»Peter was not with them for the moment, and they felt rather lonely up there by themselves. He could go so much faster than they that he would suddenly shoot out of sight, to have some adventure in which they had no share.
He would come down laughing over something fearfully funny he had been saying to a star, but he had already forgotten what it was, or he would come up with mermaid scales still sticking to him, and yet not be able to to say for certain what had been happening.
It was really rather irritating to children who had never seen a mermaid.«
J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan
AUTHOR: PAUL FEIGELFELD
PHOTOGRAPHY: TIMOTHY SCHAUMBURG
When I first saw Meghan, I saw the moon. It was traversing across her back, waxing crescent, waxing gibbous, full, waning, just as the night was. She leaped through my apartment, which was filled to the brim with people also going through various phases, like an intoxicated astronaut, a bottle of the strongest fucking Mezcal you can imagine in her hand. When all was over, she sang a song. It was almost Christmas, the last party of the year, my apartment a post-war situation, and everyone vanished from Berlin. Meghan disappeared – for good, it seemed – back to Los Angeles. Over the following months, we conversed casually on Skype, which occasionally felt more like the Terminator’s Skynet becoming sentient, our conversations gyrating between routine reveries, consulting expanded consciousness or articulating artificial intelligences, and getting deeper into Meghan’s long-standing musical dimension, Miss M.E, through Youtube videos or songs sung on Skype.
Gradually, an idea, code-named TOP40, began to emerge, creature rather than concept, yet it reimained unclear what this thing that Meghan was invoking like an ancient god would turn out to be – a warped space-time-continuum, a volatile vessel of some kind, a sardonic salon, an iridescent black lodge for arcane rituals of the post-future, Neverland? Perhaps the best term to describe TOP40 is ‘temporary autonomous zone’, after post-anarchist writer Hakim Bey’s 1991 theory: ‘WEIRD DANCING IN ALL-NIGHT computer-banking lobbies. Unauthorized pyrotechnic displays. Land-art, earth-works as bizarre alien artifacts strewn in Skate Parks. Burglarize houses but instead of stealing, leave Poetic-Terrorist objects. Kidnap someone & make them happy. Pick someone at random & convince them they’re the heir to an enormous, useless & amazing fortune – say 5000 square miles of Antarctica, or an aging circus elephant, or an orphanage in Bombay, or a collection of alchemical mss. Later they will come to realize that for a few moments they believed in something extraordinary, & will perhaps be driven as a result to seek out some more intense mode of existence.’
Meghan’s creation, TOP40, is something local yet not geographically bound, one-off yet repeating in its difference, unintentionally utopian, which is exactly why it seems to work. It’s a party dance and a political stance between pirates and lost boys, with its inventor creating and constantly renegotiating and remodeling the amorphous architectures surrounding them, a Peter Pan with a creased shadow never quite behaving properly but being the only true partner one can have. The series of TOP40 events in Los Angeles – an impressive 63 thus far – and Meghan’s musical manifestation, Miss M.E, form a symbiosis which has spun off into something autonomous with significant transformative energy. It’s as much serene rave as it is a conference of juxtapositions, séance of sychronicities and naked act of design, ‘perpetually coming apart at the seams, which is exactly the kind of confounding madness a party needs to be fun’, as the New York Times called it in their recent write-up of TOP40. Her music is melancholic at times, with spectacular spectres and phantom pantomimes haunting the harmonies and dissonances. Miss M.E.’s way of creating, thus, is simoultaneously tactical and gung-ho.
When making plans, she will aim at creating the most complex, excessive juggernaut instead of worrying about plausibility and sustainability, and let intuition and serendipity work out the rest. There is a sophisticated savagery governing how people around TOP40 find each other. After just moving back to Berlin in late August, Meghan is again instantly entrenched in the real virtuality of intensities, with a series of clandestine charades already emerging, seemingly without anyone’s doing. The spectrum of projects she is doing and planning continues to grow and spread contagiously, weaving an intricate, yet non-limiting net which slowly but surely becomes global. It consists of parties, salons, musical productions and performances, intimate dinners, and whatever else you can imagine. When speculating about the future, the last thing Meghan said to me before she disappearded to Amsterdam on a whim was: ‘Not sure when my unrecorded first record will come out, but I’m pretty sure it is going to be called The Unbearable Wetness of Being.’
Visitez:
www.soundcloud.com/missmemiss
Take a look at Natural Born: Meghan Edwards as it was featured in TISSUE N°5:
