Photograph of Tram Ton Pass in Vietnam, by Richard Curran.
Rob Curran’s profile of Jamie Taggart will appear in the Believer’s summer issue.
Scottish botanist Jamie Taggart, who went missing on October 31, 2013 while exploring for plants in Northern Vietnam, has finally come home to rest.
In mid-December, a local farmer found Jamie’s remains at the foot of a waterfall on the outskirts of the Hoang Lien national park. A Vietnamese investigation revealed that Jamie had fallen to his death while scaling the waterfall. The mountainside was a four-hour hike from the place where Jamie was last seen, walking along a road near the entrance to the national park, heading toward the Tram Ton pass.
Jamie’s family has borne his disappearance and the prolonged repatriation process with a quiet, almost oaken strength. Jamie’s mother, Jill Mary, spoke to me from her home in England, saying, “It’s good to know what happened, but it’s hard to bear.”
Last March, I met Jill Mary in Sa Pa, and, together, we tried to find out what had happened to her son. Hoang Lien park is home to the highest mountain in Vietnam, Fan Si Pan, as well as—thanks to quirks of geography—a host of plant species so distinct from their relatives elsewhere that they are still being cataloged. The 2013 trip was Jamie’s second to the park, and his first solo expedition. Jamie had planned to spend a month in the area, where he hoped to identify some of the rare species, and to discover a new plant or flower.
While we were in Sa Pa, my brother Rich and I were taken to the upper slopes of Fan Si Pan—a few hours’ hiking from the place where Jamie was found—by a local guide and self-taught botanist, Uoc Le Huu. My brother and I, novice hikers, stood on the ridge and thought only of the danger in the ravines around us. Uoc thought only of the lilies and primroses that might grow there.
We were told that search parties had concentrated their efforts on areas closer to the road, because they did not believe that anyone would brave the rocky terrain with the scant supplies Jamie had brought with him from Sa Pa. But they did not know Jamie Taggart. Jamie was devoted to plants; he was also an experienced and fearless climber. For many years Jamie lovingly curated the Linn Botanic Gardens on the western coast of Scotland, a place burgeoning with flora in a way that recalls Sa Pa.
Jamie succeeded his father in the role. Jim Taggart, who is himself an accomplished botanist, still lives in the Victorian villa that he acquired and restored with the gardens in 1971, around the time of Jamie’s birth. Jamie had an older brother, an older sister, and many close friends, both in the Cove area and in the botany community. He even knew the undertaker, James Auld, who made the arrangements for the funeral, which was due to take place today.
In a world where many discoveries take the form of abstract pixels, and where expeditions are reserved for large teams of specialists, Jamie Taggart died in an act of daring solo exploration reminiscent of the Victorians who built the Linn.
Jamie’s death may draw attention to the planned development of the Fan Si Pan area, and the need to preserve its botanical riches. The wilderness may have taken Jamie Taggart for two long years, but he would never wish to see that wilderness taken away. As Jim Taggart put it: “He was where he wanted to be.”
Research the poet undertook while writing her collection: Dark or difficult places Home Underwater
Amber Tamblyn’s late twenties kicked her mind’s ass. It’s not an uncommon phenomenon: the slightly delayed quarter-life crisis, known to star-worshippers as the Saturn Return, is the period in which one’s life feels like it’s either thrown into total chaos or hitting the skids. Tamblyn, who muscled through the wilds of child acting and came out the other end an accomplished, sardonic, down-to-earth performer and writer, suddenly began to question everything about herself.
Before she began to experience the Fear, Tamblyn had been confident and assured, having already achieved so much by her mid-twenties. The thirty-one-year-old Emmy- and Golden Globe–nominated actress is perhaps best known for having played a teenager who talks to God in the CBS TV series Joan of Arcadia, and for her character, Tibby Tomko-Rollins, in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants movies. She has also appeared in the popular hair-raising films The Ring, The Grudge 2, 127 Hours, and the beloved television shows The Unusuals, House, and most recently the CBS sitcom Two and a Half Men, where she played Charlie Harper’s long-lost lesbian daughter, Jenny.
Yet Tamblyn, who grew up among bohemians (her unofficial godfathers are Neil Young and the late Dennis Hopper), says poetry was her first love, and one of the few areas in her life over which she had full control. It was that agency, perhaps, that pulled her back from the existential brink a couple of years ago. The result was Tamblyn’s third collection of poems, Dark Sparkler. It examines the lives and untimely deaths of young actresses such as Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Sharon Tate, and Brittany Murphy, and features artwork by David Lynch, Marilyn Manson, and Tamblyn’s father, veteran actor Russ Tamblyn (West Side Story, Twin Peaks). She has published two other acclaimed books of poems, 2005’s Free Stallion and 2009’s Bang Ditto, as well as two chapbooks, Of the Dawn and Plenty of Ships, which she made as a teenager. The topic of Dark Sparkler is one that’s not unfamiliar to the Los Angeles native, who began her own professional acting career at age eleven. Tamblyn says the collection is the death of her twenties on paper—“the death of somebody who didn’t believe in herself, who didn’t think her poetry was good enough, who didn’t think she was good enough to direct a film.”
I spoke to Tamblyn, who is very much alive and well, by phone from Los Angeles, where she was on the set of her directorial debut, a film adaptation of Janet Fitch’s novel Paint It Black. She snuck away with her lunch to a quiet hiding spot on the huge, haunted-house property. As she stared out at a skyline of the city, we chatted about the late Brittany Murphy, the appeal of “ultimate silence,” and the importance of shedding one’s skin. —Rachel Matlow
THE BELIEVER: Dark Sparkler is your first thematic collection of poems. Why did you want to take on the subject of dead young actresses?
AMBER TAMBLYN: It started around the time Brittany Murphy died. I don’t know why, but I became very interested in her death. As someone who was born and raised in Los Angeles, I was really interested in this idea of people who move here to get into the business, and some of them do become famous and then oftentimes they fall out of that fame in very terrible ways. So I was obsessed not only with how she died and the mystery surrounding it, but also with humanizing her and knowing who she was as a person outside of that limelight. The first poem [in the book], I wrote for her. And then two poet friends of mine, Rachel McKibbens and Mindy Nettifee, were really the women who said, “This book is sort of a destiny for you and you need to write it,” which was ultimately writing the stories about the mortalities of actresses, not just their mortalities but also who they were outside of being actresses, and what it’s like for anybody to struggle with anything.
BLVR: The poem you wrote about Brittany Murphy begins with “In the shower/ her body dies like a spider’s.” You’ve talked about how you “privately glamorized” her death. Can you expand on that?
AT: I can tell you anything about Brittany Murphy. I’ve read her autopsy report and death certificate. I know that she died in the shower. That was the first visual image I had. I read that she had lost a lot of weight, and I so had this image of what a spider looks like when it dies. Sort of legs-closed like a crumpled, dead flower.
BLVR: What struck you most about Murphy’s end? It seems like you were fascinated by how her body was objectified even in death.
AT: The deaths here are stories in and of themselves. Certainly for Brittany Murphy, who, beyond her fame and failures, was a person who was not taken care of, both by herself and by people around her. That is the part that’s most interesting to me. I remember how, after she died, InTouch magazine put her on the cover in this beautiful sequined dress, immortalizing her as opposed to actually talking about what was really going on and what was happening in her life. And, culturally, that’s something I see all the time. She died so brutally. Still, to this day, we don’t know exactly what happened. But there was the sense of “Oh, let’s just remember her for how beautiful she was. Let’s forget all the terrible, terrible things we wrote about her, about her body, dragging her self- esteem down into the ditches. Let’s forget all of that stuff. Let’s pretend this magazine never published that, and let’s just remember her for this glowing moment.” I feel that poem was trying to shed light on all of that.
BLVR: As you mentioned, unlike Murphy and others, you were born and raised in Los Angeles. You rather fell into acting at a young age. To what extent do these actresses’ stories resonate with your own?
AT: Some of them do. When people ask me what I do for a living, I always say, “I get rejected for a living.” And that’s true. There is a painful process that if any actor or actress says they weren’t going through or hadn’t been through, they are full of shit and are lying to you. Also, part of our business is that you read interviews with these people and they don’t really talk candidly about what’s going on and the struggle—the struggle to do what you love and to maintain body image and to maintain this sort of false stature of who you’re supposed to be as a role model and also who you are supposed to be to yourself personally and privately. And because the role-model pressure becomes so insane, the personal and private takes a backseat to whatever it takes to maintain that fame and to maintain that lifestyle, and before you know it you’re not a human being anymore.
BLVR: So you’ve experienced that struggle? That pressure?
AT: It was interesting—when I started to research these women, there was nothing new to me about their experiences, whether it was suicide, thoughts of suicide, murder-suicide, eating disorders, or drug addiction. The theme through it was, ultimately, that these were stories of people who—if they were not murdered, if it was something self-inflicted that happened to them—struggled. For most women, whether you’re an actress or whatever you do, there is this pressure in society and within the world to look a certain way, dress a certain way, act a certain way, say certain things, and be this idea as opposed to being a person. That was the commonality I had with them: knowing that shame and knowing what that feels like.
BLVR: You began a six-year tenure on General Hospital when you were only eleven years old, but you seem grounded. Did you manage to avoid the dangerous—sometimes lethal—pitfalls that other child stars have fallen into?
AT: I think I did. I also never reached certain levels of fame, like Lindsay Lohan did, or even Brittany Murphy. My career has always been this sort of even-keeled, steady existence. I was also raised by poets, and I’ve been doing poetry as long as I’ve been acting. My first poem was published when I was twelve years old by Jack Hirschman, who was the poet laureate for San Francisco. A small magazine called Cups published a piece that I wrote, called “Kill Me So Much,” which was a real homage to Jack and his political writings. After I saw my first poem published, I became interested in the immortalization of words and the fact that you could put something out there that you felt and that meant something to you, and that it could be interpreted by many different people to mean many different things.
BLVR: What did it feel like when you first saw your words in print?
AT: It was exhilarating. I had this young, profound sense of affecting something. And not in the same way as acting did. It was really something that belonged to me, and it was very personal and very private at the same time. It was something that I could choose to share with the world. With acting, I always feel like you have less choice in it. When I’m acting, I have zero control, and it’s the scariest thing anyone can do in that field because, you know, your face is always the one that’s out there in front of the camera, and any number of things can happen to you once you’ve done your work. It can be edited badly, it can be distributed badly, or it can not be distributed at all. And I’ve certainly experienced that; every actor has. So the poetry when I was a kid felt like something that I could control, and whether it failed or not, whether it was good or not, was totally on me and I could accept that. It was entirely mine.
BLVR: There seems to be a lot of judgment when an actress does something other than acting. Did you feel it was harder to be taken seriously as a poet because of your celebrity?
AT: I think it’s hard to be taken seriously as a poet, period. Recently, I was at the PEN Center awards and I heard Victoria Chang, another poet, explain that poets are the armpit of the literary world.
BLVR: You seem to embrace your imperfections within the context of your poems. How challenging has that been for you, considering you work in an industry that doesn’t allow much room for imperfection?
AT: Just because you grow up in the public eye doesn’t mean that you’re immune to the same sort of issues and feelings that any other woman would go through. There was a period of time while I was writing this book, in my obsession with following these women and their journeys and also their deaths, that I was going through my own kind of death. I hadn’t contemplated dying, but I had contemplated what ultimate silence would be like. And that means not seeing and not doing and not being, and what a wonderful thing that must be. And certainly—again for someone like me, who all day, in my business, everything is about emotion, everything is about putting yourself out there in that way—the idea of ultimate silence was really attractive. The epilogue in the book explores my experience of having to unearth some really terrible experiences and feelings about myself in order to get to the root of it, which was that I was dying, and that the person I was and that I thought was so strong and that, as you just said to me, was so grounded, which was something I’d heard since I was a kid—why didn’t I feel connected to that person? Why didn’t I feel like that person mattered? And what did that mean? It was a really scary epiphany in a certain way, and I didn’t know if that meant that I felt like I wanted to die, and that everything, all of it, was some weird meta circle of me coming back to a realization that I should not live past thirty, and all of these thoughts went through my head. And the more I dug into them, the fact that I felt shame that their stories should even matter in the first place spoke volumes about how much I didn’t believe that my own voice mattered at all because of my privilege. It was sort of this reciprocal terrible situation that I was in, and the ultimate outcome of that was writing the epilogue. It took me six years to write the book. I had to stop for about a year and a half because it was so dark and I was in a very bad place in my own personal life. It was getting a little too close to home for me.
In which Stuart David writes about the beginnings of his first band with Stuart Murdoch, Lisa Helps the Blind.
Alistair’s solution to the difficulties we’d faced with our first two Lisa Helps the Blind gigs was to make sure we had complete control of the environment our third one took place in. We’d got to the point where we sounded pretty good in rehearsal, but we didn’t seem able to take that sound out into the world. So Alistair’s plan was to bring the world, or as much of it as would fit, into rehearsals. He’d decided to set up a gig in his front room, for a small invited audience, and it seemed like it might work. We rehearsed a set of eight songs, including ‘Lord Anthony’, ‘Perfection As a Hipster’, ‘Beautiful’ and ‘Dear Catastrophe Waitress’, and on the evening of the gig Alistair begged and borrowed twenty chairs and arranged them all in rows facing the bay window, with a little aisle down the middle.
Stuart invited two or three people. I didn’t invite anyone. And Alistair invited the rest of the audience, which probably amounted to about twenty-five people. When they started to arrive I began to get nervous about how things would go. They were a bewildering assortment of hard rock and S&M fans, for the most part, and when I looked at the programme Stuart had placed on each seat, like the hymn sheets laid out on the pews before a church service, I didn’t think this could go well. The front of the programme featured cartoons of hipsters drawn by Stuart, and inside there was a list of the songs we would play, along with a description of each one, and a manifesto explaining what we were about. I didn’t think it had much in common with what these people were about.
We’d set up in the bay window, and gradually the audience took their seats. It was like looking out at a private memorial service for a heavy-metal god, mostly a blur of black leather and hair. And then Stuart asked everyone to stop talking, which took them a bit by surprise, and after a quick tune-up we started to play our delicate songs, about schoolkids and disenchanted ponies. I thought they might just get us killed. There was a scene in The A-Team during the Eighties, where Boy George and Culture Club had to perform ‘Karma Chameleon’ for a barroom full of rednecks. Their chances of making it through the song and getting out of the bar alive didn’t look good at the outset, but as George sang, the crowd suddenly started to get into it. They had a change of heart, and George emerged a hero from the terrifying ordeal.
That didn’t quite happen to Lisa Helps the Blind in Alistair’s living room. None of the hairy rockers began to cry, overcome by the repressed feelings they’d been head-banging away for too long. No one threw off their leathers and began to dance like a flower person. But, on the plus side, nobody pulled a knife, and everyone listened politely to what we were doing. It was a curious sight to witness. Stuart stared straight ahead during the songs, fixing his gaze on the wall at the back of the room. Alistair did his little dance, and halfway through the shirt came off. But the most impressive thing about it all was that Stuart stood and played his songs without making any compromises, or making any allowances for the obvious differences between the audience’s tastes and what we were doing. It was the beginning of an education for me. I was aware that if I’d found myself playing my own songs in front of that audience, in that setting, I wouldn’t even have expected them to listen, much less take anything from it. I would certainly have been self-deprecating between songs, making it clear that I knew they didn’t like what I was doing. But Stuart didn’t do any of that. He just remained himself, allowing the audience and band to exist in stark contrast to each other. He presented his vision to them undiluted, and it didn’t seem to matter to him whether they liked it or not. And I was slightly amazed to find you could get away with that.
Afterwards, Alistair introduced me to the guy I’d replaced as bass player in the country band. He was simply called ‘The Animal’. He said that Lisa Helps the Blind wasn’t his type of thing, but that we’d sounded quite good anyway. And we had. We’d played as well as we did in rehearsal, and for the first time in our short history, everyone had been able to hear us. It felt like the beginning of something, but as it turned out, it was actually the end. Soon afterwards, I was sitting in a café near Beatbox with Alistair, and he told me that things had come to a head for him. He said he was going to give Stuart an ultimatum. Either Stuart agreed to do things at the pace Alistair thought we should be doing them, and make a proper drive for success, or else Alistair would leave.
‘Stuart’s songs make me feel the way songs made me feel when I was sixteen,’ he said. ‘I’ve been listening to pop music for so long I always know where a song’s going to go. But Stuart’s songs always go somewhere different.’
He looked off out the window, then shook his head.
‘It’s crunch time,’ he said.
I didn’t think his ultimatum was a good idea. Stuart still wasn’t well enough to do any more than we were doing. But Alistair was adamant.
‘I have to make it soon or not at all,’ he said. ‘I don’t have the time to wait around.’
So he made his stand.
I wasn’t there when he talked to Stuart, but I heard from both of them individually that Alistair wouldn’t be working with Lisa Helps the Blind any more. It all seemed quite amicable, but now it was suddenly just me and Stuart. With the money I’d saved up from playing bass with the country band, and the extra £10 a week I was getting for attending Beatbox, I realised I could probably afford to move to Glasgow now, if I could qualify for Housing Benefit to pay the rent. It seemed like the ideal time to do it because Diane, the guitarist in Raglin Street Rattle, worked for one of the biggest landlords in Glasgow, doing viewings for flats all over the city. So one afternoon I got her to drive me round to look at some vacant rooms. There were two places I liked, both on the same street as the Art School. One of them was an attic room, a bit like I had at home but bigger, and you could stand up straight in most of it. I sat in there with Diane at the end of the day and tried to decide.
‘It’s between this one and the one down the street,’ I told her. ‘Maybe I should see the other one again.’
But she couldn’t find the keys for the other one. She’d lost them somewhere.
‘I’ll take this one, then,’ I told her. ‘This’ll do.’
And I signed some papers.
There were eight bedrooms in the flat, four upstairs and four downstairs, plus a large kitchen and two bathrooms. At the moment, there were only two people living there: Rhonda, who was a town planner, and Michael, who had the biggest room in the flat but who never came out of it. All the other rooms were ready and waiting to be taken by students when the universities opened again. I moved my meagre belongings up a few days later and settled in. It was only a ten-minute walk to Beatbox, rather than the hour on the train I’d been travelling every day, and all at once I was living in one of Glasgow’s blond sandstone tenements, where I’d always wanted to be. It was only after Alistair left Lisa Helps the Blind that I started getting to know Stuart properly, and we became friends. When I moved into my new place, Stuart was living in a flat on Sauchiehall Street, the street parallel to my own. And we went round to each other’s places to play our new songs, discovering what we had in common.
In a letter to Karn, I wrote:
‘I think you would like Stuart. He’s kind of like us. He’s always talking about Kerplunk, and Aqua Boy, and Parma Violet-type sweets, and Catcher in the Rye. And he sings songs like The Pastels and all that. And he looks like that too. So he would probably be your friend. If you knew him.’
But it was the things we didn’t like that made us realise we should keep working together. Neither of us liked most of the things that seemed to be obligatory if you were in a band. We didn’t like blues music or drugs, neither of us drank very much or smoked, and we were both anti-machismo. We were just making music because we loved songs – not to get rich or to get out of our heads. We’d both grown up listening to music on the same tinny Dansette record players without much bass and with plenty of crackle, and we thought that’s how music should sound. We’d grown up listening to different records on those machines, and we’d come up with different solutions and visions for how to go about things in opposition to the accepted way, but we were both doing things for similar reasons, from a similar point of view.
There was one marked difference between us though. Most of the people I knew at that point who wrote songs or were in bands were fully focused on finding a record deal, myself included. That was considered to be the ultimate validation that what you were doing was worthwhile. But for Stuart, all that mattered was finding a group of people who believed in his songs enough to want to be in his band. He wanted his own band more than anything else in the world.
One of his favourite groups at that time was Tindersticks, and he often spoke of how lucky Stuart Staples (the singer and songwriter) was to have all those people wanting to play on his songs. The number seemed to matter. Having a big band like that, of the right-minded people, who were desperate to play your songs, seemed to be the only approval Stuart was interested in.
For years, he’d been putting posters up in music shops and cafés, looking for potential band mates. Sometimes his posters were cryptic, sometimes just a list of bands he liked. I don’t think he’d ever had any replies – he had a clear idea of the people he’d like to find, but so far no one had come forward. Finding those people, though, had become his constant aim. It was a concept I hadn’t really come across before. Most people around Glasgow threw their bands together with whoever was closest to hand, and there were already quite a few people at Beatbox who were willing to be in Stuart’s band. But he had an ideal vision in mind and he didn’t want to compromise it.
Stuart’s songwriting became insanely prolific around this time too. He was often writing three new songs a day, and an unreasonable percentage of them were good songs. He said that the songs often started out as jokes, and then developed into something real. That seemed to perplex him, even made him sad. But he continued to think up the jokes, and the jokes continued to turn into songs and sometimes he was writing them too fast for me to learn before he’d discarded them again. I’d go to watch him doing a solo acoustic spot at The Halt Bar, or supporting other songwriters, and he’d do songs I’d never heard before and would never hear again. There was one called ‘Adidas’, which was simply a list of all the things Adidas had been claimed to be an acronym for when we were at school; another about jazz boys and jazz girls which made me stop in wonder. Many more. But most of them were never finished.
‘I think the secret to finishing a song,’ he said to me one evening, ‘is knowing what the song’s about before you start.’
That seemed to be a revelation for him, and his songs really started to take shape after that. He got a batch together that he decided he would record in the Beatbox studio if his day ever came around. We did some rehearsals with David Campbell on drums, to knock them into shape, and we waited. Raglin Street Rattle was waiting to get in there too. So were a lot of other people, but the sessions for the band in the posters on the Beatbox wall continued to take precedence. One afternoon, standing outside the metal door at Beatbox, underneath the flyover that led up into the business park, Stuart asked me if I’d be the bass player in his band, if he could ever get one together. I said I’d help him put his band together, help him to get it going, but that I had my own band and my own thing to be doing.
‘I’d really like you to be in my band,’ he said.
‘I’ll help you put it together,’ I repeated.
And so it seemed that we’d come to a mixed-up agreement.
Stuart David now creates music alongside Karn David as Looper. They recently released a new album Offgrid:Offline and a 5 CD box set collating tracks from their entire catalogue.
The following is an excerpt from the January/February 2015 issue of the Believer. Read the full piece on Believermag.com
A BIOGRAPHY OF JIMI HENDRIX’S ELECTRIC LADY STUDIOS, ITS OWNERSHIP, AND OTHER BLACK MEMORIES
DISCUSSED: A Man of Zero Sentimentality, The Preservation of Psychedelic Sensibilities, Technical Questions for Les Paul, A Common Language, Keith Richards’s Desire for Privacy, Sold Souls, Employees for Hire, The Star-Spangled Banner, A Good Old Boy, Marlboro Reds, Something Ethereal
When I was nineteen or so, Richard Nichols, a man who was more of a father to me than my own father was, invited me to Electric Lady Studios in New York to watch Amiri Baraka record one of his new poems. Richard, who managed the Roots until his death, last July, was a jazz savant, and during his college years was a poetry student of both Amiri Baraka and Sonia Sanchez. Like Richard had in his youth, I had cultivated an interest in all things poetic, black, and avant-garde. So when he called and said that Baraka had agreed to record a poem for the Roots’ album, and that he had already reserved and paid for my Amtrak ticket to New York City, I packed my backpack and headed to the station.
I had been Richard’s “intern” for only a few months, but my internship was a strange one. In the morning I answered the office phone and in the afternoon Richard taught me about old music he loved: Rufus Harley, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Jimi Hendrix. They were the blueprints, the models to study. Over the years, Richard had developed a quiet philosophy of freedom and self-determination and, with very little money, had somehow mentored and raised an informal village of rappers, singers, and musicians: Jill Scott, Erykah Badu, Mos Def and Talib Kweli, Santigold and Bilal. I wasn’t a musician but I came to Richard a confused kid—a black kid who felt very black but wasn’t particularly interested in the kind of blackness that the local radio stations seemed to be shilling—with no idea of what I wanted to do next. Richard, a man of zero sentimentality, rescued me by allowing me to learn about black music and culture as living histories rather than parts of a storied past. From him I knew that Electric Lady Studios was seemingly the only place in a constantly evolving city and an increasingly digitized recording industry that still somehow preserved the psychedelic sensibilities of its first owner, Hendrix, the god himself.
Jimi Hendrix had initially wanted to turn the two cavernous bottom floors of 52 West Eighth Street into a club, like it had been when he first visited the space. For almost forty years it had been the Village Barn, a novelty western-themed bar, and then, for a brief time in 1968, a nightclub called the Generation Club (you can watch videos of Hendrix sitting on the side of the stage there while Janis Joplin sings). It was Eddie Kramer, Hendrix’s mix engineer, who suggested he found a studio—a place where Hendrix could have some financial and artistic autonomy—rather than a club, which Kramer insisted was a waste of money. Despite being the highest paid musician in the world, by the time Hendrix played Woodstock, in 1969, he was swamped with money problems. He was always the sort of performer who preferred to push boundaries and do the unexpected, and he was spending well into the six figures to record. He complained that crowds wanted to hear only his hits, so the studio was to be a place where Hendrix could have some freedom—something that despite his outwardly freewheeling look, riotous onstage antics, and easy come, easy go attitude, he had very little of. As Les Paul, the guitarist and inventor, recalled in the New York Times, “Musicians know that I’m a night person, so when someone’s got a technical question—how do you hold the guitar pick for this, how do you finger that chord?—they call. Back when Jimi Hendrix opened Electric Lady Studios, he was on the phone all the time; we talked about how to mike a guitar amplifier and where he should place the mike in the studio.”
Hendrix recorded only a handful of songs at Electric Lady before his death, in 1970, including several that appeared on his posthumous album, The Cry of Love, but the list of albums produced at the studio is legend: Stevie Wonder recordedTalking Book there, Led Zeppelin mixed some of Houses of the Holy there, David Bowie did Young Americans, and Patti Smith decided early on that Horses could be made nowhere else.
Tucked into the whirl of Greenwich Village, Electric Lady could have become a priceless real-estate curio. Instead it has continued to be a place where great American music is born. Unlike many historical sites in Manhattan, Electric Lady Studios has a strict but logical door policy: no tours, no strangers. For the most part, the only people admitted are those who have come to make music—the artists and their retinues.
Maybe that’s why it’s difficult not to feel sentimental, blessed even, when one gets a chance to go inside. There is something about Electric Lady that feels sacrosanct. From the moment the discreet, glass-paned door buzzes and lets you through, disbelief sets in and does not fade as you walk down the bordello-red staircase. These are the steps where a very shy Jimi Hendrix, only weeks away from his death, told a very young Patti Smith his never-to-be realized plans for a universal love orchestra, an orchestra where, as Smith wrote in her memoir, “musicians from all over the world in Woodstock… would sit in a field in a circle and play and play. It didn’t matter what key or tempo or what melody, they would keep on playing through their discordance until they found a common language. Eventually they would record this abstract universal language of music in his studio.”
West of Philadelphia and surrounded by rural towns, Lincoln University, the prestigious black college founded by the Quakers in 1854, was engulfed in the tumult of the 1960s. Because it was halfway between New York and Washington, DC, Lincoln attracted many prominent stars of the era. Muhammad Ali, a legend among college students for his refusal to go to Vietnam, was escorted around campus. The leaders of Deacons for Defense and Justice, a black self-defense group started in Alabama, and black arts leaders such as Amiri Baraka visited and talked to students.
The creative ferment at Lincoln, and the young black students from around the country attracted to that energy, were responsible for the Gil Scott-Heron who moved millions with the messages in his music and helped influence generations of musicians. Most of Gil’s early band members, including collaborator and cowriter Brian Jackson, attended Lincoln, where they found each other, formed groups, and made music. Lincoln was somewhat insulated from the anger and rage exploding on urban campuses, allowing students to absorb the changes convulsing the country without being overwhelmed by them and to respond to it in their own ways.
In September 1969, the school was on the verge of revolt. As a rural school, too far away from urban unrest, Lincoln didn’t experience the explosive rage blowing up on other black campuses such as Howard University or Morgan State. But there was plenty of anger directed at the conservative school administration, which looked down on political demonstrations and some of the free-form creativity taking place on campus. The school had started admitting female students only the year before, and some of the older students and faculty were still resentful at the changes taking place on campus. But Gil and his friends kept pushing for even more change.
Among them was Carl Cornwell, a student who occasionally jammed with the Black and Blues and who had his own band, a jazz quintet that played a lot of contemporary music by Herbie Hancock and McCoy Tyner. Called the Harrison Cornwell Limited after Cornwell and trumpeter Joe Harrison, the group had originally included Brian Jackson, until Gil snatched him away to play with the Black and Blues. Cornwell, whose father taught at Lincoln, grew up in town and was imbued with the school’s pride and heri- tage. But once he became a student, he saw firsthand that the college was lacking essential services and wasn’t responsive enough to the needs of students.
At midnight one Friday in November 1969, at the end of a rehearsal, Cornwell’s group was packing up their instruments when drummer Ron Colbert started having an asthma attack and his inhaler wasn’t helping him catch a breath. The group walked to the school infirmary but it was closed. So they took Ron back to his room. By the time the ambulance arrived, it was too late. “He died in my arms,” remembers Cornwell. “I’ll never forget it.” The tragedy could have been avoided if the infirmary had been staffed and open around the clock. Colbert’s death brought to a head some issues that had been simmering for years: Gil’s neighbor in his freshman dorm had died of an aneurism that had gone untreated after being detected, and several students had had their medical problems misdiagnosed by the cam- pus doctor. When Gil returned on Sunday night from a weekend in New York City, he quickly found out about Ron’s death and decided to take ac- tion, demanding adequate medical facilities. The student body united around the demands, especially after the administration started to claim that Colbert may have been getting high, though there was no evidence that the young man used drugs.
Gil made up a list of seven demands, including a 24/7 infirmary, the purchase of a fully equipped ambulance, and the firing of the on-campus physician, Dr. Davies. The next morning, the student body boycotted classes, and hundreds of them met in the school chapel, where Gil spoke, explain- ing the need for the changes. The protest grew angry, culminating with some students hanging the doctor in effigy from a tree in his front yard and setting it on fire. The doctor came out of his house and swore that he wasn’t responsible for the deaths. As he proclaimed his innocence, he had tears in his eyes. When Gil arrived at the protest, he stood between the students and the doctor, looking at the doctor’s children staring out the window in fear. “A cold flash scampered across the back of my neck,” wrote Gil later to de- scribe his sudden fear that events could spiral out of control into violence, a fear which was allayed only when the students went back to their dorms. The realization that radical action sometimes leads to unintended conse- quences and violent overreactions haunted Gil, and that image of a dis- traught Dr. Davis lingered in his mind for months to come. The experience reinforced Gil’s instinct to avoid violence and militant action in the struggle for social change.
Though the school agreed to most of the demands, fully stocking the infirmary and buying a brand-new ambulance, the students continued their boycott into a seventh day. At one point, Gil claimed that a young administrator at the school threatened to kick him out if he didn’t stop the boycott. Gil was sitting in the basement of the student union, trying to take it all in, when he was informed that a young doctor who had applied for the job opening would take the position only with Gil’s approval. He liked her, she took the job, and Gil decided to end the boycott.
Not that things calmed down on campus. The next battle involved student demands for a black president to replace Dr. Marvin Wachman, the longtime white president of the school. “He wasn’t the right color and he wasn’t doing the right things for Lincoln,” said Cornwell. “There was a real emphasis on black power, and the student body really wanted a black man running the school.” Students marched and circulated petitions to pressure the trustees to find a new president. They did get their black president: Herman Branson, the scion of a prominent black family in Philadelphia, came in as president in 1970, but the conservative-minded Branson didn’t approve of the school’s rampant activism.
At the turn of the decade, two tragic national events took place that served to define the 1960s. During a peace rally on May 4, 1970, at Kent State University in Ohio, the National Guard shot and killed four students. The moment was captured forever in a photograph of a student crying for help over a dead student’s body. And on May 15, 1970, two black students at Jackson State University were shot and killed by members of the Mississippi State Highway Patrol, who fired through the students’ dormitory windows. Outraged at the muted reaction by U.S. attorney general John Mitchell, Gil wanted to shut down all campus activities to protest the shooting. He saw how the violence at Jackson State impacted him and his friends at Lincoln—if it had happened there, it could happen on their campus. And if they didn’t protest the killings, their silence would only embolden reactionary forces that sought to quell student unrest by any means necessary.
The whole campus was riled up that day, and some students shouted, “Let’s march on Oxford!” That was the sleepy town just down the highway, where blacks had recently been refused accommodation at a hotel. Gil was outraged about the killings, but he feared that a march on Oxford could provoke a violent reaction and considered calling up officials in Oxford to reassure them that the approaching marchers were peaceful and were “not a realization of the fear that many of them had always held in their most secret places, like a town with a penitentiary on its outskirts.” He never made the call, but he was worried about the potential for violence.
“Hundreds of students were all lined up, ready to march down Route One,” remembers David Barnes. “We were getting ready to march into Oxford, an all-white town, which was really dumb. Somehow word spread, and we saw trucks drive by with shotguns and rifles in the back. We had no weapons for the revolution. And some of us wised up. Cooler heads pre- vailed. Gil told everyone to calm down. We weren’t ready for that type of revolution.” Rather, students headed back to their rooms and later held a vigil in the chapel.
Not that the calm would last. In some of the rural towns surrounding Lincoln, there were small units of the Ku Klux Klan. Just a few years ear- lier, the Klan burned a thirty-foot cross one night near the college campus. Concern grew that the local Klan might take revenge on students for the riots in Philadelphia. So, Gil and some buddies decided to form an impromptu defense squad and went “out prowling in the fields with rifles,” remembers Cornwell. At one point, Gil sat with a rifle and a bandolier about 100 yards from the spot of cross burnings in 1962 and 1966, determined to confront Klansmen if they attempted it again. When it started to rain, he linked up with Brian and two fellow students, stashed a few rifles in the trunk of the Rambler and headed out on the highway, one of them clutch- ing a machete. They were headed to a gas station to get some coal oil to make Molotov cocktails. Just four miles north of campus, going sixty miles an hour, one of the tires blew out and the convertible screeched across the four lanes, smashed through a chain-link fence, and hit the corner wall of an insurance company office.
Gil flew out of the car and hit the pavement, leaving a gash on the side of his head, but he was conscious—“the driver’s side door handle was still in his outstretched left hand, though the car was now some twenty feet away”—and the other three also survived the accident. They quickly grabbed the rifles and shells out of the trunk and hid them across the highway. When a state trooper stopped to help them, he didn’t suspect anything and gave them a ride back to campus. Battered and bruised, Gil and his friends recovered from their injuries, drank a few beers, and plotted their next move.
Later that year, campus unrest boiled over and students took over the administration building to demand a variety of changes, everything from overhauling the curriculum to male students who wanted the right to stay in women’s dorms overnight with their girlfriends. Some administrators were alarmed by the intensity of activism on campus and cooperated with law enforcement agencies, who were investigating radical students at colleges around the country. And Lincoln was rocked by scandal the next year, when it was reported that a Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI had broken into the FBI’s offices in a nearby town and found records indicating that Lincoln’s vice president for student affairs was an informer for the Bureau. It was not surprising that the Bureau had targeted Lincoln, which was a hotbed of student activism and was home to political refugees from around the world, including South Africa and Zimbabwe. Most of them were older, and some had been involved in revolutionary activities in their homelands—one student even had pictures of himself posing with Mao Zedong and Che Guevara.
The Bureau, which kept tabs on student activists and militant organi- zations through the controversial COINTELPRO program, targeted some members of the Black and Blues. When Ade returned to his home in the Bronx to recuperate from an illness, his mother was called by the FBI. The Bureau informed her that Ade’s name was on a list of surveillance targets. As far as his friends knew, Gil was not targeted and never mentioned being targeted by the Bureau. After his death, the FBI claimed that it did not have a file on him in its records.
Gil later wrote a poem that captured his rage over his college’s role in helping the FBI conduct surveillance on its own students:
But something else was happening and students weren’t supposed
to know.
Lincoln’s state relationship included COIN-TEL-PRO.
As now that you’ve got background and a certain point of view, I’m awarding you a scholarship to go with me to Lincoln U.
The anger and resentment Gil felt about Lincoln and the tumult reverberating on other campuses inspired his second novel, The Nigger Factory. The provocative title refers to colleges that take young black men and turn them into obedient members of a bourgeois society. Though some of his fellow students and friends at Lincoln became characters in the novel, most of the action was based on the student unrest at Columbia University, Kent State, and his mother’s alma mater, Lane College in Jackson, Tennessee. By visiting campuses and meeting students through exchange programs, Gil was well informed of the demonstrations and protests that were exploding on campuses across the country. “Where students were trying to find themselves in one direction were getting pulled in another by folks who can’t remember being young,” Gil told the Denver Westword.
Gil did marathon writing sessions, staying up for days, taking a break every once in a while to play cards in the student union. Again, he would stop by his friend Ade’s room for late-night sessions to talk about the book. He spent a few weeks questioning Ade about one of his characters: “He’s a student leader. What would he say?” Ade gave him answers and realized only later, after reading new chapters, that the character was based on him. “Gil was a great listener, he had a good ear, and that was obvious in the way he wrote things. He could capture the way things sounded; that was true with his poetry and the songs he wrote.”
By the summer of 1970, Gil’s circle of friends and collaborators at Lincoln was going through some changes. David Barnes and Victor Brown had graduated and headed off in different directions, which basically disbanded the Black and Blues. That left Gil and Brian, with some help from Knowles, to write music just for themselves. As would be the pattern for a decade to come, Gil focused on the lyrics and some simple melodic riffs, and Brian composed most of the music. But Gil was distracted that summer by the long-awaited publication of The Vulture.
When it was released on June 25, 1970, the novel attracted some notice for its raw street-smart vibe, though it was never destined to dominate the bestseller lists. Some critics described The Vulture as a cross between the work of reformed pimp Iceberg Slim and crime writer Donald Goines for its tough ghetto slang and pulp fiction style. The review in the publishing trade magazine Kirkus praised Gil for using flashbacks to ratchet up the tension, with scenes of distraught parents at a kitchen table, though it wasn’t impressed by his character development. Still, the reviewer wrote that “the patois rings true, giving a movement and strength the characterizations lack, existing as they do for just that time, place and action.”
Almost as satisfying as the critical approval was the monetary reward. Gil used the five-thousand-dollar advance to pay his tuition, buy textbooks, and treat himself to a car: a used white 1965 Nash Rambler convertible with a hundred thousand miles on it. Back at school, he drove the band to gigs in it and took road trips to explore the rest of the country beyond New York and Pennsylvania.
Publication of The Vulture validated Gil’s focus on writing, but he still enjoyed performing and playing music. By the start of the decade, he realized that he could have the best of both worlds without compromising his ideals. Poetry fit into the African American tradition of the spoken word, and many of his poems became lyrics for songs that he composed with Brian. “A lot of times, people can say in poems things they can’t say to you personally, but they need to get that information across,” he told James Maycock. “I don’t think poetry will ever lose its place in the community. I think it’s more important than ever.” He realized that writing poetry and song lyrics was its own challenge, compared to the breadth of long-form prose or novels. “To do 8 lines and tell a story, it puts you to work.”
Gil’s experience in Jackson and the blues he heard coming out of local clubs and on the radio shaped his writing style: the pathos and gut-wrenching emotional honesty of the blues. And the rhythm of the blues shaped the way he wrote poems—“lotta hittin’ on the one down there,” he said, meaning that he would emphasize certain words on certain beats, anticipating by a decade the revolution of hip-hop, with its emphasis on rhythmic speech over music. Gil also borrowed some of the styles used by Langston Hughes and other poets of the Harlem Renaissance to get the intended effect in his poems and lyrics, which was to convey his own observations to the man on the street, who wasn’t necessarily equipped with a master’s degree in English literature. He was heavily influenced by the way Langston Hughes used humor and wordplay to highlight contradictions such as the reality of life in America versus the way people thought things were. Some of Gil’s compo- sitions also seemed to borrow some of Hughes’s style, adopting a preacherly cadence to mock old elitist traditions. In “Comment #1”—“And the new word to have is revolution / People don’t even want to hear the preacher spill or spiel / Because God’s whole card has been thoroughly piqued / And America is now blood and tears instead of milk and honey”—Gil takes aim at the black church, echoing Hughes’s attack on academia in “Letters to the Academy,” in which Hughes challenged “all you gentlemen with beards” to “come forward and speak upon / The subject of the revolution.”
By 1970, Gil had written a few dozen poems that worked as song lyrics, most of them political and social commentary such as “Brother,” “Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?” and one song that will define him for- ever. That spring, he and Brian and some friends were sitting around watching TV one night in one of the dorms when a news report came on about a demonstration. The newscasters started talking about how many people were taking part. “We said, ‘People ought to get out there and do something; the revolution won’t be televised,” Gil later recounted. “A cat said, ‘You ought to write that down.’ ” Over the next few weeks, Gil started writing down lyrics in his notebook, and he and Brian started paying more attention to what was actually being shown on television. They noticed the commercials, and the friends commented to each other on the insidiously persuasive power of ads for everything from toilet cleaner to breakfast cereal. The contrast between the commercials and the demonstrations in the streets could not have been more glaring: one was on TV, and the other was live. When he was finished writing, he titled the poem “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.”
The following is an excerpt from S.D. Chrostowska’s novel, Permission, which was recently published by Dalkey Archive.
Composing a work boils down to creating favorable and even extreme conditions for the emergence of an idea and the precipitation of that idea. Real physical and physiological conditions for tapping into one’s inspiration or, indeed, the lack thereof. All day yesterday I carried in my head the intention to write, but could not find the right conditions for it. I could not even tell if I was under the influence of inspiration. Fed up, around four o’clock, I made my way to the Centre for the History of the Book, where for the next few hours I waited and then listened to a public talk by a world-famous scholar professing to break the pattern of euphoria and depression about the future of the book. He promised to make a “sober,” “philosophical” intervention into this “bipolar prophesying” prevalent in academic circles, but achieved little more than an inventory of existing ideas—without pushing the question of the future of the book far enough to really “make a difference.” In his closing statement, he paraphrased Wilhelm von Humboldt—the university is the only institutional place where the different tonalities of the different enthusiasms of different generations can inspire each other—which later sent me in search of Humboldt’s memorandum of 1810. The lecture ended, a poor man’s reception commenced in a darkling room, whose only appointment, besides a table and rows of empty shelving, was a maquette of the building we stood in (appendaged to the main library), and within a quarter of an hour the last of the lecture’s attendees had dispersed. I, too, promptly left the place, which with each passing minute became physically more oppressive, as I imagined the scale model containing this same room with another miniature of itself, and so on into infinity. I headed over to the book stacks to escape this boxed-in feeling, which bodes poorly for inspiration, to browse through some of the titles mentioned during the lecture. Strange, I reflected on the tram ride back, how much I worked to get inside the university, putatively erected in the Romantic vein—upon freedom and isolation—and where the entire world unrolled itself like a map, as it must to birds in flight. Now—after years of opening doors and closing them quietly behind me—I am left with the abstract sensation of standing inside one of those Chinese boxes, which as you know contain only smaller and smaller versions of themselves. On getting home, I dipped into Humboldt’s writings and found it inspiring fare.
There is a fuller and more immediate effectiveness of a great spirit than that possible through his works. These show only a part of his being. The entirety flows pure and wholly through his living personal self…. Written works—literatures—then take it mummified, as it were, over those gaps which the living effectiveness can no longer leap…. However great certain thoughts and works might be, it is hard to bear when the human being seems to disappear in them, when the truth of feeling is sacrificed to the artistic product, when the person yields himself completely to his work with an egotism that can’t be gainsaid.
I woke up the next morning just as the Good Friday pageant began drawing small knots of people outside my house. Year in year out, I have been the involuntary spectator of this fervent re-enactment of the passion, crucifixion and entombment of Christ, which glides just past my window and is entirely framed by it like a moving picture. I always soak up the drama in spite of myself and, exactly like last year, stood inside looking out and hearing the frills of fanfare, the plaintive song of old women clad in raven-black, the intermittent barking of Roman soldiers as they flogged the Son of God down this narrow street. As the parade wound its way around the bend, I caught the last glimpse of a life-size effigy of the Messiah lying in state on a catafalque, which inexplicably was my cue to resume this note.
I have kept up this work despite many difficulties, and it is not my only work (one has many irons in the fire). But neither is it of a piece with the others. When I feel the urge to write it, I follow through with the urge. Even though I type my way across white pages using my hands, my advance resembles tramping through new snow like a pioneer. There is normally no time for backtracking or idleness in this legwork, and my only stops are rest-stops, when I look back on that stretch of work with gratification. Whenever I think of footsteps and footprints in relation to writing, I am spirited away to the blank landscape described with a few deft strokes of the pen at the start of Kolyma Tales. A handful of prisoners tread shoulder-to-shoulder through deep snow in the wake of the “narrow, wavering track of the first man.” To rest, he lies down on the snow and lights a hand-rolled cigarette. “[T]he tobacco smoke hangs suspended above the white, gleaming snow like a blue cloud. The man moves on, but the cloud remains hovering above the spot where he rested,” like a thought or afterthought—“for the air is motionless” on days chosen for beating down roads, where “tractors and horses driven by readers, instead of authors and poets,” will soon be passing. Shalamov’s opening parable does not elicit pity for those who perished in the enormous penal colony of Kolyma. One feels this is not its intention. Instead, the story touches the quiddity of writing, which its author, a gulag survivor, chose to allegorize with rare circumspection as the prisoners’ routine toil.
If one has leisure to write, one may be tempted to defer the pleasure of setting to work, or one may actually set to work without delay. Anyone who has tried it knows that the first is perilous for serious undertakings. Not to be confused with procrastination, it means accomplishing those mundane tasks that have already been delayed before and are less urgent. Small pleasures can now be had from them—they give a foretaste of the greater pleasure just set aside. In reality, one buries the opportunity to make the most of one’s inspiration by following a mere distraction, which is always part of a diversionary chain: one diversion leading to the next. (Eventually one’s pace slackens, inspiration goes out the window, and nothing remarkable gets done.) But the second scenario—rolling up one’s sleeves and staring forthwith—is also not without its perils, and can, in certain persons, invite unmerited pretension. One shuts oneself off from external influences that (again, in certain persons) help offset the almost monomaniacal tendency to pursue one’s work at the expense of everything else. There is, I nearly forgot, a third way, the most suicidal. It is the urge to close in on one’s inspiration, to get to the meat of one’s inspiration in an unnatural way, through a mental shortcut rather than through the process of writing as such. Instead of letting the inspiration carry you on its wings, you stick a pin through it as though it were dead.
When one is inspired and working away, one hardly ever stops. I work best under conditions of moderate freedom and isolation. Nighttime lucubrations, which keep one indoors and sever them from the rest of humanity, are not for me. When all is quiet and dark, I stare at a wall because of its brightness, because with my eyes on this wall my head can clear, if only for a moment. But before it has a chance to clear, an ant appears on the wall. A black carpenter ant, you notice, is making its way up the wall. You remember that everything beneath your feet is rotting, possibly the entire structure of this house is haven to an orgy of ants, excavating their galleries below the threshold of audibility. They have been here before you arrived on the scene, and have begun emerging out of the woodwork just to show you they are the primary tenants. Or I play a piece of music, because the relative silence opens up the channels for the omnipresent buzz of electricity, raising more mental confusion than the whir of an engine, and I place my hopes in this piece of music to pick up or prolong my inspiration—but the music only proves an interference, yet another, often a major one, and one knows better not to play anything. Anything but. Better deaf for the work’s sake than in thrall to “inspirational” music like sonata no. 32 op. 111. The only exception to this rule, the only piece that neither interferes nor is interfered with but complements contrapuntally my thinking and my writing, must be “Sleep Walk.” If the phonographic needle followed the grooves of my brain, my skull would resonate with the slides and swells of this melody. I have played “Sleep Walk” with undue frequency, played it like no other melody, and still have not overplayed it. The purity of the steel guitar has been lost through magnetic deterioration, but something else has been gained in the process: a fundamental attunement between this musical composition and my thoughts, which ensures that I’ll never outgrow it. I play “Sleep Walk”—by far the best tune on the 1959 American charts and one of the most unwhistleable tunes of all time—until I can no longer listen to anything; but when I feel ready for music again, when I find myself craving music, it is “Sleep Walk” that I crave; “The Red Pony” also comes to mind, but I don’t put it on. It won’t do without tuning, and even then it goes only tolerably well. You might judge based on this that I am musically impoverished. It would be truer to say that I am a musical abstinent—and have become one on account of my work.
The idea of writing to you was conceived shortly after my encounter with you and your work. Having seen your work and heard your thoughts about it, having seen you bring into correspondence the obscurity of language and the clarity of things, I felt a surge of inspiration. On the one hand, to rethink the work I do, to turn my work outwards, to radically alter the quite predictable fate of my work, and, on the other, to forge a “direct connection” with you through my work, through the habitude of work. While you sat conversing with the person closest to me, my closest friend for a long time, I stood aside to lay down the cornerstone for this book; without actually thinking of writing a book, I stood by conceiving of both the connection and the work that would become this book. I did not join the two of you because I subconsciously understood the necessity of keeping my distance from you, of relinquishing contact with you in that fortuitous and ordinary way to have reason to move towards you in this radical and extraordinary way. Without any connection to you to speak of—only a barely established connection to your work—I was already distancing myself from you in preparation for approaching you. I held myself back from speaking an unpremeditated word to you as a pretext for writing a whole host of well-thought-out words later on. I say “I held myself back” because a part of me did not seek distance and was drawn to the certain ordinary proximity with you; but my other, stronger part would be satisfied only with uncertain, extra-ordinary proximity. I write “I” in reference to “myself” back then, but the person I was then is now a stranger to me. I cannot speak for that person who took steps away from you, despite being heir to their legacy of distance. Were I faced with you now, looking into me as you did then (which gives me the sneaking suspicion that you must have known what I would do before I myself knew it), I would not pass up another opportunity for ordinary proximity to you because of the extra-ordinary distance that has been developing between us ever since the start of our written connection.
The children of Silicon Valley tech workers—the preadolescent offspring of Apple engineers and Cisco consultants, restaurant cooks at Google and PR managers at tiny start-ups—sit dressed in dark jeans and freshly washed hoodies, describing the world as it will look and feel seventy or eighty years in the future. The questions that prompt these predictions come from behind the camera in the bemused, encouraging voice of the filmmaker Mike Mills. Mills asks the kids about their relationship to technology and how it will shape the world they’ll inherit: will there be more or fewer poor people in the future? Will people be smarter? How will nature change?
The children’s answers are charming—as any speculative conversation with a curated group of eight- to eleven-year-olds is bound to be—but as they raise questions about the environmental, economic, and social legacy of Silicon Valley’s comprehensive influence on their lives, their predictions take a darker turn. The film, A Mind Forever Voyaging Through Strange Seas of Thought Alone, was commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and appeared as part of a temporary installation Mills created in a vintage costume shop in Los Altos, California, where he also produced a broadsheet reprint of a 1976 issue of the Los Altos Town Crier combined with “official documentation of the formation of the Apple Computer Company.” That exhibition closed in March, but the film is now available to Believer readers through May 1, 2014 atbelievermag.com/mikemills
Mills, whose feature-film credits include Thumbsucker and the Oscar-winning Beginners, started his career making experimental documentary shorts like Deformer and Paperboys(about skateboarder and artist Ed Templeton and a group of Minnesota paperboys, respectively). As Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher, the SFMOMA project’s curator, points out, A Mind Forever Voyaging is a part of this lineage of portrait films, and like those two early shorts it offers “an empathetic view of suburban America” in its current iteration.
This conversation between Mills and Gideon Lewis-Kraus occurred during his recent visit to San Francisco for a screening of the film.
—The Editors
THE BELIEVER: What one immediately notices in the film is that this is a pretty ethnically diverse group, but it seems, given that one knows this is taking place in Los Altos, that they’re pretty socioeconomically homogenous. I counted just two working-class jobs among the parents, and I’m curious how you made those decisions about casting and what kind of group of kids you wanted to come up with.
MIKE MILLS: Our rule was that the parents had to work in Silicon Valley. And most of them lived around Los Altos, but there were a few from San Francisco or Oakland, but the parents worked in [Silicon Valley]. And the idea was to get the spectrum of laborers there. There were a few parents who worked in sales, but as day laborers they didn’t have full contracts. But it was really hard to get people who worked in janitorial services, or gardeners. We were actually lucky to get one kid whose dad was a cook at Google.
You talk to the human-resources element of those companies and they just do not want to connect you with that arm of their company. We tried to independently get hold of a gardening service, and they didn’t want to talk, either. There’s such secrecy around Silicon Valley, so they don’t like to talk about who they work for, and they certainly don’t want you to get in contact with their kids. And of course there’s a natural aversion to a stranger calling who wants to talk to your children. [Laughter]
The following is an excerpt from from this month’s film issue. The full piece is available to read on Believermag.com
Over his sixteen-year career, Mike White has written seven films, all of them bittersweet, black comedies about characters who fail horribly in their attempts at self-improvement. These include The Good Girl, Orange County, Chuck and Buck, andSchool of Rock. White has also directed one film (Year of the Dog), and has acted in the majority of his own films, usually volunteering to play the most hapless, unappealing characters, the kind of role well suited to his pallor and discomfiting grin. After some early writing for Dawson’s Creek and Freaks and Geeks, White eventually found a place on television with the new-age corporate dramedy Enlightened, which he created and wrote in 2012. Though it lasted for only two seasons on HBO, the show enjoyed critical praise for its writing and for Laura Dern’s anxiety-driven performance. I visited White at his home in Santa Monica. He had recently returned from a well-deserved Hawaiian vacation.
—Toph Eggers
THE BELIEVER: I’m curious about how you end up acting in so many of the films you write.
MIKE WHITE: I don’t come at it as an actor who is writing his way into his movies. I’m really coming as a writer who ended up acting in certain things—kind of like I backed into it a little bit. With Chuck and Buck, the director really wanted me to do it, and then, because I starred in that film, it kind of set a precedent. I actually think it’s helped me as a writer to have to act. It’s only when you actually start putting yourself out there that you appreciate the anxiety that comes with having to try to sell a line, or with trying to own a character.
BLVR: In Hollywood, even though the vast majority of both creators and critics lean pretty liberal politically, they still get queasy about any story heavily featuring left-wing politics or social issues. And yet in both Enlightened and Year of the Dog, you managed to make some interesting points about social issues (animal cruelty, corporate greed, mental health) without coming across as preachy.
MW: It’s hard to say. I think that those movies, those shows, have still been criticized for [preachiness] in some sense. LikeYear of the Dog—when we got our first round of reviews, in New York and LA, the critics seemed very positive about the movie. But as you got deeper into the middle of the country, suddenly there was a lot more hostility. So I do get criticism. But at the same time, Enlightened was an example of trying to see something from many perspectives. And while I guess my affinity is with Amy [the main character], I see the arrogant side of her, too, and the narcissism that comes with that I see in myself. So it’s about trying to be as honest about the character as possible, while at the same time wanting the audience to take her seriously. But I think the problem with Enlightened was that if I had made Amy a little bit more of a hero, then maybe it would’ve gotten a bigger audience, but I also think that would’ve undercut what I was trying to do.
BLVR: Is being heroic boring?
MW: It’s not boring. It’s more like I want to write something that feels true. I don’t always get along even with the people I love in my life. I’m happy with a characterization I’ve written when I’ve revealed someone with as many of their good sides and bad sides, and I’ve tried to be sympathetic to them, and honest. No one is purely heroic.
The following is an excerpt from Lili Anolik’s essay, Post-Empire Strikes Back, from this month’s film issue. The full piece is available to read on Believermag.com
BRET EASTON ELLIS AND LINDSAY LOHAN MAKE A FEATURE FILM IN WHICH THE FEATURE FILM IS BESIDE THE POINT
DISCUSSED: Sodomania, A Bug’s Life, A Fictional Work of Fiction, Super-Subtle Intertextuality, Twitter, Picking Fights with Dead Guys, Fifty Shades of Grey, Movies Made by Committee, Ellisian Perversion, The Unsung Swordsman of the Year, Listless Southern California Girls, Striking a Pose and Holding It So the Terror Doesn’t Show, Batwing Lashes
I.
I thought I had The Canyons’ number.
Last winter I picked up Lunar Park, Bret Easton Ellis’s faux-memoir-slash-Stephen-King-gorefest-rip-off-slash-surprisingly-moving-story about fathers and sons. In it, the central character, Bret Easton Ellis, writer of Less Than Zero and American Psycho, is working on a new book called Teenage Pussy, which will, he promises, contain “endless episodes of girls storming out of rooms in high-rise condos and the transcripts of cell phone conversations fraught with tension and camera crews following the main characters around as well as six or seven overdoses… There would be thousands of cosmopolitans ordered and characters camcording each other having anal sex and real-life porn stars making guest appearances. It [would] makeSodomania look like A Bug’s Life.” At the end of this description two words were flashing in my brain: oh and wow. I headed on over to Amazon, all set to place a rush order. Teenage Pussy, though, wasn’t available on that site or any other. Turned out it was a fictional work of fiction. Tough luck for me, I guess.
A few months later I came across a piece in the New York Timescalled “Here Is What Happens When You Cast Lindsay Lohan in Your Movie.” The article chronicled the troubled young actress sometimes keeping her shit together though mostly not while shooting what has been described variously as an “erotic thriller,” an “L.A. neo-noir,” a “psychosexual drama,” and “cinema for the post-theatrical age,” scripted by Bret Easton Ellis, directed by Paul Schrader, starring, in addition to Lohan, porn star James Deen, and financed in some crazy way I only vaguely understood but that seemed mainly to involve spit, string, and the popular funding-platform Kickstarter. As I raced through the story, my excitement mounting, I became convinced that this movie (The Canyons) was that book (Teenage Pussy).
Art wasn’t just about to imitate art. Art was about to cannibalize art, then wear art’s skin like a flashy new suit.
THE BELIEVER: We should probably talk about American Psycho. It’s heralded as this great cult film, but that’s not the experience you had at the time, is it?
MARY HARRON: Five years after the film came out, I was shooting an episode of Six Feet Under and Susie Bright was on the set and she said she’d just seen American Psycho, and she asked me why it hadn’t gotten more attention. That was five years after it came out. It gets so much attention now that I’m bored with it, but it was only after five years that it got all this attention. There were a lot of YouTube parodies and Christian Bale became famous, which also helped.
BLVR: Many people say it would have been a much different film had it been shot by a man. You linger on the female faces, when a male director might not have. Were you conscious of that?
MH: It was a very conscious decision to play it off the faces of the women. That’s why I cast Cara Seymour, who is a great stage actress who could carry those scenes. Those scenes come through her face; most of the film focuses on him, but the perspective in those murder scenes wasn’t through Patrick Bateman but the women. That was a conscious choice.
BLVR: Were you nervous making that film, because the book was so controversial when it came out? What did you think it would do to your career?
MH: Yes, you can’t take on something like that without being a bit nervous. I’d already been through something like that. One of the things that allowed me to do it was having done I Shot Andy Warhol. I asked Guinevere Turner to come on—she had done the first big, successful lesbian film, Go Fish—so we knew that no one could lecture us about feminism. That gave us a lot of strength. We didn’t have to apologize or add some bullshit moral lesson to it. We felt we could trust our instincts and do what we thought was interesting.
BLVR: So many movies are so hypersexualized that even if the protagonist is a woman, the film is made from the male gaze. How did people react to American Psycho?
MH: Half the audience loved it. Half hated it. That, to me, was a good reaction, and an appropriate one.
BLVR: A lot of people talk about how with directing so much of the magic lies with casting. Leonardo DiCaprio was supposed to play the role of Patrick Bateman, is that right?
MH: I had already cast Christian Bale to play the role, and I was standing in my kitchen in the East Village, and I got a phone call saying, “You should sit down. Leonardo DiCaprio wants to be in your movie, and we’re going to pay him twenty million dollars.” I told them that was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard. He’s not right for the role, and he has a fifteen-year-old-girl fan base. You can’t cast him coming off Titanic. I think he’s a great actor, but he wasn’t right for it; Patrick Bateman is a very specific character. Christian Bale had something, an authority and a darkness, whereas DiCaprio is more of a poetic actor. Some actors can draw from their own darkness. Both Bale and Lili Taylor have this fathomless place in them; when you look at them you can go far into them. They can both play very saintly and very bad. I mean, Christian Bale played Jesus in something. Christian is also a great comic actor and he brought that to the role. We had a very similar take on the character. I think, being partly British, he thought the role of Bateman was funny and approached it with humor. He loved the patheticness of the character, how embarrassing Bateman was. Trying to be cool and failing so badly.
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