11/18/2006

Interview with Mary Gaitskill

by Alexander Laurence
(c) 1994

Q: How long have you lived in San Francisco?
Mary Gaitskill: I've only been here for five months. I went back and forth between Marin County and New York City for a while. Then I ran out of money, so I don't have my place in New York anymore. I moved to San Francisco because I started to go nuts in Marin. I realize that Marin County repels many people, but I didn't feel that way because I wanted to live somewhere that was very quiet and didn't demand anything of me. It's been hard for me to get connected to San Francisco. I'm not sure why. A lot of my life here has been very internal, but that's always been true of me.
Q: You sound like you don't drive?
MG: No, I don't. Which is one of the reasons that I liked being in Marin, because without a car, everything had to slow down to one mile an hour. You wouldn't think from my demeanor that I would require that, but I can be very amped up, even though I don't show it. Everything was slow like silly putty. That was good for me at the time. My internal state was so chaotic that I needed to be somewhere that wasn't going to reflect that back to me. Two Girls, Fat and Thin came out a while ago.
Q: Have you been working on a novel or short stories in the past couple of years?
MG: I did a draft of a novel which is real short. I don't know how long it will take me to finish it. I've been working on stories. It takes a long time to finish a story. Sometimes it takes years, which is ridiculous. It used to be like I'd write something in a month, and then I would put it aside for a few months, then go back to it and finis h it up in a month or two. Maybe sometimes I would go over it again. Now, I'll put it aside for a year and come back to it. So it ends up taking four years. The new novel is tentatively titled Veronica. It's about two women and their friendship. One of them becomes sick with AIDS. It's not just about that but that's a central motif.
Q: What is your opinion of creative writing workshops? Can writing be taught?
MG: It was OK. I don't think that I'm really a teacher by inclination. It was hard for me to get over the idea that the teacher is supposed to be dispensing wisdom. That's not how it is. That's just an idea that I had in my head. But I enjoyed SF State because there was a lot of exchange. Some of the students had read my books, but most of them hadn't. I'm kind of indifferent to creative writing schools. Some writers will harangue how horrible they are, then they go teach at them. I didn't learn writing that way because when I was in school they didn't have programs like that. I think that Iowa just started when I was getting out of school. So I wasn't ever presented with that as an option. I didn't like creative writing classes all that much. It was a way of getting credit for something I would have done anyway. Why I'm not against them is because I do notice that some people really get energized by it. It's a way to be around other people who will discuss things. If you're a good writer, you're going to write whether you're in a writing program or not. I think that it would be better if you could have that arrangement in a non-scholastic situation. If you could find a congenial group of people.
Q: Do you show your work in its preliminary stages to other writers or friends?
MG: It's not something that I do very often. I'm more likely to do it if I'm working with a form that I'm not used to. I just wrote an essay recently, and I showed it to people I know who write essays. I show fiction less frequently, but I do sometimes. The essay was about all this talk on "victimism." How everyone wants to be a victim. And the date rape thing.
Q: What is your view on victimism?
MG: I think a lot of people, especially middle class people, were kind of brought up not to think for themselves. They were told what to think. So when they are put in a situation where they are required to think for themselves, they're in trouble. So they feel victimized without knowing why. They might respond by becoming very passive just going with whatever the other person wants or by becoming aggressive and thinking they have the right to take over the situation, regardless of what the other person wants. Which Is a recipe for date rape. It's weird how people are saying "How could this be happening?" It's always been present in the culture. It's just that before there was an illusion that everybody was doing the same thing, living the same way. Since that illusion has been lost, many people don't know what to do.
Q: Could you explain what you call "the fetishization of romance?" That was a concept that you wrote about in an essay for MS. Magazine.
MG: I don't think that I remember the essay well enough to give you a clear idea of what I meant at the time. But what I think I meant that when people get obsessed by something -- women are encouraged culturally to do this more than men -- they have an idea about someone or something that has nothing to do with the alleged object. People often describe it as romance, but that sounds nicer than it actually is. Romance can be rather hideous. I mean you can romanticize something to a point where it's a grotesque distortion. It can be so distorted that it's kind of gross, but on the other hand it can have some pretty aspects for the person who is doing the romanticizing. There's usually an underpinning that's nasty. At the expense of what are you elevating them? When you idealize something, you strip out all the good parts and magnify them, but the other stuff doesn't go away. You're just blocking it out and at some point it'll bite you on the ass.
Q: Sadomasochism is mentioned in your stories and about your stories. Is that just a buzz word or is that a judgment of the reality of most relationships? Is every relationship between victim and abuser?
MG: It's certainly a buzzword, but it also refers to something real. It's also a term I think has many different meanings for people. In one way I haven't liked it that people have talked about my books like that because to me that's not what they're all about. On the other hand, I've repeatedly used S/M as a motif, so I don't blame people for reacting that way. In "Romantic Weekend," the second story from Bad Behavior, part of the problem, when this girl says "I'm a masochist," is that she doesn't mean what he thinks she means. It could be anything from very theatrical playing to heavy, violent physical stuff. A lot of my characters are actually too incompetent to be properly called S/M practitioners.
Q: In Two Girls, the character Justine Shade likes sadomasochism. She wants it, up to a point.
MG: That's a more negative version of sadomasochism as opposed to Bad Behavior which was more playful. In that book, in her case, I was describing a more negative aspect of S/M sex where it's unconscious. She conscious of it in a way, but in another way she's not. It's involved with a lot of feelings that she hasn't fully dealt with or allowed herself to experience even. You asked me earlier if S/M is a part of all relationships. I think it's always there in the spectrum whether people choose to act on it or not. Justine is a special case in some ways because as a child, she was the torturer. I saw her switching roles.
Q: Was she reliving what had happened to her? Being tortured in the same way she tortured others.
MG: If humiliation and betrayal and emotional pain are central themes in your life, you can respond to that fact in many diiferent ways. I didn't see Justine as consciously trying to redress the situation of childhood. In her case, and I think this is true of a lot of people, the victim role which a masochist chooses to play may look really passive, but in some sense it's a very aggressive stance. When I say aggressive, I mean in an internal level, because she's putting herself in a passive position; dangerously so in the case of Bryan, the character opposite.
Q: How is Justine's position different from a standard S/M situation like the one that is elaborated in The Story of O? O gives herself totally to this man, becomes a slave, submits to him, and through that process feels freer than before.
MG: In Justine's case, it's not like that. It's more like a ferocity, but it's convoluted. It's a kind of inward aggression. It seems like self-contempt, but it's really an inverted contempt for everything. That's what I was trying to describe in her. I would say it had to do with her childhood, not because she was sexually abused, but because the world that she was presented with was so inadequate in terms of giving her a full-spirited sense of herself. That inadequacy can make you implode with a lot of disgust. It can become the gestalt of who you are. So the masochism is like "I'm going to make myself into a debased object because that is what I think of you. This is what I think of your love. I don't want your love. Your love is shit. Your love is nothing." Justine's attitude toward Bryan is very contemptuous. I've been puzzled when some people have described my women characters as these passive victims. On the surface I see what they mean, but ultimately I don't see Justine as being passive. She's just too angry, and she tells Bryan what to do at almost every point.
Q: The name Justine Shade suggests both Sade and Nabokov: what is your interest in these writers? Who are you favorite writers?
MG: I may be totally embarrassed about all those wacky character names at some point. Well, I like Nabokov a lot. I don't think much of Sade as a writer, although I enjoyed beating off to him as a child. His books can be good beat- off material. I haven't read him for a long time. Some other writers that I like are Marguerite Yourcenar, Deborah Eisenberg, Flannery O'Conner, Jean Genet, and Maxine Hong Kingston.
Q: Realism is a mode of writing based on 19th century models. Post-Joycean experimentation has been an interesting activity over the past 25 years. What is your impression of the term "post-modernism?" Your writing seems to be free of theoretical implications.
MG: I'm not interested in that discussion. I don't usually look at things in terms of whether they're experimental or not. It's more like, does the form suit what they're going after. I see form as being a by-product. I say that even though style and form is very important to me. What I mean is that the style will be the inevitable result of what the writer is pursuing and how she's pursuing it. Some people use non-realistic forms very well, but I don't have an allegiance one way or another. And as far as theory goes: I'm not that conversant in it. I'm not a very theoretical person.
Q: I ask those questions because your two books were written in the 1980s in the midst of what in the art world we generally call "post-modernism." I was suggesting that it was a theoretical period. You have any interest in that?
MG: It's funny, in writing I really don't. I realize I don't have anything against it in principle because I've seen it done in film, in music, and in artwork where I've liked it. So it's not like I have a statement against it, but I've never been tempted to do it. I suppose that you can argue that I've done it by the suggestion of the name Justine, because it evokes things--other people's work-- even though I don't literally use it. I'm not interested in doing it myself.
Q: Can you talk about your writing process generally? How has your writing process changed since moving here? How do you begin to write anything?
MG: I don't get ideas fully formed. I usually start with just an image, or a conversation that haunts me, or an experience I had that's really striking to me. I work with superficial detail first. If you notice, there is a lot of detail in my work, and physical detail. It's because that's how I get into the story. If I try to think in terms of who is this character, or things thematically, or things psychologically, I get lost. I just start with some small thing and dig into it that way. I write longhand first. I have to do it that way. Then, I put it on the word processor.
Q: Your work has been described as "queer literature." I was wondering what you thought about that label? Two Girls has lesbian overtones, Justine and Dorothy sleep together at the end. Are they excluding the men in their lives, and feeling free being with each other?
MG: I wouldn't say that, but for those particular women, freedom for a while might be good. I wouldn't see those two as a couple. The reason I see it having gay overtones is that I see Dorothy as being gay. I don't say that in the book. Most of her feelings toward Justine have erotic undertones. I don't know if they would act it out together, but at some point Dorothy might.
Q: What about their interest in S/M and sexual marginality?
MG: I may be alone, but it's always been my feeling that people who are into S/M tend to be bisexual because their sexuality is not oriented around the genitals. It's more oriented around fantasy than people not into S/M. So there's more inclination to go either way.
Q: You have mentioned before in an article that you worked as a stripper in Toronto. Was that a good or bad experience?
MG: I did it for two years. Actually it wasn't lap dancing. It was more like old-fashioned stripping. The last vestiges of the burlesque world were still in place in Toronto at the time. It was a culture clash because the go-go dancing was starting to happen, and the older strippers really hated it. It really disgusted them. They really despised these young girls who would dance with a nightie and then throw it off. The older burlesque dancers were in the posture of defending themselves because stripping wasn't a respectable thing. So when they saw people coming in making it more funky, it threatened their self-esteem. I saw some lap dancing recently, and I was like "God," it's totally different. It's not ego gratifying, I would imagine, but I haven't done it yet. Maybe it's in my future? When I was doing stripping, you weren't a piece of meat. There was nudity but there wasn't fisting. When I grew up, I didn't have experiences of adolescent femaleness because I left and didn't do the normal thing with dating and all that. So, in a strange way, I got to act that out in a burlesque way. So I could make fun of it and yet have the experience. It was like taking on various personas and throwing them off right away. I felt that I was in control and I didn't feel demeaned by it. I don't want to seem negative about lap dancing, but it seems that you have less opportunity to that now, at least from what I saw. I've never been to the theaters here, but in the bars that I saw lap dancing, it didn't seem that the women were able to play with that, because they're right in the guy's face, and he's telling her what to do. I want to make it clear because I don't want to put down lap dancers.
Q: Have you used your experiences as a stripper for a story? There was one story in Bad Behavior about a prostitute. I was wondering have you ever turned a trick?
MG: Yes. Have you?
Q: No. Not really. Maybe I should. I've paid a prostitute for sex before.
MG: I definitely would if I was a guy.
Q: Do you think that a purpose of writing is to communicate something and to overcome alienation?
MG: That's something that I feel complicated about too, because it is sort of a bond with the reader. When I had my first book published, I was really touched by the way people responded to it. I'm sure some people hated it. But just the fact that some people were emotionally affected by it, affected me. It was a really intense feeling. However it's also true that they saw the book in totally different ways than I meant it. Not in a bad way. For example, some people saw the story "Secretary" as a social statement about the evil of jobs and the horror of sexual harassment. Other people thought it as a story about a young girl being liberated from her tightness by a beneficent old guy. Those are two opposite extremes. Definitely it is partly communication because you're wanting people to read it, but it's also something that just happens internally for you. I didn't think that some of the stories in Bad Behavior were going to get published, but it was still important for me to write them.
Q: Are public readings something that you look forward to or like to avoid? I am thinking of a reading you did last September at SF State. Is writing for you a way to be direct by indirectness?
MG: Actually I like giving readings. Why did you think that I didn't like it? Because I seemed uncomfortable? I'm shy, so I was particularly nervous at that reading partly because I thought someone I knew would be there. Someone that I had a weird situation. Plus I find that story difficult to read because it has a bunch of different emotional tones. It's hard to get it right. I am shy, so in a way, it's hard to read. But when I get into it, I really like it. Shy people are always hams secretly. It's a way of totally being in my world, and yet coming out in the world and talking to people. It's my world because it's my story. But at the same time other people are sitting there listening, and I can often feel the audience responding, or at least I think I can. Although it's difficult if I feel the audience not responding.
Q: You wrote in both novels: "Somebody opened me up in a way that I had no control over." What is it about losing control in a relationship that is so attractive for your characters?
MG: There can be something innately erotic about it because there's a sense of limitlessness to losing control especially if you're a person with a lot of limits. And if you're used to being like that, the idea of having the limits just totally ripped off, anything can happen. It can be arousing, not just sexually, but in every way. It can be frightening to some, but fear can be exciting as well.

11/16/2006

new and old photos BJM 1990-2018

11/14/2006

Dot Allison @ Irving Plaza 2002

11/09/2006

AP: Yes it has. It came out in Japan first, then Europe, and now it is coming out in the States. It's been a long process really. Not so much in the making, but because Mo Wax was owned by A&M, and they were bought by Polygram. It was part of the Seagram’s merger. It was caught up in the politics and held up. There's many labels it's released under but I think of it as a Mo Wax record because I deal mainly with James Lavelle. He was doing a lot of hip-hop records years ago with DJ Shadow and DJ Krush, so when I went to see him, it was at a point where he was looking for something slightly different, maybe weirder, something to branch out the label. James is very young so he's not from the old school, men in suits, way of thinking. James Lavelle is just more daring. He let me just go off and do the album and he accepted at the end. There's no way around it for an artist like me.

AL: You felt like you had a lot of freedom to work, then? I noticed that Kiss My Arp covered a lot of areas and was diverse and wasn't limited to one type of sound.

AP: Well, I love gangster rap. I have this thing where I love a lot of the scenes of America, where we all like scenes that are not from our own territory. For me, I love NWA and all the old school beats. The beats are hard. Then it got a bit light and fluffy at one point. You have Mix Master Mike, and Cut Chemist from LA, and DJ Kraze from Miami. I don't like to segregate. If I'm playing in one place, I don't like to think "Oh, I can't play this record because I'm on the East Coast or West Coast." And it's very like that out here. I love Detroit techno, Chicago house, and I like all sorts of music. I know what I like. I want to play what I really believe as opposed to what I should be politically playing whatever the place is.

AL: Your influences and interests are very diverse. I thought a few songs sounded like Warp stuff, like Autechre....

AP: A lot of people think that it has the Warp sound. Warp is one of my favorite British labels. I love Autechre, Plaid, and Aphex Twin. Those records are all timeless and you can still play them. But the real reasons I like that style of music is because they are not sampling big loops of other people's music. For myself, I only use analog synths and analog decks. People like Steve Reich, Ryguchi Sakakmoto, Jean-Michel Jarre, and Art of Noise, all of these people, even Phillip Glass from way back, have this thing where you make your own sounds. You're creating all the time. You're not just relying on other things that people do nowadays. As technology has moved forward in the last twenty years, it's made people really lazy and slightly uncreative. I'm not disrespecting those people because you need all types of music but it's a bit recycled. I love electro and the 808 drum machine. There's not many pioneers now pushing boundaries.

AL: What about Kraftwerk? They were doing a lot with the technology then. And they influence much of the Warp records.

AP: Kraftwerk has always been one of my biggest influences, but again the equipment in which they were making tracks with were the maddest bits of gear. They started electro for me, and they did an incredible new style of music. They made their own synths and they are the only people with those certain pieces of equipment. Germany is a good place for electronic music. All the beats are stiff. You can play more ominous, more menacing, stiff, nasty beats in Germany and they don't find it offensive like they do where it's more house and disco based like France and America. Things like Autechre seem much more ominous than some of that other dance stuff.

AL: How much sampling do you do on the new record?

AP: I sample a lot of organic sounds from outdoors. Metal hits and wooden hits. Also I make about sixty sounds from arps and serges and moogs, make the tracks and program the sounds. That's the fun part for me. Some of the gear I'm using is the first synths that were made. You have to turn them on with a key and wait for them to heat up for an hour. I'm always listening for sounds and rhythms. I like the organic and heaviness of analog that you don't get with digital sound. In keyboards now you get like a hundred presets. There's not that much choice for me, but I love the fact that with an analog synthesizer you can make one kick sound, but you'll never be able to make that sound again. Therefore every time I'm creating something, I'm creating something new. My boredom and attention span in the studio is really bad.

AL: When you DJ now, what sort of stuff do you play?

AP: The problem for me is that I do like so many different types of music, that I find it hard to narrow it down. I don't just play house or techno. I like it to go on a bit of a journey. So I'll probably start off with hiphop, then go on to electro, then go upbeat, and then go into some Carl Craig and Detroit techno. I just can't narrow it down. That's what I'm really about. I still do a lot of experimental chill out rooms. When I play with Phillip Glass and Steve Reich, I don't play so much NWA, I will play Autechre, a Phillip Glass record, some experimental stuff with some sound effect on top of it. That's the confusing thing with me. Sometimes I'll write a vocal ballad with a forty piece orchestra, and other times I'll write a track like "Ballbreaker" which is just a nasty distorted club tune. I like having an open mind. It's great seeing different scenes where you expose yourself to so many different sounds instead of limiting yourself to one small scene.

AL: Are there any observations you have made on this tour about clubs and DJ's?

AP: Everybody really wants to be a DJ. It's really sad to me. You have to love what you’re doing and be passionate about it and not just follow the trends. It's not an easy thing to do. And it's not about being a pop star at the end of the day. The great thing about being a DJ is that music is the one thing that connects people all over the world without a doubt. You pick up little details from every little scene. The global things and the collaborative aspects are really interesting.

11/05/2006

Add N to X

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11/03/2006

LADYTRON @ UCLA

All photos by Alexander Laurence

10/30/2006

Dame Darcy Interview 1996

As I met Dame Darcy in her small apartment in the East Village, she was in the middle of creating a new series of paintings. I came there, Planet Filly as she calls it, to talk about her comic book, MEAT CAKE. But she turned out to be an artist of many talents. Dame Darcy showed me the dolls that she made. She had previously invited me to see her play banjo at the Fez. I was not feeling well that day so I never made it. She was a painter. She had made animated films, and recently made a pilot film for television. She was very busy as an artist, as well as being well-known in the comic book world where Dame Darcy is gathering a cult following. I met her on Good Friday, so religious themes were in the air. Her work evokes the Victorian and Gothic periods, so by just talking to her I felt that I was a figure at the turn of the century. She showed me some of the letters she received recently including a suicide note from some mental patient who had recently proposed marriage to her. Her birthday is June 19th. If you want to send her birthday presents like colored parasols you can send them to the address: PO Box 730, New York, NY 10009. She really needs a new parasol! She showed me three paintings recently done: one was a house, another was a group of butterflies, and the one she was working on, while we talked, was a bird.

******

Maybe I should have some questions? Like what I am doing here in your apartment?

Dame Darcy: Yeah. Just ask me any questions.

Do you feel comfortable painting while we're talking?

DD: Do you care?

No.

DD: OK. I just want to get this done before we go out tonight. Or maybe I won't go out because I've been feeling sick lately. We'll see. (Pause). I think these clouds are creating some sort of atmosphere. It's helping. I think that it's important to have some sort of atmosphere going. It's imperative to have atmosphere in all art.

You have a link to nature in all your work?

DD: I don't know. All my paintings have been nature themes so far. But I don't feel a link to nature. I feel that I'm more of a luddite than anything. Even though I would like to have a career in television, I want to use television as a medium to portray ludditian theories, so that way it's a juxtaposition. I love juxtapositions.

How did you come up with the idea for a television pilot that was also an animated film?

DD: Ever since I was eight, I wanted to be an animator. Ever since I found out how people did animation.

How did you figure that out?

DD: I think that I saw an animation special on Zoom. Or maybe on PBS. I remember seeing them doing cut-out animation, not cell animation. Then I got a book about animation, given to me by my Dad. My first animated film was like this: the background was this picture of a barn, and a creepy road leading up to the barn, and there was this ribbon going up the edge of it. It was a stop-motion animation and it was one minute forty seconds long. The ribbon was the blood and the frame. The frame was moving around the barn. I stop-motion animated this rat skull, and it was singing the words to this song by Caroliner, which was a band that I was in at the time. The rat skull had these sculpy limbs. I make the dolls out of sculpy too. The rat was walking around with these arms and legs made out of sculpy.

You had a live rat or you made a rat?

DD: It was a live rat skull. I mean it was a dead rat skull! Of course.

Where did you get this rat skull?

DD: I don't remember. I made a little dress for it and the arms and legs.

You could tell it's a rat skull from watching the film?

DD: What else would you think it was? If I saw a rat skull I would know it. Anybody that knows a rat skull is a numskull. Ha! Ha! Ha! These films were made with a 16mm Bolex. Before that I made hundreds of flipbooks. I kept telling my parents to get me some animation equipment, so I never got to do any of these films till I was eighteen. I lived in Idaho. It was horrible there. I kept begging my parents. In Idaho Falls, animation stands are few and far between. They have crafts stuff. There isn't any painting scene.

What do your parents think of what your doing?

DD: They're artists. My Dad is an artist. My mother is a nurse but she's really crafty. She does little craft things all the time. I have a really big family. I'm really glad that I had my family there, because my Dad really taught me all the skills that I know. My Dad taught me everything when I was really young. He started teaching me perspective, composition, and how to mix colors, hues and shapes, when I was six. He had actually went to art school and learned stuff there. I basically learned from him, so when I went to art school myself I didn't take any drawing classes because I didn't need to. I knew what they were teaching in there. I majored in film so I could learn animation, because that is what I wanted to do.

Who's the better painter: you or your Dad?

DD: Just different painters. Different styles.

Who has better drawing skills?

DD: Probably me. But my Dad is a better musician. He plays the banjo better than me. But he's been playing for thirty years. I don't practice enough. I do a lot of stuff. My Dad told me to focus on just one thing when I was sixteen. Music for me is just a hobby. I still like performing in front of a crowd. I get a lot of fan mail. I love it. I like to respond to it. It's really quaint and personal. But there's nothing like the instant gratification of being on stage and seeing an audience and seeing them react. I figure that if you're talented, you can apply your talent to anything and it will come out with your vision, and come out halfway legitimate. It's a test of talent.

What do you have the most respect for: the art world, the comic book world, or the literary world?

DD: It's all part of the art world. My films are art films, my comic book is underground comic book art, and my paintings are art: I'm an artist. (Laughter). It's all part of my planet, Planet Filly. And Planet Filly is an art planet.

What's up with this Planet Filly stuff?

DD: What do you mean?

Where did that come from?

DD: (Loudly) It came from Planet Filly!!!

Where is Planet Filly?

DD: Your sitting in it!

Oh! I'm in Planet Filly?

DD: Yeah.

What I was saying before was that many people already take paintings seriously, not so with comic books.

DD: That's why I'm doing these paintings. So I'm taken seriously as a fine artist and that takes the comic book up to a new level. Many people recognize Meat Cake as being a legitimate underground comic book; so many people don't think that it's art. So I figured that if I got my name around more as an artist and not just as a cartoonist, that would help my comic books and my films. The only reason I wanted to be a cartoonist, besides being an animator, was the funding. Comic books are a little cheaper to produce. I didn't know anybody who would show my cartoons if I did get them made. I did the comic books while I was waiting to get my animation show on television. At the same time, if I do get a television show, I'm not going to stop doing cartoons because I like to do Meat Cake. I like to do the sequence of stories with little pictures that cartoons are. I think that it's a good medium and a good way to express you. I come up with a lot more stories than I can possibly make films into. So that way at least they get to come out. If I sat here and waited to get all the money to make all the comics into film, I'd only have maybe ten of them done by now, or wait till doomsday to finish them all.

How many hours per day do you work on your art?

DD: Oh. Probably all day.

What? Twenty hours. Then sleep four hours.

DD: Yeah. I don't sleep very much. I'm an insomniac. That helps me get everything finished.

Do you have a secret political agenda?

DD: I don't care about politics. I just want to go back to the 1800s. I like the internet and television, but I would be content being a silent movie star. I like the 1890s up to the 1920s. I just finished a silent film last week, and I'm working on another film. E. Steven Fried directs one of them, and it's about me thinking about the devil and angels, and lust and avarice and greed, all the deadly sins....

This came natural for you?

DD: What?

Did you have to act? Did you ever think about good and evil, or the deadly sins before?

DD: I am Catholic.

And it's Good Friday!

DD: I know.

We should be in church.

DD: I'm going to one tomorrow.

Well, my question before was: Do you think about good and evil a lot and how does this inform your work?

DD: Oh. Um. Good and evil. Um.

Being raised a Catholic.

DD: Oh. Yeah, I guess so. I'm not so preoccupied with it. It was just a story idea. It was a five-minute film. If you asked me to come up with two hundred stories in a week I probably could. They might not all be that brilliant.

So the Catholic influence was a big deal?

DD: I was definitely shaped by the Catholic church. It was definitely a factor in making me the way that I am, and making my art the way it is. I hope that I'm not coming off as too pretentious. You don't think? I really care about people.

In Meat Cake, you reprint many of the letters that you receive. What decides which ones go in the magazine and which ones get left out?

DD: I like the ones that are smart, cute, or funny, or have some reference to science. I like science. If I was a man, I would have been a scientist. Things would have been different if I wasn't dyslexic. I love science because it's so sexy. I really love Devo. I think that Devo's world is really beautiful.

You don't have a talent for adding up numbers?

DD: My brain gets confused by a lot of stuff. It's really hard for me to find my way around as far as directions. I get really confused when people try to explain things to me that have to do with paperwork, numbers, and logistical stuff. I don't see why it's supposed to make so much sense. It's makes me feel stupid and I want to cry. If I was good in school and good at academics, I would have been a scientist. I have always been interested in biology and genetics.

You get many letters from psychos?

DD: Only about ten percent of the mail I get is from psychotic people or lecherous gross people. Nice people write most of the fan mail. I get a lot of letters by ladies. I really like it when ladies write me, because I feel a real kinship with women.

You have a secret feminism agenda then?

DD: No! I am just a philanthropist. I care about the well being of people in general. I have a lot of friends. I have a boyfriend. I have a lot of female friends.

So who are some of the characters in Meat Cake?

DD: There's Richard Dirt. She's the main character. She's a normal girl except that she's kind of wacky. There's Wax Wolf. He's an undead wolf made out of wax and fur. Then there are the Siamese twins, named Hindrance and Perfidia, and Perfidia means "two-faced." Hindrance is a "hindrance" to Perfidia, being the more alpha twin. There's a mermaid named Effluvia, and she has a really great car, and she lives in the ocean. There's Strega Pez whose mother was a witch, and she has pez candy that comes out of her slit throat, and that's how she talks. Her mother gave birth to Strega Pez through her throat as a curse, so that she would die. Strega Pez has been cursed all her life, so she has to do all these horrible menial jobs. Then there's Scampi The Selfish Shellfish, who is Richard's really big pet that has no head. There's Granny who gives them all advice. Granny is kind of demented. There's Igpay who is the Pig Latin speaking pig.

You are a character too?

DD: I'm sort of represented by Richard Dirt.

Which character is the most grounded in the real world?

DD: Friend The Girl. I didn't mention her before. She's the straight character.

Where did this Friend The Girl character come from?

DD: Just a girl. (Laughter). She is just a normal girl. Different people associate themselves with the different characters, and I think it's a psychology test to see who identifies with each character. Or who has a crush on whom. A lot of guys have a crush on Strega Pez. But a lot of girls identify with her because she's shy and hard working. Or the twins. People will write to me about them.

Do you have any advice for younger girls who are looking for ways of expressing themselves in art, or in life, or just rebelling?

DD: I would just say: Figure out what you want to do, then just work towards it, and don't let anybody stop you. If people want to help you, or if you get any encouragement, or any opportunities, follow through on all of them, and follow through on it completely. Don't do anything half-heartedly. Don't stop in the middle. I think that a lot of artists get discouraged. Being an artist is like taking a test. If you can survive it through the lean years, then you'll be OK later. Maybe it will never pay off, and only after you're dead, people discover your work. If you're not crazy when you started being an artist, you'll be eventually driven crazy.

Tell me about your television show?

DD: My television show is called "TURN OF THE CENTURY." I would host it, and we would have a vaudevillian style freak show and variety show. Then we would have little vignettes of animation by different artists, and little short films that were fairy tales. The whole theme of it would have a Victorian kooky, spooky, Gothic esthetic. That's what I'm doing right now. I finished my pilot for that. I sent out the pilot to people and pitch it to people, and see if I get any response.

THE PORTABLE INFINITE