And the first covid-19 victims start to come in.
Vittorio Gregotti was an Italian architect. He contributed the essay “Kitsch and Architecture” to Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste (1968) by Gillo Dorfles.
While the essay references Googie architecture and the kitsch of the roadside attraction, it fails to cite God’s Own Junkyard (1964).
It also fails to foreshadow the positive view of kitsch in Learning from Las Vegas (1972).
Mal Sharpe was an American humorist.
His most notable work was done as part of the duo Coyle and Sharpe. They were active as street interviewers in the early 1960s and were simply hilarious.
The filmed sequence of “The Warbler” is hilarious. Sadly, it appears to be offline at the moment.
I give you “Maniacs In Living Hell”, collected on the album The Insane (But Hilarious) Minds Of Coyle & Sharpe (1964).
Max von Sydow was a Swedish-born actor famous for playing chess with death in the film The Seventh Seal (1957).
In my universe, he has a minor role in Death Watch (1980) a film which caught my attention at a young age. It tells the story of a woman with an incurable disease who will be filmed 24/7 until her death.
Its theme is still my theme: technology, reality television and its impact on society.
Von Sydow has but a minor part in this film.
Speaking of reality television. The most underrated film with reality television as a trope is Paul Bartel’s The Secret Cinema (1968).
McCoy Tyner was an American jazz pianist.
What links McCoy Tyner to the Jahsonic 1000?
Let me tell you.
Among Tyner’s most critically acclaimed albums is Trident (1975).
On that Trident album there is a musical composition called “Impressions” which features a bassline by Ron Carter which was sampled throughout the “The Choice Is Yours (Revisited)” (1991) by Black Sheep. The sample is well-known in hip hop midst because in fact it is the spine of that song. It is also in the Jahsonic 1000.
The song “Impressions” is an interpretation of Coltrane’s composition Impressions (1962).
Ulay was a German artist, best known for his collaborations with Marina Abramović.
The duo are perhaps best-known for The Other: Rest Energy (1980) in which Ulay holds a bow and arrow to the heart of Marina Abramović.
David Roback was an American guitarist, best-known for co-writing “Fade into You” (1994). That was a song by Mazzy Star and it featured the vocals of Hope Sandoval.
Listening to this, I can’t help but think that Lana Del Rey has a very similar sound and voice. Not surprisingly, both Mazzy Star and Lana Del Rey are considered dream pop.
José Mojica Marins was a Brazilian film director, best-known for his persona “Coffin Joe“.
I just finished watching At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul (1964) and it’s actually quite good. I especially like the atheist bits, his materialist world view, his Nietzschean take on things.
For example, Coffin Joe eats meat on Holy Friday, just to taunt his catholic fellow townspeople.
And consider the opening oration of Coffin Joe:
“What is life?
It is the beggining of death.
What is death?
It is the end of life!
What is the existence?
It is the continuity of blood.
What is blood?
It is the reason of the existence!”
All this blasphemous discourse makes you wonder how this went down in Brasil. After all, it was 1964, another four years for 1968 to happen … and … did that even ‘happen’ in Brasil, the sexual revolution?
See atheism in Brazil, the sexual revolution in Brazil.
Flavio Bucci was an Italian actor known in my canon for his tiny part in the metafilm Closed Circuit (1978).
I wrote about that film here.
In that film Flavio Bucci sports thick glasses and plays the part of a nerdy sociologist who takes notes of the audience’s reactions during the screening of the film.
Afterwards he is interrogated by the police. Has he seen anything which can solve the murder of a man in the audience by a gun man IN the film?
You can see Mr. Bucci from 27:20 onwards.
Mr. Bucci also played in the sex comedy Gegè Bellavita (1978) which can be found in full on YouTube.
George Steiner was a Franco-American literary critic and essayist.
His anti-pornography essay “Night Words” (1965) was the first of his writings which came to my attention in my capacity as pornosopher in the early 2000s.
Although I did not agree with them, his points were well-written and intellectually interesting.
Consider:
“My true quarrel with the Olympia Reader and the genre it embodies is not that so much of the stuff should be boring and abjectly written. It is that these books leave a man less free, less himself, than they found him; that they leave language poorer, less endowed with a capacity for fresh discrimination and excitement. It is not a new freedom that they bring, but a new servitude. In the name of human privacy, enough!”
But then again, he also found the pearls and showed an appreciation for Diderot, Crebillon fils, Verlaine, Swinburne and Apollinaire. Pornography as such is just not very interesting, it is only interesting where it intersects with other genres or with other domains of interest in meaningful ways. In that sense, it is very similar to other art forms.
I happened to read In Bluebeard’s Castle (1971) during last summer. I had discovered the work when researching the notion of Western guilt. The book features the much quoted dictum:
“And it is true also that the very posture of self-indictment, of remorse in which much of educated Western sensibility now finds itself is again a culturally specific phenomenon. What other races have turned in penitence to those whom they once enslaved, what other civilizations have morally indicted the brilliance of their own past? The reflex of self-scrutiny in the name of ethical absolutes is, once more, a characteristically Western, post-Voltairian act.”
The book was on David Bowie’s Top 100 Books .
Andy Gill was a British musician famous for his work with Gang of Four.
Compositions of note are “I Love A Man In A Uniform” (1982) featured on the compilation Various – 80’s Underground Clubbing and “Damaged Goods” (1978) featured on the compilation How to Kill the DJ part 2.
Needless to say, these compilations are more interesting than the full albums of Gang of Four.
Trivia: the opening sequence of the track “What We All Want” (1981) is reminiscent of “Play That Funky Music (1976).”