Category Archives: elsewhere

Introducing French Book Covers

French blog Au carrefour étrange has ceased its activities for the time being and started a new blog called French book covers [1] which is illustrated with a chic cover photo [2] by the Italian designer and photographer Carlo Mollino. Its author, who goes by the pseudo of Losfeld, has a very extensive collection of books, running the gamut from surrealist theory to sleazy paperbacks, what I like to call nobrow.

A recent post[3] at this new blog featured cover art by French publishing house La Brigandine, for which Jahsonic regular Jean-Pierre Bouyxou has written novels under the pseudonym Georges Le Gloupier before that name was appropriated by the entarteur Noël Godin, a highschool buddy of Bouyxou. One particular of those novels is called Les Accidents de l’amer (Eng: Accidents of the Sea, or accidents of Bitterness, depending on where you place the apostrophe or blank space) and has one of the sexiest covers[4] I’ve seen in some time, due to the particular areola shape of the woman depicted.

I cannot pinpoint (or haven’t tried) the date of these publications, but I would gather mid to late 1970s.

Elsewhere #9

An Almeh by Gerome

An Almeh by Jean-Léon Gérôme

Notice the enticing quality of the semi-transparent voile. Voile is French for veil.

  1. New or newly discovered blogs dedicated to individual artists: Jean-Léon Gérôme [2] and Odilon Redon [3]
  2. The anglophone film blog Flickhead[1] quits.
  3. Trevor Brown reports[4] on a friendly letter received by Belgian artist Wim Delvoye after Trevor had caught him plagiarizing his work in Delvoye’s tattooed pigs project[5].
  4. To start your Monday musically, here is the video[6] of “Crank That (Soulja Boy),” just a quick reminder that I like (some) of my black music funky (in its original meaning, smelly and dirty) as well as dangerous-sounding. “Crank Dat” has the most original use of the steel pan since Mad Professor‘s[7] use of it in the early 1990s (I can’t remember the name of that album). Since its release in 2007 “Crank Dat,” which epitomizes the gangster sound, sold over three million copies.

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