Showing posts with label patti smith. Show all posts
Showing posts with label patti smith. Show all posts

25 Apr 2024

Horses, Horses, Horses, Horses!

Horses, horses, horses, horses! [1]

I.
 
Yesterday morning, I was in a central London café sipping a mint tea when, suddenly, from the other end of the street, a commotion was generating ... 
 
I looked at my companion, who wanted to run. But we stayed sitting as a pair of terrified horses - including a white horse drenched in blood - galloped past, causing chaos as they collided with vehicles and shocked observers [2].
 
And not only did I hear Patti Smith singing from out of the remote past, but I remembered also something D. H. Lawrence once wrote: "While horses thrashed the streets of London, London lived." [3]
 
 
II.
 
Today, still upset at seeing such noble beasts in obvious distress, I ironically went with a friend to the Horse Hospital, to take another look at the artwork of Gee Vaucher, which, to be fair, is better than I first thought (even if the overtly political nature of the work does get a bit tiring).
  
However, the thing that really caught my attention was a nude female mannequin, posing provocatively, wearing a horse's head mask and standing before a large red plastic bin at the top of the ramp that leads to the first floor ... 
 
As my friend, a longtime member of the kink community who was distinctly unimpressed by Vaucher's work amusingly remarked: I may not know much about art, but I know what I like.
 
 

 
Notes
 
[1] Fig. 1: Patti Smith photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe on the cover of her album Horses (Arista Records, 1975): click here to listen to the three-part track 'Land' (part one: "Horses" / part two: "Land of a Thousand Dances" / part three: "La Mer(de)"). 
      Fig. 2: A mannequin with a horse's head was one I took at the Horse Hospital earlier today.
     Fig. 3: Quaker (the dark horse in the foreground) and Vida (the white horse bleeding profusely), taken in central London yesterday.  
 
[2] This sounds as if I'm recounting a nightmare, but it actually happened. Apparently, five military horses were spooked and bolted when building materials were dropped from height at a construction site in Belgravia, next to where they were on a training exercise. For a BBC news report, click here.
 
[3] D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 102. 
 
 

19 Mar 2016

Dancing Barefoot (with Reference to the Case of Alice Howells)



From Zarathustra to Patti Smith, there has long been a perverse fascination with the thought of young women dancing barefoot and defying the Spirit of Gravity. One evening, for example, when the former was walking through the forest with his disciples, he came upon a group of girls dancing together in a meadow. When, upon realising that they have been discovered, they cease their movements, Zarathustra approaches them in a friendly manner and implores them to continue:

'Please, I beg you, do not stop, you nimble creatures! I'm no killjoy who looks upon you with an evil eye; no enemy to divine dancing, or to girls' feet with fair ankles.'

I've no doubt, therefore, that had he lived and retained his sanity, Nietzsche would have enthusiastically supported the barefoot dance movement of the early twentieth century, which not only challenged received ideas of what constitutes classical dance, but also wider notions of social decorum. For bare feet had long been regarded as obscene within Western culture, no matter how passionately the advocates for such made reference to the ancient world or the enlightened practices of the Far East.

Indeed, for many Edwardians any form of public nakedness remained profoundly shocking and when Maud Allan performed her barefoot Dance of the Seven Veils in 1908, it scandalised London theatre goers. Critics regarded her as the embodiment of uninhibited sexuality and, as such, a threat to public decency. But it would take another dancer, Isadora Duncan, to really shake things up, however. Duncan, a feminist and self-declared communist, revolutionized dance and liberated the naked female foot; divorcing the latter from perceptions of obscenity and linking it instead to ideas of freedom, innocence, and natural harmony.

Finally, we come to the (fictional) case of Alice Howells, a young widow in D. H. Lawrence's short story, 'The Blue Moccasins' (1928), who seduces a married man, Percy Barlow, by dancing barefoot before him on stage in a play entitled The Shoes of Shagpat.

In the play, writes Lawrence:

"Alice was the wife of the grey-bearded old Caliph, but she captured the love of the young Ali, otherwise Percy, and the whole business was the attempt of these two to evade Caliph and negro-eunuchs and ancient crones, and get into each other's arms."

In her role as Leila, Alice wears white gauze Turkish trousers and a silver veil. She also wears a pair of blue moccasins that belong to Mrs Barlow (and which have been borrowed without permission): "The blue shoes were very important: for while the sweet Leila wore them, the gallant Ali was to know there was danger. But when she took them off, he might approach her."           

Seeing Mrs Barlow sitting in the front row, so calmly superior, suddenly let loose a devil in Alice Howells: "All her limbs went suave and molten, as her young sex, long pent up, flooded even to her finger-tips Her voice was strange, even to herself, with its long, plaintive notes. She felt all her movements soft and fluid, she felt herself like living liquid. And it was lovely."

Lawrence continues:

"Alice's business, as the lovely Leila , was to be seductive to the rather heavy Percy. And seductive she was. In two minutes, she had him spell-bound. He saw nothing of the audience. A faint, fascinated grin came on to his face, as he acted up to the young woman in the Turkish trousers. ... And when, at the end of Act I, the lovely Leila kicked off the blue moccasins, saying: 'Away, shoes of bondage, shoes of sorrow!' - and danced a little dance all alone, barefoot, in her Turkish trousers, in front of her fascinated hero, his smile was so spell-bound that everybody else was spell-bound too."

Apart from the outraged wife, obviously, whose indignation knew no bounds. Unfortunately, she has to sit throughout Act II, as the imaginary love scenes between Percy and Alice become ever more nakedly shameful. As the second Act comes to its climax, Leila again kicks off her shoes of bondage and flies barefoot into the arms of Ali: "And if ever a man was gone in sheer desire, it was Percy, as he pressed the woman's lithe form against his body ..."       

Not surprisingly, Mrs Barlow doesn't stay for the third Act. By then, however, it is too late: her husband's podophilia has got the better of him and he's crucially transferred his allegiance to Alice. Leaning down, backstage during the interval, "he drew off one of the grey shoes she had on, caressing her foot with the slip of his hand over its slim, bare shape".


Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Blue Moccasins', in The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories, ed. Michael Herbert, Bethan Jones and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 165-79. All lines quoted are from this edition. 

Nietzsche; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1969), see 'The Dance Song' in Part Two of this work. Note that the line spoken by Zarathustra as it appears here is a paraphrase rather than an accurate quotation.