Carpe Noctem Interviews, Vol 3

by Carnell, Thom

  What is your take on the "trendiness" of AIDS sympathy where you see actors displaying red ribbons at awards shows?

  My best friend, who unfortunately died just a half year ago, and I used to say that we really thought that anyone with a red ribbon should volunteer for an injection of HIV so that they could really, really wear it with a more cognitive sentiment. When I see that crap - like on awards shows, it just makes me fucking ill.

  You see people with this pasted on sympathy because it's the politically correct thing to do.

  Actually, I have Hepatitis C and am doing a lot of the homework many friends with HIV have to do. Many of the alternative therapies are similar, and many persons in both groups have quite a lot of experience with alpha interferon. I’m in line for a clinical trial using a stronger dose once a week. I got a lab tech to give me some of my blood for my refrigerator and I just laugh about it because I think, "Wow! The guys never wanted to give me my blood in the laboratories because they said, 'This blood is really lethal, toxic waste.'" But I think, "Well, God, if someone really wants to get to know my disease, here it is."

  It's funny, you'll see someone at an awards show, wearing a red ribbon, yet the body of this actor's work, (specifically Sylvester Stallone) is wholly homophobic.

  Exactly right. Or the music things... They've got this fucking red ribbon on and they give some corny-assed speech, some fucking thing they can do for five minutes and then go home and get blown by a bunch of showgirls. And then, their music, their “art,” never had anything to with the epidemic, except to, maybe, when they feel like they lost a lyric in a song, say "Faggot!" I can't deal with that shit because I think it's ludicrous. I mean, artists who do any kind of work that is serious - like the work of David Wojnarowicz, Thomas Avena, Jerome Caja, or Coil - dealing with the AIDS epidemic - have made an enormous investment of time getting to know their subject REAL well.

  Since a lot of your work deals with AIDS, I wonder generally what the Gay Community thinks of your work and specifically what those who suffer from AIDS think?

  A lot of people coming to my concerts come from that community. There is a lot of warmth. I don't know how to explain it, but these are the people, in general, I am surrounded by who have asked me to continue doing the work. Many AIDS groups/organizations are very supportive of my stuff. A lot of people are. But in answer to "Is the ‘Gay Community’ supportive of your work," I could never say that some furniture queen who is only listening to Sheena Easton would give a fuck about my work just because it deals with the epidemic. My homosexual audience is a bit more "radical," shall we say.

  With the intensity of your work and the adverse reactions of such people as the Catholic Church to it, do you ever have periods where you have doubts about the direction your work takes you?

  Never.

  Good for you!

  Contradiction: once, in 1990, I did.

  For a minute.

  For a few minutes after I got the protest in Italy. On one level I thought it was interesting, but on an emotional level, I found it very sad because Italy was one of the places where I most enjoyed singing. I'm performing there now, but there was a period where I couldn't go back there and I was unhappy about this because I felt that I was being cut off, in a sense, from my own people. I didn't like it. I was very unhappy about being castigated over a moral disagreement. And I've said before that I do not think many Italian women would have found Plague Mass morally disagreeable. I think it was a bunch of guys in the Christian Democrat Party who had nothing else to do. So, I did wonder then. And yes - now that you've asked me - there have been a couple times, when in performance, if someone was very sick and I was doing, let's say, "There Are No More Tickets To The Funeral" or a kind of work that was very aggressive, I would worry about that person's presence in the audience because I wished that my music were more therapeutic; but I recognize, as a composer, that is not really its primary function. It may function that way for some people, but it can't be its primary function, otherwise I should really spend time working as a therapist.

  That's got to be tough...

  It is tough because I saw a gentleman with his mother - and he looked so frail - and I was doing "How Shall Our Judgment be Declared Upon the Wicked" and I looked at him and I said, "Why am I doing this? How can I do this?" Then, in another moment, I understood it perfectly, because many times that very person would come up and say, "I'm so glad you performed, 'How Shall Our Judgment be Declared Upon the Wicked.'" Physical frailty is often accompanied by extreme violence of thought. And an answering voice of similar resonance can be most welcome, in the wake of Hallmark prosaicism.

  I've always thought that in the moments after one of your performances when people come up to you, there must be some really amazing dialogues.

  There are. There are some very beautiful ones. As you can imagine, there are some people that call from hospitals who are coming out for an evening to see the performance and then go back. You have to be equal to that. It takes a lot because their act is so very significant to both of us.

  Does the weight of that ever wear on you?

  Well, I want to be equal to the fact that they've come to see the performance and they've come backstage and, so, I don't think the word is "wearing," but I do think that it means that you want to be at your maximum concentration with each individual you're speaking to. I try to only speak to people I think that really want to speak on a serious level because, otherwise, time for serious people is wasted, and flippancy will make me want to slap the speaker. So, in a sense, it's more intense than maybe people coming backstage after a Barry Manilow concert. [laughs] Presumably.

  I know that the death of your brother had a profound influence not only on you and your work and it set a definite course. Now, I don't know what your feelings on the afterlife are, but if there is one, do you think he is there proud of you and what you've accomplished?

  Well, I wish I could feel that way. I unfortunately can't feel that way. Anytime I look at a picture of him, I feel an overwhelming sense of shame, of horror. I can only think about anger - about him being only angry and in my dreams of him - he is enraged. There's no peace at all. Sometimes I'll say about my friend Carl or about my brother, "Well, one day we'll see each other," but I recognize that that's the human wish, the human hope. I mean who can know; but I don't really think so.

  Another thing I learned about you is that you have a background in Neurochemistry and Hematology/Immunology.

  But I wouldn't say that it's of a Master's degree background, it's just from undergraduate school.

  How much of that background finds its way into your writing?

  I think a lot of it does, because of spending years studying psychology, neurochemistry - studying different ways of thinking about things, of understanding various paradigms allows you to think about the relationship of sound, ideas and the brain in a very different way than perhaps coming out of a music program. First of all, the kind of experiments I did improvising with my voice, taking lots of acid and just locking myself up and all of this, was really more or less opting to do research on myself instead of the rats - which I felt was less cowardly. [laughs] Ultimately I felt it would end up with me having a lot more information about substances and the Inside World. [laughs]. I can't do all the substances I'd like to these days with Hepatitis C. Too, too bad.

  I can imagine...

  I mean it on an experimental level, really, not so much in a hedonistic one. Now, I have to be really careful with what I do.

  Hepatitis was always such a big problem for us working in mortuaries. I entered college expecting for them to really be concerned with HIV, however what happened was that it wasn't an issue. The things to worry about were Hepatitis or Tuberculosis and that really surprised me. They were concerned with Hepatitis because of the contact with bodily fluids. According to sources, HIV wasn't a problem eighteen hours after death...

  But Hepatitis still is...

  Right, and Tuberculosis because it
creates a capsule that you can still contract it due to manipulating the body and thereby compressing the lungs.

  People don't know much about Hepatitis C at all. Now that they are finding out about it, it's pretty alarming to a lot of people. I may be taking a course of interferon for 12 months or more, which doesn't make me very happy, I can tell you that, but if it becomes necessary after years of working strictly with alternative therapies, then I shall have to do both. Build my immune house and kill the rats inside without burning down the walls.

  Since so much of your work is based in desperation and sadness, how do you process all of that and remain the delightful lady that you are?

  [laughs] Well, I'll tell you what. If I weren't able to put these emotional things out in that context, if I had to create a concept for them, I think I would not always be a very pleasant person. I think I would be too depressed to even talk about anything. I've done some stages like that when you can't even talk or pick up the phone. You can't do anything, can't create anything, and that state, which is so close to being a catatonic, is a completely worthless place to be. It's so painful it's something I try to avoid. I know the signs of it and I try to make sure that doesn't happen. Creating things gives me a feeling of something outside my life which is more important, which is what I can do. We do one record and then do this other project and then I have that to live for and it's an exorcism of precisely the things you're talking about. It's not a disconnection from my life.

  Do you believe that you will always create your art on the periphery or will you someday find something that resembles commercial acceptance?

  This is funny, because when I create, for me, it's always quite smack dab in the center of the world. [laughs] It's only later that I discover that it's considered marginal. We had a concert in London and there was maybe eighteen hundred people there, maybe two thousand, and practically all of the people who came there were from "the fringe," but from so many different fringes that you had all these fucking witches there, from all these fringes. And it was like, "Yes! This is nice. This is where it is with me. There's a whole bunch of people who know what I'm talking about and want to hear it." You may not be able to advertise to them in Rape Magazine, I mean, Spin Magazine, or in the most mainstream art magazine or in the mainstream anything ,but they may be reading your magazine. They may be reading magazines that are not mainstream things. Actually, a lot of people who read about me now, read about me on-line which is a far more democratic enterprise.

  For now...

  For now...Well, yes, exactly. For now.

  I recently saw a photo of you on the cover of Mondo 2000 #8 and, I have to tell you, I was totally floored by how beautiful you are.

  [laughs] I don't always look like that, let me tell you. It was a good day.

  I had seen some other photos of you in performance in the midst of doing your work.

  It's not very beautiful.

  Well, it is, in its own way, but your face was contorted and you were in the middle of doing what you do and I saw that photo and I thought, "My God..." Some of the photos in The Shit of God and also the press photo Mute is sending out...you're astounding.

  Oh, that's so kind of you.

  I'm just wondering if a lot of people react that same way? I mean, are they struck by the polarity of that?

  Probably. The thing is, I don't actually feel like those press photos most of the time. I mean, there are occasional moments, but I think I'm closer to those performance photos. [laughs] I always used to say, "You're trying to get a Brooke Shields photo out of me, but you're trying to make Shelley Winters look like Brooke Shields."

  Oh stop...

  I tell you, I have a very good sense of humor about this. I always refer to her as "she." All of the photos are "she." It's done in the most healthy sense, I think. Really. Because in order for her to have a career, I have to do all of the fucking work. [laughs]

  The Annie Leibowitz photo I thought was just brilliant.

  Oh, that's a beautiful photograph. She did a magnificent job with that.

  Ok...that's enough of me kissing your ass.

  [laughs] That's very funny.

  You have been quoted as saying that, "[Weak men] should be dragged out into the middle of the street, beaten, humiliated, degraded and sodomized by my friends and me for sport. I love seeing weak men cry."

  Oh, absolutely. Oh, god yes.

  What is it about these men that elicits such a hard core reaction from you?

  My experience with them, because I've always found that they are the meanest, most mean- spirited people in the world. Their weakness makes them incapable of human kindness and makes them stingy, mean-spirited little rodents who, certainly, have no other use than to be plundered for sport. I really have gotten into a lot of trouble by loudly discussing names and places in public places. I just don't have a very high tolerance for a lot of jumped-up Napoleonic urges in short pants.

  Tell me a little bit about you working as a prostitute. What lead you to that and do you feel you gained anything once you left?

  I was living with drag queens at the time and I learned a lot from them about what the position and the power of a woman is - and I'd never thought of it before. I never even used the word. I thought of the word as a sort of sacrilege. I still have an odd feeling about using the word "woman." It seems so personal somehow. It annoyed me, but they perceived things in a very different way and they said, "You don't actually understand your position in society" and I'd listen to them and it was very, very interesting. So, my behavior, in that sense, was much more predatory than anything, working with them. Do you know San Pablo Avenue in Oakland? That's where it was. This was in the seventies. One of them said, "I'll bet you wouldn't go outside at six o'clock in the morning in the rain" and I said, "Oh yeah? You give me the right wig, and I'm on my way."

  Somehow I would never want to dare you to do anything.

  It's my own stupidity that won't allow me to turn down a dare. It's just ridiculously sick. It's one of those things I have to be accountable for, I suppose.

  Is it true that you are legally blind?

  Yeah, well, I have 20/2000 vision so that's considered quite legally blind, but I do wear very thick glasses. Usually they're dark because I have a light sensitivity also, so they look like Mr. Ray Charles’ glasses, but they're definitely a very heavy prescription.

  Does that have a profound impact on your work? Was it one of the reasons Shrei X was performed in the darkness?

  I don't know. I think that Shrei X really was done in the darkness simply because it gives me the kind of isolation that I want and need in order to do a piece that is so intimate, in a sense. Also because of the nature of the work in quadraphonic space and it being a work about sensory deprivation, that makes me want to deny the audience any visual escape from the sound. I want them to have to deal with the sound. That's why the man was angry in Prague because he was horrified that he had to sit there for thirty-five minutes and "Where was the entertainment and it was so dark and it's thirty-five minutes later and she's saying all of this shit and I have to sit here and I don't see anything. Oh shit!" So, that was a kind of research for me, that's what it really was about; but there may be some correlations there.

  I was reading a list of people who have asked to collaborate with you. Most were pretty predictable: Trent Reznor and David Harrington of the Kronos Quartet, however, the name Stephen Sondheim floored me.

  [laughs] Oh, where did you read that? Oh, I love that you know that. This is very refreshing for me, really. People come and say, "Well, we're doing this interview. Could you tell me about your music. I haven't heard it yet." That's very rare, but it's very demoralizing. [laughs]

  What can you tell me about the project he had in mind?

  Well, James LaPine's come to a few of my shows.

  Oh, great!

  I love his film work.

  I saw Sunday in the Park with George at the Golden Gate Theater in San Francisco. We cried for days aft
er seeing that. It's so funny to have always thought certain things to yourself about art and then to hear someone totally unrelated to you present the exact same thoughts on a stage.

  That's wonderful. I just saw a film of his and I thought it was wonderful. I heard that they wanted me to audition for something. It was a while ago and I couldn't because I was on the road. I was very surprised by it, because it's a tradition that I don't know anything about, really. I hear great things about these people.

  When he did Into the Woods, which is based on Grimm's Fairy Tales, it had this great sense about it. There are very dark moments to it, but also very funny.

  Well, I hope that, sometime, we are able to have tea and discuss a possible collaboration.

  I would kill to be a fly on the wall for that.

  Well, I think you should set the whole thing up. [laughs]

  I'll do that.