Cocteau Speaks to the Year 2000
Jean Cocteau Speaks to the Year 2000
111 x 180mm, 64 pages, Riso Printed in 3 Colors
Smyth-sewn Binding, Gatefold Cover
Printed & Published by Now-Time, Queens NYC
Binding in New Jersey
Former translations diligently compared and revised
Unauthorized, No ISBN
64 page re-presentation of Cocteau's millennium message recorded in 1962. Since these images for the Year 2000 are no longer beyond us. Let's organize them. We pull Cocteau's ghost through time and transform his speech into a theater of images (which it is already). The task: turning a ruin into a construction site. Ft. new typesetting, commentaries + associative images that expand, critique, and detour from the path Cocteau points to. The book works to keep this fountain of thought interactive and accessible in ways that video cannot provide.
Cocteau's 'jack-of-all-arts' project (spider mode), made of many worlds, has given us fragments of ideas diffused throughout the disciplines, seen in pieces (theater, film, poetry, painting, sculpture, literature). As a convenience, this last testament recovers and stitches together Cocteau's core ideas in a 3800 word corkscrew monologue.
anecdotes ✔️
research ✔️
guesswork ✔️
Prying into Cocteau’s consciousness in 1962, we find ourselves eerily in a similar place, sharing his struggles and hopes. Cocteau wrestles with the contradictions between inner and outer worlds, art and labor, humanity and technology, artists and institutions, control and accidents, conscious and unconscious, life and death.
The link between Mount Parnassus & Montparnasse ✔️
Simultaneously a battery and a vehicle, Cocteau's insights shock us by helping us realize how late we are to our fundamental problems. Cocteau's ghost navigates us around dangers and towards hopes for new direction toward another world different from this one.
"I hope that you have not become full-fledged robots but, on the contrary, have been humanized. This is my hope."
"From our birth to our death we are a procession of others"
Defend today - making use of yesterday, anticipating to-morrow ✔️
Full Video:
Ships with 4 Color 24"x36" Poster
incl "Vehicle for Poetry" ghost whip Papercraft
The Now-Time element:
Cocteau's discontinuous continuation of classical Mount Parnassus to 20c Montparnasse Paris. An artistic rupture more than a political one. Therefore Cocteau is limited, but a starting place.
Topics: transmissions, antipodes, the wrong track, buzzing around, anti-gravity, hitchhiking, the two stools, humanization, robots, venusians, esperanto, the two selves, others, intermediaries, night world, poetry, genius, collective genius, mythology, history, manual labor, expiration, discoveries, tin medals, errors, surprise, beginnings
Orpheus, a reworking of a classical subject...
++ Formed in Grangemouth, Scotland in 1979, Elizabeth Fraser, Robin Guthrie, and Will Heggie called themselves Cocteau Twins. The name derived from the song “Cocteau Twins” by fellow Scottish band Simple Minds. The song is reported to have been about two men in Glasgow, Scotland, who had a reputation for being pretentious film snobs with a fondness for the work of Jean Cocteau.