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ID CHECK
Anti-war Murderess
BY CAMILLE DODERO

Past ID Checks

  • Alderwoman, interrupted, Rebecca Gewirtz

  • Cool-Kid Catalogue King, Greg Selkoe

  • Lyrical Miracle, John Kulsick

  • Sneaker Pimp, Josh "Wisdumb" Spivack

  • Iron maiden, Véronique d’Entremont
  • Electro Porn Duo, Christopher Rand and Rori Hanson
  • # 1 Supportah, Christina North
  • Standup comic, Noah Garfinkel
  • Mr. Birdhead, Michael Crigler
  • Shy girl gone wild, Naomi Bennett
  • Teenage Bentmen, Casey Desmond
  • Naked animator, Bob White
  • The Boston jerk, Wayne Marshall (a.k.a. Wayne & Wax)
  • Experimental audio researcher, Jon Whitney
  • Savage rock, runway style, Keys to the Streets of Fear
  • Mash-up diva, Kate Enlow
  • Acitvist poster boy, Nick Giannone
  • Barista master, Willie Carpenter
  • Allston via MTV, Iann Robinson
  • name: Christina Desir

    age: 22

    resides: Inman Square

    dislikes: capitalism, misused funnels

    Christina Desir likes to tell stories on-stage. Controversial stories. Gross-out stories. Gossipy weird-fetish stories that involve filthy-rich people and American leaders. As the exotically striking frontwoman of a five-piece rock/fusion/protest band called the Murder Elite, the 22-year-old operatically trained vocalist likes to relay anecdotes that will surely make you squirm. Or at least not want to listen while your face is full of a chicken-and-black-bean quesadilla, like mine is right now at the Linwood Grill. And so Desir hesitates over one such story, a dominatrix-centric yarn supposedly based on a friend’s experience.

    C’mon, I urge. Naively.

    "You really don’t want to hear this one when you’re eating," Desir insists, her British accent competing with the drunken-barfly din.

    So we move on. Desir’s band is a politically active musical collective named after that privileged fraction of the population who "profit from the suffering of others." A dancy five-piece with an army-brat guitarist, a Dutch-scientist bassist, and a Berklee-trained trumpet player, they’ve played the Emergenza Festival (where they told boy-raping Catholic-church jokes) and headlined an anti-war rally. "Sometimes if you don’t listen to the lyrics, you don’t know that you’re dancing to a song about carpet bombs," explains Desir matter-of-factly.

    An Afro-sporting activist with a wide smile and a lip ring, Desir hasn’t always been inclined to sermonize. Born in Haiti, raised in France, and then biding her time between London and New York until she moved to Boston last year, Desir wasn’t someone who typically kept up with international atrocities — or even scanned the headlines. "I was pretty much always the type of kid who’d stay away from the news," she admits before taking a sip from her beer. "I didn’t want to know what was going on. I thought the world was too cruel."

    The oldest of five, Desir attended a performance-arts high school in New York City where she studied opera, piano, and dance (ballet and belly dancing). During that time, she was also recruited to be a plus-size model. "I was fatter then," the Inman Square resident says, grinning. "It makes me feel so weird and dirty sometimes to be a model." Especially since she’s now an anti-capitalist. "It’s just a way you make a living, I guess."

    Things changed drastically in 2004, when Desir’s older cousin died. An army veteran who’d just returned from Iraq, her cousin had been trying to make a life for himself on the South Shore until he was fatally stabbed in Brockton. The sluggishness of the murder investigation baffled her. "I couldn’t understand how someone who served his country for so long had almost no civil liberties in life or even in death."

    Desir relocated to the Boston area, hoping to "keep an eye" on the proceedings. She ended up as an anti-war activist working "to fight for what my cousin would of fought for if he were alive." She became the outreach coordinator for the October 29 Coalition, a 16-member alliance who organized a Stop the War rally on Boston Common that brought Cindy Sheehan to town earlier this fall. And she’s still optimistic about the protest movement, despite the continued US presence in Iraq. "Even though at first, it might not be working, the more persistence you have, the more people will have to pay attention." She doesn’t see any other choice. "Otherwise, it’s all in the government’s hands: you just kind of float around, work your ass off, go to sleep and eat, and go back to work, watch people die. Those are your options. And drink beer — more, as I’ve seen, if you live in Boston."

    So what about that not-fit-for-dinner story?

    "Well, I have this friend from Sweden," she says. "She got a job [as a dominatrix] in this den of iniquity. One of the dommes she worked with had a client [who] worked for Donald Trump. The client took her to Tavern on the Green. He paid for... " She pauses. For a long time. "She basically fed him her feces."

    Fed them to him?

    "Yeah. Through a funnel."

    I’m really done eating now. ^

    The Murder Elite play this Saturday, December 3, at Jacques Underground, 79 Broadway, Boston, with the Reagan Babies + Resistdance | 8 pm | $10 | 21+ | www.themurderelite.com | www.myspace.com/voidedchris

     


    Issue Date: December 2 - 8, 2005
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