Manabu Yamanaka is a Japanese contemporary artist. He lives and works in Tokyo, was born in Hyogo, Japan, in 1959. His photographs have been exhibited throughout Europe and North America.
His exhibition, “Gyahtei,”[1] a Buddhist term meaning “great age,” consisting of a series of black and white photographs of old people brought him to international attention.
He also did the cover art to Coin Locker Babies[2].
RIP Adrian Mitchell
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmMCObgu_jc]
Adrian Mitchell (24 October 1932 – 20 December 2008) was an English poet, novelist and playwright, best-known for his poem To Whom It May Concern[1].
Connecting lemmas for Mitchell include London Oz, Tom Phillips (artist), International Poetry Incarnation, SOMA Research Association, Wholly Communion, To Whom It May Concern (poem), Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain and Penguin Modern Poets.
The poem To Whom It May Concern is known by its iconic phrase: “Tell me lies about Vietnam.” A piece of cult poetry if there ever was one.
RIP Miriam Makeba
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85_9mKTg_Do]
Live version of “Pata Pata“
South African singer Miriam Makeba died yesterday while touring in Italy. She was 76 and best-known for being a vocal anti-apartheid activist, her 1967 song “Pata Pata“[1][2] and her marriages to fellow country trumpeter Hugh Masekela and American “Black pride“/”Black Power” activist Stokely Carmichael.
“Pata Pata” is a musical composition recorded by South African singer Miriam Makeba and released in 1967 on Reprise Records.
“Pata Pata” was co-written by Miriam Makeba and Jerry Ragovoy. After Makeba was signed to Warner/Reprise Records and published her first singles, the record company needed several songs to finish a Makeba album. Legend has it that she had told Reprise she wanted to do ballads, so they put her together with Jerry Ragovoy, the R&B writer/producer who was on staff at Warner Brothers at the time. Not being familiar with her, the night before their first recording session, he went to see her in a club in Greenwich Village, where she did a show comprised completely of African folk music. He was captivated to the point that, the next day, he just had Makeba and her sister sing a number of the songs into a tape recorder. One of them became “Pata Pata.”
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pygqt0uwnuc&]
Studio version of “Pata Pata“
The song was covered by Osibisa and Percy Faith.
In her political activism, Makeba reminds me of Fela Kuti and most of all, Josephine Baker.
Introducing Henri Gerbault
I’m just a jealous guy
Henry Gerbault (June 24, 1863– October 19 1930), also spelled Henri Gerbault was a French illustrator and poster artist. He was a student of Henri Gervex. He was the nephew of Sully Prudhomme.
Poster for the Théatre Libre
The Théâtre Libre (French, Free Theater) was a theater founded by André Antoine that operated from 1887 to 1896 in Paris, France. Théâtre Libre was also the name of a European theatrical movement which celebrated Naturalist theatre and defied theatre censorship by founding subscription-based theatres. In London there was the Independent Theatre Society, which debuted the plays of George Bernard Shaw; and Germany had the Freie Bühne. Henrik Ibsen‘s Ghosts was the landmark play for all of these theatres. —Sholem Stein
His œuvre was dedicated to humourist drawings and illustrations. He illustrated authors such as Félicien Champsaur, Charles Perrault and Marcel Prévost.
He worked for numerous illustrated journals of the Belle Époque: La Vie Parisienne, Le Journal amusant, Le Rire, L’Amour, where he was noted for his voluptuous women.
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9VWC8eB9ic]
October 30, 1938 radio broadcast
Orson Welles first gained wide American notoriety 70 years ago today for his October 30, 1938 radio broadcast of H. G. Wells‘ The War of the Worlds. Adapted to sound like a contemporary news broadcast, it caused a large number of listeners to panic, now commonly and somewhat euphemistically referred to as mass hysteria. Welles and his biographers subsequently claimed he was exposing the gullibility or naïveté of American audiences in the tense preamble to the Second World War.
A History of Derision by way of Illusory Confections who wrote on its subject[1]:
“Be still my beating heart, this is practically everything I adore in one tidy 240 page bundle! But it isn’t referenced anywhere online and I couldn’t even find mention of it on the Atlas Press site. So I zipped an email to Atlas inquiring about it, and, sadly, its nonexistence was confirmed. Apparently it was a planned project that fell to the sidelines and “[1]
the website is the accurate source of what is available, the catalogue part bibliography and part fiction, if you like…
Here it is again in a wikified version,
A History of Derision is an aborted project by Arkhive, an Atlas Press imprint.
It builds on André Breton’s Anthology of Black Humour, but is more a history of French avant-garde.
French Romantics: Sade, Lassailly, Rabbe, Forneret, Nodier, Fourier
Hydropathes: Goudeau, Cros, Haraucourt, Lafargue, Richepin, Tailhade, Rollinat, Monselet, Sapeck, Allais.
Hirsutes and the Chat Noir: Salis, Moréas, Lorrain, Verlaine, Sarcey, Haraucourt.
Arts Incohérents: : Lévy, Rivière, Allais.
Zutistes: Allais, Cros, Nouveau, Rimbaud, Ajalbert, Haraucourt, Verlaine.
La Nouvelle Rive Gauche : Trézenick, D’Aurevilly, Verlaine.
Lutèce: Rall, Rimbaud, Corbière, Caze, Rachilde, Floupette (Vicaire and Beauclair).
Symbolists : de Gourmont, Jarry, Tailhade, Huysmans, Pawlowski.
Ecole de Paris : Apollinaire, Jacob, Salmon, Albert-Birot, Cami.
Dada : Aragon, Picabia, Ribemont-Dessaignes, Satie, Arp, Rigaut.
Surrealism : Desnos, Prévert, Péret, Topor, Magritte, Scutenaire, Daumal, Gilbert-Lecomte.
Situationists : Arnaud and Jorn, Dotremont, Mariën.
Daily Bul & Co: Bury, Béalu, Colinet.
Farcistes: Encyclopédie des farces et attrapes et des mystifications, François Caradec, Noël Arnaud.[2]
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBTM-H74FjE]
Monamour, fresco footage at :10
“I had never heard of Tinto Brass until the late 1970s when I read an interview he gave to Gideon Bachmann in The London Times (Wednesday, 3 August 1977, p. 13). His remarks sufficiently intrigued me to begin a decades-long search, a search that for many years turned up almost nothing apart from tantalizing articles in trade papers. Since the autumn of 2000, though, thanks to friends in Italy, on-line overseas shopping, and eBay, I’ve been able to locate a fair number of Brass’s creations. I had been expecting at least a few of his earlier films to be excellent, but I wasn’t expecting them to be quite as good as they actually turned out to be. –RJBuffalo, a pseudonym of Ranjit Sandhu
This I read in the early 2000s when I discovered the site http://www.geocities.com/busterktn, a site hosted at Yahoo/Geocities, of which the author says it was “deleted without notice or explanation. They deleted all my email messages too.” I believe him. Yahoo did the same to my site in 2004.
Last week, I found the same site, back online, now hosted under its own domain name, http://www.rjbuffalo.com, a pleasure for the eye and the brain.
Brass is one of Jahsonic’s canonical filmmakers. Researching him today brought footage of Monamour, in which Marta visits a museum, I presume in Mantua and admires scatological (see comment 1) frescoes by – again I presume – by Giulio Romano in – presuming further – the Palazzo del Te.
Palazzo del Te frescoes
Palazzo del Te fresco (detail)
As Sholem Stein has noted: “What makes European erotic films of the seventies “euro chic” variety particularly interesting is the fact that Europe has the scenery, and the best cinematic euro chic erotomaniacs (Tinto Brass, Just Jaeckin, etc…) have put it to use. There is a reason why Radley Metzger came to Europe in the seventies to film his softcore visual extravaganzas.”
I’ve praised the non-event before[1].
Welcome to Miss America cattle auction.
Today’s non-event is of a different nature. It’s been exactly 40 years since the New York Radical Women did not burn their bras[2] at the 1968 Miss America contest in Atlantic City. A non-event (Someone suggested lighting a fire, but a permit could not be obtained, and so there was no burning, nor did anyone take off her bra) which went into history as a milestone of female protest against male oppression. I can’t help but wonder if the protesters had been male, would they have stopped their plan to burn the contents of their “Freedom Trash Can” for lack of a permit?
Also, in general, male oppressors would have been glad if beautiful women had stopped wearing bras; most women on the other hand thought and still think that not wearing bras is impractical.
The event was not televised, as it did not happen.
Bras bring memories.
Bras – short for brassieres – remind us of John Currin‘s 1997 painting The Bra Shop[3] and Cymande‘s song “Bra,”[4] from their 1973 debut album.
Cymande’s “Bra” (WMC#77) is not their signature song, they are better-known for tracks such as “Brother on the Slide“[5], which is WMC #78; and the “The Message“[6], WMC #79.
John Currin‘s 1997 painting The Bra Shop is IoEA #34.
Cover art of Cities of the Red Night depicting Brueghels “The Triumph of Death“.
I read Cities of the Red Night this July while in Spain; I had to let it ferment for a while and unfurl it. it was a profound reading experience; and my first semi-sustained one after my first and only aborted attempt to read Burroughs by way of Naked Lunch.
I have the fondest memories of Burroughs in Drugstore Cowboy, and his Gus Van Sant-directed appearance on MTV with Thanksgiving Prayer[1] (unavailable in Europe).
Cities of the Red Night stated that spontaneous ejaculation is a heroin withdrawal symptom. This caught my attention. Today, I looked it up and it is apparently confirmed by medical literature. The novel is the perfect introduction to Burroughs’s whole language is a virus trope, later adopted by the likes of Laurie Anderson, Steven Shaviro and other postmodernists.
From my wiki:
Cities of the Red Night is a novel by William S. Burroughs. It was the first book in the final trilogy of the beat author, and was first published in 1981. Drugs play a major part in the novel, as do male homosexuality. The plot of this non-linear work revolves around a group of revolutionaries who seek the freedom to live under the articles set out by Captain James Mission. At the same time in near present day, detective Clem Snide is searching for a lost boy, abducted for some sort of sexual ritual. Another subplot weaved in thematically through the narrative is a world plagued by a fictional disease, Virus B-23, that destroys humanity and is sexually transmitted and sexual in nature, causing for example spontaneous orgasms. Addiction to opiates provides some resistance to it. The disease is viral, and, at first, it appears to be an allusion to AIDS, although, it must be remembered that the first case of AIDS was not discovered until after the book was first published.
See also:’the cities of the red night were six in number, alternate history, Dr Benway, Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted
Finally, whence the quote came:
“Self-identity is ultimately a symptom of parasitic invasion, the expression within me of forces originating from outside. Language is to the brain as the tapeworm is to the intestines. Even more so: it may just be possible to find a digestive space free from parasitic infection, but we will never find an uncontaminated mental space. Strands of alien DNA unfurl themselves in our brains, just as tapeworms unfurl themselves in our guts. Not just language, but the whole quality of human consciousness, as expressed in male and female is basically a virus mechanism.” —Cities of the Red Night
Triumph of Death (1562) – Pieter Brueghel the Elder
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4A5ybTAOWw&]
Some Office Baroque footage, Some footage similar to Office Baroque
Gordon Matta-Clark died thirty years ago today. He stayed in Antwerp for a while in 1977, just before his death, working with Florent Bex, creating Office Baroque, which he called anarchitecture. Pieces of his “building cuts” were sold around the world[1].
I like him, much as I like the near-contemporary and also short-lived Robert Smithson. Whither now, anarchitecture, and other visionary environments?
![[2]](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Coinlockerbabies.jpg){kind=link}
![[3]](http://www.artnet.com/magazine/features/finch/Images/finch11-10-1.jpg){kind=link}
![[1]](http://studio-online.com/socomments/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/gordonmatta_s.jpg){kind=link}