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[145] TRANSCRIPT-FRAGMENT FROM INTERVIEW SERIES FOR PUTATIVE

MOMENT MAGAZINE SOFT PROFILE ON PHOENIX CARDINAL

PROFESSIONAL PUNTER O. J. INCANDENZA, BY PUTATIVE MOMENT

MAGAZINE SOFT-PROFILE-WRITER HELEN STEEPLY, 3 NOVEMBER Y.D.A.U. ‘Q.’

‘Well, there are odd sorts of consolations in having somebody go progressively bats in front of your eyes, such as for example sometimes The Mad Stork would go off on things in sort of a funny way. We always thought he was funny a good bit of the time.

‘You’ve got to remember he came at entertainment more from an interest in lenses and light. Most arty directors I think get more abstract as they go on. With him it was the opposite. A lot of his funniest stuff was very abstract. Are those earrings real copper? Can you wear real copper?’

•Q.’

‘You’ve got to remember that he came out of all these old artish directors that were really “ne pas a la mode” anymore by the time he broke in, not just Lang and Bresson and Deren but the anti-New Wave abstracters like Frampton, wacko Nucks like Godbout, anticonfluential directors like Dick and the Snows who not only really belonged in a quiet pink room somewhere but were also self-consciously behind the times, making all sorts of heavy art-gesture films about film and consciousness and isness and diffraction and stasis et cetera. Most extremely beautiful women Pve ever met complain of getting a sort of itchy green crust when they wear real copper. So the tenure-jockeys and critics who were hailing this millennial new Orthochromatic Neorealism thing as the real new avant-garde thing were getting tenure by blasting Dick and Godbout and the flying Snow Brothers and The Stork for trying to be avant-garde, when really they were self-consciously trying to be more like après-garde. I never did get straight on what Orthochromatic means, but it was very trendy. But The Mad Stork talked a lot about intentional atavism and retrogradism and stasis. Plus the academics who hated him hated the artificial sets and the chiaroscuro lighting, which the Stork had a total fetish for weird lenses and chiaroscuro.

‘After the thing about the Medusa and the Odalisque came out, and The Joke, and the film-establishment theory-queers were holding their noses and saying Incandenza’s still mired in this late-century self-referencing unentertaining formalism and unrealistic abstraction, after a while Himself, The Stork, in his own progressively bats way, decided to get revenge. He planned a lot of it out at McLean Hospital, which’s out in Belmont, which is where Himself had almost his own private reserved room, by then. He made up a genre that he considered the ultimate Neorealism and got some film-journals to run some proc-lamatory edictish things he wrote about it, and he got Duquette at M.I.T. and a couple other younger tenure-jockeys who were in on it to start referring and writing little articles in journals and quarterlies about it and talking at art openings and avant-garde theater and film openings, feeding it into the grapevine, hailing some new movement they called Found Drama, this supposedly ultimate Neorealism thing that they all declared was like the future of drama and cinematic art, etc.