User:Jahsonic/Sandbox archive 7
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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In February 2018, while examining the bibliography of Art and Its Objects for my thesis Kan pornografie kunst zijn?, I came across Alain's System of the Fine Arts which in turn led me anew to the "killing of the hypothetical Mandarin", a subject I had contemplated in some detail for the first time in 2013. I spent about six hours on the subject over the afternoon, time I did not spend on my thesis.
A new element in this afternoon reading and studying binge was "Killing a Chinese Mandarin: The Moral Implications of Distance", an essay by Carlo Ginzburg (the current heir to Umberto Eco?) first published in 1994 and essential to the parable, referencing Aristotle's Rhetoric, "Conversation of a Father with his Children" and "Letter on the Blind" (Diderot), Charles de Pougens, Modeste Mignon (Balzac), Ordinary Men (Christopher Browning) and David Hume.
As far as I'm concerned Alain mad the definitive statement about the "hypothetical Mandarin" when he said "Everybody continually kills the Mandarin" proving that we are all victims of collective guilt, a point particularly poignant in the current migrant crisis.
Having lost a lot of time (time I should've spent on my thesis), I decided to write this snippet reporting my vagrancies. As I was thinking of a picture that could illustrate it, I suddenly thought of Death by a Thousand Cuts. Are we not guilty -- with every Chinese product we buy -- of the violations of human rights in China perpetrated on a daily basis? But then I couldn't. The image is just too cruel.
Instead, I give you a cover of Alain on Happiness, from whence came Alain's dictum on the mandarin, not referenced by Ginzburg in his sublime piece on emotional and social distance.
As I've mentioned[1], I went to China over the holidays, to visit my daughter Bonnie.
On holiday -- and practically only then -- I read.
My finest read this year was Michel Houellebecq De koude revolutie. One of the most enigmatic essays in that collection is "Sortir du XXe siècle", the title of which translates as "Leaving the 20th Century", but which has, to my knowledge, not been translated into English.
The essay starts as a diatribe against the left, against 20th century social sciences (Pierre Bourdieu) and thought (Jean Baudrillard). It criticizes the nouveau roman and praises New Wave science fiction ("Ballard, Disch, Kornbluth, Spinrad, Sturgeon and Vonnegut...").
Most of all it praises American writer R. A. Lafferty and extols the virtues of the short story "The World as Will and Wallpaper" (1973), the title of which references Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation and manages to weave William Morris (English artist, writer, socialist, activist and designer of wallpaper) in the story, both as character and as author of The Wood Beyond the World, which in this story has become a place which cannot be reached.
I am quite fond of texts that make broad sweeping generalizations.
Last Sunday, I came across one such generalization in the Dutch translation of Kristeva's Strangers to Ourselves (at the Sint-Jansvliet flea market in Antwerp).
- “Nowhere is one more a foreigner than in France. Having neither the tolerance of Anglo-American Protestants, nor the absorbent ease of Latin Americans, nor the rejecting as well as assimilating curiosity of the Germans or Slavs, the French set a compact social texture and an unbeatable national pride against foreigners."
The above generalization is one of national character, one of the hardest to make and least respected, the category basically came into being with Hegel and Herder's Volksgeist and fell out of favor with Nazism.
RIP Boyd Jarvis (1958 – 2018) was an American record producer, remixer and musician, best known for his song, co-written with Jason Smith, "The Music Got Me"; released in 1983 by Prelude Records. Two other perennial favorites are "Hey Boy" by Tammy Lucas and "Nobody's Business" by Billie.
Jarvis is exemplary in the proto-house tradition.
User:Jahsonic/Khalid Benhaddou: Is dit nu de islam? came to speak in our school
Masterseminarie Filosofie en samenleving Universiteit Antwerpen, 2017-18
Dance Of The Peacock by Chechen actor/dancer Makhmud Esambayev
Dance of the Peacock by Chechen actor/dancer Makhmud Esambayev is a clip[3] which is currently doing the rounds on Facebook.
It intrigued me because of its kitschiness and I decided to investigate.
It did not take long to figure out that the soundtrack to which Esambayev is dancing, is a cover of the theme of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly by Sergio Leone. It has a drum break which is not in the original.
It took me more than an hour to find the original film the clip was taken from.
First I found a version with a little bit more footage at the beginning (below).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJU_VEYHHkA
For a while I thought it came from a children's movie and I scrubbed through two.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuWhoxWoWIQ
Then, by machine translating the Russian Wikipedia page of Esambayev I found that the clip comes from a film called Dances of the Peoples of the World (above) in which the Chechen dancer performs a huge number of various dances: "Chaban" (Chechen-Ingush, Uzbek), "Warrior" (Bashkir), "Golden God" (Indian), ritual "Dance of Fire" to the music of de Falla, "La Corrida" (Spanish ) and "Dance with knives" (Tajik)".
See fact checking
RIP Jóhann Jóhannsson (1969 – 2018)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sziNUZa4Sw
Jóhann Jóhannsson was an Icelandic composer who first came on my radar in 2017 with his soundtrack for the film Arrival (which is one of my World Cinema Classics.
When someone this young dies suddenly, I always think of suicide.
"Flight from the City" is a musical composition from the album Orphée (2016).
Chinese police are using facial recognition
`Pornographic Art—A Case from Definitions'
Theories of Art Today - Page 96, edited by Noël Carroll - 2000
- ... the back of a painting. This distinction is still important, but I decided that it was not one that needed to be addressed within the institutional theory of art. At this point I want to take note of an argument invented and used by Danto that I have adopted. Danto envisions visually indistinguishable pairs of objects: Fountain and a urinal that looks just like it, the painting The Polish Rider and an accidentally produced paint and canvas object that looks just like it, Warhol's Brillo Box and a real ...
Art, Beauty, and Pornography by Jon Huer
- "Hayot refers to a version of killing a Chinese mandarin in Gertrude Stein's Everybody's Autobiography, in which she remarks that “many people had thought it was funny when, in her opera Four Saints in Three Acts, 'they asked Saint Therese what would she do if by touching a button she could kill three thousand Chinamen .." --From Comparison to World Literature
Paul Postal and Jerrold Katz, Generative semantics An Integrated Theory of Linguistic Descriptions
- "artificial "Featurese" or "Markerese" can never lead us to true understanding, because, as Lewis (1970) put it, "we can know the Markerese translation of an English sentence without knowing the first thing about the meaning of the English sentence". And within natural language, there is also only a small minority of words ..." --Conceptualizations and Mental Processing in Language
In the history of 20th century erotica, Walter Sickert kicks off the era with a series of oils known as the The Camden Town Nudes. Nuit dété (Summer Night) is one of them. Sickert's erotica is exemplary of the cult of ugliness. Nevertheless, I like his nudes better than Lucian Freud's, of which I am not really a fan. Of note is also that Sickert wrote of eroticism in painting in pieces such as "The Naked and the Nude". I say "pieces", but I'm not sure he did more writings on the nude than this one.
"Solving Wollheim's Dilemma: A Fix for the Institutional Definition of Art" by Simon Fokt
- "Richard Wollheim threatened George Dickie's institutional definition of art with a dilemma which entailed that the theory is either redundant or incomprehensible and useless. This article modifies the definition to avoid such criticism. First, it shows that the definition's concept of the artworld is not vague when understood as a conventional system of beliefs and practices. Then, based on Gaut's cluster theory, it provides an account of reasons artworld members have to confer the status of a candidate for appreciation. An authorised member of an artworld has a good reason to confer the status on an object if it satisfies a subset of criteria respected as sufficient within this artworld. The first horn of the dilemma is averted because explaining the reasons behind conferral cannot eliminate references to the institution, and the second loses its sharpness, as accepting partial arbitrariness of the conferral does not deprive the theory of its explanatory power."[4]
RIP Dennis Edwards (1943 – 2018)
Dennis Edwards was an American singer, notably a lead singer in The Temptations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CH3rx8LhrQo
He scored a solo hit in 1984 with "Don't Look Any Further" (day-o day-o, mombajee ai-o, well), the video of which [above] is in the top ten of worst videos ever.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtXIdykj2QE
For the jaded and tired amongst us, it's a good thing to listen to "City Lights" by William Pitt [above].
- "In other words, many of us end up echoing Damon Knight: science fiction is "what we point to when we say it." (Though it is worth remembering that what Damon Knight actually wrote in In Search of Wonder (1956) was: "The term 'science fiction' is a misnomer, ... it will do us no particular harm if we remember that, like The Saturday Evening Post, it means what we point to when we say it." (1)) Knight's ostensive definition of science fiction has been so frequently misquoted and adapted ..." --Speculations on Speculation: Theories of Science Fiction (2005) - James E. Gunn, Matthew Candelaria.
A nude boy and extreme close-ups in Django Kill... If You Live, Shoot!
As I was researching my master thesis and examining the tautology of genre, I stumbled upon my list of unusual westerns.
Luck would have it that the first on the list, Django Kill... If You Live, Shoot!, is on YouTube[5], so I watched it.
Did it live up to its expectations?
Not really. It's a silly film.
I noticed that it featured a nude boy, just as El Topo did. But here not as nude and only seen from the back.
And then there are the close-ups, Sergio Leone style, including tiny drops of sweat.
- Randy has a drinking problem as seen in "Bloody Mary" when he was caught drink-driving. He replied "What seems to be the officer, problem?" due to his drunkenness. He was then sent to meetings where he was convinced he did not have the power to quit drinking himself, and was led to believe that he needed the help ...
Augustinus, in den Confessiones I/8:
- "cum ipsi (majores homines) appellabant rem aliquam, et cum secundum eam vocem corpus ad aliquid movebant, videbam, et tenebam hoc ab eis vocari rem illam, quod sonabant, cum eam vellent ostendere. Hoc autem eos velle ex motu corporis aperiebatur: tamquam verbis naturalibus omnium gentium, quae fiunt vultu et nutu oculorum, ceterorumque membrorum actu, et sonitu vocis indicante affectionem animi in petendis, habendis, rejicindis, fugiendisve rebus. Ita verba in variis sententiis locis suis posita, et crebro audita, quarum rerum signa essent, paulatim colligebam, measque iam voluntates, edomito in eis signis ore, per haec enuntiabam."
Referenced in the chapter "Meaning and Understanding" in Philosophical Investigations.
English translation:
- ‘When they (my elders) named some object, and accordingly moved towards something, I saw this and I grasped that the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out. Their intention was shewn by their bodily movements, as it were the natural language of all peoples: the expression of the face, the play of the eyes, the movement of other parts of the body, and the tone of voice which expresses our state of mind in seeking, having, rejecting, or avoiding something. Thus, as I heard words repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentences, I gradually learnt to understand what objects they signified; and after I had trained my mouth to form these signs, I used them to express my own desires.’ (Augustine, Confessions, 1. 8.)
I finally started writing my master thesis for a degree in philosophy.
The subject? "Can porn be art?".
The answer: "Yes it can be but usually it's not."
Anyway, to get to this answer, one needs to define art and porn.
Defining art is notoriously difficult.
Defining porn less so. First you need to get rid of the tautological genre-trap (see genre theory, corpus and tautology).
I finally read the original page on which the problem of the tautological genre-trap is first elaborated [above].
The page is from Andrew Tudor's 1974 Theories of Film, the chapter's title is "Critical Method: Auteur and Genre", the page 135.
The text reads:
- "To take a genre such as a ‘Western’, analyse it, and list its principal characteristics, is to beg the question that we must first isolate the body of films which are ‘Westerns’. But they can only be isolated on the basis of the ‘principal characteristics’ which can only be discovered from the films themselves after they have been isolated. That is, we are caught in a circle that first requires that the films be isolated, for which purposes a criterion is necessary, but the criterion is, in turn, meant to emerge from the empirically established common characteristics of the films."
Tudor calls this an 'empiricist dilemma'. More philosophically, you might call 'genre' an ostensive definition.
My way out of this quagmire?
Make use of Venn-diagrams. Some works are part of the 'western' set but can overlap with other sets.
RIP Mark E. Smith (1957 – 2018)
Mark E. Smith was an English musician, known for his post-punk group the Fall, a renowned and idiosyncratic offshoot from the UK post-punk popular music scene.
His voice is reminiscent of Jonathan Richman and tracks such as "Big New Prinz" [above] are as weird and danceable as Richman's "Roadrunner" for example.
On a personal note: the covered "Mr. Pharmacist" in 1986, at a time when I was into garage rock.
P.S. The train footage in the clip of "Big New Prinz" is an example of slow television.
"What a cruel, male-dominated culture" (2011) is a dictum by Malcolm Evans of a cartoon depicting two females, one in a burka an one in a bikini featured in a cartoon by Malcolm Evans.
To the left, the bikini clad lady saying "Everything covered but her eyes, what a cruel, male-dominated culture.
To the right, the burka clad lady saying "Nothing covered but her eyes, what a cruel, male-dominated culture.
On 16 January 2018, Cathy Newman interviewed the Canadian psychology Professor Jordan Peterson on various topics, including gender politics.
RIP Hugh Masekela (1939 – 2018)
Hugh Masekela (1939 – 2018)
I celebrated Hugh's 70th birthday nine years ago [6] and pointed to the two compositions of him that are in my top 1000 ("Grazing in the Grass" and "Don't Go Lose It Baby").
Here is "African Secret Society", a 1974 composition by Masekela, soft, breezy and jazzy (and I love the idea of an African secret society).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=339&v=0PXOdUKSi_4
Occupations that get on my nerves: notaries, apothecaries, bankers, bailiffs. Because of their secrecy monopolies and their privileged status.
"Out of fear for islam the far right have turned their longheld phobia into philia: thus misogyny became feminism, homophobia became homophilia and antisemitism became philosemitism." --Sholem Stein
All the best for 2018
I visited my daughter Bonnie in China over the Christmas holidays. An entirely pleasant journey. This is what we did.
- "Why does he think that the Mohist state-of-nature argument to justify government authority is not philosophy? What does he make of Mengzi’s reductio ad absurdum against the claim that human nature is reducible to desires for food and sex? Why does he dismiss Zhuangzi’s version of the infinite regress argument for skepticism? What is his opinion of Han Feizi’s argument that political institutions must be designed so that they do not depend upon the virtue of political agents? What does he think of Zongmi’s argument that reality must fundamentally be mental, because it is inexplicable how consciousness could arise from matter that is non-conscious? Why does he regard the Platonic dialogues as philosophical, yet dismiss Fazang’s dialogue in which he argues for, and responds to, objections against the claim that individuals are defined by their relationships to others? What is his opinion of Wang Yangming’s arguments for the claim that it is impossible to know what is good yet fail to do what is good? Does he find convincing Dai Zhen’s effort to produce a naturalistic foundation for ethics in the universalisability of our natural motivations? What does he make of Mou Zongsan’s critique of Kant, or Liu Shaoqi’s argument that Marxism is incoherent unless supplemented with a theory of individual ethical transformation? Does he prefer the formulation of the argument for the equality of women given in the Vimalakirti Sutra, or the one given by the Neo-Confucian Li Zhi, or the one given by the Marxist Li Dazhao?" "Western philosophy is racist"[7], Chinese philosophy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHeA5TWnIks
Jazz À Gogo (1964)
RIP France Gall (1947 – 2018)
France Gall was a French singer. She is famous for such songs as "Teenie Weenie Boppie", "Zozoi", "Ella, elle l'a", "Laisse tomber les filles", "A Banda (Ah Bahn-da)", "Poupée de cire, poupée de son" and "Pauvre Lola".
- "Le monde est une souffrance déployée. A son origine, il y a un noeud de souffrance. Toute existence est une expansion et un écrasement. Toutes les choses souffrent, jusqu’à ce qu’elles soient. Le néant vibre de douleur jusqu’à parvenir à l'être: dans un abject paroxysme." --incipit from Rester vivant
- "The world is suffering unfolded. At its origin it is a node of suffering. All existence is an expansion, and a crushing. All things suffer into existence. Nothingness vibrates with pain until it arrives at being, in an abject paroxysm."[8]
Notes on 'Les Mystères du peuple'
The antisemitic conspiracy theory put forward in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion started out as a Jesuit conspiracy theory in Les Mystères du peuple.
“Hier stehe ich, und kann nicht anders. Gott helfe mir! Amen”
2018 is around the corner. As always, I check the new authors/painters/musicians whose work becomes public domain in 2018.
Tricky Linguistics is a sketch by A Bit of Fry & Laurie.
- 2017 : Crazy Girl Crazy comprenant Lulu Suite d'Alban Berg, Girl Crazy Suite de George Gershwin (arrangements Bill Elliott et Barbara Hannigan) et Sequenza III pour voix de Luciano Berio – Alpha Classics
Barbara Hannigan
Luc Bovens "Moral Luck, Photojournalism, and Pornography"
Journal of Value Inquiry 32(1998): 205-217.
- A collection of pornographic art from antiquity, presented by the French “art historian” Pierre-François Hugues d’Hancarville (1719-1805). A bit of a drifter, d’Hancarville ended up in Naples where he operated as an amateur art dealer and came in contact with the British ambassador to Naples, Sir William Hamilton (1731-1803). For a time d’Hancarville worked as an intermediary for Hamilton and assisted him in the acquisitions of various antiquities, including over 700 vases, as well as more risqué objects. Described as a libertine who was in and out of money trouble (as well as prison), d’Hancarville fell into trouble over the publication of his pornographic volumes entitled Monumens de la vie privée des douze Césars, Monumens du culte secret des dames romaines, and the work featured here, Veneres uti observantur in gemmis antiquis, which according to Joscelyn Godwin were published in 1780, 1784, and 1785 respectively. The works proved popular and spread in both the original French (featured above) and English translation (featured below). As to why the images are presented so small? D’Hancarville states in the preface that at such a size they are closer to the originals and, perhaps more importantly, that they “would have still been more indecent and they been otherwise.”[9]
Communist at 20, capitalist at 50
The earliest known version of this observation is attributed to mid-nineteenth century historian and statesman François Guizot:
- Not to be a republican at 20 is proof of want of heart;
- to be one at 30 is proof of want of head.
Variations on this theme were later attributed to Disraeli, Shaw, Churchill, Bertrand Russell.
- "Celui qui n’est pas républicain à vingt ans fait douter de la générosité de son âme; mais celui qui, après trente ans, persévère, fait douter de la rectitude de son esprit." --Jules Claretie[10]
The “equity vs. equality” graphic
RIP Sunny Murray (1936 - 2017)
Sunny Murray was an American musician, one of the pioneers of the free jazz style of drumming.
His album Sonny's Time Now (1965) is in the Top Ten Free Jazz Underground.
On that record Amiri Baraka reads his controversial 1965 poem "Black Art" (above) which features the line "we want poems that kill", an instance of the aestheticization of violence.
The death of William H. Gass led me via metafiction and the antinovel to the anti-fairy tale and Johannes Andreas Jolles
- "As Calvin’s doctoral research (2011) makes clear, the anti-tale has an extant historiography. It is a concept which was, according to Wolfgang Mieder in Donald Haase’s Encyclopaedia of Folk and Fairy Tales (2008, 50), first conceptualised as the Antimärchen by André Jolles in Einfache Formen (1930). Study of Jolles’ work has tended to be avoided in light of his later affiliation with the Third Reich but a reappraisal of his earlier writings should now be possible."[11]
- "The anti-fairy tale has long existed as a shadow of the traditional fairy tale genre. First categorized as the ‘antimärchen’ in Andre Jolles’ seminal Einfache Formen (c.1930), the anti-tale was found to be contemporaneous with even the oldest known examples of fairy tale collections. Rarely an outward opposition to the traditional form itself, the anti-tale takes aspects of the fairy tale genre and re-imagines, subverts, inverts, deconstructs or satirizes elements of them to present an alternate narrative interpretation, outcome or morality. Red Riding Hood may elope with the wolf. Or Bluebeard’s wife is not interested in his secret chamber. Snow White’s stepmother gives her own account of events and Cinderella does not exactly find the prince charming." [12]
The 'Goldfrapp Trees'
Felt Mountain Map of Riffelalp
WHAT ARE THE GOLDFRAPP TREES?
One image of the Matterhorn endures beyond all others: it shows a hiking trail curving around a mighty pine, and the distant Matterhorn framed by bare angular branches arching out from a tree just in front of the viewer.
In the year 2000, this image was used on the reverse of Goldfrapp's 'Felt Mountain' album. In 2003, Phespirit set out to locate the Goldfrapp Trees .....
..... and after much searching, he succeeded.
WHERE ARE THE GOLDFRAPP TREES?
Phespirit found the Goldfrapp Trees whilst en route from Grünsee to Riffelalp. Halfway along, the path divides and goes up towards Riffelalp or onwards to Riffelalp Station. Phespirit headed up, towards Riffelalp, crossing over the Gornergrat Railway. Ten minutes along from the railway, there they are: the Goldfrapp Trees, approximately 25m further on from where telephone wires pass overhead.
The mighty lone pine is now slightly obscured by a fresh new tree growing in front of it. Also, the younger pines in the distance are much taller, as would be expected. The classic photo is captured by stepping off the path onto a well-worn sandy patch of ground in front of the near tree, about a metre and a half down to the right.
I want to see this book in my hand eventually.
Enchantements sur Paris (1954) is -- along with Paris insolite (1952), Le Vin des rues (1955) and Love on the Left Bank (1956) -- the granddaddy of low life city journalism if you leave out London: A Pilgrimage (1872).
- "First issued in 1954 under the publisher's choice of title Enchantements sur Paris (Paris Spellbound)‚ reissued in accordance the author's wishes as Rue des Maléfices (Witchcraft Street)‚ Jacques Yonnet's only published book fits into no single category. Personal diary‚ memoir of some of the darkest hours in a nation's history‚ guide to a city's lower depths‚ ethnographical study of an urban population that no longer exists or has been driven elsewhere‚ record of a number of paranormal incidents and experiences - Paris Noir is all of these." -- translator's note (Christine Donougher) to Paris Noir: The Secret History of a City
Depicted is the 1966 edition I believe, which was augmented and enhanced by photos by Robert Doisneau.
RIP Alain Jessua (1932 – 2017)
Léon la lune (1956), a film documenting the life of the 'clochard' of the title, was Jessua's first short film and it won the influential Prix Jean Vigo in 1957. The film was inspired by Jean-Paul Clébert's book Paris insolite (1952), the first of a series of realist portraits of the underworld in Paris. Clébert’s friends Jacques Yonnet and Robert Giraud wrote their own tales of the vagabond life on the streets of Paris; Yonnet wrote Paris Noir (1954), and Giraud’s Le Vin des rues (1955). The three frequented Chez Fraysse on Rue de Seine in Saint-Germain-des-Prés with Robert Doisneau, not far from Clébert’s other haunt Chez Moineau, the dirt-cheap refuge of bohemian youths and of Letterist International, and which was the subject of Ed van der Elsken’s photonovel Love on the Left Bank (1956).
Jessua first came to my attention for his "pop art film" The Killing Game (above), a collaboration with the late Belgian illustrator Guy Peellaert.
The Square is as vacuous as the art world's vacuity it tries to satirize.
Even small Belgian museums have nice collections of fine art
Over the weekend, while visiting a Robert Doisneau exhibition (he also did montages/collages![14]), I wound up in the permanent collection of the Museum of Ixelles and was surprised by Beached Fish (1643) by Dutch painter Frans Rijckhals (above). The painting is somewhat surreal as the fish (and the lobster to its right) is clearly oversized in comparison to the people in the left hand bottom corner. See Surrealism avant la lettre. Also see Stranded Sperm Whale by Dutch artist Jan Saenredam (1565–1607), satirized in Le Phallus phénoménal.
Beautiful Noise + I Never Promised You a Rose Garden
Remi Brague, Wim van Rooy Tinneke Beeckman
- "The source alluded to in the question, reliable or not, is Mustapha Kemal Ou La Mort D'Un Empire, which is the second volume of Le Loup et Le Léopard by Jacques Benoist-Méchin. No full English translation of this volume seems to exist."[15]
- "We find ourselves in a bewildering dual world. The world of education is patrolled by the gender-studies thought police — witness the departmental interrogation of a teaching assistant at Canada’s Wilfrid Laurier University, Lindsay Shepherd, who had the temerity to show students a TV clip featuring the Toronto University psychology professor Jordan Peterson. This, she was told, was a violation of WLU’s “gendered and sexual violence policy” because Peterson is known for “critiquing feminism, critiquing trans rights.”
- Meanwhile, in the entertainment world, Hollywood continues to churn out movies in which alpha-male heroes enjoy casual sexual encounters with pouting, scantily clad twentysomethings. Or are we to believe that in the new James Bond film, Bond 25, a transgender 007 will issue a heartfelt apology for her character’s 64-year career of sexism and sexual harassment? The fact that Bond films are still being made illustrates the extent of the cognitive dissonance at the heart of western civilisation today."
- I’m against sexual harassment. I condemn anyone who abuses their power in the workplace for gratification. So I am on the side of this revolution in manners. My concern is only that such revolutions have a tendency to overshoot. I wonder: do we risk sliding into a kind of secular sharia, in which all men are presumed to be sexual predators and only severe punishments can prevent routine rape? Will one-to-one work meetings between a male and a female co-worker soon be a thing of the past? What next? A more general segregation of the sexes? How the Islamists must be enjoying all this." --"Stop harassment but don’t slide into secular sharia" [The new workplace morality is welcome; just keep the thought police at bay][16]
RIP Mary Mendum (1952 - 2012)
Via the death of Ken Shapiro and my first viewing of that awful film The Groove Tube, it has come to my attention that Mary Mendum died in five years ago. Mary Mendum plays the female contestant of the world sex olympics.
She is depicted above in the film The Image as she lifts her skirt for her mistress in the very exciting rose garden scene.
Angel-A by Luc Besson with Rie Rasmussen and Jamel Debbouze.
As I told you before, I spent a couple of days in Athens. Following that, I did a lot of reading and research on the history of the archeology of Athens and found out that there once was a Frankish tower on the Acropolis; that the Germans started the first archeological reconstruction of the Acropolis in the 1830s; that the 19th century was the age of philhellenism, a blind worship of all things Greek; that two rival groups of archaeologists, in Great Britain James Stuart and Nicolas Revett and in France Julien-David Le Roy, rushed to get an illustrated book on the Greek antiquities on the market which gave us Ruins of the Most Beautiful Monuments of Greece (1758) and The Antiquities of Athens (1762-1816).
To finalize my research, I give you two pictures.
View of the Acropolis in 1872 (with the Frankish Tower conspicuously evident), a photo by H. Beck[17]. This is the same H. Beck from the photo of the Parthenon (view of the North/West facade on my page), but who is H. Beck? I've been unable to find out.
And
The Acropolis of Athens (1846), a painting by German artist Leo von Klenze. This picture is an idealized view of the grandeur of the Acropolis.
I also found out Socrates hated democracy, but that is another story.
Portraits of Time: Ancient Trees (2014) is a photography book by Beth Moon with pictures of ancient trees.
Bill Brewster – Tribal Rites (2017) is a compilation by Bill Brewster released on Eskimo Recordings
Fascination of Decay: Ruins: Relic, Symbol, Ornament (1968) by Paul Zucker
Erik Van der Paal Deze laatste was de zoon van wijlen Rudi Van der Paal,
I'm reading an New English Library edition of Junkie. The one with the cover of the forearm, the needle and the thick veins.
"Barbaarse Dans van Paul van Ostaijen"[18] is an essay by K. Van Acker on Paul van Ostaijen's toxicomania.
Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye
Recall Sculpture (2017)
Disco songs with "pew pew" laser synth sound[19]
In 2017, Mr. Yusaku purchased Basquiat's Untitled (1982), a powerful depiction of a skull, at auction for a record-setting US$110,487,500--the most ever paid for an American artwork surpassing Andy Warhol's "Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster)" which sold in 2013 for $105 million.
Paintings such as Jupiter and Antiope and Two Naked Children with Grapes[20], both by Anthony van Dyck seem to contradict my thesis on Rubens and the 17th-century beauty ideal.
I visited the Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent for the xth time.
Every new viewing brings other paintings to the fore.
This time it was Frits Van den Berghe.
Above is a detail of his self-portrait of 1919.
I spent three days in Greece.
I finished reading Topor's collection Four Roses for Lucienne (1967) and started and finished The Little Man from Archangel (1957) [pictured above], one of the 117 'romans durs' by George Simenon.
These novels have been translated in most languages, but only we speakers of Dutch can read them in the Bruna editions, with jackets designed by the unsurpassed Dick Bruna.
I bought the 1969 NEL edition of Junkie
Joseph Beuys – Greetings from the Eurasian 13 Oct 2017 - 21 Jan 2018
RIP Danielle Darrieux (1917 – 2017), French actress, 8 Women (above).
RIP Umberto Lenzi (1931 – 2017), Italian film director of Kriminal (above).
A while ago, I bought Een fee zoals je ze niet alle dagen tegenkomt (above), the Dutch translation of Four Roses for Lucienne (1967), a collection of stories by Roland Topor.
Highlights of these stories include "Les Énigmes de l'histoire" (The Enigmas of History), a one-sentence story (what in the Anglosphere is known as flash fiction) about Mr de la Palice, a man who dies 15 minutes before his death and "L'Accident" (The Accident), a story of Jesus walking on water, slipping on a banana peel and breaking his neck on the crest of a wave.
What will the influence of renewable energy be on petro-Islam?
- "through reference to and direct quotation from innumerable classical and contemporary poets, scholars, and mythographers: Ovid, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Ravisius Textor, Guillaume du Choul, Garcilaso, Lope, Cervantes, Góngora, and others" --A Tale Blazed Through Heaven: Imitation and Invention in the Golden Age of Spain
The Book of Whispers is a novel by Varujan Vosganian
I finally hold a copy of The Survival of the Pagan Gods (1940) in my hands and on page 117 is a depiction of The Punishment of Juno[21] (above) by Antonio da Correggio.
See also
- I finally hold a copy of Idols of Perversity in my hands[22]
- I finally hold a copy of Short History of the Shadow in my hands[23]
- I finally hold a copy of Rabelais and His World in my hands[24]
- I finally hold a copy of Five Faces of Modernity in my hand[25]
"Bill Laswell" and "Martin Meissonnier" are connected via Celluloid's compilation New Africa
"Shinzo No Tobira" by Mariah from the album Utakata no Hibi (1983), see Yasuaki Shimizu.
Mariah’s final recording Utakata no Hibi (1983) weaved traditional Japanese festival rhythms with rock tempos and sounds.
Radical Eroticism: Women, Art, and Sex in the 1960s (2018) by Rachel Middleman
While researching The Survival of the Pagan Gods of my previous post[26], I stumbled upon the above, The Erotic Revolution (1965) by Lawrence Lipton. It's one of these sexual revolution utopian books on erotic art of the countercultural 1960s of which Eros Denied (1964) by Wayland Young -- which I reviewed here[27] -- is probably the best.
See 20th_century_erotica#1960s
La mort de Roland, Enluminure de Jean Fouquet tirée des Grandes Chroniques de France.
Jan Cornelisz Vermeyen (c.1500 - 1559) St. Jerome Meditating[28]
The Darkening Age (2017) is a book by Catherine Nixey. It argues that Christianity wilfully destroyed the intellectual legacy of classical antiquity, by - among other things - closing Plato's Academy and erasing the Archimedes Palimpsest. Her argument makes sense. Only later did Christian monks try to recover the intellectual fruit of the classical world as was shown in the book Aristote au mont Saint-Michel.
What does this have to do with the picture above?
Well it is a depiction of Pluto and Proserpina, featured in Les Échecs amoureux moralisés by Evrard de Conty and depicted on the cover of an English edition of Jean Seznec's The Survival of the Pagan Gods[29], a work that argues that while the pagan Gods had disappeared from everyday life, they had resurfaced in art.
See also
![[2]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bartolomeo_di_Giovanni_-_The_Myth_of_Io_-_Walters_37421.jpg){kind=link}
![[17]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Akropolis_Athen_1872.jpg){kind=link}
![[20]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Två_nakna_barn_med_vindruvor_av_Antonis_van_Dyck.JPG){kind=link}
![[21]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Correggio._The_Punishment_of_Juno._View_of_the_ceiling._Detail._c.1519._Fresco._San_Paolo_Camera,_Parma.JPG){kind=link}