World music classic #43 and 44

 

“Make it Last Forever”

Donna McGhee is an American singer who released one album on Red Greg Records, produced and arranged by Greg Carmichael and Patrick Adams. The track from that album, “Make It Last Forever,” was covered by Loleatta Holloway.

Greg Carmichael (“Barely Breaking Even”) and Patrick Adams (“In the Bush” and “Keep on Jumpin’) produced at least 50 tracks which transcend disco as genre. They are in many ways the auteurs of disco, more so than Larry Levan, Walter Gibbons or Tom Moulton, who were primarily involved in post-production. The only one to rival Adams and Carmichael was Arthur Russell, but his story is altogether different.

One more by Patrick Adams (“My Baby’s Got E.S.P.” notice the similarity of Patrick Adams’s trademark: the string arrangements and slow beats).

“My Baby’s Got E.S.P.”

Your doctor will look into your mouth …

Lazarillo de Tormes (1808-12) by Francisco de Goya

Lazarillo de Tormes (1808–12) by Francisco de Goya

Your doctor will look into your mouth to see if your throat is red and your tonsils are swollen and covered with white or yellow spots. He or she will also look for small red spots on the roof of your mouth.

Are anyone of you familiar with Lazarillo de Tormes and able to tell me what this scene is about and why Goya decided to paint it? The painting, which I found today, has a strange attraction. It is as something forbidden is going on. The man looking into the mouth of the kid is not a physician, I gather.

Update: found the explanation of the painting. The man is a blind man and the guardian of Lazarillo, he suspects that the Lazarillo has stolen food and wants to inspect it. Lazarillo‘s can’t stand the feeling of the man’s nose stuck in his throat and throws up in his face.

If Hitler Had Been a Hippy

If Hitler Had Been a Hippy How Happy we Would Be[1][2] is a 2008 series of paintings by Jake and Dinos Chapman which deface orginal paintings by Adolf Hitler. The Chapmans previously used a similar ploy on work by Goya (Insult to Injury).

At the end of May 2008 the White Cube Gallery exhibited the 20 authenticated watercolours and oils painted by Adolf Hitler, which the brothers have defaced with hippie motifs. Jake Chapman described most of the dictator’s works as ‘awful landscapes‘ which they had ‘prettified‘.

On a general level, if Rome was the art world capital from the Renaissance to the 1850s, Paris from the 1850s until WWII, a title which Paris lost to New York after the war; could it possibly be that London, with artists such as Emin, Hirst and the Chapmans, is the current art world capital? I don’t see any other country but the UK coming with consistently exciting work.

Harvey Korman (1927 – 2008)

Blazing Saddles - Harvey Korman

Harvey Korman (right), click to play YouTube video

Blazing Saddles (1974) Harvey Korman

Blazing Saddles is world cinema classic #51.

See also YouTube – Dentist Sketch – The Carol Burnett Show, a hilarious comedy sketch with Korman in a supporting role, in which the latter is unable to keep from laughing. Korman was infamous for breaking character on The Carol Burnett Show when he would start laughing during sketches, usually due to the antics of Tim Conway, who would deliberately try to crack Korman up.

WMC#42: To shake memories into the air

This post rhymes with air

She threw back her hair
Like I wasn’t there
And she sipped on a julep.
Her shoulders were bare
And I tried not to stare

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYHEBa6Xx48&]

“Summer (The First Time)” (1973) by Bobby Goldsboro

A Hemisphere in Your Hair (French: Un hémisphère dans une chevelure) is a poem by Baudelaire collected in Paris Spleen.

Laisse-moi respirer longtemps, longtemps, l’odeur de tes cheveux, y plonger tout mon visage, comme un homme altéré dans l’eau d’une source, et les agiter avec ma main comme un mouchoir odorant, pour secouer des souvenirs dans l’air.
Long let me inhale, the odour of your hair,
into it plunge the whole of my face, like a thirsty man
into the waters of a spring and wave it in my fingers like a scented handkerchief,
to shake memories into the air.

In the film Withnail & I Richard Griffith’s character recites the line “Laisse-moi respirer longtemps, longtemps, l’odeur de tes cheveux” (Eng: Long let me inhale, the odour of your hair).

Elsewhere #9

An Almeh by Gerome

An Almeh by Jean-Léon Gérôme

Notice the enticing quality of the semi-transparent voile. Voile is French for veil.

  1. New or newly discovered blogs dedicated to individual artists: Jean-Léon Gérôme [2] and Odilon Redon [3]
  2. The anglophone film blog Flickhead[1] quits.
  3. Trevor Brown reports[4] on a friendly letter received by Belgian artist Wim Delvoye after Trevor had caught him plagiarizing his work in Delvoye’s tattooed pigs project[5].
  4. To start your Monday musically, here is the video[6] of “Crank That (Soulja Boy),” just a quick reminder that I like (some) of my black music funky (in its original meaning, smelly and dirty) as well as dangerous-sounding. “Crank Dat” has the most original use of the steel pan since Mad Professor‘s[7] use of it in the early 1990s (I can’t remember the name of that album). Since its release in 2007 “Crank Dat,” which epitomizes the gangster sound, sold over three million copies.

Click legend: all text links are internal, numbers are external.

Like willow I will be the willow on your bedside

or, sweet words for sweet ladies

Like willow I will be the willow on your bedside.

Like willow I will be the willow on your bedside

The quote comes from an old Asian ghost tale. The photo was taken by a Wikipedian. As an afterthought: it’s very difficult to find out who at Wikipedia is responsible for which photo, it’s equally difficult to understand the intricacies of Creative Commons licences. Enjoy the photo and quote and have a nice weekend. See you on Monday.

Every woman adores a fascist

Or, in praise of difficult women

In my never relenting quest for the stereotypes of modern culture, I’ve mentioned the “difficult man”[1] and the “sexually frustrated woman”[2]. Today, let’s have a look at another archetype: the “difficult woman.” But before we go on I would like mention that I want to include in my definition of “difficult” the connotation “complicated.” Many difficult people are difficult because they are complex personalities, often torn apart by conflicting inner desires.

The archetypical difficult women in world literature are Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina, who both had a quixotic lust for fiction and who both committed suicide. Many difficult women are also strong women and that is why we men love them and at the same time have a complicated relationship with them. We love them and hate them.

Many “difficult” people lead unhappy lives, and many commit suicide. Easy-going people don’t.

To say that Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) was a difficult rather than an easy-going woman is a platitude, she is only one of the talented but tortured people who left our planet voluntarily prematurely. She famously said that “Every woman adores a fascist,” in a poem dedicated to the memory of her father. I would like to add to her words that “every man adores a femme fatale, bad girl or difficult woman,” and would like to conclude with Sylvia Plath reading from her own poem “Daddy“. If you want to head straight to the “fascist” quote, scrub to 2:14.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hHjctqSBwM&]