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Recently I went to The Netherlands for the Roadburn Festival. Thanks to Duane Harriot for running the Fun Machine for a week and not wrecking the gears! Last weeks episode was a full three hours of music and photos from the most enjoyable fest I have ever been to, and if you haven't checked it out, I highly recommend it (not because it's my program, mind you - it is my taste, but it was really programmed by those who put Roadburn together- thank them, not me)!
Since last year's festival was disrupted by a pesky volcanic eruption, I thought it would be wise to take an extra day ahead of the festival and eliminate the stress factor. I made my ever important sleeping bag connection ahead of time, and decided to head over to the town of 's-Hertogenbosch to check out the Jheronimus Bosch Art Center.
All of Bosch's works are in name museums, so I was not sure what to expect. This town probably would have no one paying attention to it except for their famous, intensely talented son. I'm not going to even go into describing his artwork here; if you are unfamiliar, go check out a link or two and get the scoop on this man.
The Art Center is housed in what had once been a church. It looks like a church, but when you step inside, all your senses tell you nearly right away (there's a large red curtain that separates the entrance from a lot of the exhibit area) that you may have actually stepped into a delightfully quirky version of hell. There is a telltale sculpture outside as well to tip you off, that in most ways, this was not going to be a religious experience, at least of a churchgoing nature.
The helpful women at the desk were concerned with the size of my backpack and could see I was being taxed by it's weight. They took it off my hands immediately although there was no coat room. The entrance fee was laughably cheap and I was given an audio guide to boot. It was when I got to the other side of the curtain that I thought to myself "I'm going to be here for hours and hours"...
I was going to do a little review of Kitten With a Whip (1964), which I saw John Waters introduce last week at Anthology Film Archives for their 40th anniversary, but seeing as not only L Magazine but also Interview and Slant have done detailed writeups (two with interviews, one with on-site reportage), there's not a whole lot left to say--particularly as Waters repeats almost all his talking points from one writer to the next. I had no idea it would be so popular, but then again, John Waters is the kind of person with such a devoted following that even his slightest public appearances are newsworthy. So that takes some of the fun out of blogging. But, you know, commitments! etc. I'll sum it up in a few lines: Ann-Margret, a violent runaway from juvenile hall, breaks into the home of John Forsythe, a rising politician, in an attempt to hide from the police. A married man whose wife is out of town, Forsythe is eager to usher the bipolar jailbird out of his posh dwelling. Rather than brave the wilds of San Diego, she threatens him with rape claims to ruin his marriage and career, and for the next 24 hours terrorizes the bumbling politician (gratuitous scratch marks abound), eventually calling her three Beatnik friends over for a party and a disastrous trip to Mexico--a Tijuana roughly the size of a Universal backlot, and a climactic scene which, incidentally, is actually filmed in the old Bates Motel. (The user-submitted IMDB synopsis, with its random capitalizations of words like COPS, MATRON, and BACKERS, is kind of a brilliant piece in its own right.)
One line that stuck with me from Waters' intro: "Kitten With a Whip is like Douglas Sirk without the direction." And there are many things to confirm the Pope of Trash's assessment that this film isn't self-conscious camp, it's "a failed art film"--particularly in its first half, with all those gloomy 360 degree pans around John Forsythe's home and the deadpan zoom into the crazed eyes of a stuffed animal. Or--an audience favorite--one of Ann-Margret's demented harangues framed against a Tex Avery-like cartoon on a television set. There's a quintessential post-party scene that feels lifted from vintage Antonioni or Fellini, with youthful hipsters sprawled out on couch and floor, drinking and smoking while fondling an older man's records. You can see director/screenwriter Douglas Heyes trying so hard to craft Art from this material, patting himself on the back with every compositional trick deployed, but really only ending up with a variant of Beat Girl six years too late. Indeed, Waters attributes this film's total commercial failure to its obsession with outdated Beatnik slang, cynicism and stereotypes in a new era of hippies and free love. I know Waters didn't want us to laugh at this film ("I'm not showing this in any way to laugh at it"), but based on the audience's reaction Friday night, I'd say that aspect of promoting Kitten With a Whip was a total failure. On its own, Kitten With a Whip is a fun movie to see, full of lingo like "Everything's so creamy," "What a brainburger," and "I feel so shiny good about you," which one may feel tempted to add to his/her own everyday stock of phrases. But it's particularly interesting in a Waters context, and hearing the director warmly reminisce about how he saw this film on LSD with Divine when they were still kids, how he took Divine to Ingmar Bergman films when all Divine really wanted was more Liz Taylor, how Divine loved bad girls and Ann-Marget was nothing if not a bad girl... that alone should induce the wary viewer to give the film a chance. And though we may laugh at all of those things in Female Trouble, they certainly don't preclude our respect.
Perhaps some of you may fondly recall at times a favorite venue for magically finding unusual old vinyl on a regular basis. A treasure trove/mother lode of incredibly cheap wonders to delight the ear and eye. For me, still in my earlier collecting days, aside from salivating over big trunks of old, unbagged comic books at the Skyview Flea Market, one of my most magical places for vinyl excavation during my early 1980's days in Santa Cruz was going to the Goodwill Bargain Barn, where my girlfriend would peruse the clothing by the pound, under the watchful eye of the unforgettable 'Ray' the proprietor (for which priviledge people lined up way before they opened the doors), while I would troll the newest cardboard barrels of records that had come in that week, often digging crazily through a whole barrel full of lps, before they even made it out onto the rough table that they would be 'displayed' on.
Many a wonder flowed into that big old barnlike building, and for a mere twenty-five cents each, the records were often in remarkably good condition after their journey through the barrel and worse. Today's goodie is one of the more powerful DJ tools in my kit back in those protean radio DJing days, and must have messed with many episodes and sets over the years, later to be sampled and cut up even more. It struck me the other day while transferring it that the lead male child actor's voice reminded me of TV's Charlie Brown, who was actually voiced by several boys over the years, it turned out I was wrong, but it made for a fun search speculation. The kids are obviously pros (it was made in LA, where there's plenty of voice talent), as the dialogue is not the easiest to comfortably act by kids. Many of us collectors over the years have sought the elusive third volume of this set of sex-ed records: Sex for Adults. I've never seen it. Who has it? Did it ever even come out, I wonder? Many times lps are announced on the back covers of small label records that don't necessarily get released in the form in which they're shown. The second volume, Sex for Teens, I did get, I believe also from the Bargain Barn, and it has appeared here on WFMU alreadyhere, courtesy of Otis Fodder. Since there was a good response to that post I've meant for a long time to transfer this baby in it's entirety so that the two known volumes can hang together here in a nice warm place. But it's not a record that one plays a whole lot, and I've certainly slowed down on using it as a DJ anymore. So it took a while to finally play through the whole sexy thing. Tangentally, I like how the authors (Nathan Leichman, PhD, and Stanley Z. Daniels, MD) created a publishing entity (Magic Medicine) for the A.S.C.A.P. rights to the dialogue on the record, so if you wanna do a cover of it, be sure and asign the rights properly! Fun how even a spoken word educational project can be buried deep in the A.S.C.A.P. files.
Sex Explained for Children is a very well produced product, however, and deserves some better modern exposure (why? I dunno, I guess...because I'm a nut for albums, mainly). The first side is a bit dry, going over the basic mechanics of reproduction, but on side two things get fun, as the little boy and the two little girls get down to the making sweet love aspect of it all.
As a side note, some wag who owned the disc previously had added a very clever piece of dialogue to the mouth of the little boy on the cover, written in pencil, which I later inked in for more clarity, as it fits the expression of the boy in the picture SO well. So buckle up your training pants, pour a libation, set up the romantic mood lighting and enjoy some fine sex ed smoothness.
Check it, my Q & A with Timothy Wyllie, ex Process Church art director, general cosmic fellow, writer of new age books about communicating with dolphins and angels. I was going to run this interview on my Temple of Pei blog but thought better of it: WFMU's Beware the Blog gets around 5000 times the traffic, and this is a voice which much be heard. This is a guy that really lives to the beat of his own drummer. Hope you dig, and remember: As it is, so be it.
During the Process salon at the Anthology Film Archives right around when Love Sex Fear Death came out you mentioned that cults could be a good thing, that there were many benefits to you spending time in one. Could you describe examples of what a good cult experience would be?
The biggest benefit is that one gets to experience a kind of life that isn't available under normal circumstances. This especially applies to reincarnates, who require an accelerated learning curve. Most western societies these days are both risk and pain averse. Cults allow those who need to go through their own pain and anger to do it in a safe situation. Cults can become a microcosm of society, so people in cults can experience a far wider array of possibilities like service, obedience, leadership, as well as what it's like to live without personal possessions, money, and personal freedom. Celibacy for a period is also a necessary psychic/emotional antidote in an over-sexed society. Possibly the greatest gift a cult bestows is when one leaves it. One emerges back into life with the opportunity to follow one's own drummer--free of parental etc influences, and understanding the dire consequences of ever giving away one's power again.
If you were involved in the start of a new cult now in 2011 what would change compared to the Process? What would you focus on?
I wouldn't. I feel cults have had their day. At this point in time and in a spiritual sense, it's every person for themselves. Cults in the sixties and seventies were a kind of clean-up contingency. The were so many reincarnates who needed to work on themselves (and be worked on). The kids these days are different--they don't really need cults the way we did.
Over the years you probably have met hundreds of people influenced by The Process. Any surprises there, was there any indication that you were part of something so huge at the time?
At the beginning, for at least the first five years, we all felt we were onto something big and important. I doubt if any of us could have anticipated its importance as it has been emerging recently.
What teachings of The Process have you retained?
Although TP probably took the concept of personal responsibility too far--it's your responsibility if you are under the wheel of an airplane if it falls off; everything you do, or is done to you is your responsibility--I find it's a very useful POV since it returns the power to you. Blaming an outside force essentially renders one powerless to change it. One can of course always change one's response to it and in that way one regains one's personal power.
The concept that the Universe is responsive to individuals. And that reality is mutable in ways yet to be understood. And that the intuition is a far more trustworthy way of approaching the ineffable, than that of seeking hard evidence.
Standing in the rain, hands deep in raincoat pockets. This ruin of crumbled stone and ivy was once a bath, the public kind, so rarely seen now in our age of modesty. We're in provincial Europe somewhere. The ghosts, of beautiful, naked women, still frolic amongst the apparent decrepitude. A sense of loss, unbearable loss, and almost inevitable melancholy, accompany the rumblings of lust in one's blood, conjured up by mind's-eye pictures of what once happened here. When the wind blows a certain way, you can even smell the soft essence of virgin skin, and other subtle perfumes, almost detected. Such is the salacious, heady ambience, the visions conjured by the music of Lussuria.
Perhaps it's Jim Mroz' dual experience as a black metal musician that enables him to bring the heaviness in such an unexpected way, where what might strike the inattentive listener as stasis comes across ultimately as some very visceral sonic statements, both on his tapes, and unquestionably in this live session, aired on WFMU January 7, the first My Castle of Quiet live guest of our new year 2011.
I first heard Lussuria on a split cassette with Obscure, released by amourtout productions in France (the label run by Shantidas, of Aluk Todolo and Diamatregon.) It was my more-favored side of the tape—a patient, rumbling soundtrack to a nightmare, with an immersed narrative...something about angels. Having named his project after an ultra-obscure Joe D'Amato sexploitation film, Lussuria's Jim Mroz shares this writer's passion for the unusual, much-maligned and misunderstood subset of haunted, twisted, visually stunning cinema of the 1970s and 80s of which D'Amato was a major player. Even were this not the case, I would still have been taken in immediately by Lussuria's resonant, opaque sonic creations, coming out of Jim's mixer like coded maps of the subconscious.
The Lussuria releases (cassettes by Hospital Productions, amourtout, Destructive Industries, and Razors and Medicine) are chilling stuff, even troubling—like listening to a feeling always just out of reach. These sets, rendered live and expertly engineered by Bob Bellerue, certainly align with that description. Thanks also to Tracy Widdess, for rendering my photo of Jim (see above), appropriate to the translucent and mournful qualities of the music. This was a bit of a coup for me personally, as I've been an admirer of Lussuria's recordings since first hearing. I hope you enjoy these pieces, and receive them in the spirit in which they were rendered.
Today's post is of an album I picked up recently in a Salvation Army Thrift Store. The album contains the 19 minute soundtrack for a sex education filmstrip produced by Concordia. Each side has the same presentation, one with audible "beeps" one with inaudible tones, with the individual sides geared towards the use of two different filmstrip machines. This is the inaudible tone side. Let's all learn together.
Back in May,
I said I’d be doing a monthly series on the films of Ken Russell. Of course,
I’m far too flaky to stay true to my word, and have difficulty adhering to
self-imposed strictures. Perhaps bi-monthly? Whither and thither my attention
may wander…
In that previous post on KR's classic The Devils (1970), user ‘Vic’ responded rather unfavorably to my effusions with
the following: “Ken Russell is like all the other English decadent director
satirists… One lazy lousy satiric layup after another.” It was certainly
effective in momentarily checking my aesthetic tumescence, but in hindsight, I
find myself puzzled at some of the language chosen. Mostly because I don’t
consider Russell’s films to be primarily satiric—or perhaps only satiric in the
Rabelaisian sense, where common stereotypes and codes of decorum are pushed to
their breaking point, and one frequently loses sight of the object of satire in
the nihilistic absurdity of events. (Russell once considered adapting Rabelais
for the screen; truly a frightening prospect.) Satire in the more conventional
sense of “parody,” “sarcasm,” “ridicule,” does not seem too prevalent in
Russell’s work until the 1980s, beginning with Altered States—and this mostly because it is obvious that the
director has no respect for his material, a typically padded script by Paddy
Chayefsky. While one could call the director any number of epithets, “lazy” is
not one that comes to mind; for even in these films of decline, Russell will
still “pile on the virtuosity,” in Michael Dempsey’s phrase, for lack of
anything better to do with his efforts. One cannot fault the Englishman his
showmanship.
Yet, I would
readily concede that of all Russell’s films made about classical composers, Lisztomania (1975) may indeed be the
most pointless and the most cruelly parodic. A far cry from his tasteful if
unconventional work on Elgar and Debussy for the British TV show Monitor (1959-1965), or even from the
meticulously choreographed hysteria of Tchaikovsky in The Music Lovers (1970), Lisztomania
is a film still reeling from the psychedelic excesses of Tommy (1975). Indeed, it is notorious for again featuring The
Who’s Roger Daltrey in a leading role as Hungary’s original ladykiller.
Anthology Film Archives is showing Lisztomania
twice this week as part of their expansive “Anti-Biopics” series, once on
Wednesday (July 14) and an encore on Saturday (July 17). You could perhaps see
a much more respectable work by, say, Rossellini or Straub-Huillet, but make
sure to catch Russell’s film if you like your haute cuisine tempered by Froot Loops. A Region 2 DVD is available, but from what I understand, the quality is
rather poor; and, as it sells for $30+ on Amazon, one would be better off
seeing Anthology’s 35 mm print for the modest cost of $9 per ticket.
Tony Coulter here, re-back to share some discoveries and uncoveries. The sounds, per always, were recently obtained; the images have been hanging around a little longer. Several of said images are genteelly smutty in a vintage men's-magazine kind of way; NSIYLIAC, perhaps (Not Safe If You Live In A Convent). The photo above, by the way, is of a seafood restaurant's window display, and was snapped during a recent trip to Astoria, OR. Let me not forget to say thanks to both Archie Patterson and Thom Jones for some of the sounds.
The other night, myself and a few friends; artist Hakumei Kusanagi (artwork here), Mad Man John, and
the Geisha of Gore (read her column on the Cinema Knife Fight site), went to the Japan Society event thinking we were only going to see Mutant Girls Squadas part of the NY Asian Film Fest. I was unaware that two of the movies' three directors were to be in attendance, and the Geisha of Gore greeted me at the door with her copy of the promo poster for Mutant Girls Squad signed by both of them, as well as her DVD insert for Tokyo Gore Police signed by Yoshihiro Nishimura (which was his directorial debut). Her grin split her face in half as if she was Ichi the Killer. I knew it would be a good night.
I thought it would be prudent to use the rest room before the action started, and I got sidetracked in the Japan Society's ladies room. Each stall had it's own device (see photo below) with many bidet settings - including an underseat dryer! I could have taken in all the selections, but wanted to take in everything that was going on outside of the bathroom, so ran back out to the action, the presentation was about to begin!
Yoshihiro Nishimura and Noboru Iguchi introduced the film with an interpreter, and Subway Cinema's Marc Walcow; the presentation was fun and whimsical; the two directors seemed genuinely thrilled to be there in a demented childlike way. They gave out prizes to the crowd and a bit of background on the film: "He likes asses; you'll see a lot of asses and a lot of things coming out of them", and of course the deep meaning in the meeting of the 3 directors minds "we all got together and got drunk and wrote the movie"... Also on the scene was Masanori Mimoto of Alien vs Ninja, screened earlier that day.
Last Friday
I caught Michael Winterbottom’s The
Killer Inside Me on its opening night @ IFC. (Rather than recapitulate a
press release, the reader is referred here for a synopsis—it’s as good as any
other.) As someone who greatly enjoyed the Jim Thompson novel, I was looking
forward to it with a mixture of curiosity and unease. It didn’t disappoint on
the latter front; I felt more uncomfortable sitting next to my fellow theatergoers than I have at a movie since Irreversible.
Along with Noe’s film, The Killer Inside
Me is likely to be remembered as one of the most violent and offensive
works of the past decade, a new entry in the growing trend that Hoberman
recently called ‘the new realism’: movies of unrelenting brutality that take
the human body as their playground, shocking the viewer out of his or her
spectacle-benumbed complacency by systematically abusing and destroying the one
realm of screen space he or she still identifies with. I recall an anecdote
told by Nagisa Oshima after he observed the behavior of audiences at early
screenings of his art-porno classic In
the Realm of the Senses. When Sada severs Kichizo’s genitals following
a fatal bout of erotic asphyxiation, the director noticed several of the men in
attendance clutching their own groins in order to shield themselves from further
violence.
Thompson’s
book lends itself wonderfully to the screen in some ways, yet in other regards
it continues to elude proper adaptation. I have often felt that of all genres,
the crime novel was destined to find a home in Hollywood; in a beautiful
marriage, cinema found pulp and pulp found the cinema. As a fairly literalist
medium, movies have a special affinity for the kind of spare, ‘hardboiled’
prose invented by Hammett and Chandler and kept alive in Thompson’s writing.
Characters are sketched in brief, vivid strokes, their language and physiognomy
all but determining the course of action they follow in a way quite similar to
the typage of actors found in realms as diverse as Eisenstein and Hawks (ie.,
policemen are burly, thieves are wiry). Even the origins of Thompson’s novel
resemble the production values of the Hollywood assembly line: The Killer Inside Me grew out of a
synopsis the author chose from a batch of story ideas penned by editors at Lion
Books and presented to him by literary agent Arnold Hano in 1952.
Of
course, the problem with bringing text to screen is the inherent danger of
overliteralizing the material. There is something haunting about “Samuel
Spade’s jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v
of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller v” that is
simply lost when we look at Humphrey Bogart: a sense of imaginative absurdity,
impossibility, abstraction that a real face can never truly match.
Similarly,
when sheriff Lou Ford (Casey Affleck) beats in the face of a prostitute
(Jessica Alba) until her visage is little more than an amalgam of fleshy
patches protruding through streaks of blood, her cheek collapsing under the
pressure of a gloved fist, something is lost in the transition from Thompson’s
much more evocative phraseology: “I backed her against the wall, slugging, and
it was like pounding a pumpkin. Hard, then everything giving away at once… I
brought an uppercut up from the floor. There was a sharp cr-aack! and her whole body shot upward, and came down in a heap.”
What is lost is the sheer cartoonish play of language—in the absence of truly
graphic violence, the reader is forced to imagine just what a
face-turned-pumpkin might look like, a body which crosses the threshold from
animate object to rag doll in the briefest of moments.
Tony Coulter here, speaking to you from the ever-receding past (Wednesday evening to be exact). As happens ever other week, I've laid out before you an assortment of sounds recently found, and of sights that have been with me a little longer -- for me, sight moves slower than sound.
Before the tell-and-show commences, let me just thank Cozmic Eddie, occasional guest-host of KPSU's Psychedelic Renaissance, for the loan of two of the audio oddities found below.
Last week Apple became the technology company with the most bajillions of dollars, knocking Microsoft out of the #1 spot and making Steve Jobs the iMan. But it turns out that the iProduct comes with an iAgenda - and it totally sucks. I have a Macbook and I have an iPhone. I also love iTunes, it is probably my favorite piece of software in the world, and I love their podcast store - it has been awesome to see my WFMU show featured on their front page. BUT, this week, the love affair is over. Here is what happened: my show has become another unintended consequence of Steve Jobs' War on Porn.
The latest episode is called "Kicking Against the Pricks." The phrase comes from the Bible, it means "rebellion against authority." And just as it is for one of the characters in my show, this rebellion is futile. Here is what the show title looks like on iTunes:
It doesn't bother me that Steve Jobs doesn't like Porn, but if he is serious about making his world free from Porn - then I think he has to pony up some of those bajillions of dollars and hire some good old fashioned bible thumping human censors - because his computer censors can't do the job without f••king up. Here is another example: a recent episode from the WNYC Science show Radiolab
My friend and WNYC Colleague Ellen Horne, the executive producer at Radiolab, says the staff was more amazed than horrified when Apple censored the word SPERM. Plus she adds that the *** makes it sort of like a "fun adventure to figure out what the show is even about." I wish I could be as amused. But I am not, if this is the iWorld, I don't want to live in it! And just so you know, the Chinese Government uses the "freedom from porn" line to justify what it does too. Maybe Steve Jobs will realize the futility of censorship on his own, but perhaps a list of unintended consequences will be more effective. If you have more examples - add them in the comments.
"...Nay, these were the most beautiful women of the world; the whole world, not just the world of today, but the world since time began and the world as long as time shall run. Nor were the wild animals on display at the circus any less sensational than were the girls. Not elephants or tigers of hyenas or monkeys or polar bears or hippopotami, anyone and everyone had seen such as these time after time. The sight of an African lion was as banal today as that of an airplane. But here were animals no man had ever seen before; beasts fierce beyond all dreams of ferocity; serpents cunning beyond all comprehension of guile; hybrids strange beyond all nightmare of fantasy." Charles G. Finney / The Circus of Dr. Lao
"Wind, flag, mind moves, The same understanding. When the mouth opens All are wrong." Zen Flesh, Zen Bones
Well, those two California native ladies are still traveling abroad in 1983, and I'm back
with the sequel to last week's posting - side two of the 90 minute letter we were working on; a scatalogical, sarcastic, sexy and swinging romp across foreign shores.I believe they're still in their pensione in Greece with the British girls when we rejoin them...
Tony Coulter here (there? somewhere?) with another cluster of things to listen to and to look at. No theme this time: just some recent audio purchases, and a bunch of images unpacked from moving boxes. Those images, including the one above, were clipped by moi so long ago I mostly no longer remember where they came from. If you know, do tell, and I will give credit where credit's due.
And now, dear reader's finger, please slide on through to the other side....
One film at
this year’s Tribeca Film Festival that no one seems to be talking about is
Joann Sfar’s Gainsbourg, Je t'Aime... Moi
Non Plus.Perhaps Gainsbourg’s
popularity (as well as that of his ye-ye contemporaries)
is not as de jure as it used to
be.Once a cultural heavyweight on
par with Kerouac and Fellini, his piano bar melodies, crooning voice and light
jazz arrangements may no longer appeal to a generation whose purview doesn’t
extend far beyond Paw Tracks and DFA Records.I personally can’t recall the last time I pulled out my
France Gall or Jacqueline Taieb for stereo play.But, then again, I don’t find Godard’s first decade of
filmmaking nearly as charmant as I
did in my first year of college.
I was happily
surprised by Gainsbourg, Je t’Aime
(previously called by the much more pretentious title of Gainsbourg: Vie héroïque), particularly because of the maturity
with which it handles such an immature subject.After all, this is the man who said he wanted to fuck
Whitney Houston on live television.There are plenty of dirty jokes—from the young Gainsbourg expounding his
own facility in drawing “pussy hairs” to the BBW fable of “L’Hippopodame” (“The
springs creak under the hippopodame…”)—but the filmmakers give us the
impression of ascending to the songwriter’s intellectual milieu rather than
lowering ourselves to it.
Most
Gainsbourg fans know that the sexual raconteur was born Lucien Ginsburg in 1928
and grew up in the midst of Nazi-occupied France.The son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Gainsbourg was marked
early on by the rampant anti-Semitism of his motherland, which served the dual
purpose of forcing the young boy into hiding as well as providing a reflection
for his own self-perceived ugliness.A struggling painter who earned his living playing Aznavour hits in
nightclubs, Gainsbourg skyrocketed to fame when he began arranging hits for pop
lolitas Gall and Françoise Hardy.Most remarkable is the way in which, like Yellowman in Jamaica or Lou
Reed in the US, Gainsbourg managed to transform his own sense of physical
inferiority and marginal status as juif
into one of France’s most notorious sexual icons.The film does a wonderful job of chronicling Lucien’s mainstream
breakthrough in tandem with his own string of amorous conquests.Marveling at the charisma of the
musician and the transcendent quality of star power, one easily overlooks the
hooked nose and protruding ears in favor of the fingers’ sensuous rapping on
piano keys. Similar to Perrault’s
“Riquet With the Tuft”, here is an exceedingly unattractive man illuminated by
the beauty of the women who love him, while managing to impart something of his
intelligence to all and sundry that occupy his bedsheets.
The director-screenwriter
and his muse were clearly meant for each other.Sfar, a graphic novelist by training, brings a sense of
cartoonish grotesquerie to the man whose “Comic Strip” featured Bardot gasping
an ecstatic refrain of “Shebang! Pow! Blop! Whizz!”This lack of subtlety is immediately apparent following
Lucien’s eager and cheeky visit to acquire his yellow star from Nazi
headquarters.Walking home down
gray cobbled streets, he passes a poster with the words THE JEW AND FRANCE
emblazoned above a hideous caricature of the Semitic intruder.Soon this bloated, rat-like visage
comes to life as an enormous displaced head that follows Lucien on two pairs of human legs.The boy and his stereotype dance together, seemingly without concern for
the grave political implications embedded in the leering parade float.
Of course, a
biopic like this can’t succeed without actors to bring the man and his cohorts
alive.At 136 minutes it can feel
slightly swollen, but the stagings of such classic songs as “Bonnie and Clyde”,
“La Javanaise”, and the scandalous Jamaican version of “La Marsellaise” more
than justify the running time.Eric
Elmosnino’s Gainsbourg is miraculous, perfecting the singer’s proto-hipster
swagger and mannerisms while smoking through enough cigarettes to induce lung cancer in
a normal human being by age 25.Sometimes-nude model Laetitia Casta brings the Barbie doll bawdiness of
Bardot to life, while the late Lucy Gordon (who committed suicide last year at
age 28) imparts to the English femme and second wife Birkin the tragic
fragility of “La Décadanse” and the post-coital purr of “Je t’Aime… Moi Non
Plus.”After the corpulent Jew-rat
gives way to a new figure, the wily Jew of Gainsbourg’s maturity, the film is
haunted by Doug Jones in a role known only as “La Gueule”
—aka The Mug, a
towering facsimile of Gainsbourg (Gainsbarre?) replete with hideously
exaggerated hands, ears, and nose in the Nosferatu style.(With any luck, Siegfried Kracauer will
be sending us missives from beyond the grave.)The double, while an obvious and perhaps tasteless symbol of
Gainsbourg’s inner demons, adds a much-needed element of surreal whimsy to this
hyperliterate film.Like I’m Not There but far better, Sfar’s
work forgoes the truth of biography in favor of the lie.Modern mythmaking of Gainsbourg’s
variety needs—nay, demands—the vast horizon of cinema, or what Rivette aptly
called “the infinite stage of the universe.”
Gainsbourg, Je t'Aime... Moi Non Plus is playing a few more times at the festival, once tonight (4/29) at 3:00 PM and tomorrow (4/30) at 6:00. Tickets may be sold out, but show up an hour early for rush and you're likely to be seated. Village East Cinema, 189 2nd Avenue, between 11th and 12th Streets.
I went to the Miroslav Tichy exhibit at International Center
of Photography a few weeks ago, and then I went back again last Friday. (See
Vinnie Smith’s earlier post here on Beware of the Blog.)
Miroslav Tichy is an old Czech, born in Kyjov, Moravia, in 1926. He went to art
school, and then stopped painting sometime in the late 1950s. He became very
unkempt, dressed in rags, and started wandering around Kyjov with cameras he
constructed out of garbage—shoe boxes, twine, lenses from broken eyeglasses.
According to some of the local residents who were interviewed for a documentary
on Tichy’s life, most people didn’t believe his cameras were real; those who
did would call the police whenever he began “taking pictures”—mostly of women’s
feet, legs, and butts. The police also hauled Tichy off to the local insane
asylum whenever he showed up for the annual May Day parade, because they didn’t
want the village weirdo spoiling their proper celebration.
The images Tichy made are pretty great, because his cameras
and his enlarger were made out of trash, and also because of Tichy’s obsession
with his subject matter. Last Friday I watched a couple looking at the first
few photos at the ICP exhibit; the young woman turned to her date and said, “He
sure liked booty, didn’t he?” Clearly he did, which is pretty obvious to anyone
who just looks at the pictures. But if you read the accompanying text for the
show, written by some curator, you will discover that these images are all
about esthetic choice as to how best to represent the experience of village
life, or some such nonsense. Instead of shooting interiors or church scenes,
Tichy chose to shoot at the local swimming pool for some esthetic reason or
other. The fact that there are usually not a lot of half-naked babes at the
church didn’t enter into it at all, apparently. But Tichy himself, in an
interview in the documentary film that’s showing in conjunction with the
exhibit, just goes on and on about sexuality, atoms screwing, dinosaurs doing
it—he doesn’t say a word about his “esthetic choices.” He does say, “To be famous, you have to be worse at something than
anyone else in the whole world.” So he’s not stupid.
I don’t understand why we have to do the Henry Darger on
these guys. Nobody goes to all the trouble of making cameras out of trash
unless their passion forces them to
make those images. Why can’t people just look at the photos and appreciate them
for what they are? It doesn’t lessen the power of the photos to accept that the
photographer was the local creepy weirdo, or that any “esthetic choices” were
being made by his Little Miroslav.
ICP show until May 9 (Friday is pay-what-you-wish after
5:00).
This is a spoken word/comedy album I found (oddly enough) in a bin along with Terry Riley's In C and Cecil Taylor's 3 Phasis (all severely undervalued) at an antique mall in Binghamton, New York last year. When LPs are a dollar or less, and the source is a 10 minute jaunt from my apartment, I inevitably start buying in bulk. Lots of albums I know nothing about, which I generally buy because I like the title or the artwork. Gypsy Rose Lee Remembers Burlesque (StereODDITIES, 1962) was no exception. Recently, I was trying to weed out some of the duds from my collection, which meant listening to many things for the first time. I anticipated chucking this one but was more than pleasantly surprised. This is an excellent record with a rich history behind it--though for anyone who likes burlesque, the name Gypsy Rose Lee is certain to be old hat.
According to Wikipedia,
Gypsy Rose Lee was born Rose Louise Hovick in Seattle, Washington in 1911, although her mother later shaved three years off both of her daughters' ages. She was initially known by her middle name, Louise… Louise's singing and dancing talents were insufficient to sustain the act without [her sister] June. Eventually, it became apparent that Louise could make money in burlesque, which earned her legendary status as a classy and witty strip tease artist. Her innovations were an almost casual strip style, compared to the herky-jerky styles of most burlesque strippers (she emphasized the "tease" in "striptease") and she brought a sharp sense of humor into her act as well. She became as famous for her onstage wit as for her strip style, and—changing her stage name to Gypsy Rose Lee—she became one of the biggest stars of Minsky's Burlesque, where she performed for four years.
Eventually she married up into the world of Hollywood, even fathering one of Otto Preminger's children. In films like Ali Baba Goes to Town (1937), Battle of Broadway (1938), Stage Door Canteen (1943), and Belle of the Yukon (1944), she acted alongside such venerable personae as Victor McLaglen, Randolph Scott, Tallulah Bankhead and Katherine Hepburn; and, in B-movie thrillers like the lurid Screaming Mimi (1958), opposite less respectable actors like Phil Carey and Anita Ekberg--still, at the age of 47, trying to belt out a rather painful-sounding "Put the Blame on Mame." She seems to haveplayed exclusively either dancers or nightclub owners, often with jazz artists like Raymond Scott or Red Norvo providing the pulsating soundtracks. Owing to her literary reputation as the author of The G-String Murders and Mother Finds a Body, she portrayed herself as an intellectual among strippers, an attractive notion still being "fleshed" out today in books by Chris Kraus and the latest episodes of Desperate Housewives. Watch her rather tame appearance in Stage Door Canteen, as she lectures the audience on art and culture in a full Victorian gown while subtly removing stockings and garter.
After years of marginal status, Lee's memoirs of life in the biz were turned into the 1959 musical Gypsy, a Stephen Sondheim extravaganza with Ethel Merman playing the titular character [correction: playing Gypsy's mother]. As these things usually go, the stage show became a 1962 film with Rosalind Russell and Natalie Wood; which leads me to think that this 1962 LP was most likely released in order to coincide with/capitalize off the renewed attention to Lee's autobiographical odyssey. A true, ahem, "no rags to riches story," as the clip above phrased it.
The lyrics are by Eli Basse and the music by Bobby Kroll; the whole thing is produced and directed by Fletcher Smith. Not that these names mean anything to me. The "adults-only" feel is similar to Belle Barth's records, though the producers are obviously having a lot more fun with the novelties of stereo technology. The liner notes say it all: "You'll find yourself once again surrounded by the unique atmosphere that's become part of Americana. Here in all their gaudy glory parade the Dolls of the Chorus, the baggy-pants Comics and the Sensational Strippers. Set to the authentic sounds of the bumpy burly-beat pit orchestra, such realism has been captured that you'll swear you see the magenta spots and smell the powder and paint... and even the salami sandwiches!" Though I'm not sure that the words "Americana" and "realism" should ever be included in the same breath without a tinge of irony. The album has plenty of great moments, even some sad ones--particularly on side B, as Gypsy laments the disappearance of burlesque by asking passersby on the street if they share her sentiments. Even the women are sad: "Pardon me madame, how do you feel about burlesque being closed up?" "I think it's disgraceful and I'm going to write a nasty letter to the mayor." "Why, madame?" "Well, since they closed the burlesque theaters I have no idea where my husband is every night."
Gypsy Rose Lee Remembers Burlesque (StereODDITIES, 1962)
I’m currently working on a Yellowman mix for my fiancée. She’s a big hip-hop fan and thus, in my estimation, a nascent dancehall fan. We work together 10 hours a week and it’s pretty much all I like to listen to when pushing papers, so she’s starting to like it whether she wants to or not. Of course, I don’t have much of a say in things until the Leonard Lopate show is over at 2:00.
Yellowman is pretty lovable; he’s one of the crudest, rudest, slackest vocalists of the 1980s, and despite releasing at least a dozen albums in 1982 alone, most of them are pretty good. However, I did start to think that 80 minutes of pure and unadulterated Yellowman might get tiresome for the unconvinced listener. So I began toying with the idea of breaking the mix up with other material that samples King Yellow, either dub mixes or hip-hop singles, or tracks that feature him as a guest. I was much aided in my search by www.whosampled.com, which, while not exhaustive, lists 7 borrowings for Zungguzungguguzungguzeng alone. I was happy to find Junior MAFIA’s rather humorous “Player’s Anthem” (video below), where Biggie's refrain paraphrases Yellow's vocalese melody, as well as K7’s Zunga Zeng. Nice & Smooth samples Yellow’s tune not once but twice, simply rapping over the same vocal loop from “Zung” on both Nice & Smooth and Dope on a Rope. (The last three tunes can be heard mixed together on a great wayneandwax post.)
Blind people are just like us: they have needs. Plus they
are NOT just like us: They have no porno! There is already
an amazing website that provides spoken-word
descriptions of online porn for blind people, but it seems to be done by volunteers,
some of whom are better—a lot better—than others. Here are some tips:
1. Don’t
bother telling blind people what color things are, they haven’t ever seen
colors so it’s not that helpful. More helpful is the nice young lady who points
out that the woman in the video has natural breasts and a belly-button piercing
(“so that’s kind of fancy”). 2. Do not crack up as you describe the sexxxy scenes.
As one guy’s friend angrily points out, “They don’t wanna hear laughin’ when
they’re jackin’ it!” So true.
The other thing that is maybe not so good about
the free website is that they just use free teaser videos, so the scenes they
describe are all only about 20 seconds long. [A digression: In the mid-’80s
there were free phone numbers you could call to hear tape recordings of sexy
ladies describing naughty things. I think they were supposed to encourage you
to call for pay-for-it phone sex, but they were pretty awesome on their own,
and they were all definitely longer than 30 seconds. More like a couple
minutes, I think.]
So, you know how WFMU is completely Listener-supported but last year we didn't raise enough money with our annual fund-raising Marathon and we had to do a shorter on-air fundraiser later on, and nobody really wants to do that? So my idea was that we could get
some hot-sounding WFMU DJs, like Psue Braun or Bryce or William Berger, and have them record
descriptions of some long porn scenes, and put them up on a website, and sell
it to blind people who want some nice porn. I think we could definitely make some money that way for sure.
Thanks for reading my unsnarkified blogpost this time, and may God bless.
