Melvin Van Peebles was an American writer, actor and film director best known for his film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971).
I would advise against watching that movie since it’s historically significant but just not very good.
Instead, I advise to watch Classified X (1998), a film on African-American cinema and the African-American representation in Hollywood.
Donald Rumsfeld was an American politician.
Normally, I do not cover politics but Rumsfeld, by saying there are “unknown unknowns”, entered the field of philosophy.
And by becoming the subject of the documentary The Unknown Known (2013), he makes a good entry point to the documentaries of Errol Morris.
Donald Rumsfeld famously saying “there are unknown unknowns”.
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.
Enzo Mari was an Italian designer. He is perhaps best-known for his Box Chair, of which I am the happy owner of five originals.
I bought them from Bill, a Dutch guy who used to sell designer furniture in Antwerp, where I live. He was a big guy who had a shop in the Kloosterstraat. Not so long ago I ran across him in the Bleekhofstraat.
Mari belongs to the generation of Italian designers celebrated by the MoMA in their exhibition Italy: The New Domestic Landscape (1972) which had this to say of him in their catalog:
“Enzo Mari was born in 1932 and works in Milan. Beside his extensive activity as a designer, since 1952 he has devoted himself intensively to theoretical research, especially on the psychology of vision, systems of perception and the methodology of design.”
Arte made this portrait of him:
Quino was an Argentine cartoonist best-known for his satirical comic strip Mafalda which ran from 1964 to 1973.
Mafalda is a 6-year-old girl. On the one hand she is a real child who hates soup and loves pancakes. Yet, at the same time she is very much concerned with humanity and world peace. An political episode of Mafalda that is often cited is the one with the ‘south-up map orientation’.
Umberto Eco wrote a piece on Mafalda when she made her book debut in Italy with Mafalda la contestataria (1968), ‘Mafalda the rebel’.
In the same period, she is also on the cover of another Italian book, Libro dei bambini terribili per adulti masochisti, (Book of Terrible Children for Masochistic Adults), also from 1968.
Lewis John Carlino (1932 – 2020) was an American screenwriter known for several films.
In our book, he wrote the screenplay to Seconds (1966), a film about an ordinary and unfulfilled man who wants a second life and is reborn in a new body.
There is an ‘orgy’ scene (above) which was supposedly only included in European films, a practice which was common at that time.
There are plenty of surreal images.
Little Richard was an American composer and singer best-known for shouting “A-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-wop-bam-boom!” at the beginning of the song “Tutti Frutti” (1955).
Without Little Richard, no Prince.
And without Little Richard no “Be-Bop-A-Lula”, “Diddy Wah Diddy”, “Da Doo Ron Ron” and ” Do Wah Diddy Diddy”.
But without “Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay”, no Little Richard.
The boom comes first. The cycle continues.
Over at Tumblr I posted the Paladin 1969 edition of Nick Cohn’s book Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom.
Michael McClure was an American poet and writer known for his association with the Beat Generation.
Here he can be seen reading poetry to the lions. Apparently the origin of this footage is from the USA: Poetry television series. Michael McClure reads some of his 99 Ghost Tantras in the lion house of the San Francisco Zoo.
Pentti Linkola was a Finnish academic and radical ecology-activist.
So radical that in the Anglosphere he is known as an ecofascist.
He first came to the attention outside of Finland when Dana Milbank interviewed him for the WSJ.
That article was “In His Solitude” (1994), and it cited him as saying:
“We still have a chance to be cruel. But if we are not cruel today, all is lost.”
What exactly does he mean by being cruel?:
“End Third World aid and asylum for refugees, so millions die. Try mandatory abortions for those with two children. And then find some way to get rid of the extra billions of people. With 2.5 times more humans than earth can support, another world war, he says, would be ‘a happy occasion for the planet.’ Living alone in primitive style here without running water or car, the fisherman likes to compare humanity to a sinking ship with 100 passengers and a lifeboat that can only hold 10. ‘Those who hate life try to pull more people on board and drown everybody. Those who love and respect life use axes to chop off the extra hands hanging on the gunwale.'”
“In His Solitude” (1994)
Next to this there is “Humanflood”, a four-page text of his hand featured in Apocalypse Culture II (2000) which I have been unable to identify.
And then there is his book Can Life Prevail? (2011), a translation of Voisiko elämä voittaa (2004), is still in print.
The metaphor of the lifeboat [above] was probably taken from the 1974 essay “Living on a Lifeboat” by Garrett Hardin, an essay which was the basis for what has become known as lifeboat ethics.