peckinpah took
ben johnson
aside while
filming the
battle of
bloody porch
in the wild
bunch & sd
you looked
good in
that last
shot but it
wasn’t in
tense enough
what the
hell are you
talking abt
johnson
replied i
broke my
finger wor
king that
goddam
machine
gun i don’t
give a fuck
if you broke
yr dick
make it
look like
you are
falling in
love w/that
browning
because it’s
going to
be yr angel
of death
dynamite poem and dynamite graphic!
Todd, you give birth to thunder!
Sam was a wolf & the Wild Bunch his howl. Gregory Corso was trickster coyote in his beat hotel Paris of hungry ghosts. Dorn’s recollections of gran apacheria was his homage to the wolf’s extinction with extreme prejudice; in the summer of 1968, while America’s spine was burning up with war, the muse woke Peckinpah up & told him he was a poet. He drank a quart of mezcal down to the worm before noon. With is Mexican wife weeping in the background, he staggered into the bedroom & with a black crayon wrote the words: “If they move, Kill ’em” in giant angry letters on the wall. It was the first words he wrote of his screenplay.
Charles Bowden prayed to the goddess Mezcal, black lady of the border, before he wrote his latest book, Trinity. He has befriended a rattlesnake on his back porch & named it Blanca. He stares at the mesquite tree in his back yard & swears its rich veins approximate the ones in his forearm. A coyote’s howl lulls the passive rattler to sleep. the hot night spooks up a storm. Bowden can’t write when it rains, it is too potently mysterious . . & rare. The night drips poetry & the howls of an ancient tomorrow.
Trickster Corso gives birth to thunder.