[BRIEF NOTE] Linda Lamb and Hot Room

While sorting through my mp3s last month, I found an interesting song, mislabelled. When I used Windows Media to check its origins, I found that it was the song "Hot Room" by Linda Lamb, released off of the American Gigolo CD.

The "What is Electroclash?" page says that "[p]erhaps the most convincingly BIG-sounding singer is Linda Lamb of "Hot Room" fame, an Electroclash protégé remixed by Tiga for International Deejay Gigolo. Lamb's voice has a haggard and baleful grandeur that suggests some unholy hybrid of Marianne Faithfull, Nina Hagen, Kim Carnes, Nico, coke-ravaged Stevie Nicks, and Annie Lennox, while her lyrics [. . .] are wonderfully bombastic and mysterious." One Australasian style website describes the track as follows:

It’s 1982. A hot smoky black room in NYC, lit only by neon and cigarette smoke. Giorgio Moroder and Souxsie Sioux are sitting at the bar discussing the record they are about to collaborate to make. They speak so excitedly that Souxsie has to readjust her giant Egyptian neck brace and Giorgio has to slick back his hair again to regain composure. They meet in the studio and record but the result is never published, sitting in a vault for years… or perhaps it is 2002 in NYC and Linda Lamb channels Giorgio and Souxsie, finds a sympathetic ear in DJ Hell’s International DJ Gigolos label. Which ever the case Hot Room is essential retrograde futurism which must be bought with frenzied detachment.

It's right.

For my readership's pleasure, I sat down and transcribed the lyrics as best I could. (I couldn't find them anywhere on the Internet, save certain passages which--of course--were the only ones very audible, so I've made mistakes. Find the track yourself and correct me, if you'd like. I'd appreciate it.)

butterfly coming out of lagoon
white flies hanging in the fruit of the loom
my new disguise i hide away in this lagoon
butterfly coming out of the lagoon

a plate of meatballs caught on fire
my inspiration is getting higher
pay attention did I forget to mention
a plate of meatballs caught on fire

you see, freedom's an idea that cannot be
measured
am I getting through to what I thought was
treasure
freedom's an idea that cannot be
measured
am I getting through to what I thought was
treasure

back in Moscow it was still illegal
her eyes were closed so that made it better
her life was long underneath her
back in Moscow it was still illegal

you see, freedom's an idea that cannot be
measured
am I getting through to what I thought was
treasure
freedom's an idea that cannot be
measured
am I getting through to what I thought was
treasure

okay

Bombastic, yes. Mysterious, yes, but not quite the way the page's author intended. It's still a catchy song, though.

[NON BLOG] Another Daily Update

I had my Milton class again this afternoon, and followed it up with drinks with the fellow student I'll be presenting with this Thursday. The class is going well, I think, and I enjoyed the camaraderie at the Grad Club. It's funny that it's only now, in my final year of university, that I'm beginning to enjoy the university experience. But then, as Shakespear's Sister sang,

la la la life is a strange thing
just when you think you learned how to use it
it's gone

Then followed a yard sale--a student in the PhD program was selling off some of her stuff, household utensils, books, and the like. I bought some cutlery, some pots and pans, a set of camping dishes, a nice set of wooden salad dishes and scoops, a clock-radio, and a nice unvarnished wood IKEA bookshelf. (Now, if I can get a screwdriver. Or whatever I need to put it together.) Oh, I also bought books: James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, George Orwell's Coming Up for Air, Jeanette Winterson's GUT Symmetries, John Knowles' A Separate Peace, Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, Albert Camus' The Outsider, and Carolyne Larrington's translation of the Poetic Edda. Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin came as a final gift. That was fun.

I've found two things of note on the Internet, incidentally. First, via The Glory of Carniola is a link to The Years of Entanglement: Yugoslavia 1981-1990, a photo essay by Dushan Drakulich documenting the final decade of Yugoslavia's existence in images. It's a nice collection, if depressing. Second, alexpgp has an excellent account of the launch of a Soyuz rocket carrying an Intelsat satellite into Earth orbit from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakstan, with pictures. This posting is the culmination of a series of fascinating posts he's made regarding his participation in the Russian commercial space program. Go, read.

[BRIEF NOTE] A Rather Disturbing Film

Originally from Virginia Hefferman, in the New York Times:

"I strangled her," an ordinary-looking man says evenly, his eyes fixed on an interviewer to the left of the camera. The confession is not extracted but volunteered. The man, Saeed Hanaei, is a serial killer, and pleased. This is going to be bleak.

"And Along Came a Spider," a documentary that will be shown tomorrow night as part of Cinemax's "Reel Life" series, tells the disjointed story of an Iranian man who killed 16 "street women," 15 of whom had done time for prostitution, in the name of ridding his country of vice. As if the crime weren't grim enough, various people, including Hanaei's wife and son, hail the murderer as a hero. One man says, laughing happily: "He did the right thing. He should have continued."

( Read more... )

One of the most disturbing people in the film is Hanaei's mother. Smiling over her son's youthful mischief, she also reflects on how restricted she feels in Iran. Could this be a feminist statement? In fact it's brutal doublespeak:

"God knows when I see those girls using public phones--which are for people's convenience--and making dates with young men, I get so angry that if I weren't scared of this society, I'd grab those girls by their hair and cut them to pieces."

A society that denies a woman her desire to cut to pieces other women who use the public phone? That is scary, terrifying.

Another review, from The Guardian, is available here:

The case provoked a debate between reformers who condemned the authorities for failing to catch him earlier and some conservatives who shared the killer's disgust with a rise in prostitution.

"Who is to be judged?" wrote the conservative newspaper Jomhuri Islami. "Those who look to eradicate the sickness or those who stand at the root of the corruption?" [. . .]

Despite Hanaei's confession in prison that he had "improper relations" with his victims, some ideologues still sympathise with the spider killer. This month a hardline paramilitary group, Ansar-e Hizbollah, warned in its weekly publication that declining morality among women could lead to more such killings: "It is likely that what happened in Mashhad and Kerman could be repeated in Tehran."

There is something seriously, seriously wrong with the Islamic Republic of Iran.

[MEME] One last silly thing

Via Europundit:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

From "The Portuguese Community in 17th-Century Amsterdam and the Ashkenazi World" by Yosef Kaplan, in Dutch Jewish History 2 (Jerusalem: Institute for Research on Dutch Jewry 1989):

"In Amsterdam, they found a well-established Spanish and Portuguese community, which, at the end of the second decade of the century, was organized into three congregations."

To bed now.

[ACADEMIC] Tomorrow's Presentation: Milton, the Commonwealth, and the Jews

This presentation, to be delivered tomorrow at 9 o'clock for my Milton and empire class, will be my final presentation of my academic career. Thus, my desire to write everything down first.

* * *

Milton was both the product and the producer of the revolutionary Commonwealth of mid-17th century England, a period beginning in earnest with the execution of King Charles I in 1649 and continuing, past the 1658 date of Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell, to the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in the person of Charles II in 1660. The question of England's relationship to the Jews took on new importance during this period, both as a consequence of growing interest in Old Testament narratives and Hebrew culture as the keys to a non-Papist Christianity, and as a consequence of growing pressures to formally readmit the Jews to England after three and a half centuries of formal exclusion.

England's relationship to the Jews was shaped by its peculiar relationships to three cultures: the Spanish, producers of perhaps the first world empire; the Dutch, pioneers of the first mercantile Calvinistic republic; and the Jews, pioneers of monotheism and the Abrahamic tradition. All three cultures did receive a certain amount of respect in post-Reformation England, as pioneers of certain key concepts. However, particularly in the era of the Commonwealth, which was influenced by a combination of a strong English nationalism linked to millenarian sentiments which dentified England as the culmination of world history, these cultures came under particularly close and critical examination for the sin of having pioneered concepts key to the Commonwealth narrative of English national identity but not having taken them to their logical conclusions. The Spanish may have constituted a world empire, for instance, but in practice it utterly lacked any Commonwealth-era concepts of tolerationism, while the Dutch may have been both republican and Calvinistic but they were excessively mercantile and failed to see the logic in a merger with the Commonwealth. The Jews, of course, failed to recognize Christ as the logical culmination of their tradition. (Incidentally, the Jews encountered by the English--marranos and Sephardim based in Amsterdam, mostly tracing their origins to Spain or to Spanish-occupied Portugal--happened to combine traits from all three cultures: Hispanic language and culture; Dutch-based commercial and mercantile networks; and, a well-articulated definition of their ethnic and collective identity as Jews.) Competitive emulation of these cultures was a major trend.

Consequently, the Commonwealth-era English reaction towards Jews was complex, marked by a desire for a greater knowledge of Hebrew culture and its sequelae and only reluctant assent to the presence of open Jews. Milton's references to Jews, for instance, are marked by a combination of an admiration of Old Testament narrative and of Hebrew heroes and condemnation for their failure to recognize that narrative's fulfillment in Christ and the irrelevance of their laws. A comparison of the approaches of Menasseh ben Israel to Cromwell seeking the formal readmission of the Jews, and of Fell's addresses to the Hebrews welcoming the Jews on the condition that they accept conversion, reveals the ways in which Commonwealth England perceived the Jews (and was perceived as thinking about the Jews). Official England, in turn, largely perceived the possibility of a legalized Jewish presence inasmuch such a presence could increase England's competitiveness towards its three enemies (expanding the imperial and commercial energies of England, allowing for the fulfillment of England's Christian mission).

In the end, the decision to allow for the admission of the Jews by simply declaring that no law existed to bar their immigration--as opposed to the specific declaration which ben Israel had hoped for--represented England's fundamental ambiguity towards the Jews, the failure of Commonwealth England itself to live up to its theories.

* * *

Well, thoughts? I'll post a draft of my speech later tonight, but above is basically the gist of it.