brian eno 2002

http://www.indexmagazine.com/interviews/brian_eno.shtml

PETER HALLEY: I’m such a workaholic that the only way I can even make friends with people is by interviewing them. [laughs]

BRIAN: I make most of my friends through working situations as well.

BRIAN: When I watch my two little girls play, the thing that interests me about their games is the very laborious sets of relationships they’ll construct between the characters. You know, “You’re the auntie, but the mother doesn’t like you because you did this.” It’s terribly complicated, and there’s never any game at the end of it. The building of the network of relationships is just about all that ever happens.

PETER: That’s said to be a skill that’s prominent in women.

BRIAN: Yes. It led me to my theory that cities are places built for women.

PETER: Wow.

BRIAN: In cities, you have the opportunity to do all the things that women are really specialized at: intense social relationships and interactions, attention to lots of simultaneous details. And of course in cities you can do very few of the things that men are good at.

PETER: Like what?

BRIAN: You can’t break anything in a city. Everything is valuable, so you’re limited in how much you can test the physical nature of things — which I think is a big part of a man’s make up.

"I recently read Richard Sennett’s book The Uses of Disorder. It’s a very intelligent anti-planning book, and I thought, “This is fantastic, but nobody’s ever going to read it.” So I decided to condense it. I wanted to present the argument of the book in three thousand words. I went through it with a yellow highlighter, marking the bits that really got the germ of the idea. Then I photocopied all the parts I’d marked and collaged them together. After that, I had this idea that every serious book should be publishedin two forms. There should be the full version, but preceding it by a month or so should be the filtered version."


"...the introduction to his book Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. It’s only a few pages long and it’s so good. The book is about Nabakov and Orwell, and about writing and the idea that works of imagination are the way that we arrive at new social concepts, rather than works of so-called rational deduction. In the end, what Rorty turns out to be saying is that philosophy is just another kind of writing. It doesn’t have any special grasp on the truth."

PETER: I’d like to bring up Norbert Elias again. In one of his books, he kind of refutes the idea of individual consciousness. He says consciousness only resides in the group. That seemed enormously important to me.

BRIAN: I recently read a book about the CIA’s experiments in the ‘60s and ‘70s using psychedelic drugs as interrogation tools. In the end, they found that what worked best was old-fashioned solitary confinement. It drove the subjects completely mad.

PETER: It seems that almost the biggest pain humans can feel is total aloneness.

BRIAN: Occasionally I go off for a few days just to sit somewhere on my own. I refer to it as “going into the abyss.”




"One often used to hear high art people saying that pop music was so boring and formulaic. I never thought that was true. All that formula and repetition is like a great big vehicle for carrying the moment of difference — the tiny point where something happens that didn’t happen before. As a listener, the first question I ask myself is, “Why am I moved by that? Why does that difference matter to me?”


"If something I do gets criticized, I would never say, “They didn’t understand me,” or “What I did was too good for them.” I would assume there was something wrong with what I was doing."


"I’ve often thought that there are two varieties of artists. There’s the fussy type, which I tend to be, who always censor themselves, and then there are people like Miles Davis and Prince who just say, “Look, if it came from me, it’s probably good.” "


"A few years ago I was interested in what was happening to the act of curating. I’d seen a few shows in Europe, particularly in France and Germany, where the name of the curator was bigger on the poster than the names of the artists. It’s like saying, “Here’s somebody who can draw an interesting line through our culture. He can connect a few things which you’ll probably find worth taking seriously.”


"As an English person living in America in the early-’80s, I was much more receptive than a native would have been. I didn’t have many friends there, so I would just listen to the radio. There were complete lunatics on the airwaves — people whose views seemed so objectionable. I started recording them just because I wanted to show my friends in England what people in America were listening to."


"Things always look much more calculated in retrospect. I agree that you can draw a line through the things that I did, but at the time they all seemed chaotic to me. "