My Three Favourite Witches 1: Jennifer (Veronica Lake)

Wallpaper by VampireMage

My three favourite witches are not the Wayward Sisters found in Shakespeare's Macbeth, dressed in filthy robes, performing weird rituals in the fog, prophesying doom, etc. Nor are they the cock-starved, devil-invoking trio of Alex, Jane and Sukie given us by John Updike in his 1984 novel, The Witches of Eastwick.

Rather, the three broomstick-riding women I find most spellbinding are Jennifer, Gillian and Samantha ...

The first of these, Jennifer, was played by Veronica Lake in the 1942 romantic comedy I Married a Witch (dir. René Clair). The tagline for the theatrical poster declares: NO MAN CAN RESIST HER! and I suspect that's true, both of the character and the actress playing her; the much-loved peek-a-boo girl whose hairstyle was much copied by young women in the early 1940s.

Lake is often best remembered for her performances alongside Alan Ladd in movies such as The Blue Dahlia (1946), a classic example of what came to be known critically as film noir. But Lake was never comfortable being cast as a femme fatale and was a very reluctant sex symbol. Indeed, she became so disillusioned with the movie business and the way it turned people into what she termed zombies, that she quit Hollywood in 1951.

So, partly as a mark of respect to this intelligent and talented woman, I prefer to recall her playfully camping it up as mistress Jennifer and teasing the hapless Wooley, played by the much older, distinguished star of stage and screen, Fredric March (whom Lake described as a pompous poseur after he dismissed her as a bimbo void of any acting ability in remarks prior to production).

I Married a Witch is such a joyful, fun film; one that always makes wiccaphiles happy. And it comes with a moral lesson that even D. H. Lawrence - who hated witches - might endorse: Love is stronger than witchcraft.    


To read part 2 of this post on Gillian (Kim Novak), click here.
To read part 3 of this post on Samantha (Elizabeth Montogomery), click here.

               

Caitlin Doughty: Death Becomes Her

Caitlin Doughty 

Photo by Juliette Bates

LA-based queen of the alternative funeral scene and founder of The Order of the Good Death, Caitlin Doughty, is a much admired, much respected, and much loved figure in thanatological circles. Her sometimes amusing, often shocking lessons from the crematorium - published as Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - may not carry the philosophical weight of Heidegger's reflections on Dasein's angst-ridden confrontation with the void of non-being, but they are, in a way, just as crucial.

For they ultimately form part of the same wider project: A radical rethinking of our mortality and the practices surrounding our deaths; reclaiming the latter from those who would deny us access to the truth of being and the opportunity to ontologically grasp our own finitude by making death into something stereotyped and sentimental, rather than a thing of authentic joy and fundamental source of freedom (a liberating line of flight and inhuman becoming, rather than a judgement which condemns). 

Death is not the opposite or the end of life, so much as a violent reconciliation with the material world; a return to the actual as Nietzsche writes. And Doughty, to her great credit, is insistent that we face up to this fact and admit that, sooner or later, we are all going to die and the atoms that compose us chaotically disperse back into the universe. More than this, she encourages us to refamiliarise ourselves directly with the corpse. Perhaps not with the same degree of intimacy as she has experienced, but certainly to be on far better terms than we are presently in a world in which dead bodies are kept on ice behind stainless-steel doors and chemically embalmed so as to be made at least semi-presentable and semi-acceptable (not too gross looking, not too foul-smelling).

There's certainly nothing glamourous about corpses. Despite what certain poets and necrophiles might think, dead people "look very, very dead" [115] - i.e., horrific. But surely we needn't stigmatize them, or turn them into the stuff of nightmares and subject to taboo. When we become mad with fear and allow our revulsion to become irrational terror (zombie hysteria), then it's always a waste of sane human consciousness, as D. H. Lawrence says.

Thanks, however, to the medicalization and Disneyfication of death this is precisely what has happened. If, in the past, when death was a common daily occurrence and corpses were regularly viewed in public spaces, people became somewhat desensitized to suffering and bad odours, today we are overly-squeamish and can no longer tolerate the nauseating spectacle of mortality; the screams, the smells, the soiled sheets, etc. We want what Doughty terms direct disposal in which everything is taken care of online, with no fuss. Doughty challenges this - and I respect her for it. And I second her call for an active "interaction with death" [114] in the belief that corpses "keep the living tethered to reality" [168].

Now, let's be clear: I'm not advocating the re-opening of the city morgues and the re-staging of death-as-spectacle which, as Doughty reminds us, was immensely popular in Paris in the late 19th century. Nor do I think we should cook and eat our dead relatives, like members of the Wari' people. Neither morbid voyeurism nor mortuary cannibalism are the answer. But, somehow, we need to get back in touch with one another and with our dead. As a culture, we need to embrace death and be proud (rather than slightly sad, slightly bored, slightly embarrassed) witnesses of that moment when our loved ones take their leave and miraculously burst like Bernard Shaw's mother, "'into streaming ribbons of garnet coloured lovely flame'" [64].

An atheist at heart, Doughty nevertheless realises the importance of ceremony and ritual even within a secular culture. If the old ways, historically tied to religious beliefs, have become untenable, she's all for creating new methods of body disposal that are relevant to the way we live (and die) today and "inspiring people to engage with the reality of their inevitable decomposition" [216] via the composition of their very own Ars Moriendi, written with "bold, fearless strokes" [234].

All of this is excellent, I think, and I fully support Doughty in her efforts. Indeed, my only criticism of Doughty's book is similar to my criticism of Mary Roach's Stiff (2003); the writing style is just a little too folksy and upbeat for my tastes. I appreciate she's American and therefore culturally predisposed to this kind of thing, but to see the great European thinker and essayist Emil Cioran flippantly dismissed as a Negative Nancy is more than a little irritating. In wanting to revalue our thinking on death, Doughty seems willing at times to strip it of all darkness and negativity (of its tragic pessimism, of its obscenity, of its monstrous character). The book could do with just a little more nihilism and a little less homespun sappiness.

Having said that, it's encouraging that she openly regrets her youthful ambition of putting the fun back into funerals and recognises that holding celebration of life ceremonies sans corpse or any act of mourning - just the deceased's favourite records playing while everyone sips fruit punch - seems akin to "putting not just any Band-Aid over a gunshot wound, but a Hello Kitty one" [64].                  
    
Doughty, we can conclude, is both a smart cookie and a good egg. And she's doing sterling work; torpedoing the ark of the corporate funeral industry and teaching people that death becomes us all if we learn to affirm it. May she live a good and happy life and succeed in all her undertakings. And then may the animals of the forest devour her body with relish ...   
         

See: Caitlin Doughty, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, (Canongate Books, 2016). All page numbers in the above text refer to this paperback edition. 

Visit: The Order of the Good Death web page: click here.

Anatomy Presupposes a Waxwork Venus

Clemente Susini: Venerina (1782)

Bella Italia! Terra d'amore! And home also to some of the most exquisite art works depicting the goddess of love, including, famously, Botticelli's The Birth of Venus (c.1486) and Titian's rather more risqué Venus of Urbino (1538). Less well known - although just as exquisite in its own macabre manner - is the life-sized wax sculpture made by Clemente Susini known as the Little Venus (1782).

Anatomically accurate in every detail and vividly displaying the internal organs, this and other disemboweled beauties were primarily used for teaching purposes at a special workshop within the Natural History Museum, Florence (La Specola). But they were also put on public display for those whose intellectual curiosity terminated in thanatological voyeurism.

Feminist commentators, keen to read these figures in terms of sexual objectification and what we might term necropygmalionism, find something profoundly unsettling about them. Indeed, for Zoe Williams:

"There seems to be something blasphemous, inhumane, in creating a corpse and trying to beautify it - or rather, in considering beauty to be a necessary trait in an anatomically accurate dead body. In taking beauty to be such a critical component of womanhood, it misses, and seals in wax its own misapprehension of, what beauty is."

But one might suggest that it's Ms Williams who, in this case, misunderstands; not what beauty is, but what its function is and why we need to lend to even the most revolting of all things - death, not womanhood - an element of aesthetic delight.

The unfortunate fact is, corpses don't look great: "Their droopy, open eyes cloud over in a vacant stare. Their mouths stretch wide like Edvard Munch's The Scream. The colour drains from their faces" - and no one wants to see that; not even in wax replica. 

As Nietzsche wrote: We need art so that we don't perish from the truth ...


See: Zoe Williams, 'Cadavers in pearls: meet the Anatomical Venus', The Guardian, 17 May, 2016 - click here. 

Note: the description of the corpse and its horrific nature is by Caitlin Doughty; Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, (Canongate Books, 2016), p. 116. 

Those interested in knowing more about this topic might care to read Joanna Ebenstein's beautifully illustrated book, The Anatomical Venus, (Thames and Hudson Ltd., 2016).

On the Art of the Persimmon

Stephen Alexander: Lip Service (2017)

The relationship between fruit and art is long and intimate; in paint and poetry - still life and free verse - mankind has attempted to capture the fleshy beauty and essential thingness of these delicious, nutritious, seed-disseminating structures formed from the swollen ovary of the flowering plant and heavy with cultural and symbolic meaning. People everywhere love to consume fresh, juicy fruit. And people everywhere love to articulate their own perishable existence in angiospermatic terms; we too blossom and go to seed; we too ripen and rot.      

Now, I'm sure everyone will have their favourite fruit, favourite fruit painting and favourite fruit poem. Personally, I'm a big fan of the persimmon at the moment; the glucose-rich, lotus fruit of the ebony tree which ranges from pale yellow-orange in colour to deep orange-red, depending on species and variety. Belonging to the genus Diospyros, many mistakenly believe the persimmon to be a divine fruit, but, actually, it's an earthly delight found all around the world from East Asia to Southern Europe to North America.      

As for my favourite fruit painting and fruit poetry ...

Well, in my view, Cézanne's apples are still the most brilliant and courageous attempt not only to astonish Paris, but to affirm the existence of the fruit as a mind-independent object; i.e. as something that has its own mysterious reality external to our ideas and ideal representations.

And, in my view, D. H. Lawrence's fruit poems in his magnificent collection Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), remain the greatest verses ever written on pomegranates, peaches, figs, sorb-apples, and grapes. For Lawrence, like Cézanne, was sensitive to the otherness of the non-human world in all its libidinal materiality and allure; he doesn't give a fuck about what we might term the spiritual aspect of fruit which appeals to human vanity and results in reassuring artistic cliché.

But whilst Cézanne painted many types of fruit apart from apples - including pears, oranges and lemons - he unfortunately didn't paint any pictures of persimmons (as far as I'm aware). And so I've provided my own image to accompany this post; a photograph I've entitled Lip Service and which shows the eaten remains of a persimmon on a pink sponge background. It might not have the Zen-like qualities of Mu Ch'i's 13th century ink on paper masterpiece, but I think it's a provocative work of postmodern art.    

Equally regrettable is the fact that Lawrence didn't write a poem about the persimmon either. However, this happily affords me the opportunity to offer a few lines taken from one of Li-Young Lee's rather lovely verses in which, amongst other things, he instructs us how to identify which persimmons are ready to eat and remembers how his mother alerted him to the solar nature of the fruit:
      

Ripe ones are soft and brown-spotted.
Sniff the bottoms. The sweet one
will be fragrant. How to eat:
put the knife away, lay down newspaper.
Peel the skin tenderly, not to tear the meat.
Chew the skin, suck it,
and swallow. Now, eat
the meat of the fruit,
so sweet,
all of it, to the heart.

...

My mother said every persimmon has a sun
inside, something golden, glowing,
warm as my face.

Once, in the cellar, I found two wrapped in newspaper,
forgotten and not yet ripe.
I took them and set both on my bedroom windowsill,
where each morning a cardinal
sang, The sun, the sun.

- Li-Young Lee, "Persimmons", from Rose, (BOA Editions Ltd, 1986).

On the Woman in Hitler's Bathtub

Lee Miller in Hitler's Bathtub 

Photo by David E. Scherman, Munich, April 1945

Photo credit: Lee Miller Archives, 2015

Bathing scenes - particularly bathing scenes featuring an attractive young woman, nymph, or goddess - have a long history within the world of fine art. Like King David, we can all easily call to mind the image of Bathsheba at her toilette thanks to Rembrandt. And, thanks to François Boucher, we don't have merely to dream of Diana naked and displaying her divine attributes.     

Throughout the 19th century, the western pornographic imagination took on an increasingly exotic character and there were thousands of canvases produced depicting life inside the harem, or steam-filled Turkish bath. More modern artists, however, such as Degas, rejected the pretext of mythology or orientalism and preferred to paint contemporary bathers splashing about or towelling off (as if spied through a keyhole, as he voyeuristically confessed).           

The genre remained popular in avant-garde circles at the beginning of the 20th century too. Indeed, the pop artist Roy Lichtenstein was still referencing the subject and making his distinctive contribution to it in 1963. There's just something irresistible, it seems, about the combination of girls, soap, and running water ...

For me, however, the most powerful of all bathing images is one that does far more than affirm the slippery appeal of wet flesh. It's a photo of Lee Miller in Hitler's bathtub, taken at the Führer's Munich apartment in April 1945 (just 24 hours before he blew his brains out in Berlin). 

Miller, an American fashion model who travelled to Paris in 1929 in order to become a photographer and hang out with the Surrealists, was one of only a tiny handful of female correspondents working alongside the Allied forces in Europe during the War. Attached to the 83rd Infantry Division of the US Army, Miller was in the thick of the action whilst recording events for the readers of Vogue: she was there when they landed on the beaches of Normandy; she was there as they entered Paris; and she was there, camera in hand, when they liberated Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps.     

Despite her distress, Miller nevertheless photographed survivors and photographed also the mounds of decomposing bodies piled up of those enemies of the Third Reich who didn't survive, but died from disease, malnourishment, brutal mistreatment and/or the Nazi policy of extermination through labour.   

After leaving Dachau, which was situated ten miles northwest of Munich, Miller accompanied GIs into the Bavarian capital, where they discovered Hitler's apartment. Always one to seize (and to stage) a unique photo opportunity, Miller stripped off and had herself pictured by fellow photographer David Scherman naked in the German leader's bath.

It remains a striking and unsettling image; the culmination of her work as a surrealist and photojournalist, combining humour and political defiance. Miller and Scherman deliberately placed the Heinrich Hoffmann portrait of Hitler on the tub as an amusing indicator of just where she was. They also just as deliberately placed the small sculpture by Rudolf Kaesbach in the bathroom in order to pass critical judgement on the Führer's kitsch-classical (nicht entarteten) taste in art.

And, finally - most crucially - in front of the tub, Miller set down her heavy boots covered with the filth from Dachau earlier that day; filth she has trodden with contempt into Hitler's pristine white bathmat. In this way, a beauty in the bathtub achieves her victory over a beast in the bunker ... 


Afternote

It would be nice to conclude this post with the thought that she who laughs last laughs the longest and that this iconic photo represents the idealistic triumph of aesthetics and humanity over fascist ideology. But, sadly, it would be somewhat disingenuous. 

For it's not so easy to forget traumatic experiences or erase horrific memories and so, long after the War, images from the camps - many of which she destroyed or hid away - continued to haunt Miller and she suffered from severe episodes of clinical depression, eventually giving up the darkroom in favour of the kitchen.  

No poetry after Auschwitz - and maybe no photography either - but there's always cookery ... 

On the Art of the Kiss 3: Man Ray

Man Ray: Le Baiser (1930)

The above photograph by Man Ray, featuring his lover, model and muse - the magnificent Lee Miller - kissing an unknown woman (sometimes identified by the mysterious name of Belbourne), is one that I like very much; elements of faux-lesbianism and frigidity always excite my interest more than passionate scenes between genuine lovers prone to emotional excess and that soulful look.

I also find the photogram below of great interest and, in a sense, just as exciting:

Man Ray: Le Baiser, ('Rayograph', 1922)

Also entitled The Kiss, this is one of Man Ray's earliest Rayograms; a technique in which he abandons the camera and experiments with image-making by bringing objects directly into contact with the surface of light-sensitive material, resulting in spooky-looking shadow images (variations in tone indicating the degree of transparency of the objects used).

To create this negative kiss, Man Ray combines the ghostly heads and hands of himself and his mistress at the time, Alice Prin (aka Kiki de Montparnasse); an actress, model, nightclub chanteuse and artist in her own right, who perfectly personified the bohemian culture of Paris in the Twenties.

I suppose the question that arises and which intrigues me most is this: What did Radnitzky, the great American surrealist and son of a tailor, desire most; to fuck his models in the flesh, or capture their ephemeral beauty on film?

Either way, I greatly admire his avant-garde genius and envy him his way with the ladies. Man Ray is an amazing example of a creative, intelligent individual who devotes his life to the joy of erotic and artistic freedom. Insouciant, mais pas indifférent - as it says above his grave, I wish I had but a fraction of his talent, his courage, and his humour.       

On the Art of the Kiss 2: Gustav Klimt

Gustav Klimt: Der Kuß, 1907-08.

Oil and gold leaf on canvas, 180 cm x 180 cm.

Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna.

Almost everyone is surely familiar with Gustav Klimt's gilded Art Nouveau masterpiece, The Kiss. Indeed, when I was a student back in the 1980s, it was almost obligatory to have a poster reproduction on the wall, purchased from Athena and placed alongside a work by his more daring, fiercely talented young protégé, Egon Schiele, who stripped away the prettiness and coyness of Klimt's gold leaf.

Looking at it now, however, I have to confess to finding its dreamy symbolism and romantic idealism all a bit too hippyish for my tastes (Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair). And, annoyingly, one also can't help thinking of Joseph and his amazing technicolour dreamcoat - and one doesn't want to think of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber (or the tedious Hebrew scriptures upon which they based their musical) under any circumstances, but particularly when trying to discuss a work of erotic art rather than Christian rock. 

And, obviously, The Kiss is primarily an erotic painting; featuring as it does a pair of lovers lost in a moment of bliss, bodies entwined. But it's a subdued rather than scandalous eroticism, that lacks the perverted excess that belongs to the pornographic imagination and which characterised Klimt's notorious Faculty Paintings (1900-07), commissioned by the University of Vienna (none of which were ever displayed and all of which were destroyed by the retreating Nazi forces in 1945). 

It really is a lovely work, The Kiss; one that was enthusiastically received and which immediately found a buyer. But, in all honesty, it's simply not as challenging as some of his other great canvases. His public reputation damaged and his confidence severely shaken after the Vienna Ceiling Affair, Klimt was looking to win back favour and produce a successful picture; to demonstrate to himself, as well as his critics, that he wasn't too old, too nervous, or too stupid to do so.

Ultimately, The Kiss is a compromise; unlike the beautifully provocative Goldfish (1901-02), which mockingly invites his detractors to kiss his arse.

Today, retaining pride of place in the Belvedere Museum, Der Kuß is regarded as a national treasure by all proud Austrians, who boast it's not only more popular than Leonardo's Mona Lisa - and might even be more valuable if sold - but is a much bigger canvas to boot!        

On the Art of the Kiss 1: Auguste Rodin

Auguste Rodin: The Kiss (1901-04) 

Tate Collection (1953, Reference: NO6228) 

Pretty much everyone is familiar with Rodin's sculpture known in English as The Kiss. If they haven't seen the 1882 marble original in Paris at the Musée Rodin, they'll have seen the full-size version displayed at the Tate here in London. But what everyone mightn't know is that it commemorates Francesca da Rimini, the 13th-century Italian noblewoman and adulteress immortalised in Dante's Inferno, who copped off with her crippled husband's younger (and able-bodied) brother, Paolo. 

Observant viewers will note that Rodin doesn't actually allow the lovers' lips to touch, suggesting perhaps that they never consummated their affair (and that Le Baiser - a title supplied by the critics - is something of a misnomer). But this romantic idea isn't true. In fact, they carried on their illicit relationship for a full ten years before they were discovered (in flagrante delicto) and met their tragic fate at the hands of the cuckolded figure of Giovanni Malatesta.         

The sculpture's provocative combination of down and dirty eroticism - the male figure is clearly aroused in the original life-sized work - with high aesthetic idealism, secures it a permanent (if controversial) place within the history of Western art as well as the pornographic imagination. Rodin prided himself on depicting women, their bodies and their sexuality, in an active manner and Francesca is seen here as a willing partner in crime.

However, despite being a celebrated work, Rodin himself amusingly considered it as far from being a masterpiece; he described it privately as very traditional in style; little more than a large sculpted knick-knack that follows the usual formula.

And this remark - a kind of kiss this to popular opinion and conventional taste - makes me love him all the more.

Ken Dodd: How Tickled I'm Not

I don't know why, but I don't like - and have never liked - newly knighted comedian Ken Dodd. Or Doddy, as he's known; the self-proclaimed Squire of Knotty Ash and King of the super-creepy Diddy Men, waving his tickling stick about and rejoicing in his own personal merriment:

Happiness, happiness, the greatest gift that I possess / I thank the Lord that I've been blessed / With more than my share of happiness.

Dodd essentially belongs to that Mersyside music hall and variety tradition that also produced the spectacularly unfunny Arthur Askey and Tommy ("It's That Man Again") Handley.

But, rightly or wrongly, he's associated more in my mind with that depressing generation of Liverpudlians that dominated light entertainment in the era I was growing up; Jimmy Tarbuck, Cilla Black, Tom O'Connor, Stan Boardman ... Showbiz reactionaries who sentimentally pride themselves on their Scouse roots and humble origins, but love Margaret Thatcher and think the Royal Family do a marvellous job.

Great hair though. And, like Picasso, Doddy's a monster of artistic stamina. So there's something to admire and respect, despite the dodgy politics and sometimes equally dubious stage material.   

Flogging a Dead Horse (Notes on The Rocking Horse Winner)

Still from The Rocking Horse Winner (dir. Anthony Pelissier, 1949),

showing Valerie Hobson as Hester Grahame and the shadow of John Howard Davies 

as her son Paul upon his magical wooden steed

Having just re-read it, I was hoping to write something provocative on 'The Rocking Horse Winner', Lawrence's short story first published in the American fashion magazine Harper's Bazaar, in July 1926.

But, unfortunately, I've so far failed to even get out of the starting gate. Indeed, I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that anyone attempting a new interpretation is likely to find themselves flogging a dead horse. For between them, the Freudian, Marxist, and Christian critics have done an effective job of foreclosing the text; they've nobbled it, so to speak.

For Freudians, Lawrence's story is simply a classic tale of Oedipal desire with scenes of sublimated masturbation thrown in for good measure; easy to understand by any one with a working knowledge of psychoanalysis. Hester's reliance on her young son to satisfy her needs, emotional and economic, rather than her hapless husband - and Paul's frantic attempts to do so - tragically arrest his development and lead to his premature death.     

For Marxists - less interested in sex and the libidinal unconscious and more concerned with class and the role of cash within a commodity theory of exchange - and for Christians - convinced that the love of money is the root of all evil - the tale is also very straightforward and easy to explain. For the former, capitalism dissolves the human bonds that tie us together; for the latter, all forms of materialism lead to sin.

I would like to find and to offer something more; something, for example, that allows us to relocate desire from the nursery and free it from its entrapment within the Oedipal triangle of Mummy-Daddy-Me; or something that allows us to conclude other than that greed is bad, luck is vulgar, and there's merely shit in the hearts of the bourgeoisie.

But Lawrence, who at other times goes out of his way to prove himself anti-Freudian, anti-Bolshevist, and anti-Christian, gives us so little else to work or play with in this story. He's so unambiguously opposed to wealth, success, and even good fortune - not to mention so openly contemptuous of Hester - that he can't help producing a tale that virtue signals its sympathies and its prejudices too clearly, too crudely (as, arguably, he does in much of his later fiction - including his notorious last novel).             


See: D. H. Lawrence, 'The Rocking Horse Winner', in The Woman Who Rode away and Other Stories, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, (Cambridge University Press, 1995).