"Bahama Mama"
Boney M.
(1979)
Bahama, bahama mama Got the biggest house in town bahama mama Bahama, bahama mama But her troubles getting down bahama mama She has six daughters And not one of them is married yet And shes looking high and low And none of them plays ever hard to get So if youre lonesome go there go Bahama, bahama mama You should all be looking for bahama mama Bahama, bahama mama And Im sure you will adore bahama mama Bahama, bahama mama Got the biggest house in town bahama mama Bahama, bahama mama But her troubles getting down bahama mama Youll meet her daughters They ll be treatin you to honeycake Theyll be sweet and nice to you And maybe there is one youd like to take Well then youll know just what to do Bahama, bahama mama She is really in a fix bahama mama Bahama, bahama mama Being stuck with all them six bahama mama Whats the matter with men today Six beautiful roses And nobody to pluck them Its a crying shame Bahama, bahama mama Got the biggest house in town bahama mama Bahama, bahama mama But her troubles getting down bahama mama The thing is each of them looks Like a gorgeous moviequeen Every one a perfect find And if a man refused that temptin scene He simply cant make up his mind Bahama, bahama mama Got the biggest house in town bahama mama Bahama, bahama mama But her troubles getting down bahama mama
Showing posts with label disco fries. Show all posts
Showing posts with label disco fries. Show all posts
Jul 27, 2009
Jan 5, 2009
"Low" Countries
I write this, in part, to put to bed some lingering frustrations over the rapid L.A.-ification of Manhattan. Mostly, I want to talk about the "Low" in "High and Low." It's pretty clear what we mean when we say "High"--museums and poems and operas and such. But the ambiguous "Low" is the real driving force here, the texture and spice, the questing (that's another meaning of "High and Low") humour that completes the collage. It is not simply the mainstream information that we impart, the television and music and celebrity schlock. "Low" is where we come from. "Low" is Memphis. "Low," or rather, "High and Low" used to be Manhattan. Not so long ago, in the early and middle aughts, we inhabited that island of Dutch settlers, strings of perfect summers, delicious messes, such trips, such high-flying meals. We were sometimes in Brooklyn, but most nights were for Manahatta. The Lower East Side still felt (dare I say it) gritty and occasionally glitzy (in the most artful way). I was young and starry and in love with someone who was, in Velvets' parlance, "in love with the scene." I had no idea that we were living in twilight days, that everything would soon change and that my love and his cronies would be partially responsible.
Here's an important story: one night, almost by accident, I ended up at Bungalow 8, the Chelsea club that catered most specifically to Hollywood and P.R. and stuff, a club that had been featured on an episode of Sex and the City (if that gives you some notion of its various expense and uncoolness). I found the whole experience laughable. I felt like some princess emissary of the "Low," dressed carelessly, feeling much further from my friends and lover than I actually was (they were at the Passerby, some ten blocks south). The DJ played a manic mess of radio hits, cutting each one short at the minute mark. There were hideous, greasy financial types (they NEVER came around my haunts) throwing dollar bills at gyrating MILFs and Russians. I picked the money up off of the floor and tucked it into my jeans. On the banquette beside us, a sunny Kirsten Dunst and sour Jake Gyllenhaal (clearly a bad match). I recall feeling terribly sorry for her. She was lovely and (shallow as it sounds) dressed much more like me than like those MILFs and Russians. I thought, "Poor thing, she has no idea where to go. She is so programmed with this silly, cosseted Hollywood nightlife stuff of bottles and doors that she hardly knows of the real fun and freedom of life Downtown. If she wanted to come our way, we wouldn't hassle her or gawk, and she could be, you know, authentic by association . . ." Where I came from, there were no lines, lists, or doormen. The system was democratic--if one knew where to go, one was assured a place at that unmarked table. We didn't need some monitor outdoors to assure us that we were hip. Our table seated rich and poor, young and old, known and unknown, any old stranger. The set-up was positively romantic.
Not long after I left the love and scene and city of the above descriptions (for a respite in Memphis), he and his dear friends opened up the Beatrice Inn, a West Village club with a strict door policy and (to this day) a constant rotation of young starlets present—Kirsten (no longer lost at Bungalow) and Lindsay and Mary-Kate. I have not been. I can't quite stomach it. But in this new, unfamiliar Manahatta, the cruel, moneyed exclusivity of Beatrice is welcome relief from the loads of finance and Eurotrash and Greek Row and television star assholes who frequent the Lower East Side and East Village. Worse-er still, Gavin Brown's Passerby on 15th Street, America's most special hole-in-the-wall discotheque, our clubhouse and social sculpture, our school for scandal, closed last year. And why not? All people of taste realize that Manhattan nightlife is a bad, bad business these days. On that silly night at Bungalow, I never could have guessed that Kirsten Dunst would one day chase me out of my lair. Thankfully, I don't want to live in that lair anymore, old or new. I've ceased to be that scrappy nineteen year old with a scenester boyfriend, a fount of energy and an ugly ego (read: habit for drugs). And Manhattan, up and down, has become a graveyard for cultural authenticity, a blank frontier for dizzy, wealthy transplants, a den of closed doors and limitations and malls, a Los Angeles. This did not happen of a moment; it has long been in the works (since the 80s I suppose, or 1870? . . . who can tell). But now, for the first time, it seems that there is no recourse, no fight to keep the island viable for the "Low." (It is still, however, most most viable for the "High"—the exterior of Lincoln Center alone, never mind the hundreds of brilliant performances within.)
Here's an important story: one night, almost by accident, I ended up at Bungalow 8, the Chelsea club that catered most specifically to Hollywood and P.R. and stuff, a club that had been featured on an episode of Sex and the City (if that gives you some notion of its various expense and uncoolness). I found the whole experience laughable. I felt like some princess emissary of the "Low," dressed carelessly, feeling much further from my friends and lover than I actually was (they were at the Passerby, some ten blocks south). The DJ played a manic mess of radio hits, cutting each one short at the minute mark. There were hideous, greasy financial types (they NEVER came around my haunts) throwing dollar bills at gyrating MILFs and Russians. I picked the money up off of the floor and tucked it into my jeans. On the banquette beside us, a sunny Kirsten Dunst and sour Jake Gyllenhaal (clearly a bad match). I recall feeling terribly sorry for her. She was lovely and (shallow as it sounds) dressed much more like me than like those MILFs and Russians. I thought, "Poor thing, she has no idea where to go. She is so programmed with this silly, cosseted Hollywood nightlife stuff of bottles and doors that she hardly knows of the real fun and freedom of life Downtown. If she wanted to come our way, we wouldn't hassle her or gawk, and she could be, you know, authentic by association . . ." Where I came from, there were no lines, lists, or doormen. The system was democratic--if one knew where to go, one was assured a place at that unmarked table. We didn't need some monitor outdoors to assure us that we were hip. Our table seated rich and poor, young and old, known and unknown, any old stranger. The set-up was positively romantic.
Not long after I left the love and scene and city of the above descriptions (for a respite in Memphis), he and his dear friends opened up the Beatrice Inn, a West Village club with a strict door policy and (to this day) a constant rotation of young starlets present—Kirsten (no longer lost at Bungalow) and Lindsay and Mary-Kate. I have not been. I can't quite stomach it. But in this new, unfamiliar Manahatta, the cruel, moneyed exclusivity of Beatrice is welcome relief from the loads of finance and Eurotrash and Greek Row and television star assholes who frequent the Lower East Side and East Village. Worse-er still, Gavin Brown's Passerby on 15th Street, America's most special hole-in-the-wall discotheque, our clubhouse and social sculpture, our school for scandal, closed last year. And why not? All people of taste realize that Manhattan nightlife is a bad, bad business these days. On that silly night at Bungalow, I never could have guessed that Kirsten Dunst would one day chase me out of my lair. Thankfully, I don't want to live in that lair anymore, old or new. I've ceased to be that scrappy nineteen year old with a scenester boyfriend, a fount of energy and an ugly ego (read: habit for drugs). And Manhattan, up and down, has become a graveyard for cultural authenticity, a blank frontier for dizzy, wealthy transplants, a den of closed doors and limitations and malls, a Los Angeles. This did not happen of a moment; it has long been in the works (since the 80s I suppose, or 1870? . . . who can tell). But now, for the first time, it seems that there is no recourse, no fight to keep the island viable for the "Low." (It is still, however, most most viable for the "High"—the exterior of Lincoln Center alone, never mind the hundreds of brilliant performances within.)
MTV's new "reality" vehicle The City with its thin middle school lies, its pose of Uptown and Downtown as Bloods and Crips is the ultimate jumping of the hep-titude shark. Nowadays, Uptown and Downtown are simply cardinal descriptors. The meaningful divide is the East River; the ends of the spectrum are Brooklyn and Manhattan, and Brooklyn is my home. BK is less capable of the stellar, sewery "Lows" of the Manhattan that was (though Bushwick has put in its bid). Instead, we foster a sweet, romantic, "true to your school" neighborhood ethos with locavore restaurants and beer gardens and bourbon bars and curated junk shops. When combined with real houses and beaches and the actual, longstanding chops of a complex, multi-ethnic working class city-over-the-bridge, the whole picture of Brooklyn becomes a pretty fascinating one. It is the home for artists that Manhattan (for obvious economic reasons) cannot be anymore (though grubtastic, nearly-in-Brooklyn Chinatown has put in its bid). (Oh—and, we may soon be voting Williamsburg off of the non-island despite some stellar residents, restaurants, etc., because Peaches Geldoff lives there in some tacky condo.) In Brooklyn, I am at home because I see the "Low," authentic, real, and unstudied around me all of the time, and the inauthentic, studied gentrified stuff has its heart in the right place. I'm at home in Brooklyn because I'm older and healthier than I was before, and I like "home" more than the endless, rough abroadness of my old Manhattan life. Here it's cozy and a little removed and I don't (outside of this achingly long post) need to worry my little head about who has conquered any sort of scene. I am by no means a historian of all this. Those older than me would give a far wiser account of these shifts. I only know the little that I know, and I have not sought much new information.
Have I made "Low" any clearer? I hope so. Maybe I just ought to have attached some pictures of Brooklyn and Memphis, of the uncommon beauty I find here and there. I was back in Memphis last week. On Friday afternoon, Pillow and I stopped by our favorite bar, The Buccaneer, and slipped into a massive vinyl booth that we like to call our office. The Bucc' has been around since the mid-sixties, a gem of an American dive with an unchanged, demi-nautical interior. It smells rather off, and as we sat sipping our bourbon and something-like-ginger-ales, small flies droned around us. The Ole' Miss game was on a television in the opposite corner, and a group of rough-about-the-edges good ole' boys and girls of a certain generation (original regulars) had gathered to watch it. At one point, I went to the bathroom. I closed and locked the door. I sat on the toilet and read a little bit of familiar graffiti about familiar people. I glanced up at the beams on the ceiling. I began to cry, happily and just a little. Sitting on the toilet at the Buccaneer felt like "Low" and home in the most unimpeachable way. And I would never get "High" without it.
Lastly (I promise), a song that is absolutely "Low" and absolutely smart (in what is, I believe, an unintentionally genius non-video video format):
Dec 3, 2008
Child at the Dump
Our beloved (silent) partner in blog, Petrova, hails from Staten (Drama) Island. Long ago, when we were first friends and roommates, I would beg her to regale me with tales of the Motherland, tales of car bombings and rotating marble observatories and men at the medi-spa. Perhaps the most poignant, were her descriptions of the dump at Fresh Kills (what a name for a neighborhood!) and the peculiar psychosis of the borough assigned the unsavory task of receiving and processing our fair city's waste. The story arc was fascinating--young families escape the turmoil and otherness (diversity) of Brooklyn/Queens/the Bronx in search of suburban sameness, something a bit more in step with the rest of the country, yonder over the Verrazano; instead, they build a colony of Guido strangeness, a true New York stepchild to which all dust and rot is exiled, a bitter grave for the remains of the Twin Towers. The dump (and all of the failings and seeming punishments it signified) became fodder for nueroses among Staten's settlers. Sometimes, fed-up and a tinge manic, Petrova would throw our detritus out of the window and into the quad, anything to get the garbage out of sight and mind.When I first played "There But for the Grace of God (Go I)," the socially conscious, narrative disco song produced by August Darnell (of the incomparable Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band), she was thrilled. It is esentially the story of the Island presented in its favored medium, the club anthem, top full of the dynamic intermingling of tragedy and synthesizer. Fresh Kills may be in the midst of a spectacular transformation, a return to Staten's state of nature, a haven for Unami Indians and Transcendentalism, but within the six minutes of a song, we can still recall the kamp and struggle of the last quarter century:
Nov 16, 2008
Dig Sophomore
This little lady's unavoidable first single, "I Kissed a Girl (And I Liked It)" was relatively gag-inducing, an ode to the oft-maligned culture of "Spring Break" lesbian-ish antics (for the boys). Perry's album, from which the single was culled, is titled One of the Boys, and its narrative is addled by consternating, pandering ideas about gender (pandering to 12-year-olds, of course--who respond to her days-expired Misshapes meets Fall Out Boy/Jonas Lovers twang and her Lana Turner cum Belinda Carlisle "look"). Now, I have a lot of questions about the MySpace-y world of sexual foolery that Ms. Perry inhabits, but this is not supposed to be such a critical look at her avatar/body of work.
Fact is, I'm mad about her second single, "Hot N' Cold," an utter anthem, manufactured for beachside clubs, gay bars, and gymnasiums worldwide. Though unenlightened ideas of masculine/feminine haunt some of the lyrics, the ecstatic pace simulates the giddy, sick preciousness of emotional instability, the delicious tension of opposites, the dumb rush of bad decisions, the time-honored pop musical trope of teenage love (for all ages). How can you help but be charmed by an unabashed, jittery celebration of unhealthy relationships? This must be MONSTROUS en Europa:
Nov 14, 2008
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