Skyscrapers in Full Bloom
An interview with Thurston Moore
By: Maria Garcia Teutsch
Henry Miller Memorial Library
I met Thurston Moore at the Henry Miller Memorial library the day of his concert. My friend, the poet Eleni Sikelianos had worked with him at Naropa and suggested I talk to him about poetry. His knowledge of 20th Century poetry is vast. He also publishes up and coming poets and is a collector of rare books. Like most people, I only really knew about him through his group, Sonic Youth. When I began to do research on him I became more and more interested in talking to him. As an interviewer, I make a great poet. So when we sat down in the redwood grove that is the Henry Miller library, he helped me figure out how to use the tape recorder on my Ipad, and then we sat back and began to talk about poetry, art, and the creative urge.
MGT: What is the role of the artist in the 21st century?
TM: I don’t think the artist really needs to contemplate their role in the 21st century. There should always just be an understanding of what an honor it is, and what that responsibility entails, and to just take it as it comes. I don’t think there’s really any set rules or regulations about how an artist should conduct themselves. Because then it just becomes a uniform kind of concept of what an artist is, and I don’t think that’s appropriate. I think all artists should be primarily an individual in what they do. I like the idea of community, and think there’s a lot of like-minded artists, but it’s not a necessity, I also like the idea of distinction. The interesting part is more of what the artist represents which is the creative lifestyle.
MGT: Your artistic responsibility, whether intentional or not, entails your having done some rather cool things regarding free speech. We here at the Henry Miller library hold this right as sacrosanct. We also support protests against tyrannical regimes. It seems to me that as an artist you have often taken on the responsibility of providing a platform from which opposing views could be heard.
TM: I think it’s good to represent an alternative to tyranny {laughs}. I created a record label called Protest Records during George W. Bush’s initial invasions into the Middle East. This label was inspired by the poet Anne Waldman and Steve Taylor–who’s a musician and a writer involved in Allen Ginsberg’s world–and was a compatriot of his. I’ve heard both of them do readings about what was going on with this authoritative government that was overriding the humanitarian impulses of their country. I started to think that it would be nice to publish records that were free, that would be about protesting anything, though primarily the protests were about what was going on then. Protest Records was a project of mine, something I knew how to do, which may have something to do with overcoming the anxiety of feeling helpless. It is important to do something that you know you can do. That alone is strength unto itself.
I began Protest Records by sending out a mass email to everyone I knew. I said I’m looking for recordings which will be published free to anybody who wants to download them on this open-ended label called Protest Records. I started out with pieces by Steve Taylor and Anne Waldman. Everybody started sending me stuff from The Beastie Boys, to Eddie Vedder, to hundreds of people around the world. Everyone started sending me files, which in turn made my computer crash. I needed more space to do this project in the right way, and only had one person who was helping me administer it.
This Protest Records project became something that I was working on morning to night. I also began to receive hate mail with people saying things like they we’re going to kill me if they ever saw me, and “just wait until we find those weapons of mass destruction, you’re going to feel like an asshole,” and all this kind of stuff. It’s the first time I ever really experienced that, and it was unnerving. I finally had to stop this project because there was no room for anything else in my life, and I have a family and other work I had to do. Then I decided maybe what I’d do is close down this record label and turn it from music to art and people could turn in images. I kept thinking about how I could make money from it to give to organizations that were anti-war, or that helped people who were victims of war crimes. I thought, where’s the most money being made on the Internet? So then someone suggested I put advertising on my site because I had so many people looking at it, and then I’d make a lot of money. But I didn’t want to advertise, because then I’d have to investigate all of the advertisers to make sure there were no ties with anything that was a conflict—or, you know–related to arms companies. And then I thought, the people making the most money on the Internet are pornography sites. And then I started thinking wow, maybe what I should do is solicit these porn companies to see if they were anti-war, then maybe I could have them give their art away for free, whatever their art may be—but I didn’t do that because it would become kind of too scary, especially being a father of a teenage daughter, I didn’t want to have any ties. Then I just stopped doing it. The whole thing was just a sort of a gesture. In a lot of ways I think gestures are as important as anything.
MGT: Anne Waldman’s Manatee Humanity strikes me as a chant for peace. Her entire body of work is this kind of chant that goes out into the world as a very grand gesture with vibrations we cannot document but which, I believe, make a difference.
TM: Anne is very inspired by Buddhist teachings, obviously. There’s this school of Buddhism where they spend their whole day praying for peace—and that’s what they do as activists which I think is wonderful. A lot of people get involved with Buddhist meditation as a part of their activism. I am more sort of tuned to that than hands-on aggression—you know, aggression towards aggression.
I was interested in talking to Yoko Ono about this, about not confronting negativity with negativity, saying “stop this,” or “don’t do this,” or “we’re against this.” To not acknowledge that and say “we are for this—we are going to do this. This is what we pronounce, that is love.” Her whole thing was like, “don’t engage. Just be the other, be the positive.” That’s where you locate the activism. It’s a different kind of sense of protest than say, back in the days of SDS {Students for a Democratic Society}.
I think it’s been figured out how to ignore “taking it to the streets,” and how to very easily demean these kinds of protests through a media that’s controlled. It’s different world today, and there’s a lot of frustration about this media control because we can’t take it to the streets anymore because no one’s looking, or it just gets shot down. So it sometimes becomes more of a spiritual practice. I think poetry acts as a spiritual exercise because it’s the essence of writing. Everyone wants to get to the pure essence of activism, and a lot of it can be done through music and poetry.
MGT: The opposite of this peaceful kind of positive protest was embodied by the punk impulse of “in your face” and creating societal change that way. Now it seems that the more money you have the more you can control what gets attention. I remember when I was first into the Sex Pistols, and the Clash, and going to all these shows in the early 80s, it was almost a crime to have money—they were embarrassed of their fame, which is so diametrically opposed to what it is now, and I wonder if that has shaped this media landscape that you are pointing to, the corporate culture we have now, which is completely opposite. Where’d we get lost?
TM: I think the idea of success equating revenue is this constant problem in the artist’s culture. It’s a learning curve in a way, and you can see who comes out of it in a way where they’re truly in it for the devotion, as opposed to anything else. I’ve never been in the situation where I’ve had any sort of windfall, where things got good and we didn’t have to worry about working our day jobs. I always wonder what it would be like to be somebody like people I know who had so much money they didn’t know what to do, like REM, Red Hot Chili Peppers, or Nirvana.
MGT: Well, Kurt Cobain seemed a little embarrassed by his fame and riches.
TM: He was completely uncomfortable with it. But at the same time I’ve seen a lot of people who’ve been able to deal with it in a good accord. To me the model was Allen Ginsberg, when he had money he’d give it to writers who were living day by day. I think it’s a distorted model to be in a band where success is all about making money.
MGT: The other part that goes with that is the ego. Gary Snyder is so smart in so many ways besides just being this great poet, and when I met him I thought, probably one of the hardest things he has to deal with is his ego, because people just adore him and come up to him all the time to tell him how great he is. Being a famous poet doesn’t equate to monetary gain, but the adoration does equate to having to keep one’s ego in check, especially for those practitioners of Buddhism.
TM: I started out in my early 20s and people would come up and say things like, “You’ve changed my life.” By osmosis they’re living this fantasy through you. I know I’ve done it with other people as well. I don’t find my ego difficult to keep in check. I think it’s important to find out and read the words of people like Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg who are such central figures in poetry. Because they are so interested in bringing ideas of egolessness into Western culture. Particularly someone like Allen Ginsberg doing investigations into Buddhism at a time when America was still trying to deal with the Eisenhower era of uniformity and social standards. Coming to America and not being so esoteric with something most considered as being so Other, or such an alien concept. Instead they talked about it as it dealt with the American landscape, like in the “Railroad Earth” which was so ingenious and wonderful. They looked at how these Eastern ideas worked in America. America needs this because these ideas are a conglomerate of contemporary global consciousness. It’s a new country, it’s Indian and it’s European. In the 50s Ginsberg introduced the concept as playful and liberating and hip. He’s probably more so than anybody a heroic figure for me. I met him a few times and he really enjoyed his ego. The whole idea wasn’t about getting rid of your ego as it was understanding it and enjoying it. Allen knew he was idolized on so many different levels, but it wasn’t a device for control or manipulation for him, as much as it was a device for bliss and for enjoyment, more playful. He was more like, “if you idolize me then let’s sit together and talk.”
MGT: What contemporary poets do you like?
TM: Right now I just started a new publishing imprint called Flowers of Cream. It’s all about doing these small chapbooks that are perfect-bound with silver card covers. They’re completely referential to this small press from the early 70s that came out of New York called Telegraph Books which Victor Bockris started with Andrew Wylie. They’re famous for publishing Seventh Heaven, the Patti Smith book. When I was a teenager in the 70s those books were really important to me. As a sentimental gesture I decided to do this press called Flowers of Cream. The books are the same cut size, the same font size, the same sort of aesthetic as a Telegraph book, though they’re silver card covers instead of white–just to give it a bit of a glam touch. It’s all about focusing on new younger poets. I find the new generation of voices out there interesting because they’re ensconced in poetry as a history, and a lineage. They’re very interested in the academics of writing as well as the new ideas of liberation from that academic. That’s the kind of writer I’m interested in.
Right now I live on the east coast so I wanted to keep local: Western Massachusetts, New York, D.C. kind of thing. There’s also a poet from Minneapolis that I like, Dana Ward. The first book is by Ben Estes, he’s a young poet out of Western Massachusetts. There’s the New York poet, Anselm Berrigan, the son of Ted and Alice Notley. I’m doing a book with him in collaboration with another young poet from New York who’s a part of the Poetry Project scene, but he’s a New York kid, John Colletti. The D.C. poet. Rod Smith runs a bookshop in Georgetown and publishes books under an imprint called Edge. I’m also working with Elaine Kahn who’s a great poet I’ve known for a long time, and who’s helping me facilitate the imprint. We’re doing small runs of 200 that we’ll sell on the blogsite, Flowers and Cream.
I really find publishing these poets to be rewarding. I’ve had my hand at publishing in different ways. I’ve done the Ecstatic Peace Poetry Journal, a stapled 8 ½” by 11” Xerox journal for the last 12 years. I did get involved in high end book publishing with Abrams and Rizzoli. I always had it in mind to do poetry with those publishers, but it’s almost impossible to educate them or convince them that poetry is a worthwhile thing to do. The books I’ve done with them are more music oriented, which is what they like. I did a book on the history of No-wave music, {No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980}. I did a book of photography {Grunge} with this photographer Michael Lavine who documented the whole grunge scene of the 90s. I really liked all of these projects, but didn’t like to deal with the bureaucracy of corporate publishing and so I stopped doing it. There are a couple of projects I might do in that capacity, but for the most part I stopped and decided to start this new imprint. I like starting new things, I’ve had this journal, Ecstatic Peace Poetry Journal and also as a record imprint, and will continue to do both, but I like establishing something new right now.
MGT: If artists don’t provide a space for other artists in our culture no one else will.
These books are also really lovely. People can get them on your blog: {flowersandcreampress.com} Where did the name Flowers and Cream come from?
TM: I got interested in cataloging my post-war archive of underground poetry with this whole mid-western scene around Cleveland with D.A. Levy and D.R. Wagner and Tom Kryss–these 60s radical poets. I think I got the name from my interest in them. There was an imprint of D. A. Levy’s that had the word flowers in it. They always use the image of flowers in their lines a lot I’ve noticed. They’re these hard-bitten mid-western guys in these industrial towns and I always thought it was beautiful the way they looked at steel and concrete as flowers. Those were their flowers. The name flashed on me and I used it.
MGT: What about your own poetry?
TM: I write and I have a bit of a identity issue with it. I know that people look at it as sort of a “oh he’s the avant-garde rock guy who has his dalliance with doing poetry,” and it’s kind of cute in a way. Sometimes I’ll get asked to be in certain journals and I usually comply and send a piece out here and there. I think it’s difficult for people to remove themselves from the notion that I’m a musician that does poetry. The poets I deal with have a sense of community and realize my interest goes into a knowledge of where they’re coming from in their various school of poetics. I think it’s sort of known, but I thinks it’s hard to separate image from the pure energy of what’s on the paper as a poem. I was asked if one of these books {from the Flowers and Cream imprint} would be of my own poetry and I said I’d rather not do that. If I do that I’d do it pseudonymously. I have also thought about doing it with music, because there’s always preconceived expectations of what you’re going to do because of your history.
MGT: It’s nice to bust away from that kind of imprisonment—though admittedly a lovely cage—of image. If you write your poetry under a nom de plume then you can write reviews of your own stuff like Walt Whitman did.
TM: Yeah! I could say “wow, who is this guy.” {laughs} It’s a weird thing because poets want to establish presence in their identity, and their identity is in their name. I feel like I’m on the other end of that. I don’t need to do that, so it comes into a place of disturbance. There’s this idea of my dallying. It’s a minor issue really. I know Kim {Gordon} has this issue because she was brought up as a visual artist, and when we met she got involved with me playing music and subsequently she found a lot of her artistic sensibility could be expressed as a musician and a performer as such. After about 20 years, for her it became about wanting to engage in visual art and the gallery world-which she always kept in touch with, but it’s so difficult for her to establish any identity that’s not rocker Kim Gordon siding as visual artist, and that’s hard for her to deal with. I say that the amount of respect that people have for you as a creative person should override such a thing. The simple matter is she sees herself as an artist and wants to be seen as a working artist and not as a rocker doing art, which makes her bristle. I know what that feeling is, at the same time we are privileged to live in a culture that’s completely informed by mid 20th century John Cage-Merce Cunningham multi-media activity. You can still work as somebody who’s multidisciplinary in the arts. But if one discipline completely overrides everything it can challenge your audience.
MGT: People like to pigeon-hole. Labeling seems to make the hard bits easier to swallow in neatly digestible chunks, “you’re this, therefore you can’t be that.” It’s a syllogism. I think Americans in particular have a hard time expanding our definitions. It often takes us a while.
TM: For me I don’t concern myself with expectations. It should be a fairly simple life. I read this interview with George Harrison recently with his wife, and she said George was always confounded by people who’d ask him how he wanted to be remembered after he died, and he said, “I don’t care.” Why would I care? When I die it’s a completely new ballgame, everything changes. This is illusory to think about how you can control it. I thought his sense of self was inspiring, especially someone who has such a potent significance in 20th century arts culture. There are not too many people like that. I think a lot of people have concerns about establishing themselves beyond death. We just played at the Hollywood Forever cemetery. There are all these huge monuments everywhere of since-gone people, about what they were all about, these huge granite pianos. I thought, “hmm, that’s nice.”
photo credit: Jon Strymish
Originally published in Ping-Pong 2012
