For Pride 2021: "I Feel Love"

Happy Pride!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Feel_Love
http://donnasummer.com/
https://www.jimmysomerville.co.uk/
https://www.madonna.com/
https://samsmithworld.com/

Currently listening to...

...the live version of "Future Lovers" by Madonna. I seem to be stuck on this song...

First of all, the song itself--even the studio version--is pulsing, mesmerizing, hypnotizing...ecstatic. The key and the musical arrangement are arresting, gripping. Even though it is ostensibly about leaving behind this reality ("I'm gonna tell you about love/ Let's forget your life/ Forget your problems/ Administration, bills, and loans/ Come with me") there is a delicious abstract sense about the following repeated phrase, like a mantra or ritual praise, "In the evidence of its brilliance." What possesses this brilliance? That is the unspoken core she is singing of--perhaps a place in some kind of shimmering future, a place beyond words, a place, as Rumi said, "beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing." Indeed, she next sings, "In the demonstration of this evidence/ Some have called it religion/ This is not a coincidence/ Would you like to try?"

Peak experience? A transcending altered consciousness? The sinking, thrilling sensation of being--finally--separated from your body outside of time? Regular readers of OBTW might recognize these ideas as recurring themes of the art, films, music, and literature I share with you, and as a motif in my own original writing and poetry (usually featured here in April for National Poetry Month). These ideas are "the evidence of its brilliance." Its brilliance: you can't see it without it destroying you. You can't be near it without becoming it. Words cannot be used to describe something beyond words. Images cannot be employed to show something that is beyond the physical. All we can do is feel it, follow it parallel, and intone endlessly, "In the evidence of its brilliance."

But back to our powerful performance at hand: Madonna opened every concert for her 2006 Confessions Tour with this piece of stunning performance art. The equestrian theme somehow blends beautifully--perhaps because the music is so pounding and relentless, like a horse at full gallop. The tensions and anticipation building up to her entrance is palpable--she knows how to choreograph a moment. And giving a nod to the original inspiration to the song--the classic Euro-disco hit "I Feel Love" by Donna Summer--is a wonderful, dreamlike touch.

Here, listen to the studio version too: just as powerful...

In the evidence of its brilliance.

http://www.madonna.com/

"Let's get unconscious, honey..."

This just popped up on my iPod and although I posted it last June, this mind-blowing Madonna song bears a re-post. This is the Madonna I long for. Almost everything she created after "Ray of Light" pales.

http://www.madonna.com/

BEAUTY: Painting--Gabriel Mark Lipper

The hallucinatory cocktail parties of Gabriel Mark Lipper remind me of a scene in Madonna's fantastic "Drowned World/ Substitute For Love" video where everyone at a nightclub seems deformed and disfigured (at the 3:12 mark below).


Top to bottom: The Gods Go Slumbing [sic]; Zeus Discontent; The Bacchanalia; The Judgment of Paris; from the Thoroughbred series

http://artofgabriel.com/

Currently listening to...

...possibly the best Madonna song (and video!) ever, the satisfyingly eerie "Bedtime Story."

Written by Icelandic singer Björk, the song is an ode to a highly spiritual sense of surreality, dreams, unconsciousness, and the pre-verbal place in all of our brains where such things dwell.

"Today is the last day that I'm using words
They've gone out, lost their meaning
Don't function anymore

Let's, let's, let's get unconscious honey
Let's get unconscious honey

Today is the last day that I'm using words
They've gone out, lost their meaning
Don't function anymore

Traveling, leaving logic and reason
Traveling, to the arms of unconsciousness
Traveling, leaving logic and reason
Traveling, to the arms of unconsciousness

Chorus:

Let's get unconscious honey
Let's get unconscious
Let's get unconscious honey
Let's get unconscious

Words are useless, especically sentences
They don't stand for anything
How could they explain how I feel

Traveling, traveling, I'm traveling
Traveling, traveling, leaving logic and reason
Traveling, traveling, I'm gonna relax
Traveling, traveling, in the arms of unconsciousness

(chorus)

And inside we're all still wet
Longing and yearning
How can I explain how I feel?

(chorus)

Traveling, traveling (repeat twice)
Traveling, traveling, in the arms of unconsciousness

And all that you've ever learned
Try to forget
I'll never explain again"

The lyrics--and particularly the last three lines--call to my mind a quote by the brilliant C.G. Jung: “Knowledge does not enrich us; it removes us more and more from the mythic world in which we were once at home by right of birth.”

The nearly all-electronic sound is ominous, heavy, unearthly, and references nothing acoustic, in keeping with the subliminal sense of the song and visuals. And speaking of visuals, between the sets, art direction, special effects, and costuming, the video is an absolutely incredible hallucination. It seems to somehow capture the paradox of a kind of "organic science fiction" and contains some arresting, painterly tableaux. Madonna has admitted that much of the phantasmagorical look for the video was influenced by female Surrealist painters such as Leonora Carrington and especially Remedios Varo (the shot of two Madonnas, faces in mirrors, on a bench in water is a literal staging of the Varo painting "The Lovers"). Filmed over 5 days in 1994 and directed by Mark Romanek, the video is part of the permanent collection at MOMA New York. At the time of shooting, it was the most expensive music video ever made, coming in at $5 million.

http://www.madonna.com/