Table of Contents
Introduction Lynne Tillman 15
Part I Lies and Distortion
Lies and Distortion 21
Guitars 28
Frantz Casseus 30
Horn Section 39
Robert Quine 44
The Attack on Artists' Rights … and Me 47
Maybe There's Something There: Three Short Riffs on Derek Bailey 52
World Music: Time and Money 57
Still Things That Move: The Poetry of Henry Grimes 71
Songs of Resistance 76
Playing Hal Willner Home 80
Part II Everybody's a Winner
We Tell Children the Cow Says Moo 87
A Portrait of the Poet as a Young Asshole 90
I Watched from My Room as the Bicyclist Was Run Down 95
Everybody's a Winner 96
Pale Blue Eyes 100
It Was Almost Like Paris 103
O Say Can You See 104
The Lido of Something, Near Ravenna 110
Kaddish for Joan 111
The Twenty-Three-Day Tour 116
Putting Your Arms around a Memory 120
Today I Did Something Remarkable 130
Three Stories Involving Black Liquids 133
I Terremotati 144
Part III Film (Mis)Treatments
Party Boat [unfilmable treatment #1] 149
Three-Star Desperadoes (or, Biting the Hand) 151
Hungry: A Thirty-Minute Real-Time One-Take Disaster Film 160
Dialogue of the Sushi Eaters 161
Death in Venus 164
The Club-Date Musician (or, Saturday Night Nausea) 165
Whale Watching [unfilmable treatment #17] 169
Shark Watching: A Series [unfilmable treatments #18-?] 171
Bates Airbnb 172
Part IV Sorry, We're Experiencing Technical Difficulties
The Man Who Didn't Know How [tech failure #1] 177
Once There Was a Man Named Harry Who Couldn't Tie His Shoelaces 179
The Man with the Fun Job 185
Botox [tech failure #2] 192
The Boy Who Grafted Himself to a Tree 194
For Mauritzio 197
Wilderness [tech failure #3] 201
Bird 203
Ain't No Sunshine When She's Gone 204
The Activist (or, Twistin' Time Is Here) 206
IRL 210
Acknowledgments 215