tomorrow at 5pm will mark one week of the library strike. i will ask it again-what world are we living in? a lot has happened in the past few weeks in my creative life, and one of the best moments is when i was getting misty on the subway, because this was the book i was reading. amazing. as i get set to get on a train to montreal, i’m feeling pretty clear, and hope that a few days of live music and friendly faces will bring me back refreshed and ready to move with the changing waves.
saul williams talked about his experience working with trent reznor in the red chair, and how he learned to structure his songs in a corporate sense, a result that he noticed after a year and a half of working with him. i got to see the effect of watching someone interview for about that long, and seeing how i do things differently. i see the value of bringing out the calm in someone versus the frenetic energy (though that could also be the platform), and the difference in subject position-first hand inspiration in one’s chosen medium and a decade of following someone’s work vs. hot-button topic driven by the innernets or a team of writers that hasn’t listened to the latest album, either. poets dig it when you quote back their work and show that you’ve put it into the context of life. just sayin’.
the most striking thing about this book is that hulk seems to be saying that he was inspired to be a wrestler when he found out it was fake-it wasn’t some big letdown. that’s going to blow my mind for a minute, and i wonder what all the kids that guzzled raw eggs on his urging think.
“Once I knew that these guys weren’t trying to kill each other for real, that no matter how crazy it looked in that ring it wasn’t a real confrontation, I knew in my gut that I could get up there and do it as well as any of those guys I’d idolized, if not better.” (47)
“Wrestling isn’t fake. It’s predetermined. So what?
We live in an era now where that grand revelation doesn’t make any difference to the fans. Is there anyone who goes to a movie today who doesn’t realize there were lots of digital special effects that went into making it? Look at so-called reality TV: It’s still exploding in popularity even though most of the audiences are tuned in to the fact that a lot of what they’re seeing isn’t really ‘real’. People love the drama and the characters, so they suspend their disbelief and enjoy it.” (133)
“They would write out and memorize what they were going to say. They even had professional writers! It just never made sense to me, and it usually came off as stale and rehearsed-which is exactly what it is.
The fact is, if you’ve written this whole story line and then you get out there and the crowd isn’t buying it, what are you gonna do? You have to be ready and willing to go with the flow and change the direction of the match on the fly. It’s like improvisational comedy or playing jazz. It needs to be fluid and free or it just falls flat.” (165-6)
gradients of fakery.
“I’m an extremely fast reader. I can speed-read a whole script in fifteen minutes. That’s how I do a lot of my reading-knowing that I can always go back and read something slowly, line by line, if I want to study it a little closer.” (246)
“Within a couple of weeks we decided on two press outlets known for their fairness and journalistic integrity: People magazine and Larry King. That was it. I wouldn’t go on a media tour.” (285)
ken lee.
metrotextual 