Here are two video trailers, totally different from each other — one for a new movie about the peerless Tomi Ungerer, “Far Out Isn’t Far Enough,” the other for a dance inspired by Observed While Falling, a spellbinding memoir by the incomparable Malcolm Mc Neil.
Many years ago Burt Britton kept a self-portrait by Ungerer in an archive of drawings he had collected by the hundreds. And for many years Britton kept those drawings private until he was prevailed upon to publish them in the book Self-Portrait: Book People Picture Themselves. The New York Times published a story about Britton and the book and included a slide show of some of the drawings. Ungerer’s self-portrait was not in the slide show. Well of course not. The Times is a family newspaper.
“The performance had nothing to do with me,” Malcolm Mc Neil writes in an email about [Wild’s] video trailer. “Joe Wild contacted me out of the blue to ask some questions and okay use of artwork. At the time he was reading OWF. He sounds like a very interesting, insightful young guy.”
As I put it in a review of OWF, “Mc Neill is an artist who can write. Really write. He brings a fresh analytical eye to the familiar Burroughsian fixations — synchronicity and doppelgangers, control systems, the word as virus, the number 23 — that dominate the memoir, while still offering a straightforward chronicle of the author’s relationship with le maître.”
