RIP France Gall (1947 – 2018)

Jazz À Gogo (1964) – France Gall

France Gall was a French singer. She is famous for such songs as “Teenie Weenie Boppie” (on LSD), “Zozoi” (Brazilian), “Ella, elle l’a” (on Ella Fitzgerald) , “Laisse tomber les filles” (on Lotarios), “A Banda (Ah Bahn-da)” (Brazilian), “Poupée de cire, poupée de son” (Eurovision song winner) and “Pauvre Lola” (which only features her giggle).

Of personal interest is her collaboration with Serge Gainsbourg.

Notorious is the fact that she apparently was unaware of the fact that the “lollipops” in  “Les Sucettes” could mean more than just mere lollipops, despite her being already 19.

2018 in the public domain

2018 is around the corner. As always, I check the new authors/painters/musicians whose work becomes public domain in 2018.

Nude Against the Light by Pierre Bonnard

Major names this year include:

RIP Sunny Murray (1936 – 2017)

Sunny Murray was an American musician, one of the pioneers of the free jazz style of drumming.

His album Sonny’s Time Now (1965) is in the Top Ten Free Jazz Underground.

On that record Amiri Baraka reads his controversial 1965 poem “Black Art” (above) which features the line “we want poems that kill”, an instance of the aestheticization of violence.

RIP Alain Jessua (1932 – 2017)

Alain Jessua was a French film director and screenwriter who directed ten films between 1956 and 1997.

Léon la lune (1956), a film documenting the life of the ‘clochard‘ of the title, was Alain Jessua’s first film and it won the influential Prix Jean Vigo in 1957. The short film was inspired by Jean-Paul Clébert’s book Paris insolite (1952), the first of a series of realist photojournalistic books depicting the underworld in Paris. Clébert’s friends Jacques Yonnet and Robert Giraud wrote their own tales of the vagabond life on the streets of Paris; Yonnet wrote Paris Noir (1954), and Giraud’s Le Vin des rues (1955). The three frequented the same haunts as the youths of Letterist International, and this scene would become the subject of Ed van der Elsken’s photonovel Love on the Left Bank (1956), the most popular depiction of Parisian bohemian bar life.

Jessua first came to my attention for his “pop art film” The Killing Game (1967, above), a collaboration with the late Belgian illustrator Guy Peellaert.

Even small Belgian museums have nice collections of fine art

Beached Fish (1643), a painting by Frans Rijckhals

Beached Fish (1643), a painting by Frans Rijckhals

 

Over the weekend, while visiting a Robert Doisneau exhibition (he also did montages/collages![1]), I wound up in the permanent collection of the Museum of Ixelles and was surprised by Beached Fish (1643) by Dutch painter Frans Rijckhals (above). The painting is somewhat surreal as the fish (and the lobster to its right) is clearly oversized in comparison to the people in the left hand bottom corner.

See Surrealism avant la lettre.

Also see Stranded Sperm Whale by Dutch artist Jan Saenredam (1565–1607), satirized in Le Phallus phénoménal.

RIP Jerry Lewis, 91

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjNTqQ9eKhY

RIP Jerry Lewis, 91

I saw the enjoyable The King of Comedy in the 1990s, a recommendation of my movie bible Cult Movie Stars.

I know French film criticism of the 1960s was crazy about him.

The reason for this infatuation was explained in the book Why the French Love Jerry Lewis.

Why the French Love Jerry Lewis
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Well, Lewis died.

I researched him anew.

I found the movie above: Slapstick of Another Kind.

It’s the second Kurt Vonnegut film adaptation I see.

The first was Breakfast of Champions[1] starring Bruce Willis.

Both are bad films.

I enjoyed both films.

Philosophia becoming falsafa …

In Aristote au mont Saint-Michel[1] (2008) Sylvain Gouguenheim claims that it was not so much the Islamic Golden Age which transmitted our Greek heritage, but Nestorian Christians such as Hunayn ibn Ishaq and translators such as James of Venice.

In a telling passage (above) Gouguenheim says:

“Des chrétiens ont ainsi forgé, de A à Z, le vocabulaire scientifique arabe. Telle fut notamment l’oeuvre de Hunayn ibn Ishaq (809-873), le véritable créateur de la terminologie médicale arabe, dont le génie consista non seulement à décalquer des mots grecs et à les «arabiser» en leur donnant une sonorité arabe (philosophia devenant falsafa) …”.
“Thus Christians have forged the Arab scientific vocabulary from A to Z. That was the nature of the work of Hunayn ibn Ishaq (809-873), the true creator of Arab medical terminology, whose genius not only consisted in the calquing of Greek words and to “arabize” them by giving them an Arabic sound (philosophia becoming falsafa) … “

And elsewhere:

“La conclusion est claire : l’Orient musulman doit presque tout à l’Orient chrétien. Et c’est cette dette que l’on passe souvent sous silence de nos jours, tant dans le monde musulman que dans le monde occidental.”
“The conclusion is clear: the Muslim East owes almost everything to the Christian East, and it is this debt that is often overlooked today, both in the Muslim world and in the Western world.”

Translations are mine.

“Places that cannot be left” (2)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qa_xg0suuzc

Furthering my previous post on “places that cannot be left” (“The Captives of Longjumeau” and The Exterminating Angel), I remembered the book Krabat which I read as a child, about a young boy who winds up in a mill from which it is impossible to escape. Everyone who tries to run away wades through swamps all night, only to find himself (at dawn) back at the gates of that very same mill.

And by coincidence, yesterday, I watched the absurdist/surreal film Woman in the Dunes. Its male protagonist is trapped by local villagers into living with a woman whose life task is shoveling sand for them.

It’s an excellent film, one of my World Cinema Classics.

P.S. : I cancelled my cable and bought this gadget, Google ChromeCast, which allows you to play YouTube films from your smartphone or PC.