ROGER IN AMERRYKA! (Leonard Fitzroy, 1959)

I announce: I have discovered a country: Amerryka!

And with it, life as anecdotal drift. For example: It was 1940; It was 1950; It was 1960. I formed a rock'n'roll trio with two regulation gas attendants, and mewed kicking non-hits like 'Destination Cerebrum', 'Damn Cat' and Pigeon Porch Blues' all over Kentucky and Tenessee, my extracted claws making a screeing guitar holler but lacking subtlety to make pretty chords. Our sets lasted for minutes, but I always charmed a female into taking me home. I always wore a bowtie onstage, and I discovered that cats dressed as humans gets girls all giddy and a flutter. During those years I made love to thousands of cats. I made love with hundreds of human women. I tried it with males, I tried it with dogs. It was an itch I couldn't scratch; I remained candlewick dependent. I swam through ages, never getting older; I drank up the new years while still being able to see, smell and taste the old ones. My double vision became trebled, quadrupled; Olefactory calamity captivated my bronchioles, until I convulsed thrice-nightly. My dreams, seperated from waking by no film of unreality, began to multiply together, spawning horrific orgies between a pantheon of inter-human species, cat people with wings instead of heads, dancing notions pressing gruesome members into each other in an endless diorama of fur and flesh intercourse, sweating, endless and sickening. And in all of it, in my sleep and in my day, I knew I was being watched. The fairground, under the lights, I began to realise I was either being followed or was tailing an unknown suspect for an unknown crime. I was a Trojan Hoss of heightened language, embedded with chiselled horrors and cocaine brained fancy.' Roger the Cat, 'Roger in Amerryka!'

Leonard Fitzroy's Roger the Cat is but one in a long line of feline protagonists with an urbane demeanour. But no cat has surely gone as far as Roger, whose beat prose and sexual neediness marks him apart. The Roger the Cat stories, part science-fiction, part experimental fuzz, part 'awwdon'thelooklikealilman' cuteness always confound and delight equally. Too risque, perhaps, for many sensibilities; for after having the stories rejected by every magazine, periodical and newspaper going, Fitzroy finally self-published the Collected Roger the Cat stories in 1953, and managed to get some attention reading them aloud in Greenwich Village cafes.

The origins tale, Roger and the Author, caused a riot at the Semblance Cafe in Prospect when several of Fitzroy's inebriated writer friends grew annoyed at the implicit criticism of the self-deluding romantic ideals of the titular scribe. They took it to be a mocking of their scene, and flounced accordingly. This led to Fitzroy recording the jazzy single 'Too Beat for Two Beats' under the name 'Roger the Cat', with Landon Horny providing the voice of Roger for the unforgettable chorus:

Too hep for those cats

I'm feline groovy

Blue eyes, no cataracts

My relationship with myself

Is merely platonic

But I'd be lying if I said

I didn't want to take it further'

The success of the song drew attention from Hollywood. Mogul David O Selznick wanted to make an animated picture, telling Fitzroy that his 'cussin' cat causes kids to cry and I want a piece'. Arguments abounded as to the format, before settling on a quite spectacular mixture of tinted live action footage an animation, a psychedelic inversion of the yet to come real-people-in-toontown Roger Rabbit principle.

The film flopped. 'It wasn't Roger's horniness, his affair with Joan Fontaine, his taste for the swears or even smoking that Americans didn't like,' claimed Fitzroy. 'It was the fact that he was an intellectual, and talked alot.'1 Roger's poetic thrust, sexual clamour and propensity for cod-philosophy (and cod philosophy) found him an audience among students throughout the sixties, enough for a sequel Roger Gets Hep (1967) to be made, this time with no attempt to charm the kiddies. His iconic presence was seen on pin badges and banners at Vietnam protests across campuses in America, and in Paris in May 1968. It seems his constantly open spirit and questioning attitude will always find fans, albeit sporadically: A character named Roger the Catt appeared in Cheech and Chong's I Started A Toke (1981), and Roger appeared heavily in Jean-Luc Godard's Mickey Mouse biopic La Souris d'Hollywood (1987). The original film has been remastered and re-released several times, earning praise from Peter Cook who called it 'the result of a boozy seance between Doctors Seuss, Freud and John'. 2

'The truth is, Roger will always be quicker than me,' Fitzroy said in 1994. 'I never managed to pin him down in any story, strip or film. He was always too clever.' 3

'Bewitched by the Americas. Inca cats. The earth is soiled by tattooed spells. There, I was plugged into full cat voodoo, inserted into the mainframe, dispelled to a swirling hexed vortex. The Native Americans claimed that ancient cats, Gugols, were there, in North America, before humanity. They receded when Humans came. If your hive was Africa, ours was America. Inspired, giddy, lovestruck, I saw a ghostly cat that I followed. It looked pretty, pretty as me, and had a familiar gait that I attributed to a wombic memory of motherhood. When I saw her in an alley, I scared away another cat, shadowy and evasive, that slipped into the swampy indeces of the drugged city. The object of my affection did not acknowledge me once; just sidled away, with a follow me turn of the tail. Motherlode, They became expert at disappearing; they became attuned to the wind,. and took off in invisible flights. untailored modes. In the hollows of the man-made fortifications, in the call of the trees, they sing quietly. Dire tunes, terse and bitter some of them, but to a cat those hallowed meccas retune the brain like a lightning rod to the tail. exonerated spirits, The city was a used book, even when fresh metal. It's fifty-storey mountains came retro-fitted with hexes and chants, and weaved in the wind accordingly. Nectared breezes send bitter ghostly spells up Manhattan streets, before expiring in the salt of the Harbour. I was, reader, in a lather. Clutching at the West Virginian meterologies like they were tangible personages, Tom Rain, the firebrand, honest, brave, Lucy Sun, shy, alert, mating in their woozy troposphere boudoir, where further weathers are made, eternal variables of their uncles and aunts who spawn rainbow offspring with mixed metaphor jism. Awakened in a Louisiana hotel to perverse ecosystems, twitching my synapses like arcane texts, to be read aloud, to a matful of bovine schoolherd who would sink into a magical slumber and arise sainted and holy, handsome and wise.'

Roger the Cat, 'Roger in Amerryka!'Roger in Amerryka! Directed by Leonard Fitzroy Produced by David O Selznick, Tom Lord Written by Leonard Fitzroy Starring Landon Horny (voice), Joan Fontaine, Sid Caesar, Milton Berle Selznick International Pictures 92 mins Release Date US: May 1959/ UK Aug 1966 Tagline: 'The Cool Cat's Cool Cat Strikes Back (Hatless)'

1. Paris Match interview, 1986
2. Times interview, May 21 1992
3. The Guardian interview March 1994

MAN, DEAD AT 42 (Alfred Sitzl, Hans Mottel, 1972)

'It is impossible that I will die. Impossible. Without me, this world will cease to exist.' Alfred Sitzl

Set adrift in a technicolor effluenza, the extraordinary career of Alfred Sitzl might been worthy of many biopics even without this implausible final act. Concerned with the afterlife, he aborted his final film Legacy (later unreleased unfinished in 1975) in which he interviewed himself about how he felt he would be remembered, to arrange this. With Man, Dead At 42, he all but set-up his own obituary. In his will he left a script, including complex instructions for the staging, lighting and filming of his own funeral. His partner Hans Mottel executed his late lover's wishes, completing the final acts of Sitzl's 'final masterpiece'.

Sitzl's early works, the fierce, avant-jazz Seizmic Caricatures (1944) and the balmy horror The Eunuch With Electric Forearms (1947) were made in America, where he spent the last three-quarters of his life, thirty-one years and six months exactly. He is most famous, perhaps, for an interview on the late night cable show It's A Kerrazy Midnite Alright! during which he responded to a mock assault by ventriloquist John Jonjon and his puppet Cyrus by pulling a gun and threatening to 'shoot your pee-pee, Mr John'. This spawned a cult T-shirt with an image of Sitzl and these words sloganned beneath; in the late sixties, this became an iconic counter-cultural garment, despite most not being familiar with the work of Sitzl.

In 1970, Sitzl was diagnosed with terminal life and was given just months to live. He had just received rave reviews for his subversive cabaret tributes to certain golden dames of Hollywood ...And We Would Let Joan Bennett Excrete Freely (1968), Invictus Pickford (1969), Joan Crawfish (1969) and Joan Fontaine, Sexy Caller (1969) and was seemingly on a career high. Death could have been an interruption. But no matter: Sitzl sensed an opportunity. Hans Mottel was instructed to film Sitzl during his last few months of his life. 'He told me not to scrimp on the death' said Mottel, in his own documentary about the experience Late Lover (1981). 'I had misgivings of course. But Al was convinced that watching a man slowly die, and for that man to be the director of the film, was the most extreme aspect cinema could approach. None of the gigglers in Tinseltown could beat this... It was his final wish. To have the footage edited together in a precise way. And for the funeral to be a particular way. Lights here. Camera here. Flowers there. Close-up of his wife there. For five seconds. She'd better be sobbing.'

Sobbing she was. Indeed the whole exercise can be seen as a series of trapdoors and stunt mirrors to tease Sitzl's ex-wife Ronnie Barbeaux. In one scene we see Mottel watch with great difficulty as Barbeaux reads aloud from Sitzl's diary, as per his final instructions. The camera moves gently from face to face as Barbeaux discovers for the first time the extent of Sitzl's homosexual encounters before, during and after their marriage, culminating in the revelations that Mottel has been left the greater portion of Sitzl's modest estate. Barbeaux simmers, Mottel clings to the camera for dear life.

A grand feast was executed as per Sitzl's wishes, and the elaborate food display, including whisky fountains, a maple syrup luge and a forest of broccoli, are filmed lovingly. This scene in particular is famous for being the source for the nomenclature of a grubby sub-genre of cinema,

'torture porn' being a misheard translation and a comical echo of the French 'tours de pain' which Barbeaux can be heard to exclaim repeatedly at the funeral 'Tours de pain! Tours du pain! Qu'imbecile veut des tours de pain a leurs funerailles?'1. Mottel's camera lingers on the offending baguette skyscrapers, returning to Barbeaux as his directions from the grave insist he must. The sight of the dead man's ex-wife suffering inelegantly at the deceased's cosmic practical jokes and his tightly planned posthumous humour is certainly a pre-echo of the late-Capitalist bourgois-sadism of Saw (James Wan, 2004).

Sitzl died. But somehow, he lives on as a gremlin in the ink, a smudged graffito on our wall. This obnoxious double Vs at the shore of the Styx, this delicious gob in the direction of his future host (and no less, to those left behind), somehow stands as a gesture of great humanity at it's most defiant, petty and brave.

Man, Dead at 42 Directed by Alfred Sitzl, Hans Mottel, Produced by Hans Mottel, Victor Grue, Written by Alfred Sitzl Tarakan Pictures Release Date Fra: June 1972, UK/US: Jan 1973 Tagline: 'Sitzl Is Dead! Long Live Sitzl!'

1. 'Towers of bread! Towers of bread! What kind of fool wants towers of bread at their funeral?