Podcast appearances and mentions of William E Jones

O DUCENTÉSIMO TERCEIRO episódio do Podcast Dar Voz A esQrever

Have we got a surprise for you this week, listeners! On this episode, we discuss Hand in Hand's ode to itself GOOD HOT STUFF. Part cheeky documentary, part meta-history, and part outright salvage job, GOOD HOT STUFF takes us through the young studio's early artistic successes and previews its raunchy upcoming creations. Along the way, we meet an adorable narrator with an incredibly thick mid-Atlantic drawl, see some of the men who made magic behind the scenes through editing and scoring—and see an excerpt from an unfinished Scheherazade ripoff with a patently wacky backstory. But that's not all: we also have a conversation with author and filmmaker William E. Jones about GOOD HOT STUFF! The movie played a pivotal role in his previous novel 'I'm Open to Anything'—and we discuss where his and his protagonist's relation to the film differ. We also have a chance to discuss with Jones regionalism in porn, his enduring fascination with Fred Halsted, and his latest novel 'I Should Have Known Better' (now available through We Heard You Like Books Press or many other retailers). Tune in and learn what makes this film much more than a clip package or a cheap ripoff of THAT'S ENTERTAINMENT!—but, instead, a hot and artistic production in its own right.

Partendo dall'“Origine del mondo” di Courbet e dallo “Studio di un culo” di Vallotton, Costantino e Francesco mettono a confronto i loro inconciliabili punti di vista su arte e sesso. Una puntata che fa luce su questioni delicate come: c'è una relazione tra il collezionismo di Costantino e il suo calo del desiderio? Che cosa c'entra la pornografia con il crollo del comunismo? E, soprattutto, i delfini ce l'hanno la prostata?In questa puntata di parla di Gustave Courbet, Félix Vallotton, Michael E. Smith, William E. Jones, Luca Guadagnino, Sarah Lucas, Richard Hawkins, Gary Indiana, Carroll Dunham, Lena Dunham, Laurie Simmons, Andy Warhol, Halston, Victor Hugo, Andrea Fraser, Zanele Muholi, Anne Imhof, Tracey Emin, Lydia Silvestri, Monica Bonvicini, Giulia Crispiani, Jane Fonda, Vito Acconci, Louis C.K. e Salvador Dalí.

“Like writing, fisting is both a replicable skill and a rarefied art form.” This brachioproctic line begins writer Tausif Noor's “Hand In Glove” (Artforum, 12 April 2019), a joyfully loaded review of William E. Jones's novel I'm Open to Anything, released in 2019 by Los Angeles independent publisher We Heard You Like Books. In this searching conversation, Lauren and Tausif discuss Jones's oeuvre, the importance of independent publishing, and celebrate sexual transgression while lamenting that writing can often feel, like Jones's description of fisting, “a cork popping in reverse.”

“Like writing, fisting is both a replicable skill and a rarefied art form.” This brachioproctic line begins writer Tausif Noor’s “Hand In Glove” (Artforum, 12 April 2019), a joyfully loaded review of William E. Jones’s novel I’m Open to Anything, released in 2019 by Los Angeles independent publisher We Heard You Like Books. In this searching conversation, Lauren and Tausif discuss Jones’s oeuvre, the importance of independent publishing, and celebrate sexual transgression while lamenting that writing can often feel, like Jones’s description of fisting, “a cork popping in reverse.”

Co-hosts Medaya Ocher and Kate Wolf speak with Sally Rooney about her two novels Conversations with Friends and Normal People. Dubbed the "Jane Austin of the Precariat" and called "the first great millennial novelist" Sally addresses the acclaim she's received; and how she's grown into the person and writer she is today. Also, William E. Jones returns to recommend The Imposter byJavier Cercas, which tells the story of Spaniard Enric Marco, who was a national hero until he was exposed as a fraud in 2005.

Co-hosts Medaya Ocher and Kate Wolf speak with Sally Rooney about her two novels Conversations with Friends and Normal People. Dubbed the "Jane Austin of the Precariat" and called "the first great millennial novelist" Sally addresses the acclaim she’s received; and how she’s grown into the person and writer she is today.  Also, William E. Jones returns to recommend The Imposter byJavier Cercas, which tells the story of Spaniard Enric Marco, who was a national hero until he was exposed as a fraud in 2005.

Dee and Harrison chat with author William E. Jones about fisting, the gentrification of Los Angeles, and his new novel “I’m Open to Anything.” Arkansas men shoot each other while wearing bulletproof vests. Chicago man who claimed to be missing boy charged with lying to FBI. Phone calls. Sign up for the Sick and Wrong...

A perverse and explicit new take on the coming of age novel, William E. Jones’s I’m Open to Anything explores bohemian Southern California of the late 1980s and early 90s, before gentrification ruined everything. The book’s narrator flees a crumbling industrial wasteland in the Midwest and finds himself in sunny Los Angeles without a car, working in a neighborhood video store and spending many hours watching films. He explores his adopted city and befriends a number of men, most of them immigrants, who teach him the finer points of sex. He acquires the skill of fisting, giving his partners intense pleasure, and at the same time hearing the stories of their lives. They too have fled their hometowns: one to escape torture at the hands of a Salvadoran death squad; another to study anthropology after years of wandering and religious questioning. Alternating between explicit scenes of kinky sex and intimate conversations about matters of life and death, I’m Open to Anything is a porno novel of rare ambition and humor.

Colin Marshall sits down in Los Feliz with artist, filmmaker, and writer William E. Jones. They discuss what one learns by viewing a city through the prism of its gay porn; how Los Angeles gives away the least of itself in that form as in others; home he introduced Fred Halsted's "gay porn masterpiece" L.A. Plays Itself to Los Angeles Plays Itself maker Thom Andersen, and how the movie helped fund Chantal Akerman's first projects; Selma Avenue, once the "hustler central" of Los Angeles; the city as he came to know it in the movies before he came to know it in real life; the Los Angeles tendency to identify with specific neighborhoods; how truly coming to know the city somehow requires both driving and not driving; what made he and Thom Andersen decide to make a "useful" book of their conversations; his examination of the nonsexual elements of the gay porn, and the other work that got him a reputation for a time as "the porn guy"; his resolution not to create around any obvious unifying concept; why Morrissey's robust Latino fandom confounds people, and how it ties into Los Angeles' long strain of musical Anglophilia; the similarities between the industrial decay of northern England and the forlorn provinciality of Southern California suburbs; how city centers, to an extent excepting Los Angeles', have fallen to "fabulous wealth and enormous corporate power"; the way places never turn out quite as intended here, and what it means for civic pride, the force that begins a city's slide into decadence; what kind of a town Los Angeles has become for experimental film; the city's ability, now at stake, to nurture "something like a bohemia," which Glasgow has done where London hasn't; and what traces of Fred Halsted's Los Angeles survive today.

BTW (Penny-Ante Editions) Another Skylight favorite, Jarett Kobek, returns with his most comic work yet, a love letter to Los Angeles and terrible relationships. For tonight's reading he will be joined by artist William E. Jones. Bad relationships, interracial dating, cross-faith intermarriage, the endless pangs of love, reality television, Muslim fundamentalism, Crispin Hellion Glover, Internet pornography, Turkish secularism in the era of Erdoğan, the amorous habits of Thomas Jefferson, errant dogs, monogamous cheeseburger tattoos, alcoholics without  recovery, 9/11 PTSD, female Victorian novelists, the people who go to California to die. Jarett Kobek's second novel, BTW, presents the tragicomedy of a young man in Los Angeles balancing a lunatic father, two catastrophic relationships, identity politics, and American pop culture at its most confused. Praise for BTW: “Moving from Williamsburg to Echo Park, Kobek's account of post-NYU life in the aughts (so generic it can barely be lived, yet alone retold) is surprisingly disrupted as primitive identities of religion and race surface among this young, well-connected, smart and otherwise evolved group of friends. In this, his second novel, Kobek's writing continues to impress."--CHRIS KRAUS, author of Where Art Belongs and I Love Dick “Half of BTW is a coming of age novel about the narrator's romantic entanglements, the most significant of which turns out to be with the city of Los Angeles; the other half is the real love story, played out between the narrator and his father. This father, who is by turns hectoring, profane, and tenderin phone conversations and voicemail messages from his native Turkey, counts as one of the great comic characters in recent fiction, the sort of eccentric with whom you spend a minute in an elevator but can't forget."--William Jones, author of Halstead Plays Himself "Jarett Kobek's deceptively artless prose responds like a flower to the sunlight of joy as to the cold rain of alienation. BTW is a book that could be as big as Bright Lights, Big City with the same general framework of a sharply experimental novel that yet can boast a big heart, a joke on every page, an overwhelming city magnificently delineated, and a handful of fascinating and all too real characters.--Kevin Killian, author of Spread Eagle and Impossible Princess “It's like Kobek keyed into John Kennedy Toole's lost biorhythm and resurrected it amid the cosmopolitan absurdities of Los Angeles. Between Tabitha Brown, Khadija, the Butterfed Behemoth and the legendary Mehmet, BTW adds up to a funny and hyper-literate look at failing relationships.”--Ken Baumann, star of the television show The Secret Life of the American Teenager Jarett Kobek is an American author and essayist living in California. His book ATTA (Semiotexte, 2011) is a fictionalized psychedelic biography of the lead 9/11 terrorist and If You Won't Read, Then Why Should I Write? was published in 2012 by Penny-Ante Editions, both of which were longlisted for Novel of the Year by 3:AM Magazine. His most recent criticism, «Je suis devenu un magicien noir», was published as a catalogue essay by White Cube of London. William E Jones  is an artist and filmmaker born in Ohio and now living in Los Angeles.  He has made two feature length experimental films, Massillon (1991) and Finished (1997), the documentary Is It Really So Strange? (2004), videos including The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography (1998) and many installations.  His work has been the subject of retrospectives at Tate Modern (2005), Anthology Film Archives (2010), the Austrian Film Museum and Oberhausen Short Film Festival (both 2011).  His group shows include the 1993 and 2008 Whitney Biennials, the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009), and “Untitled (Death by Gun)” at the 12th Istanbul Biennial (2011). His books include Is It Really So Strange? (2006),Tearoom (2008),“Killed”: Rejected Images of the Farm Security Administration (2010),Halsted Plays Himself (2011), and Imitation of Christ (2013).  His solo exhibition, Heraclitus Fragment 124 Automatically Illustrated, opens at David Kordansky Gallery in January 2014.