Category Archives: American culture

RIP Joe Cuba (1931 – 2009)

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&]

“Do You Feel It?“

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.

RIP Lux Interior (1946 – 2009)

Lux Interior (1946 – 2009) of the Cramps died yesterday.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owF1iSVi8KA]

“Human Fly“

The encyclopedic stuff:

The Cramps are a punk rock band originally formed in 1972. Their line-up has rotated much over the years, with Lux Interior and Poison Ivy, the lead singer and lead guitarist respectively as the only permanent members. They were part of the early CBGBs punk rock movement that had emerged in New York and are best-known for their song “Human Fly“.

Their music is mostly in blues form, played at varying, (though usually fast) tempos, with a very minimal drumkit. An integral part of the early Cramps sound is dual guitars, without a bassist. The content of their songs and image is sleaze, trashy Americana (much in the style of filmmaker John Waters), sexual fetishism, clever bad jokes, and cheap, horror B-movie clichés.

Their sound was heavily influenced by early rockabilly and proto-rock’n’roll like Link Wray and Hasil Adkins, 1960s surf music acts such as The Ventures and Dick Dale, 1960s garage rock artists like The Standells, The Gants and The Sonics, as well as the post-glam/early punk scene from which they emerged. They also were influenced to a degree by The Ramones and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, who is often credited for having pioneered their style of theatrical horror-blues. Their influences and/or the songs they covered were compiled in the vinyl album series Born Bad.

In turn, they have strongly influenced subsequent punk and rockabilly revival bands, even creating a genre in their wake. “Psychobilly,” a style played by bands like The Meteors and the Sharks, is a term^† coined by the Cramps, although Lux Interior maintains that the term does not describe their own style. The Cramps also influenced or anticipated acts like The White Stripes, The Gun Club, The Fuzztones, James Chance and the Contortions and The Birthday Party.

The personal stuff:

I can’t really remember my first exposure to The Cramps, but I was hooked when they first came within earshot. The first song must have been “Human Fly“, which tapped straight into my veins. I bought most of their albums up until the early nineties, I believe the last one was Smell of Female which I played over and over. Phrases such as “This is to all you Gucci bag carriers out there” can be reproduced from memory.

The phrase is from “You Got Good Taste.”

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYiGxfOL5eo]

Of course, my interest coincided with the then garage rock revival of the eighties. My best memories of The Cramps are bying their originals on the Born Bad series.

“To understand bad taste one must have very good taste” –John Waters

The clearly Betty Page/Irving Klaw-inspired sleeves could have been a lot better but the music opened up to a whole world of musical misfits and one-hit wonders, of which the following “Goo Goo Muck” is an excellent example.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sj24CBT2NSE]

“Goo Goo Muck” (the music doesn’t start until :59)

Farewell Lux!

RIP John Updike (1932 – 2009)

John Updike (1932 – 2009) dies. I have never read anything by him. My only memory remotely connected to the physical me is a foreign professor who came to teach us English at the HIVT, where I studied for translator.

He described a scene in one of Updike’s Rabbit novel sequence in which the main character inserts a gold coin into the vagina of his partner, Janice.

I was instantly put off by the scene, although I am not naturally aversed by debauchery.

The whole story was described by this teacher as terribly a middle-class everyman, perhaps best described in Europe as the petit bourgeois who was a fan of the work of Jacques Brel, one who was laughed at by Brel despite (or perhaps, because) being a fan. It is a character I find difficult to indentify with.

For a writer of such fame, it is strange that so few of his works have been adapted for film (see unfilmability), is this due to the aforementioned unfilmability or just that no filmmaker was inspired enough by the stories of Updike?

From IMDb:

(6.30) – The Witches of Eastwick (1987)
(6.24) – Too Far to Go (1979) (TV)
(6.22) – The Roommate (1985) (TV)
(5.43) – Rabbit, Run (1970)
(5.38) – A & P (1996)

(The films are preceded by their IMDb scores which are a fairly reliable assessment of tastes.)

The Witches of Eastwick is Updike’s most famous work in filmland (it is far too easy for a writer to be famous in bookland, one has to research every artist outside of his own domain to assess future longevity). In 1987, the novel was adapted into a film starring Jack Nicholson as Darryl, Cher as Alexandra, Susan Sarandon as Jane, and Michelle Pfeiffer as Sukie.

I have fond memories of The Witches of Eastwick:

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHVIv-hSg14]

The previous excerpt on the war of the sexes …

Jack Nicholson to Cher:

“Scale against size. … You see! Women are in touch with different things. … I see men running around trying to put their dicks into everything … trying to make something happen, but it’s women who are the source. The only power, nature, birth, rebirth … cliché … cliché … but true.”

… even sounds surprisingly Paglia at her most chthonic.

RIP Charles H. Schneer 1920-2009

RIP Charles H. Schneer, 88, American film producer

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yYeZMx1Y7U]

skeleton scene in Jason and the Argonauts

Charles H. Schneer (1920 – January 21, 2009) was a film producer most widely known for working with special effects pioneer, Ray Harryhausen, best-known for producing films such as The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and Jason and the Argonauts.

The sequence in which seven animated skeletons (see above) rise from the earth and attack Jason and his comrades is widely considered to be among the greatest achievements of motion picture special effects.

Jason and the Argonauts is World Cinema Classic #81.

John Belushi @60

John Belushi, American actor (1949 – 1982)

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VstaFz_ZPg&]

A Youtube tribute to Belushi set to the Ramones “My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down (Bonzo Goes to Bitburg)“.

John Belushi would have celebrated his 60th birthday today, had he not died from a drug overdose in 1982, aged only 33.

John Adam Belushi (1949 – 1982) was an American comedian, actor and musician, notable for his work on Saturday Night Live, National Lampoon’s Animal House, and The Blues Brothers.

Happy birthday Radley Metzger!

Unidentified photo of Radley Metzger

Radley Metzger, American filmmaker, distributor and producer turns 80 today.

If all roads lead to Rome, Metzger‘s birthday leads to The Image, one of the sexiest films of the 1970s.

She lifts her skirt for her mistress.

The Image / The Punishment of Anne (1975) – Radley Metzger [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

The Image is a 1975 film directed by Radley Metzger. The film is based upon the 1956 French novel L’Image, written by Catherine Robbe-Grillet, wife of Alain Robbe-Grillet.

The story of Jean (played by Carl Parker), a writer who meets an old friend, Claire (Marilyn Roberts), at a party and is soon drawn into her world of sadomasochism along with her slave, Anne (Mary Mendum, aka Rebecca Brooke, and Metzger’s girlfriend at the time).

Watch out for the fountain scene if you ever get to see this gem, it makes very clever Freudian use of a free Parisian spectacle.

The film is World Cinema Classic #80.

Edgar Allan Poe @200

Edgar Allan Poe, American writer and poet @200

A photograph of a daguerreotype of Edgar Allan Poe 1848,

first published 1880

Edgar Allan Poe (January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was an American writer, and one of the leaders of the American Romanticism. Best known for his tales of the macabre and mystery, Poe was one of the early American practitioners of the short story and a progenitor of detective fiction and crime fiction. During his lifetime he was more popular in France (thanks to the translations of Baudelaire) than in his native country. After his premature death at the age of 40 he became internationally renowned. The Japanese writer Edogawa Rampo derived his pseudonym of his name. He came to the attention of 20th century audiences via the low-budget film adaptations by Roger Corman starring Vincent Price.

If you only want to read one story by Poe, read “Loss of Breath.”

“Loss of Breath: A Tale Neither in nor Out of “Blackwood” (1832) is a short story by Poe, first published on June 9 or November 10 1832. It concerns a man who suspects that his wife has stolen his breath.

David Ketterer describes the story as: “A surrealistic fantasy in which the idea that death involves not loss of life but merely loss of breath is combined with a whimsical but, for biographers of Poe’s psyche, revealing equation between loss of breath and loss of sexual potency on the narrator’s wedding night”.[1]

“Behold me then safely ensconced in my private boudoir, a fearful instance of the ill consequences attending upon irascibility—alive, with the qualifications of the dead—dead, with the propensities of the living—an anomaly on the face of the earth—being very calm, yet breathless.”

…

“The purchaser took me to his apartments and commenced operations immediately. Having cut off my ears, however, he discovered signs of animation. He now rang the bell, and sent for a neighboring apothecary with whom to consult in the emergency. In case of his suspicions with regard to my existence proving ultimately correct, he, in the meantime, made an incision in my stomach, and removed several of my viscera for private dissection. “

American comedian Andy Kaufman @60

Andy Kaufman performs Mighty Mouse

Click to view, hilarious!

In one of his first television appearances (on the premiere of NBC’s Saturday Night Live, October 11, 1975), Andy Kaufman lip-synched to the Mighty Mouse theme song (but only to the words “Here I come to save the day!”)

Andy Kaufman

Andy Kaufman (1949 – 1984) was an American entertainer and performance artist who refrained from telling jokes and engaging in comedy as it was traditionally understood; instead, he was a practitioner of anti-humor or dada absurdist performance art, referring to himself instead as a “song and dance man.”

Jim Carrey played Kaufman in Miloš Forman‘s 1999 film, Man on the Moon.

Outside of the United States he is best-known as Latka Gravas in the Taxi television sitcom.

RIP American painter Andrew Wyeth (1917 – 2009)

RIP Andrew Wyeth, 91, American painter

christina's world by rachelstyle

Christina’s World (1948) by Andrew Wyeth

Andrew Wyeth (July 12, 1917 – January 16, 2009) was an American figurative painter. He was one of the best-known of 20th century American art, referred to as the “Painter of the People” due to his popularity with the public, although he shares that title with Norman Rockwell. One of the best-known images in 20th century American art is Christina’s World (1948).

In the DVD extras to the film Tideland, an adaptation of Mitch Cullin‘s novel Tideland, director Terry Gilliam cites Christina’s World as an inspiration in setting the backdrop and mood for the movie. The same extras claim that Mitch Cullin was also inspired by this same painting.

Nighthawks(1942) by Edward Hopper

Wyeth is similar to Edward Hopper. Sholem Stein described Christina’s World as “Nighthawks for country folk”.

Avant-garde and kitsch in the early 21st century

Today is Clement Greenberg‘s centennial

Crying Boy (?) – Bruno Amadio

Best-known for his essay Avant-Garde and Kitsch (1939) he is more of an author to acknowledge rather than to admire. His above mentioned Avant-Garde and Kitsch is one of the first texts to one finds when one researches the two extremeties of the artistic experience: avant-garde and kitsch. Two terms coined during the industrial revolution, the first in Paris, the second in Berlin.

Avant-Garde and Kitsch does not deliver. Much more interesting and related reading are The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Benjamin, 1936), Notes on Camp (Susan Sontag, 1964) and The Aporias of the Avant-Garde (Hans Magnus Enzensberger, 1962). The intimate connection between avant-garde and popular culture was first celebrated in the 1990 exhibition High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture.

I have a separate entry on death of the avant-garde.

Combat de nègres dans une cave pendant la nuit

Negroes Fighting in a Cellar at Night predates Malevich’s, Black Square on a White Field by 31 years.

As a term avant-garde was replaced by experimental in the 1960s.

Clement Greenberg (1909 – 1994) was an American art critic closely associated with the abstract art movement in the United States. In particular, he promoted the Abstract Expressionist movement and had close ties with the painter Jackson Pollock. He is the author of Avant-Garde and Kitsch. Such was Greenberg’s influence as an art critic that Tom Wolfe in his 1975 book The Painted Word identified Greenberg as one of the “kings of cultureburg”, alongside Harold Rosenberg and Leo Steinberg. Wolfe contended that these critics influence was too great on the world of art.

He introduces his essay by juxtaposing forms of popular culture and high art:

“ONE AND THE SAME civilization produces simultaneously two such different things s a poem by T. S. Eliot and a Tin Pan Alley song, or a painting by Braque and a Saturday Evening Post cover. All four are on the order of culture, and ostensibly, parts of the same culture and products of the same society. Here, however, their connection seems to end. A poem by Eliot and a poem by Eddie Guest — what perspective of culture is large enough to enable us to situate them in an enlightening relation to each other? Does the fact that a disparity such as this within the frame of a single cultural tradition, which is and has been taken for granted — does this fact indicate that the disparity is a part of the natural order of things? Or is it something entirely new, and particular to our age?”[1]

In the fourth paragraph he starts his defense of the avant-garde vs Alexandrianism (academicism).

“It is among the hopeful signs in the midst of the decay of our present society that we — some of us — have been unwilling to accept this last phase for our own culture. In seeking to go beyond Alexandrianism, a part of Western bourgeois society has produced something unheard of heretofore: — avant-garde culture. ”

Greenberg is a flawed writer. He uses scare quotes as clarification more than 30 times in this text.

His assessment of kitsch is shortsighted. He explicitly equates academic art with kitsch and vice versa. He is right to connote kitsch with the industrial revolution. Possibly he read The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction written three years earlier, which has the same kitsch/industrial revolution analysis but with much less of the judgementalness.

See also: cultural pessimism and elitism

Jahsonic

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