William Klein (1926 – 2022) was an American-French photographer and film director.
He is known for such photos as Broadway and 103rd Street, New York, 1954–1955 and films such as Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? (1966), Mr. Freedom (1969) and The Model Couple (1977).
Klein was unassuming, unpretentious and had a healthy dose of humor. Here at Jahsonic we have lots of sympathy for mr. Klein. He strikes us as a nobrow artist, a category we hold in high esteem.
Queen Elizabeth II was a British monarch known in pop culture for being the subject of the Sex Pistols song “God Save the Queen” (1977).
Jacques Villeglé was a French mixed-media artist best known for his work in décollage, the process of tearing (lacerating) posters from city walls revealing other posters underneath, thus arriving at new compositions.
His work Ach Alma Manetro (1949) is in the Centre Pompidou.
William Henley Knoles was an American writer known for such titles as Sadisto Royale (1966).
Robert Bonfils was an illustrator of pulp novels and he designed the cover of Sadisto Royale.
Cloris Leachman was an American actress with a long an fruitful career.
I give you a fragment from The Last Picture Show (1971) in which she is a wife angry at her husband.
And one set of fragments from the Young Frankenstein (1974), where she famously is Frau Blücher, and everytime her name is pronounced the horses start to whinny, neigh and rear.
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.”
Jimmy Heath was an American jazz saxophonist, part of the Heath Brothers.
Like most Gen X melomaniacs who grew up with vinyl but switched to CDs (the musical fraud of the century), I discovered Mr. Heath on the Soul Jazz Love Strata-East (1994) compilation.
On that album is “Smiling Billy Suite Pt.II” (1975) from the album Marchin’ On (1975) by the Heath Brothers.
Here is that whole album:
Juliaan Lampens was a Belgian architect whose name has become associated with brutalism.
Brutalism is architecture which makes ostentative use of béton brut (French for raw concrete).
The aesthetic is the last phase in modernist architecture (before the advent of postmodern architecture) and it was heavily criticized by Charles, Prince of Wales, author of A Vision of Britain: A Personal View of Architecture (1989).
For lovers of the style, which includes myself, a big part of the attraction is that the imprint of the wood grain from the formwork of the concrete can be seen on the exterior concrete of brutalist structures.
Juliaan Lampens’s most famous building is the Onze-Lieve-Vrouw Kapel van Kerselare in Edelare, which I visited in 2014 and 2019.
They also bless new cars there.
Vlasta Chramostová was a Czech actress perhaps best-known for her part in The Cremator (1969), one of several Central European films that dealt with the Holocaust.
The Cremator is featured in Film as a Subversive Art (1974).
In this film, Vasta plays Lakmé, the wife of the delusional cremator who prepares for the endlösung.
Below is the OST by Zdeněk Liška.
