Monday 31 March 2008
Monday 17 March 2008
The Missing Link, The Grandest Mystery
Neanderthal Man - The Hotlegs
(watch the video)
Who was the first person to fall in Love? Which pair of hairy cavemates was suddenly, inexplicably, without warning or the slightest preparation by prior experience, lifted by the momentous revolution: from scrabbling in the mud and feasting on their own fleas, to caring for nothing but the gaze of their lover's eyes and their deliciously brutish smell - not just security and familiarity, to their sensitive wild nostrils, but something of an entirely different dimension?
It surely came before communication could express anything more subtle than survival: sex - danger - warmth - food! They had no words other than variations of UG! - and none of the thousands of poets who came after to at least warn them of the possibility of such a cataclysmic and massively strange clubbing over the head.
Imagine! To have only ever experienced the simplest physical needs, and the most basic emotions necessary to supply them - and then to be thrown into the grand mystery of Love!
Never having experienced mystery before, and then to fall in Love! What is this breathless giddiness, how has my world been swept so abruptly from under my feet? What immense power crushes me one moment and fills me with the most brilliant sunshine the next?
For us, at least, the extreme shock is something we are aware of - language may not be able to reveal Love's full mystery, but it can alert us to its existence, tell us its name, give us comparisons, hints as to the size of its domain. Love is a devastating, powerful force for us - but it has a name. Ah! I am in 'Love!' WE are in 'Love!'
Though the new society we are building is the first to elevate Love to its rightful place as the basis of not just cultural, but political activities, it is a prerequisite of all civilisations that the act of falling in Love is important, well-known, and much talked-about. But poor, lucky cavelovers! From a world of beasts, dank forests, bones and rocks, to a world of Love!
Love is what elevated us from the animals and first expanded our existence from purely instinctual to that ruled by the heart... It clearly follows that our race of Lovers, who have always ruled by the heart far more than any others... is the most advanced of all humanity.
But we know that Love, however much a force for good, also has the capacity for great cruelty. What if our primal Love was unrequited? A young hunter's flaming desire for the biggest and most hirsute mammoth-killer's consort, cruelly ignored... he would have suffered triplefold. Not only by the well-known, earth-shattering angst of utter solitude and imprisonment, which our modern scientists have still failed to provide a cure for, not only by the terrible confusion of a mind totally unequipped to even to begin to understand the power of this new emotion - but worst, by the obvious lack of the one person who might have been able to help him, if just by proximity alone, cope with it... Our broken-hearted apeman must have surely been also the first suicide.
Although there is much anecdotal archaeological evidence for this theory, it is, of course, impossible to prove entirely. However, with much-intensified urgent efforts underway, there have been extremely exciting reports from our teams in the field. We hope to be able to announce, very shortly, the precise location of The Cave of First Love...
(There is one thing I do know... there's a lot of women in Mesopotamia - The B-52s)
Sunday 16 March 2008
GIRLS! GIRLS! GIRLS!
I wouldn't attempt to defend my spotty morals, or whitewash
My flaws with aggressive lies.
If it's any help, I confess. Admission of guilt. Then why not
Go the whole hog, indict
My faults myself? I hate what I am, yet (try as I may) can't
Not be the thing that revolts me. It's hell
Being stuck with what you can't kick. I lack all firmness
And strength to control my moods, get whirled away
Like a skiff in a current. There's no one type of beauty
That arouses my longing: if I'm always in love
Blame my wide-ranging interests. Shyness and modesty spark me
Off every time - a demurely lowered face
And I'm hooked. But it's just the same if she's pertly forward:
Sophistication promises well in bed.
A primly old-fashioned appearance, then? I always suspect that's
Mere camouflage for unacknowledged desire.
A bluestocking turns me on with her intellectual powers,
A featherbrain ditto just by being naive.
Then there's the girl who tells me Callimachus is a bungler
Compared to me - I always go for my fans -
Or the critical termagant who slates both poems and author:
How I long to be laid by her as well!
One's got a slinky walk: that gets me. Another's uptight -
She can be softened out with a little sex.
A fine operatic voice, for me, is a standing temptation
To smother the singer with kisses in mid-song.
Guitar-lessons help. Watch those fingers - the chords, the glissandos!
How fail to fall in love with such clever hands?
Then think of the floor-show dancer, arms weaving in rhythm,
Doing undulant bumps and grinds:
Never mind about me (I'm just omnisusceptible), make pure
Hippolytus watch her act
And even he'd go priapic.
You're tall, like the heroines of legend,
Lie the full length of a bed;
But petite girls, too, are attractive. I'm sold on both sizes -
Long and short alike are equally to my taste.
The fashionable I enjoy at their face-value, the unsmart
For all they could be, a la mode.
I'm crazy for girls who are fair-haired and pale-complexioned -
But brunettes make great lovers too:
The sight of dark tresses against a snow-white neck reminds me
That Leda was famed for her black curls,
While a flaxen poll calls up thoughts of blonde Aurora -
My sex-life runs the entire
Mythological gamut. My tastes are equally all-embracing:
Young girls have the looks - but when it comes to technique
Give me an older woman. In short, there's a vast cross-section
Of desirable beauties in Rome - and I want them all!
Ovid, The Amores, Ch. 4 Book 2, trans. Peter Green
Pretty Girls Everywhere - Eugene Church
Twenty To One - Lord Kitchener
21 Girl Salute - Barrington Levy
A Beautiful Girl/Music To Watch Girls By - John Rydgren
(With thanks to the 365 Days Project)
The Girl From Ipanema - Elvis Costello
Fat Bottom Girls - Hayseed Dixie
Seven Sisters Blues - J.T. Smith
Hard Headed Woman - Elvis Presley
Cigarettes, Whiskey and Wild Wild Women - Tex Ritter
Wine, Women And Song - Harry Gritts
Whiskey, Weed and Women - Hank Williams III
Woman [Previously Unreleased] - Free
Independent Women/Dreadlock Holiday - Soulwax (Destiny's Child vs 10cc)
Women Women Women - Shelley Lee Alley and his Alley Cats
Sittin' On Top Of The World - Bob Wills and The Texas Playboys
The Girl With The Pre-Fabricated Heart - Fernand Leger/Hans Richter - The Real Tuesday Weld with Cibelle and David Piper: DREAMS THAT MONEY CAN BUY
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