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Wild Woman With Steak Knife
The homicidal love songs of Diamanda Gal‡s
"I am not a Goth Ñ IÕm a Greek. Being a Greek is not a geographical reality, itÕs a spiritual reality.Ó
Diamanda Gal‡s is a
spokesperson for the unspeakable. The Greek-American singer-pianist-provocateuresse is now
the subject of Wild Woman With Steak Knife: The homicidal love songs of Diamanda Gal‡s
(working title), an official biography that explores the personal, political and musical intrigues
that commingled to give birth to one of the most
radical and radically gifted artists of our time. Author John Payne's tantalizing tale spans Gal‡s'
childhood as
the piano-playing daughter of a Mikrasian Greek/Egyptian father and Maniate Greek mother in San Diego, California,
to her early performances of works by avant-garde composer Iannis Xenakis and
luminaries of the new-jazz world, as well as her controversial AIDS-themed works Plague Mass, Litanies of Satan and
The Masque of the Red Death
trilogy, and her wicked redefinitions of the blues, country, bel canto and beyond.
Wild Woman will be published on real, you-can-touch-it
paper in
hardbound, four-pound form, not just some pantywaist little e-book type of thing. ItÕs a lushly, literally weighty
presentation loaded with
new and archival full-color photographs and piquant perspectives from a glittering array of artists,
musicians, collaborators
and enemies. The Diamanda Gal‡s story is a shocking one, a moving one, a visually spectacular one,
a scabrously funny and moving one that features Gal‡s' sharp-tongued and scholarly insights into the
Armenian, Assyrian and
Anatolian Greek massacres of
1915 and 1922, the connections between multiphonic vocal techniques and sado-masochism, how both
Vlad the Impaler and serial killer Aileen Wuornos were political heroes, and how Galás' music and
ours were irrevocably changed
by the varied likes of Friedrich Nietzsche and Doris Day, Ornette Coleman and Franz Liszt, ScreaminÕ Jay Hawkins and Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones.
The world is going up in flames. Mark your calendars: Wild Woman With Steak Knife:
The homicidal love songs of Diamanda Gal‡s is slated for publication in 2014.
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