The Awl http://www.theawl.com/ Be Less Stupid Fri, 13 Jan 2012 12:00:12 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.2 Talking To The Nerdist's Chris Hardwick http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/talking-to-the-nerdists-chris-hardwick http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/talking-to-the-nerdists-chris-hardwick#comments Fri, 13 Jan 2012 12:00:12 +0000 Grace Bello http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/talking-to-the-nerdists-chris-hardwick Chris Hardwick has made a career out of being a nerd. Well, actually, he has made several careers out of being a nerd, as the host of "Web Soup" a writer for Wired, an author and the host of The Nerdist podcast. Paste Magazine and Rolling Stone both named The Nerdist one of the ten best podcasts of the year, which means that it's now a TV show, with a special airing tomorrow night on BBC America. The podcast has also spawned a community of tech, science and nerd culture enthusiasts on Nerdist.com.

Years before he created Nerdist Industries, Chris was already sowing the seeds of his enterprise. He spent his adolescence seeking out nerd artifacts such as comics, video games and comedy tapes as if they were the missing shard of the Dark Crystal. Here, he talks about working with David Cross at his first job, what nerds did before the Internet, and how building Nerdist Industries has been like a game of SimCity.

Grace Bello: You wrote in Wired that nerds were "once a tortured subrace of humans condemned to hiding in dark corners from the brutal hand of social torment [and are] now captains of industry!" How do the fans of your show and your podcast feel about that? Do they agree? Or do you get emails that say, like, "Oh, actually, I'm still a closeted nerd"?

Chris Hardwick: Well, more and more people are "coming out" about it as nerds. If you were a nerd when I was growing up, in the '80s, you were socially ostracized. We were just into things that most other kids were not into. There was a consumer electronics thing happening, but it's not like every store sold computers; there wasn't an Apple store. You'd have to build your own computer. And most kids who were concerned with being popular wouldn't take the time to do it. It took work. And the only reason you would do that extra work and sacrifice any kind of social life is if you were really passionate about what you were pursuing. And we were. And those were things like computers and chess club and comic books and things like that. But now everything's so readily available everywhere, all the time. People don't necessarily have to be into just one or two things anymore. Also, when I was growing up, nerds weren't billionaires yet. So the popular kids now have sort of glommed on to the nerds because now nerds are powerful. There was no money for nerds then, which meant that there was no political gain, which meant that there was no manipulation of the nerds. If it manifested itself in any way, it was sort of like nerds tutoring the dumb, popular kids. That was the sort of power that the nerds would have.

Through your podcast, you get to meet some really amazing people, like Jon Hamm, Patrick Stewart and Neil deGrasse Tyson. Of the guests you've met, who have you been the most starstruck by?

Most of the people who have been on the show are friends of mine. I knew Jon for years before he did the podcast. Patrick Stewart, I'd never met before; I was pretty starstruck by him. Neil Tyson, I had not met before—and is it weird to say you're starstruck by an astrophysicist? He would actually mathematically be able to tell me the impact of how starstruck by him I was. It's great. Every nerd icon I've always looked up to, I'm systematically interacting with all of them in some sort of capacity. I always flash back to me as a kid; if someone were to have told me then, "Someday, you're going to be friends with Weird Al." It's like, "What?" I almost can't process it. I'm a fanboy as much as anyone else in this community. I think I've managed to compartmentalize my brain and hold the fan stuff down really deep, and it comes out when I'm not around people.

How did you cultivate your interests in comedy and comics while growing up? That was pre-Internet, so were you lurking in arcades and comic book shops?

That's exactly it. The distribution is much wider now, but back then, we just had a different way of acquiring that content. If it meant something to you, you would find it. It was almost more satisfying as a nerd, in a way, because you did have to go on a quest for those things. And they were treasures that you had to hunt to find, whether it was underground comedy tapes that you would trade with someone or old comic books that you would trade—it was more in the physical world and it wasn't a digital process. It also wasn't instant gratification. It was definitely delayed gratification and a little bit of a crapshoot with what you'd be able to find. Then you'd also get accidentally exposed to things, and there was kind of a nerd pride to being aware of things that people didn't know. You had discovered this hidden treasure that was very personal. Whereas now, you click on a website, and there's a suggestion engine. We take for granted that you can find anything and that you're going to stumble across stuff. But there was a time when you actually had to work for it.

It's not like anyone was going, "We're all a part of this scene that's gonna ultimately yield a bunch of delicious comedy fruit!" They were just like-minded comics who weren't getting stage time at the clubs and made their own thing happen
What made you pursue comedy as opposed to, say, going into the tech industry or the sciences?

I don't know if anyone chooses to be a comedian; I think it's something that you feel compelled to do. It's pretty unrewarding for a long time, you know. You're performing for two people, and you're constantly asking yourself, "Am I doing the right thing?" If it's not something that you are genetically predisposed to doing, you'll quit doing it. The only reward that you have for so long is just the fact that you're doing it. So I feel like I don't know what else I would have done with my life. It just so happens that all my sub-interests were things like technology and sci-fi and video games and comic books. But stand-up comedy was always the thing for me.

Who were your comedy heroes when you were growing up?

Steve Martin. I had all the Steve Martin records. George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Sam Kinison, Rodney Dangerfield, Bill Hicks, Emo Philips, Bill Cosby... If there was a comedy special on TV, I taped it. I watched everything. It wasn't like I limited myself to one kind of comic. I liked all different flavors of comedy. And people don't really watch comedy that way anymore; we're such a niche-y culture where you can surround yourself with very specific kinds of things. But I watched any kind of stand-up. I loved it all.

Do you find doing the podcast as fulfilling as performing stand-up in front of an audience?

Well, it's fulfilling, but it's fulfilling in a different way. They're completely different forms of communication. In The Nerdist podcast, we're conversational, and we don't go out of our way to craft jokes in the podcast. There isn't a live audience for most of the podcast; although we do live shows every once in a while. But stand-up is just you and the audience. And you have jokes that you've written: some of them are going to work, some of them may not. If they don't, you've gotta figure out how to make them work really fast. They're completely different but both satisfying.

What advice would you give to a young, aspiring comedian who's trying to start his or her career?

We talk about this on the podcast a lot. There's not really any advice other than "you have to start performing." You can't even give someone advice until they've been on stage a bunch of times. It's not anything that you have to prepare for six months to do. You just get up and start doing it. That's how you figure it out. There's no fast track way. There's no real way to prepare for it because it's unlike anything else you've ever done. Find open mics in your area, go to open mics, get up on stage as much as possible. When you've been performing for a few months, then you can kind of take stock and figure out where you're at and what you seem to be gravitating towards. It's really about getting onstage and being comfortable talking in front of people.

Can you tell me about what it was like working on "Trashed," the MTV game show you hosted in 1994? I mean, what was it like working with Brian Posehn and David Cross back then, both of whom would later go on to do "Mr. Show," among other awesome things?

Yeah. Doug Benson worked on that show, Janeane Garofalo did stuff on the show, Steve Higgins—who was the head writer for "SNL" and who's the announcer on the Fallon show, Joel Hodgson from "Mystery Science Theater 3000"... It was an insane group of people to work with as my first job. All I can remember is not really knowing what I was doing. I was shouting a lot because I thought being louder was more entertaining. We were all young comedian types trying to figure it out, but it was such an amazing group of people, and at the same time, the people in that cast were in this sort of parallel alternative comedy scene that had just migrated from San Francisco down to L.A. That was the group that sort of spawned the David Crosses and Patton Oswalts of the world. When I look back on it, it's not like anyone was going, "We're all a part of this scene that's gonna ultimately yield a bunch of delicious comedy fruit!" They were just like-minded comics who weren't getting stage time at the clubs and made their own thing happen. It was great for me. I was right out of college and I was working on MTV. It was a weird, fun experience.

Oh, I'll tell you something that's on the nerd bucket list: a glass dome underwater lair.
What was it like hosting "Singled Out" on MTV? What was it like hosting a dating game show, period, let alone a hugely popular one?

You know, "Trashed," I thought, was going to be a big hit show. It was fun, and I thought, "Of course people are going to watch this fun show!" And no one really watched it. So it went away pretty quickly. So when they offered me the job hosting "Singled Out," what I had learned was that, well, shows get cancelled right away. I was not mentally prepared for that show to be successful at all. It wasn't until three seasons in that I finally thought, "Oh, maybe it is doing OK." I don't know; I guess it was the right show at the right time with the right age group, you know? I'm sure the show would be ridiculous and tame by today's standards. At the time, there really wasn't anything else like it. I don't know why it resonated so much with people in a certain age group. But now, if I meet people who were between the ages of 13 and 24 when that show was on the air, those people still remember it.

Nerd culture seems to be reigning right now; Comic-Cons and superhero movies are really huge franchises. What are some of the more under-the-radar things in nerd culture that you're into right now?

Every year, we do a stand-up comedy special on the podcast—an episode where it's maybe comedians that people haven't heard of yet—just because I was so influenced by comedy specials when I was growing up. That's a good place to start with under-the-radar comedians. There are some British sci-fi shows that I really like. There's this show "The Misfits" that's really fun. Um, "The Fades," premiering on BBC America right before "The Nerdist." I'm a huge "Doctor Who" fan; that seems to have caught on quite a bit in the States, which is good. I always go to Reddit.com; maybe that's more like memes and nerd silliness.

I guess Reddit is a pretty good source for up-and-coming stuff. I mean, that's where these really strange memes come from, like Goths Up Trees.

Yeah, so many things come out of Reddit. It really is a petri dish of memes. It's sort of a playground. I'm really liking Google Plus; I've been using that. Obviously, I'm still on Facebook and Twitter. I still have a MySpace account—it's like an abandoned mining town. All the windows on my profile are probably broken and shuttered. A bunch of graffiti. There's probably a hobo sleeping bag in there that's covered in cobwebs. Google Plus, it's really just a good microblogging service. And now, since Nerdist.com has become more of a website that's not necessarily about me anymore, I wouldn't really put silly, personal things on there. Like, I was in Portland over the holidays, and I passed by this old store, and there was this big sign that said that they were selling cat stickers. So I took a picture of it, and it wasn't really appropriate for Nerdist.com because it's not really a story. It's really more of a Tumblr thing; I have a Tumblr account, I don't use it. But it's perfect for Google Plus. I can put the picture on there, it's in the stream, I can write a little story about where I was and share that. So I feel like it's a cleaner version of Facebook right now.

So, at the moment, you're juggling a ton of things: you're hosting "The Nerdist," you're hosting "Web Soup," you write for Wired, you wrote a book. Is there anything that's still on your comedian or nerd bucket list?

Oh, yeah. There's a ton of things. The whole Nerdist Industries thing that we're building is like a game of SimCity. I want to see how we can grow it and expand it. That's all exciting to me. Now I've partnered with a guy named Peter Levin, who's great. We have this premium YouTube channel. We're doing a bunch of great stuff at Comic-Con. And we have a live theatre space where we do a lot of shows in L.A. It's not like we're going to go start a Nerdist steakhouse or anything; everything is related in some way. It's realizing, "Oh, we have a podcast network! Well, we have a live theater space where they can perform and record shows and do comedy shows and stand-up! And, oh, those podcasts can be developed into television shows!" So everything is complementary. So as far as a bucket list... Oh, I'll tell you something that's on the nerd bucket list: a glass dome underwater lair. I think if Nerdist Industries could be in a glass dome on the ocean floor somewhere, then that would be a big one for me.


Interview condensed, edited and lightly reordered.


Grace Bello is a freelance writer based in New York. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic and on McSweeney's.

Photo by Gilles Mingasson/BBC America.

---

See more posts by Grace Bello

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]]> Chris Hardwick has made a career out of being a nerd. Well, actually, he has made several careers out of being a nerd, as the host of "Web Soup" a writer for Wired, an author and the host of The Nerdist podcast. Paste Magazine and Rolling Stone both named The Nerdist one of the ten best podcasts of the year, which means that it's now a TV show, with a special airing tomorrow night on BBC America. The podcast has also spawned a community of tech, science and nerd culture enthusiasts on Nerdist.com.

Years before he created Nerdist Industries, Chris was already sowing the seeds of his enterprise. He spent his adolescence seeking out nerd artifacts such as comics, video games and comedy tapes as if they were the missing shard of the Dark Crystal. Here, he talks about working with David Cross at his first job, what nerds did before the Internet, and how building Nerdist Industries has been like a game of SimCity.

Grace Bello: You wrote in Wired that nerds were "once a tortured subrace of humans condemned to hiding in dark corners from the brutal hand of social torment [and are] now captains of industry!" How do the fans of your show and your podcast feel about that? Do they agree? Or do you get emails that say, like, "Oh, actually, I'm still a closeted nerd"?

Chris Hardwick: Well, more and more people are "coming out" about it as nerds. If you were a nerd when I was growing up, in the '80s, you were socially ostracized. We were just into things that most other kids were not into. There was a consumer electronics thing happening, but it's not like every store sold computers; there wasn't an Apple store. You'd have to build your own computer. And most kids who were concerned with being popular wouldn't take the time to do it. It took work. And the only reason you would do that extra work and sacrifice any kind of social life is if you were really passionate about what you were pursuing. And we were. And those were things like computers and chess club and comic books and things like that. But now everything's so readily available everywhere, all the time. People don't necessarily have to be into just one or two things anymore. Also, when I was growing up, nerds weren't billionaires yet. So the popular kids now have sort of glommed on to the nerds because now nerds are powerful. There was no money for nerds then, which meant that there was no political gain, which meant that there was no manipulation of the nerds. If it manifested itself in any way, it was sort of like nerds tutoring the dumb, popular kids. That was the sort of power that the nerds would have.

Through your podcast, you get to meet some really amazing people, like Jon Hamm, Patrick Stewart and Neil deGrasse Tyson. Of the guests you've met, who have you been the most starstruck by?

Most of the people who have been on the show are friends of mine. I knew Jon for years before he did the podcast. Patrick Stewart, I'd never met before; I was pretty starstruck by him. Neil Tyson, I had not met before—and is it weird to say you're starstruck by an astrophysicist? He would actually mathematically be able to tell me the impact of how starstruck by him I was. It's great. Every nerd icon I've always looked up to, I'm systematically interacting with all of them in some sort of capacity. I always flash back to me as a kid; if someone were to have told me then, "Someday, you're going to be friends with Weird Al." It's like, "What?" I almost can't process it. I'm a fanboy as much as anyone else in this community. I think I've managed to compartmentalize my brain and hold the fan stuff down really deep, and it comes out when I'm not around people.

How did you cultivate your interests in comedy and comics while growing up? That was pre-Internet, so were you lurking in arcades and comic book shops?

That's exactly it. The distribution is much wider now, but back then, we just had a different way of acquiring that content. If it meant something to you, you would find it. It was almost more satisfying as a nerd, in a way, because you did have to go on a quest for those things. And they were treasures that you had to hunt to find, whether it was underground comedy tapes that you would trade with someone or old comic books that you would trade—it was more in the physical world and it wasn't a digital process. It also wasn't instant gratification. It was definitely delayed gratification and a little bit of a crapshoot with what you'd be able to find. Then you'd also get accidentally exposed to things, and there was kind of a nerd pride to being aware of things that people didn't know. You had discovered this hidden treasure that was very personal. Whereas now, you click on a website, and there's a suggestion engine. We take for granted that you can find anything and that you're going to stumble across stuff. But there was a time when you actually had to work for it.

It's not like anyone was going, "We're all a part of this scene that's gonna ultimately yield a bunch of delicious comedy fruit!" They were just like-minded comics who weren't getting stage time at the clubs and made their own thing happen
What made you pursue comedy as opposed to, say, going into the tech industry or the sciences?

I don't know if anyone chooses to be a comedian; I think it's something that you feel compelled to do. It's pretty unrewarding for a long time, you know. You're performing for two people, and you're constantly asking yourself, "Am I doing the right thing?" If it's not something that you are genetically predisposed to doing, you'll quit doing it. The only reward that you have for so long is just the fact that you're doing it. So I feel like I don't know what else I would have done with my life. It just so happens that all my sub-interests were things like technology and sci-fi and video games and comic books. But stand-up comedy was always the thing for me.

Who were your comedy heroes when you were growing up?

Steve Martin. I had all the Steve Martin records. George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Sam Kinison, Rodney Dangerfield, Bill Hicks, Emo Philips, Bill Cosby... If there was a comedy special on TV, I taped it. I watched everything. It wasn't like I limited myself to one kind of comic. I liked all different flavors of comedy. And people don't really watch comedy that way anymore; we're such a niche-y culture where you can surround yourself with very specific kinds of things. But I watched any kind of stand-up. I loved it all.

Do you find doing the podcast as fulfilling as performing stand-up in front of an audience?

Well, it's fulfilling, but it's fulfilling in a different way. They're completely different forms of communication. In The Nerdist podcast, we're conversational, and we don't go out of our way to craft jokes in the podcast. There isn't a live audience for most of the podcast; although we do live shows every once in a while. But stand-up is just you and the audience. And you have jokes that you've written: some of them are going to work, some of them may not. If they don't, you've gotta figure out how to make them work really fast. They're completely different but both satisfying.

What advice would you give to a young, aspiring comedian who's trying to start his or her career?

We talk about this on the podcast a lot. There's not really any advice other than "you have to start performing." You can't even give someone advice until they've been on stage a bunch of times. It's not anything that you have to prepare for six months to do. You just get up and start doing it. That's how you figure it out. There's no fast track way. There's no real way to prepare for it because it's unlike anything else you've ever done. Find open mics in your area, go to open mics, get up on stage as much as possible. When you've been performing for a few months, then you can kind of take stock and figure out where you're at and what you seem to be gravitating towards. It's really about getting onstage and being comfortable talking in front of people.

Can you tell me about what it was like working on "Trashed," the MTV game show you hosted in 1994? I mean, what was it like working with Brian Posehn and David Cross back then, both of whom would later go on to do "Mr. Show," among other awesome things?

Yeah. Doug Benson worked on that show, Janeane Garofalo did stuff on the show, Steve Higgins—who was the head writer for "SNL" and who's the announcer on the Fallon show, Joel Hodgson from "Mystery Science Theater 3000"... It was an insane group of people to work with as my first job. All I can remember is not really knowing what I was doing. I was shouting a lot because I thought being louder was more entertaining. We were all young comedian types trying to figure it out, but it was such an amazing group of people, and at the same time, the people in that cast were in this sort of parallel alternative comedy scene that had just migrated from San Francisco down to L.A. That was the group that sort of spawned the David Crosses and Patton Oswalts of the world. When I look back on it, it's not like anyone was going, "We're all a part of this scene that's gonna ultimately yield a bunch of delicious comedy fruit!" They were just like-minded comics who weren't getting stage time at the clubs and made their own thing happen. It was great for me. I was right out of college and I was working on MTV. It was a weird, fun experience.

Oh, I'll tell you something that's on the nerd bucket list: a glass dome underwater lair.
What was it like hosting "Singled Out" on MTV? What was it like hosting a dating game show, period, let alone a hugely popular one?

You know, "Trashed," I thought, was going to be a big hit show. It was fun, and I thought, "Of course people are going to watch this fun show!" And no one really watched it. So it went away pretty quickly. So when they offered me the job hosting "Singled Out," what I had learned was that, well, shows get cancelled right away. I was not mentally prepared for that show to be successful at all. It wasn't until three seasons in that I finally thought, "Oh, maybe it is doing OK." I don't know; I guess it was the right show at the right time with the right age group, you know? I'm sure the show would be ridiculous and tame by today's standards. At the time, there really wasn't anything else like it. I don't know why it resonated so much with people in a certain age group. But now, if I meet people who were between the ages of 13 and 24 when that show was on the air, those people still remember it.

Nerd culture seems to be reigning right now; Comic-Cons and superhero movies are really huge franchises. What are some of the more under-the-radar things in nerd culture that you're into right now?

Every year, we do a stand-up comedy special on the podcast—an episode where it's maybe comedians that people haven't heard of yet—just because I was so influenced by comedy specials when I was growing up. That's a good place to start with under-the-radar comedians. There are some British sci-fi shows that I really like. There's this show "The Misfits" that's really fun. Um, "The Fades," premiering on BBC America right before "The Nerdist." I'm a huge "Doctor Who" fan; that seems to have caught on quite a bit in the States, which is good. I always go to Reddit.com; maybe that's more like memes and nerd silliness.

I guess Reddit is a pretty good source for up-and-coming stuff. I mean, that's where these really strange memes come from, like Goths Up Trees.

Yeah, so many things come out of Reddit. It really is a petri dish of memes. It's sort of a playground. I'm really liking Google Plus; I've been using that. Obviously, I'm still on Facebook and Twitter. I still have a MySpace account—it's like an abandoned mining town. All the windows on my profile are probably broken and shuttered. A bunch of graffiti. There's probably a hobo sleeping bag in there that's covered in cobwebs. Google Plus, it's really just a good microblogging service. And now, since Nerdist.com has become more of a website that's not necessarily about me anymore, I wouldn't really put silly, personal things on there. Like, I was in Portland over the holidays, and I passed by this old store, and there was this big sign that said that they were selling cat stickers. So I took a picture of it, and it wasn't really appropriate for Nerdist.com because it's not really a story. It's really more of a Tumblr thing; I have a Tumblr account, I don't use it. But it's perfect for Google Plus. I can put the picture on there, it's in the stream, I can write a little story about where I was and share that. So I feel like it's a cleaner version of Facebook right now.

So, at the moment, you're juggling a ton of things: you're hosting "The Nerdist," you're hosting "Web Soup," you write for Wired, you wrote a book. Is there anything that's still on your comedian or nerd bucket list?

Oh, yeah. There's a ton of things. The whole Nerdist Industries thing that we're building is like a game of SimCity. I want to see how we can grow it and expand it. That's all exciting to me. Now I've partnered with a guy named Peter Levin, who's great. We have this premium YouTube channel. We're doing a bunch of great stuff at Comic-Con. And we have a live theatre space where we do a lot of shows in L.A. It's not like we're going to go start a Nerdist steakhouse or anything; everything is related in some way. It's realizing, "Oh, we have a podcast network! Well, we have a live theater space where they can perform and record shows and do comedy shows and stand-up! And, oh, those podcasts can be developed into television shows!" So everything is complementary. So as far as a bucket list... Oh, I'll tell you something that's on the nerd bucket list: a glass dome underwater lair. I think if Nerdist Industries could be in a glass dome on the ocean floor somewhere, then that would be a big one for me.


Interview condensed, edited and lightly reordered.


Grace Bello is a freelance writer based in New York. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic and on McSweeney's.

Photo by Gilles Mingasson/BBC America.

---

See more posts by Grace Bello

7 comments

]]> http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/talking-to-the-nerdists-chris-hardwick/feed 7 How They Got There: A Conversation With Author Robert Sullivan http://www.theawl.com/2011/11/how-they-got-there-a-conversation-with-author-robert-sullivan http://www.theawl.com/2011/11/how-they-got-there-a-conversation-with-author-robert-sullivan#comments Fri, 04 Nov 2011 14:30:54 +0000 Noah Davis http://www.theawl.com/2011/11/how-they-got-there-a-conversation-with-author-robert-sullivan Robert Sullivan is almost certainly the only man in the country with a holiday greeting card from Anna Wintour on his fridge and a bestseller about rats on his resume. The former exists because of his 20-year gig as a contributing editor at Vogue; the latter comes as a result of the year he spent observing and chronicling the urban creatures as they lived their lives in an alley near Ground Zero.

In the Brooklyn apartment he shares with his preschool teacher wife and two teenage kids—one who recently took off for college with most of his father's drum set in tow—Sullivan explained how a life spent crisscrossing the country and writing led to cards from Ms. Wintour, discussions about rat sex with Terri Gross, and an "accidental bestseller."

In a couple paragraphs, how did you get here?

I was planning on being a musician, either a world-famous jazz drummer or a completely unknown session drummer. As a result, I ended up reviewing concerts in college, and then I ended up reviewing plays. I thought I should probably be a world-renowned playwright. I somehow got a job as a copyboy at The New York Times in college, thinking that would get me into more plays or something? It was amazing to be at the State Department taking down some comment for the bureau from the Secretary of State or else handing a letter to the Secretary of State for the bureau, and then seeing a version of that on the front page the next day. I had nothing to do with the writing, but I had taken the call from the dissident faction of some government, and the White House reporter used a line. I thought that was so cool.

I got a job in New Jersey out of college covering rural New Jersey and then urban New Jersey. I quit because I heard that freelance writers made a lot of money. That turned out to be bad information. So, I started painting houses, and I got a job fact-checking at Condé Nast Traveler. I would call Bulgaria at odd hours and ask them questions about hotels. It was really fun. Then, I got a job at a magazine called Seven Days. I went around the city writing fun stories. They closed, and I moved with my wife to Oregon where she's from. I pretended I was a foreign correspondent, and I wrote for people in New York. I thought, "Oh, I should write a book about that place I used to hang out in," which was the Meadowlands in New Jersey. I wrote another book about a whale hunt in the Pacific Northwest. Then, I wrote a couple more books. We moved back to New York City in 2000 or 2001. We moved up the river to Hastings-on-Hudson, where I think I wrote another book. We moved back to Brooklyn, and we're here now, right?

You still play the drums?

I still play the drums. I have the snare drum right over there, but my son has most of the set at college.

Is he going to be the famous drummer?

You know, as far as kids and vocation, I just wake up every day and hope they don't become a freelance writer. As I mentioned, I got bad information.

What would you tell your 20-year-old self? Don't be a freelance writer?

You know, William Carlos Williams was a doctor and he wrote. Even [work in] insurance, like [Wallace] Stevens. And then you can write in your spare time.

Was there a moment where you thought you had made it as a writer?

No, I don't think so. Usually I feel as if it's not working out. That's the drive for everything. I don't think I've ever had that moment. I would like to have that moment. That would be good.

You wrote a book called How Not to Get Rich: Or Why Being Bad Off Isn't So Bad. Personal philosophy?

There are roughly 600 copies right in the room next to us.

It was before the Great Recession, and clearly, everybody read it. They didn't buy it. It seems as though they took it out of the library. The whole country took it out of the library, read it, and we went into a Great Recession.

[Laughs] No, it's my favorite book as an object because I did it with a friend, Scott Menchin. He's an amazing artist. We both really like Ben Shahn, and we were both really into this idea in the '40s, '50s, '60s where artists would do a book together. There's a book by E.B. White and James Thurber called Is Sex Necessary? I wondered why people weren't doing more of those types of books. At the same time, I had done a number of books and everything kind of worked out, but there's never enough: college, rent, and all these things you have to pay for. And yet, to put it in a corny way, there's so much great stuff that has happened to you. It felt like a good time to write about how things are really good even though they never work out on a financial end. The best thing about that book is the cover and the pictures. The words are secondary, but I'm so proud to be the secondary part of a primarily good project.

How much do you write every day?

I work on a lot of magazine pieces. I write a lot for Vogue. I'm probably doing something for some piece for them every day. Right now, I'm doing a story for New York that's taking me a long time. I think I wrote 1,000 bad words today for them that will probably have to be re-written. I have this other idea for this other thing that's probably not going to work out. This morning, early, I wrote 1,200 words for that. On Sunday, I was planning to write a lot, but I did not write anything. I think I made notes about what I was going to write, but today I can't find them. If I have a big story due and it's that week, then that might be a 5,000-word piece. But, simultaneously, in my "free-hyphen-lance" life, I have to be working on a book at the same time otherwise I die. There's the Woody Allen line about how a relationship is like a shark and it has to keep moving. Someone recently told me that when sharks mature, they don't have to keep moving. So, I don't know. Do I have to not move anymore? I don't know. Everything is a big question mark for me.

Do you have a formal strategy? Something like your wife go to work and the kid(s) go to school and you start working?

The idea is to get up as early as you can, because nobody calls early. Five and six in the morning, nobody calls.

My formal strategy is some days you just have to go running. You have to give yourself a day off. New York is so expensive and even when you have a cheap apartment, it's still expensive. It's expensive to have kids, but if you don't have kids, it's expensive because you're here or there. There's so much pressure to figure out a way that you forget how valuable days are where you just take the afternoon off and are in New York.

My wife and I went to the American Academy of Artists across from the Met. I'd never ever been there. There's a room in there that's from the early 1900s. It has wood panels and high ceilings. All the walls are covered with paintings. And they are American paintings. I should be in that room every day. I would be a much more productive person if I spent six out of eight hours every day in that room. I can't imagine if I hadn't gone in that room.

A reviewer called you "a mischievous reporter on the universe." Is that a fair description?

Yeah, that's a good one. I should probably stop after that and not write anything else. That's perfect.

You wrote a bestseller about rats. That's pretty awesome.

Yeah, it was an accidental bestseller. That's important to remember.

I think they all are, aren't they?

Rats spelled backwards is "star." So, that's underneath the reason why people bought it. I also used to joke that a lot of people would come to readings and all of a sudden they would leave because they thought it said "cats."

Why did you write Rats?

I had been on this whale hunt, and I had been living up in the Olympic Peninsula. I had been at a reservation with this Native American tribe. They were hunting a whale, and many people were upset with them. They said, "You don't want to hunt a whale. You're Native Americans, and you love nature." At some point during this time, there were a lot of animal-rights groups there. I was with them and they mentioned that they had rats at their office. They said they got an exterminator, and I asked if they exterminated the rats. They had, and I thought, "That's the creature that's the line in the sand as far as what's natural and what's not natural." I love opposites, and I love reverses. I wanted to write a book about these creatures that are not considered natural but write a nature book about them.

The great thing is that this creature is completely associated in its living habits with humans. You get into this excellent place where you can secretly be talking about something else when you're talking about rats. Of course, I was talking about humans and crowds and cities. That's all I want to do. I love when you're writing about something, but you're also writing about something else. That's so hard to get there, but it's always where I'm hoping to be. Maybe twice in my life I've been there.

Any good rat stories?

Actually, I just heard a rat story that falls into a category of rat stories that are new to me. A guy told me he saw a rat in an apartment, his mother's apartment. He set a trap, killed it, and put it into a garbage bag. He took the bag outside and dropped it into the garbage can. As he was walking back inside, he heard a sound, a scratching, and then saw the rat that was killed leaving the can. It's a rat resurrection story, a rat Lazarus! Amazing.

And then about a week or so ago I was running across the Brooklyn Bridge, at about five thirty in the morning, in the dark, and I saw something to my right on the ground in my peripheral vision and then felt a weight on my foot. It was as if I were suddenly carrying something on my foot, in the instep, and then just as suddenly the weight was gone and the gray blur I had seen to my right was out in front of me and then quickly dashing off to my left—a rat that I had accidentally footed. For me, the most amazing part was that I had not interrupted the rat in his straight line across the bridge's path. I did not cause him to deviate. I shouted an obscenity because it scared the crap out of me.

I assume you're excited about writing that book. And I assume your wife is at least pretending she's excited about it. And maybe some friends, but what are your expectations? "I'd like to sell 1,000 copies?" "I'd like to be done with it?" Does that even cross your mind?

Done is a big thing.

When you choose a topic, you think to yourself, "Am I going to be able to live with this idea for a long time?"

In a way, I have all the stories. I'm trying to finish the three or four ideas I've had for a long time. This book about the Revolutionary War, I've been nuts about Colonial encampments. Not in a big way, but I remember covering the reenactment of the Battle of Brooklyn in 2001.

When I went to write Rats, it's something I've been thinking about. I love these places where rats are. And I wonder to myself if I could write a whole book about rats. It would be kind of cool because you'd get to go to some amazing places. There are some pretty interesting landlord tenant disputes about rats. As far as editors go, I'm just trying to keep it interesting. I'm thinking of a couple of friends and my wife. Would she want to read this sentence? Would Dave down the street be at all interested in this? And if I think they would, then it's good.

Still, I imagine talking to Terry Gross about rat sex on NPR was not somewhere that you ever imagined being.

You don't meet her when you're talking to her. And I think that's probably better because I carried a stuffed rat around with me. But yeah, I think that when you have the most fun, when you're the most psyched, then it's not completely surprising that someone else would pick it up as well.

How do you keep that excitement?

Drinking. Mostly I'm drunk. [Laughs] No, I have sort of a problem where I'm over-caffeinated, even without caffeine. Many people ask my family how they can stand it. If you look around, my wife is a teacher and an artist. The Revolutionary War is all over the house. All these quilts [that she made] are all based on ideas in the book. We live with ideas, so I get to see what I'm thinking in a way that I could never imagine because she'll make a quilt.

It sounds incredibly stupid, but it seems as though it's so easy to dig around and find cool stuff about so many topics. There's no shortage. The sky has been amazing for the past two weeks with the fall, the season changing, and the mist coming from Jersey City. I walked down to the water. It's all about finding this year or this two-year's saddle that we're going to put on it. It's all about gearing up to march into the world with a slightly different outfit, but the same direction.

Do you have a skill set that suits that type of job?

I think a better question is, "Do I have a skill set?" [Laughs] I don't think I have a skill set. I think that's why I do this.

The Thoreau You Don't Know. Who came up with that title?

I'm sure it was me under duress. I think it was my editor, too. Titles are really hard. I like really short titles. I like Brown, Black, Rats. Dead is really the title I'm working for. [Laughs] As much as that's a joke, I think that really might be. Rats is pretty close to Dead. Swamp is pretty close to Dead.

Do you have a hard time explaining your job?

My son jokes that everybody goes away, and I'm home with the silk robe, cigar, champagne, big slippers. And that's what I do all day.

It's not fair for me to complain. The really, really, really, really great thing about my job is that I can go out and walk my wife to work. But a goal of mine when I became freelance, which was when Seven Days closed, was that I would go to movies during the day because they are cheaper. I'm not sure I've gone once.

Recently, someone asked me if I wanted to go and I thought, "This is it. Today is going." I was getting kind of desperate. Are we still going? And then all of a sudden, he says, "I don't think I'm going to make it." "What do you mean?" And we didn't go.

In Brendan Gill's book, Here At The New Yorker, there was a page that I used to have when I had a drawer in my desk. It was the definition of 'freelance.' It was: "Free to starve."

But I don't know if I've made that goal.

Who should I talk to next?

Marty Skoble. He is a poet and a dancer (or was a dancer), and is mostly someone I think of as a poetry teacher, an amazing poetry teacher. I think the guy is amazing. An amazing teacher, an amazing teacher of poetry. Teaches little kids, big kids, teaches poets you have heard of. Once a bunch of high school boys walked into a poetry reading he put on, having won their game, and proceeded to read their poems—a poem in itself.





Previously: Artist Duke Riley

Noah Davis is frequently lost.

---

See more posts by Noah Davis

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]]> Robert Sullivan is almost certainly the only man in the country with a holiday greeting card from Anna Wintour on his fridge and a bestseller about rats on his resume. The former exists because of his 20-year gig as a contributing editor at Vogue; the latter comes as a result of the year he spent observing and chronicling the urban creatures as they lived their lives in an alley near Ground Zero.

In the Brooklyn apartment he shares with his preschool teacher wife and two teenage kids—one who recently took off for college with most of his father's drum set in tow—Sullivan explained how a life spent crisscrossing the country and writing led to cards from Ms. Wintour, discussions about rat sex with Terri Gross, and an "accidental bestseller."

In a couple paragraphs, how did you get here?

I was planning on being a musician, either a world-famous jazz drummer or a completely unknown session drummer. As a result, I ended up reviewing concerts in college, and then I ended up reviewing plays. I thought I should probably be a world-renowned playwright. I somehow got a job as a copyboy at The New York Times in college, thinking that would get me into more plays or something? It was amazing to be at the State Department taking down some comment for the bureau from the Secretary of State or else handing a letter to the Secretary of State for the bureau, and then seeing a version of that on the front page the next day. I had nothing to do with the writing, but I had taken the call from the dissident faction of some government, and the White House reporter used a line. I thought that was so cool.

I got a job in New Jersey out of college covering rural New Jersey and then urban New Jersey. I quit because I heard that freelance writers made a lot of money. That turned out to be bad information. So, I started painting houses, and I got a job fact-checking at Condé Nast Traveler. I would call Bulgaria at odd hours and ask them questions about hotels. It was really fun. Then, I got a job at a magazine called Seven Days. I went around the city writing fun stories. They closed, and I moved with my wife to Oregon where she's from. I pretended I was a foreign correspondent, and I wrote for people in New York. I thought, "Oh, I should write a book about that place I used to hang out in," which was the Meadowlands in New Jersey. I wrote another book about a whale hunt in the Pacific Northwest. Then, I wrote a couple more books. We moved back to New York City in 2000 or 2001. We moved up the river to Hastings-on-Hudson, where I think I wrote another book. We moved back to Brooklyn, and we're here now, right?

You still play the drums?

I still play the drums. I have the snare drum right over there, but my son has most of the set at college.

Is he going to be the famous drummer?

You know, as far as kids and vocation, I just wake up every day and hope they don't become a freelance writer. As I mentioned, I got bad information.

What would you tell your 20-year-old self? Don't be a freelance writer?

You know, William Carlos Williams was a doctor and he wrote. Even [work in] insurance, like [Wallace] Stevens. And then you can write in your spare time.

Was there a moment where you thought you had made it as a writer?

No, I don't think so. Usually I feel as if it's not working out. That's the drive for everything. I don't think I've ever had that moment. I would like to have that moment. That would be good.

You wrote a book called How Not to Get Rich: Or Why Being Bad Off Isn't So Bad. Personal philosophy?

There are roughly 600 copies right in the room next to us.

It was before the Great Recession, and clearly, everybody read it. They didn't buy it. It seems as though they took it out of the library. The whole country took it out of the library, read it, and we went into a Great Recession.

[Laughs] No, it's my favorite book as an object because I did it with a friend, Scott Menchin. He's an amazing artist. We both really like Ben Shahn, and we were both really into this idea in the '40s, '50s, '60s where artists would do a book together. There's a book by E.B. White and James Thurber called Is Sex Necessary? I wondered why people weren't doing more of those types of books. At the same time, I had done a number of books and everything kind of worked out, but there's never enough: college, rent, and all these things you have to pay for. And yet, to put it in a corny way, there's so much great stuff that has happened to you. It felt like a good time to write about how things are really good even though they never work out on a financial end. The best thing about that book is the cover and the pictures. The words are secondary, but I'm so proud to be the secondary part of a primarily good project.

How much do you write every day?

I work on a lot of magazine pieces. I write a lot for Vogue. I'm probably doing something for some piece for them every day. Right now, I'm doing a story for New York that's taking me a long time. I think I wrote 1,000 bad words today for them that will probably have to be re-written. I have this other idea for this other thing that's probably not going to work out. This morning, early, I wrote 1,200 words for that. On Sunday, I was planning to write a lot, but I did not write anything. I think I made notes about what I was going to write, but today I can't find them. If I have a big story due and it's that week, then that might be a 5,000-word piece. But, simultaneously, in my "free-hyphen-lance" life, I have to be working on a book at the same time otherwise I die. There's the Woody Allen line about how a relationship is like a shark and it has to keep moving. Someone recently told me that when sharks mature, they don't have to keep moving. So, I don't know. Do I have to not move anymore? I don't know. Everything is a big question mark for me.

Do you have a formal strategy? Something like your wife go to work and the kid(s) go to school and you start working?

The idea is to get up as early as you can, because nobody calls early. Five and six in the morning, nobody calls.

My formal strategy is some days you just have to go running. You have to give yourself a day off. New York is so expensive and even when you have a cheap apartment, it's still expensive. It's expensive to have kids, but if you don't have kids, it's expensive because you're here or there. There's so much pressure to figure out a way that you forget how valuable days are where you just take the afternoon off and are in New York.

My wife and I went to the American Academy of Artists across from the Met. I'd never ever been there. There's a room in there that's from the early 1900s. It has wood panels and high ceilings. All the walls are covered with paintings. And they are American paintings. I should be in that room every day. I would be a much more productive person if I spent six out of eight hours every day in that room. I can't imagine if I hadn't gone in that room.

A reviewer called you "a mischievous reporter on the universe." Is that a fair description?

Yeah, that's a good one. I should probably stop after that and not write anything else. That's perfect.

You wrote a bestseller about rats. That's pretty awesome.

Yeah, it was an accidental bestseller. That's important to remember.

I think they all are, aren't they?

Rats spelled backwards is "star." So, that's underneath the reason why people bought it. I also used to joke that a lot of people would come to readings and all of a sudden they would leave because they thought it said "cats."

Why did you write Rats?

I had been on this whale hunt, and I had been living up in the Olympic Peninsula. I had been at a reservation with this Native American tribe. They were hunting a whale, and many people were upset with them. They said, "You don't want to hunt a whale. You're Native Americans, and you love nature." At some point during this time, there were a lot of animal-rights groups there. I was with them and they mentioned that they had rats at their office. They said they got an exterminator, and I asked if they exterminated the rats. They had, and I thought, "That's the creature that's the line in the sand as far as what's natural and what's not natural." I love opposites, and I love reverses. I wanted to write a book about these creatures that are not considered natural but write a nature book about them.

The great thing is that this creature is completely associated in its living habits with humans. You get into this excellent place where you can secretly be talking about something else when you're talking about rats. Of course, I was talking about humans and crowds and cities. That's all I want to do. I love when you're writing about something, but you're also writing about something else. That's so hard to get there, but it's always where I'm hoping to be. Maybe twice in my life I've been there.

Any good rat stories?

Actually, I just heard a rat story that falls into a category of rat stories that are new to me. A guy told me he saw a rat in an apartment, his mother's apartment. He set a trap, killed it, and put it into a garbage bag. He took the bag outside and dropped it into the garbage can. As he was walking back inside, he heard a sound, a scratching, and then saw the rat that was killed leaving the can. It's a rat resurrection story, a rat Lazarus! Amazing.

And then about a week or so ago I was running across the Brooklyn Bridge, at about five thirty in the morning, in the dark, and I saw something to my right on the ground in my peripheral vision and then felt a weight on my foot. It was as if I were suddenly carrying something on my foot, in the instep, and then just as suddenly the weight was gone and the gray blur I had seen to my right was out in front of me and then quickly dashing off to my left—a rat that I had accidentally footed. For me, the most amazing part was that I had not interrupted the rat in his straight line across the bridge's path. I did not cause him to deviate. I shouted an obscenity because it scared the crap out of me.

I assume you're excited about writing that book. And I assume your wife is at least pretending she's excited about it. And maybe some friends, but what are your expectations? "I'd like to sell 1,000 copies?" "I'd like to be done with it?" Does that even cross your mind?

Done is a big thing.

When you choose a topic, you think to yourself, "Am I going to be able to live with this idea for a long time?"

In a way, I have all the stories. I'm trying to finish the three or four ideas I've had for a long time. This book about the Revolutionary War, I've been nuts about Colonial encampments. Not in a big way, but I remember covering the reenactment of the Battle of Brooklyn in 2001.

When I went to write Rats, it's something I've been thinking about. I love these places where rats are. And I wonder to myself if I could write a whole book about rats. It would be kind of cool because you'd get to go to some amazing places. There are some pretty interesting landlord tenant disputes about rats. As far as editors go, I'm just trying to keep it interesting. I'm thinking of a couple of friends and my wife. Would she want to read this sentence? Would Dave down the street be at all interested in this? And if I think they would, then it's good.

Still, I imagine talking to Terry Gross about rat sex on NPR was not somewhere that you ever imagined being.

You don't meet her when you're talking to her. And I think that's probably better because I carried a stuffed rat around with me. But yeah, I think that when you have the most fun, when you're the most psyched, then it's not completely surprising that someone else would pick it up as well.

How do you keep that excitement?

Drinking. Mostly I'm drunk. [Laughs] No, I have sort of a problem where I'm over-caffeinated, even without caffeine. Many people ask my family how they can stand it. If you look around, my wife is a teacher and an artist. The Revolutionary War is all over the house. All these quilts [that she made] are all based on ideas in the book. We live with ideas, so I get to see what I'm thinking in a way that I could never imagine because she'll make a quilt.

It sounds incredibly stupid, but it seems as though it's so easy to dig around and find cool stuff about so many topics. There's no shortage. The sky has been amazing for the past two weeks with the fall, the season changing, and the mist coming from Jersey City. I walked down to the water. It's all about finding this year or this two-year's saddle that we're going to put on it. It's all about gearing up to march into the world with a slightly different outfit, but the same direction.

Do you have a skill set that suits that type of job?

I think a better question is, "Do I have a skill set?" [Laughs] I don't think I have a skill set. I think that's why I do this.

The Thoreau You Don't Know. Who came up with that title?

I'm sure it was me under duress. I think it was my editor, too. Titles are really hard. I like really short titles. I like Brown, Black, Rats. Dead is really the title I'm working for. [Laughs] As much as that's a joke, I think that really might be. Rats is pretty close to Dead. Swamp is pretty close to Dead.

Do you have a hard time explaining your job?

My son jokes that everybody goes away, and I'm home with the silk robe, cigar, champagne, big slippers. And that's what I do all day.

It's not fair for me to complain. The really, really, really, really great thing about my job is that I can go out and walk my wife to work. But a goal of mine when I became freelance, which was when Seven Days closed, was that I would go to movies during the day because they are cheaper. I'm not sure I've gone once.

Recently, someone asked me if I wanted to go and I thought, "This is it. Today is going." I was getting kind of desperate. Are we still going? And then all of a sudden, he says, "I don't think I'm going to make it." "What do you mean?" And we didn't go.

In Brendan Gill's book, Here At The New Yorker, there was a page that I used to have when I had a drawer in my desk. It was the definition of 'freelance.' It was: "Free to starve."

But I don't know if I've made that goal.

Who should I talk to next?

Marty Skoble. He is a poet and a dancer (or was a dancer), and is mostly someone I think of as a poetry teacher, an amazing poetry teacher. I think the guy is amazing. An amazing teacher, an amazing teacher of poetry. Teaches little kids, big kids, teaches poets you have heard of. Once a bunch of high school boys walked into a poetry reading he put on, having won their game, and proceeded to read their poems—a poem in itself.





Previously: Artist Duke Riley

Noah Davis is frequently lost.

---

See more posts by Noah Davis

3 comments

]]> http://www.theawl.com/2011/11/how-they-got-there-a-conversation-with-author-robert-sullivan/feed 3 A Conversation With Musician Ben Lear http://www.theawl.com/2011/10/a-conversation-with-musician-ben-lear http://www.theawl.com/2011/10/a-conversation-with-musician-ben-lear#comments Wed, 26 Oct 2011 15:00:59 +0000 Chris Chafin http://www.theawl.com/2011/10/a-conversation-with-musician-ben-lear Last night at Le Poisson Rouge, Ben Lear was wearing a wetsuit that made him look like a Starfleet Medical Officer and shaking hands. The 23-year-old son of 89-year-old television mogul and activist Norman Lear (you might know him for producing "All in the Family" or founding progressive advocacy group People For The American Way) had just finished performing Lillian, a show that's like an epic blend of Arcade Fire, Feist, a Muppet adventure and rock opera (although Lear prefers the term "folk opera," for its lower pretentiousness quotient). The story, which is by turns touching and bizarre, follows a young man’s search for his lost love, which takes him to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a soup of plastic that's about twice the size of Hawaii. While there, he meets a group of jellyfish (played by a gospel choir wearing shiny robes, plastic bottles, and Christmas lights) that attempts to baptize him in a pocket of air. Sample lyric from this section: “You little jellyfish, come to me/ You hold the key to a secret place/ With all the things/ That’ve gone to waste.” After an argument with a sea captain, the young man comes to accept that the past is “not lost, just plain dead.”

Lear’s voice has the husky sincerity of Arcade Fire’s Win Butler, and his music the emotional bombast of Belle & Sebastian’s most extroverted songs. The show (and the album of the same name) feature a miniature orchestra of around ten players, and musically ranks with today’s best chamber pop, Owen Pallet’s Heartland—a record that Lear likes but says can be “too much all the time.” The whole thing is deeply silly, too, and at times felt like Jason Schwartzman (whom Lear sort of resembles a taller version of) reenacting Jason Segel’s vampire puppet opera from Forgetting Sarah Marshall. In other words, it was amazing. Though the show has faded into the ether, with no additional performances planned for now, the music exists forever—and it’s well worth a listen.

I talked to Lear about the show, the environmental issues it alludes to, what it's like to have a sister who's 40-some years older than you are, and why he wants to dump his globe-trotting life to get a regular job.

Chris Chafin: Tell me about the show.

Ben Lear: Lillian began with an idea I had in my junior year of college, when I was kind of looking ahead to possible graduation recital (I was in music composition school).

It was your graduate project?

Everybody had to put on an hour-long concert. For a composer, that means you would find like a string quartet or something to play your original pieces. Obviously, it varied a lot more than that, because there were a lot of different types of composing going on. But, mainly it was like formal recitals in a school building. That wasn’t really going to light a fire for me.

So, you decided to do a make a rock opera? Are you a fan of them?

I’d never been into rock operas before. I’ve never seen Tommy. I’ve never even watched The Wall. I’ve never seen Hedwig and the Angry Inch. I’ve never seen anything like that, because it’s never interested me. So a rock opera was always the last thing I was interested in, because I think the same reason that people would generally be turned off by that idea: seems a little cheesy and glamorous. In the same way that musical theater might be that, when these words are being fed to you because it’s so important to get this story across, but you’re also trying to maintain some allegiance to the music itself. That’s a really hard balance, and a balance I was trying to maintain. Because on the flip side, there’s the artsy conceptual narrative thing that makes no sense, and sounds like crap also. And there’s a lot of that, too. So, I thought, “I don’t want to make this pretentious high-concept album, but I don’t want to make this cheesy really straightforward rock opera with a silly story. I just want to have an awesome concert experience.” At the time, I was thinking that there was this huge opportunity for bands to do more with their live show. By that I don’t mean project video on top of them or have a lighting designer. I mean to create a narrative.

Something that happened while I was working on my show that was super-influential to me was Jonesy from Sigur Ros put out his debut solo record. He had this British production company do his live set—they built a set for him, and made these really immersive projections everywhere, with animals chasing each other, and everything was sequenced to the music. I was like, “This is what I want to do, exactly, but I want to be telling a story.”

Your show uses the Pacific Garbage Patch as a metaphor for… I don’t want to say the Island of Misfit Toys but—

Sort of that, yeah. The idea is, what if there was a place that held everything you ever lost: notes, harddrives, memories, and feelings? When you think back on the first person you ever loved, and how intense that feeling was, and now that feeling is completely… I have ex-girlfriends I’m friends with, and I can’t even possibly remember what that felt like. It’s crazy to me that that could have happened, and I have such little memory of it.

So, I was working with that idea: what would it look like? What would that place be like? This was in 2009, and that was when I first heard about the garbage patch, that’s when people were first talking about it. I was like, “That’s crazy! Where are the photos of it?” But that’s because there are no photos of it; it’s this soup of almost microscopic plastic that the fish are eating. So I also got really fascinated by that misconception, and I thought maybe my character, like everyone else, kind of romanticizes this place.

The idea is that it’s a very real journey, everything about it. Real within the logic of this world. I don’t have a scuba diving mask.

What have you been doing since you graduated?

I got invited to be on an expedition with this nonprofit that’s doing plastification research, to go from Chile to Easter Island, on a sailboat for three weeks. That was really wild. The same group of people flew me out to Burning Man to perform on their raft of plastic bottles.

Were you guys trying to raise awareness?

It was definitely to raise awareness, but the other pressing issue was to study the South Pacific Gyre. There are five main oceanic gyres, and eleven sub-gyres. This one organization has gone to all of them, and trawled a net in a very specific way to collect plastic debris. That’s the only way you’ll really see it. We would just cruise all day, and the autopilot was broken, so we were steering 24 hours a day, and drop these nets in and pull them out, clean off the plastic, label them, and when we eventually got to Easter Island, we shipped them off to this lab in California that tests them for different biotoxins. The idea is that plastic is not only inherently harmful to sea life, but something about it attracts other carcinogens that are in the water, so it becomes like a hub, and it’s three or four or more times more harmful. And then we’re eating all of that, of course.

Have you ever thought about being a scientist?

Never. I always wanted to be a filmmaker, actually. Then, music came along, and that kind of took over. Maybe I just never just fully exercised my… Is it my left brain? My science brain?

I don’t know.

Whichever one, I haven’t exercised it. If I sound science-y, I’m succeeding in bullshitting you with flying colors.

I think of myself of someone who’s pretty normal in my day-to-day life, and I just happen to have a heightened interest in this stuff, so I try to be a little better in my plastic consumption. I started a blog called “I Want to Be Good,” which was about me trying to be single-use plastic free. It only lasted like three days. And if I fucked up, I wrote about it.

So even within those three days, you fucked up?

Well, the second I went to get groceries, it was over. If you want to go to Trader Joe’s, forget about it. If you have any interest in deli meats, or any meat, forget about it.

Did you grow up having an awareness of issues like this? Both of your parents are very into progressive politics, right?

I grew up in a really political household. Not like screaming ideology, but a serious intention to stay informed. The paper was open every morning. My dad has been fighting right-wing religious America for, like, 30 years. And that’s always been a big influence.

I remember going to local Democratic headquarters on election night, or campaigning in my neighborhood. Did you do things like that as a kid?

No, and I probably would have liked that. It was more just indoors. There were definitely fundraisers in the house and stuff like that. Meeting really interesting people.

It must have been a little weird to have a bunch of people suddenly in your house.

There was a group that came to all that stuff, so I would be familiar with most of those people. Growing up in my household, at least in my own mind, I was always “the son,” and had a lot to accomplish. We have this one family friend, who helped fund the majority of my music video, and when he did that, I had a flashback to being six years old, and bringing my paintings down to my parents’ dinner parties, and trying to sell them to the people there. Everyone would say, “Oh, that’s cute.” But he bought one. For twenty bucks! When I was six years old. And he knew exactly what he was doing when he did that. I’ve met a lot of people like that through my parents, and I really appreciate it.

I have two brothers and a sister. And they’re not much older than me, but they’re like ten to 15 years older. I’m actually from my mother’s second marriage. When I grew up, there would be all these pictures in the house from the '70s, and whenever there was a family gathering everyone would talk about things I hadn’t been around for, that were totally removed from my experience. I’m wondering if you had that experience growing up—almost like you’re knocking around someone else’s house?

Totally. I have three older sisters. My dad had three marriages, and had one daughter in his first marriage, two in his second, and then me and my sister in his third. And he did it over a long period of time, and they didn’t really overlap.

How old is your oldest sister?

My oldest sister is 65. My dad is turning 90 in July. So that’s what I mean. It literally was just like a family unit, and there happened to be another one almost in a previous life. I mean, I’m, like, insanely close to my older sisters.

It must be strange having a father who’s famous, but not famous in such a way that people on the street would recognize.

That’s the weirdest thing—he’s not this outward-facing celebrity where that would happen every day, and on top of that he’s just my dad. But only on very specific occasions would he become like a god. Like, literally a god. And everyone would come up to me and be like, “Do you know how much I love your father?” It was always far enough between those experiences that I would forget what that was like. Like, the other day, he just had a 30th birthday party for his organization People for the American Way here in New York. It’s this organization he started. And it’s become a very prominent thing. And as a surprise to everybody, President Clinton showed up. And he’s doing that to my dad. That’s the other thing, because of the generation gap, the people that I look up to look up to my dad.

Like, when I was about 8, we both fell in love with "South Park," and watched it together every Wednesday. And of course Matt [Stone] & Trey [Parker] are big "All in the Family" fans, and, I mean, I think Cartman is very strongly influenced by Archie Bunker. So, they get a call from Norman Lear, and he’s like, “Hey, I’d love to meet you, and bring my son.” And they’re like “oh my God!” and meanwhile, I’m like “oh my GOD!” and he’s like “oh my God!” Because he loves everything that’s good. He’ll gawk at Matt & Trey the same way he would at… I dunno, whatever was super old. Fatty Arbuckle.

Have you had to get up to speed on the ‘business’ part of the music business?

Right now, I’m kind of actively my own marketing guy, PR guy, label executive, and on top of that, director of the show, producer of the show, composer, all these different things. And I love doing it. It’s not a problem; it just significantly cuts down on my time to just write. I think the real shift in direction I’m about to make is setting down all those hats and just getting a job. I would love to work in music in some capacity and write on the side. I’m kind of forcing it to be the work right now, but I’d like it to be a hobby again. And just write a lot more.

One last question: Do you eat fish?

I won’t touch tuna, because that’s over-fished. I try not to eat salmon, but salmon’s really great.



Chris Chafin writes for a few places about things you can listen to, play or consume. Here's his Tumblr, which isn't super compelling.

Interview condensed, edited and lightly reordered.

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]]> Last night at Le Poisson Rouge, Ben Lear was wearing a wetsuit that made him look like a Starfleet Medical Officer and shaking hands. The 23-year-old son of 89-year-old television mogul and activist Norman Lear (you might know him for producing "All in the Family" or founding progressive advocacy group People For The American Way) had just finished performing Lillian, a show that's like an epic blend of Arcade Fire, Feist, a Muppet adventure and rock opera (although Lear prefers the term "folk opera," for its lower pretentiousness quotient). The story, which is by turns touching and bizarre, follows a young man’s search for his lost love, which takes him to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a soup of plastic that's about twice the size of Hawaii. While there, he meets a group of jellyfish (played by a gospel choir wearing shiny robes, plastic bottles, and Christmas lights) that attempts to baptize him in a pocket of air. Sample lyric from this section: “You little jellyfish, come to me/ You hold the key to a secret place/ With all the things/ That’ve gone to waste.” After an argument with a sea captain, the young man comes to accept that the past is “not lost, just plain dead.”

Lear’s voice has the husky sincerity of Arcade Fire’s Win Butler, and his music the emotional bombast of Belle & Sebastian’s most extroverted songs. The show (and the album of the same name) feature a miniature orchestra of around ten players, and musically ranks with today’s best chamber pop, Owen Pallet’s Heartland—a record that Lear likes but says can be “too much all the time.” The whole thing is deeply silly, too, and at times felt like Jason Schwartzman (whom Lear sort of resembles a taller version of) reenacting Jason Segel’s vampire puppet opera from Forgetting Sarah Marshall. In other words, it was amazing. Though the show has faded into the ether, with no additional performances planned for now, the music exists forever—and it’s well worth a listen.

I talked to Lear about the show, the environmental issues it alludes to, what it's like to have a sister who's 40-some years older than you are, and why he wants to dump his globe-trotting life to get a regular job.

Chris Chafin: Tell me about the show.

Ben Lear: Lillian began with an idea I had in my junior year of college, when I was kind of looking ahead to possible graduation recital (I was in music composition school).

It was your graduate project?

Everybody had to put on an hour-long concert. For a composer, that means you would find like a string quartet or something to play your original pieces. Obviously, it varied a lot more than that, because there were a lot of different types of composing going on. But, mainly it was like formal recitals in a school building. That wasn’t really going to light a fire for me.

So, you decided to do a make a rock opera? Are you a fan of them?

I’d never been into rock operas before. I’ve never seen Tommy. I’ve never even watched The Wall. I’ve never seen Hedwig and the Angry Inch. I’ve never seen anything like that, because it’s never interested me. So a rock opera was always the last thing I was interested in, because I think the same reason that people would generally be turned off by that idea: seems a little cheesy and glamorous. In the same way that musical theater might be that, when these words are being fed to you because it’s so important to get this story across, but you’re also trying to maintain some allegiance to the music itself. That’s a really hard balance, and a balance I was trying to maintain. Because on the flip side, there’s the artsy conceptual narrative thing that makes no sense, and sounds like crap also. And there’s a lot of that, too. So, I thought, “I don’t want to make this pretentious high-concept album, but I don’t want to make this cheesy really straightforward rock opera with a silly story. I just want to have an awesome concert experience.” At the time, I was thinking that there was this huge opportunity for bands to do more with their live show. By that I don’t mean project video on top of them or have a lighting designer. I mean to create a narrative.

Something that happened while I was working on my show that was super-influential to me was Jonesy from Sigur Ros put out his debut solo record. He had this British production company do his live set—they built a set for him, and made these really immersive projections everywhere, with animals chasing each other, and everything was sequenced to the music. I was like, “This is what I want to do, exactly, but I want to be telling a story.”

Your show uses the Pacific Garbage Patch as a metaphor for… I don’t want to say the Island of Misfit Toys but—

Sort of that, yeah. The idea is, what if there was a place that held everything you ever lost: notes, harddrives, memories, and feelings? When you think back on the first person you ever loved, and how intense that feeling was, and now that feeling is completely… I have ex-girlfriends I’m friends with, and I can’t even possibly remember what that felt like. It’s crazy to me that that could have happened, and I have such little memory of it.

So, I was working with that idea: what would it look like? What would that place be like? This was in 2009, and that was when I first heard about the garbage patch, that’s when people were first talking about it. I was like, “That’s crazy! Where are the photos of it?” But that’s because there are no photos of it; it’s this soup of almost microscopic plastic that the fish are eating. So I also got really fascinated by that misconception, and I thought maybe my character, like everyone else, kind of romanticizes this place.

The idea is that it’s a very real journey, everything about it. Real within the logic of this world. I don’t have a scuba diving mask.

What have you been doing since you graduated?

I got invited to be on an expedition with this nonprofit that’s doing plastification research, to go from Chile to Easter Island, on a sailboat for three weeks. That was really wild. The same group of people flew me out to Burning Man to perform on their raft of plastic bottles.

Were you guys trying to raise awareness?

It was definitely to raise awareness, but the other pressing issue was to study the South Pacific Gyre. There are five main oceanic gyres, and eleven sub-gyres. This one organization has gone to all of them, and trawled a net in a very specific way to collect plastic debris. That’s the only way you’ll really see it. We would just cruise all day, and the autopilot was broken, so we were steering 24 hours a day, and drop these nets in and pull them out, clean off the plastic, label them, and when we eventually got to Easter Island, we shipped them off to this lab in California that tests them for different biotoxins. The idea is that plastic is not only inherently harmful to sea life, but something about it attracts other carcinogens that are in the water, so it becomes like a hub, and it’s three or four or more times more harmful. And then we’re eating all of that, of course.

Have you ever thought about being a scientist?

Never. I always wanted to be a filmmaker, actually. Then, music came along, and that kind of took over. Maybe I just never just fully exercised my… Is it my left brain? My science brain?

I don’t know.

Whichever one, I haven’t exercised it. If I sound science-y, I’m succeeding in bullshitting you with flying colors.

I think of myself of someone who’s pretty normal in my day-to-day life, and I just happen to have a heightened interest in this stuff, so I try to be a little better in my plastic consumption. I started a blog called “I Want to Be Good,” which was about me trying to be single-use plastic free. It only lasted like three days. And if I fucked up, I wrote about it.

So even within those three days, you fucked up?

Well, the second I went to get groceries, it was over. If you want to go to Trader Joe’s, forget about it. If you have any interest in deli meats, or any meat, forget about it.

Did you grow up having an awareness of issues like this? Both of your parents are very into progressive politics, right?

I grew up in a really political household. Not like screaming ideology, but a serious intention to stay informed. The paper was open every morning. My dad has been fighting right-wing religious America for, like, 30 years. And that’s always been a big influence.

I remember going to local Democratic headquarters on election night, or campaigning in my neighborhood. Did you do things like that as a kid?

No, and I probably would have liked that. It was more just indoors. There were definitely fundraisers in the house and stuff like that. Meeting really interesting people.

It must have been a little weird to have a bunch of people suddenly in your house.

There was a group that came to all that stuff, so I would be familiar with most of those people. Growing up in my household, at least in my own mind, I was always “the son,” and had a lot to accomplish. We have this one family friend, who helped fund the majority of my music video, and when he did that, I had a flashback to being six years old, and bringing my paintings down to my parents’ dinner parties, and trying to sell them to the people there. Everyone would say, “Oh, that’s cute.” But he bought one. For twenty bucks! When I was six years old. And he knew exactly what he was doing when he did that. I’ve met a lot of people like that through my parents, and I really appreciate it.

I have two brothers and a sister. And they’re not much older than me, but they’re like ten to 15 years older. I’m actually from my mother’s second marriage. When I grew up, there would be all these pictures in the house from the '70s, and whenever there was a family gathering everyone would talk about things I hadn’t been around for, that were totally removed from my experience. I’m wondering if you had that experience growing up—almost like you’re knocking around someone else’s house?

Totally. I have three older sisters. My dad had three marriages, and had one daughter in his first marriage, two in his second, and then me and my sister in his third. And he did it over a long period of time, and they didn’t really overlap.

How old is your oldest sister?

My oldest sister is 65. My dad is turning 90 in July. So that’s what I mean. It literally was just like a family unit, and there happened to be another one almost in a previous life. I mean, I’m, like, insanely close to my older sisters.

It must be strange having a father who’s famous, but not famous in such a way that people on the street would recognize.

That’s the weirdest thing—he’s not this outward-facing celebrity where that would happen every day, and on top of that he’s just my dad. But only on very specific occasions would he become like a god. Like, literally a god. And everyone would come up to me and be like, “Do you know how much I love your father?” It was always far enough between those experiences that I would forget what that was like. Like, the other day, he just had a 30th birthday party for his organization People for the American Way here in New York. It’s this organization he started. And it’s become a very prominent thing. And as a surprise to everybody, President Clinton showed up. And he’s doing that to my dad. That’s the other thing, because of the generation gap, the people that I look up to look up to my dad.

Like, when I was about 8, we both fell in love with "South Park," and watched it together every Wednesday. And of course Matt [Stone] & Trey [Parker] are big "All in the Family" fans, and, I mean, I think Cartman is very strongly influenced by Archie Bunker. So, they get a call from Norman Lear, and he’s like, “Hey, I’d love to meet you, and bring my son.” And they’re like “oh my God!” and meanwhile, I’m like “oh my GOD!” and he’s like “oh my God!” Because he loves everything that’s good. He’ll gawk at Matt & Trey the same way he would at… I dunno, whatever was super old. Fatty Arbuckle.

Have you had to get up to speed on the ‘business’ part of the music business?

Right now, I’m kind of actively my own marketing guy, PR guy, label executive, and on top of that, director of the show, producer of the show, composer, all these different things. And I love doing it. It’s not a problem; it just significantly cuts down on my time to just write. I think the real shift in direction I’m about to make is setting down all those hats and just getting a job. I would love to work in music in some capacity and write on the side. I’m kind of forcing it to be the work right now, but I’d like it to be a hobby again. And just write a lot more.

One last question: Do you eat fish?

I won’t touch tuna, because that’s over-fished. I try not to eat salmon, but salmon’s really great.



Chris Chafin writes for a few places about things you can listen to, play or consume. Here's his Tumblr, which isn't super compelling.

Interview condensed, edited and lightly reordered.

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2011/10/a-conversation-with-musician-ben-lear/feed 8 A Conversation With Chris Perkel, Editor of 'Pearl Jam Twenty' http://www.theawl.com/2011/10/a-conversation-with-chris-perkel-editor-of-pearl-jam-twenty http://www.theawl.com/2011/10/a-conversation-with-chris-perkel-editor-of-pearl-jam-twenty#comments Tue, 25 Oct 2011 17:00:04 +0000 Rick Paulas http://www.theawl.com/2011/10/a-conversation-with-chris-perkel-editor-of-pearl-jam-twenty It was never easy being a Pearl Jam fan. The explosion of hype and overexposure that came with Ten and Vs. fueled an instant mainstream backlash by the "cool indie kids." If you were going to listen to grunge, Nirvana was the band you were supposed to like. The experimental, less radio-friendly Vitalogy and No Code—as well as the annoying rise of Eddie Vedder sound-alikes—slashed the fan base even further. In terms of popularity then, they occupy a strange, contradictory place in music: They’ve been one of the biggest bands in the world for two decades but comparatively little is known about them. Which is why the Cameron Crowe-directed love letter Pearl Jam Twenty (out today on DVD and Blu-ray) is such an important document. A fan himself, Crowe was given access to the band’s entire video vault, footage that documentary film editor Chris Perkel had to comb through, culling a two-hour retrospective from over a thousand hours of raw material.

Perkel, who's in Panama shooting a documentary about international census workers, took time away from watching the GOP debates (“high comedy,” he says) in order to talk about the process."

Rick Paulas: How were you approached for the job?

Chris Perkel: I’ve been cutting docs for seven years and worked for a director named Morgan Neville who does a lot of music documentaries. He was approached by Cameron Crowe about the Pearl Jam doc a while ago; Cameron hadn’t really done any documentary work, so Morgan was brought on as a producer. Immediately, I was trying to find an avenue in because, you know, I’m in my mid-30s and Pearl Jam was a band I had a connection to as a teenager. So they gave me the chance to cut a little teaser and that ended up basically being the trailer they use now. They got that I was a fan and I had some understanding of what they were trying to do. So they gave me the opportunity to edit a music video for “The Fixer,” and then gave me the job cutting the feature.

How did you go about cutting the movie?

It’s a weird film. Usually you do the interviews first and build your skeleton on those. But here they didn’t do the interviews until last. So the first thing we did was find performances or clips we thought were particularly cool or interesting or rare. Sometimes it’s pretty subjective, so you hope you have similar taste to what most fans would like.

Did Cameron Crowe tell you exactly how each section of the narrative should go?

Early, Cameron would come in intermittently. We would have conversations about the tone and vibe he was going for, and we were trying to suss out from him what he’s trying to do, but we had a lot of independence early on. You can kind of tell when you’re on the same page and when you’re not, if you cut something and got the vibe he wasn’t responding to it. But for the most part we had a good sense of what it was he was trying to do. He was very articulate about the goal of trying to make this as if fans had raided their vaults, like you were hanging with the band. Cameron works through tone more than any other filmmaker I’ve worked with, so we’re always trying to make sure the stuff captured a particular tone or feel. If you did that, he was generally pretty happy.

Were there any worries that the first half of Pearl Jam’s career would be over-represented in the movie?

There was some talk about it, because it’s hard to avoid. Obviously, the first few years of their career has a lot more drama. I still don’t think we did as good a job as I would’ve liked in dramatizing the second half, but we did the best we could. And, frankly, it’s the stuff people respond to more. You know, those first two albums were so huge, you had to emphasize them to a certain degree. Plus, we just had less material to work with in the latter part of their career. It just worked out that we ended up having the most amount of material on the period of the band that was most interesting anyway.

Did you have a constant incoming supply of footage to go through?

It was evolving, but we had a lot of it up front. The other editor, Kevin [Klauber], had spent a year going through material, syncing footage, breaking down old performances, that kind of stuff. But stuff was still coming in as we were going. Then, you reach a point where you need certain things so you have to hunt for them in order to fill out the story. One of the last things we got was the footage of Eddie Vedder and Kurt Cobain slow-dancing at the VMAs in 1992. We knew it was out there, but couldn’t get it for months and months.

Were there any pieces you stumbled on that you were shocked you had?

Them writing “Daughter” on the bus. Instantly, we were like, that’s great. There’s some really old footage of Stone and Jeff and Andy Wood from Mother Love Bone that one of their friends, Josh Taft, was just shooting while they were hanging out at a Cult show. And the second show ever. The fact that it was even filmed was ridiculous. It just so happens that Alice in Chains, who they were opening for, were shooting a music video and decided to roll on Pearl Jam as well. They were Mookie Blaylock at the time. There’s some footage of them hanging out with Alice in Chains that’s cool. And the footage from Roskilde, the festival where the kids died, the fact there was footage where you can see the band’s reaction on the Jumbotron was pretty riveting.

Is there anything you wished would have stayed in?

When they shot the “Even Flow” video they had four cameras going and did a whole set that night. They did “Once,” “Why Go?,” “Porch,” and “Baba O’Riley.” In the film, we cut three different “Baba O’Riley” performances together, starting with them rehearsing backstage at Lollapalooza, and then we go to a live performance that’s modern, and then we used the tail end of that show. But there’s amazing footage of them playing these songs in 16 millimeter film that just didn’t make the cut. Oh, and there’s footage from this radio show, "Self-Polluted Radio," in the mid-90s. We had a great version of “Corduroy” which is a song that everyone loves that didn’t make the film at all. It’s them in this little rehearsal space, very intimate, but it just didn’t have a story to go along with it. That was kind of depressing. There was—I think this is in the DVD extras—a cool little piece I cut of Matt Cameron walking us through how they took a demo he brought in called “Need to Know” and turned it into “The Fixer.” You see the whole evolution of the song. There really isn’t any studio work in the film, because it just didn’t fit.

When dealing with a music documentary, how much does the sound quality of the footage affect what you keep and what you cut?

It does to a degree. The sound quality for their second show ever, we knew we were just taking whatever they had. The value of that footage wasn’t in the quality, it was in the rarity. And from 1995 on, they’ve archived everything impeccably. We worked with their sound guy, John Burton, and mix them a little. But it was really only the early stuff that we had to worry. If the footage was rare and cool, it really didn’t matter.

Did the band have a lot of input in the film?

Honestly, not on anything big. The film was basically a collaboration between Cameron and their manager, at least the genesis of the film was, so people assume this was a more sanitized version of the band. But when we went to Seattle to show them the cut for the first time, it was really tense and nerve-wracking because we had no idea how they were going to react. They’re notoriously private. There’s some dicey stuff in there. Aside from the Roskilde thing, there’s them talking about the change in dynamics from Stone losing power and Ed taking power. The drummers. There’s some tricky stuff. They had notes, usually stuff they found embarrassing, a line that Ed didn’t like from old footage that made him feel goofy. They tried to get rid of a couple things, but we ended up pushing back. Nothing of substance ended up changing. Basically, this film would have never happened if it wasn’t for their relationship with Cameron. They’ve known him since the band’s inception, and they trust him. They really let him make the movie he wanted to make knowing he wasn’t going to do a hatchet job.

It’s definitely a movie by the fans for the fans.

Totally. It’s been interesting seeing the critical response, because I feel the movie accomplishes what it set out to be. There are some critics that don’t believe films should exist if they’re not being more critical. But for the most part I think it’s been well received. It is what it is. People really like it because it’s a movie that clearly gets what people like about the band.

Just the fact that they’ve been around for 20 years shows you’re not going to have insane controversies you dig up.

Right. I really don’t think there’s more there than we talked about. This is a fairly honest depiction of their story. This is a band that was genuinely uncomfortable with how big they got, and took active tangible measures to make themselves smaller, which is something you just don’t see. You see bands paying lip service to wanting to maintain some credibility or wanting to do it for the music, but usually if people stop shining the spotlight on them they get scared and start waving their arms around saying, “Look at me, look at me!” These guys never did that because their priorities was always about the music and the fans. And they evolved into this crazy live act where they’re as much communal ring leaders as they are band members at this point. Really, how many bands from that era are still around? Not many. And how many are still relevant? There’s only a handful. Either you keep making radio hits like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, or you’re Pearl Jam. That’s about it.

For being as overexposed during their early period, they’re still kind of an under-talked about band.

Totally. When they retracted from the spotlight, they really retracted from the spotlight. They’ve never re-entered mainstream conversation, except for the fans who are as hardcore as they’ve ever been. But they don’t get any mainstream exposure, and they don’t get the indie, KCRW-style exposure that a Radiohead or somebody else would get. They were really genuinely off the radar. Eddie Vedder lives in Hawaii six months of the year, off the grid. And for people who didn’t grow up around them, I feel like they’re undervalued. For the people I know, the people I went to high school with, the band was really a large part of their teenage years in ways that aren’t appreciated by those who weren’t there. Because they haven’t been talked about to the degree that, say, Kurt Cobain was. And they had a greater emotional connection to Pearl Jam than they did to Nirvana.

When it was the Pearl Jam vs. Nirvana debate during the '90s, was Nirvana more popular because they weren’t as perceived as mainstream? Because Nirvana was playing acoustic shows on MTV. They were pretty mainstream.

Nirvana was clearly more punk, and it gave them more credibility. I think what the critics that dismissed Pearl Jam don’t recognize, they don’t look past the fact that musically they wasn’t as innovative as Nirvana. Clearly, Nirvana was doing something… well, maybe they were just doing what The Pixies were doing. But there was a greater musical break with what was traditionally popular. Pearl Jam was musically like any rock band in the '70s, more or less. But thematically, Pearl Jam was very different and reactionary. Thematically, they couldn’t have been more different from the hair metal that was out there, even if sonically they weren’t. And I feel like critics dismissed them because of it. They didn’t appreciate how people were responding to the emotional quality of the music. It was so sincere it almost became a joke.

And you have a retroactive thing happening in the late '90s with people hating them because of bands like Creed.

That’s also true. His voice became so ubiquitous and omnipresent, all of these bad bands that came around, knocking off the Pearl Jam sound, and people resenting them because Creed became so big. You can’t really blame them for that.

It’s why I hated Rage Against the Machine.

Totally. Because of Limp Bizkit. It’s not Rage’s fault that they created this whole genre.

But as a kid, you’re just looking for an excuse to hate something.

And Scott Stapp gives you many, many reasons to hate something.

Related: "Pearl Jam Songs, 1991-1996, In Order."



Rick Paulas still maintains No Code is their best album, partially because it truly is great and partially because it makes him a bit of a contrarian.

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]]> It was never easy being a Pearl Jam fan. The explosion of hype and overexposure that came with Ten and Vs. fueled an instant mainstream backlash by the "cool indie kids." If you were going to listen to grunge, Nirvana was the band you were supposed to like. The experimental, less radio-friendly Vitalogy and No Code—as well as the annoying rise of Eddie Vedder sound-alikes—slashed the fan base even further. In terms of popularity then, they occupy a strange, contradictory place in music: They’ve been one of the biggest bands in the world for two decades but comparatively little is known about them. Which is why the Cameron Crowe-directed love letter Pearl Jam Twenty (out today on DVD and Blu-ray) is such an important document. A fan himself, Crowe was given access to the band’s entire video vault, footage that documentary film editor Chris Perkel had to comb through, culling a two-hour retrospective from over a thousand hours of raw material.

Perkel, who's in Panama shooting a documentary about international census workers, took time away from watching the GOP debates (“high comedy,” he says) in order to talk about the process."

Rick Paulas: How were you approached for the job?

Chris Perkel: I’ve been cutting docs for seven years and worked for a director named Morgan Neville who does a lot of music documentaries. He was approached by Cameron Crowe about the Pearl Jam doc a while ago; Cameron hadn’t really done any documentary work, so Morgan was brought on as a producer. Immediately, I was trying to find an avenue in because, you know, I’m in my mid-30s and Pearl Jam was a band I had a connection to as a teenager. So they gave me the chance to cut a little teaser and that ended up basically being the trailer they use now. They got that I was a fan and I had some understanding of what they were trying to do. So they gave me the opportunity to edit a music video for “The Fixer,” and then gave me the job cutting the feature.

How did you go about cutting the movie?

It’s a weird film. Usually you do the interviews first and build your skeleton on those. But here they didn’t do the interviews until last. So the first thing we did was find performances or clips we thought were particularly cool or interesting or rare. Sometimes it’s pretty subjective, so you hope you have similar taste to what most fans would like.

Did Cameron Crowe tell you exactly how each section of the narrative should go?

Early, Cameron would come in intermittently. We would have conversations about the tone and vibe he was going for, and we were trying to suss out from him what he’s trying to do, but we had a lot of independence early on. You can kind of tell when you’re on the same page and when you’re not, if you cut something and got the vibe he wasn’t responding to it. But for the most part we had a good sense of what it was he was trying to do. He was very articulate about the goal of trying to make this as if fans had raided their vaults, like you were hanging with the band. Cameron works through tone more than any other filmmaker I’ve worked with, so we’re always trying to make sure the stuff captured a particular tone or feel. If you did that, he was generally pretty happy.

Were there any worries that the first half of Pearl Jam’s career would be over-represented in the movie?

There was some talk about it, because it’s hard to avoid. Obviously, the first few years of their career has a lot more drama. I still don’t think we did as good a job as I would’ve liked in dramatizing the second half, but we did the best we could. And, frankly, it’s the stuff people respond to more. You know, those first two albums were so huge, you had to emphasize them to a certain degree. Plus, we just had less material to work with in the latter part of their career. It just worked out that we ended up having the most amount of material on the period of the band that was most interesting anyway.

Did you have a constant incoming supply of footage to go through?

It was evolving, but we had a lot of it up front. The other editor, Kevin [Klauber], had spent a year going through material, syncing footage, breaking down old performances, that kind of stuff. But stuff was still coming in as we were going. Then, you reach a point where you need certain things so you have to hunt for them in order to fill out the story. One of the last things we got was the footage of Eddie Vedder and Kurt Cobain slow-dancing at the VMAs in 1992. We knew it was out there, but couldn’t get it for months and months.

Were there any pieces you stumbled on that you were shocked you had?

Them writing “Daughter” on the bus. Instantly, we were like, that’s great. There’s some really old footage of Stone and Jeff and Andy Wood from Mother Love Bone that one of their friends, Josh Taft, was just shooting while they were hanging out at a Cult show. And the second show ever. The fact that it was even filmed was ridiculous. It just so happens that Alice in Chains, who they were opening for, were shooting a music video and decided to roll on Pearl Jam as well. They were Mookie Blaylock at the time. There’s some footage of them hanging out with Alice in Chains that’s cool. And the footage from Roskilde, the festival where the kids died, the fact there was footage where you can see the band’s reaction on the Jumbotron was pretty riveting.

Is there anything you wished would have stayed in?

When they shot the “Even Flow” video they had four cameras going and did a whole set that night. They did “Once,” “Why Go?,” “Porch,” and “Baba O’Riley.” In the film, we cut three different “Baba O’Riley” performances together, starting with them rehearsing backstage at Lollapalooza, and then we go to a live performance that’s modern, and then we used the tail end of that show. But there’s amazing footage of them playing these songs in 16 millimeter film that just didn’t make the cut. Oh, and there’s footage from this radio show, "Self-Polluted Radio," in the mid-90s. We had a great version of “Corduroy” which is a song that everyone loves that didn’t make the film at all. It’s them in this little rehearsal space, very intimate, but it just didn’t have a story to go along with it. That was kind of depressing. There was—I think this is in the DVD extras—a cool little piece I cut of Matt Cameron walking us through how they took a demo he brought in called “Need to Know” and turned it into “The Fixer.” You see the whole evolution of the song. There really isn’t any studio work in the film, because it just didn’t fit.

When dealing with a music documentary, how much does the sound quality of the footage affect what you keep and what you cut?

It does to a degree. The sound quality for their second show ever, we knew we were just taking whatever they had. The value of that footage wasn’t in the quality, it was in the rarity. And from 1995 on, they’ve archived everything impeccably. We worked with their sound guy, John Burton, and mix them a little. But it was really only the early stuff that we had to worry. If the footage was rare and cool, it really didn’t matter.

Did the band have a lot of input in the film?

Honestly, not on anything big. The film was basically a collaboration between Cameron and their manager, at least the genesis of the film was, so people assume this was a more sanitized version of the band. But when we went to Seattle to show them the cut for the first time, it was really tense and nerve-wracking because we had no idea how they were going to react. They’re notoriously private. There’s some dicey stuff in there. Aside from the Roskilde thing, there’s them talking about the change in dynamics from Stone losing power and Ed taking power. The drummers. There’s some tricky stuff. They had notes, usually stuff they found embarrassing, a line that Ed didn’t like from old footage that made him feel goofy. They tried to get rid of a couple things, but we ended up pushing back. Nothing of substance ended up changing. Basically, this film would have never happened if it wasn’t for their relationship with Cameron. They’ve known him since the band’s inception, and they trust him. They really let him make the movie he wanted to make knowing he wasn’t going to do a hatchet job.

It’s definitely a movie by the fans for the fans.

Totally. It’s been interesting seeing the critical response, because I feel the movie accomplishes what it set out to be. There are some critics that don’t believe films should exist if they’re not being more critical. But for the most part I think it’s been well received. It is what it is. People really like it because it’s a movie that clearly gets what people like about the band.

Just the fact that they’ve been around for 20 years shows you’re not going to have insane controversies you dig up.

Right. I really don’t think there’s more there than we talked about. This is a fairly honest depiction of their story. This is a band that was genuinely uncomfortable with how big they got, and took active tangible measures to make themselves smaller, which is something you just don’t see. You see bands paying lip service to wanting to maintain some credibility or wanting to do it for the music, but usually if people stop shining the spotlight on them they get scared and start waving their arms around saying, “Look at me, look at me!” These guys never did that because their priorities was always about the music and the fans. And they evolved into this crazy live act where they’re as much communal ring leaders as they are band members at this point. Really, how many bands from that era are still around? Not many. And how many are still relevant? There’s only a handful. Either you keep making radio hits like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, or you’re Pearl Jam. That’s about it.

For being as overexposed during their early period, they’re still kind of an under-talked about band.

Totally. When they retracted from the spotlight, they really retracted from the spotlight. They’ve never re-entered mainstream conversation, except for the fans who are as hardcore as they’ve ever been. But they don’t get any mainstream exposure, and they don’t get the indie, KCRW-style exposure that a Radiohead or somebody else would get. They were really genuinely off the radar. Eddie Vedder lives in Hawaii six months of the year, off the grid. And for people who didn’t grow up around them, I feel like they’re undervalued. For the people I know, the people I went to high school with, the band was really a large part of their teenage years in ways that aren’t appreciated by those who weren’t there. Because they haven’t been talked about to the degree that, say, Kurt Cobain was. And they had a greater emotional connection to Pearl Jam than they did to Nirvana.

When it was the Pearl Jam vs. Nirvana debate during the '90s, was Nirvana more popular because they weren’t as perceived as mainstream? Because Nirvana was playing acoustic shows on MTV. They were pretty mainstream.

Nirvana was clearly more punk, and it gave them more credibility. I think what the critics that dismissed Pearl Jam don’t recognize, they don’t look past the fact that musically they wasn’t as innovative as Nirvana. Clearly, Nirvana was doing something… well, maybe they were just doing what The Pixies were doing. But there was a greater musical break with what was traditionally popular. Pearl Jam was musically like any rock band in the '70s, more or less. But thematically, Pearl Jam was very different and reactionary. Thematically, they couldn’t have been more different from the hair metal that was out there, even if sonically they weren’t. And I feel like critics dismissed them because of it. They didn’t appreciate how people were responding to the emotional quality of the music. It was so sincere it almost became a joke.

And you have a retroactive thing happening in the late '90s with people hating them because of bands like Creed.

That’s also true. His voice became so ubiquitous and omnipresent, all of these bad bands that came around, knocking off the Pearl Jam sound, and people resenting them because Creed became so big. You can’t really blame them for that.

It’s why I hated Rage Against the Machine.

Totally. Because of Limp Bizkit. It’s not Rage’s fault that they created this whole genre.

But as a kid, you’re just looking for an excuse to hate something.

And Scott Stapp gives you many, many reasons to hate something.

Related: "Pearl Jam Songs, 1991-1996, In Order."



Rick Paulas still maintains No Code is their best album, partially because it truly is great and partially because it makes him a bit of a contrarian.

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2011/10/a-conversation-with-chris-perkel-editor-of-pearl-jam-twenty/feed 3 Why Should We Demonstrate? A Conversation http://www.theawl.com/2011/10/ask-an-activist-why-should-we-demonstrate http://www.theawl.com/2011/10/ask-an-activist-why-should-we-demonstrate#comments Wed, 12 Oct 2011 16:30:00 +0000 Logan Sachon http://www.theawl.com/2011/10/ask-an-activist-why-should-we-demonstrate Things I don’t understand about activism, the short list:
• Sleeping in a park if you have an actual bed somewhere to sleep in;
• Willingly being in a place where you increase your risk of being arrested/maced;
• Being uncomfortable in a crowd when you can just, you know, read coverage on blogs;
• How crowds of people with signs change anything, ever.

Amount I’m willing to concede ignorance on matters of activism:
• Oh, a lot;
• I’d go so far as to say "total."

What I decided to do about it:
• Not take an eight-hour bus ride to New York City, that’s what;
• Get someone to explain it to me.

So I called up Sam Brody. He is a guy I went to college with, and the only person in my life who has done activist-type things on the regular. I know this because: he used to talk about these things (I obviously paid so much attention); he used to (and perhaps still does) wear t-shirts with political messages sharpied on them; and one time in 2002, Cary Tennis profiled him for Salon as a young anti-war activist. Sam is currently a PhD. student at the University of Chicago. He is a native New Yorker and was in Zucotti Park last Sunday. We had this conversation.

LOGAN SACHON: So, Sam. I have been watching the coverage for the past couple weeks —

SAM BRODY: Where have you been watching coverage?

LOGAN: I guess by watching, I don’t mean “watching.” I’ve been reading it. Mostly blogs. And what I’ve found is equal parts people saying, “This is awesome,” and people saying, “This is so unorganized, what is the point.” So what I’m interested in is: who is right? And more than that: how do protests work and what is the point of them?

SAM: Your general question — what is the purpose of street-based activism — is a good one.

The most recent thing that most people in our generation got excited about was the Obama campaign, from a liberal perspective. And that was a really clear goal: to elect one dude.

The most idealistic people maybe thought that electing this one dude would take care of a whole bunch of other things they cared about. And there were probably a lot of other people who weren’t that idealistic, but thought, well, electing this one dude won’t mean we won’t have to do all this other work, but it will be one good thing. There were a lot of people who got involved for the first time in politics on that campaign, and I think there were a lot of other folks who had been involved in activism for a long time who were kind of worried that if those people thought that the campaign didn’t deliver everything they wanted, they would just get kind of disillusioned with politics as a whole, and this kind of “plague on both their houses,” apathetic attitude that would emerge from that. That if the resulting Obama administration didn’t fix everything, you’d have people think, not in a political way, but in an attitudinal, existential way, that there’s no way to affect anything. And that you shouldn’t even bother trying.

And I think for a lot of people, that happened. They adopted this sort of very basic stance toward the world of, whoever runs things runs things, and it’s not me, and things are just going to keep being shitty, because some other people who have a lot of power and money are going to be the ones who decide what happens, basically.

I think there were a lot of folks who had been involved in activism for a long time who were kind of worried that if people thought that the campaign didn’t deliver everything they wanted, that if the resulting Obama administration didn’t fix everything, you’d have people think, not in a political way, but in an attitudinal, existential way, that there’s no way to affect anything. And that you shouldn’t even bother trying. And I think for a lot of people, that happened.
LOGAN: Unfortunately, I think I might be the poster child for this.

SAM: And so as a way of concluding a really long rambling answer to this question of “what is the point of street-based activism,” I think one of the main purposes in this case, and really the initial purpose, is to make a space, to open up a space, where people go and talk to other people about what they want to have happen.

Because maybe in your daily life you go to work, if you’re lucky enough to have a job, or maybe you go to a bar or some cultural event with your friends in the evening, and maybe politics is one thing that comes up at that or maybe it doesn’t. And you might have a stray thought here or there throughout the day about something if you happen to read the news, but when there’s a huge group of people that are all assembled in one place to talk about how something is seriously wrong and they want to do something about it, when you go there, that’s what you talk about. And you talk to a lot of different people and you hear a lot of different things, and if you start participating, it gives you sense of having power. And the more people realize that they’ve been missing that, the more people join up and ideally it has a snowball effect that does result in some change taking place, and ideally that’s the result of increased democratic involvement.

LOGAN: So it’s not necessarily the idea that media coverage of this event will make anyone that has any power change anything, but that it will inspire us to change stuff ourselves?

SAM: I mean, partially. Anything like this always has 500 million different goals and other things that it’s going to accomplish without even intending to accomplish them. So for example, one thing that I thought when I saw a reporter ask the President a question about Occupy Wall Street, and he used it as a chance to try to, he tried to say he agreed with the protesters, even though the reporter had framed the question as like, clearly they think you haven’t done enough and are part of the problem, like, just the fact that that interchange took place! Before Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party were the loud people who were in the street doing things and making noise, which set a tone so that when reporters asked the President a question, they would say, “It seems like a lot of people out there think that government is too big and is spending a lot of money and that taxes are too high, what are you going to do about that?” Right? And now the question was from the opposite direction. And so simply having that be a thing that happens is important. And that didn’t even have anything to do with specific demands, which was the criticism that you hear. Like do they want Congress to reinstate Glass-Steagall? Do they want a transaction tax on financial transactions? And people can keep kind of asking these questions, and of course, that’s good, that since there’s a giant protest, they’re asking those questions about those policies and whether they are good ideas. So there are all kinds of possible outcomes.

The unions might actually have a political campaign in the works demanding something like a tax on financial transactions. If they did, they could use the protest to try to get that passed as legislation. But since it’s still inherently leaderless and not being run by the Democratic Party and not being run by any kind of union or activist group, it’s not going to go away just because some legislation gets passed either, which I think is another advantage of it. Because sometimes you have protests about single issues, like, we want to abolish the death penalty in this state, and if you win, well, then that’s great and you go home. But this is about something that is a much deeper problem and is very very complicated and has roots in all these different sectors of our political life, so it’s unlikely that it’s just going to go away anytime soon, and I think that’s really good.

LOGAN: So you were there for a day last week?

SAM: Yes, I went down this Sunday, actually.

LOGAN: My impression of you is that you grew up with activism, is that right?

SAM: I went to high school in New York City, which, you know, not too many conservatives at my school. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to do activist stuff. You can just have a bunch of liberals around who are just complaining about things. But it was the Giuliani years, and when they shot Amadou Diallo, he became a kind of representative figure. There was a lot of police brutality and instances of unarmed people getting killed by police back then, and there was a lot of high school presence at protests around that issue. And at the beginning of the year I was in Madison when they were occupying the Capitol in Madison, so I can compare Occupy Wall Street to that.

LOGAN: I’ve actually never been to a protest at all.

SAM: Oh really? [I think it would not be exaggerating to say that he said this with some shock.] Is it because you think they’re corny or you don’t get the point?

LOGAN: I think I’ve always felt like, that that is some people’s thing and I’m more subtle, or something. Like, some people protest, and I don’t do that.

SAM: When you say more subtle, is that like going to a protest makes you declare a stance that is possibly too absolute and maybe doesn’t accept nuances and stuff?

LOGAN: Not necessarily. I guess I mean, it’s more my style to have discussions with a few people rather than making a sign and going out there. I’ve just never done it. And part of it also is that I’ve always cared about what people think of me. And I’ve always felt, well, you really have to know your stuff to hit the streets. Like, yes. I’m decidedly pro-choice. But if you put a microphone in my face, I’m probably not going to be able to tell you why. You’ve got to give me a pen and paper and some time for me to craft that argument.

The March on Washington was just one event in a multi-decade-long movement of which everyone who was present had some experience organizing on the ground back wherever they came from, on a day-to-day basis, everyday. They didn’t all just say, "Let’s all have the March on Washington where Martin Luther King will say, I have a dream, and then black people will be equal!"
SAM: One thing that’s different about Occupy Wall Street, is that, oftentimes, a typical protest, if there’s such a thing, takes the form of a march or a rally. So the group organization calls the protest for a certain time and place on a particular day, and if it’s a march, they tell you where they start and where you end up and they get a permit from the police and they walk and carry their signs from where they start to where they end up. And if a lot of people show up it’ll get media attention (or if it’s the Tea Party, ten of them will show up and it will get media attention), and the goal of it is to publicly manifest a particular view or dissatisfaction about something and have that enter into people’s conversations. If it’s a rally, the whole thing will take place in one place, and there will be a stage or platform that everybody looks at, and somebody will make speeches, and maybe someone will come in between and play some music and sing a song. And that’s a very typical format, and there have always been people who are dissatisfied with that, because it can leave you in the end with a certain sense of, what was that for? Although everyone knows really famous instances like, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. But the March on Washington was just one event in a multi-decade-long movement of which everyone who was present had some experience organizing on the ground back wherever they came from, on a day-to-day basis, everyday. They didn’t all just say, "Let’s all have the March on Washington where Martin Luther King will say, I have a dream, and then black people will be equal!" It was just one part. It was a manifestation of the power of something that was already happening.

What was different about this was that it wasn’t a march and it wasn’t a rally, although they are having those things associated with it, but it’s an occupation, which really does seem to just be about creating a space. A lot of people I know who went, before they had been reading all these stories about the bailouts or income inequality or how much many more times a CEO makes than an average worker in the U.S. compared to other industrial countries or other things that they’d be complaining about, they might say, “Where is the outrage? Why aren’t people in the streets yelling?” And then when people do go in the streets, they’re like, “What are they doing there? What do they think is going to happen?”

But for some people, just seeing it there, it’s like, there it is, I can go there, and people there will share something with me, even if I don’t know what it is or I can’t put my finger on it. The longer the occupation lasts, the more people from different backgrounds and different perspectives will be able to come and share those views with the people there. The basically hardcore group who are actually occupying becomes this opening for all these other people, people who have jobs, people who can’t live in the street, people who are interested in pursuing political channels for their problems to go and interface and connect with the broad possible spectrum of people that are interested in achieving the same kinds of things that they are.

LOGAN: So when you were there, did it feel good?

It’s a public space literally being taken over for chaotic public discussion, so you can’t say, only people that can pass through all my filters of aesthetic and political criteria can be there.
SAM: Well, I am a hyper-critical personality, so in that way I’m sort of like a typical media person. When I go down there, my eyes are drawn to the most extreme crackpot or hippie looking people. So there was some dude standing there with a sign, and he was like “NAZI BANKERS,” and I was like, oh, g-d. And his sign was the biggest, it was bigger than his entire body and he was holding it with his arms stretched out. And you knew that guy was going to be in every picture, and some people had gone up and talked to him and he was apparently impervious to people saying, like, “Dude, Nazi comparisons make you lose.” But in the past, it would have been like, I don’t want to stand in any group of people that that guy is in, but you literally can’t control it. It’s a public space literally being taken over for chaotic public discussion, so you can’t say, only people that can pass through all my filters of aesthetic and political criteria can be there.

So once you get over that fear of being associated with people that don’t take baths or people that say Hitler all the time, you just sort of find the people that you do need to be talking to.

LOGAN: So when you went to Madison, where did you sleep?

SAM: I only slept in the Capitol a couple of the nights, and the rest of the time I crashed with this guy Trevor who was generous enough to offer me a spot at his place. But almost everyone I met offered to let me crash at their place. The second I walked in there, everyone was like, oh wow, you came here from Chicago? Oh wow, thanks for coming, do you need somewhere to stay? So I had my pick of places to stay. But in the Capitol I just kind of slept on the floor in the hallway.

But the Wall Street one, too, they have a meal section, there’s a central table with all this food on it, and people are constantly coming and dropping off food, and that’s what I did. I dropped off food because I didn’t want to feel like I was just a protest tourist, so I brought and dropped off some food so at least I would feel like I had done something. But then behind the food table you have all these people washing dishes in tubs of soapy water and then to the right of that there is a table with all this medicine and first aid stuff on them. And there are people who put red tape on themselves, and they’re medics. Like, how do you know they’re medics? You don’t have the opportunity to interview these people and find out what makes them medics, but you just trust that if you get pepper sprayed or something, they will know what they’re doing. And then there’s a really long thing that’s like a People’s Library, and it was just a bunch of books. Take one! Bring one! So there’s all these things that just kind of spring up, and no one tells anyone that they have to do these things, they just kind of know and do it. And that energy is what makes it feel like an alternate place. People are in charge of their own shit here. And that greatly contributes to the sense of empowerment.

LOGAN: Was it hard for you to leave? Do you find yourself wishing you were there?

SAM: My friend Tasha had that feeling. She says she felt like everyday when she left there she was going to a worse place, that she was going to a mean place where people were not open and not understanding and judgmental. And so she’s actually been going back everyday. And I kind of wish I was there, but I’m in Chicago doing what I’m doing. But now they’ve started one in Chicago, so I’m probably going to go down there one day this week and see what’s going on.

LOGAN: Have you looked at the we are the 99 percent Tumblr?

SAM: Yeah, it’s depressing isn’t it?

LOGAN: It’s totally depressing. It gives me chest pains.

SAM: I know some people who are like, I don’t know what the people on Wall Street are about, but that Tumblr is killer. And well, that is what it’s about. I guess, nobody really has a concrete notion of how any particular action could address all of those people’s problems. So, everyone understands someone's individual story of hardship and suffering, but to connect that up to the systematic reasons that are the same reasons that caused someone else’s story of hardship and suffering is more difficult.

But a lot of people are perfectly capable of hearing those stories and blaming them on something completely different. Like people with conservative politics, for example, might read that blog and think, this is because the government spends too much money and doesn’t allow job creators to create jobs and that’s why these people have no jobs. And I think that’s ridiculous and stupid, but you don’t have to be irrational to believe that. I think it’s good that there is a loud and visible presence that doesn’t think that’s the explanation, because when it was only the Tea Party, I think we were in real trouble.

LOGAN: Yes, and I feel that most of my life, at least the part when I’ve been aware of politics, it’s been very much that the vocal conservatives are out there making a fuss, and the liberals are at home, watching the Daily Show and rolling their eyes.

You have to be really sincere and really zealous, and not basically complacent or comfortable, to think that going and setting up camp in some park near Wall Street is going to affect what anyone thinks about anything.
SAM: I think that there’s also, a certain cultural pessimism or cynicism even that goes with the cultural cachet that irony has among a certain class of liberal people, and I say that because it’s certainly not universal to all races and classes of liberal people, but there’s a certain attitude among the people that I know, that, when you talk about the sixties and you talk about hippies and stuff, you sort of laugh, because they were so earnest and they just talked about loving everybody, and seriously? Were they kidding or what. And I think at a certain point, that attitude becomes debilitating. You can express an ironic or critical comment that you think is in line with what other people you’re talking to are saying, but if you say something that is super sincere and also not something that is immediately obvious, you expect some kind of backlash. The sincerity of people who really believe that they can change things is just like, too much. Because like everyone who knows anything knows that you can’t really. And that’s part of the reason that movements like Occupy Wall Street get started by anarchists, and not by smart well-educated liberals who come out of college and go into non-profit organizing. I mean, you have to be really sincere and really zealous, and not basically complacent or comfortable, to think that going and setting up camp in some park near Wall Street is going to affect what anyone thinks about anything. And you can’t be worried that it might not be cool to believe in something.

LOGAN: So, should we all be heading down to the park?

SAM: Yeah. But if you have a job, obviously, you have to go to your job, because that’s what’s important, and you have to be able to get money, especially if you have a family. But if you don’t have a job, or you’re kind of flexible like me because you’re a student, that’s why students always run these things. It’s not just because they’re young and idealistic; it’s because they’re able. They literally have the time.

So that’s why the model seems to be, you have some people who are always there, and you have special days that get called for mass protests and rallies which happen either after work hours or on weekends so that everyone else can come. And eventually you can have things like strikes, and people can walk out of work in order to show solidarity with something. And a strike is something that has real power to stop the ordinary operation of society. In terms of non-violent social change, a strike on the part of the union is one of the only proven things that can achieve powerful change. A general strike is the most powerful non-violent tool of social change that exists, but we can’t even have a general strike, because we don’t have a enough workers in unions and general strikes are illegal.

LOGAN: What does a general strike mean?

SAM: So typically, a strike happens if a union is negotiating with management about wages or benefits or whatever they are negotiating about, they have the option to strike in support of their position. And management can hire non-union workers to try to take their place in the meantime, but if people are not willing to break the strike by getting hired, then management can be forced to capitulate to the strike. There are industry-wide strikes, which is if one airline pilot union is negotiating with their airline then the rest of the airline pilots can go on strike with them, because it helps all the airline pilots for one airline’s pilots to get paid more. A general strike is across industries. So if the railway workers were striking 100 years ago, the dock workers would go strike, too, even though they had nothing to do with the railways. So when the labor movement was at its strongest, something like that could just stop the economy, and management would be much more likely to do what the unions wanted. And the reason organized labor is so weak now is because conscious policies were put in place that made it impossible to have general strikes and made it harder for individual workers at different workplaces to join unions. So the more that stuff like this is able to happen, it’s possible that it could help or contribute to the growth of organized labor, which could contribute to the increase of more tactics for putting extreme pressure on quote unquote, the one percent, or whatever.

LOGAN: How do you think this might play out?

SAM: That’s a really good question. Anything, literally anything, anything can happen. There’s a chance that some moderate reforms might get passed, but right now Congress seems to be completely unable or unwilling to do anything, literally anything. It is a non-functioning institution, practically. And so it’s difficult to imagine change along those lines until after the next election, maybe.

But once something seizes the public imagination, stuff can happen way faster than you would expect or completely unanticipated things can change everybody’s perception of the situation. So I think what it has the functionality to be is a catalyst for changes we can’t even imagine right now. And that’s another reason that I’m glad that they aren’t simply making a list of demands for the people in power, like hey, do this for us. Because then everything would just dissolve into a debate of whether or not those particular things should happen. And what it is instead of that is a very broad and wide-ranging conversation about the organization of our society, what our priorities are, how we operate in very deep and fundamental ways. And that is basically an increase of democratization, and I think the more democratic with a small “d” our public discourse gets, the more unpredictable what’s going to happen is, and I think that’s good.



Logan Sachon is thinking about it.

Photograph from Occupy Wall Street by K. Kendall.

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]]> Things I don’t understand about activism, the short list:
• Sleeping in a park if you have an actual bed somewhere to sleep in;
• Willingly being in a place where you increase your risk of being arrested/maced;
• Being uncomfortable in a crowd when you can just, you know, read coverage on blogs;
• How crowds of people with signs change anything, ever.

Amount I’m willing to concede ignorance on matters of activism:
• Oh, a lot;
• I’d go so far as to say "total."

What I decided to do about it:
• Not take an eight-hour bus ride to New York City, that’s what;
• Get someone to explain it to me.

So I called up Sam Brody. He is a guy I went to college with, and the only person in my life who has done activist-type things on the regular. I know this because: he used to talk about these things (I obviously paid so much attention); he used to (and perhaps still does) wear t-shirts with political messages sharpied on them; and one time in 2002, Cary Tennis profiled him for Salon as a young anti-war activist. Sam is currently a PhD. student at the University of Chicago. He is a native New Yorker and was in Zucotti Park last Sunday. We had this conversation.

LOGAN SACHON: So, Sam. I have been watching the coverage for the past couple weeks —

SAM BRODY: Where have you been watching coverage?

LOGAN: I guess by watching, I don’t mean “watching.” I’ve been reading it. Mostly blogs. And what I’ve found is equal parts people saying, “This is awesome,” and people saying, “This is so unorganized, what is the point.” So what I’m interested in is: who is right? And more than that: how do protests work and what is the point of them?

SAM: Your general question — what is the purpose of street-based activism — is a good one.

The most recent thing that most people in our generation got excited about was the Obama campaign, from a liberal perspective. And that was a really clear goal: to elect one dude.

The most idealistic people maybe thought that electing this one dude would take care of a whole bunch of other things they cared about. And there were probably a lot of other people who weren’t that idealistic, but thought, well, electing this one dude won’t mean we won’t have to do all this other work, but it will be one good thing. There were a lot of people who got involved for the first time in politics on that campaign, and I think there were a lot of other folks who had been involved in activism for a long time who were kind of worried that if those people thought that the campaign didn’t deliver everything they wanted, they would just get kind of disillusioned with politics as a whole, and this kind of “plague on both their houses,” apathetic attitude that would emerge from that. That if the resulting Obama administration didn’t fix everything, you’d have people think, not in a political way, but in an attitudinal, existential way, that there’s no way to affect anything. And that you shouldn’t even bother trying.

And I think for a lot of people, that happened. They adopted this sort of very basic stance toward the world of, whoever runs things runs things, and it’s not me, and things are just going to keep being shitty, because some other people who have a lot of power and money are going to be the ones who decide what happens, basically.

I think there were a lot of folks who had been involved in activism for a long time who were kind of worried that if people thought that the campaign didn’t deliver everything they wanted, that if the resulting Obama administration didn’t fix everything, you’d have people think, not in a political way, but in an attitudinal, existential way, that there’s no way to affect anything. And that you shouldn’t even bother trying. And I think for a lot of people, that happened.
LOGAN: Unfortunately, I think I might be the poster child for this.

SAM: And so as a way of concluding a really long rambling answer to this question of “what is the point of street-based activism,” I think one of the main purposes in this case, and really the initial purpose, is to make a space, to open up a space, where people go and talk to other people about what they want to have happen.

Because maybe in your daily life you go to work, if you’re lucky enough to have a job, or maybe you go to a bar or some cultural event with your friends in the evening, and maybe politics is one thing that comes up at that or maybe it doesn’t. And you might have a stray thought here or there throughout the day about something if you happen to read the news, but when there’s a huge group of people that are all assembled in one place to talk about how something is seriously wrong and they want to do something about it, when you go there, that’s what you talk about. And you talk to a lot of different people and you hear a lot of different things, and if you start participating, it gives you sense of having power. And the more people realize that they’ve been missing that, the more people join up and ideally it has a snowball effect that does result in some change taking place, and ideally that’s the result of increased democratic involvement.

LOGAN: So it’s not necessarily the idea that media coverage of this event will make anyone that has any power change anything, but that it will inspire us to change stuff ourselves?

SAM: I mean, partially. Anything like this always has 500 million different goals and other things that it’s going to accomplish without even intending to accomplish them. So for example, one thing that I thought when I saw a reporter ask the President a question about Occupy Wall Street, and he used it as a chance to try to, he tried to say he agreed with the protesters, even though the reporter had framed the question as like, clearly they think you haven’t done enough and are part of the problem, like, just the fact that that interchange took place! Before Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party were the loud people who were in the street doing things and making noise, which set a tone so that when reporters asked the President a question, they would say, “It seems like a lot of people out there think that government is too big and is spending a lot of money and that taxes are too high, what are you going to do about that?” Right? And now the question was from the opposite direction. And so simply having that be a thing that happens is important. And that didn’t even have anything to do with specific demands, which was the criticism that you hear. Like do they want Congress to reinstate Glass-Steagall? Do they want a transaction tax on financial transactions? And people can keep kind of asking these questions, and of course, that’s good, that since there’s a giant protest, they’re asking those questions about those policies and whether they are good ideas. So there are all kinds of possible outcomes.

The unions might actually have a political campaign in the works demanding something like a tax on financial transactions. If they did, they could use the protest to try to get that passed as legislation. But since it’s still inherently leaderless and not being run by the Democratic Party and not being run by any kind of union or activist group, it’s not going to go away just because some legislation gets passed either, which I think is another advantage of it. Because sometimes you have protests about single issues, like, we want to abolish the death penalty in this state, and if you win, well, then that’s great and you go home. But this is about something that is a much deeper problem and is very very complicated and has roots in all these different sectors of our political life, so it’s unlikely that it’s just going to go away anytime soon, and I think that’s really good.

LOGAN: So you were there for a day last week?

SAM: Yes, I went down this Sunday, actually.

LOGAN: My impression of you is that you grew up with activism, is that right?

SAM: I went to high school in New York City, which, you know, not too many conservatives at my school. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to do activist stuff. You can just have a bunch of liberals around who are just complaining about things. But it was the Giuliani years, and when they shot Amadou Diallo, he became a kind of representative figure. There was a lot of police brutality and instances of unarmed people getting killed by police back then, and there was a lot of high school presence at protests around that issue. And at the beginning of the year I was in Madison when they were occupying the Capitol in Madison, so I can compare Occupy Wall Street to that.

LOGAN: I’ve actually never been to a protest at all.

SAM: Oh really? [I think it would not be exaggerating to say that he said this with some shock.] Is it because you think they’re corny or you don’t get the point?

LOGAN: I think I’ve always felt like, that that is some people’s thing and I’m more subtle, or something. Like, some people protest, and I don’t do that.

SAM: When you say more subtle, is that like going to a protest makes you declare a stance that is possibly too absolute and maybe doesn’t accept nuances and stuff?

LOGAN: Not necessarily. I guess I mean, it’s more my style to have discussions with a few people rather than making a sign and going out there. I’ve just never done it. And part of it also is that I’ve always cared about what people think of me. And I’ve always felt, well, you really have to know your stuff to hit the streets. Like, yes. I’m decidedly pro-choice. But if you put a microphone in my face, I’m probably not going to be able to tell you why. You’ve got to give me a pen and paper and some time for me to craft that argument.

The March on Washington was just one event in a multi-decade-long movement of which everyone who was present had some experience organizing on the ground back wherever they came from, on a day-to-day basis, everyday. They didn’t all just say, "Let’s all have the March on Washington where Martin Luther King will say, I have a dream, and then black people will be equal!"
SAM: One thing that’s different about Occupy Wall Street, is that, oftentimes, a typical protest, if there’s such a thing, takes the form of a march or a rally. So the group organization calls the protest for a certain time and place on a particular day, and if it’s a march, they tell you where they start and where you end up and they get a permit from the police and they walk and carry their signs from where they start to where they end up. And if a lot of people show up it’ll get media attention (or if it’s the Tea Party, ten of them will show up and it will get media attention), and the goal of it is to publicly manifest a particular view or dissatisfaction about something and have that enter into people’s conversations. If it’s a rally, the whole thing will take place in one place, and there will be a stage or platform that everybody looks at, and somebody will make speeches, and maybe someone will come in between and play some music and sing a song. And that’s a very typical format, and there have always been people who are dissatisfied with that, because it can leave you in the end with a certain sense of, what was that for? Although everyone knows really famous instances like, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. But the March on Washington was just one event in a multi-decade-long movement of which everyone who was present had some experience organizing on the ground back wherever they came from, on a day-to-day basis, everyday. They didn’t all just say, "Let’s all have the March on Washington where Martin Luther King will say, I have a dream, and then black people will be equal!" It was just one part. It was a manifestation of the power of something that was already happening.

What was different about this was that it wasn’t a march and it wasn’t a rally, although they are having those things associated with it, but it’s an occupation, which really does seem to just be about creating a space. A lot of people I know who went, before they had been reading all these stories about the bailouts or income inequality or how much many more times a CEO makes than an average worker in the U.S. compared to other industrial countries or other things that they’d be complaining about, they might say, “Where is the outrage? Why aren’t people in the streets yelling?” And then when people do go in the streets, they’re like, “What are they doing there? What do they think is going to happen?”

But for some people, just seeing it there, it’s like, there it is, I can go there, and people there will share something with me, even if I don’t know what it is or I can’t put my finger on it. The longer the occupation lasts, the more people from different backgrounds and different perspectives will be able to come and share those views with the people there. The basically hardcore group who are actually occupying becomes this opening for all these other people, people who have jobs, people who can’t live in the street, people who are interested in pursuing political channels for their problems to go and interface and connect with the broad possible spectrum of people that are interested in achieving the same kinds of things that they are.

LOGAN: So when you were there, did it feel good?

It’s a public space literally being taken over for chaotic public discussion, so you can’t say, only people that can pass through all my filters of aesthetic and political criteria can be there.
SAM: Well, I am a hyper-critical personality, so in that way I’m sort of like a typical media person. When I go down there, my eyes are drawn to the most extreme crackpot or hippie looking people. So there was some dude standing there with a sign, and he was like “NAZI BANKERS,” and I was like, oh, g-d. And his sign was the biggest, it was bigger than his entire body and he was holding it with his arms stretched out. And you knew that guy was going to be in every picture, and some people had gone up and talked to him and he was apparently impervious to people saying, like, “Dude, Nazi comparisons make you lose.” But in the past, it would have been like, I don’t want to stand in any group of people that that guy is in, but you literally can’t control it. It’s a public space literally being taken over for chaotic public discussion, so you can’t say, only people that can pass through all my filters of aesthetic and political criteria can be there.

So once you get over that fear of being associated with people that don’t take baths or people that say Hitler all the time, you just sort of find the people that you do need to be talking to.

LOGAN: So when you went to Madison, where did you sleep?

SAM: I only slept in the Capitol a couple of the nights, and the rest of the time I crashed with this guy Trevor who was generous enough to offer me a spot at his place. But almost everyone I met offered to let me crash at their place. The second I walked in there, everyone was like, oh wow, you came here from Chicago? Oh wow, thanks for coming, do you need somewhere to stay? So I had my pick of places to stay. But in the Capitol I just kind of slept on the floor in the hallway.

But the Wall Street one, too, they have a meal section, there’s a central table with all this food on it, and people are constantly coming and dropping off food, and that’s what I did. I dropped off food because I didn’t want to feel like I was just a protest tourist, so I brought and dropped off some food so at least I would feel like I had done something. But then behind the food table you have all these people washing dishes in tubs of soapy water and then to the right of that there is a table with all this medicine and first aid stuff on them. And there are people who put red tape on themselves, and they’re medics. Like, how do you know they’re medics? You don’t have the opportunity to interview these people and find out what makes them medics, but you just trust that if you get pepper sprayed or something, they will know what they’re doing. And then there’s a really long thing that’s like a People’s Library, and it was just a bunch of books. Take one! Bring one! So there’s all these things that just kind of spring up, and no one tells anyone that they have to do these things, they just kind of know and do it. And that energy is what makes it feel like an alternate place. People are in charge of their own shit here. And that greatly contributes to the sense of empowerment.

LOGAN: Was it hard for you to leave? Do you find yourself wishing you were there?

SAM: My friend Tasha had that feeling. She says she felt like everyday when she left there she was going to a worse place, that she was going to a mean place where people were not open and not understanding and judgmental. And so she’s actually been going back everyday. And I kind of wish I was there, but I’m in Chicago doing what I’m doing. But now they’ve started one in Chicago, so I’m probably going to go down there one day this week and see what’s going on.

LOGAN: Have you looked at the we are the 99 percent Tumblr?

SAM: Yeah, it’s depressing isn’t it?

LOGAN: It’s totally depressing. It gives me chest pains.

SAM: I know some people who are like, I don’t know what the people on Wall Street are about, but that Tumblr is killer. And well, that is what it’s about. I guess, nobody really has a concrete notion of how any particular action could address all of those people’s problems. So, everyone understands someone's individual story of hardship and suffering, but to connect that up to the systematic reasons that are the same reasons that caused someone else’s story of hardship and suffering is more difficult.

But a lot of people are perfectly capable of hearing those stories and blaming them on something completely different. Like people with conservative politics, for example, might read that blog and think, this is because the government spends too much money and doesn’t allow job creators to create jobs and that’s why these people have no jobs. And I think that’s ridiculous and stupid, but you don’t have to be irrational to believe that. I think it’s good that there is a loud and visible presence that doesn’t think that’s the explanation, because when it was only the Tea Party, I think we were in real trouble.

LOGAN: Yes, and I feel that most of my life, at least the part when I’ve been aware of politics, it’s been very much that the vocal conservatives are out there making a fuss, and the liberals are at home, watching the Daily Show and rolling their eyes.

You have to be really sincere and really zealous, and not basically complacent or comfortable, to think that going and setting up camp in some park near Wall Street is going to affect what anyone thinks about anything.
SAM: I think that there’s also, a certain cultural pessimism or cynicism even that goes with the cultural cachet that irony has among a certain class of liberal people, and I say that because it’s certainly not universal to all races and classes of liberal people, but there’s a certain attitude among the people that I know, that, when you talk about the sixties and you talk about hippies and stuff, you sort of laugh, because they were so earnest and they just talked about loving everybody, and seriously? Were they kidding or what. And I think at a certain point, that attitude becomes debilitating. You can express an ironic or critical comment that you think is in line with what other people you’re talking to are saying, but if you say something that is super sincere and also not something that is immediately obvious, you expect some kind of backlash. The sincerity of people who really believe that they can change things is just like, too much. Because like everyone who knows anything knows that you can’t really. And that’s part of the reason that movements like Occupy Wall Street get started by anarchists, and not by smart well-educated liberals who come out of college and go into non-profit organizing. I mean, you have to be really sincere and really zealous, and not basically complacent or comfortable, to think that going and setting up camp in some park near Wall Street is going to affect what anyone thinks about anything. And you can’t be worried that it might not be cool to believe in something.

LOGAN: So, should we all be heading down to the park?

SAM: Yeah. But if you have a job, obviously, you have to go to your job, because that’s what’s important, and you have to be able to get money, especially if you have a family. But if you don’t have a job, or you’re kind of flexible like me because you’re a student, that’s why students always run these things. It’s not just because they’re young and idealistic; it’s because they’re able. They literally have the time.

So that’s why the model seems to be, you have some people who are always there, and you have special days that get called for mass protests and rallies which happen either after work hours or on weekends so that everyone else can come. And eventually you can have things like strikes, and people can walk out of work in order to show solidarity with something. And a strike is something that has real power to stop the ordinary operation of society. In terms of non-violent social change, a strike on the part of the union is one of the only proven things that can achieve powerful change. A general strike is the most powerful non-violent tool of social change that exists, but we can’t even have a general strike, because we don’t have a enough workers in unions and general strikes are illegal.

LOGAN: What does a general strike mean?

SAM: So typically, a strike happens if a union is negotiating with management about wages or benefits or whatever they are negotiating about, they have the option to strike in support of their position. And management can hire non-union workers to try to take their place in the meantime, but if people are not willing to break the strike by getting hired, then management can be forced to capitulate to the strike. There are industry-wide strikes, which is if one airline pilot union is negotiating with their airline then the rest of the airline pilots can go on strike with them, because it helps all the airline pilots for one airline’s pilots to get paid more. A general strike is across industries. So if the railway workers were striking 100 years ago, the dock workers would go strike, too, even though they had nothing to do with the railways. So when the labor movement was at its strongest, something like that could just stop the economy, and management would be much more likely to do what the unions wanted. And the reason organized labor is so weak now is because conscious policies were put in place that made it impossible to have general strikes and made it harder for individual workers at different workplaces to join unions. So the more that stuff like this is able to happen, it’s possible that it could help or contribute to the growth of organized labor, which could contribute to the increase of more tactics for putting extreme pressure on quote unquote, the one percent, or whatever.

LOGAN: How do you think this might play out?

SAM: That’s a really good question. Anything, literally anything, anything can happen. There’s a chance that some moderate reforms might get passed, but right now Congress seems to be completely unable or unwilling to do anything, literally anything. It is a non-functioning institution, practically. And so it’s difficult to imagine change along those lines until after the next election, maybe.

But once something seizes the public imagination, stuff can happen way faster than you would expect or completely unanticipated things can change everybody’s perception of the situation. So I think what it has the functionality to be is a catalyst for changes we can’t even imagine right now. And that’s another reason that I’m glad that they aren’t simply making a list of demands for the people in power, like hey, do this for us. Because then everything would just dissolve into a debate of whether or not those particular things should happen. And what it is instead of that is a very broad and wide-ranging conversation about the organization of our society, what our priorities are, how we operate in very deep and fundamental ways. And that is basically an increase of democratization, and I think the more democratic with a small “d” our public discourse gets, the more unpredictable what’s going to happen is, and I think that’s good.



Logan Sachon is thinking about it.

Photograph from Occupy Wall Street by K. Kendall.

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2011/10/ask-an-activist-why-should-we-demonstrate/feed 40 How They Got There: A Conversation With Artist Duke Riley http://www.theawl.com/2011/10/how-they-got-there-a-conversation-with-artist-duke-riley http://www.theawl.com/2011/10/how-they-got-there-a-conversation-with-artist-duke-riley#comments Fri, 07 Oct 2011 13:00:26 +0000 Noah Davis http://www.theawl.com/2011/10/how-they-got-there-a-conversation-with-artist-duke-riley Duke Riley postponed our first interview because he was freight-train hopping across the country. The Rhode Island School of Design- and Pratt-trained artist needed to be in San Francisco for meetings so he and a friend worked their way west. They made it, eventually.

Jumping on trains is usual behavior for someone who lives a highly unusual life. Riley moved to Brooklyn in 1997 and meandered his way into the city's art world by doing his own thing. He threw parties in abandoned buildings on the Brooklyn waterfront, made art, and ended up owning a tattoo parlor, essentially by accident. Jerry Saltz credited the 38-year-old as one of the people "righting the ship that is the New York art world." Riley continues to tattoo, although not as much as he'd like due to his growing commitments in the more traditional art world. There's never enough time to create.

Half-finished drawings done on curling parchment paper cover the walls of the paint-splattered living room in the Red Hook apartment where he's lived for 14 years. Riley—arms lined with tattoos and eyes lined from a lack of sleep—reclined on one of the room's two mismatched heavy metal chairs and chatted about his freeform life.

When you were a student at RISD and you were looking down the career path is this a place you thought you would end up?

I studied painting, so ultimately I wanted to be an artist. I worked as a tattoo artist, and it was something that I had always had an interest in. It was something I enjoyed, even when I was younger, as was painting and art. Whether or not I thought it was something I thought I was actually going to stick with, I'm not really sure. As much as making art was something that I always thought I was going to do, I don't really think I believed it was possible.

In a financial sense?

Yeah. Or maybe it was self-confidence, too. I felt like there were plenty of people who I was studying with who seemed extremely confident that they were going to move to New York and start having a career as an artist. I never even thought that was possible.

Tattooing, while certainly artistic, is more financially viable than "I'm going to move to New York and be an artist." Did that play into your thinking?

Definitely. When I got out of school I didn't fully grasp how you sold art and made a living. I was thinking that tattooing and various other illegal enterprises I was involved in at the time were probably more realistic.

It's funny that the illegal enterprises were the stuff you thought you could get paid for. How did that change? Was there a moment where you thought you could make it as an "artist"? Or was it more of a gradual progression?

After I got out of school, there was a point in time where I stopped tattooing. When I moved to New York, I was trying out various different occupations that might be slightly art-related just to be involved in making stuff. I was very intimidated by the whole art world. I didn't even like to go into galleries because I felt like I didn't belong. It was a slow transition.

You're a bit of an art outsider. Is there a feeling that you were doing what you wanted to do and then people found you?

I think honestly, the easiest thing to say would be that I fell accidentally back into tattooing. All of a sudden, I was making pretty decent money doing that. I could support myself. I don't really own anything. I don't particularly think that's noble. It's more of a personal flaw. When I have free time, the idea of going to a store to buy basic shit and stand in line on a weekend, I really can't be bothered. So when I wasn't tattooing, I was putting money towards these different art projects I was obsessing about. I wasn't thinking about doing them as a way to make money, or even that making money with them was possible. It was just something that I felt like I had to do. When I think about the different stuff that I do, a lot of it is some kind of anger management. I have a theory behind the work—the concepts and what it stands for—but there's some sort of internal thing that drives me to do stuff.

Tell me a little about how you got back into tattooing.

When I moved to New York, I decided I was going to stop tattooing. I moved down here [to Red Hook] and I had a bunch of various jobs. I wanted to be one of those guys who paints the murals on the side of Houston Street. I worked a lot of crappy jobs for a long time. It was around the period when all the Internet stuff was taking off. It seemed like a lot of these people I had gone to school with were getting these crazy jobs where they were making tons of money to do nothing. I was working these bullshit jobs for like $6 an hour and working with really hazardous chemicals.

I was doing some woodworking stuff with a guy, and he had a space rented in Greenpoint. We worked out a deal with the landlord where we were going to take the empty building, renovate it and make this affordable space for artists. It was an idealist plan that didn't really work out. We had aspirations to form this guild where people could get health insurance and eventually buy their space. It had all kinds of problems. I had a problem with one of the tenants who was renting space. I got attacked by this guy in the building, and in the process of defending myself, the guy lost an ear. I ended up getting arrested and thrown in jail. I had to get bail money. What I didn't realize was that when you remove a body part in New York, it's an attempted murder charge. Suddenly, I was facing these huge charges for this thing that I had done. There were witnesses that saw it was self-defense, that this guy had just gone apeshit or whatever, but all of a sudden I was in this situation where I was in deep shit and really needed money bad.

I hadn't tattooed in years at that point. My friend T-bone was in a band with this other guy, Mad Dog. [Laughs, very genuinely] He was working at this tattoo shop with these Korean gangster guys. Mad Dog wanted to help me out, so he invited me to start tattooing there. I didn't even realize tattooing was legal in New York, but it had just become so. I was working anywhere from 12 to 16 hours a day, tattooing nonstop, six or seven days a week. It was pretty insane. I worked there for a while, and I made enough money to pay off my lawyer and that thing eventually resolved itself.

How did you end up owning a tattoo shop?

I started working at another place, and the guy who owned it got really sick. He had to leave to deal with his health issue. He walked out the door one day and never came back. The landlord came around and was looking for the rent, so I just started paying the rent on this business that nobody seemed to know who owned. Eventually, I ended up owning a tattoo shop, which really wasn't something I intended to do either.

I moved the shop back out to Brooklyn, and it's in the same building where I originally was doing the failed collective thing. I guess the restraining orders were over. [Laughs, again genuinely] I still had access to the space. I continued tattooing. I was also teaching a little bit in domestic-violence shelters.

Was that Oyster Arts [a program that organized arts education in domestic-violence shelters]?

Yeah. I was mainly doing a lot of drawing and mosaics. At that point in time there was a lot of abandoned space along the Brooklyn waterfront. I spent a lot of time down there fishing and doing whatever else. I've always been drawn to those areas. I was having parties and throwing clambakes down in the abandoned buildings on the waterfront.

When was that?

The late '90s and the early 2000s. It's not that I didn't think about them as art. It's more that I didn't think about them as art that other people in the art world cared about. I wasn't about to go to a gallery and be like, "Hey, guess what? I had a big crazy party in an abandoned building. We cooked fish and this and that and the other thing." I felt a strong drive to keep making these things happened, but I didn't think it would be anything that anyone else would be particularly interested in.

Around that same time, I was venturing out into the river and documenting different things with a video camera. I didn't know exactly what I was doing with that either; I just knew I had a strong compulsion to do it. I kept dumping money into these weird things.

Eventually, I felt like there were people around me who were taking credit for things that I had done. I started to recognize the value of what I was doing. There were other people who were trying to cash in on it. That, not the financial reason, was a motivating force to push myself forward. If I feel like somebody is trying to take advantage of me or if I witness something else or some wrong doing, it stimulates me and creates a motivating force to correct it.

Did you get involved in the politics of the art world?

I don't really know anything about that stuff at all. To be honest, I've always had a lot of frustration, anger and confusion about it. I don't have anything to complain about now, but that was not something I was any good at. My frustration with that stuff drove me to go back to graduate school. I really didn't know how to go about networking in the art world. And I still don't. I'm not good at it and I don't really have a desire to. I have a lot of friends who are artists, but I wouldn't say they make up the majority of the people I socialize with. I never know what's going on. I don't know how people have the time to do all that stuff—to go to openings and network—and still make anything. I feel like I'm pretty busy with the making part.

How much time to you spend making art every week?

It depends. I don't really feel like I'm ever not working, but a lot of the stuff that I do when I am working is pretty fun. I can't really complain. It really varies, but I'm pretty much always working on something.

Do you set quotas for yourself or does it just happen when it happens?

There are certain time schedules. You have to meet deadlines that you set for yourself.

If you could tell your 20-year-old self something, what would you tell him?

I don't know. I would definitely say that when you're in high school, people always say you thought you knew everything, and then you grow up. I look back and think, "Maybe I did actually know everything." I feel like my outlook on the world when I was a teenager, a lot of those things have come true.

Is there a place where you would like to get to in your career?

As far as what would satisfy me? [Long pause] I don't know. I don't really know that I have that much of a plan. I don't have a clear career plan that I would say, "I'm trying to get a show at this place." I constantly look at my life, think about how much time I have left, and try to figure out how I want to spend it. I deal with things that happen immediately in the future and then the thing that will happen way off in the distance. You look at how you're going to grow and develop into doing something that will hopefully have some meaning or impact.

I don't ever see myself stopping making art. It's not really something that you retire from, but that doesn't mean that I would limit myself from evolving into something entirely different if that was the course it took me in. It could potentially just change completely. Since I don't have a stopping and starting point between working and not working, I'm just living my life.

Do you even consider yourself an artist in the sense that "this is my job"? It kind of sounds like it's more that this is your life and you happen to make art as a big part of it.

I think that life is mainly about survival. [Laughs] That's a pretty obvious thing to say, but that's how I approach things. As you get older, things get a little bit easier in certain ways. You face different struggles. What it means to survive changes in terms of what you're struggling against. Some challenges rise up and other ones go away. The direction of your life can shift and that ultimately can shift what you're doing as an artist.

You seem to have a nice combination of thoughtfulness and spontaneity in your life and your art. It's almost like nothing you do is planned but everything is considered. Fair?

I don't know. I feel like I try to plan, but you can only plan so much. There's always risk in anything you do.

Sure, but I think the freight train is a good example. That's a planned thing, but it's also not. It's not like you bought a plane ticket to the West Coast.

Oh, absolutely. Riding a freight train is a lot more like sailing a boat. You try to prepare yourself as best you can, but you never really know exactly what is going to happen between point A and point B. Or whether you're even going to make it to point B.

Do you like that feeling of prepared but not planned?

In that instance, there's something that is very liberating about it, sure. It's a lot less stagnant. A lot of people need comfort and security to function at their most productive and capable. That's when I feel like I'm the least productive and functioning. I tend to shut down in those situations.

Are you still tattooing?

I still tattoo a little bit. It's not something I see myself ever stopping doing either. I like communicating with different people. I like the social aspect of it.

It seems like a badge of honor to have one of your tattoos. I was looking at pictures of an opening at a gallery for some of your work and there were a bunch of images of the people there proudly pulling up their shirts or whatever and displaying the tattoos you did.

Yeah, that's kind of cool. I don't have as much time to do it as I want to, and it gets hard because there is a lot of stuff I want to do that I can't. I like the immediacy of tattooing as well. Even in a monetary sense. I prefer to do things in cash. It's just a real simple transaction. You tattoo someone, and they hand you money. There are no meetings with people and galleries and museums and contracts and that kind of shit.

Who should I talk to next?

Robert Sullivan.



Noah Davis is frequently lost.

---

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]]> Duke Riley postponed our first interview because he was freight-train hopping across the country. The Rhode Island School of Design- and Pratt-trained artist needed to be in San Francisco for meetings so he and a friend worked their way west. They made it, eventually.

Jumping on trains is usual behavior for someone who lives a highly unusual life. Riley moved to Brooklyn in 1997 and meandered his way into the city's art world by doing his own thing. He threw parties in abandoned buildings on the Brooklyn waterfront, made art, and ended up owning a tattoo parlor, essentially by accident. Jerry Saltz credited the 38-year-old as one of the people "righting the ship that is the New York art world." Riley continues to tattoo, although not as much as he'd like due to his growing commitments in the more traditional art world. There's never enough time to create.

Half-finished drawings done on curling parchment paper cover the walls of the paint-splattered living room in the Red Hook apartment where he's lived for 14 years. Riley—arms lined with tattoos and eyes lined from a lack of sleep—reclined on one of the room's two mismatched heavy metal chairs and chatted about his freeform life.

When you were a student at RISD and you were looking down the career path is this a place you thought you would end up?

I studied painting, so ultimately I wanted to be an artist. I worked as a tattoo artist, and it was something that I had always had an interest in. It was something I enjoyed, even when I was younger, as was painting and art. Whether or not I thought it was something I thought I was actually going to stick with, I'm not really sure. As much as making art was something that I always thought I was going to do, I don't really think I believed it was possible.

In a financial sense?

Yeah. Or maybe it was self-confidence, too. I felt like there were plenty of people who I was studying with who seemed extremely confident that they were going to move to New York and start having a career as an artist. I never even thought that was possible.

Tattooing, while certainly artistic, is more financially viable than "I'm going to move to New York and be an artist." Did that play into your thinking?

Definitely. When I got out of school I didn't fully grasp how you sold art and made a living. I was thinking that tattooing and various other illegal enterprises I was involved in at the time were probably more realistic.

It's funny that the illegal enterprises were the stuff you thought you could get paid for. How did that change? Was there a moment where you thought you could make it as an "artist"? Or was it more of a gradual progression?

After I got out of school, there was a point in time where I stopped tattooing. When I moved to New York, I was trying out various different occupations that might be slightly art-related just to be involved in making stuff. I was very intimidated by the whole art world. I didn't even like to go into galleries because I felt like I didn't belong. It was a slow transition.

You're a bit of an art outsider. Is there a feeling that you were doing what you wanted to do and then people found you?

I think honestly, the easiest thing to say would be that I fell accidentally back into tattooing. All of a sudden, I was making pretty decent money doing that. I could support myself. I don't really own anything. I don't particularly think that's noble. It's more of a personal flaw. When I have free time, the idea of going to a store to buy basic shit and stand in line on a weekend, I really can't be bothered. So when I wasn't tattooing, I was putting money towards these different art projects I was obsessing about. I wasn't thinking about doing them as a way to make money, or even that making money with them was possible. It was just something that I felt like I had to do. When I think about the different stuff that I do, a lot of it is some kind of anger management. I have a theory behind the work—the concepts and what it stands for—but there's some sort of internal thing that drives me to do stuff.

Tell me a little about how you got back into tattooing.

When I moved to New York, I decided I was going to stop tattooing. I moved down here [to Red Hook] and I had a bunch of various jobs. I wanted to be one of those guys who paints the murals on the side of Houston Street. I worked a lot of crappy jobs for a long time. It was around the period when all the Internet stuff was taking off. It seemed like a lot of these people I had gone to school with were getting these crazy jobs where they were making tons of money to do nothing. I was working these bullshit jobs for like $6 an hour and working with really hazardous chemicals.

I was doing some woodworking stuff with a guy, and he had a space rented in Greenpoint. We worked out a deal with the landlord where we were going to take the empty building, renovate it and make this affordable space for artists. It was an idealist plan that didn't really work out. We had aspirations to form this guild where people could get health insurance and eventually buy their space. It had all kinds of problems. I had a problem with one of the tenants who was renting space. I got attacked by this guy in the building, and in the process of defending myself, the guy lost an ear. I ended up getting arrested and thrown in jail. I had to get bail money. What I didn't realize was that when you remove a body part in New York, it's an attempted murder charge. Suddenly, I was facing these huge charges for this thing that I had done. There were witnesses that saw it was self-defense, that this guy had just gone apeshit or whatever, but all of a sudden I was in this situation where I was in deep shit and really needed money bad.

I hadn't tattooed in years at that point. My friend T-bone was in a band with this other guy, Mad Dog. [Laughs, very genuinely] He was working at this tattoo shop with these Korean gangster guys. Mad Dog wanted to help me out, so he invited me to start tattooing there. I didn't even realize tattooing was legal in New York, but it had just become so. I was working anywhere from 12 to 16 hours a day, tattooing nonstop, six or seven days a week. It was pretty insane. I worked there for a while, and I made enough money to pay off my lawyer and that thing eventually resolved itself.

How did you end up owning a tattoo shop?

I started working at another place, and the guy who owned it got really sick. He had to leave to deal with his health issue. He walked out the door one day and never came back. The landlord came around and was looking for the rent, so I just started paying the rent on this business that nobody seemed to know who owned. Eventually, I ended up owning a tattoo shop, which really wasn't something I intended to do either.

I moved the shop back out to Brooklyn, and it's in the same building where I originally was doing the failed collective thing. I guess the restraining orders were over. [Laughs, again genuinely] I still had access to the space. I continued tattooing. I was also teaching a little bit in domestic-violence shelters.

Was that Oyster Arts [a program that organized arts education in domestic-violence shelters]?

Yeah. I was mainly doing a lot of drawing and mosaics. At that point in time there was a lot of abandoned space along the Brooklyn waterfront. I spent a lot of time down there fishing and doing whatever else. I've always been drawn to those areas. I was having parties and throwing clambakes down in the abandoned buildings on the waterfront.

When was that?

The late '90s and the early 2000s. It's not that I didn't think about them as art. It's more that I didn't think about them as art that other people in the art world cared about. I wasn't about to go to a gallery and be like, "Hey, guess what? I had a big crazy party in an abandoned building. We cooked fish and this and that and the other thing." I felt a strong drive to keep making these things happened, but I didn't think it would be anything that anyone else would be particularly interested in.

Around that same time, I was venturing out into the river and documenting different things with a video camera. I didn't know exactly what I was doing with that either; I just knew I had a strong compulsion to do it. I kept dumping money into these weird things.

Eventually, I felt like there were people around me who were taking credit for things that I had done. I started to recognize the value of what I was doing. There were other people who were trying to cash in on it. That, not the financial reason, was a motivating force to push myself forward. If I feel like somebody is trying to take advantage of me or if I witness something else or some wrong doing, it stimulates me and creates a motivating force to correct it.

Did you get involved in the politics of the art world?

I don't really know anything about that stuff at all. To be honest, I've always had a lot of frustration, anger and confusion about it. I don't have anything to complain about now, but that was not something I was any good at. My frustration with that stuff drove me to go back to graduate school. I really didn't know how to go about networking in the art world. And I still don't. I'm not good at it and I don't really have a desire to. I have a lot of friends who are artists, but I wouldn't say they make up the majority of the people I socialize with. I never know what's going on. I don't know how people have the time to do all that stuff—to go to openings and network—and still make anything. I feel like I'm pretty busy with the making part.

How much time to you spend making art every week?

It depends. I don't really feel like I'm ever not working, but a lot of the stuff that I do when I am working is pretty fun. I can't really complain. It really varies, but I'm pretty much always working on something.

Do you set quotas for yourself or does it just happen when it happens?

There are certain time schedules. You have to meet deadlines that you set for yourself.

If you could tell your 20-year-old self something, what would you tell him?

I don't know. I would definitely say that when you're in high school, people always say you thought you knew everything, and then you grow up. I look back and think, "Maybe I did actually know everything." I feel like my outlook on the world when I was a teenager, a lot of those things have come true.

Is there a place where you would like to get to in your career?

As far as what would satisfy me? [Long pause] I don't know. I don't really know that I have that much of a plan. I don't have a clear career plan that I would say, "I'm trying to get a show at this place." I constantly look at my life, think about how much time I have left, and try to figure out how I want to spend it. I deal with things that happen immediately in the future and then the thing that will happen way off in the distance. You look at how you're going to grow and develop into doing something that will hopefully have some meaning or impact.

I don't ever see myself stopping making art. It's not really something that you retire from, but that doesn't mean that I would limit myself from evolving into something entirely different if that was the course it took me in. It could potentially just change completely. Since I don't have a stopping and starting point between working and not working, I'm just living my life.

Do you even consider yourself an artist in the sense that "this is my job"? It kind of sounds like it's more that this is your life and you happen to make art as a big part of it.

I think that life is mainly about survival. [Laughs] That's a pretty obvious thing to say, but that's how I approach things. As you get older, things get a little bit easier in certain ways. You face different struggles. What it means to survive changes in terms of what you're struggling against. Some challenges rise up and other ones go away. The direction of your life can shift and that ultimately can shift what you're doing as an artist.

You seem to have a nice combination of thoughtfulness and spontaneity in your life and your art. It's almost like nothing you do is planned but everything is considered. Fair?

I don't know. I feel like I try to plan, but you can only plan so much. There's always risk in anything you do.

Sure, but I think the freight train is a good example. That's a planned thing, but it's also not. It's not like you bought a plane ticket to the West Coast.

Oh, absolutely. Riding a freight train is a lot more like sailing a boat. You try to prepare yourself as best you can, but you never really know exactly what is going to happen between point A and point B. Or whether you're even going to make it to point B.

Do you like that feeling of prepared but not planned?

In that instance, there's something that is very liberating about it, sure. It's a lot less stagnant. A lot of people need comfort and security to function at their most productive and capable. That's when I feel like I'm the least productive and functioning. I tend to shut down in those situations.

Are you still tattooing?

I still tattoo a little bit. It's not something I see myself ever stopping doing either. I like communicating with different people. I like the social aspect of it.

It seems like a badge of honor to have one of your tattoos. I was looking at pictures of an opening at a gallery for some of your work and there were a bunch of images of the people there proudly pulling up their shirts or whatever and displaying the tattoos you did.

Yeah, that's kind of cool. I don't have as much time to do it as I want to, and it gets hard because there is a lot of stuff I want to do that I can't. I like the immediacy of tattooing as well. Even in a monetary sense. I prefer to do things in cash. It's just a real simple transaction. You tattoo someone, and they hand you money. There are no meetings with people and galleries and museums and contracts and that kind of shit.

Who should I talk to next?

Robert Sullivan.



Noah Davis is frequently lost.

---

See more posts by Noah Davis

2 comments

]]> http://www.theawl.com/2011/10/how-they-got-there-a-conversation-with-artist-duke-riley/feed 2 A Q&A with the Advice Columnist Called 'Sugar' http://www.theawl.com/2011/07/a-qa-with-the-advice-columnist-called-sugar http://www.theawl.com/2011/07/a-qa-with-the-advice-columnist-called-sugar#comments Thu, 14 Jul 2011 12:10:18 +0000 Matt Davis http://www.theawl.com/2011/07/a-qa-with-the-advice-columnist-called-sugar Last year, an anonymous writer took over the advice column Dear Sugar at The Rumpus. Soon, she'll go public with her identity. Like many others, I've become obsessed with her advice. Her column isn't about etiquette. Sugar writes about being jealous of other writers. She advises people to leave secure relationships because they just know they're not happy. She tells about how she made it through the "thicket of shit" in her twenties. She writes about the absolute horror of grief. And it's not about sex, either. Sugar is soooo over the idea that sex is the only way to connect emotionally or be fulfilled.

And, it turns out, I know who Sugar is—she and I have actually known each other for a few years, but I didn't know I knew. Would the magic hold, now that I knew her identity? How much does her anonymity inform the power of her advice? And OH MY GOD, now she's planning to divulge her identity to EVERYBODY? Sugar agreed to talk about all this and more if I agreed to keep her identity a secret for just a little bit longer.

Matt Davis: So, who am I interviewing? [Sugar’s real name], or Sugar?

Sugar: Well, you asked to interview Sugar.

I guess we’ll get to that. I mean, that’s the fun part of it, right?

Right. Who are any of us? We’ll talk about that, too. Who is Sugar? I mean, Sugar is me. You know. I just won’t tell you my name, that’s all. I don’t tell you the city I live in, I don’t tell you my name, and I don’t tell you the place where I grew up. But I tell you pretty much everything else.

I knew you before I knew who you were. I was saying how good your writing was as Sugar, on Facebook. And then you contacted me to say ‘actually you know it’s me, right?’

I thought you knew it was me! Because basically, when I became Sugar I did tell [a mutual friend]. I just said ‘hey, I write this advice column,’ and I knew he told a few people and I just assumed you were one of them. So I thought you knew. So when I emailed you, ‘you know I’m Sugar, right,’ I was surprised.

I’ve been going through a divorce, and your work was very helpful in carrying on. So I was evangelizing the work. I didn’t know who you were, I was really positive about the work. And then to hear that I already knew you was quite disconcerting, actually.

I think that’s going to be disconcerting to a lot of people. Because one of the most difficult parts for me about being Sugar is when writers that I know, you know, friends, colleagues are writing about me or blogging about me and I don’t tell them. I told you because I sort of thought that you already know, and I don’t quite keep track of who knows, but it’s sort of disconcerting to me because I’ve got to keep this secret with people who I actually know. It’s going to be interesting, when I come out, how they’re going to respond. But also people guess. Anyone who’s really read my work, I get an email once a week or so saying ‘you have to be Sugar,’ and I’ll say, you know, ‘yeah, and please keep my secret.’ So, probably, a hundred people maybe.

Well there goes my business plan, because I was thinking I could just offer to tell people who you are for money. So when are you planning on coming out?

But Matt, that’s the thing, it’s all relative. Because let’s say a hundred people know. I’ve told certain people, Stephen Elliott’s told certain people, Isaac Fitzgerald, who’s the managing editor of the Rumpus, he says he tells certain women whom he wants to sleep with, you know, he says ‘if you’ll do me, I’ll tell you who Sugar is,’ so, and I think he’s only partially joking.

No I think he probably is, too. That’s amazing.

Most of the people, even if they knew, ‘[Sugar’s real name]’ doesn’t mean anything to them. So. I mean, I’m anonymous if you don’t know who I am, right?

I guess so. But your work has found an audience irrespective of the Sugar stuff, right?

Yes. It has, absolutely. But most people, they’re going to say, ‘I’ve never heard of her.’ But we sort of got into this before, I wanted to ask you first, how are you? And I’m sorry to hear that you’re going through a divorce.

That’s alright, that’s really kind of you. I’m fine. It’s not ideal, but at the same time, you do know, at some point, don’t you, when it should be over. There’s a voice somewhere.

I’ve written about that very thing!

I guess that’s one of the risks of coming out, is that people are going to start quoting your columns back to you, when you ask them how you are.

Yeah. Absolutely. Certainly. And you do know when it’s time to go. I mean, I’m turning that back to you now. I know how painful that is, whether you’re the one who knew you had to go or the other person was, it’s like hell. But there will be better days ahead, Matt.

Yeah, I hope so. I mean, the other thing that’s interesting about your column is, you are quite affirming, and a lot of the advice is about being brave and taking decisions that aren’t easy. And in fact when you are a recently separated 30-year-old man, often there are difficult decisions to be made that aren’t easy. I have made decisions, and in the moment of making those decisions I have thought of your column and thought, ‘Well, this is what Sugar would advise,’ so that’s good. It’s affirming and it’s really helpful. So it’s very nice that you asked how I am. The other thing, in your column, is that you express love for your readers.

There are so many parts of this experience that are weird to me. In my work as a literary writer, even though I think my work is inherently political, I never have a message in mind, my novel doesn’t have a message, but Sugar has a message.

Tell me what that message is.

I have never read a self help book in my life. I think self help is pretty much bullshit. I don’t pay attention to this…what’s that Oprah book, like The Secret, or some sort of crap like that?
Well it’s so many things that I feel like, what you could do, if you read all of my columns they do boil down to some pretty essential truths. You hit on one of them when you said ‘the hard choice is often the best one,’ that life is both more simple and more complex than most of us would like to believe, that there is something about the essential, that we all have an essential truth within us which if we really listen to that, which is totally different than that bumper sticker ‘follow your bliss,’ which is bullshit. You know? And that’s, I have never read a self help book in my life. I think self help is pretty much bullshit. I don’t pay attention to this…what’s that Oprah book, like The Secret, or some sort of crap like that? ‘If you only believe, then it will be true,’ I think that’s a really aggressively entitled bullshit sort of approach to life’s complicated questions. And at the same time there’s a piece of that in Sugar that says ultimately we’re all responsible for our lives, we’re all going to fail, we all have something inside to offer, and our work here is to find out and express it in whatever channels are appropriate. So it’s not Sugar’s message, but it’s really just my life, everything I think about how to live, which is in opposition to that self help crap.

Yeah, and oddly the self help crap is extremely commercial. And what you’re doing is so far, not. I mean, the writing you do under your own name is, I’m assuming, is giving you some money.

Yeah.

But the writing you’re doing as Sugar, you’ve not been paid for a column.

No.

What are they doing? What are they thinking? I mean, you must be generating three-quarters of their hits by this point.

It’s a little complicated because I work really hard on the column and takes a lot of time. I get so much email, I have thousands of emails from readers. But nobody gets paid at The Rumpus. That’s the thing. And I knew that going in. Stephen Elliott and Isaac Fitzgerald really do the work of the site and Isaac works there full time. They’ve also sold tons of mugs, the ‘write like a motherfucker’ mugs, and so I’m happy that Isaac gets to earn a living wage now. A couple of months ago Stephen and Isaac sent me a thousand dollars, because I think they felt guilty.

And you retain the rights to the column.

I do. So basically my answer to how I get paid is, I’ll get paid eventually if there's a Sugar book. And I’m happy to wait, I mean, I took it on as a lark. I thought it would be an interesting project for me as a writer. There was an old Sugar for the first 26 columns.

Who was it? You can’t tell me, can you?

I don’t know. Well, you’re a reporter, you know.

What was the plan for coming out? When were you going to come out?

I’m going to San Francisco, and I’m going to come out at one of The Monthly Rumpus events.

The Monthly Rumpus. What’s that?

The second Monday of every month they do a big thing at The Makeout Room. And the plan is my next book–one I've written under my own name–will be a Rumpus book club pick, and I’m going to announce that Sugar’s book is going to be the book club pick and Sugar’s going to have a coming out party in San Francisco.

There's also been talk of a book of your Sugar columns.

Yeah. There has been.

And when is that going to come out?

I’ll let you know as soon as I do.

You know, there’s a cricketer named Sachin Tendulkar, and apparently they’ve made, like, 50 copies of a book that’s written in his blood. And it was Saddam Hussein who had a book written in his blood. Saddam Hussein had people come and do blood transfusions and then write the Qu’ran in his blood. I think that you should consider some sort of limited edition copies of a Sugar book.

I think that’s a really interesting idea.

Well, only because, this guy described your work as ‘sacred’ to him. Now I’m not suggesting you should be blaspheming with the production of a Sugar book, but there is an aspect in which this means a lot to people, so… surely, maybe there’s a market… I’m not saying you should bleed for the book.

Well it’s fascinating because a Sugar book is not commercial in a traditional sense. My columns are really long…I have absolutely no limitations placed on me.

And they publish 15 minutes after you send it in, right?

Yeah.

And that’s unusual.

Yeah, nobody fucks with it. I have [Mr. Sugar] read it, and he says yeah, and it goes live. And I usually do it all night long on a Wednesday night, and I curse myself, and it’s tortuous, and I’m pissed, because I think, why didn’t I do this fucking earlier like I said I would do, and I’m always up on this deadline, and it’s really strange because it’s really contrary to everything I’ve ever said about the way one should write with time. But it’s odd, this thing about it not being commercially viable, because the audience is really responding. I mean, people have written to me as [Sugar’s real name] and said amazing things about my work, but as Sugar, the love is unbelievable. The way that people…people write to me and say ‘you changed my life, I thought of you when I was thinking about doing this, you helped me understand something that I’ve been going to therapy for years trying to understand,’ and what’s weird about that is that the gatekeepers have decided that Sugar’s not commercial. But the people have decided that it is.

It’s a revolution!

It is.

Are you jealous of yourself?

That’s a funny thing. I’ve almost joked before on Twitter that Sugar is jealous of her real person because Sugar has more followers, and all that stuff. I think that, I’m not…I think the Sugar fans will go buy the book I've written as myself. What’ll be interesting is beyond that.

Are you concerned that the readership may drop off after you identify yourself? Are you concerned about hostile reactions? Are you concerned about, Oh, well…I mean, I thought you were Judy Blume.

You thought I was Judy Blume? Sugar says she’s 42. I mean, everything I say about myself is true.

So are you concerned about a hostile reaction when you come out?

You’d think I’d get all these private, nasty emails, and I don’t. I’ve gotten maybe two in maybe a year. Sometimes people write to me because they disagree but they’re always very respectful. I’ve had two people that have just been mean but you’d think it was more than that. So: What am I scared of? I’m not scared that people will be hostile. A lot of people have written to me and said they’re scared of finding out who Sugar is because they fear that maybe some of what is happening will stop happening. [Mr. Sugar] was saying ‘I think you should stay anonymous forever, because if you come out, it’s going to ruin that mystique....’ I think that people feel that they can really be open with me because they don’t know who I am. And the longer that we’ve gone down this path, the less I think that’s important. And perhaps it’s because several readers, some of my biggest fans, people who are really really into Sugar, they have this relationship with Sugar, and they’re always emailing me and direct messaging me, and they’ve figured out who I am, and they all said, like, ‘I was afraid I wouldn’t love you as much and I still totally do, it doesn’t matter to me that I know who you are.’ And so I guess I’m going to go on that. But I won’t be Sugar indefinitely. I won't stop being Sugar as soon as I come out, but there will be probably be a time when I decide to stop. The way I write the column, I’m not just Dear Abby or something, I’m not just giving you etiquette advice, I’m really writing about core issues. And I think there’s a point at which I’ve spoken my piece.

You’re sort of…spent.

I’m spent. And also it’ll reach a point where it’s like, ‘see column X,’ you know? And it already feels like that, in some regard, and also the way I write the column, it’s me writing about my life. One thing that’s going to be cool about coming out is I’m going to be able to write about a bunch of stuff that I was scared about writing about before because I just thought it would be too identifying. You can Google any number of things from my columns and probably find myself.

It’s interesting that your husband was pushing you to keep the mystique, too.

What do you think?

I think you should keep the mystique.

You think I should?

Well, I’m a romantic. I don’t doubt that if you do come out, everyone’s going to love it, and I don’t doubt that it’s going to be wonderful for everyone involved. But there is a kind of romance in…like, I love Batman. Batman is my favorite, and Batman and Bruce Wayne couldn’t exist without each other. They couldn’t. But the mystique about Batman is kept because he doesn’t tell anyone who he is. And there’s a great scene, it was on Youtube the other day, where Batman and Bruce Wayne have to have a conversation with each other in front of the commissioner. And there’s this sort of façade, but there’s this sort of beauty to it. Before this interview I was going to say, ‘I should give you some advice.’ And that would be it: Keep it private. But then there’s also, could you still make money if it were private? If I were in your position, I would claim it, I would say, ‘That’s me. Hello. I’m here. And let’s go for it.’ And I think that’s something that a lot of authors are scared to do, to claim their work.

Well there’s also that other thing, actually being Sugar has been a real exercise in ego, and not getting to take credit for something that so many people love. I’ve been at parties and people are like, ‘you have to read this column,’ you know? And I’ll just be like, ‘yeah, okay,’ because you work your whole life for people to love what you write, and then they do, and you have to pretend it’s not you.

But isn’t that an incredible lesson to learn as a writer?

It’s a great lesson.

Whether or not you do come out. You get what you wanted, and it turns out that you can’t take it.

I can’t have it!

And there’s a real wisdom that comes in being able to say, ‘I want to be able to take credit for this.’

Yeah. And I could get paid. The publishers and people would know who I was, and they’d pay me. It is partly a money thing because if I don’t come out as Sugar, then those people don’t buy [Sugar’s real name]’s books. And that bugs me. Meanwhile my book is languishing, and if I just said, then they’d go buy that book.

It’s difficult as an author to be in a position where somebody says, ‘hey, do you want to sell, maybe, 100,000, 200,000 more copies of your novel?’

I want to do something really fun in San Francisco, jump out of a cake or something. I think it’ll be a good, fun, thing. But you still want me to stay anonymous. You want me to be Batman.
This is how I make my living, Matt. It’s hard. So part of coming out also feels like, people mostly want me to. Please tell us who you are. So it’ll be kind of fun to say here I am. And I want to do something really fun in San Francisco, jump out of a cake or something. I think it’ll be a good, fun, thing. But you still want me to stay anonymous. You want me to be Batman. It’s interesting that you use that comparison because so many people write about Sugar either as a superhero or a religious figure.

If I was Bruce Wayne, I’d tell everybody. I’d say, ‘listen mate, I’ve got a cave down there, and you know, some really great outfits.’

You’re fucking Batman!

In life, we all have to come to terms with the fact that we aren’t superheroes or religious figures. And then we have to own that, and then we have to be honest about who we are.

Many years ago I knew a woman who was the mistress of a man who was married to a famous advice columnist. They'd been having an affair for a couple decades by then and the advice columnist knew it was going on, but none of that was ever present in her columns. Never was there a sense of her life’s imperfections and contradictions. But what Sugar does is that Sugar would tell you if her husband had a kept woman for 20 years, so I think that the sense of this grandiose faith that people put in Sugar is not bound up in me saying ‘I know what you should do, and this is what morality demands.’ Instead it’s me saying let’s look at all of these things in this really intricate way, and they’re full of contradictions.

They are. It’s exciting to be on the cusp of this, right?

I’m not that funny in my writing, at all. I’m funny in my life, but in my writing I’m dark, and serious, and emotionally intense. And I thought that I was going to try to be funny in the Sugar column because the person before me was funny, and I thought it would just be a way for me to expand my range. And what ended up happening was I just expanded my range in a different way. And so it’s interesting to me as an artist, it’s the first time that I’ve used memoir, this kind of emotionally intense writing style, this thing that I do, in this other venue, which is the direct address…here’s what I think you should do. It’s a very different sort of address than the fictional address or even the memoir, which is just a very self-contained literary form.

Presumably you have a writing mentor somewhere. You mentioned your husband. Is there anyone else who critiques your work?

I studied with different people along the way. I didn’t get an MFA until I was a writer. Are you 30?

31.

I went to graduate school when I had just turned 30. And I had some good teachers, and I learned from people, but there isn’t one person. There are writers who I read very carefully and with great attention, and I learned from them more than anything. Mary Gaitskill, I read her for a decade, practically memorized her work, and then I worked with her in person for a short time and I had all these fantasies about how intense our relationship would be because I just got her work so deeply, and she was a fine person and a fine human being, but I don’t feel that I learned from Mary the person. It was what it was, but it wasn’t revelatory.

In the way that her writing was?

Once you know how to write, how to make a sentence or a paragraph, and those are very elemental things, they seem very simple but most people don’t know how to do those things, you can do anything.
Her writing was revelatory to me. I would study her paragraphs and study her sentences and study her stories. Alice Munro. William Faulkner. William Maxwell. What I got from my real life mentors is something different—the reassurance that a writer needs to trust her own instincts at a certain level. Once you know how to write, how to make a sentence or a paragraph, and those are very elemental things, they seem very simple but most people don’t know how to do those things, you can do anything. And there’s all this stuff with writing that’s outside of writing itself. A lot of it is just believing in yourself, just doing it. And in the Sugar column I’m always encouraging this sort of risk-taking, both emotionally and also financially. I actually have, in my life, and I have the debt to prove it, and the fucked-up trail of bad shit to prove it, I always put my writing first. I always quit the job or whatever.

But presumably you’re going to get out of this debt soon, aren’t you?

Yeah. But it’s tough. I’m still paying off my bachelor’s degree from a public university.

Are there any questions, perhaps, that you’ve not answered, that are sitting there that perhaps you want to answer?

Well, there’s a couple. I have two letters from women who found that they were pregnant and both women wanted to have abortions, but were married to men who they know would try to prevent them from having the abortion, and asking me if it was okay that they went ahead and had the abortion and didn’t tell their husbands. And those are, those are the only…those are the only exceptions that I’ve ever emailed someone privately back and told her what I thought, and didn’t publish it.

Why didn’t you publish it?

I just felt like what I had to say was not really a column. And some of these questions, it’s not just helping people but it’s also building a literary experience around it, and so sometimes I feel like, you know, it doesn’t lend itself to that kind of full-blown column. But it’s also, I guess because my answers to them, my private emails to them were so indecisive. I basically thought along with them and said, yeah, I think this completely sucks, and it could destroy your relationship if you lie to your husband and just go have an abortion without ever telling him. That could be a really bad seed. But at the same time, one can’t have a baby that one doesn’t want to have, right?

And abortion is difficult in America.

I have tons of questions from young people, like 21-year-old kids, who basically they’ve been given everything and have always been told that they’re so great and so talented, and they don’t know what the hell to do with themselves, they have no passions whatsoever, they have no interests, and they’re asking me what they should do. I don’t know. I think they should quit college, and cut themselves off financially from their parents and go work at McDonald’s, actually.

Yeah, you said a few times that you don’t really believe in inherited wealth, that you don’t really believe in that kind of support. And actually that brings me to another question, which maybe you can answer in the same sentence, but do black people write to you, much? Because it struck me that a lot of these issues you just mentioned are the issues faced by white college kids, right?

Yeah, yeah.

And, living in New Orleans, there are plenty of very bright young black people who are not at college for one reason or another, who I think get to figure out what they’re passionate about without some of this, so I was just curious.

Well I can’t tell if black people ask me for advice.

You mean they don’t write in the letter, ‘p.s. I’m black?’

A couple of them do. I do have a couple of letters. But I have a pretty sizeable African-American fanbase, and I just know that based on Twitter and Facebook, you can see the picture of the person, and I just want to clarify, and I know… some of the criticism… that column We Are All Savages Inside about writerly jealousy, and there’s that paragraph where I say ‘I think part of your problem is you’re so entitled,’ and people said I’m so mean, but I don’t think I’d say I don’t believe in inherited wealth. People who grow up with parents who have money are as blameless as the people who grow up with parents who didn’t have money. And certainly as a parent I’m going to give my kids everything I can. But I will tell you that one of the major dilemmas of my life, both [Mr. Sugar] and I grew up working class, weren’t given anything, and both made our way in the world. And as much as I wanted to be the kid who got to go to French immersion camp between my freshman and sophomore year or whatever, but because I wasn’t that kid, I actually think that helped me more than these wonderful educational opportunities that I missed because I was poor. And so that’s the complexity. I don’t mean to condemn people who have access to resources. But I do mean to very seriously say that maybe paying your own electricity bill is the path—is the path out of whatever conundrum you’re in. Maybe just being self-sufficient, that’s the answer.



Matt Davis’s website is matthewcharlesdavis.com.

This conversation took place by Skype and has been condensed.

Photo by Uwe Hermann.

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]]> Last year, an anonymous writer took over the advice column Dear Sugar at The Rumpus. Soon, she'll go public with her identity. Like many others, I've become obsessed with her advice. Her column isn't about etiquette. Sugar writes about being jealous of other writers. She advises people to leave secure relationships because they just know they're not happy. She tells about how she made it through the "thicket of shit" in her twenties. She writes about the absolute horror of grief. And it's not about sex, either. Sugar is soooo over the idea that sex is the only way to connect emotionally or be fulfilled.

And, it turns out, I know who Sugar is—she and I have actually known each other for a few years, but I didn't know I knew. Would the magic hold, now that I knew her identity? How much does her anonymity inform the power of her advice? And OH MY GOD, now she's planning to divulge her identity to EVERYBODY? Sugar agreed to talk about all this and more if I agreed to keep her identity a secret for just a little bit longer.

Matt Davis: So, who am I interviewing? [Sugar’s real name], or Sugar?

Sugar: Well, you asked to interview Sugar.

I guess we’ll get to that. I mean, that’s the fun part of it, right?

Right. Who are any of us? We’ll talk about that, too. Who is Sugar? I mean, Sugar is me. You know. I just won’t tell you my name, that’s all. I don’t tell you the city I live in, I don’t tell you my name, and I don’t tell you the place where I grew up. But I tell you pretty much everything else.

I knew you before I knew who you were. I was saying how good your writing was as Sugar, on Facebook. And then you contacted me to say ‘actually you know it’s me, right?’

I thought you knew it was me! Because basically, when I became Sugar I did tell [a mutual friend]. I just said ‘hey, I write this advice column,’ and I knew he told a few people and I just assumed you were one of them. So I thought you knew. So when I emailed you, ‘you know I’m Sugar, right,’ I was surprised.

I’ve been going through a divorce, and your work was very helpful in carrying on. So I was evangelizing the work. I didn’t know who you were, I was really positive about the work. And then to hear that I already knew you was quite disconcerting, actually.

I think that’s going to be disconcerting to a lot of people. Because one of the most difficult parts for me about being Sugar is when writers that I know, you know, friends, colleagues are writing about me or blogging about me and I don’t tell them. I told you because I sort of thought that you already know, and I don’t quite keep track of who knows, but it’s sort of disconcerting to me because I’ve got to keep this secret with people who I actually know. It’s going to be interesting, when I come out, how they’re going to respond. But also people guess. Anyone who’s really read my work, I get an email once a week or so saying ‘you have to be Sugar,’ and I’ll say, you know, ‘yeah, and please keep my secret.’ So, probably, a hundred people maybe.

Well there goes my business plan, because I was thinking I could just offer to tell people who you are for money. So when are you planning on coming out?

But Matt, that’s the thing, it’s all relative. Because let’s say a hundred people know. I’ve told certain people, Stephen Elliott’s told certain people, Isaac Fitzgerald, who’s the managing editor of the Rumpus, he says he tells certain women whom he wants to sleep with, you know, he says ‘if you’ll do me, I’ll tell you who Sugar is,’ so, and I think he’s only partially joking.

No I think he probably is, too. That’s amazing.

Most of the people, even if they knew, ‘[Sugar’s real name]’ doesn’t mean anything to them. So. I mean, I’m anonymous if you don’t know who I am, right?

I guess so. But your work has found an audience irrespective of the Sugar stuff, right?

Yes. It has, absolutely. But most people, they’re going to say, ‘I’ve never heard of her.’ But we sort of got into this before, I wanted to ask you first, how are you? And I’m sorry to hear that you’re going through a divorce.

That’s alright, that’s really kind of you. I’m fine. It’s not ideal, but at the same time, you do know, at some point, don’t you, when it should be over. There’s a voice somewhere.

I’ve written about that very thing!

I guess that’s one of the risks of coming out, is that people are going to start quoting your columns back to you, when you ask them how you are.

Yeah. Absolutely. Certainly. And you do know when it’s time to go. I mean, I’m turning that back to you now. I know how painful that is, whether you’re the one who knew you had to go or the other person was, it’s like hell. But there will be better days ahead, Matt.

Yeah, I hope so. I mean, the other thing that’s interesting about your column is, you are quite affirming, and a lot of the advice is about being brave and taking decisions that aren’t easy. And in fact when you are a recently separated 30-year-old man, often there are difficult decisions to be made that aren’t easy. I have made decisions, and in the moment of making those decisions I have thought of your column and thought, ‘Well, this is what Sugar would advise,’ so that’s good. It’s affirming and it’s really helpful. So it’s very nice that you asked how I am. The other thing, in your column, is that you express love for your readers.

There are so many parts of this experience that are weird to me. In my work as a literary writer, even though I think my work is inherently political, I never have a message in mind, my novel doesn’t have a message, but Sugar has a message.

Tell me what that message is.

I have never read a self help book in my life. I think self help is pretty much bullshit. I don’t pay attention to this…what’s that Oprah book, like The Secret, or some sort of crap like that?
Well it’s so many things that I feel like, what you could do, if you read all of my columns they do boil down to some pretty essential truths. You hit on one of them when you said ‘the hard choice is often the best one,’ that life is both more simple and more complex than most of us would like to believe, that there is something about the essential, that we all have an essential truth within us which if we really listen to that, which is totally different than that bumper sticker ‘follow your bliss,’ which is bullshit. You know? And that’s, I have never read a self help book in my life. I think self help is pretty much bullshit. I don’t pay attention to this…what’s that Oprah book, like The Secret, or some sort of crap like that? ‘If you only believe, then it will be true,’ I think that’s a really aggressively entitled bullshit sort of approach to life’s complicated questions. And at the same time there’s a piece of that in Sugar that says ultimately we’re all responsible for our lives, we’re all going to fail, we all have something inside to offer, and our work here is to find out and express it in whatever channels are appropriate. So it’s not Sugar’s message, but it’s really just my life, everything I think about how to live, which is in opposition to that self help crap.

Yeah, and oddly the self help crap is extremely commercial. And what you’re doing is so far, not. I mean, the writing you do under your own name is, I’m assuming, is giving you some money.

Yeah.

But the writing you’re doing as Sugar, you’ve not been paid for a column.

No.

What are they doing? What are they thinking? I mean, you must be generating three-quarters of their hits by this point.

It’s a little complicated because I work really hard on the column and takes a lot of time. I get so much email, I have thousands of emails from readers. But nobody gets paid at The Rumpus. That’s the thing. And I knew that going in. Stephen Elliott and Isaac Fitzgerald really do the work of the site and Isaac works there full time. They’ve also sold tons of mugs, the ‘write like a motherfucker’ mugs, and so I’m happy that Isaac gets to earn a living wage now. A couple of months ago Stephen and Isaac sent me a thousand dollars, because I think they felt guilty.

And you retain the rights to the column.

I do. So basically my answer to how I get paid is, I’ll get paid eventually if there's a Sugar book. And I’m happy to wait, I mean, I took it on as a lark. I thought it would be an interesting project for me as a writer. There was an old Sugar for the first 26 columns.

Who was it? You can’t tell me, can you?

I don’t know. Well, you’re a reporter, you know.

What was the plan for coming out? When were you going to come out?

I’m going to San Francisco, and I’m going to come out at one of The Monthly Rumpus events.

The Monthly Rumpus. What’s that?

The second Monday of every month they do a big thing at The Makeout Room. And the plan is my next book–one I've written under my own name–will be a Rumpus book club pick, and I’m going to announce that Sugar’s book is going to be the book club pick and Sugar’s going to have a coming out party in San Francisco.

There's also been talk of a book of your Sugar columns.

Yeah. There has been.

And when is that going to come out?

I’ll let you know as soon as I do.

You know, there’s a cricketer named Sachin Tendulkar, and apparently they’ve made, like, 50 copies of a book that’s written in his blood. And it was Saddam Hussein who had a book written in his blood. Saddam Hussein had people come and do blood transfusions and then write the Qu’ran in his blood. I think that you should consider some sort of limited edition copies of a Sugar book.

I think that’s a really interesting idea.

Well, only because, this guy described your work as ‘sacred’ to him. Now I’m not suggesting you should be blaspheming with the production of a Sugar book, but there is an aspect in which this means a lot to people, so… surely, maybe there’s a market… I’m not saying you should bleed for the book.

Well it’s fascinating because a Sugar book is not commercial in a traditional sense. My columns are really long…I have absolutely no limitations placed on me.

And they publish 15 minutes after you send it in, right?

Yeah.

And that’s unusual.

Yeah, nobody fucks with it. I have [Mr. Sugar] read it, and he says yeah, and it goes live. And I usually do it all night long on a Wednesday night, and I curse myself, and it’s tortuous, and I’m pissed, because I think, why didn’t I do this fucking earlier like I said I would do, and I’m always up on this deadline, and it’s really strange because it’s really contrary to everything I’ve ever said about the way one should write with time. But it’s odd, this thing about it not being commercially viable, because the audience is really responding. I mean, people have written to me as [Sugar’s real name] and said amazing things about my work, but as Sugar, the love is unbelievable. The way that people…people write to me and say ‘you changed my life, I thought of you when I was thinking about doing this, you helped me understand something that I’ve been going to therapy for years trying to understand,’ and what’s weird about that is that the gatekeepers have decided that Sugar’s not commercial. But the people have decided that it is.

It’s a revolution!

It is.

Are you jealous of yourself?

That’s a funny thing. I’ve almost joked before on Twitter that Sugar is jealous of her real person because Sugar has more followers, and all that stuff. I think that, I’m not…I think the Sugar fans will go buy the book I've written as myself. What’ll be interesting is beyond that.

Are you concerned that the readership may drop off after you identify yourself? Are you concerned about hostile reactions? Are you concerned about, Oh, well…I mean, I thought you were Judy Blume.

You thought I was Judy Blume? Sugar says she’s 42. I mean, everything I say about myself is true.

So are you concerned about a hostile reaction when you come out?

You’d think I’d get all these private, nasty emails, and I don’t. I’ve gotten maybe two in maybe a year. Sometimes people write to me because they disagree but they’re always very respectful. I’ve had two people that have just been mean but you’d think it was more than that. So: What am I scared of? I’m not scared that people will be hostile. A lot of people have written to me and said they’re scared of finding out who Sugar is because they fear that maybe some of what is happening will stop happening. [Mr. Sugar] was saying ‘I think you should stay anonymous forever, because if you come out, it’s going to ruin that mystique....’ I think that people feel that they can really be open with me because they don’t know who I am. And the longer that we’ve gone down this path, the less I think that’s important. And perhaps it’s because several readers, some of my biggest fans, people who are really really into Sugar, they have this relationship with Sugar, and they’re always emailing me and direct messaging me, and they’ve figured out who I am, and they all said, like, ‘I was afraid I wouldn’t love you as much and I still totally do, it doesn’t matter to me that I know who you are.’ And so I guess I’m going to go on that. But I won’t be Sugar indefinitely. I won't stop being Sugar as soon as I come out, but there will be probably be a time when I decide to stop. The way I write the column, I’m not just Dear Abby or something, I’m not just giving you etiquette advice, I’m really writing about core issues. And I think there’s a point at which I’ve spoken my piece.

You’re sort of…spent.

I’m spent. And also it’ll reach a point where it’s like, ‘see column X,’ you know? And it already feels like that, in some regard, and also the way I write the column, it’s me writing about my life. One thing that’s going to be cool about coming out is I’m going to be able to write about a bunch of stuff that I was scared about writing about before because I just thought it would be too identifying. You can Google any number of things from my columns and probably find myself.

It’s interesting that your husband was pushing you to keep the mystique, too.

What do you think?

I think you should keep the mystique.

You think I should?

Well, I’m a romantic. I don’t doubt that if you do come out, everyone’s going to love it, and I don’t doubt that it’s going to be wonderful for everyone involved. But there is a kind of romance in…like, I love Batman. Batman is my favorite, and Batman and Bruce Wayne couldn’t exist without each other. They couldn’t. But the mystique about Batman is kept because he doesn’t tell anyone who he is. And there’s a great scene, it was on Youtube the other day, where Batman and Bruce Wayne have to have a conversation with each other in front of the commissioner. And there’s this sort of façade, but there’s this sort of beauty to it. Before this interview I was going to say, ‘I should give you some advice.’ And that would be it: Keep it private. But then there’s also, could you still make money if it were private? If I were in your position, I would claim it, I would say, ‘That’s me. Hello. I’m here. And let’s go for it.’ And I think that’s something that a lot of authors are scared to do, to claim their work.

Well there’s also that other thing, actually being Sugar has been a real exercise in ego, and not getting to take credit for something that so many people love. I’ve been at parties and people are like, ‘you have to read this column,’ you know? And I’ll just be like, ‘yeah, okay,’ because you work your whole life for people to love what you write, and then they do, and you have to pretend it’s not you.

But isn’t that an incredible lesson to learn as a writer?

It’s a great lesson.

Whether or not you do come out. You get what you wanted, and it turns out that you can’t take it.

I can’t have it!

And there’s a real wisdom that comes in being able to say, ‘I want to be able to take credit for this.’

Yeah. And I could get paid. The publishers and people would know who I was, and they’d pay me. It is partly a money thing because if I don’t come out as Sugar, then those people don’t buy [Sugar’s real name]’s books. And that bugs me. Meanwhile my book is languishing, and if I just said, then they’d go buy that book.

It’s difficult as an author to be in a position where somebody says, ‘hey, do you want to sell, maybe, 100,000, 200,000 more copies of your novel?’

I want to do something really fun in San Francisco, jump out of a cake or something. I think it’ll be a good, fun, thing. But you still want me to stay anonymous. You want me to be Batman.
This is how I make my living, Matt. It’s hard. So part of coming out also feels like, people mostly want me to. Please tell us who you are. So it’ll be kind of fun to say here I am. And I want to do something really fun in San Francisco, jump out of a cake or something. I think it’ll be a good, fun, thing. But you still want me to stay anonymous. You want me to be Batman. It’s interesting that you use that comparison because so many people write about Sugar either as a superhero or a religious figure.

If I was Bruce Wayne, I’d tell everybody. I’d say, ‘listen mate, I’ve got a cave down there, and you know, some really great outfits.’

You’re fucking Batman!

In life, we all have to come to terms with the fact that we aren’t superheroes or religious figures. And then we have to own that, and then we have to be honest about who we are.

Many years ago I knew a woman who was the mistress of a man who was married to a famous advice columnist. They'd been having an affair for a couple decades by then and the advice columnist knew it was going on, but none of that was ever present in her columns. Never was there a sense of her life’s imperfections and contradictions. But what Sugar does is that Sugar would tell you if her husband had a kept woman for 20 years, so I think that the sense of this grandiose faith that people put in Sugar is not bound up in me saying ‘I know what you should do, and this is what morality demands.’ Instead it’s me saying let’s look at all of these things in this really intricate way, and they’re full of contradictions.

They are. It’s exciting to be on the cusp of this, right?

I’m not that funny in my writing, at all. I’m funny in my life, but in my writing I’m dark, and serious, and emotionally intense. And I thought that I was going to try to be funny in the Sugar column because the person before me was funny, and I thought it would just be a way for me to expand my range. And what ended up happening was I just expanded my range in a different way. And so it’s interesting to me as an artist, it’s the first time that I’ve used memoir, this kind of emotionally intense writing style, this thing that I do, in this other venue, which is the direct address…here’s what I think you should do. It’s a very different sort of address than the fictional address or even the memoir, which is just a very self-contained literary form.

Presumably you have a writing mentor somewhere. You mentioned your husband. Is there anyone else who critiques your work?

I studied with different people along the way. I didn’t get an MFA until I was a writer. Are you 30?

31.

I went to graduate school when I had just turned 30. And I had some good teachers, and I learned from people, but there isn’t one person. There are writers who I read very carefully and with great attention, and I learned from them more than anything. Mary Gaitskill, I read her for a decade, practically memorized her work, and then I worked with her in person for a short time and I had all these fantasies about how intense our relationship would be because I just got her work so deeply, and she was a fine person and a fine human being, but I don’t feel that I learned from Mary the person. It was what it was, but it wasn’t revelatory.

In the way that her writing was?

Once you know how to write, how to make a sentence or a paragraph, and those are very elemental things, they seem very simple but most people don’t know how to do those things, you can do anything.
Her writing was revelatory to me. I would study her paragraphs and study her sentences and study her stories. Alice Munro. William Faulkner. William Maxwell. What I got from my real life mentors is something different—the reassurance that a writer needs to trust her own instincts at a certain level. Once you know how to write, how to make a sentence or a paragraph, and those are very elemental things, they seem very simple but most people don’t know how to do those things, you can do anything. And there’s all this stuff with writing that’s outside of writing itself. A lot of it is just believing in yourself, just doing it. And in the Sugar column I’m always encouraging this sort of risk-taking, both emotionally and also financially. I actually have, in my life, and I have the debt to prove it, and the fucked-up trail of bad shit to prove it, I always put my writing first. I always quit the job or whatever.

But presumably you’re going to get out of this debt soon, aren’t you?

Yeah. But it’s tough. I’m still paying off my bachelor’s degree from a public university.

Are there any questions, perhaps, that you’ve not answered, that are sitting there that perhaps you want to answer?

Well, there’s a couple. I have two letters from women who found that they were pregnant and both women wanted to have abortions, but were married to men who they know would try to prevent them from having the abortion, and asking me if it was okay that they went ahead and had the abortion and didn’t tell their husbands. And those are, those are the only…those are the only exceptions that I’ve ever emailed someone privately back and told her what I thought, and didn’t publish it.

Why didn’t you publish it?

I just felt like what I had to say was not really a column. And some of these questions, it’s not just helping people but it’s also building a literary experience around it, and so sometimes I feel like, you know, it doesn’t lend itself to that kind of full-blown column. But it’s also, I guess because my answers to them, my private emails to them were so indecisive. I basically thought along with them and said, yeah, I think this completely sucks, and it could destroy your relationship if you lie to your husband and just go have an abortion without ever telling him. That could be a really bad seed. But at the same time, one can’t have a baby that one doesn’t want to have, right?

And abortion is difficult in America.

I have tons of questions from young people, like 21-year-old kids, who basically they’ve been given everything and have always been told that they’re so great and so talented, and they don’t know what the hell to do with themselves, they have no passions whatsoever, they have no interests, and they’re asking me what they should do. I don’t know. I think they should quit college, and cut themselves off financially from their parents and go work at McDonald’s, actually.

Yeah, you said a few times that you don’t really believe in inherited wealth, that you don’t really believe in that kind of support. And actually that brings me to another question, which maybe you can answer in the same sentence, but do black people write to you, much? Because it struck me that a lot of these issues you just mentioned are the issues faced by white college kids, right?

Yeah, yeah.

And, living in New Orleans, there are plenty of very bright young black people who are not at college for one reason or another, who I think get to figure out what they’re passionate about without some of this, so I was just curious.

Well I can’t tell if black people ask me for advice.

You mean they don’t write in the letter, ‘p.s. I’m black?’

A couple of them do. I do have a couple of letters. But I have a pretty sizeable African-American fanbase, and I just know that based on Twitter and Facebook, you can see the picture of the person, and I just want to clarify, and I know… some of the criticism… that column We Are All Savages Inside about writerly jealousy, and there’s that paragraph where I say ‘I think part of your problem is you’re so entitled,’ and people said I’m so mean, but I don’t think I’d say I don’t believe in inherited wealth. People who grow up with parents who have money are as blameless as the people who grow up with parents who didn’t have money. And certainly as a parent I’m going to give my kids everything I can. But I will tell you that one of the major dilemmas of my life, both [Mr. Sugar] and I grew up working class, weren’t given anything, and both made our way in the world. And as much as I wanted to be the kid who got to go to French immersion camp between my freshman and sophomore year or whatever, but because I wasn’t that kid, I actually think that helped me more than these wonderful educational opportunities that I missed because I was poor. And so that’s the complexity. I don’t mean to condemn people who have access to resources. But I do mean to very seriously say that maybe paying your own electricity bill is the path—is the path out of whatever conundrum you’re in. Maybe just being self-sufficient, that’s the answer.



Matt Davis’s website is matthewcharlesdavis.com.

This conversation took place by Skype and has been condensed.

Photo by Uwe Hermann.

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2011/07/a-qa-with-the-advice-columnist-called-sugar/feed 26 Male Muses And Inner Dicks: A Conversation With Kate Christensen http://www.theawl.com/2011/06/male-muses-and-inner-dicks-a-conversation-with-kate-christensen http://www.theawl.com/2011/06/male-muses-and-inner-dicks-a-conversation-with-kate-christensen#comments Mon, 27 Jun 2011 14:50:48 +0000 Maud Newton http://www.theawl.com/2011/06/male-muses-and-inner-dicks-a-conversation-with-kate-christensen I discovered Kate Christensen’s work several years ago, when I read The Great Man, and then all the rest of her books, in one weekend. After I praised them on the radio, she emailed me and we became friends, which is great because she's a wonderful, smart, funny, generous person, but it's also weird, because she's one of my favorite living writers, and here she is, flesh and blood, moving through the world like the rest of us.

Her latest novel, The Astral, is about poet and sometime lothario Harry Quirk, 57, whose wife has just destroyed all the sonnets he’s been working on for years and, wrongly accusing him of having an affair with a friend of theirs, kicked him out of their Greenpoint (Brooklyn) apartment. He’s moved a few blocks away, into one of the city’s most notorious SROs.


You've said that you wrote your first novel in the eighth grade for a boy you liked. "He giggled gratifyingly at each chapter," you told The New York Times, "which I found so inspiring, I have been collecting male muses ever since.”

If Robert Graves were still around, he'd say that's impossible: "Woman is not a poet: she is either muse or she is nothing." Don't worry, though! It's not that women—sorry, woman—can't write, just that when a woman writes "she is herself the Muse, a Goddess without an external power to guide or comfort her." Why do you think there's been so much resistance historically to the idea that a woman might be creatively inspired by love and lust and longing for a man?

This makes no sense to me at all. Women need men to get pregnant, among other important things. So why can’t we need men to fuel our work?

My first muse was a chubby, bespectacled, brown-eyed, sharply intelligent 13-year-old boy in Phoenix, Arizona in 1975. When he laughed at and loved my writing, I felt the erotic surge of my own power. Since then, I’ve written for and about and to and because of men.

Writing with this “external power to guide and comfort me” has inspired me to write in first-person male voices—it’s inspired my sex scenes—and it’s caused me to work very, very hard, in a disciplined, sustained way, as if I were a man, as if I were entitled to seize all that time for something as dubious as novel-writing. My male muses are crucial to my work, inseparable from it. They’re the oil that lights the lamp.

Last month, in (what I like to call) your "dick for a day" essay, you explained that you ended up writing from a male point of view partly as a reaction to critics' dismissing your first book, In the Drink, as chick lit: "My second novel, Jeremy Thrane, is narrated by a man who, in the opening passages of the novel, describes his penis, in case anyone is in any doubt as to his sex." Did you sit down and write those paragraphs in a white-hot rage? “Oh, yeah, well here’s my dick, you motherfuckers!”

Ten years ago, that might have been the case. In fact, I wrote that essay in a state of calm, retrospective honesty; the entire thing emerged in a couple of hours, pretty much exactly as it was published. It felt very, very good to write it, the way it always feels to tell the plain truth without worrying what people will think.

At the end of the essay, I explain that I’ve relinquished my “inner dick,” at least for now. I spent my late twenties and early thirties in a state of hotheaded fury—at the way things were, at the unfairness of it all, at the wrongheadedness of my species—you name it. I think that, over the years, this white-hot, male-feeling rage has mutated into another, different, possibly purely female mode, one that will likely inform my next books—but I can’t know until I’ve written them.

Oh, I was unclear! I love that essay, as you know, but I meant: did you write the opening of Jeremy Thrane in a rage? It amuses me to imagine you sitting down to write your second book and starting things off by, so to speak, slapping your narrator’s cock on the table.

Anyway, enough dick talk. Getting back to muses: Do you think there's any more misguided impulse for getting involved with a writer—or, really, any kind of artist, but particularly a writer—than that you want to see yourself glorified and sanctified and memorialized in the writing? Does that ever end well?

Can it possibly end well? First of all, writers are difficult to live with, and the possibility of being immortalized or celebrated in our work is unlikely if you’re the person we see every day over the dirty breakfast dishes. The payoff for musedom is slight enough (as I see it) to be nonexistent; you have no control over whether you’re portrayed at all, let alone in what light, and, worse, you have to live with a moody, insecure, egomaniacal workaholic without a secure income or any benefits. When it’s a woman, throw in PMS, and any gambler could tell you the odds against that horse.

Luz, the rageful wife in The Astral, who has destroyed Harry's poems and kicked him out, pretty clearly married him expecting to serve as his muse. Through the years, as his writerly star rose and then fell, she seems to have consoled herself with the idea that she was his subject—which may be why, at least as Harry tells it, she so utterly flips out when she discovers that the sonnets he's been working on for so long are about other women. He tries to explain that the poems' subjects are imaginary women, idealized women, women who, existing only in his mind, are no threat to their marriage, but she continues to insist that he's having an affair.

It’s fascinating to me that Harry suspects their marriage would have been easier to repair if he had been physically unfaithful. It's the betrayal of his imagination that Luz seems to find unforgivable. Or at least she resents these poems more than the affair he actually did have twelve years before. Have you ever been involved with someone so hell-bent on being your muse that he (or she) gauged your fidelity by what you wrote?

Never. Unlike Harry, I have no tolerance for being controlled by sexual jealousy or by anything else. I created Luz out of my own extreme distaste for, and desire to expose in writing, whatever that mechanism is in certain women that causes them to spy without permission on their lovers’ or husbands’ emails or texts or conversations (or poetry) to gauge whether or not they’re being unfaithful, and then to interrogate them obsessively and rip them to shreds and declare vengeance on the so-called “other woman” and throw things and stamp around screaming.

There is something in that loony, pathetic, deranged behavior—most of all a delusional sense of entitled ownership of another person, but also a grasping, desperately insecure possessiveness—that makes me cringe. Luz’s character is based on the wives and girlfriends of men I’ve known. I’ve never behaved that way, and I’ve never been in a relationship with a man who behaved that way. (It wouldn’t last long, to put it mildly.) But it was lots of fun to write about.

I once dated a guy who was a little bit like Luz; it didn’t go well, to say the very least.

In an essay about marital boundaries, you remembered all the flirting and longing and intense email exchanges that preceded your divorce. Do you think Harry was in a similar state, that his marriage to Luz was emotionally over for him and needed to end and that she ultimately did him a favor by booting him?

I envision Harry as very, very lonely in his marriage, but dependent on it and committed to it—an all-too-common state of affairs, in my experience. Before Luz booted him out, he was paralyzed and stuck and stunted in a marriage that was emotionally defunct, passionless. When the book opens, he’s floundering toward something else, some other way of being that involves growing a spine and a set of balls, as it were. I think Luz did him an enormous favor by booting him out, but as for the rest of it—the accusations, the destruction of his work, the victimized role she played… the marriage should have ended on its own terms, without all that psychodrama, without the histrionics. In that essay, I say in so many words that it’s better to leave cleanly than to stick around and make trouble; in the case of Harry and Luz’s marriage, it would have been better for Harry, of course, if she’d just quietly asked for a divorce. But then there would have been no novel.

In an interview about adapting your third novel, The Epicure's Lament, you talked about your changing feelings toward the narrator, Hugo. "Now that I'm so much older than he is, I see him as young and confused," you said. "At the time, I accepted his self-view of himself as a bitter old washed-up failure; now I understand how mistaken he is in his self-conception. He's only 40. He has no idea how young he really is and how much possibility there is left in a life for change."

How about Harry? At the start of The Astral, he's broke and jobless and, having lost his teaching gig and then sat around writing for years while Luz supported him, basically unemployable. Like Claudia (of In the Drink) and Jeremy (of Jeremy Thrane), he's careening around, casting about, getting himself into trouble...

I do seem to love these characters. Maybe floundering is my novelistic subject, if I have one. Lives in flux and trouble, characters challenged to face certain hard-to-face things, interest me as a dramatic prospect, as characters, so much I might never get tired of writing about them.

When I was 40, I created Hugo; he was an alter ego for what I was going through at the time. He and I both felt bitter and washed-up. Now it’s almost nine years later and I feel neither of those things. Life goes on for the novelist, but the character remains stuck in the book. I find it very interesting to look back on my characters and understand them in new ways, years later. It doesn’t mean I’m judging or disavowing them, as the interviewer above very mistakenly assumes. It means I’ve had other experiences since then. It means I have gained some perspective.

Your characters’ predicaments are dark and desperate and true, but their stories, Hugo’s included, generally end with at least a slight uplift. I know you’re not a moralist, but would you agree that a theme common to your books is that confronting all the hard-to-face things is better than living a dead, dull life, steeped in denial?

I think that is absolutely the sense I have of life and of novels. I write about people wrestling with various internal conflicts in ways that ripple outwards and cause more external conflicts; repressed, obedient, “good-citizen” characters interest me very little because there’s little possibility for change in them. I’m a very old-fashioned writer. Change is what I’m after. It’s my only plot device, and it emerges from within the narrators themselves. I can’t force them to do it, it has to come from them. Each of my books ends with a clarification, a shaping towards something new—that’s the uplift you’re referring to, I think. My own life has been a series of such wrestlings—with crises and slight uplifts as I move on toward something else. Flux is exciting; struggle and discord and trouble fascinate me.

Your mom is a psychologist, and the narrator of your last novel, Trouble, was too. The shrink in The Astral, though, is manipulative, bossy, and clueless, crossing boundaries all over the place, treating both members of several married couples Harry and Luz know, and Harry is enraged that Luz has started seeing her. In the essay about your marriage, you mention that you quit therapy after your divorce because it was doing more harm than good. What are your thoughts about head-shrinkery these days, and how do you think your exposure to and experience of it have affected your writing?

Over the course of 20 years, I’ve seen six therapists that I can recall—three individual, three marital. I’ve never officially “graduated” from therapy. I always leave when I feel that the therapist is more invested than I am in the process, when I start to feel controlled and manipulated and needed in some weird way. I always find it very helpful up until that point, introspective analysis and emotional revelations and all of it. My sense is, though, that therapy can easily cross over from helpful and enlightening to a kind of mind control on the therapist’s part without either party realizing it. That’s when it becomes dangerous.

The shrink in The Astral is based on a real one. I don’t know her last name, and I’ve never met her, but I know a lot of her clients, and have heard many things about her through them – she sees a large group of friends, various members of love triangles, both members of married couples, employees and employers, and she employs “maverick” tactics, which is to say, she is unethical and out of control. There is no channel that I know of for stripping such therapists of their ability to practice. So I put her in a novel.

The Astral might be my favorite of your novels yet—I'll have to wait a year or so before I know for sure—but a few friends who love your work are disappointed that Harry isn't more like Hugo (of The Epicure's Lament). Do you run into this a lot, people wistfully comparing your latest book to an older one?

As I read this question, I felt a familiar flash of wildly irritated weariness at readers (and critics) who make this complaint. I’m almost too annoyed by it to answer this question. Harry isn’t Hugo. Harry is a whole new character, and this is a whole new book. Novelists are not McDonald’s. Every box of French fries is different and new.

When we spoke a few years ago about the wrongheaded critical response to your first novel, which ended up being lumped with Bridget Jones despite having more in common with Lucky Jim, you said, "I felt a bit like an underdog/loser with a thwarted ego and an axe to grind in one of my own novels, and in that sense it was ironic, fitting, and really, the best thing that could have happened to me. Sure, it pissed me off at first, because few things are more infuriating than being underestimated, but it also lit a fire under my ass, so to speak, and taught me a few valuable Zennish lessons about writing: Let It Go (you can’t control what people make of your work); Keep Moving Forward Like a Shark (all you can do is write more books); and Ride the Ocean Tides and Stay Your Course (your internal compass, not a glowing or scathing review, is the one authority to be heeded and obeyed). If by some stroke of bizarre and undeserved fortune my first novel had been hailed as genius and won prizes and I’d floated off in a filmy golden bubble of critical blowjobs and huge advances," you said, "that would not have been in any way as good for me as a writer as being written off as disposable fluff. Honestly."

Not long after we had that conversation, you won the PEN/Faulkner. How did that feel? Knowing you, I’m sure you didn’t float off in a filmy golden bubble, but did you feel mostly excited and inspired, or more pressured and anxious, or...?

It made me want to work even harder, write even better. I felt both anxious and inspired, in about equal parts. Because it was my fourth novel, and not my first, I was able to keep things pretty well in perspective. I felt very lucky. It was a great thing to have happen. But it couldn’t affect how or what I write; that all happens underground, and this was a public thing. The two exist in completely different realms.

I for one still feel your work is underappreciated. Plenty of female writers, from Muriel Spark to Marilynne Robinson, write about men well, but I've had trouble thinking of many who do it so flintily, and with such humor and brio, in first-person. Patricia Highsmith and Iris Murdoch, maybe? Who would you add?

First of all, Housekeeping is one of my all-time favorite novels. I haven’t read much Highsmith or Murdoch, but I feel I ought to. I’ve always loved and admired Dawn Powell, MFK Fisher, and most of the mid-20th century female British novelists—Penelope Fitzgerald, Margaret Drabble, Mary Wesley, and Muriel Spark, to name just a few. Their tough-minded, clear, ironic, passionate, subtle, wide-awake voices are some of my greatest inspirations. They all understand people, men and women both, in ways I find true and thrilling.

For Murdoch, I recommend starting with The Sea, The Sea or The Black Prince; that was the advice a friend gave me, and he was so right. Under the Net, her first novel, is a great romp, though, and maybe more up your alley. I read that one after Randa Jarrar posted that she was consumed with jealousy to find anyone had written a first novel that good. (In fact, she discovered, it was Murdoch’s fifth novel, just her first that was published.) I love Spark, Drabble, Powell and Fisher. Spark especially; I idolize her. Clearly I need to get to Wesley and Fitzgerald...

Why did you write from a poet’s perspective this time around?

Poets make reliable narrators. They distill, refine, make magically potent their perceptions, experiences, and observations, rather than codifying according to moralistic preconceptions or warping to conform to dogma—they take life and make clear, true liquor out of it. A poet is an everyman and a fool, a member of an effete and obscure subset of our species who writes for himself and others like him.

I wanted to be a poet, but I lack the sensibility; I'm too social and too long-winded. Choosing a poet for a narrator—a struggling, down-on-his-luck poet who has run aground on the limitations of his lifelong adherence to form, since no form can contain his poetics anymore—was self-indulgent wish-fulfillment on the one hand, since it was sheer pleasure to inhabit his psyche and voice, and on the other, a necessary narrative strategy.

Who are some of the poets you admire most?

Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, Francois Villon, Emily Dickinson… I’m all over the map in terms of poetry. I used to read it a lot. Every day. I kept poetry collections by the bathtub and sat dreaming in the bath over poetry, letting the language wash my brain and leave behind its residue. The older I get, the less poetry I read.

The novelist at midlife would seem, if I can be seen as an average example, to be focused, pragmatic, antisocial, a homebody kind of creature. I was wild when I was younger, my brain roamed all over the place, I drank too much and loved loud music and walked the streets of New York in a manic state of wonderment. I read so much poetry, craved it, wallowed in it.

I feel as if my first decades were spent ingesting everything I could greedily swallow of the world and of life. These midlife years, I feel like a stomach, digesting, recollecting, understanding in a ruminative way (what does this say about my end years, no pun intended, if I was a mouth first and now am a digestive system? Oh dear). Reading poetry augmented and fed my adventurous sense of living as fully as possible. I have amassed a lot of experience to mull over in tranquility. That is my greatest pleasure now.

One constant in your novels has been New York. You've portrayed the city so vividly and lovingly, it feels endemic to your storytelling. Do you think that’s changing now that you're living in New Hampshire?

I don’t know yet; it’s too early to tell. For 20 years, I felt married to New York, and now we’re getting a divorce; during those two decades, New York was my place-muse, and now I’m a little tired of it, but not entirely over it. My next one, Gin on the Lanai, which I’m about to start, will be about a New York-based food writer who goes to Kauai to research Hawaiian cuisine; the book is set elsewhere, but the sensibility will very probably be profoundly New York-y. This might be the direction I’m headed in; I’m curious to find out.

Can't wait! See you back here in a couple of years.



Maud Newton is a writer and critic best known for her blog, where she has written about books since 2002.

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]]> I discovered Kate Christensen’s work several years ago, when I read The Great Man, and then all the rest of her books, in one weekend. After I praised them on the radio, she emailed me and we became friends, which is great because she's a wonderful, smart, funny, generous person, but it's also weird, because she's one of my favorite living writers, and here she is, flesh and blood, moving through the world like the rest of us.

Her latest novel, The Astral, is about poet and sometime lothario Harry Quirk, 57, whose wife has just destroyed all the sonnets he’s been working on for years and, wrongly accusing him of having an affair with a friend of theirs, kicked him out of their Greenpoint (Brooklyn) apartment. He’s moved a few blocks away, into one of the city’s most notorious SROs.


You've said that you wrote your first novel in the eighth grade for a boy you liked. "He giggled gratifyingly at each chapter," you told The New York Times, "which I found so inspiring, I have been collecting male muses ever since.”

If Robert Graves were still around, he'd say that's impossible: "Woman is not a poet: she is either muse or she is nothing." Don't worry, though! It's not that women—sorry, woman—can't write, just that when a woman writes "she is herself the Muse, a Goddess without an external power to guide or comfort her." Why do you think there's been so much resistance historically to the idea that a woman might be creatively inspired by love and lust and longing for a man?

This makes no sense to me at all. Women need men to get pregnant, among other important things. So why can’t we need men to fuel our work?

My first muse was a chubby, bespectacled, brown-eyed, sharply intelligent 13-year-old boy in Phoenix, Arizona in 1975. When he laughed at and loved my writing, I felt the erotic surge of my own power. Since then, I’ve written for and about and to and because of men.

Writing with this “external power to guide and comfort me” has inspired me to write in first-person male voices—it’s inspired my sex scenes—and it’s caused me to work very, very hard, in a disciplined, sustained way, as if I were a man, as if I were entitled to seize all that time for something as dubious as novel-writing. My male muses are crucial to my work, inseparable from it. They’re the oil that lights the lamp.

Last month, in (what I like to call) your "dick for a day" essay, you explained that you ended up writing from a male point of view partly as a reaction to critics' dismissing your first book, In the Drink, as chick lit: "My second novel, Jeremy Thrane, is narrated by a man who, in the opening passages of the novel, describes his penis, in case anyone is in any doubt as to his sex." Did you sit down and write those paragraphs in a white-hot rage? “Oh, yeah, well here’s my dick, you motherfuckers!”

Ten years ago, that might have been the case. In fact, I wrote that essay in a state of calm, retrospective honesty; the entire thing emerged in a couple of hours, pretty much exactly as it was published. It felt very, very good to write it, the way it always feels to tell the plain truth without worrying what people will think.

At the end of the essay, I explain that I’ve relinquished my “inner dick,” at least for now. I spent my late twenties and early thirties in a state of hotheaded fury—at the way things were, at the unfairness of it all, at the wrongheadedness of my species—you name it. I think that, over the years, this white-hot, male-feeling rage has mutated into another, different, possibly purely female mode, one that will likely inform my next books—but I can’t know until I’ve written them.

Oh, I was unclear! I love that essay, as you know, but I meant: did you write the opening of Jeremy Thrane in a rage? It amuses me to imagine you sitting down to write your second book and starting things off by, so to speak, slapping your narrator’s cock on the table.

Anyway, enough dick talk. Getting back to muses: Do you think there's any more misguided impulse for getting involved with a writer—or, really, any kind of artist, but particularly a writer—than that you want to see yourself glorified and sanctified and memorialized in the writing? Does that ever end well?

Can it possibly end well? First of all, writers are difficult to live with, and the possibility of being immortalized or celebrated in our work is unlikely if you’re the person we see every day over the dirty breakfast dishes. The payoff for musedom is slight enough (as I see it) to be nonexistent; you have no control over whether you’re portrayed at all, let alone in what light, and, worse, you have to live with a moody, insecure, egomaniacal workaholic without a secure income or any benefits. When it’s a woman, throw in PMS, and any gambler could tell you the odds against that horse.

Luz, the rageful wife in The Astral, who has destroyed Harry's poems and kicked him out, pretty clearly married him expecting to serve as his muse. Through the years, as his writerly star rose and then fell, she seems to have consoled herself with the idea that she was his subject—which may be why, at least as Harry tells it, she so utterly flips out when she discovers that the sonnets he's been working on for so long are about other women. He tries to explain that the poems' subjects are imaginary women, idealized women, women who, existing only in his mind, are no threat to their marriage, but she continues to insist that he's having an affair.

It’s fascinating to me that Harry suspects their marriage would have been easier to repair if he had been physically unfaithful. It's the betrayal of his imagination that Luz seems to find unforgivable. Or at least she resents these poems more than the affair he actually did have twelve years before. Have you ever been involved with someone so hell-bent on being your muse that he (or she) gauged your fidelity by what you wrote?

Never. Unlike Harry, I have no tolerance for being controlled by sexual jealousy or by anything else. I created Luz out of my own extreme distaste for, and desire to expose in writing, whatever that mechanism is in certain women that causes them to spy without permission on their lovers’ or husbands’ emails or texts or conversations (or poetry) to gauge whether or not they’re being unfaithful, and then to interrogate them obsessively and rip them to shreds and declare vengeance on the so-called “other woman” and throw things and stamp around screaming.

There is something in that loony, pathetic, deranged behavior—most of all a delusional sense of entitled ownership of another person, but also a grasping, desperately insecure possessiveness—that makes me cringe. Luz’s character is based on the wives and girlfriends of men I’ve known. I’ve never behaved that way, and I’ve never been in a relationship with a man who behaved that way. (It wouldn’t last long, to put it mildly.) But it was lots of fun to write about.

I once dated a guy who was a little bit like Luz; it didn’t go well, to say the very least.

In an essay about marital boundaries, you remembered all the flirting and longing and intense email exchanges that preceded your divorce. Do you think Harry was in a similar state, that his marriage to Luz was emotionally over for him and needed to end and that she ultimately did him a favor by booting him?

I envision Harry as very, very lonely in his marriage, but dependent on it and committed to it—an all-too-common state of affairs, in my experience. Before Luz booted him out, he was paralyzed and stuck and stunted in a marriage that was emotionally defunct, passionless. When the book opens, he’s floundering toward something else, some other way of being that involves growing a spine and a set of balls, as it were. I think Luz did him an enormous favor by booting him out, but as for the rest of it—the accusations, the destruction of his work, the victimized role she played… the marriage should have ended on its own terms, without all that psychodrama, without the histrionics. In that essay, I say in so many words that it’s better to leave cleanly than to stick around and make trouble; in the case of Harry and Luz’s marriage, it would have been better for Harry, of course, if she’d just quietly asked for a divorce. But then there would have been no novel.

In an interview about adapting your third novel, The Epicure's Lament, you talked about your changing feelings toward the narrator, Hugo. "Now that I'm so much older than he is, I see him as young and confused," you said. "At the time, I accepted his self-view of himself as a bitter old washed-up failure; now I understand how mistaken he is in his self-conception. He's only 40. He has no idea how young he really is and how much possibility there is left in a life for change."

How about Harry? At the start of The Astral, he's broke and jobless and, having lost his teaching gig and then sat around writing for years while Luz supported him, basically unemployable. Like Claudia (of In the Drink) and Jeremy (of Jeremy Thrane), he's careening around, casting about, getting himself into trouble...

I do seem to love these characters. Maybe floundering is my novelistic subject, if I have one. Lives in flux and trouble, characters challenged to face certain hard-to-face things, interest me as a dramatic prospect, as characters, so much I might never get tired of writing about them.

When I was 40, I created Hugo; he was an alter ego for what I was going through at the time. He and I both felt bitter and washed-up. Now it’s almost nine years later and I feel neither of those things. Life goes on for the novelist, but the character remains stuck in the book. I find it very interesting to look back on my characters and understand them in new ways, years later. It doesn’t mean I’m judging or disavowing them, as the interviewer above very mistakenly assumes. It means I’ve had other experiences since then. It means I have gained some perspective.

Your characters’ predicaments are dark and desperate and true, but their stories, Hugo’s included, generally end with at least a slight uplift. I know you’re not a moralist, but would you agree that a theme common to your books is that confronting all the hard-to-face things is better than living a dead, dull life, steeped in denial?

I think that is absolutely the sense I have of life and of novels. I write about people wrestling with various internal conflicts in ways that ripple outwards and cause more external conflicts; repressed, obedient, “good-citizen” characters interest me very little because there’s little possibility for change in them. I’m a very old-fashioned writer. Change is what I’m after. It’s my only plot device, and it emerges from within the narrators themselves. I can’t force them to do it, it has to come from them. Each of my books ends with a clarification, a shaping towards something new—that’s the uplift you’re referring to, I think. My own life has been a series of such wrestlings—with crises and slight uplifts as I move on toward something else. Flux is exciting; struggle and discord and trouble fascinate me.

Your mom is a psychologist, and the narrator of your last novel, Trouble, was too. The shrink in The Astral, though, is manipulative, bossy, and clueless, crossing boundaries all over the place, treating both members of several married couples Harry and Luz know, and Harry is enraged that Luz has started seeing her. In the essay about your marriage, you mention that you quit therapy after your divorce because it was doing more harm than good. What are your thoughts about head-shrinkery these days, and how do you think your exposure to and experience of it have affected your writing?

Over the course of 20 years, I’ve seen six therapists that I can recall—three individual, three marital. I’ve never officially “graduated” from therapy. I always leave when I feel that the therapist is more invested than I am in the process, when I start to feel controlled and manipulated and needed in some weird way. I always find it very helpful up until that point, introspective analysis and emotional revelations and all of it. My sense is, though, that therapy can easily cross over from helpful and enlightening to a kind of mind control on the therapist’s part without either party realizing it. That’s when it becomes dangerous.

The shrink in The Astral is based on a real one. I don’t know her last name, and I’ve never met her, but I know a lot of her clients, and have heard many things about her through them – she sees a large group of friends, various members of love triangles, both members of married couples, employees and employers, and she employs “maverick” tactics, which is to say, she is unethical and out of control. There is no channel that I know of for stripping such therapists of their ability to practice. So I put her in a novel.

The Astral might be my favorite of your novels yet—I'll have to wait a year or so before I know for sure—but a few friends who love your work are disappointed that Harry isn't more like Hugo (of The Epicure's Lament). Do you run into this a lot, people wistfully comparing your latest book to an older one?

As I read this question, I felt a familiar flash of wildly irritated weariness at readers (and critics) who make this complaint. I’m almost too annoyed by it to answer this question. Harry isn’t Hugo. Harry is a whole new character, and this is a whole new book. Novelists are not McDonald’s. Every box of French fries is different and new.

When we spoke a few years ago about the wrongheaded critical response to your first novel, which ended up being lumped with Bridget Jones despite having more in common with Lucky Jim, you said, "I felt a bit like an underdog/loser with a thwarted ego and an axe to grind in one of my own novels, and in that sense it was ironic, fitting, and really, the best thing that could have happened to me. Sure, it pissed me off at first, because few things are more infuriating than being underestimated, but it also lit a fire under my ass, so to speak, and taught me a few valuable Zennish lessons about writing: Let It Go (you can’t control what people make of your work); Keep Moving Forward Like a Shark (all you can do is write more books); and Ride the Ocean Tides and Stay Your Course (your internal compass, not a glowing or scathing review, is the one authority to be heeded and obeyed). If by some stroke of bizarre and undeserved fortune my first novel had been hailed as genius and won prizes and I’d floated off in a filmy golden bubble of critical blowjobs and huge advances," you said, "that would not have been in any way as good for me as a writer as being written off as disposable fluff. Honestly."

Not long after we had that conversation, you won the PEN/Faulkner. How did that feel? Knowing you, I’m sure you didn’t float off in a filmy golden bubble, but did you feel mostly excited and inspired, or more pressured and anxious, or...?

It made me want to work even harder, write even better. I felt both anxious and inspired, in about equal parts. Because it was my fourth novel, and not my first, I was able to keep things pretty well in perspective. I felt very lucky. It was a great thing to have happen. But it couldn’t affect how or what I write; that all happens underground, and this was a public thing. The two exist in completely different realms.

I for one still feel your work is underappreciated. Plenty of female writers, from Muriel Spark to Marilynne Robinson, write about men well, but I've had trouble thinking of many who do it so flintily, and with such humor and brio, in first-person. Patricia Highsmith and Iris Murdoch, maybe? Who would you add?

First of all, Housekeeping is one of my all-time favorite novels. I haven’t read much Highsmith or Murdoch, but I feel I ought to. I’ve always loved and admired Dawn Powell, MFK Fisher, and most of the mid-20th century female British novelists—Penelope Fitzgerald, Margaret Drabble, Mary Wesley, and Muriel Spark, to name just a few. Their tough-minded, clear, ironic, passionate, subtle, wide-awake voices are some of my greatest inspirations. They all understand people, men and women both, in ways I find true and thrilling.

For Murdoch, I recommend starting with The Sea, The Sea or The Black Prince; that was the advice a friend gave me, and he was so right. Under the Net, her first novel, is a great romp, though, and maybe more up your alley. I read that one after Randa Jarrar posted that she was consumed with jealousy to find anyone had written a first novel that good. (In fact, she discovered, it was Murdoch’s fifth novel, just her first that was published.) I love Spark, Drabble, Powell and Fisher. Spark especially; I idolize her. Clearly I need to get to Wesley and Fitzgerald...

Why did you write from a poet’s perspective this time around?

Poets make reliable narrators. They distill, refine, make magically potent their perceptions, experiences, and observations, rather than codifying according to moralistic preconceptions or warping to conform to dogma—they take life and make clear, true liquor out of it. A poet is an everyman and a fool, a member of an effete and obscure subset of our species who writes for himself and others like him.

I wanted to be a poet, but I lack the sensibility; I'm too social and too long-winded. Choosing a poet for a narrator—a struggling, down-on-his-luck poet who has run aground on the limitations of his lifelong adherence to form, since no form can contain his poetics anymore—was self-indulgent wish-fulfillment on the one hand, since it was sheer pleasure to inhabit his psyche and voice, and on the other, a necessary narrative strategy.

Who are some of the poets you admire most?

Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, Francois Villon, Emily Dickinson… I’m all over the map in terms of poetry. I used to read it a lot. Every day. I kept poetry collections by the bathtub and sat dreaming in the bath over poetry, letting the language wash my brain and leave behind its residue. The older I get, the less poetry I read.

The novelist at midlife would seem, if I can be seen as an average example, to be focused, pragmatic, antisocial, a homebody kind of creature. I was wild when I was younger, my brain roamed all over the place, I drank too much and loved loud music and walked the streets of New York in a manic state of wonderment. I read so much poetry, craved it, wallowed in it.

I feel as if my first decades were spent ingesting everything I could greedily swallow of the world and of life. These midlife years, I feel like a stomach, digesting, recollecting, understanding in a ruminative way (what does this say about my end years, no pun intended, if I was a mouth first and now am a digestive system? Oh dear). Reading poetry augmented and fed my adventurous sense of living as fully as possible. I have amassed a lot of experience to mull over in tranquility. That is my greatest pleasure now.

One constant in your novels has been New York. You've portrayed the city so vividly and lovingly, it feels endemic to your storytelling. Do you think that’s changing now that you're living in New Hampshire?

I don’t know yet; it’s too early to tell. For 20 years, I felt married to New York, and now we’re getting a divorce; during those two decades, New York was my place-muse, and now I’m a little tired of it, but not entirely over it. My next one, Gin on the Lanai, which I’m about to start, will be about a New York-based food writer who goes to Kauai to research Hawaiian cuisine; the book is set elsewhere, but the sensibility will very probably be profoundly New York-y. This might be the direction I’m headed in; I’m curious to find out.

Can't wait! See you back here in a couple of years.



Maud Newton is a writer and critic best known for her blog, where she has written about books since 2002.

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2011/06/male-muses-and-inner-dicks-a-conversation-with-kate-christensen/feed 5 A Q. & A. With Skyzoo, Mixtape Master http://www.theawl.com/2011/06/a-q-a-with-skyzoo-mixtape-master http://www.theawl.com/2011/06/a-q-a-with-skyzoo-mixtape-master#comments Fri, 17 Jun 2011 14:20:50 +0000 Chris O'Shea http://www.theawl.com/2011/06/a-q-a-with-skyzoo-mixtape-master When I was in eighth grade, I was madly in love. But the girl, who I wanted to marry and sometimes wrote sad poems about, didn't feel the same way. So I decided to prove my love with a mixtape. For me, music was (and still is) the most intense force in the world, so I thought this would truly make her reciprocate my affection. I set my plan in motion by stealing my oldest brother's Motley Crue cassette, putting pieces of tape over those tiny holes so I could record over the screeching of Vince Neil, and adding songs to my mixtape that would show just how great I was. I gave the tape to the girl the next day. A few days later, she told me that it was "cool," but somehow it didn't sway her romantic opinion of me. It might have had something to do with one too many Metallica songs, which were moving to me, but somehow not to her. But at the time, having her tell me that the mixtape was cool was a victory in and of itself.

The mixtape is a powerful thing. As a kid, they were a way to show how much you cared about someone. For others, like those in hip-hop, the mixtape is a way to get their music to the people who crave it. It's not an album; it's much more personal. Though the mixtape hasn't been a "tape" for many years now, the idea—that this highly personal collection of songs can move minds—remains the same.

Skyzoo, a 28-year-old emcee hailing from Bed-Stuy, is a mixtape genius. You might remember him from battling Jin on 106th & Park's Freestyle Friday (and if you do, you know he was robbed), but since then he has carved a career out of putting excellent mixtapes out, in addition to one major label album.

His latest, The Great Debater, released just last week. Much like his previous efforts, it's a brilliant collection of tracks that show hip-hop in its purest form. Because he's a master of the medium, and because he came up as physical tapes disappeared and hip-hop blogs emerged, I asked him some questions about mixtapes and how they shaped him as an emcee.

Artists like Grandmaster Flash and Kool Herc began experimenting with mixtapes in the 1970s. A lot has changed since then, but what do you see as the biggest change in how mixtapes are presented?

The biggest change is obviously the way mixtapes are received. They went from cassettes and CDs that you paid $5-$10 for, to logging on to your computer or iPhone or iPad and downloading them for free via a plethora of blogs, music sites and social networks. A big piece of the expenses to make a mixtape has been taken out, and the option of getting your mixtape literally around the world is now a reality.

How did you perceive mixtapes when you were growing up? Were they a hot commodity in Bed-Stuy? If so, which tapes were getting the most play?

Mixtapes were a way of life when I was growing up. It was all about who had the newest tape, and that one tape ran the city for about a month, month and a half, until the next tape came out. When I was a kid, there were a bunch of big DJs putting out tapes, but the one DJ, hands down, was DJ Clue. When a Clue tape came out, everything stopped. The race was to be the first one in your neighborhood or school with the newest Clue tape, thus giving you access to the newest LOX freestyles, or Jay-Z remix or Nas record, before anyone else who hadn't gotten to the mixtape spot yet to buy their own copy.

Emcees often say that mixtapes are a way of keeping the hype going in between albums. Do you ever worry that your mixtapes will be better than your albums? Does it matter if they are?

I personally don't worry about that, because I know how to make a mixtape and an album, where they both do what they're supposed to do. To me, a mixtape is more free spirited, more "shock and awe" inducing, as far as witty lyrics and punchlines. In today's day and age, mixtapes are now spawning radio singles and videos, so you're more aware of that reality and you keep that in mind when recording. But the general idea of a mixtape is to just keep it open and have fun. An album is where your themes, story lines, concepts, song writing, singles, etc. all go. The only artists who make mixtapes better than their albums are the ones who haven't grasped the idea of what a complete album should sound and feel like. Song writing is key.

Mixtapes typically feature beats that have been used before, but The Great Debater doesn't; it's all original production. Why did you decide to go that route?

Well, throughout history, mixtapes have been built around other artists' instrumentals, but I'd say since about 2009, 90% of the mixtapes that are released are all original music. The only thing that separates mixtapes from albums nowadays is that mixtapes are free and albums are $9.99 and up. Music has gotten so fickle now, and there's so much of it being released so rapidly, you have to offer your fans more. They aren't satisfied with you rapping over other people's beats that they already have in their iPods. They want your mixtape to be great and your album to be greater, with the material all being 100% new.

You've penned a few critically acclaimed mixtapes and an album, where do you place The Great Debater in your discography?

The Great Debater is definitely amongst the top of my ranks as far as what I feel are my best pieces of work. I don't like to compare my mixtapes to my albums because they have different goals, so to me its not fair. But if you look at all of my mixtapes, it’s easily the best one, hands down.

It features a picture of the Cosbys on the cover. Why?

The theme of the project is loosely based around the Huxtable family. The idea is that, to me, growing up, I always thought the Huxtable family represented winning. To have a beautiful wife, huge home that you owned, dope kids, doctor and lawyer money, Park Slope Brooklyn, to me, that was winning. I strived for that as a kid and pictured me in those sweaters and in that household. So essentially, the tape is all about winning. Success, and all that it takes to get there via this twisted music game.

Do you approach an album differently than a mixtape?

Definitely. I save all of my more deep, story telling and concept driven emotions for my albums. I'd never put "For What It's Worth" or "Like A Marathon" or "Under Pressure" on a mixtape, which is why they went on The Salvation [his major label debut]. And I'd never put "Rap Like Me" or any of those types of records on an album, which is why that type of material is on The Great Debater. They're all incredible records, but each has its purpose.

Hip-hop blogs like Nah Right and others have definitely impacted mixtapes and the way "underground" emcees like yourself are heard. Would you say their proliferation has helped or hurt the game?

I'd say it's definitely helped. To be able to get your music all over the country, and then all over the world, via a website, is incredible. When I started out, the blogs were in their beginning stages, so it was still about going to the mixtape spots, sneaker stores, mom and pop record stores, etc, and getting your tape in there. I traveled all around NY, Philly, Boston, Connecticut, Virginia, D.C., Baltimore and beyond, physically putting my tapes in stores. Now I just send out an email and it's all over the blogs in five minutes.

If you had to pick one track from The Great Debater to play for someone who typically doesn't listen to hip-hop, which would it be and why?

If I had to choose one, which would be tough, it'd be "The Definitive Prayer." On that song, I just rapped and rapped and rapped some more. There's no hook, no added effects or sounds to mesh with other genres; just straight beats and raps. When I wrote that record, I just did everything I felt when I heard the beat. The horns, the drum rolls, the keys, it all screamed "hunger," so I expressed that lyrically. Hip-hop started out as a way to express angst and hunger, and I'm not into staying in the past at all, but if someone has never heard hip-hop before, I'd suggest that they start there.



Chris O'Shea is a writer living in Brooklyn. He once saw Nelson in concert.

Photo of Skyzoo by Mookie X. Photo of The Great Debater by Skyzoo.

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]]> When I was in eighth grade, I was madly in love. But the girl, who I wanted to marry and sometimes wrote sad poems about, didn't feel the same way. So I decided to prove my love with a mixtape. For me, music was (and still is) the most intense force in the world, so I thought this would truly make her reciprocate my affection. I set my plan in motion by stealing my oldest brother's Motley Crue cassette, putting pieces of tape over those tiny holes so I could record over the screeching of Vince Neil, and adding songs to my mixtape that would show just how great I was. I gave the tape to the girl the next day. A few days later, she told me that it was "cool," but somehow it didn't sway her romantic opinion of me. It might have had something to do with one too many Metallica songs, which were moving to me, but somehow not to her. But at the time, having her tell me that the mixtape was cool was a victory in and of itself.

The mixtape is a powerful thing. As a kid, they were a way to show how much you cared about someone. For others, like those in hip-hop, the mixtape is a way to get their music to the people who crave it. It's not an album; it's much more personal. Though the mixtape hasn't been a "tape" for many years now, the idea—that this highly personal collection of songs can move minds—remains the same.

Skyzoo, a 28-year-old emcee hailing from Bed-Stuy, is a mixtape genius. You might remember him from battling Jin on 106th & Park's Freestyle Friday (and if you do, you know he was robbed), but since then he has carved a career out of putting excellent mixtapes out, in addition to one major label album.

His latest, The Great Debater, released just last week. Much like his previous efforts, it's a brilliant collection of tracks that show hip-hop in its purest form. Because he's a master of the medium, and because he came up as physical tapes disappeared and hip-hop blogs emerged, I asked him some questions about mixtapes and how they shaped him as an emcee.

Artists like Grandmaster Flash and Kool Herc began experimenting with mixtapes in the 1970s. A lot has changed since then, but what do you see as the biggest change in how mixtapes are presented?

The biggest change is obviously the way mixtapes are received. They went from cassettes and CDs that you paid $5-$10 for, to logging on to your computer or iPhone or iPad and downloading them for free via a plethora of blogs, music sites and social networks. A big piece of the expenses to make a mixtape has been taken out, and the option of getting your mixtape literally around the world is now a reality.

How did you perceive mixtapes when you were growing up? Were they a hot commodity in Bed-Stuy? If so, which tapes were getting the most play?

Mixtapes were a way of life when I was growing up. It was all about who had the newest tape, and that one tape ran the city for about a month, month and a half, until the next tape came out. When I was a kid, there were a bunch of big DJs putting out tapes, but the one DJ, hands down, was DJ Clue. When a Clue tape came out, everything stopped. The race was to be the first one in your neighborhood or school with the newest Clue tape, thus giving you access to the newest LOX freestyles, or Jay-Z remix or Nas record, before anyone else who hadn't gotten to the mixtape spot yet to buy their own copy.

Emcees often say that mixtapes are a way of keeping the hype going in between albums. Do you ever worry that your mixtapes will be better than your albums? Does it matter if they are?

I personally don't worry about that, because I know how to make a mixtape and an album, where they both do what they're supposed to do. To me, a mixtape is more free spirited, more "shock and awe" inducing, as far as witty lyrics and punchlines. In today's day and age, mixtapes are now spawning radio singles and videos, so you're more aware of that reality and you keep that in mind when recording. But the general idea of a mixtape is to just keep it open and have fun. An album is where your themes, story lines, concepts, song writing, singles, etc. all go. The only artists who make mixtapes better than their albums are the ones who haven't grasped the idea of what a complete album should sound and feel like. Song writing is key.

Mixtapes typically feature beats that have been used before, but The Great Debater doesn't; it's all original production. Why did you decide to go that route?

Well, throughout history, mixtapes have been built around other artists' instrumentals, but I'd say since about 2009, 90% of the mixtapes that are released are all original music. The only thing that separates mixtapes from albums nowadays is that mixtapes are free and albums are $9.99 and up. Music has gotten so fickle now, and there's so much of it being released so rapidly, you have to offer your fans more. They aren't satisfied with you rapping over other people's beats that they already have in their iPods. They want your mixtape to be great and your album to be greater, with the material all being 100% new.

You've penned a few critically acclaimed mixtapes and an album, where do you place The Great Debater in your discography?

The Great Debater is definitely amongst the top of my ranks as far as what I feel are my best pieces of work. I don't like to compare my mixtapes to my albums because they have different goals, so to me its not fair. But if you look at all of my mixtapes, it’s easily the best one, hands down.

It features a picture of the Cosbys on the cover. Why?

The theme of the project is loosely based around the Huxtable family. The idea is that, to me, growing up, I always thought the Huxtable family represented winning. To have a beautiful wife, huge home that you owned, dope kids, doctor and lawyer money, Park Slope Brooklyn, to me, that was winning. I strived for that as a kid and pictured me in those sweaters and in that household. So essentially, the tape is all about winning. Success, and all that it takes to get there via this twisted music game.

Do you approach an album differently than a mixtape?

Definitely. I save all of my more deep, story telling and concept driven emotions for my albums. I'd never put "For What It's Worth" or "Like A Marathon" or "Under Pressure" on a mixtape, which is why they went on The Salvation [his major label debut]. And I'd never put "Rap Like Me" or any of those types of records on an album, which is why that type of material is on The Great Debater. They're all incredible records, but each has its purpose.

Hip-hop blogs like Nah Right and others have definitely impacted mixtapes and the way "underground" emcees like yourself are heard. Would you say their proliferation has helped or hurt the game?

I'd say it's definitely helped. To be able to get your music all over the country, and then all over the world, via a website, is incredible. When I started out, the blogs were in their beginning stages, so it was still about going to the mixtape spots, sneaker stores, mom and pop record stores, etc, and getting your tape in there. I traveled all around NY, Philly, Boston, Connecticut, Virginia, D.C., Baltimore and beyond, physically putting my tapes in stores. Now I just send out an email and it's all over the blogs in five minutes.

If you had to pick one track from The Great Debater to play for someone who typically doesn't listen to hip-hop, which would it be and why?

If I had to choose one, which would be tough, it'd be "The Definitive Prayer." On that song, I just rapped and rapped and rapped some more. There's no hook, no added effects or sounds to mesh with other genres; just straight beats and raps. When I wrote that record, I just did everything I felt when I heard the beat. The horns, the drum rolls, the keys, it all screamed "hunger," so I expressed that lyrically. Hip-hop started out as a way to express angst and hunger, and I'm not into staying in the past at all, but if someone has never heard hip-hop before, I'd suggest that they start there.



Chris O'Shea is a writer living in Brooklyn. He once saw Nelson in concert.

Photo of Skyzoo by Mookie X. Photo of The Great Debater by Skyzoo.

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2011/06/a-q-a-with-skyzoo-mixtape-master/feed 1 Daniel Domscheit-Berg And WikiLeaks' Insecure Future http://www.theawl.com/2011/05/wikileakss-insecure-future-with-an-interview-with-daniel-domscheit-berg http://www.theawl.com/2011/05/wikileakss-insecure-future-with-an-interview-with-daniel-domscheit-berg#comments Wed, 04 May 2011 12:20:35 +0000 Maria Bustillos http://www.theawl.com/2011/05/wikileakss-insecure-future-with-an-interview-with-daniel-domscheit-berg With all the hoopla that seems eternally to surround WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, one might easily have formed the impression that WikiLeaks is a thriving concern, and that Assange himself is still the world's most powerful and effective champion of press freedom. While it's true that WikiLeaks has accomplished great things, initiating a powerful worldwide movement toward transparency and free speech, a closer look reveals that recent defections have badly crippled the WikiLeaks organization and that the increasingly erratic, mercurial Assange may have shot his bolt. The defectors have moved on and are developing a successor site, OpenLeaks, which seems likely to take up where WikiLeaks left off.

WikiLeaks has been unable to accept submissions of new documents for over six months. According to former WikiLeaks spokesman Daniel Domscheit-Berg's recent book, Inside Wikileaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website, that is because WikiLeaks is no longer in possession of the secure submission platform built by a programmer identified in the book only as "the architect." Both Domscheit-Berg and the architect broke with Assange in September 2010 along with at least four other staffers. When he departed the architect apparently packed up his intellectual property and took it with him—since he felt that WikiLeaks was not being run properly, taking his software back meant that at least he couldn't be held responsible for any disasters arising from its use.

This submission system is a maze of encryptions and techno-obfuscations spread across a worldwide network, designed to make the identity and whereabouts of potential whistleblowers completely untraceable. The implementation of such a system is far more difficult than it might sound. A few things are absolutely necessary in order to prevent all kinds of mess from occurring, both for the leak sites and for the informants they enable. First, there must be no earthly way of knowing where the material comes from, not even under the legal compulsion of a government or court. Second, the material has to be encrypted, so that it can't be read by anyone who might want to steal it. Third, the material has to be kept absolutely secure, backed up in many safe places. This is the sort of system eventually devised by the architect on behalf of WikiLeaks, before he became so furious with Julian Assange that he pulled up stakes and vamoosed.

Other whistleblower initiatives such as the Al Jazeera Transparency Unit, BalkanLeaks
et al. ask (but do not always require) that those submitting documents use the anonymous Tor network to transmit their material across the web. GreenLeaks, which is focused on environmental issues, requests submission by post: you put your stuff on a pen drive and send it along in the mail. You'd think that even one of Len Deighton's lowliest goons could foil this system (wait by mailbox in trenchcoat, etc.), but what the GreenLeaks submissions strategy really suggests is the vulnerability of Internet traffic to detection. This group has decided that, for the moment at least, the ordinary post is safer.

It seems unlikely that just using Tor servers would be enough to protect a source's anonymity completely. Apparently it is possible to track users coming in and out of the Tor network, for example. Though a knowledgeable computer user could protect himself by using anonymous public Wi-Fi connections and so on, until OpenLeaks (or equiv.) is online and able to offer a securely anonymous system for submissions, would-be whistleblowers will be taking more than the ideal zero amount of risk by sending their information over the Internet.

Packet-sniffing technology was scary enough ten years ago. Today it's safe to assume that determined parties can track nearly everything that takes place online. With the kind of heat there must be on every stray packet that even brushes up against the various WikiLeaks domains, it would be crazy for them to accept submissions until they've rebuilt a new, rock-solid system. Thus the architect's departure last September meant that WikiLeaks could no longer accept new documents safely.

In a sense, WikiLeaks has been closed for business since that day.

I don't know exactly why, as of the end of 2010, three months after our departure, the system is still not really back up on its feet. It shows that the current team is overtaxed and perhaps, to some extent at least, just not up to the job. It also shows how unsecure the system is. It has become a security risk for everyone involved.
—Daniel Domscheit-Berg, Inside WikiLeaks

***

Inside Wikileaks received decidedly mixed reviews after its publication in February, and it's true the book shows signs of having been written and edited in some haste. Still, posterity might well come to regard this book very highly; it's an unusual document in which the worlds of politics, technology and media theory collide.

Many commenters seem to have felt that the author of Inside Wikileaks comes off a bit like a jilted lover; certainly there's no shortage of wild anecdotes about Julian Assange in this book. We see the eccentric Australian sliding down banisters, borrowing a jacket off his host so that he can feel "in character" while writing an important press release, and then falling asleep in the jacket; taking more than his share of the Spam (tinned variety); being given five minutes to make a speech and taking forty-five; getting into a pointless shouting match with a gang of conductors on an Italian train; in constant terror of being watched and followed; and being dubbed the "Disco King" by amazed Icelandic lookers-on in a nightclub. (There's video online of Assange's amusingly prowly dance moves, quite possibly from the evening in question.) And there is a lot of far more serious criticism, as well.

Anyone who's ever worked with a brilliant and capricious egotist will find much of Domscheit-Berg's description of Julian Assange very familiar. For example, Assange was apparently annoyed whenever Domscheit-Berg was described as a "founder" of WikiLeaks. Given that Domscheit-Berg busted tail like one, quit his day job and used the severance money to buy servers for the project and dedicated every waking moment to the organization starting from before even the Julius Baer revelations of 2008, you'd think that Assange would have been happy to call him a founder. But no. Domscheit-Berg's version of events is here quite credible, for Assange's public pronouncements have often bordered on the megalomaniacal. In private, they bounded right over that border; he once wrote to Icelandic WikiLeaks volunteer Herbert Snorrason, for example, "I am the heart and soul of this organization, its founder, philosopher, spokesperson, original coder, organizer, financier and all the rest. If you have a problem with me, piss off."

This high-handed tone seems to have been his way of dealing with disagreements generally, even with his closest associate, Domscheit-Berg, whom he allegedly threatened regularly with destruction, imprisonment, etc., toward the end of their association.

"Thankfully, there's no 'founder' at OpenLeaks. I never want to have to discuss this issue again. A lot of people have contributed to the development of the idea, and they are all originators."
—Daniel Domscheit-Berg, Inside WikiLeaks

Domscheit-Berg does not emerge from his own book without stain. He admits his complicity in a lot of shenanigans, most seriously in lying like a rug about the number of people involved in vetting most of the documents WikiLeaks received before publishing them. One wonders how many of those who submitted documents to the original site would have run the risks they did had they imagined that the organization was so small and so vulnerable; how close they might have come to the cell adjoining Bradley Manning's.

Until late 2009, no one except Julian and I checked the vast majority of documents that had been submitted. Strictly speaking, we weren't lying when we said we had a pool of around eight hundred volunteer experts at our disposal. But we neglected to mention that we had no mechanism in place for integrating them into our workflow. [...] Instead, Julian and I usually checked whether documents had been manipulated technologically and did a few Google searches to see whether they struck us as genuine. We could only hope that things would turn out all right […] We were acting irresponsibly, playing a risky game with our sources' trust and our supporters' donations.

This naivete is shocking, coming from such a brainy character, until we recall that Domscheit-Berg was 28 years old in late 2007, when he first volunteered to join WikiLeaks. Only imagine what a clever political saboteur might have done with this near-zero-fact-checking system. It's fortunate that their luck held for long enough that these weaknesses could be addressed.

The two also told a lot of fibs about the security and reliability of their original network. It's stunning to learn that the whole of the WikiLeaks system originally resided on one creaky old server. In its early days, WikiLeaks could easily have been taken down by a single guy armed with a can of Coke, and I don't mean MacGyver, I mean really anybody with a can of Coke and the tiniest bit of ill will.

Before I read the book, I had thought that the rift at WikiLeaks was mainly a philosophical one. Both men believe passionately in "subjecting the power that is exercised behind closed doors to public scrutiny," as Domscheit-Berg puts it. Both share a love of anarchist politics, as well; Domscheit-Berg calls Proudhon's What is Property? "the most important book ever written." But their approaches could not be more different. The reckless Assange likes to make a splash, while Domscheit-Berg is unflappably cool, quiet, restrained and logical. Literal almost to a fault. He's a bit like Mr. Logic from the Viz comics. Here's one example of this almost comically precise mind in a jocular mood:

Along with trying to found a global anticensorsip movement, I had assigned myself another job, perhaps the toughest of my life. I had gotten T-shirts printed with the WL logo. Because I thought our logo stood out best that way and because I wanted to save two cents per T-shirt, I'd ordered them in white. That was idiotic. Who buys white T-shirts? Especially in a social clique where black T-shirts are something of a dress code. I myself had never worn a white T-shirt in my entire life!

Clearly, there is room for legitimate differences regarding, to give one example, how much of the raw material submitted to Wikileaks might have been edited and contextualized for splash-making purposes. But the rupture between Assange and Domscheit-Berg seems to have gone far deeper than this. Assange, according to Domscheit-Berg, eventually demanded absolute control over every aspect of WikiLeaks operations, from financial management to publicity and even to deciding what revenge to take against journalists who wrote unsympathetically about him or the project. He became an ever-looser cannon.

Also of interest is the fact that Birgitta Jónsdóttir, the activist and member of the Icelandic Parliament who worked closely with WikiLeaks representatives and others in Iceland to spearhead the IMMI laws that will create a global haven for press freedom in that country, has also broken with WikiLeaks. She gave a revealing interview to the Belgian journalist Dominique Deckmyn that appeared in De Standaard in late February (this excerpt's translation has been revised by Jónsdóttir; the full and, she says, somewhat less accurate translation appears on Cryptome.)


DD: Are you still in touch with the WikiLeaks people?

BJ: No, only with former WikiLeaks people. I am in touch with Daniel (Domscheit-Berg) and some others, although it is hard to define who does and does not belong to WikiLeaks now. Some people are semi-active or not at all active, and some people want never to talk to Julian Assange again.

DD: The organization is identified with Assange personally in the media. Do you regret that?

BJ: What is a pity is that the messenger has turned into the message. That means that the documents have not been paid the attention which they deserve. I no longer know how often I have refused to collaborate on yet another portrait of Julian Assange. It has come to revolve too much around one person, one hero, one messiah, even: That is what he is called on [one of the fan pages on] Facebook [http://www.facebook.com/pages/Assangeism-The-New-Religion/169890589708692}. It is almost a new religion, but that is certainly partly the media's fault. They have decided to create a new Icarus myth; they have blown a great deal of wind under Icarus' wings instead of focusing their attention on the real story – the contents of WikiLeaks. That has a great deal to do with the situation in which the media currently find themselves. They are seeking as many clicks as possible, and the stories which get the most clicks on websites are usually about scandals of a sexual nature or mishaps of famous people.

None of this takes away from Assange's courage, nor from the success his efforts have met with in revealing corruption and wrongdoing. It is sobering to consider the stresses under which he has lived, his nomadic existence, and also that there is no doubt that this man has made a staggering number of very powerful enemies who would like to see him jailed or worse. In the circumstances it's hardly surprising that he would crack up some.

This whole story uncomfortably recalls that of Greg Mortenson, the best-selling author of Three Cups of Tea and founder and director of the Central Asia Institute, a charity that has raised millions for building schools in Afghanistan and elsewhere in Central Asia. Jon Krakauer and "60 Minutes" recently discredited Mortenson, another charismatic and mercurial figure loved by many, by producing convincing evidence that he has misappropriated funds and done a terrible job of operating and maintaining the few schools his charity has managed to build.

Mortenson appears to have come to believe that his unique value as a fundraiser and spokesman raised him above such petty concerns as ensuring proper management and accounting practices at the Central Asia Institute. He was on my mind a lot as I studied the career trajectory of Julian Assange. This is such a common story among fallen religious leaders, fallen politicians. How easy it must be to rationalize all one's bad behavior with the idea that all you are doing is for the greater good. The cause is just, you are "indispensable," you have a plenary indulgence.

Then, because all you do is always for the greater good, such lies as you choose to tell are spotless, too. As it happens, Assange's old hacker name, "Mendax", means "liar" in Latin.

***

There's still a lot of friction between the former partners. It flared up again recently when WikiLeaks sent out this Twitter on April 24th:

Domschiet, NYT, Guardian, attempted Gitmo spoiler against our 8 group coalition. We had intel on them and published first.less than a minute ago via web Favorite Retweet ReplyWikiLeaks
wikileaks

Why should an organization dedicated to press freedom care two pins about who published first? Also, this seems a rather transparent attempt to accuse Domscheit-Berg of having leaked the Guantánamo documents to the New York Times and the Guardian. (WikiLeaks had been working with the UK Telegraph and the Washington Post on this material, and they promptly published their own work after it became clear that other organizations were getting in front of them.)

It's true that Domscheit-Berg is no fan of the exclusive deals WikiLeaks has made with press organizations, having frequently said that this practice robs WikiLeaks of its neutrality, and reduces it to a tool of big media. It's also true that Domscheit-Berg has shown himself to be more than equal to telling a useful fib, from time to time. On the flip side, though, WikiLeaks does not exactly lack for disaffected staffers who might well believe the Guantánamo material ought to have been released long before now.

Just by chance I was already in touch with Daniel Domscheit-Berg in preparation for a more general analysis of press freedom issues when this tweet came over the wire, so I wrote to him asking what the hell, or rather, "What do you think of the idea of 'spoilers' in the context of the work you are doing? Aren't WL and OpenLeaks supposed to be about press freedom, rather than 'scoops'?" He responded:

I saw that tweet this morning, and must admit I am puzzled. I agree about your statement about the scoops, but even if it was about scoops I have no clue what they mean. I have not had those files and certainly have not been working with anyone on them. Whatever "intel" it is, it sure is bogus.

Bill Keller at the Times clarified some of the questions surrounding their publication of the Guantánamo documents in an email:

It is true that we obtained the material without conditions, except an agreement not to identify our source. That means we were not bound by whatever embargo Mr. Assange put on his "8 group coalition." I assume "intel" means that one of the inside group (so to speak) picked up information that we were moving toward publication. (I don't know what tipped them off, but three major news organizations — NYT, Guardian and NPR — moving a big project along make a certain amount of noise.) I gather that somewhat spoiled the plans of Mr. Assange and the other news organizations.

I can't speak to Mr. Assange's motives. Sorry.

(Well, you can't fault me for asking.)

The first WikiLeaks tweet was followed just a few hours later with another.

We are pleased that the NYT, Guardian & NPR eventually added their weight to increasing our impact, regardless of the intent of some.less than a minute ago via web Favorite Retweet ReplyWikiLeaks
wikileaks

One can't help feeling, reading these faintly petulant messages, that Assange is putting his ego ahead of the primary goal of promoting press freedom and transparency. And the media complicity in focusing on Assange himself rather than on the cause he serves is paradoxically very damaging to that cause. There's more than enough reason to believe Daniel Domscheit-Berg's claim that this is part of the reason why he broke with Assange.

The case of slain Kenyan human rights activists Oscar Kamau King'ara and John Paul Oulu is also instructive on this point. The two men were assassinated on March 5, 2009, in their car in the middle of rush-hour Nairobi traffic; though a statement released by WikiLeaks claimed that they were "WikiLeaks writers," the career of Oscar Kamau King'ara predated WikiLeaks by many years. King'ara's Oscar Foundation had been active since 1998 in such issues as providing legal aid to the poor, in promoting children's rights, in HIV activism and so on.

Human rights organizations, Kenyan journalists and UN investigator Philip Alston were quick to cast suspicion on the police for the assassinations of King'ara and Oulu, because, starting in 2007, the Oscar Foundation had been publishing reports that exposed the extra-judicial killing of thousands of young Kenyans dating from 2002 in an alleged police crackdown on gang activity. King'ara and his associates had been steadily presenting their evidence of the murders in public. Their report was submitted to Parliament in advance of a public debate on the killings. There seems to be little doubt among observers that it is this work, done in the open, that precipitated the assassinations.

It made sense for the Kenyan human rights activists to try to broadcast their findings to the widest possible audience. In November of 2008 a report based in large part on the Oscar Foundation's work, the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights's "Cry of Blood," appeared for one week on the front page at WikiLeaks. This publication brought the Kenyan police abuses much greater attention in the world press, which might be assumed to have precipitated Parliament's willingness to take the matter up. In June of 2009, Amnesty International gave an award to WikiLeaks and Assange for furthering the work of the murdered Kenyan activists.

Certainly WikiLeaks was instrumental in spreading the story, but the story itself is not about WikiLeaks. It is about the exposure of Kenyan police corruption and mass murder. It is both disingenuous and cynical to refer to these men, who literally died for their efforts to speak truth to power, as "WikiLeaks writers." And yet as recently as last month in a panel discussion at UC Berkeley Assange was again implying that their deaths were essentially an attack on WikiLeaks.I

As with Oscar Kamau King'ara and John Paul Oulu, so perhaps with Bradley Manning. There are people who see bad things going on and take a chance, maybe a terrible chance, on ending them by telling what they know.

What finally emerges in the Q&A with Daniel Domscheit-Berg that follows here is that the value of projects like WikiLeaks and OpenLeaks has nothing to do with drawing attention to one particular story or another. It's in providing that unbreakable and secret conduit between the media and those who wish to bring hidden information to light. It's in offering safety and anonymity to people who want to speak out, but who are understandably afraid to do so.

It's been quite chilling to see the efforts of our own Department of Justice to shut this effort down. They really ought to knock it off with that.

"We in the West have a long and unworthy tradition of choking off attempts at public discussion with reference to some 'greater good' that needs to be protected … I am convinced that citizens not only can, but must be burdened with the truth."
—Daniel Domscheit-Berg, Inside WikiLeaks

Next: An interview with Daniel Domscheit-Berg.

---

See more posts by Maria Bustillos

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]]> With all the hoopla that seems eternally to surround WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, one might easily have formed the impression that WikiLeaks is a thriving concern, and that Assange himself is still the world's most powerful and effective champion of press freedom. While it's true that WikiLeaks has accomplished great things, initiating a powerful worldwide movement toward transparency and free speech, a closer look reveals that recent defections have badly crippled the WikiLeaks organization and that the increasingly erratic, mercurial Assange may have shot his bolt. The defectors have moved on and are developing a successor site, OpenLeaks, which seems likely to take up where WikiLeaks left off.

WikiLeaks has been unable to accept submissions of new documents for over six months. According to former WikiLeaks spokesman Daniel Domscheit-Berg's recent book, Inside Wikileaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website, that is because WikiLeaks is no longer in possession of the secure submission platform built by a programmer identified in the book only as "the architect." Both Domscheit-Berg and the architect broke with Assange in September 2010 along with at least four other staffers. When he departed the architect apparently packed up his intellectual property and took it with him—since he felt that WikiLeaks was not being run properly, taking his software back meant that at least he couldn't be held responsible for any disasters arising from its use.

This submission system is a maze of encryptions and techno-obfuscations spread across a worldwide network, designed to make the identity and whereabouts of potential whistleblowers completely untraceable. The implementation of such a system is far more difficult than it might sound. A few things are absolutely necessary in order to prevent all kinds of mess from occurring, both for the leak sites and for the informants they enable. First, there must be no earthly way of knowing where the material comes from, not even under the legal compulsion of a government or court. Second, the material has to be encrypted, so that it can't be read by anyone who might want to steal it. Third, the material has to be kept absolutely secure, backed up in many safe places. This is the sort of system eventually devised by the architect on behalf of WikiLeaks, before he became so furious with Julian Assange that he pulled up stakes and vamoosed.

Other whistleblower initiatives such as the Al Jazeera Transparency Unit, BalkanLeaks
et al. ask (but do not always require) that those submitting documents use the anonymous Tor network to transmit their material across the web. GreenLeaks, which is focused on environmental issues, requests submission by post: you put your stuff on a pen drive and send it along in the mail. You'd think that even one of Len Deighton's lowliest goons could foil this system (wait by mailbox in trenchcoat, etc.), but what the GreenLeaks submissions strategy really suggests is the vulnerability of Internet traffic to detection. This group has decided that, for the moment at least, the ordinary post is safer.

It seems unlikely that just using Tor servers would be enough to protect a source's anonymity completely. Apparently it is possible to track users coming in and out of the Tor network, for example. Though a knowledgeable computer user could protect himself by using anonymous public Wi-Fi connections and so on, until OpenLeaks (or equiv.) is online and able to offer a securely anonymous system for submissions, would-be whistleblowers will be taking more than the ideal zero amount of risk by sending their information over the Internet.

Packet-sniffing technology was scary enough ten years ago. Today it's safe to assume that determined parties can track nearly everything that takes place online. With the kind of heat there must be on every stray packet that even brushes up against the various WikiLeaks domains, it would be crazy for them to accept submissions until they've rebuilt a new, rock-solid system. Thus the architect's departure last September meant that WikiLeaks could no longer accept new documents safely.

In a sense, WikiLeaks has been closed for business since that day.

I don't know exactly why, as of the end of 2010, three months after our departure, the system is still not really back up on its feet. It shows that the current team is overtaxed and perhaps, to some extent at least, just not up to the job. It also shows how unsecure the system is. It has become a security risk for everyone involved.
—Daniel Domscheit-Berg, Inside WikiLeaks

***

Inside Wikileaks received decidedly mixed reviews after its publication in February, and it's true the book shows signs of having been written and edited in some haste. Still, posterity might well come to regard this book very highly; it's an unusual document in which the worlds of politics, technology and media theory collide.

Many commenters seem to have felt that the author of Inside Wikileaks comes off a bit like a jilted lover; certainly there's no shortage of wild anecdotes about Julian Assange in this book. We see the eccentric Australian sliding down banisters, borrowing a jacket off his host so that he can feel "in character" while writing an important press release, and then falling asleep in the jacket; taking more than his share of the Spam (tinned variety); being given five minutes to make a speech and taking forty-five; getting into a pointless shouting match with a gang of conductors on an Italian train; in constant terror of being watched and followed; and being dubbed the "Disco King" by amazed Icelandic lookers-on in a nightclub. (There's video online of Assange's amusingly prowly dance moves, quite possibly from the evening in question.) And there is a lot of far more serious criticism, as well.

Anyone who's ever worked with a brilliant and capricious egotist will find much of Domscheit-Berg's description of Julian Assange very familiar. For example, Assange was apparently annoyed whenever Domscheit-Berg was described as a "founder" of WikiLeaks. Given that Domscheit-Berg busted tail like one, quit his day job and used the severance money to buy servers for the project and dedicated every waking moment to the organization starting from before even the Julius Baer revelations of 2008, you'd think that Assange would have been happy to call him a founder. But no. Domscheit-Berg's version of events is here quite credible, for Assange's public pronouncements have often bordered on the megalomaniacal. In private, they bounded right over that border; he once wrote to Icelandic WikiLeaks volunteer Herbert Snorrason, for example, "I am the heart and soul of this organization, its founder, philosopher, spokesperson, original coder, organizer, financier and all the rest. If you have a problem with me, piss off."

This high-handed tone seems to have been his way of dealing with disagreements generally, even with his closest associate, Domscheit-Berg, whom he allegedly threatened regularly with destruction, imprisonment, etc., toward the end of their association.

"Thankfully, there's no 'founder' at OpenLeaks. I never want to have to discuss this issue again. A lot of people have contributed to the development of the idea, and they are all originators."
—Daniel Domscheit-Berg, Inside WikiLeaks

Domscheit-Berg does not emerge from his own book without stain. He admits his complicity in a lot of shenanigans, most seriously in lying like a rug about the number of people involved in vetting most of the documents WikiLeaks received before publishing them. One wonders how many of those who submitted documents to the original site would have run the risks they did had they imagined that the organization was so small and so vulnerable; how close they might have come to the cell adjoining Bradley Manning's.

Until late 2009, no one except Julian and I checked the vast majority of documents that had been submitted. Strictly speaking, we weren't lying when we said we had a pool of around eight hundred volunteer experts at our disposal. But we neglected to mention that we had no mechanism in place for integrating them into our workflow. [...] Instead, Julian and I usually checked whether documents had been manipulated technologically and did a few Google searches to see whether they struck us as genuine. We could only hope that things would turn out all right […] We were acting irresponsibly, playing a risky game with our sources' trust and our supporters' donations.

This naivete is shocking, coming from such a brainy character, until we recall that Domscheit-Berg was 28 years old in late 2007, when he first volunteered to join WikiLeaks. Only imagine what a clever political saboteur might have done with this near-zero-fact-checking system. It's fortunate that their luck held for long enough that these weaknesses could be addressed.

The two also told a lot of fibs about the security and reliability of their original network. It's stunning to learn that the whole of the WikiLeaks system originally resided on one creaky old server. In its early days, WikiLeaks could easily have been taken down by a single guy armed with a can of Coke, and I don't mean MacGyver, I mean really anybody with a can of Coke and the tiniest bit of ill will.

Before I read the book, I had thought that the rift at WikiLeaks was mainly a philosophical one. Both men believe passionately in "subjecting the power that is exercised behind closed doors to public scrutiny," as Domscheit-Berg puts it. Both share a love of anarchist politics, as well; Domscheit-Berg calls Proudhon's What is Property? "the most important book ever written." But their approaches could not be more different. The reckless Assange likes to make a splash, while Domscheit-Berg is unflappably cool, quiet, restrained and logical. Literal almost to a fault. He's a bit like Mr. Logic from the Viz comics. Here's one example of this almost comically precise mind in a jocular mood:

Along with trying to found a global anticensorsip movement, I had assigned myself another job, perhaps the toughest of my life. I had gotten T-shirts printed with the WL logo. Because I thought our logo stood out best that way and because I wanted to save two cents per T-shirt, I'd ordered them in white. That was idiotic. Who buys white T-shirts? Especially in a social clique where black T-shirts are something of a dress code. I myself had never worn a white T-shirt in my entire life!

Clearly, there is room for legitimate differences regarding, to give one example, how much of the raw material submitted to Wikileaks might have been edited and contextualized for splash-making purposes. But the rupture between Assange and Domscheit-Berg seems to have gone far deeper than this. Assange, according to Domscheit-Berg, eventually demanded absolute control over every aspect of WikiLeaks operations, from financial management to publicity and even to deciding what revenge to take against journalists who wrote unsympathetically about him or the project. He became an ever-looser cannon.

Also of interest is the fact that Birgitta Jónsdóttir, the activist and member of the Icelandic Parliament who worked closely with WikiLeaks representatives and others in Iceland to spearhead the IMMI laws that will create a global haven for press freedom in that country, has also broken with WikiLeaks. She gave a revealing interview to the Belgian journalist Dominique Deckmyn that appeared in De Standaard in late February (this excerpt's translation has been revised by Jónsdóttir; the full and, she says, somewhat less accurate translation appears on Cryptome.)


DD: Are you still in touch with the WikiLeaks people?

BJ: No, only with former WikiLeaks people. I am in touch with Daniel (Domscheit-Berg) and some others, although it is hard to define who does and does not belong to WikiLeaks now. Some people are semi-active or not at all active, and some people want never to talk to Julian Assange again.

DD: The organization is identified with Assange personally in the media. Do you regret that?

BJ: What is a pity is that the messenger has turned into the message. That means that the documents have not been paid the attention which they deserve. I no longer know how often I have refused to collaborate on yet another portrait of Julian Assange. It has come to revolve too much around one person, one hero, one messiah, even: That is what he is called on [one of the fan pages on] Facebook [http://www.facebook.com/pages/Assangeism-The-New-Religion/169890589708692}. It is almost a new religion, but that is certainly partly the media's fault. They have decided to create a new Icarus myth; they have blown a great deal of wind under Icarus' wings instead of focusing their attention on the real story – the contents of WikiLeaks. That has a great deal to do with the situation in which the media currently find themselves. They are seeking as many clicks as possible, and the stories which get the most clicks on websites are usually about scandals of a sexual nature or mishaps of famous people.

None of this takes away from Assange's courage, nor from the success his efforts have met with in revealing corruption and wrongdoing. It is sobering to consider the stresses under which he has lived, his nomadic existence, and also that there is no doubt that this man has made a staggering number of very powerful enemies who would like to see him jailed or worse. In the circumstances it's hardly surprising that he would crack up some.

This whole story uncomfortably recalls that of Greg Mortenson, the best-selling author of Three Cups of Tea and founder and director of the Central Asia Institute, a charity that has raised millions for building schools in Afghanistan and elsewhere in Central Asia. Jon Krakauer and "60 Minutes" recently discredited Mortenson, another charismatic and mercurial figure loved by many, by producing convincing evidence that he has misappropriated funds and done a terrible job of operating and maintaining the few schools his charity has managed to build.

Mortenson appears to have come to believe that his unique value as a fundraiser and spokesman raised him above such petty concerns as ensuring proper management and accounting practices at the Central Asia Institute. He was on my mind a lot as I studied the career trajectory of Julian Assange. This is such a common story among fallen religious leaders, fallen politicians. How easy it must be to rationalize all one's bad behavior with the idea that all you are doing is for the greater good. The cause is just, you are "indispensable," you have a plenary indulgence.

Then, because all you do is always for the greater good, such lies as you choose to tell are spotless, too. As it happens, Assange's old hacker name, "Mendax", means "liar" in Latin.

***

There's still a lot of friction between the former partners. It flared up again recently when WikiLeaks sent out this Twitter on April 24th:

Domschiet, NYT, Guardian, attempted Gitmo spoiler against our 8 group coalition. We had intel on them and published first.less than a minute ago via web Favorite Retweet ReplyWikiLeaks
wikileaks

Why should an organization dedicated to press freedom care two pins about who published first? Also, this seems a rather transparent attempt to accuse Domscheit-Berg of having leaked the Guantánamo documents to the New York Times and the Guardian. (WikiLeaks had been working with the UK Telegraph and the Washington Post on this material, and they promptly published their own work after it became clear that other organizations were getting in front of them.)

It's true that Domscheit-Berg is no fan of the exclusive deals WikiLeaks has made with press organizations, having frequently said that this practice robs WikiLeaks of its neutrality, and reduces it to a tool of big media. It's also true that Domscheit-Berg has shown himself to be more than equal to telling a useful fib, from time to time. On the flip side, though, WikiLeaks does not exactly lack for disaffected staffers who might well believe the Guantánamo material ought to have been released long before now.

Just by chance I was already in touch with Daniel Domscheit-Berg in preparation for a more general analysis of press freedom issues when this tweet came over the wire, so I wrote to him asking what the hell, or rather, "What do you think of the idea of 'spoilers' in the context of the work you are doing? Aren't WL and OpenLeaks supposed to be about press freedom, rather than 'scoops'?" He responded:

I saw that tweet this morning, and must admit I am puzzled. I agree about your statement about the scoops, but even if it was about scoops I have no clue what they mean. I have not had those files and certainly have not been working with anyone on them. Whatever "intel" it is, it sure is bogus.

Bill Keller at the Times clarified some of the questions surrounding their publication of the Guantánamo documents in an email:

It is true that we obtained the material without conditions, except an agreement not to identify our source. That means we were not bound by whatever embargo Mr. Assange put on his "8 group coalition." I assume "intel" means that one of the inside group (so to speak) picked up information that we were moving toward publication. (I don't know what tipped them off, but three major news organizations — NYT, Guardian and NPR — moving a big project along make a certain amount of noise.) I gather that somewhat spoiled the plans of Mr. Assange and the other news organizations.

I can't speak to Mr. Assange's motives. Sorry.

(Well, you can't fault me for asking.)

The first WikiLeaks tweet was followed just a few hours later with another.

We are pleased that the NYT, Guardian & NPR eventually added their weight to increasing our impact, regardless of the intent of some.less than a minute ago via web Favorite Retweet ReplyWikiLeaks
wikileaks

One can't help feeling, reading these faintly petulant messages, that Assange is putting his ego ahead of the primary goal of promoting press freedom and transparency. And the media complicity in focusing on Assange himself rather than on the cause he serves is paradoxically very damaging to that cause. There's more than enough reason to believe Daniel Domscheit-Berg's claim that this is part of the reason why he broke with Assange.

The case of slain Kenyan human rights activists Oscar Kamau King'ara and John Paul Oulu is also instructive on this point. The two men were assassinated on March 5, 2009, in their car in the middle of rush-hour Nairobi traffic; though a statement released by WikiLeaks claimed that they were "WikiLeaks writers," the career of Oscar Kamau King'ara predated WikiLeaks by many years. King'ara's Oscar Foundation had been active since 1998 in such issues as providing legal aid to the poor, in promoting children's rights, in HIV activism and so on.

Human rights organizations, Kenyan journalists and UN investigator Philip Alston were quick to cast suspicion on the police for the assassinations of King'ara and Oulu, because, starting in 2007, the Oscar Foundation had been publishing reports that exposed the extra-judicial killing of thousands of young Kenyans dating from 2002 in an alleged police crackdown on gang activity. King'ara and his associates had been steadily presenting their evidence of the murders in public. Their report was submitted to Parliament in advance of a public debate on the killings. There seems to be little doubt among observers that it is this work, done in the open, that precipitated the assassinations.

It made sense for the Kenyan human rights activists to try to broadcast their findings to the widest possible audience. In November of 2008 a report based in large part on the Oscar Foundation's work, the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights's "Cry of Blood," appeared for one week on the front page at WikiLeaks. This publication brought the Kenyan police abuses much greater attention in the world press, which might be assumed to have precipitated Parliament's willingness to take the matter up. In June of 2009, Amnesty International gave an award to WikiLeaks and Assange for furthering the work of the murdered Kenyan activists.

Certainly WikiLeaks was instrumental in spreading the story, but the story itself is not about WikiLeaks. It is about the exposure of Kenyan police corruption and mass murder. It is both disingenuous and cynical to refer to these men, who literally died for their efforts to speak truth to power, as "WikiLeaks writers." And yet as recently as last month in a panel discussion at UC Berkeley Assange was again implying that their deaths were essentially an attack on WikiLeaks.I

As with Oscar Kamau King'ara and John Paul Oulu, so perhaps with Bradley Manning. There are people who see bad things going on and take a chance, maybe a terrible chance, on ending them by telling what they know.

What finally emerges in the Q&A with Daniel Domscheit-Berg that follows here is that the value of projects like WikiLeaks and OpenLeaks has nothing to do with drawing attention to one particular story or another. It's in providing that unbreakable and secret conduit between the media and those who wish to bring hidden information to light. It's in offering safety and anonymity to people who want to speak out, but who are understandably afraid to do so.

It's been quite chilling to see the efforts of our own Department of Justice to shut this effort down. They really ought to knock it off with that.

"We in the West have a long and unworthy tradition of choking off attempts at public discussion with reference to some 'greater good' that needs to be protected … I am convinced that citizens not only can, but must be burdened with the truth."
—Daniel Domscheit-Berg, Inside WikiLeaks

Next: An interview with Daniel Domscheit-Berg.

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