Seven Songs Meme

Tagged once again, by Suburban Mum this time.

The rules:-
List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to.

Tagging seven other people is hard (especially when they're lacksadaisical about blogging; I'm eyeballing you, Frau Genau), so if you're interested to pick up the thread, feel free.

Anyhow, here is my selection of the moment.

1. Armand van Helden: You don't know me. There's just something so upbeat to the melody of this song, that it makes me want to dance.



2. Yazoo: Situation. We watched an interesting movie last week, based on The Rules of Attraction by Brett Easton Ellis. The movie was so-so, but at least it reminded me of this fantastic song by Yazoo. By the way, they were on tv on Saturday evening during Wossy's show.



3. Mick Hucknall: Farther on up the road. I heard this played live on Later with Jools Holland last Saturday and I simply loved it. For those in the UK, catch it on bbc's iplayer.

4. The Human League: see below for Love Action, which has to be the top song on my list at the moment.

5. The Blue Nile: Tinseltown in the Rain. My all-time favourite. It won't ever go away.




6. Devendra Banhart: Samba Vexillographica. In my defense, what can I say. It just stuck in my head. The video is someone's own creation (not mine, I hasten to add), with a certain old school charm to it.



7. And last but not least, la belle Kylie: Wow! The insistent wow-wow-wow-wow in this song is so catchy and the song generally so summery, that it has me hopping through the house and swinging on my bike.



You might have guessed from my selection that a lot of it has to do with the gym and keeping a certain rhythm under the glare of Gerda, the torture meister...

The meme also said that I had to stick with the seven songs that I'm into RIGHT NOW, so I had to whittle it down a little and couldn't include Bjork's Aeroplane, Offenbach's Les Oiseaux dans la Charmille, Madonna's Don't Tell me, Caetano Veloso's Cucurrucu Paloma, Cheba Djenet's C'est fini, j'en ai marre, Schubert's Gesang uber den Wassern, and many others. But I digress. There you have my seven. Feel free to post your own selection and linkback.

Madonna mia!

You have to wonder what the adoption authorities in Malawi, who are completing the adoption process for Madonna's third child, David Banda, make of this.

I hate to gripe on Madonna, but seriously, we've been there, you've done it, Madge, and some of us even bought the t-shirt. The tsunami following her deep throat kisses with Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera rippled through the world press at the time and I remember thinking that I couldn't understand why she was pitching la Spears to us, when Christina Aguilera had so much more to offer, including a voice for example. We all know what happened since: Britney Spears imploded on herself and her career (remember that disastrous performance at the MTV music awards), while Christina Aguilera reinvented the forties with some good music and had a stable family.

This... well, this is so passé. She's made some great music, I have diligently bought her cds, but now I have to ask myself: Am I getting too old for Madonna, or is she simply getting too old for me?

4 minutes...

The munchkin's been doing a cute imitation of Madonna's new song "4 minutes to save the world", singing 'tick tock tick tock' with a huge grin on her face. It beats hearing 'gimme gimme gimme' from the backseat by a long stretch (caused by being inadvertently subjected to Britney Spears' latest hit).

But let's examine the Material Girl's latest output: am I comfortable with the fact that she looks like someone took an eraser to her face? Not so. The corsetry? Nice, but been there, done that. Coming on to Justin Timberlake? Pffft. Janet Jackson did that years ago, and showed us a boob in the process. The body? I admire her stamina, but I hate to think what she will look like by 75.
The song itself? Well, it sort of crawls up on you, takes you by surprise, and then you find yourself humming it for days on end.

But I find myself missing that cutting edge that characterised her music and videos in the 80s and 90s... Twenty-five years since it hit me, the Madonna Effect is MIA.

So, as yet, no Hard Candy for me.

oh she was gorgeous - Fouquet's Madonna

I had one of those weeks where I have been working like a dog again. But in the last two days some exciting museum-related jobs landed on my desk, which will keep me happy through February. So, reflecting on my home town's museums, I thought about the extraordinary painting of the Madonna by Jean Fouquet, which rests in the hallowed halls of the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp.

The painting itself is striking, surreal almost, considering it was painted by the artist somewhere around 1450. The second panel of the Melun dyptich, which depicts its benefactor, resides in Berlin. It is said that the person who sat for the Madonna is Agnès Sorel, the first mistress of a French king to be officially recognized as such. Sadly, the power that Mlle Sorel amalgamated over King Charles VII and the court at Chinon did not do her much good, as she eventually died, from mercury poisoning. The order was probably given by the heir to the throne.

What is interesting about this work first and foremost, is of course the apple-like exposed breast at the centre of the painting. French kings seemed to be infatuated with their mistresses' breasts. For instance, did you know that the "coupe de champagne" apparently was modelled on the breast of Jeanne Poisson, better known as Madame de Pompadour (all I can say is, judging by our champagne coupes, that there was not much to write home about... an A cup at the most. So pour me seconds please.).

You will also notice the lack of angular shapes in this painting. Everything is curvy, or rounded, even the nude, chubby angels, who are positively glistening. The rounded shapes contrast with the angular, distant manner in which the mother holds the child on that pristine white silk.

Also, the angels are not staring adoringly at the mother and child. In fact only one gazes in their direction, and his eyes actually are oriented beyond the painting, to us, as it were.

And finally, the colour of the angels themselves. All I can think of is latex. Lots of latex. I was thinking about making a remark about the French tricolore, but that would have required Fouquet to have a glass ball to predict the Révolution... and the French flag... so I'll just leave it at that.
Anyway, I just thought to share this treasure with you, so I posted it among my gorgeous offerings.

You can take the girl out of the eighties...

but you can't take the eighties out of the girl :-)
I'm sorry, I simply couldn't fight the urge...





* I should add that this is technically from 1990 but to me it closes a rather emblematic decade.