Perhaps the most singular feature about Tom Waits as an artist- the thing that makes him the anti-Picasso- is the way he has braided his creative life into his home life with such wit and grace. This whole idea runs contrary to our every stereotype about how geniuses need to work- about their explosive interpersonal relationships, about the lives (particularly the women’s lives) they must consume in order to feed their inspiration, about all the painful destruction they leave in the wake of invention. But this is not Tom Waits. A collaborator at heart, he has never had to make the difficult choice between creativity and procreativity. At the Waits house, it’s all thrown in there together- spilling out of the kitchen, which is also the office, which is also where the dog is disciplined, where the kids are raised, where the songs are written and where the coffee is poured for the wandering preachers. All of it somehow influences the rest.
— Elizabeth Gilbert’s Interview with Tom Waits, 2002
What Do Those Old Films Mean? was originally a six part series that aired on England’s Channel Four Television. The series was conceived by Noël Burch. It explores the early days of film in six different countries - Great Britain, the US, Denmark, France, the USSR and Germany from a historical, social, political and cinematic perspective.
Biography, interview, and texts for each Vol.
Drone Tones and Other Radiobodies
Gregory Gangemi: Can I just ask you to begin at the beginning, with your broad definition of radio art?
Gregory Whitehead: Well, for one thing, taking experimental audio and then passively broadcasting it does not qualify for me as radio art. Radio art has to be some kind of event or performance or presentation --- a “play” in the broadest sense -- that deals with the fundamental materials of radio, and the material of radio is not just amorphous sound. Radio is mostly a set of relationships, an intricate triangulation of listener, “player” and system. It’s also a huge corporate beast, and the awareness that you’re working within a highly capitalized network. Finally, there is the way in which radio is listened to, frequently in an extremely low-fi environment, with people listening on a car radio, or they’re in the kitchen and they’re cooking and they’re listening with only half an ear. To me, radio art comes to grips with all of that, it comes to grips with both the context of production is and the context of listening. That’s why when I write about radio art I try to stress the idea of relationships, not because I don’t love to play around with sound, but because cool sound is not enough.
gildadavidian:
Alec Soth interview on A COLLECTION OF: LINK
Hi my name is Alec Soth and I’m a great photographer and, as if that wasn’t enough, any portrait of me has to be a million times better than any portrait ever made cause I’m cool like that.
(via jeffmclane)
I fortunately had this great teacher Miles Davis that helped me to find my way. He never told us what to play, never. Five and a half years he’s never said: don’t play this. And if he said “play something”, it would always be wrong. Always. I remember Miles seeing this depressed look in my face, nothing was coming out, I was sort of constipated, he said “put a B flat in the bass”. I put a B flat in the bass and it was definitely wrong, but then I found something and that worked and I was delighted, and when I looked up he said: “you see?” I took me years to figure out: he deserves the credit, because he made me search for my own answer and it got me out of the depression. If I wanted to follow him, I had to follow myself and bring the answer from myself. That’s what a master teacher does.
— Interview with Herbie Hancock
(Source: londonjazz.blogspot.com)
The way you get people to testify against themselves is not to have police tactics and oppressive techniques. What you do is to build it in so people learn to distrust everything in themselves that has not been sanctioned, to reject what is most creative in themselves to begin with, so you don’t even need to stamp it out.
— Audre Lorde, in an interview with Adrienne Rich
One thing that always kept me going - and it’s not really courage or bravery, unless that’s what courage or bravery is made of - is a sense that there are so many ways in which I’m vulnerable and cannot help but be vulnerable, I’m not going to be more vulnerable by putting weapons of silence in my enemies’ hands.
— Audre Lorde, in an interview with Adrienne Rich
Excerpt from an Interview with Octavio Paz
PAZ: Yes, but there was also the political, or to be more precise, the moral aspect. My political and intellectual beliefs were kindled by the idea of fraternity. We all talked a lot about it. For instance, the novels of André Malraux, which we all read, depicted the search for fraternity through revolutionary action. My Spanish experience did not strengthen my political beliefs, but it did give an unexpected twist to my idea of fraternity. One day—Stephen Spender was with me and might remember this episode—we went to the front in Madrid, which was in the university city. It was a battlefield. Sometimes in the same building the Loyalists would only be separated from the Fascists by a single wall. We could hear the soldiers on the other side talking. It was a strange feeling: those people facing me—I couldn't see them but only hear their voices—were my enemies. But they had human voices, like my own. They were like me.
INTERVIEWER: Did this affect your ability to hate your enemy?
PAZ: Yes. I began to think that perhaps all this fighting was an absurdity, but of course I couldn't say that to anyone. They would have thought I was a traitor, which I wasn't. I understood then, or later, when I could think seriously about that disquieting experience, I understood that real fraternity implies that you must accept the fact that your enemy is also human. I don't mean that you must be a friend to your enemy. No, differences will subsist, but your enemy is also human, and the moment you understand that you can no longer accept violence. For me it was a terrible experience. It shattered many of my deepest convictions.
For what seems like forever, silence falls. I feel exhausted from the effort of trying to get him to want to talk to me and he is now doing back-to-back yawns. And then something funny happens; Brody - from nowhere - starts to talk. ‘Professionally, I guess I have fulfilled a lot of my dreams,’ he admits cautiously. ‘But ultimately I know that that isn’t what’s going to make me a happy human being. I’m not less passionate about my work, but I understand that there are different things which are equally important. My priorities need to change.’
(…)
Ironically, by the time his escorts come and rescue him, Brody is just warming up. He even cracks a joke at his own expense. ‘I don’t want to end up sitting alone in a room looking at an Oscar I don’t even have any more,’ he says, before laughing so explosively that it seems to surprise him even more than it does me.
But our time is up and, as we are led back to the lifts that will take Brody back up to Hollywoodland’s temporary press HQ - a cluster of rooms full of posters, rows of empty tea cups and people talking in whispers - he is very much back in movie-star mode, walking several paces ahead with his head bowed against recognition. As he gets to the lift, he turns to me to say goodbye. He shakes my hand warmly, smiles even, but the real person that - just for a moment - glimmered behind those watery green eyes has gone again.
(Source: Guardian)
