Comic book artists don’t get more prolific than John Romita, Jr., whose acclaimed work with Marvel Comics spans over three decades and includes definitive illustrations on almost all the company’s A-list brands, such as Spider-Man, X-Men, The Hulk, Iron Man, and The Punisher. His latest assignment... more

Comic book artists don’t get more prolific than John Romita, Jr., whose acclaimed work with Marvel Comics spans over three decades and includes definitive illustrations on almost all the company’s A-list brands, such as Spider-Man, X-Men, The Hulk, Iron Man, and The Punisher. His latest assignment in the Marvel universe is working alongside leading comic writer Brian Bendis on a big-picture reboot of The Avengers, the famed superhero comic that regularly teams up a handful of Marvel mainstays for collective adventures against ultra-powerful foes. Romita’s assignment this time around: to create illustrations that reflect the company’s desire to return the franchise to its traditional, upbeat roots after nearly a decade of downer storylines that saw Iron Man battling Spider-Man and similar episodes created to satisfy a cultural desire for darker superhero tales.

But those who think Romita is saying adios to edgy material should remember his most popular indie project to date: Kick-Ass. Created with writer Mark Millar (Wanted, Superman: Red Son) and first published by Marvel in 2008, Kick-Ass is an R-rated, decidedly meta story of real-world NYC teens who put on costumes and fight criminals, sometimes shattering bones and earning hospital stays in the process, while gradually becoming true heroes. The comic touched a nerve with its cutting humor and its depiction of foul-mouthed, pre-teen assassin Hit Girl, a modern day Baby Herman whose existence is seen by some as a middle finger to middle-class values. The Matthew Vaughn-directed film adaptation, released in April, made newcomer Chloe Moretz a star and cemented Kick-Ass in the zeitgeist, making further adventures for the characters inevitable. Romita recently called up SuicideGirls to talk superheroes and the future of Kick-Ass.




Ryan Stewart: Is the movie sequel to Kick-Ass essentially on hold until Matthew Vaughn finishes the X-Men movie?

John Romita, Jr.: That’s a good question. From what I’ve been told – and I’m not positive -- but I’ve been told that Matthew Vaughn will decide between producing and directing the sequel to Kick-Ass at a point when he is further along in the X-Men process. As far as I know, he wants to do it very badly. But with his schedule, who knows? I have to finish the series as quickly as possible so that he has the material in his hands, and I think then it will be entirely up to him.

RS: You were writing the first series almost while the first movie was being filmed, right?

JRJ: Well, we were a little bit ahead of the game in that I had done one or two issues before the screenplay was finished, but the filming began well after I’d gotten the series done. And ironically, because of working on the film I couldn’t finish the series quickly enough. They had me working on the film, the animated sequence, and I wasn’t going to tell Matthew Vaughn “Sorry, I can’t do your movie because I still have a couple of comic books to draw.” [laughs] That would have been an interesting conversation. So, I had to put something behind schedule and it ended up being the comic book series. Ultimately, it bothered me because I would have had more comic book sequences in the film had it all been done further in advance. It was a strange confluence of events, but that’s exactly how things worked and it kind of set a precedent. I don’t know if we’ll do it again that way, but hopefully I’ll be done with the new six issues well before filming begins, and then anything they would need from me wouldn’t interfere with it and it would also allow me to help them out more. It worked out well the first time, but you don’t want to try it again to see if it has to be done that way. You’d prefer to work from a position of strength and I think that having the series completely done before they begin would help that.

RS: There’s the one animated sequence in the Kick-Ass film that you created -- do you expect to do more such sequences in the sequel?

JRJ: I honestly don’t know. I’m available if they need me, but it’s entirely up to the director and the producers. If I can get the series done quickly enough, then I’ll be able to do anything that they need at any time, but I don’t know if Matthew is a director that would want to do something completely different from one film to the next or if he would want to be consistent. So, you’d have to ask him. He’ll need me for something! I’ll sweep the floors if he wants.

RS: Are you doing any visual touch-ups to the look of the world or the main characters in the next installment of the comic, Kick-Ass: Balls to the Wall?

JRJ: The only thing is that I’ve taken it upon myself to try and show a little bit of time passing. I want them to look a little bit older, perhaps a year older, but nothing drastic. There is a need for consistency, but we are in the real world in this series and I wanted to show a little bit of a difference. So, nothing immense, just Hit Girl looking slightly older, maybe a year or so. Chloe Moretz really aged in front of our eyes. This beautiful little girl became a beautiful woman, so I thought of the same thing for the character. She’s not really supposed to be any older, but I wanted to hedge my bets a little bit. The trick is to be consistent while also show a little bit of time passing.

RS: When you do conventions, do little girls dressed as Hit Girl ever come up and curse at you? Is she a role model?

JRJ: No little girls! There have been adults dressed as Hit Girl and Kick-Ass, but no little girls. And if the [role model] thing were to happen, it could be done without the foul language and the violence. I remember the words from Jane Goldman in the run-up to the film during the press junkets, when she said: “I don’t see a problem in the empowering of a little girl, as opposed to the victimization of a little girl.” And she had a point. So, if a little girl comes by dressed up as Hit Girl and she’s taken jujitsu lessons and can take care of herself, I see nothing wrong with that. Now, if she starts using foul language and swinging machetes, then I’m in trouble!

RS: The cover of the first book famously promised “Sickening Violence: Just The Way You Like It.” Is that hard to top?

JRJ: Absolutely, and that’s a great point, because it isn’t so much topping myself in that I just have to top the content that I’ve done -- I have to come up with creative ways to do it. This is the strangest thing, but I held back a beheading in the first series because I said “That is too easy to do and I want to do something different and I may need that as a trump card.” But then, at the end when Hit Girl dispatches the bad guy Mark said to split him right down the middle with an axe and I couldn’t do it because that’s too easy, that’s what everyone would think of, visually. So, I had her do it from the side so that you could see his face. Those are the kind of sick thoughts that go through my mind, and I’m a good Catholic boy from New York! [laughs] Just look at this, I’m coming up with new and inventive ways to slaughter people! I do have to top myself by coming up with not just these brutally violent variations, but ones that make sense in the context and in the moment. For example, if they are outside as opposed to being in a kitchen then you can’t have any kitchen utensils. If they’re outside they have to use whatever would be lying around, that kind of thing. And if Mark says “We’re going to do this in the middle of Times Square” then they’re less likely to have knives, except for Hit Girl, who would bring her machetes. So, I wait until the scene dictates how the violence will progress, or at least I try. The problem is that Mark will come up with a scene where he says “She should kill him with a bat to the back of the head” and now it’s in the back of my mind that that’s what he wants, and how do I go do that? I have to vary from what he has suggested and what I’ve done before. However, the good thing is that at least I have something to go by and something to differ from. So, I’ve actually helped myself in a certain way.

RS: Where do limits figure in, with an ultra-violent series like this? I’m sure Marvel has limits in terms of what they want their name on. What about you?

JRJ: We pretty much own the project, with Marvel just distributing it. And so, no, there is no limit. Quote-unquote, there is no limit. There might be a tastefulness limit, I mean we’re not going to do pornography. We’ve done some slight sexual content, but I don’t think I would ever allow it to be taken too far. I would never do that. However, there will be some naked ladies. There will be some naked butts and there will be some naked men, but there won’t be anything that I would be ashamed of. I do have my limits.

RS: I hear rumors about a new character called Mother Fucker. Does that mean anything to you?

JRJ: [laughs] It does mean something, that’s a character! Look, Mark knows what he wants and the names have to be outrageous and different, and that’s what we’re intending to do. I think the big difference between this and the first one is that there are more Kick-Asses than there were before. There are more costumed people, and some of these people are taking themselves seriously – that’s the difference between the two stories. Whereas it was a novelty in the beginning, it’s become less so now. And yes, there’s a character called Mother Fucker. Mark wants the outrage factor and the shock value involved, and that’s cool. Now I have to follow up with equally powerful costumes and visuals.

RS: You’re sort of straddling two worlds at the moment. Have you fallen in love with the movie business yet?

JRJ: I haven’t fallen in love with the business per se, but I was always in love with cinema. Getting involved in the business is something I’m guarded about. I had this project and now there is interest in other projects. Should I be able to do it a couple of times and then people start coming to me, then wonderful, but I’ve gotten one great quality from my father and that is being grounded. My feet are on the ground. I’m a cartoonist who happens to be very lucky to be in this position. If it progresses and it allows me to do something that I’ve always fantasized about, which is to direct a film, then so be it. But I’m not going to get too far ahead of myself, if you know what I mean. Now, having said all of that, yes, I would give anything to be further involved in films from here on in because I’ve always been fascinated by the process.

RS: Where do you think we are in terms of superhero movies and the public? Are people getting bored with it? Is Marvel thinking about that?

JRJ: Knowing the people who are involved in that whole spiel, I know that they’ve anticipated that people can get tired of a genre. The trick is to be ahead of that curve. Marvel has always been able to come up with good stories, regardless of the premise. If you have a costumed character, you anticipate that there are going to be some people who are wary of that, rolling their eyes. The trick is to just come up with a good story, and Marvel does that. Look, Iron Man was one that no one expected to blow up into what it became. But Tony Stark’s story is a quality story, and in no small part thanks to Robert Downey, Jr. Iron Man was never considered to be a Spider-Man-level, A-list character, but if you have good stories you have a good quality product, and that’s all there is to it.

RS: It’s funny that the most popular superheroes tend to be 40 to 70 year-old properties. Why do you think that is?

JRJ: Because it’s like coming up with a new melody for a song. To me, that seems nearly impossible. To come up with something that’s new and different has got to be so difficult, and I’m amazed whenever one does appear. And perhaps it’s because there are already so many different characters and so many different ideas that are already out there. It’s really almost impossible to come up with something new. That’s why Mark Millar is a genius and Brian Bendis is a genius – these writers are geniuses. To be able to come up with a new idea on your own is amazing.

RS: A lot of people are excited about your new run on The Avengers, alongside Brian. Are you able to say anything about forthcoming stuff?

JRJ: Just to expect the unexpected. I can’t get into details, except to say that this has it all. You have no idea how much can be put into a 23-page story until you’ve seen what Brian is asking for and what we’re delivering. I can say that the artwork is amazing because of Klaus Jansen and Dean White. And again I can say without hyperbole that Brian is really a genius, cause that’s just the way it is.

RS: Would you like to be involved in The Avengers movie on some level?

JRJ: Sure! I’d love to. If they call me, I’m ready. If they need me for something, whatever they need me to do, I’ll do it.

RS: Even though they are creator-owned, could the Kick-Ass characters ever be incorporated into the larger Marvel universe and interact with Marvel characters?

JRJ: I doubt it. I don’t know that Marvel would allow it because of the legalities of it, since Mark and I own it. The people that own Marvel prefer to only use their own stock of characters, so, on the mundane, legal scale, no. And I also doubt that it could ever fit.

RS: Do you see any drawbacks in general to doing creator-owned stuff, as opposed to working inside the big tent?

JRJ: I don’t see drawbacks in it; it really frees up the mind to come up with your own stories. However, one problem is falling in love with what you do, as opposed to seeing it in an unbiased way. You tend to think that whatever you have is quality, and you have to be able to stand back from it. If you have a creator-owned project, the writers and artists might consider it a quality story, but you have to be both subjective and objective about it. So, yeah, there are difficulties in creator-owned, it’s not easy. But I do embrace it because it frees up the genius of the creators, even though there is a danger that young creators can sometimes fall in love with what they think is a quality project.

RS: Kick-Ass is, of course, a take-off on the notion of real people putting on costumes and fighting crime. What do you think about the real-real world people who do that?

JRJ: Well, remember that before the costume craze there were, for years, patrols by people like the Guardian Angels in New York. There have always been neighborhood patrols, and now people are just putting on costumes. And I think the muggers and the burglars should be nervous. These people are not your everyday, average accountant. I’ve met a whole slew of martial artists who are now putting on costumes. I think if you have a flashlight and a mask on and you’re trying to break in through somebody’s back door, I’d watch your ass. There really are a lot of them out there now, and they will bust you up!

RS: If you had billions to spare, do you think you might become a superhero yourself?

JRJ: [laughs] Interestingly enough, I’ve considered that. If I was that rich? Yes. I would find a way to do it, I really would.

RS: What would your name be?

JRJ: I don’t know if I’d even come up with a name, I’d just want to be very quiet about it. I guess I’d be the man with no name. I’d be like Clint Eastwood in High Plains Drifter, just fading in and out, and nobody would ever know me. I’d just be very quiet. Wait, how about that: The Quiet Man.

RS: I like it.





Kick-Ass is available this week on DVD and Blu-ray.

by Brett Warner Few bands manage to perpetually frustrate their fans the way Weezer does. With each new album, singer/songwriter Rivers Cuomo – a semi-secret musical genius, we’ve been instructed to keep in mind – continues to disappoint a very vocal legion of cynical, skeptical, and especially... more

by Brett Warner

Few bands manage to perpetually frustrate their fans the way Weezer does. With each new album, singer/songwriter Rivers Cuomo – a semi-secret musical genius, we’ve been instructed to keep in mind – continues to disappoint a very vocal legion of cynical, skeptical, and especially jaded twenty-to-thirty somethings with one word on their tongues: Pinkerton. No other album in rock history (save maybe Sgt. Pepper) gets tossed around as much; you won’t find any Weezer album review after 2001 that fails to mention it. The 1996 proto-emo classic was a commercial flop upon its release, but word of mouth and the band’s 5-year hiatus lifted it to cult classic status. Its supporters tend to hail the album’s intensely personal lyrics: a smorgasbord of frustrations aimed at groupies, lesbians, Asian girls, and Cuomo’s various other insecurities. Weezer’s latest album Hurley (their first on independent label Epitaph Records) has gotten some choice positive reviews, many comparing its rougher, lo-fi sound to Pinkerton’s – but still, many rock fans seem unwilling (or unable) to give the band another chance. To them, the deeply confessional tone of Pinkerton’s songs has been replaced on post-millennial Weezer records with sarcastic, ironic, sophomoric humor – when in actuality, Weezer have never been ironic. They are quite possibly the only completely honest, agenda-less band to come out of the ’90s alternative boom. So why the shift in general cultural opinion of the group? The reason why Weezer continues to frustrate listeners is because they draw attention to the generational shift between X and Y listeners. Throughout this significant transition in social attitudes, Weezer have remained remarkably consistent – we’re the ones who’ve changed.



In his latest book Eating the Dinosaur, pop journalist Chuck Klosterman discusses this schism between Weezer’s very face value brand of rock music and a generation of kids raised on double-meanings and cultural facades:

Klosterman proposes that Pinkerton connected with listeners purely by accident; that an album so nakedly honest and personal could only be digested (in 1996) as a sort of metaphoric construct, designed for each individual listener to personalize and inhabit as their own. If anything, Weezer’s music has grown more personal and specific, to the point of alienating those who would aim Cuomo’s lyrics towards their own experiences. Like the young people that still buy their music, Weezer express themselves in an increasingly literal manner. The Gen-X art of mixtape making has been replaced by the iTunes Genius – Kurt Cobain’s diary has become Kanye West’s Twitter. Kids raised on the internet and social media view the world in a much more open, less private way than their parents or older siblings. The entire notion of a social media community – complete with stats, Likes, and moment by moment status updates – negates the imperative for artistic self expression. Why write “Across the Sea” when you can just blog about it? Rivers Cuomo’s songs have always utilized this open book approach, and as the culture began to move in that direction as well, listeners finally realized just how pedestrian and un-pretentious Weezer really are. We like our rock stars arch and otherworldly – bestowing the gift of fire to our unendowed minds – but Weezer are content to just grunt along with the rest of us cave people.

What makes Hurley an interesting new album (apart from some typically memorable tunes) is Cuomo’s new reliance on collaboration. The record features some choice guest writers (Ryan Adams, Desmond Child, Linda Perry, and Mac Davis amongst others) and as a result, is less pinned down by the front man’s narrow pop vision. Only two of the new tracks are solo Cuomo compositions – the deceptively nostalgic first single “Memories” and album highlight “Unspoken,” which starts as a modest acoustic ballad and crashes into one of the band’s hardest rocking outros. These are some of Weezer’s most open-ended, identifiable songs since probably The Blue Album. If anything will bring back their early fans (including this author), this is it. More likely, as Klosterman opines, Weezer are just doomed to frustrate fans forever. Deep down, I think you’ll find that Weezer’s grizzled old pep squad secret enjoys the constant grappling – though Rivers Cuomo, I bet, hasn’t entered any of us into the equation.

Hurley is available in record stores and online music services now.

by Suri Suicide This is the first in a series of ‘Art of SuicideGirls’ posts, which will highlight the creativity of our community members. If you’d like your work to be considered for inclusion, please reach out to Suri Suicide, who is curating the column. (image) [Kate Suicide in Hangover] Artist... more

by Suri Suicide

This is the first in a series of ‘Art of SuicideGirls’ posts, which will highlight the creativity of our community members. If you’d like your work to be considered for inclusion, please reach out to Suri Suicide, who is curating the column.



[Kate Suicide in Hangover]

Artist / SG Member Name: Kate Suicide

Mission: “I was born in Chessington – the World of Adventures – a mere stones throw from the Vampire ride, which may explain, but not excuse, my slight leaning towards the dark and the macabre. Being a strange-looking goth at school hindered my popularity, but greatly helped my creativity, as I spent many hours alone in my room, drawing, painting and listening to strange, dark music.



“It came as no surprise then, that during my mid-twenties, I was lured to Brighton, Sussex by bright and garish lights, neo-burlesque, faded glamour, strange folk and the sea air. My work is inspired by art nouveau and art deco, erotica and Japanese madness. I now reside on Brighton pier with the seagulls, and paint and draw for food, drink and cold, hard cash. When not making art, I model for other artists, write and perform music, collect strange instruments, wander around junk shops and antique stalls, and make hats out of parts of dead animals.”



Medium: Illustration and oil paintings.

Aesthetic: The strange, the beautiful and the damned.

Notable Achievement: NOT going to art school. Live illustration featured in an exhibition at the Tate Modern, London. Moving away from London, going freelance, and still being alive.



Why We Should Care: Because Kate Suicide documents a life lived passionately and well.

I Want Me Some: www.katekamikaze.com

by Tara Diane I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time trying to come up with a fricking amazing, super simple macaroni and cheese recipe. I thought I had it perfected last year, but recent revisions have proven otherwise. So, I am sharing with you, because I love you so much, my favorite artery hardening... more

by Tara Diane

I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time trying to come up with a fricking amazing, super simple macaroni and cheese recipe. I thought I had it perfected last year, but recent revisions have proven otherwise. So, I am sharing with you, because I love you so much, my favorite artery hardening formula for cheesy pasta fatty goodness.



I apologize for the lack of sex jokes and scantily-clad attire in this post – it’s been a long week, guys! Besides, this macaroni and cheese is sexy enough.

What You’ll Need:

• A standard sized box of dried shell pasta


• 2 cups milk, cream, or half and half (whatever is in the fridge is fine, though I prefer half and half)


• 4 oz. cream cheese (half a block)


• 4 oz. smoked provolone cheese


• 4-6 oz. sharp cheddar cheese (a little extra cheese never hurt anyone)


• 1 tsp. salt


• 2 tbsp. flour

1. Grate or chop up your provolone and cheddar cheeses. I bought sliced provolone because I’m lazy as shit. You don’t have to cut/grate it that finely, something around pea-sized or a little larger is fine. DO NOT buy pre-grated cheese! There are added ingredients to prevent pre-grated cheese from caking, and it’s a fucking disaster if you put into a hot cream sauce (it makes these gross chunks that look like mini tapioca pearls in bubble tea).

2. In a medium sized pot, pour in your 2 cups of milk/cream and the two tablespoons of flour. Make sure the flour is very thoroughly mixed in or else you will get nasty chunks when it heats up. Turn the heat on about medium and stir frequently.

3. In a large pot, make your pasta. I’m not going to tell you step-by-step how to make pasta. Heat, water, pinch of salt, add pasta, cook pasta, drain pasta. I have faith that you can handle that!

4. When your milk/cream starts to boil, add in four ounces of cream cheese (don’t worry about cutting it up). Stir until the cream cheese is melted and you can feel the sauce thicken up a bit. Turn heat down to low.





5. Add in your cheddar and provolone. Mix and slowly stir until it looks like sex. Turn off the heat and let it cool/thicken for about five minutes, stirring occasionally.



6. Pour your cheese sauce over the pasta and stir.



7. Have a mouth orgasm.

Have a good non-lowfat week :].

We Americans are kind of soft. When we say Machete it kind of sounds like "ma-shed-ee." When Machete himself says it, it sounds as sharp as the blade itself: "Ma-chay-tay." Danny Trejo really emphasizes the correct Mexican pronunciation of his latest character. If there were Suicide... more

We Americans are kind of soft. When we say Machete it kind of sounds like "ma-shed-ee." When Machete himself says it, it sounds as sharp as the blade itself: "Ma-chay-tay." Danny Trejo really emphasizes the correct Mexican pronunciation of his latest character.

If there were Suicide Men, Danny Trejo might be their leader. Although, he wouldn't have to worry about committing social suicide, because nobody's going to mess with him. His rugged face, chest of tattoos, handlebar moustache and long man hair have gotten him cast as bad guys in movies for the past 25 years.

Machete is a hero though. A betrayed former federale, he now works as a day laborer. Instead of Home Depot jobs, Machete finds himself hired to kill an anti-immigration senator. It's a setup though to make the senator a champion of border patrol. Well, Machete doesn't go down like that so he takes out the bad guys with his trademark blade, in over-the-top gory Robert Rodriguez style.

In the movie, Trejo wears badass leather. In person, he wore a tan suit that hid his inked up chest. Trejo was discovered by Hollywood when he was in prison, when director Andrey Konchalovskiy cast him in Runaway Train. With the success he found, Trejo has always given back, counseling inmates and drug addicts on finding the right path. Still, based on his movies, most fans might be surprised to find Trejo smiling and giggling. Guess all that badass stuff isÖ acting!

SG: Is this how you dress when you're not making movies about badass motorcycle guys?

DT: When I'm not killing people. [Laughs] Yeah, this is actually my Eddie Bunker suit. Eddie Bunker was one of my dearest, dearest friends. He always said, "Have a tan linen suit for summer days." He was a bank robber but he always dressed really well.

Suicide Girls: Who makes your suit today?

Danny Trejo: You know what? I bought it in Thailand. I saw it and he'd just passed away so I bought it in his honor and I always just wear it to nice hot summer days, special occasions because you can dress nice and even though it's hot, you're not uncomfortable. It breathes well. That's what he said, "It breathes."

SG: Another interesting thing about your appearance though is tattoos. Are you familiar with the Suicide Girls?

DT: Yes, absolutely.

SG: For us it's alternative beauty. Was it ever trouble for you having tattoos like that?

DT: No. I came from an era when tattoos meant bad. In the early ë60s, the tattoos were either if you weren't in the army, you were a troublemaker. If you weren't in the navy, you were a troublemaker. Most of my tattoos are prison tattoos, so you kind of knew I was in trouble.

SG: Do you like girls with tattoos?

DT: You know, it doesn't matter. To me, tattoos are accessories. Beauty comes from within anyway. Even though we love beautiful packaging, if they're not beautiful inside they ain't worth a shit.

SG: I know from meeting you over the years that you've been happy playing villains and badasses. How did you feel about your transition to leading hero?

DT: Well, you always bring your best no matter what you're doing. It just means you've got to bring your best every day. Usually when you have a part in a movie, you show up for three, four days, bang, bang, bang, you're gone. Well, when you're the lead, you're there every day. There's no "you're not on the call sheet." You're there because basically it's your movie. Any time I work I always work like it's my movie, so the transition wasn't bad. Everybody asks me, "Are you going to change?" I'm not changing. My situation's changing a little bit because now I can't walk down the street, but other than that, nothing's changed.

SG: Is this the first time you've been on the movie's poster?

DT: Well, I've been on other posters but never just me. People in England, boy, when I was in England doing autograph signings, people in England were getting that tattooed on their back. The picture is a gorgeous picture and Machete is the first Latino superhero. So it's kind of a unique picture and I guess they didn't want to put the Virgin Mary up there.

SG: We Americans say it kind of soft, like "ma-shed-ee." Should we say it "ma-chay-tay" like you?

DT: You know, say it however you want. Just go see the movie.

SG: Even the announcer who says Machete Kills and Machete Kills Again at the end says it soft.

DT: That's Robert Rodriguez. That's him. I didn't even know it. We were arguing who it was, who it was. Finally Robert said, "Machete, he kills the bad guys and gets the women." I thought, "Wow, it is you, Robert."

SG: After you'd done the trailer for Grindhouse, were you surprised to find out what the rest of the story was when Rodriguez finished the script?

DT: Robert and I had been talking about this movie since we did Desperado. He came up to me and said, "You know what? You're perfect for this character that I want to do. It's Machete and he's a badass. He's going to be the first Latino superhero. He doesn't take any step backwards. He stands up for the downtrodden poor." I said cool, and after we did the trailer, it kind of took on a life of its own because everybody loved the trailer. So Robert just said, "We've got to do this movie."

SG: Did you imagine back then it would have to do with immigration and a senator and border patrol?

DT: You've got to remember, the idea for the movie became a reality before any of that happened. That was just God giving us some PR I guess.

SG: Do you weigh in on the immigration issue?

DT: No. I know that smarter minds are going to prevail. Something has to be done, I don't know what. I think in the next five or six years, this whole planet is going to be changing so it's like I'm just doing whatever I can do for whoever needs help. That's what I still do.

SG: Do you still work with drug centers and prisons?

DT: Absolutely. I still work for Western Pacific Med/Corp in Glendale. I work for them and I do a lot of their PR. I work for community and schools which deals with gang intervention. I speak at high schools, junior highs, juvenile halls, youth authorities and state penitentiaries.

SG: In the last few years, have there been new ways of battling addiction or avoiding a life of crime?

DT: Right now there's a huge budget cut to cut certain modalities of drug treatment, methadone being one of them. That's going to be chaotic if that happens because right now if they cut the budget for Medi-cal drug treatment, they'll literally turn about 59,000 drug addicts loose on L.A. So the drug cartels love the fact, "Yeah, stop that" so they'll have all new customers.

SG: So not so much new methods, but there are always new problems to solve.

DT: Right, exactly. There's always new problems.

SG: Are you making progress on that issue?

DT: Well, we're dealing with Governor Schwarzenegger and we're dealing with Sheriff Lee Baca who wrote us a letter to say, "Hey, we can't do that." He understands because he's down here in the trenches. Schwarzenegger who's up in Sacramento, he's getting bad advice as to what to do.

SG: When people meet you for the first time, are they surprised that you're all smiles and laughs?

DT: Yeah, a lot of them. A lot of them don't know how to approach me so I have to disarm them immediately, just say hello. I say hello to everybody. I say, "Hi, how are you," walk up because you see people standing there with a camera and they don't know how to approach you.

SG: When did you find your peace?

DT: Oh, a long time ago. I think that when I dedicated my life to helping other people, this peace comes the minute you start helping somebody. I ran into a kid one time at about 12 o'clock at night at Jons Market in Winnetka, which is out in the San Fernando Valley. I love Jons because it used to be Vons but the Mexicans bought it. You can still see the V under the J, but I was walking across the parking lot and this kid stopped me and he was collecting the baskets. He said, "Hey, Mr. Trejo." I said, "Yeah, what's up?" He says, "I want to thank you. I was in juvenile hall two years ago and you came up and talked. You really made an impact on my life." Wow, what a blessing to be able to make an impact on somebody's life. That is worth everything in the world, just being able to make an impact on someone's life.

SG: Boy, you hear so often that helping others is the key to happiness. Who do so many people still not get it?

DT: You look in the backgrounds of all the people, especially in Hollywood, who are having problems in your lives. I'm not talking divorce and normal kind of problems. I'm talking about drugs, going to prison, going to jail. You look at them and they're not giving anything back. That's one of the reasons why. It's all selfish, self serving. It's all what do I get, what do I get, what do I get. Until you get the eye off of you and start talking about what can I do for you, that's when you find the peace. That's when life gets better.

Machete opens September 3.

William Gibson will always be the cyberpunk prophet, the man whose Hugo-winning 1984 debut novel Neuromancer, about a future underworld dystopia where radically advanced computing possibilities exist in tandem with sex, drugs and political skullduggery, introduced the notion of “cyberspace” to the... more

William Gibson will always be the cyberpunk prophet, the man whose Hugo-winning 1984 debut novel Neuromancer, about a future underworld dystopia where radically advanced computing possibilities exist in tandem with sex, drugs and political skullduggery, introduced the notion of “cyberspace” to the public and predicted the emergence of a world wide web, along with computers of ever-increasing intelligence and dubious motive. In the post-September 11th world, however, his attention has increasingly focused not on a new imagined future (the branch of Matrix-style cyber fiction his work spawned chugs along regardless) but on the complexities of the present. In a recent NYT op-ed about Google’s tightening grip on our lives, Gibson conceded that “science fiction never imagined Google” and characterized the search engine as a “coral reef of human minds” with an impact so potentially transformative that it should cause us to consider new ideas like “training wheel” identities for today’s minors, whose every stupid, impolitic thought is being cached to their potential future detriment.

Gibson’s recent fiction has echoed his contemporary concerns. His aughts-focused Bigend Trilogy (Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and the newly-released Zero History) follows the atypical adventures of a handful of iPhone-obsessed, cosmopolitan scrappers such as ex-rock star/freelance journalist Hollis Henry, myopic drug addict and talented translator Milgrim, and the titular Hubertus Bigend, an amoral advertising entrepreneur and “cool hunter” whose appearance has been described by Gibson as “Tom Cruise on a diet of virgin blood and truffled chocolates,” and whose latest ephemeral fixation in Zero History is a high-end toy called a Festo Penguin, which is a remote-controlled airship shaped like a flying bird. The rootless nature of these characters, the flexibility of their identities, the volume of cultural data they must process moment to moment: it’s all indicative of a decade of whiplash change, and one in which the future points in infinite directions, depending on your vantage point. SuicideGirls recently called up William Gibson in a Seattle hotel to discuss his current state of mind.



Ryan Stewart: How’s the room service there?

William Gibson: Well, I haven’t had a chance to get into it yet, but I think it’s going to be okay!

RS: I was surprised to learn just now, from Google, that those Festo Air Penguins you write about are real. What is it about them that fascinates you?

WG: Well, I was initially attracted by their extraordinary beauty and elegance. And I assumed that, as with everything I’ve published since Pattern Recognition, that someone somewhere will Google every term and gizmo mentioned in the book just to figure out which ones are made up and which ones are real. [laughs] If you check out any of the Festo balloon remotes, they’re just hypnotic, I think. They’re hypnotically beautiful. The company has this really interesting design philosophy, in that they base everything on biologics. They actually move because they’re like animals, not because they’re built to move like animals. They work because they’re shaped like Manta rays and penguins, and I find that to be an inherently, extremely interesting way to design. So, they’re there in the book as these gorgeous things that a very wealthy man can buy to play with, but which have been turned to comically sinister usage.

RS: Speaking of sinister, you open the book by giving the lay of the land in Myrtle Beach, where the main character is traveling, and he casually notes Confederate flags among many other details that fill that environment. I’m sure that wasn’t meant to go unnoticed, though. Was that a comment on the inescapability of geography?

WG: Not exactly, but I wouldn’t be unhappy for someone to assume that. In retrospect I think it was an instinctive move to indicate that geopolitics – even local geopolitics – survive in what we increasingly take for granted as a post-geographical world. And Milgrim is really good at noticing details, but he’s also good at not telling you what he thinks about them. [laughs] He just sort of slides it by, like ‘And there’s a Confederate flag…’ What’s more telling about that chapter for me would be the traditional concrete lawn jockey boy who’s been painted green like a Martian in order to be more politically correct. And that’s something that I’ve actually seen. That’s an option in concrete lawn jockey boys, and I assume it’s done for that reason.

RS: The recent Wikileaks scandal was also a good reminder of the continued battle for preeminence between geography and cyberspace, I think. The long arm of the law couldn’t reach him.

WG: Well, yeah, and that’s something that’s been around as a concept since the early days of the Internet, but I think it’s the biggest and bluntest example. It’s the biggest one-shot example that we’ve seen. Organized Internet piracy of copyrighted material is some ways similar, in that it can become business as usual and we can become used to it. The Wikileaks case is sort of like all of those Bruce Sterling rants about the post-national digital world. There it is – it just happened!

RS: The federal agent character in the book, Winnie, was one I couldn’t help but find irritating because of her phonetic twitter grammar, which is frequently displayed. “Where R U?” and so forth.

WG: I may have been stretching a bit, with that. She was obviously texting, in a sense. I assumed that she wouldn’t have had any presence on twitter other than as a Fed and a mom, so I gave her that texty thing, you know?

RS: Do you tend to notice that, when people you’re communicating with do it?

WG: I’ll tell you where I notice it a lot -- I notice it in Youtube comment threads. But I didn’t think that Winnie would waste the keystrokes on Milgrim until something really started happening. Actually, something I was working on last night required me to look at all the tweets that appear in the book, and her tweets do become terser, but more grammatically correct. Once she’s got something to work with, she’s sending like one-word tweets, but they aren’t really abbreviated.

RS: She’s able to get her point across.

WG: Yeah.

RS: When a pop star like, say, Britney Spears puts out an album and the song titles have those deliberate misspellings, what message do you think is being communicated?

WG: I don’t think of it as a message, necessarily, although I haven’t actually thought of what Britney or her songwriters might see as a motive in doing that. I suspect that they would be shooting for identification. They want the reader to recognize them as just another person. I think they want to be relatable.

RS: The English major in me bristles at it, I guess.

WG: I was an English major too, but I married a socio-linguist, and that sort of cured me. [laughs] It really cured me of looking down on people who don’t use proper English. Languages don’t stabilize until they’re dead. That’s rule number one of socio-linguistics. And societies that have these huge, formal governmental bodies that attempt to keep their language from changing – they have languages that change just as much as anybody else’s. Like France. So, yeah, I think that God help us, Britney Spears is what’s happening to the evolution of our language. It’s an evolution that is, in my view, nothing more than an infinite number of accidents. Some of the things that are going to change the English language are incredibly stupid. But it’ll happen because that kind of evolution works, apparently, the way biological evolution works. If we could access spoken English from fifty years from now, I’m not sure how much of it we’d be able to understand, but I wouldn’t necessarily assume that the people fifty years could be said to be speaking some degraded form of English. I mean, God only knows what the Elizabethans would think of us.

RS: The book’s ostensible subject is marketing, but not really mass marketing; you’re interested in exploring a kind of niche, anti-marketing that attracts by making a product seem scarce.

WG: Well, I’m inclined to think that many of the people I know are functionally immune to a lot of mass marketing, but they’re not immune to other kinds of marketing. And if marketing is what we now do, in our supposedly largely post-industrial society, then marketing will find new ways. People will be coming up with marketing that gets you in the places the old marketing couldn’t.

RS: Marketing that sells us on the exclusivity of a thing is something I would normally associate with the rich, but the book’s vibe seems to be that there are other, positive attributes to it, in that it can attract pro-active types. It’s deep, sociological stuff.

WG: Yeah, interviews after the fact of writing a book are difficult for me, because I don’t want to present myself as someone who knows what he’s talking about. [laughs] If a book is working for me, I sort of help it write itself. I don’t start with a number of ideas that I’ve come to and then attempt to illustrate them with an act of fiction. When I commit an act of fiction I often find within it questions that I’m unable to answer. So, my position after the fact is to gesture, to point at the text and say ‘What do you think it is?’ There’s an assumption that I serve a didactic function, but I actually don’t. My motive is just to try to get people to wonder about the place of marketing in our culture and our society. I’m not going to hand them a token that says ‘Fear marketing, flee now!’ or something like that. If we did that, how would we even make a living? It’s what we do.

RS: It’s interesting how this trilogy of present-day books you’ve now completed falls neatly within a decade that’s still very undefined. Do you imagine that this decade will continue to be thought of as a decade of interruption? The September 11th decade?

WG: I don’t know if I’ll ever live to see this, but I keep waiting for the first person to call it the turn of the century. [laughs] There’s going to come a day when someone says ‘Back at the turn of the century…’ and everybody will instantly nod and go ‘Yeah...’ and ever after we will refer to it as the turn of the century. I think that will be what we call the first ten years of this century by the time we get to the 2020s or the 2030s. As to what it will be characterized by, there’s really no telling. If I were somehow magically offered a body of knowledge from the real future, but only one body of knowledge, what I would want to know is: what do they think of us? I think that would tell me everything I need to know about where they are at, and it would tell me so much more about the world I live in than I could possibly know now, because so many things are going to happen in the meantime. History is a speculative discipline, it’s not the study of a fixed body of information. Our view of the Victorians is nothing like the Victorians’ view of themselves, and I would assume that our view of ourselves is nothing remotely like the future’s view of us. And I’m inclined to think that we know way more about the Victorians than they knew about themselves. So, I don’t see any reason to think that we know more about ourselves than the future will be able to uncover.

RS: Do you feel like you’ve been well-placed to give the aughts some degree of shaping, through your work?

WG: Well, I sort of feel like I came to it with the oven mitts of genre science-fiction, which turned out to be marvelous things with which to heft the crazy, steaming casserole of the first decade of the 21st century, the contents of which we all still find quite baffling. I basically came to the task because I had the toolkit, you know? I had my standard-issue science-fiction writer toolkit that I earned sometime around 1981, and it’s really the only toolkit that I ever learned to work with. Having been an English major, I was taught that the only way to look at the science-fiction of the past, historically, is to look at the past in which it was written, which is invariably what gave it life and meaning for its author. So, when I began to write near-future science-fiction around 1981, I was very self-conscious about that, like ‘I’m writing some 1980s science-fiction here, and one day if anyone cares to look at it they’ll have to make sense of it in terms of what was going on at the moment I wrote it.’ So, I’ve kept that awareness as I’ve kept writing, but as I’ve kept writing the world outside the window was getting weirder and weirder.

RS: Weirder in what sense?

WG : Because of exponential technologically-driven change. I would look at the imaginary future on my computer screen and then look out the window or look at CNN and think that pretty soon we’re going to be past this [piece that I’m writing]. The window or CNN will offer a higher quota of cognitive dissonance than this stuff I’m sitting here imagining, I’d think. And that was really the beginning of the project that led to these three books, although the three previous books were also a kind of conscious segue into the present, but I did it in a way that was much less obvious. Those books were set in what is essentially now, or what has become an alternate past, and the thing that I kept to myself was my assumption that almost all of the characters were characters from the day in which I was writing those books, rather than the result of any attempt of mine to imagine how someone from the near future would perceive things. A character like Rydell, the hapless policeman [in the Bridge trilogy], really feels like a 90s guy. He thinks like a 90s guy and he speaks like a 90s guy and he basically is a 90s guy – there’s a lot of that in those books. And I found that this delighted me to do that, and to my amazement nobody complained. Nobody called me on it and said ‘Why do you have these archaic protagonists running around in this near future that you want us to believe in?’

RS: Your protagonists in Zero History , along with ones in Spook Country and other books, are very cosmopolitan. Their ability to function in a culturally dense cityscape is a key to their success. Do you think cosmopolitanism should be taught? Is it a form of literacy?

WG: I suppose it is a form a literacy. I try not to be too didactic a novelist, because I think that if I was I would be serving a fairly low function as an artist. But none of us are free of our biases, and I would think that it would be quite remarkable for me to write a protagonist who was a sympathetic character to any degree, who was either a racist, a tribalist, a nationalist, or a fundamentalist ideologue. Those are negatives for me, so I guess I would see the sympathetic characters in Spook Country as being defined more by their absence of characteristics like that than by anything in particular that they are into. They all seem to be people who are, to some extent, capable of caring about the people who are immediately around them. They also tend to be what I would see as not overly ambitious, although sometimes they just kind of take off. I sort of wind a character up and then set it down in a book and it goes off and develops its own mean, competitive edge, in which case I just let it do what it’s going to do, and I think that way in the end I’ll have a more naturalistic depiction of how people actually behave.

RS: Another author recently described to me a book he’s writing, which takes place in a future decimated by worst-case scenario global warming, but that’s in the background because the characters are focused on their own lives, finding happiness. That reminded me of your work, which often deals with thriving in whatever reality is given.

WG: Yeah, yeah, and the book you describe sounds like an entirely worthy project, as described. I’ve often thought about the real future, what it might be, since that’s the way science-fiction works in our society, but the kind of book you describe is one that we too seldom see, in which there’s been some extremely big and possibly bad change, and yet if you’re shooting for high naturalism you have to depict the characters going through everything that humans go through as they grow and get old and die. It’s not all about your plot points, you know? But closer to the traditional core of genre science-fiction, it’s all about the plot. The traditional version of that [book] would be that it’s all about the climate change. And it would also be about androgenic climate change, and the characters would get some time machine and go back and kill the guy who was about to invent the internal combustion engine. That’s a deliberately childish example, but that’s closer to what genre science-fiction has done, something broad like that. There are very few books that have attempted that sort of future. It’s probably easier to do something like that with alternative histories. You change one factor and Protestantism never happens and the Catholic church is ruling the world and you come in on characters who are just fully living their lives. So, it’s been done, though we think of works like that as falling outside the genre, but nonetheless they’re obviously science-fiction.

RS: What did you think of Inception?

WG: I loved it! Loved it. And I don’t love movies because of what I imagine the director was trying to do, I just love them when they work so brilliantly. I think the previous twelve months have been a really rich film year for me, because there have been three science-fiction films that I found, for different reasons, to be wonderfully satisfying: one was Moon, one was Splice, and one was Inception . I hadn’t thought about the fact that they all have single noun titles. That’s actually kind of scary. [laughs] Inception was the action film I always wanted to see. There’ve been so many times that I’ll be watching an action film and thinking ‘I could so love this if only it was ten times smarter.’ And Inception felt that way to me.

RS: I liked it too. I thought it was bold of Nolan to sort of radically re-conceive the idea of a dream state as a kind of stable holodeck.

WG: Yeah, after thinking about it and reading some reviews, what the script suggests that they’re doing doesn’t really have much to do with any psychological model of dreaming that I know of. I say this only having seen it once, and having subsequently read quite a few reviews, although I was fortunate to see it with almost no idea of what it was about. Just through sheer luck I got a completely spoiler-free viewing, partly because I went to see it the day it came out, which is something I never do, but a friend dragged me along. What they’re doing has very little to do with any experiential model of dreaming that I’ve had in my own life of dreams. They talk about building dreams. If what the characters are saying is true, in terms of what is going on in the movie, they are making these hard constructs into which they will go and also take the victim and play some psychodrama out. But those hard constructs also aren’t really stable, because they start breaking up with spectacular and surrealistically gorgeous CG effects, for no particular reason. Somehow I don’t think that’s what it’s about. It amazes me that people approach Inception as though it were a piece of hard science-fiction, as opposed to being a Borges story. The modality that it works in is the modality of a Borges story like The Aleph or The Circular Ruins . Those are stories that are closer to myth and fairy tale than they are to hard science-fiction. So, when people attack the premise as though the premise was a failure, I think it’s probably one of those cases of the critics’ expectations being the whole thing. Maybe it didn’t meet their expectations, but that could be because it was actually something else. I loved it, and I felt this extraordinary feeling of gratitude on leaving the theater. I think it was gratitude that it had actually been possible for somebody to spend that much money on a movie that I really loved. It’s been a long time since I had that feeling.




Zero History is available in bookstores everywhere.

by SnakePlissken Growing up as a forced Catholic really fucking sucked. Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking I’m going to make a butt-fucking joke right? Nope. I was going to make a “getting up early on a Sunday” joke. It’s really the only thing worse than forced sodomy. But what... more

by SnakePlissken

Growing up as a forced Catholic really fucking sucked. Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking I’m going to make a butt-fucking joke right? Nope. I was going to make a “getting up early on a Sunday” joke. It’s really the only thing worse than forced sodomy. But what those early Sundays were great for was shit booze. A little hit of something cheap and sweet when you’re half-awake really goes well with a slice o’ Christ. To this day I still don’t mind hitting the sauce a little early on the Day of Rest. Today I choose something cheap and purple. A little something called Four Loko Uva.

According to the webshite, Four Loko Uva (a.k.a. headache in a can), is named after a Brazilian berry of the same name. I’m guessing the berry doesn’t also contain taurine, guarana, caffeine, and 12 % ABV though. Yep, this shit has all that peppy stuff blended right in, not only making the drinker asshole-loud, but not able to pass out. Great.





The Pour

That’s damn purple stuff. If it weren’t so highly carbonated I might be convinced it came out of Grimace. How much more purple could this be? And the answer is none. None more purple. It truly looks just like a glass of good ole’ store brand purple drink, from the fizzy slight head to the syrupy consistency. If I was a teenage I’d put it in a soda bottle to sneak into the school box socials, or whatever the fuck it is that kids do today.

The Aroma

When I was little, mom used to make me take a goddamn chewable vitamin every night before bed. Usually it was a cheap-o store brand that tasted like fruit-dipped asshole, but sometimes it was a Flintstones chewable. They tasted slightly less like fruit-dipped asshole, so it was a real treat. The red was the best, the purple was the worst. And when I took a whiff of Four Loko Uva I smelled Flintstones grape-dipped asshole. Shit. Behind that is the distinct twang of cheap alcohol. Slightly like the kind best reserved for cuts and bruises. Betty Ford would turn this down.

The Flavor

I hate when products call their flavor grape, or in this case compare it to grape, and it never tastes like grape. It always just tastes like purple. A weird saccharine sweet version of the fruit is what this product presents, with a noticeable aftertaste that lets you know it’s an energy drink. And the alcohol? Oh it’s there, starting a little campfire in your belly. Maybe making some s’mores. Settling in with its friends until it’s time to get tossed out like a hobo caught in a freight yard by a railroad dick. Not quite Robitussin, but not far off.

The Verdict

The devil isn’t red, he’s purple and fits in a can. This is the stuff you’d probably see shirtless guys at ICP concerts drink all day. You know the ones, they usually end up head butting a security guard or falling off of a stack of speakers. Seriously, my gut felt rough the next day after this one, so I recommend caution. It’ll hurt ya.

4/10

SnakePlissken wasn’t sure if butt-fucking was one word or simply hyphenated.

by Nahp Suicide I came across this truly unique car art while cruising online, and really wanted to share it you. The man responsible, SlAnG 500, owns and operates a car customizing shop in the OC. He’s been building show cars for 15 years, and does “the art stuff on the side.” SlAnG 500 uses nothing... more

by Nahp Suicide

I came across this truly unique car art while cruising online, and really wanted to share it you. The man responsible, SlAnG 500, owns and operates a car customizing shop in the OC. He’s been building show cars for 15 years, and does “the art stuff on the side.” SlAnG 500 uses nothing but Sharpies to do his artwork, which combines graffiti and tattoo design elements.





“The idea came from a guy in Florida that tried to do something similar a few years ago on a Lambo,” says SlAnG 500, who flipped the idea with his own So Cal graff flavor. His first Sharpie project was a friend’s M3 (pictured) that he’d just finished modifying in his shop. He started work on the front fender, and completed it eight months later.

It ended up being pretty much all pictures mixed with my designs, that’s why it took so long,” says SlAnG 500. “I drew everything freehand – no stencils, no taping, no tracing.” Consequently the project was pretty labor intensive, taking almost 600 hours to complete.

“I wanted to do something that would get my mind off of the shit I was going thru at the time,” says SlAnG 500 of his monumental Sharpie endeavor. “This was the only thing I could do and not think about anything else, due to the amount of work and concentration needed to finish such a huge project.”

The Pleasure Principle is an album that's provided its maker, Gary Numan, with both instant and delayed gratification. Three decades ago, when the now classic electro album first came out, it made a massive impact culturally and commercially. The Pleasure Principle, and the iconic single it spawned,... more

The Pleasure Principle is an album that's provided its maker, Gary Numan, with both instant and delayed gratification. Three decades ago, when the now classic electro album first came out, it made a massive impact culturally and commercially. The Pleasure Principle, and the iconic single it spawned, “Cars”, hit the number one spot simultaneously on the album and singles charts in the UK in September, 1979. The following year, the records crashed the US Billboard charts, making the painfully shy young vocalist, composer and musician a household name here too.

Numan's Kraftwerk-inspired tracks, which channeled the voice of the machine, had a raw energy and DIY aesthetic that served as the bridge between '70s punk and the early dance and hip-hop scenes of the 1980s. Indeed the bare break beats from the opening segment of "Films" (the fourth track on The Pleasure Principle) became the sample of choice for a generation of producers, thanks in part to the song's inclusion on Street Beat's tastemaker compilation series Ultimate Breaks and Beats (which served as the primary DJ and studio sample resource pre-CD).

Ironically, as the spotlight faded on Numan, the sounds he created proliferated exponentially through the fabric of pop music culture. As a new generation of producers sampled samples, the origins of these staple breaks escaped many. However those in the know - such as Basement Jaxx, Armand Van Heldon, Afrika Bambaataa and Dr. Dre - openly covered, used, credited and paid homage to Numan's body of work.

In 2002, Numan once again toped the charts in the UK with an all-girl band called the Sugababes and a song called "Freak Like Me." The track was essentially a highly produced and super slick mash-up of the top line from Adina Howard's "Freak Like Me" and the riff and groove lifted directly from "Are Friends Electric," a song Numan recorded pre-Principle with his band Tubeway Army (which first hit the #1 single spot across the Atlantic in May, 1979).

More recently, Trent Reznor outed himself as a fan, inviting Numan to perform his songs with Nine Inch Nails during the band's 2009 shows in London and Los Angeles. The strong reaction Numan received following his guest spots at NIN's four final shows in LA in particular turned heads, and a coveted invite to play Coachella this year was forthcoming. Unfortunately, fallout from a volcano in Iceland, which grounded flights throughout Europe, meant that Numan, along with several other artists, was unavoidably a no-show at the festival. However fans won't be disappointed for long, since a dedicated tour honoring the 30th Anniversary of The Pleasure Principle will stop off in 15 US cities this fall.

We called Numan up at the East Sussex home he shares with his wife and three children to talk about the shows, his music - past and present - and the realities of life beyond The Pleasure Principle.


NP: Can you talk about a little of what you have planned for this tour?

GN: We actually did it a little while ago in the UK. It was the 30th anniversary of an album called The Pleasure Principal, which first came out in '79 in England, and 1980 in America. It's 30 years since it got to number one and it's not an anniversary that's likely to come again really for me. By the time it's 40, I'm going to be 60-odd and I probably won't be doing this anymore. Even though I'm not a big fan of retro, it seemed a reasonable thing to do. We did a tour in November of last year, just doing Pleasure Principal for the first half of it, and then new stuff for the second half. And because I don't really like retro things at all really, I didn't expect to enjoy it so much, but it just seemed the right thing to do. I played keyboards and everything, and it surprised me, I actually quite enjoyed it. I think because it was a mix, the first part of the show was this particular album, which I have sort of grown to be more proud of than I was when I actually released it, and then there was new stuff after that. It felt like it was almost like a documentary set of where you were and where you are, so it didn't feel entirely nostalgic and retro, which I was grateful for.

That actually went much better than I expected. It sold really well. Then, we were going to come to America in the early part of this year to do Coachella, and to do another couple of shows. The promoters that were putting on those shows were interested in doing the Pleasure Principal thing that we've done here, and I thought it'd be cool. It was just two shows, so I didn't mind so much. Then, that got blown out because of the volcano. So now we're coming back to do it properly, and the Pleasure Principal thing seems to be kind of the vibe that everybody wants for the tour. I'm okay with that. All we're really doing is that particular album and that kind of a focus on it. It's nothing special. It's not as if we've got a massively impressive light show or anything like that. It's really concentrating on the fact that that album came out 30-odd years ago now, and a number of people have talked about it being influential, and a number of people have done covers of the songs on it, or taken samples from the songs on it. So it's become - I shouldn't say "important" because it sounds like I'm blowing my own trumpet - but it's become one of the better-known albums for this genre of music anyway. So we're kind of going out and celebrating that fact. Then, when that's done, hopefully they'll be a new album and we'll come back and do more music.

NP: It almost feels to me like that volcano was sort of serendipitous for you. 'Cause instead of Coachella, we're getting a whole tour from you in more optimal circumstances.

GN: Coachella, to me, seemed like a massive opportunity. I was absolutely, just hammered when [the volcano erupted]. Of all the weirdest things you could imagine stopping a tour, a volcano wasn't one of them.

NP: It isn't something that you'd have contingency plans for.

GN: It wasn't top of my list when I woke up that morning and thought, "What's going to go wrong today?" It felt like a massive opportunity and the fact that the two shows they'd put either side of it, or with it, both sold out, for me was quite a good thing. It's not as if they were massive venues or anything, but none-the-less, for me, that was a step forward. Because the last time I was there, it wasn't that great to be honest. I began to feel that it was all over for me. It feels a lot more positive now. I did the Nine Inch Nails thing last year and got a lot of positive feedback from that.

NP: Right, you got up on stage with Nine Inch Nails and performed some of your songs while they were on tour in LA.

GN: We did it here first. Trent invited me along to the O2 in London, which is a big place, and that was just brilliant. I actually couldn't believe how kind the audience was. Because if it was me, and I was going to see Nine Inch Nails and somebody stood up and did two non-Nine Inch Nails songs, I don't know if I'd be very happy about it to be honest. I was kind of expecting that sort of a reaction really, but, it actually went really, really well and I was kind of blown away by that.

Then Trent invited me over to do the American part of it as well, doing a very similar thing, just going on and singing a couple of songs. Because the London experience was so good, I was really keen to do that. But I could only do the Los Angeles things because of other commitments. I came out and did the last four shows that they did. Again, it was just a brilliant experience, because Nine Inch Nails are my favorite band anyway. I'm a huge admirer of Trent Reznor's, so to be involved at that moment, at that sort of level, was just a real honor. I was massively flattered and in awe of the whole thing really. It was just really, really cool. But the spin on from that, the effect that that's had on me and the opportunities that have come to me since then, have been really noticeable. That's why, not only was I in awe of it at the time, I'm really grateful for it now. It's been just a brilliant experience from beginning to end.

NP: How did the Trent thing come about?

GN: A long time ago, we were doing a show in Baton Rouge, near New Orleans, and he had come to see us with Clint Mansell [of Pop Will Eat Itself].

NP: Was that during your 2006 tour?

GN: I think it might have been the one before that actually.

NP: Wow.

GN: I can't remember when it was. He was making the The Fragile anyway, so it was before that actually. He bought me a cover version that he'd done of a song of mine called "Metal," and it was just brilliant. I was blown away by that - not just the fact that it was so good, but the fact that they'd even bothered to do it. I just thought it was the coolest thing ever. So I got to know him a little bit then, and whenever they came here to play I would go and see them and I would meet up with him. So it's kind of, not a close relationship, but it was friendly and ongoing.

Then, when they was doing that last tour, somebody sent me an email saying that there was a link on YouTube of them doing the "Metal" song live. Because my wife is an absolutely obsessed Nine Inch Nails fan and she knows Trent obviously through me, she got in touch with Trent via the tour management and said, "are you going to be doing it in London," because I was coming, and "wouldn't it be a good idea if..." All behind my back. I had no idea she was doing it. The first thing I know, I got an email from Trent saying it was great idea. I didn't even really know what he was talking about, then it all kind of fell into place. It was just brilliant. I would've never have had the courage to ask myself, and it was such a great thing to do, and, as I say, it sort of went on to even better things. So I'm very grateful to my wife really, for being sneaky.

NP: [laughs] Ah, women, you can't trust 'em.

GN: [laughs]

NP: I guess Trent's got a little bit of time on his hands now he's knocked the Nine Inch Nails thing on the head. Are you guys going to be collaborating on your new album?

GN: I don't know about the new album. When I was with him in September, we went out for an evening and he said at the end of that we should do something together, but that we should do something that nobody expects. Not a continuation of what I've done, or a continuation of what NIN has done, but something completely different that would surprise people. But since then, obviously, he's done the [How To Destroy] Angels thing, and he's doing a film score I think with Atticus Ross at the moment. So I know NIN are quiet, [but] Trent is as work obsessed as ever. Pinning him down to actually say what days could we do it is a little tricky in itself. But hopefully when we go back there on this tour we'll be able to meet up with Trent. We've got some time in Los Angeles so maybe we can meet up and maybe get some tracks done. I hope so. I'd love to. For me it'd be a great thing to do. But I wouldn't ever want Trent to feel like I was pushing for it or using it in any way. So I'm very passive with the whole thing. I guess, I want it to happen...

NP: But you're being very British about it.

GN: [Laughs]

NP: Don't want to presume.

GN: Yeah, a bit I guess. I just wouldn't want him to think that I was using him to try to advance myself, so I'm absolutely not pushy. I just have to hope that I don't go so far in the passive way that it looks like I'm not interested.

NP: Exactly. It's so weird, Americans see being pushy as a virtue whereas English people would be horrified if they were ever considered to be such a thing.

GN: It's weird, I don't really understand the American psychology at all. I'm so British through and trough. I really struggle, and I'm quite shy anyway. I'm not bristling with confidence or ego. I'm actually quite laid back and shy about the whole thing. Like I said, I would never have gone on stage if it hadn't been for my wife being pushy behind my back. That would never have happened. I would never have thought, never dreamed of actually asking if I could come and sing one of my songs on his show. I'd rather poke myself in the eye with a needle than do that.

NP: I have to say though, I was doing some research last night and I was watching an interview with you on Graham Norton's show a couple of years ago. What really struck me was that you seemed so much more happy in your own skin now then you were when you first had success back in the late '70s, early '80s. You seemed very relaxed and comfortable, and actually at the point where you were finally able to enjoy your success.

GN: Yeah, I think that's true. I think when it first happened, well, first of all, it happened very quickly. I think that's always a bad way to have it. If you could ever choose, then I would choose a slower line to success. I went from being completely unknown to number one in about two weeks. From my first TV appearance to being number one was two weeks, and then I was massive everywhere. That's quite a lot to take in, especially when you're a solo act. It's not as if you're part of a band and you can share the burden, share the worries, and the stress, and the shock of it. It's quite a lot to take in. I was with a brand new record company that had no experience either. I didn't have a manager. I was looking after myself. I felt very much out on the deck. Almost immediately I was plunged into something that I was totally unprepared for and totally ill-equipped to deal with. Although I was 21, which seems quite old these days compared to the age of some people that have become successful, to me, it was very young. And, I was a young 21 as well. I was a very immature, childish 21.

Where I should've just been enjoying every moment of it and just having the best time of my life, I was panicking and worrying, and kind of overawed by the whole thing, and intimated for much of it. I said some stupid things, and certainly did stupid things. I've got no sensitivity. I'm Asperger's, so I don't really understand subtlety and interaction too well. There's a lot of personal communication skills that I think are very important if you do this for a living, if you want to have a relatively easy ride through it - and I have none of them. I think people found me abrasive or obnoxious or whatever - and I'm really none of those things - I just don't know how to be.

That's become better as I've gotten older. What was shocking at first isn't anymore because you've been doing it for such a long time you kind of get used it. I think that's what happened now. Now I'm comfortable, and, of course, it's at a much lower level now. It's nothing like it was in those days. So all the weirdness that goes with being that successful that young isn't there anymore. It's kind of settled down to a more pleasant, bumbling along kind of path really. It's just easier now. If I go out, people don't scream and faint and all that sort of stuff. They just shake your hand and say hello. It's a much easier way to be, 'cause I'm nowhere near as successful as I used to be. All that's kind of tailed off now.

NP: Well you say that but in England you had the number one with the Sugababes. America didn't experience that, which is a shame because I loved what they did.

GN: I love what they did. I thought it was great. When that happened and it went to number one, I was doing lots and lots of interviews at the time, and almost everybody was prodding me to say something bad about it. To ridicule the Sugababes, or to just be a shit in one way or another. I couldn't understand why people wanted that, and I didn't have any of it. I don't think I've ever said a bad word about it because I don't have a bad word to say about it. I thought they did a really good job. I thought the music sounded really good, even though it was 20, 25 years after I'd first written it. I was fine with it. I thought it was great.

I remember I went to see The Mission in London, because I know Wayne Hussey really well, and I had goth girls coming up to me in the crowd, giving me a hard time because of the Sugababes. I thought, how snobby is that? ...Because you've got pink hair and wear black clothes, doesn't mean to say that your taste in music is the only valid taste there is. I just don't like the attitude anyway. There's lots of things that I don't like. I actually have very narrow taste in music, but I don't go around slagging off the things that I don't like because there's something for everyone. I'm quite tolerant. [laughs] God, that's not the right word is it?

NP: Ah, tolerant works.

GN: I wouldn't put people down because they like things that I think are dreadful. You get what you can out of life through music or anything else. You find what you love.

NP: What can we expect from the new album? 'Cause musically, you've made a progression and your later work is very different from what people perceive as the classic Gary Numan from the Pleasure Principal era.

GN: Well the last two or three albums that I've done, I've actually been really happy with where I've gone. I like the direction of them, and I like the whole feel of it after certain music that I've been into for the last 10 years or so. All I want to do with the next one is just do it better. I want it to be darker, heavier, and more menacing. More epic, if you like, in terms of light and shade. I want to do what I've done before but better. I also want to make it much more aggressive, much more powerful, almost like a wall of noise. That's a very bad description, but it's kind of the way I feel it in my head. It's just everything that I've done, but more of it, you know, darker, heavier, and so on. I'm very bad explaining music I'm afraid - that's about as good as it gets.

NP: What's inspiring you lyrically?

GN: For a quite long time I've been having a bit of an issue with religion and so on, but I think I've done it to death.

NP: Right, 'cause you are famously an atheist.

GN: Yeah. Yeah. A few years ago, me and my wife, we couldn't have children naturally, or at least we couldn't for a while, so we did IVF. We were very lucky, in the first attempt that we had IVF, Gemma got pregnant. But then there was something that was really horribly wrong with it, and it was just horrible, and then it died. It was all heart breaking stuff, and I remember getting messages from people telling me how much god loved me. And [I'd think], "Fuck off." For that reason it just really got to me and I was on a bit of a crusade with it. But I just think I've done it a lot now. I feel like I've explored [it]. I could actually write songs about it until the day I die because it's an unending sort of inspiration, but I think, from a fan's point of view, I've probably done it enough or too much actually. So where I go next is a bit different.

With the last album, Jagged, I tried to look at some of the more bizarre people that I've met over the years, and the things that they were into and that kind of stuff. I magnified it a little bit for the sake of entertainment, but, none-the-less, you're looking back into your own past and the people that you've met through the last 20-odd years or so. 'Cause there's been some peculiar and frightening people at various times, that were into some strange and interesting things. I thought I'd write about that a bit, but I recon about a third of it was still going back into the god thing.

But the next one, I actually don't know yet to be honest. For me, the lyrics come at the very end of the album, so it's one of those things that I don't necessarily have to think about too soon. The music is well underway now, but the music is all done with working titles. Then the lyrics, they come towards the end of it, [and] the proper titles come from that.

NP: So you make the tracks, and then you do the top line melody and lyrics on top of the tracks at the end?

GN: I do the top line right at the beginning. I'll have a vocal line and the melody, sometimes quite complex multiple melodies going on, but I won't actually have any lyrics for them. I'll just sing noises. You know when you're laying out text when you're laying out magazines, it looks like weird Roman shit?

NP: Right, you just use dummy text.

GN: It's like an audio version of that. That way you get to know what type of word will fit a certain part of the song. I've never done it the way where you write lyrics first and then you make the music fit. I write the music first, get the atmosphere, the mood, get all that sorted out first. Then the lyrics will just flow because that bit of music puts you in a certain frame of mind anyway and that automatically takes you towards a certain type of lyric, word or feeling. For me, it's just a natural progression. The mood creates the lyric, rather than trying to create a mood because of a particular lyric. I actually don't know what's normal. To me, that seems quite an obvious way to do it. I know other people do lyric first.

NP: I think each to his own process. Sonically, I know that you've flipped between synth-based and guitar-based music. Where on that scale is the new music falling?

GN: I would say it's getting more and more synth-based with the new one, far more electronic. The guitar is still going to be a part of it, but the emphasis is swinging very much back to - not synth necessarily - but just noises. Noises and weirdness, and that kind of thing, rather than guitar grooves. Although the one I wrote yesterday is a guitar groove, so I'm still doing that. It's not that it's going to be all synthesizers, it's where the main focus of it switches. I think the last one, certainly the one before that and the one before that, were very much a guitar emphasis, but now it's swinging very much the other way again.

NP: Being a gear head, is there a particular piece of equipment that's exciting you right now?

GN: As far as hardware, I'm still using a thing called Access Virus, which is a brilliant, brilliant keyboard. It's too damn unreliable for taking out live, but it actually puts out some really good noises. I love that. In terms of hardware, that's the only one that I'm into for the minute; Software-wise, quite a few things really. Omnisphere, obviously, which I think everyone has now and knows about. That's just absolutely awesome. And there's a company called Native Instruments who've got a series called Kontakt. There's actually seven now, but I bought Kontakt 6, which is actually an array of different bits of software that all do certain things. That's absolutely brilliant. That and Omnisphere are the background of all the new stuff.

NP: Outside of music, you were also known for playing with some pretty spectacular toys. Are you still flying?

GN: Not too much now, no. Since the children come along there just isn't the time. Whereas before on a Saturday morning you'd wake up and if it was a nice day you'd go down the airfield with your airplane, or you go off to do a air expo in Europe or somewhere. You'd be away with the airplane for the whole weekend, doing all your loop-the-loops and all that kind of stuff, you know, really exciting. Now, you wake up on a Saturday morning and the kids want to go to the beach, or the kids want to go to the park. Your life becomes totally dominated by these little things who just get whatever they want really.

NP: What crazy things do the kids have you doing? What are they into?

GN: Honestly, it's a two-month cycle of obsession. At the moment it's horses, everything's all about horses for one of them. The other one is Thomas the Tank [Engine], so today they've been out to a park near here that's got a Thomas the Tank train that runs around.

They've been through dinosaurs. We've been up to the museums in London looking at dinosaur bones. That was a big thing for a bit. Then it was Pink. We had to go to London and watch Pink in concert, which [my daughter] got halfway through before she fell asleep. Then we had the Madonna period, we've had a Gwen Stefani period. They're quite musical, we've have lot of musical periods.

NP: You've got two daughters?

GN: Three. All young.

NP: Surrounded by girls.

GN: Yeah. Fantastic. [laughs] It is actually. It is fantastic. But, I'm surprised at how much they fight - just the amount of time - you could say almost every minute of the day. Even working is a problem. Just trying to get out to write songs, because your days are now broken up into chunks. You might have an hour here and a couple of hours there. Before I'd get up in the morning and I just had all day to do nothing but think about songs and spend time in the studio working on ideas. It's not like that now, and I'm useless when it comes to working in chunks. So my actual amount of output, if you like, the amount of work that I'm doing, is just a fraction of what it used to be. And that's a problem, 'cause I'm not the youngest thing in the world and I need to be working as hard as possible because I don't know how many years I've got to still do it, and the opposite is happening. I'm genuinely worried about it. I don't know what to do. I love them so much and I don't want to not be there and not be a part of their lives - especially at this stage when they're so young - but I've got to work to give them the life I want to give them.

NP: I guess that's why a lot of artists hole themselves away while they're recording albums, just so they can have a period of concentration.

GN: I could see that. For me, the compromise would be if I had a studio, even if it was just a mile away, but so you can go out to work in the morning. So you leave the house, and you leave all their little things. Not that I want to leave, I don't mean that, but I need to get away. I need to go somewhere. At the moment I've got a studio in the garden, and it's just pointless. You go out to the studio and two minutes later they're knocking on the door [and they're going], "Can I have some orange?" They've had to walk past their mom to come and ask me. Then they want to sit in and watch, and then they never do. They start pressing things and chatting. It's lovely, but it's so not conducive to actually writing songs.

NP: Well Virginia Woolf said it, an artist needs a room of one's own. You need a space where you can lock yourself away from distractions.

GN: Yes, absolutely true. Distractions, they will kill your career more than anything else you could ever do.

NP: I think that's often the battle artists have, because you feel selfish asking for that, but it's essential for an artist's soul just to be able to lock yourself away and create. Like you say, you want to be able to give your kids the life that you want them have, and that does require that you to allow yourself to be selfish, and I guess that's the hardest thing.

GN: Yes. Yes, that's exactly right. It's one of those things that it's easy to say, but it's much, much harder to actually do, and I still haven't got on top of it. You know, my oldest is just coming up to 7, so I don't know if I ever am going to get on top of it. The amount of songs that I'm writing now is nothing. In 1979, I think I wrote three albums in a 12-month period. I'd be lucky if I write an album within five years now. I want to. I love it just as much as I ever did, but there's all this other life stuff that gets in the way.

NP: The ironic thing is that although you might not be making any new tracks yourself, other people are making new tracks using your music. So probably in terms of where your music appears, you've probably got one of the highest outputs of any artist ever. And knowing where you come from, understanding what Essex represents, it must be so bizarre for you to have the likes of GZA from Wu-Tang Clan, Afrika Bambaataa and Dr. Dre using you as an inspiration for their music - all of these hip hop greats who couldn't come from a more opposite world.

GN: Yeah, it's great. Again, like the Nine Inch Nails thing, it's incredibly flattering and all that. I do not take it for granted. Every time I hear that someone else has sampled something or covered something, I get a huge grin on my face. I'm really, really proud of it, and I ring up my mates and tell them. I do think of it as a cool thing, and I'm still shocked that it happens. I think that my mental attitude, or self-awareness if you like, is still very much the same as it was when I was 19 or 20. I go into a studio and do my best to write the songs that I write, and I just hope that people like them. I have no expectations whatsoever.

When people like what you do, it's nice to see that. I'm genuinely surprised and pleased about that. I don't expect it. I think that's one of the reasons why I've handled the years that have not been so good, when the press have not been so kind, because I didn't really expect anyone to like what I did anyway. So if I get a bad review, I've almost been expecting it. I'm not crushed by it. You see what I mean? I think there's other people that are far more confident than I am, which I envy, but when they get a bad review, they're staggered by that, that somebody could actually not like what they did. And they're ruined people, sometimes forever, and I'm so the opposite of that.

NP: It's actually good that you expect the worst because then when the best happens, you actually enjoy it. Whereas someone that's over confident and expects the best and gets the worst, they just don't enjoy any of it.

GN: I don't do it for the praise either. I don't do it to get good reviews and for everyone to know who I am. I do it because I love doing it, first and foremost. To me, what I do for a living is a lovely big cake, and if you get a good review, or if something sells particularly well, that's just like the icing on the top. I actually love doing what I do anyway. I would choose to do this for a hobby even if I couldn't earn a living from it. I'm just happy that I get up in the morning and then, apart from having to take the kids to the park, I can pretty much do what I want. I have that kind of the freedom in life, which I don't think many people really have. I massively appreciate that, and you don't have to be the biggest thing in the world to have that, to have that kind of a life. I think very early on, I recognized that and enjoyed it.

I'm very realistic. When you're touring, for me anyway, you're in a lovely big bus. You're with your mates. My wife comes with me, so everything is cool. You're going out, you're traveling all over the world, which I love to do anyways. You're going on stage each night and playing your songs to people that like them. That's a pretty brilliant way of living. I've got no qualms with it. I never quite understand all these people who hate touring and say it's very stressful and that sort of stuff. I don't really get that. I think it's a great thing to do and I love it.


The US Pleasure Principle tour kicks off at Club Firestone in Orlando, FL on Oct 17. For full tour dates visit GaryNuman.co.uk.

Russell Simmons sat all by himself at NBC's party on the rooftop of the Beverly Hilton hotel. Well, not totally by himself. The young girls he came with were talking amongst themselves, and celebrities kept stopping by to meet him (hence the photo opp with Jimmy Fallon). The Oxygen Channel, an NBC... more

Russell Simmons sat all by himself at NBC's party on the rooftop of the Beverly Hilton hotel. Well, not totally by himself. The young girls he came with were talking amongst themselves, and celebrities kept stopping by to meet him (hence the photo opp with Jimmy Fallon).

The Oxygen Channel, an NBC cable arm, is producing a documentary on Simmons' business. Running Russell Simmons shows the viewer what it takes to maintain Simmons' multi-faceted life, by following the assistants who coordinate all his endeavors behind the scenes. It is scheduled to premiere Nov. 2.

Even with all of Simmons' productions in music with the Def Jam label, its on air components like Def Comedy Jam and Def Poetry Jam, business isn't even the most interesting thing about Simmons. He's a vegan, he's an animal activist, he's an author, he has several clothing lines. He may be one of the biggest philosophers of the times. He practices Buddhism, yoga and meditation, and his work is layered with philosophy. His biography, Do You, talks more about spiritual peace than running a record label.

Everything Russell Simmons says is wisdom, so if he's sitting on the roof by himself, you take that opportunity and learn as much as you can from him. The questions aren't even really that important. Just get Simmons talking about philosophy, music, politics or dating. So let's get started.

Fred Topel: How has your philosophy evolved since Do You?

Russell Simmons: It hasn't. The thing is for me I've been reading the same scripture over and over again and I can't make sense of it but the simplest thing I can say is the book is called Super Rich, the new one. The state of needing nothing is rich, obviously, right? So Super Rich is a state of consciousness, like Nirvana, like Samadhi, like Christ Consciousness, the idea being hyper sensitive and focused. The road to enlightenment is paid with riches, right? The idea that you give it all away or I couldn't care less or don't need to hold onto it are so free that it keeps coming. You can't give it away and it keeps coming, that idea is different from what The Secret or other Christian self help books talk about because we know that you can't pray for shit, and if you do, when you get it, it won't make you happy. It's a funny thing. A lot of these books that talk about the state of consciousness that attracts all these things actually act like the end all is the thing that it attracts instead of the state itself. So it's kind of a funny book but it's kind of a simple book and it's a how to book again. The publishers think it's much better than the last one. I get a lotta, lotta, lotta people and it's selling more now than it did when it came out still. Not right when it came out obviously but when it became a best seller. So I'm excited about the new one and the book coincided with this TV show.

FT: It's funny you mention The Secret because I got a lot out of that too, and I don't see it as a way to get stuff.

RS: I don't mean to limit it. I mean that the essence of everything that The Secret is talking about, The Secret itself is what we call the Atman or the Self or God. I think that they say that but they play the second fiddle to what you can achieve in the world as a result of this consciousness. Instead of saying needing nothing, operating from abundance not as a way of attracting things but as a natural state, it happens as a byproduct of all the things you talk about. I think maybe even Oprah when talking about The Secret, said The Secret is God. I don't mean God, that scary God or the outside of you God but the connectivity self. The core of The Secret is that connectivity.

FT: Yeah, my relationship with God is not someone who punishes you for doing things he doesn't like.

RS: No, I don't think like that. I don't even think of God as outside of me. I think God's a big living breathing everything that we're connected to and the more we realize that connection, the more obviously "powerful" we are. Even to the state of Christ Consciousness, the miracle workers. Samadhi refers to a state, the Yogis refer to a state that's not just enlightened where you walk around and you're comfortable in your skin. Beyond that, it's enlightened where you can actually perform miracles. That's the last stage of Samadhi. It's documented in all the scripture, that mysticism. So if you don't achieve that state while you're walking around right now, certainly on the way to it you become so much more powerful. That's all you have to know. The book's about that.

FT: People who are interested in spirituality might be more accepting about giving up material wants. How can you give up that longing for another person in relationships?

RS: I'm a big meditator and I believe in it. I believe the more secure you are in yourself the more you can love someone without having to be with them and the more you can be free to really give and not worry about receiving love so much. You really get it just by your presence alone. Somebody that exudes love attracts anything they want to. So just like the thing that you think you want as you become less attracted, operate from more abundance, more love inside. Everything just comes. Never mind not being perceived as needy. What we're trying to get to is letting go of some kind of suffering. It's easy to talk about letting go of suffering, "Oh, forget it." It's easy to say it but the best way to help someone else to get rid of it is to get rid of it for yourself. So go find a place and serve and it'll help you to leave yourself.

FT: Which of your many, many projects has the most focus for you right now?

RS: Well, I want to make sure I don't fuck this reality show up because it's obviously putting myself and all my businesses at risk. I've got to make sure I watch the editing and watch everything.

FT: Are you still concerned about coming off well with all acclaim you've had over the years?

RS: No, no, I don't think that. I'm already fucked up. There's nothing they can say about me. I already fucked everything up already that way. I mean I'd like to make sure I do the right thing for all the companies that I represent, all the charities that I care about. I'm responsible to a lot of a people for a lot of shit.

FT: You must be expert in post production though.

RS: A little bit, a little bit. I'm working on it. I'm not an expert but I'm working on it. I know what I want for myself. I wouldn't say I was good at doing derivative shit so I've got to always fight the urges of everybody around me to do derivative stuff.

FT: You're so open already, what will we be surprised to learn in the show?

RS: I don't know, you read my books, I read my own shit and my own Twitter. Language is a funny thing. I don't write my message with a lot of foul language often, but when I'm describing the Bhagavad Gita I noticed re-reading the book, being proofread now, it's like, "Krishna said, 'Nigga' go out there'" No, Krishna didn't say, "Nigga' go out there." In my book, that's in there the way I describe Krishna and teaching Arjuna yoga on the battlefield. The Bhagavad Gita is the story where Krishna teaches Arjuna yoga on the battlefield. The language that I use and in my show, when I read it it's kind of shocking. So on the show, to actually see my language, my real talk, it may be difficult to take, it may not be. It may be just enough personality so people can digest a lot of, not preaching, but a lot of yoga, a lot of prayer, a lot of animal rights, a lot of human rights, a lot of gay rights. So real language and also the fact that I struggle with women. Buddha didn't stop struggling with women until enlightenment. That was his last problem. I'm single. I was married a long time to a lot of girls. That's kind of a funny thing. Some are yogis, some are really sweet vegan but there's been a lot of them and until I actually found a girl I'm starting to see now more at the end of the show, but all through the show I had too many dates.

FT: Where does a man like you meet someone you can trust?

RS: I'm pretty open minded. Simone [Reyes] thinks I'm a little open minded. I meet girls who say, "Oh, I'm a vegan, I'm a yogi, I just came back from a meditation retreat." Simone says, "That girl's a coke whore from Hell." I don't care if they're vegan or yogi around me. It's fine. Do you. If you want to go on a yoga date and go to a vegan restaurant, and if you're fine and successful and smart, you want to do all that for me, keep doing it. See how long you can keep it up. How many yoga classes can you take and how many vegan meals can you eat? I don't know. I mean, some girls I see after I break up with them, they're still vegan later. That's okay.

FT: Do you ever laugh when someone just puts on the wrong act to try to impress you?

RS: I don't laugh. I don't know, I live with it.

FT: Language is a funny thing too because we can never quite express our feelings in words. Is that something unique to the complexities of English?

RS: I don't know, I'm not a language expert at all. I know about English and poetry a little bit, not much of that. I express myself, people say I was vulgar sometimes but I'm more concerned with the suffering of animals than I am about what curse words I use. I'm more disappointed when I see somebody eat a steak than I am if I see somebody use a cuss word, that's for sure.

FT: What is the legacy of Def Jam today?

RS: I don't know. Def Jam Rap Star comes out at the beginning of the Fall [October 5]. That's a big deal. It's a video game but it's a big game. It's like a brand new creative update to whatever Karaoke was supposed to do, it does it. It makes videos. Def Jam, hopefully what I'm doing will be Poetry stuff right now, we're shooting for . We still do stuff and we'll hopefully keep making good records and stick with the work we want to do. I still own the name Def Jam for all these other creative things. I don't have that many ideas for it actually because I'm not that much into youth culture like that. I'm into an urban graduate culture I guess. I would say that my clothing company is urban graduate. Hip hop got older. Some of the older shit, I think you don't have to give up Phat Farm[/url when you're President Obama and put on Ralph. You can put on Argyleculture. Or I can do things that speak to that grown up hip hop audience that's so big and so underserved. You have to grow up out of the 80 clothing companies that were made for hip hop and then have to wear Ralph. You don't have to do that. There's something new. There's some new cultural phenomenon that's integrated and cool. Adam Sandler doesn't have to keep wearing Phat Farm. I know he's a comedian but shit, he can wear new shit.

FT: What are you wearing?

RS: Argyleculture, my own stuff. Or American Classic which I made for Walmart.

FT: Music today is going in such a rhythm intensive direction with a lot of electronic sound. How can someone who's interested in more traditional music learn to appreciate the new styles?

RS: You ain't got to hear them. Fuck them. You like what you like. Enjoy it. Whatever makes you feel good. I heard a 50 Cent record, "I Get Money," I was so excited I almost jumped out the window. When he made "I Get Money," it sounded like a Public Enemy record or an old hardcore record, I loved it. I like "New York" by Jay-Z but I don't always like the new shit. I try to like everything but I don't try hard. I listen, sometimes I don't like it. I don't feel bad if I don't like it.

FT: I don't feel bad but I'd like to appreciate what's out there.

RS: I want to be young too. I mean that. I like being with new shit. I like new shit but if I don't like it, if I don't get it, I don't think I'm going to get too old and die. I like Delfonics records and Blue Magic and shit like that a lot.

FT: Are you working on anything to help the cause of gay marriage?

RS: A lot of gay rights, yeah. I'm a big gay rights activist.

FT: Is there something new we can do to push that cause?

RS: I wrote a letter to the president and put it on the cover of about Lt. Choi. That was fucking horrible. In America now, you let that happen on your watch? No. Do something. Give him a pass. You're fucking president. Write him a letter like Kennedy wrote a letter to Martin Luther King. Even if you don't do shit, write him a letter, "I'm sorry for you." Do something.

FT: What do you think it will take to finally make this inevitable change happen?

RS: It is inevitable. It'll be fine but it's not fine. People live and die and they're discriminated against. So everything's fine later? What, next generation? You've got to live a whole life full of discrimination? You're going to die and be discriminated against? People always say, "Oh, things are better." Also the disconnect in African-Americans and education and poverty and unemployment, it's horrible, man. It's horrible. I think we've got to do something about it. I think we say, "Oh, how'd it get this way?" It got this way because they've been through a lot of shit and they suffered and they were disconnected. They're humans and they obviously had a problem. When you see the black community and Mexican community, stop bussing people, stop immigrating, that's horrible.

FT: Are there things you're happy with Obama for doing?

RS: Yeah, crack cocaine reform. Yeah, I'm happy with a lot of what Obama's doing. I'd just like him to stand up and be a little bit more aggressive, that's all. And I think it's tough because he doesn't have a support system. These Democrats[/url are green. They're not blue.

FT: Do you think he could possibly lose re-election?

RS: I hope not. Not if I can help it. I'm going to go on the road and break my neck for him.

FT: Are we actually making progress on the economy?

RS: I don't know. I mean, I built a company to help underserved communities just because I know that they're suffering and they need it. Find creative ways to help people come out of the poverty or help them and support them and protect the little money they do have, the little infrastructure they built.

Running Russell Simmons premieres on Oxygen on Nov. 2. Super Rich is in stores Jan. 4, 2011.

It's been over a decade since Lincoln Park released their debut album, Hybrid Theory, which spawned the breakout, radio-friendly crossover hits "Crawling" and "In the End." The SoCal rock/rap band, whose vocal interplay between singer Chester Bennington and rapper Mike Shinoda... more

It's been over a decade since Lincoln Park released their debut album, Hybrid Theory, which spawned the breakout, radio-friendly crossover hits "Crawling" and "In the End." The SoCal rock/rap band, whose vocal interplay between singer Chester Bennington and rapper Mike Shinoda became their sonic signature, have come a long way since then.

But though Linkin Park's subsequent full-length offerings, Meteora (2003) and Minutes to Midnight (2007), were solid performers, they failed to match the excitement of the band's initial release. Consequently, when we were invited to a special laser listening event a week ahead of the street date for Linkin Park's fourth studio album, A Thousand Suns, we weren't sure what to expect. However, the album - and its presentation - quite frankly, blew us away. And, judging by the reactions of those gathered at Hollywood's Music Box Theatre, we weren't the only ones who felt that way.

Though not strictly a concept album, in an age of single song MP3 downloads, A Thousand Suns is somewhat of a concept by default - being a collection of tracks that are specifically intended to be listened to old-school style, in order, in their entirety. Having toyed with the idea of not even breaking A Thousand Suns into separate song files, the band chose to premiere the album in front of a select group of fans and press at the aforementioned listening party by playing it from start to finish, with Pink Floyd-style laser visuals serving to focus minds and energy, and underscore the vintage Dark Side of the Moon-style album effect.

Less than a week later, Lincoln Park similarly exceeded expectations when they performed the first single off the album, "The Catalyst," during MTV's 2010 Video Music Awards. The epic performance, which was broadcast from the iconic Griffith Park Observatory, surprised fans and non-fans alike.

We caught up with the Lincoln Park's frontman, Chester Bennington, by phone to find out how the band busted out of their music box.

Nicole Powers: Congratulations on the new album.

Chester Bennington: Thank you.

NP: It's kind of weird, because when you came on the scene you were known as this pop/rock/rap hybrid combo, but you've gone somewhere very different with this album.

CB: We decided that we were not comfortable falling back on the things that were obvious in terms of the way that we write music. Stylistically and creatively when the natural obvious thing is to go with big heavy guitars on the chorus, then let's not do that. Let's go do something else and see if we can still achieve that energy without using all of our old tricks.

NP: In 2008 you announced that this fourth release was going to be a concept album. Is that still the case for you?

CB: We kicked around the idea of making a concept record and that was something that seemed like it would be challenging and it would create an album that could be recognized as something that should be listened to as a whole. That was something that was interesting to us.

When we started writing, we went into the studio and we were like, okay, let's not think about song structures. Let's not think about things that we always think about. Let's not run it through our song mill, so to speak. Let's just let things flow and be free. So when we threw the rule book out, then the idea of the concept record now felt like we put ourselves creatively in a box.

The appealing thought of making a concept record became unappealing, because now all of a sudden we have to write all these songs about one specific story. That limited us in our minds too much creatively. So what we did is we decided to focus on creating sounds that were interesting to us, that were different...and just let the songs become the songs that they want to become.

Interestingly enough, lyrically and sonically, we started noticing that there was a very political, very social, very spiritual theme happening in all these songs. They all seemed to work really well together and something was happening. When we started putting the album together at the end, finding the right line-up for the album, all of a sudden we found the magical sequence...It really felt like we had created the concept record that we had intended to do in the first place but without forcing ourselves to write it about a specific theme or story.

And there's definitely a clear visual and creative purpose behind this album. I actually wanted to only put it out as one track, and not separate the album into segments, or into different songs or whatever. I thought it would be fun to put it out as one 48-minute track.

NP: Right. I was chatting to one of your bandmates backstage, and he was saying that you got to a point where if you made a change on the record, you'd actually listen to the whole thing again from the start, so it made the production process very laborious. He was joking that it would have been great if you'd been on drugs.

CB: Yeah. That was one of our conversations early on in the album's process; Let's look at records from the past that we feel are conceptually sound. Maybe not necessarily thematically, for example, not like Tommy. Not a rock opera. But, albums that gave you a clear vision of what the band is about, and [albums that make you want] to listen from beginning to end because it's an experience. [Music that] takes you out of the real world, takes you to a different place, and sounds like the band is taking the best drugs ever. We were like, how do we make a record that makes you feel like you're escaping? Like you're getting out of yourself, almost like being on drugs for example. We wanted to make a record that did that. We wanted to make a record that was a multi-sensory experience.

NP: What do you hope people take away from this?

CB: What I really hope that people come away from this record feeling about the band is that we're not afraid to take chances. We're not afraid to push ourselves. We're not afraid to challenge our fans by doing something different. You know, we're willing to put our balls on the line and really try to make art, and, not make hit radio songs that are catchy and jingle-y. That's all great too, but we don't want to repeat ourselves and we don't want to continue to just write music for the sake of writing music because we can be successful at it. We want to make music that feels like it's important and is artistic and substantial. Whether we do that or not, that's for other people who listen to it to decide.

NP: Well I honestly think that you've achieved that - absolutely and categorically. I was blown away by the show the other night (see photo gallery). The laser show that you did, you could almost tour with that and not even get up on stage. It was that damn good.

CB: We actually joked about that. We were like, that was fun, let's just send the record out with that, and we could stay home with the kids. I think ultimately, where I'd like to go, is to take things like that experience and incorporate them into our live show. For the past 10 years, the energy of the band and the music has been what people come to see. It's not the big, grand light show, or the circus act that's happening around us. We definitely want to up the ante this time. We want to really bring a show that feels good and looks great. And these kinds of things, like the laser light show with our album, are just little things that we do to help inspire us to take our live performances to another level. I would love to bring some type of prism glasses and lasers to our show and really give people a chance to get out of their selves and experience the record in a three-dimensional kind of way.

NP: Well I definitely hope people get to experience what I got to experience the other night. That was just phenomenal. How did the concept for it come about?

CB: Well interestingly enough, no one in the band had seen any of that stuff before we got there that night. It was just as much a surprise to us as it was to anybody there. I was talking to our manager, and I said I would really like to do something special for this album. He came back with, "You know those Pink Floyd laser light shows? What if we did something like that? I said, "Make it fuckin' happen dude."

NP: So, what's in the immediate future for Linkin Park?

CB: We're going to be going to South America, performing five shows down there. And we're off to Europe and Australia, New Zealand until the end of the year. Then, after the holidays are over, we're coming back to do the US and Canada, and then out to Asia, then back to Europe and then back to the US, and, hopefully hit some other places as well.

NP: How dare you drop the album and then make us wait for the shows. You tease!

CB: I know, it's hard. One of the things that's a blessing and curse is that we've become a band that has a lot of fans all over the world, and the world is a really big place. The United States has had a lot of Linkin Park, and there's a lot of places outside the US that really haven't had us very much, South America is one of those places. We're playing Abu Dhabi - we've never been there. We're playing in Tel Aviv, we've never played there. We'd like to get down to South Africa, play there. There's a lot of places that we haven't gone. We haven't even really played Canada very often. There's a lot of places that we want to hit on this round. I think by the time we come back to the US with our show, we'll be in a really good place in terms of visually and how we're going to be incorporating more of the new album. And people will be more familiar with the album at that time, so I think it will be better for us to hold off a little bit and come back when we're just kickin' ass and ready to go.

NP: With this record I kind of want you to do one of those tours where you do the album in it's entirety.

CB: Oh totally. I'm with you 100%...I think that's something that could happen in the future for sure. I think once people listen to the album and they can absorb it for a little while, and really feel what it's all about and where it could go, then I think at that at that point we could definitely come back and say, "Okay, we're going to put together a really beautiful show, visually, that encapsulates the vibe of the record, that really captures the energy of the record, and come out and do that, and maybe come back for the encore and play eight or nine hits.

NP: I can't believe that I'm actually encouraging an artist to do a tour without playing the hits, but this album is that good.

CB: Thank you. But, you're right. You're right on. You're preaching to the converted. I'm with you 100%. Like, I only want to play the new stuff. I love it. I think that it's going to push us as a band to become better live and challenge ourselves in that way. But at the same time, it is a new record and it is going to be challenging for a lot of our fans to wrap their heads around going from Hybrid Theory...

NP: To The Dark Side of the Moon.

CB: Exactly. I think once people can live with it, and digest it, and process it in a way that gives them the time they're going to need, there will be a time when we can come back and do something special with this album and play it in it's entirety.

NP: When you're out on the road, what are the essential things that you take out with you to kill the time and make it work?

CB: Well for the first six or seven years of our career it was a huge bag of weed, some cigarettes, Jack Daniels and a barbeque. That was what I needed to get myself through. Now that I'm getting older and I'm falling apart, piece by piece, the things that make the biggest difference are bringing my family out with me and having my connection with my kids and my wife. The really important things in life like that - not missing out on those milestones in my kid's lives. I think that's important. I like to stay connected that way.

I have a very mundane routine. I wake up, I eat breakfast, I work out, I go run. I get on a plane to fly to the show, do an interview, rock my ass off, come back, and get stretched out and worked out before I go to bed. I do that every day. Then I get up early and do fun things with my kids when they come out. When they're not there, I just kind of go into 'take care of myself so that I can play the best show I can' mode - which is no more big bags of weed and no more Jack Daniels. I quit smoking four years ago, and now I work out and run. I feel like I kind of flipped the role of what it means to be a rock star on myself.

NP: In the same way that the album is more than the sum of it's parts, I always think that a band is more than the sum of the individual members. You've had a fairly stable line up since '99. What do you do to preserve the relationships within the band and keep it all working?

CB: I think that we're all pretty sensitive guys. I think there's a good golden rule kind of vibe in our band. We don't treat each other with disrespect. At least we try not to, for the most part. I think 98 percent of the time we're very respectful of each other. We can take criticism. If somebody doesn't like something, rather than yelling, "This fucking sucks! Get rid of it," we can talk about what it needs to be better. Communication is key.

We respect each other's private lives and we try to encourage family, children, wives, and girlfriends to be around and be involved. We need the road to be the place for the family or else we're not going to make it, because we need that as people. We need that connection with ourselves for our souls and our hearts and our minds to be able to withstand the 22-hours a day that we don't like about touring. We want to be able to be creative and work with each other, and write, and tour, and find balance with family. We're all on the same page in terms of that. I think that's the key. We know that we can push ourselves because we like to work. But we also know that it's important sometimes to pull the reigns back and give a little bit back to the people that support us most.

NP: Aside from playing new and different places on this tour, are there any outstanding goals that you have for this band?

CB: Yes. We definitely want to put more records out, quicker. We would like to put a record out every year. But, given the nature of the business, touring is the business now, so you can't sit in the studio all year round.

We're going to basically take the studio on the road with us, and we'll be working on new music as we're touring. And during our down time between tours we'll be popping in and out of the studio, working on the next record. I think that by doing so, hopefully we can get records out within every couple of years rather than every three to four years like we have been. That's something that I'd like to see happen.

Also, with A Thousand Suns being the way it is, I really feel like its time for us to jump into the visually appealing shows, that aesthetically and artistically are much more intricate and involved than our past 'let's put a video screen behind us with some art and a Linkin Park backdrop.' That's cool, and it's worked very well for us until now. I think we've done a good job live. It's what we're known for. Now it's time to take that to a whole new level. I'd like to see us accomplish that too.

by Suri Suicide This is the first in a series of ‘Art of SuicideGirls’ posts, which will highlight the creativity of our community members. If you’d like your work to be considered for inclusion, please reach out to Suri Suicide, who is curating the column. (image) [Kate Suicide in Hangover] Artist... more

by Suri Suicide

This is the first in a series of ‘Art of SuicideGirls’ posts, which will highlight the creativity of our community members. If you’d like your work to be considered for inclusion, please reach out to Suri Suicide, who is curating the column.



[Kate Suicide in Hangover]

Artist / SG Member Name: Kate Suicide

Mission: “I was born in Chessington – the World of Adventures – a mere stones throw from the Vampire ride, which may explain, but not excuse, my slight leaning towards the dark and the macabre. Being a strange-looking goth at school hindered my popularity, but greatly helped my creativity, as I spent many hours alone in my room, drawing, painting and listening to strange, dark music.



“It came as no surprise then, that during my mid-twenties, I was lured to Brighton, Sussex by bright and garish lights, neo-burlesque, faded glamour, strange folk and the sea air. My work is inspired by art nouveau and art deco, erotica and Japanese madness. I now reside on Brighton pier with the seagulls, and paint and draw for food, drink and cold, hard cash. When not making art, I model for other artists, write and perform music, collect strange instruments, wander around junk shops and antique stalls, and make hats out of parts of dead animals.”



Medium: Illustration and oil paintings.

Aesthetic: The strange, the beautiful and the damned.

Notable Achievement: NOT going to art school. Live illustration featured in an exhibition at the Tate Modern, London. Moving away from London, going freelance, and still being alive.



Why We Should Care: Because Kate Suicide documents a life lived passionately and well.

I Want Me Some: www.katekamikaze.com

It's been a couple of years since Tank Girl made her dramatic comeback. Since then she's been kicking a lot of physical and metaphorical butt. After a hiatus of over a decade, the punk rock comic character is making up for lost time, with a slew of new adventures in book and comic form. Created... more

It's been a couple of years since Tank Girl made her dramatic comeback. Since then she's been kicking a lot of physical and metaphorical butt. After a hiatus of over a decade, the punk rock comic character is making up for lost time, with a slew of new adventures in book and comic form.

Created by anarchist wordsmith Alan Martin and artist Jamie Hewlett, Tankie (as she is affectionately known to those in the know) first made her debut in the pages of UK comic magazine Deadline in 1988. Her "fuck you" attitude instantly resonated with Britain's disenfranchised, Thatcher-abused youth, and it wasn’t long before Hollywood came calling. However MGM’s 1995 film, which captured the look but not the spirit of the comic strip, pretty much stopped Tank Girl in her tracks.

Having run out of steam, Tank Girl languished in the desert. Her fans moved on, as did Hewlett, who founded the virtual band Gorillaz with Blur’s Damon Albarn. With Hewlett entrenched in the music biz, when Martin decided to brush the dust off Tank Girl and recall her into action, another pen pal was needed.

Stepping into the Doc Martin’s of Hewlett was a daunting task, but London-based pencil master Rufus Dayglo has proved himself worthy. His authentic yet fresh vision of Tank Girl has won over old and new fans alike. With a veritable avalanche of new material hitting stores, we tracked Dayglo down by phone at his peanut factory-turned-art studio to talk out about the inspirations behind his Tank Girl.

Nicole Powers: How did you first get into comic culture?

Rufus Dayglo: I started with comics when I was three or four years old. My dad took me to see one of the Star Wars films, and on the way out he bought me a Star Wars comic and said, "If you keep drawing, you can draw Star Wars." And [I thought], "That way I can marry Princess Leia." So basically my whole plan about getting into comics was to marry Princess Leia.

NP: That sounds like a very sensible career plan.

RD: I'm sticking to this plan. I see no reason to change it now.

NP: What comics did you grow up loving?

RD: Like a lot of people in the UK, I grew up reading the War Digest books, so I grew up watching Germans getting blown to pieces and thinking that was the best possible thing to do with your time. I was in love with war comics, and was fairly obsessed with them. As a child, I was happily waiting for World War III to start because then I thought I could do new comics about that.

Then my dad bought me 2000 A.D., which had Judge Dredd in it, and also had a fantastic strip about dinosaurs called Flesh. It was about some futuristic cowboys that go back in time to harvest dinosaurs as cattle and the dinosaurs turn against them and eat them all. Needless to say, as a 5 or 6-year old, that's the best possible thing, to see a tyrannosaurus rex rip off the head of a futuristic cowboy. Basically, anything with a lot of blood in it - and guns - I was fairly keen on...I started from a very early age drawing my own comics. I used to draw these war strips where I would turn all my friends into soldiers and then kill them one by one.

NP: And these were your friends? I'd hate to think what you did to your enemies!

RD: Exactly, those were the people I liked. I think that explains why I went on to live alone with a cat. So, that's where I started with comics.

NP: Was there any sort of formal art training?

RD: None really. Both my mom and dad were quite artsy people. My dad worked in advertising when I was a little kid. He was away a lot, so when he used to come back he used to pin drawings of tanks and jeeps and airplanes to my door. I was very lucky, my parents encouraged me to draw. Most of the artists I know, they tell me these horror stories about how their parents would beat them with sticks and send up chimneys and things because they didn't want them to draw. Whereas my parents were pretty much "as long as you're happy, go for it."

I didn't really pay a hell of a lot of attention at school, I just sat there drawing. I think the best training in art is just to do it. It's about practice, the more you draw, the better you get...I think the problem is when most people pick up a pencil and draw something, they don't like the results and they give up. Whereas if you're a particularly stupid person, you just keep going and you end up sticking with it because you can't think of anything else to do. I think that's what happened to me. Just out of my own sheer stupidity I kept drawing. I just loved drawing explosions, and out of sheer tenacity and the will to marry Princess Leia, I was determined to carry on down this path.

NP: You've changed taste in women somewhat from the very prim and proper Princess Leia to Tank Girl. How did that change come about?

RD: As a teenager, I got into Tank Girl when Jamie and Alan started Deadline. I absolutely fell in love with it. I was a little punk rocker. I wore bondage trousers and had spiky hair, and generally looked a mess. All the girls I liked looked like Tank Girl, so it completely fed into my group of friends really. I was in the right time and place, and it just completely clicked. For me, drawing Tank Girl now, it's largely based on a couple of friends of mine, one of whom is one of my neighbors, a girl called Sophie. A lot of the clothes that I draw on her are either stuff that I own or Sophie owns, which obviously says a lot about my wardrobe because I dress up in a lot of old World War II stuff.

NP: And ladies boots and bras?

RD: Well, yeah, I don't like to talk about that! [laughs] That's Sophie's end of things, but make of that what you will. I'll try not to deny anything too strenuously because otherwise it'll just be like a red flag to a bull.

I just basically base it on all the people that I like. I suppose it's a love letter to the people I like and admire, some of whom I fancy. I think if you're drawing something that you love, other people will love it too. If I didn't like what I was drawing, it would show pretty quickly. When you look at some artwork, I can tell if the person struggled through it and didn't enjoy it very much. A lot of the stuff I draw is quite scrappy, but because I'm having fun while I'm drawing it - it kind of carries it through and retains that balance of fun.

In the same way that punk music might not be the most accomplished music in the world, but you can tell when people are actually having fun when they're doing it...You'll put something on and you can just tell someone really loves what they're doing. I can think of bands - even Riot Grrl bands like Bikini Kill - not the most accomplished bands in the world, but if you ever saw them or you've ever heard them, it's like someone's happily chainsawing through your head. We want it to be the same thing with comic books. I want it to be open-brain surgery with a smile.

NP: How did you go from being a fan of Tank Girl to taking over the drawing duties?

RD: eBay! [laughs]

NP: Do tell.

RD: This sounds fairly mental. I was working for 2000 AD, and I was bored one day basically, and was procrastinating instead of doing my strip that I was supposed to be drawing. I was looking up stuff on the comic section on eBay and typed in "Tank Girl." Some scripts came up of paragraphs from an unpublished Tank Girl book, which eventually was the book that Alan published called Armadillo, which was his Tank Girl novel. At that stage, his publishers weren't interesting in putting it out, and he was just selling copies of different paragraphs of it on eBay so fans could read it. I bought one and I sent him an e-mail when I realized it was Alan, and asked him why he wasn't putting it out. He said, "Well, nobody's interested and I don't have an artist."

Foolishly, in my over-excitement, I suggested my friend Ashley Wood, who's a very famous Australian artist. He did the Metal Gear Solid comics, and he does his own strip called Popbot, which is quite a big comic in the Sates. It's just been optioned by Disney to be made into a movie. I suggested Ashley as a replacement because, if [Martin] was going to do it, he needed a big name artist. Ashley draws the most beautiful tanks and robots - and he draws amazing women, so I thought he was the perfect choice.

Ashley was keen to do it, and started doing the comic, then he had a conflicting schedule. He asked me to come in and help, and I ended up taking over basically. Alan was happy with what I was doing and we got good feedback from the fans because it looked more like Tank Girl perhaps than the other version. So I ended up doing it. It was basically a £4.99 investment on eBay, so it was a pretty cheap way of getting your dream job.

NP: How did you approach Tank Girl, balancing the need to keep it authentic while making it your own?

RD: I was pretty terrified that I was going to be met with a barrage of abuse and such about not being Jamie Hewlett, and it was quite the opposite. Everyone was really lovely and very sweet. There were a couple of people who like "Bah humbug! If it's not Jamie, it's not Tank Girl," but thankfully they all fucked off very quickly. Having scared those people away, what became apparent quickly was that we had a new readership.

I think where we were lucky was that because there was a gap from 1994, 1995 up until two or three years ago, when we started republishing. A lot of the people that read it originally are professional old farts now and they've moved on in their lives. The kids who've picked it up have actually grown up on the movie, so a lot of them were coming to it fresh from the movie and didn't even know it was a comic book. We were getting lots of fan mail saying "it's brilliant that you're making a comic book of my favorite film."

NP: There's irony upon irony there, because I know the movie was something that Jamie and Alan hated.

RD: Yeah. It was a very bad experience for them, and it did kibosh the comic the first time around, but bizarrely the movie has given it a second lease of life. Rachel [Talalay], who's the director, and Lori [Petty], who played Tank Girl, have both been incredibly supportive...It set both of them back personally and professionally, doing that film, but both of them have really stuck by it. Lori has a lot of time for Tank Girl fans. She answers questions on Facebook, she's a real sweetheart. She checks in on what we're doing - I talk to her on Facebook most days.

There's this whole new generation of fans that have come to the comic, it's like this whole new generation of Riot Grrrl and SuicideGirl type kids who are doing their own thing. They've got their own take on it, and they don't give a fuck about what was done twenty years ago. A lot of them have got the old comics now and love the old comics, but they like the new ones as well because the new ones are the ones that are coming out now, and for them, that's their Tank Girl.

That's the great thing about Tank Girl, she's always been different things to different people. Originally she was this very punky girl, and then she turned into a hippy, then she was slightly Riot Grrrl-ish, and then she became a bohemian. That's one of the things Alan's always tried to do as a writer. Every time someone tries to claim it, he kicks them in the knackers and runs in the opposite direction. That's the reason why the character's lasted as long as it has. If it had just been a Riot Grrrl comic, which is what a lot of people tried to write it off as in the late '80s / early '90s, it would have dated and we would have been stuck with that one little audience. But because he refused to let anyone put their tag around it, it's always been his, so he's always been able to turn it into whatever he wants.

I think that's why we have such a large female readership, because a lot of the girls who are reading it now are like that themselves. They're like, "I can be whoever I want to be, and fuck you." I love that fact that we're doing a comic book and most of the people reading it are female - and they're vocal as well. They get in touch with us, they communicate and they're enthusiastic.

NP: Can you give us a run down of the stuff you and Alan have done together?

RD: Well the first one I did with Alan was called The Gifting, which was the one that I took over from Ashley. I did three of the four issues. Then we did a series called Visions of Booga, which is also a book. Then there's Skidmarks, and The Royal Escape, which is coming out as book next month. Our latest image comic that just came out is Tank Girl: Hairy Heroes, which is a collection of war stories, which Alan wrote for me because I've always wanted to do war comic books. That delves into Tank Girl's past, and will be collected up before Christmas as a trade paperback.

NP: But Skidmarks, is your latest trade paperback, right?

RD: It's just come out. It's kind of a racing story and it's got our friend Dee Dee Ramone in it.

NP: I love it. It's kind of Wacky Races for punk rock adults that like fart jokes.

RD: Yeah, exactly.

NP: How did the Dee Dee Ramone thing come about? I understand it's done with the full cooperation of his widow.

RD: Well, Barbara [Dee Dee's widow] is a friend of mine. I met Dee Dee when he was in London, and I got to know him there, and I was in touch with Barbara after that. With me and Barbara being friends, when it was the anniversary of his death a couple of years ago, I made a suggestion, half-jokingly, [saying] wouldn't it be great to have Dee Dee as a comic book character. She said, "Fuck yeah! Do it!" So I asked Alan to write him into the story, and he did. I know Dee Dee would have loved it. He was a huge comic fan himself. When I did meet up with him in London, he just wanted to talk about comic books.

NP: Really? What comics was he into?

RD: He liked The X-Men and stuff like that. He didn't collect stuff month by month, he was just one of these people that picked up comic books...We had these very, very funny conversations, and so I know that he would've loved being a comic book character. Particularly as he gets to drive a car with a German helmet and he's trading flick knives, because he was also obsessed with knives. I tried to incorporate all the things that I knew he liked into his character. That's why he's wearing a German helmet, because his mom was German and he grew up there as a kid, so he was very obsessed with German memorabilia and stuff.

NP: I love all the extras you throw into this book, the art panels and the board game. It reminds me of the old comic annuals.

RD: Absolutely. We used to get those every Christmas didn't we? That was your only entertainment over Christmas, unless you wanted to watch Bridge On The River Kwai for the eight-hundredth time with your grandma. We wanted it to have that feeling of being a bit like a kids annual. I'm sure a lot of the younger readers won't even get that reference because they don't really do annuals [anymore], but I think a lot of the readers like the fact that they don't get a lot of the references. It's this kind of arcane weirdness, and it almost doesn't matter what it is. For them, it's just this kind of surreal humor, and they don't realize it's all a reference to our childhoods.

NP: At one point there's a Genesis reference, and I'm like, why the fuck Genesis? Then I read Alan's essay on the cool-crap-continuum. Ever since I read that essay, I've been reassessing the word according to its rules.

RD: Paradoxically, I've been doing it by default without realizing there was actually an alternative to that. I think that's one of the reasons why Alan and I work quite well together, we have a fairly similar world-view of things and sense of humor. When we're discussing stuff, we tend to approach things from a reasonably similar angle. Alan's obviously got a lot more experience than me on the writing stuff, so if I make a stupid suggestion, he can take it and twist it around and completely turn it into something else. That's the great thing about collaborating on the book, it's almost like Chinese Whispers. I'll suggest something and he'll twist it around into something completely unexpected or unanticipated.

For me, it's a bit like for the reader, I'm always surprised when I get the script. I literally don't know from issue to issue what's going on either. Usually when you work with a writer they give you a synopsis, so you have a pretty good idea of what's happening in a series. Before you've even started the first issue, you know how the whole story finishes. Whereas with Alan you don't know what's going on until the last minute when I get the script delivered. I just had to do a cover the other day for an issue where I don't know what's in the issue. I rang him up and asked him, and he was just giving me random words. It was almost like a beat poetry thing, like word association. He was just throwing things at me and I had to piece together a cover from random words

NP: Then he'll see the cover and be inspired to go in a different way with the writing anyway.

RD: Exactly. Yeah. Welcome to my nightmare. That's it entirely. I'll do something and then he'll go, "Oh, well that's not what I wanted." Then he'll go off in entirely the opposite direction and leave me hanging. It's kind of like an aerial ballet, but with no wings.

NP: I have a title for the obligatory Star Wars-style prequel to Skidmarks - Touching Cloth. What do you think?

RD: [laughs] Yes. Ah nice. Oh happy days. I have this vision of Booga lying on the ground with a pair of panties over his face, sucking contentedly.

NP: [laughs] You went straight to the visual with that didn't you. You instantly thought, "How would I do the cover to that one?"

RD: Yeah, scratch 'n sniff I think.

NP: That would be a very special issue.

RD: Yeah, I'd love to do that. My sister used to collect scratch 'n sniff stickers and nobody was allowed to touch them. I would sneak into her room and scratch them all furiously. She got furious about that.

NP: And you have something called Bad Wind Rising coming out?

RD: Yes, that's the new series from Titan Books, the same people who published Skidmarks. That's the series I'm just starting now. It's basically about Tank Girl and Booga breaking up.

NP: No, no, no! If there was one relationship that you knew you could rely on, it was Tank Girl and Booga's.

RD: Well, you know, these things happen. It's just my way of moving in and getting closer to her...So we're starting this new series. Alan has completed the first issue and I'm drawing it now. That should hopefully be out for the New York Comic Con in October, which I'll be at, doing signings and sketching for people and punching people in the face.

I like drawing kangaroos, so in this story the kangaroo gang that Booga used to belong to are coming back for revenge. It's going to be a nice, big, bloody story. We've discussed the plot synopsis and the story hangs around the fact that Tank Girl and Booga have this huge bust-up and go their separate ways and what happens to them.

NP: You've made me so sad.

RD: Well, you know, sometimes traumatic things have to happen.

NP: You can't leave me hanging. I need to know if there's a happy ending for Tank Girl and Booga.

RD: Well, I don't know either. Like I said, Alan doesn't write it like that, so I don't know what happens either. He's already killed off Sub Girl, so for all I know he could kill off Booga, he could kill off Tank Girl. I really wouldn't put it past him. He's always said that he intends to kill Tank Girl by having her run over by an ice cream van or something. He's so bloody-minded, he might just do it. I think it would be the best way for a major comic book character to go, crossing the road and getting killed by an ice cream van. Lying there with Mr. Whippy all over the pavement - it'd be fantastic. It's how she would've wanted it.

NP: So going to the conventions and meeting Tank Girl fans live, what's the weirdest reaction you've had?

RD: Well in Portugal I had one girl pull out a bayonet on me, which was interesting. She was like, "I'm Tank Girl," and pulled out a bayonet. That was nice. It was a real bayonet too. Most people you meet are really lovely, but you meet a few weird people. I had a guy come up to me who asked me to draw Tank Girl having sex with Booga - while standing in front of his 8 and 9-year old daughters - who both look like they wanted to die and drop through the floor. I also wanted to die and drop through the floor. I declined his kind offer. I just wondered what his motivation was - particularly having got his whole family with him - which I thought was just a bit weird.

Basically most of the people are really lovely. We get people dressing up as Tank Girl, which I always find funny, and Alan finds absolutely terrifying. I think he still has traumas from the early Tank Girl parties where him and Jamie got chased into the bathroom by fifty Tank Girls, all of whom were intent on either raping them or beating them up.

NP: And this was a problem because...?

RD: Well, yeah, I personally don't have a problem with this but to each their own. In the same way that I'm happier going out doing public things more than I think Alan is. Alan likes to stay at home with his family, and I like going out and getting drunk and falling down the stairs. We all do our different things I suppose.

NP: Unlike most superheroes who have one outfit, Tank Girl has a serious wardrobe, which makes dressing up like her a lot more fun. I'm actually very suspicious of superheroes who only have one outfit. I mean, when do they wash it?

RD: Yes. That was depressing as fuck. If you were Batman, why would you want to run around in blue pants all day?

NP: And I want to see Batman wearing alternate outfits, so I know his pants are clean.

RD: Well, I can assure you that if you were sitting next to Tank Girl, you'd smell her before you saw her. She's not the most hygienic person in the world. She's definitely someone you'd want to hose down first before taking her to bed. She's a bit of a skank.

For me, as a kid, I used to trade my Action Men for my sister's Cindy Dolls [a British Barbie-like doll] and turn them into soldiers as well. I loved dressing dolls up and I used to design outfits and stuff for them. I've always loved clothes, and being punk, it was about making your own stuff. I live in an old peanut factory, which is full of art studios. All of my neighbors are artists, sculptors, printers and a lot of people here recycle clothes, make their own stuff. It's not unusual to see people walking around looking like they've fallen out of a dumpster.

There's nothing more depressing than when you see people and they're all wearing Adidas and they're all the same. It's like superheroes, it's something which is just pretty bland. I don't want to dress like that. I would feel like a complete cunt if I turned up at a comic convention dressed like Batman or something because I'm not a big muscly guy. Whereas you could turn up as Tank Girl and it doesn't matter [what you look like physically]. It's about the attitude. If someone gives you shit, you kick them in the knackers - that's what's important. It doesn't matter if it's a brand new shirt or the correct Nike top. It's just about fucking getting out there and doing it yourself. That's why I've never wanted to draw superhero comics, because to me, it's a bit like belonging to a team and I hate teams. I don't like sport teams or superhero teams.

NP: Well if the outfit is picked out, you're basically only drawing the face and background.

RD: Yeah, what little face there is generally. I like dressing up. I like being silly. I mean, I'm looking around my studio now and I can see a sword, a machete, an American helmet...Basically, whatever's on the floor, goes on the girl. I like girlfriends that do the same thing...In our books the same thing happens. Nothing fits, nothing's the right size and everything smells.

I think that's what makes someone appealing. It's about how you wear it, not what you're wearing. You can see someone wearing the coolest clothes in the world, but if they're not inherently attractive in the way that they're carrying themselves it's just all rather bland. That's the nice thing about some of the Suicide Girls - it's down to their attitude.They may not necessarily be a perfect size but it's about the fact that they're happy with who they are.

Like my neighbor Sophie, she dresses like a real tomboy but she's one of the most beautiful people you could ever meet, because she's just inherently happy with who she is. She's a very beautiful person as well, but she doesn't dress like a pretty girl. She's usually wearing a completely scuffed-up pair of boots or something that's ripped to shreds which just looks like she mugged it off an old man - and she probably did. But it's about the attitude she wears it with. That's what makes someone look sexy. Someone who's trying to look sexy, generally looks like a car crash, or something off a television.

The cover for our first image book, it's a blue cover and it's a picture of Tank Girl's head. She's wearing a German helmet, which is a helmet that I've got here. It's got a band around and it's got a Pez machine and cigarettes and all that sort of shit, and she's got a black eye. That's based on Sophie. She came around to my house one morning with her hair all over the place - she'd obviously been up all night at a party - with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth. She sat down and put the helmet on and she had this huge, big shining black eye. She sat there and still looked absolutely stunning. She was an absolute mess, she stank of boose, and she went, "Oh, I think I'm going to be sick." That's the sort of people that I like. I like the sort of people that can sit there with a black eye threatening to vomit on your sofa and you still think they're cute.


The trade paperback of Tank Girl: Skidmarks, which collects together the 4-issue Skidmarks mini-series for the first time, is out now from Titan Books. The trailer for Bad Wind Rising, the forthcoming shocking new saga, which sees Tank Girl kicking Booga to the curb, can be viewed via the YouTubes. For the latest Tankie news visit tank-girl.com and follow @Team_Tank_Girl on Twitter.

by Blogbot It’s been ten years since Tommy Lee has made a record under the Methods of Mayhem moniker. But with Mötley Crüe on hiatus in 2010, the drummer-cum-multi-instrumentalist decided now was the perfect time to revisit his hybrid dance/rock side project. The new album, A Public Disservice Announcement,... more

by Blogbot

It’s been ten years since Tommy Lee has made a record under the Methods of Mayhem moniker. But with Mötley Crüe on hiatus in 2010, the drummer-cum-multi-instrumentalist decided now was the perfect time to revisit his hybrid dance/rock side project. The new album, A Public Disservice Announcement, comes out tomorrow, but the fab folks at Roadrunner Records have been kind enough to give SG an exclusive preview of one of the tracks, “All I Wanna Do,” which is sexy and nasty in the nicest of ways.





“It’s one of my fucking favorite tracks on the record,” Lee told us over the phone. With lyrics that talk about “a love volcano getting ready to blow,” it’s clear the bad boy of rock had his tongue firmly in cheek (among other places) when writing this song. “It’s just nasty for the sake of being fun. You’ve got to have a good sex song on the record. If you don’t you kind of suck right?”



Look out for our exclusive new interview with Tommy Lee, which will go live as soon as our fingers finish typing it up. Always outrageous amounts of fun to chat with, Lee doesn’t disappoint this time around. During our conversation, he cops to a truly heinous tattoo crime and offers a mea culpa to one of our own.

Methods of Mayhem’s new album, A Public Disservice Announcement, will be released on September 21 via Roadrunner Records.