Behold the spam

spam.jpg

Via Vintage Ad Browser.

Thanks to the very efficient WordPress spam filter readers here seldom see any spam comments but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any hitting the site. This blog receives an average of around 1,200 a day, sometimes more on those occasions when some algorithm out in the Deep Web turns its Sauron-gaze this way. The programs that post these things occasionally misfire (or are simply badly written) so you find things in the spam list that weren’t meant to be seen in the wild. Dangerous Minds spotted an example earlier this week, and I found another today, mine being a list of garbled “inspirational” quotes that must have been translated to a foreign language then translated back to English. Spam comments are a pain but since they’re auto-generated they’re often funny or simply strange for the ways they mangle the language. A few choice examples follow. There was a lot more of this!

This stupid guy imagine using thin thoughts and consult with wide mouth.
—Charlie Face

Commonsense isn’t really all of that popular.
—Voltaire

Resist much. Follow tiny.
—Walt Whitman

Should you communicate comprehend, get just one feet inside stirrup.
—Turkish proverb

When great modifications take place ever, as soon as good guidelines are involved, usually the majority is inappropriate.
—Eugene Sixth v. Debs

That which can be wrecked from the real truth ought to be.
—P. Chemical. Hodgell

When Christ ended up the following, there is something however definitely not always be: any Roscoe.
—Mark Twain

In no way characteristic for you to malice that which can be properly discussed by simply silliness.
—Hanlon’s electric shaver

Wizard might have it is restrictions, although stupidity isn’t therefore equipment.
—Elbert Hubbard

I just wanted to offer an instant brain upwards!
Various other subsequently that will, great blog!
Great get in line. We will be backlinks to
the wonderful content about your website. Continue
the great composing.
Method great, some good things! My partner and i value an individual thus, making this write-up accessible, all of those other website is additionally excellent. Have a very exciting.
This website is definitely alternatively useful since I’m presently producing the internet flowery web site –
Thethoughts a person exhibit are actually great. Expect you will suitable more threads.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Word games

Le Tarot de Philippe Lemaire

lemaire1.jpg

Philippe Lemaire is French, and another engraving collage artist who I’d have to include in the list of post-Ernst practitioners if I ever get round to updating my Strange Attractor essay about Wilfried Sätty. Like Ernst and Sätty, Lemaire seems to use paper-and-scissors techniques, although Sätty also made use of print processes in order to duplicate the images he cut from old books, and also resize, flip or invert them. In this he’s the bridge between the original method of engraving collage and digital techniques.

lemaire2.jpg

The examples here are from a small series of Tarot images on the artist’s website, none of which are labelled so we’re left to guess the identity of what I presume are figures from the Major Arcana. The one above may be The Empress but the other two resist easy interpretation. Judge the others for yourself here.

lemaire3.jpg

Previously on { feuilleton }
Tarotism and Fergus Hall
Giger’s Tarot
The Occult Explosion
Wilfried Sätty album covers
Nature Boy: Jesper Ryom and Wilfried Sätty
Wilfried Sätty: Artist of the occult
Illustrating Poe #4: Wilfried Sätty
The Major Arcana by Jak Flash
The art of Pamela Colman Smith, 1878–1951
The Major Arcana

Street Fair, 1959

sf1.jpg

The street is upper Grant Avenue, San Francisco, seven minutes of local colour captured on silent 16mm film by Edward Silverstone Taylor:

This edited Ektachrome home movie with professional titles documents a 1959 street fair, upper Grant Avenue, San Francisco—the center of Beat culture. The film includes shots of filmmaker Dion Vigne and his wife Loreon, artist and occultist Marjorie Cameron, and artist Wallace Berman, displaying and selling their art works.

The presence of Marjorie Cameron (below) is what fascinates in these quarters, recognisable thanks to her red hair and the distinctive profile seen when she played the Scarlet Woman in Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome five years earlier. You also see what appear to be a couple of her paintings. The street fair looks pretty bohemian for the late 50s but a glance at Anthony Stern’s frenetic San Francisco short from a decade later shows a much wilder place. (Via Dangerous Minds.)

sf2.jpg

Previously on { feuilleton }
San Francisco by Anthony Stern
Kenneth Anger on DVD again

Sebastiane by Derek Jarman

sebastiane.jpg

Sebastiane Opens
October 1976: Sebastiane opened at the Gate cinema in Notting Hill last night after a day of record attendances and good reviews. At the opening Barney James, who plays the centurion, sat next to my parents. At the end of the film he turned to Dad and said, “I don’t suppose forces life was ever like that.” To my surprise Dad replied, “I was out in the Middle East before the war and it’s really quite accurate.”

After its opening at the Gate, where it played for four months before moving into the West End, Sebastiane opened all over the world to wildly different reviews. The Germans found our Latin untuned to their ears, and the French, at least so I was told, panned it. In the States it was classed S for Sex and we were unable to advertise it – so the audiences turned up expecting hardcore and were disappointed. However in Italy and Spain it was a stunning success with lyrical reviews. In Rome, Alberto Moravia came to the first press show and praised the film in the foyer saying that it was a film that Pier Paolo would have loved.

Derek Jarman, Dancing Ledge (1991)

Pasolini would indeed have loved Sebastiane (1976) which owes much to the Italian director’s historical films, especially Oedipus Rex (1967) and Medea (1969). The film was Jarman’s first feature (co-directed with Paul Humfress), produced on a very small budget, and filmed on the coast of Sardinia. Brian Eno provided the music, and Lindsay Kemp has a memorable cameo appearance in the opening scene. The events which lead to the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian (Sebastianus) are dramatised from the point of view of a group of Roman soldiers who have Sebastianus among their company. The film is notable for its all-Latin dialogue, and for being the first non-porn film to feature a male erection, although that detail is often missing from prints which judiciously crop the lower portion of the screen.

The copy linked here has somehow turned up at the Internet Archive, and is the same erection-free version which has circulated for some years on DVD. The sneaky censorship would have been justified ten or more years ago but makes no sense today when far more explicit films are easily available. But if you haven’t seen Sebastiane then you have an opportunity for as long as this copy remains available…which may not be for long since I’m sure its copyright can’t have lapsed.

The late, unlamented and very reactionary British film critic Leslie Halliwell once complained that Pasolini’s “Trilogy of Life” films featured “a forest of male genitalia”. The same might be said of Sebastiane which, judging by the intemperate comments one sees on review sites, provokes a similar splenetic reaction. “It’s just gay porn!” they shriek, to which the obvious response is “No, it isn’t”, and “So what if it was?” A century of cinema has paraded the bodies of women for the gaze of the heterosexual male, the same male who chokes on his dudgeon when faced with the very thing he carries between his legs. Grow up, boys. Also at the Internet Archive (for the time being) is Derek Jarman’s The Garden (1990), the most personal of his later films until his final feature, Blue, in 1993.

Previously on { feuilleton }
A Journey to Avebury by Derek Jarman
Derek Jarman’s music videos
Derek Jarman’s Neutron
Mister Jarman, Mister Moore and Doctor Dee
The Tempest illustrated
In the Shadow of the Sun by Derek Jarman
Derek Jarman at the Serpentine
The Angelic Conversation
The life and work of Derek Jarman

Weekend links 156

leonard.jpg

Le Vampire (c. 1903) by Agathon Léonard. Via Beautiful Century.

• Two masters of rumbling atmospherics interviewed at The Quietus: Bobby Krlic aka The Haxan Cloak talks to Maya Kalev while Thomas Köner talks to Joseph Burnett.

Discussions about the arts now have an awkward, paralyzed quality: few judgments about the independent excellences of works are offered, but everyone wants to know who sat on the jury that gave out the award. It’s become natural to imagine that networks of power are responsible for the success or failure of works of art, rather than any creative power of the artist herself.

We’ve reached the point at which the CEO of Amazon, a giant corporation, in his attempt to integrate bookselling and book production, has perfectly adapted the language of a critique of the cultural sphere that views any claim to “expertise” as a mere mask of prejudice, class, and cultural privilege.

Too Much Sociology, an essay by The Editors at n+1

• Prints of Karl Blossfeldt‘s plant portraits can be seen at the Whitechapel Gallery, London.

Stephen J. Gertz on Samuel Roth, “The Most Notorious Publisher In American History”.

• Max Beerbohm is Cranky: Mary Mann on the appeal of the curmudgeon.

• Travel brochure graphics: Graphic design from the 1920s to the 1970s.

• Still returning to its constituent components: Chernobyl’s ghost town.

Thoughtless Grin: a new Arthur Mixtape

Richard Williams: the master animator

Ketch Vampire (1976) by Devon Irons | A Vampire Dances (Symmetry) (1988) by Jon Hassell with Farafina | Vampires (1999) by Pet Shop Boys