Mal Sharpe was an American humorist.
His most notable work was done as part of the duo Coyle and Sharpe. They were active as street interviewers in the early 1960s and were simply hilarious.
The filmed sequence of “The Warbler” is hilarious. Sadly, it appears to be offline at the moment.
I give you “Maniacs In Living Hell”, collected on the album The Insane (But Hilarious) Minds Of Coyle & Sharpe (1964).
Max von Sydow was a Swedish-born actor famous for playing chess with death in the film The Seventh Seal (1957).
In my universe, he has a minor role in Death Watch (1980) a film which caught my attention at a young age. It tells the story of a woman with an incurable disease who will be filmed 24/7 until her death.
Its theme is still my theme: technology, reality television and its impact on society.
Von Sydow has but a minor part in this film.
Speaking of reality television. The most underrated film with reality television as a trope is Paul Bartel’s The Secret Cinema (1968).
McCoy Tyner was an American jazz pianist.
What links McCoy Tyner to the Jahsonic 1000?
Let me tell you.
Among Tyner’s most critically acclaimed albums is Trident (1975).
On that Trident album there is a musical composition called “Impressions” which features a bassline by Ron Carter which was sampled throughout the “The Choice Is Yours (Revisited)” (1991) by Black Sheep. The sample is well-known in hip hop midst because in fact it is the spine of that song. It is also in the Jahsonic 1000.
The song “Impressions” is an interpretation of Coltrane’s composition Impressions (1962).
I am writing a review of The Madness of Crowds and as is so often the case, I get sidetracked quite easily.
One way to deal with this sidetracking is my encyclopedia, which allows me to store every single trope, meme, lemma, phrase or idea quite easily. No thought is lost.
Now in Murray’s book, there is a chapter on women which mentions the “Women Mean Business” conference. Murray is present and he witnesses young, smart, attractive women.
This started a digression on my part into the power of women wich made me watch A Fool There Was (1915) yesterday evening. This made me research The Vampire painting by Jones and its accompanying poem by Kipling. Both of 1897.
All morning!
I have to stop now.
In this phase I have reached the publicity shot for that film which shows Bara sitting behind a skeleton, now #99 in my series World Photography Classics. See above.
I really have to stop now.
Ulay was a German artist, best known for his collaborations with Marina Abramović.
The duo are perhaps best-known for The Other: Rest Energy (1980) in which Ulay holds a bow and arrow to the heart of Marina Abramović.
During an online life of more than 25 years, it would be strange not to run into kindred souls.
One such soul is the translator and writer Alistair Ian Blyth.
Card Catalogue
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
It so happens that Alistair has a new novel out. Its title is Card Catalogue and it is due to be published or already published.
In Alistair’s own words:
Card Catalogue features ruminations on the metaphysics of dust, oneiric libraries, an exhaustive catalogue of mentions of the cockroach in the classic Russian novel, and, of course, the Marlbrough Theme.
David Roback was an American guitarist, best-known for co-writing “Fade into You” (1994). That was a song by Mazzy Star and it featured the vocals of Hope Sandoval.
Listening to this, I can’t help but think that Lana Del Rey has a very similar sound and voice. Not surprisingly, both Mazzy Star and Lana Del Rey are considered dream pop.
José Mojica Marins was a Brazilian film director, best-known for his persona “Coffin Joe“.
I just finished watching At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul (1964) and it’s actually quite good. I especially like the atheist bits, his materialist world view, his Nietzschean take on things.
For example, Coffin Joe eats meat on Holy Friday, just to taunt his catholic fellow townspeople.
And consider the opening oration of Coffin Joe:
“What is life?
It is the beggining of death.
What is death?
It is the end of life!
What is the existence?
It is the continuity of blood.
What is blood?
It is the reason of the existence!”
All this blasphemous discourse makes you wonder how this went down in Brasil. After all, it was 1964, another four years for 1968 to happen … and … did that even ‘happen’ in Brasil, the sexual revolution?
See atheism in Brazil, the sexual revolution in Brazil.
Flavio Bucci was an Italian actor known in my canon for his tiny part in the metafilm Closed Circuit (1978).
I wrote about that film here.
In that film Flavio Bucci sports thick glasses and plays the part of a nerdy sociologist who takes notes of the audience’s reactions during the screening of the film.
Afterwards he is interrogated by the police. Has he seen anything which can solve the murder of a man in the audience by a gun man IN the film?
You can see Mr. Bucci from 27:20 onwards.
Mr. Bucci also played in the sex comedy Gegè Bellavita (1978) which can be found in full on YouTube.
Andrew Weatherall was an English DJ, record producer, and remixer.
There was a time when music research took up most of my time. It coincided with the golden age of the music compilation, roughly from 1990 to 2005.
From that era stem Nine O’Clock Drop (2000) and Fabric 19 (2004).
Andrew Weatherall is also the man who made me discover “Black But Sweet” (1931) via his “Wilmot” composition.