Iggy Pop on his mother’s love

Wednesday, January 11, 2023

I was touched by these bits from an interview with Iggy Pop. As @jhiggy suggested, they lend new depth to the lyrics of “No Fun”:

Maybe go out
Maybe stay home
Maybe call mom
on the telephone

Iggy has spoken elsewhere about the love of his parents:

My parents had been shocked and impoverished by the Depression. It made them careful and frugal. At first, as a teacher, my father made no money. So he got the idea of living in a trailer park. The rent was a dollar a day for the plot. I slept over the dinette, on a shelf. We were definitely the only college-educated family in the camp.

Once I hit junior high in Ann Arbor, I began going to school with the son of the president of Ford Motor Company, with kids of wealth and distinction. But I had a wealth that beat them all. I had the tremendous investment my parents made in me. I got a lot of care. They helped me explore anything I was interested in. This culminated in their evacuation from the master bedroom in the trailer, because that was the only room big enough for my drum kit. They gave me their bedroom.

“I had a wealth that beat them all.”

(He speaks more about his upbringing in Jim Jarmusch’s documentary, Gimme Danger.)

5 great books about art and motherhood

Sunday, May 10, 2020

Happy Mother’s Day. Here are 5 of my favorite books about making art and being a mother:

1. Sarah Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time To Write

Short essays about making art and raising children, and the interesting ways that one influences and provides insight into the other. Ruhl is a playwright and a mother of three and writes beautifully about art’s need for solitude and quiet vs. the constant interruption of mothering:

There were times when it felt as though my children were annihilating me… and finally I came to the thought, All right, then, annihilate me; that other self was a fiction anyhow. And then I could breathe. I could investigate the pauses.

2. Sally Mann, Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs

Mann is that rare master of both pictures and words, and her memoir shows off that mastery: the visual images are perfectly woven into the text to tell her story. The book covers her long, interesting life and career, but a portion of it reads as a cautionary tale about using your children in your art.

Not only was the distinction between the real children and the images difficult for people, but so also was the distinction between the images and their creator, whom some found immoral.

3. Jenny Offill, Dept. Of Speculation

A wonderful short novel about art, marriage, and motherhood that you can read in one sitting. The way the text is fragmented replicates the way you think when you’re a new parent.

About the book she has said:

New parents, but especially new mothers like the [main character], have a set of alarms going off in their heads during the early, high stakes period of trying to keep a baby alive, while dealing with the pleasant lull of housebound boredom. The transcendence is undercut by the tedium. I wanted to get that feeling on the page. The solution I came up with was to describe her thoughts and actions in fragments, so that one would always be dislocating the other.

4. Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

While all these books are in some way about women coming to terms with being both an artist and a mother, there’s the added complexity of Nelson being a queer-mother-artist, and an older one at that:

I’m an old mom. I had nearly four decades to become myself before experimenting with my obliteration.

Another very good (and fragmented) short read with a really smart system of quotation, and an excellent ending.

5. Sylvia Fein, Heidi’s Horse

Fein, a surrealist painter who celebrated her 100th birthday last year with a 70-year retrospective exhibition in Berkeley, took a break in her painting career to write this book and its followup, First Drawings. The book collects her daughter Heidi’s drawings of horses from the age of 2 to 17. (Fein raised her daughter on a horse ranch.)

I don’t know of any other book like this. A weird, remarkable work showing the development of a child’s drawings with a single subject. (More about the book in my post: What pictures of horses can teach us about art.)

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Filed under: parenting

Listen to the voice

Friday, September 6, 2019

I’m still thinking about that interview with Ray Magliozzi of Car Talk:

The show’s most frequent listener these days might in fact be Ray himself. He said he still listens to the show “all the time,” mostly to hear his brother’s voice and remind himself about times they had together. To remind himself of the jokes they shared. To remind himself of the good times.

“I love to hear his laugh, and I love to hear his take on things,” Ray said. “It’s a rare opportunity that I’ve had to still communicate with my brother that most people don’t get.”

A few years ago at I heard Cord Jefferson tell a story at Pop Up Magazine about a voicemail his mother left him a month before she died of cancer, and about “the power of the human voice and what we lose when a voice goes away.” (At one point he cites a study that concluded a Mother’s phone call is as comforting as a hug.) “It seems increasingly worth considering what we’re missing out on when we neglect the voices of the people we love.”

My wife and I used to make homemade audiobooks with our phones and play them for the boys in the stroller. Now the boys can read on their own, and I wonder whether those recordings will survive, whether anyone will ever listen to them again.

My mom has an old tape of me at age 5, singing Christmas songs for her. A few years ago, I archived it onto a CD so she could play it on her boombox whenever she wants.

My first grader has recorded songs for several years now, and he’s so obsessed with recording everything around him that he asks me at least once a day to record something on my phone. Until this moment, I haven’t realized what a favor he’s been doing me. I can listen to his little voice wherever I am, whenever I want, as long as my hard drives last.