Lolita Del Rey

Thanks to the arrival of Spotify in Australia (whose incredibly annoying ads have already pretty much completely driven me away) I've been listening to a couple of albums that I would never have actually bought, or gone to the trouble of chasing on Youtube. This is a bit of a problem, seeing as it posts everything you listen to on Facebook. Everyone now knows I've been listening to Lana Del Rey. 

I heard her breakout hit, Videogames, on Youtube with everyone else, and loved it as much as everyone seemed to. Her stoner-seductive aesthetic, with the naturally accompanying bored, weed-husky voice, went nicely with the hypnotic smoke-haze looping of the song itself. When she was 'unmasked' as nowhere near as trailer-trash as we'd been meant to think, well, that seemed to work pretty well too. Somehow, rich girl fantasising about life on the hood of a pick-up truck seemed just even more fitting--probably because the music was already way more about fantasy than reality. By the time we found out she couldn't really sing live, the fact could hardly have been less relevant. It just added to the spectacle.

So anyway now I've been listening, the past few days, to the album, which she (or They) have called "Born to Die." It's a predictably top-heavy record: three of the first four tracks are singles, and only one of the remaining eleven. Maybe this goes without saying--no-one expected this to be anything but a pop album. More interestingly, it's also an album that is single-mindedly devoted to character. Throughout, the songs work to build Del Rey's character. The first track, also called "Born to Die," opens with a flourish of strings, then a beat and some backup singer sighing. When Del Rey's voice comes in, it has all the bored/seductive resonance "Video Games" lead us to expect, that combination of fate and apathy. The lyrics, like the music itself, are a baroque redux of Video Games' sexy-stoner imagery. "Video Games" had the flirt of "I heard that you like the bad girls / Honey, is that true?" "Born to Die" has the dragged out, ominous "You like your girls insaaane." Over the whole record, she doesn't break character once. It creates an aesthetic a friend of mine described as "Hollywood sadcore." Not sure whether that's actually his creation or not, but I think it's pretty perfect.

One aspect of that character that is played up on the record is Del Rey's (literal) flirting with innocence.  "Video Games" had notes of this; I think one of the song's loveliest moments is the teasingly innocent lift in her voice as she sings the above quoted bad girls line. You don't need to be watching the clip to see her eyelids bat there. But this dynamic gets amped way up in a couple of songs here. I'm thinking "Off to the Races," a song heavy on lines quoted from Lolita. The song starts off muddy and weak, chugging on lines like "he loves me with every beat of his cocaine heart." But it kicks into gear when Del Rey lifts her voice into an innocent squeak and sings "Light of my life, fire of my loins / be a good girl and do what I want."
 
She channels a Lolita chacter all through the song, an the album as a whole. A later (weaker) track is actually for the book. And we realise something we might not quite have got earlier. Del Rey's character is not just bad girl: often, it is also bad little girl. Creepy. But everyone knows by now that it is all an act, all the way down. The flirts of faux-innocence scattered liberally through Born to Die are part of what lifts the performance into tasty madness. Lana Del Rey is a great fake mirage of dirty insanity. And that's what makes her album so entertaining.

Unspeakable Acts of Privacy

• Are you single?
• Have you been tested for STDs in the past month?
• What is your favourite sex position?
• Do you have any secret fantasies or fetishes?
• Would you please take off your shirt?
• Kiss me, now.

Last week, I saw "Unspeakable Acts of Privacy" at UQ St Lucia, as part of the Anywhere Theatre Festival, which is now (sadly) over. During the play ("experience" might be a better word), I found myself in the front of a Holden ute, being interviewed for a role as a very upfront girl's casual sex partner. Her questions (and demands) are reproduced above. Though she "unfortunately, couldn't force me to do anything," I did end up with no shirt on, sharing fairly private information--if not "unspeakable", then at least unbloggable. For the rest of the show, I worried that my confessions would be made public. It was a visceral expression of the show's theme of privacy under threat from within.

This was only a small part of a suprisingly ambitious performance put on (and put together) by UQ drama students, under the direction of Zen Zen Zo founder Lynne Bradley. The show 'began' before it actually began, with a form for everyone to fill in with moderately private information, and a privacy policy to sign, a la Facebook. I was already loving the experience, anticipating deliciously confronting public reveals of our private information, foolishly divulged.

 From there, the audience was gathered on some Schonell theatre steps, and a troop of aggressive dancers materialised before us, appearing ninja-like from apparently empty surroundings. That was the beginning of an adventure--the term is no exaggeration--that would lead us not just into stranger's cars, but all around an eerily transformed UQ campus. I'd never realised just how 'promenade' promenade theatre could be.

 

A heady atmosphere of menace pervaded the best parts of the performance, as when the actors marched we audience members along the front of the Forgan Smith building, past various totally unprivate displays of lust, anger, and despair, shouting at us to keep time and face forward, and when I found myself following two deranged nurses, chanting "Forgive me Facebook for I have sinned" with increasing anguish, and gradually stripping as they marched. Moments like these transformed the theme of lost privacy, which at first sounded pretty dull and petty to me, into a powerful, and persuasive experience. Privacy is not as meaningless as I'd thought. 

 The general feel of prison-camp melodrama gained part of its success from the scattered moments of relief, of quiet--of poetry, even. At one point, I was pulled aside by a girl who delivered a gentle monologue about being a dancer, and the way in which her body no longer felt like her own. These gentler points were not always integrated convincingly into the larger structure of the performance, but they did provide thought-provoking contrasts in tone, as well as some excellent writing and acting.
 

"Unspeakable Acts" faltered when it abandoned its atmospheric, visceral approach to its theme in favour of more straightforward didacticism. A section on the disturbing iPhone app Girls Around Me, for example, could not have been any preachier, or less theatrical. The messages of the play resonated best when left unspoken.

What was perhaps most impressive about "Unspeakable Acts," though, was its sheer scale. The audience was continually splintered throughout into smaller and smaller groups, all lead through different experiences, rejoining at various points. My experience of the play was only one of many possibilities. My girlfriend and sister, for example, spent time helping one actor stalk another, and described it as a highlight. Maintaining the complexity of this structure, with the careful choreography required to keep everyone where they need to be when they need to be there, over such a large physical area, was a stunning technical achievement.

Congratulations to everyone involved. "Unspeakable Acts" was a genuinely impressive piece of theatre. It's even convinced me to fix my Facebook privacy settings.