Category Archives: grotesque

Headpress Guide to the Counter Culture

Headpress Guide to the Counter Culture : A Sourcebook for Modern Readers (2004) – Temple Drake, David Kerekes [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Subject matter will appeal to a broad cross section of interests, and includes cult film, outsider music, graphic art, photography, adult comics, fiction, eroticism, crime and the occult.

This is a collection of zine and book reviews that previously appeared in the Headpress zine during the nineties. Most of the material was familiar to me. Some pleasant surprises were Daniel Clowes (Ghost World, Google gallery, and this, his work is similar to fellow American Charles Burns), mentions of Colin Wilson, a portrait of the work of Roy Stuart, (Google gallery who put narrativity back into erotic photography by making use of vignettes).

Most of the books/mags reviewed are from the nineties and early 2000s.

I am very much intrigued by this:

Bechamp or Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology (1997) – Douglas E. Hume
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

This book claims that virtually every serious and minor ailment known to humanity has been linked to vaccine damage, and there’s an “unaccountable” connection between the AIDS epidemic in Central Africa and the massive vaccination campaigns that occured there. — Mikita Brottman via Headpress Guide to the Counter Culture (2004). See also anti-vaccination.

And thankful for turning me on to this:

The Art of the Nasty (1999) – Nigel Wingrove, Marc Morris
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK] […]

Conclusion: I liked the non-fiction reviews the best. In that field, Adam Parfrey (Apocalypse Culture) is somewhat a central figure.

If you like Headpress you may also enjoy Dalkey Archive Press – Atlas Press – Jörg Schröder – John Calder – Sylvia Beach – Creation Books – Edmund Curll – Lawrence Ferlinghetti – Maurice Girodias – Glittering Images – Grove Press – Eric Losfeld – Headpress – New Directions – Obelisk Press – Olympia Press – Jean-Jacques Pauvert – RE/Search publications (V.Vale and A. Juno) – Barney Rosset – Taschen and Semiotext(e).

Headpress elsewhere: at giallo fever.

Tarantino’s take on the grindhouse phenomenon opens tonight

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6l-InqDHmA]

Grindhouse (2007) – Rodriguez and Tarantino

As I’ve pointed out before here, Greencine is serializing Eddie Muller’s 1996 non-fiction book Grindhouse: The Forbidden World of “Adults Only” Cinema on the grindhouse phenomenon. From Greencine’s latest entry:

“I’m almost surprised that Tarantino and Rodriguez didn’t convince their patrons, Harvey and Bob Weinstein, to coat the floors of the theaters themselves with the very special shoe-sole-sticking gunk that was an unavoidable aspect of the real grindhouse experience,” writes Premiere‘s Glenn Kenny. “Death Proof offers ‘thrills’ that are deeply unpleasant and deeply unwholesome, and it’s here that Grindhouse comes closest to achieving the ‘climate of perdition’ that another surrealist critic, Robert Benayoun termed the hallmark of ‘authentic sadistic cinema.’ A lot of people associate a taste for grindhouse movies with the tiresome condescension of the ‘so-bad-it’s-good’ ethos, but Tarantino understands the aesthetics of aberrance that animated the explorations of so-called trash hounds.” —Greencine

Returning to Glenn Kenny’s review, I am intrigued by his opening lines mentioning Ado Kyrou and by the mention of Benayoun. I quote:

“…[G]o and learn to see the worst films; they are sometimes sublime,” the surrealist filmmaker and critic Ado Kyrou advised in 1963. While neither Robert Rodriguez nor Quentin Tarantino are (to my knowledge) disciples of Kyrou, they carry his ethos in their bones.

…

And it’s here that Death Proof offers “thrills” that are deeply unpleasant and deeply unwholesome, and it’s here that Grindhouse comes closest to achieving the “climate of perdition” that another surrealist critic, Robert Benayoun, termed the hallmark of “authentic sadistic cinema.”

I am especially interested in where Benayoun supposedly talked about the “climate of perdition” and “authentic sadistic cinema.”

Anyone know more?

Trevor Brown’s fantasy land

Following on my previous post on Venetian Snares where I mentioned Trevor Brown, some more about the latter:

Artwork by Trevor Brown

My Alphabet (1999) – Trevor Brown
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Li’l Miss Sticky Kiss (2004) – Trevor Brown
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Though presently living in Japan, Trevor Brown is an British artist whose work explores paraphilias, such as pedophilia, BDSM, and other fetish themes, with unusual wit.

Important career motivating friendships include French artist Romain Slocombe (the pioneer of “medical art”) and William Bennett (leader of the notorious electronic-noise band Whitehouse.

Trevor Brown’s art has been featured in Adam Parfrey’s Apocalypse Culture II, and in Jim Goad’s ANSWER Me! zine, as well as a variety of other publications. His work has been featured as cover art for a number of bands, including Deicide, Whitehouse, GG Allin, Kayo Dot, and Venetian Snares.

He is often compared with Mark Ryden in that he is known for child-like characters in various states of distress. However themes in his work extend to car crashes, (reminiscent of J.G. Ballard’s Crash), abattoirs, and Japanese pornography. His art is close in spirit to the Young British Artists such as Damien Hirst or Jake and Dinos Chapman. —[1]

Trevor Brown illustraded CDs by Merzbow, Venetian Snares and Whitehouse (here, here, here and here).

Articles: Trevor Brown interviews Masami Akita – Trevor Brown on Japanese bondage, Kinbiken and Chimou Nureki

The common tendency to do exactly the wrong thing

For lack of a better illustration: Ligeia read by Vincent Price

The Imp of the Perverse is a metaphor for the common tendency, particularly among children and evildoers, to do exactly the wrong thing in a given situation. The conceit is that the misbehavior is due to an imp (a small demon) leading an otherwise decent person into mischief.

The phrase has a long history in literature, and was popularized (and perhaps coined) by Edgar Allan Poe in his short story, “The Imp of the Perverse“. It is a study in guilt or the human thirst for self-destructive behaviour.

“Guilt” should not be taken here in either the standard legal or moral senses. Poe’s characters usually do not feel “guilt” because they did a “bad” thing—that is, the story is not didactic (in his essay “The Poetic Principle” Poe called didacticism the worst of “heresies”); there is no “moral to the story.” Guilt, for Poe, is “perverse,” and perverseness is the desire for self-destruction. It is completely indifferent to societal distinctions between right and wrong. “Guilt” is the inexplicable and inexorable desire to destroy oneself eo ipso.

The Poe Decoder notes that “When Poe speaks of perverseness, he does not intend narrower denotations of the various forms of the word. He does not mean “perverted,” as in sexual miscreance. Though such deviancy may be perverse, it bears little resemblance to the examples of perversity which Poe elucidated in his tales.” As such, Poe’s interpretation of perverseness deserves a prominent place in the history of irrationalism.

In Poe’s words:

“… no reason can be more unreasonable; but in fact, there is none more strong. With certain minds, under certain conditions, it becomes absolutely irresistible. I am not more certain than I breathe, than that the assurance of the wrong or error of any action is often the one unconquerable force which impels us, and alone compels us to its prosecution. Nor will this overwhelming tendency to do wrong for the wrong’s sake, admit of analysis, or resolution into ulterior elements. It is a radical, primitive impulse–elementary.”

and

“We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss – we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is the shrink away from the danger. Unaccountably we remain… it is but a thought, although a fearful one, and one which chills the very marrow of our bones with the fierceness of the delight of its horror. It is merely the idea of what would be our sensations during the sweeping precipitancy of a fall from such a height… for this very cause do we now the most vividly desire it.”

The Imp of the Perverse is also masterfully exemplified in The Bad Glazier, a prose poem by Baudelaire collected in Paris Spleen:

Baudelaire’s prose poem “The bad glazier” is a marvelous example of the imp of the perverse; after a discourse on personality and action, a man calls a glazier up to his fourth-story apartment. He inspects the glazier’s glass, “discovers” that there is no colored glass in the man’s pack (which we sense he may have known all along), and sends the glazier back on his way. When the poor glazier reaches the ground floor and leaves the building, our protagonist throws a flower pot at him and breaks his glass. “And drunk with my madness,” the protagonist tells us, “I shouted down at him furiously: ‘Make life beautiful! Make life beautiful!'” Rachel Barenblat via www.webdelsol.com/InPosse/barenblat.htm

Gymnosperm plants, a genus comprised solely of the Welwitschia mirabilis

Unidentified illustration of the Welwitschia mirabilis

I want to quickly share this find with you. The Welwitschia mirabilis is a Gymnosperm (“naked seeds“) plant which is quite literally sui generis: of its own kind. The plant reminds of the Komodo dragon.

via thrillingwonder

See also: this, the Google gallery and the Wikipedia entry. Check also the same blog’s post on lenticular clouds.

His unpleasant relations with her so affected his health

And some Goltzius to bid you good night:

Icarus, from The Disgracers, engraving, 1588

At the age of twenty-one Goltzius (1558 – 1617), Dutch painter and engraver, married a widow somewhat advanced in years, whose money enabled him to establish at Haarlem an independent business; but his unpleasant relations with her so affected his health that he found it advisable in 1590 to make a tour through Germany to Italy, where he acquired an intense admiration for the works of Michelangelo, which led him to surpass that master in the grotesqueness and extravagance of his designs. He returned to Haarlem considerably improved in health, and laboured there at his art till his death.

The monster appeared in Buenos Aires on August 26

Via Celeste comes this:

Description of a Monster Born of a Ewe (Translation of August 1708 Work)

“The monster which is shown in the figure appeared in Buenos Aires on August 26. The contrast of three resemblances which it had, that of a child, a horse, and a calf, surprised all who saw it. I asked the person who showed it to me if I could examine it in order to describe it faithfully, but he never allowed me to do this. I examined it from quite close and drew its principal traits without his noticing. As soon as I returned to my room, having all the information about the monster vividly in my memory, it furnished what was missing from the drawing. I completed it and represented it in its natural color.”[2]

Louis Éconches Feuillée (sometimes spelled Feuillet) (1660-1732) was a French member of the Order of the Minims, explorer, astronomer, geographer, and botanist.

Kierkegaardian and arcimboldesque

André Martins de Barros more here, Barros is also the artist who did the flyer I first encountered on Ian McCormick’s grotesque page.

Found when Googling for Arcimboldesque, this anomymous etching c.1700, mid-Italian map, sourced here

The Moviegoer is a 1961 Kierkegaardian philosophical novel by Walker Percy. The writer of this page holds that High Fidelity, Garden State, The Graduate, The Truman Show, American Beauty, Harold and Maude, Adaptation and Sideways are similarly themed.

I quote from The Moviegoer:

“Today is my thirtieth birthday and I sit on the ocean wave in the schoolyard and wait for Kate and think of nothing. Now in the thirty-first year of my dark pilgrimage on this earth and knowing less than I ever knew before, having learned only to recognize merde when I see it, having inherited no more from my father than a good nose for merde, for every species of shit that flies – my only talent – smelling merde from every quarter, living in fact in the very century of merde, the great shithouse of scientific humanism where needs are satisfied, everyone becomes an anyone, a warm and creative person, and prospers like a dung beetle, and one hundred percent of people are humanists and ninety-eight percent believe in God, and men are dead, dead, dead; and the malaise has settled like a fall-out and what people really fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall – on this my thirtieth birthday, I know nothing and there is nothing to do but fall prey to desire.”

More info over at Kierkegaard and Arcimboldo.

American Psycho redux

Patrick Bateman: Do you know what Ed Gein said about women?
David Van Patten: The maitre ‘d at Canal Bar?
Patrick Bateman: No, serial killer, Wisconsin, the ’50s.
Craig McDermott: So what did he say?
Patrick Bateman: “When I see a pretty girl walking down the street, I think two things. One part wants me to take her out, talk to her, be real nice and sweet and treat her right.”
David Van Patten: And what did the other part think?
Patrick Bateman: “What her head would look like on a stick…”
[laughs]

It’s American Pyscho Day over at Dennis Cooper’s blog courtesy of SYpHA_69. Patrick Batemen would, I believe, be proud, says The Laughing Bone, who adds:

“After many years working in bookstores, I found there were a few titles that inspired a certain “persistent interest”: Naked Lunch, Stranger in a Strange Land, The Secret History, Perfume and Gravity’s Rainbow, … “obsessive fanaticism” such as Catcher in the Rye, Dune and Lord of the Rings. American Psycho, perhaps endemic to the current cultural climate, holds a tenuous middle ground between such interest and fanaticism. In the late 90s, I met quite a few budding Patrick Batemans who would use lines from the book like a secret language for the initiated. Little Holden Caufields gone all the way through the rye.”

My first exposure to American Psycho was a newspaper article mentioning that the original publisher had declined to publish the book after reading the manuscript. Enough to pique my curiousity and read it as soon as it came out. I haven’t re-read the book since but once started reading the 19th century version of it, Against the Grain by French writer Huysmans; which I stopped reading because of the overly long description of material goods — just like in American Psycho.

Here are links to all Cooper’s posts:

The 2000 film

I haven’t seen the film yet, and I’m not sure if I’ll ever see it unless catching it on television. In the meanwhile here is the trailer and here is a mash-up of the same. In case you’re wondering what a mash-up (actually a détournement in this case) is, it’s a musical genre which, in its purest form, consists of the combination (usually by digital means) of the music from one song with the a cappella from another. Technically a mash-up is a remix. Video can also be ‘remixed’, only it’s usually called ‘re-edited’ or ‘re-cut’. Another video mash-up is this version of Scarface, with only the fuck segments. Pulp Fiction underwent the same treatment.

Awe of nature, taste for the bizarre, thirst for knowledge

I found some excellent plates of the Monstrorum historia cum Paralipomenis historiae omnium animalium by the Italian naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522 – 1605) at the Universidade de Coimbra. You can view full sized versions by clicking the thumbnails. In the same collection are also plates by Ambroise Paré, Conrad Gessner, Bartolomeo Ambrosinus, Olaus Magnus, Giovanni Cavazzi da Montecuccolo.

Here are the Wikipedia links: Ambroise Paré, Ulisse Aldrovandi, Conrad Gessner, Bartolomeo Ambrosinus, Olaus Magnus, Giovanni Cavazzi da Montecuccolo.

Il Giornale Nuovo has two posts on Aldrovandi: Aldrovandi’s Watercolours and Aldrovandi’s Herbal. Mr. Aitch adds:

Plants, sea-creatures, serpents, birds, domestic beasts, exotic creatures, ‘monsters’ (deformed animals, freaks of nature, conjoined twins, etc.) are all depicted in these watercolours, as are fantastic fauna, such as dragons, whose existence one supposes had not yet been altogether disproved. Many of the paintings are very beautifully and vividly executed. I’m particularly impressed by the pair of entwined snakes which, whilst I can hardly vouch for their zoological verisimilitude, appear very much alive.

Stuffed Animals & Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums (2001) Stephen T. Asma [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

The natural history museum was a place where the line between “high and low” culture effectively vanished–where our awe of nature, our taste for the bizarre, and our thirst for knowledge all blended happily together. The first natural history museums were little more than high-toned side shows, with such garish exhibits as the pickled head of Catherine the Great’s lover.

Jahsonic

Burgemeester van Dodenstad