We interrupt our regular necrological programming to show you most Dick Bruna covers of Simenon’s ‘romans durs‘.
I’m currently in a reading project that will see me reading all of these. You can follow my endeavour here. As we speak, I read 53 of them, of a total of 84 Dutch translations of a grand total of about 119 novels.
Jean-Claude Romer was a French actor, film critic and film historian.
Midi Minuit Fantastique (1962 – 1971)
He was editor-in-chief of French film magazine Midi Minuit Fantastique (1962 – 1971), the first magazine dedicated to genre cinema and cinema fantastique.
It has come to my attention that the first issue of Midi Minuit Fantastique is online in full at Archive.org[1].
That issue is dedicated to Terence Fisher, who still seems to be a bit underrated and of whose film The Stranglers of Bombay it is said:
“More clearly than any other Hammer effort, The Stranglers of Bombay lays bare the foundation of voyeurism, scopophilia, misogyny, castration anxiety, repression, sadomasochism, and “the male gaze” which informs the construction of Hammer’s output.”
The Charm of Evil: The Life and Films of Terence Fisher (1991) by Wheeler W. Dixon
One thing leading to another as they say, I stop here, because it is leading me too far.
Karl Wirsum was an American artist, one of the Chicago Imagists, a group known for their grotesquerie, surrealism, and complete uninvolvement with New York art world trends.
To the world at large she is probably best-known for her parts in the Whitesnake videos, especially in the 1987 clip for the song “Here I Go Again” (1982). In that clip, she is seen cartwheeling across the hoods of two Jaguars XJ dressed in a white negligee.
Willy Kurant was a Belgian cinematographer, famous for shooting films such as Trans-Europ-Express (1966), Man on Horseback (1969), Cannabis (1970) and Je t’aime moi non plus (1976).
Nick Kamen was an English singer-songwriter best known to me for a) being featured on the January 1984 cover of The Face wearing a ski-hat, lipstick, orange roll-neck sweater and aviator sunglasses; and b) for appearing in a 1985 Levi’s advert.
Anita Lane was an Australian singer-songwriter who was briefly a member of The Bad Seeds with Nick Cave and Mick Harvey, and collaborated with both bandmates. Lane released two solo albums, Dirty Pearl (1993) and Sex O’Clock (2001).
From that album Sex O’Clock (2001), I give you “Do That Thing” (2001). Be sure to stick around until the guitar kicks in at 3:00.
By reading Jan Verplaetse’s “Vrouwenpijn en mannenplezier: de antifeministische wortels van sadomasochisme in de Belle Epoque” (1999), I came across Johanna Fürstauer, an Austrian writer who specialized in Sittengeschichte, a famous German euphemism for histories of the vita sexualis. Fürstauer is from the same sex researching generation as Eberhard and Phyllis Kronhausen.
Above is a picture of the cover of Eros im alten Orient (1965) on Eastern erotica, the debut of Fürstauer.