Category Archives: love

free screening tonight: the ballad of genesis and lady jaye

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Screening today at 20h00 at Bolo’bolo, the new anarchist infoshop and vegan café at 76 Lower Main Road, Observatory, Cape Town.

An intimate, affecting portrait of the life and work of ground-breaking performance artist and music pioneer Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV) and his other half and collaborator, Lady Jaye, centred around the daring sexual transformations the pair underwent for their “Pandrogyne” project. Watch the trailer HERE.

 

ballad of genesis

Here’s a full synopsis:

Genesis P-Orridge has been one of the most innovative and influential figures in music and fine art for the last 30 years. A link between the pre- and post-punk eras, he is the founder of the legendary groups COUM Transmissions (1969-1976), Throbbing Gristle (1975-1981), and Psychic TV (1981 to present), all of which merged performance art with rock music. Celebrated by critics and art historians as a progenitor of “industrial music”, his innovations have transformed the character of rock and electronic music while his prodigious efforts to expand the boundaries of live performance have radically altered the way people experience sound in a concert setting.

But that’s just the preamble to the story. Defying artistic boundaries, Genesis has re-defined his art as a challenge to the limits of biology. In 2000, Genesis began a series of surgeries in order to more closely resemble his love, Lady Jaye (née Jacqueline Breyer), who remained his other half and artistic partner for nearly 15 years. It was the ultimate act of devotion, and Genesis’s most risky, ambitious, and subversive performance to date: he became a she in a triumphant act of artistic self-expression. Genesis called this project “Creating the Pandrogyne”. Influenced, like so much of Genesis  work, by Brion Gysin and William Burroughs  Cut Ups , it was an attempt to deconstruct two individual identities through the creation of an indivisible third.

This is a love story, and a portrait of two lives that illustrate the transformative powers of both love and art. Marie Losier brings to us the most intimate details of Genesis’s extraordinary, uncanny world. In warm and intimate images captured handheld, Losier crafts a labyrinthine mise-en-scene of interviews, home movies, and performance footage. The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye documents a truly new brand of Romantic consciousness, one in defiance of the daily dehumanization of the body by the pervasive presence of advertising and pornography, conveying beauty, dignity and devotion from a perspective never before seen on film.

barthes on the other-ache

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Painting by Francine van Hove

Painting by Francine van Hove

compassion/compassion

The subject experiences a sentiment of violent compassion with regard to the loved object each time he sees, feels, or knows the loved object is unhappy or in danger, for whatever reason external to the amorous relations itself.

1. “Supposing that we experienced the other as he experiences himself — which Schopenhauer calls compassion and which might more accurately be called a union within suffering, a unity of suffering — we should hate the other when he himself, like Pascal, finds himself hateful.” If the other suffers from hallucinations, if he fears going mad, I should myself hallucinate, myself go mad. Now, whatever the power of love, this does not occur: I am moved, anguished, for it is horrible to see those one loves suffering, but at the same time I remain dry, watertight. My identification is imperfect: I am a Mother (the other causes me concern), but an insufficient Mother; I bestir myself too much, in proportion to the profound reserve in which, actually, I remain. For at the same time that I “sincerely” identify myself with the other’s misery, what I read in this misery is that it occurs without me, and that by being miserable by himself, the other abandons me: if he suffers without me being the cause of his suffering, it is because I don’t count for him: his suffering annuls me insofar as it constitutes him outside of myself.

2. Whereupon, a reversal: since the other suffers without me, why suffer in his place? His misery bears him far away from me, I can only exhaust myself running after him, without ever hoping to be able to catch up, to coincide with him. So let us become a little detached, let us undertake the apprenticeship of a certain distance. Let the repressed word appear which rises to the lips of every subject, once he survives another death: Let us live!

3. So I shall suffer with the other, but without pressure, without losing myself. Such behaviour, at once very affective and very controlled, very amorous and very civilised, can be given a name: delicacy; in a sense it is the “healthy” (artistic) form of compassion. (Ate is the goddess of madness, but Plato speaks of Ate’s delicacy: her foot is winged, it touches lightly.)

~ Roland Barthes, from A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments pp. 57-58

alka yagnik and ila arun – choli ke peeche kya hai (english subtitles)

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“This is a city of heartless beings; what can I do?”

This provocative song featured in the 1993 film, Khalnayak (Hindi = “Villain”), starring an incandescent Madhuri Dixit and Sanjay Dutt. It was a huge yet controversial hit, largely due to the erotic lyrics.

erica jong – becoming a nun

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La Sucette - Cherry Bomb - 2007

“La Sucette” – Cherry Bomb, 2007
Digital photograph manipulated with Microsoft Photo Editor

On cold days
it is easy to be reasonable,
to button the mouth against kisses,
dust the breasts
with talcum powder
& forget
the red pulp meat
of the heart.

On those days
it beats
like a digital clock–
not a beat at all
but a steady whirring
chilly as green neon,
luminous as numerals in the dark,
cool as electricity.

& I think:
I can live without it all–
love with its blood pump,
sex with its messy hungers,
men with their peacock strutting,
their silly sexual baggage,
their wet tongues in my ear
& their words like little sugar suckers
with sour centers.

On such days
I am zipped in my body suit,
I am wearing seven league red suede boots,
I am marching over the cobblestones
as if they were the heads of men,

& I am happy
as a seven-year-old virgin
holding Daddy’s hand.

Don’t touch.
Don’t try to tempt me with your ripe persimmons.
Don’t threaten me with your volcano.
The sky is clearer when I’m not in heat,
& the poems
are colder.

Poem © Erica Mann Jong

“La Sucette” by Rosemary Lombard is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

marina abramović and ulay – moma 2010

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Marina Abramovic and Ulay shared an intense love in the 1970s, performing art out of the van they lived in. When they felt the relationship had run its course (after almost 12 years), they decided to walk the Great Wall of China, each from one end, meeting for one last big hug in the middle and never seeing each other again.

ulay

At her 2010 MoMa retrospective, Marina performed ‘The Artist Is Present’ as part of the show, where she shared a minute of silence with each stranger who sat in front of her. Ulay arrived without her knowing and this is what happened:

(Background information from HERE.)

missing, forever

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missing cat head

I made this poster in reference to this one, but the events it describes are entirely true. My cat’s head was never found. That night, I think I lost a part of me too, though I didn’t realise it at the time: the part that trusted and expected people who said they loved me not to hurt me intentionally.

What made me realise how this all fitted together was a chain status update game that went around on Facebook a few weeks ago. My answers to the questions went like this:

Age I was given: 17 (I balked because it was a very heavy year for me, but here goes…)
Where I lived: Waterfall, a village in KZN a little north of the Comrades Marathon route, through the sugarcane fields (which are now Tuscan townships).
What I did: Wrote matric with the help of regular immunoglobulin injections and reflexology to stave off the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/M.E.that I’d been severely ill with since 14 when I’d contracted Glandular Fever. Spent a lot of my study time taping songs off the radio. Went to Turkey on short term Rotary Exchange after finishing school.
Who had my heart: My cat, Jorgy, who had been my constant companion throughout my illness. He was killed while I was in Turkey. I’d broken up with my first boyfriend during matric trials – I couldn’t handle his obsessive, controlling demands for attention. He turned stalker on me, hanging around outside my house, phoning all the time, sending letters threatening suicide, warning me that I would be sorry if “I left him” and went to Turkey. A day or two before I got back, my family found the headless body of our beloved Jorgensen Fassbinder Kittyman Von Streichen Hashimoto Lighoré at the bottom of the garden, tossed over the fence. I wish I was making this up.

Age I am now: 34
Where I live: Oranjezicht, Cape Town
What I do: I excel at giving too much of a shit.
Who has my heart: My heart is a hot potato.
__
The shadow of this manifested down the years in relationships with a string of men who were deliberately unkind and dismissive to me too often; with me always holding on too long because I mistakenly identified their cruelty or disloyalty as evidence of their love for me in spite of what they judged to be my shortcomings. At the darkest junctures over those years, I actually believed that I might deserve the humiliation, the punishment; that I should be grateful anyone humoured me. If they weren’t critical or manipulative enough, if I didn’t have cause to be outraged by their mistreatment, to defend myself against their accusations, to demand consideration, recognition… then it didn’t feel like they could really care (how twisted is that?).

The men I fell most deeply for were never truly available or fully present, would leave me because they cared more about someone else, or were running for their own damaged reasons. I guess I only felt safe from being smothered when they had one foot outside the door, though I yearned with all my heart to be held unconditionally, the way I held them.

This delusion is broken and I am free of its bonds.

jim morrison on painful feelings

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People are afraid of themselves, of their own reality; their feelings most of all. People talk about how great love is, but that’s bullshit. Love hurts. Feelings are disturbing. People are taught that pain is evil and dangerous. How can they deal with love if they’re afraid to feel? Pain is meant to wake us up. People try to hide their pain. But they’re wrong. Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain. It’s all in how you carry it. That’s what matters. Pain is a feeling. Your feelings are a part of you. Your own reality. If you feel ashamed of them, and hide them, you’re letting society destroy your reality. You should stand up for your right to feel your pain.

~ Jim Morrison

nick cave on love songs

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Though the love song comes in many guises – songs of exultation and praise, songs of rage and of despair, erotic songs, songs of abandonment and loss – they all address God, for it is the haunted premises of longing that the true love song inhabits. It is a howl in the void, for Love and for comfort and it lives on the lips of the child crying for his mother. It is the song of the lover in need of her loved one, the raving of the lunatic supplicant petitioning his God. It is the cry of one chained to the earth, to the ordinary and to the mundane, craving flight; a flight into inspiration and imagination and divinity. The love song is the sound of our endeavours to become God-like, to rise up and above the earthbound and the mediocre.

~ Nick Cave

it’s only a paper moon

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Here are three very different versions out of the countless recordings of this whimsical old standard written by Harold Arlen, with lyrics by E. Y. Harburg and Billy Rose.

The same year it was published (1933), Cliff Edwards, also known as “Ukulele Ike” (and later the voice of Disney’s Jiminy Cricket!), recorded this rendition, with his charming tenor and the sweetest little mouth trumpet solo:

Killer a cappella harmonies from Fiona Apple and Maude Maggart (the pseudonym of Fiona’s elder sister, Amber, a cabaret singer)… Fiona can draw melancholia out of any pretty ditty without being mawkish – I love this about her: 

The Miles Davis Sextet, recorded at Apex Studios, New York City, on October 5, 1951.
Personnel:
Miles Davis – Trumpet
Jackie McLean – Alto Sax (sits out)
Sonny Rollins – Tenor Sax
Walter Bishop Jr. – Piano
Tommy Potter – Bass
Art Blakey – Drums

jaime sabines – the lovers

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The lovers say nothing.
Love is the finest of the silences,
the one that trembles most and is hardest to bear.
The lovers are looking for something.
The lovers are the ones who abandon,
the ones who change, who forget.
Their hearts tell them that they will never find.
They don’t find, they’re looking.

The lovers wander around like crazy people
because they’re alone, alone,
surrendering, giving themselves to each moment,
crying because they don’t save love.
They worry about love. The lovers
live for the day, it’s the best they can do, it’s all they know.
They’re going away all the time,
all the time, going somewhere else.
They hope,
not for anything in particular, they just hope.
They know that whatever it is they will not find it.
Love is the perpetual deferment,
always the next step, the other, the other.
The lovers are the insatiable ones,
the ones who must always, fortunately, be alone.

The lovers are the serpent in the story.
They have snakes instead of arms.
The veins in their necks swell
like snakes too, suffocating them.
The lovers can’t sleep
because if they do the worms eat them.

They open their eyes in the dark
and terror falls into them.

They find scorpions under the sheet
and their bed floats as though on a lake.

The lovers are crazy, only crazy
with no God and no devil.

The lovers come out of their caves
trembling, starving,
chasing phantoms.
They laugh at those who know all about it,
who love forever, truly,
at those who believe in love as an inexhaustible lamp.

The lovers play at picking up water,
tattooing smoke, at staying where they are.
They play the long sad game of love.
None of them will give up.
The lovers are ashamed to reach any agreement.

Empty, but empty from one rib to another,
death ferments them behind the eyes,
and on they go, they weep toward morning
in the trains, and the roosters wake into sorrow.

Sometimes a scent of newborn earth reaches them,
of women sleeping with a hand on their sex, contented,
of gentle streams, and kitchens.

The lovers start singing between their lips
a song that is not learned.
And they go on crying, crying
for beautiful life.

Translated by W.S. Merwin

a special message from jimmy rage

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jimmy rage01each and every one one of us has a book of narratives, that we read write and become part of. each chapter verse and paragraph tells our stories and as time passes, we become familiar with our own characters and our own cast of characters become familiar with us.

there is the longing, the dreaming, the ambition, the beauty and the ugliness and above all, there is the love.. the love of others, the love of others like self and the love of self..

the hardest part though, is to be and become part of the narrative..beauty.. to not negate from its positivity its validity as a document to the light rays streaming through our windows of hope and courage to go forward.
the sun rises and sets in a distant sky, as trees bend, bow, blow leaves, jingling. we are hushed into our own simplicities, the grace of intelligence..

man woman or child is the subtotal of a life lived and hoped for.. the narrative of distant and close dreams are but moments, in our own being, where we are awake and know and overstand that it is in the power of our being that we learn that our own empowerment is the storehouse.. that we are capable of more than the small parts that make up the whole.

love, romance, career, children are all part of the course of our own destined future, but the inner self, the inner voice is the calling to follow your own path, all love, and in doing so .. this becomes a mantra, a calling even..

jimmy rage02

la double vie de veronique

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The marionette scene from Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Double Life of Veronique (1991). Watch the full film HERE.

“The director’s international breakthrough remains one of his most beloved films, a ravishing, mysterious rumination on identity, love, and human intuition. Irène Jacob is incandescent as both Weronika, a Polish choir soprano, and her double, Véronique, a French music teacher. Though unknown to each other, the two women share a mysterious and emotional bond that transcends language and geography, which Kieslowski details in gorgeous reflections, colours, and movements. Aided by Slawomir Idziak’s shimmering cinematography and Zbigniew Preisner’s haunting, operatic score, Kieslowski creates one of cinema’s most purely metaphysical works. The Double Life of Veronique is an unforgettable symphony of feeling.

veronique butterfly

“Krzysztof Kieslowski focuses on identity using actress Irene Jacobs in the dual role of French music teacher Veronique and Polish soprano Weronika – both born on the same day. Metaphysically they are aware of each other’s counterpart – this harkens back to the director’s penchant for fate, chance and circumstance,and we envision a possible meeting of the intertwined souls… Our unspoken desire for a mirrored being – who can non-verbally share our most intimate loves and joys – is the ultimate expression of personal support… Overall, an ambiguous and enigmatic offering, this is a film that clings to you for years after viewing. A true masterpiece of cinema.”
~ Gary W. Tooze