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).
He also recorded a version of Balzac’s risque story “A Passion in the Desert” (1955).
Tag Archives: 1960s
“War is good business – invest your son.”
“GET UP, STAND UP!“[1] is the title of a wonderful exhibition held at the Millennium Iconoclast Museum of Art in Brussels, featuring numerous posters of the 1968-1973 civil protests across the West.
A sampling:
“Gone with the Wind, the film to end all films”, showing Reagan and Thatcher, a criticism of the atomic bomb.
“War is good business – invest your son”, a criticism of war.
“Milk in such containers may be unfit for human consumption”, a criticism of DDT.
“The age of nations is past, the task before us now, if we would not perish, is to build the earth.” —Teilhard de Chardin, a criticism of nationalism.
A Roland Topor graphic on censorship used by Scanlan’s, criticism of Nixon.
A poster mentioning the “Chicago Seven trial, G. Harold Carswell, The Cattonsville 9, Jackson State, Invasion of Cambodia, Kent State, My Lai Massacre, Alaskan pipeline, ITT scandal, Watergate Caper, 20,000 Americans dead, ? Asians dead, 26,000,000 bombs, General Lavalle, Wheat Scandal, Unemployment.”
Histoires d’A, On ne mendie pas un juste droit, on se bat pour lui (W. Reich), criticism of anticonception.
“Jesus was an only child”, criticism of anticonception. Correction: Jesus was apparently not an only child, he had brothers.
No American movie has ever found it “necessary” to show a toilet, let alone to flush it
I viewed the film Hitchcock last night. It features Geoffrey Shurlock as the censor of the Motion Picture Production Code, who says with regards to the production of the film Psycho:
- “no American movie has ever found it “necessary” to show a toilet, let alone to flush it.”
Some thoughts:
I never knew that the American censor was involved during pre-production, i.e. before the shooting of the film.
It appears that the introduction of sound film coincides with the drafting of the Production Code. Did sound pose a threat more than imagery? Or was it the combination of sound and image that finally saw film evolving from a mere sideshow attraction to a genuine and ‘real’ mode of fiction consumption?
I remember a scene in Duck Soup where the Marx Brothers poke fun at the Production Code by showing a woman’s bedroom and then showing a woman’s shoes on the floor, a man’s shoes and horseshoes. Harpo is sleeping in the bed with a horse; the woman is in the twin bed next to them.
I remember extensive coverage of Psycho, Hitchcockianness and toilets in Enjoy Your Symptom! and The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, both by Slavoj Žižek.
Above: “The Murder” by Bernard Herrmann used in the shower scene. “The Murder” is World Music Classic # 811.