Vin Suprynowicz and Scott Bieser
[Continued from page 2]
SUNNI: Scott, when I visited your site, I saw some writing by you, one piece of which I'll ask about specifically in a minute. You're a capable writer. So why aren't there more essays on your site?
SCOTT: When I first created my web site I had planned to have an essays section, called "Rants." I wrote exactly two rants and then for some reason I never got around to writing any more. I'm not sure why, but I seem more compelled to write when I'm responding to something someone else has written. I have a hard time sitting down and starting trouble on my own initiative.
SUNNI: I really like the motto on your site -- "Opening eyes two at a time." Where did that come from?
SCOTT: From my pineal gland, I think. I was trying to think of a cute tagline and it just came to me. I may have seen it somewhere else but can't remember.
SUNNI: Your declaration of independence from the Libertarian Party, written in 2000, was very nicely done -- and dovetails nicely with some of my thoughts regarding the national party's usefulness. Yet I also saw a banner on your site proclaiming it to be in the "Smith 2004" webring. Did you, or anyone who's written you, see some potential hypocrisy in that?
SCOTT: Not yet. Remember, the Smith 2004 list originally sought to make Neil a presidential candidate either of the Libertarian Party or as an independent candidate. My position was that I'd support him as an independent candidate. If the LP had nominated Neil I'd support Neil the candidate but not the rest of the Party. But ultimately I had hoped that he would not be a candidate, and felt it likely that he would not be a candidate, for various reasons. I'm glad he wasn't. Neil's best destiny is writing great libertarian novels and I don't want anything to distract him from that. But as his friend I also wanted him to be successful at whatever it is he wanted to do. Does that explain it?
SUNNI: Pretty much. So, it isn't electoral politics itself that led to your discontent, but just how the current LP is being run, and by whom?
SCOTT: It was a combination of things. Partly it was seeing some of my local Libertarian friends, who I had thought of as being intelligent and perceptive people, do silly shit like give money to Harry Browne. But what I concluded from that is that electoral politics tends to make libertarians stupid.
SUNNI: Heh. You won't get an argument from me on that, Scott. Speaking of stupidity, Vin, I'd guess that your opinion of most of your journalist colleagues -- and I use that term loosely, because unlike you, most of them seem to have forgotten what true journalism is -- isn't too favorable. Is that accurate, and if so, what keeps you in a field that seems to largely be unappreciative of your work?
VIN: The paycheck. It's a dream job, in a way. You know those internet spam ads that say "Get paid for your opinions"? Well, I've already got that job. If you're some freelancer out there on the internet, people have to wonder if tomorrow you'll be writing about gray aliens inside the hollow earth, and they'll be embarrassed that they were touting you to their Uncle Ned last week as a real solid source. It's like a musician going back to play the Newport Jazz Festival. Do they still do the Newport Jazz Festival? Miles used to go back and do Newport to prove it wasn't all studio magic, that the rumors were wrong, that he wasn't too sick or strung out to stand up and jam. I will have to move on, eventually. But it takes some years to build your chops and land a seat on a major metro daily, and it does add a little cachet. At least, I used to think it did. And don't even talk to me about the "alternative press." Being socialist was an alternative when the powers that be were William Howard Taft or Warren Gamaliel Harding. Since 1936, to be "alternative" in American journalism you've had to be Austrian in economics and Libertarian/Constitutionalist in politics. Repeal every law passed since 1912: There's an "alternative."
SUNNI: Ooooh, Miles Davis. You just reminded me of something from The Black Arrow that I loved, but didn't mention in anything I've written on it: your bringing old music into the story. In part because of that, I've been going back to the music I heard on my parents' radio station when I was a kid and other older music I'm just now discovering, and I'm finding all kinds of songs that are still relevant, and meaningful. Like the Association's Requiem for the Masses, Frank Zappa's Trouble Every Day, the Rascals' People Got to be Free, and several from Cream, and Crosby, Stills, & Nash (and sometimes Young). Did you work the music in just because you love it, or to make a point?
VIN: What's the first sentence in The Black Arrow? Most people think it's "Madison walked alone." But it's not. It's "This is the story of a dream. Whether it was a good dream, you must judge for yourself." It was part of the dream. The dream had a soundtrack. A lot of writers have to hunt around and find the right kind of music to listen to while they write, Les Daniels first told me about that, years ago in Providence. It blasts everything else out and helps clear a pathway -- music can be a useful drug that way, a useful way to alter the consciousness. Anybody who's planning to live with a writer probably needs to ask about that. And the music that you need can change according to the book you're working on, or maybe what you write changes in part because of the music you're listening to, the emotional content, the phrasings -- I don't know if anyone has ever answered that particular chicken-or-egg question.
The rhythm of your sentences is actually affected by the music, so you have to be careful. Choose carefully, Grasshopper. Originally I thought this book would be Tommy James and the Shondells, Ronnie Spector and Edison Lighthouse, the 1910 Fruitgum Company. But that wasn't quite right. I Think We're Alone Now is the only Tommy James song that I kept. It's there when Jack and Joan find themselves sitting in that darkened drainage tunnel, you have to listen for it, it's just a fragment. Who knew this book would be The Raspberries? But when you find the right sound, it's bliss, I'll tell you. Storytelling is an aural art form, they used to do it around the campfire, it's the sound of the words. You have to hear the words as you write; the keyboard is a musical instrument. I just know the new book I'm working on is Miles and Bill Evans and Dylan and John Sebastian -- Younger Girl and Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind, which are basically the same song. It's a considerably different mix from The Black Arrow. I'm still working on it, getting it right. It may require some Gershwin or some Hoagy Carmichael. You never know, it's all trial and error. I tried Billie Holiday; not quite right. Thought it would be, but no. That doesn't mean she's not great; of course she's great. But you're trying to re-open a wormhole to a particular altered state of consciousness. You can use pharmaceuticals or sacraments, of course, but we all know the downsides there, how draining that can be, and the risk of diminishing returns. What may work is using a sacrament to find that dream state, and then finding less taxing ways to return there at will.
It helps that my brother is a musician; I called him up and explained the kind of stuff I was looking for, I was looking for real heroin music, and Clark immediately says, "Oh, you want Miiiiiiles. 'Steamin' With the Miles Davis Quintet.'" And he was right, of course. But doing Black Arrow, it was the first time I found the music was so intrusive -- I mean that in a good way, so omnipresent -- I could only write a scene right when I finally figured out what song to write it to, it was part of what told me I'd finally stumbled on the right tone -- the music would give coherence in tone over these vast expanses, hundreds of pages -- that I figured, what the hell, let's give this a try. Let's tell the reader what the background music is to this scene, since it forms a kind of subtext. If I could have stuck a disc in the jacket flap with a little number on it and said, "As you read this scene, play track 12," I would have done that. But the expense of the permissions alone would have been nuts. The written page is too limiting, really, if your dreams have soundtracks.
If I'd written The Black Arrow as a screenplay with the soundtrack music specified it'd still be sitting on some shelf, somewhere, gathering dust. So all I could do was plant that stuff there, in case some reader wants to go to the trouble to go to Amazon.com and buy these old discs and stick them in the player on "shuffle" and really have the full experience of reading The Black Arrow. The Raspberries' Greatest Hits, the Chiffons' Greatest Hits, just read the attributions at the back of the book. It would be like discovering the original soundtrack to a movie that you always thought was a silent movie, wouldn't it?
You wouldn't believe how long I looked for the right music to write the final battle scene to. You'd think it would be Liszt's Preludes or the 1812 [Overture] or Wagner's Walkure, I tried all of those. All wrong, completely wrong. Pompous, overblown, no nuance. Then one night I'm lying in bed, I've essentially given up, I'm never going to get this, maybe that scene just isn't supposed to be there at all, and what comes on in the other room but Sweet Talkin' Guy, and I go, "No way. Come on. You're kidding me. The cavalry comes to the rescue playing Sweet Talkin' Guy?" It was hilarious and ridiculous and impossible and it was perfect so of course I leap out of bed and blast the Chiffons through this old tubes-that-glow-in-the-dark sound system that Jimmy on East Charleston keeps repairing for me as a labor of love because the digital stuff just doesn't sound the same, these big old 60-pound floor speakers I've been lugging around for years, and it was perfect, I wrote the whole scene in an hour. And this way, if they ever do make the movie of The Black Arrow, they'll know what's supposed to be there, on the soundtrack. I already did the work for them. Change it at your peril; the readers will know, 'cause it's all in there.
