Carpe Noctem Interviews, Vol 3
Page 9
Yeah. It’s funny, a lot of people think that a lot of it was done in Photoshop, but none of it was done in Photoshop, whatsoever. It’s all hand done with just layers of lots of stuff that I’m putting on it. The photographs in it, at the last part of it, where there is an image of Kabuki like a mask with this helmet and there was a woman called Miss Fumiko from the First Zen Institute of New York who has sent me so much correspondence and many gifts and she actually included an antique samurai helmet in one of her gifts. I used that with a mask that someone named Brian Bendes made when I asked him to do a piece in the [Kabuki] Gallery and I put them together, put some nice lighting on it, and took lots of photos and also used some of the fabric Fumiko had sent me. I thought it worked out real cool with the helmet and I thought it would make perfect sense to paint right on them.
Do you do any computer manipulation in your work?
No, none whatsoever. I guess the only thing comparable to that is there are a couple of things in there where I mention that she has closed her eyes, but the scanners in her contact lenses see through it and there is a heat registration of the dragon image. I just did that on a color Xerox. There are a zillion effects you can do on a Xerox that people really don’t know about.
What would your feelings be toward a Kabuki film?
When I did the very first book, my publisher got contracts from Live, New Line, and Fox. They all wanted to make a film of it, but the contracts and the paper work that I saw weren’t that satisfactory to me. It was at a point when Hollywood was at its peak of strip-mining comics, The Crow had just hit and everyone wanted to buy up rights for everything. Basically the deal was that they would give me a certain amount of money no matter what, whether they made it or not and then, if they made it, I would get so much royalties, but their idea was that they would have it for a couple of years to decide what they wanted to do with it and basically they would have full control of it. I just wasn’t really interested in doing that at all. I completely had my own vision just doing it with the comic. I didn’t create it as a vehicle to make money or a vehicle to sell into other media applications or anything like that. So, until the right one came along, I wasn’t interested. However, not too long after that, some producers approached me who completely had the right idea and they made it very clear after many conversations that they knew exactly where I was going with it. They sent me a list of all the directors they had worked with and I did sign an option agreement with them. They’re the same people who produced The Doors with Oliver Stone. It was a really good deal. Basically, I write the whole screenplay to it, although they have the opportunity to call in re-writes, but I do the first draft of the screenplay, and I get to choose the director I want plus two or three runner-ups. They have a year to secure one of these people.
So, now that Kabuki is operating under a full head of steam, and the next story arc is happening, is that about it for the near future, or do you have other projects coming in the future?
I will easily be doing Kabuki for the next five years without a doubt. [The books are] about a person’s life so, of course they far outspan any of this "Bad Girl" conception about things. I will be making many changes in it: people die, things get different, they lose their fingers and other parts of their bodies, and life goes on, but everything is mapped out and I’ve got it all written, although many people have offered me a lot of different things, I’m not going to do anything to jeopardize what I’m doing with Kabuki right now. There is no limit to this person or what the books can be about to me.
Diamanda Galas
This is easily one of my favorite interviews. As a longtime fan of Diamanda, I was stoked to get a chance to talk with her. I was always of the opinion that she was someone who was quick-witted, whip-smart and completely uncompromising in both her music and her opinions. And I’ll admit it… as the day of the interview drew nearer and nearer, I found myself getting more and more nervous at the thought of talking to her. So, by the time we chatted, I’d pretty much psyched myself out and whipped myself into damn near a full-blown panic. I was fully prepared for her to say, “Who are you and why the hell am I talking to you?” within the first few moments of our conversation. Instead, I discovered Diamanda to be a gentle, kind, and engaging personality who was quick to laugh and had a wicked sense of humor. As the time went on, the mood of the talk became more playful and she started dropping real insight about herself and her art. After the interview was over, I would periodically get an email or a note from here (including one of the Carpe Noctem stickers stuck onto a stuffed bear which was sitting on her piano). This is a prime example of how preconceived notions can be wrong and how a perceptive interviewer can spot when those notions are wrong and be surprised.
"Oh Lord God of My Salvation, I Cry Day and Night Before Thee: Let My Prayer Come Before Thee: Incline Thine Ear Unto My Cry."
Her name has become synonymous with controversy. Her recordings challenge the listener to see beyond his/her limited perceptions of what music is capable. She is outspoken, dedicated and ferociously loyal to her cause. She is Diamanda Galas and she will grab your attention and, by sheer force of will, make you listen. From the initial strains of her Plague Mass through the exploration of AIDS dementia and clinical depression called Vena Cava and on to her latest release, the amazing Shrei X, she has forged a career of intelligence and raw emotion in the arena that is the music business. I must admit, I was more than a little wary of sitting down to talk with her. I had heard how she harbored no inclination to suffer fools and I feared a talk wherein I would feel the need to walk on eggshells. Much to my surprise, the woman I met was an absolute delight, fascinating and intelligent, witty and alarmingly beautiful. She is a living contradiction to the image the oftentimes myopic press has crafted for her. Diamanda Galas is, and will remain, a stunningly committed artist and one who truly is an original.
~*~
What were you like as a child?
Oh God, I'll tell you. Extremely introverted, which hasn't changed at all, really, not at all. Very, very introverted and very, I suppose you could say "bookish." I would sit at the piano and play for long, long hours, improvise and play Chopin and Beethoven and just not really talk to anyone for quite a long time. I was not a popular child. [laughs] I was a very unpopular child. Most of the interesting people I've met were unpopular as children... So, that's good. I think it must be. Clearly, I'm more extroverted than I was then, but that's only because, by the nature of this profession, you end up having to be a little bit more.
What do you consider a bigger influence on you and your work: your life at home with the family and siblings or your time after that on the streets and going to college?
I would say that life at home, really, because I spent so much time at home that everything afterwards became, to some degree, a reflection of it. So, even if the other things are a reaction against, it's still a mirror image of a certain kind of upbringing. In my case, it was a very, very sheltered, Greek Orthodox, "don't trust the Americans" type of upbringing. Yes, to reiterate, I would say that everything amounts, in a sense, to looking at the beginning as the primary image. I do not mean to cast a pejorative light on that upbringing, as it taught me how to be alone for long periods of time in complete concentration.
Out of curiosity...your parents... What do they think of your work?
My father very much likes the piano work. He loves the piano work... My mother likes the more operatic work. They are very happy that I am able to survive doing this. That's my father's primary concern, that I should be able to survive doing this work, and, clearly, I am able to, so that's fine by him.
While researching this interview, I learned that you once toured performing at mental institutions. I was immediately curious as to the patients' reactions to your art. Was it just the performance of songs or was it the type of art that you are doing now?
I would say that Shrei X is related to that early work. I was performing standing with my back to the audience, dressed in a long
black dress. It was 1975-76. I was just doing improvisational vocal things. I didn't really know what I was doing. I would stand for ten minutes silent and then make these sounds. The reaction to it was that most of the men were kind of flipped out about it, but the women were very interested. Some of the men were interested...The people who were interested wanted to do it, too, you know what I mean? They wanted to do it because clearly, it was an inappropriate activity to do this kind of thing and they were not in a position to do anything creative they could do on their own, except maybe basket weaving. You know when you go into a mental hospital, they give... They give you these little tasks. "Listen, we're going to make some clay jars."
"It's pot-holder day!" [laughs]
Well, there it is. I remember when I was in one of those places, they said, "Today, we are going to do finger-painting" and I said, "Look, you know what? I'm not doing this shit, man because I might start to get used to this and I don't want to get used to it." [laughs] I think they were kind of unhappy about that. As concerns the performances several years before, however, I did not think it would be responsible to undertake this as therapeutic work, since I had no training whatsoever in that area.
You’ve been called in the press "emotionally too strong for the wimp classical establishment." Do you feel that is an accurate assessment of your career?
Oh, yeah, I think so. I mean, one has always to look at individuals, though, in these kinds of assessments, because there are individuals in every group, classical or what is called avant garde, rock and roll, contemporary music, free jazz, whatever, who have iconoclastic visions and then there are people who don't and there are people who are very, very timid, I find, especially in what is considered alternative music. Some of those people who I would not expect to be so timid went to Vena Cava and they were truly shocked. They couldn't listen to that music. They could listen to the voice and piano music or the band stuff, but they could not listen to Vena Cava and they had all sorts of theoretical, aesthetic, or moralistic reasons to find it horrifying or distasteful.
I recently read an article about you by Joy Ray of some Los Angeles-based fish wrap and she referred to you as a "deranged diva" and described your voice as a cross "halfway between Ethel Merman and a tortured farm animal."
Oh! I read that! I loved that so much. It’s the Downtown News wasn’t it?
I think it is.
I laughed so fucking hard. I died laughing.
She later says of your performance, "It made one wish that some kind of grandmother would nag, 'You have such a lovely voice, Diamanda, why do you shriek like that?'"
[laughs] Adorable!
On the other hand, I wonder if that kind of blatant stupidity ever infuriates you?
I think it's because I've heard it for so long that either something is written in such a way that it just makes me completely laugh, or it's written in a very banal way and then it just bores me. Very few times are you going to find people who are going to "get it," you know? In the mean time, I hope they can, at least, be entertaining, and someone saying a "cross between Ethel Merman and a tortured farm animal," makes me laugh. I mean, years ago when I heard that stuff, when I heard "operatic-voodoo, zombie music” and all that shit and "play it only when the neighbors annoy..." that was Downbeat Magazine, who should, theoretically, know better, and that was 1978. Curiously enough, Downbeat Magazine, which is a jazz magazine, who will extol my ass when I'm dead, still does not understand where I have taken the voice; they just think I’m a pervert. This, in my estimation, is totally mad. And, I don't care, because it's not like they sell lots of records for anyone... Still, it's a very strange thing. So, then I figure of this broad, I don't know who she is, she writes something like that, I get a “kick out of it” - ha ha! I have to make sure that, in this business, I look at things and I'm able to get an entertainment level out of them, because there are so many ignorant things written. It's just endless.
Some of the other articles I read about you strove to denigrate you and match your intensity when they clearly didn't have the balls to do so. They would go on in this purplish prose describing you and your performance and trying to illicit an emotional response in the reader. I just thought that was so hypocritical.
They were doing it to denigrate me?
Yeah, it was like "She was up there shrieking and carrying on..." It was definitely designed to conjure specific emotions in the reader.
Obviously it did. You know, I have to tell you, I had to do a reading recently - which is not my sort of thing. I've never done anything like that, but they asked me at The New School to read from The Shit of God and so what I decided the most important thing would be to do, for my own entertainment and for theirs, was to read a bunch of things that I had found on-line - different descriptions of my work from people who disliked it intensely. It was so much fun, the shit that they wrote. One guy actually liked it but he was so funny because he was talking about a SWAT team coming - why he can't listen to the music because of the fucking police and a SWAT team would come into his house - and then what would happen to him...? The shit was so funny that everyone was screaming with laughter and I said, "Look, when you go and do this kind of music, you have to able to read this shit and laugh because if you can't, you may not want to do it very long." Because you're constantly going to be getting this shit and not in a polite way, like in a magazine. I mean during the show. In Prague, we had this performance of Shrei X where this guy kept standing up during the quiet bits and saying, "You fucking bitch. You fucking shut up. You fucking shut up. You fucking shut up," in what his language was. We had it on tape because we had taped the performance and so, I thought, "God, how beautiful if we keep it on the tape of the live performance." It ended up that we had a better take of that section of the piece somewhere else - which was really unfortunate. All I can do is look at that in a scientific way and say, "That's his response." There's nothing I can do to change it and it's not my responsibility really because I'm not playing Vegas.
That would be good...
Well, I think so, too.
I'd love to see that.
I would love to do Vegas, but I would only consider it if I were doing the most, most experimental work I do. There would be no point otherwise, really. [laughs]
How hard on your voice are the number of shows you do on a tour?
They're not hard on my voice. Things that are harder on my voice are actually talking. The hardest thing on the voice is talking on the phone. When I speak on the phone, I speak, unfortunately, very aggressively and I speak very loudly because I think of the phone as a microphone or something, but then, at the same time, I'm trying to make an intimate sound so that I'm not yelling at you. So, I end up fucking myself because I'm not actually projecting the voice in the way that you’re supposed to for singing or for speaking. Every singer, including Luciano Pavarotti, will tell you that the phone is the most dangerous thing for a singer. If I don't do more than just four shows a week, I'm all right.
You are quoted as saying, "I've never been interested in willful provocateurism." However, some would say that your work is exactly that. How do you answer those people?
They may be right. There may be some things that are willfully provocative. But I suspect those things are more a response to things that are meant to insult me. In that sense, I've learned to lose that energy by the way I answer something that's far off in left field - by deflecting the energy. So, I don't know. I really can't know about that. The one thing I do know is that on a musical level unless I heard something I wouldn't be able to do it. Not by doing some kind of advanced audience survey and writing something I thought was calculated to shock them. I just wouldn't be able to work that way. It would be dull...and not my ace in the hole, in any case; it would be like playing the stock market or something.
How do you answer those who say that your voice is an "acquired taste"?
[laughs] I would have to agree with that. I can't understand why I shouldn't agree with that.
I should have known. Anyone who would interview me would have a fucking degree in Mortuary Science.
I fully agree with your sentiments regarding the alienation of those afflicted with HIV. Do you think that we, as a society, will ever have a rational outlook when it comes to death and dying and the plight of the afflicted?
I don't know because it seems to be so insidious. You can see someone who says all of the right shit and is even out there demonstrating or signing bills or giving money to the right organizations and blah blah blah, but then, in this person’s one-to-one, private life - in terms, for example, of how they deal with people who are sick, he or she is just completely out of the picture and won't see people in hospitals - won’t be around sick people. They want to disconnect because they think of these people as already dead. I've seen so many contradictions in behavior that I am almost of the belief that, unless a person experiences a thing like this first hand, it may be impossible for that person to have even an approach pattern to understanding the pain of another individual. I hate saying that because I didn't think it before, but cynical observation triumphed.