Elizabeth's Lost In Music

Reference:
McMahon, Elizabeth. Lost in Music [online]. Meanjin, Vol. 59, No. 2, 2000: 166-177.
Ari’s description of the four sections of the city interlace demographic information with personal affect. Sex, drugs and alcohol will ease the strain on Ari’s groin, that will take away the burning compulsion and terror of his desire. But here at the novel's space of endpoint and stasis he does not identify any independent capacity for pleasure. Ari exposes the under-belly of the city by charting trajectories and spaces of the city's excess: forbidden desires, sexual transgression, waste and decay. If the map of the city is the governance of culture and language, this dynamic tour offers the possibility of an individual activity and expression.
These dark paths and silent alleyways are actual places in this novel. They become spaces of experience that have required detours off the main road. As an outsider to the circle of dancers Ari raises questions about the putative inclusiveness of this scene of community.
Perhaps the most powerful agent of motility and speed in Loaded is music. Ari provides a soundtrack to accompany and propel his dromomania; he walks to the beat, tempo and dynamics of music. In
Loaded each of the four compass-point sections of the novel is prefaced by an epigram from a song. Each epigram provides a key note or quality that characterises the particular territory of Melbourne and Ali's experiences there. Music is thus inextricable from both the official map and the personalised tour, and with all modes of travelling including car and taxi trips, train journeys and walks. Each journey is characterised by the music played:
We weave through dark suburban streets, get onto the freeway and I'm grinning from ear to ear, listening to the radio, listening to my friends sing along, out of tune. watching the headlights of
In the course of his walk through the city streets, Ari comes across a figure, probably gay, dancing on the street to the music of the 1970s: Across the street a van is playing seventies disco and a tall thin man is dancing on top of the roof. A sign on the side of the van says: I have AIDS and I have been fm:d from work. Please give me some money I'm dancing as fast as I can ... He is spinning on the roof of the van, looking to heaven, finding jubilation in the gospel of disco, music from a time when you could put your dick into anything and not worry about what you would find. (7B) allow associations across conventional barriers of class, ethnicity and sexuality. The disco or dance also promises bodily connection and a type of body collectivity, which facilitates individual pleasure but also temporarily transforms alienation into a pleasurable abandonment. Ari's dance experience is not confined to one genre or mode, or to one community. He describes dancing at The Retreat: 'On the dance tloor I move between bodies twirling and swaying to the pain of the music. But in our motions we transform the pain into joy' (66). the dance offers the possibility of a temporary respite from the constructions of individuality in a collective association. Ari describes the effect of dancing at the Greek club in a shift from the first person 'I' to the collective