Since the Girls board is overload, I've decided to start this topic here. Just to point out Synnove's hot new profile pic: (image) so hot!

by Laurelin I have always loved a challenge. Who doesn’t love to be tested to the limits, and pushed beyond their comfort zone to see if they can rise to the occasion and be successful? The human mind and body can be pushed, and the reward is sometimes nothing more than the personal satisfaction of... more

by Laurelin

I have always loved a challenge. Who doesn’t love to be tested to the limits, and pushed beyond their comfort zone to see if they can rise to the occasion and be successful? The human mind and body can be pushed, and the reward is sometimes nothing more than the personal satisfaction of knowing you did it. Take rock climbing for example. I started a while ago after reading John Krakauer’s Into Thin Air. I thought that the climber’s concept of ‘mind over matter’ when it comes to physical activity was fascinating. To be able to push on and keep going when every muscle in your body is screaming for rest, to be halfway up a mountain (or in my case, a rock wall in a gym) and know that if you stop, you fall, and you might die.

When I’m climbing everything in the world goes silent; all you can think about it putting one leg in front of the other and pushing up to find the next finger hold. You must go on. Failure is not an option. On the opposite end of the spectrum, I find myself searching out similar challenges when it comes to men and dating. I crave a chase and hopefully big payoff. The guys I fall for usually have something wrong with them that I think I can fix, some undesirable quality that I convince myself I find endearing, something that makes things absolutely more difficult than it needs to be.

During my freshman year of college over a decade ago, I fell for one of the biggest “players” I had ever come across. This guy was a disaster, pledging a fraternity and totally dedicated to his brothers, but not at all to his school work, running though women like his life depended on it. And all the while, I was chasing after him, spending too much time with him, then watching him with other girls and feeling terrible. There had to be a real person under there somewhere. I was going to find him, and he was going to fall in love with me and stop all that crazy behavior. I could do this, I knew it.



I put up with a lot choosing that path, but through some act of God that’s exactly what happened. That guy turned out to be a wonderful person. We did fall in love. He shaped up, figured things out and while things didn’t work out with the long run, something clicked in my head that made me think, “You can do it! You’re different, and these broken men will see that, and everyone will live happily ever after! It happened once!”

Clearly once ten years ago shouldn’t set any sort of precedent, but it did; I am still a sucker for a challenge. I want the broken ones, I want the ones who don’t want to settle down, I want to have to work hard for my payoff. That has essentially meant I spend a lot of time heartbroken, wondering what I did wrong, what I should have said, what I should have done, how can I fix my own game for next time (maybe I shouldn’t have sent that goodnight text, now he thinks I’m clingy).

My friend Stephanie and I were going for coffee the other day and talking. “When did dating become this game?” She said. “It’s always about leaving them wanting more, not saying anything that makes you sound crazy, not texting too much or not enough, it’s not normal!”

“It’s not the game, it’s the players.” I said. It’s true. We meet all the wrong people, or we ourselves are someone else’s wrong people. The game has started playing us, and when it’s not, we keep making the same wrong moves over and over. I’d say I was getting tired of it, but I’m not. Failure is not an option until I fall off that proverbial relationship mountain, and when I do, I just get back up and keep trying. It’s exhausting and exhilarating, lots of bumps and bruises with only minimal positive results. Always reaching for that next finger hold.

“I give up, I swear,” Stephanie says. “Game over.”

“I don’t know...” I say, smiling. “You’re probably right. But did I tell you I met someone the other night? He has a reputation of being a bit of a player, but I like him and I think he likes me...”

When it comes to this game, this player is all in.

***

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Chuck Palahniuk needs little by way of introduction on SuicideGirls, our very name being an hommage to the author of Fight Club, Choke and Snuff. We caught up with him by phone to talk about his latest novel, Tell-All. It's a fictional gossip-laced memoir told in the voice of Hazie Coogan, the female... more

Chuck Palahniuk needs little by way of introduction on SuicideGirls, our very name being an hommage to the author of Fight Club, Choke and Snuff. We caught up with him by phone to talk about his latest novel, Tell-All. It's a fictional gossip-laced memoir told in the voice of Hazie Coogan, the female assistant to "the glorious film actress" Miss Katherine Kenton who resides in Hollywood's very real past - a glamorous world populated by the likes of Lillian Hellman, Darryl Zanuck, David O. Selznick, Clark Gable and Bette Davis, who are all names Tell-All's characters love to drop. During our conversation with Palahniuk, we spoke about society's need for the culture of celebrity, the nature of name-dropping, and the ultimate name to drop.

NP: I watched All About Eve last night to get some of the flavor of the era since Tell-All is described in the press release as "a dark re-imagining of All About Eve."

CP: It's also a re-imagining of Sunset Boulevard.

NP: I can see that.

CP: I always loved that story, that Max is the one who orchestrates so much of that story, and Max the butler, Erich von Stroheim, is the one that's left at the end, not dead and not insane. In a way, part of me always thought Max set all of this up so that it would happen. It could easily have been done.

NP: Ah, so Hazie Coogan is your version of Max.

CP: Exactly.

NP: Tell-All explores the concept of celebrity. Why do you think as a society we're so celebrity obsessed?

CP: My crackpot theory is that people are losing their skill to express themselves, and they're, in a way, farming that task out. If they want to express themselves they buy a song or they buy a greeting card that's already processed by someone who's kept that skill. We can't express our own feelings anymore so we have to hire someone to do that. To a large extent movies take that on, they're our therapy and our expression.

NP: I would concur with that. There's even a movie series called Cinematherapy on WE TV.

CP: Right, movie therapy and movie community, where we may not have friends but there's a show called Friends. It gives us that sense of having a community of people. It functions on every level.

NP: Also there's that line from All About Eve where they talk about how the theater is tantamount to religion, with actors and actresses being the gods and goddesses.

CP: When you think about polytheism, where you have any number of gods, each one kind of personified a different type of character. Then that went by the way and was replaced by the system of saints, where each saint typified a different person, a different archetype or a platonic ideal of what someone should be at this point in their life. In a way, actors have become those archetypes. There's always going to be one blonde Brad Pitt. He succeeded the blonde Robert Redford, who succeeded the blonde I can't remember. There's so often just one of these archetypes that really last until they're replaced by the next of that perfect archetype, that perfect saint that personifies that type of person.

NP: And Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are the golden idols people worship right now.

CP: And that they measure themselves against. They say, I'm not a Brad Pitt type, I'm more of a...George Clooney type. And so we look to George Clooney for how to behave. We looked at Cary Grant for what to wear, how to conduct ourselves in public. We find the type that we feel best represents us, and then we model our behavior on the behavior of that type, of that role model person, of that saint.

NP: And people model their relationships on those of their idols too.

CP: And that goes back to people not knowing how to express themselves. So-and-so bought this type of ring for so-and-so, so everyone will rush out to buy that ring that's suddenly mass marketed because it's what you do. It has to be dictated every year.

NP: Going back to Tell-All, obviously it's that golden era of Hollywood that fascinates you. Even in Snuff, your central character, porn queen Cassie Wright, was obsessed with movie stars from that era - you threw in those amazing Hollywood factoids as recalled by her.

CP: I'm always looking for something that books can do that movies cannot do. It's perfectly OK for me to write a book that depicts all of these famous people as characters. I can make them do whatever I want as long as they're dead. That way they can't sue me. In a movie you never could. You could not create a movie that would literally be a tell-all, because you couldn't get the rights to the images of all those famous people, much less doctor the film, to search vintage footage so those people were recreated. So that's something a book can do very easily, but a movie can't touch, and I love doing stuff like that.

And in Snuff, the factoids played a whole different role. They were a means of depicting Cassie's inner strivings. She didn't set out to be a porn star. She had set out to be an actual golden age movie star. Her body of knowledge, all these little things that she knew about those people, had really been [an indication of] her original aspirations without stating them overtly.

NP: Can you talk about some of the underlying themes that you were thinking about as you wrote Tell-All.

CP: One was just the nature of name-dropping. How names function in language by creating these instant networks of associations the moment the name is said - kind of bestowing or claiming part of the status of that famous person and adding it to the speaker's present. The moment you say, "Oh, Juliette Lewis said the funniest thing yesterday," you're kind of claiming an association with her that gives you a greater status in your current context. I love how name-dropping works that way - especially when people say God. I think that's the ultimate form of name-dropping. [People] are always citing God, and it's wonderful to listen [to]. We don't think of it as name-dropping, but it's the biggest form of name-dropping, and it instantly places them on the moral high ground. It places them in a position of greater status.

NP: And it makes it hard to challenge what that person says without also, by implication, challenging God, which is socially a very difficult thing to do.

CP: Exactly. You could always say, "Juliette Lewis, I don't like her," and lessen the impact of the name-drop. You really are not allowed to say that about God.

NP: That's one of things that Richard Dawkins gets very upset about in his writing - that it's hard to win an argument once people bring God into it because essentially society and politeness dictates that one has to respect God unreservedly.

CP: [laughs] Right, the freedom to worship as you desire.

NP: But the freedom not to worship doesn't really exist - in this country at least. In America, a political candidate is unelectable if they're not God-fearing. I often wonder how many politicians lie about their beliefs in order to attain office. Because, statistically speaking, there has to be more atheists in Congress than those that admit to it.

CP: I would agree.

NP: Getting back to Tell-All, were there any other themes and ideas that you were exploring?

CP: I was at Sundance when they were marketing the movie Choke, made from my fourth book, and I was really fascinated to see these incredible groomed and styled movie stars that would just wander freely, unencumbered through the snowy landscape. They wouldn't have a coat, they wouldn't have a purse, they wouldn't have anything in their hands. They would just be these beautiful things that were like animals that had wandered out of the forest. They'd be surrounded by people, flashlights, paparazzi, just this kind of nimbus, this halo of flashing beautiful light.

I was always fascinated because maybe twenty steps away would always be this dowdy woman who'd be carrying all their crap. Their tote bag, their coat, their purse, the make-up cases, thermoses, everything that went into making the beautiful woman beautiful was being lugged around by this dumpy woman who was always far enough away that she would never get caught in the photograph. I thought it was fascinating to have that kind of Jungian separation between the ideal perfect-seeming woman and then the other woman who had to carry the burden of that perfection.

And that when the beautiful woman had a moment to herself, the only kind of intimacy she had was to go to the imperfect woman, and they'd kind of put their heads together and whisper. That other woman seemed to be the only person that she was safe taking to. So that relationship between the woman who looks beautiful and the woman who creates that beauty I thought was absolutely fascinating. I just followed these people all around Park City.

NP: The assistants are cast as much as the stars are, because the assistant has to be non-threatening in appearance.

CP: And they have to be loyal, and they have to be organized, and they have to be aware - constantly watching for the effect, for that stray hair, constantly present.

NP: One of the things I find interesting about your writing is that conventional wisdom dictates that a writer should find a voice and a style, and then stick with it. But what you tend to do with each book is actually create a unique voice for that book, and also a unique way of telling the story, be it non-linear, or, in the case of Snuff, the way you told it through many different voices. It's not like you're just telling the story, you're creating a new style of writing specifically to tell that story. How do you set about that?

CP: I really am looking for a style of writing that will, in a way, work against the content. In Tell-All, I wanted to use the style of writing of the conventions based on gossip columns, those Walter Winchell or Louella Parsons / Hedda Hopper columns from the 1930s and '40s. Because they're a non-fiction form, and a non-fiction form will always lend greater credibility to a really outlandish, wild fictional story. My favorite examples of that are how in Citizen Kane, the story itself is pretty melodramatic, it really is a kind of a soap opera of a story, but they placed it within the context of newsreel photographers seeking out the true story for the production of a newsreel. They put this whole context of journalists in it, and that lent this melodramatic story a gravity, a profundity that it would not have had otherwise.

And then when the Coen brothers did Fargo, they'd just come off of Raising Arizona, which was this over-the-top, wild, outlandish comedy, and Fargo was going to be another one of those kind of violent, fast-paced comedies. But on the front end of Fargo they put that very black, single card opening that said: "This is a true story. The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987. At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed. Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred." That's shown against this very sad harp music, almost like angelic mournful music. It creates this sense of mournful, profound sadness at the beginning - and truth - that keeps that story from landing like too much of a Raising Arizona comedy. So I'm always looking for a non-fiction journalistic form that will allow me to tell an even crazier story without the story seeming too crazy.

NP: I would love to see Tell-All turned into a movie. And, given the era it's set in, I would love to see it made as a black & white movie. Have you thought in those terms?

CP: I was last told that Pedro Almodóvar had first look at it. He was between projects and looking for something, and this seemed really appropriate for him. Because it does deal with glamorous women of a certain age, and the male romantic lead is very young and good-looking. It just seems like a Pedro Almodóvar movie. But the biggest hurdle is going to be, how do you fill it with movie stars without having those movie stars? The movie has to make the story so literal that it's going to be a real challenge for this one.

NP: But I can see audiences suspending their disbelief and enjoying watching one celebrity take on the role of another.

CP: That might work. The only time I've ever seen it done was in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, a movie they made about Dorothy Parker. Even in that movie they had all of these really awkward lines when people would walk into a room and a character already present would say, "Oh, look! If it isn't Mr. and Mrs. Roger S. Hart." People had to be called out in this kind of pointless expository way because otherwise we would have had no idea who they were supposed to be...It makes it really awkward, the idea of trying to convince us that so-and-so walking in is going to be Cary Grant without saying, "Look! It's Cary Grant." There's place cards and all these cheats, but it would be difficult.

NP: So are you already working on your next novel?

CP: Yeah. I've got one for next year. It looks like it'll be for next fall, so it'll be a year from this fall. It's called Damned.

NP: Are you willing to reveal any of its themes, or details of the world it's set in?

CP: There is an existing form of story where an innocent party finds themselves placed in horrific circumstances and they're not quite sure how they got there. Examples include The Shawshank Redmption, where Tim Robbins' character finds himself in prison, and he's not entirely sure whether he deserves to be there but he has to make the best of it. And in Great Britain there was a very popular book called Cold Comfort Farm that was made into a movie. Again, the young woman's parents have died just before the movie begins and we're not sure of anything about them other than the fact that she's being sent off to live on this filthy farm. And in the U.S., another very popular version of that story is Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, where a little girl comes back from camp and she finds her parents have moved from New York City to Long Island, and she has to start a new life out in the suburbs.

So Damned is about an eleven-year old girl who wakes up basically and finds that she is in hell and that she's dead, and that she's going to be eleven-years old and dead in hell for the rest of eternity. So she has to, number one, make friends and figure out how hell works and make the best of it. But she's also got to figure out why she's in hell and how she died, and then ultimately whether or not she wants to petition to go to heaven, to try and uncover some mistake that might have been made. So it's about an eleven-year old, a very optimistic, cheerful, pushy little girl who finds herself in hell.

NP: Hell is an interesting concept in itself, because everyone has a different definition and their own vision of hell. I think my idea of hell would be having to work in a grey photocopy center for all eternity. What would your idea of hell be?

CP: Hmnn. That's a tough one. I have had some just terrible jobs and I always find some way - even in the most horrific, boring, stressful job - to have fun, and to kind of make the situation fun for other people, so that is a tough one for me.

NP: So if you ended up in hell, you'd find a way of making it fun.

CP: Oh my gosh, yes, definitely.

NP: They always say that all the interesting people will go to hell.

CP: And that's part of the paradox in Margaret is her realizing that most-likely the parents she loves and misses most in the world, they will end up in hell. And so if she's successful in getting to heaven she will most likely lose them once again, but lose them for eternity. How many of us would choose heaven if we knew the people we loved would be in hell? That's the paradox.

NP: It must be hard, because you're immersed in the new book and yet you're currently doing a book tour to promote Tell-All, which means you have to revisit something that you turned the last page on when you finished writing it several months ago.

CP: That's why for tour I always write a short story that is not related to the next book or not related to the current book. It's a short story that I can read that's self-contained and fairly short and works well out loud and has a really strong effect - like the Guts story. It's that story that I really make the event around. Here it's a little story called Knock, Knock that's been getting a really strong reaction.

NP: Is that something that people can read on your website?

CP: It'll be in the December Playboy. In the meantime, Random House had the event in New York videotaped by a documentary company and they were going to cut that together and make that available.

NP: Can you talk a little about what it's about?

CP: It's about a man whose father is dying of late-stage cancer. This man is determined that he is going to heal his father in the hospice by telling his father every joke his father has ever taught him. So he goes into the hospice as his father is dying and starts to tell these jokes and then slowly realizes that these jokes are horrific and racist and sexist and anti-Semitic, and that really the legacy his father has left him is this mind full of completely despicable, disgusting jokes that he will never be able to forget. So it's got some laughs, but by the end people are crying.

NP: People get away with expressing terrible opinions by making jokes out of them.

CP: Also there's a wonderful energy when people say something that is supposed to be funny and no one laughs. There's this stress that builds when you say one thing after another that's supposed to be released with laughter, and no laughter happens. Eventually the room is just electric with unexpressed tension. That's just an incredible feeling.

NP: So this story is very much meant to be read out loud, and in reading it you're trying to create that energy.

CP: Yes. Because the man who taught me writing, Tom Spanbauer, came from a theater background as well as writing. In workshop he made everyone read their work out loud. So every week I still meet with friends and we have to read our work out loud to find out where the laughs land and where the energy lags, and so everything has to work out loud.

NP: And you did that with Tell-All too?

CP: Yeah, definitely. Every book. That's why I use so many timing devices like the "bark, squeal, bray, Sigourney Weaver," those odd choruses of animal sounds that come in. They're just a device to pace information, so that gestures and things don't butt together too closely. In a way, it's slowing down the reader for a moment so that the next thing that they land on, lands in a better place.


Tell-All is available from Amazon.com and all fine bookstores. For more information and for details of upcoming events go to ChuckPalahniuk.net/.

(image) by Aaron Colter Last week I said this week's post would be about beer. It's not. Moving on . . . (image) With so much good new music from bands that incorporate a variety of styles into their sounds, sometimes I forget about a tried and true genre that for too long has been saturated... more

by Aaron Colter

Last week I said this week's post would be about beer. It's not. Moving on . . .



With so much good new music from bands that incorporate a variety of styles into their sounds, sometimes I forget about a tried and true genre that for too long has been saturated with bands that seem to put style over substance - punk. Thankfully, The Taxpayers still embody the important D.I.Y. and iconoclastic spirit from which punk originated.

Fuck Green Day and the host of other teen angst rejects that think cleverly designed outfits and over produced tracking are the way to corner the market in suburban rebellion. The best punk happens in basements or backyards, with mangled equipment that's as loved as it is beaten, and is played by people to have to hustle every fucking day to get to the next gig.

The Taxpayers are a hard working band that can still lose control in the moment of their music. Two of the group's albums are up on Soundcloud. Enjoy.

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[IMGhttp://s95218.gridserver.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/408_Ben_Bernanke_official_portrait.jpg[/IMG]

One more thing, Anonymous is targeting the Federal Reserve for giving away trillions of our dollars to a small group of bankers who manipulate the global economy. The ultimate goal is to end the centralized banking cartel, which has merged even more supposedly "too big to fail" firms following the massive looting the bankers successfully executed, and politicians refuse to prosecute. The first step of Op ESR is to demand the resignation of Ben Bernanke. If you're bold enough, here's the open forum where actions are being planned. Be careful out there.

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If you have something you like that you think I might like too, please email me: youmightlike [at] gmail [dot] com

Dave McKean’s first love was comics, but the artist, designer and writer has branched into other fields, creating book and album covers, publishing multiple books of his photographs and paintings, and has even drawn stamps for the Royal Mail. He’s the illustrator of “Arkham Asylum,” the landmark... more

Dave McKean’s first love was comics, but the artist, designer and writer has branched into other fields, creating book and album covers, publishing multiple books of his photographs and paintings, and has even drawn stamps for the Royal Mail. He’s the illustrator of “Arkham Asylum,” the landmark 1989 graphic novel written by Grant Morrison. He worked with John Cale on multiple books and collaborated with Heston Blumenthal on the memoir and cookbook, “The Big Fat Duck Cookbook.”

McKean is probably best known for his many collaborations with writer Neil Gaiman. McKean was the cover artist on “The Sandman,” illustrated “Coraline” and “The Graveyard Book” and the pair have created a series of graphic novels and picture books including “Violent Cases,” “Signal to Noise” and “Mr. Punch.” One of their collaborations was the film Mirrormask, which McKean co-wrote, designed and directed. It’s led to another career as a filmmaker, with two films currently in progress.

Working on his own, McKean has crafted dozens of short comics, many of which were collected in the book “Pictures That Tick” and authored “Cages” which is widely considered one of the most acclaimed and ambitious graphic novels ever created. McKean’s new book is “Celluloid” which was published by Delcourt in France and was just released by Fantagraphics in the United States.


ALEX DUEBEN: It’s funny because a number of people when writing about the book have talked about it as your return to comics, because it feels like you’ve never left.

DAVE MCKEAN: Yes. It’s strange. I’ve never really left doing comics. It’s still my first love. I’ve done a few other things yes, but I’ve always done other things. It doesn’t really feel like a return.

AD: I suppose part of that’s because more recently most of your comics work has been shorter pieces for anthologies.

DM: That’s true, it is longer, but I don’t really draw hard lines between these things. I’ve done long books for other people and they haven’t necessarily been all comics but they have always included bits of comics whether they’re children’s books or the book I did with John Cale. They’re not full length graphic novels, but I don’t really think of compartmentalizing them so much. They’re just books.

AD: Your first graphic novel, Cages, is considered by one of the great graphic novels by many people, myself included. Celluloid is a much smaller book both in terms of scale and length. Where did it start?

DM: Well it started in Cages. One of the things I really fancied doing in Cages was to have the couple on the roof and just do a proper un-embarrassed sex scene. In a five hundred page book, it would have made the book an x-rated book, just from those few pages, so in the end I backed off from doing that. I’m always surprised that sex is not treated in comics very much at all. Pornography generally is pretty awful and boring and repetitive and pretty miserable to look at from any sort of aesthetic point of view. All of these things hung around in my head, just waiting for a place to be.

I was originally thinking of doing it as a completely private book. It wouldn’t have a name. It wouldn’t have my name on it. It would be completely private. I would print a couple hundred copies and not sell them in shops. You would have to know where to go to get them. Maybe we’d just sell them under the table at conventions or just sell them through a website that you had to know the access code to. I like that secret knowledge thing. Guy Delcourt at Delcourt Editions in France offered to publish it when I was talking to him about it. It just seemed like a perfect match really. That’s why it ended up being that way.

AD: You did a short story for a Delcourt anthology recently.

DM: I did a short story for them, yeah. I really enjoyed doing it. Originally it had dialogue and I just wasn’t feeling the dialogue. It wasn’t bad dialogue but it just didn’t seem to have a purpose. It just needed to be there because there seemed to be an obligation for these people to talk to each other, but I didn’t really see it was necessary. You could put the story across perfectly well without any words. Dialogue during a sex scene is usually pretty perfunctory, so that also led into Celluloid. I was pretty sure I didn’t want any words in it and that confirmed it really

AD: I feel odd discussing the book and breaking it apart. I keep thinking of the phrase “talking about music is like dancing about architecture” because the book has no dialogue, no text, no description, no author bio. There’s the title, your name, the copyright info and that’s all.

DM: No. (laughs) Very cagey.

AD: Was the packaging just an extension of the idea of a private book?

DM: I didn’t really want it to be confused with the children’s books that I do. That’s obviously very different thing for a completely different audience. I didn’t want any confusion there. It feels odd enough doing this book. It’s always a bit strange doing something that is exclusively about sex and putting it out for people to look at. There are people who are bound to draw some sort of parallel between you as an individual and the stuff you’re putting in the book, which is not necessarily there to be drawn, but people do. So I tried to keep my identity out of it as much as possible. I went, okay, I will put my name on it but I don’t want to have my picture in there or to have any bio or anything that relates to anything else I’ve done. Thankfully Guy was really happy to oblige with all that. And it adds to the feel of it. Even though it does have my name on it, it still feels like a secret thing.

AD: The book snuck out rather than had a big release.

DM: Snuck out? Maybe. It would be nice if people just discovered it because it’s just there, even in a couple years time. I’m not mentioning it in my biographies generally and that’s fine by me. It’s just what it is. I always like Woody Allen’s thing about trying to keep the release of his films as low key as possible. He doesn’t like big premieres. He goes to work, puts out a film every year, doesn’t make a fuss about it. I like that.

AD: As you say, creating erotica is an odd thing, what drew you to working in this genre?

DM: Even thinking of it as a genre is slightly strange. I don’t really think of sex as a genre. It’s just part of my life. (laughs) Unlike a lot of stuff that you usually end up with, especially in comics, violence and stuff that, I don’t come upon violence in my life. I don’t find violence particularly amusing or entertaining, so I’ll happy avoid it. Whereas sex is a perfectly happy, healthy thing. I think most of us think about sex, well, at least every week, probably every day. (laughs) It’s strange to think of it as a genre, some sort of side thing like detective fiction. It’s not. It’s just part of life.

AD: Besides the formal constraints - no words - were there any other restrictions or guidelines you placed on yourself?

DM: Yeah. Loads. (laughs) I mean if I’m deciding to do this episodic thing, breaking down a sex scene into a series of chapters, each one dealing with one little part of what is an overall sex scene, there’s all sorts of areas where I personally didn’t want to go. Anything relating sex to violence, even play violence, I wouldn’t go near. Personally, I just think they’re totally opposite impulses. And there was all kinds of other things I just really didn’t want to go near. The list of don’ts was probably a lot bigger than do’s. I think there’s something to be said for breaking all taboos and just letting it all hang out and doing whatever you want. The Marquis de Sadean way of writing. And there’s something else to be said for taking personally responsibility for what you do and I think I’ll probably err on the latter. Maybe in a future book I might not, but for this one I definitely had a list of things that I felt queasy about. I wanted to try and do something that was beautiful and tickles the mind and is enticing and an awful lot of pornography is really pretty off-putting and gynecological.

AD: I was wondering if you could talk about the use of color and its role in the book.

DM: Well I wasn’t really using color literally. It’s there for a reason. There’s very little color there in the beginning. I don’t really have much for the color to do at the beginning. Then depending on the theme, the color just adds to the mood I think. The red in the devil sequence is obviously there as a sort of stain of excitement and blood flowing and all those sorts of things. Natural greens and blues in the outside natural scene. It’s pretty obvious, but I just wanted it to help to create the mood for that moment. Each part of the overall sex scene has certain feelings and sensations along with it and I was just trying to capture those sensations in the color and the marks and whether it’s painted or drawn or whether it’s just a line. Lines and colors are loaded with feeling and meaning so I was just trying to make them all describe the same thing, the same moment, the same feeling. It’s like music really, speaking of tap dancing about architecture, it’s closer to music really. Music just goes straight in. You don’t need a book to decipher what you’re listening to. If it feels pastoral or if it feels aggressive or if it feels funny. Musical notes can make you laugh if they’re played correctly. It just goes straight in and that’s what I was trying to do with this. No text. No explanations. You either go into that world and into those scenes and feel it, or not.

AD: A lot of what I’ve read about the book because the main character is a woman who goes from watching to taking part, have written about it in terms of voyeurism.

DM: Yes, the voyeuristic thing is really interesting. It’s slightly dangerous. That’s why I ended up making it from a woman’s point of view. Again it was in my list of don’ts. I think I would feel queasy if it was a man wandering around. I was happy with it being obviously fantasy rather than a realistic story. It was about the fantasy of sex. It was not about the moral obligations and these are real people and real wives and children. I didn’t want to get into that. It’s not that. It was just tickling the mind. You close your eyes and have a fantasy. And so having a woman at the center of it would be a better scenario than a predatory male. Does that make sense?

But the voyeuristic thing is always interesting. There’s a lovely film, it’s actually a kind of mediocre film but it is really interesting, called The Lickerish Quartet by Radley Metzger. That was a big influence on this. It’s one of those seventies b-films and it’s not very well done but it’s got some really lovely ideas in it. It’s a bit of a landmark with regards to sex in the cinema. There are a few films like that. There’s a film called Ecstasy from the twenties with Hedy Lamarr before she was famous. That’s another one. A very, very beautiful, strange mysterious film. It’s a fantasy involving a woman wandering around and she’s naked in the film. This was before cinema really closed up with the Hays code and censorship. Those strange little things that are not really pornography, but they are dealing with sex and eroticism and the way our minds tease us with sex. I think those things are interesting.

AD: My first thought wasn’t voyeurism. I kept thinking of the story in terms of art, because of course we go from viewing art to creating it.

DM: Yes, absolutely. That’s a perfectly good reading of it. You dive in and you absorb you get into the atmosphere and you head towards something and you end up inside it. Whether you actually end up where you thought you’d be is something else.

AD: I read that you’re assembling collection of short comics, a sort of sequel to Pictures That Tick, can we expect that soon?

DM: It’s nearly finished. And it’s a lot. It doesn’t really feel like I’ve been away from comics because I’ve got three hundred pages worth of short comics that are going in this book. There’s lot of very short ones but they include two longer pieces which were both exhibitions. The story took place within the exhibition and then I made a book version of the exhibitions.

AD: I read about “The Rut” which was an exhibition in Battersea in London last year which I didn’t see but I saw photos of it. You had work on the walls, the floors, what were you trying to do there?

DM: Well that was a situation where the space was offered. It was being curated by a guy called Paul Gravett who’s very much the man in the middle of the comics industry here, well, there isn’t really an industry, but the comics world here in England. He published Violent Cases, my first book with Neil Gaiman way back when. It was called Hypercomics. He wanted four people to explore new ways of telling stories. And it seemed to me that this space was so beautiful, it was on the third floor, it was overlooking the park, and it seemed to me that it would be good to try to tell a story that is truly interactive. It’s not clear you’re not necessarily reading a sequence, you’re exploring the room. The story is the room and you’re piecing it together from that. As you enter the room there are a few images to sort of lead you in and they are in sequence and then the story very obviously splits into three possible futures involving three different characters. You can kind of follow them, but they fragment, and then they meet up at some indeterminate time in the future with three possible outcomes to this event. It’s really down to you to decide what’s true and what’s not true. There were clues in the room. It’s based on something that happened to me, so it is an actual thing, there is an actual truth at the center of it. What that is, is hard to discern. It’s a bit of a memory trick story. It’s what happens when you remember something and you’re not sure that you’re actually remembering it correctly. Maybe you’re just remembering a memory which is already degraded. By the time twenty-thirty years goes by, what was the actual truth back then? It’s really hard to work it out. Some of the story took place on the windows. There were images on the windows and they related to what was actually going on in the real world beyond the window. It was amazing to do. Quite fun. And there was a dead body hidden behind a screen and some people didn’t even see that. Some people went around the room and didn’t see that, so when they got out they didn’t know what their friends were talking about with the strange red figure with the horned mask. That was great. I really liked that sort of thing.

AD: Other than sequencing the images, did you have to do anything else to make it work on page?

DM: No, I just ended up kind of having to give it some sort of page sequence. That’s the trouble with books. Obviously it’s a wonderful thing about books. It means you can take people through the story in the way that you want them to. This was designed as an interactive thing, so it’s a bit of a mismatch, but I wanted to document it in some way. I ended up forcing a sequence on it. Something of the splitting story is retained and it does kind of fragment towards the end and you just have a collection of spreads that document the room. So to a degree you can still make of it what you will. But it’s not the room. The room was the ideal way of seeing it, but then it will never be seen again. It was dissembled. It was created specifically for that space and now I’m starting to exhibit some of the drawings on their own and selling them. It’ll never be seen again, so it’s nice to have a record of it at the very least.

The other exhibition story was called “The Coast Road.” That took place along the South coast of England. The gallery that we showed at was right in the center of the pathway along the whole of the South coast. That went really, really well. That was a sequence with an order, but what I’d hoped people would do, they did. Usually people walk into a gallery space, head for something they like the look of and then just wander around a bit in no particular order. People came, headed towards something and very quickly realized hang on there’s a sequence, so then they’d go back to the beginning by the front door. Instead of ten minutes, they’d spend an hour. I think it was quite a moving story and we had a lovely reaction to that. We had a few people in tears by the end.

AD: I would be remiss if I didn’t ask about Neil Gaiman. The two of you always seem to working on something together.

DM: Pretty much. The last year or so is pretty much the only time we’ve ever not had something in the works. We’ve both been completely absorbed with other things. Just now Neil’s been sending me chunks of a new children’s book.

AD: You’ve been working on a film for a few years now, Luna. Many of us loved Mirrormask and just wondering what you would do next in film.

DM: A couple of years after finishing Mirrormask, I shot another film. Unfortunately all the things that were great about the process of making Mirrormask, the ease of getting the money from Sony Pictures was ridiculous and the production side of Mirrormask was so easy, the production side of Luna has been a nightmare. The making of Mirrormask, spending eighteen months in a studio endlessly compositing animated shots, was torture, whereas the editing process and actually working on Luna has been wonderful. I’m really really happy with it so far. The whole film is shot and 98% of it is edited so there’s just a last little bit to do. We just had to keep on stopping and refinancing. We haven’t gone over budget. For some reason, they’ve just found it very difficult to get the money to stay put. It looks like the final bit of money we needed to finish up the effects shots, the sound and the music is now there, so we’ll be working on that through the rest of the year.

The thing that slightly got in the way of it also is that I’ve shot now a third film, which came about very, very quickly and strangely. I was in Oberammergau, which is in Germany, at a passion play. I went with Michael Sheen cause we were thinking of doing a book together. At Easter this year he did a passion play in his hometown of Port Townsend. That’s why he was there doing research. It was a three day live theatrical event and 10,000 people showed up to see it. It took place in the whole town. Thousands of people involved.

It’s a contemporary secular version of the Easter story. He played a Welsh teacher who goes missing from the town for forty days and forty nights. He loses his memory and his mind and then comes back to the town as this character called the teacher and he has come to listen. All the beats of the Easter story are played out ending with him being crucified on a roundabout by the seafront on Sunday night. I agreed to shot it as a film. Well, I suggested it, and I probably should have kept my mouth shut. I was there with a crew of ten cameras and then there were various other little camera crews. The BBC was there doing a documentary. I’ve just had all the footage delivered back to me so through the rest of the year I’m going to be trying to edit this into some kind of feature film. The film will be called The Gospel of Us.

AD: As a last question. Is there anything you haven’t tried or something you’d like to do more of?

DM: I really want to do either one or two really good comics. I was very happy with Cages and I still am very happy with it. I’m very happy with Pictures That Tick. This new collection of short stories, I’m very happy with that. I’d love to do one or two proper graphic novels that I’m really happy with. And I’d love to make a film that I’m really happy with. I’m really delighted when people liked Mirrormask, but for me, the process of doing it was so painful that I find it very hard to watch. I would love to make a film that I’m really happy with. That’s the main thing really. I think I’ve probably spent too much time being very fragmented and getting very excited about doing other things, photography or stage design or various other things. I’d love to do a really good film and a couple of really good graphic novels. My ambition at the moment is to stay home and draw. (laughs)

by SG's Team Agony feat. Apple and Rydell Let us answer life's questions - because great advice is even better when it comes from SuicideGirls. (image) [Apple in Pi] Q: I love my wife and we've almost been married a year now. I find myself less and less attracted to her physically and... more

by SG's Team Agony feat. Apple and Rydell

Let us answer life's questions - because great advice is even better when it comes from SuicideGirls.


[Apple in Pi]

Q: I love my wife and we've almost been married a year now. I find myself less and less attracted to her physically and I'm not sure why. She is a gorgeous woman with beautiful features. The only thing I can think of is maybe the medicine I'm on is contributing to this, or the fact that she's put on some weight. I basically have to force myself to have sex with her or we won't have it at all. Maybe it's because right after we got married I basically had to beg for sex and never got it so now I'm not willing to try? I'm worried. I'm finding myself more and more attracted to other women, and I'm hardly interested in her even if she throws herself at me. Please help me.

A: First I would say, don't do anything drastic with people you find attractive that could affect your marriage. Think of what attracted you to your wife in the first place. If that doesn't work for you, you may just be bored with the relationship. If that's the case, you have to do your part in making it exciting again. There are a million ways to kink up your sex life, and the relationship in general.

As for your medication, is it possible for you to try for a substitute?

Also, a lot of people put on weight when they are very comfortable in their relationship. It's happened to me. I have a friend who calls it "happy fat." Maybe you can suggest that you want to start a healthier diet, and you want her to be your partner in it. Say you need an exercise buddy.

And finally, any rejection can put a little dent in anyone's self-esteem. However you shouldn't let rejection ruin sex with the person you love. Maybe she didn't want to be begged for sex, but romanced into it. Maybe that's what you need too. I hope this helps, and good luck to you.

Apple

***


[Rydell in Changing Seasons]

Q: My girlfriend is perfectly fine having sex in missionary every time. When I suggest something else she says she likes it missionary, and I don't really want to press the matter. How can I press it without going without sex for a while?

A: Well, it may just be that she has never really enjoyed other positions with other people or maybe she is a bit self conscious and shy about it.

Tell her that you like missionary but that it gets a bit tedious and you would love to try a position that is mutually beneficial for you both. Maybe to get her to try something new, go out to the book store and buy a Kama Sutra together. There’s actually several different versions of the missionary position - you could start there and work your way up. Maybe flag a few positions you like and have her do the same then review each others position and pick a night to each try one from each other’s list in the book.

If she is willing to try something new then tell her how sexy/beautiful/sultry she looked while in that position and how much it turned you on to have her like that. Females respond more to that then a visual stimulation, so next time she might be more willing to try it again or something a bit more risqué.

If she is really is unwilling to try anything other than missionary, talk to her and try and find out why. Talking can sometimes solve the issue as well. It may just be something as simple as the fact that the positions she tried were not comfortable for her and made sex painful. But it can’t hurt to ask, even if you get rebuffed. Opening up a dialog and getting a book to inspire new positions should help move the issue along nicely. Hopefully this works for you hun.

Rydell

***
Got Problems? Let SuicideGirls’ team of Agony Aunts provide solutions. Email questions to: gotproblems@suicidegirls.com

After 30 years together the Flaming Lips are still among the best and most interesting bands in the world. Blessed with a rabidly loyal fanbase and the pockets of indulgent major label patrons, the Lips have been able to pursue just about every project that struck their interests: recently including covering... more

After 30 years together the Flaming Lips are still among the best and most interesting bands in the world. Blessed with a rabidly loyal fanbase and the pockets of indulgent major label patrons, the Lips have been able to pursue just about every project that struck their interests: recently including covering Pink Floyd’s entire Dark Side of the Moon album, releasing an EP every month for a year in forms as diverse as Youtube videos and USB drives embedded in gummy fetuses. This summer their always unforgettable live shows will even mix Dark Side of the Moon with the Wizard of the Oz in a way that seems almost inevitable. SuicideGirls recently spoke with frontman Wayne Coyne about his new art gallery, The Wizard of Oz, and the power of Twitter.

Keith Daniels: So tell me about your new art gallery, The Womb. Is it a coincidence that you’re releasing a record in a fetus and opening a gallery called “The Womb”?

Wayne Coyne: Well I would say that it’s not necessarily a coincidence. You’re starting to see how my mind works, for better or for worse. When you have to come up with things you have to name them, you have to give them a color, give them meaning. I think, little by little, there is no pretense. You’re not building an idea of yourself; you’re being yourself. So if I can name a gallery and call it anything I want, well, let’s call it that! But I have to say I didn’t give it very much thought. [I said to] the people that are helping me out with the gallery, “Come on! Let’s come up with a cool name,” and they didn’t really think about it too much. I said, “Well we’ve got to call it something.” If it ends up that we don’t like it very much we’ll just change it to something else. Sometimes I think that’s the only way you can be real, is to say, “It doesn’t matter what it’s called.” Then it really has a great name. Now I think everybody loves the name. So yeah, it’s not a coincidence, but just things I think about all the time.

KD: What would you like The Womb to be?

WC: Well, the friend who’s helping me do it wanted to open a gallery, so a lot of it is based on his interests. He had a gallery five or six years ago, and he had some dilemmas with the building and finances and stuff. When this came around, he had talked to me in the beginning of January. He said, “You know, I’d like to open another gallery.” I was interested in it because he’s interested in it. That would be number one.

I think, beyond that, we just thought it could be very cool, you know. We wanted to bring in artists that we knew from all over the world -- to bring stuff here [to Oklahoma City] so it could be part of our world. I travel all the time, but not everybody here does. So we thought we would do that and it would be interesting to meet these people and be around them.

Plus, we just wanted a space where we could have freaky events: concerts, you know, experimental art, experimental performances, parties where people do drugs and hangout; a place where we could be at 4 o’clock in the morning that isn’t one of our houses. So we thought, “Why not make this place?” If we’re lucky it’ll attract artists and weirdos, people who are already our friends, and be a way we can make new friends. There’s a lot of things about it.

KD: This seems to be a time when you guys are doing a lot of smaller, fun projects: Dark Side of the Moon, the gallery, “Two Blobs Fucking”, the gummy skull and fetus, releasing a song a month... instead of doing one big album and tour.

WC: Yeah, I agree! Once you start in that mode it does kind of remind you that anything is possible -- if you’re lucky enough to have money and energy at the same time. It would be difficult for someone a lot younger than me, who doesn’t have as many connections as me, as much money and all that sort of stuff. But yeah, I agree. I think it’s a great, explosive, freaky time for the Flaming Lips, like, “Fuck! Let’s do this stuff, you know?” Again, I’m lucky; I’m around a lot of people who are energetic. They feed off my energy and I feed off of theirs. That makes all the difference.

KD: Thinking about the skull and the fetus, there have always been those two sides of your art. Your stage show might have clips from Battle Royale and have you covered in blood, but there might also be a rainbow and somebody dancing in a pink bunny outfit. A song like “Do You Realize?” is a beautiful song, but it’s also about death. Are those two sides of life kind of an obsession for you?

WC: Yeah! I think understanding this big range of our experience of what life is makes the other [aspects] deeper. It’s a dumb analogy, but it’s the idea that you really don’t want to just sit there and eat candy all day. Or potato chips. But if you have the right combination you can almost do it endlessly, because one is giving you a different sensation than the other.

When we talk about believing the idea that we can create our own happiness, and that happiness means something to us, we don’t want it to be empty. It’s only because of our experiences -- that we know how horrible the world can be, how boring the world can be, how full of pain the world can be -- that we want to believe that happiness and pleasure can be just as potent. But we can’t know how potent either of them are if we don’t really know them.

When we’re doing songs we’re singing about whatever it is that’s fucking with us. You never sing about the whole scope of what your life is. You’re really singing about a very specific moment. Sometimes it’s about questioning, “What am I about?” Other times it’s, “Why do we have to die?” Other times it’s like, “Man it’s great to feel good and have good times.” A lot of it is based on these little experiences. But I think music can expand anything a thousand times over because it makes your mind kind of involuntarily swim around. That’s one of the mysteries of music: how it engages all the different parts of our mind at the same time.

So even though I might be singing something that sounds simple, like, “Everyone you know someday will die,” with music and with the inertia of where that’s going to take you it can be a big, epic statement. That’s why we love music so much, because it makes everything -- if it want to be -- bigger and better.

KD: It bypasses the part of your brain that holds things at a critical distance.

WC: That’s why we want it on all the time. If you’re driving to the grocery store in your car, you want to be taken, yeah.

KD: You’ve been posting on Twitter recently about your Wizard of Oz / Dark Side of the Moon ideas. You guys have been doing Wizard of Oz references for a long time. What is it about that movie that appeals to you?

WC: It’s probably connected to everybody’s childhood in some way, but it’s very connected to mine. I was born in 1961, long before there was even video tape. The only time you could see a movie, if you didn’t see it in the movie theater, was when it played on television. When I was young The Wizard of Oz played on television, I think, around Easter every year. So every year for the first, probably, ten years of my life I’d see this movie. That would be one of the only movies that you would have seen multiple times. Nowadays you can watch a movie a hundred times and it doesn’t even matter because every movie ever is available to you, all the time.

So it became that you got to know the music, and know these characters. I think, as I started to embrace the idea of what the Flaming Lips’ music could be, I would always reference that. It hints at this longing, it hints at this optimism, but a lot of that movie is about horrible tragedy and loss. I mean, the Wicked Witch... in the beginning, they kill this other witch! They kill the Wicked Witch! [Dorothy’s] in this horrible tornado in the beginning. It’s violent! There’s a lot to be scared about it. And I’m not saying kids’ movies these days [don’t], Harry Potter and all those other things all embrace that sort of thing. I think that’s why people like them so much, because it really isn’t just for kids. It has bigger things about it.

Also, for me, I still think Judy Garland, the Dorothy character... there’s elements of those songs, with her singing it... Someone else singing it would not have had the same intensity or power or believability. For me, The Wizard of Oz is so far above what we think of as dumb musicals. It has stellar songs. The themes of it are these optimistic, fantastical things. It’s about longing. It’s about this idea of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”. That whole thing is saying, “The rainbow is in the distance. My life is here. I understand what my life is, and my life is real. I don’t know if I can live the life that’s over the rainbow.” We can’t stop from longing and thinking about it and believing in it, but I think it’s because we don’t ever know if we can escape into fantasy. Parts of our minds are so rooted in what’s real and what’s reasonable and what’s rational. Again, I think that’s what fantasy and music and all that childlike wonder is: it’s part of us but we’re not really able to hold it.

So it’s a lot of things. Plus it’s a very psychedelic, drug-oriented movie, and I think when it became associated with Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon... It was like Reese’s Peanut Butter -- like peanut butter and chocolate -- two great fucking things that are even better when you get to fucking have ‘em together. All that. So Pink Floyd and The Wizard of Oz. I mean, there’s a million other things from my childhood. When I was growing up I had older brothers that took drugs and listened to music. A lot of that is lived within us. We live in the Midwest, you know. The Wizard of Oz is based on her being from Kansas. People kind of think of me sometimes as living in this magic land, “You’re living where The Wizard of Oz takes place,” and I’m like, “Not really. That was in Kansas. We’re in Oklahoma.” But they are a lot closer than New York or Los Angeles or something. A lot of it ties into that.

KD: You know, I’m from Oklahoma City myself.

WC: No! I wasn’t aware of that.
KD: So I can identify with the “Over the Rainbow” idea. I’m younger than you but old enough to remember the sort of cultural isolation we had here, especially before the internet. I remember going to the record store twenty years ago and asking for a Meat Puppets record. The guy didn’t know what I was talking about, so I was just fucked.

WC: That’s what I mean. There’s this whole other world out there that you’re longing for. I know what you mean. The way that the Wizard has all this fantastical stuff -- I’ve been thinking about it because we’ve been fucking with it recently -- but what I like about the Wizard is that he says, “Yeah, this is all a farce.” It doesn’t make it less fantastic, but it’s a farce. When he gives them their fake medallions and their badges, the things he says are great things to say about courage and all that other stuff, I forget. These real humanistic qualities are the real magic, and all this other stuff is just magic stuff that we get to behold. I think that’s a great thing for a silly little movie to go to. It’s got a lot of great things about it that, if I’m lucky, apply to this world of the Flaming Lips as I create this fantastical shit that I want you to stand in front of while you’re taking acid. But also, we don’t want to forget that we’re people, and the greatest thing about being people is that we get to laugh and cry and fuck each other and have friends. We get to experience humanistic things.

KD: Speaking of doing acid. There was a major headline in the news this week: The Drug War Has Failed. Connecticut just decriminalized pot...

WC: [Laughs]

KD: Is that issue personal for you?

WC: It is. I don’t care that much about smoking pot myself but I know a lot of people that do. A lot of people that are smoking it, they have to smoke in a sense, because they suffer from too much anxiety, and there’s this wonderful cure of smoking a joint, early in the day or later in the day, that lets them relax. I think that’s great, that’s great for them. Unfortunately, they may go to jail which would cause a lot more anxiety in their life. But I would say the opposite. I would say the Drug War is starting to have an idea what the fuck is worth having a war over. I would say, crack cocaine, crystal meth, some of these drugs, to me, are always going to be too hazardous. They’re always going to rob young people of their... I don’t know if you know the neighborhood I live in, but I live in one of the lowest income neighborhoods in all of Oklahoma.

KD: Over by 18th & Classen, that area?

WC: Yeah, yeah. I’m over here in the Plaza District, but I’m on the other side of 16th, so I see it every day. The horrible destruction that drugs do, especially to young families. There’s guys over here who don’t have a job, they have four kids, they don’t know what the fuck they’re going to do, and then get addicted to fucking crystal meth. Fuck! Life is tough enough and then you get these drugs that make you insane, and they’re very addictive and very cheap and they’re everywhere. Yeah, it’s horrible.

But I’d say pot is not anywhere near, ever, the same category as crack cocaine or crystal meth. Those are completely different things. So, to me, the idea that we can say, “Pot is fine but these other drugs are bad.” I think both of those things can be true at the same time. I don’t think we need to make every drug, ever, legal, “Make ‘em all legal! Fuck it!” I don’t believe in that at all. We can sit here and analyze it and say, “Y’know, pot’s been around a long time.” Even Barrack Obama has smoked pot and he’s the President of the United States. He seems like a smart, rational, mega-thinker of a dude. Of course he [smoked pot], because he’s a smart, curious dude. He wants to find out things for himself, and one of the things he’d want to find out is, “What is pot?”

So that’s what I’m riding at. If a conservative state like Connecticut can legalize it, I say, “Yes. Fuckin’ do it.” Let’s make the laws out there in our world worthy of respect. This stupid law that makes pot illegal makes you suspect of all laws. Like, “Why are these laws here? They seem stupid.” Let’s give the law some validity and say, “Let’s change this stupid law.” That would be my argument.

KD: You mentioned how a curious person wants to try new things, wants to say, “Yes.” That’s an idea that I’ve always associated with you guys ever since I read that Dave Eggers piece that used you guys as an example a long time ago.

WC: Well that’s great of you to say that, and I agree. When that was brought to my attention, that Dave had said that, I hadn’t thought about it that much. I just thought I was kind of doing what I like, pursuing the things that I like, but when he said that I thought, “You know, you’re right. That does change everything. That makes a big difference” It even makes a big difference when you see someone else do it, because you may be cautious or you may think, “What’s going to happen here?,” but when you see other people do it it’s like, “Gee, what’s the harm? Fuck it!” We learn from our mistakes, but if we don’t try we’re never going to find out anything. All we’re going to know is the things that are already in our minds: things that make us afraid, things that make us second guess what we’re doing. I agree.

But I’m also doing art. I’m not flying a 747 airplane full of 500 people, you know. There are areas in our society where we want people to say, “Yes,” and take chances. See what you can do. Take risks. Part of that would be people who are thinking about smoking pot. I mention it only because I can’t think of a single artist or a single musician who wouldn’t want to try pot. Maybe they wouldn’t like it but they’d have to try it just to see what the fuck it is.

KD: I know that technology has enabled you and a lot of other people to do amazing things, but do you ever feel like the internet sometimes allows people to feel like they’re doing something when they aren’t, or being connected when they’re not?

WC: Well, that would be up to them. I’d never blame it on technology. For us, even the way that we were able to make The Soft Bulletin back in 1997, without the ways computers are working, without the way all these new digital effects were working, we probably would’ve never thought that we could make it.

As far as people communicating... People will say, to me, “Don’t you think Twitter is kind of empty?,” and I’ll say, “No. I don’t think it’s empty at all.” People say, “Texting people, is that really communicating?,” and I say, “Yes!” I can give you a thousand examples. We’re traveling in Canada; we’re traveling from the east coast to the west and stopping at a lot of places in between. Canada’s got some pretty empty areas when you get out into the middle of it. We were going to be in a place called Medicine Hat, Canada. I knew we were going to be there for an evening and I thought, “Man, what the fuck are we going to do there?” So I tweeted -- and this is the power of my Twitter account, motherfuckers -- that we were going to be in Medicine Hat, Canada. I jokingly said, “I hope I run into some mystical Indian and he brings me peyote.” It’s a stupid thing to say. What the fuck? It’s funny, you know.

People immediately tweeted me back, saying, “Wayne! That’s so cool! Go to this bar and we’ll meet you there.” I was literally walking down the street and people knew I was there, came out, took us into this little art complex where people were painting and doing music. I had just taken a picture, as I do, of a dead bird on the street. Five minutes later I was in a little art complex where they were painting a dead pigeon that they had found silver. That would have never happened if I hadn’t announced, “Hey, the Flaming Lips are bored and we’re spending 14 hours in Medicine Hat.” That, I know for sure, happens everywhere we go: if I announce where we’re at, people say, “Hey! Look at this, this is interesting.”

We were just in Barcelona a couple of days ago and I couldn’t remember where the fuck an absinthe bar was. I tweeted, “Hey, anybody out there remember where the absinthe bar is?,” and within twenty seconds four people said, “Yeah, Wayne, it’s here.” I got in a cab and we went there. It’s powerful. It doesn’t change your life, but it’s like, those are cool experiences with people who aren’t necessarily my close friends but people who I think are like-minded. That’s what I think we want. You don’t really have room for 10,000 close friends in your life because you don’t have enough time, but you have room for millions of people who are like-minded. We can connect on things that only take moments to explain to each other. I think it’s wonderful.

KD: What’s real absinthe like? All I’ve ever had is the fake stuff.

WC: I don’t think these days we can ever really know what the real absinthe was like, unless you are lucky enough to run into someone who makes it themselves. We have some friends who make moonshine, and we’ve occasionally run into people in Europe that make real absinthe from real wormwood. To me, it fucks you up. It’s a good drunk. There’s a little bit more of a dream associated with it. I think it’s awesome. But, to me, it’s more that you’re in a place where people are drinking absinthe as opposed to you drinking it while everybody else is drinking something else. When you’re around 50 or 60 other weirdos at 3 o’clock in the morning and you’re all drinking absinthe, smoking cigarettes, listening to music, telling stories, there’s prostitutes outside... it’s just a fucking great place to be. [Laughs] It’s not necessarily that you’re drinking absinthe, it’s just that the absinthe has created this atmosphere. You’re not around people who are drunk on whiskey or beer or other things. Everybody there is in the same dream state. Of course, a lot of times we’re drinking Red Bull because we don’t want to stop. We want to keep going.

KD: Speaking of which, you just turned 50 this year, but you seem as energetic as ever. How do you maintain that? How do you keep that spirit up?

WC: A lot of it I think is just luck. The natural inertia of my genes and whatever have allowed it. I do yoga almost every day. I mean, sometimes I don’t because we’re getting up at 6AM and flying or something. I try to be a happy person. I try to be involved with as many happy, healthy, energetic weirdos that are like me, that pull me along into their universe. But I think a lot of it is just dumb luck that I haven’t been injured or have any brain damage or anything like that from being alive as long as I have. Then, just seeing that my time is limited now. When you’re 20 you can almost feel like your whole life is ahead of you and nothing drives you that much. For me, when I turned 50, I was like, “Oh fuck. That’s very cool,” because I used to look at people who were 50 and think, “Those motherfuckers are done with.” I realize now that there’s a big variety of how you can be [at] 50, and I’ve been very lucky that my 50 is like... I’m healthier now than I was even 10 years ago.

But it gives me that inertia of knowing... maybe I have 50 more years, maybe only 40, maybe 30! My father died when he was 64, maybe I only have a little bit! So that drives you as well. You think, “Well I can sleep, [but] not tonight. I can sleep at the end of the week.” It pushes you. As my life has gone on I start to value experiences more than things. I’m not really concerned about having more and more things in my life. I’m lucky. I have a great house. I have all these things. Now, I’m more driven to having experiences and not just things.

KD: What else do you guys have planned for this year? Do you have something coming after the fetus that we don’t know about?

WC: Well, every other month we’re doing those elaborate, 12 inch EPs. Those, really, are very beautiful. I have a guy in Dallas who makes those, and he handfeeds the machine that the vinyl goes into. He does each one himself. They’re pretty fucking fantastic. Beyond that, I have a gummy frog that you’ll lick. The “salt box” is moving ahead. Some of the things we were trying to do on it we won’t be able to do, but some other new things have come up that we’ll be able to do. We have this sort of stroboscope that spins and you shoot a light at it and it makes these sort of... animations. Quite a few great little things.

At the end of it we still have our secret skull/vag combination that’ll have the fetus inside the skull, but we’re not showing people that yet. It’s going to be pretty fantastic. That’ll be a collection of all these songs that we’ve done [this year]. That could be 50 or 60 songs by the time we finish in February of next year. I think it’s going to be a great, freaky year for us. We’ll probably always operate like this to some extent. I don’t know if we’ll release something every month, but I have so many things now that people are showing me and saying, “Wayne! What about this? What about that?,” that I believe that if I kept pursuing I could keep releasing interesting Flaming Lips objects for five years.

KD: Has that been an upside of the decline of CD sales, that record companies like Warner Bros. might be more inclined to let you be creative with packaging and things like that?

WC: Not really. I don’t think it’s the record companies at all. Make no mistake, Warner Bros. still sells shitloads of records. They just don’t sell shitloads of everybody’s records. They’re a mega-successful company even by today’s standards. They’re going to keep selling shitloads of records. Maybe not records that me and you would buy, but they’re a big, diverse company.

But with us and Warner Bros. they wanted me and the Flaming Lips to do this. They said, “Everybody keeps talking about the next thing. Well, if anybody could be the ones to do the next thing, you guys would be one of them. Why don’t you go do your thing?” We are still on Warner Bros., but we’ve been given this freedom to do our thing. What I mean by that is... we’ve always had freedom with Warner Bros., but they’re a giant bureaucracy that takes a lot of time to go from the front of the building to the back. When you do something that has the Warner Bros. stamp on it, you could not release something every month. It would take you six months just to release one thing, you know. And they know that. So, when I told them, “Here’s what I’d like to try,” they were like, “Good. Let’s do that. But you’re going to be the one that has to do it, because we can’t do that.”

That’s the great position that we’re in. We’re able to do it, we know how to do it, we want to do it. We have a lot of people connected with us that help us to do it. I think it would be very difficult for a young band who’s just starting out to do what we’re doing. We’ve been doing this a long time, so not only do we have a backlog of experience we have a lot of cool people who help us do all these things.

KD: I don’t think your career arc could be replicated if you tried.

WC: We wouldn’t have been able to do it on purpose. A lot of it just happened by accident, “Yes! Let’s do it!”

by Laurelin Dating. I think we all know by now that I suck at it. I’m a tough girl to win over, and the odds of me scaring someone off by date three are pretty damn good despite the initial attraction. I’m going to be honest, I have been sampling what Boston has to offer lately and am having a damn... more

by Laurelin

Dating. I think we all know by now that I suck at it. I’m a tough girl to win over, and the odds of me scaring someone off by date three are pretty damn good despite the initial attraction. I’m going to be honest, I have been sampling what Boston has to offer lately and am having a damn good time with it -- it’s summertime, what do you want from me? I’ve realized that keeping an open mind when it comes to guys has meant I have met a lot of cool people who I normally wouldn’t have gone for… I have also met a lot of idiots.

Guys, good lord, I know sometimes girls turn out to be a bit bonkers; especially girls like me who habitually come home a little drunk around 4 AM with a rip in their jeans and a half eaten cheeseburger in their purse. But I figure I may as well tell it like it is; it doesn’t matter how hot you are, it is totally possible to lose even the most captivated girl in ten minutes. Listen up guys. Help me help you, take heed of these simple rules, and then maybe we can all go get a margarita.



1. Watch your language. Don’t use the n-word on our first date -- or ever for crying out loud! I don’t care how hot you are, how big your muscles are, or how lucky I thought I was to be with literally the hottest guy I have ever seen in my whole life -- the second you start telling me a story and dropping racist terminology, I am gone. It’s a damn shame and a colossal waste of my time. Men, lock up those lips and grow a brain. Ignorance doesn’t look good on anyone.

2. When we go out, God help you if you don’t know how to tip. I honestly don’t remember the last time I dated someone who wasn’t a bartender, waiter, barback or bouncer (that’s a problem in and of itself), but it’s happened to a few friends of mine. I would rather not have to duck back in and leave another twenty on the table because you’re trying to save a few bucks. I’m staying home next time, and you’re a jerk.

3. There comes a time when it’s time to put out. Trust me, no one is coming back to my apartment right away, but I don’t want to be surprised a few months in and find that you have a mangina. Nothing good can come from that. It either ends in us still talking while I see other people, us becoming buddies, or me purposely dropping my cell phone in the toilet and forgetting you exist. I also don’t want to hear about your ex-girlfriends, talk about your feelings, how many kids you want and what you want to name them, or other mangina-y things. Grow. A. Pair.

4. If we wind up doing it, we are probably/maybe dating and we really/moderately like one another. On a few rare occasions maybe I’m just trying to get over someone, or maybe I didn’t want you to drive home drunk and let you stay over and I took my Ambien too soon. But either way, the first time having sex with someone is always a big deal. I’m not a prude by any means, but sweet baby Jesus, I swear I will never talk to you again if you refer to me as “Mama” or refer to yourself as “Daddy.” And the baby talk… I have never been more freaked out in my life. No, I don’t “likey.” I was “likey-ing” until you started talking like a three year old. Game. Over.

5. If you pee on my stuff after drinking, you are a tool. We have all been there, drunk as a skunk and in some strange bed. However. Why am I waking up to you peeing on my futon, my desktop computer, or my bookshelf? Is this what I have to look forward to the next time you come over? I watched a guy pee in his room once and actually felt terrible so I cleaned it up and put him back to bed. The next morning I was trying to break the news gently and not embarrass him and he actually said, “Are you sure you. didn’t pee?” Good luck buddy. I’m out, you’re gross. I know this goes hand in hand with the type of men I keep going after… maybe I should start assessing how many people have actually peed in my room before I date another bartender.

I hate to be that girl and point out that the first thing I noticed about a guy is his appearance. I don’t however, make a snap judgment and decide if I like you then and there. Sometimes a sense of humor and a nice smile can overpower things like being shorter than me, bad haircuts, funny dancing, fist pumping (okay, not fist pumping, sorry) and silly T-shirt wearing. These things are not deal breakers. If you make me laugh I don’t mind bending over to kiss you, and I might laugh telling my friends about your silly T, but hey, I’m telling my friends about you.

I might not be in the mood for a relationship just now, even in my sea of badly shorn and stupidly attired bar scene men. But at least I have a few hands to squeeze and options to savor while watching the Bruins game. As for all the rest, I really did drop my cell phone in the toilet. And I’m not getting another one, ever. Please don’t ever call me again, you racist baby talking bed wetters.

Thank you.
Love, Laurelin