Advice to writers

Penthouse: You got a lot of heat from publishers at first, didn't you? Was it your style or your content that most editors found hard to swallow?

Smith: They objected to both. They said I had sick attitudes for a woman. I'd get letters, "We find your thinking and ideas and your morals very immature. Write back when you mature." I was twenty-six, for Chrissake! They were looking for the usual jive-ass poetry, I guess. But now they're all knockin' at my door with bags of money. Fuck 'em.

From 'a baby wolf with neon bones', Patti Smith's interview with Nick Tosches, Penthouse, April 1976. (Possibly the best interview ever published.)

Older than Elvis

The big guy said something interesting the other day. (I should stress that this event in itself isn't the point of this post: he is often quite interesting, both on and off his specialty subjects.) We were talking about the extraordinary outpouring of emotion on Twitter and in the old media about the death of Michael Jackson. I was quite surprised about it, probably because I haven't thought anything he'd sung since Billie Jean is much chop. The big guy, however, pointed out that I'm swimming against the stream of 750 million album sales, which would mean that quite a lot of people do think Michael Jackson is reasonably good.

So then I thought about the celebrity deaths which have been meaningful in some way to me.

1. Elvis 1977
2. John Lennon 1980
3. Ian Curtis 1981
4. Princess Diana 1997 (cough cough; no excuse for this really)

And of these, of course, the greatest and most significant was Elvis.

'Do you think Michael Jackson was the black Elvis?' I asked the big guy, and also put it out for consideration on Twitter: the answer from both sources was a resounding no. In a royal smackdown between the King of Rock 'n Roll and the King of Pop, 'Presley', as my father always referred to him, would take care of business on all fronts.

When I wondered aloud if the estimable Harry Hutton might be correct in his assessment that 'Michael Jackson touched the hearts of simpletons everywhere', ('No display of ass-hattery will be judged excessive in the coming days. If Blair himself read a prayer at Jackson's funeral then led the congregation in an embarrassing dance, I would hardly wince'), the big guy suggested that it was more likely to be an age thing. 'People affected by Michael Jackson's death are too young to remember Elvis's,' he said.

Comparisons, though odious, are also quite interesting as well as being good money-spinners for hack writers, and someone's bound to do a fine job pulling together all the links between Elvis and Michael Jackson: the entourages, the crazed shopping sprees, the prescription medicines, the odd relationship with food, the physical wreckage, Lisa-Marie.

Michael Jackson certainly had the comparison in mind. I came across this sad quote from his 1998 memoirs: 'The way Elvis destroyed himself interests me, because I don't ever want to walk those grounds myself.' Which is just inviting any number of sappy feature articles lambasting the cruelty of the global capitalist celebrity mincer machine and referring to butterflies broken on the wheel, candles in the wind, etc etc. (In the midst of all the emoting, however, I was pleased to hear that Bubbles the chimp is doing it easy 'listening to flute-and-guitar music' away from the media spotlight at a sanctuary in sunny Florida. Damn shame someone who cared about him couldn't have got Michael Jackson to one, as well.)

Jeff Koons, Michael Jackson and Bubbles, 1988. Ceramic.

In 1988 Jeff Koons made a large-scale porcelain sculpture immortalising both Michael Jackson and Bubbles, who was then a very young chimp. Interviewed by Farah Nayeri, Koons commented on Bloomberg.com this morning: 'I wanted to show Michael as a contemporary Christ figure: I wanted to give the viewer a sense of a spiritual authority. The type of adulation, the type of support that’s given to pop artists -- this was the contemporary type of support that I thought that Christ would have received in his time.'

Now that I am considerably older than Jesus, the next big birthday milestone will be the Older than Elvis birthday. I can't imagine a similar marker point at 50, the final age of Michael Jackson, but you never know.

When animals attack

Still from 'A.F.F.C.O.', ©Brilliant Films/Skeptics 1988, via Spleen

When curator Francesco Bonami invited animal rights groups to view the controversial video works of French-Algerian artist Adel Abdessemed (in which animals are shown fighting for sport or being bludgeoned to death by Mexican butchers) prior to the exhibition's opening at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin last month, it resulted in vigorous protests and the involvement of local legal authorities.

"An act of openness was seen as a sign of weakness, and when you show fear, it’s just like in the animal world, they attack you,” Mr. Bonami said. “That’s what happened with the animal-rights groups. We showed a little fear, and they attacked us.”

So far only warning signs have been erected: it's unclear whether the city will insist that the work be removed from public view. The same work was previously pulled from an exhibition at the San Francisco Art Institute; Bonami, curator of the next Whitney Biennial, is now reported as "thinking twice" about whether to include Abdessemed's work (which deals with the presence of violence and alienation in contemporary western society, and frequently features animals, as in his 2006 series of photographs of wild animals roaming the streets of Paris) at all in the Biennial. “I don’t want to terrify the institution," Bonami said, somewhat surprisingly. (Or perhaps he was issuing a challenge?)

I haven't seen the work (and probably wouldn't care to; I have a weak stomach and it's not the sort of thing I much fancy looking at), but I suspect that what, if anything, Abdessemed is guilty of -- in a public sense, at least -- is not being obvious enough in his moral standpoint to be publicly palatable. It's not entirely clear whether the artist is glorifying the suffering and death of animals, or is drawing attention to it in order to protest against it, or whether his works are in fact allegories of wider human situations. Or all of those things at once, or something else again. The audience isn't told. And of course, nor should it be. Although that's an entirely fair enough position for someone who's an artist and not a propagandist to take, in this private moral ambiguity lies a public problem. How should a work like this be understood in a public context?

Interestingly, one of the animal rights protestors in Turin suggested that if Abdessemed 's purpose was to "denounce the process of butchering animals", he should show their own "far more gruesome" slaughterhouse videos. This suggestion is founded on the notion that making images of real-life horror public encourages people to agitate against the conditions which brought it about. (I can vouch for this from my own experience: peering into the back of a butcher's van in my teens definitely encouraged me to become a vegetarian.) But one person's horror is always another person's entertainment.

While Bonami stresses that the animals would have been killed anyway, and that Abdessemed was just documenting what he saw, apparently that's not obvious from the videos themselves. His moral position is essentially ambiguous. It's a version of the eternal problem faced by war correspondents: should the photographer at some point put down the camera and try to intervene in the situation unfolding before them, or should they capture it and trust that the publication of the image of an atrocity will help to prevent more in future?

Perhaps it's a bit rich to compare the horrors of war with the slaughter of animals for food, which is, after all, only what Abdessemed is filming (as well as scorpions fighting spiders and whatnot while people bet on the outcome, which is apparently legal in Mexico). Not that I can imagine anyone bringing it here, but I wonder how the work would play in New Zealand? Probably OK, I would think: given our Calvinistic background, it's blasphemy or exotic sexuality which primarily pushes the New Zealand public's art censorship buttons. We're fine with dead animals. New Zealand's effectively been an enormous meatworks for the rest of the world since the late 19th century. (This in itself brought about a minor diplomatic contretemps when Peter Peryer's Dead Steer was exhibited in Germany in 1995, in an exhibition supported by the New Zealand embassy.)

As New Zealand band the Skeptics found back in 1987 when they shot their video 'A.F.F.C.O'. in a South Auckland freezing works, the meat-packing business is a violent and dangerous one, with six-foot chainsaws ripping beasts in half and 'men wading around up to their waists in blood'.

You need a strong stomach for that.

"New York is cold but I like where I'm living"

Back on the air after a few days away: celebrating the baby's first year with a solo trip to Wellington, where I saw Leonard Cohen play at the Events Centre on the waterfront. It's become a cliche in the reviews I've read, but it really was the best concert I've ever been to.

From the moment he skipped on to the stage, a lithe figure in an immaculately cut dark suit and homburg hat, and launched into Dance me to the End of Love, he had me -- and the other four and a half thousand people waiting breathless in the dark -- in the palm of his hand. The voice -- rich and mellow with a touch of gravel -- was better than any recording by him I've ever heard. At 74, he sounds better than he did twenty-five years ago. Apparently he's touring in order to replace his lost pension fund: since retiring from the live music scene he's been studying Zen Buddhism, and has become an ordained Buddhist monk.

At one point he said: "It's fifteen years since I got up on stage, just a kid of 60 with a crazy dream."

The concert was full of similar deadpan one-liners, delivered with the sort of portentous and seemingly sincere yet ultimately self-deprecating manner I always associate with artist Max Gimblett. (Must be the Jewish/Buddhist cultural mash-up.) For The Tower of Song, Cohen started up the farfisa organ: "Don't be alarmed friends, it plays by itself. It's fairly sophisticated and you may not have seen one before."

He kicked off by apologising for the "handrail crisis" that had placed a visual barrier in the way of the premium seating: "I suggested to the management that they take it off but they thought that due to the nature of my work people would be throwing themselves off." Later on he remarked on the media reports which had described him as being of "diminutive stature", suggesting that at times he was actually invisible to the naked eye and while he'd been in Wellington he'd been offered a job by Te Papa as the "colossal shrimp". Less the godfather of gloom and more the wizard of wisecracks, at every turn the cheerfulness kept breaking through the poet laureate of pessimism's dark and complex act.


I'm quite simply desperate for a live album to come out from the world tour: not till the end of the year, apparently. The musical arrangements of songs I've known by heart for twenty years were extraordinary. The large band backing Leonard Cohen included a virtuosi Spanish guitarist from Barcelona and the Irish Webb sisters on "vocals and acrobatics". I wouldn't have thought that the perfection of songs like So Long, Marianne, or Who by Fire could be improved upon, but it could, and was.

Cohen frequently sang down on one knee on the gloriously kitsch Persian carpets which lined the stage, assuming a position somewhere between Frank Sinatra's "fleet's in!" 1940s hoofing style and Elvis's karate-derived vibrating leg. We were sitting upstairs, down the left-hand side of the auditorium, on about the same level as the band: we dismissed afterwards the idea that he was doing so in order to read the words off a song sheet, thinking instead that kneeling was a way to mitigate the stress of standing for almost the three-hour duration of the concert. (It seemed to take ten minutes to go by, of course.)

Silver-haired though he is, I got the sense that almost every woman there was utterly captivated by his presence. (He's a famous ladies' man who once announced that he “had a great appetite for the company of women.”) Dozens of women of all ages moved down the front for the second half of the concert, blocking the aisles and lining the stage. When during Chelsea Hotel Leonard Cohen sang "You told me again you prefer handsome men/ But for me you'd make an exception", I thought they'd rush the stage.

"The visits of the famous are always connected with our anxieties," writes Damien Wilkins in his When Famous People Come to Town. But when, after making a few jokes about Wellington's wind ("You don't even seem to notice it!"), Leonard Cohen said "You're lucky to live in a place like this", I thought that he's right. It's quiet down here at the end of the world, and sometimes I worry that it's a bit dull, but you can live a good life. But it's a life made much richer by the occasional visits of our cultural heroes.

Imagine

Everyday miracles: the face of John Lennon miraculously appeared this afternoon in the fabric of my Darryn George T shirt, hanging inside-out on the washing line.

Or maybe it's Leonard Cohen? Be able to tell you on Thursday.

Waiting for the Man

Artforum notes that musician John Cale will represent Wales at the Venice Biennale in 2009, producing a new audiovisual work exploring aspects of the Welsh language in collaboration with artists, filmmakers, and poets. Along with Lou Reed, Cale was a founding member of the Velvet Underground in NYC in 1965; creative disagreements saw him leave the band in 1968 and carve out a solo career as a musician and producer working with the likes of Patti Smith, Brian Eno, The Stooges, Siouxsie Sioux, the Happy Mondays and the Modern Lovers.

Here's a quote from Cale, put out by the Welsh Arts Council, and appearing in various articles about Wales's plans for Venice:

“As surprised and honored as I was to be asked to contribute to the Welsh presentation at the Venice Biennale of Art 2009, it also was a challenge that I eagerly accepted,” Cale said. “It offers an occasion to address certain pernicious issues in my background that had lain dormant for so long. There are certain experiences uniquely suited to the exorcism of mixed media and I am grateful for this opportunity to address them.”

It was Cale's use of the word "surprised" which caught my attention. It sounded suspiciously like the Welsh Arts Council simply approached him to take part, not requiring him -- in the tiresome way Creative New Zealand still does -- to submit a detailed proposal which would be considered in competition with those of other artists against the brief for the project, as if a country's participation in the Venice Biennale were an algebraic problem to be correctly solved.

The Welsh selection procedure for Venice isn't entirely clear from their website, but this paragraph in the job description for members of their Venice Advisory Committee leads me to presume that no proposal competitions are required in the watery land of Dylan Thomas and Richard Deacon:

"Research on the artist/s to be selected for 2009 will begin as soon as the Curator is in post. The Advisory Committee will have an opportunity to discuss various possible artists and themes before being asked to ratify an exhibition proposal from the Executive in the Autumn of 2008. Once the artists are selected, the Executive will work with them to create the exhibition that will be installed in Venice for the opening in June 2009."

Eh? What's that? Appoint the curator, discuss possibilities exhaustively with a group of expert advisors, work up a proposal, confirm the selection, no mucking around ... Put this together with the admirable Bedwyr Williams, whose work I've been reading a lot about lately, and I have to say I like the cut of the Welsh jib.


Here's what Alun Ffred [love the double eff] Jones, minister for heritage in the Welsh Assembly Government, had to say about Wales's choice of a singer-songwriter for Venice: "John Cale is a 'bard' in the widest sense - an artistic craftsman whose work is firmly rooted in Wales' cultural history, and it will be exciting to see how this manifests itself on such an important international platform."

I saw John Cale play in Christchurch in 1986. It was one of the best gigs I've ever been to, just the man sitting on a stool under a single spotlight with a floor mike in front of him. There were two perfectly conceived opening acts before him, as I remember: local singer-songwriters Roy Montgomery and Chris Knox. Here's a crazy idea: just imagine if New Zealand's arts council woke up one day and thought, what if we asked Chris Knox to put something together for Venice? Not a bad idea at all, but I just couldn't imagine it happening.

Maybe we're too enthralled by due process and the political imperative to be seen to be giving every man and his dog a fair go ever to operate in such a grand manner and leave the artists-proposal competition behind. Quite possibly there's something inherently bureaucratic in the national psyche which would preclude this kind of thing from happening here, whereas the Welsh (who've only been going to Venice since 2003) seem a bit more relaxed about it all, happy to select someone who is (a) not a visual artist and (b) unlikely to enter competitions, seemingly without fear that the Welsh people will rise up in revolution, crying "Unffair!"? I think it was poet D'Arcy Cresswell who suggested that New Zealand is a nation of clerks. Can't we be a bit more Welsh about things?



John Cale performing Heartbreak Hotel live at the Hillsborough Tavern in Christchurch, 1983.

Death of a princess

What seems like a lifetime ago, I spent a couple of gloomy years in the provinces, learning my trade. I thought I would save a lot of money, and possibly also finish a half-written novel, as there were very few distractions where I lived: but I discovered that, as my predecessors had, I spent both my wages and my weekends driving to more interesting places, desparate to be distracted after another week spent in dun-coloured sweaty suburbia.

During what I now refer to as my period of missionary service in the heartland, I spent those long turgid weekends when I was stuck in town listening to music, making compilation tapes for the long drives north and west. On wet Saturday afternoons I wrote playlists and made picture covers for my cassettes. (When I saw High Fidelity some years later, it played like a documentary.) Because there wasn't a decent European mechanic where I lived, when the thermostat in my car blew I drove for some time with the heater stuck on high, which necessitated the driver's window being down and the music turned up loud. It was at this time I discovered Yma Sumac.

Once heard, never forgotten: "She warbles like a bird in the uppermost regions, hoots like an owl in the lowest registers, produces bell-like coloratura passages one minute, and exotic, dusky contralto tones the next," a Los Angeles Times reviewer wrote following a 1955 performance. The self-styled Voice of the Xtabay (or "female ensnarer"), Yma Sumac had a vocal range spanning four or five octaves and looked like an Incan princess (she claimed to be descended from the Peruvian imperial line, and may well have been).



Her brand of supercharged technicolour tribalism (described by the Tampa Tribune as "South American travelogue scripted by Disney, directed by Dali") was enormously popular in America in the early 50s, her records outselling even Bing Crosby. Self-taught, Sumac claimed to be influenced in her vocal style by the jungle birds and animals of her native Peru; when she played Carnegie Hall, she was flanked by two erupting stage volcanoes. Somewhat prone to exaggeration, Sumac claimed that when she left Peru, 30 000 people rioted in Lima. Her son suggested ruefully that there was just one -- his mother -- but it may well have seemed like 30 000. (Strangely, a rumour that she was really a housewife from Brooklyn named Amy Camus -- her name spelt backwards -- persisted in clinging to her, though it was vehemently denied by both the singer and the Peruvian government.)

Yma Sumac, who died aged 86 on Saturday at an assisted-living home in her adopted LA, provided a soaring note of tribal exotica to the soundtrack which backed my desparately provincial life in those years. Mondo suburbia ... Glenview mambo ... la la la! (Needless to say, I never did finish that novel.)