Brutalism at the Schoonselhof. Jack Godderis grave seen from the back (rear).
Photo Jan Willem Geerinck.
World music classic #829
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pvmfbOEjKY
“Milestones” by Miles Davis is the 829th entry in my top 1000 songs. There is no hierarchy in this top 1000 list. It’s like a giant mixtape you can put on shuffle.
829 songs (six years in the making; i.e. compiling) account for about fifty hours of music. When finished, the list will feature more than 58 hours of music. The average song length in my calculations is three minutes and a half.
On Youtube, of all places
I can’t remember exactly how but I managed to stumble on a complete version of the German short film Besonders wertvoll.
On Youtube, of all places:
Besonders wertvoll (1968, English: Of Special Merit) is a short subject directed by Hellmuth Costard and produced by Petra Nettelbeck.
The film, now almost fifty years old, criticized the new German Film Funding Act of 1967 by way of a talking phallus representing German politician Hans Toussaint, co-sponsor of the new film funding law. The title Besonders wertvoll translates as ‘of particular merit’ (as in cultural significance vs. ‘utterly without redeeming social importance‘) and is an allusion to the highest film rating given by Deutsche Film- und Medienbewertung.
Love misquotations? Here’s a good one. This film is famous for originating “Only the perverse fantasy can still save us,” (misattributed to Goethe), which is shown at the end of the film credits.
For those of you interested in weird films, here[2] is a Youtube playlist of films featured in Amos Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art (1974)
The film is a milestone in the history of the sexual revolution in Germany.
Pope in bed, almost dead
Caricature of Innocent XI (1676) by Bernini
I’ve been furthering my research on the history of caricature, aided by two books: History of Caricature and Grotesque in Literature and Art (1864) by Thomas Wright and Caricature and Other Comic Art (1877) by James Parton, the two earliest Anglophone studies on the subject.
Both mention amusing examples of Roman caricature: the Pygmy caricatures in Pompeii.
Neither mentions the Caricature of Innocent XI (1676) by Bernini (above).
The coarsest drawings in the history of caricature
Birds, bees and psychoanalysis
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The Shell by Odilon Redon represents yonic symbolism.
Already in 1916 the Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi in Sex in Psychoanalysis[1] wrote:
“The derisive remark was once made against psychoanalysis that the unconscious sees a penis in every convex object and a vagina or anus in every concave one. I find that this sentence well characterizes the facts.” (tr. Ernest Jones)
I found the above dictum while researching sexual symbolism. Ferenczi’s dictum was most famously referenced in Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History by Norman O. Brown.
Bosch’s disembodied senses
The Trees have Ears and the Field has Eyes is the informal title of a two-sided drawing by Hieronymus Bosch.
The disembodied eyes are on the ground, the disembodied ears float in the woods.
I previously published an example of disembodied eyes here.
See disembodied and independent body parts.
When a nose is not a nose
Napoleon III nose caricatures from Schneegans’s History of Grotesque Satire
Following my previous post on [1] the concept of the grotesque body in Bakhtin’s book Rabelais and His World (which mentions the term grotesque 91 times), I did some research on previous books Bakhtin mentions in Rabelais and His World with reference to the grotesque.
One of the authors whose name pops up most (13 times) is that of Heinrich Schneegans, author of Geschichte der grotesken Satire (1894).
Bakhtin criticizes Schneegans for failing to notice the connection between caricatures of the human nose (above) and the phallic symbolism of the human nose. Sometimes a nose it not a nose.
Anything coming out of the mouth of a ‘wise fool’
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I’ve been reading up on the grotesque body, finally taking the trouble and the time to read how its ‘inventor’ Mikhail Bakhtin defined it.
Here you have it, from Rabelais and His World:
“Contrary to modern canons, the grotesque body is not separated from the rest of the world. It is not a closed, completed unit; it is unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits. The stress is laid on those parts of the body that are open to the outside world, that is, the parts through the world enters the body or emerges from it, or through which the body itself goes out to meet the world. This means that the emphasis is on the apertures or convexities, or on various ramifications and offshoots: the open mouth, the genital organs, the breasts, the phallus, the potbelly, the nose. The body discloses its essence as a principle of growth which exceeds its own limits only in copulation, pregnancy, childbirth, the throes of death, eating, drinking, ordefecation. This is the ever unfinished, ever creating body, the link in the chain of genetic development, or more correctly speaking, two links shown at the point where they enter into each other. This especially strikes the eye in archaic grotesque”. (tr. Helene Iswolsky)
It’s quite a beautiful piece of prose. It reminds me of Deleuze and Guattari saying “there is no castration” and Sloterdijk’s genius comment on the the arse: “the arse is truly is the idiot of the family.”
See embodied cognition, body genres and body politics.
Also, anything coming out of the mouth of a ‘wise fool‘: morosophy and its mutant siblings serio ludere and spoudaiogeloion are still of great interest to yours truly.
Vices he never committed look out of his eyes in a wild revolt
Charles Baudelaire by Étienne Carjat (ca. 1863)
Charles Baudelaire by Étienne Carjat (ca. 1863) is a photographic portrait of Charles Baudelaire taken by Étienne Carjat.
The photo was published in a widely distributed series entitled Galerie contemporaine, littéraire, artistique.
The piercing gaze of Baudelaire has not gone unnoticed. Arthur Symons in Charles Baudelaire: A Study (1920) noted:
In the portrait by Carjat, his face and his eyes are contorted as if in a terrible rage ; the whole face seems drawn upward and downward in a kind of convulsion ; and the aspect, one confesses, shows a degraded type as if all the vices he had never committed looked out of his eyes in a wild revolt.