the interview:
writeThis: Blem Vide, do you think the work that falls near the end of this list is superior to the peurile twaddle that is characteristic of the earlier works?
Blem Vide: i reviewed the dreck disguised as posts i have left at writethis and, well, fuck. i have decided it all sucks. do these posts represent my creative output over the course of a year? well, no. but maybe the drugs did affect me somehow. i don't remember typing most of them. that's probably a defense mechanism.
the only thing that carries any of the posts is my attitude. my attitude is right on the money, usually. or on the spare change. but i gave up on craft a long time ago. actually, i gave up on craft before i pursued it. a profound intellectual laziness. art, for me, is a tuesday afternoon headache.
this response is typical of a midnight hour mood. what time is it?
ask another question.
writeThis: We find it interesting that the author of these moments in writing in need of an adjective would describe them as dreck. We are interested in obtaining some insight into the mind of Blem Vide. There is very little that hasn't already been said about Blem Vide, yet so few have ever heard it. Can you tell us what fragment of human experience has had the biggest influence on you as a writer?
Blem Vide: well, i am very influenced by myself. a self-perpetuating program of near-functionality, as my lady friends would say.
writeThis: Your self assured qualities of deception should by now be legendary if only anyone had ever heard of you, but your modesty travels far in your stead. Tell us a bland story about your experiences before writing your first poem.
Blem Vide: i still had $1800 to blow on shiny things that caught my attention. or on devious gifts for a womans personal attention. or on rare vinyl records. at that time, there was a record shop in town that had a copy of the Spades "you're gonna miss me" single from 1965. it was in mint condition. out of a pressing of maybe 100. i didn't buy it, though.
i went to a mexican restaurant a block up the road from the automobile shop. i recall i ordered a plate of spinach enchiladas with verde sauce, rice and beans & guacamole. i sometimes wonder what i'd do without mexican food. i like different arrangements of flour tortillas & refried beans. you can concoct enchiladas, burritos, tostadas, chimichangas. it's an ethnic art. i am compiling a small book of the merits & disappointments of local restaurant salsas. right now, a little place called El Caribe (near Lamar & Koenig) is getting my tongue for their special verde sauce. made with fresh tomatillios, some sort of cream, and a slight orange/lime flavor.
so anyway, i went home that night and wrote some stanzas of awful gibberish. i had to. i had been touched by the creative impulse.
my first writings were some conjob rhyming scheme of "everybody lightning phantom naked fantastic sheet metal fuse, chasing a fuse, eating a liquid fuse" & i continue to write stanzas of gibberish to this very day.
writeThis: How impressive. A poet of few means dragging himself out of the slime of meaningless sound alikes to the high reaches of barely sustainable meanderings.
Blem Vide: people speak of "barely sustainable meanderings" as if these were bad things. i cherish vague fugues when i encounter them, here. i am an errand boy of the partial semi-thought . if an idea is not contradicted perhaps it never existed. how the fuck should i know? yes, i believe it was me who said "aphorisms are diversions from the reality of a situation" and i never believed it because i don't believe in words. i only believe in the ambivalence of everything, i guess.
writeThis: Yes, I see. The ambivalence of everything. "Aphorisms are diversions from the reality of a situation". This must go to the heart of your thrust. I believe you are also the one who wrote,
"drooma spotter al delroy chroma
and drama cutter laps
jeek telroy eeka tal bloiga floriz
and agnow"
in your poem, Rig Valoop. Could you amplify on not believing in words? and resolve that with the need to use words in your poems.
Blem Vide: i have no philosophically fixed positions, except that i won't budge from my position of no philosophically fixed positions. and my attention span is rather short. i am a slow learner. but i am a very attractive person, so who gives a fuck.
have i answered any questions here?
poetry is for blowing against the back of your neck. ts eliot experienced painful bowel movements, right. hugo ball invented the beach ball, died with a baseball. albert huffstickler threw out his back ignoring poetry in 1862. blem vide likes name-dropping and mexican food.
writeThis: Do you live in the unknown to some cultural mecca of the united states?
Blem Vide: i live in a rather hip city, i must confess. but this doesn't help me.
writeThis: It rarely does. Blem, why do you write?
Blem Vide: because i fucked your mom. and i like 15 minute interviews.
i have been pre-approved for another chase platinum visa card. if i transfer a credit balance of over $100 dollars from an old card to a chase platinum visa card, i can enjoy 0% interests on purchases until march 2004. and no balance-transfer fees. i'll be in debt until i hack into a new identity. fraud is only fraud if it can be proved to be fraud.
writeThis: At what point during the creative process do you find is the worst time of that feeling of pointlessness of it all; is it right before you begin to write, at some crucial moment during or right before the end, or at the end when you throw down the pen, or that awful after-feeling when it is done and it sits there and everything is still the same?
Blem Vide: today is my birthday. i am being swallowed by numbers. i don't see the "pointlessness of it all" that you mentioned. i claim ambivalence & jejune jazz like i claim locust water. i use words from the pawn shop of the soul. organized under a ghetto rainbow.
okay i'm lieing. i slap shit together out of boredom. i never check my phrases for that "special glue which binds together all souls," but maybe i should (n't).
fuck, you want a real interview? get me drunk, you pay the tab. drive me around town. i'm hungry too.
writeThis: I want to ask a tough question. There has been nothing said and much of it would have been apocryphal, I'm sure, or even outright lies from those trying to capitalise on your imagined notoriety, but much could have been slung about your personal life, and to the point that the artist's life and the individual's ~ exist, these reports of binge drinking and dalliances with slightly unattractive older women, according to a couple of poorly written police reports, does your pissing on a wall play a meaningful symbolic role to your method of pissing on the page?
Blem Vide: well i uh, you know. i've never been able to hold my liquor in any respectable manner. i don't drink casually. if i drink i get drunk & beautiful and i'm everyone's best friend. and i pick up that "oh fuck" inertia where i run on autopilot. but always amusing, never mean or nasty.
i do work out a mojo when i'm intoxicated. and i can't turn a woman down. well, unless she's an ex-Hell's Angels mama. i like young girls who want to play with an artist who never produces art. or older women, divorcees, who want an energetic young man in bed. i have a great capacity for listening to women & making them feel like they are the only one on earth, for a few hours.
but i'm only innocent. my autistic, excuse me, artistic life is actually a revolt against my angelic nature. i piss & moan & spit in fauxart because my life is generally very calm and quiet.
oh, and when i was 17 i thought, or rather i convinced myself, that i was a hyperactive lesbian trapped in a man's body. this has nothing to do with lipstick, much to do with labia.
writeThis: What are you going to do when you're never really remembered except for an incident of sexual misconduct with a 16-year-old high school girl that went however not prosecuted, very reminiscent of a certain so-called king of pop michael jackson's involvements in certain peter pan modality markpaulers, and your life is now just puking into women's shoes at a discount shoe emporium slash semi-secret s & m hideout where you contracted syphilis last time, and someone finally lifts your dying hand whose fingernails are slowly scratching searching for cigarette butts in the groove of the pavement near the curb in which you are lying and you get asked for the first time your autograph? what then, mr. blem vide, will you last have to offer?
Blem Vide: Love. and i've been asked for my autograph before, asshole.
people magazine asked me more disturbing questions than these.
and they didn't let me sleaze my way out of any answers (see Jan 2003 issue "Blem Vide: August Step Dehydrate")
then again, i have read better interviews with john stamos
