Speaking Martian/Miami Soul Scene
Symposium: Curiosity and Method
Organized by Cabinet Magazine
Princeton University
April 9, 2011

At the Chancellor Green Rotunda on the Princeton campus, a Martian, uh, Soul Mash-Up was situated between readings and it was delivered once. But the song did not so much pit one Helene Smith against another Helene Smith; as it structured a situation so that one unsung late 1960's Miami Soul Singer possessed a late 19th Century Intergalactic Spiritual Medium. They modulated one another. They 'versioned' each other.

Cultural producers (writers, curators, artists) were invited by Cabinet to select and read an excerpt from a text published in the first ten years of the magazine's publication. It was difficult to choose the "most beautiful daughter," so to speak; nevertheless, Daniel Rosenberg's "Speaking Martian" was selected, not because there were no other 'beautiful daughters' but because it allowed an externalization of trespass. Who knows how to speak Princeton's language and at one moment? The wrong language might be most right.

The mystic Smith's glossolalia could be recast in yet another form, a language that insists that its pronunciation is dependent upon the musical note delivering the sound. The other Smith, the first Lady of Miami Soul, provides the means. I borrow her melody in strange digs.

At the first note, one man understood what was being sung; Daniel Rosenberg, the author of the text, sat amongst the crowd. For others, a context would not return until after I ceased singing. When I ceased singing, my sense of the context ebbed. To craft one's own unreadability is one transitory way to perceive that one has agency, generative or ungenerative.

My soul descends to you. O Why do you not always keep yourself near me, friend, at last found again? - Helene Smith (France)

LISTEN here.