Chloe Sevigny must be a veteran of film festivals. The types of movies she usually does often get their start at Sundance or Cannes looking for distribution. At this year's South by Southwest film festival in Austin, TX, she had two films, Barry Munday and Mr. Nice. Barry Munday is a comedy starring... more

Chloe Sevigny must be a veteran of film festivals. The types of movies she usually does often get their start at Sundance or Cannes looking for distribution. At this year's South by Southwest film festival in Austin, TX, she had two films, Barry Munday and Mr. Nice.

Barry Munday is a comedy starring Patrick Wilson as a womanizer who loses his testicles in a comical attack. He finds out he's impregnated one of his one night stands, Ginger (Judy Greer) and tries to do the right thing for his last chance at fatherhood. Sevigny plays Ginger's sister Jennifer, an antagonistic provocateur who may or may not be a stripper by night. Mr. Nice is a stylized true story of British drug smuggler Howard Marks (Rhys Ifans). It would screen later in the week.

It's been 15 years since Sevigny's debut in the controversial indie drama Kids. That film tackled promiscuity, rape and AIDS among New York City teens in 1995. Sevigny also won acclaim and notice in films like Boys Don't Cry, American Psycho and The Brown Bunny (notoriety in that case, giving on-screen fellatio to ex-boyfriend Vincent Gallo). Now she stars on HBO's controversial polygamist drama Big Love, which just wrapped its fourth season.

Jennifer seems the polar opposite of Sevigny, and indeed Barry Munday is a rare comedy in her body of work. She took the previous interview out into the hallway of the Four Seasons hotel in Austin, because she was nervous with all the onlookers in the interview suite. She kept this interview in the room, but still remained shy and guarded. It's cool. That's what makes her such an independent enigma, the rare actress who's not trying to be the center of attention.

Suicide Girls: You look very stylish today with a striped top and a blazer. How did you put this outfit together?

Chloe Sevigny: My friends are designers in New York. I went into their showroom and just pulled a bunch of stuff to wear during the festival.

SG: Is that how you usually pick your clothes?

CS: I guess so. Sometimes I look on Style.com and I pick stuff and I have it sent, but usually that's more problematic because you don't know if it's going to fit. So it's easier always just to go into the showroom and try stuff on. I always like to have new stuff when I go to festivals. You feel a little more sparkly.

SG: Was it nice to get to be funny in Barry Munday?

CS: I don't think I was that funny though. I think I was more the straight person to Judy's comedic [one], but I tried. I tried. It was really scary. It was hard.

SG: Her aggressiveness at making Barry uncomfortable, didn't you find that funny?

CS: I hope so. I think she was kind of more bad than funny, more of a troublemaker, but I hope it's funny. I hope some of it is funny. I feel like my stuff with Judy at the dinner table was kind of cute and funny.

SG: Are you just self-critical?

CS: I think also because I've only seen the film one time and the first time you see it, you're always just kind of like, "Oh my God, no." So I think I'd have to see it a couple more times to feel more confident about the performance. The first time you're always so critical.

SG: How would you describe the rhythm of this comedy?

CS: I don't know, how would you? It's very odd, no? It's kind of flat. It's not ba-dum bum. There's something different and I think mainly that's Patrick Wilson's performance. He's so hilarious. He's so good in this. His looks, every nuance, every face I was rolling on the floor.

SG: You do it well too.

CS: Do I? I'm just impersonating him though.

SG: Jennifer wouldn't wear something as hip as you are right now. What did you think of her basic suburban style?

CS: Oh yeah, I thought she was very boring. I mean, I think she was supposed to be more contemporary, kind of looking pretty cool but not too cool as opposed to Ginger. I think she was just supposed to kind of be her opposite. It was Ginger still dressing like she did when she was in elementary school in the '70s. I think Jennifer was more just supposed to be her opposite.

SG: You looked great with dark hair in the stripper scene.

CS: Oh thank you. It was a terrible wig. Really bad wig.

SG: Were you happy with that look?

CS: I wasn't crazy about the wig but I liked the look. It was fun. It was fun to do the dance sequence. I practiced the dance sequence a lot and then of course it only lasts for a few seconds and you barely see me once, but it was kind of fun to do although I vowed to myself I would never play a stripper or a hooker, but I thought in this case I could kind of get away with it.

SG: Does it count as playing a stripper when it might just be Barry's fantasy that it was Jennifer?

CS: Yeah, it might be a fantasy. It might not be her. That's how I justified it.

SG: Performing it, were you playing the dance straight and sexy or hamming it up a little?

CS: I was just trying to get through the routine. I wish I had hammed it up more. I wish I had been more comfortable. I think I was dancing pretty straight.

SG: You must be a veteran of film festivals. What are your film festival survival tips?

CS: Well, I always do the wrong thing, like last night I went out too late because I want to experience the city. You have to work but you want to go out and have fun, so it's always a balance that I can never get right. Plus, with the time change, it got me all screwed up last night. Film festival survival, bring a friend or a companion. As an actress at least, I have one of my best friends here with me because sometimes when you're here alone it gets lonely and it's more fun to have someone you're with to go to parties with and run around town with and what not. Visine, for an actress. Drink lots of fluids, remember to eat. I can't obviously see a lot of films because I'm working the whole time I'm here but I think if you go as a viewer to a festival, just to be educated on everything that's out there and pick and choose. Like for me, when I go to music festivals, I always know who's playing on every stage and have mapped out what I want to see.

SG: Do you get to make any new friends when you're at all the events for your own films?

CS: Well, at events you're always meeting tons and tons of people of course. Sometimes you make new friends. I once made a boyfriend in Cannes. I met a boy in Cannes who was a journalist and he became my boyfriend. So you never know.

SG: Which film was that on?

CS: Oh, it was a long time ago. I don't want to talk about it.

SG: When can you sleep? I'm having a hard time with that one.

CS: God, hopefully I'll be able to sleep for a couple hours this afternoon because I have another premiere tonight, Mr. Nice. So I need to rest my head a little bit.

SG: Since you have two films here, are you being pulled every which way?

CS: Not so much. I think we're trying to keep it to a minimum here. It's not like Cannes or one of the bigger festivals where there's so much press. I think the press is more like a grass roots kind of thing around here, South by Southwest.

SG: Have you gotten to see anything?

CS: No, I kind of want to see that Lemmy movie. I don't even know how to get in. I have to ask one of these publicist people if I can get in.

SG: It's hard to believe it's been 15 years since Kids.

CS: I know, shocking, right?

SG: How do you look back on that movie?

CS: I'm really proud of my career and my trajectory and the films that I've made. I'm surprised it's been that long. I'm just glad I'm still around. I'm glad people are still hiring me. I'm glad that I've remained true to myself and only worked on films that I want to work on. Now with the TV show, I feel like people are more exposed to my work which has been really great. I'm pretty satisfied.

SG: Would Kids have to be different if made today? Would it have to address all the texting and social networking?

CS: I don't know. I was watching that How to Make It in America on HBO which has a little bit of a Kids feel. It is a different time. There were a lot more freedoms in the '90s, at least in New York City. You could get away with a lot more on the streets, less distractions. You could say, "Well, let's meet in the park" and you'll meet there. You're not like, "Oh, I'm late" or "I'm not going to make it." You couldn't just cancel on people. It's just a different feeling, different time.

SG: Where are you in your life now, 15 years later?

CS: I'm really happy as I said before with my work. I'm a homeowner. I don't know where I am in life. Just trying to do my thing. Working, hanging out with my friends.

SG: Is it different being part of an artistic community as a grown-up than it was when you started out as a young adult?

CS: I don't know. There's a lot of young kids now on the scene in New York, at least the scene that I'm in. They seem really wild and they're acting out and they're doing their thing. It's kind of amusing. Then you see a lot of kids that behave really crazy and oh, well, they're young. I say, "When I was young, I didn't act like an idiot." I was more of the observer which I still am I guess. I feel like now I have more confidence as a person, walking into an opening or doing whatever. I feel more comfortable in myself and that's a great feeling.

SG: Is there a different TV world you've traveled in now?

CS: I guess so. There's definitely the HBO family because I go to a lot of their events and I think they have great programming and great actors on their shows. I never really felt embraced at all by the film world. Definitely indie film but Hollywood never. I've never even made a studio film. Well, Zodiac, but I feel more embraced by the TV community. I feel like there's less snobbery and elitism.

SG: Is Big Love done for the year?

CS: We're done. We start shooting again next August, the fifth season.

SG: Do you have any insight into why polygamist wives are common but not multiple husbands?

CS: I mean, that was their religion. Brigham Young, what can you say? That was the religion they started. It's kind of stuck. I'm sure if there was another religion, the other way around, of course men as they say rule the world so the men are going to be a more dominant force.

SG: Do you think the women of those communities are getting to see Big Love?

CS: No, I don't think they even know who the president of the United States is. I think that they're kept really repressed and it's really shocking that it happens in America right now.

SG: Do you see awareness happening?

CS: No, no. Not within the compound. I don't even know if they get to look at newspapers.

SG: But at least are people on the outside trying to reach in and help?

CS: Oh, I hope so. I hope so. I think that would be great. I think hopefully people are supporting these different organizations where women can go to to escape. I know I have.

Barry Munday is currently seeking distribution. Look for it later this year.

I'll start: (image) Anthea : Ladders and Hearts

Dr. Steven Novella eats, sleeps, and breathes science. An academic clinical neurologist by day at the Yale University of Medicine, he spends much of the rest of his time promoting science and rationality through the massively popular weekly podcast he hosts, The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe, his... more

Dr. Steven Novella eats, sleeps, and breathes science. An academic clinical neurologist by day at the Yale University of Medicine, he spends much of the rest of his time promoting science and rationality through the massively popular weekly podcast he hosts, The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe, his own blog, Neurologica, and the influential blog he founded, Science-Based Medicine. He is also the President and co-founder of the New England Skeptical Society. Our conversation revealed how every question is complicated, and the subtle link between seemingly unrelated pseudo-sciences like intelligent design and alternative medicine.

Keith Daniels: A lot of the claims that you deal with, in terms of pseudoscience -- things like anti-vaccination, have to do with problems that medical science hasn’t figured out yet. You don’t see a lot of people trying to do “alternative medicine” for things that already have scientific cures. Do you think a lot of these things will go away as science cures whatever-it-was?

Dr. Steven Novella: Well, I’d like to think so. There certainly is that relationship where, the more mysterious the disease is, the less effective our evidence-based treatments, the more that gap of knowledge is filled with superstition, pseudo-science, or “alternatives”. I do think to some extent they’ll be squeezed out, but there are, unfortunately, institutions now dedicated to things like homeopathy, or acupuncture, or chiropractic, et cetera. That develops a certain cultural momentum or inertia, so these things are not going to just “go away” because their reasons for existing go away. I think they will find a niche. They might just migrate over to other things, or reinvent themselves in some other way, but I doubt they will just go quietly into the night.

KD: Because the money is so good.

SN: Absolutely! There’s a huge financial incentive not to give up what they’re doing. They’re not science-based to begin with, so science is not going to dissuade them in any way.

KD: When you see somebody make millions of dollars off some shit like putting in foil in a bracelet and selling it, do you ever wonder if you’re in the wrong line of work?

SN: [Laughs] Definitely my colleagues and I will joke about that, the fact that we’re on the wrong side of this equation. We’re certainly not making any money doing what we’re doing. We’re often going up against people who are extremely well funded, because there’s a lot of money on the other side. There’s a lot of money in fraud, or in selling hope -- whether it’s false hope or not -- and there’s no money in skepticism. We’re evidence of that.

KD: How careful do you have to be when you’re debunking or taking down a bogus medical claim just because of the seriousness of the concern behind it? For example, if you tell people there are no ghosts they probably won’t get their feelings hurt, but if you tell them that homeopathy’s not going to cure their cancer...

SN: Yeah, it is very difficult to go after beliefs when there is something very real and serious on the line. With ghosts... people actually do get quite upset when you address their core beliefs. Whatever beliefs they have, nobody likes to be told that something they believe is wrong, but when there is something really tangible on the line, like health, then it brings a new dimension into it. Plus, I’m a physician, so I have to be somewhat in that role when I’m dealing with these issues. I rarely will confront an actual individual person who is claiming that something cured their own disease, or cancer, or whatever it is. I usually like to talk about the evidence and the claims more in the abstract. Of course, if my own patient asked me for information, then I’m happy to give it to them, but I can’t treat somebody who’s not my patient as if they were by giving them advice; that’s not appropriate. I also think it’s just really tricky and not very effective, and also questionable ethically to directly address somebody’s personal beliefs or claims about their own experience. I’d much rather deal with the questions on the level of what the scientific evidence says.

KD: What do you think are some of the more common mistakes scientists make when dealing with the media?

SN: There’s definitely a skill-set involved in dealing with the media. Scientists may understand their field very well, but if they don’t understand the nature of science journalism they can get into trouble. Often I feel that scientists will be goaded into making very irresponsible statements; statements that make the research that they’re talking about sound a little bit more exciting or interesting, but they don’t realize that they’re also playing into fear-mongering or a distortion of the evidence. They may not be aware of the fact that journalists are often just fishing for quotes that they’re going to plug into the story they’ve basically already written. So, as a scientist dealing with the media, you can’t just answer questions straight up. You have to talk to the journalist, or whoever it is that you’re dealing with, and make sure that they understand what the real story is, get a feel of where they’re coming from. Also, you need to talk in self-contained soundbites that will stand on their own, that can’t be easily taken out of context or twisted. Those are the core things that a scientist needs to know when dealing with journalists. Of course, I read stories all the time where scientists are made to look like fools, and you never know how they were treated by the journalist. Did they really say something that stupid? Or were they just naive and being taken out of context?

KD: Do you think that media literacy ought to be included in the training in a science education?

SN: Well, it should at least be optional. I think the resources should be there. Not every scientist needs to deal with the media, or develop that skill-set. You either do need to be aware that there is a skill-set, or at least make an effort in becoming competent in dealing with the media; or, you should leave it to your colleagues to do so. You shouldn’t just naively go, “OK, I’ll do a press-conference,” or, “I’ll talk about my research,” without having any idea what you’re doing; that’s where scientists get into deep trouble.

KD: One of the logical fallacies that you’ve cautioned against often on The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe is “argument from authority”, but how does someone like me who works all the time, is not a scientist, know who to trust?

SN: Yeah, that’s tricky, and it’s getting trickier. There’s no easy answer to that. I’ll explain part of the problem. There are a lot of false authorities out there. There are professions that are not based upon science, evidence, and reason, but they might be licensed and have the imprimatur of legitimacy, and certainly the public can get fooled into thinking that they’re a reliable source of information. There are institutions that are created specifically to promote an ideology, but try to make themselves look as if they are a legitimate scientific organization. There are groups that do that specifically to confuse the public and to muddy the waters. There are also just people who are grossly misinformed, but can set themselves up as some kind of authority on the internet. It’s easy to have a slick enough website that you can appear to have legitimacy. So there’s a lot of minefields out there of information. I see this all the time, where people are just confused by the misinformation, and they’re not sure which authorities to trust. Again, this is another skill-set that I think the public needs to develop in the age of the internet and this proliferation of information: you need to have some idea of how to navigate all of these various sources of varying authority. I think [there are] a couple of good rules-of-thumb to follow: one is to try to figure out what the consensus is. Don’t ever trust a single source. Try to look at multiple sources and see if there’s a consensus of opinion that emerges. Any one opinion could be idiosyncratic or quirky, and there’s no reason to rely on any single opinion. Also, there are still brick-and-mortar institutions that are well-established; universities, for example. They will tend to be more trustworthy than some fly-by-night website. Also, always find what the other side is saying. Whenever I get an opinion on a topic, I want to find what the people who don’t believe that opinion are saying. Until you specifically look for the other side you shouldn’t think that you have the complete story. Usually, you’ll see an asymmetry: the more reliable sources -- the recognized professional organizations, the institutions and universities -- tend to coalesce around a certain consensus, and then there’s either a minority or an ideological opinion that is on the outside. You also get a flavor for the kind of opinions that are more likely to be more like a straightforward, scientific opinion, versus an ideological one. [If] people are starting to talk about conspiracy theories and [how] their views are being suppressed, then that should be a red flag that maybe they’re just trying to justify why their opinions are not accepted by the scientific community, and generally that’s just an excuse for beliefs that are not based upon science. There’s a lot more, but those are the kind of skills and the rules-of-thumb that you can develop to at least try to rely upon more reliable sources.

KD: How influential has the Science-Based Medicine site that you helped found become? Are you starting to see it expand beyond the skeptic community and into the medical community?

SN: Yeah, it’s definitely starting to be fairly prominent. We still have a ways to go, I think, in terms of developing it, but I’ll notice, for example, when I’m searching for a topic, or a question that I have, a Science-Based Medicine article will often come up on the first page [of the search results], often the first hit, and I wasn’t searching on a skeptical topic or specifically on Science-Based Medicine. It’s nice to see that it’s coming up very high just on searches for general medical information. That’s a good indication that there are a lot of people linking to it and using it as a resource. I think, just as an internet resource, it’s doing quite well. I think the area where we have a lot of work to do is developing it into more of an academic resource, and achieving some of the trappings of academic legitimacy. For example, we’re trying to retool some of our more basic concepts into peer-reviewed articles to get published on other sites, rather than publishing everything on our own site.

KD: A controversial video-game came out last week, Bulletstorm. Fox News rolled out some scientist who said this was going to increase rapes. What, if any, evidence is there that video-games harm people in any way?

SN: The literature on video-games is a little mixed. If someone has a predisposition to violence, engaging in violent video-game play certainly may increase their aggressiveness; there’s evidence to support that notion. There isn’t really a lot of evidence to support that there’s actual negative societal consequences to it, that people will actually go out there and commit crimes because they were egged on by video-games. So, it depends on what kind of research you look at. Yes, it might increase aggressiveness. I believe there was a study that showed that certain kinds of video-games at least correlate with increased promiscuity. Part of the problem with a lot of this research is it’s all correlational, so you can always ask the question, “Do video-games make kids aggressive, or, do aggressive kids like these kinds of video-games?” When you control for that sort of thing, any remaining effect is actually fairly weak. I don’t think it’s a big societal problem is the bottom line, that we have to put a lot of time and energy into dealing with the effect of video-games.

KD: Do you feel that marijuana and other recreational drugs should be legalized?

SN: That’s a thorny question. I have mixed feelings about that. It’s really tricky. As a neurologist, I know that the brain certainly responds physiologically to certain addictive substances. They are addictive. They actually change brain chemistry. To that extent, they take away people’s free will and ability to really control their actions, and they can take over people’s lives. It’s a susceptibility in our biology, in our brains, so that’s, I think, clearly established by science; that’s how the science informs this question. But then where do we go from there? Do we err on the side of individual freedom? Do people get to decide what to do to themselves and to their own bodies? I can certainly understand that point of view, but people may get into substances not being fully aware of the power of addiction: the fact that they’re actually going to lose themselves in a very real and important way to these substances. Does society have a right to protect them from themselves? There is also, if you look at the societal harm from use of recreational drugs it gets a little tricky, because again you get into the correlation versus causation thing. The greatest societal harm is caused by alcohol, which is the one legal recreational drug. By far, alcohol is the worst that’s out there. You can ask, “Is that because it’s legal? Is that why it’s worse, or is there something else about alcohol that makes it so bad? Or is it just that, culturally, because it’s so widespread?” You can try to compare countries that legalized certain drugs to those who don’t, [but] the comparisons are very problematic. The other aspect of this is just the practical aspects that the “war on drugs” is just not very effective. It just creates more crime and drives it underground, and takes away the ability to control it all. In the end, you have a lot of conflicting information, and conflicting ethical choices. I don’t personally think there’s one objective answer. It really depends on your value judgements. For me, it’s a real dilemma. It’s a real vulnerability in our biology. We have to learn how to minimize the negative effects of this, and there’s no one objective, correct answer.

KD: Speaking of thorny issues: how do you feel about socialized medicine? Do you think that health-care is something everyone has a right to, regardless of their ability to pay?

SN: Well, the short answer is, “Yes”. Health-care ethics are certainly based upon the idea that everybody has a right to at least basic health-care. We certainly don’t turn away people who need urgent care because of their inability to pay. So, that’s one issue. From an ethical point of view, as a profession, we can’t turn away or deny basic care, but once you get beyond that, again, it gets really tricky. How do you define “basic care”? Where do you draw the line? Different states, different countries, draw the line in different places. Is an organ transplant at the cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars considered “basic” care, or is that extraordinary care? Is that heroic care? And what’s the difference? Also, we find ourselves now in somewhat of a zero-sum game in that we have finite health-care resources. We’re exceeding, really, our ability to deliver those resources, and so, when you give somebody a liver transplant, you’re also taking away resources that could go to a hundred children. So it’s not just that that person has a right to a liver transplant, it’s, “What’s greater? The right of that one person to a liver transplant, or the rights of a hundred children to basic health-care?” These are tricky issues that are not being dealt with head-on by the political system. I think they did a good job of avoiding the really important issues during the debate. I think everyone is pretty much in favor of the notion of universal coverage, just because there’s really no downside to it, in that it’s efficient. It’s massively inefficient to have uninsured people who then use the emergency room as their primary care system. Just for efficiency, which we absolutely need to do because of the costs of health-care. We need to have a system in place where everybody can get preventive care and basic care, and efficient care. It also absolutely appeals to everyone’s sense of social justice. I don’t think anybody thinks that people should be turned away [from] health-care. The really hard question is, “How do we devise a system to pay for it all?” That’s where you get to the point where, again, I don’t think there’s one correct answer. Every system has perverse incentives in it of one type or another. Whoever’s paying for it has a huge disincentive to pay for it. If anyone's reimbursement, the money that they make, is at all tied to the amount of health-care that they deliver, then they have an incentive to deliver more health-care. If you then flip it and give them an incentive not to treat, then they have an incentive not to treat. We’d like there to be an incentive-free system where practitioners and patients are only motivated to do what’s best without worrying about their bottom line. Actually, I sort of practice in that situation myself. As an academic, I’m salaried, I don’t get a fee for service; I don’t get paid based on my volume. That’s kind of nice, but the system does still care. The system that I work in does have to be solvent, or at least organize itself in such a way that it’s not losing too much money. So, you can rearrange the furniture on the deck of the Titanic, as they say, but it’s not really changing the overall cost of the system. Whether you’re paying it through taxes, or premiums, or higher costs of goods, we’re all ultimately paying for health-care in the end anyway. So, I think we should just think about how to make the system maximally efficient, fair, and free of perverse incentives. But there’s no one perfect system, you just have to sort of pick your poison.

KD: Have you been following the Planned Parenthood funding issue? Is that something that concerns you?

SN: I’ve been following that issue in general. I sort of have this vague sense that there’s been some activity on that issue recently, but I haven’t had a chance to get up to date on it. Is there something specific?

KD: The Republicans in the House of Representatives, but not the Senate, have voted to remove funding for it. I assume that this has to do with trying to limit abortion, but it seems sort of... short-sighted?

SN: Yeah. That definitely is about the abortion issue, there’s no question. Abortion is such an emotional issue. It’s one of those political issues that sort of poisons everything it touches, and so you have a lot of innocent bystanders, like providing preventative or primary care to women. Reproductive care to women gets sacrificed to this ideological issue of abortion, and the government funding abortion. Unfortunately, again, people have sort of focused on the more ideological questions, and the more practical issues get lost in the shuffle.

KD: What do you think is the most dangerous of the prevailing “alternative medicine” claims out there right now? Anti-vaccination? Homeopathy?

SN: It’s really hard to quantify. There are a number that certainly deserve to be mentioned. You bring up anti-vaccinationists. I think that their specific claims are very dangerous. They’re trying to convince people not to get vaccinated. It’s only the safest and most effective public-health measure invented by man, and they are trying to convince people that it is, in fact, dangerous and not effective. [They are] just full of misinformation, and that is leading to previously preventable diseases coming back. I mean, people are actually dying. Kids are dying from preventable diseases because their parents won’t vaccinate them, because they’ve been made to be afraid by this misinformation. But the scope of it is still on the small side. That’s where it gets hard to compare. Homeopathy is not that big in the United States; I think it’s a much bigger problem in Europe. Chiropractic is a much bigger phenomenon in the United States, and I think that it sucks a lot of resources away from medicine, and can serve to delay definitive medical diagnostic information. To a small degree, there’s some direct harm. To a lot of these things, the direct harm issue is actually pretty minor. It’s more the indirect things: the diversion of resources, the delay of diagnosis or care. I think the big problem is just that the marketing campaign of the alternative-medicine proponents has been so successful over the last twenty years that they’ve successfully profoundly confused the public on a lot of fundamental issues, and they’re doing a lot of harm to the practice of science-based medicine, to the education of the next generation of physicians. Things like confusing “natural” with “safe and effective”, or “holistic” with “patient-centered,” actually trying to weave these really confused and tangled arguments about the nature of science, and the relationship between science and the practice of medicine. This is all having a very insidious and negative effect on the institution of medicine and the beliefs of the public about how medicine works, and how science works. It’s very hard to quantify all of that, but I definitely see it as having a tremendous negative effect. I see patients every day struggling with all of this marketing misinformation: wasting money, wasting time, subjecting themselves to needless risk, because it’s just in the culture now, “Yes, I want a ‘natural alternative’.” Meanwhile, they’re taking something which is basically an unregulated, unpurified drug with unknown content and unknown side-effects and unknown drug-interactions, and they’re spending their limited health-care dollars on this rather than on a proven treatment because they’ve bought into the marketing hype. They often have no clue what it is they’re really buying. It’s unfortunate that they’ve been so successful in pulling off the swindle of the century, really, and in convincing so many people that their marketing con is somehow an acceptable alternative to logic and evidence.

KD: It seems like that’s happening on all fronts. Little kids get it at school with “intelligent design”. Then we get the climate change debate. And then it’s in medicine, too. It just seems like people are being taught that there’s a false balance, that, “there’s always two sides to everything”.

SN: Yeah. In many ways, I think they’re sort of learning off of each other. It is again, this sort of marketing culture that has learned how to market pseudo-science, whether it’s intelligent design, or alternative medicine, or global warming denial, or whatever it is. I see a remarkable consistency in the kinds of arguments that are being used by all these otherwise very different endeavors. They’re all ultimately a way of promoting an ideology, or promoting a financial interest, against the scientific consensus, and their methods are remarkably similar. They’re largely selling misinformation, doubt, confusion, and some fairly sophisticated but ultimately anti-scientific arguments in order to undercut the bottom-line that what they’re selling is not consistent with the science.

after my sudden yerning for an sg belt buckle, i realized that i didn't just want that. now added to my list of things i'd like to see in the shop... SG hip flask SG martini shaker SG zippo (you know you want one!) and SG cigarette case

Neil Strauss has a talent for honing in on the very essence of who a person is. It's an attribute that has served him well as a interviewer for publications such as The New York Times and Rolling Stone, as a writer penning biographical books with the likes of Mötley Crüe (The Dirt) and Jenna Jameson... more

Neil Strauss has a talent for honing in on the very essence of who a person is. It's an attribute that has served him well as a interviewer for publications such as The New York Times and Rolling Stone, as a writer penning biographical books with the likes of Mötley Crüe (The Dirt) and Jenna Jameson (How To Make Love Like A Porn Star), and in his other life, as Style, the seduction guru and author of the pick-up bible, The Game.

On the surface, his latest book, Everyone Loves You When You're Dead, is an anthology of interviews culled from Strauss' extensive back catalog, which includes conversations with everyone from Madonna, Lady Gaga, and Britney Spears to Chuck Berry, Leonard Cohen, and Johnny Cash. However, the acknowledgements section at the back of the book, which sums up all that's included, isn't just a laundry list of high profile names. Amongst the interviewees are some surprising and lesser known people (Kenny G, Patrick Miller, members of the Calabrian Mafia, et al.), and it's these inclusions that perhaps give an indication of the collection's greater purpose - that of a self-help book compiled from lessons learnt (or not, as the case may be) from those with problems on a grander scale than our own.

Because of this underlying narrative, readers are advised to read the book from start to finish, cover to cover, rather that skipping about to find preferred interview subjects as one might initially be tempted to do. "I think I maybe should have put a note or something in the beginning of the book about how it's supposed to be read," admits Strauss during the closing moments of our interview, "because I do think if you skip around for a favorite artist you won't get the experience."

In serving this higher purpose, Strauss chose to omit a few seemingly beyond qualified people. "I interviewed Stevie Wonder and Iggy Pop, two of what I would consider the greatest artists in the last fifty years," says Strauss, "and yet there weren't those profound moments in the interview so I left them out, even though they were huge artists who I'd love to have in a book."

The result of Strauss' labors is an anthology like no other, one that he hopes will stand the test of time. "You assume if you write a book it's not for the moment. It's for a longer period of time. I wanted a book that even in ten or twenty years would still be intrinsically interesting even if half of these people were obscure by then. I wanted it to hold up on its own."

Having read the 500+ page book in a surprisingly short space of time, in our humble opinion, Strauss has achieved this goal. After making the journey to the back cover, SucideGirls called Strauss up to talk about the things he's learned from interviewing the great and the late.


Nicole Powers: All your books have very different forms, and when you last came on SuicideGirls Radio and I asked you about that, you said that you're inspired by other books. What was the inspiration for the structure of this one?

Neil Strauss: Before I do a book I'll do research. I bought every single anthology I could possibly buy by writers I liked and respected, whether music writers or journalists or fiction authors. I bought all these anthologies and I read through them all, or skimmed through them, some of them. And I realized they were all semi-boring. By the time you were done you were bored of the person's voice, and that the only people they really appealed to were people who were already fans. So I felt screwed, because my whole life, spending all this time writing all these thousands and thousands of articles for The New York Times and Rolling Stone, I would save the best ones and I just couldn't wait to put out the anthology of my work like all the writers and critics I was a fan of have done. When it came down to it I realized they don't hold up on their own - that if somebody who had never heard of your writing went out and bought that book, they might be disappointed. So it's interesting because this is the only book where I had no model for it at all. I had no plan even to do it like I ended up doing it, but it seemed to me the only way to make it intrinsically interesting...

NP: It starts out as a cleverly done anthology, where you thread interviews together - like you'll be talking to one person and then they'll mention someone else and then you cut to an interview with the person they've just mentioned. But then I began realizing that you've created something bigger than that. You've constructed a self-help book using advice gleaned often from reading between the lines of what your subjects have said.

NS: Yeah. I think that's totally true, that there was a goal and maybe there's an influence. There's a book by John Berger called Ways of Seeing where there are chapters that are just images. As you look at the images in a row, ideas will come to you without them having to be said. So maybe that book is a slight influence structurally.

The idea was by putting say Christina Aguilera confessing her domestic abuse, followed by Ike Turner talking about Tina, followed by Lady Gaga talking about a different kind of abuse, followed by someone else talking about their incest experiences, you start to get your own ideas on abuse and its effects from both the perpetrator as well as from the victim's [point of view].

I kind of wanted people to naturally come to those ideas. And of course these are people who live life at a much higher level of intensity than most of us have. And I definitely think when I was doing the interviews themselves there were things I was trying to work out in my life and I was using them for sort of free therapy.

NP: As a writer, especially when you spend time with your subjects, you can end up taking on the therapist role, and that's a difficult thing to balance. Because as a writer you are defined by what you print, but as a human being who writes you are defined by what you don't print. It's a difficult line to draw.

NS: Huh, I never thought of it like that.

NP: And because this book contains many previously unpublished interview outtakes, I know with one band in particular you had to make a phone call to warn them that certain revelations were going to be made public. Were there other instances where you had concerns about printing stuff?

NS: Yeah, but it was still going to be printed. I'm definitely not callous about it, but I assume that they're professionals and anything they tell me in the context of an interview is going to be part of the interview unless they flat out say this is off the record. So there are examples: When I called the guys from At The Drive-In to tell them that the fact that [Omar Rodríguez-López] mentioned that he was an incest survivor was going to be in there. And Christina Aguilera, I remember she'd never talked about being a victim of domestic violence from her father before, and so I called her and her mom to let them know it was going to be in there. But it wasn't like they asked for it not to be in there. I wasn't going to remove it. I was just going to give them a fair heads-up so they're aware of it. It wasn't to be callous. It was just that, you know, I didn't trick them into saying those things.

NP: You seemed to have a very clear objective in mind when you do your interviews. During your conversation with Soul Asylum you explain to them that you're not writing the article for the band, you're writing it for the people that like their music.

NS: Yeah, I think my goal is always...but it changed. It's funny because I really think journalism has changed. Because back then there was this golden age of journalism where if someone was doing a Rolling Stone cover story and they just recorded a record, the cover story was almost part of the communication process. You did your record and that's your art. Then you do your Rolling Stone cover story, and that's how you would tell your fans, your listeners and the general public, what this album is about, what you went through while you were recording it, what your intention is, and where you are in your life. You were their mouthpiece. And obviously in the last five or so years they can just Twitter that, or send it to their mailing list, or make YouTube videos. They don't need you anymore as their mouthpiece, so it's changed now, that whole relationship.

NP: In what way?

NS: I think most of a journalist's duty now, sadly, is to try and get some revelation that will be picked up by a bunch of other websites so they can get a lot of traffic...But I'm going to do a Rolling Stone cover story next week, and my goal is to read everything that's ever been written about that person, watch every movie, and listen to every album they've ever done. My goal is to A, advance the dialog about the person, say something new that hasn't been said before, and B, to find out who they really are...I want to really get in their head and show the public who that person is underneath the mask. And maybe even show them who they are - things they may not realize about themselves...

I mean I'll never judge in the article, I'll just show them as they are. Some people afterward love the articles. Like Tom Cruise afterward sent a letter saying, "This article is great. My mom saw it and she thought you just nailed me perfectly." On the other hand, after the Soul Asylum one - and it was definitely no more or less judgmental, if anything some people thought Tom Cruise came off worse. [Soul Asylum's lead singer Dave Pirner] was really upset because he thought I was trying to portray him as an alcoholic, which I wasn't doing. You can tell their comfort level with who they are by their response to the article.

NP: I noticed on the back cover of the book there's a note which alludes to some correspondence that Phil Collins sent to you.

NS: Uh-huh.

NP: I take it that was one very unsatisfied customer.

NS: Yeah. I wrote a review of him for The New York Times. I thought it was a really bad concert, but I was holding back and trying to make it not so negative. He sent this two-page, handwritten letter on Peninsula Hotel stationery basically just railing against me for having his head on a plate. His last words were, "Neil, fuck you."

NP: Well this is from a man that split up with his wife by fax.

NS: Somebody said they saw an interview with him later where he actually said, "I once wrote this guy a letter and I felt really bad about it afterward." It was really an angry letter. It's something you'd expect from Trent Reznor, not from Phil Collins, which is why it's framed in my office now.

NP: In the interview that you did with Trent Reznor you gently prod him about the consequences of his drug use. Then there's another interview that you do with Gary Wilson where you suggest that he sees his dad before he dies. Obviously the therapy goes both ways though. What insights have the people that you've interviewed given you?

NS: It's funny. You know, I didn't realize [it goes] the other way too, but it is true that I am at the same time giving people advice in their life.
I remember even with Chuck Berry, trying to help him get over the cross he carries over the scandals he had 40 years ago that still makes him bitter and angry - that's why it's called Everyone Loves You When You're Dead.

I know you're asking the opposite question...I think a lot of the questions I've had are about the importance of your work - about relationships, and love versus work and career and art. Whether it's with Lenny Kravitz or Joni Mitchell, I've had those conversations talking about which they see as more important...Sometimes these people don't follow their own advice, but they definitely were usually good at giving it.

NP: For me, one of the exciting moments in an interview is when you have that aha moment with a subject, where they realize something about themselves that they haven't thought about before, or they make a connection that they haven't made before.

NS: I love that.

NP: Is there a moment that you particularly remember that was like that?

NS: Yeah, there's one, and this one is more because it was so funny. But I love it. It's in the Orlando Bloom interview. It's like my favorite line in the book. I don't know why. It's so small. I was asking him, "Have you noticed that in all of your movies you have very little dialog?" He thinks it over and he's like, "I don't know, are you sure about that?" I point out some examples, and he's like:

He was getting this epiphany that really he had these characters that were given [very little dialog].

And then there were other times, say with Chuck Berry...when I said these things that were scandals, yes, they don't go away, but after the moment they actually make you more interesting. They make you not Pat Boone. And it was sort of him realizing these scandals that are long gone, that people don't care about them anymore...

NP: Right, you talked about how the scandals become stories, and because of the distance of time people know the stories but they remember them without any level of judgment - that was really key I think.

NS: Yeah, yeah, again, hopefully, at age 83, that was an aha moment for him. The reason I named the book Everyone Loves You When You're Dead is meeting all these people who are icons and legends who you admire for their work, and seeing that they're haunted by old scandals and bad reviews everyone else has forgotten about. I think there was a note to myself: let go of those small things and you can live your life happier and be proud of your accomplishments, and not die thinking that everybody hates you because you got one bad review.

NP: There are other times where I wonder if your subjects have yet to grasp the weight of what you may be implying, or if they'll put it together after the fact. Particularly with the abuse section in the book. You talk about Christina Aguilera and the domestic violence, Lady Gaga and the abuse that happened following her drug use, and Alanis Morissette with the statutory rape. You don't put it into words, but you imply that the abuse has profoundly affected their art and their careers.

NS: I think that's interesting too, that sometimes you leave the interview knowing more about the artist than they know about themselves. Sometimes too, maybe they'll have that epiphany when they read it - if they're open to it. But I think Lady Gaga isn't open to it. Even Jenna Jameson, when I did the book with her, wasn't open to thinking that. The two issues she had when she was young and sexually abused, she doesn't think that those changed her, or affected her, and led to her career - and I don't necessarily think that's true. Even with Lady Gaga, I think she hasn't dealt with what she seems to be implying in the book, which seems to be that she was assaulted very violently a couple times. I think she hasn't dealt with that, but I think her exhibitionism and the way she leads her career kind of speaks to that. It was so obvious from how she leads her life - it's clear that she's a trauma survivor.

NP: It concerns me the way Gaga's getting more extreme. It's gotten to the point where she's becoming a parody of herself. The whole egg thing did seem like a big cry for help.

NS: The one genius thing about the egg thing is it's a great way to go through the red carpet without having to talk to anyone or get your photo taken. But on the other level, when I interviewed her, I said, "What are you going to do when the backlash happens?" And she's like, "What do you mean the backlash? There's not going to be a backlash." I'm like, "Anybody who gets to your level at some point the culture turns on them. Everything they do is all of a sudden seen as horrible, and then later it puts them back on top again. That's how the culture works. They tear you down and they bring you back up." And she goes, "Well my karma is good. I'm good to everybody." Then she calls her assistant over and says, "I'm good to you, right?" The assistant is like, "Yes, of course you're good to me." And she's like, "See, my karma is good. It's not going to happen." I thought, oh man, when this happens they're going to tear you apart.

NP: It's kind of already happening. I know that there is a section of the gay community that is upset at her latest single "Born This Way" because they don't want to be aligned with the freaks of this world.

NS: That's one of those things where I think it's not intentional on her part. She calls her fans monsters...But there is that element that it's like well I'm a broken person...

NP: She views herself as a broken person and is drawing connections between herself and the gay community. But the gays are like, "Hey, we're not broken. We're whole but we're gay." She's comparing her broken soul with people that do not consider themselves broken.

NS: I haven't heard that critique. That's a really smart critique and accurate. So yeah, it will be interesting to see, especially because that's an audience she thought she could count on. That's the one she's seen who have kept the careers of Madonna and Cher and other people going...

NP: Her fallback audience.

NS: Yeah, but by pandering to them so much she's almost turned them off.

NP: Her response to the question you posed about what will happen once the backlash starts touches on something that you wrote about in an article you did for The Wall Street Journal. In it you talked about how a degree of blind faith is almost essential to the success of an artist.

NS: Yeah. That was one of the things that I found fascinating was looking over all those interviews together, seeing the patterns and seeing what happened in their life after the interviews - who went up and who went down, who died and who thrived. That was an interesting and surprising lesson to me, that those who had faith, not just belief in God, but believed their success was part of God's plan for them - which, of course, is mostly hubris - that belief sustained them through the hard times.

The opposite examples, and I didn't mention it in The Wall Street Journal, but Jewel, for example, at the time of that interview in the book she said, "Why am I here? Why not all these other people who were struggling just like I was. I don't feel like I deserve this anymore than they do. It isn't fair that I got here in five years." At that time she had I think her second Top Ten single, and since that interview she's released like eight more records and not had another Top Ten single. Or the White Stripes who were just wringing their hands and saying, "We're from another planet, we don't belong here." And, of course, they just broke up...

NP: Going back to that Chuck Berry interview, how awesome would it be for an artist that's going through a similar shit storm to read that and have the perspective that you gave Chuck Berry. That yeah, it's going to suck for six months or six years, but down the line it's going to make you a more interesting person and it will make the comeback even sweeter.

NS: Yeah, or even to see that, Madonna, when she first came to New York, was this nerd who was uncomfortable at a club. We've all been there, so it definitely makes these things relatable.

NP: One of the most profound lines is during your interview with Trent Reznor. You talk about how the idea that anyone fits in is a delusion, and that no one really fits in. Where did you get that concept from?

NS: I think that's something you get from interviewing everybody. The people you think are the popular people feel like they're outcasts inside. Everybody feels like that, whether it's Snoop Dog or Madonna and Lady Gaga...they all really feel the same. They all feel alone in their castles they've built.

NP: And the ironic thing is that fame doesn't help them feel like they fit in. If you don't sort out those issues before you get famous, you'll still feel awkward and like you don't fit in, but in front of a bigger audience, which amplifies the problem rather than solving it.

NS: That was one of the biggest takeaways of the book, that you meet all these people who think money and fame are going to cure their problems, and it just amplifies your problems. I think two takeaways are, A, fix your problems now because they'll get worse if you become more famous or more wealthy. The second one is the celebrities who weren't raised with unconditional love, who weren't raised with at least a parent who they knew loved them when they were growing up, then seek that love so aggressively from the world that it backfires and it becomes sort of pathetic. So besides having faith in something, those were the two other axioms of becoming stable when you become more famous.

NP: What were your parents like?

NS: One always grows up and thinks they're in the most miserable shitty situation, which I definitely felt, but at least it came from love, even if the intentions and the actions were misguided. In my book Rules of the Game I put: "Dedicated to your parents. You may want to blame them for what's wrong with you, but don't forget to give them credit for what's right with you."

I think that was the motto in the end, that's the way I came to understand my parents...I mean I definitely give them credit for the - let's just say the lack of self-esteem that led to the relentless pursuit of women in The Game. I'll have to also give them credit for the drive and intelligence and excitement about literature and writing as well...

NP: Putting together an anthology is very much a way of closing a chapter on a life. Are you now thinking about your own end game?

NS: I definitely think this is the way to wrap up the chapter on it. I think I've gone through a couple things...for example I used to do a lot of reviews and I stopped reviewing altogether one day. It was probably a consequence of becoming a writer and getting reviewed myself. It was also partly talking to musicians after you've reviewed them and discussing the reviews and realizing that any time someone records a record or makes something they put their heart into it. They care about it. They don't put it out because they think it's shitty. So who are you to say this is three stars or four stars, or this is good, this is bad. Obviously it was something true to themselves.

Kenny G, for example, when his new record came out, I knew I could have reviewed him for The New York Times and it would have been a typical kind of slam, but I thought why don't I meet this guy and see what he's about. What I learned is Kenny G is playing what he feels. That's his personality. It's kind of gentle and kind of soft. There's not a real dark side. He's a sweet person and he's playing sweet, gentle, vapid music because that's on some level [who he is]. I realize I'm sounding condescending, and maybe I am, because I'm a more dark person than Kenny G unfortunately. I'm sure I'd be happier if I wasn't. But I thought I've got to respect Kenny G because he's playing what he feels.

So you realize those things and so I stopped reviewing, and I think this anthology was, on some level, closing the door on the interviewing/profiling part of life. Because looking back on all those articles, no matter how you want to rationalize it as a public service or art, you're really part of a promotional machine in the end. So I wanted to close the door on that and really try to focus on writing the books that I'm passionate about.

NP: So is the cover feature that you're currently working on for Rolling Stone going to be one of your last?

NS: Yeah, that's the plan. At this point I'll only interview someone if it's someone who I really, really, really want to meet and really want to get inside their head, and I have enough time to be allowed to do that. I won't turn down a Jack Nicholson feature, but I will turn down a Justin Bieber feature.

Everyone Loves You When You're Dead: Journeys into Fame and Madness comes out via It Books on March 15, 2011.

Neil Strauss will be the special in-studio guest on SuicideGirls Radio next Sunday, March 13. Listen live at 10 PM PST on Indie1031.com/.

Over the past five years, Austin rockers … And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead have broken from Interscope, put out a series of increasingly challenging and complex albums, and started operating under their own imprint, Richter Scale Records. It's been a tough ride for Trail of Dead, but... more

Over the past five years, Austin rockers … And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead have broken from Interscope, put out a series of increasingly challenging and complex albums, and started operating under their own imprint, Richter Scale Records. It's been a tough ride for Trail of Dead, but it's led them to their new LP, Tao of the Dead, which came together more easily than any record the band had ever done before. They finished it in just ten days.

Tao of the Dead is Trail of Dead's 7th full-length effort, featuring a slimmed-down four-person lineup of founding Trail members Conrad Keely and Jason Reese, lead guitarist Aaron Ford, and Midnight Masses frontman Autry Fulbright. They recorded the album in two parts, each with a different producer. Part I consists of 11 separate tracks, while part 2 is a continuous 16-minute track with six distinct movements. The Tao Te Ching, a classic Chinese text that dates back to the 6th century BC, provided a name for the record and the lyrics for part 2.

Trail's Conrad Keely is a visual artist as well as a musician -- his striking drawings appear on the band's album covers -- and he's releasing the beginning of a graphic novel along with Tao of the Dead. Listeners will have to draw their own connections between Keely's steampunk-tinged sci-fi story and Trail's music.

We talked to Keely and Fulbright about the making of Tao of the Dead, the influence of the Tao Te Ching, and Keely's new comics project.

Jay Hathaway:
Let's talk about your new album. How did it take shape into two different sides?

Conrad Keely:
It evolved that way. It was just natural that that was the right way to do it. We didn't have to talk about it or anything. It just kind of happened. That was the general experience with recording this record, as well.

JH:
Did you plan on bringing in two different producers for the two different sides? How did that happen?

CK:
We started one part with one producer -- our old producer, Chris Coady -- and he did part two with us. He did the basic track. But we always knew that we were going to do the full side with Frenchie [Chris "Frenchie" Smith], and I think the idea originally was that part 2 was going to be an EP, but instead we just made it part of the record.

JH:
So it just seemed like the two sides fit together naturally?

CK:
They fit together, but they're definitely separate. They're like two different experiences.

Autry Fulbright:
I listen to part 2 first, that's my experience, but I think everyone's going to be able to interpret it however they like as a whole thing. Even though we started with part 2 and continued with part 1 and they had their rightful places on the record, it stands as something that can be unique to anyone that listens to it.

JH:
How do you translate that to the live experience? Are you going to play the entire 16 minutes of part 2 at each show?

CK:
I think if we do side 2, we would like to perform it as one piece. It's not separable. So that's the plan, but part 1, we've already performed songs from that. The first time we played Weight of the Sun was a few months ago. I think the answer is that we don't know yet.

JH:
Is the tour lineup going to be just the four of you? I know it was kind of a stripped-down band for the recording of this album.

CK:
For now, I think it will have to be, but that's not saying that later on, we might not have more than one band. Obviously, we've been known for that. For now, we're just going to do the four thing, and it feels good this way.

JH:
Autry, are you in the band full time? Are you still doing Midnight Masses? What's your situation?

AF:
In a word, yes, to all of those things. I still have other projects that I'm working on, that include other members of Trail of Dead as well. I'm really just making music, and right now Trail of Dead is something I'm putting my focus on. I continue to look forward to more touring and more writing with everyone in it.

JH:
Did you contribute to the songwriting and the lyrics on this album? I know you're a writer yourself.

AF:
Not really to the lyrics. I think we were all under agreement that the Tao Te Ching was a great influence on part 2, and it became the album's namesake.

CK:
But the music was really collaboratively written on this record.

AF:
When we played together, a lot of the ideas came from jamming.

CK:
Which makes it different from some of our previous records, I think.

AF:
It was really great to just go in and make ideas bounce off each other, especially since we hadn't played in that capacity together before.

CK:
Yeah.

JH:
This is the second album you've put out on your own label ...

CK:
You mean under the Richter Scale imprint? I guess, officially. I consider everything we've done to be under the imprint of what we do. I just gave it a logo. I mean, we've never done any of our records without the help of the labels, really.

JH:
How are things different for you now than they were five years ago, when you were on a major label?

CK:
I think a lot of that pressure is internal. I think that back then I was a lot more stressed out about putting stuff out, but I don't think that came from the label. I think that was just self-imposed. And these days, I feel a little bit less self-conscious about it. The label has been a huge help. One of the things I really like about working with Superball is that there's so many different new formats, and ways to put things out, and it's been kind of an adventure finding out ... I mean, this album was done in four different formats, and we've never done that in the past.

JH:
You guys are doing vinyl for this record, then?

CK:
The vinyl's going to be three sides, with an engraving on the fourth side.

JH:
It must have been fun to do the cover art for that, and get a bigger canvas.

CK:
I've always designed on vinyl size. Even the albums that we didn't put out on vinyl were always ready for vinyl. They just had to be shrunk down to CD. I always design intending it to be 12 inches.

JH:
You're a band that's always made albums that are meant to be listened to as albums. With the success of iTunes, and music sales increasingly focusing on individual tracks, what do you think about the future of the album as a format?

AF:
I feel like the fact that we're doing it means that people are still doing it. The music that we both like are albums. In the 90s, where it was a more CD-driven music world, and a band could have one good song, and you'd have to buy the entire CD. To me, an album wasn't good unless it had several great songs, which meant the whole record had to be really good. I wasn't just thinking about that one song in the middle of the album. I listened to the album from start to finish.

CK:
Also, I think there are lots of bands that -- at least, the bands that I admire these days -- are putting out albums.

AF:
I feel like that's my favorite music that's around now. I don't believe in just a ...

CK:
iTunes shuffle!

AF:
Yeah!

CK:
Unless you're having a dance party. Then it's okay.

JH:
What are some of those bands? Who's putting out really great music at the moment?

CK:
I like the Die Antwoord album a lot. I was really obsessed with them. The new Beach House record, I think, is beautiful from beginning to end. A complete album.

AF:
I think Tame Impala's record, Innerspeaker, and Steeple by Wolf People have been my two favorite ones. And again, those are albums I listen to from start to finish.

CK:
It's definitely not a dead art form, if that's what people are worried about.

JH:
How did the Tao Te Ching come to influence the record? Where did you run into that, and how did it ge written into the second part?

CK:
When we were recording part 2, and I needed some lyrics to sing for the scratch vocals, and the only book that was around was the Tao Te Ching. The lyrics just fit. The reason that it struck a chord was that I'd been reading The Art of War and this book by Baltasar Gracian called The Art of Worldly Wisdom. Although all three of these were not written in the same time period, they all expressed a really close philosophy. I was surprised that the Tao Te Ching wasn't a religious or spiritual book as much as it was a practical book.

JH:
Have you finished the comic you're working on, this graphic novel?

CK:
I haven't. We're hoping to work it into the next two records, actually. But I've finished enough that it's going to be released probably right after the record comes out.

JH:
How does that relate to the album? I haven't seen the comic yet, but I've heard it's a steampunk story that you've been working on for a long time ...

CK:
I don't want to tell you how it relates. I want you to discover by checking it out. Because I want to see the connections that people make. That's half the fun, I think. Does that make sense?

JH:
Yeah, definitely. So, we've been hearing a lot about steampunk recently but you've been working on this story since before there was any kind of trend ...

CK:
There were people who'd ask me if I was into steampunk before I'd heard of it, and I didn't know what they were talking about. They'd ask that in reference to my work, my drawings.

JH:
Do you consider your drawings steampunk?

CK:
It's a bit more grounded in science fiction. It takes place on another world that doesn't relate to earth at all. It depends. It's such a wide genre. I consider Jules Verne the father of it, in a way. He was a big influence on me.

JH:
It seems like every time you put out an album, it gets compared to Source Tags and Codes. How do you feel about that, and what's your opinion of that album now?

CK:
As you can well imagine, that's kind of frustrating in some ways. Especially when I think about this perfect rating we were given by a popular online magazine. I didn't even think it was a perfect album. I don't think of that as a perfect album for us. I think of it as a developmental album. It was what helped us develop into what we are, but it wasn't some kind of penultimate statement. I guess I just have to apologize to all those people who think that was our best record, because I feel I've moved on from it. I'm probably happier about our new record than I am about any record we've made, including Source Tags.

JH:
Is it that way every time you put out a record? Do you always feel like what you've just done is your best work?

CK:
No. The last three records were very difficult. They were disastrous in some ways. But that had more to do with the difficulty of making them, and all those things that happened when they were being made. It was kind of the opposite with this record, because there was such a flow and it was so easy. It just kind of came out, y'know? We had fun doing it.

I first became aware of Dave Navarro's penchant for cute things bearing the likeness of Sanrio's Hello Kitty character while doing the SuicideGirls Radio show. We broadcast each Sunday out of Indie1031.com's studios, which at the time also served as home for the wild living and hard rockin'... more

I first became aware of Dave Navarro's penchant for cute things bearing the likeness of Sanrio's Hello Kitty character while doing the SuicideGirls Radio show. We broadcast each Sunday out of Indie1031.com's studios, which at the time also served as home for the wild living and hard rockin' Jane's Addiction and Camp Freddy guitarist's Wednesday night Dark Matter show (which has since moved to Moheak.com's Silverlake base). In the Indie studio, there was a shrine of sorts, where people left various Hello Kitty offerings to Dave.

Having an affinity with the character myself, when I noticed the various Hello Kitty items on the counter, I asked SG Radio's engineer and co-host Jessica Sattelberger (who also manned the boards for Dark Matter and several other Indie shows) what they were doing there. She explained that people had left them for Dave. My first reaction was "Huh?" Then, after she explained that Dave was into Hello Kitty, my next was to track him down to find out why.

I called Dave up on what turned out to be his new Verizon iPhone. He was having new phone issues when I initially called for this interview, but, after a couple of false starts, we settled in for a chat that began with Hello Kitty, and moved on to his affection for his somewhat modified "Bondage Barbie" and his latest love - Angry Birds. We also talked Twitter, booty calls - and Jane's Addiction's new album, which he is currently in the process of recording.

NP: So I understand you're into Hello Kitty. Why?

DN: There's a multitude of reasons. I first became aware of Hello Kitty when I was about 7 years old. You know, it's been around for a long, long time. When I was in grade school, my first crush was a girl by the name of Rina Yasuda...Her family was from Japan, so she would go to Japan for the summers and come back to school. She would always have all this Hello Kitty paraphernalia - little rulers and pencils and stickers - and I always associated that image with my first crush. It always brought me back to this age of innocence in a strange way.

So, that's the number one reason. The number two reason is - I'm a weird motherfucker - what do you want me to say? I think in adulthood when the image is used, especially in the way that it's been used in terms of some of these young alt girls, it's transcended being for kids. A lot of young adult females have started really embracing the product. I've always found that - and I don't want to get in trouble for saying this because it doesn't stand for all of them - but for many of them the sweet little girly exterior that loves Hello Kitty and unicorns and rainbows and My Little Pony and Barbie, more times than not there's a dark hidden underside of these women's lives.

NP: I would agree with that. I mean, we do have a Sanrio Fan Club group on the SuicideGirls website.

DN: Right. So, being that there was this young experience with it as a kid, I wasn't really into it as a kid of course, but I associated it with this Japanese girl. And then now as an adult, seeing it kind of come back into the forefront of culture even more so then it did back then, with young, adult women, generally speaking a lot of them have very secretive dark pasts that force them to embrace something unique and pure and girly, if you will. There's a duality that's inherent in that which is interesting and fascinating to me.

The image itself is more of a symbol of darkness to me than anything else. Because you can take one person who's really dark and they're into really dark things, but it's the person who gravitates toward the light to hide away from the darkness that's actually more intriguing. A good example of that would be the serial killer John Wayne Gacy doing paintings of Bambi or doing paintings of himself as a clown or the Seven Dwarfs. There's such a severe contrast between the dark and the light, that's the type of intellect that I find incredibly fascinating.

NP: So it's almost like a Freemason handshake. Hello Kitty is a way of finding kindred souls.

DN: Yeah...And also for me personally, my mother was murdered when I was 15 and I'm a recovering drug addict, and so I am no stranger to the darkness. And again, I don't want to make a blanket statement and upset anybody, but I would say in about 75% of cases, adult fans of Barbie and Hello Kitty and things of that nature, there's usually a past of either abuse or divorce or maybe sexual abuse, eating disorders, something that can easily be looked up in the DSM IV, which is basically the psychiatric diagnostic manual of disorders.

I'm incredibly disordered myself. I've got plenty of them, you know what I mean? ...So when I meet adult women that are into the Hello Kitty product and the frilly, little girl stuff, I find that I ultimately identify with them better as people because of that duality of mankind.

NP: There's a level of understanding.

DN: Yeah. That's probably a way more heavy-handed answer then you wanted...But actually, it makes a lot of sense. It's the same reason why I have a collection of Barbies and I have a ballerina box. I went through a unicorn phase back in the '90s. There's always some little symbol that's supposed to represent life that I have always found is a much darker symbol than coffins and skulls and crosses and bats.

NP: I hear that you have a rare bondage Barbie.

DN: I do.

NP: I'm told that that was something that Mattel came out with and then rapidly stop producing.

DN: Well, you know the origin or Barbie right?

NP: No. Do tell.

DN: Barbie was a knock off of a German doll called Lilli, and Lilli was a novelty item for adult men. It was a little figurine of a hooker. So the original Barbie was based on a hooker doll. That's absolutely true.

NP: Wow, I had no idea.

DN: Yeah, you can Google it*. It was a novelty hooker doll for adult men and it came with little outfits. That is what it was intended for. The creator of Barbie saw that doll and decided to make a PG version, or a G-rated version for children in America and it took off like wild fire. So, again, if you take Barbie for what she stands for in today's culture, it's a pretty benign symbol of modern society. But if you do the research, you're talking about a doll that was based on a hooker in Germany, and there's all kinds of taboo that goes along with that. And then just for me to use it on stage and for me to have it on my amplifiers, there's a whole other element of that just being really fuckin' twisted.

The bondage Barbie...I ordered it online and I think it eventually got discontinued. We ended up getting out the black tape and made her a little more bondage-like than she came in the package. Let's just say we modified her. Since then I received another one that came as a result of friendships that I made on Twitter. There was a girl on Twitter who's kind of like an alt model, and, in a round about way just through Tweets and what not, I became friends with her and her husband, who live in Florida. Her husband thought it was kind of amusing that she and I had this online flirtation having never met. He created a Barbie doll made in her likeness, and they sent it to me as a gift for Christmas. So, I wasn't able to actually connect with the girl, but I was able to have my own Barbie version of her as a gift from them with their blessing. So now I got two.

NP: Nice. Two Barbie's can have a lot more fun than one. I hope we're going to see some interesting Twitpics.

DN: Oh, I've already Tweeted them out, they're all over the place. I've taken one of them to a movie. When I drive around with one I always buckle her in in the passenger seat.

NP: I saw that Twitpic.

DN: Yeah, there's lots of things like that. My appreciation for these modern day icons is a lot deeper and more twisted than one might think. Also, just being a sufferer from a few disorders myself, I certainly identify with the types of adult females that tend to gravitate towards them.

NP: Listening to your Dark Matter show, you're very honest about your life and your past. I know you don't always like doing interviews because by nature they're invasive...but the show is very much an open door into the mind of Dave Navarro.

DN: Well, it is in the sense that it's an open door into the aspects of the mind that I allow it to be opened into. A lot of people are struck by the honesty on the radio and my honesty online, and they think that I'm this open book. But, believe me, there's a few doors that are slammed shut. I'm aware that what I'm saying is being heard, and I'm aware that what I'm writing or Tweeting or posting is being seen, so it doesn't paint the whole picture. But yeah, when it comes to sex and drugs and you know, things that I may have done in the past that I learned from, I have no problem sharing those things. Frankly, I have found that the more open we are, the more confident one is about who they are, the less anybody has to hold over you. If I'm sitting here talking about all this stuff, what's anybody else going to say? There's nothing to dig up. So in a lot of ways it's freeing and it's empowering, and it helps a lot of people who are listening that may or may not have gone down some of the roads that I have.

NP: In your recent Twitter posts I noticed that you've been having fun pointing out the irony of posting seemingly private messages in a public forum.

DN: Well, sometimes I'll get negative responses from people. That's just the way the internet is. Instead of going to war with those people, I just create a JPEG of their message to me and post it and let everybody else go to war for me. Because that way the sender gets inundated with the multitude of the negativity they threw my way, and all I'm doing is saying, "Hey, this is what somebody said to me." A perfect example is this one guy sent me some kind of nasty message and his avatar was of, I think, a newborn child that he had. I pointed out, basically, what kind of a father is going to print those kinds of things next to a photo of his newborn infant child. I just took a screen shot of it and just Tweeted it back.

You know, it's fun. I can't really pay a whole lot of attention to the stuff that people say online. But if I have a moment where I can use technology in an advantageous way without mixing it up personally, I'm by all means going to do that. I think that's just the smarter way to go about it, because at the end of the day, I didn't really say anything back to this guy.

NP: It does annoy me when people say things online that they would never have the balls to say to someone in person. There's a weird amount of hate spewed out online.

DN: Oh yeah, it's horrible, it's horrible. But, one of my favorite go-to lines that I heard from someone else, and I kind of re-originated it, made it my own, is that any time somebody has something to say to me that is less than flattering or negative, I just look at them and go, "Hey man, anytime you want to compare lives and compare accomplishments, I'm ready to go." That usually shuts them up.

NP: I saw on Twitter that you just downloaded Angry Birds. How is that going for you?

DN: [deep breath] Not great.

NP: Is Angry Birds beating your ass?

DN: Well, I downloaded it last night. I just got an iPhone, I just stepped into the new millennium. I was holding off for a long time, but I couldn't resist when it went to Verizon.

NP: Were you a Crackberry before?

DN: Yes. Yes.

NP: So you're now a recovering Crackberry addict?

DN: I am a recovering Crackberry addict, and I'm still struggling with the iPhone transition. I went to the app store and, of course, it came up on the "Downloaded Top Apps" or whatever. So I get this Angry Birds thing which I had heard about, and I've got to tell you, I looked up and a few hours had gone by. I just discovered the new thing that's going to do me in and put my record on hold for the next six months. 'Cause Jane's Addiction is recording an album right now. We're about halfway through with it, and I'm going to miss going to the studio because I'm up late at night playing Angry Birds.

NP: Angry Birds is essentially going to put the next Jane's Addiction release back to 2012.

DN: It's very possible. And frankly, you know, it's two or three in the morning and you're on your iPhone playing Angry Birds, and then in comes the late night booty call texts, and I'm hitting ignore, ignore, ignore.

NP: Nooooo!! Angry Birds is getting in the way of your booty calls?

DN: It's destroying my sex life.

NP: Oh dear, oh dear. Well, if you ever get over your Angry Birds fascination, there are SuicideGirls iPhone apps too.

DN: What do the SuicideGirls iPhone apps do?

NP: Well one of ours actually got banned. It was called Flip Strip, and was inspired by those 1950s novelty pens. You could flip through images of various Suicide Girls and then, if you turned your iPhone upside down, the clothes would melt off. So that was kind of fun, but it got banned. We go a million downloads in a week, but it was too much fun for Apple. But there's another one, Seduce A Suicide Girl, where you get to go on a virtual date with an SG. It's an interactive game where, depending on what you do and what you say, there are different outcomes.

DN: The interesting thing about me, and a lot of people don't understand this, because I'm a porn director, I write for Penthouse magazine, [I'm] certainly no stranger to a free lifestyle per se, but when it comes to looking at pictures of naked girls or looking at pornography, I'm not necessarily a fan. I don't really do it. The reason is very simple; When you're hungry you don't just get a menu and look at what's on the menu, you want to order a sandwich.

NP: Right, you actually want to eat the sandwich.

DN: Exactly. I don't want to just get a menu and look at the pictures on the menu and see what kind of food they have. So that's the same kind of thinking. If I put on a porn film or if I look at naked pictures, it's the same kind of concept to me. I would rather just have sex than look at something that's going to get me all aroused. I'd rather experience something, or do something else. My other late night love, and a lot of the stuff we're talking about we're talking about late night stuff - because we're talking about broken girls, we're talking about sex, we're talking about Angry Birds and online stuff and Twitter - these are all things that kind of, for me, live between the hours of 11 and 4 AM. The rest of the day I actually have my life to live.

NP: Right.

DN: The other thing that comes to mind is horror films - horror, suspense, super dark documentary films. That's my other love, outside of music, of course....Have you seen any of the films by Gaspar Noé? Irreversible, Enter the Void, and I Stand Alone, those are three films that you need to see if you're interested. They're not horror films, but they're super dark suspense films. His directorial style is absolutely stunning. I've never seen anything like it.

NP: Given that you're doing all this between 11 and 4 AM, does that mean that you're an insomniac?

DN: Somewhat. I think what happens is that I'm a napper. I get up, go to the gym, go to work, do whatever I've got to do during the day, and then I kind of fall asleep again around 6 or 7, for a couple of hours. Then that takes me up until the wee hours of the night, which I prefer because I don't have as much incoming interaction with people. Because - as much as I work, and as many people as I know, and as out in the world as I appear to be - I'm really a loner, and I enjoy it. When the cell phone and the emails quiet down, and the workday is over, that's when I feel happiest.

NP: Well, especially with Twitter, it's a way of interacting with people while still being alone. You're interacting with people, but it's not in an invasive way because you can retreat from it.

DN: I basically use Twitter at night. During the day it's like band updates and funny little anecdotes and stuff for the majority of the followers, but once it's nighttime, I basically use it as a public global chat room. So I'm Tweeting stuff to people that only that person is going to get. A lot of people use it as a way to communicate with a vast amount of people at once. I do that the majority of the day, but then at night, it just becomes personal email that anybody can read basically. I think that's kind of interesting and fun and voyeuristic...I just think that, for me, to be able to eavesdrop on somebody's private conversations, so to speak, might be a little bit more interesting than [tweeting] "my band is playing out in Anaheim on the 17th." Anybody can find that out anywhere. You know what I mean?

NP: It's like a door that's slightly ajar into someone's private world.

DN: Exactly. But, like I said...

NP: And an ajar door is more intriguing than a wide open door.

DN: Exactly. The sense has been in the past that I'm this open book, and I let everybody into everything - believe me I don't. Nine times out of ten the women that I'm most flirtatious with on Twitter are the ones that I don't know. And the ones that I have actual friendships with are the ones I'm pretty tame about...At the same time, don't think I haven't direct messaged my cell number about 10,000 times to people, but you know. Always an interesting question is: How many times have you direct messaged your personal cell number? I've definitely been down that road, and I've definitely met really cool people on there.

NP: I have to ask...obviously you mentioned the Jane's album - how's that going?

DN: It's going really great. We're working with Dave Sitek, he's from the band TV on the Radio. He and Rich Costey are co-producing right now. We have all the material written, and actually today we're going to start tracking the actual album. It's an exciting day. It's going really, really well. It's totally different for us. It sounds like Jane's Addiction without sounding like any of our past records. I think a lot of that has to do with song structure, and the fact that we have Perry Farrell on vocals. I mean, he sings on something, it's certainly identifiable that it's him. But the music's really modern, and we're recording in a really new way...With this record, we're trying to sculpt a piece of art that's an entire album. I haven't been this excited about the band for many years.

NP: It is really hard to get people to see an album in terms of the whole when people are just downloading individual tracks.

DN: Yeah, and that's fine, they can do that, but I think as the artist you still want to create a body of work.

NP: And create a complete work of art.

DN: Exactly. I know a lot of bands focus on a couple of singles and then the rest of the record is filler, and a lot of bands really just focus on the album, and I think that we're the latter. We really want to make an epic album.

NP: So how are you making it feel complete? Is there a thread that's going to go all the way through it?

DN: Well, you can't help but have that thread with the same people writing and creating. That's going to be there. That's going to be inherent. I think when it comes down to the songs, we have a couple of hours worth of material, so obviously we're going to pick and choose the ones that are best suited. Some may be stronger than others, so we'll pick those, and then the way it's sequenced is an art form in itself. How the album unfolds. There's a lot of different ways that it can go, and we're hoping to make it something that provides a mood.

NP: When I spoke to Lincoln Park, they were talking about how they got to a point in production where they would actually work on the thing as a whole. If they made a change on one bit, they wouldn't just rewind to the start of that section and listen, they'd go right back to the start of the album and listen to how that change affected the whole album in terms of the journey.

DN: Yeah, that's a great point. A lot of people, I don't think today, take that kind of care when it comes to their music and their shows, and it's nice to see that others still do. We're definitely trying to exercise that kind of care on the album and certainly on the sequencing. I'm just really, really excited and motivated right now. This is a really cool time.


Catch the live stream of Dave Navarro's Dark Matter show on Wednesday Nights at 9 PM PST on Moheak.com.

* The original boobylicious blonde doll was based on an adult cartoon character called Lilli, who first appeared in the West German tabloid newspaper Bild Zeitung in 1952. She had sex for money, spent her time seeking out the company of fatcat businessmen, and talked saucily to male authority figures. Mattel president Ruth Handler came across the Bild Lilli doll on a trip to Europe. Handler claimed she was unaware of the adult nature of the doll when she took her inspiration for Barbie from it. Mattel subsequently bought the rights to Bild Lilli and ceased production of the rival doll in 1964.

I love me a brunette with light eyes!! [Searched for this topic and couldn't find one so please excuse me if this has been done] (image) (image) (image) ♥ more

I love me a brunette with light eyes!!
[Searched for this topic and couldn't find one so please excuse me if this has been done]




♥

I've been enjoying SG for a week or so now, and have a few suggestions that could make the experience even cooler: * LAST VISITOR - a list on your profile page that tells you the last 10 visitors you had. * PRIVATE MESSAGE BOX - so that you can leave messages for people, without them having to... more

I've been enjoying SG for a week or so now, and have a few suggestions that could make the experience even cooler:

* LAST VISITOR - a list on your profile page that tells you the last 10 visitors you had.


* PRIVATE MESSAGE BOX - so that you can leave messages for people, without them having to go to email to pick it up.

...that's about it from me. Keep up the amazing work all those involved.

[Edited on Apr 29, 2004 by hoisin]

For some of us, Felicia Day will always be Penny from “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-along-Blog,” but that isn’t because she’s resting on her laurels. She’s an actor who starred in the recent Syfy channel movie “Red,” guest starred in the “Epitaph One” and “Epitaph Two” episodes of “Dollhouse”... more

For some of us, Felicia Day will always be Penny from “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-along-Blog,” but that isn’t because she’s resting on her laurels. She’s an actor who starred in the recent Syfy channel movie “Red,” guest starred in the “Epitaph One” and “Epitaph Two” episodes of “Dollhouse” and will be appearing in the second half of the current season of “Eureka” on the Syfy channel in 2011. She also voiced a character in the recently released video game “Fallout: New Vegas.”

Felicia is also the writer and star of the webseries “The Guild,” which finished its fourth season earlier this year. The series centers around “The Knights of Good,” a guild of players obsessed with a World of Warcraft-like game who meet in real life for the first time in the initial season. Over the course of four seasons, the characters have grown deeper and the world has expanded. And the show has become funnier, managing to successfully straddle the line between character-based and situation-based humor so that even those who aren’t as obsessive about video games will be able to laugh at almost every joke.

This month the DVD collecting the fourth season goes on sale with a number of extras including the Bollywood-style music video “Game On” in addition to the trade paperback of the first run of comics and a new comic written by Felicia and her co-star Jeff Lewis, focusing on Lewis’ character Vork.


ALEX DUEBEN: I remember looking at extras on one of the DVD’s and you mentioned that you have really bad writers block.

FELICIA DAY: I do. Unfortunately it still plagues me a lot. I have a little bit of a perfectionist syndrome going on. (laughs) The number one thing you have to know when you’re writing is that you’re not going to write perfect the first time, but you want it to be perfect, so sometimes that gets a little out of control.

AD: Do you spend a lot of time just thinking about it and not putting it on paper?

FD: Yeah. Or I just feel like I can’t put it down unless that’s the way it should be performed. (laughs) It’s always challenging. You don’t want to repeat yourself. You want to outdo yourself. Sometimes there’s external pressures like thinking about how people are going to receive something, how it’s going to come out of somebody’s mouth. All these things that have nothing to do with the writing can get in the way.

AD: Has it gotten easier over time?

FD: Not particularly. I mean, it has gotten easier in that you have deadlines and you have to meet them, but the longer you live with characters, the more you feel like you need to challenge yourself. You can’t rehash what you’ve already done before. You always want to present something that’s a little bit different than what anybody has seen. It almost gets harder to be reinventing the characters in a way and not be predictable.

AD: That’s a good lead in to talk about The Guild comics.

FD: I definitely take a different approach with the comics.

AD: Have you gotten used to writing for comics?

FD: The learning curve for that was pretty high. I mean I’ve read comics, but writing it was a completely different challenge. Not only being the writer, but being the director and adding the visual elements, was definitely different from what I’ve been used to in screenplays. You put down words for a screenplay and then the director is the one to bring it to life. I didn’t even know this signing up. That it was the writer’s job to work with the artist, but really it comes to the writer to be as specific as possible as to what we visually want to see in the panels. That was the biggest challenge. Figuring out how to tell a story and let it flow and be able to surprise myself while I’m writing.

I don’t know how other people work. Writing it as a screenplay and then going back and figuring out what can fit in the panels turned out to be a much better process for me. Now I’m doing five issues with Dark Horse that feature each of the other Guild characters and that’s been a lot easier process. I’m also co-writing several of them with other people, which has also been a learning curve, but fun. I’m able to be a little bit more surprised about these characters that I’ve lived with for over three years now.

AD: What is it like co-writing these issues? I know that you’re writing the first one with Jeff Lewis.

FD: Yeah I’m doing the first one with Jeff Lewis, who plays Vork, and I’m doing the last one with Sandeep Parikh, who plays Zaboo. That’s fun because the origin of The Guild is them playing those characters. We were doing improv together and I wrote those characters specifically for them. I thought they were the funniest guys I ever knew so when I sat down to write The Guild[/I, I tried to feature those two parts so that they could play them. And they’re writers themselves. Jeff does a lot of writing. He’s actually more of a writer than an actor. Sandeep writes The Legend of Neil, which is his webseries.

Also the actors always come in with different ideas about the characters. It was a fun process with Jeff, doing the Vork character in a way that I hadn’t thought about before. The same thing with Sandeep when we started working on that issue. I did Tink by myself when I was doing Eureka in Vancouver and the one I’m working on now, Bladezz, I’m co-writing with Sean Becker who’s the director and editor of Seasons 2, 3, and 4 of The Guild. That’s really fun because he’s a huge comic book fan and he’s a director so he comes at it from a more visual standpoint.

AD: You make The Guild on essentially a barebones budget, so there’s a certain practicality to your thinking when you write the episodes, but in comics none of that matters.

FD: The Guild is so dialogue based because, you’re right, we can only shoot in our houses, basically. (laughs) We have to keep it to a bare minimum. We tend to keep our locations as small as we can and as few as we can each season, so it’s much more dialogue heavy and joke heavy. With the comics you can open up the whole world. You can go anywhere you want. You can have people do fantastic things and the production value, in a sense, is whatever your imagination is limited to. The real estate, as far as how much dialogue you can put in, is something I’ve constantly been struggling with. I’ll get notes back from the editor Scott Allie and he’ll be like, you have to cut three words from this bubble. (laughs) I’m like, no! It’s such a challenge. I can write dialogue all day, but being able to be precise and concise is a challenge. When I wrote season four after doing the comics, I found that it made me a lot more cogent of the fact that I needed to be a little more sparse with my dialogue. I think the jokes sometimes hit better if you’re more concise.

AD: So are you in the midst of writing season five now?

FD: We haven’t gotten picked up for Season five. I have ideas floating around, so as soon as we get that pickup, I’ll start writing. I’m in the middle of writing the comics. Then I have two other webseries that I’m working on that’s still unannounced. It’s been fun to design other characters, but it’s actually making me more excited to go back to season five of The Guild. At the end of season four, they’re all maybe going to a convention. Or there’s a convention involved somehow. (laughs) That’ll be fun to delve into. And at the same time I just finished doing eight episodes of Eureka, so it’s been quite a juggle the last couple months to be doing so many awesome things. I’m just thankful that I’m doing what I really love every day and I’m excited about all the things I’m working on.

AD: Where do you see web content going? There’s more being done, but it really continues to feel hermetically sealed away from Hollywood and the rest of the entertainment field in many ways.

FD: It’s totally different. It’s almost like Sundance when independent films just came to the forefront. When they were smaller and it wasn’t so cast-dependent and there wasn’t big money involved. I think that trajectory can be pretty comparable but independent films even now are pretty separate from mainstream Hollywood films. Some of them have such big casts and become Oscar contenders, but if you look at ten years ago even, there was a huge separation between independent film and the mainstream. I think that’s going to be a similar situation for web video. We don’t have budgets to be able to make episodes every single week. That would require a huge crew and a writing staff and constant production facilities. It’s a scale that you can’t do, but at the same time, we’re moving to a world where people are unplugging their cable.

I think we’re becoming an on demand society and the place where people interact with their content is online. People aren’t just consuming, they want to consumer and share. That’s definitely a testament to where content is going. I love working in the venue that I do and I want to keep pushing web content to be more accepted. The viewers are there, it’s just that the money and the support and the production are not there yet. There’s some great really funny indie things, but people are doing them in their house or doing them on a very low budget scale, so you don’t have the production value, you don’t have the scale, you don’t have the consistency in content that you do in the big Hollywood machine. But those are millions of dollars an episode. It’s two different worlds.

It’s not where anybody would want it to be. We’re slowly but surely getting there. I am most gratified that I’m part of that, rather than just jumping back into the machine even though I make a lot more money there. I’m hopefully inspiring other people to do what I’m doing.

AD: Many people have talked about you in terms of being a breakout star, but has The Guild and Dr. Horrible translated into producers, casting directors, other people who know you and want to work with you?

FD: To be honest with you, I’ve been so out of the machine in a sense. I think all the roles that I’ve gotten in the past two years have been [because] people who are writers, who know who I am, have written me parts. I don’t know if casting directors would necessarily watch the web for talent. I think that producers and writers are looking to the web. Production is very precarious. Even in L.A., production is moving to Canada and out of state. There are some weaknesses in the armor of Hollywood and the smart people are looking to the web to see what’s going on there. That’s what I’m encountering. Writers and producers are familiar with my work and that seems to be the way I’m going to work as an actor or collaborate with people in the future. Rather than going through a casting director and getting approved by the network.

Like you said, it’s two different parallel worlds, and until the money is there, until the power is there, it’s not going to get the mainstream attention. I don’t care about that. I’m just honored that on a show like Eureka, the show runner and the writers see what I’m doing on the web, think it’s funny and wrote a part for me. That’s a much cooler way to get a part than just knocking on doors and trying to make my hair look pretty so I can be one of ten girls to pick from.

AD: Can you say anything about Eureka other than you’re on eight episodes?

FD: I don’t when it’s going to air, but I play a really quirky scientist named Holly Martin. She comes to Eureka on a secret project and immediately has a lot of clashing of wills with Fargo. Wil Wheaton is also part of that relationship triangle. It was such a fun time. I actually miss the time on set because we had such fun just hanging around. It’s such a nice set and such a welcoming cast and crew. I can’t wait for people to see the episodes. I think they’ll be really, really funny.

AD: You made a comment in an interview that you always lived online. And that phrasing was interesting because I think for some people social media and lot of other recent innovations are strange and awkward but for other people, they feel very natural.

FD: I might be one of those first or second generation of people who have grown up more wired to people who I don’t know than in real life. I think that kids nowadays I don’t know if they will really understand how cable works (laughs) or just not knowing where everyone is at all times. My parents are very tech savvy and that’s how I became tech savvy. My family’s always been a little more tech savvy and on the cutting edge, but the scale and quickness with which people’s social interactions have changed is just is phenomenal. I hope I don’t get left behind, but if you’re raised with an ipad that you can touch and move things around with and you can press a button and watch whatever show you want, that’s a different life perspective you’ve grown up with. It’s going to change how they invent things for future generations and it’s happening very very quickly. I’ve always been online. I was on dial-up before people were on the internet with prodigy and compuserve trying to get King’s Quest clues. (laughs) To me, that was always a cool way to connect with people. I might have been one of the first, but I think it’s definitely going to define all of our future generations.

AD: In Microsoft, you really seem to have found a perfect partner for The Guild, in that they’re not demanding any rights or changes to what or how you work.

FD: It was definitely a dream come true. All the people who offered to buy the show before that were traditional studios. Yeah, it would be awesome to work with you, you’re really fancy, but how are you going to get me millions of people who haven’t already seen the show on youtube? They can’t offer that. The fact that Microsoft was able to feature us on their portals and get millions of people watching the show, was really the deciding factor. The fact that I was able to retain the rights to the show is an absolute dream come true. Sprint has also been a partner. It’s definitely rare. That’s my goal in the next year or so. To prove that you can do that again. There’s some really great shows out there like Riese, but there still hasn’t been that one to have as many views as a cable show.

AD: With everything going on, do you have time to game much anymore?

FD: Oh yeah. I just finished Fallout: New Vegas last night. (laughs) I played with my own character, which was creepy, but whatever. I was a good character. And that was really fun. I’m really excited about the new WoW changes. I haven’t been able to play in months, and to see they’re totally reinventing their game but being friendly to the people who know the game. I think they’ve done it in a really smart way and I can’t wait to play that. I don’t watch enough TV and I really need to write more, but if I have three hours, I definitely want to be gaming.

Hello there! I have been pulling pics from the threads you have been posting about eyes and girls who look like celebrities to post as previews on facebook for awhile now. It has been a wealth of great images of the girls. I thought I could start a new thread to find the sexiest clothed pics on the site. more

Hello there!

I have been pulling pics from the threads you have been posting about eyes and girls who look like celebrities to post as previews on facebook for awhile now. It has been a wealth of great images of the girls.

I thought I could start a new thread to find the sexiest clothed pics on the site.

I'll start...





Thank you in advance!

xoxo
-missy

Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky's bloody epic Santa Sangre, which was inspired by the story of Mexican serial killer Gregorio "Goyo" Cárdenas Hernández, has been praised as "a throwback to the golden age, to the days when filmmakers had bold individual visions," and derided... more

Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky's bloody epic Santa Sangre, which was inspired by the story of Mexican serial killer Gregorio "Goyo" Cárdenas Hernández, has been praised as "a throwback to the golden age, to the days when filmmakers had bold individual visions," and derided as "a massive clearance sale of leftover psychedelia." It's story and imagery has been dismissed as "a series of banal Freudianisms involving a circus family" and celebrated as "a wild kaleidoscope of images and outrages, a collision between Freud and Fellini." But love it or hate it, you'll never forget it, since with Santa Sangre, Jodorowsky firmly straddles the line where madness becomes genius.

Conceived and directed by Jodorowsky, who wrote the screenplay with Claudio Argento and Roberto Leoni, Santa Sangre tells the story of a young magician named Fenix, the son of two circus performers, who witnesses the death of his overprotective mother, Concha, at the hands of his knife throwing, hypnotist father. Concha, who in the big top is suspended from great heights by her hair, also happens to be the leader of a religious cult, which worships a girl whose arms were cut off during a violent rape. The sect's temple of worship, which houses a pool of holy blood (hence the film's name), gets bulldozed in the opening sequences. After his mother's murder, Fenix's arms are possessed by Concha - whose own arms were severed in the fatal attack by her husband - and a killing spree ensues.

Santa Sangre was released in 1989, over a decade and a half after Jodorowsky's defining films, El Topo (1970) and The Holy Mountain (1973). The low budget horror movie-cum-art house masterpiece has since gained bona fide cult status, resulting in its first official US DVD release via Severin Films in January of this year.

The multi talented Jodorowsky (who, aside from filmmaking, has also mastered comic book writing and the tarot), had previously scored his own films, but with Santa Sangre he handed the musical reigns over to English musician and composer Simon Boswell. An integral part of the post-punk power pop band Advertising, after the outfit's demise, Boswell went on to score over ninety films including Phenomena (Dario Argento), Dust Devil (Richard Stanley), Shallow Grave (Danny Boyle), Lord of Illusions (Clive Barker), and Hackers (Iain Softley).

Ironically for a composer whose résumé has a distinctly devilish slant (his latest credit is the Richard Driscoll film Back2Hell), Boswell in recent years has been collaborating with the Vatican, producing music featuring the voice of not one, but two popes. He provided the score for Santo Subito, a DVD released in 2007, which commemorated the life and death of Pope John Paul II. That was followed up with contributions to Alma Mater, an album released in 2009, which featured the voice of Pope Benedict XVI. Boswell's next papal project is an album celebrating the fast-tracked deification of Pope John Paul II, which is set for release this spring.

Given that we are a counter-culture community, when we called Boswell up, our initial focus was on the colorful orgy of sin that is Santa Sangre. But since you can't have saints without sinners, our conversation also explored more outwardly virtuous topics, and how often the best art is a seemingly contradictory balance of heavenly and hellish elements.

NP: I understand you were in LA recently. What was that trip about?

SB: That trip was about the Santa Sangre screening at the American Cinematheque. I gave a little talk beforehand and then did a Q&A at the end.

NP: When you first got involved in the project, you probably didn't think you'd be flying halfway around the world to talk about it over twenty years on.

SB: No. Well, that's true, one wouldn't. But I've been asked so many times in my career, "What's the best film that you've done?" And I have to say, when I think about it, it was very apparent even at the time that Santa Sangre was just quite a unique piece of art really.

NP: How did you get involved? Were you aware of Jodorowsky before you got the call to do the job?

SB: The whole connection to the Jodorowsky film came about through Dario Argento, the Italian director. That was the first movie I ever did. It was called Phenomena, or Creepers as it's called in the States. His assistant A. D., Michele Soavi, directed the second film I did, and the first film was produced by Dario's brother, Claudio Argento. He asked me to do Santa Sangre, so there's sort of a creative connection going through there. But I had seen El Topo when I was a student at the cinema, and it had never left me. At the time I'd never seen anything like this either, so I was aware of Jodorowsky going way back actually.

NP: The Santa Sangre project was very much an unknown quantity, at the time because, discounting Jodorowsky's kids fable Tusk (1980), there had been a huge gap between El Topo (1973), The Holly Mountain (1973), and this one.

SB: Yes, it was an awful long time. Obviously, there's great difficulty in raising money for films like that, which are supreme examples of art house cinema and probably don't make any money. There was a lot of difficulty with him raising money, but when I asked Alejandro about it, he said, "Well I don't consider myself a filmmaker." He said, "When I make a film I'm a filmmaker, but otherwise, I have plenty of other things to do." It's interesting. It's not like he felt he had a career as a filmmaker. So that was his take on that.

NP: When did you first come face to face with Jodorowsky?

SB: I flew to Rome and met him there whilst he was editing Santa Sangre, and watched the film with him. We talked through a few ideas, but he mainly sort of sent me away saying, "Just do what you want to do."

NP: So there was no grand brief?

SB: No, no, not in the slightest. It's funny I discovered subsequently - I didn't really know this [at the time] - but he was keen on me doing the music. I mean he's a musician himself.

NP: Right. This was the first film on which he'd actually handed over the reins for the music to someone else.

SB: Yes...Dario and Claudio were pushing me because I was doing a lot of electronic music which, at the time, seemed quite fresh and quite different. It was sort of somewhere between Tangerine Dream and Mike Oldfield. I think Tubular Bells is probably an influence on loads of film composers.

But it was the idea I think of doing what was kind of fake orchestral music, but with synthetic sounds, with synths and samples. It was a little bit like the Clockwork Orange soundtrack. It clearly must have sounded nothing like that, but Jodorowsky - I mean he's a true artist in the sense that he's very happy to allow the creativity of other people to come to the fore - so I think it intrigued him, the idea that on this very organic film set in Mexico there would be an electronic score.

NP: Did he involve himself at all in the music for Santa Sangre?

SB: No, no, not at all. There was only one scene [in the film where he gave me specific input]. On the first day that I met him we were watching it through, and there's a scene where the knife thrower's wife, Concha, gets her arms cut off. It's pretty grizzly, and I said to him, "Do you want me to write something horrible for this? Something really unpleasant?" And he said, "No, no, no, no, no, no." He said, "This is like a moment of religious ecstasy for her. It must be wonderful, beautiful, uplifting. She's going to heaven." It was a very early lesson for me in smart movie making if you like, which is to...

NP: To not do the obvious?

SB: Well I get really irritated with most film music these days, and most movies. Because film music it seems to me tells you the same information you already know.

NP: Right. And I don't always want to be told in a heavy handed way what I should be feeling. It's good to work it out for yourself.

SB: Absolutely. I think there's a lot of paranoia in the film business about "let's make sure everyone understands the scene." Just kind of treating the audience like morons really. Clearly that is the case. When there's a car chase they have really car chasey music, and if there's a love scene they have some soupy love theme. And it's very interesting, Jodorowsky was the first one, but Dario also pointed this out to me. He said to me, "You know you can write beautiful music for something horrific." That makes the audience actually question what it is they're watching, and makes them more engaged in a film than less engaged. You tell people the same information twice, it's just like having too much of something really, and it usually turns me off the movie.

NP: When you saw the bare bones of Santa Sangre coming together in the editing room, what was your first impression?

SB: Well my first impression, having seen El Topo previously, was that it's been made more like a work of art than it has a movie. It has this strange atmosphere - not of bad acting - but a kind of very mannered, slightly awkward acting. They made it in English with a lot of very heavy Mexican accents. And I was just aware that the look of it was just incredibly beautifully crafted. The color palettes and the way the subject matter has something of surreal art about it.

It is quite a surreal movie. All that stuff with the elephant, when the elephant dies...it's like a Magritte or Dali feeling picture in the sense that it's just a bit bizarre. And what it makes it even more bizarre is it's not explained at all. It's not necessarily a part of the plot. It's just there because it's wonderful and crazy really. So I just knew it was a very special film. I took it in my stride because at this point I wasn't thinking I was going to be a film composer. I didn't set out to be one, so I just kind of reacted honestly to the images. And because the images are so inspiring, I think I wrote some good music for it, but I also wrote some stuff I cringe at now, because I was very naïve.

NP: Well when synthesizers first came out there was the novelty element. It's only with the passage of time that we can look back and see what kinds of synthesized sounds have dated and what haven't. You don't have that issue with a violin for example, because the violin's been around for hundreds of years.

SB: Yes. I think that's very well put actually. It is interesting, you can tell which movies date and which don't, and in the same way, you're right, there's certain bits of music... But it wasn't like it was all synthesizers. There was a guitar scene in there which I wrote and played myself, which I think really expresses the soul of the young boy in it. It's very simple and full of yearning and lost innocence as well.

NP: Have you kept in touch with Jodorowsky over the years?

SB: I have actually. I don't see him that often, but I made an album over a period of 13 years actually, which I was sort of finishing about 5 years ago. I cut a lot of my film scores up into bits and then reassembled those bits as if they were samples other people had made, but it was all my own samples as it were, and created new pieces. I wanted to involve some of the filmmakers that I was particularly proud of having worked with to [do] spoken word stuff on the album. At the same time I also filmed them doing it. So I rang up Dario, and I went to Rome and filmed him saying his lines that I had written for him, and I did the same with Jodorowsky in Paris.

NP: And the "Close Your Eyes" music video was borne out of that project (see below).

SB: Yes. I had already filmed Jodorowsky five years ago doing his bits, that's on the CD, on the album. But I just thought, why not make a kind of pop promo. When they said to me I could use any clips from Santa Sangre I thought, okay, I have to do this.

NP: I know that Jodorowsky's working on a sequel to El Topo - is that something you're going to be working on?

SB: I'd love to say yes, and the only reason I'm saying I'm not sure is because he's been trying to make that for about 10 or 15 years, and I think it's by no means certain that he'll make it. I'd like to think he'd ask me but, as it's sort of the son of El Topo, and he did music for El Topo, he might want to do it himself. So I wouldn't feel at all bad about whatever decision he made on that really. I'd love to work with him, but I think he takes each kind of film on its own merits really.

NP: Has he spoken with you about the project in general?

SB: No, not really. Have you got the Santa Sangre DVD?

NP: Yes.

SB: I interviewed him. This is about the same time that I went to Paris to film him...El Topo 2 didn't come up, but I asked him about Holy Mountain and the Beatles and John Lennon. Because he was sort of taken up by John Lennon after El Topo came out as some sort of genius guru, and there was talk of him directing a Beatles film if you can imagine, which would have been amazing. And in that interview, he does talk about George Harrison. Harrison was going to be - I forget which - the thief I think was the character in Holy Mountain that he wanted to be. But Jodorowsky said, "Well there's a scene where the thief has to strip naked and have his anus washed."

NP: And Harrison wasn't up for that?

SB: So Jodorowsky said, "You don't have your ass washed, you don't do my movie."

NP: Harrison quite literally wouldn't put his ass on the line.

SB: There you go.

NP: Given the subject matter of Jodorowsky's films, particularly with regards to religion - I understand, though spiritual, he's very disapproving of organized religion because of the destruction it brings - your career has taken a different and unexpected turn because you're now working with the Pope.

SB: [laughs] Yes it has...I mean there are things that I'm deeply uncomfortable with about the Catholic Church. I'm not Catholic, I'm not religious at all. So I'm struggling with why I was asked to work with them, but they seem to quite like me. In fact the best explanation I had for it is that - there was a documentary being made about of the making of this thing, and the director of the documentary asked the priest who is creatively in charge of the project, "Why Simon Boswell? Why have you picked him?" And he kind of fell about laughing, and he said, "Jesus loves the sinner."

NP: [laughs]

SB: [laughs] So, knowing my dysfunctional lifestyle, I'm happy to have that on my gravestone really.

NP: Has that priest to watched Santa Sangre?

SB: Probably not. They're actually rather sweet. I mean there's a lot of stuff that's very difficult and wrong with the Catholic Church obviously - that's had a lot of publicity recently - but they're very kind of sweet and naïve a lot of the priests that I've met.

I first got involved when they asked me to write some music for a DVD which had the funeral of John Paul II on it, and there's two stories I can tell you actually. I was on holiday near Rome because I knew this project was coming up, and I went into a meeting in the Vatican and I had my laptop bag with me. They were trying to show me this footage on the DVD. All these priests couldn't make the technology work, so I said, look, I've got my laptop, we'll watch it on here. I took it out and then saw my battery was flat, so I rummaged around in the bag and pulled all this stuff out, and onto the floor fell a copy of The Da Vinci Code.

I put my foot on that as they sat behind the desk, so I had to sit for an hour in the Vatican feeling this book burning a hole through my shoe. But at the end - this is sort of going back to their naiveté - Don Giulio, who's the priest who christened me a sinner, he said to me, "Wouldn't it be great to have a song on the end of the DVD?" I said, "Well, I don't know, maybe." And he said, "Simon, you've worked with Elton John - why don't you ask Elton?" I looked at him and I had to say, "He's homosexual." He went [Simon puts on a very shocked Italian accent], "No, no."

NP: [laughs]

SB: [laughs] I thought that was quite sweet really, the idea the priest is completely unaware that Elton John is gay.

NP: Do you have any more Vatican projects in the pipeline?

SB: Yes, we do actually, funny enough. I find it so strange answering these questions as if I've become some sort of weird Vatican...

NP: Well you are the go-to guy for Vatican music.

SB: Yeah. I have to console myself actually with the fact that Michelangelo probably was too [for art] - and we don't know what he was thinking. I mean when he was doing the Sistine Chapel, he could have got there in the morning and said, "I'm not working for those bastards today." I mean, who knows what he thought.

We're doing a new album which is going to be a tribute album to John Paul II who is being made a saint at the beginning of May. We've composed some new tracks using Gregorian music, and this time asked some people to perform them. We have Andrea Bocelli, we have Placido Domingo, and we have various other world stars who are going to perform on the album. And we're trying to get a big concert together in Krakow where John Paul was born to commemorate his death. So that's the next project for the Vatican.

NP: You realize you're setting a whole new precedent for the deification process. Now no pope can be deified without a soundtrack album and at least a couple of world famous opera singers singing on it.

SB: I know. It's hideous. I'm sorry. I apologize now. But I don't think it's as bad as X Factor.

NP: Nowadays art is judged in terms of sales, and with these papal releases, the legacy of popes will be judged by how many records they sell when they die and are deified.

SB: What's interesting is of course that's how all the world thinks, but the Vatican really don't consider themselves to be a commercial entity. I mean there was a lot of difficulty in getting this album released, and they didn't want to be paid for it either. There's some payment you make to license the Pope's voice, but they really discourage people thinking of them as a business. But obviously the rest of the world thinks that way, so there's going to be some sort of comparison between things.

The last one didn't sell anywhere near what we thought it would. But I think that's because they didn't try and sell it to Catholics. They sold it to the rest of the world as a sort of classical crossover album.

NP: You don't think it's because the Catholics are more adept at downloading?

SB: [laughs]. That's a sin. Don't you know that? No, it was kind of wrongly marketed. I was only one of three composers on the album. I probably did about half of it. It was really nice music, and I think the record company got carried away with the fact that it was this classical crossover music, rather than just for Catholics. And clearly that was a mistake in terms of sales. Because if only five percent of Catholics had bought it would have sold more than Thriller, and I'd be speaking to you from a much bigger house.

NP: It is interesting the relationship between the Catholic Church and commerce. I remember going to the Vatican and on the roof there's a hut with nuns selling plastic rosary beads. I was like, haven't they read their own Bible? I mean even I know that Jesus disapproved of that kind of thing.

SB: Yeah, well I think there's a great gulf between the things one knows about Jesus and his preachings and his sayings - a huge gulf between that and organized religion in general, whether it's Catholic or Church of England or whatever. I think they've lost the basic principles of all of that stuff to be honest with you. But you know, I have to say, it's been a learning curve for me doing it because I was quite moved by being in [the Vatican]. I mean there's a lot of fantastic art that's been made in the name of religion. The Catholic Church, and churches in general, have been incredible patrons of wonderful art.

NP: Incredible patrons of the art, but then also, particularly with music, they've had a very uncomfortable relationship with artists. For example, if you make music you can shake your hips to it's considered akin to devil worship by some.

SB: You mean like Elvis wiggling his hips, that sort of temptation.

NP: When you're doing the music for the Vatican projects, have they ever come back to you to complain that anything's to jolly and therefore inappropriate?

SB: I didn't feel that sort of pressure from the Vatican. I think they're quite keen on uplifting music actually. In fact there's one track which we didn't use in the end...There's a whole branch of music which is called marian music, which is written to the memory of the Virgin Mary, particularly in Italy. It sounds like Neapolitan music, like Volare or some sort of thing Dean Martin might have sung. It's wonderful actually because there's all kind of oom-pah stuff. It sounds very jolly and very Italian. So I don't feel there's any problem with that. There's a huge debate though about the happy clappy stuff that came in the '60s, when you couldn't go into a church without some god-awful guitarist singing some new hymn he'd written. I think the current Pope is very disapproving of that, and my god, I agree with him.

NP: So he's not a happy, clappy Pope?

SB: He's not a happy, clappy Pope. No, he's not. Basically he likes Mozart and music like that. That's pretty uplifting stuff.

NP: It's interesting when you talk about the marian genre of music because that seems to be reminiscent of the Santa Sangre music in the scenes where Concha is fighting to preserve her temple.



SB: Yes. Yeah, well that's interesting...In fact, I saw that scene just recently, where they're confronting the people who want to knock their church down. They sing this song called "Fin Del Mundo," which is a Mexican song about the end of the world. One of the jobs I had to do quite a lot of in Santa Sangre was to fix or add to things which they'd literally recorded live on the set. When I got that clip there was just people singing. You could hear like one guitar way off in the distance. I had to stick a load of guitars and things on it and make it into something that sounded like it was a bit more peppy really, give it a bit of zap.

NP: In the DVD extras Jodorowsky talks about that scene. How he was searching for authentic music, and how he was randomly tapped on the foot by a beggar in the street. He saw it as a sign, and asked the guy where he could find some music. And the guy, as it turned out, was in a blind choir, which Jodorowsky then used for that scene.

SB: Exactly. It's funny, that's very particular of Jodorowsky. He finds meaning in wherever life takes him. I really admire him for that. You were talking earlier about his interest in spiritual things rather than organized religion. You know he is very knowledgeable about the tarot and he gives tarot card readings every Wednesday in a café just on the corner of the block where he lives in Paris. Loads of people come from all around the world every week to have their tarot read by him.

NP: Have you had your tarot read by him?

SB: No, I haven't. I was a little bit scared really.

NP: Well of course the Catholic Church would say tarot was akin to devil worship.

SB: Oh my god, of course they would. They would indeed. But you know, it's funny, people talk about the Catholic Church like it's all of a like mind - and it's not. What I discovered was that it's full of people who don't agree on all kinds of things. It's not like they're all unified in this particular way of looking at the world. Being a Catholic means lots of different things to different people.

NP: Even within the church - or maybe especially within the church.

SB: Yeah, even within the Vatican City. I mean there are different orders of priests. You have Paulines and Jesuits, and they really have a different world view actually. The Paulines, for example, run the whole media wing of the Vatican, and they're more relaxed. They wear jeans and are much more into film and music. They run all the Catholic bookshops all around the world, and are involved in the media, the newspapers and TV stations that the Vatican own. And I'm sure they're at complete loggerheads with the Jesuits who are part of that rather austere group who want everyone to be a bit miserable.

NP: On the DVD you talk about how Jodorowsky had this fatalistic approach to the music; He'd hired you, and therefore the music he got was the music he got because it was in your hands.

SB: Yeah.

NP: Ironically that seems to be a similar approach to what you experienced with the Catholic Church.

SB: Doesn't it, yeah. That's interesting. Yes. I guess so. It is a sort of fatalistic approach. I have to say I've really taken that lesson through into my life...and also coincidences that you come across in your life. I'm more of a believer in Jung than anything religious, and Jung says that what we see as being coincidences is really our unconscious making things happen for us. It's not that there's a level of awareness, but our unconscious drives our life in certain directions that we're not aware of, which is why things happen that you think, my god, that's such a coincidence.

NP: So there's a connection in the work process, because you're attracted to situations where you're not being micromanaged. You want to work with people who will trust your choices - even if it might not be their choices - because, at the end of the day, that's why they hired you. That's the whole point with art. You're not buying a commodity, you're buying someone's creativity and taste.

SB: That vision. That's true. Absolutely, and you know, this couldn't be more relevant I suppose. I find that the best directors one works with are directors who are generous enough and secure in their own selves enough to hand something over to someone. And that the worst directors just try and control everything, being sort of Nazi directors that are very unwilling to let people do their thing. And it's really, I think, a function of being a secure person or insecure person.

NP: So beyond Jodorowsky and the Catholic Church, who are the directors you've had good experiences with?

SB: Richard Stanley, for example, do you know his work? I did work on most of the stuff that he's made. There's a movie called Hardware and a movie called Dust Devil, and I think some of my best music has been for him and Jodorowsky and people who just let me do my own thing, you know, let me have an interpretation of my own on the film. Clive Barker also was like that. He's very trusting. It's very difficult I think for directors to hand over their baby essentially to someone doing music. Because music is the one thing you can't really describe in words, and it has a huge influence on the outcome of a film, so it's a great act of trust for a director to hire a composer. I'm always very aware of that.

NP: What's next for you?

SB: I'm working on a film with Richard Stanley, which is a film with different segments by different directors. And I've just been to Sundance, and there's a movie called Hobo With A Shotgun. It's a Rutger Hauer film, and it pushes the level of bad taste to a new high or low, whichever you want to describe it. It's a completely over the top movie, and I think it's going to be a crossover hit. I didn't score it. I was contacted about them licensing a song that I'd written for the first movie I ever did with Dario Argento for this really cool sequence. I'm very pleased about that. That's coming out, and I think will take the world by storm.

NP: I'm glad. I think Rutger Hauer is really underrated.

SB: Yes, I think so too.

NP: He's a very intriguing presence on the screen.

SB: Yes. Particularly in this film, let me tell you. It's very funny, but completely over the top.

NP: There is that fine line between bad taste and genius. That's always something that Jodorowsky's straddled isn't it? People love him or hate him, or say his work's tasteless or high art.

SB: Yes, that's true. That is true. Even in Santa Sangre, the elephant sequence, that scene's gratuitous but in a rather wonderful way. It doesn't tell you anything extra about the film's story. It's just a wonderful, weird thing. I think it's very difficult to ride that line, and let me tell you, Hobo with a Shotgun has some scenes which you will not believe....

What's this website you've got? What is that?

NP: Suicide Girls? It's a counter culture website. It's named after a term Chuck Palahniuk coined. He was talking about how those with tattoos and piercings are essentially choosing to commit social suicide by permanently marking their body, which ultimately means that there are certain sections of society that they're permanently barred from entering or getting approval from.

And of course there's a big rite of passage tattoo scene in Santa Sangre between Fenix and his father, so it's an iconic film within our community. Also SuicideGirls is about redefining beauty, and Santa Sangre is a very beautiful movie, but it could also be perceived as being ugly by some. There's beauty in the ugliness and in the horror.

SB: Yes, exactly. No, it's true. That's very interesting. It's a very interesting observation. And it's very true. Yeah, of course, tattooing is a big statement, isn't it really?

NP: And the choice that Jodorowsky made that you were talking about earlier with the music in the scene where Concha's arms are sliced off, he was inclined to see that as a moment of transcendence, but someone else might only have envisioned it as a horrific and ugly scene. He chose to see the beauty in it.

SB: Yes, yes, absolutely. I think that's what great artists do to be honest. They create a resonance within things, between what you see and what you feel. The contradiction is everything - it's how life really is.

So when I look at my life, and how I work on horror movies and with the Pope, I remember one thing. As a teenager the writer who influenced me the most was William Blake, and in particular a work of his called The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Even when he wrote it, which was the late 18th century, he was making a statement against the church basically, but saying that true creativity has to have both energy, which he sees as hell, and form, which he sees is like heaven or the restrictive aspects of the Church like the Ten Commandments.

His famous poem, "Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright," is about the idea of taking this pure energy and putting it into words, into the restrictive form of poetry, where this contradiction allows the finished poem to throb and burst as the fire within tries to bend the bars of it's prison. For me, this is a sensible way to see the creative process, which is to put something that contains chaos, or comes from chaos into something that has form, like a film, just as Jodorowsky did. But not a film where the violence of that scene with Concha is just violence. It must contain an element that challenges, that pushes, that provokes and even insults.

That's what the best art is, for me. It's stuff which is inexplicably contradictory. And when I was sitting at night, pretty much alone in St. Peter's - because we recorded in there at night with a Gregorian choir - I remember not only being very moved by it being a very spiritual experience, being in that huge space, surrounded by Michelangelo's art instead of by a zillion Japanese tourists, but that it was also that I couldn't be a better living embodiment of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In my life, as well as my art. Horror may be beautiful. And beauty may contain true horror.


The first official US DVD and BluRay release of Alejandro Jodorowsky's Santa Sangre is available now. The 2-disc set features a new high definition transfer of the original film plus over five hours of additional content, including an interview with Jodorowsky conducted by Simon Boswell.



Close Your Eyes, an album of music drawn from over 50 of Simon Boswell's original film scores which features the voices of numerous singers, actors and directors (including Jodorowsky), is available via iTunes and at SimonBoswell.com/.

Sources for quotes: Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times (positive) and Hal Hinson, Washington Post (negative).