Archive for the ‘music’ Category
this is important: bonobos and humans
Wolf Alice – the right stuff
I’ve been listening to the music and watching the videos of Wolf Alice recently – I’ve just discovered them, mea culpa. Just a fantastic band. They often sing about emotional stuff, emotional confusion, as in the song Blush, which is accompanied by a video that adds gender to the confusion, and an extra dose of sadness to the word ‘happy’, which is the song’s refrain.
I won’t pretend to analyse the song, but it’s one of a number of influences lately that have made me think of humanity’s gender issues – issues that don’t seem to be shared by our closest rellies. Tormenting issues.
My novel In Elizabeth dealt with adolescent and later teen issues in a working-class town, mostly in a light-hearted way. But the fact is, it was a period of torment – though sometimes I felt a sort of enlightenment, or superiority, in thinking of things, indulging in feelings, that I sensed were ‘beyond the pale’.
I described my first sex (but what exactly is ‘sex’, is it feelings or acts? The first erection, the first masturbation, the first awareness of the exciting/disturbing physicality of your own body, the first physical attraction to another?) – so here I’m talking about my first act of putting my penis into the vagina of a girl, an act which, I’m not sure, was probably illegal according to the laws of the time, and even of today. It was my 16th birthday, and the girl was a year below me at school, so either 14 or 15, but not a virgin, as she told me. I was beyond words overwhelmed by the occasion, because she was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. Only a few weeks before I’d spotted her in a school corridor, chatting to girlfriends. Her movements, her smile, her grace mesmerised me, and I recall thinking of a young horse, a filly, free and unself-conscious, untamed, perfect. For days I could barely think of anything else and I kept seeking her out in the school grounds….
So I described my obsession to a school friend, and when I pointed her out, he told me he knew her, her name was Edwina, her family were friends with his, and he suggested ‘putting in a good word to her’ about me. That sounded ridiculous, and I agreed. A couple of days later he came back to me. Edwina said yes, she would be my girlfriend.
The joyful impulses of youth. I described this in my novel, and I described the massive impact of Bowie on me as a 16 year-old, and my youthful questioning of sexuality and gender. I didn’t happen to mention that the boy who got me together with Edwina (very briefly) was very pretty, and I had delicious fantasies about him. Not that I avoided homosexuality – I wrote of some boy-boy cuddles and fantasies, which at least one reader told me she found ‘a bit shocking’.
To be honest, I’m shocked, dismayed, and above all disappointed, that people are shocked. Which seems code for disapproval.
The whole male-female gender stuff is still very much a minefield, and a battlefield. As someone in his 70th year on the planet, I’m hoping I can think about it ‘objectively’, if that word means anything.
The issue is important because for centuries upon centuries we’ve lived in a patriarchal world. I’ve read a lot of history, and much of it has been about men behaving badly. And I mean really really badly. And there are still large regions of the world in which females are automatically considered to be inferior, meaning their lives are heavily circumscribed vis-à-vis men. So gender matters muchly.
So what is it? What do we mean by it? And what does it mean to a bird, a cat or a bonobo?
Bonobos are female-dominant. In order to be so, they must clearly be aware of their gender, though they have no knowledge of the word ‘gender’ – they’re never confused by language like we can be. So they’re driven, or affected, by instinct, to be supportive of their own gender. They know who’s male and who’s female, though there may be degrees of maleness and femaleness, as Frans de Waal pointed out in the case of Donna, the female chimp who hung out with the males and never became pregnant (she finally became the dominant chimp in her troupe – or rather in the Lincoln Park zoo enclosure where she lived – but would this have happened in the wild?)
It’s difficult enough to understand how and why bonobos became female-dominant in a period of one or two million years (a pretty wide margin of error) since their separation from chimps, without trying to understand our broadly patriarchal system, which is clearly undergoing change, not only in the WEIRD world. Still, it’s a fascinating topic, which I feel the need to focus on more exclusively, without being distracted by Trumpism or the possibly coming European holocaust, should Putin be pushed to the brink, or the possible slaughter of Taiwanese people under Xi – and other horrorshow issues.
So, in the non-human primate world, size generally matters, and males are mostly bigger than females. Gorillas and orangutans are at the extreme end of this dimorphism. Interesting in the case of orangutans, as they’re solitary, so there’s no obvious need for gender-based dominance – but then, if you’re going to rape a female, it pays to be as big and strong as possible. But of course, the term ‘rape’ is never used when referring to non-human primates. Forced copulation is the preferred term.
But ‘forced copulation’ isn’t just a euphemism. It’s done to produce offspring, and humans don’t have sex, be it via rape or love or anything in between, just to produce children. And why do orangutans have sex? Do they know they’re doing it to produce children? Does a dog – male or female – rub its genital area intensely on your leg to produce offspring? Silly question. These activities are ‘evolutionary by-products’ – we are stimulated to have sex in order to reproduce, but that stimulation being in itself pleasurable, we just do it regardless, often without a partner. And often, as with bonobos, to promote fellow-feeling – you rub my front and I’ll rub yours. Humans often do it for similar reasons, but not enough, I think. After all, we can mutually masturbate and reflect on the nature of dark matter/energy. We contain multitudes.
I’m generally intrigued, and often disturbed, by the difference between human sexual practices and those of other species. Again we are probably the only species that knows that sex leads to pregnancy. We’re also the only clothed species, and these two facts seem connected. Is there anywhere on this planet where public nudity (above a certain tender age) is not a crime? Clothing and civilisation go hand in hand, and most people are relieved that this so. After all, we’re not animals…
But seriously, civilisation demands clothing. Indeed, we might argue that the greater our level of civilisation, the more vast and varied our vestments should be. Charles Darwin, as I’ve mentioned in a previous post, used the word ‘savage’ rather a lot in The descent of man, and it seems clear to me that he could see one coming by her lack of anything resembling a petticoat.
So, enough of the cheap shots. I’m intrigued, and inspired by the fact, and surely this is a fact, that bonobos have used sex to become female dominant, while humans have used violence to become male dominant.
There, I’ve come out with it. I’ve avoided being direct about it till now, in fact I’m not even sure that I was clearly aware of this before writing it. Of course it wasn’t deliberate, but that’s how it happened. So, if we deliberately create, or try to create, a female dominant society, will it have a bonoboesque result? Are we currently trying to create such a society, or is it just happening, like evolution? The WEIRD world is certainly more ‘permissive’ than it used to be – with the inevitable frustrating conservative backlash, which means we need to recognise that the future is long, frustratingly long for us mortals, especially the oldies. And of course there are plenty of ultra-conservative females in powerful positions throughout our world, as well as women who are skeptical of any difference that greater female empowerment would make. Usually they point to one or two female politicians, or bosses, or mothers, who weren’t much chop. That’s a ‘not seeing the forest for the trees’ argument, IMHO.
Obviously I’m not going to be around to experience a female-dominant WEIRD world, and neither is anyone now living. It may never happen, but I think it should, for the sake of humanity and life on this planet. The trouble-makers today are the leaders of Russia, the USA, China, Iran, Israel, Sudan and North Korea, to name a prominent few. Of course they’re all male, and they’d all expect their successors to be male for all eternity, but that won’t happen, at least we know that much.
So, Wolf Alice isn’t an all-female band, but at least they’re not an all-male one, and there’s no doubt that their sole female member, Ellie Rowsell, is also their most prominent member, for a number of reasons. Their song The Sofa, in contrast to Blush, the song I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, seems to me to be happy and life-affirming, and the accompanying video of males, females and kids engaging in fun, skillful, weird and wonderful activities as a backdrop to a floating or rolling sofa occupied by the band members in turn, but mostly by Rowsell, the singer (and intellectual beauty queen), is – well, it’s just nice, in a bonobo sort of way. Here are some of the lyrics:
Hope I can accept the wild thing in me, hope nobody comes to tame her, And she can be free.Sick of second-guessing my behaviour, And what I want to be. Just let me lie here on the sofa…
I’ll be fine, I’ll be okay, I feel kind of lucky right now and I’m not ashamed to sayI can be happy, I can be sadI can be a bitch when I get madI wanna settle down, or to fall in loveBut sometimes, I just want to fuckI love my life, I love my lifeSometimes, I just want to…
Bonobos don’t have sofas, but I like to think to think they have a similar mind-set, if in a more simplified form. Emotionally labile at times, excitable, sexual, and, given their precarious position in the Congo, hoping to maintain their freedom, the threats to which they’re perhaps dimly aware of. .
So, vive les bonobos, and thank you Wolf Alice, you’re good.
Okay, so this is a chimp, but you get the idea…
David Bowie and little old me
I’m now around the age that David Bowie was when he died. I heard it on the radio when I was in bed that January morning in 2016. I wept. He was a fundamental part of my life – certainly of my youth. I’m writing about him now because I’m re-reading Simon Critchley’s book about him, published in 2014. It was given (or loaned?!) to me by a friend a couple of years back, and I somehow read it rather cursorily, finding it a bit pretentious in places (Heidegger’s Dassein and other metaphysical stuff has never been interesting or particularly comprehensible to dumb me), but effective in Critchley’s love for and obsession with the artist, who certainly obsessed me, particularly from the early 70s into the 80s. He was uniquely indecipherable, catchy but unable to be caught.
Take for example, ‘Changes’, from the (ironically titled?) Hunky Dory album. So easy to sing in the shower and such, but lyrically a torment of sorts ‘…so I turned myself to face me, but I’ve never caught a glimpse, of how the others must see the faker – I’m much too fast to take that test’. There is pride here, but also confusion, uncertainty, innocence, doubt – in short, a sort of vulnerable complexity in turning to face the strange. Listening to this sort of stuff as a teenager, this lyrical skirmishing, was somehow rewarding, or at least reassuring – ‘you’re not alone!’
My first encounter – in 1973 I was 16 and, for a time, had a ‘good job’ as an accounts clerk at a factory making plastic tubing. So I had the money to buy a record album – my first. I looked hard at this album cover of a blonde-haired, effeminate-looking male, dwarfed by a brown urban landscape. The title, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, sounded deliciously audacious to me. Surely this would be absolute shite or revelatory. Then again maybe neither. I was able to play it there in a little booth to myself. I played the whole album. And, of course, I bought it.
I’d already been introduced to musical wordsmiths – Dylan and Cohen in particular – and was experimenting with writing myself, exploring who I was and what I could be. The fact that I had no musical ability whatsoever made music unbridgeably, magically superior.
So I played Ziggy to death and my next three purchases were Hunky Dory, Space Oddity and Lou Reed’s Bowie-produced Transformer album. I lost my job in the failing plastics factory and hung out at home alone, admiring my made-up face in the mirror, and my legs in my mother’s stockings. I felt, or tried to feel, a sense of transcendent, transexual superiority. I went out for walks in my sister’s floral jacket and was honked by passing cars – an edgy sort of thrill.
And so it went – Aladdin Sane, Diamond Dogs, Pin-ups, and I was ‘officially’ an adult, and various misadventures meant I lost all my records, together with home and family. I shared houses with students, wrote endlessly about my misadventures and my fascination with writers – Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Frisch – and, after a strange, perhaps perverse period of listening only to ‘classical music’, especially Schubert, I caught up, through others’ collections, with Bowie’s continuing oeuvre – Lodger, Scary Monsters, Station to Station, Low. All interesting stuff, but of course the intensity of my teenage attachment was gone. His likely drug-induced flirtations with fascism were disconcerting, and I’d frankly lost interest in what he was up to by the nineties.
Now, in my seventieth year, it’s time for a catch-up, and a rethink, especially in light of my ‘no free will’ understanding, which has been something of a pre-occupation in recent times. For the fact that there’s no such thing as free will doesn’t simplify matters – au contraire. The complexity of what has made us who we are is pretty well unfathomable. But a recognition of that complexity should help us to treat even Hitler and Stalin and Putin and Trump as, if you like, ‘products’. In Bowie’s fascinating case, he was obviously a precocious musical talent, absolutely obsessed with expressing himself to the world, to explore its, and his, complexity – sexually, politically and existentially, and not necessarily in that order. I don’t really know much about his family background – he grew up in Brixton, which I believe isn’t the most fashionable suburb, and his mother was a sometime Oswald Mosley fan, and I’m imagining his flirtations with fascism might’ve been a hat-tip to a troublesome mother-son connection. My own background took me nowhere near right-wing politics, and that fact, and the realisation that it could’ve been quite different, helps me to sympathise with someone like him and his more existential concerns, which I do share – at least to some degree. I’m probably a bit more complacent, or perhaps resigned, than he was. And I’ve never been much tempted by drugs, other than the odd youthful booze overdose and some very minor flirting with dope.
One thing I’ve read about him, quite recently, was that he was an avid reader, as I most certainly am, though the what of the reading is of the essence. Much of Bowie’s reading might have had a desperation about it – who will love a lad insane? One might guess from some of his music that he wanted or needed to be a lad insane, but not too insane and not too much of a lad. My own reading, too, is about establishing, confirming, extending identity, and I suppose that’s what all reading, or information-gathering, is about.
Anyway, my interest in Bowie has been renewed, and I’ll be enjoying, if that’s the word, his later work and its connection with what’s familiar to me, as well as seeing that old stuff in a new light – the crazy piano stuff on the title track of Aladdin Sane, for example…
Reference
Bowie, by Simon Critchley, 2014
Eartha Kitt – the sexiest matriarch?
When you ain’t got nothin’, you got nothin to lose
Bob Dylan, Like a rolling stone
Eartha Kitt, 1927-2008
So before I go onto the second lecture on immunology, a break to write about a theme I’ve neglected for too long – interesting women as models for a future matriarchy. So the other night, in a slightly boozy session with friends, one of them happened to mention his interest in Eartha Kitt, whom I knew only as something of a sex icon who had the obvious bon goût, and the most unAmerican ability, to sometimes sing in la belle langue. So we spent the next pleasant hour or so sampling her most playful work on Youtube.
Before that session I knew vaguely of Eartha Kitt (the earthy kitten?) as perhaps a comedienne of sex, who sang purrrfectly absurd songs sending up and celebrating the world’s most delicious vice. But…. well, let’s find out more.
She was born in the tiny town of North (or on a nearby plantation), in South Carolina, and having checked out what information is available online about the town, I find no mention of surely one of its most famous daughters. But then, her beginnings weren’t auspicious. Her father is basically unknown – some say a plantation owner’s son, others say a local white doctor. Could it be that her success had to be attributed to ‘white genes’? Others, or maybe the same conjecturers, say that she was the product of rape. In any case, her mother (who was of mixed Cherokee and African descent) began a relationship with a black man, who rejected Eartha as being ‘too white’. So, not exactly your standard middle class or even working class beginnings.
So, just a few lines on that earthy name of hers. Eartha really was her birth name, and her family name was Keith, (or Keit) or at least that was the surname of her mother, Annie Mae Keith, who died when Eartha was still quite young. The inspired switch from Keit/h to Kitt seems to have been Eartha’s own.
But more on her unpromising beginnings. She was sent away to be raised by a relative, one Aunt Rosa, ‘in whose household she was abused’, according to Wikipedia. The nature of the abuse isn’t mentioned, but it’s clear that life wasn’t easy for her in this period. She recounted in a later interview that ‘we’ were near starvation at this time, though who exactly she was referring to is unclear. I may have to read one or all of the three autobiographies she has written…
The difficulties of her early years are, to me, made clear by the fact that she wasn’t even sure who her mother was, let alone her father. According to Wikipedia,
After the death of Annie Mae, Eartha was sent to live with another close relative named Mamie Kitt [okay, so that’s where the name came from], who Eartha later came to believe was her biological mother, in Harlem, New York City, where Eartha attended the Metropolitan Vocational High School (later renamed the High School of Performing Arts).
No date is mentioned for this big city move, clearly a decisive event, but it was likely in the early 1940s. According to her daughter, this was undoubtedly the essential move of her life, getting her away from the bigotry of the South, where she was discriminated against by both Blacks and Whites. Interestingly, she wasn’t aware of her own birth day, until a group of students from her home state of South Carolina unEarthaed her birth certificate in 1998. She was born on January 17, 1927. Wikipedia next states, without evidence, that ‘she began her career in 1942’, whatever that means. After all, she was only 15 at the time. In any case, she’d clearly shown enough talent to appear ‘in the 1945 original Broadway theatre production of the musical Carib Song’, though not in a major role. In the 1950s she recorded a number of songs and gained her enduring reputation as a tongue-in-cheek ‘sex kitten’, with a very distinctive and, to me at least, very unAmerican, voice. Speaking of which…
She toured Europe as a dancer and vocalist from 1943, an extraordinary opportunity for a young teen, where she also proved to be skilled at picking up languages – la langue d’amour especially, but according to Wikipedia she was able to sing in eleven of them and to speak more or less fluently in four. C’est ridicule ça! When as a youngster I first heard her singing in French, I thought she was a native, or from the French Carribbean (if I’d heard of such a place) – at least, not a United Stater. In any case, such polyglotism seems freakish to me, in the best possible way. But French was the foreign language that had the most influence on her early career. Apparently she’d been touring with the Katherine Dunham dance troupe and was offered work in a Paris nightclub, which she accepted, becoming fluent in the language much quicker than I ever could. Bitch!
So when she eventually returned to the USA, reputation enhanced, she came to the attention of one Orson Welles, and made her acting debut in a Welles adaptation of Faust, as Helen of Troy (of course). This was in 1950, and she want on to record songs such as C’est si bon, Santa Baby and I want to be evil in the early fifties, establishing her reputation as an earthy sex kitten. Or should I say tiger, panther, bonobo…?
So this is a real rags to riches story, of a talented and enterprising young girl from the most unpromising of backgrounds, which, frankly, moves me more than I can say. And she has all the best bonobo qualities, though much better looking, at least from a human perspective.
It’s interesting – and very USA it seems – that a performer who, in a most unAmerican voice, performed I want to be evil and a deliciously slurpy (but strangely affecting) Lilac wine in her younger days, to grand acclaim, would be ‘outlawed’ for her sympathy for the young American troops being sent to an unnecessary war in Vietnam (not to mention the Vietnamese and Cambodian people caught up in the slaughter). It’s likely her early touring life gave her more of an internationalist, humanist perspective. And she spoke often about ‘falling in love with yourself’ as a prerequisite to a happy and fulfilling life, which is, I think, a more sophisticated view than it might sound. Only she would know how many intimate relations she had, but not too many, it seems. She married only once, relatively briefly, a union which produced her only child, Kitt McDonald, who is devoted to her memory.
I feel quite privileged now to have discovered the life of this fascinating and worthwhile person, who was more than just a unique polyglot entertainer. Hell, I may as well quote some of the Wikipedia material on her activism:
Kitt was active in numerous social causes in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1966, she established the Kittsville Youth Foundation, a chartered and non-profit organization for underprivileged youths in the Watts area of Los Angeles. Kitt was also involved with a group of youths in the area of Anacostia in Washington, D.C., who called themselves “Rebels with a Cause”. She supported the group’s efforts to clean up streets and establish recreation areas in an effort to keep them out of trouble by testifying with them before the House General Subcommittee on Education of the Committee on Education and Labor. In her testimony, in May 1967, Kitt stated that the Rebels’ “achievements and accomplishments should certainly make the adult ‘do-gooders’ realize that these young men and women have performed in 1 short year – with limited finances – that which was not achieved by the same people who might object to turning over some of the duties of planning, rehabilitation, and prevention of juvenile delinquents and juvenile delinquency to those who understand it and are living it”.
I wish I’d been there to hear her! Articulate and precisely on point – this approach reminds me of what I’ve been reading in Rutger Bregman’s Humankind. Treat people like shit and you’ll get nowhere with them. Treat them as better than they have been and they will learn to love themselves and their environment more.
Kitt was also a member of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, formed during World War 1 and still in existence. She was under CIA surveillance from 1956, further proof of her bonafides as an international humanist. And there’s more:
Kitt later became a vocal advocate for LGBT rights and publicly supported same-sex marriage, which she considered a civil right. She had been quoted as saying: “I support it [gay marriage] because we’re asking for the same thing. If I have a partner and something happens to me, I want that partner to enjoy the benefits of what we have reaped together. It’s a civil-rights thing, isn’t it?”
Indeed. With the current turn to conservatism, intolerance and patriarchal attitudes, Eartha Kitt’s attitude and example, including even her sexiness, reminds me of the purpose of this blog (she surely would’ve loved the bonobo example). Vive Eartha Kitt! I wish I could’ve met her.
References