Judith N. Shklar

A review

Das Kulturmagazin

Here

Aglaia Konrad reist viel

Aglaia Konrad was born in Salzburg in 1960 and now lives and works in Brussels. Over the years she brought together an enormous archive of images shot in such diverse cities as Sao Paulo, Beijing, Chicago, Dakar, Tokyo, Cairo or Shanghai. Her pictures are always very strong, dry, very beautiful. Her book “Elasticity” provides a “strong dose of the thrill and horror of the late 20th-century metropolis” (…) her work documents “the global centers of late capitalism in all their frightening glory.” (R. Smith in NY Times 2004). A catalogue of an exhibition of her in Antwerp is available here.

(c) Aglaia Konrad

Unica Zürn

Unica Zürn photographed by Man Ray in 1956. She was born in Berlin in 1917 and jumped out of the window in 1970 in Paris. She wrote a weird and beautiful novel, Der Mann im Jasmin. The Jasmin Man is in fact the Belgian writer Henri Michaux (see previous post) that she met in Paris. Michaux provided her pencils and papers to draw when she was locked in a psychiatric hospital. Her mother was part of the elite nazi society. She also had a long and painful love story with the surrealist drawer Hans Bellmer.

Paul-Jean Toulet

Paul-Jean Toulet wrote one of the most beautiful collections of poems in French, les Contrerimes. He had three passions: women, alcohol and landscapes. If I remember well the (great) classes of poetics of Marc Dominicy, he was also cocainomane. He was friend with Claude Debussy. His novels are quite boring, but his poems delicious. I didn’t find anything translated in German, weird if it’s true. La Contrerime is a rarely used poetic form. Toulet and Leconte de Lisle were among the few ones using it. A contrerime is a short poem with three to five strophes, which alternate octosyllabic and hexasyllabic verses. The first one rimes with the last one, and the internal ones rime together (ABBA):

:

Dans le lit vaste et dévasté

J’ouvre les yeux près d’elle

Je l’effleure: un songe infidèle

l’embrasse à mon côté

PS: To learn how to count syllables in French verses, read eg Marc Dominicy, «Métrique accentuelle et métrique quantitative», Langue Française, numéro 99, 1993, 75-96.

.

Chantal Akerman

From here: “Geboren am 6. Juni 1950 in Brüssel. Besuch eines Lyceums in Brüssel. Mit 15 Jahren sieht sie den Film “Pierrot le Fou” von Jean-Luc Godard und wird angeregt, selbst Filme zu drehen. Für vier Monate besucht sie die Film-Hochschule in Brüssel (INSAS). Nach eigenen Aussagen hat sie dort keine Anregungen erhalten. 1971 längerer New-York Aufenthalt und Beschäftigung mit den Filmen von Stan Brakhage, Michael Snow und Jonas Mekas. Seit 1968 dreht sie Filme.” Below a picture of her taken from her filmed autobiography.

Dear Umberta,

I told you a bit some weeks ago about a film inspired by “La Prisonnière” of Marcel Proust. It is La Captive (die Gefangene, 1999) by Chantal Akerman, jewish and homosexual like Proust. Very very beautiful film about jealousy inter alia. Any film of Chantal Akerman is interesting, but I particularly liked “Demain on déménage” (morgen ziehen wir um) — she’s a bit obsessed with migration — and “Jeanne Dielman” (1975) an incredible experimental film about an efficient homemaker and also a discreet one-client-per-day fille de joie marvelously performed by one of most beautiful voices of French cinema, Delphine Seyrig. One can see her peeling the potatoes here. She also published a not very well known small autobiographical novel, “Une famille à Bruxelles”, Edition L’Arche, 1998, of course not translated in german. The picture below is taken from La Captive.

Professor Bad Trip by Fausto Romitelli

I went to this concert I was talking about of Ictus ensemble last Friday (Professor Bad Trip of Fausto Romitelli) and I can only recommend to anybody reading these lines to listen to this piece. It is simply one of the most beautiful pieces of contemporary music. It is very strong, never boring or pretentious as contemporary music can sometimes be, filled with a “dry sadness”, a sadness which is never pathetic, and often nasty (esp. the cello solo, very beautifully played by François Deppe). Jean-Luc Plouvier (one of the pianists of Ictus) told me that it is certainly the best album of them (and only 12 euros on the site of the excellent Cypres Records). They worked on it for months and together with Romitelli. It is the last album by Ictus that Romitelli could hear before his death (and from what I was told, he was extremely happy with the result). During the concert, I thought that if progressive contemporary music exists, then Professor Bad Trip pertains to this genre. It is a bit like the first Pink Floyd album of classical music. The presence of the electric guitar (sometimes played with distortions) certainly explains it partly. And in fact, this impression was justified, since Plouvier explained me after the concert that Romitelli called this piece after a famous hippie comics from the seventies in Italy (see the drawing above) by
Gianluca Lerici, whose best known comics is an adaptation of William Burroughs’ ‘Naked Lunch’ (‘Il Pasto Nudo’). Professor Bad Trip was also inspired by the poetry of the Belgian writer and painter Henri Michaux and esp. his works on mescaline and other psychedelic substances. And it’s true that the drawing of Michaux above resembles a bit Professor Bad Trip. The drawing below is by him.

Medea am Deutschen Theater Berlin

Was immer Medea in der Tragödie des Euripides Schreckliches plant, welche Flüche und Verwünschungen sie auch ausstößt – in einem Punkt stimmt ihr der Chor der Korintherinnen unbeirrbar zu: Sie ist eine Betrogene und sie hat ein Recht auf Rache. Der Abenteurer Jason, der Medea sein Leben und seinen Ruhm verdankt, darf nicht – da mag er noch so viele Argumente für mehr soziale Sicherheit und die Zukunft der Kinder anführen – ins Bett einer jungen Prinzessin steigen und diese heiraten wollen. So einfach sehen das die Frauen. Und so einfach sieht das Medea, die aus weiter Ferne mit Jason gekommene Ausländerin. Im Racheakt – einem der grauenvollsten und folgenreichsten der Weltliteratur – wird sie wieder zur Zauberin, die sie war. Zum Entsetzen aller, die sie für assimiliert hielten.
In der erstmals auf dem Theater realisierten Neuübersetzung von Hubert Ortkemper erscheint Euripides’ Stück als ein schnörkelloses, psychologisch bis in feinste Details durchgearbeitetes Ehedrama. Für die Regisseurin Barbara Frey, die im Deutschen Theater »Minna von Barnhelm« und »Der Kirschgarten« inszeniert hat, ist es die erste Auseinandersetzung mit einem griechischen Drama. Der Antiken-Schwerpunkt im Deutschen Theater – nach Aischylos’ »Orestie« in der Regie von Michael Thalheimer und »Die Perser« in der Regie von Dimiter Gotscheff – schließt mit dem berühmtesten und doch selten gewagten Stück von Euripides.

No title

“The Division Museum of Ceramics and Glassware is the only private institution in New York City dedicated to the future historical importance of Twenty First Century ceramics and glassware. Founded in 2004, the Museum exclusively collects damaged ceramic and glass items, primarily everyday items of food preparation and consumption.” Found here

Ictus Ensemble in Stuttgart today

The Ictus Ensemble is an Ensemble playing contemporary music born in Bruxelles. They play today in Stuttgart the piece “Professor Bad Trip” from the Italian composer Fausto Romitelli. Some extracts of this ’spectralist’ piece can be listened here (to the right somewhere).

Ictus Ensemble plays with Rosas, the company of Teresa de Keersmaeker based in Bruxelles. Among the members of Ictus are the pianist Jean-Luc Fafchamps (below) and the violonist Georg van Dam.

Manon filmed van Dam playing a sonate of Bartok in “presto perfect sound” (2006). According to Bartok, this piece should be played in 6 minutes, but Manon told me that it is so hard to play that it is almost impossible to make it so short (but apparently, van Dam managed to)