to the world’s most overt symbolism to gritty realism to epic pageant, farce and avant-garde psycho-obscurism.

Dizzies Newsfeeds™ for Wednesday, July 25

Named for the Arabic word whose triliteral root - ayn, jeem, meem - holds such antithetical meanings as to clarify and elucidate and to make ambiguous and foreign, "I'jaam" follows the prison diaries of Furat, a young poet who keeps a record of his dreams and nightmares during his incarceration in Baghdad. Already jailed for writing off the official script, Furat takes precautions: He obscures the meaning of his words by leaving off the diacritical dots that distinguish about half of the letters in the Arabic alphabet from one another.

Two memos bracket the narrative: One acknowledges the discovery of Furat's manuscript and assigns the task of deciphering it; the other reports back on the task's completion. Whether by accident or design, the second memo leaves readers to puzzle over the liberties taken in the translation and interpretation of the text that lies before it. Meaning in "I'jaam" is forcefully unstable, and the recuperation of Furat's writing is deliberately, creatively left open to question.

—"A ruined manuscript, a broken country and the cryptic missives of a young man from Baghdad," in The Daily Star (Lebanon), by Kaelen Wilson-Goldie (who worked, long, long ago, at the PTSNBN)

I am always attracted to words like manuscript and cryptic, aren't you?

(Via Complete Review)

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From Jane Dark's Sugarhigh:

[O]ne way to understand [Transformers] is as a sort of measuring device displaying the necessary distance of fantasy at which the events in question can be screened. Or as a particular registration of the certainty that this one day in history is to be the Rosetta Stone of American cultural imagery for the foreseeable future.

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Jacques-rivette.com posts "Track One" of B. Kite's Rivette opus, originally seen in the pages of Cinema Scope. How's this for a beginning? I love how it's one huge, continent-sized sentence...

When a submerged continent rises suddenly to the surface, and one is able to visit territories that had been relegated to the fabulous by their previous inaccessibility, and trace continuities and significant ruptures between what had seemed isolated promontories, when there are new languages to learn and histories to uncover in urban centers still impossibly vibrant with life despite their decades of undercover existence, that, you may say, is a hell of a thing, and one steps out onto ground still redolent of fish and spackled with seaweed with excitement and apprehension, not least at the fact of one's own inevitable inadequacy as explorer, at a time when one stays close to home, keeping company with the cats, so seldom finding new neighborhoods, let alone new worlds.

Fangs for the memories

My latest Astral Weeks column is up at the L.A. Times. This month I cover Liz Williams's Detective Inspector Chen novels and David Wellington's fangfest 13 Bullets.

But enough about me: Dizzyhead Hua rhapsodizes over a single LCD Soundsystem song over at Slate, and the Oxford American features two Dizzyhead contributions: Devin McKinney on William Bradford Huie and Andy "Citizen Truth" Selsberg on what it means to eat like a man. (And still seen on the stands recently: The first part of B. Kite's "Rivette-iad," in Cinema Scope.)