Françoise Cactus was a French musician and author.
Her band Stereo Total provided some music for the highly regarded TV series The Trap and All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace by Adam Curtis.
Tag Archives: 2021
RIP Louis Clark (1947 – 2021)
Louis Clark was an English music arranger and keyboard player, best-known for his series of kitsch masterpieces Hooked on Classics, disco-reinterpretations of classical music.
RIP Johnny Pacheco (1935 – 2021)
Johnny Pacheco was a Dominican musician and record producer.
He is best known as the founder of Fania All-Stars and for his recording “Quimbara” (1974) with Celia Cruz.
RIP Milford Graves (1941 – 2021)
Milford Graves was an American musician and artist known for such albums as Nommo (1967), an album featured in the “Top Ten Free Jazz Underground” (1995), a list by Thurston Moore.
RIP Ghédalia Tazartès (1947 – 2021)
Ghédalia Tazartès was a French musician known for his guttural singing.
He is on the famous Nurse with Wound list.
RIP Chick Corea (1941 – 2021)
Chick Corea was a legendary American composer working in jazz, mainly playing keyboards.
He is a celebrated name in jazz fusion, but he never actively appeared on my radar.
So, I give you “Was Dog a Doughnut?” (1977) by Cat Stevens on which Chick plays keyboards. This did came to my attention in the period when I was researching late 20th century nightclub music.
RIP Larry Flynt (1942 – 2021)
Larry Flynt was the publisher of American pornographic magazine Hustler, founded in 1974 in the slipstream of the sexual revolution.
I show you an interview from 2014.
In the opening splash you see — at the right hand side — the controversial cover of a woman who is fed to a meat grinder.
Flynt was a rebel. Many pornographers were. That’s what used to make pornography so interesting during the early modern period up until the sexual revolution.
RIP Jean-Claude Carrière (1931 – 2021)
Jean-Claude Carrière was a French novelist and screenwriter famous for scripting The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, The Phantom of Liberty and The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
I give you the toilet scene from The Phantom of Liberty, it makes you wonder if Buñuel scripted it alone or he asked Carrièret to assist him.
RIP Giuseppe Rotunno (1923 – 2021)
Giuseppe Rotunno was an Italian cinematographer with a long career, working with many great directors, check your regular sources.
One of these films is The Stendhal Syndrome , the last feature film he worked on.
There is a full version of The Stendhal Syndrome on YouTube, a film I had not seen before which turned out to be very enjoyable.
I especially liked the opening scene at the Uffizi in Florence with The Birth of Venus by Botticelli, Caravaggio’s Medusa, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Paolo Uccello’s The Battle of San Romano and The Duke and Duchess of Urbino by Piero della Francesca.
When Asia is walking towards the Uffizi, you can already see the distinctive style of Rotunno’s cinematography, already invoking the fainting of Asia once she stands before the Bruegel painting.
After that, when she falls into the Icarus painting, she kisses a grouper fish. Beautiful!
The film is full of these little details, in her hotel room hangs a copy of The Night Watch by Rembrandt. She walks into this and finds herself on the streets, blurring the lines between fact and fiction.
RIP Christopher Plummer (1929 – 2021)
Christopher Plummer was a Canadian actor best-known for his part in The Sound of Music.
In my universe, Plummer played parts in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, The Man Who Would Be King and Harrison Bergeron, an admirable adaptation of the wonderful short story by Vonnegut.
In Harrison Bergeron, Plummer is John Klaxon. Klaxon is the benevolent tyrant of the intelligent elite that gives the masses the illusion that they rule.
There seem to be quite a lot of differences with the short story, but I have not had time to check them out.
Update: I re-read the short story, which is only 6 to 7 pages long so there is barely opportunity to compare. In the short story the parents of Harrison are watching television, their son having been arrested some time before. The parents are watching television. All of a sudden the son is seen on television interrupting a ballet performance. The son speaks to the people, imploring them to free themselves from their handicaps. He ‘marries’ a ballerina and is subsequently and tragically shot.
The 2009 short film 2081 follows the short story faithfully.
The film version, with Harrison becoming part of the elite, is reminiscent of V for Vendetta, one of the best films of the 21st century.