The Monk: A Romance by Matthew Lewis (1796)

Source.

Inside the Mansfield Mansion

The Original Barbie House: Inside the Mansfield Mansion
c/f 60′s Sex Symbol Jayne Mansfield & Her Hot Pink Beverly Hills Palace

Kenneth Anger Film's Animated Gifs

Source.

via Dangerous Minds

Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete, by Francois Rabelais

Source.

The Tales of Hoffmann

Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom

c/f A Mad Dream: Introduction and Annotations by Pasolini.
c/f A Film Maker's Life (doc on Pasolini).

Battle Royale: Character Design, with Weapons

• Battle Royale Manga online.  N
• Battle Royale Wikia.  N
• Battle Royale Character Entry on Wikipedia  N
• Internet Movie Firearms entry.  N
• Battle Royale film fan site.  N
• Chart with characters and weapons on fan film site.  N

Alphonse Mucha

Website of the Mucha Foundation
Website of Mucha Museum in Prague
The Slav Epic official site (EN)
The Slav Epic
Works by Alphonse Mucha at the Art Renewal Center
Painting by Mucha Graces Pisek, N. Dak., Church
Mucha Gallery at MuseumSyndicate
Alphonse Mucha – article on La Plume
Alphonse Mucha – illustrations from Le Pater

Snuff, Exploitation, Mondo, Gore, Gross Out: Synopsises

Here is a database dedicated to itemizing the dramatic minutiae in which the antichrist tendencies of modern film-making find their anecdotal grounding. The obliteration of the body stands in thematically for where once there were trials of the soul.

Obviously, this is genre film, meant for very specific connoisseurs. Still, the plainest way to describe a theological (-ish)--non-specialized--interest in this queasy and unpleasant material is to make the case, as in hardcore pornography, that the struggles of the soul, for us moderns, needs a physical correspondence. Gore describes suffering.

Particularly useful if one has not the heart to see all these masterpieces of splenetic auteurs, but for some perverse reason must still bear witness.

N Scariest Movie Moments N

N The Top 100 Most Violent Movies Ever Made N
N Video Nasties N
N Horror Tropes on the often droll TV tropes site contains various generic descriptions. N

Hausu (1977)

Chapter 4 from Rabelais and his World: Banquet Imagery in Rabelais

Source.

On Google books, with a few pages (like two) annoyingly omitted.

Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine

Arthur Rimbaud

Poems in French and English
La Nouvelle Decadence: Library of Poems and Translations

Paul Verlaine

Project Gutenberg - Poems of Paul Verlaine (in English Translation)
La Nouvelle Decadence: Library of Poems and Translations 
Madame Aubin, by Paul Verlaine, translated by Frank J. Morlock

Grand Guignol: Resources, Film, Texts

Meaning "Giant Puppets," pulp genre horror owes a great deal to this early 20th C French, live action schlock theater, as does the furnishings of the carnival fun-house and our contemporary sense of the eerie, gory and the macabre. For a history and some cultural context, GrandGuignol.com has a lot of helpful articles and links to resources online. 

Other Resources

Andre de Lorde's: At the telephone is an online Grand Guignol play, in English translation. This mini-drama is pretty smart on why communication technology always seems to contain within it an uncanny sense.

Devil Doll. An American film that borrows stylistic cues from this French horror theater, Devil Doll is also notable for the inclusion of Rafaela Ottiano, a former Grand Guignol actress whose somewhat bizarre performance gives a good idea of the broad, melodramatic acting style presented on the Grand Guignol stage. Not the best film ever made, this version was shown as part of the sadly defunct comedy-cult program Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Marquis de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom

In full.

Shary Boyle: If I Had One Wish

Some Context:

Website

Why Feminist Art Still Matters | Hazlitt | Random House of Canada (Discussion with Shary Boyle, Vanessa Dunn, Aminah Sheikh)

Shary Boyle Represents Canada at 55th Venice Biennale

Everything under the Moon (with Christine Fellows) - A heartbreaking shadow play that achingly equates the show's illusory projections with vanishing peoples and species, the transitory symbols of art becoming the ghostly psychic debris of our terribly, evermore plausible extinction. And yet a children's story as well, a quest, a buddy movie, the story of friends around a campfire.

Canadian Artist Project (including commentary by Sholem Krishtalka).

New and Upcoming work.

Facebook (with art posts!).

One wishes, within the seemingly infinite crawl spaces and hobby-holes of the inter-web, that the site of a *lovvved* artist would represent all of their collected and studio work. The representative sample of Shary's work so inspires and gives voice to awkward, shapeless dodos of thought.

Below are a few of my own dodos.

- Sensitivity, skill in craft and imagination are pursued as peregrine themes in Shary Boyle's work. These three motivations are rarely pursued as separate from one another. Imagination is allowed a mischievous tentacle, transforming reality, not retreating from it.

- Sensitivity is sometimes a shying quality in the purveyor of commodities, as making commodities is a repetitive activity. In an artist, this often seems to lead to a heightened valuation of craft. The other route (not always exclusive, sometimes complimentary) is to become more machine-like. One could (arbitrarily) set up two default positions to illustrate the range of attitudes towards the art object and the commodity: the 19th Century Arts and Craft movement, at one pole, and Warhol, at the other.

- Shary's production schedule is regularly machine-like (Warhol). Each individual piece of work, however, has a great deal of particular patience and care put into it (Arts and Crafts).

- Art objects, knickknacks that demonstrate sensitivity in craft, now a rarer sight for a modern, resist the habitual quick scan of the senses. Such work is to involve one, imaginatively, sinuously, in the presented vignette. 

- Shary spends much effort digging up techniques of undervalued, outmoded (by the ever-efficient machines), excluded or forgotten artisanal practices. Among practices, thoughtfulness, sensibilities renewed in the twining, fluffy, shying-then-emboldening, leaky, leafy-lined aesthetic of Boyle's work is a generous array of stylistic preciousness.

- Here is a scrapbook note of what I imagine to be preciousness in her work: fairy tale or folklore sources; imaginative landscapes; animals and animal-people; fantastical flights of fancy; elfin and prepubescent bodies; daffy costumes; detailed depictions of cloth, material; gilt, decorative, flowery, ornate flourishes; a respect for field observation as in naturalism; brittle, dainty, breakable materials for the sculpture; delicate, complimentary colour palette for the paintings; drawer-ly pencil strokes and pencil textures for the drawings; arcane technologies (minded mostly in the service of creating wonder) for the projections (slide projectors, magic lanterns, manipulated, theatrically and moodily, in real time).

- The porcelain figurines also point to a further back historical source, in European rococo (I imagine the first originators of stylistic preciousness also sensed this continuity between the two practices, the delicate, aristocratically-refined rococo collectible on the one hand and the imaginative, industrial-democratic object of preciousness, on the other).

- No doubt the general dis-inclusion of preciousness from canonical museum art has--at least--socially patriarchal roots. Noting its remarkable influence on every nick and cranny of twentieth century creative output, glaring is the lopsided gender participation in either milieu's practitioners/members (museum=boys, preciousness=girls). Common from the Victorian era on, transmitted broadly via the pulp children's industries through the 20th then into our century, under Boyle's deft touch, preciousness has almost the appearance of a polemic; it also tests the redemptive quality of historically excluded material.

- I say "almost polemic" because so often the polemical tone in art leads to a certain brashness in presentation, broad strokes, blunted figurations, rhetorical outwardness. Again, sensitivity, the value which Boyle seems to place in preciousness, remains ice-cream-serene, supreme.

- However, Boyle's adoption of preciousness, is not in itself precious (if one is to mean by precious to be cloyingly taken with the sentimental, obsessively self-protected by the pretty and the quaint). Darkness, unsentimental frankness appears in this mythic retelling of the modern situation often, with a certain grounded literalness. And with humour.

- Darkness often comes in the form of a stylistic intrusion: the gothic, the grotesque, the violently flattened.

- Relatedly, despite the luster of pretty inherent in the materials and certain of the techniques (porcelain, ornament, floral patterning etc.), forms are often knotty, gnarled, organic in the way of old dead trees or mud.

- A lot of her illustrative qualities so reminiscent of children's picture story books, it is hard not to feel one is in the midst of a story. So, one makes up a story. Her figurines, also calling up qualities of toys (especially the off-limits-to-children toys of impeccable enchantment collected by grandparents) put one solidly over to a place of meaningful, fantastical, sentimental play.

- The stage is mythic, her girl children the heroes. Her girl children or also highly androgynous or effeminate boys; also near-hermaphrodites.

- Proportions or features of profiles, torsos, limbs, erogenous chassis, blemishes, blotches that lack ideal ratio or poise by corroboration of the beauty industries are studiously, lovingly attended to.

 - Departing from a gloomy Dickinsian suburbs of dingy interiors, looming, impersonal adults, coercive bullies, her heroes flee to take up residence in a savage and wonderful Never-Never Land. This land is frequently a woods or savanna-like. All of these locales possess an Edenic, private quality.

- Modern heroes, their adventures are complicated by embarrassment, awkwardness, genital compulsion, clumsiness.

- Heroes nonetheless, they are embarked upon a journey where they encounter as trials the strangeness of their bodies; evolving amorousness and/or self-pleasure; the compulsion of rituals; a battle with shyness and boldness before an implicit, all-present gaze (the gaze, in my mind, is a camera lens, the pose perhaps the remembered gesture of confinement during a vacation snapshot); a fight for equilibrium and fair footing within the catastrophes, excesses, self-sacrifice of desire; and the ever-present, lurking monsters of past trauma.

- Violence to the psyche is portrayed bodily (a severed head, a discombobulated anatomy).

- One suspects that the kaleidoscopes of fantasy start as nascent buds within the skin. Like leaves growing then falling from branches, these buds elaborate then self-shatter before the force and processes of the world. Responsible for these strange flowers and twirling vines, the literal crisis--its hard contours kept slightly off-frame-- is pictured in a transformed manner. The vignette is more bodily and remembered than based in the hard light of present perception.

 - Fate, the trans-formative point in stories, intervenes at moments of charged physicality, when a body seems in revolt against both environment and itself. The resulting, intimate metamorphoses convolute the flesh into endless, strange contusions and conjurations, often involving the return of spring-time or the appearance of animals. In these instances, the body can be like a disguise, an erratic shrub or sometimes a fountain.

- Otherworld Uprising (the title of Boyle's *really* good art book) is a designation which seems to refer to the condition of a literal spirit world. In the revolt, spirits, nature, body overlap one anothers' conventionally separate outlines.

- The just-below-the-surface, (half) presence of this Otherworld, its portals and rabbitholes located in bodily orifices, throws subjective turmoil and psychical discomfort in ribbons of stress against a semi-solid yet also fugitive, fleeing screen. This screen, made up of dreams and of shadows, often stands as a protective shield between two figures encountering one another, forestalling or warning off their first meeting. This outcome of these meetings is often either reconciliation/camaraderie or assault-dismemberment.

- I suspect the ectoplasm of this spirit world is made up of bodily juices.

- Poised together on a small pedestal of turf, possible murderers, potential companions, yet many times the figures stay half disinterested in one another, with the retiring tendency of shy but busily assessing, curious children.

- The contrast or collusion of gender roles (the same, different) is helpful in drawing out possible secretive meanings lodged in these frozen confrontations. Meaning plays out many ways: as fantasy fulfillment; as revenge; as appreciation and gauge of difference; as fetishistic worship; as friendship, fulfilling, joyful and intimate, but also brutal or conspiratorial; as wistful compensation; as jokey-making-fun; as critique; as ceremonial renewal; as violence. But, also, sometimes, inscrutably.

In the prolific stories of her art, Boyle seems attracted to rituals of visionary questing more usual to those swept aside, the misfits, the crackpots, the obsessive hobbyists, the shut ins (i.e. Blake, Darger). The import managed within each strange vacation slide or cameo often gives the sense of secrets within secrets, fleshed out in private and in locations of quiet, a remembrance of a remembrance (possibly dangerous), gaining not just velocity over time but also structure and a skeleton.

- Ever so often, with the kind of concentrated, slow pacing capable of affecting a shift in scene without hemorrhaging continuity or narrative sweep, Boyle's turbulent frame switches to almost-fulfillment and near-certitude in the sublime. The characters are alone, holding hands, with a planet to themselves, a planet worthy of the naturalistic raptures on the pages of a speculative edition of National Geographic. Within the context of Boyle's art, this is sublime in a heroic, personal sense, haunting one with the juxtaposition of the human with inhuman, and, in a sense, the unrepresentable landscape: Nature. It is not the sublime of the modern architect for whom the sublime is the habitat-equivalent of military shock and awe (Derived from Fredrick Jameson, the more habitual invocation of the word).

Diamonds.

Said to be a girl's best friend.

Karl Marx on Use Value and Value.

• Wikipedia article.
• A History of Diamonds.
• Diamonds on ebay.
• Source for below:

Diamond Grading
Diamond Cut
Diamond Clarity
Diamond Color
Carat Weight
Diamond Certificates
Diamond Flourescence
Diamond Ring Settings
Shapes
Asscher Cut Diamonds
Cushion Cut Diamonds
Emerald Cut Diamonds
Heart Shaped Diamonds
Oval Diamonds
Pear Shaped Diamonds
Princess Cut Diamonds
Radiant Cut Diamonds
Round Brilliant Diamonds
Glossary

Recommended Diamond Stores
Mondera
Blue Nile

Vintage Jewelry Ads and Catalogs
Vintage Jewelry Ads

The Flowers of Evil

Charles Baudelaire is a modern poet. With his jokey tone of high seriousness careening wildly into purple prose, he sees the task before him of the inversion of a monarchical Christian Classicism into Satanic Modernism. Perverts, rogues, outcasts are family to him.

With hard work, at times absurdly, he attends to this new position of his invention, ironic high priest of a new flock. Yet his own internal attitude is ambivalent. He is channeling, a shaman. His assessment of the times, for the most part, with the nobility of a magician, he keeps deliberately muted. His Satanism is a means to see a change in value, an art strategy. It is not literal.

His symbolism is nuanced and sophisticated, despite a mock-comic delivery, preposterous intonation. Grounded in material objects, luxury commodities and those of the day to day, his symbols are mostly borrowed from the marketplace. They are only assigned poetic, magical purpose via the not-so-mystical vagaries of mood and psychology. Mood is often equated to recreational substances, drugs, booze. But especially the hormonal waft of sex. He reads Edgar Allan Poe a lot.

Most of his "career" is spent revising one book. He devotes himself to itemizing the crowded vistas, both material and mental, of the modern city dweller.

Here are the multiple versions of Flowers of Evil which appeared during the course of Baudelaire's life. Both in the original French and in multiple English translations.

Diamanda Galas - I Put a Spell on You (live)

Quite simply the closest thing to the shamanistic enactment of self-annihilation, as posted on YouTube, I have had the pleasure of experiencing. Source.

The Art Fag on Ryan Trecartin

For further (or, perhaps, less) edification on the subject of video-maker Ryan Trecartin, here is hands down my favourite reaction to his work, in essay form. With apologies to Sholem Krishtalka who has since gone on, I believe, to have entirely comprehensive, multi-tiered, professionally-paying and loquacious views on the subject, this represents something like Mr. Krishtalka's first then second stab at coming to terms with Mr. Trecartin. And in my mind, something like the perfect critical first response to Mr. Trecartin.

Sholem Krishtalka is Toronto-based.

"Providing a detailed summary of I-Be Area is much like providing a detailed summary of the rest of Mr. Trecartin’s oeuvre; certainly possible, but one runs the risk of sounding like someone given abrupt leave of their senses (“so there was a guy with a yellow face, and then he became a girl with a yellow face, but with long hair and gym shorts…”). By now, darlings, we have watched I-Be Area two and half times, and while we do feel like we’ve just been run over by about five rollercoasters, we are no nearer to providing a cogent synopsis."

Taken from Art Fag 17 and Art Fag 23.

from Art Fag 17

A QUICK NOTE FROM THE UNDERGROUND.

Thus far, we have only been detailing our daylight viewing habits. Some of our evenings (the ones we see fit to narrate, that is) were spent in the arms of the New York Underground Film Festival. We shall not bother to detail every program consumed, but end our travelogue by sharing an epiphany.

It concerns one Mr. Ryan Trecartin. We have been eyeing him with intense suspicion ever since we came across his name in the pages of Artforum, where his singular genius was extolled by none other than that perpetual coddler of damaged fags, Mr. Dennis Cooper. Mr. Cooper was working himself into a hyperventilating frenzy over Mr. Trecartin's epic "A Family Finds Entertainment," which largely defies description, but has loosely to do with the adoption of a runaway hit-and-run victim by a houseful of hard-partying cartoon psychotics, and is ladled with heavy doses of camp. We had seen snippets at the Whitney Biennial (and what a dog's breakfast that was, ladies and gentlemen), and seen it in full at Pleasure Dome's recent "Bad Boys" program, where it was the star attraction. Even after the full 40 sensory-assaultive minute running time, we could not come to a firm opinion of Mr. Trecartin's work; there were moments of starlit genius, where the lunacy of his cast and their improvisatory abilities made for utter brilliance. And there were just as many moments that came off as mannered and irritating, like the grating antics of an overindulged and understimulated child.

We met with one of Mr. Trecartin's shorts at an Underground Film Fest program, and we have been further edified. In fact, we are currently happy to hop on his bandwagon (even if we are a little leery of how crowded it is, and how fast it's going). The short, entitled "(Tommy Chat Just Emailed Me)," concerns the perils of internet dating, single motherhood and constipation, and involves many of the same characters that populate "Family...". As you might be able to glean from our description, it involves the same general tenor of "Family...", but this time, the brief running time has reined in Mr. Trecartin's more indulgent sensibilities. Despite its apparent insanity and the ludicrous behavioural tics of its characters (at one point, the single mother, cruising the web for a lover, locks her baby in the shower to get some alone-time), the durational brevity forced a more stringent structure on the proceedings; the video, in all its antic absurdity, came off like a Bach fugue; the unfolding of motifs was made transparent, its progress made clear while still maintaining its anarchic tone. Consider the final moments of the video: throughout, Catherine Pimples (the heroine of the constipation storyline) holds court from the toilet in a lake-house. The final moments of the video finds all the characters in the bathroom with her. Mr. Trecartin (in character as Tammy) raises his hand like an orchestra conductor and leads his introverted, self-referential characters, all still trapped in the bathroom, in a slow, rhythmic chorus of "What's outside? Oh my God!" as the camera makes a slow pan of the surrounding environs. This single moment casts an illuminating pall over the entire video, revealing its parallel strands of containment and sequestration (both social and intestinal).

* * *

from Art Fag 23 

Providing a detailed summary of I-Be Area is much like providing a detailed summary of the rest of Mr. Trecartin’s oeuvre; certainly possible, but one runs the risk of sounding like someone given abrupt leave of their senses (“so there was a guy with a yellow face, and then he became a girl with a yellow face, but with long hair and gym shorts…”). By now, darlings, we have watched I-Be Area two and half times, and while we do feel like we’ve just been run over by about five rollercoasters, we are no nearer to providing a cogent synopsis. To say that the plot is loose is akin to saying that the Eiffel Tower is tallish. Still, there are threads and themes, the grandest of which is Command-C and -V (or Control-C and -V for those who are not goose-stepping along with the Apple army): the copy and paste functions; in other words, cloning, replication, avatars, multiple selves. It has also to do with the exercise and application of these themes: adoption, the internet, on-line profiles, and chatrooms. These latter two are especially important, as they provide what could loosely be described as the setting for I-Be Area. As near as we can make out, this is to what the title specifically refers. Each character in the video has their own allotted space, or Area, and much of the vertiginous atmosphere that engulfs the viewer like a fever dream comes from the representation of these spaces: at once claustrophobic and cluttered; tight, cramped little spaces, gaudily painted and garishly lit, each populated, if not by one or two people, then a single minded collective.

Mr. Trecartin’s 100-odd minute opus jetés manically from room to room. The main narrative arc concerns the identity dilemma (or, in Trecartin’s southern-fag drawl, “diii-layeh-maauuh”) of I-Be 2 (Mr. Trecartin), the second in a series of clones named I-Be. He finds no affinity with his previous incarnation (who has become a woman, and rechristened herself You Me Me You), and his on-line avatar has taken on a life of his own. Although this distinction between what goes on in front of the screen and on the screen is virtually moot in I-Be Area. Thus, he embarks on a quest for identity. At its core, I-Be Area is a picaresque tale of self-discovery and self-creation, and bears a striking structural resemblance to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I-Be 2 cycles through identity after identity, and like Huck down the Mississippi, wanders from Area to Area, and so we meet a slew of characters: the den mother of the I-Bes (who, by the by, is the best actress of her generation – she is the only performer who does not attempt to mimic Trecartin’s über-queeny-sassy-fag-on-speed delivery; she translates the idiosyncrasies of his script into a kind of Tennessee Williams heroine performing beat poetry, and all we can say is that Meryl Streep has nothing on her), the I-Be Adoption Agency staff, Cheetah and Jammie (I-Be 2’s entourage), a young boy named Django (who grows up to become a clone named Pasta, also played by Mr. Trecartin, who looks like Linda Blair in a blonde page-boy wig), a preternaturally dramatically gifted baby named Polly, The Everymom (a troupe of adoption-crazy lesbians), a grating creature in pink gym shorts and six-inch platform heels named Ramada Omar, Jamie the pregnant drama teacher/goth band frontwoman who isn’t really pregnant, and on and on and on.

The introduction and subsequent disposal of these characters follows the narrative logic of channel surfing; they appear (or, more aptly, flounce) on screen suddenly, and disappear without warning. But we always see them in their Area, and as the film wears on, the Areas, and the boundaries between them, are violently destroyed: rooms are painted black, windows are smashed, objects thrown in and out, walls torn down in a grinning, laughing, wide-eyed orgy of hopped-up unleashing of frantic energy.

Trecartin’s pacing only goes at one speed: faster. Like a freight train chugging to life at the top of a steep decline, I-Be Area is languid at first; whole minutes go by without a cut. But as the movie progresses, scenes are choppier and choppier, dialogue (whose pitch is sped up and slowed down at will) overlaps more and more, until the final scenes end up as an anarchic riot of cuts and cacophony, a screaming blur of relentlessly jumping images, a Babel of crashes and shrieks and maniacal giggles. It’s exhausting.

So what is to be made of the hour and forty-eight minute stretch of I-Be Area? When we attempt to illuminate the vast and varied thematic territory that he traverses, one might easily be led to believe that Mr. Trecartin’s candied hysteria operates in the service of some sort of commentary. After all, the thematic core of his work is always tight as a drum; adoption, cloning, identity, the internet, profile pages: these are by no means wildly disparate subjects. Indeed, if Mr. Trecartin’s grasp of the conceptual map of his universe were not iron-clad, his videos would be unwatchable. Zany is as good a performative mode as any, but it is a poor organizational method. No: we the viewer are taken on a very carefully controlled path. Its iconography might be the nth degree of a highly individualized eccentricity, but it follows an internal logic. The one thing this is not, and must not be confused for, however, is a critical statement, and Mr. Trecartin is not a polemicist.

It is a mistake to ascribe politics, critical or otherwise, to Mr. Trecartin. If his characters flip in and out of identities (and baroque make-up jobs and dollar-store wigs and Salvation Army get-ups) with the ease of shuffling playing cards, zigging into another gender or zagging out of gender altogether, it is not because Mr. Trecartin is championing a kind of political consciousness. He is merely displaying his inner reality, where outer Reality (or, as Huck might have put it, “sivilization”) has no bearing. In the video-space he creates, there is no consequence to these characters’ queer transgressions; no one argues with them, no one questions them, no one even comments upon them. The people in his videos barely even talk to each other; they talk only to the camera and are subsequently reacted to. There is no outside world and so its conventions of time, space, narrative, and identity have no need to apply; Reality has been abandoned for the funhouse of Trecartin-land, where only the rule is the anarchic Wonderland logic of his internal universe.

The surest signal of this lack of polemic drive and political intent is the kind of dialogue that Mr. Trecartin, in the span of two feature videos and one short, has made utterly his own, to the extent that we find it hard to accurately describe. It is a goulash of slangs and affectations: campy gay, Valley-girl, southern belle (and southern redneck), urban black. It is a babble dialect consisting entirely of abbreviations, shorthands, in-jokes, punchlines, soundbytes and song lyrics, whose syntax is mannerism, and whose grammar is artifice. It even has registers, like Cantonese, only its registers are the gradient between the highest and lowest limits of a pitch controller. Every utterance of every character in Mr. Trecartin’s videos is in this mode. Seriousness, drama, import: these are, if not anathema, then certainly alien to Mr. Trecartin’s language. His dialogue clips along like a series of rapid-fire text messages; there is no time, but more importantly, there is no space for genuineness of affect, or meaning, or any kind. There is only a back-and-forth of one-liners, whose inanity slowly vanishes as it becomes familiar, and habitual.

The result of the anarchic logic and flip, mannered dialogue that are the principal components of Mr. Trecartin’s universe is that any meaning is delivered as if it were meaningless. Thus, because of this misfire, this gap between the spoken word and the substance it purports to communicate, there seems to be a yawning void that lurks behind the colour and the shrieking and the mania. But Mr. Trecartin is not a nihilist: one does not create these varied sets, establish these elaborate narratives that branch and twist and lurch, assemble a vast troupe of people, have them perform like an overloaded synapse, and edit the entire lunatic happening into an hour and forty-eight minute feature for nothing. Things of import do happen in I-Be Area, and in Trecartin-land. Concepts are, if not elucidated, then fenced around, poked at, pulled like taffy, and turned inside out. In short, politics, thematics, concepts: they are all subject to the same gravity as Mr. Trecartin’s dialogue, and the same physical laws as his characters – that is to say, none. They might be meaningful, but they are also infinitely malleable.

I-Be Area is not uniformly engaging, nor consistently good. Mr. Trecartin has yet to master the pacing of a feature-length video; there are parts that lag, parts that are flabby, parts that pedal as fast as they can but go nowhere. This is in some respect due to his performers. He himself is a captivating and energetic presence, but in a style this mannered and manic, one bleary routine can ruin a scene. Mr. Trecartin’s videos are ensemble pieces, after all, and thus, he is heavily dependent on his actors, and not all of them operate or captivate at the same level. There are those who can meet the demands of his dialogue and his situations, and there are those who simply can’t, who do not have the force of personality to play to the camera at a fevered pitch that is difficult to sustain. Rapid cuts and a twitchy finger on the pitch control can only compensate for so much. But this is only his second feature, and it already marks an evolutionary step beyond A Family Finds Entertainment; his universe is being further fleshed out, and one is beginning to get the hang of Trecartin-land. The subtleties of his dialogue are beginning to emerge. A Family Finds Entertainment was basically an elaboration of a simple set-up; I-Be Area does far more daring and complex things with narrative than its predecessor; a storyline that branches and re-branches and circles back on itself, lurching forward and backward in time. The reaction to Mr. Trecartin via A Family Finds Entertainment was fuelled by the shock of its discovery; here was something startling, something dazzling and effervescent that issued forth like the shrill screech of a banshee from a hitherto-unknown; here was some dizzy child of Jack Smith spewing out his frenzied choreographies out into the maw of the internet. But shock and novelty cannot sustain careers. If anything, I-Be Area is a profoundly encouraging sophomore move from Mr. Trecartin, for not only does it signal that his principles – the insistence on his sprawling cast of friends, on a dumpster-drag aesthetic – have thus far survived his art world translation from nowhere to epicentre; in its honeycombed conceptual structure, its narrative sprawl, it signals that his vision and his ambitions have expanded, and it signals that he has yet greater, yet more hectic things in store for us.

Susan Sontag's Camp Canon

These are a list of links to works, often literary or cinema, in their entirety when possible, which Sontag specifically cites as part of her imagined, informal pocket canon of camp in her famous essay Notes on Camp.

Attending to the subject of Camp with as alabaster reverence as a Sontag essay, then following up on all its associated literature, a gesture itself steeped in campiness.

Christopher Isherwood's - The World in the Evening (Excerpt on Camp)

Oscar Wilde - Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young

Beerbohm, Max, Sir - Zuleika Dobson

Tiffany Lamps
History

Scoptione Films

. . . an example . . .

The Enquirer, headlines and stories
Vintage National Enquirer on Pulp International

The Brown Derby Restaraunt

Aubrey Beardsley drawings

Swan Lake

Bellini's operas

Oscar Wilde - Salome

John Ford - 'Tis a Pity She's a Whore

Certain Turn-of-the-Century Postcards. Source 1: NYPL Digital Library. Source 2: Lu Lu's Vintage.

Schoedsack's King Kong

the Cuban pop singer La Lupe

Lynn Ward's novel in woodcuts, God's Man

the old Flash Gordon comics

women's clothes of the twenties (feather boas, fringed and beaded dresses, etc.)

the novels of Ronald Firbank and Ivy Compton-Burnett

stag movies seen without lust

(as well, a great many rare and vintage stage movies can be seen here.)

Louis Feuillade (here Les Vampires)

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

Paris Métro entrances designed by Hector Guimard

Der Rosenkavalier

Jacopo Pontormo

Rosso Fiorentino

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio

Georges de La Tour

John Lyly

Alexander Pope

Horace Walpole

William Congreve

Oscar Wilde -The Decay of Lying

Jean Cocteau

The Operas of Richard Strauss.

42nd Street

The Gold Diggers of 1935

The Maltese Falcon

Trouble in Paradise

Tallulah Bankhead in Lifeboat

All about Eve

Gaudi's buildings

- Cathedral of the Sagrada Familia

Carlo Crivelli

Quotes from Charles de Gaulle

The Prodigal

Sampson and Delilah

The Mysterians

The H-man

Rodan

Maciste

The Triumph of Maciste  . . . . 

Rudy Vallee

Vera, or the Nihilists

Excruciations . . . . 

James, Henrey - The Wings of the Dove

                          The Awkward Age

                          The Europeans

Shaw, Bernard - Major Barbara

Oscar Wilde - Lady Windemere's Fan

Oscar Wilde - A Woman of No Importance

Paul Valery - Monsieur Teste

Walter Pater - Marius the Epicurean

Huysmans' - À Rebours

 from the 1931 Illustrated Editions issue of A Rebours.


Frontispiece-Gay Paris The Serpents "He had tasted the sweets of the flesh with the appetite of a sick man" "It had not been able to support the dazzling splendour imposed on it..." "He possessed in accordance with this taste a marvellous collection of tropical plants" "Come and have a drink" The Image of the Pox "It was Miss Urania, one of the most famous of the acrobats at the Cirque." "Never had he experienced a more alluring relationship" Stolen Kisses "He returned to Fontenay, feeling all the physical exhaustion of a man restored to the domestic hearth..." "When all was said and done, the future was the same for all" Pagan Idyll "He was alarmed at the doctor's silence" "The physician, who was imbued with all the prejudices of a man of the world, only smiled..."

(this article is still, and perhaps forever, in progress, I am trying to find the best material possible, preferably at first hand, preferable legible to read on most monitors, to support references. If you know of better, please let me know)