BOMBLOG reprints Cedar Sigo on Kenneth Anger

The internet! She sure don't take a break! Most specifically: BOMBLOG's excellent reprints of [ 2nd Floor Projects ] editions has, today, unearthed poetry and prose by Cedar Sigo and Johnny Ray Huston inspired by the art of David Enos, Frank Haines, and Wayne Smith, whose "Untitled (Montessori blocks) 2008" looms above. Also included in this post is an essay by Sigo entitled "Blood Brought to Ghosts: Notes on Kenneth Anger." Though you can read the entire piece here, we've done some magical excerpting:

Stars tumble from the dice cup over a fixed horizon. As we get older passages that once seemed random gain wisdom. They illumine our secret fears, then, brighter still, straight burn them into dust. Most arts would welcome the arrival of such revelation joyfully, though the thought of these transformations being brought about by Anger’s work frightens me. “A magical evocation born out of the rigors of choice,” chance.

When one is looking forward to an opening, performance, or screening of film, fantasy tends to run wild as to the imagined depths one might reach on that particular outing. Atlantis! Our arrival does not fall to one grand sweeping gesture, but is beset by small fires and symbols on point within that first flow of recognition, tracing a rise in nobility. We are allowed to see it once, and then it hardens, is set away from us. These are the works that come about casting shadows and years later light upon the door to that innermost chamber, girdled in gold leaf, three pieces turned down queer into the bed, caught in the wind and folded there.

Anger’s works stack up almost as if he had died very young. Lucifer Rising was finally completed in 1981 and the Magick Lantern Cycle appeared to be sealed, as any royal tomb should be. I had heard that when a print of his more recent Mouse Heaven arrived at Canyon Cinema, he’d taped a large handwritten note to its canister that read, “Keep away from Disney spies and all enemies of Kenneth Anger!”