Through Galas darkly

Autumn spawned a monster. Aileen Wuornos, dubbed “America’s first female serial killer” by the US media, was executed on October 9, 2002. In the aftermath, Diamanda Galás performed a series of concerts in New York and Glasgow in memory of Wuornos. Explaining her position of solidarity with Wuornos, subject of the bio-pic Monster, for which actress Charlize Theron has won an Oscar, the classically trained Greek-American performer posted a message to her website. I reproduce a fragment here; the complete statement can be found at www.diamandagalas.com.

“The existence of this woman, whose life remained undefended since the day of her birth to the day of her death – as a street prostitute, a middle-aged woman, a lesbian, and a child raped continuously by her father, was comprised of the four strikes that finally put her into critical mass. In 2002, after living on Death Row for ten years, Wuornos finally become worn down and asked to die by lethal injection. At her execution she said, ‘I’d just like to say I’m sailing with the Rock and I’ll be back like Independence Day with Jesus, June 6, like the movie, big mother ship and all. I’ll be back.’”
The present writer interviewed Diamanda Galás in late January, primarily about the simultaneous release of her albums La Serpenta Canta and Defixiones: Will And Testament just before Christmas. At that point I was unaware of the singer’s position regarding the Hollywood-isation of Wuornos. On learning of it, I sent an e-mail requesting an additional quote on the subject. The following is Galás’ response, reproduced here with her permission.

Hi Peter!
Let me just say briefly that the Doppelgangster Hollywood Kill/Reincarnate Syndrome especially with Aileen, is as evil as they come. The ads for this film came out the day after Aileen’s execution. This summer the articles on Charlize Theron in various designer clothes announced that this role will break “the toughest woman in Hollywood,” the way Boys Don’t Cry, or whatever, broke that hag somebody’s seedy gash, what’s-’er-name.
These people never gave one bloody cent to trying to help this poor woman, about whom they “cared so much”; they disingenuously used double-entendre or incontinent sardonicism in their creation of the title, Monster. They played her for all it was worth, and threw her body in the garbage dump. For them she never really existed anyway, she didn’t have a life, a frightening history to detail or discuss compassionately; she was just a photo-op for the new post-post-Stanislavski method (accent on the second syllable) of faking a part in the Gortex room.
Remember when Laurence Olivier asked Dustin Hoffman, who was no doubt sucking off the waste products of some autistic child somewhere, “Why don’t you just ACT?” In the future Hollywood will be able to afford the sabbaticals of their leading men and ladies so that they can commit the actual crimes themselves, with the appropriate Hollywood lawyers standing by. So they won’t have to passively kill-off their real-life protagonists for threat of lawsuits.
More later,
Affectionately yours,
Diamanda

Galás’ outspokenness on this matter is entirely in character. Denounced by the Christian right in America and the Catholic Church in Italy, beloved of Marilyn Manson (who used her music as an intro tape on tour), she’s not your average three-and-a half octave singer, virtuoso pianist and composer of hardcore avant-garde liturgies. Equal parts Medea, Medusa and Mahalia, Galás renders terms like ‘diva’ and ‘cutting edge’ entirely meaningless.
The singer’s stance regarding Wuornos’ case is informed by her own case history. In previous interviews, she has spoken about her past as a prostitute in California and the clientele that comes with the job, and has been an aggressive supporter of draconian retribution towards rapists and perpetrators of sexual assaults. She’s also been a long standing champion of the rights of prostitutes who, in order to make a complaint against a rapist, attacker, or an overly aggressive client, must first confess to solicitation.
Brought up in San Diego by Greek Orthodox parents, Galás made her performing debut in 1979 at the Festival d’Avignon in France, taking the lead in the opera Un Jour Comme un Autre by composer Vinko Globokar, based upon the Amnesty International documentation of the arrest and torture of a Turkish woman for alleged treason. It would set the template for much of her later work. On her 1984 self-titled album she explored the mindset of the incarcerated, the isolated and the cast-out on ‘Panoptikon’ and commemorated the Greek women killed by the Junta between 1967 and 1974 on ‘Song From The Blood Of Those Murdered’.
Throughout the mid to late ’80s, much of her energy went towards highlighting the social pariah status of AIDS sufferers, a pandemic whose growth she saw as an act of genocide on the part of a government that treated HIV as divine retribution upon homosexuals and drug addicts (her own brother, Philip Dimitri Galás, a playwright, died of the disease in 1986).
Galás continues to interrogate history on her new works. La Serpenta Canta is a live album on which she strips bare and breathes fire into standards by Blind Lemon Jefferson, Hank Williams, John Lee Hooker and Ornette Coleman. Defixiones, Will And Testament is an ambitious studio work concerning “the forgotten and erased” of the Armenian, Assyrian, Anatolian and Pontic Greek genocides that occurred between 1914 and 1923.
This writer became aware of Galás work tangentially, from a variety of sources. Trent Reznor spliced her hackle-raising version of ‘I Put A Spell On You’ into Jane’s Addiction’s ‘Nothing’s Shocking’ on the Natural Born Killers soundtrack after that film’s co-producer Jane Hamsher championed her music to Oliver Stone. Then there was her reading of ‘Masque Of The Red Death’ on Hal Willner’s 1997 Poe tribute Closed On Account Of Rabies. And interviewing John Paul Jones a couple of years ago, I asked the bassist if there was anyone he’d worked with who exhibited the same chemistry as Led Zeppelin. Without hesitation he name-checked Galás, with whom he collaborated on The Sporting Life in 1994.
“She’s actually stunning,” he said, “the voice and the musicality. I love her piano playing, and just the sheer, ‘Fuck you, I’m going for it!’ Somebody suggested we work together, and I’d heard the ‘Wild Women With Steak Knives’ single, which is pretty much as it sounds from the title. One thing Diamanda told me, which I took to heart because she’d done the same thing with collaborations, was that if she was going to put that much effort into music, it might as well be her own.”
Galás, for her part, says, “John is one of the classiest men I have ever met. Of course, for a gentleman he plays the bass like a 400-pound spree-killer.”

Defixiones, Will And Testament and La Serpenta Canta are both out now on Mute