Nigel Finch’s 1991 documentary covering many of the stories from Kenneth Anger’s sordid Hollywood gossip book of the same name.
An interesting artifact on early Los Angeles myth, glamour, and tragedy — regardless of relative veracity of the stories.
“Wilde’s affected aestheticism was for him merely an ingenious cloak to hide, while half revealing, what he could not let be seen openly … Here, as almost always, and often even without the artist’s knowing it, it is the secret of the depths of his flesh that prompts, inspires, and decides…
Wilde’s plays reveal, beside the surface witticisms, sparkling like false jewels, many oddly revelatory sentences of great psychological interest. And it is for them that Wilde wrote the whole play––let there be no doubt about it…
Try to let some understand what one has an interest in hiding from all. As for me, I have always preferred frankness. But Wilde made up his mind to make of falsehood a work of art. Nothing is more precious, more tempting, more flattering than to see in the work of art a falsehood and, reciprocally, to look upon falsehood as a work of art… This artistic hypocrisy was imposed on him… by the need of self-protection.
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— André Gide, on Oscar Wilde, from The Journals of André Gide
“On ne découvre pas de terre nouvelle sans consentir à perdre de vue, d’abord et longtemps, tout rivage.”
“One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight, for a very long time, of the shore.“
― André Gide
Between 1968 and 1972, Stewart Brand published The Whole Earth Catalog an American counterculture catalog. It was essentially “a paper-based database offering thousands of hacks, tips, tools, suggestions, and possibilities for optimizing your life.” For Steve Jobs, it was a “Bible” of his generation, a life –transforming publication.
Click on the image above to go to the online version of the The Whole Earth Catalog that is now available online. The collection of that work provided on this site is not complete — and probably never will be — but it is a gift to readers who loved the CATALOG and those who are discovering it for the first time.
The title Whole Earth Catalog came from a previous project of Stewart Brand. In 1966, he initiated a public campaign to have NASA release the then-rumored satellite photo of the sphere of Earth as seen from space, the first image of the “Whole Earth.” He thought the image might be a powerful symbol, evoking a sense of shared destiny and adaptive strategies from people. The Stanford-educated Brand, a biologist with strong artistic and social interests, believed that there was a groundswell of commitment to thoroughly renovating American industrial society along ecologically and socially just lines, whatever they might prove to be.
Steve Jobs, chief executive officer and co-founder of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, urged graduates at Stanford to pursue their dreams and see the opportunities in life’s setbacks — including death itself — at the university’s 114th Commencement on June 12, 2005.
Jobs explained why he drew inspiration from this intellectual creation of the 60s counterculture:
“When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960′s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.”
You can watch the video below
Aubrey Beardsley was born on 21 August, 1872, in Brighton, England. The family, of middle and upper middle class origins, was often nearly destitute. He attended Bristol Grammar School for four years as a boarder, indulging in his talents by drawing caricatures of his teachers.
In February of 1893, Wilde’s scandalous play Salome was published in its original French version. An illustration inspired by the drama was admired by Wilde and Beardsley was commissioned to Illustrate the English edition (1894).
Not content with art alone, Beardsley expressed an intense desire to translate the French text after Wilde found the translation by his intimate, Lord Alfred Douglas, to be unsatisfactory. This assignment was the beginning of celebrity but also of an uneasy, and at times unpleasant, friendship with Wilde, which officially ended when Wilde was tried and convicted of sodomy in 1895.
Beardsley’s fame was established for all time when the first volume The Yellow Book appeared in April 1894. This famous quarterly of art and literature, for which Beardsley served as art editor and the American expatriate Henry Harland as literary editor, brought the artist’s work to a larger public.
It was Beardsley’s starling black-and-white drawings, titlepages, and covers which, combined with the writings of the so-called “decadents,” a unique format, and publisher John Lane’s remarkable marketing strategies, made the journal an overnight sensation. Although well received by much of the public, The Yellow Book was attacked by critics as indecent. So strong was the perceived link between Beardsley, Wilde, and The Yellow Book that Beardsley was dismissed in April 1895 from his post as art editor following Wilde’s arrest, even though Wilde had in fact never contributed to the magazine.
The film After Beardsley attempts to depict today’s world through Beardsley’s eyes and in his drawing style. Showing Beardsley’s better known drawings, some of which take on a different guise later in the film. Written and drawn by Chris James.
It’s an online, handwritten all vegan recipe book written by Jónsi & Alex. You’ll probably know Jónsi as part of the Icelandic post-rock band, Sigur Rós, and Jónsi & Alex is a collaboration between he and his partner, Alex Somers. They released the album Riceboy Sleeps, which is great!
I love the book, especially that you can flip the pages with the mouse. You can also download the book as PDF file by clicking on the image above.
The pictures are beautiful, and it’s lovely that everything is hand-written. I’m really liking the look of the strawberry milkshake and the tomato sauce, as you can see. I have only tried the Macadamia Monster Mash several times and is always very good. You can see how they make it in the video below. I can’t wait to try the rest out!
The Keith Haring Foundation has scanned Keith’s journals from 1971 to 1989, some of which are featured in Keith Haring: 1978–1982. A page will be posted each day for the duration of the show, which will be on view at the Brooklyn Museum from March 16 through July 8, 2012. The exhibition is the first large-scale presentation to explore the early works of one of the best-known American artists of the twentieth century.
Click on the Polaroid for the Journal.…
Getting offended can be such a fun feeling, especially when it’s art and humor where no one is being spared.
Bob Staake has created a super cute series of “Satire, Humor and Visual Parody of Classic Children’s Books From the 1940s Through 1960s.” Prepare to learn how to make money, what Bukowski really does to children, and just what does daddy have in the trunk…
Above is an illustration by artist ~caltron (Isam S. Prado) of William Burroughs’ novel Junky.
““The question is frequently asked: Why does a man become a drug addict?
The answer is that he usually does not intend to become an addict. You don’t wake up one morning and decide to be a drug addict. It takes at least three months’ shooting twice a day to get any habit at all. And you don’t really know what junk sickness is until you have had several habits. It took me almost six months to get my first habit, and then the withdrawal symptoms were mild. I think it no exaggeration to say it takes about a year and several hundred injections to make an addict.”
Six years before he published his breakthrough novel, Naked Lunch (1959), William S. Burroughs broke into the literary scene with Junky (sometimes also called Junkie), a candid, semi-autobiographical account of an “unredeemed drug addict.” It’s safe to say that the book wouldn’t have seen the light of day if Allen Ginsberg hadn’t taken Burroughs under his wing and edited the manuscript. The book, originally published under the pseudonym “William Lee,” was distributed by Ace Books, a publishing house that targeted New York City subway riders. Below, you can listen to Burroughs reading a three-hour abridged version of the text.
“The questions, of course, could be asked: Why did you ever try narcotics? Why did you continue using it long enough to become an addict? You become a narcotics addict because you do not have strong motivations in the other direction. Junk wins by default. I tried it as a matter of curiosity. I drifted along taking shots when I could score. I ended up hooked. Most addicts I have talked to report a similar experience. They did not start using drugs for any reason they can remember. They just drifted along until they got hooked. If you have never been addicted, you can have no clear idea what it means to need junk with the addict’s special need. You don’t decide to be an addict. One morning you wake up sick and you’re an addict.”
If like me, you can not get enough of William Burroughs, I invite you to stay with us a little longer and watch the following 1983 documentary by Howard Brookner. At the beginning of it, you will be able to see William S. Burroughs’ first appearance on American national television. Appropriately, it was on the irreverent, late-night comedy show, Saturday Night Live. I hope you enjoy it.
The Beat Hotel, a new film by Documentary Arts, goes deep into the legacy of the American Beats in Paris during the heady years between 1957 and 1963, when Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky and Gregory Corso fled the obscenity trials in the United States surrounding the publication of Ginsbergs poem Howl. They took refuge in a cheap no-name hotel they had heard about at 9, Rue Git le Coeur and were soon joined by William Burroughs, Ian Somerville, Brion Gysin, and others from England and elsewhere in Europe, seeking out the freedom that the Latin Quarter of Paris might provide.
The Beat Hotel, as it came to be called, was a sanctuary of creativity, but was also, as British photographer Harold Chapman recalls, an entire community of complete oddballs, bizarre, strange people, poets, writers, artists, musicians, pimps, prostitutes, policemen, and everybody you could imagine. And in this environment, Burroughs finished his controversial book Naked Lunch; Ian Somerville and Brion Gysin invented the Dream Machine; Corso wrote some of his greatest poems; and Harold Norse, in his own cut-up experiments, wrote the novella, aptly called The Beat Hotel.
The film tracks down Harold Chapman in the small seaside town of Deal in Kent England. Chapmans photographs are iconic of a time and place when Ginsberg, Orlovsky, Corso, Burroughs, Gysin, Somerville and Norse were just beginning to establish themselves on the international scene. Chapman lived in the attic of the hotel, and according to Ginsberg didnt say a word for two years because he wanted to be invisible and to document the scene as it actually happened.
In the film, Chapmans photographs and stylized dramatic recreations of his stories meld with the recollections of Elliot Rudie, a Scottish artist, whose drawings of his time in the hotel offer a poignant and sometimes humorous counterpoint. The memories of Chapman and Rudie interweave with the insights of French artist Jean-Jacques Lebel, author Barry Miles, Danish filmmaker Lars Movin, and the first hand accounts of Oliver Harris, Regina Weinrich, Patrick Amie, Eddie Woods, and 95 year old George Whitman, among others, to evoke a portrait of Ginsberg, Burroughs, Corso and the oddities of the Beat Hotel that is at once unexpected and revealing.
Ritual is a horror novel by British actor and author David Pinner, first published in 1967. The protagonist of Ritual is an English police officer named David Hanlin. A puritanical Christian, Hanlin is requested to investigate what appears to be the ritualistic murder of a local child in an enclosed rural Cornish village. During his short stay, Hanlin deals with psychological trickery, sexual seduction, ancient religious practices and nightmarish sacrificial rituals.
Shrouded in the same brand of mystery and contradiction that forms its tangled plot, Ritual, the 1967 debut by RADA-trained playwright David Pinner is commonly recognised by cult cinema fanatics as the original seed that grew into the towering movie enigma The Wicker Man.
In 1973, Ritual was used as the basis for The Wicker Man, a British horror film directed by Robin Hardy and written for the screen by Anthony Shaffer. Edward Woodward stars as the policeman, renamed Sergeant Neil Howie. Pinner discussed the book in a 2011 interview. “I then sold the film rights of the book to Christopher Lee in 1971 – the basic idea and the structure of it was used for The Wicker Man.”
As a result of the film’s popularity, Ritual became a much sought-after collector’s item, and was being sold for £400 to £500 on eBay. It was not until the 2011 reprint that the novel became widely available.
Watch below the documentary “Burnt Offering — The Cult of the Wicker Man” where the cast and main players in the crew come together to discuss the making of cult British horror film The Wicker Man. They discuss the adaptation of the source material, the casting process and the difficult shoot which dealt with everything from a summer film being shot in late autumn and the troubles of the actual wicker man itself.