Tired/Wired #1

Since its inception in the early nineties of last century, Wired Magazine has run a series called Tired/Wired. It highlights what is hot and what is not in cyber culture.

Here is my first Tired/Wired entry backed (or fronted) by a song by my musical hero Gainsbourg:

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sieGXAP2dCg]

“Qui est In Qui est Out” (1966) by Gainsbourg

(The above composition also counts as World Music Classic #28 )

Tired/Wired

Please excuse the inclusion of my project. It is more a question of ambition than of reality. MUSE and JSTOR feature the best academic info but they keep it behind a walled enclosure.
Further rationales:

  • Wikipedia feels bloated today, Wikisource is getting up to speed (great for contemporary historical info in the public domain)
  • Google books has been a reliable source for some time now and is only getting better, Google itself contains too many Wikipedia clones
  • Downloading: only did this once, and downloaded some 250 tracks during a two month period which I subsequently lost, so I never downloaded again, I’ve always been in favor of the server-centric model proposed by SUN Microsystems rather than the client-centered model of that bête noire of computing Microsoft
    • Youtube satisfies my every music and moving images whim
  • Wikicommons is featuring a better and better image database free for use for any writer and blogger

Icons of erotic art #22

File:Masked nude woman, seated, by Thomas Eakins.jpg

Study of a Seated Nude Woman Wearing Mask (c. 1865–66) by Thomas Eakins

This drawing by American artist Eakins is a testament to the aphrodisian qualities of sensory deprivation. Central to this drawing are the breasts, ripe and heavy, surreal and unreal, proof that the most beautiful of women are not to be found in real life (except in brief photographic glimpses); but rather on paper.

Previous entries in Icons of Erotic Art here, and in a Wiki format here.

I urge you

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbGUr97tIDs&]

Early animation by the Chiodo brothers (of Killer Klowns from Outer Space)

“I urge you, learn to see ‘bad’ films; they are sometimes sublime”. —Ado Kyrou, Le Surréalisme au cinéma, p. 276

Bad films are not only sublime, they learn you about the techniques of filmmaking, all the things we take for granted, the inner workings of concepts such as credibility in acting, continuity editing are exposed in watching and studying bad films.

I found the clip above while researching Elihu Vedder‘s painting The Roc’s Egg (1868) which is said to have furnished Ray Harryhausen with inspiration for The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad.

The only version of the Roc’s Egg painting I found was this one, by Robert Swain Gifford

I couldn’t find Vedder’s painting.

Update: I found the Edder version, clearly inferior to Gifford’s. I’ll give you both so you be the judge.

The Roc's Egg by Vedder

Vedder’s version of the Roc’s egg

The Roc's Egg (1874) by Robert Swain Gifford
Gifford’s version of the Roc’s egg

World music classics #27

“California Soul”Youtube (1969) by Marlena Shaw

There are those records which invite you to perform grand gestures and theatrical movements on the dancefloor. This is one of them. A very spacious sound from the sunny side of the United States. Happy music.

My sensibilities in literature, film and the visual arts may sometimes be more to the gloomier side, in music I love bright, happy and danceable (exceptions notwithstanding).

Shaw is best-remembered for the use of her vocals in the 1996 “Remember Me” by Blue Boy Youtube.

Previous World Music Classics.

Quiddity and Derrick May

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUWpSDtD9no&]

“It is what it is” (1988) – Derrick May

Prompted by a recent comment by Lichanos, here is a post on quiddity (the what-isness of things), Susan Sontag’s essay “The Aesthetics of Silence” and Derrick May.

Derrick May’s “It is what it is” is a composition first published in 1988 on Detroit recording label Transmat. Derrick May was my hero in the early 1990s but after his collaborations with System 7 (if you’d care to track down this material, only go for the Derrick May/Steve Hillage collaborations) he basically stopped making music.

“The scene changes to an empty room.”

“The Aesthetics of Silence” is an essay by Susan Sontag first published in book form in Styles of Radical Will. She examines three 20th century intellectuals who – after having produced work in their younger years – stopped making anything as they grew older. Her case rests on Arthur Rimbaud, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Marcel Duchamp.

The analogies with Derrick May are obvious, but does he deserve to be mentioned in the row of illustrious predecessors?

Back to the title of this post. The oblique link is the title of this musical composition “It is what it is” = quiddity.

Stunning work by Slavko Vorkapić

The Furies (1933)
music: Ludwig von Beethoven
score synchronized by Slavko Vorkapić

“Vorkapich hade complete creative freedom in writing, designing, directing and editing his montage sequences for feature films, his work was often reduced to its bones in the released productions. Here is the filmmaker’s original version of one of his outstanding efforts”

Thus reads the Youtube blurb to this wonderful clip; strange that I cannot find reference to this film over at IMDb.

Slavko Vorkapić (March 17 1894 – October 20 1976), was a Serbian–American film director and editor, university professor and painter, one of the most prominent figures of modern cinematography and film art, best-known for The Life and Death of 9413: a Hollywood Extra.

See surrealism and film

Nobrow manifestos, #2

The Pornographic Imagination is is my second entry in this series, the first was Leslie Fiedler’s Cross the Border — Close the Gap (1969).

The Pornographic Imagination is a nobrow essay by Susan Sontag first published in book form in Styles of Radical Will. It had been originally published two years earlier in the Partisan Review of spring 1967.

The subject is erotic literature and Sontag contends that five French literary works are not ‘just’ pornography but literary fiction and thus genuine literature. Although the term paraliterature had not been coined at the time of its writing (we have to wait 17 years for Fredric Jameson to do that), the connection between science fiction and erotic fiction makes this essay one of the first defenses of the nobrow or paraliterary category.

Her ‘case’ is based on these five novels:

On Georges Bataille she writes:

“One reason that Histoire de l’oeil and Madame Edwarda make such a strong and unsettling impression is that Bataille understood more clearly than any other writer I know of that what pornography is really about, ultimately, isn’t sex but death. I am not suggesting that every pornographic work speaks, either overtly or covertly, of death. Only works dealing with that specific and sharpest inflection of the themes of lust, “the obscene,” do. It’s toward the gratifications of death, succeeding and surpassing those of eros, that every truly obscene quest tends.”

I CANNOT live without my life! I CANNOT live without my soul!

Dead Mother (1898) by Max Klinger

Dead Mother (1898) by Max Klinger

“May she wake in torment!’ he cried, with frightful vehemence, stamping his foot, and groaning in a sudden paroxysm of ungovernable passion. ‘Why, she’s a liar to the end! Where is she? Not THERE – not in heaven – not perished – where? Oh! you said you cared nothing for my sufferings! And I pray one prayer – I repeat it till my tongue stiffens – Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living; you said I killed you – haunt me, then! The murdered DO haunt their murderers, I believe. I know that ghosts HAVE wandered on earth. Be with me always – take any form – drive me mad! only DO not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I CANNOT live without my life! I CANNOT live without my soul!“

That’s the end of Wuthering Heights‘ Heathcliff‘s tirade against his faithless lover Catherine who has just  died in childbirth, a speech which begins in anger and blasphemy and ends in beseechment and pleading, which epitomizes the love hate relationship between the two characters.

Wuthering Heights is Emily Brontë‘s only novel. The narrative tells the tale of the all-encompassing and passionate, yet thwarted love between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw, and how this love hate relationship eventually destroys both themselves and many around them.

An obsession with the female form

Miroslav Tichy

Baby Got Back (a.k.a. “I Like Big Butts“)

Via gmtPlus9 (-15) comes outsider artist par excellence Miroslav Tichý, a Czech photographer and painter. During many years Tichý wandered the small Moravian town of Kyjov in rags, pursuing his obsession with the female form by secretly photographing women in the streets, shops and parks with cameras he made from tin cans, children’s spectacle lenses and other junk he found on the street. He would return home each day to make prints on equally primitive equipment, making only one print from the negatives he selected. His work remained largely unknown until 2005, when he was 79 years old.

The shoe of a dead woman at the bottom of a cupboard

Dead_Woman's_Shoes

The Critical Dictionary (French: Dictionnaire critique) was a regular section of the journal Documents. It offered short essays by Georges Bataille and his colleagues on such subjects as “Absolute“, “Eye“, “Factory Chimney”, and “Keaton (Buster)“.

In the entry for aesthete one finds the following sentence:

“When it comes down to it, these words have the power to disturb and to nauseate: after fifteen years, one finds the shoe of a dead woman at the bottom of a cupboard; one throws it in the rubbish bin.” […] The unfortunate who says that art no longer works, because that way one remains disengaged from the ‘dangers of action’, says something deserving of the same attention as the dead woman’s shoe.” (translation by Art in Theory).

Bataille never fails to intrigue me. I must confess – and I always do – that I do not understand one iota of what he means by the image of a dead woman’s shoe in relation to art and aesthetes, but not understanding is a very big part of the attraction. As I stated before, I like my philosophy poetic and incomprehensible.