RIP Benjamin Walker (1913 – 2013)
In July 2011, Walker first came to my attention when I was researching “Della verga” by da Vinci.
Walker had researched “Della verga” in his book Body Magic which has the wonderful painting Potere cieco by Rudolf Schlichter on its cover (see above).
“Della verga” is a seminal text in the history of the unruly member (i. e. the genitals have a will of their own).
Wham. What a painting.
Paul Delaroche often depicts his subject matter with an over-the-top sensationalism, think of his execution of Lady Jane Grey and the Christian female martyr floating down the river with tied hands.
The painting of a despondent Napoleon has a more subdued quality.
The high level of truthfulness does not arise from its photorealism but resides in the double chin, the disheveled hair and the dirty boots.
P.S. The painting is one of my WACs, that is, World Art Classics, an ongoing series of visual art and visual culture classics.
This is a fresco.
It’s quite wonderful the way the houses are stacked.
I feel I have to go to Italy and see all the delights with my own eyes.
See the previously posted “The Unswept Floor, or, of vestiges and precursors.”
I viewed the film Hitchcock last night. It features Geoffrey Shurlock as the censor of the Motion Picture Production Code, who says with regards to the production of the film Psycho:
Some thoughts:
I never knew that the American censor was involved during pre-production, i.e. before the shooting of the film.
It appears that the introduction of sound film coincides with the drafting of the Production Code. Did sound pose a threat more than imagery? Or was it the combination of sound and image that finally saw film evolving from a mere sideshow attraction to a genuine and ‘real’ mode of fiction consumption?
I remember a scene in Duck Soup where the Marx Brothers poke fun at the Production Code by showing a woman’s bedroom and then showing a woman’s shoes on the floor, a man’s shoes and horseshoes. Harpo is sleeping in the bed with a horse; the woman is in the twin bed next to them.
I remember extensive coverage of Psycho, Hitchcockianness and toilets in Enjoy Your Symptom! and The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, both by Slavoj Žižek.
Above: “The Murder” by Bernard Herrmann used in the shower scene. “The Murder” is World Music Classic # 811.
Prince Jazzbo toasting on “Croaking Lizard“
Linval Roy Carter (3 September 1951–11 September 2013), better known as Prince Jazzbo, was a Jamaican reggae and dancehall deejay and producer.
“Croaking Lizard” is a musical composition by Lee Perry, published on the 1976 Super Ape album.
On this recording, Prince Jazzbo is heard chanting (toasting is what the Jamaicans call it) over the “Chase the Devil” riddim. The lyrics are largely nonsensical. Shards of texts I recognize are “on the river bank” and what I believe is “it’s slippery out there.”
Super Ape is a seminal recording in the history of 20th century music.
Allegory of the World (1515) from the studio of Joachim Patinir
Allegory of the World (1515) is the title of an anonymous Flemish painting, attributed to the school of Joachim Patinir.
The work comes from the collection of the prince of Salm-Salm and is now in the collection of the Museum Wasserburg Anholt. It was first exhibited at the Meisterwerke westdeutscher Malerei in Düsseldorf in 1904.
On a globe of glass the artist has painted the joys and miseries of the world, with its gallows and torture wheels. The rocky and fantastic landscape is indeed reminiscent of Patinir. Through an opening on the left, a young man with a long stick tries to enter. A Flemish inscription tells us that he would like to cross the world without bending:
We see him coming out on the other side, middle aged and laughing, holding his long crooked stick. He has recognized the need to bend.
See also
Limestone rock formation in the White Desert, Egypt (Hathor13 photo[1])
See also non-man-made art, mushroom rocks, In praise of erosion.
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Alamut, vestiges of an impregnable castle (photo Payampak source).
As I wrote in a post 10 months ago in a post over at Tumblr[1], there once was an artist who:
“had a garden. And every day, maybe several times a day, that artist walked a certain marked path in his garden, until the soles of his shoes had flattened the grass and eroded a path. I guess he then took a photo of his garden with its newly formed path. Maybe he sold the photos.”
Yesterday, I find out the name of this mysterious land artist, of which I had been ignorant for more than 20 years. It is a certain Richard Long (born 1945) and instead of my imagined curved geoglyph, he walked a straight line.
Richard Long first came to the attention of the art world with A Line Made by Walking in 1967 — three years before the iconic Spiral Jetty — and repeated the exercise in 1972 on a much larger scale and with more efficiency in Peru.
Where in Peru this was, I have been unable to find out, I wonder if it’s still there. Maybe it’s not far from When Faith Moves Mountains (2002) by Francis Alÿs.
Illustration: cover of a book on Richard Long‘s A Line Made by Walking by Dieter Roelstraete.
Loisirs Littéraires au XXe siècle (above, English: “Literary leasures in the 20th century”) is the title of an illustration from the story “The End of Books” by French writer Octave Uzanne and illustrator Albert Robida, a story about a post-literate society in which readers have become ‘hearers,’ i. e. consumers of audio books. It was published in the collection Contes pour les bibliophiles (1895). The illustration depicts a female reader of the 20th century, imagined by Robida, who is listening to “12 poètes assortis” (twelve assorted poets) in on a balcony overlooking a future city.
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