Things artist say about their work you don't believe

[Smapti]

Neil Peart insists the song The Trees is just a silly little ditty about trees fighting each other, and that it’s not a parable for the tyranny of the mediocre that’s so feared in Objectivism.

Given that just about every other song he wrote in that period was Ayn Rand fanfic, this comes off as hard to believe.

[Justin_Bailey]

@HubZilla

Nor was [the Cloverfield monster] killed by the bombs at the end of the movie.

Of course he wasn’t. You can faintly hear a dude say “It’s still alive” after the bombing.

[MrDibble]

@HeyHomie

Body and beats I stain my sheets is, for me, the giveaway. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this brings to mind masturbating under the covers and ejaculating onto the sheet. Of course, I freely admit that I may be wrong.

I thought he was “so strung out” and “high as a kite” that he pissed the bed/crapped himself.

[HubZilla]

@Justin_Bailey

Of course he wasn’t. You can faintly hear a dude say “It’s still alive” after the bombing.

J.J. Abrams to Rolling Stone magazine: Yes, he’s dead. Ultimately the bombs kill him:

[Elendil_s_Heir]

Bumped.

@Two_Many_Cats

Was it in So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish that Douglas Adams had Arthur Dent tell Fenny a story about some stranger eating cookies out of Arthur’s cookie package at some train station or something, and Arthur defiantly eating his own cookies out of the package to show the guy up? And then, it turns out that it wasn’t Arthur’s cookie package at all, but it belonged to the stranger who didn’t say a word about Arthur eating his cookies?

Douglas Adams claimed that it was a story that really happened to him.

Actually, the story is an urban legend…

I just read Jeffrey Archer’s 1980 short story “Broken Routine” (in his collection A Quiver Full of Arrows), which has the same premise, except that it’s cigarettes and a newspaper on a British commuter train.

[Penfeather]

@PlainJain

I’m not an expert on Warhol but in every interview with him I’ve seen, he’s denied emotional sincerity.

Did he mean it, though?

[eunoia]

@Derleth

All authors are dead.

If cultural criticism can be viewed as an art form in its own right, I don’t believe “in toto” what Barthes (or Camille Paglia for that matter) says they believe either. The difference being that if you put artists in the unnatural position as critics of their own works, any extreme or controversial stances will tend to obfuscate rather than educate.

Re: Blister In The Sun
I think the sheets could be bloodstained from habitual drug injection sites. Has Gordon Gano ever commented why a junkie, strung out and presumably uninterested in sex, even with the mentioned girlfriend, would be out on the streets trying to spot women with unusually big hands?

Admittedly, I’m not completely separating the artist from their work in this line of questioning.

[Crafter_Man]

According to The Residents, they never intended to release the album Not Available, even from the start. According to Wiki,

In 1978, the “official” word was that The Residents had stated that Not Available could never be released. The group claimed that they had recorded the album in secrecy as a way of exercising their “theory of obscurity” to its fullest, and, in strict accordance with the theory, the work could never be released until its creators no longer recalled its existence.

It was originally recorded as a follow-up to 1974’s Meet the Residents. However, following the Theory of Obscurity, it was immediately locked away in a bank vault with no plans to issue it until the members of the band had completely forgotten about its existence.

Sounds like a load of horseshit. I suspect the real reason was more mundane.

Oh, and I absolutely love this album. I’ve probably played it 300 times.

[DavidwithanR]

@JohnT

The one thing that supports her argument is that the society of Gilead is so idiotic, it is obvious that she didn’t even think about any potential long-term implications of what she was writing (which is part and parcel in re: to science fiction writers). To quote an earlier post I made:

I don’t agree with you. I think the idiotic and unworkable nature of Gilead society is exactly because of the old-(white)-man-centric policies enacted by the old (white) men doing the shagging. Their POV evidently being that if their own children were not going to populate the country, then better for society to die out.

[DavidwithanR]

@eunoia

Re: Blister In The Sun
I think the sheets could be bloodstained from habitual drug injection sites. Has Gordon Gano ever commented why a junkie, strung out and presumably uninterested in sex, even with the mentioned girlfriend, would be out on the streets trying to spot women with unusually big hands?

Admittedly, I’m not completely separating the artist from their work in this line of questioning.

I may be completely lost in the discussion of this song, but wouldn’t big hand refer to his own hand being his next injection site? I mean, maybe that’s exactly what you just said and I’m missing some context.

[eunoia]

@DavidwithanR

I may be completely lost in the discussion of this song, but wouldn’t big hand refer to his own hand being his next injection site? I mean, maybe that’s exactly what you just said and I’m missing some context.

I’m OK with any interpretation that favors heroin over masturbation. Understandably, more people have experience with performing and discussing masturbation than a hard drug user’s quest for a fix.