A fan hits the Schnittke, &c.

Hi ho, grapple fans. Sorry to have been so silent here of late but it's been one of those silent-but-deadly times. I have two posts half-drafted and apparently stuck, one on Miranda July and the other just a sort of free-range mess: but spirits are pretty low here at Schloss Thompson and it's incredibly hard to believe that my opinions on anything are worth sharing. I just seem to go on and on, wah wah wah. I'm sick of the sound of my own typing. The moral of this story is that people with bipolar disorders make bad bloggers. Exactly half the time, at any rate... I'm afraid just at the moment I've got a touch of, oh, whatever. Sclerosis of the narcissism.

I will try and do a little Edinburgh preview some time this week as there's a few things worth making a fuss of. But obviously I can't tell you about them until I've booked my own tickets :)

For the moment, I have to admit my cultural life is largely being lived indoors and half under the duvet, but -- so that this post at least points a little bit outwards rather than simply sitting here completely inertly like a black dog beanie baby -- I may as well drop some art-kids off at the pool, I guess...

So:

I am mostly listening to: Daniel Hope's gorgeous recording of the Schnittke Sonata for Violin and Chamber Orchestra (quite obsessively I'm afraid); Rhodri Davies & Ko Ishikawa, Compositions for Harp and Sho; Flash Hawk Parlor Ensemble, Plastic Bag in the Tree; Pan Sonic, Katodivaihe. Also some great radio: Oliver Postgate's superlative Desert Island Discs; Paul Whitehouse reading Robin Cooper [a.k.a. Robert Popper] 's Timewaster Diaries -- with theme music by Moondog, astoundingly; for the eighteenth time, a daily dose of Paul Temple on BBC7.

I am mostly reading: well I've just finished Neil Bartlett's Skin Lane -- hokey and a bit self-conscious but quite, quite beautiful on the page. (That's my novel for this year.) And continuing to jump around between: Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (brilliant); Pierre Guyotat, Eden Eden Eden; Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology; Slavoj Žižek, Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle. Also the slow excruciating drip of news on Chris Langham, poor sod, and the hive of provocative activity over at Postcards from the Gods.

I am mostly watching: massive slabs of The West Wing, natch; Larry Sanders on YouTube (there's loads); both series of Look Around You; and, just now, on 4oD (which is a bastard application btw, don't get it if you don't have to), Kevin Elyot's Clapham Common -- brave, complex... A jarring mix of tonalities and registers, which I dare say was largely deliberate, but probably let down in the end by not being quite well enough written or sufficiently coherent to amass a really powerful body of usable evidence. But there were some good performances: Rupert Graves, Paul Nicholls, and above all, quite stunningly good, Luke Treadaway. And it did a lot to expose the trauma and desolation that lies at the heart of metropolitan gay existence for very many people -- though I suppose not much more than is evident every time Graham Norton opens his fucking mouth.

There, that's enough. Not least because actually I am mostly asleep or immobile and there's not so very much to say about that.

Two quick plugs and one, er, unplug.

Plug one: I will be doing my second and final London preview of Hippo World Guest Book this Thursday evening at the Etcetera Theatre in Camden. Details and online booking are here. Do please come along, if you can, and cheer me on my way. I promise I will be in far better shape there than I am right now. Doctor Theatre, don'tcha know.

Plug two: after eighteen years, five broken marriages and a triple bypass, The Salt Companion to Geraldine Monk, to which I contributed, has finally hit the streets. And I have to say I'm awfully pleased with the look and feel of it and I think most of the essays, if not quite all, are really excellent. Even if you've never read a word of Geraldine Monk's poetry (take the shame!), there's surely a lot of pleasure to be had in discovering how other people read it. An essay like Elizabeth James's, on the visual in Monk's work, is in and of itself a bracing adventure among bold and delightful ideas.

Unplug: partly because of the straits I find I'm once again in with my health, Lucy and I have decided to pull our pipeline show Henry & Elizabeth from the Edinburgh schedules. It was miserable to arrive at that point, doubly so when almost the next morning the Guardian picked it as one of its fifty 'hottest' Fringe shows. But also weirdly reassuring; the world continues to turn. We'll get back to making the piece when we're both back up to something resembling par, probably for a London launch this year next year sometime never, and of course I'll keep y'all posted on developments.

OK, well, thanks for bearing with me. Soon, I hope: more better lovely. (...Ahhh, Nick Hallam, where are you...?)

Hard times in the smoked glass aquarium

Well, so much for the regime of almost-daily updates. Course I hadn't considered the Z-factor, the frequent bouts of indolence by which I am mysteriously and often beset. If there was ever any possibility of me posting most days, I'd have been doing it long before now. Heigh ho, tant pis, pass the alfalfa jerky.

Actually you'll note -- if you're a frequent flyer, that is, a member as it were of Thompson's Advantage Gold -- that I've being doing a little springcleaning, it being merely July and, in fact, only February in meteorology months. (It's like dog years for global warming, you'll get the hang of it.) The links list is finally updated, with a separate blogroll. Enjoy, my pretties! Don't waste your time on my mechanically reclaimed aperçus when you could be out keying cars with the very much cooler kids to the right of your picture.

Even more exciting, not least in that it'll save me eight quid a month, is that I've finally chucked in the towel with the Gevorts Box radio stream over at Live365.com, partly because they've started running adverts every twelve minutes unless you pay them not to. Also because no one was listening. Instead, please enjoy the snazzy little Gevorts Box widget over there at the top of the links heap. It has in it, and I guess will usually have, about ten mp3s which you can play while you're reading -- or, for your added comfort and safety, you can download the files to your own hard drive and make hay / playlists / whoopee. For that reason I'm going to refresh the content fairly regularly, but even so, if you're here because you want me to take down an mp3 you don't like me making available (and you own copyright in the track -- this doesn't work if you just don't like the song) then please email me or leave me a comment here and I'll comply like the weak-kneed bitch that I am.

The first ten tracks in the Gevorts-O-Tron are almost all from recent or brand new or even still-officially-imminent releases that I've been very particularly enjoying these past few days, with a couple from a little while back that I still can't shake. The track names get a bit squished in the widget (as do we all from time to time, Lord knows) so here's the full skinny:


1. Astrobrite, 'Dragonfly Pinkfuzz'
-- from whitenoisesuperstar (Vinyl Junkie)

2. Black Moth Super Rainbow, 'Drippy Eye'
-- from Dandelion Gum (Graveface)

3. Seabear, 'Good Morning Scarecrow'
-- from The Ghost That Carried Us Away (Morr Music)

4. The Go! Team, 'Grip Like A Vice'
-- new single (Memphis Industries)

5. Dan Deacon, 'Okie Dokie'
-- from Spiderman of the Rings (Carpark Records)

6. Opsvik & Jennings, 'Silverlake'
-- from Commuter Anthems (Rune Grammofon)

7. Tetui Akiyama & Jozef van Wissem, 'The Road of Excess Leads to the Palace of Wisdom'
-- from Hymn for a Fallen Angel (Incunabulum)

8. Loney, Dear, 'The Warm Dark Comforting Night'
-- from The Year of River Fontana (self-issued CD-R)

9. Wobbly, 'Vingt Regards'
-- from Regards (Alku Records)

10. Throw Me The Statue, 'Young Sensualists'
-- from Moonbeams (Baskerville Hill)


Expect to see most of the above albums accounted for in this year's Furtive 50 (if I can be bothered to go through all that again).

If that's not enough ear-candy for yr voracious lug'oles, you can find here an interview with -- well, not to put too fine a point on it -- me. That nice young Andrew Haydon invited me to plonk myself in a chair opposite and blah on about theatre for 46 mins: and that's just what I did. Up to you really: if I come across like a pontificating twit in these pages, I don't suppose there's much to be gained from the experience of hearing the same order of stuff given open and apparent vox. But it was a pleasure for me, at least, to have a serious conversation in a relatively serious time-frame; doubly so because Andrew listens as sensitively as he writes, which made it all pretty easy. (He has a new blog too, linked at right, though it's early days so be nice; also, be careful where you click, there aren't many links yet and one of them will take you straight to an interview with Roger Scruton. Cover your children's eyes.)

The rest of the archive at TheatreVoice is worth a trawl, too: over the past few years it has unostentatiously amassed a pretty remarkable cellar-full of recordings. Most of the expected headliners are present and correct, Peter Brook, Mark Rylance, Simon McBurney, David Eldridge, Martin Crimp, Anthony Neilson, Tom Morris, Ken Campbell, Howard Barker, and so on (mostly, slightly annoyingly, filed under 'I' for 'interview', which is only one mark up from the way the late tacitly-lamented allofmp3.com download site filed band-names starting with 'The' under 'T'...). But range a little wider and there are some more unexpected pleasures too: Adriano Shaplin, Hayley Carmichael, Tim Crouch, Lemn Sissay, some of Shunt; a really interesting discussion on Forced Entertainment, with Lyn Gardner and Andy Lavender among the contributors; most gripping of all, a white-knuckle interview with the radiantly unique Blanche Marvin. (If you've never met Blanche... well, go listen.)

More words by me, coming out of a totally different mouth, over at Meshworks (the Miami University Archive of Writing in Performance -- yup, it's the world's most inscrutable acronym) -- viz., a clip of the heroic Peter Manson reading my poem "Virtual drive capacity in the problem bird", as the Chicago Review British Poets tour passed a-jangling through Miami University on the yellowbrick road of whatever. As I couldn't in the end make the tour, Peter read a piece of mine at each of the gigs they did, and if this reading (of a pretty wacked-out poem) is anything to go by I have surely made some new friends without knowing it. -- Oh, do trawl the rest of the menu while you're there. Keston Sutherland's 'Hot White Andy' is, just, y'know, something else entirely.

Enough of that. Except, not much else. It's been a sort of extravagantly miserable week, as is so often the case in those odd periods between super-busy spells. I should have been scripting Henry & Elizabeth, the new Edinburgh home performance, this week; but I got nuthin. Tiredness and rain and a sudden slump of anxiety about the near future and whether I'm ever going to work again (at the moment the dirt says hot but the diary says not) and where the rent's going to come from and yadda yadda yadda, all meeting in the middle and expressing itself as high-gravity inertia. I think I may have finally watched all of YouTube this week. And I stupidly re-installed the tv card in my computer so that when my eyes began to bleed from watching the hand-holding otters I could have a complete change of experience by watching Deal Or No Deal instead. And then there was the day I remembered I had a ZX Spectrum emulator on my PC and lost several hours to rediscovering the barely-sensible pleasures of 'Daley Thompson's Decathlon' and DK'Tronics' 'Dictator'. ("Press any key to become the dictator of the Ritimban Republic.") Which whole miserable sodding farrago was prompted by watching this engrossing, nostalgia-packed1984 BBC documentary about the competition between two of the great Spectrum software houses, Imagine and Ocean. Which was in turn a consequence of learning from the Popbitch board one morning that Barry Bulsara was at one time a programmer for Imagine. (Sounds to me like it might well rank up there with Bob Holness having played the sax solo on 'Baker Street': but, as Tim Miller says, credulity is much more fun.) I'm going to stop recounting the chain of suggestion at that point, as I realize I'm basically just copying out the whole internet in longhand. Anyway, kids, that's my week right there. Plus a lot of Frosties and an awful lot of chocolate chip cookies. And extraordinary, gross, Heliogabaline amounts of porn. No wonder I'm sleepy.

And then you know it all comes out while I'm sleeping. I've had this curious run of dreams about minor celebrities. (Yes, yes, I know; in fact one of the characters in Speed Death of the Radiant Child says exactly what you're thinking: "Other people's dreams are so boring and... shit." But I'm just recounting these for safe-keeping. Feel free to go out and do something less boring instead.) Last night I became -- I think it's safe to assume -- the only person ever to dream at the same moment about the folksinger June Tabor and the popular entertainer Brian Conley. I dreamt my late mother and I were on tour in South Wales with the latter, and running late for a meeting with the former, and the bus-ride was bumpy and slow and my mum was suffering from travel sickness. As you would be, I'm sure.

We'll not spend too long on the dream where Dennis Cooper (dressed like William S. Burroughs and physically resembling the dreary Australian poet Peter Porter) shot Loudon Wainwright III, causing his blood and guts to be action-painted all over his candy-pink-striped hotel suite. I was there to meet Wainwright, who was cheerily packing a suitcase despite being, you know, dead. We'll also gloss over my dreamtime encounter with Cannon & Ball, who were teaching me to tango; we won't even go there, despite the arresting moment when Tommy C. put his hands under Bobby B.'s arms to lift him up, and upon executing the lift caused BB's torso to come cleanly away from his waist, which remained, with his legs, just where they were. That happens all the time, the hallucinated lateral bisection of Bobby Ball, we won't speak of it.

But pardon me this one, will you, because it has a tiny section missing, and if any of my kind readers can supply the requisite narrative junction I should be very profoundly grateful. The scenario was that I was having lunch, outside, at a picnic table, with an old boyfriend (whom I am secretly still kind of in love with, despite not seeing him often these days and it all being a very long time ago and etc etc: but there you are, just in case it's not completely beside the point). He was being sort of a dick and I was increasingly frustrated that he wouldn't listen to what I was saying about us being together again. I had a slight sensation of there being other people there, not at the table with us but close by, because I certainly knew there was a reaction of disapproval when I took out my anger on my iPod, which was lying on the table, by beating it and smashing it repeatedly with my fist over and over again until it was pretty much destroyed. And then comes the blank few seconds that I no longer recall. And then when we rejoin the action, the DJ and broadcaster Paul Gambaccini is lying on the grass, and I am holding him by his right leg and dragging him round and round the picnic table, and he is protesting, and I know everyone thinks I should stop, but I'm too angry. I'm just too angry. *

Of course now I relate it here in black-and-white and the cold light of, er, three in the morning, it's so obviously about my deep dismay at the mendacious narratives of true and eternal love of which pop music is the carrier, the witless fucking mule, that there's literally no point continuing.

Why don't I dream about monkeys any more? I never used to dream of famous people as a kid. I dreamt about monkeys. Little tiny monkeys running over the ceiling. A giant monkey that squatted outside Spar in the village precinct, mutilating itself with a dagger: and every cut that it inflicted on itself appeared simultaneously, stigmatically, on my body. And a vast space-monkey made completely out of poo, that hung like a constellation in the sky and would pull lumps of poo off its own body and throw them at me through my bedroom window. Perhaps tonight I could have a night off from the C-list and dream of shit-slinging monkeys.

Though, now I come to think of it, I did have a dream when I was pretty young in which I gave Windsor Davies some broken glass to eat and blood came out of his mouth. And another one in which a bomb went off inside Bill Owen from Last of the Summer Wine.

O, well, Mister Sandman, you decide. Will it be (a) old boyfriend yet again, or (b) scary monkeys, or (c) Windsor Davies bleeding from the mouth? ...Or maybe I'll just eat another couple of bowls of Frosties and stay awake until I die.

...Yeah, I'll write about something else next time, I promise. In the meantime: imagine, if you will, everything foregoing in this post, gathered together, put in a blender, blitzed for fifteen seconds, poured (I imagine it's thick and puce, somehow) into a tall glass, and garnished with extravagant candyfloss and a tiny disgruntled sardine. Take a sip. Go on. Just a sip. What does it remind you of?

That's right. That's where all this has been leading, all along. Ladies and gentlemen: the late, the beautiful, George Melly.





Night night, all.


* vide "the ever irascible Chris Goode" -- David Eldridge

‘The heat of affiliation’: A conversation with Tim Miller

Tim Miller is one of a small number of key figures who have shaped the terms and conditions of contemporary performance art: not only in the LA and New York scenes in which he has played a crucial role for a quarter-century and more, but right across the United States, as well as in the UK – where he has frequently performed (making devoted friends wherever he goes) – and further afield.

Tim Miller

Early success led quickly to large-scale projects such as the seminal Postwar (1981) and an ultimately dead-end quest for the great American gesamtkunstwerk: a journey that nonetheless never took him altogether away from his roots in smallscale performance, his dedication to which had already led him to co-found two of the US’s most significant performance venues, P.S.122 in New York and, later, Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica. The mid-80’s onwards saw Miller focused on (in every sense) stripped-down performance, almost always solo: work pulsing with vivid personal narrative and an angry, joyous vision of artistic practice meeting and celebrating civic imperatives, committedly but not exclusively trained on the equable living of queer lives in times of crisis.

The turn of the decade brought a new and salient challenge in the form of a bitter and galvanising battle over the then chair of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) John E. Frohnmayer’s veto of grants awarded, following a peer-review process, to Miller and three other artists – collectively, thereafter, the ‘NEA Four’. The blatant political interference of the Bush (Sr.!) White House in the business of the independent NEA, in violation of the First Amendment rights of the affected artists, led to Miller and his colleagues successfully suing the federal government: though a more recent Supreme Court ruling has once again shifted the ground by enshrining the right of the NEA to take ‘decency’ standards into account – though it anyway no longer makes grants to individual artists. For Miller the fight was both vitally necessary and an unwelcome distraction from the creative business of making work and engaging in more grassroots activism.

A series of acclaimed performances – funny, energetic, strenuously candid – continued through the 90’s and into the brave new millennium: the best known of which, perhaps, is My Queer Body (1992), a daring and dazzling confection which, astonishingly, emerged out of the vortex of the punishingly long NEA throwdown to show Miller at his most combative and charismatic: he starts as a sperm, “swimming upstream”, and ends, typically (and pointedly) sweaty and exhausted, declaiming sexed-up visionary queer poetry while Ravel’s Bolero rages tumultuously about him. A series of more recent works, starting with Glory Box in 1999, deal with Miller’s on-going struggle simply to be with the man he loves, the Australian writer Alistair McCartney, in the face of the US federal government’s refusal to extend to gay couples the immigration rights that pertain to binational heterosexual couples.

The almost impossibly romantic story of the beginning of Miller’s relationship with McCartney – as well as steadfast reference to the obstacles still before them – is just one of the threads that Miller pulls together, with his usual passion, guileless humour and lyrical bravura, in his new piece 1001 Beds, which played a couple of weekends recently at the Drill Hall. A recently published book of the same name, which comprises scripts, essays, documents and images from the whole span of Miller’s career, contains the essay in which he first explores the symbol of the ‘1001 beds’ that he estimates he has slept in whilst on the road over the past 25 years, a striking (and characteristically erotic) metaphor for the cumulative work of travel, of performance, of making new connections, that has been his mission, often through dark and dangerous times.

The new book, 1001 Beds

So that’s ‘Miller’, the capital-A artist, and (to my mind) the great poet of the body-in-theatre. But when we met in London a couple of weeks ago, the day before I saw 1001 Beds, I could have sworn I was basically hanging out with Tim. Just Tim: intellectually promiscuous, butterfly-minded sometimes, gossipy, gracious, and still, 1001 beds down the line, as cute as all get-out. (Though it has to be said, he had in his twenties an ethereal beauty that makes the documentation of his early performances look kind of fictional.)

I didn’t have very much in mind by way of prepared questions for Tim because I figured we’d probably just chat about stuff – as, indeed, we did. I’d asked his friend from way back, the writer and blog-artist Dennis Cooper, if there was anything he wanted me to ask Tim on his behalf, and he suggested I bring up the Russian Futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, fondly recalling (as does Tony Kushner in his effervescently lovely foreword to Miller’s anthology Body Blows) Tim’s very early piece Paint Yrself Red / Me & Mayakovsky. So I had that up my sleeve.

I arrived at Tim’s temporary Bloomsbury apartment to find him in good spirits, though a little exercised by the loss of wireless internet access in the block. Fresh from an appearance at Fierce! in Birmingham, he had been back in London at least long enough to buy provisions (including, unexpectedly, own-brand instant coffee) from Tesco’s, and before we got down to the oh-so-highbrow conversation we nattered inconsequentially for a few minutes while Tim demolished a good-looking plate of chicken, hummous and tomatoes. It was the unexpected revelation that, at the start of his career, Tim had had a (live) chicken as a collaborating partner for a while, that had me reaching for my voice recorder...




TM: ...You know I’ve got chicken all over my face.

CG: That’s a great opening line.

[Mr Miller leaves the room momentarily. Returning:]

TM: ...‘Tim Miller wiped the Tesco grease from his face’...

CG: So tell me about the [collaborating] chicken.

TM: I was still vegetarian, though barely, at the time – I think that’s partly why I got it... I was nineteen and I was living in lower Manhattan, just below Soho, a little canal where Chinatown starts. And, you know, they kill the chicken for you right in the window and stuff. So I went and bought one, and said ‘I’ll kill it at home’. Because I wanted to save the chicken. It was probably the usual studied American impotent sentimentality of, like, save one chicken...

But then I kind of lived with it for quite a long time, maybe seven or eight months. I had a beautifully huge, like, parrot cage -- but then I would let it out and it would walk around the house. It was kind of quite... e-for-eccentric queerboy freak. And I used it in a lot of my early performances. And then eventually I liberated it to a farm upstate. But within forty-eight hours a dog ate it.

CG: [laughs]

TM: So there’s the Zen slap. Like, ‘you think you can save a chicken! Ha ha ha!’

CG: But I think this is the fate that awaits retired performance artists, isn’t it? You get sent away and a dog eats you.

TM: Yeah, upstate New York, there’s some farm you get sent to. ...So that was the chicken. That really makes me... The image of the chicken in the cage on my fire escape is so vivid.

CG: I guess you got billing over the chicken.

TM: Well we were Los Dos Chickens, since I was certainly nineteen looking about twelve at the time... You know I think there’s a Tim & Chicken poster or something. It’s early on. I think – since Dennis [Cooper] cued you to ask about Mayakovsky – I think the chicken showed up in some of my Mayakovsky performances. I’m always curious what these core embarkation points are for what anybody gets obsessed with, and that’s certainly an ongoing one, Mayakovsky: a rather doomed example of... you know, engaged artist, artist in the world, artist in society, artist trying to change things...

At the time – when I was nineteen, twenty - I used to spraypaint all over the East Village, in Cyrillic letters, a line from the Mayakovsky poem ‘A Cloud in Trousers’: “I shake the world with the might of my voice, / and walk -– handsome, / twentytwoyearold.” Such a great, youthful originator... And of course you know he had a whole avant garde career before the Revolution, as a young man. He’s not much thought of any more, but still quite interesting, and certain core people – like Dennis, who was more in his poet mode then - would certainly have had some relationship to Mayakovsky.

CG: But how, at what point, did you encounter Mayakovsky? How does that happen? I mean, you’re growing up in Whittier – which I know slightly and am fond of...

TM: Oh, you’ve been there, that’s right.

CG: For about a month.

TM: You were in love. Do you need some more water?

CG: I might do if we’re going to talk about that.

TM: You might need a mint julep... But you actually went out there.

CG: I lived the Whittier high life. Yeah.

TM: God, that’s rare, that I ever... Alistair’s never been to Whittier. It’s on our list. Uptown Whittier’s kind of cute-ish.

CG: I loved it.

TM: Those were kind of my childhood... That’s where I’d go to the movies... I grew up a bit more suburban. Imagine that. Well, Whittier’s a little bit of an old late-nineteenth century town; I grew up in East Whittier, which is pure Fifties suburbs. But I’d ride my bike up there.

CG: But I think it’s really fascinating how you get from Whittier to New York and Merce Cunningham and... The way you tell it, it’s like that’s just what naturally happens to people who are growing up queer in Whittier. Like, that’s how it goes. But how does that happen? What were the models that you had when you were growing up that said, there’s this whole other life out there...

TM: Of course when we talk within life narrative, it’s as edited and concocted as anything, and my dog-and-pony show routine on it is kind of an oversimplification, but... What most inspired me was feminist performance artists, seeing all these women at the Women’s Building in LA in the late seventies when I would have been in high school seeing things... Taking the bus to downtown LA, which was sort of the centre of lesbian performance art on the planet, probably, it was a big big feminist arts centre. And it was very thrilling to me. As feminism still is, even now, you know.

CG: Sure, yeah.

TM: I meet these little nineteen year old gay boys who are women’s studies majors... Let’s face it, the rigour of the discourse and the politics is still more articulated than gay men’s. I mean how can you not relate to some general terrain of Marxist-feminist analysis? So that was kind of important.

And my horrible feeble punk rock band.

CG: Oh really?

TM: Yeah, with my first boyfriend. I write about it a little bit in Shirts and Skin. His horrible Orange County punk rock band that I started doing stuff with.

But probably the main thing, like for lots of us, is just that queerness demands motion, affiliation... You know, how do I read myself with [regard to] the avant garde, the outsider, the artist-rebel? All of which are of course sexy, erotic archetypes as well. So all that mixes in pretty juicily. And would I have been so programmed to move to New York without Allen Ginsberg, and Beat stuff? I mean I was already living in the second biggest city in the country. But LA, especially then, was quite a different story than New York, and still is, as a place for an artist to seek their fortune. Vast numbers of people seek their fortune in LA for all kinds of other reasons, whether it’s millions of undocumented immigrants, or film and tv stuff...

I think it’s just finding that heat of affiliation and connection and, out of feeling isolated, trying to understand: I’m connected to, like, queer people from essentialist history, and from the primordial... you know, Gilgamesh... And I’m such a history head. I like context.

So as an American kid, as an artist, New York sort of ends up calling you at some point. Which includes being called to Mayakovsky. If you’re interested in politics, Mayakovsky and his pals are sort of the progenitors, in Russian Futurism and Italian Futurism, the origins of live art and performance.

In a way it’s kind of obvious, I had the RoseLee Goldberg Performance [Art from Futurism to the Present] book... But then also wanting to see how that connected to political praxis, which is something I’m always interested in. Knowing the rocky history of art and praxis.

In the same way that we look at Dennis’s blog, and the quite remarkable community that’s generated there... Not that we know these people, but assuming one believes anyone’s profile... Which I just generally do, because credulity is more fun than scepticism. Don’t you think? I’ve never said that before, but I’m sure I will again...

I mean Dennis is this major queercore person for anyone who reads English, and so people want that linkage. You know, it would have been amazing, when I was a kid, if I’d been able to find spaces like that, on the internet. I’m sure I would have been very drawn to it. And now you can.

There was a big New York Times article last week: apparently now there’s even this huge pressure on extremely major rock’n’roll acts to really tend their MySpace community, to go and put in a good hour a day – and not just have your assistants do it. And I find that kind of fascinating: that suddenly now even extremely famous people, not just avant garde cult fringe folk, are also having to be disciplined to this kind of community. It’s interesting.

CG: I’m certainly very interested in the strength and the usability of those communities and what the value is and harnessability of that [online] community feeling in real-world spaces. I have this kind of question in my head about what virtual spaces can be used to do in the real world. And the reason I wanted to ask you about this was: obviously you were instrumental in setting up two really important [real-world] spaces, P.S.122 and Highways, and I’m wondering about the importance of having a space that you can identify with and relate to and make stuff happen in, the importance of that to all kinds of intersecting communities, and whether actually there’s any kind of displacement of that real-world activity by virtual activity. I feel very uneasy about that. I’m interested in the opportunities of those virtual spaces but I wonder how much they make harnessable, energised things happen in real spaces.

TM: Right. Well, I like to imagine that they’re not oppositional. Though there’s ways they are too. If we assume that the vast majority of virtual space is erotic discourse, and certainly some good chunk of that ends up in actual real-time hook-ups, if that’s our formula, that actually means there’s quite a dynamic and... um... fluid relationship --

[Laughter.]

-- between them. I have my blog, because I know I should, and I post lamely every month, almost, which means like, why bother? But someone then visits and they usually email me and then I have an interesting conversation. And, you know, those people end up at shows all the time. Which is not so much significant in terms of the crassest motor of all this activity, which is ‘Let’s make money and sell CDs and make Pirates of the Caribbean make more money than anything ever has in history.’

But abundance is a bit bogus. We have limited time, limited attention; the compelling fever of being online is so overwhelming and junkyish. And I’ve got it! So you have to imagine that it does on some level keep people from exploring... If you’re, like, beating off to XTube all day long, you know, you’re done. You’re maybe not going to go fall in erotic poetic love with someone. Sexual energy is certainly finite.

Happily we don’t have to choose: the choice is beyond us. It seems mostly a kind of interesting synergy. As all live performers do, I privilege the shared real-time moment. Because frankly, as we may all see in our lifetimes, this may all stop working. I mean, I think the likelihood of that is high. That twenty years from now, we’ll be: ‘Remember when we had electricity?’ It would take a very small set of events to make the internet no longer exist, and suddenly, you know, actually, it’s the ceramics people who are really going to...

CG: [laughs]

TM: Well, our oldest stuff is pottery. It’s stuff that lasts. Books don’t last. So that’s kind of an interesting thought. I think within that it’s really important to keep our essentialist digital human duty, which is to connect, real-time, finger to finger – where 'digital' comes from. I teach performance a lot and we hold hands so much. The other digital time, where our hands and our skin touch each other, our fingers entwine...

Right now for me though it just feels really rich. And it’s like, you know, after being in a rehearsal with twenty nineteen-year-olds at Illinois State University or something, I go home and think about what we did and send them some questions, some provocations, and some of them read it that night and some of them read it the next morning and some of them don’t read it, and it changes the work the next day when we come in.

Unfortunately the people putting the most thinking into this, [are doing it] for crass marketing reasons. It’s ‘How does this get people to give us their credit card number? Or make them buy something? Or show up the first weekend of a blockbuster movie?’ So that’s the sort of dispiriting thing. But then it will also make people go to some length and some expense to scurry up to Glasgow, maybe a city they’ve never been before, to see Dennis’s Kindertotenlieder piece, and that’s kind of amazing and numinous. ...A word we use in California a lot.

[Laughter.]

CG: World centre of numinousness.

TM: But I think it’s a good question. Especially to imagine, what are we going to do without it? Because I presume if nothing else the technology will change so dramatically that this will seem like the wireless or something. You know, the old wireless. Or those wax things, you know, the early phonographs.

CG: Going back to early stuff... I wanted to ask about your transition through the early 80’s pieces, the bigger pieces... Maybe you can talk me through one of the earlier pieces, like Postwar?

TM: Yeah. Which was also the first piece I ever did here. I did it all over England long before I was touring in America, in 1982.

from Postwar (1981)

CG: This was kind of a breakthrough piece in terms of the number of people who were paying attention to what you were doing.

TM: Yeah, it came out of a whole period of about a year of doing a new solo every Monday at P.S.122, which kind of coalesced around this... That was a very strong piece, and really very appropriate for 1982, you know, to be a 23-year-old performer, sort of the youngest performer getting attention in New York at the time. I just saw Michael Clark’s company in Birmingham, who I met that year: the two young things of the Dance Umbrella festival in London, going [cat-like hiss] at each other. Especially because I got the BBC tv show. I don’t remember what it was called. ...Omnibus?

CG: Oh, OK.

TM: They did, like, twenty minutes on me, and Michael was cursing me. We had a chat on Saturday, I hadn’t seen him in years...

But anyway, it coalesced into this very strong piece about growing up and hamburgers and Reagan and this huge early-80’s nuclear panic moment, especially ‘82. Because Reagan and Thatcher – the special relationship which always wreaks havoc on earth, as it is with Blair and Bush now – were remilitarizing Europe. So to be doing work around that general anxiety of childhood and...

There’s no queer stuff in that piece, but I’d already done a piece earlier that year with my boyfriend at that time, John Bernd, called Live Boys, that was a big successful thing in the New York demimonde, you know, lots of press and stuff. But this [Postwar] was the other thing that I was really interested in exploring: my place in history, a lot of counting back and figuring out where I fit, and the current situation as I saw it then. Lawnmowers and hamburgers. A very Californian piece. And apocalyptic. And it connected strongly both in the States and here, I did 25 cities in the UK, all over the place. I’d never been anywhere in America, and suddenly I was performing at Crewe & Alsager College!

But also, amid the blood-drinking New York career-obsessed artists’ community, it was really this desire for... You know, this huge 80’s presumption, to make the big spectacle, the huge overarching masterpiece, and Postwar was quite a good piece in that general Wagnerian... You know, music, and heavy media, and five performers. ...But mostly me!

And then the next piece, The Cost Of Living, was even more a multimedia spectacle, and since I was having sex with Robert Wilson’s husband at the time, about a block from here at the Kenilworth Hotel... Is that still here? Jim Self, who is a wonderful choreographer and still my close friend. I know he wouldn’t mind. I’m encouraging him to write the tell-all book because he was with Merce for years and was Jasper Johns’s lover for six or seven years as a young man –

CG: Wow!

TM: - and then Robert Wilson’s husband during that crucial eighties period. So he’s worked the waterfront.

CG: There’s the lineage! Yeah.

TM: Anyway, you know, this huge desire for spectacle. And it was presented at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Next Wave festival, which is the gig to this day, the big mainstream-experimental gig. Had a huge failure there. So, you know, being washed up at twenty-five... Which is hard but good.

And really what happened was, you know, AIDS. And people were dropping like flies. And that challenged anyone who was in New York, especially, as the epicentre. And it really challenged my work: to get simpler, more direct -- and queered it hugely.

But then, I’d always been a writer, since I was a little boy, so it was also the reclaiming of my writer’s self. ‘OK, I’m not going to have the money to do these big spectacles any more, since everyone thinks they were so awful...

CG: [laughs]

TM: ...but people seem to think I’m a good performer and a good enough writer. And I’ve got a story to tell.’ And I had a community to be engaged with as a gay person at this huge moment of crisis. So that was really the disciplining developmental kind of thing, I think. You know, how we behave when the world is falling apart – as it sort of always is, but there’s moments you’re more aware of it because it’s happening to your ex-boyfriend, to your neighbour, to your best friend you kissed when you were twenty-two... And that really coalesced it back down to this –- in a way highly theatrical, writerly... –- well, you know the work. I mean our work is very similar – your solo work, you know – humour, writerly, love of the language and specificity...

You know, you have something you want to get out. It’s an essay, really. I’m ultimately an essayist, my performances are really essays, they’re essays about something I want to get at. Maybe every couple of months I open up Montaigne and check one out, and they’re like performance texts! Completely quirky, odd perspective, obsessional... That has a real sustaining pleasure, and people connect with it. And the fun of humour.

And I do like performing. I read through the first half of the piece [1001 Beds] right here, since I have a big bed with a white duvet [as a set] at the Drill Hall, it’s pretty much the same set up [as in the apartment]. And as I was doing it I was thinking – this ain’t bad... [laughs] This’ll be fun tomorrow.

Also, the honing down -- the reality that there’s very little support for the arts in America.

CG: Sure, I was going to ask you about that: how does your work happen at all now? Is it entirely out of international connections?

TM: Well, I make most of my living in the States, by far. I mostly work in America.

CG: But in terms of the funding of it?

TM: It’s through gigs. I perform a lot. I mean our situation... – I have friends here who are hooked up to large pots of Arts Council England cash - obviously the vast majority are not, but there are certain people I know who are friends of mine and when I hear how much money... They probably get more money than, like, the American Ballet Theatre gets.

But what we do have there is the university infrastructure, which is quite rich. There are literally thousands of colleges and universities in the States and they’ve become the alternative arts space, at least for a lot of people. They’re the main presenters. And, you know, I can’t imagine anything more purposeful right now than connecting with 18-22 year olds. They need to rule the world as soon as possible, or at least rule America. Unless they become real sick fucks, once the current nineteen-year-olds are in power, America will be so much less fucked up.

At Prairie Lights Books, Iowa City, IA, 2006

photo: Donald Baxter

So going into very very conservative state colleges in South Carolina or something, as I do, this is a huge opportunity to connect with people. And I really like young audiences, they’re really fun. And then the town people come too, and gay people get on their Rainbow Network hotline, so they know I’m around... And the press usually covers it. So I make money through the gigs; but, you know, they’re subsidised by college endowment or by the state of Illinois or Louisiana or whatever, there’ll be some freaky faculty member who’s making sure they get some money to bring me in. So that’s how I keep it together.

But I’m also fairly well known in my field, in the States especially –

CG: Sure, of course.

TM: - and I have several books out and people study my work. And I also have taught in universities off and on since I was twenty-two years old. So my work fits in that setting. Not all artists do. I was just up with Ron Athey in Birmingham and I know there are few [American] universities that might actually think they could pull Ron off without a major mishap. [sic] Or Annie Sprinkle, who’s so amazing. You know, you can talk about ass-fucking and -eating and take your clothes off almost anywhere, as I do, but you can’t really... There’s a whole bunch of things you just wouldn’t be able to do in universities, almost all of them, without someone getting sued. So every artist’s situation is different. But many of the colleges people go to, I’m sort of edgy enough but not so edgy that anyone’s going to lose their job. You know, I’m also a nice white boy and well-spoken and polite and behave myself for the most part. At least with the students. [laughs]

But if they weren’t there I’d be in a real pickle. And you know, you don’t come to England to make money. But I don’t have many needs financially, and I’d rather make my money by doing the stuff, performing and connecting and teaching...

CG: Obviously, as I’m sure you know, there’s a lot of distress here at the moment about the way that ACE funding for Grants for the Arts has been cut quite substantially, and this is really why I was interested to ask the question about how your work gets supported. I feel very conflicted about the situation in a way, because obviously it’s going to stop work being made that ought to be made, it’s going to stop people in the early stages of their careers who would be making bigger and more prominent work in fifteen years time, there’s that movement that that directly affects. But at the same time, it’s kind of... I’ve never been directly funded by the Arts Council –

TM: Just through venues.

CG: Right, yeah, a lot of indirect support, but nothing that I’ve asked for money for has ever been accepted. And one of the things that’s come out of that is the thread of performance that I do in people’s houses, which I’ve lived off when times are tough, taking work into people’s houses. So I suppose it’s this thing of feeling a little bit that maybe... you just do it. You find a way of doing it, and you do it. Which is a very difficult thing to say in a climate where people are struggling but also – I suppose what I’m trying to ask you is, whether you feel in any way constrained as an artist. You know, thinking about the scale you were working on twenty, twenty-five years ago, whether there’s anything still in you that’s, you know, ‘I wish I could still do that kind of widescreen –

TM: [mock sobs]

CG: - stuff now’... Or I guess it was quite a burning experience...?

TM: Yeah, it was so awful.

CG: So maybe that isn’t an appetite that’s ever come back.

TM: Well...

[Longish pause.]

I mean my first thought is, you know, that I’m doing pretty much what I want to do. But there’s probably some part of that kind of burning ambition for larger... What is that ‘larger’? Audiences, more money, more resources...

I think -- as you said -- though, I was so burned by that experience, it was so awful, it was the only time I didn’t like being an artist, it was the only work I made that I think was pretty terrible. So I feel like I probably got it out of my system, that desire for a larger...

And I live in Los Angeles, my friends are infinitely richer than me, I know the people who produce the interesting queer movies and tv shows and have that access to a large media, and I don’t really envy them. They have to go to all these meetings; I get to sit and chat with you. I feel quite privileged in that way, that I get to have very high levels of engagement and vast amounts of control. Also modest scale, but scale is amplified out through books and newspapers and people write about my work a lot, and all that [reaches] thousands and thousands more people than will see me perform. So that amplifies that out more.

Budgetary constraints take their toll on Mr Miller's wardrobe

I always question: ‘Am I really repressing something?’ A very American narrative! -- but actually a good question to ask yourself. But I don’t really think so. I feel so lucky to be alive, first of all -- you know, I could have been dead at 22, I so easily could have... I was in New York having vast amounts of sex at the age of nineteen, at exactly the peak moment, early 80’s, that last year when lots of people probably did get infected...

So I admit I take after my mom: ‘Whaddya have to complain about?’

[Laughter.]

Books are really important to me. I mean I’ve had dinner with Susan Sarandon, and she’s very nice, but to meet Pat Barker... that’s a stalk, that’s a celebrity. [panting] She’s so great, I love her. And again, the same stuff that really interests me: history, war, artists’ private lives: her themes are permanently interesting to me. So if I didn’t have books out, you know, that would upset me.

Very old media. But also one of my books, called Body Blows, you’ve seen it I’m sure... This Muslim guy in South Africa gets the book, and pulls sections, and has performed my material all over South Africa, where I’ve never been, I may never go. So I’m delighted that the book took me there, and he used the book to make something happen.

It could change, but I’m also kind of lazy. I like hanging out with Alistair, and, when I’m home, going to the beach. Writing in the morning. And I get an ample amount of time to write and perform. So the scale feels pretty agreeable. But that could also be me here in my forties accepting this is how it is. But it feels so rich and challenging within that.

My friend Rob Hooper, he’s obsessed with Marc Almond, he said: ‘You must read Marc Almond.’ It’s like a three-year-old book but I’m reading it. He’s been quite forthright... He’s, like, two years older than me. And also someone who was a fringy popstar: had a hit, a big hit in the States, more of a career here... and I’m finding the book quite interesting, just about that... Who are we, what do we do, what’s your life..., how much attention does any human being need?

CG: [laughs] Yeah.

TM: You know, what’s enough? I think I probably get enough. I feel quite content with that, which may be deep bourgeois programming of, like, enoughness... But I’m glad it is because it actually makes the day more fun.

I think I feel lucky to just enjoy things, and they can be quite modest. And that eludes people. And I think that’s sort of there in my work too. You know I’m very fortunate in that way, I’ve been looked after pretty well by media and press and stuff. And enough opportunities. And, like you say, I was getting funding when I needed it, as a young artist. And now I can make it work another way.

But in 1982 when I was making pieces where someone in a Ronald Reagan mask is beating the shit out of me, you know, without those NEA grants -- and I was working full time as a carpenter then -- I would not have been able to shift over, and that’s harder now for a young artist in the States. There’s literally no grants from the federal government anymore.

CG: You just reminded me of something, talking about media attention. The last time I saw you at work actually was about three weeks ago. I was in an apartment not unlike this in Plymouth and it was the middle of the night and I was watching cable...

TM: Mmm...

CG: Larry Sanders. [An episode in which Tim is brought onto the fictional ‘Larry Sanders Show’ as part of a drive to book more cutting-edge guests. Tim performs the notorious sperm routine from My Queer Body – which ends with him announcing: “ECCE HOMO! Behold the fag!” -- but the segment is pulled from the show by Larry and Artie, despite their having praised Tim fulsomely to his face.]

TM: Oh right! Yeah. That’s sweet.

CG: I thought that was really great.

TM: It’s a fun episode. It’s a great teleplay. Very cleverly written. That was an extremely enjoyable process. In spite of the fact they wanted Karen Finley and had to settle for me!

CG: Oh really? [laughs] No way. I don’t believe that for a second.

TM: Well they didn’t tell me that but I knew that’s how it was. ...It worked out. People tell me [they’ve seen that episode] all the time. I need to get that little clip up on YouTube.

CG: It’s lovely, it’s really nicely done. And what I wondered was the extent to which – this might be labouring it a little bit – but it seemed to me like quite a plausible scenario in terms of... -- I wondered about the extent to which that whole process with the NEA also made you something of a cause celebre for a liberal media that was also not truly aligned with what you were doing.

TM: Well, you know, it’s so hard to say. The NEA stuff happened in 1990 at a point when I was extremely... you know, I was already the representative ACT-UP queer performer in the US, and touring all over. You know, late 80’s, suddenly I found my stride and hit thirty at the end of the decade and kind of was at my peak cuteness... Well actually I think peak cuteness was about 1995, it’s all downhill from there... But it’s quite a strong moment for me, and quite a fearless moment. Other than that I woke up nightly sure I would die of AIDS soon.

But [the NEA affair] was totally a huge national story in the US.

CG: And it took a long time to resolve, didn’t it?

TM: It unfolded over years. And immediately right after it I lost all kinds of work because people became afraid to present me. I was already touring 35 states in the US a year and I’d always worked in the south a lot. I’ve done a lot of community-based work in the southeast. Most New York / LA performers don’t work in the south, but I’ve had a long history. Most years, North Carolina’s the state I perform in the most -- really I’ve been adopted. People know I get it, and I’m extremely interested in the south. Or they’ve worked with me and so they bring me back. Repeat trade: which performers and prostitutes rely on, God knows.

But like you say, it did create some new alliances and inscribed me in terms of political and theatre-historical placement around the culture wars in the US. So I would never presume to think that there weren’t ways it increased my visibility. These days no one even remembers what it was, unless they’re studying it in college. And, you know, the right in America doesn’t really focus on this anymore. Kind of locally and occasionally. They’re more worked up over library books still, they’ve gone back to the old... Partly because they did destroy the National Endowment for the Arts, and they won most of the battles, in spite of our Supreme Court case.

But it certainly deepened and engaged my national identity as an American artist in duking it out with AIDS and the Bush family and homophobia, and of course in the last many years just widening that alphabet soup of NEA, INS, HIV..., into all the stuff I’ve been doing around marriage equality and immigration. Which in a way is continuity, you know, it’s more fucked-up federal American stuff.

So then the narrative about me is sort of a queer artist who’s in this ongoing -- multi-decade, at this point -- relationship to pressuring, exploring, challenging US federal government stuff: its laws, its agencies, its iniquities... So it’s hard to imagine –- I mean, many years of work previous to that, but it’s seventeen years ago this month –- so it’s hard to imagine what [my situation] would be [if the NEA battle hadn't happened]. Though certainly right now the political text that comes up is much more around what Alistair and I are going through with his status and the marriage...

CG: Where is all that right now? I think when you and I first met it felt quite imminent that you were going to have to leave the US and maybe move here or something?

TM: Yeah, that was right before Alistair got the first of two possible work visas; you can get two three-year work visas, and then you have to leave, and now he’s on the tail-end of his last one. So we have pretty much exhausted our options, and as of yesterday morning it was not looking... He teaches creative writing at Antioch University and they’re not really figuring out how they could step up and do the right thing -- sponsor him for a Green Card -- which is unfortunate. I hope that they will consider this, because otherwise we have to leave. So actually, this particular moment as we sit here, it feels quite perilous again. You know, you can pull it out of the fire a few times, but eventually if you don’t get a Green Card you do have to leave. And we’re much too visible to think about being under the radar.

CG: Sure.

TM: Alistair’s book is coming out next year. So it needs to be... We have about a year but it all has to get sorted out. We’ll know soonish. Certainly in the fall. You may be seeing a lot more of us...

But it’s been a huge, a much more sustaining, motor through a couple of different shows...

CG: Yeah. It’s a long haul.

TM: And also just within this cultural context... In America, you know, after abortion, the gay marriage thing is the big social battle going on. And to be –- back to Mayakovsky in a way –- to be one of the very few artists in the US who’s been doing a lot of work around this subject, it’s also generated a lot of opportunities because people are thinking about this, every single state in the country is relating to it some way or another, and people want to do cultural programming around issues that people are thinking about.

But, segueing to the new stuff: these ongoing battles, that’s partly where this 1001 beds metaphor is interesting to me. You know: how do we understand the shape of our lives, the volume, the mission of it?

This piece is also sort of about performing, more than any piece I’ve done. Not just my own performing, but also about art changing the world, or changing desire: you know, moments of... Getting fucked in the butt for the first time at seventeen and going to the Hollywood Bowl and hearing the Liebestod [from Tristan und Isolde] and it pulling you out of your first negative sex experience...

It’s quite a fun piece to be doing right now, just acknowledging the sweep of this conservative calculation of 1001 of these [pointing to his bed], and probably two hundred of those beds will have been in England, Scotland, Wales... I’m finding it quite a poignant and funny metaphor.

And also because most of us travel. I mean it’s the title of this new book but it came out of an essay I’d written –- someone wanted me to write about travel so it led me to think about the bed math, all the gigs over a lifetime... And so it meant this piece kind of began out of an essay. I’ve never begun a piece in that way. It’s kind of interesting.




Having come all the way up to date, that seemed like a good place to finish: but mindful -- in his life as in his performances -- of the power and the profound truth of circularities, Tim had another animal-related revelation with which to spin me out: this time, a Lonely Goatherd toy: a plushy animatronic goat which mimes to the song of the same name. Banish all thoughts of Billy Bass – clearly, this technology has really advanced quantumwise in the last few years...



TM: Have you heard this? I have to do it quickly. I wanted one, I almost bought one on line, but they have one at the Drill Hall. I love this, it’s really cute.

[Mr Miller activates the goat. Laughter.]

CG: It’s incredibly sophisticated.

TM: Twenty-five pounds. Thirty online.

CG: You did very well. You’re never alone with that.

TM: True. Well also Alistair’s a Capricorn and he loves goats, so it’s the perfect present for him when I come home. He likes that song. But something like that... That I have twenty-five pounds to spend on a singing goat. That is privilege. But also I could imagine enjoying that for the rest of my life. It’ll have pride of place...

A life in musicals.

CG: I just don’t know how I’m going to transcribe it. There’s no way of expressing it in words really.

TM: It would have to be an audio clip. Which is much too challenging. But [The Sound of Music] is almost my favourite musical. I did go. I hadn’t seen it since I was a little boy. I can’t believe I cried during ‘Do Re Mi’. ‘Do Re Mi’ is so beautiful, it’s such a great... You know I expect ‘Climb Every Mountain’ to..., but ‘Do Re Mi’...

CG: It’s just that drop of golden sun. It’s gonna sneak up on you.

TM: It did, it's true. It’s such an optimistic song. That people can learn to sing. I mean it’s really about art as a transformational tool. It's like, you know, you can change how people think or how they behave or how they relate to each other. And anyone can do it. I think it was something about that.

Oh I can’t believe I played the Lonely Goatherd.