Fellow blogger Nurse Myra and I share an interest in weird science. Nurse Myra writes of herself in the third person singular. Norman Mailer used to do that too. Sometimes I feel I’d like to experiment with it. Jahsonic quotes from Nurse’s post on Serge Voronoff (the scientist responsible for the experiments depicted above and who came to his attention by stumbling on American “anthropologica” publisher Falstaff Press):
“One of nursemyra’s guilty secrets is that she is attracted to simian men. if they’re strong, silent, hairy chested, single minded, testosterone fueled and stinking of pheromones I’m a good chance to be shedding my uniform and peeling their bananas before the day is out. “
“El Topo is not a Western, it goes further than any Western … El Topo is not a religious film, it contains all religions … This film is bloody… El Topo is miraculous and terrible … El Topo is monstrous and cruel”
This slightly overrated curio premiered exactly 37 years today at the Elgin, New York.
The Dice Man is a comedic novel published in 1971 by George Cockcroft under the pen nameLuke Rhinehart and tells the story of a psychiatrist who begins making life decisions based on the casting of dice. The novel is noted for its subversivity, anti-psychiatry sentiments and for reflecting moods of the early 1970s. Due to its subversive nature and chapters concerned with controversial issues such as rape, murder and sexual experimentation, it was banned in several countries. Upon its initial publication, the cover bore the confident subheader, “This book can change your life” and quickly became a modern cult classic.
“I deny baptism and the mass. There is no human act, on the internal erotic level, more pernicious than the descent of the so-called jesus-christ onto the altars.
No one will believe me and I can see the public shrugging its shoulders but the so-called christ is none other than he who in the presence of the crab louse god consented to live without a body…”
…
All this is very well,
but I didn’t know the Americans were such a warlike people.
In order to fight one must get shot at
and although I have seen many Americans at war
they always had huge armies of tanks, airplanes, battleships
that served as their shield.
I have seen machines fighting a lot
but only infinitely far
behind
them have I seen the men who directed them.
Rather than people who feed their horses, cattle, and mules the
last tons of real morphine they have left and replace it with
substitutes made of smoke,–Artaud via [1]
Scrub to 3:30 for immediate access to Free Radicals (an instant dance music classic)
The phrase “free radical” got stuck in my head, and Googling for it brought up a 1958 film by New Zealand experimental filmmaker Len Lye, titled Free Radicals. The film features white ‘chalk’ lines constantly moving on a black background with African drums (‘a field tape of the Bagirmi tribe’) playing throughout. The film won second prize out of 400 entries in an International Experimental Film Competition judged by Man Ray, Norman McLaren, Alexander Alexeieff and others, at the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels. In 1979 Lye further condensed this already very concentrated film by dropping a minute of footage. Stan Brakhage described the final version as “an almost unbelievably immense masterpiece (a brief epic)’. I could not agree more.
“In 1951, the first electronic music studio was conceived from scratch at the WDR Radio of Cologne (Germany) to enable the composition of electronic music sounds. Briefly, the concept of studios evolved up to the 1955 design of the Phonology studio in Milan by Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna. With nine oscillators, various filters and other sophisticated equipment , the presence of a technician/musician (Marino Zuccheri), the studio was the best equipped in the world at that time.” via usoproject
For those of you new to Branca, you may want to start with the fairly accessible and trancy composition Lesson 1 for Electric Guitar, originally released on 99 Records as a mini-album, remastered and re-released in 2004 by Dan Selzer’s Acute Records.
EXPRMNTL, also known as the Knokke Experimental Film Festival and Festival du Film Expérimental de Knokke-le-Zoute was the largest Belgian festival dedicated to experimental cinema. The festival succeeded the Brussels Experimental Film Festival (1947 and 1958) and was held under the EXPRMNTL moniker in 1963 (EXPRMNTL 3), 1967 (EXPRMNTL 4) and 1974 (EXPRMNTL 5). It was conceived and curated by Jacques Ledoux and the Cinémathèque royale de Belgique in Knokke-le-Zoute. It was organized five times between 1949 and 1974.
