Editors' Introduction
Birds, prosthetic legs filled with ping pong balls, Van Gogh, Jennifer Anniston, Descartes, Derrida, Godard, Jane Fonda, the Dead Monk Bench, and the Charles Bukowski of 19th Century Japan: all can be found in this issue of HoW.
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Haunting Birds - Allen Frost
At L-KO studios, Billie Ritchie made films with titles like Love and Surgery, It Might Have Been Serious, Hearts and Flames, Bill's Blighted Career, The Curse of Work, A Doomed Hero, and Life and Moving Pictures. Then in 1919, ostriches on the set of his comedy attacked him. He never did recover. Within two years he died from those pains.
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Jen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
- Scottie and Jeff
For some reason, that makes me think of a funny moment in that recent documentary on Jacques Derrida where an Australian TV host asks if the ideas of deconstruction aren't somehow embodied in the hyper-irony of a show like Seinfeld. Derrida's face goes totally blank--he was stumped! His expression was probably the same as Jennifer Aniston's when she heard the name "Bertrand Russell."
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On Ripping Off Nick Hornby
- Dave Zauhar
The artistic innovations of the Beat writers, as well as their extension of living literary traditions go unnoticed among most of their readers, largely because we live in an age where "lifestyle" matters more than life (and artistic) substance. They seem to have entered into popular culture, for good and for ill. The good: they are read passionately in ways that few writers are read. They have FANS, for God's sake! The bad: they have fans, who are not the most discriminating readers and thus reduce the works to lifestyle manuals in ways that lead to reinforcing mass-mediated caricatures of beatnik illiteracy and superficial, ill-informed, inarticulate dissent. Along with heavy doses of alcohol, fame along these lines is what killed Jack Kerouac.
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Trees In The Asylum Garden
- Allen Frost
Like the script of a paperback left out in the rain, the movie follows a warped version of the book. It seems clear that the film is directed more at a teenage Drive-In audience, especially with its mordant jokes about egg salad, balloons and girls. The sitcom atmosphere is quickly shattered though when death arrives whistling like a tea kettle in the night.
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