Michel Legrand is best known for penning “The Windmills of Your Mind” (1968), which people where I live now in the version “Cirkels” by Herman van Veen. Above in an oft-sampled version by Dorothy Ashby.
Legrand is also known for writing pop music such as Claude Nougaro‘s “Tout Feu Tout Femme“.
I discovered Edwin Birdsong when I discovered Salsoul and have yet to listen to his earlier work for Polydor, Bamboo and Philadelphia International.
Sometimes I can’t even remember just how I stumbled upon something. Maybe it was a suggestion by YouTube that brought me into contact with Bernard Parmegiani maybe it was something I was reading. I just can’t trace it. However it may be, I stumbled upon Parmegiani simultaneously with his connection to Walerian Borowczyk. Parmegiani did the soundtrack for at least three of Borowczyk’s films: Les Jeux des Anges (1964), Docteur Jekyll et les femmes (1981) and Scherzo infernal(1984). I’d seen Scherzo before but I had not seen Les Jeux des Anges[1] nor the Jekyll film. You can watch the Jekyll film over at YouTube[2] in an English version with Dutch subtitles.
Neither had I seen that holy grail of transgressive cinema The Beast (way up there with Le Sexe qui parle by Claude Mulot and The Image by Radley Metzger, both from the same year) which you can see here[3] in a dubbed Spanish version. An uncut version, it appears. You can read its British censorship history somewhere online, it’s extensive. Both Docteur Jekyll et les femmes and The Beast are obsessed with large beast-like phalli. In the case of Jekyll ripping open the abdomen of its victims, in the case of The Beast as seen in copulating horses (with gorgeous shots of dripping horse vulvae) and of a bear-like-constantly-ejaculating huge hammer-shaped penis raping and making love to Sirpa Lane.
As for Parmegiani’s art music. I listened numerous times to the incredible piece De Natura Sonorum[4] (1975) which is really remarkable at being soothing while appearing chaotic. I can’t get enough of it. Caribou mentions it in his Caribou 1000 and apparently it has been of some influence on Aphex Twin. From what I know of him, that may be true.
Finally, at 4:40 of Chants Magnétiques[5] (1974) you can hear ASMR bits. For those of you unfamiliar with ASMR, it stands for autonomous sensory meridian response. ASMR-sounds are sounds that give goose bumps and cold chills.
I mentioned King Mob Echo in my previous post on Rita Renoir[1]. It’s the magazine of the English Situationist offshoot wich ran for five issues in the period 1968-70.
Its historiography seems to be incomplete.
The first issue depicts and image of the Fantomas serial which Wikipedia[2] lists as of the Barrabas film.
However, if you look closely at the image, you will see that the caption reads “77. Feuillade, Fantomas, 1912”. The Barrabas film dates from 1920 so it seems unlikely that the still stems from that film. The film, which lasts more than five hours, is here, I just don’t have time to watch it. Can anyone tell us from where this still is taken? It is also on the cover of Fantomas: The Corpse Who Kills (2008).
Secondly, and here’s a little mystery I solved myself, there is the caption, a citation by Karl Marx:
Most sources researching King Mob attribute this dictum to The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, but it’s not, it’s actually from Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and reads in the original German: “Ich bin nichts und ich müßte alles sein” and is recently translated as “I am nothing and I should be everything”.
Thirdly, there is the case of the photo of Rosa Luxemburg’s corpse. I’ve known this photo since I read Lipstick Traces, featured in their section on King Mob, but I would very much want to find out where this photo was first published.
Anyone?
Via research on the King Mob Echo magazine, which led me to Chris Gray which led me to Conrad Rooks which led me to Chappaqua (in which Rita had a part), it has come to my attention that Rita Renoir has died.
Rita Renoir was a French exotic dancer, sex symbol, nobrow figure and actress.
Above you can see Rita Renoir performing a striptease to Serge Gainsbourg’s “Sois belle et tais-toi“, a song from the album Serge Gainsbourg N°2 (1960).
But…
The clip is actually from from Il mondo di notte numero 3 (1963), a typical mondo film, and the music is actually by Riz Ortolani. The scene is superb.
German writer Edgar Hilsenrath is best-known for his novel The Nazi and the Barber (1971), the story of a German SS mass murderer, who after the war assumes a Jewish identity and escapes to Israel and becomes a zionist. The story is told from his perspective and describes the atrocities he committed.
It is supposedly both funny and gruesome, which earns it its label ‘grotesque’.
Today, it is exactly four years ago that Charlie Hebdo was massacred.
My father, who died in 2000, used to bring copies of Hara-Kiri home when I was a boy.
Charlie Hebdo was the new incarnation of Hara-Kiri, after it had been permanently banned by the French government.
I recently looked at ALL covers of Hara-Kiri, which you can find here.
The funniest cover is perhaps Hara-kiri n°162 (March 1975) which depicts a frontal view of male genitals wearing a shirt along with the following accompanying text:
“Chômeurs ! c’est pas avec cette tête la que vous trouverez du boulot rasez-vous !”
English:”Unemployed! You won’t find a job with your face looking like this. Shave yourselves!”
I am, you might say, an unabashed fan of Charlie Hebdo. I am also a fan of the right to offend and insult, especially of fictional beings.
The words of Marquis de Sade from “Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans” are particularly apt here:
“I should like there to be perfect freedom to deride them all [all religions]; I should like men, gathered in no matter what temple to invoke the eternal who wears their image, to be seen as so many comics in a theater, at whose antics everyone may go to laugh.”
For those of you who think that Charlie Hebdo was obsessed with Islam. You are mistaken. It is simply not true and it has been proven.
Art critic Yve-Alain Bois in “Taken Liberties: Yve-Alain Bois on Charlie Hebdo”[1] has stated:
“A statistical analysis of Charlie Hebdo‘s content over the past ten years, particularly that of its front page, was published in Le Monde on February 25. It reveals not only that the publication was actually less obsessed with religion than is generally supposed, with only 7 percent of its front pages devoted to the subject, but also that the topic of Islam makes up less than a fifth of even these covers. When Charlie attacks religion–its contributors are particularly exercised by fundamentalism (of all stripes) and the hypocrisy of the clergy–Catholicism is most often the butt of its satire.”
So only seven percent is devoted to religion, and of that seven percent, only twenty percent to Islam. Which makes for 100*.07*.2 equals 1.4 percent. Yve-Alain Bois bases himself on research by Jean-François Mignot and Céline Goffette titled “Non, ‘Charlie Hebdo’ n’est pas obsédé par l’islam” [“No, ‘Charlie Hebdo’ is not obsessed with Islam”], published in Le Monde, February 24, 2015.
As we go forward, I’m rather pessimistic about freedom of speech , especially with regards to the global growth of religion. The question E. Kaufmann asks in 2010, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? is extremely relevant today.
Every year, I check which authors have become public domain.
In 2019, the list includes German artist Kurt Schwitters, German actor Karl Valentin, Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein, French playwright, actor and director Antonin Artaud, Soviet-born painter Arshile Gorky, American film director D. W. Griffith, German actor, film director, and screenwriter Paul Wegener, Hungarian composer Franz Lehár and Cuban percussionist Chano Pozo.
I only saw three 2018 films this year:
Although not comparable to the other two, the best film is This Magnificent Cake!
Ce magnifique gâteau ! (2018, This Magnificent Cake!) is written and directed by Marc James Roels and Emma de Swaef. It is cloth/fabric stop-motion film. The title is based on a dictum by Leopold II of Belgium recorded in a letter in which he remarked eagerly that he wanted his share of “this magnificent African cake”.
It is an anthology film set in colonial Africa in the late 19th century telling the stories of 5 different characters: a troubled king, a middle-aged Pygmy working in a luxury hotel as an ashtray, a failed businessman on an expedition who stole the fortune of his family which subsequently went bankrupt, a lost porter and a young army deserter. And a clarinetist who is forbidden by the king to play his cuckoo notes in “The Cuckoo in the Depths of the Woods”.
Jorge Grau was a Spanish film director who worked in the age of the sexual revolution which came late in Spain because of censorship in Francoist Spain.
To the illustrious history of Spanish horror film, Grau contributed The Bloody Countess (1973) and Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (1974), the first film on Elizabeth Báthory, the second on zombies.
To the not so illustrious history of Spanish erotica, he contributed the film La trastienda, the first Spanish film to feature full frontal nudity. The film touches upon sexual repression and Opus Dei.
María José Cantudo was the actress who was first seen nude on Spanish cinema screens in La trastienda. While researching Grau, it also came to my attention that Cantudo recorded a song called “Desnuda me”, Spanish for “Unrobe me”.
In the part on Spanish horror of the documentary Eurotika!, Jorge Grau is featured on 18:50 [above].
![[2]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/Barrabas.jpg){kind=link}