African Reggae
Songs in Our Heart # 2 African Reggae (Nina Hagen) (Written by Reinhold Heil, Bernhard Potschka and Nina Hagen; released 1979) [Best pop yodeling ever.]*
Continue Reading →ECO : A Gift From the Heavens
We at TVC have procrastinated about posting an item on the death of Umberto Eco on the 19th February, due to our shame at not having read a great deal of his writing. Of course we have read the potboiler “The Name of the Rose” and the accessible “The Island of the Day Before”. But we have not been able to get past about page 50 of “The Prague Cemetery”, “Foucault’s Pendulum” or “The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana”, finding the prose at times impenetrable. But that is our deficiency and we will try harder. We do admire his essays “On Literature” and…
Continue Reading →Pretty Poison
(Dir. Noel Black) (1968) It starts like a pilot for Psycho II…Norman…er, Dennis (Anthony Perkins), is making a new life as an inspector on an assembly line in Shanty-town, rehabilitating himself after life as a rapist/psycho/firebug. Dennis has got some mad, grand, plan, and he is innocent, I swear he is, he didn’t know his Aunt was in that house he burnt, but whilst he is clearly too old for trim blonde cutie, Sue Ann (Tuesday Weld), he is not too mad: for she is a match for him, and more! David Shipman, a highly perceptive critic, suggested that Weld (the key role…
Continue Reading →Modern Art Theory
(Bosslet Public Art, 1988)
Here’s a a link (see below) to a highly entertaining and rather persuasive rant from Paul Joseph Watson, about the essential bogus nature of much modern art. It’s a fight no-one can win, of course – you can debate aesthetics till the sun blows up. But it is true that expensive modern art carries a strong whiff of elitism about it. Style is loosed from substance. Then style is discarded, as a rhetorical flourish. What is left? Modern art. In a piece entitled “The Perils of Painting Now”*, Jed Perl reports, possibly ironically:”A few years ago, the Luxembourg & Dayan gallery…
Continue Reading →Atticus Unsympatheticus
Is it a sin to kill a Finch?
Harper Lee died a few days ago. Atticus Finch died a while ago, mortally wounded by the publication of Go Set a Watchman. That is, the holier than thou Gregory-Peck-type Atticus Finch of To Kill a Mockingbird, died. The real Atticus Finch, or the draft Atticus Finch, depending on which way you look at it, lives on in infamy. He’s A Bad Man because he’s racist. Lordy lordy. Our whiter than white Atticus was nought but a whited sepulchre. A product of his time and place. Either a man with shades of grey in his past, a hypocrite, an even better lawyer and…
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