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"Method of this work:
literary montage.
I have nothing to say only to show."
(Passagenwerk (1927 - 1940) - Walter Benjamin)


2005, May 11; 13:43 ::: Erotomaniacs

Carlo Mollino: Polaroids [Amazon.com]

Erotomania definition
Excessive sexual desire. --AHD

The term erotomania is sometimes used in a less specific clinical sense meaning excessive pursuit of or preoccupation with love or sex. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erotomania#Contemporary_syndrome [May 2005]

List of erotomaniacs in visual arts, photography, publishing, film, literature and theory: Guillaume Apollinaire - Nobuyoshi Araki - Pedro Almodóvar - Pietro Aretino - Henry Spencer Ashbee - Balthus - Georges Bataille - Charles Baudelaire - Franz von Bayros - Aubrey Beardsley - Hans Bellmer - Jean de Berg - José Bénazéraf - Theresa Berkley - Gilles Berquet - Bernardo Bertolucci - Alfred Binet - Iwan Bloch - Walerian Borowczyk - François Boucher - Guy Bourdin - Tinto Brass - Catherine Breillat - Restif de la Bretonne - Trevor Brown - Luis Buñuel - John Cleland - Gustave Courbet - Guido Crepax - David Cronenberg - Richard von Krafft-Ebing - Havelock Ellis - Rainer Werner Fassbinder - Michel Foucault - Jess Franco - Sigmund Freud - Eduard Fuchs - Théophile Gautier - Jean Genet - Maurice Girodias - Alain Robbe-Grillet - David Hamilton - Frederick Hankey - Yoshifumi Hayashi - Magnus Hirschfeld - Alfred Hitchcock - Michel Houellebecq - Juzo Itami - Elfriede Jelinek - Allen Jones - James Joyce - Patrick J. Kearney - Jack Kahane - Richard Kern - Alfred Charles Kinsey - Irving Klaw - Pierre Klossowski - Eric Kroll - Stanley Kubrick - Choderlos de Laclos - D.H. Lawrence - Tanino Liberatore - Eric Losfeld - Pierre Louÿs - Mirka Lugosi - Martin Van Maële - Dusan Makavejev - Edouard Manet - Milo Manara - Robert Mapplethorpe - Leopold von Sacher-Masoch - Peter Mendes - Russ Meyer - Radley Metzger - Henry Miller - Octave Mirbeau - Carlo Mollino - Bénedict-Auguste Morel - Otto Mühl - Pierre Molinier - Alberto Moravia - Alfred de Musset - Vladimir Nabokov - Andre Robert Andrea de Nerciat - Helmut Newton - Anais Nin - Ovid - François Ozon - Camille Paglia - Pier Paolo Pasolini - Jean-Jacques Pauvert - Max Pécas - Georges Pichard - Roman Polanski - Pauline Réage - Anne Rice - Nicolas Roeg - Jean Rollin - Félicien Rops - Barney Rosset - Ken Russell - Marquis De Sade - Egon Schiele - Romain Slocombe - Bruno Schulz - Hajime Sorayama - Eric Stanton - Sheryl Straight - Erich von Stroheim - Swinburne - Roland Topor - Alexander Trocchi - Clovis Trouille - Lars von Trier - Roger Vadim - Oscar Wilde John Willie

see also: erotica - erotic art - erotic fiction - nymphomaniac - satyr - sexology

inspired by Sheryl Straight via http://www.eroticabibliophile.com/people19.html


2005, May 11; 12:21 ::: Villain

Crispin Glover as the Thin Man in Charlie's Angels (2000)

A villain is a bad person, especially in fiction. Villains are the fictional characters, or perhaps fictionalized characters, in drama and melodrama who do evil deliberately and work against the hero. As such, villains are an almost inevitable plot device, and more than the heroes, the villains are the crucial elements upon which plots turn. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villain [May 2005]

see also: villain


2005, May 11; 12:00 ::: Sharon Tate

Sharon Tate, image unidentified
image sourced here.

The Fearless Vampire Killers, or Pardon Me but Your Teeth Are in My Neck (1967) - Roman Polanski [Amazon.com]

The Fearless Vampire Killers is a 1967 movie directed by Roman Polanski. It has been produced as a musical, named Dance of the Vampires.

Plot
The film takes us into the heart of Transylvania where Professor Abronsius (Jack McGowran) and his apprentice Alfred (Roman Polanski) are on the hunt for vampires. Abronsius is old and withering and barely able to survive the cold drive through the wintry forests. Alfred is bumbling and introverted. The hunters come to a small Eastern European town seemingly at the end of a long search for signs of vampires. The two stay at a local inn, full of angst-ridden townspeople who perform strange rituals to fend off an unseen evil.

Production
Straight from Polanski's international success with Repulsion, it was mounted on a lavish scale - color, huge sets in England, location filming in the Alps, elaborate costumes and choreography suitable for a period epic. Previously accustomed only to extremely low budgets, Polanski chose some of the finest English cinema craft artists to work on the film: cameraman Douglas Slocombe, production designer Wilfrid Shingleton. Polanski engaged noted choreographer Tutte Lemkow, who played the actual Fiddler in Fiddler on the Roof, for the film's climactic Danse Macabre minuet. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fearless_Vampire_Killers [May 2005]

see also: Sharon Tate - Roman Polanski


2005, May 11; 11:17 ::: The Tell-Tale Heart (1843) - Edgar Allan Poe

TRUE!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses—not destroyed—not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily—how calmly I can tell you the whole story.

It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain; but once conceived, it haunted me day and night. Object there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! He had the eye of a vulture—a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees—very gradually—I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever. --Edgar Allan Poe, 1843, via http://wikisource.org/wiki/The_Tell-Tale_Heart [May 2005]

see also: Edgar Allan Poe


2005, May 11; 09:26 ::: Bloody Mama (1970) - Roger Corman

Shelley Winters as Kate "Ma" Barker in
Bloody Mama (1970) - Roger Corman [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

When Kate "Ma" Barker (Shelley Winters) robs a bank with her four beloved sons, she's got a great opening line: "We're gonna play Simon Says, and this," she says, pointing to her Tommy gun, "is Simon." You gotta love the ol' broad's moxie, and you gotta love this Roger Corman classic for serving it up so shamelessly. Capitalizing on the impact of Bonnie and Clyde while adding the more perversely exploitative elements of Corman's drive-in fare, this Depression-era shoot-'em-up is prime viewing for its early appearance by Robert De Niro (making his fifth film) and Corman stalwarts like Don Stroud, but it's Winters's over-the-top portrayal of Ma Barker (very loosely based on fact) that gives the movie its rather unseemly edge. Alternately sharing her bed with each of her sons (as if they were teddy bears made for her incestuous pleasure), and twisting morality to suit the needs of her homicidal brood, this gun-toting matriarch is a deviously amusing detour on Winters's weight-gaining road to The Poseidon Adventure.

The movie gains character from its rural Arkansas locations, but the redneck flavor is entirely theatrical, and while De Niro learns to shine for the camera, his performance as glue-sniffing, dope-shooting Lloyd Barker shows hints of future stardom. Corman gets good work from the entire cast, in fact, even if his formula calls for sex, violence, or vice every 10 minutes. And while it would be a mistake to elevate Bloody Mama above its trashy aspirations, it certainly earns its place among such '70s gangster fodder as Big Bad Mama and Boxcar Bertha. Made at a time when movies were enjoying their liberation from the confines of good taste, Bloody Mama is an enjoyable wallow in bad taste. --Jeff Shannon via Amazon.com

Shelley Winters
Shelley Winters (born August 18, 1920) is an American actress. Born Shirley Schrift in East St. Louis, Illinois, she is known to today's audiences as a large figure of comedians' scathing humor, but when she began her career, she was known as a voluptuous beauty. She is said to have had an affair with Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., father of President John F. Kennedy.

Her first movie was What a Woman! in 1943. By 1959, she had won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for The Diary of Anne Frank and A Patch of Blue in 1965. Notable later roles included The Poseidon Adventure (1972) as the ill-fated Belle Rosen, for which she received her final Oscar. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelley_Winters [May 2005]

Kate 'Ma' Barker
Kate 'Ma' Barker (Birth name Arizona Clark) ( c. 1871 - January 16, 1935) is a legendary American figure from the 1930s public enemy era, when the exploits of gangs of criminals in the Midwest gripped the American people and press. Today her name is usually mentioned last when people cite the criminals of this period, often after Bonnie and Clyde and John Dillinger. The era led to the creation of the modern FBI.

The myth of Ma Barker inspired a 1970 low budget film called Bloody Mama. Directed by Roger Corman and starring Shelley Winters as Ma, the movie depicts Barker as a corrupt mother who encourages and organises her children's criminality and is notable for an early appearance by a young Robert De Niro playing the part of Lloyd Barker.--http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ma_Barker [May 2005]

see also: Roger Corman


2005, May 10; 17:01 ::: Music - Soul Jazz presents: The Sexual Life of the Savages (2005) - Various Artists


Soul Jazz presents: The Sexual Life of the Savages (2005) - Various Artists[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Tracklisting:
1. As Mercenarias – Inimigo 2. As Mercenarias – Panico 3. Akira S Et As Garotas Que Erraram– Sobre As Pernas 4. Akira S Et As Garotas Que Erraram – Eu Dirijo O Carro Bomba 5. Fellini – Rock Europeu 6. Gang 90 – Jack Kerouac 7. Chance – Samba De Morro 8. Patife – Poema Em Linha Reta 9. Patife – Teu Bem 10. Gueto – Borboleta 11. Nau – Madame Oraculo 12. Chance – Striptease De Madame X 13. Smack – For a Daqui 14. Smack – Mediocridade Afinal 15. Fellini – Zum Zum Zazoeira 16. Muzak – Ilha Urbana 17. Cabine C – Tao Perto 18. Harry – You Have Gone Wrong --via Amazon.co.uk


2005, May 10; 11:01 ::: a David Mancuso DJ set

David Mancuso has a link to an MP3 stream of his show on Shibuya FM in Japan!

SHIBUYA FM 784Mhz 1:00:17, 56mb, 128k

DAVID MANCUSO (THE LOFT NYC)
23:00-23:58 (The Last Saturday of every month)
SHIBUYA FM 784MHz
Japan

“It’s Music” Playlist
Reasons to be Cheerful, Pt.3 / Ian Dury & the Blockheads / Stiff records
Mother Africa / NY tribulation / Slaag records
Revitalized / Babara Jackson / Stride Records
Joy / Yuki / King Street Sounds
Shianne / Antonio Ocassio / Tribal Winds
Dragon Balls / Flying Rhythms / Lustrum
So Glad You Could Make It / Archie Bell / CBS

More Information on David Mancuso…

Since 1970, David Mancuso has been the DJ of the legendary New York private party The Loft.

David is the parent and progenitor of much of NYC’s dance scene. In 1975 he, along with Steve D’Aquisto and Vince Aletti, wrote the charter for the first DJ record pool. He has also consistently popularised new music, bringing the Barrabas LP back from Spain and selling it at cost in The Loft as well as playing a major role in getting Eddy Grant’s music over to the hardcore dance audience.

He long abandoned the use of either a mixer or headphones, There is no overlaying or re-mixing of records at The Loft. They simply follow after each other as rhythmically as possible and Mancuso’s editorial input is restricted to the narrative of the song’s sequencing and the fidelity with which they are reproduced by the custom-made Paul Klipsch speaker system, Mark Levinson amplifiers, Mitchell Cotter turntable bases and line amplifier and the Koestu hand-crafted cartridges. --Steven Harvey, 1983, behind the groove article, Collusion magazine

via http://www.audioarsenal.com/05/04/2005/david-mancuso-loft-nyc-radio-stream/

Mancuso, a Sixties seeker, like many of his generation, had been profoundly affected by acid guru Timothy Leary, whose ‘turn on, tune in, drop out’ mantra had been the sound bite of the summer of love. Leary, along with Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert, had written ‘The Psychedelic Experience’, a manual for LSD experimentation, which was based on the ancient text, ‘The Tibetan Book Of The Dead’. This became Mancuso’s ‘bible’. It was the same book that had inspired John Lennon to write the epic Beatles track, ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, which closed the 1966 album ‘Revolver’, heralding the psychedelic era with its instruction to ‘turn off your mind, relax and float downstream’. What was, until then, only known within underground circles, was about to be unleashed on an unsuspecting world in spectacular style, via the spaced-out celebrations of 1967’s ‘Summer Of Love’. --Greg Wilson

see also: David Mancuso - music

opgedragen aan Dominique, die nog eens zin had in lekkere disco, dit is het beste wat ik je kan geven x


2005, May 10; 11:01 ::: Georges Barbier (1882 - 1932)

Illustration by Georges Barbier (1882 - 1932)
image sourced here.

Illustration by Georges Barbier (1882 - 1932)
image sourced here.

Illustration by Georges Barbier (1882 - 1932)
image sourced here.

There is very little information to be had on George Barbier as a person. Writers repeatedly mention his beautiful drawings and designs, but pass over the man himself with breathtaking consistency. (Perhaps when contrasted with his more exotic contemporaries, he seemed rather dull). Whatever the reason for this omission, this leaves us with only a poor understanding of his personality, and a great many drawings. This, perhaps, is the better half of the bargain, since Barbier's work speaks for itself better than anyone could speak for Barbier. Barbier's career did not "take off" until he was thirty, but his drawings were so exceptionally good that his career could never said to have stopped going, even after his death. Barbier's drawings are still so popular that they continue to thrive in reprint form, and also on such varied objects as dishes, notebooks, stationary, and perfume bottles. --http://www.costumes.org/history/100pages/BARBIER.HTM [May 2005]


2005, May 10; 10:01 ::: George Sand (1804 - 1876)

George Sand (1838) - Eugène Delacroix
image sourced here.

Amandine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin, later Baroness Dudevant (July 1, 1804 – June 8, 1876) was a French novelist and early feminist (prior to the invention of the word) who wrote under the pen name of George Sand.

Born in Paris to a father of aristocratic lineage and a "common" mother, Sand was raised for much of her childhood by her grandmother at the family estate, Nohant, in the French region of Berry, a setting later used in many of her novels. In 1822, she married Baron Casimir Dudevant, and they had two children, Maurice (b. 1823) and Solange (b. 1828). In 1835, taking the children with her, she left her husband.

Her first novel, "Rose Et Blanche" (1831) was written in collaboration with Jules Sandeau, from whom she allegedly took her pen-name, Sand.

After parting from her husband Sand made less and less a secret of preferring men's clothes to women's, although she continued to dress as a woman for social occasions. This male "disguise" enabled Sand to circulate more freely about Paris, and gave her increased access to venues that might have been denied to a woman of her social standing. This was an exceptional practice for the 19th century, where social codes—especially in the upper class—were of the highest importance. As a consequence Sand lost a good deal of the privileges attached to being a Baroness. Ironically, it was also a part of the mores of this period that women of higher classes could live physically separated from their husbands without losing face, if they didn't show any blatant irregularity to the outer world.

She was linked romantically with Alfred de Musset (summer 1833 - March 1834), Franz Liszt and Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849) whom she had met in Paris in 1831. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Sand [May 2005]

Gamiani
Gamiani, ou Une Nuit d'Excès, was the first really important work to come from the French presses of the 19th century. It is still one of the most erotically explicit works to come from any French press. Its author is supposed to have been Alfred de Musset, and the eponymous heroine a portrait of his lover, George Sand. --http://www.eroticprints.org/scarlet-gamiani.asp


2005, May 10; 09:42 ::: Achille Devéria (1800-1857)

The Harem - attributed to Achille Devéria (1800-1857)
image sourced here.

- Achille Devéria (1800-1857) is known best for his illustrations of "Gamiani".

See also: Gamiani


2005, May 10; 00:19 ::: The Nouveau Roman and popular culture

As a literary movement, the nouveau roman belongs unambiguously to high culture. Far from aiming at a mass readership, it has always been defiantly elitist, setting out from the start to be "difficult" in the sense that it aims to challenge and disorientate the reader; but also in that it is, as an avant-garde movement, vigorously differentiating itself from traditional literature. This very attack, of course, assumes that the reader has an extensive familiarity with this earlier literature; in other words, the reader knows the conventions of nineteenth-century realism or of the modernist psychological novel of Proust, Joyce, or Virginia Woolf, for instance, and can therefore see how the nouveau roman is distancing itself from them. But it is nevertheless an attack on high culture of an established kind. --Celia Britton via http://elecpress.monash.edu.au/french/1998_1/britton.html [May 2005]

Popular culture
It is, however, undoubtedly Robbe-Grillet who, amo all the nouveaux romanciers, has made most use of popular culture and has integrated it most closely into his own texts. His first novel, Les Gommes, uses the detective story form just as Butor's L'Emploi du temps does, but in a very different way. What for Butor was a significant metaphor for the philosophical possibility of reaching the truth becomes in Robbe-Grillet's hands merely an object of parody. Juxtaposing the common thriller with Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, as the whole narrative structure of Les Gommes does, is a move towards deflating high culture, while simultaneously deflating the popular myth of the superhuman detective. Wallas, the detective/Oedipus figure, is also made to function--but again in a completely different way from that of Butor's figuring of the detective as Oedipus in L'Emploi du temps--as a parody, or at least a banalization, of the Freudian Oedipal hero. This can be seen as the beginning of an idea which Robbe-Grillet develops much more explicitly in his later work: that Freudian notions have become popularized and integrated into the general cultural text of the latter half of the twentieth century and that this process has important effects on both popular culture and on individual notions of selfhood. --Celia Britton via http://elecpress.monash.edu.au/french/1998_1/britton.html [May 2005]

Alain-Robbe Grillet
Or so one would have thought; but in fact Robbe-Grillet's explanations of what he is doing with them and why are rather contradictory. These contradictions become more and more important as the stereotypes in question are increasingly those of sadistic pornography. What is at issue here, in other words, is the way in which sexual fantasy is both codified and gratified in forms of popular culture, and what Robbe-Grillet's position on this really is. The problem arises because he is, on the one hand, often quite open about the fact that the fantasies staged in his texts are his fantasies as well; he claims that he is simply less hypocritical about them than most other writers of high culture. Interviewed in Le Monde, for instance, he says: "Mes fantasmes sado-érotiques, je n'en ai nullement honte, je les mets en scène: la vie fantasmatique est ce que l'être humain doit revendiquer le plus hautement". He also argues that popular culture is more honest and straightforward than high culture in its treatment of sexuality, and claims that he wants to associate himself with that--and by extension, to associate himself with "l'homme dans la rue". --Celia Britton via http://elecpress.monash.edu.au/french/1998_1/britton.html [May 2005]

see also: Alain-Robbe Grillet


2005, May 09; 22:47 ::: Etymology of erotic and erotica

Erotic
1621 (implied in erotical), from Fr. érotique, from Gk. erotikos, from eros (gen. erotos) "sexual love".

Eroticize is from 1914.

Erotomaniac "one driven mad by passionate love" (sometimes also used in the sense of "nymphomaniac") is from 1858.

Erotica
Erotica (1854) is from Gk. neut. pl. of erotikos "amatory," from eros; originally a booksellers' catalogue heading. --Douglas Harper via http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=erotica&searchmode=none [May 2005]


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