DC's

The blog of author Dennis Cooper

Rave

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Mark Leckey Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999)
‘In the film Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, Leckey spliced altered video footage from dance clubs with an amalgamation of sounds to examine countercultural nightlife, revealing the poignant interpersonal energy among and socio-economic aspirations of its revelers. The video is sourced from footage of British clubs that spans trends in fashion and attitude from the 1970s to the 1990s. Despite the differences among the partygoers, Leckey’s film unites the disparate cultural moments in a frenzy of youthful, euphoric ritual. Tongue in cheek, the title alludes to Italian fashion house Fiorucci, wildly popular during the artist’s youth in the late ’70s. Although dress and taste evolve through Leckey’s edited juxtapositions, brand allegiance and material symbolism are undeniable constants in an otherwise fleeting remix of three decades of dance culture.’

 

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Michael M. Hughes Hex Putin (2022)
sigil

 

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MSHR Index Network Entity (2016)
‘MSHR is a collaborative project by Birch Cooper and Brenna Murphy. The duo builds and explores systems as a way of manifesting ecstatic sensory zones. They work at the intersection of digital sculpture, analog hardware and ceremonial performance. Their current performance series revolves around a unique system of light-audio feedback that employs their hand made synthesizers.’

 

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Thomas Van Linge Deep Down Inside (2018)
‘Sculptures made from turntable flight cases emblazoned with laser cut motifs were scattered around the space against a sinister backdrop of, a now iconic, anti ecstasy cartoon from The Sun newspaper in 1988. The cartoon is recreated on laser cut sheets of metal and depicts a cloaked Devil offering pills to unsuspecting youths, whilst hidden behind a smiley face.’

 

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David Swindells Labyrinth Details (1992)
Photo

 

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Dan Witz Brite Nite (2014)
‘Dan Witz is best known for his monumental paintings of mosh pits, but a recent exhibition saw his work extend to other realms. The artist styles himself as a 21st-century “academic realist painter” and expanded his exploration of sweaty, writhing bodies into (besides the orgy) scenes of dancers at an unidentified party in New York. In contrast to the aggression and masculinity of the mosh pit scenes, Witz’ Brite Nite paintings present, in photorealistic accuracy, the euphoria of losing yourself on the dance floor.’

 

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Conrad Shawcross GOLDEN LOTUS (INVERTED) (2019)
‘In Golden Lotus (Inverted), Shawcross silences his cerebrum to create a tribute to renegade raves’ pure emotional release. He hung a disemboweled, gold Capri Lotus Elite upside down from the ceiling. Shawcross’s car spins around to a bespoke soundtrack by DJ Mylo (Myles MacInnes).

Watch it working here

 

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Justin Piperger Project Zoltar (2019)
mixed media

 

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Bahar Noorizadeh Teslaism: Economics at the End of the End of the Future (2022)
‘The video is based on a musical racing game featuring Elon Musk, his self-driving car/lover, and life coach as they drive towards a shareholder meeting in a post-gamified Berlin landscape. The work takes the newly built Gigafactory in Berlin as a prism to describe the emergence of Teslaism (succeeding Post-Fordism) as a novel system of production and consumption predicated on advanced storytelling, financial world building, and imagineering “the look of the future”.’

 

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Chen Wei The Stars in the Night Sky Are Innumerable (2010)
C-print

 

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Vinca Petersen Timeline of a Raver (2021)
‘The story begins in the ecstatic ascent of rave parties in the early 1990s, which were integral to the development of techno culture. With an emphasis on hedonistic collectivity and gender empowerment, the ideology of raves were clearly at odds with the contemporary policies of the British government under Margaret Thatcher and their concepts of morality and family. This section of the work chronicles Vinca Petersen’s journey from squatting in London and raving every weekend to buying her own van and driving to continental Europe, where she lived on the road for more than a decade. In her travels, she joined up with various loose groups of nomadic music-makers, putting on illegal raves in fields and warehouses everywhere from Portugal to the Czech Republic. The piece provides parallel timelines of her personal life in rave and the progression of the free party movement itself.’

 

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Tony Regazzoni Celebration (Pretty Dancing) (2011)
‘”The forms of art have no other origin than celebration,” says writer and art historian Georges Bataille. The work of artist Tony Regazzoni echoes this maxim. He explores nocturnal rituals, both current and ancient: nightclubs, funfairs, solstice dances, and even megalithic monuments.’

 

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Masala Noir Rave Tapes (2024)
‘A compilation of house, techno, trance and jungle audio cassettes from the 90s rave era.’

 

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Zuzanna Czebatul Tristan, Kewin, Joss (2015)
Foam, polyester, metal

 

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Cory Arcangel The AUDMCRS Underground Dance Music Collection of Recorded Sound (2011-2012)
‘Once grouped with early net artists, Cory Arcangel’s recent practice delves more into musical tropes. THE AUDMCRS UNDERGROUND DANCE MUSIC COLLECTION OF RECORDED SOUND is a collection of 839 underground trance LPs that the artist bought from retired DJ Joshua Ryan. Realizing that, at a certain age, both the records and the artist himself and would outgrow the dance floor, Arcangel’s project was simply to create a catalogued archive for posterity. It’s been exhibited at museums and galleries in Paris, Montréal, Reykjavik, and more.’

 

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Andro Wekua Shoulders Grow As Sun Goes Down In My Belly (2012)
Pigmented paper, polyurethane, steel, painted silicone, human hair and basketT-shirt

 

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The Vinyl Factory & David Simms Wiltshire Before Christ (2019)
‘Visitors were greeted by large spinning cut-outs of the National Trust logo and beaming acid house smiley faces painted on to straw archery targets.’

 

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Rebecca Salvadori The Sun Has No Shadow (2022)
‘The Sun Has No Shadow is the first chapter of Rebecca Salvadori’s upcoming feature-length documentary film built on an archive of over ten years of experimental music documentation within London’s diverse cross-functional environments and music scenes. The fragmentation of the visual experience, practices of self-observation and the tradition of portraiture are some of the reflections surrounding Salvadori’s visual research.’

 

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Robin Wen Blue Rave (2023)
Ballpoint pen on paper

 

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Wolfgang Tillmans Lights (Body) (2002)
‘Vibrant flashes of light flicker through the darkness to the beat of techno music. An armada of rotating spotlights sends dazzling beams of light down from the ceiling. Colored light refracts in the mirrored mosaic surface of a disco ball. A moment of darkness elapses before the spotlights move to the rhythm of the music again. Tillmans’ first video Lights (Body) captures an auspicious moment in a club night that could go on forever.’

 

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Carl Craig Party/Afterparty (2020)
‘In Los Angeles, you can measure a show’s hype by the number of filthy bus stop benches it’s advertised on. For the last few months, bright yellow signs publicizing CARL CRAIG: PARTY / AFTERPARTY at the MOCA Geffen museum have been plastered across the city’s public transit stations, sandwiched in between Hollywood movie posters and public health campaigns about STDs. These ads, which resembled rave flyers, struck me with their hyper-visibility. Sure, there are party fliers and music festival posters all over these streets too, but never so ubiquitous and reeking of institutional money. Lauded by the media as the one of the first major art exhibitions by a techno artist in the United States, Party/Afterparty is a groundbreaking show—and the museumification of techno* brings up both potent and challenging questions.

‘Many critics also noted that the show’s poignancy drew from the ambient sense of loneliness, alienation, and yearning for dancefloor communion during the lockdowns. Deprived of actual parties that summer, many friends from the New York rave scene took the Amtrak upstate to Beacon to view the show. Some told me they wept as they danced in the nearly empty, social-distanced room. It was the closest they’d come to raving in a long time, and the strobing lights and perfectly-tuned soundtrack formed a spectral reminder of the ritual that had defined their lives.’

 

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Jeremy Shaw Phase Shifting Index (2020)
7 screen video installation, variable durations

 

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Tom Friedman Friend (2022)
Oven roaster tins, nuts and bolts

 

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Tim Hecker Ravedeath, 1972 (2011)
‘Recorded primarily in an Icelandic church, Ravedeath, 1972 evokes a sense of grandeur collapsing into ruin, with compositions that shift between celestial beauty and overwhelming intensity. The album as a whole unfolds like a sonic requiem for lost technology and fading echoes of the past.’

 

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Andreas Gursky Cocoon (2017)
‘Gursky has long been interested in electronic music and for more than a decade his photographs of raves and concerts have made up an important part of his work. For his newest pictures, Gursky has photographed The Cocoon Club in Frankfurt, a famous German nightclub designed by his friend, the DJ Sven Väth. The club resembles a futuristic hive and two of the photographs on view depict nearly 1,000 people dancing. Two other photographs show the club emptied of its clientele, highlighting the unusual architecture.’

 

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Lu Yang The Great Adventure of Material World (2020)
‘The great adventure of Material World – game film meshes concepts and imagery from science, medicine, art, Hinduism and Buddhism.Viewers are led by the androgynous protagonist “Material World Knight” through multiple identity transformations. In eight episodes we explore the universe, acquire energy, are destroyed and reborn, and experience internal battles with emotions and desires. Along the journey, Knight comments on life and death, happiness and suffering, desire, eternity, and the cycle of reincarnation.’

 

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Jeremy Deller Everybody In The Place: an Incomplete History of Britain 1984 – 1992 (2018)
‘A re-evaluation of acid house, a musical phenomenon that, as this film shows, did not spring out of nowhere, but owed its emergence to the social and political landscape of 1980s Britain.’

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** Montse Meneses Vilar, Montse!!! Hi, pal. I’m good. Summer here has been dreamy cool and often wet the whole summer apart from about three hellish days. I’m guessing Barcelona hasn’t been so lucky? Nice listening there. A friend of mine is Deafheaven’s manager. I’m happy you’re on the Um, Jennifer? train. And Backxwash’s. Very cool about translating the Lippens book. Wow. Weird re: Sitges: We submitted it right before the deadline but then they declined the submission because they said it was too late, which it wasn’t. So I guess no Sitges. We did submit the film to a Barcelona festival, but it doesn’t happen until June of next year. We’ll look for other ways. So great to see you! Come visit very cozy Paris! xoxo. ** Bill, Hi. Yeah, he’s smart fun. Excellent about the gig! Yes, we’ve submitted ‘RT’ to MIX, and we’ll see. Would be awesome to share the festival berth with you if fate assists. Second. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Yay, you’re back in your hood and this hood. I’m fine. Yeah, giving ‘Room Temperature’ life is pretty much the whole story of my life right now. I think we’re right on the cusp of finishing the new film script. I’m waiting to see if Zac agrees. ‘The Passenger’ … the Antonioni film? It’s pretty interesting, if so. Look for the famous single traveling shot. Good for love! Love so disappointed that the Tuileries summer carnival didn’t have a haunted house ride this year that he bought and ate a nutella and banana crepe to cheer himself back up, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, Glad you dug Shimamoto. I think John W. told me he could hardly see the first scene in ‘Irreversible’ through his tears of joy. ** julian, Something on the blog feeding the work of someone looking at the blog is kind of the blog’s ideal goal in life. There are haunted water rides, but strangely few and far between. Very strangely. Maybe the props would get mouldy or sag or something. There are a handful of computer games where you build amusement parks. They often have word Coaster in their titles. You would probably need a very sophisticated and very open minded AI program to build the ‘IE’ ride, no? ** Uday, Hi. Oh, well, I like Shimamoto’s work obviously. Um, I don’t know, it charms and amuses and makes me think about what art is, I guess. Dambudzo Marechera is a great translation goal. I don’t know his poetry very well, but his novels would be a tough translation, I think? I feel that way about pigeons, the most underrated bird. Well, actually, I hate beets with a passion, but I will try them yet again just for you. The only food I have in my apartment right now is a baguette, but you can have it. ** jay, Hey. I get what you mean for absolutely sure. I guess the VPN providers must be having an amazing groundswell of financial input right now thanks to y’all. ‘Rimworld’, huh, I’ll see what that is. I still haven’t locked back into my Switch yet, but, when I do, I think I’m going to play ‘Stray’. Love back to you and all of yours! ** nat, Hi, nat, good to see you, it has been a while. I keep trying to imagine what looking at this blog on a phone must be like, and I just can’t. I keep thinking that stupid porn ban will either be rescinded or hacked into smithereens, so hopefully you’ll be finished post-insanity. ‘Closer’ has been known to de-tenderize squeamish innocents on occasion. Cool, obviously, if the book club takes the leap. Thanks. Oh, well, now you’re back, and I’m always here if your memory coughs something up. Have a legendary Wednesday somehow. ** Steve, MIX NYC takes place from November 20 – 22. Ace about the well timed single drop. politekid, If you’re reading this, Steve recommends Jean Douchet’s book on the French New Wave. Thanks for that. I’m actually picking up the new Wire issue today, and that is good news! ** Alice, Hey. People always pooh-pooh the effect of the internet on everyone, but, yeah, I wouldn’t have half of my best friends if it weren’t for that. Absolutely about the mutating/blossoming friendships. So much better than back when it had to happen via becoming pen pals. Okay, I’ll peer at ‘Splendor’ one of these days. James Duvall is such a lovely guy. I did a little project with him way back when. Pray tell what Via makes of ‘Eraserhead’. ** HaRpEr //, But there you go indeed. The porn ban sounds too messy to survive, but famous last words. But isn’t Jeremy Corbyn launching some left party that’s pulling in far more people than Farage’s. That’s what I read. The 70s were kind of the ultimate decade for film, it’s true, when it comes right down to it. Yeah. I of course remember that ‘Lancelot’ scene and, of course, being a Bresson film, the horse wasn’t harmed. Oh, right, that ‘Alexanderplatz’ motif. I forgot. Boy, is that a hell of a film/series/thing. ** Hugo, Oh, okay, I guess that makes sense as to why your friend’s soul bristled in response to ‘Thomas’. Pessoa, interesting. Thanks for feeling the warmth of those two novels of mine. My Tuesday was just a little busy and a bit stressful. Nothing unusual. I think I finally got over the excitement promising Friday effect and the dread producing Sunday effect, but it took forever. Thanks, script is patiently waiting for its next verdict from its collaborator. ** liquoredgoat, Hi, happily surfacing lurker! Good to see you, pal. I’m glad you’re passing through the rehab’s exit. I have two friends in sober living transitional housing right now, and they seem to be thriving actually. Hope the same for you. No, I didn’t read your last book, but I’ll get it. I’m good, doing what I always do. Man, best of luck with everything you’re going through. Stay bright and tough. xo. ** Okay. Today I invite you to explore the components of an overly conceptualised rave. Hang onto your hats. See you tomorrow.

Galerie Denis Cooper presents … Shozo Shimamoto

 

‘Born in Osaka, Japan in 1928, Shozo Shimamoto is a very influential member of the famous Gutai Group, formed in 1954 by other well-known figures such as Yoshihara Jiro, Kanayama Akira, Murakami Saburo and Shiraga Kazuo, in the Kansai region.

‘A forerunner of European movements of the 1950s, Shimamoto conceived a type of action painting or happening. His performances go beyond the limits of the usual spaces reserved for art and directly address the audience-participant. The characteristics of his work use a combination of material-color and sound. A famous work from 1956 – he threw paint-filled bottles on to the canvas to the accompaniment of cannon shots – was also later presented at the 1993 Venice Art Biennial.

‘In 1992 he presided over an association of artists with handicaps. In 1994 he was invited to the exhibition, “Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky” at the Guggenheim Museum in New York at which the curator Alexandra Monroe discovered that Shimamoto’s “holes” dated to 1950, igniting the Fontana-Shimamoto controversy.

‘In 1996 he was considered among the candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize because of his pacifist activities. In 1998 he was chosen – together with Pollock, John Cage and Lucio Fontana – as one of the four greatest post-war artists in the world for an exhibition at MOCA in America. In 1999 he was again invited to the Venice Biennial of Art at the urging of David Bowie and Yoko Ono. New York Times art critic Roberta Smith has noted him as one of the most daring and independent experimentalists of the postwar international art scene in the 1950s.

‘Shozo Shimamoto’s action painting works are created by filling bottles with paint — or, as he prefers to call them, dyeing substances — and hurling them at various types and sizes of canvas, objects, and sometimes people, all of which are never touched by the artist. As in many Gutai works, the artist’s control over the work is limited, mediated by the arbitrariness of throwing the liquids and thus by pure chance.’ — Berengo Gallery

 

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Certain works

Untitled Action, 1956
Shozo Shimamoto making a painting by hurling glass bottles of paint against a canvas at the “2nd Gutai Art Exhibition”, Ohara Kaikan, Tokyo.

 

Please, walk on here, 1955
The photo documents the work at the outdoor exhibition of Gutai held in 1955. This work has been acquired by Pompidou Center.

 

Cannon, 1956
This photo shows the striking performance Shimamoto did in 1956 using a 5-meter long cannon to throw the paint onto a huge canvas. The cannon was set in an almost vertical position and the paint described a parabolic trajectory before reaching the canvas.

 

Helicopter performance Work, 2004
In 2004, Shimamoto did a performance from a helicopter in anticipation of the forthcoming 2005 Venice Biennale, where, suspended from a helicopter he dropped balls full of paint onto a canvas on the ground below.

 

Untitled, 2008
Resin, paint

 

Bottle Crash, 2008
In 1956 at the 2nd Gutai Art Exhibition in Tokyo, Shimamoto produced his first ‘Bottle Crash’, where he placed a rock in the centre of a large canvas on the floor, against which he hurled bottles containing various coloured paints. This experiment produced a technique which would significantly affect his future work. “I think the throwing of bottles as a method of painting is a form of study of the unknown,” Shimamoto once said. “More than anything else, I find stimulation in the materialisation of an unpredictable expression.” Often produced during performances in various locations either within Japan or abroad, through the act of throwing, Shimamoto produced highly charged and dramatic works based on randomness and chance. Bottle Crash, 2008, was the largest of his bottle crash works.

 

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Further

Shozo Shimamoto Official Website
The Official Gutai Site
Association Shozo Shimamoto
‘From Art to Network: Shozo Shimamoto’s Radical Attempts’
Shozo Shimamoto interviewed @ Diatxt
Shozo Shimamoto page @ Facebook
Books on or by Shozo Shimamoto

 

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Reenactment of a 1955 Shimamoto work

 

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Aimed to banish the Paintbrush
by Shozo Shimamoto (1957)

People usually think that colors and paintbrushes are necessary to paint. Till now a form of painting deprived of these two elements has never existed. In fact paintings, paintbrushes and colors have been always considered tightly linked one to the other. In spite of that, their relationship is not so pacific and quiet.

Dyeing substances have usually been subordinated to the paintbrush’s existence. And then the dyes’ course is no more than the story of a long challenge between them and the paintbrush itself. This story of paintbrushes and colors begins at the same starting point. When paintbrushes and dyeing substances began to be used, tones were not considered by artists as virtually necessary.

When I began using dyeing substances, I knew nothing about the paintbrushes employed during Renaissance, but I have always been sure that everywhere in the world the paintbrush is considered uniquely necessary to express color, depriving dyeing substances of their power and causing them to become the brush’s slave with the goal of creating colors for which the dyeing substances are no more than a tool. But just as a line without thickness does not exist, a color without its matter does not become concrete. In every situation and place, dyeing substances offer resistance to the paintbrush. And whoever the painting’s author is, whether Rembrandt, Pissarro, Van Gogh, Utrillo or somebody else, they will be always clear through the technique that the picture has undergone.

Romantic artistic production or the Surrealist one show how a powerful and active paintbrush can be used to capture dyeing material and subject it to the author’s narrative intent. But, although their results were magnificent, their relationship with coloring substances had not changed with respect to the past experiences already mentioned. Today, on the other hand, we don’t want to use dyeing materials quality by distorting them. I just said it: a color without matter does not exist. I think the first thing to do is to free color from the paintbrush. If you do not throw away the paintbrush when creating something there is no way to bring the dyes themselves into existence.

To begin, you can use whatsoever kind of tool: instead of paintbrushes you can use your bare hands or a paint scraper. Then you can continue using objects, used also by Gutai members such as watering cans, umbrellas, vibrators, abaci, skates, toys, feet, weapons, and others. And in Gutai performances it is also possible that a paintbrush will appear again. In fact, in our innovative representations, something can also come from past. But paintbrushes must be used, now, not to kill dyeing matters’ quality but to make them more vivid.

 

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Letter to Jackson Pollock

 

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Five paintings/actions


Palazzo Ducale, Genova 2008


Espace Felissimo, Kobe (2007)


Ladonia Biennial (excerpt, 2009)


嶋本昭三 (excerpt, 2007)


Performance al Magi’900, Italy, 2008

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** Steve, Oh, that sounds like a most excellent solution vis-a-vis the time slot. Congrats and relief. Yeah, nice to be able to use your translation. That was a cool find. ** Steeqhen, Will do. That new ‘Donkey Kong’ looks very sweet. I haven’t gotten a play report from Zac yet. I loved and read all of the Oz books where I was a kid. They need a revival. Your current Labor government almost makes the previous Labor government seem utopian. If I can get my French resident visa renewed next year. I’ll get the great costless French healthcare by default, which would be, like, whoa. ** lotuseatermachine, I highly recommend Kay Gabriel. She’s great, just to name one. I need to read that Hedva. Noted, thank you. Exactly, I’ll take promising. That’s often as good as we’re ever going to get. ** Misanthrope, Okay, right. I’ve known a couple of trainers, and, yeah, they did okay financially, although I don’t know what your current money input situation is. Early happy birthday to Alex! ** jay, The porn ban thing is truly shocking. Even the US hasn’t laid down that law yet. Too many very horny fascists in charge over there, I suspect. We’ll see what the blog’s UK fate is. One of the reasons I stopped labelling the escort and slave posts as that in the headline is because my hosting site’s tech workers, which are largely based in India, I think, refused to work on the blog because of those posts. But, luckily, they only seem to check the posts’ titles and not the things themselves. Well, well, heady war gaming experience you had there. Nice that Bataille is proving to be such a good host. Thursday is the slaves post, so fingers crossed when the time comes. ** _Black_Acrylic, You might quite like his stuff, the early 70s films especially. ‘Irreversible’ virgin no longer. And you seem okay. The first time I saw it in a theater, one of my friends I went with had to un to the restroom and throw up. ** Jack Skelley, Well, I’m glad you don’t have the time or my permission, haha. Well, maybe my permission if you asked me very nicely and slipped me some bills. ** Tosh Berman, Hey. Well, luckily art itself isn’t getting worse, but that’s just about the only thing that isn’t. ** julian, ‘TMatW’ is considered his masterpiece, and it might be. Otherwise, the early 70s films are kind of his best, I think. ‘Mes Petites Amoureuses’ is very good. Oh, I hadn’t actually thought about what dark ride I would personally live in. Huh. Rain check as I scroll through my voluminous memory bank. So cool about your childhood drawings. Me too, of course. I wish I still had them. I’ve still never played any of those amusement park building computer games. I wonder if there are any that are really, really flexible. I would pay top dollar to ride a ‘Inland Empire’ ride. If you designed it, of course. ** Uday, Did I forget to paste in your name yesterday? Sorry. So much to think about indeed. ** Carsten, Ah, apples and oranges, as always. Limp Bizkit still packs them in for some godforsaken reason, but I’m assuming those seas of jock rockers are gray haired and thick waisted. Sounds valuable indeed. ** politekid, Yeah, how about that. Oh, gosh, books on the French New Wave. I’ll have to think and look around. Serge Daney’s writings on them from that period are great. And they’re fairly newly in English. Oh, right, Jarman’s gone kind of viral recently. You just never know. I looked at what, at the time, for violent porn when I was, like, 10 years old, and look at me, I’m sweet as pie. I never play games on my laptop, or hardly ever, only platform games. I desperately need to get away from my laptop. I will look into ‘Desperados’ though, thank you. Speedrunning tactics in writing makes total sense to me, yes, of course, or, if not ‘of course’ then … naturally? ** Alice, It was fun. Any disruption to my neighborhood’s normality is exciting. Even Covid lockdown was exciting for a while. But I don’t follow Tour de France. A bit samey for me. ‘Too esoterically’: In theory I would pay people I know to be too esoteric. Famous last words maybe. Jarman was interesting and very funny, even about his death which was already looming in his mind when I interviewed him. I’ve never seen ‘Splendor’. Let me know if it’s worth a gander. Here’s hoping our respective weeks start picking up as of now. ** HaRpEr //, Hi. Cool. Gosh, I don’t know, I’m pretty high on the first gen Nouvelle Vague. Not that the second generation is anything to shake a stick at, of course. I do like ‘My Little Loves’ a lot, yes. I think ‘TMatW’ and it are probably his best maybe. Interesting that ‘Adolescence’ might have helped trigger the banning mania. Boy, people can be so shallow. It never ceases to amaze me. I have a bad or good habit of looking on the bright side, but I can’t see the ban sticking. I feel like that machine will make enough mistakes that it’ll break and get shut down by default. But I would have thought Trump would be assassinated by now, so don’t listen to me. ** Hugo, I had one of those nights the other night. Yeah, urgh. How curious about your friend’s reaction to ‘Thomas the Obscure’. I mean, I guess it is a downer, but it seems like a curious book to read for content, but then again I so rarely read anything for its content. Rare pretty much totally lost it when they bailed on Nintendo for Xbox way back when. But, yeah, they were gaming royalty there for a while. I am way bogged down, and my mind is bigger than my eyes, but you never know. Are Tuesdays inherently mediocre? Interesting. I intend to find out. ** Justin D, Hi. There are tons of films thought great by the wise that leave me cold. So, yeah. Oh, hm, a film deliberately anti-nostalgia. Huh. Interesting idea. I think maybe in a way our films try to fuck with any nostalgia that their characters and settings might provoke in viewers. The romanticising of youth, for instance. Or subvert it at least. I don’t know, I need to think about it, But, yes, interesting idea. And thank you very much for the kind words. I think, if push came to shove, I’d say ‘My Little Loves’ is probably my favorite of his. Happy day, pal! ** Darby 🦇, Hey! My weekend was okay, can’t complain. We’re having this non-summer weather over here which is so, so nice. I can’t even watch people cook, I get too antsy and bored. Uh, I’m a diehard smoker, but even I can warn you not to smoke. It’s such a drag. It does give the brain this nice little jolt of concentration though. That’s the only good thing about it really. I haven’t actually watched ‘La Cochon’, yet anyway. Mm, it depends on the film and the depiction of animal death and meat preparing. If it’s fiction, it doesn’t really get to me. If it’s a documentary that shows animal murder, I do tend to duck and cover. If they’re already dead, I can usually look even if I don’t like it. That said, one of my favorite films ‘In a Year of Thirteen Moons’ has a long scene where the characters walk through a real slaughter house where cows are killed and hoisted up to an aerial conveyer belt while the main trans character talks about all the horrors inflicted on them in their life. It’s intense and amazing. So, I guess it’s complicated. You? All the luck you might need at the job interview today! ** Sarah, Hi, Sarah. It’s so nice to see you! Going to readings and writing sounds pretty and good and valuable. I think I was probably going to Efteling, and in fact I still haven’t gone, and in fact I think I am finally going to go in a couple of weeks. I was supposed to go for my birthday but then complications arose. I do go to amusement parks as often as I’m able to, which isn’t hugely often. Efteling is my all time favorite park, so that should be cool. Do you like/go to amusement parks? Again, happy to see you. ** chris dankland, Hey! Mm, no, I’m not entirely sure what the controversy was. The French are pretty ‘liberal’ about sex in films, so maybe it was the slant or attitude in the film towards sex? I don’t know. There are so many French films worth seeing even if most of them were made quite a long time ago. Sweet, I’ll look for the interview soon. Thank you, pal! I can’t wait for you to see the film, seriously. ** Okay. Today the opportunity the blog is hoping to provide to you is a look at the artist Shozo Shimamoto. Thank you in advance for taking the time if you do. See you tomorrow.

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