So you feel a fantastic motivation, and it’s not commercial, even though you may have taken the thing on for commercial reasons. Because finally there’s this moment when all these people are just waiting.
INTERVIEWER: So the pressure is good for you?
SOUTHERN: Yes, assuming that it’s a good situation, where you dig the people and have some kind of a rapport.
INTERVIEWER: When you write a movie, do you write with particular actors in mind, and does that help or hinder you?
SOUTHERN: That helps a great deal. You’re given Marlon Brando, and you can already think of him saying a certain line. In a book you have to create the character. Sometimes a character is more inflexible than an actor, because an actor has a range. You can imagine Marlon Brando saying almost anything. Whereas if you create a character, there he is, and you think of him in a certain way—there are things he cannot say, things he might say, things he’ll probably say—it’s different.
INTERVIEWER: Your really serious writing—in the sense that it’s noncomic—is in your short stories. Is that by design?
SOUTHERN: That’s just the way it’s worked out. I have a lot of longer noncomic things, too. I have this novel called The Hipsters, of which I’ve written about three hundred pages, which is a full-on Jean-Christophe. The idea was to take the development of a man—I mean, beginning in childhood. It’s introspective, in a completely different tone. Very conventional, very simple. I don’t know whether I’ll get back to that. It doesn’t really interest me much any more.
INTERVIEWER: You used to be identified with the Village hipster scene. How do you feel about that now? Are you still attached to it?
SOUTHERN: No. Those scenes change—like in Paris, the way it kept switching, from St. Germain to Montmartre to Montparnasse. As soon as they’re invaded by tourists, the prices go up, it’s impossible to get cheap places to live, and the people who know what’s happening all move out. Then what you have left is a kind of deliberate bohemianism. It seems to me that’s happened in the Village. You’ve got to have cheap rents, places that are completely undeveloped, like lofts, before a real scene can emerge. Artists have to have a place to live, cheaply. Now it’s the Lower East Side.
INTERVIEWER: What’s your favorite piece of work that you’ve ever done?
SOUTHERN: I’ve never thought of it like that. I love to reread stuff, and occasionally I read something and think, My God, did I write that? Some of my favorites appeared in The Realist. Then there’s some stuff in Candy that I like. Or maybe letters, some letters, never published, and unpublishable, I suppose.
INTERVIEWER: Why do you sometimes sign your letters with girls’ names?
SOUTHERN: Because the letters are chatty. And obscene. Signing “Cynthia” or “Paula” after a lot of obscenity makes a curious juxtaposition. Letter writing is the best writing of all, because it’s the purest. It’s like writing to yourself, but you’ve got an excuse to do it because this other person will dig it. And you can transmit information in a strange way, you can sort of mix things up, so they wonder, Well, is this true? You say something outlandish, and then you throw in, “John and Mary just ran away to Hawaii,” and they think ha-ha-ha, but in fact it’s true.
I don’t know why, but I always feel a kind of necessity to write things that are beyond acceptance, that are too offensive or something. For people to read them and say, Ha-ha-ha, very funny. No, we can’t print that. I mean, even The Realist has turned down stuff of mine. I’ve got a piece there now that they turned down a couple years ago. It’s about Frank O’Hara, and it’s very weird—not obscene, but it violates a lot of taboos. That’s the whole history of writing, really, trying to emancipate images and language. It’s not just a question of four-letter words—you can get away with that—but of attitude. Great writers like Céline and Henry Miller, they affect attitudes, weird attitudes. Like Miller, dancing with a girl, and moving her up against a doorknob. He isn’t really like that, of course. I mean he doesn’t do that—he simply felt compelled to have a first-person narrator who could say, Yeah, got that doorknob up her cunt, because you couldn’t print it, and he felt you’ve got to be able to print it, even though it’s disgusting.
He’s really quite finicky. He’s no Greg Corso.
INTERVIEWER: Maybe he was thirty years ago.
SOUTHERN: I don’t think so. The beauty of it is, he created a first-person narrator and made it very believable. What J. D. Salinger did, taking a thirteen-year-old, pre-sex kid and making him believable as a first-person narrator is relatively easy. But when you’ve got a Lucky Jim–age person, or Henry Miller, then it begins to get dicey, because you’ve got this sexual thing to deal with. The whole trick is frankness, candor, directness—and when grown men start being candid and frank and direct about sex, how far are you going to take it? Well, Miller tried to take it as far as he could. But this wasn’t self-expression—he had an obsessive interest in the development of literature, in the idea of being able to go farther than D. H. Lawrence.
In Candy, I wanted to do something that hadn’t been done, to go a little farther, but on a different level—to make it funny rather than disgusting. It’s like a painter looking at a canvas, and he sees there’s something missing in a certain area, and so he tries to put it in. No one’s ever written a novel about the relationship between a girl and her father, for example. I mean, from the girl’s point of view. Someone like Susan Sontag should devote herself to that.
INTERVIEWER: What about pornography on the screen, which is in one way the theme of your novel, Blue Movie? Would that be a next step?
SOUTHERN: Of the things that thrive unjustifiably, very salient among them are the clandestine—things that are taboo thrive, almost by definition. These dirty movies are so bad, and so expensive, because they’re taboo. If you allowed them to be played freely, it would be much easier to make better ones than exist now, because the bad ones simply couldn’t survive. And then, when they got better, they wouldn’t be called pornographic—they’d just either be good or bad. And then you might say, Well, this is stimulating, or, This is erotic, but there’s no law against eroticism. It’s stock-in-trade for all filmmakers.
INTERVIEWER: If filmmakers had that freedom, do you think a movie would have to include eroticism to be considered good?
SOUTHERN: I’ve never seen a good erotic movie, so I really don’t know. That’s the exploration of Blue Movie. The idea is to find out at what point the erotic would become too much, aesthetically—in the view of the creator, not in the view of the audience.
For instance, in Les Amants, the Louis Malle film, there’s that scene where the lovers are in bed—what we call a “tight two-shot”—nude, from the waist up. He’s on top of her, and his head goes down, between her breasts, and horizontally out of the frame. It’s supposed to be very erotic, but I just felt a kind of mischievousness on the part of the director. On the other hand, I was wondering what would happen if, instead of letting his head go out of the frame, the camera followed his head. How far would that go before it was, I don’t know, embarrassing?
There may be something so personal or intimate about lovemaking that it’s impossible to do that successfully. In a novel you can leave just enough to the mind’s eye that the reader will construct a very personal image. In a movie, I don’t know. If you do it merely “suggestively,” it’s a cop-out.
INTERVIEWER: How do you feel about the sudden popularity of black humor as a genre, something you were doing a long time ago?
SOUTHERN: It’s a sign of the times, isn’t it? Old values are crumbling.
INTERVIEWER: How does it feel, after years of being a so-called underground figure, to have “made it?” Are you afraid at all that money and fame will change your outlook? In other words, will success spoil Terry Southern?
SOUTHERN: Any feelings of success I may have experienced came much earlier—in the form of whatever readership I have had in The Realist, in certain literary magazines, and among friends whose reactions I v
alued. These few readers, and not the general public, are what give meaning to a work. In fact, it is almost axiomatic—the wider the acceptance of a work, the weaker its quality is bound to be.
As for my outlook, I would certainly welcome a change there, because it is basically one of discomfort. I’m afraid, however, that God would have to show his hand, in some way more dramatic than fame and fortune, before that could happen.
INTERVIEWER: But now you are selling a lot of books, Life magazine writes about you …
SOUTHERN: The important thing is to keep in touch with the youth of whatever culture you’re in. When you lose them, you can forget it. When they’re no longer surprised or astonished or engaged by what you say, the ball game is over. If they find it repulsive, or outlandish and disgusting, that’s all right, or if they love it, that’s all right, but if they just shrug it off, it’s time to retire. Or rather, you can still write for a living if you want to, but it’s suicidal if you have any relationship to the work other than that.
INTERVIEWER: People seem to like the idea of putting you down, now that you’ve “made it.” It probably happens to everybody, but you hear them say, Terry Southern, isn’t he a junkie? or, Isn’t he a faggot? or a God knows what, but I wonder if it’s …
SOUTHERN: If it’s true? A junkie fag! A spade junkie commie fag!
New York writers are very suspicious of people who spend any time in Los Angeles. Most of them don’t get invited, and they’re sort of hurt and confused by it.
INTERVIEWER: Do you find it more difficult to attack now? If, after all, attacking comes from feeling angry?
SOUTHERN: I’m not interested in attacking, I’m interested in astonishing. Lenny Bruce was one of the great astonishers, and he was a very gentle, mild person. He didn’t lead any protest marches or anything—what was funny to him was the irony of the smugness and so on, and he deflated it, because it’s funny to see it deflated. Of course he was very conscious of injustices and absurdities, like any sensitive person, and that came out as an attack, but it wasn’t his motivation.
It’s different in Europe, where there is, or used to be, a very definite notion of class conflict. You can set about illustrating a theme in a more conscious way. Sartre writes that way. He’ll pick out a subject, like religious hypocrisy, and he’ll write a play to flesh it out. I think Mailer writes like that. I have never approached writing that way.
Say I were to witness a scene, some sort of fracas between a headwaiter and a Negro. There would be something grotesque, something ironic about it, and the engaging thing in writing about it would be the grotesqueness, the irony. It wouldn’t be because I thought, This is a terrible social injustice that should be dramatized and brought to the attention of the public.
INTERVIEWER: What movie would you make if you could make any movie?
SOUTHERN: Naked Lunch and A Clockwork Orange.
INTERVIEWER: What about underground movies, do you think they’re doing something good? If you had the opportunity, would you make them?
SOUTHERN: There are any number of things that are inherently cinematic and dramatic and that haven’t yet been fully realized or exploited. Rather than go to the underground, or the so-called expanded cinema, I think these things can be done under existing conditions. It’s no good if the audience just thinks, Oh yeah, this is very curious, very interesting. I’d be more inclined to work under the prevailing mechanics of moviemaking, using other people’s money.
INTERVIEWER: You talk about exploring and experimenting under prevailing conditions. If the studios are in control, will they let that happen?
SOUTHERN: They’re relenting all the time, because they’re losing ground. Television is the thing, you see—its existence puts movies in a position of having to do something different. In five years television screens will be half the size of a movie screen, they’ll occupy a whole wall. And people will just sit there. They’re not going to leave the house except to see something groovy, something that they can’t see at home.
The great future, not for creative writers, but for professional writers, is in television, because pay television is going to come in, and that will take the place of the art movies that exist now, and ordinary television will take the place of what now exists in movies. In twenty years, the movies that compete with TV and pay TV will have to be pretty far out. Otherwise people will simply hang with the tube.
INTERVIEWER: If you weren’t a writer and could choose any job, profession, or career, what would you do and why?
SOUTHERN: If I were not a writer I would prefer being a psychiatrist-gynecologist. I’m not sure this exists—like eye, ear, nose, and throat specialist—but I personally think it is a winning combo and would like to give it a whirl.
INTERVIEWER: If you were given enough money so that you didn’t have to work or make any commitments and could do whatever you wanted, where would you live and what would you do?
SOUTHERN: First I would engage a huge but clever and snakelike “Blowing Machine,” and I would have it loaded with one ton of dog hair each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. It would be brought up East Seventy-second Street to the very end, where it would poise itself outside George Plimpton’s house like a great dragon. Then, exactly when Katherine the Char had finished one room, the powerful, darting snout of the machine would rise up to the third floor windows and send a terrific blast of dog hair into the room—a quarter ton per room. I would observe her reaction—I have friends opposite—with a spyglass, room by room. The entire place would be foot-deep in dog hair, most of which however has not yet settled and has the effect of an Arctic blizzard. Then I would drop in—casually, not really noticing her hysteria, or that anything at all was wrong, just sort of complaining in a vague way, occasionally brushing at my sleeve, et cetera, speaking with a kind of weary petulance: “Really, Katherine, I do think you might be more … uh, well, I mean to say …” voice trailing away, attention caught by something else, a picture on the wall: “I say, that is an amusing print—is it new?” fixing her with a deeply searching look, so there could be no doubt at all as to my interest in the print. If this didn’t snap her mind I would give her several hundred thousand dollars—all in pennies. “Mr. Plimpton asked me to give you this, Katherine—each coin represents the dark seed of his desire for you.”
Wired
FINALIST—FEATURE WRITING INCORPORATING PROFILE WRITING
If Kim Dotcom hadn’t invented himself, it would have taken somebody like Terry Southern to do it for him. Charles Graeber went to New Zealand to meet the six-foot-seven, 350-pound Dotcom in his Dotcom Mansion soon after he was arrested by Kiwi authorities. The result was, in the words of its editors, “a fast-paced crime story, an adventure yarn, a legal thriller, and a tearful portrait of a troubled child prodigy who becomes an international robber baron.” Plus, there’s the Filipino ex-model wife, the three-year-old son, and a posse straight out of The Big Bang Theory (or The Hangover, take your pick). In any case, the National Magazine Award judges were impressed, describing this as a “masterly, sometimes hilarious profile that brings its larger-than-the-web subject brilliantly to life.”
Charles Graeber
Mega
Ten Days Inside the Mansion—and the Mind—of Kim Dotcom, the Most Wanted Man on the Internet
Please Choose One of the Following Statements:
• A. Kim Dotcom is not a pirate. He’s a hero. The savior of my online liberties. A visionary digital entrepreneur. His company Megaupload was a legitimate data-storage business used by hundreds of millions of individuals and by employees of NASA, U.S. Central Command, even the FBI. The raid on his New Zealand home was excessive and illegal—shock-and-awe bullshit. Hollywood is terrified by the digital future, and an innocent paid the price. Kim is a martyr. But Kim will triumph.
You’d like him, he’s cool.
• B. Kim Dotcom is a pirate. A megalomaniacal gangsta clown. An opportunistic and calculating career criminal. His Megaupload enterprise willfully made hundreds of mi
llions of dollars off stolen movies, songs, videogames, books, and software. And, oh yeah, he couldn’t be more obnoxious about it.
He wanted Wired to write a nice story about him, so he manipulated its writer by providing exclusive access, and even a few tears, in hopes of a puff piece. But Kim is a criminal. He knows he’s a criminal. Like any pirate, the only freedoms he really cares about are the ones he can exploit to make himself rich. The rest is all PR.
If you think he’s cool, you don’t know him.
• C. Kim Dotcom is rich enough to work however and wherever he wants. And what he wants is to work from bed.
His bed of choice is a remarkable piece of custom Swedish craftsmanship made by a company called Hästens. Each one takes some 160 hours to produce and is signed by a master bed maker who lays out the most perfect matrix of horsehair, cotton, flax, and wool. Price after custom framing: $103,000. Kim has three such beds in his New Zealand mansion, one of which faces a series of monitors and hard drives and piles of wires and is flanked on either side by lamps that look like, and may well be, chromed AK-47s. This is Kim’s “work bed” and serves as his office. It was here that he returned in the early morning of January 20, 2012, after a long night spent on his music album, one of his many side projects.
Kim had spent the previous seven hours down the road at Roundhead Studios, laying down beats with songwriter Mario “Tex” James and Black Eyed Peas producer Printz Board in a studio owned by Crowded House frontman Neil Finn. They finished around four-thirty a.m., and Kim slid into the backseat of his Mercedes S-Class for the ride back to his mansion. Soon after leaving the parking lot, Kim noticed headlights behind them. He said to his driver, “I think we’re being followed.”
Best American Magazine Writing 2013 Page 36
