Howard Wales was a keyboardist best known for his collaborations with Jerry Garcia in the early 1970s.
However, solo, he produced little gems such as this “Rendez-Vous With The Sun, Part. 2” on his album of almost the same name in 1976.
The tracks is also included in DJ Harvey’s cult mix “Sarcastic Disco Volume 2” which you will find on Soundcloud.
RIP and thank you for the music.
This happened some time ago. But the general public only found out years later that Emmanuelle Arsan had died. At first it said that it happened in 2007, but later it appeared to be in 2005.
More than any fictional character Emmanuelle was the symbol of the sexually liberated woman, celebrating her new freedom because of the pill, the main cause of the sexual revolution.
The funny thing about this Thai born woman, is that nobody today can confirm that it is she who wrote the Emmanuelle novels, some say it was her husband.
What is certain though, is that my hero Eric Losfeld published the first novel of the series clandestinely in 1959 as Emmanuelle (1959).
About the re-writing that has happened since 1959, the book Censure, autocensure et art d’écrire: de l’antiquité à nos jours (2004) by Jacques Domenech notes that the first version was ‘harder‘, more hardcore.
For the occasion of this post, I watched the Italian film Io, Emmanuelle (1969), which seems a better film than the 1974 Sylvia Kristel vehicle.
But this 1969 version has nothing to do with Emmanuelle.
The name Emmanuelle has gone on to become a by-word for erotic films and conjures up an image of the rotan peacock chair which was used as a publicity shot in the 1974 film starring Sylvia Kristel.
François Leterrier was a French film director and actor. He entered the film industry when he was cast in Robert Bresson’s film A Man Escaped (1956).
Goodbye Emmanuelle (1977) features a reggae-inspired soundtrack by Serge Gainsbourg.
His sketch film Slices of Life (1985) is a bit silly but features the prescient and good-hearted “Paris sera toujours Paris” which is an illustration of the Great Replacement theory.
Jutta Lampe was a German actress best-known for her film Marianne and Juliane (1981).
In that film she plays the ‘good’ sister, the regular journalist. The ‘bad’ sister has joined the RAF.
Many people forget, but Europe during the 1970s and 1980s, witnessed a series of bloody terrorist attacks rivalling the islamist terrorism of today.
David Prowse was an English bodybuilder and actor known for his parts in Star Wars, A Clockwork Orange and Jabberwocky.
In my book, he is the Frankenstein on the cover of Midi Minuit Fantastique 24 (12/1970) in a still from Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974), see above.
Jörg Schröder was a German writer and publisher.
He founded countercultural publishing house März Verlag in 1969 and published books such as Sexfront (1970), instrumental to the sexual revolution in Germany.
Daria Nicolodi was an Italian actress known for her collaborations with Mario Bava.
Diego Maradona was an iconic association football player.
For people not into football, he was the obese Latin American in the film Youth (2015) by cult director Paolo Sorrentino.
In the scene above he kicks a tennis ball repeatedly into the air.
One with the ball.
Jan Morris (1926 – 2020) was a Welsh writer known for being one of the first celebrity transgenders in the West.
She wrote the book Conundrum about his sex reassignment surgery.
Two quotes from that book:
“I was three or perhaps four years old when I realized that I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl. I remember the moment well, and it is the earliest memory of my life.”
“The first man who ever kissed me, in a carnal way, after my return from Casablanca, was a London taxi-driver who drove me one morning to the recently opened Army museum in Chelsea. We chatted all the way across London, and when we reached the museum he got out of his cab to look at the new building with me. Quite suddenly, slipping his arm around my waist boldly on the pavement, he kissed me roughly and not at all disagreeably on the lips. ‘There’s a good girl,’ he said, patting my bottom and returning to his cab: and all I did was blush.”
Researching several dicta of Marquis de Sade I came across this one:
“The life of the most sublime of men is to nature not of greater importance than that of an oyster.”
This dictum only appears in the third version of Justine (1797), a version which has not been translated into English, the translation above is mine.
The dictum, I found out afterwards, resembles a dictum by the British philosopher David Hume, who wrote in his work “On Suicide” (1777):
“the life of man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster”.
The only difference is that Sade added the notion ‘sublime’ to the statement, making the extra point that even outstanding men are not worth more than an oyster. It seems that the likeness between the two dicta is too great to be coincidental.
I have not been able to find out whether Sade actually read Hume. The text by Hume precedes that of Sade by 20 years, so technically he would have the had time and the opportunity, but in fact, I’m not even sure Sade read English. I know that he had read The Monk and other gothic novels, but possibly he read them in a translation.
I went looking for paintings of oysters that could illustrate this post and found two.
One by Manet. One by a certain Josef Lauer. The Lauer one is very fleshy and sexual. The one by Manet is less fleshy and less lively, but more more stylized, in fact, an incredible painting.
