Posts Tagged ‘music’
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
limerence and bonobos
You know I’ve never met anyone quite like she before
Temptation, New Order
How can I even try, I can never win…
You’ve got to hide your love away, The Beatles
I’m reading Alexis Wright’s dauntingly long book Praiseworthy for a book group, and I was stopped short by this passage:
… in the all-twisting, all-turning immersion of limerence, skyrocketing in an out-of-proportion infatuation that would never be consummated.
Alexis Wright, Praiseworthy, p25
Limerence? I had to look it up. As a lifetime writer and therefore amateur wordsmith, I’m always surprised and a little shocked, at my age, to be confronted by something new in the field. But the shock was even greater on learning the meaning:
Limerence is a state of intense romantic infatuation or obsession with someone else. People experiencing limerence may have intrusive thoughts, feel melancholic, or have tragic concerns for the person they are infatuated with. They may also constantly obsess about whether their feelings are reciprocated
This definition comes from a ‘generative AI’ website, which is pretty hilarious, but I digress. The word was coined by a psychologist, of course, and to me it has huge resonance, both personal and intellectual. In fact I once wrote a novel, Sextet, never published, in which I tried to make comic play of what I might now call ‘polymorphous limerence’, an infatuation with a number of women, each of which might be the ‘one true one’, or not. The central character is ‘bowled over’ by not just one but a number of impressive young women, and feels more or less unworthy of them all. Being tongue-tied and hapless before each of them, but having more faith in his writing than his speech, he decides to send hand-written letters to six potential paramours (a concept completely spoiled by the startlingly swift onset of the internet). Whittling the number down to a mere six is a major task in itself, but anyhow it all falls apart in a tragicomic way (I can’t even remember how it ended).
There’s no doubt though, that I was playing with a theme that has ever fascinated me, the powerful myth of ‘true love’ that’s at the heart of monogamy (well, apart from the arranged/forced marriage type). Which brings me to bonobos.
I’ve often speculated fruitlessly about human monogamy and its origins, considering that neither bonobos nor chimps practice it. Indeed monogamy is a strangely arbitrary ‘system’ of species-furtherance, practised by many bird species, eschewed by many others (though the most recent bird research reveals that their sex and breeding practices are every bit as complex and nefarious as ours). Amongst primates, about 30% of species are monogamous, up from between 3 and 5 percent in the whole mammalian world (10% according to other sites). It’s speculated that human monogamy began with H erectus about two million years ago, but who knows? There’s also a distinction between social and genetic monogamy – but all this is taking me far from the very human concept of limerence, and its apparent absence in our closest living relatives, who certainly seem to be full of fellow-feeling. It seems that concepts of possession, or possessiveness, are key here. Ownership and jealousy play their part, promoted by social expectations, as well as yin-yang perfect fits, and of course for those who are partnerless, loneliness, in a human world that is so much more internal than external compared to other primates (but then I’ve never been a bonobo – maybe next time?).
There’s not much in the way of isolation in bonobo communities. Everyone tends to rub shoulders, euphemistically speaking, with everyone else, so hiding your love away is hardly an option. Also, the plague-paradise of internal thought, so unique to humans among the primates, and perhaps among all living beings, and so much intertwined with language, the language of desire, hope, anxiety, despair, longing and – limerence – is what has brought about our transcendence as a species. Not only the negatives, if such they are, but the positives – the transformative ruminations of Newton, Einstein and Darwin, among so many others (some of them even female). Limerence might be an unfortunate by-product of all that busy neural thought-language activity – but hey, it has often produced great music, and for that humanity will ever be grateful. A limerence shared is a limerence halved, maybe!
References
Alexis Wright, Praiseworthy, 2022
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7416880/
Why some birds mate for life – and why some play the field (and the trees, ponds and rooftops)