NYAB Event - Spencer Sweeney Exhibition

Spencer Sweeney Exhibition

Karma

This event has ended.

Conversation with Abel Ferrara, Filmmaker
On the phone (NYC + Rome), 2014

Spencer Sweeney: When I was a kid, I kind of lived at the revival movie houses in Philadelphia, and that’s where I first saw one of your films. It was Bad Lieutenant, and I was flipping out for it. I used to take my friends’ parents to go see it.

Abel Ferrara: [Laughs] Why?

SS: These were my friend’s cool parents and they were into all kinds of great shit, so I was like, “Oh, man, you’ve got to come check out this movie.” So I saw it numerous times. Seeing it in Philadelphia was a special experience because of the soundtrack.

AF: Schoolly.

SS: Yeah, with Schoolly. We were a bunch of kids from Philly and the movie opens with “Signifying Rapper”—we were jumping out of our fucking seats. So I thought I would start by asking you about your relationship with Schoolly D.

AF: I met Schoolly on King of New York. Someone gave me a tape of a shitload of rap, and Schoolly’s stuff really jumped out. We were in love with it, and we wanted to use it, so we reached out to this guy—since especially with a movie like that, we had a budget and could pay for shit—but we couldn’t track him down. We knew he was in Philadelphia. We knew people who knew him and then we would connect to these guys and never hear anything back. Meanwhile we’re getting closer and closer to mixing the movie. I wanted this stuff bad, you know? I’m telling people we’ve got to just say, “Hey, we’re using this fucking music whether this guy agrees to it or not, so on the next call, tell him to just sue us or whatever, because this music is right in the bag and I want to use it.” I would ask people if they knew the guy, and people would say they did, but then when I would pin ‘em, “You met him? Where’d you meet him?” they’d be like, “Oh no. I didn’t really meet him. We were just going to play in a gig.” I was talking to Ice T and I’m saying, “You know Schoolly?” And he says, “Yeah, yeah, I’ve played with him,” and I asked what he’s like. I didn’t know if the guy was young, old—like what the fuck, he’s a phantom character—and Ice T says he was going to play a gig with him and then he didn’t show up … In other words, no one had ever seen the cat, you dig?

So we were in LA and finally we put the music in. We did it anyway, and we flipped it around and put it back. When you put music in a film you’re slowing shit down, speeding it up, looping it in, doing all kinds of crazy shit. So now he’s going to come to New York to see the film, right? It’s this cinema with this Japanese dude named Randy. King of New York was a money film, so I fly these guys here, because they’ve got to look at the film to give us the okay. Schoolly shows up in a limo, with five or six guys—this is the first time we actually had a sighting. We had booked the screening room at night and I call my guy up and ask if Schoolly’s there. And my guy says he’s there with a bunch of people—they all showed up. But then it dawned on me that Randy is there all by himself with these five or six dudes from Philly. I said, “Dude, you’ve got to remember, we changed all that music around, this shit he’s got that was slow is now fast, the fast songs are slow, and things are looped.” The bottom line is that he loved the movie and wanted us to shoot a video of “Saturday Night.”

Cut to six months later and he’s telling me, “I wrote a song about the movie.” So we bring a video crew and drive from New York to Philly. The minute we get to the studio our DP [Ken] Kelsch gets a phone call that his wife’s having a baby. So these guys go, “Oh shit. the cameraman’s having a baby.” I said, “Okay, fine, take the equipment, give him the keys.” So he gets in the car and splits, and SchoolIy and these guys are like, “What the fuck? ” And I say, “I’m shooting it. We’re going to shoot this fucking video—DP or no DP—you guys know how to use lights?” It was that kind of thing. So now he’s playing me this new song, “King of New York.” Schoolly wrote a song that was ten times better than the movie. Everything we wanted to get across in the movie he got across in the song. It was one of these masterpieces. You know he’s a brilliant, brilliant dude, right? He’s a good artist—you’ve seen his work, right?

Conversation with Paul Major, Musician
Peter Luger Steak House, Brooklyn, 2014

Spencer Sweeney: It’s always right now, right here.

Paul Major: The past is only now. [Laughs] It doesn’t exist, except in memories. You could look at an Egyptian temple or a mountain or something that’s been there a long time, but you’re not looking at it except right now. I can imagine the past, but I can’t live in it.

SS: You’re here now, but there’s no certainty that you or the thing that we’re thinking about will be here in a second. The past no longer exists, and you can’t bank on the future. The planet’s atmosphere could burst spontaneously into flames.

PM: Or the fault line along 125th Street could open. They don’t seem too worried about it, but maybe? [Laughs]

SS: But that’s also where the magic lies—in the moment, right? Like when you’re playing guitar. You’ve got to push yourself into being exactly in the moment. Or do you?

PM: Exactly, because when you do start to think, you can never calculate a next move. It could be the worst move ever. It might be good in your mind, but …

SS: You also have no idea what the context might be. [Laughs]

PM: It could change completely, so all you can do is just do it in this one way, and to me that ‘s the beauty of artists. When it’s happening, they transcend their own ideas about what they’re doing.

SS: You’ve spent your lifetime studying, so you’re very much informed by it. Trying to assign any of that knowledge to a certain moment is a fool’s game.

PM: Basically, you have this knowledge and you have these ideas and you have these things, and you’re trying to throw them out the window and do it instinctually in the moment.

[Waiter enters and group sings “Happy Birthday” to Paul, who is celebrating his sixtieth]

UNKNOWN GUEST: Sixty! Yeah! Sexty!

PM: Aw, thank you!

SS: Look at that sundae. That is some heavy-ass crème fraîche. Oh, man, the cheesecake is fucking good!

UG: Pass the cheesecake down. Don’t bogart the cheesecake!

SS: But you know, sometimes I think about this moment when you’re playing and you’re about to do a solo, and you’ve got to get right in there and get yourself out of the way.

PM: That’s really it. Your greatest skill is to keep your talents and throw them out the window. I think sometimes the more technically skilled you are, the harder it is to throw those skills out, which is why some kid blasting away on a guitar in a garage sometimes can be more direct and moving than one of those Joe Satriani-type guys, who’s an incredible technician but vapid as far as expression.

Conversation with Mary Heilmann, Artist
Mary’s Loft, Tribeca, NYC, 2014
SS: I see you’ve got some of my favorite records here. Terry Riley and John Cale, Church of Anthrax—I love this record. Then, right behind that, you’ve got Brian Eno’s first solo record, Here Come the Warm Jets.

MH: Isn’t that something, that I have that?

SS: Yeah. Then, you have another one of my favorite albums. N.W.A., Straight Outta Compton.

MH: Straight Outta Compton. Oh, it’s giving me goose bumps.

SS: Yeah, that’s a really good one.

MH: Remember when they showed up … “Straight Outta Compton.”

SS: I was just talking about N.W.A. with Tony Shafrazi. He’s a big N.W.A. fan, too, and we were talking about West Coast rap and Dr. Dre and that sound. We had a good time talking last night; we just talked for hours and hours.

MH: We go way back, too, to the Chatham Square days in the 70s. He was around at the time.

SS: Chatham Square—what was going on down there, if I can ask?

MH: That’s a big square in Chinatown where I found this loft in 1970-ish, 1969 or whatever. It was kind of like a hippie commune. Phil Glass rehearsed there. We had six floors and got the whole building for five hundred dollars. I moved in and Dickie Landry, Tina Gerard, and all these people from Louisiana came up and moved in there. Dickie is this really cool sax player who’s working with Robert Wilson now on the Genet play The Blacks. He and a few other guys from down there played with Phil Glass, the first startings of Phil Glass. Keith Sonnier, Lawrence Weiner, a lot of hip people were around. It was a whole scene for about ten years, and I was right in the middle of it.

SS: Where were you coming from?

MH: I came from Berkeley in ‘68, after I finished school. I was from San Francisco and I moved to West Broadway. Then, after a couple of years Susan Rothenberg moved into that loft and I moved to Chinatown.

SS: So you moved to New York in ‘68 from San Francisco? San Francisco at that point was blowing up with the counterculture, hippie movement, yeah?

MH: The Free Speech Movement was big in Berkeley. There were so many demonstrations and protests about ending the war.

SS: I was just watching a documentary by this English filmmaker Adam Curtis called The Century of the Self, which included some interesting information on the activism of the late 60s and how that turned into the human potential movement, which involved things like EST and acid. They had some great footage of Esalen, that institute in Big Sur where they were doing all of this psychotherapy research and stuff. Thermal hot springs baths overlooking the ocean and stuff.

MH: Esalen. You know, when I was in the midst of the whole hippie thing, I was not into it. I had been sort of informed by the beatniks, who were all ornery and not peaceniks. Before Berkeley, I went to Santa Barbara and we would drive up and down the coast and we would stop where Esalen was. A little later it became Esalen, actually, but people were already doing acid there.