[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gNktI3AF4Q]
Salad Fingers (2004) by David Firth
“The feeling of rust against my salad fingers is almost orgasmic.” Thus begins the first episode of internet phenomenon Salad Fingers, a series of Flash animation cartoons. Similar animations include David Lynch’s earlier Dumbland.
Me, my brother and our stuffed dog
Reminiscent is one of my favorite adjectives. It says all and so little. To describe something as “reminsicent of” always requires the reader to know the item it reminds one of. Auctorial descriptives belong in the category “reminiscent of.”
This post’s meaning of reminiscent falls in to the category: memoirs. The photo was taken by Janice, the sister of my then-girlfriend Mireille and it portrays me, my brother Joost and our stuffed dog.
My brother and I got the stuffed dog at the auction house we worked at, we were in our very early 20s at the time and we lived in a small apartment in the Bestormingstraat, Antwerp, which we rented for very cheap, about 100 Eur per month. We used to put the dog outside on the window sill of our apartment, people thought it was real dog and sometimes signaled us that we had accidentally forgotten our dog “outside” on our second-floor apartment.
Madam Satan American poster
I love apparent antonyms and verbal incongruities combined in one little phrase, tucked close to each other as tiny juxtapoems.
Two examples that come to mind are Madam Satan and Monsieur Vénus.
I’ve mentioned Monsieur Vénus before.
Today, a little about Madam Satan.
The film came first my attention via the French poster depicted at the now offline French site Fantasfilm.com dedicated to “le fantastique” in film. The superb dress was designed by Adrian.
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMjAhtsqxvw]
Watch out honey, you’ll get burned.
Don’t worry, my heart is made of asbestos.
“Zozoi” by Cesar Camargo Mariano and France Gall (1970).
World music classic #33 is European again, a French-Brazilian production voiced by France Galle.
The track is very giddy, the giggle it features reminded me of the one of the vocal version of Italo-outfit Klein & MBO’s “Dirty Talk,” but I checked and it’s not, see the most famous giggles in late 20th century dance music.
I went to the Permeke library in the center of Antwerp yesterday evening and loaned these:
Two of these books I had already loaned, the work by Rachleff, which is excellent, and the sublime Sade / Surreal, which I’ve mentioned before here. Sade/Surreal is a pricey book (a French bookseller currently wants more than 300 EUR for it, but a German vendor is currently letting it go for less than 40 Euros, which is a bargain, if you have deep pockets, consider buying it for me as a present). For the last hour of so, I’ve been updating my wiki with the names found on the opening and closing pages of the book (pictured below), which reads like a who’s who of Sadean thought, a summa sadeica, as it were.
Opening and closing page of Sade/Surreal
There were only a couple of names I could not identify, any help is welcome: Retz (either Gilles de Rais, or the cardinal with the same name, Young (perhaps Mr. Young of Night Thoughts?), de Saint Martin, Bertrand (probably Aloysius Bertrand ?) and Constant (Constantin Meunier?). The rest is indentified.
Also in the same book is the engraving below, which I find lovely, like a cake-building or a building of collapsing blubbery wet clay.
Tomb of Pompeii by Jean-Baptiste Tierce, 1766
I am re-reading Sex, Art, and American Culture by Paglia after my brother salvaged a copy from the dustbin. It must have been 4 years since I first read it and I understand a lot more. The vehement attack on “French theory” now surprises me in the sense that she mainly focuses on Foucault, Derrida and Baudrillard without mentioning what are imo the truly great French theorists: Barthes, Deleuze, Bataille. I know from a Salon q&a[1] that she doesn’t even like Bataille. Really! Re-read him Camille! In that short 1997 q&a she notes that she “was deeply disappointed in Bataille from the moment I picked up his books. His themes are my themes, his influences (in many cases) my influences.” She does confess to like Sade, Gautier, Balzac, Baudelaire, Huysmans, Sartre (whom I find difficult to stomach), de Beauvoir, Genet and Bachelard.
Of course her style is offensive (and I suspect it has had some re-writing in subsequent editions). As a European I find the following derogatory remarks on the French post-wwii-climate difficult to swallow (but funny anyhoo):
Nevertheless, Paglia strikes me time and time again as a great intellectual with an amount of books read which seems astronomical and a very astute power of analysis: how she equates Foucault’s taxonomy to Primitive Classification by Mauss and Durkheim and Foucault’s Discipline and Punish to Durkheim‘s The Division of Labour in Society.
This reading also brought Arnold Hauser‘s The Social History of Art to my attention.
Sex, Art, and American Culture is a sensible buy for someone who wants to brush up on cultural history from an irreverent but yet well-read perseptive.
On a different note, and only for a Dutch-reading public: the publication of Hermans-Reve correspondence is imminent. Hermans was brilliant and Reve a bit of a bore, at one point Hermans decided not to continue the correspondence. Read more at The Paper Man.
more on strange women
(Proverbs 2:12-19)
To deliver thee from the strange woman, even from the stranger which flattereth with her words;
(Proverbs 2:3-6)
For the lips of a strange woman drop as an honeycomb, and her mouth is smoother than oil:
(Proverbs 5:20-29)
And why wilt thou, my son, be ravished with a strange woman, and embrace the bosom of a stranger?
To keep thee from the evil woman, from the flattery of the tongue of a strange woman.
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHlKT8y8RQM&]
Remote Control
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m-U11KTDEs&]
Pryings
Kathy Dillon participated in Vito Acconci‘s body art pieces when she was his girlfriend in the early 1970s.
“Remote Control” has Acconci remote controlling Dillon by voice, including having herself tied up, as depicted.
“Pryings” is Dillon trying to keep here eyes closed while Acconci is trying to pry them open.
I’ve finished version 1.0 of my personal note-taking platform Artandpopularculture.com, affectionately known as “Art and Pop”, which I started a year ago. Version 1.0 consisted of adding people and events to each day of the year.
Version 2.0 will be ready in April 2009, it consists of adding the same info (yes, I am seeking this level of self-referentiality) to each year from 1650 until the present day.
There are still some days that need work (in April and May, when I started the wiki), so my apologies for these lacunae. Also, to the individual dates will be added more cultural events such as releases of notable films, first public showings of works of art, releases of musical compositions. Notability criteria are mine, in accordance to the publication biases of the wiki.
The Art and Pop wiki is a continuation of a project I started in 1996: Jahsonic.com, and can be considered as Jahsonic Pro, a who’s who of culture or “culture for smarties”.
According to internet rating service Quantcast, the site reaches approximately 6,816 U.S. monthly unique visitors and is popular among a mostly male, primarily older crowd.
