Another portrait of Donna Summer… I seem to be a little obsessed….
Creative Loathing
Raspberry Fields
Donna Summer, “I Feel Love (Patrick Cowley Mega Mix)” (1978)
I wrote some initial thoughts about Donna Summer for Pitchfork that I’m pretty happy with, and features maybe a little bit of a different perspective. (I also had to get the Patrick Cowley mix of “I Feel Love” in there, as in its “beatless” midst are quite a few excellent ideas picked up by one corner of the Detroit electronic music community.)
Some of the feelings I wrote about were also awesomely expressed by a reader writing into Andrew Sullivan’s blog on Friday.
“Here’s the thing about Donna Summer and her gay fans: She was never that into us….And yet: She and an entire generation of gay fans shared their very souls. Our connection was real, it was abiding, and it had nothing to do with her look, her life or anyone’s camp sensibility. It was entirely about the music - which simply couldn’t have been any gayer.
“Donna’s gay sensibility was written into her DNA. She understood what her gay fans wanted on a cellular level. For all her discomfort with what she thought she knew about us, she made music that was so unbelievably, manifestly, pervasively extra gay, only a gay person - or a true kindred soul - could have made it….
“To me, this is the paradox of Donna Summer. In one sense, she knew next to nothing about her most ardent fans, and was only too happy to keep her distance. But on the very deepest level - the music itself - she was ONE with us. And that’s why we can forgive whatever statements she might have made about gay people. It’s why we don’t care about Donna Summer’s indifference to us. And it’s why we’ll love her forever.”
The whole thing is worth reading.
Douglas Coupland on Translit
We live in a post-era era without forms of its own powerful enough to brand the times. The zeitgeist of 2012 is that we have a lot of zeit but not much geist….There is something psychically sparse about the present era, and artists of all stripes are responding with fresh strategies.
This new reality seems to have manifested in the literary world in what must undeniably be called a new literary genre. For lack of a better word, let’s call it Translit. Translit novels cross history without being historical; they span geography without changing psychic place. Translit collapses time and space as it seeks to generate narrative traction in the reader’s mind. It inserts the contemporary reader into other locations and times, while leaving no doubt that its viewpoint is relentlessly modern and speaks entirely of our extreme present….We visit multiple pasts safe in the knowledge we’ll get off the ride intact, in our bold new perpetual every-era/no-era…
A decade ago the critic James Wood used a term, “hysterical realism,” to describe books of this ilk. But that somehow feels dated, as Translit prose, whle crossing genres within itself, tends to be icy cool, and what once seemed like hysteria in our culture has now become a staple of daily life. The Translit reader knows there is spirituality lacking in the modern world that can only be squeezed out of other more authentic eras. And why not? It’s all history and it’s all at your fingertips…
I do wonder if being a writer in 2012 means needing to be able to write in multiple genres…but not as some sort of postmodern party trick. It’s more a statement of fact about the early-21st-century condition. Genre shifting is as fundamental to working with words as is punctuation and knowing the difference between serifs and san-serifs. The fact that China has recently sought to suppress time travel as a creative device for some artists (yes, it’s true) makes Translit somehow subversive and highly credible.
Bonnie “Prince” Billy, “I See a Darkness” [Full Band version] (Drag City 2012, produced by Steve Albini) - Remember that Shellac 7” cover on which Albini created a correlation between the Drag City artist roster and the ’60s/’70s dinosaurs they most resembled? At least that was the implied connection. Well, a decade+ on, who’d have thought that it wasn’t a member of Pavement that took up the Grateful Dead’s explore-your-catalog-til-it-has-stretch-marks philosophy, but Bonnie Will Oldham (whom, as Palace, Albini equated with John Denver, but is looking more like Jerry every time). All good things in all good time, indeed!
“The artistic challenge, one I accept, is to use the tools of Western progress and communicate messages of African heritage.”
— Francis Bebey, in “Africa O-Ye! A Celebration of African Music” (Guinness Publishing Ltd. 1991) by Graeme Ewens
Christian Lattier…and Salif Diabagate
[Christian] Lattier was Ivory Coast’s greatest 20th-century artist. Born in 1925, he studied in Paris, where he broke with the French academic practice of modeling in plaster and began weaving figures from copper wire, a technique used in traditional African art.
After independence he settled in Abidjan and taught here until his death in 1978. Unattached to any Western movement or style, and undervalued in his home country in his time, he was a man of conflicts, cultural and personal. You sense this in his sculptures, made from rice-sack hemp hand-twisted into cords wrapped around armatures, of freakish animals, crucifixions and sardonic riffs on traditional African masks - or rather on Picasso’s riffs on such masks. Talk about international networking: Lattier was an African and a modernist quoting Picasso quoting Africa.
Lattier also turned out public sculptures, the best known being an giant relief called “The Three Ages of Cote D’Ivoire” for Abidjian’s international airport. When the airport was renovated in 2000, the relief was taken down and carted away. For years it lay, a tangle of frayed cord and rusting metal, on a patch of grass outside a government building, the Palace of Culture….
Periodically, [contemporary Cote D’Ivoire painter] Salif Diabagate will bring interested visitors to see it….Lattier, a star of a high, half-forgotten cultural moment in Africa, is his hero….
For years, he has planned to restore the piece, though no one asked him to until the government started to show interest a few months ago. His Abidjian dealer tells him he’s crazy, tells him to make his own art. But saving the Lattier is a personal matter. It’s about preserving African art history, which is also his own history, and assuring the future of both.
Holland Cotter, “Out of Adversity, Visions of Life - Africa’s Artists Court a Global Audience, Undaunted by Civil War and Neglect,” New York Times, April 15, 2012
Photo: Christian Lattier sculpture from Ivory Coast Pavillion at the Montreal World’s Fair in 1967, credit unknown
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Peaking Lights, “Lucifer Mixtape 1” (2012)
The whole Peaking Lights-Not Not Fun/100% Silk story was probably among my favorite music blips of 2011. Here, people generally associated with (and thought to be a part of) the greater indie-rock subculture did not just embrace dance music, they added their own muddy lo-fi smears, personalizing it in a way that was perfect for the times. The releases were hardly consistent, but as an aesthetic counter of perfect Serato mixes and the uber-digital roar of bro-lectro/bro-step/arena-house, they seemed a way to simultaneously scale back, lovingly embrace and time-stamp. Peaking Lights’ “936” album embodied the pop side of that mindset with some wonderful dub/post-punk-gone-West-Coast-psyche grooves; it helped that it was also full of catchy songs the masses could love. Additionally, the duo (Indra Dunis and Aaron Coyes) had an incredible garage-alchemists story that any creative folks could relate to (VBS’ Motherboard did an excellent story on them). Now, ahead of the release of their new album (now on Mexican Summer), Peaking Lights drop a mixtape that continues the mostly-homebuilt, analog dance adventure, and, while the songs remain the same, they continue to generally avoid the retromaniacal cliches. Definitely worth a play.
Batida, “Alegria” (Soundway 2012) - One would have figured that after the (kinda) breakthrough of Buruka Son Sistema, there would have been a UK Bass-powered wave of Kuduro flooding hipster club soundsystems. But - no! Interesting that Batida (i.e. Portuguese/Angolan DJ Mpula, a.k.a. Pedro Coquenão) keeps the booming machines somewhat scaled back, or at least tempered with the chiming West African guitars, (dubbing them out when needed), and adding layers of almost samba school-like percussion. (Or maybe it’s the images and content of the Angolan Carnival video…) In any case, the resulting traditional-modern mix is the kind I would not feel uncomfortable playing for partisans of either mind-set.
