Monthly Archives: May 2018

RIP Tom Wolfe (1930 – 2018)

Tom Wolfe was an American author and journalist widely known for his association with New Journalism, a style of news writing and journalism developed in the 1960s and 1970s that incorporated literary techniques.

The Painted Word (1975)

From Bauhaus to Our House (1981)

His best-known works are The Bonfire of the Vanities and The Right Stuff but of interest to me are his essays.

The Painted Word (1975) and From Bauhaus to Our House (1981)

He wrote The Painted Word (1975) and From Bauhaus to Our House (1981), both critical of  high modernism and avant-gardism to the extent that they have been connected to the death of the avant-garde meme.

RIP Mel Gordon (1947 – 2018)

Research occasioned by the death of Adam Parfrey (see prev. post) brought to my attention that one of the writers who were often published by Parfrey, Mel Gordon, also recently died.

Mel Gordon was a theatrical historian. He wrote on 1920s BerlinGrand GuignollazziHanussenDadadrugs and Expressionism.

From left to right: Hanussen: Hitler's Jewish Clairvoyant (2001) The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber (2006) Horizontal Collaborations (2015) Voluptuous Panic (2006) The Stanislavsky Technique (2000)

From left to right:

RIP Adam Parfrey (1958 – 2018)

Adam Parfrey was an American writer, editor, and publisher whose work centered on unusual, extreme, or “forbidden” areas of knowledge. He is perhaps best known for Rants and Incendiary Tracts (1989), which he co-edited with Bob Black.

Rants and Incendiary Tracts (1989)

Rants and Incendiary Tracts (1989)

Rants and Incendiary Tracts (1989, above) is an anthology of 56 pieces of invective in the style of An Anthology of Invective and Abuse (1929) by Hugh Kingsmill.

Thanks to the death of Adam, I watched The Hate That Hate Produced (1955, above)

By the way, can anyone illuminate me on the cover photo of Rants?

One thing leading to another

Reading Roger Scruton’s “Flesh from the Butcher” for my thesis I noticed the word Tafelmusik. My encyclopedia brought up “Tafelmusik für König Ubu“. Anything with the word Ubu in its title piques my interest. “Tafelmusik für König Ubu” appeared to be a German version of Musique pour les soupers du Roi Ubu (1966), a musical composition by Bernd Alois Zimmermann.

I played it [above], it’s wonderful, it’s a sound collage. Not really. It’s a musical composition filled with quotations.

YouTube’s autoplay is on.

The next track [above] starts very sweet and gentle. At 4:55 the most wonderful waltz waltzes in.

Waltzes have these pauses that remind me of weightlessness.

The composition appeared to be “Der Waltzer (1969) by Alfred Schnittke.

I ended up listening to Alfred Schnittke’s music for most of the weekend.