Ghosts Are White

Most everything

2012-02-06T03:02:00.000-08:00

A lot of songs don’t have much going on in them—

Most things don’t have much going on. Most movies, most everything.

Why do you think that is?

You have to see what’s popular. My friend Doc Pomus always used to say, “Look at the source.” When you get criticized, it’s important to look and see who’s saying that. I think people hear what they want to hear. People are doing that for money. If everyone ran out to buy this other thing, then that’s what they would give you. Although they don’t seem to up the ante very much.

Because they feel there’s no need to?

Right. It’s like Mission Impossible 2. There’s a screenplay by Robert Towne. John Woo directs it. And they are aiming so low that the audience they think they are aiming at actually laughs at the movie. It’s amazing to see people that good aiming that low.

Lou Reed 2011

Style

2011-09-05T23:42:00.000-07:00

I suppose that, in a sense, you can't escape your own style. So, in one sense that's true. But, of course, I'm always interested in something when it isn't familiar to me. So, there's a kind of edge to what you're doing, the kind of leading edge of what you're doing. Inside that edge [are elements you] are familiar with, and are probably becoming slightly bored with, as well, over a period of time. "I've pulled that one out before. Oh, no, I can't I'm just fed up with that. Let's do something else." So, there's that, and then at the edge of things, there's some new things you're starting to do and to find exciting. And you always think "Oh my God I've never done anything at all like that before." But, of course, in retrospect, and to an outsider, they'll say, "Oh, yeah that's typical Eno."

It's just like I was saying about when you look back on a historical period of music, it seems so obvious to you what the characteristics of it are, but they're not obvious at the time. So, when I look back at my own work, I could easily write a very convincing sort of account of it that made it look like I had planned it all out from day one and that this led logically to that and then I did this and then that followed quite naturally from that. But that's not how it felt. It always felt [like], "Oh God I've never done anything like this before; that's so exciting!"

Brian Eno

Boredom

2011-08-23T21:28:00.000-07:00

Boredom - his name for the relentless enemy that has stalked him everywhere - has lessened with age, Mr Greene said. He has described, in terrible detail, the peculiar torture it once caused him. A young, and more despairing Graham Greene found his boredom so unbearable that, in 1923, he played Russian Roulette, alone, with a loaded revolver "to make the discovery that it was possible to enjoy again the visible world by risking its total loss." It was boredom too that made Mr. Greene once insist that a dentist extract a healthy tooth because he so wanted the ether that was used.

from profile of Graham Greene by Gloria Emerson, March 1978, Rolling Stone

Intention

2011-01-30T01:21:00.000-08:00

Your intention is to express this moment when things go wrong. But what you write about is a trailer court, and a blue car in a trailer court. Yet, somehow, when people come back to talk to you, they will say, “You know I listened to that song and it reminds me of when things go wrong.” They always understand what you intended. That’s the mystical thing about songwriting to me. We’re talking on these other levels that we don’t know. And the best thing you can do as a songwriter is trust the higher part that is writing, and don’t judge yourself or worry too much about it. Yes, the wrong word or wrong phrase can impede that process, but let it be. Trust yourself; trust your journey and your life; write the song.

Rickie Lee Jones

Chops

2011-01-09T13:28:00.000-08:00

The Ten Commandments made quite a splash. Big enough for Moses to be remembered as a one hit wonder if he'd done nothing else. But if you're a one hit wonder in the artistic world, you can't make any real money, you don't have a career. And a hit just ain't what it used to be.

Don't create before you're ready. Then again, if you write a song every day, your chops will be honed. That's what the Brill Building people did, they wrote all day, a lot of it was crap, but they created so many classics.

Bob Lefsetz

12 songs a year

2010-11-01T16:45:00.000-07:00

Over three decades I've averaged about 12 songs a year. There have been a couple of fallow years and the odd bumper crop but generally I've written between 10 and 15. And by writing, I mean finishing something that was started several days, several months or several years before.
If you've written three or four hundred songs you get called prolific. But a dozen songs a year is not a lot.
Somehow the songs turn up, one by one. Or so far they have. I never know where the next one's coming from. There may never be a next one. I take comfort from the words of Thomas Mann: "A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."
I wake up every morning and hope there's still one more tune ambling towards me down the road.

Paul Kelly

Summer Hours

2010-10-18T17:00:00.000-07:00

I am more interested in how people try to deal with difficult situations — situations of crisis and grief — in the most decent possible way. When I’m dealing with this family I want to be close to every single one of them. I want to be able to understand their reasons. If at some point I don’t understand what one of my characters is doing and why, then there’s something flawed about what I’m doing. In theoretical terms I can’t analyze why I’m closer to this or that character in this or that respect, but in human terms I am with them, to me they are the center of the film whenever they are onscreen, and I can share in whatever they are saying. The characters in the film are, hopefully as we are, smart enough to understand that the forces that drive them apart are the forces of the transformation of the world, the transformation of society. And sadly it’s not things that we voted for or against, it just happened. It’s the way the modern world functions. It changes on its own. It changes like the sky changes, and we kind of have to grin and bear it.

Olivier Assayas

Unreasonable Drives

2010-09-22T20:33:00.000-07:00

What we are is not the same thing the world requires us to be. We are full of appetites, unreasonable drives. This internal system of impulse and desire tests itself against the reality of social law — what the people with whom we live expect and require of us. This push and pull is part of the process that makes us human, and makes us interesting, too. You need some opposing force to measure yourself against and to define yourself either in accordance with or in opposition to. It could be the law, it could be the church or God, but you need something to be the Other and something to represent what is expected of you in contrast to what you sense you really are.

Scott Spencer

Novel

2010-09-20T14:00:00.000-07:00

In the days after the memorial service, as my brothers and I went from room to room and handled things, I came to feel that the house had been my mother's novel, the concrete story she told about herself. She'd started with the cheap, homely department-store boilerplate she'd bought in 1944. She'd added and replaced various passages as funds permitted, reupholstering sofas and armchairs, accumulating artwork ever less awful than the prints she'd picked up as a twenty-three-year-old, abandoning her original arbitrary color schemes as she discovered and refined the true interior colors that she carried within her like a destiny. She pondered the arrangement of paintings on the wall like a writer pondering commas. She sat in the rooms year after year and asked herself what might suit her even better. What she wanted was for you to come inside and feel embraced and delighted by what she'd made; she was showing you herself, by way of hospitality; she wanted you to want to stay.

Jonathon Franzen The Discomfort Zone - House For Sale

Webb

2010-09-09T17:02:00.000-07:00

What keeps you writing still? What’s the motivation to write?

I think I can still do it better. I never take it for granted that I’ve mastered songwriting. I don’t think one ever does. Usually what I do is end up hearing a song that I’ve written before on the radio and thinking I wish I could write that line again. Unfortunately, you can’t do that. Once you’ve recorded a song, it has a tendency to stay that way! I can almost always think of ways to improve songs, even songs that were big hits. I’m always working on them. I never stop working on them, which sometimes people find out when they come to my live shows. Sometimes people are very irritated by that. They come to the dressing room and say, “Why did you change ...?” People like to hear things the way they heard them the first time. You learn that you can’t really do that. You just sort of have to leave them alone, leave the mistakes in place.
What keeps me writing is the notion that I can still do a better one, that I could do a Broadway show, that I got the chops for that, that I would like to, for my own satisfaction, demonstrate that I can do that, that life goes on after 30 and 40 and 50 and that it’s okay. You can keep working and continue to contribute to the community and be creative. You can still exercise those talents that God gave you in your golden youth and maybe you can even do it a little bit better than you did then. It seems harder to get people’s attention as you get older but I think that most people do continue to mature and improve in their craft, even airplane pilots. There are guys in their 60s and 70s flying better than they’ve ever flown in their lives. I do it because I can and because I’m still pretty good at it and even now I think I can be better at it.

Jimmy Webb

Machismo

2010-09-08T03:59:00.000-07:00

"machismo is not the easiest cloak to wear, the easiest role to assume in life. Machismo is a ladder, and there's always a guy who's more macho than you coming up that ladder. I've never had any illusion that I was high up that slope, and it's a desperate slope, because if you get to the top, you're dead. Macho means taking the dares that come your way, and if you take every dare that comes your way, sooner or later you're gonna be dead."

Norman Mailer

You grow up, and they bury you

2010-09-05T17:20:00.000-07:00

"It's a real simple story. You grow up, and they bury you. They keep throwing dirt on you, throwing dirt on and dirt on, and some guys they bury so deep they never get out. Six foot, twelve foot down. Other guys, something comes along and they're able to get some of it away. They get a hand free or they get free one way or another.

I don't think you ever really blow it all off, but the idea is to keep charging. It's like anything. Everybody can't make it. You can see the guys on the street who aren't going to make it, and that's a frightening thing.

That's what I'm talking about. That some people get dug in so deep that there's a point where it stops getting shovelled on them and they roll over and start digging down. They literally roll over and start digging down themselves.Because they don't know which way is up. You get down so deep that you don't know which way's up. You don't know if you're digging sideways, up, down, you don't know... until something comes along, if you're lucky, and shakes you 'til all of a sudden you have a certain sense of direction and at least know where you're going.

A lot of people don't ever get that. You go into the bars and you see the guys wandering around in there who got the crazy eyes. They just hate. They're just looking for an immediate expenditure of all this build-up. They're just screaming to throw it all off. But you can't and it turns into, like, death throes. A guy walks into a bar, a little guy, and he walks up to another guy, a dome, and the little guy's looking to get creamed. Looking to get massacred. He wants to. 'Look,' he's saying, 'I'm dying here and I don't know what the fuck to do.' It's a scary thing when you see the guys that ain't gonna get out, just ain't gonna get out.

But I guess it comes down to... You just see too many faces, you just see too many... It's a funny kind of thing. It's the kind of thing where you can't save everybody, but you gotta try."

Bruce Springsteen 1978

Generations

2010-08-25T16:14:00.000-07:00

"So what is striking about contemporary Auckland writers - make that New Zealand writers - is their detachment from the matters of social justice or the fundamental political and social freedoms and concerns of their fellow citizens. Poets and novelists, both realists and satirists, have their scrutinising place in Britain and America but most here show indifference to dealing with the live issues of public concern, not only in their work but as writers within the community.
Apart from a few satirical journalists, the quarrels with the world of our contemporary writers and their fictional characters seem mostly confined to stories of middle-class bickering and angst; and among themselves they expend much energy on silly, internecine spats... Are too many current writers unwilling to offend the establishment in the way their 1930s forebears would have done? A question that must be asked is whether this lack of engagement with the world is because they have been lulled by the largesse of too much patronage?"

Gordon McLauchlan Auckland Our Story - August 2010

Identity Block

2010-07-29T15:54:00.000-07:00

"It took me another ten years to realize... that my academic inability to write, this "writer's block" as I described it, was in fact a creative method in which my unconcious was desperately trying to tell me something. The message was simple: I do not like or recognize this R.A. Gekoski: he is not pursuing ends that are good for him, he is inauthentic and his efforts are those of an unhappy person manifesting his unhappiness. His tones are strangulated, pompous and unreal, a pretend voice and not a real one. I won't let him write like this, not without a fight. Every word he tries to write I will resist every letter of the way. And that is how it felt. I didn't have writers block, I had identity block."

Rick Gekoski Outside of a Dog p.259

Doc

2010-07-23T20:19:00.000-07:00

"The fighters always have a shot at turning a corner, and if you holler loud enough, sometimes somebody hears you. And truth and love always separate the greats from the neverwases and the neverwillbes."

Doc Pomus, from his liner notes to RETURN TO MAGENTA by Mink DeVille (1978)

A firewall against the void

2010-06-16T20:39:00.000-07:00

“Nobody, nobody,” Kerouac writes in the closing lines of On the Road, “knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old.” But it is also true that those rags—ghosts from the inevitable future, time bombs woven into our very DNA—are with us even when we’re at our most transcendent. If, in some sense, that’s a form of failure, it’s the same failure we all face, the failure to sustain ourselves in the face of eternity, to build a firewall against the void. No one ever tried harder—making his friends into mythic figures, turning his adventures into heroic legends, creating a cosmology around the essence of the self. It’s a remarkable achievement, or it would be if we could see it, if we could clear away our preconceptions and misreadings, if we could recognize that it is precisely the contradictions (the road warrior who lived with his mother, the “happy, sheepish imbecile” who became an alcoholic) that make him so compelling after all. “Kerouac,” Burroughs pointed out, “opened a million coffee bars and sold a million Levis . . . [but] Kerouac and I are not real at all. The only real thing about a writer is what he’s written, and not his life.”

Or as Kerouac himself said, in that Paris Review interview: “It’s our work that counts, if anything at all.”

David Ulin

Salter

2009-07-16T20:20:00.000-07:00

No one I know of has ever been able to definitively say what a short story is or should be, what distinguishes it from an anecdote or an account-Mishima’s “Patriotism” is an account but with a power that dismisses definitions - or a piece of description. I like stories that keep you reading until the line that makes it a story, as in, say, Carver’s “Night School” when [the narrator’s wife] says, “That’s only writing…. Being betrayed by somebody in your own family, there’s a real nightmare for you.” Suddenly all of it, solid, with a click like steel, falls into place.

James Salter

Chess

2009-07-08T17:43:00.000-07:00

I like the moment when I break a man's ego

bobby fischer

A spaniel, a bulldog or a retriever?

2009-06-30T17:18:00.000-07:00

I just draw what's interesting to me, and then I paint it. Rows of houses, orchard acres, lines of tree trunks, could be anything. I can take a bowl of fruit and turn it into a life and death drama. Women are power figures, so I depict them that way. I can find people to paint in mobile home communities. I could paint bourgeois people too. I'm not trying to make social comment or fulfill somebody's vision and I can find subject matter anywhere. I guess in some way that comes out of the folk world that I came up in.

Say you wake up in a hotel room in Wichita and look out the window. A little girl is walking along the train tracks dragging a big statue of Buddha in a wooden wagon with a three-legged dog following behind. Do you reach for your guitar or your drawing pad?

Oh wow. It would depend on a lot of things. The environment mostly; like what kind of day is it. Is it a cloudless blue-gray sky or does it look like rain? A little girl dragging a wagon with a statue in it? I'd probably put that in last. The three-legged dog - what type? A spaniel, a bulldog, a retriever? That would make a difference. I'd have to think about that. Depends what angle I'm seeing it all from. Second floor, third floor, eighth floor. I don't know. Maybe I'd want to go down there. The train tracks too. I'd have to find a way to connect it all up. I guess I would be thinking about if this was an omen or a harbinger of something.

Dylan on his art, 2009.

The furniture of espionage

2009-06-27T22:39:00.000-07:00

There has to be a beginning, a middle and an end. In the authentic world, almost no espionage case is ever resolved, because you don't want it to be resolved. You want the man or the woman to stay in place, to continue working for you. If he or she loses her effectiveness, you fade the person out and life goes on. Now, that doesn't make a story — that's "the cat sat on the mat." I have to tell "the cat sat on the dog's mat." I have to produce the tension, the danger, and so on. The disciplines of storytelling require that I shape, out of the monotony and everyday life of espionage, something that has a beginning, a middle and an end. That's already contrary to the reality.

Then, I have to introduce levels of intelligence on both sides and in each protagonist, which very probably do not pertain. I have to introduce levels of moral doubt, self-doubt, which may not pertain. I mean a guy who just takes 10,000 bucks to go and do something probably is not asking whether he can reconcile this to his maker. But in my books, he has to.

So I use the furniture of espionage to amuse the reader, to make the reader listen to me, because most people like to read about intrigue and spies. I hope to provide a metaphor for the average reader's daily life. Most of us live in a slightly conspiratorial relationship with our employer and perhaps with our marriage. I think what gives my works whatever universality they have is that they use the metaphysical secret world to describe some realities of the overt world.

John le Carre

Generations

2009-06-27T21:39:00.000-07:00

I never subscribed to the bumper-sticker sentiment that when you’re leaving New York you’re going nowhere, a conceit now rendered ridiculous by the ascendancy of cities like Shanghai, Moscow, Mumbai, and Berlin. New York seems to be constantly proclaiming itself, constantly burnishing its own myths, compulsively reassuring itself of its supremacy, an insecurity one would have thought unnecessary in a great city. In the end, tough, gritty New York is the most sentimental of places, at least when it comes to itself.

But still, of course, a great city, and while I may have been fortunate to have experienced it at a time when the balance between the sheer terror of daily life and the excitement of living in a newly resurgent downtown was perfectly calibrated—getting mugged at five in the morning not quite as bad if it was walking home from watching the Talking Heads at the Mudd Club — I’m sure there is a whole generation in Greenpoint or Red Hook busy stacking up its own store of memories. Greenpoint or Red Hook, perhaps, but not Manhattan, where the rich and richer have completed their rout of most of what was different or interesting, leaving only a few pockets of sad and rapidly aging hipsters — a generation so obsessed with looking good that they forgot to actually do anything. There they are, freelancing away in Starbucks—Web designers, graphic artists, unpublished photographers (and, you have to wonder, why are they all so, well, … visual?)—unpoliticized, unangry, uninterested. Some apparently feel quite strongly about wearing fur, others about the virtues of the vegan life (and don’t get them started on Tibet), and all have seen every film made in the last 20 years. Soon they will all be living in upstate New York, in their late 30s and 40s, looking really good, with exquisitely dressed accessory children, driving a perfectly beaten up pick-up truck and convincing themselves that they are there out of principled rejection of city life rather than failure to land that big ad campaign. True, perhaps, but hardly their fault. While it’s always better to be young (age having nothing to be said for it, failing to confer even wisdom), the hipster generation got a raw deal. Impossible any more to shock, impossible to rebel, impossible to create anything not immediately appropriated by commercial interests, it was a generation destined to live in the long shadow of candle-waving boomers and desperately hip, dope-smoking parents. That would have driven anyone into Starbucks or the Catskills. You also have to wonder, when did the 60s become the template for youth, when did this become the generation by which all others are measured? If I wasn’t one of them, I couldn’t wait for the bastards to all die off.

Brian McNally

Looking

2009-06-27T21:31:00.000-07:00

I am writing this in a hotel room. I like the room, I pay for it, for the moment it is mine, but its mirror, some kind of false antique in a heavy frame, is hung on a wall that's at right angles to the table where I work, and whenever I look up from this exercise book I have to see myself getting older, my doubtful expression and downward lines, so every morning after I have read the paper with scissors in my hand and stuck its manageable stories ('manslaughter, or jealousy, or business, or motor-car racing') into my notebook I heave the mirror down and stand it on the carpet with its face to the wall. Once I brought my camera here and took some pictures of myself in the mirror. They came out crooked. One side of my head looked higher than the other, and slightly flatter. I couldn't tell whether this was due to the way I had slept on my hair, or whether the lens — or perhaps the mirror itself — contained some distorting property which in waking life, I mean life without camera, was not apparent. Anyway I showed the photos to my friend, a painter, who glanced at them and said with a laugh, handing them back, 'The artist's obligatory self-portrait.' She was only teasing but I was abashed, as if caught out in a naivety. In the afternoons I go out walking (gardens, the bank, shops displaying racks of the ill-made shoes that our country produces) and when I return the maids have done the room and hung the mirror back on its hook. I let it be. I even look at myself. Outside my hotel window a tremendous excavation is under way. Early on I thought of taking a series of photos of the progress of the hole, and I did begin it, but now I find it's more fun to stand at the window with the camera up to my eye and not press the shutter at all, even when the men in hard hats spot me and caper about, rolling their bare shoulders and mugging to make me laugh. I'm just practising looking.

The Psychological Effect of Wearing Stripes Helen Garner.

Memories

2009-06-27T21:23:00.000-07:00

For, if our memories do indeed belong to us, they do so after the fashion of those country properties which have some little hidden gates of which we ourselves are often unaware, and which someone in the neighbourhood opens for us, so that from one direction at least which is new to us, we find ourselves back in our own house.

The Fugitive Proust

Piloting an L-1011 into O'Hare

2009-06-25T21:36:00.000-07:00

Yes writing can be complicated, exhausting, isolating, abstracting, boring, dulling, briefly exhilarating; it can be made to be grueling and demoralizing. And occasionally it can produce rewards. But it's never as hard as, say, piloting an L-1011 into O'Hare on a snowy night in January, or doing brain surgery when you have to stand up for ten hours straight, and once you start you can't just stop. If you're a writer, you can stop anywhere, any time, and no one will care or ever know. Plus, the results might be better if you do.

Richard Ford Goofing off while the Muse recharges

Noir love

2009-06-22T21:50:00.000-07:00

"I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me and I lived a few weeks while she loved me."

Bogart in In a Lonely Place

Inside stitches

2009-06-22T21:47:00.000-07:00

"The book is chaotic, ill constructed, it has and will have no external shape; and yet it hangs together because it is stitched internally, because it contains rhythm."

E M Forster on Proust.

Zeus in armor

2009-06-15T20:51:00.001-07:00

Bob Dylan on first hearing a Robert Johnson record in 1961.

He seemed like a guy who could have sprung from the head of Zeus in full armor... someone playing for an audience only he could see, one off in the future.

Chronicles. Vol. 1

Jack

2009-06-15T20:44:00.001-07:00

A woman is beautiful
but

you have to swing
and swing and swing
and swing like
a handkerchief in the
wind

Jack Kerouac from Pomes All Sizes

"Cautious culture"

2009-06-15T20:35:00.000-07:00

"I'm exploring something that has nothing to do with race or gender. I'm the crazy girl on the end of that chain. I'm the one who felt I was losing control of my mind and my body because I was not tethered to anyone. And I needed to be snapped back. I needed my father, who died at 49 of a heart attack, to tell me, "It's gonna be OK, and you're not alone. Everybody goes crazy at certain times in their life. You're entitled to some happiness, you're entitled to some unconditional love. And it will never stop. You will constantly be getting punched in the gut, being exploited, being judged."

So I think it's foolish to immediately jump to sexism because of the imagery. But I will give them this: I'm asking for it. I guess I could have chosen some other way to do it. But, look, you can't do a movie about the blues and not explore biblical imagery and Southern iconography. And it is an obvious flip to see that black man with a white woman on the end of a chain, walking with her in his beautiful bean field, with her in those white cotton panties and a crop top with a Confederate flag and an American flag on it. I can't believe people are thinking this is, like, a documentary -- that this goes on in the South every day.

It doesn't, but "Tobacco Road" doesn't happen every day in the South, either. "Baby Doll," the Elia Kazan movie, doesn't happen every day either. But we give those movies a pass. We're in a very cautious culture, and to some extent I think that means we've created a bigger divide."

Black Snake Moan's director Craig Brewer.