Vincent Gallo.... C/D?

http://www.sun-times.com/output/eb-feature/cst-ftr-cannes22.html

Those who saw Vincent Gallo's "The Brown Bunny" have been gathering ever since, with hushed voices and sad smiles, to discuss how wretched it was. Those who missed it hope to get tickets, for no other film has inspired such discussion. "The worst film in the history of the festival," I told a TV crew posted outside the theater. I have not seen every film in the history of the festival, yet I feel my judgment will stand.

(More here.)

Ouch. (FWIW, I loved Buffalo 66)

although I did like "buffalo 66," kinda

I thought Buffalo 66 was great.

"Vincent Gallo's monumental folly has already become a defining moment in Cannes history. Awestruck future generations will ask: 'Were you there the night they screened The Brown Bunny?"' one of the magazine's critics wrote Friday. A clearly depressed Gallo said he had hardly been able to face his friends since Cannes critics, bored by what they say is a miserable harvest of films, started laying into his movie.

Imagine a film so unendurably boring that at one point, when he gets out of his van to change his shirt, there is applause.

There's your first clue.

based on the "essay" and the interview I read on the "writings" part of www.vincentgallo.com. says he "wouldn't go to Harlem for a million dollars" and how all of South America is "primitive," and he's so casual about "spics" and Italians and others who aren't, y'know, him, that you just wanna smack him all over again.

also does a number on "faggots" and "pussies" and both Harmony Korine (whom I also hate) and "boring Connecticut Chloe Sevigny". Kinda makes ya wonder if he did this whole movie just to get Chloe to blow him to piss off Harmony Korine.

also a huge George W. Bush fan, but that doesn't necessarily make him a racist.

Yes.

As long as he was able to spot that Brown Bunny was the was the worst in Cannes history, I'm sure his taste is just fine. That and because he's one of the few good film critics writing today.

My feelings on Gallo can be summed up by taking every mean thing written here so far, blending them together, and redoubling them.

I really don't find any of these supposed travesties of ennui and pretention damning at all, and you could make similar types of statements about isolated aspects of any number of the movies Ebert considers great, like "Last Year of Marienbad", "Picnic at Hanging Rock", "Blow Up" or "Dinner with Andre". "The Brown Bunny" might well suck big-time, but Ebert's particular illustration of its suckiness is not convincing at all.

The impression I get is that this is literally all that happens in the movie. Which is pretty goddamn pretentious, you have to admit, even if you're a Jim Jarmusch fan.

If this film is as big of a bomb as people say, there are going to be red faces at work - not mine - is all I'm saying. And in an even odder set of six degrees, my step-aunt used to date Ebert. Go figure.

I've got nothing against the guy's love and knowledge of movies, which are real, but he rarely offers insight that one couldn't find from the gallery of movie stars recruited to comment on every annual AFI list of "100 Years... 100 of the Same Movies Rearranged." If he's the best we've got, then maybe the rancid Stephen Hunter deserved his ludicrous Pulitzer.

Ebert also hates Kiarostami but loves Majidi, which is like hating Godard but loving Molinaro. As boutique as shit.

(Sorry!!)

I don't have strong feelings about Gallo one way or the other. I thought I should point out, though, that a number of films that had disastrous receptions at Cannes have gone on to become, if not unassailable classics, then important touchstones. Like Dreyer's Gertrud ("100 minutes of static shots of furniture," said one French critic at the time--sounds a bit like Ebert's synposis of The Brown Bunny).

Buffalo 66 seemed like an effective mood piece to me, not much more. The fairytale-esque conceits in the midst of the limpid upstate NY realism were actually a bit ahead of their time--they're all over indie films now. That doesn't mean I liked them. The film looked gorgeous though, I forget the particular method Gallo used to process his film stock but the results were distinctive.

As for "film critics in the English language," I can't pretend to know half of them. Ebert is a very good prose stylist, much more pleasant to read than Jonathan Rosenbaum. Rosenbaum begins practically every long review with a screed about the Cultural Guardians not letting us see (x) film and force-feeding us Titanic or what have you. It's not that his complaints don't have a basis in fact, it's just that his need to see every foreign/art movie through this particular lens is limiting, tiresome, and v. possibly condescending. In interviews Kiarostami has lauded The Godfather and in Positif not long ago Chris Marker said anyone who condemned Gilliam's 12 Monkeys (which borrows its plot from Marker's The Pier) and thought they were doing him any favors were foolish. I wonder what Rosenbaum--whose outlook on Film culture is increasingly Manichean--thinks of that.

Ebert doesn't hate fun.

I think the distinction I make that puts critics like Rosenbaum and White (I mention these two particularly because of their tone, which many people insist is condescending and vengeful) above Ebert is that film criticism... or, at least, film criticism that aims to mean something other than to tell you whether or not you should see a movie (as a film prof once said to me: "every film is worth watching at least once") is usually more about the person reflecting and writing about the film in question as it is about that film. Purely objective "checklist criticism" (good cinematography, a stunning performance, clever jokes) means nothing to me. I'm not saying Ebert is a checklist critic, but he does more often than not seem to be striving for a very objective tone.

Different strokes, obviously, but I prefer reading a very personal opinion that I happen to disagree strongly with (most of A. White) than merely nodding along at a basic description of a given film's socio-cultural-zeitgeist position at the moment it opens (which is what I think Ebert excels at).

At least we both love Gertrud... am I right?

It's pretty difficult for me to trust anyone who decides that a film is or is not important -- and not even important for me, for the writer, but just for everyone. First and foremost, any standards of what is considered "good" in film need to be held in suspect if not outright contempt. Take the films of Brian De Palma, for example. Nothing he does could be considered in "good taste," as far as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences' definition of "good" has developed. Is he important to me? Hell yes. Is he important to others? Not for me to say. The best I can do is suggest how perhaps the cultural barriers between good and bad films might be interfering with one's reading of his films....

But I suppose I could just as easily stop now, since you hate reading blog entries on movies. ;)

By the by, I can't help but feel it's a bit ironic having this discussion in the first place, as I'm much more into movies than music in general, and have been posting at cinephile's message boards a lot longer before I stumbled onto this neat place. Like with you (only opposite), I sort of operated under the assumption that music was very much a totally subjective thing and the best any blog writer could do was to merely suggest the music was worth my time. I've certainly been disabused of that notion since reading some of the insights here.

(Also, though I'm biased because I've engaged in conversations with them, I have to say that Zach Campbell, Ed Gonzales, Damien Bona, Jaime Christley, and a great number more have done as much as anyone to shape my understanding and appreciation of film at the moment.)

(regarding film critics, Ebert & Charles Taylor rock)

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA! XD

it wasn't a process, he shot it on reversal film

More rock critics impress me than film critics do. They're livlier. Maybe it's because the commerce/art dichotomy isn't quite as vexing, and maybe it's 'cause rock critics don't have to bother with narrative and can talk about OTHER THINGS like Beyonce Knowles' hair. Which doesn't mean they do, just that they can. Oh, I suppose film critics can too, just that they don't, or at least not often enough. Actually, rock critics don't talk about Beyonce Knowles' hair all that often either. But in rock criticism it wouldn't be weird to talk about her hair. Usually. Umm...

That several French critics liked it was, Gallo said, "almost like salt in the wound."

All that said I do think he is a fine critic and his perspective is a good one to have. He is certainly as good a critic as Ebert, and it's perhaps my taking for granted his many attributes that allows me to criticize his faults. It's a relative thing. People I know tend to look down their noses and Ebert so I feel obliged to defend him, because I think he's good. When push comes to shove absolutely I'd trust Rosenbaum's taste more than Ebert's, but being a critic should be about more than defining/refining/challenging taste. Rosenbaum makes stabs every week at doing something more but it's always laughably half-assed. His long-promised book Movie Wars, rather than deepen, organize, and nuance his analysis, just turned up the invective.

I can't remember who (might have been Charles Taylor, actually) that said something like "expertise in a field in which everyone assumes they are an expert is often dismissed as snobbery." Words of wisdom in my opinion.

Rosenbaum's Small Soldiers/Ryan review was CLASSIC, just for its sheer insane chutzpah, although I agree that it was somewhat unfair. I think he's generally a good writer, and I appreciate his uniquely non-condescending attitude toward Orson Welles (which D. Thomson could take a lesson from), but his elitism grates, and his willingness to blame George Lucas for all the problems of the world is a bit stupid.

Thank you Justyn for remembering that criticism can and often should be, among many other things, interesting-cum-fun.

But if I'm going to read a film critic (or a philosopher or a critic or a historian), I'm not interested in mere "expertise" in a field, however expert that expertise might be.

Ha! I've always been a fan of pioneering smart-asses. Kael, too.

yancey, we must hang out more often...i am overdue for a gallo sighting...

I dig him because he turned me on to "Heart of the Sunrise" by Yes on the Buffalo 66 soundtrack, and the fast parts of that song are the only Yes suff that have ever interested me and that song is pretty good, at least until the guy starts singing.

Sharp-tongued Vincent Gallo has launched a scathing attack on "fat pig" movie critic Roger Ebert - after the reviewer claimed the indie filmmaker apologized for making his widely slammed flick The Brown Bunny. The movie caused uproar at last month's Cannes Film Festival with its graphic oral sex scene between Gallo and actress Chloe Sevigny. But fuming Gallo vehemently denies he has apologized for making the film. He says, "I never apologized for anything in my life. I like the movie. I had 100 per cent creative and financial control of it and if I didn't like it, I would have changed it. The only thing I'm sorry about is putting a curse on Roger Ebert's colon. If a fat pig like Roger Ebert doesn't like my movie, then I'm sorry for him." Ebert wrote in American newspaper Chicago Sun-Times that Gallo had expressed regret for making Brown Bunny to a reporter from US movie magazine Screen International.

http://us.imdb.com/PeopleNews/2003/20030603/#2

"The (brown bunny) fur continues to fly between Roger Ebert and Vincent Gallo. Ebert says he has no idea what Gallo meant the other day when he bragged that he'd put a curse on the critic's colon, "but when I had my last colonoscopy, they let me watch it on a little TV, and it was far more entertaining than [Gallo's film] 'Brown Bunny.'" (N.Y. Post) "

What's sad is that a number of mediocre American and European films in the festival's first half convinced a number of American journos to leave when some apparently wonderful films from Asia, without marquee directors, appeared out of competition in its final days.

(Even among the most intelligent sets it always boils down to the American films every year, doesn't it? This year wasn't only about Dogville, Elephant, Mystic River and Brown Bunny)

let's not forget about my hometown boy Denys Arcand!

I liked Peranson's article. Also, Hoberman on Gallo was prime.

Great quote, but he does seem to be a tosser.

http://www.buddyhead.com/other/vincentgallo/page_3.html

http://www.suntimes.com/output/entertainment/cst-ftr-ebert04.html

Evil, but very funny.

Obviously, "The Brown Bunny" is not for the mass audience, but you gotta give it to Vincent though for making something totally uncompromising and getting a ten million dollar budget for such a small scale operation.

Sounds like "The Brown Bunny" is heavily influenced by "Two Lane Blacktop," a masterpiece of film that is often derided as dull and boring by people who think Kevin Smith is bold and daring and just fucking hilarious.

We just don't have the attention span for such films anymore, and I suspect "The Brown Bunny" is such a film. I commend Gallo, even though I haven't seen the film yet. I hope this is not his last film.

Vincent Gallo is simply fencing his persona within the film industry just like Matthew Barney hustles the artworld. That's what it's all about. Gallo is similar, but he is a "renaissance" hustler. But I don't believe he'll write the Great American Novel since he doesn't seem to enjoy reading novels.

Buffalo '66 was one of the greatest independent films ever made. Sure he borrows a hell of a lot from Cassavettes and French New Wave auteurs, but there one can emulate far worse.

Vincent Gallo is simply fencing his persona within the film industry just like Matthew Barney hustles the artworld. That's what it's all about. Gallo is similar, but he is a "renaissance" hustler. But I don't believe he'll write the Great American Novel since he doesn't seem to enjoy reading novels.

Buffalo '66 was one of the greatest independent films ever made. Sure he borrows a hell of a lot from Cassavettes and French New Wave auteurs, but one can emulate far worse.

yeah but Cub I don't see why you need to drag the Cremaster films into this--you're assuming (based on what?) that Ebert wouldn't like them, & using that to disparage his brown bunny comments--it's kind of pointless no?

also you must admit this is nonsense

Thank you, Raskolnikov.

It all comes down to this:

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls vs. Buffalo 66

Russ Meyer and Ebert all the way.

Some critics have become the greatest directors we have know, like the Cahiers du Cinema crew. There were really fanboys with a fanzine of their own. But they still worshipped Brecht.

I would watch almost anything over Ebert's colon. I'll take "The Brown Bunny" over the "Ebert's Round Brown."

It implies you're somehow separate from them. In reality, we're all individual voices IN the mass, and something which you like -- I'm not talking about film here, but anything in general -- might be seen by someone else as an indictment for you just being 'one of the masses' in turn. So I wouldn't be so quick to condemn.

http://www.nypost.com/gossip/36030.htm

Russ Meyer and Ebert all the way."

A-fucking-men. I liked Buffalo 66 but Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is a bizzare-o masterpiece of the highest order. Not a dull moment in that film anywhere.

Ned, I agree completely with you on the individual as one of many thing. I probably just came across as a bit aloof. That's just part of my nature though.

I do love this Ebert/Gallo feud. Gallo shouldn't take it too such a personal level with the Siskel comment. That's just as nasty as nasty gets. And Ebert is a funny guy.

What I would like to see is Michael Medved's review of "The Brown Bunny," because if Medved says it is a bad film then it must be good.

That would have been genius.

One of the most enjoyable nights of my life -- seeing a screening of Beyond at UCLA when it was still officially out of circulation, back in 1991. A huge number of old punk band folks and scenesters showed up -- chatted with one of the guys in the Droogs for a while -- and the panel was Meyer, Ebert and a good chunk of the actors, including the guy who played Z-man! Allegedly he had been ashamed of the film/angry with Meyer for years, but he was there and the conversation was all good fun. What's her name who played the lead Carrie Nation was wonderfully wry and witty (and is actually British! pretty good American accent in the film).

if Medved says it is a bad film then it must be good.

These days, Medved thinks anything and everything is a bad film that isn't pure fluff that celebrates a specifically monothiestic god.

aww yeah

http://members.aol.com/anakrid/photos13.jpg

In an interview with the online film publication indieWIRE, independent filmmaker, actor, photographer, painter, model, and composer Vincent Gallo said, "[T]he best interview of Vincent Gallo was done by Vincent Gallo. The best articles about Vincent Gallo were written by Vincent Gallo, the best acting performance of Vincent Gallo was directed and edited by Vincent Gallo from a screenplay written by Vincent Gallo; even the best photographs of Vincent Gallo were taken by Vincent Gallo. So you see, this is painful for me."

Listening to Vincent Gallo's Recordings of Music for Film, it's easy to see what he means. These experimental, reticent musings, culled together from his various movie scores (including Buffalo 66, The Way It Is, Downtown 81), are best taken as a personal experience from their creator. The only alternative is a direct emotional response from the individual listener. Everything else is bullshit analysis in lieu of pure feeling.

Gallo provides ample liner notes describing his experiences with the underground. Though he writes elegantly and pointedly about his artistic flourishes, his dogged passion to the medium, and indifference (or dislike) toward industry practice, it's best to save those reflections until after hearing the sounds as an egotistical listener. Divorce them from the movies they accompany, and they stand on their own as fleeting tone poems running a minute or two each. It's good to let the blues, the romance, the yearnings of Gallo wash over you. Try to believe the songs were written for your own introspection.

1. Her Smell Theme. The lonely strumming sounds become distracted by smoky drifts of another theme, as one guy in his apartment has wafts of perfume or sweat in his heartfelt recollections.

2. The Girl of Her Dreams. Discordant notes pile up, trying to get somewhere, forming a cluttered pattern. Underneath is a deep, low hum. Damned if I can't get it straight, but damned if I won't try.

3. A Brown Lung Hollering. The heart is too big for the chest and rattles against the ribcage, as striking sounds and saxophone foghorns erupt.

4. The Way It Is Waltz. A piano accepts circumstance and hopes for something more. It's atypical Gallo, and it's easy to imagine thoughts about some girl. And it must be raining.

5. Glad to Be Unhappy. A teasing little smile of a song has notes flickering away like a wry chuckle.

6. Brown Storm Poem. More waves of dread come creep, creep, creeping in.

7. Good Bye Sadness, Hello Death. Ah, shimmering epiphanies! Here's a song Martin Scorsese might have used in The Last Temptation of Christ, a full minute of wholeness.

8. Brown Daisies. The tune plays low, with its eyes looking at its feet as it walks down the street. It doesn't look where it's going, coasting on an instinctive rhythm and pace.

9. And a Colored Sky Colored Gray. A touch of blues guitar, sitting on the dock of the bay when it's overcast and a little cold outside. The clouds don't roll away, but they've merged into a deep bed for all your doubts to linger on.

10. Fishing For Some Friends. Friends are good, and sometimes absent. Let's take a more literal attack, though, and say the song is about a hunter stalking its prey -- only the guy is a doofy fisherman whose bait and tackle box rattles around as he struggles with his line.

11. Six Laughs One Happy. It's the lone triangle sound in this chamber expression piece that stands out for me and says "Bing! Bing!" Talk about your bright-eyed, perky individual in a room full of groaning hangovers. I don't know whether to embrace it or brush it away.

12. Sunny and Cloudy. Music to march to? A heartbeat and a clarion call go about their business side by side. Another day's work lies ahead.

13. No More Papa Mama. There are a few instruments at work here, but it's all about one guy playing alone on the guitar. Liken it to the guy camped out on the bench in Grand Central Station as busy, busy people are a gigantic blur around him. Yeah, he's moved out. And now what the hell is he supposed to do? Think, think, think.

14. Fatty and Skinny. Thick notes and thin notes -- I suppose they co-exist, though they don't interact. They only become more entrenched.

15. Her Smell Theme (reprise). Still that perfume... and all those bittersweet romantic thoughts and feelings have grown lucid, richer, and more vivid.

16. Lonely Boy. "Show a face from my childhood days," a voice sings. It sounds like an old recording of girlish, nostalgic charms (in fact, it's Gallo's vocal). "Now and then I start to cry," the voice pines, and it's really too bad. Romantics, prepare to be crushed under the weight of your own intense desire.

17. A Falling Down Billy Brown. So it goes, as it were. But you don't have to be happy about it. Those bastards...

18. Drowning in Brown. Let's all go to a midnight disco club, and maybe there'll be swinging trouble there.

19. A Somewhere Place. More nostalgic romanticism, but there's something so endearing about the small squeaks of the guitar that come before each lovely chord.

20. A Wet Cleaner. As Dennis Hopper advised Christian Slater in True Romance, "Just slow it down, maaaan!"

21. Sixteen Seconds Happy. Why is it that we associate happiness with wind chimes? But yes, it's tranquil.

22. With Smiles & Smiles & Smiles. There is no visual or verbal association for this tune. It's music for glazing your eyes over, which is not necessarily a bad thing. You want to find the closest couch or beanbag and sink into it, hearing stuff like this. The abrupt climax is slightly unnerving, and appropriate. Where did that vibe go?

23. A Cold and Gray Summer Day. The opening notes are left to linger in the air. This meditation on melancholy is obsessive, reflexive, subjective, compulsive, repetitive, hauntingly bleak, and startlingly beautiful.

24. Brown 69. It's a song with personality, and there's enough mystery about that person that you'd like to get to know them better. But does mystery preserve attraction? And is that a reason to return to Brown 69? The slow, sloping, downbeat rhythms have a meandering, quiet man's attractiveness.

25. Dum Beet. The candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long. By the time you've adjusted your vision to the flashing lights, it's already gone.

26. Me and Her. Melodious complications that feel like the opening of a heartfelt ballad, and purposefully never get there. Keep up those defenses.

27. Ass Fucker. Experiments in sounds culminate in a festering nightmare. It ain't gentle, but it's quick.

28. Ass Fucker (reprise). "No, please! Please!" Hey, come back here! I'm not finished with you yet! (Or is he simply fixing the rusty carburetor?)

29. I Think the Sun is Coming Out Now. Some bleary-eyed optimism at the end of the tunnel, shaken and a little crazed but perhaps the better for having suffered through it. Then the music slowly fades away into nothing.

If you're anxious for to shine
In the high aesthetic line
As a man of culture rare,
You must get up all the germs
Of the transcendental terms
And plant them ev'rywhere.
You must lie upon the daisies
 And discourse in novel phrases
Of your complicated state of mind;
The meaning doesn't matter
If it's only idle chatter
 Of a transcendental kind.
And ev'ryone will say,
As you walk your mystic way,
"If this young man expresses himself
 In terms too deep for me,
Why, what a very singularly deep young man
This deep young man must be!"

I know you're not referring to me and it's presumptuous (and foolish) to jump back into this now, but it's not so much a question that I take Gallo seriously (which I don't) as it is a fact that I sure as hell don't take Ebert seriously. His crack about French movies in that last column, as modestly amusing as it might be, is really stupid. When you've got a target like Gallo, why the hell resort to bashing French movies?

ER: "You, sir, are drunk."
WC: "And you, madam, are ugly, but at least tomorrow I'll be sober."

i think "buffalo 66" was interesting enough to presume that gallo is not simply some huckster or charlatan as some seem to suggest.

I think he's an excellent enthusiast.

*shameless nostalgia-masturbation session over*

it's here:
http://www.observer.com/pages/story.asp?ID=7480

As for the curse on his colon, what I actually said was that I put an unremovable black magic curse on his prostate, which will enlarge into a large cancerous ball by the fall

Better sacrifice another goat, dude. Your last one sucked.

McGee on music: How Vincent Gallo taught me to love Yes

The pop-culture polymath has used his spectacular tastes to introduce people to much-maligned musical genres. But if only he could get around to releasing his own recordings

Vincent Gallo is one of the few modern renaissance men. He boasts a long list of achievements and I can add another: Gallo is the only person who could persuade me to get into the prog-rock band Yes.

Every time I play Tales from Topographic Oceans, I have to laugh at myself and ask: "Am I really listening to Yes?" The band were a joke back in 1977, associated with creepy basement dwellers who read fantasy novels while watching VHS tapes of Rick Emerson stabbing his keyboard with Nazi daggers. I'd always sided with punk rock's reaction against 17-minute songs, so it took the musical wisdom of Gallo to show me the error of my ways. He's proved you can be both a Yes fan and a Ramones fan (kudos to Gallo for getting Johnny Ramone a film role in Stranded and for being godfather to Chris Squire's child).

Gallo's musical opinions are always spot on. For a start, he's gone on record to say he prefers Journey's Don't Stop Believing to Radiohead's OK Computer. Need more evidence? Just look at the tracklisting for the Brown Bunny soundtrack … it's genius! The critically misunderstood film shows Gallo as a man of spectacular musical tastes. Brown Bunny is the answer film to Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop and stars Gallo as anti-hero Bud Clay as he goes on an existential search through America to the sounds of Gordon Lightfoot, Jackson C Frank and John Frusciante. Amazing. On the soundtrack to his masterpiece Buffalo 66, Gallo repays his debt of influence to prog rock and includes great and original covers of King Crimson and Yes. I still remember being shocked at how much I enjoyed the soundtrack. Gallo vanquished my own musical prejudices towards the era of musical excess. I was curious enough to get Tales from Topographic Oceans, and had to admit he was right – it's a classic album.

The facts show that if something was happening in New York in the late 70s and early 80s, Gallo was at the epicentre of it. At 16 he moved there and started a no wave band with Jean-Michel Basquiat. Gallo was heavily into the downtown art scene, playing with the Bush Tetras and Lydia Lunch, and was a regular at Manhattan's Mudd Club. Hip-hop? Gallo was there, starting his own rap act Trouble Deuce, and as Prince Vince he appeared on the shortlived, iconic and utterly street Graffiti Rock. Twenty years later and he's making appearances with Rick Rubin in Jay-Z's 99 Problems and rapping with RZA. The man is a pop-culture zeitgeist.

Despite all this, Gallo's own recorded musical output has been curiously limited. Sure, there are treats out there for people willing to spend outrageous amounts of money, but he has only had two wide releases on Warp: When, a cool number inflected with the spirit of Moondog, and Music for Films and Recordings, a compilation of Gallo's previous scores and cinematic offerings, twisted and bent into shape for general release. This is somewhat frustrating. Gallo is sitting on a mountain of unrecorded material; even in the mid 90s, when I heard talk of him signing to Sony and recording with Bunny member Lucas Haas, prog-rock producer Eddie Offord (producer of Tales from Topographic Oceans), Beastie Boy Adam Horowitz and DNA member Tim Wright, I was excited – but nothing happened. And again he recorded in 2005 with Sean Lennon and Jim O'Rourke, but has this project been released? No.

Gallo sparked my musical curiosity when he announced his new improvisational project RRIICCEE, featuring a rotating lineup (Eric Erlandsen of Hole was a founder member). The band's musical manifesto is to create tours only featuring improvisation, to dispense with the recording-industry model and be true to the music. Yet again, no records appear to be forthcoming. Is he refusing to release his recordings out of spite (as he did with his artwork)? Or is he too preoccupied with other projects? I don't know. But I'd like to hear more from the man who helped me understand the complicated and majestic beauty of Yes.

ugh

the man who helped me understand the complicated and majestic beauty of Yes.
hee hee, ugh is right. though i will admit that Buffalo 66 made me revisit Yes. Though I already owned Tales from Topographic Oceans ...

lol @ "Rick Emerson"

dude's touring on the west coast now

http://graveyardshiftshane.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/vincent-gallo-when.jpg
this is a very good album

I saw him on that RRIICCEE tour--I was probably one of a handful of folks there for the music, as the first 3 rows were packed with girls trying to catch his eye. He wore a long blonde wig and didn't say a word the entire show; at the end the girls gathered around the stage hoping he'd come back but he didn't, which made me chuckle. Now the music was tedious "improvisation" with his nasal-ly croon atop it periodically, which was a letdown for me given how much I like the album mentioned above...

The sheer amount of time and effort this man spends wheeling and dealing vintage bass guitar knobs on eBay (not to mention snatching up his own memorabilia whenever he can) almost undermines his place as one of popular culture's greatest self-mythologizers since Orson Welles. Almost.

Vincent Gallo is so great

no he isn't

newish
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYyWo0JL62g

Would laugh when the AV Club would do it's yearly christmas catalog of unlikely and ludicrous items available over the internet and end with the same punchline: a vial of Vincent Gallo's seed he was selling on his website for $10,000 dollars, maybe more, for prospective mothers. Also, Gallo's refusal to sell to any females who weren't caucasian.

Vincent Gallo is so great
― puff pastry hangman (admrl), 14. Jaanuar 2011 16:35

[1 year passes...]

no he isn't
― am0n, neljapäev, 10. Mai 2012 23:15 (6 hours ago)

did enjoy reading this part of the discourse. really.

neljapäev, 10. Mai

everybody I know who's worked with this guy has nothing but awful things to say about him

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_leggenda_di_Kaspar_Hauser

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnPh97aRRVw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4YQGIuamnA