Trinidad Film Festival; The Way of the Daou; Solid F in Sex Writing; Father Satan Flirts With Fruit

 

Trinidad, Here I Come

At the end of this week, I am hopping aboard the Super Chief train to head to Trinidad, Colorado, to my vacation home in the mountains.

Riding the Super Chief during Christmas and New Year’s is a charming and colorful experience.  Look out the window, and you see the Christmas decorations aglow in passing towns and distant houses in the late hours.

Plus, you catch up on your reading.  This year, I’m finishing Gone With the Wind and rereading the Annotated Lolita, because I have to.

Once I reach Trinidad, I’ll hunker down, eat ham sandwiches and potato salad and nut roll with strong coffee as I and my fellow film aficionados indulge in good bad (and good good) movies and TV series.

Ah yes, the following DVDs have been wrapped with care, ready for critical viewing along with such Family Classics as Valley of the Dolls, Manos: The Hands of Fate, Hot Rods to Hell, and the Assassination of Trotsky:

•      Fifty Shades Darker  The not-so-awaited sequel to 50 Shades of Grey. “While Christian wrestles with his inner demons, Anastasia must confront the anger and envy of the women who came [no pun intended, surely] before her.”  I understand that “there are no rules” in this one.  Also promised is a cameo by the star of the first film, the flogger.

•      The Boy Next Door  Jennifer Lopez stars as middle age school teacher Claire in this mind-scorching thriller that explores a forbidden attraction with hardbody student Noah who parades up and down half naked next door.  Should be worth it for this scene alone: “Claire goes to investigate a leak in the boys' bathroom, where she instead sees the words "I *ucked Claire Peterson" written on the wall before Noah emerges.”

•      Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids: The Complete Collection  With the wordless slurred mutterings of one of my favorite cartoon characters of all time, the immortal Mushmouth.

•      Sex and the City, Season 5 “Recently converted to Judaism, Charlotte is shocked when Samantha enthusiastically explains how she enjoys role-plays with her sexy actor Jerry Smith Jerrod, including fake rape.” Guest star Harvey Weinstein delivers sexual double messages. (Hey, I just saw that one episode concerns Carrie’s Paris trip where she meets a lover named Eiffel Tower.  See below.)

•      Lord of the Flies  A good good movie.  A group of English schoolboys crash land on a deserted island while they were escaping a nuclear holocaust.  Eventually, after conflicts over leadership, the boys paint their faces to go tribal and worship a hog head infested with flies.  The superior 1960s version.

•      The Children’s Hour  Another good good movie, see below.

•      Toddlers and Tiaras Season Two Four DVDs, 13 hours, of women who voted for Trump coercing their dismally made-up daughters into humiliating beauty pageants after motivating them with powdered sugar tubes called Pixie Sticks.  The lower pits of the American Dream.

I’m looking forward especially this year to escaping Chicago, where things have been pretty dismal of late.  More about that later on, but first, an uplifting tribute to a favorite artist:

Vanessa Daou: Ethereal Goddess

Sometimes, when I finish crafting a piece, I'm encouraged to continue writing through Jungian synchronistic occurrences rather than directly.  Such was the case after my last blog entry.

The singer, dancer, antique photography curator and true feminist pioneer Vanessa Daou (I call her V), answered a recent Facebook query to her.  I asked when we would see videos of her entrancing performances from the 1990s that I knew she had been collecting and restoring.

"I've got to get around to digitizing all of it.... lots on VHS 👌" she said.  She also told me "Including a show at Le Palace in Paris".  Excellent, I have a promo card in French of that show proudly displayed on my mantel.

I first heard Vanessa on a random cut from Pandora.  A dance mix of the song "Little Bit of Pain" from her Make You Love album.  Gliding and dipping hooks hooked DJ Huk.  And the voice whispering confidential revelations:

Gone to heaven, then it's back to hell
You're climbing down her staircase
All you wanted was to love this Jezebel
Even angels make mistakes
 
Thank you for revealing that angels make mistakes, Vanessa Daou.  Who would have known?

After hearing that masterpiece, I was a goner for V.  Over the whispering clouds and back.  Of course, I did a search on the web for her but only found a dead website page.  Vanessa, apparently, had put her career on hold while hiking through South American jungles and living in a biosphere.  I should have figured as much.

Then she returned to her career, released a new website and beckoned me to open a Facebook account so I could accept her as my first friend.  

How did I not know about Vanessa in the 1990s?  I later discovered through her first album, Zipless, that she was better than Sade and Madonna combined.  Zipless carries songs with lyrics from the works of Erica Jong that V composed with her husband at the time, Peter Daou.  Check out this iconic cover art.  So sleek, so coy, so very zipless:

 When I play Sunday Afternoons, I am always never the same.  I want every day to have a Sunday Afternoon.  Lazing around brunch, in a romantic idyll.  Ah tragic poetess Anne Sexton: we love her now as we loved her then, now that she is in the whispering clouds.  And that walk through the Black Forest, listening to wolves and cuckoo clocks as odd lovers slither out of shadows:

Mistress of the Black Forest 

And dear Blogolytes, this photo from a shoot for a fashion magazine fascinated me to the point where it inspired my writing The V Poems. 

Tres Branche Photo, V 

Here's the poem I wrote honoring the photo. (Butterflies regularly appear in Vanessa's work.  The concert program card reveals evidence of a butterfly tattoo, as a matter of fact.)

 

V Poem III

We often would meet at Le Papillon Noir

Where all of our evenings were just like ce soir

The club was a kind of existential heaven

Scribbled notes to new jazz circa 1947

At Le Papillon Noir, we could talk until dawn

And tease the first one who fought back a yawn

Our thoughts and our words took various flights

Like swirls of moths in Parisian white lights.

The sound of the crowd was straight out of a cave

As political factions took what they gave

It amused us to watch them holding their grounds

Threw lefts and rights like boxing ring clowns

For we were not this tempestuous sort

Our discussions would float with ascending import

Not of this earth, but more of the skies

We were talking in circles of butterflies

Her black licorice hair trimmed short but cut sweet

Showed a shock of blonde stripe curving to her right cheek

Where she shooed away smoke with her faux geisha fan

Which she fluttered quite like the butterfly can

In her Romeo suit and Godiva lace halter

She revealed a species that she had uncovered

Her red feather boa flew free with her talking

I admired her shoes that were not made for walking

She would gaze long and hard at some faraway dance

Then enter a sort of hypnotic trance

Then she whispered some words like a lepidopterous curator

On the well-traveled paths of the champagne migrator

We agreed that you could not pin down their colors

Monarch and viceroy and all of those others

All of which brought up the ultimate question

How many could dance on the head of a straight pin?

Now why would I speak of Le Papillon Noir?

While she glides through a space in my net at this hour?

Because she was you, but just to my eye

As her given name was Vanessa Cardui

Zipless is classic, but it's her third album, Plutonium Glow, that turns me into a slobbering blob of a humanoid. Tears in the corner of the eyes, the whole waterworks. 

She based it on Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince, an outer space tale of a little boy who lives on an asteroid.  Vanessa and Peter Daou riff on the theme by trip hopping Alive through Zero G toward a Life on a Distant Star.  She sings a lyric "in a quintessential landscape, of my dreams" that always stirs an emotion I never felt before, and can still not pinpoint.

Zero G, Out There With V 

In both in space and real time, she ends certain lines of lyrics with this exhaled kiss of breath on the ear I've never heard from any other singer. 

I once told V on Facebook that I wanted to write a book as part of the 33 1/3 series of popular music books about Plutonium Glow. 

I could picture the front of the book showing the two covers the album has appeared under: one on the Oxygen label with a a picture of V looking alluring as usual and the other on Daou Records with artwork by Vanessa that looks like a deconstruction of her Zipless persona.

She liked the idea, but, God, I'd have to spend more hours at the library than Karl Marx at the British Library writing the Commie Manifesto so he could eventually annoy Seth Lipsky.  Studying music theory, writing lines like "three of those four chords follow an harmonic structure called the 'cycle of fourths' ".  Then fly out to California for interviews with Vanessa and later figure out how to write it off on my taxes.  And then there's how to make a living after I quit my job. 

Or maybe I'll just Make Believe.

Until then, I look forward to repeated viewings of these restored concert videos.  And the red feathered boa in action.

I Flunk Sex Education Writing Class 

(Parental Guidance Suggested)

Early last week, I left work early after enduring a pile-driving slew of projects and took an expensive taxi drive across Chicago to StoryStudio for a Sex in Writing class by one of my favorite creative writing teachers.

 I was not in the best of moods when I arrived: in shreds with fatigue.  I even turned to Chamomile Tea to try to take off the edge.  It just made my brain turn into slop.

As part of this sorry narrative, I am including parts of some curious review of Zipless written in 2017 by one "Randy" James in Femme Magazine.  

“The act of decentering men involves a stronger attachment to selfhood, found in relationship and solitude.”

Yeah, well, I ended up mightily decentered in class.

It started out well, because I was interested in the experience of being the only man in a classroom of women.  They seemed friendly enough and I especially wanted to later talk with a woman wearing a leopard skin patterned coat that looked like it belonged in the gatefold of the first Roxy Music album and who described how she once had a gig photographing nudes.

Everything went smoothly, until my teacher gave us a prompt to use sexual language to describe a fictional relationship.  I wrote a lighthearted piece about a man who meets a woman he hasn't seen in years in Paris, where they go to a hotel room and kid around as they make love. 

It amused my teacher and the class, but then the teacher said "one thing, a woman would never say 'did you ever look at the Eiffel Tower like a penis? ' "?  The rest of the class agreed. 

Totally threw me. 

Though the teacher suggested a good way to reword the Eiffel Tower dialogue, I was still somewhat cloudy.  I thought about women who might pose the question.  But all I could come up with was Samantha Jones in Sex and the City and Carrie's Eiffel Tower purse.

She's hugging BIG himself with a well-hung Eiffel Tower Purse . Quelle Ménage à Trois!

From the opening moments of “The Long Tunnel of Wanting You,” the listener is plunged headlong into Daou’s sexually intimate space.

One of the students included the image of a man hanging himself in her piece.  I had just seen the ending of the 1964 film The Children's Hour where Shirley MacLaine hangs herself after confessing a lesbian infatuation with Audrey Hepburn.  Shirley and Audrey portray teachers in a girl's school who are accused wrongly of a lesbian affair by two evil girls who rival Rhoda Penmark of the film The Bad Seed and her sneaky, braided nastiness.

  

As if the word "lesbian" never being uttered isn't weird enough, that hanging scene has haunted me ever since I saw it as a kid on WGN-TV, back when they use to show good movies (and no, it wasn't on Family Classics).

Audrey screaming as she batters down the door to Shirley's room.  The fallen chair, the shadows of the noose and Shirley's legs and high-heeled shoes dangling down.  All with an autumnal lilting soundtrack. Massive Creep Out ...

Anyway,  my rambling descriptions of The Children's Hour didn't catch on as the only response was empty air.  Was it the "forbidden lesbian" angle?  Who knows?

Man, I could go on about all my other stuttered babblings.  Like a defense of the book Lolita from an attack by a classmate: it's not just pages of perverted pedophile sex acts but a rich literary creation with, for example, interwoven allusions to the etymology of rare butterflies, paleopedology and Aeolian harps.

 Daou [well, really Erica Jong] associates female pleasure derived from the vagina with something beyond structured time. In addition to calling her vagina a long tunnel, she likens her pubic hair to a forest, natural and apart from the artificiality of patriarchal society. She, or rather the personae she inhabits, are at once metaphysical and material.

I asked my teacher about clinical terms in sex writing, like "penis" and "vagina".  Suddenly, there was an outcry from the class about "vagina".  Apparently, the word no longer conveys the complexity of a woman's genitals: the vulva, the clitoris, the, uh, forest.

But, it says right here in Taber's Medical Dictionary that: "The vagina is a passage for the insertion of the penis, for the reception of semen, and for the discharge of the menstrual flow. It also serves as the birth canal." Wouldn't that still qualify it for a hot sex scene?  Especially beyond structured time?

Later, I learned that I can still use "anus" in my writing, though I had enough sense left not to bring up Last Tango in Paris to the class.

It wasn't a total disaster.  As usual, the teacher made succinct suggestions about avoiding euphemisms like "throbbing member" and such.  But everybody was sour and mean to me after class, when usually I, at least, have brief amiable chats.  The woman with the leopard skin coat was curt when I wished her well on her photography and, as for the Nabokov hater, well, she snarled at me.

All the women quickly ran away, and I was left staring into the sink as I poured away my dead coffee.

 She investigates the internalization of patriarchy through “Alcestis on the Poetry Circuit,” where, imagining herself as a modern day Alcestis, Daou links the dismissive voice of the male gaze through literary irony and a mocking sense of self-awareness.

I left StoryStudio and walked through the cold winter drizzle to the Brown Line EL, lost in my internalization of the artificiality of a patriarchal society.  My old nemesis, depression, was stirring.

Then what to my wondering eyes should appear, but ...

Fruit Salad Surgery

I entered a car that smelled like it had just left a coven of bong worshippers and checked my smartphone for texts.

It was Father Satan.  In the middle of an entry, the 60-plus-year-old bragged that "young girls still flirt with me."

Usually, I'd chalk it up to his negative charisma.  But after flunking Sex Education Writing class, I was in no mood to read this.  Images of the woman in the leopard skin coat in class flirting with Father Satan as she dismissed the voice of my male gaze sent me deeper into depression.

Now I must confess to you, my dear Blogolytes, that I am a certified first-class introvert, straight out of Jung's clinical notebooks.  I shrink from conflict or small talk or bragging or being stuck in a line of people waiting for their morning Starbucks designer coffees or visitors to my man cave bunker.

But when I lapse into extrovert behavior in an extrovert world, like in that writing class, I lose it.  The worst is when I welcome conflict.

So I texted Father Satan that he and Baby Judas (his metaphysical foe) should stop going to Hooters because the only reason young girls flirted with them was the "tip incentive" (see the Seth Lipsky entry in my last blog).

Turning defensive, he called me a humiliating sex act. 

It deteriorated from there.  His extrovert script collapsed.  Like, please, no more emails  bragging about how he could read a book four or five times but could only stand the inferior aesthetic of movies or television once or twice.  As he repeatedly reminds people.

Rather than shrugging it off as "typical Father Satan", I suddenly hated this idea of pumping up the ego through the weight of how many books one reads.  I love books for themselves too much, whether I read them once, twice or hundreds of times.

I especially didn't want his praises of an actor friend, Sir Donicus.  Oh, Father Satan can mock writers who take "creative writing" classes or join in at Open Readings as beneath him as an "authentic writer" (yeah but where's the writing?). But Sir Donicus? The height of stage artistry.  "As Sir Don was bringing to life Edwin Booth, Jeff Davis, and Edwin Stanton [two  Edwins in one show!]"

(Sir Don never deigns to send emails thanking Father Satan ... like, even Joan Crawford regularly rises from the grave to personally respond to each piece of fan mail.)

No Wire Hangers !!!!! 

Now I like Sir Don's acting.  Sure, he can be kind of histrionic as he enunciates sometimes, but, for the most part, he's solid. My favorite role was him as a Pee Wee Herman character mocking some clownish bureaucratic hack who ran the Chicago School Board. 

But, I wish Father Satan would just say, "you were excellent".  And surgically cut out the hyperbole.  It's getting too fruity salad:

Fruit Salad Matrimony 

By the God of Mormon, enough of this.  This ugly conflict goes on sordidly, and it's just not introvert me.  Maybe I'll forgive Father Satan at some point (hell, he gifted me with Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids for my birthday).  But for now, I need distance, far into the Colorado mountains.

Kook of Seth (Part Two)

Still trying to figure out, to borrow a lyric from a Sound of Music song, "how do you solve a problem like Amity"? (Reminder: she 's Seth Lipsky's conflicted wife.)

Meanwhile, I'm compiling a list of cliches and affectations that Seth regularly uses in his editorials and columns. I guess he thinks they're distinguishing marks of his writing style. 

Instead, they are hackneyed.  Some examples:

• Obsessive use of the royal "we"
•  By our lights
• We carry no brief
• Hand-wringers, hand-wringing
• In a swivet [instead of state of extreme agitation]
• It takes some brass

And, by our lights, as we move forward with Kook of Seth always remember:


"I don't believe in journalists having 'responsibility.'"
-Seth Lipsky, October 16, 2003

With those words of wisdom in integrity I'm outta here for two weeks.  Meanwhile, I (and I'm sure Vanessa Daou) wish you all (oh, all right, including Father Satan) Happy Holidays Merry Christmas Happy Hannukah Joyous Kwanzaa, etc.