Amazing Grace

 

Grace Jones on the Pee Wee Herman Christmas Special from 1988

Jones clip via the fascinating, poignant HBO documentary on Pee Wee Herman, which shows how much he came out of the whole Andy Warhol / Theatre of the Ridiculous / Angels of Light / John Waters lineage

A fellow traveler with Club 52, B-52s, Klaus Nomi (some image cross over there), Devo et al

An ancestor (in his collecting of kooky Americana) of World of Wonder  

Paul Reubens was also an alumnus of Cal Arts, doing performance art and weird films and such... a trip to see shaky old super-8 footage of things performed in the corridors and halls that are now very familiar to me 

The Grace Jones appearance is almost like this

filtered through this 

Until the doc I never even heard of this big bump in the upward trajectory of his career 

For reasons best known to himself he wanted to have the longest kiss in cinema history

mirror mirror mon amour

 

“When I was modelling, I spent half my life staring at thousands of perfect reflections. It got to a stage where I was losing all sense of reality, so after I quit modeling, I took all the mirrors out of my house.”

- Grace Jones, 1981, on sitting shiva for her media-ghostified self

"Who can account for facial expressions made in a mirror of people?" - Iggy Pop

Nightclubbing we're nightclubbing

We're what's happening

Nightclubbing we're nightclubbing

We're an ice machine

Nightclubbing we're nightclubbing

We walk like a ghost

We learn dances brand new dances

Like the nuclear bomb

Written by Sting, covered by Grace but could equally have done for Iggy - it's almost like a rewrite of "Search and Destroy" 

"it only takes a camera to change her mind"

photophilia (Grace / Amanda)

 

I am a glossy photograph

I am in color and softly lit

Overexposed and well blown up

Carefully printed and neatly cut

You can look at me for hours

I won't mind, I'll let you dream

From the page of a magazine

I am a glossy photograph

Of course I am a bit retouched

And my color has been processed

But cameras always erase

Fear lurking behind a face

I am a lie and I am gold

But I shall never grow old

My lips are parted

But they're not for kissing

My eyes are open

But I'm not listening

My breasts are round

But my heart is missing

I'm a photograph, I'm a photograph

I'm better than the real thing

I am a glossy photograph

I am appearing by the magic

Of a Nikon Automatic

Maybe I'm just a piece of paper

But some think that I am better

Cause photographs do not complain

Or cry, or love, or suffer

Or cry, or love, or suffer

Or cry, or love, or suffer

"I am a Photograph" is the title of a song by Amanda Lear (1977), which Sabranski is performing with 35 % accelerated speed playback and synchron. He is sitting in a close up in front of a wood structured wall paper and is wearing different eye masks, made of different photographs. In the beginning the masks change in time with the music and are accompanied by studio lightning. When the voice comes in till the end of the video Sabranski is wearing the same mask. The lyrics of the songs are telling from the perspective of the photograph, the different working steps in the developing process of a photograph and their different aspects.

Cf