[Duelo de titanes] Frank Black vs Ray Bradbury
Publicado: 01 Ago 2005 14:57
http://www.laalternativepress.com/v04n0 ... /black.php
Indie-rock hero Frank Black goes one-on-one with his literary hero, the indomitable Ray Bradbury.
BY FRANK BLACK
I got an email from the editor at the L.A. Alternative Press asking me to call up the one and only Ray Bradbury to ask him some questions for a casual Q&A. I avoided responding. When my high school English teacher said I could write short stories instead of doing homework, Ray Bradbury was my main source of inspiration. Years later I would absorb what Ray had to say at personal appearances he made at libraries and gymnasiums. I named a record after him [1996’s “The Cult of Ray”] and squeezed as much of him as I could into my own work. Once I got an autograph and mumbled garbled, humbled praise. I was totally intimidated to speak with the beyond-famous and beloved writer, and yet I thought myself a fool to pass on the experience.
I called Katherine at the Press back right before the deadline and was given Ray’s home telephone number. She told me he would pick up the telephone when I called. The first two times I called I was very satisfied to hear the ancient sound of the busy signal. I was not surprised that Mr. Bradbury had no use for call waiting. Then, on my third attempt, he answered after one ring...
RAY BRADBURY: Good morning.
FRANK BLACK: Good morning Mr. Bradbury, this is Frank Black representing the LA Alternative Press publication. I was hoping I could speak to you today, perhaps...or whenever it’s convenient.
RB: Um, let’s see what time it is here...Could you do it right now?
FB: Absolutely.
RB: Put on your tape recorder...
FB: It’s going! [Laughs.]
RB: Let’s do it right now.
FB: Wonderful! [Clears throat.] Thank you for your time, by the way...
RB: Sure.
FB: ...and I won’t take too much of it. Over the years I have imagined, in my own mind, filling the Los Angeles storm drain and aqueducts with water to accommodate boats to ferry people around town. If you could be mayor, or king, of Los Angeles for a day, what great works could you imagine?
RB: I would turn the river bottom into a freeway. You don’t need water, just clear out the rocks and you could have a freeway all the way out to the Valley away from the other freeways. There’s a lot of rocks there. There’s a drain in the middle that channels what little water’s there.
FB: The Los Angeles river?
RB: It goes all the way to the Valley. You’d have a freeway, which would give you extra ways of traveling from the Valley into downtown.
FB: Some of us in the world are excited about colonizing Mars. Why do you suppose that some people have such a negative, or sometimes even hostile attitude about this?
RB: It’s always been true that the average person has very little imagination. We can’t expect them to anticipate the things that we anticipate. It’s inevitable that we go back to the moon, its inevitable that we go to Mars, and its inevitable we go on out into the universe. We’re just not gonna stay here. The people that don’t think about these things, they think only of the practical things of getting up in the morning, and going to bed at night. But if that sort of thinking had occurred five hundred years ago, there’d be no America. Three Italian voyagers discovered America. Columbus never touched ground until the third expedition. Then Giovanni Caboto was sent by Henry VII, and finally Jacques Cartier was sent by Francois I of France. Each of them didn’t realize that what they were doing was creating a country with 300 million people. Now, if the thinking had gone on in those days the way it is today, they would have never have left Italy and France and England, and there would be no United States. So think of that. Come on! We’ve gotta do these things, in spite of the people who don’t care.
FB: Amen. On that note, it seems inevitable that one day many locales on Mars will be named after you, Mr. Bradbury.
Does that give you a little thrill?
RB: Right now it’s enough that I have a crater on the moon named after one of my books. The Dandelion Crater. That’s good enough for me.
FB: OK. You attended the first world science fiction convention, Worldcon, in 1939.
RB: When I was 19 years old.
FB: You’ve attended comic book conventions throughout your life.
RB: I’ve been going the last three years to the one in San Diego. It’s great fun, its just jolly.
FB: Are you a believer in human gathering? As humans, are we meant to gather?
RB: It seems that we need it, doesn’t it? If we’re all crazy together...You can go to the comic conventions in July and you can see how crazy we are. Because we all get together and say, “Well, we’re pretty nuts, aren’t we?” But we love each other. So that’s why we do it.
FB: Some Angelenos are secessionists and think the city would run better if it shrank some. Do you think Los Angeles’ problems might be helped by making it smaller, or do you think it should stay big?
RB: We don’t need to make it smaller. What we need is the monorail. We were offered the chance by Helwig Monorail 40 years ago at the meeting of the Board of Supervisors. Helwig Monorail offered to build eight or 12 systems for free and give them to us, if we allowed them to run them. That seemed fair enough to me. So that would solve the traffic problem, because it’s above traffic, it’s off the street, and can be built away from the street then brought in and put up without any trouble or hurting anyone. We’re not going to make LA smaller, it’s too late. But we have to have a decent monorail system to help us move around.
FB: I couldn’t agree with you more. I’ve read that before my time — I’m 40 years old — that movie theatres were everywhere, and that Los Angeles even used to have several Japanese-language movie theatres.
RB: Oh, I used to go to them all the time, I took all my children to the one near Wilshire and La Brea. I took them to see all of [Akira] Kurosawa’s films there.
FB: I guess it was a really wonderful time in America when movie theatres were so much more plentiful then they are now.
RB: Well, now we have multiple theatres. Most of them are too small. I don’t like to go to the multiple theatres. But there’s still a few big ones and thank God for that.
FB: Would you be in favor of making sections of Los Angeles pedestrian zones, free of cars, or do you think that car culture is too important to the city?
RB: I helped Santa Monica rebuild their pedestrian section which starts at Wilshire and goes all the way down for about six or eight blocks, and throughout Fifth Street in Santa Monica. I’m responsible for nagging them to rebuild that, ‘cause it works. At Century City you have a car-free zone, and I helped rebuild that. I told them that they needed 30 restaurants, because people go out to eat, they don’t go out to shop. They go out to eat, and when they feel good, they buy things they don’t want. So I am in favor of more of these, I think Westwood could do with closing a few streets and turning them into pedestrian malls, and it will be done. It will be done.
FB: In modern cinema, do you think that its become too violent or graphic, leaving less to the imagination, or is this an old fashioned kind of attitude?
RB: Mostly crap, isn’t it? Every five minutes they explode ten thousand gallons of gasoline. So that is moronic. And indeed they’re too violent. So many of them are tests between macho males trying to prove they have biceps and balls. I like the old fashioned movies and there are still a lot of movies around that are excellent. During the last year or so there was a wonderful western that is a bit violent with Robert Duvall, called “Open Range.” There’s a film with Michael Caine and Robert Duvall, “Secondhand Lions,” a beautiful film about Africa. And then during the Academy Award time, there was Annette Benning in.“Being Julia” was the name of it. Very nice film. So there are some good films around. But we have to pay attention to them.
FB: The one filmmaker who has been able to make me cry is Jaques Tati.
RB: Well, I knew him very well, he was a good friend. “Mr. Hulot’s Holiday” is one of the funniest films, and one of the saddest films ever made. It’s very funny, but it has a touch of melancholy. Beautiful.
FB: Is there a filmmaker that can make you cry?
RB: Well, I did a film at Disney, “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” it has its moments that make you cry because it’s very human, the relationship of the boy with his father. And Jack Clayton directed that. Very nice.
FB: Speaking of directors, I feel emotionally scarred to this day by a guy who almost punched me out in a barroom where my girlfriend worked. This was someone I did not know. You were almost punched out by John Huston, who you admired. Can you laugh about that now, or do you still feel hurt by that?
RB: No, no, ‘cause it’s a long time ago, and he gave me a job to write [the screenplay for] “Moby Dick” and I’m very grateful. He’s the only one that paid attention to me 55 years ago. So I’m very grateful.
FB: I’m a rock musician; I’ve done a lot of flying in the world, and I’ve gone through phases in my life where I’ve been afraid of flying. But once, I was upgraded to a flight on the Concorde. I know you’ve flown the Concorde—were you sad to see it go, finally?
RB: That was a terrible mistake that was based on a piece of metal that was on the runway. And the tire of the Concorde hit the piece of metal and it went up through the plane and destroyed it, but it had nothing to do with the Concorde. But they were cowards to give up because this had nothing to do with the plane. It was a piece of metal on the tarmac. It should never have caused the destruction of the Concorde.
FB: I only got to fly the Concorde once, but I loved that moment when the aircraft reached the speed of sound and the sound of the engines disappeared behind you. Do you have any favorite recollections of that supersonic flight?
RB: It’s wonderful, but more important is this: I discovered when I flew for the first time that I wasn’t afraid of flying, I was afraid of me. Once I discovered that I was afraid of me, the fear went away, because I’m a good guy. So I’ve been flying ever since. A lot of people think they’re afraid of flying, and they’re just afraid of themselves, that’s all.
FB: Maybe I should pass that along to my grandmother, who’s exactly your age; she still won’t fly. I think she’s traveled around the world on boats but she still won’t get on a plane.
RB: She’s afraid of herself. Tell her to just relax and take a drink of gin and get on the plane.
FB: I’ll tell her you said so. One time I got to travel on the Queen Elizabeth II. I imagine you probably traveled that boat once or twice in your lifetime.
RB: I’ve taken all my daughters on it.
FB: Were you sad to see that ship go?
RB: Well, they’ve got other new ships. In fact, its still around, it’s making trips. It hasn’t been retired completely.
FB: They say that the first ship to Mars will be a bit of a slow boat. Some say six to nine months. With that kind of travel time involved, do you think some colonists will be saying goodbye to Earth forever?
RB: Oh, I can’t answer that, it’s too far in the future. I couldn’t answer that at all.
FB: OK. Well, as colonists in the future, that distant future, do you think we should alter the atmosphere of Mars to make it more hospitable, or should we take a more ‘green’ approach and learn to live within its limitations?
RB: At the start, we’ll have to live within its limitations. But as we begin to plant Mars, then the oxygen will come out of the plants, won’t it? That will take a lot of planting and a lot of doing.
FB: As a writer, I’m sure you’ve had many meetings over the years with people in restaurants. What is your favorite restaurant in Paris, if it’s even still there?
RB: Oh God Almighty, there are so many. First of all, there are 20,000 restaurants in Paris. And I’ve been in most of them. Fouquet’s is on the Champs d’Elysees, it’s a very nice restaurant, and it’s pretty social, and you have the fun of eating good food and watching the Parisian public walk by.
FB: In Los Angeles, my personal favorite is the Pacific Dining Car downtown.
RB: Oh, you just named mine. I go to both, I go to the one on Wilshire out in Santa Monica. It’s just as good.
FB: Yeah, I like the one in Santa Monica as well. I really like the fact that there isn’t any music being piped in and it’s so quiet and sound-absorbent...
RB: You can talk to one another...
FB: Is that the mark of the restaurant of yesteryear, or is that just a fantasy of mine that back in the day a lot of restaurants were like that?
RB: Nowadays people don’t want to talk to each other, so they go to a restaurant where there’s a lot of talk, a lot of sound, and a lot of music, and they don’t have to say anything. It’s a real bore.
FB: When I was 16 years old I took the GED high school equivalency test because I was anxious to begin my career in music, and my mother made me finish high school. Would you have different advice for a teenager who’s in a rush?
RB: Well, it depends what you’re going to do. Now if you want be a writer, you don’t need education. You can do it yourself. So when I graduated from high school, I went to the library and I stayed there, I went to the library two or three days a week for 20 years. I graduated from the library when I was about 28 years old. Through writing, you educate yourself. You write every day and you read every day. And at the end of 10 years or so you’ve become a writer. That’s the way you rush it, by doing it.
FB: The sound and the vibrations of the typewriter are virtually gone now, and I realize that since your stroke you may be writing a different way now, but up until that time, was the feel and the sound of the typewriter machine an important part of the writing experience for you?
RB: I think it is, but I suppose if you’re used to the computer, it doesn’t make any difference. After all, the pencil and paper, or a pen and paper, are quiet too, so you can write just as well. It doesn’t matter how you write, just as long as you write. So you don’t need the sound, but it’s very nice.
FB: Last year, 63-year-old Mike Melvill flew the first privately built craft into space. Do you think that it’s individuals, or groups of individuals, rather than governments, who will finally colonize space?
RB: First of all, it’s too expensive. It’s hard to guess if there will be enough crazy people in the future to do it. I think you require the government to do it, because the government needs to do it. Crazy people are not that frequently to be met. So I think it will be a government thing as far as I can see.
Indie-rock hero Frank Black goes one-on-one with his literary hero, the indomitable Ray Bradbury.
BY FRANK BLACK
I got an email from the editor at the L.A. Alternative Press asking me to call up the one and only Ray Bradbury to ask him some questions for a casual Q&A. I avoided responding. When my high school English teacher said I could write short stories instead of doing homework, Ray Bradbury was my main source of inspiration. Years later I would absorb what Ray had to say at personal appearances he made at libraries and gymnasiums. I named a record after him [1996’s “The Cult of Ray”] and squeezed as much of him as I could into my own work. Once I got an autograph and mumbled garbled, humbled praise. I was totally intimidated to speak with the beyond-famous and beloved writer, and yet I thought myself a fool to pass on the experience.
I called Katherine at the Press back right before the deadline and was given Ray’s home telephone number. She told me he would pick up the telephone when I called. The first two times I called I was very satisfied to hear the ancient sound of the busy signal. I was not surprised that Mr. Bradbury had no use for call waiting. Then, on my third attempt, he answered after one ring...
RAY BRADBURY: Good morning.
FRANK BLACK: Good morning Mr. Bradbury, this is Frank Black representing the LA Alternative Press publication. I was hoping I could speak to you today, perhaps...or whenever it’s convenient.
RB: Um, let’s see what time it is here...Could you do it right now?
FB: Absolutely.
RB: Put on your tape recorder...
FB: It’s going! [Laughs.]
RB: Let’s do it right now.
FB: Wonderful! [Clears throat.] Thank you for your time, by the way...
RB: Sure.
FB: ...and I won’t take too much of it. Over the years I have imagined, in my own mind, filling the Los Angeles storm drain and aqueducts with water to accommodate boats to ferry people around town. If you could be mayor, or king, of Los Angeles for a day, what great works could you imagine?
RB: I would turn the river bottom into a freeway. You don’t need water, just clear out the rocks and you could have a freeway all the way out to the Valley away from the other freeways. There’s a lot of rocks there. There’s a drain in the middle that channels what little water’s there.
FB: The Los Angeles river?
RB: It goes all the way to the Valley. You’d have a freeway, which would give you extra ways of traveling from the Valley into downtown.
FB: Some of us in the world are excited about colonizing Mars. Why do you suppose that some people have such a negative, or sometimes even hostile attitude about this?
RB: It’s always been true that the average person has very little imagination. We can’t expect them to anticipate the things that we anticipate. It’s inevitable that we go back to the moon, its inevitable that we go to Mars, and its inevitable we go on out into the universe. We’re just not gonna stay here. The people that don’t think about these things, they think only of the practical things of getting up in the morning, and going to bed at night. But if that sort of thinking had occurred five hundred years ago, there’d be no America. Three Italian voyagers discovered America. Columbus never touched ground until the third expedition. Then Giovanni Caboto was sent by Henry VII, and finally Jacques Cartier was sent by Francois I of France. Each of them didn’t realize that what they were doing was creating a country with 300 million people. Now, if the thinking had gone on in those days the way it is today, they would have never have left Italy and France and England, and there would be no United States. So think of that. Come on! We’ve gotta do these things, in spite of the people who don’t care.
FB: Amen. On that note, it seems inevitable that one day many locales on Mars will be named after you, Mr. Bradbury.
Does that give you a little thrill?
RB: Right now it’s enough that I have a crater on the moon named after one of my books. The Dandelion Crater. That’s good enough for me.
FB: OK. You attended the first world science fiction convention, Worldcon, in 1939.
RB: When I was 19 years old.
FB: You’ve attended comic book conventions throughout your life.
RB: I’ve been going the last three years to the one in San Diego. It’s great fun, its just jolly.
FB: Are you a believer in human gathering? As humans, are we meant to gather?
RB: It seems that we need it, doesn’t it? If we’re all crazy together...You can go to the comic conventions in July and you can see how crazy we are. Because we all get together and say, “Well, we’re pretty nuts, aren’t we?” But we love each other. So that’s why we do it.
FB: Some Angelenos are secessionists and think the city would run better if it shrank some. Do you think Los Angeles’ problems might be helped by making it smaller, or do you think it should stay big?
RB: We don’t need to make it smaller. What we need is the monorail. We were offered the chance by Helwig Monorail 40 years ago at the meeting of the Board of Supervisors. Helwig Monorail offered to build eight or 12 systems for free and give them to us, if we allowed them to run them. That seemed fair enough to me. So that would solve the traffic problem, because it’s above traffic, it’s off the street, and can be built away from the street then brought in and put up without any trouble or hurting anyone. We’re not going to make LA smaller, it’s too late. But we have to have a decent monorail system to help us move around.
FB: I couldn’t agree with you more. I’ve read that before my time — I’m 40 years old — that movie theatres were everywhere, and that Los Angeles even used to have several Japanese-language movie theatres.
RB: Oh, I used to go to them all the time, I took all my children to the one near Wilshire and La Brea. I took them to see all of [Akira] Kurosawa’s films there.
FB: I guess it was a really wonderful time in America when movie theatres were so much more plentiful then they are now.
RB: Well, now we have multiple theatres. Most of them are too small. I don’t like to go to the multiple theatres. But there’s still a few big ones and thank God for that.
FB: Would you be in favor of making sections of Los Angeles pedestrian zones, free of cars, or do you think that car culture is too important to the city?
RB: I helped Santa Monica rebuild their pedestrian section which starts at Wilshire and goes all the way down for about six or eight blocks, and throughout Fifth Street in Santa Monica. I’m responsible for nagging them to rebuild that, ‘cause it works. At Century City you have a car-free zone, and I helped rebuild that. I told them that they needed 30 restaurants, because people go out to eat, they don’t go out to shop. They go out to eat, and when they feel good, they buy things they don’t want. So I am in favor of more of these, I think Westwood could do with closing a few streets and turning them into pedestrian malls, and it will be done. It will be done.
FB: In modern cinema, do you think that its become too violent or graphic, leaving less to the imagination, or is this an old fashioned kind of attitude?
RB: Mostly crap, isn’t it? Every five minutes they explode ten thousand gallons of gasoline. So that is moronic. And indeed they’re too violent. So many of them are tests between macho males trying to prove they have biceps and balls. I like the old fashioned movies and there are still a lot of movies around that are excellent. During the last year or so there was a wonderful western that is a bit violent with Robert Duvall, called “Open Range.” There’s a film with Michael Caine and Robert Duvall, “Secondhand Lions,” a beautiful film about Africa. And then during the Academy Award time, there was Annette Benning in.“Being Julia” was the name of it. Very nice film. So there are some good films around. But we have to pay attention to them.
FB: The one filmmaker who has been able to make me cry is Jaques Tati.
RB: Well, I knew him very well, he was a good friend. “Mr. Hulot’s Holiday” is one of the funniest films, and one of the saddest films ever made. It’s very funny, but it has a touch of melancholy. Beautiful.
FB: Is there a filmmaker that can make you cry?
RB: Well, I did a film at Disney, “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” it has its moments that make you cry because it’s very human, the relationship of the boy with his father. And Jack Clayton directed that. Very nice.
FB: Speaking of directors, I feel emotionally scarred to this day by a guy who almost punched me out in a barroom where my girlfriend worked. This was someone I did not know. You were almost punched out by John Huston, who you admired. Can you laugh about that now, or do you still feel hurt by that?
RB: No, no, ‘cause it’s a long time ago, and he gave me a job to write [the screenplay for] “Moby Dick” and I’m very grateful. He’s the only one that paid attention to me 55 years ago. So I’m very grateful.
FB: I’m a rock musician; I’ve done a lot of flying in the world, and I’ve gone through phases in my life where I’ve been afraid of flying. But once, I was upgraded to a flight on the Concorde. I know you’ve flown the Concorde—were you sad to see it go, finally?
RB: That was a terrible mistake that was based on a piece of metal that was on the runway. And the tire of the Concorde hit the piece of metal and it went up through the plane and destroyed it, but it had nothing to do with the Concorde. But they were cowards to give up because this had nothing to do with the plane. It was a piece of metal on the tarmac. It should never have caused the destruction of the Concorde.
FB: I only got to fly the Concorde once, but I loved that moment when the aircraft reached the speed of sound and the sound of the engines disappeared behind you. Do you have any favorite recollections of that supersonic flight?
RB: It’s wonderful, but more important is this: I discovered when I flew for the first time that I wasn’t afraid of flying, I was afraid of me. Once I discovered that I was afraid of me, the fear went away, because I’m a good guy. So I’ve been flying ever since. A lot of people think they’re afraid of flying, and they’re just afraid of themselves, that’s all.
FB: Maybe I should pass that along to my grandmother, who’s exactly your age; she still won’t fly. I think she’s traveled around the world on boats but she still won’t get on a plane.
RB: She’s afraid of herself. Tell her to just relax and take a drink of gin and get on the plane.
FB: I’ll tell her you said so. One time I got to travel on the Queen Elizabeth II. I imagine you probably traveled that boat once or twice in your lifetime.
RB: I’ve taken all my daughters on it.
FB: Were you sad to see that ship go?
RB: Well, they’ve got other new ships. In fact, its still around, it’s making trips. It hasn’t been retired completely.
FB: They say that the first ship to Mars will be a bit of a slow boat. Some say six to nine months. With that kind of travel time involved, do you think some colonists will be saying goodbye to Earth forever?
RB: Oh, I can’t answer that, it’s too far in the future. I couldn’t answer that at all.
FB: OK. Well, as colonists in the future, that distant future, do you think we should alter the atmosphere of Mars to make it more hospitable, or should we take a more ‘green’ approach and learn to live within its limitations?
RB: At the start, we’ll have to live within its limitations. But as we begin to plant Mars, then the oxygen will come out of the plants, won’t it? That will take a lot of planting and a lot of doing.
FB: As a writer, I’m sure you’ve had many meetings over the years with people in restaurants. What is your favorite restaurant in Paris, if it’s even still there?
RB: Oh God Almighty, there are so many. First of all, there are 20,000 restaurants in Paris. And I’ve been in most of them. Fouquet’s is on the Champs d’Elysees, it’s a very nice restaurant, and it’s pretty social, and you have the fun of eating good food and watching the Parisian public walk by.
FB: In Los Angeles, my personal favorite is the Pacific Dining Car downtown.
RB: Oh, you just named mine. I go to both, I go to the one on Wilshire out in Santa Monica. It’s just as good.
FB: Yeah, I like the one in Santa Monica as well. I really like the fact that there isn’t any music being piped in and it’s so quiet and sound-absorbent...
RB: You can talk to one another...
FB: Is that the mark of the restaurant of yesteryear, or is that just a fantasy of mine that back in the day a lot of restaurants were like that?
RB: Nowadays people don’t want to talk to each other, so they go to a restaurant where there’s a lot of talk, a lot of sound, and a lot of music, and they don’t have to say anything. It’s a real bore.
FB: When I was 16 years old I took the GED high school equivalency test because I was anxious to begin my career in music, and my mother made me finish high school. Would you have different advice for a teenager who’s in a rush?
RB: Well, it depends what you’re going to do. Now if you want be a writer, you don’t need education. You can do it yourself. So when I graduated from high school, I went to the library and I stayed there, I went to the library two or three days a week for 20 years. I graduated from the library when I was about 28 years old. Through writing, you educate yourself. You write every day and you read every day. And at the end of 10 years or so you’ve become a writer. That’s the way you rush it, by doing it.
FB: The sound and the vibrations of the typewriter are virtually gone now, and I realize that since your stroke you may be writing a different way now, but up until that time, was the feel and the sound of the typewriter machine an important part of the writing experience for you?
RB: I think it is, but I suppose if you’re used to the computer, it doesn’t make any difference. After all, the pencil and paper, or a pen and paper, are quiet too, so you can write just as well. It doesn’t matter how you write, just as long as you write. So you don’t need the sound, but it’s very nice.
FB: Last year, 63-year-old Mike Melvill flew the first privately built craft into space. Do you think that it’s individuals, or groups of individuals, rather than governments, who will finally colonize space?
RB: First of all, it’s too expensive. It’s hard to guess if there will be enough crazy people in the future to do it. I think you require the government to do it, because the government needs to do it. Crazy people are not that frequently to be met. So I think it will be a government thing as far as I can see.