Jean-Marc Vallée was a Canadian filmmaker, film editor, and screenwriter, known for such films as Dallas Buyers Club (2013). A masterpiece, in my opinion.
He was, next to David Cronenberg and Atom Egoyan, one of the more interesting post-war Canadian filmmakers.
He also directed and Big Little Lies (2017) one of the few television series of the television series era I have seen.
E. O. Wilson was an American writer, biologist and naturalist best-known for his book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975).
This book met with great criticism from the political left. In Not in Our Genes (1984) these opponents rejected sociobiology and expressed their desire for a socialist society.
There is a film Sociobiology: The Human Animal (1977) by the BBC. I show it supra. It features interviews with Wilson and his main opponent, Lewontin, co-author of Not in Our Genes.
Wayne Thiebaud was an American painter, one of the more interesting American painters of the 20th century.
I particularly like his Refrigerator Pies (1962) which I first came across in Art Now (1976) by Lucie-Smith.
Two good texts on the early period of his career are “The Slice-of-Cake School” (1962) and “An Interview with Wayne Thiebaud” (1966).
The first text has some intelligent remarks on lighting. The second has Thiebaud talking about the significance of pies in the American mind.
Because there is no good Youtube footage of Thiebaud and as an non-journalist I cannot reproduce content in copyright, I give you one of my favorite paintings, Mound of Butter.
Joan Didion was an American writer.
I don’t quite know what to think of Didion’s writing and whether I would like to read it.
She seems similar to contemporary Susan Sontag, however, Didion seems strictly non-philosophical.
Something did catch my eye, however, it is Philosophy and Vulnerability: Catherine Breillat, Joan Didion, and Audre Lorde (2019) by Matthew R. McLennan, a book in which Catherine Breillat, Joan Didion and Audre Lorde are called rigorous “nonphilosophers”.
Update 24/12: I was wrong. I came to that conclusion after delving into the White Album (1979) book, which seems to be an interesting portrait of 1960s counterculture. But not only that, she gave the world a beautiful nobrow analysis. In the book The White Album (1979)there is a passage where she writes about her habit of watching outlaw biker movies and she says:
“I suppose I kept going to these movies because there on the screen was some news I was not getting from The New York Times. I began to think I was seeing ideograms of the future.”
Richard Rogers was a British architect. He is best known for designing and building the Centre Pompidou (1977), the first postmodern building.
The film above is a strange juxtapoem. It is a film of the construction phases of the Centre Pompidou set to the tones of “Black Cow” (1977) by Steely Dan.
Eve Babitz was an American artist and writer. She is best known for playing chess in the nude with Marcel Duchamp.
She is a figure central to L. A. history of the late 20th century and has been called a groupie and a socialite.
She is also the author of Fiorucci: The Book (1980), a book which has become very expensive.
However, you can read the text of Fiorucci: The Book in I Used to Be Charming: The Rest of Eve Babitz (2019).
bell hooks was an American author and social activist, working in the intersectionality of race, capitalism, and gender.
She is perhaps best known for Ain’t I a Woman?(1981).
I first came into contact with her work by way of Angry Women (1991), a book in the RE/Search series.
She also wrote on Paris Is Burning (1990) in a vocabulary typical of her corpus:
“Within white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy the experience of men dressing as women, appearing in drag, has always been regarded by the dominant heterosexist cultural gaze as a sign that one is symbolically crossing over from a realm of power into a realm of powerlessness.”
bell hooks on Paris is Burning in a piece published in Black Hooks (1992)
Each of these words, white, supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal, hetero-sexist sounds as meaningful and portentous as vacuous and meaningless. It is a description of a state of affairs that betrays a desire for change. The form of this change, however, is not spelled out. Would bell hooks prefer communism instead of capitalism?
Nevertheless, looking at old interviews on Charlie Rose, bell hooks comes across as a gentle, well-read and smart woman.
Joe Simon was an American singer who worked in the soul and R&B idioms. Well-known recordings are “The Chokin’ Kind” (1967) and “Drowning in the Sea of Love” (1971).
But I give you “Love Vibration” (1978) because Larry Levan used to played it at the Paradise Garage.
Be sure to also check “The Chokin’ Kind” for its interesting percussion. Morevoer, that song was written by Harlan Howard, the same songwriter who gave us country music favorite “No Charge”.
Michael Nesmith was an American musician, best known as the songwriter of “Mary, Mary”.
That song made into a hit by Run-DMC in 1988.
It was also sampled by De La Soul in 1989 on their debut album, 3 Feet High and Rising.
Anne Rice was an American writer known for her gothic fiction and erotic literature.
I only read one of her books, her debut Interview with a Vampire (1976), probably when I traveled Indonesia or when I lived in China, I cannot remember.
It was the first vampire story that I read. Later I became interested in lesbian vampires. When I researched exploitation films I came to realize that female vampires preying on other vampires is a metaphor for lesbianism. Five minutes later I came to realize that that vampirism is a metaphor for sex tout court.
And then obviously, the road from vampirism and sex to sadomasochism is short.
And by googling Anne Rice + sadomasochism, I stumbled upon the book Anne Rice Reader in which the interviewer asks:
In your novel Exit to Eden you talk about there being a racial memory of …
And her answer is:
“If we look for a cause, we would have to think about something like racial memory – something encoded in the genes, some way in which after thousands of years, we’ve turned experiences of violence and violation into something erotic.”
And then, googling again for Anne Rice and “racial memory” I land on my own site where I’ve started to wikify the book The Biology of Horror.
Racial memory is a sort of vestigial memory a cell memory that contains all of the experiences of our species.
In that same book The Biology of Horror there are (and I will not pursue the racial memory strain) some beautiful quotations by Rice:
A person unwilling to die is described as “the vampire of time which has sucked on it for years on end”.
And the book also mentions Anne Rice’s appreciation for a line of poetry by Yeats. She cites “I must lie down where all ladders start, / In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart” from “The Circus Animals Desertion”.
She seemed very intelligent and reminds me in some ways of Stephen King.