Category Archives: 1001 things to do before you die

Nabokov @110

(notice “complete and unabridged,” meaning previously censored)

Delving more and more into the art of commemoration I find it strange that people also commemorate people’s deaths. To me the birthday is what counts. I always want to go to the source, not to the end. Just like in horoscopes, where I find it strange that it takes as basis the date of birth, rather than the date of conception.

I offer you the Corgi edition of Nabokov‘s Lolita, the novel he will always be best remembered for.

RIP Peter “Carry On” Rogers (1914 – 2009)

RIP Peter Rogers (1914 – 2009)

Carry On… Up the Khyber

Peter Rogers (20 February 1914 – 14 April 2009) was a British film producer. Rogers is best-known as producer of the Carry On series of British sex comedy films, beginning with Carry On Sergeant in 1958.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkqHI3-KXCs&]

“It sounds bizar but the Carry On films are as much part of the sixties as Pink Floyd” (documentary by the BBC, 2007).

The Carry On films were a long-running series of British low-budget comedy films, directed by Gerald Thomas and produced by Peter Rogers. An energetic mix of parody, farce, slapstick and double entendres, they are seen as classic examples of the low end of British humour in the British comic tradition of the music hall and seaside postcards, best documented in Keeping the British End Up: Four Decades of Saucy Cinema by Simon Sheridan.

World Cinema Classic #98

Via Ian Kerkhof‘s incredibly prolific blog[1] comes our 98th World Cinema Classic, an ongoing project at the Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia.

This entry goes to The Dogway Melody [2] (1930), one of the Dogville shorts.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=II1BkpX03-M]

The Dogway Melody is a 1930 comedy short film that recreates scenes from early musical films, particularly The Broadway Melody. The entire cast are trained dogs with human voiceovers. It was directed by Zion Myers and Jules White and it forms part of the MGM produced series of Dogville shorts.

“Antichrist,” a horror film by Lars von Trier

Via Tomorrow Museum comes the announcement of Lars von Trier’s Antichrist[1]

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-3mWmLAcsY]

Lars von Trier‘s Antichrist

Antichrist is a 2009 horror film directed and co-written by Lars von Trier. The film is about a couple who, after the death of child, retreat to a cabin in the woods where they encounter strange and terrifying occurrences. Starring Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe, the film is scheduled for release on August 19, 2009 in France.

Lars von Trier (born Lars Trier, April 30, 1956) is a Danish film director. He is closely associated with the Dogme95 collective, calling for a return to plausible stories in filmmaking and a move away from artifice and towards technical minimalism, although his own films have taken a variety of different approaches. Danish film in the 1990s was dominated by Lars von Trier. His films Europa, Breaking the Waves, The Idiots, and Dancer in the Dark received great international attention and were nominated for numerous awards. Von Trier’s 2000s Dogville was a radical departure from the naturalistic rules of Dogme 95, and instead the film invented a completely new style that draws from the theatre but yet remains eminently cinematic.

The antichrist is one under the direct control of the Devil, who will lead the abomination in the end times

RIP Marilyn Chambers (1952 – 2009)

RIP Marilyn Chambers

Behind the Green Door

Marilyn Chambers (April 22, 1952 – April 12, 2009) was an American pornographic actress, exotic dancer, and vice-presidential candidate. She was best known for her 1972 hardcore debut porno chic title Behind the Green Door. For a brief time, mainstream cinema noticed Chambers, who in 1977 nabbed a major role in David Cronenberg‘s low-budget Canadian-made body horror film Rabid.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-petXcizF1E]

Rabid

Behind the Green Door (1972) was the first hardcore pornographic movie widely released in the United States. Directed by the Mitchell brothers and starring Marilyn Chambers as Gloria Saunders, the movie depicts her abduction to a sex theater, where she is forced to perform various sexual acts in front of an audience, with characters including nuns and trapeze artists. The Mitchell brothers appear in the film as her kidnappers. In a psychedelic and colorful key sequence, an ejaculation on Chambers’ face is shown with semen flying through the air for seven minutes. Along with Deep Throat, released later in the same year, the movie launched the “porno chic” boom and started what is now referred to as the “Golden Age of Porn“. The production of the movie is dramatized in the movie Rated X[1] starring the brothers Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez as Artie and Jim.

Rabid (1977) – David Cronenberg [Amazon.com]

Picture shows Marilyn with orifice under an armpit, within it hidden a phallic stinger

Rabid is a 1977 body horror film written and directed by David Cronenberg starring Marilyn Chambers and Robert A. Silverman. The plot is about a critically-injured woman (Chambers) victim of a motorcycle accident is taken to the plastic surgery clinic of Doctor Dan Keloid, where some of her intact tissue is treated to become “morphogenetically neutral” and grafted to fire-damaged areas of her body in the hope that they will differentiate and replace the damaged skin and organs.

Unfortunately, the woman’s body unexpectedly accepts the transplants: she develops an orifice under an armpit, within it hides a phallic stinger. She uses it to feed on the blood of other people, and afterwards wiping their memories of their incidents with her.

It soon is apparent that her every victim transforms to a rabid zombie whose bite spreads the disease, eventually causing the city to fall into chaos before the outbreak can be contained.

The history of American erotica: the Falstaff and Panurge presses.

Promotional page for Panurge Press, from Bookleggers and Smuthounds

In the history of American erotica there are two private press publishers of curiosa, Falstaff Press [1] and Panurge Press. Both are well-documented in Bookleggers and Smuthounds, both were at the hight of their activity in the 1930s.

Interestingly, both of the presses’ names are derived from male fictional characters, in the case of Falstaff described as “fat, vainglorious, cowardly, jolly knight” and in the case of Panurge as “an exceedingly crafty knave, a libertine, and a coward.”

Both cowards, both anti-heros. Falstaff as much as Panurge, very much in tune with American modernist literature.

Today, following my binge of French erotica, I’ve been busy researching the “also avaible from this publisher” page from The Erotic History of France[2] by by Henry L. Marchand, a Panurge book.

The Sotadic Zone by Sir Richard Burton, Panurge Press edition, image courtesy vintagesleaze, the site that lives up to its title.

Other publications of Panurge include The Sotadic Zone by Sir Richard Burton, here with an illustration courtesy of vintagesleaze.com [3].

French erotica, and, icon of erotic art #42

In the history of world erotica I present you with Le Poitevin’s diableries.

From the Les Diableries Erotiques by Eugène le Poitevin

Eugène le Poitevin (1806 – 1870) was a French artist, author of Les Diableries Erotiques.

He is an underrated figure in the history of French erotica and his engraving above from the aforementioned Les Diableries Erotiques is icon of erotic art #42.

Diableries are an interesting genre and illustrates how — before the “invention” of erotica and pornography — body parts and the people possessing them were used for subversive purposes, here as a form of satirical pornography or pornographic satire. The genre goes back to Rabelais, although his masterpiece Gargantua and Pantagruel was more emetic than erotic.

Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais, illustrated by Gustave Doré in 1873

Cardinal Armand de Rohan-Soubise by anonymous
Anonymous satirical caricature of the Cardinal Armand de Rohan-Soubise (1717-1757); this engraving is a good example of “pornography” as a tool for political subversion during France’s ancien régime.

Of course, artists such as Le Poitevin deserve a place in the history of derision, a playful and benign derision that is turned toward ourselves, toward the very core of human nature. As such it is also a piece of toilet philosophy.

Remarkably, the writeup on a Poitevin engraving not depicted here in my edition of Erotic Art of the Masters the 18th, 19th, 20th Centuries Art & Artists , author and editor Bradley Smith notes “penises and vaginas fly through the air like butterflies, are gathered in baskets and, personified, play games with adults and children.” This quote echoes the following by Deleuze and Guattari, “Flying anuses, speeding vaginas, there is no castration” (A Thousand Plateaus, p. 32).

Introducing Lisa Yuskavage

Lisa Yuskavage (1999) by Katy Siegel [Amazon.com]
[FR] [DE] [UK]

I’ve mentioned the work of Yuskavage several times[1] [2][3][4][5] before but never dedicated a post to her.

Lisa Yuskavage (Born May 16, 1962 in Philadelphia) is a contemporary American figurative painter. She is a controversial painter with loaded subject matter such as that has been referred to as “outrageous quasi-pornographic sirens” and “anatomically impossible bimbos” as they mock the male desires of male fantasy.

Yuskavage is classified as a new figurative painter, to which American artists such as John Currin and Graydon Parrish also belong.

Lisa Yuskavage attended Tyler School of Art and received her MFA from Yale in 1986 but came to prominence in the mid-nineties in a series of seminal museum shows “Figure as Fiction” (1993) Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; “My Little Pretty” (1997) Museum of contemporary Art, Chicago; “Presumed Innocence” (1997) “Pop Surrealism” (1998) Aldrich Museum; “The Nude in Contemporary Art” (1999).

Max von Sydow @80

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCjoNt0iCzY]

Break-up scene in Hannah and Her Sisters

Max Carl Adolf von Sydow, (born 10 April 1929 in Lund) is a Swedish actor (also French, since obtaining citizenship in 2002), known in particular for his collaboration with filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. He has acted in films as diverse as The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Hour of the Wolf, The Exorcist, Illustrious Corpses, Death Watch, Hannah and Her Sisters, What Dreams May Come and Minority Report.

The Seventh Seal (Swedish: Det sjunde inseglet) is an existential 1957 Swedish film directed by Ingmar Bergman about the journey of a medieval knight (Max von Sydow) across a plague-ridden landscape. Its best-known scene features the knight playing chess with the personification of Death, his life resting on the outcome of the game. The film has long been regarded a masterpiece of cinema.

Wild Strawberries is a 1957 film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman. The original Swedish title is Smultronstället, which literally means The Wild Strawberry Patch. The cast includes Bergman regulars Bibi Andersson, Ingrid Thulin and Gunnar Björnstrand. Max von Sydow also appears in a small part. Bergman wrote the screenplay while in the hospital.

Hour of the Wolf is a Swedish film from 1968. It is Ingmar Bergman‘s only horror film. Hour of the Wolf originated from a manuscript with the working title “The Maneaters”. Bergman started working on it in the spring of 1965, during which time he suffered a minor nervous breakdown. In the end, the manuscript resulted in not one but two movies, Persona and Hour of the Wolf. Together with the former movie, Hour of the Wolf is probably one of Bergman’s most personal films, though he deals with himself in one way or another in almost all of his movies. It is filmed as if it is a true story about an artist who has disappeared. The story of the artist and his life just before his vanishing is based on interviews with his wife, and on his diaries.

The Exorcist is a 1973 American horror film, adapted from the 1971 novel of the same name by William Peter Blatty, dealing with the demonic possession of a young girl, and her mother’s desperate attempts to win back her daughter through an exorcism conducted by two priests. The film features Ellen Burstyn, Linda Blair and Max von Sydow. Both the film and novel took inspirations from a documented exorcism in 1949, performed on a 14-year-old boy. The Film is one of a cycle of ‘demonic child‘ movies, including The Omen series and Rosemary’s Baby.

Illustrious Corpses poster designed by Enrico Baj.

Illustrious Corpses (Cadaveri eccellenti) is a 1976 thriller film directed by Francesco Rosi and starring Lino Ventura. The film was adapted from Leonardo Sciascia‘s novel Equal Danger a novel on organized crime. Its Italian poster art was designed by Enrico Baj. Cadaveri eccellenti literally means Excellent Cadavers and is also the name of a surrealist technique known in English as exquisite corpse.

Death Watch (French: La Mort en direct) is a 1980 French science fiction film directed by Bertrand Tavernier. It based on the novel The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe by David G. Compton. Romy Schneider plays the dying heroine with whose death is being recorded on national television in an ongoing soap opera of morbid reality tv. Much of the filming took place in and around Glasgow.

Hannah and Her Sisters is an Academy Award-winning 1986 romantic comedy film which tells the intertwined stories of an extended family, told mostly during a year that begins and ends with a family Thanksgiving dinner. The movie was written and directed by Woody Allen and stars Mia Farrow as Hannah, with Barbara Hershey and Dianne Wiest as her sisters. The film is Allen’s biggest box office hit thus far, without adjusting for inflation, with a North American gross of $41 million. Adjusted for inflation it falls behind Annie Hall and Manhattan, and possibly also one or two of his early comedies.

What Dreams May Come is a 1998 dramatic film, starring Robin Williams, Cuba Gooding, Jr., and Annabella Sciorra. The movie is based on the 1978 novel by Richard Matheson, and was directed by Vincent Ward. The title is taken from a line in Hamlet‘s To be, or not to be soliloquy.

The ArtandPopularCulture wiki @2

On April 8, 2007, the ArtandPopularCulture wiki was founded. At the end of that day, this [1] is how the wiki looked.

The wiki is still best described as Jahsonic‘s project to seek connections, bridges and intersections between high culture, pulp and avant-garde, or, towards a postmodern canon. It served as the successor to Jahsonic.com (1996-2007)[2] which had become nearly unmanageable and hard to make better without severely diluting its idiosyncrasy.

Today, there are there are 42,940 pages and 250 files have been uploaded. There have been a total of 5,692,699 page views, and 225,268 page edits since the wiki was setup. That comes to 3.30 average edits per page, and 25.27 views per edit.

In its first year, writing version 1.0 consisted of completing the almanac. Version 2.0 would have been an almanac per year. Instead, thanks to a recent partnership with a programmer with taste we are moving towards exploiting the web 2.0 capabilities of this wiki using applications such as Yahoo! Pipes.

I’ve been using with great satisfaction my wiki as bliki and would invite all of you nobrow fellow-travellers to do the same by making a user account and writing about your interests on your personal page.