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September 29, 2006

Excuses For Why I've Been Silent

(1) BIRTHDAY.
The big day was September 26th. Wasn't as traumatic as I'd predicted. We threw a big party on Saturday night--combination birthday and house-warming--and that was a success. I think over 50 people showed up. Friends from NYC and even LA visited Boston for the weekend. Pictured below left is the cake, from the Greek bakery in our local neighborhood village. (The words on the frosting duplicate the words on Divine's cake in Pink Flamingoes. I laughed. Then I ate it.)

(2) SISTER.
I didn't take enough pictures of the party, but here's one: above right, my LA friend Eryk and my NYC friend Tony; between them is my sister Tamyra. My sister's visit was a huge surprise--Michael had secretly flown her from Kansas to Boston. Seems like everyone (but me) was in on the surprise, but no one leaked it. So it was cool hanging out with her and showing her around Boston. We even headed out to the Cape one afternoon, where we had dinner at my #1 sushi restaurant.

(3) TV.
While Tamyra was here, we got to share our love for reality TV. Thankfully, the new fall seasons of Survivor and The Amazing Race have started, so if you know me, you know what that means. Below: four of my favorite Survivors so far, including hot hot hot J.P. in picture #2.

(4) BEEHIVE.
Yeah, I'm watching too much TV again... but I've also made myself watch and re-watch my favorite film Spirit of the Beehive, which was finally released on DVD, thanks to the ever-wonderful Criterion. Photo below.

(6) SLEEP.
Both the literal, under-the-covers kind, and also the cinematic kind (Michel Gondry's The Science of Sleep, below). As for the film, it's difficult and messy and has a lot of flaws, but it's also weird and fantastic and visually mindblowing, so I sort of loved it. Michael didn't. This disagreement started a fight.

(7) NYC.
Before all this birthday stuff, I drove to New York to meet with my editor and agent to discuss the new book. On the way there, my rattletrap car's windows and windshield wipers started malfunctioning--all in the middle of a heavy east-coast rainstorm. Scary. While in NYC, I stayed with my friend John (see more about him in this past entry); he took me to some of the new spots in Carroll Gardens/Cobble Hill/Red Hook, areas that have totally exploded since I lived there in 2002. Pictured below are three of the celebrities I saw around these Brooklyn 'hoods: Elijah Wood (he sat at the table next to us during our Cubana Cafe' Cuban brunch); Amy Sedaris (she was walking out of the Carroll Street subway stop... she and I used to know each other, but it's been a long while, and she looked at me strangely) and John Kenney, a past contestant on Survivor (he was riding my late-night subway car into Manhattan. Okay, maybe he's not an actual celebrity, but he is to me, sort of).

(8) BOOK.
Yeah, I've been revising We Disappear. Or trying to. I'm going a little crazy with it right now.

(8) INTERNET.
Like everyone else, I'm obsessed with YouTube. This giant doll film is one of my favorites--spooky yet soothing; I can't stop watching it. Then there's this bizarro German review blather about the Mysterious Skin DVD, of which (with my 17-years-ago, barely remembered college Deutsch knowledge) I can only understand about half. And then there's this breakdancing teen. And on and on and on. Outside of YouTube, and on a completely different (and disturbing) level, is this totally fascinating and sad 9/11 film that I'd never seen before last week.

(9) TOMATOES.
Right after we moved into our new place, I planted cucumber, butternut squash, and tomatoes in a little square of dirt in our backyard. These past couple of weeks, we've had more of the latter (pictured above, on our kitchen windowsill) than we can use.

(10) MUSIC.
New cds I've been listening to:

Junior Boys, So This Is Goodbye.
The Album Leaf, Into the Blue Again.
Isan, Plans Drawn In Pencil.

Posted by scottheim at 11:01 PM | Comments (5)

September 26, 2006

Birthday

Today's my birthday. My sister is here visiting from Kansas (a surprise birthday present from Michael); my friends from NYC and LA were also just here, and we had a big party on Saturday night. I have lots to report but won't have time to make another blog entry for a couple of days....

in the meantime, HAPPY BIRTHDAY also to:
Bryan Ferry... Serena Williams... Melissa Sue Anderson... Will Self... Ronald DeFeo (ie AMITYVILLE HORROR murderer)... Anne Robinson (ie Weakest Link)... Tracey Thorn... Darby Crash... and Olivia Newton-John.

Posted by scottheim at 09:00 AM | Comments (4)

September 07, 2006

Happy Birthday, Dario Argento

September 7th marks the 66th birthday of one of my heroes, the Italian horror film director Dario Argento.

If you haven't seen any of his films, I highly recommend his early and mid-period stuff over the more recent. These days, with all the bad Hollywood remakes and emphasis-on-torture blockbusters, it's really rare to find such a master stylist making horror movies (I think Kiyoshi Kurosawa is one of the only directors working like that anymore), and Argento's films of the seventies and early eighties show off this signature style the best. Suspiria, in particular, pretty much remains the most intense, earsplittingly loud, hallucinogenic, brutal, and strangely beautiful film I've ever seen. Anyway, blah blah blah. Interspersed throughout this posting are stills from some of Argento's movies.

My five favorite Argentos:
(1) Suspiria
(2) Opera
(3) Inferno
(4) Tenebrae
(5) (tie) Deep Red / Four Flies on Grey Velvet

Argento does amazing, tricky, and often incredibly excessive and self-indulgent things with camera angles and unusual frames and shots. If you've seen his movies, you know what I'm talking about. The bullet through the peephole in Opera; the shot through the face wound (censored from many prints) in Stendhal Syndrome (the onset of this scene is pictured below left); the so-excessive-it's-almost-funny crane shot that slowly moves around the house in Tenebrae (a shot that occurs just before the photo below right).

To further celebrate this day, I'm going to re-read a couple of books I highly recommend:
(1, below left) a great book that gives a lovely critical retrospective of Argento's films called Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento, by Maitland McDonagh--whom I was lucky to meet once at a critics' screening of The Blair Witch Project that my film-critic friend Dennis Dermody took me to; and

(2, above right) an equally great (but unfortunately hard-to-find) book of poems inspired by D.A. himself, Argento Series, by the brilliant novelist & poet Kevin Killian (one of the two books in existence that also happens to be co-dedicated to yours truly). And now, with Kevin's permission, here's one of the poems from the book, a poem that makes me want to go watch this particular referenced film again and again.

OPERA

The tricky part is keeping your eyes.

Loving isn't enough, not with needles.

Overhead of the crowd beats the black crow,
His chance revenge.

Betty the teenage opera star in her
glittery black and silver Raiders gown
the crow, attentive, tilts his beak to caw
though no sound escapes

My mother slept with him long ago
Now he's back to give me an opera
dedicated to my name
in this theater holy with my death.
Unlucky love, that left to my devices
needed transfusion from lens to lens,
takes off his shirt in deco profusion
giving me head over hand over hand,
unlucky in love, lucky in cars
pull over and pick me up
I'll take you where

I’ve been watching you since
you were a child
In the corner of the schoolyard playing ball
and reading Wayne Koestenbaum

I’ve got a van with locks that shoot down into the doors, once you’re in
head over hand over hand

Folly to take so limpid a face for a match
the gun droops from your pale hand

give me the gun, dear
I’ll bind your green bruises with this ketone acetate,
that freezes into cloth once bound around
an itchy trigger finger

the swelling must go down

van back, cold corrugated metal, scrap of red carpet
put your eye to the keyhole
while the stitches force you to see
that which is unseeable
the collision of the ghosts in the hall
singing an aria, and banging into each other,
their flesh, not flesh, stinging then melting
they pass without speaking, only surprise
the tricky part is keeping your eyes
ghosts pause, behind each other now
do you see them in the dusty hall
see them shimmer, reading Wayne Koestenbaum
the crow, attentive, tilts his beak to caw
a sound escapes

Attention focused on the van
it starts to hump, to rock, its fat black tires
squeezing
and sighing, and swelling

Ink those tires, drive them over white strips of
paper like John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg

Like John “Van” Cage and Robert
“Van” Rauschenberg

--Kevin Killian

"Argento aims for, and achieves, total sensory overload. . . . By the end, you may feel that you’ve had needles thrust into your ears, and acid thrown in your eyes: but, this being cinema, you’re unscathed--in fact, you’re better off, as your sensory frame of reference has been forcibly widened." --Neil Young, Neil Young's Film Lounge.
Want to read more of this, as well as some good online reviews or essays on Argento? Get started with these: here; here; here; and here. You can also read this little interview he did with McDonagh.

Above and below: some classic images from Suspiria. I wish I knew how to put music on this blog, too; I'd cram on some samples of the otherworldly Goblin soundtrack from that film. But here it is. Happy birthday to Argento, and here's hoping his next film--the beautifully titled Mother of Tears, #3 in his proposed trilogy--will be terrific as the first two.

Posted by scottheim at 02:35 AM | Comments (2)

September 06, 2006

Four Stories: Reading

I'm giving a reading on September 11th, part of the kick-off season for the Four Stories reading series. (More information here, too.) I'll probably read from the new novel, although right now it's in a state of, um, "disassembled post-first-draft mid-revision," and I'm feeling rather drowned by it.

In any case, the reading will be in Cambridge at the Enormous Room, 567 Mass Ave., beginning at 7pm, admission free. The night's focus is ""A Place Apart II: Tales of Exile and Home, Family and Foreigners," so I guess my excerpt will fit into that theme somehow. Oh, and one of the other readers is my great friend Christopher Castellani, so that will be cool.

Posted by scottheim at 03:23 AM | Comments (2)

September 01, 2006

Eighteen Favorite Poetry Books

In no particular order:

(1) Anne Sexton, Live Or Die, 1966
(2) Ai, Killing Floor, 1979
(3) Amy Gerstler, Bitter Angel, 1990

(4) James Wright, The Branch Will Not Break, 1963
(5) Sylvia Plath, Ariel, 1964
(6) David Trinidad, Answer Song, 1994
(7) John Berryman, 77 Dream Songs, 1964
(8) Brigit Pegeen Kelly, The Orchard, 2004

(9) Sharon Olds, The Gold Cell, 1987
(10) Kevin Killian, Argento Series, 2001
(11) Stephen Dobyns, Cemetery Nights, 1987
(12) James Tate, Worshipful Company of Fletchers, 1995

(13) Elaine Equi, Decoy, 1991
(14) Dennis Cooper, Idols, 1979
(15) James Schuyler, The Morning of the Poem, 1980
(16) Denis Johnson, The Incognito Lounge, 1982
(17) D.H. Lawrence, Birds, Beasts, and Flowers, 1923
(18) e.e. cummings, 50 Poems, 1940

Posted by scottheim at 09:45 PM | Comments (1)