I feel that I have begun to go off the rails a little in my series, which after all was supposed to be fun, not a demonstration of my psychological estrangement from normal human society. I thought about taking a break from the series and writing a few nontaxing posts about watching music videos from the 80s on Youtube. For example, I had forgotten that Swing out Sister had a second song ("Twilight World") released in the US. Seeing it again made me rather melancholy. Here were people who clearly thought themselves, circa 1988, to be very clever, fashionable, creative, progessive, international--in a word nearly at the extremity of the cutting edge of world civilization itself. Moreover, they had broken through and made some figure in the great world; the possibility, even the probability, that they were in some way important could not but have flitted across their consciousnesses a few times. And then of course, as quickly as they came, they dropped off the face of the earth again, immediately becoming a relic of those very last dregs of the 80s, of the Cold War era, a time that in media and technology and politics and economics at least often feels no less remote than that of the big bands. I had utterly forgotten about them. I remember their song coming on my car radio back when it was new and feeling that it was a harbinger of some excitement coming to happen in my life, I suspect because I was alone, temporarily freed from the dreariness of family life. I was on I-84 somewhere in eastern Connecticut, probably on my way to have lunch at McDonald's and then right through New York City without stopping and on to my mother's in Philadelphia to watch television and evoke pity or scorn from all the regular hard-working people and wander fruitlessly around the neighborhood in search of...? This is what else I have looking at to carry me back to that time:
"Domino Dancing"--The Pet Shop Boys
"Joe le Taxi"-- Vanessa Paradis--terrible video and she is about 13, but it was a big hit when I was first in Paris, and everybody like me always thinks Paris is perfect the way it was when they were first there, and is never quite so wonderful ever after.
"Basketball"-Kurtis Blow
Morrissey--`Suedehead` and `Everyday is Like Sunday`--the essence of Morrissey on video
"Here`s Where the Story Ends"--The Sundays. Harriet Wheeler of course was my dream north-of-England dark rainy evening at the pub date circa 1990.
"Just a Friend"--Biz Markie. Don`t ask. Some things, like my fascination with this song and this performer, defy explanation.
"Wonderwall"--Oasis. I know this is years later, but it was the raging hit the 1st time I was in London, and I didnt make it to London until I was in my mid-20s.
Esther, as she is presented either in the Bible or in this painting, is not a woman of the type with whom I historically have had any success, even so far as getting her to say hello (if she were forced to do so) without a clenched jaw and hostility in her eyes, but this is nothing if not an aspirational web site, and neither artists nor writers seem to able to take her up as a subject without convincing the audience that she is hot-t-t-t-t-t-t-t. Esther was the sexiest female character in the Bible by far. I wish there was a better way I could say it without sullying one of the greatest productions of the human race, but having once read the whole thing straight through there is really no getting around it when you hit that story; it is what is most memorable when you read it. (I always considered Leah to be the second sexiest, by the way; the text insisting that she was inferior to Rachel in every way and was unloved, her story has always interested me, as she was still frequently entered into and impregnated, probably with a certain amount of relish despite not being the dreamgirl or the mother of a race of heroes. There is a lesson in that somewhere.) I dont have a very vivid idea of what Esther might have looked or been like (and her beauty is important, or at least might have been, if the literature is to be believed, to the course of human history.) The intellect suggests that to become the favorite of the King of Persia, a line of men renowned for their sensual appetites even among other Asiatic despots, she must have been a tall, poised, raven haired girl with the body of a college swimmer, though I tend to imagine her as one of the rather small but energetic, motormouthed (and pretty) Jewish girls I knew and loved, deservedly unrequited as it turned out, in my youth. But of course for us gentiles and non-Greeks all these characters and events of antiquity are just symbols that we use, that we only can really use, for our own purposes however petty or great, are they not. The modernists probably set Western art down that same path. We have been knocked loose from the moorings of the past as far as their being to us what they say or suggest they are or are supposed to be. What, after all, are Esther or Theodore Chasseriau to me? I am not of their race nor kind.
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