[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fagd2mC6RAQ]
Bridge by Michael Cross
Bridge is an installation by British contemporary artist Michael Cross currently hosted in Hasselt, Belgium. It gives the impression that one is walking on water.
Every step you makes a floater appear and disappear. It feels like hovering over an abyss. It is mechanically powered. One of the best things I’ve seen in a while.
Principes d’une esthétique de la mort by Michel Guiomar
And just when you think you’ve seen everything, a book manages to come out of nowhere and amaze you. Today, at the Antwerp book store Demian, I bought Principes d’une esthétique de la mort, les modes de présences, les présences immédiates, le seuil de l’Au-delà, a book essay by French writer Michel Guiomar, published in 1967 by French cult publisher José Corti. The book has not been translated to English, a possible translation of the title is Principles of an aesthetics of death. The book extensively references jahsonic favourite Gaston Bachelard.
Sunbathers by Tuke
Today would have been Henry Scott Tuke‘s 150th birthday. Tuke, (12 June 1858–13 March 1929), a British painter and photographer, is best remembered for his homoerotic paintings of naked boys and young men, which have earned him a status as a pioneer of gay male culture. His nude adolescent boys were depicted doing everyday activities; his images were not overtly erotic, nor did they usually show their genitals.
Staying with our theme of love letters from great men and women, I want you to have “… à aultre ne veulx estre” (Eng: to anyone else I do not want to belong), which I believe to be by Marguerite of Navarre. Aultre means other in Rabelaisian French.
See also: Aultre ne veulx estre (No desire to be otherwise), quotation from Félicien Rops.
Dino Risi (December 23 1916 – June 7 2008) was an Italian film director. With Ettore Scola, he was one of the most prolific exponents of Commedia all’italiana and was best-known for films such as Il Sorpasso and Profumo di donna.
Il Sorpasso (1962) – Dino Risi
The Easy Life (Italian: Il sorpasso) is a 1962 Italian cult movie directed by director Dino Risi. Often considered Risi’s masterpiece and one of the most famous examples of Commedia all’italiana film genre and a poignant portrait of Italy in the early 60s when the “economic miracle” (dubbed the “boom” -with the actual English word- by the local media) was starting to transform the country from a traditionally family-centered society into an individualistic, consumerist and shallower one.
Trailer [YouTube]
The soundtrack includes Italian 1960s hits such as “Saint Tropez Twist”[1] by Peppino di Capri, “Guarda come dondolo”[2][3] by Edoardo Vianello and “Vecchio frac” by Domenico Modugno.
The Annales School is a school of historical writing named after the French scholarly journal Annales d’histoire économique et sociale (first published in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre) where it was first expounded. Annales school history is best known for its approach to history diametrically opposed to various great man theories, incorporating social scientific methods into history resulting in one of the first currents in social history. The Annales school critics influenced later thinkers like Michel Foucault, who, in turn, influenced other Annales thinkers such as American cultural historian Robert Darnton (The Literary Underground of the Old Regime) and the best-known exponent of this school: Fernand Braudel.
The Annalistes, especially Lucien Febvre, advocated a histoire totale, or histoire tout court, a complete study of a historic problem. While several authors continue to carry the Annales banner, today the Annales approach has been less distinctive as more and more historians do work in cultural history and economic history.
The images shown (Thomas Müntzer als Theologe der Revolution, 1921 in a French 10/18 translation and Le Problème de l’incroyance au XVIe siècle. La religion de Rabelais, 1942) are only tangentially related to the Annales School and were sourced at the enigmatic page La Passion des Anabaptistes by Belgian comic book creators Ambre and David Vandermeulen.
I can’t help but wondering what – if there was one – the relation of the Annalistes was to Georges Bataille, who started his journal Documents in the same year as Annales d’histoire économique et sociale. Perhaps Valter “Surreal Documents” knows?
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oawa85d_bJY]
Red Road trailer
I watched the 2006 British film Red Road yesterday evening. The film felt like reading a nouveau roman: no interior nor exterior monologue whatsoever (by that I mean an almost wholly depersonalized narration), the story is revealed through images and short pieces of dialog and benefits from having no prior information of the plot. The film is very reminiscent of that other little gem, Intimacy , but also of Haneke’s Caché because of its intense claustrophobia and manic voyeurism.
As far as my interest in prurience goes, Red Road had everything I had found lacking in Lust, Caution.
Michael Dwyer notes:
Red Road is World Cinema Classic #52, Caché #53 and Intimacy #54.
French blog Au carrefour étrange has ceased its activities for the time being and started a new blog called French book covers [1] which is illustrated with a chic cover photo [2] by the Italian designer and photographer Carlo Mollino. Its author, who goes by the pseudo of Losfeld, has a very extensive collection of books, running the gamut from surrealist theory to sleazy paperbacks, what I like to call nobrow.
A recent post[3] at this new blog featured cover art by French publishing house La Brigandine, for which Jahsonic regular Jean-Pierre Bouyxou has written novels under the pseudonym Georges Le Gloupier before that name was appropriated by the entarteur Noël Godin, a highschool buddy of Bouyxou. One particular of those novels is called Les Accidents de l’amer (Eng: Accidents of the Sea, or accidents of Bitterness, depending on where you place the apostrophe or blank space) and has one of the sexiest covers[4] I’ve seen in some time, due to the particular areola shape of the woman depicted.
I cannot pinpoint (or haven’t tried) the date of these publications, but I would gather mid to late 1970s.
Yves Saint Laurent (August 1 1936 – June 1 2008) was a French fashion designer who was considered ‘one of the greatest figures in French fashion in the 20th century. He was the first living fashion designer to be honored by the Metropolitan Museum of Art circa 1983.
YSL’s noted creations include the “trapeze dress” from 1958 onwards, with a particularly noted incarnation as the “Mondrian dress“[1] in 1965 which adapted Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie-Woogie painting; his “Le Smoking“, immortalized in a photograph by Helmut Newton[2] which anticipated the androgyny of the 1970s and his perfume “Opium” with an appropriately controversial ad campaign [3] photographed by Steven Meisel.
Laurent was the main couturier for Catherine Deneuve and dressed her in The Hunger and Belle de jour[4], and also did the costumes for Gérard Depardieu in Trop belle pour toi and dressed Claudia Cardinale in The Pink Panther.
Today is Marquis de Sade‘s 268th birthday. Was he our first postmodernist? The man who showed us that words are not necessarily representations of reality. That one can construct limits of text only. The first modernist too: by transgressing all rules, showed us that there are rules. Above all the Marquis has proven a tough act to follow. One can divide modernity in pre- and post-Sadean. Anyone wishing to transgress (in words, not in deeds) has only one reference, the Marquis himself. The only possible answer to his antics are incorporating his sensibility without following his monomania.
David Locher writes[1] in “Postmodernism as Neo-Dada”
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![[1]](http://www.jahsonic.com/YSL.jpg){kind=link}
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