p.s.  So the other day I was thinking about Todd Solondz, a filmmaker about whom I've never quite been able to form an unconflicted opinion, and I'd thought I'd throw him and his stuff out to you lurkers and locals so see what you think.  So have at them, if you feel like it, and thanks.  I woke up too early today so I'm kind of sleepy, so I'll probably be a little a little short and loopy today.  **   Lost Child, Yeah, I'm in email non-answering hell, and trying to clear my way out it.  Nothing personal, of course, of course.  You'll hear from me really soon, I swear.  Well, I sure hope our LA trips in January can align.  That would sure be nice.  Let me know your dates there when you know them.  Much love to you.  **  Sirhc, Chris!  Wow, how the heck are you?  That's fantastic about your film.  Well, I'm actually living in Paris the great majority of my time now, so I'm not in LA, which sucks.  Get your film in some Parisian festival.  Man, it's so nice to see you.  Say hey to Andy, and I hope we can sort out a reconnection soon.  Take care, man.  **  Bernard, 'Spooky Bear Weekend', goodness.  Can human bears be spooky, even when they try?  I'd like to see that.  Glad you liked the Wes Anderson too.  Excellent UFO think out loud.  I saw a handful as young teen, or maybe I did, in the skies over Hawaii, although I don't know.  Officialdom said it was meteors, but why were those air force jets chasing them like crazy if they were meteors?  **  Mat, Oh, you can post any pix of me you want, I guess, except those making a stupid face in sequence ones maybe.  **  Doug Wasted, Yeah, sneaking is usually the best policy, but oh well.  What are you writing about regarding Syria anyway.  Let me know if the Paris trip goes through.  I don't have to make my LA dates for a short while yet.  **  David Ehrenstein, Renfro was so not flirty.  What's the opposite of flirty? Or the opposite minus hostility.  He was that.  'Sayat Nova' aka 'The Color of Pomegranates' is one of my 10 favorite films of all time.  **  Ackechikogorou, Oh, your experimental fiction blog is in German, drat.  That blue is intense.  I'm real glad you and Cata met up.  He's great, right?  As no doubt you are too.  I need to get Berlin somehow, god damn it.  I look forward to the Broken Social piece, needless to say.  **  SYpHA_69, Yeah, maybe the legs problem is inherited.  Yury has weak knees that make swimming and jogging difficult for him, and apparently weak knees goes back centuries in the Smirnov clan.  I say give the exercises a while to work.  Muscles are stubborn motherfuckers, as are legs.  **  Statictick, Objectively, yeah, you know what they say about rebound love not being long love or whatever.  Maybe you need a hobby or something.  Or a porn plunge.  Just do your best, whatever that may be.  **  Steevee, I can't imagine 'Killed' can reach France, unless it's been youtubed, which seems like a natural.  I'll check.  Yeah, to my mind the fuss over the moveon 'betray ad' was one of the most telling, depressing things in recent memory on so many levels.  Just the idea that things are so off course than moveon could actually be called a radical group with almost no one on either side challenging that tag.  Is it really so grim and deadheaded in the US that moveon does in fact constitute a radical group these days?  That's a very sad question to even have to ask.  **  Slatted Light, Beautiful thoughts on Xiu Xiu, and thanks about George.  He's on my mind so often that it doesn't take much to start talking about him, and I  do want to be mindful of others' attention spans.  I hear you about the body merging.  I mentioned this in one of my novels, maybe 'Guide', but I used to have this exercise I'd do when I felt overly attracted to someone.  I would imagine myself inside their body, and it would quite often diminish the lust, and was kind of an instructive mental exercise about the nature and limitations of lust too.  You agree about 'In the Mouth of Madness'?  Wow, I rarely find people who've even seen it, much less agree.  Nice horror film top ten.  I'll have sort out mine, now that you've triggered my top ten list fetish.  I'll figure a way to do the b horror movie entry, and any suggestions from you or anyone else about the best way to do that are very welcome.  **  Jack, Nice icing on the cake.  Yeah, not a bad bit of icing at all.  Why am I surprised?  **  5stringsA, You've been very sick? Very sick?  Dude, are you all right?  Naturally, I've been wondering where you were.  Yeah, I really did smoke a whole bunch of joints with Michael Anthony, and he didn't wear spandex clothes back then or anything.  **  Wolf, Wow, that was great.  Your post.  What's going on down there in Brighton right at this very moment?  **  Atheist, I got a note that there's a package in the currently closed office of this residency waiting for me.  I wonder ... could it be ... ?  I'll let you know.  **  Joe M., I bet you could fall in love with a new band if you let yourself, and Xiu Xiu is one quite viable candidate.  I think there's a lot of really interesting films being made, and I'd say this has been an usually good year for film  in fact, with a bunch of potentially really fresh films coming out between now and Xmas, like (just to name the more Hollywoody stuff) the new Todd Haynes, the Tim Burton/Sondheim, the new Van Sant, the new Coens, and others, but I don't know that TV is open minded enough to play the really fresh stuff while it still fresh or make such things very often.  Capitalism's a bitch.  Isn't there a good art house cinema in Glasgow you could haunt?  **  Mb, My total pleasure.  Thank you.  More, please?  **  Math t, Whoa!  Are you a sight for sore eyes, or what?  Fucking cool.  Are you, like back back, like back to hang out?  Whatever's good.  That new drawing you linked to is incredible.  The work's in some spectacular new shape.  And I'm glad you sound like you're in okay shape after what sounds like a pretty unokay period.  I can't wait to see you in NYC too.  Just such a pleasure to see you, Math.  You made my month.  **  Robert-nyc, Yeah, Velvet Mafia is an excellent thing.  Those guys who do that and the press are heroes.  I don't know my top five Xiu Xiu songs off the top of my head, but 'Blacks' is definitely in my top two.  **  JW Veldhoen, I'm too tired this morning to try to answer such a good question.  I don't know ... painting is so ... I'm not a big painting guy, never have been really.  With many exceptions, but it's the lack of insidiousness that kind of, I don't know, bores me a lot in painting, not that painting can't be insidious, but I like sculpture, best of both worlds, of many worlds, plus you can't represent it even slightly in a photo, which is one reason I love it.  But anyway, I'm rambling.  I absolutely love that kid pic of you.  **  Richard Eichmann, Hi.  **  Bacteriaburger, One thing I love about the idea of making porn is that you have believe you're right, that your tastes are in fact common ones, or that they aren't and you can seduce others into feeling things your way, which of course is exactly what so-called fine artists believe, which is one reason why I think porn has to be considered an art form, albeit an art form that's way too rarely utilized by artists, which makes it a kind of frontier, which makes the idea of making all the more exciting,  **  Thomas Moronic, That's a great book to read on that particular trip.  Maybe you should read it to the kids around a campfire  You could do so much worse for them.   Good luck with all that, and see you on Friday if not before.  **  Porcelain Skull, Sorry, Alex.  I'd say someone having a boyfriend is not like living on the other side of the Berlin Wall, but it's probably best to let it go, right?  Great about the group show.  I'm so glad things are happening in a public way.  Do please let me/us know when we can have a look.  **  Matthew, Hey.  New, real name.  Why not?  Well, thank Creative Massacre for that trailer tip.  She's the blog's reigning master of that genre.  **  Adjoun, Where can you get that Japanese design stuff?  Like in stores?  Xmas is coming up, and Yury loves that kind of stuff.  Yury's thinking about Moscow tips.  He cringed when I asked and then said he'd think about it.  **  Tigersare, Gosh, that pic was, well, let's just say I'm on the immediate look out.  And listen out too.  Thanks.  Wow, you're busy.  Do you just crank out the articles and try not to care about them?  Or are you gifted with the magical ability to do quality with speed?  Monty Python: when they were at their height of popularity in the US, I was in my one year at university, and the school was just full of people doing the dead parrot thing and singing the spam and lumberjack songs and so on, so I came into their stuff kind of hating the mere sound of them, so, no, I wasn't much of fan, but I get the good in them now even though the unpleasant memories remain.  You were/are a real fan?  **  Catachrestic, I told you it was awesome, see?  You did superbly, sir, and I will be forever in your debt, and it is my understanding that Jamie is a reader of my blog, so I have stinking suspicion he saw the Day and is possibly even lying in bed with the covers turned down staring longingly in the direction of Berlin right now.  **  Chris, Frankly, that does sound pretty civilized.  Civilized in the negative sense, spoken by anarchist me.  But I'm glad you were a hit.  And I'm glad I was wrong in my 'Wound Man' guess too.  I did a reading at Queer Up North once ages ago.  In fact it got me laid.  And laid more than satisfactorily too.  Word to the wise.  I was pretty into the poetry coming out of England in the early 70s, yeah.  There was this Penguin anthology called 'Children of Albion' that gathered what I guess were the more sort cutting edge English poets at that time: Horowitz, Raworth, that guy who also wrote Cream's lyrics, and many others, and I liked it a lot.  Are/were you into those guys?  They were kind of a overseas parallel to the second generation New York poets like Padgett, Berrigan, Brainard, et. al., whom I adored.  The early 70s were a great time for poetry.  There was a sense of revolution and fun going on that pretty much died out right after that, it seems.  **  Blair, I wrote you.  Man, thank you so much.  Your photographs?  Yeah, definitely think about  showing them.  Absolutely. Oh, and to anybody else whose eyes are seeing this, Blair's new novel that's coming out in March is fucking amazing.  You all just wait.  **  Marc, Yeah, err, uh, email phobia continues, but it's being chipped away.  Awesome about the new job, and your exciting busyness.  Oh, yeah, here's the address:  Dennis Cooper c/o Centre International des Recollets, 150 rue du Faubourg St. Martin, 75010 Paris France.  That's good until mid-late December, so it should work.  **  Creative Massacre, The Fabulous Moolah died?  Oh, that's really sad to hear.  When I was first getting into wrestling, she was still around although I don't think she was still wrestling then.  I think she was more of a side character by then, maybe a manager or something.  I always adored her.  That's sad. Thanks for the 'Hostel 2' tip.  It's been on my list.  Can you believe I never even saw the first 'Hostel'?  Do I need to see them in order?  **  Misanthrope, You'll have to wait a bit to celebrate or slit your wrists about my 'Paranoid Park' review.  See, kindly CyCyLoLo got me and Yury free passes to see it, but it turns out you can't use the passes on weekends.  Hopefully asap.  Oh yeah, well, if I ever get the chance to eat VK's ass, that German cannibal killer is gonna seem like Laura Bush drinking Starbucks.  Oh, that's right, you idolize Laura Bush.  Okay, like, like Leslie Stahl drinking Starbucks.  Top that.  **  Dynomoose, Those pix of Persephone are so unbelievably sweet they even had the 'most dangerous writer in America' awwwing and cooing like I was Atheist or something.  I never saw all that much in Brad Renfro, actually.  He was too angry for me or something.  You liked 'ItMoM' too?  Cool.  I'm not the hugest John Carpenter fan in general apart from the obvious couple: 'Halloween,' 'Escape from New York', etc.  He's made an amazing number of total stinkers to my mind:  'The Fog', 'Vampires', 'Starman', ... need I go on?  Am I wrong?  **  Okay, I've gotta go artificially wake myself up some more somehow.  See you tomorrow.