On Camille Paglia, for the Spectator

and some music I like!!

I wrote for the Spec again about Camille Paglia!! (and some of the things I have had to put up with during my degree - I did say on the module evaluation forms that I would be spilling the beans to the national press). Paglia was my main inspo to start writing properly, and I’m now doing it for magazines that I really like and it’s given me sooo much confidence - will be forever grateful to her. And to my editor!!!

OST for La Scuola Delle Vergini by Carlo Savina

LOL this is a 60s Czech New Wave film starring one of the girls from Daisies, but it appears to have been marketed in wider Europe as if it were a pulpy Italian sex comedy. The soundtrack by Carlo Savina is also VERY Italian giallo/what people in the know call ‘porno groove’. I did some good uni work to it!

The synths on Purple Rain

Many people were raised on 80s music but I was NOT (my parents were sheltered and had nothing to pass down). I once saw the drum machines and synthy sounds as an undesirable unrefined stage in modern pop, and then I heard Madonna’s Open Your Heart, which won me over because it sounded exactly the way I imagined the 16th century to sound... Same vibes from this!!

Ilyen ma egy lány by Judith Szűcs

Some Hungarian disco just to reinforce my point

Unforgiven Love by Linda Yamamoto

Am listening to more of the 60s-70s in J-pop as part of detective work re. the Taiwanese pop I like from the end of the 70s. This is my current standout.

Tears of a Swan by Okumura Chiyo

Also really into Okumura Chiyo, whose work gets re-released under titles like ‘Chiyo! Coquettish Bomb!’ Clearly something filtering into Japan from European ye-ye.