"What's D.I.Y mean to you?" "D.I.Y, Do It Yourself, means answer your own damn questions live your own damn life." "To me it means nobody falls off the conveyer belt." "Means you have to stand up and jump and you have to embrace the falling of life that's what it means." "It means survival ...It means you'll have a career" "This film is about artists who exemplify and embody the D.I.Y." "or Do IT Yourself ethic." "We will profile a unique group of icons and unknowns working in various media including print, film, graphic art, cartoon art, dance and music." "The three-dozen interviewees are uniquely American artists who operate outside of any "studio system", are beholden to none, and produce influential, quality art regardless of a continuous paycheck." "Most of them are able to make a somewhat comfortable wage at their art." "Some are just scraping by." "A few are rich." "Many have been major influences on modern culture." "However, they all have a common denominator:" "The need to make art is their biggest reason to get up each morning." "The DIY movement has its roots in the punk rock culture of the mid-70s." "Unable to garnish corporate support, many began working around the "culture industry"" "to invent new channels of creative dissemination." "They put on their own concerts, made their own films, started tiny but influential record labels out of their basements, and used their bedrooms" "to review and promote each other." "The D.I.Y. l-Think-l-Can ethic exists today, driving everything from garage bands to the largest software companies in the world." "We will document this spirit in these modern mavericks as they strive to survive, to create, and to form communities against a backdrop of indifference." "Why do you do art?" "I do art because it's something that my heart feels something that changes with how I feel changes with what the world around me feels like." "It's one of the few things in the world that seemed like it called to me in any way" "Why do I do music?" "I don't think that the "why" ever enters into it." "So that's probably the reason, it's beyond why." "It's just is what I do." "I've never understood... people ask me. "How did you decide music?"" "I never DECIDED to do music." "Now I don't think of myself as a musician either." "I wake up and do something and this is what I do and this is what seemed like the most natural thing to do." "I was hoping to do this interview with my kid in the photo but it was impossible." "But the kid really is what drives me... feeding and ... this is him." "See?" "That's Mini Me." "That's what drives me." "Before he was born, I don't know what was driving me, I guess pursuit of something but I'm not really sure what it is." "But now it's like, providing for my family drives me." "I think anyone would be lying to you if they said there wasn't an ego involved in this." "I think there full of shit." "But yeah, sure it's ego, but I've worked so hard at what I do." "Every spare second I have I'm doing it and now that I'm not bartending I'm really doing it." "I just really want to share it." "I don't want to just do it and have it sit in my house." "It's really the only thing I know how to do." "Honestly." "It's pretty hopeless." "I've got to make stuff or I get really depressed." "If I don't make stuff I get can't function." "So with this piece what I did was" "I sat in a big wad of clay and I cast my ass in plaster." "And I use to love Davy Crockett and I'd wear the buckskin outfit and we'd go to "Glenn Echo", this park there'd be a" ""Davy Crockett" dude." "He go around and play the banjo and sing the song." "So when he came to our little area I knew the Davy Crockett Theme Song." "So I sang it with him." "He goes "Would you mind if I took him around with me for awhile?"" "Nowadays, "NO WAY are you out of your damn mind?" "!"" "But for me, "I'm performing!" "Too cool!"" "So I went around with him for an hour or so and sang the song with him and went," ""Uh-oh." "That's it." "I'm hooked", and that's what got me going." "Then I remember just being a kid and lying in bed." "I'm like 10 years old or 12 going, "I don't want to go to College," "I don't want to get a job, I don't want to have family, I don't want kids, I just can't do that"." "Even then I knew I couldn't." "I didn't want to do that and I was always worried what would happen and how it would come to be that I wouldn't have to be a normal person." "To some degree I think being involved with the Punk Rock scene is actually an area where I feel like it's full of deviants, people who are kind of challenging all sorts of conventional thinking." "So to the degree my interest in music or my interest in playing music has sort of brought me into this kind of underground world." "That IS the reason I do it, because it's where I feel comfortable." "I feel like it's where I can actually feel like I've accomplished something" "My job is pretty good." "I did pick this job cause I thought it would be cool if I was 60 years old to have young women or men or whatever come over to my house and take their clothes off." "I thought that would be really funny." "Seriously, that was one of the considerations when I went into this field." "Well, at first my art was my music and later on" "I just ventured into doing artwork." "But the art that I do, the Demonica Erotica Series, is what people sometimes think" "I just do for shock value." "But basically it's just what I love to do because I've been drawing since I was a baby" "Why did you start playing Punk Rock?" "Cause I just quit doing drugs and I had a whole bunch extra energy and I was drinking lots of espresso, eating lots of pastries, riding my bike everyday and" "I just couldn't help but...do it" "What would you do if you weren't playing music?" "That's a tough question..." "I'm kind of all-consumed by music" "When I first started seeing bands I realized I could play." "So it was never like I thought, "Oh, I'm going to be in a band", it was sort of like, "Well, I can play so let's get together and play some music"," "and then, "Lets write a song"." "It was all very momentary, very process oriented." "Which is exactly the way I think about things in life." "I had this grandmother who wouldn't shut up." "She talked all the time." "She'd never stop talking." "She'd talk to herself, she'd talk to you." "She would listen to you, but then she would talk." "And anything that would come to her mind she would have to say it." "I think that's the urge to write." "It's like the urge like the urge to communicate and be alone at the same time, but the need to get everything that's in your head out of your head either by saying it or writing it down." "I think is really similar." "So rather than making everybody crazy and talking too much and telling everyone everything I'm thinking, I just write it all down and just show them the good stuff." "The ultimate goal is freedom and that's what art and music and writing and literature and painting, ultimately that's what we look for when we look to someone else." "We look to them to unlatch this key to open up this door that we can go to for that second, that moment, of looking into that painting or hearing that one note finding this freedom that we so long" "as individuals to feel." "Were doing it so that we can live." "Why are we doing this?" "Were not just doing it then" ""YEA!" "we accomplished, we ran the busses on time and now were dead"." "Unless you're the bus driver on the way that says," ""Hi" to everybody and makes it a positive thing." "They're adding some art to..." "...." "You can add art to being a bus driver, you can add art to just about anything and basically it's taking whatever life is and making it better and expressing this really deep-felt core of our lives." "And if you don't have that if I don't have that, it's really bleak," "you know?" "There's nothing else." "I began to realize that it was something that I could do and it was something that kept me sane and focused, whereas" "I lack focus in every other category." "So yeah I've always done art." "I've always painted, drawn...created" "I've performed 'cause I have to." "I started performing on the stage when I was...with this person, when I was about 8 years old." "I came for a really working poor family and being on a stage and performing always somehow gave me a new perspective of myself and this idea that there weren't any limitation or boundaries when" "I was having this performance dialogue with people and it was the truth of the emotion of the situation that I want to convey and I couldn't find that in my daily life but I could find that and embody that and create" "that dialogue when I was performing for people." "We were probably approached by virtually every major label on some level." "Some of which were just someone saying," ""Hey, can we have lunch?"" "and us saying, "Hey, no."" "Never rudely, but it's like there's nothing to talk about." "The corporations and big money gigs always somehow knew instinctively not to approach me." "So it wasn't as if I had to necessarily refuse." "I was never drawn to it and they were never drawn to me." "I think my reputation preceded me from 1977 on." "It could have been because I think one time when a record company tried to not pay me," "I threatened to throw first their stereo, and then them, out the window." "And I was quite serious." "We did turn out one relatively explicit buy-out offer which would have meant a lot of money and so on." "I don't object to that and I'm not all that anti-commercial." "I just decide that the right way to do this was as a labor of love and just to keep plugging away." "Now we're doing okay despite the down-turn." "I'm just glad we did it this way." "I'm not really driven by money." "Money's the last thing I think about when I'm writing." "I've never written thinking," ""Oh, this will make me a bunch of money"." "If I was thinking about money," "I'd be writing about cartoons instead of writing about straight males in gay bars and strippers, you know what I mean?" "I don't think I write the kind of stuff that's heavily commercial at all." "I've had to call my own press." "I've had to book my own stuff." "We don't have a record company." "And I want to keep it that way." "But there were also the times we were also offered really ridiculous amounts of money." "Absurd amounts of money because they were trying to get our attention." "They were saying "We should talk about it because we would like to do ...we're talking about a million dollar deal here."" "But the thing they didn't take into account was that I'm coming from the early 80s." "For me it was no fucking joke." "This is a radical point of view." "I feel like that what we created was something, not only we the band, or we the label, or even we Washington, D.C." "I'm talking about we all these people, all these kids and young people around the United States who created this network." "We made something that was in spite of major labels, it was a parallel community." "It was legitimate, authentic music that didn't have to deal with all that nonsense" "This is not something that was for sale." "And you can't really do the things you want to do or the way you want to do things if you have to actually make art or do anything for somebody else, or if you're being paid to do it for somebody else." "That means that you're doing it for them and you're actually not purely doing the art how you express it or how you want to do it." "I just reached the point where I had to put everything I had into it, trying to make it work for me because I knew that I really wouldn't be happy doing anything else." "I used to sell my work in other galleries in Washington, D.C. and New Orleans," "but I got sick of dealing with somebody in the middle selling my work." "So that's why I opened up my own gallery." "Major labels, in general... they've really succeed in their war." "They've totally corporatized punk rock and revolution." "Because the major labels are so corrupt and obviously just in the way of the whole thing." "I mean, the distribution channel's is gone." "There is no distribution channel anymore." "It's all bytes and there's no need to push around on a little silver disc anymore." "It's not necessary." "At this point in my life," "I prefer not to be on one." "But if I were, it would be under certain terms which they would seldom agree to, especially an artist on my level." "But besides that, major labels are not interesting." "It's boring!" "To me most major labels' music is not that interesting." "What would those terms be?" "That they at least use a little lube before I give them privilege of fucking me." "It's usually when something doesn't... you get to a stage and then somebody asks you to do something that feels weird or just as far as writing songs that might have swear words in them." ""Oh, if you take this out then you can get radio play."" "There's a song on it called "Baby Dick Fuck"." "Warner Brothers asked us, they told us basically" ""If you don't take this song off, we're not gonna do this record."" "And we thought, and I'm not going to say we just said" ""Fuck you"." "We considered it seriously, and then we told them," ""No, we're not taking it off." "Fuck you."" "The truth has never been a popular commodity." "It will never sell records or books." "So therefore, it's not even a question of selling out or finding a corporate sponsorship." "They do not desire me and I do not desire them." "I look at each interview as equally important, whether it's for a zine or Rolling Stone." "Zines are more important than Rolling Stone in some ways." "Rolling Stone reaches more people, maybe." "But because of the D.I.Y. thing, zines are more important to a lot of us." "I'm not really saying you're better or worse." "You get a kink in your neck looking up at people or looking down at people but if you look right across your shoulder at your peers-no kinks." "This is part of Jam Econo, doing what it takes for you to try to realize your expression and not getting caught up in all these side issues like how to adjust the tiara on your princess head." "That's fine for other folks, but I think it gets in the way." "I like what John Coltrane said about music." "Somebody asked him," ""What are you trying to do with music?"" "He said "I'm just trying to uplift people."" "And he goes "I work for this liquor company and we'd love to use your stuff to do this bar promotion."" "I'm like "Well....." He basically remembered my strip was about drinking, a lot of drinking, and partying back in college." "It's vastly changed now." "I said that." "I said "Well, I guess I talk about drugs and stuff a little bit." "And drinking." "But mostly I deal with a lot of different issues."" "He's like "Oh, well what do you mean?"" ""Issues of race and some politics and different things like that."" "He's like "Oh, race?" "Well, that's cool man!" "'Cause this liquor is going to be marketed towards black people."" "It's circus." "Of course it's a sell out." "Like I was telling you earlier," "I wouldn't be doing historical justice to my ancestry if I didn't lie, cheat, and steal, and embellish liberally." "I think most writers are much more into people reading what they've written than they are about making a zillion dollars." "The more people that read my stuff," "I'm happiest when more people are reading it." "It's bad enough that we're so fucked up to begin with but then to cry when the words aren't coming fast enough." "Because you've exhausted that memory of your ex-girlfriend, your dead mother, your fucked-up friends who you don't really worry about, your job, and the money." "Always the money, where's the fucking money?" "I was like "You don't understand." "I'm not going to do it."" "I didn't even get into it really with him." "I didn't want to continue the conversation." "I didn't want to hear how much money they'd be offering or anything." "It doesn't really matter because in the end, you gotta sleep at night." "And whether it's on a nice, cushy, squishy bed or a little futon, you still gotta sleep at night." "And I ain't going to sleep any better on either type of thing." "It's not like it is in the books." "Me and Mark barely make enough to eat and survive right now." "Even though we pay this overhead that we're all in in this studio." "It comes in waves." "Sometimes you sell a bunch of paintings, sometimes you wonder why you're doing it financially." "But it's fun to make your own artwork." "You feel good at the end of the day." "You're broke a lot." "I only think about money when I'm on my last dollar you know, I think, "Fuck man, I'm poor again." "I don't get it, how do I keep getting so poor?"" "And then once I got a few bucks put away, then all the sudden I'm not thinking about it at all." "Which at some point I think will lead me to abject poverty." "Why do you sell your records so cheap?" "First off, it's real economy, since the label doesn't actually act like most labels, and we're not bothered by the kind of structure that most entertainment labels use, which is largely legally based: a lot of copyrights and stuff." "We don't have contracts, we don't have lawyers, we don't hire out press agents, we just don't take in all the mess." "It's very simple what we do." "So therefore, we know what the real economy is, like what we spend on a project and then how much we can sell it for to make that money back and then make enough money for the artist and for everything to continue on." "Do you recorded your own stuff ever?" "Yes." "Produce it and recorded it at home?" "Yes." "Why do you do that as opposed to paying lots of money and going into a studio and having someone else do it and having it maybe sound a little bit better and cost a lot more?" "Exactly." "Dealing with agents or whatever, managers or whatever the hell," "I can easily trust myself." "I don't know wear people's intentions are in the long run with big business, being from the music industry." "Come to find out, the art industry is exactly just as evil as the music industry." "I suppose that's why I've always try to do things myself." "It's really hard to do, because it costs a lot of money." "So I try to live my life as inexpensively as possible so I can actually save money to publish my own books or my own postcards or whatever." "So I think, from our point of view, on the one hand, it's based on a real economy." "The second half of that equation is that" "I buy records and I'd rather buy a record for ten dollars than fifteen dollars." "What do you think of Napster?" "I think it benefits the artist on a smaller level and maybe not the ones who are already millionaires." "That's good" "But hey, I think the people who aren't millionaires deserve to benefit more than the people who are, at this point, for myself." "There's many schools of thought, and people that really stand up and are vocal about it are the ones saying," ""Look, it helps to promote you and blah blah blah", but I think there's just this huge school of thought that just think they shouldn't have to pay for music, and I think that's just bullshit." "As the bandwidth increases and we can get CD-quality digital music" "And movies." "and movies as fast as we get MP3s, then the crucial issue is going to be how to figure out how to compensate all the people fairly for their art and cutting out the middleman who has no purpose anymore." "I published my own stuff so I started publishing zines and I started leaving them for free at different comic book stores around the city." "This one guy said, "Hey man, don't leave them for free, you've got to sell them for something, sell them for a dollar", because people don't value it." "If they get something for free, they'll just toss it out." "And if people have paid for something, they value something." "They'll hold on to it and treat it a little more respectfully." "It's a real finesse kind of a deal, compelling people to plan an evening, buy a ticket, get in their car and go see something their better nature tells them they shouldn't see." "All right stand on my head." "It's the lowest form of entertainment." "Tell your friends, thank you for coming, get the fuck off my head!" "I'll shoot a band for two hundred dollars or shoot a friend for two hundred dollars just for some instant cash." "But if a band from a record company comes to me and says, "We need some photographs,"" "I'm going to charge them a fortune." "I would sit in the studio and stare out the window, sit on the couch and think, "Wow, it's costing me a thousand dollars to stare out the window"." "Somehow I would be paralyzed in that position just thinking that the day would go by and I'd leave and there was a thousand dollars out the window." "And I figured I can do that at home." "Doing it myself with no agent or anything means" "I'm just basically doing a lot of hustling." "Like running around town right now in this taxicab going to the recording studio to hang some artwork there and then I have to run to Trash and Vaudeville clothing store to try to peddle my T-shirts onto them." "So basically it's a lot of scrambling for money." "But I'm so highly organized and structured and I've kept my overhead so low and I've been able to find outlets, but I have to live my life six months in advance in order to support myself." "And most people can't do that." "It becomes very frustrating because you feel as if your trapped by time almost." "Because you have to know what's going to happen." "Because otherwise you might have to get a day job." "And that's just anathema to my nature." "I haven't had a job this time for like six months and I'm going to see if I can just never ever have a day job ever again, 'cause I hate working." "He wants to know what I do for the company what I think of the new product how much my stock options are worth." "I tell him the truth:" ""This is sort of weird", I say," ""But I'm supposed to be here to read poetry."" "And no matter what happens" "I'll never get more than minimum wage because there's so many hours to account for before I can pass that mark." "So anybody that writes for money you know, probably the same with music, is just a fool." "Why don't you have an agent?" "Uumm, ten percent." "Why don't I have a manager?" "Fifteen percent." "Why don't I have publicist?" "Five thousand dollars a month." "What would you be doing if you weren't doing this?" "I'd be a publicist." "I don't consider what I do art because it encompasses so many fields," "I really think I'm more of a journalist, no matter format my creativity takes." "I think that I'm documenting the truth, whether it's through music, photography, video, spoken word, illustrated word, written word, the art of it is in surviving as an independent creator." "I've never thought, for instance, that anything" "I've ever done was anything but a success." "Because if I actually did it, like if I actually got together with someone and played it was an incredible success." "And if I wrote a song, then it was a incredible success." "I never thought there was a line and if I reach this line then I'm successful." "I've been successful since the beginning." "I think everyone is." "It's just been an illusion that we're not." "Why do you do it yourself?" "The main reason is to make sure it gets done, and then later on I guess you fall in love with it and you come up with a lot of reasons why it's the right way, and then you figure out that everybody has a different path" "and maybe your path is this way." "And the more things you can do two at once really helps." "Like this whole truck, this truck really helps to get the word out about the band and in the daytime I move furniture." "An artist, an American artist, West Coast artist, female artist, queer artist, living artist." "Great American living queer West Coast female artist?" "Yeah." "I don't really consider myself someone that does art." "I feel more like I'm someone who takes photographs and shows those photographs in art galleries." "I use to think I was an artist, but my definition of what's an artist is kinda clouded to me." "You know basically someone who uses the Internet and computers, to again, glorify the individual and to fight things like corporate hypocrisy and all that crap." "That's what I think of." "And that's definitely a D.I.Y sort of ethic if that's what you wanna call it." "Again it's empowerment and it realizing the tools are their for anybody if you just learn to use them." "I don't think of myself, "Oh I'm a woman artist and I really try to speak to women or not to speak to women", nothing like that." "I'm just a human being." "I'm just a soul." "As you get older I think the growing up process is all about finding your spirituality." "I think you can't actually grow up at all" "(like I really wanna grow up)" "But there's a certain amount you have to do to in order to become one with the Earth and your planet and your fellow human being to not fuck each other over and I think the only way to really do that on a really consistent" "like compassionate, and really selfless level is through spirituality." "Finding what your spirituality is and letting go of a lot of everyday anger and frustration and just" "even praying a little bit (dare I say that?" ")." "Do you think there's a spirituality in punk rock?" "Definitely, well there is now." "I think there's been phases of it where it's just like" ""Let's just get fucked up, do a lot a speed, drink a lot of beer and have a lot of perv sex", and that was punk rock for a while...fashion, "Lets shock people" "with our outlandish piercings."" "But I think people are more "Let's use punk like people used to use folk music:" "to move people." "To change things"." "Well my spirituality is anal, my personality is introverted," "and my sexuality is muted." "What is your name, Matt, and do you consent to be filmed?" "Yeah my name is Matt Enger," "Mark's brother." "Mark's older brother." "Older by how long?" "Two minutes." "So does that mean you win the arguments, because you're older?" "No, I just had to brave the world first" "Do you guys fight?" "Yes, every day, all the time." "Do you love each other?" "Yeah." "What's it like being partners with your brother?" "It's beautiful." "It's the most beautiful thing in the world and it's the most horrible thing in the world, because it's like your married to him and you can't get a divorce." "We both know exactly what to say to cut the other one to shreds with our mouths." "We're good at sparring with each other and you gotta be careful in your personal life that you don't talk to your girlfriend or something like that, 'cause I can send my girlfriend into a total freakout with just a few words, 'cause I'm use to fighting with him." "Do you ever fist fight with him?" "Yeah, all the time." "I'm not proud of it." "But sometimes you have to." "Who wins?" "Nobody" "Well, I have great friends and I have the ability to make music, to create music, to write music, and I've got a great family." "Knowing good people is a great thing." "I feel rich in that regard, and the fact I'm fortunate enough to be allowed to play music." "So really, that's most of what I need." "It's never been an issue of like," ""Well, it's time for us to get real"." "They've always been real." "That's the problem with American society:" "Everyone says "It's time to get real"." "Fuck that." "You're real from the beginning, so get with it." "I like being on stage." "I like touring and being in the studio." "I love writing songs and playing for my friends at a party." "Because it's music and it is truly the most wonderful thing there is." "That is, of course, my opinion, which matters more than most people's." "What's your book about?" "About a speed freak bike messenger in love with a stripper" "And her road to enlightenment." "I'm sure that's a stretch for you." "Yeah, it was." "I made it up" "Oh." "I was supposed to say," ""Most men seem to think", oh excuse me." ""Most men either seek war, sex, money, fame or some combination of these four." "I make my living documenting sex and providing sexual fantasies for people but I don't think of myself as a big sex maniac"." "Sometimes I dress just in lingerie and high heels" "or something like that." "Sometimes I feel more introspective and it's not so crazy, so involving..." "I just want to be true to the mood I'm in." "It's about being true to the mood you're in:" "being honest with who you are." "Would I kill for my art?" "Probably." "We're all victims of whatever circumstance, whether it's religious indoctrination, classist structure, the family structure which is the microcosm of the fascist organization." "Being bullied, being a freak." "I mean we are all on this planet now, on this planet forever, in one way or another, we have been victimized, unless we are that very small elite cult of people that have been born blessed." "But in this country, you can never have enough bombs, you can never have enough money, you can never be tall enough, blond enough white enough, rich enough or" "Republican enough to suit their tastes." "Criticism sucks." "Well, I think artists deal with criticism differently." "It depends a lot on if they're doing it because they care about their art, or if they're doing it because they're trying to prove something to somebody, or to themselves." "The first question I ask is," ""Where is the criticism coming from?"" "I mean, who is it coming from?" "Where is it coming from?" "If it's mean spirited?" "Mean-spirited criticism is just worthless, it's just somebody else putting you down for trying something." "I tried to take a music class in seventh grade." "Put me on the clarinet and after ten weeks, his name was Mr. Luna, he says," ""Watt, you try hard but you just don't have it."" "When I first saw Hendrix or movies and listened to Hendrix and the Beatles," "I thought, like, "God, I'd love to be in a band."" "But it was obviously completely out of my reach." "It was for professionals, really, it wasn't something" "that I would be able to do, because I couldn't play guitar, you know, I was not trained." "And besides that, anyone who grew up in the 70's knew that rock and roll was like a gallery princes and princesses." "It was like royalty:" "like you had to be anointed by God to play music." "Like you gotta be born with this talent." "Or you just know somebody and you got in the band as an assistant hair tech, or something." "It was just jive." "I think music's for bringing people in and not for shoving people out." "That's the way I look at it." "The money is starting to come in, but it's, a struggle, it's always a struggle." "And I'm fine with it because I grew up on the Lower East Side and it was just always a struggle." "We grew up really poor, so now, doing this is a great way for me to show myself that yeah," "I can fucking make it on my own." "Especially in Manhattan in the art world, even if they know you personally, they could have known you for years and they don't really like your work or you until they hear it from someone else that they respect." "And I also hate being accused of being an imitation of the people who imitated me in the first place." "I recently took a visit to Tower Books, and was looking through some magazines, just maybe for some source material." "I was looking at the stands and three magazines popped to my eye and those were all three magazines that had my name on the cover, with huge features." "Which was really, of course, exciting." "But at the same time, as I picked them up and was about to take them to the counter," "I realized I only had three dollars in my pocket." "I haven't paid rent in two months and they're going to shut the power off and the phone gets shut off all the time and I know everybody down at PGE and the phone company." "I know all the girls and how to talk to them and da da da and all the stories just to make it stretch." "Eviction." "We lost our practice space, my band did, and now I'm fighting an owner move-in eviction." "I can't tell you how many illegal owner move-ins I was a part of that really pissed me off." "I think we just have to be very wary of how our time is stolen from us." "And I could have not created the body of work that I have, at this age, at this stage of my life if I had let the Internet and television and bars and rock concerts, that ultimately enriched me in no way," "take my time." "There's no way I could have created ...it's not as if work is the only thing I live for because it certainly isn't and I need outside experiences and I constantly want to know what's going on" "and what people are doing." "However:" "You just have to be cautious." "So much exists in order to steal your energy, and your time and I just, I won't have it." "In the big scheme of things when stuff gets really rough and horrible in your life it's like the one thing you can do is you can produce art" "And the worst times in your life you'll produce some of the greatest art and it's just something that you can return to and be proud of if you look at some of the work that you've done during some of the bad times." "Maybe right now we could be on the verge of the next great explosion in underground and independent music because if you look at the history of it, the height of the cold war," "Eisenhower years is when you saw the emergence of rock and roll." "And then in the turbulent sixties you saw the hippie movement and then in the height of the recession and economic upheaval in America and Britain you saw the emergence of punk and then in the Reagan Years you saw all the American hardcore and indie stuff" "really take off." "And for the last ten years, through the nineties, there was nothing really happening because people were prosperous, people were happy, they were fat, they were sitting in front of their computers and they're making money" "and so they're not going out to see music and they're not really angry with anything." "They want to keep the status quo and keep what they've got and now the economy is unraveling and there is tension in the air and people realize, you know what?" "We've gotta get out there and say something." "We have to do something with our lives we need to create and make that creation meaningful." "What advice do you have for kids coming up today that want to do it themselves?" "Well, it takes awhile." "Learn how to make something that you think is good, despite what everybody else thinks." "Give yourself some time to find out who you are and who you want to show the world who you are." "If they are somebody that really doesn't have a choice but to keep doing this thing they love to do, like they didn't choose it, it chose them, even though it sounds kind of corny." "But that's actually the way it happens a lot of times, then just be prepared for a lot of work and probably a lot of rejection and probably not so much success." "But, if you need to do it, then the ends justifies the means anyway, so it will be all right." "Just do it, any way possible." "I don't care if you have to steal the materials." "Just do it, and keep improving on your skill factor." "The finest and hardest thing to do is to just keep up a level of skill that's just unmatchable even the way you wrap the canvass." "Everything really well packaged, put together, whatever that package is." "Come up with a format, come up with your images and just keep developing those images." "It will naturally develop into your own visual language, if you just keep doing it long enough" "Don't get too discouraged man, because" "I've been living in rat dens for about fifteen years, just now getting my head above water." "And like I said just never lose touch with what you just want to create for yourself." "The whole falling into" ""Oh, maybe I'll get signed, maybe I'll get chosen."" "It's so easy to lose your own personal vision in that." "And if you're waiting for the validation of that external stamp to hit your forehead, you'll either get a short-lived ego blast or a long-lived ego blast that will end." "The only specific advice I would ever have is to say, "Just do whatever you do because you love it."" "That way, if in the future it doesn't turn into like selling tens of thousands of records or it wasn't the most beautiful painting or the most incredible sculpture ever, at least you enjoyed yourself while you were doing" "it and you were doing something that you loved." "My only advice for up-and-coming photographers always has been and always will be to get a model release from the people you're shooting." "You never know when you're going to be able to use that work off in the distant future." "I can tell you I had a really hard time collecting model releases for stuff I did in the 80s" "I had to collect it them the early 90s, it was difficult." "I warn people of the world where they're just waiting for someone to pick them." "You don't do it for money." "You don't do it for pleasure either." "I don't know why you do it." "You just do it because you have to do it." "You just fucking do it" "..I've peddled some bands through the lowest ebbs of their careers." ""Where's the drummer?"" ""He's dead, just keep rowing."" ""We lost another one."" ""Just keep going."" ""At least they brought their own weed, they seem cool," ""We'll let them on the boat." "Oh we gotta lose him!"" "BAM!" "You just keep doing it." "You're just steering." "You don't know where you're going." "You're on the road less fucking traveled, man." "Just keep going forward." "So I think anybody who likes to play music should just do it regardless, quit your job, run away, join the circus, be a musician and live on the street." "We can't use that part, I hit a wrong note!" "A lot of people say," ""I can't believe you're able to exist just doing your art."" "And that's what you've got to stop and think about and be happy about because there's a lot of people that say," ""I used to draw"." "That kills me more than anything else when people sit there and say, "I used to do this", or "I used to do that"." "I say "Why don't you do it anymore?"" ""Oh there's no money in it."" "Is that the priority?" "Is that really the priority?" "If it made you happy, then that's better than anything else." "And I suggest that anyone taking photographs of someone always pays the people, even if it's a dollar, so they don't come back the line and say," ""You're making money off of me, where's my cut?"" "Real fast" "Wrap up?" "The main thing is about the rider." "That's what I've learned about being an independent artist." "When you really graduate, you get to ask for things like towels." "You have to make it happen." "You can't wait for some hand to come out of the sky and say" ""Here's a really cool gig, here's a really cool opportunity."" "You've gotta take what you get and make it sensational." "Do it yourself and don't wait for a trust fund or a grant or think anyone's gonna come and help you." "Buck up your resources, get a job if you have to, find a way to gather the money and just do it." "It's not that difficult." "You have to just have the will to do it." "There's no secret." "There's no mystery as to how you create as to how you produce as to how you collaborate." "The thing is to have the balls to decide," ""I'm gonna do it", and do it." "I can't imagine not doing it myself." "It doesn't matter if nobody gets it, because most of the things that turned out the best have a period where nobody understood it, and how would they?" "Because you're doing something that's new." "If you believe in what you are doing, just keep it up, be good at it, don't get lazy with it, just follow through." "If no one ever knows who you are, at least you knew who you were." "For me, I don't actually have any kind of hobby really, outside of music, you know, I don't have hobbies." "All I do is just be me, is just basically what I do." "But I would play piano on my own;" "you know, I'll fool around." "I think, probably in the world of competitive piano playing, that I would probably come in very close to last." "But luckily, I don't actually exist in that world," "I just love to play piano, and I can never fail."