Further reasons why he's my hero

Yes, it's more wonderful words of wisdon from Dave Eggers. These come from an interview posted at www.armchairnews.com/freelance/eggers.html and even though its a long piece, every single word is worth reading because it is all true and it is all relevant and because it makes me want to run out in the street shouting YES YES YES YES YES!

Here we go:

You actually asked me the question: "Are you taking any steps to keep shit real?" I want you always to look back on this time as being a time when those words came out of your mouth.

Now, there was a time when such a question - albeit probably without the colloquial spin - would have originated from my own brain. Since I was thirteen, sitting in my orange-carpeted bedroom in ostensibly cutting-edge Lake Forest, Illinois, subscribing to the Village Voice and reading the earliest issues of Spin, I thought I had my ear to the railroad tracks of avant garde America. (Laurie Anderson, for example, had grown up only miles away!) I was always monitoring, with the most sensitive and well-calibrated apparatus, the degree of selloutitude exemplified by any given artist - musical, visual, theatrical, whatever. I was vigilant and merciless and knew it was my job to be so.

I bought R.E.M.'s first EP, Chronic Town, when it came out and thought I had found God. I loved Murmur, Reckoning, but then watched, with greater and greater dismay, as this obscure little band's audience grew, grew beyond obsessed people like myself, grew to encompass casual fans, people who had heard a song on the radio and picked up Green and listened for the hits. Old people liked them, and stupid people, and my moron neighbor who had sex with truck drivers. I wanted these phony R.E.M.-lovers dead.

But it was the band's fault, too. They played on Letterman. They switched record labels. Even their album covers seemed progressively more commercial. And when everyone I knew began liking them, I stopped. Had they changed, had their commitment to making art with integrity changed? I didn't care, because for me, any sort of popularity had an inverse relationship with what you term the keeping 'real' of 'shit.' When the Smiths became slightly popular they were sellouts. Bob Dylan appeared on MTV and of course was a sellout. Recently, just at dinner tonight, after a huge, sold-out reading by David Sedaris and Sarah Vowell (both sellouts), I was sitting next to an acquaintance, a very smart acquaintance married to the singer-songwriter of a very well-known band. I mentioned that I had seen the Flaming Lips the night before. She rolled her eyes. "Oh I really liked them on 90210," she sneered, assuming that this would put me and the band in our respective places.

However.

Was she aware that The Flaming Lips had composed an album requiring the simultaneous playing of four separate discs, on four separate CD players? Was she aware that the band had once, for a show at Lincoln Center, handed out to audience members something like 100 portable tape players, with 100 different tapes, and had them all played at the same time, creating a symphonic sort of effect, one which completely devastated everyone in attendance? I went on and on to her about the band's accomplishments, their experiments. Was she convinced that they were more than their one appearance with Jason Priestly? She was.

Now, at that concert the night before, Wayne Coyne, the lead singer, had himself addressed this issue, and to great effect. After playing much of their new album, the band paused and he spoke to the audience. I will paraphrase what he said:

"Hi. Well, some people get all bitter when some song of theirs gets popular, and they refuse to play it. But we're not like that. We're happy that people like this song. So here it goes."

Then they played the song. (You know the song.) "She Don't Use Jelly" is the song, and it is a silly song, and it was their most popular song. But to highlight their enthusiasm for playing the song, the band released, from the stage and from the balconies, about 200 balloons. (Some of the balloons, it should be noted, were released by two grown men in bunny suits.) Then while playing the song, Wayne sang with a puppet on his hand, who also sang into the microphone. It was fun. It was good.

But was it a sellout? Probably. By some standards, yes. Can a good band play their hit song? Should we hate them for this? Probably, probably. First 90210, now they go playing the song every stupid night. Everyone knows that 90210 is not cutting edge, and that a cutting edge alternarock band should not appear on such a show. That rule is clearly stated in the obligatory engrained computer-chip sellout manual that we were all given when we hit adolescence.

But this sellout manual serves only the lazy and small. Those who bestow sellouthood upon their former heroes are driven to do so by, first and foremost, the unshakable need to reduce. The average one of us - a taker-in of various and constant media, is absolutely overwhelmed - as he or she should be - with the sheer volume of artistic output in every conceivable medium given to the world every day - it is simply too much to begin to process or comprehend - and so we are forced to try to sort, to reduce. We designate, we label, we diminish, we create hierarchies and categories.

Through largely received wisdom, we rule out Tom Waits's new album because it's the same old same old, and we save $15. U2 has lost it, Radiohead is too popular. Country music is bad, Puff Daddy is bad, the last Wallace book was bad because that one reviewer said so. We decide that TV is bad unless it's the Sopranos. We liked Rick Moody and Jonathan Lethem and Jeffrey Eugenides until they allowed their books to become movies. And on and on. The point is that we do this and to a certain extent we must do this. We must create categories, and to an extent, hierarchies.

But you know what is easiest of all? When we dismiss.

Oh how gloriously comforting, to be able to write someone off. Thus, in the overcrowded pantheon of alternarock bands, at a certain juncture, it became necessary for a certain brand of person to write off The Flaming Lips, despite the fact that everyone knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that their music was superb and groundbreaking and real. We could write them off because they shared a few minutes with Jason Priestley and that terrifying Tori Spelling person. Or we could write them off because too many magazines have talked about them. Or because it looked like the bassist was wearing too much gel in his hair.

One less thing to think about. Now, how to kill off the rest of our heroes, to better make room for new ones?

We liked Guided by Voices until they let Ric Ocasek produce their latest album, and everyone knows Ocasek is a sellout, having written those mushy Cars songs in the late 80s, and then - gasp! - produced Weezer's album, and of course Weezer's no good, because that Sweater song was on the radio, right, and dorky teenage girls were singing it and we cannot have that and so Weezer is bad and Ocasek is bad and Guided by Voices are bad, even if Spike Jonze did direct that one Weezer video, and we like Spike Jonze, don't we?

Oh. No. We don't. We don't like him anymore because he's married to Sofia Coppola, and she is not cool. Not cool. So bad in Godfather 3, such nepotism. So let's check off Spike Jonze - leaving room in our brains for… who??

It's exhausting.

The only thing worse than this sort of activity is when people, students and teachers alike, run around college campuses calling each other racists and anti-Semites. It's born of boredom, lassitude. Too cowardly to address problems of substance where such problems actually are, we claw at those close to us. We point to our neighbor, in the khakis and sweater, and cry foul. It's ridiculous. We find enemies among our peers because we know them better, and their proximity and familiarity means we don't have to get off the couch to dismantle them.

And now, I am also a sellout. Here are my sins, many of which you may know about already:

First, I was a sellout because Might magazine took ads.
Then I was a sellout because our pages were color, and not stapled together at the Kinko's.
Then I was a sellout because I went to work for Esquire.
Now I'm a sellout because my book has sold many copies.
And because I have done many interviews.
And because I have let people take my picture.
And because my goddamn picture has been in just about every fucking magazine and newspaper printed in America.

And now, as far as McSweeney's is concerned, The Advocate interviewer wants to know if we're losing also our edge, if the magazine is selling out, hitting the mainstream, if we're still committed to publishing unknowns, and pieces killed by other magazines.

And the fact is, I don't give a fuck. When we did the last issue, this was my thought process: I saw a box. So I decided we'd do a box. We were given stories by some of our favorite writers - George Saunders, Rick Moody (who is uncool, uncool!), Haruki Murakami, Lydia Davis, others - and so we published them. Did I wonder if people would think we were selling out, that we were not fulfilling the mission they had assumed we had committed ourselves to?

No. I did not. Nor will I ever. We just don't care. We care about doing what we want to do creatively. We want to be interested in it. We want it to challenge us. We want it to be difficult. We want to reinvent the stupid thing every time. Would I ever think, before I did something, of how those with sellout monitors would respond to this or that move? I would not. The second I sense a thought like that trickling into my brain, I will put my head under the tires of a bus.

You want to know how big a sellout I am?

A few months ago I wrote an article for Time magazine and was paid $12,000 for it I am about to write something, 1,000 words, 3 pages or so, for something called Forbes ASAP, and for that I will be paid $6,000 For two years, until five months ago, I was on the payroll of ESPN magazine, as a consultant and sometime contributor. I was paid handsomely for doing very little. Same with my stint at Esquire. One year I spent there, with little to no duties. I wore khakis every day. Another Might editor and I, for almost a year, contributed to Details magazine, under pseudonyms, and were paid $2000 each for what never amounted to more than 10 minutes work - honestly never more than that. People from Hollywood want to make my book into a movie, and I am probably going to let them do so, and they will likely pay me a great deal of money for the privilege.

Do I care about this money? I do. Will I keep this money? Very little of it. Within the year I will have given away almost a million dollars to about 100 charities and individuals, benefiting everything from hospice care to an artist who makes sculptures from Burger King bags. And the rest will be going into publishing books through McSweeney's. Would I have been able to publish McSweeney's if I had not worked at Esquire? Probably not. Where is the $6000 from Forbes going? To a guy named Joe Polevy, who wants to write a book about the effects of radiator noise on children in New England.

Now, what if I were keeping all the money? What if I were buying property in St. Kitt's or blew it all on live-in prostitutes? What if, for example, I was, a few nights ago, sitting at a table in SoHo with a bunch of Hollywood slash celebrity acquaintances, one of whom I went to high school with, and one of whom was Puff Daddy? Would that make me a sellout? Would that mean I was a force of evil?

What if a few nights before that I was at the home of Julian Schnabel, at a party featuring Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro, and at which Schnabel said we should get together to talk about him possibly directing my movie? And what if I said sure, let's?

Would all that make me a sellout? Would I be uncool? Would it have been more cool to not go to this party, or to not have written that book, or done that interview, or to have refused millions from Hollywood?

The thing is, I really like saying yes. I like new things, projects, plans, getting people together and doing something, trying something, even when it's corny or stupid. I am not good at saying no. And I do not get along with people who say no. When you die, and it really could be this afternoon, under the same bus wheels I'll stick my head if need be, you will not be happy about having said no. You will be kicking your ass about all the no's you've said. No to that opportunity, or no to that trip to Nova Scotia or no to that night out, or no to that project or no to that person who wants to be naked with you but you worry about what your friends will say.

No is for wimps. No is for pussies. No is to live small and embittered, cherishing the opportunities you missed because they might have sent the wrong message.

There is a point in one's life when one cares about selling out and not selling out. One worries whether or not wearing a certain shirt means that they are behind the curve or ahead of it, or that having certain music in one's collection means that they are impressive, or unimpressive.

Thankfully, for some, this all passes. I am here to tell you that I have, a few years ago, found my way out of that thicket of comparison and relentless suspicion and judgment. And it is a nice feeling. Because, in the end, no one will ever give a shit who has kept shit 'real' except the two or three people, sitting in their apartments, bitter and self-devouring, who take it upon themselves to wonder about such things. The keeping real of shit matters to some people, but it does not matter to me. It's fashion, and I don't like fashion, because fashion does not matter.

What matters is that you do good work. What matters is that you produce things that are true and will stand. What matters is that the Flaming Lips's new album is ravishing and I've listened to it a thousand times already, sometimes for days on end, and it enriches me and makes me want to save people. What matters is that it will stand forever, long after any narrow-hearted curmudgeons have forgotten their appearance on goddamn 90210. What matters is not the perception, nor the fashion, not who's up and who's down, but what someone has done and if they meant it. What matters is that you want to see and make and do, on as grand a scale as you want, regardless of what the tiny voices of tiny people say. Do not be critics, you people, I beg you. I was a critic and I wish I could take it all back because it came from a smelly and ignorant place in me, and spoke with a voice that was all rage and envy. Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one, and do not dismiss a person until you have met them. It is a fuckload of work to be open-minded and generous and understanding and forgiving and accepting, but Christ, that is what matters. What matters is saying yes.

I say yes, and Wayne Coyne says yes, and if that makes us the enemy, then good, good, good. We are evil people because we want to live and do things. We are on the wrong side because we should be home, calculating which move would be the least damaging to our downtown reputations. But I say yes because I am curious. I want to see things. I say yes when my high school friend tells me to come out because he's hanging with Puffy. A real story, that. I say yes when Hollywood says they'll give me enough money to publish a hundred different books, or send twenty kids through college. Saying no is so fucking boring.

And if anyone wants to hurt me for that, or dismiss me for that, for saying yes, I say Oh do it, do it you motherfuckers, finally, finally, finally.

"That ain't a Shepherd."

I'm a Browncoat. I have been for over 5 years now. For the uninitiated, Browncoats are fans of Joss Whedon's spectacular sci-fi series Firefly, and its subsequent film, Serenity. I am vocal and passionate about both. In my opinion the 14 episode run of Firefly is one of the most perfect shows ever to grace a television screen and its tragically premature cancellation causes me an almost physical pain.

The power of the Browncoat fanbase is not to be underestimated. 4 years after the series was cancelled, the ongoing love and support was such that the fans succeeded in getting a film made, one which in turn gained more fans and acclaim for the original series, and from which a series of graphic novels have sprung. The newest one has just been announced, and i made an embarrassingly excited and hopefully unrepeatable sound when i found out what it was about.

Capt. Malcolm Reynolds: It's of interest to me how much you seem to know about that world.

Shepherd Book: I wasn't born a shepherd, Mal.

Capt. Malcolm Reynolds: You have to tell me about that sometime.

Shepherd Book: [pause] No, I don't.

The new book focuses on Shepherd Book's very mysterious past. Nothing is really known about him in either the show or the film, but there are plenty of hints that he is not what he seems. One of my greatest frustrations upon the cancellation fo the show was that i didn't get to find out what was going on with him. But now i do!

http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=25183

My favourite part of the article is part i've heard before, that "Shepherd Book killed a man and took his name, is best known for his biggest failure, has a part of himself that is artificial and ultimately found God in a bowl of soup."

Up until now, thats all we've had to go on as far as a back-story. I have my own theories, but i won't share them now. Needless to say, i'm very, very, very excited.

One more for the road

I just found this one on the same site and had to share it. It is from Nancy Spero to Lucy Lippard; two highly influential women whose paths crossed numerous times; Spero as a feminist artist, Lippard as a feminist art critic, historian and curator.

A dying art

I've just found the most wonderful website.
It is called letters of note and every day they post a new letter from some interesting person or other. I've just lost a couple of hours browsing and it makes me want to sen letters to everyone i know. We may live in the digital age, but i think email has as many downsides as it has perks. Yes it is faster, but emails don't last like letters do.

This one is kind of fascinating.
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2010/02/john-lennon-signed-my-album.html

This one makes me happy.
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2010/02/what-does-all-this-stuff-about-flying.html

This one made me cry.
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2009/09/it-was-hard-to-give-five-sons-to-navy.html

This one is really beautiful.
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2009/11/thousands-of-other-daddies-went-too.html

When i was in the States this past October we visited my godparent's house and Kelly, my godmother, had a big box of letters and notes that my mum had sent her from when they were about 11 right up until about a week before i was born. I spent most of the weekend sitting on the sofa reading them. I felt like i was getting to know my mum as a kid instead of as my mother, and it was amazing. If email or facebook had been around back then i would never have seen any of them.
It makes me sad to think that my children won't have a big box of all the stupid notes i send to Kelsea that they can find in an attic when they're 21.
Who knows though, maybe they'll read this blog...

I do not see you but love you blindly

How exactly have a lived 21 years and studied English in some form for 17 of them and never read one of Pablo Neruda's poems before?
It is an outrage.
Anyway, he kept me up till 3 last night, and i have to share some of my favourites with you. They are love poems, but not the romantic dross we studied in "Aspects of Literary History." This isn't Wordsworth, with his weak rhymes about flowers. These poems are alive.

I Crave Your Mouth, Your Voice, Your Hair

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.

Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.

Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day

I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.

I hunger for your sleek laugh,

your hands the color of a savage harvest,

hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.

I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,

the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,

I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,

and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,

hunting for you, for your hot heart,

like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.

These next 2 are my favourites i think.
 

Don't Go Far Off, Not Even For A Day

 

Don't go far off, not even for a day, because --

because -- I don't know how to say it: a day is long

and I will be waiting for you, as in an empty station

when the trains are parked off somewhere else, asleep.

Don't leave me, even for an hour, because

then the little drops of anguish will all run together,

the smoke that roams looking for a home will drift

into me, choking my lost heart.

Oh, may your silhouette never dissolve on the beach;

may your eyelids never flutter into the empty distance.

Don't leave me for a second, my dearest,

because in that moment you'll have gone so far

I'll wander mazily over all the earth, asking,

Will you come back? Will you leave me here, dying?

I Do Not Love You Except Because I Love You

I do not love you except because I love you;

I go from loving to not loving you,

From waiting to not waiting for you

My heart moves from cold to fire.

I love you only because it's you the one I love;

I hate you deeply, and hating you

Bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you

Is that I do not see you but love you blindly.

Maybe January light will consume

My heart with its cruel

Ray, stealing my key to true calm.

In this part of the story I am the one who

Dies, the only one, and I will die of love because I love you,

Because I love you, Love, in fire and blood.

Why don't they teach poetry like this at school? William Blake can take a hike. As far as i'm concerned there's no comparison between the two.

Back in the habit

I'm trying to get back into the habit of drawing. I have about a million notebooks, and i have one that i really love which i carry about with me all the time, and i occasionally draw in it. I'm not very good, but i enjoy it, and i know i'll never get better unless i do more of it.

Anyway, here are some drawings from the past weeks and months, and a few just from today. Sorry about the poor photo quality. Click to enlarge.

Sketch of a photo of Malcolm X by Richard Avedon

Sketch from a photo of Twiggy by Richard Avedon

Dried rose on my windowsill

A Warhol skull and a Modigliani nude - sketched at The Met in New York

These 2 are from today. I understood absolutely nothing in my lecture on post-colonial modernist writing today, so after about 15 minutes I stopped taking notes and drew a waiter instead. The flowers are in a champagne bottle by my bed.

The Food Penguin

 Not Ranunculi

That's it for now, but i'm (hopefully) going to be drawing more and more, and if i like any of it i'll put it up, so check back soon.

Kings of the one shot

I just found the video for Ok Go's new song. You may not remember the band, but i'm sure you remember the videos, first the dance for A Million Ways and then the ridiculously famous and oft repeated treadmill dance from Here It Goes Again. These boys do their videos in one shot, 3 and a half minutes of handmade perfection. Their new video is no exception.



It reminds me of Filschi and Weiss, who i have blogged about before, or that car advert where they do the same thing but all with car parts. The video was filmed in a two story warehouse, in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, CA. The "machine" was designed and built by the band, along with members of Synn Labs ( http://syynlabs.com/ ) over the course of several months.

Here is part 1 of the making of:



Interestingly, this isn't the only video for this song that they made, and the other one is super awesome too. Also done in one shot and featuring the Notre Dame marching band, all the audio was recorded live during the take, so the sound you're hearing is exactly what you see them performing in that shot. IU can't embed it, but follow the link here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJKythlXAIY&feature=related

That's it for today, I hope it gave you a little life, i know both videos make me smile.

I get a kick out of you

Ok, so its not often that i blog about shoes i want, because i try not to make it that kind of blog, but sometimes i just can't help it. If you're not interested, stop reading now.

Right. So.

I'm not the kind of girl that buys the same item in more than one colour. I like things a bit wierd, a bit special. I wear things other people don't have. Owning something twice makes no sense to me. BUT...
I searched for 3 years for the perfect pair of brogues, looked high and low, vintage, high-street, internet, you name it, and i eventually found them. They are from Office, they are called Frank and i wear them almost every day. They are the perfect shoes, or so i thought.

Today, i went in to Office, and what do i find, but Frank brogues in different colours and materials. They have 20's style saddle shoes in canvas and leather, they have them in a matte sky blue, and they have these...

Now i've always said i'd never buy the same thing twice, especially with shoes, but i'm finding it very hard to resist. They are so beautiful, so feminine and so masculine at the same time. They make me smile.

I'm having a crisis. What should i do?