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Just opened my Interviewer doll from JHD and I am happy with her.
The box design and quality is superb. Her outfit is fantastic as is her face paint and hair. Love that they have improved the hands. They are still a bit soft but far from the earlier rubber feel. She comes with earrings, a bracelet, a nice folder with inserts of the models' bio, and a stand. And an extra set of hands (BOTH pairs of hands have long nails. No cheapness there!)
At $130, she is amazing. I wish JHD could keep their dolls around the $150 mark. I'd buy more of them and look back even less at others.
Special THANKS to Sandra (trixiefishstabber) for doing a little interview with me and putting my work on her whimsical blog :)))!
So if you wanna know a little more about me, check it out!
trixiefishstabber.blogspot.com/2010/08/vladimir-stankovic...
Everything to do with Sex Show 2019 - Interview 1 - Isabelle Babe (4K)
Interviewer: Dom Davidson (Instagram: @ddavidsonportfolio)
Video: TorontoJack (Instagram: @cosplay)
Model: Isabelle Babe (Instagram: @Isabelle_Babe92)
am Marx-Engels-Denkmal, Berlin - Marx-Engels-Forum
Wegen der U-Bahn-Baustelle mussten die beiden an die Nordwestecke des Forums umziehen
I already have The Interview Silkstone, but I bought her nude with her hair down, and possibly trimmed. I also bought her complete fashion three years ago, but always wanted her complete. I love how stylish this Silkstone is. Hoping to just display her as is one day if I ever get the space!!
An interview by Steve Turner 1971
We came together to talk about Grapefruit, Yoko's book of poems, and ended up talking about Jesus. Somewhere in between, we mentioned the Beatles. John and Yoko are currently facing the plight of 'super-stardom'. Within two weeks they had become the third set of artists I had met who were complaining of being sold as people rather then for their art or for their music. James Taylor was the first, complaining of being used only as a headline or a photograph to sell more newspapers, and Pete Townsend was equally determined that "he won't get fooled again" into being a "superstar".
"Being misunderstood", John explained, "is being treated as if I'd won the pools and married an Hawaiian dancer. In any other country we're treated with respect as artists, which we are. If I hadn't bought a house in Ascot I'd leave because I'm sick of it. It's only because it's such a nice house that I'm staying. I'm a fantastic patriot for Britain. Ask Yoko - I never stop selling it! But she finds it hard to love England when they never stop shitting on her."
Yoko feels very much the same way and is waiting rather apprehensively for the response to the paperback edition of Grapefruit. She's been feeling misunderstood for the past fifteen years and has come to the conclusion that she must be the supreme optimist to ever carry on. "I just get this feeling that it's going to be the same thing again, but I have to go on knocking on the door."
John says: "An artist is not usually respected in his own village, so he has to go to the next town. It's a bit of that with us really. I think it's also like Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan - they both died of drink. Artists always die of drugs, drink and all that. Like Jimi and Janis -it's just that they're so misunderstood and tortured that they kill themselves. I refuse to do that. I've found the way out. You are here, live for the day, minute by minute. That's the essential way."
"You are here", meaning that this is all we can know of life's purpose, is the pervading message behind the art of both John and Yoko, The message is short but conclusive. In his song God, John lists fifteen people and philosophies that he no longer believes in and claims that he has now arrived at a position where he only believes in, "Yoko and me/that's reality". When I asked him what he considered reality to be, he answered, "Reality is living, breathing, eating and dying". So, outside of the undeniable fact of our own existence they claim that there is no need for questions or answers. As far as any ultimate reason, purpose or meaning to this life is concerned, John states, "There isn't an end product to life or a reason for it, it just is, It's not a game, though," he assured me, "it's very serious."
"You are here", is the statement they offer, and "what you can do while you are here" seems to be the message behind Yoko's poetry. They all take the form of a simple instruction, often of a single line and are divided into sections titled Painting, Event, Dance, Film, Object etc. When life itself has no meaning, there is no reason why the activities we perform during that life should have any ultimate meaning either. This would seem to be the philosophy behind the poem Line Piece, which says "Draw a line/Erase a line" or Map Piece - "Draw a map to get lost". Probably the best poem in this line, once you have an understanding of the underlying philosophy, is the one line ‘Lighting Piece‘. Here it is important to see both the meaninglessness inherent and the allegory between the match and our lives. The poem says simply "Light a match and watch till it goes out" Without purpose we seem to have been brought down to the level of a matchstick, and our lives are as a flame which burns awhile and then extinguishes. The matchstick is then discarded.
Yoko of course, is no newcomer to the art world having been associated with such avant-garde artists and musicians as Andy Warhol and John Cage. Warhol has explained his own art as being, "to stop you thinking about things". Francis Bacon, another contemporary artist who shares the same philosophy, has said, "Man now realises that he is an accident, a completely futile being and that he can only attempt to beguile himself for a time. Art has become a game by which man distracts himself."
In these cases, art has lost its power of Man communicating ideas and emotions to Man. It merely becomes a game to amuse ourselves with while in death's absurd waiting rooms. I feel that it is absolutely necessary to understand the thoughts of John and Yoko before their art becomes understandable.
"People seem to be scared of being put on", says John, commenting on a recent review of Grapefruit."I don't understand people who say they don't understand it because even a seven year old can understand it,"says Yoko. I commented that it's not the how of the instructions that were misunderstood but the why? Yoko explained: "You see, we live and we die. In between that we eat and sleep and walk around - but that's not enough for us. We have to act out our madness in order to be sane."
I asked John whether he'd been influenced a lot by Yoko's ideas. "Yeah, it's great, It's amazing that we think so alike coming from different ends of the earth. She's come from a very upper class scene, going to school with the prince and all that shit, and I'm from wherever! It just shows that colour, class and creed don't come in the way of communication. You don't even have to speak the same language. We made a calendar with some Grapefruit quotes on and some from my books. The ideas behind it were quite similar. Yoko was a bit further out than me when we met - and I was pretty far out, you know - but she really opened my head up with all her work."
I wondered whether he found a great difference between the poetry that he puts into his songs and the poetry that Yoko writes. "The last album I made was very much the same as Yoko's poetry, There weren't many words to it. It was pretty simple and so is the one I've just made which is called Imagine. We work well together in music too, except when I'm doing completely straight rock. But things like Revolution Number 9 would make a good background for her voice." John reminded me that his meeting with Yoko hadn't been the factor that made him write his songs of personal statement. He was writing the same kind of song back in his days as a Beatle, but again he was famed for just 'being a Beatle' rather than for the content of his work. "Help was a personal statement, In My Life was a personal statement and so was I'm A Loser. I was always on that kick but they were just considered to be 'pop' songs at that time. That's why I gave it up. It was all Beatles."
Halfway through our interview, John went out of the room for a few minutes and returned with a magazine which had been sent into the Apple offices for him, the cover contained his picture and the inscription 'Dear John', indicating an open letter to him which was inside. "You ought to see this, This is a message to me from the Jesus people. This is the Jesus freaks in America." He then sat down again and began reading aloud:
"Dear John, I've been through a lot of trips with you. When I was down I put your records on and you'd bring me back to life. We've been up mountains together and I know you know where it's at. But the main reason I'm writing to you is to tell you of a friend I met last June. He said that he is the way, the truth and the life. I believed him and gave my life to him. I can see now how he can boast such a claim. Since then I've heard that you don't believe in him, but you can see in your eyes that you need him. Come on home Johnny, Love a friend."
"I think they've got a damn cheek, I think they're madmen. They need looking after." I reminded him that this same suggestion had often been levelled at himself and Yoko. "That's my opinion you know, You asked me what I thought and I think they're crackpots."
As our earlier conversation had been on the topic of prejudice and how to remove it from society, I asked John whether he wasn't himself guilty of prejudice here. "I don't think it's a prejudice I just think it's a lot of bullshit, I think it's the biggest joke on earth that everyone's talking about some imaginary thing in the sky that's going to save you and talking about life after death which nobody has ever proved or shown to be feasible. Why should we follow Jesus? I'll follow Yoko, I'll follow myself." John's opinion of the Jesus Freak cult, is that they are following in the same tradition that he and the rest of the Beatles followed when they enlisted with the Maharishi. "It's the same as I did when I went looking for gurus, It's because you're looking for the answer which everybody is supposedly looking for. You're looking for some kind of super-daddy. The reason for this is because we're never given enough love and touch as children."
On another subject John very much sympathised with the attitude that Spike Milligan had presented when he ended his TV documentary with the question of whether it was he that was insane or the man who drills holes in pieces of wood for fifty years. "That is complete insanity....Don't you see that the society creates insane people to do their insane work, so that they can wank each other off on fucking yachts. That's what it's all about. And everybody's screwing holes in and going to school and going to work so that fifty people in Britain can fuck about on yachts."
After these comments, and as a leg-pull, I suggested to John that he ought to have his very own political TV show. Taking it rather more seriously than I had intended, he stated With firmness, "I am a revolutionary artist, not a politician". At least it gave me an extra understanding of what John Lennon thought about John Lennon rather than what critic and journalist number 5739 thought about John Lennon. It is precisely this assertion that he is an artist, which is the difference between Beatle John and the post-dream John, ("The dream is over... Yesterday I was the walrus/but now I'm John").
Song writing is now just one of his arts as he dabbles further into the field of film, sculpture and happening. Yoko is certainly the person who harnessed and directed the Lennon potential but his talent has been evident for years. His anti-organised religion attitude was evident from his early books and as he himself said, the personal songs go back as early as I'm A Loser on the Beatles For Sale album. Previous to meeting Yoko he seemed to be a philosopher in search of a philosophy and an artist in search of something to say. Now with Yoko, he sings the songs explaining the philosophy which has made Yoko's poetry a possible and indeed valid art form.
John and Yoko are two very warming people to be with. They both speak as if draining knowledge from the same mind, feeding each other with ideas. John hasn't lost the humour which was enjoyed so much in the Beatle days and he pounces on any opportunity to make a crack. When you see a copy of Grapefruit, only laugh at it if you feel that what you are doing that day has more meaning to it than Yoko's instructions. When you get John's albums, use them as reference works to gain an understanding of his wife's poems. And then next time someone tells you that John and Yoko are a couple of crackpots who could do with two years in the army, tell them that they're a couple of misinterpreted but nevertheless brilliant artists who are honest to their beliefs, and tell them that it was I who said so.
Lianne Dalziel Christchurch's mayor being intervened about the event.
It was Five years today September 4, 2015 that Canterbury was first shaken by a major quake, the people of Christchurch gathered on New Brighton beach this morning to mark the anniversary. I went with a friend but she didn't want to get up so early so we missed part of it. New Brighton Christchurch New Zealand at dawn.
There was a person from Radio News interviewing people there about their experiences of the earthquake five years ago and I was on the Radio News and also in a article.
This the link to me on the News www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/checkpoint/audio/20...
And this is the article: www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/283264/christchurch-marks...
Today we're interviewing Oky, a talented builder, reviewer, funny maker, and fellow blogger.
Read more: eurobricksstarwarsforum.com/2016/08/15/ebswf-blog-intervi...
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Our daughter is a reporter for the wonderful TIME For Kids publication. Talk about a plum assignment--interviewing Zac Efron on the heels of HSM3...
COOKIE DOLLS ON BIZARRE MAGAZINE
ENTREVISTA / INTERVIEW
www.bizzarre.co.uk/#!rebeca-cano/cqyz
Thank you very much to Desi for this fantastic article.
Rebeca Cano - Cookie dolls
© All rights reserved
www.recyclart.org/2015/10/recycled-art-interview-2-sophie...
We continue our series of posts interviewing "recycled art" crafters & artists. This week, we interviewed Sophie Marsham, a well-known sculptor in the community of Recycled Art. If you think you deserve to be featured in the next interview, please, drop us an email.
Tell us a little more about you? Who you are? Where are you from?
I am Sophie Marsham, a sculptor, from London, working in reclaimed and found objects.
How did you become a "Recycled Art" artist?
I became a recycled art artist 25 years ago when I was at Chelsea Art School.
Since when are you working with recycled & upcycled materials and more general since when are you in the world of "Recycled Art"?
I partly used reclaimed materials in the beginning as it was a cheap resource as a student.
What are your can’t-live-without essentials?
My can't live with essentials are wire, glue, nuts and bolts and tools.
How would you describe your style? Are there any crafters/artists/designers that you particularly look up to?
I make thought provoking, often humorous pieces from found objects. I love Joseph Cornell, Cornelia Parker, Haroshi and Kendra Haste.
How is your workspace, how do you make it inspiring?
My workspace is in the garden and full of inspiring objects, clock faces, springs, beads, glass, printing blocks, old tools, chocolate moulds etc...
What sorts of things are inspiring you right now? Where do you look for inspiration?
I am inspired by objects that I find in vintage fairs/carboot sales, especially if it's multiples of the same object, such as pen nibs, clock hands, teddy bear eyes... I am mostly inspired by nature, repeated patterns found in nature, bird feathers, snowflakes, shells, stones...
When do you feel the most creative?
I feel pretty creative all the time, as I'm constantly finding new objects to inspire me.
We live in such a mass-produced, buy-it-now society. Why should people continue to make things by hand?
Making things by hand is the most rewarding and making one off art from something that has been previously used and discarded is the most exciting aspect of the work. I love it when the viewer works out what has been used for a certain sculpture, I love the intrigue. I believe in breathing new life into discarded objects.
What is your favorite medium to work in?
I mainly work in metal but also use wood, glass, resin...
What is your guilty pleasure?
My guilty pleasure is good coffee and great cake.
What is your favorite thing to do (other than crafting)?
My favourite thing apart from art is art house independent films. I would love one day to make an animation film with some of my objects.
You have been involved in a lot of artistic projects, are you a full-time artist or is it just a hobby?
I am a full time artist, it's not a hobby and have been working for 22 years. I make tiny hand held pieces and have made many large scale installations up to 6 meters. I love to vary the scale.
Any websites that our readers should not miss?
Not a website to recommend as such, apart from my own of course www.sophiemarsham.com, but a great book called RAW + MATERIAL = ART.
Anything else you would like to tell to the « recycling community »?
Keep up with recycling, it will become even more vital for our kids and their kids.
Thanks a lot Sophie for this interview! :)
To see all the posts by Sophie, it's here.
Japan Camera Hunter - Jesse's Visual Interviews: www.japancamerahunter.com/2019/12/jesses-visual-interview...
Notes: In an interview for the Library Service in 1984, Don Kerry talked about the family motor repair business which was started by his father in 1928. His father built the current garage in 1936 and in 1939 when the first petrol pumps arrived, there were six brands sold: Shell, Altantic, Plume, Texaco, COR and AMP. Don joined his father in the business in 1944. By 1951 it was just Atlantic petrol, which later became the Esso brand.
Format: Colour negative film
Licensing: Attribution, share alike, creative commons.
Repository: Blue Mountains City Library bmcc.ent.sirsidynix.net.au/client/en_AU/default/
Part of: Local Studies Collection
Provenance: BMCC
Date Range: 1983
Location: Great Western Highway
Jetzt, wo du endlich die Universität absolviert hast, ist es an der Zeit, dir einen anständigen Job zu verschaffen, damit du die volle Unabhängigkeit genießen kannst. Eine unabhängige Frau ist doch eine sexy Frau, oder? Mit diesem gesagt, Sie werden jedes Interview, das Sie gehen, ass, so d...
coolideen.com/2018/08/14/was-man-zu-einem-job-interview-t...
JOHN LENNON and YOKO ONO (talk to Robin Blackburn and Tariq Ali)
Tariq Ali: Your latest record and your recent public statements, especially the interviews in Rolling Stone magazine, suggest that your views are becoming increasingly radical and political. When did this start to happen?
John Lennon: I've always been politically minded, you know, and against the status quo. It's pretty basic when you're brought up, like I was, to hate and fear the police as a natural enemy and to despise the army as something that takes everybody away and leaves them dead somewhere. I mean, it's just a basic working class thing, though it begins to wear off when you get older, get a family and get swallowed up in the system. In my case I've never not been political, though religion tended to overshadow it in my acid days; that would be around '65 or '66. And that religion was directly the result of all that superstar shit--religion was an outlet for my repression. I thought, 'Well, there's something else to life, isn't there? This isn't it, surely?' But I was always political in a way, you know. In the two books I wrote, even though they were written in a sort of Joycean gobbledegook, there's many knocks at religion and there is a play about a worker and a capitalist. I've been satirising the system since my childhood. I used to write magazines in school and hand them around. I was very conscious of class, they would say with a chip on my shoulder, because I knew what happened to me and I knew about the class repression coming down on us--it was a fucking fact but in the hurricane Beatle world it got left out, I got farther away from reality for a time.
TA: What did you think was the reason for the success of your sort of music?
JL: Well, at the time it was thought that the workers had broken through, but I realise in retrospect that it's the same phoney deal they gave the blacks, it was just like they allowed blacks to be runners or boxers or entertainers. That's the choice they allow you--now the outlet is being a pop star, which is really what I'm saying on the album in 'Working class hero'. As I told Rolling Stone, it's the same people who have the power, the class system didn't change one little bit. Of course, there are a lot of people walking around with long hair now and some trendy middle class kids in pretty clothes. But nothing changed except that we all dressed up a bit, leaving the same bastards running everything.
Robin Blackburn: Of course, class is something the American rock groups haven't tackled yet.
JL: Because they're all middle class and bourgeois and they don't want to show it. They're scared of the workers, actually, because the workers seem mainly right-wing in America, clinging on to their goods. But if these middle class groups realise what's happening, and what the class system has done, it's up to them to repatriate the people and to get out of all that bourgeois shit.
TA: When did you start breaking out of the role imposed on you as a Beatle?
JL: Even during the Beatle heyday I tried to go against it, so did George. We went to America a few times and Epstein always tried to waffle on at us about saying nothing about Vietnam. So there came a time when George and I said 'Listen, when they ask next time, we're going to say we don't like that war and we think they should get right out.' That's what we did. At that time this was a pretty radical thing to do, especially for the 'Fab Four'. It was the first opportunity I personally took to wave the flag a bit. But you've got to remember that I'd always felt repressed. We were all so pressurised that there was hardly any chance of expressing ourselves, especially working at that rate, touring continually and always kept in a cocoon of myths and dreams. It's pretty hard when you are Caesar and everyone is saying how wonderful you are and they are giving you all the goodies and the girls, it's pretty hard to break out of that, to say 'Well, I don't want to be king, I want to be real.' So in its way the second political thing I did was to say 'The Beatles are bigger than Jesus.' That really broke the scene, I nearly got shot in America for that. It was a big trauma for all the kids that were following us. Up to then there was this unspoken policy of not answering delicate questions, though I always read the papers, you know, the political bits. The continual awareness of what was going on made me feel ashamed I wasn't saying anything. I burst out because I could no longer play that game any more, it was just too much for me. Of course, going to America increased the build up on me, especially as the war was going on there. In a way we'd turned out to be a Trojan horse. The 'Fab Four' moved right to the top and then sang about drugs and sex and then I got into more and more heavy stuff and that's when they started dropping us.
RB: Wasn't there a double charge to what you were doing right from the beginning?
Yoko Ono: You were always very direct.
JL: Yes, well, the first thing we did was to proclaim our Liverpoolness to the world, and say 'It's all right to come from Liverpool and talk like this'. Before, anybody from Liverpool who made it, like Ted Ray, Tommy Handley, Arthur Askey, had to lose their accent to get on the BBC. They were only comedians but that's what came out of Liverpool before us. We refused to play that game. After The Beatles came on the scene everyone started putting on a Liverpudlian accent.
TA: In a way you were even thinking about politics when you seemed to be knocking revolution?
JL: Ah, sure, 'Revolution' . There were two versions of that song but the underground left only picked up on the one that said 'count me out'. The original version which ends up on the LP said 'count me in' too; I put in both because I wasn't sure. There was a third version that was just abstract, musique concrete, kind of loops and that, people screaming. I thought I was painting in sound a picture of revolution--but I made a mistake, you know. The mistake was that it was anti-revolution. On the version released as a single I said 'when you talk about destruction you can count me out'. I didn't want to get killed. I didn't really know that much about the Maoists, but I just knew that they seemed to be so few and yet they painted themselves green and stood in front of the police waiting to get picked off. I just thought it was unsubtle, you know. I thought the original Communist revolutionaries coordinated themselves a bit better and didn't go around shouting about it. That was how I felt--I was really asking a question. As someone from the working class I was always interested in Russia and China and everything that related to the working class, even though I was playing the capitalist game. At one time I was so much involved in the religious bullshit that I used to go around calling myself a Christian Communist, but as Janov says, religion is legalised madness. It was therapy that stripped away all that and made me feel my own pain.
RB: This analyst you went to, what's his name. ..
JL: Janov ...
RB: His ideas seem to have something in common with Laing in that he doesn't want to reconcile people to their misery, to adjust them to the world but rather to make them face up to its causes?
JL: Well, his thing is to feel the pain that's accumulated inside you ever since your childhood. I had to do it to really kill off all the religious myths. In the therapy you really feel every painful moment of your life--it's excruciating, you are forced to realise that your pain, the kind that makes you wake up afraid with your heart pounding, is really yours and not the result of somebody up in the sky. It's the result of your parents and your environment. As I realised this it all started to fall into place. This therapy forced me to have done with all the God shit. All of us growing up have come to terms with too much pain. Although we repress it, it's still there. The worst pain is that of not being wanted, of realising your parents do not need you in the way you need them. When I was a child I experienced moments of not wanting to see the ugliness, not wanting to see not being wanted. This lack of love went into my eyes and into my mind. Janov doesn't just talk to you about this but makes you feel it--once you've allowed yourself to feel again, you do most of the work yourself. When you wake up and your heart is going like the clappers or your back feels strained, or you develop some other hang-up, you should let your mind go to the pain and the pain itself will regurgitate the memory which originally caused you to suppress it in your body. In this way the pain goes to the right channel instead of being repressed again, as it is if you take a pill or a bath, saying 'Well, I'll get over it'. Most people channel their pain into God or masturbation or some dream of making it. The therapy is like a very slow acid trip which happens naturally in your body. It is hard to talk about, you know, because--you feel 'I am pain' and it sounds sort of arbitrary, but pain to me now has a different meaning because of having physically felt all these extraordinary repressions. It was like taking gloves off, and feeling your own skin for the first time. It's a bit of a drag to say so, but I don't think you can understand this unless you've gone through it--though I try to put some of it over on the album. But for me at any rate it was all part of dissolving the God trip or father-figure trip. Facing up to reality instead of always looking for some kind of heaven.
RB: Do you see the family in general as the source of these repressions?
JL: Mine is an extreme case, you know. My father and mother split and I never saw my father until I was 20, nor did I see much more of my mother. But Yoko had her parents there and it was the same....
YO: Perhaps one feels more pain when parents are there. It's like when you're hungry, you know, it's worse to get a symbol of a cheeseburger than no cheeseburger at all. It doesn't do you any good, you know. I often wish my mother had died so that at least I could get some people's sympathy. But there she was, a perfectly beautiful mother.
JL: And Yoko's family were middle-class Japanese but it's all the same repression. Though I think middle-class people have the biggest trauma if they have nice imagey parents, all smiling and dolled up. They are the ones who have the biggest struggle to say, 'Goodbye mummy, goodbye daddy'.
TA: What relation to your music has all this got?
JL: Art is only a way of expressing pain. I mean the reason Yoko does such far out stuff is that it's a far out kind of pain she went through.
RB: A lot of Beatle songs used to be about childhood...
JL: Yeah, that would mostly be me...
RB: Though they were very good there was always a missing element...
JL: That would be reality, that would be the missing element. Because I was never really wanted. The only reason I am a star is because of my repression. Nothing else would have driven me through all that if I was 'normal'...
YO: ... and happy ...
JL: The only reason I went for that goal is that I wanted to say: 'Now, mummydaddy, will you love me?'
TA: But then you had success beyond most people's wildest dreams...
JL: Oh, Jesus Christ, it was a complete oppression. I mean we had to go through humiliation upon humiliation with the middle classes and showbiz and Lord Mayors and all that. They were so condescending and stupid. Everybody trying to use us. It was a special humiliation for me because I could never keep my mouth shut and I'd always have to be drunk or pilled to counteract this pressure. It was really hell ...
YO: It was depriving him of any real experience, you know...
JL: It was very miserable. I mean apart from the first flush of making it--the thrill of the first number one record, the first trip to America. At first we had some sort of objective like being as big as Elvis--moving forward was the great thing, but actually attaining it was the big let-down. I found I was having continually to please the sort of people I'd always hated when I was a child. This began to bring me back to reality. I began to realise that we are all oppressed which is why I would like to do something about it, though I'm not sure where my place is.
RB: Well, in any case, politics and culture are linked, aren't they? I mean, workers are repressed by culture not guns at the moment ...
JL: ... they're doped ...
RB: And the culture that's doping them is one the artist can make or break...
JL: That's what I'm trying to do on my albums and in these interviews. What I'm trying to do is to influence all the people I can influence. All those who are still under the dream and just put a big question mark in their mind. The acid dream is over, that is what I'm trying to tell them.
RB: Even in the past, you know, people would use Beatle songs and give them new words. 'Yellow submarine' , for instance, had a number of versions. One that strikers used to sing began 'We all live on bread and margarine' ; at LSE we had a version that began 'We all live in a Red LSE'.
JL: I like that. And I enjoyed it when football crowds in the early days would sing 'All together now'--that was another one. I was also pleased when the movement in America took up 'Give peace a chance' because I had written it with that in mind really. I hoped that instead of singing 'We shall overcome' from 1800 or something, they would have something contemporary. I felt an obligation even then to write a song that people would sing in the pub or on a demonstration. That is why I would like to compose songs for the revolution now ...
RB: We only have a few revolutionary songs and they were composed in the 19th century. Do you find anything in our musical traditions which could be used for revolutionary songs?
JL: When I started, rock and roll itself was the basic revolution to people of my age and situation. We needed something loud and clear to break through all the unfeeling and repression that had been coming down on us kids. We were a bit conscious to begin with of being imitation Americans. But we delved into the music and found that it was half white country and western and half black rhythm and blues. Most of the songs came from Europe and Africa and now they were coming back to us. Many of Dylan's best songs came from Scotland, Ireland or England. It was a sort of cultural exchange. Though I must say the more interesting songs to me were the black ones because they were more simple. They sort of saidshake your arse, or your prick, which was an innovation really. And then there were the field songs mainly expressing the pain they were in. They couldn't express themselves intellectually so they had to say in a very few words what was happening to them. And then there was the city blues and a lot of that was about sex and fighting. A lot of this was self-expression but only in the last few years have they expressed themselves completely with Black Power, like Edwin Starr making war records. Before that many black singers were still labouring under that problem of God; it was often 'God will save us'. But right through the blacks were singing directly and immediately about their pain and also about sex, which is why I like it.
RB: You say country and western music derived from European folk songs. Aren't these folk songs sometimes pretty dreadful stuff, all about losing and being defeated?
JL: As kids we were all opposed to folk songs because they were so middle-class. It was all college students with big scarfs and a pint of beer in their hands singing folk songs in what we call la-di-da voices-'I worked in a mine in New-cast-le' and all that shit. There were very few real folk singers you know, though I liked Dominic Behan a bit and there was some good stuff to be heard in Liverpool. Just occasionally you hear very old records on the radio or TV of real workers in Ireland or somewhere singing these songs and the power of them is fantastic. But mostly folk music is people with fruity voices trying to keep alive something old and dead. It's all a bit boring, like ballet: a minority thing kept going by a minority group. Today's folk song is rock and roll. Although it happened to emanate from America, that's not really important in the end because we wrote our own music and that changed everything.
RB: Your album, Yoko, seems to fuse avant-garde modern music with rock. I'd like to put an idea to you I got from listening to it. You integrate everyday sounds, like that of a train, into a musical pattern. This seems to demand an aesthetic measure of everyday life, to insist that art should not be imprisoned in the museums and galleries, doesn't it?
YO: Exactly. I want to incite people to loosen their oppression by giving them something to work with, to build on. They shouldn't be frightened of creating themselves--that's why I make things very open, with things for people to do, like in my book [Grapefruit]. Because basically there are two types of people in the world: people who are confident because they know they have the ability to create, and then people who have been demoralised, who have no confidence in themselves because they have been told they have no creative ability, but must just take orders. The Establishment likes people who take no responsibility and cannot respect themselves.
RB: I suppose workers' control is about that...
JL: Haven't they tried out something like that in Yugoslavia; they are free of the Russians. I'd like to go there and see how it works.
TA: Well, they have; they did try to break with the Stalinist pattern. But instead of allowing uninhibited workers' control, they added a strong dose of political bureaucracy. It tended to smother the initiative of the workers and they also regulated the whole system by a market mechanism which bred new inequalities between one region and another.
JL: It seems that all revolutions end up with a personality cult--even the Chinese seem to need a father-figure. I expect this happens in Cuba too, with Che and Fidel. In Western-style Communism we would have to create an almost imaginary workers' image of themselves as the father-figure.
RB: That's a pretty cool idea--the Working Class becomes its own Hero. As long as it was not a new comforting illusion, as long as there was a real workers' power. If a capitalist or bureaucrat is running your life then you need to compensate with illusions.
YO: The people have got to trust in themselves.
TA: That's the vital point. The working class must be instilled with a feeling of confidence in itself. This can't be done just by propaganda--the workers must move, take over their own factories and tell the capitalists to bugger off. This is what began to happen in May 1968 in France...the workers began to feel their own strength.
JL: But the Communist Party wasn't up to that, was it?
RB: No, they weren't. With 10 million workers on strike they could have led one of those huge demonstrations that occurred in the centre of Paris into a massive occupation of all government buildings and installations, replacing de Gaulle with a new institution of popular power like the Commune or the original Soviets--that would have begun a real revolution but the French C.P. was scared of it. They preferred to deal at the top instead of encouraging the workers to take the initiative themselves...
JL: Great, but there's a problem about that here you know. All the revolutions have happened when a Fidel or Marx or Lenin or whatever, who were intellectuals, were able to get through to the workers. They got a good pocket of people together and the workers seemed to understand that they were in a repressed state. They haven't woken up yet here, they still believe that cars and tellies are the answer. You should get these left-wing students out to talk with the workers, you should get the schoolkids involved with The Red Mole.
TA: You're quite right, we have been trying to do that and we should do more. This new Industrial Relations Bill the Government is trying to introduce is making more and more workers realise what is happening...
JL: I don't think that Bill can work. I don't think they can enforce it. I don't think the workers will co-operate with it. I thought the Wilson Government was a big let-down but this Heath lot are worse. The underground is being harrassed, the black militants can't even live in their own homes now, and they're selling more arms to the South Africans. Like Richard Neville said, there may be only an inch of difference between Wilson and Heath but it's in that inch that we live....
TA: I don't know about that; Labour brought in racialist immigration policies, supported the Vietnam war and were hoping to bring in new legislation against the unions.
RB: It may be true that we live in the Inch of difference between Labour and Conservative but so long as we do we'll be impotent and unable to change anything. If Heath is forcing us out of that inch maybe he's doing us a good turn without meaning to...
JL: Yes, I've thought about that, too. This putting us in a corner so we have to find out what is coming down on other people. I keep on reading the Morning Star [the Communist newspaper] to see if there's any hope, but it seems to be in the 19th century; it seems to be written for dropped-out, middle-aged liberals. We should be trying to reach the young workers because that's when you're most idealistic and have least fear. Somehow the revolutionaries must approach the workers because the workers won't approach them. But it's difficult to know where to start; we've all got a finger in the dam. The problem for me is that as I have become more real, I've grown away from most working-class people--you know what they like is Engelbert Humperdinck. It's the students who are buying us now, and that's the problem. Now The Beatles are four separate people, we don't have the impact we had when we were together...
RB: Now you're trying to swim against the stream of bourgeois society, which is much more difficult.
JL: Yes, they own all the newspapers and they control all distribution and promotion. When we came along there was only Decca, Philips and EMI who could really produce a record for you. You had to go through the whole bureaucracy to get into the recording studio. You were in such a humble position, you didn't have more than 12 hours to make a whole album, which is what we did in the early days. Even now it's the same; if you're an unknown artist you're lucky to get an hour in a studio--it's a hierarchy and if you don't have hits, you don't get recorded again. And they control distribution. We tried to change that with Apple but in the end we were defeated. They still control everything. EMI killed our album Two Virgins because they didn't like it. With the last record they've censored the words of the songs printed on the record sleeve. Fucking ridiculous and hypocritical--they have to let me sing it but they don't dare let you read it. Insanity.
RB: Though you reach fewer people now, perhaps the effect can be more concentrated.
JL: Yes, I think that could be true. To begin with, working class people reacted against our openness about sex. They are frightened of nudity, they're repressed in that way as well as others. Perhaps they thought 'Paul is a good lad, he doesn't make trouble'. Also when Yoko and I got married, we got terrible racialist letters--you know, warning me that she would slit my throat. Those mainly came from Army people living in Aldershot. Officers. Now workers are more friendly to us, so perhaps it's changing. It seems to me that the students are now half-awake enough to try and wake up their brother workers. If you don't pass on your own awareness then it closes down again. That is why the basic need is for the students to get in with the workers and convince them that they are not talking gobbledegook. And of course it's difficult to know what the workers are really thinking because the capitalist press always only quotes mouthpieces like Vic Feather* anyway. [Ed. Note: Vic Feather 1908-76 was General Secretary of the TUC from 1969-73.] So the only thing is to talk to them directly, especially the young workers. We've got to start with them because they know they're up against it. That's why I talk about school on the album. I'd like to incite people to break the framework, to be disobedient in school, to stick their tongues out, to keep insulting authority.
YO: We are very lucky really, because we can create our own reality, John and me, but we know the important thing is to communicate with other people.
JL: The more reality we face, the more we realise that unreality is the main programme of the day. The more real we become, the more abuse we take, so it does radicalise us in a way, like being put in a corner. But it would be better if there were more of us.
YO: We mustn't be traditional in the way we communicate with people--especially with the Establishment. We should surprise people by saying new things in an entirely new way. Communication of that sort can have a fantastic power so long as you don't do only what they expect you to do.
RB: Communication is vital for building a movement, but in the end it's powerless unless you also develop popular force.
YO: I get very sad when I think about Vietnam where there seems to be no choice but violence. This violence goes on for centuries perpetuating itself. In the present age when communication is so rapid, we should create a different tradition, traditions are created everyday. Five years now is like 100 years before. We are living in a society that has no history. There's no precedent for this kind of society so we can break the old patterns.
TA: No ruling class in the whole of history has given up power voluntarily and I don't see that changing.
YO: But violence isn't just a conceptual thing, you know. I saw a programme about this kid who had come back from Vietnam--he'd lost his body from the waist down. He was just a lump of meat, and he said, 'Well, I guess it was a good experience.'
JL: He didn't want to face the truth, he didn't want to think it had all been a waste...
YO: But think of the violence, it could happen to your kids ...
RB: But Yoko, people who struggle against oppression find themselves attacked by those who have a vested interest in nothing changing, those who want to protect their power and wealth. Look at the people in Bogside and Falls Road in Northern Ireland; they were mercilessly attacked by the special police because they began demonstrating for their rights. On one night in August 1969, seven people were shot and thousands driven from their homes. Didn't they have a right to defend themselves?
YO: That's why one should try to tackle these problems before a situation like that happens.
JL: Yes, but what do you do when it does happen, what do you do?
RB: Popular violence against their oppressors is always justified. It cannot be avoided.
YO: But in a way the new music showed things could be transformed by new channels of communication.
JL: Yes, but as I said, nothing really changed.
YO: Well, something changed and it was for the better. All I'm saying is that perhaps we can make a revolution without violence.
JL: But you can't take power without a struggle...
TA: That's the crucial thing.
JL: Because, when it comes to the nitty-gritty, they won't let the people have any power; they'll give all the rights to perform and to dance for them, but no real power...
YO: The thing is, even after the revolution, if people don't have any trust in themselves, they'll get new problems.
JL: After the revolution you have the problem of keeping things going, of sorting out all the different views. It's quite natural that revolutionaries should have different solutions, that they should split into different groups and then reform, that's the dialectic, isn't it--but at the same time they need to be united against the enemy, to solidify a new order. I don't know what the answer is; obviously Mao is aware of this problem and keeps the ball moving.
RB: The danger is that once a revolutionary state has been created, a new conservative bureaucracy tends to form around it. This danger tends to increase if the revolution is isolated by imperialism and there is material scarcity.
JL: Once the new power has taken over they have to establish a new status quo just to keep the factories and trains running.
RB: Yes, but a repressive bureaucracy doesn't necessarily run the factories or trains any better than the workers could under a system of revolutionary democracy.
JL: Yes, but we all have bourgeois instincts within us, we all get tired and feel the need to relax a bit. How do you keep everything going and keep up revolutionary fervour after you've achieved what you set out to achieve? Of course Mao has kept them up to it in China, but what happens after Mao goes? Also he uses a personality cult. Perhaps that's necessary; like I said, everybody seems to need a father figure. But I've been reading Khrushchev Remembers. I know he's a bit of a lad himself--but he seemed to think that making a religion out of an individual was bad; that doesn't seem to be part of the basic Communist idea. Still people are people, that's the difficulty. If we took over Britain, then we'd have the job of cleaning up the bourgeoisie and keeping people in a revolutionary state of mind.
RB: ...In Britain unless we can create a new popular power-and here that would basically mean workers' power--really controlled by, and answerable to, the masses, then we couldn't make the revolution in the first place. Only a really deep-rooted workers' power could destroy the bourgeois state.
YO: That's why it will be different when the younger generation takes over.
JL: I think it wouldn't take much to get the youth here really going. You'd have to give them free rein to attack the local councils or to destroy the school authorities, like the students who break up the repression in the universities. It's already happening, though people have got to get together more. And the women are very important too, we can't have a revolution that doesn't involve and liberate women. It's so subtle the way you're taught male superiority. It took me quite a long time to realise that my maleness was cutting off certain areas for Yoko. She's a red hot liberationistand was quick to show me where I was going wrong, even though it seemed to me that I was just acting naturally. That's why I'm always interested to know how people who claim to be radical treat women.
RB: There's always been at least as much male chauvinism on the left as anywhere else--though the rise of women's liberation is helping to sort that out.
JL: It's ridiculous. How can you talk about power to the people unless you realise the people is both sexes.
YO: You can't love someone unless you are in an equal position with them. A lot of women have to cling to men out of fear or insecurity, and that's not love--basically that's why women hate men...
JL: ... and vice versa ...
YO: So if you have a slave around the house how can you expect to make a revolution outside it? The problem for women is that if we try to be free, then we naturally become lonely, because so many women are willing to become slaves, and men usually prefer that. So you always have to take the chance: 'Am I going to lose my man?' It's very sad.
JL: Of course, Yoko was well into liberation before I met her. She'd had to fight her way through a man's world--the art world is completely dominated by men--so she was full of revolutionary zeal when we met. There was never any question about it: we had to have a 50-50 relationship or there was no relationship, I was quick to learn. She did an article about women in Nova more than two years back in which she said, 'Woman is the nigger of the world' .
RB: Of course we all live in an imperialist country that is exploiting the Third World, and even our culture is involved in this. There was a time when Beatle music was plugged on Voice of America....
JL: The Russians put it out that we were capitalist robots, which we were I suppose...
RB: They were pretty stupid not to see it was something different.
YO: Let' s face it, Beatles was 20th-century folksong in the framework of capitalism; they couldn't do anything different if they wanted to communicate within that framework.
RB: I was working in Cuba when Sgt Pepper was released and that's when they first started playing rock music on the radio.
JL: Well hope they see that rock and roll is not the same as Coca-Cola. As we get beyond the dream this should be easier: that's why I'm putting out more heavy statements now and trying to shake off the teeny-bopper image. I want to get through to the right people, and I want to make what I have to say very simple and direct.
RB: Your latest album sounds very simple to begin with, but the lyrics, tempo and melody build up into a complexity one only gradually becomes aware of. Like the track 'My mummy's dead' echoes the nursery song 'Three blind mice' and it's about a childhood trauma.
JL: The tune does; it was that sort of feeling, almost like a Haiku poem. I recently got into Haiku in Japan and I just think it's fantastic. Obviously, when you get rid of a whole section of illusion in your mind you're left with great precision. Yoko was showing me some of these Haiku in the original. The difference between them and Longfellow is immense. Instead of a long flowery poem the Haiku would say 'Yellow flower in white bowl on wooden table' which gives you the whole picture, really....
TA: How do you think we can destroy the capitalist system here in Britain, John?
JL: I think only by making the workers aware of the really unhappy position they are in, breaking the dream they are surrounded by. They think they are in a wonderful, free-speaking country. They've got cars and tellies and they don't want to think there's anything more to life. They are prepared to let the bosses run them, to see their children fucked up in school. They're dreaming someone else's dream, it's not even their own. They should realise that the blacks and the Irish are being harassed and repressed and that they will be next. As soon as they start being aware of all that, we can really begin to do something. The workers can start to take over. Like Marx said: 'To each according to his need'. I think that would work well here. But we'd also have to infiltrate the army too, because they are well trained to kill us all. We've got to start all this from where we ourselves are oppressed. I think it's false, shallow, to be giving to others when your own need is great. The idea is not to comfort people, not to make them feel better but to make them feel worse, to constantly put before them the degradations and humiliations they go through to get what they call a living wage.
Tariq Ali is editor of London's New Left Review, a filmmaker and novelist, and has written more than a dozen books on world history and politics, including 1968 and After: Inside the Revolution (1978) and the 1987 Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties. He was prominently involved in 60s antiwar and radical politics; Jagger, a personal friend, is said to have written "Street Fighting Man" in his honor.
Tim Armstrong, CEO of AOL, is interviewed on-stage as part of the company's presentation about content and online strategy during Advertising Week. Taken on September 29, 2010 in The Times Center.
Update: Featured in this Japanese blog post about the art of listening vs speaking in the business world kazumoto.jp/?p=1501
And in this blog post about interviewing techniques wisewolftalking.com/2011/11/24/856/
And in this Spanish language blog post about recruiting and the interview process www.unemprendedor.com/ser-emprendedor/325-seleccion-de-pe...
Used in this blog post about IT strategy and talent recruiting www.orsyp.com/blog/684-what-are-the-top-7-it-strategies-y...
As seen in this blog post about job interviews laugh-raku.com/archives/4560
Featured in this Chinese blog post about interview skills blog.alphacamp.co/2014/12/31/startup-ux-3/
Used in this blog post about behavioral interview techniques leavingthepublicsector.net/2011/11/24/856/
Created as a flash card image here quizlet.com/20576851/collocations-with-go-take-get-and-do...
Featured in this Romanian blog post about non-verbal signals sent by managers during the job interview process www.managerexpress.ro/company/hr/comportamentul-nonverbal...
Used in this blog post about hiring employees abroad clickhowto.com/how-to-employ-staff-in-a-foreign-country/
Part of a lesson plan by this teacher teflreflections.wordpress.com/2014/11/20/past-simple-pres...
As seen in this listicle of advice for startups when hiring new people into their business goodness.greatergood.com/retest-cs-startup-success/
Used in this blog post about how to use a blog to get a job (in addition to your CV website) www.unostips.com/blogcv-curriculum-vitae/
Featured in this business article about why so many interviewers misevaluate candidates with their questions www.alleywatch.com/2015/11/probably-suck-interviewing/
As seen in this blog post about how to read social cue during business meetings orgleader.com/meeting-impact/
Used in this blog post about MBA interview questions www.targetadmission.com/articles/mba-interview-questions-...
Featured in this blog post about how to moderate on-stage interviews with celebrities www.moderatingpanels.com/2017/02/when-your-moderation-gig...
As seen in this article about medical school admissions www.medical-school-insider.com/medical-school-admissions....
Used in this Japanese slideshow about Rakuten? www.slideshare.net/TakaoOyobe/20131106-change-hacker
Interview avec C215 par Vitostreet à propos de son soutien au projet “Errance” en faveur des sans abris.
[Photos C215]
Hans-Christian Ströbele (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen) auf der Bösebrücke (S-Bhf. Bornholmer Str.) bei den Blockaden gegen den Nazi-Aufmarsch am 01.Mai 2010 in Berlin.
Finnian foi Tagg pela Ste Ferreira <3
Eu ñ sei vcs mas eu estou com problemas de postar fotos no flick, diz q o arquivo expirou..... vai entender....
______________________________________
1 - Como foi a sua infância?
Finnian: Acho que foi bem normal... acho..
2 - Se você pudesse voltar no tempo e mudar alguma coisa, o que seria?
Finnian: Hum...... tenho q pensar em algo q eu ñ possa me arrepender.........
... acho q foi quando eu li spoiler de GoT
... ñ... acho q foi quando eu coloquei "lemon" no google...
... espera... acho q foi quando eu estava em duvida entre Charmander, Squirtle ou Bulbasaur
... estou pensando....
...
- ok proxima pergunta...
3 - Quanto você pesa?
Finnian: Acho que uns 45Kg
4 - Alguma vez você já amou e perdeu?
Finnian: Animal de estimação vale? *começa a fazer cara de choro*
5 - O que você faz para ganhar a vida e por quê?
Finnian: Sou estudante... ñ faço mais nada
6 - Que tipo de música você gosta?
Finnian: Gosto de trilhas sonoras
7 - Quantos anos você tem?
Finnian: Tenho 15
8 - Qual é a coisa mais irritante do mundo?
Finnian: Quando as pessoas vem conversar comigo quando estou lendo ou jogando ¬w¬'
9 - Qual é a sua palavra favorita?
Finnian: hum... acho q é "abraço"
10 - Você tem algum hobby interessante?
Finnian: Eu gosto de ler e jogar D; para mim são interessantes -q
11 - Qual é a coisa mais romântica que alguém já fez por você?
Finnian: Hum.... *pensando*..................... se alguém fez algo assim para mim eu ñ me lembro
12 - Como você relaxar no final de um longo dia?
Finnian: Eu leio ou jogo
13 - Você tem obsessões?
Finnian: No momento eu quero tentar fazer mais jovens se interessarem pela leitura *olha feio para o Ulric*
14 - Qual é a sua nacionalidade?
Finnian: Sou brasileiro, mas o meu pai é norte americano e as vezes me manda umas cartas.
15 - Que idiomas você fala?
Finnian: Português e um pouco de inglês
16 - Se você pudesse ter qualquer animal de estimação no mundo, o que seria?
Finnian: Um dragão *0*
- Acho q esse não vale..
17 - Qual é a coisa mais aleatória que você se encontrar fazendo todos os dias?
Finnian: Acho q é sair de fininho para ñ ter q encarar todos de manhã >_<'
18 - Favoritos, rápido, vai! Livro, filme , jogo, bebida, cor?
Finnian: Calma calma >//////< ern... acho q é O Hobbit, Como treinar o seu dragão, Pokemon, milkshake de chocolate e creme
19 - Qual é a coisa mais sentimental que você possui e por quê?
Finnian: Acho q são alguns livros que tenho desde pequeno...
20 - Você está em um relacionamento?
Finnian: Não... e não quero.
21 - Qual foi a sua pior lesão?
Finnian: Foi quando caiu um livro na minha cabeça @w@'
22 - O que te assusta mais?
Finnian: Algumas pessoas me assustam... por exemplo as garotas que vivem aqui.... >_>'
23 - Algo que a maioria das pessoas não sabe sobre você?
Finnian: Eu gosto de ser organizado! o_ó
24 - Você tem algum animal de estimação?
Finnian: No momento não.
25 - O que você acha desta entrevista?
Finnian: Já acabou? estou pensando sobre a pergunta numero 2 ainda....
_________________________
Taggueados:
Dino e Rae da Larissa
Recently, there was an interview about me on the net. I was asked to show three of my photos that I liked and tell why I liked them. I also told how and why I do my photography in the way that I do. You can read the full interview at this web address:
Kristen Stewart on the cover of interview mag.
The first decade of the 21st century, which is about to draw to a close, is in serious danger of being remembered as the time when fame was measured in pokes, tweets, and the ability to parlay a death-defying (and sometimes not so death-defying) degree of persona recklessness into a reality-television deal. But just as the door was about to slam shut on the double aughts, in walks—or, more appropriately, saunters—Kristen Stewart.
At 19, Stewart has already earned a place in the annals of pop-culture history. This is due to her starring role in Twilight, which—in case you’ve somehow managed to elude word of its all-encompassing death grip on young America—is a film based on the first in a series of very popular books about vampires, werewolves, and teenage life in the town of Forks, Washington. Stewart’s character, Bella Swan, is a newcomer to Forks who is forced to cope with the dueling pressures of starting life at a new school and the fact that her prospective boyfriend, the rakish Edward Cullen (played by the rakish Robert Pattinson), is a 104-year-old undead bloodsucker.
Given Twilight’s preoccupation with the timeless themes of misunderstood youth, troubled young love, and the intervening forces of darkness, the film’s success isn’t all that surprising. (To date, it has grossed more than $380 million worldwide.) Nor is the fact that more Twilights are in the offing: A second installment, New Moon, hits theaters in November, and a third, Eclipse, is due out next year. But the growing size and complexity of the Twilight machine has had some unavoidable implications:
In the last 12 months, Stewart has become a tabloid regular and a blog-stalked cynosure. The fact that her Twilight character is romantically linked to Pattinson’s in the film has also fueled nonstop speculation that they are involved in real life. BUYING A HOUSE? and GETTING MARRIED? were just a couple of the early autumn headlines. Between filming Twilight sequels, Stewart did a turn as Joan Jett in Floria Sigismondi’s new rock-band biopic The Runaways; even her hair for the film—which was chopped and dyed to mimic Jett’s late-’70s shag—inspired reams of media critique.
Stewart grew up in Los Angeles in a Hollywood family of sorts—her mother is a script supervisor, and her father is a stage manager—and as a kid announced her interest in working in front of the camera. Her second film, David Fincher’s 2002 thriller, Panic Room, in which she played Jodie Foster’s too-quick, too-wise, too-over-it daughter, proved an early indicator of her ability to play young, smart, but not precocious. Her performance in more left-of-center projects such as Sean Penn’s Into the Wild (2007) and this year’s Adventureland has only reinforced that notion. But if there’s a thread that runs through her relatively small body of work, it’s one that’s closely connected to the idea that you don’t have to be old to have soul. With Stewart, you don’t get 19-going-on-35. What you do get is a visceral window into what it means to be young and struggling to make sense of your own life and the world around you—and all the alternating waves of darkness and confusion and brightness and possibility that come with that. In many ways, it’s the unwritten nature of Stewart’s own story now, with its surreal subplots and recent twists and turns, that makes her compelling to watch. It’s true that she might very well be a rebel anodyne to many of her bleached and sprayed-on contemporaries. Or, like Bella Swan, she might just be someone who comes from somewhere, found her way into something exceptional, and is on her way to someplace else. Either way, she’s got a solid arc.
In celebration of Interview’s 40th anniversary, we askedactor, director, writer, and photographer Dennis Hopper—whose connection to the magazine reaches across all fourdecades—to handle the interviewing duties for this cover story. He graciously obliged. He spoke to Stewart, who was shooting Eclipse in Vancouver, from the set of his cable series, Crash, in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
DENNIS HOPPER: Before we start, I have a little six-year-old daughter here who’s going crazy right now because you’re on the phone. Could I just put her on for a second to say hello?
KRISTEN STEWART: Yeah, sure.
HOPPER: Okay, her name is Galen. [hands phone]
GALEN HOPPER: Hi!
STEWART: Hi! How are you?
GALEN: Good.
STEWART: It’s really nice to meet you, Galen. [pause] Hello?
GALEN: Hi!
HOPPER: [takes phone] She’s so excited.
STEWART: Wow, that made me so nervous!
HOPPER: It made you nervous?
STEWART: Yeah. I’m just sort of intimidated by kids. I didn’t know what to say.
HOPPER: Well, thank you for doing that. So how are you doing?
STEWART: I’m pretty good. I’m not very good at interviews, but this is a trip. Why in god’s name did you want to do this? You have no idea how cool this is for me.
HOPPER: Well, you’re a really good actress. And my daughter is your biggest fan, so I thought, What the hell? [laughs] I usually don’t do this, either. But you must be going through a lot right now, the way Twilight is hitting. You must have no peace at all.
STEWART: The sad thing is that I feel so boring because Twilight is literally how every conversation I have these days begins—whether it’s someone I’m meeting for the first time or someone I just haven’t seen in a while. The first thing I want to say to them is, “It’s insane! And, as a person, I can’t do anything!” But then I think to myself, God damn it, shut the fuck up.
HOPPER: [both laugh] You know, you’re giving really wonderful performances. Since you didn’t know you’d be making sequels when you were making the first Twilight, has it been difficult for you to get back into character for these new ones?
STEWART: I’ve actually always been interested in following a character more long term, but the only place to really do that as an actor is on a TV series. But the Twilight series is cool because you know what’s ahead of you—all of the books have been written. And I get breaks in between. It’s sort of a depressing thing to lose a character just when you’ve been able to get to know her. Usually, at the end of a film it’s like I’ve finally gotten to know this person completely, and then we’re done. That actually happened on the set of Twilight, and then it happened again on New Moon. Each time my character Bella became a different person, and I got to know that person and take her to the next level.
HOPPER: Have you been able to enjoy it? Or do you feel more pressure doing these sequels?
STEWART: I do feel more of a pressurized strain than what is typical for me. Usually, what drives you is your own personal responsibility to the script and the character and the people you are working with. But in this case, I have a responsibility not only to that but to everyone who has personal involvement in the books—and now that spans the world. It’s an insane concept. There are certain things in Twilight . . . As much as I’m proud of that movie and I do like it, I feel like maybe I brought too much of myself to the character. I feel like I really know Bella now. But most readers feel like they know Bella because it’s a first-person narrative. She’s like a little vessel and everyone experiences the story through her. All of these girls who are fans personally feel like they encapsulate that character. So it’s like, “How the hell am I going to do that for all of them? It’s impossible!” But I’ve decided, if you’re just unabashedly honest all of the time, you have nothing to be ashamed of.
HOPPER: These Twilight books have some dark material.
STEWART: But the movies aren’t that dark, as much as we’d all have loved to have made those films. But as pretty as it is to watch and as nice as it is to have watched these two characters find solace in each other, everything around them is absolute chaos. I mean, you have to question their motivations—to watch two people so unhealthily devoted to each other . . . I stand behind everything that they do. I have to justify it in my mind, or else I couldn’t play the character. But they are definitely not the most pragmatic characters. The weirdest fucking themes run through this story—like dominance and masochism. I mean, you always have to realize that the story needs to make sense to the 11-year-olds who read the book and aren’t necessarily going to be viewing a scene as foreplay. But then there is the other segment of the audience—a large percentage—who does see the scene as foreplay. And it’s pretty deep, heady foreplay. [laughs] So it’s fun to play it both ways. I mean, I don’t know what it feels like to make out with my vampire boyfriend because it isn’t something that anybody has ever felt. But it’s funny to think that a lot of the audience is 10 years old and will maybe one day grow up to realize there are a lot of involved thoughts in Twilight that they didn’t see before.
HOPPER: Well, you’re getting a lot of attention.
STEWART: Yeah, it’s weird. There’s an idea about who I am that’s eternally projected onto me, and then I almost feel like I have to fulfill that role. Even when things come out of my mouth, I want to be sure I’m saying exactly what I mean. All I’m thinking of is the fact that everything that I say is going to be criticized—not criticized, just evaluated and analyzed. And it’s always something that matters so much to me that doesn’t come out right. But in terms of how my life has changed, I never really went out a whole lot before. I’m sort of an in-my-head kind of person. I wish I could take more walks . . .
HOPPER: You can’t take walks?
STEWART: I’d like to take more walks after work, instead of having to come back to my hotel room and not leave. So it can be boring. I’ve been working as an actress since I was very young, and I know a lot of people who are actors who don’t have to deal with having a persona . . . You know, if you look up the word persona, it isn’t even real. The whole meaning of the word is that it’s made up, and it’s like I didn’t even get to make up my own. It can be annoying. But I have a really strong feeling that this is going to go away, that this is the most intense it’s going to get—and could get—and that it’s fleeting. So in a few years, I will hopefully become more like the people I want to become like.
HOPPER: Does it bother you to see yourself in the tabloids?
STEWART: There’s nothing you can do about it, to be honest. I don’t leave my hotel room—literally, I don’t. I don’t talk to anybody about my personal life, and maybe that perpetuates it, too. But it’s really important to own what you want to own and keep it to yourself. That said, the only way for me not to have somebody know where I went the night before is if I didn’t go out at all. So that’s what I’m trading. It depends what mood I’m in. Some nights, I think, “You know what? I don’t care. I’m just going to do what I want to do.” Then the next day I think, “Ugh.Now everyone thinks I’m going out to get the attention.” But it’s like, no, I actually, for a second, thought that maybe I could be like a normal person.
HOPPER: I was looking at all the films you’ve done, and you’ve worked with some extraordinarily talented people: Patricia Clarkson—god, she’s a great actress—and Jodie Foster. Just really wonderful people. And your performances are very different. You started when you were nine years old. You wanted to act, right? It wasn’t like you were forced into it because your parents were in the industry?
STEWART: No. Not at all.
HOPPER: Because Dean Stockwell is one of my best friends, and he has horror stories about acting when he was a kid. But you wanted to do this, right?
STEWART: It’s a weird thing to expect a child that young to say what they want to do, like act. I’m not sure it was a natural inclination for me either, but it was something that I fell into. To be honest, I had fun at first. It was the first thing I ever thrived at. My parents are crew. They were both baffled that I wanted to act. But they support anything that me and my brothers want to do. It was something I thought was fun because I grew up on sets. And then a few years later, I grew up and acting became very different to me. I think I was about 13.
HOPPER: Did you study with anyone? Or did you just pick it up through association?
STEWART: No, I just walked into it.
HOPPER: You learned it there. That’s the best place to learn. I saw Panic Room again last night.
STEWART: Really? I haven’t seen that in so long. That was the second movie I ever made. Thank god Jodie Foster did that movie because I wasn’t thinking about anything on that set. I was literally just hanging out with her and being myself. I can’t think about watching that—it would kill me. It would be like watching a home movie.
HOPPER: But you’re so good in it. Did you go to school while you were working as a kid?
STEWART: I went to public school up until junior high. I know it’s a little late and I’m a little old, but I just finished high school—with honors. The other day I was doing a graduation scene on Eclipse, and I had just finished high school myself the week before, so I told the crew, “Hey, just so you know, I’m actually graduating right now, and I’m not going to have another ceremony.” So I took a mock picture with an extra. I literally asked the actor to come back and shake my hand and hand me the diploma while I was dressed in a cap and gown.
Fanning, and he knows her as well, so it was cool. I actually hadn’t seen him in a couple of years. So it was sort of a trip because I’m different and he’s not. You know what I’m saying?
This is an excerpt of the October cover story. To read the full Kristen Stewart interview pick up a copy of Interview.
www.interviewmagazine.com/film/kristen-stewart-1/
oh pls. don't try to copy me
no POSERS allowed here!!!
pls. don't take my photos with w/out my permission
no STEALING pls.
btw. don't just view. leave comments && notes too:)
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