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[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1llNYAlYrc]
Saul Williams (born February 29, 1972) is an African American artist best-known for his blend of spoken word poetry and hip-hop. He plays a leading role in the independent film Slam.
Introducing Bxzzines
Image sourced here.
Bxzzines [1], is a French-language blog by an anonymous internet user who goes by the pseudonym of Clifford Brown, indicating a link to Jess Franco (Franco worked under innumerable pseudonyms and was a big fan of jazz music, many of his pseudonyms are taken from famous jazz musicians, such as Clifford Brown and James P. Johnson).
Bxzzines is dedicated to zines and has featured posts on film directors Max Pécas, Michel Lemoine, Herschell Gordon Lewis, Jean Rollin, Jess Franco, Jean-François Davy and 1970s magazines such a Midi-Minuit Fantastique and Sex Stars System.
The illustration shown depicts a part of a promotional insert [2] for the Le Terrain Vague publishing imprint of Eric Losfeld, inserted in Midi-Minuit Fantastique n°15/16 (12/1966). The page depicted above is an advertisement for Charles Fort‘s The Book of the Damned, in its second French translation, translated by Robert Benayoun; with a forward by Tiffany Thayer.
The censored title on the same page is George de Coulteray‘s Sadism in the Movies.
Recent entries on the Bxzzines blog include:
Introducing Chris Morris
The list of sensibilities published in my recent post on Grillet prompted a regular reader to alert me to the work of Chris Morris.
Chris Morris (born 1965) started his career on radio, the clip above is from his television work, which – so it is said – is a little less powerful than his radiophonic work, but works better on the blog format.
The clip is very disturbing and funny, it appropriates the tropes of reality TV shows.
I’ve long stopped watching television on a regular basis, but I have known periods of serious telephilia. The BBC has always been a haven to the telephile.
Recent British television I did enjoy (on Youtube) have included:
Eyecandy #7: Arboretal arabesques
Suddenly Baucis and Philemon each saw the other putting forth leaves. Their skin started to turn into tree bark. They embraced each other and cried, “Farewell!” Baucis was turned into a linden tree and Philemon into an oak, two different but beautiful trees intertwined with one another.
Indeed Rafaela, thanks.
Part of the same trope is:
Apollo and Daphne, Apollo and Daphne by Antonio Pollaiuolo, one tale of transformation in the Metamorphoses—he lusts after her and she escapes him by turning into a bay laurel.
Previously on Eye Candy.
Cult fiction #3
From Leni Riefensthal’s book
I have a habit of running into ontological problems, so my third entry in the “cult fiction” series [1] is appropriately not really fiction. It’s documentary photography, a problematic genre that is neither fact nor fiction. The Last of the Nuba belongs to the realm of documentary, faction, pseudo-documentary and pamphlet.
Leni Riefenstahl, better known for directing Triumph of the Will and Olympia, published a collection of her photographs of the people titled The Last of the Nuba in 1974. The book was extensively reviewed in Fascinating Fascism by Susan Sontag.
Fascinating Fascism is quite an essay. It was first published in 1975 and republished in Under the Sign of Saturn, in 1980. The essay considers the link between fascist aesthetics to sadomasochism.
- […] Between sadomasochism and fascism there is a natural link. “Fascism is theater,” as Genet said. As is sadomasochistic sexuality: to be involved in sadomasochism is to take part in a sexual theater, a staging of sexuality. Regulars of sadomasochistic sex are expert costumers and choreographers as well as performers, in a drama that is all the more exciting because it is forbidden to ordinary people. Sadomasochism is to sex what war is to civil life: the magnificent experience. (Riefenstahl put it: “What is purely realistic, slice of life, what is average, quotidian, doesn’t interest me.” As the social contract seems tame in comparison with war, so fucking and sucking come to seem merely nice, and therefore unexciting. The end to which all sexual experience tends, as Bataille insisted in a lifetime of writing, is defilement, blasphemy. To be “nice,” as to be civilized, means being alienated from this savage experience—which is entirely staged.
I started reading the essay last evening, and haven’t finished yet, but time and time again, Susan Sontag strikes me as one of the most insightful cultural critics of the 20th century, way up there with Walter Benjamin.
The essay is of an era that also saw Salò by Pasolini and The Night Porter by Cavani, both aesthetic meditations on fascism and sadomasochism.
World music classics #24
Embedding disabled by request, click to play
“Can You Feel It” (1986) by Larry Heard
In the beginning, there was Jack. And Jack had a groove. And from this groove came the groove of all grooves. And while one day viciously throwing down on his box, Jack boldly declared, “Let there be House!” –first lines from the lyrics
I remember listenin to this song on Grand Theft Auto! I was speeding down the highway then ended up in the ocean and the song stopped and I went crazy and jumped off my house (in the game). -Youtube comment
Previous World Music Classics.
It arrived late in an aging civilization
The Bristlecone Pine realizes that it arrived late in an aging civilization. This may well be the most disquieting trait of this disquieting plant, and the one most disturbingly seductive to a contemporary soul.
More on the beauty of nature at horticultural horror and ugly plants.
I am not a cinephile
I would have to concur with Alain Robbe-Grillet who stated in a televised interview that he is not a cinephile. He is interested in “certain films,” that’s it.
“What are commonly called true cinephiles are mental retards (débile mentale) who love “the movies”, people who run to any theatre to submit to viewing any film. They consume with the same pleasure whatever genre of film. That is what is known as cinephilia. It’s an illness, though a less common one than it used to be [during the heydays of the Nouvelle Vague],” he concedes.
From Alain Robbe-Grillet : Je ne suis pas un cinéphile ! Youtube clip posted by beethoven000999.
In the same interview Grillet adds that he is neither a devourer of books. The way I like to interpret this soundbite is that Grillet does not follow any medium, but rather is in search of certain sensibilities. Mine include:
absurd – alternative – anti – avant-garde – banned – bizarre – clandestine – controversial – counterculture – cult – eccentric – elitist – esoteric – excessive – extravagance – exotic – experimental – forbidden – gratuitous – grotesque – hermetic – hidden – horror – illegal – incongruous – independent – intellectual – irrational – kinky – kitsch – libertine – macabre – modern – monstrous – non-mainstream – obscure – occult – offbeat – offensive – original – outsider – perverse – postmodern – queer – radical – rare – revolutionary – scatological – sensational – strange – subculture – subversive – supernatural – surreal – taboo – transgressive – travesty – ugly – uncanny – unconventional – underground – unusual – weird – wild
P. S.: guilty pleasure of the day: Yelle – “A Cause des Garçons” Remix Tepr Video Tecktonik, a popular track when it first came out in 1987 in Francophone Europe, here in a recent remix.
World cinema classics #40
Today’s World Cinema Classic is Glen or Glenda Youtube, sorry embedding disabled, a film on transsexuality directed by Ed Wood, Jr. and released in 1953. I only saw this a couple of years ago. Since the arrival of the VCR, the film has been marketed as one of the worst ever. I would have to disagree with that statement, it’s very enjoyable. There is a dream scene in this film (a bit similar to the one shown in the clip) which ranks way up there with “genuine” surrealist films such as Un Chien Andalou. By all means, see it.
The defining sentence is “Pull the stringk!”
Caveat emptor: There is the slightest of chances that I liked the soundtrack (I cannot identify it, does anyone have the details?) so much that it prejudiced me in a favorable way.
Previous “World Cinema Classics” and in the Wiki format here.
Guilty pleasures #6
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gl-7fbIrpQ]
Ever since buying Die Grosse Jux-Box [1] late last year, I’ve been crazy about the La la la la la singing/laughing chant on that record. Today I hear it on Radio Centraal in a version by French singer Henri Salvador (1917 – 2008) who died last Wednesday. The track is called “Juanita Banana”. The eponymous heroine Juanita Banana is a banana grower’s daughter singing “Caro Nome” from Verdi‘s Rigoletto.