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Poe, Baudelaire, Rops, erotic idolatory & satanic idleness; Jarry’s & Maeterlinck’s redefinition of theatrical space: of puppets & porn

The title Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (translated into French as Histoires extraordinaires) combines two terms taken from the vocabulary of the decorative arts, erecting an aesthetic system on the opposition between fantastic caricature and nonfigurative ornament, between the deformation of the body and the pure abstraction of line,

Virgil Thomson in chaos & bed: defining freedom & fun

the rigidities of the modern world are to be found in the strict application to politics and sociology of Das Kapital of Marx and the techniques of psychoanalysis as practiced by Freud – not by the others. The scientific world has boh the spontaneous discoveries expounded mathematically and mathematics itself, which,

what’s wrong with Branca?

I picked up this book for the John Cage interview. Not that the offer of some kind of vicarious intercourse with Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, Five, count ’em, Five Generations of American Experimental Composers, didn’t arouse my innerest. No. And William Duckworth got to talking with John Cage and

the devil’s work

It used to be that a University Dean could stand before the student body and espouse the view of the University as a check and balance to a well-functioning democracy. He or she could, if the need arose, as it did in the late 1980s, with the threat posed by

is strategic social investment another way of saying charity?

I don’t know. Is freedom just another word for nothing left to lose? From one meeting with a CNZ representative at the Auckland offices and a cursory reading of the Creative New Zealand, Arts Council of New Zealand’s Strategic Development Plan and Statement of Intent 2007-2010, I know

Cf. theatre of terror: insofar as our relationship to capitalism, negotiated by consumer items, involves a similar inflationary principle to that between the mother and infant in Melanie Klein’s ‘theatre of terror’

As Daniel Harris concedes at the beginning of his excellent book on the aesthetics of consumerism, Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic, it is ridiculous to “single out corporations as the source of all that is crude, manipulative, and mercenary in our society, while … whitewash[ing] the consumer as a helpless

Gustave Moreau explains The Life of Humanity (1884-6) to his mum

I have designed a decorative and monumental work as a group of subjects representing the three ages of sacred and profane mythology: the Golden Age, the Silver Age and the Iron Age. I have symbolised these different ages by dividing each one into compositions representing the three phases of the