It is a land, if God exists, he created in anger

"Kinski always says it's full of erotic elements. I don't see so much erotic--I see it more full of obscenity. And nature is violent here, base. I wouldn't see anything erotical here--I would see fornication, asphyxiation, choking, and fighting for survival... and growing... rotting away.... The birds don't sing here, they screech.... It is a land, if God exists, he created in anger.... It's the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder. And we in comparison to the articulate vileness, baseness, and obscenity of all this jungle, we in comparison to this enormous articulation, we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid, suburban novel, a cheap novel.... And we have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming fornication, overwhelming growth, and overwhelming lack of order. Even the stars up here, in the sky, look like a mess.... There is no real harmony as we have conceived it. But, when I say this, I say this all full of admiration of the jungle. It is not that I hate it; I love it. I love it very much. But I love it against my better judgment." -Werner Herzog, on the making of Fitzcarraldo



And a bonus Herzog rant, this time, on chickens:
Werner Herzog on Chickens from Tom Streithorst on Vimeo.

film mini-post, gigantic was interviewed

thanks to justin taylor and htmlgiant, i just read this amazing and candid interview with interview with veteran actor bronson pinchot, in which horse-crap removal, denzel washington abuse and a 20 year-old tom cruise is discussed.

the interviewer, nathan rabin, his stuff is pretty much all this good. i just spent the last hour reading all the a.v. club’s “commentary of the damned” stuff, in which the dvd commentaries of terrible movies are viewed, digested and discussed. hilarious. like this, for example: commentary of the damned on street fighter: the legend of chun-li.

---

and did you hear about this? werner herzog's rogue film school.

among the things you will learn:

Lockpicking. Traveling on foot. The exhilaration of being shot at unsuccessfully. The athletic side of filmmaking. The creation of your own shooting permits. The neutralization of bureaucracy.

but be warned:

Censorship will be enforced. There will be no talk of shamans, of yoga classes, nutritional values, herbal teas, discovering your Boundaries, and Inner Growth.

herzog was also recently interviewed in vice, in which, among other things, he discloses a single dictum:

The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot.

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illustration by joanna neborsky

finally, gigantic was interviewed by fictionaut.

Whopper virgins, The Savage Detectives and new Bolano publications available online

Two things I reacted to strongly today:

-Roommate Ben points me to whopper virgins.



I was reminded of the film Fitzcarraldo by Werner Hertzog, about an intrepid European businessman who seeks to build an operahouse in the middle of the Amazon jungle. Undeterred by hostile natives and environments, Fitzcarraldo carries on with his plan with a fanatical zeal. The image of the helicopter lifting the specially-made broiler in a net reminded me of the scene where Fitzcarraldo oversees the throng of natives he has employed, dragging his 32-ton steamboat over a mountain. The broiler scene was like a cheapened version of that -- but instead of opera, we're giving them shitty food.

Toward the end of the commercial, I found the "symphonic" music playing in the background as an oddly moving (and disquieting) extension of the director's desire to document a kind of "culinary culture" (these are his words) and "profound new human experience" (my words) -- a kind of culture "sharing" with the Other while, of course, ignoring the possibility that the Other might already have one, that is, a culture. At first I felt amused, then immensely sad. There's something tragic about this: this world we live in, where everyone has eaten a burger.

On a side note, although I have no additional inclination to eat a Whopper (or Big Mac, for that matter), my feelings toward Burger King, I think, have shifted slightly in the positive.



-I'm nearing the 500 page mark of The Savage Detectives by Chilean author Roberto Bolano. I have to say: it's probably the most beautiful and moving book I've ever read. I hope the ending doesn't disappoint me.

Eyeshot has a new piece of his up, a powerful, lyric essay entitled "The Beach". It's currently the only English translation for it. Next week's issue of The New Yorker will also feature freshly translated material of his as well, a short story, which, if it's anything like the last one published there ("Clara"), will be amazing.

Sometimes I wouldn’t even go out shopping because I was scared of coming back and finding her dead, but as the days went by my fears gradually faded, and I realized (or perhaps conveniently convinced myself) that Clara wasn’t going to take her life; she wasn’t going to throw herself off the balcony of her apartment—she wasn’t going to do anything.

UPDATE (12/15/08): Link to Bolano's new story "Meeting with Enrique Lihn" in The New Yorker.