Hell - Massive pissed love: nonfiction 2001-2014

ALSO BY RICHARD HELL

GO NOW

HOT AND COLD

GODLIKE

I DREAMED I WAS A VERY CLEAN TRAMP

Copyright Richard Meyers 2015

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hell, Richard.

[Essays. Selections]

Massive pissed love: nonfiction 2001-2014 / Richard Hell.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references.

I. Title.

PS3558.E4752A6 2015

814.54dc23

2015030008

SOFT SKULL PRESS

An imprint of COUNTERPOINT

2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

Berkeley, CA 94710

www.softskull.com

Distributed by Publishers Group West

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

e-book ISBN 978-1-61902-674-2

CONTENTS

Ive always liked thinking about subjects that move me, like movies and painting and music and writing, and even life that isnt art yet, when I notice it, and Im lucky that Ive been able to write about them without a lot of interference from editors. Much of the writing in this book came from me approaching editors with subjects I wanted to apply myself to. Part of the reason I have the freedom Ive had in non-fiction is that editors will think of me as a freak. Im allowed some latitude because after all youre watching a punk write as if hes an intellectual.

The organization of the book is semi-arbitrary. It was too dull to just divide it by subject matter, so I skimmed through it in search of aspects. I saw that some pieces were lengthy, some were angry, and many were thrilled or adoring: massive, pissed, love. So I had a possible title too. (Though the subtitle is slightly inaccuratethere are three pieces from the 90s-2000 and one from 2015. Other pre-2001 nonfiction is in my book Hot and Cold.) Within sections, I just went with the classic flow, kind of like sequencing songs on an album, but with a few random other factors, like the technical ones affecting what and where I could color illustrate.

Writing this book was almost all fun, even though sometimes stressful. I like to do research, and to be sure anything I present as factual is. The first couple of times I took on something large, or even small (a thousand word film review), I would get annoyed with the way its necessary to endlessly research and fact check in order to turn up the three percent which will actually be used. But pretty soon I accepted that and even reveled in it. Some of the writings are practically scholarly, or at least studious, while others are neatened notes for loose talks. For the Mouth of Hell columns the system was Id set the alarm on my calendar to pop up one day before each deadline and then ask myself what Id been thinking about, go 500 words from there, and turn it in the next morning. Foundations are hidden. I like my notes and drafts towards pieces almost more than the pieces themselves.

When I was young I made aggressive rock and roll music, but it originated in thought and analysis and artistic ambitions too, no matter how physical, emotional, and crude it might have seemed. One thing Ive learned in years of thinking about peoples artworks is that the interesting, useful way of looking at them is to assume that the artist knows what he or she is doing. Its profitably confusing when the artist actually is an idiot, or a punk.

THERES NOT ENOUGH TIME. Theres not enough time. I remember when I was a kid in my early twenties and trying to teach myself to write I was also publishing books as a small publisher and I was doing a book of Patti Smiths. We were calling it Merde, and she drew some pictures for it and one of them was just the penciled words, Theres not enuf time (she first wrote enough and changed it to enuf which was better), and I thought that was glamorous, because for me there was way too much time, way way too much time. Which brings me to The Devil Probably, doesnt it, because the devil makes playwait no its workfor idle hands.

But what I was really thinking when I said theres not enough time was that when I consider how Id like to speak of Robert Bresson, theres not enough time. I dont have enough time to be brief! Because its true Im not who I was when I was twenty or twenty-five and I have come to the kind of existence where theres not enough time and I am ultimately glad of that, even if it brings an awareness that I cant do justice to Robert Bresson.

But what brings me to this movie this afternoon is the recognition in it of that kid who I was in the 1970s. Doubtless its presumptuous and ignorant of me to come to the movie in such a self-centered way, but I think its no worse than coming to it by way of picking pockets. Its a strange path I have had to take to come to Bresson.

So I want to talk a little about how this movie affected and affects me. As I say, I came to Bresson late. I dont know why. Ive always loved movies and I thought I had fairly sophisticated taste and knowledge. Its true that Bresson goes against everything were conditioned to appreciate in movies by Hollywood and modern life, but then so does Godard whom Ive loved since I first saw his movies in my teens. But then Godard did start out riffing on his love for Hollywood genre movies, so he took you on this educational ride, whereas Bresson is astonishing for his fidelity to filmic values that forego all audience manipulation, all pandering for any cheap thrills. For instance, as Susan Sontag pointed out, theres no conventional suspense in his movies. His movie about a prisoner trying to get away actually reveals its denouement in its title: Un condamn mort sest chapp (literal translation: A Man Condemned to Death Escapes; English release title: A Man Escaped). In fact, its funny, when we posted at my website in advance of this screening a little account of the story of The Devil, Probably I made the ending of it into a hyperlink so that the reader would have to choose if he or she wanted to know the ending. But of course later when I was looking at the movie again I saw that practically the first shot of the movie is a newspaper headline shouting out the movies climax.

Also theres no humor in Bresson. Well, it is pretty much impossible for anything really good not to be a little funny, but theres as little humor as you can imagine. Dostoevsky seems to have been an artistic brother for him, at least in terms of themesPickpocket and Une Femme Douce and Four Nights of a Dreamer are all derived to degrees from Dostoevskyand maybe the incidental humor in Bresson happens the way it does in Dostoevsky, rooted in grotesque pathos. Nobody ever even smiles in a Bresson movie. The only moment I noticed in The Devil, Probably where there was a hint of upturned lips on a character was during the most disturbing scene of the movie and happened when the main character Charles realizes the bus hes on is out of control.