I have wondered for a long time what your take is on the artistry and persona of Kate Bush, the singer/songwriter/visual artist from England, if you've had an opportunity to hear or see her work.
Bruce V. Bracken
I have enormous admiration for Kate Bush as a true artist who has done work of the highest quality in a dazzling variety of media. In the 1980s and '90s, I was irritated by the adulation given Laurie Anderson, with her cutesy postmodernist game playing, and I often protested that, as a performance artist, Kate Bush had infinitely more depth and vision. However, except for a few music videos, Bush was simply not as visible a presence in the U.S. as she was and is in the U.K. It has certainly been our loss. Ambitious young performers need to be exposed to her work.
Here from trusty YouTube is Kate Bush's brilliant, haunting song "Running up That Hill," with its skittering vocal echoes and ominous military tattoo. Bush puts on a boffo exhibition of her mastery of modern dance, and the whole thing ends in a surreal procession of Jungian masks multiplied in starkly high-tech corridors. Bush is a sorceress with a poet's instinct for the archaic and universal.
There is a documentary on YouTube (in 12 parts) that I think you would very much enjoy -- a 2002 BBC production on Luchino Visconti. It's wonderful!
Damion Matthews
San Francisco
This documentary, directed by Adam Low and narrated by James Fox, is absolutely superb! I loved every minute of it and am so grateful to you for forwarding the link for interested Salon readers. The Mahler Adagietto movement suffusing the program (from his Fifth Symphony) is heavenly -- though not all viewers of Visconti's "Death in Venice" were as enamored of it in that film as I was.
There is a glut of visual riches: the chilling, baby-devouring serpent in the ancient Visconti heraldic crest, based on a Saracen shield captured in the Crusades; the drop-dead gorgeous family palazzos in northern Italy; Visconti's stunning beauty as a young man; his unsettling 1925 self-portrait with his mother's face inside of his; his handsome long-term lovers, director Franco Zeffirelli and actor Helmut Berger; the ultra-sophisticated Claudia Cardinale and Charlotte Rampling aging fabulously; and best of all, a clip from Björn Andrésen's screen test for "Death in Venice. " (Visconti auditioned 1,500 boys for the role of Thomas Mann's androgynously charismatic Tadzio. Quel task, as Holly Golightly would say!)
Here are the YouTube chapters of the Visconti documentary: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12.
For anyone wishing to hear the whole of Mahler's decadently evocative Adagietto, here is Zubin Mehta conducting the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. And here are two different fan tributes to Björn Andrésen, whose Nordic angel-with-rock-star-hair Tadzio evidently had a huge impact on East Asian popular culture, including Japanese anime.
Recent work in human cognition has strongly suggested that people get imprinted or fixated on certain kinds of music in their teenage years, a pattern that shapes their musical taste for life. Guilty as charged. For me, it started with Beethoven's symphonies. Whenever I hear them, and let myself enter the moment, I can be age 14 all over again. Other composers on this short list: Handel, Mozart, Bach and Monteverdi. I bought a fantastic recording of Monteverdi's "Orfeo" around age 19, probably just under the age-appropriate limit for this kind of imprinting.
For me, "Orfeo" is one of the most nostalgic pieces we know of, and it's an emotional thing to come across a fine excerpt on YouTube, like this one.
The creators of these first operas, surrounded by ancient ruins, picking up the pieces of classicism, thought they were reviving ancient art, after a hiatus of many centuries. They were wrong about that, but it doesn't matter if the artist is wrong, provided he's convincing. "Orfeo" gives us total conviction. Bravo, Monteverdi.
For a native speaker of English, this YouTube clip also offers a glimpse of the marriage between the Italian language and song. Consonant follows vowel in a steady stream we can only dream about for English or German. Italian is musical before the notes are even added.
What rhetorical power! This effect is not reproducible in English, certainly not the trilled R's, which have a long pedigree, from before Cicero down to Castro and beyond in the present day. An analogous effect is to be found in all the Almodóvar films, where many of the characters, especially the women, spit out their dialogue in the same impressive way. This too has a long history, since Cicero on several occasions refers to the brilliant manner of speaking (and writing) of the aristocratic matrons in Roman high society.
Eric Fern
Sublime! I am thrilled to share your marvelous discovery with Salon readers. With the aid of my esteemed emeritus colleague Kent Christensen, an opera expert nonpareil, I learned that this video is from a 2002 performance in the Gran Teatre in Barcelona, Spain. Jordi Savall is conducting, and the Italian baritone Furio Zanasi is singing the part of the legendary Greek poet Orpheus. I love the in-profile ring dancing, which looks like an Isadora Duncan re-creation of Greek ritual. And kudos to the costumer who designed those supple, bouncy dancers' tunics -- exhilarating!
Professor Christensen found another clip from the same performance -- Savall's wife, soprano Montserrat Figueras, exquisitely singing the part of La Musica (personified music) with beautiful formal hand gestures. Savall himself, looking like a medieval alchemist, is seen entering the theater to Monteverdi's rousing, brassy prelude. "Orfeo" was first performed in 1607. What music, art or literature being produced today will still be as fresh as this 400 years from now?
Brava, Camille!
Thank you for saying what I've been thinking for the past few years about the Oscars. That so many of the women have made themselves un-feminine, completely un-original and without personality, thanks in part to all that over-exercise that seems to be required by today's female stars.
Years ago, I wanted to write an article about my mother's diamond earrings. My father, the late producer Tony Owen, had given my mother, the late actress Donna Reed, a stunning pair of Ruser diamond earrings to celebrate the success and the fifth anniversary of "The Donna Reed Show" (which was the result of their collaboration). When Mom passed away in 1986, she left the earrings to us kids. They sit in a bank box. And when I think about selling them and look at most of the women in Hollywood today -- I can't imagine.
I really enjoyed your tirade and your invocation of the great foreign actresses, many of whom I too love -- Julie Christie being one of my all-time favorites.
Mary Owen
New York
How delightful to receive your support! My baby-boom generation thought of Donna Reed as the serene, perfectly coifed, 1950s über-mom, so her long and distinguished career was a fascinating discovery for many of us. She had already made 40 films before "The Donna Reed Show," and she had won an Oscar for best supporting actress for playing a prostitute in "From Here to Eternity" (1953). Her TV image, however, was deservedly iconic, limiting as it may have seemed to her in her later career. How emotionally centered and authentically womanly Donna Reed's persona was -- compared to that ditzy passel of screeching jaybirds tatted up in designer rags at our increasingly mundane awards shows.
Let's forget about politics for a minute. What did you think of Madonna's new face at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductions?
Stephen Smith
Sigh. You do put a gal on the spot. Madonna fans of the world (among whom I number myself, despite my sniping) should view her as a very grand architectural monument in slow stages of repair and restoration. As with the bitterly controversial cleaning of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, we will all have our opinions about whether the conservators have gone too far or not far enough. But Madonna's still out there kicking, so she needs as much lamination as she can get. We don't want her retiring like a creaky recluse to her flat, as her role model Marlene Dietrich had to do at the end in Paris. So go for it, Madge, but we won't be surprised if one of these days you smash into a thousand tinkling shards right onstage.
Speaking of Madonna, Woody Hochswender (author of "The Buddha in Your Rearview Mirror") wrote in to confirm that yes, Norman Mailer was indeed hired at mind-boggling expense by Esquire magazine to interview Madonna after she refused to be interviewed by me way back in 1994. The result was a cover story of astonishing emptiness and mediocrity. Hochswender says: "Editorial lapses of this sort are what have led to the downward spiral of men's magazines, once influential voices in our intellectual life."
Many thanks to the Salon readers who wrote in with candidates for the mysterious Greenwich Village pizza parlor that I asked about. Unfortunately, there is no consensus. John's and Frank's have been nominated, but so has La Marionetta -- whose name might suggest the Commedia dell'arte wallpaper that I remember so vividly from early childhood. If anyone else has ideas, please advise!
The Guardian's long-running Q-and-A was with me last weekend. When asked which living person I most admire, I replied, Germaine Greer. The living person I most despise: Dick Cheney.
On Thursday, April 10, I will be giving the keynote address for a conference, the Legacy and Future of Feminism, at Harvard University. My lecture, "Feminism Past and Present: Ideology, Action and Reform," starts at 8:15 p.m. in the Science Center. All conference events are free and open to the public.
Camille Paglia's column appears on the second Wednesday of each month. Every third column is devoted to reader letters. Please send questions for her next letters column to this mailbox. Your name and town will be published unless you request anonymity.
About the writer
Camille Paglia is the University Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Her most recent book is "Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World's Best Poems."
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