Finally, an excuse to talk about Kim Cattrall Scatting
I've been waiting for this, and as it turns out, maybe I should've kept waiting.
Not that I needed one, I suppose.
But I do have to give my thanks to both Kim Cattrall and HBO — the latter for rebooting Sex and the City because nothing can ever truly die, and the former for deciding to not be a part of it. Because the show and the actress are back in the news, Cattrall’s greatest gift to the media landscape, in my opinion, is once again relevant.
To be clear, I’ve seen about 20 seconds of SATC during either my sophomore or junior year of college when I thought maybe that would be the next show I would binge, got through the catchy opening theme and a few notes of Sarah Jessica Parker talking to her computer, and promptly got distracted, never to go back for more. In fact, outside of those 20 seconds of SATC, I don’t think I’ve watched any film or television program Cattrall’s been a part of (Ed. note: I have seen Disney’s Michelle Trachtenberg vehicle Ice Princess, which featured Cattrall, but I have no real recollection of that movie besides Trachtenberg stepping into a bucket of ice water).
However, that somehow does not disqualify me for commenting on one of the great YouTube artifacts of our generation, and the one before: Kim Cattrall Scatting.
“Now, what is that?” you may be asking. It’s as simple and concise as its title, which tells you exactly what it is in an economical three words. It’s a 42-second-video of actress (and noted poem and sonnet reader) Kim Cattrall scatting while a man next to her plays the upright base.
Two of the more popular questions this video elicits from its viewers are “what the fuck?” and “why?” As one of the leading scholars on the video simply by having written this much about it, I still haven’t necessarily found the specific answers to those broad questions. The search for them will exist, in all likelihood, perpetuity.
And that’s OK, because in the meantime, a second viewing, and each one thereafter, is an experience of sheer joy and delighted confusion. I mean, what??? What is happening? I’ve boiled that first chunk down to “yamma kippee yay bo, setta ray fokaybo, indoor Latin he quoth, yoojay savasooRAY.” Grammatically, that last bit is in all-caps. This ostensibly means nothing to most people, probably everyone on the planet except for Cattrall herself. What really intrigues me is breaking up the complete jibberish with “indoor Latin he quoth,” which certainly are real words, but don’t make any kind of sense juxtaposed with each other in any order, much less the one she chose. The beauty, though, is that it’s fully up to interpretation. YouTube user Natalie Alcazar has the top comment on the video, and her ears heard: “Yahma kippa yaybo Sedda rayfa kayba window latin E quo You jay Sabba Souray!” More or less the same, but different enough when you look closer — like a snowflake. To each their own.
After the camera slides down to a beautiful Dutch angle, the second part makes a very small inkling of sense: “Well, he bit all the he-dogs and winked at all the she-dogs” *jump cut* “The town never knew such a hullaballoo as that little dog raised ‘til the end of that day.” I’m never, never going to get over that jump cut in the middle. What are we missing??? A half-second? Another two to three lines of improvisational jazz and a story about a womanizing dog? Regardless, what really caps off the spoken-word performance is the little head-bob Cattrall does along with the bouncy bass notes — she’s so pleased with herself. As she should be.
Whatever this was filmed for clearly had questions about what was going on, because in a talking head sequence that makes up the last 10 seconds of the video, Cattrall elaborates about the relationship she has with the bassman, as if the artistic connection and expression we just witness wasn’t enough: “We just have a good rhythm together, you know? He feels me out, I feel him out, and we go for it.” He seemed pretty lowkey, but Cattrall was undeniably going for it.
For a video that has for so long occupied too much space in my mind, I had done surprisingly little digging into any of the context surrounding it, of which I assumed there was none. It may have been funnier if I had never tried to find any, but reader, I did.
First, the video itself. As we’ve established, it’s titled “Kim Cattrall Scatting.” It was uploaded to YouTube by user FinalSlutPro (incredible stuff) on Aug. 17, 2017. But what I recently discovered is that this video is actually a purloined, SEO-friendly duplicate. Whenever I need to find it, which is more often than you’d think, I just google “Kim Cattrall scatting,” so that’s probably why the video that condensed the title comes up first. However, the original video is titled “Kim Cattrall talks about hubby Mark,” and it was posted to YouTube on February 22, 2011 (nearing its 10-year-anniversary, celebrate accordingly). Posted by user secretintelligence, the video’s description reads “Kim shares her secret for happiness with now ex-husband Mark Levinson.”
So, Mark Levinson. That’s the medium-sized drink of water slappin’ the bass, it would seem. To confirm this, I went to Cattrall’s Wikipedia page, and what I found was 1. alarming and 2. evidence as to why this scatting and bass-playing is probably not actually the secret to their happiness. Taken from the Personal Life section of Cattrall’s Wiki entry: “Her third marriage, from 1998 to 2004, was to audio designer and jazz bassist Mark Levinson; the couple co-wrote the book Satisfaction: The Art of the Female Orgasm (2002).”
Well, well, well, Mr. Levinson. An audio designer? Very, very cool. And it appears his company has remained afloat!
It’s unfortunate that the couple didn’t “go for it” longer than six years, but as Lao Tzu once said, “the flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long.” They both seem to be doing well, though, and their legacy — or at least the legacy of this video — lives on, regardless if they know it or not. I found a Vice story from 2017 that detailed a little Brooklyn museum, THNK1994, that dedicated an entire exhibition to Cattrall and the scatting video. The exhibit displays art in all mediums from fans of the actress and her be-bopping, curated by the two friends who run the museum. According to the article, they’d previously had an exhibit dedicated to Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding. That’s hilarious. Per their website, they’ve currently got an exhibit full of an artist’s renderings of Britney Spears’ Instagram posts from this past summer. I love this place.
But my jubilation in THNK1994 was short-lived, as I continued my research on the 42-second video destined for the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry. YouTube user KELLY RIBEIRO (it is in all-caps), shattered the minds of many with their comment under the original 2011 scatting video.
No matter how much I wanted to believe that KELLY was lying, I knew they weren’t — it’s impossible to factually state that combination of letters, even as a bit. The dream was dead. A hesitant but necessary Google search led me to what I feared to be true: “The Little Dog’s Day,” written in July of 1907 by Rupert Brooke, does indeed contain a stanza that in turn contains the phrase “‘Jam incipiedo, sedere facebo,’ In dog-Latin he quoth, ‘Euge! sophos! hurray!’”
What that means, I do not know. My gut tells me Kim Cattrall, Mark Levinson and even Rupert Brooke himself don’t either. But it’s there. It’s been there for more than 100 years, at least 90 at the time Kim laid it down on wax. I can’t discredit her for not scatting. She wasn’t, of course, but I didn’t know any better, for I wasn’t well-versed enough in Rupert Brooke’s oeuvre. Apparently he wrote this when he was 20. Well, Rupert, it shows.
The poem did provide some light on one question: the jump cut. On the Rupert Brooke Society’s website, the full poem reveals there was actually quite a bit between the gendered dogs and the town’s hullaballoo — the moment in which the video cuts to an opposite angle of man and wife. Chief among that section are shins of old frumps, rabies and eating cats. It seems that this dog was a real fucking asshole.
Though maybe I’m just predisposed to hate that god damn dog, that literarily canon canine, for he jumped from the pages of a 1907 poem, and not from the brain of one Kim Cattrall like I’d long believed. In the mere hours since I came to this discovery, I’ve begun to question much about the things I previously knew, or rather, thought I knew. I mean, how can I not? How can I see life with such certainty now? As HBO has proven with this Cattrall-less SATC revival, nothing ever truly dies, especially early 20th-century poems. Even if remembered by only one mid-40s actress and her then-husband, it’s still there. Nothing disappears Except for, sadly, all known evidence of Kim Cattrall scatting.