Bitterness Personified

The devil has all the best tunes! Light a black candle: Anton LaVey (11 April 1930 – 29 October 1997) - founder of The Church of Satan, “The Black Pope”, musician, author of The Satanic Bible and the man who shamelessly melded Vegas-style show business and publicity stunts with devil worshiping – was born on this day 95 years ago. LaVey’s opportunistic friendship with doomed sex kitten-gone-berserk Jayne Mansfield is explored in Mansfield 66/67, the delirious and lurid 2017 fever dream / documentary by Todd Hughes and P David Ebersole.

“She Puts Everything in Writhing! Bouncy Blaze Starr Makes Every Curve a Wiggle When She Peels! Blaze Starr is tops in peelmanship! Every line and movement have a message all their own! This sultry stripper, headliner at Baltimore’s Two O’Clock Club, has the ringsiders shrieking when she puts on her take-it-off routine!”

Born on this day: sin-sational exotic dancer Blaze Starr (née Fannie Belle Fleming, 10 April 1932 – 15 June 2015). Billed as “The Hottest Blaze in Burlesque” and "Miss Spontaneous Combustion”, the flame-haired and buxotic sex goddess was one of the top striptease headliners of the post-war era. Starr’s affair with Louisiana’s married governor Earl Long sparked a national scandal in the 1950s and was later dramatized in the 1989 film Blaze starring Paul Newman and Lolita Davidovich. Later in life Starr became a fixture in Baltimore’s seedy red light district The Block when she bought the Two O'Clock Club. That’s where cult director John Waters discovered her. “Just from a showbiz point of view, I respected her deeply,” Waters has said. "I still think she was the best tourist attraction that Baltimore ever had.” I particularly treasure Starr for her gloriously terrible performance in the 1962 Doris Wishman “nudie cutie” flick Blaze Starr Goes Nudist.

“The ultimate “this is better than I remember it” single of Madonna’s career, “Angel” is best half-remembered, the better by which to keep rediscovering it again and again. Which is to say, keep this “Angel” in pop purgatory.” Eric Henderson of Slant magazine, 2020.

“Walking down a crowded avenue / Other faces seem like nothing next to you / And I can’t hear the traffic rushing by / Just the pounding of my heart and that’s why …”  lyrics to “Angel” by Madonna.

Released on this day 40 years ago (10 April 1985): “Angel”, the irresistible sugar rush third single from Madonna’s Like a Virgin album. I can vividly remember when this one was new, blasting forth (in “cassingle” format, inevitably) from the high school cafeteria at lunch time. Opening with the sound of Madonna’s flirtatious giggle, “Angel” is three minutes and 56 seconds of deluxe ear candy, a yearning, urgent and giddily euphoric declaration of love (or sexual attraction. Or infatuation), dispatched with kittenish coos and squeals. Some fun facts: this was the rare Madonna single not accompanied by an official pop video. And according to Wikipedia, the line “I can see it in your e-e-e-eyye-e-s" was inspired by an unlikely source: the anguished 1979 Public Image Ltd song “Death Disco”!

Irrefutable documentary evidence that Jayne Mansfield did indeed used to dot her “i” with a little heart!

“Isn’t it too dreamy?” Debuted on this night 35 years ago (8 April 1990): David Lynch’s twisted, nightmarish and hallucinatory TV soap opera Twin Peaks. To commemorate the occasion, why not drink some damn fine coffee, hug a log, tie a cherry stem into a knot using only your mouth, talk backwards and crank up the ethereal tones of Julee Cruise LOUD? Pictured: Sheryl Lee as the doomed Laura Palmer.

jazz-improvisation:

Billie Holiday, 1949

photo: Herman Leonard

“… Holiday stood on the bandstand, hardly moving – an elegantly gowned beauty with a gardenia in her pulled-back hair. Holiday’s small, wailing voice revealed a woman who lived for love and would possibly die for it. She both luxuriated in her suffering and gave it dignity, even in “My Man” in which she sang: “He isn’t true / He beats me too / What can I do?” Holiday’s singing was pure autobiography, tied to stylistic quirks that are copied to this day: seductively bent notes that sounded like sighs; a thin, brassy edge that evoked a muted trumpet; a languid delivery that could drag perilously behind the beat yet never fell out of time. Her life was cloaked in tabloid scandal, much of it involving her addictions to heroin and abusive men. She lived her saddest songs to such a reckless degree that she died at forty-four.”

/ From the biography Is That All There Is? The Strange Life of Peggy Lee (2014) by James Gavin /

Born on this day 110 years ago: regal, soulful and ravaged jazz chanteuse Billie Holiday (née Eleanora Fagan, 7 April 1915 – 17 July 1959). Lady Day’s bruised but defiant (and sexy as hell) spirit lives every time you listen to her music. My favourite songs of hers will always be “I’m a Fool to Want You”, “Don’t Explain” and “You’ve Changed.” Oh, and “Good Morning Heartache.” I’d argue the greatest living interpreter of the Billie Holiday songbook is Joey Arias.

Born on this day: decadent and charismatic German-Italian actress, model, scene-maker, “Lady Rolling Stone” and ultimate rock chick Anita Pallenberg (6 April 1942 – 13 June 2017). Pallenberg was an alluring occasional presence in art-y bohemian nightlife in early 1990s London. I recall her DJ’ing at the Horse Hospital once and coming face to face with her when I opened the bathroom door (“I always need to pee!” she cackled). But before that, buried in the listings of Time Out magazine (in the pre-internet days when it was a dense essential bible that we all relied on), I read about a screening of Pallenberg’s old home movies in Shoreditch. It announced she would be present, possibly hosting or emceeing. The venue was a palatial industrial loft (possibly someone’s apartment), just before gentrification went full tilt boogie there. I sat alone in the back and overheard people conferring that a vintage Cadillac had been dispatched to collect Anita. She arrived late and alone - and sat next to me! Pallenberg – looking just like she did in that 1995 Calvin Klein ad by Steven Meisel with that other ravaged countercultural survivor Joe Dallesandro – radiated elegantly ruined glamour. I never got to meet Nico, but this was a very respectable equivalent. We made small talk. As Pallenberg’s friend Marianne Faithfull describes in her autobiography, “She spoke in a baffling dada hipsterese. An outlandish Italo-German-Cockney slang that mangled her syntax into surreal fragments.” Pallenberg glugged red wine and chain-smoked throughout (there’s a theory she was one of the inspirations for Patsy Stone in Absolutely Fabulous – alongside Amanda Lear). She also maintained a running commentary on what was happening onscreen (mostly images of herself – clad in Ossie Clark and vintage finery – and Keith Richards in the late sixties cavorting on their jet-set travels). At one point, things turned intimate – a seemingly post-coital Anita and Keef canoodling in bed together. The camera zoomed in on her naked breast. “That’s my neeeple,” she declared in her gravelly Marlene Dietrich voice. I spotted her just once more – at a Marianne Faithfull concert in 2008. (I still haven’t seen the documentary Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg yet. I’ve heard mixed things).

“If you live in a big city, lunchtime is among the choicest hours for people-watching - for what the photographer Charles H Traub refers to as “the passing parade of the street.” Between 1977 and 1980, Traub held two jobs that left him smack in the middle of the midday urban bustle. As the chairman of the photography department at Columbia College, he’d take his Rolleiflex SL66 camera out onto Chicago’s Loop and take pictures of strangers; later, as the director of the Light Gallery, in New York City, he did the same around Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Seventh Street, “the centre of the world.” His resulting portraits - which also include subjects in Paris, Miami, and other cities - present lunchtime characters like species of butterfly in an entomologist’s shadow box. Traub captures his human specimens in blunt closeup, their personalities fixed to the page in extravagant, often merciless, detail. There are freckled little kids and rouged old biddies, elegant fashionistas and prim gentlemen …”

/ From “Lunchtime Portraits: The Passing Parade” by The New Yorker, September 2015 /   

Born 80 years ago today (6 April 1945): inspired street photographer Charles H Traub. Pictured: one of his lunchtime portraits of a subject with a fiercely original fashion sense. These photos are compiled in the 2015 book Lunchtime.

“Robert Altman’s 3 Women is, on the one hand, a straightforward portrait of life in a godforsaken California desert community, and, on the other, a mysterious exploration of human personalities. Its specifics are so real you can almost touch them, and its conclusion so surreal we can supply our own … The movie’s story came to Altman during a dream, he’s said, and he provides it with a dreamlike tone. The plot connections, which sometimes make little literal sense, do seem to connect emotionally, viscerally, as all things do in dreams. To act in a story like this must be a great deal more difficult than performing a straightforward narrative, but [Sissy] Spacek and [Shelley] Duvall go through their changes so well that it’s eerie, and unforgettable. So is the film.”

/ From Roger Ebert’s review of 3 Women (1977) /

Yes! Join us on Thursday 17 April when the FREE monthly Lobotomy Room film club (devoted to cinematic perversity) presents Robert Altman’s dream-like and inscrutable psychological drama 3 Women! Starring the dream duo of those two most distinctive of 1970s actresses, Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spack. Let’s debate the head-scratching enigmatic ending over Fontaine’s excellent rage of stiff cocktails! All you need to do is email bookings@fontaines.bar to reserve a seat! Details here.