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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
My latest salvo, which opens with Hillary, will be published in two weeks by Arion: "Feminism Past and Present: Ideology, Action, and Reform," which was the keynote address of a conference called "The Legacy and Future of Feminism," held at Harvard University in April. The article may be available on Arion's Web site by late next week.
On the culture front, I was in Brazil two weeks ago for my first visit to the gorgeous and historic capital city of Salvador in Bahia, which I adored. (Don't get me started on the fabulous food, with its African and Amerindian roots.) I gave a public lecture at the Teatro Castro Alves in the Frontiers of Thought series, sponsored by Copesul Braskem: "Varieties of the Erotic in 20th Century Art."
In the green room afterward, as my mind was still lit up with the 61 images I had shown (from Gustav Klimt and Pablo Picasso through Cindy Sherman and Robert Mapplethorpe), a press agent arrived with a gift from one of Salvador's most famous residents, the Brazilian superstar Daniela Mercury -- five of her DVDs tied up with a red ribbon. Sensory overload! With the precious DVDs cradled in my carry-on, I flew back to the U.S. on a magic carpet of Mercury reverie. I'm not kidding: Here's the magnetically molten cover photo from "Classica."
Since my return, I have plumbed the riches of the Web to research the Mercury phenomenon (her real name: Her mother's maiden name was Mercuri). I've had a ball on YouTube, which is lavishly stocked with her videos, TV interviews and candid fan encounters. Daniela, now 42, has been called Brazil's Madonna, but her work as a singer and dancer is far broader and more eclectic than Madonna's. Her folkloric aesthetic was shaped by Salvador's colossal Carnival celebration, where the entire city turns out to sing and dance around huge amplified trucks (trio élétricos). A typical performance on the elevated platforms can last seven hours straight. (Here's Daniela in full carnival drag getting charmingly teary on the catwalk before singing "Swing Da Cor" to the vast crowd below.)
Though her professional career began in nightclubs, Daniela achieved stardom in the 1990s as "Queen of Axé," a Salvador-based Afro-Brazilian fusion pop sometimes called samba-reggae. Her extensive repertoire ranges from torch songs to Portuguese rap. Through it all runs her attunement to deep emotion as well as her fascination with the infinitely complex rhythms of Africanized Bahia. Her stated master principle is "alegria" (joy), which she calls the essence of life and which she visibly transmits to her surging sea of fans.
Watching Daniela Mercury in action, I realized just how bored and disillusioned I have become by American popular entertainment over the past 15 years, when Madonna went corporate and lost her grip on the zeitgeist. All that passionate, improvisational, open-air vitality has been going on in Brazil while American music fans have been trapped like doped steers in the commercial stockyard of overpriced, overpackaged arena concerts, where performers trot out canned patter in between the computerized special-effects lighting. Low-budget "alternative" musicians are just as programmatic, with their rote political bromides or their dated affectations of urban irony.
I heartily recommend Daniela Mercury's DVD, "Eletrodoméstico,
Similarly, one can't imagine Daniela, with her relaxed, fluid body language and sleek, golden silhouette, cultivating the grotesquely sinewy arms and sallow, claw-like hands that have to be minutely erased from workaholic Madonna's magazine photos. Stressed-out, wired, over-conceptualized Anglo-American womanhood, currently on display in the hit film of "Sex and the City," is causing cultural dyspepsia. Is it any wonder that so many interesting, talented young men are reluctant to marry or have turned gay in droves? Exactly what do young professional women have to offer these days, aside from hyper office talk over a business lunch?
Reconnection to nature would obviously be easier in lushly tropical Bahia than in the stony grid of Manhattan. But this is where art comes in -- the medium of expanded imagination, which dissolves time and space. Full circle to feminism: Sexism, where it exists, is a political barrier that must be removed. But life is an organic principle and a cosmic skyscape, far vaster and more eternal than politics.
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. 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."
