Visual culture blog Hugo Strikes Back is back after a two-month absence, reports our English correspondent Paul Rumsey.
He used to be here[1], now he is here [2].
From Hugo Strikes Back’s recent posts, I give you the above book cover by Japanese artist Yotsuya Simon (born July 12, 1944) and noted for his bellmeresque[3] dolls.
This is Carl Hancock Rux‘s “No Black Male Show” mixed with “I Recall (There I Am)” from Rux’s Rux Revue album. Most readily, it seems to refer to “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised“.
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XirwjeOJaqM]
The video by Philipp Virus and Ian Kerkhof under the alias Aryan Kaganof.
Ian Kerkhof was brought to my attention by Valter when he pointed me to The Dead Man 2: Return of the Dead Man.
Carl Hancock Rux is probably familiar with Saul Williams whose “List of Demands”[1] was one of the finds of 2008. See also contemporary voices in black music.
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daaKRAWTjJ8]
Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye is a 2004 American film adaptation of the 1928 novel by the French writer Georges Bataille. The film, directed by Andrew Repasky McElhinney, takes place in a seemingly abandoned house where a group of people engage in wordless acts of passion. The film covers a period from evening to morning, and the sexual couplings among the members of the house becomes increasingly harrowing as daylight arrives.
Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye began as a video installation before being reconfigured into a feature-length film. It had its New York theatrical premiere in September 2004, and its support was led by Dave Kehr of the New York Times, who wrote of the production; “This is transgression in a literal sense, an act of aggression that Bataille would no doubt have appreciated. This is not a movie for passive consumption, but a film that bites back.”
I discovered Cuba’s work via the Nu Yorica and Nova Classics 01 compilations. Tracks from those compilations that have acquired cult status include “Do You Feel It?[1]” (most likely his interpretation of the Latin traditional “El Ratón“[2]), and “El Pito (I’ll Never Go Back to Georgia)[3].”
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-xIxdwpqY8&]
His biggest hit was the 1966 “Bang! Bang![4],” which achieved unprecedented success for Latin music in the United States.
Joe Cuba (1931 – February 15, 2009), was a Puerto Rican musician who was considered to be the “Father of Latin Boogaloo“. The lyrics to Cuba’s music used Spanglish, a mixture of Spanish and English, becoming an important part of the Nuyorican Movement, somewhat the Latin version of the Harlem Renaissance.
I’d never seen this one before.
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwQJdHLlSdk&]
Opening scene from Bad (most probably featuring Cyrinda Foxe)
Andy Warhol’s Bad is the title of a 1977 American film directed by Jed Johnson starring Carroll Baker, Cyrinda Foxe and Susan Tyrrell and produced by Andy Warhol. It is infamous for a scene where a baby is thrown out a window of a skyscraper by Susan Blond and dies on the pavement.
Got to love eighties video cover art.
The opening screening in March 1977 attracted over 750 people, including Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, Julie Christie and George Cukor.
Who did the music on this intro?
Lou Castel and Carroll Baker
Carroll Baker’s “eurosleaze” career
After finding out about Bill Landis‘s death last month, I finally ordered his Sleazoid Express and surprisingly almost read it from cover to cover in chronological order.
I’m amazed by the book.
It is very much “spirit of place,” (I should explain, the whole book is divided in chapters that correspond to certain film theatres in the vicinity of 42nd Street, with knowledge of every hot dog stand, every theatre’s audience, the condition and relative safety of the bathrooms etc…).
At times Sleazoid Express reads like a realistic plotless piece of fiction in the manner of the enumerations of consumer goods in American Psycho.
Just like the consumer goods in Psycho, the films referenced are real and range from silents such as Trapped by the Mormons (1922) in its Mondo film chapter, to intriguing eurosleaze titles such as Orgasmo by Umberto Lenzi in its chapter on the sexploitation school of European exploitation so well documented in Immoral Tales: European Sex & Horror Movies 1956-1984.
Let us focus on Orgasmo, a 1969 Italian film by Umberto Lenzi starring Carroll Baker and Lou Castel.
Carroll Baker’s eurosleaze career
Following a protracted legal battle with Paramount Pictures and divorce from her second husband, Jack Garfein, Carroll Baker moved to Europe. Eventually settling in Italy, she would spend the next several years starring in hard-edged giallo thrillers, including The Sweet Body of Deborah (1968), Paranoia (1970), and Baba Yaga (1973). During those years, film locations would take her all around the world, including Spain, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Mexico. A lead role in Andy Warhol’s Bad (1977) brought her back to American shores.
Umberto Lenzi
Umberto Lenzi (born August 6 1931), is an Italian film director who was very active in low budget crime films, peplums, spaghetti westerns, war movies, cannibal films and giallo mysteries (in addition to writing many of the screenplays himself). He is the director of two highly controversial exploitation films: Eaten Alive! (1980) and Cannibal Ferox (1981) as well as the film adaptation of the Italian comic book Kriminal (1966). He was one of the first Italian directors to get involved in the Giallo film craze (along with Mario Bava and Dario Argento), and his “Man From Deep River” is credited as being the film that started the “Italian cannibal film” genre later popularized by Ruggero Deodato, Jess Franco and others. His most critically acclaimed film is Milano odia: la polizia non può sparare (1974).
Paranoia/Orgasmo
Trailer
Orgasmo is a 1969 Italian film by Umberto Lenzi starring Carroll Baker and Lou Castel. The film was released in the United States as Paranoia. Lenzi’s other film Paranoia (1969) was released as in the United States as “A Quiet Place To Kill” in the USA, since “Orgasmo” was already released in the USA as “Paranoia“.
Orgasmo premiered in Italy on February 2 1969. Bertrand Tavernier was credited but did not actually work on the film.
Orgasmo is my first exposure to Umberto Lenzi. It is the story of a rich woman being seduced by a male, who moves in with her but his “sister” comes along. His sister appears to be his lover and their goal is to destabilize the woman with drink and drugs and then kill her. (the plot twist of bringing a “sibling” to the party and destroying their host has been best explored in The Servant (1963) with Dirk Bogarde).
The film brings up interesting links.
Cuckoldry discovery
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPnPpPzcKpY
Carroll Baker in scenes from Paranoia/Orgasmo, A Quiet Place To Kill and The World Is Full of Married Men.
For example the above YouTumentary of a recurring scene in Carroll Baker‘s oeuvre played by her in three different movies. In Paranoia/Orgasmo, A Quiet Place To Kill and The World Is Full of Married Men. This scene ought to have a name in narratology. The first hand experience of catching your lover making love to another woman or another man. An iconic moment in this category would be the famous walk-in scene in Brian De Palma‘s Body Double in which the hero discovers his wife after a long and painful build up.
When I think of myself I want to vomit
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xf5WKB791M
An iconic scene of Orgasmo is Baker saying “When I think of myself I want to vomit.” Great stuff for when you are in a self-loathing mood.
Charles Darwin @200
Contemporary satirical drawing of Darwin
It is my fashion to view people’s careers in terms of their controversies and their influences outside of their own fields.
Darwin’s claim to fame in this context is that he said we are of common descent with “apes.”
Charles Robert Darwin (February 12, 1809 – April 19, 1882) was an eminent English naturalist who achieved lasting fame with his 1859 book On the Origin of Species which established evolution by common descent as the dominant scientific explanation of diversification in nature.
Influence on Naturalism
Writers who belong to the 19th century literary school of Naturalism were influenced by the evolution theory of Charles Darwin. They believed that one’s heredity and social environment decide one’s character. Naturalism attempts to determine “scientifically” the underlying forces (i.e. the environment or heredity) influencing these subjects’ actions. In fact, Zola wrote a long essay in which he mentioned Darwin in relation to contemporary literature. The essay was called The Experimental Novel and described the process of writing a novel as an experiment, in which the writer introduces “characters”, and the outcome is determined by heredity and mileu.
He wrote:
If I remember correctly, Naturalism in literature shares its etymological roots with the Natural Sciences, of which Darwin was a practitioner.
Also, one-time-Naturalist-turned-decadent Huysmans‘s in Against the Grain has his alter ego Des Esseintes praise the “evolution of language so rightly insisted on by Darwin“. But that book appalled Zola, who felt it had dealt a “terrible blow” to Naturalism.
Influence on Bergson
Henri Bergson was highly influenced by biology, particularly Charles Darwin‘s On the Origin of Species, which was released the year of Bergson’s birth. This leads Bergson to discuss the ‘Body’ and ‘Self’ in detail, arguably prompting the fundamental ontological and epistemological questions to be raised later in the twentieth-century French philosophy.
Related subjects
To say that Darwin has been influential is an understatement. His name has been linked to other controversial issues such as degeneration, social hygiene, color terminology for race, and social Darwinism, as well as the notion of the survival of the fittest.
Maybe Marinetti‘s 1927 book Scatole d’Amore in Conserva (boxes of love conserved) later inspired Piero Manzoni so famously to can his own excrement. “Conjecture, your honor!”
![Merda d'Artista by Piero Manzoni by [AMC]](http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2364/2318022504_b88e8e8ca4_m.jpg)
“Merda d’Artista” by Piero Manzoni by Flickr user [AMC]
RIP Blossom Dearie
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHUVWEgHAy8&]
Blossom Dearie (April 28, 1926 – February 7, 2009) was an American jazz singer and pianist, often performing in the bebop genre and known for her “distinctive, girlish voice”. Outside of the jazz world, she is noted for such songs as the 1970 “I Like London In The Rain“, which features an opening breakbeat that has been sampled by hip hop producers.
“I Like London In The Rain” is WMC #277.
Soul Jazz Presents Fly Girls: B Boys Beware – Revenge of the Super Female Rappers (2008) [Amazon.com]
[FR] [DE] [UK]
I’ ve mentioned this before, that the majority of releases in my cd-collection are anthologies. One of the finest anthology labels since the 1990s is Soul Jazz Records. That British company has just released
Fly Girls! (full title Soul Jazz Presents Fly Girls: B Boys Beware – Revenge of the Super Female Rappers), anthology of female rap artists that celebrates the genre’s 30th anniversary. What follows is a wikified version of the liner notes, of which I could not identify the author. Please fill me in on that blank if you own the cd. The liner notes are hyperlinked to Youtube entries.
The compilation is worth its price alone for featuring the below track by Camille Yarborough.
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zg1oh45n5iI&]
The history of female rap on record begins in 1979 in New York City as the clamour of the city’s artists, record companies and producers strove to make it onto vinyl in the wake of The Sugarhill Gang’s squillion-selling hit, “Rappers Delight“[1] – released that year on the former soul singer Sylvia Robinson’s Sugarhill Records. It would be the Winley family – comprising sisters Tanya, Paulette – who made the first female rap record produced by their mother Ann and released on their father’s label, Paul Winley Records.
Aside from the singing/rap styles that earlier soul artists such as Aretha Franklin[2], Shirley Ellis[3], Millie Jackson[4] and Laura Lee[5] would occasionally adopt in their songs, female rap (like rap itself) had its antecedents in the groundbreaking black poetry of the 60s and 70s with radical, free-thinking poets such as Nikki Giovanni[6], Camille Yarborough[7] and Sarah Webster Fabio[8] – all of whom are included here – vocalising hitherto unheard expressions of female and black self-determination in their work. These strong, educated, political women not only led the way stylistically but also helped define how a female artist could make their own career path – weaving creativity, politics and family in a way that Missy Elliott[9], Queen Latifah[10] and others have since followed – establishing the boundary-breaking career paths of many female artists in rap. Hip-hop is a culture of which music is only a part; nowadays (and to an extent from the very beginning) the most successful female hip-hop artist is often singer, DJ, actress, manager, political and social agitator and more in multiple combinations.
Hip-hop’s story begins in the tenement blocks and community centres of the South Bronx. In the first three years-or-so history of hip-hop (1976-9) – before the first rap records were made – aspiring female artists could watch onstage the early female MC role models of Sha-Rock (the first female MC in the group Funky Four Plus One[11]) or the Mercedes Ladies[12] (the first female MC and DJ crew). With Tanya and Paulette Winley’s ‘Rappin and Rhymin’ on vinyl by 1979 it would not be until the following year that the first all-female crew made it onto vinyl when The Sequence[13] (featuring a then unknown Angie Stone) was astutely signed, once again, by Sylvia Robinson to Sugarhill Records.
Robinson was not the only woman on the business side of hip-hop. There was Kool Lady Blue who first brought rap out of the Bronx and into downtown NYC at the Roxy nightclub and also later managed The Rocksteady Crew. Monica Lynch who rose to head of A and R and president of Tommy Boy Records, and later vice-president of Warners, comments that because hip-hop was new it did not have the hierarchy of the traditional music industry and women were thus able to move more easily into executive roles. Later, as we shall see, many of the artists moved into the business themselves taking control of their careers and aiding others.
Roxanne Shante is certainly the first female rapper to make a career out of her music. Shante and fellow Queens-resident and producer Marley Marl fought their corner for both their borough (taking on Boogie Down Productions and the Bronx) and anyone else who dared call themselves ‘Roxanne’ in a slanging-match known as The Roxanne Wars[14]. This verbal jousting had its antecedents dating back to the ‘dozens’ of the playground and tower-block (‘Your mother is a …’, ‘No, your mother is a …’) and to the Griot storytellers of Africa. Roxanne Shante, and many others here, effortlessly subverted this – and many other – male-dominated traditions to create and re-write new histories.