My Sexy Saturday playlist wakes up languorously having slept in all morning, and now contemplates the seemingly endless (but always ending too soon) landscape of the weekend. Engulfing it are the loves of my life; namely, love, joy, dance, and a few other random obsessions. Its choices, like my life, dabble in various unrelated and dispersed engagements. Some of them are bodily, others thoughtful, and in a most un-Cartesian fashion, the twain sometimes do meet.
1. Uptown Funk: Bruno Mars ft. Mark Ronson
The afternoon gets going with some serious swag. Bruno Mars performs Uptown Funk with so much pizzazz, all of his childhood years of impersonating Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson now producing some insanely laidback dance moves. Oh, how I love myself a man who can dance. Actually, scratch that. “Anyone” who can dance. But also, there is something so seemingly “doesn’t take himself seriously” about a man who can dance. As if masculinity and femininity were merely about bodies that moved, and stole moves from each other. I so want to dance like Bruno Mars.
2. Sheila ki Jawaani
Speaking of swag, up the tempo with Katrina Kaif and Sheila ki Jawaani. Every year, I try to sneak this song into my syllabus on feminist theory, in order to illustrate consumption, spectacle, embodiment, sexuality and gender. Actually, I just want to watch her dance. But seriously, how difficult is it to see both Uptown Funk and Sheila ki Jawaani’s narcissism as instantiations of market logic? It’s almost like the two videos function as a call-and-respond dyad. Never mind. Watch the video. Dance like Katrina. Like everyone’s watching.
3. Lilies of the Valley: Jun Miyake
Keep those feet moving into evening with the hypnotic “Lilies of the Valley”. This is the only piece of Jun Miyake’s that I know, and it is fabulous. As is the video. I first heard the piece when watching the trailer for Wim Wenders’ “Pina” where men and women move in such delicate, intense, unbearably beautiful relationships to one another. I knew I was in love.
4. Django Reinhardt & Stéphane Grappelli: Minor Swing
Slow down the tempo as we head into dusk with the fabulous Django Reinhardt. Who I love. That’s all. Long years before I discovered his music, I was but of half a life, desolate and without either rhythm or reason. I became acquainted with gypsy jazz and Django Reinhardt the same year I made friends with tango, and driving, and kir royales. So there.
In the Mood for Love – Yumeji’s Theme: Shigeru Umebayashi
And last, but not the least, because we know that beauty, love, and all that is good in the world must also be accompanied by spectres of their impossibility, end Saturday with the gloriously melancholic Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung as they go about steadfastly not doing their business. Nothing so beautiful as things not fulfilled, love not meant to be, and hearts forever in longing.
Tune in to the playlist of all of Mathangi Krishnamurthy's Sexy Saturday Songs here.
Mathangi Krishnamurthy teaches anthropology for a living, and believes that critical theory will save the world. In times of frequent disbelief, she turns to fiction. And melancholia. Also Hemant Kumar.
