Jim Steinman was an American composer best known for his work with Meat Loaf.
In general I find his music unbearably swollen kitsch. Bombast is the word. Steinman himself called it Wagnerian rock.
However, I admit that I have soft spot for “Total Eclipse of the Heart” (1983), a song interpreted by Bonnie Tyler.
That song happens to be in the Jahsonic top 1000 (part 2).
Marshall Sahlins was an American anthropologist.
What currently interests me in anthropology are a) accusations of eurocentrism; b) discussions on the nature of human nature (innate good or bad); and c) sexual anthropology. By sexual anthropology I mean a particular variant of it, which I call anthropologica, namely the prurient interest in sex which masquerades as anthropology.
There is no anthropologica in Sahlins, anthropologica is more the province of the 17th and 18th centuries.
I know not of discussion by Sahlins on the innate goodness or badness of man.
There are accusations of eurocentrism in Sahlins: see the Sahlins–Obeyesekere debate.
Sahlins co-authored the book On Kings (2017) with David Graeber, who died recently and of whom I’ve read the book on debt and the book on bullshit jobs.
David Graeber also wrote a foreword to a later edition of Stone Age Economics (1972).
Gene Youngblood is an American writer best known for his book Expanded Cinema (1970). The book is a typical product of 1960s counter-cultural utopianism.
Contrary to the usual 1960s utopianism, Youngblood’s utopianism is not focused on politics but on form.
Central to this book is the predicted advent of a new noosphere. Noosphere is a concept coined by Teilhard de Chardin (along with Vladimir Vernadsky).
Patrick Juvet was a Swiss singer-songwriter who had a string of hit records in France (“Où sont les femmes?”) during the seventies.
He found international success with disco compositions such as “I Love America” (1978) which was his biggest record and was included on the compilation A Night at Studio 54 (1979).
Also in 1979, he wrote the soundtrack to Laura by David Hamilton.
By the early eighties, after the death of disco, his five minutes of fame were over.
Malcolm Cecil was a British musician best-known for his involvement in Tonto’s Expanding Head Band. And Tonto are best known for their involvement with Stevie Wonder.
I give you Zero Time.
I recently purchased the two volumes of Male Fantasies (1977/78). It’s a weird work. It is a psychoanalytic portrait of the German Nazi soldier and a classic in the field of right-wing/fascist ideology. The book is full of illustrations. I decided to upload the ones that are in the public domain.
The books are profusely illustrated with material varying from Grandville to Poitevin, from Crumb to Hergé and Donald Duck and from Nazi propaganda to 18th century satirotica.
I bought this book following my reading of Langs de afgrond van Heumakers, Le sec et l’humide by Littell (for which Klaus Theweleit, the author of Male Fantasies wrote the afterword) and Radicaal-rechtse seks, a recent Dutch language study on alt-right sexual morality.
Also, a couple of plates from Une semaine de bonté and work by Lucien Coutaud.
Bertrand Tavernier is known for such films as Death Watch (1980), a French science fiction film in which Romy Schneider plays a dying woman whose death is recorded on national television in an ongoing soap opera of morbid reality television.
Jessica Walter was an American actress best known for Play Misty for Me (1971) in which she was Evelyn Draper, an obsessed female fan of a radio disc jockey played by Clint Eastwood.
George Segal was an American actor best-known for his portrayal of Nick in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), the man who admits he aims to charm and sleep his way to the top in this film that celebrates love gone awry.
Nawal El Saadawi was an Egyptian feminist writer, activist, physician, and psychiatrist.
She wrote many books on the subject of women in Islam, paying particular attention to the practice of female genital mutilation in her society.
She described her mutilation in The Hidden Face of Eve (1977) in these words:
“Then suddenly the sharp metallic edge seemed to drop between my thighs and there cut off a piece of flesh from my body.”
[…]
“I did not know what they had cut off from my body, and I did not try to find out. I just wept, and called out to my mother for help. But the worst shock of all was when I looked around and found her standing by my side. Yes, it was her, I could not be mistaken, in flesh and blood, right in the midst of these strangers, talking to them and smiling at them, as though they had not participated in slaughtering her daughter just a few moments ago.”