Hey lady, you, lady

Hey lady, you, lady, don’t just walk away, cause I have this need to tell you why I’m all alone today.

By that time you have already entered the castle with a mysterious woman dressed in white who walks in her sleep up the stairs and stares out of the window while telling you a story, her story. From the first listening it seems a line of memories, carrying her back to Georgia and California and anywhere she could run. But as soon as she speaks of the preacher man she made love with in the sun, you realize that there is something entirely different going on. The woman tries to calm you down with clichés about Greek yachts and nights in Monte Carlo, and the music does its part to make her voice and the whole scenario even more kitschy, but still it happens again: the woman confesses to you that she has seen some things that a woman ain’t supposed to see (in a cover version sung by a Korean female duo one of the singers fakes disapprobation at that part). She has seen something you ain’t supposed to see. Something she wants to tell you about because she can see so much of you living in her eyes. You have entered her fantasy by listening to her too long. Be careful with what it will do to you.

Charlene D’Angelo married twice. As a consequence, her name changed to Duncan and then to Oliver. Charlene Duncan tried to land a hit in the US in 1976 called “I’ve never been to me”. One line about “unborn children” was misunderstood as a feminist pro-abortion statement, which did not really help to make the song popular at that time. Some other singers tried after her to turn it into a success, such as Nancy Wilson and Randy Crawford, but it was Charlene Oliver, by then living in the UK, who made the song become a “one-hit wonder” in 1982. “I’ve never been to me” made it into the charts and Charlene into TV-shows. After that she continued her work in a sweets shop in Ilford, where she is supposed to work still now, if she has not retired yet.

So far, so sweet.

Or, as Charlene would put it: I took the sweet life, I never knew I'd be bitter from the sweet.

Be careful, this is another trap she prepares for you, because now comes a line that is usually cut out - for obvious reasons as you will see - of the Japanese cover version “Love is All” sung at marriage ceremonies. Here it goes:
I've spent my life exploring the subtle whoring that costs too much to be free.

We’re not listening to Charlene anymore (in fact, the original version was written for a male voice, as the front singer of the group “The Temptation”, who performed their version of the song in 1982, proves on You Tube).
We’re now listening to Priscilla, future queen of the desert, moving her lips accordingly to Charlene’s words, trying to defend her show against the drunken dangerous men molesting her on stage.

We’re not in the big castle anymore, following a little private guided tour: we’re on stage, exposed to the audience’s clutches and touches, trying to make it through the night without losing the line. Trying to move between spaces along this line, which is really a line of D and not of C, always and already in the middle – but of what?

We lost the point here, the origin, though the story I am telling you already raised some doubts about a point of origin: was it a crazy idea of a crazy composer? A male voice supposed to address a female audience? A Korean pop star raising an eyebrow in fake disapproval about her partner’s confession? Was it Priscilla’s fantasy that took hold of Charlene, drawing her deeply into exploring the subtle whoring, or was it Charlene in her sweets shop, who tries assure you that the sweet will make you bitter (but why selling sweets then)?

Forget about the truth. Forget about memory. Start fantasizing with me. Don’t believe my lies that you are the true woman holding that little baby. Try to misunderstand me when I sing of the man you fought with this morning. Do it like Valentina Hassan and think of the man you fucked with this morning and the one you will make love with tonight.

Follow me into the desert of a becoming, it starts just behind the castle.

Please lady.
Please. Lady.

Don’t just walk away. Listen to me again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrIqsFSjqso&feature=related

PASS THIS ON

THIS TEXT OFFERS A PACT. Not the kind of pact that is made in the opera “Der Freischütz” (The Marksman) and that leads inevitably to death and destruction. More a kind of pact that keeps the audience watching the opera till the end, with the feeling that there is no escape from the cruel German legend, but that there is pleasure in assisting to it.

THIS IS A PACT ABOUT PLEASURE. What else could it be? There is no money or fame involved. Even a proofreader is missing to edit these words, written during a rainy evening in a Berlin apartment. There is just Word’s auto-correction program and I. And a strange voice in my head, telling me to

PASS THIS ON


MEMORIES OF A STORYTELLER

I don’t know if I passed on this link to you already:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VLnLs_-Ez4

Don’t worry; it is not a virus, though it might become contagious. Let me explain to you: When I watched this video colleagues had passed on to me some time ago I felt a certain danger, a growing tension between the singer and the audience. I have been to Finland a couple of times and have experienced community centres in countryside that offer cultural divertissement at isolated places. I have seen a drag queen performing in a back street of Tampere, and I also got into trouble in another back street, when walking along with an Argentinean colleague who was wearing his hair long and black. The video’s constellation did not seem to predict a lucky ending at all. Even when the first man starts to dance, it looks more like a kind of provocation. “Is he willing? Will he play?” asks the singer, and then suddenly the scene takes off to another place, to an old fairy tale that goes like this: Two brothers follow the spell of a strange woman, and lead the whole village to her place in the forest, where young and old lose their caution when listening to the woman’s seductive songs. They follow her invitation and start to dance; they lose themselves in their movements and in their dreams. They become somebody else. The only one, who does not enter the dance, but watches from the margin, is the brothers’ sister, who gave her voice to the woman in exchange for the promise of fame and fortune for her family. Silently, unable to speak, for her tongue belongs to somebody else now, with her eyes wide open, she keeps watching.

MEMORIES OF A SORCERER

It is the fascination of a multiplicity inside us that draws us to the edge of a forest to witness the pack (of wolves, of witches, of witnesses of a ritual) and its shepherd, its leader or singer or sorcerer. Unnatural participation, as Deleuze and Guattari call it, a propagation by epidemic, by contagion. There is always someone on the edge inviting you to make and alliance, to enter a pact. Someone defined by the liminal position of being inside and outside the pack, of slipping into it (slipping into a tune, a costume, a voice, a gender) or standing outside as the exceptional individual, the “Outsider”. It is a dynamic position, a movement marking the borderline of the pack, into which the human passes or inn which his or her becoming takes place, by contagion (Deleuze&Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 1730). In this sense, the singer does not only invite the brother to play or to dance, but also to bring along the human group he has a second alliance with, the audience watching the two dance, as the singer watched the two brothers dance before (Oh, what a dance), and along with it the next human group, the fascinated Self, the You Tube audience watching a dance that comes as a surprise; that involves a group most unlikely to spend time together in a community centre up north. What are they doing there? How did they come together, if not secretly and always on the fringe?

You can say that we are just watching a summer hit of Club music, produced by Karin and Olof Dreijer aka The Knife, who appear in the video as the dancing men and the young woman in the last shot. That Rickard Engfors who performs the playback version of the song “Pass this on”, simply marks the making of his/her drag performance by putting on the music and taking the fake microphone. A drag show, a fake song, a music video.

I say we are watching a becoming, and by watching it, we get invited to a pact, we might even get infected by an affinity to politics that are neither those of the family nor of religion nor of the State.

This video might be contagious.

PASS IT ON