Monthly Archives: March 2007

Trevor Brown’s fantasy land

Following on my previous post on Venetian Snares where I mentioned Trevor Brown, some more about the latter:

Artwork by Trevor Brown

My Alphabet (1999) – Trevor Brown
[Amazon.com]
[FR] [DE] [UK]

Li’l Miss Sticky Kiss (2004) – Trevor Brown
[Amazon.com]
[FR] [DE] [UK]

Though presently living in Japan, Trevor Brown is an British artist whose work explores paraphilias, such as pedophilia, BDSM, and other fetish themes, with unusual wit.

Important career motivating friendships include French artist Romain Slocombe (the pioneer of “medical art”) and William Bennett (leader of the notorious electronic-noise band Whitehouse.

Trevor Brown’s art has been featured in Adam Parfrey’s Apocalypse Culture II, and in Jim Goad’s ANSWER Me! zine, as well as a variety of other publications. His work has been featured as cover art for a number of bands, including Deicide, Whitehouse, GG Allin, Kayo Dot, and Venetian Snares.

He is often compared with Mark Ryden in that he is known for child-like characters in various states of distress. However themes in his work extend to car crashes, (reminiscent of J.G. Ballard’s Crash), abattoirs, and Japanese pornography. His art is close in spirit to the Young British Artists such as Damien Hirst or Jake and Dinos Chapman.  —[1]

Trevor Brown illustraded CDs by Merzbow, Venetian Snares and Whitehouse (here, here, here and here).

Related: Google gallery 1Google gallery 2fetish artgrotesque arthyperrealismperversion in arterotic arttransgressive artBritish art

Articles: Trevor Brown interviews Masami AkitaTrevor Brown on Japanese bondage, Kinbiken and Chimou Nureki

Some positive events in his life

Waiter by Alex van Warmerdam is a superb film by the best Dutch language auteur. The styling of his films always have a retro feel; the interior depicted above reminds me strongly of the Drugstore Cowboy hotel room. In my opinion, Warmerdam deserves an entry in the Sensesofcinema’s directors hall of fame.

See also:

Plot:
Waiter tells the story of Edgar (Alex van Warmerdam), a waiter with a flair for the unfortunate. His wife is sick, his girlfriend Victoria (Ariane Schluter) is overly possessive, customers at work constantly bully him and his neighbours make his life impossible.

Fed up with the way his life is going, Edgar goes to the house of Herman (Mark Rietman), the scriptwriter who invented Edgar and is currently writing his story. Edgar complains about the events in his life that keep getting worse and begs for some positive events in his life, including a decent girlfriend. Herman decides to create Stella (Line Van Wambeke), but soon Edgar realises that Stella will only complicate his life more. Meanwhile Herman is pestered by his pushy girlfriend Suzie (Thekla Reuten), who constantly tries to change the script. Driven to insanity by Edgar and Suzie constantly trying to interfere with his story, Herman decides to make the story more extreme and violent…

Thematically related films:
The Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998) and Adaptation (Spike Jonze, 2002)

Dutch fabulist

The Dutch fabulist continues to build his own contemporary Northern European mythology, following up on the 2003.

The uncompromising, innovative writer-director himself plays Edgar, the put-upon middle-aged man of the title. Edgar waits tables at the decrepit, cunningly named restaurant The West, where he is abused by his patrons. He is tired of his wife, his demanding mistress and his belligerent neighbours. He goes to the home of Herman (Mark Rietman), the man responsible for writing the story of his life, and begs the author for a change. Much of the blame for his misery lies with Herman’s meddling wife, Suzie (Thekla Reuten), who interferes in her husband’s work by steering Edgar’s life in disagreeable directions.

Van Warmerdam is a master of the theatre of the absurd, as singular a slapstick performer as he is a director. He plays Edgar as a phlegmatic, sullen character who grimly attends to the needs of the patrons at the torpid and soulless restaurant – a space that becomes more and more abstract as Herman loses control of Edgar’s universe.

Van Warmerdam has said that a character whose destiny is completely in another’s hands is necessarily tragic, and he mines this fruitful conceit for all it is worth. His surreal film is a witty and constantly surprising take on fate, creativity and power, taking as its tormented protagonist a man doomed to a life of servitude – not just to his customers, but to the conventions of literary fiction as well. –Dimitri Eipides

A modern character

Van Warmerdam hanteert niet alleen een creatief zwartkomisch scenario, ook maakt hij een knipoog naar de wereld van het scenarioschrijven. Als Edgar aan Herman vraagt waarom die het toch zo slecht met hem voor heeft, antwoordt de gefrustreerde Herman slechts dat hij een ‘modern personage’ is. Een hip, modern filmhuisfilmpersonage, denkt Herman, is een lijdend voorwerp, geen interessante, succesvolle persoon. Van Warmerdam laat Edgar deze opgelegde troosteloosheid met verve aanvechten. Toch loopt Ober nogal abrupt af, alsof Van Warmerdam met eenzelfde writer’s block te maken had als Herman. Hoe graag Edgar zijn leven ook een positieve wending wil geven, de auteur blijft de baas, niet de personages. –René Glas

More Dutch language reviews:
Hyperrealism and surrealism in perfect balance. [Dutch]
Nieuwe Van Warmerdam scoort aardig bij critici [Dutch]

Elgar Cello Concerto, Venetian Snares and Arthur Russell

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5C99JyP2ns]

1st movement

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6wt64X8Am0]

2nd movement

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gsekb1qwZs0]

3nd movement

This (Sir Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto in E Minor, Op. 85) is what Venetian Snares samples in my previous post. It sounds very much Arthur Russellish, although the likeness is largely limited to the use of the cello.

Venetians strings

www.myspace.com/venetiansnares (the strings on ‘Hollo Utca 2’ appear real, but who played them?)

The image from the cover is from this painting: Death and Woman (1517) by Hans Baldung Grien.

At Youtube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rjyVF6a4xo

See also:

Cover art:

Winter in the Belly of a Snake

Trever Brown?

Doll Doll Doll

Trever Brown?

Horse and Goat

Trever Brown?

Higgins Ultra Low Track Glue Funk Hits, 1972-2006Chocolate Wheelchair Album

??

Hospitality

?

Cavalcade of Glee and Dadaist Happy Hardcore Pom Poms

?

Meathole

?

Winnipeg is a Frozen Shithole

?

and one more by Trevor Brown (I think):

On micro-blogging and macro-blogging

Micro-blogging is a relatively new term that has been used in connection to new social networking applications such as Twitter (What are you doing?). Today, it’s also being used in connection to Flickr and YouTube. A good post on the subject here and here.

I’ve only been ‘properly’ blogging since August 2006. With properly I mean using blogging software, I used to imitate the style of a blog in simple .txt files here. First I tried blogspot, which I disliked so much that I thought I’d return to my old ways, but then I tried WordPress and have stuck with it.

But when I compare the ease of editing at WordPress with those found at Flickr, Flickr is clearly the winner. Many times when I started with a post I’d compose it first at Flickr and than copy it and continue with it here (WordPress).

Now the main –how do you say it in English (overall tendency or purpose)? — is:

  • to praise Flickr’s writing environment.
  • to praise WordPress and especially its SNAP extension
  • to raise the question whether there is a Flickr-like application for MP3s
  • to question whether there is content management system in the making which is as elegant as Flickr, and which also includes content from Wikipedia and YouTube, sort of the meta-approach to internet publishing and where I could re-publish the content now hosted at Jahsonic.com
  • to introduce the term macro-blogging referring to the process listed in the bullet point above

In order to spice up what is perhaps an uneventful blog entry I give you Chesty Morgan in Fellini’s Casanova:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeUzWi2O0KU]

Breast fetishists may want to scrub to two minutes and 23 seconds.

Credit where credit is due: I think it is Nils Geylen who first led me to the concept of micro-blogging.

My name, I believe, is Robert Jones

I am, that is to say I was, a great man, but I am neither the author of Junius nor the man in the mask, for my name, I believe, is Robert Jones, and I was born somewhere in the city of Fum-Fudge.

The first action of my life was the taking hold of my nose with both hands. My mother saw this and called me a genius:—my father wept for joy and presented me with a treatise on Nosology. This I mastered before I was breeched. ..

Who else but Borges could start a story by introducing a character who is unsure of his own name? The answer is Poe, the story is titled Lionizing (1835). It makes you wonder if there are any precedents of stories with characters who are unsure who they are.

I am currently reading Poe for the first time in my life. I’d written about Poe without ever having read one of his stories. Much like I had written about Baudelaire and Borges (and decided I was going to like them) without ever having read them. Recently, I found a rationale for my behaviour. It came by way of Oscar Wilde who supposedly said: “I never read a book I must review, it prejudices you so.”

I am reading Poe in Dutch, my native language. Poe is really too difficult for non-native speakers. I mean, how many native speakers know what vituperate means? In Dutch this translates as beschimpen, and while not a word I use every day, nor every month, maybe once every year, I do know what to make of it. Nevertheless, I enjoy difficult words and I learn every day. My main site Jahsonic helps me in this by providing context. Yesterday I came across arcane, I look it up at my place and at Wikipedia and at Answers.com. Roughly it means esoteric.

Then I remember Eric Losfeld and his Editions Arcanes:

Losfeld began secret publishing about 1949, and openly in 1952 when he established Editions Arcanes. For the following ten years or so his feet were planted firmly in the fields of both clandestine and open publishing. His open publications were certainly avant-garde and included works by Nelly Kaplan, Claude Seignolle, Boris Vian, Francis Picabia, Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues amongst others. —Patrick J. Kearney more…

Back to Poe. Please check this post with a very good illustration of Lionizing. And the superb The Nose by Gogol.

Totally unrelated is a Horace Andy track over at Sly and Robbie’s MySpace.

Excuse the rambling post. My name, I believe, is Jan Geerinck.

Groovy Glamour International

Supplement to Glamour International n. 16, April 1991

Cover illustration probably by Leone Frollo.

 

See a collection of Glamour International covers at the excellent Numagazine vintage erotica site (to which I am not affiliated) and my page on a similar Italian publisher Glittering Images.

Each issue of Italian erotica magazine Glamour is 12×12 inch, has a color wraparound cover, and is mostly in color. The focus is international eroticism, from classic cheesecake and bondage to the latest work by top artists.

Black women and jungle girls for example includes work by filmmaker Federico Fellini, and huge double-page spreads by Scozzari, Cadelo, Steranko, Frollo, Dave Stevens, Saudelli, Frazetta, and a fine cover and illustration by Chichoni. Girls and horror films of the 1950s, and Bill Ward. See all available at Amazon here: Alberto Becattini

Some Google galleries here, here and here.

Also check Numagazine’s review of Psychopathia Sexualis in Italian sinema. Mine is here.

And to conclude I want to let you in on a little secret: the best Italian — and perhaps the best worldwide — erotic photography is by Carlo Mollino. The proof is here.

Si boops deh. With his arms open wide

Click here [YouTube].

Enjoy. I always believed the lyrics were: “Civil check, arms open wide.” Who can tell me the title of the classical? song whistled at 2:30?

This song is by Sly and Robbie produced by Laswell.

While we’re on the subject of Mr. Laswell, Miles Post Mortem is a 1998 French language documentary by Pierre-Yves Bourgeaud for Arte television on Laswell’s Miles Davis remixes.