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90% of my street work has been made in Athens/Greece. The political and social situation there is pretty loose and that gives room for anomie of all sorts. It is not necessary to get a permission to paint in the public domain.

Zak Smith: First–for the people who don’t know–who are you, where are you from?

Alexandros Vasmoulakis: My name is Alexandros Vasmoulakis, I was born in Athens, Greece in 1980 and studied painting at the university. Currently I live in Berlin.

Smith: Like a lot of early 20th century artists like Balthus or Modigliani, your work almost always features these people who have a certain kind of face.  This sort of dark, kind of deep-eyed faces–like Kafka’s family or something.  Where do these faces come from?  Are they Greek faces?

Vasmoulakis: The process starts first of all by ripping pages from magazines, collecting fragments of other faces, mostly from glamorous ads.

The next step is the selection of the proper elements (mouths, eyes, noses) and the mix of them with my own drawing.

Actually it is a collage but it is not that obvious in the final project because it is all made just with ink and acrylic. The very first idea is to create something through the destruction of something else.

Smith: You use a lot of techniques associated with commercial art and illustration, but you pervert them away from their original purpose and message.  A lot of artists do that, but then they usually pervert it towards some other message.  It almost seems like, instead of trying to show the audience a simple, understandable, message–like advertisements and most fine art–you’re trying to destroy the idea of a simple message and just leave people with a picture.  Is that right?

Vasmoulakis: Well, partly yes. By keeping the message loose and general I intend to let the viewer include his/her own experience. This way gives room to ambiguity, vagueness and doubts. It’s one step closer to poetry.

Smith: It looks like you’re influenced by both Western illustration as well as the sort of more cartoony, edgy, satirical, illustration from Eastern Europe in the ’70s and ’80s.  Is that a conscious thing?  Is it because Greece is right in the middle of Europe?

Vasmoulakis: Actually Greece is at the edge of Europe and generally has more oriental and Arabic characteristics than European ones.

I’d say that first of all I am one more victim of globalization! My works have been influenced by artists and movements from all around the globe.

Smith:You have done a lot of street art but also some commercial work and you’ve sold things in galleries under the fine art system. It often seems to me that, with an artist like you the fine art system can be much more conservative than the commercial art system–do you find that to be so?

Vasmoulakis: No! It depends on how good and efficient your gallerist is.

For almost a decade I was working as a freelance illustrator and met very nice clients but very cruel and brutal ones as well.

There is a certain type of clients without any sense of flexibility which causes unpleasant collaborations. No doubt, both fields stink a lot and the artists have to compromise much but shit happens everywhere.

I do believe that, if you have the right gallerist, the fine art system is much better and less conservative.

Smith: A lot of your street art seems like it would take a long time to do–how do you manage it without getting arrested?  Or do you mostly do legal stuff?

Vasmoulakis: 90% of my street work has been made in Athens/Greece. The political and social situation there is pretty loose and that gives room for anomie of all sorts. It is not necessary to get a permission to paint in the public domain.

I have been arrested a few times though, but each time eventuated in discussions on art topics, with cops trying to understand what motivates some artists to work in the streets. Sometimes a visit to the police station can be entertaining.

Smith: You have a strong sense of geometry in your work–where do you think that comes from?

Vasmoulakis: I love triangles!

Smith:Can you pick an artwork, not your own, that you like, and talk about some things you like about it?

Vasmoulakis: Although it is not officially considered a work of art, it is indeed a masterpiece, a great performance!

This is the Christmas tree of Athens in December ’08 [more info here]:

It’s not only that I hate xmas or that I do love the beauty of destruction and violence… this performance addressed questions about social rot, disingenuous happiness and desires in the most sharp and eloquent way.

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Zak Smith: So, the basics: where are you from?  Where do you live now?  How long have you been showing etc.?

Anthony Lister: I live in Sydney at the moment. I kind of spend half the year in Australia and the other half in my studio in Brooklyn. I’ve been exhibiting my works in solo shows since 2001.

Smith: Some of the interviews and press I’ve seen about you emphasize your themes—TV, super-heroes, etc.  But the first thing I noticed about your work is that it doesn’t suck at all.  I mean, lots of artists can and do make art about “contemporary symbols,” but you manage to make these things breathtakingly gorgeous and worth looking at. What’s with all this useless adding to the enjoyment and richness of the human experience? Why not just make your point and move on?

Lister: It’s more a case of over-analysis. When I make work, I try to only make it for myself. There isn’t much thought about who is going to see it or what they will think or what they know or what is cool. Painting is a funny thing. There are a few guide lines that I try to keep in mind, like what would I think of this painting if I was an 80-year-old man reflecting on what I wanted to make as a younger man.

Smith: Are your paintings all spray paint, or do they include a little of this and a little of that?

Lister: There is a lot of this and that. Spray paint is usually just to lay down quick drying color planes in which I come back into and usually end up painting out completely.

Smith: The impression that magazine articles and gallery shows generally give—especially when the artist is involved with graffiti—is that all the artists are part of this big helpful cool collective and are all always hanging out together and skating and doing collaborations and generally having a network and a scene. Now, I know this is neither all-the-way-true nor all-the-way-untrue but to what degree is it true?

Lister: As I have grown up and made the work I have wanted to make and met people in similar situations it has become apparent that there is a large collective of like-minded creators. And at times it can be ironically exactly as you describe.

Smith: If I were a moron, I’d compare your work to the old Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, since he was the first artist to use comics imagery a lot.  But in reality, it seems like you guys really occupy opposite ends of the spectrum: he basically took art that Jack Kirby and other comic artists made and made it bigger and put it in a gallery and said, “Look, now it’s real art,” whereas you seem to see comic book artists as real artists whose work you’re trying to build on top of. Does that make sense?

Lister: Well I have always admired the hand drawn line and comics especially have played a roll in my early development as a training artist. I wouldn’t say that I am “building on top of” as much as I am “borrowing aesthetics” for my own rendition of conceptual redefining.

Smith: What’s an average working day like for you?  How much time do you spend painting?

Lister: It is hard for me to maintain a consistent working practice outside of just trying to pay attention to the energy I have and the to-do lists I write for myself. Painting is an unpredictable thing; I try not to push myself to work if I am not feeling it unless there is something that has to get done in which case I usually find the energy in the chaos of panic. There is so many other elements to maintaining an artistic practice especially if you are your own boss. I try to maintain a balance of all things at all times.

Smith: How much street art do you do these days?  I noticed something on Wooster Collective recently.

Lister: Yeah sure. As much as I have the headspace for. I treat my street practice as a bit of break from my studio work. It’s always a pleasure to install a good street painting for the public.

Smith: The impression I get is that you start with a blank surface and then start sketching—maybe something you already had an idea about, maybe not, and an idea for a figure comes up and you basically form that figure until the “energy” of that single image dissipates. Like there’s one image that’s in your head that needs to get up there and once it’s formed and up there, you let it go and don’t fiddle with it. Is that pretty much it?

Lister: Pretty much.

Smith: Now forgive me if this is a stupid question Australian artists always get, but I feel like the sort of imagistic, almost dreamlike way you pull up these heroes is in spirit—if not in style—like the way Sydney Nolan painted his pictures of Ned Kelly—is that at all on target?

Lister: Sure, I mean, I like to paint about what I know about, what I like to see and what I like to talk about. If a painting makes me smile then I know its good.

Smith: The color in your paintings seems really to have taken a jump when you started working with comic book images—do you feel like that was part of the appeal?

Lister: I guess. For the longest time I used to restrict myself by using a limited palette as a way to concentrate on the subject matter and technical approach. The super hero series since has been kind of about me letting go of the safe places I relied on in the past and exploring new chromas.

Smith: You’ve said—and I believe you—that your stuff is about reality, even though the images are from the media. Could you talk a little about that?

Lister: Well I’m all about developing analogies in relation to situations I am exposed to in society and my own life. I feel a lot of the time the ambiguity in my work acts as a trap door in which I can create excuses and make up stories. A lot of these stories are about reality.

Smith: Can you grab one or two of your paintings and describe the situation that inspired it?

Lister: This piece, titled HOLY MOLY (mixed media on canvas, painted 2008), is based on a story about Britney Spears’ sister having a baby. I initially painted a picture of a pretty young woman with a baby spitting lottery balls out of its vagina as if to suggest that children are a metaphor for the Holy Grail. It is a painting about fertility, miss-guided youth and predators within social networks and in the media.

Smith: Are there any artists working now you feel like you want to tell us about? (Some who are your pals, but also some that you don’t know, if you can.)

Lister: It isn’t often that I am really blown away and impressed by work I see. But having said that I am totally into the work of Ben Frost, Kill Pixie, Faile, Judith Supine, Gerhard Richter, Magnus McTavish, Keiron McMaster, the Chapman Brothers, Chris Johanson, Bast and Josh Keyes just to name a few.

Smith: Ok, in a painting like “Tigra Got A Talk Show,” the title is a joke about Tyra Banks, but the painting, really, is just a painting of Tigra from the Avengers comics. Are the titles just an opportunity to say one more thing to the audience, (as if you are standing next to your own painting and are thinking of something to say) or an integral part of what the picture means or something you know you have to do so you just do, or what?

Lister: That’s exactly it. In a painting I feel like I have three points of power: the first is painting the work, the second is titling the work and the third is exhibiting it. Each of these points is very important for me to get my message across and each is an opportunity to alter my ultimate expression to the viewer.

Smith: In street art, there’s no title—or at least none the viewer can see. Does that affect anything?

Lister: Not really. The work essentially is the work and that is ultimately what it is all about and most important.

Smith: Even if someone doesn’t read comics, what a given superhero means or stands for is sort of communicated by the way that character looks; Batman is supposed to be dark and noire-y, the Hulk is angry and radioactive, etc. Is this one of the reasons they’re useful to you?  I mean, if you painted Athena or Apollo up there, the impact wouldn’t be as visceral.

Lister: That’s right. Eros and villains are better portrait in contemporary society as the iconic characters we have grown up with and have been influenced by from cultural and political media. Using this subject matter allows me to communicate with my peers but make the same points that have been made for a thousand years.

Smith: One thing that’s unusual about these paintings is they sometimes combine an extremely powerful, sharp visual impact with something funny in the same picture—like “Fat Batman” is obviously kinda funny, but it also screams very loudly at you to look at it and keep looking. Like the way you painted his head, for example, is striking. A lot of people can paint “funny,” and a blessed few can give you that “skylight-shattering-over-head” visually intensity, but few do both.  Do you consciously try to counter the “cool” aspects of your own work with a sense of humor, or is that just automatic?  Or is it a crap shoot every time?

Lister: A combination of all three, and then some.

See more of Anthony Lister’s art on his Web site.

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Zak Smith: What are the different projects/bodies of work you’ve done?

Dennis McGrath: The one I’m about to start work on is a collaboration with my brother Jonathan, Gary Van De Griek and Ed Templeton. Gary’s photos are just incredible. So it’s about a guy named Lennie Kirk, a friend. It’s titled HEAVEN and it’s pretty interesting. From 14 year-old runaway to California to pro skateboarder to born-again Christian to 3 to 5 years in San Quentin for armed robbery. Photo documentary, with ephemera. That’s the first. I’m long-term. My sex project has been 5 years so far. At least the exploration photographically.

Smith: You did a lot of skate photography–is there a trick to catching people in mid-air or do you just keep hitting the shutter?

McGrath: You gotta know what’s going on and it’s timing.

Smith: I hear you’re a kinky sex fiend–can you confirm or deny that?

McGrath: Who told you that?

Smith: Why do you like black and white?

McGrath: I just do. There’s something about the grain that you just can’t deny. The fact that I can develop the film and print it myself is also really cool. I do shoot color too it’s nice. I just like black and white better.

Smith: Can you describe your cameras? First, last and every one in-between.

McGrath: My first camera was a Canon AE-1. Second was a Nikon FM2. Third was an Olympus XA. Fourth Nikon f4. Fifth an Olympus xa4. Sixth a Nikon F5. Seventh a Leica M6. All I got left is the Leica and that’s all I shoot with, maybe a point-and-shoot sometimes. And I got a Lumix digi point-and-shoot. It’s decent.

Smith: Have you ever thought about making a movie? Have you done it already?

McGrath: I used to shoot a lot of 16mm film. I wanna make an avant-garde sex film.

Smith: What would your avant-garde sex film be like? As in: what things might be in it and/or what kind of films would it look like?

McGrath: It’s inspired by the films of Nathaniel Dorsky. He’s an experimental filmmaker from San Francisco who I’ve known since I moved to the city. It’s just an idea.

See more of Dennis McGrath’s photography on his blog (NSFW).

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Like when Tasha Rey does The Tyra Banks Show.

(This is an excerpt from We Did Porn. At the beginning of the book, the author notes that, although this is a work of non-fiction, the names of all the adult performers in the book have been changed “to remind readers–and myself–that there is probably more to them than I managed to see or record”.  So, Sasha Grey is referred to as Tasha Rey.  Tyra Banks is Tyra Banks.)

It begins, as I assume is usual, with Tyra in front of a large blue screen featuring her own first name gleaming on an unconvincing computer-generated medallion.

Tyra says how, when she was in high school, her friends got jobs working in fast food, or at corporate chain clothing stores—like the kind that sell the sweater-vest-and-puffy-shirt combination Tyra is wearing. Tyra doesn’t say how it was an all-girl Catholic prep school called Immaculate Heart that held its graduations at the Hollywood Bowl and that, when she was there, her own job was being a runway model.

Tyra says, “But today, you wouldn’t believe the lengths that some teenagers are going to to make money.”

Tyra doesn’t say why she made Halloween: Resurrection.

Tyra shows some footage of Tasha Rey combing her hair and packing a bag and reading a book. It doesn’t show which book.

Tyra says that, as a teenager, Tasha was sexually active.

There are no statistics available on how many girls at Immaculate Heart High were sexually active.

In a voice-over, Tyra says that Tasha, in school, was “bombarded” by pornographic images while Tyra shows footage of Tasha, seminude in pearls, eye-fucking the camera.

Tasha says that, in school, far from having porn dropped on or launched at her in a military setting, she actually looked for porn online and stole it from her friends. This is in a shot where Tasha is driving and looking very sleazy and blurry in wraparound sunglasses and lighting that erases her jaw and in a from-below, up-the-nose angle that everyone in television, film, or photography will tell you is the shot you use to make someone look ugly and morally bankrupt.

There is no footage of Tyra Banks from that angle, not in the show or anywhere else, even in that part of Coyote Ugly when she’s dripping wet and doing a pole dance on the bar where it would be the most appropriate shot to accurately represent the point of view of the shrieking drunks she was supposed to be dancing for.

Tasha talks about the ways she likes to have sex. She is still in the horrible driving shot, where she is looking not at the cameraman, who must be sitting in the well of the passenger seat, but straight out the windshield. It makes her look creepily detached from the very many deviant sex acts and perversions she’s describing.

But actually it is good because when you’re driving you have to look not at the camera but straight out the windshield or you’ll kill yourself and everyone in the car and possibly other people or animals.

There is a Godard-ian edit and Tasha says how much money she makes. It’s unclear whether this is in response to a question someone off camera asked or whether this is something Tasha feels personally is important to communicate to the audience of The Tyra Banks Show.

Tasha says how she has to take some days off if she gets an infection and at the word infection there is a sort of doom-lite keyboard-where-a-guitar-should-be brake screech in the soundtrack and a sinister fade into a makeup room.

“Although the money is seductive, this young woman struggles with the trappings of her pornographic life,” goes Tyra.

Tasha says something unrelated while getting her makeup done.

As the interview proper begins, Tyra says that Tasha looks like a middle-school student, but does not say that when Tasha walked into the studio, Tyra told Tasha she looked too old because, in her natural habitat, Tasha has almost intimidatingly extreme and sleek Francophile-fashion-model-on-cell-phone-with-agent-with-whom-she-is-none-too-pleased-this-morning style and so Tyra had her people put Tasha in a shapeless rubber-ball-pink shirt, and clueless-attempt-at-cute earrings, and bruised-peach makeup and iron her long, dark, shampoo-commercial hair into a flat playground slide awkardly semitwisting around her neck so that she would—in the same daytime-TV hotlit-high-contrast glare that makes Tyra’s own face seem like a rusting bone mask—look like a middle school student. Who smoked.

Tasha talks about movies where they want her to be like a little girl: “I don’t do it though—you know—you wear the clothes, you wear the wardrobe, but I try to change that, I don’t want to portray that, that’s not me.” The camera pans back to show the Gap jeans and rube-ishly awkward flat brown slippers Tyra asked the wardrobe people to put on Tasha.

There is a cut to the nearly all-female audience looking like they are watching a live appendectomy being performed on an unanesthetized kitten after having been told that, if they move at all, the kitten will be impaled on fence spikes and then incinerated.

Then Tasha tells the famous Asking-to-Be-Punched story, and a pall falls over what we can see of the room and an atmosphere takes over the broadcast that is rare, and funny, and disturbing in every essential way. It comes from the sequence where Tasha’s small, roving, lash-shaded, and knowing eyes move easily, almost self-deprecatingly (I’m such a freak) across the crowd while she tells this story about how totally deviant she is, but then her whole face tightens as she realizes, in the middle, that she’s talking to someone with no sense of humor and we notice too, since all this is intercut with the paralyzed, lip-lifted, triangular slab of inert judgment that is Tyra Banks’s face and the edge-of-tears, speechless, butterfly-wing flickering of eyelids out in the audience.

Those who enjoy whatever private pleasure is to be gained from receiving physical pain publicly would appear not to overlap at all with those who enjoy whatever private pleasure is to be gained from inflicting shame collectively.

The idea that you could be playing a different game with your life than them and yet still be playing it with a full deck is totally alien to this audience.

Have you ever watched strangers play cards? It takes patience to figure out whether they have fifty-two, and whether the game is poker or rummy or bullshit. There is a cultural scar so wide and raw here that information can’t cross it.

There are parts of Tasha’s face that always seem like they’re squirming to do something cruel, around the lower lip and lower lids, under the sated stasis in the eyes, but her business sense keeps them still.

Tyra asks Tasha what she will do. Tasha says anything but children or animals.

Tyra asks about anal: “Anal sex? On film? Every scene?”

Tasha also has to explain to Tyra what a gang bang is. The five gyrating guys in wifebeaters and jeans deflowering the air behind a lone Tyra in Daisy Dukes and a bikini top in the “Shake Ya Booty” video did not explain it to her, apparently.

Tasha explains about fucking fifteen guys at once. This is something the audience can imagine, and they do, judging from a real or inserted rippling reaction shot of them imagining what it would be like to have sex with fifteen men at the same time. The audience girls look grave. One of them is hot. I’d fuck fifteen of her.

Tasha talks, twinklingly, about the always interesting experience of telling your mother you’re doing porn. Pale and still peachy in her makeup, time after time, she smiles and tosses the ball of human interaction to Tyra, where it hits a null field, loses all inertia, and is sucked straight to the floor. Thuck. If the look Tyra Banks wears while receiving reality was a sound, the sound would be thuck. If Tasha is very lucky, she gets instead a cautious, queasy nod before the next queasily asked question.

Station break.

“Up next: a teenager sucked into the seductive world of porn.” Tyra asks Tasha why there is something cold, hard, and distant about her and says she can’t help thinking there is something that made her that way.

This, coming from Tyra Banks, is really, really, really, really funny.

Tyra asks about child sexual abuse.

Tasha says she wasn’t sexually abused as a child.

Tyra says, “So you got into porn just because?”

Tasha says no, like she said before, she got into porn because of things she wanted to do that have to do with having sex.

Tyra says that it’s a fact that a lot of women in porn have issues whether they want to admit them or not and then talks a lot more about how people do things for reasons and then cuts immediately to Tasha’s boyfriend.

We see Guy, looking as if the camera just woke him up. He comes across like a dazed, blunt-headed mouth-breather in a collared shirt who doesn’t realize that his unwavering, upright posture and attempts at eloquence and pruned facial hair only seem to exaggerate how unwholesome and hollow he is. That is, Guy comes across here like all boyfriends ever on daytime talk shows.*

Tasha’s agent comes on and helps even less. He looks exactly like a shaved wombat in flared lapels that just ate a truck, and also exactly like sleaze.

The show tapers toward the next commercial break and Tyra asks Tasha to really sit down with herself and do some soul-searching and find out why she’s really in this industry.

And Tasha says she knows why she’s in this industry, which Tyra does not expect to have to respond to because she was planning on just saying all that and then just going straight to commercial, but then she has to respond to this or else redo it so they can reedit the whole bit, in which case the studio audience might realize how strange and manipulative that is, and so Tyra quickly says, “Yeah, okay,” but Tasha hasn’t told her a real reason, a “deep soul reason,” and then, okay, commercial.

Presumably there are soulful and deep reasons for a seventeen-year-old wanting to be a rich and beautiful actress/model/celebrity who fucks pop stars, gives people tips about makeup, cuts records, shows up in people’s music videos, and eventually has babies, but there are no possible deep soul reasons for an eighteen-year-old wanting to be a rich and beautiful actress/model/celebrity who fucks porn stars, gives people tips about sex, cuts records, shows up in slightly better music videos, and eventually has babies.

“We’ll be right back,” Tyra says, and gives the camera a Sir-would-you-mind-standing-behind-the-line? smile and then there is a shot of Tasha looking off into the audience with controlled hate.

When the show comes back there’s a segment about a fourteen-year-old prostitute.

I watch all this on YouTube—where the show is posted by whoever runs antipornographyactivist.blogspot.com. This entity claims that the (extremely involved) montage the show inserts after the commercial showing “Victoria” (the prostitute) wandering a city in a short skirt at night is misleading because Victoria was never a street prostitute and also that Tyra’s people told the prostitute they’d blur her face out and didn’t.

The (now) sixteen-year-old prostitute comes on the TV. Tyra does not ask her why she is cold or hard or distant, because she is feverish and quivering and gushing and looks essentially like a piece of confused cookie dough. Which isn’t surprising because she is a sixteen-year-old prostitute and she’s on TV.

Tyra interviews the little hooker with a measured condescenscion that stands in stark contrast to the measured condescenscion with which she interviewed Tasha (now in the front row of the audience next to her agent). With Tasha she kept herself coiled and steady-eyed—like if she asked the wrong question, Tasha would blink twice and turn her into a pervert. Her style with Victoria is that of an SVU cop wanting to know just exactly where she was when the bad men came and took her mother away.

Victoria is clearly totally fucked up, and not comfortable, and sad, and not very smart, so Tyra knows she isn’t going to tell her anything everybody didn’t already know when they saw the commercial for this afternoon’s show, and that that makes for good TV. Victoria says she became a whore because she wanted money and then started doing cocaine and it was scary and she says she is upset and that no one should do what she does.

Something that at first seems to be a giant pencil in a sport coat but is actually a celebrity doctor comes on in order to tell everyone more things they know.

He frictionlessly offers a Freudian, or post-Freudian, “compulsion to repeat” theory for Victoria’s behavior. He uses plural nouns enough that you can’t tell if he’s talking about Victoria and everyone else who’s irrational and on drugs and greedy, or about Victoria and Tasha, who is keeping silent in the front row of the audience next to her agent.

Tyra says she’s gotten in touch with an organization that will help Victoria and her family and that antipornographyactivist alleges did not actually help her as much as Tyra told Victoria it would. Tyra touches Victoria a lot, and while being touched, Victoria has exactly the expression the girl who gets raped while she’s high has when she’s in the elevator in the movie Kids.

After the commercial, Tyra says:

“Now, when she was a teenager, my next guest thought sex was an easy way to make money, but now at age twenty-five she knows how wrong she was.”

Her next guest is a fat whore (spiritually speaking) and a fat ex-whore (physically speaking).

Tyra asks her to offer advice to Tasha and Victoria collectively. The fat whore says she knows these girls and she is these girls. While the fat whore is certainly large enough to be at least tripartite, a certain ambiguity remains. She may be following the Catholic philosopher Peter Geach, who argued that the mutual indwelling of the Holy Trinity can be understood if one assumes that all identity is relative to a chosen sortal term.

To illustrate her perichoresis, the fat whore tells a story about her path from stripper to cam girl to whore to porn star that is teleologically similar in no way to the story of either of the other guests because, she says, it’s a slippery slope.

Rejecting both epistemic and pragmatic modes of argument, she says:

“It’s a lifestyle. I mean, you drive a nice car, you live in a nice house, you have tons of money, you can buy whatever you want, but, but what does that get you in the end?” Okay—sure—I see where you’re going—you have material things but you don’t have integrity or self-respect or love or Jesus in your life or something, right? No, actually, that’s not where she’s going at all—next she says: “I don’t have any of the things from when I did that.”

So it’s bad to be a whore or a porn star not because there are more important things than money, but because somehow the money, house, and car evaporate due to some form of as-yet-undescribed economic attrition that attacks only money made in the sex industry.

The fat whore has advice for Victoria: “Money and material things can be gone (snap) like that.”

Victoria cries a lot and nods.

The fat whore has advice for Tasha—oh wait, no, she says it is, but it’s questions. The first question has a false premise, which Tasha points out. The question also brings up the fact that Tasha licked a toilet seat in a movie, which Tasha then points out was her own idea because it was her movie. The fat whore says, “Then, well, I have a question for you.”

Examining the shrapnel in the wake of the rhetorical train wreck that is the second question, you can clearly pick out cars labeled aren’t-your-fans-horrible-masturbators? porn-is-a-bad-example-to-somebody, and your-movies-make-people-think-things-about-you-that-aren’t-true, but by the time the traditional verbal-question-mark-followed-by-pause-to-receive-answer is actually delivered, the fat whore is basically asking whether Tasha would like to be in an abusive relationship. Tasha says no.

Tyra goes on for a tigerish paragraph about how she—Tyra—can’t judge Tasha or tell her what to do because she hasn’t lived Tasha’s life, but that the fat whore can because the fat whore used to have the same job Tasha has and is now seven years older than Tasha. Tyra does not then invite Nina Hartley on to give advice to the fat whore.

The fat whore then says that all that anal sex will destroy Tasha’s butt. Tasha tries to say out loud that doctors servicing the world’s many homosexuals have not reported this to be so, but she is interrupted by the celebrity doctor in the suit and also Tyra, who both agree about her butt based on unstated evidence. When they’re done gang-interrupting her, the conversation has finally pinwheeled over to the point where Tasha realizes she has to explain to Tyra that, other than being white and a woman and once having had the same job, none of the things in the fat whore’s life resemble things in Tasha’s.

The fat whore says, “Your pimp is sitting right next to you.”

This shifts cameras and attention to Tasha’s obviously unsavory agent Jack Wiegler, whose silk-framed bald spot everyone in the studio audience has been eyeing queasily throughout the show, and so it gets the show’s first full-blooded-Orc-horde-Nuremberg-pecking-party-vintage-daytime-talk-show-We-Will-Drive-Them-into-the-Sea roar of approval.

Commercial.

Tyra, having finally realized where her points are going to get scored, tacks Wiegler-ward. Is he a pimp? Wiegler points out that Tasha does what Tasha wants to do. The fat whore points out the fact that Tasha makes Wiegler a lot of money because of all the sick shit Tasha does. Wiegler fudges and lies and argues with the fat whore and sounds generally governmental.

The fat whore keeps bringing up how much money the agent makes. Tyra talks about how “seductive” the money in porn is.

Tasha’s main crime appears to be talking about some other thing besides money. When she makes arguments that reference some nonmoney standard, no one else seems to believe or even hear her. The idea that sex might be “seductive” doesn’t seem to occur to Tyra, which is sad because what you see in a Tyra Banks music video is a woman licking a fist-sized microphone who is going to make a lot of money off the fact that her only talent is she makes you want to fuck her.

The doctor says Tasha is like a heroin addict because she is trapped in self-destructive behavior that she says she wants to keep doing.

He says he sees porn stars on their knees begging him for help: “—and that’s where this always goes. If it didn’t, it could be a healthy behavior—who knows? The fact is it’s destructive—if it were not destructive we wouldn’t all be shaking our heads [saying], ‘Why would someone put themselves in this position?’”

The audience applauds this provably inaccurate statement and its attached tautology.

“And Victoria wouldn’t be crying the whole time,” adds Tyra.

Victoria says it’s because all her emotions came out. The fat whore tells her to love herself and that money isn’t everything.

There’s a commercial and then Tyra tells any teenager out there that there are other places to turn for validation and support than pornography and prostitutiton, because money that comes that easily has a lot of consequences, and then says that whatever money you make you will pay for emotionally and then she touches Victoria again.

There is not another Tyra Banks Show about Tasha when she wins Performer of the Year and announces she is leaving her agent to form her own agency. You get the definite feeling about Tyra, and the fat whore, and the doctor—and the audience—that they would not care that, if Tasha really did what she said she would and started her own agency that avoided agents and commisssions and therefore their desire to book you for whatever, this could be a major step in the practical prevention of violence toward—and exploitation of—women in the Industry. You get the definite feeling that this wouldn’t matter to them and they would still think Tasha was missing the point.

The point is: they will not forgive her until she is ashamed.

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“…Beauty is often considered suspect based on the lingering premise that it is radically conservative and reactionary, and that the strategies of visual appeal used by the mass media can be seen as one of the ways that authentic experience is transformed into mediated experience and false consciousness.”

Zak Smith: Your paintings are beautiful. What’s up with that? Don’t you know this is 2009 and you’re supposed to make paintings that are ugly or, at the very least, boring, in order to highlight that the only thing that matters is the choice of subject? These paintings aren’t beautiful for like three seconds, either, I could look at them for a very long time, they’re beautiful for several hours at a time. Didn’t you get the memo? Contemporary art in 2009 is only allowed to look good in the interior-design sense. Deep looking is discouraged; why have you taken the left-hand path and attempted to radically absorb the viewer into your little universes?

Gordon Terry: I think I’ll answer these two questions at once: There’s a careerist voice in my head that always nags me about this. But my belief that humans approach ideas through materials, through the physical, always wins out in the end. Ultimately, there are a lot of theoretical arguments I could make to prop up my fixation on the aesthetic experience, form, and the sensuality of materials, but honestly it comes down to the fact that it’s my first impulse.

One of the ideas about physical form that has become very important to me is the notion of immanence, or the subtle difference between immanence and transcendence. I’m fascinated by the potential for objects to be infused with a sense of the numinous, of the “wholly other.” This is essentially the metaphysics of immanence–the otherworldly, or the sacred existing and acting within the physical world–as opposed to transcendence, where an unseen reality exists in a realm above and unconnected to the physical world. I also like to think about this dichotomy in terms of pagan and shamanic world views as opposed to gnostic, technophilic, and Judeo-Christian approaches to otherworldy content.

I’m glad you mention “radical absorption.” I totally think it’s one of the ideal responses to my work. The meaning of aesthetic experience can be, I think, characterized by Theodor Lipps‘ theory of empathy. In Lipps’ theory, aesthetic enjoyment requires the apperception of a sensuous object separate from the viewer, who empathizes life into an object. Forms hold their beauty and life only through the vital feeling that we in some mysterious manner project into them.

This is a very humanist perspective which I think touches in some way on my fixation with beauty…

I think a lot about how and why the idea of beauty has largely been removed from critical discourse, particularly as it relates to visual culture. To be completely reductive, I think beauty is often considered suspect based on the lingering premise that it is radically conservative and reactionary, and that the strategies of visual appeal used by the mass media can be seen as one of the ways that authentic experience is transformed into mediated experience and false consciousness.

This is complicated to me because the idea of “authentic experience” as a premium is very humanist and leaves a lot of room for meaningful aesthetic experience. And I actually really admire a lot of the thinkers that I associate with this type of criticism. Particularly after reading Breaking Open the Head, by Daniel Pinchbeck, who uses Benjamin and Adorno very convincingly to argue that both psychedelic experience and the shamanic world view are relevant to our state of cultural crisis.

But this is just one excuse to be suspicious of beauty–maybe just one way it manifested in the 20th Century. I think there’s been a long-standing, Northern European prejudice against color (which I’ll loosely connect to the discussion of “beauty”) going much further back. I recently saw Michael Taussig lecture about a new book he’s writing about color; color as it was historically exploited, marketed and experienced by colonial European powers. He told a story about how Northern Europeans weren’t really exposed to bright colors until the indigo trade reached full tilt. When brightly colored dyes and textiles started to come on the market they were simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by them. Attracted sensually, but repulsed by the association with primitives and savages, and all the sexuality and godlessness associated with them. Essentially, his argument is that this is where the prejudice against color starts, where the idea that restrained, muted, unsaturated color equals sophistication, refinement, and taste; whereas vibrant, saturated, high value colors equal garish, unrefined, lo-brow and childish tastelessness.

Smith: Back in the day, old abstract painters used to leave their paintings untitled, or give them some sort of neutral title, in order to emphasize that everything the viewer needed to know was in the picture. Your titles, on the other hand, are long and topical, like “Often Originating With Intelligent Forces At Present Unknown To Us,” that seem to be almost jokes.

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Zak Smith: There’s a lot of “stoner” art being made these days–like some half-assed faux-naive drawing of a yeti riding a bicycle into a bee’s butt or something. Your work isn’t like that–yet it does seem to have something to do with the kind of doom/stoner metal being put out by like Sleep or Electric Wizard or Monster Magnet back when they were good–can you talk about this stoner aesthetic or mood?  About paranoia?  About hallucination, paranoia, altered perceptions of time–anything like that?

Sean McCarty: Well, of all the metal subgenres, I tend to like the stuff classified as stoner/doom the best.  It could partly be a matter of logistics on the part of the musicians: a pot habit doesn’t seem to require enormous sums of money to keep it going the way a heroin or coke habit does, so at least in that sense the pothead feels less pressure to make commercially viable work and is correspondingly free to indulge the compellingly ridiculous ideas that come from smoking pot. That’s definitely something I like about a record like “Dopesmoker” by Sleep: tons of effort and technical ability mobilized in the realization of a really stupid concept, something like, “Let’s make one epically long track, like, an HOUR long, made up of one simple crushing riff that modulates almost imperceptibly throughout, with about four solos and lyrics that conflate becoming a stoner with making a religious pilgrimage.” I like the same thing about Peter Saul‘s late work, the way he takes really stupid ideas and makes loud, crushing, beautiful paintings out of them. I think that’s the thing that’s missing from the stoner art you’re complaining about: it has the stupid ideas but lacks the effort, concentration and obsession necessary to get them all the way back to interesting. Otherwise, I appreciate the irresponsible impulse.

As for hallucination, I like the idea of having access to the invisible world, but I have an intense fear of drugs and insanity. I’m already deeply paranoid as a result of the atmosphere of my formative years and have spent the last decade working to become less so.

Smith: If I were to, like, sit down with a bunch of grad students with degrees in art history and a slide rule and try to plot the course of 21st century art history, we would never in a million years come up with an artist like you–you don’t make installations, use expensive technology to re-mix crap we’ve all seen a million times before into videos, or glue your own pubes to graph paper in the shape of, like, Afrghanistan or Andy Warhol’s head–why not?  What gives?  Why are you not following the program, buddy?

McCarthy: I’m not so sure there is a program. I think the practices you mentioned may be ones favored by certain powerful art world types at the moment, but, taking a broad view, I think they’re just a handful of a vast number of proliferating viewpoints and practices available today. For my part, I make art primarily for myself, as an end in itself, not as a means to success in the art world. In fact, I see success exclusively as a means to doing what I want to do on a day-to-day basis, not the other way around. Therefore, no matter how successful I might become illustrating some fashionable theory or fulfilling some abstract historical process or exploiting the labor of assistants, if I’m not enjoying myself, what’s the point? Beyond that, most of my favorite artists have been misfits and cranks and malcontents of various kinds, and I look to their example for guidance and hope.

Smith: People often speak of artists that rely heavily on appropriated images (i.e. other people’s pictures) as being “like DJs”–which I feel is very true, in that they both suck.  You, on the other hand, make your own images; and you like the Melvins, who make their own music.  How have the Melvins influenced you?  What areas of experience do they explore that you might like to?

McCarthy: Besides simply enjoying their music, I’m interested in the Melvins as mannerists and/or formalists. I see characteristics of their music as being analogous to those of mannerist art (discord, strain, capricious elongation of forms, eccentric compositions, large discrepancies in tone and scale, etc), which I also like for, I think, similar reasons. I say formalist most obviously because their songs often have nonsensical phonetic lyrics, suggesting that they consider their sound and formal structure to be more important than their subject or meaning. Also, I like that they approach punk-influenced heavy metal with such perversity and humor. I would aspire to achieve a similar kind of thing in my work, to start with something most responsible intellectuals would think of as stupid (making pictures of monsters) and do it with as much intelligence, conviction and good humor as possible. They’ve also managed to be successful while pretty obviously making exactly the records they’ve wanted to make over the past quarter-century, without an eye toward trends or chart success.

Now, I realize that one often does so at one’s peril, but I have to disagree with you somewhat about artists who rely heavily on appropriated images. There is a fine and noble tradition of collage—from, say, Hannah Höch to the Bomb Squad—that takes existing cultural artifacts as its raw materials and, through various processes of cut-and-paste, turns them into something new and interesting. I think Max Ernst‘s collage novels are the best work of his career, and they’re made up entirely of images from Victorian engravings. John Wesley and Gary Panter both trade in appropriation, but translate their borrowed images into formal languages that are unmistakably their own. Which is not to say that there aren’t terrible artists who’ve based their careers on the wholesale theft of other’s images AND formal inventions. Compared to the artists I just mentioned, Licthenstein, for example, is a vampiric cipher, which is maybe way those reflectionless mirror paintings seem to be the most personal images in his oeuvre.

Smith: Your work is influenced by, or at least coincidentally resembles, images from the history of demonological thought.  Given that we are all 21st century human beings and we all know religion is total bullshit, what’s the continuing appeal of demons?

McCarthy: Demons interest me insofar as they’re embodiments of evil, harm, distress or ruin depicted as animal hybrids. They represent a fortuitous combination of form and content for me. I don’t think I have to believe that I could draw a pentagram on my floor and stand inside it and recite some incantation and call one of these things into being in order to make compelling art out of them. I like what Francis Bacon used to say about the crucifixion, that it was an amazing structure from which he could hang all of this form and feeling, despite being an atheist.

Smith: Your art doesn’t make me ask ‘Is it art?’  Is this a failing?  Why or why not?

McCarthy: When I’m feeling generous and optimistic, I see the essentially modernist project of making work that causes people to ask “is it art?” as a process of opening up possibilities that could subsequently be made good or interesting. Unfortunately, many art professionals have tended to see this the other way around, again, as an end rather than as a means, as though the point of art is to perform an infinitely regressive ontological interrogation of itself.  Also, of course, the originally transgressive impulse to defy categories has by now become a thoroughly academic and frequently tiresome cliché. It’s particularly troublesome in the paradoxical desire of certain art institutions to take it upon themselves to nurture a dying ideal of an avant-garde.

Regarding my own work’s relationship to this question, what’s weird is that it seems to prompt it from the other side, to cause some people to question its status as art as opposed to that of illustration, which drives me up a wall.

Smith: Are you an expressionist?

McCarthy: Certainly not in the way that the artists of Die Brücke were, for instance, at least in their conception of the relationship between form and content. I’ve always felt that there was something basically false about the idea that a more hastily made mark is inherently more expressionistic than a carefully made one. Maybe more like the way David Foster Wallace defines an expressionist in his essay on David Lynch, as someone who uses “objects or characters not as representations but as transmitters for… internal impressions and moods.”

Smith: That Dead Kennedys song “Your Emotions Make You A Monster”–what do you think of that?

McCarthy: I like it a lot, although I think the sentiment it expresses is actually closer to “Blindly Accepting Society’s Values And Repressing Your True Emotions Makes You a Monster.” Which, admittedly, would make a much weaker refrain. I think the lyrics to that one were written by the guitarist.

Smith: Your work went through profound changes during the George W. Bush era–did the atmosphere of those bleak days influence your perception of the world?

McCarthy: Certainly. The Bush years were, for me and a lot of people, full of pervasive feelings of incredulity, helplessness, resignation and bemusement. I think there may be some connection between that and the kind of angry whisper of the small black-and-white drawings. Oddly enough, I’m working now to increase scale and to bring color back into the work.

Smith: The black-and-white in your work, and the use of extremely sharp and textured drawing, sometimes seems like a kind of appeal to the tactile memory rather than the visual one–is this an accurate perception?  Can you talk about the relationships between the tactile, the sensual, the emotional, and the psychological?

McCarthy: That’s an accurate perception; in fact, I’m very happy that you say that, because I want the main effect of the work to be visceral. I’ve wrestled with this issue since I first read Francis Bacon’s interviews with David Sylvester in college. He talks about wanting his work to act directly on the nervous system of the viewer, and opposes this idea to illustration, which for him means a way of making an image that communicates with your brain through some boring, roundabout story. I would like to bridge that opposition, to use what most people would think of as illustrative mark-making to make images with a visceral impact. I’m not sure if it works for everybody, but your comment has given me hope.

I would like to answer your second question and to talk about about those relationships, but I fear that for me they lay quite outside the realm of the verbal.

Smith: Your work argues for the relevance of the psychological and the pathological–do you feel these ideas are underrepresented in contemporary art?

McCarthy: In some ways, sure. For instance, I think a lot of art world people would claim that “relational” art is the representative art of our moment and, while I’m no expert, it seems to me that most of the relational art I know about allows very little room for the pathological. The enjoyment of most of it (I’m thinking of famous stuff, like Rirkrit Tiravanija‘s meals served in gallery spaces or Felix Gonzelez-Torres‘s piles of candy) seems to be predicated on the assumption of an audience of cheerful, well-adjusted upper class folks who get their kicks easily.

Smith: What are some important differences between you and classic surrealist like Dali?  A pop surrealist like Giger?

McCarthy: This question makes me really uncomfortable, but I’m going to try to answer it (sort of—I actually don’t want to compare myself to those artists) because I hope I can use it to clarify a couple things. First, regarding pop surrealism, I should say that I’m just as bored and frustrated by the Juxtapoz crowd as I am by the October crowd. It’s an adolescent ghetto and I’d never want to be stuck there. That said, like a lot of people I was really into Giger as a teenager and his stuff soaked itself into my impressionable consciousness to such a degree that I haven’t felt the need to look at it in fifteen years. At this point, I feel like I can get most of what I like about it in purer form from Bellmer. I do think Giger’s a great creature designer, and I’m very grateful for his work on the first two Alien movies, but I think his paintings’ compositions are usually pretty static and boring. Dali was great when he wasn’t being a self-parody; I think his paintings, when they’re good, are way better and weirder than Giger’s. They’re also funny sometimes, which Giger’s things never are.

Smith: You’re from Texas–has this influenced you in any way?  In the way you see people?

McCarthy: I spent twenty-three years there so I have to say yes, but it’s hard to I have profoundly mixed feelings about Texas. When I was young, a lot of what as identifiably Texan about my surroundings was horrible and repulsive: I hated country music and anything cowboy-related, I hated the landscape, I hated the heat, I hated good ol’ boys. But the food was good, and I was generally happy about the Mexican influence on the local culture: bright colors, dancing skeletons, etc. As a teenager I discovered the Butthole Surfers, who were originally from San Antonio and prior to 1994 were freaky and interesting and a reason to feel some local pride. When I got to UT Austin, I discovered all kinds of local stuff that I loved and that had an enormous influence on me: Sound Exchange was covered floor-to-ceiling in Frank Kozik posters and had a Daniel Johnston mural painted on its exterior; that’s where I started buying his tapes. A little later, I bought a bunch of his drawings at Austin Books & Comics at $5 for b&w and $10 for color; apparently he’d bring in piles of them periodically and trade them for comics. I took painting and drawing classes with Peter Saul, and had a bunch of other great professors: Richard Jordan, Sarah Canright, Michael Ray Charles, etc. Sarah had known Jim Nutt in Chicago and brought him down as a visiting artist. I became aware of Chris Ware’s comics and learned that he had gone through the art program a few years before me.

Smith: Is Texas fucked?

McCarthy: Yes, but not irredeemably.
Smith: It seems like you–in common with a lot of contemporary artists interested in drawing who aren’t hippie scum–took some measure of inspiration from comic books.  What were some of your favorite comics?

McCarthy: When I was a kid, my taste in comics was pretty conventional; I liked Garfield best when I was really little, Calvin and Hobbes when I was a little older, X-Men as an adolescent—I followed it seriously during most  of the Marc Silvestri years but started to lose interest once Jim Lee came on. I loved The Dark Knight Returns, Arkham Asylum, Walt Simonson’s Thor, etc. I stopped reading comics for several years, but started to get back into it after discovering Jim Woodring‘s Frank in college. Lately Henriette Valium is my favorite. He’s horribly underrated, I guess because his imagery is sociopathic and his drawings are dense to the point of being nearly unreadable, but those are things are like about him.  I also really like Mat Brinkman’s comics, especially Multi-Force. I was very happy to discover recently that PictureBox is putting out a collection of those.

Smith: What was the last thing you heard someone say or read that made you go: yeah, totally–that is exactly right?

McCarthy: I just finished reading Delacroix‘s Journal, which is full of good stuff; here’s the last entry:

“The first quality in a picture is to be a delight for the eyes. This does not mean that there need be no sense in it; it is like poetry which, if it offend the ear, all the sense in the world will not save from being bad. They speak of ‘having an ear’ for music; not every eye is fit to taste the subtle joys of painting. The eyes of many people are dull or false; they see objects literally, of the exquisite they see nothing.”

Smith: Grab a painting off the web from art history that you like and tell us some things you like about it.

McCarthy: This is a painting I began seeing recently at the Met—”Hercules and Achelous” (1590) by Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem. It’s hardly my favorite painting or anything, but when I first saw it at the Met I was really surprised, because you rarely see a painting of its size and weirdness suddenly appear in those fusty European painting galleries. I like the bull (of course)—I like how its hindquarters are more or less just a cube and the way the rest of the body seems to ooze out from there; I also like the contrast between the fuzzy modeling and the hard edges, like you might see in a ’60s Paschke. I like how its left front leg ends in a phallic nub. I like the shape that the bull and Hercules form together and the way it stretches across the composition and sort of politely touches the left and right edges. I like the bizarre smaller scenes in the background, particularly the one on the left, which appears to be a man, naked from the waist down, killing a dragon just underneath the bull’s ball sac. I also think that the expressions on the faces of the bull and the lion skin are hilarious.

Check out more of Sean McCarthy’s work on his website.

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Here is what is going to happen to him: in ten or twelve years, after the Hollywood development people have clawed past the Dunes and Narnias and Spider-Men and have begun to see the bottom of the complexly-constructed-fictional-realities-that-can-be-plausibly-turned-into-mammoth-SFX-epics barrel, Harrison’s work will be discovered and turned into films. This discovery will probably be at least partially due to all the hip, young science-fiction and fantasy writers currently claiming him as an influence–writers who will have many films to their names by then and who I hesitate to name here because they are all so much worse than he is that listing them would give the reader the wrong impression entirely. The films will be terrible because his books aren’t really about things you can film, and he will go back to being ignored and, if he hasn’t died already, he’ll die.

This is because, unlike fellow fantasists like Tolkien or Asimov or William Gibson, the best thing about Harrison is not the thoroughness with which he imagines his worlds–although he’s no slouch in imagining–but the power of the language he uses to animate them. In other words, M. John Harrison can write–really write–not just describe strange situations with words.  In his best work, he writes as well as our best authors–Pynchon, Amis, Nabokov.  No computer-generated blockbuster will manage to get any of the bleakly magnificent prose that makes Harrison genuinely unique on the screen.

Harrison is marooned in a ghetto.  People afraid of ghettos, or who only know ghettos from what makes it onto the news, will not know his name. Harrison has written mainstream fiction, and it is lackluster; his verbal imagination is like William Burroughs’s or the Comte de Lautreamont’s–it is at its most intense when the entire environment can be bent to his psycholinguistic will.  If you can imagine a world where Borges was only ever published in Del Ray paperback editions with minotaurs on the cover, then you can imagine how fucked M. John Harrison is.

The children of the ghetto are unanimous about the man:

- K. J. Bishop: “M. John Harrison is a true master of English prose.”
- Michael Marshall Smith: “No-one can use words like M. John Harrison. They trust him. The Viriconium books show astonishing poetry and depth.”
- Graham Joyce: “M. John Harrison is a writer whose work detonates in the mind after putting the book down. His prose runs like silk but his ideas work like some principle of atomic fission. I’m in awe of his writing powers.”
- Richard Morgan: “Word for word, probably the greatest prose stylist working in the English language in any genre.”
- Elizabeth Hand: “Harrison’s Viriconium is the jewel in the crown of 20th-century fantasy, a work that proves irrefutably that fantastic literature can be Art with a capital A…”
- China Mieville: “That M. John Harrison is not a Nobel laureate proves the bankruptcy of the literary establishment.”

And they are not alone. Gravity’s Rainbow is the only book I own with more glowing and articulate reviews crammed in ahead of the table of contents than Viriconium–a collection of Harrison’s best stories, mostly from the early ’80s.  The reviews that aren’t from sci-fi and fantasy authors are from The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Guardian, Kirkus Review–pretty much any major publishing organ that feels obliged to hire someone to read fantastic literature and talk about whether it’s any good.  While people apparently only read Harrison because they’re getting paid to or because they work in the same ghetto, once they do they all decide he’s great.  Let’s try it:

“Nothing lives about these beaches but limpets and kelp, a few curiously furtive terns which survive for the most part by eating one another’s eggs, and in season a handful of deformed seals.”

“The words fell from his soft mouth one by one like pieces of pork.”

“Everyone enjoyed themselves thoroughly; while down below, among the ragwort on the towpath, writhed the thousand-and-one black and yellow caterpillars of the cinnabar moth, some fat and industrious, rearing up their blunt, ugly heads, others thin and scruffy and torpid.  The Barley brothers ate them and were sick.”

When I read, I am in the habit of creating a sort of thumb-index by drawing small arrows across the exposed edges of the stacked pages of the book which point to any page where I find a good line or a fine idea (the two things merge in the best prose).  My copy of Viriconium looks like the Battle of Hastings.

So: ignore whatever turgid cover they’ve given Viriconium this printing; ignore the faux-portentious taglines they’ve embossed in whatever fairy-font across the top; ignore the introduction by whatever popular second-rate imagineer they’ve hauled up to write it; ignore the sneer of the checkout girl, and buy Viriconium—a collection of three novels and a handful of short stories about an imaginary city.

Readers afraid of anything with a sword in it can still get their money’s worth if they just read the third book–In Viriconium–which is only a fantasy novel genealogically speaking.  What it resembles most is a mid-20th-century surrealist novel. In it a disheveled portrait painter, an inventor, and a self-absorbed midget attempt to rescue a great artist from an enigmatic plague while wearing ridiculous disguises (“It looked like a horse’s head, newly scraped to the bone in a knacker’s yard and decked with green paper ribbons for some festival”) and despite all this, it is never the least bit wacky.  It is elegant, elegiac, enigmatic, funny, horrible, and sublime.

If the exact novel had been written by Julio Cortazar or Salman Rushdie, In Viriconium would be available in a slim, impressively-designed, and expensive pastel volume with a blurb from Harold Bloom on the back, but we are lucky: readers who fall for In Viriconium’s can just turn the cheap, grainy page and keep reading more novels.

A Storm of Wings will be the first one to get optioned by the movie people–a handful of eccentric and barely adequate heroes go on a quest that ends in a Gnostic apocalypse where they struggle against an accidental invasion of their reality by ignorant alien insects.  Cronenberg is the obvious choice to handle the bugs, but there are probably a lot of directors who’d be willing to make a go of it, given the right budget:

“From wounds like women’s lips had bloomed a fantastic, irrelevant anatomy: drooping feathery antennae, trembling multi-jointed legs, a thousand mosaic eyes, vibrating palps, and purposeless plates of chitin.”

But will any of them have the range, irony, and patience to go from there to the icy melancholy of…

“What of Viriconium–Pastel City and erstwhile centre of the world–at this desperate conjunction, amid the mass abdication of real things and the triumph of metaphysics? . . . Her cold plazas and antique alleys reeking of cabbage accept their fate . . . Her people accept their fate: they are so superstitious that they believe almost everything, and so vulgar they have noticed hardly anything.”

The first novel in the book–The Pastel City, was written nine years before A Storm of Wings, and, while certainly the most conventional piece in the collection, has as much fun with it’s genre as Raymond Chandler has with his.  The rest of the stories range from the gorgeous to the bafflingly diffused, but all reiterate the idea that Harrison’s Viriconium is less one city than a sliding labyrinth of notions about place and time that can be reconfigured to the needs of any particular story–like a less detached and abstractly arty version of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.

This idea is not only central to Viriconium, it’s also essential to understanding why it works so well.  The best fantastic fiction justifies itself by using the past or the future or some imaginary combination of the two not as a place to go to escape reality, but as a place where ideas about reality can be tested without the distraction of keeping things familiar. So Viriconium is mutable: What’s revealed in one story is an obscure legend in another; what’s a plot point in one is a distant metaphor in the next. Place names change, characters become altered analogues of themselves.  The history, geography, and rituals of Viriconium bend to the need to understand this or that quiet corner of human psychology, not the need to pump out a plot that will allow us to tour the author’s marvelous inventions or pretend to kill exotic animals.

What else to say?  There are characters named Dissolution Kahn and Osgerby Practal; there is a genius so old he forgets at intervals who he is and why he lives in a fortress filled with brilliantly-constructed machines; there is “a frail, organic pink” light, there are Analeptic Kings.  The words burn like embers.  It’s a very, very good book.

**

More Rumpus’ The Last Book I Loved

The Rumpus interview with Zak Smith

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