Her best-known piece is Interior Scroll (1975), a performance in which she produced a scroll from her vagina while standing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TB-OMgol-YE
Her films include Fuses (1967) in which Schneemann and her then-boyfriend James Tenney are having sex, a reaction to Stan Brakhage’s Window Water Baby Moving (1959) which shows Brakhage’s wife giving birth.
Above are fragments of Fuses set to an educative narration made as a school or university assignment.
He contributed to “Out of Space” (1992) which sampled the classic reggae track “Chase the Devil” (1976) by Max Romeo, which was produced by Lee Scratch Perry.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpIAc9by5iU
That track featured the Afrofuturist lines “I’m gonna send him to outa space, to find another race.”
At first I thought I’d not pay her death any attention, since I do not own a copy of The Undergrowth of Literature, the reason I discovered Mrs. Freeman in the first place. But I changed my mind when I found out that the Hendrik Conscience Heritage Library had a copy of this book in its warehouses, so off I was.
Leafing through the book (200 pp.) one finds references to other studies of porn from that era but most of all one is struck by the female point of view. Mrs Freeman is one of the first porn researchers to put forward that female sexual fantasies can be found in women’s magazines:
“I have merely made a survey of current fantasy literature which overtly or covertly, supplies the stimulus which so many people need, from the romance of Woman’s Own to the sado-masochism of Man’s Story” — p. 1
As always the negative criticism is most amusing:
“[the book is] nothing more than a collection of quotes, précis, paraphrases and photographs from current pornographic publications and glossy magazines … there is no love like the liberal prig‘s love for perverts and perversions”. –Stephen Vizinczey,The Times, 4 November 1967
Since Undergrowth is not in Google Books, I thought I’d give you the index. This may be useful to the aspiring pornosopher although apart from its focus on herstory it does not come near the qualities of Sex in History (1954) and Eros Denied (1964).
André Previn was a German-American musician best known for his film scores.
He first came to my attention when his ex-wife Dory Previn died in 2012.
After some quick glancing through my archives, I find that a ‘porn groove’ on the compilation The Mood Mosaic Vol. 3 “The Sexploitation” is of Previn’s hand, a track called “Executive Party” composed for the film Rollerball.
In the clip above that song is heard in a wonderfully strange scene “shot in the pre-dawn “magic hour,” as the wealthy, decadent upper-class fire explosive rounds at a line of towering trees, setting fire to them one after another, reveling in destruction” [1].
Stanley Donen (1924 – 2019) was an American film director and choreographer best-known for Singin’ in the Rain (1952).
We remember him fondly for directing Bedazzled, an updated version of the Faust legend set in 1967.
Dudley Moore plays a lonely young man whose unrequited love of his co-worker drives him to attempt suicide. Just then the devil (Peter Cook) appears and offers him seven wishes in exchange for his soul.
The film’s fun-loving association with the Swinging London of the 1960s is smart and well-executed.
Henry Jacobs was an American sound artist and humorist, known for the radio program Music and Folklore, the TV program The Fine Art of Goofing Off (1971–1972) and compositions such as “Sonata For Loudspeakers” (1955).
Of these three, Sholem Stein is my favorite. I used him as a mystification in my book on the history of erotica in which I put the following words into his mouth:
“Man reveals his true nature in his fears and desires. Show me what he is afraid of, show me what excites him, I will tell you who he is.”
I use Sholem Stein off and on nowadays, I usually have him cite dicta I don’t know who to ascribe to.
Ken Nordine (1920 – 2019) was an American voice artist, best known for his series of spoken word jazz poetry albums, the first of which was Word Jazz (1957).
