Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961, Directed by Roger Corman)

This film was shot in five days, in Puerto Rico, for tax reasons. Apparently it concerns a gang of crooks trying to steal some gold from one General Tostada and his crew, by pretending a sea monster is on the loose.

One of the characters is a henchman who speaks in dubbed-in animal noises. Amongst the actors is Robert Towne who went on to write some extraordinarily original and intelligent scripts in the 1970s, including those of "Chinatown", "The Last Detail" and "The Parallax View". Apparently the director appears in a cameo, wearing a suit and sunglasses, grinning maniacally.

I've never seen this movie and don't particularly intend to.

From sleeve notes to the record "Something is Wrong- Songs From East Africa, 1952-1957" (HJRLP50-2):

"Today it can be hard to decipher these songs. An email request for help in transcribing some of the Luo lyrics brought the following response: "Please note that Luo, like most language, is fast evolving and therefore the meanings used then would be different today. Also Luo, the language, varies at different geographic locations. We Luos from South Nyanza in Kenya use the word haro to mean "pruning vegetables" whereas Luos from Central Nyanza use the same term for "sex"!"

Currently on display at the West End galleries of Hauser and Wirth (and in nearby St. James’s Square) is an enormous show by the Los Angeles based artist Paul McCarthy (born 1945) entitled “The King, The Island, The Train, The House, The Ship”. Viewing these pieces recently I felt that some outstanding work was on display. 

I want to focus on the two central works of the exhibition, both of which were worked on by McCarthy over the same eight year period, each feeding into the other.

“Train, Mechanical” (2003-2009) features two gigantic anamatronic silicone figures with swivelling, expressive George W. Bush heads, both with wide open mouths and bulging eyes that directly confront onlookers when approached. In constant mechanical movement they are both continuously sodomizing a couple of pigs, who both, in addition, have a couple of piglets repeatedly entering their heads with their erect piglet phalluses.

Gouges have been formed in the bodies of all of these figures, who seem to have been created from rotting mounds of pink flesh, with rough pitted coatings of skin, absent limbs, bloated bellies and a range of possible congenital defects. Wires & boxes are visible, emerging from the back of each of the Bush “dolls” and spilling downwards in an intricate chaos underneath them, and whilst all of these figures are in motion, the machinery propelling them onwards creates creaking sounds akin to the hideous whinings of pigs.

                                                                                        

At first viewing “Train, Mechanical” seemed to me a little cartoonlike, somewhat too obviously blunt a political statement, however memorable and accurate its portrayal of the recent political landscape, and despite its genuinely visceral, disgusting power, and mordant dark acidic humour, I thought that it was perhaps a little too easy as a statement.

However, its companion piece, “Pig Island” (2003-2010), arguably the outstanding work of the exhibition, considerably expands this worldview to the point of achieving the epic. McCarthy let this piece expand and gestate within his studio over the course of eight years, so that in the end it is half “completed” work and half transplanted studio.  Here fragmented versions of the “Train, Mechanical” sculptures are placed within a sea of detritus on a series of raised platforms taking up the entirety of a large gallery room.

Jagged piles of wood are strewn across surfaces caked with brown dust, stray nails, latex gloves, dirty towels and aluminium tins of adhesive substances. These jostle with all sorts of miscellaneous items: plastic Disney figures, shaven-headed young women, emptied buckets of fried chicken, scattered portions of a drumkit, a photograph of Angelina Jolie, baseball trophies, a number of yellow polyurethane George W. Bush heads, floors littered with thousands of fragments of crumbled lumps of pink clay massed together like wormy heaps of minced flesh.

McCarthy himself has referred to the piece as a “sculpture machine” and you do sense that an endless series of forms could potentially emerge from within its folds. There is an exciting feeling of being privy to the secret chamber where bold and prolonged acts of creation have taken place, something I always felt when seeing Eduardo Paolozzi’s studio (pictured below), which I would often go and see when I was a student in Edinburgh. A "recreation" of his studio has been permanently installed in the city's Dean Gallery. It shares with "Pig Island" a similar display of unusual clutter, a predilection for severed sculpted heads and the magical feeling of being able to see what has been concealed and left "behind the scenes".

  

In all “Pig Island” can be conceived of as a disdainful comical self-portrait of the artist (without the artist's body being depicted), also as an extended metaphor for the entirety of the U.S.A., in particular forming an artistic testament to the appalling grunting brutality and violence of recent years in what was conceivably the worst American political administration since the birth of that particular nation, and yet "Pig Island" is also an extremely hopeful vision of what that nation and its citizens (and others) might be capable of achieving through acts of the imagination.

The exhibition continues until January the 14^th.

"various occurrences of 2011"

1. a white cat (lucie) sometime pet of an illustrious industrialist, roamed the streets of Marseille, enjoying an afternoon of absolute freedom

2. various forgotten audio recordings of ghosts were discovered in a shed, inside a mahogany box stuffed with torn petticoats lined with crinoline

3. hairdressers everywhere discussed the ambiguities of love

4. a 49-year-old man, sat in a threadbare brown armchair, dreamt of opening an ostrich farm on the Isle of Man

5. the discipline of anthropology declined

6. after spending some time pretending to be a donkey, a boy, in a room, in Ghana, dizzy with fatigue, fainted

7. the walls of a leisure centre, which had been denied the funds required for a full renovation programme, were painted a shade of eggshell blue

8. on thursday the 19th of may, a security guard, working in an abandoned cinema, successfully completed a crossword puzzle

9. an ant emerged, from underneath a wardrobe, during the late summer, in Khatlon province, Tajikistan

10. guava-flavoured jelly was consumed

11. a woman found her left armpit to be itchy

12. various people living in and around Hull took up new hobbies with some success

Onwards!

The most exciting contemporary art show which I have ever seen was by the artist Stephen Wright and held at the Last Tuesday Society in Hackney, London in 2010. This venue, is in itself one of the most extraordinary places in the city, with a bizarre and extensive collection of neglected objects for sale- most of them in some way occult or obscene, including shrunken human heads, animals pickled in glass jars, instruments of torture and the erect penis of a hanged man from the 18th century (unless that's been sold by now). There are more or less continuous contemporary art shows on display there, as well as many different kinds of talks and workshops.

Entering the shop that evening was perhaps the most intense bodily experience I have ever had in direct relation to any artwork of any medium. Having been invited to the show without having any idea of quite what the art might consist of, I walked through the door (my first trip to the shop even!) to encounter such a dizzying, seemingly endless array of colours and forms, that my mind unspooled, fragmented, dissolved. I was both frightened and grateful.

This work is traditionally known as Outsider Art, a phenomenon which fascinates me, which I feel a profound affinity with. I really don't care about the orthodoxies of any artistic establishment, am far more concerned with creation undertaken purely for impassioned purposes, that is not overly worried about impressing anyone, that emblazons itself jubilantly on its sleeves, rather than languishing in the comfortable obscurity of textbook theories, of official accolades.

Since 1999 Mr. Wright has been transforming his own house, in Dulwich, into a living artwork. These photographs are all of this abode. He is apparently open to members of the public arranging visits, but I have yet to do this myself.

His work, with its myriad of forms, of dolls, bottle caps, seashells, garlands, its long looping handpainted texts of autobiography, is very natural & warm & human, with a delightfully pitched sense of the ridiculous, expressing essentially universal desires for play, for colour, for joy. I find it immensely inspiring and defiant.

dream i will never have #1:

kidnapped. benevolently. blindfolded, but otherwise unburdened by my captors, led towards the insides of a mysterious vehicle.

eventually, inevitably, the countryside. led into a building with a vast echoing chamber. after encountering various delights to the senses (mild dronings, aniseed placed on tongue etc.) veil is lifted to reveal a large room, entirely empty and white, in its centre a spiral staircase leading downwards. i am compelled to investigate.

at the bottom of the steps an enormous network of teeming underground passageways, a series of secret cities, their thoroughfares and byways thronging with pedestrians and stray cats.

i wander for some time. linger in a cathedral built from antique clocks. pay for a shave in a barber´s shop replete with tropical fishtank. come across intriguing unknown publications for sale at a street kiosk. discover a boutique selling only single sentences written on scraps of cardboard.

In full growth an artichoke plant can spread 9 feet in diameter and stand 5 feet tall. Typically a plant will produce about 20 artichokes in a year.

Artichoke seeds, probably cultivated, were discovered when excavating Mons Claudianus, a Roman quarry in eastern Egypt where Black Quartz Diorite was once mined.

The Romans considered artichokes to be an aphrodisiac, and this belief continued up to the 16th Century. During this time women were prohibited from eating them.

Picasso painted his "Woman with an Artichoke" in 1941, in Paris. His work depicts a woman whose features have been distorted and fragmented, perhaps by the terrors of war. Here the artichoke resembles a spiky weapon, like a club, and is held on to defiantly.

 Osias Beert, a Flemish painter of Still Lifes who lived from 1580 until 1624, entitled this painting "Still Life with an Artichoke".

Castroville, California (pop. 6481) proclaims itself to be "The Artichoke Center of the World". Almost the entirety of the U.S. artichoke supply is produced in and around Castroville.

"The World's Largest Artificial Artichoke" is on display here in a parking lot. It was crafted from steel and plaster in 1963.

Every year an Artichoke Festival is held in Castroville. At the first, in 1948, Marilyn Monroe was declared Artichoke Queen.

Cynar is a dark brown bittersweet liquer, still manufactured in Italy by Campari, whose most significant ingredient is an artichoke (Cynara scolymus). It was first launched in 1952 and is apparently especially popular in Switzerland.