Larry Levan MP3s

Via analog giant:

Mp3: Joubert Singers – “Stand of the Word” (Levan Remix)
Mp3: Grace Jones – “Pull Up to the Bumper” (Levan Garage Remix)
Mp3: Inner Life – “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” (Levan 12″ Mix)
Mp3: Chaka Khan – “Tearin‘ It Up” (Levan Mix)

Pay special attention to ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough‘ (1981), especially the break. Vocals are by Jocelyn ‘Somebody Else’s Guy’ Brown, mix by Larry Levan, keys by Michael De Benedictus.

Another Jocelyn fave is ‘Make It Last Forever’ (1979).

Larry Levan produced over 70 remixes. To me his best record is the Padlock EP (1983).

More info on the Joubert track here.

Slavoj Žižek and the chicken joke

Slavoj Žižek and the chicken joke from The Parallax View (2005):

“For decades, a classic joke has been circulating among Lacanians to exemplify the key role of the Other’s knowledge: a man who believes himself to be a grain of seed is taken to a mental institution where the doctors do their best to convince him that he is not a grain of seed but a man; however, when he is cured (convinced that he is not a grain of seed but a man) and allowed to leave the hospital, he immediately comes back, trembling and very scared—there is a chicken outside the door, and he is afraid it will eat him.“My dear fellow,” says his doctor,“you know very well that you are not a grain of seed but a man.” “Of course I know,” replies the patient, “but does the chicken?””

What is hauntology?

Spending time on Padraig’s Subject-barred brought the concept of hauntology to my attention via this piece titled The Gramophone’s Technological Uncanny which furthers Mark K-Punk’s investigation of sonic hauntology. In its origins hauntology is Jacques Derrida‘s neologism which is, in French, a pun on ontology and refers to, in the words of the Halflives website: “the paradoxical state of the specter, which is neither being nor non-being.”

Besides by K-Punk (here in a piece on Kubrick), hauntology is also used by Simon Reynolds here and by Woebot here.

No doubt the term goes back 1848 when Marx and Engels stated “A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of Communism.” Haunting is about ghosts, and one of the first people to use the word haunting in a musical context was David Toop’s Haunted Weather : Music, Silence, and Memory (2004).

About four weeks ago, The Existence Machine also wondered just what is hauntology.

K-Punk thinks this is a good summary of the concept.

Someone wrote an Wikipedia entry on hauntology in October of 2006 but it was deleted by consensus. It finally passed Wikipedia stringent notability criteria in August 2007.

See hauntology at artandpop.

New David Lynch film

Subject-barred goes by the name of $. The blog is one of the more enigmatic ones on the web. I first found him via his transcript of Zizek’s The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006). Subject-barred now presents a short video “Without cheese there wouldn’t be an INLAND EMPIRE,” recorded by two guys who “made/accidentally-captured this 2-minute video – of Lynch in a suitably bizarre “performance art” promotion of his latest film on a Hollywood sidewalk – sound like the two guys from the Black-Book office scene/massacre in Lynch’s Mulholland Dr …”. –subject-barred

Lasse Braun, the sexual revolution came from the cold

Yesterday evening on Arte TV (along with the BBC, one of the best television stations in Europe) there were two documentaries about the sexual revolution in Europe. The first documentary was on Lasse Braun and it was followed by a documentary on the sexual revolution as it happened in Denmark, what I have called the ‘Danish experiment’ before. I fell asleep during this second part, so some notes about the Braun feature:

Worth remembering about Lasse Braun (born 1936) is that he spent some time in Breda, The Netherlands, which was his most fruitful time; that he was/is somewhat of an intellectual/guru type of person (equalling pornography to anarchism (a practice which started in 18th century Europe)) and that he is a sexually dominant who works with women who were/are in love with him.

Sensations (1976) – Lasse Braun

There was an interesting interview with Tuppy Owens (Britain’s leading “pro-sex” (a radical group within the post-feminist camp) writer and activist, comparable to the likes of Annie Sprinkle, Susie Bright etc in America). Tuppy Owens appeared in the 1976 film Sensations, Braun’s first feature film and a good illustration of the shift of pre-1970s pornographic film (usually filmed on 8mm and 16mm formats and distributed in brothels and peep show booths) to porn chic films (filmed on professional stock and shown in ‘mainstream’ theatres.)

The end of the documentary saw Lasse Braun in Susan Block’s TV show, a very sad affair indeed.

See also: European pornography– sexual revolution in the cinema


The Pianist (2002) – Roman Polanski

I saw Roman Polanski’s 2002 film The Pianist today. The story about a Jewish piano player and his time in the Warsaw Ghetto. I have never seen a bad film by Polanski, in my view he is one of the greatest post-war cineasts and this film is no exception. While I recently said that there can be no fictional narrative of Auschwitz (thinking of the faux realism of Schindler’s List black and white footage) this film sort of changed my mind. I thought that it was very realistic in its portrayal of the atrocities committed by the Germans and the gradual build-up of the dehuminazation of the Jews. The film is also a testament to the value of art and music, a bit contrary to Adorno’s famous statement that “there can be no art after Auschwitz.”

Searching for polanski+pianist+schindler+black and white+spielberg+verisimilitude brings up two good reviews, the first by Clive James and one by kamera.co.uk.

Trivia: I cried when the wheel-chaired bound man was thrown of the balcony and the men were shot and driven over by the Germans. I laughed when one of the brothers told the story of the surgeon who was brought to the ghetto to operate on someone, and was subsequently shot along with the anaesthetized patient.

See also: verisimilitude – realism in film – the Holocaust in art and fiction

In search of monomaniacs

Monomania: The Flight From Everyday Life In Literature And Art (2005) – Marina Van Zuylen
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

First sentence: “The early twentieth-century physician, philosopher, and psychiatrist Pierre Janet (1859-1947) could be renamed the great poet of obsessive disorders…” (more)

Monomania explores the cultural prominence of the idée fixe in Western Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Marina van Zuylen revives the term monomania to explore the therapeutic attributes of obsession. She introduces us to artists and collectors, voyeurs and scholars, hypochondriacs and melancholics, whose lives are run by debilitating compulsions that may become powerful weapons against the tyranny of everyday life.

In van Zuylen’s view, there is a productive tension between disabling fixations and their curative powers; she argues that the idée fixe has acted as a corrective for the multiple disorders of modernity. The authors she studies—Charles Baudelaire, Sophie Calle, Elias Canetti, George Eliot, Gustave Flaubert, and Thomas Mann among them—embody or set in motion different manifestations of this monomaniacal imperative. Their protagonists or alter egos live more intensely, more meaningfully, because of the compulsive pressures they set up for themselves. Monomania shows that transforming life into art, or at least into the artful, drives out the anxiety of the void and puts in its place something so orderly and meaningful that it can take on the aura of a religion. — from the publisher

Monomania word sample from Jahsonic.com:

  • The She Devils remains Pierre Louys’ most intense, claustrophobic work; a study of sexual obsession and monomania unsurpassed in its depictions of carnal excess, unbridled lust and limitless perversity. –Kathleen Murphy on Pierre Louÿs (1870 – 1925)
  • It’s this very monomania that gives [Sade’s] works their coldly granitic fascination, page after page of mechanized sexual debasement hewn out like so many identical slabs of stone, and it’s also why he can disturb the most open-minded reader. — Bruce Reid on Quills (2000) – Philip Kaufman
  • Poe’s tales, of course, fall into several classes; [the] third group deal with abnormal psychology and monomania in such a way as to express terror but not weirdness. –Lovecraft via Supernatural Horror in Literature (1924-1927)

    • From Art and Popular Culture:

    In psychiatry, monomania (from Greek monos, one, and mania, mania) is a type of paranoia in which the patient has only one idea or type of ideas. Emotional monomania is that in which the patient is obsessed with only one emotion or several related to it; intellectual monomania is that which is related to only one kind of delirious idea or ideas. The originally French term was prominent in the 19th century and has come into disuse.

    In colloquial terms, the term monomania is often attached to subcultures that to the general public appear esoteric. However, the differences between monomania and passion can be very subtle and difficult to recognize.

    The term was first attested in the English language in 1823, probably on model of earlier French monomanie. [2]

    See also: everyday life – escapism – addiction – obsession – creativity