You're not my Wonderwall

Another treasure found (and lost) somewhere between the 60s psychedelia and and fashion/drug culture. Starring the starlette of the day, Jane Birkin. film is about music, colours and atmosphere, not about the plot. Just enjoy your eyes.
from Dangerous Minds website

Wonderwall is probably the ultimate “swinging London” film and what a pedigree it has. The film stars the lovely Jane Birkin and featured Anita Pallenberg and Dutch design collective The Fool (who art directed the film and were well-know for their work with the Beatles) in cameo roles. The soundtrack was by George Harrison and featured Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton, some top classical Indian players in Bombay and an uncredited banjo performance by Monkee Peter Tork. There is one song called Ski-Ing that features one of the single most ferocious guitar riffs that Eric Clapton ever laid down and most of his biggest fans have never even heard it. Made in 1968 by first time director Joe Massot (who would later direct the Led Zeppelin concert film The Song Remains the Same and work on the psychedelic western Zachariah with the Firesign Theatre), Wonderwall was released on DVD in an elaborate package by Rhino in 2004 that now goes for top dollar to collectors.

George Harrison's music in it is great. I resist embedding too much of clips - you can easily found it on the net. And imagine those f***in' tarts Gallagher bros, while releasing their mediocre hit Wonderwall, ekhm, tried to channel the Beatles. I'm no a die hard fan of the Fab Four now, as I know tons of the equally (at least) great bands from the 60s, but this should really be prohibited. And George did say "um..no" to Gallaghers.

And I'm looking for some other spectacular films of this era, like, Who are you, Polly Magoo? check this one out.

Un peu des rhythmes diverses

Just a bunch of links, since I have to do some serious work now. While looking for some, excusez le mot, non-european idiom and thank to my friend, DJ and a versatile person at all accounts, Jacek Staniszewski, I come across some rap from RPA from a collective called Die Antwoord. Not only the arfikaner language makes it completely unusual and sorta alien to our own Western idiom. of course, you can syill recognize some common, mutual rhthms and articulations. but as a combination totale it is a new sonic and cultural experience to me. ie it's actually great:

"Die Antwoord is a zef rap-rave crew from Cape Town, South Africa.

Die Antwoord is a lovable, mongrel-like entity made in South Africa, the love-child of many diverse cultures, black, white, coloured and alien, all pumped into one wild and crazy journey down the crooked path to enlightenment.

All DIE ANTWOORD's next-level rap-rave tjoons are downloable FOR FREE off: www.DieAntwoord.com"




http://www.dieantwoord.com/

and here some other treasure from Africa, Duda dj Txiga, actually I don't know anything about them apart from what can be heard & seen on the clips I found on YT. here some more familiar african rhythms, but having in mind of how tremendous significance african rhythms were to the development of western popular music, we may say that they are now familiar, we internalized it, but did we also appropriate it?



and here an example of the appropriation totale, but at least done by one of the most legendary french rappers MC Solaar, appropriating also some Eastern influences. Even though I can't imagine anything more commercialized than this, at the same time Solaar inscribes into a very long tradition of mixing. So Inch'allah, indeed.

Free Roman

and the Genesis P-Orridge text goes:

Are You Free? Are You Really Free?
Is It You? Is It Me? Or Is it Simply History?
Is It You Or Is It Me Or Is It Simply Jealousy?
Sharon lies on a Hollywood beach
Sharon sees all her hopes are in reach...
Sharon knows all the Hollywood names
Sharon plays all the Hollywood games
Sharon walks alone as your wife
Sharon gives her life for a knife
Sharon floating high up above
Sighing, crying, dying for "LOVE"

Oh Oh Roman, Oh Roman, Roman P

Are You Free? Are You Really Free?
As You Hide Away In Gay Paris?
Life of money, life of sex
Life of honey, life of hex... Więcej...
Little girls drinking and eating cupcake
Little girls cause you
your grestest mistake
Flesh of the flesh of insidious flesh
Little girls wearing their Hollywood dress
Corrupter you are, corrupter you be
Corrupter you are, the corrupter you see

Oh Oh Roman, Oh Roman, Roman P

Roman you are, Roman you be, Roman
you are in your history
Roman in your victory
Roman in your destiny

Are You Free? Are You Really Free?
Is It You? Is It Me? Or Is it Simply History?
As You Try To Keep Your Liberty?
Are You Really Free?
Or Are You Simply Roman P......

rage



and sentimentality

Les Valseuses

Memoirs des films continued. I simply love Les Valseuses by Bertrand Blier and this is probably the funniest scene in this film and also maybe in the history of cinema



and this one too



couple of fragments



and for the good beginning of teh week, the defloration of Isabelle Huppert ;-))



I have to finish here, because I can't stop laughing right now.

ENJOY![more on the film later, as I post already TOO much]

Edufactory

Partisan Songspiel. Belgrade Story from dmitry vilensky on Vimeo.

[taken from Chto Delac, Partisan Songspiel, love it!]

Just attended a very inspiring and productive seminar w/ Gerald Raunig, whose book Art &Revolution. Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century, published at semiotext(e) was quite a revelation for me, when I read it when it was published 2 years ago.

Organised as a part of Free University of Warsaw, curated by Kuba Szreder, seminar was conducted by Ewa Majewska, who gave a compelling introduction on some key Deleuzian terms and notions, such as war machines and various meanings of the "body" in Deleuze/Guattari diptych, Anti-OEdipus and Mille Plateaux, then with lots of ideas coined by Raunig himself and then an interesting exchange between the attendants, including Jaroslaw Lubiak and Daniel Muzyczuk. It was an intense afternoon indeed. for now I can send you to the text of Gerald we were discussing, like this one

the themes of productivity/nonproductivity, free time/labour, exploitation and going on strike, resonate in me since some time ago; especially since I can call myself a part of so called "prekariat", as I am a rather low paid freelancer occupied with writing on art, attending meetings, doing a lot of research all the time; and now starting this blog, which is projected as a training ground for variety of ideas I have, which I'm ferociously update'ing. Of course I'm doing it, because I need it, want it, but it's also a pleasant, and as I discovered lately, quite exhaustive, and of course absolutely non paid extra "job".

I had the pleasure of attending Martin Kaltwasser's, very interesting Berlin-based artist dealing with the notions of public space etc., Picnic of Creative Leisure in June in Warsaw, where Martin gave a very interesting open air lecture, which I translated then; and the interview with Kuba Szreder i also translated.

Martin made me even more conscious about the notions I'm unwillingly dealing with every day: the division between work and non work, leisure and labour, that has been completely erased in my life. The recurring question will be, which model I will choose and whether I have any choice at all.

The interview w/ Martin can be found at the 6-Weeks-notebook and Bec Zmiana Foundation website on the right from this post.

and here some e flux Liam Gillick's articles I'm reading at the moment:

here

and here

and a wonderful piece by Nina Power and Alberto Toscano on Badiou and May '68

Toscano and Power - The Philosophy of Restoration - Alain Badiou and the Enemies of May

"Charbovari"

Three films on which I'm going to write short notes these days:

Roman Polanski, who will probably never get rid of this sale histoire until his death, has been arrested today in Switzerland, which collaborates veri nicely with American justice administration. the new category of wtf, indeed.

The Tenant, a film which I saw 1st time in my childhood in TV and was fascinated ever since, found in a whole at some Japanese website

go here

Chabrol's apparently classic adaptation of Madame Bovary, in 15 parts on youtube, with this delightful "Charbovari" scene:



Marat/Sade by Peter Brook, famous adaptation of Peter Weiss play



and Wajda's Danton, one of my fave by this too often humourless director, shoot during the Martial Law in Poland, great cast, music and interesting interpretation:




And I'm still thinking about Eustache. A strange, cameral, even performative movie by Eustache, Une sale histoire, is the one that sort of encapsulates all the anxieties and despair of this director. With a wonderful performance by Michael Lonsdale, who tells the title "dirty story", interpreting a man addicted to pornography and a voyeur, who actually finds himself detesting women. In a arresting monologue he pushes the boundaries of the story over and over

go here

here some lucid quotation from Senses of cinema:

In both these early shorts, relations between the sexes is a matter of resignation and empty distraction rather than connection or genuine feeling-there's no love or tenderness, only groping and conquest. For all Jean Nöel-Picq's storytelling skill and wit and Eustache's exhilarating experimentation, Une Sale Histoire expresses the same conviction. Nöel-Picq clearly gets a kick out of pushing his story to the limits of what is socially acceptable, testing his audience, daring them to be offended. But that's not to say that he doesn't mean what he says. After spending hours and hours at his post before the spy-hole, he observes that "all the hierarchies about the body had been overturned" so that he had come to believe that "the mirror of the soul is the pussy," and this seems to me to be as blunt an expression as possible of the state to which the relations between the sexes, in Eustache's view, have been reduced. The frankness in Une Sale Histoire or The Mother and the Whore is not a sign that Eustache condones this new freedom-he's not enthusiastically pushing the envelope even further but rather wallowing in the human wreckage he sees it as having produced. It's not that sex has been elevated to a spiritual level but that religion, morality, and love have been reduced to the physical plane. Later in Une Sale Histoire, Nöel-Picq complains that he's sick of taking women to movies, talking to them, learning about them-"That's the part I hate most." It's not that "the mirror of the soul is the pussy," but that the pussy is the soul now, as close to it as most men care to get anyway. Eustache seems to believe that sexual liberation has drained male-female relations of any mystery and emotion they might once have had, that sex has become so central that a great emptiness has washed over society.

6-weeks-Notebook

I cordially invite you to read the current issue of 6-Weeks-Notebook, a publication of Bec Zmiana Foundation , with which I cooperate. There you can find my interview with Nasty Brutalist aka Owen Hatherley, "Nothing is Too Good For Ordinary People". Owen is a young & very talented critic of architecture, and the author of one of my favourite blogs, Sit Down Man, You're Bloody Tragedy and others, that may be found on the right from this post, where he writes also on music, politics & culture.

And Foundation's website offers the whole pdf of this issue, unfortunately for the PL language people only, but you may always try the Google translator, at least for some kind of amusement.

go here