letters of note // hunter s. thompson [real mail]

** disclaimer **: hunter was a verbal scrapbooker, expletives were his glitter. as such, the post below is quite...sparkly. dig? if you're not into it, please just skip it.

who gets to send a fax that has a cc list of depp, pitt, nolte, benicio del toro?

Transcript

HOLLY SORENSON / Shooting Gallery / Hollywood / Jan 22 '01

Dear Holly,

Okay, you lazy bitch, I'm getting tired of this waterhead fuckaround that you're doing with The Rum Diary.

We are not even spinning our wheels aggresivly. It's like the whole Project got turned over to Zombies who live in cardboard boxes under the Hollywood Freeway... I seem to be the only person who's doing anything about getting this movie Made. I have rounded up Depp, Benicio Del Toro, Brad Pitt, Nick Nolte & a fine screenwriter from England, named Michael Thomas, who is a very smart boy & has so far been a pleasure to talk to & conspire with...

So there's yr. fucking Script & all you have to do now is act like a Professional & Pay him. What the hell do you think Making a Movie is all about? Nobody needs to hear any more of that Gibberish about yr. New Mercedes & yr. Ski Trips & how Hopelessly Broke the Shooting Gallery is.... If you're that fucking Poor you should get out of the Movie Business. It is no place for Amateurs & Dilletants who don't want to do anything but "take lunch" & Waste serious people's Time.

Fuck this. We have a good writer, we have the main parts casted & we have a very marketable movie that will not even be hard to make....

And all you are is a goddamn Bystander, making stupid suggestions & jabbering now & then like some half-bright Kid with No Money & No Energy & no focus except on yr. own tits.... I'm sick of hearing about Cuba & Japs & yr. Yo-yo partners who want to change the story because the violence makes them Queasy.

Shit on them. I'd much rather deal with a Live asshole than a Dead worm with No Light in his Eyes.... If you people don't want to Do Anything with this movie, just cough up the Option & I'll talk to someone else. The only thing You're going to get by quitting and curling up in a Fetal position is relentless Grief and Embarrassment. And the one thing you won't have is Fun...

Okay, That's my Outburst for today. Let's hope that it gets Somebody off the dime. And if you don't Do Something QUICK you're going to Destroy a very good idea. I'm in the mood to chop yr. fucking hands off.

R.S.V.P

(Signed)

HUNTER

cc:
Depp
Benecio
M. Thomas
Nolte
Shapiro

via letters of note, a super great site that is collecting, translating and transcribing found correspondence of all kinds of profundity, humor and grace. example #2: the history behind the naming of slaughterhouse v.

yours ever [books // real mail]

a few years ago i sat down in a cramped, teal-green riverwest bedroom intending to continue a myspace 'conversation' i'd been having with my not-yet girlfriend, mauriah. having typed a few lines, i stopped short, not feeling invested in it. i realized that i'd shot my mouth off about enjoying writing letters but had yet to follow through (nevermind that we lived three blocks apart). so i drew a mock-up of the myspace message creation page and wrote a letter instead. there was no way of knowing then the trials and miles and travails and mails we'd survive in the coming months and years - largely buoyed by writing letters.

our pen pal partnership transcended daily email and occasional video phone calls as a series of tactile, genuine articles. daily ruminations, found items, coffee rings and the hopes of early mornings mingled with doodles, cut out pictures, work frustrations, and full-color descriptions of the minutia of moments. often the envelopes were handmade. occasionally letters were lost, always to much cursing and despair (on my end, at least). during one stretch, 3 of m's letters in a row were eaten by the mail, leaving me to wonder why 7,500 miles away she'd not been writing. after a time i asked about it and she told me she'd been writing. a few days later, two of the road-weary letters showed up postmarked weeks apart. i almost cried.

i am fortunate to be happily enveloped[!] in a relationship that owes much to real letters. i believe in them. no surprise then, that i'm very keen to get a copy of thomas mallon's latest, yours ever: people and their letters. excerpts from the nytimes review below.

think of a letter, ralph waldo emerson urged his daughter, as “a kind of picture of a voice.” (thomas) mallon recognizes letters as well to be monuments, marathons, performance art. he neglects neither ann landers nor the unabomber. by way of unexpected detours...he delivers up epistolary swooning, stroking, wincing, mulling, composting...

...it is next to impossible to read these pages without mourning the whole apparatus of distance, without experiencing a deep and plangent longing for the airmail envelope, the sweetest shade of blue this side of a tiffany box. is it possible to sound crusty or confessional electronically? it is as if text and e-mail messages are of this world, a letter an attempt, however illusory, to transcend it. all of which adds tension and resonance to mallon’s pages, already crackling with hesitations and vulnerabilities, obsessions and aspirations, with reminders of the lost art of literary telepathy, of the aching, attenuated rhythm of a written correspondence. (full article)

(yes, those pictures are some of our actual collected correspondence.)

thanksgiving

lu guang [photography // china]

lu guang, a former factory worker in china, was recently awarded the w. eugene smith grant in humanistic photography by the asia society for his documentary project “pollution in china.” sorry for the logos on the photos, i trust that you'll be able to look past them...

LINK: translated interview with lu guang

tim burton [illustration // film]

LINK: Tim Burton at the Museum of Modern Art through April 26

kim sin hye [paint]

japón [film]

on a recent trip to kuala lumpur, i attended a showing of japón at annexe gallery's semi-regular monday night movie series and in doing so had the rare good fortune of making a frugal decision that was worth every ringgit. carlos reygadas' curiously uneponymous first film is peopled phenomenally by non-actors and peppered by shots that create the too-rare burden of the camera as a medium for carrying narrative. watching japón begins to feel like a responsibility, an experience that has nothing in common with the bald voyeurism or off-the-cuff omniscience playing at the local cineplex. the on-screen palette is all shades of heather, it's run through with heavy mexican roman catholic allegory, and various dead animals punctuate and are punctured. don't judge it by the hackneyed preview, do try to see it.

LINK: recent wall street journal feature on the malaysian art scene

andy warhol [photography]

great set of athlete polaroids by warhol on the moment. thanks to bear for the tip.

the counterfeiters [books]

here's a character map of the counterfeiters by andre gide who is my french author. the thing that strikes me most so far is how easily he engages the reader; seemingly without breaking a sweat he's knotted a half dozen characters' fates and i buy it. read up on it here. i don't know if it's accurate, though. i haven't read it because those wikineanderthals care nothing for the sanctity of the spoiler. click the pic if you want a bigger view.

kuala lumpur weekend [photography]