Category Archives: death
Harvey Korman (1927 – 2008)
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.
Every woman adores a fascist
Or, in praise of difficult women
In my never relenting quest for the stereotypes of modern culture, I’ve mentioned the “difficult man”[1] and the “sexually frustrated woman”[2]. Today, let’s have a look at another archetype: the “difficult woman.” But before we go on I would like mention that I want to include in my definition of “difficult” the connotation “complicated.” Many difficult people are difficult because they are complex personalities, often torn apart by conflicting inner desires.
The archetypical difficult women in world literature are Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina, who both had a quixotic lust for fiction and who both committed suicide. Many difficult women are also strong women and that is why we men love them and at the same time have a complicated relationship with them. We love them and hate them.
Many “difficult” people lead unhappy lives, and many commit suicide. Easy-going people don’t.
To say that Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) was a difficult rather than an easy-going woman is a platitude, she is only one of the talented but tortured people who left our planet voluntarily prematurely. She famously said that “Every woman adores a fascist,” in a poem dedicated to the memory of her father. I would like to add to her words that “every man adores a femme fatale, bad girl or difficult woman,” and would like to conclude with Sylvia Plath reading from her own poem “Daddy“. If you want to head straight to the “fascist” quote, scrub to 2:14.
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hHjctqSBwM&]
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]
Albert Hofmann (1906 – 2008)
- “I suddenly became strangely inebriated. The external world became changed as in a dream. Objects appeared to gain in relief; they assumed unusual dimensions; and colors became more glowing. Even self-perception and the sense of time were changed. When the eyes were closed, colored pictures flashed past in a quickly changing kaleidoscope. After a few hours, the not unpleasant inebriation, which had been experienced whilst I was fully conscious, disappeared. what had caused this condition?” —Albert Hofmann (Laboratory Notes, 1943)
Albert Hofmann (January 11 1906 – April 29 2008) was a Swiss scientist best known for synthesizing lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). Hofmann authored more than 100 scientific articles and wrote a number of books, including LSD: My Problem Child.
Some LSD visuals:
Film poster for The Trip (1967)
The Acid Eaters (1968) – Byron Mabe
Tagline: The film of anti-social significance.
images from here.
Aimé Césaire (1913 – 2008)
Aimé Fernand David Césaire (25 June 1913 – 17 April 2008) was a French poet, author and politician. He was with Léopold Sédar Senghor one of the figure heads of the négritude movement, the precursor to the Black Power movement of the 1960s. His writings reflect his passion for civic and social engagement. He is the author of Discours sur le colonialisme (Discourse on Colonialism) (1953), a denunciation of European colonial racism which was published in the French review Présence Africaine. In 1968, he published the first version of Une Tempête, a radical adaptation of Shakespeare’s play The Tempest for a black audience.
Rafael Azcona (1926 – 2008)
Rafael Azcona died last Monday. I was sort of waiting until someone in the English blogosophere would write a fitting obituary (I was thinking of Robert Monell or Mike from Esotika), but it appears that his death went largely unnoticed in the anglosphere. As such, it would have gone unnoticed by me as well, were it not for the excellent Belgian literary blog “De Papieren Man” who reported Azcona’s death here.
To mainstream audiences, Azcona is best known for his writing credits on Belle Époque Youtube, which starred Penelope Cruz.
To cult film aficionados as myself, Azcona is best-known for his collaborations with über cult filmmaker Marco Ferreri, and especially as the scriptwriter of La Grande Bouffe WCC#13.
More Ferreri/Azcona collaborations include El Pisito, The Wheelchair, The Ape Woman , The Conjugal Bed, Countersex , The Man With The Balloons, The Wedding March, Kiss The Other Sheik, Her Harem, The Audience and, Don’t Touch the White Woman.
There is one Spanish obituary you may want to check by a blogger who calls himself an emotional pornographer (que bonito) [1]. Finally, this seems to be one of the more complete English language obituaries.
Mikey Dread (1954 – 2008)
The shoe of a dead woman at the bottom of a cupboard
Image from Dead Woman’s Shoes
The Critical Dictionary (French: Dictionnaire critique) was a regular section of the journal Documents. It offered short essays by Georges Bataille and his colleagues on such subjects as “Absolute“, “Eye“, “Factory Chimney”, and “Keaton (Buster)“.
In the entry for aesthete one finds the following sentence:
- “When it comes down to it, these words have the power to disturb and to nauseate: after fifteen years, one finds the shoe of a dead woman at the bottom of a cupboard; one throws it in the rubbish bin.” […] The unfortunate who says that art no longer works, because that way one remains disengaged from the ‘dangers of action’, says something deserving of the same attention as the dead woman’s shoe.” (translation by Art in Theory).
Bataille never fails to intrigue me. I must confess – and I always do – that I do not understand one iota of what he means by the image of a dead woman’s shoe in relation to art and aesthetes, but not understanding is a very big part of the attraction. As I stated before, I like my philosophy poetic and incomprehensible.
Art or exhibitionism?
Above is a feebly related image to introduce this post on Art or exhibitionism?
A recent post [1] by Belgian blogger Martin Pulaski, in which he shares with his readers his list of medication, prompts me to think about the relation between art and exhibitionism.
All of us bloggers are to a lesser or greater extent exhibitionists and artists. We want to share, get our message out there, we imagine a readership, we want it to grow, we want to connect. All are qualities of the artist and the exhibitionist. Whether we succeed or not can only be left to posteriority. This has not always been the case perhaps, I hear myself wonder. It hasn’t and it has.
One can easily point to the Romantics and JJR‘s Confessions as a starting point of this exhibitionism. One can even go further back to Catullus who authored these incredibly explicit lines of poetry in the first century BC.
Coming back to the present age and the contemporary relevance of “art or exhibitionism?,” there has been the internet which has made each and everyone of us self-publishers.
Back to the arts, the real arts, the institutionalized arts.
I’ve been very much intrigued by Tracey Emin‘s Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995, a concept that needs no explanation except maybe a Google gallery [2].
I’ve made a variation on this candid list: Everyone I’ve personally known who committed suicide. I know it’s macabre, even more than Emin’s listing the foetus of her aborted child; but this is a dedication to those who’ve said goodbye, and a thank-you-note to whoever for my life until now.