In Caroline Polachek’s world, we are surrounded by fluidity, systems and artefacts of a modern life imbued with a beauty and rich- ness that represents both the dark and the light in our world. In between these polarities of modern life lies an artist focused on the now, inherently self-aware and deeply philosophical – an artist who is compelled to express the intense emotions in life. Her creations are sewn together by the same gold thread which can be traced through all historic artistic expressions of the human condition. Listening to her music often feels like a heavy weight pressing on your chest suddenly being lifted, or the sharp inhalation of cold air at the top of a mountain just before passing out from oxygen deprivation.
Interview taken from METAL Magazine issue 45. Adapted for the online version. Order your copy here.
Polachek is not, however, tied down by this – she weaves in and out of these more intense emotions with joy, touches of absurdity and silliness in her music videos, and an apparent self-awareness in her lyricism. She is an interesting artist within the PC Music family, no Hannah Diamond of pure hyperrealism but an artist with one foot strongly in this world. This can be seen not only through her continued work with producer Danny L Harle on her own music, but also through her transference of collaboration with many artists who also sit within and around that space, such as A. G. Cook, Charli XCX, Umru and Oklou.
There is no doubt to almost anyone paying attention to popular music right now that Polachek is accelerating through this lockdown straight into pop stardom. In this journey there is no compromise involved. Caroline Polachek isn’t diluting her artistic vision for any sort of broader appeal, she is rather bringing you into her own world as it steadily stretches itself outwards, slender-limbed into new spaces.
As an artist, she is currently going through a process of writing new material, as well as testing out new music to live audiences for the first time as shows return. This is a moment that is not just about the new. However, these shows see Polachek consolidate a relationship with an audience – many of whom, paradoxically, haven’t seen her live before but are deeply familiar with her. A large part of her journey in her solo career and its growth has in fact happened after the success of her debut album, Pang, where lockdown tightened its grip and we holed away listening to music.
We speak as she settles into a new apartment. It is within this shifting landscape of boxes and through the digital echoes of a Zoom conversation that we discuss these themes of past, present and future, where we as individuals and collectives sit, and our journey between them.
There is no doubt to almost anyone paying attention to popular music right now that Polachek is accelerating through this lockdown straight into pop stardom. In this journey there is no compromise involved. Caroline Polachek isn’t diluting her artistic vision for any sort of broader appeal, she is rather bringing you into her own world as it steadily stretches itself outwards, slender-limbed into new spaces.
As an artist, she is currently going through a process of writing new material, as well as testing out new music to live audiences for the first time as shows return. This is a moment that is not just about the new. However, these shows see Polachek consolidate a relationship with an audience – many of whom, paradoxically, haven’t seen her live before but are deeply familiar with her. A large part of her journey in her solo career and its growth has in fact happened after the success of her debut album, Pang, where lockdown tightened its grip and we holed away listening to music.
We speak as she settles into a new apartment. It is within this shifting landscape of boxes and through the digital echoes of a Zoom conversation that we discuss these themes of past, present and future, where we as individuals and collectives sit, and our journey between them.
Have you had time at all to dream and think about the future over the past year?
It’s funny. I feel like, in a lot of ways, I’m still catching up with the present. I’ve felt this very extreme sea change in the way people exist online since the start of the pandemic and I think, just like anyone else, I have one foot in and one foot out. In this month in particular, I feel like I’m more interested than ever in catching up to the present moment. I think there’s a really exciting and interesting return to language that’s happening right now between podcasters, the prevalence of Substacks, a return to blogging and a new renaissance of poetry. It’s interesting to me because this record that I’m working on right now is defined by a departure from language. I’m more interested in texture, melody and abstraction than I ever have been before. So, it’s interesting to find myself at this juncture, and to reconcile with it, to be like, okay, am I going to double down? Or is this a wake-up call to reinvestigate my relationship with language?
Recently you’ve been using choral groups in your live performances as well. It feels like you can get lost within those elongated ethereal choral patterns in a way you can’t, sometimes, when lyrics come in. Is that what you are seeking to do?
In some ways it’s the opposite. What I’m hoping for is the opposite of ethereal; what I’m hoping to do is just things that are so objectively embodied. For example, you see a choir in front of you, of 11-year- olds or 14-year-olds. There’s just so much context from where these kids are from and their process of learning and the expressions on their faces. It’s the opposite of a digital synthesiser, I guess. So, the combination of those things is very interesting to me.
So, you find that voice roots things more in the present, then?
Oh, yeah! The human voice carries more information than any other sound, period.
When you’re talking about writing your new music and how it’s moving away from words, what is that sounding like?
I always tend to write non-lyrically. At least at first, even songs of mine that are the most on the nose like So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings. That song started with a melodic motif – a synth and keyboard motif – and then everything got written over and then spliced together. I realised that a lot of songwriters are the opposite – they’ll start with a text – but, for me, it’s always either groove, structure or melody, and then words are the last thing. So, in that sense, the stage three of the song-making process has changed, not stage one and two. I guess what it means is that I’m more curious about pursuing the mood in its own right rather than the mood as it relates to external events.
What do you mean by that?
For example, when I write lyrics, it usually feels like decoding, a little bit – like I’m listening to what the melody is already expressing and then I try and put words to that expression. On my last album, I did a lot of very personal work because there was so much going on in my life that I wanted to talk about, but I was very rarely showing up in the studio with the bravery to talk about these things. So, I would write melodically and then listen and say, okay, well, this song is very clearly very sad. What can this be about? And then, well, actually, this was going on and this is very sad. So, obviously, this is where the song came from. It’s like a detective process, but this time around I’m more interested in describing the moods themselves rather than linking them back to ontological events.
Does lyricism still exist at all within what you’ve created? How are you mapping out any sort of words or lyrics when you’re writing these new songs?
It absolutely exists. It’s just looser, more playful and abstract. And this is a mode of writing that I’ve gone in and out of my whole career. There’s a song called Amanaemonesia that I did with my former band called Chairlift which is, completely, free association, but still has a very strong character. And then, Bunny Is A Rider is a song I did just a few months ago now, and that song follows the same methodology as well.
Okay, yeah! This made me think of your extended mix of The Gate. There was a reintroduction of voice with your vocal melodies throughout the whole album being recapitulated, elongated, and revoiced. What was the thought behind creating these larger spaces? Is it so other people can insert more of their dreams and thoughts into it? Or is it more what you’re talking about, there being a deeper expression of the music that doesn’t have to be lyric-based? Are these sections still about you pushing meaning outwards?
Yeah, totally.
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I guess it’s like a form of Reader Response Theory, which makes us wonder whether it’s the author that actually matters or whether it has more to do with the audience’s input.
I was thinking along slightly different lines, actually. I felt that the essence and mood that get established in The Gate were only half executed in the original – it functions as a prelude to the album. It’s also a place that I felt had way more behind it than I allowed it on the album. I couldn’t have started the album with a 10-minute ambient track. I mean, I could have, but it just wouldn’t have felt right. So, I liked it as the idea of the final gesture of the album being a return to the introductory track, almost as a gesture of invitation to loop the album in a way. But, also, the place we started, we now return to, and it’s blossomed into a fuller version of itself. It felt like a nice way to end the album cycle.
That makes so much sense and I really thought it was so beautiful. So, it feels like what I’ve been saying contradicts what you think about when you’re writing music. It’s not like you’re creating space for other people to embed ideas of futures, you’re still very presently expressing your emotion within it.
The beautiful thing about music is that everyone will do that by default. Unless you make it so theatrical and so descriptive that there’s no room being given for it, but I trust the listener so inherently I don’t feel I need to do that on my end.
Yeah, that makes sense. I guess that’s what pop music is also about, in some ways: allowing ambiguities to exist in quite a clever way.
I think that’s what all music is about.
You have said that you haven’t had time to think about the future. You were trying to catch up to the present, in a way, and pushing forward to that. I was wondering what it was like going through a year of non-performance and then reemerging and playing at the Greek Theatre in LA. Did that feel like a rebirth for you in your project, like moving into the new chapter of your music?
It absolutely did feel like a rebirth. But it also felt like a way of lassoing what people have shared through my music since that album came out, bringing it into the present moment. I released my last album just a couple of months before the pandemic hit, and I think I’m very lucky and still bewildered to be able to say that the listenership really deepened and grew during the pandemic. I emerged with all these people who are connected to the music that weren’t prior. That was quite surreal for me, but I think also surreal for them, for everyone, to be in this one space together and relive a lot of shared memories together that we’d experienced separately. It felt pretty powerful, That show was so early in the summer and so early in the return of live music, so it was most people’s first big group event like that, so the electricity in the theatre was just so intense. It was incredible.
Talking of rebirths, do you see an emergence of old and new in your aesthetics at all, for example within your work with Timothy Luke? Do you feel like there is old and new within that?
Definitely. I think, in some ways, I grew up as a child and teenager with a very strong sense of romanticism. When I say romanticism it includes this love for very formal expressions of emotion that have existed through painting, music, linework and architecture. Things that have a lot of emotion in their form – most of where you find that is through old things because they have been very powerful, have entered the canon and have stuck around. Everything from Arthurian tales to Tudor architecture, to 1970s dresses and thrift stores that are clearly doing the mediaeval thing. So, you get these layers of back- referencing of romanticism and romantics, and I had this strong sense that ‘my people’ (in quotes) have always existed. I hesitate to use the word nostalgia, it’s more that passionate, romantic people have always existed and are speaking to each other through art. I care a lot about positioning myself and my work in that lineage. I don’t think about it in terms of referencing history, it’s more of a nod to this thing that I think has always existed and that I feel passionate about keeping alive.
I find what you’re saying really interesting: creating that space for people who have a similar clan and self-expression. If it has existed before, is it a new future or a rebirth of those old ideas? Or because you’re saying it’s continuous, do you not see it as a rebirth?
Well, they never died. I think one thing that I care a lot about, maybe now more than ever, is making music that can help people harmonise or become harmonised with the present moment –people who are, like me, clinging on to so much beauty that has existed at different times in the past – and helping [them] find a way to stay spiritually alive during a present moment that those ideas can be at odds with.
We’re in an increasingly faceless, automated, digitised, transactional society, and I think a lot of popular music helps people harmonise themselves with capitalism and with materialism, which, of course, slots really well into the advertising landscape, into the strip mall landscape and into the hustle landscape of infinite growth. I think it’s important to make music that is not necessarily escapist, but where these romantic ideas are situated in the present moment and allowed a way of living in 2019, in 2020, in 2021 – where you can straddle both realities at once, where you can straddle this romantic connection to art and also feel as if you live in the present. Every generation of artists, I think, has a responsibility to do that, to answer that question, because it can never be answered the same way twice.
We’re in an increasingly faceless, automated, digitised, transactional society, and I think a lot of popular music helps people harmonise themselves with capitalism and with materialism, which, of course, slots really well into the advertising landscape, into the strip mall landscape and into the hustle landscape of infinite growth. I think it’s important to make music that is not necessarily escapist, but where these romantic ideas are situated in the present moment and allowed a way of living in 2019, in 2020, in 2021 – where you can straddle both realities at once, where you can straddle this romantic connection to art and also feel as if you live in the present. Every generation of artists, I think, has a responsibility to do that, to answer that question, because it can never be answered the same way twice.
In Bunny Is A Rider, the lyrics make reference to ‘satellites’, and it feels, in the way the character is jumping around, that they represent a freedom from overbearing modernity. In that sense, do you think that the character is able to romantically leap out of the constraints of modern life?
Bunny Is A Rider is very literally about disappearance. It’s about this very feminine sexual aspect of unavailability, non-response and making yourself unavailable. And, for me, personally, it’s a fantasy, because I’ve never felt more available in my life. I feel completely surgically attached to my phone. So that song is very Freudian – my unconscious sneaking out the back door and becoming Bunny.
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How did you see it as Freudian?
You know, that which you’re repressing finds other ways of existing. In this case, it’s total irresponsibility and blowing everyone off.
In Bunny Is A Rider you used the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur as a foundational story arc within the video. What did the Minotaur represent for you in that story?
The Minotaur represents the camera very literally – we made a few allusions to that. There’s a shadow of the Minotaur that’s thrown by the camera at a few points, and then it charges through the wall, and the video ends with a matador sequencer where I kill the camera. I was very inspired by videos showing paparazzi following people. The body language of this person walking, running, being pursued and sometimes having a f lirtatious relationship, allowing the camera to catch up and then shrugging it off, and then hitting it away, kicking it or swinging a hip bag at it or whatever. I felt like this tension with the camera was going to be something that I felt very stressed about in returning from the pandemic as well – feeling so physicalised, feeling so not in my own body and not ready to be on camera. And yet the demand of being not even ‘just’ a musician but a person in 2021 is you have to be on camera. So, I think that song was about letting off some steam there.
But every aspect of that video was a bastardisation of different narratives. Obviously, I’ve never studied proper bullfighting, I was just doing a cartoon impression of a matador’s movement. It’s the same thing with the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur because the best part of that myth really is Ariadne’s thread, how Ariadne gives Theseus a thread that he unspools behind him – much like the Hansel and Gretel tale of the cookie crumbs –, how he uses it to find his way out of the maze after killing the Minotaur. But we completely abandoned the thread aspect. I liked the idea of being completely lost and disoriented and not having an escape plan.
But every aspect of that video was a bastardisation of different narratives. Obviously, I’ve never studied proper bullfighting, I was just doing a cartoon impression of a matador’s movement. It’s the same thing with the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur because the best part of that myth really is Ariadne’s thread, how Ariadne gives Theseus a thread that he unspools behind him – much like the Hansel and Gretel tale of the cookie crumbs –, how he uses it to find his way out of the maze after killing the Minotaur. But we completely abandoned the thread aspect. I liked the idea of being completely lost and disoriented and not having an escape plan.
How did it feel to take control of the idea of the lens of the camera in that way?
It was quite exciting, actually. Mostly because the process was unlike any other I had ever worked with behind the scenes of a music video. Because I’m mostly moving backwards, the labyrinth had to be planned out in a very exacting way so I would know how many steps and what my timing was. I was rehearsing with my choreographer playing the camera so that I knew where my eyeline was going to fall, where my head needed to be facing at any given point. Just to execute this very simple, natural walking pace required really, really precise choreography, and that was fascinating to me. Again, after a year of not being a physical person, to really break down such simple things such as where your eyeballs are looking at and how many steps behind you have before you have to turn around and shift your gravity from one foot to the other just in time. These things were very exciting to do under the circumstances.
You were talking earlier just briefly about how you felt like you were becoming digitalised. Is there an escape for you out of that? Or is it just something that you have to get used to?
We’re all getting used to it, and it’s not like we’ve ever arrived. The landscape keeps changing as well. But I think, for me, the antidote to that is – if there is one – movement. It’s things like choreography, being onstage, and body awareness.
What do you think it is about choreography and body awareness that allows people to escape from the pressures of that highly digitalised, watched world?
It’s a world that no digital tool has any bearing on yet. I’m sure it will, once we get the chip implanted in our brains (laughs), but our relationship with our bodies and with movement is one thing that we have a purely psychedelic relationship with. I guess Apple Watch, treadmills, and certain biostatistics for sure exist, but that doesn’t really inform one’s body control. So that’s one place where the power of your unconscious, your subconscious mind in the literal control of your body reigns supreme.
If we take things back to myth, we were talking about Theseus and the Minotaur. Did you feel like there was a sense that you were breaking out or subverting that myth? Or is that something you were not really hyper-conscious of?
I felt like a little magpie just collecting bits of it, taking what I wanted from that and in a very irreverent way.
In So Hot You're Hurting My Feelings, it also seems like you’ve magpied the myth of Hades and Persephone. Is that the correct interpretation of that video?
It was more just the location. Yeah, it was the Looney Tunes version of Hell, which of course includes those myths, but also the Catholic depiction of Hell, the Halloween version of Hell – always the most archetypal Hell. I loved the idea of Hell not being a place where you’re tortured physically but where you are just bored out of your mind and time just stretches out in front of you forever. I guess for me, that’s what a long-distance relationship is like, because it’s not actual hell but it’s a form of purgatory where if you’re in love with someone, it’s painful. And if you’re not in love with someone, you’re wasting your time, and this state of your time being wasted and you suffering is my personal hell. So, there we were.
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Were you brought up Catholic, or what were your first conceptions of Hell? Did you ever think about that when you were younger?
Well, no, I was brought up American. America is obsessed with these binaries, and the Heaven and Hell binary I think played a lot into 1990s culture. For example, I was obsessed with Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet and the very heavy-handed Catholic pop iconography in that film, and the way in which that story plays with morality. But then, I also read Dante’s Inferno in school, and there is this incredible Japanese film, Jigoku, by Nobu Nakagawa; the depictions of Hell are just so incredible – it’s some of the most amazing set design I’ve ever seen. Set design was one of the things that I got to really passionately play with on the Pang album because I wanted to do my own little version of Hell.
In Hell, although you seemed bored, it seems like an element of fun and silliness comes through with your dance moves. I know you did the choreography yourself for that, was that the case?
It was totally absurd. I was looking at a combination of line dancing and Scottish and English traditional dance, like the jigging style movement. There’s a lot of similarity between them because the Smoky Mountains in the US are the best-preserved place of what early English colonial culture was like in terms of that accent and folk music. It’s a lot of hands on hips, stomping, and square shapes. I thought it was funny because I think a lot of what I do vocally is so twisty, ribbony and sinewy, and then to do something that was that bratty and angular, I got a real kick out of it.
Do you feel like that’s what we all have to do, in a way, to get through the dystopia?
I think combining beauty and a sense of humour is essential as a coping mechanism. In that video, it hasn’t descended into total absurdity like slapstick or anything similar; it still maintains a sense of melodic beauty. But yeah, I think especially my generation of women are really ripping that open as well. I think humour has been the domain of men for so many generations. And now it’s really exciting. Women are putting their own stamp on it.
As you’re going on tour now, it feels like a new chapter is unfurling for you. Are there any changes you expect that might happen over that period of time?
That’s an interesting question. I’m obsessed with the live tour videos that Nathy Peluso has been posting. I guess when I watch her videos, it just gets me so excited to refine stagecraft – and I don’t mean that in a showbiz way, I mean it in a magic way. The art of feeling the music in the moment and letting the tension from the performance fuel things rather than hinder it. I’m still very nervous when I play live, I get the shakes and I get short of breath. I still get very nervous, so I’m hoping that will melt away more and more as the shows happen.
Yeah. I think with extended touring, you have to get used to it at some point, and it becomes a new normal.
Totally.
So, what do you think it is, specifically, that makes you feel nervous when you perform?
Just the stakes of it. I respect the audience profoundly, and my standards are also very high. I find a lot of live shows exceedingly boring, so I want to do my best to bring something exciting and where there’s actually something at stake. Where if I’m making a big mistake, they can hear it or see it because that’s what keeps it exciting.
If we return to ideas of the past again, are there any elements of the past that you’re looking forward to reinventing or throwing into the future?
Yeah, I’m thinking a lot about cave art right now, and also drawing and very primitive drawing as a medium. It’s almost a joke to me that people don’t know how to write with their hands anymore. Especially the younger generation will grow up not really being able to write very well. Cursive is not being taught in American schools anymore, so that means people who are growing up in the school system now won’t be able to read their own grandparents’ letters, they won’t be able to read their own constitution. I like the idea of hand drawing or painting as an expression of our own futility, specificity and animalnessness [sic]. So, I think I’m going to be exploring that a bit.
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That sounds amazing, do you ever write letters yourself? Or, when do you frequently write?
Gosh, I mean, I used to so much and I haven’t written a letter in ages.
You might be one of the first people to fall within when it comes to it then?
No, really! I’ve been rootless for so many years now. I haven’t truly had a home for the last four years, so I haven’t written things or even printed things that run a risk of getting lost or thrown out or neglected or left behind. So, my whole world has gone digital just for portability, just like everyone else’s has.
How would you centre yourself when going through that?
Spending time with friends. I do this more compulsively. If I go to a new place, I become hyper social, and then once I get a lay of the land in terms of how people are feeling, what people are doing, how time can be spent together beautifully and what the challenges that we’re all mutually chewing on are, a part of my brain relaxes and then allows me to work by myself in a focused way. It’s funny, it’s like I need to do a scan of a new place. That happens very compulsively.
Just to see how everyone else is feeling?
How people I care about are feeling, what they’re thinking about and what’s going on in the place. It’s like mapping geography conversationally.
I was going to ask how long you’re going to be in this new place that you’ve moved into, do you get to centre yourself in a physical space as well as a social space?
God, thankfully I do. I mean, who knows how long I’ll be here? Long enough, I suppose.
Long enough for you to not feel a sense of a complete lack of structure or home?
Yeah, fingers crossed!
How, then, do you recharge when you do get burnt out?
Last time I recharged by reorganising systems like my clothes, the files on my computer, or the way the kitchen is laid out. I can never just relax. I always have to be doing something. But I like the idea of improving my life and my workflow through system reengineering and making things more f luid. Making it so I can find things in the dark fast!
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If we move to a more expansive question, I was wondering, do you feel hopeful for the future?
I am trying to answer this honestly.
What is your instant reaction? To not be honest or...?
I guess when I hear the word future I think very specifically about the socio-economic or climate versions of it. The word future that’s used in a newspaper way. I don’t have hope for that future, but I do have hope for my own. When I think about my day-to-day life, in 30 years, I’m excited about it. I think I’ll be extraordinarily surprised. I know, I can’t even imagine it, but that’s exciting.
I think that’s beautiful because I believe we all have to do that. If the grander future isn’t filled with hope, it can be so important to centre yourself down into what your actual progression will be. What specific hopes do you have for the future?
I hope to be making music in new ways, having new ways of improvising music, new ways of recording it, new ways of listening to it and maybe, most importantly, new ways of talking about it. I think the concepts of gender and self and friendship are undergoing such radical change right now, and I think we’re dealing with a lot of the growing pains of that as collateral. I’m excited for a time where those growing pains are done and maybe we’re on to new ones – we’ll definitely be on to new ones – but a future where the ones that we’re currently chewing on and grappling with have been sublimated into the fabric of society and are peaceful. Where gender definitions and this idea of individuality that I think has become very toxic have melted away into something else.
It does feel like a lot of work has to happen or is happening right now.
Yeah, it’s already happening. So, I think the fruits of that labour will be seen in the future. I’m excited about that.
Yeah, definitely! What is it about individualism that you find toxic?
We’ve never been more dependent on structures ever as a species than we are now. And yet, there’s this myth that’s used to sell us things and make us good consumers, that what we consume constitutes a personality and constitutes individuality. I think a lot of pop music echoes that and produces a lot of really good art. That’s the thing, I think a lot of Kanye’s work, for example, is grappling with individualism. And it’s brilliant, as a result, because of the tragic elements of it that he takes on in a very aware way.
What parts does he take on? What is he grappling with at the moment?
His own frailty, right? This switching between ‘I am a God’ and then ‘I have failed myself or I have failed others’. But I’m excited for a more nuanced idea of the self and especially of our relationship with dependency to emerge.
An understanding of dependency?
A sense of interconnectedness. For example, that the things we buy at the supermarket don’t just appear, or that when we throw something away it doesn’t just disappear, or the mechanics behind our material reality. I think an awareness of that would change a sense of how individuality is handled in pop culture, and the denial of it allows something akin to what we have now.
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I think that’s really interesting and it makes me think about how we’re surrounded by all these different systems where we can get rid of things very quickly. From people picking up your bins or the f lushing of things, you’re surrounded by places where you can do that easily. You know, you don’t have to sit with the things around you.
Exactly, and a heightened sense of that can inform your sense of beauty, awe, horror and humour in ways that I think only make us more human. And that makes good culture; that makes good art.
A heightened sense of what, specifically?
In the sense of the abjectness of things, and also the tight choreography of things. Both being extreme and both being beautiful.
What do you mean by choreography in that sense?
For example, where your water comes from. There’s so much choreography in that. A lot of people have worked on that, and a lot of machines are working on it every second, and that is beautiful.
Do you think about that often?
Yeah, I get very emotional about that sometimes, actually.
When you’re sitting there, how do you come to that point of thinking about it? Does it just f low in?
Yeah, just very directly, and there’s much tragedy in it but a lot of comedy as well.
I guess that’s this romanticism returning, but maybe in a different way than when you were talking about it before, imbuing things around you with that sense of beauty. What does that process do for you when you imagine those things?
It makes me feel very small. It used to make me feel like things fell into two distinct categories: holy like wood or things that were handmade or gifts, and then things that were from the trash world that come from a faceless plastic reality. I think last year, it just all merged into one for me where I started seeing the intention behind it. Things from the trash world were put in motion even at their darkest.
Can you give me an example?
For example, someone making money and putting in place horrible mines in Chile to get this metal for a circuit board for a product that’s meant to be thrown away after just one use. But that degree of exploitation, greed, and ruthlessness feels timeless and mythical to me. We are surrounded by those, they’re part of a timeless spectrum of human emotion. I believe that looking at some single- use plastic thing and not includ it in this charged mythological reality is to miss out on a lot of richness.
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So, you’re saying the intention is sometimes based on capitalistic greed. It’s interesting that this doesn’t make you feel full of despair.
We can’t expect to live in a morally good and pure world; that’s never existed and it never will. I think this sort of Yin-Yang is all that’s ever been around and all we can ask for.
So, when people think of utopian futures, does that just feel completely unrealistic?
Oh yeah, obviously. I think it exists for some, and it will exist for the very rich, but not for the rich who are paying attention. Do you know what I mean?
Do you feel that to be able to cope with the world you have to sit with the idea of those contrasting things with a sense of awareness?
No. In fact, I feel like there are a million siren songs calling you away from that awareness constantly. So, you have a whole restaurant menu of coping mechanisms but the one that I find to be the most compelling is just thinking about the flow of things, where things are from and where are they going to.
You see it as a coping mechanism rather than the way things are?
It’s the same thing, I guess.
In what way?
Maybe that’s arrogant for me to say. We know one version of a coping mechanism is vision, right? Seeing what’s going on and trying to create a sense of understanding. Other coping mechanisms are the opposite. It’s like retreating. I guess the reason I say it’s arrogant is because, who am I to say that what I’m seeing is macro? I’m a tiny speck of a consumer; I’m not like Elon Musk. My access to data is extremely limited and very micro. So, I guess I’m still operating on very peasant terms (laughs). But it certainly is, at least emotionally, a coping mechanism.
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