Johnny YesNo video cover, 1983. Design by Neville Brody.
Being a Cabaret Voltaire enthusiast of long standing it was good to hear last week about the imminent reappearance of Johnny YesNo, an hour-long film by Peter Care for which the Cabs provided the soundtrack. Mute Records will be releasing Care’s debut on DVD in a set which includes two versions of the film together with two music CDs. I never got to see the original release on CV’s VHS label, Doublevision; for most of the 1980s I didn’t even have a colour TV never mind a video recorder so I missed all CV’s videocassettes aside from Gasoline In Your Eye. The new edition will be available in November. Brainwashed has a list of the contents while The Quietus posted a clip from the new “redux” version. (And before anyone tells me it’s on YouTube…yeah, everything is on YT in shitty quality and barnacled with the misanthropy-inducing drivel which passes there for comment. If I’m going to watch something for the first time I’d prefer it to be on a shiny disc, thanks.)
• The world has noticed Terrence Malick again following the release of The Tree of Life. Malick’s second feature is returning briefly to UK cinema screens, an event which prompted David Thomson to ask Is Days of Heaven the most beautiful film ever made?
• This week in imaginative art: S. Elizabeth on The Fantastical Fairy Tale Art of Sveta Dorosheva, AS Byatt on the strange paintings of Richard Dadd (there’s another Dadd article here), and Rick Poynor on Chris Foss and the Technological Sublime.
• Ethan Hein demonstrates how Alan Lomax came to have copyright control over many songs he had nothing to do with simply by recording traditional music.
• Visual Vitriol: The Street Art and Subcultures of the Punk and Hardcore Generation, a book by David Ensminger.
• More Club Silencio: Inside David Lynch’s Paris nightclub and a gallery of photos.
• Histoire un-Naturelle, selected works by Ruth Marten.
• Come hither: The deceptive beauty of orchids.
• More Peter Care: Just Fascination (1983) by Cabaret Voltaire | Sensoria (1984) by Cabaret Voltaire | Rise (1986) by Public Image Ltd.
Had you seen this? I first saw it and thought it might interest you and then further down noticed a nearly Flandrin pose…
The pictures are gorgeous (love the light in them)
In fact that whole site has a lot of beautiful things.
I love the art of Sveta Dorosheva. I see she is on LJ, so I’ll add her to my reader (can’t read her posts but at least I can enjoy the pictures).
How unfortunate that Lynch’s Parisian nightclub isn’t as surreal and mysterious as its cinematic namesake, oh well. Also never heard of Richard Dadd before, intriguing to say the least, obviously very talented. As detailed as his pictures are, one couldn’t be all that surprised if someone like him actually enjoyed being incarcerated for all the spare time for painting it alloted him.
Nathalie: I’d not seen those, thanks. Great photos.
Wiley: It seems to be a rule that, just as the solution to any narrative mystery is always inferior to the mystery itself (thanks, Jorge), so any real derivation from a fictional world is always going to be a disappointment. That said, the club is in Paris and since I love that city I’d be tempted to pay the extortionate fees for a membership.
Dadd is fascinating for being one of the most accomplished of all painters who were labeled insane which is one reason his paintings continue to work their strange spell when many of his sane (or whatever) contemporaries have been forgotten. The detail which caught my attention in Byatt’s piece was the suggestion that mercury poisoning may have unbalanced his mind. The 19th century was a deadly place with arsenic, lead and mercury in common use in all manner of household and industrial products. It’s no surprise that mental derangement seemed a lot more common then than it does today.
Did you know that “orchid” comes from the Greek word for testicle?
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=orchid&searchmode=term