I’m looking at the two ancient yew trees that frame the door that leads outside the compound. I don’t know their pronouns, but I spend most of my time with them. Our garden was the village burial ground at some point. One of my dogs used to bring us what looked a lot like a femur or a proximal
phalange from time to time. Somehow not as creepy as one might expect. I like to imagine what this place looked like in the 12th century. We have a dog now who arranges his (non-human) bones in large circles in the garden. Bonehenge, he calls it. He’s my favourite designer.

Sometimes I just see the things that need attending to. Other times I think: ‘This would be the perfect house if one lived in the Keys or Panama or Montserrat…’ It’s always freezing inside. There’s usually a week in late July when a hot-water bottle is not essential. If you’re lucky. It can be 100°F (Fahrenheit: the scale that makes no sense!) outside & it’ll still be 53°F inside.

Yes! When I look back at my life, at this point, from this vantage, I’m flummoxed & impressed by the intricate pattern revealed – by the spooky specificity of each detail that had to be carefully arranged in order for It to be Now. Filigree of trade winds. My partner’s father was a book collector, literary critic & best friends with Violette Leduc who did some of her best writing here, upstairs. He was also friends with Cendrars. Henry Miller has one of the best chapters on Cendrars in his The Books in My Life, which is so good I’ve read it at least 20 times. Now I’m questioning the wisdom of even mentioning it to anyone, never mind here in this fashion magazine where everyone pretends to complain about the fashion business. It’s that good. But I think my secret’s safe because 99% of people don’t actually read. Anything. Especially fashionable people who pretend they are afraid to talk frankly about the fashion biz.

I was already around 20 when I first came to Paris on my own. I had been living in NYC, attending SVA & studying with Hannah Wilke & Joseph Kosuth. I had already met Herbert Huncke & was spending a lot of time with Burroughs at the Bunker during the afternoons. Started doing a few things for Italian Vogue with Arthur Elgort. Modelling was my side gig, just something that happened. It paid more than the Village Chess Shop where I put together games between angry Russian taxi drivers (50 cents!), many of whom were ranked masters. Mostly angry. I remain an average chess player, at best. My friend Andrew’s aunt owned the shop for years & Andrew financed his time at SVA by being the chess consultant on a long-running soap opera – can’t remember which one – but he was there to make sure this ongoing TV chess game (which took place over a year!) was correct. I guess they didn’t
want sacks of mail from Midwestern housewives outraged by a faulty castling or rogue bishop.

I’m not sure I had any expectations, I was just going with the flow at the time. It seemed exactly how it should have seemed. I spent a lot of time wandering around like a free man in Paris.

I’m not sure that my experience was typical. I worked right from the beginning so I never went through that go-sell-your-self-go-see process. I doubt I’d have been any good at that. I’m not a people person. No one has ever accused me of having a great personality. I’m not a sought-after dinner guest. I didn’t want it. I didn’t give a fuck. Not pretend not-give-a-fuck but like zero interest. Never crossed my mind as something I’d choose to do. When I was a kid I had hyperlexia, elective mutism & was only recently diagnosed with ASD, which explains a lot. Performing femininity was not on the top of my list of things I thought I might be good at. I still don’t get it.

Uhm… I was pretty tight with Julien d’Ys, Freddie from City, Tony Viramontes, Teri Toye, Philippe Krootchey, you, Victor Fernandez… Oddly enough Farida, Christine, Dominique Issermann, Claudia Hubrodos, Jeny Howorth… I don’t know, I’d have to think about it. It’s like I’ve had six lifetimes in this one & I really haven’t thought about that chapter for a long time.

If they were important at the time I didn’t know that. I just liked them as humans because they were not false with me. Their energy matched their words. Three very different humans, all kind, creative & industrious. Azzedine was sweet. Gaultier was/is mischievous. Helmut (the human) was/remains an intellectual & an artist. All of them were supremely talented & equally as kind & generous with me. It seemed normal to me. People doing what they liked to do.

Didn’t really think about it. I’d already hung around other women photographers like Annie Leibovitz, with Bill King, on a more social level. If by social you mean driving around in a limo, stopping off at their coke dealer’s mews house & going to the Anvil – then taking freaky pics with a street boy Bill
picked up. With Issermann, I was mostly just friends, I never worked with her on the regular, but I would go to her house & watch films with her & Krootchey. It’s the first time I saw any Cocteau films, Tati & all the FR classics. I’m thinking of Au Hasard Balthazar right now. How ’bout you? As far as work – I’m not Issermann’s type. She likes a body & a graceful line. I lack both of those & I have man hands. Huge. Hands. Man. In my opinion some of her best photographs of women is the series/book she did of Marguerite Duras. Issermann never listens to my music. That I know of. We talk about other
things. We talk about Leonard & we talk about Formula One racing, architecture, film & diseases.

Not sure I’m ready to weigh in on Freddie. That’s a book. She singlehandedly par hasard changed fashion by entirely disregarding outmoded ideas of what a beautiful, interesting woman might look like. Extremely underrated. Criminally underrated. She lured me away from Elite fairly quickly after
I arrived in Paris. I was at a café – she was sitting on the other side, staring at me & I said: ‘What the fuck are you looking at?’ Turns out we were both waiting for a RDV with the same shady person. Surprise! It felt good to get away from those creepy-crawly Elite people – not just the men: all of them. Super creeps. They were going to ‘fire’ me from the agency when I cut my hair. Oops. When I first came to Elite Paris they would have a bunch of the new ‘girls’ go out to dinner at a fancy restaurant (cue Sinéad), so they could see who was good for ‘pimping’ out. I didn’t make the cut. I already knew which fork to use.

Yes, I liked Rei & Yohji. Still do. I liked not being able to talk to them because it’s easier for me to really see someone when there’s not a bunch of BS coming out of their mouths. I’m pretty sure I met them in Tokyo first, before they even came to Paris.

Peter was something else entirely. Easy-going. Kind human. I memorized his light set-up (when in the studio). I guess he was already important but, you have to remember, all this was well before supermodel days when he became whatever it was he became & fashion became what it became. At the time ‘nobody was watching you, Mime’ (to quote Majora’s Mask). I was a model for maybe five years total. I did do some stuff later with Italian Vogue with Franca S. & Albert Watson – by which time I already had two daughters. This was after I had started making music. Franca was very kind to me over the years. She never needed anyone else to tell her what to think. She took me to a lot of museums. She took me to (the other) Giacometti’s studio for no reason. Not on work time. Because she knew. I’ve never seen those Lindbergh photos except for the pram one, which I saw online.

Most of my crimes were self-offence. I did have some weirdos who cut their hair like me & copied my clothes & sent creepy ‘presents’ to my agency. Stalkers, really. There were a lot of desperate models trying to ‘make it’ which hardly ever works. I guess it works now. It’s kind of a pay-to-play situation now from the little I’ve seen. Either rich people’s kids with extensive work or the ‘I’ll do anything for free for the exposure’ camp. So, the rich ones get paid crazy cash & the others work for the glory. Oh, the glory of it all!

Hmmmm. Emerson. Yes, I grew up in Massachusetts, so I have a particular penchant for New England writers. Oddly, I lived a street away from Anne Sexton when I was young & then on the street where Sylvia Plath grew up when I came back to Massachusetts to take care of my grandmother. Steeped in the Transcendentalists, Emily Dickinson, Melville & Hawthorne. Spent much of my childhood swimming in Walden pond.

‘Have you ever read The Marble Faun?’ springboks to mind. Dickinson’s mother grew up in the same town I was born in & is buried next to my bio-family’s plot. The plot thickens. Spent a lot of time contemplating the fact that Emily Dickinson & the colonization of the Wild Wild West were happening at the same time. Made a song some years back called

‘Half Past Three Cowboy’ where I deconstruct her:

At Half past Three, a single Bird
Unto a silent Sky
Propounded but a single term
Of cautious melody.

At Half past Four, Experiment
Had subjugated test
And lo, Her silver Principle
Supplanted all the rest.

At Half past Seven, Element
Nor Implement, be seen —
And Place was where the Presence was
Circumference between.

Currently doing a version of:

Ashes denote that Fire was —
Revere the Grayest Pile
For the Departed Creature’s sake
That hovered there awhile —

Fire exists the first in light
And then consolidates
Only the Chemist can disclose
Into what Carbonates.

I imagine her, ever so occasionally, making the carriage ride from Amherst to Boston & as I recite the poem however many times, my Boston accent getting more prominent as she reaches Boston. ‘Revere’ is particularly fulfilling in a hard Boston accent, kid. It sounds wicked fuckin’ cool. Horse hooves. Wanted to use horse hooves ever since the mid-90s. One of my daughters was in the Boston Children’s Opera & during rehearsals the rest of us’d take the drive-thru tour of Mount Auburn Cemetery. I done the apple tree thing many times. At the entrance they’d give you a cassette that had a clip-clop sound of a horse carriage during the parts in between the explanations of Mary Baker Eddy’s monument & progressively less interesting dead people. Clip clop, clip clop, clip clop. I should have just kept it because I’ve spent years trying to track one down – but I also suspect that the one in my head may be better, like a lot of things.

You take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders,
but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.
—Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino

I’m not sure. I was fairly busy getting high. I lived on Rue d’Assas for a while, 112; 40 years later I still can’t say douze properly. Or roi. One day I realized that Samuel Beckett lived nearby. I couldn’t believe it. Every day I wasn’t working I would go to La Coupole & watch him eat his lunch. The waiter kind of knew what I was doing so he’d set me up just the right distance away behind a plant or at a banquette at a perfectly discreet angle. Beckett was beautiful & looked, as everyone knows, like a magnificent bird of prey. I never talked to him. I ate the same thing every time. I’ll leave it up to you to
imagine what that might have been. Like a common Malloy.

Yes, I think so. I had already been doing features on other people’s records in London & after being able to sit in the control room with Trevor Horn & seeing how he worked I figured I may as well learn how to work the recording console at Première Heure. We both know how good I wasn’t at my job.
So I started by reading the manual for the desk we had there: an Akai 12-track that saved to beta tapes! I wouldn’t mind having one of those now – it had a warm warm ssssound that I liked. Yes, so, thank you Première Heure. He fired me soon afterward, but I had already recorded ‘Kind of Easy’ with
Karl Bonnie from RSW.13 The owner of PH hated the track & was completely dismissive of it & me. Hahahahahhahaha-ha. They had good food there for a while. I saw him a few years ago at a viewing of Baillie Walsh’s brilliant Springsteen film. I fucking loved that Springsteen doc of Baillie’s. When I tell people I like Springsteen, like LOVE him, they always laugh nervously like I’m being ironic (or moronic, some -ic) but I straight up Love him without reserve. Most Europeans think he’s like Middle America at its worst. They think ‘Born in the USA’ is a pro-war song. They just don’t get the Boss. But I do. Have you ever heard his version of Suicide’s ‘Dream Baby Dream’? I could make tracks for the rest of my life just sampling Nebraska. Recorded on a 4-track! Impossible & sublime.

Yes, Jon Baker from Gee Street Records16 heard ‘Kind of Easy’ & wanted to put Karl & me in the studio in London so we moved back there & went into the studio where we made ‘When He Come Back’ & ‘Lost Flight’. F brilliant new tunes with Helen Terry absolutely goosebump crushing it on b/r vox. She remains one of my favourite singers of all time. Unfortunately or fortunately, Jon Baker absolutely hated the tracks (what’s he doing now, again?), but wouldn’t give us the masters. Karl managed to steal the tapes back & then I signed to Rhythm King & made Witch.

Walkers are ‘practitioners of the city’, for the city is made to
be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities,
and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting
from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be
said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker
invents other ways to go.
—Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit

Yes, the walker invents other ways to go. I got kind of obsessed with the notion of desire paths for a while there. Desire paths are those deviation people-made paths that are most noticeable in a place that was designed to be family, housing & green friendly. Some poor landscape architect crippled by the anxiety of student-loan debt decides to put concrete pathways going from point A to point B. Everyone who is supposed to be using these pre-decided official pathways decides to make their own pathways from point A to point B – sometimes you can see the rational: shortcutting & so forth – but sometimes it’s for no reason at all that you can see. Maybe principle. For some reason I’m thinking of Magnetic Fields’ ‘Railroad Boy’ right now. No idea why. I will not sing your ugly song. I won’t put on your ugly play. I cannot join your ugly priesthood.

I will not sing your ugly song.
I won’t put on your ugly play.
I cannot join your ugly priesthood.

Not any more.

I like to spend a lot of time in the woods, either hiking, mushroom hunting or riding my neighbour’s e-bike which seems to replicate the power I had when I was eight.

Paris is a woman but London is an independent man
puffing his pipe in a pub.
—Lonesome Traveler, Jack Kerouac

I go to Paris maybe three or four times a year. That’s enough for me. It remains surprising that way. Parisians seem even more bourgeois than before. If such a thing be possible.

Just makes me think of William’s musings on the British – paraphrased: ‘If the British ever made it to the moon the first thing they’d do after disembarking would be to look around for inferiors.’

Yeah, Paris is a ho with a big bourgeois heart of gold that might be stolen by a ring of journal-less parkouring teenaged thieves who dream of being in Supreme ads. Like all well socialized young people in this late-stage capitalist dystopia we’re currently living in; if Twitter & social media are to
be believed & s/wallowed in. If you don’t know what they’re trying to sell you: the product is You. All these chumps creating free content for the feedlot overseers. Like, like, like. You’re working for the man, people. You’re giving it away. Bunch of chimps down by the nickel slots. ‘Cute shoes.’

I went to London to stay with John Maybury after we first met in Tokyo. He says I was dancing on a table but I have no memory of that. Seems doubtful. My dancing skills have not improved over the years. Unlike yours. Favourite photo ever. Insert here.

Tough question. I’m thinking of everything & it’s a lot. I’m thinking of Fritz right now for some reason & maybe Alan.

I’m thinking of all the dead boys. Now.

Leigh Bowery, Taboo
I was friends with Leigh because we had Trojan in common. Leigh was always super kind to me & I would often see him on the late bus (him) dressed as a wedding cake – I never remember him wearing the same thing twice. There’d be kids giving him shit, but then, somehow, they kind of always trailed off… maybe they got a look at those rugby legs & thought better of it. My favourite Leigh look was his daytime look. Grey wig askew, cardigan, cords & CLOGS. Extreme! No one’s copied that look yet. I’m talking to you, Rick Owens.

John Maybury, film collaborations
What can I say about John Maybury? Best friends for quite some time. I can hear him painting.

Alan Macdonald, Sage
Alan – gone too soon – really the quiet unassuming leader of ‘Pack of Fags’ as he called the posse. ‘The Bronte Brothers.’ Baillie Walsh had newspaper names for all of you & his newspaper name for Alan was The Observer. Supremely talented, kind human, also mean AF when warranted. Secretive &
sweet. Never the same since Fritz died. Sometimes he seemed like a wise old man & sometimes like a little kid.

Sinéad O’Connor, collaboration on the track ‘Just Call Me Joe’ on The Lion and the Cobra
Ah, Sinéad. Voice of an angel. I don’t know Sinéad all that well. Never spent any time alone with her or really even had a conversation of any note. She was either afraid of me or disliked me. She can throw it down though. Fact.

Trojan, ‘Little Ghost’
I met Trojan in Tokyo, a couple of years before I met Maybury there. It was in the middle of the night, I was walking down an empty street heading toward one of those hot canned coffee machines they have for no reason in the middle of residential areas. I could hear someone coming from the other direction – but it can’t be – I see a very large Little Bo Peep with sheep crook. Larger than it had to be on platforms with 14 petticoats & oversized shepherdess dress coming my way. Big puffy mutton dressed as lamb-leg sleeves. He was like: ‘Alright ?’ I was like, ‘Uhm, yeah, how ’bout you?’ & we hung out for the rest of the time in Tokyo. The next time I saw him was in Camden Town at Maybury’s. All this talk about Leigh, justifiable of course, all these designers still pilfering & deconstructing what Leigh did all those years ago – but Trojan was even more extreme in a lot of ways. I miss him most, sometimes.

Boy George, covered the song ‘Little Ghost’
George. What can you say about George? Everybody loves George. Curiously. Both Leigh & Trojan could be particularly cruel about George, but who’s to say? Also, they didn’t discriminate. I did receive an odd e-mail from George a few years ago asking if he could borrow £500. I must have read
that e-mail 50 different ways trying to figure out why George would, completely out of the blue, find my e-mail address & write to ask ME to borrow money. Maybe it was a joke. No idea. Did anyone else get one?

I knew Viv from the old Sex days & Malcolm, but I only really reconnected with her these past years since her partnership with Andreas Kronthaler. They are extremely kind people & not at all fashion-y. We talk about books or costumes. They made me a winter suit, which I wear every day. It’s sort of based on a 1930s FR gentleman farmer’s working suit in a wide whale corduroy. Thing’ll last a few lifetimes. It’s my Steve Jobs. Zero thought required. Got a million pockets. I can gather all the pinecones, boletus, chaga, birch polypores & morels without a bag. Mushroom pockets are mesh so the spores can proliferate more widely. I’m a very morel person. It has another pocket for a small hand axe. She gave me a computer bag some time back & last time I saw her she noticed it & said: ‘I hate that bag!’ She don’t pull punches, Viv, she says what she’s thinking & she invites me to the Royal Albert Hall for Proms even though she can’t hear all that well. I think it was Benjamin Britten & I could hear Miles in there. Clearly.

There’s a huge chasm between how people see her & how she is.

We were in a room with some other people a couple of years ago & some clown there said to her: ‘Did you know Leslie used to be married to….?’ & zero pause, Viv says: ‘Never heard of him.’ End of story.

Child of Nova, story over.
—W.S.B.

I have been both a ghost and haunted in the city I love.
—Rebecca Solnit

That’s all I do some days. Most of my friends are dead.

I don’t feel haunted. I like it when people visit me in dreams or suddenly appear. I feel my ancestors speaking through me when I manage to get out of the way. Writ large in the code.

Not really. To survive in NYC in the late 70s I think you had to be pretty angry, which was easy at the time. I wasn’t looking for anything specific, just looking around.

Rene Ricard, Jean-Michel, Edit deAk, Johnny Thunders, Bill, Huncke, Corso, Howard Brookner, Harry Smith & Cabel. Dead friend A-list NYC. I was computer speaking with John Lurie some time back & we both figured out that we had never gone to see any film made about people we knew because the Wrongness was either too painful, ridiculous or anger inducing. The revisionism of it all. There’s no shortage of ‘best friends’ or ‘experts’ you’ll see elbowing their way to the coffin when someone’s gone. Usually someone the person disliked when they were alive. It’s like clockwork really.

Dirty Ears aims a knife at me, I pump him full of lost watches…
—‘Birthplace Revisited’, Gregory Corso

I knew Rammell from Jean-Michel & we all used to hang out down the Roxy when Grandmaster Flash & Run & that scene was going on. ESG. All the people.

One night I went out to a New Year’s party at the bunker – sort of an upstairs-downstairs type of affair put together by John Giorno but with Bill’s loft too. Huncke was like ‘Let’s quit this scene, man. I know of a better party.’ He really talked that way. Like he was still a hustler in Times Square c. 1948. Laughing here. So Huncke, Cabel (street boy & Civil War enthusiast) & I went to this other party. When we walk in there’s this long coatrack for the guests’ coats & Huncke’s like ‘Would you look at this coat? Gunmetal grey, soft & buttery.’ We go to the party, we leave. Next morning Huncke is out on 2nd Ave. yelling up to my window in the old Anderson Theatre where I lived with the Fox Brothers. I go down & he has this bag. He’s all fake guilty & saying ‘I’m so embarrassed (not), but I brought you this, try it on, try it on.’ It’s the coat from the night before. I try it on. ‘Like a glove!’ he says. Later that night I’m wearing this coat & heading down toward Crosby St. to Jean-Michel’s – streets are dark & empty. Not anything like now. Two kids start trailing me saying ‘Nice coat, nice coat, Papi…’ & I’m like ‘Oh fuck, I’m gonna have to give this coat up.’ Next thing I hear is from in front of us: ‘Hey girl, what’s happening ?’ It’s Rammell in some crazy futurist outfit complete with ski goggles. He wore ski goggles All The Time. Needless to say, reader, I kept the coat.

There’s old Herbert Huncke wearing someone else’s
overcoat.
—William S. Burroughs

With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable
can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream
is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear.
Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if
the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are
absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything
conceals something else.
—Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino

Yes. My agent there sent me to Kyoto & I went to the Nijo Castle. It has a wrap-around porch also made of wood & designed to make the sound of nightingales to ward off intruders. I think about that sound fairly often. We have nightingales here & owls. My daughters could imitate the owls & communicated with them when they were younger & we were looking at the night sky – a thousand stars deep.

My brother & I spent so much time imitating an extreme Boston accent that we kind of have one for real now – especially when together. My grandmother was horrified if she happened to hear us. There’s nothing like an extreme Boston accent. It says Everything. There are words that only exist in Boston.

‘L’histoire est écrite par les vainqueurs.’ (Read: men.)

I find being photographed most awkward. I’m extremely stiff in photos & it’s mostly an endurance test on my end of things. That’s why I always say no unless they’ll make it really rain. It was easier when I was younger & a heroin addict. Gimme one good reason…

When I do something now I always say upfront: ‘No laughing, no acting happy, no jumping around, no smiling & no dancing.’ They agree & without fail comes that moment when someone says: ‘Can you smile a little ?’ (enraging!) or ‘Get in there with the others & dance with abandon’ & I just stand there, stone-faced & wait it out. People like their women to be smiling, I’ve noticed. Or maybe everyone has to be happy now. I recently worked with a whole bunch of desperately happy people. All very impressed with their uniqueness that they imagine they’ve invented. There’s a certain invisibility that’s bestowed upon elders that smells like freedom to me. Most interesting part of that job was meeting someone who had three kidneys. We talked for around five minutes at most & I’m not sure how it came up… but I think about it often. Three kidneys. That’s a club I haven’t been to. Money in the bank, kid. Cue: Ace in the Hole (Gloria Grahame version). I have face blindness to a certain extent & have problems recognizing people if they, say, change their clothing or hair or anything really. Now that I’m older I just say hello to everyone & wave like some deranged overgrown American toddler & people I can’t see or recognize probably just think I’m mentally compromised. Used to be thought a snob, now I’m wearing a helmet to prevent further head injury. People will say, after the rare event, ‘Did you see Catherine Deneuve?’ & I fucking certainly did not. Then they’ll show me a photo on their phone of me standing right next to her & I’ll be astounded at how short she is & how big her head is in real life. Meanwhile I’ll have also failed to notice Charlotte Rampling, who looks exactly like you’d expect her to look. You won’t see her cosying up to the Pope, I’m pretty sure about that. You won’t
have to listen to her thoughts on the patriarchy or Brexit or intermittent fasting – though I’m sure she has a few.

What’s it like being a woman drinking a cup of tea? What’s it like being a woman walking down the stairs? is what I think when faced with music interviews & inevitably asked what it’s like being a woman making music. Subtext being: how did a monkey change the oil on the pick-up?

Men who don’t even make music will give me tips on how to improve my music. This happens, without fail, all the time. Still.

Here’s a review of an EP I released with Christophe Van Huffel under the name Purity Supreme (after a horrendous Boston area supermarket where there’d always be a hair-covered piece of baloney stuck to one of the shopping cart wheels). I occasionally reread this review, the best one I’ve ever gotten, because the reviewer thought I was a MAN.

Purity Supreme – Always Already Review:★★★★★
‘The main attraction to the listener is the singing-intoning voice of the lead fellow, who may be the French half of the act. Cracked and dusty his vocal cords be, whether through mannered device or naturally desiccated, trying to convey the effect of a dissolute and broken man. Just right for follow-
ers of Wm Burroughs we might think, but this sort of prose-speak-sing also shades into areas once occupied by Nick Cave or Michael Gira, as does the lugubrious and dense content.

The lyrics are highly ambiguous, even when they seem straight to the point and use plain English at all times. I like to hear multiple repetitions of slightly mysterious phrases in songs and Purity Supreme does this trick very well. The first song keeps saying “It’s Nice To See You”, when the mood of the singer and indeed the music itself is expressing the exact opposite of that sentiment, and it’s a song that wishes we would just go home and stay there. Angst-ridden steel strings and a relentless drum pattern make this snarky item a vicious twin brother to Leonard Cohen’s later works. The second song is slightly more recognisable as something a weary Lou Reed might have recorded at any time between 1975 and 1988, and with its basic guitar and drum sound could almost pass for any decent slab of indie art-rock music.

On the flip, even more words and more repetitions in the two remaining songs. So many words, these songs are more like recited poems or short stories really, very much like a slightly nastier Tom Waits or what we might hear if Charles Bukowski turned his throaty husk to song. Indeed the words are privileged by appearing in full on the front cover. And there’s a very strong cinematic component too, with vivid film noir images somehow encoded in the very sound of the record. Narrators alluding to scenes unknown, to backstories we cannot know, and delivered with a snarling curl to the lip at all times. The creators here are the French musician Christophe Van Huffel, and the American writer-composer Leslie Winer. Quite unusual, muscular, and opaque music from these offbeat modern beatniks.’

So, yes, that’s what it feels like being a woman trimming the roses. Slightly nastier Tom Waits. I’ll take it.

Massachusetts. I’m a Masshole (as people from New Hampshire call us) born & bred.

Massachusetts. Maine & the Cape in the summers. I don’t miss the people but I do miss the land. I miss the woods & the ocean. I miss the animals, the mountains & the trees. I miss the coyotes, the bears & the fishers. I miss chipmunks. I miss kingfishers. I miss Monotropa uniflora, Indian pipe. I miss
lady’s slippers.

When all my relatives I grew up with died.

I’ve been writing since I was four. My grandmother would give me poems to memorize & recite.

How do you like to go up in a swing,
Up in the air so blue?
—‘The Swing’, Robert Louis Stevenson

‘My machines came from too far away’ is the Richard Feynman quote I have etched into my machine flight cases. Some years ago I wrote Tim Berners-Lee an e-mail & he replied. We had us a dialogue which was helpful to me at the time.

From the beginning, & the word was Sound.

Well, they are their own people. They’ll throw me a bone once in a while. Unlike me, they all can sing & play anything. I love watching them sing. I love hearing them sing. They come from a long line of Irish travellers who did that for generations. They don’t have any desire, as far as I know, to Be Somebody. It’s an odd world we’ve left them.

I used to try to get them to sing old Irish songs they learned from their Granddad or slave songs their friend Kelli taught them. I’m sure this will offend someone. If it helps, I’m also wearing a fur coat & holding a .22 long rifle as I answer this question & eating some trophy elk jerky. I figured we could
clean up, five girls singing on the corner in Harvard Square near Christmas, but they weren’t having it. At all. They would break into five-part harmony in the car just to torture me. One of them, in particular, could do fake Spanish singing & I would have to pull the car over from laughing too hard.

Not really. Sometimes. Variable.

Can’t talk about it. Linder Sterling is an artist. She do whatever she like…

I like it. It’s a freaky thing to do. I’m not particularly good at it, but I like working with M & percussionist Gaëlle Salomon.

I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.
—Jorge Luis Borges

Well, I definitely can sleep out in the woods, where all books come from, so maybe No?

Maybe it was Anne Sexton who said. ‘Writing poetry is like trying to make a tree out of used furniture’.

Am I jumping around too much? Should I just dance on this table? Or should we just sit & listen to birdsong?

This is how space begins, with words only, signs traced
on the blank page. To describe space: to name it, to trace it,
like those portolano-makers who saturated the coastlines
with the names of harbours, the names of capes, the names
of inlets, until in the end the land was only separated
from the sea by a continuous ribbon of text. Is the aleph,
that place in Borges from which the entire world is visible
simultaneously, anything other than an alphabet?
—Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, Georges Perec

Yeah, we make it all up. You know that.
‘She do whatever she like… make people so mad …’

I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that
I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that
I have loved; all the cities I have visited.
—Jorge Luis Borges

I’d woken up early & took a long time getting ready to exist.
—Fernando Pessoa

I don’t rightly know. Just a dream some of us had. Maybe.