William Stobb

A few months ago, I was invited by contributing editor and awesome guy Max Greenstreet to submit a movie to a new poetry site called The Volta .  I'd never made a movie, but I like movies.  I shot some footage and connected it with fragments from Absentia , built some sounds / music around it, and am pleased to say that it debuts today on The Volta : http://www.thevolta.org/medium-mainpage.html It's ambient and, I think, kind of captivating.  I hope you'll check it out and like it.

Friday, 4/27, 6:00 PM at The Root Note, downtown La Crosse: In March and April, I've done a half dozen events around the region in support of Absentia , my new poetry collection in the Penguin Poets series.  This coming Friday night, I'll close up my spring "tour" at The Root Note, with my friends in the band 1, 2, 3 Walrus!   I'll read poems from the book and new work, like "The Dream of the Perfect Pants" and "Failing Science Lullaby," and then I'll clear off the stage and make way for the horn section.  Should be a fun night.  Come on out!

In a recent conversation about favorite movies,  David Lynch's Mulholland Drive came up.  For me, this film embodies all the psychological and imagistic depth of Lynch's best work while continuing to be comprehensible as a narrative (albeit a complex, fragmented narrative that features several suspensions and diversions).  In this scene, our two protagonists--Betty Elms (Naomi Watts) and Rita (Laura Harring)--arrive at a mysterious theater called Club Silencio, where they view a moving performance of "Llorando," the Spanish-language version of Roy Orbison's "Crying," sung a capella in the film by Latina recording artist Rebekah Del Rio.  Just as the performance reaches its apex (honestly, it gives me chills every time I watch it), the singer collapses , and we understand the horrific false-ness of the moment--the singer is a propped up corpse, somehow animated.  So many things about the scene are amazing.  ...

Sixty Second Television Spot Awesome Gorilla Suits SPOKESPERSON [35-ish white male in dressy casual on a small, all-white stage] SATISFIED CUSTOMERS [various actors in various, celebratory settings—all are happy-quirky, dressed in gorilla suits but holding the heads of the suits so that we can see their nice faces] SPOKESPERSON At Awesome Gorilla Suits, we make awesome gorilla suits.   Don’t take my word for it, listen to this satisfied customer.                                                             SATISFIED CUSTOMER ONE I wear my awesome gorilla suit to company parties and family events on my inlaws’ side.   People often confuse me for a paid entertainer,...

I enjoy the work of Czech-born writer Milan Kundera.  I'm not a scholar, just a fan.  Over the years, I've read the two of his books that I own, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being , each a couple of times.  Lately, I followed an interest in the Czech composer Janacek, which was sparked by Murakami's 1Q84 , to Kundera's book of essays, Testaments Betrayed , and the novel Immortality .  Though one is fiction and one non-fiction, both books offer dramatic narratives and insightful interpretative exposition, delivered by a speaker whose imagination and wisdom are incredibly engaging to me.  There are so many stories and ideas in these books that I love--the story of Max Brod betraying (allegedly, possibly) Franz Kafka's last will which would've had many or all of his works destroyed.  The story of Rubens, a virile but aging man whose sex life is overtaken by his past and event...

Werner Herzog:  "My film school would allow young people who want to make films to experience a certain climate of excitement of the mind.  This is what ultimately creates films and nothing else." Werner Herzog is an amazing artist--he's made so many films of such a wide variety, that I admittedly have barely scratched the surface of his work, and probably have no business writing about him, but....  I have been most interested in Herzog's dramatic documentaries like Grizzly Man and  The Great Ecstasy of the Sculptor Steiner , in which Herzog's pursuit of "ecstatic truth" tests the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction.  Herzog seems not just willing to, but actually eager to  sacrifice journalistic truth to the more resonant truth of story .  Examples abound, but the one freshest in my mind occurs at the end of Herzog's most recent film, the truly spectacular 3-D masterpiece, Cave of Forgotten Dreams.   ...

A Lewiston woman recently almost won on The Price is Right .  "She left the stage empty-handed," reports The La Crosse Tribune,  "but hugged an actor from 'The Young and the Restless' on her way down.... 'I was up there acting crazy,' she said.  'Everybody liked me.'"  Sadly, "Brenda underbid her package by $2,319....  'It still hurts,' she said."