Norman McLaren

Norman Mclaren is often referred to as a Canadian animator and filmmaker. Well, there you are. But the truth is he was born in Stirling, Scotland, the town from which I also hail, in 1914. He attended Glasgow School of Art and didn't move to Canada until 1941 when John Grierson to make films with the NFB. And boy did he make fantastic films in Canada:

Just watched

'Wild Combination', the documentary by Matt Wolf about Arthur Russell.

It is great. It is great. It is wonderful.

Here are a couple of videos from youtube of Arthur Russell playing 'Terrace of Unintelligibility', film by Phil Niblock.

it is not easy to jam a
video camera down the
eyehole of a virtual boy,

but if that was meant to
stop us, nobody told me.

i saw my husband having
an affair with the ghost of
the mistress he had killed
to save his reputation and
our marriage.

i saw my mice eating poison

i saw the transmitting of
thoughts through the air
(not really)

i saw the brothers karamazov

the films of jeff keen

the conspiracy by Paul Nizan

in what we call the 'special section'
of the supermarket,

i saw a pictorial history of horror

Shakespeare Performances in Asia Video Archive

a fascinating and very promising resource.

Lilli Carati and Karlheinz Stockhausen

Betrand Russell

Sartre

Head by Cheryl Donegan

THIS FILM IS RIGHT WHAT I LOVE, SO ABSOLUTELY 100 % WHAT I LOVE AND NEED... COURTESY OF ubu


did not post last week
that's just because i was busy,
driving my Gran to the hospital
to see my uncle chris who was
getting a knee replacement and
got home today and preparing for
an interview for the Teaching
Assistantship...

anyway, here are some of the books
i have been reading, half-reading
and looking at this week...

Martian Dawn by Michael Friedman
Key Bridge by Ken Rumble
Street of Stairs by Ronald Tavel
The Plane Trees by Monique Lange
The New Underground Theatre edited by Robert J Schroeder

Willard Maas

Above, Marie Menken and Willard Maas at home.

If Willard Maas is well-known today, it is as the director of the film below, 'Andy Warhol's Silver Flotations'. It's a film of Warhol's 'Silver Clouds' installation, and I think it's a great short film, surreal, bizarre compelling eery and beautiful. Some people disagree, (one youtube comment reads 'this video is so lame'), but I'm sticking to my opinion.




Otherwise, Maas might be remembered as the 'did he? - didn't he?' off-screen presence in Andy Warhol's 1963 film Blowjob.

Above, DeVeren Bookwalter in Andy Warhol's 'Blowjob'. It is rumoured that Maas was an, erm, administrative assistant on this film.

And finally he might be remembered as the husband of experimental filmmaker Marie Menken, whose 'Glimpses of the Garden' I put up here last week. (That film is on soon at BFI in london I believe, as part of a series of 'Garden' films). Maas and Menken were famous for their bohemian salons in 40s-50s-60s New York.

Maas isn't usually remembered, though, for his poetry. I only have one book, 'Concerning the Young', which came out by Farrar & Rinehart in 1938, and I really like it. Below is the titular poem in its entirety:

CONCENRING THE YOUNG

Boys walk along the sanded river-banks
Dreaming of saxophones, April fugues,
And summer girls of cloud-winged evenings,

The empty street, seeking answers in
The Gothic archways leading to velvet tombs,
The sound of hymns within the gilded pipes.

Beyond spring's tender hills and stone towers,
Words receding into the plane of night,
They have heard the rumor bearing darkness.

The young having died, the old seek atonement,
Lifting their eyes to statues in the parks,
Mounted iron horses, the bronze inscription.

Whether the heroes be of Lexington or the marne,
Dry winds of rhetoric ruffle the thinning beards
With orations at the marble drinking fountain.

(The cold lips torn from the jawbone, the meadow
Smoking with handgrenades in the early flowers,
The waters sleeping with mines beneath the foam.)

They have heard the rumor, remembering
A pathway of warm stars, the deserted docks,
Dormitories, pennants, and painted beds.

Speak of the green hills against the winter sun,
Forged from the heart weapons against defeat:
They have heard the rumor of days ending in blood.

Out of the classrooms past the factory wall,
They stand upon the platform in the square,
Erecting barricades against the night.

The world revolves about the darkling mouths
And guns retreat. They have heard the rumor
While the sky turns to dusk and the least leaves fall.

I don't know, maybe you hate this, find it 'lame', don't think it comes off. But for me, that parenthesized portion about two thirds through is exquisite, a complete entanglement of war and foam and lips and cigarettes. I love the line 'erecting barricades against the night' too, and desperately want to work that into a poem somewhere. Either that or just sing it as a mantra daily.





Gerard Malanga and Maas.

Go here for more info, (and a playlet my Dwight Ripley!) on Menken and Maas.

A selection of Youtubes to do with Andrzej Żuławski

I am sorry they are not better organized.

Amanda Lear - Enigma, Give a bit of mmm to me (78)

The Films of Mårten Nilsson

Mårten Nilsson is a Swedish cinematographer and filmmaker, born in 1962.

Some, limited, information is available here

He is a collaborator with composer Kenneth Cosimo, together they were-?- 'the institute of high speed art'.

His work often uses dance, you can see a short clip from 'What you do' a collaboration with Gunilla Heilborn and Kim Hiorthøy here

I would, though, recommend you buy the 'greatest hits' dvd from here



The above video is from 'The King of Danvikstull', a collaboration with Kenneth Cosimo.

And this one below is, I guess, a film he made for The Göteborg International Film Festival.



Anyway, the dvd is stunning. And more of my responses to it might follow in the next few days.

From the poem 'My Achilles Heart' by Andrei Voznesensky, translated by W H Auden in the book Antiworlds (OUP 1967):

"Riddled with holes, I laugh
At the furious pack: 'Tallyho, Boys!
I am a lattice. Look through me.
Isn't the landscape lovely?'"

Megumi Satsu

Megumi Satsu is a Japanese Singer who lives in Paris. She is fabulous.

She is famous for interpreting Jacques Prévert poems, as well as having songs written for her by the like of Roland Topor (author of The Tenant, which Roman Polanski made into one of my favourite films).

Her personal website is here.

Megumi Satsu - Give back my soul
Uploaded by Arcalod

Megumi Satsu - Clocharde - live au Rex Club
Uploaded by Arcalod

Glimpse of the Garden (1957)

This is a great short film by Marie Menken.

Benjamin Péret, poet.

Benjamin Péret really is an astonishing, surprising, bizarre and remorselessly exciting poet. He lived from 1899 until 1959. I recently ordered the selected poems 'From The Hidden Storehouse', (published by Oberlin, translations by Keith Hollaman), and i opened it this morning to the complete exclusion of doing anything else. I mean any poet who can write the following lines will have a devoted fan in me for ever. They are from a poem called Badly Shaved:

'A chicken paces back and forth in a snuff box
which is a very fitting burial place
for a polishing brush
toothless like the minister of agriculture
and so feeble
you would want to hang it
like a sack of onions from the edge of the roof
to drive away the swallows
that without that would come to nip at our heels
to make us long for the doubledecker bus'


There seems to be a great collection (out of print) by Atlas Press called 'Death to the Pigs'

This link will take you to the 'Friends of Benjamin Péret' site.

In this picture, Peret is far left and Breton second from the left.