Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry (photo credit David Corio)
Via gmtPlus9 (-15) who also has:
I cannot overestimate the influence that Perry has had on my musical tastes since I first listened to Super Ape about twenty years ago.
The couple meets at the end of the film.
I finished viewing 5×2 by François Ozon this afternoon. It stars Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, the sister of singer/model Carla Bruni who also starred in the 2005 Ozon Time to Leave. Like Irréversible and Memento before it, 5×2 is an experiment in cinematic time since it is executed in reverse chronological order. The story concerns a couple; it opens with their divorce and moves in five scenes (Scenes from a Marriage by Bergman in reverse) towards — making halt at their marriage — their idyllic meeting pictured above. Ozon describes the quiddity of life, sex and relationships with an odd and compelling detachment.
This is a pensive film essay of which the highlights include the absence of the father during the birth of their son; the joyous dancing and later the romantic/forced encounter on their wedding night; the after-the-break-up-sex-scene; the beautifully rolled spliff and the birth of romantic love.
Ozon’s campish tastes in music (remember Cher’s ‘Bang Bang‘ (and here) in his short A Summer Dress; this scene from Gouttes d’eau sur pierres brûlantes; this scene from Sitcom and the dance scene from Swimming Pool) find full expression in the songs by Italian crooners which separates each sequence and Paolo Conte’s theme song “Sparring Partner”, featured in this YouTube remix of the film.
P. S. Just look how beautifully rolled this spliff is.
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.
In the Cut (Unrated and Uncut Director’s Edition) (2003) – Jane Campion [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
In the Cut, of course, continues Campion’s career-long examination of female masochism.
In the Cut (1995) – Susanna Moore
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
I’m halfway through Susanna Moore’s 1995 novel In the Cut, the story of a thirty-something literature teacher in New York City with an interest in street slang who falls in love with a cop of whom she suspects he may also be a serial killer/psychopath. There are lots of similarities here with Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, which I read last year. Can both be categorized as chick lit? If yes, this kind of chick lit takes it upon itself to study men’s (sexual) behavior in an almost anthropological way. Moore describes how a post-coital man, Erica Jong described one of her lover’s post-toilet behavior.
So far I liked Jane Campion’s film adaption of In the Cut better, Moore’s prose is kind of trite and Moore lacks the philosophical breadth I liked in Fear of Flying.
What In the Cut and Fear of Flying also share is the concept of women’s sexuality after the sexual revolution, a topic I’ve first mentioned in my profile of Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977).
Speaking of the end of the sexual revolution which oficially arrived in 1984 (cfr. TIME cover) and which coincides with the arrival of AIDS (see Benetton AIDS ad) and of postmodernism: many writers of the pre- and sexual revolution era such as Gershon Legman, Wayland Young (Eros Denied), Gordon Rattray Taylor and Amos Vogel (Film as a Subversive Art) foreshadowed utopia as soon as we would get rid of our sexual inhibitions.
I quote from Jim Haynes’s website[1]:
“Murder is a crime; describing murder is not. Sex is not a crime. Describing sex is. Why?” –Gershon Legman.
“If we were sexually liberated there’d be no president, no police force, no night sticks, no governments.” –Germaine Greer.
The utopia did not happen because of the aforementioned AIDS epidemic and what I suspect a whole range of reasons. Personally I like the concept of inhibitions, the concept of taboos, the concept of shame and guilt; not only are these inhibitions what makes sex exciting in the first place but I suspect that they are necessary to regulate a society. If these inhibitions would not be there life would be an eternal recurrence of the orgy in Perfume. Maybe I should read this?
The only writer that comes to mind who has dealt with this subject is Camille Paglia.
Well, um, what I’m saying is that I’m part of the sexual revolution, um, and I feel that the…in one of my most controversial sentences is “Everybody who preached free love in the 60’s is responsible for AIDS.” I mean by that the Mama’s and the Papa’s and all of us, so, the price of that revolution has been paid by gay men, primarily. I think that what we’re understanding is the enormous power of nature. Even Larry Kramer is starting to talk like this now: that nature apparently did not want us to be promiscuous and that it puts a thousand obstacles in our paths such as these diseases. OK. I feel that procreation is nature’s law, and that’s why I defy nature, I resist it, I oppose it. OK. I think that women certainly are in the..um, you know we were the first generation to have the birth control pill, OK, which frustrates nature. […] –Camille Paglia interviewed by Jack Nichols, 1997
But of course there must be other literature out there, and if you know of any, I’m looking forward to your recommendations.
Photographic Iconography of Salpêtrière.
Paris: 1876-1880
Image sourced here.
More from this collection:
The Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital is a hospital in Paris. Salpêtrière was originally a gunpowder factory, but was converted to a dumping ground for the poor of Paris. Eventually it served as a prison for prostitutes, and a holding place for the mentally disabled, criminally insane, epileptics, and the poor; it was also notable for its famous population of rats.
During the French Revolutionary period, it was stormed by the mob and the prostitutes released, but others (probably madwomen) were less fortunate and were murdered. Since the Revolution, La Salpêtrière has served as an insane asylum and a hospital for women.
The Origins of Love and Hate (1910 – 1965) – Ian Dishart Suttie
The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (1948) – Robert Graves
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
I can’t remember how I happened (oh yes, now I do, search terms used matrist+patrist, see my previous post on the work of Gordon Rattray Taylor) but I found this interesting text by the recently deceased Robert Anton Wilson on the relationship between James Joyce and Eastern philosophy. Some excerpts:
Throughout the long day of Ulysses the thoughts of Stephen Dedalus and Mr. Bloom repeatedly return to the East; and this is not without reason. Ulysses is so profoundly Oriental in mood and conception that Carl Jung has recommended it as a new Bible for the white race. Molly Bloom’s fervent “Yes” mirrors the author’s acceptance of life in its entirety – an acceptance that transcends the dualisms of light and dark, good and evil, beautiful and sordid.
…
Some Sinologists trace this “Eternal Female” back to a Chinese “Urmutter” myth of pre-Chou times, but Lao-Tse was far beyond primitive mythology. He was using this myth as a pointer, to indicate the values that must have been in the society which created the myth. The distinction between Patrist and Matrist cultures made in such books as Ian Suttie’s The Origins of Love and Hate and G. Rattray Taylor’s Sex in History (not to mention Robert Graves’ The White Goddess ) places the Taoists as representatives of a Matrist social-ethical system living in Confucian Patrist China. —cached source
Molly Bloom’s fervent “Yes” from her famous soliloquy:
“…I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. “
Marc Meulemans [1] (right) died of a heart attack last Friday. He was 50 years old. In the seventies he was member of the punk group De Kommeniste (1000 Titels), later he would become graphic designer for Belgian magazines such as MaoMagazine and Deng as well as sound designer for the theatrical producer Ivo van Hove (left).
K-Punk and Richard on Children of Men, a new dystopian British film from the director of Y tu Mama Tambien (2001) . Screenshot here.
I’ve finally seen Children of Men, on DVD, after missing it at the cinema. Watching it last week I asked myself, why is its rendering of apocalypse so contemporary?
British cinema, for the last thirty years as chronically sterile as the issueless population in Children of Men, has not produced a version of the apocalypse that is even remotely as well realised as this. You would have to turn to television – to the last Quatermass serial or to Threads, almost certainly the most harrowing television programme ever broadcast on British TV – for a vision of British society in collapse that is as compelling. Yet the comparison between Children of Men and these two predecessors points to what is unique about the film; the final Quatermass serial and Threads still belonged to Nuttall’s bomb culture, but the anxieties with which Children of Men deals have nothing to do with nuclear war.
Kris Melis pointed out to me that the plot of Children of Men is similar to that of the 1982 pomo porn film Café Flesh in which humans are divided into Sex Negatives and Sex Positives. The negatives get sick if they have sex so they go to Café Flesh to see positives who are forced to perform on stage for the negatives. If the similarity is superficial, both films belong to the category infertility in fiction in a post-apocalyptic world.
Stephen Fry: The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive (Youtube)
Bipolar(previously known as manic depression) (Jahsonic)
… following his highly publicised nervous breakdown in 1995, which was attributed at the time to bad reviews … Fry was suffering from serious clinical depression at the time as a result of his as-yet undiagnosed cyclothymia, a form of bipolar disorder (formerly known as manic depression). He subsequently walked out of the production, prompting its early closure … Fry subsequently was unaccounted for for several days, during which period he contemplated suicide.
Stephen Fry (V for Vendetta, 2006) has since spoken publicly about living with a bipolar disorder, and in 2006 made a two-part documentary about his experiences, Stephen Fry: The Secret Life of the Manic-Depressive. In it, he interviews celebrities (such as Robbie Williams, Rick Stein, Carrie Fisher, Richard Dreyfuss (Inserts, 1975) , and Tony Slattery) and non-famous persons, all of whom also suffer from the illness. The programme was broadcast BBC Two on September 19 and September 26, 2006.
