Muses with Dirty Faces: In Praise of the Groupie

 

Four of the GTOs looking fabulous and freaky in 1969
Photo by Ed Caraeff / Morgan Media / Getty Images

 

 

I. 

 

Are groupies still a thing in the era of #MeToo, or are they now an extinct species of young female fan who voluntarily performed sexual services in order to demonstrate their devotion to the rock gods they worshipped and followed on tour ...? [1]  

 

 

II.

 

Although the term originated in the music scene of the 1960s, the phenomenon itself was much older and wider. Indeed, some argue that Mary Magdalene was the mother of all groupies, travelling with Jesus and his gang of disciples known as the Apostles, happy to show her support in whatever way was asked of her [2]. 

 

But it's the groupies of the 1960s and '70s who are best remembered and who, in their day, were almost as famous as the musicians they fucked [3]. 

 

Girls such as Pamela Des Barres [4], 'Sweet' Connie Hamzy [5], Cynthia 'Plaster Caster' Albritton [6], and Barbara 'The Butter Queen' Cope [7], were certainly not regular girlfriends - although they were sometimes regarded as surrogates - but they were much more than ordinary fans; if they weren't expecting engagement rings, neither were they interested in simply collecting autographs or having a one night stand. 

 

The groupies wanted to be an integral part of the scene; as vital in their own way as roadies, able to access all areas and legitimately declare: I'm with the band and I kind of admire them for that - as well as their declaration of agency: these girls did not regard themselves as victims or as being exploited; they knew what they wanted, what they were doing, what the rewards and dangers of a rock 'n' roll lifestyle were. 

 

Having said that, there was a very obvious power imbalance (or inequality) built into the rock star-groupie relationship and so questions of agency and consent do arise and remain complex and problematic. 

 

And this is particularly so when it comes to the so-called baby groupies - i.e., underage girls such as Sable Starr [8] and Lori Mattix [9]. The latter was only fourteen when she (allegedly) lost her virginity to David Bowie and not much older when she began her illicit affair with Led Zepplin's Jimmy Page, the couple seen here at Rodney Bingenheimer's English Disco in LA, in 1972:    

 

 

      

Notes

 

[1] I'm certainly not the first to ask this question; see, for example, Thea De Gallier's article 'I wouldn't want this for anybody's daughter': will #MeToo mean the end of the rock 'n' roll groupie?' in The Guardian (15 Mar 2018): click here. 

      It's hard to imagine in an age when allegations of inappropriate behaviour and sexual misconduct are made at the drop of a hat and issues around consent and male entitlement are widely discussed, that the wild Bacchanalian excesses of the 1960s and '70s would be tolerated now. 

 

[2] In the Gnostic texts, Mary Magdalene's uniquely close relationship with Jesus is often emphasised. In the Gospel of Philip, for example, she is described as a companion to the latter, whom he would openly kiss on the mouth. This has led some scholars to conclude that there was a sexual component to their relationship. 

      The portrayal of Mary as a promiscuous woman or prostitute began in 591 when Pope Gregory I conflated her with Mary of Bethany (Luke 10:39) and the unnamed sinful woman who anointed Jesus's feet in Luke 7:36-50. This view of her has persisted in popular culture, giving rise to the idea of Mary as the original groupie. 

      See: Pamela Des Barres, Rock Bottom: Dark Moments in Music Babylon (1996), who develops the idea that a groupie is to a rock band as Mary Magdalene was to Jesus.

 

[3] This is evidenced by the fact that the February 1969 edition of Rolling Stone was devoted to the topic of groupies and that Time magazine also published an article on the girls of rock, discussing their manners and morals. The documentary film, Groupies (dir. Ron Dorfman and Peter Nevard) was released the following year. 

 

[4] Pamela Des Barres (b. 1948) is an American groupie, writer, musician, and actress. She is best known for her 1987 memoir, I'm with the Band: Confessions of a Groupie, which details her experiences in the Los Angeles rock music scene of the 1960s and 1970s. She was also a member of the experimental all-girl group - composed of groupies - the GTOs (Girls Together Outrageously). 

 

[5] 'Sweet' Connie Hamzy, aka Connie Flowers (1955-2021), was an American groupie who claimed to have had sex with numerous rock musicians and that she was propositioned by Bill Clinton in 1984, when he was the governor of Arkansas. 

 

[6] Cynthia Plaster Caster, born Cynthia Albritton (1947-2022), was an American groupie and visual artist notorious for creating plaster casts of the erect penises belonging to her famous lovers. She began this unusual practice with the assistance of rock stars in 1968, but later included the cocks of filmmakers and other artists, producing 50 phallic works in all. 

 

[7] Barbara Cope (1950-2018) was an American groupie, known in the late 1960s and early 1970s as The Butter Queen, due to her penchant for using butter as lubricant during her sexual encounters with rock stars. Cope claimed to have visited 52 major cities in the United States while following bands, and travelled to 11 different countries with them. She retired from groupie life in 1972, having had sex (again according to her own account) with around 2,000 musicians. 

 

[8] Sable Starr (1957-2009), often described as the queen of the groupie scene in LA during the early 1970s, was also (due to her age) one of the so-called baby groupies; she lost her virginity to a guitarist when she was twelve. In an interview in 1973, she claimed to be acquainted with many famous rock stars, including Rod Stewart, Alice Cooper, David Bowie, Mick Jagger, and Marc Bolan. At 16 she met Johnny Thunders of the New York Dolls and went to live with him in NYC. This did not turn out well. Later, she had a affair with Richard Hell, befriended Nancy Spungen, and participated in the local punk rock scene, but by the early 1980s her groupie days were over.    

 

[9] Lori Mattix (b. 1958), sometimes known as Lori Maddox, or Lori Lightning, is a former American child model and baby groupie of the 1970s. In an interview in 2015, she claimed to have been fucked by Bowie, Jagger, and Jimmy Page whilst she was underage. True or not, she had begun frequenting clubs on Sunset Strip with her friend Sable Starr whe she was 13 and her story has been widely discussed by commentators keen to highlight the sexual exploitation of minors within the music industry.   

 

Further reading (for those who are interested): 

Kathryn Bromwich, 'Groupies revisited: the women with triple-A access to the 60s', The Observer (15 Nov 2015): click here. 

 

Craig McLean, 'Good time girl: memories of super groupie Pamela Des Barres', The Observer (6 May 2018): click here. 

 

 

And for a follow up post to this one, on Nancy Spungen - last of the great American groupies - click here.

Tropics Not Really My Line: D. H. Lawrence's Letters from Ceylon

So long Ceylon - and tell the Buddha to stand up!

Image: thedigitalpilgrimage.wordpress.com

 

I. 

 

On or about this day in 1922, D. H. Lawrence set sail for Australia, having spent six weeks in Ceylon - a place which he was glad to have seen, but which, due to the heat, a tummy bug, the unbearable sense of the prehistoric past, and the fact that the Buddha sat cross-legged in front of temples that reminded him of decked up pigsties, he really didn't care for, as the following passage from a letter written to Lady Cynthia Asquith makes clear:

 

"Here we are on ship again [...] I did not like Ceylon - at least I liked looking at it - but not to live in. The east is not for me - the sensusous spiritual voluptuousness, the curious sensitiveness of the naked people, their black, bottomless, hopeless eyes - and the heads of elephants and buffaloes poking out of primeval mud - the queer noise of the tall metallic palm-trees: ach! - altogether the tropics have something of the world before the flood - hot dark mud and the life inherent in it: makes me feel rather sick." [1]

Watching a native festival and night-time procession attended by the Prince of Wales certainly made an impression on Lawrence, with its "huge elephants, great flares of coconut torches [...] savage music and devil dancers" [2], but it was entirely alien to him and, mostly, he was conscious of the fact that it was impossible as a white European to ever truly return to a dark, far-off past wherein insects and people swarmed. 

 

Similarly, he was aware that eastern religion wasn't his cup of tea either: "I don't believe in Buddha - hate him in fact - his rat-hole temples and his rat-hole religion." [3] 

 

 

II.

 

Funny enough, the trip to Ceylon had started so well. After an excellent 15-day voyage with perfect weather, Lawrence and Frieda landed at Colombo on the 13th of March, where they were met by their American friend Earl Brewster - then an ardent student of Buddhism - and travelled the next day to Kandy. 

 

Despite the soaring temperature and high humidity, Lawrence was hopeful of learning to love the tropics. Ten days after arrival, he wrote to his sister Emily:

 

"We have been in the bungalow a week. It is about a mile or mile and a half from Kandy, looking down on the lake: very lovely. It stands uphill among a sort of half wild estate [...] almost like the jungle. We sit on the verandahs and watch the chipmunks and chameleons and lizards and tropical birds among the trees and bamboos [...] It is very hot in the sun - we have sun helmets and white suits - but quite pleasant sitting still. If one moves one sweats. [...] It is rather fascinating, but I don't now how long we shall stay." [4]

 

He closes the letter:   

 

"One doesn't do much here, I tell you - though Brewster goes every day to the Temple to learn the sacred language of the Buddhists - Pali. I wish you could see it all - it is most strange and fascinating. But even at night you sweat if you walk a few yards." [5]

 

 

III. 

 

The heat - my God the heat! - was clearly problematic for Lawrence; as was the sense of malaise and his inability to work. It quickly dawned on him that he would never feel at home - or even himself - in Ceylon and his hostility towards the natives, the local wildlife, tropical fruit, and Buddhism intensified by the day, as these extracts from seven of his letters written from Ceylon demonstrate:

  

"One realises how very barbaric the substratum of Buddhism is. I shrewdly suspect that high-flownness of Buddhism altogether exists mostly on paper: and that its denial of the soul makes it always rather barren, even if philosophically etc. more perfect. In short, after a slight contact, I draw back and don't like it." [6]

 

"Here it is monstrous hot, like being in a hot bell-glass. I don't like it a bit. I don't like the east. It makes me feel sick in my stomach: seems sort of unmanly." [7]

"This is the hottest month in Ceylon - and the heavens are white hot from 10 till 6. The bungalow is outside Kandy on a hill among trees [...] birds shriek and pop and cackle out of the jungle, creatures jerk and bounce about. [...] The east, the bit I've seen, seems silly. I don't like it one bit. I don't like the silly dark people [...] or their hideous little Buddha temples, like decked up pigsties - nor anything. I just don't like it. It's better to see it on the cinema: you get the whole effect, without the effort and the sense of nausea." [8]

 

"Here the heat is terrific - and I hate the tropics. It is beautiful, in a lush, tangled, towsled, lousy sort of way. The natives too are quite good looking, dark-skinned and erect. But something about it all just makes me sick - there is something smooth and boneless, and a smell of cocoanut oil and sickly fruits - that I can't bear. I loathe the tropical fruits, except pineapples, and those I can't digest: because my inside has never hurt me so much in all my 36 years as in these three weeks." [9]  

 

"No, the east doesn't get me at all. Its boneless suavity, and the thick, choky feel of tropical forest, and the metallic sense of palms and the horrid noises of the birds and creatures, who hammer and clang and rattle and cackle and explode all the livelong day, and run little machines all the livelong night; and the scents that make me feel sick, the perpetual nauseous overtone of cocoanut and cocoanut fibre and oil, the sort of tropical sweetness which to me suggests an undertang of blood, hot blood, and thin sweat: the undertaste of blood and sweat in the nauseous tropical fruits; the nasty faces and yellow robes of the Buddhist monks, the little vulgar dens of the temples: all this makes up Ceylon to me, and all this I cannot bear. [10]

 

"Ceylon is very interesting to look at, but would be deadly to live in [...] I nearly sweated myself into the grave [...] I am glad I came. I am glad I looked at this corner of the east. Then one has no more illusions about it. From a cinematograph point of view it can be fascinating: the dark, tangled jungle, the terrific sun that makes like a bell-jar of heat, like a prison over you: the palm-trees and the noise and the sullenness of the forest: and then the natives, naked, dark, in all shades of darkness [...] suave, smooth, in their way beautiful. But curiously enough, the magnetism is all negative, everything seems magnetically to be repelling one. You never for a second feel at one with anything: always this curious black tropical hostileness, this underneath gloom [...] the sense of apathy, black, dark empty apathy, as if nothing ever could matter, not really, not in our sense of the word: and the feeling that there is a lid down over everything. [...] Queer it is, so different from what I expected. I am glad to have experienced it: but would die if I had to stay. I am glad to have seen something at least of these Oriental millions, and of this vaunted Buddhism. The last is to me a barren, dead affair: and the teeming millions don't seem to me as if they would ever do much, unless it were something wicked." [11]

 

"It has been lovely to see Ceylon. But I feel the east is not for me. It seems to me the life drains away from one here. [...] One could quite easily sink into a kind of apathy, like a lotus on a muddy pond, indifferent to anything. And that apparently is the lure of the east: this peculiar stagnant apathy where one doesn't bother about a thing, but drifts on from minute to minute. [...]

     By the way I detest Buddha, upon slight contact: affects me like a mud pool that has no bottom to it. One learns to value what one actually knows and possesses, and to have a wholesome indifference to strange gods. Anyhow these little rat-hole Buddhist temples turn my stomach." [12]

 

IV.

There are many things that one might comment on here: for example, Lawrence's sense of white privilege and cultural superiority. As John Worthen notes, the letters from Ceylon illustrate how quickly Lawrence could turn to "colonial and racist explanations" [13] to justify his own feelings of bitter disappointment and estrangement - or even make sense of a stomach upset.

 

More surprising, perhaps, is Lawrence's suggesting that, rather than travel to faraway and profoundly foreign lands, one is better off staying in Blighty and watching a travel film at the local cinema - or that dark gods and exotic creatures aren't all that he thought they were. As Worthen says, such a "fantastic reversal of almost everything he had been saying and thinking for the last seven years [...] is a useful reminder not only of his contradictoriness, but of how divided he was" [14].    

What I really want to discuss, however, is Lawrence's hatred of Buddhism, a religion which, in his view - typical of the period in which he wrote - was a form of ascetic idealism; one that encouraged an introspective quietism, or non-engagement with the world (as perfectly illustrated by the representation of the Buddha as a fat seated figure) ... [15]

 

 

V.

 

By his own admission, Lawrence much prefered Hinduism to Buddhism and thought more highly of Jesus on his Cross than Buddha seated beneath his Bo Tree. But how much he actually knew about Buddhism is debatable; there is no evidence that he ever studied its central texts with the same enthusiasm that he read works of theosophy, for example. 

 

According to Gerald Doherty, Lawrence probably acquired his knowledge of Buddhism indirectly from three sources: the philosophical musings of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, the esoteric teachings of Mme. Blavatsky, and from semi-popular 19th-century books on the subject [16]. 

 

From Nietzsche, Lawrence would have picked up the idea of Buddhism as ultimately a form of decadence. It might be a religion beyond good and evil, but it's also a religion of fatigue and decline. From the studies written by English colonial types who had spent a good deal of time in India or Ceylon, Lawrence would have absorbed the belief that underneath its ethical sophistication, Buddhism was a primitive (and inferior) form of religion compared to Christianity. 

 

But it was only when in Ceylon that Lawrence really seems to have developed a visceral (and aesthetic) hostility towards Buddhism: now the latter is holy nihilism pure and simple; "a vulgar temple of serenity built over an empty hole in space" [17].     

 

In one of his final essays, Lawrence places the Buddha alongside Plato and Christ as one of the grand idealists responsible for destroying the vital relationship between men and women, as well as the (equally vital) relationship mankind has with other forms of life and, indeed, the cosmos itself:

 

"Buddha, Plato, Jesus, they were all three utter pessimists as regards life, teaching that the only happiness lay in abstracting oneself from life, the daily, yearly, seasonal life of birth and death and fruition, and in living in the 'immutable' or eternal spirit. But now, after almost three thousand years, now [...] we realise that such abstraction is neither bliss nor liberation, but nullity. It brings null inertia. And the great saviours and teachers only cut us off from life. It was the tragic excursus." [18]

 

I think this is a profound insight on Lawrences part - one which can be placed alongside his more humorous conclusion that travel is a splendid lesson in disillusion ... [19] 

 

 

Notes

 

[1-3] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Lady Cynthia Asquith  (30 April 1922), in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. IV, ed. Warren Roberts, James T. Boulton and Elizabeth Mansfield, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 233-34.

 

[4-5] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Emily King (24 March 1922), Letters, IV 215, 216.

 

[6] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Robert Pratt Barlow (30 March 1922), Letters, IV 218.  

[7] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Robert Mountsier (3 April 1922), Letters, IV 220.

[8] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Mary Cannan (3 April 1922), Letters IV 221.

[9] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Mary Canaan (5 April 1922), Letters IV 224.

[10] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Mabel Dodge Sterne (10 April 1922), Letters IV 225.

     

[11] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Robert Mountsier (16 April 1922), Letters IV 227. 

 

[12] D. H. Lawrence, letter to S. S. Koteliansky (17 April 1922), Letters IV 228.

 

[13-14] John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider, (Allen Lane / Penguin Books, 2005), p. 265. 

[15] David Ellis warns us that it would be dangerous to "place too much emphasis on any one statement" made by Lawrence in his letters, "when his attitudes were always so highly volatile and full of contradictions". But, on the other and, he admits that it would be mistaken to "ignore how extreme Lawrence could be in the declaration of his opinions" or fail to take him seriously. 

      See David Ellis, D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game 1922-1930, (Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 18.

[16] Gerald Doherty, 'The Nirvana Dimension: D. H. Lawrence's Quarrel with Buddhism', D. H. Lawrence Review, Vol. 15, No. 1/2 (Spring-Summer 1982), pp. 51-2. Click here to access on JSTOR. 

[17] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Mabel Dodge Sterne (10 April 1922), Letters IV 226. 

[18] D. H. Lawrence, A Propos of "Lady Chatterley's Lover", ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 330-31. 

[19] I have discussed this remark (also from one of Lawrence's letters) in an earlier post: click here.  

 

 

Why I Still Love My Cassette Pet

(EMI Records, 1980)

 

 

Consisting of seven original tracks written by Malcolm McLaren and the trio of Ants he'd persuaded to abandon Adam and form a new group under his management [1] - plus a joyous cover of the Bloom-Mercer classic, 'Fools Rush In' - Your Cassette Pet [2] is 20-minutes of pop perfection that sounds as brilliant and as bonkers now as it did back in the day.

 

Essentially, Your Cassette Pet is a mixtape manifesto setting out McLaren's idio-romantic vision for music and fashion in a post-punk world. Ideas (and fantasies) vocalised by 14-year-old Annabella Lwin, include: 

 

(i) underage sex and rape play (Louis Quatorze) -

(ii) societal breakdown and gold fetishism (Gold He Said) -

(iii) extraterrestrial birth and macrosomia (I Want My Baby On Mars / Giant Sized Baby Thing) -

(iv) suicide as an eroticised practice of joy (Sexy Eiffel Towers) -

(v) queer primitivism coupled to new technology (Uomo Sex Al Apache / Radio G-String).

 

There is nothing else quite like it, athough some of the songs on Kings of the Wild Frontier - released in the same month and year as Your Cassette Pet (Nov 1980) - arguably come close and contain some of the same inspired madness, and I have always admired Adam for not only learning from his mentor McLaren, but, making the latter's ideas very much his own.

 

It's disappointing, therefore, that Your Cassette Pet isn't more widely - and more fondly - remembered. 

 

The reaction of Vim Renault, for example, is typical: in a reflection on Punk Girl Diaries, she describes Your Cassette Pet as a "remarkable release", before then informing us that "with the hindsight of 2020 attitudes to child exploitation", it becomes obvious that McLaren wrote the "back-of-the-envelope sexualised lyrics" for sleazy and commercially frivolous reasons: 

 

"At the time, I thought it was bold and I admired Annabella Lwin. But they weren't her words - they were the words of a narcissistic old perv." [3]  

 

Whilst I'm pretty sure the last line would have made Malcolm laugh, it's disappointing (to say the least) that Ms Renault feels this way and has come over all Mary Whitehouse in her old age; from being the cause of moral outrage to one who, with hindsight, has become the voice of such. 

 

Perhaps it might help her to think more favourably of McLaren as a lyricist if she were to be informed that, far from being written in a hurried manner, several of the songs had a history pre-dating the formation of Bow Wow Wow, when Malcolm was drifting round Paris in the post-Pistols period and trying to find funding for a new film company that would produce movies combining pop and porn, by and for a young generation that he termed the sex gang children [4].

 

And perhaps it might help Ms Renault to understand the wider (socio-political) context that McLaren's thinking had grown out of in the late '60s and early '70s; a time when radical theorists, such as Michel Foucault, were convinced that even underage teens should be allowed (and encouraged) to express themselves sexually [5].

 

Although in his biography of McLaren, Paul Gorman repeatedly indicates his unease with (and distase for) such a countercultural conceit, he considers the matter in an insightful manner and what he writes is worth quoting here (at length and in closing), not least for Ms Renault's benefit:

 

"Unlike David Bowie, Johnny Thunders and other rock stars whose sexual exploits with such young groupies as Lori Maddox and Sable Starr are well documented, McLaren derived no sexual pleasure from, and was not interested in engaging in, sexual acts with underage teens. By nature he was more of a romantic than a libertine, though it is true that he had cultivated a prurient view of sexual matters, largely as a result of his strange upbringing. His promotion of liberating young desires sprang from radical political grounding; not only had the Situationists propagated the idea [...] but the European and American underground press of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which informed his worldview, had brimmed with such views [...]

      McLaren's point was that true power in popular, and in particular music, culture resided with youth, not preening performers in their twenties or self-indulgent, middle-aged music-biz hacks, and that the sexual and social potential of young people outstripped that of any of the rock stars of the era [...] McLaren constantly referred to record company executives as 'child molesters' in that they corrupted and stifled fans' desires with a forced diet of corporate gloop." [6]    

 

Notes

 

[1] Matthew Ashman (guitarist), Dave Barbarossa (drums) and Leigh Gorman (bass) - along with 13-year-old Annabella Lwin on vocals - were brought together as Bow Wow Wow by McLaren, who not only managed them, but styled them and provided song lyrics and ideas.   

 

[2] Bow Wow Wow, Your Cassette Pet (EMI Records, 1980), a debut mini-album available only on tape, (therefore making it ineligible for the UK albums chart): click here to play in full.

      Your Cassette Pet came in a flip-top box designed by Jamie Reid and was originally to be sold alongside a magazine, Chicken, containing song lyrics, band photographs, features on fashion, consumer technology, and pornography for the under-12s. Perhaps not surprisingly, EMI got cold feet and when Bow Wow Wow's next single - 'W.O.R.K. (N.O. Nah, No No My Daddy Don't)' - failed to chart, the record company dropped them like a hot potato.

        

[3] Vim Renault, 'Bow Wow Wow - Your Cassette Pet' (7 Jan 2020) on punkgirldiaries.com: click here.

 

[4] 'Sexy Eiffel Towers', for example, was written by McLaren for a proposed musical about  three 15-year-old girls to be called The Adventures of Melody, Lyric & Tune. The script for this film eventually merged with that of another project, The Mile High Club, that will ring a bell with fans of Bow Wow Wow, as a song of that title appeared on their 1982 EP The Last of the Mohicans (RCA Records).  

      The phrase, 'sex gang children' - which Malcolm borrowed from William Burroughs - can be heard in the 'Mile High Club' track. Interestingly, Boy George - who briefly performed with Bow Wow Wow under the name Lieutenant Lush - considered using this as the name of his group before going with Culture Club.

 

[5] For Foucault and many other intellectuals in the 1970s, the suggestion that children - particularly over the age of twelve - were unable to consent to sexual relations, either with one another or with adults, was itself an unacceptable form of abuse, restricting their right to freedom and decision making via the use of contractual law introduced into the amorous realm. Children, he said, should be fully empowered to find pleasure in any way they liked. 

      I have written on this subject in a post published last year (9 Jan 2021) on TTA: click here. 

 

[6] Paul Gorman, The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren, (Constable, 2020), p. 437. 

      As Gorman goes on to note, McLaren's primary concern, as ever, was simply to provoke people and create a storm of moral outrage: "McLaren knew that banging on about teenage sex was an effective means of causing a stir." [438]

 

 

Chrysopoeia 3: No More Gas, Just Gold He Said - Gold on My Head!

Do you love Annabella? 

Gold is what she holds.

 

 

I. 

 

Having confronted the perceived greyness of English culture with nihilistic blackness during the punk period, McLaren and Westwood dramatically changed tactics (and shop design) during their pirate phase: now gold was the colour by which to challenge the three things they hated most: puritanism, provincialism, and poverty.  

 

Just to be clear: by the latter, we refer to a certain spiritual condition; to individuals bereft of ideas, imagination and a sense of adventure, rather than those without money for the gas meter; to individuals whose vision of a post-punk future involved either wearing raincoats and moaning about being on the dole, or adopting a gothic persona and pretending to be one of the undead.  

 

Contra this model of either bleak or morbid miserabilism, Malcolm and Vivienne offered a new romanticism that was all about sun, gold, and piracy ...

 

 

II. 

 

Thus it was that Seditionaries gave way to Worlds End and Malcolm's new group, Bow Wow Wow, was fronted not by a spiky-haired, pale-faced punk with green-teeth, but by an exotic-looking, 14-year-old girl called Annabella, who informed us that she didn't care about having no money, because she had gold in her hair. 

 

And, besides, thanks to TEK technology, sang Annabella, she could steal the songs she loved to listen to by illegally taping them off the radio: "No silver, no copper / Cassette on my shoulder / I'm richer than Richard III / I don't need to work" [1].

  

The idea that you can look rich and feel powerful - without having any money - is an interesting one, rooted in both the concept of a natural (or savage) nobility and dandyism. It suggests that what matters most is not what you have in your wallet, but how you walk, talk, and present yourself; a combination of style, swagger and attitude. 

 

And it's always important to be reminded that, for Malcolm, punk was about fighting for the right not to work - Cos work, is not the golden rule - and I happily endorse his suggestion that the unemployed be issued roller skates and paid in gold dust [2].  

 

 

Jordan wearing a golden outfit from the 

Worlds End Pirate Collection (A/W 1981)

Image reworked from a photo by Michael Costiff

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Lyrics from the Bow Wow Wow song 'Gold He Said', which originally featured on the 8-track mini-album Your Cassette Pet (EMI Records, 1980). Whilst Dave Barbarossa, Leigh Gorman and Matthew Ashman came up with the music, it was McLaren - a uniquely gifted lyricist - who came up with the words. Click here to play. 

[2] This is something that all those dreary left-leaning punks who earnestly believed themselves to be part of a drab socialist revolution never understood. I would have loved to have been paid in gold dust when I was signing on during the 1980s - far more exciting than having to cash a giro at the post office every fortnight. I'm a little surprised, therefore, that Paul Gorman dismisses Malcolm's proposal as preposterous (though maybe he's a fan of Absurdism and means that in a good way); see The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren, (Constable, 2020), p. 456. 

      Finally, note that the line quoted in italics is a lyric (again written by McLaren) from the second Bow Wow Wow single 'W.O.R.K. (N.O. Nah, No No My Daddy Don't)', (EMI Records, 1981): click here to play the extended version. 

Chrysopoeia 2: Volpone (He's the Fox - the Fox with the Golden Brush)

Aubrey Beardsley:  

Volpone Adoring His Treasures (1898)

 

Good morning to the day; and next, my gold: 

Open the shrine, that I may see my Saint.

 

 

I. 

 

Ben Jonson's brilliant comic play Volpone (1606) opens with a very famous scene of gold veneration that is worth reproducing in full:

 

 

A ROOM IN VOLPONE'S HOUSE. ENTER VOLPONE AND MOSCA. 

 

VOLPONE: 

 

Good morning to the day; and next, my gold: 

Open the shrine, that I may see my Saint. 

 

MOSCA WITHDRAWS THE CURTAIN REVEALING PILES OF GOLD, PLATE, JEWELS, ETC.

 

Hail the world's soul, and mine! More glad than is 

The teeming earth to see the long'd-for sun 

Peep through the horns of the celestial Ram, 

Am I, to view thy splendour darkening his; 

That lying here, amongst my other hoards, 

Shew'st like a flame by night; or like the day 

Struck out of chaos, when all darkness fled 

Unto the centre. O thou son of Sol, 

But brighter than thy father, let me kiss, 

With adoration, thee, and every relick 

Of sacred treasure, in this blessed room. 

Well did wise poets, by thy glorious name, 

Title that age which they would have the best; 

Thou being the best of things: and far transcending 

All style of joy, in children, parents, friends, 

Or any other waking dream on earth: 

Thy looks when they to Venus did ascribe, 

They should have given her twenty thousand Cupids; 

Such are thy beauties and our loves! 

Dear saint, Riches, the dumb god, that giv'st all men tongues; 

That canst do nought, and yet mak'st men do all things; 

The price of souls; even hell, with thee to boot, 

Is made worth heaven. Thou art virtue, fame, 

Honour, and all things else. Who can get thee, 

He shall be noble, valiant, honest, wise - [1]

 

 

II. 

 

There are many things I love about this speech: for one thing, Volpone's is a profoundly cynical and materialist philosophy, which imagines even the anima mundi in chemical-elemental (non-spritual) terms. This is to immediately challenge all those idealistic thinkers from Plato to Hegel who identified the world-soul as a force of vital intelligence which is accesible to (because self-identical with) human reason.

 

The Gnostics may, like Volpone, have also posited gold as the essence of all that exists, but for them this was alchemical allegory; for them, gold was not a metal gifted to mankind from beyond the stars in an age before life itself, it was rather the Light Soul to be contrasted with the dead matter within which it is imprisoned. 

 

Gold may have been recognised as the noblest of all noble metals - and their origin - but it is still regarded with contempt by those whose real concern is with the inner gold (i.e. the spark of divinity) within each of us. Volpone may use religious language - open the shrine that I may see my saint - but he does so mockingly, that is, in a knowingly idolatrous manner. 

 

And when Volpone expresses a desire to kiss his gold, we are reminded that there is also an erotic aspect to his gold fetish. However, unlike Auric Goldfinger - whose case we discussed here - Volpone doesn't desire gold in a perverse manner and, ultimately, I don't think he is guilty of either greed or lust; what he does, in fact, is exploit the vices of others. 

 

For as he confesses to his man-servant, confidant, and fellow-schemer, Mosca: "I glory more in the cunning purchase of my wealth / Than in the glad possession ..."

This line is crucial, I think, in understanding Volpone's character - and my attraction to him; for he reminds me of the Embezzler, played by Malcolm McLaren in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980); a man who enjoys manipulating events, exploiting the gullible, and defrauding the rich. Yes, he wishes to generate cash from chaos, but it's the swindle itself that most excites his imagination. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I'm quoting from Ben Jonson's Volpone as found freely online as a Project Gutenberg eBook: click here. 

 

 

Chrysopoeia 1: Goldfinger (He's the Man - the Man with the Midas Touch)

Shirley Eaton as Jill Masterson in Goldfinger (dir. Guy Hamilton, 1964)

 

For a golden girl knows when he's kissed her

It's the kiss of death from

Mister Goldfinger [1]

 

 

I. 

 

Although, personally, I prefer to see Shirley Eaton dressed in a nurse's unform (Carry on Nurse, 1959), or wrapped in a large bath towel (Carry on Constable, 1960), it is as (sacrificial) Bond Girl Jill Masterson in Goldfinger (1964), that she has firmly secured her place in the porno-cultural imagination.

 

I'm referring, of course, to the iconic scene of her lying naked on a bed, painted from head to toe with gold, which, according to Bond, was the cause of her death [2].

 

The fact that this scene is still fondly remembered and recreated today - many decades later [3] - would seem to suggest that quite a few share Goldfinger's perverse love of gold and perhaps secretly dream of having his Midas touch, even though this can only lead to tragedy [4].      

 

 

II. 

 

What can we say about the strange character Auric Goldfinger? 

 

Well, as his name suggests [5] and as Shirley Bassey repeatedly informs us in the film's title song, he loves gold - really loves it. Not merely as a commodity or valuable asset, but as a thing in itself: a brightly coloured alien metal that has come to us from beyond the stars [6]. 

 

Goldfinger isn't greedy for gold in the way some are greedy for money; his vice is lust - he desires it in a perverse (and primitive) sense [7]. As he confesses to Bond at one point: 'All my life I’ve been in love with its colour, its brilliance, its divine heaviness.'

 

Not only does Goldfinger sport a perma-tan and dress mostly in golden-coloured clothes, but so too does he drive a gold-plated car and if he does decide to fuck a woman - usually a prostitute - he likes to have them hypnotised and painted gold before sex [8].

If Goldfinger's perversity (and, indeed, Pussy Galore's lesbianism) is more evident in Ian Fleming's 1959 novel [9], than in the 1964 film adaptation, I think the latter still does a good job of indicating that Auric Goldfinger is, to say the very least, a man of unusual tastes.

 

Finally, it is interesting to note that Fleming himself also had something of a gold fetish; not only did he collect Spanish doubloons, but he wrote with a gold-tipped ballpoint pen and possessed a gold-plated typewriter. 

 

German actor Gert Fröbe as Auric Goldfinger 

in Goldfinger (dir. Guy Hamilton, 1964) 

 

Notes

 

[1] Lyrics from the song 'Goldfinger', recorded by Shirley Bassey and used for the opening and closing title sequences to the 1964 James Bond film of that title. The music was composed by John Barry. Lyrics were by Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley and are © Sony / ATV Music Publishing LLC. To play, audio only, click here. To play and watch scenes from the movie (showing why it is such a great film - and I say that as someone who isn't really a Bond fan), click here.    

 

[2] Bond informs his superior, M, that skin suffocation is a well-known phenomenon amongst cabaret performers who use body paint to disguise their nakedness. Actually, this is fictitious, even if it is now believed to be factual by many people apparently unaware of the fact we breathe through our noses and mouths and not the surface of our bodies, like frogs. 

      Having said that, it is true that the top layer of our skin - the epidermis - gets its oxygen directly from the atmosphere and not via the blood and that clogging the pores of the skin for an extended period can cause heatstroke, which is potentially life-threatening. So perhaps the director of Goldfinger, Guy Hamilton, wasn't being overly cautious or naively buying into the Fleming myth of death-by-gilding by ensuring that a small patch on Eaton's stomach remained paint free and that a doctor was standing by on set just in case.      

 

[3] See for example the American model and actress Elle Evans recreating the Shirley Eaton / Jill Masterson Goldfinger look for Maxim magazine (Sept 2014) in order to celebrate the movie's 50th anniversary: click here. 

[4] Those unfamiliar with the story of Midas and his golden touch are encouraged to read Ovid's Metamorphoses XI: 85-145: click here.  

      In brief, King Midas is granted his wish by the god Dionysos (or Bacchus, as the Romans knew him) that whatever he touch be instantly transformed into gold. As might be imagined, this soon becomes problematic. 

      Indeed, in the version of the myth told by Nathaniel Hawthorne, it has fatal consequences when, reaching out to comfort his young daughter - who is upset that the roses growing in the palace gardens, having been turned to gold, have lost their magnificent scent - Midas inadvertently turns her into a lump of precious - but lifeless - metal. See A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys (1851): click here.     

[5] Not only is his family name - one of German origin - obviously related to gold, but Auric is also an adjective pertaining to gold. As Jon Burn (of the James Bond blog Not Perfected Yet) reminds us: 

      "Bond makes mention of the queerness of the name Auric Goldfinger, comparing it to a French nail varnish; emasculating Goldfinger by likening him to a feminine product; insinuating femininity in Goldfinger, with the possible implication that Goldfinger sounds like he may be homosexual." 

      See Jon Burn, '"He Loves Only Gold" - sexual 'perversion' in Goldfinger', on the interesting website Licence to Queer: click here. 

 

[6] Gold is thought to have been produced in supernova nucleosynthesis and from the collision of neutron stars and was present in the dust from which the solar system formed. However, because the Earth was originally molten, almost all of the gold present probably sank into the planetary core. Therefore, most of the gold found in the Earth's crust and mantle is believed by some theorists to have been delivered later via asteroid impacts about 4 billion years ago. If this isn't reason to be awe-struck by even the tiniest gold nugget, then I don't know what is. No wonder so many peoples have desired it, worshipped it, and thought it to be of divine origin; the Aztec word for gold - tecuitlatl - literally means excrement of the gods.  

[7] I'm not a theologian, but I assume there is an important difference between greed and lust as cardinal sins, which seems to hinge on the fact that the former is an artificial (or disordered) desire for material goods or things and the latter a desire for sensual pleasures, so at least a striving for natural relationship with one's fellow man made in the image of God. Thus, the latter, whilst usually regarded as less serious, is still deadly; you can still go to hell because of it.  

 

[8] The fact that Goldfinger does, on occasion, choose to penetrate female bodies - even if first painting them gold - is why I would challenge the claim made by Jon Burn that "Goldfinger's perversion is object sexuality, having sexual desire for an inanimate object, specifically to the precious metal gold, and not to a person of any gender, or even any human being." If he was in love, for example, with the Golden Gate Bridge, or with Fort Knox, I would be perfectly happy to accept this argument, but, actually, he loves golden girls, whom he may objectify sexually, but that's not evidence of objectum sexuality. Indeed, one might argue that by denying their humanity "in order to make them into living golden statues", Goldfinger could be characterised as an agalmatophile. 

      See Jon Burn, '"He Loves Only Gold" - sexual 'perversion' in Goldfinger' ... click here. 

 

[9] Goldfinger is the seventh novel in Ian Fleming's James Bond series. Written in 1958, it was published the following year in the UK by Jonathan Cape. It was an immediate best-seller and mostly well received by the critics. The eponymous villain of the work was named after the architect Ernő Goldfinger and, whilst physically very different, there are some similarities between Auric and Ernő Goldfinger. 

      On learning of this, the latter threatened to sue. Whilst the matter was eventually settled out of court, Fleming was still sorely tempted to change the name from Goldfinger to Goldprick, thus anticipating Mike Myer's slightly limper rendition of the name as Goldmember in the 2002 film of that title (dir. Jay Roach).

      (For the record, the character of Auric Goldfinger was probably based on the American gold tycoon Charles W. Engelhard Jr., whom Fleming had met in 1949.) 

 

 

To read the second post in this series - on Ben Jonson's figure of Volpone - click here. 

 

This post is for Torpedo the Ark's very own Bond Girl, Katharina Braun. 

Look! Up in the Sky! It's a Bird! It's an Angel! It's Barbette!

Vander Clyde (c.1899-1973) aka Barbette

Photo by Man Ray (1925) / Poster by Charles Gesmar (1926)

Where there is loveliness of appearance, then there is no fraudulence ...

  

I.

 

Once upon a time, a young boy in Texas, named Vander, made a fateful visit to the circus and instantly decided that he wanted the life of a performer. Thinking he might make a good high-wire walker, Vander spent many hours practicing at home on his mother's steel clothes line. 

 

After graduating high school, aged 14, Vander began his circus career as one-half of a famous aerialist team called The Alfaretta Sisters. The fact that he was male wasn't deemed a problem, as he was happy to dress as a girl, agreeing with his new female partner that audiences preferred to watch women in colourful and elaborate costumes perform dangerous acrobatic stunts, rather than men in plain leotards [1].    

 

After he had devised a solo act, however, Vander decided to go it alone and exchange the world of circus for vaudeville, working under the mononym Barbette, which he thought had a mysterious French ring and certain neutrality to it. 

 

 

II. 

 

Barbette made her debut at the Harlem Opera House in 1919. After performing in full drag and maintaining the illusion of femininity until the end of the act, Vander would then pull off his wig and strike exaggerated masculine poses (as if only playing the part of a man) to the (shocked) amusement of the crowd [2]. 

 

After several years on the vaudeville circuit, Barbette made her European debut in 1923. Initially performing in London, it was Paris where, like many American artists belonging to the so-called lost generation [3], Barbette was truly to find herself, appearing at venues including the Casino de Paris, the Moulin Rouge, and the Folies Bergère. She was soon the talk of the town.   

Unfortunately, on a return visit to London, Vander was caught in flagrante delicto with another man. This resulted in the Palladium cancelling his contract and in Barbette being unable to work in England ever again. However, her adoring fans and famous admirers across the Channel simply shrugged in a typically Gallic manner when hearing of the incident.   

 

 

III. 

 

One of these admirers was the avant garde artist Jean Cocteau, who, by his own admission, was completely captivated by Barbette, whom he described as a queer combination of actor, angel, and bird: No mere acrobat, but one of the most beautiful theatrical performers alive today, whose artistry is comparable with that of Nijinsky. 

 

In fact, so impressed was Cocteau with Barbette's astonishing ability to slide back and forth between man and woman - thereby revealing the fluid and performative aspect of gender - that he wrote a seminal essay on her in 1926, in which he beseeched his fellow artists to learn from Barbette if they wished to understand the true nature of artifice [4].

 

To illustrate the essay, Cocteau commissioned a series of photographs by Man Ray - another American in Paris - which captured not only aspects of Barbette's performance, but also the pre-show process of gender transformation. Cocteau also cast Barbette in his experimental first film Le sang d'un poète (1930), where she appears dressed in Chanel. [5]

 

 

IV.

 

Sadly, all glittering careers must come to an end and a combination of age, injury, and illness obliged Barbette to bring down the curtain on her life as a performer at the close of the 1930s. 

 

Happily, however, a new life opened up as an artistic director at various circuses and Vander also worked as a consultant on a number of Hollywood films, including Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot (1959), where he coached Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon on the art of drag [6]. 

 

In his final months, Vander ended up living back in Texas, with his sister. Having been in often severe pain for many years, he committed suicide (by overdose) in 1973. In an interview with Francis Steegmuller four years prior to his death, Vander explained his thinking behind the character of Barbette:

 

"I’d always read a lot of Shakespeare […] and thinking that those marvelous heroines of his were played by men and boys made me feel that I could turn my specialty into something unique. I wanted an act that would be a thing of beauty - of course it would have to be a strange beauty." [7]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Although Barbette entered the circus ring or, later the theatre stage, dressed like a showgirl, she would obviously remove her headdress, cape and gown, before taking to the high wire and trapeze. 

 

[2] As Chase Dimock notes:

      

"Barbette does not simply reveal his male identity and return to his true self, instead, he pantomimes and performs the masculinity supposedly revealed by removing his wig. His male sexed body and its expected postures and actions are revealed to be as much a product of artifice and performance as the female persona he adopts on stage."

 

The thing that is most interesting is that even after the big reveal and Barbette rebecomes Vander, s/he still retains their allure as an object of desire. Dimock interprets this in Kantian terms:

 

"While Barbette initially lures the desire of those drawn in by his pleasing make up and costuming, he is still able to retain the beauty of femininity after removing these items. Therefore, the attraction of Barbette is deeper than the pleasing veneer of femininity that he wears; it comes from an attraction to the pure form of beauty that he realizes through his acrobatic stunts and graceful movements. If Barbette could sustain his feminine form after all of the socially constructed signifiers of femininity had been stripped from his body, then it stands that Barbette had discovered some universally attractive structure of beauty that kindles desire irrespective of gender constructs." 

 

See Dimock's excellent essay; 'The Surreal Sex of Beauty: Jean Cocteau and Man Ray’s "Le Numéro Barbette"' (2 June 2011), in the As It Ought to Be archive: click here.   

 

[3] Gertrude Stein is usually credited with coining the term Lost Generation to refer to a group of American expatriate writers and artists drifting round the capitals of Europe during the 1920s. It was popularised by Ernest Hemingway, who used it in the epigraph for his 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises. 

 

[4] Jean Cocteau's 1926 essay on the nature and artifice of the theatre was originally published in Nouvelle Revue Française. It can be found alongside Man Ray's photographs and a New Yorker profile of Barbette written by Francis Steegmuller (see note 6 below), in the book Le Numéro Barbette, (Jacques Damase, 1989).

 

[5] Barbette also inspired the characterization of "Death" in Cocteau's later film Orphée (1950). Clearly, Cocteau was in love with Barbette, though whether they consummated their brief affair I don't know.   

    

[6] For a recent post on Some Like It Hot - in which I compare the drag performance of Curtis and Lemmon with that of Kenneth Williams and Charles Hawtrey in Carry on Constable (1960), click here.

 

[7] Vander Barbette, quoted by Francis Steegmuller in 'An Angel, A Flower, A Bird', The New Yorker (20 Sept 1969): click here to read online.

 

 

In Praise of Notes and Parenthetical Elements (A Reply to a Critic)

A gargoyle checking footnotes

 

 

A critic writes:

One of the most irritating things about your blog is the use of endnotes. 

      One might question whether such are really needed at all in what is essentially an informal and non-academic forum, but since you seem determined to provide additional information, thereby supplementing your main text, you might at least try to keep them as brief as possible and not attempt to write a post within a post; as you do, for example, in the note on Barbette in 'Carry On Cross-Dressing' (9 April 2022). 

      It's fine to mention that Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon were coached in the art of drag by Barbette, since you were discussing Some Like It Hot, but you needn't then discuss Jean Cocteau's relationship with the latter. This seems to suggest distraction on your part - as if you suddenly become bored with your own post and wish to head off in a new direction - and it's disconcerting too for readers to suddenly be taken off-topic. 

      If I were you, I would rework the format of your blog and consider eliminating notes altogether.

         

My reply: 

 

As a provocateur, it pleases me to think there are irritating aspects to Torpedo the Ark and that it doesn't simply soothe or pacify its audience. The pleasure of the text in its most radical sense - what Barthes terms jouissance - ultimately relies upon the reader's discomfort [1].      

As a post-Derridean, i.e., one who happily inhabits the margins of philosophy, I am favourably disposed towards footnotes, endnotes, and parenthetical elements, and prioritise fragmented forms, literary digressions, and the seemingly trivial detail (in which the devil hides) over conceptual coherence, etc. [2]

 

I regard the notes, therefore, as more than merely supplementary - they are not just afterthoughts, or add-ons, which serve to complete or enhance the main text; the notes have interest and import in their own right and function more like gargoyles on the side of a cathedral, jeering at the idea of wholeness (as if any post could ever be the last word on anything) [3]. 

 

The endnotes, as a type of birdsong, provide a way out of even my own arguments. I want to digress (to step aside or walk away from the straight and narrow); I like to be distracted (to have my thoughts pulled in a different direction, my attention diverted). If you find this disconcerting, then that's good; see my remarks above about jouissance. 

 

And so, I won't be changing the format of posts on Torpedo the Ark; a blog which might even be characterised (à la Whitehead) as ultimately nothing but a footnote to Nietzsche.     

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller, (Basil Blackwell, 1990). And see my discussion of this work in Postmodern Approaches to Literature 3: click here. 

[2] See Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, (The University of Chicago Press, 1982). 

      See also Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), particularly the reading of Rousseau, in which Derrida demonstrates how there is no transparently pure language awaiting corruption by an external supplement that is entirely alien to it. 

 

[3] See D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 188-191. I discuss Lawrence's gargoyle philosophy in several posts, including 'Believe in the Ruins' (16 April 2019): click here. 

 

 

Further reading:  

 

Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History, (Harvard University Press, 1999). 

Chuck Zerby, The Devil's Details: A History of Footnotes (Touchstone, 2003). 

 

See also Pat Thomson's post 'a little fluff on the footnote' (9 May 2016) on her blog, Patter, click here.