Things are kind of rolling along here in Sydney.
It rained all last week, every single day, and that was terrible. But today it’s sunny again. SUN!
This is what it was like last week (and this is WHY I couldn’t go out running yesterday morning when it was raining, TWITTER):
I’ve started doing the couch to 5k, which is really just an interval training approach to running 5km. So far I walk/run about 4km. It makes me feel like a gun. I didn’t think I’d like running this much, but the endorphines are fabulous and helping me stave off a case of the unemployed-understimulated-uninteresting-s. It also helps me keep my mood stable – no ‘what am I doing with myself?’ introspection and anxiety… well, a little bit. But mostly that sort of thinking is under control. I’m also delighted by the effect just a couple of weeks of the program has made to my dancing. That, as well as finally ditching the wedding-exchange cold has me feeling fit, collected and energetic on the dance floor. Yay.
In other news, I’m all signed up for a pgrad diploma in Information Management. It will cost a ridiculous amount of money, but at least this degree will get me a job. I’m especially interested in digital archiving and increasing the accessibility of public collections like the Powerhouse’s, the National Archives, the State Library, etc etc etc. It’s all a bit exciting. I was asked to teach some undergrad subjects when I contacted the postgrad coordinator, but I said no because a) that’s too weird, and b) I want to focus on my own study and to (brace for ridiculously over-achieving ambition) do really well and kick arse. There’s a complicated online enrolment process (not like in my day, when we had to line up at the office to hand in our forms in person) and a heap of screwing about to do yet, but it’s all happening.
This is a fairly demanding course, so I’m not sure just how much traveling for dance I’m going to be able to do this year… not that we could afford much, what with the zillions of dollars this course will cost. But I will make do with local Sydney and Canberra stuff and a mid year trip to Melbourne and November trip to Melbourne for MLX. The latter are combined with family visits, of course. This means, sadly, that I won’t be able to go to Hullabaloo, which I tend to think of as one of the Big Australian Events, both in terms of DJing and dancing. The dancing is good and the music is good at Hullabaloo, and Perth always puts on a quality event with lots of attendees. I’d also have liked to DJ at Hullabaloo (if they’d have me), but we simply can’t afford $1000 in plane fares plus assorted expenses. That’s a subject and a bit of my course right there.
In other news, I’ve been experimenting with bread baking. I’m not hugely good at it. It looks ok, but it tends not to taste too good. Sort of sweetish and overly yeasty. I’m going to try some sourdough next (as inspired by Tammi to see if that improves the flavour. A different sort of yeasty taste. But I’ve not had a chance to get the starter going, yet, so that’s a way off. In other food thoughts, we’ve been eating well, but the shitty humidity has sapped our appetites. Lots of boring salads and little interest in anything else.
On the DJing front, things continue as usual. Lately Sharon has been DJing like a demon, inspired by international travel and an unfortunate laptop theft. I think the theft was actually a good thing, as she’s been going through her music, re-adding CDs and transferring files from her other computer, rediscovering forgotten stuff and adding new things. It’s meant that her DJing has suddenly had a burst of inspiring energy, and is absolutely great for dancing. She’s a madkeen balboa dancer, and much of the music she loves dancing bal to is my perfect cup of lindy hopping tea. Yahoo.
The tempos in Sydney have also jumped up quite a bit (interstate visitors over the wedding exchange weekend last month commented on the speediness), and I have to say that this also delights me, as I really do prefer the higher tempos for dancing. By higher, of course, I mean over 160bpm. Tempos at other Sydney venues remain ridiculously low. I’m not interested in a majority of songs below 120bpm (srsly) with the odd dodgy ‘faster’ song for ‘balboa’. Egads.
We’ve also got a Swiss DJ in town who’s also a bal nut and a solidly swinging classic jazz fan, so nights at the Roxbury have been really, truly great dancing. For me. One thing we’ve noticed, though, is that the beginners have sort of dropped away a bit. In part, I think because the first half hour (8.30-9 or so) is super-fast tempoed for bal-nuts and crazyjazzlindyhopfools. By 9, things return to normal, but the tempos over all have been a bit higher.
This is great for me, and great for the scene as a whole, I think, as Sydney really needed a wider range of tempos in the classic swing vein. There’s lots of superfast neo at Jump Jive and Wail, but that’s not much good for lindy hop (well, for my lindy hopping taste). So we just needed some faster stuff. Right now, though, I think we could perhaps re-administer a little more at the lower end of the spectrum (120-140) just for variety’s sake, and then we’re laughing.
When I DJ I’m very conscious of working the wave (moving up and down the range from 130->200 and down again), and the mega-humidity and heat have made this even more important. My last few sets have seen me working a fairly predictable wave: 140-160-180-200-180-140- etc. It feels as though I’m covering the tempo bases pretty well and managing dancers’ energy levels more effectively. I think in the recent past I’ve tended to clump at specific tempos, neglecting the wave. I’ve also tried hard to manage energy levels as well. Though dancers are more interested in higher tempos, now, they simply can’t hack the physical demands of fast lindy hop in 90% humidity (which is where we’ve sat for the last two Roxbury nights) and mid 30s temperatures. It’s just too draining – the humidity in particular.
I think that balboa has, once again, to be thanked for many dancers’ comfort, or willingness to experiment with, faster tempos. Faster tempos simply seem less threatening when you hear them more often. And when you hear really fast tempos, 180bpm just doesn’t seem too fast at all. Which is very nice. My own increasing fitness has made it much easier to deal with the humidity and to enjoy faster dancing again. Yay.
Though we have perfect growing weather now (warm, wet, sunny), we still haven’t put in a proper herb garden. We are feeling its lack quite seriously, but we just haven’t had time to get to the markets for plants, or to get some seeds sprouting. We must get on that ASAP, as fresh herbs are so important in our day to day cooking.
Twitter continues to swallow up my intertubes brain. It’s the instant gratification that I like. I’ll try to do better.
I’m sure there’s more to write about, but I can’t think of it. So, enough, then.
Category Archives: academia
a revision of my comments about CSIRO’s approach to vegetarianism
I want to add something to my first post discussing the CSIRO diet.
Here is some very basic information I’ve found in the two CSIRO books. I haven’t looked further afield (yet).
The acknowledgments in the second book write:
CSIRO gratefully acknowledges all those who have contributed to the funding of research on higher-protein diets for weight management: CSIRO Human Nutrition; Dairy Australia; Goodman Fielder; Meat and Livestock Australia; The National Heart Foundation; The National Centre for Excellence for Functional Foods; The National Health and Medical Research Council
My immediate response to this funding from particular interest groups (especially Meat and Livestock Australia) is to wonder just how trustworthy the findings of this research can be. But then I think about the realities of funding for research in Australia. It is probably not so much that the funding bodies dictated the terms of the research, but that there wasn’t funding available for research into alternatives to a high-meat diet. I’m reasonably confident that CSIRO (and the authors of this book) are reputable researchers. So it’s not as though we’re reading a diet book written by me.
This of course raises all sorts of interesting questions about the role of public bodies – government research bodies – as ‘reputable’ or authoritative sources of knowledge and information. It also makes me wonder about the way we are willing to accept ‘scientific’ research about health and bodies as ‘objective’ and ‘reputable’, but are far more sceptical of research on these topics from the humanities. I have read some really, seriously dodgy published work in the humanities on bodies and diet and food and so on – stuff that’s really theoretical supposing and not at all substantiated by solid data – but I’ve also read some equally dodgy ‘scientific’ work. I think, though we could probably accept that CSIRO is quite good at doing ‘scientific’ research, that it would be wrong to assume that this study (as with any ‘scientific’ study) is objective or neutral or reporting ‘just the facts’. This study is as guided by ideology and notions of ‘body’ and ‘health’ as any other. Science isn’t neutral; it’s just institutionalised in a different way.
At any rate, I approach the CSIRO diet with a degree of critical engagement. I want to ‘trust’ this study and diet, but at the same time, this is my body and I don’t want to fuck it up with the consequences of bullshit research.
With this in mind, here are a few issues that I have with the CSIRO diet’s approach to food, and most importantly with its recipes. Firstly, it’s worth pointing out that the books have three general sections:
1. a discussion of the research into health and nutrition upon which the ‘diet’ is based;
2. a section outlining exercise, and providing some basic exercises;
3. a section of menu plans and recipes.
The books do not position the diet (and its approach to food and nutrition) within political, social, cultural context. There is no discussion about the political economies of food. There’s no talk about the social and environmental sustainability of particular diets and lifestyles. There’s no discussion about (or even reference to) class and how spending money on food is not dictated entirely by ‘lifestyle choices’, but my the basic economics of living within a budget. I do quite like the way it avoids discussions about body image and gendered notions of ‘beauty’, instead emphasising the benefits of fitness and good health: feeling good. I could also discuss the pictures (which are quite heterocentric and feature far more women than men), and I might later in another post.
Generally, the books remind me of the ABC. Sort of middle class aesthetics, careful with its gender talk (but still gendered), articulate but not alienating in its language, lots of nice san serif fonts. It appears ‘neutral’, but of course it’s not.
The one issue I want to take up here is the books’ approach to (or neglect of) vegetarianism and veganism.
I wrote this in my previous post:
There are also questions to be asked about the CSIRO diet’s funding (which was in part from Australian primary producers – meat farmers to be specific) and how this affected their research and findings. Their very brief section(s) on vegetarianism are really quite bullshitty. There’s a line something like ‘there’s no evidence that vegetariaism is bad for you…’ Which of course is misleading if not downright deceitful. A vegetarian diet is much better for you than a meat diet, so long as you’re eating well. No diet is good for you if it doesn’t have mostly fresh fruit and vegies, wholegrain foods, dairy products and then protein, and finally a small amount of certain types of fats. You can skip the dairy stuff (so long as you replace it), but you certainly don’t need to eat meat.
But I wasn’t entirely accurate. I was actually a bit full of shit, there. Here’s what the CSIRO books actually say:
The first book has this to say about vegetarianism:
Our bodies have evolved to thrive on a wide variety of both animal and plant foods. Many people eat a plant-based diet by way of necessity, but others choose to for a wide range of reasons. Population studies have shown that vegetarians have a lower risk of obesity, coronary heart disease, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes and some forms of cancer – but it is not clear if this is due to their diet or their lifestyle. However, if you are a vegetarian, you need to plan your diet carefully to make sure that all essential nutrients are included (p 39-40 Book 1)
And this (within a very serious section about the importance of calcium, particularly for women:
Vegetarians absorb and retain more calcium than do non-vegetarians. Vegetable greens such as spinach and broccoli, and some legumes and soybean proucts are good sources of calcium. Vegetarians who eat dairy foods will obtain sufficient calcium (p 46 book 1).
There’s even less about vegetarianism in the second book (in a section addressing readers’ questions):
Is there a diet for vegetarians?
We have not investigated whether a high-protein vegetarian diet is as effective as a high-animal-protein diet, but we do know that vegetable protein confers a similar benefit in reducing hunger. You may want to consult your GP or dietician to modify the Diet for your needs. If you wish to substitute non-meat protein, we would suggest eating 200g tofu or 260g cooked chickpeas, beans or lentils instead of 200g meat, fish or chicken (p33 book 2).
The context of these quotes – sections ‘warning’ about the dangers of inadequate amounts of calcium (for women especially), about malnutrition generally – is significant. Vegetarianism is framed in terms of nutritional failure or of malnutrition. It is pathologised. This is the most common criticism I’ve heard of vegetarianism: that you have to eat really carefully or else you won’t get the nutrients you need, and that this is very difficult (if not impossible). My immediate response is to wonder whether most omnivorous human beings in mainstream Australian society eat ‘properly’. Eating meat does not automatically ensure proper nutrition. The meat is far less important than the other stuff you should be eating. A standard ‘meat and three veg’ diet with its emphasis on white bread, processed foods and meat rather than vegetables and fruit is not as nutritionally balanced as it might appear. There’s lots of interesting stuff written about the way this type of diet developed in Australian culture, with attendant discussions of mid- and post-war shortages, the rise of supermarkets, gendered division of labour in the home, the economics of mass-production and distribution of food and so on.
Perhaps the most interesting part of this literature (with which I am not terribly familiar) is the idea that science (and the idea of ‘Science’) defined or shaped ‘modern’ living and food. We could go on here about a movement away from diversity in food plant stocks and towards the genetic ‘management’ of food my corporations. We could also talk about the way diets are shaped by supermarket wholesale purchasing and relationships with growers. And we could discuss the role of class in ‘whole food’ or ‘organic’ counter-movements. But I don’t really have the brain for it today. Really, what I want to say here is that the ‘meat and three veg’ diet is culturally specific. It’s shaped by class and gender and ethnicity and so on. It’s not ‘natural’ and it didn’t ‘just happen’. It is a product of economics and capitalism, of patriarchy, of mass media discourse and so on. It’s also, ironically, the product of government policy and ‘education’.
So, what I really should have just said above, is that vegetarianism is presented as deviance from a ‘normal’, ‘healthy’ diet in the CSIRO diet, and that this reflects broader mainstream notions of vegetarianism. But, of course, it’s not. Vegetarianism is as difficult/easy as omnivorous eating. It is, however, more difficult socially and culturally in many contexts. Dining out offers the best example of this: vegetarian restaurants are fewer in number than omnivorous ones in Australia, and vegetarian dishes are marginalised within mainstream menus at Australian restaurants.
A prioritising of meat of course makes sense in the CSIRO diet: this is a diet focussing on high-protein diets. More specifically, it is concerned with the importance of meat in a high-protein diet. I think that the issue not so much the neglect of vegetarianism, but the over-emphasis of meat and neglect of non-meat protein sources.
What this means, in terms of the menu plans and recipes, is that the dishes are all constructed around meat. The meals are still thinking of the ‘meat and three veg’ ratio, rather than thinking of meals as a combination of elements. This basic point is one that we find most difficult about the CSIRO recipes. Each meal is constructed as one item + one item + one item. This is almost diametrically opposite to the notion of constructing a meal as a complex, harmony of flavours and elements. As an alternative, we might construct a meal that is composed of a series of small dishes, each representing one of a series of flavours: salty, sweet, wet, dry, etc. Or we might select ingredients that balance the ‘humours’ of the body: cooling, heating, etc. The meat and three veg diet lumps vegetables into one or two groups: greens and ‘others’. We might instead think of the role of brassicas and leafy green vegetables in relation to pulses and grains and root vegetables. Though the CSIRO diet does explore the sources of particular minerals and nutrients, the meals themselves are still imagined as ‘meat and…’:
Tandoori chicken with garlic spinach
chicken with djon mustard and white wine
chicken and tarragon meatloaf
(book 1 recipe titles)
And vegetable dishes are then served with them (if at all).
In practical terms, this means that you buy the meat first, then look for vegetables to go with it. This tends to suggest that cooks will look first to their meat, then their vegetables. Which means that they’re more likely to use fresh meat and less likely to use fresh vegetables. If meat is the priority, then the veggies are the ‘add-on’ rather than the central taste and ideological ingredient. Financially, it’s challenging to build a menu around meat – it’s one of the most expensive ingredients. But then the CSIRO diet is not cheap. In part because of its emphasis on meat, but also because of its neglect of seasonal variations in ingredients. I think it’s worth emphasising the importance of cost: this is not a diet for those on a low budget.
Of course, this leads me to an interesting point: the idea of meat as a luxury good. This line from the CSIRO book works with this point:
Many people eat a plant-based diet by way of necessity, but others choose to for a wide range of reasons.
The line about necessity is key. I wish they’d expanded. What issues do they feel necessitate vegetarianism? Poverty? Religious restrictions? Geographic location? Allergies? I also wish they’d referenced some of the reasons vegetarianism is chosen. A few million spring to my mind immediately: ethical (preventing cruelty to animals, treading lightly environmentally, avoiding unjust labour and economic practices…), religious, economic… Surely vegetarianism for these ‘reasons’ is a necessity. It is necessary that they choose not to exploit animals. It is necessary that they live simply so that others may simply live. It is necessary that they honour the teachings of a holy figure by not taking lives.
Finally, the point I’d like to return to at the end, is the one of eating seasonally. The CSIRO diet does not in any way account for seasonal variation in fresh produce. It relies upon its users shopping at conventional supermarkets and having access to all ingredients at any time. We found that the preponderance of particular ingredients (tarragon!) made shopping expensive. The neglect not only of seasonal variation, but also of regional availability made shopping difficult and expensive. This is where we first began varying the menu plans: we didn’t want to eat manky out-of-season tomatoes, or to walk past gorgeous fresh asparagus.
One of the delights of a vegetarian diet is that you supplement dried ingredients (grains, pulses) with fresh produce. Your diet changes with the seasons. In practical terms, this means that you’re eating a menu that changes over the year; you don’t just keep eating the same old stuff, day in and day out, regardless of its freshness or availability. Seasonal produce – stuff that’s in season is fresher, tastes and looks better and is cheaper than stuff that is not. So it simply makes sense to build meals around ingredients which are in season rather than force-grown in a greenhouse, shipped in from overseas and riddled with preservatives and generally sapped of any flavour.
Eating seasonally does require some knowledge of the seasons, and also, by extension, of local farming practices. But this sort of knowledge can come almost osmotically if you’re not shopping in a supermarket. Supermarkets stock the same products, day in, month out. Greengrocers and fresh food markets tend to buy most what is cheapest as well as keeping in stock perennial favourites. But when you’re shopping at a greengrocer every week, you see the biggest piles of cheapest vegetables change with the seasons. Even if you’re not buying organic.
Of course, buying organic is something the CSIRO diet does not make simple. Meat-centred meals with un-seasonal menus do not support a diet of organic, seasonal produce. While the second does not refer to it at all, the first book has this to say about organic produce:
We are often asked whether or not it’s better to buy organic produce. Although organic fruit and vegetables are probably no more nutritious than conventionally grown varieties, they may taste better. Some organic leafy vegetables and potatoes also seem to have higher vitamin C contents, which may be due to the fact that organic produce is often smaller and therefore denser than conventional produce, which has a high water content. The bottom line is that eating more fruit and vegetables, whether organic, conventional, fresh, frozen or tinned, will increase your intake of protective compounds and is important for good health (p50)
There’s a whole world of wrong in that paragraph. I’ll let other people explain why.
I know I’ve rambled off-topic a bit here. I began with an argument about the CSIRO diet’s anti-vegetarian stance. But I think it’s important to point out how a meat-centred diet which neglects seasonal variation discourages the consumption of organic produce and encourages the consumption of processed foods (including canned and frozen food). I think that eating out of season is a matter of swimming upstream when you’re trying to convince people to eat more fruit and vegetables. If the fruit and vegies they’re eating don’t taste too good (because it’s out of season, loaded with preservatives and pesticides or simply sat around for too long), people won’t eat them. If the fruit and vegies they have do taste delicious, they will eat them.
I think this is at the heart of a ‘healthy’ diet. Eating well should be a delight to the senses. It should be about pleasure. This means that a ‘good diet’ not only avoids discussions of ‘restriction’, ‘denial’, ‘guilt’ and ‘suppression of appetite’, but actively encourages pleasure and interest in food. Healthy eating is about enjoying food, about taking an interest in the growing and preparation of produce. It is about the provocation of appetite, the association of food with pleasure and happiness.
It’s no wonder that hardcore cooks become interested in . An interest in cooking leads to an interest in sourcing produce. And this leads to producing your own food – even if only your herbs. For many foodies, an interest in gardening leads naturally to an interest in water and sustainable food production. But not all foodies. I think it’s worth pointing out that being interested in food and growing your own veggies does not necessarily mean you’ll end up a hardcore hippy growing organically. I think it’s also worth pointing out that availability (or lack of it) often pushes cooks to gardening. I’m thinking about migrants in particular: tomatoes in Brunswick, bok choy in Ashfield. Frugality is often a prime motivator for gardening: it’s far cheaper to grow your own organic produce from seed than buy it from the shops.
While the CSIRO diet has been very useful, I think that its neglect of these sorts of social, cultural, economic and scientific issues is a profound weakness.
Having said that, though, I think that its success is largely owed to the fact that it does not address these issues. Perhaps, then, it’s worth thinking about the CSIRO diet as a gateway drug, encouraging an interest and food and cooking and nutrition that might lead to experimentation with other recipes and food types? Unfortunately, I think that the CSIRO diet’s books discourage this type of exploration. Though the book suggests that once the ‘initial’ ‘weight loss’ part of the diet is achieved, users should move on to tailoring their meals to suit their (new) lifestyles, I wonder just how many users do stay with the diet long enough to reach that point.
Ultimately, the CSIRO diet is not so much a ‘diet’ as a manual for lifestyle change. But it is not, unfortunately, a manual for ideological change in terms of approaches to socially and environmentally sustainable food production and preparation.
thinking about victoria spivey and discographies as historical resources
I’ve recently come across some Victoria Spivey songs quite by accident. I have quite a few by her, but mostly bits and pieces from various compilations. I haven’t put any effort into collecting her, in part because my resources are limited and in the other part because my attention was caught by Bessie Smith. I also tend to prioritise ‘songs for lindy hopping’ in my purchasing.
I came across some Spivey songs in a Henry Red Allen JSP (I think) set from emusic. It’s also on one of the Complete Jazz Series, and I think the latter versions are slightly better quality. On both it was just labelled ‘Henry Red Allen and his orch’ I think. I found the additional details in the discography at the library. Listed under Victoria Spivey, she did quite a few sessions in New York 1928 with Clarence Williams etc, and then in 1929 she did some stuff in New York again with some really big guns. Below are the discographic details for the sessions that caught my interest:
Victoria Spivey
[S10354] Victoria Spivey (vcl) acc by Louis Armstrong (tp) Fred Robinson (tb) Jimmy Strong (ts) Gene Anderson (p) Mancy Cara (bj) Zutty Singleton (d)
New York, July 10 1929
40252-C Funny feathers
Okeh 8713, Swag (Aus) 1267, 1310, Col C3L-33, Odeon (F)7MOE-2250, Par (E)PMC7144, CBS (F)65421, (Jap)SL-1209/10/11
402526-A How do you do it that way?
Okeh 8713, Swag (Aus) 1267, S1310, Odeon (F)7MOE-2250, Par (E)PMC7144, CBS (F)65421, Spivey LP2001, Jass 5, Biograph BLP C5, Book of the Month Club 21-6547
[there are details about where these songs were published]
[S10355] Victoria Spivey (vcl) acc by Henry “Red Allen” (tp) J.C. Higginbotham (tb) Charlie Holmes (sop) Teddy Hill (ts-1) Luis Russell (p) Wil Johnson (g) Pops Foster (b,tu-2)
New York, October 1, 1929
56732-1 Bloodhound blues (1)
[with recording details I can’t be arsed typing out]
56733-2 Dirty T.B. Blues (1)
56734-1 Moaning the blues (1)
56735-1 Telephoning the blues
[there are details about where these songs were published]
When you go to the Henry Red Allen entry, you find him in New York in the same months (July and October of 1929) recording with mostly the same musicians. Luis Russell is the one that catches my eye, mostly because he’s (one of) the connections between Allen and Armstrong, leading a band which starred both of them at some points in the 30s.
Here are the details of recordings from the Henry Red Allen entry:
[A1573] Henry Red Allen (tp,vcl) J.C. Higginbotham (tb) Albert Nicholas (cl) Charlie Holmes (sop, cl, as) Teddy Hill (ts, cl) Luis Russell (p, celeste) Wil Johnson (g, bj, vcl) Pops Foster (b) Paul Barbarin (d, vib), Victoria Spivey (vcl) and the Four Wanderers (vcl quartet) added: Herman Hughes, Charlie Clinscales, (tenor), Maceo Johnson (bariton) Olivier Childs (bass)
New York, September 24, 1929
55852-1 Make a country bird fly wild (tfw vcl)
[with recording details I can’t be arsed typing out]
55852-2 Make a country bird fly wild (tfw vcl)
55853-1 Funny feathers blues (vs vcl)
55853-2 Funny feathers blues (vs vcl)
55854-1 How do they do it that way (vs vcl)
55855-1 Pleasin’ Paul
55855-2 Pleasin’ Paul
[there are details about where these songs were published]
I think the sessions under Spivey’s own name were the best for blues dancing, though really it’s a matter of taste.
FYI, if you’re trying to find all the recordings by a particular musician, you use the Musician’s Index (if you’re using the books rather than the online or CD Rom version of the discography) to find all the page and recording session details for each song featuring that musician. When you’re looking at someone like Louis Armstrong, that can get tedious very quickly. In his case, there’re whole books devoted just to his discographies. But people like Henry Red Allen (and Eddie Condon) tend to ramble across dozens and dozens of bands and hundreds of individual songs. You tend to get a feel for a particular musician, and you realise that they played in a whole range of bands in a particular city at any particular time. This gets really interesting, particularly when they’re using pseudonyms to escape restrictive recording contracts with particular labels.
Just looking up ‘Henry Red Allen’, for example, won’t get you all his recordings. But it will get you the recordings which are credited to him, or recorded by bands with his name attached (eg Henry Red Allen and his Orchestra). This sort of attribution gets interesting when you look at artists like Spivey, who had some of the biggest names in jazz listed as her accompanists.
You can see how I get interested in the relationship between blues and ‘jazz’ or ‘swing’ when I’m doing this digging in the discographies. Surely accompanying these singers (and they were accompanying, particularly when it came to people like Bessie Smith) influenced their music in significant ways. And these big names in jazz influenced other musicians – particularly when we’re talking about people like Louis Armstrong or Allen.
Spivey is interesting because she was not only a seriously famous singer in the 20s, she also managed to survive the declining popularity of blues at the end of the 20s. She did interesting things like play in the Hellzapoppin’ stage review (not the film, lindy hoppers, the stage review from which material for the film was drawn) and found her own record company, Spivey Records in the 60s. It was with this label that she recorded Bob Dylan as an accompanist.
I’m fascinated by the idea that you can chart the relationships between musicians in a particular city by using the discographies. All you have to go on is the city, date, song title and musicians. Which is a surprisingly useful amount of information. My attention is caught by the names which turn up all over the place, in all sorts of bands. Zutty Singleton. Paul Barbarin. Buster Bailey. Peanuts Hucko. People I didn’t know before I started looking through the discographies. Now I find that following these guys through the Chronological Classics or Complete Jazz Series gives me an overview of a particular city or style during a certain time frame. So if I follow Zutty Singleton through a particular year on CD, I’ll hear a range of bands. And I can speculate about the professional relationships between bands and the way creative ideas spread between bands.
Of course, all this information is really only dealing with recorded performances. Though this does include a massive amount of recorded broadcasts and live performances (particularly in the 1930s), we’re really only looking at formal recording sessions in the 20s. I always wonder what went on around these sessions. Who did they meet at the restaurant where they had dinner afterwards? Did they go for drinks with the band who’d been in there before? Who sat in on the following sessions to make up numbers or simply out of musical interest? Did these things even happen?
And of course I can’t help but think about the race stuff going on. I notice things like particular bands having personnel with names of particular cultural backgrounds. German or European names in Benny Goodman’s bands. Italian names in New Orleans bands. Anglicised names in Chicago. Certain names are more common in African American bands than in Anglo-American bands.
There are hardly any mixed-race recordings, so when they do pop up, my interest is immediately caught. And of course, when you get into the French recordings of artists like Bill Coleman, Coleman Hawkins, the remnants of Glenn Miller’s band in 1945, you see familiar American names teaming up with French artists. Glenn Miller’s former bandmates (Peanuts Hucko, Mel Powell, Joe Schulman, Ray McKinley) are joined by Django Reinhardt.
All this is super-interesting. And that’s just the information you can gain from reading through the discographies. When you listen along with the discographies, tracing particular sessions and particular combinations of musicians, you can hear musical developments and experimentations expanding and changing an individual musician’s style. Arrangers become much more important. Listening across bands (following a particular musician rather than a band), you hear similarities within a single year. And when you add to that the fact that many bands recorded the same songs in the same year, you hear each of these little moments in creative time explored within the framework of a single composition, arranged in countless ways, exploded by solos and improvisations.
When you think of the music that wasn’t recorded, of all the live performances on stages and in back rooms and kitchens, you realise that music was not only everywhere, but that these were communities of musicians, complicated networks forged by the act of making music. And money.
And, finally, in all of this, if I do come across a female name anywhere other than in the vocals, I’m flabbergasted. This is a world of men. Or so you’d assume, if you relied only on the discographies. There were plenty of women in these pictures, just not dug into the grooves on the record. There were women playing and writing and recording music, women running offices, making dinners, washing clothes. It’s just that you can’t hear them on the records, unless you listen very closely.
Refs:
Lord Jazz Discography
This is an interesting piece about Henry Red Allen.
Red Hot Jazz.
adventures with badass sistahs in outer space: olivia dunham
I love SF telly. I love it. I watch every SF program, just in case. I also like supernatural, fantasy and general make believe stuff.
But I tend to have less patience with programs that do not have good female characters. I make exceptions for programs like Supernatural which explore male characters and masculinity in new ways.
I love all trashy vampire telly. I can’t help it. It’s a sickness.
I did my honours thesis on female violence in action film, and I’m still interested in the way women and violence and, more importantly, women’s violence are depicted in mainstream film and television. While I was doing this honours project I came across an article which basically argued that straight-to-video releases (ie B films) were often more transgressive in terms of representations of gender than mainstream or A films. I am really interested in this idea. This is partly how I justify my passion for B telly. Partly. But I also think it’s true. Telly that doesn’t gain broadcast telly release, doesn’t make it to prime time, or even make it to Australian television tends to be where I find the most interesting gender stuff. It’s as though being B gives you a little freedom to explore different types of characters.
I gain access to these programs through the internet, and through video shops. Video shops are actually very important. DVD releases of even the most B programs has given me access to some of the most wonderfully un-top-shelf television. Accessing these programs this way (rather than via broadcast telly) means that I tend to watch them in a block, rather than one episode-per-week. I binge view. This changes the way that I read these programs. It makes me more likely to read the meta-arc, the larger story. I tend to regard individual episode stories as pieces of a whole, rather than as discrete texts. Even when the program is very ‘monster of the week’ (as most SF is, particularly in its first season).
I find out about these programs via websites like io9. I use wikipedia extensively to clear up plot points I haven’t understood or to follow up characters and add-on texts like comics. I also use imdb for details about directors, actors and so on. I like to talk about these programs with other people, but I don’t particularly want to sit down and dissect them for hours. This was something I used to do with Buffy when I was at school. These days I quite like to share programs and to mention them, or to share add-on texts, but I’m really only interested in watching them. I do talk about them with my partner when we’re watching. But only the programs he’s also interested in.
My PhD dissertation involved a lot of research into fan studies and methodologies and theories involved in researching fan cultures. I am self-reflexive about most of my talk about these SF telly shows. I am interested in issues of gender and class and sexuality and race and ethnicity…. and all that good identity stuff. But I am also interested in questions about technology and machinery, wider questions about humanity. But, really, gender is where it’s at; all that other shit is inflected by this. And, as somebody clever said once, I’ll be a post-feminist when we live in a post-patriarchy. Gender issues are so central to SF culture and texts, it’s ridiculously self-deceiving to try to ignore them.
This is just one post about one character (mostly) that I like. I’ll try to write other posts about other characters. And perhaps about this program in more detail. But don’t count on it; I’m slack.
Because I tend to watch a number of programs at one time, and am also reading SF all the time, I tend to read intertextually. Well, of course I do. We all do. But this is one of my particular pleasures; I like to imagine characters from different programs meeting. I like exploring the industrial connections between programs – how could the director of Veronica Mars move to Moonlight and what happens when Mark Mothersbaugh does the music for Big Love. Oh – I also read and watch across genres. I’m reading lots of dodgy supernatural romances most of the time, and always reading Tanya Huff; I’m watching programs like Vampire Diaries and, of course, Blood Ties.
So when I’m watching these programs I’m not only reading the text in front of me, I’m also thinking intertextually, I’m thinking about modes and industries of production, and I’m paying attention to audiences and modes of reception. And the communities which tie them all together.
And I re-watch and re-read on a massive scale.
I also do some sessional teaching at various universities. I exploit this role by pushing the television I love on young, vulnerable middle class kiddies. I do, unapologetically and with great verve, present these programs in a feminist light. I have no – as in zero – tolerance for anti-feminist arguments from my classes. I will listen to them and then dismiss them as they deserve. I aim to indoctrinate a generation of students. They will be feminist and they will value SF.
They can just suck it up or fail.
So here’s some stuff about Olivia Dunham. Main character of Fringe. All-round badass sistah. Mos def.
First, watch this:
That’s a Fringe promo. The blonde is Olivia Dunham.
I’m really liking the character Olivia Dunham in Fringe. I especially liked her in the first season of the program. Why?
She’s a crack shot. She is really, really good with a gun.
She’s a good fighter. She wins most fights, and when she doesn’t win, it’s only because her opponent is, I dunno – a car or something.
She’s super clever and figures things out. There are lots of things to figure out in Fringe.
She’s a good explainer. Because she’s a good figure-er-outer, she often has to explain things to other characters. Usually her male partner Charlie, but also quite often her boss.
She listens and thinks and listens again. She’s not always flapping her lips, yapping. She’s listening.
She’s a good runner and jumper.
She’s very gentle and patient with Walter, who’s not only a habitual drug user (and abuser) but a mentally unwell older man who’s been quite seriously damaged by his time in an institution. She listens to him and pays attention to him; she doesn’t patronise him. She protects him when he needs it (and when he asks), but she is also willing to let him take care of himself.
She used to be a prosecutor in the military. She investigated and then prosecuted a middle aged white man who later became her boss. He was charged with sexually assaulting a number of women. When he became her boss, he sought revenge on her through systematic harassment. She didn’t take that crap; she kept on being a badass agent. She didn’t martyr herself; she called him on his bullshit. Her usual boss was this bad boss’s friend. At first he didn’t want to like Olivia because of this. Eventually he figured out Olivia was a gun, and that his friend was crap. Then he became a better boss. Olivia kept on being a gun, regardless.
She’s willing to tell bosses off if they need it. She’s also prepared to listen and to admit she was wrong.
She really likes her sister and her little niece.
She had good, solid, platonic relationships with her male coworkers. There is never even the intimation of sexual tension between her and (the awesome) Charlie. They are partners in the truest sense. He has a wife he loves and Olivia is busy being… Olivia.
She operates in an all-male world – the FBI (or is it CIA? Whatevs – some institution) – but she is aware of gender issues and articulates them. Most especially in her dealings with the bad boss. But she also makes comments about men in positions of power who can’t handle assertive women. She has one great line in the first season about how the men around her (especially her male boss) aren’t listening to her because she’s ‘getting emotional, just like a woman’. And then she says something, very sternly, about how she is getting emotional, because this is emotional stuff, and that this emotion is making her a better agent. Olivia is not only calling the men around her on their mysogynist bullshit, she’s also reworking the role of ‘great agent’ to incorporate a range of characteristics not traditionally located in the male arse.
And she is a fully sick agent.
Throughout season one she is the main character. She is the centre of stories, and as the agent in charge, she is also boss of the cases they work. She’s the one to call the lab and tell them to get their gear and come investigate something gross. This changes a little in season two, and she is set up as something of a victim (recovering from a ‘car accident’), but this is changing. We are at about episode four, and she’s already back on her feet and kicking arse. Peter has taken on a more managerial role in the group, and the ‘Fringe division’ has officially been disbanded. Charlie has [SPOILER] died [/SPOILER], which sucks arse, but I’m dealing. So Olivia’s status has shifted. But this is ok, as Peter’s character has only slowly been working away from ‘carer’ for Walter and ‘general slacker’ towards some sort of three dimensional personhood. He’s also finally realising his abilities as an investigator type person. In other words, his character is gradually being fleshed out. I worry that he’ll become Olivia’s partner (in the sense of FBI ness and in the romantic sense), but I don’t see this happening any time soon.
I really like Olivia because I don’t worry about her. She’s kind of superhuman, but only in the way we expect our SF protagonists to be. She gets scraped and banged and shot occasionally, but it doesn’t stop her winning. Sure, she’s kind of a paragon of all things awesome, but this is as it should be in SF. She is, however, flawed. And [SPOILER] probably partly psychic and awesome because she was experimented on as a kid. But she has begun dealing with this history and is assimilating and coming to terms with its effects in a phenomenally healthy way. Which in itself is a bit worrying.
Olivia is an impossible woman. An impossible character. But this is as it should be in SF. This is how SF protagonists are: they are strong and brave and clever. Cleverness is important. She is conventionally attractive, but she doesn’t wear booby shirts or stupid shoes. She can run like a badass mofo and she likes suits. Just like the male agents around her. She wears her hair tied back in a piggy tail, or she wears a sensible black beanie. She doesn’t wear much make up. She is conventionally attractive. But so are most protagonists.
I <3 Olivia.
Olivia isn’t the only woman character in Fringe worth loving. I also love Astrid, who’s the agent assigned to working with Walter in his lab.
Astrid is also awesome.
She has a degree in cryptography, another in computer stuff (or is that a double major) and she’s got some sort of medical training (well, she does now). She loves cryptography. As in, she’s a nerd for it. And she loves computers.
She’s also an agent.
She calls Walter on his bullshit, including his inability to remember her name (which we suspect is a ploy on Walter’s part). She won’t let him (or anyone else) forget that she is actually a badass agent as well.
She deals with Walter’s gross dissections and experiments very matter of factly.
She runs errands and also has some badass ninja agent skills.
She veers into ‘servant territory’ every now and then, which is particularly worrying as she’s African American. But these little deviations are usually addressed: Astrid will call bullshit on Walter’s behaviour and regularly refuses tasks she feels cross the boundary from professional assistance to nurse maiding.
She is super smart.
She and Olivia talk regularly about things other than men. They often figure out puzzles together.
She is fond of Walter and also deals with his mental illness and fragile personality gently, yet without patronising him. She does not take on a carer role; she is, if nothing else, Walter’s lab assistant.
Nina Sharp is another important female character in Fringe. She’s the CEO of Massive Dynamic, a sort of super-corporation specialising in technology. A bit like Skynet Cyberdyne Systems, but awesomer. She admires Olivia greatly and has tried to recruit her to Massive Dynamic a number of times. She and Olivia have a refreshingly realistic relationship; they deal with each other as professionals. They do not have the sort of antagonistic rivalry alpha women are usually given in SF… in telly.They talk to each other about plenty of things besides men. They often talk about technology together. And science.
Nina Sharp is middle aged.
Nina Sharp has a bionic arm and a clear glass ipod thingy. She is way cool with technology generally. This is one middle aged woman who is not relegated to earth mother status; she is technology, economic and industrial power and smarts.
I love Olivia the most, though. I love the way she stops and thinks about things. I love the way she can fighty fight. I love it that though she might, one day be interested in Peter romantically, that day is waaaaaay off in the future, and for now she’s busy being a badass. He thinks she’s neat. He might think she’s neat in a romantic way, but for now he just thinks she’s a badass and he wants to be her partner, I think.
So I love Olivia Dunham. And this is why I can watch Fringe.
PS: I’ll try to add some more pics to this later, when I can figure out how to do it in this new version of MT without opening a new stupid window every time.
EDIT: I had to add this link to a drawing Jasika Nicole (the actor who plays Astrid) drew of herself.
i’m not sure about natalie portman
Watching a film this afternoon I asked myself what possessed Natalie Portman to keep taking roles where her character is tortured. Is it something in her, that this torture satisfies some sort of inner masochism? Is it that she is continually cast as victim, as vulnerable by directors and casting agents who see a vulnerability in her? Who knows – I wouldn’t speak for her. But this has made me think about actresses taking on these types of roles.
There are few roles in cinema (both mainstream and otherwise) depicting women as strong and independent and free of the threat of violence or otherwise immune to vulnerability. To work, an actress simply must accept roles which present them – as the body a character occupies, as the craftswoman creating this persona – as vulnerable. Weak. Potentially victim of violence of all types. Does the actress refuse these roles, and perhaps not work? If she accepts these roles, is she complicit in this representation of women?
tweet
I think I’d like to be sewing. Or going to the gallery. Or nerding it up in the library. I think the library is going to win. Again.
amiri baraka at last
Finally, I’ve made it to Amiri Baraka (aka LeRoi Jones). It’s taken way too long.
I’ve just read this: Jazz and the White Jazz Critic. I didn’t read it there (in a google books page that make me suddenly think ‘what the fuck do we bother with publishers and book deals? All our rights as authors are dead with this one new technology… which really just does as the photocopier did for us all 20 years ago, but faster). I read it in a paper book.
And I got excited.
And then I went here and read that story. But mostly I looked at the youtube clip and got a bit excited.
I recommend the Jazz and White Critics article, as it sums up my misgivings about the jazznick fanmags and magazines and newsletters and recreationists.
Here’s one bit I like:
There were few ‘jazz critics’ in America at all until the ‘30s and then they were influenced to a large extent by what Richard Hadlock has called ‘the carefully documented gee-whiz attitude’ of the first serious European jazz critics. They were also, as a matter of course, influenced more deeply by the social and cultural mores of their own society. And it is only natural that their criticism, whatever its intentions, should be a product of that society, or should reflect at least some of the attitudes and thinking of that society, even if not directly related to the subject they were writing about, Negro music (Baraka 138).
And here’s another:
Most jazz critics began as hobbyists or boyishly brash members of the American petite bourgeoisie, whose only claim to any understanding about the music was that they knew it was different; or else they had once been brave enough to make a trip into a Negro slum to hear their favorite instrumentalists defame Western musical tradition. Most jazz critics were (and are) not only white middle-class Americans, but middle-brows as well (Baraka 140.)
This article is important because it was written by a black man in the 60s, and published in Down Beat magazine. I can’t remember whether Down Beat was moldy fig or modernist, but I think it was the latter. I cannot tell you how rare it is to come across a commentary by a black writer on jazz from the 60s or earlier. Doing all this reading of ‘jazz histories’ I’m beginning to think I might have to kill myself. It’s tedious. I like Baraka’s comment about ‘gee-whiz’ approaches to jazz. I was just saying to The Squeeze the other day that I’d have liked one of these guys to stop gushing about how wonderful jazz is, and to actually open their freakin eyes and see what’s going on around and beside the music. Hells, even in the music!
I’m gearing up for Blues People and will report back later.
jjj’s hottest 100: where was Lil Armstrong?!
John has posted an interesting piece about JJJ’s Hottest 100 and I thought I’d better comment at length here rather than cluttering up the comments thread there. I will annotate for those who haven’t been following the twitterati/bloggy chat.
[Point raised by others: the hottest 100 was a bit 90s-nostalgia trip for blokes who were teenagers in the 90s]
JJJ and Rage have always felt a bit 90s-nostalgia to me. But perhaps that’s because the 90s were about the last time I listened to mainstream music…
I was wondering where Blondie, Siouxie and the Banshees and other punker chicks were at in the hottest 100?
[This is where I get into some stuff I’ve been thinking about]
To be honest, I wouldn’t really expect JJJ’s list of ‘hottest 100’ songs to come up with anything particularly inclusive or properly representative of rock (let alone the broader music world). It’s a list made by listeners of one particular (state funded national) radio station in one particular historical moment, so audience demographics, radio playlists and radio/record company relationships are going to be the guiding factors.
I’d be more interested in 4ZZZ’s list – localised indy music? Or in comparing hottest 100 lists from different radio stations and then different media sources generally.
[Here I address a bigger couple of issues]
Someone noted that I should respect the opinions of the women voting in the hottest 100. If not, wouldn’t that also be neglecting women’s contributions?
My response is that this approach simply accepts the broader social and institutional factors that have lead us to this point. It is more the case that the hottest 100 and the way it is run and organised is at fault, and that it’s more useful to discuss the way the music industry works, and to think about the audiences of JJJ and popular music generally. In other words, I do not accept the premise of the question – that it is not JJJ that is at fault, but women (and their voting or failure to rock).
Firstly, here’s a point that’s been raised by a couple of books I’ve been reading about women in jazz (Placksin and Dahl, primarily):
women have been making music forever. It’s just that the music industry has not recognised this. Both Placksin and Dahl point out that the profound absence of women in jazz histories is in fact a complete fallacy. There are and have always been plenty of women in jazz. It’s just that they haven’t been scoring recording contracts, haven’t had properly managed careers, haven’t been promoted or even hired by venues or band leaders, and haven’t even been allowed into bands in many cases. Placksin and Dahl produce a massive list of fully sick jazznick sisters, and make the point that there _were_ plenty of women in jazz. We just have to look beyond the popularly accepted myths about jazz history.
So, in reference to the Hottest 100, there are heaps of women who rock. It’s just that people aren’t seeing or hearing them. Who are these people?
a) the DJs playing music on the radio,
b) the station programmers making up playlists,
c) the record company promotions teams who aren’t sending promo material to radio stations,
d) the record companies who aren’t putting women musicians under contract,
e) the company and radio peeps who aren’t looking beyond their own memories of the music world – they’re not actually getting into the library to see what’s there,
f) the audiences of these radio stations who are (voting) and buying/listening to music,
g) and of course the machinery of live music, where bands get their starts – the venues and festivals and so on simply aren’t giving chicks a go. If women even feel comfortable asking.
So, there are fully sick women musicians.
There are fully sick women musicians who rock.
There are fully sick women musicians being recorded.
There are fully sick women musicians playing live gigs all the time.
It’s more that the problem is with the music industry not promoting their music, and that the music industry itself is inimical to any type of professionalism which is not aggressive, competitive, misogynist, etc. It’s not that it’s even a masculinist culture; it’s more that a particular set of skills and personality traits are required. And these tend to coincide with hegemomic masculinity.
Sigh. Just once, I’d like this not to be about the goddamn fucking patriarchy. Or capitalism.
[This is where I think about industrial and cultural factors which might prevent/discourage women from getting into bands/rock]
I was just reading an interesting discussion of the way different instruments are perceived as ‘female’ or ‘male’ (Dahl). This was an issue in the 20s and 30s – there’s a famous quote from Jelly Roll Morton where he states that there was some concern that playing the piano would sissify him (and this from such an aggressively heterosexual man). Looking through jazz history for women musicians who played instruments (other than vocals), there’s a preponderance of pianists. In the 10s, 20s and 30s the piano was an acceptably ladylike instrument, as was the voice. This is not to say that there weren’t women playing guitars, trombones, trumpets (the most masculine of 1930s instruments), etc. It’s just that they weren’t recorded and didn’t feature on stage in a big way until the war years, when all-girl bands became a novelty. Even though bands like the International Sweethearts of Rhythm were massively badass, and bands led by people like Lil Hardin Armstrong had a very long history of badassery and fully sick jazz roots and cred.
I wonder if 90s grunge was important for stimulating a garage band phenomenon which offered young blokes something else to do in the garage beyond fiddling about with cars? There’s also that story about Seattle’s climate facilitating the development of such a vibrant live music scene (similar comments are made about lindy hop today – Seattle has a massive lindy scene, in part – I suspect – because indoor activities suit rainy, miserable weather). But part of me is sure that all the time spent fiddling about with instruments has something to do with the way girls and boys are encouraged to spend their leisure time – domestic duties for girls, guitars for boys?
[Here is where I testify and you hear a lot about me. And me.]
I spend quite a bit of time in music shops (usually the DJ Warehouse, but often a music store when I’m looking for cables), and I am almost always (as in 99.99% of the time) the only woman in there. I’ve never dealt with a female retail worker. I have the same experience in jazz music shops. I don’t mind this, really. I’m used to being around blokes, and I’m not exactly your conventionally feminine chick. I’m not adverse to kicking arse and taking names. But more importantly, I’m stubborn and determined, and it’ll take more than a cock to distract me from purchasing the perfect headphones.
I’m a DJ rather than a musician, and the mainstream DJing scene seems just as male-dominated as the band scene. In swing (where I’m DJing), most top tier DJs are male, whereas the gender divide is fairly even in the everyday, bread and butter DJing. ie, women and men are doing the everyday DJing for regular events (keeping the local scenes going), but there are very, very few women at the top end, doing the big name interstate and international DJing.
Sound familiar? Looks like there are glass ceilings in the swinguverse too.
This is partly because of social/cultural factors: DJing is an intimidating world, with an emphasis on technology and a fairly intimidating culture. Women DJs are no more collaborative and supportive of new DJs than male (I’ve found), but they’re less likely to speak up in online DJing talk and less likely to pursue a DJing career aggressively. They do good community stuff, men can do good community stuff, but male DJs tend to have the skills and appproach required by professional DJing.
Economics are also important. DJing requires:
– A fairly steady income (which can be frittered away on music, software, hardware, etc),
– copious amounts of time (to spend cataloguing music, dealing with tossers in music shops, practicing, learning to use technology, researching music, participating in online DJ talk (networking, skilling up, etc), etc).
Basically, you need time and money to get a certain skill and experience base.
– Actually getting gigs also demands some serious networking, and it’s very masculine, male-dominated networking: you have to really work hard to get into the gang if you want good, high profile, paid gigs.
Working conditions are challenging.
– Once you’re actually there, the hours are hard (late nights, long hours, lots of coming home late by yourself), dealing with the technology can be challenging (working in shitty venues with shitty gear) and there’s quite a bit of pressure – you’re responsible for entertaining a bunch of dancers, you have to be assertive enough to not get screwed over by event coordinators and also confident enough to put your hand up for challenging gigs.
All of these are the usual, familiar issues facing women in employment. I think that many of these issues face women in bands as well. While no one in the swinguverse has ever said (or even implied) to me that women shouldn’t be DJs (like to see them try), the work and role are heavily gendered in the sort of sneaky, invisible way that we see in many other industries.
And girls in bands, of course, have to deal with record companies, with PR machinery, with radio networks, with the importance of visual presentation (ie what they look like), video clips, etc etc etc.
Add all this to the fact that a large proportion of teenage blokes have been trained to think of women only as boobs with legs, should we be at all surprised that JJJ’s Hottest 100 didn’t sport a higher proportion any women?
Fuck, I’m surprised. And it’ll be a sad day when we stop commenting.
Blogging commentary:
The Hoydens have had at it already.
Stubborn mule has given us some figures re the list’s favouring the 90s.
John brings it (after a long stream of interesting tweetage, btw).
Something to remind you:
What is male privilege? (I have to add: even writing that makes me cringe in anticipation of a kick from some bloke. I’ve spent far too long in the swing world, which is so scarily patriarchal even I’ve absorbed it. egads.)
Book references:
Dahl, Linda. Stormy Weather: the Music and Lives of a Century of Jazz Women. Limelight: NY, 1992.
Placksin, Sally. Jazzwomen: 1900 to the Present. Pluto Press: London and Sydney, 1982.
violence and film and blues
Reading Gussow’s book about racial violence in southern America, I wonder why I keep coming back to violence. My honours thesis discussed female violence in film, and this book really is about violence in blues music. Both are about violence from the perspective of the disempowered; one discussing women, one black men and women in America.
I’m not comfortable with this stuff – I don’t like stories about violence, I don’t like watching it in film. But both seem linked to hopelessness. Violence for the women in the films I discussed was a last resort or an act of desperation. In the blues songs I’m reading about now, violence is either to be borne or to be perpetrated in revenge or rage or desperation. Both are domestic or carried out in ordinary, everyday spaces.
In my honours thesis I was interested in what happened to female characters when their acts of violence were institutionalised or sanctioned by institutions in the role of assassin. In these blues songs, we are continually reminded that white men were perpetrators of violence which was ignored by the state or unofficially condoned – or at least ignored. These acts of violence contrast clearly with the violence of waged war. I’m interested in the way some types of violence are sanctioned by the community and some not. And who gets to enact this ‘sanctioned’ violence. You know, of course, that class and gender and race are at work here.
One of the other elements of these representations of violence is the role of fantasy, or imagined violence. In the blues song, it might be an imagined retribution for a lover’s deceit, or for a lynching. Music allows the playing out of ideas or fantasies, and the public performance of this music encourages an attentive, participatory audience. It is not enough simply to imagine; it is necessary that the imagined violence be laid out and commented upon by the broader community.
what again?! I’m still crapping on about dance, power, etc
I’m refining and developing these ideas. So I’m just going to keep writing and posting these same points. Over and over again.
One of the more interesting discussions I’ve read about derision dance (from Jacqui Malone’s book I think) discussed derision dance in African American dance as a way of responding to white power/black disempowerment ‘under the radar’. In other words, the cake walk (or whichever example you’re using) allowed dancers to deride or mock whites surrepticiously or indirectly. To ‘get the joke’ you had to recognise who was being mocked, and how the mocking was intended.
This sort of idea comes up in a number of different cultural practices across cultures. I’ve read a bit about satire and humour and derision-through-impersonating-for-humour’s-sake.
I’m reading this book at the moment:
(Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the blues Tradition by Adam Gussow.
Gussow is a a blues musician who’s interested in violence and the blues. One of his central arguments is that the blues (as in blues music – both sung and instrumental) gave black musicians access to a ‘blues subject’
who then found ways, more or less covert, of singing back to that ever-hovering threat. Although blues scholars have long claimed that blues singers remained self-protectively mute on the issue of white mob violence, lynching makes its presence felt in various ways throughout the blues tradition: not just as veiled references in blues lyrics and as jokes recounted by blues musicians…
Gussow discusses the fact that black responses to white violence (in southern America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries) were limited by necessity. In the simplest terms, if you fought back, if you responded to white violence, then white retaliation would come ten-fold. Without this ‘right of response’ (legal or otherwise), music offered a way of dealing, publicly with violence. Albert Murray talks about singing the blues as a way of ‘stomping’ the blues – of sharing woe and therefore easing its burdensome weight. The idea with singing a song that implies lynching or violence (ie you might simply sing ‘I have the blues, my body is broken’) is that you share your pain and frustration without directly inviting white censure. Singing and music allow you to sneakily respond, but without risking violent retribution.
Gussow begins his book with a comment from the book What is Life? Reclaiming the Black Blues Self by Kalamu ya Salaam:
[W]e laugh loud and heartily when every rational expectation suggests that we should be crying in despair. [T]he combination of exaggeration and conscious recognition of the brutal facts of life is the basis for the humour of blues people (Gussow x)
So in these cases making jokes when it seems impossible to laugh is an important part of subverting white power and violence. Simply being able to laugh is a way of saying “I am not beaten down”. The joke part is an extension of the sneakiness of singing about violence indirectly, of responding indirectly when direct responses could get you killed. Humour is of course utterly subversive and powerful in this sort of setting.
The sort of violence Gussow talks about in Seems Like Murder Here is a fairly extreme example (though I highly recommend the book – it’s disturbing but also fascinating), but it makes the point that humour through music can work as humour in dance does. By hiding your true meaning or intention under a layer of melody or rhythm, you can say subversive things, do subversive things and reclaim some control over your life and public discourse. You mightn’t be able to speak out, but you can sing out.
I’m particularly keen on the idea of multiple layers of meaning. The cake walk can function just as silly clowning. But (as every clown knows), the surface humour hides something deeper and more subversive. While at first glance the black clown appears as the butt of the joke to white audiences (of the day), to white dancers and observers, the butt of the joke lies elsewhere. Tommy deFrantz writes in Dancing Many Drums that, when faced with white forbidding of black religious dance,
serious dancing went underground, and dances which carried significant aesthetic information became disguised or hidden from public view. For white audiences, the black man’s dancing body came to carry only the information on its surface (DeFrantz, discussing black masculinity in dance 107).
I’ve also heard similar discussions from aboriginal Australian elders discussing religious dance. While some dances are strictly for women or men or older women or older men or not to be seen at all, under any circumstances by the uninitiated, the meaning of a sacred dance can be hidden in plain sight. The uninitiated, watching a sacred dance (or looking at a sacred image in a painting) doesn’t have access the important, sacred meaning, simply because they haven’t been initiated, and therefore don’t understand what they’re looking at. They look, but cannot see.
I think it’s important to say here, though, that having control over who looks at your body (dancing or otherwise) is a matter of power. I’ve been thinking about it in reference to film and how we give permission to have our own image photographed or filmed (and I repeatedly return to an article on the Warlpiri Media Collective’s siteabout managing access to sacred or even just private space in indigenous Australian communities). But discussions about, for example, women’s rights to control who looks at their bodies has just as long a history as white occupation of Australia. It is, after all, a similar discussion about occupation, colonialism and the power of the gaze.
I’ve read some interesting discussions about this in music in other places as well. There’s quite a bit of discussion about Louis Armstrong and his ‘mugging’ or ‘uncle tomming’ for white audiences. Krin Gabbard discusses Armstrong’s work with Duke Ellington, including the filming of Paris Blues (in which Armstrong starred, and for which Ellington contributed the score) and the recording of the ‘Summit’ sessions:
…at those moments in the film when he [Armstrong] seems most eager to please with his vocal performances, his mugging is sufficiently exaggerated to suggest an ulterior motive. Lester Bowie has suggested that Armstrong is essentially “slipping a little poison into the coffee†of those who think they are watching a harmless darkie….Throughout his career in films, Armstrong continued to subvert received notions of African American identity, signifying on the camera while creating a style of trumpet performance that was virile, erotic, dramatic, and playful. No other black entertainer of Armstrong’s generation — with the possible exception of Ellington — brought so much intensity and charisma to his performances. But because Armstrong did not change his masculine presentation after the 1920s, many of his gestures became obsolete and lost their revolutionary edge. For many black and white Americans in the 1950s and 1960s, he was an embarrassment. In the early days of the twenty-first century, when Armstrong is regularly cast as a heroicized figure in the increasingly heroicising narrative of jazz history, we should remember that he was regularly asked to play the buffoon when he appeared on films and television (Gabbard 298).
Gabbard continues the point here:
…Armstrong plays the trickster. Armstrong’s tricksterisms were an essential part of his performance persona. On one level, Armstrong’s grinning, mugging, and exaggerated body language made him a much more congenial presence, especially to racist audiences who might otherwise have found so confident a performer to be disturbing, to say the least. When Armstrong put his trumpet to his lips, however, he was all business. The servile gestures disappeared as he held his trumpet erect and flaunted his virtuosity, power, and imagination (Gabbard 298).
Again, there’s this idea of layers of meaning. On the one hand, Armstrong appears as the smiling, ‘safe’ black man, entertaining white audiences with clowning. But on the other, his sheer musical talent empowers him and defies his reduction to ‘harmless’ clown.
There’s quite a bit written about black masculinity and layers of meaning in musical and dance performances, but I’m especially interested in women in all this. Gussow has a fascinating paper about Mamie Smith’s song ‘Crazy Blues’ (which is in that book). And Angela Yuval Davis talks about lyrics and women’s blues performances and power.
Ultimately, though, the idea of layers of meaning is important to a discussion of African American dance. Any one dance can yield a whole host of meanings or interpretations. And at times it’s important to hide the most subversive or dangerous meanings way down inside, where you need a lived experience with violence and disempowerment to really understand or to ‘get’ the joke.
Here’s my current absolute favourite example of layers of meaning in dance. This is a scene from a musical stage play version of the book The Color Purple by Alice Walker. Most of us are more familiar with the film version (with its wondeful music) and with Oprah’s interest in the story/film.
link
On one level it’s very much ‘classical’ musical stage play fare – ‘singing’, dancing, ‘period’ costumes (late 19th, early 20th century), young black men with phenomenal dancing ability performing a ‘light hearted’ song about ‘love’. That’s the straight reading (well, almost straight). It looks quite a bit like some of the clips we watch for lindy hop or jazz dance dance from the 30s and 40s. Almost.
But it takes on a different meaning when you’ve seen this.
Immediately, another layer of meaning can be found in that first clip. Men dancing a ‘woman’s’ song. Add the fact that this is a contemporary stage play, not a piece from the 30s or 40s. The lyrics, the movements of the dancers all gain new levels of meaning. The reading is ‘queered up’, not only in terms of sexuality (gay? straight? tranny? wuh?), but in terms of power and gaze. The Color Purple is a story about gender and power and race and ethnicity and class. It’s themes and story are heartbreaking in parts. And yet here are three gorgeous young blokes performing a dance which invites a smile or a laugh. It’s ‘queer’ in that it’s played ‘straight’. The dancers are dancing ‘seriously’, but the entire performance seems unusual, something is happening here, below the surface. Actually, not below the surface. It’s right there, in your face. Making you want to dance. This sort of performance is often talked about in critical literature as provoking a sense of unease in the audience – should I laugh? Or is that wrong, considering the story of The Color Purple? This unease or anxiety centres on issues of sexuality, gender, class, ethnicity, etc etc etc. In some ways, this is what makes the performance so powerful. You can enjoy it simply as badass dancing. But you can also left wondering what it means. And context is everything. Watching from an expensive seat in a huge concert theatre is a little different from watching from the audience with different vested interests:
Link.
I like the second version because it’s not a quiet audience, sitting and listening quietly and politely. It’s a loud, rowdy audience interacting with the dancers. It’s ok to laugh, to cheer, to want to dance with them, to enjoy the show. The audience are part of the performance. The ‘mistake’ where one dancer drops his hat becomes a chance to demonstrate their ability to improvise, to work it for a crowd. Three men dancing the overtly sexualised, feminised steps from Beyonce’s clip changes the meaning of the movements. It changes the way their bodies are sexualised or regarded as sexualised bodies. It’s ‘feminine’ movement, but this is definitely a performance of masculinity and masculine sexuality. Just not a terribly straight or mainstream one. And when the women appear on stage, all this gets tipped over again.
Is it derision, though? I think it’s more complicated. But it makes a point that we can apply to cake walk. On one hand, it can be read as ‘straight’, fabulous dancing. But it can also be read as clowning or buffooning. Or it can be read as queer-as-fuck politics. Or sexed-up awesomeness. Or race politics. Or mocking Beyonce. Or celebrating Beyonce. It’s imitation and flattery and derision and commentary. It’s complicatedness invites us to engage and to look for layers of meaning. Which of course is the point: one dance becomes a discourse, a discussion, rather than a monologue.
Davis, Angela Y. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday. Toronto: Random House, 1998.
DeFrantz, Thomas. “The Black Male Body in Concert Dance.” Moving Words: Re-Writing Dance. Ed. Gay Morris. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. 107 –
20.
Gabbard, Krin. “Paris Blues: Ellington, Armstrong, and Saying It with Musicâ€. Uptown Conversation: the new Jazz studies, ed. Robert O’Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, Farah Jasmin Griffin. Columbia U Press, NY: 2004. 297-311.
Malone, Jacqui. Steppin’ on the Blues: The Visible Rhythms of African American Dance. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996.
Murray, Albert. Stomping the Blues. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976.
Hinkson, Melinda. “The Circus comes to Yuendumu, Again,” reproduced from Arena Magazine no. 25, October-November, 1996, pps 36-39.