Mami Wata 4: Water for the Haitians

As I predicted almost exactly nine months ago it would, a cholera epidemic is sweeping Haiti as the result of the pollution of water by unburied dead. It has reached the capital.


http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1953379_1953494_1954584,00.html

There will be no recovery, no Haitians, no Haiti unless there is potable water. You got $5? You have agency in this.

Please give all you can to Water Missions International.
https://my.watermissions.org/donate


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/10/world/americas/10haiti.html?scp=2&sq=cholera&st=cse

More Pissy Than Sinatra

I'm reading Bill Wyman's unsung bio, Stone Alone, while waiting for the price of Keef's to come down. Wyman's is fabulous because he kept diaries. He has the money stats and the numbers of groupie stats and the dates, the names of the venues, the precise number of concerts played in their Bataan march years ('64-'69) and was apparently the first to notice, if he did not act upon, the incredible ripoffs perpetrated by the satanic promoters and accountants who leech on to these guys.

And the reason is the amazing unleashment of weird monetized female sexual energy, the gaze. Why did Bill play his guitar holding the neck straight up? To shade his eyes so he could see the girls in the first row and mime his room number to them. At every gig, girls scale 13-foot walls, hide in dumpsters, leap onto the stage to maul and rip the clothes off the guys.

Wyman runs into Bob Geldof and Geldof says his sister took him to his first Stones concert when he was about 12. Wyman, a good reporter, poker-faced and detail-oriented and drug free and fire-in-the-belly girl crazy, asks him what he remembered. Geldof said, the overwhelming smell. The smell? says Wyman. Of piss, says Geldof.

This observation of the female gaze, of the locust like crowds of women, was first noticed in France when the Haussmann era opened the boulevards and the first department stores were designed.


The Street Singer, Manet

Zola's positively electrifying 1883 novel The Ladies' Paradise is a Marxist urban theory document fer sher, a brilliant evocation of the erotic public display the department stores pioneered, and the creation of a ravishing public capitalist space in which the hordes of women shoppers thronged the private-seeming space and then the public sidewalks. The vision of women out looking at Stuff led to misogynist sociology, to, indeed, sociology (LeBon, Taine, Tarde), which began in misogynist tracts on crowd control, meaning the locust-like hordes of women on the new broad sidewalks of Paris.

Art moderne is all about this voracious animal-like female sexuality, the four SATC girls on the prowl. This Lalique hatpin was the emblematic object of the boggling art nouveau exhibit, all about the urban theory of modernity, at the National Gallery a few years back.


René Lalique
French (1860-1945)
Dragonfly woman corsage ornament, c. 1897-1898
gold, enamel, chrysoprase, moonstones, and diamonds
Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon
© 2000 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris

This would be the first artistic vision of voracious, engulfing, female shoppers/groupies.

Finally, there are three quotes I remember I wish I could recover. (The first is about Brazilians walking down the street as if willing to please; any student of flaneurism will recognize a revolutionary and completely unAmerican attitude toward public space. This was in the NYT book review about a thousand years ago. Ditto, except I think in the TLS, the citation of work on how schizophrenics like to think they're cyborgs and become prosthetically attached to their cameras and computers. And finally the one germane here, in Rolling Stone I guess it must have been.) Some ancient rocker of the Crosby Stills and Nash/Cream nexus was recruited into playing the guitar by somebody who told him he'd get more pussy than Sinatra. It sounded good to him.

Liz Phair's review of Keef's autobio ends with, he did it his way. As oneroom points out, Liz Phair is an eeejit.

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