Apart from a brief but ardent infatuation with Dutch schlager singer André Hazes in April (you don’t want to know 🙂 ), musically the best of 2018 was the discovery of the oeuvre of Hiroshi Yoshimura (1940 – 2003) who worked within Japanese ambient.
I discovered Hiroshi Yoshimura while listening to Birds of Venezuela (1973), an album of bird vocalizations which was re-released this year.
This whole Japanese ambient scene is most weird. There is the super sweet Jamaica ～ Waves And Light And Earth (1993) by Takashi Kokubo, which Discogs classifies as non-music.
In fact, many of these albums seem to have been made as pure background music. Kokubo’s album Get At The Wave (1987) was created for a new line of Sanyo air-conditioners.
Then there is the oddity Watering a Flower (1984) by Haruomi Hosono which was commissioned by Muji as in-store background music. And Hiroshi Yoshimura’s A・I・R (1984) was produced for the makeup and skincare company Shiseido; while his album Surround (1986) was made for playing at the model homes of the Misawa Home corporation.
But the best album is Green (1986) by Hiroshi Yoshimura. Someone remarked that this album is what green sounds like, what plant life sounds like. So soothing, full of natural sounds that have a very relaxing effect.
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”.
Cantudo sings “Desnudame”, in the background are excerpts from “La trastienda’
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].
Dutch translation of 1970 of Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) translated by Else Hoog and with a cover by Ton Klop
It was not until I had read Galápagos (1985) in 2012 that I realized what a genius Vonnegut is. Last winter in China I read While Mortals Sleep (2011), a collection of short stories of which “The Humbugs” is absolutely gorgeous.
Back to Slaughterhouse-Five.
On page 21 (I’m reading the beautiful Dutch translation of 1970 translated by Else Hoog and with a cover by Ton Klop[above]), is the remark of Vonnegut on the fact that nothing intelligent can be said about a massacre, in this case the bombing of Dresden in World War II.
These are his words: “There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds. And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like “Poo-tee-weet?“”
“Poo-tee-weet”, translated with an exclamation mark in Dutch au lieu of a question mark in the original English, is an onomatopoeia of a bird vocalization and in Vonnegut’s novel it stands for something meaningless (as Aristotle used it when he called the Platonic forms teretismata).
In reality of course, bird vocalizations are not meaningless (they are not blituri to use another ancient word), it is a form of animal communication that humans fail to understand.
Which brings us to the trope of meaningless violence, the Dutch notion of excessive and unnecessary violence. Here too, Vonnegut has something to say. When one character announces he is writing an anti-war book, someone retorts that writing and anti-war book is useless, because war is inevitable, you might as well write an “anti-glacier book”. Observations like this make Vonnegut not only a philosophical writer but also one of the great moralists of the 20th century.
Last Tango in Paris (1972) was the first of his films I saw. I’m sure if I would see it again, it would bore me to death. In contrast, Performance (1970) by Roeg (see prev. post) has aged better. Both films are a testament to the sexual revolution.
The last of Bertolucci’s film that I saw was The Dreamers (2003). I remember liking it and I guess that likely hasn’t changed.
Luck has it that YouTube has an entire copy of The Spider’s Stratagem (1970). Like Performance of Roeg, it is inspired by Jorge Luis Borges.
I’ve never seen it, I’ll watch it now.
Let me end (because I can) with this beautiful juxtaposition only marginally linked to Bertolucci:
I believe Performance was the first of his films that I saw. In some Antwerp art house probably.
Roeg’s most intriguing film is Castaway, the true story of an adventurer who publishes an ad looking for a ‘wife’ to spend a year on a uninhabited island.
In the beginning of his career he was a cinematographer. He filmed Roger Corman’s The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe.
Several aspects of Performance were novel and it foreshadowed MTV type music videos (particularly the “Memo from Turner” sequence in which Jagger sings) and many popular films of the 1990s and 2000s.
Roeg belonged to the generation of Ken Russell and Stanley Kubrick and was the last one alive of the three.
Italian director Cesare Canevari died six years ago but it went unnoticed by me.
I learned of his death yesterday when I landed on Canevari’s Last Orgy of the Third Reich (1977) via Nazi Love Camp 27 (1977). God knows what brought me there.
Kaw-Liga was released in 1986 and is a re-interpretation of the eponymous song by Hank Williams, replacing its original backing music with the bassline of Michael Jackson‘s Billie Jean.
