Consider me: my hands can not cover my breasts, I cling to them tightly to hide my shame. But also consider this: sunlit windows gaze down upon me like undeniable eyes, millions of bronze eyes; and shame turns into pride.
Jeune fille en buste 1794 by Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, a typical illustration for the blog Femme, femme, femme.
Previous entries in Icons of Erotic Art here, and in a Wiki format here.
“Oh baby, is this the woman I want to be? The door is unlocked, the windows are open, every time the place looks best for me. I said, kiss me, kiss me, kiss me again, kiss me again…”
These lyrics are from “Kiss Me Again“, a track by Arthur Russell. Listen to the entire track here (unfortunately the lesser of the two mixes of this twelve inch).
The photograph is of Maria Bonnevie, one of the more interesting actresses currently working in European cinema. She is the lead in the 2003 small masterpiece Reconstruction and the current cult favorite; Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s The Banishment.
The audio track posted above comes via here, a new blog of someone who goes by the nick fac586, what I believe to be a reference to Fac 51 Haçienda also known as just The Haçienda.
The author of this blog does an extended analysis of the song and its lyrics. Regarding the lyrics he says:
Have you ever gotten back together with someone who you shouldn’t have? I think most of us have, and I think that’s what this song is getting at, and the music tells the story even more than the words.
Deserving mention in this context is a recent article by popular music scholar Tim Lawrence, author of “Love Saves the Day” and current biographer of Arthur Russell. The article is titled “Connecting with the Cosmic: Arthur Russell, Rhizomatic Musicianship, and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-92” and connects Arthur Russell in a tired way to the theory of rhizomatics of Deleuze & Guattari.
“Kiss Me Again” is world music classic #25 and Reconstruction is world cinema classic #41
While I was in Amsterdam in the winter of 2006-2007 I asked the people in a philosophy bookstore: “If Slavoj Žižek and Sloterdijk are my two favorite contemporary philosophers, who would the third be?” They came up with Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Alain Badiou.
I had remembered Badiou but had almost forgotten Enzensberger, but last weekend at the used book store De Slegte I bought a Dutch translation of Enzensberger’s Einzelheiten, and was very much taken by his analysis of the concept avant-garde in his essay The Aporias of the Avant-Garde.
Aporias, published in 1962 in Germany, is one of the first essays that preached the “death of the avant-garde” which has been celebrated since the advent of postmodernism. It features good analyses too of Lukacs petty defense of literary realism and stimulating reflections on the absurdity of some critics’ grouping of individual artists into art movements, especially in cases such as expressionist literature (no writer has ever called himself expressionist).
On a general level it provides excellent etymological and semantic analyses of the term avant-garde.
P.S. Published in the same year was another work on avant-garde practices, which I suspect is more an eulogy: The Theory of the Avant-garde by Renato Poggioli.
Der Abend (1820) by Caspar David Friedrich
Connecting vocabulary: crépuscule, twilight, the blue hour.
Honoré Daumier would have been 200 today.
Honoré Daumier (February 26, 1808 – February 10, 1879), was a French printmaker, caricaturist, painter, sculptor, and one of the most gifted and prolific draftsmen of his time. He is best-known for his satirical work in Le Charivari, and underrated for his work as a painter.
RIP Teo Macero [1] and Joe Gibbs
Teo Macero (October 30 1925 – February 19 2008), was an American jazz saxophonist, composer, and record producer. He was a producer at Columbia Records for twenty years, and most notably produced the Miles Davis album Bitches Brew[2], one of the first albums to apply the studio as a musical instrument, featuring edits and studio effects that were an integral part of the music.
Joe Gibbs (1943 – 21 February 2008) was a Jamaican reggae producer, best-known for producing “Uptown Top Ranking”.
“Uptown Top Ranking” [3] (1978) is a single by Althea and Donna, produced by Joe Gibbs based on the riddim of the Alton Ellis’s song “I’m Still In Love” of 1967.
Alton Ellis‘ song “I’m Still In Love” [4] is a 1967 single previously popularized by Marcia Aitken’s cover “I’m Still In Love With You Boy” and the dub track “Three Piece Suit” by Trinity. It’s still a popular riddim today.
Via Simon Reynolds [5].
The French paper Le Monde reports [1] on the cremation of Alain Robbe-Grillet, who died last week. The attendance was small, about 80 people and members of the literary establishment were absent.
A text was read, a text that had been written by Robbe-Grillet for the occasion of Roland Barthes‘s death.
My translation from French:
Via Papieren Man
I’ve recently taken the decision to watch more pulp and listen to more pop. Let’s start with the pulp.
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c92TGgK68ZE&]
From: Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo
Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo (2005) is the sequel to the 1999 film Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo. Rob Schneider stars as Deuce Bigalow, a male prostitute who must go to Europe to help his pimp T.J., played by Eddie Griffin, find a murderer who is killing the greatest male prostitutes of Europe. Film critic Roger Ebert includes the movie in his most hated films list.
This particular scene is about African American stereotypes . Don’t worry, plenty of European stereotypes in this American nouveau exploitation: the gross-out film. My previous male prostitute film was American Gigolo, I suppose. My latest male prostitute novel was Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet.
For pop I have an enduring classic of camp and pulp by Belgian’s own Lou Deprijck, principally known for his underground disco twelve inch “Que Tal America”. While the previous is considered the “high art” of disco, what I’m about to present you is truly guilty. Here is
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsJun-ZtqTs&]
“Disco Samba”
The dodgiest things about this track are that a) it is a medley; and b) it is rip-off of Jorge Ben but nevertheless succeeds in spreading a joyous vibe; c) the song originated in Belgium, a country of which American journalists have remarked in post-9/11 hysteria that they ” have trouble enough fighting bad breath, never mind a real enemy soldier.”
“He who has attained the freedom of reason to any extent cannot, for a long time, regard himself otherwise than as a wanderer on the face of the earth – and not even as a traveller towards a final goal, for there is no such thing. But he certainly wants to observe and keep his eyes open to whatever actually happens in the world; therefore he cannot attach his heart too firmly to anything individual; he must have in himself something wandering that takes pleasure in change and transitoriness.” –from The Wanderer, of Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human
