NEW YORK — Peter Gabriel’s inspirations have always been all over the map, from as far off as Pakistan’s Islamic rhythms and as close to his English home as traditional Morris dances. On his new CD-ROM, “Eve,” Gabriel worked with four visual artists from around the world — Yayoi Kusama, Helen Chadwick, Cathy de Monchaux and Nils Udo — to interpret his music and shape the visual landscapes of a multimedia journey.
A co-production of Starwave and Gabriel’s own Real World Records, “Eve” provides a gently surrealistic exploration of the romantic, scientific, psychological and genetic nature of love. In February, “Eve” won the Milia D’Or award at the Milia Festival in Cannes. Its arrival in the U.S. was delayed when Starwave pulled out of the CD-ROM business, but its new American distributor, Graphix Zone, has announced an early May release.
Gabriel’s own long journey has included a rise to prominence with the band Genesis, a 1978 jump to a flourishing solo career and a longtime commitment to human rights activism. In 1994 his “Xplora” CD-ROM was hailed as one of the first multimedia products to merit the label of art.
As Laurie Anderson commented at an “Eve” launch party at Manhattan’s Chelsea Piers, “Peter has a generous way of including people. He’s not one of those rock stars who use pop culture to buy themselves a big home in the suburbs. He’s incredibly generous in including other artists in his work, and encouraging everyone to play with and have fun with his music. I really do think that music can change people’s lives, and he shows you there are other ways to use the things we already know.”
Gabriel walks with the elegance and composure of a dancer, has a warm-hearted and pensive presence and is careful with his words.
What would you like people to come away with from “Eve”?
I think it should be like a kid in a sandbox. That was our model: You’d go in there and build things, maybe knock them down — or just explore.
Why did you choose Adam and Eve as the theme?
“Eve” starts off with Adam and Eve in a paradise world, where there’s unity between male and female, and they are pulled apart. Adam has to go off looking for Eve again, and try and work his way back into paradise. That’s the map, the human condition.
People are mainly preoccupied with relationships, I think. Work, achievements, success come secondary. Because most people don’t feel complete in themselves. You’re looking to find the other entity that’s going to fill up the hole. It’s a lot easier to try and expose and fill up your own holes than it is to get someone else to do that.
There’s a great Kenneth Tynan line that says, “We seek the teeth to match our wounds.” Isn’t that good? I wish I’d written that. You see it where someone goes through a lot of relationships, or three marriages, and married the same person three times, only they have a slightly different face. It’s a real struggle not to fall into that. You have to work at changing yourself. If you change the shape of the holes, the plugs that fit them may change.
“Eve” is full of very primordial, archetypal images.
It’s a spiritual and mythological collage. We included interviews with these “boffins,” experts who can help you delve into their world — psychology, genetics, art, the future. We were trying to ask, if we were going on some journey, what would we like to encounter? What detours would we find interesting?
I love doing research. I was doing a song on twins one time, and I got to have some interesting talks with some scientists doing research on twins. The Net will allow you to do that stuff — you can actually find out who’s doing the most interesting papers and research. Of course, not too many people are doing that yet, so some of these experts are still available to punters like me chasing them down.
And the look was very important too. I didn’t want it to come across with that sort of sci-fi shoot-’em-up aesthetic. So it’s very naturalistic — there are 20,000 photographs in there. And the artists we chose had never worked with computers before. That made it more interesting. I think some of their work, say Helen Chadwick’s for “Shaking the Tree,” has some real depth. It’s not just an illustrator, but someone who’s struggled in their own path with these issues, so it resonates much deeper.
How did you work with the four artists?
We were like animals sniffing around each other at first. We started with these illustrated songbook ideas. We commissioned some particular pieces for the project. But we also asked if they’d be willing to let us connect with their existing work. For them, they’d never been asked to have their work manipulated, opened up in this way. They weren’t sure at first how confident they could be that their stuff wouldn’t get abused. But after a while, they realized we were happy for them to steer it and to let us know between consenting adults how far they wanted us to go. So we built much more trust.
Unfortunately, Helen Chadwick died during the completion. Yow, she was younger than I am. That’s a bit scary. We dedicated the project to her. She was incredible — a really fast, fertile brain. She reminded me of Laurie Anderson in the way she can really focus in with fresh energy and humor — all sorts of interesting angles on any subject. She really started playing; it was like a big sandbox. And that’s really the model we wanted to use, that it should be fun — to hit that childish part of our brain, to come at things in a more open way than like us cynical older persons.
You’ve pulled out this amazing quote from Friedrich Nietzsche to describe your aims with “Eve”: “A good book should be like an ax to a frozen lake.” Why?
I can’t remember where I got that, but I just thought this is the best description of how a work of art should affect someone that I’ve come across. There’s this sense that we have this flowing mass below us that can be tapped, opened up. If you see a great film, a great concert, a good book, or whatever it is, these are great tools that we use to accelerate our own gathering of experience.
How did the technology affect the decisions you made?
Between “Xplora” and “Eve,” the technology allowed us to do quite a bit more. Greater memory, faster speeds and so on. But you never quite know where the consumer equipment is going to be when you start — this is a two-year run-in. So you don’t quite know whether to go with what people might have in their homes in two years’ time, or go for a more democratic spread, less memory, less speed.
The production was complicated: a team of 60 designers and technical people, the four artists, your recording studio. Getting through the piece is quite a journey. Technically, you have to assume we’re all idiots out there.
No, I’m idiot No. 1. If it’s Gabriel-proof, that’s one stage below idiot-proof.
You also demand that people engage. The transitions aren’t simple. They’re not all just a simple click.
Not clicking all the time — that was a conscious decision. Sometimes you have to move it around, washing, scrubbing over the landscapes … I really believe multimedia’s a prototype for a future language — that we’re all going to be communicating using pieces of TV, video, text, pictures, music, and we’ll have our own little personal archives, dictionaries of multimedia stuff that we communicate with. I’m sure kids’ll be doing that first, before us. Because I love all this stuff, I had some conversations with this futuristic research company, Interval. They’re talking about having built into your clothing something that would record your peak moments. You hit the button and say, “I like this.”
So you’d be able to replay peak experiences?
Yeah. Have some access to it. I know that’s what I try to do in music composition. Often you’re improvising around a theme. Ninety-eight percent of the stuff is dross, you don’t want to hear it again, you want to be able to go straight to the bits you knew were happening. So someone designed a foot pedal for me, all I have to do is just click and it puts a marker on the DAT. A very simple technology. But if you could do that with your life as well, you just put down these markers … Go straight back to your favorite girlfriend (laughs). But it’s funny in a way — each person has rights to their own experiences, no one else does, unless they’ve volunteered.
The Internet also raises questions about artist’s control of their work. You seem to be interested in making work available, giving people access to play with it.
I have no problem with that. I know as a fan I would have loved to be able to have done that with my favorite records — just pull them apart. We artists put our stuff out there. If it works, it moves people.
My definition I’ve been using for a number of years is the difference between vomit and shit. We all take nourishment out of anything that looks appetizing or tasty. If it goes through the system, it comes out with our mark on it, if you like, and if it doesn’t, it gets regurgitated without being digested. That’s a different process. I’m not saying it’s invalid, but it’s probably less personal, less a work of art, in vomit form than in shit form. Alchemists believed in their tradition that gold could only come out of shit. The lowest base elements.
You’ve always been outspoken about the political effects of the global information culture. Where do you see things moving today?
These new satellite systems are going to be enormously influential in the way the world changes. If you get cheap communication from the developing world into the developed world, it means that suddenly these other countries where wages are low can become information processors and producers. They can genuinely compete and perhaps do better than richer countries where the overhead is much bigger. But until the technology has got out into the developing world, the gap is going to go the other way, to separate rich and poor.
Still, the political impact of the spread of pop music is really underestimated. Through things like MTV, kids in Latin America, India are now just as informed as kids in America and Europe on a load of issues. Though you still see a lot of bouncing breasts and fast cars on MTV, there’s actually a lot more content. And although music is never ideal for getting into detail on any subject, it’s very powerful for actually providing an opening, a doorway, into deeper stuff. Even by changing your haircut or your dress, which is maybe all you get, that starts creating stuff in your own culture and society that puts you against other forces. That can start instinctively making you question things.
What effects do you think the growth in world music is having — the development of vibrant Latin, African, Asian music scenes?
It’s a real source of richness and excitement. Genetics, I think, is a very useful reference for us, because if you look at the hybrids, they’re the most vital and alive people. And that’s where the throbbing culture is. We travel around quite a fair amount in our job, and you get to one city and you see the same shops that you see whether you go to Russia, China, London, France — you can always find the McDonald’s. With this tendency for our world to homogenize everything, I believe it’s important that variety gets valued more highly. Our differences are things that we should protect and exploit, rather than our sameness.
Is world music still a useful label?
I’ve always argued that the correct definition of world music is music that’s made in the world. Sometimes that label is useful for an artist to get that little bit of attention, but we’ve proved to a fair amount of people now that you don’t have to have lyrics in English to have music that is meaningful, to touch people. That was a major barrier 10 years ago; it seems ridiculous now. You still can’t get play on the radio, but we’re trying to find ways to bypass that now. Whether it’s with one of our WOMAD festivals or with films.
What new music do you listen to?
All sorts of things. Obviously through WOMAD and Real World records, I get exposed to all kinds of stuff. We know we’re weak in Latin music, I’d like to learn more about that. For me, it’s the spiritual content that’s still the thing — well, rhythm and spiritual content. As an old drummer, you know, you can’t argue with great grooves. That’s foundation No. 1. The other is spiritual elements: When I listen to Nusrat Ali Khan or Youssou N’Ddour, I get shivers. It’s like taking a shower in an essence of … something … magical.
I was listening to Ali Farka Toure with a composer friend, saying to him how the sound was almost straight blues. He insisted it couldn’t be blues, because African music uses different scales …
I would say, where the hell does he think blues come from? The whole movement with the slave trade, the black African Diaspora. They may have changed over the years, but for sure you can find the Bo Diddley rhythm in the Congo. You can hear the source, so I would accept they’re using different scales, different tonalities, but the fundamental elements are branches from the same tree.
For instance, the most traditional folk dancing in Britain is Morris dancing. And there’s one theory that the tradition is actually Moorish dancing. The sailors brought it back from having traveled to visit the Moors in Africa. Again, I think Africa is a big heart of origination of a lot of stuff that’s been absorbed and maybe changed as it’s spread around the world.
So, we’re way beyond that whole “Graceland” controversy now.
I hope so. It should just be good music. I mean, again, I go back to that vomit/shit idea. As one does.
The overriding metaphor of our time?
The urge to digest.
When you make your living as an ostensible muckraker, you better be careful where you step — as John Stossel learned to his cost. Last week, the ABC News correspondent found himself stung by the target of his own attempted sting. Stossel, who has lately shifted his undercover operations from consumer reporting to a series of pro-corporate and anti-environmental ABC specials, was lured into a trap — one that he himself might have designed under different circumstances — by his latest target.
Stossel, working on a special he dubbed “Junk Science,” had been hoping to debunk the work of Dr. Grace Ziem, who specializes in treating medical ailments resulting from exposure to environmental toxins. Instead, Ziem, tipped off to the Stossel sting, invited two reporters from the Baltimore Sun and the Washington Post to a Baltimore hotel, and accused Stossel and two associates of illegally taping her medical consultations with two of Stossel’s ABC colleagues. The two associates had visited her complaining of symptoms which she attributed to “chemical sensitivity” — a reaction to the vast cocktail of synthetics used to produce household paints, cleansers and countless other products that can cause health problems in susceptible individuals.
Stossel planned to use the recordings in the latest of a series of reports that the media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) has characterized as
“biased against consumers and environmentalists.” Instead, he now faces felony charges resulting from Maryland’s requirement that both parties involved must assent to a tape recording.
The tip that clued Dr. Ziem into Stossel’s bungled sting came, appropriately, when Stossel made a public pitch to corporate interests, as reported in the feisty Washington, D.C.-based newsletter Corporate Crime Reporter. Two weeks before the sting, one of Ziem’s patients had read a report in the newsletter about an appearance Stossel made in early September before the Federalist Society, a group of conservative lawyers. According to the Reporter, at the meeting Stossel talked up his upcoming projects — on “junk science,” “freeloaders” and
“the permanent government,” all favorite conservative fodder — and made a pitch for corporate sponsors: “I certainly would encourage any of you who knows somebody who buys advertising on television to say ‘please buy a couple of ads on those Stossel specials.’”
“A pitch for sponsors is generally not what an investigative reporter does,” observes Jeff Cohen, director of FAIR. “But Stossel’s reputation preceded him into that room — his attacks on environmental, consumer activist, and regulatory agencies got into that room way before he walked in. He’s famous for being the reporter who ‘champions the overdog.’” According to FAIR, two producers on Stossel’s specials quit because, they say, he refused to accept information counter to his thesis about government regulation.
The Stossel case reveals how reporters seemingly in search of “the truth” all too often are compromised by financial and personal connections with the very people and organizations they are covering. Such ethical problems are explored in tonight’s Frontline special, “Why Americans Hate the Press,” on which I worked as a reporter.
Stossel’s humiliating counter-sting occurred too late to make it into tonight’s show. But if it had, we might have pointed to the $11,000 speaking fee that he received two years ago from the American Industrial Health Council — a group that includes such companies as Du Pont,
Pfizer, Proctor & Gamble and Squibb, all of which have a vested interest in many of Stossel’s assaults on government regulation.
And Stossel is not alone. Many of the most famous members of the D.C. press corps — the true power elite of American journalism — accept high-paying corporate speaking engagements and have direct personal ties to the political candidates. The top echelon of Washington political reporters — Cokie Roberts, Sam Donaldson, George Will, Andrea Mitchell and many others whose heads appear daily on the screen — receive from $10-$30,000 (in Cokie’s case) per appearance from industry groups like the National Association of Realtors, the American Hospital Association, the Public Relations Society of America and the Mortgage Bankers Association. The sensitivity of this issue was demonstrated last November, when ABC’s Cokie Roberts, informed that her paid appearance in front of the Public Relations Society of America might include audience questions about her speaking fee, withdrew at the last minute (she was replaced by NBC’s Andrea Mitchell).
Over the last 18 months, all
three networks, in an effort to combat what ABC News Vice President Richard Wald termed “the appearance of conflict of interest,” have imposed guidelines that prohibit their correspondents from taking speaking fees from profit-making enterprises or groups representing those they may report on.
But the real compromises lie deeper — in corporate sponsorship that defines the very parameters of what is considered acceptable discourse. Take the pundit
talk shows, where a parade of center-to-right-wing talking heads appear each week to engage in what passes as political debate. From “This Week with David Brinkley” to “The McLaughlin Group,” two corporate sponsors predominate: General
Electric and Archer Daniels Midland, two of the biggest corporate recipients of subsidies, tax breaks and government contracts in the country.
Is it really a surprise, given this fact, that these shows are more like political circuses than political debates? That histrionic posturing, featuring heat-filled disputations of political minutiae, fills the vacuum where genuine ideological discussion might otherwise exist? That television rarely challenges the abuses of corporate power? And that such progressive populists as Jim Hightower and Ralph Nader have routinely failed in their efforts to obtain backing for a political television show with a truly left-wing perspective?
Stossel is feeling the heat right now for his allegedly biased reporting, but there’s a whole new career field waiting for him. Perhaps he should consider punditry.
Mark Helprin is more than just an accomplished novelist and sometime conservative commentator. He’s also a would-be kingmaker. The novelist has been besieged by the press ever since it was revealed that he authored Bob Dole’s Senate retirement speech — an unusually lyrical oration by the Kansas solon’s dry standards. Helprin’s soaring words were widely credited with at least temporarily recharging Dole’s languishing presidential campaign.
After laboring unsuccessfully for an interview with the feted speechwriter, one recent afternoon I received a mysterious phone call. The caller challenged me to guess his identity, providing me with a series of obscure clues: he was calling from “the state with the second largest park service, after Alaska;” he lived in “the north of that state;” he was sitting at a “polished wooden desk with a clutter of papers in an office with rosewood panels;” he was “looking out the window
onto a farm field of alfalfa.” I finally realized that I was talking to none other than the elusive Mark Helprin himself. My acumen was rewarded with a nearly hour-long interview, as the novelist sat in his rosewood-paneled office in the farmhouse in upstate New York where he lives with his wife and two children.
Helprin’s participation in the Dole campaign did not come as a political shock. He has been a conservative contributor to the Wall Street Journal’s opinion page for more than a decade. It was one such column published in February — in which he argued that Dole’s leadership in the Senate was hampered by the Republican bomb-throwers in the House — that brought him to Dole’s attention.
As a senior fellow of the Hudson Institute, a right-wing think tank based in Indianapolis, Helprin promotes an almost aesthetic ideal of rugged individualism and a high-minded aversion to the sloppy realities of the welfare state. He will continue to sound these themes in a new online conservative magazine being launched by former Delaware Governor Pierre (“Pete”) du Pont.
Helprin is also the author of what some critics regard as among the most magical works in contemporary fiction — which he acknowledges Dole has not read (“Elizabeth maybe, but not
Dole”). “Ellis Island and other Stories” was nominated for a National Book Award. His three subsequent novels, “A Winter’s Tale,” “A Soldier of the Great War” and “Memoir from Antproof Case,” are books of ambitious sweep and complicated entanglements worthy of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. His outsized characters retain a bizarrely mystical, purist perspective, willing to throw everything overboard in pursuit of their beliefs. Sound familiar?
Helprin hankers for the rough-and-tumble of political campaigning; he suggested that I consult “A Winter’s Tale” for the type of “campaign that I would love to run.” That book conjures up a mayoral campaign in New York City in which an eccentric Praeger de Pinto wages a challenge against the machine candidate, referred to simply as the Ermine Mayor. Helprin writes: “Where most politicians, including the Ermine Mayor, were quick to promise things
they would never deliver, such as clean streets or the absence of crime, Praeger’s approach was different… He never talked about garbage, electricity or police. He only talked about winter, horses and the countryside. He spoke almost hypnotically about love, loyalty and esthetics… He promised them love affairs and sleigh races, cross-country skiiing on the main thoroughfares, and the transfixing blizzards that howled outside and made the heart dance.”
Helprin concludes the passage with an observation as applicable to current American politics as it was to his literary invention: “They thought, or so it was generally stated at the time, that if they were going to be lied to, they might as well pick the liar who did it best.”
Though in real life Helprin’s preferred candidate, not unlike his opponent, already sounds more like the promise-a minute Ermine Mayor than the quixotic Praeger, Helprin has every intention of continuing his unpaid work for the Dole campaign. In fact, he revealed that he has already sent a draft acceptance speech for Dole to deliver at his Republican coronation next month — perhaps the candidate’s last chance to narrow the double-digit gap between himself and President Clinton. Helprin refused to provide any details of the speech, saying that it could be changed, or rejected altogether — an unlikely prospect given the success of his previous foray into speechwriting.
In our conversation, Helprin was alternately playful and resentful of being “misunderstood” — and at times reviled — by the “liberal” literary establishment. Claiming that his phone has been ringing 12 hours a day since Dole let slip who authored his resignation opus, Helprin insisted that I would be permitted only five questions, which he ticked off one by one as we spoke.
In “Memoir from Antproof Case” and “A Soldier of
the Great War,” your protagonists undergo dramatic
wartime experiences that shape the course of their lives. In the speech you wrote for Dole, you elevated his wartime experience into an almost religious metaphor of transcendence and redemption. Why does war have such literary and political resonance for you?
I write about war heroes because they are ever at risk
of their lives. The interest of the group comes ahead of your own personal experience. This is important to politics, as well as in literature. If you think too much of yourself, and about preserving yourself, you don’t have the spark of life. It is the same thing from a literary point of view. The liveliness of character and personality comes from one’s commitment to the world. Something that puts you at the door of death can do that.
I once had that experience. I was cross-country skiing down a glacier on Mt. Rainier, jumping crevasses. I was sailing over those crevasses one after another. I was perhaps a little out of it, maybe there was not enough oxygen in my blood cells. I sailed over one patch of snow and fell into a deep crevasse. I tumbled in, and was showered with snow and ice crystals. I can still feel the taste of them as they touched my lips. It looked to be 600 feet down. I thought I was going to die. I was in ecstasy. It was a wonderful feeling. Fortunately I caught myself on my ski poles, and I didn’t
die. It was also a wonderful feeling to survive. That is the stuff of life. Everyone faces death. In literature, you just shorten the time. When we exaggerate that, in literature as in politics, we make a metaphor of it, it has great power.
Is this idea of facing down death the root of your support for Dole?
The best way to encapsulate my attraction to Dole is that I admire the man’s courage, his fortitude, though I may not agree with all his political positions. When we vote for president, we’re not just voting on his political positions. Something could happen you cannot foresee to change those. The only way to judge is on the character of the man. We must know what the man is.
There’s a far stronger tradition of literary engagement in politics in Latin America and Europe than there is in the United States. Where do you see yourself in that tradition?
There is a long and honorable tradition of writers’ involvement in politics and political speechwriting. Look at history: Melville was awarded with a position as Customs House inspector; Hawthorne was American consul to Liverpool; Washington Irving was U.S. ambassador to Spain. They did political scutwork, and were rewarded. Walt Whitman — do you know why he wrote “Leaves of
Grass”? He was working as an editor at the Brooklyn Eagle and was fired for writing an editorial in support of Martin van Buren for President. He wrote “Leaves of Grass” because he was out of a job and had to earn some money.
Many people over the past few months have accused me of stooping to politics. But their objection is that it is the the “wrong” politics.
They lionize Vaclav Havel, Mario Vargas Llosa — they’re okay as long as their politics are okay.
You’re suggesting that you’ve suffered in this regard because you are a conservative. Has it had any effect on how people now perceive your fiction?
Though I can’t prove them, I hear anecdotal reports. I spoke to someone in a reading group who told me that someone said they wouldn’t stay in the group if they read me. She allegedly called me a “right-wing twerp.” I don’t mind the “right-wing,” but “twerp,” I don’t like that. I’ve heard reports of bookstores that won’t sell my books. Look at the history of my books. I wrote “Ellis Island” in the early 1980s. It received the Penn-Faulkner Award, was awarded a Guggenheim, the Prix de Rome, nominated for a National Book Award. Then Christopher Buckley wrote a piece in the Sunday New York Times saying that the Right now has its own reputable writer of belle lettres. There’s not been a single nomination since. I’m not saying that’s the reason, but it may have something to do with it. Whatever happens, I don’t give a damn.
According to your official biography, you served in the Israeli Air
Force; you did a stint in the British merchant marine; you grew up in
Jamaica. But you’ve been accused, in the New York Times Magazine and most recently in The New Republic, of blurring the line between fiction and nonfiction in describing your own life.
I cannot tell a lie. Except once or twice in my life. There was a
character assassination piece about me in the New York Times Magazine (by the novelist Paul Alexander), in which they tried to show I wasn’t straight with interviewers. This guy, he came to my house, I spent hours with him. He didn’t believe I was in the
British merchant marine; that I was almost killed in Jamaica by a Pakistani immigrant. He was such an idiot. I was in the British merchant Navy in 1967. Because I couldn’t show him crew records, he said I was making it up. Later I found the crew records in a warehouse in Newfoundland, and published them in the Paris Review.
And the truth is that I was in the Israeli Air Force in the late 1970s. I became an Israeli citizen, served in a combat unit, I went on dozens of patrols at the Lebanese border. Counter-infiltration it was called. But I never ran into anybody, I never said I did. I was never in combat, but I was at the risk of it. One of the stories in “Ellis Island”
came out of that experience: ‘The Jew of Persia,” based on a guy I met when we were stuck on the top of a mountain in a snowstorm.
I’ll admit to making up two stories. On a college radio station I made up a story that I was a millionaire, an assistant to an African dictator who stole diamonds. But it was a good story. And I made up a story once about my family, growing up. I said we’d all sit around the dinner table, and my father would command us to tell him a good story. My father saw that and got angry.
I keep a foot in both boats, truth and fiction. And you know what they say about keeping a foot in both boats…
