Sunday, June 13, 2004

Kinski

Reading Klaus Kinski's autobiography now. An unusual and not very good piece of mostly-fiction. Unfortunately, he concenrtates on his sex life, real and imagined. Nothing against graphic descriprions of sex, really, but a 500-page book mostly consisting of them makes a somewhat monotonous reading, and besides, most of it is obviously untrue. At least if 1/10 of the sex encounters he describes were true, I don't quite understand how he found time to make more than 130 movies. Besides, things like "was in a hospital with kidney stones; at night a nun came, climbed on me and fucked me; in the morning the doctor came and also climbed on me and fucked me" do not sound completely plausible. Especially considering that the man was spectacularly ugly. Not ugly in a common unshaved-alcoholic-guy-with-bad-skin-and-no-redeeming-features way, but in an uglier-than-consequences-of-a-nuclear-war-absolutely-cannot-be-fucked-without-a-paper-bag-on-his-face way.

He was a very good actor, though. Especially good at playing psychotic people, and now that I have read what he was doing in between real and imaginary sex, I can understand why.

Besides sex, the book describes various tricks of the kind that is normally featured on Darwin Awards and also describes a lot of his coworkers, especially the director Werner Herzog, in a most unflattering way.

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