why are there flowers?

i was in the large waiting room shared by two teams of doctors and a testing lab, reading in a ten year old issue of natural history magazine an article entitled 'why are there flowers?'; the answer, which the magazine clearly thought would shock its readers, was quite obviously sex.

as it is, perhaps, for us humans as well. is it any wonder that we all, men and women alike, admire being, and/or seeing, the flowers? and when the hormones are flooding, we women often feel it of ourselves too: the lightness of purpose and the dance of life.

but most of us women know, or learn sooner or later, that that's not it; gender falls away in the face of substance. we are all quite more, men and women again alike, than the pursuit of the sum of our parts. (i remember suddenly realizing, at the age of three, that all the songs on the radio were love songs. how absurd! i thought.)

that's why when i come across an image of a woman who is not being portrayed for her loveliness first and foremost, it catches my attention. images of women who are thinking of something, who are complex, who have more knowledge than they are expected to have, sadly, often fall into the categories of dejection or exhaustion. but wait -- is there a glimmer more?

Each cell has a life. There is enough here to please a nation. It is enough that the populace own these goods. Any person, any commonwealth would say of it, “It is good this year that we may plant again and think forward to a harvest. A blight had been forecast and has been cast out.”

Many women are singing together of this: one is in a shoe factory cursing the machine, one is at the aquarium tending a seal, one is dull at the wheel of her Ford, one is at the toll gate collecting, one is tying the cord of a calf in Arizona, one is straddling a cello in Russia,

one is shifting pots on the stove in Egypt, one is painting her bedroom walls moon color, one is dying but remembering a breakfast, one is stretching on her mat in Thailand, one is wiping the ass of her child, one is staring out the window of a train

in the middle of Wyoming and one is anywhere and some are everywhere and all seem to be singing, although some can not sing a note.

Anne Sexton from “In Celebration of My Uterus” from The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981). Copyright © 1981

colours*

FOR ANNE GREGORY

'Never shall a young man,

Thrown into despair

By those great honey-coloured

Ramparts at your ear,


Love you for yourself alone

And not your yellow hair.'


'But I can get a hair-dye

And set such colour there,

Brown, or black, or carrot,


That young men in despair

May love me for myself alone

And not my yellow hair.'


'I heard an old religious man

But yesternight declare

That he had found a text to prove



That only God, my dear,

Could love you for yourself alone

And not your yellow hair.'


WB Yeats





















*what artists like seitei watanabe gave us was the way to color that sings

AC-CENT-TCHU-ATE THE POSITIVE

Gather 'round me, everybody
Gather 'round me while I preach some
Feel a sermon comin' on me
The topic will be sin
and that's what I'm ag'in'
Settle back and just sit tight

You've got to accentuate the positive
Eliminate the negative
Latch on to the affirmative
Don't mess with Mister In-Between

You've got to spread joy
up to the maximum
Bring gloom down to the minimum
Have faith or pandemonium's
Liable to walk upon the scene

To illustrate my last remark
Jonah in the whale, Noah in the ark
What did they do
Just when everything looked so dark

Man, they said
we better
Accentuate
the positive
Eliminate
the negative
Latch on to the affirmative
Don't mess with Mister In-Between
No, don't mess with Mister In-Between

please click arrow to listen....via

i found this yesterday and it made me so happy

courtesan sidebar: Salomé-mania!

Early twentieth-century Paris saw an embarrassment of half-naked women dancing with seven veils and papier-mâché heads: ‘Salomania’ had gripped the capital. By 1913 Salome was a regular feature on music hall show-bills, besides the balletic and operatic stage.

...Three variations on Salome's notorious Dance of the Seven Veils, [were] performed by Loie Fuller (1907), Ida Rubinstein (1909) and Maud Allan (from 1906) on music by Florent Schmitt, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov and Richard Strauss respectively. 1

what about this moment in time brought about this mania?

Bram Dijkstra has written of the general fin-de-siècle interest in Salomé that "Salomé's hunger for the Baptist's head thus proved to be a mere pretext for the men's need to find the source of all wrongs they thought were being done to them. Salomé, the evil woman, became their favourite scapegoat." In order for the spirit to triumph over the body, Salomé had to be executed "in a cleansing massacre." Her death became the triumph of the Victorian male over sexual temptation. 2

Christians traditions depict her as an icon of dangerous female seductiveness, for instance depicting her dance mentioned in the New Testament (in some later transformations further iconised to the dance of the seven veils), or concentrate on her lighthearted and cold foolishness which according to the gospels led to John the Baptist's death.

A new ramification was added by Oscar Wilde, who in his play Salome let her devolve into a necrophiliac, killed the same day as the man whose death she had requested. This last interpretation, made even more memorable by Richard Straus's opera. 3

Joseph Cornell's L 'Egypte de Mile, Cléo de Mérode, 1940, is not the Egypt seen by Flaubert, detachedly noting the gleam of his white socks at mid- night on the Nile. Cornell had never been, or wished to go, to that Egypt. But in his mind the image of Cléo de Mérode, a courtesan who so enraptured Paris society in the '90s that even Proust is said to have murmured "Gloria in excelsis Cléo!" when she walked into Maxim's, fused with those of Cleopatra and the Sphinx. 4

Within a short number of years, Otero grew to be the most sought after woman in all of Europe. She was serving, by this time, as a courtesan to wealthy and powerful men of the day, and she chose her lovers carefully. She associated herself with the likes of Prince Albert I of Monaco, King Edward VII of the United Kingdom, Kings of Serbia, and Kings of Spain as well as Russian Grand Dukes Peter and Nicholas, the Duke of Westminster and writer Gabriele D'Annunzio. Her love affairs made her infamous, and the envy of many other notable female personalities of the day.

Six men reportedly committed suicide after their love affairs with Otero ended, although this has never been substantiated beyond a doubt. It is a fact, however, that two men did fight a duel over her. She was pretty, confident, intelligent, with an attractive figure, and was famed for her voluptuous breasts, and one of her most famous costumes featured her breasts partially covered with glued-on precious gems, and the twin cupolas of the Hotel Carlton built in 1912 in Cannes were modeled after her breasts.

It was once said of her that her extraordinarily dark black eyes were so captivating that they were "of such intensity that it was impossible not to be detained before them." 5

The Belle Epoque, the period that Otero symbolized, was famous not only for its writers, artists, playwrights, and actors but also for the glittering social scene which was staged almost continuously on the Grands Boulevards in Paris, the epicenter of the atmosphere, and the stage on which the courtesan played a vital and charismatic role. 6

Just as Venus arose from the sea instead of a lake or a river, the courtesan emerged from a very particular medium. The waters of her birth, salted by the bitter tears of women who were condemned to penury and by those of wealthy and poor women alike who lamented the rules that limited and constrained their erotic lives, were made up of a perfect blend of injustice and prudery.

The genius of the courtesan was in how she turned the same ingredients to her advantage. Considering the distribution of power between men and women in the times during which she lived, to say that she turned the tables would be an understate- ment. If we ponder very long the fact, for instance, that La Belle Otro, the famous courtesan of the Second Empire, successfully demanded from one of her lovers the priceless long diamond necklace that had once belonged to the former queen, Marie-Antoinette, we may begin to appreciate the dimensions of the reversal. Yet exactly how this stunning victory was achieved remains a mystery.

Some clues are given to us in a story that Colette tells about a conver- sation she had while she was still performing in music halls with La Belle Otro. Thinking the young woman somewhat green, Otro offered her some advice. "There comes a time," she said, "with every man when he will open up his hand to you."

"But when is that?" Colette asked.

"When you twist his wrist," Otero replied.

Like many courtesans, Otero was known for her wit. Doubtless, that is why Colette remembered the dialogue. Indeed, the key we are seeking to the mystery is less in the content of Otero's answer than in the way it was given. She delivered her last line with con- summate timing. And looking further at what she told her young protegee, it becomes quickly evident that the crucial phrase in her advice is not in the last line but in the first phrase, "There comes a time." The secret of her success was that she chose exactly the right moment to twist her lover's wrist. 7

And there is reason for the disappearance of this tradition. The temper of the times has shifted, too. Technically speaking, many women today do what courtesans did; it is quite common still for a married man to support his mistress, and a whole population of highly cultivated and elegant women serve today as escorts, call girls, and modern hetaerae. But just as surely as the role of the courtesan was created by historical conditions, she was also inextricably linked to a historical mood that had come to an end by the third decade of the last century. In 1948, after visiting La Belle Otero, Anne Manson wrote: "When Otero departs there will depart with her the last symbol of an epoch, superficial, light and at the same time virtuous and cynical, covetous toward others yet madly extravagant in its pleasures, full of faults but not without its splendors." 6

i didn't expect to go here, but here came to me, with six of these women having been known as being courtesans in addition to being in the theater. another writes about courtesans, but, as phyllis rose says, "Colette's courtesans don't die of tuber- culosis. They guard their jewels and railway shares and, with good humor and a firm hand on the servants, gracefully grow old." (8) others are dancers, actors, authors, yet inseparable from that moment's demi- monde. one more installment in paris tomorrow, and then we visit another time and place where there was a very very similar demi-monde.

another element from which we can imagine the line straight through to modern art is the 'outside the box' phenomenon.











by this i mean literally going outside the lines.

frames are made deliberately too small to fit the people in them.

as in the cases we've seen before, these are sometimes

framing strategies, or perhaps for emphasis' or design's sake.






perhaps hiroshige (or utamaro) was just sitting there one day and had a creative inspiration: why must this always look like that???

and found it didn't.

medium as message

once again i intend to do far too much in one post. this began, the seed, was ed weekly's wonderful post on swedish japonist, anders zorn. i had especially liked, of his choices, the little girls, sisters, playing beauty parlour in kimono.

another i had picked was his woman in a hammock. his is the one where the hat is on the ground beside her, and there are orange flowers. then i remembered tissot's images with a hammock, and went and dug up his two, the ones with the parasol.

then i wondered who else did a woman in a hammock, and found the wonderful courbet, with the flowing red hair. but then i started thinking about how many images there are of women lying down, resting, or ill, or even dead (think of the pre-raphaelite ophelia). a book called 'idols of perversity,' by bram dijkstra addresses just this in his profusely illustrated book.

"Art has only one gender," wrote The 19th-century French political philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. "It is masculine." Not only were the creators of the works almost universally male, but so was their audience. And their subject was women. Men looked, women were seen. The power to look is the power to name, to locate and thus the power to control, to manage the boundaries of acceptability.

" And when men looked at women at the end of the 19th century, they saw them through the lens of ideal domesticity-passive and indolent, the saintly asexual housewife. She was a "mindless, vacant creature whose only reason for being resided in her beauty and her reproduction function," writes Bram Dijkstra in his utterly fascinating, if disturbing book, Idols of Perversity. Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siecle Culture (Oxford University Press, $37.95). In this profusely illustrated volume, Dijkstra, a professor of comparative literature at the University of California, San Diego, documents a virulent misogyny that infected the arts in turn-of-the-century Europe and America. Combing through hundreds of art magazines and discussing the most celebrated painters of the time, Dijkstra uncovers a virtual "iconography of misogyny" in the representations of women in both popular and high culture.

" Dijkstra's lucid psychosocial reading of late 19th-century canvasses is unsettling. The progression of images of women he arrays-from invalid to seductress, from earth mother to sex-crazed monster-illustrates a persistent male terror of women's sexual awakening and a backlash against women's efforts to improve their social position. The closing of the frontier, the gradual disappearance of the independent worker and farmer and the rise of the assembly line had eroded the foundations of masculinity. With these traditional sources for the validation of masculinity decimated, men projected their anger, and their own sexual fears, onto women, into the acute, lurid, antifeminine symbolism" of late 19th-century art."1

not for nothing, the men are alarmed: "Femme Fatale is the first exhibition to explore the sexual politics of women's fashion in turn-of- the-century Paris, when courtesans and actresses set the latest styles."2 just as they had done in japan for centuries.

so now we come to where my brain just keeps circling around. in the art of the period in the west, as dijkstra has said, everyone is lying down. in all of the japanese prints, it's nearly impossible to find a reclining figure. and when you look for nudity, you have to wait a number of decades, whereas, in the west, it practically defined the arts.

in advertising, however, women in the west were standing up, often square shouldered, chin up, eyes forward, soldiers in feathers with grace. the japanese prints reveal women who rarely lift their heads up; all we incorporated is their posture. the graceful s-shape was adopted, as style, and as statement.

so it's all running through my synapses. the women in the japanese prints were very often courtesans, but never dressed provocatively. the women in the west had "morals" far more pristine, even if some experimentation was being done. and they were definitely not prostitutes.

i don't have any conclusion yet. please feel free to offer one if you'd like.