JahSonic's Blog

December 2003's Wire Magazine has an extensive article on Arthur Russell by David Toop, the writer ever to interview Arthur Russell and one of the first to point out his exceptional qualities. The original plan was to release this CD on this compilation on Nuphonic, but Soul Jazz records picked up the project after Nuphonic went defunct. There is another release by Arthur Russell on Audika records. [http://www.audikarecords.com/]

More on Audika:

Steve Knutson, formerly of Tommy Boy and currently of Audika, has been kind enough to put in a word with Soul Jazz about our compilation, New York City Body Music, Volume One, which we hope to have out somewhere, before too long. Audika will be reissuing Arthur Russell's World of Echo next year, possibly with DVD element. How fucking gangsta is that?

He/Audika will also be releasing Calling Out Of Context, a "complete album of previously unreleased rhythmic/song material" by Russell. Double boner! --Sasha Frere-Jones http://sfj.abstractdynamics.org/archives/000645.html

The prize for record label of 2003 goes to Soul Jazz records.

The interplay between the world of magic and the world of Muggles in the Potter books is identical to how queer historians and sociologists describe the interplay between the closeted gay world and the mainstream world, particularly in the days before the gay-liberation movement. Homosexuals were everywhere, yet heterosexuals usually could not see them. Gay bars looked just like straight bars from the outside. Gay people invented elaborate codes, often in language, dress, and deportment, so they could recognize one another but not be seen as abnormal by the heterosexual — Muggle — world. In his book Gay New York, historian George Chauncey writes of the "invisible map" that exists in all cities that enables queers to find fellow travelers and assembling places: people and places usually invisible to the unknowing heterosexual. This is precisely the situation in the Potter books, where Hogwarts, Diagon Alley (where the magic shops are), 12 Grimmauld Place (the meeting place of Order of the Phoenix), Azkaban Fortress, and even magical buses and trains that run out of major terminals exist in the middle of large cosmopolitan cities and yet remain invisible to Muggles who simply cannot see them. --http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/news_features/other_stories/documents/02977459.htm>

The Whip Angels and Linda's Strange Vacation, now joined together in a single volume, are long-lost forbidden classics of explicit literary erotica. First published clandestinely in 1950s/60s Paris, and now republished and relocated amongst the most erotic, imaginative and exceptional examples of the genre. The Whip Angels is attributed to Diane Bataille (wife of Georges, author of The Story of the Eye).

Between 1979 and 1989, BLOCK initiated and responded to key debates in visual and cultural studies, publishing writings by artists, art and design historians and cultural theorists. The journal's editors and contributors furthered the critical tradition in art history, responded to the work of contemporary artists, and brought the concerns of new cultural and critical theory to the study of art and design history. The BLOCK Reader in Visual Culture collects previously unavailable classic writings by leading cultural theorists and artists first published in this seminal journal, providing an invaluable resource for the teaching and study of art and design as well as theory and cultural studies. Contributors include Jon Bird, Barry Curtis, Philippa Goodall, Frank Hannah, Dick Hebdige, Lucy Lippard, Kathy Myers, Fred Orton, Claire Pajaczkowska, Griselda Pollock, Tim Putnam, Lisa Tickner, and Judith Williamson. --amazon.com

[B]arney had plenty of stories to tell, and they were all eccentric. People began referring to him as the Wagner of contemporary art because, like Wagner, Barney operated in a mythological language that seemed willfully irrational, and he had a plan for a cycle of works (the five "Cremaster" films) that would take years to complete. The hubris alone seemed Wagnerian. --Miohael Kimmelman, New York Times, 1999

The theme Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author has been weaved into film a number of times: the Lickerish Quartet by Metzger, Pasolini's Teorema. Francois Ozon's Sitcom is said to be based on Teorema.

Bart Plantenga is a widely published author, having written journalism, fiction, and non-fiction. His writings have appeared in Reggae, Rasta Revolution: Jamaican Music from Ska to Dub , and he has contributed to many musical and pop culture journals, including the American Music Research Center Journal. He lives in Amsterdam.

Yodel-Ay-Ee-Oooo is the first book to address the question: How did a centuries-old, Swiss mountain tradition make its way into American country music? Along the way, the reader discovers that yodeling is not just a Swiss thing--everyone from Central African pygmies, Nashville hunks-in-hats, avant-garde tonsil-twisters like Meredith Monk, hiphop stars De La Soul, and pop stars like Jewel have been known to kick back and release a yodeling refrain. Along the way, we encounter a gallery of unique characters, ranging from the legendary, such as country singer Jimmie Rodgers, to the definitely different, including Mary Schneider ("the Australian Queen of Yodeling") who specializes in yodeling Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms, and the Topp Twins, a yodeling lesbian duo who employ the sound in their songs aimed at battling homophobia. The book is both a serious study of the history of yodeling around the world and a fun look at how this unique sound has worked its way into popular culture. Yodel-Ay-Ee-Oooo promises to be a classic for fans of music and popular culture.

JahSonic.com - Sharing Tastes. best wiki i've seen in a while. cultural smörgåsbord. --http://www.blanketfort.com/v2/archives/2003_11.html#001137

I looked up what a wiki is in wikipedia. And it says: The terms wiki is used to identify either a specific type of hypertext document collection or the collaborative software used to create it. --http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki

Jahsonic.com appears to be neither because it is a one-man project and it uses no special software to create it.

Dadaist poet Guillaume Apollinaire fine-tuned his uniquely poetic and surreal vision to produce these two materpieces of the explicit erotic imagination at the turn of the century, works which compare with the best of the Marquis de Sade. In Les Onze Milles Vierges, debauched aristocrat Mony Vibescu and a circle of fellow sybarites blaze a trail of uncontrollable lust, bloody cruelty and depravity across the streets of Europe. Whilst in Les Mémoires d'un Jeune Don Juan, a young man reminisces his sexual awakening at the hands of his aunt, his sister and their friends as he is utterly corrupted in a season of carnal excess.

Louis Aragon's Le Con d'Irène is the intense story of a man's torment when he becomes fixated upon the genitalia of an imaginary woman and is reduced to voyeuristically scoping her erotic encounters in-between describing various events in brothels and other sexual adventures.

Translated from the original, complete and unexpurgated versions by Alexis Lykiard (translator of Lautréamonts Maldoror), Flesh Unlimited has a general introduction and notes section. --amazon.com

Author Profile: Born Wilhelm Albert Vladimir Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky in Rome, Italy, he was one of the many great artists who worked in the Montmartre district of Paris during an era of great creativity. One of the most popular members of the artistic village at Montparnasse, his friends and collaborators during that period were Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Erik Satie, and Ossip Zadkine. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillaume_Apollinaire

Described by Susan Sontag as one of the few works of the erotic imagination to deserve true literary status, The She Devils remains Pierre Lous' most intense, claustrophobic work; a study of sexual obsession and monomania unsurpassed in its depictions of carnal excess, unbridled lust and limitless perversity.

[T]he Devil Is a Woman, a title forced on von Sternberg, is adapted from Pierre Louys’ 1898 novel Le Femme et le pantin, as was Bunuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire. It’s set during a hallucinatory Spanish carnival during which all rules are suspended and license reigns. Von Sternberg’s most synthetic film, it brims with delirious artifice: in lighting, décor, costume, performance, narrative movement. At times, the dialogue makes sense only if one assumes that Dietrich and her director are speaking directly to each other about their cinematic collaboration. --Kathleen Murphy

The book reads like a gossip column mixed with sleazy tabloid journalism, yet with the wit and humor of a prankster. It's an exploitation of exploited lives. To mimic tabloids further, the pages appear with large and sometimes disturbing photos of stars at their most inopportune moments.

While much of the material has already had its heyday in newspapers of the times, it has a new life today where many of these actors and actresses are virtually unheard of by the general public and rekindled new interest in their films. Just as watching and old O. J. Simpson football game may have the same appeal as watching Lana Turner in her debut "They Won't Forget."

The title to me is entirely fitting, as Hollywood is the "Babylon" of our society, one in which everyone has all their wants at their disposal. A place where hedonism is the religion and tragedy is only the end of a scene, for we know by the end of the movie everything will be all right. My only disappointment in the book is its cursory glance at such stars as Marylyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield and many other stars that became almost a tally only to be put under a heading of how they died. "Hollywood Babylon" still fits the bill, however, as an enticing and racy read of the darker seedy side of that strange and secret society. --mygotta, amazon.com

Sedgwick's literary analysis, while provocative and often startling (you will never read Billy Budd or The Picture of Dorian Gray the same way again), is simply the basis for a larger project of examining and analyzing how the categories of "homosexual" and "heterosexual" continue to shape almost all aspects of contemporary thought. Epistemology of the Closet is a sometimes-dense work, but one filled with wit and empathy. Sedgwick writes with great intelligence and an eye for irony, but always makes clear that her theories and critical acumen are in the service of a politic that seeks to make the world a better and more humane place for everyone. An extraordinary book that reshapes how we think about literature, sexuality, and everyday life. --Michael Bronski

This is no simplistic analysis of how the counterculture "sold out" to big business. Instead, Frank shows how the counterculture and business culture influenced one another. In fact, he writes, the counterculture's critique of mass society mimicked earlier developments in business itself, when a new generation of executives attacked the stultified, hierarchical nature of corporate life. Counterculture and business culture evolved together over time--until the present day, when they have become essentially the same thing. According to Frank, the '60s live on in the near-archetypal dichotomy of "hip" and "square," now part of advertising vernacular, signifying a choice between consumer styles.

After more than a week of entertainment and "passing the time, as they say, very pleasantly," he gets down to business--heading off to call on some landowners. More pleasantries ensue before Chichikov reveals his bizarre plan. He'd like to buy the souls of peasants who have died since the last census. The first landowner looks carefully to see if he's mad, but spots no outward signs. In fact, the scheme is innovative but by no means bonkers. Even though Chichikov will be taxed on the supposed serfs, he will be able to count them as his property and gain the reputation of a gentleman owner. His first victim is happy to give up his souls for free--less tax burden for him. The second, however, knows Chichikov must be up to something, and the third has his servants rough him up. Nonetheless, he prospers.

Dead Souls is a feverish anatomy of Russian society (the book was first published in 1842) and human wiles. Its author tosses off thousands of sublime epigrams--including, "However stupid a fool's words may be, they are sometimes enough to confound an intelligent man," and is equally adept at yearning satire: "Where is he," Gogol interrupts the action, "who, in the native tongue of our Russian soul, could speak to us this all-powerful word: forward? who, knowing all the forces and qualities, and all the depths of our nature, could, by one magic gesture, point the Russian man towards a lofty life?" Flannery O'Connor, another writer of dark genius, declared Gogol "necessary along with the light." Though he was hardly the first to envision property as theft, his blend of comic, fantastic moralism is sui generis.--Kerry Fried, amazon.com

John Higgins is Associate Professor in the department of English at the University of Cape Town. He is the author of Raymond Williams: Literature, Marxism and Cultural Materialism (1999) and Founding Editor of the South African Journal, Pretexts: Literature and Cultural Studies. Contents: Introduction: The Contemporary Raymond Williams. 1. Film and the Dramatic Tradition (1954). 2. Culture is Ordinary (1958). 3. The Masses (1958), excerpt from The Conclusion to Culture and Society. 4. Images of Society (1961), from The Long Revolution. 5. Modern Tragedy (1966), excerpt from the introduction to Modern Tragedy. 6. Bertolt Brecht (1968), from Drama from Ibsen to Brecht. 7. Thomas Hardy and the English Novel, from The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (1970). 8. Being a Writer (1971). 9. Lucien Goldmann and Marxism's Alternative Tradition (1972). 10. Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory (1973). 11. Language (1977), from Marxism and Literature. 12. Ideas of Nature. 13. The Bloomsbury Group (1978/80). 14. The Writer: Commitment and Alignment (1980). 15. Crisis in Literary Studies (1981). 16. Distance (1982). 17. Towards 2000 (1983), from The Conclusion to Towards 2000. 18. Writing, Speech and the Classical (1984). 19. Mining the Meaning (1985). 20. Writing, Speech and the Avant-Garde (1986), from The Politics of Modernism. --D Williams, amazon.com

For Irina Ionesco, photography is a poetic medium. The pictures of female nudes collected here are witness to genuine encounters between women and, because Ionesco's daughter Eve is frequently the subject of her photography, between mother and daughter. Born in Paris, Ionesco spent her childhood years in the port city of Constanta, Romania. Deeply affected by the loss of her mother in childbirth, her photography is also the pursuit of the motif of suffering: the painful experience of the absence not only of her mother's affection, but of the memory of her image. This desire for an encounter with a mother's face is a dual one: Ionesco strives to recreate a sense of both visual recognition and affection in an ethical sense. --http://www.children-in-art.com/eva/en/irina_ionesco.html

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