Monthly Archives: January 2009

Robert Duncan @90

Robert Duncan, American poet (1919 – 1988)

Robert Duncan (January 7, 1919 – February 3, 1988) was an American poet and a student of H.D. and the Western esoteric tradition who spent most of his career in and around San Francisco. Though associated with any number of literary traditions and schools, Duncan is often identified with the New American Poetry and Black Mountain poets. Duncan’s mature work emerged in the 1950s from within the literary context of Beat culture and today he is also identified as a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance.

Robert Duncan also translated Nerval’s Les Chimères, famous for being referenced by Eliot‘s Waste Land. I am very much fascinated these days by poetry and the translation of poetry.

Francis Poulenc @110

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7QTyUaH2OE&]

Francis Poulenc and Jean-Pierre Rampal play the second movement of Poulenc’s flute sonata.

Francis Poulenc, French composer (1899 – 1963) was an openly gay French composer and a member of the French group Les Six. He is known for such works as The Breasts of Tiresias and Les Biches.

RIP Stooges band member Ron Asheton (1948 – 2009)

RIP Ron Asheton

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

A New Order song (not the UK band, an early Asheton project)

Ron Asheton (July 17, 1948 – c. December 31, 2008 or January 1, 2009) was an American guitarist and co-songwriter with Iggy Pop for the rock band The Stooges.
Asheton was found dead in his Ann Arbor, Mi. home of a reported heart attack on January 6th, 2009, having died several days earlier, probably either on New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day.

God, I would hate to die alone like that.

Marilyn Manson and Kool & The Gang drummer @40 and 60

Marilyn Manson, American singer @40*

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jU6iP0WLsU8]

Tim Burton‘s The Nighmare Before Christmas re-cut with Marilyn Manson‘s version of “This Is Halloween“.

George Brown, American drummer of Kool & The Gang @60

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfxaNR71tYM&]

“Summer Madness” (1974)

*I think many people underestimate Marily Manson, I find his recycling of my intellectual darlings in such products as The Golden Age of Grotesque (which practically cannibalizes the whole of Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin) endearing. However, I do not count myself a fan.

Louis Braille @200

Louis Braille* @200

Louis invented Braille age 12.

Sensory depravation (I mean sensory impairments such as blindess or deafness, remember the film Peeping Tom, where the blind mother knows all along that the male protagonist cannot be trusted because she ‘feels’ this sort of thing?) is often a nice plot device.

Braille makes a clear statement that the reading experience is not visual per se.

*Louis Braille (January 4, 1809 – January 6, 1852) was the inventor of braille , a world-wide system used by blind and visually impaired people for reading and writing. Braille is read by passing the fingers over characters made up of an arrangement of one to six embossed points. It has been adapted to almost every known language.

Ah, woman, the incomplete sex

Film noir.

This Sex which is Not One

I’ve only seen two film noirs in the 2000s. One was the neo-noir The Last Seduction, the other was The Naked Kiss.

Donald Westlake‘s recent death has inspired me to research film noir and noir fiction. My fondest memories of the noir thing are probably films such as Jim Thompson‘s Coup de Torchon and Charles Willeford‘s Miami Blues.

But above all the nobrow references in the bold film The Naked Kiss.

I was totally surprised to find references in that film to:

Beethoven’s Moonlight sonata
A Baudelaire quote
Goethe
A male version of Brigitte Bardot

The same astonishment took hold of me when researching Kiss Me, Deadly, Mickey Spillane‘s sixth novel featuring private investigator Mike Hammer. (because of the Signet Books and Fawcett Publications link).

Listen to the following dialogue excerpt (see below). Is there a better way to introduce This Sex which is Not One, feminism and the Oedipus complex and Pussy Talk? Most of contemporary theory is useless without its counterpart in popular culture.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjgDNvS8XVU&]

Kiss Me Deadly

Scrub to 6:30 for the dialog

Christina: You’re angry with me, aren’t you? Sorry I nearly wrecked your pretty little car. I was just thinking how much you can tell about a person from such simple things. Your car, for instance.
Hammer: Now, what kind of a message does it send ya?
Christina: You have only one real lasting love.
Hammer: Now who could that be?
Christina: You. You’re one of those self-indulgent males who thinks about nothing but his clothes, his car, himself. Bet you do push-ups every morning just to keep your belly hard.
Hammer: You against good health or somethin’?
Christina: I could tolerate flabby muscles in a man who may be more friendly. You’re the kind of a person who never gives in a relationship – who only takes. (Sardonically) Ah, woman, the incomplete sex. And what does she need to complete her? (Mocking) Why, man, of course. A wonderful man.
Hammer: All right, all right, let it go. That bus stop will be comin’ up pretty soon and I don’t even know your name.
Christina: You forget. I’m a loony from the laughing house. All loonies are dangerous. Ever read poetry? No, of course you wouldn’t. Christina Rossetti wrote love sonnets. I was named after her.
Hammer: Christina?
Christina: Yes, Mike. I got your name from the registration certificate, Mr. Hammer. Get me to that bus stop and forget you ever saw me. If we don’t make that bus stop…
Hammer: (confidently) We will.
Christina: …if we don’t, ‘Remember me.’

–Transcribed by filmsite.org [1]

And the film score by Frank De Vol? Brilliant.

Happy birthdays J. D. Salinger (90) and Grandmaster Flash (51)

With all this dying, one would forget about the living. Fear not! Happy birthdays J. D. Salinger and Grandmaster Flash. The first birthdays of 2009.

Jerome David Salinger (born January 1, 1919) is an American author best known for his 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye, as well as his reclusive nature; he has not published any new work since 1965 and has not granted a formal interview since 1980.

The Catcher in the Rye original cover

Signet Books “sensationalist” cover

The famous “fuck you” excerpt:

“‘That’s the whole trouble. You can’t ever find a place that’s nice and peaceful, because there isn’t any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you’re not looking, somebody’ll sneak up and write ‘Fuck you‘ right under your nose. Try it sometime. I think, even, if I ever die, and they stick me in a cemetery, and I have a tombstone and all, it’ll say ‘Holden Caulfield’ on it, and then what year I was born and what year I died and then right under that it’ll say ‘Fuck you.’ I’m positive, in fact.'” – Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye page 183

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3kRuJhIVIo]

“The Message“

Joseph Saddler (born January 1, 1958 in Bridgetown, Barbados), better known as Grandmaster Flash, is a hip hop musician and DJ; one of the pioneers of hip-hop DJing, cutting, and mixing. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five are best-known for their single “The Message“.

“The Message” is an old school hip hop song by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five released in 1982. The song’s lyrics were some of the first in the genre of rap to talk about the struggles and the frustrations of living in the ghetto. Another fuck you, I guess.

Deaths in 2008

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXz22-_Io-c]

“Nobody had every done anything like this before” —Bebe Barron (1925 – 2008) on Anais Nin

January 22 – Heath Ledger, Australian actor (b. 1979)
February 13 – Henri Salvador, French singer (b. 1917)
February 18 – Alain Robbe-Grillet, French writer and filmmaker (b. 1922)
February 18 – Teo Macero, American record producer
February 21 – Joe Gibbs, Jamaican record producer
March 15 – Mikey Dread, Jamaican singer
March 19 – Sir Arthur C. Clarke, English science fiction author and inventor (b. 1917)
April 5 – Charlton Heston, 84, American actor
April 20 – Bebe Barron, 82, American composer, pioneer of electronic music.
April 29 – Albert Hofmann, 102, Swiss researcher, chemist and discoverer of LSD.
May 12 – Robert Rauschenberg, 82, American pop artist.
June 1 – Yves Saint-Laurent, 71, French fashion designer
June 2 – Bo Diddley, 79, American rock and roll and blues singer, songwriter, and guitarist.
June 2 – Mel Ferrer, 90, American actor, film director and producer.
June 7 – Dino Risi, 91, Italian film director (Il Sorpasso, Profumo di donna), natural causes.
July 4 – Thomas M. Disch, 68, American science fiction author (Camp Concentration, The Brave Little Toaster), suicide.
July 7 – Bruce Conner, 74, American artist, natural causes.
July 7 – Hugh Mendl, 88, British record producer.
August 10 – Isaac Hayes, 65, American soul and funk musician, actor (South Park), stroke.
August 17 – Manny Farber, 91, American film critic and painter.
September 8 – Hector Zazou, 60, French composer and record producer.
September 12 – David Foster Wallace, 46, American author and essayist, suicide by hanging.
September 12 – Norman Whitfield, 65, American Motown songwriter (“I Heard It Through the Grapevine“), diabetes.
September 18 – Mauricio Kagel, 76, Argentinian composer.
September 26 – Paul Newman, 83, American Academy Award-winning actor, cancer.
September 26 – Marc Moulin, 66, Belgian musician, cancer.
October 11 – Alton Ellis, 68, Jamaican singer, lymphatic cancer.
October 25 – Gerard Damiano, 80, American adult film director (Deep Throat), stroke.
November 1 – Yma Sumac, 86, Peruvian soprano, cancer.
November 4 – Byron Lee, 73, Jamaican musician and record producer, bladder cancer.
November 9 – Miriam Makeba, 76, South African singer, heart attack.
November 17 – Guy Peellaert 74, Belgian painter, illustrator and photographer.
December 2 – Odetta, 77, American folk singer and human rights activist, heart disease.
December 11 – Bettie Page, 85, American pin-up girl, complications from a heart attack.
December 24 – Harold Pinter, 78, British playwright, recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature (2005), liver cancer.
December 25 – Eartha Kitt, 81, American singer and actress, colon cancer.

RIP Donald Westlake

A Gold Medal Books original by Westlake under the name Stark.

Donald Edwin Westlake (12 July 1933 in Brooklyn, New York – 31 December 2008 in Mexico) was an American writer, with over a hundred novels and non-fiction books to his credit. He specialized in crime fiction, especially comic capers with an occasional foray into science fiction. He created the psychopathic fictional character Parker.

Film still from Point Blank

Outside of the world of literature he is perhaps best-known for the film adaptation of his novel The Hunter as Point Blank in 1967 with Lee Marvin. The Hunter was written by Donald E. Westlake under the pseudonym Richard Stark. The plot concerns a criminal, Parker (or Walker in Point Blank), who is himself betrayed, shot, and left for dead by his partner, and his relentless pursuit to retrieve his money and wreak revenge.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPKL3KHE–I]

“As Tears Go By” by Marianne Faithfull in Jean-Luc Godard‘s Made in USA (1966)

Jean-Luc Godard‘s Made in USA (1966) which was an extremely loose adaptation of “The Jugger,” a novel by Westlake. Neither the film’s producer nor Godard purchased the rights to the novel, so Westlake successfully sued to prevent the film’s commercial distribution in the United States.

Introducing Dino Valls

Click for credits

Click for credits

Dino Valls is a Spanish painter born in 1959 in Zaragoza, presently living and working in Madrid. This self-taught artist studied Italian and Flemish masters of the 16th and 17th centuries and currently makes use of egg tempera.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaZ1vzqOecI]

Having previously obtained a degree in medicine, he is now one of the Spanish representatives of the vanguard of new figurative art [1], along with Odd Nerdrum in Norway and John Currin, Lisa Yuskavage in America where there is also the Lowbrow art movement, presided over by critics such as Suzanne G..

His work is also classified as fantastic art.

Here is an interesting YouTumentary with a soundtrack by Funkstörung.[2]

Jahsonic

Aantekeningen uit Dodenstad.