Elvis Costello’s ‘Imperial Bedroom’ was played inside the courtyard of the Hammer Museum on Tuesday night, and it was making completely sense for the very large crowd trying to get into the Billy Wilder theater located inside the museum. Too bad for me, even though I had left the house almost 2 hours before the scheduled time, I did not get in! Bret Easton Ellis has reached such a stardom status, the Hammer expected this success and two large screens had been installed outside the theater, one in the courtyard, one inside a gallery, and I decided to opt for this last option, a little disappointed, but reassured when I heard there would be a book signing after the event in the bookstore.
The Hammer organizes these provocative conversations between two great minds coming from different fields, and Tuesday night, novelist Bret Easton Ellis was meeting with Jonathan Gold, a food critic for the LA Weekly, who also wrote about music in the 90’s for Blender, Spin, Rolling Stone and Details. Food, music, writing, LA, the event was very promising but when Bret arrived, wearing a black jacket over a black hoodie with jeans and tennis shoes, looking very casual and comfortable, he declared right away to Jonathan Gold ‘I don’t want to talk about LA or food!’ And he continued while opening 2 cans of Four Loko he had just installed on the table between them ‘I want to talk about the To catch a predator marathon I have seen this weekend, it calms me down’. There was also question of a YouTube video about some angry Mexican ibex Ellis got obsessed with, and which he had done an impression of in order to kill a deadly restaurant conversation. Could it be this one? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TugslL45aXk They They talked about LA anyway, and about food, and New York, and music, and writing, what else could they have talked about? Bret admitted he was worrying a lot about this discussion, because he had read on Twitter that people ‘expected a lot’. ’But, it’s free, so you get what you pay for’, he added.
In one minute, you had already tons of pop-culture references, and among the weirdest ones, a TV show about pedophiles, an awful college kid energy drink that both men drank while grimacing (of all the drinks that exist he had to choose one that is controversial and banned in some states!), a YouTube sensation, and Twitter,… what about the music? Because it is after all a music blog! Both men had many occasions to mention music, something omnipresent in Ellis’ books.
But Bret was nervous, he said he never does this kind of thing, that he gets the chills, but he accepted to do it when Jonathan Gold asked him just before going to Australia for his Imperial Bedroom promotional tour, thinking he would die during the tour and would never have to do it.
He cannot stop talking about how much he had fun in Australia (he decided to go after the recommendation of a ‘hot dump friend who was raving about Australia’), how much he loved everybody there, because people were so illiterate, and there was no pressure!
Bret cultivates his cynical humor with real delight, and he goes on and on about his love-hate relationship with the country which banned his book American Psycho, and still considers it as the only X rated book. He described the first very serious interview he did over there with a woman asking some 7-minute-long questions, exhausting him, letting him completely frozen. ‘Who’s Delta Goodrem?’ he suddenly asked to the interviewer, ‘I love her songs, I saw her on MTV in my hotel room, she is a little bit like Olivia Newton Jones’…Of course the very serious interviewer did not appreciate his impromptu question, telling him to Google her, saying Delta was too old for him anyway. ‘But it was to break the ice Ramona!’
Probably one the best moments of the conversation was when Jonathan Gold mentioned Phil Collins, and the three pages in praise to his music in American Psycho, ‘Was it hard to write?’ ‘Yes, it was!’ said Bret. When he decided it was the kind of music Bateman was listening to and realized he had no Phil Collins album, he bought several of them, and got the revelation he had to write about this music because he was so not interested by it. Years later, when he was in Italy to promote Imperial bedroom, he was invited in the same show than Phil Collins, and people told him he had to meet the Genesis guy in the green room. It turned out that Collins never accepted to meet with Bret… and Bret seemed to jubilate about this situation, because he added, he did not want to meet him either.
There was a lot of talk about creative process and what is autobiographical in a work of art, and I cannot remember how many times during the discussion, Bret said that his novels are about his pain, his despair, a way to let certain things get out, using the writing process as a therapy. I thought it was the case for all the artists I appreciate.
The first draft of ‘Less than zero’ was done in high school, a sort of dairy entries turned into a novel later, but not intended to be public book at first.
If people see him as the LA writer, he insisted that his book are not about LA but about him, about what he was living at the time, wherever he would have lived. He claimed that The informers, Less than zero, Imperial Bedroom were all very autobiographical, and if there was a lot of darkness, it was because darkness was what he was interested in at the time, not because LA was dark. In fact, Bret went back to LA in 2006 after spending several years in New York, and he declared his love for the city of angels at several moments during the talk: ‘I was getting sick of New York, a sort of romantic, magical kingdom when you’re a teenager’ he said describing his idea of the big apple, ‘but I had always felt like an outsider, a valley boy’, after adding he had always felt stressed out and tired of not feeling smart enough in New York, ‘You don’t feel that here!’
‘But, in LA, I know a lot of suicidal actors in their 40’s’ he continues contradicting what he has just said, ‘who think New York is a breeze,… I say get over that, man up!’ Then, suddenly the conversation is not about LA versus NY, but about his overuse of the expression ‘man up’, that he first thought was original, than very trite as everyone was using it.
For him, Mulholland Drive, David Hockney’s paintings are more about LA than any of his books, but he also cites the MTV reality show, ‘Th
e Hills’, being very good at explaining isolation and alienation in LA, a perfect representation of ‘how geography plays a role in romantic disappointment,’… Apparently Bret is still obsessively watching MTV.
e Hills’, being very good at explaining isolation and alienation in LA, a perfect representation of ‘how geography plays a role in romantic disappointment,’… Apparently Bret is still obsessively watching MTV.
He has never taught creative writing classes because he thinks that writing cannot be taught since it’s an innate confidence, ‘it just helps to build an armor against criticism’ he added. And he knows about criticism, as most of the questions he gets are still about American Psycho he wrote in 1991! He said the NY Times had never written a positive review of any of his books, since most reviewers are older women, feminists who never got his extreme male behavior criticism and just saw it as his ‘evilness’… But Bret considers there is a lot of pop culture illiteracy in the New York Times. As the king of pop culture, he is filling up his books with music, bands, and songs references, setting the LA scene with characters constantly listening to Elvis Costello or X, something he got criticized for by one of his teachers who told him he was ‘dating’ his material… ‘So?’ said Bret.
But the criticism from women is changing, as he has noticed more and more young women discovering his books, telling him they like the sex scenes in American Psycho. ‘That cannot be a good thing!’ said Gold, ‘Why not?’ answered Bret, ‘They have now access to a thing called the interweb, they are liberated!’
Bret is fully aware of the new technologies. ‘Before people were getting their news from novels’ he said at one point with a sort of nostalgia since novels are still the central point of Ellis’ life.
‘All fiction is metaphorical to me’ he said, but visibly some people don’t seem to get it seeing how much Hollywood wants to adapt his books on the big screen, and wanted to first adapt American Psycho with ‘no restaurant, no violence!’ I am not sure what book they were reading, and Brad Pitt was even considered for the role. Bret still does not know what the film with Christian Bale was about, a movie that should not have been made, answering all the questions not answered in the book.
I got to meet Bret for the signing, after the talk, I did not know it would happen but I had brought Imperial Bedroom, just in case. I wish I had had an original question to ask him, he had already answered to many during the Q&A following the discussion, even to the fact that the only regret he had was not being prolific enough and not having enough ideas for novels.
My brain froze up, as I was a little intimidated to meet him. But there was absolutely no reason to be intimidated, he was extremely nice, signing a book and another thing for me, shaking my hand and thanking me for coming as he had done for everybody else. May be I should have asked him what songs he was listening to at this time, but this is what people ask him all the time.