Still from Deep Throat featuring Linda Lovelace
Gerard Damiano (August 4, 1928 – October 27, 2008) was an American director of pornographic films. He made the infamous film Deep Throat in 1972 starring Linda Lovelace and Harry Reems, cited in the 2005 documentary Inside Deep Throat as the most profitable film ever made. Other notable films made by Damiano include The Devil in Miss Jones (1973) and the sadomasochistic classic The Story of Joanna (1975).
in search of philosophical poetry and poetic philosophy
Time-image is a concept of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze which argues that because of film’s inherent ambiguity (it must be “read” as much as it is “seen” and “heard”); it produces what Deleuze calls “any-space-whatever.” The theory was first brought up in his books on film in relation to such directors as Yasujiro Ozu. He borrowed the term from Pascal Augé (although some scholars erringly reference Marc Augé).
Now Guggenheim chief curator Nancy Spector appropriates (borrows) French philosopher Deleuze’s concept as theanyspacewhatever, an exhibition which brings together new installations by 10 artists including Angela Bulloch, Maurizio Cattelan, Liam Gillick, Jorge Pardo and Carsten Höller. Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho will be shown backwards in 24-hour sequences during which the museum will remain open.
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvWMLAWrEjU]
“In recent years a workprint of Spike Lee‘s music video to Michael Jackson‘s “They Don’t Care About Us” has appeared, which is a rough cut of the Prison version. This version contains even more violent footage (the Rodney King beating, Los Angeles riots, the Chinese Tank Man, the Vietnam war) than the released video, which also includes scenes of the Holocaust, dead bodies, gunshot and African famine scenes and a kid throwing around a foot detached from its body.” —Sholem Stein
See art and politics
Rudy Ray Moore died. I had never heard of him. But the image above I liked.
Rudy Ray Moore (March 17, 1927 – October 19, 2008) was an American comedian, musician, singer, film actor, and film producer. He was perhaps best known as Dolemite, the uniquely articulate pimp from the 1975 film Dolemite, and its sequel, The Human Tornado. The persona was developed during his earlier stand-up comedy records.
Rudy Ray Moore’s type of African-American humor, called bawdry, is also represented by Blowfly and the Detroit Grand Pubahs.
It’s been five years since singer-songwriterElliott Smith (August 6, 1969 – October 21, 2003) died from two stab wounds to the chest. The autopsy evidence was inconclusive as to whether the wounds were self-inflicted. Smith had battled with depression, alcoholism and drug addiction for years, and these topics often appeared in his lyrics.
I’d heard of him before, but this is the first time I am listening to his work. His story and music remind me of Nick Drake and that other tragic 20th century American musician, Tim Buckley.
Some complimentary depression imagery:
Henri Pachard died. Henri who? Don’t worry, I hadn’t heard of him either. He was a porn film director, but judging by way of this clip of the 1984 Great Sexpectations[1], one with a sense of humor and an understanding of the film medium, which is rare in the genre, but successfully displayed in John Byrum‘s Inserts, which to tell you the truth, wasn’t a sex film at all.
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0m42FFeyDY&]
I am quite surprised by this clip of Great Sexpectations. I thought that scripted pornography was a thing of the past after the home video revolution, making way for boring wall to wall sex and killing the softcore and porno chic film industry.
Common wisdom has it that:
I haven’t been able whether Sexpectations was made for a theatrical release or was shot for video. Thanks to Joplinfantasy for uploading this.
Inserts (1975) – John Byrum
Inserts is World Cinema Classic #64. Moon in the Gutter did an article[2] on it.
How to describe Paul Newman to a Martian? He played good guys in 20th century cinema? Did he play bad guys too? I don’t know. He was incredibly handsome with a definite gender-ambiguity about him.
If I had Netflix or GreenCine, I’d watch his rendition of The Glass Menagerie tonight.
Bad Boy (1981) by Eric Fischl
Today is Icon of Erotic Art #33 day. Remember this series is handmade, I’m not pulling this out of a list. So it was with great pleasure that I was reminded Eric Fischl‘s Bad Boy painting[1].
Bad Boy (1981) depicts a young boy looking at and older woman shown in a provocative masturbatory (a beaver shot to be precise) pose on a bed, while the subject is surreptitiously slipping his hand into the woman’s purse and presumedly stealing its contents.
The painting unites eroticism and crime, between the two is a very strong link first explored by Sade and verbally juxtaposed by Jules Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly in Happiness in Crime, a short story first published in the 1874 collection Les Diaboliques. I hope to explore this connection later.
Bad Boy is a painting which provokes the imagination, an equal amount of events seem to be in the painting as outside of it.
I imagine the neighborhood outside the room depicted suburbian. I imagine her husband (she is married and sexually neglected) watering the garden in a David Hockney painting manner. Maybe her husband is taking a A Bigger Splash[2] in their pool. Or the same husband is entertaining his gay lover in Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)[3].
Since all figurative painting involving the human figure is narrative painting a number of questions can be raised:
What is the relationship between the older woman and the boy? Is he her son? Or is she barren? Is he a neighborhood boy who entered her house without her knowing? Is the woman aware that she is being stolen from and spied upon at the same time? Is it a game they play regularly and is the boy rewarded the money afterwards? Who is to tell?
Norman Whitfield died yesterday.
Now you are sad. You remember going religiously to the Passage 44 in Brussels every week to rent 10 CDs, you were determined to learn as much about music as was possible in a very short time. You discovered The Temptations at about the same time you discovered Lee Perry. Your love affair with black music was about to start.
Whitfield remains an underrated music personality. In the words of pop historian and DJ David Haslam:
“The trad agenda set by commentators in the sixties, heavy with value judgments – glorifying the work of the Velvet Underground over Motown releases, the production skills of Brian Wilson over those of Norman Whitfield, and the social significance and songwriting talent of John Lennon rather than James Brown – persists.”
David Haslam
Amen.
In search of computer love.
“In 1959, Texas Instruments’ Jack Kilby files the first patent for an integrated circuit. (Texas racists later run him out of town, crying “segregation forever!”)”
Today, 2008 September 2, is the 50th anniversary of the integrated circuit, and invention that lead to electronic music, Japanese music machines, personal computers, the internet, bitpop and YouTube, to name but a disparate yet connected few.
Much of what we now call the origins of postmodernity coincides with the “microchip revolution or digital revolution,” aptly described by techno-utopian writer Alvin Toffler in Future Shock (1970) and The Third Wave (1980) .
With “Computer Love” (1981), Kraftwerk became the first German musical ensemble to hit No. 1 on the U.K. music charts and the first band to reach an audience with a love song to the computer.
Zapp and Roger also professed their love for man’s best friend in “Computer Love”[3] (1985).
Computer love can lead to computer addiction. By the mid eighties most traditional orchestration was replaced by “Japanese music machines” in Western music. Marvin Gaye’s single “Sexual Healing” lead the way.
An outright celebration of the electronic aesthetic came with electronic disco (“I Feel Love,” “Do You Wanna Funk”), electro funk (“Planet Rock”), techno (“Techno City”) and house music(“Your Love”); while previously non-electronic genres such as reggae also took up the aesthetic (Sleng Teng), but nowhere was this man/machine love affair so strong as in acid house (“I Got a Big Dick”).
Several of these compositions are WMCs.
See also: The Electronic Revolution.
![[1]](http://www.artchive.com/artchive/f/fischl/bad_boy.jpg){kind=link}
![[2]](http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/hockney/splash/hockney.splash.jpg){kind=link}
![[3]](http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/hockney/hockney.pool-2-figures.jpg){kind=link}