Vulgar Marsala Press

03/03/2025

NOW AVAILABLE FROM SCUM VIDEO AND THE DOUG BLANKENSHIP FOUNDATION: THE COLLECTED WORKS OF PHILLIP LEE DUNCAN

DISC ONE
• Love Songs for Scumbags, Phillip Lee Duncan's 2011 Feature Film, presented in an HD 1080p Presentation

• Famous Last Chances, Phillip Lee Duncan's 1998 Feature Film, Presented in an SD 540p Presentation

• Archival Commentary Track featuring Director Phillip Lee Duncan and Producer/Editor Daniel Scheimberg for 'Love Songs for Scumbags'

• Archival Commentary Track for 'Famous Last Chances' by Director Phillip Lee Duncan

• Archival Commentary Track for 'Famous Last Chances' by Co-Director Daniel Scheimberg

• Alternative Storyline for Famous Last Chances

• Deleted Scenes for Famous Last Chances

DISC TWO
• A Collection of Short Films and Music Videos directed by Phillip Lee Duncan including:

- Caleb Fraid sings "Wet Money" (2001)
- There's No Tunnel of Light (2002)
- It's All True (2002)
- The Sorrows of P*ssyfooting (2003)
- Poohbear Crisis (2004)
- Scorpio Sitting Still (2004)
- Nobody Can Love You Like I Do (2009)
-Gewohnheit ist ein Himmelschatz (The Heaven of Habit) (2011)
- As a Whistle (2011)

• 2024 Interview with Daniel Scheimberg

• Ribeye - Winter was a Bug, Deleted Scene from 'Love Songs for Scumbags

• Art Gallery, a montage of Phillip Lee Duncan's Artwork

• Original Trailers

• 2024 Rerelease Trailer

*INTERNATIONAL BUYERS PLEASE ALLOW 2-4 WEEKS FOR SHIPPING Doug Blankenship is a ne'er-do-well folk artist who has lived with his mother for the...

06/15/2023

RIP Cormac McCarthy. For the unforgettable all-of-it.

“The eye turned to the fire gave back no light and he closed it with his thumb and sat by her and put his hand upon her bloodied forehead and closed his own eyes that he could see her running in the mountains, running in the starlight where the grass was wet and the sun's coming as yet had not undone the rich matrix of creatures passed in the night before her. Deer and hare and dove and groundvole all richly empaneled on the air for her delight, all nations of the possible world ordained by God of which she was one among and not separate from. Where she ran the cries of the coyotes clapped shut as if a door had closed upon them and all was fear and marvel. He took up her stiff head out of the leaves and held it or he reached to hold what cannot be held, what already ran among the mountains at once terrible and of great beauty, like flowers that feed on flesh. What blood and bone are made of but can themselves not make on any altar nor by any wound of war. What we may well believe has power to cut and shape and hollow out the dark form of the world surely if wind can, if rain can. But which cannot be held never be held and is no flower but is swift and a huntress and the wind itself is in terror of it and the world cannot lose it.”

- The Crossing

11/21/2022

Happy late birthday to the late/beloved Phillip Lee Duncan, a force to be reckoned with.

A DETECTIVE IN HER TWENTIES (VIA A NEIGHBORING DUCHESS)

To see her now, a failed Sherlock
On her hands and knees, her eye
A blue fried egg in the magnifying
Glass, as she burns down the backyard
Blade by blade, the gardener laughing in Portuguese,
Not seeing the ladybugs burst, the hidden dime
Blinding, the clue itself grown worse,
Bonding to all others, a reef of loss:
It is, yes, endlessly humanizing.

Her father has done such a good job
Keeping it out of the papers, keeping
The wretch's hair combed and clean.
I help wipe her mouth sometimes,
All snot, milk and chicken grease.
She had saved our village a thousand
Times, yet now this (someone swore she
Was a psychic or a New Age witch.)

Her father says her room is crystalline:
The bed is made, the atlas is shut,
Except for the telescope,
Which is blinded by dust.

The windows are still of a piece despite
Occasional fists; but otherwise
Put a pencil in her hand and let her
At her lists (according to Mr. Drew)
Lists of impossible groceries
And dead-end suspicions,
State capitols, the arcs and azimuths
Of antique munitions, puzzles and tests,
The 52 colors found in a shadow,
13 sizes of horse shoes, the bones in a catfish,
The phyla of distances, the varieties of teeth
On a key, the scentless, tasteless heavy gasses,
Etcetera, one through thirty-three.

Her most recent list was her name
And the hundred ways of its being spelled,
Signaled, smoked out, illuminated:
Nancy in medieval script, Nancy shoddy
In dashes and dots, Nancy in mirror-scrawl,
Nancy in flashes of light from a distant ship,
Nancy the lion-headed, bird-bodied hieroglyph.
I congratulated her on her thoroughness,
She said they were all forgeries; her last
Chance at identity theft, the first lines
Of an anonymous elegy, a slow death in bad checks.

Sweet as she might be in her ambiguities,
She is no Belle of Amherst.
She has all the art of a pi***ng doll.
I can still remember that brunch,
(Cucumber sandwiches, crusts cut off,)
Her rising from the cellar,
Bloody up to the elbows,
Saying, “it is solved, it is solved."

For forty years, I have abandoned her at the lighthouse,
The old mill, the haunted boys school, with only a lantern
And a book of manners to keep herself alive.
I have swallowed her whole: oyster, pearl, and sand …
As Va**um, as vodka, as diatribe, but the girl we were
Will not go down. Once at a dinner party, someone
Noticed her hair ribbon stuck in my teeth.

But she will not die.
My sixty-five years, are, granted, a bit of a pyramid
Scheme, but they are nothing compared to
The finder of lost dogs, the re-tracer of shallow steps.

Phillip Lee Duncan reads "A Detective in Her Twenties (Via a Neighboring Duchess") from his book "The Hospice O**y" (Vulgar Marsala Press, ISBN 978-0-9820077...

06/26/2022

Vulgar Marsala authors will be in Telluride on July 7th. Come on out, if you're within range!

05/22/2022

Kim Vodicka's 'Dear Ted,' soon to be published by Really Serious Literature, runneth (bleedeth?) over with wit & brilliance that will blow your mind, & we'll be reviewing it any day now:

https://tinyurl.com/42xz2wps

05/22/2022

Congrats to Peter Waldor on the publication of his new book:

"College girls puking into the witchy cauldrons of Macbeth, wry takes on the narcissism of Gertrude Stein's autobiography of Alice B. Toklas..."

Experience/order it here:

https://vulgarmarsala.squarespace.com/peter-waldor

05/01/2022

We love this review of PJ Harvey’s “Orlam”:

“Not since the poetry of William Barnes in the 19th century has the dialect been used in this sustained way. The words themselves are a lovesome delight: soft and buzzy in mouth and ear (zummer, yoller, whiver, theasom), guttural and crude when needed (maggoty, puxy, stumble f**k). The glossary is its own poem.”

Set in a magical realist outpost of the West Country, the singer-songwriter’s novel-in-verse delights in Dorset dialect and folklore

05/01/2022

Pleased to welcome Peter Waldor to the VMP lineup; his witty collection “Midwife vs Obstetrician” will be published this year:

Peter Waldor was born in Newark, New Jersey. He earned a BA from Tufts University and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is the author of four collections of poetry: The Unattended Harp (2015); Who Touches Everything (2014), winner of a National Jewish Book Award in Poetry; The Wilderness....

05/01/2022

Phillip Lee Duncan’s satirical, sentimental, scathing, & sweet final masterpiece “As a Whistle” now on MUBI

Love is a dirty business. The lack of love even dirtier. You can scrub and sing all day until your skin is as red as a valentine. But they will never return. This same body that moved them to tears, this same body that warmed them… is now frozen inside a song. Maybe you refuse to wipe the steam fr...

04/25/2022

VMP is back on Twitter! Not much to see yet, but there will be. 🍾 🥂

10/16/2021

VMP is coming out of hibernation. Check out our revamped listing in Poets & Writers:

10/16/2021

A harrowing, hallucinatory excerpt from “Kamion,” Trevor Griles’ Gen X punk/fiction odyssey: