CUPS MAGAZINE 1991-2000

CUPS MAGAZINE was a child of the 1990s. Who reads books anymore? Most people in cafes now, just cruise the internet and look at OK Cupid and Ebay and Wikipedia. In the 1990s, we drank coffee and read novels, and argued about poetry films and politics. Today's young hipsters could hardly give a flying fuck. They are more concerned with finding a good weed connection and getting a check from their parents. CUPS MAGAZINE explored the existential bohemianism of last great decade.

This was a free magazine that existed before the Starbucks generation. Interviews with Andrew Vachss and Jayne County? Magazines today wouldn't even bother today. Today is so lame stream. Most of the writers of Anthem and Vice wouldn't know who these people are.

This was the first magazine with FIONA APPLE on the cover. Also we had articles about Gram Parsons and Serge Gainsbourg in 1997. Nobody even knew who they were back then. And also three interviews with some authors like Paul Theroux? Today even Vanity Fair hardly features any worthy news about fiction writers.

CUPS MAGAZINE 1991-2000

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Cups Magazine (1991-1999)

CUPS MAGAZINE was a free monthly magazine that I was the editor of in the 1990s. We basically did whatever we wanted to do, and it was very fun pissing off people. We got to interview many people like Martin Amis and Mary Gaitskill. Many of the interviews that I did, and have included on The Portable Infinite, first appeared in CUPS. Regular contributors were William T. Vollmann, Dave Eggers, and D. Strauss. We started it in San Francisco and then moved to NYC in 1995. This issue above featured Vincent Gallo. He agreed to be in the magazine only if we would put him on the cover. I have found a bunch of back issues and correspondence. We were once sued for plagiarism. A story by a writer appeared in CUPS. It was by some teacher and the student claimed that she had been ripped off. We settled out of court. Many people who were frequently in the magazine, like Ronald Sukenick, David Markson, Gilbert Sorrentino, and Allen Ginsberg, are all dead now.

Cups Magazine (1991-1999)

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Larry Fessenden interview

THE HORRORS
OF A BLOOD HABIT
An independent filmmakers talks about the blood, sexual hunger, paranoia, 

and the East Village hangover

actor/director/writer Larry Fessenden 

Interviewed by Alexander Laurence

CUPS MAGAZINE
October, 1997

Larry Fessenden has been lurking in the independent and underground film scenes for many years. He is an actor, director, writer and editor. An early version of his new movie Habit was actually made as a video when Larry Fessenden was still at NYU film school in 1980. He formed Glass Eye Pix in 1985 and got involved with performance artist David Leslie. Together they made a few videos including The Impact Addict Video which documented the risk taking stunts of Leslie. Fessenden then moved on to documenting strippers in 1989 with Hollow Venus. This movie starred Heather Woodbury who was a dancer and wrote the script. She later turns up in the film Habit. After doing No Telling and River of Grass, Fessenden was still involved with editing, and soon decided to work on his first real feature as writer/director/actor in true Orson Welles fashion. He soon hooked up with Frank DeMarco, and started shooting in 1994. Fessenden plays an East Village loser who has a drinking problem. His girlfriend leaves him and he looks for some replacement but this only gets him in trouble.

Alexander Laurence: How did you get involved in film?

Larry Fessenden: My first movie I was the animator on a GI Joe caper film. Then when I was 11, I did a live action Dr. Jeckyl & Mr Hyde. I did mostly acting during high school. And I started making films and videos as an undergraduate at NYU. The video program was much looser. In the video department there were no limitation so you could make feature-length videos. I made the first version of Habit in 1980. It's just me in a paired down version, but it's the same basic story.

AL: How did you meet David Leslie and Heather Woodbury?

LF: I was editing for people at that time, actor's reels and that sort of thing, and then I met David, and got involved in the performance art scene. I documented his crazy stunts. We started intercutting movies and all his childhood influences into these pop-myth collages. The videos were seen in performance spaces and some film festivals. While I was making those films and getting known in the performance world, I met Heather Woodbury, who was also a performance artist. She did one-woman solo acts. She was also a go-go dancer. She had a story to tell which was her life as a go-go dancer. It was one drunken evening where we decided to made a film about it, and that turned into a project that lasted from 1986 to 1989.

AL: When did you start thinking about doing a new version of Habit into a full length feature?

LF: Around the time that I was making No Telling, I had envisioned this trilogy of movies: Habit, No Telling, and Hector Dodges. I ended up doing No Telling first instead of Habit, but it has always been on my mind to re-do it. It's a story that's really close to me. Even at the time of its original conception, it hadn't been done. Now we can say that there are other "Lower East Side-Vampire films." At the time, when I thought of re-doing it, it was still a fresh idea. After doing No Telling I was hired on a movie River of Grass as an actor. That was a great experience and reminded me of doing low-budget film. So I was hungry to get started with Habit. I wasn't going to play the lead in the beginning. We did a reading at Nuyorican Poets Cafe. I got inspired to put it together with a small crew.

AL: Who was involved in the beginning?

LF: I found my freind, Dayton Taylor, who's a producer and production manager on everything from commercials to features. We devised a plan to work with this small crew of volunteers. He wasn't intimidated by the more ambitious parts of the script like the wolf scene and that there were so many locations. I could see that Dayton was a man who I could work with. We went forward and made a general invitation to people to work on this project. That's when we got involved with Frank DeMarco who had recently shot a documentary called Therimin. He became the Director of Photography. We shot the movie in our own apartments and on the sly all over the city.

AL: The main character of Habit is a drunk who breaks up with his girlfriend and then gets involved in this obsessive sexual relationship....

LF: This was a very intuitive story for me. It's an obsessive affair about blood and cutting. Sam is obviously on a downward spiral and then he meets this woman who's fabulous. She makes him feel important. I think you can tell a story about a more marginal character if you root it to a tradition, like the vampire story. You can look at this guy's specific life and see what's universal in it through the vampire story. We all have demons that cause us despair. Habit is a portrait of the little things that add up and lead to Sam's undoing, and it's about how this kind of self-destruction is in our myths, its quality in human nature, that's the real moster. I'm interested in re-examining that nugget of truth at the core of a genre that I love. You know, the horror movie, the vampire mvie.

AL: What is Glass Eye Pix and who is involved?

LF: Glass Eye Pix is me, and some editing equipment. It's a dwindling bank account. I work as an editor. I rent out equipment. Glass Eye Pix has its hands in various little projects. I made a book that went along with the film No Telling which was about environmental issues. Glass Eye Pix is the people I'm working with right at this moment, and the people I've worked with in the past. I'm working with Mike Ellenbogen right now to distribute Habit. I have helped other filmmakers through Glass Eye Pix. It's an umbrella for indy filmmaking, mostly my own.

AL: What do you think about Independent filmmaking in New York now?

LF: It's all over the place. New York still has museums and literary traditions as a base, but film has infiltrated everything. New York will always be resilient, but there's moments when it feels like LA, and what I mean by that is that every waiter and bartender wants to be an actor or writer or director. It's good that video is more accessible and makes people able to make their own films. My worry is what people really have to say. I think that really needs to be discussed. I think that there's too much discussion of celebrity and people's financial packaging and what have you. In Hollywood films it's all about special effects and the celebrity's machismo and how many vans they have shipped around the world. I think that in five or ten years, there will be a resurgeance of interest in authentic cinema or single-voice cinema, because the price will go down, so that people with a vision might be able to get their movies made. It's really where they're distributed and how they're exhibited that becomes difficult. There's a tendency now of being so hyper-aware of your place in the hierarchy of showbiz. I can't believe that a guy like Cassavetes sat around and talked about the numbers he was getting. I think they were really interested in making dramas that reflected their lives.

AL: What about some of these kids who are cutting themselves and drinking blood? Do you think Goth kids are going to be attracted to Habit?

LF: It's all part of a milieu of self-destruction, but it's also a visceral world where one is living a little closer to the edge, and that's the world I was trying to create in Habit, this bohemia which is sort of dying out now as everyone is so career-oriented and gets serious at age seventeen. In my day, you take a little time to deal with the bigger issues and if it lead you to despair, "Well, you pull out the old pocketknife and express yourself!" As far as the Goth culture, I hope that they would appreciate my film because I think that I'm talking about things that they're concerned with and consumed with. I'm not in that world directly though I've been there.

AL: Who are some of your influences?

LF: In terms of movies, I'm one of the guys who's really influenced by the 1970s when I was first being turned on to moviemaking. Well, Scorcese, who I always call Marty. It's like knowing someone through their filmmaking. I love Roman Polanski. His early movies. Up to his American departure. I loved Cul de Sac and The Tenant. Rosemary's Baby. Chinatown too of course. But in Rosemary's Baby I think that he has this perfect blend of realism and something surreal. In that way I like Bunuel. I like Godard for his breaking the medium. Polanski has an incredible attention to detail and the story unfolds very realistically. Rosemary's Baby for example, there's not a lot of indicators during the film that are saying this is all very spooky. It's really the unfolding of events. That's what I really love about Polanski. Bunuel just had a nasty sense of humor, but even he would just throw in strange events in an overwise straight-forward narrative. I'm interested in breaking narrative. Having the accumulation of events form the narrative, rather than the signposts of drama which you expect and are now overused in Hollywood films. I'm interested in detail, and an accumulation of detail forming the narrative, and therefore character-driven.

AL: What is the link that connects all your films?

LF: All my films are about how you create your own truth in a crazy and chaotic world. And the truth that you make becomes your reality. Obviously Sam in Habit focuses on the dark side and it leads to his demise. In No Telling, it's about what are we calling progress? Are we really entrusting oursleves to science and the market to determine our reality? Even in Hollow Venus, it's about the way she rationalizes being a go-go dancer and how much is she kidding herself? David's stuff is all about pop culture and how it drives you mad, which is a theme that is still relevant today.

AL: Why are you so interested in the truth?

LF: I just think when you're educated you're supposed to ask questions. You read all this stuff at fine schools as I did anyway. Then you have information, then you're pursuing truth. Then when you grow up you realize that no one wants to hear the truth, and the media suppresses the truth. So there's this total contradiction between the potential for growth and understanding and the way the world is run which is counter to that, because everyone has their agendas. Within that comes a feeling of alienation and horror. My films are about alienated horror.

AL: You won this award recently?

LF: It was the "Someone To Watch" award. Mostly for Habit but I think that they were excited to see that I had done a lot of movies, and I would probably go on making movies. 

Larry Fessenden interview

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Tiny Tim Interview

photo by Alexander Laurence

TINY TIM: The Impotent Troubadour (1996)

I did an interview with Tiny Tim for CUPS Magazine a few months before he died. I drove out to Laughlin Nevada to meet him, and it was one of the most bizarre events in my life. He was playing in one of those retro sixties shows with some guys from Badfinger. We spoke for an hour in the casino office. Then we went up to this hotel room, and he gave me some orange juice. Many indie labels started releasing records by him.

by Alexander Laurence


Alexander: Very prolific of you with all these three CDs coming out at once: I
Love Me, Girl, and Prisoner of Love. What prompted this?

Tiny Tim: When it rains it pours. I Love Me was done in 1993. Steve Rubin
started it, God rest his soul. The Girl album was done in 1988 in Denton, Texas.
Prisoner of Love was done in 1994 and that's just coming out now. I've never
recorded a better one than this one.

You've had a low profile since the early ’70s?

TT: I've never retired from this business. I could not afford to. 1968 to
1969 were the great years. In 1970, the slump came. Success in the usual cases is
two years. After that the fickle public wants something new.

What was the secret of the success of your big hit, "Tiptoe Through the
Tulips"?

TT: I thank Jesus Christ for his blessings. I prayed about it in 1954 when I
was thrown out in the media for my long hair and white makeup. Parents asked
me, "What's wrong with him?" and "What is going on here?"

What's this Tiny Tim thing all about?

TT: That's what Larry King asked when I was on his radio show. I didn't know
how to answer this question because the only thing I can tell you is that at
Loews Theater--I worked there in 1951--at the Christmas Party they have
employees sing for us. I sang a song called, "Never." I was uptight and I bombed out.
Right after Christmas something had to change.

You needed a way to stand out?

TT: Beautifully put. Something cried inside of me: change, change!! So in
1952, I decided that I was not good-looking and I didn't want cut this nose
because I was afraid of operations. So I took a challenge to try to make it with
this long nose. I must tell you that I always liked women, but they were not
that much attracted to me. I had to find two things: a career and what would
appeal to women. Certain women who fit into my princess dream world.

What sort of women are these?

TT: I'll give you an example: a woman who you know is Elizabeth Taylor. I met
her in 1947 and when she saw me there, her eyes popped out of her head. She
threw me a kiss from the cab. Some fellow said she likes anyone who makes her
eyes pop out of her head. That inspired me. I wanted to make it to her level. I
dream of a certain face that fits into my dream world and I had to have
something because of my looks. I started cleansing my skin eight times a day. I
used Pawns from Woolworths. Landers cream from Woolworths 25 cents.

That sounds kind of fruity.

TT: It's only fruity if you're fruity. I wanted my skin to be soft and
immaculate. Clean it, use astringent, night cream, eye cream, and if I can, a throat
cream. I wash my hair every day and haven't missed a shower since December
20, 1989. Cleanliness is next to godliness, but with women it was more so. I
wanted to appeal to women by cleansing and using cologne and light makeup. When
I made it with Tiptoe through the Tulips, the world was saying, "This guy is a
fag." It was worth it when one makes it. Originality is the key to success.

My main appeal as it is now: Jesus Christ comes first, romance comes second,
and show business comes later. I just saw two nice young girls come here. Just
to see that is heaven. They say: what a nice guy Tiny Tim! He signs so many
autographs. What they don't know is that I'm looking for one or two angels in
the crowd who might be the trophy winner in my dreams. Now I'm married to
Miss Sue and can't give any trophies out. She is 40-years old and I am nearing
65. The only thing with women is the Bible says I can't touch them until
marriage. Unfortunately, I'm no saint.

You've touched women outside marriage?

TT: Terrible, it was a sin of fornication. Every time that happens, I pray to
the Lord for forgiveness. I didn't say it was right because Masters and
Johnsons says it's normal.

How many trophies are we talking about?

TT: Thirteen trophies from 1963 to 1982. My first trophy came out to a girl
called Mrs. Snookie. I worked in New York in a club called The Page Three.
Police closed it because girls liked each other that went to that club.

So I wanted to appeal to women. First the high voice came. The high voice was
a miracle because at that time I sounded like everybody else.

Where'd the high voice come from?

TT: There was a feeling in the heart in 1952. I'd pray to Jesus "Oh lord, I
needed a change." It just came over me while singing Tony Bennett's 'Because of
you.' It sounded original. My father told me, "Stop that fairy voice. What
happened to your other voice?"

Looking at myself I didn't like short hair. I emulated a picture of
Valentino. It was not the long hair alone. It was the white face makeup with the long
hair. I wore the white face because it gave me a feeling of purity with
women. I see women as pure angels and it kept me in that facility with women. Tan
makeup made me feel too heavy in my soul whereas the white makeup was it. In
1954--high voice was there, the makeup was there and the long hair was there
and not just for show business. I wanted to find an eternal princess. Trying to
get jobs was difficult; going on the train with long hair and white face
makeup and cologne crowded customers would clear out as soon as I sat near
someone. They would get up and leave.

I notice you are a follower of Jesus Christ.

TT: In 1952, I found Jesus Christ. There was a touch where all of the sudden
I felt all my little worries. I mean I was so worried about the Dodgers. I
would cuss and swear when they lost one game and when I found Jesus Christ, the
most important thing was to get to heaven.

Will you get heaven?

TT: It's only up to him to judge. I can never make that judgment. I have to
work harder and harder all the time.

So you think the competition is thick to get to heaven?

TT: If we just sit here and think about anyone who ever lived, it would be so
uncountable. We'll see the great stars and singers of King Arthur's court.
Show business does not start with this time. I want to know who the stars were
then. I disagree with the Pope. I think there will be s-e-x in heaven or on new
earth.

Sex in heaven?

TT: Why do I believe there will be s-e-x in heaven? For the kids who died in
abortions, for the kids who died in their mothers' womb, for those who died in
wars, for the Mongoloids and the cripples. I believe they will have a taste
of it in the new world to come. In this world you can look at them but there's
always a line where you can not go further. For example I would love to go
with a 15-year-old girl if her parents said it was okay.

We could set you up with somebody.

TT: It's wrong for me to fool around because God says, "Thou shall not commit
fornication." There is an angry god right now. He is angry at man and woman
because so many people are divorcing and fooling around before marriage. Like
he almost destroyed the world with Noah. Look at what is happening today: the
unrest with Israel, England, and this thing with China.

These are the end times.

TT: Oh, the beginning of the end times.

Is the rapture approaching?

TT: Nobody knows when. It comes closer. However if the world goes on, we
ended the first half. If the world continues, we are finally going to meet
outer space aliens. Either from different galaxies or from another dimension
here.

Are they related to Jesus Christ, the aliens? Was he an alien?

TT: Oh no, he was the son of God. But he may have created the aliens. I don't
know.

Why do you think it will happen?

TT: You take Verne, Da Vinci, and Spielberg. In Da Vinci's time he sketched
wings for man. Verne did the submarine ahead of its time. Speilberg has his
vision of how they look -subconscious revelations of what aliens look like. As
for myself, I couldn't go in the army when I got drafted in 1951. They asked why
I wanted to go. I said it is a chance to go to the moon. They rejected me and
classified me as 4G which means if they bomb New York City we'll call you.
Now these things are coming true. I believe that 100 years from now they'll be
saying, 'how can you marry that creature from Mars or that creature from Saturn
or from wherever.' All these things will happen if the world goes on and
Christ doesn't come back. The question that will come up then is whether the
banishment to the Garden of Eden will only apply to earth or to the whole universe.
I think it will apply to the whole universe.

Will the aliens be subject to Christ?

TT: Yes, or they would have a God of their own. I believe personally it will
be the same God of Israel through Jesus Christ.

A lot of people see you as a novelty act. How do you see yourself?

TT: I'm the master of confusion. There is no explanation. As long as I please
him and walk with him, that's what counts. It is the same with the abortion
issue: abortion is absolutely wrong. The only time an abortion should be
allowed is if the mother's life is in danger. We could have been aborted, never
would have tasted pizza, never would tasted ice cream. The scripture says the body
is not your own. It is legal murder and that is why I am for Pat Buchanan. He
is the only one to stand up against abortion which is the murder of a life.
All the rest are prostituting themselves for the election. Number 2- Condoms in
schools--shocking.

Have you ever used a condom?

TT: Never did. Even to look at the thing. In the 1940s, those things were so
secretive. They'd hide them in the back of the store. I don't believe in
[the] rhythm [method] or birth control. That is why women have cancers, lumps, and
tumors because they wish to stop a flow the Lord does not wish to stop. That
is why Olivia Newton John had cancer. Birth control creates cancer. It is
causing a lack of the white race while poorer races who don't believe in it are
multiplying because the white man has decided to take it easy and wait until he
is 40. What is happening is all the dark races are multiplying while the white
man is diminishing. The quota is getting lopsided.

Overpopulation is the biggest false philosophy. Satan is a beautiful prince
that looks like Fabio. He is jealous of God. He goes to the United nations and
offers the false lie of overpopulation in China. I'm for life on every planet.
We can never be over populated: we can make a haven on the moon, a haven on
Jupiter.

So Planned Parenthood is part of Satan?

TT: In my opinion, yes.

Are you sick of playing "Tiptoe Through the Tulips?"

TT: I never yield to the tiredness. Never bite the hand that feeds you.

How many Top 40 songs did you have?

TT: "Tiptoe" hit number 17 and that was the only one. It had such a furor in
1968. One disc jockey who went on strike didn't want to play it.

Why is that?

TT: He thought it was too odd. It blew his mind.

Another thing you're famous for is getting married on the "Tonight
Show"?

TT: Miss Vicki. She was 17-years old and I was near 40.

How long did the marriage last?

TT: Four years.

Was she too young?

TT: Age does not matter. A person knows as much at 17 as they do at 47.

Whose idea was it to get married on TV?

TT: Mr. Carson's.

Why did you agree?

TT: I would smitten by her and I told the press. Carson asked me to marry
her on his show. It would make her mother happy and save the expenses.

How is your latest marriage going?

TT: I must also say that I am impotent. I discovered this in July 1994. It
happened like that maybe because blood diabetes or age. I told this to Ms. Sue and
press and even made a documentary record in England called, "Songs of the
Impotent Troubadour." The reason I made this album is to show that even if you're
impotent, you can still sing love songs. Miss Sue doesn't care that I can't
enter her. The album has sold a thousand copies in two years.

Tiny Tim Interview

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The Flaming Lips

BLAST FROM THE PAST APRIL 2000

I caught up with the lead singer of The Flaming Lips on the recent American tour with Looper. Their new album, The Soft Bulletin, has received so much acclaim that it would be difficult to live up to it. But The Flaming Lips live show, witnessed by a sold out crowd at Irving Plaza April 17, was theatrical and spectacular. Video of the band, mixed with medical footage, scenes from the The Wizard of Oz, Brazil, and many other films created a bizarre backdrop for the band. Wayne Coyne was quite a showman with using puppets, blood, and a gong as props. Performances of new songs such as "Waiting For The Superman" and "What Is The Light?" were nothing less than moving. The band handed out FM Radios so you could listen to the music on headset. As we met Wayne at the sound check, we went into a room that curiously reeked of pot. So the discussion started about drug use. by Alexander Laurence and Robert Lanham ****** AL: I know that you don't use drugs anymore. What do you think about drug use? WC: I read this story about Stanley Kubrick when he was talking about his film 2001. They ask him if it was supposed to be a psychedelic experience. In 1969, people were curious about that. They asked him if he had taken LSD, or if that movie was about an LSD trip. He said "No." The reason he gave was that most of the people he knew who had taken a lot of LSD had lost their ability to be self-critical. People take it and think that they're one with the universe. I wouldn't want to be in that cosmic state because I would never want to lose my ability to be self-critical. It's good to lose your critical opinion of others but not yourself. Who wants to be 40 years old and doing the same things you did in high school anyway? AL: What do you think of older musicians like Mick Jagger who seems to be in the papers all the time for his antics? WC: He's got to be a smart guy. The things that we read about him and the things that he really does in his real life are drastically different. He loves the idea of being on VH1's Naughty News when he has gotten some model pregnant. He calculates it out so we think of him as some sexy old rock star. In real life he's a smart guy and people around him love him and respect him. I would never want to speak for someone who has manipulated so much of what we think of him. It's great. It's what a lot of artists do. They say "I'm going to invent a character and people will love him." I don't do anything like that. I'm just me. I don't have a persona. AL: But with the band gaining popularity, and The Soft Bulletin getting so much positive response, does that allow you to hang out with Madonna, and have sex with models? WC: No. We used to pursue that stuff more in like 1992, when we first started hanging around with celebrities. It's really exciting the first time you're in a room and someone like Perry Farrell walks in. By the time we ran into Madonna, we were playing with The Red Hot Chili Peppers in London. Madonna came to see them. We were standing on the side of the stage watching the Chili Peppers waiting for the night to be over. By this time we had seem Flea naked about five times. We were bored. All of a sudden these bodyguards came up and there was a woman in there somewhere. I was thinking what the fuck is this? And then Madonna really sat down right next to me and all the bodyguards stood around her. I looked and thought "That's Madonna." By then I didn't really care. I realized that I was past being excited by anything. I mean we were on The David Letterman show and met Paul McCartney and David Gilmour. By the tenth person, you go home and say to your brother "Hey, I met Paul McCartney!" And he's like "Whatever!" It has no value. You see people at the ATM in New York, and they say "Hey, I saw you on Letterman last night, you guys must be famous?" Well, famous for you anyway. RL: Is The Soft Bulletin your most successful album to date? WC: No. "She Don't Use Jelly" off of Transmission has still sold more. But as this year goes on, I'm sure that The Soft Bulletin will do better. When we were doing it, we thought that it would be the end of us. It was so elaborate and "out there." It's more of a work of art than anything we have done is. We isolated ourselves and said "Let's make music the way we want to do it." With our past records we would occasionally look out and see what the market was doing commercially. With The Soft Bulletin, we figured whatever happens happens. It was liberating in some ways but at the end of the day you think "What are we going to do now?" We did a show at SxSW around the time of the release and we didn't know what the reaction was going to be. But even during the show we knew that people were going to accept it. It usually takes us so long to do records. Three of four songs would go out and we would here feedback. First they would feel shock. But then a week later they would say "But now I love it." They were shocked but they didn't know what that shock was in the beginning. At SxSW we felt the same thing. The shock happened and then we escaped out of town. But this time, all this other stuff happened, like it was named record of the year in NME and it was on the top ten list for a hundred magazines. We have become so thick-skinned over the years. You're so used to people hating what you do, that you become numb to it. The thick skin that protects you from the bad stuff deflects the good stuff as well. People come up to me and say "Well, you and Brian Wilson..." Whether the work is good and important, that's for other people to decide. When artists starts deciding what they're doing is important, they start sounding like idiots, like Billy Corgan or something. AL: What is the connection with Mercury Rev? The Soft Bulletin and Mercury Rev's Deserter's Songs were recorded at the same time with the same producer. Were they an influence? WC: Totally. Me and Jonathan have a lot of similar things we're trying to do. I think that honestly when we were doing these records, Jonathan was thinking "I'm completely going into outer space and doing my own thing." We both probably thought that we were going into different and opposite directions. In the end it turned out we were doing very similar things. It makes sense since we were in the studio at the same time with Dave Fridmann. There were times when we were pulling our gear out at ten o'clock one night, and Mercury Rev would be there in the morning the next day. Dave Fridmann would be at one session to the next. Whatever miraculous things we would stumble upon, whoever came in next would benefit from it. Most of it was technical stuff, because ideas for one band rarely work for another. How to get these sounds and these songs to combine with these ideas. We would come into the studio and Dave would say "Fellas, you know that thing we were trying to do and couldn't do? I found a way to do it." That was the process of making those records. But idea-wise, you can't translate that over from one band to another. Some bands try to do what was on their last record, and those are their own ideas, and they fail. You never know whether an influence is going to be a good or a bad thing. We have so many ideas of what we want to do, that we pursue them all and sort them out later. RL: Are there any current influences? Are there any records that you are listening to now? WC: I listen to everything now. I bring about fifty CDs along when I go on tour. After a week I'm sick of those. I listen to everything from classical to jazz, from old to new, from techno to folk rock . . . everything. I don't have any area where I won't go anymore. Influences are weird. There are things that I hear that are definitely exciting. My biggest influences are my own experiences and things that have impact on me which I can put into something that becomes poetic or lyrical. Instead of talking to you right now, I would rather put some words and sounds together that move you. AL: What do you think about bands who use a lot of techno gear and computers versus bands who play all the instruments live? I ask because you use backing tapes in your live show. WC: There are people who say if there aren't real musicians playing, it sucks, and other people who think that real musicians are old-fashioned. I just sit in the middle and I think that I have no stance either way. If it's good, let's have it. People want to restrict you because they have this idea how music should be presented. I'm sure that the greasers in the late 1950s were bummed out when they stopped having the sock hops every Saturday night. Evolution moves on. It's fine to gravitate towards things that you like. Those things don't have any intrinsic meaning. People give meaning to a longhaired guy playing an E chord. To me it's no big deal. It's what they do. People have asked me "Is the guitar dead?" And I say an instrument is never dead or alive, the people playing them are. People who have too much time analyzing their record collections are the only people who think of these things. We have noticed with our live shows that they don't even notice that we're doing something weird. They just think that this is a great show. AL: Do you like these new shows more than the shows you did ten years ago when there were more people in the band? Not having to play guitar allows you to be more of a showman. WC: I'm a horrible singer. And I'm even worse when I have to play the guitar. To me, I like it much better now. I don't know how people can do both. They are talented and should be applauded. I'm not one of them. I'm more entertaining and focused when I don't have to play the guitar, because I'm not a very good guitar player either. There's something in my voice that people like. They let me sing. People can come to see us and I could play guitar all night and they would go "Man, I didn't come to see this." At the end of the day, they came to hear me sing, in the context of the band. When I saw Brian Wilson play about two years ago in the Midwest. He had fifteen musicians up there and they played wonderfully but it didn't matter till he sang. Even though he couldn't sing very well, it was him and those songs that mattered. I'm saying that, not comparing myself to him. Some nights my voice is gone and I'll apologize. And they love it more because I'm trying to do things that I am not capable of doing. In some ways it doesn't matter how you get there, as long as you get there. I am a lousy singer but I have experienced moments where it can move people. AL: We were just over at the Virgin Megastore and I was looking at the new Q Magazine. In this month's issue they had an article about "The 100 Crazy Acts by Rock Stars." Number 30 was the Zaireeka album [a 4-disk cd intended to be listened to simultaneously on 4 seperate boom-boxes or stereos]. It was beat out by the John Lennon and Yoko One nude picture, Jim Morrison's poetry, and I think Ginger Spice becoming a UN Ambassador among other things. WC: That's regrettable, definitely. When we started Zaireeka, people were going "You got to be kidding?" I don't see it as being anything special. We had an idea for a record we wanted to pursue. We were able to do it, not because we wanted applause or attention, but because we knew it could be done and I wanted to push the possibilities of what listening could be like. So much of the responsibility goes on what you do making the record and everybody listens to them the same way. And I just wanted to force the hand both ways. That we make it differently but you have to listen to it differently as well. It is an area where new things can be done. AL: Did the sales of boom-boxes go up after you released Zaireeka? WC: Even as we were experimenting with the boom-boxes, we discovered ways of doing it more easily. People would go to their friends who worked at hi-fi stores and they would put them all in. I thought that the audience that got it, were the people who did get it. People who were much like ourselves, people who were in bands, or involved in music. Those are the people who are pushing the evolution one more step. It's rarely that the casual listener who really contributes in any way. It's usually people who were digging and digging and trying to find something. It's rare that an idiot wakes up without giving it any thought and says "I've invented the greatest thing ever!" Those who try harder usually find it. And we do try hard and I do go consciously into the unknown and unexpected. AL: Was "Waiting for Superman" influenced by Nietzsche and his ideas about a "superman?" WC: Unlike Nietzsche, who wanted the world to improve, I think it's already great. I don't have any complaints. I don't do art to make the world a better place. I do art cause I like it. The world is already as good as it could be. It doesn't need to be saved or improved. AL: What about your hypothesis about love being a chemical related to the Big Bang? Have you done any further testing? WC: I have no way to do any testing. I feel that it's a theory that may proved right or ludicrous. It's a great concept. It occurred to me that we are all made up of the same sort of things, and the most powerful thing drawing us to each other is love. People will die for or kill over love. It's a vague observation. I'm not trying to predict the future. But as far as songs go, what a great thing to sing about. The universal revelation that love is what connects us all. RL: Scientists are trying to re-create the Big Bang somewhere out West. They were talking about the possibly of creating a black hole if the experiment goes wrong. WC: I don't know what people like Stephen Hawkings envision with all that mathematical jargon about how the universe folds in on itself. Some of that stuff is so abstract I can tell how it's going to have any impact on me. I sometimes wonder how much science and reality can explain each other. That's the great thing about art and ideas: some of them are based upon science, but a lot of them defy science. There's no formula for how you get to things in art. That's why it appeals to me I guess. You don't have to have any knowledge of the elements to come up with something amazing. Alexander Laurence is a writer who lives in New York City. He has interviewed over 100 novelists, many of which are accessible through the Internet. His book reviews have appeared in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, American Book Review, East Bay Express, LA Reader, Bay Guardian, and American Book Jam. He has been the editor of Cups magazine since 1993.

The Flaming Lips

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Allen Ginsberg Interview

I met with Allen Ginsberg on his book tour for Cosmopolitan Greetings: Poems 1986-1992 (HarperCollins). I was accompanied by George Scrivani who was an editor, who created Hanuman Books with Raymond Foye and Francesco Clemente. I didn't get along so well with Allen Ginsberg as is evident in the following. I interrupted him every time he launched into a soundbite about the importance of theBeats. He often questioned me about my questions. In the interview, I stressed the importance of obscure Beats including Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Bob Kaufman, Ray Bremser, and Irving Rosenthal. Alexander Laurence with Allen Ginsberg In fact, my mention of Sheeper being the best work of the Beat Generation, seemed to annoy Ginsberg. Later that day, Ginsberg read "Hum Bom!" at Candlestick Park and was booed by the apolitical and conservative baseball fans. Ginsberg died in 1997. Alexander Laurence: Cosmopolitan Greetings is your new book of poems which collects your most recent work: 1986-1992. Your poetry seems to have changed stylistically, especially in your delicate attention to language; I think of your earliest poems, such as Howl, possessing a complex use of language, utilizing many adjectives, and being influenced by Surrealism, yet the new writing is much more transparent, direct and simplified. Allen Ginsberg: More or less, with the occasional touches of a surreal sequence of images. There are a number of poems in here and in White Shroud which are examples of complicated language or complicated dream situations. Within some simple poems are some surreal word chains, particularly "I Went To The Movie of Life," "Grandma Earth's Song," and in the Jacob Rabinowitz poem: "Put me down now for not hearing your teenage heartbeat, / think back were you serious offering to kidnap me / to Philadelphia, Cleveland, Baltimore, Miami, God / knows, rescued from boring fame & Academic fortune, / Rimbaud Verlaine lovers starved together in boondocks houseflat / stockyard furnished rooms eating pea soup reading E. A. Poe?" I want to have lucid clear pictures in my poetry rather than jump-cut, cut-up, chaotic flashes. I want my poetry to be like a cinematic movie. The magic comes not from the speed up of the words, but the magic comes from the fact that it's an imaginary dream vision. The prototype of that is Shelley's "Triumph of Life." AL: But has your use of language become more simplified? AG: It's become more lucid. Yeah. I've become interested in very clear one sentence poems. Like a snapshot. "I can still see Neal's 23-year-old corpse when I come in my hand." (American Sentences). AL: You grew up in a Marxist, Jewish, leftist background. How did this influence your sexuality and politics? AG: I wasn't bar mitzvahed. I lived across the street from a synagogue. My family was Jewish but they were all communists and socialists and atheists. They hated the orthodox rabbis. My great grandfather was an orthodox. There a poem called "Yiddishe Kopf" that directly answers the question about politics. How it influenced my sexuality I don't know, but coming from a bohemian Jewish background, that including free thinking, free love, 1920s modernist idealism; those were the ideas circulating at the time. AL: How do feel about the idea that sexuality is related to writing? AG: A lot of my writing is to attract lovers, like in "Personals Ad." There are a number of poems in here that are directly intended to make a homunculus picture of a young boy that I want to make out with. It rarely works out, but eventually the whole body of my work is a big personals ad. That's a big motivation, to make myself open and candid. AL: Do you prefer pre-Stonewall homosexuality, repressed and closeted or .... AG: No way! AL: Is the gay revolution of the 1970s the best thing that happened? AG: No. It was a good thing that happened. But the best thing that happened? Come on! Why do you treat it as a stereotype? AL: I just wanted you to talk about pre-Stonewall activity. AG: There were a large mass of people who were gay and who knew each other, and then there was police repression. The clubs and the gay bars were owned by the Mafia who paid off the police. Stonewall didn't pay off the police. Police corruption was really at the bottom of it all. For the mass of people it was a gay riot. It was a political action lead by the transvestites, they were the pioneers who fought the police. I don't think that there was that much psychological difference before and after Stonewall. Burroughs, Genet, Christopher Isherwood, and Gore Vidal had all written gay novels before then. There was a lot of gay literature. It wasn't the internalization of homosexuality but the official repression by the police and the Mafia, who had a vested interested in it staying black market. George Scrivani: Are you going to attend the 25th anniversary celebration of Stonewall in New York? AG: I don't know where I'm going to be. If I'm in New York, I will be marching with NAMBLA. AL: I wanted you to talk about political activism. My feeling is that it is based around single issue politics. This sort of activism is usually a reaction of "a society of the spectacle" scenario... AG: I don't know what all this language and references mean. I don't know the relationship between single issue activism and spectacle. That is the language of the Situationists. I don't understand what logical link you are making. AL: How has you view of Walt Whitman changed over the years? AG: Is that the same question? AL: No I changed it. I skipped that question. AG: Why don't you clarify. Can you give me a clear idea of what you mean? AL: Definitely! AG: So can you say it in more simple language? I don't mind answering the question if I can understand it, but I can't. AL: First, there is an activity called "Political Activism." This is a very popular activity in San Francisco. All over. AG: Gay activism? AL: That as well. It seems that... AG: Which type are you talking about? AL: Activism surrounding the Rodney King Trial, The Iraq War, and Act-Up for instance. AG: There were anti-Iraq War demonstrations here in San Francisco? GS: Yeah, it was big. But television distorted it. AL: Yeah. The way media is structured now, most debates focus on single issue politics while ignoring the larger picture, which resembles a model set up by the Situationists, in Guy Debord's The Society of The Spectacle. Debord criticizes the fascination of the spectacle. AG: The critique was that everything was reduced to unrelated theater. I don't know if the left or anyone has a unified field of activism. I'm not sure if the situation is so far out of control that there is any solution. One problem is over-population and another is hyper-technology, which are ruining the planet. Technology is ruining the planet, so the answer is "less power" but that's unlikely to happen. Does anybody disagree with a dark vision of the future? All pop culture is based on it. AL: Everyone my age believes that they are inheriting several of these problems such as toxicity.... AG: And overpopulation. We have this privilege. We're all dependent on technology because we use electricity, even a cute magazine like Cups is dependent. Everyone in the West is complicit. AL: There's not much cynicism in your work. You don't value that position about the world? AG: That's a stupid young person's reaction towards the world. That's a person who doesn't sense their own value or worth. Given a situation like this, the most practical approach is creating some relationship to mass suffering. It's the difference between living with AIDS and dying with AIDS. AL: How do you feel that the poets associated with The Berkeley Renaissance, such as Spicer and Duncan, and poets now referred to as The New York School of Poets, Ashbery, Koch, and O'Hara, differed from the Beat poets? AG: The Beat Poets were close stylistically to The Berkeley Renaissance, but the Berkeley people were a little more literary, in a sense that they drew on a more elite literary tradition and language, derived from Neo-Platonic studies of the renaissance. As far as The New York Poets: we all went to bed together. O'Hara was a close friend. We wrote poems to each other. O'Hara put the stamp of approval in New York, which was very important in those days, on John Wieners, and on Gregory Corso. Spicer and Duncan didn't care for some of the Beat Poets, but they respected Kerouac. Duncan had been a gay pioneer when writing an essay in the 1940s about being gay as a political act. They thought that the Beat Poets took away some of the praise. We had certainly gotten a lot of publicity. I wrote to Duncan "In unity there is strength." But he never joined us for any readings. Spicer always thought that there was some vulgarity involved, that Gary Snyder's work was too intentional, and that I wasn't sufficiently learned. AL: In what I've read, you painted the history of poetry as cyclical and continuous, but a poet like Jack Spicer doesn't seem to fit in to the traditions that you talk about. AG: He fits in. He wanted to be totally individual. He even fought with Duncan: certain metaphysical arguments. AL: What do you think of the poets on MTV and performance poetry in general? AG: Poetry since Homer and Sappho has been performed. The minstrels. Pound and Yeats always stressed reading poetry aloud. They thought it was important. Pound's daughter said that her father always thought that the proper way to present poetry was through performance. It all depends on how sophisticated the is text on the page. If it looks good on the page it should sound good in the air. A lot of it is shit on the page and good in the air. A lot of it is shit on the page and shit in the air. And some of it is great on the page and great in the air. AL: Speaking of shit, there seems to be a lot of preoccupation with the anus? AG: Are you speaking about shit or playing with the anus? Doesn't everybody play around with the anus. I would say that a majority of people in America, whether they are heterosexual or homosexual, like to have their anus diddled with during copulation. Does that seem inaccurate? AL: That's perfectly acceptable. AG: Is that an accurate statement? Do the girls that you make out with like to have their anus diddled with? Not fucked in the ass, but... AL: You have this poem "Sphincter" which reminds me of a Rimbaud/Verlaine poem. There is a tradition of anus poems. AG: It's a universal theme. I wrote a poem after that which goes: "I got old and shit in my pants, shit in my pants....." AL: How do you feel the gay homosexual imagination has contributed to 20th century poetry and how much have you contributed to this? AG: My part has been minor. What I have done is to take gay, homosexual love and give it a dimension of ordinariness. So it's not a big deal. Are you gay? AL: Um, well let me ask you another question. AG: I don't understand. Is this a gay magazine? AL: No. I interviewed Dennis Cooper in the last one, but it's not a focus. Alexander Laurence is a writer who lives in Los Angeles. He has interviewed over 100 novelists, many of which are accessible through the Internet. His book reviews have appeared in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, American Book Review, East Bay Express, LA Reader, Bay Guardian, and American Book Jam.

Allen Ginsberg Interview

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William T. Vollmann Interview

photo by Alexander Laurence 1992.

I met Bill Vollmann in 1990. I had read Rainbow Stories and read a few stories of his in Conjunctions. I lived in San Francisco at the time, and except for a few people and friends, nobody knew who he was. Vollmann had lived in San Francisco off and on since 1981, but I had no idea how to contact him. I found out later that he was living in New York City at this time and was writing Fathers and Crows.

I asked a few papers in the Bay Area about doing an article on Vollmann. They weren't interested, because he wasn't part of the PC fads. In 1993 and 1994, I finally got to do some interviews with Vollmann and I saw him a lot during these years. Many of these magazines were apprehensive about doing anything about him, but I soon made them believers. I remember one time when I met Bill in Noe Valley. We walked down to Mission Street and all the way to the 16th Street Bart Station, talking about the hotels and the people who would later show up in The Royal Family. Today you see articles in the Bay Area newspapers and magazines much as you see articles about lesser writers such as Amy Tan and Anne Lamont, who have been over-praised and had too much attention given. I mean if some lesbian built a table, as long as it worked, as was a nice looking table, I wouldn't care who built it. The Royal Family is a novel about two brothers. Henry a detective who is looking for the Queen of the Whores. John a lawyer who is thinking about the loss of his Wife, Irene.

Enough about me, and more about Bill. He was born in Los Angeles in 1959. He attended a few colleges like Cornell University and Berkeley, but we won't hold that against him. He's won plenty of awards and not enough cash prizes. His journalism has appeared in Spin Magazine, The New Yorker, and Cups Magazine. His novels include You Bright and Risen Angels (1987), The Ice-Shirt (1990), Whores For Gloria (1991), Fathers and Crows (1992), and The Rifles (1994). His short story collections include The Rainbow Stories (1988), 13 Stories and 13 Epitaphs (1991), Butterfly Stories (1993), and The Atlas (1996). His only non-fiction book is actually the first he wrote, An Afghanistan Picture Show (1992). His next book will be Argall, part of the Seven Dreams series of novels which include The Ice-Shirt, Fathers and Crows, and The Rifles. Vollmann now lives in Sacramento with his wife and child.

You can see him at Saturday, April 23rd at the LA Times Book Festival. His most recent book is called Europe Central.

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AL: The Royal Family book over the past fifteen years. You must be excited?

WTV: Well, a book is a book. Another day, another dollar, Alexander.

AL: By the way, am I speaking to Bill Vollmann or William the Blind?

WTV: Maybe both of the above.

AL: The narration of The Royal Family seems slightly different than the other books. There are coroner's reports and documents. Different characters seem to narrate the book themselves. There are not as many intrusions as there is in the other books where William the blind shows up. So could you talk about the narration and how you handled it with this new book?

WTV: I was trying to describe a lot of life and a lot of people, so it seemed that there was no reason to make it more complicated by throwing in some of the narrative tricks. It was already about all I could handle. I didn't want to make the book unreadable. It's already pretty long so why not let people off the hook for a little bit? The narrator himself is not such a strong presence you know. I guess your right.

AL: Are all these characters like Domino and Dan Smooth in the other books or is everyone a new character?

WTV: They're all new characters I would say.

AL: A few years ago you were talking about a play you staged. It was called "Queen of the Tenderloin" or "Queen of the Whores." Was that the genesis of this book?

WTV: That's exactly right. I did that with lots of different prostitutes and so forth, to get some ideas, to see how they would act out the roles. That was one of them.

AL: One of the last times I talked to you, you said that you were working on Argall, you had a book of poetry, and then there was a long book, an essay called, "Rising Up and Rising Down." Since you had so many other books in the works, how did you find time to write this new one?

WTV: I work on lots of books at the same time. So this is the one that happened to get finished next. It was kind of fun writing it. Yeah, "Rising Up and Rising Down:" some people are looking at it. Who knows? Maybe it will get a publisher too? I have been working on The Royal Family for the past four years, maybe more.

AL: Did you write this book while you waited for the other books to get published or at least get some attention?

WTV: I keep chipping away at all of them, and I try not to think about the publishing. The publishing is like this business thing that I do not have a lot of control over. I do the best that I can. I work on whatever I feel like doing on any given day. That's what I do.

AL: I was reading a few magazines and editorials about prostitution. It's been so many years and I don't think many people understand it. Nothing changes. People have the same attitudes.

WTV: You're so right. It's sad.

AL: People say about prostitutes: what's wrong with these people? Why don't they get a job? Girls think to themselves: sex is something personal, letting someone enter you, how can they take money for that? Prostitution is a closed world unless you want to go in there and see it for what it is. Could you comment on that?

WTV: Well, I still think it should be legalized and regulated. If they were to do that, if they gave the prostitutes a safe place to work, I think that there would be less crime, less disease, and everything would be a lot less hypocritical. It would be a win-win situation for everybody, as long as they let everyone work. If some prostitute got a disease they would have to figure a way for them to still get money. Otherwise she would be out there on the street doing thing for a cut rate. In the long run, everybody would be better off. There wouldn't be people who think that just because they are prostitutes, everybody has given up on them, and they have to be drug addicts and thieves, and everything else, like be covered with lice. It would be so much better. It's very cruel and stupid the way it is now. It really makes me angry.

AL: You talk about the way it is in Nevada where prostitutes are legal as long as they stay in those house. You deal with that in the section "The Feminine Circus." They want the Queen to work there.

WTV: In Nevada brothels it's quite expensive. Presumably more competition would allow there to be more variation in the market. There can always be high-priced and low-priced ones. It's the low-priced ones who I'm concerned about. The high-priced ones already operating. These escort services, these women are doing fine. Some of them have told me that they like prostitution being illegal, because they can go to someone's hotel room, get the money, and refuse to do anything. Or they can do what they want. Or they can blackmail the guy. So it's very convenient for them. But it's the women working on the street that no one seems to care about. They get harassed. It's pretty sad.

AL: You quoted de Sade saying something like "If you create laws, you also create crimes…."

WTV: That's true of prostitution. That's for sure. They should make everything easy and honest. It's such a waste, like the drug war.

AL: Who are some of these characters based on, like Dan Smooth, for instance?

WTV: They're just fictional characters, you know, based on people I've hung out with, or stories I've heard, or people I've read about. They're not based one-to-one on someone real.

AL: The Royal Family is probably your darkest book about San Francisco. Do you think that you are protecting us from all these myths that San Francisco wants to portray itself as, like the land of the Dot.Com, the clean city by the bay where you invest your capital?

WTV: It's certainly going to be more and more that way I suppose. But Henry's life and John's life are similar, you know. Even if all the Henrys are driven out, and all the Johns will are there. They will still be Johns and they will be going to different kinds of prostitutes. Lots of luck.

AL: What do you think about the critical appreciation of your work?

WTV: All I hope is I can get some money for the next book, and I can keep doing what I want. Critical acclaim is a means to that end. But if I don't get it, it doesn't hurt my feelings, and if I do, it doesn't really impress me that much. Because it's really like people talking and saying what they think. I don't think it's that important. The marketing people keep up with that. It's a bad time for the libraries. That's why I dislike the Internet. People think that they can get information just by sitting at a computer terminal. If that information is just a screen length excerpt from a book, as opposed to the whole book itself, some people don't care. There should be places where libraries keep all books and no book should be discarded. Every book is valuable.

AL: It's become very unfashionable to read the Classics, the Greeks and the Romans, and their literature. Some of your books suffer from the fact that a classical education that readers used to have is no longer in place.

WTV: That's right. Fortunately the world is so big and the technology of publication is so efficient, if it turns out, ten years from now, that there's only a handful of people who care about what I care about, maybe there will be enough to support me, and let me do what I want to do. And if there are other people who don't know what a book is, more power to them. Hopefully it won't just be a bunch a priests. Hopefully it will be a bunch of fun-loving people who can pick up some whores.

AL: That's whom you dedicate this book to. Whores, junkies, people who like to have fun….

WTV: People such as yourself….

AL: Yeah, except I don't do any drugs anymore. But when I see you next, we'll have to do a line of bump. In this book there a mention of Doestoevski, and this book, Irene's Cunt, by Louis Aragon. Are you interested in Surrealism?

WTV: Yeah. Irene's Cunt was interesting. It has some pretty sentences in it. Maldoror influenced me, but that's beginning to be an old influence. I read that before I wrote my first book. I wanted to write a book that was searching and was spiritual in certain ways, and Doestoevski was a master there. It was interesting to think about him and The Bible and the good and bad things in that. And to consider Buddhism and addiction. Some of the Gnostic scriptures were important to me in this book, The Royal Family. But the main thing was to be honest and to give some of the characters the drive to understand their worlds and make sense of their selves. The more intellectual ones are going to use Doestoevski, and the others are going to use crack. They're trying to go to the same place whatever that place is.

AL: A few people have compared The Royal Family to a previous book, Whores For Gloria. Are they on to anything there?

WTV: It's the third in a trilogy: Whores For Gloria, Butterfly Stories, and The Royal Family. They are all love stories. Each one is about a man who gets involved with one or more prostitutes. Each one has a slightly different point of view of that subject.

AL: I just read Fathers and Crows for the first time a few weeks ago. That seemed the most different novel from the rest, and maybe the most heavily researched. Is Argall going to be more like that?

WTV: That's right. It's going to be a little like that. There's going to be a strong Elizabethan narrative voice. There's more research on the Elizabethan mindset, and a little on the anthropology of the Indians. I hope to make Pocahontas come alive. It's more similar to Fathers and Crows.

AL: I had a little minor question about You Bright and Risen Angels. In the table of contents it went on to describe further chapters that weren't in the book.

WTV: If you read that table of contents you can sort of tell other things that happened in the book. It was a fun little trick. At least I thought it was fun at the time. You can see that the Bug's Revolution doesn't really succeed and a bunch of awful things happen and it makes sense and ties together. And having seen that, it makes no sense to have the book go on to describe those things. It's a book about disconnection, alienation, and dwindling away, and death, and so forth. So that's a way of doing it without all the chapters being there.

AL: That book was also about Deep Springs?

WTV: Well, sort of. Deep Spring isn't really like that. But Deep Spring is a great place and the Society of Daniel is a really evil place. Some of the historical settings of Deep Springs were recycled. But some of that Society of Daniel was in fact based on Telluride, Colorado. Telluride was where the founder of Deep Springs first started using alternating current. That was L. L. Nunn.

AL: Have you traveled anywhere in the past year? Have you went anywhere new?

WTV: I returned to Afghanistan. Haven't been there in 1982. I returned to Columbia. First time since '99. And I have traveled all through the United States for a story about guns. I am working on a story about Asian Gangs right now in California for The New Yorker. I have done a little traveling for that but not much.

AL: A character in a few books is Brandi. She's in four or five books. But she doesn't show up in The Royal Family. Are we to assume that she's died by now?

WTV: Hard to say, Alexander. It's a pretty unpredictable world out there. She was in a couple book come to think of it.

AL: And now she's gone?

WTV: I could always resurrect her. If I write any more about prostitutes? Maybe I have written enough. If the spirit moves me I'll write about them. Argall will probably be the next book. And I am working on some short stories about Europe during World War Two. I'm hoping to finish that up in the next year. I'm working on my Book of Candles, which I started in 1995. It's a massive project. I printed a page last week. I hand-color the pages and I got to finish the boxes. It's going to be a few years before I finish.

AL: Are you still making bullets?

WTV: Absolutely. It's gives me something to do in my free time.

William T. Vollmann Interview

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Contact Information

EMAIL me at AlexLaurence @ AOL (dot) com

"If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite."

The Portable-Infinite started in January 2005. It is the creation of one person: Alexander Laurence. It started in the ashes of all the other magazines and websites that I have been involved with the past 20 years. The purpose of The Portable-Infinite is collect all the interviews and essays I have written over the years. Plus there is always new material being added all the time. This is a blog that is focused on what is happening in Los Angeles right now in music and pop culture. It's all about now and the future.

It's really a scrapbook. There are a lot of new photos being added all the time. I am also very interested in the new art gallery scene that has taken off in Downtown LA. So hopefully after a while there will be a lot of interesting content on here each day. From May 2009 to present, I have been working with photographer, Angel Ceballos (robotangel.com). She is based in Seattle, but has shot a lot of bands in LA over the years. Her photography will be featured exclusively here from now on. I have also been interviewing more bands and writing more reviews. There are also other makeup people, graphic design people, collaborators, and others, at the fringes. 

Alexander Laurence has also been a tour manager since 2009 for the following bands:

Alessi's Ark (Alessi Laurent-Marke) from 2010 to present. (UK band)

Magic Wands from 2009 to present. (Tennessee, LA band)

Gliss from 2011 to present. (Denmark, LA band)

Deer Tracks (2013 US Tour, including SXSW) (from Sweden)

F.O.X. (2013 US Tour) (from UK)

We have supported and played with the following bands: Sam Amidon, Paul Weller, Laura Marling, Patterson Hood, The Villagers, The Kills, The Horrors, The Jesus and Mary Chain, The Warlocks, School of Seven Bells, Vacationer, Ava Luna, Jail Guitar Doors, Middle Class Rut, Moving Units, Mac Demarco, Blood Candy, Vinyl Williams, L.A. Witch, Death Valley Girls, Suuns, Rah Rah, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, The Crystal Method, Geographer, Atlas Sound, The Noisettes, The Raveonettes, Glasvegas, Blonde Redhead, Liars, Autolux, Io Echo, and many others.

Thanks for asking.

CONTACT ME: click on my name below

--Alexander Laurence

Suffer what there is to suffer, enjoy what there is to enjoy. Regard both suffering and joy as facts of life and continue chanting Nam-Myoho-Renge-Kyo, no matter what happens. Then you will experience boundless joy from the Law. Strengthen your faith more than ever.

"Happiness In This World" --Gosho

All content created and copywritten by Alexander Laurence © 1995-2020

(except the borrowed bits). Many of these interviews were featured in different forms in Cups Magazine, Free Williamsburg, SF Burning, Altx, and Zoo Magazine. Many others I cannot remember.

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