Iconic women pt. 5

It has often been said that if Joni Mitchell had been a man she would have been bigger than Bob Dylan. I’m not sure how helpful that is to anything, but certainly, for my money, her achievement in the clumsily named of singer-songwriter category places her firmly among the very best. Watch this clip from her 70^th birthday celebratory concert at Massey Hall in Toronto in June this year doing one of her very best songs Furry Sings the Blues (listen to the original studio version here and read the lyrics here). A seeming homage to the old blues singer Furry Lewis and the magic that we imagine was Beale Street in Memphis at some golden age, it’s really a lament for the things that change in our lives and the bits of the and our past that are gone forever and cannot be recovered.

And if that doesn’t do it for you, try this, a live version of In France They Kiss on Main Street with the incomparable and irreplaceable Jaco Pastorius on bass and the unmistakable Pat Metheny on guitar, or this, The Judgement of the Moon and Stars (Ludwig’s Tune), an elegy to Beethoven.

 

I grew up with the voice of Janet Baker and still think it is unique. She is certainly the finest mezzo-soprano I’ve ever heard and has a tone that is never strident and always just sort of sucks you in and makes you feel you are drowning in honey.

Her Schubert song cycles are a wonder, as are her interpretations of Mahler, but for me her performance of Dido’s Lament (the well known and frequently performed aria When I am laid in earth) from Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas is absolutely unsurpassed, maybe even unsurpassable.

And if that doesn’t convince you try this, Morgen by Richard Strauss. In Italian they say that “il bel giorno si vede dal mattino” (you can tell if it will be a good day by the morning). Obviously for the Germans it’s different. But my goodness it’s beautiful.

 

Now there are difficult characters and there are impossible ones. But it is extraordinary how much we can forgive or overlook when faced with genius.

Nina Simone was a classically trained pianist who gave herself over to a sort of jazz that allowed her to use her extraordinary skills and unmistakable voice to express what were clearly her many grievances with the world; first among them having to endure the inequalities that were inherent when she was young due to her being both black and a woman.

It made her strident, unpredictable and sometimes violent. She was as unhappy in love as in life, but her gifts were so unequivocal and inspiring that, since she died, there continue to be newcomers to the fold of her enthusiastic admirers. Not one yet yourself? Listen to these: the jaunty and unforgettable My Baby Just Cares for Me; this clip from the Montreux Jazz Festival in which we catch a glimpse of her obsessive side before she breaks into the brilliant Backlash Blues (studio version here) and, lastly, the very moving Four Women.

 

Less known, younger, in some ways a pupil of the Joni Mitchell school, Shawn Colvin just has a voice and style that I like. Aided for many years by the producer John Leventhal, I just think she has written and sung some of the best things in this genre over the last fifteen years or so. I discovered her first through the 1997 album A Few Small Repairs, which features the magnificent Facts About Jimmy.  From the following 2011 album Whole New You contained the strange and dark Another Plane Went Down and, lastly, from the 2012 album All Fall Down, a song about change and regret On My Own with Emmylou Harris on backing vocals.

 

Laura Nyro was another of the great singer-songwriters whose extraordinary talent was never full appreciated at the time and, unfortunately, her star has rather faded since. But the recovery begins here. The first song of hers I ever heard was actually sung by Barbra Streisand. Stoney End was released as a single in the UK in 1971 and I still think it’s brilliant, see what you think here.

It was some time before I caught up with Laura Nyro herself. The first thing I noticed was the enigmatic album titles, such as,  Eli and the Thirteenth Confession or New York Tendaberry, or, again, Christmas and the Beads of Sweat.

From what I know she was a nervous performer and so never made the breakthrough that was certainly her due. She died at 49 of cancer.

Here is a sample of her work: Eli’s Coming (1968), The Cat Song (1976), Time and Love (1969), and, finally, also from 1976, the extraordinary I Am the Blues.

 

The appellation “The Voice” has been given to a number of people. Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, etc. It is now a globally successful TV format. But, for me, there is only one the voice, and that is Ella Fitzgerald. What she could do with a song was often so thrilling and unimaginable that one has merely to bow before greatness.

With a vocal range that spanned three octaves, she shone in scat, the classic American songbook and excelled in the ballads of the 40s and 50s, songs of such lasting quality that they will be with us forever and, most likely, in the versions recorded by Ella.

Examples? There are so many, but here are three:

Summertime (1958) the outstanding Gershwin song from the opera Porgy and Bess, Reach For Tomorrow, from the exquisite 1960 album The Intimate Ella, and from Ella in Berlin, also in 1960,  the classic The Man I Love.

Iconic women pt. 4

 

Jonathan Miller, himself an exemplary British polymath, once famously described Susan Sontag as the most intelligent woman in America. Writer, critic, filmmaker, polemicist and political activist, she epitomised the radical engagée celebrity intellectual in the 60s and 70s with an uncompromising and demanding style. Her many books and novels set her apart as a non academic critic of the first order, which also explains why she so often came in for academic criticism.

“It hurts to love. It’s like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.”

Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

 

Hannah Arendt was a German-Jewish intellectual at a time when that was a decidedly unhappy combination. Perhaps her best works are The Human Condition (1958) and On Revolution (1963), but she is best known for her attendance at the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem and her reports for the New Yorker and the resulting book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). The phrase “the banality of evil” itself has gained wide currency even if few are actually familiar with the reasoning behind its coining. As a fairly sceptical observer of the Eichmann trial, she pondered the question of whether evil is a radical concept or merely the result of thoughtlessness, the tendency of ordinary individuals to go with the flow without an especially critical evaluation of what is going on around them or what the consequences of their actions or inaction might be. A reflection that is as relevant now as ever.

“Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.”

“The common prejudice that love is as common as “romance” may be due to the fact that we all learned about it first through poetry. But the poets fool us; they are the only ones to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one.”

From The Human Condition (1958)

 

Superficially less highbrow than the others in this category, Nora Ephron was in fact a journalist, essayist, playwright, screenwriter, novelist, producer, director and blogger.

She achieved great success with her screenplays for the romantic comedies When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle, but in her books, including Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman (2006) and I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections (2010) are only apparently lighthearted while in fact being quite radically feminist, albeit in an understated, ironic and hugely amusing way.

For some memorable quotes go here.

 

Camille Paglia, who describes herself as a ‘dissident feminist’, is nothing if not controversial. Self-admittedly inspired by Susan Sontag (see above) she also claimed to be the only lesbian at Yale Graduate School, picked fights with prominent feminists and ended up under the wing of Harold Bloom.

The book that made her name was Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, which, after many rejections, was finally published in 1990 by Yale University Press (and by Einaudi in Italy). It is a challenging analysis of a perceived struggle between masculine and feminine forces in literature and art, and received wildly enthusiastic and horribly hostile reviews in almost equal measure. 

Other outstanding titles include Sex, Art and American Culture (1992) and Vamps & Tramps (1994)

Quotable (and sometimes debatable) quotes:

Sexuality and eroticism are the intricate intersection of nature and culture. Feminists grossly oversimplify the problem of sex when they reduce it a matter of social convention: readjust society, eliminate sexual inequality, purify sex roles, and happiness and harmony will reign. Here feminism, like all liberal movements of the past two hundred years, is heir to Rousseau.

From: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

Modern liberalism suffers unresolved contradictions. It exalts individualism and freedom and, on its radical wing, condemns social orders as oppressive. On the other hand, it expects governments to provide materially for all, a feat manageable only by an expansion of authority and a swollen bureaucracy. In other words, liberalism defines government as tyrant father but demands it behave as nurturant mother. Feminism has inherited these contradictions.

Ibid.

The artist makes art not to save mankind but to save himself. Every benevolent comment by an artist is a fog to cover his tracks, the bloody trail of his assault against reality and others.

Ibid.

One of feminism’s irritating reflexes is its fashionable disdain for “patriarchal society,” to which nothing good is ever attributed. But it is patriarchal society that has freed me as a woman. It is capitalism that has given me the leisure to sit at this desk writing this book. Let us stop being small-minded about men and freely acknowledge what treasures their obsessiveness has poured into culture.

Ibid.

The search for freedom through sex is doomed to failure.


Ibid.

Male mastery in marriage is a social illusion, nurtured by women exhorting their creations to play and walk. At the emotional heart of every marriage is a pietà of mother and son.

Ibid.

In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf satirically describes her perplexity at the bulging card catalogue of the British Museum: why, she asks, are there so many books written by men about women but none by women about men? The answer to her question is that from the beginning of time men have been struggling with the threat of woman’s dominance.

Ibid.

Women will never succeed at the level or in the numbers they deserve until they get over their genteel reluctance to take abuse in the attack and counterattack of territorial warfare. The recent trend in feminism, notably in sexual harassment policy, has been to over-rely on regulation and legislation rather than to promote personal responsibility. Women must not become wards and supplicants of authority figures. Freedom means rejecting dependency.

From: Vamps & Tramps

I admire hard-bitten, wisecracking realism of Ida Lupino and the film noir heroines. I’m sick of simpering white girls with their princess fantasies.

Ibid.

Is there intellectual life in America? At present, the answer is no.

Ibid.

So, she may sometimes be a little hard to take, but she is always worth reading.

 

 

In some ways Mary Wollstonecraft can be considered the source. Her 1792 book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman began from the premise that women are not ‘naturally’ inferior to men, a claim of such astonishing radicalism, even at a time of ‘Enlightenment’, that it is today difficult to imagine and impossible not to admire her singular courage.

Though obviously greatly expanded in her most famous book, the quotation I most like, for its synthesis, comes from an earlier work:

Virtue can only flourish amongst equals.

From: A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790)

  

It is not too much to say the reading The Female Eunuch (1970) in the 70s changed my view of the world forever. It introduced me to a perspective I had previously been almost entirely unaware of: from the automatic assumption of gender roles to putting the loo seat down after taking a pee. Germaine Greer, an Australian by birth who has lived most of her adult life in England, is an academic, a journalist and a ferociously engaging and provocative speaker. Listen to her talking about her book Shakespeare’s Wife (2007) here.

Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate.

From: The Female Eunuch

But she continued to think and to challenge and to be outspoken, a much more preferable approach than silence or mute hostility because at least you know what you’re up against.

Women over fifty already form one of the largest groups in the population structure of the western world. As long as they like themselves, they will not be an oppressed minority. In order to like themselves they must reject trivialization by others of who and what they are. A grown woman should not have to masquerade as a girl in order to remain in the land of the living.

From: The Change: Women, Aging and the Menopause (1991)

Men have still not realized that letting women do so much of the work for so little reward makes a man in the house an expensive luxury rather than a necessity.

From: The Whole Woman (1999)

Along with her (all male) near contemporaries from Australia, Clive James, Robert Hughes and Barry Humphries in particular, she was part of an Antipodean invasion that immeasurably enriched the intellectual life of the English-speaking world and mine along with it.

 

Up next MUSICIANS.

 

 

Iconic women pt. 2

The actors above don’t need any introduction from me, they have won so many plaudits and awards as to have become household names in most homes. They are not the highest paid or even the most popular in their profession, but, for money, they all stand out for the exceptional range and intelligence they bring to their roles. They have all, it must be said, in some pretty dreadful films too, but they are never less than watchable and interesting, and sometimes they raise the art of acting to such a level that it can only make us grateful for the intensity of feelings they are able to evoke; like all good art, the remind us of what it means to be human.

See examples of their art here: Huppert, Wright, Scott Thomas, Moore, Streep, Linney 

Coming soon LETTERS.

Iconic women pt. 1

One of the very first posts I made was a list of “Heroes”, one for more or less every conscious year of my life. It was my youngest son who first pointed out that there were no women on my list. I, in turn and a little defensively,  pointed out that it was a list of ‘heroes’ and not ‘heroines’, which of course I have but had decided to focus on the former as, in most ways, having had a greater influence, also as a result of , often ‘narcissistic’, identification.

However, it has long been my intention to deal with “the other half of Heaven” and was recently inspired by my friend Digital epiphanies who on another social network had posted a list of women who had inspired her and men she would have liked to meet.

I consider all of these women inspirational and am as much in awe of their talents as anything else. I decided to break them down into categories that are relevant really only for me, but it makes for a series that I hope will prove engaging also for others.

I start with what might seem the easiest, or most banal (below I will try to say why I don’t think there is anything banal about it). Subsequent categories will be ACTORS, LETTERS, POLYMATHS and MUSICIANS. Watch this space.

 

Perhaps the most banal comment about beauty is that it is “in the eye of the beholder”. Well, yes and no. It is true, fortunately and magically, that we have an individual capacity and propensity to see beauty where others might not, but there are, I believe, certain examples of beauty – faces, landscapes, works of art, etc. – that are immediately and universally recognised and therefore not susceptible to serious debate.

And since female beauty has been a central theme in poetry and art from even before the ancients, it seems only right to recognise it as a force in our lives. But, unlike the other categories – that all have six icons – this category seems to me so particular as to demand an even more rigorous selection.

The two women above are, in my view, so unique and so extraordinarily and unquestionably beautiful, as to merit being at the apex of this personal pantheon. They have a beauty that also seems to suggest hints of varied ethnicity; they don’t look Belgian or American, for example,  or French, or German, or anything else for that matter. They have been blessed with faces and bodies that are perfect in form; the sort of form that an artist might choose to create. They are without voluptuousness or vulgarity, they are emphatically not what one hears described as “sexy”, and yet their femininity, charm and intelligence make them incomparably alluring.

Come back next time for ACTORS.