NB: not for the strait-laced! An experimental Freudian drama by Niki de Saint Phalle and Peter Whitehead. Grotesque, garish, ghastly… with an incredible piano-driven soundtrack that riffs on Cole Porter’s “My Heart Belongs To Daddy”. If you’re needing an antidote to all the commercial, anodyne Father’s Day bull, this should do the trick. 
jerry lewis on the secret of staying young
“If you think childlike, you’ll stay young. If you keep your energy going, and do everything with a little flair, you’re gonna stay young. But most people do things without energy, and they atrophy their mind as well as their body. You have to think young, you have to laugh a lot, and you have to have good feelings for everyone in the world, because if you don’t, it’s going to come inside, your own poison, and it’s over.”
— Jerry Lewis
down by the schoolyard
Paul Simon and a wonderfully spunky child in improvisational counterpoint on the Muppet Show in 1977. Thank you to Genna Gardini for reminding me about this awkward, amazing moment. Read more on the Muppet Wiki.
Simon later would stress the concept of rhythm itself communicating a deeper message, and his earlier writing also demonstrates his dedication to making a deceptively simple rock and roll song embody a unified, total package in which each part must complement the others. “If you take a song that has some rhythm to it…and I don’t get the rhythm right… then the song doesn’t seem real.” With the right rhythm, though, “the listener gives up his defense. You’re willing to entertain a number of ideas, you’re having that good a time.” Rhythm, he said, “is good for lyrics that express emotion. And in allowing emotion to speak, rhythm connects us in anger or in love, to others.” Again, Simon stresses that the artist must communicate, and the songwriter´s communication must appeal to a sense well beyond that of the five recognized senses, a sense of rhythm innately found in songwriter and audience alike.
the highveld (is a shit place to be in winter)
(with apologies to Toast Coetzer)
this week it’s all about clones and drones
obama is checking your email
Go to http://obamaischeckingyouremail.tumblr.com/ (thanks to Anthony Collins for sharing this).
the old spinning wheel
giorgos bandoek apostolakis – the guns of brixton
Greek cover of The Clash.
smashing pumpkins – soma (instrumental mix)
So great sans Billy’s whine for a change…
Produced by Butch Vig and Billy Corgan
Recorded at Triclops Sound Studio, Atlanta, GA, USA
December 1992 – March 1993
Mixed by Alan Moulder, Butch Vig and Billy Corgan
Unreleased until 2011
belly – star (feed the tree version)
Sweet, sweet, sweet wind
Burn off this skin
Get it to reach
Sachuest beach
I can never win
With this body I live in
Belly’s Star has been one of my favourite albums since the early 1990s. This is a version of the title track that appeared as a B-side on the “Feed the Tree” single. The version on the album is slower and sparser, and not online, unless you listen to the entire album HERE, which I highly recommend you do!
light and dark
“Keep your face always toward the sunshine and the shadows will fall behind you.”
— Walt Whitman
sugar never tasted so good
The fifth track on the White Stripes’ debut, eponymous album, released in 1999.
popped
She was almost just like creme soda
Bubbly, cool and sweet
But definitely not green
kim kierkegaardashian?
(found on Facebook, uncredited)
a protest jam from istanbul this week
Kardeş Türküler perform “Tencere Tava Havası” (“Sound of Pots and Pans”) in the streets of Istanbul this week. Check out the Kardeş Türküler’s website HERE for background on the group, which came into being in 1993 as a concert project by the Boğaziçi University Folklore Club.
And, here’s an explanation of the penguin footage later in the video from a Youtube comment:
“If people don’t know about it, the penguins mock mainstream media that has very close relations to the government. Main news channels have been nearly totally silent about the protests, not wanting to be hated by the government. One main news channel (CNNTurk) preferred to broadcast a penguin documentary while all of these are happening. Similar attitude from others. After being severely mocked by protesters, an apology and more coverage came.”
Istanbul group Kardeş Türküler recording the video “Pots & Pans” in response to the Taksim/Gezi Park protests this week.
whirling sufi protesters
A whirling Sufi protester wearing a gas mask in a Gezi Protest in Ankara, 2 June 2013
Photograph: Azirlazarus (on Wikipedia)
“You come too!”
bergüzar korel – bu sabah güneş doğmuyor
girls upside down
Marketa Luskačová – “Girls upside down, Blenheim Crescent, London, 1984”, from the series ‘Children in Britain’
Born in Prague. Degree in sociology of culture at Charles University, Prague 1967, thesis on traditional religion in Slovakia accompanied with photographs of pilgrims. 1967 – 1969 studied photography at FAMU, Prague. Since 1968, freelance photographer. Check out more of her work HERE.
i keep my secrets in my hair
Ner-Tamin – “Bells”
More of this Russian artist’s work can be found HERE.
a rose is a rose is a rose
Read more about this book HERE.
colonizing in reverse – louise bennett-coverley
“Wat a joyful news, Miss Mattie
I feel like me heart gwine burs
Jamaica people colonizin
Englan in reverse.
By de hundred, by de tousan
From country and from town,
By de ship-load, by de plane-load
Jamaica is Englan boun.
Dem a pour out a Jamaica
Everybody future plan
Is fe get a big-time job
An settle in de mother lan.
What a islan! What a people!
Man an woman, old an young
Jus a pack dem bag an baggage
An tun history upside dung!
Some people doan like travel
But fe show dem loyalty
Dem all a open up cheap-fare-
To-Englan agency.
An week by week dem shippin off
Dem countryman like fire,
Fe immigrate an populate
De seat a de Empire.
Oonoo see how life is funny,
Oonoo see de tunabout?
Jamaica live fe box bread
Out a English people mout’.
For wen dem ketch a Englan,
An start play dem different role,
Some will settle down to work
An some will settle fe de dole.
Jane say de dole is not too bad
Because dey payin she
Two pounds a week fe seek a job
Dat suit her dignity.
Me say Jane will never fine work
At de rate how she dah look,
For all day she stay pon Aunt Fan couch
An read love-story book.
Wat a devilment a Englan!
Dem face war an brave de worse,
But me wonderin how dem gwine stan
Colonizin in reverse.”
#rediscoveringtheordinary | a photographic exhibition by germaine de larch
My Debut Solo Exhibition #rediscoveringtheordinary – a photographic exhibition by Germaine de Larch @ Studio23, Arts on Main, Sunday 16 June, 3pm. On until the 23rd July. Please come.
“[T]he demand that everything must make a spectacular political statement […] has forced us to gloss over the nooks and crannies [….] By rediscovering the ordinary […] the daily lives of people should be the direct focus of political interest [….] If it is a new society we seek to bring about in South Africa then that newness will be based on a direct concern with the way people actually live.”
Njabulo Ndebele, 2001, South African Literature and Culture: Rediscovery of the Ordinary
“My work is an artistic exploration of making the private public. For me there is no politics outside of the private, nothing extraordinary outside of the carnival of everyday, ordinary life. My artistic vision stems from the need to share the quirky, queer, beautiful and extraordinary that I see in the ordinary. I am in love with the individual, eccentric beauty and extraordinariness that I see in the ordinary around me in my daily life – the very human landscape of the city we live in, the selves that we choose to inhabit and the very organic and dynamic energy at the heart of the way that we engage with our city and our selves. It is this energy, this life-saving and life-celebrating renewal, recreation and renegotiation that is at the heart of my journey and who I am, what I see in this city and its people, and thus the images that I make.”
— Germaine de Larch
Germaine de Larch is a writer, visual artist and gender artivist living, working and playing in Johannesburg.
gramsci on being immersed in life
“Give up to life your every action, every ounce of faith. Throw all your best energies, sincerely and disinterestedly, into life. Immerse yourself, living creatures that you are, in the live, pulsing tide of human existence, until you feel at one with it, until it floods through you, and you feel your individual personality as an atom within a body, a vibrating particle within a whole, a violin-string which receives and echoes all the symphonies of history; of that history which, in this way, you’re helping to create.”
– Antonio Gramsci
evelyn glennie – how to listen with your whole body
In this fascinating TED talk, virtuoso deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie demonstrates how listening to music involves much more than simply letting sound waves hit your eardrums.
According to Wikipedia, Glennie has been profoundly deaf since the age of 12, having started to lose her hearing from the age of 8. This does not inhibit her ability to perform at an international level. She regularly plays barefoot during both live performances and studio recordings in order to feel the music better.
Glennie contends that deafness is largely misunderstood by the public. She claims to have taught herself to hear “sound colours” with parts of her body other than her ears. In response to criticism from the media, Glennie published Hearing Essay in 1993, in which she discussed her condition. Read it HERE.
zeena parkins & ikue mori – phantom orchard
Live at Teatro Fondamenta Nuove. Suggestion: play this over the Frida Boccara I just posted.
Zeena Parkins and Ikue Mori
frida boccara – les moulins de mon coeur
My dad was a fan of Frida Boccara and I grew up hearing this wonderful interpretation of Michel Legrand’s most popular composition, “Les Moulins de Mon Coeur”/”The Windmills of Your Mind”.
on sensitivity
“The mind which is most capable of receiving impressions is very often the least capable of drawing conclusions.”
— Virginia Woolf in The Second Common Reader
Adolf Hoffmeister (1902 – 1973) – Collage
not francesca woodman, spinning
Francesca Woodman (1958-1981) – Untitled
pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name
“Just keep still; keep together!”
6 December, 1969: A free live performance by the Rolling Stones at Altamont of “Sympathy for the Devil” with Hells Angels doing security descends into chaos.
Screenshot of the infamous Altamont concert from the film “Gimme Shelter”
spinning with a turkish drop spindle
Bizarrely, there just happens to be a news report about South African security and miners on in the background of this British instructional video, which I came across looking for footage of Sufi mevlevi (dervishes) directly after I posted the piece below (cf. connection of spinning, drilling, finding gold and freedom). I really find it so bizarre how often the messy layers of random stuff I find while looking for other things fit what I want to find more appositely than what I was looking for. What I am talking about goes way beyond confirmation bias… It’s uncanny… and partly what this blog is about is documenting these “curiouser and curiouser” moments that blossom outside of the frame.
Rumpelstiltskin
Illustration: A H Watson
I’ll bet what I am writing is not making much Sense and I should probably try to sleep. It’s 3 a.m. and the aftermath of this waking dream is only going to add up to fog at work tomorrow.
Rumpelstiltskin
Illustration: John Gruelle
fleurmach 