Interviews: Laurie Anderson

Laurie Anderson 

Gets Hungry

While I sat going over my notes in the back of a cab hurtling downtown from the RockBill offices on 57^th Street to Laurie Anderson’s Canal Street loft, the turbaned cabbie blasted Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like The Wolf.” Great, I thought, I got to deal with this distraction when I’m trying to get into the head space to interview one of the most innovative and provocative artist of the times, a woman who took performance art to an unprecedented level of subtly and popularity with her hit song “O Superman,” and in a masterpiece of an album, Mister Heartbreak, as well as a dozen other astounding accomplishments (again, this is why God invented Wikipedia, look her up), including, much later on, marrying Lou Reed. But here I am with the cabbie singing along with one of the most plasticene, corporate-pop pabulum bands ever,

“In touch with the ground, I’m on the hunt, I’m after you

Smell like I sound, I’m lost in a crowd, and I’m hungry like the wolf.”

“Smell like I sound?” What the bloody hell does that mean? And the worst part, the terror, was that as we crossed 14^th Street I started singing along, too.

“Mouth is alive with juices like wine, and I’m hungry like the wolf.”

What the frak? Laurie Anderson is a serious artist. I have serious questions. There are allusions to Foucault deconstructionism here. There are ironies to investigate about using technology to subvert technology, and I’m wailing, “Hungry Like The Wolf” to the prostitutes and drug dealers down 8^th Avenue.

It’s so bad that as I ride the elevator up to the top floor of a converted warehouse overlooking the Hudson River, I think I hear that song reverberating behind the walls of Laurie Anderson’s apartment. When she slides open the door, I naturally catch my breath to see her in person.

I swear she had candlelight dancing in her sea-green eyes. She greeted me warmly, a smile brightening her beautiful face. She wove her paint-flecked fingers through her trademarked pixie hair, and welcomed me in.

Her apartment had all manner of musical instruments and artistic supplies, books, albums, the accouterments of a busy and deeply curious mind, including a telescope by the wall-sized windows overlooking cargo ships on the river and New Jersey factories beyond that.

I gave her a copy of Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Map, the only geographically accurate map of the world ever made. Reciprocating, she gave me a t-shirt printed with the same map. Turns out we were both Fuller fanatics.

We sat down and I pulled out my tape recorder and my incomplete notes when I heard the radio play (because God may be dead but irony isn’t) Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like The Wolf.”

   “Oh my God,” I said, feeling like Gig Young in a forgotten episode of The Twilight Zone.

   “I know,” she said. “I just love this song.”

   “Yeah,” I said, too cowardly to come out of the closet and agree, “but why?”

   “I don’t know.” She laughed. “I hear the words, ‘hungry like the wolf.’ I know what they mean. But it’s emotional. I feel it more. You don’t have to believe in a song to like it. That’s where art works differently than ideas. With ideas, you can either believe them or not. Art comes to you sensually. You have very few defenses against it. Art can trick people into accepting ideas they don’t even see coming and they wouldn’t accept otherwise. It’s why someone like Reagan was so successful. He was more of an artist, than an ideas person. Politics is close to art. The emotion politicians work with is fear. We all ask ourselves questions such as, ‘What am I working for? Why do I get up in the morning?’ Well, in the United States, at least, the answer is practical. ‘I get up to go to work to get paid to pay the rent and to buy stuff.’ Most political arguments, whether about taxes or immigration, come down to how one candidate can get you more of what you want. Everybody’s worried they wont be able to get what they want in the future. People talk about how bad things are and how much worse things will get. But the emotion is excitement, as if they’re rooting for the end of the world. Our hearts beat faster. There’s something spectacular about the thought of the TV going off and the sirens going on. There is a romance about an impending holocaust, an apocalypse. Maybe it’s a relief. Freud recognized this years ago. We are as attracted to death as we are to life. Perhaps more so to death. But wouldn’t it be incredible and wouldn’t it change our expectations and maybe also our reality if we got as excited about peace, maybe even love? Love is a type of gravity. ‘Falling in love’ is the obvious comparison. The difference is there are very few places where you can escape gravity. It’s the opposite with love. Love is not omnipresent. In fact, it’s hard to find. It’s what we’re the most hungry for.”

   “Like the wolf.”

Ficciones: Somebody Bury Me

  Ficciones

Inspired by our grandfather, Jorge Louis Borges (not that one, the other one), we published very short stories in RockBill. Most of mine ended up in a bottle washed up on the shores of Antarctica. But a few survived. Here’s one:

Somebody Bury Me

He didn’t know he wanted to be a country and western singer until a tune and a one-line lyric popped into his head as he fidgeted at his computer. “Somebody bury me ’cause I’ve been dead for years.” He crooned it over and over to himself, wishing he could play the guitar and pick out the somber minor chords to match.

         As the day went by and he uncarefully marked the fluctuating stock quotations of the companies he was responsible for tracking, the tune refused to stop haunting him. It even grew stronger.

         The steely face of his supervisor reflected in his desktop like a still and permanent screensaver.

         “What are you doing, Jacoby?” she asked.

         He turned around to look at her and the peering bespectacled eyes darting out of other cubicle stalls.

         “Somebody bury me ’cause I’ve been dead for years,” he sang, not to her as much as to all the other after work losers, cheaters, gamblers, and slackers nursing Lone Star bottles of beer in the honky tonk of his mind.

         He wasn’t fired. He didn’t quit. He was given the rest of the day off. When he came in the next morning, he entered his cubicle and flipped on the computer, just like always. The darting peepers didn’t notice anything different in Jacoby. There was nothing different to notice except for the 100 percent rattlesnake cowboy boots clicking their heels under his chair.

      

Pirates!

The Pirate Life For Me

The joke goes, you can spend your money on wine, women, or song, or you can waste it. By those markings, the least wasteful people in history are pirates, whether vilified as blood-thirsty killers or romanticized as Deppish cads.

         The truth is that no infamy perpetuated by pirates in their dedicated pursuit of happiness compares to the wholesale depravations committed in the name of government. In the golden age of piracy, from the late 15^th century up through the early 19^th, pirates ransacked the Caribbean and the eastern shores of America. They pillaged and plundered just like in the movies. But their crimes pale compared to the legalized enslaving of millions of Africans and the outright stealing of the entire western hemisphere from the various Indian people. Let’s not even start with the religious mumbo jumbo that kept most of the population either victimized or terrorized, or the institutionalized racism that kept people who had much in common, such as black slaves and exploited white factory workers, apart.

         None of these polarizing, “us versus them,” factions existed on pirate ships. Pirates didn’t care what God you whispered sweet nothings to or what percentage of melatonin you carried on your skin. Pirates didn’t even care about making money, only spending it on the aforementioned wine, women, and song. As such, they were uncontrollable by the Power Elite and therefore dangerous.

         Yet, for all the piratical heads hanging from the yardarms, governments fell over themselves to enlist pirates in their quasi-military acts of state-sponsored terrorism. Sir Walter Raleigh, an idealist and poet, was basically a privateer (a private pirate) instrumental in harassing Spain, Britain’s main rival for super-powerism. Blackbeard, the poster boy for pirate clichés, was employed by the British Governor of Carolina to steal from rival French, Spanish, and Dutch ships. Simon Bolivar gave Jean LaFitte carte blanche to attack British and Spanish ships. Without the help of LaFitte and his brothers, Andrew Jackson would have lost the Battle of New Orleans to the British during the War of 1812, and we would be speaking English today!

         If pirates made great mercenaries, they made better revolutionaries.

         Democracy, for all the fancy words of lawyers in Boston and Amsterdam, started on a pirate ship. All the men participated in every major decision (who to attack, where to hide out, etc). They practiced a form of communism that Karl Marx would have drooled over. Despite their reputation as lawless barbarians, pirates obeyed strict and fairly universally applied rules. Every manjack aboard shared equally in all the booty they took. A double share was reserved for the Captain and the Quartermaster (in charge of all supplies) owing to their greater responsibilities. Every pirate had life-time life insurance. If a man was permanently injured beyond your basic gouged out eye or loped off hand, he was taken care of, retired to a sweet little acreage in Bermuda or Carolina. If he was killed, the pirates anted up enough money to take care of his wife (or wives) and children for life.

         Did any Navy or merchant fleet offer the same compensation? No, and wouldn’t for centuries. If a British sailor became disabled on the job—and it happened with alarming frequency, hence the need to continuously kidnap new recruits—he was given a tin cup and told to beg the streets of Bristol.

         Pirates took care of their own.

         It went deeper than that. The values of pirates—wine, women, and song—may seem trivial at first glance, but think it out. They enjoyed life to the fullest. Do we? They actually lived out all the New Age t-shirts and bumper stickers we’re so fond of decorating ourselves with. Pirates followed their bliss. Pirates lived every day as if it was their last. Pirates never postponed joy. They lived for the moment.

And women? It’s easy to accuse pirates of absconding with innocent girls. But that discounts the choices those women made to be around pirates in the first place. If you were a woman living in 1555, what choices did you have? There’s nun. There’s housewife. That’s it. In both cases, you were in for a life of drudgery and non-existence. Women who ran off to live the pirate life found a third choice; themselves. Like the men, they basked in all the freedom and indulgent joy they could muster out of lives that were usually existentially bleak, disease-ridden, and short. We often think of women as victims, when the truth is that many women lived the pirate life, too, both aboard ships and in the ports of call.

         It’s that choice to live a life free from the regulations of Church and State, not to mention Family, that we today take for granted, but way back when, it took considerable guts to break away and live by your own lights.       

Pirates were an alternative to the lock step mass consumerist, aggressively capitalistic, racist, exclusionist, and imperialistic patriarchy that was just getting its game face on in the 16^th and 17^th centuries.

         Look at the world we live in now. The only thing different is that the government does a better job pirating for itself and using money and fame to co-opt any potential pirates (rock stars, mobsters, graffiti artists, anyone with a flash on individuality). The real pirates were never in tall ships, swigging rum. They were on Fleet Street in London then, now on Wall Street in New York and on Capitol Hill in Washington. These pirates in yellow ties and thousand dollar suits don’t steal baubles and trinkets. They take people’s homes, their life savings, their futures. They take entire nations (Hello, Goodbye, Europe). They don’t lust after women. They confine men and women to very narrow, tightly policed roles and, by the hocus pocus of Madison Avenue, tell people who they are, what they like, and, more to the point (of the sword), what to buy.

         As for me, shiver me timbers, matey, but before they get me to trade in my blunderbuss for an iPhone, I’ll take my chances on the high seas. Weigh anchor and shove off. Yo ho ho.

        

        

  

Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury

The Boy

The first Ray Bradbury book I ever read was Something Wicked This Way Comes and it left me then, at age 12, and now, a bit older, breathless, panting, sleeping with a flashlight, and hoping that I never take that sucker’s bet to have my dreams comes true. With Bradbury, dreams come along with nightmares, but nightmares come along with dreams, too. No matter how Dark it got, there was a light somewhere at the end of the Merry-Go-Round. Not much of a light, but enough to see a glimmer of hope. I interviewed Mr. Bradbury in his office in Los Angeles. He was an old man then, though it was many years ago, and though we might have been in the room of a nine-year-old boy who lived among stacks of Monsters of Movieland, tin-plated spaceships with battery-operated strobe lights, puzzles, puppets, and toys that allowed the wonders of his mind to spill out and be touched. I had seen Mr. B before, fantastically with Kurt Vonnegut during a photo session, and weirdly arguing with Gore Vidal, also in bookstores, at plays, he tended to be around. You can look up his credits and his bio, his experiences as one of the fathers of modern science fiction, definitely of the sensibility that brought us everything from The Twilight Zone to Star Trek to Star Wars to most of the movies of Steven Spielberg, as well as writing the John Huston adaptation of Moby-Dick, and his strange escapade with Fellini in Rome (These are great stories best read from the brush strokes of the Master.) Bradbury was a Master. Everything necessary to learn from him is in his books and stories and plays. But here’s a little extra, a little something he gave me, and now I give to you. Ray Bradbury from a spring day in Los Angeles when the Jacarandas were in bloom and the circus had not yet arrived, though we could hear its calliope approaching:

I’m a storyteller from way back. My influences were the great storytellers. If you can hook people on your ideas, you can get them to read your stories, or listen to them, or watch them. However they experience the stories, it’s the ideas that count. The history of the world is the history of ideas. We dreamt in caves of being warm, so we invented pajamas—and other things such as learning how to build fires. Eventually that led to television and bad shows, as well as good ones that connect people. The Berlin Wall, Tianamen Square, the Persian Gulf, everyone is watching. That makes life harder for those who prefer to work in the dark. I’ll take that, even with the ridiculous sitcoms that come along with it. I find ideas everywhere. Even among trash. I read the great books, but also the trashy ones. Most of our culture is trash. I’m full of trash. How many hundreds of hours have I listened to the radio? How many thousands of hours of television have I watched? I’ve seen every movie ever made. Starting when I was a kid, I saw 14 movies every week, maybe more. Almost everything I’ve seen, heard, and read is, for the most part trash. What makes something more than trash are the ideas within it. Take the movie Predator, please. Actually, it’s beautifully made, but there’s not a single really interesting idea in it. You watch men get killed and it doesn’t mean anything. Where are the philosophical concepts? What was the meaning of the lives of those men so brutally killed? What about their families, their lovers? Who are they? Who is the so-called monster? Why is everybody doing what they are doing? Tarzan had more brains. At least he had a love affair with Jane. And he had a story. Still, we need all the trash in our cultural lives, all those lousy books and everything else that will turn your brains to mulch, because, if you have any imagination, you will take in all that trash, along with what is truly excellent, and then you become you.

Thank you, Mr. Bradbury, for helping us become us.

Interviews: Tom Waits

Before I reformed my wicked ways, I plied the dark alleys of the fourth estate. Touring through my back pages, I intend to report here on some of those bits and pieces.

This one is more or less how it appeared in RockBill. Bob O’Brian accompanied me to the interview because he knew stuff and also because sometimes in life you need Bob O’Brian on your wing. To this day, Waits is one of the most interesting, compelling, challenging, and rewarding artists. I’m grateful to have had this small exchange with him.

The Navy Still AWaits

Dr. Thomas Alan Waits, Esquire

Nope. We’re not in some Parisian pissotiére. Not stool side in any town’s downtown bar. Not even sloped on a guardrail off the Interstate in a place where “everything’s so flat you can dream everything up.” We’re on a bruise-colored couch in New York. Tom Waits is not smoking a cigarette, but he’s thinking of it. His voice tends to roll under the furniture so he puts the tape recorder right next to his trumpeter’s lips like he’s going to blow a solo.

     If you’re paying attention, you know Waits wrote “Jersey Girl” and “Downtown Train,” and his classic urban-suburban landscapes of bottomless desire on the albums Heartattack and Vine, Small Change, Swordfishtrombones, and a whole lot more. You know him from his acting in Down By Law, Rumble Fish, and other movies. You also know him from the soundtrack of Francis Ford Coppola’s underrated classic, One From The Heart.

         Waits plays a mean tape recorder, his voice sounding like early morning coffee grinds in the bottom of a cracked cup. He riffs on his songs, calling some of them “a score for a mutant dwarf community,” or “music for retarded monkeys on Benzedrine.” When he talks about composing movie soundtracks, he smirks. “It’s like sewing a button on a sports coat and you can’t contact the guy who’s working on the sleeves and the guy who’s doing the lining hasn’t been hired yet or he just quit. It’s like throwing a rock and waiting two years for it to go through the window.”

     Think of these questions like the backbeat to the demented calliope billowing through the carousel of Waits’ mind.

        How were you raised?

       I don’t think I’m raised, yet. I always found that curious. “You’re raised.” What do you do then? Go back down? There’s no place else to go.

       What do you listen to?

        Certain music affects you like you want your head on that body. For a long time, I liked hearing anything with an upright bass and a tenor saxophone.

What’s the current music in your head?

I’d like to have a band that could sound like an automobile accident and also rhumba.

How does the music come out of you?

       You have to dismantle yourself and scatter it all around and then put a blindfold on and put it back together.

        Why do you like bagpipes so much?

         I love the sound. It’s like strangling a goose.

         What other instruments would you like to play?

         I’ve grown very fond of the bass marimba lately.

         What was your first instrument?

        I played the trumpet when I was a kid because it was easy to carry, like carrying your lunch. A piano, you have to go to it. You never hear anybody say, “Pass that piano, buddy.”

        What kind of kid were you?

        Real repressed. I wanted to skip growing up and rush all the way to 40.

         Who were your early heroes?

         You ever hear of Tozzio Navarali? He’s a famous Italian race care driver, before Granatelli. Jonathan Winters talked about him. Now that guy, Winters, he’s certifiable. That must be a good way to be, to live in your head.

         Were you writing when you were a kid?

       It takes a long time for the input to be shoved through your apparatus and germinate and come out as something of your own devising.

         How do you write?

       With a butterfly net. All these things pass through you all the time. Every once in a while, you got to reach up, grab it, and swallow.

         Do you write on the road?

         I like to go to Rangoon or Hong Kong, come home, and then write. Get something on you and come home.

         Were you always a rambling man?

       I wanted to join the Navy when I was a kid. You know, the Navy’s not just a job, it’s $39 a month, or was back then. When I turned 18, I got tattoos and thought that was it.

         Would you join up now?

         I think the Navy is no longer a career opportunity for me, but it’s nice to know it’s there.

         What else would you do besides what you do?

         I’d like to be a great tap dancer.

         Could you be happy alone in a room?

         As long as I had a wet bar, some clam dip, a black and white TV, and the yellow pages, I’d be alright.