Monthly Archives: March 2009

Island Records @50

Island Records @50

Island Records celebrates its 50th in May. Props to Simon Reynolds for summarizing Island’s succes as managing “in its heyday to achieve that rare feat: combining commercial success with artistic integrity.”[1]

In other words: not selling out.

Padlock EP, one of my most prized Island Records releases

Click the footnotes to hear all four tracks.

The Padlock EP is a compilation of 4 musical compositions written for Gwen Guthrie. The rhythm section to the studio project consisted of Sly and Robbie, keyboards were by Wally Badarou, and mixing and remixing was done by Larry Levan. The Padlock mini-LP was released in 1983 on the Garage Records label and included “Hopscotch[1], “Seventh Heaven[2], “Getting Hot[3], “Peanut Butter[4] and ends with the title track “Padlock”[5]. The sleeve of the German Island pressing was designed by Tony Wright, the illustrator who was also responsible for the artwork to Lee Perry‘s Return of Super Ape album.

Clyde Barrow @100

Clyde Barrow @100

Clyde Barrow by you.

Mug shot of Clyde

Bonnie Parker (October 1, 1910May 23, 1934) and Clyde Barrow (March 24, 1909May 23, 1934) were notorious outlaws, robbers and criminals who travelled the Central United States during the Great Depression. Their exploits were known nationwide. They captivated the attention of the American press and its readership during what is sometimes referred to as the “public enemy era” between 1931 and 1935.

Bonnie and Clyde (1967) is a film about their lives. It is regarded as the first film of the New Hollywood era, in that it broke many taboos and was popular with the younger generation.The film was controversial on its original release for its supposed glorificaton of murderers, and for its level of graphic violence and gore, which was unprecedented at the time. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times was so appalled that he began to campaign against the increasing brutality of American films, although one has to add to that Crowther was very puritan about sensationalization.

Fascism @90

The birth of the Fascist movement can be traced to a meeting he held in the Piazza San Sepolcho in Milan Italy on March 23, 1919. This meeting declared the original principles of the Fascists through a series of declarations.

Destroying the fascist snake

Anti-fascist Spanish poster.

Fascism is an authoritarian political ideology (generally tied to a mass movement) that considers individual and other societal interests subordinate to the needs of the state, and seeks to forge a type of national unity, usually based on ethnic, cultural, or racial attributes. Various scholars attribute different characteristics to fascism, but the following elements are usually seen as its integral parts: nationalism, authoritarianism, militarism, totalitarianism, anti-communism and opposition to economic and political liberalism.

The governments most often considered to have been fascist include the Mussolini government in Italy, which invented the word; Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler, but other similar movements existed across Europe in the 1920s and 1930s.

Fascism and the avant-garde

Fascism attracted political support from diverse sectors of the population but most surprisingly also from intellectuals and artists such as Gabriele D’Annunzio, Curzio Malaparte, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Knut Hamsun, Ernst Jünger, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, and Martin Heidegger.

Ze’ev Sternhell (The Birth of Fascist Ideology (1989)) argues that European fascism first articulated itself as a cultural phenomenon, as a nonconformist, avant-garde, revolutionary movement. Modernism, says John Carey in The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992), is a literary theory of fascism.

Manifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals

The Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals was written during the course of the Conference of Fascist Culture, held in Bologna, Italy, on March 29 and 30, 1925. It was published a few weeks later in nearly all Italian newspapers on April 21, by tradition the anniversary of the Founding of Rome. The secretary to the conference told the Italian news media that over 400 intellectuals attended the meeting; however, the number who gave public support to the manifesto was only 250, among them Vittorio Cian, Francesco Ercole, Curzio Malaparte, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Ernesto Murolo, Ugo Ojetti, Alfredo Panzini, Ardengo Soffici, Lionello Venturi, Gioacchino Volpe, and Giuseppe Ungaretti. Luigi Pirandello, though not present at the conference, announced his support of the manifesto by letter. Support for the manifesto by Neopolitan poet Salvatore Di Giacomo resulted in a falling out with Benedetto Croce, who, shortly afterwards, responded to the Fascist proclamation with his own Manifesto of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals.

Fascism in fiction:

Christ Stopped at Eboli

Carlo Levi was a painter and writer, but he also had a degree in medicine. Arrested in 1935 by Mussolini’s regime for his anti-Fascist activities, he was sent to live in remote town in southern Italy, in the region of Lucania which is known today as Basilicata. The landscape was beautiful, the peasantry poor and neglected. Since the local doctors were not interested in peasants and not trusted by them, he began to help them.

A Special Day

As her entire family (including her fascist husband) goes to the streets to follow Hitler‘s visit to Mussolini in Rome, an Italian housewife (Sophia Loren) stays home looking after some domestic tasks. Her apartment building is empty but for a man (Marcello Mastroianni) who seems repulsed by fascism (a strange attitude in those days).

The audience learns early in the movie that this man is a radio broadcaster who has lost his job and is about to be deported due to his political attitudes and his homosexuality. Unaware of this, the housewife flirts with him, as they meet by chance (or intentionally) in the empty building. During their conversation, the rather naïve and mainstream woman is surprised by his opinions and finally shocked when she realizes his sexual orientation.

Nonetheless, despite their fights and arguments, they eventually make love before he is taken away by the police and her family comes back home.

Further reading

RIP Eddie Bo (1930 – 2009)

RIP Eddie Bo.

RIP Eddie Bo

Edwin Joseph Bocage (“Eddie Bo”) (September 20, 1930March 18, 2009) was an American singer and one of the last New Orleans junker-style pianists. Schooled in jazz, he was known for his blues, soul and funk recordings, compositions, productions and arrangements.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANoc-TghlWM]

“From This Day On”

He debuted on Ace Records in 1955 and released more single records than anyone else in New Orleans other than Fats Domino.

His song “Hook & Sling” was featured on the breakbeat compilation “Ultimate Breaks and Beats” and on the rare groove compilation Rare Grooves Vol. 1.

Rare groove is an umbrella term that refers to relatively obscure and hard-to-find jazz-funk, funk and soul, soul jazz and jazz-fusion tracks from the 1970s. Originally coined by Kiss FM DJ Norman Jay in 1985 through his show The Original Rare Groove Show, ‘rare groove’ tracks have been influential on the musical genres of hip hop, techno, house, breakbeat, jungle and others.

Zizek @60

Slavoj Žižek @60

Zizek in The Birds by you.

Slavoj Zizek inserts himself into The Birds in this promotional image for The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema.

Slavoj Žižek (born 21 March 1949) is a Slovenian sociologist, contemporary philosopher, filmosopher and cultural critic.

I’ve been drawn to Žižek since the early days of the internet, perhaps making my way to him via Gilles Deleuze, my first philosophy/internet love. My interest peaked in 2006 when he released The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema in which he celebrated his brand of psychoanalytical film theory based on horror films and psychological thrillers. Last summer I spent about 3 continuous hours “getting” Žižek only to find out that Žižek’s entire work is the endeavour to use Lacan as a tool to reactualize German idealism using the Lacanian concepts of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real (see Zizek and the German idealists).

If I had my way, I would organize the David Bordwell vs Slavoj Žižek Celebrity Deathmatch.

Discussing the Divine Comedy with Dante

Discussing the Divine Comedy with Dante

Discussing the Divine Comedy with Dante is a painting by Dai Dudu, Li Tiezi, and Zhang An depicting 103 cultural icons. It was released without credits on the internet in 2006 as a kind of painterly mystification and became an internet phenomenon in early 2009.

The painting’s antecedents are Disputation of the Holy Sacrament (1508/1509) and The School of Athens (1509/1510) or The Parnassus all by Raphael. Here[1] is a list with all the visual sources.

At first I thought it was uninteresting kitsch and had way too many political figures to be of interest of me. But then I thought this work might make it into the list of  works of art in the collective unconscious. Besides, due too its large presence of Chinese celebrities, it can easily be regarded as an example of 21st century Chinocentrism. And I like to believe that China is the only World Power to challenge Pax Americana as we’ve known it for the last sixty years.

List of celebrities include mostly figures from the political realm, sourced here[2].

1. Socrates 2. Cui Jian 3. Vladimir Lenin 4. Prince Charles 5. Ramses or King Solomon or Sinuhe of Egypt 6. Bill Clinton 7. Peter the Great 8. Charles de Gaulle 9. Margaret Thatcher 10. Ulysses S. Grant 18. Bill Clinton 11. Bruce Lee 12. Winston Churchill 13. Raphael Sanzio or Matisse 14. Robert Oppenheimer 15. Elvis Presley 16. William Shakespeare 17. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 18. Genghis Kahn 19. Napoleon Bonaparte 20. Che Guevara 21. Fidel Castro 22. Marlon Brando 23. Lao zi or Hokusai 24. Marilyn Monroe 25. Yassar Arafat 26. Julius Caesar 27. Mike Tyson 28. George W. Bush 29. Luciano Pavarotti 30. Salvador Dali 31. Empress CiXi 32. Liu Xiang 33. Kofi Annan 34. Prince Charles 35. Ariel Sharon 36. Ho Chi Minh or Qi Baishi 37. Osama Bin Laden 38. Qin Shi Huang 39. Mikhail Gorbachev 40. Mother Teresa 41. Song Qingling 42. Otto Von Bismarck 43. Saint Peter or Rabindranath Tagore 44. Li ZhenSheng 45. Voltaire 46. Hu Jintao 47. Dante Alighieri or Julius Caesar 48. Pu-Yi or Dai Dudu 49. Saloth Sar 50. Yi Sun-Sin or Yue Fei 51. Michelangelo 52. Hideki Tojo or Hiro Hito 53. Michael Jordan 54. Dwight Eisenhower or John Calvin Coolidge 55. Corneliu Baba 56. Claude Monet 57. Mahatma Ghandi 58. Vincent Van Gogh 59. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec 60. Marcel Duchamp 61. Confucius 62. Noah 63. Li Bai or Caravaggio 64. Mao Zhedong 65. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 66. Zhou Enlai 67. Marie Curie 68. Abraham Lincoln 69. Pablo Picasso 70. Steven Spielberg 71. Friedrich Nietzsche 72. Karl Marx 73. Leonardo Da Vinci 74. Joseph Stalin 75. Queen Elizabeth II 76. Lu Xun 77. José de San Martín 78. Deng Xiaoping 79. Sun Yat-Sen 80. Theodore Roosevelt or George Custer or Maxim Gorky or Philippe Pétain 81. Saddam Hussein 82. Benito Mussolini 83. Adolf Hitler 84. Guan Yu 85. Pelé 86. Bill Gates 87. Audrey Hepburn 88. Ludwig Van Beethoven or Chopin 89. Charlie Chaplin 90. Henry Ford 91. Lei Feng 92. Victor Babeş or Norman Bethune 93. Mike Tyson 94. Sigmund Freud 95. Erich Honecker 96. Vladimir Putin 97. Lewis Caroll 98. Shirley Temple 99. Chang Kai Chek 100. Leo Tolstoy 101. Albert Einstein 102. Ernest Hemingway 103. Franklin Roosevelt 104. Woman from photograph by Cartier Bresson or Mother Teresa 105. Dolly (the cloned sheep)

Nothing is true, everything is permitted

Grafitti subversion of the original phrase, from the photostream of Paul Neve

A post[1] by Valter on Lev Shestov’s influence on Georges Bataille leads me again to the aphorism Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted. I think I’ve known this phrase from my Wired days, but first absorbed it consciously last summer while reading Burroughs’s excellent Cities of the Red Night.

Research of the last hour:

“Nothing is true, all is permitted”: so said I to myself. Into the coldest water did I plunge with head and heart. Ah, how oft did I stand there naked on that account, like a red crab!Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted” is the famous aphorism attributed to Hassan i Sabbah.

The aphorism was first used by Friedrich Nietzsche in his 1880s work Thus Spoke Zarathustra (original German Nichts ist wahr, Alles ist erlaubt). Like Crowley‘s “‘Do what thou wilt’ shall be the whole of the law“, this phrase is often interpreted in its most literal sense to mean that objective reality does not exist (see relativism) and therefore that free will is unlimited. However, “Nothing is True and Everything is Permitted” is more widely interpreted to mean “there is no such thing as an objective truth outside of our perception; therefore, all things are true and possible”. It is a basic tenet in chaos magic and a core concept in discordianism and pirate utopias.

The aphorism is mentioned in the 1938 novel Alamut and in William Burroughs’s novel Cities of the Red Night. It is used as a credo on Axiom, Bill Laswell’s record label and alluded to in the title of Isis’s album In the Absence of Truth. Brion Gysin‘s biography is titled Nothing Is True – Everything Is Permitted: The Life of Brion Gysin.

P. S. Surya notes in his biography of Bataille that the phrase “nothing is true” originates with Dostoevski. There could be some truth in that since Dostoevski was born 20 years before Nietzsche.

“Sex Without Stress” is WMC #288

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OtuZjBc_H0

Sex Without Stress” by the Au Pairs

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these. As I explained, I now do music on Facebook almost exclusively (join me there at Jan Geerinck with a brief note).

It’s been so long that I need to explain what WMC stands for: World music classics is an ongoing series of World Music Classics.

It had been a while since I’d heard “Sex Without Stress” by the Au Pairs.

Sex Without Stress” is a musical composition by the British post-punk band the Au Pairs first released in 1982. It was also released on their album Sense and Sensuality. The song is also featured on Stepping Out of Line: The Anthology.

From the lyrics:

“Would you like to express
your sex without stress?
Would you like to discover
physical conversations of different kinds?”

The Au Pairs were a post-punk band who formed in Birmingham in 1979. Musically they were very similar to bands such as Ludus, Gang of Four and the Delta 5. That is, the rhythm section was tight and funky (obvious influences were James Brown and Funkadelic), but the guitars were light and “scratchy” (like Subway Sect). All these bands shared a strongly left wing social outlook, but the Au Pairs stood out due to their frontwoman, Lesley Woods, being an outspoken feminist and lesbian: the band were greatly influential in this respect on the riot grrrl movement a decade later. Music historian Gillian G. Gaar noted in her history of women in rock (She’s A Rebel: The History of Women In Rock & Roll) that the band mingled male and female musicians in a revolutionary collaborative way as part of its outspoken explorations of sexual politics.

Introducing Ferenc Pintèr (1931 – 2008)

Ferenc Pinter by you.

Anima Mundi (2004) [source]

Pop. 1280 by Jim Thompson (Italian edition cover by Ferenc Pintèr).

posted by tonto–kidd[3]

Researching Carlo Jacono in my previous post[1] brought me to the work of Ferenc Pintèr.

Ferenc Pintèr (1931 – 2008) was an Italian illustrator and painter. He is best-known for his book cover designs for Mondadori. he also designed tarot decks for Italian publisher Lo Scarabeo.

Digressions:

Pop. 1280 is a novel by Jim Thompson (19061977) first published in 1964. It is a particularly bleak species of American hard-boiled crime fiction, but exhibits experimental flourishes that align it with literary (as opposed to genre) fiction, as well as occasional surrealist episodes. The unreliable narrator as a story-telling device, of which Thompson was particulary fond, is exemplary in this  novel.

Pop. 1280 was made into the French film, Coup de Torchon by Bertrand Tavernier in 1981. In that film, Lucien Cordier (Philippe Noiret) is an ineffectual local constable (see bumbling authority figures in comedy) with a cheating wife and laughable job. He accepts condecension from his superiors and his wife with good humor, as his antisocial personality allows him to tolerate such abuse. However, he soon realizes that he can use his position to gain vengeance with impunity, and he starts to kill everyone who has regarded him as a fool. After numerous trysts and murders, his pathology catches up with him in the film’s climax.

Carlo Jacono @80 and Italian exploitation

Carlo Jacono @80 and Italian exploitation

Segretissimo n° 75 (art cover by Carlo Jacono)

An Italian translation of Malory by American author James Hadley Chase

Cover design by Carlo Jacono

Carlo Jacono (March 17, 1929June 7, 2000) was an Italian illustrator detective novel covers and regular contributor to Mondadori’s gialli and Urania magazine.

A digression into Italian exploitation.

My interest in regional exploitation or pulp culture is that what it tells about the region where it is produced. I am searching for national stereotypes by way of their exploitation culture; regional stereotypes deduced from regional fears and desires (horror and eroticism).

Italian exploitation culture is literature and films in the “low culture” tradition originating from Italy, cultural products which address the prurient interests of its audience. A quick glance at Italian society on the one hand, which its firm anchor in puritan Christianity, and its abundance on the other hand of graphic exploitation material, quickly reveals its double standards.

In print culture there has been giallo fiction, quickly followed by adult comics, the so-called fumetti neri.

But the nature of Italian prurience is most readily revealed in Italian cinema. Genres such as cannibal films, Italian erotica, Italian horror films, giallo films, mondo films, il sexy, spaghetti westerns, sword and sandal films all went a tad further than contemporary products of European exploitation.

Had it not for the world wide web, these maligned genres would probably not have been so widely known, but if you prefer reading books to the internet, here is a list of publications on European exploitation you may enjoy.