Porridge Legs

Woozy and Zonked

2012-01-12T11:00:00.002Z

New compilation for the excellent Stop Making Sense HERE

JIM MORRISON ★ interview 1969.....predicting electronic music amongst other things!

2011-10-27T21:53:00.000+01:00

Mosolov - Three Children's Scenes (1927)

2011-10-26T22:41:00.000+01:00

Vladimir Deshevov - Rails (Gleise)

2011-10-26T22:38:00.000+01:00

British Sculpture!

2011-10-18T08:51:00.000+01:00

Shostakovich: Satires

2011-08-25T08:22:00.010+01:00

Heard these at the Edinburgh festival the other day, really funny and really cynical.....an ideal combination in my view! The texts are by Russian poet Sasha Chorny. They first got performed in 1961 sung by Galina Vishnevskaya (wife of Mstislav Rostropovich). A little blurb follows. The pics are of the soprano (hanging out with Britten), porttrait of the poet and a nice book cover too:

1 To a critic
2 Spring awakening
3 Descendants
4 Misunderstanding
5 The Kreutzer Sonata

‘Sasha Chorny’ (‘Sasha the Black’) was the deliberately suggestive pseudonym of the early 20th century poet Aleksandr Glukberg. His mordant and biting poems, mercilessly satirising literary and emotional pretension appealed to Shostakovich, who loved laughter and caricature. The composer chose five of Chorny’s verses to make a short cycle for his friend, the distinguished soprano Galina Vishnevskaya . She herself suggested a subtitle to the cycle, ‘Pictures of the Past’, which the composer approved as it ironically underlined that, of course, these songs were all about the present. The set begins with the mocking addres ‘To a critic’, and continues with ‘Spring awakening’ in which Chorny pokes fun at writers who wax sentimental about the coming of spring and Shostakovich has boyish musical fun at the expense of Rachmaninov’s famous romance ‘Spring Waters’. Two cynical little numbers about human motivation are finally rounded out with a poem referring to Tolstoy’s famous murder-story ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’. The reference to Beethoven gives Shostakovich the chance for some more musical jokes.

Desireless - Voyage Voyage

2011-08-14T21:33:00.000+01:00

Melodic June

2011-06-08T08:36:00.004+01:00

1. Francoise Hardy: VIP

2. Wolfgang Dauner Quintet- Come On In On

3. The Cars- I'm in Touch with Your World

4. Ken Nordine-Anytime Anytime

5. Merta- Picchio Dal Pozzo

6. Nina Nastasia-That’s All There Is

7. McGough and McGear- Ex Art Student

8. Oliver-Cat and the Rat

9. Vogel- Flaschenzug

Notes:

1. Bothering to rhyme Glenmorangie with VIP is bewildering, to believe that it is somehow classy is possibly more so.

2.From the demented album The Oimels (just look at the album cover…), one of those albums where the tracks get weirder the further you go. This one has a great nonsense refrain and a good screaming freakout at the end. The whole record is a strange mix of jazz, krautrock and spacey zonkedness.

3. What do you mean, you don’t like The Cars?

4. Ken Nordine is a great combination of straight man and Hep Cat, the closing sample is as good as any Zappa tape cutup. From the superb Son of Word Jazz.

5. Nice glockenspiel loop (and it’s not often you get to use that phrase). More of an internoodle than a fully formed idea but pleasant nevertheless.

6. A clever song of romantic resignation….with someone briefly playing the saw. (oh, and produced by Steve Albini, particularly for AC)

7. Depressing.

8. I’ve always associated this with Nathaniel Mellors when it pops up on the iPod, I think perhaps it’s the mental voice which reminds me of some of the dialogue from his film(s) Ourhouse….

9. Increase your Swiss music by 100% !

Link Expired

Art Criticism

2011-05-24T08:15:00.001+01:00

Untitled from VJ Peter Rand on Vimeo.

public art in colombia....at the parque de las esculturas medellin

2011-04-25T16:01:00.001+01:00

T.O.T.U.The.Landlady. Part 1.

2011-04-19T10:21:00.000+01:00

Was reminded of this by AK the other day. It's one of the best. Try 'Flypaper' also, though I think the themes wouldn't make it past the censor these days...
The rest of The Landlady is also on Youtube.

The Tale of the Fox - Wladyslaw Starewicz (1930) Part 1/6 (English subti...

2011-04-07T09:42:00.001+01:00

Ladislaw Starewicz - Cameraman's Revenge

2011-04-07T09:42:00.000+01:00

Early 70's/ mid 70's Hunt Emerson

2011-04-06T11:22:00.004+01:00

One of my favourite cartoonists when I was a teen. This is some of his earlier work which fits with generally zonked comix work of the 70's. I think his eighties, more involved, work is great too and due for a revival. His site if HERE

(with thanks to NM via DF)

2011-04-05T07:38:00.005+01:00

Cuts

2011-03-30T10:53:00.003+01:00

A perverse thing on the Guardian site....HERE...where you can watch live comment on the Arts Council as it delivers the bad news (relatively worthy, but of course in keeping with the 'we're all f****ed now' theme of the paper).

High quality public art.....

2011-03-29T14:34:00.000+01:00

With thanks to IH

Ratataplan (M.Nichetti) - 4

2011-03-24T09:33:00.000Z

The Chêne Chapelle of Allouville-Bellefosse

2011-02-11T07:44:00.001Z

2011-02-01T15:26:00.000Z

Bert Jansch - There comes a time/Fresh as a sweet sunday morning live

2011-01-16T19:31:00.000Z

The joy of The Bevis Frond

2011-01-04T20:15:00.000Z

LINK

2010-12-19T09:03:00.000Z

Hollow Smoke

Hollow smoke the hole transmitting
her hair come out like red meat through uh screen door
wiped her shoulder balanced like a ball
her face was erect on a long thin neck
light rubber mountains in the distance stretched
under wind blown spider webs
the wind puffed out drank the blue sky
one milk cloud grazed
the sun sailed into black bag hung t' strap around
the girl bowed 'n rested against her cocked hip
a row of buttons ran up her like raisins
crisp collars folds made shadows under her loose breasts
feet orange rakes wiggled sand
the sea moved returned claimed one lace paper plate
like a frayed damp fish it spun 'n sank in a foaming circle
a sandwich corner flys in a gulls beak
she smiles her fingers skim into green beads
drip roll 'n line off her creased palm
clear salt diamonds sparkle on her nose
black horns shadows her cheeks
turn pink red pulp darts into speech
'n rests between glazed white
in a moment I say
the day caught me full hot open eyes swam blood graphs
cloth grated roughly damp where I set
black hair fur 'n wings rancid rainbows
hummed the half eatin' dead fish silver 'n pink brine
bubbled from the torn off fin
I searched for a stick
poked the bloated bulb one scale broke loose like uh husk
shaped like a fingernail blew away like paper
over my shoulder the sand made the highway crawl
black 'n wavy my car looked important
a fat person moved noisily by with two small children
on either hip disappeared down the beach as decorated genitals
under an umbrella rocks stuck my buttered body
I caught one under my nail 'n flicked it with my thumb
Pena said: "You look like a sugared strawberry."
we better get going before it gets cold 'n it makes us too hot
Pena danced like a wounded stork - held her foot up
screaming: "I have been bitten by something!"
I consoled her - you have been attacked by a coke cap
it's angry teeth prints fading
Pena exclaimed: "That's the raspberries."
uh banana like uh limp star drooped from her free hand
this situation pleased the old man
his face smiled leather laughter
the thermos opened - the inside of the car
tasted like a caramel you walked by
this is cold - this is too - somebody will see if we do something
about it - it's too day
you wanted to - it was your idea - it's damp 'n cold 'n noisy
at night though - cops might arrest us - who cares how we go
together but Jesus?
Pena your legs are pretty as uh crab the way they open
"Are like pincers" said Pena innocently
"Whales never come out of the water do they?" Pena tongued
if that happened it would be uh sticky situation - listen to
the ocean - I can't - all those little ears - ha ha pth pth zzzz
Pena exclaimed: "That's the raspberries!"
what more could you want than to be brought up?
the old fart's heart beat like uh drum
his mouth was dry 'n there was an angry whelk
throbbing from where he'd been poked earlier that day
while posing as a dead fish
one fly had crawled through the nostrils in his intricate
trout replica mask and had somehow got fouled-up in his
intricate air-bulb atomizer breathing device 'n it whistled
'n stank 'n tickled with every breath
one leg had been torn off where the tube went in his mouth
he could feel it hanging from his lip
'n the thought of it almost made him vomit
he was numb from the neck down
and was too exhausted at this point t' dig himself out of the sand
his whole scheme had been foiled
by the fog that gathered on the inside
of the detailed view holes
that even upon close inspection
appeared to be eyes

Marquis (part 1/9)

2010-12-09T13:10:00.000Z

Extraordinary work with puppets from Roland Topor. As it's an anthropomorphic take on de Sade it's not for the faint hearted but if you have more than a passing interest in Topor, Passolini, Jadorowsky etc. I think you'll dig it!

How 7-Up was marketed as 'un cola'.....

2010-12-02T21:34:00.001Z

All you need to KNOW

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

2010-11-17T11:10:00.006Z

Now that it's ok to sit in the gloom and eat it's instructive to turn to the witticisms of this culinary hero. (Thanks to OP for the recommendation)

"A man who was fond of wine was offered some grapes at dessert after dinner. 'Much obliged,' said he, pushing the plate aside, 'I am not accustomed to take my wine in pills.'"

Complete text HERE

Heiner Goebbels

2010-11-08T15:30:00.002Z

(link in the title)

Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (February 6, 1736 – August 19, 1783)

2010-11-08T15:22:00.001Z

A LINK

Katsumi Komagata

2010-11-02T15:20:00.003Z

An excellent Japanese author of kids books who uses paper stock and colour to do the work and make some nifty visual tricks. You can see some more info HERE

Micro Comp for the Soggy Leaves

2010-10-18T20:22:00.006+01:00

1: My Mind Capsized- The Holy Modal Rounders

2: (I Know From) Self Destruction- Mick Farren

3: Do It- Pink Fairies

4: Machines- Lothar And the Hand People

5: Opening song from ‘Crank’- Vivian Stanshall

6: Anmut sparet nicht noch Mühe- Heiner Goebbels & Ensemble Modern

7: Beautiful Stranger- Mike Heron

1. Continuing my interest in the freakout music area is one of the top tracks from this quasi jug band meltdown.

2. An oddity from Vampires Stole My Lunch Money by the music journo. It features Wilko Johnson so I suppose I ended up listening to that after watching the Dr Feelgood movie. Anyway not bad and probably better than many journalistic groups.

4. From an album that is just a bit too wrong and a bit too Mellotron comes this moderately acceptable number.

5. Some of the Viv legacy and to celebrate the long-awaited release of the jaw dropping Men Opening Umbrellas Ahead.

6. I am now utterly obsessed with Goebbels after being introduced to him by CM. This is a great mix of Eisler texts and various musical modes....the whole work is quite astounding and quite moving. Currently investigating his Landschaft mit entfernten Verwandten.

7. Another celebration, this time to mark having read the excellent Electric Eden….though having said that it made me listen to Arnold Bax much more.

link expired

An important message about the arts.....

2010-10-06T07:54:00.001+01:00

Sign the petition HERE

John Cage - Water Walk

2010-10-05T21:13:00.000+01:00

Codex Seraphinianus

2010-09-29T07:36:00.004+01:00

A bonkers (and slightly dated) offering by the Italian artist, architect and industrial designer Luigi Serafini. It's a visual encyclopedia of an unknown world which resembles the Planete Sauvage imagined by Roland Topor on some level.

Get the PDF HERE

John Cooper Clarke - Chickentown

2010-09-25T22:36:00.000+01:00

Derek Boshier

2010-09-05T21:45:00.007+01:00

(top tip from 97p)

James Burke : Connections, Episode 1, "The Trigger Effect", 1 of 5 (CC)

2010-08-22T21:20:00.001+01:00

Recommended by D, this is well worth watching in its entirety.
The Spiel:
Connections was a ten-episode documentary television series created, written and presented by science historian James Burke. The series was produced and directed by Mick Jackson of the BBC Science & Features Department and first aired in 1978 (UK) and 1979 (USA). It took an interdisciplinary approach to the history of science and invention and demonstrated how various discoveries, scientific achievements, and historical world events built off one another in an interconnected way to bring about particular aspects of modern technology. The series was noted for Burke's crisp and enthusiastic presentation (and dry humour), historical reenactments, and intricate working models.

Sinister Ducks and Green Horses

2010-07-26T21:34:00.005+01:00

1. Caledonia: Cromagnon

2. X Rated: Wicked Witch

3. Soap Shop Rock: Amon Düül II

4. Poor People: Alan Price

5. Wailing Sounds: Lord Sutch

6. The Four Horsemen: Aphrodite's Child

7. March of the Sinister Ducks: Sinister Ducks

8. The Chill Of Death: Charles Mingus

9. This Morning: Gila

10. No Deposit-No Return Blues: Sandy Bull

Link Expired

1. Better than Big Country. Actually a mental late sixties band from the US whose album Orgasm, from whence this offering comes, is splendid noise.

2. From 1983 and not so far from the tiny little Prince.

4. From the O Lucky Man! Soundtrack, a bit of blackest humour to match the film.

5. This is from his ‘Heavy Friends’ album, on some level you can see why he failed to get widespread attention for his music (an albums worth of his singing and you feel like you have been in a very large and very loud factory) but I like this song for its earnest love of fairly straight forward British r’n’b. Jimmy Page is providing the squelchy wailing sounds in question. Again Sutch is audibly excited to be sharing a studio with the musicians.

6. Yes it is Vangelis in previous prog incarnation and yes this is the kind of ‘psych’ fare that normally makes me want to stop listening to music but somehow this is acceptable, it must be the chorus which is utterly ludicrous….I shan’t spoil it until you listen to it.

7. After watching the terminally awful V For Vendetta on television by mistake I remembered Alan Moore had dabbled in music. This is with a minor Bauhaus connection amongst other things and proves that there is more to the Gandalf of comic books than nonsense politics. (apparently he has branched out into comic book porn…..never mind)

8. This is to jazz what Thriller is to pop, portentous voice being similarly fine. This comes from his album Let My Children Hear Music. Mingus is supposed to have professed on his deathbed that this was his favourite album and indeed it is a quasi-orchestral masterwork….on the other hand people probably say some pretty demented things on their deathbeds.

9. Whimsical Krautrock offering. I like it. If you feel nauseated I apologise.

10. Sandy Bull again. John Fahey on ketamine basically.

David Ohle 1

2010-07-26T08:12:00.000+01:00

David Ohle 2

2010-07-26T08:11:00.000+01:00

Amon Düül II - Between The Eyes , Beatclub Germany 1970 live

2010-07-14T16:02:00.000+01:00

Die Soldaten

2010-07-12T20:30:00.004+01:00

Scale models of Lyon opera's production of Die Soldaten from the eighties. Die Soldaten is an incredible thing, myriad musical approaches and effects. It really is the opera of the second part of the 20th century!

About the composer HERE

Some of the music available at the Avant Garde Project HERE

it.......

2010-07-09T00:00:00.007+01:00

As part of its devotion to the bejewelled chaos of our lives, International Times presents an annotated and illustrated trawl through all printed issues of the paper from 1966 – 1986.

All main articles and contents are listed. Eventually we will make available many articles and specific issues in searchable and scanned digital formats.

The archive contains full background detail and chronology of the title:

related information of major events; sister publications; attendant publicity, events and ephemera; full personnel notes; legal battles; personal ads; listings excerpts......HERE

And more exhaustive archive scans HERE

Clayton Bailey

2010-06-30T20:35:00.005+01:00

The top image is 'Robot Group' while the other is the excellently titled 'Kissing Pots'.
I really like his rubber/latex works but these aren't really represented so much on his website. His ceramic and robot work is however which is excellent. I have an old copy of Art&Artists with some of the former which I'll try and put up online soon.
His site is HERE

Cat Kindergarten

2010-06-07T08:30:00.002+01:00

Galina Ustvolskaya

2010-06-03T21:37:00.003+01:00

I am excited by this discovery. It's via Shostakovich which conforms to the theme of her being overlooked in favour of her more famous mentor but her compositions are extraordinary! They are a bit hard to find but you can get a thing called, rather limply, 'Misterioso' on ECM which has a couple of her things played really well amongst other composers. On another note I reluctantly reaped the rewards of the closing of one of my favourite record stores, buying Shostakovich The Golden Age, Bartok's Bluebeards Castle with Gergiev and John Cage Music for Violin and Piano.

You can read more about Galina Ustvolskaya (and listen to the slightly odd 'radio' programmes about her!) at her website HERE

Corvo within a Corvo

2010-06-02T09:38:00.005+01:00

Just back form Hay Festival where I picked up a copy of New Quests for Corvo which is a collection of essays about the biography of partially the same name. Appropriately obscure I think you'll agree. The table of contents is pleasingly antiquated and just a bit dry!:

The clerk without a benefice: a study of Rolfe's conversion and vocation, by C. Woolf and B. Sewell.

Rolfe and Benson: a friendship's downfall, by B. Fothergill.

The last years: some memories of Rolfe in Venice, recalled by Mrs. Ivy van Someren, in an interview, by V. Hall.

The anatomy of Corvinism, by B. W. Korn. Rolfe's bestiary, by D. Lodge.

Some notes on the making of Hubert's Arthur, by I. Robertson.

The Benson-Rolfe manuscript, by G. Sims. A Corvo collection, by D. Weeks.

The man who was buried alive, by V. G. White. Don Renato, by A. Zaina.

A request for Rolfe, by S. Houédard.

New York Loft Sessions

2010-05-21T14:45:00.002+01:00

Got this LP's but at last a legitimate download of all of them for cheap (half as much as iTunes)HERE .........Heartily recommended

Talk at Hay Festival

2010-04-27T07:40:00.003+01:00

In May I'll be involved in a talk at Hay which will 'use Northrop Frye’s model of seasons/genre to explore some issues in contemporary British art'. It'll be chaired by Tom Morton and Lisa Le Feuvre.

DETAILS HERE

Schreibtisch

2010-04-20T13:38:00.006+01:00

1. Ground Control To Pilot: Robert Calvert
2. Ain't Nobody Straight In L.A.: The Miracles
3. The Taster: Wild Man Fischer
4. The Things That Concern You: Fifty Foot Hose
5. Cat and the Rat:Oliver
6. A.B.C.D. Gol'Fish: Anthony Moore
7. No Sex: Alex Chilton
8. Cheese And Onions: The Rutles
9. Misery Farm: Leslie Sarony
10. Cortigiana Dal Velo: Onna
11. This is the Age of Investigation Poetry and Every Citizen Must Investigate-Ed Sanders
12 Tiger Roach: Frank Zappa (with Captain Beefheart)
13. Iêéaóôu: Walter Smetak

GET IT

1. From the bizarre concept album, Captain Lockheed and the Star Fighters, (about the Starfighter jet plane) complete with comic book pseudo German accents and some Viv Stanshall. This is one of the interdoodles with Viv and seems to list some of the drugs that kept Calvert vaguely hanging together!

2. From City of Angels Soul these are the Miracles of Smokey fame just without Smokey. They deemed it sensible to include this slightly wonky tribute to their own tolerance. They shoot themselves in the foot a bit with the claim that a gay club is the best place to pick up girls.

3. From An Evening With Wild Man Fischer, produced by Frank Zappa in the early seventies. Wild Man may well have been exploited as he was a genuine nutcase but the album is still good car crash listening. Apparently he fell out with Zappa as a result of throwing a jar at his daughter…

4. From an album called Cauldron……hmmm. It’s bonkers and has some vague connection to Peel.

5. This sounds a bit like Bevis Frond combined with Ween’s first record……in a good way.

6. A recommendation from DF this is from Pieces From The Cloudland Ballroom. Apparently a boutique US label is doing something with this guy. Quite good Eno wants to be Kraut stylings.

7. I’m not really sure about this guy ever but this makes an amusing eighties riposte to The Miracles track, his (presumably put on) paranoia is jaw dropping. It’s from a record called Feudalist Tarts-No Sex.

8. The send up is great and actually the Rutles doing psychedelic Beatles is essentially Oasis’ career…

9. From the comp Songs the Bonzos Taught us this demented offering is the yang to Jollity Farm’s ying. The singing concept gets increasingly worrying.

10. Japanese noise merchant and cartoonist connected to lots of bands you’d want to be caught listening to.

11. The mighty Ed with a call to arms.

12. Beefheart does pop. Actually this album of extra bits is mighty fine and some good Mothers ‘workouts’.

13. A nutcase connected to Tropicalia in Brazil, his own works are made on homemade instruments and various other wonky devices.

2010-04-10T10:52:00.001+01:00

Old prints of Chamonix and Mont Blanc

2010-04-05T09:43:00.001+01:00

Resurrection

2010-03-24T15:40:00.006Z

1. Sleeping In A Jar:Frank Zappa & The Mothers
2. You're No Good :The Harvey Averne Dozen
3. VU Radio Spot: The Velvet Underground
4. Let Go: John Fahey
5. Shenai Instrumental: Bismillah Khan And Party
6. I Don't Play Piano: Money Mark

1. From the fabulous Uncle Meat. I've had a bit of a session going back over Zappa's output after the classic Freak Out, Absolutely Free and We're Only In It For The Money. Turns out some of the studio sweepings of the Mothers still stand up as pretty worthy albums and actually tend more toward his avant-garde sensibilities so check out Uncle Meat, Burnt Weenie Sandwich and Weasels Ripped My Flesh for that reason.
2.Reliably informed by DF that this is what Terry Riley's Poppy Nogood is based on, it's pretty good anyway so top tip there.
3. Tip from NM. I think I posted a whole load of radio spots some time back but don't recall one quite like this, good selling of the rock and roll 'lifestyle'!
4. From Fahey's most 'pop' album. I won't hear a word against it even if it is a bit twee.
5. If you're needing a break for Harry Smith's Anthology then Victrola Radio Favourites is a good start, being in effect a kind of 'world music' equivalent.
6. Unfashionable but it made me smile when I was having some Sunday morning hungover random plays.

Link Expired

Yes please!

2010-03-12T21:34:00.003Z

http://www.upne.com/0-8195-6830-9.html

Dear Mr Stockhausen.....

2010-02-23T23:28:00.001Z

Radio interview in Lyon

2010-02-16T10:35:00.004Z

A fun extra to The Nose show. This is a four way radio interview which I enjoyed, but which slightly humiliated me in terms of language as everyone accomodated me by speaking excellent english! The photo shows the the folk at the Salle de Bains and me after an extreme install.

Hear the piece HERE

and Mari Tepper was pretty good too!

2010-02-13T20:27:00.002Z

Lee Conklin

2010-02-13T20:25:00.003Z

One one my favourite poster artists has a ramshackle website here.

Art & Artists

2010-02-12T23:20:00.003Z

Finally started to scan my archive of Art and Artists magazines covering 1966 to 1979. Some fascinating stuff. I'm planning on scanning every cover and then a best bit from each mag. It's a long process but I hope to post a Pdf of the whole thing when it's done! ( a good way of looking back at some unfashionable concepts too..)

Drawing for Zero Deux

2010-02-11T11:52:00.002Z

Dr Syntax endpapers

2010-02-10T22:38:00.003Z

Images from The Nose

2010-02-05T10:58:00.003Z

Upcoming show.....The Nose

2010-01-20T09:55:00.001Z

The Rutles - Yellow Submarine Sandwich

2010-01-15T10:24:00.001Z

Ant Farm buried a car but here's a bus....

2010-01-07T16:54:00.001Z

David Ohe's new novellas now available!

2009-12-16T22:07:00.003Z

HERE
The author of a book I keep returning to, Motorman, is repsonsible for this micro compendium of two novellas. Look interesting and the small press angle is similarly appealing....

The Messiah mauled

2009-12-14T20:58:00.003Z

An amateur organist loses the plot.....the choir, to their credit, attempt to carry it through. Sounds like Handel meets Messiaen.

Listen HERE

Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Herland

2009-12-11T21:23:00.004Z

A charity shop find by the author of The Yellow Wallpaper. It's a utopian novel about a world with no men written in 1920
Electronic text HERE

And reason to read The Yellow Wallpaper:

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper" (1913)
This article originally appeared in the October 1913 issue of The Forerunner.

Many and many a reader has asked that. When the story first came out, in the New England Magazine about 1891, a Boston physician made protest in The Transcript. Such a story ought not to be written, he said; it was enough to drive anyone mad to read it. Another physician, in Kansas I think, wrote to say that it was the best description of incipient insanity he had ever seen, and--begging my pardon--had I been there?

Now the story of the story is this:

For many years I suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia--and beyond. During about the third year of this trouble I went, in devout faith and some faint stir of hope, to a noted specialist in nervous diseases, the best known in the country. This wise man put me to bed and applied the rest cure, to which a still-good physique responded so promptly that he concluded there was nothing much the matter with me, and sent me home with solemn advice to "live as domestic a life as far as possible," to "have but two hours' intellectual life a day," and "never to touch pen, brush, or pencil again" as long as I lived. This was in 1887. I went home and obeyed those directions for some three months, and came so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that I could see over. Then, using the remnants of intelligence that remained, and helped by a wise friend, I cast the noted specialist's advice to the winds and went to work again--work, the normal life of every human being; work, in which is joy and growth and service, without which one is a pauper and a parasite--ultimately recovering some measure of power. Being naturally moved to rejoicing by this narrow escape, I wrote The Yellow Wallpaper, with its embellishments and additions, to carry out the ideal (I never had hallucinations or objections to my mural decorations) and sent a copy to the physician who so nearly drove me mad. He never acknowledged it.The little book is valued by alienists and as a good specimen of one kind of literature. It has, to my knowledge, saved one woman from a similar fate--so terrifying her family that they let her out into normal activity and she recovered. But the best result is this. Many years later I was told that the great specialist had admitted to friends of his that he had altered his treatment of neurasthenia since reading The Yellow Wallpaper.It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.

Portrait of the artist as a set designer

2009-12-11T21:16:00.000Z

Jonathan Jones
The Guardian
Friday 14th June 2002

In 1915, Wagner's dream of a 'total' work of art came true when Jean Cocteau asked Picasso to work on the ballet Parade. Since then, writes Jonathan Jones, few artists have turned their hands to music theatre with such success

In January 1882 the impressionist painter Auguste Renoir arrived in Palermo in Sicily searching for Richard Wagner. His account of stalking the genius, whom he found at the Hotel des Palmes putting the finishing touches to Parsifal, reads like a combination of Joseph Conrad and Henry James. Finally he was granted an audience with the composer and persuaded him to sit for his portrait. During the session Wagner kept up a stream of anti-semitic banter. But Renoir left happy, having met and painted the man who more than anyone else in 19th-century Europe seemed to have pointed the way to a new art.

No creative artist has had such an electrifying impact on his contemporaries as Wagner. "What an artist! A man like him in painting would be quite something, and one will come," wrote Vincent van Gogh in 1888. Wagner obsessed artists because he had conceived of an art that denied the consumerist status of art, which Renoir captured in his 1874 painting La Loge, of a couple in a box. Wagner evoked an art that enveloped its spectators, dissolving boundaries between creator and public, involving every art form - music, literature, architecture, painting - fused in a Gesamtkunstwerk , a total work of art.

Nothing ever happens like it does in dreams. In the 20th century, Wagner's dream of Gesamtkunstwerk came true, but in forms that he would have considered revolting. In the end, all it led to is the idea of visual artists designing opera and ballet.

Jean Cocteau was enough of a Wagnerian to film Tristan und Isolde during the second world war as a means of keeping in with France's German occupiers, but that was a long way off when the young poet introduced himself to Pablo Picasso in 1915. The idea that he just had to tell Picasso about was for a modernist Gesamt-kunstwerk, a collaborative ballet to which Erik Satie and Picasso would contribute music and designs.

Cocteau called his music event Parade. It was to evoke the chaotic life of modern Paris in a cacophonous performance by street artists including a Chinese conjurer, an acrobat and " une petite fille américaine ". The idea was to synthesise the avant-garde cubist vision of modernity with the high forms of opera and ballet that still dominated French bourgeois taste.

Getting a visual artist, as opposed to a professional stage designer, to conceive the sets and costumes of an opera or ballet was not new. In late 19th-century Europe, it was the Russians who took up Wagner's baton. In the 1880s the railway millionaire Savva Mamontov established his own private opera, putting composers including Rimsky-Korsakov and Mussorgsky together with artists such as Mikhail Vrubel and Victor Vasnetsov. In 1883 Mamontov's opera company performed Rimsky-Korsakov's The Snow Maiden in Moscow with exotic sets by Vasnetsov. Music theatre became the forcing ground of Russian modernism, with designs in all styles. The imperial theatres followed the fashion and, when Serge Diaghilev was sacked from his job in the imperial theatre administration, he brought the Ballets Russes to Europe and the US.

But none of this prepared anyone for Parade. Cocteau and Diaghilev conceived of Parade as part of a fashionable form, the high-concept, high-design music spectacle, but with a twist, making the controversial new art of Picasso acceptable to polite tastes. Cleverly, Cocteau caught Picasso just at the moment when he was moving from the "realist" concerns of analytic cubism - portraits and still lifes - into fantasy. The painting closest to the monstrous figures he designed is Harlequin (1915), a frightening phallic automaton.

Cocteau lost control of Parade very quickly. Without Cocteau's knowledge, Picasso elaborated his ideas to Satie. "Parade is turning into something even better, behind Cocteau's back!" wrote Satie to a friend in wicked delight. "Picasso's ideas I find even better than those of our Jean: what a shame!"

Picasso proved a natural at this, not just contributing designs but thinking about the spectacle as a whole. But this was the opposite of the languorous, ambiguous Wagnerian aesthetic. It replaced spiritual exploration with a brassy, clipped, glamorous spectacle - a spiky circus.

The music lasts 15 minutes. It is presentational music, taking music performance back to the masque. What a parade it was. Picasso created new characters to rule over Cocteau's acrobats: the American and French Managers. They survive today only as curiously touching black and white photographs, but they must have been fearsome on stage: 3m-tall cubist costumes worn by two dancers. This design was not a backdrop: it was the event. The dance itself became an animated cubist vision, with the dancers controlled by these sinister figures: the American with skyscrapers sprouting from his back, the French manager with a scary pipe.

Picasso's painted curtain for Parade survives, depicting a theatre without script, rules or logic. A girl dances atop a winged horse while Harlequin and friends sit in the wings of a classical theatre. Apollinaire hailed Parade - along with his own drama The Breasts of Tiresias - as "a kind of sur-realism".

If Cocteau thought he was about to make Picasso legit, he was wrong. Parade's first night in May 1915 was riotous and hateful: Cocteau believed that if it hadn't been for the wounded soldier Apollinaire supporting them, the creators would have had their eyes gouged out. "Go back to Berlin! Shirkers! Draft dodgers! Foreign scum!" shouted the audience. It was a total success.

Modern art had a date with opera and ballet because music theatre, further removed from the everyday than literary theatre, is a theatre of dreams, of the unconscious: the darkened auditorium tense with excitement as the orchestra begins, the sweep of the colossal curtain, the secret goings-on in boxes that Renoir captured in La Loge. Picasso carried on working with the Ballets Russes, creating a string of spectacles including a comedy of Andalusian life, Le Tricorne, which premiered at the Alhambra Theatre in London in 1919.

Picasso's engagement with opera was double-edged. On the one hand, Parade was a subversive, surrealist dream theatre that refused to become a relaxing evening out. On the other hand it was about snobbery, the chance for artists to swank it up at the opera (while in London, Picasso stayed at the Savoy).

Since the second world war, as modernism has become a tradition, the idea of the artist- designer has caught on. The interrelationship of visual art and music has taken many forms, from the painter con ceiving an opera or ballet - Howard Hodgkin, an exhibition of whose work in this field can be seen at the Aldeburgh festival, and David Hockney, who reworked Parade - to the contemporary rethinking of the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk. Peter Sellars' productions incorporating video monitors are totalising and yet fragmentary, exposing the impossibility of a unified culture.

Hodgkin and Hockney, while creating vivid enough tableaux, are not likely to have anyone calling them traitors or reds. A painted opera has become just one more move in the opera game. Significantly, by far the best opera design by either Hodgkin or Hockney - far more successful than their decorative essays in modernism - was Hockney's Rake's Progress.

Picasso's friend Stravinsky was to become a consummate postmodernist, creating in his 1951 opera The Rake's Progress a pastiche of 18th-century opera, based on Hogarth's prints and elaborating on Mozart's Don Giovanni. Hockney's brilliant designs for the piece are a perfect analogue for this music. Elaborated from Hogarth's cross-hatching technique, which makes them at once elegant and oppres sive, Hockney's sets are the perfect staging for Stravinsky's neo-Mozartian opera. In their delightful confinement, they are also an image of what opera has become.

The art form that seemed to van Gogh to be the vanguard of a utopian synthesis of the arts has become a pleasurable, sensual pastiche of itself. We're closer to La Loge than the first night of Parade.

Hiding Man

2009-12-09T18:49:00.001Z

Very good, if slightly dry biog has been making me increasingly intrigued by Donald senior. Here's a pic of the family home in Texas amongst other things.....
"The senior Barthelme created important modern buildings in Texas, including the family home on the outskirts of Houston, and spent his life preaching and teaching about the need for a new and uncompromising modern style. (“Be prepared for failure,” he told his son once he had seriously embarked on his career as a writer.) Donald Jr., born in 1931, remembered moving when he was 8 to the house his father had built: it was, he said, “wonderful to live in but strange to see on the Texas prairie. On Sundays people used to park their cars out on the street and stare. . . . We used to get up from Sunday dinner, if enough cars had parked, and run out in front of the house in a sort of chorus line, doing high kicks.”The early chapters of Tracy Daugherty’s admiring, comprehensive and painstaking biography of Donald Barthelme, “Hiding Man,” emphasize the challenging education he received in taste and theory from his father and then the brilliant education he gave himself in Houston when he was in his 20s".

Mount Analogue

2009-11-03T11:41:00.003Z

Alpinism is the art of climbing mountains by confronting the greatest dangers with the greatest prudence. Art is used here to mean the accomplishment of knowledge in action. You cannot always stay on the summits. You have to come down again... So what’s the point? Only this: what is above knows what is below, what is below does not know what is above. While climbing, take note of all the difficulties along your path. During the descent, you will no longer see them, but you will know that they are there if you have observed carefully. There is an art to finding your way in the lower regions by the memory of what you have seen when you were higher up. When you can no longer see, you can at least still know. . .

Electromagnetic Steamboat

2009-11-02T20:16:00.002Z

Sometime iTunes throws up a great bargain. The first one of these was `Beauty Is A Rare Thing' which is all Ornette's work for Atlantic. The second is a real treat, 'Electromagnetic Steamboat'. This is a collection of the Fugs records for Reprise Records including my all time favourite It Crawled Into My Hand, Honest'. So if you're feeling honest that's 65 tracks for £7.99.

Bretzel Picks

2009-10-28T22:57:00.005Z

Track list:
1. The Object Lesson-Michael Mantler
2. 1, 2 ,3, Partyy!-Mission Of Burma
3. Seven Deadly Finns-Brian Eno
4. And About Love-Noah Howard
5. 7 And 7 Is-Love
6. Crazy-Neu!
7. Black White Yellow And Green-Shirley Collins
8. Shine On-The House of Love
9. The Man That Waters The Workers' Beer-Paddy Ryan
10. La Cite Des Hommes Libres-Alain Goraguer
11. Lightbulb Boogie-Bassholes
Link Expired

Notes:
1. Edward Gorey poems interpreted by Robert Wyatt (voice), Terje Rypdal (guitar)
Carla Bley (piano, clavinet, synthesizer), Steve Swallow (bass) and Jack DeJohnette (drums) in 1975. A fine, fine record. Friends who want this I have the whole album if you want it.
2. I liked their first incarnation and don’t mind their recent things either.
3. An early solo Eno single. If you love those post Roxy works this’ll cut it for you.
4. The glorious Noah Howard in the zone. The whole album called ‘Quartet’ is fabulous and a little less spaced out than some of the lesser works.
5. Say no more.
6. One of the few acceptable tracks from the ill-fated Neu 4.
7. My hero(ine)! This is from a great album of outtakes and live performances that is well worth picking up.
8. Shameless nostalgia of the floppy fringed variety.
9. A good lefty work from the recent and excellently presented Topic Records anthology.
10. The soundtrack to the Planete Sauvage…great movie with Topor artwork that you may or may not know. This track reflects the soundtrack in general..slightly zonked out Gainsbourg era orchestration with rock band.
11. A bit of surf fun.

Advanced Sportswear

2009-10-26T19:30:00.003Z

Treat yourself to a fine album in a plastic bag! But seriously, if the mp3 samples that you can hear HERE are anything to go by it'll be a great record. Same musicians as Skill 7 but sounds like they've taken the ideas somewhere even better. 'G for Genius' is the one that's sticking in my mind at the moment......

Yoshitaro Isaka

2009-10-19T15:03:00.002+01:00

CAPC Bordeaux

2009-10-11T21:03:00.003+01:00

The blog of the show I have some works in right now in Bordeaux. It's part of a quasi biennial which is called Evento, an impressive manifestation of arts funding the like of which you never see in the UK.... The CAPC itself doesn't have a proper website which is weird for such a big public gallery. You can get a vague idea of the concept from this though. Images of the work will be on the website soon.

http://insiders-evento09.blogspot.com/

Richard Brautigan is bringing me joy

2009-10-07T12:16:00.001+01:00

Jonathan Meades on football in Scotland...brilliant

2009-10-02T22:53:00.002+01:00

"a bespoke cast of gladiatorial yob-gods, wag-roasting Croesus kids, who once a week descend from their Parnassian blingsteads to run around for 90 golden minutes of bravura vanity"

Michal Ajvaz

2009-09-13T19:28:00.001+01:00

"And at the zenith above Bersabea circles a heavenly body which deflects back all the affluence of the city and instead contains the hoard of things that have been cast out: it is a planet of quivering potato skins, broken umbrellas, discarded socks, sparkling shards of glass, lost buttons, candy wrappers, used tram tickets, fingernail clippings, kernels of corn, and egg shells.”

Michal Ajvaz………………Czech novelist, poet and translator

Born to the family of Russian exile, Ajvaz studied Czech studies and aesthetics at Charles University in Prague. Currently he works as a researcher at Prague's Center for Theoretical Studies and, in addition to fiction, has published an essay on Derrida and a book-length meditation on Borges. His novel Prázdné ulice was awarded the Jaroslav Seifert Prize for literary achievement (2005), the most prestigious literary award in the Czech Republic.

List of works:
1989 – Vražda v hotelu Intercontinental
1991 - Návrat starého varana (Return of the Old Komodo Dragon)
1993 – Druhé město (The Other City)
1994 - Znak a bytí
1997 - Tyrkysový orel (Turquoise Eagle)
1997 - Tajemství knihy
2001 – Zlatý věk (Golden Age)
2003 - Světelný prales
2003 - Sny pragmatik
2004 – Prázdné ulice (Empty Streets)
2006 – Padesát pět měst
2007 – L´autre ile (French translation)

DALKEY ARCHIVE PRESS ARTICLE
ENGLISH EDITION OF THE OTHER CITY

Somebody To Love/White Rabbit Jefferson Airplane

2009-09-11T18:37:00.001+01:00

New David Ohle novellas coming soon!

2009-08-22T21:49:00.002+01:00

Have a look HERE

Basil Wolverton

2009-08-22T10:43:00.001+01:00

2009-08-17T12:55:00.003+01:00

It's wrong to like this Sunday institution for the hungover and the old but this pean to the Antiques Roadshow amuses me....

GET IT

On a Stupendous Leg of Granite

2009-08-15T11:25:00.005+01:00

On a Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below.

In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows.
"I am great Ozymandias," saith the stone,
"The King of kings: this mighty city shows
The wonders of my hand." The city's gone!
Naught but the leg remaining to disclose
The sight of that forgotten Babylon.
We wonder, and some hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when through the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the wolf in chase,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What wonderful, but unrecorded, race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

Horace Smith (1817)

Soggy Summer Pt.1

2009-08-10T21:40:00.004+01:00

1. The Lady Is A Tramp- Stephane Grappelli and Stuff Smith
2. Peba & Pobó- Tribo
3. I Want To Be Free- M.A. Numminen
4. Days of the Underground-Hawkwind
5. Mosquito Dance- Béla Bartók
6. Il Pleut- Brigitte Fontaine
7. Os Alquimistas Estão Chegando os Alquimistas- Jorge Ben

DOWNLOAD

Notes:
1: From the 1957 album ‘Violins No End’. It a bit demented and Stuff Smith is always pretty abrasive but I do think it’s unique and worth a listen. That’s Oscar Peterson in the background by the way, keeping his baroque stylings to a minimum as an accompanist.
2. From a Brazilian EP called ‘Posicoes’ from 1971. Soul Jazz had a kind of post Tropicalia effort recently which is great; this on the other hand is fairly throwaway but has some strangely discordant elements nonetheless.
3. Recommendation from NM. An album by a barking mad Finn called ‘In English’. Notable for the way the song begins to collapse lyrically almost by the third line. Very knowing but it works.
4. From their Quark, Strangeness and Charm album which is one of the New Wavey ones….I have been enjoying their Hawklords guise immensely though I’m sure purists would be dismayed. Incidentally the Hawklords ’25 Years On’ now has a live companion release which looks curious and interesting. It seems to have inspired some boffins to discuss and dispute various tour dates on Amazon which is good comedy.
5. From an Emi album “44 Duos/Three Violin Duets/Sonata for Two Violins, Op. 56’, Shostakovich, Bartók and Prokofiev played by Itzhak Perlman and Pinchas Zukerman. Most people who have been to the west coast of Scotland can relate to a mosquito melody as they neck a few cans of Tennents sitting in the door of their tent of an evening.
6. From a new compilation album distressingly called ‘Dirty French Psychedelics’. Never mind, the music is good (some unfortunate ‘funky’ aspects but a low percentage mercifully) and lyrics are predominantly mental. This track is a good Fontaine effort though she has been involved in weirder avant jazz offerings. Worth looking on Wiki and chasing a few of these up.
7. From ‘A Tábua de Esmeralda’. This track has a great chorus of ‘the alchemists are coming’. Of course having no language skill in this department I may find this funnier/weirder than it really is. The whole album is top notch and worth finding somewhere on a Brazilian music blog.

NB: Image taken while driving to the shops in Glasgow today.

Everybody Needs These Records!

2009-08-02T11:36:00.003+01:00

Get Fred Lane & Ron Pate's Debonairs-From the One That Cut You, & Fred Lane & the Hittite Hot-Shots- Car Radio Jerome HERE

And the wiki for the uninitiated:

Reverend Fred Lane is the stage name of Tuscaloosa, AL, vocalist/songwriter/visual artist T.R. Reed (Tim Reed) who released two relatively obscure yet critically-appreciated albums in the 1980s on the Shimmy Disc label.

Lane was involved in the conceptual music scene at the University fo Alabama in the mid-seventies. He was a member of the Raudelunas Marching Vegetable Band collective, influenced by the pataphysical theories of Alfred Jarry.

His stage persona displayed a devilish grin, goggle glasses, a well-oiled goatee, and various band-aids applied to his cheeks and scalp.

He released two albums in the early 1980s. From the One That Cut You, credited to Fred Lane & Ron Pate's Debonairs, was inspired by a somewhat illiterate threat note found in a 1952 Dodge truck. Ron Pate's Debonairs was a big band that included noted Alabama-based free improvisers Davey Williams and LaDonna Smith, both performing under aliases. ("Ron 'Pate," also a fictional name, refers to the word "'Pataphysics," which was coined by playwright Alfred Jarry.) Car Radio Jerome, credited to Fred Lane & the Hittite Hot-Shots, navigated his band through various hard-boiled fedora film noir scenarios, and was especially noted for the memorable parody of a children's nursery song, "The French Toast Man". Lane also appears on an album entitled Raudelunas 'Pataphysical Revue, credited to "Ron 'Pate's Debonairs featuring Rev Fred Lane" and released on the tiny Say Day Bew label in 1977. Written up in a 1998 article in the Wire magazine entitled "100 Records that Set the World on Fire," it was still awaiting reissue on CD as of 2001.

Tim Reed left the music business in the late 1980s to devote his career to mobile sculptures.

EASY SNEEZING AT THE CENTURY: DAN FOX

2009-07-27T21:49:00.002+01:00

Junior Aspirin is a great label. Well worth checking out the other (non free) releases.
On a personal note I want to bring everyone's attention to this fine album by Dan Fox. Fairly unclassifiable which is always encouraging.....

Get a free download HERE and have a look round the site while you're at it.

Carl Otto Czeschka

2009-07-20T21:34:00.001+01:00

Quatuor Ebène - Ravel, Debussy, Fauré -- String Quartets

2009-07-14T21:16:00.001+01:00

The Flying Man - George Dunning

2009-07-09T09:21:00.001+01:00

Les Halles

2009-07-08T21:23:00.005+01:00

Having just spoken about Don't Touch The White Woman! by Marco Ferreri with NM it got me thinking about Les Halles, the film was set in 'Le Trou des Halles' the enormous hole made by the excavation of the former market for its bizarre replacement. The main market was moved to Rungis...apparently demented and worth going to if you can get up early enough. The images are of the forum, the hole, the original market and the film...

The Age of Wonder

2009-07-04T11:13:00.006+01:00

Been reading The Age of Wonder which is good popular science/bio with lots about the Herschel's and their pioneering astronomy, Davy, Banks etc. It also makes you realise how little people had figured out two hundred years ago....lots of animal magnetism, the four elements etc.

The Herschel Museum (Here) is worth going to to find out about the strange relationship of brother and sister act Caroline and William Herschel. For me that's the most interesting aspect of the book too as they seem to have been relatively clear headed about the world (apart from repeatedly stating that the moon was definitely inhabited by aliens).

Frank Zappa, King Kong, BBC 1968

2009-06-19T09:35:00.001+01:00

Fugs - Crystal Liason

2009-06-19T09:09:00.001+01:00

May Picks

2009-05-28T13:57:00.001+01:00

1. Fresh as a Sweet Sunday Morning-Bert Jansch
2. PSI Power-Hawklords
3. Canadee-I-O-Nic Jones
4. Alma Ville-Vince Guaraldi Trio
5. Lady Nothing-Bert Jansch
6. Fatman’s Son-The Softboys
7. I’m Thinking of a Friend-Leadbelly

Notes:
1. From Bert’s slightly ‘lost’ period. Comes from the LA Turnaround album. It features some fiddle and bass etc. and is produced by an ex Monkee…..you see the potential problem. Nevertheless is somehow rather beguiling.
2. For Hawklords read Hawkwind as I’m sure you’re aware. Great record even though the New Wavey singing is a bit demented. PSI power is an excellent ramble which sings us through some geometric shapes amongst other things.
3. Nic Jones made a great record sadly called Penguin Eggs. That it was about whaling in the era of Moby Dick was probably lost on his potential fans. Good geeeeetarr if you’re into that kind of thing.
4. The genius Vince Guaraldi of Snoopy music fame. This is from an album of Brazilian music for a movie. I picked the most Charlie Brownish track with his trademark turnarounds intact.
5. Another from the same Bert record.
6. The Softboys. Either you like him (Robyn Hitchcock) or you think he’s twee. I go and off the idea of this band but I like the curious shifts in this track alongside the usual lyrical mess.
7. From the amazing Smithsonian ‘Last Sessions’ collection. Here his long-suffering wife receives some unwelcome singing tips from the original felon.

GET IT

Barbara Wright

2009-05-08T20:09:00.003+01:00

Here is someone you may have inadvertently read....What an excellent life she lead!

Barbara Wright, who has died at the age of 93, was one of the most brilliant, conscientious and original translators of 20th-century French literature. The greater the difficulties and structural originalities, the more pains she took to make her version as accurate as possible and as idiomatic as the original. She worked tirelessly with those authors who would give her their time and developed a special relationship with them all.

This applied especially to Raymond Queneau, Robert Pinget and Nathalie Sarraute, but she also made performable translations of modern French plays, including in 1996, after his death, the long suppressed Eleuthéria by Samuel Beckett, which was offered in Paris at the same time as Waiting for Godot but withdrawn by the author for personal reasons. Unauthorised versions were published posthumously in America, before Faber commissioned Barbara to take it on, although it remains unperformed.

Born in Worthing, Sussex, Barbara trained to be a pianist at the Royal College of Music in London, then in Paris under Alfred Cortot, and at first embarked on a career as accompanist. However, she turned instead to translation; her agent, the legendary Peggy Ramsay, often criticised her for choosing to translate the more intellectual authors in preference to the commercially successful.

But Barbara picked what interested her and had an acute critical eye for quality and originality. This talent could sometimes jolt publishers when, asked for her opinion about a piece, she pointed out weaknesses in the manuscript. During the 1950s she wrote some inventive art criticism and later translated artists' texts, for the critic and curator David Sylvester among others. She was a regular reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement.

She won the Scott Moncrieff prize for best French translation several times - twice in her own right (1987, 1992), but anonymously on two other occasions for rewriting the inadequate translation of others. Her work was honoured by institutions in France from the Collège de 'Pataphysique to l'Association des Traducteurs Littéraires. In 2002 she was appointed Commandeur dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Personally, she was always modest, but professionally she always got her way.

Her first translations were for her friends Stefan and Franciszka Themerson, published by their Gaberbocchus Press. Barbara was a founding director of the company in 1948 and later secretary of the Gaberbocchus common room, a meeting place for artists and scientists, from 1957 to 1959. For the Themersons she started with first English translations of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi (1951) and of two short stories by Queneau (1954). She later met Queneau - a friend of James Joyce and a writer who could be compared with him in the variety and originality of his work - and he proposed that she translate his linguistic games, Exercices de Style, which she did in 1958. This is the banal story of a minor incident on a bus, told in 99 different ways. The author encouraged her invention of new English equivalents for those chapters that were too embedded in idiomatic or phonetic French to be transcribed. A working relationship was established and she went on to translate many of Queneau's works.

Thereafter, the French authors she tackled ranged from Dadaists such as Tristan Tzara to bestsellers such as Marguerite Duras, intellectuals such as Alain Robbe-Grillet and, of course, many of the leading playwrights of the postwar generation. But her greatest delight was in working day by day with French writers who were also friends, such as Pinget and Sarraute. They trusted her absolutely, and what emerged was less a translation than a re-creation in many styles that opened to the reader like music or poetry.

Barbara was unassuming but erudite in her knowledge of often neglected writers, whom she re-read frequently, and she was always willing to consider a new commission. For years she lived and worked alone in Hampstead, north London, but in her last years she moved to Chiswick, south-west London. She donated her archive to the Lilly Library, Indiana. Other papers are in the Themerson Archive in London.

Barbara married Walter Hubbard in 1938 but they separated in 1957. She is survived by her daughter, Nicola, and stepson, Jake.

• Barbara Winifred Wright, translator, born 13 October 1915; died 3 March 2009

The Ballet Russes

2009-05-04T15:30:00.002+01:00

Was very tickled by this description from G2 today:
In May 1909, Paris was buzzing with stories about a company of young Russian dancers who had just hit town. There was Ida Rubinstein, parading around with a panther on a lead and drinking champagne out of lilies; there was Anna Pavlova, whose delicate dancing was already legendary; and, finally, there was Vaslav Nijinsky, who became known as the God of the Dance for the miraculous height of his jumps.
Here's a caricature of Ida from the time.

Hans Krása & Pavel Haas quartets

2009-05-04T15:19:00.003+01:00

Hans Krása quartet & Pavel Haas quartets 2 and 3 performed by the Hawthorne String Quartet.
(From the currently out of print Entartete Musik series)

Hans Krása
Krása, primary influences were Mahler, Schoenberg and Zemlinsky. He felt an affinity with French music, especially the group of composers known as Les Six and made a number of trips to France to study under Roussel whilst he lived in Berlin. Krása eventually returned, homesick, to Prague to resume his old job as a répétiteur at the Neuen Deutschen Theater.

Krása's debut as a composer came with his Four Orchestral Songs op. 1, based on the Galgenlieder (Gallows Songs) of Christian Morgenstern. The work was first performed under Zemlinsky's direction in Prague in May 1921 and was widely acclaimed. There followed a string quartet, a set of five songs for voice and piano and his Symphonie für kleines Orchester, which was performed in Zurich, Paris and Boston. His major achievement, however, was the opera Verlobung im Traum (Betrothal in a Dream) after the novel Uncle's Dream by Dostoyevsky. This work was first performed at the Neues Deutscher Theater in Prague in 1933 under Georg Szell and was awarded the Czechoslovak State Prize.

Brundibár, a children's opera based on a play by Aristophanes, was the last work Krása completed before he was arrested by the Nazis on August 10, 1942. Krása was sent to the Theresienstadt ghetto where he reworked Brundibár for the available forces, which was then performed 55 times in the camp and also features in the infamous propaganda film made for the Red Cross in 1944. While he was interned in the ghetto, Krása was at his most productive, producing a number of chamber works, although due to the circumstances, some of these have not survived.

Pavel Haas
A (who also perished in the Holocaust) belonged to Leoš Janáček´s compositional school. In his compositions he used also the elements of the folk music and jazz. Although his output isn't very volumnious, he is notable particularly for his song cycles and string quartets.

He composed his String Quartet No. 2, Op. 7, titled "From the Monkey Mountains" (Czech: "Z opičích hor"), in 1925, three years after he finished his studies of composition at the Leoš Janáček´s masterclass. The title of the quartet is somewhat provocative in the Czech language, the "Monkey Mountains" used to be a nickname of the Vysočina Region (Moravian Highlands), a popular touristic area in that time. The composition was premièred in Brno on 16 March, 1926, by Moravian Quartet.

The composition consists of four movements:

1. Landscape (Krajina) - Andante
2. Coach, Coachman and Horse (Kočár, kočí a kůň) - Andante
3. The Moon and I... (Měsíc a já...) - Largo e misterioso
4. Wild Night (Divá noc) - Vivace e con fuoco

GET IT HERE

Very odd musings on Kippenberger

2009-04-27T11:43:00.005+01:00

Germaine Greer:
A literary lunch having been cancelled, I had a free afternoon in New York. My publishers presented me with a corporate ticket good for one visit to the Museum of Modern Art. I rode the escalator to the next-to-topmost floor and there it was, Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective. For years, I have been avoiding Kippenberger. I skipped the retrospective at Tate Modern in 2006. Shockmeister? Schlockmeister, rather, I thought, averting my eyes as if he were a man exposing himself, as of course he was. The way critics wrote about him repelled me. They made it sound as if his art was just a sideshow. I was not about to applaud his bad behaviour, his uproariousness, his exhibitionism, his self-destructiveness, so I looked away. I'm older and braver now. I walked into the Moma retrospective as if I had a gun to my back, and let Kippenberger hit me right between the eyes.

No male artist, not even Rembrandt, ever made so many self-portraits. Everywhere I looked, there was Kippenberger's heavy Teutonic mask, gazing sightlessly from stony eyes. Kippenberger did what many women artists do - undressed, dressed up, role-played - but, even as he did so, he placed himself within the painting tradition. The end result is not a performance but an image. For art to be anti-art, it first has to establish what art is, and Kippenberger's notion of artness is fundamentally conservative. There is hardly a celebrated artist to whom his work does not refer, in an oblique, unsettling way, as if to smash accumulated charisma, as if art were useless, as if art were shit, as Freud thought it was. Critics recognised that he was poking fun, but not that it was the same kind of fun as kids get from throwing lumps of concrete off motorway bridges. By portraying himself as Picasso with sagging man-breasts and a paunch bulging from outsize underpants, Kippenberger is telling us that art has got us nowhere. Critics who downgraded his anguish to mere irreverence must have driven him to more and more desperate shifts. And all the while he was drinking himself to death.

What was coming at me like a runaway train was anger, white-hot rage and despair. The artist was bound to mow me down because I am a woman. Kippenberger's work, though frantically sexual, is a woman-free zone. The sex objects are all male, and even so, all craven, all venal, all expendable. Kippenberger struggles like a man transfixed with horror at his own sexuality, returning to it again and again, like a dog to its vomit. The crowning irony of the whole show was that so many of the people gazing reverently at it that day in New York were well-dressed, well-educated women of a certain age. The exhibition, which has raised the status of Kippenberger like no other before it, was curated by two women, Ann Goldstein and Ann Temkin. Kippenberger had four sisters, his principal gallerist was a woman, and his only child was a daughter. Not one of them made an impact on his art. Here was the Frida Kahlo of maleness, pushing that maleness in my face, insistent, relentless, implacable. The full gamut of sexual references was there, all the projections, all the holes, and all male.

From New York, I travelled up to Harvard. The curator of a show of works by Kate Millett at the Pierre Menard Gallery was anxious to have me see it. I dutifully ran through the rain to see a smattering of minor works called Oppression and Pleasure. Once again, I was taken aback, but not by savagery, intensity or nihilism. This was Frauenkunst with a vengeance, footling and self-indulgent. In 1977, Millett exhibited the same print series at the Levitan Gallery in New York, and called it The Lesbian Body. The images might have been shocking or surprising then, but I doubt it.

They were mostly variations on the theme of Courbet's L'Origine du Monde, but where Courbet's paintbrush quivers with desire and awe, this was mawkish sentimentality in the lithotomy position, buttocks spread apart, vagina displayed. The vagina was represented by loaded brush squiggles like fake oriental calligraphy. There was also a diptych of a close-up photograph of the same view, another portrait of woman as perineum. Recent work was represented by a plaster head, vaguely recognisable as Millett when young, with a glossy black wig, set on a black chair and given the title Domestic Violence. A screen print in two shades of pink, pale Barbie and darker Barbie, showed two pairs of exactly similar breast outlines facing each other. I groaned aloud.

When Kippenberger's mother was killed in a road accident, he inherited enough money to live on. Millett has had to make a living by writing books, selling Christmas trees, and running farmstays. But there is a more significant contrast, which cannot be expressed in terms of talent. Kippenberger was always on the job, always generating his febrile male display, and he was surrounded by people helping him do it, most of them women. There is more to this sexual politics business than we as yet understand. Just wishing that women were empowered, or pretending that they are, will not make it so.

NYC Public Library Archive

2009-04-22T09:40:00.003+01:00

A remarkable resource for strange images. The crematorium feature above was highlighted by Journey Round My Skull. You can access the library archive here: NYPL

JG Ballard

2009-04-21T06:49:00.002+01:00

From the Guardian yesterday:

He kept the literary world at arm's length, and refused a CBE in 2003, pouring scorn on the honours system as a "Ruritanian charade that helps to prop up our top-heavy monarchy".