An excerpt from the book Woody Allen on Woody Allen.
You said that you hadn’t felt any need of re-evaluating your life, the way Marion does in ANOTHER WOMAN. Has it always been like that for you?
Yes. I knew this when I was in my late teens, that there were always going to be distractions as well. And I felt that anything that distracted from the work and minimized your effort on it was a self-deception that was going to be detrimental. So to avoid getting caught up with a lot of writing rituals and time-wasting, you’ve got to get there and just work. Art in general, and show-business, is full to the brim of people who talk, talk, talk, talk. And when you hear them talk, theoretically they’re brilliant and they’re right and this and that, but in the end it’s just a question of ‘Who can sit down and do it?’ That’s what counts. All the rest doesn’t mean a thing.
The widow Berman and Paul Slazinger were obviously born to tell stories better than most people can. Other people are obviously born to sing and dance or explain the stars in the sky or do magic tricks or be great leaders or athletes, and so on.
I think that could go back to the time when people had to live in small groups of relatives-maybe fifty or a hundred people at the most. And evolution or God or whatever arranged things genetically, to keep the little families going, to cheer them up, so that they could all have somebody to tell stories around the campfire at night, and somebody else to paint pictures on the walls of the caves, and somebody else who wasn’t afraid of anything and so on.
That’s what I think. And of course a scheme like that doesn’t make sense anymore, because simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world champions.
The entire planet can get along nicely now with maybe a dozen champion performers in each area of human giftedness. A moderately gifted person has to keep his or her gifts all bottled up until, in a manner of speaking, he or she gets drunk at a wedding and tap dances on the coffee table like Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers. We have a name for him or her. We call him or her an “exhibitionist.”
How do we reward such an exhibitionist? We say to him or her the next morning, “Wow! Were you ever drunk last night!”
When I was in Toronto for Christmas I found a copy of this Leonard Cohen book of poetry in an old box of my Mothers. I wasted no time and quickly threw it in my bag. Without a doubt I deserved it more. The whole thing is beautiful. Printed in 1974. But my bastard conscience caught up with me. I confessed my robbery. But it’s O.K. I am now simply borrowing it……Forever.
A friend of mine told me about this book awhile ago. It was a project spanning between Canada (Quebec and Ontario) and Germany that’s purpose was to create photocopy art. Below are some of the more interesting images in it. It didn’t go into much detail at all as to how these images were actually created and in turn spoke more about the actual purpose this work stood for among other genres of art. But no matter.
I’m working on Menstrate issue two, and though I didn’t find much in the vein of ideas it was still good.
Here are a few quotes from the book. This book is from the early-eighties if I remember correctly. I like how they figured that in the near future this art form would become obsolete due to the amount of paper being wasted and in turn the shortage of trees.
QUOTES.
The photocopier permits self-impression, the production of art books that short circuit review boards and other dilatory and often disappointing procedures. It adds to the problem of copyright and “counterfeiting” that of competition which could become a boykott.
This particular case gives one pause. It is with printing, here, that the border is revealed to be hazy, porous and beckoning. As Marshall McLuhan said: “…Caxton and Gutenberg enabled all men to become readers, Xerox has enabled all men to become publishers.” (Notice in passing that we photocopy for deferred reading, in order not to have to read immediately documents that we will not read at all in more then half the cases. As if assimilation were transferable from the brain to machine. What would this mean about the electronic brain and its “memory?”)
It is more advisable not to seek a philosophical answer here.
The waste and glut of paper is such (in 1979 Xerox estimated an average of 4 000 documents per employee, almost an entire file cabinet and increasing steadily) that an end is in sight through sheer lack of paper. Paper, if there are any trees left, (it’s already hard to find tissue paper) will be liberated for artistic production.
They all have collection in common; stockpiling, inventory, a repertoire of fragments from various sources. This mania of Bidner’s evidenced by his “hyper-hoarding” of documents has taken on Kafkaesque proportions: a 2 000 sq. foot warehouse in London Ontario cannot accommodate the tonnage piled to the rafters, and overflowing into studios at Stratford and Toronto, even into a friend’s basement….
I forgot to scan this last image. So I went back to the library and photocopied it from this book on photocopying. It seemed appropriate. It’s too good. Photo-Copy Rock and Roll. By Jurgen, of course.
“His form is ungainly - his intellect small -”
(So the bellman would often remark)
“But his courage is perfect! And that, after all,
Is the thing that one needs with a Snark.”
He would joke with hyenas, returning their stare
With an impendent wag of the head:
And he once went a walk, paw-in-paw, with a bear,
“Just to keep up its spirits,” he said.
+
“As to temper the Jubjub’s a desperate bird,
Since it lives in perpetual passion:
Its taste in costume is entirely absurd -
It is ages ahead of the fashion:”
“It’s like today when I see kids who go to film schools, and writers who say that by page 13 you have to have this happen, and by page 32 you have to have this happen, and by page 106 it has to be over, blah blah blah. Well, we didn’t have all those rules, and it’s not that we even broke them, because they didn’t exist. Now I think these kids are hampered by rules - not that they can’t think beyond them, just that they don’t go beyond them, because they are axiomatic of what you do. I think there have been too many screenwriting schools and too many books, and people think that’s what they must do. They treat it the same way they treat mathematics, and it’s wrong.
I just finished reading a book called Conquest of the Useless. It is the diary Werner Herzog kept during the making of his film Fitzcarraldo (1982). The story of a somewhat crazed dreamer and entrepreneur (played by Klaus Kinski.) who drags a steam ship over a mountain in the Jungle. The book isnt that great, but as always with Werner Herzog there are some good quotes. For the most part its simply recounting events of days with set people whose identity you are unaware. There is a film on the making of the movie called Burden of Dreams that is far more entertaining. Irregardless I copied out all that I liked from the book. If you ever plan on reading the book I wouldn’t advise reading whats below, seeing as it is essentially the entire book boiled down to the most entertaining parts. I realize now I’ve copied out a lot. And even now my mind is in a fog, its eight am and I have been wading in someone else’s strange dream for too long and even now don’t see any hope of sleep. All this work, most likely simply a small conquest of uselessness.
(Werner Herzog is a German director. He speaks in a very serious manner. Here is a little video to give a sense of his dialect, it is better to picture his voice when reading his diary entries.)
A vision had seized hold of me, like the demented fury of a hound that has sunk its teeth into the leg of a deer carcass and is shaking and tugging at the downed game so frantically that the hunger gives up trying to calm him. It was the vision of a large steamship scaling a hill under its own steam, working its way up a steep slope in the jungle, while above this natural landscape, which shatters the weak and the strong with equal ferocity, soars the voice of Caruso, silencing all the pain and all the voices of the primeval forest and drowning out all birdsong. To be more precise: bird cries, for in this setting, left unfinished and abandoned by God in wrath, the birds do not sing; they shriek in pain, and confused trees tangle with one another like battling Titans, from horizon to horizon, in a steaming creation still being formed. Fog-panting and exhausted they stand in this unreal world, in unreal misery-and I, like a stanza in a poem written in an unknown foreign tongue, am shaken to the core.
Swarms of parrots fly screeching toward the evening sun as if they had urgent business of which we are unaware.
When I went into the forest to take a shit, a pig followed me, sniffling and waiting with shameless greed for my shit. Even when I threw sticks at it, the animal only took a few symbolic steps backward.
For a spoonful of this black , sticky mass, you can get yourself a woman to marry, I was told in a respectful whisper by a boatman, as he cleaned his toes with a screwdriver. (pure curare for poisoning arrow tips.)
At the market I ate a piece of a grilled monkey-it looked like a naked child.
Now the natives were wearing “John Travolta Fever” and “Disneyland” T-shirts.
Henning drew the sketch for the figurehead of Fitz’s ship. A naked Indian woman with a python curling around her and an alligator and a tortoise whose shell covers her pubic area.
The only striking thing about the taxi today was that it had no steering wheel: The driver steered it with a monkey wrench, and did a good job.
Time is tugging at me like an elephant, and the dogs are tugging at my heart.
A primeval tortoise came crawling through the store, rocking its head and its body like an autistic person who wants to have nothing to do with the world.
Lord almighty: Send us an Earthquake.
I sit alone in the house with the gangly young bookkeeper from the city, whose mere presence is death to any meaningful thoughts.
The rain is cowardly.
The taxi drivers here are not to be trusted.
It was an Argentinean film, with one very thin man and one very fat one, blonds with bursting breasts and naughty lingerie, which was hanging up to dry in the kitchen belonging to one of the women. Because of his girth, the fat man could not duck down very well, so he kept bumping into the dangling panties and bras, rolling his eyes in ecstasy. Andreas’s girl screeched with laughter. In one scene the fat man was also playing tennis.
During the night I developed diarrhea, the onset was so sudden that I soiled my pants as I was making my way into the forest.
The dog was chasing the helicopter the way dogs sometimes chase a moving car, even though the draft from the rotor almost knocked it to the ground and was kicking up gravel at him. Then, at a slight distance, the dog lifted one leg and pissed in the direction of the helicopter.
I was so fed up that I promptly went to see him without an appointment. I let him have it and spoke so bluntly of the telltale signs of extortion that he stared at me in amazement and wished me all the best, as if I were someone setting out to swim the Niagara Falls. The time for diplomacy is past.
The painter working on the painting swished his brush around in the dabs of paint on a mahogany board, and after I had watched him for a while, I knew that he was only pretending to be painting; in reality he would never paint, only mix colors, for all eternity.
Across from the wretched Pucallpa airport is a bar with a beautiful monkey. Black, with limbs that go on forever. He looks very intelligent and would make the ideal companion for Fitz. A drunk spat at the monkey and almost hit him from behind. The monkey inspected and sniffed with great interest at this globule from the depths of an unhealthy lung, as it lay on the ground, greenish yellow and steaming. It looked as though the monkey wanted to eat the spit, or at least taste it. I said silently to him, leave it, leave it alone, and he let it be. Now he is sitting with his tail wrapped around his buttocks like a rope, his knees under his chin, and his arms around his knees. This is how he sits when he is chained to a tree limb. I realized I was sitting the same way, with my feet propped in the rungs of a second chair and my knees under my chin. Does the monkey dream my dreams in the branches above me?
Very early in the morning the cripples bathe at the beach.
I went with some of the people to a house where they sang to drive away the shadows.
No one realized that I was not invited, so I drank several of the cocktails being served. Then an elegant young woman wanted to discuss art with me; what kind of art, I barked, and she said something confused about my hostility to art per se.
The delicate needle on the scale moved more and more slowly, and it was almost a minute before it finally stood still, as if my weight were increasing the longer I stood on the scale. Maybe, I thought, the scale also weighs one’s thoughts.
The thunderstorm held off all afternoon, but then descended far off over the rain forest, sweating and streaming, as if out there an enormous, violent rape were being carried out.
The jungle is obscene. Everything about it is sinful.
The laundry on the line refuses to dry as if part of a conspiracy.
Does the devil keep a log book?
She is convinced the monkey will rape the baby.
Robards is disintegrating more and more, revealing himself increasingly as a whiner, a stupid star. He is simply cowardly, sneaky, and dumb, high-decibel dumb.
Has anyone heard rocks sigh?
A young woman who spoke German pulled up her skirt and showed her legs. Prela, the Albanian who claims he is a much better actor than Marlon Brando, dragged her with loud curses onto a bed that was heaped with coats, pulled down her pantyhose, called the rest of us to see, and dragged her by the legs over the mountain of coats, showed us her bare abdomen, and then, with even worse curses, left her lying there. The guests then made a big show of sniffing cocaine, after which any conversation collapsed, like a poorly constructed house of blocks thrown up by a cranky child.
But the question that everyone wanted answered was whether I would have the nerve and the strength to start the whole process from scratch. I said yes; otherwise I would be someone who had no dream left, and without dreams I would not want to live.
I cannot imagine a more deadly, naked, worm-like eelish parasite to have in my own innards.
Last night I had to combat a fresh invasion of army ants in my cabin. I swept the raving warriors off my platform into the swamp. Our work is not compatible with nature Amazon-style.
murcielago = bat
I became lost in imagining an unknown river with headwaters in dreamed up mountains of alabaster and sapphires and ending in a sea of emeralds. Lord, grant me to see an unknown fish at my feet.
Death is hereditary.
The first thing I did was put my radio on the rough hewn table on my porch and play, very loudly, a cassette with Vivaldis Dixit Dominus. I noticed that two large ants, affected by the vibrations of the mighty tone, were acting like mad creatures, doing a rhythmic St Vitus’ dance in front of the loudspeaker. They writhed, raced around crazily in a circle, and whirled as if an electrical current were running through them.
Yesterday at the airport in Pucallpa two scruffy four year old Indio children asked me in all seriousness whether I needed a taxi, and presented themselves as drivers. I responded just as seriously that I needed a pilot and was not one of them a pilot? No, they said, neither of them was a pilot. So there they stood, the two miniature taxi drivers, barefoot, smeared with mud, which had welled up between their toes, their bare bellies distended above the elastic waistbands of their gym shorts, their hair wild and black. They were very sure of themselves.
Nothing was there anymore, nothing. Leaving me like a suit of armor with no knight inside.
It sounded as if all of nature were rising up in rage at some infamous deed.
I thought about the fascination of ski jumping, which persists in me like a dream without end. Is the desire to fly innate to all creatures? One should take a closer look at cows, dogs, lizards. Is not the Ostrich, with wings that cannot carry it, the most unredeemed of all living beings?
One time I had grasped hold of a smooth sapling without noticing that a multi lane highway of fire ants led up and down it. Then I made the mistake of trying to cut down the tree with my machete to protect those following behind me, but my blow was not strong enough and merely shook the sapling, sending fire ants raining down on me, getting under my shirt and in my hair, and for two days I was climbing the walls.
For the last few days one thought keeps presenting itself: why can a four legged stool wobble, while a three legged one never does. and: if a person hangs himself in the attic and a breeze is blowing, how many additional ropes would one need to prevent the hanged man from swinging, or more precisely, from moving at all? The answer: one additional rope stretched from his feet to the floor and another from his belt to a wall, so the corpse cannot rotate around its own axis. But how many ropes would one need, if necessary infinitely long ones, to fix oneself in the universe, definitively and unchanging, and free of rotation? Is a fixed position in the universe even possible?
The banana fronds to the left of my hut are bursting with growth, shamelessly sexual.
Life in the sea must be pure hell, an infinite hell of constant and ever present danger, so unbearable that in the course of evolution some species-including homo-sapiens crawled, fled, onto some clods of firm land, the future continents.
A Japanese doctor operated on his own appendix.
I was taken aback when next to me something dark colored that I had not seen suddenly made a noise. It turned out to be two black hens that had been sleeping on the railing. I shone my light directly into their eyes at close range until I felt sorry for them.
One glance at the script makes it clear that Kinski’s project is beyond repair. There is half a page of fucking, then half a page of fiddling-and so on, for six hundred pages.
A dog hopped over to me on three legs and looked at me like an apostle gazing at the Lord.
I called for more coffee. More! Scram, you ghosts!
Suddenly Kinski started yelling again, but it had no connection to anything here. He was beside himself, calling Sergio Leone and Corbucci rotten vermin, no good so and so’s and cyclopean assholes. it took a long time for him to tire himself out. Then his yelling flared up again briefly, as he called Fellini a bungling idiot, a fat bastard.
The freight included three large turkeys, one of which keeps spreading his tail to intimidate me, gobbling, and putting on a great show of agitation. This turkey, this bird of ill omen, is a pure albino, so it is quite a sight when it fans its great white wheel, spreads its wings, whose tips trail on the ground, and puffs up its feathers. Snorting in bursts, it launched several feigned attacks on me and gazed at me with such intense stupidity emanating from its ugly face, which took on a bluish purple coloration and had tumor like wattles, that without more ado I pulled a feather out of its spreading rear end. Now the turkey’s sulking.
I am on very intimate terms with death.
Kinski poked around in the banana fronds outside my cabin and had Beatus take hundreds of pictures of him surrounded by the luxuriant leaves. Kinski amorously leaned his cheek against a tree trunk and then began to copulate with the tree. He thinks this is immensely erotic; the child of nature and the wild jungle. yet to this day he has not ventured so much as ten metres into the forest: this is one of his poses. His Yves St Laurent jungle suit is far more important to him then the jungle itself, and I snapped at him without any real reason when he expected me to happily agree that the primeval forest was erotic. To me it was not erotic at all. I spat, only obscene.
Once back over the jungle it struck me that the people in Satipo were like vomit, ugly, mean-spirited, unkempt, as if a town in the highlands had regurgitated its most degenerate elements and pushed them off into the jungle.
Some winged creature promptly flew into my ear, as if it had been fired at me. It felt as if its wings were made of metal, rotating like a lawnmower that wanted to bore its way into my skull. Once it had been removed and I could hear normally again, I heard the frogs outside testing the night. Night should watch out for me!
85 percent of all existing species are beetles and insects of various sorts; so where are we on the scale of God’s favor?
I brooded over the hero of my story, who rides into the mayors office, smashes in a door, and gallops right into an assembly of his enemies , on whom he, as surprised as they are, lets loose a hail of bullets until both his Colts’ chambers are empty. From then on he is an outlaw.
Unsociable. The children put the cat into the laundry dryer and turned it on. The cat survived. After that it was not sociable anymore.
A dwarf missing his front teeth also wanted to get into the film.
A world that does not exist for me anymore. How often I used to study calender pictures down to the smallest detail, trying like a detective to figure out the exact date and time when the picture was taken. Looking at a picture of the Hamburg harbor, I examined the models and years of the parked cars, figured out which ship was being loaded with what and where, found a church tower with a clock that showed the time, comapared the angles of shadows: all these pieces of information, when checked against the harbor’s logbook, would make it possible to determine the date and exact time, as well as the photographer’s position and the lens he had used. The picture could serve as evidence in court for a major case, evidence sufficient for conviction.
I told her about La Soufriere, making comparison with the atom bomb over Hiroshima for the sake of clarity-explaining how much more powerful the apparently inevitable catastrophe would be. Atom bomb? she asked. She did not understand. To clarify, I explained that at the end of the Second World War the Americans had dropped it over Japan. But she did not know what the World War was, either. I found that striking, and with a joke brushed aside two world wars, several continents, and a whole world whose reach does not extend to these parts. (Explaining about the time Werner stood atop a volcano that was bout to explode to a Native.)
Kinski is becoming the epicenter of discouragement.
Kinski complained that the rooster had woken him up at five in the morning; that someone had thrown away an empty beer can close to his hut, of all places; and that a light a hundred metres away had been left on all night; that all these vile tricks could not possibly be the result of mere stupidity; but had been perpetrated on purpose. He said he was going to raise holy hell, not only here but all over America.
Errol Morris was in complete panic, because as usual he has too much material but still no plot for his story about a small town in Florida where dozens of insurance fraud cases are uncovered by a detective working for an insurance company: Policy holders keep losing limbs in the most absurd ways so they can bring enormous claims, but every time the accident leaves them with a combination of limbs-missing a leg or an arm, or one leg and one arm-that still permits them afterward to drive a Cadillac with an automatic transmission. I suggested to Errol that in the first scene, set in the town of Vernon, which the insurance companies privately call Nub City, which Errol wants to use as the film’s title, he should show Junior attaching a self-shooting device to a tree so he can shoot off his left arm. He has a pot of tar heating up, into which he can plunge the stump to stop the bleeding, he has already fastened the device to a branch with a wire attached to the trigger, so he can explain afterward that he was planning to attack a nest of vultures, when he notices at the last moment that he is being watched: the insurance company detective has come to town. From then on, the cops and robbers game can get under way, with the insurance investigator as the bad guy, the cop who tries to prevent the “accident,” which Junior tries to pull off with increasingly clever techniques. In the end Junior triumphs when he succeeds in losing an arm.
We have no dinosaur, it says on a hand-lettered sign outside a farm that puts on rattlesnake rodeos.
Today I cannot stand being around people, so I ate sitting on the wooden bench on my porch, my gaze fixed on the dumb green river.
I was reminded of Aguirre: when everything had fallen apart and we were all perched on a raft in the depths of the jungle, hating each other. I asked for a half-hour recess, withdrew to the very edge of the raft, sat down with my back to the others, and cried. Miguel Vazquez promptly came up to me from behind, placed his hand firmly on the back of my neck, and silently sat down beside me. he stayed there quite a while, holding my neck firmly, and the only word he said was “Courage!” And gradually my courage returned, and the people on the raft who had behaved worse than animals acted halfway human for at least a day.
Our kitchen crew slaughtered our last four ducks. While they were still alive Julian plucked their neck feathers, before chopping off their heads on the execution block. The albino turkey, that vain creature, the survivor of so many roast chickens and ducks transformed into soup, came over to inspect, gobbling and displaying, used his ugly feet to push one of the beheaded ducks, as it lay there on the ground bleeding and flapping its wings, into what he thought was a proper position, and making gurgling sounds while his bluish red wattles swelled, he mounted the dying duck and copulated with it.
The camp is silent with resignation; only the turkey is making a racket. It attacked me, overestimating its own strength, and I quickly grabbed its neck, which squirmed and tried to swallow, slapped him left to right with the casual elegance of the arrogant cavaliers I had seen in French Musketeer films, who dutifully do fancy swordplay, and then let the vain albino go. His feeling hurt, he trotted away, wiggling his rump with his wings still spread in conceited display.
Segundo gave me a big insect, quite unusual. It has a bulge on its head like that of a crocodile, and allegedly its bite is lethal, as Segundo reveals in a whisper. During the rubber era there were many more of them, and the only way to prevent certain death was allegedly to make love to a woman right away, but a hundred years ago, when there were so many woodsmen but hardly any women, a silent understanding developed that in such a situation a woman would be lent out by her husband. Thus there were many men bitten, and even more survivors.
The extent of our demoralization can be measured more and more clearly by the bad jokes that are making the round. The weirdest one deserves to be mentioned: Why was Jesus not born in Mexico? They could not find three wise men and a virgin.
At night I am even lonelier than during the day. I listened intently to the silence, pierced by the cries of tormented insects and tormented animals. Even the motors of our boats have something tormented about them.
In the face of the obscene, explicit malice of the jungle, which lacks only dinosaurs as punctuation. I feel like a half-finished, poorly expressed sentence in a cheap novel.
While hauling away a mud-smeared, uncooperative steel cable, one of the Indians farted from the effort with such force and duration that it sounded amid the roaring vulgarity of the nature like the first indication of a human will to impose order.
In my imagination my wishes carry me away to a place where people fly over church towers, church towers over farmland, ships over mountains, and continents over oceans.
(On rumors that Claudia Cardinale, the female star, had been in an accident.)
Somehow the Italian journalist managed to reach me again, in the office. Following the promptings of inspiration, because you cannot dispel a rumor with the truth but only with an even wilder rumor, I told him the whole situation was actually far worse than had been reported: the barefoot half-cast mestizo Indian who had run over her had not only been drunk; he had promptly raped the accident victim, even though shocked bystanders gathered around. At that there was a long silence on the other end of the line, and then the receiver was hung up.
In the evening Kinski was full of threats; he would see to it that the film was a bust; this was not the first time; he had already done this in dozens of cases. I listened to him unmoved, although I knew what a trail of destruction he has left behind him in his life. Then he threatened to do a whole slew of other things-he did not give a fig for the laws, and for the things he had already done he should have gone to jail long ago. Then he described what he had done to his two daughters, Pola and Natassja, probably meaning that as a threat; for that alone he would have been given a twenty-year sentence in the U.S.; i should watch my back, he was not deterred by anything.
For the first time in my life I rode a motorcycle through a movie theater. After the screening of the rushes, which I slept through, as I usually do, it was raining so hard that to shelter my motorcycle from the deluge I rode through a side entrance into the theater and past the screen, then up the middle aisle, past the rows of seats, then through the women’s restroom into the lobby, which was closed off with a grille; and there I left it.
Six Sinchis strolled toward me in camouflage, young figures in top condition with slow movements and alert eyes, imbued with the sense of being the best of the best. Their leader strolled, his phallus erect under his battle trousers, among his athletic fighters, all Indians, by the way.
Animals are in the camp, a little monkey with round saucer eyes; he always looks as though he were saying, “Fitzroy was here.”
When he got home, he found his wife had run off with another man, He went to his mother-in-law and said, I am going to take you, then. And that he did, but he did not last more then a week with her.
Chino had a similar story: when he returned to Iquitos, his wife told him, Now you have money; buy me a sewing machine. He did so. A week later his wife ran away with another man, and the sewing machine.
Large green lizards are rustling in the leaves. Fish leap out of the water as if they actually belonged to the clouds in the sky. It is only through writing that I become myself.
The air is fat as a pig, and lingers rigid and sweaty outside.
For days there has been a sick duck lying around by the water. At first I thought she might be sitting on eggs, but after she was roasted on two crossed sticks over Zeze’s fire, I learned that the duck had had the habit of climbing into the Indian laundry women’s large plastic tub when it was filled with detergent, because apparently she liked bubble baths. But as a result she had lost the film of oil on her feathers, and whenever she tried to swim in the river, she soaked up water and sank.
For several days we had also been having problems with one member of the team. It was becoming more and more noticeable that he was acting frantic, distracted, incoherent, to the point that I suspected him of being on drugs. What I did not know was that he had gone temporarily insane. He arrived emaciated, altered, confused. I finally decided, in order to keep an eye on him, to have him join us at our headquarters on the Nanay. I gave him my hut on stilts and moved for the time being into the house up front. The first night, just before dawn, my hut went up in flames. He had set it on fire, and, wearing only a loincloth, had jumped onto a motorcycle and raced into town, a large machete clamped between his teeth. he had also painted his face black, so as to be invisible like the Indians in the film. In town he seized two young travel-agency employees as hostages, but fortunately released them before the police opened fire. Fortunately this turned out to be a passing episode. To this day, he is someone for whom I feel undying friendship.
I looked around, and there was the jungle, manifesting the same seething hatred, wrathful and steaming, while the river flowed by in majestic indifference and scornful condescension, ignoring everything: the plight of man, the burden of dreams, and the torments of time.
Today, on Wednesday, the 4th of November 1984, shortly after twelve noon, we got the ship from Rio Camisea over a mountain into the Rio Urubamba. All that is to be reported is this. I took part.
I decided while working on Menstrate two (My ground breaking magazine.) I would try and tackle it from a more femine point of view. So I bought a Marvin Gaye tape, took out a Patsy Cline cd at the Library and Bought a book called the Encyclopedie De La Femme. Its in French. But even with the language barrier it is a vast chasm of information.
I just finished reading the autobiography of Klaus Kinski. Kinski Uncut. He was a German actor. A prisoner of war, a raving womanizing loon. Some claim it is filled with half truths and downright lies. Growing up in poverty, he later made whatever movies paid the most. One after the other. He brags of sleeping with a women’s thirteen year old daughter, and her elderly mother. He rambles on and on about his sexual exploits, though some sound more like rape at times. The hookers, the prostitutes. And it gets a little old near the end, as he complains about not being able to see his boy enough. As though that love, if repeatedly expressed in these pages, will make up for his other mistakes (even though during this whole time he never mentions his first daughter who he never seems to speak too.) A mad, controlling, exploding animal. Outrageous and insane. He was most famous for making an arm full of films with Werner Herzog. He was a mad man, a great actor, a self proclaimed genius at love making. A real true blue psychopath.
Here are some of the better quotes in the book.
“But whenever I so much as touch her, she flinches in terror. After two hours of this torture, I rip off her blouse at one swoop, and the pear tits lose control. They actually do a Saint Vitus’s dance and shove their way into my mouth. We yank at our clothes, stumble, fall on the floor, gasp, yelp, shriek as if our lives depended on our getting rid of our clothes.
By the time we’re naked, we’re both crouching like two beasts about to pounce on each other. Then we do pounce, we dig our teeth into each other. We hit each other on the body. The face. The breasts. The genitals. Attack each other more and more violently. Sink our teeth in more and more painfully.
She pushes her abdomen up to my mouth as if performing a gymnastic bridge. She does a belly landing. Stretches her butt in the air. The cheeks gape apart, opening up her asshole and the gullet of her ravenous pussy-which snaps at my writhing eel like a feeding predator.
Sixteen hours later when I leave her apartment at seven A.M., there’s nothing we haven’t done.
A short time afterward I read in the papers that she and her husband have committed suicide.”
“She’s got to have it six or seven times a night. She barely talks, only when it’s absolutely necessary. Besides, I don’t understand her gobbledygook.”
“It might look as if all I do is loll around in beds and fuck. No way.”
“A wasp on the windowpane drives me crazy with its buzzing while I sit at the table by the window, staring at the sky. I open the window to let the wasp out, but it doesn’t fly away. For a while everything is silent. Then the wasp starts buzzing again and drumming its head against the pane. Bang! You’d think the wasp was drunk. Or doing this to get my attention. It wants me to deal with it. Perhaps it enjoys teasing. I should try as hard as I can to catch it even though I’m certain I won’t succeed. I should touch it, even graze it - without hurting it, of course. Brush its ass, and so on.
Its buzzing is so supersonic that I have to put my hands on my ears. This goes on for several hours. Whenever I remove my fists from my ears, the wasp starts it again, as if it were watching me and just waiting to fly headfirst against the pane. I try to hit it, but I miss. It hides. I know it’s watching me. As soon as I sit back down at the table, hoping that I’ve killed it or it’s flown away, the torture resumes. I press my fists against my ears until I’m certain that the wasp is finally fed up with tormenting me. But when I remove my fists, it starts all over again. This time it sounds as if the wasp were banging its skull against the pane more violently then ever.
I remain sitting for a while without covering my ears. While watching the wasp from the corners of my eyes, I pretend I’m not looking. In a surprise attack I rip the tablecloth - with the ink, the honey jar, and everything else - from the table and knock the wasp to the floor. The wasp is merely stunned. I tear a thread from the tablecloth and strangle the wasp. Then I incinerate it over the gas flame. As its charring body crackles and slowly fades out.”
“The hookers want me to autograph their tits and also their panties - right over their cunts. But I have to save my strength, and not only for performing. A girl has written me care of the Hotel Frankfurter Hof, asking to meet me. She goes to high school.
Without even knowing what she looks like, I’m obsessed with the thought of drilling this impatient swan.”
“A door opens in the brick dump, and a young female giant bends forward in the door frame. She has to bend because she’s truly gigantic - almost seven feet tall, and as broad as a heavyweight boxer.
Her stiff, horizontal tits are as huge as udders. Her arms are as strong as my thighs. Her hands could easily strangle me. Her strangely dark-blond hair, which reaches as far as her butt crack, is woven into a single braid as thick as a python. She’s got the hips and ass cheeks of a young mare. I can circle her thighs only with both arms. She must wear size fourteen shoes. Her pussy is as big as my head.”
“Even though she’s bent over, the giantess’s back is as high as that of a fully grown horse. Now I benefit from the Cossacks’ lessons: They taught me how to jump on a horse without stirrups or saddle just by grabbing its mane. I clutch her braid, and I’m on top of her in one fell swoop. She hasn’t budged. I mustn’t slip no matter what, for my spread legs, which barely envelop her hips, are high above the floor. If I sit down, I’ll have to repeat my leap every time.
I hold on to her strong braid with both hands and ride her like a jockey. She trembles. Her flanks quake like those of a thoroughbred. Not because I’m riding her, but because she’s having such powerful orgasms. I lie flat on her back-this is the end spurt-but my abdomen is working furiously. Goal! I bite into her braid and twitch on her trembling ass cheeks.
I’ve fallen asleep on her back. When I open my eyes, she’s still in the same position, bent over at the mirror. Once again we gallop down the course. Then I glide down to the floor.”
“Anything I don’t know she teaches me, anything she doesn’t know I teach her. She no longer wears undies, because I won’t let her. Never again. Not in the street. Not in the studio. Not in the restaurant. Nowhere.”
“I’m not talking about the Jesus in those horribly gaudy pictures. Not the Jesus with the jaundice-yellow skin - whom a crazy human society has turned into the biggest whore of all time. Whose corpse they perversely drag around on disgraceful crosses. I don’t mean the jabbering about God or the blubbering hymns. I don’t mean the Jesus whose moldy kiss frightens little girls out of horny dreams before their first communion and then makes them die of shame and disgust when they foam in the latrines.”
“My first woman is a veiled cyclist. She wears a black burnoose like a nun’s habit, and all I see is her ringed fingers on the handlebars, her bare feet in her sandals, and her coal black eyes. I call to her as if hailing a cab. She turns her head, narrowly missing a car. The drivers here must all be ex-camel drivers. I have her write the time and place on a scrap paper. She’s written ‘twelve midnight’ - that much I can read. The address is in Arabic, and I can’t possibly decipher it.
Finally I join the hash smokers on the dusty ground and listen to the storyteller. I don’t understand a word.
Then I heave a little girl to my shoulders: She can’t find her way through the teeming marketplace and so she can’t see anything. She’s not wearing any panties under her torn little dress. I can tell because her naked twat sticks to the back of my neck, which gets wet. The girl rubbing her clit against me as I caress her skinny thighs; the evocative movement of the storyteller; the hash, which is extremely strong in Morocco; the numbing air, spiced with indefinable aromas and a sultry stench; the monotonous Oriental music seeping in from all nooks and crannies like a narcotic; the voices whispering, murmuring, calling, yelling, yelping, laughing in the most disparate Arabic dialects - all these things might have caused me to miss my appointment with the cyclist. But the half-naked girl on my shoulders points to the crumpled up note that drops to the ground from my pants pockets.”
“In Rome Marlon Brando bangs away at Sherene’s door every night. He’s filming some piece of garbage and lives in the same pensione as Sherene. I hope she finally opens the door and lets him in so I can attend to other twats. But she never does open the door, and the next day I have to fuck her in her dressing room at Helios Studio.”
“It’s mainly journalists who booze and chow down in the castello. A German newspaperwoman pukes on a Chinese rug because her googly eyes were bigger then her stomach. She then writes in a glossy mag that I gobble caviar by the spoonful.”
“We hop into our Maserati and dash over to George’s, the most expensive restaurant in Rome. After the meal I smash all the plates and glasses and pay for the damage - it’s worth it.
Mario Costa is dead. Just as I prophesied.”
“Herzog sticks to me like a shit-house fly. Now I hate that killer’s guts. I shriek into his face that I want to see him croak like the llama that he executed. He should be thrown alive to the crocodiles! An anaconda should strangle him slowly! A poisonous spider should sting him and paralyze his lungs! The most venomous serpent should bite him and make his brain explode! No, panther claws should rip open his throat - that would be much too good for him! No! The huge red ants should piss into his lying eyes and gobble up his balls and his guts! He should catch the plague! Syphilis! Malaria! Yellow fever! Leprosy! It’s no use; the more I wish him the most gruesome deaths, the more he haunts me.”
“On a street in Paris, a dog eyes me, and I can’t help crying. What did I do to the dog?”
“The German government writes me that it has awarded me the supreme distinction for an actor: the Gold Film Ribbon. What gall! Who gave those shitheads the right to award me anything? Did it never occur to them that there might be somebody who doesn’t want their shit? What filthy arrogance to award me - me, of all people! - a prize! What does this prize mean, anyway? Is it a reward? For what? For my pains, sufferings, despair, tears? A prize for every hell, every dying, every resurrection? Prizes for death and life? Prizes for passion, for hate and love? And how did you shitheads intend to hand me the prize? As a gift? As a favor, like those tasteless hosts that the pope distributes like fast food? I’ll kick you! Or do I come submissive, whimpering? I’ll kick you again! And there’s not even a check. It’s outrageous!”
“When we were shooting Nosferatu, I brought him (Herzog) a pair of white slacks from Yves Saint-Laurent in Paris. Who knows what he did with the Yves Saint-Laurent trousers? In any case, he’s still sporting those unwashed, sweat-stained, fart-soaked rags - and he’s just as recalcitrant and he still stuffs his face like the garbage can he is - without ever picking up the check.”
“The other Frenchwoman is hysterical and is still resisting long after I’ve stuck my dick into her pussy and shot. She’s married, and during the fuck she babbles about “rape…..adultery……scoundrel….” Yet her bodacious butt sticks out so hornily that she can’t want anything but adultery.”
“Herzog who’s producing the film, also wrote the script - and he wants to direct it, too. I promptly ask him how much money he’s got.
When he visits me in my pad, he’s so shy that he barely has the nerve to come in. Maybe it’s just a ploy. In any case, he lingers at the threshold for such an idiotically long time that I practically have to drag him inside. Once he’s here, he starts explaining the movie without even being asked. I tell him that I’ve read the script and I know the story. But he turns a deaf ear and just keeps talking and talking and talking. I start thinking that he’ll never be able to stop talking even if he tries. Not that he talks quickly, ‘like a waterfall’ as people say when someone talks fast furious, pouring out the words. Quite the contrary: His speech is clumsy, with a toad-like indolence, long winded, pedantic, choppy. The words tumble from his mouth in sentence fragments, which he holds back as much as possible, as if they were earning interest. It takes forever and a day for him to push a clump of hardened brain snot. Then he writhes in painful ecstasy, as if he had sugar on his rotten teeth. A very slow blab machine. An obsolete model with a nonworking switch - it can’t be turned off unless you cut off the electric power altogether. So I’d have to smash him in the kisser. No, I’d have to knock him unconscious. But even if he were unconscious, he’d keep talking. Even if his vocal cords were sliced through, he’d keep talking like a ventriloquist. Even if his throat were cut and his head were chopped off, speech balloons would still dangle from his mouth like gases emitted by internal decay.
I haven’t the foggiest idea what he’s talking about, except that he’s high as a kite on himself for no visible reason, and he’s enthralled by his own daring, which is nothing but dilettantish innocence. When he thinks I finally see what a great guy he is, he blurts out the bad news, explaining in a hard-boiled tone about the shitty living and working conditions that lie ahead. He sounds like a judge handing down a well deserved sentence. And, licking his lips as if he were talking some culinary delicacy, he crudely and brazenly claims that all the participants are delighted to endure the unimaginable stress and deprivation in order to follow him, Herzog. Why, they would risk their lives for him without batting an eyelash. He, in any case, will put all his eggs in one basket in order to attain his goal. No matter what it may cost, ‘do or die’ as he puts it in his foolhardy way. And he tolerantly closes his eyes to the spawn of his megalomania, which he mistakes for genius. Granted, he sincerely confesses, he sometimes gets dizzy thinking about his own insane ideas - by which, however, he is simply carried away.”
“I once asked a Gypsy girlfriend whether she ever went to the theater or the movies, and she replied: ‘When I was fourteen, two men fought with knives over me. One stabbed the other to death. I touched the dead man: he was really dead. The other was really alive.’ That’s the difference between make believe life and real life. Mine is real.”
The above video is from a documentary Werner Herzog made that detailed their working relationship. It was called My Best Fiend. You can watch it here.
