1. Amy Winehouse, beloved as she is this week, ain't exactly the global standard for grooming, sexual comportment, or even singing. (I finally heard her for the first time yesterday... What's all the fuss? Forty years ago, Joplin would have thrown her out a window just to watch something fall. Hell, Toni fucking Tennille would have landed a right cross. Even Taylor Dane was more fun to look at. Probably still is.)

2. You're having far too much fun clucking over there... These are obviously extreme cases from America. Go to the (taxpayer-supported) Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and you'll see plenty of tits... Ditto the Getty and the Norton Simon. I've seen as much freaky sexuality depicted at the Geffen Contemporary in Little Tokyo as anywhere in the world: The Murakami show that closed this week was freakazoid in the extreme.

3. Besides, if Paris were a sexual paradise, we'd know. For starters, French people's temperaments would be more admirable then they ever actually turn out to be.

Fucking's good all over the world. Tell us about the food!

Los Angeles doesn't count. See Texas link above.

Was too hungry yesterday at lunch to photograph the Chateaubriand (au beurre, by the way, delish!) Will try to remember to bring out the camera ce soir, at Bastide Odeon.

Amy Winehouse, beloved as she is this week, ain't exactly the global standard for grooming, sexual comportment, or even singing. (I finally heard her for the first time yesterday... What's all the fuss? Forty years ago, Joplin would have thrown her out a window just to watch something fall.

Really?

I've been playing the girls (Amy 'n' Janis) pretty much back-to-back the last few days. I find them adorably complementary myself though, true, neither make a virtue of scrubbing up prettily!

I'm with Jody on the Winehouse thing. The songs "You know I'm no Good" and "Back to Black" do the raw, rough emotion and regret properly. The better-known "Rehab" doesn't quite do it for me. The whole Back to Black album is solid, IMO.

A related recommendation - check out 100 Days, 100 Nights by Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings. They did the backing work on Winehouse's album and just kill the bluesy soul stuff. Jones' voice is really powerful - maybe not Aretha Franklin powerful (whose is?) - but still.

Here's a third pro-Winehouse post, Crid. Other than the swearing (obviously), Back to Black, especially "He Can Only Hold Her", sounds like something that would pour out of your speakers circa 1966. For a skinny, drug-addled freak, the girl's got a set of pipes that would drag Toni Tennille and Taylor Dane by the hair up and down the boulevard and toss them into the alleyway. After disposing the bodies, Amy would find Janis shooting up behind the dumpster in the alley and the two of them would go to the corner dive bar to drink Southern Comfort and talk about the men in their lives.

This subject reminds me of a somewhat new label that I've heard applied to our society/culture here in the US: Neo-Puritanism. It's incredibly ridiculous (that we have such an attitude) and, unfortunately, accurate.

Really, how bizarre is it that we (as a society) tout the need to have sex on every-other article, television show, commercial, you name it – never mind the fact that you just might be getting older, are flat-out tired, whatever – YOU MUST HAVE SEX or your life means nothing… but oh my! an actual body part is shown and now we’re all going to hell in this thing that is… oh dear… a big basket.

It’s all so silly.

What I’m curious about is whether anyone else sees a similarity between radical Muslims and right-wing Christian fanatics. I mean – wow – a teacher got suspended for taking kids to a museum?? It boggles the mind.

I wrote a column about a guy with a small penis who got all pissy at his wife -- and got all sorts of letters from religious people about how it was not fit for a family newspaper, blah blah blah. I pointed out that I was helping them keep their marriage together.

What I’m curious about is whether anyone else sees a similarity between radical Muslims and right-wing Christian fanatics.

Sure...and the Jewish fanatics, too. And anybody with a belief, sans evidence, in god, and the ensuing evidence-free hooha that goes with. The thing is, the Christians and Jews don't have their rabbis standing up on the pulpits telling them to go kill the infidels. Sure, the Christians used to, but that was a long time ago. Muslims are the people with large numbers of their "flock" bent on the death, conversion, or taxation and lesser citizenship (dhimmitude) of people who don't believe as they do. Of all the people with a primitive, evidence-free belief in god, Islam is most primitive and quite dangerous.

Ho-kay, let's do this....

We can't argue personal tastes. If you guys like Winehouse, then you like her, and more power to ya... I'll give her another listen. If you're responding to a simple celebrity pleasure, then let's all enjoy it together! To quibble too aggressively is to argue that Paris is much prettier than Lindsay, or that Gary Coleman was a much more graceful comic than Emmanuel Lewis. What would be the point? Listen, I got nothing against schmaltz. Justin, check your email: That electronica I sent you last week is all about simple ostinatos, plain rhythms and cornpone Hollywood dressings.

A few years ago there was a ten-year-old white girl whose abstract paintings were making everyone hot and bothered... The miracle that was making her famous (or, if you like, the shtick by which she was marketed) was that her work was strikingly similar to Picasso's early works of cubism... As if the talent had been reborn. Or as if his insights could have any fresh students after they'd saturated the visual arts for a century.

Well, nope. Context counts, as much in the arts as anywhere. You can't go back again. I mean, you can if you want, but you'll be bored to tears, and by definition you'll be spending time (and money) on unimaginative people. So why not go look at a real Picasso? Almost everything is available for study, and most of the best of it is available on public display.

In that first hearing of Winehouse the other day, the feeling was exactly like Rebecca's: She "sounds like something that would pour out of your speakers circa 1966." But the difference is that back in the day, R&B was new, or at least newer, and turgid with a thousand fascinating vectors that have since been charted and drained.... (Sly & the Family Stone make Winehouse seems really silly.)

And in those years, the idea that people would drop back a generation for new excitement in music was unthinkable. Players were expected to do something new, with a minimum of bowing and scraping to the old folks. Hendrix never covered anything from Sammy Davis Jr. (The Beatles covered "Til There was You" from Broadway, but even then people knew that Paul was just being a dick.) The Rat Pack, which had dominated pop for the previous decade, seemed pathetically mannered to people who took new music --even simplistic pop and bubblegum-- seriously. Children were making weird sounds seem beautiful, and R&B was something that a lot of people hadn't heard before.

My affection for Joplin rests within the jacket of a single record... And actually, it's within a single song on that record, called "I Need a Man to Love." Fire up your Itunes and enjoy it with me now, won't you? Here are some fun things to know about that song.

First, she wrote it.

Second, she arranged it. All that call-and-response-ish stuff in the guitar solo/development passage was likely her idea. There was probably nothing scratched on the staves that would have seemed remarkable to anyone familiar with music of the American south. But she did it with fuzztone guitars, which were still thrilling people in new ways.

Thirdly, she had a big hand in engineering that record. As the Wiki page notes, it's an ironic mockup of a live performance... And I dare you to find the seams.

Sure, people were doing interesting things with recording technology and pop music all over the place in those days, but this was a pretty intense effort for a 24-year-old, alcoholic, college-dropout girl. Big Brother and the Holding Company was never heard from again. I consider Janis Joplin one of the late forebears of heavy metal and good psychedlic rock, and I'm tremendously grateful for efforts like hers.

Amy Winehouse has cute tatoos. ("No affectation of peculiarity can conceal a commonplace mind." -- W. Somerset Maugham)

PS- The art on that record sleeve meant a lot to me in fifth grade.

PPS- The spellcheck reads "Winehouse" as Cinereous \Ci*ne"re*ous\, adjective [L. cinereus, fr. cinis ashes.] Like ashes, ash-color; gray tinged a little with blackish; the color of wood ashes.

... but this was a pretty intense effort for a 24-year-old, alcoholic, college-dropout girl.

Yeah, well, 24 was like about forty back in those days, Crid!

Crid - there's good and then there's transformational. There's no doubt who is who here.

Little side Janis note: some friends live in an old Victorian on Page street (1 block off Haight, for those who don't know San Francisco) with a huge open attic that was rumored to have been a place where Janis and her band jammed with friends. I hope its true - I can totally imagine the scene.

Thanks for that track.

winehouse who? put me in the hype free column...

back to the matter up front... whenever I speak with the Neo-Puritans on such things, I always ask them if their faith is really that weak, just to see them froth about that... and requesting a sermon derived from The Song of Songs, then pointing out that the puritans came here to get away from religious persecution...
I think religion in these cases is just the cover for people who want control over others... 'Course in a place called India, home of a book in which couples explore 1001 ways to get a charliehorse in bed, kissing in public is scandelous... so we wouldn't be the only society with some hangups.

I go backwards through the treads when I log on until I catch up or get to the end of my work day (whichever comes first; dread a week from next Monday since I'm off next week due to freaking out over turning 50 -- that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it, the winter's getting too damned long).

Anyway, (I seem to be rambling today), reading that about a teacher getting fired over a museum trip about makes me want to eat my words on the education thread (not quite, but almost). Absurd. But I am prudish enough to admit that sometimes (like if I'm being spared a tattooed nipple or something) I do appreciate American censorship. What bugs me, however, is the hypocrocisy and the attitude that we'll either die or be nasty individuals without sex. Like hell! I'm only nasty when things piss me off and sex is not a necessity, folks. It's a want/desire. You will not die without it.

I've no idea who Amy Winehouse (my age is showing I'm sure) is but Joplin, Elvis and Dylan suck. Dylan was a good songwriter but, with that voice, he should have stuck to writing and let other people record it. And Joplin, Christ! Sick cow dying. Literally. And I have trouble seeing anything deep in her shit.

But, Crid, I do like Toni Tenille and Sly and the Family Stone.

Oh, and consider this when I critique music: disco has it's place and never died. My grandson is a big fan of KC and the Sunshine Band and I am so proud.

Oh, relax, I'm having/making fun. The way I really feel about music is simply this: beauty is in the ear of the beholder.

Reminds me of a video made by a friend of mine:
The International Symbol of Peace! (i.e. Boobies)
(She's in an all-chick comedy troupe in L.A., they have lots of good humor stuff.)

Donna- Of the names dropped thus far, I'd list them in descending order of talent thusly:

1. Elvis (By the highlights of his career, he had no peer, and much of The Miracle wouldn't have happened without him. Maybe he was a stooge in his life viewed whole, but that doesn't matter [PS- I saw 'Cilla on the street once in Brentwood in '89])

2. Sly Stone

3. Joplin (only for the reasons mentioned above)

4. Winehouse (People seem to like her, and mean it when they say so)

5. KC- He had more fun in '76 than you or I will have in our whole lives, and is apparently content to work on the outskirts of Vegas for the rest of his days. Props to a man who's made peace with his place in life.

6. Tenille (Bitch almost ruined '75, a very important summer for me)

7. Dylan (It was all bullshit, every second of it. Yes, Hendrix liked him enough to give the best known performance of his work, and Zappa was impressed enough in the early days to say nice things [but mocked him mercilessly in the '70's]. There's just no reason to be patient with that shit anymore. His harmonica playing strikes me as transubstantiation strikes Amy; "Are you fuckin' kidding me?")

PS- Flynne if you're reading: There was an article about RTF working in Los Feliz (Los Angeles) in the LAT over the weekend, I'll send you the link if you want, write to cridcrid at g mail dot com

And-

> sex is not a necessity,
> folks. It's a want/desire.
> You will not die without it.

I don't that's true. People without sex in their lives experience a mortality exceeding the failure of their genes to propagate.

There's never been a culture without music, either. You wanna say it's not essential? You got some 'splainin to do

"I don't that's true. People without sex in their lives experience a mortality exceeding the failure of their genes to propagate."

I think I know what you mean. No one would directly die from a lack of music or sex (or other things higher on Maslow's hierarchy - or whatever pyramid thingy is trendy now). Once can survive adequately completely alone - provided their physical needs are met (watch a certain Tom Hanks movie?). But it wouldn't be much of a life.

Life without fucking and melodic death metal... (shudder)

Well, y'know, lonely people get weird.

Eg, anybody remember
Bremer? He got released a few months ago, though his crime seems like yesterday.

"1. Elvis (By the highlights of his career, he had no peer, and much of The Miracle wouldn't have happened without him." Perhaps but he still sucked. He was ugly and couldn't sing. I don't give a dang about his personal life, he was just a hyped up no talent sex symbol and, sadly, that's what he set up the ever hacked out model for.

But I agree with you totally about KC. And, unlike Elvis, he is and was sexy. I could be in trouble if I met him. Okay, I'm sure his sex appeal is lost on you but, yes, you do have to admire someone who accepts and are at peace with who they are, including their limitations.

I likewise admire Bobby Sherman for having the forsight to recognize that he was naught but a pop idol and banking it to live off the rest of his life. That's the way to do it. If your star doesn't fall, the rest is gravy; if it does, you're still okay.

Oh, and Crid how the heck did I almost let this one pass (oh, yeah, it's pretty silly):

"I don't that's true. People without sex in their lives experience a mortality exceeding the failure of their genes to propagate. There's never been a culture without music, either. You wanna say it's not essential? You got some 'splainin to do"

Uh, you got stats to back that up? Frankly, read all the posts on my ex. If anything, having sex has made me a bigger bitch than I would have been without that lovely little experience and probably shortened my life span. It's certainly increased my blood pressure. Luckily no STD's that could have also shortened my life quite considerably. One impregnation that in another time might have caused me to die in childbirth. As it was in a modern hospital, I had to have a transfusion.

As for music, I'm wondering what the stats are on the deaf. Give me painitings and I'll ask for stats on the blind. We all have to have some pleasure in life to keep from going nuts and killing ourselves. But you pick your poison and I'll pick mine.

True we need social give and take with other human beings but they don't necessarily have to be sexual in nature to be satisfying. I've been involved at times and I've had times I've been celibate by choice. (As I've said before and will again, there is nothing difficult about getting a man.) Overall, I've been happier when I've been alone.

However, I am wondering if Amy's Gregg has a NY cousin of like mind. They have the perfect relationship. I am envious. ;) (I'm just kidding though I think if I did want a man that is the kind of relationship I'd want.)