Category Archives: postmodernism

Introducing Praxis

[Amazon.com]
[FR] [DE] [UK]

It’s actually strange that I’ve never actively come across this band besides of having heard of them. I am a big fan of Bill Laswell and all P-Funkiana, both are canonical to my encyclopedic work. Praxis introduces a whole collective of adventurous culture, from cutting edge music to exciting graphics, rebellious texts and tetsuoesque performances (is the life-size doll by Rammellzee?).

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUL_gcHv0EA]

“Animal Behavior” (1992) from the Transmutation (Mutatis Mutandis) album.

Praxis is the name of an ever-changing Bill Laswell musical project. Praxis combines elements of different musical genres such as funk, jazz, hip-hop and heavy metal into highly improvised music. First appearing in 1992 with the critically acclaimed Transmutation (Mutatis Mutandis), Buckethead, Bill Laswell, Bernie Worrell and Brain have defined the direction of the band over the last 15 years.

Transmutation (Mutatis Mutandis) is the first album by Bill Laswell‘s everchanging “supergroup” Praxis. This first album features Buckethead on guitar, Bootsy Collins on bass and vocals, Brain on drums, Bernie Worrell on keyboards and DJ AF Next Man Flip on turntables and mixer.

Transmutation features a wide range of musical styles, all mixed together to make a very diverse and unique album. Styles such as heavy metal, funk, hip hop, ambient, jazz and blues are blended together to form a strange style of avant-garde, with extended guitar and keyboard solos, and highly improvised passages.

The artwork is by James Koehnline, photography by Thi-Linh Le and liner notes by Hakim Bey.

 

World music classics #23

In 1994 I was crazy about the “Wilmot” track (see clip below) by Andrew Weatherall‘s Sabres of Paradise project. I had since lost the record but the mesmerizing horns kept spooking through my head over the years.

Last week, I am listening with my children to a commercial radio station and I hear a track by Shantel Youtube, a Balkan artist in a “techno” remix. I recognize the mesmerizing horns.

Today, I am making my 1980s music page and re-discover the composition by The Sabres of Paradise, find its Youtube clip Youtube and discover that the original version of the horns dates back to 1931, is called “Black But Sweet”, and is composed by calypso artist Wilmoth Houdini.

Another case closed in the history of cultural appropriation in western music.

World cinema classics #36

I agree “to meet Mr Neville in private and to comply with his requests concerning his pleasure with me.”

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlEo563RJZI]

The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) – Peter Greenaway

The Draughtsman’s Contract is a 1982 British film written and directed by Peter Greenaway. The score was by Michael Nyman and borrows extensively from Henry Purcell, forming a substantial attraction of the film. It was most recently re-used in Winterbottom’s A Cock and Bull Story.

Previous “World Cinema Classics” and in the Wiki format here.

RIP Ettore Sottsass (1917 – 2007)

Unidentified photograph of Ettore Sottsass

Carlton Cabinet (1981) – Ettore Sottsass

Invitation to the first Memphis presentation, Sept 18 1981,

graphics by Luciano Paccagnella.
image sourced here

Ettore Sottsass Olivetti Valentine, first released on Valentine’s Day 1969.

Ettore Sottsass (14 September 1917 – 31 December 2007) was an Innsbruck-born Italian architect and designer of the late 20th century. He founded the Memphis Group and was a member briefly flirted with the Situationist International for a (very) short time. He was also connected to the radical design movement. His best-known product is the 1969 Olivetti Valentine typewriter. His 1981 “Carlton Cabinet” was to many people their first de facto exposure to postmodernism.

Sottsass founded the Memphis Group, an influential postmodern Italian design and architecture movement of the 1980s. Memphis explored a visual language outside of the limiting canons of “good taste,” blurring the boundaries between “high culture” and mass-produced “ordinary” consumer goods.

Radical design developed in Italy in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It continued the tradition of using new materials and bold colours that began with Pop Art but also drew on historical styles such as Art Deco, Kitsch, and Surrealism. The main exponents of Radical Design were small groups of architects and designers who questioned Modernism and rejected mass-consumer culture. Key groups and designers of the Radical style include Superstudio, Archizoom Associati, UFO, Gruppo Strum, and Ettore Sottsass.

Great films vs. small films

Little Children, the pervert

The pervert in Little Children

“Sarah reminded herself to think like an anthropologist”

I watched Little Children yesterday evening. Little Children = Madame Bovary + suburban postmodernism, it is an attempt to create the “Great American Film” (see Great American Novel) in a tradition which started with American Beauty and Magnolia; ultimately the film is pretentious but proficient.

Kate Winslet shines as Emma Bovary and the “new Paul Newman” is as useless as the worst of Emma’s lovers. Given the choice between the Great American Film and the “Small American Film” (think Fast Food, Fast Women and Denise Calls Up), I’ll choose the latter.

Nonetheless, this is the best film adaptation of Madame Bovary since Chabrol‘s literal interpretation starring Isabelle Huppert, and I was amused with the book clubbers debating the sexual practices described in Madame Bovary (specifically, whether a vague reference to a “shameful” sexual act implies that she has anal sex). The sex scenes are as hot and steamy as The Postman Always Rings Twice. The film is recommended but I’m not going to count it as a World Cinema Classic.

When hip-hop’s selling perfume and boy band’s selling grief

“Everything Is Everything” is a poem by Paul Heaton read by Bootsy Collins (listen) in a spoken word performance featured on Late Night Tales: Fatboy Slim.

Poem About Everything and Naught:

When hip-hop’s selling perfume

And boy band’s selling grief

The blues man’s market life insurance just won’t flip underneath

Jazz just chucks its concrete into transparent handkerchief

Everything is anything to anyone … (read)

I’m an eye. A mechanical eye.

Speaking of Ways of Seeing (see previous post).

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qu1ejGmPk2w]

Beginning of the first of four Ways of Seeing at the BBC

This is a first for me, I’ve read the book, but had never seen the documentary film. Fascinating.

It starts with Berger cutting a piece out of a quattrocento painting in a museum, moves to showing a printing press printing the cut-out, switches then to fragments of Man with a Movie Camera accompanied by the text of the 1923 manifesto Kinoks Revolution, by Vertov (see below). Please also the checkbook lettering which were en vogue at the time.

Notes how Berger constistenly says “camewa” and “woom”.

An excerpt of Vertov’s manifesto:

“I’m an eye. A mechanical eye. I, the machine, show you a world the way only I can see it. I free myself for today and forever from human immobility. I’m in constant movement. I approach and pull away from objects. I creep under them. I move alongside a running horse’s mouth. I fall and rise with the falling and rising bodies. This is I, the machine, manoeuvring in the chaotic movements, recording one movement after another in the most complex combinations. Freed from the boundaries of time and space, I co-ordinate any and all points of the universe, wherever I want them to be. My way leads towards the creation of a fresh perception of the world. Thus I explain in a new way the world unkown to you.”

One just has to love Youtube for making all of this available. Filesharing has made music available (but not in real-time alas), Google books did the same for books, Youtube does it for the moving image. There is still a wealth of TV and radio documentaries waiting to be unearthed. I am particularly thinking of European state funded radio and television since the 1960s.

Batailleana #1 and 2

Ma Mère by Bataille, cover by publisher domaine francais

Ma Mère by Bataille, cover by publisher 10 | 18

#1) 10/18 is a publisher in France (with a sub collection named domaine français). Their series of Georges Bataille novels are illustrated by Hans Bellmer. One of the nicer book illustrations around. I like the overall feel of the design. Can someone tell me more about the graphic designer over at the 10/18 publishing imprint?

Here is the 10/18 cover of Madame Edwarda.

#2) In 1997 André S. Labarthe produced a documentary on Georges Bataille. The focus was Bataille’s extreme, perverse, surreal story ‘Madame Edwarda‘ where the prostitute reveals that she *is* God (‘je suis DIEU’) – perfectly merging the sacred and profane, a key notion for Bataille … in the final section of the clip, the infamous Chinese torture victim is shown … in his last work, the heavily-illustrated ‘Tears of Eros,’ Bataille said this about these photos:

“What I suddenly saw, and what imprisoned me in anguish-but which at the same time delivered me from it-was the identity of these perfect contraries, divine ecstasy and its opposite, extreme horror.”

posted by hiperf289 (check his other Youtube clips)

I don’t get it

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orDR4JA91F4]

“Maintenant je sais” (1954) by Jean Gabin

Jean Gabin sings that now he knows he’ll never know. Like in South Park episode 1101 (#154), the “With Apologies to Jesse Jackson” episode, popularly known as the “Nigger guy” episode to which the conclusion was “I don’t get it” and Luc Tuymans current photo exposition in Antwerp with the same title.