READIN

Thursday, March 19th, 2009

🦋 The Practical Uses of Discomfort

Robyn Hitchcock speaks with Paul Byrne of Movies.ie about making Rachel Getting Married (which sounds like a whole lot of fun) and about Sex, Food, Death, and Insects.

Byrne: During [Sex, Food, Death, and Insects] you said at one point, "At heart I'm a frightened, angry person -- that's why my stuff isn't totally insubstantial, I'm constantly deep down inside in a kind of rage..." And it made me think, well, here you've got people like Gillian Welch and... Jonathan Demme's a fan... you've been playing music for a long time, The Soft Boys and everything, and I was thinking does that make it easier? Because for a lot of artists, to have some kind of recognition, some outlet, you know, eases the soul a bit, I don't know whether, is it still true that you have that rage in you? I guess you only said it last year so maybe it is still true...

Hitchcock: I haven't had enough therapy to get rid of it completely, you know, just enough to find it... Yeah, everybody is at some level of discomfort. Even the people you mention. And some people are in more pain than others, some people know what to do with their discomfort. You know, I mean I could be playing with my hair, I could be, you know, picking on an E♭ or something like that, I could be smoking except it's illegal to smoke now; there's all these manifestations of what to do with your own dis-ease... For me, I turn it into music, and a lot of other people I know; that's how we metabolize. We breathe in life and we breathe out music; it keeps us sane and it seems to be somehow good for the environment, you know, like plants take in CO₂ and produce oxygen, we take in the anxiety of life and give out music. And I'm very happy to be able to do that.

posted evening of March 19th, 2009: Respond
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Monday, March 26th, 2007

I just did something I have never done, which is to call my cable provider and order a channel. To wit, I ordered the Sundance Channel, because tomorrow night at 10 they are premiering John Edgington's documentary, "Robyn Hitchcock: Sex, Death, Food, and Insects". This looks like it will be really good -- you can see some trailers at the Sundance web site, although the rest of the internets seem not to have heard about it yet. This anecdote made my day.

...The reason the rest of the internets have not heard about it, is that the title is actually "Robyn Hitchcock: Sex, Food, Death, and Insects". Here is the press release.

posted morning of March 26th, 2007: Respond
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