freed from desire

no money no fame no power - we’ve got our strong beliefs

bell hooks was celibate for seventeen years. i’m coming up on five, undergirded by sentiments as catholic as they are buddhist, plus a nun’s love of habit and hanging out with her mates. the bar is in hell, the club is in heaven, love is everywhere.

Born Gala Rizzatto in Milan in 1975, she was named after Salvador Dalí’s wife. Raised in a musical household, she left for New York at 17 to study at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and began a music career post-graduation, at first as a backing singer and songwriter.

In the mid-'90s, she returned to Italy and wrote a song. This song drew from her experiences in New York—witnessing extreme wealth disparity, and reconnecting with her passion for dance after doctors told her she would never dance again, and falling in love with a broke dancer from National Ballet of Senegal.

“It’s a very personal song… It represents resilience and alignment with your passion. The song was dedicated to my first love and his wonderful Senegalese community of dancers and drummers. I was, and I am still, shocked every single day by the injustice, the unfair distribution of wealth in the world. The night I wrote the song I went from a famous uptown restaurant in NY eating with some people I knew, to going back to my boyfriend in Harlem who was sleeping with five other people in a small house and even had big rats in the apartment.”

The hook itself is an incantation of a Buddhist prayer.

The song’s most memorable part is the na-na-na section and there are exactly 200 ‘na’s in its 3:34 seconds.

“The clubs were my ‘church’ and if I ever had a religion or philosophy of life, Buddhism would be probably the only philosophy that I could feel close to. So, you have no idea how is my pleasure when I see an entire club dancing and singing to these lyrics like a prayer.”

Here’s my v-day broadcast for 2025, NOT a valentine’s day show, and a first time ‘live session’ spiral with Ireland's most unhinged and also fit singer-songwriter Leigh Arthur. We ably bust you out of love jail with a deep and juicy dive into the politics of desire and the structure of feeling around modern romance. I’ve been really hooked on Shon Faye’s great recent book Love in Exile which was also a major influence on the ideas shared in this show. My friends sent me some incredibly funny dating and touching confession voicenotes for this, featuring armed teens, desperate acts and oral gonorrhoea. I also give some raw dog romance advice as a heartbreak veteran cum amateur divorce mediator (lol) and we hear from Audre Lorde, Lauren Berlant and CS Lewis on the religiosity of love, love as transcendence, the agony of affect. We also sway to some lovely songs especially Leigh’s, and have a laugh, what more do you want?

Listen and tracklist below:

After an insane three years living with a deranged German man in his mid sixties whose politics I keep saying I will one day properly write about, I get a sumptuous sublet just a few streets away, miraculously, above a bakery. I feel, and it is a rare feeling, like, what with one thing and another, I have earned this. Warm strains of börek wake me before my alarm and the physical sensation of being able to potter about freely is still fresh enough to come on like an ecstatic slap in the face every morning. lotta velvet here. it is of course still Berlin so it is unclear how long i will be here, but i notice myself unfurling again slowly alongside large mature palms in wall-sized mirrors. she’s dusty but photosynthesising, still. my new abode contains many beautiful items of furniture and a lot of professional sex tools, a collection of antique whips, a large floor to ceiling cage big enough for three. coexisting alongside such items brings me into occasional coy reflection on my extended period of utilitarian desirelessness, its source and its meaning, whether i chose it or was just busy, and which idea, neither totally true, fits me better on any given day.

as a distant formless notion, desire is something i can still very occasionally notice in myself, sure, even appreciate, like a patch of blue sky in winter, but to seek it out actively, let alone use it as any kind of animating principle or, good god, allow it to influence my self-concept? surely weak-minded folly. i am a bitch of extremes. not trying, on this specific topic, is just a discipline that comes easy. my friends laugh when i deftly move the conversation on like a sleight of hand magician. on new years eve Leigh texts a photo of herself in thigh high leather boots and asks me drolly who i’m kissing at midnight. i respond without thinking ‘oh that’s not really my thing’ and then cackle in the follow up voicenote. ambient exposure to inanimate objects together with the slow creaks of spring might be part of what it is now that tunes/turns me slowly back in/on/towards another frequency, a desiring that i forgot can also be lightfooted and inconsequential, pleasures without anchor or meaning like coffee or colours, existing for its own silly sacred sake in this risk of a world.

*

i also turned thirty nine last month and after we recorded the radio programme all my friends came over and we had a party and it felt great, here are the flowers.

love, like a project, like an instrument

your mate

ps. i wrote this song which references gala’s masterwork for the last band i sang in which contains the lines ‘what’s that one about being freed from desire / mindless and senseless i’m a male voice choir’, lol call it a suggested sidedish - Dim Siawns - Yfory