It has been a long, hard day of work…no, wait. That’s not quite right. It has been a long hard TWO days of work packed into one from-10-am-Monday-to-5-am-Tuesday stretch, thanks to getting three article assignments after 9pm, due by dawn. Gee, thanks. Remind me to delete all article pitches at 7pm sharp and simply re-post them the next morning.
Anyhoodle, I ran across the Dancing Queen of Eastleigh here and I just wanted to say that she is my spirit animal. I haven’t got the strength to do this right now, but if I did, I would. Because this queen needs some backup princesses to really make this look work.
Hi Tim, yes she does know, through me taking this video I have now met her and we have become friends… she is so pleased she has made people happy and she still dances at the bus stop every day. :D
Who knows why founding Beat poet and professional reprobate William S. Burroughs chose to fixate on the minor Mayan death god Ah Puch (which he spelled “Ah Pook” probably because it sounds like a dirty phrase in his native Midwestern dialect), but once he did, Ah Pook was resurrected from his sojourn in Limbo and elevated to the Pantheon of immortals, thanks to this bizarre prose poem, now immortalized as an unforgettable, gruesome, beautiful, award-winning animated film.
Ladies and gentlemen, brace yourselves. Ah Pook is here.
AH POOK IS HERE – This 1994 stop-frame interpretation of recordings by the late William S. Burroughs, was crafted around a selection of tracks from the album “Dead City Radio” produced by Hal Willner & Nelson Lyon – and featuring music by John Cale.
AH POOK received Ten international film awards, was archived in the Goethe institute, and was part of the Burroughs retrospective PORTS OF ENTRY. AH POOK was also voted ‘BEST OF THE BEST’ at the 2010 Stuttgart International Trickfilm festival.
The Guardian review: “Phillip Hunt’s gorgeous, grisly animation mates William Burroughs’s gravelly narration of Ah Pook The Destroyer’s death-dealing parable with music by John Cale at his creepiest. Hunt’s deliberate and disgusting illustrations of Burrough’s monsters of the mind are a revelation; delicately articulated puppets riddled with revolting detail. Turn down the lights, get out the headphones, and give yourself over to The Master’s ghastly visions and sonorous warnings (“The world cannot be controlled, except by accident”) for six gut-churning minutes.” -Kate Stables / The Guardian
Director Philip Hunt Producer Eddel Beck Music Hal Wilner & John Cale Produced at the Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttemberg Distributor BFI & The British Council
PS (still reading? eh?)
You might like the following story ( spoiler alert!): The final scene of the film is an unbroken take wherein Pook puts the gun in his mouth and we pull back until we hear a gunshot and see a red flash, cutting back into the stars… and the spirit of Pook intoning ‘falling in Love again’ among the Heavens… The original intention was to pull the camera all the way back a good respectful distance and show Pook’s body flinch backward etc.. But we had a small problem while shooting. Now, back in the day (‘94) we did this part on film and in-camera without video assist etc. and the entire sequence was one continuous camera track made frame by frame …all adjusted incrementally by hand. When we were nearing the end of the shot we realised the focus had messed up & we were shooting blur. We had no way of knowing how long we had been shooting blur either.. The simple shot had taken us all day to shoot due to the awkward nature of the set up and we despondently wrapped for the day and sent the film off for processing ( a 2 day turnaround due to the location we shot in at that time). Now, the films audio was pre edited, the master mix already had the gunshot set as part of the audio track. So, after 2 days we got the processed rushes back & synched them up to the audio and played out to see how much of the animation had been captured before the accidental focus pull screwed it all up… By some bizarre co-incidence.. The moment of blur synched up EXACTLY with the gunshot.. And so that’s how we left it. Still freaks me out even now…
When I mentioned on Facebook that I was coming to the wild Penticistan steppes above Ruralopolis, I never thought that the locals would take it upon themselves to create a Welcome video for me. Apparently, they were so overcome with joy at the thought that soon the mighty raincoaster would roam the sagebrush slopes above the lake, gibbering softly and occasionally making nameless sacrifices on mysterious altars on the hilltops, that they created this gloriously Canadian multiculti work of art to welcome me.
It appears they think I do not know what is meant by the term “Indian pony” but we will let it slide. After all, OMG PONIES!
Well, I haven’t gotten the final word but so far so good. It seems that they’re amenable to my compromise, providing I get the paperwork done, which I’d always assumed was a condition of the whole deelio.
Or, probably, in the future as well. In all of recorded time and space, in fact. And just think, Nick Denton, if your place hadn’t become a cesspool of festering Deadspin lunkheads, you could have had this on your site.
In response to an AIDs denialist in the comments on the video of Spencer Cox from the previous post:
Oh, honey. Spencer’s toenails were better than you. They had a higher IQ, more credibility, and a better likelihood of being remembered with fondness. Spencer is now redecorating the halls of Valhalla while the best thing you can think to do with your completely unjust continued life is to troll YouTube, forsooth, in order to eke out tiny shreds of the attention you crave but can gain no other way. Because you have nothing to offer the world. You are wholly contemptible. Go pour salt on yourself.
