Deaths in 2008

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“Nobody had every done anything like this before” —Bebe Barron (1925 – 2008) on Anais Nin

January 22 – Heath Ledger, Australian actor (b. 1979)
February 13 – Henri Salvador, French singer (b. 1917)
February 18 – Alain Robbe-Grillet, French writer and filmmaker (b. 1922)
February 18 – Teo Macero, American record producer
February 21 – Joe Gibbs, Jamaican record producer
March 15 – Mikey Dread, Jamaican singer
March 19 – Sir Arthur C. Clarke, English science fiction author and inventor (b. 1917)
April 5 – Charlton Heston, 84, American actor
April 20 – Bebe Barron, 82, American composer, pioneer of electronic music.
April 29 – Albert Hofmann, 102, Swiss researcher, chemist and discoverer of LSD.
May 12 – Robert Rauschenberg, 82, American pop artist.
June 1 – Yves Saint-Laurent, 71, French fashion designer
June 2 – Bo Diddley, 79, American rock and roll and blues singer, songwriter, and guitarist.
June 2 – Mel Ferrer, 90, American actor, film director and producer.
June 7 – Dino Risi, 91, Italian film director (Il Sorpasso, Profumo di donna), natural causes.
July 4 – Thomas M. Disch, 68, American science fiction author (Camp Concentration, The Brave Little Toaster), suicide.
July 7 – Bruce Conner, 74, American artist, natural causes.
July 7 – Hugh Mendl, 88, British record producer.
August 10 – Isaac Hayes, 65, American soul and funk musician, actor (South Park), stroke.
August 17 – Manny Farber, 91, American film critic and painter.
September 8 – Hector Zazou, 60, French composer and record producer.
September 12 – David Foster Wallace, 46, American author and essayist, suicide by hanging.
September 12 – Norman Whitfield, 65, American Motown songwriter (“I Heard It Through the Grapevine“), diabetes.
September 18 – Mauricio Kagel, 76, Argentinian composer.
September 26 – Paul Newman, 83, American Academy Award-winning actor, cancer.
September 26 – Marc Moulin, 66, Belgian musician, cancer.
October 11 – Alton Ellis, 68, Jamaican singer, lymphatic cancer.
October 25 – Gerard Damiano, 80, American adult film director (Deep Throat), stroke.
November 1 – Yma Sumac, 86, Peruvian soprano, cancer.
November 4 – Byron Lee, 73, Jamaican musician and record producer, bladder cancer.
November 9 – Miriam Makeba, 76, South African singer, heart attack.
November 17 – Guy Peellaert 74, Belgian painter, illustrator and photographer.
December 2 – Odetta, 77, American folk singer and human rights activist, heart disease.
December 11 – Bettie Page, 85, American pin-up girl, complications from a heart attack.
December 24 – Harold Pinter, 78, British playwright, recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature (2005), liver cancer.
December 25 – Eartha Kitt, 81, American singer and actress, colon cancer.

RIP Donald Westlake

A Gold Medal Books original by Westlake under the name Stark.

Donald Edwin Westlake (12 July 1933 in Brooklyn, New York – 31 December 2008 in Mexico) was an American writer, with over a hundred novels and non-fiction books to his credit. He specialized in crime fiction, especially comic capers with an occasional foray into science fiction. He created the psychopathic fictional character Parker.

Film still from Point Blank

Outside of the world of literature he is perhaps best-known for the film adaptation of his novel The Hunter as Point Blank in 1967 with Lee Marvin. The Hunter was written by Donald E. Westlake under the pseudonym Richard Stark. The plot concerns a criminal, Parker (or Walker in Point Blank), who is himself betrayed, shot, and left for dead by his partner, and his relentless pursuit to retrieve his money and wreak revenge.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPKL3KHE–I]

“As Tears Go By” by Marianne Faithfull in Jean-Luc Godard‘s Made in USA (1966)

Jean-Luc Godard‘s Made in USA (1966) which was an extremely loose adaptation of “The Jugger,” a novel by Westlake. Neither the film’s producer nor Godard purchased the rights to the novel, so Westlake successfully sued to prevent the film’s commercial distribution in the United States.

Introducing Dino Valls

Click for credits

Click for credits

Dino Valls is a Spanish painter born in 1959 in Zaragoza, presently living and working in Madrid. This self-taught artist studied Italian and Flemish masters of the 16th and 17th centuries and currently makes use of egg tempera.

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Having previously obtained a degree in medicine, he is now one of the Spanish representatives of the vanguard of new figurative art [1], along with Odd Nerdrum in Norway and John Currin, Lisa Yuskavage in America where there is also the Lowbrow art movement, presided over by critics such as Suzanne G..

His work is also classified as fantastic art.

Here is an interesting YouTumentary with a soundtrack by Funkstörung.[2]

What the Butler Saw

I have received questions about the signification of What the Butler Saw in my post on the Düsseldorf erotic art exposition [1].

I’ve introduced two fictional characters on this blog. One has been rather active, Sholem Stein [2], another, Waloli has only done three posts[3]. The butler may be third character (although the only character I now feel comfortable with – in terms of what kind of message he can bring – is Sholem Stein.

But I sometimes feel it’s easier to express things in the third person, like Facebook invites you to do in their status updates.

The butler is the voyeur, the ultimate peeping tom, the man who sees everything but whose duty it is to remain silent. Silence is golden, remember?

As for the encylopedic stuff:

What the Butler Saw first referred to an early mutoscope softcore series of erotic films.

Mutoscopes were a popular feature of amusement arcades and pleasure piers from the 1890s until the mid-20th century. The typical arcade installation included multiple machines offering a mixture of fare. Both in the early days and during the revival, that mixture usually included “girlie” reels which ran the gamut from risqué to outright soft-core pornography. It was, however, common for these reels to have suggestive titles that implied more than the reel actually delivered. The title of one such reel, What the Butler Saw, became a byword, and Mutoscopes are commonly known in England as “What-the-Butler-Saw machines.” (What the butler saw, presumably through a keyhole, was a woman partially disrobing.)

English playwright Joe Orton appropriated the title What the Butler Saw to make a theatrical farce of the same name, first staged in London on 5 March 1969. Cinema-goers recognised situations used by Orton’s contemporaries, the Carry On comedians of the late 1960s. For example, Carry On Doctor was showing whilst the play was being written in 1967.

An early 1970s reference is the title of the film What the Swedish Butler Saw, also known as Champagnegalopp, a Swedish film from 1975 directed by Vernon P. Becker. The story is based on the Victorian anonymous novel The Way of a Man with a Maid. This sex comedy, in English known as What the Swedish Butler Saw or Confessions of a Swedish Butler, the film starred Ole Søltoft and Diana Dors.

As of the 2000s, the expression What the Butler Saw has functioned as a byword for voyeurism in general, much like peeping tom before it.

A lovely surprise. I am spinning at a party, so it seems. Dear me.

RIP Freddie Hubbard (1938 – 2008)

Moanin’ with Freddie Hubbard

Freddie Hubbard (1938 – 2008) was an American jazz trumpeter.

He was primarily known as a sideman to Art Blakey in the latter’s Jazz Messengers and many other jazzmen’s bands but achieved his greatest personal success in the 1970s with a series of albums for smooth jazz record label CTI Records. Although his early 1970s jazz albums Red Clay, First Light, Straight Life, and Sky Dive were particularly well received and considered among his best work, the albums he recorded later in the decade were bashed by critics for their commercialism.

Polar AC

A particularly accomplished track is Gibraltar, compiled by Ashley Beedle on the Grass Roots album.

RIP Ann Savage (1921 – 2008)

RIP American actress Ann Savage at age 87, best-known for her iconic bad girl role in Detour.

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Ann Savage discusses Detour

Ann Savage (1921 – 2008) is mainly remembered as the cigarette-puffing femme fatale in Detour (1945) and other Hollywood B-movies and film noirs of the 1940s.

When it became public domain, Detour was often run on syndicated television and several versions were released on VHS home video. Although made on a small budget and containing only rudimentary sets and camera work, the film has garnered substantial praise through the years and is held in high regard. Director Wim Wenders called her work in Detour “at least 15 years ahead of its time”. The film’s ending is notable as an exemplum of involuntary manslaughter.

Ann most recently earned rave reviews in all media for her stunning performance as Canadian director Guy Maddin‘s mother in his most acclaimed film My Winnipeg (2008).

Introducing Japanese photographer Manabu Yamanaka

“Gyahtei,”[1]

Manabu Yamanaka is a Japanese contemporary artist. He lives and works in Tokyo, was born in Hyogo, Japan, in 1959. His photographs have been exhibited throughout Europe and North America.

His exhibition, “Gyahtei,”[1] a Buddhist term meaning “great age,” consisting of a series of black and white photographs of old people brought him to international attention.

He also did the cover art to Coin Locker Babies[2].

Lucy, a hypothetical primate

The butler[0] told me that yesterday at Düsseldorf he also saw Transplant[1] by Otto Dix. The print reminded me of Italian comic artist Liberatore‘s Frankensteinesque [2] vision RanXerox [3], [4], [5], one of the most neglected comic book series of the 21st century.

Lucy, l’espoir (2007) illustrated by Liberatore and written by Patrick Norbert.

To my surprise — I know that Liberatore has not made an album since 1996, not counting Femmes[6] which has no story — I stumbled on Lucy, l’espoir a 2007 graphic novel illustrated by Liberatore, many times called the Michelangelo of comic art, but probably more kin to Goltzius (compare the depiction of exaggerated muscle mass in[7], [8] and [9])

On the cover[10] of Lucy, l’espoir’ (En: Lucy, the hope) is an ape mother holding a baby and looking skywards to the moon on a clear night. On a second plate[11], one ape fights another and they both seem to fall off a cliff. The ape on the cover is Lucy, an Australopithecus afarensis specimen discovered 1974, at one time considered the missing link.

RIP Eartha Kitt (1927 – 2008)

RIP Eartha Kitt

Eartha Mae Kitt (1927 – 2008) was an American actress, singer, and cabaret star. She was perhaps best known for her 1953 Christmas song “Santa Baby“. Orson Welles once called her the “most exciting woman in the world”. She is internationally known for such songs as “I Want to Be Evil” (1957) and Where Is My Man (1983) (UK #36), the first a prime example of American cabaret, the second a gay anthem. She is an archetypical cat woman.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQ5VaBgXzuM&]

“I Want to Be Evil“

As for “I Want to Be Evil,” I just discovered the song today. The version on Youtube depicted was recorded for a Swedish television show called Kaskade or Kaskad, Swedish for waterfall.

The song was written by Lester Judson and Raymond Taylor, first recorded in 1953, taken from the album That Bad Eartha with space-age pop musician Henri René and his Orchestra.

What the Butler Saw in Düsseldorf

The butler visited Diana und Actaeon – Der verbotene Blick auf die Nacktheit with a fellow butler and a maid.

He was thrilled to see Étant donnés[1] by Marcel Duchamp. And he did not realize it also looked like this[2]. He saw the famous metal doll sculpture[3] by Hans Bellmer and Bad Boy by Eric Fischl. He saw the most beautiful penis in post-war photography, yes he meant the Robert Mapplethorpe one[4].

He saw and liked photographs[5] of the Linley Sambourne collection, paintings by French figuratist Jean Rustin [6], paintings by Michael Kirkham [7], his first viewing of the fauvist Erich Heckel [8], Phryne [9] by French academic cult painter Jean-Léon Gérôme, waxworks by Belgian sculptor Berlinde De Bruyckere [10], and paintings by Roland Delcol [11].

The butler was also very much taken by Johannes Hüppi [12]; his first viewing of his fave John Currin [13]; his first real Félix Vallotton; and a Lisa Yuskavage [14]. But not that one.

Butler wants you to know that the works he pointed to are for reference only and may not correspond to the works at the exhibition. He also wants you to know that some of the links may be NSFW.

Jahsonic

Burgemeester van Dodenstad