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MarsDust:
Have
you always been a Blue Oyster
Cult fan? Are you a Veteran of
Psychic Wars now? How did that
collaboration come
about?
John
Shirley:
I caught BOC when I was a lad
visiting New York, they were
playing Central Park, and I
appreciated the BOC's
neo-classical hard-rock
sensibility. And Buck Dharma's
phenomenal guitar playing. "The
thinking man's hard rock band" -
really oblique, interesting,
artfully cryptic lyrics. They
created a whole sort of mythos in
their lyrics. Twenty some years
later I got to write for them
through mutual friends. They're
humorous - for example, "Joan
Crawford Has Risen from the
Grave" - and serious at once. And
I can appreciate that. That was
in line with a lot of New York
punk - the Ramones, the
Dictators, had that satirical
flavor. Yet, it was complex,
ballsy music with a vaguely
fascist overtone to it, though
neither they nor me are fascists.
Yet, in each of us there is a
fascist that needs a healthy
outlet....
On the
same trip I went to a small
glitter show and saw a new rock
band called Kiss, in their very
first performance publicly - Kiss
entertained me, as at the time,
they were capable of really
rocking and they were outrageous.
It was a tiny place and the guy
spat fake blood on my shoe.
Later, I did the first print
interview with Kiss ever and one
of them fucked my girlfriend, as
she stayed behind after the
interview! I think he gave me the
clap through her - I was not,
however, a Kiss fan. I just liked
the makeup and fire breathing and
leather, it was such a relief
from the proto disco shit, but,
after the first album, I lost
interest.
MarsDust:
What role does music play in your
life now? Is there a serious
career component to it, or is it
a way to keep the rock in your
writing?
John
Shirley:
Well
I've made some okay money (not a
lot) from writing for the Blue
Oyster Cult and I think of it
professionally. I'd like to write
more lyrics for people
professionally. But when I write
lyrics for myself to sing, it's
mostly at best an avocation, like
an actor who paints. Still, it's
very close to my heart - I'm
happiest when singing and have
gotten better and better at it.
I'm thinking of starting a Punk
Blues band ... I'm a good
performer and feel more at home
doing that than almost anything
else. And I feel there's
something in me that's
frustrated, trying to get out
when I don't do it. Like that guy
in Unbreakable, couldn't be happy
until he did what he was created
to do.
I had my
chance - John Hammond, Sr., who
discovered Dylan and Springsteen
and many others, offered me a
deal with his label at Columbia,
but he said I had to get rid of
my band. I said no! So, of
course, the band broke up soon
after, and I went back to Hammond
- and he'd had a stroke. I
could've had him produce an album
for me on Columbia.
His last
guy was Stevie Ray Vaughan, whom
he told me about and whom no one
had ever heard of at the time
outside Texas. I regret blowing
off Hammond, of course. But, at
the time, the only thing that
kept me from overdosing, on my
drug binges, was not having
enough money. Maybe I'd be dead
if I had taken that deal ... now
of course I'm in recovery, for
many years. Singing will have to
be my drug where I can find
it.
MarsDust:
So many punks seem to do spoken
word now - Henry Rollins from
Black Flag, Jello Biafra from the
Dead Kennedys, Excine Cervenka
from X - it seems that all the
righteous indignation that made
punk so raw and important began
to undergo a metamorphosis into
some kind of equally powerful
articulation. As a punk who has
always been a man of letters,
have you considered going down
this road? It seems it would be a
perfect fit. Where do you prefer
to focus your "righteous
indignation" now?
John
Shirley:
I
have always done spoken word. I
started out doing spoken word -
so did Patti Smith and Jim
Morrison. I used to do
rock-inflected poetry readings in
Portland, Oregon (I went from
that to starting the first punk
club in Portland, early on, way
before Satyricon - a once-a-week
unlicensed nightclub called The
Revenge). When I did the readings
I sometimes had a guy play
guitar, along with my doing the
prose or poetry, and that evolved
into bands (Sado-Nation, the
Monitors, Obsession, etc). I
think it was the same for Jim
Carroll, back east. I did various
spoken word recordings for
various small venues and plan to
get some more onto some CD
sometime ... so yeah it's a
powerful thing to me.
When I
do a reading it can be very
intense, for me, I get very
performance-oriented - a
tradition that goes back at least
as far as Charles Dickens, who
was also an actor. It's just that
spoken-word touches a different
part of the listeners, to some
extent - it doesn't engage the
lower centers of a person, the
visceral, quite so much. But then
if you listen to Patti Smith's
first albums, especially the very
first one - which some women
artists are being very derivative
of now - she perfected the
combination of song and reading,
took it to a high art, blended
the two. It was a kind of beatnik
thing originally ...
A John
Shirley compilation CD can be had
via the John Shirley mp3 site,
accessible through the
John
Shirley
website.
Also, you can hear me do spoken
word in the audio book of Demons,
on which Harlan Ellison also does
some of the reading, which is now
out.
My
righteous indignation, you ask? I
don't know. I tend to get into
satirizing social states in my
lyrics. In fiction, I just did
two novels, Demons
(now out from Del Rey books) and
Crawlers, coming from the same
publisher in 2003, and both books
[are] - like my
Eclipse
books
- political/social/spiritual
allegories.
Demons
is perhaps a bit didactic - it's
a novel of the supernatural about
an invasion of demons,
ostensibly, but essentially it's
about how industry and the
multinationals are willing to
sacrifice people for their own
profits. How they're willing to
kill, through irresponsibility,
and how they damn well know
they're killing, and how at root
the problem is all about
consciousness - and the lack of
it. Crawlers is perhaps the first
real cyberpunk-horror novel -
it's set in contemporary times in
a small suburban town, but it's
about the place where our
mindless appetites meet
technology and the sickness that
arises from that. I'm no Luddite,
but I think we're allowing
ourselves to be hypnotized by our
own technology ... I think we're
half-human because of
it.
I don't
mean we're half cyborg, like the
fantasy that people have of
technology being our evolutionary
leap to a higher state - I mean
we're SUB-human because of it. We
sacrifice consciousness to
entertainment and to ease.
Technology should be our tool -
we should not become its tools.
And how is this phenomenon used
to control us? The Eclipse books
- the only truly
leftist-political science fiction
novels except for Le Guin and
maybe The Handmaiden's Tale -
warned that computer animation
techniques would become so
sophisticated they will be able
to generate videos and holograms
indistinguishable from real
images, and these would be used
to manipulate our political
mindsets.
Our
views are also manipulated
through partial control of the
media. I'm very skeptical about
most conspiracy theories, but
some of it's true - the national
media, for example, barely
reported, if at all, on the
20,000 people who marched on
Washington, D.C., to protest when
George W. Bush STOLE the
election.
The
racist bullshit that went on in
Florida then - and which was just
repeated for Jeb Bush's
re-election - was barely touched
on. Many black voters were not
allowed to vote, in many places,
and it made a difference. Besides
sometimes blocking physical
access to the voting place, the
Jeb Bush political machine used
voter-registration software that
weeded out black voters by
alleging that they had
criminal-felony records (which
removes their right to vote) when
they DIDN'T have any such felony
records. Jeb Bush knew this
software was biased this way,
ahead of time. But how much
reporting is there about that? As
technological control of media
becomes more exact, so will
censorship.
MarsDust:
What can you tell us about Spider
Moon?
John
Shirley: Spider
Moon
is a short, intense, rather
violent, emotional-yet-hardnosed
crime novel set in the San
Francisco area. It's ostensibly a
tale of revenge, but it's also
about how after you go straight,
even after years of a straight
job, if you're a former
lawbreaker and drug addict, as
the first-person narrator is, you
still have to struggle with that
part of yourself - the dark side
doesn't go away.
The
story involves pimps and
prostitutes and drug dealers and
the characters are based on
people I knew before I went
straight. The narrator isn't
based on me - in the narrative's
timeline he starts out being a
book editor (he was offered a
chance by a small publisher,
after he got out of prison) moved
to the Bay area from Texas, and
I'm not a book editor from Texas
- but then again he has a lot in
common with me. He's very
attached to his son - his son is
what keeps him from fucking up -
and my relationship with my kids
is what keeps me from fucking up.
I stay straight for them and my
wife.
But when
he loses that son ... and when it
appears he's committed mass
murder in the workplace when he
hasn't ... he goes ballistic. The
characters and situations are
sharply drawn, I think. The kind
of almost-overlit photographic
sharpness you need to make
bizarre, eccentric characters
come to life. Sort of like the
movie Punch-Drunk Love. I suppose
it also has a Quentin Tarantino
feel, in a way. I did like Pulp
Fiction.
People
who know my work will recognize
that Spider Moon is in line with
a pre-Tarantino stream of short
fiction I've written, which I
called "New Noir" - like the
stories from my book New Noir and
stories from the first sections
of the my collections
Black
Butterflies
and Darkness
Divided
and Really,
Really, Really, Really Weird
Stories.
The pressures of life (and "The
Life") distort people into
strange shapes - think of the art
of Goya, applied to today's inner
city ... stories that evoke the
darkest states of mind and
confrontation with - I hope - a
cinéma
vérité, almost
documentary sharpness. Anyway
that's what I go for.
MarsDust:
We've read that you're putting
together a movie studio. Has that
happened and can you talk about
it? What are you interested in
producing?
John
Shirley:
I'm working with Jeff
Most,
producer of The Crow and
other films, ... on creating an
independent studio. But we're in
the early stages and must go
through the daunting "finding
financing" stage, which involves
elaborate business prospecti and
the like. You know, these things
usually go south, but it's worth
trying.
I've
always wanted to produce -
especially a television series,
actually. I've sold pilot
scripts, which then didn't get
approved to go to production,
yet, I got close enough I think I
can eventually get a TV series on
the air. I'm interested in seeing
the creative process from another
point of view - and in not being
the puppet on the producers'
strings anymore. Of course, you
always have to answer to someone,
but I'd have more creative
control as a producer. Everyone
knows that creative people are
put through wringers, then
Cuisinarts, by producers. Except
those writers who are the
executive producers
themselves....
Lately,
I've been pitching animated
shows! I also have a new spec
(that is, written speculatively,
without a deal yet) pilot script
for an action-adventure show
called Last Shot. The
International Film Group is
planning a movie of my novella
Her Hunger, by the way - I don't
have much more info on it. Except
that they have renewed the option
twice for it.
MarsDust:
You've a reputation for forging
ahead of everyone else.
City
Come a
Walkin'
is considered the first cyberpunk
novel. The SF Bay Guardian called
you a "pop magic realist." In
what ways do you see yourself
"forging ahead" today? Which
direction do you see the
confluence of music and
literature going? Which direction
would like it to go?
John
Shirley:
Demons
was very risky because it came
from a spiritual point of view.
Not any particular religion - I
don't trust organized religion -
but from my own spirituality. It
was also a novel of protest. It
is strident at times. It would
have been safer for me to write a
"stephenkingy deankoontzy" novel
with no politicizing, no talking
about consciousness - that stuff
makes many readers frown and
recoil. But I took the risk. I'm
kind of a compulsive
experimenter.
My next
book Crawlers will
entertain and be more in the
commercial ballpark than some
I've written, but it's definitely
got a socially critical theme. I
want to write a novel called
The Other End that is a
reply to those Judgment
Day novels - repudiating
them, giving out with my
preferred "Judgment Day" - a
feral, surrealistic book I have
in my head. But when my agent
pitches it to editors, they just
blink in confusion. I may take
the risk of my time and write it
anyway, but would any of these
bozos publish it? They have no
fucking vision.
MarsDust:
Paul T. Riddell, in a review for
Anodyne and Tangent
wrote ... "In all the talk about
cyberpunk, one name deliberately
has been left out from this
reminiscence. Just as while the
Sex Pistols weren't the first
'punk' band but acted as the
catalyst for the whole movement,
John Shirley catalyzed the whole
cyberpunk movement. A Portland
native who fronted a punk band
while writing science fiction as
a day job, Shirley managed to
inspire most of the other talents
with his vicious, balls-forward
writing style. In fact, his
enmity with Harlan Ellison is
paralleled by the mutual loathing
between Johnny Rotten and Mick
Jagger: the young rebel of the
late seventies and the young
rebel of the late sixties
apparently infuriated each other
to the point where Ellison once
challenged Shirley to a duel."
Besides Harlan Ellison, what
still pisses you off?
John
Shirley:
It
wasn't really a duel - he wanted
a fiction-writing duel, not a
pistols-at-dawn duel - and Harlan
doesn't piss me off, we've buried
the hatchet. He was important to
the field.
Well,
I'm pissed off that the Bush
administration and the new
Republican-controlled Congress (a
disaster!) is dismantling
environmental controls and
regulation - at a time when we
need far more regulations than we
have, he's getting rid of the few
that are there. I was pissed off
when, after medical researchers
recently reported that children
here in California are being hurt
by automobile pollution more than
ever, are dying because of it,
three weeks later George W. Bush
comes out AGAINST the plan to
require car manufacturers to
further reduce their engine
pollution.
He's an
ignorant chump. He's a one-man
environmental catastrophe. People
say, 'Oh there's no difference
between the Democrats and the
Republicans' - BULLSHIT. Gore
would NOT be dismantling the EPA
and Bush IS. That's a stark
difference that will impact your
life. Not that there's ENOUGH
difference - true, they are both,
like Governor [Gray]
Davis, the puppets of people who
pay their campaign
contributions.
(Bush is even more in the pocket
of big business,
though.)
Governor
Davis is BLOWING big money moguls
with his mealy-mouthed little
lips. I voted for the Green
candidate, knowing he couldn't
win, just because I hate that
sellout Davis. But it was a
mistake to vote for Nader. It
helped Bush. Yet, I agree with
most of Nader's ideas. That's the
fucked-up state of America -
you're forced to vote for the
wrong people because of the
political constraints
here.
As for
what pisses me off in the genre
publishing region - the fact that
mediocrity rises, that I am
expected to write bad shit to get
good money, and the fact that I
got into genre publishing at all.
SF types are mostly not my real
audience. My real audience is
Vonnegut's and William Burroughs'
audience, and Ballard's and
sometimes Elmore Leonard's
audience maybe, or Bukowski's
audience, and I should've worked
harder on reaching
them.
One
problem is that I change genres
easily and that confuses people.
But who likes to be pigeonholed?
And pigeonholing me pisses me
off. I won the Bram Stoker award
for Black
Butterflies
- but almost no one at the World
Horror Con knew my work, even
when I was guest of honor! So
horror fans aren't my people
either, mostly ... only the SMART
ONES. You know who you
are.
MarsDust:
What advice can you give aspiring
young troublemakers? What's the
best way to rattle the cages of
the current collection of
geriatric fanboys? Everyone likes
a good laugh, but it seems that
pissing people off in an
intelligent, righteous way can
make people sit up and think. Do
you still think it's possible in
our desensitized
world?
John
Shirley:
Most fanboys are just out to be
entertained. There's nothing
wrong with entertainment, I like
entertainment, but they've given
up on themselves and the world,
they've chosen mental
masturbation. Thus the
prevalence, the excessive
presence, of board games, video
games, and movie and TV "media"
at SF conventions.
You know
what will rattle their cages? The
real future. It will come after
the old guard fanboys like a
rabid wolf and drag them from
their work cubicles and their
Nintendo systems, whimpering for
Mama. Oh, the end of the world
isn't coming - but I think that
massive ecological crises will
come; famine will come to the
U.S.A. (look what's happening to
the oceans, for a clue), and more
terrorist attacks - we may lose
between a hundred thousand to two
million American civilians - and
vast unemployment. And a
worsening loss of job benefits.
Look for an overall diminution of
the American dream, accompanied
by the reduction of basic
liberties (Ashcroft is working on
it). That shit will make the
fanboys sit up and beg-but it
should make them sit up and
think.
You know
what people should do? Tell the
truth, in writing and fiction,
the real sincere truth, the truth
that hurts - make sure it hurts
to say it - and the illusions
will drop away. And life without
illusions is both frightening and
exhilarating.
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