Herzog. Encounters with Remarkable Men.

Well I finally saw Herzog with my own very eyes. Thanks to my friends Lauren and Dave, (Babushka and Little Fyodor) who clued me into the international conference at the University of Colorado. I had been to this conference before as an undergraduate in the mid 90s. The highlight of the experience was always Roger Ebert's "interruptus" session of some movie he thought worth dissection. It is a "democracy in the dark." A movie is watched in a theater (The Mackie Auditorium) but anyone is allowed yell "stop!" to make a point or ask a question. In the past it was wholly moderated by Ebert. But the man can't talk anymore.

All I knew was that Herzog was going to be in Boulder, and therefore, so must I. The details trickled in, but I was in such an excitement that nothing really registered except that "Herzog was going to be in Boulder!" A quick glance at the panels excited me further. A talk on his "walking on foot." And then two two-hour sessions of Aguirre the Wrath of God in Interruptus form over two days.

To my extreme delight I found out when I arrived that not only would it be Herzog, but also Ramin Bahrani, director of the neo-realist film "Chop Shop.' A film that I think is one of the best movies of the past decade. The absolute anecdote to Avatar. (He also directed the cutesy "Plastic Bag" short that's been floating around, narrated by Herzog.) Bahrani, a young accomplished director, and a professor at Columbia, asked all the best questions. And the audience mostly allowed the two do the majority of the commentary. Still, even when some knucklehead would ask a stupid question, Herzog could ALWAYS transmute the banal into the profound. He is just spectacular to see speak. *

We went up to talk to him afterwards; Babushka in the vanguard. She slipped him a CD of Little Fyodor and Babushka's Peace is Boring. And as a delightful consequence, the CD is a prop in the video that Ebert shot of Herzog explaining his latest project; something to do with a cave in France. Petroglyphs and stalagtites filmed in 3-D, apparently!

Here's Ebert's blog post from the first day.


I'm off screen. But only just. Off to the left, standing with Dave and Lauren (Little Fyodor and Babushka.)

If only I had the courage to chime in with something substantive, instead of enduring stupid comments from aging, clueless Boulderites! (I'm positive that there could be a very small number of people in the audience that knew as much about the man as I did--if any.) But I was mortified, less than ten feet away, in the presence of the man I most idolize on this planet. So, I didn't get to speak to him directly. That will have to happen another time.

* The esctatic culmination of this effect was at the end of the second showing day of Interruptus. Because Herzog could not stay the whole week, there was a short question and answer segment at the end. There was time for one last question, and this older dude was annointed with the honor of the last question. This gent stood up and announced he was very particular about movies. He questioned the special effects, and how a cannon that fell from a cliff wouldn't explode this or that way. Some literalist bullshit. Herzog took this deflating, idiotic question and went on to explain that he was a storyteller, and the moment in the story was one of many that form a fabric that leads the viewer into stranger and stranger realities.

Aguirre the Wrath of God was the first Herzog film I saw. I watched it almost disinterestedly on my roommate's tiny crappy TV on VHS. By the end of the movie I had felt like something had changed in me. Beyond something like "a ride," or "an experience." But an actual change in the way I experience reality.

The dissection of the last two days showed me in many ways how this is accomplished by Herzog. Slowly, ever slowly, the reality of the movie evolves so that the unacceptable becomes the acceptable. And it is not a drug trip crescendo; quite the contrary. The film is rooted: in the environment, the circumstances of production, the physicality of the jungle, in the mud, Kinski's histrionics--all of it is crafted by the structure of the movie to slowly change the viewer's mind what is acceptable and what is not. By the end we are in El Dorado with a demented conquistador who talks to monkeys. Yes, it is a parallel experience to drug or dream reality. But it is a conscious, crafted reality chiseled by an artisan. It is the difference being in love with a cloud and in a human being.

In short, my faith has been affirmed. Inspired anew!

The edge of the end: Herzog up for Oscar

Well, it's happened. He's been hobnobbing in Hollywood long enough; he's up for a nomination for best doc, along with Henry Kaiser. I haven't seen it yet.

I saw Henry Kaiser perform with Loren MazzaCane Connors, providing a live soundtrack to some crazy Japanese silent film (A Page of Madness).

I saw Mister Lonely. That isn't winning any awards. Nor should it. It should just be let be. Perhaps long down the road we'll see the genius in it.

Film geek drrrrroool: Lynch and Herzog Collab

David Lynch and Herzog together.

Hollywood Herzog

Is shooting a remake of Bad Lieutenant this summer, then another film with Focus called "The Piano Tuner."

No word yet on Herzog's Ghostbusters remake.

h/t zentrout

The Stupidest TV Show on TV right now

I've watched a lot more TV the past 9 months more than I have any right to claim I have any brain left to critically examine anything in this world anymore, but the Travel Channel's Most Unique McDonald's in the World is the crappiest of nighttime crap. Pure corporate propaganda. Seems to be made by the people who brought us the hot dog show, same narrator, same lack of curiosity about the strangeness on the topic.

I feel crappy about making this post, but it should be said that even after nine months of saturating my brain with TV's blast of raw stupidity, McD's show just seems to be the worst of the worst. But the medium is the message. Or, in the words of Umberto Eco, the medium is NOT the message. Which is worse? In times of crisis I defer to a higher power:

May I propose a Herzog dictum? Those who read own the world, and those who watch television lose it. from Herzog on Herzog.

While on the subject, I found this interview with Errol Morris and Herzog here at the believer.

My bet on the sleeper-hit of the summer? DC Comics answer to the hep Ironman makeover: Harmony Korine's remake of DC comics' Wonder Woman, here's a sneak peek:

Morris' Documentary on Abu Ghraib a whitewash

According to this gentleman:

Morris takes pride in calling “SOP” a horror movie and – with the mood music and the needless slow-motion reenactments – he makes sure of that.

However, “SOP” does little more than humanize some of the “bad apples” (a good thing, I suppose), while gratuitously absolving the civilian interrogators actually responsible for fouling those apples.

I really love Morris' movies and his First Person TV series. But I think his latest films are getting a bit too ambitious for his style. I have not seen Fog of War--I'm too worried about its inadequacy in addressing the horrors of the Vietnam War. (Interesting that Morris calls Standard Operating Procedure a "horror" movie.) Anyhow, I'll eventually watch them; but documentaries have never been substitute for investigative journalism. On the other hand, despite the topic, such as Idi Amin, or Jean-Bédel Bokassa, a good documentary tells truths that can't be told in any other format. The last one of course is by the master, but I'm wary of both Herzog and his protege Morris because they never let the truth get in the way of telling the story. That's a vulgar way of putting it--Herzog speaks of the ecstatic (or aesthetic?) truth being different from "The Accountant's Truth." But he also was responsible for Herzog's shoe eating.

Wikipedia wars: Herzog, Dokdo and Israel

Here's an interesting page on wiki wars. Note the entry on Herzog:

Werner Herzog

Born in Germany, supposedly of a German mother and a Yugoslavian father, and raised in Bavaria, Germany. Does that make Herzog: a) Croatian or b) Serbian? How about the fact that the relatives live in Bosnia-Herzegovina? Use edit summaries to publish interviews that you conducted — or heard rumors about. Mirrors and forks are great sources too. After consulting a printed source, it turns out that it was the mother who was from Croatia. Ouch.

Ouch indeed!

Here's the list of wars on wikipedia (that happened in the real world not on wikipedia.) I love lists.

And here's a real war being waged on wikipedia by some right-winger Israel Nationalists.

Repost/Reprise

Here's a nice shot of Herzog with his protégé:




I got a--I got a-- I got a poem.You want to hear it? Yeah. Daddy, can I read a poem? Okay. "Midnight chaos... Eternity chaos... Morning chaos,eternity chaos, noon chaos, eternity chaos,evening chaos, eternity chaos, midnight chaos,eternity chaos, morning chaos, eternity chaos,noon chaos-- evening chaos,eternity chaos, midnight chaos,eternity chaos... morning chaos,eternity chaos, noon chaos,eternity chaos, evening chaos,eternity chaos... midnight chaos,eternity chaos, noon chaos, eternity chaos, evening chaos, eternity chaos..." Julien, cut it out. "Morning chaos, eternity chaos..." You're repeating "Chaos, chaos."It doesn't even rhyme. - It rhyme with chaos.- Oh, come on. Come on, stop that.That's not a poem. I'm not finished. - "Midnight--"- What kind of poem is that? It doesn't even rhyme.You repeat "Chaos, chaos." It doesn't even rhyme. - How about that?- "Midnight..." Shut up. Shut up. I don't like it becauseit's so artsy-fartsy. You see, I likethe real stuff. I like something like, uh, the end of "Dirty Harry." I saw this "Dirty Harry,"and the end is really-- a terrific showdown. What? There was thistremendous shoot out. You should better listen.Just listen. Grandmama, listen.Just listen. There was this shoot out. Dirty Harry hasthis bad guy cornered. I mean, he wasa real bad guy, and there's thistremendous shoot out. They're really exchanginglots of fire. They're shooting bulletsat each other and they keep missing. At the end the bad guysomehow drops his gun. It's just down thereon the bottom. Harry hovers over him, and now Harry, he is reallyfull of contempt. Harry's standing there,he's totally full of contempt, and he says to him,"We've wasted many of our bullets. Do you think there's stilla bullet left in your gun? " and he says to him, "You know, now you've gotto ask yourself a question: 'Do I feel lucky?'" At that moment, the bad guylunges for his gun, raises itand it goes, "click." He hasn't got a bullet left.And Harry blasts him away. He blasts him into a river. He knocks him off the feetand blasts him away. You see,that's good stuff. I truly like that. I don't likethe artsy-fartsy thing. I think I hated his poem.

Must we forget why we create art..

I've never heard of this..His first Documentary

First Movie....I've never heard of this one.....

Hanging with the crew..."Ah, those were the days..."

Wings of Hope: The Self-Mailing Anecdote

I have acquired the Herzog Documentary Boxset, and yesterday I watched the first disc. The highlight was a doc called "Wings of Hope," about the sole survivor of a plane crash that happened in the Peruvian jungle in 1971. This happened at the same time that Herzog was filming Aguirre. And so, 25 years later, Herzog did a doc about this incredible woman who fell from the plane in the sky--that basically just disintegrated--and somehow landed in the jungle alive. And then she wandered, almost unconsciously--because of her concussion, and almost blindly--because her face was so badly bruised she could barely only see out of just one eye, for 10 days until some locals found her. The movie is very good; I think it's superior to Little Dieter Needs to Fly. (Note: I have not seen Rescue Dawn yet.)

The heroine of the movie, Julianes, is German by birth, but her parents lived in Peru because her father was a biologist studying the jungle ecosystem. Julianes grew up in the jungle, and that fact is evident in the movie because of how comfortable she seems to be in the wild. (She herself is a Phd biologist expert on jungle bats.) But when she was a child, her father was so desperate to get to Peru that he, a la Charles D. McKinley, shipped himself there. Well, actually, he sneaked on board a plane; packing himself in a crate of salt. So another man in a box. And overseas. And in salt. But I guess that was in another time; a time of heroes and villains. And maybe Herzog made the story up. So, who knows. I'll look into it.

Computerized Translation Experiment #1

I have been fooling around with the altavista babelfish translator. I wrote a little ditty about a conversation between Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski talking about the potential of filming Paganini, (this was an idea for a play that I had), and I used the translator to translate it into one language and then back into English again to see if there was any interesting differences. There are lots. I won't post it on this page because it goes on for quite a bit. But go to my experimental photo-blog A METAPHOR FOR I DON'T KNOW WHAT to see the fruits of this exercise. I also did multiple translations, for example, English to Spanish to French to German to English. The more times it translated, the more amorphic (and longer) the text got. Interesting, no?

In other news, I would like the other contributors to send me short bios to put on the sidebar; and perhaps mention your blog specialties. Anyone else who is interested in contributing to A&S, please let me know.

And any interesting experiments with translations you have, send them to me.

English to Korean to English of this blog post:

Electric computer anger one translation test #1 me in altavistababelfish interpretation act foolishly in circumference. It was going out, me with the WernerHerzog regarding the great disaster between the KlausKinski which talks the potential energy of thin shell Paganini small smallness song, (this playing was hazard idea) to be bitter, interpretation when with 1 language under translate, that time there will be a what kind of fun it sees again with English, it used it. There is a swallow. In order hazard to continue considerably me not to arrange it in this page. But goes to my, test photograph blog the hazard metaphor which will carry in order to see the fruit of this motion does not know what. Me also it swelled up in English and the poison it happened and with English.to.spanish many-sidedness translation, for example and and. When compared to this it translate an hour, the amorphic (and it is longer) the original which it gets. Is interest the chisel? Inside different news, in order to put a sidebar above me the contributor who is different in me short bio su it will send and,; And refer your blog specialty probably. The A&S it peels and there is an interest to contribution to peel and who makes troublesome army song that only, the egg which it will carry. And to me which it spreads out is them, the test which what kind of fun to the translation which it sends is.

English to French to German to English:

Automated experience #1 of the translation I had rear-been issued over with the translator of babelfish from Alta Vista. I a small Liedchen regarding a maintenance between Werner duke and Klaus Kinski wrote, which speaks about the potential of pelliculage Paganini (an idea for a play which was I had), and I the translator used, in order it into a language and again into English to translate then, in order to still see, if there were interesting differences. There are fates. I will not communicate it to this side, because she continues for completely a little. But Versuchsblog, a METAPHOR FOR me NOT KNOWING go seeing the fruits of this exercise to my photo. I likewise made repeated translations English Spanish for example at the Frenchmen at GermanEnglish. More translated it periods, amorphique (and longer) the received text. Don't interest? In other messages I that other contributing me bios send runs would like, in order to place that sidebar above; and perhaps your blogspezialitaeten mentions. Everyone otherwise, which is interested to contribute to A&S please communicate to me. And all interesting experiences with translations, which have you them, send me.

English-Portuguese-French-Dutch-English-Chinese-English:

Experienced Computarizada #1 the translation I translator to deceive with altavista the babelfish. I have written a young song in a conversation between Werner Herzog and Klaus falo in the movie Paganini potential chin ski, (a this time idea has for me), it used and the English with I translator traduziz in the language to have other times then to look at some interesting difference for back the match. There its party. I in this page introduced because for completely makes a piece is. But fotoque experimentally goes to the mis metaphor in order to I is not WEET any sees this exercise fruit. I and have made many translations, is the example, English to spanjaard to the French to duitser to the English. The lake time has translated, the lake starts the amorphism (and is longer) by the text. Interest, N.s? In another observation, another taxpayer happily must transmit my their biology live element route to invest sidebar I; And perhaps blog mentions specialized them. Everybody stays behind is interested to the A&S contribution, I if he seek pleasure the knowledge you. And some interesting experimentings the translation which has by your meas, the transmission.

Fake Herzog Anecdotes

http://groups.myspace.com/fakeherzog


"After Lena and I unpacked our boxes, we set about arranging the furniture. Lena had a picture of her family from Siberia and my picture of my dear mother--these were to be the anchors of our new home. Also a woolen blanket that the man who played Huerequeque had given to me upon completion of Fitzcarraldo. (Lest I mention, that this trifle token of affection moved me deeply.) There were problems from the start. Lena and I rarely argue, we don't so much as talk, as I can tell what she is thinking--I can see through her like I can see through a tub of dishwater. But there was something different this time, I could tell. I said, "Honey, dear, what's the problem? You have to communicate with me!" My wife said, shyly, "Werner, I am unhappy with our sofa. We need a new one. And that TV set--we have the money, why can't we buy a Hi-def?" I bit my lip. "Did I mention that I didn't make a phone call until I was eighteen? Do you know what my mother did to feed her starving children after our father abandoned us?" Calmly, collected, coolly, Lena said in a icy Siberian whisper, "You forget who you have married. You're going to compare family histories? I'll match yours point for point--don't pull that sob story on me. I'm Siberian, I know who I married. I know how many movies you made. How many bullets you've dodged. But I'm still your wife. And we need a new sofa and I want a new TV!" Yes I stared down Kinski, and the guns of an elite Central African Guardsman, and an active Volcano, but I always find the inner strength of women beyond those earthly hazards. Man's soul versus woman's soul is the eternal struggle of God and Satan. Which is God and which is Satan--I couldn't tell you. It is just a feeling that is hard for me to articulate, and would even be beyond my powers to capture on film. Onward, though, I stubbornly persisted: "No new TV! This one still works fine. Last year my friend Harmony bought us the DVD player--and we have all of Kurosawa--we live like the Mycenians! How much more do you demand! And this sofa works fine! There are no more sofas like this in the world! It is a truly fine and good sofa!" Lena would not relent, however. And I was discomfited by my loss of composure. Lena was one of the few human beings on the world who could do this. And that thing inside me that I listen to told me that the moment I lost my composure was the moment that I had lost the battle. We were going to buy a new sofa. We were going to buy a new TV set. I don't know what I did in those next moments...the whole world quaked and I seemed to have lost my sense of sight even. What happens next I can't even explain--but I felt as I did so many years ago in the field of windmills. Just an ecstasy--The illusion that is LA and George Bush dissipated and I saw myself as a man with a cigarette and a typewriter, writing soap operas for a Spanish speaking audience. Would I trade everything I had experienced up until now in exchange for that humble life? I don't know. But not my Lena. I thank God on my knees for that momentary insight. I'm sorry if this anecdote has no end. I only see the beginning of it--but it is so clear that I had to share it."

From Madrid to Kiev

(That's a rockfish. I ate one Saturday night.)

There's a guy who's working on a movie about his 5000 km walk from Madrid to Kiev, as suggested offhandedly by Herzog in the book Herzog on Herzog. Called "more shoes."

Interested to see it. The dude got's devotion. Motivation. Play it on the guitar every Saturday night.

It's raining in Seoul. For some reason I wanted to eat ice cream and drink a beer. I hurt my jaw joint eating the ice cream bar I bought. Serves me right.

Anyhow, Herzog said that a 5,000 km walk on foot from, say, Madrid to Kiev would be worth more than five years of film classes. I imagine it would be cheaper too. So more power to this dude.

I invite the bloggers to more shoes too. I mean, the confederate bloggers. And if you haven't been invited to blog on Angry and Sloppy, please email me at solardriftwood at geemail to rectify the sloppiness. And poets, add your angry and sloppy poetry. Because there's nothing sloppier than poetry; and the best poetry is angry.

And those who have become confederates, please feel free to be sloppier. And damnier, angrit. That's what this is for.