Chad Taylor

Apple Crumble: Tama Janowitz

Last flashback: Tama Janowitz on the line from New York. Her collection Slaves of New York was published in 1986. The movie came out in 1989 and was generally panned, as was Janowitz's next book, A Cannibal in Manhattan, the subject of which she hints at towards the end of the interview. I don't know how critics rate Slaves of New York nowadays but you can find traces of its DNA in everything from Sex And The City to Girls.

She had the most wonderful voice. Think Janice in Friends.
New York, New York, city of dreams. Where the streets are paved with gold and the Velvet Underground were invented. Where King Kong climbed the Empire State and where the editor of Vanity Fair gets a $20,000 clothing allowance. Where Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe worked and died. Where Def Jam was born. Where the stars go for lunch. Where art dealers live like rock stars. How are things in New York, Tama?

"It's raining."

Wow! No kidding?

*

Tama Janowitz's Slaves of New York chronicles the city's urban sprawl in 22 short stories. It's her second publication (the first was the lauded but less sensational novel American Dad) and the subject and timing has captured the popular imagination. At its weakest the collection is a thin pastiche of Damon Runyon; at its best it's an amphetamine-paced chronicle of the art world that Robert Hughes loves to hate.

"I just went to New York and hung out and went home and wrote about it," Tama drawls. "I didn't see anybody else writing about this world. It was at a time when the art scene was like the rock n' roll scene. I didn't know anybody, but I could go to a gallery opening and someone would give me a glass of wine and somebody else would say, 'Do you like the paintings?' and 'There's a party on later tonight...' I mean I wasn't writing non-fiction, but I was trying to record some of the situations and problems that were occurring at that particular time and place.''

The stories first appeared in various publications, including the New Yorker. And one day Andy Warhol was leafing through a copy of the New Yorker and...

"Warhol first bought five of the stories from me to make into a movie, so I did a screenplay for him. After his death it turned out that Merchant lvory had been reading my work and they'd been interested in it for some time, so after Warhol's death they found out that my stories were available and they brought them from the [Warhol] Foundation."

Which is how the movie of Slaves Of New York came to be. Janowitz wrote the screenplay, Bernadette Peters played the central character / narrator Eleanor, and the film was produced by Ismail Merchant and directed by James Ivory.

Merchant and Ivory are the hard-nosed and starry-eyed guys who brought you Heat And Dust, Maurice and A Room With A View. They're the sort of films in which Julian Sands and Anthony Andrews ride bicycles around English colonial settlements and Helena Bonham-Carter frets over her virginity. Was Janowitz concerned that the makers of such films would miss the In Your Face style of modern New York?

"No. Merchant Ivory have been making films for 20 years, many of which have been set in social settings, and I thought in any event that if they could get down the Boston of Henry James and Edwardian England, then certainly that had to be more difficult than modern New York, which was standing right there in front of us. So I never had any qualms -- their work has always been about social mores and behaviour and rules at society and etiquette, and that was what I was interested in too."

On paper the Slaves Of New York are willing victims of the inner-city in-crowd, the Manhattan art-world madness that packs galleries and covers canvasses with some of history's most meagre scrawl. The art scene in New York has always been hyped but the 80s have seen it attain new levels of raging bullshit. Publicity-hungry painters like Jean Michel-Basquiat and Julian Schnabel make Madonna look like a hermit. The movie makes this point not without sympathy, but when it screened in New York the reaction was not good. The Emperor was naked, and in Cinemascope.

"They hated it," Janowitz says, her voice starting to whine. "They hated the whole thing. They said it was undermining the fabric of American society, and that Tri-Star was an evil company for making the film, and that Bernadette Peters was too old. Just one thing after the other. They went crazy.

"I don't think they liked New York being made fun of. They were angry that I got a lot of attention and they were angry that Merchant Ivory were doing something other than Henry James or E.M. Forster."

You'd think that New York could handle a media version of itself.

'They're like sharks here, they gang up on things. It was like the Ayatollah saying, 'Kill Salman Rushdie.'

"I'm not sure that the movie was sympathetic, or that the book was. To me, this is the way the city is. I don't think the people in it are all bad, or all good; I don't think they're all creative geniuses, or they're all hustling, ambitious people -- this is the way people are acting at this particular time at this particular place on the planet.'

New York definitely has its own folklore.

"Well, they come here from all over the place, from Holland and Germany and New Zealand, and they all think that they're gonna make it somehow. There are an awful lot of people here vying for attention -- and there are not many people willing to give any attention."

Which is something you capture -- the spectacle of intelligent people spending their lives trying to shout each other down.

"There are people living on the streets here -- I can't imagine Calcutta being much worse. These men are living in the park, sitting on lawn chairs with furniture, everything. People come from all over and they get stuck here, like on flypaper."

The premise of the title story is that apartments are so hard to get in the city that you end up being a slave to the leaseholder -- is that still the case?

"There are more apartments around now. Do you have a lot of apartments in New Zealand?"

Some. New Zealand's a place with not many people in it.

"That must be nice. My father wanted to emigrate there. You probably have good fishing."

Yes. Do you like fishing?

"No. But if I moved to New Zealand... I could take it up."

*

You had a cameo role in the film. Did you enjoy it?

"I didn't care for that too much. I couldn't remember my lines. It took me like three days to memorise them and it was agony. You have to say them over and over again and you have to get your face to make the same expression. But what the hell do you look like it you say 'Hi there, how are you?' I don't know how your face is meant to look to match that expression. I mean how do you look when you say something like 'Well I'm used to Roger cooking for me, would I have to cook for Bruce?' Am I smiling at that point or what? I dunno."

Playwriting, not prose, was Janowitz's main interest after leaving college. She is currently working on a new play for a Louisville theatre company ("Right now there are 12 players, but some may die") and reading the work of other playwrights to get ideas.

"I'm reading Joe Orton and some Pinter and Sam Shepherd and Beckett. And I like George Orwell and Nabokov and Saul Bellow. It depends on what style I need. I read Marquez for his style. I read a lot of true crime books. And I like to read News Of The World."

News Of The World -- that's the classy one, isn't it?

"It's a little different over here. It has a lot at stories about Siamese twins and women impregnated by aliens."

Is that a source of ideas?

"It makes you kind of ashamed, because if those things aren't true then somebody out there has a fantastic imagination. If they are true then all the better. If they are true, then why bother to write anything at all?"

(1989)

An Opera Sandcastle: Dieter Meier

Conceptual artist, gambler and pop star Dieter Meier is one of my heroes so I was excited to get him on the line from his home in Switzerland when Yello were promoting Flag circa 1988/89. I wrote up a version of the interview for Rip It Up but this the full transcript. I've corrected some of the grammar, but he really did talk like that. 
I'm sure I asked more questions than this but chose to save precious time by not entering them into the RIU computron's floppy disc input panel. The faded dot-matrix printout has been sitting in a box since 1988 waiting for a time when I could photograph it with a pocket digital camera, transfer the images to a pencil-thin SSD laptop and upload them to a OCR translator to be shared online. But now that time has come.  
CT: Hi Dieter.

DIETER MEIER: Hey you sound very close! Ja, we have an incredibly good line. I am in the house and I was about to fall asleep.

CT: Have you had a busy day?

DM: Today? What did I do, well let's see ... we were discussing several things, we are planning a film in Poland , this is a little Yello opera which we are hopefully beginning in Breslau in a big old film studio, and we were getting closer to the beginning of this.

The film is a fantasy-type story, based on music which was written for it about a young man, a young musician who is kidnapped from planet Earth by the underground empire of the Duke of Shadows where he is used to create images of the world with his music. He plays an instrument down there, and playing this instrument creates real opera scenes inside a snowball. This is the title of the whole movie -- and this snowball is a huge opera set.

CT: Are you directing?

DM: Yeah, sure.

CT: It sounds like a very typical Yello idea.

DM: Ja ja, it has a lot to do with Yello. People call us film soundtrack makers and our music is very visual. This time we are fulfilling the visuals with the reality.

CT: Do you draw inspiration from films?

DM: No, I never go to the movies myself. It's more based on fantasies; it's not real movies, but movies for your head, movies of your imagination.

CT: Will you appear in the movie?

DM: Definitely! Boris [Blank] is playing a part, I'm playing a part and [so is] an English actor called Paul McGann. And a lot of Polish actors because the whole thing is basically a Polish production.

CT: Do you think of yourself as an actor rather than a singer?

DM: Ja, that's true, ja. I've said this before. I don't think I'm a typical rock star; as you said, I'm an actor in Boris's sound pictures for your head. I change my part for each song -- always the same actor but with a different part.

CT: The part has seen you travel the world musically.

DM: Yeah of course, but it's intentional to be very open and to use all kinds of musical subjects. It's not intentional to write an African or a south American piece. It's like two kids sitting at the beach, building a castle made of sand: an opera sandcastle -- a South American or African sand piece -- it's not an intentionally based on a technological piece of music. When there is a rhythm you land in certain territories, and not in others. Like Norwegian is not a rhythmical piece.

CT: And you have no fear of the studio.

DM: Ja that's of course all Boris who is responsible for this. I never touch any equipment and Boris touches it every day for ten hours. Our advantage probably is that, starting with little cassette recorders and later a four-track machine, we really grew with the jungle of technology. Boris is at ease with it: it's not an enemy you have to overrun, it's a friend with whom you are talking. I always said that for Boris, all this technology is nothing more and nothing less than a jungle of the 20th century. For him, the whole studio is one big instrument.

CT: Are you comfortable in the 20th century?

DM: Yeah, sure. Well, in classical music I think in the 20s and 30s -- people from the new school -- everything more or less stopped. And the other things that came out of this century after the 30s to me are either endlessly experimenting.

Of course it is very good to have music that experiments but it gets kind of boring, this sort of John Cage approach. It's a historical monument if you are destroying things, if you you are destroying a piano -- if you are fooling around with sounds, that's important -- but I think that nothing really came out of this after a while.

I think pop and rock -- I believe that till the early 60s apart from some examples, this was a very slow movement. Then rock and pop made this incredible step -- early Beatles and Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix -- [they were] just like an explosion, and now you see mainly the last little tiny glowing fires of this explosion. Now there is not much, for me, happening.

If you listen to the English charts for example, it's more and more producers squeezing the last drops of blood out of young musicians; young musicians who bleed for a producer's musical non-impact. It's a very dull moment right now. Of course, there are always exceptions, but basically I think most pop and rock music now is very epigonal.

CT: Yello is an exception.

DM: As I say, I think we were very lucky to grow with all the technology and then I think we were lucky not to come out of a country where the last drops of life have been squeezed out of the rock circus. We truly had to invent ourselves, invent something else. To be to become ourselves, because of course rock music has no tradition at all here [in Switzerland] -- if people and bands are moving in the traditional rock and pop direction they are to me like yodelling Japanese: technically very good, but they are doing something that is not their thing, their spirit, their movement. They become as ridiculous as yodelling Japanese -- they change their style, they listen to that then they do that, it's sort of epigonal fashion.

Because we never started as a commercial band, we just did what we had to do to become like this. We had all the freedom and the commerciality of it, at the beginning, was a highly unimportant sideline. It was not something we aimed at because if you aim at becoming an international act then you should be sent to loony home straight away -- it is impossible. So you have nothing to lose, and a lot of time to become yourself, because you don't belong to any traditions. Being alone in a territory without rock and pop in this age was an advantage to us.

CT: A lot of bands that start off sounding different soon fall into traditional forms, yet Yello sound more and more like Yello.

DM: That's true. Of course sometimes people, especially in England, they tell you since the first Yello album, they all sound the same, and I am very proud of this, because if you have found your style, how can you change over the years? When a painter has found his way to dance, to express himself -- how do you call it -- 'on canvas' that is a very slow process, and there is not a dramatic change each year. Only people who have no style change their style every year, because they haven't got one. If you listen to the Cure, it's always the Cure, and if you listen to Mozart, even if you have heard only three pieces from the chap, you can immeditely say, 'Aha! This could be Mozart!' Every strong artistic movement has a style which slowly develops, and does not change like fashion.

CT: You have a lot of other singers on this album -- I'm assuming you don't suffer from ego.

DM: No, I don't suffer from it at all. In fact, I'm the promoter of this idea because Yello really is soundtracks for your head -- movies for your head, and these movies sometimes employ other actors. On the last album we concentrated more on me again, but you can never tell.

CT: How'd you come to use Shirley Bassey?

DM: A friend of mine knows Shirley Bassey very well: and he heard that she kind of likes our music, and she expressed that if we had a track for her, she would be interested in singing it. So we wrote 'The Rhythm Divine' and she liked it and came into the studio. It was very simple. You could get Michael Jackson to come in and sing a few tracks if liked them -- it's not a big trick.

CT: And Billy MacKenzie?

DM: Yeah, he's a friend.

CT: You are known as a performance artist. Do you consider Yello an extension of that?

DM: Well ja somewhere in one way it is, I think. Boris and my performance is always live in the studio -- it is live. People ask me why don't you ever play live, I say, we play live every day.

My role, which in very much that of a painter, is painting life. Painting is always life -- you're not reproducing, you're only producing. You're not like a band which is writing a piece, then rehearsing it and then sometimes bringing it to the studio to reproduce it -- we only go to/the studio to produce. We are a very live band.

CT: Did performance art give you confidence in that process?

DM: No. If you ask me now why did I do this, I can't even tell you. It is to me a very strange wonder how I became a performance artist, how I succeeded in having museum exhibitions and becoming quite known in this area. It was something where I obviously followed a track where I somehow had to go, but I never started with the intention of becoming a conceptual artist or a performance artist -- it just happened to me, like everything. I never planned to become a feature film maker. I always wrote down little ideas and little scripts and someday somebody asked me to direct one of these little ideas, and I said why not? I became a movie director overnight -- I never intended to be one.

CT: You also used to gamble.

DM: Mm-mmm. Not seriously, now. If you do this, you are either a professional or a hobby free-loader. If you do it really you do it like a job, an everyday's work. But that was years ago, I stopped when I was 23.

CT: What's it like as a job?

DM: It's the most complete escape from the world possible. Like being a boxer. I only played poker, and with the very simple idea of standing in the ring to knock down your enemy, the sooner the better, and he wants the same thing. This is such a thrilling but simple parameter of existence that you can consider it an escape from the world. You are living in a hermetical situation, standing in this boxing ring, only when you play poker you can play it 14 hours a day. You can't box 14 hours a day -- well, they did in the 19th century, but this would be crazy. Poker, when you sit at the table, you're given a new hand each few minutes, and you can work with that hand, and you're carrying your fate in your hand, and this thrilling moment is the most total escape: it makes you feel good, it makes you feel important, it gives you immediate sense for those minutes.

CT: Francis Bacon was a gambler, a blackjack man.

DM: That's interesting. I never gambled in casinos -- I was interested only in poker playing. When you're gambling with and against individuals.

CT: Since Dada it's been respectable to draw a direct line between chance at the gambling table and chance on the canvas, in the studio.

DM: Well, it has a lot to do with this. This is, of course, true.

CT: What's in store for Yello's future?

DM: Well, the movie is Yello, you know? The most logical extension of what we've always been doing in our video work, this time, it's a feature story and hopefully strong enough to entertain people for 100 minutes. There has never been anything more Yello than this opera. I think this is gonna be the future, I think we will make more films like this. I'm also planning some other features, more in the thriller area. I hope we will enjoy ourselves, and be good entertainers.

CT: Is it a musical or a written idea?

DM: We did have a verbal idea, which was then turned into music which is now turned back into a movie, with a lot of verbal ideas.

I hope to make it sooner or later to your most beautiful country. A cousin of mine was there for two months, and everyone says it is one of the last resorts. Is that true?

CT: "The last resort"... yes.

DM: A very famous Austrian painter, Hundtertwasser lives there, keeps a big farm in new Zealand. The only problem is there's a lot of work here and it takes a long time to travel.

(1989)

Discreet Machinery: Syd Mead (1987)


Five years after Blade Runner came out in theaters, Syd Mead visited New Zealand to lecture at an Auckland technical institute and I swung an interview, i.e. asked a friend of a friend whose father worked at the polytech if I could talk to Syd and Syd said, sure. The self-described 'visual futurist' turned up dressed like a TV detective in a suit and tie and a crumpled raincoat and indulged my very young person's questions; it was only as the conversation progressed that I realised Philip K Dick's fiction was a much larger part of my life than it was of his. Cult movies really were cult movies, then. I had an ex-rental VHS copy of the first cut of Blade Runner and I don't like to think of how many times I watched it.

Mead's lecture consisted of 35mm film slides of his paintings and drawings on twin Kodak Carousel projectors which he operated manually during his narration. The interview was recorded earlier in the day on a Phillips cassette deck and transcribed on a Sharp QL300 electric typewriter. This version of the story was published in the Melbourne-based magazine Tension, issue #12, December 1987. This week Terence Hogan scanned the pages and emailed them to me as PDFs which I converted to text using a free online OCR service and uploaded to Blogger. Give me a hard copy, right there.

*

The future was once a bright and happy place. Built on the social aspirations of the fifties and sixties and fuelled by seventies technology, Tomorrow was a time when two-car families became two-rocket families and holidaying couples went for picnics on Venus. Designers, writers and illustrators assured us that society would ease into the new frontier without so much as blinking.

A designer named Syd Mead, then working as a 'visual futurist' for US Steel and Ford Motors was – and still is – one of the great optimists. His paintings and drawings depict utopian futures filled with sleek transporters and vast buildings. Cities are slotted into mile-wide space-bound cylinders or, as in one future-projection of San Francisco, constructed as a single piece of "discreet machinery" to complement the size of the surrounding landscape as well as its ecology.

Last year a Tokyo company commissioned Mead to imagine a sport of Tomorrow. He suggested "120-foot high robot racing greyhounds." Another painting shows going to work: a giant Lazy Susan slides down one side of a skyscraper, collects the tenants in their cars and serves them coffee before sling-shooting them to work. And if personal transport becomes impractical in a crowded city, he still envisages the social need for a ceremonial form of transport for, say, a night at the opera. Patrons arrive in gold, wheelless tear-drops that hover inches above the ground and flood with light when opened. It's the designer's version of the American dream a thousand years on: Royal carriages for the Everyman.

"Science fiction," Mead smiles, "concerns itself with the technology of the future, and that's a kind of magic. Isaac Asimov has said that magic is just something beyond immediate belief – it's always been one of society's favourite things to indulge in.

"I call science fiction 'reality ahead of schedule' sometimes. You can perceive a trend and other professional futurists, maybe economists, spot trends Looking into the future and creating these scenarios is exciting because you can try and imagine what would happen if you rearranged the flavours in the cake-mix. This is called modelling. Now with our elaborate computers available, this modelling-prediction technique is being used extensively in all industries. Science fiction's been doing that for decades."

Syd Mead has published two collections of his Future: Sentinel 1 and 2. Chromed and rosy-hued, they catalogue every aspect of a day in the life of Tomorrow. They owe as much to the American tradition of landscape painting as they do to the people-using-a-product renditions of advertising; it's their content that's ahead of schedule, not their attitude. This is Mead's catchphrase idea: a future that's as old as it is new. His Future reflects the present with an almost paternal reassurance. There will be fast cars in 3000 AD, but no war.

It took British director Ridley Scott to darken the vision and bring Mead's ideas to a wider public. Scott was filming Philip K Dick's novel Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, cutting its six-word title down to only two - Blade Runner. The plot of the novel had been likewise reduced (with Dick's full approval) to a tight, simple future-cop tale, Chandler with rocket-fins, and this had placed a special premium on the look of the film. Mead was commissioned to design a flying car and ended up shaping the look of everything else.

Blade Runner is now regarded as a watershed in science fiction and much of that credit goes to Syd Mead's visual influence. It's a wry, mature fantasy of high-tech and low-life backwashed with smoke, rain and neon. The future has never been the same since. But Mead shrugs off the movie's influence, almost bored.

"Maybe I did the lob too well on that one," he suggests. "The reason I got involved is that the first book I had published had just come out then. Ridley Scott had my book and Chris Foss's book and Roger Dean's but he picked my approach really just because of my industrial design background. The machines had little screw-holes and the metal looked like it was split in the right place for doors to open and things like that.

"The original story for the film was Philip K, Dick's and Dick's stories were very dreary anyway. I don't agree with that vision particularly, but I was hired to help Ridley make this as interestingly a dreary picture as possible, which we proceeded to do. We invented a socio-economic theory which would fit the story and then I invented the look of things to go along with that. It was a very classical industrial design approach to movie design, which isn't done that much. I like to design for film on a very logical basis and then mix it up or change the format to fit the dramatic necessities. Starting with a genuine design programme first hopefully gives the end result a more believable look."

Mead and Scott took their task seriously. Although Mead dryly reflects on the film's flying-cars ("It would be a nightmare. allowing the average person access to a three-dimensional traffic matrix") the city depicted in Blade Runner points at what is happening in cities now.

"For Blade Runner we just took all the trends in progress today: in Chicago, New York, areas outside of Paris, all the sections that are going high-rise because of land-use – and accelerated the trends already in place to come up with a sort of peculiar vertical society. We found that you need a second layer of streets for access to and from big buildings, about sixty feet above the real street. And this would produce a basement effect on the real street which would become filled with cabling and so forth.

"It all has to do with land use. If everyone wants to be in one space you have to build the buildings taller both to create more floor space within the same acreage and to handle the loan on the cost of construction. It's all a paper accounting game. One mile away there might be nice flat land and lots of room but nobody wants to build there because it isn't fashionable.

"In LA this is now happening in Westwood which is extremely dense. Visiting there is literally not worth the trouble, unless you drop in by helicopter.

"The grid plans of our cities, in general, are not much use for anything other than keeping track of who owns what property. In Europe, the old Medieval cities began at natural pathways and landmarks. As they grew and grew and try to accommodate street traffic it becomes an absolute nightmare. You try and arrange a traffic-light system there and it's almost impossible. Tokyo's like that – an absolute nightmare. It's high-energy! I love to go there. As long as someone else drives. I was asked repeatedly if I'd copied the high-rise look of the Shinjuku area for Blade Runner but I said no, I hadn't been there since before all the high-rises were built."

*

The Japanese zeal for scientific process appeals to Mead, who regards the Sixties hippies as the last flicker of techno-paranoia.

"The whole techno-chic appreciation of machine intricacy is certainly Japanese — they just love that approach. Their mind–set is different, culturally. They can literally pretend not to be next to someone on a crowded subway. Europeans and Americans and people with that same cultural base don't like that degree of proximity – your 'bubble' is that much larger. It's to their benefit that the Japanese allow that because there is this intense pressure in their lives to tolerate things in their work and living conditions which we wouldn't put up with. It's to their benefit right now economically but it's changing — the world is beginning to flatten out in terms of cultural exchange."

It was cultural exchange that first bought Mead to Tokyo. His work in other films (Aliens, Tron, 2010) had caught the eye of Japanese entrepreneurs who commissioned him to design the other-worldly interior of the Alpha-Turia nightclub. Club patrons can phone home from a moon-module phone box and dance below a shuttle-cockpit DJ booth.

"The idea was to create a science-fiction set where the cast changed every night. It had to have cost millions and millions of dollars to build |n Tokyo, with their land prices. So this disco is a space liner, the front end of a luxury intergalactic space-liner. We have the observation lounge where you can see duplicates of all the instrumentation – an intense, information-exchange lobby, if you will. And we have the disco floor which is to the delight of all the passengers; the place where they can look out the front of the spaceship. The owners took bits and pieces of what I had shown them in sketches and then had a production company translate these vocabularies of ideas into finished wall surfaces and fixtures."

Mead says he had a great time designing the club and dancing in it afterwards; like most of his work it was a combination of dreams and day-to-day employment. More practical patrons have made an effort to keep their commissions on par with Mead's imagination but their requests, in general, are odd.

The US Air Force, commissioned him to paint a recruiting poster depicting the Stealth bomber — a project so secret that it may or may not exist. As a result, Mead was supplied with no models or plans from which to work. He would make some drawings and show them to the Air Force officials and they would say – well, they couldn't say if it resembled the bomber which may or may not exist but could he make the fins a little bigger and move the cockpit forward a little? And he would ask, 'Is that what it looks like?' And they'd say, We can't tell you. The final, full-colour poster was printed in a special edition to meet public demand.

Mead's commissioned work includes designs for customised private airplane interiors. Clients such as King Hussein and King Fahud of Oman enjoy travelling in style and the designer panders unashamedly to their aesthetic lunacies. The interior of one 747 was modelled to resemble an l8th century English manor, complete with marble floors and oak doors. Another 747 sports its own jacuzzi with jewelled star-charts on the ceiling. "It's the upper end of the market," Mead says.

*

The things that will really matter Tomorrow, he insists, are the things about which we're becoming the most blasé: electronics, computers and information.

"The manipulation of information – we haven't been able to do this before on this massive a scale. You can take a computer and produce theoretical designs for industry and then do part-trial breakdown runs, all in theory. You can design a part, run it through its tests in, say, an operating engine and have a very real feeling for how it is going to operate without actually making anything at all. Thirty years ago that would have been magic.

"We tend to live, unfortunately, with all the results of the mistakes of the past to date. You can't get rid of everything at once, short of a natural disaster, so you have to adapt. So you can think up a whole new concept and apply it or you can do a clever lob of retro fitting.

"For instance, maybe people can go to work not by cars but by electronics. Which isn't a new idea but it's becoming more possible because of the way we're organising work. Other than manipulative labour, work is tending to be the processing of information that's available from within a closed network, which is what a corporate system is. You can work from anywhere that you happen to be as long as you have access to that network. So if you have middle-management people working in judgemental positions, they really don't have to go to work. All they have to do is tap into the network and they can do their lot. That, for instance, might also be a way of getting rid of so much traffic."

The thought of a 21st century society still plagued with traffic jams: it's that same blend of past and future again. Syd Mead, 54, leans back in his chair and contemplates the futureworld nine-to-five with relish.

"People have been the same for thousands and thousands of years," he concludes. "They just use different tools. The nice use of technology would be to keep the human side of things a little bit nutty, a little bit random and let machines take care of the drudgery – that would be the most ideal, optimistic track. A writer like Philip K Dick predicts things going wrong, but you really do have to take that chance."

-- December 1987

I talk such nonsense while asleep...

Stephen Stratford has dug out a fifteen year old interview with me for his cause celebre / literary gossip column™ Quote Unquote. You can read the interview and post your negative comments here. The photo is taken on the back steps of Cafe DKD! Good times. Please note I am no longer wearing my hair like Ensign Ro.

Reading it back I'd give myself points for consistency / stubbornness although for some reason I bang on about "writers' societies". The interviewer was asking me about whether or not I socialised / met with / discussed my work with other writers and obviously that pushed a button. I'm not a joiner - I hesitate to put links on a blog, ffs. What can I say? I'm moody. Or as Bjork put it more or less perfectly: I'm an artist - it's my job to be emotional.

Margaret Atwood made a more cogent case for such societies in her recent speech at the PEN American Center:
....Writers can’t retire, nor can they be fired: As we hear constantly from those who think there should be no arts grants, writers don’t have real jobs. That’s true, in a way: They have no employers. Or rather their employers are their readers: which imposes on them a truly Kafkaesque burden of responsibility and even guilt, for how can you tell whether you’re coming up to the standards of people you don’t even know?
The Daily Beast reports that the speech was made before a glittering crowd of writers from all over the world. Glittering.

So: fifteen f*cking years. It's official: time has flown. The afternoon sun is cutting through the window here and outside I can hear the noisy clatter of the Balconettes preparing another doomed barbecue. As wee Billy Mackenzie says it: My voice deep with age / speaks in tongues of younger days. Big ups.

Things I said


Mark Broatch interviewed me for the Sunday Star Times and the Q&A is now online at www.stuff.co.nz. In the interview I say things like:
I have way too few other interests. I'm lucky to be able to write and feel that anything that takes me away from it is abusing the privilege. In reality I am more fun than that, especially if you catch me in the hating myself / seeking distraction period.
You can read the rest of it here.