Kinski reading Herzog’s version

‘Never believe anyone from the Balkans.’

– Robert Perišić, Naš čovjek na terenu

Born Werner Stipetić to a Croatian mother in 1942, Werner Herzog with his hypnotic voice remains a peculiar mixture of the German lack of knowing when to stop and the Balkan love of westerns (i.e. tall tales). When he remade F. W. Murnau’s silent Nosferatu (1922) with Klaus Kinski in 1979, he could not shoot in Wismar, which was in East Germany, so he moved the production to Delft. The authorities there refused to let him release 11,000 rats in the city but in nearby Schiedam they weren’t so fussy. Biologist Maarten ’t Hart was hired by Herzog as rat adviser but, as the Dutchman told the story in Granta magazine in July 2004, he got a bad feeling about it on the way to the engagement.

Starving white rats were imported from Hungary and they started to cannibalize each other on the way. Herzog then insisted that the vermin had to be dyed grey for cinematic effect. This meant dunking them in cages into hot, coloured water, which killed half the creatures. The survivors then licked off the dye, as the biologist had predicted, so, in the (apart from Kinski) soporific finished product, the rats look kind of beige, at most. By the mass makeover, Maarten ’t Hart no longer wished to be involved. He later implied in Granta that the other, more cuddly animals used in the production were also treated cruelly.

Herzog made five (mostly jungle) films with Kinski, who was undoubtedly a headcase. After the latter died in 1991, it didn’t take Herzog even a decade to spin his revenge, which is of the shoulda, woulda, coulda killed Kinski variety. Nevertheless his documentary Mein liebster Feind (1999), which translates as ‘My Best Enemy’, didn’t convince every critic. It has been the subject of at least two screen parodies, the more astute of those being a fly-on-the-wall-style episode of the US comedy series Childrens Hospital in which the director explores his troubled relationship with one of the cast. Thereby it gradually becomes obvious that the insane director is responsible for many of the actor’s troubles.

The South American jungle masochism of Herzog is immortal thanks to Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) and Fitzcarraldo (1982) but it also recalls a very different German who appeared in a 1993 documentary by Britain’s Channel 4. Therein, Charles Nicholl follows the path of Walter Raleigh’s search for El Dorado, along the Orinoco. Upriver he encounters this man with a German accent, who, when asked what he is doing there, explains what Venezuela means for him.

I can realize myself. I could shoot somebody in the street and I would get out of jail because this is a country you can really do anything you want. You just have to have the right connections, maybe a little bit of money and you can do what you want.

Stressing that he was not an explorer or a survival nut, though, he answered another question, about the space and the “mind or… the mood of the place” [sic].

The land is immense but maybe the people don’t want to live in the jungle. I think the Venezuelans, they don’t, they prefer to live in the city, they prefer the comfort we always had in Europe, eh, the electricity, the television… I don’t go into jungle to get bitten by a snake. I have enough bugs at home.

This German (“Lobo”) appears after 16:39

Stephen King & Ron Burgundy

To humour someone long ago, I picked up a Stephen King book and read a bit of it. I don’t recall the title but the one thing I do remember is that the word “incredibly” appeared at least once on every page. On that score, King has, in recent days, with the supreme confidence of his culture, endorsed a war criminal.

It’s only now that the fictional Ron Burgundy can retire. King has corroborated in documentary fashion that egomania and any scrap of common sense are never seen in the same room, and that, like Ron, he will say anything in response to a cue and a prompt.

King took a call from someone pretending to be the Ukrainian president in what undoubtedly had to be a normal wartime diversion for Zelensky, i.e. shooting the breeze with an American celeb in a friendly hat.

When the caller turned the screw, he omitted any mention of the many Polish victims of the “national hero” for dramatic effect. He had introduced a historical character whose record, he conceded, contained some, eh, “not so big” crimes against Jews (“accidentally”), and it still never dawned on King that it might be wiser to confess to his unfortunate ignorance of the name Bandera.

But no, like a possessed ventriloquist’s dummy, he incredibly praised him as a great man.

Stay classy, Maine.

Aspirin & Heroin

A drug story…

Breakfast Paranoia

1998

Dublin

26 October

A strange, unsettling outbreak of paranoia in the renamed Billboard (“Leroy’s”) on Camden St: I was upstairs, waiting patiently, admiring the voluptuous new waitress. Thirty-something, a dyed blonde, bobbing up and down the stairs she came and went.

Three guys sat quietly at the table behind me, the farthest one back, in a raised corner under a translucent skylight. As I was eating the indifferent brunch, one of the other staff below discreetly called the lady in charge about an issue upstairs. Whatever the problem was, I was suddenly keen to find out. I just felt that I should know what the matter was but it wasn’t being broadcast.

Looking down I could something of a contagion spreading among the black-attired waitresses, an almost silent but visible effect like the chill in The Masque of the Red Death.

I wanted to know more. The problem created a paralysis, like it was frightening, at least to women. I wanted to know but all I managed to make out was a simple exchange.

“Have you been up there?”
“No, I haven’t been up there,” replied the one in charge.
“Well, there’s something up there.”

It didn’t get any more appetising, what was on my plate. Those three guys behind abandoned their table and didn’t pay. When they had left, I was alone in the eye line of the anxious women in black, down below. They couldn’t stop themselves raising their eyes in my direction, in that of the skylight. Remember Harry Dean Stanton and the cat in Alien.

Don’t look back. It was time for me to leave. I paid but wouldn’t be back. If we only knew, we’d go nowhere. Start a panic. If I’d turned around before the door and demanded to know what was going on, I’d have been the one to start that stampede.