"Living It Up at The Cockfights." Or, "Custer's Last Stand."

"He peered sideways up and gave a long low whistle of call, then paused awhile in rapt attention, his even white teeth glistening here and there with gold points. Chrysostomos."

JAMES JOYCE, Ulysses.

I was watching a Dog the Bounty Hunter episode which I knew I'd already seen, which is - as I said yesterday - not far different from giving up altogether and freely, deliberately, frittering away your God-given life. It is not far different, I say, from cocking a pistol into your lower jaw and spinning the barrel playfully then pulling the trigger just to see what might come of it.

Anyway, that happened and this episode involved the team chasing a slippery character who goes by the colourful name of CHESTER CHRISOSTOMOS ("gold-mouthed," I thought, a good and dutiful scholarly "spalpeen" and remembranceful reader of James Joyce), who had retreated to the deepest darkest wilds of Hawaii. He had, in the idiom of his confreres, "dug in."

This man CHESTER GOLD-MOUTHED withdrew from society not - like Thoreau - to be closer to his thoughts and God-in-Nature, but to partake in low gambling and cock-fighting. He found a certain rural transcendental calm in bloodletting and mayhem.

The team busted in on one of his associates out way out in the wilds and the guy had dead chickens all over his yard and was actually wearing a baseball cap that said "COCK FIGHTING". The man goes, "I am not involved in cock-fighting."

They didn't find Chester. He had a way of disappearing into the night.

So on day three or four, Dog announced to the camera his revised methodology: "The plan is the boys are riding the motorcycles down in there, Baby Lisa's parked out at his mother's house and Beth and I are going to be up on the ridge." Then, without a trace of irony, he said: "We learned this tactic from Custer."

Their enterprise was about as successful as Custer's. Baby Lisa abandoned her post to use the toilet and the thing fell apart from there. "We're kind of stuck here," Dog admitted, "so we've got to try to make a possibility out of the impossible."

This seemingly involved them browbeating Chester's girl CARLA to no avail, then blundering aimlessly through the brush. At one point Dog picked up a breeze-block and hurled it into a bush. I thought, "What if Chester Chrisostomos had of been in there? He'd of been killed." The methodology further involved Duane Lee and Leland building plank bridges and falling into quicksand. The A&E website amazingly has the transcript of this episode, which includes this wonderful exchange, which since we have the apparatus I simply must quote liberally from:

00:54:16	Right now we found this freakin' pig farm, we can't find a way to get around it.
00:54:20	There's a big, huge moat.
00:54:22	We got Leland going to go get a plank, and then we're gonna drop it like the military and freakin' attack.
00:54:31	Go, just bounce like a rabbit.
00:54:33	I'm right behind you.
00:54:36	( laughing ) Are you going ?
00:54:44	No way, bro.
00:54:48	Okay, you guys, it's getting dark.
00:54:50	We gotta put this on hold until tomorrow.

As you can plainly see from the transcript, they conclude their "methodology" - as usual - by going home as soon as it gets dark. It's really a pity that they stop at sundown, so they can put the kids to bed. Because as I have established in a previous essay, most criminal enterprise tends to take place after sundown. Maybe this is another tactic cribbed from that master strategist CUSTER.

In the interests of brutal honesty they really ought to show the scenes at home after a day of bounty-hunting, after the Chapmans have "clocked off," and everybody is sitting in the TV room watching TV. Like that scene a few weeks ago where they showed Duane Lee dolefully watching Storage Wars. Gary Boy stuffing his face with too much pasta. They could have ingeniously juxtaposed these scenes of domestic calm with orgiastic, bacchanalian scenes of Chester living it up at the cockfights. Chester with a chicken's head in his mouth, blood around his jaws as he heaves on an ice pipe.

[...]

As I mentioned, I had seen this episode before, but happily I couldn't seem to remember the ending. How they caught the bad guy and such. Usually I remember some sweet peculiarity from the arrest and the corollary Backseat Redemption Scene. This time I couldn't remember any such thing. It became clear why not in the last minute or so, when it turned out that one night, while the Chapmans were innocently dozing watching TV at home, the police burst in on Chester's rural compound and arrested him. It was one of those episodes, where they lost out to the FILTH. The police, it seems, don't play fair. They have an annoying habit of going after criminals even after the sun has gone down.

[...]

I wonder how much they pay per hour for somebody to transcribe the dialogue from an episode. It'd be a lot of fun I expect and you'd certainly improve your written English as you worked.

"The House Always Wins."

Sometimes in your day, in your life, in your soul's reeling arc betwixt the vault and the precipice, you have to simply listen to some good old kkkountry gold on the stereo of your shitkicker flatbed truck. And when you stop, as stop ye must, you have to stroll over to your foeman's front porch, where your foeman lounges in a hammock, and you got to spit a plug of tobacco in your foeman's face and smile as the juice drips down your foeman's chin.

Other times you have to watch an episode of Dog the Bounty Hunter that you know that you have seen before, even with the knowing that thy term of natural life on this firmament is perishing by the second.

Why because it's good and it's righteous and it's right and it's goodly and it's kindly and it's not ungood.

This lunchtime I watched an episode where Dog was going after an inveterate gambler, one Kristine Lau, and this provided the premise and the impetus for round after round of gambling metaphors from Dog.

"She's a gambler. So are we. We're gamblers. It's gonna be like chasing ourselves. Because bounty-hunters are gamblers. Every time we take on a bond we make a gamble. Right?"

The camera then shows Leland with his lips parted. You can almost read his mind:

"...? Whaddid he just say? We're gamblers now?"

Nothing daunted, Dog kept the thematic zingers coming. "We're The House. She's the gambler. She's bet she can outrun me. A-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha."

Now Dog had narrowed his focus. He wasn't going to keep making broad gambling metaphors. He was going to refer to himself and the team henceforth as "The House".

This is not to say he didn't experiment with other, equally confusing figures of speech. At one point, to punctuate a lull in the narrative, he growled "We're here. We're live. This isn't Memorex."

Bad metaphor for the digital age, Duane. You're making yourself look old - obsolete.

Then he resorted to that classic trope of American folk rhetoric, willful exaggeration. Speaking of his quarry's dwindling options, he asked facetiously, "Where they gonna go, the ocean? They gonna rent a submarine to get away from us?"

He was on rare form in this episode. It was, I should note, from maybe six or seven years ago, when the world looked young and hopeful and a bard was inspired to heights inconceivable today.

Dog's methodology had been typically bewildering. In pursuit of Kristine Lau they had decided to be as blatant and cumbersome as possible, effected by blundering raucously into all the illegal gambling dens and asking the staff bluntly "Ya seen her?" while brandishing her mugshot. Amazingly, when this didn't turn up any results, Dog seemed genuinely surprised. He was at a loss as to how it could've not've worked.

As time ran out the bounty-hunting team would go to the car parks of these strip malls where the gambling dens were and saunter around like Union Square protesters, ostensibly scaring off custom. I think the quaint idea was to embarrass her into submission. This didn't seem to be working either, especially because come about ten o'clock at night, when most gamblers are still eating breakfast, the Chapmans got tired and went home.

They were knocking on a gambling den door one evening when they received a call from their own office that Kristine Lau was there and had given herself up. Not one to underplay the moment, Dog still got right flustered and acted like they were in a race against death itself to get back to the office before Kristine Lau changed her mind. He was all animated in the SUV, bouncing up and down on the back seat, one second chiding Beth for her driving then chuckling with glee "The House is gonna win!"

As usual when they got to the office the arrest was totally mundane and everybody calmed down immediately.

Nevertheless, Dog had room for one more gambling metaphor in his summing-up segment: "In a gambling perspective you win, lose or draw. This was a draw."

Here he paused, and I thought he had finally laid his flirtation with the device of The House to rest. No such thing. He grinned his pure kkkountry gold smile and resumed:

"A draw in favour of The House."

"Unused Jokes" Or, "Backwork".

The "Unused Jokes" envelope is beginning to fill up. These jokes are ready-to-go, but they are (I predict) going to be boring to write out. They might also be boring to read. The convoluted mechanics of realizing the joke, of turning it from an idle rumour in my brain-stem to actual "physical" words on the "page," the actual "real-time" backwork involved, put me off writing these jokes down. I've got a whole new round of Dog the Bounty Hunter material around somewhere, unpublished (and so - to the greater world - unsaid), for the same reason: too much bloody backwork.

Still----

JOKE #1. Infinity Gauntlet: The Movie. Starring Klaus Kinski as Thanos.

JOKE-OID #2. Monkees Season Two Revisited.

I watched the last two episodes of The Monkees and then I watched the 1969 TV Special 33⅓ Revolutions Per Monkee.

The penultimate episode had a commentary by Mike Nesmith, who delivered it in a cool manner. Humility, remorse, chuckling at the excesses of youth. Nice. I was quite pleased because he confirmed some of the aimless ruminations of my previous "postings". For example, he recalled that the Monkees had indeed gotten cocky in the Second Season (he said they "gathered so much unwarranted power") that the character actors were required to carry the shows while the group rolled their eyes at their lines, ad-libbed badly and made their little peace signs. He said, "they would pretty much uniformly despise us or despise the show by the time they left."

DVD commentaries are often unintentionally funny. Nesmith was drawling about the show, then he'd get sidetracked on a subject and fall behind what was actually happening onscreen but he really couldn't give a fuck about that, you could tell... Incidentally, everybody on the DVD commentary tracks seemed to be compelled to remark, at some point, about Micky Dolenz's hair. The factoid that he had straightened his hair diligently in the First Season, but let it grow naturally curly in the Second. Everybody made this comment at some point. As if it were of some urgency that it be communicated to us.

Of all the things you could say... it gives you these sense that life, taken in the long view, is pretty boring, taken all in. As Emerson says, "Not much life in a lifetime."

Anyway Mike Nesmith was the only one who supported this factoid with some "local color" - he recalled how Micky would sit on the set with a pair of pantyhose on his head to keep his hair static and straight.

Nesmith was ruminating as the end credits came up, when you expect the DVD commentator to hush up and let the credits play out, but towards the last seconds he saw a credit for the man who designed the Monkeemobile and he burst out laughing at that: "The guy who designed the Monkeemobile got himself an end credit?"

Micky Dolenz had the honour of the DVD commentary track on the final episode. Micky puts the ADHD into DVD Commentary. The years since the Monkees have not brought wisdom to the Dolenz noggin. He's still hacking out the old hits. Night after night. Still Circus Boy in his mind. He makes Jerry Lewis in his prime sound sober and sagacious. The episode ends with a nice performance by Tim Buckley. Micky mused wistfully, as he watched it over over our shoulders, "I've been thinking of re-recording some Tim Buckley songs."

Yesssssss, I thought. That sounds like an excellent, commercially shrewd notion. Just what the world is crying out for right now in these difficult times: Micky Dolenz Sings Tim Buckley. The time is right. There is the threat of nuclear attack from North Korea. Time to hear Micky Dolenz's version of "Dolphins".

At one point, Dolenz was actually saying, "Oh wow. I remember buying that shirt. I liked that shirt. What did I do with that shirt."

Micky also provided the Commentary Track for the diabolically bad 33⅓ Revolutions Per Monkee. That is to be regretted because this hour-long special was so confusing that I wanted a lucid explanation of How it came to happen and more particularly Why?, and I obviously wasn't going to get any lucidity from Dolenz. It was like trying to sit through Fata Morgana back-to-back with Even Dwarfs Started Small in one bonanza of boredoom [sic].

The alternative to Micky's rhapsodies was a commentary track by Brian Auger, who is a "pivotal" figure in the hour-long special, this inexplicable cock-and-balls story. Brain [sic] was so dull and earnest in his commentary ("the Monkees were splendid chaps... I spent Thanksgiving with Mike Nesmith and his lovely family... hem, here I believe they used a green lens to...") that I ended up sticking with Micky pumping out his fitful bilgewater. Betwixt Scylla and Charybdis, always pick Scylla. After all, it has a girl's name.

At one point, - from the mouths of babes and Micky Dolenz - our guide, our Virgil, just sighed "This is so boring." The other momentary piece of rare and candid clarity slicing through spiritual materialism on this hour-long paean to self-indulgence and obfuscation came from Julie Driscoll of all people, who archly turned to the camera and observed, somewhat redundantly, that the show had degenerated into an "UTTER BLOODY SHAMBLES."

JOKE #3. "Worlds Within Worlds, Mad My Masters." Or, "Cinema Studies PhD at UEA": Clip of Duane Lee Chapman watching Storage Wars on TV. It was a scene with Dave talking to the camera.

JOKE #4. Amazing Race. The navy vet, newly returned from Afghanistan, who unwisely elected to go on the Amazing Race with his wife, who he hasn't lived with in years, immediately on returning from the War on Terror. They squabble incessantly. They say hurtful things that they can't take back.

They really went wild. They possessed the much-desired "Express Pass" which they could play at any time in the race and which would automatically get them past any obstacle on one occasion. They were counseled to use it wisely. They totally wasted it on a momentary whim and then compounded their mistake by giving up on the next task (balancing full bottles of wine on their heads) in a fit of pique and facing the two-hour penalty. As H.P. Lovecraft would say, "They went mad."

JOKE #5. People on Jeopardy really don't think about what they're saying to Alex in the biographical section. They're too nervous. Today, Dave, the reigning champion, actually informed America that his '98 Ford pickup had 140, 000 miles on the clock.

The woman whose ancestor was a judge at the Salem witch-trials.

"Did he order the deaths of anyone?" Alex asked, eyes twinkling.

"Yes he did," she replied, chuckling helplessly.

"Impenetrable."

I ran into Keith from the No Neck Blues Band the other day in the Village. I had some copies of The Kirby Collector magazine in my hands at the time and he looked disdainfully at me and said "Is that what you're reading these days?"

My lips reared back from my gums in a defiant sneer and I drawled "Who don't like Jack Kirby? Show me that man. Let him come among us and state his case if he dare."

I asked Keith what he'd been doing lately. He'd been acting in Eugene O'Neill he says.

"Fiddle-de-dee," says I.

The band he said was sifting through old tapes of live shows, of which they had thousands of hours.

"Like the Dead." I mused dreamily. "Like Pearl Jam."

Keith said, "I prefer the comparison to the Dead."

We were talking about the interview I'd done with the No Neck Blues Band in 2003. I said, "Yeah we should do an update. A twentieth anniversary Where are they now?"

Keith goes, Yeah, it must of been a good ten years by now.

I shot back, shrilly, "Nine years. It was nine years. It's been nine years."

I am very prickly about matters of time -- every year an indictment.

On the subject of dwindling self-expectations, we spoke a bit about David Foster Wallace who was after all the sujet du jour nine years ago. Keith said he'd summoned up a bit of interest in DFW after DFW's suicide. "Like it legitimized his mewling about despair and sorrowfulness," I chuckled. Keith prevaricated a bit then admitted it. "Like reading Sylvia Plath."

I said I'd read The Pale King twice (happily I got paid by the hour for my trouble) and I was quite content to leave the poor man buried and not to bother his soul further after that last ejaculation.

So as we were parting ways, Keith goes, "So are you writing anything now?"

Before I could mumble something, eyes averted, about a vast systems novel in progress lo these many years, he corrected himself thus: "Are you writing a blog?"

As soon as he said it we both had a queasy sense of deja-vu, only compounded as I tediously spelt out ("spat out") the name ELIAS NEBULA.

"Oh yessss," Keith said. (Anagnorisis.) "I remember now. I tried looking it up. It was impenetrable."

"Impenetrable?" I rejoined, sharply. "You're calling me impenetrable? Have you listened to your group's records lately?!"

This is of course the tragedy of the avant-garde in the twenty-first century.

Infighting, and the regrettable conquest of the mid-cult.

AFTERWORD: I remembered, I urged Keith to look at this site and to leave a comment to prove he had done so. Curious readers will note that no such comment has been left. "Curious readers" may have "noted," in fact, that nary a comment has been left since Mark Balelo (an occasional character on the show Storage Wars) wrote his famous "cease and desist" note to this correspondent after I called him a nouveau-riche half-wit with all the grace and intuition of a guinea-fowl some time in the balmy days of last year. Is Mark Balelo really more committed to the life of the mind -- the project of die kunstkulturwelt -- than Keith from the No Neck Blues Band? It appears he is.

Asterix Und Der Goths Mit Der Herz Aus Glas Mein Gott Leibchen

I just watched Herzog's Heart of Glass after several months of pronounced dawdling and dithering and evasion (watching Monkees, watching Dog the Bounty Hunter). These Herzog films are forbidding, not in a sense that they will be an intellectual powerball overload, but in the sense that they could conceivably be dull. They almost never are dull, of course (Fata Morgana and Even Dwarfs Started Small notwithstanding); one wonders why the trepidation persists. Maybe it is the humdrum, unwavering nature of the opening German rural settings of his earlier films. The willful, defiant holding of the shot on the static mountaintop or the roiling mists (or the landing aeroplanes) beyond an acceptable point.

Maybe it is the dulness of the flaxen-haired towheaded German peasant in his shit-coloured smock. The image does not draw us in irresistibly.

I wearily work my way through the three Herzog box-sets I bought years ago on Shaftesbury Avenue, like a duty to the god Weltkunstkultur. Like I ploughed through The Monkees Seasons One and Two. Like I strove like a pit-pony through the Alain Delon box set my wife got me for Christmas. It's absurd; wasn't culture meant to be pleasurable?

It is of course a symptom of the times that we are so ADHD that to sit through anything longer than an episode of Justified is considered a travail.

The Delon box-set was on my "Wish List" so it's hardly my wife's fault, but still it felt like a purifying mortification for the deity of KUNSTKINEMA, sitting through these less-well-known Delon vehicles. The Widow Couderc. The Swimming Pool. Simone Signoret at every turn, imploring us with her sad eyes to invest our spirits in the project of Kunstkinema weltschmerz.

Nothing ever equals Delon's fine work in the Melville films, of course. Still these films were okay and I liked them and I did my duty by the Lord and I watched them. I mortified my flesh and I am a better upstanding Christian for it.

And Herz Aus Glas was a good film too. Not particularly dull. It has a beautiful soundtrack, with Swiss yodelling and medieval music; and when I listened to portions of Herzog's commentary track, and I heard his enduring and unfeigned fannish enthusiasm for the soundtrack, my slight vexation at Herzog as a public man evaporated. Herzog was not posturing here --- he was not feeding his self-ego -- his gaping Cthulhu Mythos -- his shrine to himself as his own hearth deity -- his own skull kept in a cabinet in his Hollywood home -- he was speaking as an unabashed enthusiast, and it was good to hear. A bit of sincere humility Christ Sake.

I even felt bad for some of the uncharitable unChristian things I said about him in a previous post.

(The fact remains that his attested ignorance of Nick Broomfield is the arrantest bunk.)

When I was watching this film I thought, of course, in my chronic comparing way, that the film was very similar to the beloved "B.D." Asterix and the Soothsayer (1972).

Heart of Glass was made the year after the German edition of this book (Der Seher) was published (although it appeared in serial form in MV-Comix from 1972 to 1973).

I suppose that M. Herzog will now claim that he has "never heard" of Asterix the Gaul!

IT IS TO LAUGH, NICHT WAHR?

Werner Herzog Says He Don't Know Nick Broomfield

THE TWO GREATEST LIVING DOCUMENTARY-MAKERS --- THEIR SECRET LIFELONG ENMITY --- LIKE LINCOLN AND JEFFERSON DAVIS IT IS SAID --- SIMILAR IN SO MANY WAYS AND YET DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSED ON THE WORLDWIDE "FIELD".

I was at the Library last night, there for to see Werner Herzog hold forth on the subject of the death sentence. His interrogator on the dais was somewhat of the "Charlie Rose School" of interviewing: he was partial to interrupting mid-sentence, just as the subject was getting going. He coupled this was an uncanny ability to poise, mouth agog, in silence for agonizing seconds on end while Herzog fanned the air with his hands in frustration: he had finished his sentence.

The conversation, somewhat freewheeling, was definitely a "curate's egg" - the good parts of which included Herzog's outspoken endorsement of Vladimir Putin, which you could tell perplexed the liberal arts community of New York City; also his enraptured praise for the library's book deposits under Bryant Park. I liked, and appreciated, Herzog's instinct that this was in its way a "sacred grove." I who have toiled in these groves lo these ten years---

Forgive me if I wax pretentious---!

The less noble moments in the evening's entertainments included the peculiar passage of time, irrevocable and alienated to me now, when Herzog tried to discuss the mysteries of Mycenean Greek, aided only by slides showing a book on the subject. I noted with displeasure puerile notes and underlining on the text. I felt like I was attending one of my own university lectures back in the old country, with my various xeroxes on acetate upon the lightbox-- "ah.. this is Thoreau with a beard; now, this is him without." Some of our most intimate passions and pleasures are really untransferable to other humanoids, I must regretfully conclude.

Now Herzog fell to reading from one book after another of middling prose which he deemed exceptional. Here was one of those books "brilliantly rediscovered" by the New York Review of Books imprint & resubmitted for the pleasuring and edification of NPR-listening McSweeneys hipsters. Ensues a protracted description of an owl. The audience hushes and warbles reverently because they have been told that this is good prose so it must be.

Then Herzog's interlocutor woke up for a moment to read a fine quotation from il miglior fabbro, Ralph Waldo Emerson, comparing death with the end of summer. Herzog responded: "Yes, that was very beautiful. Now let me read from Cormac McCarthy." Followed a bemusing passage describing a bull on a dusty tract of desert. Red clouds on its flanks &c., --- or some such.

Bulldust: seems apt.

Another score agin was the little old lady behind me whispering "That's right" to certain comments Herzog made. Testifying. Uncannily, every time he earned this lady's endorsement, I felt that he was mouthing commonplaces and platitudes. I also felt like this little old lady -- or her clone -- doppelganger -- or let us say her tanist in the tribe -- let us be mythological since that was the mood of the evening -- has been behind me at every cultural soiree I have attended in this good city New York. She crops up like the proverbial bad shekel at Film Forum -- she is at the Met when ye would goe --

Enough about that jazz. The thing over, I went to get my book signed by Herzog. And since I must be who I am, I of course did not fail to have a brilliant question to put to him as he signed.

I should really have learned, over the years, that these exchanges with the admired writers and artists (or, as Herzog says he views himself, "soldiers") never go well. They are too busy signing their names to give my incisive questions the rapt attention and full consideration they deserve. There is a line of dreary drones behind me as I ask it. The situation is awash with potential for misery. But I think it is also the type of question I go in with. I always seem to ask questions of influence or shared characteristics with contemporaries, and these questions tend to irritate the people in question. They fly too close to the petulant ego.

Mein Gott, they fly too close to the sun!!!

(These questions tend to irritate people in general. At university, I was roundly upbraided by a senior academic for my persistent inquiries into the mysteries of influence. "Why influence?" he cried from his regular booth in the bar, slamming his tankard on the table with emotion. "Why not the clash of the valiant unwashed against the prevailing ideology?"

"I don't know, I just don't seem much to kyear," I responded [quoting George Arnold].

This as I was trying to claim Cotton Mather's influence on --- what --- the Uncanny X-Men?.)

(Then I was in Rapallo, too, among those who had known Pound on the lawn at Saint Elizabeths --- and I went to them and I was among them and I asked them each of them, Did Poundie ever speak of Artemus Ward? Did he ever speak of Mark Twain?" ["Did he ever mention me?"] )

(And again see also my question to Updike, as he signed my copy of Terrorist: "Is this your Catcher in the Rye?"

"Fuck off home, sonny."

I do not win them with these my questions.

I am always going to be the preppy guy with the horn-rim glasses and the tweed jacket irritating Dylan in Don't Look Back who doesn't know what to do when Dylan hands him a harmonica.

If I was ever to collect my "celebrity interviews" in a book, each actual interview would consist of one or maybe two lines, with the usual considerable preface and epilogue (or: "flummery") in which I made my excuses.

This time, in my defence, I asked the question which I would, after all, have liked answered. It wasn't abstract or arbitrary - I had been wondering it for some time, since seeing Herzog's excellent documentaries The Great Ecstasy of the Sculptor Steiner (1974) and La Soufriere (1977) several years ago and noticing a familiar tone and even methodology. My question was a good one, I maintain it, I say, goddammit, and the answer it got flummoxed me.

I asked him: What his opinion of Nick Broomfield was.

"I do not know who this person is," Herzog replied steelily through his permanently pursed lips. He'd signed one book for me, and, at my request, written To F_____ in it. However after this question, he most summarily signed the second book, notably without the gentle dedication.

I was slightly taken aback by his denial of Nick Broomfield. I said, "He's an English documentary-maker. He's made films on subjects quite similar to those in some of yours. For example, about the penal system."

(Herzog, this evening, was -- in his roundabout way -- promoting a cable TV series [? - it was never made quite clear] of documentaries about the eccentric characters who make "death row" their home. Nick Broomfield, as I thought was well-known, at least in documentary-maker circles, has also made films about people on death row and in jail, and in fact at all the stations and strata within the wider "worldwide world of crime" and criminal prosecution. I give you the superb Juvenile Liaison [1975] and its sequel [1990] about quaint English pre-teen delinquents and their treatment by the authorities. Then here is Tattooed Tears [1978] about a juvenile correctional facility in California. Here is the famed visit to Suge Knight in prison in Biggie and Tupac (2002). Then there are of course, most prominently you would suppose, the documentaries Broomfield made [1994, 2003] about Aileen Wuornos while she was on death row. )

I was taken aback, probably visibly, by this unexpected response, anyway. My expression bespoke bullshit.

It is well enough known that the worst thing one can say about somebody is that one does not know the cove. People say it and sometimes - perhaps even oftentimes - it is just as they say. But sometimes (perhaps even oftentimes) it is not so. Rather it is the most cutting remark one could make. "I don't know the puppy." "The coxcomb is a stranger to me."

Woe unto the person who says he don't know a man and he is then caught in the lie and it is shown ("thuswise:") that he knows the man.

After I had "explained" to Herzog who Nick Broomfield was, because of course he didn't know, Herzog repeated gravely the fact that he did not know who he was. He was quite at pains to publish the fact that he did not know this Broomfield creature. Even as I was leaving, he was saying for a third time "I do not know who this person you are talking about is, so I am sorry I cannot answer your question."

I was inevitably reminded of Herzog's "war-of-words" with Abel Ferrara over Herzog's film Bad Lieutenant New Orleans: Port of Call (a very good film, incidentally, and far superior to Ferrara's earlier film Bad Lieutenant). Or, as Borges described it, "two bald men fighting over a comb." In that instance, too, certain corners of the filmic industry doubted whether Herzog was strictly honest in his public claim that he had "never heard" of Abel Ferrara or the original Bad Lieutenant. But why might Werner dissemble?

Three words: ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE.

Some artists (of whatever variety), however personable and magnanimous and gosh-shucks they may appear in public appearances, can withal be extremely protective of their published selves and souls. One score I had against Herzog I discovered when reading Herzog on Herzog, a book of interviews with the great man.

In this book he is interviewed about his filmic career &c. &c. There appear in the text certain anecdotes that he tells which are almost word-for-word identical with his previous tellings of them in his (excellent) documentary about his relationship with Klaus Kinski, My Best Fiend (1999). For instance, there is a good line Herzog uses in that film about Kinski trashing a room so thoroughly that all the fragments of the furniture and contents of the room "could be passed through a tennis racket." This is a novel and illustrative description. He says the exact same thing in Herzog on Herzog (2002) which instantly halves the puissance of the original usage. I thought then, Wasn't the author of the book - who surely had a thoroughgoing familiarity with Harzog's films - vexed at being given second-hand chickenfeed?

When I hear somebody repeat themselves, repeat their best lines I should say, jealously devise and then trot out fine words for sundry occasions even, I think to myself: "strictly self-fashioning." People - at least those people we hold in high esteem - should not be caught so flagrantly in self-fashioning. Larry David does the same thing.

Don't they suppose that parties interested in their work might conceivably come across both usages, as I did, and feel a certain subtle deflation?

I believe the same egotistical preening is at work in Werner Herzog's insistence that he "don't know Nick Broomfield."

In the interest of "transparency," I must declare an interest inasmuch as I have been called egotistical myself, and I believe there may be truth in it. Even so I am perhaps egotistical enough that - were I to be interviewed on the scale Herzog surely is - I would endeavour to be ever-vigilant against repeating the best-loved lines and also the mock-casual-denial-of- recognition motif. Werner, you and Nick Broomfield were both guests in the documentary category of the Toronto International Film Festival in September last year. Did you not perhaps hear tell of him among your colleagues?

Pull down thy vanity,

Paquin pull down!

Egotistical though I may be, I do, and we must, travail against the tendency, rather like Emerson did.

I am God in nature; I am a weed by the wall.

Funnily enough, I can pinpoint in my memory the first time I physically recoiled from somebody because I caught them in the act of egotistical self-fashioning, and that too was a gentleman of Teutonic extract: one J___ M______.

This J___ was a charming, excellent, guileful, gregarious, urbane, designing man, who overcame ye with modest charm,-- hooded eyes -- serpentine tongue -- but then would after a while over-egg the mixture and become unctuous - imposing -- and he would slip - his masque would -- and you would mark the chink in his works - the conceit beneath the modesty and the humble handwringing. ("The poor handwriting.") This phenomenon, when a man overplays his hand and exposes his vile, pulsing egotism, -- became known universally as the "J___ M______ Moment", indeed.

Since then I find myself more and more apt to recoil when the ego rears up - as it did last night, Mein Herr, in your avowed and over-said denial.

I hurtled away from this, yet another peculiar exchange with a cult director (see also: David Lynch, John Waters), and walked headlong into Paul Giamatti, who I grabbed him earnestly by the hand and told him he was "great in John Adams."

Only walking home, down at the turnstile in the subway by Bryant Park, did I think "I should have said how much I enjoyed him in Fred Claus!"

"They Say The King's Gone Mad."

“QADDAFI PRONOUNCED MAD”

I confess to the tribunal that I had been disturbed by all the vicious footage of Qadaffi's decline and fall. Not having stayed as close as perhaps I should have to the arab street or the revolutionary underground in Tripoli over the past forty years, I couldn't in good earnest summon enough righteous angst in support of the bloodthirsty masses of crowing tweeters and Youtube snuff posters. I say, I wasn't slavering and honking a klaxxon when I heard of how they had "scourged" the Colonel with a cattle prod &c. I really couldn't seem to get into the democratic moment and share in the joys of the Arab Spring. I felt like a terrible reactionary. That is, until I read the New Yorker piece about Qaddafi's last days and I was illuminated.

I was reading it while my wife overslept. I roused her with excerpts.

“You know what they called Qaddafi towards the end of his reign?" I asked her. "They called him ‘Abu Shafshufa,' which means ‘Old Frizzhead’. His problem hair was the subject of national mirth and satire.”

Nothing daunted I went on, “The truly amazing thing is that when he had fled his compound and the rebels broke in and sacked the place, alongside all the other outrageous luxuries there abounding they found a personal hairdressing salon. Can you believe it? A hair salon for Qaddafi! And still he looked like that. Whoever was doing his hair, he should have fired them.”

Finally my wife drowsily responded, with a woman’s patented insider knowledge of such things: “He was very vain, that’s why he looked that way.”

Only now did the penny drop for me. “What, do you mean you think he intended to look that way? And he thought it looked good? My God... the man was insane.”