“Palm Trees (Love Guitar)” is World Music Classic #381

Steve Hillage‘s “Palm Trees (Love Guitar) “[1] from his Green album is World Music Classic #381.

RIP Thierry Jonquet (1954 – 2009)

RIP Thierry Jonquet, sometime collaborator of Jacques Tardi, author of the nouveau polar français, author of Mygale (1984), currently being filmed by Pedro Almodóvar as Tarantula.

Thierry Jonquet’s Tarantula was blurbed as “An unholy collaboration between Sade and Sartre, with occasional comic interventions by that honorary Frenchman Jerry Lee Lewis”

Tip of the hat to De Papieren Man

Floris and Blancheflour (is) (not) the missing link …

Floris and Blancheflour (is) (not) the missing link between European medieval literature and the Arabian Nights.

Many of the details, such as the Tower of Maidens (i.e. harem), eunuch guards, and the odalisques (white slavery) derive from material carried to the west via The Arabian Nights. The frame tale of The Nights (the king “re-marries” every night) is reflected in a plot element (“the king re-marries every year”) in Floris and Blancheflour.

The tale could be originally French, or possibly of Oriental origins, or a synthesis of motifs. Kathleen Coyne Kelly, in her essay “Bartering of Blauncheflur,” summarized the discussion of the sources as follows: “Scholars disagree as to whether Floris and Blauncheflur is an oriental tale that was adapted for Western audiences, or a tale whose European author simply supplied it with an oriental setting.”

Compared to other medieval romances, the story has not frequently been brought to the screen. In 1978 Fabrice Luchini and Arielle Dombasle (photo) portrayed Floris and Blancheflour in Perceval le gallois by Éric Rohmer.

Icon of Erotic Art #54

The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1878) is a watercolor painting by Belgian artist Félicien Rops. Freud commented on this work in his essay “Delusion and Dream in Jensen’s Gradiva”:

“The engraver has chosen the model case of withdrawal into the life of saints and penitents. An ascetic monk takes refuge – probably to escape worldly temptations – near the image of the crucified Saviour. This cross fades like a shadow and in its place the radiant image of a naked woman in full bloom, takes its place, also in the shape of a crucifixion. Other painters, whose psychological insight was not as penetrating, positioned their analogous representations of temptation, with sin insolent and triumphant, somewhere alongside the Saviour on the Cross. Only Rops made it take the place of Our Lord Himself on the Cross; he seemed to know that the repressed thought returns at the very moment of its repression…” —Translation James Strachey

Some snippets in original German:

“Eine bekannte Radierung von Felicien Rops illustriert diese wenig beachtete und der Würdigung so sehr bedürftige Tatsache eindrucksvoller”

“Ein asketischer Mönch hat sich – gewiss vor den Versuchungen der Welt – zum Bild des gekreuzigten Erlösers geflüchtet. Da sinkt dieses Kreuz schattenhaft nieder und strahlend erhebt sich an seiner Stelle, zu seinem Ersatze, das Bild eines üppigen nackten Weibes in der gleichen Situation der Kreuzigung.”

Some of the stories of the demons and temptations that Anthony is reported to have faced are perpetuated now mostly in paintings, where they give an opportunity and pretext for artists to depict their more lurid or bizarre fantasies. Emphasis on these stories, however, did not really begin until the Middle Ages, when the psychology of the individual became a greater interest.

Many visual artists have depicted these incidents from the life of Saint Anthony; in prose, the tale was retold and embellished by Gustave Flaubert.

The subject of Saint Anthony was first presented in the 10th century at Italian fresco paintings. In the European Middle Ages one can watch an accumulation of the theme in book illumination and later in German woodcuts.

About 1500 originated the famous paintings of Martin Schöngauer (ca. 1490), Hieronymus Bosch (ca. 1505) and Matthias Grünewald (ca. 1510).

In modern and contemporary art (Félicien Rops and Salvador Dalí) the Temptations of Saint Anthony are stable elements in European art.

I would love your company

Hi WordPress crowd and longtime friends.

I’m probably spending too much time at Tumblr and I need questions answers with things such as image IDs.

Please come and see my lifestream there, I would love your company.

Jahsonic is the number one Tumblr in Belgium.

It took me three days of intensive posting. I met a lot of great people and was literally barraged with good imagery. The quality of images is very high and no other platform can compare in quantity.

It reminded me of the old days when I used to blog at a maddening tempo over at Jahsonic.com from 2001 Nov until 2006 Aug.

I then switched to WordPress where I’ve had a very good time and my first availability in RSS format. I posted about 3,400 posts from August 2006 until today, an avarage of three posts per day.

RIP Simon Vinkenoog (1928 – 2009)

RIP Simon Vinkenoog, 80, Dutch poet and writer.

Vinkenoog with Spinvis in a totally Fela Kuti-esque track

Simon Vinkenoog (1928 – 2009) was a Dutch poet and writer. He was instrumental in launching the Dutch “Fifties Movement“.

In the Anglosphere Vinkenoog’s name is associated with the Albert Hall poetry event (and the film Wholly Communion) and his connection with IT magazine.

He was one of the Néerlandophone beat writers. The same cultural climate that begot the beat writers in the United States engendered European counterparts.

These countercultures must be looked for in two spheres, the sphere of European counterculture and the sphere of European avant-garde.

In France this was the Letterist International, in Germany perhaps Gruppe 47; visually and on a European scale there was COBRA.

Vinkenoog was born in the same year as Andy Warhol, Serge Gainsbourg, Jeanne Moreau, Nicolas Roeg, Guy Bourdin, Luigi Colani, Stanley Kubrick, Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, William Klein, Roger Vadim, Yves Klein, Jacques Rivette, Alvin Toffler, Ennio Morricone and Oswalt Kolle.

“Disco Sucks” @30

On this day 30 years ago in 1979, Disco Demolition Night heralded the last days of disco.

Disco started in small nightclubs in American urban centers in the early seventies with imported records such as “Soul Makossa.” During the 1970s disco steadily increased in popularity reaching a high point with Saturday Night Fever in 1977.

This was followed with a homophobic, racist backlash two years later when rock music fans started to consider disco culture — with its perceived drug-fuelled sexual promiscuity — silly and effeminate, and objected to the idea of centering music around an electronic drum beat and synthesizers instead of live performers.

Another (more masculine) subculture, punk music, arrived on the scene.

Parodies of disco music became common. The backlash was epitomized in Chicago by the riotous Disco Demolition Night.

Nile Rodgers, guitarist for the popular disco era group Chic said “It felt to us like Nazi book-burning, This is America, the home of jazz and rock and people were now afraid even to say the word ‘disco’.”

There was never a focused backlash against disco in Europe.

Now, for the first time on this blog: local news coverage of this Dionysian moment.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpQfCcsqQ0E]

What does it mean to be a revolutionary today? by Slavoj Zizek’s @ Marxism 2009

Via Belgian blogger Martin Pulaski comes What does it mean to be a revolutionary today?, Slavoj Zizek‘s response[1] to Alex Callinicos at Marxism 2009.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GD69Cc20rw]

At exactly 21:55 comes a hilarious joke on the self-inflatibility of futile resistance.

In the good old days — now comes the dirty conclusion, I’ve warned you, it’s really dirty — in the good old days of really existing socialism a joke was popular among dissidents. A joke used to illustrate the futility of their progresses. In 15th century Russia, occupied by Mongols, that’s the joke, a farmer and his wife walked along a dusty country road, a mongol warrior on a horse stops at their side and tells the farmer that he will now rape his wife. He then adds, but since their is a lot of dust on the ground, you should hold my testicles, while I am raping your wife so that they do not get dusty — dirty. After the Mongol finishes his job and rides away, the farmer starts to laugh and jump with joy. The surprised wife asks him: “How can you be jumping with joy when I just brutally raped?” The farmer answers: “But I got him! His balls were full of dust.”

This sad joke tells of the predicament of dissidents. They thought they were dealing serious blows to the party nomenclatura. But all they were doing was getting a little bit of dust on the nomenclatura’s testicles.

What is so brilliant in this piece of “toilet philosophy“[2] (I am more inclined while writing these words of nobrow philosophy, of which Zizek and Sloterdijk are the greatest contemporary examples in this category) is that Zizek returns to this joke for closing his arguments. In the same vein in the same speech he has the embodied metaphor of “cutting of the balls of capitalism” and how to proceed for capitalism’s castration. Brilliant.

Other outstanding episodes include Victor Kravchenko I Chose Freedom/I Chose Justice case.

John Calvin @500

Calvinism has been known at times for its simple, spartan and unadorned churches and lifestyles, as depicted in this painting by Emmanuel de Witte. Belgium, where I live, is on the Protestant-Catholic border between Northern and Southern Europe. The South is known for its joie de vivre, haute cuisine and exuberance, the North for its antithesis: frugality, meager food and general restraint.

John Calvin né Jean Cauvin (10 July 1509 – 27 May 1564) was an influential French theologian and pastor during the Protestant Reformation. He was a principal figure in the development of the system of Christian theology later called Calvinism. Originally trained as a humanist lawyer, he suddenly broke from the Roman Catholic Church in the 1520s. After religious tensions provoked a violent uprising against Protestants in France, Calvin fled to Basel, Switzerland, where in 1536 he published the first edition of his seminal work Institutes of the Christian Religion.

In the 1540s the Frenchman John Calvin founded a church in Geneva which forbade alcohol and dancing, and which taught God had selected those destined to be saved from the beginning of time. His Calvinist Church gained about half of Switzerland and churches based on his teachings became dominant in the Netherlands (the Dutch Reformed Church) and Scotland (the Presbyterian Church).

Anyone against him was called a Libertine, providing the origins of a well-loved term of this blog. The group of Libertines was led by Ami Perrin and argued against Calvin’s “insistence that church discipline should be enforced uniformly against all members of Genevan society”. By 1555, Calvinists were firmly in place on the Genevan town council, so the Libertines, led by Perrin, responded with an “attempted coup against the government and called for the massacre of the French … This was the last great political challenge Calvin had to face in Geneva.

Engraving of the Iconoclasm from G. Bouttat (1640-1703)

Many Protestant reformers including John Calvin were against religious art by invoking the Decalogue’s prohibition of idolatry and the manufacture of graven images of God. As a result, statues and images were damaged in spontaneous individual attacks as well as unauthorised iconoclastic riots. In my part of the world, this started in 1566, two years after Calvin’s death and resulted in the Beeldenstorm.

Calvin’s legacy in modern times has produced a variety of opinions. Certainly the execution of Servetus has left a negative view of Calvin. Voltaire mentions the event in his Poème sur la loi naturelle (Poem on Natural Law, 1756) and Dialogues chrétiens (Christian Dialogues, 1760). For Voltaire, Calvin’s philosophy had not produced any improvement over the intolerance presented in previous revealed religions. Calvin is discussed in Max Weber’s classic work on the The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in which he argues that Calvin’s teachings provided ideological impetus for the development of capitalism. Political historians have recognised his contributions to the development of representative democracy in general and the American system of government in particular.

In find Calvin only mildly interesting, more radical Reformation info can be found under the headings of Thomas Müntzer, Jan Hus, the anabaptists and the Peasants’ War.

As was to be expected, John Calvin‘s writing was put on one of the more interesting compendiums of Western literature, The Index.

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) – James Hogg [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Illustration by William Blake.

If you’d like to know more about religious fanaticism and the intricacies of Protestantism, I can recommend James Hogg‘s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (by way of Lichanos).