Consider me: my hands can not cover my breasts, I cling to them tightly to hide my shame. But also consider this: sunlit windows gaze down upon me like undeniable eyes, millions of bronze eyes; and shame turns into pride.
Jeune fille en buste 1794 by Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, a typical illustration for the blog Femme, femme, femme.
Previous entries in Icons of Erotic Art here, and in a Wiki format here.
“Oh baby, is this the woman I want to be? The door is unlocked, the windows are open, every time the place looks best for me. I said, kiss me, kiss me, kiss me again, kiss me again…”
These lyrics are from “Kiss Me Again“, a track by Arthur Russell. Listen to the entire track here (unfortunately the lesser of the two mixes of this twelve inch).
The photograph is of Maria Bonnevie, one of the more interesting actresses currently working in European cinema. She is the lead in the 2003 small masterpiece Reconstruction and the current cult favorite; Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s The Banishment.
The audio track posted above comes via here, a new blog of someone who goes by the nick fac586, what I believe to be a reference to Fac 51 Haçienda also known as just The Haçienda.
The author of this blog does an extended analysis of the song and its lyrics. Regarding the lyrics he says:
Have you ever gotten back together with someone who you shouldn’t have? I think most of us have, and I think that’s what this song is getting at, and the music tells the story even more than the words.
Deserving mention in this context is a recent article by popular music scholar Tim Lawrence, author of “Love Saves the Day” and current biographer of Arthur Russell. The article is titled “Connecting with the Cosmic: Arthur Russell, Rhizomatic Musicianship, and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-92” and connects Arthur Russell in a tired way to the theory of rhizomatics of Deleuze & Guattari.
“Kiss Me Again” is world music classic #25 and Reconstruction is world cinema classic #41