Yearly Archives: 2008

Happy birthday Piero Simondo!

Piero Simondo is a founder of the Situationist International. He turns 80 today.

1957 Guy Debord photographed by Ralph Rumney, with Piero Simondo at Cosio d'Arroscia, Italy

1957: Piero Simondo and Guy Debord photographed by Ralph Rumney at Cosio d’Arroscia, Italy. [1]

Situazionisti

The founders of the Situationist International at Cosio d’Arroscia, in April 1957[3]. From left to right; Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio, Piero Simondo, Elena Verrone, Michele Bernstein, Guy Debord, Asger Jorn and Walter Olmo.

Sholem Stein has recently noted that Situationist practices continue to influence underground street artists such as gHOSTbOY, Banksy, Borf, and Mudwig, whose artistic interventions and subversive practice can be seen on advertising hoardings, street signs and walls throughout Europe and The United States. The aforementioned use stencil graffiti.

I’m not much of an album man

“Take 4 parts blues add 2 parts country and give it to a poor white boy and you have rock.”–Duane Allman

I’m not much of an album man, I prefer singles and compilation albums. Nevertheless Sweetheart of the Rodeo is one of my top 50 albums (I feel a new series coming on).

[Youtube=http://ie.youtube.com/watch?v=One9fHq-3qc&]

Sweetheart of the Rodeo was the sixth album by American rock band The Byrds, released on July 29 1968. It serves here as the seminal recording of country rock. It was the most commercially unsuccessful album recorded by the group at the time of its release.

Country rock is a musical genre formed from the fusion of rock with country music, with its roots in the American folk music revival.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RK70vImXkgY]

After the darling of the young enthusiasts, Bob Dylan, began to record with a rocking rhythm section and electric instruments in 1965 (see Electric Dylan controversy), many other still-young folk artists followed suit. Meanwhile, bands like The Lovin’ Spoonful and the Byrds, whose individual members often had a background in the folk-revival coffee-house scene, were getting recording contracts with folk-tinged music played with a rock-band line-up. Before long, the public appetite for the more acoustic music of the folk revival began to wane.

Enough facts already.

“Hickory Wind“[1] is WMC #69 and “Blue Canadian Rockies“[2] WMC #70.

The United States of Unconsciousness

The United States of Unconsciousness is how cultural pessimists (most recently the dim-witted Roger Scruton) would like to label the olympic sport of “couch potatoing,” better known as television. That is if they (the likes of Scruton) had the fine wit, ardor and imagination of the likes of Gil Scott-Heron and Michael Franti to come up with phrases such as “Television, the drug of a nation,” poetic but seemingly straight out of Mao’s The Little Red Book (cfr Opium of the People).

However, it will take a nobrow cultural optimist to point out that many television studies have failed to point to interesting quality television such as Civilisation: A Personal View; and entertaining cult television such as South Park and Série Rose, programming which has lead to a genuine postwar global television culture.

Nevertheless, I have sympathy for the alarmists, especially if by voices of distinguished pedigree:

I give you World music classics #67[1] and #68 [2]

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08x34xtdzlU]

“The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” —Gil Scott-Heron, 1970

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgOWTM5R2DA]

“Television, the drug of a nation, feeding ignorance and breeding radiation.” —The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, 1992

“Carrier/Carrière is surrealist in drowning”

In the history of 20th century subculture, the surreal sensibility, and Surrealism in particular takes center stage.

Surrealism itself deserves a decentralized and regionalized historiography.

1

Polish surrealism for example brings the work of latter surrealist Jacek Yerka[1].

More than just a celebration of the new, Surrealism sought to find itself in the past and opened a revisionist approach to historiography. It sought to trace a sensibility in retrospect.

Faustino Bocchi

Faustino Bocchi (ill. above) would have been dubbed surrealist, if Breton had known him.

Arcimboldo

Arcimboldo (ill. above) would have been dubbed surrealist, if Breton had known him

In “What is Surrealism?” Breton defines what we can label proto-Surrealism.

See the insets for the Carrier/Carrière debate

“Young‘s Night Thoughts are surrealist from cover to cover. Unfortunately, it is a priest who speaks; a bad priest, to be sure, yet a priest.
Heraclitus is surrealist in dialectic.
Lully is surrealist in definition.
Flamel is surrealist in the night of gold.
Swift is surrealist in malice.
Sade is surrealist in sadism.
Carrier is surrealist in drowning.
Monk Lewis is surrealist in the beauty of evil.
Achim von Arnim is surrealist absolutely, in space and time
Rabbe is surrealist in death.
Baudelaire is surrealist in morals.
Rimbaud is surrealist in life and elsewhere.
Hervey Saint-Denys is surrealist in the directed dream.
Carroll is surrealist in nonsense.
Huysmans is surrealist in pessimism.
Seurat is surrealist in design.
Picasso is surrealist in cubism.
Vaché is surrealist in me.
Roussel is surrealist in anecdote. Etc.”

This list comes from a lecture given by Breton in Brussels in 1934, either on May 12 or June 1 of that year, and published as a pamphlet immediately afterwards by René Henriquez, with as cover art Magritte‘s The Rape, which was created for that purpose. The enumeration in the lecture harks back to a list published in the first Surrealist Manifesto in 1924.

Other versions exist, one was published in the “Surrealist Number” of This Quarter. Another version was translated to Czech and published as “Co je surrealismus?” (1937), with a cover by Karel Teige. This list reprised the 1924 version.

Many of the names on the list are obscure, but I have managed to track all … but one.

When Breton says “Carrier is surrealist in drowning,” I have no idea who he means. Apparently, I am not the only one.

Marguerite Bonnet says in the 1975 André Breton: naissance de l’aventure surréaliste

… “Nous n’avons pas encore retrouvé le texte français de cet article, dont la version anglaise donne au « nom « Carrière » que Breton a corrigé en Carrier”
… “We have been unable to find the French text of this article, of which the English version gives as name Carrière, which Breton later correct as Carrier”

If Bonnet confesses that she could not find the French text (published by René Henriquez) there is even more room for confusion. The “Surrealist Number” (1932) of Parisian “little magazine” This Quarter‘ (edited by Edward W. Titus)[2]; and André Breton: naissance de l’aventure surréaliste [3] each mention additional names such as Helen Smith (surrealist in tongue), Uccello (in the free for all fight), Radcliffe (in the landscape), Maturin (in despair); and can’t agree on the spelling Carrière/Carrier.

Your impressions, Brussels

Four invisible people tagged

The hightest point of Brussels – or so it seems – is the Law Court. It’s a good place to park your car. It’s free and there is a somewhat surreal elevator to the city.

DSC00894

DSC00891

DSC00890

DSC00893

DSC00892

In Brussels, there is a small arcade not far from the Grand Place and the Royal Galleries of Saint-Hubert, where new and second hand books are sold. You photograph L’art en Belgique depuis 1975, La Divine et l’impure, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, Amours, guerre et sexualité, Philippe Garner‘s (you presume) Decorative Arts from 1940 to the Present Day (originally London, 1980) with cult brand Fiorucci on the cover.

DSC00895

DSC00902

Entering the Royal Galleries of Saint-Hubert from The Grand Place side, you follow the arcade until after the intersection, on the corner is art book shop Librairie Saint-Hubert, where you photograph Into Me / Out of Me (Klaus Biesenbach, Georges Bataille and Susan Sontag) [1].

DSC00901

DSC00900

DSC00899

Continuing, you take some shots of the ongoing Écran Total repertory programme from Cinéma Arenberg.

DSC00907

By now it has started raining, this is what you see at the Regentschapsstraat, on your way back to the car, holding a piece of cardboard over your head.

Tony Duvert (1945 – 2008)

Tony Duvert, the most infamous French gay writer (similar enfant terrible Pierre Guyotat was hetero) since Jean Genet is dead, says the The Paper Man.


[Amazon.com]
[FR] [DE] [UK]

Tony Duvert (1945 – 2008) was a French writer. He was the winner of the Prix Médicis, author of When Jonathan Died and contributor to French gay journal Gai pied.

In 2007 an English translation by Bruce Benderson Good Sex Illustrated (Le bon sexe illustré) was released by Semiotext(e).

Dennis Cooper described him as “A writer criminally undertranslated and consequently barely known in the primarily English-speaking areas of the world…. Duvert is one of the more significant and idiosyncratic contemporary French fiction writers. He’s also one of the most mysterious.”

Softly from Paris

While completing my pages on Walerian Borowczyk, I came across the Série rose.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwHoKL0W_VY]

Trailer for the Série rose, alluding hidden and secret libraries, or, enfers, Giftschränke or remota.

Série rose: Les Chefs d’œuvre de la littérature érotique (literal English: pink series, the masterpieces of erotic literature) is a French television series of 28 episodes of 26 minutes each, produced by Pierre Grimblat and broadcast on French television channel FR3 from November 8 1986 to 1990.

The series consisted of adaptations of libertine fiction from the European literary canon, original authors included Marguerite of Navarre, Comte de Mirabeau, Nicolas Restif de La Bretonne, Anton Chekhov, Chaucer, Guy de Maupassant, Jean de La Fontaine, Théophile Gautier, Daniel Defoe and Aristophanes.

Directors included Belgian director Harry Kumel (Daughters of Darkness), French colleague Michel Boisrond (Cette sacrée gamine) and Polish director Walerian Borowczyk (The Beast). Harry Kumel‘s contributions were separately released as The Secrets Of Love: Three Rakish Tales. Walerian Borowczyk directed four episodes for the series: Almanach des adresses des demoiselles de Paris, Un traitement justifié, Le Lotus d’or, and L’Experte Halima.

Série rose was bought by German and South-American and American television where they were known as Erotisches zur Nacht or Softly from Paris (USA).

Most notable appearance is that of Pedro Almodóvar ensemble cast member Penélope Cruz.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7dTd2gqijg]

Contact with a beast must not be kept secret at confession

Twenty three years ago, the French film The Beast premiered in France.

Sirpa Lane in
The Beast (La bête) (1975) – Walerian Borowczyk [Amazon.com] [UK]

La Bête (Eng: The Beast) is a 1975 film written and directed by Walerian Borowczyk, starring Sirpa Lane, based on Lokis, a story by Prosper Mérimée. The film (originally conceived in 1972 as a film on its own, but then in 1974 as the fifth story in Contes immoraux) belonged to his later work, which was seen by many as a decline in the director’s career after Dzieje grzechu, except in France, where it was hailed by nobrow critics such as Ado Kyrou.

Here is some shaky Youtube footage:

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RV0xScJuYXc]

The music consists of harpsichord pieces by Domenico Scarlatti.

Music in Borowczyk films usually draws from the high art canon of classical music, for example, he uses Mendelssohn in The Story of Sin, Handel in Goto, Island of Love and Domenico Scarlatti in La Bête.

Incidentally, the term “classical music” did not appear until the early 19th century, in an attempt to “canonize” the period from Johann Sebastian Bach to Beethoven as a golden age. The earliest reference to “classical music” recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary is from about 1836.

With regards to the title quote and the strange vocabulary of eroticism, Tim Lucas [1] gives the top 10 dialog lines from Massimo Dallamano‘s Venus in Furs (starring Laura Antonelli).

At ten is “I must resign myself to being normal.”

“This groove is out of fashion, these beats are twenty years old”

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qu9LhFXymxs]

“Strange Overtones” is the first single by David Byrne and Brian Eno from their new album Everything That Happens Will Happen Today.

“This groove is out of fashion, these beats are twenty years old,” state the lyrics and yes indeed, it has been 20 years since the beat has been self-consciously celebrated during late 20th century electronic dance music revolution brought on by Japanese music machines such as the Roland 808.

But the beats (some of them by Robert Wyatt) in this track are actually very intricate and danceable too.

Most of the drumming and programming reminds me of “Riot in Lagos“[1], from B2-Unit, Ryuichi Sakamoto second solo album.