11 August 2007

leafy circles

one weekend in mar 1971 I met Tony Perkins at a regional theater in Cincinnati. he wantd to sleep with me. I went on to a regional theater in Louisville where I saw Katharine Houghton in a Shaw play. at the time I was doing a series of prose poems which eventually became the book The Origin of Oregano. in one of the pieces   "Weekend"   there's this line: "...I grinned my Tony Perkins grin and you pouted your Katharine Houghton pout."

shortly after that Richard Grossinger wrote "Sex, Outer Space, Ziggy Stardust, and the Revolution." in his essay is the line: "Ziggy has all the mannerisms of the Kinks ("Everbody's a Star"), or the New York poets putting on Hollywood, Warhol's Marilyn, Alex Gildzen's Katharine Houghton."

that all came back to me last nite as I was watching "The Seeds of Evil." this modest horror film from 1975 was one of Katharine Houghton's few starring vehicles. her film career was hit or miss. unfortunately for her the main attraction of the film is her leading man. Joe Dallesandro was never accusd of acting but he had a powerful screen presence. director James H. Kay understood that when he gave Joe few lines of dialog & kept him shirtless thruout. he even has some nude scenes. the camera simply eats him up.

& as these things happen I saw the movie a week after the opera "Daphne." that work ends with the leading lady becoming a tree. at the end of the movie Dallesandro becomes a tree. & in between the dual tree transformations I wrote abt my personal arbophilia.

1 comment:

cinemage books said...

I guess it was in the early 70's that as I waited for a bus on 6th ave, Perkins rode by on his bike and gave me a big cruisy grin and then rode on. He sure got around didn't he. Delasandro besides being one of the most attractive non acting presences in 70's underground and sometimes above ground movies was very shy. A friend of his once tried to introduce him to me, when they came into a bookstore I was working in. Joe just turned around and fled.