by Nicole Powers (video) You’ve Been Trumped documents the David and Goliath battle between the dignified and humble residents of a tiny Scottish hamlet and Donald Trump, who is arguably the world’s least dignified and humble property developer. The battle lines are drawn when The Donald decides to... more

by Nicole Powers



You’ve Been Trumped documents the David and Goliath battle between the dignified and humble residents of a tiny Scottish hamlet and Donald Trump, who is arguably the world’s least dignified and humble property developer.

The battle lines are drawn when The Donald decides to build what he modestly claims will be the world’s best golf course on the Menie Estate in Scotland, a site that – until Trump’s bulldozers moved in – was home to some of the world’s best sand dunes. Indeed, the Menie sand sheet was called the “jewel in the crown” of Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) in the UK by Scottish Natural Heritage, an advisory body set up by the government to oversee such conservation designations.

However, seduced by Trump’s false promises of investment and jobs, the Scottish Government disregarded the environmental advice of its own advisory body, made a mockery of the hard to come by SSSI designation, overruled the local authority – which had denied planning permission – and trampled on the wishes of local residents in order to give Trump the green light to build his exclusive playground on land of such extraordinary natural beauty if was immortalized in the 1983 film Local Hero.

Though documenting a geographically specific dispute, the tale You’ve Been Trumped tells is in many ways archetypical of our times. The film vividly shows what happens when the 1% are allowed to run rampant in the wilderness at the expense of both the environment and the 99%, while the politicians and police "protect and serve" their megabucks masters and the media is too distracted by celebrity to report the truth.

I caught up with You’ve Been Trumped’s director Anthony Baxter on the morning of the film’s opening in The Donald’s hometown...

Nicole Powers: It’s a big day for you isn’t it? Being the first day of You’ve Been Trumped’s theatrical run in New York City, virtually in the shadow of the Trump Tower.

Anthony Baxter: Exactly. It is exciting. It’s taken a lot of effort obviously to get here and it just feels like the right thing to be doing – taking You’ve Been Trumped to Trump essentially.

NP: You say it’s been a long journey, how did it start? What’s your background?

AB: Well, I’m a journalist filmmaker, but this is the first feature film I’ve made. I’ve worked as a journalist for the BBC and ITN and various other organizations since 1989. Then, when I moved to Scotland ten years ago, I moved to a town called Montrose, which is just down the road from where Donald Trump announced he was going to be building a golf course. As a journalist filmmaker living locally, I was very aware of the story, and was struck very much by the fact that the local newspaper in Aberdeen just seemed to completely ignore any environmental issues raised by the development. They just said that this was a great thing for the area. They whipped up a media frenzy, essentially, about anybody who objected to the development.

For example, the local authority first of all blocked the Trump development, and then the local newspaper, the Evening Express, ran a headline “Traitors” with a picture of the councillors who had objected to the development. Those people who were objecting were doing so on very heartfelt and strong environmental grounds. They just felt it was the wrong thing. Also, I felt that the local residents were just not being given a voice at all. The people living on the footprint of the development were effectively being threatened with eviction through the British eminent domain, which was extraordinary.

When the Scottish government gave Mr. Trump the green light to go ahead, which it did after calling in the application saying it was in the national interest because of all these ludicrous claims that jobs were going to be created, I just felt it was a really important story to document. So I went to speak to the local residents and found them to be an extraordinary group of people, very dignified, very caring for the land on which they lived. These dunes are scientifically very, very important. They were supposed to be protected as a Site of Special Scientific Interest, yet the government decided to overthrow those concerns in favor of Mr. Trump’s development.

NP: Right. Trump managed to bulldoze not only through the local council’s rejection of planning permission, but also a special site designation.

AB: Yeah, exactly – and that’s unprecedented. It’s an incredibly worrying precedent because these sites are designated Sites of Special Scientific Interest for very good reason. It takes a lot for a site to be designated in that way. It’s done so in order to protect it from development. For example, those dunes are key to understanding the interaction between the North Sea and the coast there. They’re used by scientists to study global warming. They’re also an incredibly important wilderness. That stretch of sand dunes is one of the last coastal wildernesses of its type in Europe.

If you or I wanted to build a shack on that land, we wouldn’t be allowed to do so. One of the local residents tried to alter her chimney. She’d applied for planning permission several times and had it refused. Yet Mr. Trump comes along and says that he wants to build two championship golf courses, a skyscraper hotel, a 450 bed hostel for workers, 1500 houses, and timeshare apartments, and was given the green light to do so. All the environmental groups were bitterly opposed. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds said that Scotland’s green policy had been sold down the river. There was not one credible environmental group who supported the development. All of the groups opposed it for very good reason.

NP: The media seemed to be so busy fawning over Trump’s celebrity that they completely ignored the valid objections to this development. Indeed, you were forced to self-fund this movie.

AB: Yeah. When I did a pitch for the film at the Edinburgh International Film Festival maybe three years ago now, I made a trailer and I stood in front of a group of commissioning editors from the BBC, from independent television, from the arts agencies in Scotland, from international broadcasters, and I explained why I thought this story was very, very important to tell. All of them commended me on the pitch but refused to fund the film in any shape or form. One American executive said, “I hope you’ve got a good lawyer.” It seemed to me as if the media was almost afraid of taking on a tycoon such as Donald Trump because of the fear of litigation.

I just felt very, very strongly that we shouldn’t allow those kinds of fears get in the way of telling this important story. Particularly, as you point out, because the local newspapers had effectively blacked out any opposition to this development. It’s hard to explain sometimes to people outside of the area just what a stranglehold those newspapers have on the agenda in that area. The Press And Journal and the Evening Express newspapers very much set the editorial agenda. They had refused to reflect any of the opposition apart from the spat between Michael Forbes, the farmer [who’d stalwartly refused to give up his property in exchange for an offer of cash, a job, and a lifetime golf club membership – really!], and Donald Trump. Michael was painted as this guy standing in the way of development, and nobody ever bothered to go speak to any of the other local residents who were affected, and I just felt that it was extraordinary.

For example, I went to speak to Susan Munro, one of the local residents whose house now looks over a concrete car park where the dunes used to lie. Not one reporter from the local newspaper had ever bothered to go and speak to her over the several years that this has been running on as a local planning dispute. I just felt it was really, really important for journalism that we try to tell that story as best we can. And when we were faced with no funding, obviously, I had to decide whether or not to continue. So we mortgaged the house and then we went on the internet through IndieGoGo, a crowd funding website, to raise the rest of the money in order to finish the film.

NP: It doesn’t surprise me that money talks in today’s climate, but it was really shocking way Trump treated the locals. The names he called them very publicly and the contempt with which he treated their property rights was appalling. These were ancient property lines that had been set in stone that he just decided, because he was Donald Trump, he could change at will. You even have footage of him literally digging up garden fences and moving them to where he felt they should be.

AB: Exactly. But there’s one rule for tycoons with money and one rule for everybody else. The fact is, if you move and you’ve got a new neighbor, you would try and get on with your neighbors as best you can. But Donald Trump’s response to neighbors who didn’t want to sell him their properties was to brand their homes pigsties and them as pigs for living in these houses which have gone back generations.

NP: Right, he’s repeatedly called Michael Forbes “a pig” who lives in “a slum.”

AB: Yeah, it represents in a way a cultural chasm between, not Americans, but Donald Trump. I don’t think the people on the Menie Estate in these properties think that Mr. Trump is a typical American at all. They’ve been very moved by the comments that have comes from Americans all over this country who have written to them and supported them. But what he does represent very much is the ultimate one percenter. He thinks he can manipulate the media, manipulate the government, manipulate even the police…

[The locals] would call the police to complain about the excessive security measures being taken when they want access to their homes for example. One resident, Susan Munro, was told to spread eagle on the bonnet of her car by Mr. Trump’s security workers. They felt very much that there was one rule for Mr. Trump, who would come in with fleets of Range Rovers with blacked out windows, and there were some startling stories that emerged.

People used to be able to walk freely on those dunes. One horse rider was stunned to find vehicles “almost chasing after her,” was how she was reported it, startling the horse. I mean, this is a wilderness, it’s supposed to be a place in Scotland where you can roam freely. You have a right to roam in Scotland, and yet this was being turned into a gated community around the residents under their noses. Essentially, they were feeling incredibly powerless. They would call the local authorities and say, “Look there’s a big bank of earth being built next to my house that’s not on the plans – what are going to do about it?” And nobody did anything about it…

NP: One of the things that you show very vividly is how the police protected and served the 1% and not the 99%. There’s a scene in the movie where you’re talking to camera on someone’s private property, on a driveway, not causing trouble to anyone, and the police actually trespass onto that property to arrest you. You’re not doing anything wrong. You’re in a place you’ve been invited to.

AB: Exactly. That’s right. We’re on the property of Susan Munro, one of the local residents. We’ve just done an interview with one of Mr. Trump’s workers and we’re on private property. Then the police come on to Susan’s land and start wrestling the camera from me, without explaining to us what was going on at all, putting me up against the car and handcuffing me in a very brutal way.

This was essentially two journalists following a story and trying to hold power to account, which is the whole point of journalism as the National Union of Journalists recognized when it complained to the Chief Constable about the incident, saying that it was unprecedented, that it raised very serious questions about press freedoms in the UK, and that the police were completely out of order. The Chief Constable refused to bring any kind of independent inquiry into this incident at all. The Herald Newspaper did an investigation into the relationship between Donald Trump and the local police, which raised many alarm bells, and had to use Freedom of Information [requests] to get details of that relationship…

People are completely fed up with this whole kind of situation, being up against this stranglehold on the people who are supposedly representing them – in this case the First Minister of Scotland. These people are in his constituency. Alex Salmond, who is the local MSP [Member of the Scottish Parliament] for these people, he has not once bothered to go and visit them, and refuses to see the film. He is as accountable in this whole sorry saga as Donald Trump and the local police are.

NP: That’s the thing, in the film you see crimes against the environment, you see the blatant theft of property and land, you see Mr. Trump slander of the locals, we see you being improperly arrested – yet none of you really have any recourse. Donald Trump has unlimited funds to fight in court; it’s almost pointless even trying to go up against him.

AB: Yeah, for example, Molly Forbes, the elderly lady who felt so passionately about this area and that the decision to build houses and hotels on this land was wrong…She did what she thought was the right thing to do, which was to take out legal action through the Court of Session in Edinburgh [Scotland's supreme civil court]. She lost that case and then the Trump Organization announced it was going to sue her for $50,000 in legal costs. Now that’s a drop in the ocean for the Trump Organization, but for a lady who is just trying to do the right thing and hoping that she can raise awareness in the public on this thing which was getting no press at all, it’s utterly appalling…

NP: The other issue too is that in order to get planning permission to make this golf course happen, the quid pro quo was supposed to be jobs and investment. But it appears that Trump lied about the investment, lied about the number of jobs, and the labor that he has brought in has been by and large from outside the community.

AB: Yeah, the jobs that were promised were 6,000 jobs, and this was an utterly ludicrous projection. It was based on people running a luxury hotel, which in most communities in Scotland are run by people from overseas because the local people cannot afford to take those jobs. The terrible pay offered is often bang on the minimum wage, and they are not the kind of jobs that people aspire to. Now that’s even if there were jobs there, but those jobs have not materialized at all. There’s a temporary clubhouse, there’s one golf course, so there’s a few people serving drinks to wealthy golfers, a few people caddying bags around and mowing the grass, but a few dozen people is not 6,000. That projection was utterly ludicrous and was found out to be by the London School of Economics who poured over the figures that we gave them that had been presented to all those at the Scottish Government inquiry by the Trump Organization. It took the London School of Economics no time at all to say these numbers don’t add up.

Essentially, this is what’s happening all over the world. People are blinded by the ludicrous claims and projections of jobs and economic prosperity for an area in order to rip it up and start building – and, on the way, inflate the prices of the land because the planning permission is given to the land and not the person. Donald Trump could – and the local residents believe he will – sell up all the property that he has there with the planning permission for 1,500 houses, and, as the London School of Economics says, benefit to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars probably just for the planning permission for the land. There are people lining their pockets and making big cash out of these green field sites that are supposed to be protected, while the local people who recognize the importance of these sites, and recognize the value for generations to come, are left powerless on the sidelines to do anything about it.

NP: And the value of their properties is vastly reduced because they’ve got bloody great car parks and mountains of dirt outside their windows.

AB: That’s absolutely right. Susan Munro’s property when I first visited was right by the dunes. She had lived there with her family peacefully for years. There used to be another lady who had an old railway carriage which she lived in…The first thing that happened when Trump bought the land was that was pulled up onto the back of a truck and taken away. Susan had watched this from her back garden aghast. Then she finds a car park being rolled out overnight almost. She’s at the bottom of her garden, tarmac is being piled down on to the dunes over concrete, and she is left there, utterly powerless, calling the local authority saying, “What’s happening? This isn’t supposed to come so close to my property is it?” And they’re saying, “Oh well, I’m sure everything’s happening according to the plans.” As you say, her house is being deeply devalued by the fact that you can’t walk out of her garden onto the dunes. She’s now got a massive fence being put up in front of her house.

Mr. Trump’s executive, Michael Cohen, visited Susan Munro’s property recently. When she voiced to him the deep concerns she had about the security forces roaming around the property, Mr. Cohen’s response to Susan was, “Well, don’t worry, you’ll soon have a security pass to access your property.” That is not what she lives there for and why she decided to move to the dunes. For somebody with the power and money and resources of Donald Trump to take that sort of stance with his neighbors is absolutely appalling, and deeply worrying I think for audiences who see the film. They are startled and shocked by that…

NP: The genius of the film is that you don’t really need to editorialize Trump. He’s hoisted on his own petard. The stuff that he says is utterly, utterly appalling on every level. You just have to roll the cameras and present the footage.

AB: One thing that I’ve always said is I went to start documenting what was happening…What you see on the screen is what came into the camera lens over the course of 18 months to two years. That is the fact. Now, people may not like what Mr. Trump says, and that’s for them to make up their own mind, but the fact of the matter is that what you see on the screen is what came into the camera lens. It is cut together as a film has to be, because you can’t have 300 hours of footage on the screen, and what you see is Donald Trump having probably the most screen time in the whole film. It represents, I think, a cultural chasm between the way that Mr. Trump may be used to speaking to people in New York City and the way the local people in a rural Scottish wilderness feel is the right way to behave and the right way to interact with their neighbors. They were brought up to say “please” and “thank you,” and to do their best to get on with people who live next door. Whereas Mr. Trump’s answer to becoming a new neighbor was to brand their homes “pigsties” and “slums.”

NP: And I think he honestly can’t comprehend why someone wouldn’t be thrilled to live in a gated community and have a security pass to get to their own property.

AB: The thing about him is that he has not in any way recognized the wrongs that he’s responsible for…People essentially are saying “where are the lawyers in all of this?” The local people are incredibly dignified, they’re incredibly patient – this has been going on for years. They are people who when the news crews come around and ask them for sound bites, they have great eloquence, dignity, and a deep respect for their environment, and their choice of words is so restrained.

We did two screenings at the Scottish Parliament itself to which we invited the First Minister and he refused to come. The local residents, who came there…they win hearts and minds wherever they go…These people were only branded the other day by the Trump Organization in a statement released to the Daily News here in New York, as “a national embarrassment for Scotland.” Well I say, come and see the film and make up your own mind about it.

NP: I’m not left in any doubt who is the national embarrassment here – and it’s not anyone from Scotland.

AB: The thing is, the people there, they didn’t ask for this, to have the media spotlight thrown on to their homes…They didn’t ask for the media to come knocking on their doors. They just ask to live peacefully on the dunes. They are people who have a great deal of respect for the environment and for each other, and have been brought together by this struggle. In a way, one thing that’s come out of this is that the community has really come together, as you see in the films when hundreds of people march through the dunes to one of the resident’s homes, Michael Forbes’, to support him.

NP: This film is helping shine a spotlight on an international level on something that otherwise would be a very local issue. What are your plans for it in America?

AB: We felt that it was very, very important to take You’ve Been Trumped to Trump, to take it to New York City, so that people can see for themselves what has been happening in Scotland, and bring those events here to his own backyard essentially. Because the story is not a local story, it’s an international story. I started the film before the Occupy movement started, but people have said to me it is a film for the Occupy generation because it captures the deep frustrations that people are feeling everywhere…

I think people need to know and see stories around the world which show communities in those situations feeling utterly powerless. And although the film is not meant to, and could not ever on it’s own be something which changes things, it educates and informs people to make decisions and to say, look, we need to change the way that we live…

So we’ve been screening it across Scotland. We’ve had great difficulties in getting the film out in the UK. The British Film Institute in London refused to support the release of the film. It has millions of pounds of lottery funded money to try and bring films to cinema audiences, and the only money that exchanged hands between us and the BFI was us paying to show the film to a few executives at its West End headquarters.

NP: And this is a film that’s gone on to win 10 awards so far.

AB: That’s right, exactly. It’s just been nominated for a Grierson Award, which is the British documentary Oscars essentially. We’ve found everywhere we have turned closed doors from organizations who are supposed to support us. So what we have done is we’ve hit the internet four times and raised money from hundreds of people around the world who also agree that this is an important film that needs to be seen. We put it in the cinemas of Scotland, where the reaction has been shock, and also in as many cinemas as we can around London and in England – although not nearly as many as we would’ve liked.

We want to get it into cinemas because we feel that audiences seeing it collectively feel that it’s a powerful film. It needs to be seen in that kind of an environment at this stage I think. Also, as we know from the last few days here in New York, if you release a film on a cinema screen it gets a lot more attention in the media than it does if you just pop it up on YouTube…Bill Moyers said very generously in his PBS interview that many, many people should see it because of its importance.

What we have at the moment is a media obsessed with celebrity who will often say to journalists and filmmakers, we’d like a film on Donald Trump if you’ve got access. If you can fly around the world on his 757, then that’s fine, we’ll commission you to make a film. But this film is more important than that because it’s giving the ordinary people and our planet a voice, which is so stifled in this media environment we’re in. Despite the huge number of channels, we can’t even get a story out about ordinary people being bulldozed in their lives and on their properties. It just seems utterly lopsided and completely wrong to us. That’s why I was prepared to re-mortgage the house and to take these steps, because I just think if nobody else is prepared to support us, then we have to go out and do what we think is right.

NP: My hope too is that in future when local authorities are considering planning permission requests for similar projects that government officials – and the press – will be a bit more cynical about the numbers that they’re being bamboozled with. One of the myths that you dispel is this idea that it would take a billion dollars of investment to build a golf course. Isn’t it $6 million that’s actually been spent on essentially a large grass lawn with a few holes in it?

AB: Exactly. What we have here is a very, very worrying situation where figures are bandied around by the Trump Organization, which are then printed as fact. This was originally a £1billion development. Then overnight it dropped to £750 million one day, and all the press reported that as if nothing had happened. Then, suddenly, we had it reported in the news that Donald Trump had opened this golf course and that it’s a $100 million development, and one golf course has cost that amount of money – and it is wrong. We know that the figures lodged with Company’s House show that, according to a leading land rights expert in Scotland who has done some serious investigation into this, the amount that has been spent is to the tune of around £6 million – that’s around $10 million.

NP: And that was out of £1 billion promised.

AB: Yeah, exactly…In the interviews in the film Mr. Trump says to me that we’re about to start the Marram grass planting project. He said that’s a very big job, hundreds of people are going to be planting the grass. Well, thanks to a screening at the Scottish Parliament, there was a Sunday Herald journalist there, an environment editor, who then did some research and under Freedom of Information got hold figures which showed that 12 unskilled laborers had planted the Marram grass. Mr. Trump is used to bandying these ludicrous figures around which are then printed as fact. Like his claim that 93% of people in Scotland were behind the development. We know, because the BBC did an investigation into that number, that the poll that he referred to was never actually done. And yet that figure was bandied around by the local newspapers constantly as being proof that this development was supported.

NP: I very much hope that your documentary will help stop things like this from happening in the future, but it really saddens me that as a result of Trump’s efforts to build the “world’s best golf course” we’ve actually lost some of the world’s best sand dunes.

AB: That is a tragedy, we can’t turn back the clock. Once these things are done, they’re done. Even though the locals feel and hope one day that nature will take its quiet vengeance and reclaim what is its, the fact is that we have lost this wilderness. It has been destroyed and we can’t turn back the clock. When you move biblical amounts of sand around a site with fleets of bulldozers, it’s very difficult to allow nature to take its course...

The only hope I have is that people will look at the film and think, how many times can we allow the planet to afford these kinds of decisions?…And I think the communities are so tired of this stuff. The ordinary people who are out there in their masses are sick and tired of it, and they want to see a change. The tycoons and the rich and powerful, who are used to getting their way, and having this huge amount of influence with their money and power, should listen to what the masses are saying – listen to the voices of those ordinary people who just have to be heard. I think that’s the whole point of what we’ve been trying to do.

You’ve Been Trumped opens at Laemmle’s Town Centre 5 in Encino on Friday, August 17 and can be seen at the Art Theatre of Long Beach on Sunday, August 19 and 16. For more information visit: youvebeentrumped.com

In May of last year, I found myself sitting alone in the stands of a race track with Sean Astin. He was filming an independent movie about horse racing, and I was invited to visit the production at Hollywood Park in Los Angeles. When Astin had a break in shooting, we walked into the stands to sit for... more

In May of last year, I found myself sitting alone in the stands of a race track with Sean Astin. He was filming an independent movie about horse racing, and I was invited to visit the production at Hollywood Park in Los Angeles. When Astin had a break in shooting, we walked into the stands to sit for an interview. You may not think of them as a whole, but several of Astin’s movies have become seminal films for more than one generation. I grew up with The Goonies, where a teen Astin led his friends on a quest for pirate treasure. A young adult Astin portrayed college football legend Rudy Ruettiger in the football classic Rudy. To today’s kids, he’s perhaps best known as Samwise Gamgee in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Astin was happy to stroll down movie memory lane with me. His recollections of even the earliest film are as vivid as his descriptions of the film he was shooting. And They’re Off cast Astin as Dusty, a disgraced jockey who gets another chance with an underdog racehorse. It’s a comedy in mockumentary style. The independent film played the Hollywood Film Festival and is now open in select cities, including racing centers like Kentucky.

SuicideGirls: I’ve always wanted to ask you, on the DVD commentary for The Goonies, you keep trying to say a message for Cyndi Lauper and all theo ther Goonies keep interrupting you. What were you going to say to her?

Sean Astin: I was going to apologize to her, because we were so tired. The whole cast, everyone was tired. She was the only person not tired because she hadn’t been doing the movie with us. She came in to do the video. I just remember we were all up at the pirate ship set and we were shooting the music video and we were all trying to not be tired. This was Cyndi Lauper, the great Cyndi Lauper, doing this wonderful performance to a song we loved. The first time we heard the song we were in Hawaii actually, where Steven Spielberg sent us to play a prank on [director] Dick Donner, and he played her “Good Enough” song for us and we flipped out. We just loved it. We all listened to it over and over and over again. Then some period of time later, we were all on the boat and she was really bummed. Millions of people would come and pay tickets to scream and yell at her concerts and we were there trying to not be devoid of energy. So I was going to apologize to her and I know if the guys would’ve let me get that out, they would have totally said, “Oh my God, we had so much fun doing that.” They would’ve been excited about it.

SG: What was the prank?

SA: Just going there. Dick had said to us throughout the movie, “I can’t wait to get away from you brat kids.” One day Jeff Cohen, who played Chunk, shows up with his mom and his sister Edie, and they’re all wearing Midwestern tourist with the hats and camera and flower print shirts and they’re like, “Dick, we’re going to Hawaii with you!” He kept saying he wanted to get to his house in Maui, get away from us brat kids. They’re like, “Dick, we’re coming with you.” He was on the floor laughing because it just was so cute. It was so funny. The next thing you know, they were like, “Let’s tell Steven. Maybe we really will trick him, we’ll surprise him.” So he sent us, somebody brought Dick out to the supermarket and we came back, all the Goonies and our family and friends had all trashed his place and we were hanging out there. It was pretty funny. I thought he was going to have a coronary. He looked really funny.

SG: Do you think kids today still have Goonie like adventures, in the age of Facebook and Twitter?

SA: Yeah, I think it’s different but I’m sure they have adventures. They have to. It’s just the nature of being a kid. Now with the technology, gosh, what we wouldn’t have done to be able to iChat or some of the walkie talkies. It’d just be fun. That thing that people love about The Goonies, that sense of adventure, is something that’s intrinsic to kids. I think some elements of our culture kind of work against it. The world is dangerous. Kids have to be careful where they go. There’s bad people out there so people have to be careful. That kind of stops you but one kid flew around the world in a Cessna who was 10. Their dad orchestrated that, made it work out for them. That’s an adventure. That’s as cool as finding pirate treasure. “I flew myself around the planet when I was 10.” Pirates always have an allure. You have the Pirates of the Caribbean movies that come out. Yeah, it changes, it grows, gets better. It’s all good. I’m blown away that a movie like Goonies has such staying power. That’s a pretty amazing thing.

SG: It’s been 10 years since Lord of the Rings. Do you have a different perspective on it now than when you were in the middle of it?

SA: We just did a photo shoot for Entertainment Weekly. Elijah, Dominic and I were in the photo shoot together and they’re going to do a lot of other cast and composite it together for the 10 year anniversary of when we started filming. It only took about an 18th of a second being together where it felt like we’d just been doing these photo shoots and making the movie together. In a weird way, I think my thoughts and feelings continually grow and change and in some ways, it’s really the same.

SG: When you hear about The Hobbit does that seem like something some other guys are doing, or is it still the same family?

SA: Both. It feels like both. It seems like the same family because I know them but it’s been a lot of years now and their production apparatus has changed a lot down there. They’ve grown. They’re making lots of movies all the time so there’s probably a lot of different crew and a lot of different people down there than I know. There are some people that I know but my character Sam does not appear in The Hobbit to the best of my knowledge. They could do whatever they want so I’ve heard different things about what they might want to do, but it feels like a cousin that you grew up with that maybe when the next person gets married, you’ll all see each other again. But there is a little bit of distance there.

SG: Is there anything we don’t know about those films yet?

SA: Of course. I’m sure most of the really fun stuff that’s publishable has been mined, but you’re talking about two years of people’s lives. It was a pretty unbelievable experience. A lot of times when stories are told, there’s usually an angle on it, so I don’t know what other angles there are out there. I’m sure there are a lot. I feel like even with the total wealth of stuff that’s been put out there, that kind of stuff only reflects part of what my experience was. But I don’t know that what my experience was is going to be entertaining for readers to hear about. What kind of vegetables we had in New Zealand that were in season that time of year.

SG: Do you remember that?

SA: Well, I could never keep up with it then. The one thing they always have in New Zealand, it’s kind of like a squash. I can’t remember the name of it now. Yeah, put that in there. A signed autographed poster by the cast of Lord of the Rings if anyone can name the vegetable that was the predominant vegetable.

SG: I remember when Rudy came out, it was compared to a Rocky type story. Now do you find movies are compared to a Rudy type story?

SA: Absolutely. Absolutely. A lot. It’s sort of a classic underdog tone that the movie put out there. You see journalists who’ll write about movies. This movie is a horse racing movie so you’ve got Seabiscuit, but there’ve been so many movies, every sport now it seems like. We haven’t done a curling movie, but that feeling, that idea. What I love about Rudy, one of the many things I love about it, is that it’s an upwardly mobile social treatise, that if you work hard and you get an education and you believe in yourself and you get a little bit lucky, you can raise your station in this world. That’s a quintessential American narrative. People love dreamers. It’s ripe for satire too. It’s easy to make fun of that but when I’m walking through the airport and a group of guys sees me, they’ll just go, “Rudy! Rudy!” They’ll start the chant. I mostly hear it when people say, “Well, it’s like that. It’s like a Rudy or it’s like a Hoosiers or Rocky.” There’s a group of them and there’s usually lists that come out. Rudy has found its way onto some of those lists.

SG: You must get attention from sports fans and fantasy buffs.

SA: I do. It’s a good thing. Now hopefully horse racing fans. Hopefully they don’t hate me for being such an idiot. There’s good idiot and bad idiot. I hope I’m a good idiot in this.

SG: One thing that annoyed me when Rudy came out, my local newspaper critic complained that it wasn’t a Rocky story because he didn’t help win the game. He only made it to the final plays. I wanted to write in and remind him how Rocky 1 ended.

SA: No, but Hoosiers was made by David Anspaugh and Angelo Pizzo, the director and writer. It was the story of the unbelievably wild success story of an Indiana basketball team that came from nowhere, a small town team to go on and win the national title against teams with guys who went right to the NBA. And they did that. They won the championship. It was a buzzer beater. Dennis Hopper’s character was an alcoholic who was on the bench, all this amazing stuff and it was about a winner. The guys wanted to do a story about the last guy on the bench. They liked that for him, winning was relative. It was specific to him and his life. You think of Patton, at the beginning of Patton he goes, “America loves a winner! Nobody ever won a war dying for their country. They won a war by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.” You look at Rudy and he’s exactly right on the one hand. He doesn’t help win the game. The game is over. Even if they’d have been run back for an opposing touchdown, they still had a three touchdown lead. It was what it meant to him and what it meant to his family, what it meant to the people that knew them. You’ve got to be a pretty coldhearted son of a bitch if you hear about somebody’s life story and they tell you a moment that was a signature moment in their life and that their family responded to, and you’re like, “Oh well, whatever.” Should every family’s moment be made a movie? I don’t know, but when you factor in Notre Dame, it’s the first time since Knute Rockne, All American with Ronald Reagan playing George Gipp that they had let the movie be shot on the University campus.

SG: But Rocky 1 isn’t about winning in the end either. It’s just about making it, so I think that critic missed the comparison. He was thinking of the Rocky sequels.

SA: No, but I’m getting at what’s underneath that. Yeah, arguably the Rocky movies, when he goes back and wins in the second one and goes to Russia, each of those movies, Seabiscuit, Tin Cup. Did he not like Tin Cup because Tin Cup didn’t win? Tin Cup fails so spectacularly that it becomes a signature thing.

SG: We’ve seen you play characters from dramatic to outrageous comedy. What kind of guy is Dusty?

SA: Dusty is an eternal optimist and he is a guy who didn’t come from much. He didn’t have a background in money or anything. He’s earnest and he’s fun and he’s a little dumb, flat out. The director would probably be very upset. He’s not dumb. He’s just so confident when he shouldn’t be. He makes lots of mistakes but he perseveres. I think the fact that I portrayed Rudy, I think Rudy and Doug from 50 First Dates, if you could combine their DNA and just plop them into the horse racing world, you’ve got Dusty.

SG: Are there great sports cliché training montages?

SA: There’s a lot of clichéd moments in this movie. They should have called it Cliché. We should have had a horse named Cliché. “That’s Cliché coming around the outside.” Like Rocky, maybe there’s a couple. Those aren’t the moments that jump out the most to me about this movie. This movie’s about little personal moments that you see and happen in little steps along the way. A lot of people don’t know anything about horse racing but a lot of people who do know about horse racing don’t really know anything about what goes into it. Even the fact that people who own the horses hire people called trainers, they go and train the horses and hire the grooms, get all the feed right and the medical stuff and make decisions about what races to enter them in. They talk to the jockeys’ agents and have to deal with all the rules. There’s that kind of stuff.

SG: With this knowledge you’ve gained from the film, would you feel comfortable making a bet?

SA: See, here’s the thing. I bet my house on Friday night and my children are homeless now. No, I got very excited about having a particular system of betting. Alex Rocco who plays and owner that I work for who fires me in the movie, everyone was talking about, “Oh, Sean’s got a system, Sean’s got a system.” So I sat down and described the system and he said, “Don’t ever tell anybody what you just told me. You can’t do that.” And went on to explain what it was. So I bet, I had fun one night, actually for a day and a half of racing here at Hollywood Park. I bet a bunch and I pretty much lost everything I bet. When it was over, I thought that’s not the most fun part. And my brother won everything. He won three exactas, three trifectas in a row and one two long shots. Exacta is two, first and second, trifecta is first, second and third. You can box them, which means you click the box and you play three times as much. Then if those three horses come across the finish line in any order, first, second and third, you win. He won three of those right off the bat, three trifectas which is really, really rare for that to happen. So with two dollars, he turned it into $300. I took $200 and turned it into nothing.

SG: What was your faulty system?

SA: The way I wanted to look at it was just look at their most recent six races and say, “Okay, who’d won the most races, who’d come in first and second the most in their last six races.” Then I would group them together and then come up with little combinations of how to bet on those people so that if even most of the bets didn’t pay off, one or two of those front runners should come in at least third and then that third would pay it off. It certainly made a lot of sense to me but the odds are tricky, because if it’s a front runner, the better chance it has to win, the less it’s going to pay if you win. That’s the guy I’m looking for to pay off my downside if I don’t win everything else or some of the other things. You can’t bet on every horse in the race. You’ve got to pick a horse. It doesn’t matter how good they are. Part of the problem with that system is the horses are in different classes, so this one horse could’ve won or come in second in four of its last six races. But now it’s running a longer race against a different class of horse. It’d be lucky if it comes in third or fourth. There’s the newspapers you get and the betting guides, there’s so much detail and so many different factors that you can choose to focus on when you’re placing your bet. Then you’ve got handicappers who’d tell you things. There’s all different kinds to think about but your little girl can walk in and say, “Daddy, I like Runs Like a Rose” so you bet on Runs Like a Rose with 50 to 1 odds and Runs Like a Rose wins and you just won a ton of money because your daughter picked one.

by Nahp Suicide A column which highlights Suicide Girls and their fave groups. (image) [Autrum in River Styx] After a hard day’s work behind the counter, Autrum tells us how she finds humor and therapy in SG's Retail Group. Members: 865 / Comments: 4,666 WHY DO YOU LOVE IT?: I love it because... more

by Nahp Suicide

A column which highlights Suicide Girls and their fave groups.



[Autrum in River Styx]

After a hard day’s work behind the counter, Autrum tells us how she finds humor and therapy in SG's Retail Group.

Members: 865 / Comments: 4,666

WHY DO YOU LOVE IT?: I love it because it is so therapeutic to know I am not the only one having to deal with asshole customers, managers, and co-workers on a daily basis. It's great to be able to vent somewhere about the tremendous amount of crap you get from working in retail and find the humor in some situations.

DISCUSSION TIP: Don't be afraid to share your mind and vent or poke fun of whatever happened to you at work that day. Someone will most likely show you up with a worse or funnier story.

MOST HEATED DISCUSSION THREAD: The thread that is the most heated is the Pet Peeves thread. Whenever I am feeling down, it hasn't failed to make me smile or shake my fist in the air.

BEST RANDOM QUOTE: “The customer who seems to think the shop should open early/re-open after closing time just for them, to the extent they'll start hammering on the door/ringing the doorbell to get your attention simply in order to ask, ‘Are you open?’ Yes, the 'Closed' sign, no lights on, locked door and absence of people in the shop all actually mean that we're open, you colossal tallywhacker.”

WHO’S WELCOME TO JOIN?: Anyone who is or has worked in retail and wants to reminisce about the good, the bad, and the colossal tallywhackers!


***
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Christopher Moore is one of America’s funniest novelists and his new book, “Sacré Bleu,” a novel subtitled “A Comedy d’Art,” makes the case for him also being one of the smartest and most inventive. Arguably his best work, the book is set in the Belle Epoque era and involves the impressionist... more

Christopher Moore is one of America’s funniest novelists and his new book, “Sacré Bleu,” a novel subtitled “A Comedy d’Art,” makes the case for him also being one of the smartest and most inventive. Arguably his best work, the book is set in the Belle Epoque era and involves the impressionist and post-impressionist painters who lived primarily in the Montmartre district of Paris. Starring Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, who is so colorful and entertaining a character that it’s hard to believe that Moore didn’t create him, it’s a strange and fascinating novel that is about, among other things, the color blue.

Moore is fascinated by what made the impressionists so radical that they created unconventional work and lived in unconventional ways. If this novel is less laugh out loud than some of his previous books, it’s because Moore is trying for a different tone. While there are plenty of hilarious moments – try looking at a Renoir after reading this without cracking a smile – the book details the murder of Vincent Van Gogh and how his friends try to discover what really happened. Along the way you’ll learn the best way to test a baguette, how color is made, and learn a lot about art (although admittedly, some of what we learn is fictional). Moore is currently on book tour and we spoke to him about his just-released novel.


ALEX DUEBEN: I feel I should ask at the outset, have any art historians been harmed in the making of this novel?

CHRISTOPHER MOORE: Not yet, but there may be a few cardiac incidents once the book is out. I took some liberties.

AD: You mentioned at the end of the book that you set out to write a novel about the color blue. Why blue? And why not, say, vermilion?

CM: To be honest, I just don't remember. It just came to me, like, out of the–well, you know.

AD: This feels in some ways like a book that could have taken longer to research than to actually write. How much research was involved and how long did it take to craft this book?

CM: From the time I started working on it to the time I delivered it was four years. I was still doing research as I was writing it, but the actually writing time was about 18 months.

AD: I am forced to admit that I have never given thought to how to create color and after reading how they did in your book, I'm a little amazed that anyone went through such trouble.

CM: When you consider that humans have been harvesting color and using it to make art for nearly 100,000 years, it's not surprising that we moderns would take it for granted. The Australian aborigines, which, in spots, retained a stone-age culture well into the last century, actually have “sacred” color mines where their ochers are dug, and the colors were traded between bands all over the Australian continent, since you could only use a certain color for a certain type of painting. Color and religion are tied. Color is part of creation. I think color is so ingrained as part of human culture that now we don't think of it as having a source, any more than we associate the food we eat or the clothes we wear with the plants and animals from which they come.

AD: You spoke a little about the impressionists in the end but I was wondering if you could just talk briefly about what you love about them and find so fascinating about their work.

CM: I think I was first drawn to the Impressionists work as a respite from modern life, which is somewhat ironic, I suppose, since one of their goals was to portray modern life as they saw it. When I was on book tour I would go to museums to get out of the pace and patter of self-promotion, have an experience that wasn't about me or my books at all, and looking at Impressionists' paintings gave me that break. Later, when I learned about their lives, and about what they were trying to do as artists, and how unconventional it was at the time, I gained a whole new level of respect for them, as people as well as painters. They all had the ability to work within the conventions of art at the time and make a living, but they did something that broke with convention, in a counter-survival way. Creative courage is impressive, and inspiring.

AD: Who was Henri Toulouse-Lautrec and what made him the perfect character for a Christopher Moore novel? Was he really that colorful in real life?

CM: Toulouse-Lautrec was the Count de Toulouse-Lautrec Monfa, he was royalty, and was heir to a substantial fortune -- he didn't have to make art to survive. He was injured as a child in a riding accident, and his legs never healed properly, and he also had a genetic bone disorder (probably because his parents were first cousins) that cause him to be very short of stature. He discovered, early on, that he was very good at drawing, and as his athletic activities were limited by his disability, he got a lot of practice. When he came of age, he went off to Paris to learn to paint, and attended drawing classes with Vincent Van Gogh, Emile Bernard, and other budding artists of the day. In addition to being an extraordinary painter and printmaker, he was a bon vivant, a notorious drunk, who lived much of his life in brothels and cabarets, and recorded life there in his drawings and paintings. It's the combination of his being an artist and a bit of a madman that made him the perfect character for one of my books. Since I decided to open the book with the murder of Vincent Van Gogh, having a diminutive detective who was his friend, try to solve the murder, was irresistible.

AD: How important was it to spend time in Paris researching the novel?

CM: I don't think I could have written the book if I hadn't spent time in Paris. Much of Paris as it stands today, was built in the 1850s, so it hasn't really changed that much, so being there gave dimension to the scenes, plus, there are huge collections of the art that I was writing about, and living around where it was painting, gave me a perspective I wouldn't have had otherwise. 

AD: What is the challenge of writing a historical novel that's set in the more recent past, as opposed to Fool or Lamb?

CM: Mainly there was just more to work with -- almost too much. In the case of Lamb, for instance, they didn't even know where Jesus was for 30 years of his life, and Fool was constructed around Shakespeare's King Lear, which had so many anachronisms in the original play, that I had to make up a mythical time in which to set it–in other words, I was able to work with huge holes in history. With the Impressionists, they more or less knew what each of them had for breakfast every day of his life, plus, each was more or less recording moments of his or her life on canvas. It was a huge body of knowledge, and the challenge was how to pare it down and tell a story with a pace that would satisfy a modern reader. 

AD: Why did you want to include so many paintings throughout the book?

CM: I didn't want to assume that my reader had seen the art I was talking about. I have only seen a lot of it in the last few years, and yet so much of the story depends on understanding what the art looks like. I thought it would give readers who might have come to my work through the vampire books or the Pine Cove books a door into this new world I was writing about. 

AD: Do you fear that Renoir will be best known by his new catch phrase: I like big butts?

CM: I can only hope. I just couldn't resist writing a scene where he says that. In his biography he more or less says that a lot, I just sort of used a phrase we've heard before. Sometimes you just have to swing at a comedy slow-pitch, like when Manet sees Whistler at an art exhibition and the first thing he asks is, “How's your mother?”

AD: Is hitting someone upside the head in fact the best way to test whether the baguette has been properly made?

CM: I have no idea, I just thought that would be funny. Parisian society seems to sort of revolve around the baguette, even today, and I thought it would be funny if every morning you saw bakers smacking their kids in the head with a loaf to test the crust. 

AD: Is there a chance we might someday see a pseudo-sequel featuring Toulouse-Lautrec and the Art Nouveau movement?

CM: I don't know. I really like the art from that period, but it's not nearly as rich or influential as the Impressionists. It was really more decorative and design, like Art Deco, than revolutionary, like, for instance, Cubism or Surrealism. I love the period and the characters of the time, but if I were to revisit Paris, I think I'd have to tell the story around something a little more universal–maybe just use Belle Epoch Paris as the setting. Everyone was there, just everyone, so there's a wealth of historical material to launch from.

by Lee Camp (video) Once upon a time there were a couple of boys named the Brothers Koch. They had a dream of owning the United States of America. Their dream is coming true. And call me a romantic, but I love watching dreams come true. Related Posts: Moment of Clarity: Your Vote Will Be Stolen And Here's... more

by Lee Camp



Once upon a time there were a couple of boys named the Brothers Koch. They had a dream of owning the United States of America. Their dream is coming true. And call me a romantic, but I love watching dreams come true.


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Michael Robbins made a splash in the poetry world when his poem “Alien vs. Predator” was published in The New Yorker in 2009. The poem, which called Rilke a jerk and included the line “That elk is such a dick,” was atypical for the magazine. Robbins, who received a Ph.D. in English, would go onto... more

Michael Robbins made a splash in the poetry world when his poem “Alien vs. Predator” was published in The New Yorker in 2009. The poem, which called Rilke a jerk and included the line “That elk is such a dick,” was atypical for the magazine. Robbins, who received a Ph.D. in English, would go onto write poems like “Dig Dug,” which was inspired by the video for Guns N' Roses’ “November Rain” and has just had his first book published by Penguin Poets, Alien vs. Predator.

Robbins’ poetry owes as much to hip-hop and contemporary music as it does to classical poetry and it’s clear from talking with Robbins that while he is as obsessed with pop culture as the rest of the us, he’s more concerned with poetic form. His poems take place amidst chain stores and suburban wastelands with references to the Care Bears, Jeffrey Dahmer, Soylent Green and everything in between.

However, he’s interested in what has always been the focus of poetry: truth, beauty, ugliness, vulgarity and making some sense of the world in a fun way that sounds good when read aloud. In talking with SG, Robbins quoted Rimbaud and Eliot with the same ease with which he discussed Guns N' Roses. and complained about the laziness of many contemporary artists, and, as in his work, was not just fun to talk with but was thoughtful in talking about life and art.


ALEX DUEBEN: The title of your poetry collection is Alien vs. Predator. How did you decide on that title?

MICHAEL ROBBINS: It honestly just came to me when I was trying to think of a title. I never am sure whether the justifications or interpretations that I give for the title afterwards have much to do with that initial decision. I mean as soon as I thought of it, the title made sense to me. It’s a cheeky appropriation of a schlocky movie franchise. Also, they’re both major words in American culture. We’re always catching predators and legalizing aliens. It made sense to me. I mean the book is partly about my feeling of alienation and being preyed upon. (Laughs)

AD: It’s interesting that you phrase it like that. What do you feel preyed upon by?

MR: What don’t I feel preyed upon by? (Laughs)

AD: I ask because I think it’s possible to read the book as being preyed upon by pop culture, but I don’t think you mean that.

MR: No. I’m not going to bite the hand that feeds me, but I do think the pop culture angle has been getting too much attention to the exclusion of other aspects of the book that I’m interested in. I mean I understand it. You have a book of poetry that talks about black metal or something, you have a topic to talk about and it’s handy, but the attractive surfaces are meant to be sinister as well. It’s about being preyed upon by capitalism, I suppose. I meant for it to be something of a dark book. (Laughs)

AD: I think the definitely feels that way.

MR: I’m preyed upon by lots of things. Stephen Dedalus has that line in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man where he says “I fear many things: dogs, horses...” I can’t remember exactly what the list is, but that’s pretty much how I feel. I’ve spent a lot of my life dealing with anxiety and depression and spent a lot of my life kvetching about the way we’re all sort of subordinated to the logic of the market. The pop culture is there in part just because I love it, but it wouldn’t be there without the economic apparatus that supports it. It’s not a wholly negative thing. Capitalism is a dialectical thing. Marx himself celebrated capitalism as an advance over feudalism.

There’s alienation and there’s predation and there’s also the sense that I myself am the predator consuming pop culture, consuming goods. It’s that sense of conflict that the “vs.” part is supposed to get across. There’s a great deal of conflict in my own absorption in these things, but like I said, that’s an interpretation that I can impose after the fact. At the time I’m not sure that I was thinking about these things, but that’s how poems work. They don’t necessarily make themselves clear to you right away.

AD: As you pointed out your work is sometimes treated a novelty because you use pop culture, which is not often addressed in poetry.

MR: Well, it is. That’s another thing that frustrates me about the concentration on it. Again, it doesn’t frustrate me to the point that I’m not very, very pleased that the work’s getting attention, but pop culture gets addressed in poetry all the time. I’s just a lack of familiarity with contemporary poetry that leads it to it seeming to be novel in my work. I mean Paul Muldoon is often writing about pop culture. My friends Nick Demske and Anthony Madrid both have books that are immersed in pop culture. My friend Anthony Madrid has these great lines: “Maybe I’m just like my mother. / She’s never satisfied. / Maybe I’m just like my father: / Always a bridesmaid, never a bride.” It’s there. Contemporary poets are writing in the culture that they live in and they respond to it. I would say that my work is sort of manic about it. (Laughs) There is perhaps a difference of degree, although Nick Demske is a terrific poet who is just dripping with pop culture.

AD: You wrote a piece for Poetry a little while back where you reviewed a few books and in talking about Ruth Stone you took issue with her heightened language.

MR: I don’t think so. I think poetry has to be heightened language distinct from ordinary English. If it’s not patterned language, then it’s not poetry. What I took issue with in Stone’s work is her treating poetry as a kind of chapel that we all go to and forget our lives as people immersed in the ordinary. Even her treatment of the ordinary seems to me to be pious. Piety in poetry annoys me. But if you’re just taking English and not doing things with the language, then I don’t know what the point is. Pound said “great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.” I do believe that language can exist in a heightened form without being pious. I think that the heightening of language is what poetry does, but it’s a question of how that heightening takes place.

AD: I think that’s very true. Rhythm and structure are clearly very important to you and it feels like you’ve internalized poetic form and structure, but you’re writing about the world you see, the world around us.

MR: I think that’s just what poetry should do.

AD: “Should” being the key phrase in that sentence.

MR: Oh definitely. I mean Rimbaud said: It is necessary to be absolutely modern. I think that poetry, if it’s not responding to contemporary life, is failing to be poetry. Poetry for me is just a way of responding to contemporary life, responding to contemporary conditions and I would never want to deny that one must be absolutely modern. I don’t know what else art is for if it’s not a way of being contemporary; if not a way of making sense of the life around us. That involves me in Best Buy and Red Lobster and popular music, but I think it’s possible to do that without eschewing the traditional means of imparting pleasure. Pleasures of sound, because sound to me is part of what makes poetry poetry. The intricate or rhythmical patterning of language. It doesn’t seem to us to be anachronistic in hip hop. There are some great poets writing in hip hop at the moment. I don’t feel like poetry should have to be composed of boring sentence fragments. (Laughs)

AD: I do remember Paul Muldoon wrote a poem about music, I think it was Sleeve Notes?

MR: Yeah, Sleeve Notes. I do think that as I’ve said elsewhere, the way I respond to popular music and the way I respond to poetry are not mutually exclusive. Certainly I make obvious distinctions between them, but music has been an extraordinarily important thing in my life. I always think people are exaggerating when they say that rock and roll or a DJ saved their lives, but it’s an understandable hyperbole. It can feel like that, especially when you’re younger. I’m old now. (Laughs)

AD: And in your poems so much is going on amidst the pop culture references; the sort of things that have always happened in poems and that have always been discussed, just in a different landscape.

MR: I hope so. I don’t think one should hesitate to be beautiful if one can. It’s again a question of the kind of beauty. There’s a striving for beauty that annoys me in poetry, a kind of processed beauty. I often think of it as kind of the James Wright epiphany. I love James Wright and I love the poem A Blessing, but the way that poem ends with him realizing that if he stepped out of his body he would break suddenly into blossoms, that sort of gesture or device where one ends a poem with a little lyric epiphany and one steps out of one’s body in some way or rises into the air or has become a cheap way of accessing beauty without earning it. I’m wary of that. I think that there’s a hell of a lot of ugliness in the world and that ugliness can be treated in a beautiful manner.

AD: That’s a prominent trend in all art forms, even among good writers.

MR: It’s like American Beauty. Who was that, Sam Mendes? That to me is my exemplar of unearned emotion, unearned pathos, unearned beauty. It has all the trappings of beauty, but it only goes through the motions. The cheap reliance on things you already know to make you feel as though you’ve experienced beauty. That of course is a very common problem in art. I would never want to suggest that I don’t fall into that trap myself sometimes, but I try to be aware of it.

AD: That is a good one. I always think of Brideshead Revisited where the ending doesn’t quite fit with what came before and feels uncomfortably shoehorned in.

MR: Well yeah, you can just have Chancy walk on the water– (Laughs)

AD: –And then it becomes something else entirely.

MR: Yeah. Instead of finding a way to actually convey the complexity of meaningful experience, you can just throw in a little gesture that is a shorthand for it. That’s what annoys me about Ruth Stone. I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead. She had a hard life and made art out of it. I’m in no position to dismiss her life’s work, but that’s what annoys me about poetry like hers. It’s what annoyed me about certain of Robert Hass’ poems. It what annoys me about Mary Oliver and Billy Collins and Sharon Olds (Laughs). One could go on and on. In fact, I’m probably not supposed to. I mean I’ve already attacked all of these people in print, so I’ll try not to name anyone I haven’t already dissed so as not to impair my job prospects. (Laughs)

AD: I always come back to Larry McMurty’s book Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen and that juxtaposition of reading Benjamin at a DQ in rural Texas, which seems like it would be dissonant, but it’s not at all.

MR: And Benjamin would have been the last person to ignore Dairy Queen. I am living at the moment in Hattiesburg Mississippi so I’m experiencing a lot of that dissonance myself, but it’s not dissonance. Intellectual work should be available to us wherever we are, not just on the steps of the Met. Art should speak to people in Hattiesburg with the same pressure and the same urgency that it speaks to someone in the New York Public Library. Which is not to say that I can’t wait to get out of Hattiesburg. (Laughs)

AD: Are you teaching there this year?

MR: I have a one year visiting position as Visiting Poet at the University of Southern Mississippi. It’s been interesting, but I’m moving back to Chicago at the end of this month.

AD: When did you first become interested in poetry?

MR: The first poets that I remember reading with any attention were Yeats, Rimbaud and Dylan Thomas. I couldn’t make heads or tails of any of them. (Laughs) I was probably in junior high or high school and it was partly that that attracted me. I didn’t know what the hell Yeats, or especially Thomas, was talking about. I’m not a big fan of Dylan Thomas, but there was a poem–and I can’t even remember which one–that went on for a hundred lines and then there was a stanza break and then another hundred lines. The hundredth line rhymed with the hundred-first line and the hundred-second line rhymed with the ninety-ninth line and so on until the very last line of the poem rhymed with the first line two hundred lines before. There was no way you would notice this hearing it, but that sense that intricate patterns could be sustained in ways that connected in ways that you had work to understand was fascinating to me. I probably should go ahead and pickup Dylan Thomas. I’ve hated him long enough.

Yeats and Rimbaud continue to me a lot to me. Rimbaud’s going to mean a lot to any kid who’s growing up in a conservative city and likes punk rock, but I find his work deepens as you get older. Rimbaud says in Illuminations: “Is it possible to become ecstatic amid destruction.” That spoke to me as a teenager and it speaks to me now in a more nuanced way as someone living in late capitalism in a country that is conducting an assault on its most helpless citizens.

AD: You recently received your Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

MR: Yes, I did. I’m a doctor. I tell my students not to call me Dr. Robbins, but they keep doing it. (Laughs) It’s horrible. I think if you’re not Condoleezza Rice or Henry Kissinger, you should think it’s totally pretentious to be called doctor if you’re not a medical doctor. I mean they should too, but they’re beyond shame. (Laughs)

AD: Why did you decide to get a Ph.D.?

MR: I wanted to become an intellectual. (Laughs) I know that sounds horrible. I realized that I had a disease, the disease of autodidacticism for a long time. It’s an exhilarating thing to be an autodidact, but it’s also possible to have the wrong conversations with yourself. Not the wrong conversations, but to have conservations that don’t move you past certain assumptions in a way that the conversations at a great university like the U of C allow you to do. I just wanted to study with people smarter than me and really, really, really think about this art form that I decided to devote myself to. And to think about it hard. One thing I find is that not enough younger poets are immersed in the tradition as deeply as they should be. Reading George Herbert or reading John Donne, and in contemporary work reading outside what I thought of as my little corner of the tradition was, I don’t think I could have written this book without that experience. It broadened my idea of what poetry was, what it could be, where it comes from, and what it accomplishes in our lives. It was a very valuable experience. I was lucky. I studied with Robert Von Hallberg and Oren Izenberg. I was thirty-something when I entered the Ph.D. program and I feel like they taught me how to read poetry. I also have an MFA and a masters degree, both of which are kind of useless.

AD: Where did you get your MFA?

MR: I never tell anyone that. (Laughs) It’s a part of my life I would like to forget. There’s that I use this epigraph from Fucked Up, the hardcore band. It’s the only epigraph in the book and it introduces the fourth section and it just says “I’ve wasted a lifetime / Not proud of it” and that was just a little personal reminder. I don’t want to say I’m a late bloomer. By the Frost/Whitman/Stevens model for first book publishing, I’m doing all right but I took too long to really get serious and my MFA experience was part of that. I’m like a born again Christian in many ways. Not literally, although I am interested in Christianity. What I mean is there’s this sense that your old life is gone and you’ve cast off some kind of skin. That’s how I feel about the first, oh, thirty years of my life. (Laughs) I was very irresponsible for a very long time.

AD: I can relate a little to that.

MR: I think a lot of people can. I just gave a copy of Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son to a friend of mine and she read it and we were talking about that gamble–I don’t know to what extent it’s autobiographical–of living a dissolute life in the hopes of turning it into art later. Just what long odds those are and how likely it is that you’re not going to get swallowed along the way. I feel grateful that I can put that epigraph from Fucked Up in my book. (Laughs)

AD: With so many pop culture references in your poetry, do you ever worry about the book being dated?

MR: I think everyone should worry about that. (Laughs) But sure. William Logan has some line about, I don’t know if it was Tony Hoagland or who mentions Britney Spears in a poem and how Britney Spears will be forgotten in ten years and your poem will look ridiculous. I think William Logan knows exactly nothing about Britney Spears, but sure, one worries about it but I would hope that what matters in the poems is more lasting than the cultural references. A number of [the pop culture references] aren’t too contemporary anyway. There are references to the Stones and to Berryman, but I hope that what’s lasting in the poems will outlast their topicality.

AD: I just think of a poem like Dig Dug, which I enjoy, but I also remember when the video for November Rain was released and I appreciate that you found the right rhyme for “Axl.” I wonder if it lacks something without that background and personal knowledge, but I think the poem works without it.

MR: I hope so. There are cultural markers in poems. There just are going to be. It’s not like I don’t think about it. The book’s been getting a lot of attention, but how many books have gotten a lot of attention that nobody reads in ten years and no one has heard of the person. (Laughs) You’re foolish to assume that you’re going to be immortal. I don’t care. I’m happy to be a poet that people read during my lifetime and after that, I won’t have any idea what’s going on. (Laughs) I’ve never understood the bid for immortality. You’re not going to be around to care.

It was actually my mentor and friend Oren Izenberg’s idea to write a poem about the video for November Rain. He was going to write something about it and I just ran with the idea because I loved it. Slash is upset and the helicopter is swirling around and he’s just got to play a solo in the desert. There’s no chord connecting his guitar to an amp, but he doesn’t care. It’s an important image. It’s like the moon landing for my generation. (Laughs)

Arnold and Jacob Pander first achieved comic book stardom with their first project, “Grendel: Devil’s Legacy,” written by Matt Wagner which starred Christine Spar. The Brothers have since gone on to work on a number of projects including “Accelerate” written by Richard Kadrey and “Tasty Bullet”... more

Arnold and Jacob Pander first achieved comic book stardom with their first project, “Grendel: Devil’s Legacy,” written by Matt Wagner which starred Christine Spar. The Brothers have since gone on to work on a number of projects including “Accelerate” written by Richard Kadrey and “Tasty Bullet” which Arnold collaborated on with Jonathan Vankin, but for the most part, the pair have worked together on comics and film projects. Among their many projects are “Triple-X”–not to be confused by the Vin Diesel movie of similar title, “Batman: City of Light,” “Exquisite Corpse,” and “Ginger Fox.” The duo have also directed many music videos, short films and commercials in addition to writing and directing the feature film “Selfless.”

Their new release is “Secret Broadcast Redux,” a full color digital version of the comic the pair released through Oni Press in 1998. When the comic was initially released, it was accompanied by a soundtrack and music videos. “Redux” includes a new coda to explore what happens to the characters after the events of the story and an all new soundtrack.


ALEX DUEBEN: For people who don’t know, what is Secret Broadcast?

ARNOLD PANDER:  Secret Broadcast is a two-part short story with a companion soundtrack of electronic music, Secret Broadcast Redux. The story follows Toby who seeks spiritual enlightenment through his beat driven pirate broadcasts with the assistance of his girlfriend Gina and his DJ buddy Carlos. It’s really a story about finding a your personal voice in a commercial media saturated world.
 
JACOB PANDER: And the creative forms that youthful rebellion can take as it expresses itself. It also reflects the world we saw around us in Portland in the late nineties.

AD: Talk a little about the music scene in Portland in the nineties and the pirate radio happening in Europe. For people who weren’t there what that scene was like in the nineties and what you and others were trying to do?
 
AP:  When Jacob and I were living in Amsterdam writing and drawing the Triple-X International for Dark Horse comics, we discovered House Music and Techno on the pirate station, Radio 100. We thought it would be cool to have a parallel story in America about pirate radio.
 
JP: It presented an exciting context for both the theme of free expression as well as the new electronic music culture that we were discovering while living and working in Europe.
 
AP: We returned to Portland to finish Triple-X and in the late 90’s a small pirate station had sprung up called “Subterradio”, playing new electronic music that had a focus on DJ culture labels like Ninja Tune, Mo Wax, OM and Ubiquity. It struck us as serendipitous and when Oni Press asked us to come up with a story for their flagship venture, we decided this would be a cool way for art and life to blend.  As we created the comic and the first CD soundtrack, there were fundraisers and other events to support the fringe station that was starting to impact programming on some of Portland’s commercial stations as electronic music gained popularity. Toby’s voice and metaphysical musings were heavily inspired by Subterradio’s maverick, DJ Shmeejay.
 
AD: So why was this a good time to return to Secret Broadcast?

JP: We’ve always pushed to find ways to combine our comics and film projects, and the original release of Secret Broadcast was a real multi-media vision, which has always played a major roll in our approach to projects. The original release ultimately included the comic, the CD, and music videos that we self produced for Jamal-ski and Pistel at the time, both landing airtime on MTV’s Amp.  But unless you had a major budget to cross promote these different mediums it was very difficult for them to be experienced as a cohesive whole.  A lot has changed since the original printing. Now we see all forms of media converged on the web where digital comics can cross-pollinate with YouTube videos, social networks, games and music. It really felt like the perfect time to release Secret Broadcast.
 
AP: We launched Panderbroscomics.com inspired by this zeitgeist in new media or “Transmedia”, and the creative possibilities of convergence entertainment that will more than likely be experienced online. Secret Broadcast really bridges the 20th century era of word-of-mouth to the digital modus operandi of the 21st century with the same spirit of artistic rebellion.
 
AD: Talk a little about the two big changes to the book - the addition of color and pulling together a new soundtrack - why did you make both decisions?

JP: Much of our printed work originally appeared in B/W, and as we’ve set out to digitally publish a number of our existing projects and new ones we’ve been making an effort to bring them to the world in the way we’d originally environed them. We enlisted colorist Grace Alison who really captured the atmosphere of the underground DJ era. We also decided to add two new pages to the ending that helps illuminate the fate of the Secret Broadcast characters.

AD: Any tracks from the new soundtrack that you’re especially excited by?
 
AP: They’re all my little babies. (Laughter) Well, adopted at least. Like any compilation people are bound to pick their faves, but we were really excited to get a brand new single from legendary British producer, Howie B. Also we had first heard Meat Beat Manifesto on Amsterdam pirate radio, so getting Jack Dangers to be on the record really captured the origins of the project.  Mark Pistel was really instrumental in getting that to happen.
 
JP: The music in Secret Broadcast Redux reflects the evolution of the project in an exciting way, with amazing tracks from a couple of electronica’s godfathers, as well as new emerging voices that that continue to push the genre.
 
AD: The book was originally published by Oni Press, one of their first publications, but now you’re releasing the book yourselves through Pander Brothers Comics. Why was this a good time to publish work yourselves?

JP: The last few years were devoted heavily to producing our feature film and other directing projects, but with the advent of new digital publishing platforms we became excited about the prospect of releasing a number of our classic books in color, and also experimenting with new approaches to hybrid storytelling by combining our love of movies, comics and music.  
 
AP: We have a number of comics that no one has seen or are out of print. The cool thing is we created a lot of characters and stories that still resonate today. With digital comics we have the ability to release some of our previously published books with an updated look, and get new stories out more consistently.  Hopefully we will connect with new readers and some of our previous fans as well.

AD: Talk a little about Jack Zero. This comic was first published in Dark Horse Presents years back and then you colored it and released it digitally. What is it and why you released it digitally?
 
AP: Jack Zero was also born out of living in Amsterdam and being homesick during a harsh winter. I connected with a writer and “beatbox” comedian named Joel (Zeroboy) Blumsack who had a number of alter ego’s including, “Jack Zero”–a misunderstood marksman whose Wild West affiliations launches him into pulp fiction infamy and thus into unintended adventures. We rereleased it with sepia tone color and all-new full-color covers, plush some cool extra true Wild West profiles in the back pages.
 
AD: Will we see a print copy of Secret Broadcast or Jack Zero soon?

AP: Later in the year we’ll be making our digital releases available as print on-demand books.
 
JP: Currently the digital books are available on Graphicly.com and Panderbroscomics.com, including the energy drink conspiracy adventure, Tasty Bullet, co-authored by Jon Vankin. We plan to expand this to more digital platforms soon, including Kindle Fire, NOOK, iBooks, Google Books and Kobo.

AD: You mentioned Triple-X–not to be confused with that Vin Diesel movie–which is possibly my favorite book of yours. Will we see a new edition of it one of these days?
 
JP: Thanks. That book means a lot to us since we spent most of our 20’s writing and drawing it for Dark Horse Comics in the early 90’s. We are planning to color it and add more pages including a prologue that sets up the conflict in the U.S. and also what befalls our hero at the end that will open it up for more adventures for Hans and company. The biggest change is we will be giving Triple-X a brand new title that will be announced closer to its digital re-release.
 
AP: The whole Vin Deisel thing totally caught us by surprise. One day a bus drove past us with a huge XXX on the side and we were like, what the hell!? It really prompted us to focus on Hollywood with our comic and graphic novel properties and hopefully see them to the screen or the web with our own vision intact.

AD: After Selfless, are you planning another movie?

JP: That’s definitely in the plans now that our comic book site is up and running. Arnold has been in L.A. the last two years and we’re working with DJ2 Entertainment to develop our comics as motion pictures.
 
AP: We’ve been writing a lot and assessing the new distribution landscape.  Later this year we’ll begin developing our next indie feature. The experience of making Selfless was an amazing journey and really taught us a lot about every aspect of the process. You can watch the trailer at: www.selflessthemovie.com.  

AD: Portland has changed a lot over the years - it’s grown in size, become a (perceived, at least) center of hipster culture, become a big filming location. What do you love about the town and from your perspective, how has it changed?
 
AP: It really has changed. Portland is going through a major identity shift with all the new people moving in from different parts of the country. There are a lot more voices now so it broken into a lot more subcultures.
 
JP: It’s very boutique in a way. You have these aesthetic microcosms from one end of the spectrum to the other. There’s a lot of unique small businesses and DIY movements that make Portland a kind of incubator for new ideas.
 
AP: We did our part over the years to help the underground art and electronic music scene but it’s really just taken off into something new and cool.
 
JP: The last few years we’ve focused on independent film and watched the film community grow around us. Hollywood has flirted with Portland off and on but our hope is to keep the local film industry thriving whether those TV shows continue or not.
 
AD: What are you working on now?

JP: We’re currently drawing a yet-to-be-titled vampire comic series based on one of our original screenplays.
 
AP: The Twilight franchise made it difficult to sell a vampire script in Hollywood, but it’s a story that we love and have wanted to tell, so we’re giving it a life as a graphic novel. We’re having a blast drawing it and will be releasing it in winter 2013.
 
JP: It’s a sexy thrill-ride that puts the “amp” back into the Vampire genre.

Black Lips are a four-piece from Atlanta, Georgia who play a psych-garage style they call ‘flower-punk.’ Heretofore as well known for their unpredictable live shows as their self-produced records, the Lips have seemingly been aiming for more artistic respect since their breakout, 2007’s Good Bad... more

Black Lips are a four-piece from Atlanta, Georgia who play a psych-garage style they call ‘flower-punk.’ Heretofore as well known for their unpredictable live shows as their self-produced records, the Lips have seemingly been aiming for more artistic respect since their breakout, 2007’s Good Bad Not Evil. And not without justification. That record and its followup, 2009’s 200 Million Thousand, showed that they were as serious about their craft as they were about good times. With their new record, Arabia Mountain, the Black Lips’ connoisseur’s ear for the best bits of rock history and hard-won chops have found an unlikely but sympathetic enabler in super-producer Mark Ronson. Ronson, famous for his work with artists like Amy Winehouse, Lily Allen, and Robbie Williams, might have seemed a risky choice, but he’s left the Lips’ scruffy lo-fi charm intact while bringing a wider palate of sound and honing their songs to razor sharpness. SuicideGirls spoke recently with the band’s singer/guitarist Cole Alexander about the new record, heavy metal, and economics.

Keith Daniels: Your sixth record is coming out today. What’s different about your situation now than when your first record came out?

Cole Alexander: Well, I’ve got a little more hair on my balls. We were a little more purist when we first came out. We were still learning the rudimentary style of rock’n’roll. So we were kind of a beat band, kind of like how the early Beatles might have sounded. As we learned more about music we delved into psychedelia and all that jazz.

KD: Do you still feel nervous when you’ve got a new record coming out and people haven’t heard it yet?

CA: I do. Unless we make music for ourselves. Before anybody ever heard our music I was making it for myself in our bedroom, and I still love those songs. But as we’ve gotten larger and you play more and you tour you open yourself up to more criticism. You put yourself out there more. It makes you a little nervous to be judged by so many people, because it’s easy for someone to just hear the record one time and just write it off. Maybe if they’d listened to it five times they might have liked it. To spend a lot of time, like a year, on a record, to have someone critique you can be a little... it affects you emotionally, you know? But it goes both ways! Some times you get a real glowing review and it makes you feel good about yourself. You definitely put yourself out there and you have to accept some of the criticism and what other people think of you. It’s kind of hard.

KD: Before this record you guys had always produced your albums yourselves. Was it also nerve wracking to have a pro like Mark Ronson come in and judge your music?

CA: A little bit, but not too much. We had a lot of faith in Mark and we trusted him, and he actually came through. It actually made it a little easier to know somebody who’s acclaimed and talented [was] listening to our music and believing in it and helping make it the best it could be. I felt very fortunate to have him on our side, especially being our first time using a producer.

KD: We actually talked to him a few weeks ago, and he was saying that he was actually nervous to be working with you guys because he was a fan.

CA: I think it was real out-of-left-field for us and for him to do this. In a lot of ways we’re quite different, so that made us a little nervous. But it’s good to be nervous. I read a thing the other day that basically said ‘if you’re not nervous it means you don’t care’.

KD: What inspired the album title and cover?

CA: There’s a mountain in Georgia. We were looking for pictures for our album cover, and we found this neat place outside Atlanta called Arabia Mountain. It’s a large granite rock. It’s elevated. We took these pictures and then we transposed them with milk, food coloring, and dish soap, which is hydrophobic and repels the colors from the milk.

KD: That’s badass.

CA: Yeah, I was happy with the cover. Again, I was nervous about that. Nervous what people think.

KD: I thought, when I saw the cover, that it had something to do with the interest you guys have expressed in the Middle East, in going to places like Iraq. You’ve been to...

CA: Palestine, Turkey, India. Yeah, that’s true. There was a little undertone of that. It’s volatile in that region right now, and we’ve tried to show a lot of openness to that region. So yeah, there’s an undertone of that. We wanted it to be kind of ambiguous, so people would wonder. But it’s really up to people’s interpretation, you know? People don’t know there’s an Arabia Mountain, Georgia, so they just assume it’s that. We also have a Rome, Georgia, and an Athens, Georgia.

KD: [Laughs] Well yeah. I actually asked one of the Suicide Girls who’s from Atlanta, Flux, if she had any stories about you guys. She said, “The Black Lips make you kiss people you shouldn’t.”

CA: We’ve had a lot of onstage kissing. It’s kind of juvenile and innocent. Like a kindergarten orgy. [Laughs]

KD: [Laughs] You’ve been all over the world. What are some bands in other countries that you think people here should check out?

CA: There’s a band from France I like called King Khan & the Shrines from... all over Europe. Omar Souleyman from Syria. I haven’t seen him live, actually, but from what I’ve seen on Youtube he seems pretty outstanding.

KD: Where’s the sample from at the beginning of “Mad Dog” where the guy is talking about summoning demons?

CA: I’m actually not sure where that’s from. What I’ve heard is that in the ‘90s there was a cassette tape of that call; an answering machine went on and it was recording a phone call where this guy was talking crazy to his friend or whatever. So they talked for an hour about heavy metal and all kinds of shit. It used to be a popular road tape for bands in the ‘90s, then it eventually got on the internet. It’s called Tight Bros. From Way Back When I think there’s a TV show called that now. We have a booking agency called “Tight Bros”. I think it all comes from that. It wasn’t a prank call, it was more like a found recording, a field recording. It’s an excerpt that I actually liked. They were talking about which black metal band or whatever was using the book of Necronomicon to conjure spirits into their songs, but the guy’s really talking with conviction about it. It really got me more into heavy metal listening to him talk about it.

That “Mad Dog” song is about playing a record backwards and having subliminal messages, like how Judas Priest got in trouble. In the ‘80s they thought that they told people to kill themselves and they had to go to court. If you play our song backwards there are memetic palindromes, there are actual backwards messages.

KD: Something about Ke$ha, right?

CA: The Ke$ha thing was kind of a joke, but there are actually lyrics forward that work if you turn them backwards.

KD: I was raised in a really religious family, really had the fear of God. When I was a kid there was another kid next door who was really into heavy metal, and he would play those records that had all that backwards shit on them and I’d think, “Ugh, I’m going to Hell.”

CA: [Laughs] That song is like a tribute to that whole... exactly what you’re talking about.

KD: I’ve heard that one of the alternate titles you were considering for this record was Expensive.

CA: [Laughs] It was like a concept album we thought of having where we charge an exorbitant amount of money, so like the record is 99 dollars. But you get the record no-money-down, like you get it for free at the store, but you’re on an installment plan of 99 cents a month for 12 years or something. Like a refrigerator that seems great, “Take it for free!” but then it winds up ruining your credit. No money down but it builds interest over ten years. Everybody likes a free record. We didn’t really have time to manifest all that, but maybe in the future we will as kind of an ironic joke on the economy and society. [Laughs]

KD: What do you think of the idea that this record might really blow you guys up?

CA: I’d be open to that, but I don’t think the world is quite in that place right now. But if they took to it, I’d love that. I want to make a bigger live show where we can have more lights and own sound guy and be able to enhance our product and do more crazy stuff. It would take a little success to build out some of the more far-out ideas we have. Like Expensive.

KD: Your success up til now has been a gradual process. There hasn’t been that one big moment.

CA: Yeah, much like human evolution. Baby steps. But I think we’ve persevered longer doing it slow and easy than if we’d been a flash in the pan and had a big record label push in 2001.

(image) by Steven Whitney All of us take too many things for granted, the rights and rewards we enjoy for which others greatly sacrificed and often even died. On Memorial Day we do reverently honor our fallen, and we still wildly celebrate our nation’s birth on July 4th...but Labor Day, once a holiday... more

by Steven Whitney

All of us take too many things for granted, the rights and rewards we enjoy for which others greatly sacrificed and often even died. On Memorial Day we do reverently honor our fallen, and we still wildly celebrate our nation’s birth on July 4th...but Labor Day, once a holiday that truly paid tribute to workers, has become just a three day weekend of boating, beaches, and barbeque, with nary a thought of the valiant, against-all-odds struggle of both individual and organized labor. These days it should probably be called a Bank Holiday, like in England, because the financial sector has had a great three decades at the expense of labor.

Long forgotten are the inhumane working conditions of the past – sweat shops, child labor, company towns, workplaces incubating extreme physical danger and biological disease, unbearably long hours for barely sustainable wages, and so much more. The many thousands of lives lost in union struggles over the past 200 years have faded in our memory like a sunset disappearing over a lost horizon.

In 1806, the Philadelphia Journeymen Cordwainers union went on strike for higher wages. These already poor shoemakers were bankrupted and convicted on charges of criminal conspiracy, setting a precedent of conservative governments combatting labor from that very first U.S. strike to the present.

Over the next century, the battles between owners and workers – let’s say the 5% against the 95% - were constant and bloody, with state militias, our national Army, city police forces, and hired goons all ganging up to inflict pain and punishment on workers. Men, women, and children alike were beaten, shot (sometimes mowed down by new-fangled machine guns), hanged, executed, imprisoned, and deported. The workers themselves – whether they were miners, carpenters, railway hands, dressmakers, auto or steel workers, skilled or unskilled – were branded as organizers, anarchists, socialists, and communists...all because they wanted a living wage and a better life.

In 1911, seamstresses – women and young girls – at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company threatened a strike for higher wages. Within a few days, their workplace – the top three floors of a ten-story building – was consumed by fire. 147 died – many by jumping out the windows, others burned or were trampled to death as they tried to escape through exits that had been locked. Two weeks later, the company owners were indicted not for murder, but manslaughter.

By the 1920s – an era of unchecked conservative policies advocating deregulation and a pro-business agenda – the U.S. Bureau of Investigation, the forerunner of the FBI, created a strike force called Palmer’s Raiders whose mission was to crush unions and workers under the guise of anti-communism. The violence and injustices visited upon workers was unprecedented, even when measured against the worst bloodbaths in labor’s history – the Haymarket Riot, the Tompkins Square Riot, the Bay View Massacre, the Thibodaux Massacre, the Ludlow Massacre, and literally hundreds more battlegrounds. The Republican congress even passed laws totally abolishing the right of workers to strike, assemble, bargain collectively, and picket.

It took the Great Depression and a Democratic congress to right the ship of state – and the state of unions in America. Early on, FDR recognized the role of labor in revitalizing a financially bankrupt economy when he said:

A mere two months after taking office in 1933, FDR passed the National Industrial Recovery Act, which not only restored all the rights denied them by Republicans, but also contained provisions like minimum wage and maximum hours. Since that time historians have isolated its most important passage:

By empowering workers, America arose from the ashes of the Depression, our country’s infrastructure was built from the ground up, a World War was won, and the largest and most stable middle-class in the world was created. FDR’s pro-labor programs ended the Republican era of plutocratic “job creators,” trickle-down bubble economies, and in 1934 American voters gave Democrats the largest majority either party had (and has) ever held in Congress – 322 Democrats to 103 Republicans – leading to the Fair Labor Standards Act and the greatest period of wealth and job creation, productivity, prosperity, and income equality any nation has ever known.

Today, with the sweatshops and child labor camps gone, we all enjoy the fruits of the labor movement’s long struggle – the 8-hour workday and 5-day week, equal pay for equal work, 2 weeks’ vacation, sick days, higher wages, safe and regulated working environments, health care, collective bargaining, the rights of petition and assembly, worker’s compensation, non-discriminatory employment practices, laws protecting whistleblowers, pension and retirement funds, and, of course, the Family and Medical Leave Act, passed by Clinton’s Democratic congress in 1993. Labor was behind it all – and even aggressively backed Martin Luther King Jr.’s crusade for Equal Rights.

Predictably, starting when Reagan fired the Air Traffic Controllers in 1981, Republicans have consistently tried to turn back every one of those hard-won benefits. In this year’s GOP primaries, a return to child labor was even floated as a viable solution to the economic disaster caused by Bush-Cheney / Republican economic policies. For the last 30 years, the GOP has hacked away at labor and unions. Because of that, wages of American workers now make up the lowest percentage of GDP since 1947, even as corporate profits are the highest in 40 years. That obscene inequality is not a coincidence – it is the priority of the modern Republican party, this year led by Romney and the despicable hypocrisy of Paul Ryan.

So if we are to rebuild a strong Middle Class and keep America a land “of, by, and for the people” – if we are to avoid a dystopian Blade Runneresque future – we must continually recognize the importance of labor’s contribution to the growth and strength of our nation. Most of us – probably 95% or more – are, or came from, the working class, and now is not the time to lose sight of our heritage. Instead, we must pick up the cudgel of those who came before us. Too many of our ancestors actually died – sacrificed their very lives – to give us and not our wealthy overlords the power to determine our own destinies.

This Labor Day, September 3rd, instead of the all-day backyard barbeque, let’s take a few hours to mobilize our faith in ourselves and in the founding principles of our nation by hitting the streets once again to honor and support America’s two greatest assets – the worker and the Middle Class. They are one and the same.

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Gotcha!

by Nicole Powers (video) You’ve Been Trumped documents the David and Goliath battle between the dignified and humble residents of a tiny Scottish hamlet and Donald Trump, who is arguably the world’s least dignified and humble property developer. The battle lines are drawn when The Donald decides to... more

by Nicole Powers



You’ve Been Trumped documents the David and Goliath battle between the dignified and humble residents of a tiny Scottish hamlet and Donald Trump, who is arguably the world’s least dignified and humble property developer.

The battle lines are drawn when The Donald decides to build what he modestly claims will be the world’s best golf course on the Menie Estate in Scotland, a site that – until Trump’s bulldozers moved in – was home to some of the world’s best sand dunes. Indeed, the Menie sand sheet was called the “jewel in the crown” of Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) in the UK by Scottish Natural Heritage, an advisory body set up by the government to oversee such conservation designations.

However, seduced by Trump’s false promises of investment and jobs, the Scottish Government disregarded the environmental advice of its own advisory body, made a mockery of the hard to come by SSSI designation, overruled the local authority – which had denied planning permission – and trampled on the wishes of local residents in order to give Trump the green light to build his exclusive playground on land of such extraordinary natural beauty if was immortalized in the 1983 film Local Hero.

Though documenting a geographically specific dispute, the tale You’ve Been Trumped tells is in many ways archetypical of our times. The film vividly shows what happens when the 1% are allowed to run rampant in the wilderness at the expense of both the environment and the 99%, while the politicians and police "protect and serve" their megabucks masters and the media is too distracted by celebrity to report the truth.

I caught up with You’ve Been Trumped’s director Anthony Baxter on the morning of the film’s opening in The Donald’s hometown...

Nicole Powers: It’s a big day for you isn’t it? Being the first day of You’ve Been Trumped’s theatrical run in New York City, virtually in the shadow of the Trump Tower.

Anthony Baxter: Exactly. It is exciting. It’s taken a lot of effort obviously to get here and it just feels like the right thing to be doing – taking You’ve Been Trumped to Trump essentially.

NP: You say it’s been a long journey, how did it start? What’s your background?

AB: Well, I’m a journalist filmmaker, but this is the first feature film I’ve made. I’ve worked as a journalist for the BBC and ITN and various other organizations since 1989. Then, when I moved to Scotland ten years ago, I moved to a town called Montrose, which is just down the road from where Donald Trump announced he was going to be building a golf course. As a journalist filmmaker living locally, I was very aware of the story, and was struck very much by the fact that the local newspaper in Aberdeen just seemed to completely ignore any environmental issues raised by the development. They just said that this was a great thing for the area. They whipped up a media frenzy, essentially, about anybody who objected to the development.

For example, the local authority first of all blocked the Trump development, and then the local newspaper, the Evening Express, ran a headline “Traitors” with a picture of the councillors who had objected to the development. Those people who were objecting were doing so on very heartfelt and strong environmental grounds. They just felt it was the wrong thing. Also, I felt that the local residents were just not being given a voice at all. The people living on the footprint of the development were effectively being threatened with eviction through the British eminent domain, which was extraordinary.

When the Scottish government gave Mr. Trump the green light to go ahead, which it did after calling in the application saying it was in the national interest because of all these ludicrous claims that jobs were going to be created, I just felt it was a really important story to document. So I went to speak to the local residents and found them to be an extraordinary group of people, very dignified, very caring for the land on which they lived. These dunes are scientifically very, very important. They were supposed to be protected as a Site of Special Scientific Interest, yet the government decided to overthrow those concerns in favor of Mr. Trump’s development.

NP: Right. Trump managed to bulldoze not only through the local council’s rejection of planning permission, but also a special site designation.

AB: Yeah, exactly – and that’s unprecedented. It’s an incredibly worrying precedent because these sites are designated Sites of Special Scientific Interest for very good reason. It takes a lot for a site to be designated in that way. It’s done so in order to protect it from development. For example, those dunes are key to understanding the interaction between the North Sea and the coast there. They’re used by scientists to study global warming. They’re also an incredibly important wilderness. That stretch of sand dunes is one of the last coastal wildernesses of its type in Europe.

If you or I wanted to build a shack on that land, we wouldn’t be allowed to do so. One of the local residents tried to alter her chimney. She’d applied for planning permission several times and had it refused. Yet Mr. Trump comes along and says that he wants to build two championship golf courses, a skyscraper hotel, a 450 bed hostel for workers, 1500 houses, and timeshare apartments, and was given the green light to do so. All the environmental groups were bitterly opposed. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds said that Scotland’s green policy had been sold down the river. There was not one credible environmental group who supported the development. All of the groups opposed it for very good reason.

NP: The media seemed to be so busy fawning over Trump’s celebrity that they completely ignored the valid objections to this development. Indeed, you were forced to self-fund this movie.

AB: Yeah. When I did a pitch for the film at the Edinburgh International Film Festival maybe three years ago now, I made a trailer and I stood in front of a group of commissioning editors from the BBC, from independent television, from the arts agencies in Scotland, from international broadcasters, and I explained why I thought this story was very, very important to tell. All of them commended me on the pitch but refused to fund the film in any shape or form. One American executive said, “I hope you’ve got a good lawyer.” It seemed to me as if the media was almost afraid of taking on a tycoon such as Donald Trump because of the fear of litigation.

I just felt very, very strongly that we shouldn’t allow those kinds of fears get in the way of telling this important story. Particularly, as you point out, because the local newspapers had effectively blacked out any opposition to this development. It’s hard to explain sometimes to people outside of the area just what a stranglehold those newspapers have on the agenda in that area. The Press And Journal and the Evening Express newspapers very much set the editorial agenda. They had refused to reflect any of the opposition apart from the spat between Michael Forbes, the farmer [who’d stalwartly refused to give up his property in exchange for an offer of cash, a job, and a lifetime golf club membership – really!], and Donald Trump. Michael was painted as this guy standing in the way of development, and nobody ever bothered to go speak to any of the other local residents who were affected, and I just felt that it was extraordinary.

For example, I went to speak to Susan Munro, one of the local residents whose house now looks over a concrete car park where the dunes used to lie. Not one reporter from the local newspaper had ever bothered to go and speak to her over the several years that this has been running on as a local planning dispute. I just felt it was really, really important for journalism that we try to tell that story as best we can. And when we were faced with no funding, obviously, I had to decide whether or not to continue. So we mortgaged the house and then we went on the internet through IndieGoGo, a crowd funding website, to raise the rest of the money in order to finish the film.

NP: It doesn’t surprise me that money talks in today’s climate, but it was really shocking way Trump treated the locals. The names he called them very publicly and the contempt with which he treated their property rights was appalling. These were ancient property lines that had been set in stone that he just decided, because he was Donald Trump, he could change at will. You even have footage of him literally digging up garden fences and moving them to where he felt they should be.

AB: Exactly. But there’s one rule for tycoons with money and one rule for everybody else. The fact is, if you move and you’ve got a new neighbor, you would try and get on with your neighbors as best you can. But Donald Trump’s response to neighbors who didn’t want to sell him their properties was to brand their homes pigsties and them as pigs for living in these houses which have gone back generations.

NP: Right, he’s repeatedly called Michael Forbes “a pig” who lives in “a slum.”

AB: Yeah, it represents in a way a cultural chasm between, not Americans, but Donald Trump. I don’t think the people on the Menie Estate in these properties think that Mr. Trump is a typical American at all. They’ve been very moved by the comments that have comes from Americans all over this country who have written to them and supported them. But what he does represent very much is the ultimate one percenter. He thinks he can manipulate the media, manipulate the government, manipulate even the police…

[The locals] would call the police to complain about the excessive security measures being taken when they want access to their homes for example. One resident, Susan Munro, was told to spread eagle on the bonnet of her car by Mr. Trump’s security workers. They felt very much that there was one rule for Mr. Trump, who would come in with fleets of Range Rovers with blacked out windows, and there were some startling stories that emerged.

People used to be able to walk freely on those dunes. One horse rider was stunned to find vehicles “almost chasing after her,” was how she was reported it, startling the horse. I mean, this is a wilderness, it’s supposed to be a place in Scotland where you can roam freely. You have a right to roam in Scotland, and yet this was being turned into a gated community around the residents under their noses. Essentially, they were feeling incredibly powerless. They would call the local authorities and say, “Look there’s a big bank of earth being built next to my house that’s not on the plans – what are going to do about it?” And nobody did anything about it…

NP: One of the things that you show very vividly is how the police protected and served the 1% and not the 99%. There’s a scene in the movie where you’re talking to camera on someone’s private property, on a driveway, not causing trouble to anyone, and the police actually trespass onto that property to arrest you. You’re not doing anything wrong. You’re in a place you’ve been invited to.

AB: Exactly. That’s right. We’re on the property of Susan Munro, one of the local residents. We’ve just done an interview with one of Mr. Trump’s workers and we’re on private property. Then the police come on to Susan’s land and start wrestling the camera from me, without explaining to us what was going on at all, putting me up against the car and handcuffing me in a very brutal way.

This was essentially two journalists following a story and trying to hold power to account, which is the whole point of journalism as the National Union of Journalists recognized when it complained to the Chief Constable about the incident, saying that it was unprecedented, that it raised very serious questions about press freedoms in the UK, and that the police were completely out of order. The Chief Constable refused to bring any kind of independent inquiry into this incident at all. The Herald Newspaper did an investigation into the relationship between Donald Trump and the local police, which raised many alarm bells, and had to use Freedom of Information [requests] to get details of that relationship…

People are completely fed up with this whole kind of situation, being up against this stranglehold on the people who are supposedly representing them – in this case the First Minister of Scotland. These people are in his constituency. Alex Salmond, who is the local MSP [Member of the Scottish Parliament] for these people, he has not once bothered to go and visit them, and refuses to see the film. He is as accountable in this whole sorry saga as Donald Trump and the local police are.

NP: That’s the thing, in the film you see crimes against the environment, you see the blatant theft of property and land, you see Mr. Trump slander of the locals, we see you being improperly arrested – yet none of you really have any recourse. Donald Trump has unlimited funds to fight in court; it’s almost pointless even trying to go up against him.

AB: Yeah, for example, Molly Forbes, the elderly lady who felt so passionately about this area and that the decision to build houses and hotels on this land was wrong…She did what she thought was the right thing to do, which was to take out legal action through the Court of Session in Edinburgh [Scotland's supreme civil court]. She lost that case and then the Trump Organization announced it was going to sue her for $50,000 in legal costs. Now that’s a drop in the ocean for the Trump Organization, but for a lady who is just trying to do the right thing and hoping that she can raise awareness in the public on this thing which was getting no press at all, it’s utterly appalling…

NP: The other issue too is that in order to get planning permission to make this golf course happen, the quid pro quo was supposed to be jobs and investment. But it appears that Trump lied about the investment, lied about the number of jobs, and the labor that he has brought in has been by and large from outside the community.

AB: Yeah, the jobs that were promised were 6,000 jobs, and this was an utterly ludicrous projection. It was based on people running a luxury hotel, which in most communities in Scotland are run by people from overseas because the local people cannot afford to take those jobs. The terrible pay offered is often bang on the minimum wage, and they are not the kind of jobs that people aspire to. Now that’s even if there were jobs there, but those jobs have not materialized at all. There’s a temporary clubhouse, there’s one golf course, so there’s a few people serving drinks to wealthy golfers, a few people caddying bags around and mowing the grass, but a few dozen people is not 6,000. That projection was utterly ludicrous and was found out to be by the London School of Economics who poured over the figures that we gave them that had been presented to all those at the Scottish Government inquiry by the Trump Organization. It took the London School of Economics no time at all to say these numbers don’t add up.

Essentially, this is what’s happening all over the world. People are blinded by the ludicrous claims and projections of jobs and economic prosperity for an area in order to rip it up and start building – and, on the way, inflate the prices of the land because the planning permission is given to the land and not the person. Donald Trump could – and the local residents believe he will – sell up all the property that he has there with the planning permission for 1,500 houses, and, as the London School of Economics says, benefit to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars probably just for the planning permission for the land. There are people lining their pockets and making big cash out of these green field sites that are supposed to be protected, while the local people who recognize the importance of these sites, and recognize the value for generations to come, are left powerless on the sidelines to do anything about it.

NP: And the value of their properties is vastly reduced because they’ve got bloody great car parks and mountains of dirt outside their windows.

AB: That’s absolutely right. Susan Munro’s property when I first visited was right by the dunes. She had lived there with her family peacefully for years. There used to be another lady who had an old railway carriage which she lived in…The first thing that happened when Trump bought the land was that was pulled up onto the back of a truck and taken away. Susan had watched this from her back garden aghast. Then she finds a car park being rolled out overnight almost. She’s at the bottom of her garden, tarmac is being piled down on to the dunes over concrete, and she is left there, utterly powerless, calling the local authority saying, “What’s happening? This isn’t supposed to come so close to my property is it?” And they’re saying, “Oh well, I’m sure everything’s happening according to the plans.” As you say, her house is being deeply devalued by the fact that you can’t walk out of her garden onto the dunes. She’s now got a massive fence being put up in front of her house.

Mr. Trump’s executive, Michael Cohen, visited Susan Munro’s property recently. When she voiced to him the deep concerns she had about the security forces roaming around the property, Mr. Cohen’s response to Susan was, “Well, don’t worry, you’ll soon have a security pass to access your property.” That is not what she lives there for and why she decided to move to the dunes. For somebody with the power and money and resources of Donald Trump to take that sort of stance with his neighbors is absolutely appalling, and deeply worrying I think for audiences who see the film. They are startled and shocked by that…

NP: The genius of the film is that you don’t really need to editorialize Trump. He’s hoisted on his own petard. The stuff that he says is utterly, utterly appalling on every level. You just have to roll the cameras and present the footage.

AB: One thing that I’ve always said is I went to start documenting what was happening…What you see on the screen is what came into the camera lens over the course of 18 months to two years. That is the fact. Now, people may not like what Mr. Trump says, and that’s for them to make up their own mind, but the fact of the matter is that what you see on the screen is what came into the camera lens. It is cut together as a film has to be, because you can’t have 300 hours of footage on the screen, and what you see is Donald Trump having probably the most screen time in the whole film. It represents, I think, a cultural chasm between the way that Mr. Trump may be used to speaking to people in New York City and the way the local people in a rural Scottish wilderness feel is the right way to behave and the right way to interact with their neighbors. They were brought up to say “please” and “thank you,” and to do their best to get on with people who live next door. Whereas Mr. Trump’s answer to becoming a new neighbor was to brand their homes “pigsties” and “slums.”

NP: And I think he honestly can’t comprehend why someone wouldn’t be thrilled to live in a gated community and have a security pass to get to their own property.

AB: The thing about him is that he has not in any way recognized the wrongs that he’s responsible for…People essentially are saying “where are the lawyers in all of this?” The local people are incredibly dignified, they’re incredibly patient – this has been going on for years. They are people who when the news crews come around and ask them for sound bites, they have great eloquence, dignity, and a deep respect for their environment, and their choice of words is so restrained.

We did two screenings at the Scottish Parliament itself to which we invited the First Minister and he refused to come. The local residents, who came there…they win hearts and minds wherever they go…These people were only branded the other day by the Trump Organization in a statement released to the Daily News here in New York, as “a national embarrassment for Scotland.” Well I say, come and see the film and make up your own mind about it.

NP: I’m not left in any doubt who is the national embarrassment here – and it’s not anyone from Scotland.

AB: The thing is, the people there, they didn’t ask for this, to have the media spotlight thrown on to their homes…They didn’t ask for the media to come knocking on their doors. They just ask to live peacefully on the dunes. They are people who have a great deal of respect for the environment and for each other, and have been brought together by this struggle. In a way, one thing that’s come out of this is that the community has really come together, as you see in the films when hundreds of people march through the dunes to one of the resident’s homes, Michael Forbes’, to support him.

NP: This film is helping shine a spotlight on an international level on something that otherwise would be a very local issue. What are your plans for it in America?

AB: We felt that it was very, very important to take You’ve Been Trumped to Trump, to take it to New York City, so that people can see for themselves what has been happening in Scotland, and bring those events here to his own backyard essentially. Because the story is not a local story, it’s an international story. I started the film before the Occupy movement started, but people have said to me it is a film for the Occupy generation because it captures the deep frustrations that people are feeling everywhere…

I think people need to know and see stories around the world which show communities in those situations feeling utterly powerless. And although the film is not meant to, and could not ever on it’s own be something which changes things, it educates and informs people to make decisions and to say, look, we need to change the way that we live…

So we’ve been screening it across Scotland. We’ve had great difficulties in getting the film out in the UK. The British Film Institute in London refused to support the release of the film. It has millions of pounds of lottery funded money to try and bring films to cinema audiences, and the only money that exchanged hands between us and the BFI was us paying to show the film to a few executives at its West End headquarters.

NP: And this is a film that’s gone on to win 10 awards so far.

AB: That’s right, exactly. It’s just been nominated for a Grierson Award, which is the British documentary Oscars essentially. We’ve found everywhere we have turned closed doors from organizations who are supposed to support us. So what we have done is we’ve hit the internet four times and raised money from hundreds of people around the world who also agree that this is an important film that needs to be seen. We put it in the cinemas of Scotland, where the reaction has been shock, and also in as many cinemas as we can around London and in England – although not nearly as many as we would’ve liked.

We want to get it into cinemas because we feel that audiences seeing it collectively feel that it’s a powerful film. It needs to be seen in that kind of an environment at this stage I think. Also, as we know from the last few days here in New York, if you release a film on a cinema screen it gets a lot more attention in the media than it does if you just pop it up on YouTube…Bill Moyers said very generously in his PBS interview that many, many people should see it because of its importance.

What we have at the moment is a media obsessed with celebrity who will often say to journalists and filmmakers, we’d like a film on Donald Trump if you’ve got access. If you can fly around the world on his 757, then that’s fine, we’ll commission you to make a film. But this film is more important than that because it’s giving the ordinary people and our planet a voice, which is so stifled in this media environment we’re in. Despite the huge number of channels, we can’t even get a story out about ordinary people being bulldozed in their lives and on their properties. It just seems utterly lopsided and completely wrong to us. That’s why I was prepared to re-mortgage the house and to take these steps, because I just think if nobody else is prepared to support us, then we have to go out and do what we think is right.

NP: My hope too is that in future when local authorities are considering planning permission requests for similar projects that government officials – and the press – will be a bit more cynical about the numbers that they’re being bamboozled with. One of the myths that you dispel is this idea that it would take a billion dollars of investment to build a golf course. Isn’t it $6 million that’s actually been spent on essentially a large grass lawn with a few holes in it?

AB: Exactly. What we have here is a very, very worrying situation where figures are bandied around by the Trump Organization, which are then printed as fact. This was originally a £1billion development. Then overnight it dropped to £750 million one day, and all the press reported that as if nothing had happened. Then, suddenly, we had it reported in the news that Donald Trump had opened this golf course and that it’s a $100 million development, and one golf course has cost that amount of money – and it is wrong. We know that the figures lodged with Company’s House show that, according to a leading land rights expert in Scotland who has done some serious investigation into this, the amount that has been spent is to the tune of around £6 million – that’s around $10 million.

NP: And that was out of £1 billion promised.

AB: Yeah, exactly…In the interviews in the film Mr. Trump says to me that we’re about to start the Marram grass planting project. He said that’s a very big job, hundreds of people are going to be planting the grass. Well, thanks to a screening at the Scottish Parliament, there was a Sunday Herald journalist there, an environment editor, who then did some research and under Freedom of Information got hold figures which showed that 12 unskilled laborers had planted the Marram grass. Mr. Trump is used to bandying these ludicrous figures around which are then printed as fact. Like his claim that 93% of people in Scotland were behind the development. We know, because the BBC did an investigation into that number, that the poll that he referred to was never actually done. And yet that figure was bandied around by the local newspapers constantly as being proof that this development was supported.

NP: I very much hope that your documentary will help stop things like this from happening in the future, but it really saddens me that as a result of Trump’s efforts to build the “world’s best golf course” we’ve actually lost some of the world’s best sand dunes.

AB: That is a tragedy, we can’t turn back the clock. Once these things are done, they’re done. Even though the locals feel and hope one day that nature will take its quiet vengeance and reclaim what is its, the fact is that we have lost this wilderness. It has been destroyed and we can’t turn back the clock. When you move biblical amounts of sand around a site with fleets of bulldozers, it’s very difficult to allow nature to take its course...

The only hope I have is that people will look at the film and think, how many times can we allow the planet to afford these kinds of decisions?…And I think the communities are so tired of this stuff. The ordinary people who are out there in their masses are sick and tired of it, and they want to see a change. The tycoons and the rich and powerful, who are used to getting their way, and having this huge amount of influence with their money and power, should listen to what the masses are saying – listen to the voices of those ordinary people who just have to be heard. I think that’s the whole point of what we’ve been trying to do.

You’ve Been Trumped opens at Laemmle’s Town Centre 5 in Encino on Friday, August 17 and can be seen at the Art Theatre of Long Beach on Sunday, August 19 and 16. For more information visit: youvebeentrumped.com

by Lee Camp (video) In the 2008 election millions of votes were stolen or purged – and 2012 will make that election look cleaner than Mr. Clean's ass after a Brazilian. Learn how your vote will be stolen. Then learn how to stop it. Then tell everyone you know. Related Posts: Moment of Clarity:... more

by Lee Camp



In the 2008 election millions of votes were stolen or purged – and 2012 will make that election look cleaner than Mr. Clean's ass after a Brazilian. Learn how your vote will be stolen. Then learn how to stop it. Then tell everyone you know.



Related Posts:
Moment of Clarity: Why Can't War Be Fun For The Whole Family?
Moment of Clarity: On The Brink Of Cultural Singularity
Moment of Clarity: Storming The Headquarters Of Chase Bank
Moment of Clarity: The Euro Was Designed To Fuck You 12 Ways Til Sunday
Moment of Clarity: This Video Is Not Fracking Offensive
Moment of Clarity: Go Greenland, Scratch That, A lot Of It's Already Gone
Moment of Clarity: America Is Too Fat, Skinny & Free!
Moment of Clarity: Did The Lord Say To Be A Greedy A$$hole?
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Moment of Clarity: The Shadows Are Taking Over

Once you’ve made it to the height of your chosen field, what do you do next? Well according to Tool and A Perfect Circle singer Maynard Keenan, what satisfies him at this point is crushing grapes in his backyard. If that sounds like fun to you CBT fans then you’re missing the point. Keenan has figured... more

Once you’ve made it to the height of your chosen field, what do you do next? Well according to Tool and A Perfect Circle singer Maynard Keenan, what satisfies him at this point is crushing grapes in his backyard. If that sounds like fun to you CBT fans then you’re missing the point. Keenan has figured it out, he’s taken his love for wine and started his own label and vineyard and is taking some heavy risks with his next music project Puscifier.

Check out the official site for Puscifer

Daniel Robert Epstein: What are you up to today?

Maynard Keenan: I’m working on some Puscifer music and I’ve got the winery kicking. I’m trying to sort out some bottling dates.

DRE: What’s your wine called?

MK: I have two, Caduceus Cellars is my premium brand and then I have the more middle of the road stuff which is called Merkin Vineyards.

DRE: How did the wine thing get started?

MK: I’ve been a fan of wines since the early 90’s and it progressed to the point where I just decided to put a vineyard in my backyard, not really having any idea what I was doing or what I was going to be doing with the grapes. I met the right guy who had a plan of his own and I’ve been riding his coattails learning as I go. We released our first wines about a year and a half ago and everything has sold out. Now we’re just trying to get some more wine into bottles so we can get it up for sale.

DRE: It sounds like a lot of fun.

MK: Yes and it’s a pretty grounding experience. The music industry and Hollywood tends to be very disconnected and not really about reality. Some of the activities that go on there don’t have a lot of logic to it. You’ve got people from damaged childhoods that are emoting and running the business when they have no idea what they’re doing.

DRE: I don’t know a ton about wine but when you say started a vineyard; does that mean you hooked up with a grape that you liked or developed a grape?

MK: I had some guys come out from U.C. Davis to check out the area, check out the elevation, make some suggestions on root stock and what varietals would work in this climate. Like evaluation of temperature, soil content, elevation and all that stuff goes into them calculating what might or might not work here.

DRE: Are you finding it’s getting into people’s mouths that don’t know who you are?

MK: Yeah, I think so. I have a blog on the main page of Wine Spectator. It’s good wine, so it’s finding its way into the hands of people who appreciate wine and they’ve been reporting good things.

DRE: It must be very satisfying to walk out into the middle of your own vineyard.

MK: Absolutely and very calming.

DRE: How was touring with the Big Day Out festival in Australia?

MK: It was good. I got a chance to taste some wines down there as well, but I had the flu which sucked because I couldn’t taste anything.

DRE: So when you’re on tour you just hit all the wineries you can?

MK: Well, if you can time it right then it works out great. But it’s not always that easy. The schedule for touring is usually grueling. You can’t just take a week off in the middle of a tour to go taste wine.

DRE: Do you drink much else?

MK: I don’t normally drink a lot of wine. I’m not a huge drinker. I just really enjoy a good glass of wine with a meal and I know that I have an aptitude for it. It’s like writing music in a way. There are lots of levels and nuances to discover.

But as for the Big Day Out Festival, it gave me a chance to meet some people that I want to work on with some Puscifer music. I’ve been talking to different musicians about coming and guest appearing on some of these tracks.

DRE: So while you’re chatting with guys you just say, “I’ve got this thing going on, are you guys interested?”

MK: Yeah, absolutely. Right now I’ve got a couple tracks I’m working on with Tim Alexander from Primus and some of the guys from Audioslave, Tim [Commerford] and Brad [Wilk].

DRE: Yeah, they’re free.

MK: Also Johnny Polanski. I’ve worked with Danny Lohner on a few tracks before.

DRE: Recently I’ve gotten to talk to Les Claypool and Mike Patton who have all these different bands that they do. They both pretty much told me that they’re not even sure sometimes where the music they’re creating will go. Are you the same way?

MK: I try to wear one hat at a time. I find that’s the best way to do it. When I’m doing tours I’m doing tours. If I’m doing A Perfect Circle then I’m doing that. But Puscifer has been a little different because it is not just music. It’s actually as much a clothing line as it is a band. I’ve been talking with different manufacturers so it’s almost a brand at this point.

DRE: Was that always the intention?

MK: I think it’s just the age that we’re in. With the internet the way it is, music is now a soundtrack to some other activity. You can make a living selling songs but you make a better living playing them. If you’re not going to play them you got to figure out what else to sell and I guess that comes down to t-shirts and key chains.

DRE: How many vineyards do you have?

MK: Up in Arizona I have about three vineyards. My partner and my mentor, winemaker Eric Glomski from Page Springs Vineyards and Cellars, who I make all my wines through, has a similar amount of acreage. We bought about 60 to 65 acres together down in Tucson. We’re the largest producer of wine grapes in Arizona at the moment.

DRE: It sounds like it will be really big.

MK: It gives us options. We actually supply all the other winemakers in the state with grapes. That way I can have a huge vineyard, we can cherry pick the best grapes for our wines and then sell what’s left over to anyone else in the state. We can really make great premium wines with a choice grape rather than just being isolated with one small amount of grapes that one year might be good, one year might be bad. The average amount of cases my partner and winemaker, Eric Glomski makes is between 4000 and 5000. I do about 1200. The average winery makes hundreds of thousands of cases a year.

DRE: What was the inspiration for Puscifer?

MK: Puscifer has basically been my little baby and I just kept working on it. I was inspired by all these tunes on the radio like oldies, Motown stuff and hip-hop. Stuff that feels good. I approached Puscifer like that. I’m just trying to get stuff that I don’t have to think too much about it. It’s got a good groove. It makes you feel good and that’s where I’ve been concentrating because I have all the introspective, torturous, painfully organized and arranged music that takes years to create and cuts really deep. But Puscifer does not do that. It’s something that I want to have fun with and not worry about it being groundbreaking or changing the world.

DRE: Are you going to tour with Puscifer?

MK: Maybe I will do some stuff in small theatres someday but for now I’m not even worried about that.

DRE: Something like that has to be at least a year and a half off.

MK: Yeah but I’m not even thinking about it yet.

DRE: Have you brought in a lot of people to help you with music?

MK: Well I’ve got a guitar tech engineer and a ProTools engineer. Tim Alexander has a whole set up and we just kick it around in my home studio.

DRE: A lot of people have home studios that are just as good as some of the professional ones. I’m sure yours is.

MK: The home studios work but at the end of the day nothing sounds like analog two inch tape. So once the ideas are all organized I want to put all these tapes on two inch tape if not re-tracking them on two inch tape.

DRE: I read that the name Puscifer is taken from a Mr. Show skit you were in.

MK: Actually the band itself existed before Mr. Show. It was always a little project that I had going on. I used the name for Mr. Show because it just made sense to get it on the map. The original name of the band was called Umlaut a premiere improvisational hardcore band, it lasted about a day. It was fun but it evolved quickly into Puscifer.

DRE: When you’re doing something totally new that’s not going to be Tool or A Perfect Circle did you know that eventually you wanted to bring back Puscifer?

MK: Yeah, absolutely. That was always the intention. I just got focused on all the other things that I never really put a lot of time into really bringing it forward and I think now is the time.

DRE: So you guys have postponed the [Tool] tour because Danny hurt himself?

MK: Yeah, he pulled a muscle in his arm.

DRE: You think it will be just a couple months?

MK: Yeah because the drummer from Tool only has one arm [laughs].

I’ve been focusing most of my time on the vineyard and the winery. But because we have quite a bit of a break. it’s a perfect time to really start tracking some of these ideas I have in my head. Getting them on tape and developing some new merch ideas. I’ll be going to Hong Kong in a couple weeks to meet with some garment manufacturers and get some of the ideas together.

DRE: Is it a different visualization process while you’re coming up with a new t-shirt or something like that?

MK: Yeah, I pretty much rely on my fucking twisted sense of humor to put some of that stuff together and just have fun with it, not take it too seriously. I don’t want it to be a thing that gets so big that I have to worry about selling it. I’ve been doing really low volume stuff. I may make only 500 copies of one shirt and never make another one. Some stuff is from collaborations with Globe in Australia and I’m doing a leather jacket with Paul Frank where there will just be a few of them.

DRE: I know you’re friends with a lot of comedy guys who collect a lot of things. Are you into stuff like that?

MK: No, not really. But, yeah I have a lot of friends who collect stuff.

DRE: With such low runs, it sounds like you’re trying to make something that will become collectible.

MK: I think that we’re getting into an age where this whole conquer the world with consumerism thing, falls apart at some point. So the idea is just to create a few fun things and that way I don’t have to worry about storing it anywhere. There are a couple of them, you sell them, they’re gone, then there are the next couple other ideas and you get rid of those. I can make a living but not have to have some crazy overhead and infrastructure or some building where I’m paying rent and utilities with staff that have to put food on the table. It’s small enough that I can latch onto independents and just have fun with it.

DRE: So you don’t really have like a team of people.

MK: No, not at all. It’s basically two or three of us. Of course I have people that I go to manufacture the shirts, those are companies in and of themselves. But it is pretty much me mailing off artwork, designing shirts or jackets. I’ve also been selling targets I shoot at the range that I then autograph.

DRE: Do you have any desire for these things to become bigger?

MK: If it got bigger I would license it to somebody else and then it becomes their headache. If they can’t move them it’s their problem. But I’m making things in low quantities so we won’t end up with a huge warehouse of stuff I can’t get rid of.

DRE: What inspired the Tool album 10,000 Days?

MK: Just life in general.

DRE: There’s a track in there about your mom. Is stuff like that still just as cathartic for you?

MK: Yeah and just as difficult to talk about.

DRE: Are you into people interpreting it for themselves?

MK: Yeah pretty much, just let them run with it.

DRE: Is creating music still just as satisfying or does it just satisfy a different part?

MK: I think that when it gets to be as big as this corporation known as Tool is, some of this business stuff ends up making it more difficult to enjoy the process. That’s why I end up doing all these little things because I’m trying to make sure I’m enjoying the process. I really enjoy making and recording music, but I don’t really enjoy the business end of it. It really ends up putting a knot in your stomach.

DRE: For a while there we thought there wasn’t going to be anymore Tool.

MK: There are times you just have to get through things. Like any marriage, there are rough spots.

DRE: What brought you back to specifically wanting to do Tool?

MK: Well, we never left. You never leave any of it. You’re married to these people. It’s a relationship. Everyone that you come across in your life that you had intimate relations with are still part of you. You don’t really leave them, you just might not be standing in the same room with them all the time.

DRE: What would have to change about Tool for you to say “I don’t want to do this. I have other things to concentrate on”?

MK: If the entire world turned into something where there is no money involved. If there was no money involved it would be easy to do this but as soon as the money comes into play, everybody gets weird. It has an affect on everybody. It doesn’t matter who they are but as soon as there’s money involved people get fucking goofy. When you don’t have money to lose you don’t have to worry about somebody taking the money. All that bullshit aside I’m trying to prove that I can just make music and make my living doing that and selling shirts for fun

DRE: [laughs] Years ago a friend of mine had a Tool bootleg of this show you guys did in 1992 at a bar with about 12 people in the audience. I don’t expect you to remember.

MK: It was in Philadelphia.

DRE: That was back when the Tool albums were more stripped down, would you ever go back to a more stripped down Tool?

MK: No, because we have your attention. If you want someone’s attention you have to scream from the back of the room to be heard. Once you have everybody’s attention you have to whisper to keep it.

DRE: Do you get see much comedy anymore?

MK: Not really since I live in Arizona. The only comedy I see is when my dogs are chasing their tails around here.

DRE: [laughs] What about on TV?

MK: Well, of course Extras is just off the hook. I like My Name is Earl, Reno 911 and that kind of stuff. Also Borat and all the stuff involving Sacha Baron Cohen is true genius.

DRE: Have you gotten into the American version of The Office?

MK: Yeah. Like everybody else, I was one of those purists because I had watched all the seasons of The Office in the UK. So when the American Office started they were trying to fit the formula and do exactly what the UK version had done. Now I’m so glad they’ve abandoned that formula and gone down their own path. It’s an incredible show.

DRE: It’s gotten really good. I love it.

MK: Yeah, it’s painful. It’s like watching Curb Your Enthusiasm where you almost have to watch it from across the room.

DRE: It gives me backaches [laughs].

MK: Yeah it does.

DRE: I know that you’ve like appeared in little things here and there but did you ever get involved in much comedy?

MK: The problem with me being involved in comedy is that I’m not funny. So if I’m in a comedy I have to be in a scene or a sketch with somebody that’s actually funny and then I can play the straight man. But without anybody actually funny in the scene then I’m just a dork trying to be funny and not doing it. Having said that I am working on some short films with a friend of mine who’s a writer, which we would show on Puscifer tour. I’m working with Ford [Englerth] and Jeffrey [Brooks] from Red Rock Entertainment Development. They are in a similar format to Mr. Show or Tom Waits when he did his live album Big Time.

DRE: So you are writing and directing them?

MK: I’m one of the guys that has 16 ideas every minute and then tries to scratch them all down. I write down characters and little scenarios and then I hand them off to Jeffrey. He hands them off to a guy who’s actually funny and can write. He finishes them up until they are up to the 90 percent margin then I nudge them that final few percent that really gives them their shape.

DRE: I read you are going to be on the Bonnaroo Festival with The Police.
You must have been a Police fan.

MK: Absolutely, I was a huge Police fan. Zenyatta Mondatta was a good album.

DRE: Do you ever get star struck around people like The Police?

MK: Not so much around The Police. If I was around Gene Hackman or [Robert] De Niro or Morgan Freeman, my knees would probably give out. Those people are just pure artists and are channels for that amazing talent and energy.

DRE: You didn’t mention any musicians.

MK: That’s just too close to home. The people who I would freak out to meet are dead. If Hendrix walked into the room I would piss myself because he’s dead. “Dude you smell like you’re rotting.”

DRE: [laughs] There was a SuicideGirl who just debuted who has a big tattoo of you on her back.

MK: Illyria.

DRE: What’s it like to see that?

MK: Real creepy.

DRE: [laughs] You must have met plenty of people that have stuff like that though.

MK: I usually make them sign a waiver so they can’t sue me when they can’t get a job. “I couldn’t get a job at a bank and it’s your fault.” “Fuck you buddy, you signed the waiver.”

DRE: For some reason I don’t expect such beautiful girls to have giant portraits of men on their back.

MK: My guess is that she passed out at a party and somebody did it when she wasn’t looking. She probably doesn’t look at her back in a mirror very often so she didn’t notice. It was probably supposed to be a portrait of Christina Aguilera but whoever did it made it so ugly that they pretended it was me.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck

Rob Zombie is not one to rest on his laurels. Indeed, his rate of productivity in the realm of music and film means he’s one of the most interviewed artists on SuicideGirls – this being his sixth one-on-one conversation with SG. Mondo Sex Head, a collection of Zombie classics remixed and reinvented... more

Rob Zombie is not one to rest on his laurels. Indeed, his rate of productivity in the realm of music and film means he’s one of the most interviewed artists on SuicideGirls – this being his sixth one-on-one conversation with SG.

Mondo Sex Head, a collection of Zombie classics remixed and reinvented by the likes of Photek, Big Black Delta and Ki:Theory, has just been released, and a new studio album is currently in the works. In the live arena, Zombie recently signed on to co-headline with Marilyn Manson on the Twins of Evil Tour. The 28-date US jaunt kicks off on September 28th, and perhaps fittingly ends on Halloween.

Meanwhile, on the film front, Zombie is in the final stages of post-production on Lords of Salem, a movie he wrote, directed, and produced in association with the team behind the Paranormal Activity franchise. It’s the latest entry in a filmography that includes such titles as House of 1000 Corpses, The Devil's Rejects and Halloweens I and II. However, not one to be typecast, Zombie’s next movie marks a distinct departure from the cosy confines of the horror genre. We caught up with Zombie to find out more…

Nicole Powers: Where are you calling in from?

Rob Zombie: I’m in the recording studio right now working on a new record.

NP: So this is the new studio album that I’ve been hearing rumors of.

RZ: Yes. Yes. We’ve been working on it for a while. We should be done in about a month.

NP: How does this record differ from your previous ones?

RZ: I’m really into this record right now. We have a long way to go, but it’s the most free sounding record I feel like I’ve made in a long, long time. As time has gone on I feel at different moments in my career I’ve made a record that’s significant for that time period. With White Zombie, Astro-Creep was the significant record at that time for that band. Then the next one was Hellbilly Deluxe, my first solo record. You make other records and they’re cool and they’re good, they have good songs, but you haven’t really turned the page to a new thing. I feel like this record is the beginning of the next phase of what I’m doing. It’s just a big crazy live sounding record. I just love it. It’s hard to describe, but every once in a while a creative vein opens up and you head off in a direction that’s just…you don’t question it because it doesn’t happen that often, let’s put it that way.

NP: I guess if you think about too much, you’ll over analyze it and then you’ll fuck it up, so you almost don’t want to question it.

RZ: Yeah, I just like the idea of doing it right. Also, one of the things that I think is the reason for this freedom is, once you have success, whether you know it or not, you subconsciously want to achieve more success or maintain the success that you’ve had. So, obviously, if you write a hit song, you try to write other hit songs. That’s sort of the nature of the game. But, with the fact that nobody really buys records anymore, I’m not really sure what constitutes a hit record or a hit song. Those rules don’t quite apply anymore because you’re not going to sell millions and millions of records no matter what you do. It just doesn’t happen anymore really. So, because of that, you feel like, fuck it, who gives a shit? And because you feel that way, you almost feel like a new band does. You’re not chasing the dragon anymore, you’re just being creative and coming up with great stuff. And that’s usually when you do have hits, strangely enough, because you’re just creatively free at that moment.

NP: It’s the nature of need; When you need something too much, you often don’t get it.

RZ: Yeah, basically. Because you just can’t manufacture these things. Most of the time whenever I’ve had a “hit song” or a big record it’s always come from something that someone said “Oh, I don’t even like that song” [about] when you first record it. So it’s totally unpredictable. That’s why you always have to do what you find satisfying. You can never predict anything.

NP: So who are you in the studio with right now?

RZ: Right now I’m just here with the producer [Bob Marlette]. The rest of the band is not here right now. They were here. They all went home for a while. I’m just laying down vocal tracks and working on the arrangements and doing different things, so I’m just here by myself.

NP: What’s the current line-up that you’re working with?

RZ: The line-up is the same that it has been for a while. John 5 is still the guitar player, he’s been in the band now for over seven years. Piggy D is still playing bass. He’s been with me for about six years. And Ginger Fish is still playing drums, and he’s been around now for a year and a half maybe.

NP: And you guys are heading out on the "Twins of Evil Tour” with Marilyn Manson in September. That’s a tour that should’ve happened a long time ago.

RZ: Yeah. It seems like an obvious tour, but I’m kind of glad it didn’t because I’m running out of people to tour with. It’s nice that at this stage of the game you can still put a tour together and it still seems exciting. Right before you called I got word that the ticket sales are just huge for the tour. So it’s great. People are into it.

NP: I understand you’re going to be doing quite a bit of production on this tour.

RZ: Yes. A lot of production.

NP: What can people expect from the shows?

RZ: Well, it’s going to be huge and amazing but I’m not going to tell anyone because we’re building it now and I want there to be some element of surprise.

NP: I like that. I’m also really intrigued by this Lords of Salem movie that you’ve been working on. When are we likely to see it?

RZ: The movie is almost done. I just have to mix the sound and do a couple of little things like that in post-production, then it will be out…This time it was a little bit screwier with the movie because I was trying to make a record at the same time as the movie, going back and forth. Usually when I do one thing, I don’t do the other, and I take long breaks between. This time I was trying to see if I could balance both at the same time, and because of that I wasn’t able to lock in a definite release date yet, so I don’t actually know when the movie is coming out yet.

NP: Right. You’ve got a lot on your plate because you’ve also just bought the rights to the Philadelphia Flyers / Broad Street Bullies’ story. Why do you have an affinity to that tale?

RZ: Well, basically, I remember that story from when I was a kid. I was a big hockey fan when I was young in the early ‘70s. I remember all these characters and just the story of it all. I like sports movies, even if I don’t know anything about the story, and this is a great story. This is one of those stories that everyone could get into even if they hate hockey and don’t like sports. The characters involved are so outrageous and ridiculous. I’ve just been looking for something different to do too. Because making horror movies is great, but that’s not the only type of movies I want to make or the only type of movies I like. This is the perfect film to take me up out of that world.

NP: I was going to say it’s a massive departure for you from the horror genre, which is where you’ve been typecast. That must be kind of exciting for you. I mean, this is a movie that Ron Howard might make, but I’m sure you’re going to do it in a very different way.

RZ: Well, yeah, because it’s a really crazy story. It’s a really violent story. The reason these guys became known is they basically were the ones that brought fighting and all this stuff to hockey. It’s a very bruising, bloody movie. They basically intimidated their way to the championship. But, yeah, I don’t like being typecast as one thing. Not that I never want to make another horror movie, and maybe I’ll make 100 more, but I don’t want to have to do it. I want to want to do it. I don’t like getting stuck in anything.

NP: Does that go with music? Could we see a Rob Zombie ambient album for example?

RZ: Well, I’ve always tried to vary up the sound a lot. I didn’t want to get stuck in a thing like, oh, it has to be this, it has to just be heavy guitars and drums. That’s why, over the years, we’ve brought in mandolins, and sitars, and acoustic guitars, and hundred piece orchestras, and all kinds of stuff in all the records. Because I didn’t want to get trapped in that thing where it has to be this, and any time you varied from it the fans don’t like it. I think sometimes that becomes just learned behavior. I always liked bands that had that vibe where they could do anything and the fans are accepting of it, because that’s part of the journey with the band. I never wanted to be, oh, it has to be exactly like this or it’s not right – that’s just seems so boring to me.

NP: I noticed on this remix album that there’s a lot of light and shade. I know it’s a collaboration between you and KCRW’s Jason Bentley, which is a very intelligent combination. It’s a great mix of mixes. I was expecting it to be really heavy and grungy, and on the more industrial side of dance music, but there’s a complete across the board mix. How did the project come about? Where these mixes that were done specifically for this album? Or are they ones that have happened over the years that you’ve just been collating?

RZ: No, they were done specifically for the album. They’ve been compiled over the last six months…I just wanted it to be all over the place. I didn’t want them to do what the fans would expect it to be because that’s boring. I know some of the fans will love it and some of them will hate it, but that’s going to happen anyway with everything. You can’t guard against that. Pretty much, it is what it is. What I like about these remixes too is that they play better in places. You want to hear it at a club with people out and about…

NP: Do you have a particular favorite track?

RZ: I like a lot of them. I mean, the ones I picked were my favorites, because there were more that I didn’t like quite as much. I like different ones for different reasons. I liked “Foxy, Foxy [Ki:Theory Remix]” because I actually thought it was kind of better than the original song, the groove in it. I like “Living Dead Girl [Photek Remix]” just because it was this long atmospheric thing that almost had nothing to do with the original song. That was kind of cool. Truthfully, I wasn’t really loving any of it until one night when I could clear my head. I was just driving in LA at night and the lights were zooming by, and I listened to the record and that’s when I got into it. Sometimes I find that as life goes on, it’s cluttering your mind all the time. It’s hard to just focus on the music…Most of the time people are listening to music and fussing around on their phone or the computer, they’re always doing something else. It’s really only in the car that I find that I can focus on it. There’s this zen thing, driving and listening to music. That was the moment where I discovered the record for myself.

NP: I feel with music that sometimes it’s a situational thing. There’s music that I specifically like to listen to on trains, and music I like for parties, and music I like when I’m hanging out by the pool, and they’re very different vibes.

RZ: Yeah. Exactly…If you’re in a club, a song that might sound really annoying on the radio comes on booming in the club and you go, “Ah this is fucking great.” It works great in that situation, but you wouldn’t want to hear it somewhere else, so I totally agree. I just wish…there was a day where I used to just have a record or an album and sit in my bed and just listen to it and that’s literally all I did…Now I find that it’s hard to just listen to music, there’s always something else going on.

NP: Plus, I don’t think kids do that anymore. I remember going to the record store, and when I bought a record, I couldn’t wait to get it home. Then I’d play it over and over and over again until I sent my parents crazy. Now, if kids are listening to music, they’re doing it while watching a video on YouTube. And while they’re watching the video on YouTube, they’ve probably also got a game going on too.

RZ: Yeah, they’re texting and doing other things.

NP: Music is much more the background for life.

RZ: Music is not as important as it once was. Yeah, it’s just one of the many things now. Before it used to be the only thing. I kind of miss that. But that’s life, that’s the way it is.

NP: Talking about situations and music, the new studio album, where could you see someone having the perfect moment with it?

RZ: Well, for me, I think for this record, there’s two ways. When I was a kid, I used to always love listening to music on headphones in my bedroom at night. Because there was just nothing and you were just sinking into the music so hardcore that it’d almost become like an altered state….Now, the other way I really like is driving in a car. That’s when everything sounds great to me.

NP: Is there anything else that you’re listening to right now? Other people’s music that’s hitting the sweet spot?

RZ: No, not really. It’s funny, what I usually like to listen to when I’m in the car, I like to listen to the radio, because I do miss sometimes, it doesn’t really happen much, but I want to hear the DJs and hear the songs and the concerts coming up. Even though you get stuck listening to the commercials…I have satellite radio, but I think sometimes that’s very isolating…I still like that feeling of there’s a song, and there’s a concert announcement. I feel like there’s a community of people around this music. Whereas when you listen to satellite radio, somewhere there’s a robot that’s playing a group of songs to you and it’s not connected to anything. A great example of this, I remember reading an interview with Tim Burton and he said that he really likes watching movies on television because he said there’s something about knowing that if you were sitting down to watch that movie at that moment so was somebody else. It’s like we’re all watching this movie at the same time. But when you DVR or it’s on your TiVo, there’s no feeling of that. Everybody is in their own little bubble, and that’s cool too, but there was always something about like, you hear a concert announcement, the band is coming to town, they’re playing this song, and there felt this excitement about things that I don’t feel quite as much anymore.

NP: Right. Like the Olympic ceremony tonight that’s going to be on TV, that’s going to be one of those event things that a lot of people are going to watch. And then people can talk about it the next day and have something in common. People used to have more of that with music when there was more community based radio.

RZ: Yeah…That’s a good example. Everything used to be like that. Any stupid TV show, if you didn’t watch it that night, you didn’t watch it. So the next day, everybody knew what it was, whatever TV show it might be that you’re talking about or song that you hear on the radio.

NP: Right, it’s not just the automation of radio programming, it’s also things like TiVo that are robbing of us that community spirit too.

RZ: Yeah. And it goes back to what you said before about going to the record store. First day the record comes out there’s a line of people to buy it. It’s exciting. As opposed to, I don’t know, is it really that exciting to go to iTunes and hit purchase? [laughs] That’s not very exciting. It’s pretty boring.

NP: I think that’s why the live shows are all the more important. That’s almost the only time now where you feel that kind of shared excitement.

RZ: Yeah, that’s why I love touring and that’s why I love playing shows. That’s really the only thing that has not changed at all. Well, actually, let me take that back, it’s changed a little bit, but for the most part it hasn’t changed at all. The one thing that has change – and I fucking hate this – is people filming the show with their phones.

NP: I knew you were going to say that.

RZ: And it’s not because they’re bootlegging – I don’t give a shit about that. It’s just because I can tell they’re not watching the show. They’re staring at their phone trying not to jiggle their hand too much. And you look out at a sea of that and you’re like, this is ridiculous. These guys stand there as still as possible so they that they can go home and relive the concert later on their crappy little phone they shot it on. It’s so dumb.

NP: I get annoyed with that too. As a fan, I just want grab the phone off people who do that and shake them, and say like, experience this with me, I want to feel your excitement. Because those people suck the energy out of a crowd.

RZ: Yeah, you’re right. People don’t understand, the show is good because the band feeds off the energy of the crowd. And if the energy of the crowd is not there because everybody is filming, the show is not going to be as good, and it just becomes an endless cycle…

NP: And I think it’s fucking rude to just stand there with your cell phone.

RZ: Yeah, what we do a lot of times is I’ll just stop the show and wait for everyone to put their phone away…As soon as they put their phones away, you can feel the show jump up to a whole other level. It’s so funny.