I’ve always thought that ‘photographer’ was a very sexy profession for a woman, more so than for a man. As it turns out, Cass Bird’s photography is a modern and mischievous celebration of femininity. That’s a true statement, and one that sounds good, but I feel like the rise of Cass today is attributable to her personality, her ability to live in an intrepid way and so catch the exuberance of love and life so that her art, and the range of emotions contained inside, always appears to be an extension of moments lived.
Making the world a lot more like the way you imagine it, is at the root of what a certain ilk of artists do. But it’s not easy to pull off. Friendship looks like the central thread: Letting your guard down, our early years - blithe and happy, and the underlying ideal of resisting the strictures on everyday life.
[Photo by Daria Werbowy / Styling by Natasha Royt / Model Cass Bird]
“Home”, according to Benjamin Clementine, “is just a concept.” A sense of unbelonging is central to the 26-year-old’s art. The youngest of seven siblings, born in Ghana but raised in the tough North London suburb of Edmonton by strict Christian parents, the softly-spoken and shy Clementine spent his teens keeping his head down to avoid trouble, while secretly teaching himself piano in his bedroom.
At the age of twenty, disillusioned with London life, he absconded to Paris without a euro to his name, sometimes sleeping rough, and busking on the Metro to survive, as well as washing dishes in the city’s hotels like his hero Orwell before him (a coincidence Clementine didn’t discover till later). The time spent singing other people’s songs - a bit of Leonard Cohen, some Bob Marley, a few French numbers by Jacques Brel and Léo Ferré (even though Benjamin doesn’t speak the language) - to commuters on Ligne 2, between Nation and Porte Dauphine, honed his performing skills and instilled the confidence to effectively stand naked in front of the world. After a couple of years travelling around France, he made the right contacts to allow him to put out two EPs, and has now released his debut album “At Least For Now” via Barclay, the legendary label of Brel himself.
[Interview by Simon Price / Photo by Shawn Dogimont / Styling by Mélina Brossard]
Welcome dear reader, to a new issue of Hobo. You’ll hopefully notice a change as we decided to create a much bigger magazine, one wherein the artwork and texts truly come to life. I’ve always liked the idea of an exceptionally large magazine, a supple book with a nod to the Whole Earth Catalogue. Something of a folly then, which, rolled up, will stick out of your backback like an easel. It has to be impractical to carry around but you do so anyway because it’s romantic, it’s called Hobo, and art, like photography and writing, needs to be physically experienced and interacted with. I’m sure Frédéric Beigbeder would agree.
It’s also a pivotal issue due to who’s in it. Tilda is a major creative influence, an intellectual, and like reading Pauline Kael’s essays, it’s almost as much fun reading her reflections on Only Lovers Left Alive (and for that matter Stephen Scobie’s thoughts on Inside Llewyn Davis) than it is to watch the films themselves. I’m thrilled that Tilda was photographed by the brilliant artist Juergen Teller who I also believe to be the most important fashion photographer of his generation. Travelling from Scotland or Tangiers with a suitcase full of books, Tilda came to meet us in the Bois de Boulogne at dawn one very cold morning in March. Crazily, she’s barefoot in one photo and that was her idea. I met Norman twelve years ago when he helped me shoot Asia Argento for our second cover, all in the same wild and serendipitous afternoon. Life goes on, Norman hasn’t changed – he’s as original – I like him as much as I did then, and we’ve magically come full circle.
As you may know, Hobo started in British Columbia; we wanted to bring your attention to some of the world’s last wild wolves who are either being hunted out of unjustified hatred and ignorance, or losing their home – the wild sanctuaries they’ve kept for thousands of years – to clear cut logging and potentially very devastingly, to a pipeline cutting through the Great Bear Rainforest. Please dive in and read this pure, firsthand account by Ian McAllister. Clearly, as wolves disappear, so does the nature they represent and that we all depend on for spiritual nourishment and physical sustenance.
So despite the physical changes, Hobo is more than ever about artists, films, travels, wild nature and animals. We remain on the side of the outsiders, the dreamers, those who don’t play the obvious game, and continue to feel very much like a ginger cat named Ulysses, watching in wonder as he travels by subway farther and further away from his home, seeing the names of the stations go by.
My buddy Norman Reedus makes his show The Walking Dead in the woods of Georgia, away from Hollywood. He’s had a unique career path and life in general. With his son Mingus, he makes me think of Ogami Itto in the manga The Lone Wolf and Cub. If you look, there’s even a theme of apocalyptic justice running through his work. He’s a longtime cult favourite, a really nice guy, and you just root for him in life and on screen. He’s poised for a massive breakout now but still lives in Chinatown. As he says here: if it’s ever slow acting I’ll just do more art shows. At the moment he’s doing less.
Shawn Dogimont — I’ve got some questions prepared, should I just start?
Norman Reedus — Throw it at me, let’s see what you’ve got.
— You were born in Florida but you didn’t grow up there, you moved away quite young.
— Yeah, I moved from there very young. I don’t remember anything, I was just a baby when I left there. I lived in a few different places, Texas , Florida, California, Colorado, Tokyo for a little while, Motookubo in Chiba. London, at the end of the Northern line. I was in Spain in Sitges, for a little bit and moved to Los Angeles. I followed a girl basically, I went with a girl there.
— How come you lived in all these different places, throughout your teens and twenties?
— I just bounced around a lot
[Interview & photos by Shawn Dogimont]
— So, at one point you ended up in LA. How did acting come into your life, how did that thing happen to you?
— I got a job fixing motorcycles at a motorcycle place, they call it Dr Carl’s Hog Hospital. I went to work one day and something happened with my boss, we got into a little argument over one of his animals and I went to a party up in the hills that night. I met people there and they asked me to be in a play and I did the play. A lady who’s a casting agent from William Morris started side pocketing me, which means they don’t sign you but they send you out on stuff and that play, I was an understudy in that play, the first day, the dude that was supposed to play the part didn’t show up so I did it and she started sending me out and I started booking films.
— Was that something you wanted to do, that you were curious about or did it just land in your lap and you went with it?
— I think at the time I didn’t take it very seriously and I just thought: Oh I’m going to get paid to do this. I was still kinda figuring it out, but I didn’t really think much of it to be honest. I did that and the first film that I got was by Guillermo del Toro who cast me in Mimic and gave me my SAG card.
— And that was the mid to late 90s?
— Yeah.
— Have things changed since then? It’s funny, I got onto this YouTube thread last night watching Jim Carrey doing stand up. I was watching him present the Awards shows and realized that this was already quite a while ago. Have you noticed changes in independent cinema and even from your memories of LA fifteen years ago?
— Oh God, everything has changed so much, I mean Los Angeles has changed so much just from when I lived there to now. I go back to Los Angeles and it’s completely different. That was the time when Jane’s Addiction was coming out you know, they had Alice in Chains and Nirvana, and I remember going to a party Downtown LA to some friends of mine, this guy Tarsem [Singh] who’s a director – he directed The Cell and a bunch of amazing music videos. Tarsem and his girfriend Fatima at the time, they had a loft downtown and I lived downtown. Back then nobody lived downtown, I mean there were like eight of us who lived downtown. There were trash cans on fire under bridges, homeless people walking around and it was completely different. Now it’s like condos, the hip place to live. I remember they had a party for Halloween and there were all these crazy people there and downtown, which is already the end of the world back then, I remember hearing this old lady on a microphone and she’s going: I see you, you mother fuckers! I was dressed as a blue horse, or something really weird like that, so I wandered over to where the noise was and all of a sudden Jane’s Addiction comes out singing and people were like: Who the hell is this band? They were amazing, the energy from that band was what LA felt like back then. It was just so raw and dangerous, and on edge, such a cool vibe. Now all the artist from NY have moved to LA, it’s a completely different vibe. It kind of seems like Westwood just got bigger and engulfed Los Angeles.
— I remember it was about twelve years ago when we met up in NY and it was probably my first or second time there. Walking around the Lower East Side at night, Max Fish and the Pink Pony on Ludlow... And then coming back and moving there a couple years ago and walking around those neighbourhoods, even in that short span this city’s also changed so much.
— I’ve been in Chinatown for twelve or thirteen years now, because Chinatown sort of stays the same. Everything changes all around Chinatown but Chinatown seems like the same place it was back then. The stores change but the energy in Chinatown always stays the same. Same with that little strip of little Italy. Soho seems to be squeezing more towards us, and NoHo and all this other stuff. It didn’t feel like that before, everything’s changing, it’s crazy. Talking about Jim Carey, I was with a friend who knows him and he was saying that Jim grew up on movies with actors like Humphrey Bogart, when you didn’t know anything about the actors and now it seems like everybody knows everything about everybody. Everyone’s doing interviews and asking about your lives, who you’re dating and what your favourite colour is. Back then, when he was a kid watching these movies, he didn’t know anything about them. I think that thing is kind of lost and I wish it was more like it was then, to be honest with you.
— I agree. Let’s backtrack a little bit. You’ve always taken photos and continue to. That’s how we first met actually. I did this story with Asia [Argento] and she had these ideas for self-portraits channeling Anita Berber. I remember you showed up, grabbed a camera for a few rolls and got the most beautiful shots of her. I should send you the negs because really, they’re yours.
— Oh my God! Would you please send me those negatives, I would love that.
— I also have high res scans of them here somewhere, I feel like you should have them, put them in your next book or something.
— Please send them to me. I’ve always tried to use those photos and put them in places and played with them. But I don’t have them in high res. Yeah, please. That shoot, using the flash of the camera and turning off all the lights and just not knowing what she was going to do and snapping the pictures and getting all personal with her. That was a great day!
— I always kept such a good memory of that afternoon, it felt like there was a spontaneous energy with things coming together in an unplanned way. I’ve really trusted your tastes and ideas from that day on when it came to creating images and situations.
— Thank you. You know Asia and I did a lot of little weird things like that, we made these little films from the beach. She put on this crazy American flag bathing suit and did her hair up all blond, put on this wig and went on Venice Beach, jumping in the middle of people’s volley ball games, flirting with cholos on bicycles. I would hide behind people and follow twenty paces back and video tape people’s reactions to her. She did a boxing routine back at the house. We did a lot of fun stuff. She’s such a cool girl
— She is yeah. I don’t even know if it could happen again like that today. It was all pretty new to us, it was a lot of fun and the photos are rad.
— We co-directed a Trash Palace video together. I was supposed to be in her film The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things. I remember the whole JT Leroy thing, when that first happened. [laughs] Asia was the first person to figure out that JT wasn’t a boy and that JT wasn’t the person doing it. She was like “Come here! I gotta tell you something”. So we found out about JT before everyone else did and to watch that onslaught of all those celebrities come out of nowhere to promote JT. And JT wasn’t really JT... It was like a whole thing and Speedy, that girl Laura that goes by Speedy, she was the writer of all that and all these get togethers and stuff and more celebrities and more celebrities coming out of the woodwork, supporters. It was kinda of insane to watch that whole thing go down. And Asia was the first person to get in there and figure it out, she’s a smart girl.
— Have you ever met her dad?
— I’ve never met her dad. I’m a huge fan of Dario but I’ve never met him.
— I wanted to ask you, how similar do you think acting is to being an artist. Take photography for example. Is one more personal for you?
— Yeah well, there are things about them that might be the same but it’s different because it’s your face and it’s your voice, how you move which is completely different than being an observer. Let’s put it this way, if you did an art show, you could take a bunch of pictures and put them on a wall and have an opening and you could go stand in a corner and nobody has to know that you took those pictures, you can sit back and you’re removed from the thing hanging on the wall. But when you’re acting, you’re not really removed from the thing hanging on the wall, you are the thing hanging on the wall, which also goes back to the Jim Carey comment I was making which is that now you’re that thing on the wall. I guess if there wasn’t social media and there wasn’t such an interest in celebrities, and it was more of an artist thing, Jim would probably be happier with the way things are nowadays. The celebrity thing sometimes overshadows the artist thing, and you try to hold onto the artist thing and it’s weird. People have known me for a long time but not like they know me now, so it’s a whole other animal. I think sometimes it gets confusing holding on to one or the other, one instead of the other if that makes sense.
— At the same time, everyone knows acting is a collaborative effort. As an actor you must let go and trust the director, or the editors... but if you’re a photographer, when you show your work, that’s it, you’re completely responsible.
— Fashion photography, a lot of the time, with Terry [Richardson] or somebody, there’s a crew, it’s a collaborative thing too. Unless you walk around like you’re in high school and you just take photographs of graveyards and clouds, then it’s just you. People judge you rather than judge the character. I was watching True Detective the other night and I was talking to somebody about Woody Harrelson’s performance: I think he’s so good in that, and I know that Matthew [McConaughey] is just killing it right now but Woody is very good.
— He is very good.
— Woody is awesome. I was watching the show with somebody who was saying: Man, he’s such a bad husband and how can he do that? And I’m thinking: You’re confusing Woody with the character on the show. The reason why he’s so good is because he has all these flaws. I mean flaws are interesting to watch. If he didn’t have any flaws he would be just modeling.
— Maybe even more interesting to watch than Matthew’s performance in a sense because the character Matthew plays goes the other way and to me becomes a fantasy object for the viewers.
— Yeah and it’s interesting to think that Matthew did Mud and he did that and then he did The Wolf of Wall Street and then he did Dallas Buyers Club. He knows that he has to lose a lot of weight for Dallas Buyers Club so he starts losing it while he’s doing True Detective and you can see like when the clothes are tighter here and baggier there. They’re selling a before and after on that TV show but watch his body change down to Dallas Buyers Club: he’s on a mission for those three project ahead of time. At least physically, it’s on the back of his mind.
— Do you admire that?
— Well you know, it’s cool when you can do that, when you have the time to lose weight for a project or get buffed, or get fat or whatever you’re going to do. A lot of times it doesn’t work like that. You can’t lose that much weight in four weeks or build that much muscle. That’s what I like about television. It would look ridiculous if I took off my shirt on The Walking Dead and had a six pack. I would look like a vain actor trying to look good on a TV show. But if you have four years to do a character you get to sort of drop little seeds behind you and they turn into trees and turn into story lines over the course of four years. That’s really interesting.
— The character you’ve grown into on your show - was he created for you by the writers or did you invent him as you went along?
— It was a collaboration as well. I have really good writers on this show, really good cinematographers, really good directors, producers with really good ideas. It’s interesting too because we are so close and we’re all such good friends. You know I can call Gale [Anne Hurd] and ask for advice on something totally unrelated, I feel like she’s protecting me, she’s my friend you know. The directors on this show I go out with and we’ll go out on the town. I was with Ernest Dickerson in New Orleans, he’s one of our big directors. Greg Nicotero is one of my best friends now. It’s like that for all of us. We’re really tight on the show so I go to them for help, and they come to me and we bounce ideas back and forth, so it’s always a collaborative thing. I would never want to have all the pressure of doing everything by myself. I don’t even know how actors direct episodes they’re in and direct their friends while they’re acting, I don’t even know how they do that. That would be so difficult for me.
— At what point do you abandon your own sense of self and entertain someone else’s. I mean, is it a mix?
— Yeah well you definitely put yourself into it, you relate things to your own life you know, you have to make it real for yourself. If I was going to do a movie about John Denver and I was going to play John Denver, I would be doing John Denver things thinking of Norman things. All the moments and all the personal pieces of those moments would be things that happen to Norman. I don’t know what goes on in John Denver’s head, I can try to figure him out but it’s still my interpretation of what John Denver would be thinking.
— That makes sense. Has it taught you anything, being on this ride, anything about life? I’m thinking about your show because everyone is fighting for their lives. Has it taught you anything about why we swim upstream and fight for things?
— Well, this job has definitely been a blessing and I’m super pleased that I got this opportunity. I’m really enjoying it. It makes me excited to go back to work. I can’t wait to go back to Georgia right now. It’s all I think about all day, I’m ready to go back!
— Wow!
— The life there, making this with my friends... it’s fun. And we don’t do it like in Hollywood. We don’t make this show around Starbucks and agents, and people and an abundance of fans and other actors in the business. We go out into the woods in Georgia and we shoot and it’s our thing that we make out there. Then we throw it out to the world and hope people like it. It’s like any other job, if you like your job and are excited to go to work. That’s something that I’ve learned on this more than anything.
— Was there a point in your life, in your career, where you thought you wanted to do something else, when you were thinking of quitting or just going in another direction, maybe shooting more?
— Well I’ve always done multiple things: If it was ever slow acting I did more art shows, and if it was ever busy acting, I did less art shows. I’ve said no to jobs, I’ve said yes to jobs maybe I should have said no to, but I’m never like: Ah man, what am I going to do with my life? I’m always doing stuff.
— That’s good, I like that.
— I’ve gone through years and years of doing lots and lots of stuff and making like, a dollar. It wasn’t really about a certain lifestyle, I must have this, I must have that. I’ve never been a shopper, I just like doing stuff so it wasn’t really the driving force. I didn’t get a real estate license on the side. I just lived a cheaper lifestyle when I needed to.
— What do you think it is about the premise of the show, maybe even the treatment, that has captured the interest and the imagination of so many people?
— The title The Walking Dead isn’t referring to zombies. It’s referring to us, we’re the walking dead. So if you think about it like that, everyone’s infected and everyone’s clock is ticking and everyone has to man up, it’s your two feet on the ground, your words are important, what you do is important, you have to decide who you want to be and what you’re willing to do and what you’re not willing to do, and hold on to some shred of humanity that you had before this all happened. As you can see from the show, it usually seems like it’s the bad people out there that are surviving and they are doing bad things to survive and we end up doing a lot of things that we would never do or ever thought that we would do to survive. So it’s kind of a play on words, The Walking Dead. It’s your two feet on the ground and what you’re willing to fight for and that means fight against and also fight to hold on to. It’s a really clever play on words what Robert [Kirkman] did.
— Do you know what will happen in the story, your or the other characters’ arcs, or is it just one episode at a time? How does it work?
— Well, I know how the rest of the season plays out obviously. Next season, I have no idea. I have a little idea how it’s going to start, like maybe the first couple of episodes but Scott Gimple and his team are really clever at throwing us, they throw all the time, we think it’s going in a direction and then we read and go: Wow! We’re all super excited to find out, that’s the show!
— That’s so exciting. You know, I was just reading that you used to play tennis?
—I did yeah.
— Why don’t I know this? You were like a junior?
— I was really good for a minute!
— [laughs] We have to go out and hit some balls together.
— When we were shooting The Boondock Saints II, I tore my right shoulder because they had these giant desert eagles made, with these giant oversized silencers on them, these guns were like thirty pounds each crazy so to hold those two guns side by side straight arm and shoot while swinging all the time, I tore my rotator cuff in my shoulder. I still need surgery and it takes six weeks to recover. I haven’t had six weeks to do that yet. It really fucks with my serve to be honest.
— Ok last question. I ordered the book The Sun is Coming up like a Big Bald Head.
— Oh Cool.
— I don’t have it yet and I was hoping you could comment on a couple of your favorite photos from the book and tell me how they came about but I don’t have it in front of me.
— Oh no it’s fine actually. Some of my favorite photos that I shot were during a film in Moscow with Andreï Kontchalovski who’s a director out there and this guy Chris Solimine. We were down in the sub basement of a maximum security prison and the walls were these crazy colours of green which was rotting and the smell down there was insane. We were shooting in one of the jail cells there, in one of the corridors, and right around the corner were these prisoners that were in their prisoner’s outfits. They were working in the kitchen and every once in a while they would peek their heads around and the guards would hit the bars with the stick and yell and rush in and make them like hide themselves. At one point that guard walked by me and when he got out of sight I went [whistles] and these two guys leaned their heads out perfectly and right when they leaned their heads out a little kitten came running out towards me and there’s all these cigarette buts on the ground and the kitten running around the cigarette buts and these two guys looking like super models, perfectly posed.
— I know the photo! That’s a good one. Well man, thank you so much for doing this thing, and for meeting up in NY and taking those photos with me.
— Oh dude, it was a pleasure. How did the photos turn out?
— They’re good I think. I hope. I’ll email them to you.
— Send me some, I want to see what they look like, I’m excited!
— And yeah, that’s it I guess. I hope to run into you again soon and congratulations on all your success.
— Aw thanks man, I would love that, hit me up when you come to NY.
Hobo #16 | Excerpt | Following the Last Wild Wolves
The rain pounded down on the roof of my boat; it sounded like a gorilla banging away up there. At the same time, the storm-force gust hit the boat broadside and almost threw me out of my bunk. But I knew that the salmon were now finally entering the forest and would get to their spawning grounds. And the wolves would be waiting for them.
This had been the driest season on the central coast since records had been kept – the driest for a hundred years. It was the first time in Waglisla had ever seen so many snowless mountain tops from the village. Even the lake fed systems had not contained enough water for the salmon to migrate upriver, so they had been pulling at the mouth. Marine predators such as seals, sea lions, halibut, whales, eagles, and humans had taken their fill.
I had been gone only a few months from the Fish Trap Pack’s territory, but I sailed up the inlet, I could sense that things had changed. It was strangely quiet.
With the Fish Traps Again
I stopped off to check the pack’s den site. I knew they were absent before I had even set the anchor, and not just because I couldn’t hear or see any birds in the forest. This den island does not have the salmon resources that the neighbouring one does, so before the salmon migrate upriver, the Fish Traps change location and swim across the channel to the spawning grounds. Islands that provide greater spawning density tend to support more resident competitors such as bears. The wolves thus avoid such islands in the spring and early summer while the pups are vulnerable.
The swim would be the longest the pups had taken so far, but I knew they would have made this aquatic journey with ease.
I was fortunate enough to watch the wolves make the swim one August. I can’t usually observe every pack member at once, but they were all on hand for this move. They made the crossing in single file, with adults bringing up the stern and the bow of the wolf flotilla. Wolves swim across channels and inlets as we cross sidewalks, looking both ways to make sure there is no oncoming traffic.
Many times I have come around the bend in a motorboat and unintentionally forced a wolf to turn around and abandon a crossing. Wolves need to be cautious, since moose and deer swimming between islands have been swallowed by orcas, and some humans armed with guns or gaffs would show little mercy.
When the wolves reached the opposite shore that August, they shook off the salt water and looked back the way they had come, waiting for Three Legs to arrive. I could only imagine how this new experience would be for the pups – a different set of islands, an expansion of their territorial world, a new playground to explore.
Back in the present, at the tide line I located the main trail to the den site. Just one fresh set of adult tracks crossed the mud flat; there were no pup tracks anywhere. Since thousands of tracks are typically associated with active rendezvous and den sites, it was clear that the pack had moved on in search of salmon.
[Excerpt from Following the Last Wild Wolves by Ian McAllister]
I followed the trail along the edge of a small lake and approached the den. The forest understory on these islands varies from place to place, but I have found that wolves choose den locations in fairly thick vegetation, especially amid salal bushes, which crackle loudly, like rice paper, when you walk through them. It is almost impossible to approach the den site undetected.
The grass in front of the den was worn down to bare earth from the pups’ play-fighting, sleeping, digging, and exploring. A maze of trails led in and out of the base of two large, gnarled cedars, which were leaning over the tannin-darkened lake. The tops of fallen cedars poked out of the water, their bases secured deep in the muddy bottom. Gulls made their nests in the secure, mossy tops of these partially submerged logs. A loon called from the other side of the lake.
I have been to more than thirty den sites on the coast, and although they are almost always located in beautiful spots, this one was especially so. It was exquisite. Although I am sure that the pack chose this location because of its access to prey and fresh water and for security and ease of defence, I still couldn’t help thinking that a more aesthetically appealing place could not be found. It appears that the needs of wolves, when choosing a den site, converge with our view of beauty in the natural world. But it also makes sense that we associate beauty with necessity and utility.
Trails radiated from the den. Large, round balls of green and red mosses, a metre (three feet) in diameter, were scattered about and served as perfect day beds for the adults. The roots of the multiheaded red cedar that provided the support structure for the den below were covered in teeth marks from the pups’ insatiable desire to chew everything in sight. Among these day beds, rounded out from the warm bodies of the wolves, a rivulet of water cascaded down through moss and grass.
The den smelled dry and comforting. I shone a flashlight inside and felt the floor, which was hard packed, its edges covered with soft, shredded cedar bark, twigs, grass, and dry moss. Pup fur was scattered everywhere, and the larger guard hairs of the mother were snagged here and there on the roof of the den.
This site had been used as shelter for enough generations of the Fish Trap Pack’s offspring to buff the root-formed entrance smooth. At a now-famous den site in the Arctic, radio dating of bones from prey suggested that it had been used by wolves over a seven-hundred-year period. I looked around at some of these cedar trees and knew that seven hundred years was not an uncommon age for them.
Deer bones and feathers from what looked like a Canada goose were scattered about outside the den. I wondered whether the wolves would use the den the following year. They seem to reuse den sites but only intermittently, since the pack changes its breeding female and each has her own idea of the ideal den site.
In southeast Alaska, Dr. Dave Person of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game located twenty-four den sites between 1993 and 2004. All were in old-growth forests and about a hundred metres from fresh water, and all were carved into the basement of an old tree. Only one of the dens was found under a fallen log.
Reanchoring the boat across the channel, I launched the canoe and paddled slowly into the bay. The excited calls of ravens, gulls, and eagles could be heard upriver. Salmon were jumping all around me, boiling over on the surface like river upwellings.
After I reached the beach, I hoped that I could make it to my spot in the forest quietly, without causing a disturbance. Turning towards the forest, I stopped abruptly. Just past the golden and red crabapple trees, Ernest was sitting, waiting. As usual, he had placed himself right in my path, doing what Ernest does best – staring intently. There was no doubt that he recognized me.
After a quiet greeting, I circled off to one side of him. I knew I was not going to win a staring contest with the self-proclaimed gatekeeper of the pack. He had figured out at an early age (all of a few months before) that howling, growling, or generally being a wolf was not the way to discourage me and that alerting the adults did not elicit much interest.
I was pretty sure that the rest of the pack was pleased to have Ernest off their hands for a while, and if the oddball creature hanging out under the tree (me) was happy to entertain him, so be it. He was convinced that if the pack were to be protected, he would have to do it himself, so his general strategy was to boldly plant himself in clear view, sit on his haunches, and with both ears pointed forward and a furrow in his brow, stare directly at me without flinching. I heard somewhere that a human can outstare any mammal on the planet, and I have found this to be true – except with Ernest.
He was a peculiar wolf even as a pup, frequently straying from the pack and exploring the estuary on his own while the other pups preferred to stay in a group. He did not seem to be positioned low on the social scale; in fact, when all the pups were together he appeared to be the dominant or alpha sibling. I think he just had an independent streak in his personality and liked to sort out things for himself.
Watching him from inside the tree line, I wondered what role he would carve out in the complex and very social hierarchy in this family. Were strength and physical dominance more important than intelligence and social aptitude? Ernest seemed to have it all. I suspect that, as with our best leaders, a combination of these traits works best. Maybe some pups are destined to lead from an early age.
The responsibility appeared enormous. The alpha provides leadership for up to fifteen individuals, maintaining pack cohesion, strategizing hunts, and deciding, usually on an empty stomach, whether to move in search of prey or to remain patient, hoping for a successful hunt. Leadership among wolves is complex, and it varies according to season and pack. What seems to be common, however, is sex-based roles. Top males lead other males, usually in association with hunting and defending territories. But many times, as I have found when close to pups, it is the ranking female who takes the lead in defending the pack. One of the most important decisions to be made is the location of the birth den, the core site for the pack for many months, and it is chosen by the breeding female.
Ernest, for all his quirkiness, was also downright beautiful, with dark, striped highlights in his coat, bright grey-white eyes, and a swagger that separated him from his siblings. I had never encountered a young wolf like him before. He had such an unnerving sense of earnestness that he made me feel a bit sheepish for intruding on the pack. But once I was past him and settled in my spot hidden away under the trees, I very much admired him for it. It was as if he were trying not to be one of the pack, even if just for a little while. This behavioural variation is what makes wolf observation so interesting; each pack has such a diverse cast of characters.
Ernest’s staring strategy was quite effective. We eventually agreed that I would stick to my one spot underneath a patch of spruces and hemlocks, instead of wandering around the fishing rendezvous site, and in return he would stop staring at me.
Although I wanted to push the boundaries of this relationship with Ernest, I know that a human-habituated wolf, one that naively, unconditionally trusts people, will not live to be an old wolf, not even in this remote part of the world. Wolves here arguably suffer the least amount of human persecution in all of North America – possibly in the whole world – but they still must be cautious.
Here, wolves are almost always killed indiscriminately and opportunistically. There are no limits to the number a commercial guide-outfitter can kill. Resident hunters are allowed to kill three wolves per year but do not need a special licence, though one is required for every other large-mammal hunt and even for geese and ducks. Because reporting is not mandatory in British Columbia, no one knows for sure how many wolves are killed by hunters, but it is estimated that about two to three per cent of rain forest wolves throughout the Great Bear Rainforest die this way each year. Closer to communities and roads, the number killed rises significantly.
The temperate climate means rain forest wolves have a less commercially desirable coat than wolves in the colder Far North or the interior of Canada, so trapping coastal wolves is not considered economical. But if deer or bear hunters, fishers, loggers, or landowners see a wolf, they may shoot to kill. Some guide-outfitters advertise wolf hunts and pride themselves on their ability to locate and kill wolves. Many hunters I talk to say they are teaching the wolves a lesson – as if a dead animal, no matter how intelligent, can learn a lesson.
Some hunters offer the excuse that they are helping to boost deer populations by killing wolves; they call this “ungulate enhancement.” But modern work on disease in ungulates has shown that populations without wolves and other predators are much more likely to suffer catastrophic disease outbreaks. In addition, wolves are obligate carnivores and must eat meat continually. If deer decline, so will the wolves, often quickly, thus allowing deer to bounce back in large numbers. This fact is an elementary truism of predator-prey dynamics.
On some of B.C.’s outer islands, smaller than the Surf Pack’s islands, wolves can reduce deer numbers while maintaining their own population by then switching to a marine-based diet. Such a diet has its limits, however, and the wolves will often move to other islands or die.
When humans kill wolves, the wolf population will often retreat and reproduce in greater numbers. Humans form the only species on the planet that eats itself out of house and home. Easter Island and the Pleistocene overkill are two such lessons, but our current unsustainable existence on Earth may be the most relevant example.
I met with Arthur Rimbaud on February 28, 2014 in the cafeteria of Le Bateau ivre, the prize container ship of his Arabica coffee conglomerate, Gentleman Savages Inc. He generously, if inconveniently, summoned me to join him on a transoceanic passage to deliver a shipment from Ethiopia to New Jersey. He doesn’t do phone interviews and doesn’t have the time to indulge in the erotic mechanics – his words – of sitting around some merdique hotel answering the merdique questions of culture salesmen. Well aware of his reputation for solitariness, general orneryness, and robust cynicism, I was naturally taken aback when I received his invitation. I nonetheless interpreted his mandate – come to Ethiopia – as somewhat of a geographical deterrent. Right. Off I flew to Dire Dawa International near the Gulf of Aden. The present interview was conducted on a series of afternoons during our journey. Generally, Monsieur Rimbaud would get around to “answering”, in his way, only a single question in a sitting. What follows is the tapestry of these afternoons, each panel joined as well as could be along a seam of thought. On these occasions we would mostly sit eating bread and salted butter and jam, drinking coffee, and speak about what humans and art could be and do and why these days he, for the most part, detests both. By way of preamble, a note on the interviewee’s brief but startlingly radiant pre-mercantilist career. The touchstone of generations of avant-gardes, Arthur Rimbaud was the punk wanderer par excellence, the poet of universal consciousness, tragic and mythic, the hobo god of gods, and I would argue a supreme, albeit, phenomenally nascent wave rider. He completed the works that would revolutionize the written word by the time he was nineteen, abandoning and violently repudiating it all when most kids are picking the last booger of their tidy, if slightly overpriced, little university degrees and smearing it to the under-brim those ridiculous tasseled square caps. Like all good bodhisattvas he was the herald of the adventure into (other)self(lessness) – the self being a middle/mediate term/mode at best, annihilation, and transformation. He killed all who followed him, after the hunt or libation. All followed him…
[Interview by Thaddeus O'Neil / Illustration by Hugo Guinness]
Thaddeus O’neil — Maybe you could start by telling us a little about yourself, where you’re from, etc?
Arthur Rimbaud — My life was nothing but sweet stupidities, unfortunately. The miserable incidents of my childhood. Charville! In all the world, no more moronic, provincial little town exists than my own. From my ancestors the Gauls I have pale blue eyes, a narrow brain, and awkwardness in competition. I think my clothes are as barbaric as theirs. But I don’t butter my hair. [pausing to relight his pipe, sucking and sending a spume of it toward me, obscuring him for what seemed seconds] The Gauls were the most stupid hide-flayers and hay-burners of their time. From them I inherit: Idolatry, and love of sacrilege - oh, all sorts of vice, anger, lechery – terrific stuff, lechery - lying, above all, and laziness. I have a horror of all trades and crafts. Bosses and workers, all of them peasants, and common. When I was still a little child, I admired the hardened convict. I used to visit the bars and the rented rooms his presence had consecrated. I followed his fatal scent through the city streets. He had more strength than the saints, more sense than any explorer. Drunk, petty thief, the best son of the world. God blesses all the merciful: and the world blesses the poets.
— Thanks. That was… quite thorough. So not a lot of love lost for your home or the people there?
— The popular mind is like one stupid, ceaseless itch. The things people say. Depressing. I detest my native land. I will wander far away, a vagabond.
— Well here you are now, coffee baron of the high seas. This is an adventure…
— Oh, wonderful world of adventures. I should assure you that I am living a really stupid, tiresome existence.
[There was not a hint of irony in him. Sensing his prolific cynicism redoubling, gaining momentum, I change the topic, hoping for greener pastures.]
— You abandoned poetry at 19. On the verge of great success and critical acclaim…
— Ambition! Such madness! Honestly it’s not useful. What do I care if I succeed. What is it good for, succeeding at that, for nothing, right? No, it is said that there is work for those who succeed. I don’t want work; I will be independently wealthy. Don’t bestir yourself! That is my principle, out-idling the sleepy toad. The best thing is a drunken sleep, stretched out on some strip of shore.
— But success is something right? Art’s strict utility is debatable, even undesirable and imminently incongruous, but isn’t success useful to some degree?
— All men of action are the toys of some grotesque raving. Action isn’t life, it’s merely a way of ruining a kind of strength. Morality is a weakness of the brain. You will always end up a self-satisfied man who has done nothing because he wanted to do nothing.
— You mean men who want to do nothing but to be ‘successful’, and that success in this domesticated sense is in itself nothing? [I’m not sure, but I think he nods, sort of, or was it a shrug? The gesture seems to imply that it is worse than nothing…]
— My life doesn’t weigh enough, it drifts off and floats far beyond action. You must set yourself free from the striving of Man and applause of the World! You must fly as you can.
— I think you underestimate how much your work has meant to people, fellow artists, how your experimentation with the word revolutionized what the word could do, how your poems upended language in the world and forever altered the poet’s mind.
— A song is so seldom a work, that is to say, a thought sung and understood by the singer. For I is someone else. This much is obvious to me: I am present at this birth of my thought, I watch it and listen to it. Universal intelligence has always thrown out its ideas. Author, creator, poet, that man has never existed! The first study of the man who wants to be a poet is the knowledge of himself, complete. He looks for his soul, inspects it, tests it, learns it. As soon as he knows it he must cultivate it. The soul must be made monstrous. Imagine a man implanting and cultivating warts on his face.
— So we must be made ugly to ourselves, unrecognizable. The poet, the creator has never simply existed but we must create them, become them through a sort of willed suffering? Ok, so what should be done? What is worth doing?
— Perhaps you would be right to walk a great deal and read, escape from reality, seek secrets that would remake life a dark heaven in a paradise of sadness, a reason in any case not to be confined in offices and homes. Stupefactions have to be carried out far from such places.
— Stupefactions?
— I say one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet makes himself a seer by a long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses. All forms of love, suffering, and madness. He searches himself. He exhausts all poisons in himself and keeps only their quintessence. He becomes among all men the great invalid, the great criminal, the one accursed – and the supreme Savant! – for he reaches the unknown! He says: “We pronounce you, method! We have faith in the poison. We know how to give our whole life every day.” He reaches the unknown, and when, bewildered, he ends by losing the intelligence of his visions, he has, at least, seen them. Therefore the poet is truly the thief of fire. He is responsible for humanity, even for the animals; he will have his inventions smelt, felt, and heard; if what he brings back from down there has form, he gives it form; if it is formless, he gives it formlessness. A language must be found, every word being an idea, the time of a universal language will come! This language will be of the soul for the soul, containing everything, smells, sounds, colors, thought holding on to thought and pulling.
— So it is a matter of constantly leaving yourself? Of abandoning at all costs even the idea of an identical, stable self?
— I devour myself, leave again and again, and then… it is recovered. What? Eternity. In the whirling light of the sun and sea, hold fast to desire, consider the mind’s disorder a sacred thing, lay about idle, envy the bliss of animals. Your memory and your senses will simply be the nourishment of your creative impulse. As for the world, when you emerge, what will it have become? In any case, nothing of what it seems at present. What was I in the century past? I only find myself today. Now is the time of the Assassins. Inventions of the unknown call for new forms.
— So am ‘I’ permanently provisional, split down the middle with time, the ‘I’ that receives the world through sense, and the ‘I’ as Other that thinks, creates, and synthesizes it, assassinates it over and over, continually killing it off and inventing it in another form?
— It is wrong to say: I think. One ought to say: people think me. I is someone else. Do not underline it with your pencil or too much with your thought.
— Ok. So what is art?
— Instantaneous application, the opportunity, the only one, for the release of our senses! And the noise and the movement and the future they make!
— So our senses applied spontaneously create the future?
— This future will be materialistic, always filled with Number and Harmony. Wild and infinite flight toward invisible splendors, toward intangible delights – and its maddening secrets for every vice – and its terrifying gaiety for the mob. For sale, the bodies, the voices, the enormous and unquestionable wealth, that which will never be sold. Salesmen are not at the end of their stock! It will be some time before travelers have to turn in their accounts.
— The seer is a sort of traveling salesman then? Everything is ‘for sale’, to be expended, and yet what they contain can never really be sold off…
— Poetry will no longer keep step with action. It will precede it.
[I was caught in the boggling eddy of his thought, swirling somewhere inward. nothing to put the breaks on poetic ‘reverie’, like politics, like dipping a hard-on in an ice bath.]
— What do you make of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, or of pathological nationalism in general?
— The flag goes with the foul landscape, and our jargon muffles the drum. In the great centers we’ll nurture the most cynical prostitution. We’ll massacre logical revolts, at the service of the most monstrous exploitations, industrial or military, rabid for comfort. Let the rest of the world croak. This is the real advance. Marching orders, let’s go! Don’t forget to shit on La Renaissance, and shit on the season and courage.
[Oh, politics is such a bore, the same stupidities enacted ad infinitum - history, the old Hegelian slaughter bench, the chopping block with the well-worn blood-brown axe ruts… How about something perennially novel!? What about love?!]
— What about Love?
— I don’t love women. Love has to be reinvented. Sometimes I see women who ought to be happy, with whom I could have found companionship, already swallowed up by brutes with as much feeling as an old log. Do you see that lovely young man going into that beautiful, peaceful house? His name is Duval, Dufour, Armand, Maurice, whatever you please. There is a woman who has spent her life loving that evil creature; she died. When the endless servitude of woman is broken, when she lives for and by herself, man – heretofore abominable – having given her her release, she too will be a poet! Women will find some of the unknown! She will find strange, unfathomable, repulsive, delicious things…
[Ah Love, strange love, always a distance between Others without a self to start with, forget it, lets talk about something real, eternal. Lets talk about fashion…]
— Arthur, ahem, Mr.Rimbaud, I’d like to talk about Fashion…
— A monotony of pretty lies. Tricked out with nauseating luxury. What havoc in the garden of beauty…
— But people seem to care a lot about it. Look at the proliferation of magazines dedicated to it in various guises and avatars?
— Can addicts resist a bag of blow? As if butterflies take the high road, to avoid shitting on the daisies below. If decadent decoration is the answer that looms to prettify your pages, the larger question’s clear: Is this riotous, ceaseless vomitation of blooms worth a seagull’s turd or one candle’s tear? This sort of thing – so disgraceful – is bull. Heard of the notion of “keeping it real”?
— So I take it you’re no a follower of fashion. But dressing is basic and elemental to the human mode of being, at once formed by and forming it, a true becoming. As simple evidence of this, imagine walking naked into a stranger’s closet and coming out in their clothes. Here is the other, in immediate confrontation, covering your flesh. Fashion may be a bad bag of blow, but is there hope that we can reclaim that rudimentary and vital expression called dress from the dealers, that we can renovate this most personal experience of the world: our (dis-)play?
— An age of hell is now upon us. True life is lacking. We are exiles from this world. Elegance, science, violence! Unable to grasp this eternity, it ends in a riot of perfumes. Rack of enchantments! Hurrah for the wonderful work and for the marvelous body. Oh, our bones are clothed with an amorous new body. Ah! To return to life! To stare at our deformities…
— To celebrate ourselves, our grotesque ever changing idiosyncratic selves in a place and time, in Experience, in our art as experience, and to not have to scream “look at me, I exist!” through twitter and instagram and all that technorabble…
— I am unknown: So what? The neophytes are free to curse their forebears: it’s their party and the night is young. I am hidden, and I am not weakness or strength: you exist, that is strength. You don’t know where you are going or why you are going; go in everywhere, answer everyone. No one will kill you, any more than if you were a corpse.
— Our own Experience is our only hope in this technozombie hell.
— Hell is powerless against pagans. No hope, forever.
— No hope but revolt?
— I cannot understand revolt. My race has never risen, except to plunder.
— The poets of plunder!
— The battle for the soul is as brutal as the battles of men. I am born in reason. One must be absolutely modern. The world is good. I will bless life. The open road in every weather. And off I’ll go, hat, greatcoat, fist in my pockets and away. No more words, burn all the poems, shouts, drums, dance, dance, dance!
One does not finish a work, one abandons it.
– Paul Valery
and I shall be a fugitive and vagabond in the Earth
– Genesis 4:14
Tilda Swinton’s language is as bewitching as her look. The ethereal Scot drops truisms like Jenny Holzer and evidences her claims in metaphors of nature, adventure, and lore. Life, as per Swinton, “is a wander through strange woods, whistling and following bread crumbs.” She plays. Not acts, plays. She’s played the widow of a high school shooter in We Need to Talk About Kevin, an adulterous Russian trophy wife in I Am Love, the White Witch of Narnia, David Bowie’s double, both man and woman in Orlando, and a too-dutiful general counsel in Michael Clayton. Most recently, she’s played an 84-year-old lover to Ralph Fiennes in Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, a computerised therapist in Terry Gilliam’s The Zero Theorem, a dictator in Bong Joon-Ho’s sci-fi Snowpiercer, and 3000-year-old vampire, Eve, in Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive. The latter role is most of what Swinton and I discussed in this interview, which was conducted via e-mail; she writing from her home in Scotland, me from mine in Brooklyn. This distance set my hypermediated imagination in overdrive – Tilda, to me, is both star and constellation: a singular artist, a self, but also a composite of every role she’s played. I pictured her in a stone chateau in the country of my forefathers, wrapped in tapestries like Eve, “Moonage Daydream” playing in the background.
[Interview by Fiona Duncan / Photo by Juergen Teller]
Fiona Duncan — Could you share with us one of your favorite dishes; how to make it, step by step?
Tilda Swinton — Rhubarb and ginger crumble:
Pick the rhubarb.
Wash the muck off it.
Top and tail each stalk.
Chop up into cigar stub length chunks.
Put in a pan of water with a squeeze of half a lemon and soften the fruit till it goes all loose.
Strain and set aside.
Save rhubarb water in the fridge to make juice with.
Put two handfuls equally of spelt flour, demarera sugar and some soft butter into a bowl, take off your rings, roll up your sleeves and rub them together until the consistency of couscous. Add in ground ginger to taste – nice and sharp is the way in this house.
Put the rhubarb in a dish with bluebells painted on it.
Cover with the crumble.
Bake until the top goes brownish and the rhubarb bubbles up a bit like tar on a hot road.
Serve with any combination of goats yoghurt, cream, ice cream, custard or preferably all the above.
— Only Lovers Left Alive is a fantasy film. But it is a fantasy that feels “true to life.” In terms of its representation of love, it was one of the truest felt films I’ve ever seen—showing what it’s like to love in duration, when you know your significant other as deeply as one can but still respect their being other. Adam and Eve’s is not a merging romance, not an Aristophanes love as oneness, it’s a coexisting love. Another recent film that felt this true to me with respect to love was Spike Jonze’s Her. Like Only Lovers Left Alive, Her is about love as it manifests across time and space; it’s also about ways of being together that allow for separateness; it’s also a fantasy. I’m wondering if maybe we need extended metaphors, like vampires in Only Lovers Left Alive or artificial intelligence in Her, to discuss the truisms of love. What do you think: Is there something about “fantasy” that lends itself to addressing “reality”? Is this a zeitgeist thing, like, do we need these fantastical/abstract forms to discuss love now because we discuss it so much already (mass media loves love stories but the language of most of it is so cliché)? What love stories feel truest to you?
— I would say that fantasy reliably addresses what we call reality: that that is precisely what it’s for. That everything from Parzival to Rapunzel and even fairy stories that don’t have a z in their name spin a net for our psyches to bounce on with the impunity of knowing ‘it’s not real’ and so our true enchantment can come out to play. The Mark Twain diaries of Adam and Eve that provided the grit in the oyster if this film are practical, ‘historical’, records of a real love between two people who (let’s dare...) never existed. And yet, they inspire precisely because of the human scale of their detail and the compassion of the attitude they swim in. I think – I know – that loving somebody needs no prescribed formula, that each love story is particular – and unknowable outside of the lovers that live it. And that anyone labouring under the impression that there are rules that must be observed has yet to feel the force.
— Eve is a relatively much older woman next to her man, Adam; she’s 3000 to his 500. Her worldly wisdom, compared to his angsty withdrawal, stuck me as not just a wisdom of age, though, but one of femininity. Even if Adam and Eve had been turned at the same time, if there wasn’t a 2500 year age gap written into the script, I would have identified with their man-child/worldly-woman dynamic. Would you agree that there’s a difference – something like age or experience; maturity – between men and women?
— We need a neurologist, maybe an endocrinologist, to talk to us here about hormones and gender specificity... But from where I’m sitting, not having that high spec gen, I would say I can think of just as many men providing the perspective on a relationship with someone - male or female - whose eyes are more inward, who are more concentrated on the wood than the trees. I would suggest that beyond any other aspect of difference between them, the most significant thing that distinguishes the contrast between Adam and Eve’s perception of life is that he is an artist and she is not. Maybe too much perspective is a distracting thing if you’re slipping your music to Schubert one minute and following your nose into drone, the next..
— One of the things that most excited me in Only Lovers Left Alive were the historically-minded vampire’s speculations on the future of humanity. Adam commenting on global warming, for e.g. Snowpiercer is even more wholly a speculative fiction. Do you speculate much on the future? If so, what do you think about? What concerns and/or excites you about where humanity is heading?
— My personal observation in life so far is that randomness is key, in all it’s glory. And I have no doubt that people have been leaning on their scythes or menhirs for all time speculating about where humanity is heading, as they will in teleportation corridors and endless chatrooms way up ahead..
— Eve is a reader. Her book collection was so exciting. I can’t wait to watch the film on my own so that I can pause and study her shelves. Who curated her book collection?
— Jim [Jarmusch] and me.
— Are you a reader like Eve?
— If you mean can I read every known language at speed through my fingertips, sadly no.
— Are there book(s) or author(s) you revisit regularly? Could you tell me about one and how your relationship to it has changed over time?
— Great Expectations is a book I read about once every five years and every time I read it it is a different tale. It’s like a chemistry experiment: you drop adolescence on it and it’s about being young and approaching the great mysterious exciting wood of life with all fantasy and idealism intact. Somehow, the darkness doesn’t register.. You read it in the atmosphere of growing experience as a young adult and it is about learning to pick your battles and understanding that some things go wrong and stay wrong: it’s a book about mistakes. You read it under the influence of being a parent, or losing a parent, or sensing your finite mortal capacities, and it changes again, like an octopus, like quicksilver - and becomes a book about death and redemption that opens in a graveyard, that ends with the afterlife.. Its a magical mirror of a book. I will read it until I can’t any more.
— Celebrity creates this aura that can blind us to the intricacy of the celebrated person, their work. I feel that way about you—that the incredible idea of Tilda Swinton turns you into this sign that I accept like I accept Oreos, as good and whole, as a thing I’ve decided I love but as a thing. Another way of saying that might be that fame turns the individual into a shorthand of herself. As a consumer of media, and that’s a lot of spectacular media (film, TV, pop), I find myself doing this: forgetting why and how I love, say, Kanye West’s work or David Foster Wallace’s work or your work; my mind holds onto, rather, the idea of Kanye, the idea of Wallace, the idea of Tilda. But when I do actually engage with the work, when I reread Infinite Jest or rewatch Female Perversions, I’m reminded at how much there is to engage with—the infinite why’s and how’s I love. Engaging like that—that’s where the pleasure of media is for me—but I feel like so much media coverage refuses to go there; the fame game turns us off that. I’m wondering how, as an artist, you negotiate working within this celebrity system that produces stars so bright, viewers have to work to see the work itself?
— I suppose it’s a question of separating the signal from the noise. The bare facts are that I live my life, make my work, alone and with my colleagues, look after my family, cherish my friendships. I don’t have anything to do with any other shadow puppets anybody else throws on me or anybody else, to the point that I would not know any exist were it not for people in your position letting me know that i make any shape against the curtain at all. Imagine what it feels like to read the phrase “the incredible idea of Tilda Swinton”. In my skin, Tilda Swinton is the name of the person I am, day in day out, super (apparently hieroglyphic) longhand, not remotely an idea and all too credible, and that’s the name I put on the form that authorises my children’s school trip, that’s the name on my plumber’s invoice. Having said that, what I make in the world is shapes, atmospheres, stories. If what any artist makes inspires others to create, then that’s what I call a good, good thing. Joining the dots of one’s own work – in ones own mind – is a mega slippery eel: the idea that others might be engaged in trying to perceive patterns themselves feels like company. But, at the end of it all, there is just a person making work: the work is the message in a bottle across the high seas, the person throws it knowing he or she cannot follow. Whoever picks it up on the other side must make of it what they will. But it’s the message that bonds the thrower and the finder, nothing else: keeping the other nonsense at bay is probably worth making an effort for.
— I’ve heard you say in several interviews that you never intend to make another film, that you’re, “not a big believer in people being in more than one film.” But here you are now with four films coming out around the same time. I would love to know if this is still something you believe, and why.
— What you describe is my personal preference as an audience: the thrill of a real, fresh, human face in one story, not detached from it by the burden of ‘interpreting’, or God forbid, acting - or providing the distraction of being recognisable from some other film’s atmosphere. Of course, I have let myself down in this respect. Damn those friends who have tempted me to play... Now, as long as I accept these temptations, I am somehow committed to attempting the tricky task of working my way back to throwing shapes new to me, providing - at least - a semi-convincing part of each film’s furniture. It’s a trick of the light..
— Could you list an example of an actor who’s only played one role? I’ve been trying to think of one and can’t...
— Actors tend not to. That’s the general trouble. But people do, in the world of documentary. And the donkey(s) who play Balthazar in Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar give hands down my favourite performance of all time. Happy that they never gave later interpretations of wildfowl or met the challenge of ‘giving’ their marsupials.
— I meant to ask: where are you writing from? Could you set the scene?
— My little book room in our house in Scotland. It’s a chill day so there’s a fire in the grate. Three dogs draped about ahead of me, a fourth behind me like a cushion, his preferred position.
— Could you list three things on your bedside table?
— A hand-knitted horse. James Salter short stories. Grape hyacinths.
— In Only Lovers the themes that jump out at me are love certainly – what it is to be an old couple – existentialism, and thirdly capitalism – to feel excluded from a world transformed by consumption (so well represented by Mia Wasikowska’s character and a dying Detroit). The film also feels very personal, your co-star (Tom Hiddleston) plays a musician who can’t adapt to new technologies... Do you identify with Jarmusch’s code of values and this picture of the artist life?
— There is no doubt, this is a very personal film, for both Jim and me and many of our friends. The whole question of how to stay on the bucking bronco of modern consumerist society is something that I think both of us clearly steered clear of from the outset, and this particularity is something of a bond between those of us wired this way. But it is important to remember that this idea of feeling excluded is not inevitable: this is exactly what Eve brings to Adam, the perspective that they are excluded from nothing, that the necessity of their outsider status is a privilege and a great gift, not a deprivation. That however outnumbered the refusnik may feel by the mass of warm bodies all moving in the same – different – direction, there will always be company, fellow travellers, with whom to feel like kin – maybe not even warm or bodied any more, but living in books, in music, in art, in our memories. The community of cultural outsiders – even outsiders who find themselves capable of being effective in the world at the same time as sideways to it – is a never-ending companionship, the great and immortal, power of art in the face of nature’s transformations – and the dance-partner of human limitation.
[Interview by Fiona Duncan / Photo by Juergen Teller]
As soon as I learned that the Grand Palais in Paris was going to host a major retrospective of the work of Georges Braque in the autumn of 2013, I knew that I had to drop everything and go. It was, after all, the first major retrospective of Braque in Paris for over thirty years.2 It would be the first time that the complete series of nine paintings named Les Ateliers, the Studios, had ever been shown together in Paris (for some of these paintings, the first time they had ever been shown in Paris at all, even singly). This was a major event.
I have been in love with Braque ever since the winter of 1975-76, when I was staying in Paris with my late wife Maureen, and I used to spend long gloomy afternoons in the basement of the Musée de l’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris,3 communing with the dark splendours of his 1920s still lifes, and with the deep and glorious mystery of his billiard tables. In 1997, I travelled to Houston, Texas, for the monumental exhibition of his late work at the Menil Collection. So I scarcely came to Paris this November as a neutral or unbiased spectator.
But that “bias” was born out of instincts – visual, theoretical, aesthetic – which I still trust. To go into the show in a spirit of determined skepticism, distrust just for the sake of it, would be simply perverse. So, well before I left, I tried to write out what my biases were, to give them even a deliberately exaggerated and provocative form. The following section, scrupulously not edited or altered, though at times it is rashly overstated, is what I wrote here in Victoria, several weeks before I set foot in the Grand Palais.
[Essay by Stephen Scobie]
(3) Preliminary polemic argument on Georges Braque
For almost five years, between 1909 and 1914, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso conducted the most extraordinary collaboration in the history of modern art. They saw each other every day; they absorbed each other’s work; they fed and built on each other’s involvement in what would come to be known as Cubism.
And each of them had a characteristic image for that collaboration.
Picasso, with a typically sexist disdain, said “Georges Braque – c’était ma femme” – Braque, he was my wife. Thus acknowledging the partnership, but relegating Braque to a minor, subsidiary role. Kind of like the cook in the kitchen.
Braque was more accurate and more generous: “C’était un peu comme la cordée en montagne” – it was a little like being roped together on a mountain.
Braque’s modesty here – “a little” – speaks volumes. For those with eyes to see, Braque is never the partner. He is always the leader. Picasso is the showman, the exhibitionist. Braque is the painter.
Picasso came to Cubism through primitive painting, via the spectacular psycho-drama of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Braque came the slow way, through a patient study of Cézanne. That’s where the eye comes in.
There are some things in art history which just cannot be taught. You see it, you feel it. You stand in front of a painting and it just hits you. It may be something to do with the tension of the composition, the lines of force inside the rectangle – or maybe the colour, the vibration of tone – but it declares itself. It jumps off the wall at you. You know that this is painting at its ultimate.
It happens time after time with Cézanne. You recognize its inheritor in Braque. (And with Matisse in the decade of the 1910s.)
Picasso, he could fool around. He was a genius at improvisation. His greatest gifts were in portraits – a Picasso portrait was always
definitive. But even then, it was showmanship. When it came to the serious work of painting, there was only Braque.
The major innovations, like papiers collés, always came from Braque. Picasso seized them and ran with them. Braque stayed with them and made something serious out of them.
Picasso, in the analogy of a painter friend of mine, Wayne Thom, was always a sprinter. He could go in any direction, very fast. But Braque was the long-distance runner.
This is abundantly clear in the later work. After 1914, Picasso lost his way. In one sense, he was prolific; he poured out works of “genius,” several times a day. But they were going nowhere. They were merely product. They had become either sexist boasting or political propaganda.
The later Braque, however, grows and grows in stature. Look at the majestic still lifes of the 1920s. The incredible series of Billiard Tables. The vast, mysterious views of the Studios. Nothing in late Picasso even begins to compare.
Here there is gravity and depth. Here there is a sober consideration of what painting means. Here there is the conclusion of a life’s work. This is what I hope to see this fall at the Grand Palais: even from the gauche experiments in Fauvism; through the grand enterprise of Cubism; into the measured gravity of the later work – if you want to know what it means to be a painter in the 20thcentury, look at Georges Braque.
There really is no one else.
PS: Let’s put it another way. Look at Jean-Luc Godard and Bob Dylan. Both of them started out as Picasso. Both of them grew up to be Braque.
(4)
there is no such thing
as abstraction
abstraction is not a thing
but painting
deals in things
things you can see
a painting is what I make
of the things I have seen
so that you see
something new
abstraction is nothing
it may be new
but it is nothing new
there is nothing
you cannot paint
but you cannot paint
nothing
there is nothing new
under the sun
there are only the things
you have all seen before
I make you see again
for the first time
new
(5)
So, how did the real thing measure up? Did the exhibit satisfy my expectations?
Oh yes it did, it really did. The experience was, even physically, let alone emotionally,overwhelming: over 200 paintings, not to mention photos, letters, old museum catalogues. It took me three hours to walk through it. The paintings were carefully displayed against neutral grey walls (not the hideous black walls that have plunged theImpressionists at the Musée d’Orsay into funereal gloom), well spaced, well arranged.
What a delight to see the juxtapositions of paintings of similar if not identical motifs (houses at l’Estaque, the château at La Roche-Guyon) hanging side by side. Paintings housed in museums and private collections from all over the world, here returned to each other, like separated siblings staging a family reunion. I remember particularly one wall of four 1920s still lifes (Cat. 120-1234), on loan from museums in Prague, New York, Zürich, and Paris; I had previously seen at least three of them, separately, but to see them all together was a revelation.
Braque himself was deeply ambivalent about a retrospective exhibition. Late in his life, according to Alex Danchev in his exemplary biography,5 Braque thwarted a proposal for a major show; according to Jean Cassou, “it was not so much the verdict of others that he dreaded, but rather his own.” Placed or re-placed alongside each other, judged in their own company, would the paintings hold up?
At the Grand Palais, finally, fifty years later, the question could be answered. They held up. All the paintings held up.
“To hold” is a recurring phrase in Braque criticism. In French it is simply “hold,” tenir, without the assistance of the English pronoun “up.” It is in that sense that I here use it in a translation of a famous anecdote by the great French poet and critic Pierre Reverdy:
In 1917 I met him in the Midi, close to Avignon, and one day, as we were walking across the field from Sorgues to the hamlet where I was living, Braque was carrying, at the end of a stick passed over his shoulder, one of his own canvases. We came to a halt. Braque laid the painting down flat, among the pebbles and grasses. I was struck by something and I said to him: “It’s amazing how that holds against the real colours and the rocks.” People have said to me, since, that the most important thing was to know whether it held even against famine. Today I answer. Yes, it has held, and against many other things as well, for paintings are afraid of nothing.
It was still true in the Grand Palais in autumn 2013, a hundred years later. It held. Les toiles n’ont peur de rien.
(6)
it was
he said
like being
a little
it was a little
he said
like being
like being roped
he said
it was
a little like being roped
together
together
like being roped together
he said
it was a little like being
roped together
on a mountain
(7)
Alex Danchev is not a neutral biographer. He is, first and last, a Braque partisan. Yet even at his most extreme, I find it hard to disagree with him:
If an ism can be said to be invented by a person, then Cubism was invented by Georges Braque. It was Braque who
painted and exhibited the first Cubist pictures. It was Braque
who established Cubist motifs. It was Braque who created
Cubist space. It was Braque who demonstrated Cubist
techniques. It was Braque who accented Cubist language.
It was Braque who set the tone. And it was Braque who led a
second revolution – the move into 3-D, making the first paper
sculptures in 1911 and the first papiers collés… in 1912.
(Danchev, p. 48)
Way to go, Alex. You tell ‘em.
(8)
Even Braque’s most ardent supporters and partisans will readily concede one point: one overwhelming gap in his painted vision of the world. (And one which is even more obvious in a comprehensive retrospective, as at the Grand Palais.)
Braque never could portray the human body. His figure paintings are always clumsy (some deliberately so, as in the 1908 Grand Nu, Cat. 35; others unfortunately not), or else highly stylized (as in the arabesque drawings of figures from Classical mythology). But there is never any sense of comfort with the body. And in the whole of Braque’s work, there is not a single memorable human face.
For some viewers, this is a major problem, and a decisive argument for Braque’s inferiority to Picasso (whose skill at portraiture was always uncanny). On the other hand, there are many great artists who also avoided the portrait. Turner. Monet. The great Canadian artist David Milne. And of course any artist whose major mode was abstraction. You don’t look at Rothko for portraits.
And Braque, by and large,6 recognized his own limitations, and stayed within them. One, or rather two, possible exceptions are two remarkable canvases from 1942 (Cat. 165, 166), both of which show a male figure, seated, with his back to the painter and the viewer. One is holding a guitar, one is painting at an easel – two figures, that is, of the artist himself, seen here as a man who has turned his back on the world, turned away from portraiture, turned away from all communication. They are powerful images of solitude and alienation. The fact that both were painted in Paris at the height of the Nazi occupation is certainly relevant, but need not be a limiting factor in their interpretation. For once, or twice, Braque’s awkwardness with the human form is profoundly expressive.
(9)
everything that is not
in his paintings
the war
the head wound
the blindness
three years without working
out of this to come back
again to the tables
piled fruit in bowls
and shadows bisecting the light
what his language calls
dead nature
and mine for once more accurate
still life
(10)
It is often said of Braque that he paints not only things but the spaces in between things. Not literally, of course: that is still a bottle and that is still a lemon, and that is the tabletop they share. But the painting also succeeds in making the space between the bottle and the lemon sensible – in every sense of that word.
We sense the bottle and the lemon, they are discreet and tangible objects in the world of our senses – sight, touch, taste – and yet they also “make sense,” their presence and utility are immediate, practical, reasonable, sensible. And the painting appeals to our sensibility, that trained or untrained instinct for visual appropriateness and pleasure. One does not reason one’s way into a Braque painting; one senses the way inside; and the result will be eminently sensible.
(11)
cutting the paper
into shape
drawing a line
across two planes
combing the paint
to make it wood
(12)
Braque’s work makes use of some techniques which might unkindly be called mere tricks or gimmicks – things like mixing sand into the paint to produce a granular surface texture, or using a comb to give an impression of the grain in wood. And sometimes, especially in their adoption by Picasso, the primary effect is indeed gimmicky: a witty and whimsical playing with the conventions of representation.
But Braque was always more serious about them. Many of these “tricks” were in fact the “tricks of the trade” of his father’s profession as a decorative house-painter, and Braque accorded them the respect and dignity due not only to a father but to a craftsman, a professional.
Take, for instance, the “gimmick,” used in many later paintings but perhaps most notably in Le Billard (1944, Cat. 173), in which the voluteoutlines of the tops of the curved struts of the easel are included in the painting. In one sense, it is a play upon the literalness of the representation: asthe painter looked at the subject over the top of his easel, the easel itself would still be a part of his visual field. But convention would eliminate any trace of its presence in the painting itself.7 Just as early Cubist paintings included both front and back of the object represented, Braque here gives a more complete, a more “realistic” view of what lies in front of his eyes.
But the presence of the easel is more than just a clever play on the conventions of easel painting: it also becomes an integral part of the composition, and an element which binds together the multiple overlapping levels of depth. Just as the billiard cue stretches over several levels of depth recession, the curve of the easel is both a transparent screen in front of the viewer and the shape of a circular dish, supporting a vase of flowers, which appears to rest on a sideboard behind the billiard table.
It is the easel “gimmick” which ties together all the levels of the painting, and reconciles their spatial incongruities into a pictorial harmonious whole.
(13)
I prepare my colours myself
he said
I do the crushing of them
like a good cook using
only fresh herbs
the aromas of colour
mortar and pestle
strong
in his gentle hands
(14)
The exhibit at the Grand Palais for the most part observes a strict chronological order, demonstrating both the succeeding phases of Braque’s career and its deep underlying continuity. But right at the end, there is a twist. It may be due to the physical layout of the available rooms in the Grand Palais, but it also seems to make a deliberate thematic statement.
Of the last three rooms in the exhibit, it is the first which is devoted to his “last” paintings. After a lifetime of still life, these final canvases return at last, like Odysseus coming home, to landscape. Their most characteristic format is a long, narrow, horizontal rectangle, with the paint thickly encrusted, and, in the majority of cases, unsigned . The sky broods, and the fields burn, with the intensity of Van Gogh. These paintings put the horizon back into the horizontal.
In the Grand Palais, they inhabit a small, semi-circular room; but they are not the end of the story the exhibit has to tell. In the next room, we enter Braque’s studio, in the majestic series entitled Les Ateliers. By the looks of it, Braque’s studio was magnificently cluttered; “The Studios” are not. They are dense agglomerations of iconic objects (busts, vases, stoves, palettes) crammed into a dense and accumulated space. Dominating most of them, starting with #2, and hovering in indeterminate air, are the vast mysterious shapes of birds.
The birds may have begun as paintings of birds – paintings within paintings, hanging on the studio wall. But the rectangular frame surrounding them soon disappears. As Wayne Thom puts it:
What fascinates me is the loss of that framing rectangle. I suspect that it simply excused itself and left the scene. It knew that its presence was inhibiting the life of the painting…. The rule that corrects emotion is something that only the painting itself can reveal to the artist and the process is necessarily slow and faltering. It is his absolute obedience to that process and the strict obliteration of ego that it demands that most impress me about Braque .
So the last room of the exhibit – the largest room, the lightest room (the room with the most windows letting in natural daylight) – open, uplifting, delighting in light – the last room belongs to the birds.
Ah, the birds. Braque’s birds. Not always blackbirds (some of them are white), but definitely a species all of their own. Braquebirds.
About the origins of these birds, Braque himself was both literal and evasive. “In one of these Studios,” he said, “the bird arrived naturally to perch on the top, a complete surprise.” Or elsewhere: “They are simply birds, species unknown” (quoted in Danchev, pp. 248, 246).
One thing is clear: the birds are not symbolic. They have no assigned or implied meanings. They carry none of the “significance” of Picasso’s pretty little peace doves. In some ways (by no means all) they resemble the creatures in The Birds, by Alfred Hitchcock (who was a great admirer and collector of Braque). Not in the sense of malevolence – Braque’s birds would never attack – but in the sense of being utterly other, beyond any reasonable explanation, beyond any attempt to recuperate them into an allegory, or a morality.
They hover in the dense air of the timeless heavens; they never flap their wings, they glide. They return to their nests. They are at home in empyrean blue, yet they also invade the interior space of his Studios, and hang there: vast, silent, unknowable, mysterious.
The mystery is not that they have any “hidden meaning” – they are not symbolic – but that their very existence is a resistance to any easy reading of “meaning.” They are themselves, that is all. There is nothing to say “about” them. They just are.
The windows are open in their room of light.
(15)
And then the exhibit is over. As Llewyn Davies says at the end of the Coen brothers’ great film, “That’s what I’ve got.” You buy the catalogue and some postcards. You collect your stuff from the cloakroom, and step out into the thin November Paris rain.
(16)
J’aime la règle qui corrige l’émotion
– Georges Braque
I love the rule
which corrects the emotion
I love the emotion
which corrects the rule
I love the rule which corrects
the emotion I love
corrects the rule
I correct the emotion
which loves the rule
I rule the love
which moves the correction
1 This poem, like those in sections 1, 4, 6, 9, 11, 13, and 16, comes from a sequence of poems on Georges Braque which I wrote in 1978. The sequence won a Special Award in that year’s CBC radio Literary Competition, and was published in Exile. It also appeared in a privately printed booklet, les toiles n’ont peur de rien (Edmonton, 1979).
2 The French neglect of Braque is another topic, too vast for this article, and requiring an author far more fully versed than I am in the politics of the Parisian art establishment. But I was astonished, when I arrived in Paris, to find that there were absolutely no subsidiary exhibitions: not one small gallery (at least of those advertised in Pariscope) displaying even a poster, let alone a lithograph. Is it simply the idolatry of Picasso, whose late works, in all their easy banality, are considered more commercially viable than Braque? Or is it a late hangover from Gertrude Stein, who remembered Braque mainly as the man whose long arms made it possible for him to hang paintings in awkward positions on her walls?
3 See Hobo #13 for my account of the recent theft from this museum, whose spoils included one Fauve painting by Braque, a painting whose absence hung over the otherwise splendid display of Fauve Braque in the first room of this exhibition.
4 The numbers refer to the exhibition catalogue.
5 Alex Danchev, Georges Braque: a Life (Penguin, 2005), pp.266-7.
6 There is one dreadful painting, by far the worst in the exhibition, Cat. 144, in which Braque disastrously tries to copy Picasso’s distortions of body and face.
7 It is like the moment in Godard’s La Chinoise where the film shows, in a mirror-reflection shot, the camera filming the scene. The apparatus of reproduction is always present, but convention excludes it from the frame, except in moments of deliberate self-reflexivity – Godard showing his own camera, Braque displaying his own easel.
8 Personal e-mail. My thanks to Wayne for some very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay.
I first met Frédéric over lunch at Allard in the 6ème arrondissement after translating and publishing excerpts from his passionate book on books: First Inventory After the Apocalypse. I’ve since come to realize just how well known and prolific a figure he is. His program Le Cercle exudes intelligence and wit and is, along with The Walking Dead, my favourite show on television. He has penned nine novels which sometime fictionalize his own life, often caricature consumer society, and always pose metaphysical questions. He was one of the first people to sign the manifesto opposing the new legislation penalizing clients of prostitution in France and to me represents the liberal side of a country that was known for revolutions and the Enlightenment: founding the Prix de Flore, keeping the image of Hemingway in A Moveable Feast alive, championing institutions like L’Ami Louis...
Shawn Dogimont — It seems to me like you’ve invented your own career. I find this very inspiring because it’s based on classic interests and talent, your appetite for literature, and I wonder if a professional journey such as yours could exist elsewhere than Paris where film criticism is at the forefront of media, there’s still a love of physical books… You’ve published nine novels and you’ve directed a film. You’re touching on all the things I’ve romanticized doing.
Frédéric Beigbeder — I agree with you – it’s not possible elsewhere because you have in Paris this culture of cinema d’auteurs, the story of the nouvelle vague which basically says: when you are a writer, you can be a director. Because François Truffaut was a film critic, because Sacha Guitry and Marcel Pagnol directed movies, and Jean Cocteau also. So you don’t have this wall between writing and directing movies. Many directors were writers before in France, and still are. So that’s the main difference. When I said to Jay McInerney “I’m going to direct a movie” he said “wow, but did you go to film school?” Of course not, I’m just a writer but in France when you’re a writer you’re someone who’s telling a story and you can tell your story with ‘la camera stylo’. The camera is like a pen here and in America it’s different, there’s a culture based around Hollywood, technique, and if you don’t know everything about movies you’re considered an analphabet I suppose, and maybe it’s right, I don’t know, because many bad movies are made by writers where people talk for hours but ‘c’est permis en France’. It started because I organized parties when I was eighteen. Before any artistic activity I was known for nightlife and I invited many guests to costume balls and things like that. So I became a ‘figure de la nuit’ ‘un noctambule’ and started writing in magazines about this night life. What I wrote seemed funny to some people so I published a novel, was called to work in an advertising agency and as a host on television. I became a character before doing anything. I’m like a Kim Kardashian from the 80s. [laughs] It doesn’t mean I have no talent but it was a succession of accidents, one leading to another, which is why I do a lot of things.
— Where is your ‘âme’ in all this, where do you feel the most at home?
— All these things are connected to writing. If you do a TV show you start with the questions you’re going to ask or what you’re going to say. If you do cinema you have to write a script. If you write a book, you write. If you write an article in a magazine, it’s writing. So it all begins with writing at some point, except when you throw a party. Well, you still have to write an invitation that makes people come. All these forms of expression are different but they begin with one guy alone in a room scratching his head and wondering what he’s going to say.
[Interview & photo by Shawn Dogimont]
— They’ll say: he knows what he’s talking about.
— Exactly. If I tell the story of a guy being arrested for doing cocaine on the hood of a car outside, people will know it’s true, so it’s a good start.
— Is there a similar social malaise between Octave Parrango, your alter ego in 99 francs, and Bret Easton Ellis’ Patrick Bateman or the anonymous narrator in Fight Club?
— Oh yeah sure. When David Fincher’s film was out on screens I was very sad because I admired it so much. I was writing 99 francs at the time and I thought “shit, he did it before me.” I was trying to describe the crazy madness of advertising, the power of advertising by using advertising techniques. The book is full of bylines and slogans, so it’s like turning back on advertising the weapon that they use to influence us. This kind of expression/writing is very American, very attractive, very seductive, like Elis or McInerney did in the eighties. I was influenced by both of them. Elis more because he’s very radical, McInerney’s more romantic, more tender maybe.
— What attracts you to North American life and literature?
— Well the thing is: I love French literature, it’s my language so I read a lot of French poetry and novels. Americans, they tell stories. Maybe in the 20th century we looked for new languages and new experiences, like the ‘nouveau roman’ where you refuse to tell a story, and some of it for me became too abstract. That’s why I like to read real novels with characters and situations describing our time. It can be Hemmingway, Fitzgerald, but also Tom Wolf. This ambition, that was the ambition of the French in the 19th century. For example Zola and Stendhal. Stendhal said novels are a mirror, you show reality. So the Americans are writing French 19th century novels. Even Bukowski said he was influenced by Zola and Céline. I’m influenced by the Americans because they’re influenced by the writers that I love. The Russians also. The Russians and Americans have this ambition to sum up the world, to embrace the world. So you’re reading a story but you’re also looking at yourself in a mirror.
— What does this passage from George Perec’s Things: A Story of the Sixties immediately make you think about?
“Alas, quite often, to tell the truth, they were horribly let down... The screen would light up, they would feel a thrill of satisfaction. But the colours had faded with age, the picture wobbled on the screen, the women were of another age; they would come out; they would be sad. It was not the film they had dreamt of. It was not the total film each of them had inside himself, the perfect film they could have enjoyed for ever and ever. The film they would have liked to make. Or more secretly, no doubt, the film they would have liked to live.”
— Les Choses is very important because it was published the year I was born so it’s a very important year… [laughs] It’s the first novel to describe consumer society and how it’s disappointing to human beings. I admire Perec. It’s his first novel and he said everything about what happened after the fall of the Berlin wall. Thirty years prior he understood why the end of utopias will not make us happy, we need to have a dream. The dream of the people in Les Choses is having material things. That’s their utopia: to have furniture, a tv, a nice apartment and that this will make them happy. Of course it doesn’t. It’s maybe the first novel that says buying stuff won’t make you happy and it’s the subject of everything I ever wrote. How my generation is a generation of disappointment because we have been lied to, ‘on a été escroqué’. Since I was born, people have been explaining to me communism is bad, capitalism is good. Fascism was horrible and all your parents and grandparents suffered in the war so you should be happy with capitalism. And the thing I write about is how we are not happy with capitalism, it’s not enough, we need something else. Religion it’s difficult, it’s over, we don’t really believe anymore.
— So if you don’t have a dream?
— Start writing books to explain books to explain how sad you are and that’s the reason why maybe we get drunk, take drugs, have sex with people we don’t know and then don’t call back, it’s because we don’t have a dream. Perec is a turning point for me. When he says we wanted to be part of a film, we wanted our lives to look like a movie, but then it was a bad movie [laughs], it was a boring movie, it’s exactly how I feel! I think it’s a real problem of my generation and the generation after. Now they have YouTube. They think Facebook and YouTube and Google will make them happy. It won’t!
— How do you escape the trappings of modern city life where lifestyle is being sold as life?
— I do not escape. I am inside this world. I am a part of it. I have a magazine called Lui with lots of advertising and beautiful pictures of naked models. I go out, I get drunk, I buy stuff, like everyone else. I just describe how it’s not enough to be happy. And I don’t really know how to be happy and that’s what I’m writing about. You know, happy people, I don’t think they write, or they write boring books. I have an attraction to glamour, I’m part of the system, but I’m also complaining all the time. I like that, it’s very comfortable maybe. [laughs]
— Why do you write novels? What are you looking for in your writing?
— Trying to put words on ‘mon malaise’, discomfort, ‘sodade’ in Portuguese. It’s like auto-psychoanalysis, you feel better at the end of the day if you’ve written one sentence that’s telling about why you feel bad, what’s wrong with you, what’s wrong with this life, just one sentence every day and that’s enough, it helps. Maybe you stop writing the day you know who you are.
— Do you agree with Georges Simenon who once said: Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness. I don’t think an artist can ever be happy.
— I strongly think he’s right but I hope he’s wrong. I love Simenon because he was always trying to find the simple words. He got this from Colette. Very detailed descriptions. A vocation I agree totally. I started when I was nine years old to write things like a diary. You don’t decide to become a writer, it’s like a sickness. Some people like to live, other people like to immortalize things by writing them and it’s like a handicap in life. Sometimes, say in a restaurant, people are having fun all around me and I’m like a dead guy going out of his body and looking at everything and not living.
— Does writing jog memory? Does surfing jog writing?
— They have things in common. You have to wait for inspiration and suddenly there is a wave and you have to listen to what happens, very quickly take notes. I believe in inspiration, I think it exists. Some days you’re good and some days you’re shit. Writing is like waiting for an appointment with yourself. Sometimes you can be stood up. Sometimes you get a text…
— Why did you write First Inventory After the Apocalypse? Are you genuinely concerned about the disappearance of physical books?
— Oh yes sure, I’m very scarred of that. The world is changing of course. The digital revolution. To me it’s different reading on a screen. Books become digital files, it’s not the same as reading on paper. Because of concentration. If you read Dostoevsky on paper you have to sit down, open a bottle of Armagnac, sit in a nice comfortable chair, turn off your phone, your tv, everything, have silence and listen to the voice of a dead, old Russian with a beard talking to you about how gambling destroyed his life. This is real. It’s a joy that no other form of art can give you because you will listen to the soul of someone much more clever than yourself. It’s a real treat for me, literature is like a movie you direct in your head so it’s the best thing ever. But it’s an increasingly difficult thing to do today. My daughter has so many temptations, I don’t know if she will ever read Crime and Punishment. It’s difficult for me too. I have so many things to turn off. To read one page of Proust is like a war. I read more when I’m in my little village in the southwest of France. No television, nobody calls me, I feel alone, trapped… Sometimes I hate it and I want to come back and go to the Montana! [laughs]
— What are the consequences for society? Because people seem to be alright with the notion that our minds, the way in which we process information, are changing. A world where things are meant to be felt not thought about and articulated...
— It’s funny because the digital revolution made me realize I was a ‘réactionaire’. I thought I was a ‘progressiste’, ‘libertaire’, ‘libéral’, somebody of the future but… I’m not. I’m someone from the past and I discovered that because I don’t like Facebook I don’t like to be bothered all day long by technological things that ring and disturb me. I like an old civilization, the history of literature, I like to have time and decide what I do with my time, I liked to surf. I like to disobey this revolution. I don’t think it’s good to be unable to write good language, with the correct spelling, I don’t think it’s a better life to be unable to read long novels.
— Is the form and length of the novel in danger?
— Yes. No one is telling the truth. And the truth is: you cannot read Proust on an ebook. You just can’t, it’s not possible. So it’s going to change the novel, the way people write and read, and maybe they will not read anymore. I’m scarred when I go to the apartments of some friends and there are no books.
— That’s weird.
— That’s very weird. The music industry disappeared as objects. No albums, no CDs.
— I remember someone saying that the only time humanity has gone backwards technologically was when we got rid of the Concorde.
— [laughs]
— But that’s not true anymore. Ask Neil Young or Eddie Vedder and they’ll tell you recorded sound sucks now. It’s not as good as it was just a few years ago and I feel the same way about film.
— Tarantino agrees with you. He only shoots on celluloid. The thing is it scares me because it says we are getting old. [laughs] ‘On est des anciens combattants.’ Intelligent people should analyze the positive and negative aspects of any invention. It’s normal to say it has good parts. You can talk with people all over the world on Skype for free. Some things are better. But for example Twitter, it’s stupid. It makes people say things they regret the next day, say things about society in only a few letters, it’s too short. Calling people friends on Facebook. They’re not your friends, you don’t know them. Maybe they’re lying! I know of five people who are fakes, using my name and picture. ‘Le progrès scientifique n’est pas toujours bon par essence.’ This is called scientism. Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, they are also very weird, they believe in a new form of mankind. They’re not only saying it’s great to feel things instead of thinking, they’re saying much worse. They’re saying we’re going to mix machine and human and create a new creature with cameras in our heads and chips in our bodies and we’re going to live for 400 years… they’re speaking exactly like the Nazis! [laughs] It’s a new utopia.
— It’s as if the nerds in school are taking over. Where are the slackers?
— The most boring guy in the class is now the richest in the world. That’s a big problem. [laughs] It’s the same as Adolf Hitler. Maybe this shouldn’t be in the interview [laughs] but it’s true, Adolf was ‘un raté’. He had no talent as a painter and he was very angry at all the people who had the girls because he was very ‘complexé’ and… it’s dangerous when nerds get the power. [laughs] You know why? Because they want revenge. They want all the brilliant people to obey their orders. For example when Zuckerberg says something like private life does not exist anymore – this is George Orwell and I don’t understand why nobody reacts. So we have to resist. It’s important to choose your side. Do you prefer things that are irrational, art, instinct, or do you prefer mathematics? I don’t want to be a superman.
— “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” Ray Bradbury isn’t very far off finally.
— Yes and that’s exactly what’s happening now. He was wrong on one point – they are burning the books. They’re not burned but ‘pillonés’. Hundreds of thousands of books are going to be destroyed. Seventy-eight bookstores closed this year in France. When you close bookstores you physically destroy the books. So Bradbury was too optimistic. [laughs]
— Why is it important to read novels?
— Because it’s taking time, deciding to use your time to be alone with yourself and the mind of a genius like Flaubert or Walt Whitman. Perec again, one of his books is called La Vie Mode d’Emploi. Books are like instruction manuals for life. The most important things you are not taught, except in novels. How to love, what is the meaning of life, are you happy, did your parents love you, do you know the smell of the canal in Venise, would you like to cross the United States in a car starting from NY and going to LA with a crazy guy? All this you learn in books, nowhere else. No one will teach you how to be happy or why you are sad.
— It’s checking out, time when you’re not productive, not consuming, and maybe that’s not in the best interest of governments.
— That’s why the Nazis burned the books. They didn’t want people to think or criticize. When you read you get out of reality and you start thinking and you are more free. Also it’s useless and that’s what I like. ‘Le sens de l’inutilité.’ When you wake up in the morning and all day long you have appointments, things to do and you are efficient from 8am to 8pm... when you go to bed you can’t sleep. There’s a reason – you need time to be useless, to operate with instinct. To waste time is very important.
— Do you have a favourite hero?
— Can I have two? One French and one American. They’re almost the same and they were written almost at the same time. Meursault, L’étranger de Camus and Holden Caufield, The Catcher in the Rye. They are the same. They are young and lost. They don’t really understand how to integrate the world of adults. Meursault kills someone and doesn’t know why and Holden just escapes school and walks around Central Park. They’re anti-heros, that’s what I like about them. They escape, they have no real goals and they don’t want to obey. Holden’s wasting his time, of course he’s expelled from school, but instead of going home and getting yelled at, he rambles, talks to a nun, a prostitute, a cab driver… He wanders. He’s a hobo.
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