Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself (28 page)

I don’t know, Denzel Washington’s another one, I don’t know whether I like him a whole lot. But God, you talk about star presence, he’s just like—you’re just, your
eye
, he fills your eye no matter where he is on the screen.

I read they were saying they couldn’t bank on him in a movie …

Wait. He’s been a leading man in
tons
of movies that have done well. Oh, come on—this was a period—people don’t see history movies anymore, people don’t see like a
noir
movie with a black man as the hero. I mean it’s an enormous risk.

… Glory …

Glory
was a great movie.

That moment: Matthew Broderick saying good-bye to his horse …

Yeah. Talk about something that
could
have been cheap, they had the
balls
to, like, do something that could have been really cheesy. And that ends up just—and it’s ingenious in so many ways.
Ferris Bueller’s
essential woodenness works perfectly for a young man, you know, prematurely elevated to a position of that kind of power.

Callow
.

Callow youth, you’re right. He’s
callow
in this.

Best battle scenes … that first scene at Antietam … people say best battle scenes …

Braveheart
’s got some pretty fucking
good
ones.

… where Broderick’s a coward, he faints …

And it gives him—and it also, it’s ingenious. Because otherwise there’s
no
motivation for the assault on Fort Wagner, you know? “Sir, give us the opportunity to die gloriously.” It’s like that would be—that would be nothing but surface, if we hadn’t seen how he’d been at Antietam.

… intensely moving …

Yeah, it really is.

… music …

Oh—[Hums it: he knows the
Glory
theme; impressive.] It’s a very intrusive soundtrack. But it works with this thing. I don’t know, there’s a whole real interesting essay to be written about the psychodynamics of melodrama in that movie, and why
that
movie allowed melodrama to work when—I mean, there’s
never
been a time in serious art more hostile to melodrama.

… themes that deserve the most dramatic treatment
.

Yeah. And it was also very safely set in the far, far, far distant past, you know? A mythic American time.

…
Morgan Freeman … walking through Charleston … “That’s right. We run off slaves, but we come back fighting men …”

He was
great
in that. I haven’t liked him in much else, but he was great in that.

He was Easy Reader
.

On
Electric Company?
Yeah. Can we turn the
heat
up a tiny bit? I also—I wonder, we’ve got to be fairly close.

…
I’m worried about your dogs, too. Isn’t it funny, we’re two people who are used to working alone. And we speak more comfortably looking out the window in the dark as opposed to looking across the table. It’s not surprising, but it is funny
.

It is, it’s very interesting to me the ways, I don’t know, we sort of converge and differ. It’s real interesting just to hear what actors you like and don’t like, and all about reading. I don’t very often—there’s a couple writers that I know really well who I’ve known for years. But this is just weird ’cause I like only met you a couple days ago. It’s kind of
intense
. I’ll be following your career with great interest
too. If only just because now I feel like I know what you’re
like
a little bit.

Let’s talk about music for a second. What kind of music do you play …?

I have the musical tastes of a thirteen-year-old girl.

I mean, I will find one or two songs—I listened to “Strange Currencies” over and over again all summer. Right now I’m listening—

Can we turn the light back on …?

Sure. I knew this would come. Because of the
Rolling Stone
thing. I’m just—and now I’ve taped these two Bush songs off the radio. One’s “Glycerine,” and I don’t even know what the other one’s—it’s that one, “I don’t want to come back down from this cloud.” “Glycerine,” by the way, is a complete rip-off of Brian Eno’s “The Big Ship,” the
entire
bass line. Here, I’ll even, when we get back I’ll play “The Big Ship” for you and then “Glycerine.” And it’s just—it’s sort of like Eric Clapton’s “Cocaine” is a total rip-off of a Tommy Bolin song called “Post Toastee.” Litigation. [I check; he’s absolutely right.]

It’s weird, I know—I know little esoteric bits. I listened to a lot of fusion in high school, and listened to like an enormous amount of, like, Pink Floyd and weird psychedelic shit. And then I know a fair amount about like esoteric Australian music, ’cause my sister lived in Australia for two years and sent me these tapes. But I don’t have any kind of comprehensive, you know. … Like I’ll read
Spin
or another magazine’s record reviews. And I’ll be like, I won’t recognize three-quarters of the records they’re talking about.

But then I’ll happen to hear Alanis Morissette. On the radio. And you know just for some reason—that squeaky orgasmic quality in her voice will just
hit
me. And so I’ll go like listen to nothing but Alanis Morissette for two months.

Why? I saw her on the wall
.

[Left Alanis poster and
Cosmo
magazines out for me to find.]

I don’t know what it is. She’s simultaneously
so
erotic and
so
human and she can’t sing all that well, and she’s got that squeaky quality. I don’t know
what
it is but there’s something—I can’t say anything interesting about it.

Did you like that song?

Which one? “I Want to Tell You”?

No, that’s O.J. Simpson’s I’m-on-Trial book. … Would be great if O.J. had sung “You Oughta Know” …

“I Want to Know,” yeah, that one was all right. You know what? I could—the one, the only one I really
don’t
like is that “I’m high but I’m grounded, I’m …” You know, that Gen-X anthem shit. But the
new
one—the one that, that’s, but here’s what’s weird. If it was anybody else, I wouldn’t forgive it. I
like
that she’s trying too hard. For instance, Sheryl Crow made me want to vomit, from the very beginning. And there’s not really a—they’re sort of functioning in the same kind of role. And you can see Joan Osborne on deck, swinging two baseball bats, ready to have her fifteen minutes after Alanis Morissette.

What similar role are all of them playing …

My guess is—my guess is it’s some kind of, there’s a ditsy overearnest quality, where we can sneer at them a little bit. Which allows—we can stand to
hear
things from them that we couldn’t stand to hear from a more hard-rock band. Because there’s a ditsy flaky granola-crunchy quality about like …
Tch tch tch tchoo
. … For instance: I mean a seriously political like halfway-deep singer-songwriter like, what’s her name, Natalie Merchant. Who used to be with 10,000 Maniacs. Is like—her career trajectory is entirely different. I mean she’s—she’s
got sorta small solid hits time after time. But these are different figures. Let me see, first Sheryl Crow—well, first there was Joan Armatrading for a while—not Joan Armatrading. Tracy Chapman. And lately there’s been first Sheryl Crow and then Alanis Morissette and then you can see Joan Osborne—

Edie Brickell, too
.

Well, see, here’s what’s weird: I’m really a bad person to ask about it. Because it just happens to be, like, you know, for a year I’ll listen to country on the radio, and then for a year I’ll listen to like shitty alt. And so now that I’m in the shitty alt phase a little bit, I’m a little more alive to the stuff. It’s more like—

…
more seasoned … What stuff can they say?

I’m trying to think. I mean imagine if—I don’t know, the “God” song, “What If God Were One of Us.” Let’s try to imagine that being sung by, I don’t know, R.E.M. Not an unearnest or an unpretentious rock band. But there’s some sort of
waifish
quality about them. And we know the egg timer’s running on their career, we know that they’re like the 10 CC of 1996 or something like that. And that allows—it gives them a weird kind of freedom.

What I would love, and there maybe have been articles like this. But I would love profiles of the men involved, and the decisions about who gets not just record contracts, but who gets serious radio play, you know? Because it’s real clear that Sheryl Crow with that “I Just Want to Live in L.A.”—and then Alanis—are in lots of ways media creations. And it’s probably five or six, I would imagine, guys in Ray-Bans and suits, have decided not just that they’re good, but that they’re
sellable
. And that there’s a market. Has there been stuff like that, that I’m just too ignorant to have seen?

I don’t think so … But it’s not just those guys in suits … when “All I Wanna Do” came out … feel it in your belly somebody somewhere saying
,
“We’ve got a hit.”
[Break]
Thinking this way: What about on a series, what you see on TV is not the characters, but just the actors straining to get their own pilots and series. …

That’s been what’s excruciating about
Saturday Night Live
.

…
Do you feel that ever listening to music? Like in Alanis Morissette …

No, I don’t think so. And again—I’m very ignorant. My musical tastes are so eclectic and so involved, it’s like what students have given me. I mean I didn’t even, I hadn’t even
heard
of Nirvana until after that man died.

What do you make of them?

I think it’s absolutely incredible. But
unbelievably
painful. I mean if you, you know, all the stuff that I was groping in a sorta clumsy way to say about our generation? Cobain found, Cobain found incredibly powerful upsetting ways to say the same thing.

You wrote a whole book about rap. Why?

No, I—Mark and I wrote a book-length, a long essay that was originally going to go in a magazine called
Antaeus
. That turned, was turned
into
a book. [David’s third book,
Signifying Rappers
.] That was about—why we and a lot of other white people like us, found ourselves
obsessed
with listening to black, to serious black political rap. That was thoroughly suffused with hatred for all things white. And watching these bands then get captured by white labels, and watching the hip-hop phenomenon get digested by Madison Avenue. And it wasn’t—it wasn’t about rap. I don’t know that much about rap.

Also, I was terrified to write fiction. And Mark thought he might want to try this with me. And I was so desperate to feel like a writer, and whenever I would try to write fiction it was just an incoherent mess. So I thought that we would try that.

… more music stuff …

Don’t get pissed off, though, about like I know next to
nothing
about this. I mean I am like a bonehead who listens to the radio.

[Break]

[About being a writer] … the attempt to track. I’m not sure we’re any better, but we’re able to describe the attempt to track our wandering in circles in a way that perhaps somebody else can identify with. I don’t think writers are any
smarter
than other people. I think they may be more compelling in their stupidity, or in their
confusion
.

…
well said …

And I’m structuring it as a sound bite, that’s—I
think
that’s closer to what I think.

…
You said being a regular guy was a great strength of yours as a writer; I thought it was smart, but what did you mean by that?

I think—I had
serious
problems in my early twenties. I mean, I’d been a
really
good student. I was a really good logician and semantician and philosopher. And I really had this problem of thinking I was smarter than everybody else. [Reason for faux] And I think if you’re writing out of a place where you think that you’re smarter than everybody else, you’re either condescending to the reader, or talking down to ’im, or playing games, or you think the point is to show how smart you are.

And all that happened to me was, I just had a bunch of shit happen in my twenties where I realized I wudn’t near as smart. Where I realized I wasn’t near as smart as I thought I was. And I realized that a lot of other people, including people without much education, were a
fuck
of a lot smarter than I thought they were. I got—what’s the word?
Humbled
, in a way, I think. And uh, and what the weird
thing is, discovering—I mean if you see more heart, you know. … Or I don’t know, the prose is prettier or it’s less cold or whatever—I—

I see more of a human person’s experience …

I doubt I’m all that different from other like you know, seriously overeducated, intellectual kids. I
really
had this—I think I
really
had a very difficult time believing that anybody else, um, was at all like me. Or was anywhere as smart as me.

And
please
, if you put this in, make it clear that I’m talking about really how I
was
, like twelve, fifteen years ago. That I mean I, that I’m real
embarrassed
by that, you know? And I’m saying it only ’cause I pray that other people will, like—that other people will have been the same way.

Before I address that … In Harper’s pieces, you said you peel back your skull
.

Yeah. It’s basically, you know, welcome to my mind for twenty pages. See through my eyes, here’s pretty much all the French curls and crazy circles. And the trick about that stuff is to have it be honest, but also have it be a lot more interesting. I mean most of our thoughts aren’t all that interesting. They’re mostly just confused. That stuff’s rhetorically real interesting ’cause it’s about how to be honest with a
motive
, you know?

…
Only two more minutes to go before we change tapes. That’s really well said: how to be honest with a motive …