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Lee Hazlewood @80
Lee Hazlewood (9 July 1929 – 4 August 2007) was an American musician best-known for “These Boots Are Made for Walkin“[1] and “Some Velvet Morning“.
“Some Velvet Morning” is WMC #347
“These Boots” is WMC #348
Via Ponyxpress comes Anton Solomoukha
via vonneumannmachine.files.wordpress.com
Anton Solomoukha (born 1945, Kiev) is an Ukrainian painter and photographer, currently living in Paris, France. He graduated from the Fine Arts School of Kiev and left the USSR in 1978. His works are mostly neoclassicist; Sigmund Freud, eroticism and psychoanalysis are recurring themes in his works.
RIP Mollie Sugden, 86, British actress (Are You Being Served?).
Mrs. Slocombe at the hairdresser’s
Mary Isobel Sugden (21 July 1922 – 1 July 2009) was an British comedy actress, known as Mollie Sugden, who is best known for playing Mrs. Slocombe in the popular and long running British sitcom Are You Being Served? from 1972 to 1985.
Are You Being Served? rarely left the store, and to parody the stereotype of the British class system, characters rarely addressed each other by their given names, even after work.
Mrs. Slocombe was the Head of the Ladies Department in a department store. She frequently died her hair unusual colours such as lime green or orange. Mrs. Slocombe’s husband left her and she lived with her cat, Tiddles, which she referred to as “my pussy;” this was the source of many a double entendre, most of which Mrs. Slocombe herself completely misses. It is often suggested that when she was younger she had quite a wild life and possibly even worked in a bar.
At various times, Mrs. Slocombe has (often while drunk) tried to flirt unsuccessfully with various members of the male staff.
The Cut-Ups is World Cinema Classic #108
The Cut-Ups[1] is an experimental film by British filmmaker Antony Balch and American writer William Burroughs, which opened in London in 1967. It was the second time Balch and Burroughs had collaborated after their earlier Towers Open Fire. The Cut-Ups was part of an abandoned project called Guerrilla Conditions meant as a documentary on Burroughs and filmed throughout 1961-1965.
The film contains 19 minutes of someone saying “Yes, Hello?”, “Look at that picture,” “Does it seem to be persisting?,” and “Good. Thank you,” accompanied by a repetition five or six basic film clips shot in New York City and featuring Brion Gysin.
Inspired by Burroughs’ and Gysin’s technique of cutting up text and rearranging it in random order, Balch had an editor cut his footage for the documentary into little pieces and impose no control over its reassembly. The film opened at Oxford Street’s Cinephone cinema and had a disturbing reaction. Many audience members claimed the film made them ill, others demanded their money back, while some just stumbled out of the cinema ranting “its disgusting”.
Included in The Cut-Ups are shots of Burroughs acting out scenes from his book Naked Lunch. The idea of bringing Naked Lunch to the big-screen was Balch’s dream project. First developed in 1964, a script was completed in the early 1970s which would have adapted the book as a musical. Personal differences between Balch and the film’s would-be leading man Mick Jagger caused the project’s collapse.
For an indepth description of the films of William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and Antony Balch, see brightlightsfilm [1] by Rob Bridgett.
“Lesson #1 for Electric Guitar” is WMC #342
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9lwuojEREI]
Lesson #1 for Electric Guitar[1] was the first album released by Glenn Branca, originally in 1980 on 99 Records as a mini-album. It was re-released in a remastered form in 2004 by Acute Records and is variously classified as no wave or noise rock. It combines punk aesthetics with those classical music.
Glenn Branca[2] is an avant-garde composer and guitarist of the New York “downtown music” scene known for his use of volume, repetition, droning, and the harmonic series.
99 Records was an independent record label that existed from 1980–1984. 99 (pronounced Nine Nine) Records was run out of a record store with the same name, located at 99 MacDougal Street in New York City’s Greenwich Village, and owned by Ed Bahlman. Artists included ESG, Liquid Liquid, Bush Tetras, Glenn Branca, Y Pants, and others.
Downtown music is a name given to the New York music scene from the 1960s to the 1980s. A scene that suppposedly began in 1960, when Yoko Ono — one of the Fluxus artists, at that time still seven years away from meeting John Lennon — opened her SoHo loft to be used as a performance space for a series curated by La Monte Young and Richard Maxfield.
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kx6-raGX6U]
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fi_z7rvASQg]
From Lialeh.
Bernard Purdie turns 70 today. He is best-known in rare groove circles for his “Funky Donkey[1],” collected on Last Night a DJ Saved my Life (1999), played on Gabor Szabo‘s “Jazz Raga” and did the soundtrack for the blaxploitation flick Lialeh[2].
The Origin of the World (1866) by Gustave Courbet
Le Sommeil (1866) by Gustave Courbet
Gustave Courbet (1819 – 1877) was a French painter who led the Realist movement in 19th-century French painting, best-known today paintings The Origin of the World, The Stonebreakers and Burial at Ornans.
He was one of the firsts to criticize Academic art and denounce the use of pretexts for depicting certain subjects when he said that:
“I have studied the art of the masters and the art of the moderns, avoiding any preconceived system and without prejudice. I have no more wanted to imitate the former than to copy the latter; nor have I thought of achieving the idle aim of ‘art for art’s sake.’ No! I have simply wanted to draw from a thorough knowledge of tradition the reasoned and free sense of my own individuality. To know in order to do: such has been my thought. To be able to translate the customs, ideas, and appearance of my time as I see them — in a word, to create a living art — this has been my aim.” Gustave Courbet, preface to World’s Fair catalogue, 1855.
The Origin of the World is IoEA #47 and Le Sommeil IoEA #48.
Yesterday, Hugh Hopper, British progressive rock and jazz fusion bassist and composer (Soft Machine) died at age 64. He was a prominent member of the Canterbury scene, as a member of Soft Machine and various other related bands. The Soft Machine was a pioneering English psychedelic band from Canterbury, named after the book The Soft Machine by William S. Burroughs.
Hopper’s role with Soft Machine was initially as the group’s road manager, but he already composed for their first album The Soft Machine and played bass on one of its tracks. In 1969 he was recruited to be the group’s bassist for their second album, Volume Two and, with Mike Ratledge and Robert Wyatt, he took part in a recording session for The Madcap Laughs of Syd Barrett. Hopper continued with the Softs, playing bass and contributing numerous compositions, until 1973. During his tenure the group evolved from a psychedelic pop group to an instrumental jazz-rock fusion band. In 1972, shortly before leaving Soft Machine, he recorded the first record under his own name, 1984 (named after George Orwell‘s novel). This was a decidedly non-commercial record featuring lengthy solo pieces using tape loops as well as shorter pieces with a group.
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJtUwVRFjjM&]
In one of the myriad connections in (un)popular music, New York based No Wave music group Material led by Bill Laswell covered Hopper’s “Memories” on their One Down album. The song was written by Hopper just prior to his joining Soft Machine, but most well known from Daevid Allen‘s Banana Moon album which featured a lead vocal from Robert Wyatt.
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3CZPNT9GSs]
The vocal here is performed by Whitney Houston in one of her first ever featured lead performances.
“Memories” is World Music Classic #329.
Still from Gradiva (C’est Gradiva qui vous appelle) by Alain Robbe-Grillet
The good people at Mondo Macabro[1] are releasing Gradiva (C’est Gradiva qui vous appelle), the last film by French master-erotomaniac Alain Robbe-Grillet, Robert Monell points out in a recent post [2].
C’est Gradiva qui vous appelle (2006) is a French language film by Alain Robbe-Grillet starring: James Wilby, Arielle Dombasle and Dany Verissimo. It premiered at the 2006 Venice film festival on September 8 and in French cinemas on May 9 of 2007.
The film, Grillet’s last, is a Franco-Belgian production loosely based on Gradiva: A Pompeiian Fancy by Wilhelm Jensen. The setting has been updated to modern times, at least, no earlier than the 1970s, based on vehicles and appliances seen in the film. It begins with an English art historian named John Locke is doing research in Morocco on the paintings and drawings that French artist Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) produced when he spent time in that country (back then, a French colony) more than a century before. Locke spots a beautiful, mysterious blonde girl (Gradiva, of course) in flowing robes dashing through the back alleys of Marrakech, and becomes consumed with the need to track her down. Like most of Robbe-Grillet’s cinematic output, this film is highly surrealistic and also involves a surprisingly explicit amount of “sex slave” nudity and S&M, although it is a serious film and not just softcore fluff.
A Pompeiian Fancy is a novel by Wilhelm Jensen published by in German as Ein pompejanisches Phantasiestuck (Dresden and Leipzig: Carl Reissner) in 1903.
The story is about an archaeologist named Norbert Hanhold who holds a fascination for a woman depicted in a relief that he sees in the Naples National Archaeological Museum. Hanhold later dreams that he has been transported back in time to meet the girl, whose unusual gait captivates him as he imagines her walking on the stepping stones that cross the roads in Pompeii while the hot ashes subsume the city in 79 AD.
Delusion and Dream in Jensen’s Gradiva (1907) is an essay by Sigmund Freud that analyzes the novel Gradiva by Wilhelm Jensen from a psychoanalytical point of view.
After that, Gravida became a favourite of the Surrealists. Salvador Dalí used the name Gradiva as a nickname for his wife, Gala Dalí. He used the figure of Gradiva in a number of his paintings, including Gradiva encuentra las ruinas de Antropomorphos (Gradiva finds the ruins of Antropomorphos)[3]. The figure Gradiva was used in other Surrealist paintings as well. Gradiva (Metamorphosis of Gradiva)[4], 1939, by André Masson explores the sexual iconography of the character.
In 1937 the Surrealist wirter Andre Breton opened an art gallery on the Left Bank, 31 rue de Seine, christening it with the title: Gradiva. Marcel Duchamp designed it, giving its door the form of a double cast shadow.
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