Someone on Facebook recently posted this image of the Hindu goddess Kalaratri, the fiercest version or aspect of Kali-Durga, consort of Shiva, I believe (Hindu mythology makes me dizzy), and I became very intrigued. According to asianart.org, “Durga appeared when the gods were unable to subdue a demon who was threatening the entire world. Individually, the gods were unable to defeat the demon. They summoned Durga and gave her all their weapons. The battle went on and on, prolonged by the fact that Mahisha [demons] continually changed shapes.” And of course, she triumphs. Durga apparently has eight other manifestations as well:

Kalaratri is typically represented by cascades of black hair lit by the stars, dark/blue skin, and four hands: two in the mudras of giving, the others clutching a cleaver and torch, respectively. She’s also usually on a horse. She’s celebrated on the seventh day of the festival Navaratri, as the image above relates, and sometimes bears Kali’s bloody tongue:

For me, she embodies the necessity of a mother-warrior archetype for which there are few western parallels. Some in Greco-Roman and Euro-pagan traditions, but none in the Judeo-Christian. The idea of a fearsome female deity who could be both destroyer and savior, capable of subduing evil while sustaining life, is obviously just too complicated and threatening for patriachs;).  Polytheistic belief systems are always more egalitarian that-a-ways as there’s room for variety and permutation built in.  Anyway, I’ve always found Durga inspiring, and this version of her, Kalaratri, was new for me, so I thought I’d share. BTW, I could find no other representation of her similar to the first one I posted, which a friend suggested may be part of a deck of cards (there is no information online).

For more info on Kalartri, go here. And if you have time, and want to explore more, I highly recommend checking out my friend Liz Insogna’s amazing project, Goddess, Speak; a series of invocations, writing, art and audio interviews.  Through cross-cultural studies of the goddess, she creates vivid and introspective portraits that are truly divine.

Liz Insogna,The Chinnamasta, ink on paper, 2014

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Here’s the NYT obit. Not sure why Robert D. McFadden, a 30-yr veteran and political reporter wrote it, but I guess they wanted a jump start on the sad news. It starts with some flubby beauty metaphors that would’ve made Joan kvetch, but it gets better. Sometimes I think The Gray Lady has become The Gray Crone (and not in a good way), but that’s another matter.

Here’s Joan on the Ed Sullivan Show, 1967. Brilliant!! , and some of her best jokes:

I have no sex appeal. If my husband didn’t toss and turn, we’d never have had the kid.

People say that money is not the key to happiness, but I always figured if you have enough money, you can have a key made.

My best birth control now is just to leave the lights on.

I’ve had so much plastic surgery, when I die, they will donate my body to Tupperware.

My vagina is like Newark. Men know it’s there, but they don’t want to visit.

A man can sleep around, no questions asked. But if a woman makes 19 or 20 mistakes, she’s a tramp.

I hate housework. You make the beds, you do the dishes, and six months later, you have to start all over again.

My husband killed himself. And it was my fault. We were making love and I took the bag off my head.

When I was born, my mother asked the doctor, “Will she live?” He said, “Only if you take your foot off her throat.”

My earliest childhood memory was watching my parents loosen the wheels on my stroller.

My breasts are so low, now I can have a mammogram and a pedicure at the same time.

I was the only Jewish kid in a Catholic neighborhood. They all did Hail Marys, I did Hail Murrays.

I blame my mother for my poor sex life. All she told me was, “The man goes on top and the woman underneath.” For three years my husband and I slept in bunk beds.

Princess Diana and the Queen are driving down the lane when their car is forced off the road by masked thieves. “Out of the car and hand over your jewels.” After the thieves rob them and steal their car, Diana begins to put her earrings, necklace, and rings back on. “Wherever did you hide those,” demanded the Queen. “Where do you think?” asked Diana. “Pity Margaret wasn’t here,” said the Queen. “We could have saved the Bentley.”

I was so ugly that they sent my picture to Ripley’s Believe It or Not and he sent it back and said, “I don’t believe it.”

When the rabbi said, “Do you take this man,” 14 guys said, “She has.” My husband bought the horseback-riding story, thank God.

You want to get Cindy Crawford confused? Ask her to spell mom backwards.

I was so flat, I used to put Xs on my chest and write, “You are here.” I wore angora sweaters just so the guys would have something to pet.

I blame myself for David Gest. It was me who told Liza Minnelli to find herself a man who wouldn’t sleep with other women.

The whole Michael Jackson thing was my fault. I told him to date only 28-year-olds. Who knew he would find 20 of them?

I finally found out how priests get holy water. They boil the hell out of it.

And since we’re all adults here, let’s be brutally honest — most babies are not actually attractive. In fact, they’re weird and freakish-looking. A large percentage of them are squinty-eyed and bald and their faces are all mushed together, kind of like Renée Zellweger pushed up against a glass window.

I was dating a transvestite, and my mother said, “Marry him, you’ll double your wardrobe.”

Did you hear Tom Cruise just had a baby? He was there when it was born … He should have been there when it was conceived.

My sex life is so bad, my G-spot has been declared a historical landmark.

I knew I was an unwanted baby when I saw that my bath toys were a toaster and a radio.

I saw my first porno film recently. It was a Jewish porno film — one minute of sex and nine minutes of guilt.

Not all plastic surgeons are good. My cousin went to one and told him she wanted to turn back the hands of time. Now she has a face that could stop a clock.

Everybody talks about multiple orgasm. Multiple orgasm — I’m lucky if both sides of my toaster pop.

On the Vanna White diet, you only eat what you can spell.

I got a waterbed, but my husband stocked it with trout.

Want to know why women don’t blink during foreplay? Not enough time.

“You know I love you, Joan. Goodbye, through tears, Tiny Giant. Heaven just got meaner and way funnier.” PeeWee Herman

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There are no vids to be found of the later performing live (I was happily surprised to see that recent Wiki entry), and just a few for La Lupe, who has this crazy sexy frantic energy going on on stage — its so worth watching. And yes, she’s a little nuts, the voudou priestess to Celia Cruz’s perfect diva, as awkward as she is sexy. J’dore her, AND witness how hard she works to deliver. Her life story is pretty amazing too as the PBS doc conveys. She was born Lupe Yoli, and grew up in a tiny town outside Santiago de Cuba, so small it wasn’t on the map. Still, she became so wildly popular that Castro (supposedly) told her to leave Cuba because she was getting too much attention!

Betty Davis, briefly married to Miles Davis, lovers with Jimi Hendrix, also has an interesting story, the link to her label above gives the highlights. She never got the same fame or attention, though, her raunchy blues style being too raw for most labels to market, and too badass for 1970s radio. This odd little medley of some of her work isn’t a bad introduction, I guess, but here’s one of my favs that I think gives a better sense of her best work. (In my getting links for this post I just saw that somehow I missed this tribute at the Schomburg in 2011:(). She more or less went into hiding outside Pittsburgh in the mid-1980s.

Both of these artists excite and inspire me, for their octane energy and sexual abandon, of course, but also for being women who dared to take up more space than society allotted them, especially in the entertainment industry. Its one of my criteria for “my favorite broads” list, btw, which I need to update (someone who transgresses in this way). Anyway, listen to La Lupe and Betty Davis, and if you aren’t immediately smitten/inspired, you don’t have a pulse, haha! Naturally, it helps that they were both sultry vixens!

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I’m on a cooking binge these days, grilling and stove. Made this tasty mushroom, lentil, quinoa, carrot, celery dish, close to this Martha Stewart recipe but with rosemary and some of Trader Joe’s garlic and eggplant dip mixed in.  Improv-style. Delish! A bit heavy for summer I suppose but it can be eaten cold (or must mushrooms always be served warm?), and its vegan (I added no butter). I also made a hearts of palm, avocado, artichoke, cucumber, celery, and mint salad, which I’ve made before, and always change up a bit. Its based on this recipe.
 

Tomorrow night I hope to grill more than I can consume, or at least that’s the plan:)) Happy Summer!  Enjoy the fresh food, and in the spirit of company, I’ll leave you with some choice words on food by Lydia Lunch discussing her cookbook, The Need to Feed:  “(Plus), cooking is one of the most intimate things this side of sex—cooking leads to good sex. You are touching something that someone else is digesting. Your DNA is on the food they eat. It’s a form of impregnation—which is basically what my entire artistic motive is, anyway. The whole goal of why I create is to either allow people who have been poisoned or contaminated to feel some relief. So cooking is just natural. Plus, cookbooks are so awful and boring. Except for Coolio’s, who measures the spices with nickel and dimebags. ” The interview is with VICE, namely Brad Cohan, who calls her ” the iconoclastic no wave skank goddess” recalls  this great issue of RE/Search devoted to her). Okay. He wrote preview/ Village Voice listing for her Retrovirus show, which I should’ve seen:((((((, earlier this month, so he’s sincere. I’m just not sure what I think about him calling her a skank, or later, whorish.  The  interview did inspire me to cook, which is always good, and I loved hearing LL trash New York, so I still recommend it. NITE!

(pics represent recipes given in links)

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There are two ways of spreading light;
to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
– Edith Wharton (from Vesalius in Zante, 1902)

Mona Hatoum, Current Disturbance, 1996 (White Chapel, 2011 installation)

I love this the quote, and when I thought of coupling it with an image, Mona Hatoum popped into my head! (I fell in love with Hatoum’s work at her New Museum solo in 1998). Its a pairing that yields a lot of pondering and tension – perfect for the longest night of the year! Read more about it here.

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JELENA BEHREND:

ANDREA CORSON:

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I’m half way through Reinaldo Arenas’ The Palace of The White Skunks, 1982, and totally enraptured. It made me look up his poetry. That led to my discovery of this clip from the documentary Havana, 1990, by the Czech-born director Jana Boková . It features a poem by Arenas in a sequence directly appropriated by Julian Schnabel for his film adaptation of Arenas’ incendiary autobiography, Before Night Falls (a project that credits Boková as one of five screenwriters including – red herringly – Schnabel himself). I’ve not seen either film yet, and while the latter got rave reviews, I suspect I might feel as this frieze reviewer does who says: “The exotic aestheticization of the film does have a downside: the politics of the Fidelista and Arenas, whose insistent, hedonistic sexuality was as much about politics as personal satisfaction, are toned down. Arenas’ erotic quest is recast as more happy-go-lucky than rebellious.”

Did you figure out I’m not a fan of Schnabel’s? Anyway, I shouldn’t say I’m surprised that he would so freely take from a lesser known filmmaker, a woman and a documentarian, to boot. Someone without Hollywood connections. Its in keeping with his arrogance (which I’ve had the displeasure to witness). A grossly overrated artist (ok, the plate paintings were pretty brilliant) who turns out to a talented director, someone who knows how to assemble and lead talent. That doesn’t make him a writer or an auteur. It makes me wonder whether Boková fought for that credit.

In the same frieze review, the influence of Boková’s film is summed up this way, neatly sidestepping the matter: “Mr. Schnabel said he’d first heard about Arenas through a Cuban real estate agent in Miami named Esther Percal. ”She told me I had to see this documentary that Jana Boková made called ‘Havana,’ ” Mr. Schnabel said. ”So for $25 we bought a black-market copy of it in a bodega in Little Havana. It’s an oral history of Cuba, interviews mixed together with fragments of these people’s writings, including Virgilio Pinera and Guillermo Cabrera Infante. Reinaldo comes on and starts talking, and the guy is so funny and so modest. I was so impressed with him that I read ‘Before Night Falls.’ ”

A Variety review makes specific reference to the clip as if Schnabel created the aesthetic it borrows: “By heightening the color and playing around with film stock, Schnabel cleverly integrates archival footage — reportedly the only color film shot of the revolution — to illustrate the moment of excitement, optimism and political ferment, while Arenas’ poem, “The Parade Begins,” is heard in voice-over. This is one of several instances in the film in which the author’s writings are used to great effect and one of many skillfully handled narrative expedients….In addition to Arenas’ autobiography and other writings, Schnabel also sourced a BBC documentary on the author by Jana Bokova. Footage from a banned Cuban film titled “PM,” which is mentioned at one point, is seen over the end credits.”

Watch and see for yourself.

Obviously, Schnabel was/is sincere in his appreciation of Arenas, and I do want to see the film. I just couldn’t ignore coming across these two snippets one after the other, Schnabel’s popping up immediately (in my Google search for the poem), Boková’s precedent coming later. Is this the fate of small films and female directors in a greedy male-dominated industry? And maybe we should rethink our relationship to the notion of “appropriation” because, as I’ve said before, this is not the 1980s?

Granted, there’s no way to know how Boková feels, and I tried to find out. Perhaps she and Schnabel are great pals though there’s no evidence of that in the way of images or articles. Her Doc alliance bio says this: “She was the first to film the writer Reinaldo Arenas, about whom Julian Schnabel later made the feature film Before Night Falls, which was directly inspired by Havana.” A quiet indictment? Made me want to explore her films, if nothing else. You can watch the 1968 drama Hotel Paradise online, made just after she left Prague for Paris (how fortuitous that it includes a Camus storyline, given my post recent on him). Getting a hold of Bye Bye Shanghai, 2008, might be as easy as it gets though of course I want to see the BBC doc on Arenas first! The Cinémathèque Française gave her a retrospective in 2003, but that’s all the leads I’ve got at the moment. I wonder which version of himself Arenas would’ve preferred, Boková’s or Schnabel’s?

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Fascinating article I have my students read every year as we discuss the Weimar era “New Woman”. I highly recommend it. Here’s an excerpt to get you interested:

“Sexually predatory and educated, she achieved financial independence through employment and spent her earnings on fashion and fun. She had short bobbed hair, wore relaxed masculine clothes, smoked cigarettes and enjoyed the globally notorious nightlife of Berlin’s theatres, cinemas, cafes and bars. According to the historian Ute Frevert, the Weimar women were ‘children of the new age who were variously celebrated or accursed’.”

Kind of interesting to read against this prostitution code from a sex tourist brochure (or adapted from several, can’t recall), which I will share with my students as well:

BOOT GIRLS: Dominatrices whose sexual services
were signaled by the color of their boots, laces, and
ribbons, sometimes worn in combination.
BLACK BOOTS: Buttocks cropping (lying on bed).
BROWN BOOTS: Asphyxiation by boot or
stockinged foot.
COBALT-BLUE BOOTS: Penetration by female.
SCARLET BOOTS: Cross-dressing humiliation.
BLACK LACES: Punishment with a short whip.
GOLD LACES: Defecation on chest.
WHITE LACES: Collared like a dog.
WHITE RIBBONS ON TOP OF BOOTS: Male customer
begins as the dominant figure and ends
as the submissive party.
DOMINAS: Leather-clad women who specialized
in whipping, humiliation, and other forms of
punishment, and worked in lesbian nightclubs
that admitted heterosexual couples and
male clients.
FOHSES: Independent prostitutes who advertised
in newspapers and magazines as manicurists
or masseuses.
GRASSHOPPERS: Streetwalkers who performed oral
sex in the Tiergarten.
GRAVELSTONES: Physically deformed women who
worked in north Berlin.
MEDICINE GIRLS: Child prostitutes who were “prescribed”
by pimps posing as physicians in phony
pharmacies in west Berlin.
MUNZIS: Pregnant women who waited under
lampposts on Münzstrasse.
RACEHORSES: Masochistic prostitutes who worked
in Institutes for Foreign Language Instruction,
where the schoolrooms were equipped with
bondage equipment.
TAUENTZIEN GIRLS: Women wearing the
latest fashions and hairstyles, often working in
mother-daughter teams near the Kaiser Memorial
Church.
TELEPHONE GIRLS: Child prostitutes, aged twelve
to seventeen, who were made to resemble junior
versions of theater or film starlets and were ordered
by telephone.

— from Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin

And I’d like to get my hands on this book, too.

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All love is tragic. Requited love dies of satiation, unrequited of starvation. But death by starvation is slower and more painful.” Lou Andreas-Salomé

To Lou Andreas-Salome

I held myself too open, I forgot
that outside not just things exist and animals
fully at ease in themselves, whose eyes
reach from their lives’ roundedness no differently
than portraits do from frames; forgot that I
with all I did incessantly crammed
looks into myself; looks, opinion, curiosity.
Who knows: perhaps eyes form in space
and look on everywhere. Ah, only plunged toward you
does my face cease being on display, grows
into you and twines on darkly, endlessly,
into your sheltered heart.

As one puts a handkerchief before pent-in-breath-
no: as one presses it against a wound
out of which the whole of life, in a single gush,
wants to stream, I held you to me: I saw you
turn red from me. How could anyone express
what took place between us? We made up for everything
there was never time for. I matured strangely
in every impulse of unperformed youth,
and you, love, had wildest childhood over my heart.

Memory won’t suffice here: from those moments
there must be layers of pure existence
on my being’s floor, a precipitate
from that immensely overfilled solution.

For I don’t think back; all that I am
stirs me because of you. I don’t invent you
at sadly cooled-off places from which
you’ve gone away; even your not being there
is warm with you and more real and more
than a privation. Longing leads out too often
into vagueness. Why should I cast myself, when,
for all I know, your influence falls on me,
gently, like moonlight on a window seat.

Translated by A. Poulin
Rainer Maria Rilke

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