Why we work
Pretty much everything that ever inspired me to become a writer right there. Although I don't know if I could work with that view. Opening titles from Columbo, 'Murder by the Book' (1971), c/- @columbophile.
-- Sam Shepard interviewed by Benjamin Ryder Howe, Jeanne McCulloch, Mona Simpson for The Paris Review.INTERVIEWERI read somewhere that you started writing because you wanted to be a musician.
SHEPARDWell, I got to New York when I was eighteen. I was knocking around, trying to be an actor, writer, musician, whatever happened.
INTERVIEWERDid you start right in?
SHEPARDNot immediately. My first job was with the Burns Detective Agency. They sent me over to the East River to guard coal barges during these god-awful hours like three to six in the morning. It wasn't a very difficult job—all I had to do was make a round every fifteen minutes—but it turned out to be a great environment for writing. I was completely alone in a little outhouse with an electric heater and a little desk.
INTERVIEWERDid you already think of yourself as a writer?
SHEPARDI'd been messing around with it for a while, but nothing serious. That was the first time I felt writing could actually be useful.
I thought if you were a singer and went out and performed, that’s how you made your money. Like when I would see Nat King Cole or Frank Sinatra on TV, I thought of course you went in the studio and made records—that’s how the public got to like them—and then they’re going to make their money when they go out and perform. So I never thought about royalties. When we toured the UK and US, that’s when we made tons of money. But who knew? It was nothing compared to what the writers and publishers got.
But I don’t care. I’m still out there. I'm still on stage and they're not.
'Pornography violates the Aesthetic Distance. What does this mean? When we see the scene of simulated sex we can think only of one of two things: 1) Lord, they're really having sex; or 2) No, I can tell they aren't really. Either of the above responses takes us right out of the film. We've been constrained to remove attention from the drama and put it on the stunt.'
-- David Mamet, Make-Believe Town (Little, Brown, 1996)
'I think that one of the functions of Art (both for the artist and for the perceiver, though not necessarily in the same way) is to furnish a false world which is an analogue of at least some of the aspects of the real world and to explore within that new behaviour patterns that might yet be too dangerous or imponderable in a real-life context.'
-- Brian Eno (Another False World interview by Ian McDonald, NME Dec 3 1977)
'Any sort of upheaval gratified our anarchic instincts. Abnormality we found positively attractive.'Been thinking about how many of my favourite things have fallen foul of both official and self-appointed censors. (Including my own work.) Talk is cheap, anger is free and all threats in art are metaphorical.1
-- Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life (Libraire Gallimard, 1960)
Q: Many films based on real-life events are being attacked over accuracy. What responsibility do you have to the facts?
CLOONEY: This is a new thing, by the way. This is all, like, bloggers -- if that existed when Lawrence of Arabia came out, believe me, Lawrence's own autobiography would not hold water. Patton wouldn't. You can go down the list of movies -- Gandhi -- these movies are entertainment. And that's what we have to get back to. A movie like 12 Years a Slave, somebody will go looking for something that doesn't jibe and they'll try to disenfranchise the whole film because of it. Because there's this weird competition thing that's going on now that didn't exist 10 years ago. That happened with us on Argo. It's bullshit because it's got nothing to do with the idea that these are movies. These are not documentaries. You're responsible for basic facts. But who the hell knows what Patton said to his guys in the tent?
-- Actor / writers George Clooney, Grant Heslov, Julie Delpy, Nicole Holofcener, John Ridley, Danny Strong and Jonas Cuaron interviewed by Stephen Galloway and Matthew Belloni The Hollywood Reporter.
And a very interesting thing happens to your brain, which is that any information which is common, after several repetitions, you cease to hear. You reject the common information, rather like if you gaze at something for a long time, you'll cease to really see it. You'll see any aspect of it that's changing, but the static elements you won't see ... The amount of material there is extremely limited, but the amount of activity it triggers in you is very rich and complex.
-- Rob Tannenbaum, "A Meeting of Sound Minds: John Cage and Brian Eno," Musician 83 (Sept. 1985)
"Character in any sense that we can get at it is action, and action is plot... We care what happens to people only in proportion as we know what people are." (Henry James)
'It's like [Eye in the Sky] when actual rescue is right at hand but they can't wake up. Yes, we are always asleep like they are in Eye and we must wake up and see past (through) the dream -- the spurious world with its own time -- to the rescue outside -- outside now, not later.'
'There is only one situation in which the virtue of the good citizen and excellent man are the same, and this is when the citizens are living in a city that is under the ideal regime...'
One more thing. Neneh Cherry had broken big by scratching Malcolm McLaren's 'Buffalo Girls' for the single 'Buffalo Stance'. In 1989 she released her debut solo LP, Raw Like Sushi.
In the background to this Rip It Up interview was the discussion about what sampling and sequencing was going to mean for "real" musicians. Such debate seems quaint nowadays but it was a major topic for artists and fans at the time. There was a lot of fear about the new technology and its implications for copyright and creativity.
Likewise my precious questions re: dance vs mainstream and UK vs US styles, the distinctions between which have all but disappeared. (Cherry was speaking from New York.) But would a modern musician with a top ten single name-drop Fripp and Eno? Some things were better then.
By happy coincidence I had just done a phoner with Malcolm McLaren and he'd given me my opening line.Well, Neneh Cherry, Malcolm McLaren says you're just doing what he did, but with a pretty face.
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.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?
She had the most wonderful voice. Think Janice in Friends.
Second-to-last article from the archives: Green Gartside, 1988, promoting Provision. After this Green dropped off the map for over a decade before reemerging with a flinty hip-hop album of varying quality, Anomie and Bonhomie in 1999 and then, finally, in 2006, White Bread, Black Beer, a digital bedsit Carl Wilson-tinged collection that at last reconciled the distance he had travelled from North London to New York and back again. It was the second stage of this musical journey which I inexpertly quizzed him about here. OCR'd from the original RIU interview with a lot of my dumb chatter cut out."I was disposed not to like pop songs for a while. When I first started out, nine years ago now, I was concerned, in a silly and juvenile way, to be different. I would have hated the kind of songs I play now if you'd played them to me then. I was concerned not to have things that sounded slick, not to have things in 4/4, not to have verse-chorus-bridge. I was concerned with not doing a lot of things, and that all started to look dead-endish to me. When I wrote Songs To Remember I was just coming out of that and had started writing songs; that album sort of has one foot in the camp of Amateurishness As Virtue and one foot on the camp of Trying To Get It Together."
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.
Digging through paper I discovered some articles I wrote for Rip It Up, including this interview with Ice-T at the Regent Hotel in Auckland in 1988. He was in New Zealand to promote the Power LP and play the Box. Photo by Darryl Ward.Darlene says 'Hi darlin" as you come in the room. And Ice T opens his mouth.