There is something about this pose, legs crossed, one foot put forward, that I find particularly attractive. Mabe it’s the fact that standing like this makes the rear foot tiptoe and raise the buttocks.
If anyone can help me with the date on this painting, please drop me a line.
Previous entries in this series.
In 1994 I was crazy about the “Wilmot” track (see clip below) by Andrew Weatherall‘s Sabres of Paradise project. I had since lost the record but the mesmerizing horns kept spooking through my head over the years.
Last week, I am listening with my children to a commercial radio station and I hear a track by Shantel Youtube, a Balkan artist in a “techno” remix. I recognize the mesmerizing horns.
Today, I am making my 1980s music page and re-discover the composition by The Sabres of Paradise, find its Youtube clip Youtube and discover that the original version of the horns dates back to 1931, is called “Black But Sweet”, and is composed by calypso artist Wilmoth Houdini.
Another case closed in the history of cultural appropriation in western music.
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2XjH6TZkQg]
Rain (2001) – Christine Jeffs
It is my sincerest pleasure to announce the first guest contribution for Jahsonic’s World Cinema Classics category. Could it be any more befitting that today’s classic should be contributed by this blog’s liveliest commentator – a cultural omnivore like myself: Nurse Myra of the Gimcrack Hospital (PG)? Over the past few months, I have discovered her as a lady of seemingly impeccable taste, acute powers of perception and a huge stash of humor. She chose the New Zealand film Rain, directed by director Christine Jeffs released in 2001.
Nurse Myra:
“Rain deals with a very young girl observing problems in adult relationships at the same time as experiencing sexual awareness and the power that brings. The young actors are particularly good and the depiction of a new Zealand bach* holiday is perfect.
*A NZ holiday cabin was/is called a bach (pronounced batch). They were usually quite rudimentary and used to be very cheap to buy. Most of them are near the sea and prices would have skyrocketed by now.”
Previous “World Cinema Classics” and in the Wiki format here.
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L762HQ-ha7I&]
“Funky Nassau” (1971) Beginning of the End
“Funky Nassau” was a proto-disco composition released in 1971 by Bahamian group The Beginning of the End.
“Funky Nassau” is now also the title of a music compilation of Compass Point Studios recordings by Talking Heads, Tom Tom Club and Grace Jones, as well as lesser known compositions from the fringes of rock, soul, and dance music. The compilation will be released on March 11, 2008 by Strut Records.
The Hitcher (1986) – Robert Harmon
This film introduced me to Jennifer Jason Leigh, it was love at first sight. In one particular scene in The Hitcher Leigh is kidnapped by the villain Rutger Hauer, who ties her between a Mack truck and its trailer, threatening to tear her in half.
In the film, she does not survive, in real life, it is Jennifer’s 46th birthday. Congratulations, you are one of my favorite living actresses and I enjoyed your recent parts in In the Cut and The Machinist.
Previous “World Cinema Classics” and in the Wiki format here.
Cover of the 1937 guide book to the Degenerate Art Exhibition.
Nazi Germany disapproved of contemporary German art movements such as Expressionism and Dada and on July 19, 1937 it opened the travelling exhibition in the Haus der Kunst in Munich, consisting of modernist artworks chaotically hung and accompanied by text labels deriding the art, to inflame public opinion against modernity and Judaism. The cover the 1937 guide book (illustration top) features a sculpture of unknown origin. It could be Polynesian or any other tribal art work, please help me out here.
The sculpture clearly links modern art with primitivism.
This exhibition is also a perfect illustration of the beneficial side-effects of censorship. Beneficial in the sense that any attempt at banning works of art, books or other cultural artifacts results in an aide to discerning culturati to seek out these artifacts with zeal. Such has been the case with Video Nasties, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (the Catholic Index) and the Degenerate Art expo mentioned above.
I once again repeat my question to you, dear reader: what is the origin of the statue depicted in the picture above. I thank you beforehand for a reply.
Like the contemporary Italian design movement Memphis, Italian fashion designer Fiorucci helped postmodernism to percolate to mass culture awareness in the early eighties. Sottsass designed some of their shops and their brand was a visual feast.
Eve Babitz is an American writer who gained notoriety by posing nude with Marcel Duchamp in 1963, at the Pasadena Art Museum[Julian Wasser photograph]. She is the author of Eve’s Hollywood, Slow days, fast company and Fiorucci, the book.
Fiorucci, the book is out of print and has become quite a cult item, ranging in price from 200 to 1,000 USD.
Some more Fiorucci advertisments from the eighties:
unidentified Fiorucci campaign
image sourced here.
[A shot from behind from what appears to be a black young woman, from the waist to the knees. She wears nothing but a short (a cut off Jeans), the short is very short. The jeans is full of holes and is patched with pieces of cloth.]
Campaign for Fiorucci (1974) – Oliviero Toscani
image sourced here.
[A young woman sitting on a chrome barstool, shot from the back. She is wearing a striped T-shirt, jeans and striped socks. Her hair is curly.]
“The two lovers are able to experience a feeling of unrestrained and untamed abandonment to one another. It is not necessary for them to pay attention either to what the self is doing or what the partner is doing. All the movements take care of themselves, as if reflexively. The sensations greedily absorbed by the vulva, externally and through deep interior pressure, tell the vaginal cavity how to selfishly pulsate, ripple, quiver, and contract on the penis, in order to release itself in orgasm. Reciprocally, the penis selfishly probes and presses, twists a little, withdraws and tantalizes at the portals, and sinks deeply again, it too greedily building up its own orgasmic pleasure. The two bodies writhe, unheedingly. The two minds drift into the oblivion of attending only to their own feeling, so perfectly synchronized that the ecstasy of the one is preordained to be the reciprocal ecstacy of the other. Two minds, mindlessly lost in one another. This is the perfect orgasmic experience. This is how an orgasm sighs, moans, exclaims, expires, exhausts itself into exultant repose.” —John Money, Love and Love Sickness: The Science of Sex, Gender Difference and Pair-bonding, pp. 118-119. John Hopkins University Press (Baltimore, London) 1980.
I agree “to meet Mr Neville in private and to comply with his requests concerning his pleasure with me.”
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlEo563RJZI]
The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) – Peter Greenaway
The Draughtsman’s Contract is a 1982 British film written and directed by Peter Greenaway. The score was by Michael Nyman and borrows extensively from Henry Purcell, forming a substantial attraction of the film. It was most recently re-used in Winterbottom’s A Cock and Bull Story.
Previous “World Cinema Classics” and in the Wiki format here.
![[Julian Wasser photograph]](http://reconstruction.eserver.org/061/images/Fig1babitz.jpg){kind=link}