Monthly Archives: November 2007

World music classics #11

Marquee Moon (1977) – Television

I was 16 or 17. D____ gave me this record. He didn’t like it or didn’t know what to make of it. To the last of knowledge, he lives on the Canary Islands. I don’t know where he got the record from. I no longer have this album. The World Dance Music classics category has been renamed to World Music Classics.

Marquee Moon is New York Television‘s post-punk outfit 1977 debut album. Television originally wanted to record Marquee Moon with veteran jazz recording engineer Rudy Van Gelder (John Coltrane‘s A Love Supreme, most of the classic Blue Note Records catalog) at his legendary recording studio. The album cover features a portrait of the band taken by Robert Mapplethorpe, who also took the cover of fellow CBGB rocker Patti Smith‘s Horses album. A cover version of the title track was recorded in 1990 by the Kronos Quartet for the compilation album Rubáiyát. The song “Marquee Moon” was done in one take; drummer Billy Ficca thought that they were rehearsing.

See previous entries in this series.

Introducing Pete Rock

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQWxrWSsI2k]

I’ve been listening to Pete Rock (born 1970) since he’s been releasing records with British label BBE, and it’s the most accessible route to date to his music. This video shows you how he makes his laid back beats. He uses this machine to “chop up” records:

“Sometimes … I’ll take something that’s a quarter of a bar, like a kick and a snare, that goes boom bap, but there’s enough air between it so that it sounds like it was just played together …”

Icons of erotic art #4

Pornokrates (1879) – Félicien Rops

Few things are sexier than a blindfolded woman. I was 20 or 21, I was in Brussels with Ilse and her friends. We were — I think — in the Agora galleries. Suddenly I spotted this painting on a poster on a shop door. I was stunned. The blindfold, the stockings, the shoes, the pig, the gloves. As I mentioned in my previous post, few works of erotic art can be used for masturbatory purposes. Neither can this painting, but its theatricality sets a mood, engenders expectations and hints at hidden desires. Painted 128 years ago, this work set standards which few other paintings will transgress.

Rops in a letter to a friend:

“My Pornocratie is complete. This drawing delights me. I would like to show you this beautiful naked girl, clad only in black shoes and gloves in silk, leather and velvet, her hair styled. Wearing a blindfold she walks on a marble stage, guided by a pig with a “golden tail” across a blue sky. Three loves – ancient loves – vanish in tears (…) I did this in four days in a room of blue satin, in an overheated apartment, full of different smells, where the opopanax and cyclamen gave me a slight fever conducive towards production or even towards reproduction”. –Letter from Rops to Henri Liesse, 1879.

Previous entries here, and in a Wiki format here.

Icons of erotic art #3

There are those works of erotica — although very few, otherwise they would be classified as pornography — which are erotic, meaning arousing, and those which are not. Our third entry in this series belongs to the second category. Although not erotic, it does provide a certain a shiver, or frisson, as the French would say. I am talking about The Rape [1] (1934) by Magritte, one of the more Sadean artists of French surrealism. The painting depicts a faceless woman –her face is replaced by her torso. She is mute, her mouth replaced by her pubic hair. The painting [2] was also used for the cover of André Breton‘s pamphlet What is Surrealism?.

Digression #1: Please let me remind you of the fabulous blog lemateurdart.

Digression #2: Speaking of rape, below is a very powerful painting by Degas, titled Interior (The Rape):

Degas The Rape

Previous entries here, and in a Wiki format here.

World cinema classics #24

Steve + Sky

Steve + Sky (2004) – Felix van Groeningen

Steve+Sky (2004) is a Flemish film by director and screenwriter Felix van Groeningen (Dagen zonder lief). To the right of the screen capture is Titus De Voogdt, to the left the Delfine Bafort, the Belgian model/actress who recently starred in Looking for Alfred by Johan Grimonprez. The film was produced by Dirk Impens, best known for Daens, currently working on an adaptation of Dimitri Verhulst’s novel De Helaasheid der Dingen.

The film is situated in a Ghent “route nationale” red light district (locally and euphemistically known as “De Warme Landen”, literally the “warm countries”), and beautifully photographed by Ruben Impens who treats this Belgian vernacular architecture with a gloss of 1980s nostalgia.

The petty criminal Steve (Titus De Voogdt) is released from jail and looks up his ex cell mate Jean-Claude (Johan Heldenbergh) in the latter’s strip club. There he meets the intriguing Sky (Delfine Bafort). They start a passionate but impossible love affair in a story reminiscent of Betty Blue and the American production Buffalo ’66.

The soundtrack was compiled by Soulwax who chose “De meeste dromen zijn bedrog” by Marco Borsato, the cult hit “Putain Putain” by TC Matic, Reese‘s “To the Rock (to the Beat)” and “Beats of love” by Nacht und Nebel for the clubbish post-punk/New Beat atmosphere of the film.

The film editor is Nico Leunen, who learned the trade from Ludo Troch.

The film is noted for its naturalism with dialogues such as “A hole is a hole and a dick has no eyes.” (Jean-Claude) and a hilarious dispute between Jean-Claude and his pubescent daughter in which she asks him for money. When she gets the money he says: “Thank you, daddy!” and she replies “Thank you, asshole!”

Jan Sulmont at Kutsite.com has a fine review.

Previous “World Cinema Classics” and in the Wiki format here.

“I am interested in women as words.”

Thinking About Women

Thinking About Women is work of feminist literary criticism by Mary Ellmann first published in 1968 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc. In it, she supposedly said “I am interested in women as words.” The publisher describes it as “a scathingly witty attack on literary misperceptions of women and prejudice against women in letters by an Oxonian critic and writer.” From the cover: “An original, often starling, genuinely funny, and deeply serious investigation of our conceptions of femininity as revealed by writers from Jane Austen to Mary McCarthy and Norman Mailer. ”

Anne Koedt used this book to refute Freud’s two-orgasm theory in her “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm“.

A tale of two orgasms

The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm

The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm

The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm is a 1968 essay by Anne Koedt. I was very much intrigued by the tale of the two orgasms before I was sexually experienced. In her introduction to the essay, radical feminist Anne Koedt writes:

“Whenever female orgasm and frigidity are discussed, a false distinction is made between the vaginal and the clitoral orgasm. Frigidity has generally been defined by men as the failure of women to have vaginal orgasms. Actually the vagina is not a highly sensitive area and is not constructed to achieve orgasm. It is the clitoris which is the center of sexual sensitivity and which is the female equivalent of the penis.” [1]

Empirical proof of vaginal orgasm came relatively late in my sexual life, and proved to be very liberating.