Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 694

Queer – Luca Guadagnino‘s film adaptation of William Burroughs‘ novella opened this week in the US (for a limited release) and will open in theaters nationwide December 13 (similarly opening that date in the UK, Ireland and Canada, and in Germany, January 2).  More dates to be announced.

We already noted it here and here and here

Michael Ordoña reviews it for the San Francisco Chronicle  – here
Manahola Dargis reviews it for The New York Times –  here
Mark Kennedy‘ s review for the AP is here

More reviews (a compendium of reviews) here – (last time we looked it was a 78% approval rating surveying 37, that figure has held firm with now 85 reviews)

Daniel Craig has been receiving almost universal acclaim for his role as the Burroughs stand-in, Lee – the eschewal of his “James Bond” persona, the candor and honesty of the sex scenes. There’s much talk of his possible nomination for an Oscar

and the overall “look” of the film has been widely praised – the evocation of the fever dream – the costumes, the setting…

However…

Ira Silverberg‘s dissenting voice – “Just How Queer Is Luca Guadagnino’s Queer Anyway?,
(a by no means unsympathetic, but nonetheless dissenting voice) – needs to be heard.
In his detailed evaluation of the movie, Silverberg writes:

“It (Queer) does has a firm foundation in the text and plotline of the novel. The craftsmanship of the film is sterling on many levels. But it is not the book I know by the writer I knew so well. It is stylish in the modality of fashion – having a “look”; it is beautiful in its entirety as a complete visual construction. It is, essentially, a gay location film. It is romantic, something of a travelogue – you might want to go where it is set, eat at the restaurants, while wearing the clothing, certainly in the company of some of the flawless boys cast. But it is not the world that the book conjures for most readers, certainly not me.”

Silverberg notes noticeable parallels between Queer and David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Naked Lunch (another flawed Burroughsian adaptation)

and concludes:

“This terribly stylish new film feels tepid. It’s paying more of a tribute to an adaptation of a different Burroughs book, a film that feels genuinely Burroughsian but has less of a basis in the underlying text than his own. Something is off, the essential is missing, and this may be why I didn’t feel Burroughs’s spirit.”

“spirit” – “the Ugly spirit” (an essential Burroughs concept) – “Guadagnino’s Queer… does not give much screen time to the Ugly Spirit”, Silverberg notes, “or anything all that ugly at all”.

 

More Burroughs – Burroughs and connections (or, rather, mis-connections) – Victor Bockris’ eagerly-awaited book on Burroughs and Andy Warhol – The Burroughs-Warhol Connection comes out this weekend. More on that forthcoming. Here’s (by way of a taster) Jonah Raskin on that remarkable book

 

and Brion Gysin – “The Late Brion Gysin  (1916-1986)”, our friend Jan Herman declares, “Is Having A Moment”

“Over the years he had many, in fact, although few of them lived up to his expectations. But never mind. An updated model of his and Ian Sommerville’s Dreamachine was recently featured in a symposium on art, AI, and the humanities here in New York; and another will be installed in London at the Tate Modern, in the exhibition Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet, which will run from the end of this month (Nov. 28) to June 1, 2025.  Meanwhile, Roger Knoebber has brought Gysin back to life in a shaggy, unconventional book-length profile, Hysteresis..”

 

Steven Watson’s wonderful and ambitious Artifacts project, “a new online video platform exploring the avant-garde, the arts and queer culture”, premiered this week – see here –
– “Silver Factory”, “Gender Benders”, “Underground Press”,  are the three initial categories

Here’s a sampling (of interviews – illuminating interviews) (from the “Underground Press” section) –  Herbert Huncke (on “Hipster Slang”), Lawrence Ferlinghetti,  Hettie Jones, Paul Krassner…
((and) this is just a beginning)

 

Anne Marie Maxwell (Anne Murphy),  Neal Cassady‘s sometime companion (we posted earlier this year about that relationship and the belated publication of her no-holds-barred memoir) passed away last month at the age of 92.
Read Sam Whiting‘s obituary notice in the San Francisco Chronicle – here