While looking for YouTube footage of the Henry Jaglom film Can She Bake a Cherry Pie, I saw my first episodes of Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert thumbs down/up film criticism show Siskel & Ebert at the Movies. My sympathies went out to Ebert, who I’d formerly dismissed as too mainstream, but who surprised me when he rooted for both Can She Bake a Cherry Pie YouTube, scrub to 5:35 and Joe Versus the VolcanoYouTube trailer, two of my World Cinema Classics. They are WMC #49 and 50 respectively.
Category Archives: American culture
World music classics #39, 40 and 41
 Added: 6 months ago
From: iwillluvher Views: 7,489 |
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 Added: 6 months ago
From: tertolkin Views: 7,336 |
Background info:
- Beastie Boys – Cooky Puss, 1983
- Ciccone Youth – “Into the Groovey“, 1986
- Liquid Liquid – “Cavern“, 1983
Notes: There is a better version on Youtube of “Cavern” (sound-wise), but the one featured here has the original music video, and the only one commissioned by New York record label 99 Records. “Cooky Puss” was a revelation when it came out, and my first exposure to the Beastie Boys. “Into the Groove(y)” was also my first exposure to SY, there are two alternative versions of this Madonna spoof/cover.
If you have the time, check dipsetmuthafucka‘s Youtube channel, he, or rather his musical selection, is the incarnation of taste.
Robert Rauschenberg (1925 – 2008)
Retroactive I (1964) by Robert Rauschenberg
Photo from the Flickr collection of ALFAP
Robert Rauschenberg (October 22 1925 – May 12 2008) was an American artist who came to prominence in the 1950s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art and best-known for such works as Retroactive I (1964) which “collaged” images of current events gathered from magazines and newspapers. A large press photograph of John F. Kennedy speaking at a televised news conference was the source for this screen print on canvas. He juxtaposed the image of Kennedy with another photo silkscreen of a parachuting astronaut. The overlapping, and seemingly disparate, composition creates a colorful visual commentary on a media-saturated culture struggling to come to grips with the television era. (see Susan Hapgood’s Neo-Dada, Redefining Art 1958-1962)
The painting was described by John Coulthart in 2008 as a work that could easily serve as an illustration to J. G. Ballard‘s The Atrocity Exhibition. Coulthart added that “Rauschenberg was one of a handful of artists who seemed to depict in visual terms what Ballard was describing in words. In this respect Robert Hughes’s discussion of the “landscape of media” [in The Shock of the New (1980)] (Ballard’s common phrase would be “media landscape”) is coincidental but significant.” [1]
“I’d rather be lonely than happy with somebody else”
Discover Johann Sebastian Bach [1] through Nina Simone “Love Me or Leave Me“[2] (from 1:40 to 2:50). No, really.
Click the numbers to listen to the music.
Oblique “namesake” connection: Moodymann’s “I’d Rather Be Lonely”
This city is famous for, or, cult fiction #6
This post is part of the cult fiction series, this issue #6
“This city is famous for its gamblers, prostitutes, exhibitionists, anti-Christs, alcoholics, sodomites, drug addicts, fetishists, onanists, pornographers, frauds, jades, litterbugs and lesbians. If you have a moment, I shall endeavor to discuss the crime problem with you, but don’t make the mistake of bothering me.” –Ignatius J. Reilly in A Confederacy of Dunces
Introducing August Darnell
August Darnell aka Kid Creole (Montreal, Canada, 12 August, 1950) is a Canadian musician who has been involved in several dance-oriented projects in New York in the late 1970s and early to mid 1980s. Projects include Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band[0] (led by Darnell’s brother Stony), Don Armando’s Second Avenue Rhumba Band[1], Gichy Dan’s Beechwood #9, the “mutant disco” of Aural Exciters and, of course, Kid Creole and the Coconuts[2], as well as “solo” projects involving Andy “Coati Mundi” Hernandez[2,5], Taana Gardner[3], Fonda Rae[4]. and Lizzy Mercier Descloux[5]. Some of the more (and less)obscure offerings of Darnell have been released on an music compilation in 2008 by Strut Records as Going Places: The August Darnell Years 1976-1983.
Click the number to listen to the tracks, not all tracks are Darnell projects, but also just of the artists mentioned.
Fonda Rae in Machine’s “There but for the Grace of God Go I”[4] is world music classic 38, and has an interesting bit of music censorship history behind it, perhaps more on that later.
Will you talk about yourself?
This post is part of the cult fiction series, this issue #5
The Swimmer (1968) Frank Perry
The famed John Cheever short story appeared in the New Yorker and people talked. Now there will be talk again. When you sense this man’s vibrations and share his colossal hang-up . . . will you see someone you know, or love? When you feel the body-blow power of his broken dreams, will it reach you deep inside, where it hurts? When you talk about “The Swimmer” will you talk about yourself?“
World music classic 37
“I’m looking for the party people, to get down”
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMEEYPc87OQ]
“Wicki Wacky‘” (1974) by Fatback Band
“Wicki Wacky‘” (1974) is a single released on Event Records by the Fatback Band. It was featured on their album “Keep On Steppin’“. The proto-disco song is noted for its driving hi-hats and was a blueprint for subsequent four-on-the-floor dance records. Other notable songs from Fatback include the 80s groove “Is this the Future,” currently unavailable on Youtube. Enjoy and let me know how you like it.
“Talk about genetic deficiencies”
This film is the 46th entry in the category World Cinema Classics.
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esl2NNOtHQE&]
‘Dueling banjos’ scene in Deliverance (1972) by John Boorman
Four Atlanta men go on a trip the remote American wilderness, expecting to have fun and see the glory of nature before the river valley is flooded over by the upcoming construction of a dam and lake. The trip turns into a terrifying ordeal revealing the primal nature of man, his animal instincts of predation and survival, and even his potential for violence.
In what remains one of the most disturbing scenes in film history, Bobby (played by Beatty) is forced at gunpoint to strip naked, his ear twisted to bring him to his hands and knees, and then ordered to “squeal like a pig” as the mountain man sodomizes him, while Ed is bound to a tree and held at gunpoint by the other man.
Other 1972 films that may one day be featured as classic include Silent Running, Deep Throat, The Last House on the Left and Last Tango in Paris.
See also: Unusual Westerns
Adam Kotsko’s blog on the newest The Roots album, and, on Kotsko
The Roots:
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vcz2E4Rs2OU&]
Rising Down “Get Busy” by The Roots: “one of the better large-label releases of 2008.[1]” –Brad via Adam Kotsko
On Kotsko
- Blogging about blogging: “To some extent, I agree with Adam Kotsko that “Meta-blogging is the greatest vice yet developed by humankind.” –Adam Kotsko quoted in the The Reading Experience.
- “Over the past three years, I’ve become a habitué of The Weblog, a “virtual neighborhood” created by Adam Kotsko, a graduate student in theology, and de facto in continental philosophy, who lives in Chicago.” —Scott McLemee
http://www.adamkotsko.com/weblog/