Tom Waits on Ken Nordine

Ken Nordine, yeah I know that guy, I heard his voice 1000 times, he’s the guy in the bus station that says “go ahead I’ll keep an eye on your stuff for you,” and you see him the next day walking around town wearing your clothes. He broadcasts from the boiler room of the Wilmont Hotel with 50,000 watts of power. I know that voice, he’s the guy with the pitchfork in your head saying go ahead and jump, and he’s the ambulance driver who tells you you’re going to pull thru. He’s the guy in the control tower who talked you down in a storm with a hole in your fuselage and both engines on fire. I heard him barking thru the Rose Alley Carnival strobe as samurai firemen were pulling hose. Yeah, he’s the dispatcher with the heart of gold, the only guy up this late on the suicide hotline. Ken Nordine is the real angel sitting on the wire in the tangled matrix of cobwebs that holds the whole attic together. Yeah, Ken Nordine, he’s the switchboard operator at the Taft Hotel, the only place in town you can get a drink at this hour. You know Ken Nordine, he’s the lite in the icebox, he’s the blacksmith on the anvil in your ear.

Harlem Shuffle ~ Hot Joints from the Beat Barbecue

There follows an eclectic and esoteric selection of tunes, all of which have recently graced casa del ionesco's boomin' system. The only common denominator is that they have refloated my capsized boat/relit my fading fire/swung my cobwebbed chandelier/got my geriatric groove going and/or found gainful employment for my recalcitrantly idle mojo:

Hank Levine & His Orchestra ~ Image Part 1
Goldfrapp ~ Lovely Head & Pilots
Nikki Giovanni ~ Ego Tripping
Ray Bryant ~ Up Above the Rock
Massive Attack featuring Terry Callier ~ Live With Me
Cornelius ~ Drop
Jenny Evans ~ In the Name of Love
Flora Purim ~ Preciso Aprender A Ser Só
Tenth & Parker featuring Mark Murphy ~ Kool Down
Ken Nordine ~ Faces in the Jazzamatazz
De-Phazz ~ Chez Clerambault
This Kid Named Miles ~ Ring of Fire
RJD2 ~ Ghostwriter
Flying Pop's ~ Côte Ouest

Graeme Jamieson ~ Descendissent & Two-Paced Poverty of Mind

Descendissent

I'm not a New Yorker,
Though I do own a monocle,
While my ol' Pict patrimony
points to an apple-eyed,
retroactiview of
amalgamation,
emendation,
integration,
occupation,
and unification,
as the static,
pentagrammatic avowals
of all new nouns, towns,
and nations.

Two-Paced Poverty of Mind

Madness creeps.
Ofttimes it leaps.
In the still of airs.
Or with solar flares:
Stuttering to move.
Often cutting a groove.
Like Mythe: If only slightly so.
Or/either: intending to cop and blow.
Upped or magnetically Poled.
More by way of through-put.
Leaving not, nor bulbs or fruits.
Lest there are roots therein.
Where iffy splendidz begin.
Next-of-splintered,
a hungering junkie.
With heavy permeability.
High in man de tact.
Tangled thick with time,
one de facto lacks:
Heel-toed spirit-levels.
Listless?
Mist is.
Tipped for riches and gifts.
Dipped in a reality of grift.
While illusion carves its bent,
Dial delusion, curve the scent.
Extracting feelings to bury.
Retract reality: Hurry.

Graeme Jamieson

Massive Attack featuring Terry Callier ~ Live With Me ~ video

Jonathan Glazer's video for Massive Attacks's insidiously sexy, soulful urban blues ballad "Live With Me", featuring the vocal talents of the sublime Terry Callier, can be found here

Graeme Jamieson ~ V for Vendetta

V for Vendetta lacks any singular element of élan and, for me, it seems to be as flavourless, overrated, and set on sand, as its source material was, back in '83.

Before I tear in, let me begin by saying that I sincerely believe the Wachowski's simply can't write charismatic scripts. It seems that, somewhere along the road between Whitney M. Young Magnet High in Illinois, and the heady heights of an audience with 'The Architect' insisting 'Zion' was already five-times destroyed, they bypassed their Curie Point, and became artistically null and void.

For a moment, lets forget their next trick, and remember that for their last flick, they refused to do any press, interviews, or photo-ops whatsoever, insisting that 'the material' must speak for itself. Well, I'd advance a theory that it spoke volumes for 'the gimmies', and made these small men susceptible to complex, Napoleonic allegations of being greedy, self-abased elves, doing a pseudo ladder-shimmy.

I'd reason that it offers a retrospective ray of light for why they've chosen to now make an entire picture around an incuriously expressionless hero, while adding a salty insult to a stinging injury, by wasting the collective talents of Hurt, Graves, Biddle and Mazzotti. Sure, wearing a full facemask peels eyes over pulped pages, but on-screen it made 'V' oh-so-resistible, and for that you have to shoulder arms' blame onto those schnook sibling sages.

You would think that a comic book caper would fit right into their overuse of overhead shots, particularly given that trenchmate James Matrix McTeigue directed again here, but it takes more than a signature storyboard gimmick to hit the limit and break the skin that quickly formed over the top of this not-so-hot soupy shizit.

Further, for a screenplay with such dusty dialogue, it's doubly disappointing to say that neither the effects, the sound, the furious fantasy, or even the au courant arc save the day.

Less than intriguingly, the Wack Bros. have also written what is reckoned to be one of "the best unproduced films ever," at least according to Empire anyway. It's called Carnivore, and it remains frozen in their digital domain, somewhere between the cutting room floor and where the rain gets in by the bottom shelf. Perhaps art imitated life, and it ate itself?

Graeme Jamieson

Donald Fagen's tribute to Ray Charles: "What I Do"

Gone are the days when I smuggled a new Donald Fagen, or Steely Dan, album across the threshold of casa del ionesco with all the guilty anticipation and incredulous anxiety of the class nerd who, inexplicably, charmed the prom queen and couldn't quite believe he was about to be accorded the privilege of unwrapping such an aesthetically-appealing alien artefact at his leisure, and for his pleasure, within the comfort of his own apartment.

Passing immediate judgement on Don's (and the Dan's) output is inadvisable. As I said in Planet Dan :

A statutory prohibition should be placed upon Dan reviews until such time as the reviewer has adequately assimilated their latest languorous, languid, bittersweet, blissful, cryptic, cynical, entrancing, encoded communiqué into the bloodstream.

Like love affairs Don & Walt’s work can only be evaluated and contextualized in retrospect. As assuredly as ephemeral lipstick traces mutate into life's lingering leitmotifs, the Dan’s spectral melodies and enigmatic lyrics haunt past, present and future, defying definition.

If Morph the Cat never quite promises to be an inexhaustible repository of "sensations which stagger the mind", à la Aja or The Nightfly, it clearly contains at least one stone-cold Don classic. Fagen's tribute to Ray Charles, What I Do, is superb, and the lyric is as erotically-energised as doing wrong with Miss Right in Manhattan at midnight:

I say Ray, why do girls treat you nice that way
He said it's not what I know, what I think or say
It's what I do, It's what I do
It's deep beneath the skin
It's what I major in
It's what I do

Yes I come to play and I bring big soul
Well I could rock long before they named it
Rock & roll
It's what I do, it's what I do
I'm specially qualified
To keep 'em satisfied
It's what I do

You turn the lamp down low
And make her feel secure
You gotta show the girl
That she's the one you adore
If you want that sugar to pour

You bring some church but you leave no doubt
As to what kind of love you love to shout about
Its what I do, its what I do
If you can't dance by now The Raelettes will show you how
It's what I do

You turn the lamp down low
And make her feel secure
You gotta show the girl
That she's the one you adore
If you want that sugar to pour

He says Don don't despair- just take some time
You find your bad self- you're going to do just fine
It's what I do, it's what I do
It's not some game I play
It's in my DNA
It's what I do

Husain Naqvi ~ Critical Digressions: The Simple Violence of “The Sopranos”

I share Bob Geldof's distaste for Mondays, but a brisk workout, a bracing shower and an invigorating transfusion of insight, courtesy of a typically perspicacious critical digression from the brilliant Husain Naqvi, over at 3QuarksDaily, have refreshed both my gin-soaked body and testosterone-clouded mind.

From 3QuarksDaily:

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,

Since our incarnation as a destitute and sometimes diligent academic, we haven’t possessed a TV, much less cable. We lead a wonderfully Spartan life here in Cambridge, reading, writing, braving the Massachusetts winter. Like hermits, ascetics, Eskimos, or those lost natives of the Amazon with dangling members, it seems we have also lost the talent for chit-chat, small talk. Consequently, the opening episode of “The Sopranos” Season Six presented us with a project. We had to call up old friends, mend tenuous if not severed relationships, invest in wine, crackers, a pricy lump of cheese. It was an awkward encounter, a bona fide production.

Had Tony been in a similar predicament, he would have done things differently: the balding, bearish, flinty-eyed Soprano antihero would have showed up unannounced, yelled at his host (arguably Arty), consumed the six-pack he brought for himself, sprawled on the couch, hand jammed in trousers, cradling his testicles. Strangely, we understand the impulse. In fact, we have a visceral appreciation of Tony’s likes and dislikes, his aspirations and motivations, his rages, his lusts. Even Tony’s theme song, the moody, bluesy A3 number, resonates in quiet cantons of our head most mornings during Soprano season:

“When you woke up this morning everything you had was gone/
By half past ten your head was going ding-dong/
Ringing like a bell from your head down to my toes/
Like a voice telling you there was something you should know/
Last night you were flying but today you’re so low/
Ain’t it times like these that make you wonder/
If you’ll ever know the meaning of things as they appear to the others…”

Typically, we’d consider having our head checked. After all, identifying with a sociopath is always a troubling development. And Tony is not a mere sociopath; he’s serial adulterer, a misogynist, a man who considered murdering his own mother. He has no real friends and has people he calls friends murdered. He is a very, very bad man.

We have, of course, empathized with such men before, from Richard III to Patrick Bateman, American Psycho. In American popular culture, the antihero has a rich heritage. The protagonists that populate the canon of film noir, for instance, are real pieces of work. Mike Hammer, the antihero of “Kiss Me Deadly” (1955), is, as his name suggests, not a charming rogue but a brute. A commentator characterizes him as a “cheap and sleazy, contemptible, fascist private investigator/vigilante.” Hammer’s doppelgangers populate other genres of cinema, from the cool, squinty, monosyllabic and violent Blondie in the late Western, “The Good, Bad and Ugly” (1967) to the raging, foul-mouthed Cuban gangster, Tony Montana in DePalma’s gangster film, “Scarface” (1983).

Interestingly, David Liao makes the case that Scarface has even influenced gangsta rap:

“Perhaps no movie has had as conspicuous an impact on hip-hop, and more specifically the genre’s gangsta variation, as ‘Scarface’…Since its release, [it] has lent its dialogue, music, fashion and imagery to countless rap artists and their songs, such as Notorious B.I.G’s ‘10 Crack Commandments’ and Mobb Deep’s ‘It’s Mine.’ One rapper has even gone so far as to adopt ‘Scarface’ as a stage name, and build an entire career around references to the movie. Indeed, two decades later, it seems as if the very essence of De Palma’s film has been assimilated by the hip-hop community, or at least a highly prolific segment of it. Evidence of this can be seen in the 2003 album ‘Def Jam Recordings Present Music Inspired by Scarface,’ a compilation of songs by artists including Jay-Z, N.W.A, Ice Cube and even Grandmaster Flash.”

There may be some resonance of the classic American antihero in the rage of old-school gangsta rap but its ethos is informed by a different variety of disestablishmentarianism. Institutional racism dates back not more than a couple of generations and continues to exert itself. NWA’s beef with the police has little to do with Hammer and Blondie, Tony Soprano or Tony Montana. Their anthemns concern certain ground realities; in particular, the reality of being a young black man on the streets of Compton, LA:

“*uck tha police comin’ straight from the underground/
Young *igga got it bad cuz I’m brown
And not the other color so police think
They have the authority to kill a minority…

*uckin with me cuz I’m a teenager/
With a little bit of gold and a pager/
Searchin’ my car, lookin’ for the product/
Thinkin’ every *igga is sellin’ narcotics…”

Of course, this raw sentiment has since been appropriated and cheapened by hip-hop, repackaged and marketed for an audience of young white men who wear baggy jeans and tilted caps and furiously mouth manifestos while listening to their I-Pods. Faraway, in the banlieus of urban France, young North African men find meaning in hip-hop, in what Staley Crouch calls the “thug-and-slut minstrelsy,” and roving child soldiers in Sierra Leone also listen to it while hacking off limbs.

But perhaps we shouldn’t treat this generation with too much sarcasm. After all, back in the day, we listened to NWA as well (and can spout lyrics on demand). Why, boys and girls, are we all drawn to the antihero, black, or white?

Montana sagaciously mulled this question before us and arrived at the following conclusion:

“Whattaya lookin’ at? You’re all a bunch of *ucking *ssholes. You know why? ‘Cause you don’t have the guts to be what you wanna be. You need people like me. You need people like me so you can point your *ucking fingers, and say ‘that’s the bad guy.” So, what dat make you? Good? You're not good; you just know how to hide. Howda lie. Me, I don’t have that problem. Me, I always tell the truth--even when I lie. So say goodnight to the bad guy. Come on; the last time you gonna see a bad guy like this, let me tell ya. Come on, make way for the bad guy. There’s a bad guy comin’ through; you better get outta his way!”

In this rather brilliant discursive philosophic pose, Montana seems to be suggesting the symbiotic duality of good and evil, an echo of the Zoroastrian creation myth, the Sufi malamti tradition, the business of Yin and Yang. Also inherent in his response is an allusion to Freudian tension, the Ego grating against the Id. (We here must note that we agree when Nabokov when he says, “Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts.”) Parsing Montana’s pithy treatise is a project for a bigger, better man. We return, then, to our initial impulse, Tony Soprano, and pose a different, perhaps more interesting question altogether: why does “The Sopranos” command such popularity in America today?

That Tony is a sociopathic leader may have some resonance among a segment of the voting populace but this variety of exegesis seems somewhat facile to us (and as a young Muslim male in America today, not at all advisable.) No, we suspect that apart from being an intelligent, dramatic show (when every other critically feted production these days seems to be peculiarly undramatic, whether we’re talking “Capote,” “Good Night and Good Luck” or “A History of Violence”), “The Sopranos” evokes nostalgia for a simpler time, for simpler violence.

After 9/11, America, indeed the world, changed. The scourge of international terrorism suddenly threatened civilization. A “War On Terror” was waged. Now, there are different ground realties. Iraqis are daggers drawn, their country teetering on civil war. The Afghans have a smart new leader but continue shooting themselves in the foot as they have throughout their bloody history. And somewhere in the southern Afghanistan, in and around Helmand, lurks Osama bin Laden, and his one-eyed pal, Mullah Omar (who corroborates the proverbial theory that “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king”). They are figures we cannot identity with. Tony Soprano may be a very bad guy but he’s goodfella. He whacks some people; he scratches his balls; he’s the sort of antihero we get. It’s kind of like the sage once said, “All I have in this world is my balls, and my word, and I don’t break ‘em for no one. Jou understand?” We do.

Husain Naqvi

Who was John Fante?

from Salon.com

In his current book, "An Offer We Can't Refuse: The Mafia in the Mind of America," George De Stefano bemoans the fact that young Italian Americans know themselves only through skewed popular images: "They know all about John Gotti but not John Fante." Unfortunately, you don't have to be Italian American not to know who John Fante was, though perhaps a few more will discover his work thanks to Robert Towne's adaptation of Fante's best-known novel, "Ask the Dust," starring Colin Farrell and Salma Hayek, which opens March 10.

If it weren't for Charles Bukowski, who regarded Fante as his (please excuse the term, but it applies) literary godfather and who dedicated poems to him, it's likely that few would remember Fante's name today. Bukowski, who was known in the early part of his literary career to go around shouting, "I am Arturo Bandini!" in tribute to Fante's ebullient, raw-nerved literary alter ego, was instrumental in getting Fante's books back into print in the late '70s, shortly before Fante's death in 1983. (Twelve of his books are currently in print from Ecco, including all four of the Arturo Bandini novels.)

Fante -- the name rhymes with Dante, which must have afforded no end of amusement to someone whose best-known character constantly proclaimed a desire to be "the world's greatest writer" -- is one of the true bad boys of 20th century American literature. Born in 1909 and raised in an Italian American ghetto in, of all places, Boulder, Colo., Fante fits into no particular niche. Many refer to him as the quintessential L.A. novelist -- not exactly the most glowing of recommendations, but one that does take in, after all, Raymond Chandler and Nathanael West, whose "Day of the Locust" was published in 1939, the same year as "Ask the Dust." (Michael Tolkin, author of "The Player," is a longtime admirer of Fante's work. He recently told the Los Angeles Times that if the Los Angeles school system was serious about its curriculum, it would "make 'Ask the Dust' mandatory reading.")

Others have called him the big brother of the Beats. Italian Americans have never known quite what to do with him; second-generation Italian Americans might display a copy of "Christ in Concrete" by Pietro Di Donato on their bookshelves (as my father did), even though Di Donato was a communist, because, after all, he had achieved some measure of respect in the literary world, as few Italian Americans had. But John Fante was notorious. My father's generation didn't read him, or didn't admit to reading him, which is a shame because in many ways he was the writer who most embodied the hopes, dreams and insecurities of the children of immigrants.

Allen Barra

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Swingin' Sounds for Hipsters: iMix

I've just put together an iMix called Swingin' Sounds for Hipsters (hipster jazz, hepcat swing, laid-back lounge & beatnik beats).

Cintra Wilson ~ Oscar Castrates Himself

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Graeme Jamieson ~ The Instrumental Struggle

I watched a really interesting programme last night on the old tube. Jon Snow, from Channel 4 News, presented a segment of the show live from Iran. They'll be doing this every night all week, in what is surely the first production of its kind for a Western-type current affairs team.

For a half-hour, I watched and wondered as this award-winning programme juxtaposed a live interview with Dr Ali A. Larijani, Iran's Chief Negotiator for Nuclear Issues at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna, with some bellicosely brazen rhetoric brimming from America's UN Ambassador, Mr John R. Bolton, to a hand-picked horde of Israeli sympathisers.

Now, I'm totally Swiss when it comes to matters of the dark arts of international diplomacy, and by that I mean: I'm nobody's "hater". So, it's with the clearest of conscience that I reveal my wonder at who is the real wrong-doer here, and who is taking an understandable view of national security. By the time the piece finished, amid a segued sequence of voluble vox pops from Capitol Hill hawks, one could have justifiably joked to oneself: "These Yanks are nuts!"

There are scores of arguments on both sides, of course...

For, it is undeniable that Iran has benefitted from the quagmire the US has created inside Iraq – but whose fault is that, folks? – while allegations continue to persist of Iranian intervention on behalf of various insurgent factions therein. Yet, Iran has assisted the US-led Coalition in Afghanistan, and this despite there being zero prospect of a US Embassy reopening in Tehran.

If the recent remarks attributed to the Iranian President by sections of the Western media – about "wiping Israel off the map" – are obviously outrageous, you've got to keep in mind the geography of incitement: Israel have some 200 nuclear warheads to fiddle with, and they are constantly threatening the Iranians. (The difference is, of course, that they enjoy immunity because of their bald eagle ally).

Further, while the current administration purports to spread freedom and democracy across this sweet swinging sphere, whose model of democracy is that? Why, lets not forget already that the Palestinians recently elected Hamas by legitimate means... only to have their US-funding freezed. Remember too, that a CIA-financed coup overthrew a democratic Iranian regime in 1953, replacing them with a hand-picked despotic autocracy, and this long-before Reagan's seminal Contra hypocrisy. Of course, it is only natural to endeavour to control the proliferation of nuclear cuckolds... but it's the US, and not Iran, who is bent onto a constant war foothold.

One also has to wonder what role the international community is playing in this brinkmanship, particularly when the Russians are directly involved, and when the Chinese already have 20% of US GDP in their pocket. Contrast that with the UK, France and Germany's stance. So, who's ball-bustin' who?

My own view, is that this is an instrumental struggle, to decide who is dancing to whose tune.

We'll have to wait and see what outcome this week brings, but at least this long-running soap has, among the cast of its many cross-purposed characters, a number of diplomatic doves in Washington, who will resist the hardline hawks for as long as there is 15 Round Bout feathers flying a flag for the Rest of the World Team.

Amid all of the Muslim misrepresentation, the Secular confusion, and the media's 'misconstrusion,' let us not forget that these dudes have a sense of humour too. We'll maybe never get it, mind you, because our perspective is fit to be tied, and paralysed by way of some received dim view.

Why Dave Fell for the Texan Belle

Casa del ionesco eagerly awaits the imminent release of music and video from the collaboration between surrealist auteur, David Lynch and bewitchingly beautiful chanteuse, Chrysta Bell. In the meantime, this video, from DutchRall.com, tells us all we need to know about why Dave fell for the Texan belle:

Chrysta Bell video

Please note this is a RealPlayer video file.

When everyone feels like relaxing, what makes a glass of beer taste so good?

From Plan59.com

New Leader in the Lively Art of Electronics

From Plan59.com

Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show

From Timesonline via Arts&LettersDaily

Christopher Hart reviews "Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show" by Rachel Shteir.

The Innocence of the Striptease

Rachel Shteir’s history of the striptease is also a celebration of a vanished art form. She obviously relishes her subject, and her relish is infectious. Not for her the dour puritanism of first-wave feminists, who would insist on taking pity on their poor, exploited sisters on stage. But nor, one senses, would she subscribe to the post-feminist notion that for a woman to sport artificial GG breasts is somehow liberating and, gulp, “ empowering”. Her account of the disappearance of erotic undressing before the onslaught of hardcore porn is a sad one; because, in its heyday, striptease was a lot of glamour and fun.

Was it ever exploitative? Well, it certainly wasn’t a prelude to prostitution, as some might glibly assume; and although she finds one tragic example of a stripper who was also a heroin addict and committed suicide, it is only one case among many happier stories: tragic, but not statistically significant. Most of the women made a great deal of money, and managed their careers with a fierce independence.

Even though Shteir is a fully fledged academic (associate professor of dramaturgy and dramatic criticism at DePaul University), her writing style is elegant, vivid and mercifully free of jargon. Not for her the kind of soporific bilge spouted by too many of her peers. Indeed, she quotes a little mockingly from a forerunner of such jargon-mongers, Roland Barthes, to show the path she will not be taking. Here is the great Gallic thinker in 1957, writing on the G-string: “This ultimate triangle, by its pure and geometric form, by its brilliant and hard material, brandishes sex like a pure sword and re-imagines the woman in a mineralogical universe, the precious stone being here the irrefutable theme of the total and unuseful object.” In 1955, the French actually founded an Académie du Striptease. Thank God for les Anglo-Saxons and their pragmatism.

Shteir dwells much more on the lives of actual striptease artists than on windy abstractions or academic arguments, and this is the book’s great strength. There is a wealth of marvellous biographical detail here, with the leading players lit up in the full glare of the garish footlights. Striptease stars such as Blaze Starr, Tempest Storm, Lili St Cyr, Dodo d’Homberg and Rita Cadillac — even the names are redolent of a past age, far from a world where hardcore porn is a click away. One stripper, Sherry Britton, fainted when she first revealed herself on stage, although it seems she soon got the hang of it, and was gaily balancing glasses of water on her breasts.

Such acts could earn the girls a lot of cash. $500 a week for a top stripper was the usual rate in the 1930s, and $1,000 not unheard of, at a time when, Shteir points out, the editor of Vanity Fair was earning $35 a week. The stripper Rose Zelle Rowland did even better by marrying her sugar daddy, the Belgian financier Baron d’Empain, who owned the Egyptian railway system, among other things.

A number of the women had time to develop their minds in between flaunting their bodies, more like geisha girls, or the hetaerae of ancient Greece, than modern-day porn stars. Ann Corio negotiated herself not only a grand a week plus 25% of the house take, but, when asked how she spent the time backstage between shows, said that she liked to read Spinoza and Omar Khayyam. Well paid, well read, cultured, and perhaps rather amused by the fascination that their own nakedness held for men, these were clearly no dim, exploited dollybirds.

My favourite stripper by far in this gallery of nudes must be the wonderful Gypsy Rose Lee, with her “regal persona”. The girl was Dorothy Parker in a G-string. Hard-nosed and sassy, she understood her craft precisely. “The naked skin to the naked eye is just so much epidermis,” she said. It’s what’s “hinted at rather than hollered about” that is erotic. Gypsy Rose could do an absurdly demure but tantalising routine that began with her on stage in a long polka dot skirt, like a virgin bride on her honeymoon night; or she could do an almost absent-minded routine in which she stripped right down while chatting casually to her audience about whatever came into her head, as a wife might talk to her husband in the bedroom. Perhaps that was its intimate appeal, though it could also be extremely funny. She would even teeter about on stage, rolling down her garters while explaining to her admirers why she simply couldn ’t strip to the music of Brahms.

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