Monthly Archives: January 2007

Russ Meyer documentary

Supervixens (1975)

The British Channel Five produced documentary about legendary Sexploitation master and lover of unfeasibly large breasts, Russ Meyer, is now available in six parts on YouTube. Enjoy… part 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6
via Retrofap via PCL.

In his early career, Russ Meyer was a director of nudie films. His films were always more more ribaldry than pornography, and seem unusually focused on women with large breasts. His later films are almost entirely devoted to this vision; his discoveries include Kitten Natividad and Uschi Digard. He co-wrote Beyond the Valley of the Dolls with film critic Roger Ebert. Faster, Pussycat. . . Kill! Kill! is usually considered to be his greatest, or at least his most idiosyncratic, picture.

Interesting about the documentary are the people interviewed: John Landis, Dita Von Teese, the founder of Troma Films, Richard Kern, film critic and cultural historian Jack Sargeant, Kim Newman, Jim Morton (who contributed to Incredibly Strange Films (1986)) etc …

Update: I just watched the six part documentary and it was fun but well travelled territory. And everyone is going on how erotic his films are, and fun at the same time. I’ve found them strange … and decidedly unerotic.

No, what I am waiting for is a documentary based on Pete Tombs’s 1994 book Immoral Tales: Sex And Horror Cinema In Europe 1956-1984 which covers European exploitation cinema of the this era with profiles of Jess Franco, Jean Rollin, José Larraz, José Bénazéraf, Walerian Borowczyk and Alain Robbe-Grillet.

Soft knocks at the door

The Tenant (1964) – Roland Topor
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

The Tenant chronicles a harrowing, fascinating descent into madness as the pathologically alienated Trelkovsky is subsumed into Simone Choule, an enigmatic suicide whose presence saturates his new apartment. More than a tale of possession, the novel probes disturbing depths of guilt, paranoia, and sexual obsession with an unsparing detachment. With an introduction by Thomas Ligotti. The novel was adapted to film by Roman Polanski in 1976.

The above is a new edition of the 1964 The Tenant, a novel by Roland Topor which is better known in the film adaptation by Polanski.

Topor is one of my canonical artists for his satirical wit and his unique crosshatched drawing style which is somewhat reminiscent of that of Alfred Kubin. His ‘nodes’ are just as interesting as his work, he is connected to Fernando Arrabal, Alexandro Jodorowsky, Roman Polanski, Daniel Spoerri and René Laloux.

Amazon’s similar items connects him to Thomas Ligotti, Theodore Sturgeon, William Hjortsberg, Clark Ashton Smith, Ramsey Campbell, Alfred Kubin and William Browning Spencer, none of whom are familiar to me.

Take pleasure in change and transitoriness

Le Voyageur (1972) – Schizo
cover of the 7″ vinyl

“Le Voyageur“/Torcol (1972) is a seven inch single by Heldon. It features Nietzsche lyrics recited by Deleuze on music by Richard Pinhas:

“He who has attained the freedom of reason to any extent cannot, for a long time, regard himself otherwise than as a wanderer on the face of the earth – and not even as a traveller towards a final goal, for there is no such thing. But he certainly wants to observe and keep his eyes open to whatever actually happens in the world; therefore he cannot attach his heart too firmly to anything individual; he must have in himself something wandering that takes pleasure in change and transitoriness.” –from The Wanderer, in the first volume of Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human

The track is available on:

Radio Nova presents: Underground Moderne (2001) – Various [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

More here.

Just when you think those vocals couldn’t climb any higher

Tommy delivers again with Aura – L.A. Sunshine (1978, Change/MCA)

… This single has to be one of the most intriguing, and certainly interesting disco tracks I’ve come across so far, anchored by that understated, percolating percussion and bass; those dreamy strings and of course that absolutely mad vocal. For me, the vocals are notable, not just because of their delivery, but because the way it seems to have been recorded, sounding slightly canned and processed but most likely without actually being so. It’s like one of those records that, on paper, shouldn’t work (kind of like Loose Joints’ “Is It All Over My Face”), but somehow comes together into something that, while a little off-beat, is completely and oddly captivating. Perhaps the most sublime moment comes right after that verse where she goes “I’ll be back soon.” Believe me, it’s not as plain as it sounds when you actually hear it; just when you think those vocals couldn’t climb any higher, they end up soaring right above your head.

Introducing the Opinionated Diner

Simon Grigg has The Opinionated Diner, a music blog with good taste.

Silent Introduction (1997) – Kenny Dixon Jr
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

….enigmatic, even in his most open moments, Kenny Dixon Jr remains both one of America’s great musical secrets, almost unknown outside electronic circles, and a massive influence across the pond in Europe and America (try and imagine Henrik Schwarz’s wonderful DJ Kicks mix without Kenny’s influence). And completely addictive…once you buy in you come back again and again (and indeed, find yourself paying silly money for those rare 12”s). His rhythms, grooves…call them what you will…are often ridiculously understated in their subtly but their ability of snare you…as he says: I Can’t Kick This Feeling When It Hits —The Opinionated Diner

A bit more on Henrik Schwarz:

DJ-Kicks (2006) – Henrik Schwarz
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

It features tracks by personal favourites, Moondog, James Brown, Cymande, Drexciya, Coldcut, Robert Hood, Pharoah Sanders, Arthur Russell and Rhythm & Sound.

Other releases in 2006 that seem good:

Sunday Afternoon at Dingwalls (2006) – Gilles Peterson, Patrick Forge
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Related: Patrick Forge – Gilles Peterson – Acid Jazz – Dingwalls

And finally K Punk’s 2006 rewind:

Momus argues that ‘if music didn’t exactly die in 2006, it certainly felt sidelined, jilted, demoted, decentred, dethroned as the exemplary creative activity, the most vibrant subculture.’ That is one reason why Burial has to be the album of 2006, and hauntology the year’s dominant theme. K Punk’s 2006 rewind

Burial (2006) – Burial
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

 

Burial’s self-titled LP on Hyperdub is one of our albums of the year. It’s a remarkable debut, built from damaged beats and distant, hiss-smothered vocal samples: a haunted pirate station broadcasting forgotten rave anthems from the afterlife. —factmagazine

Listen to a track by Burial here. The genre is called dubstep, and it has been championed by Simon Reynolds and K-Punk since more than two years, I’m not sure I’m too keen on it. I have the same feeling as when the British music press was raving about The Streets.

Best of 2006 in music:

I’m afraid I’m not very good at year end lists, but everyone seemed to like Ys by Joanna Newsom. She belongs to that elusive category New Weird America, my brother bought a lot of that stuff last year, and his musical taste is impeccable.

Toilet philosophy

Human waste has been of interest to a number of philosophers and I call them — and I do not mean this in a derogatory way — toilet philosophers.

Fountain by Duchamp

Among them are Georges Bataille, who André Breton called “excremental philosopher” and Peter Sloterdijk, famous for his remarks on the role of the arse in his book Critique of Cynical Reason.

Then there was Slavoj Žižek in a review of a book of Timothy Garton Arsh who connected toilets to Buñuel to Lévi-Strauss to Hegel to Erica Jong.

Underground canon

Underground U.S.A. (2002) – Xavier Mendik, Steven Jay Schneider
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Whether defined by the carnivalesque excesses of Troma studios (The Toxic Avenger), the arthouse erotica of Radley Metzger and Doris Wishman, or the narrative experimentations of Abel Ferrara, Melvin Van Peebles, Jack Smith, or Harmony Korine, underground cinema has achieved an important position within American film culture. Often defined as “cult” and “exploitation” or “alternative” and “independent,” the American underground retains separate strategies of production and exhibition from the cinematic mainstream, while its sexual and cinematic representations differ from the traditionally conservative structures of the Hollywood system. Underground U.S.A. offers a fascinating overview of this area of maverick moviemaking by considering the links between the experimental and exploitative traditions of the American underground.

I would recommend readers to pay particular attention to those articles [in Underground U.SA. by Steven Jay Schneider] that take issue with the representation of sexuality and graphic nudity in the underground canon such as [Elena] Gorfinkel’s work on taste and aesthetic distinction, Sargeant’s research on voyeurism and sadistic transgression and Michael J. Bowen’s work on the violent eroticism of what he terms the ‘roughie’. The work on the sexploitation film is interesting in terms of a discussion of taste formations and cultural distinctions, but more importantly (in terms of the aim of this book), the sexploitation film is interesting due to the fact that such films provide a ‘shadow history to cultural and social events’ of particular historical periods. —Rebecca Feasey, Scope

And a Richard Armstrong review at Flickhead.

Things exist by mistake

Slavoj Žižek (1949 – ): I feel a kind of spontaneous affinity with quantum physics, where – you know, the idea there is that the universe is a void, but a kind of positively charged void, and then particular things appear when the balance of the void is disturbed. And i like this idea spontaneously very much. The fact that its not just nothing, things are out there, – it means something went terribly wrong. that, – what we call creation is a kind of cosmic imbalance, cosmic catastrophe. That things exist by mistake. And im even ready to go to the end, and to claim that the only way to counteract this is to assume the mistake and go to the end, and we have a name for this, its called love. Isn’t love precisely this kind of cosmic imbalance? I was always disgusted that with this notion of “I love the world, universal love”…I dont like the world, i dont know how..- Basically I’m somewhere inbetween, I hate the world or I’m indifferent towards it. But the whole of reality its just it, its stupid, it is out there, I dont care about it. Love for me is an extremely violent act, love is not;”I love you… all”. Love means i pick something out, and its again this structure of imbalance, even if this something is a small detail, a fragile individual, person, I say, “I love you more than anything else. In this quite formal sence, love is evil. — Youtube clip, transcription source

The Abduction of Europe (1993) – Cees Nooteboom

Abduction of Europa (1908) – Félix Vallotton

I’m currently reading Cees Nooteboom‘s 1993 essay bundle De Ontvoering van Europa (Eng: The Abduction of Europe), dedicated to the question of a European identity.

I read Nooteboom’s Rituelen while in my twenties and I had largely forgotten about him. It strikes me now how he is probably one of the foremost intellectual writers of Europe and also a true European in the sense that he divides his time between Amsterdam, Berlin, and the Spanish islands. Petri Liukkonen says that he “has been frequently mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature”.

Here is my translation of an excerpt on France’s fear of American cultural imperialism (Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Dallas and Dynasty):

… if we give Europe’s indigenous cable television moguls a chance, we will soon enough prove that we are capable of producing television series equally bad as those in America, and that the French secret weapon of MacBaudrillard and MacDerrida is wreaking just as much havoc at American universities as harmless McDonald’s in Europe.

See also: Rituals at the Existence Machine and All Soul’s Day at This Space.

P. S. : It’s interesting to note that the concept of abduction as it relates to the mythological figure of Europa is interchangeable with the terms rape and seduction. The Wikipedia article states that “the [latter] two being near-equivalent in Greek myth.” I had encountered this before when reading about Don Juan who is depicted as either a seducer, rapist or murderer, depending on who’s doing the analysis. The American Production code (the forerunner of the MPAA, the current American film rating system) said of the depiction of seduction and rape (intimately locating them in one entry): “They should never be more than suggested, and only when essential for the plot, and even then never shown by explicit method.”

Admittedly I may be influenced too much by 1990s feminist discourse in locating these similarities, but here is one more pointer: History of Rape, Abduction, and Seduction in European Art and Literature