June 25th, 2009 1:40pm

Interview: Carey Mercer (Pt. 2)

MBV Ronnie: Would you pay fifty million dollars for a Picasso original?

Carey Mercer: I think the heart of this question is addressed in a book I once enjoyed: David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress. The protagonist lives in a world where humanity has disappeared, and she is alone with its primary inheritance: the great paintings of the world. I think she burns Picasso during a snowstorm at the Louvre. Let’s hear what Han Shan thinks about all of this:

Too Many Words

Talking about food doesn’t fill you up,
talking about clothes won’t keep you warm.
What your belly wants is rice and a thick coat is nice in a storm.
Sometimes words just confuse things
and make the Buddha hard to find.
While you’re talking the Buddha sits
fat and warm inside your mind.

MBV Ronnie: Are you a music lover?

Carey Mercer: I try to force myself to have something always playing. But I am in truth a lover of sound as much as music. The airplane over my head, and my neighbour watering her plants – this is a kind of heaven to me. The senses are a gift. From Zeus. And to think that music organizes and compresses sound, transmogrifies hearing into a kind of untranslatable language; this is the domain of love.

MBV Ronnie: Which senses does music affect?

Carey Mercer: The most profound and mystical sense, of course: one reason why the early-Judeo culture shit-kicks the Greeks is its understanding of the mystical properties of sound, the “I am here” that Abraham supposedly heard in Moriah. “The senses are a gift. From Zeus.”How less potent would this call have been if it had issued from some physical manifestation? A ghost-angel shimmering in the water-light? The angel would have to smile, or look stern, and communicate both aurally and visually. What clothes would it wear? Or would it be naked? Would it have short or long hair? Would it slowly materialize, or fly down fully-formed from the heavens? All of these concerns rob this event of its mystical properties: Hearing is the thing…

I should start playing in total darkness. Except that is so Evergreen University 2005.

MBV Ronnie: What do you need to enjoy art?

Carey Mercer: An education, or revolutionary wild blood.

MBV Ronnie: Alright, I have to break character, meaning “stop typing out the art questions from this Spanish phrase book”. Do you listen to pop music? What is the most slickly-produced song you like?

Carey Mercer: I don’t know about pop music. I don’t think I care much about it either way.

My wife loves Devin the Dude. My father made her a mixed CD of his greatest hits for her birthday. Whatever bauble I had purchased her paled in comparison to this sonic gift.

MBV Ronnie: I’d believed that for the last five years, individual writers’ tastes have had more to do with a band’s success than a publicist does. Now I feel naive. Does Frog Eyes have its own publicist? Absolutely Kosher has a publicist, Jagjaguwar has a publicist – is it enough to have your label’s publicist?

Carey Mercer: “I am in truth a lover of sound as much as music. The airplane over my head, and my neighbour watering her plants – this is a kind of heaven to me”Frog Eyes has a publicist. He has worked for us at least five years – since our second record, called The Golden River. He also released that record on his own small label. He loves our band. It puts a small lump in my throat. It’s been a long time; we haven’t set any sales records. He continues to believe in the purpose of our existence. I don’t want to talk anymore about this, but I am glad you gave me the chance to talk about this.

MBV Ronnie: What are you trying to write about other than hunters? Now that you mention it, you have certainly covered hunters who hunt all kinds of game, from sea monsters to a woman named Donna. “Over that ridge, a hunter lives.”

Carey Mercer: The idea of hunting comes from William Carlos Williams, who of course rightly loves Brueghel, and uses that curious powerful poetic statement (Hunters in the Snow) to illuminate the process of searching for poetic meaning in the lived life, which, as far as occupations go, is certainly noble. To quote Han Shan:

Enlightenment never comes
to those who scrabble in the dirt.

See: I don’t just get all “fantastic” for the LOTR/Borges/zoomers crowd. There’s a reason.

I write now about ignoble and debased hunting. I can’t take this world: it’s acidic and corrosive and it eats women. I live in a region that consumes and kills women and no one knows what to say or what to do. I write these words through a veil of tears, thinking about a highway of tears in my province where so many women have disappeared. I do not mean to suggest that all men are killers; I do mean to suggest that patriarchy is a killer. I do not know what to say or what to do. I am not entirely sure if writing about these things is the thing to do.

Skin of Evil is not directly about this, but Skin of Evil is trapped in a car driving around a bend, getting close to this fucking horror.

But I could never write anything that gets too close to this horror, for horror is a blankness, an echo in reverse.

I’m very sad now.