George Michielsen’s “Qu’y vit” project consisting of four baobab trees
George Michielsen, also known as Joris Michielsen, is a Dutch-born artist working in Antwerp. His “Qu’y vit” will be unveiled this Thursday. Its final destination is the Kievitplein in Antwerp. George will receive The Devil Tree from me.
Garbo in The Joyless Street
A scene from The Joyless Street (or The Street of Sorrows), a 1925 silent film directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst and starring Greta Garbo before she came to Hollywood. Scored to Shostakovich‘s Violin Concerto no. 1 in A minor. Shostakovich scored many ‘silent’ films but I’m not sure he originally scored this Youtube clip. The very young Dmitri Shostakovich helped to make ends meet by playing the piano in movie houses and later went on to compose film scores for many silent films, including his debut The New Babylon.
Like many of Pabst’s contemporary films, The Joyless Street concerns the plight of women in German society.
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-6AME4iSzY]
The Needle and the Damage Done (1972) Neil Young
“The Needle and the Damage Done” is a song by Neil Young that chronicles the descent of musicians he knew into heroin addiction. Neil has introduced the song thus:
“Ever since I left Canada, about five years ago or so.. and moved down south.. found out a lot of things that I didn’t know when I left. Some of ’em are good, and some of ’em are bad. Got to see a lot of great musicians before they happened… before they became famous.. y’know, when they were just gigging. Five and six sets a night… things like that. And I got to see a lot of, um , great musicians who nobody ever got to see. For one reason or another. But.. strangely enough, the real good ones… that you never got to see was.. ’cause of, ahhm, heroin. An’ that started happening over an’ over. Then it happened to someone that everyone knew about. So I just wrote a little song.”
This post is dedicated to my friends Walter and Dominique.
Dessin d’un boudoir () – J. J. Lequeu
Three days ago, I reported that it was Jean-Jacques Lequeu‘s 250th anniversary. My good friend Dominique alerted me that the Parisian “enfer” will open its doors from December until March of next year. This will be a unique opportunity to see books and illustrations which have been hidden from the general public for more than 170 years.
Enfer is French for hell. In this instance it refers to the private case of the French national library. The contents of this library were cataloged by Pascal Pia and Guillaume Apollinaire in the 1913 Les livres de l’Enfer, and in 2007 the “Enfer” will be shown to the public in an exhibition titled Eros au secret. Children are not admitted.
I hope this will be an impetus for other European libraries to do the same. Let the gates be opened of all private cases, Giftschränke and Remota.
View the original French advertisement here and my entry Eros au secret.
Study by Antonio del Pollaiolo
Image sourced here. More lesbian erotica of this gallery below.
Previously we showed the work of Anders Zorn.
Correspondance amoureuse avec Antoinette de Watteville (1928-1937) (2001)
Balthus and Gin (a young Belgian diplomat) fight over the love of the lovely but fickle Antoinette de Watteville, who can’t make up her mind. After many adventures, the young Swiss noblewoman settles on the painter. Two hundred and forty letters make up this veritable epistolary novel of passion, fury and tears. But these pages are also a chance to discover Balthus in his own words (during these decisive years, he painted three of his masterpieces; “La Rue”, “La Leçon de guitare” and “La Montagne”). Writing to Antoinette, Balthus defends his choices, his conception of painting, his interest in the erotic… He talks of theatre and literature. He evokes his friends: Antonin Artaud, Pierre-Jean Jouve, Michel Leyris, Rainer Maria Rilke. He gets annoyed with the world, which is slowly tipping into a generalized and murdering madness. He suffers endless money worries, and faced with Antoinette’s hesitations, he attempts to take his own life… This correspondence was prepared by Balthus and Antoinette de Watteville’s children, Thadée and Stanislas. Sketches, photographs, notes, and a foreword written by the couple’s sons complete this edition of this moving correspondence — a darkly romantic love story that publicly bares the extraordinary painter’s heart for the first time.
The painting on the cover is La Toilette de Cathy.
The English translation of Anti-Oedipus appeared in 1977. By a total coincidence — one that is really not much of a coincidence at all — so did (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction
* “Betty Davis is the funk,” says poet and rapper Saul Williams. “It’s not just that she’s sexy and the music is sexy, but she’s just so in the pocket! The notes she chose, the placement, to be able to dance around the music. Man, she killed that shit.”
For this slow, languorous Midwestern autumn Sunday, here are some Soviet Glasnost neoavant-garde paper architecture by Brodsky & Utkin.
Foto de Alexandre Maller
An Illustration for Kafka’s Ein Hungerkünstler (A Hunger Artist) by Andrzej Ploski, circa 1983,
‘Le grand baailleur [sic],’ drawing by J-J Lequeu, from between
1777-1824 (Eng: the big yawner)
Jean-Jacques Lequeu (Rouen, September 14 1757 – 28 March 1826) was a French draughtsman and visionary architect. Today is his 250th anniversary.
Born in Rouen, he won a scholarship to go to Paris, but following the French revolution his architectural career never took off.
He spent time preparing the Architecture Civile, a book intended for publication, but which was never published. Most of his drawings can be found at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Some of them are sexually explicit (Le Dieu Priape [1] (ca. 1779 – 1795) which shows a rather large male phallus and Trois images du sexe féminin) and are kept in the Enfer of the library. Most of these drawings have been reproduced in Duboy’s book but can also be found in Sade / Surreal.
Cypid and Psyche
Woman in front of Mirror (1841)
“Portrait of Anna Maria Magnani” (1814), I like her heavy gaze.
Work by Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg
All Ladies Do It/Così fan tutte (1992) – Tinto Brass [Amazon.com]
Così fan tutte, ossia La scuola degli amanti, (Eng: “They all do it” or “They are all like that”) opera buffa by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and a bawdy film by Tinto Brass. Mozart took as a theme “fiancée swapping” which dates back to the 13th century, with notable earlier versions being those of Boccaccio‘s Decameron and Shakespeare‘s play Cymbeline. Elements from Shakespeare‘s The Taming of the Shrew are also present. Furthermore, it incorporates elements of the myth of Procris as found in Ovid.
Although the title is usually translated into English as “They All Do It”, Italian speakers will notice that the word “Tutte” has a feminine ending on it. The title can thus be translated as “All Women Do It” (i.e. cheat), or even “Women are all the same”.
