Helen Boyd Kramer's journal on gender and stuff
& Here are some Ants tracks you probably haven’t heard (unless you’ve known me a long, long while).
It’s really a lot easier to understand how I turned out the way I did, what with listening to songs about BDSM and fetishes when I was 14. I think I was reading Joe Orton’s diaries around the same time.
So happy birthday, Adam Ant, however & wherever you are. Thanks for the education.
These are straight guys: how queer is that?
(btw, FB is blocking this content. feh to FB.)
I think the Franz Ferdinand is one of the sexiest songs I’ve heard lately – you know you know you know you’re so sweetly is delivered with a lovely rasp – and Cherry Lips is the classic straight grrl appreciation of MTF fabulousness. Enjoy.
How can you not love Sly & the Family Stone? I was a fan from the first track I heard (which was “Stand!” covered live by World Party with Sinead O’Connor on guest vocals, at the New Ritz, or the old Studio 54). I don’t think any other act has had quite so much lifted direct, except maybe James Brown. Get up & dance to the music, & note the woman playing trumpet.
Weird, but kinda nice. Courtesy of Ron Hogan.
Damn, Jim Carroll died. I missed the news probably because he died on 9/11 this year, & that’s the day I avoid the news (because every clever media asshole thinks it’s a good idea to replay footage that still traumatizes me). Still, it’s fitting that this NYC icon died on 9/11, in a weird way; Jim Carroll might have died of a lot of things in his life – drugs, alcoholism, AIDS – but he didn’t. He made it to 60 & had a heart attack.
I’m going to be an Old Person for a moment, so bear with me, but I just went through a lifetime of cassette tapes – and yes, I am keeping some – ones that my artist friends made me, or ones that were particularly good compilations (especially if they have music I haven’t otherwise tracked down in another form yet), compilations used at parties – it seems I used to throw a lot of parties, go figure – and other rare & interesting things, like a tape of Yul Brynner singing Romany songs.
& What I was thinking, in choosing a bunch for one of my students who likes cassette tapes – he has an older car that plays them – is that Kids These Days won’t have this kind of physical detritus to part with painfully at some point in their adult lives. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but it is a thing, & I wonder what that means for them. I feel similarly about vinyl (although I know that’s kind of hip again, apparently) — these were all Things of Love, fetishy tokens of friendship and a shared love of music. So what do the kids swap these days when they have a crush on someone? Playlists? Seems a cheap imitation, but I suppose love & friendship are still the same, & heartbreak too.
No, “Marco’s Guitar” isn’t the name of the band; I’m talking about Marco Pirroni, long-time Ants guitarist, original Siouxie & the Banshees guitarist, & his current work with a band called The Wolfmen. The time you got to hear him and didn’t know it was probably in the Sinead O’Connor track Jump in the River, which he rocks, and of course I threw in some of the fine, fine, Ennio Morricone inspired stuff from the Ants days: Clint. Eastwood.
How much do I wish Adam would come back just to get that guitar back? A lot.
That Wolfmen song is one of the reasons I was really holding out on Betty changing her name to Jackie. (There just are no good songs about Rachels, but plenty of good ones about Jackies, & Betty’s the kind of person you write songs about. Or books, say, if you can’t write songs.)