Activity, Art, Music

Pornography, strippers, art.

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“The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. These are kinetic emotions. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts. The esthetic emotion (I use the general term) is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.”
— Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Pornography. The new movie Magic Mike, about male strippers according the advertising campaign, made me think about this theory of art expounded by fictional college student Stephen Dedalus. And about desire. Dirty, dirty desire. And art.

QUICK! A photo of a chick, before the attention drops!

Dedalus’ theory is infused with the Catholic shame that evoking desire is something base and bad, exclusive of a more noble high-mindedness. Life isn’t quite that way, neither is art, but it does reflect my experiences in strip clubs.

The photo is one I took of a performer in Mary’s Club in downtown Portland as she says “Thank you!” to marchers on the inaugural day of Occupy Portland on October 6, 2011. A scantily-clad dude stands behind her, amused (easier to see if you zoom in).

It’s been more than a decade since I’ve been in a strip club. I hardly go out. I often go months without going into a bar. When I have gone to strip clubs, some of the time is spent desiring/coveting the performers on the stage. I don’t get aroused significantly, enticed is nearer the mark. Some of the time is also passed people watching, though watching people watch the same person you can has limited charm.

Mostly I wonder what the performer is thinking, and seeing through her eyes.

And I don’t feel pity, at least if the place is decent. The assumption many make that strippers and porno actresses have troubled family lives (doesn’t everyone?) and daddy issues (again, doesn’t everyone?) is condescending. Similar jabs aren’t laid at porno dudes or male dancers. It’s slut-shaming masquerading as gender sensitivity. Feh! FEH!

I have no statistics, but as this is the internet, amn’t gonna care. Stories abound of women who danced to help pay for college, knowing it was a waystation to another, better life. Or people who made a good living for a while. Who cares? Why judge?

It’s expression, it’s a mating display in controlled circumstances. An extension of the same mating/style displays we ponder when we decide what to wear because of how it looks/fits/conveys us for the day.

In strip clubs, if the vibe is good, I wonder what it’s like to be so desired. Thoughts fill of the power wielded, to have a physique that inspires want and awe from people who don’t know you. To know that and to use that to get what you need, to make a living, to hold people in thrall. To externalize that power with a smirk slays me when dancers do it.

Yes, it is possible to dwell in these thoughts while listening to lousy butt-rock music as women swirl around a pole. It is possible to have esthetic arrest and epiphanies to Motley Crüe or REO Speedwagon.

One of my favorite artists, singer/songwriter Sam Phillips, performs “The Fan Dance” in 2008.

Art, Poetry, Writing

From lump to bean

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A book of Anne Sexton poems have been on my nightstand for about a year. I can only read 1-2 poems at a time before saturation. On those nights, chances run high I’ll dream about Sexton. Mostly her voice and sitting around in living rooms and dining rooms. Don’t even know what we talk about. Tried to write her back, with Father’s Day on my mind.

Women are born twice, men once.

But for us, son, the drying off is slow.

From lump to sapling to tree to bean.

And in between we watch and attend.

Watch clumsiness turn to grace to poise to squeezing life out again.

Help from the outside, only let in in small ways.

We are builders and servants, boasters and protectors.

Anne, what would you have made of us

Had you seen us grow from lump around again to bean? Seen us

Fuller, slower than invaders and thralls.

Between you and your slender friend in a Boston cab,

Breaking away from Lord Lowell. Brobdingnag jokes.

You both would catch in my eyes when I saw you as vessels.

As I would see in yours whether I was politic and small or rescuer and hunter.

Consigning you to gray sparking damp clouds would not happen on my watch.

Talking with trained strangers and medicinal minuets probably would.

Son, see how a poem to you turns to apostrophe

Of desire and dreams and duties?

Those are all of the things we do.

Do not let them be all the things you are.

Do not be afraid to take taxi cab rides alone.

Do not take all of your taxi cab rides alone.

Art, Music, Pop Culture, Science

Sting, biochemical love, loss of mind.

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Sting is an example of an artist with a strong personality needing other strong personalities for balance/combat to create better art. The Police was a better act than Sting as a solo artist because the band had two people who could tell Sting to shut up.

Yet I poured over his first two solo albums, so great was the devotion to The Police. Grant me wisdom! Musical genre dabbling! Dribblings of wisdom! Then realized he was a dork. A slow period of acceptance.

I laughed when he appeared in diapers extolling the virtues of yoga in the early 90s (I later took on yoga). His tantric sex boast about maintaining a state of orgasmic arousal for four hours caused tittering across our Puritan nation (including me). Now? Dude, if you can manage it, bully for you. When I made that boast in Oregon shopping malls instead of MTV, it failed to pay dividends.

Sting claps during the Nothing Like the Sun tourWhen the song “Straight to My Heart” off his second late-1987 solo album Nothing Like the Sun came up as a topic, my girlfriend at the time and I mocked Sting (not around to defend himself) about being so showy over writing a pop song with a 7/8 time signature. In the Nothing Like the Sun tour, he had a little drill for the audience to teach us all to clap in 7/8 time. Nailed it! I can also clap on the 2/4 and 4/4 (noted on my résumé) but for genetic reasons cannot clap on country music’s 1/4 and 3/4 (not noted on résumé).

Video below is from a “Symphonicity” tour he did a few years ago. Sting/Police songs played backed by a symphony. I refused to attend, for religious/aesthetic reasons over the title. Haven’t gone to a Sting show for over 20 years. Yet on top of that “Synchronicity” = “Symphony” = “Symphonicity”? Yeesh.

YET, years later, I find myself charmed by the song. (1988 Me and Then-Girlfriend laugh at Present Me. I nod obeisantly, then turn with a grin and think: “Oh, brother, what you’ve got coming…”) The song is a defiance of the knowledge that romance is a state caused by biochemistry, not metaphysics.

A sub atomic chain
Will maybe galvanize the brain
A biochemic trance
Will eliminate romance

But why ever should we care
When there are arrows in the air
Formed by lovers’ ancient art
That go straight to my heart

Here are lyrics that would make a great Valentine’s Day card:

But what will make me yours
Are a millions deadly spores
Formed by lovers’ ancient art
That go straight to my heart

In an interview Henry Rollins did with Howard Stern years ago, he shared many insights. Two that have stuck: 1.) U2 may have the worst rhythm section of any major rock act 2.) Sting is a wickedly talented person, but if you buy a Sting CD then you have pretty much given up on music.

As “Straight to My Heart” has earwormed me the last couple of days, I have to allow for my own aesthetic/mental entropy. It’s possible to draw a straight line to a day when I will be in an old folks home (as an old folk) standing on a chair and singing Sting’s song “Russians” at the top of my lungs until the orderlies are summoned. Present Me mourns Future Me’s diminished mental state, but nods at what a kind of small bad ass moment that would be.

Art, Music, Parenting

“Montauk”

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New song from Rufus Wainwright’s “Out of the Game” album. His daughter having to navigate between her two dads. Daughter whose blood grandfathers include Leonard Cohen and Loudon Wainwright III. Worry that is daughter will not stay. Thoughts of his mother whose ashes are scattered in the nearby ocean. Cyclical structure. What’s not to like?

Art, Music

“3 Second Rule”: DIY control-freak doomed-relationship anti-music

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This is terrific. Whatever is the opposite of AutoTune (AntiTune?) this uses it.

While not astonishingly attractive, there is something to admire about the confidence she has. Make me a hot teacher! Give me a class full of white-shirted cowboys preoccupied with dancing and looking away from me, the one woman around! That edginess gives her a bonus +2 points on the hottie scale.

She has difficulty standing upright, or walking in a straight line. Am left to guess that she has recovered from some trauma that gave her the gumption to fulfill a 20, 30 year-long dream to star in a music video. Bully for her! Don’t dream it, BE it!

-3 points for controlling behavior, allowing for three seconds of a wandering eye and then, snap to attention, buster! Contemplate me and my odd fashion choices!

Actually, three seconds is more generous than some who would allow NO visual meandering. Maybe a sense of ovary competition gets her going. “Three seconds of looking at another woman, then I’m taking you HOME and will order you to do what I want.” Maybe her album features tracks detailing what she demands in recompense for the three seconds her man’s gaze strayed. Each second he stared leads to ten minutes complying with her demands. I’d listen to those songs, would probably stay away from those videos.

Lisa Gail Allred’s website

Art, Poetry

“Lovesong” by Ted Hughes, and beef with Sylvia Plath

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Ted Hughes and Sylvia PlathI have a beef with Sylvia Plath, but it’s not her fault.

I was on a roll in high school, sure of a 5 for 5 score on the A.P. English Lit test I was taking until I came to the poem “Sow”, and I shanked it. Brain gears ground to a halt. I could not interpret anything beyond “this is a big pig”. Crumpled, if there were anything after to fill out the remainder of the test it was probably doodles of approximations of Prince album art.

Years later I was on a walk listening to poetry read by authors, when Sylvia Plath’s voice came on reading “Sow”. For certain, when I made the connection I stopped in place. Memory flits between either my saying “Oh, fuck!” or taking my headphones off to look at them, as if I could shake that extra 1 point that would have boosted my 4 score to a 5.

Here’s a poem by Ted Hughes. Difficult to not read his tempestuous courtship and marriage with Sylvia Plath into it. Though this poem is dedicated to Assia Wevill, a paramour of Hughes’ who ALSO killed herself and their daughter by gassing. That was how Plath killed herself, and Anne Sexton killed herself through gassing. What’s up with that? Why did suicidal poets in the 50s-70s lack a sense for physical adventure – jumping off a bridge, skydiving without a parachute, hari-kari – and go for passive, slow-fade, wasteful natural gas/gasoline methods for languidly shuffling off their mortal coils?

“Lovesong” by Ted Hughes

He loved her and she loved him
His kisses sucked out her whole past and future or tried to
He had no other appetite
She bit him she gnawed him she sucked
She wanted him complete inside her
Safe and sure forever and ever
Their little cries fluttered into the curtains

Ted Hughes and Carol OrchardHer eyes wanted nothing to get away
Her looks nailed down his hands his wrists his elbows
He gripped her hard so that life
Should not drag her from that moment
He wanted all future to cease
He wanted to topple with his arms round her
Off that moment’s brink and into nothing
Or everlasting or whatever there was

Her embrace was an immense press
To print him into her bones
His smiles were the garrets of a fairy palace
Where the real world would never come
Her smiles were spider bites
So he would lie still till she felt hungry
His words were occupying armies
Her laughs were an assassin’s attempts
His looks were bullets daggers of revenge
His glances were ghosts in the corner with horrible secrets
His whispers were whips and jackboots
Her kisses were lawyers steadily writing
His caresses were the last hooks of a castaway
Assia WevillHer love-tricks were the grinding of locks
And their deep cries crawled over the floors
Like an animal dragging a great trap
His promises were the surgeon’s gag
Her promises took the top off his skull
She would get a brooch made of it
His vows pulled out all her sinews
He showed her how to make a love-knot
Her vows put his eyes in formalin
At the back of her secret drawer
Their screams stuck in the wall

Their heads fell apart into sleep like the two halves
Of a lopped melon, but love is hard to stop

In their entwined sleep they exchanged arms and legs
In their dreams their brains took each other hostage

In the morning they wore each other’s face

Art, Poetry, Politics

“The universe is made of stories, not of atoms”

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Muriel RukeyserThe first stanza is apt today given the stupid backwards direction misogynistic politicians are taking against women determining what they do with their bodies. Worse than that, the insistence by these self-hating assholes to linger and intrude and control and KNOW what women do with their bodies.

“The Speed of Darkness” by Muriel Rukeyser

        1
Whoever despises the clitoris despises the penis
Whoever despises the penis despises the cunt
Whoever despises the cunt despises the life of the child.

Resurrection music,     silence,     and surf.

        2
No longer speaking
Listening with the whole body
And with every drop of blood
Overtaken by silence

But this same silence is become speech
With the speed of darkness.  

        3
Stillness during war, the lake.
The unmoving spruces.
Glints over the water.
Faces, voices.     You are far away.
A tree that trembles and trembles.

        4
After the lifting of the mist
after the heavy rains
the sky stands clear
and the cries of the city risen in day
I remember the buildings are space
walled, to let space be used for living
I mind this room is space
this drinking glass is space
whose boundary of glass
lets me give you drink and space to drink
your hand, my hand being space
containing skies and constellations
your face
carries the reaches of air
I know I am space
my words are the air.

        5
Between     between
the man  :  act     exact
woman  :  in curve     senses in their maze
frail orbits, green tries,     games of stars
shape of the body speaking its evidence

        6
I look across at the real
vulnerable     involved     naked
devoted to the present of all I care for
the world of history leading to this moment.

        7
Life is the announcer.
I assure you
there are many ways to have a child.
I bastard mother
promise you
there are many ways to be born.
They all come forth
in their own grace.

        8
Ends of the earth join tonight
with blazing stars upon thier meeting.

These sons,      these sons
fall burning into Asia.

        9
Time comes into it.
Say it.     Say it.
The universe is made of stories,
not of atoms.

        10
Lying
blazing beside me
you rear beautifully up—
your thinking face—
erotic body reaching
in all its colors and lights—
your erotic face
colored and lit—
not colored body-and-face
but now entire,
colors     lights     the world of thinking and reaching.

        11
The river flows past the city.

Water goes down to tomorrow
making its children     I hear their unborn voices
I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.

        12
Big-boned man young and of my dream
Struggles to get the live bird out of his throat.
I am he am I?     Dreaming?
I am the bird am I?     I am the throat?

A brid with a curved beak.
It could slit anything, the throat-bird.
Drawn up slowly.     The curved blades, not large.
Bird emerges     wet     being born
Begins to sing.

        13
My night awake
staring at the broad rough jewel
the copper roof across the way
thinking of the poet
yet unborn in this dark
who will be the throat of these hours.
No.     Of those hours.
Who will speak these days,
if not I,
if not you?

Art, Poetry, Reading

Poetry month: White Trash Haiku with Interpretation

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April is National Poetry Month, and for April Fool’s Day something funny and clever:

Fanny Chicken passed along this hilarious stream of white trash themed haiku her sister wrote up several years ago, with excellent interpretive notes that amplify the experience.

Annotations are an underutilized art form. An example of what you’ll get at the post:

Carnival’s in town,
Who’s that runnin’ the zipper?
Like to git with him.

Interpretation: Note how the lure of the carnival is enhanced by the enchanting possibility of new romance. In this haiku, one can almost hear the “clickity whirr” of the zipper ride. It’s as though the reader sees through the author’s eyes: A hansome, although oily-ish, traveling man who’s yearning for a reason to stay in one place for the first time since his release from juvie 7 years ago. Maybe she shall inspire such desire!

More White Trash Haiku with Interpretation

 

Art, Music, Opera, Science

‘Galileo Galilei’: opera ‘Memento’

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Saw the opening night of Portland Opera’s Galileo Galilei yesterday. At 90 minutes, it was more thought exercise than cathartic. Performers were fine, artistic design was really interesting (especially the seraphim costume for the opera-in-an-opera Eos – could have admired that for half an hour) but ephiphanies and the sublime never arrived.

The story felt based on about 1-2 paragraph biography of Galileo. Not much effort went into showing personality. A film I saw in high school did a better job of explaining the concepts of Galileo’s accomplishments and the sense of the person himself.

90 minutes without intermission. That was a good choice. Had it been longer, the opera might not hold onto people’s attention. That is the fault of the music and the words.

The music was not memorable. It was a 90 minute libretto. The plot and concepts all felt like blocks getting passed around. I did not feel within any of the characters. I mostly waited for the next visual (and there were many interesting ones).

Galileo’s life is presented in 10 chapters, in reverse chronology. To start he is feeble and expressing self-doubt about not having stuck to his earth-is-not-the-center-of-the-universe Copernican proof, or not being devout enough to the Catholic Church in renouncing science completely in his heart. Then we see him with gradually increasing vigor, the role handed off to a better vocalist (or maybe the music improved with more narrative once it moved from tiresome “the earth moves!” “no, the sun moves!” lyrics between Galileo and clerics). The final chapter is a boy Galileo taking in the spectacle of a really interesting opera about Orion. Then at the end the old Galileo is united with the boy Galileo rapt with wonder and they walk into a great brightness together.

But it’s the CONCEPT of old Galileo and the CONCEPT of boy Galileo walking together. I never thought: “Oh, how nice for Galileo to get this closure”. They were blocks at the end nudged into a bright white screen.

I proclaim from the second balcony “Je suis arriviste!” about opera matters. Portland Opera did an interesting job given the material, but the material was meh.

Art, Music, Pop Culture

Growing up (in 2002) and Peter’s bouncy giant zygote

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Summer 2002 at a mutual friend’s wedding, saw an ex-girlfriend I hadn’t spoken with in ten years. My main response? Shame. See, I had come to realize I had been a major drip, clingy, and utterly failed to see that a cross-continental relationship between two young people who could not afford to travel cross-continent (and my drippy behavior had already begun in-person) was a not-so-good idea. She saw that early on, I didn’t and kept on dripping long afterward.

BUT a Peter Gabriel concert tour was taking place that winter. After 17 years of Gabriel fandom, I had never seen him in concert. It had been 10 years since his last album. And it was coming to Seattle where my friend lived. I took two buddies along. She hosted and toured the three of us through fun corners of the city. It was fun. She was stalwart about being a tour guide to three goons. My mind kept going whoosh between past and present and I somehow managed to insert sentences in between urges to apologize for drippiness.

All that made me VERY ready for the Peter Gabriel concert. He’s one of the few artists I tuck in deep. My favorite song on his album up was Growing Up (which had the deepest groove) and I was delighted how over the course of the show the staging by Robert Lepage (who also works with Cirque du Soleil) had a huge overhanging egg. Then the egg covering fell away to reveal a round moon image projected from within. Then the moon’s covering fell away to reveal a giant transparent egg cell that lowered slowly onto Peter Gabriel as he inserted himself within it as the opening bars of “Growing Up” began. And then he moved around the stage in the zygote, and bopped up and down to the song.

The birth of my second child was pending in about four months. The song is about birth and engaging the world (like how we first learn to identify one point in space, then two, then three… I kept thinking about how my daughter would be coming into the world, ready to bop about (which came true). The female vocalist on the stage is Melanie Gabriel, Peter’s daughter, and her making way for her daddy’s strolling zygote was even more amusing.

It was a hazardous drive back, heavy rain and wind, VERY tired, the laughs back in the car exhausted after the first hour or so. But we made it alive, and after our early morning return a few hours later I joined one of my friends to watch The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers on opening day. A memorable, intense 24 hours.

Not quite ten years after THAT day, was listening to this album and this memory/anecdote came back. Most everything everyone says about Time is true, escpecially the word “funny”.

Below is a screen grab of a Google ad that came up while viewing the video above. Funny indeed, though I’d flip the genders in this case. Glad Google is pandering to the me from 20 years ago.