Fluxblog Interview with Maxi Geil!

Maxi Geil is the alter ego of Guy Richards Smit, an artist who began as a painter, but has since branched out into comedy, film, and pop music. His debut album with his band Playcolt, A Message To My Audience, is perhaps the most unjustly neglected pop album of the year; an epic glam record which would be dominating rock radio and filling arenas in a better world. In December, Smit’s film Nausea II, which features Maxi Geil and music from the album, will debut at the Museum Of Modern Art in Manhattan. Last week, I met with Smit at his studio in Brooklyn to talk with him about the band and his various projects. Later on in the interview, he speaks about a few specific songs which are included here as mp3s.

Matthew Perpetua: How did the Maxi Geil project begin?

Guy Richards Smit: Well, I started doing a lot of work with watercolors, and the songs started with the titles of the pieces, or things that people would be saying to each other in them. I started to put them together. I had been in bands since the 80s, and I had also done some work as a comedian called Jonathan Grossmalerman, working these ideas in as jokes. The character was this washed-up art star from the 80s, he was a “big painting” man, so he was like this kind of Schnabel character. He had done films and made a record, as Schnabel did, and now he was going to try to do stand-up. It became this kind of desperate confessional. It was enjoyable for me to try to work art into a joke pattern. Comedy has its own rules – how to set up a joke, how to finish it. That character did well, and I got some recognition for it, but after that was done, I was starting to get noticed as this stand-up artist, and I didn’t want to do that anymore. I was still interested in the doing the character of an egomaniac, and how he navigates through the world, and the sort of mythology that he sets up for himself so that he can be cruel to other people, essentially. Whereas Jonathan Grossmalerman was sort of a loser, in a way, I wanted a character that was less of a loser but just as delusional.

MP: Something where the world supports that ego?

GRS: Exactly, yeah. You see it with George Bush, and how people handle him, and you think ‘why would they admire this guy?’ But people seem to want a guy like that. So this character is delusional but seemingly harmless, and people support this kind of destructive path.

MP: How did you start working the project into the films? Did the characters exist before the films?

GRS: Sort of. Maxi Geil, which means ‘super-horny’ in German, was the star of a movie I did called “The Ballad Of Bad Orpheus.” Maxi Geil plays this horribly cruel sailor who keeps his crew from mutiny with his golden voice. That got showed at the MoMA, and I had been wanting to do a larger-scale thing with more characters, and more self-reflection. I had basically been writing this for a very long time, and started it, but funding disappeared and I started working on other projects. Then I got a call from the MoMA, and they said “we’re doing this premieres thing,” and they are showing this new Jean Luc Goddard film and a reissued Scorcese film. They asked me if I had anything new, because it’s all new stuff at these events. They were like, “we know you were working on this thing, is there any way that you could get it done in time?” And so everything kicked into high gear, and I started to complete the film. By that time, we had already recorded all of the music. “Please Remember Me” is the song that Maxi sings at the press conferance when he quits the porn business, “Paying For Something New” is from when they all go on their shopping expedition, and “Sunday Morning” is the final song, where they wake up in love, the ecstatic finish.We had done some performances which had been scripted. At one point we had Zoe in the band, and she was the second back-up singer. She would get fired from the band during the show, and wander around backstage, and start drinking. She’d return for one song, and there would be a sort of tension. Anyway, I wanted to do all of this, but also have all of them be good songs. As much as they were part of this larger project, I wanted them to stand on their own and be listenable as a pop record. They don’t have to be part of a movie or a performance.

MP: Do you find that music is any more or less successful than painting or film in getting across your ideas?

GRS: Yeah, except for there’s a whole section of people who don’t even seem to listen to lyrics. I’ve always been a person who has listened to lyrics, so I never understood that, but I’ll talk to our old drummer and I’d be like “that’s the part where I go ‘blah blah’,” and he just says “I don’t know, because I’ve never heard your lyrics at all.” He thinks of it terms of music. And I know that when I talk to him about other bands, he just doesn’t listen for lyrics. So in that sense, it may be less successful. But it’s more successful in forcing an engagement with an audience. I think that we all have an experience with records that we’ve grown up with, and we have an experience with paintings that we’ve grown up with, and it is sort of different. For instance, to take a banal choice, “The Scream.” We’ve all seen that from an early age and it connotes an energy, fear and angst. And there are songs which also bring up the same feelings, but in a very different way, so I think that we have traditions in how we relate to them. Both of them are satisfying, but I think that music is just really viscerally satisfying. Again, you get to confront the audience. You get to mock them, gently. You get to get their approval, and whatever cheap narcissistic thrill that one gets. I don’t get the thrill that some people get off the stage, where they need to be on it. But it’s nice knowing that you’re with other people doing something. Last night, seeing Siouxsie, I was really happy that I knew what it was like to be on stage, and I feel that I related to the concert differently. I was impressed with her handling of the stage. Every now and again, you get a thrill of success on some level.

MP: Is that something that you find is less frequent than in painting, where you’re isolated from the audience?

GRS: Exactly. With painting, I really, honestly don’t know what people are thinking. Every now and then, you’ll get a review, and they won’t address the topics you were hoping, and they might’ve missed it or something, and you’re just like “okay.” It could be a good review, but it feels like they are reviewing something else and you think “did I make that?”

MP: Well, often art critics just talk about their own pet ideas which they want to bring up, and everything they look at goes through that filter. At least with music critics, they tend to be a bit more fair and engage the work on its own terms.

GRS: I
think that’s because we universally share more similarities in our approval of music. We must, because a song can become a number one hit with millions of people buying it. Whereas you can’t seem to get that in paiting, because after all, there’s only one.

MP: And people get very hung up about mass production and associate that with inauthentic commercial endeavors.

GRS: Yes, that it is somehow cheapening. Still, there are subtleties that you often can’t approach with music, I think. The closest I think it’s ever come to being like a painting in music, is John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy.” It’s that clarity and subtlety, that straightforwardness. Somehow it’s always struck me that that song is almost like a drawing. There’s no flair to it, almost. There’s no theatrics to it. It’s so brilliantly straightforward, and even the flair, that whistling, is so intimate.

MP: That’s funny, because you’ve set up your own record to be very theatrical and in the opposite direction of music that you say you think would be more like painting. Are you just trying to engage with music as a form distinct from what you’ve been able to accomplish in painting?

GRS: I think that I’ve got a form in which I can get intimacy reasonably well, so I don’t necessarily need another. The thing about John Lennon is that he had such guts, to do a thing like “Mother,” and I don’t think I could ever do that with music. It’s funny to watch certain musicians wrestle with that, not always to such great success.

MP: Do you think that maybe John Lennon just came to that confidence due to the circumstances of his life? He wasn’t like that in the beginning, of course, and he and the Beatles worked their way up to other things as more people gave them approval, and the culture at large was open to pretty much anything that they would do. I can’t imagine anything like that ever happening again, where people are so trusting of an artist.

GRS: Yeah, and otherwise you get things like Sarah McLachlan which seems like an attempt to be like that, but it’s so awful.

MP: But I think that she just skipped a lot of steps in between. Not just her, but a lot of people who jump straight to that raw, emotional point.

GRS: I think that a lot of my lyrics, particularly “The Love I Lose,” are for me, pretty straightforward. It’s very specific and it is an attempt to touch on that kind of honesty about how people get through life. There’s also an absurdity to it. Basically, it’s the story of Giselle Thurst, a porn star in the film who starts to stammer horribly on a set, and gets kicked off and fired, and she leaves singing this song and has a moment of clarity about her life and what it is to be this kind of lone character saddled with various neuroses and behavior which she can’t seem to control. So she sings about this in a very self-realized way. In a sense, I wrote this very sincerely. I think that we’ve all either been there, or have friends who behave in a way that they can’t control. It’s what I love about people, and what frustrates me about people. The only way I can ever really approach those moments of honesty is with a lot of absurdity because I’m either scared of it, or it makes it more palatable, or I’m not good enough yet, I don’t know what it is. For me, the songs get written from ideas, so I write starting with the words, and a melody comes from that. It comes from a very sincere part of me. I think that my goal is to reach that point of almost total absurdity, and start taking it in on an almost pure level. I could be fooling myself here. Sometimes one lyric will stick out through a load of protective tripe. For instance, there’s a sentimentality to “Artist’s Lament,” with those last lines of the muse singing “come with me.” That is actually meant to be this tender moment. For me, it is a really great place you can go, no matter how much you’re lying to yourself.

MP: The first half of that song, it’s a lot of him saying “I’m an artist, damnit, I’m a beacon of light,” and it seems that he’s reminding himself of this, that he needs to remember this kind of self-delusion.

GRS: It’s what gets you through.

MP: It’s not that he’s totally wrong.

GRS: Right. I kinda mean it. At least from my own personal purposes, I don’t know what it becomes in a song, necessarily, or how people respond to it, but I don’t know an artist who doesn’t have that thought at times.

MP: That you’re doing this for the world.

GRS: Right. And you could actually change it, and it’s really wonderful what you’re doing. And then, of course, later you’re thinking “oh this is awful, I can’t believe I wasted my time doing this.” So in that sense, it’s not ironic. One of the first songs I wrote for Maxi Geil was called “I’ve Got Feelings But My Feelings Don’t Last,” and it’s ridiculous and dumb, but at the same time, we all have these feelings and it’s weird how they don’t stay. They disappear. It’s a weird thing, being sure that you’re doing the right thing, and then an hour later being sure that it’s not. It’s really human, but I’ve never heard a song about it, I don’t think.

MP: How do you feel that the art world, and the rock music and the characters that you’ve created relate to pornography, which is central to the plot of Nausea II?

GRS: First of all, the amazing thing about pornography is that it has a very specific goal. It exists for basically one purpose. I feel that increasingly music and especially art has become this overspecialized thing. One of the things that I criticize in the film is the porn guy who is constantly shooting the same scene over and over again. At one point, when Maxi does this big lecture as to why he’s leaving the porn business, he points out all of the guys who have these weird little websites, and it becomes subculture porn, and like math porn and gothic porn.

MP: Is there actually math porn?

GRS: No, but there could be. There’s definitely at this point, goth porn.

MP: Right, and that’s the whole new frontier in that world, with the Suicide Girls and all the different permutations on that.

GRS: Yeah, then there’s other stuff where it’s just anal, or just facials.

MP: And even more specific than that.

GRS: The art world has absolutely become that way. Lots of painters just doing the same damn painting over and over and over again.

MP: I sort of touch on that in an interview that I did the other day, where the question was “if you could ask any musician a questio

n, what would it be,” and my question was for Bjork. I want to know why she feels that she has to do all of these one-idea records. She started off doing records where every song had its own premise and its own set of ideas, and now this last one is the same basic concept fourteen songs in a row. I can’t imagine that isn’t a result of being immersed in the art world and being with Matthew Barney. Going through art school, that was one of the things which drove me nuts, all of these students stretching one idea into a year’s worth of work. You think, “you’re only going to do that? You don’t have any other ideas? You can’t do a lot of ideas at once?”

GRS: I think that in the art world, if you make one of something, what happens is that it disappears. There’s only one of something, and somebody buys it and its gone. So other people want to buy it, but they want that one idea too. So you have to make a bunch of them. It has nothing to do with art, as far as I can tell. I took Fluxus really seriously in as much as it’s about this journey, the stumbles and awkwardnesses, and making weird shit and hopefully at some point, someone would be interested in your larger project. I did this one song that was called “The Passerby,” and one of the lines was “I offer endless permutations on a single idea / and if it the market can still maintain me, I’ll be here next year.” And also, “I’m a one trick pony, two show only talk of the town.” They have these tiny, short careers, and you know the person from that one piece you saw over and over again.

MP: It doesn’t seem that a lot of these people are eager to reinvent themselves either.

GRS: Well, when they get that specific, reinventing themselves means going back and starting from square one. They don’t allow themselves to move into a different area.

MP: That’s funny, because it really does seem to have nothing to do with art as I understand it.

GRS: No, it’s marketing.

MP: Well, it’s like marketing, but it’s also like being a craftsman. Like, “I will make shoes,” or “I will be a blacksmith.”

GRS: Exquisite doorknobs! The best doorknobs in all of Italy! That’s certainly fine, but y’know, you’re a craftsperson, not the modern notion of what an artist is.

MP: In terms of the art world, it’s about marketing and playing to existing market forces, but in the broader sense of marketing, marketing is more about having a steady stream of new items and getting people interested in new things that they might not be open to naturally.

GRS: I’ve always had good reviews, but my sales have been sort of patchy. And I decided a long time ago that I was going to present everything that I was doing and deal with the patchy sales, hoping that later on people would understand that I have this larger, long term project, and it’s an interesting and worthy project, hopefully. I can put up with some years where my friends are making more money, but with any luck, I’ll come into my own and build a real lasting career. The other technique may be satisfying in the short term, but it’s not viable if you’re interested in sticking around.

(You can read an unabridged version of this interview here. Click here to buy the album from the official Maxi Geil! website.)