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A streamlined production “3D Studio MAX R2” Produced by Kinetix Directed by PROFESSIONAL ANIMATORS AND TECHNICAL DIRECTORS

A DIVISION OF AUTODESK, INC.

3D elements created in 3D Studio MAX by Mondo Media, www.mondomed.com

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Thi estos nee with the fe ee ——- tricky, but well worth it. It was web

technology that assuaged my how- emt CO rel hace (Kee ara Cec hee NVC enn and ny eS ts

for instant communication. We also used the phone. On a Macintosh you can do an instant screen ele arpa oot oy holding down the shift, command and the number uae oe Cropping to the

important stuff and jpegging it made for easy-to-send-over-the-net visuals. Mondo is on the web at

-www.mondo2000.com and our marketing director, Beth Slatkin, did all ale sei) eeeye Cen toners) aa ser olde] omSt Cosco) brates while I trekked out across Europe after the beatae ona ce) coe irene

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atone only did the cover, but also the spine, a collage using his friend Joel Wheeler's ooatarirl reer se\ Oem [

he forged new ground with his photos, design and layouts for the Nina Hagen article, AND a special

Sree velnmeatladcamnsiametc@)iccaclclts piece. Tom flew to L.A. with Steve Beck and captured — Oliver's visual story. AND Tom’s-forever-luscious-eye-candy Fashion, he brings us Cuban darlings (however cunning and wicked). AND, with the help of make-up artist David Searle, Tom shot Orbital

rae eee Music Sas Ever an artist, AN De rz) vege :

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GusGus (a band, designers, photographers, filmmakers, cute & handsome kids in

sweaters who our music editor Rob Phoenix met and liked) guest = rl & remix our Electronic Music section. All the way

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ey 21S LP Byer itoty2 on Berra Quarterly, a long time friend of our — _ erstwhile managing editor Cedric Puleston, interviewed, edited and designed the Frank Miller article. Mischa hasasexy __ RON VaAKey ecm nave UmnVTouMmenmrsteu Ven celunineesecbivebi elie _ mc (oreteacuoerettCaimn vere auetiat arte conjureupfleshandbloodin = ¥ ne my mind Cai I mo clases —— Miller comics. — |

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Publisher Fun City MegaMedia Domineditrix Queen Mu a Dicraome sir aaa Associate Publisher Beth Slatkin Science Editor Charles Ostman 2 Music Editor Robert Phoenix Managing Editor Mo Lohaus

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Guest Designers Tom Pitts - |

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Pete McCracken

Mischa Beitz Po ean crae ici arm alec

Heide Foley

SEP US ett STC (sh ae Wa subscriptions@mondo2000.com

PO ELLE tel: 510-559-2060 S ACL @Ry | st)! 74/4 ESOT rattan

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Toy and weird stuff ieraeltae Stephen Webster has sent me pix or

Pe See uy Te Ue — LULU Heartfelt thanks to Eric Gullichsen, David Kalish, and Richard oe Kudos to our beloved Jennifer Slatkin, a.k.a. Ad Matrix. And ce our old friends Tulip Graphics and Canterbury Press in Berkeley. |

years, and finally I wised up and got him in this issue, right here on the masthead page. For the letters we were inspired by one of DAH’s edgy

photos, so much so that we reinvented the section to go with it (look roe Mo thanks: Karen Wiessen, publicist for Soul Coughing; Gene Mallove

Sabatino, Mark Comings, Brian O'Leary, MY Frau Sitte, ie eee

Thor, Sweet Princess and Kyle.

the t-shirt soon). I did a Siren shoot for the stitch-in & blow-in cards with the help of stylist Cynthia Lueng, models Andrea Marie and Star from Look in SF, and a few delicate props from the Bone Room and Tupper & Rob thanks: the goddesses at Formula, Girlie Acton: Green Galactic and Shorefire; Dr ”O” the Sushi Messiah, Cosmo and especially the divine Vrah Diva. We all thank: Erich Shienke and the CoMA folks; Rudy Rucker, Jr. and Magnolia Editions; CellSpace; Stephan Williams, Will Linn and the generous — help from Blasthaus (or was that MM?), Noah Thorp, Isaac Feldman, and

Seperate Ways—for their musical maddness. And Andy for marrying me.

Reed Music. Photos in the Electronica section came from the record companies, except for Tom Pitt’s uncanny shot of Orbital (taken at the Beresford) and my dramatic portrait of Percy Howard (done here in the, um, salon). Steve Kromer generously and warmly let me dig through his stacks of family photos to pick the definitive ”JPB-behind-the-facade” glimpses for the Barlow interview. David Rankin and Peter Hamlin were - VOTED GOD’S GIFT TO GRAPHICS GURUS — Macworld (Dec ’97) ~ Thanks, God. And thanks Rob for talking to Molly Ford at UMAX who sent the 5900 604e/233 mac clone. This fast toy arrived with a 2.1 GB SCSI hard drive, 32 MB of RAM (upgradable to 1040MB whew!) and 4MB of VRAM which drives my | 17” Lapis monitor. It has 7 external, as well as 7 internal | SCSI ports and I have just one left for Yamaha to send the CRW 4260. This single processor CPU was my willing date, but I'm ready to go double dutch with the s900/250DP RAID. With Apple pulling licenses, prices are dropping to very

two last minute serendipitous finds for the Melatonin extract. DAH’s abstracts allowed me to conceptualize the very fringey Zero Point Energy. Charles Ostman humoured me with great willingness for the Laser Weapons pix and Mark Shepherd (Brutal Gift & Co.) rendered the ever once CruleneCocbwrerciecvitcemmelCoce Queen Mu was Cite acer emaiceed nme! this issue’s video games artist, Kino, whom Chris Hudak introduced to us. Kino wins a big extra sentence here for adroitly following my direc- tion to do a double truck spread leaving a place within the image for text. Of course, we found the intriguing, shadowy, murky background sooo

- beautiful we hated to put any type over it anyhow... Speaking of type, attractive levels. Get a cheap clone now, Apple obsoletes Psy/Ops, Mondo’s official font foundry, has a new web site.

SOOM este cee act aroemobenltcce TANCE

—Heide Foley

Checkout their le font designs at we

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: 1) Using the Pen toa, draw a path around the portion you desire to cutout from ct Ta cae |

At the areas ao using the Pen tool just doesn’t ut it—don’t. Get the fourier ays aa careful to keep the path within the lines of the desired shape. Make the path a selection and Aven leer me rey ireCle

2) Using the Lasso tool draw a selection around the hard-to-get edges and copy this part of the image.

3) Don’t deselect. Without deselecting create a new channel. Be sure the

a eo

ae reflects UINCe UAW eEN relebelecenceraeyelersie

_ 4) Paste the image into the floating selection. This keeps it in the exact

same spot, assuring a dead-on cutout.

5) Use the eye-dropper in Levels to contrast the background and image. The erase tool and air- brush may be needed to get rid of highlights.

6) Now load this selection onto the one created with the path and delete.

The result is a very precise outline of the area you want to cut out wo the

Reo ace

Separating an image hone ee is acommon hes when appropriating tae: for illustrations or ronnie an clenent for design purposes. Sometimes doing an insanely great cutout can be super easy. Unfortuanatelly, it only works when the element you want to cut . a it SUNY well conn acai Doe ou need co intetecelels Cee Castel ona i Pe cat Da ieene oH pee cer

EP nenorcenena dete as necessary on the image. J used this technique for Star’s hair and for the - eeatezael tana vee partially transparent by au eree

Neelemerniy avery ceiver channel by tightening daCemcred (caste n mer barca eAts Modify menu or softening the edges by applying a OF Tersorn iy oturemm bien load the selection onto the layer you want to cut out of the background (you many need to invert your selection first).

For tips on creating : SEE see a DO _ issue | 16, .

ie

The spirit of time.

Xemex Avenue. Case: stainless steel, brushed, laterally polished, bracelet: stainless steel. Water-resistant to 30m. Ref. 2016. Design Killing.

aa fe iy $ Wl es € WA T €-H Neiman Marcus, Beverly Hills E. Michaels & Co., New York

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WIE AWARE CLO

Do you really think this very american-modern-folklore has such an inherent value so as to be portrayed with a post-industrial psychedelic-influenced tech jargon? if the Net is about a new language, you’d better turn to poetry, it’s awfully inventive in its obsolescence... Don’t you have the feeling that to be more than an .alt-centered magazine you should include more intemporal talk and subjects? And you have plenty of them at hand, being in that imaginary world of high tech mysteries out there in California.

My point could be this: How do you figure, in the case of an american ideologized world, our

common lives on earth? In the perspective of the rule of american symbols—which is to my mind each day more and more accurate but does not necessarily fit in the ancestral manners of many peoples—what could survive of an intellectual bio- diversity? And if one could interpret the Net existence as a somehow brilliant metaphor of the organic world, a sphere echoing the terrestrial sphere, it has also the role of avoiding the america-centered Weltanschauung. Maybe | should stop reading ondo.

rno David

, impasse de la Source rance

MONDO [40] 2000

This america-centered Weltanschauung is that one and the same which to your mind is each day more and more accurate? Try giving up language masturbation and go for the real thing—communication. H.E.

You rat bastid, you! Here | am, 33 years old and fat, living a humdrum existence doing planetarium shows and downloading titty pictures from the net, thinking that the high-octane, rapid-cognition, FTP->Gopher->WWWV, smart- drug-using, techno-house- listening, tarot-card-forecasting, C++ programming, Al developing days of my twenties are gone for good, when suddenly | get the latest (the last?) issue of Mondo 2000 and just as it did when | saw

it for the first time in 1992, IT

Now | am unhappy, because instead of concentrating on doing “The Earth is Bigger than the Moon” for eight year-olds, | want to design self-communing avatars, but before | do that | want to write a book about Atlantis and study some disinformation and hump Reese Witherspoon ’til she evaporates. And that’s just right now—| still haven’t finished the damn thing because | got dizzy.

As you did in 1992, you ripped me out of black and white and dropped me into technicolor, and | will NOT forgive you for it!

along with lots of magazines and

Patrick DiJusto

R.U. & MONDO FOLK,

Today, | picked up a copy of the new issue of Mondo at WaldenBooks down here in de bayou (Lafayette, LA). All | can say is, “You are Queens & Princes among editors/writers/layout-doods-&- grrris. I’ve read every issue of Mondo from its inception (actually, | began w/ High Frontiers... but that is a long time & many tabs ago... get's me wet-eyed & nostalgic just thinking about dem daze...):

THIS IS THE BEST MONDO YET / YOU RULE THE NEWSSTANDS & SHD BE NOMINATED FOR EVERY MAGAZINE AWARD DEY IS. The depth, the intelligence, the clarity of yr thinking—in the interviews (R.U., you are the master... I’m pretty keen... but you are the master...), the choice of persons-to-be interviewed, the angles you've taken, all genius. & that’s just the interviews. The essay-contributions are groovy too (I sent Chris Hudak e-mail about five nights ago, and, lo & behold, he shows up in yr pages...

We (this Tribe, this Thing that is Happening) are the Vibe.

Wired, Yahoo (especially

Yahoo, p.u.), all the cyberslicks, have much to worry about: Mondo is back in a big bad way... Am FUCKING GLAD to see it’s so.

Warmest of the Warm, Todd Brendan Fahey

Publisher, Far Gone Books PO. Box 43745

Lafayette, LA 70504-3745 fargone@popalex|.linknet

! trademark rights in the names, ~“Mondo” and “Mondo 2000.”

As you know, the word “mondo” means “world” in Spanish and is also used extensively in our culture as a synonym for the adjectives “large” or “huge.” MSNBC used the word “mondo” in these headlines to signify that this section was essentially a huge guide of links to other sites of

_ interest on the Internet.

DEAR EDITOR,

A little over a couple of years ago | was barreling through the state of New Mexico and stopped ina groovy little cafe in Albuquerque that served a damn good latte

journals and zine-like stuff to

_ peruse. | saw Mondo 2000 for

_ the first time and a really big “wow*

- curtain and the flying champagne

_ Love and kisses, _ Mindy

_ DEAR MS. KENNEDY: ~ Merrill Brown asked me to respond

formed in my head. I’ve read your magazine ever since... and recently was truly excited to find myself at the Crucible Steel Gallery opening

of Mondo’s latest offerings. Seeing

_ those covers up close and fiery

was a little like a wet dream. | !

- got to meet the Art Director! ! DEAR MONDO:

~|am currently working on a

Between the art-tattoos happening on the Persian rug, the slithery music behind the velvet

corks, | gotta tell ya, it was the best part of the CoMA Fest. Great job!

to your July 29 letter regarding — your concern over MSNBC's use of ©

~ the name, “MSNBC Mondo Guide” — and the sub-section names,

“Mondo Movies’, “Mondo Music’,

denies any wrongdoing in using the word “mondo” in the above headlines and did not in any way infringe or dilute your alleged

MONDO [41] 2000

Nevertheless, to avoid a nuisance claim by your company, MSNBC has decided to remove this feature name from its web site and consider new names. This action

_ in no way prejudices MSNBC, NBC _or Microsoft or impacts its future

decisions to adopt the word

“mondo” in other manners. ~Because MSNBC has removed the “Mondo Guide” name and sub- section names from its web site,

_ we will consider this matter closed.

Sincerely,

Scott Behm, Corporate Attorney Microsoft Corp., Redmond, WA

documentary film called THE MORRISON CASE: Dead or Alive—

the subject being the possibility that Jim Morrison faked his own

death in 1971. There are several indications suggesting that this is

the case. One such being that Jim

Morrison’s son, Cliff Morrison, lives here in Los Angeles. Yet the

~non fiction book No One Here

Gets Out Alive states on page 317

that Jim Morrison’s wife, Patricia

Kennealy had an abortion, and that there never was a child.

There are many more discrepancies _when you investigate the Morrison - “Mondo Books”, “Mondo Cyber” __ ~ and “Mondo Web Sites.” MSNBC

case, so to resolve this enigma | propose that an SIR (Subsurface

_ Interface Radar) test be performed on the grave. Essentially this test

is an X-ray of the grave and will

_ expose a high definition video

image of what actually lies there. Based on my research, | feel that this test will show Jim Morrision’s grave to be empty.

Just a story idea you might be interested in. If you have any comments or questions please call me.

Sincerely,

Michael Noonan Hollywood, CA

DEAR EDITORS,

In the wake of Waco, Ruby Ridge, the Oklahoma City bombing and numerous other domestic incursions, an “anti-terrorist” bill has been passed, additional federal and local law enforcement has been funded to the tune of

$ | ,000,000,000, airport security has been tightened to the point of the absurd, privacy and First

prisons have been constructed at an alarming rate.

The Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of

1996, Public Law 104-132 on April

24th, 1996 (S.735 introduced by Sen. Dole) was passed despite opposition by a wide mixture of strange bedfellows across the political spectrum. It has wide- reaching consequences that ought to chill the spine of every decent American born into the luxury of freedom in this increasingly unfree New World Order. Some of the features of this law are: it establishes a five-member commission to study activities of federal law enforcement agencies; removal of protections on interception of wireless messages; increased scope of BATF; prohibitions on providing material support of any kind to

(with no measures for appeal) if the government believes they are agents for foreign terrorists; exception to rules of discovery in civil proceedings when the government claims classified materials are involved; habeas corpus reform will curtail the ability to appeal previous court decisions where evidence was destroyed or suppressed by prosecutors (as in Waco and Oklahoma City); authorizes antiterrorism training programs. The military-industrial complex so prevalent during the Cold War and Vietnam years has transformed into the prison- industrial-police-attorney complex, resharpening its focus from a war against the Soviets to a war against the individual liberties of the American people. It is time to wake up to this peril.

Amendment rights have been increasingly attacked, censorship is on the rise, a national |.D. card instituted, welfare privatized, prisoner rights curtailed, and

organizations the Attorney General or Secretary of State have deemed as international terrorist organizations; freezing of © domestic groups’ bank accounts

_ Johnny Liberty

- Cascadian Resource Center [Johnny Liberty is a well-known lecturer on personal sovereignty and

let it rip

ju-ju space jazz

7 Buead, - EY, iam pa Tem = |b ||

[afal tt pe] 8c] 8 |e |p pe

the Author of Sovereign American’s

Handbook. He can be reached at: 800.299.4497]

While Mondo has been surfing the light fantastic, ominous perturbations have been coming out of Washington. Are you folks aware of Public Law 104-132—the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Law? You should be.

Are you “likely to engage” in the “gathering of information” related to the Federal Government or its Officers? Do you provide “any kind of material support including a safe house, transportation, communications, funds...or training” to “any individual or organization” you “reasonably should know” plans to do so? (Do you show your kids or sibs how to surf the Net, or subscribe to any publication which acknowledges the intra-beltway

circus or its performers?) TERRORIST!!!

Mewie - Grice coce: Pring S@@) Jac ~ @rkiet coce:

e

eb Marley -artist cede:

Gathering information on government activities, or supporting publications or non- profit groups which do, now legally constitutes terrorism. And if we’re loud enough or vocal enough in holding legislators responsible for their actions (or holding them up to public ridicule), the President, Secretary of State, or Attorney General may simply declare us “terrorists.” Any of us. At any time. “The determination of the Attorney General...shall be controlling and shall not be subject to review by any court.’ “No question concerning the validity of the issuance of such designation may be raised by a defendant in a criminal prosecution as a defense in or as an objection to any trial or hearing.’ Done deal.

As “terrorists”—and we are all “terrorists” waiting to be so designated—we “shall have no right of discovery of information... nor... the right to seek suppression of evidence.

Further the government is authorized to use...the fruits of electronic surveillance and/or unconsented physical search.”

And what are the teeth?

Per Public Law 95-147 “all depositories of public monies... and insured institutions... shall perform duties as fiscal agents of the United States”—such as seizing all our assets and canceling our credit cards the day we are designated “terrorists.” Trial? What trial? How're we gonna find gas money to get to work? How’re we gonna eat? How're we gonna go anywhere? Hope we ve gotta lotta high-end electronics and a soft-hearted pawn broker handy.

And if we do? Or if we keep a few K in gold under the mattress for just such an occasion? “Assistance may be requested from any Federal, State or local agency, including the Army, Navy or Air Force...” Now let’s not get

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paranoid, but do you really want to know about the “Effective Death Penalty” part of this law? Go to www.thomas.loc.gov and check it out.

As for me, I’m canceling my subscription to Harper’s and burying my head in a stack of Mondos... unless... of course... you print this letter.

deep C

DEAR MONdOjidZ

| read about you guys for years in Rushkoff and Dery and all of that cyberfoo... and | thought you were a buncha wacked out new age utopians ripped to the gills on smart drugs, lsd and high priced toys for silly brats. Then | stayed with a friend who happened to have the full collection. Man, did they ever get it wrong.

HHHey... you guys are highly literate, skeptical to the point of paranoia, and obviously very post-new age. Oh yeah, and probably wacked to the gills as well.

Keep up the good work.

Brian Mancini Philadelphia, PA.

MONDO 2000

Issue #16 promises Reese Witherspoon on the cover. Reese, babe goddess of my every fantasy, and a smarty pants to boot... WHERE IS SHE????!!!! All you have is that interview with the dood who did Freeway (a killer movie tho). He’s cool but why no Reese interview?

Oh well. Liked the William Gibson and the CIA/LSD thing. And any magazine that gets behind Robyn Hitchcock is ok in my book.

Joe Serrano Babylon, New York

MONDO [44] 2000

QUEEN MU AND COMPANY I’m ecstatic over yet another MONDO finally on my doorstep. The issue (#16) had a nice flow to it... zeitgeist pifata indeed (whatever the hell that means). It

- gets so nicely thick and paranoid

at the center what with Harry Horse, Todd Fahey, Disnformation,

_ and that Halperin weirdo. And - then the vibe smoothes with the

music section. (Nice Yoko interview,

_ although she may as well have

been talking to herself).

Speaking of James Halperin, consider that his clueless Orwellian fantasies have earned

a great deal of praise and

attention in the media. We're living in a time when people we used to think of as rational will actually justify the de facto censorship of a film based on Nabokov’s Lolita on ethical grounds. It’s a pod people country full of promise keepers, promising to never utter a discouraging word. Al Gore is

on the TV pleading with artists

to form a “partnership” with

the government so that there'll be “social responsibility.” Stalin said the same thing, only he

_ didn’t have to ask.

Jim Walden

TO HEIDE FOLEY:

What do pouty half-naked girls have to do with cyberspace or the new edge? Why does MONDO 2000 have to look like a Calvin Klein ad? Please, more content

and less sex!

Sylvia Pastorelli Berkeley, CA.

Um, Sylvia Darling, I suggest you pick up a copy of MONDO 2000 and actually take a look at it. Just which trench-coated (like our #16 cover) Calvin Klein ads are you referring to? As for pouty lips, I sincerely

Pm mC 10 TL CELT Te]

at fast the horizon ADDRArs free AGAUN {o us, at last our ships may venture out agath, |

Five quarterly issues of MONDO 2000 for $24 NAME |

ADDRESS

CITY STATE. ZIP

TELEPHONE

L] TAM ENCLOSING A CHECK OR MONEY ORDER [] 1AM SUBMITTING MY VISA/MC NUMBER—AND

THAT NUMBER IS: EXP DATE:

SIGNATURE United States $24 e Canada/Mexico $27 US funds e International $50 US funds

venture out to face any danger; all the daring |

ledge ‘5 permitted again;

‘ive quarterly issues of MONDO 2000 for $24

SIGNATURE

United States $24 e¢ Canada/Mexico $27 US funds e International $50 US funds

Ree (AL 32a, Our sea, lies OPRh Agath; perhaps there has never yet beer Such ah "Opeh sea.’ —friedrich Mietzsche

_ STATE - = -22iP

MY VISA/MC NUMBER—AND

EXP DATE:

e ico $ 7 US funds ¢ International $50 US funds

%.

Introducing Jamshied Sharifi’ A Prayer For The Soul Of Layla (ALU-1005)

In this mesmerizing recording Jamshied Sharif explores and expands on Middle Eastern musical traditions, weaving exotic melodies, West African rhythms, incandescent vocals and eclectic instru- mentation into rich tapestries of emotion and sound. This is music of extraordinary range and power, at once voluptuous and deeply spiritual. It is music of the heart and of the soul — a prayer

come to the exuberant sonic -landscane of = Japanese composer and banjo player Akira Satake. Featured artists include Johnny Cunningham, Jerry O' Sullivan, Glen Velez and Steve Gorn.

“TA]n incredibly varied and complex cross-cultural feast for your ears... “TYjou have probably never heard anything quite like this music, infectious as hell... it not just works, it rocks!” which is spare, haunting, melodic, and compelling... A wonderful CD, Wind and Wire magazine well worth seeking out.”

The $ensible Sound

worthy of high praises... one of the best new releases of the year.”

ALUILA

AcE CC. 0° Ris

ALULA RECORDS P.O. Box 15867, Durham, NC 27704-0867 USA 1-800-9 Fax: 919-403-2451 e-mail: alula@aol.com Web: http://www.alula

aa

... soul music for the next millennium.”

— Mickey Hart

®

ORE ERNATIVE

tp order or for catalog, 800-966-3699;

to preview, 900-370-4500

Ganga Devis bijamudra, Mul Chowk, Patan © Kevin Bubriski.

advise you to stop thinking of a fictional film charactor giving the birdie (re: reese pic) as a come-hither

signal... As for half naked, which winter clad mode from our fashion spread did you absolutely distort in your brainwashed cranium? If you managed to find some cleavage in the Sarah McLachlan photos, I guess you spent a bit too much time in the dark. Finally, instead of erroneously accusing me of selling out, I think maybe it is you who needs a little bit of sex, perhaps with some

half-naked pouty Calvin Kleiners. But good luck finding them, they aren't in MONDO.

—Heide Foley, Art Director

HI, MY NAME IS YEVGENIY

Recently, | saw the issue of Mondo 2000. | was so excited and fascinated that my poor English can’t let me to describe all the emotions | had. | am magazine-designer, for [2 years, from Moscow (Russia) I’ve been in New York for two years, and have collected many professional magazines like PRINT, HOW, COMMUNICATION ART. | have always been ardent fan of extraordinary design, and new solutions to design problems. | thought that those catalogs were the future of design. However, after | saw Mondo’s Cybermania | was completely swept off my feet. My blood was boiling and | was salivating with thirst for more as | looked through the first issue | accessed.

Truly Thankful, Yevgeniy Serch

Join the Wide Awake Club. Submit rants, raves, reviews, and other ramblings to our rough and ready staff.

web: editor@mondo2000.com fon: 510-559-2060

fax: 510-559-2062

mail: P.O. Box 10171 Berkeley, CA 94709

MONDO [48] 2000

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Lost in the white noise din of the millennium’s end is the tradition of

the troubadour, the creator of

cantos and weaver of magical incantations. The troubadours

have gone back underground to Ce

their most potent magic, transforming

eluted MUM ciate eA Ce balla

of alchemical discovery, ete Howe | lead voice of the Peete Nds, is one of the eee

of this time-honored

tradition. His voice

speaks with insight on

the creation of art

without heart.

Goa teumec tom eset ac | ttt edmeecetsernneys a boy pulling the wings off a fly... too often Electronica enters my body with this type a Bot and makes me Toto terh a oytatretamehmalccvasm ye) (ouetelel Stee for an immediate sonic breath of spirit. :

There is a cure for the monotony of drum ‘n’ bass, for the linear, frameless void of aimless ambiance; for the cut and paste soul-lessness of “found sound” arrangements. It was in the reverberant soul off the angelic voicings of Jeff buckley erie Cas : oonings of ere Hiss

alt flight. If Electronica could move me so R ei be both practitioner and disciple... But as this fashion stands now, MEE eCasdoneamyyeconteomead cent enetece print, the kabuki mask worn by a geisha who does not ae SFA Rotate ents Ea This is the key to the whole issue. Electronica is the ice queen, the Bond girl, the BMOC of the alternative youth culture machine, at least at the - moment, and as such it is the perfect STL taa eae Warholian culture, due it’ f oc steratratri cone

mee SoCo oeecorreeccceesaceone Electr nica + load

- Seecrrecotitettiteg iiivere Cetiae an DE ee is

_- @ 2, 4

7 ceo CEI

Move me. | keep wai ae VNU Cte aeymeccrelanylamenematicascosnt genius of “sampledelia,” ieee Seo fre i

me, a resounding NO. And while I will give the young man all die corel Witcme (cao eco m sonar uCicoetbl acca tetra ana

talk of the work’s musical genius is at best uninformed. Call ie

thing what it is.

In naming what a thing is, we must see it in it’s entirety— the entire Hippo, above and below the water—and much of si etarentesBeKeonyserce Ream rays elce Keegan! mort tacae deconstructionism. It takes it’s energy from being able to pick Men orornieerceoincnlerr elcome BraccMo aris cr

oe eM weaver atecentt a — Te oo all ee

yeethefin such a EN that —_ pre the oo at ibaa fulnéés and intent of the song sources that are their genesis? For

upon an act of aT Hon. ee epi ae a

I eteevrnteasHl erence lnneteem Cone Cnn aTIn Cocotte matt atoa Hie GAN CvaComiemrsnie) ae cau cenoc CRG) otrmlaceccr tat when he told The Wire one of his rly was to make music that was divested of any of the energy of things labrnneese la he was seeking in effect the creation of a milieu that was: eosin) ihm oe emey terete me eclaclCecme Ne mt RCH Say truth inherent in much of Electronica that spells its death knell, because the only people you are going to lead for very

Oita with this particular carrot are the cool ones, the ones who Bacallesestiae im Coyiterccasramriscistits4 Naan nea! king race bia

is wearing a glittering suit. | The only viable future in Electronica is in ficton ecm erase

argued that many great Jazz musicians did their worst work — | Pa tomeggitah tc cdcrerteansimoccccconc resto) ae and R&B. The Bitches Brew vs. Kind of Blue debate will be had by musicians and enthusiasts for years. However, much Brande retcelel ete eycepnivicibarcast ema Ccmniete CHebaroKcouc Kea (clanxeyet(e __ is what is being summoned on its outer fringes, artes Cee va of craft and heart who are not afraid to include those Pinta bnnre cole

human elements of creation and oT OCneMCcnaela carte ye

ear tany: human experience. Musicians such as Talvin Sood at L | | William Orbit, Bill Laswell, The Grassy Knoll, etc., all recognize

Taree) LAr Ae) Oona music that engages Tela just the nd fashion sense, but the head and soul as a oe

nos a to me that the most cela ieascevst (as rele Cv ace _ have no great stake in preserving some sacred Ccitctecer(s | | for Electronica, ~~ needy PST! ane Be ae _

| i" ruil into aa rhetoric ae | 3 he - hi Et Ao at See es

ele a sop a FY ns cee danse - But craft is never spoken of. Lack of er ee ere re of Pecans cue

: cop took Aa to varying pau aie a because it was accepted that they were working in a musical —

Oat pee deisel Loynitesvnnbis ted ae Electronica

MULES (aC bUcMderLmcs Sum Con ercRciel nema NreLaditcate eae ofthese

arcane Oca) nists must eprelocetecccisnvenaicrimtetlaroedetem tciea(eyii(ommm dinosaurs that used them in the 70’s and 80's. n their course, and i in this failatiee Alene

rea fetes i

atceeiccKerccomn menace tracers cous inca cr cwsllcen cenit: Ea ae

mentary he dnd when the bored media seeks to endow the — . Boca te gaye arelietds mark of FYOyOOCene Eacte) Peano |e

can cease to be inundated with the recycled psychedelic oe | se is See Please, Se Choe acl :

moire EC I)

ZV TeVan CoM UE AC OmIV siete Macs CclesT acne a occ Ut aa

VES.

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[coven nce cabot clecmepesversop eal lates Olecent Cadses an zaces-an bade one commen thing gory on a7 all dady |

VAN LB rita clas tate NH: They call him the Yogi-Christ of India. He is mentioned in Yogananda’s Autobiography CTP CAUCE Loree recat et Ros nCeat mene Rcean Oat eattam yt

is the guru of the gurus. And the guy I'm talking about—they call him Babaji. CO Ar duoe aoe eRe ACen Leo mr VAM ee eT ermal tect

Seem a eR eee ae tal ay afta A his closest disciple. Babaji died on Valentine's Day in ‘84. I happened ., to be busy doing an album called Fearless. I hadn't met the incarnation of Babaji. But I knew many stories about Babaji, and I experienced the way of life he was teaching because I spent time at his ashram in India. His teaching includes things like: we are all

. equal; all religions are equal; we have to learn to live together _ in harmony—all the different tribes and races—and have

WORE am elma matt NH: To recycle, burn old trash, to take care of what you consume. Understanding the sacredness of all things and having fun at the same time.

M2: He’s not a heavy guru then. ie sR Came mnie Nr haem Conner ome time with him, he can look directly into your heart and knows what's going on with you. So he acts as a mirror. If you have emotional troubles with your.loved one or with your life, he imprints on _you. He can show you the real happy life without your hang ups, and you learn techniques and yoga forms from those schools. Breathing yoga... which is called re-birthing in our language. It gets rid of our old, horrible imprints _ and sickness. | ee elemo mya eC DE velo evel erred tetas (eye

wee ie

MONDO [47] 2000

It all began when I was about 12, when I was looking at all those Communist faces around me, because I grew up in East Berlin. And they were very ee LsTes)| Communists, like the fascists and the nationalists. They all said there’s no God, so I thought I'd look. I grabbed the Bible and kneeled down before an old wooden Madonna face. | went to . . Poland and sat there in a church looking at Jesus up there. « . A couple of years later, when I was 19, friends told me that . things can happen if you take LSD. You can meet God or Buddha. It was very difficult in the beginning.

M2: Were you looking for a guru? NH: I was with two Polish people. It was like dying, but I couldn't die. It was like a never-ending zone of pain. So I cried for help, “I need a doctor; I’m dying!” And this one Polish guy said he was going to give me a downer to go off my trip. So I thought if I took te Oe Rivet emacs to take LSD one day again because I really wanted to find. God. So I didn’t take the pills. The pain came back and then I cried out to God, “Please help me!” And things started to get better, and I heard this sweet male voice saying my name and “Nina, you're here and you have to die.” My old self didn’t want to die. I cried out and the era came back. And | remembered what he said, and I thoug! s the way it goes; I have to surrender. I lay dow1 ee my eyes. | came out of my body and saw colo hospital scene with cut off amputated pieces and parts And a nurse calling my name and Saas my cheek, suysteca em eenttca nals ‘back J lite. But I said, “I’m not go’ I ae so much better now.” And I heard this voice ag, my eyes. And I opened them and he said “Turn aro Selatan vibrating, the picture. And he looke much love. He was ern long hair like Jesu: atc etme lnm omuen- Ne har tern hn ve PU attemeye| said, “I’m always es ei always be there. stone fell off my heart and | relaxed. | asked he there, and he said, “You took LSD, so I must I asked his name and he shook his head. And } Wal lb etem nto TeRceN a Tirca stam Oued TET esc elas kind of a mischmasch, but I could hear, “Only H “Muusch, muusch.” So I thought his name was lofcrecteonatelace- VG Raat Cem ite. one soem yous Rhee utes of people calling him. So I crawled on his lap all night, and — Pee eier eel would be really dying. And that there — were four possibilities when you die. Et he erecue certs i. tunnels on the wall. I asked him “which one to eee) ened ne and he said “I can’t help” and that you be en eee) where you belong. I wanted to know which one to take to go to him. I felt like he was my boyfriend. And I’ve felt like Tae ever since. And when I ran into a poster in ‘87 of Babaji, | thought, “My trip, is it you?” My now girl triend Trudi, who knew him COME Bee Cet Teen thought “Tt’s the Lord of the — Sun...He’s the Sun God.” And we ees ee two days ago the — George Harrison version of “My Sweet Lord.” It’s for my Beato Luca's project, but I'm going to throw it on my album too. |

eee ‘ oS ‘and

i ne}

APA WE Cee Rite em oe ad

NH: Luca is a disco star in Australia. He travels from disco to disco. And spreads the names of the Lord through his dance hall music. He just came from Bangkok with crowns he wanted me to wear, but my daughter looks better in them.

M2: How old is your daughter? [Cosma Shiva]

MONDO [4

> Going to the comics shop, a few doors down from Moby

Dick’s on the corner of Hennepin and Seventh, was about

as good as it got when | was fourteen. These weren’t the comics your parent’s read. They were gritty, violent and smart. The industry was being stood on its head by hot new talent and none was hotter, grittier or more talented than Frank Miller. Through his work | grew to appreciate the squalid dankness of Moby Dick’s, or at least find the derelict bar newly fascinating. Miller transformed every character he touched. He resurrected Batman and turned an unknown blind hero into the hottest title in the industry. He’s now having the time of his life doing Sin Gty for Dark Horse Comics. It’s some of his best work to date.

Mischa Beitz: How did you get your start in comic books?

Frank Miller: It’s the only thing I ever wanted to do. My mother tells me I declared to her that I was going to become a comic book artist when I was six years old. By then I was already starting to draw my own. When I was able to—in other words when I was out of that prison that we call High School—I moved to Manhattan and essentially made a nuisance of myself. Neal Adams, the

artist, was of particular

help to me: giving me | i wi advice and doing his best i

to discourage the young

fool, but a very generous man. I just kept banging on people’s doors and hanging

out in lobbies until I was able to get work.

NO NEED. TO PLAY IT QUIET.

NOT ANYMORE.

monpo [46] Tt

M2: Persistence paid off.

FM: Oh yes. Especially then because it was considered a dying field. Many of the first editors I worked with just shook their heads at me and said, “We all know we're going to be out of business in five years. What are you doing?” Of course, I showed up with completely the wrong material. | showed up with all these crime comics I'd drawn and I was somehow arrogant enough to think they were going to start publishing that sort of thing. M2: You're certainly doing it now.

FM: Oh yeah, oh yeah. I’m having an absolute ball.

M2: The crime story is something you've incorporated in a lot of your work. You managed to incorporate a lot of it in Daredevil.

FM: Yeah, that was ‘78 or ‘79. Beyond my life-long love of crime stories I had also rather recently discovered Will Eisner’s Spirit. My Daredevil work was obviously grabbing all it could from Will Eisner and applying it to the basic vernacular Marvel Comics.

M2: Daredevil was your first big break at Marvel.

FM: Yeah. Before Daredevil I'd been doing single stories here and there for every pub- lisher there was. I did Weird War Tales for DC Comics and Twilight Zone for Gold Key Comics, all kinds of odd pieces. Then I got the break of doing a couple of fill-in issues tor Spider Man featuring Daredevil as guest star and started lobbying very hard to get the job on Daredevil.

M2: So you really fell in love with the character?

FM: I thought Daredevil was the most vul- nerable character they had. Usually when you ask about a super hero people tell you, “well, he can fly, he’s very strong.” With

LER

Artwork by Frank Miller. '™ Sin City and © Frank Miller Inc.

Daredevil, you'd have to say, “he’s blind” and I thought I could do a lot with that; make him a Spirit-like crime fighter.

M2: So you had the idea of doing a Spirit-like character when you began lobbying for Daredevil.

FM: Oh yeah, Daredevil was less tied up than other super heroes; much less popular. At the time, they made comic books that didn’t sell bi-monthly and when I got the title it was selling poorly enough to only be published every two months; which was also convenient for me, because I couldn’t do more than that at the time. It’s a standing rule: if you're going to come in on all these old comics, the smartest thing is to pick the biggest loser. It was the same with Batman. Batman was actually selling quite poorly when I did Dark Knight.

M2: You wrote the script for RoboCop II, how did you get involved in that?

FM: The phone rang. It was really as simple as that. The producer called me up and asked me if I wanted to write it. [ hadn’t really planned on working in the movies. It always intrigued me but I didn’t have any particular ambition for it. It also hit at a time when I was in a real creative lull. I guess I got too much attention after Dark Night. Got a little full of myself. From what I gathered, Dark Knight had influenced the first movie a great deal and they needed a script for the second.

monpbo [4.7] 2000

M2: There were many ‘Milleresque’ themes in the movie, there was one scene using medical equipment as torture devices...

FM: [laughing] Yeah, one of my favorites.

M2: You've been very outspoken about censorship in both comics and movies...

FM: I don’t really think you can comfortably use the word censorship in relation to Hollywood. They surrendered the first amendment years ago by adopting a rating system. Like television, when they say first amendment they’re closing the barn door way too late. M2: Do you think it’s possible for Hollywood to produce

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you'd like to write?

FM: They'd be producible, but I don’t know if the current system—with so many hands on every project, with everything costing so much and aiming at such a wide audience—I don’t know if it’s a real good route to take. Also, I never regarded writing movies as a step up. I've always loved comics the most, and I’m quite happy doing what I'm doing.

M2: Any thoughts on a rating system for comic books?

FM: Over my dead body—I'Il fight it tooth and nail as many times as I have to.

M2: It’s interesting that TV seems to have succumbed.

FM: And you'll notice that even when the censors got what they wanted, they kept complaining—even more loudly. That’s what happens and that’s why no concession makes any sense. You don’t use red meat as shark repellent. They never seem to learn. Every few years there’s talk of a rating system in comic books and we've got to bang that drum again.

M2: What do you think of the translation from comic book to film? Do you think it works?

FM: No... There are a few moments that are kind of nice; some moments in the first Superman movie, for instance, that really did celebrate the folk hero. But I think in general the movies based on comic books are pretty good proof they don’t translate.

M2: Yeah, I keep expecting great things and end up being terribly disappointed. What about the Batman movie? Did Tim Burton bother to talk to you about it? FM: No. Asa matter of fact, my own reaction to what I've seen of the Batman movies is that they’ve got nothing to do with comic books. They're adapted from the old TV show. You know, the slumming stars showing up as villains; they're like the Batman TV show without the humor. The Batman movies have much more in common with The Brady Bunch, The Beverly Hillbillies and the Star Trek movies. They're clearly TV derived. It’s delusional for people to think that these films are in any way related to the original comics. M2: Especially after the Dark Knight where MO ABO M Aa m Oma crla (sitad mcm mat Wear rae CLNen eel naenilo nel ile the most guilty and culpable character in some respects. _

FM: Well, I went for the Wagnerian.

WON Uocm ne CeiCititt em commit) hele timate tan elas b Ce NU WY | FM: Well the super hero started as an outlaw and at one point they all got deputized; about the same time that the comic book industry got castrated in the 1950s. The super heroes reflected that. Superman in his earliest s rather mysterious figure ai reer ace © Warring generals are carrying ona are dying on either side. It’s horrible. moat generals, drops them in front n to sit and sort it out and then leaves. He hority figure and with Batman it isn’t much out that he’s a guy that dresses up like a bat people through windows. : Any idea what led to the creation of the super heroes of the 1930's. | : FM: Ihave my own theories. Obviously y

think there’s a relatio characters o

WSs iceelaice one il; you couldn’t judge them © EBC e metalic was an ancient interview, right? It must have was doing Dark Knight because | sounded a lot like ® ack then. In Dark Knight I was creating a larger than life igure and treating it very seriously. A larger than life figure would be very hard for us to figure out and might even be

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capricious. [ think people running around t characters should be role models ought to sit The Odyssey. MOA Oracle m Ce ouCBele rman lee look back and say, “my greatest work was Da FM: If I did that, I’d have to retire. No. Tom along the way. With each project, I end up wit weapons in my arsenal, a few more things I ca more ideas about where to go next. I don’t kn done the Sin City work if | hadn’t done the pre M2: Any thoughts on Marvel’s chapter 11? FM: Oh, I think this has been coming down th Mum cmrlcta cre once nner ents Jack Kirby and Stan Lee could only be milked steadily alienated the better talent. The prevailing attitude had always been th were all that mattered and the talent was com

Tit miele

changeable. Even when that was plainly not t had to hold to the theory and it was really onl PO CHMCM MTOR OMe ReoTmary in the early 1960's. That's thirty years ago. oa Bree cemeereniey- veya iVetieme Com bcm reac.

was part of one of them. But it was quite and it was still essentially the same group of peop | the book. You know, Stan Lee was still around and oe Net an infusion of a lot of us kids who had grown up on Marvel comics wanting to do them and getting a chance. The characters were good and they were bound to have another surge or two. It was just... how far can you go with much of anything? There are only two American super heroes who are folk heroes. There’s only Superman and Batman. Everything else is a distant

Ca) si the way with Superman nd eee

FM: I don’t know if they'll lead the way. Traditionally they’re not leaders, but they are doing some very wise things that constitute a real investment in the future. They’re diversifying their line wildly. They're publishing things I don’t think anyone would have dreamed they'd have published ten years ago. They have the big Warner behind them so I suspect they have more freedom to maneuver than other publishers.

I don’t think anybody is really going to lead the way. I think it’s going to be a time when no single publisher is going to domi¢ WLM MB Cum Restut) Giet pee) Rms iC peel crave bite2 You've got to understand, when you go toa aS say, 'l only buy Berkeley books."

M2: The number of small publi

ae euy named Bill Sul

FM: No, I don’t think so. I don’t know if I have the er I

a g out books is tremendous. There appears to be CR aCe AI aT yen (em AU Ca Ce FM: Well, I can say where Loy and more individualwoices out ther doing the kind of work they want to

on d

turning out wr sery dN MCHCUE

the publishers would distribu

NRE Tice aeRO Meera RST aeTite oltre epee) tc) tats came along who didn’t have as many bad habits.

M2: At one point it seemed you were interested in writing a book on the subject. You felt it was a very important time in the industry and that somebody ought to sit and write it all down. Will you write a book on this?

keep wanting to draw it [laughs] I’m not much of a scholar, but I'll

certainly help anybody who intends to do a history. I think it’s one

of those, "somebody really ought to." I’m not the guy, one look at

my studio and you'd understand. [laughs] I’m not very organized.

M2: Any projects beyond Sin City at this point? Is there

PUiNAaiveiream Can eseieLeD Tim TMG ICM ro au motte Ce

FM: There is, I try not to talk about stuff until it’s pretty far

along. Believe it or not I've got a historical piece. I’m like a kid

in a candy store, there's no end to the possibilities.

M2: I just read William Gibson’s new book, Idoru. Are you.

familiar with his work?

FM: I haven't read this one.

M2: maa that Has a big role is a nano-technology parts of cities. I remember reading ©

1 and the Aquarius Project.

‘to yours. Have you

ir Oy err

FM: I never have, but I’d look forward to the opportunity. It’s a weird time for fiction in general. | think there’s a lot of synthesis and searching going on. People are combining things in unusual ways, and Gibson’s a good example.

M2: Do you know what it is that distinguishes this work?

FM: I suppose it’s the audience. They’re restless enough now to take a chance.

M2: Which is good for you.

FM: Yeah! It’s a great time to be in this field. It’s funny, the only

thing that ever makes the headlines is this news about Marvel

Comics filing for bankruptcy, or whatever, so people think we're

in some kind of dead field. They don’t realize how alive it is.

There's nothing like working in a field that’s just been laid clean.

M2: When I first saw your Martha Washington series it

reminded me a lot of Howard Chaykin’s work; particularly

American Flag.

FM: Well, Chaykin and I shared studio space for a couple of

years, | remember when he started doing American Flag—it was

very exciting to see the ideas fly as wildly as that and it was quite

liberating for me. He brings an amazing number of influences to

comics that people haven’t seen before.

M2: You've been writing crime stories your whole career, have

they always had the noir twist?

FM: Oh yeah, I grew up reading things like Raymond Chandler

and Mickey Spillane. Still do as a matter of fact.

M2: Have you read all their works?

FM: Oh yeah—several times each. There’s also Hammet and a

host of others that aren’t as well known. There's

Chester Himes and Jim Thompson... there’s an 4 ox.

awful lot of great crime fiction to read.

M2: Are there any new authors you're

reading?

FM: Well I really enjoy Carl Hiaasen. %G

Unfortunately he’s most known for VA)

writing the novel from which the WA 9

movie Striptease was based. But that ag. © ves

we.

really didn’t capture his writing at all. He's remarkably witty and a vicious ——~. writer. And there’s Charles ; Willetord. Now Willeford’s stuff is old... he’s dead, but as far as what’s og @ going on right now I'm not really up to spark yet.

I've read a little James Ellroy and want to read more but he takes some doing. I simply have to take enough time off to immerse myself in his work. Stylistically he’s a shock. When he gets stac- cato I've never seen anything like it. I also enjoy Andrew Vachss’ work. His stuff is barely fiction. He’s on a much more realistic end of things. His characters

ct ae.

nee

ff

are clearly fictional but his stuff has the ring of reality. I mean, it’s utterly unromanticized. With Sin City you're dealing with a subject that’s highly romanticized.

M2: i I was going through the Sin City covers, I couldn’t help but notice that your title’s are like censor bait: Sex and Violence, That Yellow Bastard, etc. It's like waving a red flag!

We’‘re dumbing the entire country because we’re afraid an 18-month-

FM: [laughing] We'll see, that’s always been part of the genre. There’s an old Jim Thompson novel called That Swell Looking Babe. Sin City is meant to hit hard on a visceral level. When I come up with a title as good as That Yellow Bastard, there’s no way I'm going to say “oh, this is going to get me in trouble.” | mean, trouble is my business. | suppose one of the things I respond to these days is that we’re living in such tender times. Everybody is oh so careful not to offend oh anyone and everybody's always concerned about kids all the time. We're dumbing the entire country down to the level of an 18-month-old, because we're afraid an 18-month-old might have a bad afternoon. I guess I respond to this overly tender approach by wanting to be a bit outrageous.

M2: Comic books have changed dramatically in the last thirty years.

FM: Yeah, they’ve been getting back where I think they ought to be. If you look at cable TV now, some of it’s most outrageous material is adapted from old comic books.

onc Sa

show called Perversions of Science which is based on the old EC Science Fiction comics. Up until the self censorship of the 1950’s, comics were not considered an exclusively children’s medium at all. In fact, it had established what I thought was a really worthwhile beach-head as being a bit outlaw. You know, if you want the homogeneous stuff you can go to network television or even Hollywood movies, but with comic books, because the over- head is lower and because it takes so few hands to make one, you can really get some different points of view. I guess part of what I like is that they can provoke. I've got a new title coming out next month

_

50] 2000

called Tales to Offend; as in Tales from the Crypt. It’s formatted different shapes and images of different sizes have different meanings.

very much like an old DC comic. The biggest enemy any cartoonist has is time because unlike a film M2: Is this a Sin City title? maker or even a prose writer, the reader is in total control of time. FM: No, this is it’s own thing. It does have one Sin City story Technically it only takes a few seconds to read a comic book page and it has two stories featuring a hero named Lance Blastoff unless there are too many words on it. You have to keep the words who teaches children not to recycle, to eat plenty of meatand — ata minimum to be true to the form. For instance, I find you can to smoke. make the reader pause and take a breath by using a single-page M2: No relation to Toy Story’s Buzz Lightyear? tableau. Why? Because they’re being hit with a single forceful FM: I came up with the idea as a parody of the Sterling Buck image rather than one that is asking you to move forward. That's Rogers type. Lance Blastoff as far as I know is the only super the real stuff, the joy of my craft: finding ways to

hero who has a hip flask. TTS communicate things that take a single M2: Concealed as a laser gun? ae , : moment. Things that perhaps, at the FM: [laughing] No, it’s just plainly a flask. start of my career I might have done M2: One of the things that has changed since the ona third of a page I'll now give ten 30’s is the way comic books are laid out. Reading pages, in order to really squeeze panels sequentially from upper left-hand corner to every ounce of value out of it.

lower right-hand corner has changed radically and you M2: Do you spend much time were a big part of that process. trying different layouts and FM: The music comparison is inevitable. You can go thinking “this moment from Bach to Jazz and see certain structures seemingly 4 needs to be bigger”? fall apart when actually new structures are forming. I | FM: Oh yes, all the think a fair number of my colleagues and I have yy | m® time. That's what | wanting to shove things around an see what . enjoy most. As

happens. As far back as the 40’s Will Eisner much as I enjoy the

was shaking things up. Though he generally craft of drawing— stuck more or less to three tier, he there really isn’t a played with ita lot. Hehad things 4 part of this job I run vertically up and down | don’t like except

and then later Jack Kirby ; . ae o/ Naw maybe ruling panel just made the pages oe oe ae borders, like boring—I explode. All of a sudden a work with a thick marker single image would be two pages on vellum just doing a wide. It’s an on-going process and I think the series of rough picture ideas more that’s attempted the more can be discovered. and I’ll work out an entire

M2: I think narrative techniques have become sequence. Perhaps I'll use one in ten

vastly more complex. If I Wy of the roughs that I prepared. I tend to do y that very fast though—it’s where I feel like

showed a contemporary

comic book to my mother I’m conjuring or something, just throwing

I don’t think she’d stuff at the page. Then I'll find a way to know how to read it. approach something that I haven't seen before, FM: Well, that can and it all becomes very simple. I’m probably happen. I work very -s\ \ being incoherent now.

hard to make my stuff as readable 2 M2: No, not at all. The representation of time as possible, but it’s a form in the comic book is fascinating. It’s visual that one has to learn. If and in many ways closer to the raw stuff people are only used to of consciousness than any other

the four panel newspaper medium. The symbolic immediacy strip they're going to be of comic books is something that in for some shocks. As other media can’t touch. I’m thinking you play with it, you discover that particularly of film.

FM: Film is just so damn literal. For one thing you use real people. It’s much more powerful than comics, there’s no competition there, but a comic can crawl inside your head better. I mean, a movie may shock but it will rarely stick with you for a long time. A comic, even a little Calvin & Hobbes strip, can be Sorc OEM Brsronllsm com Mere CE oerviemstelacm iy ocen dae form is much more the brother of prose than it is of film. I think comics have much more in common with prose. They really work on the deepest level, because they work much more inside your head. The drawings themselves can be illustrative and ornate but they need not be, because the reader is doing a tremendous amount of image making. Not just finishing the pictures in front of them but filling in all those little white gutters between moments. That's the beauty of the form, but it’s also part of what makes it very hard to practice. You're constantly playing a dangerous game with your reader. You know, will this connect, will it hit them on the right level and does it still make sense.

finding ways to

M2: It seems there’s a process of interpretation and communi- PECAN ECM aa CR Eee ume rat bT PRIYA Um ey RUT eCOLE (emacs wl oer

FM: I guess the thing I find so wonderful about comic form is that you're really in a situation of communicating with one person, but it’s also a visual experience. So the author is getting across the intimacies of something they wrote but it’s amplitied by the fact that you’re seeing reality interpreted by that person. Getting back to the Calvin & Hobbes example, I hope that Watterson continues not to let anyone touch that. I don’t ever want to see some little actor try to be Calvin. Calvin is that scribble.

M2: A very elegant scribble.

FM: Beautiful, beautiful work. I really think he’s the premier strip practitioner. I find his stuff remarkable; it’s such wonderful eye candy and it charms constantly.

M2: My aesthetic was profoundly influenced by the artwork you and people like Bill Sienkiewicz produced. pr = will be with me forever.

FM: [laughing] That's kind of fun. I look at the comics I grew up on, they were obviously about ten years before the ones you did, and they were like Jack Kirby comics. Since then I’ve researched the history of comics and I’ve got shelves of them; a whole history. The period from the 40’s to the 50’s is actually the peak of the craft. Unless you count Kirby in which case you've got to say the whole thing. He just kept recurring and eae ltesCOUVAnm aaa asisbites

M2: When did you discover Manga?

FM: I was first exposed to Manga by friends in my early twenties and I was just knocked flat on my back. It was a completely different interpretation of comic books and such a liberating one. Unfortunately, I

saw the best first. I saw Kojima’s artwork on Lonewolf and Cub.

M2: The stories themselves are just gorgeous, there’s something about that writing.

FM: One of the things I was really struck by

was the absolutely different sense of time. Things were allowed to breathe fully, whereas in the traditional American comic book the story is

just dripping off the pages; so many incidents per page. I’m talking about the traditional American comic book most people think of, with six panels per page and each panel has a shot of Superman pulling the earth on a chain or some-

thing. [laughs] A lot of what I’ve been trying to do with Sin City is play the American pace against the Japanese, so that every once in a while it speeds up and you get a lot of little panels with an awful lot happening. Then some little event will take four pages that would actually take place in a second. In the last Sin City I finished—Sin City: Family Values—there’s a scene where a man is hit by a car; I gave it six pages before he even hit the ground. He just tumbled through the air.

M2: Manga must have been a big influence in doing Ronin?

FM: I think that was really where it was the most immediate and obvious influence, because | was trying to draw like Kojima in the Samurai sequences. I think it’s Sin City where | actually internalized more of what really makes Manga work. With Ronin I was an extremely excited fellow who had discovered Jean Giraud and Goseki Kojima in the same year and wanted to imitate both at the same time.

M2: How do the two traditions compare?

FM: Both cultures have a tremendous visual history and they were taking very different directions. In Japan comics are a

| mass medium. In American they only sell briefly and don’t

belong in the mass media.

M2: In Japan you see businessmen on the bullet train...

FM: Reading fishing comics [laughs]... It’s a different history. We really went off the rails in the early 50’s. The juvenile

Monte 152] 2000

delinquency threat at the time—which was about as real as the current, deadly threat that’s resulted in having seventeen letters before a TV show—created a scare in the industry. Even when the U.S. i) Senate vindicated comic books, the comic book industry took it upon itself to do something about William Gaines’ Company, EC comics—which did Tales from the Crypt, the Crime Comics, Mad Comics etc. Gaines was outselling the rest of the publishers and they essentially conspired to shut him down. That's the whole rea- son there was a comics code for all those years... so that it would prohibit exactly the titles Gaines published. M2: That little shield in the corner of all those comic books... FM: It’s a badge of shame ... yeah. They shut down ) the best comic publisher in history. But you know, | ‘*\ William Gaines was a very smart fellow. He took little cae ‘*) Mad Comics, turned it into a magazine and did rather well for himself. |

M2: I’ve enjoyed hearing your thoughts on the medium.

FM: I’m always afraid of being incoherent when I start talking about that end of it. I mean, so much of my mind is spent there that I’m afraid I come back sounding like I’m speaking in tongues or something.

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FM: I think one of the reasons I found myself so entranced with the Japanese stuff is because as I studied it more, I studied the Japanese more. When I was there for a few weeks I came to realize how iconographic a culture they are. Of their two written languages, one of them is pictographic. The pictographs are kind of hard for us to sort out because they’ve become so stylized over time, but to me that was a real clue that there’s a common ancestor to both the word and the picture. In a lot of ways comics are an attempt to bring the two back together. So when people ask whether I like to write or draw © better, on some days I'll say I like to draw better, it’s more physical, but most days it’s like the two are really one thing.

M2: It seems like an unfair question. If you preferred one or the SS ERICA ROCA m meme Ce mCCORuo ite

books.

FM: Yeah. I’m not a novelist and I’m not an illustrator. I’d probably fail at either. So I’m glad I’ve got comic books.

M2: Thank God for comic books. FM: [laughing] I’ve spent a lot of my life saying that. [jz

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PART 1:

Oliver Stone: Hi Stephen. I’m sorry for the delay but it’s been a really crazy day. It's all Stanley Kubrick’s fault.

Stephen Beck: Now what did he do to you? OS: He’s been taking Tom Cruise for almost a year to make a movie. [laughs] I just had a meeting with Tom and it went on and on, we had so much to discuss.

SB: Rumor has it that Tom was really upset because Kubrick made him do 48 jillion takes of one scene.

OS: I don’t know. I didn’t talk about the gory details but he is very happy with the movie and with Stanley. These are tough questions you sent me!

SB: Tough questions, easy answers.

OS: Well, obviously there are too many questions, and your pieces are kind of short and punchy, aren't they?

SB: Yes, but you know how it is. You have to get a lot of ore to find a few nuggets.

OS: Well, maybe I can find five nuggets.

SB: I’m hoping to get some insights into your creative process.

OS: Getting inside my creative process is going to be tough.

SB: I’m reminded of the comment by the non-objective painter Wassily Kandinsky in his book On the Spiritual in Art. He wrote about the “inner necessity” which drives artists to create, to overcome the inertia of material and themselves to create the final work.

OS: Is this an interpretive piece or a Q and A? SB: Yes—I want to let you talk and then we'll edit the piece. I’m recording our conversation and once I've transcribed and edited the piece, I'll submit it to you for checking any quotes for accuracy.

OS: Run the quotes by me? Very good.

Then you write a little prologue for the piece? SB: Yes, I sent a draft intro down for your review.

OS: It was quite nice. It motivated me to do this interview.

SB: Your recent appearance at the U.C. Berkeley Journalism Symposium with a panel of academic and documentary filmmakers discussed the topic of fact and fiction, truth and reality in filmmaking... OS: Were you at the Berkeley symposium? They seemed to cut it off a bit early, just as the academics were warming up.

SB: If this had been Berkeley of the 60's we would have all been there talking until 2 o'clock in the morning.

OS: I agree. I think the panel was a little rushed, and many of the conclusions could have been developed more. Did you enjoy the show?

SB: Yes I did, and I was curious why you came up to Berkeley, into an academic forum, so to speak.

OS: Orville Schell, the Dean, is a friend of my former partner Janet Yang. He had asked me to help him out about a year ago so I said I would come up there one day. I like Berkeley, I respect Berkeley.

Did you hear about the commencement speech I gave there a couple years ago? It was a big forum with thousands of students and families, a big party on the grounds, and all these incredible coeds running around. SB: There are beautiful women all over Berkeley.

OS: Id never been to Berkeley in my life and there I was invited up to give a commencement speech. It was pretty heavy. I told a terrible Chinese joke at the start of the speech. I was just trying to be funny and it went over backwards, and the audience hissed me, so I had to overcome that to make the speech. SB: I missed that little incident.

OS: The Chinese joke was very funny, and Chancellor Tien talks kind of funny, if

you ve ever heard him. I was just trying to imitate his voice, to re-introduce myself because he had made some mistakes about facts in my life when he introduced me. But I didn’t realize that 85% of the crowd was probably Asian. So in trying to do a stupid accent imitation of him I pissed them off. It was so funny. I’m sorry.

SB: What do you know about Asian humor? OS: Well Chinese-born are much different to me from American-born and raised. There’s more political sensitivity here as opposed to a little more earthy, a little broader acceptance of humor there, which I associate with China.

SB: Is that one of the things which attracted you to Asia in the first place?

OS: You're asking me about 43 questions in a second here, and its hard to answer them in a nanosecond.

SB: Well, OK, let me slow them down.

OS: I can give you code words, code words. Yeah, Asia, it’s always been there. Since 1965 on it’s been in my life somewhere, but I never expected it to grow so important and be a part of my life.

I have an assistant who is Asian, and a Korean woman is the mother of one of my

MONDO [5 6] 2000

children. My recent business partner Janet Yang is Asian, and I have been involved with various businesses in China. I've lost a lot of money in China—actually that one I never told anyone before. [laughs] I lost some dough in China. | invested in a place. A lot of dough, a lot of money, a lot of my savings, after taxes you know. I was paying a large tax rate. I sunk a lot of savings over there, believing in future dreams. This was 3 or 4 years ago. And I’ve lost it all. Haven’t seen a dime of it.

SB: Do you think Asian culture is going to take over Western culture?

OS: Talk to me! I need to see your eyes. | don’t know if you’re registering this. I don’t even know if you are empathetic to my story. For all I know you are laughing at me and you re going to tear me apart.

SB: Well, I’m not here to take you apart. I’m empathetic to your story. I want to try to coax some interesting ideas from you. OS: A lot of people write negatively about me.

SB: I’m not a negative person. I’ve lost a lot of money in ventures too, but I’m still an optimist.

OS: I just don’t know. I’ve been fairly honest. When I talk in public forums I try to be honest, I expose myself and put myself in a position where I could get hurt. And some people have mis-used that and hurt me. What can I say? I guess it’s the price of traffic, right? Your toll ticket... but it can really be painful sometimes.

SB: The sensitivity of an artist is like a raw nerved exposed. When you bare your soul in your work and then you stick around to hear about it, it’s not always constructive or positive.

OS: The ultimate inequity is you put so much energy in over the course of making a film, a year or more of pure energy, it’s all your best, the best of yourself, you've poured it into something. You never get that molecular response in the Universe, karmically you will never have an equivalent to it, electron-wise, energy-wise, quantum- wise, nothing.

So how can you do it? Even the applause would seem thin, if it were applause. And the damning would seem damning, the damning, the damning! Damned in Paradise! That was a great title for John Barrymore’s life. [a book by Gene Fowler—eds.] ...It gets worse as you get older.

SB: I was hoping it got better.

OS: It gets worse in the sense that you're wiser, and you know more, you've had more experience. Asa result you distrust having a new experience because you don’t want to get hurt again. You get more wary.

Often a critic will say something, and I know he’s not really serious, because if he really thought about what he was saying, he wouldn't really believe it. That's my feeling. SB: What of your comments in the epilogue to your new book? You say that you are now trying to plant the seeds of joy. I thought that was very beautiful.

OS: Wait ‘til you read my book. If you call St. Martin’s Press you can get it this weekend. [ really want you to read it. Try to read it before Monday. It'll be a whole other conversation.

Publishing is another world—it’s like a 19th century movement. Herman Melville and Typee. Trying to move 10,000 copies is a major effort. They published 50,000 copies hardcover of my book A Child's Night Dream

which is very amazing for this kind of material.

You'll see.

SB: Readers would be fascinated with a work from your early life.

OS: But I modified it through the older framework so to me it’s acceptable now. They're saying things that embarrass me in there, and I’m a little bit ashamed, but you know I feel like, yeah, that’s the way I was, that’s the way I behaved. I really feel like I’m embarrassed by it, but at the same time I say, well, not really. It was you and that’s the way you were. That's the way you really thought. Well, you were a little sick in some ways.

I accept sickness because it was part of a process. I'm trying to make the book, make my past life work for me. That’s why I’m going back to your quote from Kandinsky. That’s where your energy comes from, a certain narcissism, and a certain absorption with your own self energy because you're using that energy to explode outward. Like meteors, like meteors going out.

The thing that destroys the creative man the most is criticism. Criticism breeds self- doubt ultimately, or too much of it, constantly, as a given. Then you will automatically doubt yourself. It does you no good at all. You need to keep that energy clean and pure. And where does it come from? It comes from the darkest deepest most fertile spot of

hen you arrive to replace me, be awfully sure the plastic robot is sapient, cold, pedantic, and if possible a coward.

the self—the mushroom. It’s a mushroom, it grows in the dark I guess.

And what happens is you've got to get it out and trust it. That's all you have to do. You have your blind self, it’s an instinct, and if you lose the instinct I believe you shit, I really do. Because I have been in both positions, both places. I took both forks.

SB: It's bad enough when the critics nail you, but when you know it’s bogus...

OS: Why do we have so many spear throwers in our culture? Why is there so much negativity? Why do we have so many commentators that have to say something awful about somebody? Percentage-wise, if you look at all the columns written all across the United States in every magazine, newspaper or Internet, bet you most of the juicy ones are negative.

SB: Is it the mechanism of the market or is it human nature?

OS: It’s true for me. Asa kid, when you study the classics, you study about human foibles and greed and desire, you read all that stuff from an academic point of view. But little did I realize then what I realize now, and that’s how much I under estimated the power of jealousy and envy in human life. Never got it until the past ten years! It’s another book. That's what all these negative emotions derive from.

SB: Does it derive from the underlying puritanism of American culture?

OS: I think we blame ourselves from the day we are born. Le Ly Hayslip said that to me in her book, from which I made Heaven and Earth. Redemption and the ability to forgive. She forgives those who hurt her, and that’s not a character you see very often in movies. Most characters get even and they go after somebody. In this case it’s spooky because we automatically assume the negativity in this culture.

Only if you've been outside this culture... I've had the good fortune that my mother was French and I was able to spend time in Europe and later in Asia. It’s a much softer clime in Asia, more forgiving between people.

In any strong Buddhist society, like Thailand, Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Viet Nam, parts of China, you would find a kindness that exists between everyday ordinary people that is really the engine of society. It’s the beauty of having a society really.

SB: The formality of politeness?

MONDO [57] 2000

OS: There’s a formality, but at the same time there’s a hidden part, things are not always out in the open. You're not on the Montel Williams show talking about your emotions, or your need for therapy—how you were psychologically abused—and so forth. There’s a lot of concentration on abuse in our society. You read about the father who beats up the child, or vice versa, but you don’t know about the successful ones, how many fathers are doing a good job? A lot of them. SB: Where are the heroes today? OS: I think it goes beyond that. The heroes are in everyday life—everywhere. You have to be blind to not see it, but most people are. There are teachers, nurses, doctors, they’re doing their job everyday making crucial decisions, people who are on the front line. It's going on all the time but we don't see it. School for example, seems like a war zone in movies because it’s more dramatic. And that’s the falsification of the movies because they tend to exaggerate the problem for dramatic purposes. You can accuse me of such in Natural Born Killers, but | didn’t feel that anyone had addressed that issue in the same way until then. SB: Well, I wouldn’t accuse you of anything. It's the most talked about film you’ve made in recent years. It’s a stunning piece of work. OS: It’s misunderstood. SB: All great work is misunderstood. Look at Galileo. The Pope threw him in prison because he was telling the truth. OS: Galileo! [laughs] Say, I’ve got to get toa wedding by six. Let's continue this Monday. You're coming down [ hope?

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The scene at Illusion Entertainment seems pretty mellow for a late Monday afternoon. Giant color posters of all of Stone's films hang on the walls: Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, Natural Born Killers, and Mixon most prominently displayed. A few pleasant, young film school types staff the office. A Chinese producer sits below several colorful action movie posters displaying Chinese movie icons, with one glass wall stretching out to infinity. The view of the Pacific goes almost to Asia. Wild palms sway along the Santa Monica escarpment, that 100 foot drop-off along the Pacific Coast Highway that separates the LA plateau from the rest of the world.

This is as far as you can go, final destination of the American dream. Go west young man, to LALA land. This is the edge, the end of the line, the bleeding, windward edge of the American Continent.

Here on the 6th floor, atop the westernmost office building on the West Coast, sits Command Central for Oliver Stone's dreamtrip machine, Illusion Entertainment. Headquarters for the Oliver Stone School of Film Making.

Praised and pilloried, lambasted by the press, Stone is one of very few movie directors to be “damned by fame”— to catch the public fascination in a Way generally reserved for actors.

Toss the script of prepared questions out the sixth floor window, check your weapons, labels or preconceived notions at the door and go with the flow.

This is Oliver UNMUZzZled.

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MONDO [58] 2000

Part 2:

[Stone is meeting with a production staff member about shooting the opening titles for U-Turn. Mondo 2000 is tuning in]

Oliver Stone: What do you mean if something goes wrong?! Like what could go wrong? STAFFER: What could go wrong is if there’s a problem when they shoot the titles and they fuck it up. These things can happen. OS: [to Steve] People don’t have any com- prehension that directing is mostly behind the scenes work. You get through the mix, you're at the lab, you spend hours and hours and you're tired.

The point is, by the time a movie comes out the actors are all rested and they always do what they want to do. But the director has been working very hard, editing, finalizing

seen and witnessed all since the beginning of time. And that perhay

skiers who get in the gate. They would come up the line, they’re like three away and get in the gate, and that was their moment. Then BOOM! They open the gate and you're down the course. Except that they didn’t tell you there were like fourteen people with rifles aiming at you as you're going down, with bows and arrows. And they throw fireballs out there too, barbed wire, and a lot of shit like that.

I'm still in love with dialogue. That's been one of my things. I love Chayevsky, love having speeches in my movies, great monologues. I didn’t put any monologues in U-Turn at all. The guy never stops one time to ask “Who am I?” or “What am I doing here?” It’s all kind of fluid. Sean Penn is a very fluid actor. He’s sort of playing himself here, or somebody close to himself. He did it without rehearsal. He came in fast. He replaced Bill Paxton within three days. He showed up the first day.

The first day I always shoot some road shots, and the guy had been up all night. It all takes place in 24 hours, the whole movie, and he’s supposed to be driving all night, and he comes into town and blows his radiator out, and that’s supposed to be the opening structure. And Sean shows up from LA totally wiped, he drove all night to Arizona. He’d been signed like three days before, and I think we made the deal about eight hours before we started filming, because he wouldn't start unless he had a deal.

s | am here on this earth to write

it looked like a little boat, and he used it during the shoot sometimes.

SB: Was this at your instigation or did he just do it to get into the mood of the character? OS: Oh, we were lucky to just make the deal. I was very concerned when Bill Paxton dropped out, and it’s true that Bill called me back and said he would do it if I couldn't find anybody. But it was scary for a while, I didn’t know if I had a movie or what—all that work, the whole cast and crew sitting around in Arizona. And you don’t want to make a movie with the wrong person either, so who’s gonna play your leading man when you're down to the wire?

SB: So how do you bear all this tension and still make a masterpiece?

OS: Thank you. [hope it is. But I knew I could play it myself at the end of the day! [laughter]

SB: Are you in U-Turn in one of your trademark cameo appearances?

OS: No, I never do that anymore. I’m too lazy because | hate wardrobe changes. [Mondo Photographer Tom Pitts takes his leave... . | Tom Pitts: Thank you for letting me take your picture.

OS: Sorry I was talking all the time.

Tom: I wanted to give you this book by Peter Duesberg.

OS: Oh, that’s all I need, more reading about AIDS. Jesus, what do you expect me to do? Tom: Well he’s saying that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS.

Ue a ea from Nexus by Henry Miller

the cut, right up to the release. We then have to go out and talk about the movie, we gotta defend it, it’s a thankless existence. People don’t realize that to be photographed on TV is a major pain in the ass. SB: So the director is misunderstood? OS: I don’t want to sound like I'm complaining about it because a lot of people think it’s a great job. But to go out and market the picture, that whole fourth phase of the movie business is the hardest for me, the most difficult. SB: Is it luck and timing, as much as skill and being ready for the moment? OS: Totally. That’s the problem. There’s so much media now written on movies, you feel like a heavily watched jockey by the time the film comes out.

Did you ever see the winter Olympic Games? | always feel nervous for those

It was one of those things, really loose. I don’t think he even knew what scene he was shooting. He was driving to this location in the middle of Arizona, right! And every- body, the production manager, are up at 4 o'clock in the morning, saying “Is he going to make it? He'll never show up. The guy blew it out somewhere!”

So sure enough at 6:23 AM or some- thing he comes rolling in in the fucking car, he gets out of the car man, totally wiped out, he’d been driving all night to get there. Did the cops bust him? I’m not going to say. So I say to him, “Why didn’t you take a fucking plane, Sean?” No answer. I was thinking “What kind of contraband did he have on him?” What would motivate a guy to want to have his car around? He had this really cool car

with big fins, a big, bad 67 Chevy El Camino,

MONDO [59] 2000

OS: Oh really? What causes AIDS then? Tom: He makes a really good argument that it was excessive drug use in the 70's by gay populations. And poisoning by drugs like AZT.

OS: So he says the immunity was let down by the drugs? What does he want me to do, get involved?

Tom: No, it’s just a gift from my friend Kurtis Van Quill. There’s a letter from him. And a pamphlet by Christine Maggiore. OS: I thought it was from Christine.

Tom: No. Kurt's writing an article about it for the next issue of Mondo. This is really important information.

SB: Thank you so much Tom. I think we got some spectacular images from up on the roof, the wrestling. Bacchus wrestling with nymphs or dryads, Eris and Persephone. [Exit Tom]

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SB: So tell us about your book, which you began writing when you were nineteen: A Child’s Night Dream. Where did it come from? OS: This book is about going through adolescence, going through the first major crisis in my life, first being conscious and being con- scious in a literary way, because I read a lot. So there’s a lot of big words but it’s fun, it’s done in a poetic kind of style. I would like to do an audio of the book. To me it reads best as poetry because there is a rhythm to it, a galloping kind of thing.

Gerard Manley Hopkins. Did you ever read his stuff? Well Eliot has his rhythm, Hopkins has his rhythm. In various chapters I have a different rhythm. Sometimes it’s like the rhythm of Eliot, of Hopkins. Sometimes of Tennyson, because I always admired Tennyson.

SB: “Dear Mom”— the book is dedicated to your mother?

OS: No, that’s just chapter four. It changes style you see. There’s a thread to the ae thing. I went back after thirty years a at the urging of this editor Bob Weil at St. Martin’s who really asked me to look at it because it was worth saving. So I took a huge mess basically, over 1200 pages—and I’d lost 500 or 700 pages or something—and | tried to give it a structure. So it starts with “America.”

None of this was set in any order you understand, there was no begin- ning, middle, or end. New York. Goes to Yale. America Farewell in 1965. Then it goes Land Across the Sea. It goes to Viet Nam, Saigon, then it flashes back to France, goes to a hooker in Bangkok who the protag- onist knows, and his name is Oliver Stone, but it’s sort of like a third per- son Oliver Stone to me. Like another person, another country. And then war, and then the interlude, there’s also fantasies he has, because all young men have fantasies. And then home. So it stretches mythologically ian se really. He ends up in the Merchant Marines, then he ends up in Oregon, then another fantasy, which is amazing, of his whole life. And then this chapter called Final Things, which is an interesting conclusion to this movie [chuckles|—I mean what's in this book.

SB: Movie? Are you thinking of making your book into a movie? Is it your Iliad?

OS: No, it’s not written like a movie at all. I did it because I had to do it. [had a strong passion at the time. A lot of my own work is in here. The desire for integrity, the search for God.

It’s a rough world, kiddo. None of us gets out of it alive.

—Oliver Stone’s father Lou Stone in A Child's Night Dream

[Looking over the book] I forgot I said all this. I’ve gotten a lot of letters from young people who told me that it had affirmed them in some way, because a lot of them are hungry, or how do you say, outside the norm. They don’t know if they are OK. That's a big thing when you are young. You don’t realize that a lot of other people are also going through a lot of pain and that helps you to understand that you are not isolated.

I was so isolated that I really was considered... sick. I damaged myself, I hurt myself unnecessarily in some ways because of my isolation. I took to negative thinking too much, and the energy was devoted to not believing I could ever be successful at anythine— which is part of the reason | went into the infantry, to disappear. SB: But you triumphed in the end. Your ability to put these feelings into words is a rare talent. Part of your work evokes these deep feelings in people which they don’t want to acknowledge.

OS: This is good here, what I said: [after telling his father he was dropping out of Yale... |

“My father was furious. He said ‘You’re going to regret this

for the rest of you life. What are you going to do with your

life? You're going to be a bum! You think you're a writer

but you're not.” [from Stone by James Riordan, p.38]

The joy, the true joy for any working person in this matter is the creation of something that is special, that people would just appreciate. It doesn’t have to be the most loved, it doesn’t have to win the Academy Award, it doesn’t have to be the best any- thing. It just is a good piece of work, like craftsmanship.

When you see a movie you just want to enjoy those two hours in the dark. It’s a dream world that you enter into. A covenant with other people, the people on the screen and the makers of the film, to go on a trip —[laughs]— it’s really simple. At the end of the day that’s what's beautiful.

Did you like the movie? [The Doors]... [looking at the photos in the Riordan book, of his son Sean and others] .. .look how fat he was!

nice pictures... I think Elizabeth

He’s much more beautiful now... gave them to him. Look how young Tom [Cruise] looks! [laughs] That's the wrestling scene [in Born on the Fourth of July]. Here’s a great shot [looking at a photo of him, his former wife Elizabeth and son

Sean]... it looks like a happy couple.

SB: It probably was at that time.

OS: It was.

SB: Happiness is very dynamic. If you can hold onto it you are very lucky.

OS: This is the real me. [Looking at two photos, one of him sitting at a manual typecoriter writing JFK at his Santa Barbara home, the other, directing, showing Gary Oldman how to die like Lee Harvey Oswald in JFK].

Here I am taking the hit, acting out Oswald. That's my life story: these two pictures. [now looking at picture of Stone clowning with Jack Lemmon and Ed Asner during JFK]

That was a great moment working with Jack Lemmon and Ed Asner, and Walter Matthau was in the movie. I had such a trip. | brought those guys back, ‘cause they hadn’t done the Grumpy Old Men series yet. That came after JFK, you remember. They hadn’t worked together in a long time, and I had seen them around and I

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just wanted to work together because they were such heroes to me and my father when I was young. All those Billy Wilder pictures with them were fabulous.

I got to meet Billy Wilder and he treated me like a fellow director. He was very sweet to me. I was very flattered. It was a few years ago and we used to have lunch all the time, and I would try to write down afterwards some of the things he said because they were so funny. So I have a pile of notes on Billy Wilder lunches [laughs]. I said to him one day maybe I'll write these up—Lunch with Billy Wilder —a brief book of essays, like 67 pages... [laughs]. Few people talk like that anymore, like Billy. [calls to Rob, staff member] We need two things here: A bottle of water and frappaccinos— they’re very bad for your diet.

SB: So what about visual language?

OS: I'd say it starts in the script. You and I are talking. Everything we are saying essentially is very interesting, to us in this moment in the first dimension because we are fascinated by the unpredictability of what's going to happen. But visually this is very static, probably a boring image—two people talking in profile at each other. How to make this interesting is a big challenge. I would go about it minutely.

I would first of all try to figure out, well the lighting’s not bad, but try to get some decent light going. And also we have some views out the windows. [sweeping views of a trademark Technicolor California sunset over the Pacific Ocean| Obviously, we have some sculpture, we have an office, there’s things to play off of.

But ultimately if it is going to work, we re gonna have to get to the words and the words would interpret for us. | would probably cut away to some of the concepts that are being illustrated. I might shoot, I could shoot this way [pointing into my facel, I could shoot over, I could shoot into, I could shoot your lips, your eyes, your nose, the way of your habits, your manner of talking. I could pull back to a wide and have the whole room, and have that effect, bouncing off. Some tight singles or else overs. Lalso havea choice. I could shoot low, shoot high, I could shoot over shoulder, I could cut across the axis and shoot across your shoulders that way [pointing in another direction]. So | could combine a shot of you this way, this way, and then I have it cut this way and that way. I could doa split screen.

What I’m trying to say is that I've given you about fifty options of how to shoot this very normally conventional scene. Too many directors I find just don’t look deep enough into their vision. A lot of directors are paying lip service to the plot, too. We all do. We have to keep the thing structured in a way that comes home and resonates. People just historically will not go too far adrift. They won't drift too much without having a feeling that they're going some- where, that there’s a thread. I personally enjoy mood films to some degree, I drift on them. But the mood has to be in tune with what I want too.

SB: Are you saying that the most interesting aspect of a scene is the controlled uncertainty?

OS: That’s what Kubrick got. When I was growing up | felt that in the movies. Everybody else would shoot pretty conventionally, but when I saw Godard or Kubrick, in that period when I was studying film with more intensity, there was an unpredictability about Stanley Kubrick. Even when | was a kid, I didn’t know what he would do next. It’s a wonderful feeling, it’s a very powerful thing. How do you recreate that unpredictability?

It’s the way Kubrick looks at reality. His reality is supercharged. Some people say mine is very intense, too—no matter what | do it’s intense. I could try to make a comedy and it would still be intense.

SB: Intense Comedy. OS: That's a good title. Some people will say that U-Turn is an intense comedy.

I guess it leads back to: Respect the moment very much. Everything is sacred inasense. There is no conventional moment, only that your mind will let it be conventional and turn it into an ordinary two shot. [ hate that because you get into the editing room and I spend a lot of time working on a film and seeing it over and over again. The boring stuff always goes, it doesn’t last. It’s shallow. I could be wrong sometimes. My films have had every accusation, but rarely of being boring.

It's always working at something and you realize that it’s working at something, it’s provoking you. And that’s the result of much refinement actually. Because you have to really intensify through those ideas. You have to live with the film for a long time as a director and editor. You are in there for an intense six months, and if some- thing is phony in there it will bother you

MONDO [61 | 2000

until the day you remove it from the film. You may not realize it—subconsciously it’s been phony. It finally takes the eighth screening perhaps to say that's what's been bugging you, you never bought that. Then you pull it out and you have to start over.

So it’s a process of refining your own thinking—and that's not just verbally but also visually. Sometimes you think something is verbally brilliant but unfortunately it’s not playing because it wasn’t done right visually.

A director’s job is never done. You could always do better. I guess the best director would have really, really thought through intensely every moment of the film, like Hitchcock supposedly did, and could just go right to it. But Kubrick takes a year to make his last movie and does fifty takes, so! And I know a lot of directors shooting, like James Brooks—he is very talented but I bet you he does a lot of takes. And Warren Beatty was infamous for that. So there is always room for analysis.

You can analyze something to life, or sometimes, unfortunately, to death. SB: Death. Death and women. Death and Sex. Are they all related in your work? Don’t the French have a saying for orgasm—lIa petite mort? OS: Do they? It’s a beautiful expression— too bad Americans don’t have anything like that in their language. The small death, the lesser death, the smaller death, the little one before the big one.

a SSS a a Ta

SB: How do you continue to maintain the momentum of your film making?

OS: I use the momentum to create more momentum. I had a good run of ten or eleven good years, and I made eleven movies. They were all tough movies, tough to get made, tough to finance, and ambi- tious. I’m glad I did it. And I knew at the time that it was a rare thing.

If you get the power from one movie, then use it. You will never feel right in yourself unless you use it to make some- thing even more difficult. I’m glad I used the power I had when I had it, because they are very fast to take it away.

They're always chipping away at you, gli telling you that your last movie didn’t Yep: make money, or this or that. They're always trying to put the negative : something. So I've gotten an eno | amount of hits in the last ten yea :

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If I put it together in a computer—I might do that one day—it would be a tremendous cubic psychic energy that was launched to destroy me, to destroy my thinking. Very negative.

I didn’t realize, I underestimated the power of jealousy, the power of envy, I really did. It was a big mistake. But you learn as you go.

[had a run, I did it. I took the success of Platoon and I was able to make Born on the Fourth of July which was smart. And a business movie called Wall Street. I took the amazing success of Born—thank God for Tom Cruise’s involvement—and I turned that into a one-two hit, The Doors and JFK.

Now JFK was an impossible film to have made. Three hours with a very high degree of dialogue, at a cost of $40-some million dollars. And it got done with a huge cast, a cast that worked for pretty much very little, except for Kevin [Costner]. And we did the movie, it worked, and that was amazing. | thought it would blow out at that. I did the right thing.

A lot of people I know, they get a success and they want to go out and make a more commercial picture. They’re not really doing the work for themselves. They're doing it because they want to please their masters, or they feel like they're on a roll, and they don’t want the luck to end by having cold dice. Well, everybody gets cold dice once in a while. It’s how you handle it after that.

SB: When Talk Radio came out it wasn’t commercially successful. OS: [quick to interject] It was cold but I moved on quickly to Born. It was a small film, made for $2 million. It got hurt the most.

I more or less used the JFK thing to make Nixon, which is an amazing thing to have made because it is a three hour political biography. It’s serious, it’s complicated, and it didn’t make any money. The dice went cold. Partly because I think the character, the subject matter of Mr. Nixon is cold. They’ve hammered him, that was part of the problem.

The dice went cold, but I did a good thing with the dice, I played them, and I got two political pictures done that are antipodal. One's a biography, one’s a search for the what history is—a tearing apart of the so-called reality veil. So they both got made, and that’s an amaz- ing run I’m telling you. I mean I can’t complain.

Heaven and Earth, unfortunately, didn’t do anything commercially either, and that really hurt me because | really put a lot into that.

SB: Heaven and Earth is a very spiritual film and it brings tears to your eyes when you watch Le Ly’s struggle unfold.

OS: I still cry when I see that film. It’s just beautiful. People say I dislike women—I love women! I mean Heaven and Earth... what do I have to do? I love that story! I love that woman!

SB: But your films will live forever, so despite its initial commercial failure, imagine audiences 30 or 40 years from now. The real excitement over some of your films may not come for decades. You might not be around to see it.

OS: How sad.

SB: But look at what happened to Van Gogh.

OS: Yeah, I wanna live like Vincent. That was a hard life man. What I'm saying I guess is a little bit like I’ve got to be a warrior. I realize that—really tough. You do get scalded alive here. Not only does the work get criticized, but often it is ignored or dismissed.

SB: Which is worse?

OS: Both. Both are bad. Heaven and Earth was ignored and dismissed. But a lot of people would still come up to me and say “that’s the

most beautiful film ever made, the most spiritual.” It’s a Buddhist film actually, it really is in its spirit because it reflects her spirit, Le Ly.

The spirit of forgiveness, that was the beauty of it. I had thought “great story” because all western movies generally relate to revenge, to getting even. This girl, she took a lot of shit, but she won, she beat ‘em. But how did she beat them? She beat ‘em really by forgiveness, that’s how she beat ‘em. She didn’t beat ‘em by doing well, she didn’t beat ‘em by writing a book, she beat ‘em by being able to accept those people who would hurt her, in her heart. And in her heart say “I forgive you and I wish you well. And I thank you for having taught me these lessons because in their own way they opened my eyes to myself.”

That’s a tough message to sell in a western society. That’s why the Tommy Lee Jones character commits suicide. He commits suicide but in a weird way. He also becomes Buddhist in that he seeks the spirit. The little Wizard character then comes and tells her that he is still around, that he’s checking it out. He dies naked which is a very Buddhist method.

SB: Yes, you quickly cut back to that image for a second glimpse, as if to ask the viewer, “Are you sure of what you saw?”

OS: People notice. It only does $6 million or whatever, which is an art house gross. The point is, the film does get seen and certain people will really get it deeply. People like you, you saw it, you got it, and you relate.

SB: How can you judge what is a failure at that moment?

OS: You know what a failure is? When you know you sold it out, you know you didn’t do it, you didn’t complete it, you just didn’t give a fuck. I know, it happens to directors, I’ve seen it. But it hasn’t happened yet on these eleven films. Is it eleven or is it twelve? I forget already—in a row.

U-Turn is a new period in my life, having passed fifty. My book is out. That took a lot of time. I took six months off after Nixon to edit the book and to put it back together and to do some revisions here and there.

SB: As I scan the book, there it is again, death and women. Your portrayal of the harlot as temple. Is there any hope in this culture? OS: I think we have to take the bargain we got. We were born into a highly privileged society. America. Volatile. Dynamic. Fun. Tremendous copy as well as fun to ride the seesaw. But the deal is we re puritanically split, that was always the deal. At the very beginning the Puritans got control, and they were always fighting from the get-go in American history. Prohibition is a disaster. Prohibition was a disaster for this country, and the Puritans put that one through. And it really led to a lot of the modern corruption and organized crime.

And the sex laws—the feminists missed the point in my opinion. They're always rappin’ for equality for women, but they don’t under- stand that behind it is sexuality, and it’s the American, the Anglican view, of sexuality that has rerouted women. Here we are not sexually communicating the right way. People are not fucking enough, basically, and they are not fucking the right way.

The women aren't getting off and neither are the men. A lot of American men—I really feel sorry for them—they don’t get enough sex. They get a lot of that Playboy fantasy sex—virtual and cyber sex is very popular—but they’re not getting the real thing. They need a

I'm that way. | travel alone and | am so blind that | am not able or willing to differentiate between people, for they are all the same to me, creatures to be met, interrogated, and left behind. | am a lodestone without polarity, the mathematician who has reasoned out the odds and decided against. There is forever

MONDO [64] 2000

little more Kama Sutra in their lives. The bed is 54 or 69 positions— whatever they say it is—it really is. You can have a great orgasm and you can have fun and you can fuck and you don’t always have to fuck the same person to feel good, I mean you can too—but you don’t have to.

So it’s like dope. Talking about freedoms and permissions we allow ourselves. Thank you very much but I don’t need some government to tell me what my joy can be or not. But we do accept those traditions now. Our forefathers cut a deal. We live in society, therefore we put up with condoms and with the laws of sexuality which put many of us behind bars—for drugs and sex. We have so much violence because we don’t have good sex.

SB: You open JFK with Eisenhower's 1960 farewell to office speech warning the country to watch out for the military/industrial complex. OS: Eisenhower is an interesting man. He went through a lot. He was hardly a liberal. He was an extremely conservative man. So why would he stop after eight years of basically a victory? He'd won, he got out, he had done the game totally. He had achieved everything that Doug MacArthur, his one time chief, had wanted to and failed. He’d become everything that George Washington would have dreamed of. He was a George Washington figure in many ways.

But Dwight was at the heart of much of that National Security State shit and saw it first hand. Why would he stop after eight years? Why would the most profound wisdom he could pass on to us be that statement? Because he saw something coming that was far worse that he knew was BAD for the country. And that’s what makes him a fundamentally decent man. [laughs]

My dad was right about him. And of course the apologists, all those people like the regressives of the world, they said “He didn’t say that. He really meant that...” They always come up with another meaning for what he said. But it’s not true, that’s what he said. He warned us. Period. He warned us about a group of men and companies and corporations that would endanger our freedoms. Period.

SB: Are you saying the image streamers, the media corporations control us? You have said that whoever controls the memory of a nation controls its destiny. Why are people shown the images they are? OS: Actually JFK was one of the first pictures to go after the media. Chayevsky’s Network did too, and was effective I thought, but some- how was embraced more by the media. You can’t watch that movie without asking, why didn’t the press do something? It’s a naked finger in their face.

SB: It’s reached the point where you've become so iconized that in the movie Conspiracy Theory the Mel Gibson character rants about you and your conspiracy theories, and that you worked for the CIA and George Bush, and that “they” still let you make those films, even though you know so much. Are “they” now propagating misinformation about you as such an icon?

OS: [with a frown on his face] They got onto that right away. If you notice how ridiculous the media has gotten, how desperate to say that Oliver Stone-believes-that-Elvis-is-alive, that’s basically what they are saying. They've lumped us all together.

I would go the other way and say that you have to be a troglodyte or dinosaur to stand by the single bullet, the single assassin theory, given all the evidence that has come in. Not to doubt it would make you either a fool, a moron, a retard, or else a conspiracy person—a conspiracy against allowing the truth to come out.

el

OS: You asked what am I going to do next. I don’t know. It’s going to slow down a little bit. I’d like to do something major. See, it’s a question of energy. | just can’t bang it out like I used to. I mean it’s too much. Part of the energy comes from being new and being unexpected. They don’t know what's going to come next, it’s a surprise. But unfortunately a lot of that element is robbed, denied me, because I’m always being watched, and labeled and categorized. It’s a drag.

So avoiding categories is part of the game, camouflage is part of the game, never signaling too much, being smart, talking one game, going the other way. What's that famous strategy in Sun Tzu: The Art of War. You know, you kind of get the eye going that way and then do that. [cross-pointing with his eyes and fingers] Fooling the eye.

Every project I would try to develop would get around. I would normally be developing four, five, six things at one time. Sometimes you're writing it, or another person’s writing it, but it takes time, a year, two years. Well, of course with me they announce everything within a week. Like I'm doing this movie, it makes national headlines, you know. But they don’t realize that this is like an R&D business, too. You research and develop ten things, and then you come down to producing only one. No one takes that into account.

I get letters from all over the world ona continuing basis. “Oh, I hear you're doing this story of, ah, Houdini. I knew Houdini.” “T hear you're doing the story of every single man in jail for-any-kind-of-noble-reason.” —I've gotten a letter about it. It’s unbelievable, I can’t answer all the mail, I can’t deal with it. There’s just too many people out there who are hungry for justice. They see me as a justicier—a man who seeks justice—some- body who can do good. I have prisoners write me with awe, like I have such power. “You can do a movie and get me out of here and change the whole world.” People look to you with big hopes.

I have so little power because as you know the studio heads have the real power. Directors, we're just gladiators in the arena and if you lose a couple of films in terms of financials, they'll slaughter you. They like to two-thumbs down you, man! [growling] “Stone is over the hill. It’s about time it happened to him, man. This guy is good

for nothing. I'm glad he failed.” All that ugly stuff. It’s another game.

The point is I guess, less energy. Make it count more. You gotta be smarter about it. So you take your energy and you get ready and when you go—I mean I'd like to do something BIG. I'd like to do something that I can maybe go out on and say “this is the last film I do.” That this is the ONE. I'd really like to do something that sums up everything I stood for, if can, at the turn of the century. Whatever.

Then go to Asia all the time, full-time [laughs]. No I'd come back here. I like the States, I like the energy. I get it.

SB: Here you're on the edge of the Pacific... OS: I’m often over there—also Europe, my third choice. I’m not including Australia. [musing] I don’t know if I'd consider

Australia a choice. [fz

Webography http://globetrotter.Berkeley.edu/Stone “Conversations with History” interview May, 1997, by Prof. Harry Kreisler of Berkeley’s Institute for International Studies

http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/Stone/ stone-grad1.html Berkeley Commencement speech of May 1994

jaobrien@mindspring.com Fan email

Sy ar TY A Child’s Night Dream by Oliver Stone; 1997, St. Martin’s Press, NY

STONE: The Controversies, Excesses, and Exploits of a Radical Filmmaker by James Riordan; 1995 Hyperion, NY

Killer Instinct

by Jane Hamsher; 1997 Broadway Books, NY Tall-tale, tell-all told by a former co-producer of Natural Born Killers

Pert ar

Oliver Stone - Inside Out

Directed by Joel Sucher & Steven Fischler (1992) available from: The Cinema Guild 1697 Broadway, New York 10019

tel. 212-246-5522 fax. 212-246-5525

MONDO [67] 2000

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based on what the truth might be. They can’t do that because of all the secrecy. So there are some folks now who represent another view. They're very interested in a new open system for both information gathering and dissemination. | was involved in the efforts to get them on the web. You can’t imagine how resistant they were to that.

RU: They do have a web site...

PB: They have a web site and it’s chock full of good stuff. If you want to get the latest maps of politically boxy regions like the Balkans, that’s the place to go.

Anyway, they're interested in declassifying also. And there’s a lot of resistance. The problem is that the whole process of declassification involves shortening the length of so many bureaucratic penises. Inside that system, the way you enlarge your dick is to have the capacity to declare as much stuff secret as possible. The actual sensitivity of the information is far less relevant than your ability to declare it sensitive. And you can imagine what kind of mentality that breeds. One of them said to me, “What we're trying to do is determine reality”.

50,1 got into the nerve center of the CIA. You'd imagine some kind of James Bondian reality... massive parallel computing with the entire world’s information and all this secret stuff. But the nerve center of the CIA is five analysts sitting around a

aie! pene in felace oe . oe oe Sa little poe — S ine advanced. But no nes

have nailed is satellite systems. They have developed some sophisti- cated systems. They’re taking pictures from space with resolution down to the size of a cigarette pack. The problem is that they have all this information and they don’t have any capacity to render it intelligible. They evaluate their effectiveness by how many images they have. So what?! It’s like how the Soviets used to evaluate the success of their programmers. They'd weigh the computer chips. [/aughter]. They focused so thoroughly on the other side for so long, they became it. There’s an old Arab proverb, “Choose your enemies well; for you will eventually become them.” That's precisely what happened. The pictures on the wall in the CIA are of scenes inside Russia. Even the wallpaper in some places

are old maps of Moscow!

RU: Another g group ‘ak ae Cs JPB: Yeah. They’ re socially oe ea re Paranoid.

“possibly be ina society that isn’t really very straight. -

L re ncreasinglyu una in se _ They're the kids

They’re too smart by half, and they're as straight eu can :

RU: Militia-type publications have been claiming that thee :

this fifth column i in the CIA that’s been shoe information — RU: a have that anti-terrorism bill... _

In | 1, and that includes en under the wire a that people

G Ofeedom i in Teh ina ‘way ee ver makes the oils _ And people don’t know about it. Because it's not the O, J. trial.

on corruption in politics and using it to blackmail

corrupt politicians. And this is why so many of them have been quitting. Do you know anything about this? JPB: I’m not privy to this, but I “. “s believe it more ==" or less. I think «it’s one of the reasons that Clinton has been ‘so spineless. It’s because they've got him in a lot of ways. - ll tell you something. ~ When I was around the White House petitioning against the Clipper Chip ‘(government-sponsored _ encryption scheme to eliminate freely available _ strong public encryption),

JPB: A beautiful case in point. They pass an anti-terrorism bill after an incident that might have been caused by the federal government! I’m not paranoid enough to think that they actually blew that plane up in order to keep their jobs, but I’m getting there. You just have to ask yourself: Who benefits? Who is going to reap the most from these incidents? It’s the obsolete cold war state. That's a lot of people who need to make their car payments. They don’t want to quit working. They have to have a justification for being employed And it’s not out of the question that some of those people figure they'll produce a justification.

RU: We’re never going to figure out what's going on. It’s gotten too complicated. We’re never going to know who killed Kennedy, because we're into such a media babel. If you proved who killed Kennedy, there would still be enough disinformation around to raise public doubt. Nobody can get to the bottom line on anything.

JPB: There are so many wheels within wheels within wheels... Also, the way that information is managed inside the governmental apparatus is so compartmentalized. Everybody’s sitting on their own little pile of information. There's no way even within the system to gain access to any large percentage of it. I don’t care if you re the head of the CIA, there’s an awful lot of information that you can’t get to.

RU: I thought about that when John Deutch was denying that the CIA was involved with cocaine. Everybody on the street knows that the CIA has been involved in drug dealing all along... .. because you know somebody who got mixed up with — 4 down

a) Winter 1979 Bar Cross Ranch, Barlow fills the hay-sled with bales to feed the livestock. b) Tools of the trade. c) At -40F these hungry Herefords huddle in the New Fork River Valley. d) On the Farm School in Massachusetts 1996. e) Bar Cross _Land & Livestock entrance to Barlow’s ranch f) Pinedale (Pop. 1181, Elev. 7175) Barlow’ s home town. g) Barlow always does things in a big way (stack built by Steve Kromer, It'll Do Custom Stacking Co. h) Barlow trapped by his hay-stacking sweep 1987, Sublette County, Wyoming. i-j) Everything’s broken, all the time. Replacing a differential in a ‘47 International Harvestor, when the nearest part store is 250 miles away, is all part of a day’s work. k) Barlow, Ken Kesey and Jon Mcintire do Dylan and the Dead, Eugene, OR, Summer 1987. |!) November 1996, pre-coffee preparing for an Election Day speaking engagement. m) Backstage at the Dead, Oakland Coliseum, New Year’s 1990.

MONDO eto) 2000

‘the effect deviates fer th the intention. Tt S noe as sif the story’ 5. : connected to the writer.

“NEWT MORNING | , RU: Ihave a very unpleasant subject to bring up... Newt Gingrich. You've said some nice things about him. So what is there to like? He wants to hang drug users in the public square. He’s helped to increase the military budget. He | _tried to censure Torricelli when he brought out revelations | about CIA torture in Guatemala. I could go on and on... | JPB: Gingrich is another one of those faces where the balloon he has over his head, the great virtual myth, is greatly at variance ___ with the guy himself. And the characteristics of that balloon — have to do not so much with the policies of belief, but the - | policies of belief that he remains silent about, because he’s trying to hold together an incredibly shaky coalition. He’s holding together two halves of the Republican party that hate each other. The party consists of fundamentalist authoritarians and laissez faire libertarians. And there are some things they _ agree on about limiting the size of the government andthe — JPB Well, really there’s a balancing between the Deadheads and | -uselessness of the welfare state as it’ s been constructed. Ina a the Dead. The lighter and more loving things became out front — sense, he’ s tryin among the Deadheads, the darker and more twisted they became he backstage. There was a great sacrifice involved in making that thing go on. After Brent died, the way they dealt with that was so callous and unfeeling. Towards the end, the range of emotional

RU: He’ 8 ‘font oe te all the rdeeedual rights-busting . Dagpnian crime bills... the a es ae aes

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‘Tt’s a lot safer there.” And Garcia ae “Man, if | could do that I would. But, unfortunately, I’m strapped in here.

ae Aad ‘he said,” “af T did what was seit under these They’re all enormously sensitive as individuals. But they circumstances, | Nas Lie aoe oo allowed themselves to become part of a beast that was dark and ee a ~-eold and absolutely heartless. I mourn the Grateful Dead. Ilament _ that I will never have one of those epiphanies that periodically — occurred at a Grateful Dead concert. But things had gotten SO. _ bad that it was time. :

MONDO aa 2000

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They had gotten used to living in very plush circumstances. They never stayed anyplace but a Four Seasons Hotel. There was a lot of ironically plush living. I can’t cast any stones; I was as much a beneficiary as anyone else, and I was delighted by it. It’s there, you take it. There was such a strong cultural impetus against judg- ment and moral imperatives, that it ended up creating a kind of moral vacuum. So there was no awareness of a point where irony crosses over into gross hypocrisy.

RU: How do you locate that line? JPB: I think there’s a lot of truth in that Dylan line “to live outside the law you must be honest.” I’m one of the least judgmental people I know. You have to fuck up pretty magnificently before I'll be incapable of finding some extenuating circumstance to get you off the hook. But I do try to have my own personal morality. It’s about how you treat people, basically. I don’t require that other people share my values, but I do require that I have my own. And they’re pretty straight in some ways.

RU: I heard a hysterical story about the Grateful Dead and Bob Dylan heading to Jerry’s funeral. Do you want to tell that story?

B: Dylan is the strangest little creature. He’s one of those characters that the holy prankster god decides to channel itself through. Further proof that God has a sense of humor. Because it never picks the worthy. It always picks the least likely candidate for the job. And Dylan is inspired, but he’s a peculiar little guy. So we're all headed over to Bob Hunter's house after the funeral. I'm driving a rent-a-car, and getting directions from Weir, who was in kind of a strange state. He had been hit unbelievably hard. And he’s not all that great at directions even in the best of circumstances. And Dylan is in a chauffered limousine behind us. He’s following our lead. And Weir's sending us up all these blind alleys and cul-de-sacs. There’s a lot of turning around and going in the other direction and hand waving. Dylan is starting to radiate unhappiness. When Dylan is unhappy, you can feel it two blocks away. And I was thinking, I don’t care how weird

MONDO [82] 2000

this guy is, he’s still the great Bob Dylan and he thinks I’m a complete fuck up. Because he’s assuming that since I’m driving, I’m responsible for all this. So I’m pretty embarrassed. Anyway, we finally went up one of those extremely narrow Mill Valley streets and got into a really narrow spot where it was obvi- ous we weren't headed the right way, but the only way we could turn around was to angle ourselves into this driveway. So I'm thinking everything is fine and I drive forward. What I don’t know is there’s a drop off—some stairs that lead down to somebody's house. And I drive right off this thing. And suddenly the front wheels are pawing air. Everybody in the back seat jumps out and suddenly the car goes boing! and all of it’s wheels are off the ground. And it’s poised there, teetering back and forth, and threatening to cascade down into these people’s front door. We don’t know what we're gonna do. We're blocking the street. Cars are coming down. We're all in the street in total distress. Dylan comes out of his limousine, and the look on his face was so disgusted.

So I said, “Look, if we all get together here and grab the front end and shove it back while somebody else puts it in reverse, it’s possible that we could shove it back along the frame where the front wheels are lifted and pop it back out. So this is what we did and it worked like a charm. | mean, the whole thing didn’t take but three minutes. We were in this complete Mongolian clusterfuck one minute and out of it the next.

Of course, Dylan wasn’t about to be part of the team that popped the car out— there were six or seven guys, some of them passersby trying to get past us down the street, so it was an odd collec- tion of folk. But the moment we were reaching out to make this great effort and push the car back out of danger, I turned around and there was Dylan about five feet behind us with the strangest smirk on his face. It was the only time I’ve seen the little asshole smile. So as soon as we got the car up and out, I looked to see what his reaction was. And he immediately spun on his heels and was headed back toward his limousine without giving us the grace of any appreciation. Jz’

Photos by Jill Posener

KATHY ACKER

TRIBUTE

1 he depth of Kathy Acker’s legacy is hidden from view. Like the treasure in her last ereat novel, Pussy, King of the Pirates, it

might be too complex, amorphous, perverse, alive,

to be clearly defined. The labels— “sexually transgessive postmodernist” “the original literary riot grrl’”—can only hint at the rich texture of her body of works. At once bracingly intellectual and utterly elemental—Acker wrote from her cunt and from her dreams, crafting worlds full of signs and portents, deep resonances, sensory triggers, potent currents. What I’m saying here, and what the official lit people have not been able to tell you because it’s outside the world of lit, is that Acker was a magician. She lived as a magician and she died, controversially, as a magician. Critics and commentators emphasized her raw punk sexuality, her in-your-face radical impatience with bullshit, her feminist anger. And while all that was a vital aspect of her personality, its function in her work was to whip up the energy for the first cause—to use storytelling Reece ene nr seme Come ON Cece oentcee

postmodern urban campfire grrl voodoo wherein

characters (ex)changed skin, gender, temporal and physical location, and personal histories. Bits of appropriated text functioned as evocations and invocations for a ceremony that was wholly of her own making.

In all of this she is similar only to William S. Burroughs, who was also primarily involved with magick. They appear as twin avatars of the nomadic urban modern primitive tribes, making unsentimental-yet-poignant storybook lives out of the detritus of brutal, end-of-the-century hypercapitalism—Burroughs’ wild boys and Fa Comm ial Ce mcate ce

Acker died as she lived. Rejecting bureaucratic Western medicine, she consorted with magicians, healers, shamans, nutritionists, brujos, and psychics. This process didn’t cure her cancer (as she deluded oars ernicon ec Ccastamublaiarimerl ccm iomecioe Hers was not the path of designer dying—she spent a year in defiant denial. She took that rage and those fears to explore her core etiology—early woundings and the certain knowledge of her own freakishness. The fruit of that final ferocious encounter with herself is Requiem, the libretto for Pus cer aae) oe

Her legacy? The libretto of her life, a new kind of picaresque heroine—tunny, feisty, fractious, and

able to own her own hormones. Jf2 ——R.U.Sirius

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ee paradigm. I was interested in “new physics, which led to consciousness pres which led to free energy research. .

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Biv car was new physics thinking received at the iste LeCO UM Ome Lita Lae Leg BO: Not well received. When I was at Princeton a most - common topic of discussion was how ridiculous links to the Se oclenognlAacae Wem (cater itcictitar ce Ae eRormt faculty with some very prestigious people: John Archibald Wheeler, Henry Vigner, who later substantiated those very links. My interest went beyond traditional physics, and there is traditionalism even within new physics. wm. New physicists do acknowledge that consciousness does play a role in the ME LoeelAIVoe CGentkele carom cae but most of them stop there. They Yebeuim dar ladita cee cm er ietelo cos in quantum physics, and those paradoxes can only eNO Mice My atk oe , cise of consciousness. But there’s much more to that story. To the . story of particles being influenced by

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BO: For example the experiments of Bob Jahn at Princeton, Robert Jahn. His paetsebeites tem aig random event generators, influenced by observers in tepeatable ways, which then Acco Ces th ebeten oT oye

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BO: I’m unaware of whether that distinction was considered. These were devices producing binary sequences, ones and zeros, at a ai rapid rate. A test subject would come in and focus on a specific event. UCR s MM leC lei ne-Le(e Momsen Maecal ccm Corrected hy significant. There were also ways of amplifying these results: Bonded couples. Groups working together...

PCR aC RICE ec lae rl mmc Nem ORt mag Rumen te litt BO: Tremendous resistance. Bob Jahn was almost kicked out of Princeton for presenting his results. Almost like John Mack at Harvard, the psychiatry professor who came out with UFO abduction material. But this has happened throughout history: Galileo's colleagues refused to look through his telescope; the French Academy of Sciences in the seventeen hundreds refused to acknowledge meteorites existed, because rocks can’t fall out of the sky; the journalist who covered the Wright Brothers flight, the original one, was fired from his position, because heavier than air machines can’t fly. When we look at concepts like free energy and consciousness research...

M2: And the two are inextricably linked, in some way...

BO: Yes, oh yes. The new paradigm is ready to come through. As Bertrand Russell once said: the resistance to a new idea increases by the square of its importance. And if you talk about a two trillion dollar a year energy infrastructure worldwide that will be supplanted by a whole new technology, we are talking about tremendous resistance, tremendous change. There is no question that these things are really Meyers atees

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PLUMB omeKesarmeccoenencctatescn Caen cael these tenured faculty, who, if they're going to accept these new premises, would have to totally reevaluate the significance of their Mata e

BO: Exactly. The materialist paradigm is the basis of it all and the ADR MTS CMLs wee elem vevam aon astccceaiaoassenencet Memo oetam-vele meee Cri tstce

PR eee atie em locaniiree OM aie Reicha golem este t cee BO: Beginning to fund, yes. Up until now, in this country, it has been very competitive, very suppressed, not acknowledged, but I think that’s going to change very soon...

M2: The Japanese are funding... Ss

BO: The Japanese are funding to the tune of, I believe, one hundred twenty million dollars a year. The Toyota Corporation is funding Pons and Fleischman, the cold fusion inventors, to the tune of ten million a (cleus as Reo brag ye cccic-tca tevatemelexr-]oyeventoul@ CAM occ tmcO Rp oyeseccic There are so many stories of inventors like Mark Comings and others, who have been suppressed, whose devices have been confiscated by the Department of Defense, under the Secrecy Act. If the D.O.D. construes a device to have defense applications, they can confiscate the device and Orem SIN m avo meio aoiela- cre

These changes are profound. We’re talking about

monvo [93] 2000

OA oa etme were lm racy t , BO: Yes, I was an astronaut in the Apollo program in * 1967 and was appointed to go to Mars, when that was still in NASA’s program plan.

M2: Did NASA fall under the purview of the D.O.D.?

OMEN a eO Cr Rens netoa am cke bam Ce Oat: open civilian exploration of space. They have since been swept up in the vortex of the D.O.D.

M2: Were you made privy to D.O.D. information as to the potentiality of zero point technology? BO: I wasn’t. But that was thirty years ago—

I wasn’t interested back then. I wasn’t pursuing It.

OAV Bim rem cirartcire Osim yuereR (aan applications of technology? BO: Increasingly, I’m getting out of conspiracy and bal KoRcreD tte loy twa Gcra echt RGN KS is conspiracy and suppression, but I have energy now only for what we can do and how we can do it.

OO OR Ce stemrit can receptivity to the development of zero point technology?

BO: Sure. My book Miracle in the Void is all about my world travels, visiting free energy inventors, documenting the work and considering the changes we must make to embrace this new technology.

nothing less than supplanting a two trillion dollar a year infrastructure.

M2: Fossil fuels. ; BO: Yes. Fossil fuel delivery. It’s such a big shift for a culture, it’s no wonder we’ve been resistant. But the Wright brothers have already flown on this one. The concept is alive and well, totally viable. All we need to do is figure out how to implement it.

M2: You've seen functional devices actually running?

BO: Yes.

M2: Tiwari?

BO: Tiwari; Inamata. Tiwari is the chief project Sua como Um Heo wee Tm eK om OCT La rm TerCy under construction. He's getting ready to retire, so he SM Oe AON Cw seme ieccccle Bill estecmev emits government of India has given him laboratory space

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M2: Describe zero eta se4 3 . : oS The vacuum of space is filled with potential energy, like a reservoir with ome just have to know OAC ae ON hACnCl mar tccocentaeh tote museccnuor stro mlm cierteedlociarrerrer ard electromagnetic charge, within that field, through the rotary motion of magnets, such as N-machines, a Tuwari type device, or a solid state device in which the electromagnetic charges are oscillating. This zero jeetalas (Ce inyeleletocyAcere Crem Cero M Orme sss Ae ORC Ca aril eros

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M2: The bases for this hypothesis?

BO: Physicists have come up with a number of reasons why this field must exist. John Archibald Wheeler has said that one cubic centimeter of free space contains enough energy to evaporate all the oceans of the Earth, something like ten to the hundred and fifteenth ergs. We haven't been aware of this field because it is homo- OMSL e Bec oes Comarca enous CR eC RAOO Acree OnE eest caso aoR iC Reames lade it using traditional means of measurement. But if we accelerate a charge in the presence of the field, then we begin to have an interaction. .

M2: Sounds like this field supports the Pasa AO aa: universe; inertia. Mark Comings describes it as energy of every conceiveable wavelength with perfectly symmetrical dynamically opposing vectors. He METER ae ELC Shediac Fl slate TH done — od eels ie WSs eeacerende

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ft ligt toils) and the narrow band intellects of institutional science. This teal PLACE pal look for new at=pVci ia) laste) ee commercially available products and investment opportunities. Oh, yeah. And if you really want to win the science fair this year, check out issue 14 and the cold fusion reaction you can initiate in your high school chem lab....

monpdo [96] 2000

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THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT

It's at times like this—when you find yourself stumbling around a sprawling, haunted mansion in the absolute sepulchral dead of night, with the leaking, violated remains of your colleague at your feet and yowling Neve ccte bree ont leste( ait Ron bial ecena Rone eens eT you think: "I'd ie a hell of a lot better if I had a rocket launcher right about now.” But would you? Would you really? Would it really make any difference, standing there in the fouled-wood gloom of some claustrophobic corridor, hearing the moaning, bloated, shambling thing coming EVaeen Celie nu aeons Ome and knowing that any seconc Pe leet going sa Ceca i

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the course, destroying A eeyeenteny ehicles or anand

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through truck stops, Main Streets and rural trailer parks? Ultimately, you suspect the Air Force must have something to do with your being padlocked out of your house,

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non-tiled) eschew a years (ec ae ee in lieu of ambient urban sound effects which increase in volu: nove: eg Biter agen

| woman's bie dilece every hit is a clean 16s the only way to Si (oie ate ceytae ee the wounded is to walk up to the writhing victim and press the ’X” key for a formal, solemn execution, So oa with ominous incidental music. _ Allthis sounds scary enough, but the 2 a alarming thing about ie anthem game for late C20 America is its utility asa dry run visualization tool for just such a one-man rampage. One gears up; one takes shots with an eye for opportunity, for panic; one adopts guerilla tactics, already running to the next attack point even as the grenade just lobbed is causing havoc in a crowd; one sticks to the alleys, the defensible positions, the happy accidents of obstruction and line of sight; one utilizes the shielding advantages of noncombatants; and one constantly thinks: ” What would PCr evar an rom eel cae Sick? You bet it’s sick—a kind of do-it-yourself six o'clock news kit. The only thing missing is the disgruntled trip to visit the soon-to-be ex-boss or soon-to-be ex-girlfriend at work... Well... maybe

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to have a few stray flecks of bone and brain material in the mix. Ae a ee Ce NO tote to Classis. e

gla: eee ie or multi-player PC game - onanisland overrun by an army of the recently reanimated. Just as in the movies, the goals for the beleaguered humans are pretty straightforward: shoot, chop or otherwise terminally disorganize

Played from an overhead and slightly offset view, Flesh Feast takes place in the usual locales— hospitals, graveyards—as well as some unlikely and film-inspired ones—shopping malls, offices and even an airport. The zombies are legion, but slow and lumbering, and can be hacked into manageable pieces with a variety of implements. Flesh Feast is gory, to be sure, but it’s largely guilt-free killing since the beings in question are not strikingly human—and oughta be dead anyway. In Flesh Feast’s multiplayer mode, you can also play the bad, dead guys, lurching slowly but in great numbers toward your human victims. Kill one of the humans and you have two options open to you that aren’t open to the human players: either wait and let the recently-deceased reanimate and become part of your undead army... or just eat the guy right there. Peckish players absorb not only a full day’s supply of vitamins and minerals but also any useful powers or attributes of the dearly departed. If

more dexterous than yours, and they have pistols, shotguns, fire, elaborate traps, the trusty axe, VCO Reet cmeKG IC MACCOMK RCN) note the subtle modulation in the chain saw’s sound effects as it saws through relatively soft flesh, into relatively hard bone, and back out © again). In extreme cases, unarmed humans may have no choice but to pick up recently amputated limbs—yours!—and use them against you.

A final caveat: Flesh Feast has incredibly graphic cut-scenes— the ones which involve brain-eating have some of the wettest, most gruesome sound ota eda Seti onto a disk. [gz

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THE FIRST REAL-TIME 3D ADVENTURE

BLADE RUNNER FOR THE PC

www.bladerunner.com

TU ECR RUC Sea eat TTTT A mem treme LO investigative skills and the tools of a 21st century Bape Runner ™, you'll be Te Cm OME S revolutionizes computer gaming, and tests your ability to survive in one of the richest and most atmospheric games ever created for the PC. Are you ready?

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MiCrOSO Ft | 9M Qprserrmserresnrs Windows 95 | LMC

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