Latin hustles and European folksongs


Soul Jazz presents: New York Latin Hustle (2007) – Various
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

New York’s melting pot of Puerto Rican, Cuban and Afro-American musicians led to stunning culture clashes in the 1960s and 70s when Latin styles mixed with Funk, Disco, Soul and Jazz to produce new hybrids such as Boogaloo, Latin Jazz, Disco and Salsa. All these are featured in Soul Jazz Records latest journey into Latin music, New York Latin Hustle.

The record features all the kings of Latin music – Tito Puente, Machito, Eddie Palmieri, Candido, Ray Barretto and many more, alongside rarer, lesser known names.
In the 1960s Fania Records and Tico Records released stunning Latin Boogaloo, Descargas, Latin Soul from the emerging New York Latin scene. In the 1970s, Salsoul Records similarly mixed Salsa, Soul and Funk to release stunning Latin Disco crossover material such as Candido’s ‘Dancin and Prancin’, which would go on to be a million seller.
New York Latin Hustle brings all this together and features Latin music from all these styles, labels and eras.

The album comes with extensive sleeve-notes and exclusive photography. –Soul Jazz

On an entirely different note, I’d like to introduce this album:


Brossa d’Ahir (1977) – Pep Laguarda & Tapineria
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

What do I know of this album? Nothing much except that it was produced or engineered by Daevid Allen (Soft Machine, Gong), that it sounds somewhat like this, that it’s sung in Mallorquí (Majorcan Catalan), that my brother discovered it via Jens Lekman and that it is recommended for Joanna Newsom fans.

Introducing Surreal Documents

Valter’s Surreal Documents is an excellent blog on subversive surrealism as professed by Georges Bataille and the Acéphale group. Recent subjects have included Alice Coltrane, Coffin Joe, books acquired and Nico. The blog can now be accessed from my blogroll.

I quote from the Acéphale post:

… the Jean Rollin who participated in this issue of “La Revue Acéphale” is of course not Jean Rollin, who was born in 1938 and couldn’t possibly have contributed any articles to this “La Revue Acéphale” (I just corrected the error in Wikipedia).

In fact, it was the filmmaker’s father who contributed to the publication. The father was also called Jean Rollin. Jean Rollin’s mother, Denise Rollin-Le Gentil, had an (extramarital) relationship with Georges Bataille from october 1939 to the end of 1943.

Tohill and Tombs’ “Immoral Tales. Sex & Horror Cinema In Europe 1956-1984” suggest that years later Jean Rollin (the filmmaker, that is), would remember the bedtime stories that Bataille told him, about ‘Monsieur le Curé’, a wolf dressed in the robes of a priest.

How I would like to have heard those stories!

More on Denise Rollin-Le Gentil:

On 2 October 1939, [Georges Bataille] meets Denise Rollin-Le Gentil, who is 32 and married with a young son, Jean. Surya writes, ‘She was beautiful, a beauty that would be described as melancholy if not taciturn. She spoke little or, for long periods not at all’. She joins him at his flat in October; thereafter, Bataille will spend time in her flat at 3 rue de Lille.

[In 1945, Maurice] Blanchot commences an apparently largely epistolatory affair with Denise Rollin, which will continue until her death in 1978.–Spurious and more at Google books.

From Surreal Documents’ first post which features a photograph by Boiffard and Valter’s manifesto:

This blog has been inspired by my visit to the exhibition “Undercover Surrealism” at the Hayward Gallery in London. The blog is intended to contain doctrines, fine arts, ethnography, variety. Expect dusty things, ethnographies of one-man-Cthulhu Cults, confused concepts, black and blackened musics, untruths.

Checking Valter’s blogroll (show me your blogroll and I will tell you who you are) you will find Jim Woodring, Monster Brains, the Wooster Collective, Esotika Erotica Psychotica, Giallo Fever, Groovy Age Of Horror, Mutant Sounds, Video Watchblog and the recent newcomer Ombres Blanches.

To conclude, some Coffin Joe:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXuVaA63Hbk]

Enoch Soames and proto-pomo-lit

My brother’s recommending the short story “Enoch Soames”, and the anthology above looks like a nice place to read it in. The story is well-known for its clever and humorous use of the ideas of time travel and pact with Faust. Another good place to read it would be The Book of Fantasy (1940), an Argentianan anthology edited by Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Silvina Ocampo. A site dedicated to Hunter S. Thompson has this:

Published in 1979 by St. Martin’s Press, this collection edited by Duncan Fallowell contains a number of stories, including “The Dinner” by Thomas Love Peacock, “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allan Poe and “Enoch Soames” by Max Beerbohm. Hardly the kind of works you would expect “The Heat Closing In” by William S. Burroughs to be surrounded by. HST [Hunter S. Thompson’s] part is called “A Night on the Town” , the part from FFLV [Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas] where HST describes his encounter with an acid guru, when he lived near Michael Olay. –www.gonzo.org

 

Taxidermia (2006) – György Pálfi

Taxidermia (2006) – György Pálfi

It’s difficult to write much about Taxidermia in a blog that my parents read! The film, directed by György Pálfi, is visually and thematically grotesque. It’s full of startling, transgressive images. (Even the original poster had to be obscured, though the poster used for the Cannes Film Festival premiere is uncensored.) www.matthewhunt.com/blog

György Pálfi’s grotesque tale of three generations of men, including an obese speed eater, an embalmer of gigantic cats, and a man who shoots fire out of his penis. www.imdb.com/title/tt0410730/

Taxidermia is a 2006 film about three generations from Hungary, including a taxidermist, starting during the Second World War. The film is surreal in nature with dark comedy. The director is György Pálfi. The film is a Hungary / Austria / France collaboration and the language is Hungarian. The film is based on short stories by Lajos Parti Nagy. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxidermia

Aside from his albums and collaborations, Amon Tobin has also produced the composition to the Hungarian film, Taxidermia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amon_Tobin

György Pálfi est un réalisateur et scénariste hongrois né le 11 avril 1974 à Budapest. fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gy%C3%B6rgy_P%C3%A1lfi

German language trailer at YouTube:

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

Hungarian trailer at YouTube

French trailer at YouTube:

Amon Tobin soundtrack excerpt of same

The breeding of money

Donald Kuspit on contemporary art in Artnet:

By way of introduction, I want to quote some lines from the tenth and final Duino Elegy of Rainer Maria Rilke. Describing the “booths” in a fair — let’s call it an art fair — “that can please the most curious tastes,” he asserts that there’s one “especially worth seeing (for adults only): the breeding of Money! Anatomy made amusing! Money’s organs on view! Nothing concealed! Instructive, and guaranteed to increase fertility!”

I will suggest that the irrational exuberance of the contemporary art market is about the breeding of money, not the fertility of art, and that commercially precious works of art have become the organ grinder’s monkeys of money. They exist to increase the generative value and staying power of money — the power of money to breed money, to fertilize itself — not the value and staying power of art. —Donald Kuspit

Headpress Guide to the Counter Culture

Headpress Guide to the Counter Culture : A Sourcebook for Modern Readers (2004) – Temple Drake, David Kerekes [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Subject matter will appeal to a broad cross section of interests, and includes cult film, outsider music, graphic art, photography, adult comics, fiction, eroticism, crime and the occult.

This is a collection of zine and book reviews that previously appeared in the Headpress zine during the nineties. Most of the material was familiar to me. Some pleasant surprises were Daniel Clowes (Ghost World, Google gallery, and this, his work is similar to fellow American Charles Burns), mentions of Colin Wilson, a portrait of the work of Roy Stuart, (Google gallery who put narrativity back into erotic photography by making use of vignettes).

Most of the books/mags reviewed are from the nineties and early 2000s.

I am very much intrigued by this:

Bechamp or Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology (1997) – Douglas E. Hume
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

This book claims that virtually every serious and minor ailment known to humanity has been linked to vaccine damage, and there’s an “unaccountable” connection between the AIDS epidemic in Central Africa and the massive vaccination campaigns that occured there. — Mikita Brottman via Headpress Guide to the Counter Culture (2004). See also anti-vaccination.

And thankful for turning me on to this:

The Art of the Nasty (1999) – Nigel Wingrove, Marc Morris
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK] […]

Conclusion: I liked the non-fiction reviews the best. In that field, Adam Parfrey (Apocalypse Culture) is somewhat a central figure.

If you like Headpress you may also enjoy Dalkey Archive Press – Atlas Press – Jörg Schröder – John Calder – Sylvia Beach – Creation Books – Edmund Curll – Lawrence Ferlinghetti – Maurice Girodias – Glittering Images – Grove Press – Eric Losfeld – Headpress – New Directions – Obelisk Press – Olympia Press – Jean-Jacques Pauvert – RE/Search publications (V.Vale and A. Juno) – Barney Rosset – Taschen and Semiotext(e).

Headpress elsewhere: at giallo fever.

 

Tarantino’s take on the grindhouse phenomenon opens tonight

Grindhouse

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6l-InqDHmA]

Grindhouse (2007) – Rodriguez and Tarantino

As I’ve pointed out before here, Greencine is serializing Eddie Muller’s 1996 non-fiction book Grindhouse: The Forbidden World of “Adults Only” Cinema on the grindhouse phenomenon. From Greencine’s latest entry:

“I’m almost surprised that Tarantino and Rodriguez didn’t convince their patrons, Harvey and Bob Weinstein, to coat the floors of the theaters themselves with the very special shoe-sole-sticking gunk that was an unavoidable aspect of the real grindhouse experience,” writes Premiere‘s Glenn Kenny. “Death Proof offers ‘thrills’ that are deeply unpleasant and deeply unwholesome, and it’s here that Grindhouse comes closest to achieving the ‘climate of perdition’ that another surrealist critic, Robert Benayoun termed the hallmark of ‘authentic sadistic cinema.’ A lot of people associate a taste for grindhouse movies with the tiresome condescension of the ‘so-bad-it’s-good’ ethos, but Tarantino understands the aesthetics of aberrance that animated the explorations of so-called trash hounds.” —Greencine

Returning to Glenn Kenny’s review, I am intrigued by his opening lines mentioning Ado Kyrou and by the mention of Benayoun. I quote:

“…[G]o and learn to see the worst films; they are sometimes sublime,” the surrealist filmmaker and critic Ado Kyrou advised in 1963. While neither Robert Rodriguez nor Quentin Tarantino are (to my knowledge) disciples of Kyrou, they carry his ethos in their bones.

…

And it’s here that Death Proof offers “thrills” that are deeply unpleasant and deeply unwholesome, and it’s here that Grindhouse comes closest to achieving the “climate of perdition” that another surrealist critic, Robert Benayoun, termed the hallmark of “authentic sadistic cinema.”

I am especially interested in where Benayoun supposedly talked about the “climate of perdition” and “authentic sadistic cinema.”

Anyone know more?