User:Jahsonic

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

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Ars Memoriae: The Theatre (1619) - Robert Fludd
“In the illusory babels of language, an artist might advance specifically to get lost, and to intoxicate himself in dizzying syntaxes, seeking odd intersections of meaning, strange corridors of history, unexpected echoes, unknown humors, or voids of knowledge… but this quest is risky, full of bottomless fictions and endless architectures and counter-architectures… at the end, if there is an end, are perhaps only meaningless reverberations.” --Robert Smithson

Image:Ruggiero Rescuing Angelica by Gustave Doré..jpg

Ruggiero rescuing Angelica in Orlando Furioso, engraving by Gustave Doré.

Related

Wikipedia
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Featured visual

Nocturne in Black and Gold, the Falling Rocket, (1874) James McNeill Whistler

Book of the month

Georges Bataille traces
the intimate connections
between love and death
in The Tears of Eros

Areas of interest

edit

Diary

1 Jahsonic in Google books
2 Music introduction
3 Film introduction
4 Projects
5 Diary archives

Jahsonic in Google books

Music introduction

In 1996, when I first gained access to the internet, I found an online playlist of dance music from New York from the period 1975 - 1985. It represented the roots of house music, a genre I had been interested in since its inception. I copied the document, started to buy the vinyl involved, and Jahsonic.com was born.

Although I have omnivorous tastes in music, the music section of jahsonic.com mainly focused on maligned genres of the late twentieth century pop canon: dance music, black music, disco, reggae, dub, house music, early hip hop, gay music, electronic music and techno. The focus is on artists that are lesser known but who have proven to be influential within the music community. The history of the club DJ is documented extensively in this section, along with the development of the twelve inch recording. If you'd like more in-depth information on this last subject, I recommend Last Night a DJ Saved My Life (Brewster and Broughton, 1999) and Love Saves the Day (Tim Lawrence, 2004)

Some of my favourite artists (I tend to focus on individuals rather than bands) are Lee Perry, Arthur Russell, Neil Young, Fela Kuti, Roy Ayers, Derrick May, Bill Laswell, Kraftwerk, Frank Zappa, Pharoah Sanders, George Clinton, Moodymann, Larry Levan, Walter Gibbons and Serge Gainsbourg.

Although there are few, certain genres do not agree with me. Heavy metal (exceptions notwithstanding (Vertigo Mixed, 2005, Andy Votel. The aesthetics of heavy metal feel wrong; and although the United Kingdom is my favourite music journalism country (they are the best trainspotters), I don't care much for their pop records nor certain recent trends in British dance music (acid jazz, drum and bass, grime, ...). I also do not like the macho lyrics in contemporary hip hop. Although no longer actively so, I have been a Rolling Stones fan when I was younger, I guess their love of black music has something to do with that. I do not own Beatles tracks.

For additional reading apart from the books mentioned above, I wholeheartedly recommend Cut 'N' Mix (Dick Hebdige, 1987) and Ocean of Sound (David Toop, 1995). Welcome to my pages on film. My love for cinema started when I was young, fostered by my father. My omnivorous tastes in film are reflected on these pages, where you will find films considered as "high art" and films considered as "low art". Geographically the films are from Europe, the US and Japan.

Film introduction

I tend to follow the work of certain directors and actors. The first wave of directors whose work I started to appreciate — mainly influenced by the wonderful book Cult Movie Stars, the Antwerp art house cinemas and television — were Roger Corman, David Cronenberg, Pedro Almodóvar, Peter Bogdanovich, Larry Cohen, Peter Greenaway, Jonathan Demme, Roman Polanski, Stanley Kubrick, Patrice Leconte, Nicolas Roeg, John Sayles, Jacques Tati and Alex van Warmerdam.

The second wave of directors and associated titles were discovered with the help of the internet and the Antwerp film museum. They include Catherine Breillat, Georges Franju, Michael Haneke, Todd Haynes, Juzo Itami, David Lynch, Radley Metzger, François Ozon, Lars von Trier and Michael Winterbottom.

You will find cross-referenced information on these directors and their films, as well as info on genres which are dear to me, but maligned in the mainstream. I refer to art films, documentaries, erotic films, horror and science fiction, cult films or the combination of the above. In academia referred to as paracinema, they are perhaps overrepresented on this wiki. The reason for this is straightforward: there are numerous sites out there covering the films of canonized directors such as Scorsese, Bresson, Hitchcock and Tarantino; authors whose work I appreciate but who receive enough attention as it is. I try to find beauty in unexpected places and redress — what I perceive as — a ruling publication bias.