from: http://ftl.nypress.com/blogx/display_blog.cfm?bid=63571082

Posted to Art
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Xene Cervenka of the Band X Discusses '70s Punk and Her Art Opening


Earlier this month, I spoke with Exene Cervenka, frontwoman of revered L.A. punk
band X, that plays the Fillmore at Irving Plaza on Saturday the 24th on its 31st
anniversary tour. The concert is preceeded by the Friday night opening of Sleep
in Spite of Thunder, Cervenka’s second New York solo gallery exhibit at DCKT
Contemporary (195 Bowery, Ground Floor). Cervenka discussed the much-storied
L.A. punk scene of the ‘70s, her poetry and visual art, her attraction to
antiquity and the vanishing America that she chronicles in some of her work.

How has X been able to keep the live energy up, especially over these recent
waves of shows?

Exene Cervenka: I guess we love doing it. I love playing live, touring, and
seeing friends. Seeing all the kids in the audience and all the people that have
seen us a million times. It’s pretty exciting up there. I think that makes for
a more exciting show, just the fact that you want to be there. There’s nothing
worse than seeing a band that doesn’t want to be there.

When the band started, how long did you envision that it would last?

Oh, we had no vision of it lasting or not lasting.

Besides enjoying it, what was the spark that got you guys started again? Writers
attribute the return of X to the rise of alternative rock, and that seems
oversimplified.

Oh no. It was 10 years ago, ’98. We got asked to do a commercial for the X
Files. They were doing this series of commercials with people saying “I’m
going to watch the X Files this year, aren’t you?” or something like that.
And they asked Billy [Zoom] to do it, not knowing that Billy hadn’t really
been in touch with the rest of the band very much. And he showed up for this
thing with me. He said he would do it if I did it. He showed up with his silver
jacket and his guitar and his amp. And I showed up just being me. They filmed us
on the street. I got along really good with Billy and we decided to get back
together after [Elektra] released an anthology [titled Beyond and Back] and
wanted us to do an in-store and about a thousand people came. It took us a while
to decide “should we be playing, or what should we do?” [Zoom left the band
in 1986, and they recorded one album, See How We Are, with Dave Alvin in his
place before disbanding. X
then reformed with Zoom in ’93 to record Hey Zeus! and has toured on a
periodic basis since. -- Ed.]

Now it seems like a pretty casual arrangement with the on-again, off-again
touring -- 2004, 2006, and now. The obvious difference would be that the band is
not the main focal point of everyone’s career. How much of a toll did any sort
of pressures take when this was the main thing you were doing?

It’s a lot easier now. There’s less at stake. We’re not selling a record,
we’re just playing shows to play shows. I think there was more pressure in the
beginning to sell records and we never did, really.

You’ve said that you wish you had appreciated it more.

Yeah. I mean, I appreciated it to some extent, but now I really value it.
Because when you’re young, you just don’t think it’s going to end.

Speaking of appreciating, how much should fans be concerned that this might be
the last time they’ll ever get to see the band?

That’s not true. We’re going to keep playing until we can’t play anymore.

With everyone having done other things over the years, everybody’s grown as
players. How much do you think the music comes across differently or more
seasoned now?

I think we make up for the lack of physical energy. You can’t be 23 again. You
just can’t. But you make up for that by playing better and having emotional
intensity.

And having life experience, one imagines.

If that can come across live. I’m not sure if it does. Maybe the emotional
intensity comes from that.

In the book Forming: The Early Days of L.A. Punk, you’re quoted as comparing
the L.A. punk scene to the hippie generation, and as saying that “it wasn’t
about the bands; it was about people being bohemian even though they didn’t
know what bohemian meant.” -- what’s your take on punk being made now, and
what would you say the equivalent of punk is today?

You’d know more than I would. I’m not real well-versed in what’s happening
around the country in every city, as far as scenes. But I think there will
always be a bohemian underground.

Some people are comparing what’s happening on the Internet to that spirit,
like that community sense has moved online.

In some people’s eyes I’m sure that’s true. But it’s not quite the same
thing. You can’t really replace interacting in a place that you’re not
supposed to be -- like a club or a bar or a streetcorner or an alley -- with
four or five other people that you just happened to stumble across who have the
same views, sharing a bottle in an alley because you can’t get into the club,
you don’t have the money. I don’t think the internet can replace that.

As people who weren’t from L.A., except for Donald [drummer D.J. Bonebrake],
how much do you think the band’s take on that city resonated because it was
coming from outsiders’ eyes?

It’s Day of the Locusts, that book. It’s about coming here to making it big,
and ‘going west, young man.’ That’s what California’s all about --
arriving there with rose-colored glasses and having them quickly removed, seeing
the squalor. We had a love-hate relationship with L.A. for sure. But coming
there from an outsider’s point of view was everything, really important for
songwriting.

You’ve talked a lot about how superficial the place is, but it’s funny that
you lasted living there for such a long time.

I lived in Idaho for two and a half years for part of that time, but other than
that, yeah, I did live there for thirty years. [Cervenka now lives in Missouri.
-- Ed.]

Reading things you’ve said about how sleazy and superficial it is and how
everybody goes there to “make it,” it almost struck me as the antithesis of
the way the Velvet Underground and Patti Smith were so taken with New York.

Oh yeah, it was the complete opposite of the New York scene, what happened in
L.A. We had a lot of bands in common. But New York embraced its artists. Los
Angeles did not, not initially. Not for five years.

You moved to Los Angeles from Florida with only enough money to pay for gas for
your ride -- like 80 bucks -- to get to your friend’s house. I know you ended
up living above and working at [poetry workshop] Beyond Baroque, but how the
hell did you make that work once you got there?

I got a job right away -- and I kept my job. I worked at Beyond Baroque and then
when I finished that, I worked in a shoe store. How I kept myself afloat was I
just hit the ground running, you know? [Laughs.] It was cheap to live. When I
moved to Venice, it was a ghetto and my rent was 180 dollars a month for a
two-bedroom apartment at the beach. And I was making about two hundred dollars a
month. [Laughs.] I don’t know what I was making -- probably three hundred.

The way you were just talking about L.A. -- go West, and all that stuff. A lot
of Americans almost have like an immigrant experience there.

It is, definitely.

I wanted to ask you about Magical Meteorite Songwriting Device, your book of
collages that came out in 2006. In the preface, Kristine McKenna writes: “In
the end, each piece Cervenka has made is a valentine to a fragile America that's
disappearing before our very eyes.” I know you’ve said that garbage you find
on the street isn’t exclusive to where you are anymore, that it’s all been
homogenized, but what aspects of American life in particular are disappearing?

Well, the past is disappearing. When I started touring in the late ‘70s/early
‘80s, it was almost like the ‘20s in some places! You’d still go through
towns that were just like neon paradises, with neon signs of people hammering
nails that would move and art deco buildings. Small-town America before WalMarts
and MTV, that’s all gone. Now, you go to Alabama, it looks like Missouri; you
go to Missouri, it looks like Kentucky; you go to Kentucky, it looks like New
England. Not every part of it, but there’s housing developments on all our
farmland. That’s disappearing. I’ve always just been a big fan of the past.
I dress in old clothes, I wear old jewelry, I read old books, I listen to old
records. Everything I do -- my house is old -- is a recreation for me of
different eras.

Now, your second New York solo exhibition opens this month. You’ve been making
visual art for like the last 30 years in your journals and stuff. But when did
you start making collages in particular, and what is it about that medium that
has been grabbing you lately?

Well, it’s perfect for me, because it’s a mix of the past and the present.
Everything Americana that I can find that I like, I can make art out of. It’s
perfect. The possibilities are endless. The mixture of coincidence and intent is
just genius, I think. I think the medium itself has got its own genius in it.
Because there’s all this coincidence. You just find something off the street
and you incorporate it in your art and it becomes this running theme. And then
you have this whole new place to go. I’m very creative in Missouri too because
there’s lots of auctions and old things and memorabilia -- what they call in
the art world, “ephemera” -- that I can work with. It’s still a place that
has its history, to some extent. It still has the old way of life. It still has
farms, farmland. And I like it.

Maybe collage is an artform that’s closest to what someone’s actual thought
process is. If you were to take a snapshot of someone’s thoughts and feelings
over a minute, there’d be all sorts of jumbled things in there. As opposed to
a film or something that pulls you into its own tunnel.

I see what you’re saying. I’m telling a story, though. With collages,
you’re still telling a story, it’s just not a very long story sometimes like
a movie. It’s a short, little story. Like, an image of a young girl with a
flower in it can be an entire collage, but if you do it right you’re telling a
story about the girl or the flower. There’s content there.

When can we expect more poetry from you?

It’s not on my list of top-five projects, but I sure would love to do another
book. Right now, I’m working on a kids’ book called Bedtime for Punks.
It’s lullabies. That’s going to be really exciting. It comes out next year
sometime. And I’m doing a record for Bloodshot in 2009, so I’ll be recording
this summer.

You’ve said that doing spoken-word appearances is harder than being in a band,
and that your poetry comes across better when someone reads it than when you do
a reading. How do you deal with that?

It’s hard. I just did a spoken-word engagement at the local high school, which
was really fun. They responded a lot differently because they didn’t have the
life experience to get some of the references, but they got a lot of it, and
they appreciated it. Something like that is really special, so you just do the
ones that you think are special. Or, if you can do a spoken-word tour with a
bunch of other artists, that’s really rewarding. But just to go out night
after night by yourself and read what your thoughts are? Nah. I write a lot
about what happens in my life, too, and in some ways I don’t want to re-live
that every night. It’s different with songs.

With songs, you can put it in a frame that it’s less emotionally demanding to
step back into. You can ornament it a bit.

Yeah, and plus I have John [Doe, bassist/co-lead vocalist, and Cervenka’s
ex-husband] there to sing with. It makes a big difference. It’s much more fun
when you’re with a crew or a band than when you’re out by yourself.

How do you continue to function creatively with someone after a divorce or a
breakup?

You just do. It’s more important. It’s the most important part of the
relationship, so you don’t throw it away.

How difficult was that for you and John?

It was hard at first. It got easier. It’s easy now. I’m glad we maintain the
connection. There’s only a few John Doe’s in the world. There’s only a few
Exene’s. I’m not gonna meet a guy like that again, so I should hang on to
the one I got.



Posted by Saby Reyes-Kulkarni at 6:53 PM