… despite showing acres of pallid flesh in the fetish-bondage garb of urban prostitution, Lady Gaga is far less sexy than Stefani Germanotta used to be. In fact, Gaga isn’t sexy at all — she’s like a gangly marionette or plasticised android. How could a figure so calculated and artificial, so clinical and strangely antiseptic, so stripped of genuine eroticism have become the icon of her generation? Can it be that Gaga represents the exhausted end of the sexual revolution? In Gaga’s manic miming of persona after persona, over-conceptualised and claustrophobic, we may have reached the limit of an era.
In 1933, the critic I.A. Richards, writing about “The Waste Land”, spoke of T.S. Eliot’s “persistent concern with sex, the problem of our generation, as religion was a problem of the last.” After the first world war, sexual experimentation and titillating smart talk became the hallmark of the emancipated new woman, who smoked, drank, bobbed her hair and danced the antic Charleston. Hollywood discovered that sex was great box office — leading to pressure from civic and religious groups for a production code, which movie-makers found ingenious ways to evade.
We are approaching the 100-year anniversary of Hollywood sex: Theda Bara’s incarnation as The Vamp in A Fool There Was (1915), a lurid femme fatale who slew overnight the lingering Victorian ideal of the pure, saintly woman-child, portrayed on screen by Mary Pickford and Dorothy and Lilian Gish. Theda Bara, like Lady Gaga, was a manufactured personality; although the studio publicity department claimed she was born in the Sahara to a French artist and Arabian princess, she was actually Theodosia Goodman, the daughter of a Jewish tailor in Cincinnati.
The sexual icon of 1920s Hollywood was Clara Bow, a madcap flapper who was probably falsely rumoured to have bedded the entire University of Southern California football team. Lithe Louise Brooks, with her signature bobbed hair, made landmark films of decadent eroticism in Germany. Wicked Mae West and lushly buxom Jean Harlow began the tradition of the sex bomb, which continued through Hedy Lamarr to Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe, whose influence endures around the globe. But the cardinal sexual pioneer was Marlene Dietrich, who exploded on the international scene in 1930 as the heartless cabaret singer of The Blue Angel. In her subsequent films with the director Josef von Sternberg, Marlene toyed with transvestism (based on the drag balls of Weimar Berlin) and created the sophisticated look of hard glamour that remains a staple of fashion magazines.
Marlene was Madonna Louise Ciccione’s idol; the seductive, commanding Marlene permeates Madonna’s brilliant videos of the 1980s and the early ’90s, with their dominatrix, transvestite and bisexual motifs. Madonna wanted to play Marlene on film, but the idea was overruled by Marlene herself, who (as the proud daughter of a Prussian officer) decreed Madonna “too vulgar”.
Weimar cabaret was recreated in the 1972 film Cabaret, based on Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin stories. Bob Fosse’s dazzlingly aggressive choreography in that blockbuster film was adopted by Madonna for her videos and stage shows — all of which have been doggedly imitated by Lady Gaga. Gaga has borrowed so heavily from Madonna (as in her latest “Alejandro” video) that it must be asked, at what point does homage become theft? But the main point is that the young Madonna was on fire. She was indeed the imperious Marlene Dietrich’s true heir. Madonna’s incandescence is still on view in videos like “Open Your Heart”, “Vogue” and “Express Yourself”. However, for Gaga, sex is mainly decor and surface; she’s like a laminated piece of ersatz rococo furniture. Alarmingly, Generation Gaga can’t tell the difference. Is it the death of sex? Perhaps the symbolic status that sex had for a century has gone kaput; that blazing trajectory is over.
Camille Paglia, “Lady Gaga: The Death of Sex”, Sunday Times, 2010-09-12.
November 17, 2021
QotD: From Theda Bara to Lady Gaga
November 13, 2021
The unrealistic expectations society has of minimum-wage security guards
As a teenager, I worked several months as a security guard. In the 1970s in Ontario, to work as a security guard you basically needed to be physically fit (to a not-very-high standard), to pass a police background check and to be 18 or over. The jobs I worked were usually overnight shifts at upscale apartment buildings, industrial facilities and fill-in shifts at retail malls to cover for regular security staff vacations (plus one really interesting midnight shift on a ship docked in Toronto harbour). I think I was paid $3 per hour, and 99% of the time the work wasn’t worth any more than that. It’s that 1% of situations where the company hiring security guards might wish they’d invested in better-trained staff. According to Joshua Hind‘s article in The Line, the standards for security guards have been improved in the many years since my time, but that 1% is still a big issue:
While some of the best minds in the field of crowd management and event safety weigh in on the probable causes of the crowd surge, a new article in Rolling Stone has turned a spotlight on the security guards, and the culpability of private security in general, a high turnover, low-wage business focused on filling orders with warm bodies, seemingly regardless of their actual experience or competency. In Canada, security work is one of the easiest routes to employment for young people and particularly recent immigrants with little Canadian work experience, but, when it comes to live events, it’s also an often impossible mix of customer support, crowd management, law enforcement, and emergency medical services that requires years of training and on-the-ground experience to do well.
The apparent failures of this type of security, which is often referred to as “contract security” (not be confused with “private security”, which usually means expensive bodyguards), are not unique to Houston. I’ve been working in large public events for more than 20 years and contract security has always been one of the great planning dilemmas. If you want to get insured, you need lots of security, but every one of those guards must be treated as part asset and part liability.
Event sites, especially festivals with multiple stages, are expansive (the site in Houston was over 1,000,000 square feet in total space), and a well-designed event site, just like a well-designed building, needs plenty of entrances and exits, each of which must be adequately staffed. Guards are needed in front of the stage, in the crowd, at backstage access points, and around critical infrastructure. On top of all that you also need a team of roving guards to patrol the site looking for issues. Add it up and a large event site could have dozens or hundreds of security guards doing a variety of jobs, all of which fall under the catch-all description of “security”. On a big summer weekend at the height of event season, a large city like Toronto might have thousands of guards working dozens of sites. How do you find that many good people who can bear the responsibility of preserving public safety? Generally, you don’t.
It only requires a two-week commitment and a little patience to become a security guard in Ontario. So long as you have a clean criminal record, you can sign up for the required training: 40 hours on law and security, plus another 30-40 hours of first aid. This training is often performed by the very companies that do the hiring, which can greatly affect priorities in accurate skills testing. Hit all those marks and mere weeks after deciding to become a security guard you could be faced with a horde of concertgoers busting through the fence you’ve just been ordered to protect.
When I started in live events, it was all on the technical side, setting up lighting, sound and stages, and I didn’t pay much attention to what happened on the other side of the crowd barrier. About 15 years ago I started working on Nuit Blanche, Toronto’s overnight outdoor art event, and it was during those long nights watching hundreds of thousands and then millions of people that I developed a sense of how they act in large groups and how unpredictable they can be. This isn’t meant to sound like a superpower, it’s just a honed instinct. It took me well over a decade of steady work and constant observation to develop some ability to sense when a crowd might turn ugly. That experience can’t be replicated with two weeks of training, but that’s exactly what’s often expected of security guards.
November 9, 2021
Led Zeppelin IV, fifty years on
In Monday’s NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh helps a lot of “late Boomers” and Gen X’ers to feel even older:
This very day, friends, marks the 50th anniversary of the release of Led Zeppelin’s fourth studio album, whose title is technically a series of glyphs representing the band’s four members. Frustrated writers and editors usually just call it Led Zeppelin IV, and will have to go on doing so until the Unicode Consortium comes to its senses.
Zep IV is generally considered the band’s strongest LP, and it contains the song “Stairway to Heaven”, which has been played so often over 50 years of life that it is now somewhat divisive. It’s possible the species can be split into people who are sick of “Stairway” and those of us who still have to let it play all the way through, every time, even though it has nothing left to disclose and no remaining power to surprise. (How could it? We all know every note, every overtone of every chord, every syllable of incomprehensible Robert Plant doggerel.) NP Platformed is cheered by the thought that there are babies being born every day who will, at some time or other, get to hear “Stairway” for the first time. It’s not like they’ll get very far without hearing it.
“Stairway” makes for a hell of a cleanup hitter, but on Zep IV the lineup is immense from top to bottom. There are those who would argue that other Zeppelin studio LPs are stronger on the whole. If you like the heavy-blues side of the group, you might be tempted to vote for Zeppelin II (1969); folkies appreciate Zeppelin III (1970).
The fifth record, Houses of the Holy (1973), was once called “Zeppelin’s best record” by Chuck Klosterman, an undoubted authority in such matters … but please note that Klosterman wrote this in a listicle about the greatest metal albums that had Zeppelin IV No. 2 overall, with Houses of the Holy altogether omitted. Later, when trendsetting music-review site Pitchfork.com did a listicle of the top 100 albums of the 1970s, they ranked Zep IV seventh and spent a couple hundred words apologizing for not putting it first. (“We must be lying to ourselves …”) Zep IV: too big to ignore.
October 20, 2021
Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition – Music of World War Two – WW2 – On the Homefront 011
World War Two
Published 19 Oct 2021With the ascent of the radio, popular music became an important cultural phenomenon for the masses throughout the world. Therefore, it is the perfect mouthpiece for Allied war propaganda during the Second World War.
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October 17, 2021
Just about the least likely 2021 issue … protesting a school principal for her musical taste
In Friday’s NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh reports on some St. Catharines, Ontario parents who apparently just woke up from a 40-year long stasis pod:
Adrian Humphreys has a short item in today’s Post about an attempt to petition against a St. Catharines, Ont., public school principal because of her off-hours fondness for Britain’s ancient heavy-metal act Iron Maiden. NP Platformed can only applaud the success of what is clearly a disguised ploy for global publicity: Maiden, now 46 years into a busy life of recording and touring, released its first new studio LP in six years last month.
Then again, it is vaguely possible that the petition was started out of genuine concern by the “parents”, who claimed to have authored it, none of whom have stepped forward to own their objections to principal Sharon Burns. (She is, perhaps wisely, not giving interviews herself.)
If you’re about Burns’s age, you can only marvel at the operations of Father Time. When we and Burns and Iron Maiden’s (mostly intact) classic lineup were all still young, the band was one whose symbols you might draw on a Duo-Tang to annoy and disquiet a prissy teacher. How the tables have turned, as tables will.
Burns’s Instagram account contained photos of her going to concerts and wearing Iron Maiden merchandise of the sort that has made the group incalculable fortunes. Her gear included some references to 1982’s The Number of the Beast, which critical consensus considers to still be the finest of the group’s studio albums.
This was seen by the anonymous petitioners as signalling an allegiance to Satanism, and perhaps it’s natural for a very sheltered parent to have become upset. (The school, as Humphreys explains, has a distant background as a Mennonite Bible school.) But getting angry at Iron Maiden in 2021 feels a little like getting angry at McDonald’s. Even on a surface level, Maiden, a “new wave” metal group that did its most innovative work in the 1970s and ’80s, has been succeeded by several generations of metal groups and entire subcultures that take the violence, noise, crudity and obscenity into realms we old farts never dreamt of.
October 7, 2021
QotD: Music as a career choice
James Lileks, The Bleat, 2005-06-03.
September 25, 2021
“Steel Commanders” – Tanks and Panzer! – Sabaton History 106 [Official]
Sabaton History
Published 24 Sep 2021From the first landships of the Great War to the massive armor-battles of Prokhorovka and El-Alamein — the introduction of the tank to the battlefield had changed warfare forever. Impregnable to small-arms fire, they crushed barbed-wire and field fortifications underneath their tracks, paving the way for the infantry’s advance. In independent formations they surged forward at the head of the offensive, outmaneuvering the enemy’s defenses and wreaking havoc in their lines. From the Mark V to the T-34, from the Tiger to the Centurion — the evolution of armor is the history of Steel Commanders.
Support Sabaton History on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/sabatonhistory
Watch the Official Music Video of “Steel Commanders” here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peTCe…
Listen to Sabaton on Spotify: http://smarturl.it/SabatonSpotify
Official Sabaton Merchandise Shop: http://bit.ly/SabatonOfficialShopHosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Markus Linke and Indy Neidell
Directed by: Astrid Deinhard and Wieke Kapteijns
Produced by: Pär Sundström, Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Executive Producers: Pär Sundström, Joakim Brodén, Tomas Sunmo, Indy Neidell, Astrid Deinhard, and Spartacus Olsson
Community Manager: Maria Kyhle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Editor: Iryna Dulka
Sound Editor: Marek Kaminski
Archive: Reuters/Screenocean – https://www.screenocean.com
Sources:
– IWM E 18376, IWM 357, Q 9249, IWM 1198, IWM 130-09+10, Q 107828, IWM 508-70, KID 109, UKY 502, E 7070, H 37169, MH4107
– wall by mara julieta G., Tree by Joni Ramadhan; from the Noun Project
All music by: SabatonAn OnLion Entertainment GmbH and Raging Beaver Publishing AB co-Production.
© Raging Beaver Publishing AB, 2019 – all rights reserved.
September 23, 2021
QotD: The problem with “free” tech stuff
It has gotten so bad lately that they don’t just barrage you with ads, they’re now starting to force-feed you content. I used to have Amazon Music — the free one, of course — because it was a good way to listen to The Z Man’s podcasts and my classical library during my commute. I’d download albums to my phone, switch to “offline” mode, and listen that way. Which Amazon obviously considers no good, because they pushed out some “car mode” bullshit that now automatically turns your wifi on, then starts blasting hip hop at you. And that’s not all! A few weeks back, while trying to figure out a way to turn the damn thing off, I noticed that it now has a “your playlist” feature, based on “your” music … which is, of course, the same force-fed rap shit I’ve been trying so desperately to avoid. It has decided that not only shall I listen to Young Jeezy, Big Weezy, and MC Funetik Spelyn, I will also like it, to such a degree that they will start force-feeding me other shit based on my “likes”.
Yeah. Uninstalled. Fuck you, Bezos. I’ve got a CD player. And when Microsoft decides that I’m not listening to the right music on that, and uninstalls the driver, I’ve got a tape deck. And when that breaks, I will sing to myself as I go down the highway. 99 bottles of beer on the wall, motherfucker, just like bus trips back in Boy Scouts. Enough is enough.
Severian, “Mailbag / Grab Bag”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-06-18.
September 22, 2021
QotD: Urban bohemians
Powers fails to recognize that her bohemia is predicated upon a market liberalism that throws off so much wealth that you can live like a Pharaoh just by scavenging what other people throw out — as she and her slacker buddies did in San Francisco in the ’80s and early ’90s. Her bohemian lifestyle is part of the same system that underwrites free markets, consumerism, and tolerance for all sorts of offensive speech and alternative lifestyles. In other words, the liberty to be bohemian is a glorious result of the very capitalist reality that Powers says a real bohemian must be against.
Brian Doherty, “Rage On: The strange politics of millionaire rock stars”, Reason Online, 2000-10.
Update: Broken link fixed, thanks to “somercet1” for the heads-up.
August 27, 2021
QotD: Music corporations, musicians, and hypocrisy
So says Tom Morello, guitarist for the Los Angeles-based band Rage Against the Machine. He and his bandmates are not simply against cops and the suburbs, of course. They also stand for the Zapatistas and the Shining Path, for freeing Mumia Abu-Jamal and Leonard Peltier, for giving California back to Mexico, and for destroying stores where rich people like themselves shop.
That’s pretty strong stuff coming from work-for-hire employees of one of the great cogs in the global capitalist machine, the megaconglomerate Sony, which wholly owns and distributes Rage’s music and even is a co-owner of the group’s publishing. Since 1992, Rage has sold nearly 7 million records, and it’s safe to say that nobody has benefitted more from that commerce than the band’s unabashedly capitalist paymaster.
Brian Doherty, “Rage On: The strange politics of millionaire rock stars”, Reason, 2000-10.
August 11, 2021
The Symphony That Defeated the Wehrmacht – WAH 040 – August 1942, Pt .1
World War Two
Pubished 10 Aug 2021The Big Action at the Warsaw Ghetto continues, while The Japanese carry out retaliations against the Chinese for aiding American airmen. Dmitri Shostakovich’s “Symphony no. 7” premieres in the besieged city of Leningrad.
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August 6, 2021
Shostakovich: Stalin’s Composer? – WW2 Biography Special
World War Two
Published 5 Aug 2021Leningrad’s Dmitri Shostakovich has risen from a child prodigy to be one of the Soviet Union’s most celebrated composers, having rescued his career from Stalin’s interference along the way. Desperate to defend Russia after the German invasion, he fights back, not with a rifle, but with music.
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July 29, 2021
QotD: An opera called Margaret
Dominic Sandbrook, The Great British Dream Factory, 2015.
July 15, 2021
Goodbye Lenin, Hello Jazz! | B2W:ZEITGEIST! I E.22 Winter 1924
TimeGhost History
Published 14 Jul 2021The winter of 1924 sees the death of not only Vladimir Lenin but also the Ottoman Caliphate. However, it also sees something fresh and completely unique enter the American mainstream. George Gershwin has given the Jazz Age a soundtrack.
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July 12, 2021
“The Royal Guard” – Livgardet and the Kalabalik at Bender – Sabaton History 104 [Official]
Sabaton History
Published 10 Jul 2021From the devastated battlefield of Poltava to the long exile in the Ottoman Empire, Livgardet never abandoned their King. Even when King Karl XII found himself surrounded by thousands of foes, the remaining four men of his Royal Guard stood by his side. Pistols raised and sabers drawn, the Swedes fought through smoke and fire in the Kalabalik at Bender, protecting their King’s life with their own.
Support Sabaton History on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/sabatonhistory
Listen to “The Royal Guard” on the album: https://music.sabaton.net/TheRoyalGuard
Watch the Official Music Video of “The Royal Guard” here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZN5b…
Listen to Sabaton on Spotify: http://smarturl.it/SabatonSpotify
Official Sabaton Merchandise Shop: http://bit.ly/SabatonOfficialShopHosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Markus Linke and Indy Neidell
Directed by: Astrid Deinhard and Wieke Kapteijns
Produced by: Pär Sundström, Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Executive Producers: Pär Sundström, Joakim Brodén, Tomas Sunmo, Indy Neidell, Astrid Deinhard, and Spartacus Olsson
Community Manager: Maria Kyhle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Editor: Karolina Dołęga
Sound Editor: Marek Kaminski
Archive: Reuters/Screenocean – https://www.screenocean.comSources:
– Photo of Axel Rose courtesy of andres fernando allain https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi…
– Nationalmuseum
– Painting of King Charles XII in Turkey courtesy of Allan Egnell https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi…All music by: Sabaton
An OnLion Entertainment GmbH and Raging Beaver Publishing AB co-Production.
© Raging Beaver Publishing AB, 2019 – all rights reserved.
