G-A-Y Day(s)- R.E.M.- Chronic Town EP (1982)- Vinyl Rip (24 bit FLAC)

We had to throw in some R.E.M. ON G-A-Y Day(s), especially after we had to pull 69 Love Songs after two "I'm asking you nicely..." removal requests. Oh, well. No one's gonna golden shower on our G-A-Y parade. Here's a pristine vinyl rip of R.E.M.'s first E.P. Think of it as the 70th love song. Murmur is sure to follow. I hope.




From Richard Grabel at NME:

A town is chronic because we are fated to revisit it time and time again. A chronic town might also be a carny town, jammed full of colour, with incomprehensible barkers and terrible secrets stowed away behind the tents.

This chronic music revisits us, reminds us of the wonderfully, excitingly familiar but of nothing in particular. There are of course precedents, influences if you like. Ringing and chiming '60s guitars are part of it. Voices and harmonies that are distinctly American, not by being any kind of nostalgic throwback but inherently, deeply, are a part of it; as is a modern English pop sensibility, an openness to the possibilities of what pop music can carry or suggest.

Chronic Town is five songs that spring to life full of immediacy and action and healthy impatience. Songs that won't be denied.




Mystery is a thing that is lacking in run of the mill pop product. Michael Stipe's voice comes close, gets right up next to you, but his mumblings seem to contain secrets. Intimacy and distance. The voice tells of knowledge but doesn't give too much away. The songs have mystery but are in no way fuzzy. No, they have a cinematic vividness, they paint pictures.

Sometimes the pictures are clear and particular, but shaded and shadowed by the singer's mumblings. Sometimes the pictures are made of sharply seen fragments whose composition is a puzzle. This is the way Stipe scrambles language, plays with it like a dyslexic poet, scatters loaded words around like leaves in the wind. Pete Buck's chord ring memory bells, push buttons of good feelings. Stipe's voice vibrates with wonder, too. It's a voice that is guarded at times, astonished at others. Voices and chords and melodies form rhymes with each other.

"I Could Live a Million Years." Stipe makes such outrageous promises. And makes us believe them. The construction of these songs is classic. There are bridges and balances, put to original use. The logic of these songs makes me smile, makes me want to sing along.




You can read all sorts of things into these songs. Like the thematic balance in "Wolves" between outside and inside, which are also suspicion and relaxation, danger and safety. The verse tells us what's creeping in the garden: "wilder lower wolves." And the chorus invites us in, with a group harmony that is airy and open, to a "house in order," a-a-a-a.

"Carnival" makes us imagine a movie, its entire plot outlined and its scenery suggested in seven short lines. "Diminished carnival...stranger to these parts...boxcars pulling out of town." Perfect economy of expression, a perfect puzzle, perfect enchantment.

Well, not perfect, of course. I suspect these songs could have been mixed better, the guitar given even more of that clearly pitched sound, the voice given even more presence, some extra force. But R.E.M. ring true, and it's great to hear something as unforced and as cunning as this.




Technical Information:

Artist: R.E.M.
Album: Chronic Town E.P.
Year: 1982

Audio Codec(s): FLAC
Encoding: Lossless
Rip: Vinyl
Avg. bitrate: 3109 kb/s
Sample rate: 96000 Hz
Bits per sample: 24
Channels: 2
File size: 452 MB
Length: 0:20:20


Tracklisting:

01. Wolves, Lower (4:13)
02. Gardening At Night (3:31)
03. Carnival Of Sorts (Box Cars) (3:52)
04. 1,000,000 (3:06)
05. Stumble (5:39)





Chronic Town EP Megaupload Link

G-A-Y Days(s)- Tales of the City (1993)- DVD Rip (480p-x264)

This was a request fill. I've seen Tales of the City...twenty years ago. To be honest, I've forgotten everything about it. That doesn't mean it was bad, it means I'm more than likely suffering from Early Onset. I don't even remember what I did yesterday, let alone twenty years ago. Safeway dating??? That's about it. Enjoy!




From Culture Shock:

In 1993 Armistead Maupin's comic novel about San Francisco in the '70s, Tales of the City, is adapted for television by Britain's Channel 4, to be aired the following year in the United States on PBS' American Playhouse. With its interwoven plots and interrelated characters, some of whom are gay, the upcoming miniseries creates a stir in some circles.

Telephones ring off the hook at public TV stations across the country, both before and after Tales of the City first airs in January 1994, with some viewers demanding the show be cancelled. Responding to state legislators' threats to recommend budget cuts, PBS feeds two versions, one as produced and one edited to remove scenes such as two men waking up in bed together. A week after the miniseries' premiere, the Family Research Council's Robert Knight appears at a public hearing of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the agency which funnels government monies to PBS. He terms the series "a slick piece of gay propaganda." He is not alone in characterizing both CPB and Tales of the City, which depicts recreational drug use and openly homosexual relationships nonjudgmentally, as "anti-family, anti-religious," and "pro-gay." Reverend Don Wildmon's American Family Association advocates budget cuts, sending each member of Congress a videotape with clips the AFA deems particularly salacious.




In Oklahoma, a PBS station airs the edited version, but even this triggers a legislative campaign against the program and public TV. In Georgia, the state Senate approves a nonbinding resolution demanding that Georgia PTV "cease airing it and never air it again." And in Chattanooga, TN, WTCI receives hundreds of negative calls, as well as a bomb threat, and pulls Tales of the City from its schedule an hour before airtime.

But fans of the program flood stations with their own calls. Tales of the City garners critical raves and PBS' highest ratings ever for a dramatic series.

Two years later, PBS chooses not to make the sequel, based on Maupin's More Tales of the City. Maupin accuses PBS of "caving" to conservative protestors, and People for the American Way, which monitors anti-gay groups and public policy, labels the decision "a bad omen for free speech." Showtime, a commercial cable channel, picks up the miniseries, now produced by Montreal-based LaFete Productions, and airs the sequel, once again to critical acclaim, in 1997.

In addition to its record-breaking ratings, Tales of the City receives two Emmy nominations, and the National Board of Review honors it as Best Miniseries. It also wins the Peabody Award, the most prestigious in broadcasting. Armistead Maupin remains a powerful and popular voice in both literary and gay circles.




Technical Information:

Show Title: Tales of the City
Year: 1993
Country: UK/USA

Source: DVD Retail
Video Codec: 480p-x264
Container: .mkv
Programs used: mkvmerge

Resolution: 702x480
Aspect Ratio: 3:2
Video: MPEG4 AVC H264 @ ~1636 kb/s
Frame Rate: 29.97 fps

Audio: English- MPEG4 AAC Stereo
Subtitles: None


Note: This video was not deinterlaced before it was converted to x264, but you can manually deinterlace it in both VLC (through the video menu) and Media Player Classic (through navigate/shader).




Episode Title: Part 01
Size: 604 MB
Length: 0:51:37


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Length: 0:48:07


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Episode Title: Part 06
Size: 573 MB
Length: 0:49:28


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G-A-Y Day(s)- Carmelo Bene- Salomé (1972)- DVD5 (PAL Format)

And here's an even more bizarre movie to go with Oscar Wilde's play.




From Maximilian Le Cain at Senses of Cinema:

On March 18 2002, legendary Italian theatre director, actor and writer Carmelo Bene died at age 64. Between 1968 and 1973 he also made films, five experimental works that marked him as the wildest of Italian cinema’s several wild geniuses. When asked why he gave up filmmaking he replied, “To relax. The way I make cinema is extremely exhausting.” (1) This statement evokes not only the production circumstances of his movies, on which he worked outside the structures of commercial filmmaking as writer, producer, director, actor and decorator, but also the intense energy which animates every scene of his oeuvre. This energy emanates from the cartoonish dementia of the performances, the disorientating speed with which one phantasmagoric image replaces another and the jarringly non-naturalistic use of sound and music. No director has ever come closer to the heightened expressive freedom of animation in live action cinema than Bene.

By the time he made his first film, Bene had been a prominent figure in Italian experimental theatre for a decade. He was born in Campi Salentina near Lecce in 1937. After a brief stint in Rome’s National Academy of Dramatic Art he formed his own theatre company. A staging of his adaptation of Camus’ Caligula in 1959 had first brought him notice. His subsequent career earned him the reputation of being a provocateur, with the police closing down several of his productions, notably Christ 63 in 1963. His work also drew much acclaim, with Pasolini hailing Bene’s “autonomous and original” (2) theater as the only exciting work being done in an otherwise worthless experimental theatre scene. Bene played Creon in Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex (Edipo Re, 1967).




His first film, Our Lady of the Turks (Nostra Signora dei Turchi, 1968), is a fragmented series of scenes centred around the cathedral at Otranto in which the protagonist (Bene) tries repeatedly but unsuccessfully to meet Saint Margherita. It was adapted from Bene’s own 1965 novel. His second film, Capricci (1969), works with ideas from Manon and the Elizabethan play Arden of Faversham. The third, Don Giovanni (1971), is taken from a story by 19th century author and dandy Jules Barbey D’Aurevilly, Le plus bel amour de Don Juan, and Salome (1972) is a version of Oscar Wilde’s play. The brilliantly titled One Hamlet Less (Un Amleto di meno, 1973) combines Shakespeare with Jules Laforgue.

Bene’s films are critical explorations of the texts they are based on. He operates by returning these stories to a sort of primordial dramatic and intellectual state of chaos where ideas, narratives and characters struggle to come into being. As Deleuze pointed out (3), Bene is concerned not with beginnings or endings, but with the middle, an engagement with a perpetual becoming, a world of constantly shifting potentiality. He achieves this by questioning and throwing off balance every aspect of his films. The frequently hysterical performances of his actors – or ‘actorial machines’ – are caricatures amplified to the level of the grotesque. Rather than playing characters, the actors become stylised embodiments of some of their defining characteristics, shrieking, slobbering, whispering and drooling their way through a series of events that resemble variations on certain themes or gestures rather than a developing narrative. Bene described his films as “music for the eyes” (4) put together with a “surgical indiscipline of montage” (5). He constantly strives for a glorious visual excessiveness, with unusual camera angles, shifts between black and white and colour, interesting superimpositions and either overtly theatrical – Don Giovanni, One Hamlet Less – or otherwise expressionistically employed settings – the cathedral in Our Lady of the Turks. This anti-naturalistic approach is further heightened by the asynchronous use of sound, which incorporates heavily amplified sounds such as breathing and coughing, shouted or stammered dialogue and sudden bursts of mainly classical music, most commonly opera.




If Bene’s cinema is one of constant becoming, of repetition and incompletion, perhaps the most common recurring theme in his scenes is frustration. Frustrated desire is the key element in the stories of Salome and Don Giovanni and all of his films feature memorable images of frustration – victims of a car crash returning to life in order to crash again but with their corpses in more deathlike positions in Capricci; a man in armour attempting to have sex with a woman in Our Lady of the Turks; Don Giovanni repeatedly trying and failing to put down his tea cup in Don Giovanni; a follower of Christ attempting to nail himself to the cross in Salomè only to discover he cannot nail his last hand down.

After these five exhilarating films, Bene returned to the theatre and writing. Although his later life was dogged by ill health, his work continued to receive attention and acclaim. Yet the films that comprise his self described “cinematic parenthesis” are seldom screened or written about, especially in the English-speaking world. For a director whose work matches the visual power and representational complexity of Kenneth Anger or Derek Jarman’s best work, this a particularly unfortunate oversight.




Technical Information:

Title: Salomé
Year: 1972
Country: Italy
Director: Carmelo Bene

Source: DVD5 Retail
DVD Format: PAL
Container: .iso + mds
Size: 3.06 GB
Length: 1:13:20
Programs used: ImgBurn

Resolution: 720x576
Aspect Ratio: 4:3
Video: MPEG2 @ ~5800 kb/s
Frame Rate: 25 fps

Audio: Italiano- Dolby AC3 Stereo @ 192 kb/s
Subtitles: Italiano, English (custom)

Menu: Yes
Video: Untouched
DVD Extras: Biography of Carmelo Bene (Italian only)




(Use JDownloader to speed up downloading and avoid file stalls.)

Salomé Megaupload Links

G-A-Y Day(s)- Oscar Wilde- Salomé (1894)- PDF Format

Salomé may be the strangest thing Oscar Wilde wrote. It's definitely one of the strangest plays I've read and it's also one of my favourites.

The book this was scanned from didn't have the original Aubrey Beardsley illustrations, so I tracked them down and included them with the file.




From Robert Ross:

Salomé has made the author’s name a household word wherever the English language is not spoken. Few plays have such a peculiar history. Before tracing briefly the vicissitudes of a work that has been more execrated than even its author, I venture to repeat the corrections which I communicated to the Morning Post when the opera of Dr. Strauss was produced in a mutilated verson at Covent Garden in December, 1910. That such reiteration is necessary is illustrated by the circumstance that a musical critic in the Academy of December 17th, 1910, wrote of Wilde’s “imaginative verses” apropos of Salomé — a strange comment on the honesty of musical criticism. Salomé is in prose, not in verse.

Salomé was not written for Madame Sarah Bernhardt. It was not written with any idea of stage representation. Wilde did not write the play in English, nor afterwards re-write it in French, because he “could not get it acted in English” as stated by Mr. G. K. Chesterton on the authority, presumably, of Chambers’s Encyclopaedia or some other such source of that writer’s culture. It was not offered to any English manager. In no scene of Wilde’s play does Salomé dance round the head of the Baptist, as she is represented in music-hall turns. The name “John” does not occur either in the French or German text. Critics speak contemptuously of “Wilde’s libretto adapted for the opera.” Except for the performance at Covent Garden which was permitted only on conditions of mutilation, there has been no adaptation. Certain passages were omitted by Dr. Strauss because the play (which is in one act) would be too long without these cuts. Wilde’s actual words in Madame Hedwig Lachmann’s admirable translation are sung. The words have not been transfigured into ordinary operatic nonsense to suit the score. When the opera is given in French, however, the text used is not Wilde’s French original, but a French translation fitted to the score from the German.




Salomé was written by Oscar Wilde at Torquay in the winter of 1891–2. The initial idea of treating the subject came to him some time previously, after seeing in Paris a well-known series of Gustave Moreau’s pictures inspired by the same theme. A good deal has been made of his debt to Flaubert’s tale of Herodias. Apart from the Hebrew name of “Iokanaan” for the Baptist the debt is slight, when we consider what both writers owe to Scripture. On Flaubert’s Tentation de Saint Antoine Wilde has indeed drawn considerably for his Oriental motives ; not more, in justice it must be added, than another well-known dramatist drew on Plutarch, Bandello, and other predecessors. The simple syntax was, of course, imitated directly from Maeterlinck, who has returned the compliment by adapting to some extent other features from Salomé in his recent play Mary Magdalene, a point observed by the continental critics. Our old friend Ollendorff, too, is irresistibly recalled by reading Wilde’s French; as he is indeed by all of M. Maeterlinck’s early plays. A famous sentence in one of John Bright’s speeches Wilde bodily transferred when he makes Iokanaan say, “J’entends dans le palais le battement des ailes de l’ange de la mort.” Large portions of Holy Writ, too, are incorporated. One of the musical critics is particularly severe on some of the Biblical quotations from Ezekiel (spoken by Iokanaan). He finds them “typical of Wilde’s perverted imagination and tedious employment of metaphor.” To the more scholarly and truffle-nosed industry of Mr. C. L. Graves I am indebted for the discovery that Wilde probably got the idea of Salomé’s passion for Iokanaan from Heine’s Atta Troll, though it is Herodias, not her daughter, who evinces it. Before this discovery was announced in the Spectator, that too was merely a disgusting invention of Wilde, who is, of course, anathema to “the journal of blameless antecedents and growing infirmities,” as a well-known statesman said so wittily.

So much for the origins or plagiarisms of Salomé. It is well to remember also the many dramas and ballets composed by various French writers, including Massenet’s well-known opera Herodiade, composed in 1881, and performed in 1904 at Covent Garden with the title Salomé. All of these were taken directly from the story told by St. Mark or Flaubert ; nearly all of them are now forgotten. Wilde would certainly have seen one by Armand Sylvestre. Sudermann’s Johannes, from which Wilde is also accused of lifting, did not appear until 1898, several years later. Needless to say, there is no resemblance beyond that which must exist between any two plays in which John the Baptist and Herod are characters. Wilde’s confusion of Herod Antipas (Matt. xiv. 1) with Herod the Great (Matt. ii. 1) and Herod Agrippa the First (Acts xii. 23) is intentional. He follows a mediaeval convention of the mystery plays. There is no attempt at accurate historical reconstruction.




Madame Bernhardt, who in 1892 leased the Palace Theatre for a not very successful London season, had known Wilde from his earliest days. She has recorded her first meeting with him at Dover. He was constantly at the theatres where she was acting in London. She happened one day to say that she wished Wilde would write a play for her. One of his dramas had already appeared with success. He replied in jest that he had done so. Ignorant, or forgetful, of the English law prohibiting the introduction of Scriptural characters on the stage, she insisted on seeing the manuscript, decided on immediate production, and started rehearsals. On the usual application being made to the Censor for a licence it was refused. This is the only accurate information about the play ever vouchsafed in the Press when the subject of the opera is under discussion. Wilde immediately announced that he would change his nationality and become a Frenchman, a threat which in spired Mr. Bernard Partridge with a delightful caricature of the author as a conscript in the French Army (Punch, July 9th, 1892).

The following year, 1893, the text was passed for press, the late M. Marcel Schwob told me, by himself. He made only two corrections, he in formed me, because he was afraid of spoiling the individuality of Wilde’s manner and style by transmuting them into more academic forms and phrases. I have learned since, however, that Mr, Stuart Merrill, the well-known French–American writer, a great friend of Wilde, was also consulted, and that M. Adolph Rette and M. Pierre Louys (to whom the play is dedicated) claim to have made revisions. But no one who knew Oscar Wilde with any degree of intimacy would admit that Salomé, whatever its faults or merits or de rivations, owed anything considerable to the invention or talents of others. Emerson said that “no great men are original.” However this may be, Salomé is more characteristic and typical of Wilde’s imperfect genius, with the possible exception of The Importance of Being Earnest, than anything else he ever wrote. The sculptor must get his clay or bronze, his marble and his motives from somewhere, just as the painter his pigment and models. How much more does this apply to the dramatist? The play was published in French simultaneously by Messrs. Elkin Mathews and John Lane in London and by the Librairie de l’Art Independant in Paris in 1893. It was assailed by nearly the whole Press. But there was one exception : that of Mr. William Archer in Black and White. Now that Salomé has become part of the European dramatic repertoire, though so often consigned to oblivion by two generations of dramatic critics and though the fungoid musical critics have spawned all over it, Mr. Archer’s words have a special and peculiar interest :




“There is at least as much musical as pictorial quality in Salomé. It is by methods borrowed from music that Mr. Wilde, without sacrificing its suppleness, imparts to his prose the firm texture, so to speak, of verse. Borrowed from music may I conjecture through the mediation of Maeterlinck. . . . There is far more depth and body in Mr. Wilde’s work than in Maeterlinck’s. His characters are men and women, not filmy shapes of mist and moonshine. His properties are far more various and less conventional. His . . . palette is infinitely richer. Maeterlinck paints in washes of water-colour. Mr. Wilde attains to depth and brilliancy of oils. Salomé has all the qualities of a great historical picture, pedantry and conventionality excepted.” Black and White, March llth, 1893.

I do not know that Mr. Archer liked the play particularly or that he likes it now, but at all events he had the foresight and the knowledge to realise that here was no piece of trifling to be dismissed with contempt or assailed with obloquy. Mr. Archer has fortunately lived to see a good many of his judgments justified, and beyond emphasising his interesting anticipation of the eventual place Salomé was to occupy in musical composition, I need pay no further tribute to the brilliant perception of an honoured contemporary. The Times, while depreciating the drama, gave its author credit for a tour de force in being capable of writing a French play for Madame Bernhardt, and this drew from Wilde the following letter, which appeared in the Times on March 2nd, 1893:




“SIR, My attention has been drawn to a review of Salomé which was published in your columns last week. The opinions of English critics on a French work of mine have, of course, little, if any, interest for me. I write simply to ask you to allow me to correct a misstatement that appears in the review in question.

“The fact that the greatest tragic actress of any stage now living saw in my play such beauty that she was anxious to produce it, to take herself the part of the heroine, to lend to the entire poem the glamour of her personality and to my prose the music of her flute-like voice this was naturally, and always will be, a source of pride and pleasure to me, and I look forward with delight to seeing Mme. Bernhardt present my play in Paris, that vivid centre of art, where religious dramas are often performed. But my play was in no sense of the words written for this great actress. I have never written a play for any actor or actress, nor shall I ever do so. Such work is for the artisan in literature not for the artist.“I Remain, Sir, Your Obedient Servant,“OSCAR WILDE.”

The Censor was commended by all the other reviewers and dramatic critics. Never has that official been so popular.




In 1894 Messrs. Mathews and Lane issued an English translation of Salomé by Lord Alfred Douglas. The illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley which it contained were received with even greater disfavour by reviewers and art critics. A few of the latter, the late P. G. Hamerton and Mr. Joseph Pennell among others, realised, however, that a new artistic personality had asserted itself, and that the draughtsman was, if anything, hostile to the work he professed to embellish. Heir Miergraefe, the German critic, has fallen into the error of supposing that Beardsley’s designs were the typical pictorial expression of widespread admiration for Wilde’s writings. They are, of course, a mordant, though decorative, satire on the play. Excellent caricatures of Wilde may be seen in the frontispiece entitled “The Woman in the Moon” (Plate 1) and in “Enter Herodias” (Plate 9). The colophon is a real masterpiece and a witty criticism of the play as well. The impression the drawings have produced, not so much in England but in Europe, may be gauged by reference to the work of the same German critic, who in his universal survey of modern art allows only three artists of the English School separate chapters to themselves the three being William Morris, Whistler, and Beardsley.

By connoisseurs of Beardsley’s work the Salomé set of drawings is regarded as the highest achievement of a peculiar talent. In England, from constant reproductions and exhibition, they were more familiar to the public than the text of the play, until the revived interest in Wilde’s writings.

And here I may warn collectors against the numerous forgeries of the originals which are continually offered in the English and American markets. Of the sixteen drawings fourteen are still in the possession of Mr. John Lane. One (“Toilette,” Plate No. 12) is in the possession of the present writer, and “Enter Herodias” has recently passed from the collection of Mr. Herbert Pollit to that of Mr. W. D. Hutchinson. There is a coloured design of Salom6, one of Beardsley’s very few coloured drawings, belonging to Miss Doulton. This was never intended as an illustration for the play in published form, but on being shown to Mr. Lane suggested to him the idea of commissioning Beardsley to illustrate the English version of the play (Marillier, “Early Work of Aubrey Beardsley,” page 23). All others are spurious.




In 1896, when Wilde was still incarcerated at Reading, M. Lugne–Poe, the poet and actor, produced Salomé at the Theatre de l’OEuvre in Paris. It was coldly received. But the author, who heard of its production, refers pathetically to the incident in one of his letters to me from prison :

“Please say how gratified I am at the performance of my play, and have my thanks conveyed to Lugne–Poe. It is something that at a time of disgrace and shame I should still be regarded as an artist. I wish I could feel more pleasure, but I seem dead to all emotions except those of anguish and despair. However, please let Lugne–Poe know that I am sensible of the honour he has done me. He is a poet himself. Write to me in answer to this, and try and see what Lemattre, Bauer, and Sarcey said of Salomé”

Within two years of Wilde’s death, Salomé was first produced in Berlin on November 15th, 1902, at the Kleiner Theater, where it played for two-hundred nights, an unprecedented run for the Prussian capital. From that moment it became part of the repertoire of the German stage, and draws crowded, enthusiastic houses whenever it is revived. At Munich particular attention is given to the staging and mise-enscene. The late Professor Furtwangler was said to have personally supervised the “Dance of the Seven Veils,” which is rendered with scrupulous regard to archaic conventions. (In the opera the dance is except in the case of Madame Ackté seldom more than a commonplace ballet performance, and is usually executed by a super.) Technically the interlude of the dance interferes with the tense dramatic unity of the play (though this is less noticeable in the opera), and is one of many indications that Salomé was not originally composed for the stage.




In May, 1905, the New Stage Club gave two private performances (the first in this country) at the Bijou Theatre, Archer Street. A new generation of dramatic critics was more severe than its predecessor, but displayed less acquaintance with Scripture ; objection was again raised by one of them to certain phraseology, quoted from Holy Writ, “as the diseased language of decadence.” In June, 1906, the Literary Theatre Society gave further performances. This last production was distinguished by the exquisite mounting and dresses of Mr. Charles Ricketts. The role of Herod was marvellously rendered by Mr. Robert Farquharson ; that of Herodias by Miss Florence Farr. The National Sporting Club, Covent Garden, was the odd locality chosen for an illicit entertainment, on which the critics again fell with exacerbated violence. Another and very inadequate production occurred at the Court Theatre in February, 1911. Such is the remarkable history of a drama that shares the distinction or notoriety of Beckford’s Vathek, in being one of the only two considerable works written by an English author in French. Mr. Walter Ledger, the bibliographer, records, exclusive of the authorised French texts, over forty different translations and versions. These include German (seven), Czech, Dutch, Greek, Italian, Magyar, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Catalan, Swedish, and Yiddish translations, in all of which languages it is performed. The play is often performed at the American Yiddish theatres. There is a popular Yiddish text sold for fivepence in London, where it is whispered that, unknown to the Censor, the play can also be seen in the Yiddish tongue. The authorised original French text is included in the uniform Methuen editions of Wilde’s works.




According to an interview with Dr. Strauss in December, 1905, when his opera was first produced in Dresden, the composer’s attention was first drawn to the possibilities of Salomé by a Viennese who had prepared a libretto based on Wilde’s work. This seemed to him unsatisfactory, and he turned to the original, or (to be precise) to Madame Lachmann’s German translation.A young French naval officer, Lieutenant Mariotte, a native of Lyons, unaware that a dis tinguished competitor was in the field before him, composed an opera round Salomé, for which he used the original French text. It was produced in 1911 in Paris, and ran concurrently with the work of Dr. Strauss. Mr. Henry Hadley, an American composer, has composed a symphonic poem “round Wilde’s motive. This was performed at Queen’s Hall in August, 1909. The burlesque dances of Miss Maud Allan and her rivals are also well known. It is noteworthy that the former appeared first at the Palace Theatre where, sixteen years earlier, the play was prohibited. It would be idle to deny that the origin of the dance was the extraordinary popularity of Wilde’s play on the Continent a popularity that existed at least four years before the production of Dr. Strauss’ s opera.

With reference to the charge of plagiarism brought against Salomé and its author, I venture to mention a personal recollection. Wilde complained to me one day that someone in a well-known novel had stolen an idea of his. I pleaded in defence of the culprit that Wilde himself was a fearless literary thief. “My dear Robbie’ he said, with his usual drawling emphasis, “when I see a monstrous tulip with four wonderful petals in someone else’s garden, I am impelled to grow a monstrous tulip with five wonderful petals, but that is no reason why someone should grow a tulip with only three petals.” That was Oscar Wilde.




Technical Information:

Author: Oscar Wilde
Translator: Oscar Wilde/Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas
Title: Salomé
Year: 1894/1907

Format: PDF
Source: Scans of print book
File size: 3.38 MB
Number of Pages: 146


Contents:

The Persons of the Play
Introduction (From "Life of Oscar Wilde" by R.H. Sherard)
Salomé


Thanks to archive.org and the Library of Congress for the original upload!





Salomé Megaupload Link

G-A-Y Day(s)- Toshio Matsumoto- 薔薇の葬列/Funeral Parade of Roses (1969)- DVD5 (NTSC Format)

Here's some more late 60's Japanese New Wave that fits so nicely with G-A-Y Day(s). You know, the same old story of the marginalized and "lowest of the low" of our society being beat down till they can't take it anymore. Rinse, repeat.




From Jasper Sharp at Midnight Eye:

Looking back at it from the light of the early twenty-first century, one of the most astonishing things about Funeral Parade of Roses is just how little seen it has been. This in itself is something of an enigma. It's not like the title is unknown outside of Japan, having been pretty extensively discussed in books like David Desser's Eros Plus Massacre and Noel Burch's To the Distant Observer. But I was really amazed given its international reputation to learn that Eureka's DVD release actually represents the first of any kind for the foreign home video market. One can only hope that the belated rectification of this grave oversight will serve in some degree to hoist its director Toshio Matsumoto's name up to a higher level on the totem pole of internationally visible filmmaking greats than it hitherto has been and lead to more widespread releases of his other films. Because on the evidence of this kaleidoscopic view of Tokyo's vibrant gay countercultural scene of the late 60s, his work represents something of an undiscovered treasure trove for the Western viewer.




Just to put the name into context, Matsumoto was born in Nagoya in 1932 and rose to become one of the key players in the early Japanese experimental scene with short films like Silver Ring (Ginrin, 1955), the 18-minute documentary on the renewal of the US-Japan security pact Ampo Jouyaku (1959), 300 Ton Trailer (1959), Record of a Long Wide Line (Shiroi Nagai Suji no Kiroku, 1960) and Magnetic Scramble (1968). Many of these early works have been recently made available for the first time in Japan in the three-volume box-set Toshio Matsumoto Experimental Film Works 1961-1987.

Funeral Parade of Roses is his first feature-length work, and was made possible through the support of the Art Theatre Guild, who produced and distributed the film. Though the following decades have seen Matsumoto continuing to practice within the fields of experimental cinema and video installation, subsequent theatrical features, which include Pandemonium (Shura, 1971), A 16-Year-Old's War (Juroku-sai no Senso, 1972) and Dogura Magura (1988), have been rather thin on the ground.




The experimental background is very much in evidence in his first feature. Trying to explain the pleasures of such a scrambled impressionistic piece as Funeral Parade of Roses in plot terms is a pretty fruitless exercise, although the disjointed narrative does reach fever pitch in the latter moments, with developments inspired by the ancient legend of Oedipus Rex so succinctly described in the dark ditty written by 50s American singer/satirist/maths professor Tom Lehrer: 'There once lived a man called Oedipus Rex / You must have heard about his odd complex / His name appears in Freud's index / Because he loved his mother ...'

Those aware of the mythological underpinnings of Freudian theory might have some inkling as what to expect in the gruesome closing scenes. While these in themselves go some way in giving those attempting to sum up the essence of this work in a few choice phrases something to hang their hats on, the net effect of the film is considerably more substantial than such a dime-store Freudian denouement might suggest.




This is as much due to the freak charismas of those in front of the camera as the talent of the director behind it. Admirably carrying the main weight of the drama on his shoulders among a cast predominantly made up of non-professionals and counter-cultural mini-celebrities is a player known solely as Peter. According to an incredibly youthful looking Matsumoto on the on-disk interview, he was scouted especially for the part while working as a transvestite bar hostess in Roppongi. One can immediately see how he caught the filmmaker's eye: Peter, who subsequently played the Fool in Akira Kurosawa's Ran and turned up in several other films during the 70s (the most familiar mainstream appearance perhaps being the 1970 entry of the long-running Shintaro Katsu vehicle Zatoichi, Fire Festival), certainly has all the right moves, not to mention a doe-eyed vulnerability and the ability to project a potently polymorphous form of sensuality that belies his gender. It would be difficult to imagine the film with anyone else in his high heels. In the role of the androgynous bar worker Eddie, Peter wrestles with inner demons while jostling for the affections of drug-dealing cabaret-manager Gonda (Tsuchiya; one of the few professionals in the cast with several roles behind him in Kurosawa films such as The Seven Samurai and Throne of Blood) with rival cross-dresser Reda (Ogasawara) and taking centre stage in a documentary being made about Tokyo's gay culture.




The story really remains only a ruse for a work that is best seen as a fascinating reflection of a long-vanished place and time, caught in a cross-current of international pop-cultural styles and influences and not dissimilar to what was going on in similar circles in other far-flung parts of the world. The colourful underground milieu, populated by a rag-tag collection of cross-dressers, bohemians, druggies and drop-outs, bares easy comparisons with the environment fostered by Andy Warhol and his disciples at his Factory studio in New York - at one point the American underground film scene is explicitly mentioned when one of the characters quotes Jonas Mekas (though another has to correct the mispronunciation of Mekas' name.) The exuberant costumes and pop-art sensibilities recall all the excesses of the European swinging 60s scene as celebrated in William Klein's kitsch cult oddity Who Are You, Polly Magoo? (1966), and it is rumoured that Matsumoto's false-eyelashed protagonists served as the inspiration for Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. Finally the experimental melange of dramatised sequences and documentary footage assembled in a cocktail of freeze frames, onscreen text, sped-up sequences, solarised or over-exposed shots, distorted wavering news footage filmed directly from TV and stroboscopic cross-cuts immediately puts one in mind of the French New Wave.




I offer these foreign examples primarily as descriptive points of reference. While Matsumoto readily acknowledges the early impact of nouvelle vague director Alain Resnais on his work, Funeral Parade of Roses amounts to much, much more than the sum of its influences. And anyway, though its focus on experimental filmmaking technique is very much in keeping many of the other films produced by the Art Theatre Guild - typically those of Nagisa Oshima, Shohei Imamura, Masahiro Shinoda, Susumu Hani and Kiju Yoshida - Matsumoto's film never quite seems like the dry meta-textual exercise in formalism of some of his contemporaries. It also boasts its more playful moments, for example Reda and Eddie's under-cranked showdown, alongside its more poignantly tragic dimension revealed through flashbacks to Eddie's traumatic fatherless childhood.




Technical Information:

Title: 薔薇の葬列/Bara no Sōretsu/Funeral Parade of Roses
Year: 1969
Country: Japan
Director: Toshio Matsumoto

Source: Retail DVD5
DVD Format: NTSC
Container: .iso+mds
Size: 4.35 GB
Length: 01:44:45
Programs used: ImgBurn

Resolution: 720x480
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Video: MPEG2 @~ 5800 kb/s
Frame Rate: 29.97 fps

Audio Channel 1: Japanese- Dolby AC3 Stereo @ 384 kb/s
Audio Channel 2: Japanese Commentary- Dolby AC3 Stereo @ 384 kb/s

Subtitles: English, English Commentary

Menu: Yes
Video: Untouched
DVD Extras: Director Interview, Japanese Trailer, Poster Gallery




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Funeral Parade of Roses Megaupload Link

G-A-Y Day(s): Elton John- Madman Across the Water (1971)- Vinyl Rip (24 bit FLAC)

Blogger was down for most of yesterday, so that means that G-A-Y Day(s) will more than likely be extended until Saturday. We've hunted down a couple of new posts that need sharing, so we're going to fudge and pretend that the Stonewall Riots lasted wayyyyy longer than they actually did, so that we can pack more posts in. But enough of this housecleaning talk...

Madman Across the Water has one of the most amazing side one's that you'll ever listen to on an album. Side two is another issue, being that the album devolves rather quickly after the flip, which is why Honkey Château is my favorite Elton John album. But what a 'side one' it is. Couple that with a Steve Hoffman analogue remaster and Dr. Robert rip and one has a quality trifecta that shouldn't be missed. Enjoy some Elton John!.



Technical Information:

Artist: Elton John
Album: Madman Across the Water
Year: 1971

Audio Codec(s): FLAC
Encoding: Lossless
Rip: Vinyl
Avg. bitrate: 2631 kb/s
Sample rate: 96000 Hz
Bits per sample: 24
Channels: 2
File size: 853 MB
Length: 0:45:20




Tracklisting:

Side A:

A1. Tiny Dancer (6:16)
A2. Levon (5:21)
A3. Razor Face (4:44)
A4. Madman Across The Water (5:59)

Side B:

B1. Indian Sunset (6:46)
B2. Holiday Inn (4:17)
B3. Rotten Peaches (4:58)
B4. All The Nasties (5:08)
B5. Goodbye (1:50)


Thanks to Dr. Robert for the rip and original upload!





Madman Across the Water Megaupload Link

G-A-Y Day(s)- Kate Davis/David Heilbroner- Stonewall Uprising (2010)- DVD5 (NTSC Format)

When you treat people as if they're subhuman and steal their voice and their liberty, they'll eventually turn on you. The Stonewall uprising was when the gay community finally had the sense to push back against a system that had failed them at every turn. The Mike Wallace appearance and the jaded history of the Atascadero State Hospital would make Josef Goebbels proud. This is some scary, scary history. Another "must-download" I dare say. Enjoy!




From Stephen Holden at the N.Y Times:

“The average homosexual, if there be such, is promiscuous. He is not interested in, nor capable of, a lasting relationship like that of a heterosexual marriage.” So declared Mike Wallace in authoritative voice-of-God tones in “The Homosexuals,” a tawdry, sensationalist 1966 “CBS Reports,” excerpted in Kate Davis and David Heilbroner’s valuable film, “Stonewall Uprising.” Funny how yesterday’s conventional wisdom can become today’s embarrassment.

The most thorough documentary exploration of the three days of unrest beginning June 28, 1969, when patrons of the Stonewall Inn, a seedy Mafia-operated gay bar in Greenwich Village, turned on the police after a routine raid, “Stonewall Uprising” methodically ticks off the forms of oppression visited on gays and lesbians in the days before the gay rights movement. “Before Stonewall there was no such thing as coming out or being out,” says Eric Marcus, the author of “Making Gay History: The Half-Century Fight for Lesbian & Gay Equal Rights.” “People talk about being in and out now; there was no out, there was just in.”




At the time of the riots, homosexuality was illegal in every state except Illinois. Before the laws were changed, one commentator observes, gay bars offered the same kind of social haven for an oppressed minority as black churches in the South before the civil rights movement. The cultural demonizing of gay men in public service films depicted them as at best, psychologically damaged and at worst, ruthless sexual predators. Lesbians were nearly invisible.

The same “CBS Reports” peddled the medical opinion, since discredited, that homosexuality was determined in the first three years of life. The movie has ominous vintage footage of electroshock aversion therapy being administered, accompanied by the suggestion that it might be a promising cure for what was widely regarded as a mental illness. The most unsettling historical tidbit concerns the treatment of homosexual patients at a mental hospital in Atascadero, Calif., where some were injected with a drug that simulated drowning, a process that one commentator describes as “chemical waterboarding.”




It is a sad indication of the marginalization of homosexuality in the late 1960s that media coverage of the Stonewall riots was mostly after the fact. And even then it was cursory and often condescending. Because so little photographic documentation exists of the unrest, the film relies mostly on eyewitnesses, including Seymour Pine, the now-retired police officer who led the initial raid of six officers and who describes it as “a real war.” The details of the raid are reconstructed by several who were present, including Howard Smith and Lucian Truscott IV, journalists for The Village Voice whose offices were nearby. The film focuses on the first night of the unrest.

As one rioter remembers: “All of a sudden the police faced something they had never seen before. Gay people were never supposed to be threats to police officers. They were supposed to be weak men, limp-wristed, not able to do anything. And here they were lifting things up and fighting them and attacking them and beating them.” It was the first stirring of what came to be known as gay pride. “This was the Rosa Parks moment, the time that gay people stood up and said no,” Mr. Truscott recalls. “And once that happened, the whole house of cards that was the system of oppression of gay people started to crumble.”



Technical Information:

Title: Stonewall Uprising
Year: 2010
Country: USA
Directors: Kate Davis, David Heilbroner

Source: Retail DVD5
DVD Format: NTSC
Container: .iso + mds
Size: 4.16 GB
Length: 1:23:21
Programs used: ImgBurn

Resolution: 720x480
Aspect Ratio: 16:9
Video: MPEG2 @~ 5800 kb/s
Frame Rate: 29.97 fps

Audio Channel 1: Dolby AC3 5.1 @ 448 kb/s
Audio Channel 2: Dolby AC3 Stereo @ 224 kb/s

Subtitles: English

Menu: Yes
Video: Untouched
DVD Extras: None



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Stonewall Uprising Megaupload Links