January Believer!

The first Believer of 2011 (!!) is out! (I was at Book Culture yesterday and saw a stack of 'em!)

You must read Andy Selsberg's piece on conscientious clothing—is there a movement afoot? Does said nascent movement need a Michael Pollan (as Andy suggests)? Well, Andy Selsberg is the Michael Pollan of the conscientious clothing movement!

Reif Larsen (on the pleasures of the book, and the possibilities of the e-book) and Theo Schell-Lambert (on what those e-book ads really mean) will blow your mind!

Plus interviews with Guy Maddin, Pharoahe Monche, Bianca Casady, and others!

An excerpt from Deb Olin Unferth's upcoming memoir Revolution (which is great)...Justin Taylor on Bette Pesteky's Lish-edited 1981 collection, Stories Up to a Point...Columny goodness from Greil Marcus, Nick Hornby, and Jack Pendarvis...and much more!

Happy new year!

Ouroborush

Scott writes: "In light of that Rush ouroboros drumkit you posted the other day,
here's the ouroboros-ish cover of a Rush bootleg CD that I actually illustrated the cover for back in 1996, as part of a slightly shady association I had with a dude who ran a bootleg label. OK, it's not really an ouroboros, but it's kind of close! Maybe sort of part ouroboros, part caduceus?"

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More Canadiana—an interview with Guy Maddin in the Boston Phoenix, about his latest film, My Winnipeg:

So it’s your basic Michael Moore movie.
It may be looked at that way. I wanted to make it like a film equivalent to a W.G. Sebald book, where he sets out on a stroll and ends up digressing and winds up in a really interesting place. It doesn’t matter whether Sebald really went on the stroll or not, he’s managed to cobble together a wonderful trip, and you realize the landscape that he covered with his feet doesn’t matter as much as the landscape of his heart.

Table-talk of Parkus Grammaticus for March 3

I. Parkian fiction and nonfiction:

A) Another bit of the novel The Dizzies has cropped up in a new anthology, 3:AM London, New York, Paris. It's called "The Alchemists"! First line: "But first a little bit about me." (Other bits have appeared here, here, and here.)

B) Speaking of anthologies out in March, the Atkinson-edited Exile Cinema (with my pre-Host Bong Joon-ho piece) comes out this week....yes?

II. New Cinema Scope has part 2—or shall we say "Track 1b"?!—of B. Kite's Rivette epic! Also: Edward Crouse on The Darjeeling Limited, Tony Rayns's eye-opening piece on a Korean movie so alarming-sounding that I've repressed the title, Dizzyhead Jason on Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg, Dizzyhead Jessica on Lady Chatterley...I am no longer qualified to write for this excellent magazine!

III. Ten Words has a new writer—Mr. Levi Stahl! (Who is even more of a Powellite than I am—he has actually read Violet Powell's memoirs!)

Weapons of Mass Distraction

From an unearthed Guy Maddin interview:

Lately, there have been new weapons in my daydreams. I think in terms of harpoons. Whenever the fire of creation sears my brow, I find fierce manifestos carved, just for me, in scrimshaw upon the jawbone handles of these great whaling javelins.

—International Rooms

The Joie of Guy, or To the Lighthouse

"I would love to be a poet, but it’s not in me, so I’m this other thing, whatever that is." —Guy Maddin

On the spur of the moment I caught Guy Maddin's epic Brand Upon the Brain! last night, as narrated by Joie Lee. It was great! She did an amazing job! Maddin uses as many exclamation points as Keeler!

I would write down some choice quotes but I had only two-thirds of one side of one sheet of paper and a small dull golf pencil = I can't read anything!

It's set on an island where "Guy Maddin"'s very strange parents run a mom-and-pop orphanage...in a lighthouse...and their charges have mysterious marks on the backs of their heads...and the harp-playing Wendy Hale, part of a brother-sister detective team, is investigating...all of this done with hysterical (often three exclamation points) title cards...and live sound effects: a heap of unspooled cassette tape simulated the wind through long grass, egg cartons and celery were put to creative use, the doors were done with a door...

Poetry nuts will want to hear John Ashbery's narration tomorrow at 7, though something tells me tickets will be scarce. (Last night's later show, with Crispin Glover, was sold out.) Next best thing is to read "Plenty of Sublimated Rin Tin Tin," the Jdawg's excellent interview with Guy about Ashbery, over at the Poetry Foundation site.

If we're talking Ashbery, I found the texture of much of the Brand! text sort of Nest of Ninnies/Girls on the Run–ish. And if we're talking other things, there's a dollop of Feuillade (one of the detectives always "goes formal!" when s/he's doing undercover work) and a bit of eXistenZ (weird orifice stuff). But first and foremost it's...Guy Maddin!

(For further reading/links, here's an earlier Maddining post.)

UPDATE: From the PTSNBN...back in the glory days of D. Lim's editorship...here's GM's "production diary" from The Saddest Music in the World:

For years, I've been meaning to put into practice my Anatomy of Melancholy approach to directing. And now I finally get to! Having already copied out on index cards various descriptions of depression gleaned from Burton's ancient tomes, as well as some 40 synonyms for sadness culled from a thesaurus, I now start each day by dealing out all 52 cards, face down, on the breakfast table full of actors who are to work that day. Each performer has a different, sometimes fuzzy idea of a word's meaning—for instance, lugubrious or throboxyc, which is sadder? Actors love restrictions, and why not restrict them in the only fair way possible: with a lottery windfall of commands drawn randomly from a reference book?

Brain food

Our own Tea-maker and Buffalo sports commentator Emmet has a terrific interview with Dizzies favorite Guy Maddin up at IFC News:

How did you start working with Isabella Rossellini?

I met her once in Central Park, actually—and I'm not a very forward person, especially with celebrities. But, we're both dog lovers, as it turns out, and just as she was coming towards me, she stopped to pet a Labrador Retriever, and started a conversation with its owner. And I thought, that Lab's cute enough, I'll use that as an excuse, so I started petting it too. I looked down, and she was basically ignoring me, but she had allowed the dog to hold her hand in its mouth, and I thought, aw, I'll put my hand in the dog's mouth too. And pretty soon both of our hands were in this big drooling dog tongue, in intertwinement. Very slippery. Before we knew it, the dog and its owner were gone, and we were left with our hands hanging in the air, dog spit dripping off. By that time I had worked up the confidence to tell her I knew her ex-husband a bit, or that I didn't really know him, but that he bought one of my films for his archives, "Tales from the Gimli Hospital," and that I was a filmmaker making a film, and that I had a part screaming to be played by her, an amputee beer baroness.

(For more on Maddin, read The D-Lim-inator's nifty feature on Brand Upon the Brain! in the Times.)

Wasp's nest

Over at Termite Art, Team Dizzies switch-hitter R. Emmet Sweeney has the quote of the day:

"The Buffalo Sabres play like a wasp's nest hit with a stick."
—Guy Maddin

As you get psyched for GM's Brand Upon the Brain!, read the rest of the post for the Maddin angle you won't read anywhere else!

Metal machine movie

Ray Tintori's Death to the Tinman—a terrific short film from this year's Sundance slate—can be seen here.

Here's a quick YouTube preview, for the nonce:


I detect a touch of the Guy Maddin sensibility, stretched over the skeleton of L. Frank Baum's Tin Woodsman of Oz. I'm not a Baum fanatic—for some reason I did not read the books in childhood—but this is one LFB that I did read, for some reason, about 10 years ago. I'm still tickled/haunted by the reduction of the Tinman from "meat" (Baum's word) to metal; at what point is he still the person he was? (At what point do you stop calling a table a table, as you lop off legs?)

(Thanks to Dizzyhead Mairead for the link.)