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Darkness On The Right Edge Of Town
This entry was posted on 2/12/2007 9:06 PM and is filed under Music,Literature,Heroes and Heroines,Theme Week.
 2/13/07: RightWingTrashWoman: Diamanda GalasOne of New York City’s better traditions is the occasional Valentine’s Day Massacre concert by Diamanda Galas. You can find out about this year’s show at her website—which will also provide more info about the stunning vocalist who brought true depth to Goth culture. We’ve had the pleasure of interviewing Galas several times, and we certainly wouldn’t want to jeopardize her career by implying she’s some kind of Republican. She’s no reliable Leftist, either, as seen in the following interview from 2005. (We’d usually link to ourselves in a display of self-love, but the following is more readable than what’s on the website): There’s a new flock of NYU students lined up with their parents along 3rd Ave. A few of them would be thrilled that Diamanda Galas lives around the corner. Then they’d be disappointed to learn that I’m going to meet Diamanda one street over at her beloved Starbucks.
Actually, we end up on the porch of another Starbucks, since the first one is too crowded. “Nnngh,” says Diamanda on a lovely Sunday morning. “Everyone’s so beautiful and hip. Honestly, it’s a good reason to move out of here.”
Nobody’s got a better reason to get out of town or country. Diamanda’s operatic performance art is both beautiful and demanding. Her amazing voice also serves as a torturous setting for cultural explorations bedded in various languages—as showcased again with this week’s NYC premiere of Defixiones, Orders From The Dead .
And yet Diamanda enjoys all the frustrations of being a celebrity, most recently in the sense of firing her William Morris agent in the wake of a cancelled tour. Her past alt-rock success would allow Diamanda to cash in with a simple tour covering Hank Williams and The Supremes alone on piano. Instead, she’s currently inspired by her epic take on the genocide that devastated Asia Minor in the early 1900’s.
“You get paid real good at [NYC cabaret] Joe’s Pub,” Diamanda explains, “but when you put on a show at a place like St. John the Divine or Carnegie Hall, forget it. I have to go to places like Colombia to get paid. People say, ‘Don’t go to Colombia, it’s dangerous.’ I’ll tell you what’s dangerous—not paying my fucking rent for three months.”
Our society isn’t just neglecting Diamanda for her art, either. She’d be a great correspondent for The Daily Show , and could bring genuine passion to the smug cultural commentary always airing on VH1. (On the topic of Juliette Lewis: “Every time I see that fucking visage, I get totally ill.”)
We’d also enjoy a sitcom about her sex life. There was probably a feature film waiting to be made about the regular guy who met the Goth goddess living in his building while they stood outside during a fake fire alarm. That’s wrapped up, and Diamanda’s last serious relationship was with a guy who starred in gay porn.
“That ended when he got a job in construction,” she explains, obviously looking for a showbiz marriage.
Diamanda could also be the right-wing Wednesday Addams to Ann Coulter’s Marilyn Munster. The California girl can still work the dark sex appeal, despite a withering standup delivery and cackle reminiscent of Phyllis Diller. That sense of humor was hard earned, too, as Diamanda’s had to endure her own mad monster party. She’s a genuinely educated person trapped in what passes for today’s intelligentsia.
“I just had a fight with this real piece of shit,” says Diamanda, “telling me he was going off to discover the real roots of slavery. He’s going to Ethiopia, where people are going to say, ‘The slaves came from West Africa and we don’t want anything to do with you, you stupid fuck.’ If someone wants reparations, we should make them pick up the money in West Africa. Go through Egypt on the way, where they’ll be asked to take the bags of any Egyptian on the street and put them in the back of their car.”
Diamanda’s equally quick to dismiss this sad summer of Cindy Sheehan as a further desecration of the dead. (“Why would she lie and make her son look like a simp? Mother’s denial.”) This leads to a good rant about victim culture from a woman with plenty of problems.
“This whole year has been one big fight,” Diamanda explains, “I was just thrown out of an artist colony in Italy for insubordination. No surprise. I have these letters they sent me: ‘Diamanda: It is not acceptable for you to have your music papers on the tables in your library.’ Those tables were rotting wormwood. I had this metrosexual fuck writing me administrational letters, so he’d have some paper trail because he knew I was going to fuck him in the press. I promised him. That’s a Spartan tradition; if you say you do it, you do it.”
Diamanda then pauses, as well she should while promoting a work about genocide. “I hate victim culture. I knew I was going to be kicked out, so I’d stolen a book about exiled artists from the colony library. I was reading it later in my hotel room, thinking, ‘What is this? There are people who have been real exiles. You’ve just been kicked out of a stupid art colony. Big fucking deal.’”
Make her your own: It’s hard to know where to begin with a gal like Galas, but start listening somewhere. She’s a hell of a read, too.
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