Happy birthday Jello Biafra, former lead singer of the Dead Kennedys. In the late 1980s, the band was embroiled in an obscenity trial in the US over the 1985 Frankenchrist album, which included a “biomannerist” poster with art that depicted penises, “Penis Landscape“[1] by H. R. Giger, a work in the same vein as jahsonic fave Yoshifumi Hayashi.
Interviewed by Jools Holland:
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVrTW7AUkoM]
Photo unidentified of Bill Coday
Bill Coday (May 10, 1942 in Coldwater, Mississippi – June 8, 2008) was a blues and soul musician popular on the British Northern soul scene. As a young man he began singing in juke joints in and around Blytheville, Arkansas. Later, Coday travelled to Chicago, Illinois, and there one night he was “discovered” by Denise LaSalle. LaSalle signed Coday to her Crajon label, and introduced Coday to Willie Mitchell of Memphis, Tennessee. Mitchell’s reputation in the soul and soul blues music industry includes producing such artists as Al Green and Ann Peebles. Mitchell agreed to work with Coday, and a result of this relationship, the team of Mitchell and Coday produced songs that included “Sixty Minute Teaser,” “I Get High on Your Love,” “You’re Gonna Want Me,” and “Get you Lies Straight.”
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCle3p43m3I]
“Sixty Minute Teaser”
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1si3JxfYuBA]
Symmetrics (music credits anyone? Possibly Ravi Shankar?)
I don’t think I’ve mentioned American experimental filmmaker Stan Vanderbeek (1927 – 1984) on this blog. Today, I found his Symmetrics[1] of 1972 on YouTube. Vanderbeek is one of those artists I discovered in the post-internet days. Before the advent of YouTube this usually meant reading about him only, apart from the occasional still one might find on the net, such as this[2] very nice one.
Actually seeing Vanderbeek’s output on YouTube has proven to be very rewarding, especially after my disappointment in seeing much-read-about works Wavelength[3] by Michael Snow (born 1929) and that other overrated “structural film” Serene Velocity[4] by Ernie Gehr (born 1943).
These two last ones are deadly serious and devoid of any sense of humor; works such as Achooo Mr. Kerrooschev (1960) [5] by Vanderbeek are anything but that.
Click the numbers to see, hear.
If you like the work of Vanderbeek, you may also enjoy Len Lye.
My first exposure to Chuck Palahniuk was the film Fight Club. My second was picking up the novel Haunted and reading the epigraph “There was much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust,” a quotation from Edgar Allan Poe‘s “The Masque of the Red Death.” My third exposure was Diary, a novel I started to read and stopped reading around page 30 for reasons I forget.
The first and second exposures were enough to canonize Chuck.
Today, I present you Chuck’s latest novel Snuff, about a porn star on sabbatical, her attempt to break the world record of serial fornication and a portrait of three of the men obliging her in her attempt.
I was a huge Stephen King fan between my twenties and my thirties but if I still would be such an avid reader today, Chuck would replace Stephen. Stephen is a mere horror author while Chuck belongs in the tradition of the fantastique and the grotesque, genres which overlap with horror but which are more of a celebration of the ambiguity and ambivalence of expierence.
Back to the novel.
Since the book industry misses something akin to IMDb.com (although LibraryThing[1] comes close), which allows viewers to rate films, we resort to a randomly picked review [2] by minor writer Lucy Ellmann for the The New York Times who does not like the novel:
Don’t you just love this? Negative criticism which makes you feel like reading the books involved. Lucy Ellman conveniently forgets all of the sensationalist writers from the past.
I seem to have become somewhat of an obituarist.
The pantheon of disco DJs lost one of its demigods when Barry Lederer (September 9 1944 – May 31 2008) died earlier this week. Now you may ask, if Lederer was a demigod, who were the true gods in disco-DJ-mythology? Most commonly cited in this category are David Mancuso, François Kevorkian, Larry Levan, Walter Gibbons, Francis Grasso, Nicky Siano, Tom Moulton and Tee Scott.
In a 2000s interview[1] with disco-disco.com, Lederer noted that his favorite records included:
Click the footnotes to hear the music.
I seem to have developed a strange predilection for women’s fiction over the last few years, and have become a regular viewer – that is, once or twice a month – of the Belgian women’s channel VijfTV since they started airing De Co-assistent . Part of my attraction to women’s fiction is due to the fact that I like to cry (remember, tearjerkers are one of the body genres). Last Friday that station broadcast Linda Hamilton and Jacqueline Bisset in Sex & Mrs. X and I fell asleep afterwards during Cruel Intentions, an interesting update to Les Liaisons dangereuses.
The thing that started my proclivity to chick flicks and women’s fiction was my viewing last summer with my girls of the series Sex and the City during our vacation at Le Crotoy. But even before that, there was my liking of Bridget Jones’s Diaries when it came out and more recently the riveting zipless fuck read by Erica Jong during the summer of 2006.
So it came to pass that I saw Sex and the City: The Movie over the weekend. Since I only do appreciative criticism on these pages I want to focus on three redeeming elements of this film, of which I can say that it lasts 142 minutes, which are 120 minutes too many.
Love Letters of Great Men. A fictional book, which will soon enough become a real one. Quotes from Beethoven‘s letter to his Immortal Beloved: “Though still in bed, my thoughts go out to you, my Immortal Beloved.” The letter ends in the unforgettable lines
ever thine
ever mine
ever ours
The love story between Miranda and Steve. Miranda is the only woman in Sex … whose acting moves me. I’ve always liked Steven.
Louise, the asistent to Carrie Bradshaw is quite endearing. She is played by Jennifer Hudson.
Finally, trying to stay clear of negative criticism, does not mean I cannot use somebody else’s words to lambast this film: Manohla Dargis of The New York Times found Sex and the City: The Movie “a vulgar, shrill, deeply shallow — and, at 2 hours and 22 turgid minutes, overlong — addendum to a show.”
From various Flickr members.
Colette Calascione (born in 1971) is an American artist. She received a B.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute, California. Her work has been shown at St. Mary’s College, Moraga, California and the San Francisco Art Institute, as well as in many galleries, most notably in the San Francisco area.
Sometimes her work reeks just a bit too much of the lowbrow art movement on which I am not always too keen (exceptions such as Mark Ryden notwithstanding), but the work above is steeped in art history, yet feels fresh.
This painting (title: Persephone, 2002) constitutes Icon of Erotic Art number 26.
“Make it Last Forever”
Donna McGhee is an American singer who released one album on Red Greg Records, produced and arranged by Greg Carmichael and Patrick Adams. The track from that album, “Make It Last Forever,” was covered by Loleatta Holloway.
Greg Carmichael (“Barely Breaking Even”) and Patrick Adams (“In the Bush” and “Keep on Jumpin’) produced at least 50 tracks which transcend disco as genre. They are in many ways the auteurs of disco, more so than Larry Levan, Walter Gibbons or Tom Moulton, who were primarily involved in post-production. The only one to rival Adams and Carmichael was Arthur Russell, but his story is altogether different.
One more by Patrick Adams (“My Baby’s Got E.S.P.” notice the similarity of Patrick Adams’s trademark: the string arrangements and slow beats).
“My Baby’s Got E.S.P.”
Harvey Korman (right), click to play YouTube video
Blazing Saddles (1974) Harvey Korman
Blazing Saddles is world cinema classic #51.
See also YouTube – Dentist Sketch – The Carol Burnett Show, a hilarious comedy sketch with Korman in a supporting role, in which the latter is unable to keep from laughing. Korman was infamous for breaking character on The Carol Burnett Show when he would start laughing during sketches, usually due to the antics of Tim Conway, who would deliberately try to crack Korman up.
Kulchur issue 11
For background info, see Kulchur , see also Guide to Kulchur by Ezra Pound
Here are some Kulchur covers from other Flickr members.
Index and covers of all 20 issues
Via realitystudio.org (Supervert)
![[1]](http://members.tripod.com/~revcarroll/gigerlandscape.jpg){kind=link}
![[2]](http://www.jahsonic.com/Vanderbeek.jpg){kind=link}