Lene Lovich
Stateless

I had a dream...

Someone was putting Marina Abramovic, Pippi Longstocking, and a couple of Bulgarian backup singers into a psychic blender...

And what came out was at the very least noteworthy...

__________________

There was a time when anything normal was never considered. Doing so would have been the worst betrayal. Against ourselves even before others.

After all, psychiatrists teach that any form of delusion soon transforms into a surrogate form of identity. And you don't mess with identity. At least, I wouldn't advise it.

Just to say, for a guru, we had someone who spent nights playing chess with an imaginary Sancho Panza. He always lost and after each defeat, the insults would start.

“Oh Sancho, Sancho, you certainly don't smell of ambrosia!!!”

What about Guglielmo Pasi, the unfathomable poet and author of the immortal masterpiece "My girlfriend is a howler monkey"? Well, better not say anything. After all, apart from the title which, admittedly, is quite good, no one remembers a single verse anymore.

Then there were us, intent on discussing the hole we ended up in and the one we wished to be in. Something like "and a bit lower the little bird of the godmother wanted to fly"...

But let's get back to our guru...

Imagine a gaze suspended between vagueness and myopia, a swaying gait, a look of sparkling freakiness in a punk sauce. Imagine a fine head with a flurry of thoughts and things.

A very funny and extravagant fish, in short. But anything but fake. Such characters at the time were as common as rain. Only most of them were as false as Judas. The Guru, no, the guru was authentic. Never mind if he was a cross between the tender Giacomo and the strange but true of the puzzle week.

He possessed, just to name one, a sort of instinctive esotericism. He was one of those who, after sizing you up for a moment, would come up with certain mysterious phrases like "you are suspended between power and abandonment" "the feminine rebalancing of your being is weakening." Then, to avoid making our heads spin uselessly, he would dilute his elixirs of words until he reached a series of down-to-earth statements good for us gullible. Nine times out of ten, he pierced your soul.

Another thing, as a child, he played with dolls and, fixated on pirates and princesses, sewed some amazing little outfits with his mom that resembled the costumes of Miss Lene Lovich.

“Do you remember Lene Lovich?”

“But who, that girl with the braids?”

“Exactly, the braids... the braids and the little feet...”

And, out of the blue, a line from Guglielmo Pasi knocks on my head... even though it isn't a line but a kind of concept. Something about flying...

"A flight including a landing on princess feet" ...

And Lene Lovich really did have princess feet. It's mentioned in a nice interview by a guy who played with her.

Obviously, the guru also went crazy for Lene/Marlene.

And the duo (the guru and Sancho Panza) became a trio (the guru, Lene Sancho Panza)...

Or rather, he (the guru) was in the middle, and the other two marked him closely. After all, we're all nailed between fantasy and rugged reality. Even if most don't know.

And anyway, Lene Lovich was a show. One of those where, yes, the record is good, but better see her live.

Between a witch and a blossoming maiden, it seemed like a switch turned on and off all the masks on her face.

Decked out, like a strange kind of gypsy from a chaos of mantillas and laces, her wild, spirited eyes darted, flashed, twitched, and God knows what else...

The absolute expressiveness passed through her as if she were a mime in the midst of electroshock.

And then that disjointed voice capable of trills and screeches. In short, a paradigm of tender and sweet wild femininity...

The music then... a sensational synthesis between Devo and Kate Bush...

If you want to know more, look up Lao Tze's page, a wonderful review...

I've only raved a bit

But now excuse me, good old Sancho Panza is giving me checkmate after a queen sacrifice.

“Oh Sancho, Sancho, if you were my nemesis, I think I deserved a more fitting one”

Trallallà...