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A 45-minute ‘God Save the Queen’ for HM Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee!


 
“A report in 2019 revealed that Queen Elizabeth II and her family cost the British people £67 million per year,” says grateful subject Andrew Liles, introducing his elongated version of the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen.” The monarchy is a sweet deal for Britons, since the royals put on the occasional horse show starring Tom Cruise to thank the common people for expending their lives in toil so that their betters may luxuriate among jeweled combs and Sèvres tea services.

Now, Liles has found a musical way to tell the royals “you’re welcome” for the generalized misery that supports their year-round debauch: extending Her Maj’s favorite Pistols choon from a length of about three minutes to 45, one for each year since 1977. In all likelihood, this is the very melody she will be humming this morning while she consumes a year of your wages for breakfast.

Unfortunately, there’s still no future, but on the bright side, there’s a lot more of it!
 

Posted by Oliver Hall
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05.19.2022
03:08 pm
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Team Human: Douglas Rushkoff and Richard Metzger talk counterculture (and where it might be heading)


 
I was on my old friend Douglas Rushkoff’s Team Human podcast. We taped this just before news of George Floyd’s murder became widely known, and talked for over four hours over the course of two long calls. The edited version is just under an hour. It’s always fun to have a conversation with him.

Playing for Team Human today, counterculture icon and Editor of Dangerous Minds, Richard Metzger. Metzger envisions what life might look like on the dole and what that means for the future of the counterculture.

Rushkoff and Metzger consider whether the ideals of yesterday’s counterculture were so successful that they’ve become the new over culture? And if so, who really are the new revolutionaries? They also consider the effect Covid-19 will have on a new generation’s financial prospects, and whether the underlying flaws in capitalism will finally be laid bare.

In his monologue, Rushkoff looks at the way our policing problems can only be solved if we fund and utilize other kinds of civil servants instead of just ones with weapons.

Read “Good Cops Don’t Need Grenade Launchers” by Douglas Rushkoff from Medium’s GEN.

 

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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06.12.2020
11:04 am
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New video for Mark Stewart’s first solo release in seven years, a DM premiere
04.18.2019
08:02 am
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‘Pay It All Back Vol. 7’ on On-U Sound
 

In a secret world of forbidden knowledge,
power comes at a terrible price.

A tour of every department of our media saturated society,
the most explosive conspiracy ever conceived,
the people shapers at every turn
we see ourselves as they want us to be.

Immersed in their options,
surrounded by their representations,
reality melts.

                            —Mark Stewart, “Favour”

The latest installment in On-U Sound’s Pay It All Back series of compilations, named after William S. Burroughs’ demand in Nova Express, gathers new music by Gary Lucas, Lee “Scratch” Perry, Roots Manuva & Doug Wimbish, Nisennenmondai, African Head Charge, Coldcut, Ghetto Priest, Sherwood & Pinch, Little Axe and Horace Andy, among others. Best of all, side three of the double LP kicks off with “Favour,” the first new solo material from Mark Stewart since 2012’s The Politics of Envy and its ghostly dub twin Exorcism of Envy.
 

Adrian Sherwood and Mark Stewart, London, 1985 (photo by Beezer, courtesy of Mute)

The video for “Favour,” directed by Stewart and Ruth Perry, sets the song’s opening lines, about emerging from a coma, deep in the sidereal void. Parched after his long sleep, the singer asks for a soda and receives dynamite—a better deal than Howlin’ Wolf got.

Everything in “Favour,” from the symbols of circular time suspended onscreen to the drum the size of New Jersey reverberating on the soundtrack, suggests a vast mental space where all that is solid has melted into air. The only landmarks are memories that vanish as soon as they surface, represented here by footage from Tøni Schifer’s documentary On/Off: Mark Stewart (Pop Group to Maffia). Perry and Stewart have processed these images from the singer’s life to resemble the “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite” sequence of 2001.

Mark Stewart told DM in January that he’s got “like two or three albums worth of new stuff” in the can, so keep your eyes on the stars.

Pay It All Back Vol. 7 is available from On-U Sound and Amazon.
 

Posted by Oliver Hall
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04.18.2019
08:02 am
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Test Dept returns with the new video ‘Landlord’ (a DM premiere)
02.21.2019
08:58 am
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Test Dept’s new album, ‘Disturbance’

Next week, the London-based activist industrial group Test Dept, forgers of the “Stakhanovite sound,” will release their first new album in over 20 years: a merciless piece of work called Disturbance.

Though Test Dept’s first records included collaborations with Cabaret Voltaire, FM Einheit and Genesis P-Orridge, in that milieu, their left politics stuck out like red flannel underwear. Their second album, Shoulder to Shoulder, was a split release with the South Wales Striking Miners Choir on which the two groups combined to perform a track called “Comrades.” I have a hard time picturing this moving gesture of solidarity coming from, say, Blixa Bargeld or Adi Newton.

We’ve got the premiere of the brand new Test Dept video “Landlord” below, and founding members Paul Jamrozy and Graham Cunnington were kind enough to answer a few questions by email.
 

Courtesy One Little Indian

There’s a very funny contribution from Laibach in [the excellent Test Dept book] Total State Machine enumerating the industrial groups active in 1984 and dismissing all but one: “only Test Dept were somehow made of (industrial) flesh and blood, only they were actively involved within concrete political and social space.” What is Test Dept’s political orientation? Is it true that Test Dept was the only industrial group of the left?

Paul Jamrozy: I am not entirely sure of that but certainly many groups that were linked to industrial music flirted with right wing iconography or were overtly apolitical, some with a snooty attitude as if politics were something beneath them. There came a point where that kind of trendy indifference became untenable, or you could say part of the unacceptable face of freedom.

Graham Cunnington: Orientation? Left. Socialist with somewhat anarchist tendencies.

Are there any plans to reissue the Test Dept catalog? Are there any plans to tour?

Graham: We are looking to release the back catalogue with One Little Indian in the near future. We have the album launch live show in London on 26th April with Manchester on 18th and Portsmouth on 25th. There are plans to tour UK and mainland Europe later in the year.

From my perspective, Test Dept’s return helps me make out the continuity of historical developments in the UK and US over the last four decades. For instance, Brexit and Grenfell appear on the news as illustrations of our strange, uncertain times, in which shocking events come out of nowhere and nothing is connected to anything else; but if I put on The Unacceptable Face of Freedom or Disturbance, a very clear story about the neoliberal period emerges. How does it look from your point of view?

Graham: The material on Disturbance has as its DNA our earlier work. The Unacceptable Face of Freedom was about the days of the Thatcher-Reagan axis driving forward the inception of the neoliberal period and the effects that had on society at the time; and Disturbance is about the effect that the development of that is having now. We are in the end-game of that whole arc and the system, quite obviously unsustainable, is collapsing, shored up by those with vested interests in its ongoing implementation who continue to tighten their grip; leading to austerity, the fragmentation of the welfare state, a return to Victorian levels of inequality and the rise of darker forces, as profit is extracted in ever more inventive ways and surveillance capitalism attempts to hook every aspect of our lives into the raw material for further gain and control.
 

Courtesy One Little Indian
 
I wish I could have attended the Assembly of Disturbance festival marking the centenary of the October Revolution. Please tell me about it. Was it the debut of the new material on Disturbance?

Graham: Assembly of Disturbance incorporated a platform for discussion and artistic expression, with live music, film, sound-art, installation, performance, DJs and talks on various forms of artistic, political and philosophical thinking. In its early days, the October Revolution gave rise to a huge explosion of creativity and radical new forms of art that expressed the visionary possibility of a new age and a different path for society, even though the society that spawned it was soon crushed by the dictates of Stalin’s despotic regime. That kind of visionary thinking, not for a communist state but for a radical systematic change with a global perspective, is something that the world is crying out for now – a disturbance in the present order. That’s what we were marking with the event.

The new material on Disturbance had been developing in a live format over a few years, from electronic remix work to a full live presentation, but it was certainly a coming together of many of the ideas we had been working on.

Collaboration with dancers, visual artists, and performance artists has long been part of your practice. How did you hook up with Kris Canavan for the “Landlord” video?

Graham: We met Kris while working with Rebecca Shatwell and the AV Festival in Newcastle (the DS30 installation/film and An Unprecedented Campaign live film soundtrack). We were looking towards doing a large-scale show for the AV Festival in 2018 and Kris was a possible collaborator on that. Unfortunately, in that year, the AV’s funding was cut and their final iteration had to be scaled back.

The video is a recording of Canavan performing his piece “Yes, it’s Fucking Political”, against a wall to wall video installation by our visual director David Altweger, which displays a stream of chopped up and manipulated broadcasts including the events around Grenfell – a tapestry of media fragments and surveillance footage that encompasses Kanavan’s body from all sides.

“Yes, it’s Fucking Political” was conceived in 2010 & originally designed to be a rallying cry or call for direct action against the betrayal of the electorate by the Liberal Democrats and a forthcoming Conservative agenda of austerity, which would predictably see the poorest suffer and shoulder the burden of responsibility.

One Little Indian will release Test Dept’s new album, Disturbance, on March 1. Below, Kris Canavan performs in the video for the new song “Landlord.” 
 

Posted by Oliver Hall
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02.21.2019
08:58 am
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‘The Monkey’s Teeth,’ French cartoon written by patients in a mental hospital


 
Les dents du singe (The Monkey’s Teeth) is the directorial debut of René Laloux, the animator who made Fantastic Planet and Time Masters. This, his first short, came out of the experimental La Borde clinic at Cour-Cheverny. As supervisor of artistic activities at La Borde, Laloux staged therapeutic puppet shows with the resident malades mentaux during the years before he gave them their big break in the motion picture business. 

According to his obit in Positif, Laloux and his patients were aided in writing the screenplay for Les dents du singe by Félix Guattari, later the co-author of a number of influential books with the philosopher Gilles Deleuze; the group’s screenwriting method was something like a combination of “automatic writing, exquisite corpse, and Jung’s tests.” In 1960, Guattari was working at La Borde as a therapist. He had been drawn to the clinic by its founder, the Lacanian psychiatrist Jean Oury.

The biography Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives conveys a sense of life at La Borde:

Oury baptized his clinic as soon as it opened in April 1953, writing a constitution that he dated Year I (a tongue-in-cheek reference to the French Revolution) and that defined the three guiding principles for this collective therapeutic undertaking. The mangers were protected by democratic centralism, reflecting the Marxist-Leninist ideal that was still popular in the year of Stalin’s death. The second principle reflected the idea of a communist utopia whereby each staff member would alternate between manual labor and intellectual work, which effectively made any status temporary. Tasks were assigned on a rotating basis: everyone in the clinic switched from medical care to housekeeping, from running workshops to preparing theatrical activities. The last principle was antibureaucratic, so things were organized in a communitarian way whereby responsibilities, tasks, and salaries were all shared. Although the term “institutional psychotherapy” had not yet been coined, many of its themes were already in evidence: spatial permeability, freedom of movement, a critique of professional roles and qualifications, institutional flexibility, and the need for a patients’ therapy club.

Hollywood has not yet produced many tales about bike-riding simians meting out justice at the dentist’s office, but I expect we’ll see a “reboot” of The Monkey’s Teeth before long.

 
via Reddit

Posted by Oliver Hall
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09.27.2018
07:38 am
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Elmer Fudd, capitalist shill: The auto industry finances Looney-Tunes propaganda, 1950s


 
Within a few years of the end of World War II, a perceived need to stamp out any trace of leftist ideas led to the scourge of McCarthyism and a heavy emphasis on what I consider to be the Chamber of Commerce outlook on life, which led to brittle pro-capitalist maxims such as “what’s good for General Motors is good for America,” which derived from a comment made by Charles Erwin Wilson (formerly an executive at that company) during his confirmation hearings to become Eisenhower’s Secretary of Defense. 

As Jeet Heer pointed out in an insightful tweetstorm  over the weekend, the election of Labour candidate Clement Attlee to become British Prime Minister in 1945 was a deeply unsettling moment for U.S. capitalist interests. After all, if SOCIALISM could (gasp) prosper in the United Kingdom of all places, why, it could happen anywhere, couldn’t it? Within just a few years you had the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (started by some other GM muckety-muck) shoveling money in the general direction of Isadore “Friz” Freleng to concoct a few amusing cartoons featuring Sylvester and Elmer Fudd to promote the wisdom of the capitalist techniques of using stockholder investments to finance much-needed infrastructure, a process that would inevitably enrich the working masses.

At what might be called the high point of McCarthy’s paranoid blacklist—1954 to 1956—the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation sponsored three Warner Bros. cartoons—the titles were “By Word of Mouse” (1954), “Heir-Conditioning” (1955), and “Yankee Dood It” (1956). A friend points out that Warner Bros., in taking the Sloan money, would have had every incentive to take the heat off of their own creative staff, which (it can be presumed) had more than a few left-leaning types on it. If you ever made a habit of watching Looney Tunes cartoons after school (my era for that hobby was the late 1970s), it’s almost certain that you saw these animated attempts to convince you of the superiority of capitalism—not exactly the usual subject matter of afternoon cartoon antics.
 

 
The capitalist propaganda hardly have been more overt—in all three cartoons the antics grind to a halt while a favored character steps up and explicitly feeds the audience a condensed presentation of the virtues of the capitalist system. In “By Word of Mouse,” German mouse Hans visits his American cousin Willy, who lives in a department store named “Stacy’s.” Hans spends much of the cartoon goggling at the unimaginable vitality of the American system—gesturing at a highway crammed with vrooming jalopies, Hans can’t grok how many plutocrats could possibly have so many new cars. Street-smart Willy blandly replies that those are regular workers, and a lot of those cars aren’t all that new—a nation full of car owners being old hat to him. Eventually they visit a professor mouse who explains via multiple charts why the existence of Rival Department Store (yes, that’s the name) obliges Stacy’s to cut costs in order to maximize sales, which ends up enriching the labor force.

In “Heir-Conditioning,” Sylvester the Cat inherits multiple millions of dollars, so understandably, the alley cats in the neighborhood descend on his residence in order to get ahold of some moola. Elmer Fudd plays a “financial advisor” who tries to get the unwilling feline to invest his piles of cash in order to increase his own profits while enriching the rest of society—Elmer even hauls out a film projector to demonstrate the relative poverty of workers 50 years previous—after all, they hadn’t reaped the benefits of mass production yet. Hilariously, when Sylvester temporarily absconds with a large satchel full of paper currency and offers to give it to the alley cats, they tell him to listen to his bald-headed analyst and invest the money.

The oddest entry in the Sloan/WB canon might be the last one, titled “Yankee Dood It.” That short takes its plot elements from the 19th-century story “The Elves and the Shoemaker,” which became one of the Grimms’ collection of fairy tales. Here, Elmer is the “King of industrial Elves” and magically materializes at the workshop of the “Elf Shoe Company,” whose proprietor refuses to infest in the needed machinery to increase his profits, etc. This time, instead of showing a film, Elmer causes a screen to materialize, on which he walks the timid entrepreneur through a sort of slide show about the need to use a proper factory instead of unpaid artisanal elves. Reason magazine writer Tim Cavanaugh noted that “Yankee Dood It” is “an interesting window on the politics of the fabulous fifties: not just that somebody felt the need to argue that productivity benefits somebody besides greedy bosses, but that they made the argument through the commander of a militarized corps of elves.”

All three of these cartoons appear on the DVD Looney Tunes Golden Collection: Volume 6, but you can watch them after the jump.

After the jump, watch Elmer in full “Chamber of Commerce” mode…....

READ ON
Posted by Martin Schneider
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09.24.2018
12:57 pm
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New book collects every issue of the Crass zine ‘International Anthem’


The ‘domestic violence issue’ of International Anthem, 1979
 
This deserves more press than it’s received: a new book collects every issue of International Anthem: A Nihilist Newspaper for the Living, including two never before published. The volume is an official product of “the publishing wing of Crass and beyond,” the venerable Exitstencil Press.

International Anthem was Gee Vaucher’s newspaper, but denying its connection to the band would be a challenge. Its 1978-‘83 run coincided, roughly, with Crass’s (as opposed to, say, Exit‘s), and the Crass logo sometimes appeared on the paper’s cover (see above). Eve Libertine, $ri Hari Nana B.A., Penny Rimbaud, G. Sus (aka Gee Vaucher) and Dave King contributed to its pages.
 

Gee Vaucher collage from International Anthem #2 (via ArtRabbit)
 
The book contains scans of the originals (“bad printing, creases, mistakes and all”), reproduced at full size. If it is good to buy quality art books, it is better to buy them directly from the artist. Buddhists call it “accumulating merit,” and they say you want to do a lot of it in this life, so you don’t have to come back as Eric Trump. Below, consume two hours of Crass programming broadcast on Australia’s JJJ Radio in 1987, featuring some Crass texts read in Australian accents and contemporary interviews with Gee and Penny at Dial House.

Help Gee Vaucher collect 20 million hand-drawn stick figures for her World War I project.
 

Posted by Oliver Hall
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05.17.2018
08:47 am
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Ulrike Meinhof’s teenage riot TV movie


“If you obey, they are happy because you are ruined. Then they are cool because they have crushed you.”
 
Right before she embarked on a campaign of left-wing terror, Ulrike Meinhof produced her screenplay for Bambule, a TV movie about the miserable lot of girls in a juvenile reform institution. It was supposed to air in 1970, but the broadcast was canceled after Meinhof helped the Red Army Faction bust Andreas Baader out of prison.

The title means “prison riot,” though apparently the bambule originated as a form of nonviolent prison protest, making a “Jailhouse Rock”-style racket by drumming on anything available. “You lousy screws!”

During one scene, the girls beat a frenzied tattoo on their doors. But in Meinhof’s own definition of the term, from a 1969 radio report (quoted in Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of the R.A.F.), there is no mention of noise:

Bambule means rebellion, resistance, counter-violence – efforts toward liberation. Such things happen mostly in summer, when it is hot, and the food is even less appealing than usual, and anger festers in the corners with the heat. Such things are in the air then – it could be compared to the hot summers in the black ghettoes of the United States.

 

(via ARD.de)
 
Meinhof based the screenplay on her conversations with girls at the Eichenhof Youth Custody Home, for which Bambule is not much of an advertisement. They had a prescription for teens like Monika, expelled from a convent for kissing another girl: discipline and work, with occasional breaks for obeying the rules. The only pleasures in Bambule are the small acts of disobedience available to teenagers. They smoke cigarettes, curse out a few fuckwords, write graffiti about LSD and hash, play the Bee Gees’ “Massachusetts.” All relationships with adults are characterized by violence, cruelty and exploitation; everyone over 20 is dead inside. It’s like watching an episode of Dragnet written by a militant leftist.

More after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Oliver Hall
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05.11.2018
08:56 am
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‘Europe after the Rain,’ classic documentary on Dada and Surrealism
05.03.2018
10:14 am
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‘Portrait of Andre Breton’ by Man Ray, c. 1930
 
Europe after the Rain, the Arts Council of Great Britain’s 1978 documentary on Dada and Surrealism, looks at the careers of André Breton, Tristan Tzara, Salvador Dalí, Antonin Artaud, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Kurt Schwitters, Yves Tanguy, John Heartfield, Giorgio de Chirico, Francis Picabia and René Magritte, among others. Sure, there are better ways to see these artists’ work than on YouTube, but this film is worth watching, because it makes both movements’ commitment to revolutionary left-wing politics explicit as few other surveys do.

Take this list from 1919, drawn up by Richard Huelsenbeck and Raoul Hausmann on behalf of the Dadaist Revolutionary Central Council:

Dadaism demands:

1) The international revolutionary union of all creative and intellectual men and women on the basis of radical Communism;
2) The introduction of progressive unemployment through comprehensive mechanization of every field of activity. Only by unemployment does it become possible for the individual to achieve certainty as to the truth of life and finally become accustomed to experience;
3) The immediate expropriation of property (socialization) and the communal feeding of all; further, the erection of cities of light, and gardens which will belong to society as a whole and prepare man for a state of freedom.

(The full manifesto goes on to demand free meals on Potsdamer Platz for “all creative and intellectual men and women,” the requisition of churches, “immediate organization of a Dadaist propaganda campaign with 150 circuses for the enlightenment of the proletariat,” and “immediate regulation of all sexual relations according to the views of international Dadaism through establishment of a Dadaist sexual center.”)
 

‘Europe after the Rain II’ by Max Ernst, 1940-1942
 
The movie is full of treasures: BBC interviews with Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp from the Sixties, a reading of Artaud’s “Address to the Dalai Lama,” an account of Freud’s meeting with Dalí. As usual in a film of this type, the attempts to dramatically recreate speeches by historical figures are embarrassing. I am not extra fond of the portrayal of Tzara as a supercilious toff. But the re-enactment of Breton’s dialogue with an official of the Parti communiste français is illuminating, and complements the other valuable material on the “Pope of Surrealism”: his work with shell-shocked soldiers in World War I, trials and expulsions of other Surrealists, collaboration with Leon Trotsky in Mexico, less-than-heroic contributions to the French Resistance, and study of the occult.

A VHS rip of the movie has been up on YouTube for some time, but this sharpened upload only recently appeared through the good offices of Manufacturing Intellect. It’s worth noting that the original VHS rip is nearly six minutes longer.
 

Posted by Oliver Hall
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05.03.2018
10:14 am
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When Luis Buñuel wrecked Charlie Chaplin’s Christmas
04.12.2018
09:30 am
Topics:
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Eduardo Ugarte, Luis Buñuel, Jose Lopez Rubio, Leonor and Tono at Charlie Chaplin’s house, 1930

Whenever someone voices alarm about the “war on Christmas,” I think of my hero, Luis Buñuel, and smile. In 1930, Buñuel disrupted a Christmas party in Los Angeles by leading an attack on the tree and, when it proved hard to destroy, jumping up and down on the presents. Among the guests was Charlie Chaplin, whose house Buñuel often visited “to play tennis, swim, or use the sauna”; sometimes, he sat by the pool drinking with Sergei Eisenstein.

I seem to remember Buñuel or his son, Juan Luis, saying somewhere or other that Buñuel and his comrades attacked the Christmas tree because they found both it and the custom of gift-giving intolerably bourgeois. In My Last Sigh, however, the director writes that he was offended by a patriotic gesture.

He and his roommate, the screenwriter Eduardo Ugarte, were at the house of the Spanish comedian Tono and his wife Leonor, who had been Buñuel’s companions on the recent voyage from Le Havre to Hollywood:

At Christmastime, Tono and his wife gave a dinner party for a dozen Spanish actors and screenwriters, as well as Chaplin and Georgia Hale. We all brought a present that was supposed to have cost somewhere between twenty and thirty dollars, hung them on the tree, and began drinking. (Despite Prohibition, there was, of course, no shortage of alcohol.) Rivelles, a well-known actor at that time, recited a grandiloquent Spanish poem by Marquina, to the glory of the soldiers in Flanders. Like all patriotic displays, it made me nauseous.

“Listen,” I whispered to Ugarte and an actor named Peña at the dinner table, “when I blow my nose, that’s the signal to get up. Just follow me and we’ll take that ridiculous tree to pieces!”

Which is exactly what we did, although it’s not easy to dismember a Christmas tree. In fact, we got a great many scratches for some rather pathetic results, so we resigned ourselves to throwing the presents on the floor and stomping on them. The room was absolutely silent; everyone stared at us, openmouthed.

“Luis,” Tono’s wife finally said. “That was unforgivable.”

“On the contrary,” I replied. “It wasn’t unforgivable at all. It was subversive.”

The following morning dawned with a delicious coincidence, an article in the paper about a man in Berlin who tried to take apart a Christmas tree in the middle of the midnight Mass.

On New Year’s Eve, Chaplin—a forgiving man—once again invited us to his house, where we found another tree decorated with brand-new presents. Before we sat down to eat, he took me aside.

“Since you’re so fond of tearing up trees, Buñuel,” he said to me, “why don’t you get it over with now, so we won’t be disturbed during dinner?”

I replied that I really had nothing against trees, but that I couldn’t stand the kind of ostentatious patriotism I’d heard that evening.

Below, the French TV series Cinéastes de notre temps catches up with Luis Buñuel in ‘63 or ‘64.
 

Posted by Oliver Hall
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04.12.2018
09:30 am
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