Smoking # 6

Spirit of Ecstasy

This comic, written by Mairead Case, is now appearing in a promo zine made by Light in the Attic Records. It celebrates their re-release of Serge Gainsbourg's classic "Melody Nelson" album.

(Click here to read page two of the comic.)

(Via dlasky@lj here.)

Coming soon...

"Engin/Explosif/Improvise"
by
Kiki et Loulou Picasso
Details here & here.
(Translated from the French.)
(Use search engine to the right to find more on Kiki & Loulou Picasso and the Bazooka group on the blog>)

'True Love Will Find You In The End'

(Via 'A Stranger's Candy' here.)

"Terminator Salvation" extended trailer

Jenny Saville - "Strategy 1964"

(Click on pic to enlarge)

Jenny Saville - "Passage"

Jenny Saville: With the transvestite I was searching for a body that was between genders. I had explored that idea a little in Matrix. The idea of floating gender that is not fixed. The transvestite I worked with has a natural penis and false silicone breasts. Thirty or forty years ago this body couldn’t have existed and I was looking for a kind of contemporary architecture of the body. I wanted to paint a visual passage through gender – a sort of gender landscape. To scale from the penis, across a stomach to the breasts, and finally the head. I tried to make the lips and eyes be very seductive and use directional mark-making to move your eye around the flesh.

Simon Schama: So you really do manipulate what’s in front of you through the mark-making. It’s very striking – I’m looking at a photograph of your transvestite painting Passage and that passage that moves from the penis and balls to the belly is really about the anatomy of paint as it constructs the body.

Jenny Saville: I have to really work at the tension between getting the paint to have the sensory quality that I want and be constructive in terms of building the form of a stomach, for example, or creating the inner crevice of a thigh. The more I do it, the more the space between abstraction and figuration becomes interesting. I want a painting realism. I try to consider the pace of a painting, of active and quiet areas. Listening to music helps a lot, especially music where there’s a hard sound and then soft breathable passages. In my earlier work my marks were less varied. I think of each mark or area as having the possibility of carrying a sensation. (Extract from ‘Interview with Jenny Saville by Simon Schama)

Saatchi Gallery here.

Superb site with lots of images here.
Glynn Griffiths, 'Jenny Saville in front of Plan', The Independent, Tuesday March 1, 1994

LYRICS: Manic Street Preachers - '4st 7lbs'

"4st. 7lbs."
(lyrics by Richey James Edwards.)

I eat too much to die
And not enough to stay alive
I'm sitting in the middle waiting

Days since I last pissed
Cheeks sunken and despaired
So gorgeous sunk to six stone
Lose my only remaining home

See my third rib appear
A week later all my flesh disappears
Stretching taut, cling-film on bone
I'm getting better

Karen says I've reached my target weight
Kate and Emma and Kristin know it's fake
Problem is diet's not a big enough word
I wanna be so skinny that I rot from view

I want to walk in the snow
And not leave a footprint
I want to walk in the snow
And not soil its purity

Stomach collapsed at five
Lift up my skirt my sex is gone
Naked and lovely and 5st. 2
May I bud and never flower

My vision's getting blurred
But I can see my ribs and I feel fine
My hands are trembling stalks
And I can feel my breasts are sinking

Mother tries to choke me with roast beef
And sits savouring her sole Ryvita
That's the way you're built my father said
But I can change, my cocoon shedding

I want to walk in the snow
And not leave a footprint
I want to walk in the snow
And not soil its purity

Kate and Kristin and Kit Kat
All things I like looking at
Too weak to fuss, too weak to die
Choice is skeletal in everybody's life

I choose my choice, I starve to frenzy
Hunger soon passes and sickness soon tires
Legs bend, stockinged I am Twiggy
And I don't mind the horror that surrounds me

Self-worth scatters, self-esteem's a bore
I long since moved to a higher plateau
This discipline's so rare so please applaud
Just look at the fat scum who pamper me so

Yeh 4st. 7, an epilogue of youth
Such beautiful dignity in self-abuse
I've finally come to understand life
Through staring blankly at my navel

From 'The Holy Bible' by the Manic Street Preachers.

Both 'The Holy Bible' & 'Journal For Plague Lovers' covers are paintings by Jenny Saville.

(Photo by Tom Sheehan)

Bonus:Audio

"You know so little about me. What if I turned into a werewolf or something?"

Christian Bale in 'The Machinist'.
The headline quote is also the first thing we hear on the new Manic Street Preachers album 'Journal For Plague Lovers'.

The legacy

Steve Bell's 'IF' strip ('The Guardian' 04/05/09)
(Click on pic to enlarge.)

Smoking # 5

Sasha Grey & Cosey Fanni Tutti exchanging gifts April 09.
Photo by Chris Carter.

The Stone Roses' debut to get deluxe treatment

The Stone Roses' 1989 self-titled album, a record that's often heralded as one of the greatest debut albums of all time, is set for a major resurrection this summer. On August 11, Silvertone/Legacy will deliver a deluxe 20th anniversary reissue of The Stone Roses in three different packages.

First, there's a single CD "Special Edition" containing the original album, remastered by Stone Roses frontman Ian Brown and producer John Leckie. It contains the original album as well as with the full-length version of "Fools Gold". Then there's a 2xCD plus DVD "Legacy Edition" containing the original album plus a bonus disc of demos plus the Live in Blackpool concert film, shot in 1989.

Finally, there's the mammoth "Collectors Edition", containing everything in the "Legacy Edition" as well as three LPs containing the original album and 13 non-album tracks. Oh, and a 2 GB USB drive shaped like a lemon (you know, like the album cover) containing "all the audio, promo videos, ringtones, wallpapers, plus previously unseen John Leckie home video footage of the recording of "Fool's Gold'," according to a press release. Not to mention a book featuring photos and musings from the band and their cohort as well as people like Noel Gallagher and Mark Ronson. AND six art prints painted by guitarist John Squire for the covers of the album's singles.

Whew. That's a lot of Stone Roses.

Tracklists for each disc listed below:

The Stone Roses:

01 I Wanna Be Adored
02 She Bangs the Drums
03 Waterfall
04 Don't Stop
05 Bye Bye Bad Man
06 Elizabeth My Dear
07 (Song for My) Sugar Spun Sister
08 Made of Stone
09 Shoot You Down
10 This Is the One
11 I Am the Resurrection
12 Fools Gold

The Lost Demos:

01 I Wanna Be Adored
02 She Bangs the Drums
03 Waterfall
04 Bye Bye Badman
05 Sugar Spun Sister
06 Shoot You Down (1 version)
07 This Is the One
08 I Am Resurrection
09 Elephant Stone
10 Going Down
11 Mersey Paradise
12 Where Angels Play
13 Something's Burning
14 One Love
15 Pearl Bastard

The B-Sides & Non Album Singles:

01 Elephant Stone
02 Full Fathom Five
03 The Hardest Thing
04 Going Down
05 Guernica
06 Mersey Paradise
07 Standing Here
08 Simone
09 Fools Gold
10 What the World Is Waiting For
11 One Love (Full Length)
12 Something's Burning (Full Length)
13 Where Angels Play

From 'Pitchfork' here.

The Stone Roses - Fools Gold

The best Can song NOT written by Can!

Cosey Fanni Tutti

The press release bill and the original poster (above) for the Coum Transmission's show 'Prostitution' at the ICA in 1976.
Cosey's thoughts on the show here and an interview here.
Cosey's 'action' at the Hayward Gallery 1979 (below) in which I was in the audience.

Mark Lanegan - Hit The City