Laura More
Mauricette Atencio
Hurricane Laura's top wind speeds nearly doubled in just 24 hours as it approached the border between Texas and Louisiana. The wall of water it pushed in front of it grew until forecasters warned that it would produce "unsurvivable" storm surge.
Laura's rapid intensification is one hallmark of climate change. As the Earth warms up, the water on the surface of the ocean gets hotter. Hot water is like a battery charger for hurricanes; it send energy and moisture into the storm as it forms and helps it grow more powerful and deadly.
"This is concerning because hurricanes that rapidly intensify before landfall are the hardest ones to prepare for," says Masters, because there is less time for people to evacuate or find local shelters than can withstand highly destructive wind speeds.
This is a story which takes in a largely forgotten 80s singer songwriter, bare bottoms, and a sweating, salivating former prime minister. It's a story of regret, longing, and the short-lived effects of sudden fame. Along the way we'll meet movie stars and aerobics instructors. We'll learn about ourselves and the lives of others. This is the story of the video for "Call on Me" by Eric Prydz.
Every story has a beginning. Ours takes place in a flat in London. Huse Monfaradi, a director at the start of his career, was put forward for a music video job by a friend working at Ministry of Sound, the label who released Prydz's charbusting filter-house smash hit. "The commissioner from MoS was a friend of mine," Huse tells me down the phone, "and he said, "look this is a good opportunity, it's going to be a big track, you should do it." I wrote a really throwaway idea, about sexual aerobics. It was that simple." The idea that came to him within a minute of hearing the record for the first time went on to become one of the most significant pieces of public art of the 21st century.
"Call on Me" is a video that lives long in the memory. Even now, hearing just a split second of it on the radio is all you need to be transported to that sweaty, sexy, lewd, and incredibly crude aerobics class. While we've become so desensitized to sex that you half expect Antiques Roadshow to feature a bukkake scene or two, there's something so genuinely real about the video, something so almost tactile about it, so genuinely filled with priapic longing and lycra-encased lust that watching it now, feels like an act of genuine transgression.
"In pre-production, in shooting, in post production, even in editing, I don't think anyone really felt it was over the top, or extraordinary or even erotic," Huse remembers. Now, given that this is a video in which an aerobics instructor, played by Deanne Berry, and her crew of nimble bodied dancers virtually fuck a sweat-soaked lone male, played with gusto by Juan Pablo Di Pace, over a thuddingly monotonous, MDMA-spangled soundtrack, that might seem like a slightly naive attitude. After all, this is a video so saucy that disgraced warmongering former-PM Tony Blair actually fell off his rowing machine while watching it for the first time. For a second, if I can be so bold, imagine that scene: Blair, in his little white Donnay socks and shiny PE shorts, probably wearing a grubby old t-shirt with some Labour slogan on the front, pumping away on the machine, his biceps glistening with sweat, his teeth clenched, his whole body arching and straining, like a dolphin trying to break free of one of John West's infernal nets, a semi billowing around his boxers, eyes on stalks watching "Call on Me" for the first time. There's a fall and a thud and Cherie arrives, barging into the No.10 gym, aghast at the sight that's unfolding. That's how salacious a video it was, and still is.
The video, for all of Huse's efforts, wouldn't have been the video it is had it not been for the fundamental thing that makes "Call on Me" as memorable as it is: the dancers. Now, dancing and dancers are an elemental part of pop music and have been ever since Elvis started shaking his dick around on stage so much that American broadcasters had to film him from the waist up. Pop music makes people want to sing, cry, fuck, and dance. "Call on Me" probably makes a certain kind of person want to do all of those at once. So, like any rational person writing an article about the video for "Call on Me" by Eric Prydz, I tried to track down those dancers. Things didn't pan out as planned.
Before beginning the research for this article, I thought I knew what a sad sentence was. I'd read enough novels to have a slight grasp on what a bleak, destructive, genuinely depressing and depressing collection of words was. Now I know I've been wrong all this time. The single darkest thing you can ever, ever read is thus:
The final resting home for most of the "Call on Me" cast was here, at Music Video Babes, a website dedicated to cataloging the various babes who've appeared in music videos over the years. The site has little time for anything that even resembles traditional biography, preferring to stay firmly rooted in the realm of Physical Anonymity, where all that matters is those all important vital statistics. There's something, probably mildly significant, to be said about the reduction of a human being to a set of numbers, but this is a piece about a tawdry bit of masturbatory nonsense that sold a lot of records and kept Kleenex in business for a while so we'll leave that article to someone a bit brighter.
The point is thus: despite being in possession of bodies which thanks to their brief moment of fame are almost instantaneously recognizable, these dancers are nothing but anonymous cyphers, empty vessels. And so what? Most of us go through life without making a mark. Most of us live and work and die and are remembered only by a select few who go on to die themselves, and eventually, our name, all of our names, become nothing more than a whisper in the wind. It doesn't matter that Franky Wedge didn't go on to become a massive celebrity. Because that isn't the point of art. Art does more than that. Art makes us immortal. Art is both a way of celebrating corporeality and totally destroying it.
It should play on a permanent loop at the entrance of the National Gallery, for this is the real art of the people. It is a perfect capsule, a pristine embodiment of early 21st century desire. It is fetishistic and inclusive at the same time. It speaks to all of us, whether we'd like to admit it or not.
The best thing about "Call on Me?" It nearly never happened. We were very, very nearly robbed of it's throbbing delights. "Half an hour into shooting it," Huse tells me, "we lost all power. A digger cut through the power lines and we nearly scrapped it for an insurance job." A world without the video for "Call on Me" is a world that's nigh on unimaginable. Deanne and Juan and the rest may have vanished, but they'll always be there, in our hearts, in our minds, in our pants.
Here at Kwiziq, we're a mixed team of language enthusiasts, with different approaches to how and where we most enjoy using our language skills. Dotted around the globe working from home offices, we don't often get a chance to sit down and have a chat. So I thought it would be a good idea to get to know some of my colleagues better and introduce them to you through a series of interviews.
I always wanted to live in France and eventually did, for 6 years, but I found that it was just too cold for me, even in the south. Je suis trs frileuse, as they say. My husband and I spent 9 months in Costa Rica, which I loved - I often told him that we could stay there if it were a French-speaking country. And then we visited Guadeloupe, which is the best of both worlds: a tropical climate that is part of France. I would love to have a little pied--terre in Athens as well, because it's such a great city and I have a lot of good friends there.
1) In my early 20s, I was a belly dancer - sword balanced on my head, dancing around tables while the audience stuck money in my harem pants, the whole shebang. I started out taking classes at an adult education center. My class eventually performed regularly in a Greek restaurant and we were hired for a couple of parties. I also danced solo at a friend's wedding reception.
How? Out of what?
The most common ingredients are cashews, almonds, tofu, and deodorized coconut oil, which is unique in that it's solid when cold but liquid at room temperature, and therefore helps non-dairy butter and certain cheeses melt like their traditional counterparts.
3) I dabble in all kinds of different arts and crafts, including collages (paper, metal), painting (silk, watercolor, acrylic), mosaics, mobiles and pottery. Years ago I made a bunch of mobiles from recycling materials (plastic jugs, cans). The mobile behind my desk is made mostly from gold sheet metal, cut with tin snips, and the figures dance in the slightest breeze.
I always have an eye out for interesting materials that may, some day, inspire me to do something. I have a huge box of junk - I mean colorful paper, textured packaging materials, interesting bottles ....
Are you inspired by any particular artists?
Not in my own art. I mean, I love Van Gogh but I don't make any effort to paint like him. And I absolutely adore the architect Antoni Gaud. I was completely blown away the first time I visited Barcelona - and the second and third. His work inspires me personally - I just didn't know you could do things like that; he inspires me to be more creative in my life, not just in art.
And I love Moroccan Arabic's informal negation ما ... ش (ma ... sh). It has two parts, like French ne ... pas, but it's not restricted to verbs. For example, ما فهمتش (ma fhemtsh) = I don't understand; that's easy enough. But also ما مزيانش (ma meziansh) = not good. There's no verb; the negation surrounds just the adjective "good."
I studied Arabic through Spanish. When my husband and I lived in Casablanca, we wanted to learn Darija (the local, spoken dialect of Arabic), but the only classes we could find were for Classical Arabic. A few months before we left, we discovered that the Instituto Cervantes (Spanish language and cultural center) offered Darija classes, and of course they were taught in Spanish so that's how we finally got to learn some.