RMAP09: LABOTOMY EYES (DELUXE EDITION)

CONTENTS:

LABOTOMY EYES (December 1995)

Comment
Ornament
Gargoyle
Catatonia Grid
Play + Record
Warmandfuzzy
Falling
Yes

COLUMBIA ASSIGNMENTS (October 1995 – January 1996)

Picture Window
Prom Night
Styrofoam USA
Poem
Catatonia Grid
Warmandfuzzy
Thinking About John Lennon
Epileptical Illusion
Late Night Blues

DRAFTS (September 1995 – January 1996)

Dub 1 Bedroom, Sept. 1995
Dub 2 Bedroom, Sept. 1995
Dub 3 Bedroom, Sept. 1995
The Ballad Of Jenny Pt. 1 Bedroom, Sept. 1995
Gargoyle Bedroom, Oct. 1995
Like A Flower Columbia Library, Oct. 1995
Play + Record Columbia Library, Oct. 1995
Thinking About John Lennon Bedroom, Oct. 1995
Labotomy Eyes Columbia Library, Nov. 1995
Stock Columbia Library, Nov. 1995
You Are Beautiful Forest Park, Nov. 1995
Comment Columbia Library, Nov. 1995
Epileptical Illusion Columbia Library, Dec. 1995
Boy, Is My Finger Tired Columbia Library, Dec. 1995
2183 Columbia Library, Dec. 1995
Reflection Processing Columbia Library, Dec. 1995
Kneel And Bobby Sock It To Me Columbia Library, Dec. 1995
Shedding Skins Columbia Library, Dec. 1995
About No One In Particular Columbia Library, Dec. 1995
The Left Doesn’t Know Which Hand To Jerk Itself Off With Columbia Library, Dec. 1995
Cuz The Cave, Dec. 1995
Late Night Blues The Cave, Jan. 1996
All-In-Together Columbia Lounge, Jan. 1996

NOTES

EPHEMERA

All titles written by Richard Millett © 1995 published by FLUXLIFE INC.

- except “Late Night Blues” and “All-In-Together” written by Richard Millett © 1996
published by FLUXLIFE INC.
LABOTOMY EYES
COLUMBIA ASSIGNMENTS
DRAFTS
NOTES
Labotomy Eyes: Excerpts From A Conversation
Recorded on 11-25-99 by Jessica Swearingen

PART 1

“So Nazareth and The Fluxus came to an end roughly around the same time, and Nazareth was
a welcome end. The Fluxus was sort of an unwelcome one, I suppose.”

“I really had thought that we were going to continue as some sort of collective or
collaborative unit…but you know, Jon's leaving.”

“We had plans. We were gonna do zines. We were gonna do films. Record. Performance art.
But without the physical proximity. And this is obviously the very early days of the
Internet. I think at this point I knew maybe two people that had email accounts. So what
we had talked about doing was virtually impossible.”

“The one thing that was going to happen was very abstract. This idea that we were going
to go to college and meet other like, turned down groovy people and they wouldn't be
brought into the collective per se, but we would recruit them to write essays or submit
photography or something for the zine.”

“By the Fall of 1994, I had found my writing voice, what could be identified as Rich
Millett. And in addition to that, I came up with my reading voice or performing voice,
so one could feed the other. I probably had my performing voice before I had the
material to go with it because I was doing readings in 1993 with probably a lot of the
same attitude and energy. But what I was reading were the earlier poems, and that was a
whole different idea. Anyway, even though I now had both, I also felt like I had come to
the end of that. So I really only had that all together for a matter of about six
months.”

“And when you are 17 years old and all of these other major life changes are happening
around you and within you, you perceive everything as the end.”

“And what I didn't understand was that this was really just a phase. It's the same as
discovering different editing tools. Or it's the same as adding more colors to the
palette. And I was far too young to perceive that correctly. So, when I found that I
couldn't naturally roll out Fluxus material, or what I considered to be Fluxus material,
or what I considered should be my contribution to the Fluxus, I assumed that I just could
not write poetry anymore.”

“What I tried to do was I went through this phase where I thought, I'm going to become a
short story writer. But with poetic language and some poetic devices. So I was gonna do
things like have internal rhymes or have very ornate descriptions of an envelope lying on
a table or something. And I thought was gonna be the way forward.”

“The way that I thought about it was almost akin to if somebody is telling you about
their day, but they're strumming a guitar. That's sort of how I perceived it. It wasn't
really a poem. It wasn't really a story. It was obviously being written, but it was kind
of being improvised. And I wrote a couple attempts that went round in circles. I had this
idea of not having character names. Everyone was just he, her, the old guy. I thought
names would storify it too much.”

“I was still writing poems though, kind of despite myself. I wrote a few at Columbia
over the Summer, and even in the final weeks of Nazareth I wrote several very quickly.
And the poems were a lot more esoteric and introverted. They weren't angry, political
tirades.”

“And I was surprised every time I would write one. And every time I would write one, I
would think, well, this will probably be the last one, this was an accident, and this
won’t happen again.”
PART 2

“It's hard to explain this. I had gotten so political about everything and I had gotten
so intensely focused on…I would walk into a store and look at the food on the shelves and
I would think about who owned what and who was the CEO of what. And what this person did
and who they what campaign they contributed to.”

“I couldn't watch television or go anywhere without my mind spiraling out into these
ideas. The intensity and unceasing obsession with trying to find the…what's the way to
put it…the root wickedness of things brought me into the spiritual realm. Because it got
me thinking about molecules and atoms and fractals. And then that led into the nature of
creation. So I had these two opposites of the ultimate realpolitik Hard core thinking and
then the sort of invisible kingdom. And it felt like a complete contradiction. I was
constantly oscillating between these two extremes. And when I would get to one extreme I
would critique the other. So it was this constant idea of this is the real me. No, this
is the real me.”

“I went on what was my concept of a macrobiotic diet. Actual macrobiotics would be

horrified, because I was way off. For all intents and purposes, I had an eating
disorder. My diet would be a day or two of lettuce and cashews and orange juice, and then
I would have an entire box of cereal at one in the morning two days later.”

“I would find myself doing things like punching a wall. I'd be sitting in a chair in the
basement. And I would realize I've just been punching a wall for ten minutes. Why was I
even doing this? And not even aware that I was doing it? So I was very unbalanced and it
felt like I was trying to resolve things in my mind that couldn't really be resolved.”

“What happened was everybody had gone to school, whether they were staying local or going
far away. And Columbia started very late. Columbia started like September 30th or
something. So, I had roughly a month to do nothing and I was fearful of having that much
time to myself.”

“I really had nobody to talk to because everyone's in the first blush of their first
semester of college. So I spent my time reading and I would go on very long walks. I
swear to God it was overcast for 30 straight days, like it constantly had just rained or
was about to rain. So I got home one afternoon, and it started raining. I sat down on my
bed, and in one fell swoop, I wrote four poems. Straightaway, that shocked me because in
my mind, I wasn't writing anything anymore. One of the pieces wound up in Coming Out,
and the other three I really liked, but I kept them for myself. I think it was then that
I finally realized, I think I just write poems, this is what I do.”

“Within days after that, I started writing the material that became Lobotomy Eyes. I
know that by the by the time I got to Colombia, I was already conceiving of this book and
had very solid ideas of what I wanted it to be.”

PART 3

“It was weird to be writing again. And part of what was weird about it was that I hadn't
reconciled the fact that I was now back to being singular after the experience of The
Fluxus. Because even though there were lots of things that were created by all three of
us. I can't speak for them, but everything I did, whether they ever even knew it existed
or not in my mind was Fluxus related. I was fully in the world of that.”

“Very early on at Columbia, I had grown a beard. I went in for my first I.D. photo. I
had this ridiculous beard that didn't ever really grow in because I was so young. I
looked like a Flemish painting. I looked like I should have been named Jedediah or
something.”

“The first thing that I self-consciously thought of as not a Fluxus project was I decided
to make this film called To the Bath. It's one of my favorite movies, because it was
very personal, but unfortunately, I copped out at the end. I get out of the shower and I
am holding a towel over myself. I should have just shown my dick. Eternally regretful.
I mean, now I would never do it, but I should have I should have just gone for it.”

“What the movie is actually about. And I shouldn't…maybe I shouldn't say this, but…I got
into this idea. For years, I had been reading Freud and Jung. Psychology of Dreams was
a really big book for me. I had also read Janov’s The Primal Scream.”

“I got into this idea that I could do auto-psychotherapy and it was a major preoccupation
of mine. And I felt that I was successful because I had used these techniques earlier
that I’d put together to get out of suicidal depression. So when my parents were out, I
would go and take a bath. And I would submerge myself under the water. I would fill the
bath up, but I would have the shower going at the same time and I would lay beneath the
water, and think of something that I didn't like about myself.”

“And all the qualities that fit into that. And all of the situations or circumstances I
didn't like would surface and how that would play out. I actually had made a list of all
of the qualities that I did not like. And I hit upon this idea that these things were
foreign to me. That I was sort of born as a blank slate and they had been um… implanted.
And so I would focus very, very, very, very hard. And I would imagine peeling skin off
myself and that skin would be that representative of that particular quality. I would
intensely visualize this translucent soaking thing I had pulled off of myself. And then,
I would get out of the shower. You know, rinse off. And I would have shed that thing that
I had been wrestling with. Well, this is the real me. I decided that. I couldn't deal
with those contradictions anymore. So I was going to get to the root of it. So that's
what To The Bath is about.”

PART 4

“Colombia was chosen indirectly. Nazareth had one final act of fucking with me. Never
mailed my applications to other schools and the only reason why I got into Columbia is
because that was the only one that I took care of myself. On what was my second or third
to last day at Nazareth, they sent me a postage bill for the applications that they never
mailed, which really says everything about that place. As far as they go, I don't know if
I've made this obvious not, but fuck them, fuck them, fuck them, fuck them, fuck them all
the way into hell.”

“So before I formally started at Colombia, I had taken a writing class there over the
Summer, and it did not go very well. I was about six months older than any of the other
students in the class. And I wound up just submitting Mindjacker for my final project
because I just couldn't be bothered. I was really frustrated, and unfortunately that was
kind of an indicator of how things at Columbia wound up going. I was very adrift. It was
a commuter school. Nobody knew anybody. There was no sense of any kind of continuity. And
especially if you just weren't all that social. You really were just a little lost sheep.
And I was really never comfortable there.”

“After being under surveillance so much at Nazareth to now just being deposited into the
South Loop with nothing, I very quickly started spending most of my time at the Harold
Washington Library or going to the Tower Records and walking around.”

“I had a creative writing class with Art Lange, and he immediately had my respect because
he'd done all this work with different literary magazines. He had also worked with John
Cage. He was a fascinating guy, and I really wanted to impress him. And his demeanor was
this is sort of archetype that you don't really see any more of. He was a tough-talking,
seen it all, grizzled, hard boiled, wounded romantic, baby boomer type. Someone who wore
their survival of the 60s and the 70s like a ribbon.”

“On the other hand, I felt like he was welcoming of all types of far flung artistic
expression. He still wrote articles for Downbeat. I mean, I think he was looking for
something interesting and farther afield than what most people certainly in academia were
looking for. But he wasn't impressed with anybody in the class. He seemed disdainful of
most of us. Especially if we expressed too much in the way of idealism.”
“And it just so happened that I was going through this phase in my work with Labotomy
Eyes where I was trying to synthesize the political and the poetic or metaphysical. And
it wasn't really successful. And then I was trying to complete his assignments. And so
balancing these two things was very difficult. And I was just handing him potboilers,
basically.”

“If you showed up for class and met the minimum number of writing requirements, you could
probably get an A or at least a B, a lot of people half assed their way through the
class. There were six or seven of us that were actively trying.”

PART 5

“While I was taking the summer writing class at Columbia, I started noticing these people
handing out the ISO newspaper. I didn't know anything about them. I just knew that this
was a newspaper that I thought had interesting articles that I wanted to read. And they
referenced people like Noam Chomsky and Angela Davis. I was intrigued by that. And it was
also this period where I was trying to put ideals into action. I became very interested
in these people, and it turns out they very quickly became interested in me.”

“I started having meetings at this cafe around the corner from Columbia. And the signs
that this was basically cult like were already there. It's just like Scientology or
anything else. You're constantly moving up the ladder. So you meet the first recruiting
person for this district and then you meet the next person up the rankings. And it was
the hard sell, so to speak. To show they weren’t racist, the one woman brought, from what
I observed was the one black person in the whole organization. He was mildly retarded,
and wore a baseball cap with the socialist fist on it. And he just sat there grinning
and staring off into space, or smiling if she said his name.”

“They were very keen to get me on as a writer. And naively, I showed them some of my
work. They liked what they saw, but the problem that I should have spotted was I started
getting mild critiques that it wasn't anti-establishment in exactly the right way.”

“Another woman I met had walked out of a Circle Jerks concert because they weren’t anti-
establishment in exactly the right way. And another one hated Public Enemy because they
were operating as capitalists. I really should have just left right then.”

“I kept going up the ladder, my curiosity was just too great. Very weird things would
happen, like they would book a meeting and tell me the location, and then there’d be no
one around.”

“The next day I would get a phone call demanding to know where I'd been, because, you
know, Greg was there and he's the people’s great leader of the tri county area, and now
you’ve ruined your chances for advancement. And will we even be able to count on you
when the revolution comes.”

“Even weirder was I would then get phone calls from yet another level up. And that person
would be very impressed with me. So, okay, Rich, we're going to have you go to, whatever
location on Wabash and now you're going to meet, you know, LuAnna and Mike. And they're
going to be the ones to you’ll have to convince. But you really better know you're
Trotsky from your Marx.”

“They wanted me to start paying dues. You know that term card carrying, that's literal.
They carried membership cards. And in addition to paying dues, I’d have to sell the
newspaper. However, if you're able to finally shed your bourgeois pacifist leanings, then
you don't have to sell the newspaper. You can write for us full time.”

“One of the funniest conversations I had with the higher ups involved them sternly
correcting me when I said something anti-police. Apparently, since the police were all
union, they would side with the ISO when the shit went down, and they’d serve as the
first line of defense against the army. Very realistic.”

“I forget the name of it now, but there was an Australian cultural magazine that I really
liked. And they had an article about Noam Chomsky’s tour of Australia. He spoke in four
or five cities. He would have a press conference at every airport and the dispatched ISO
reporter basically went and disrupted every single press conference and would rearrange
Chomsky's quotes to fit specifically what the ISO wanted him to be saying. And the
article in this magazine changed its focus from Chomsky's speaking tour, to tracking this
fucking lunatic from the ISO. By the time Chomsky got to Adelaide, what had been printed
in Brisbane had already come out. And it was very grotesque because this is everything
that the straight press and the pigs would be doing, right? And so, I’m on the phone
with, you know, Craig, who is the ultimate triple time socialist manifestation of the
Great Revolution, and I relayed the story to him. And this was one of the guys I really
had to impress. So I relayed the story to Craig thinking that he would naturally try to
defend the ISO. And his response was a straight up excited “Really? And what magazine was
this?” He was thrilled. He was fucking overjoyed that they had the press halfway around
the world. I was in disbelief, and he's like, “Oh, come on, don't be naïve”.”

“Conversations from there with them petered out. I would get calls like, we're going to
have the rally at Midway and yell at New Gingrich when his plane lands. And then you
know, Newt Gingrich was going to rethink the whole Contract With America thing. Again,
very realistic.”

PART 6

“I always thought I was a riot girl. And the scene I had come from, I think a lot of us
thought that we were riot girls or that we were at least sympathetic to them. I mean, I
bought the Bikini Kill records, we all did. We loved them and referenced them all the
time. From Yoko Ono to the Guerrilla Girls too, you name it. I loved all that stuff and
was influenced by all of it.”

“Famously, the riot grrrls had a press blackout, and we had pretty limited access to
zines. So you didn’t know much firsthand. But, you saw the footage and read what you
could find. I loved the image of it. I loved the iconography. I loved that they were, you
know, fearless and bold. To me, it was like a female version of what Public Enemy or
Ice-T or N.W.A were doing. I thought it was fantastic. The basic ideas all made perfect
sense. Putting a stop to girls getting groped or thrown around at shows, or being
intimidated to be in bands or be intimidated in technical things like mixing records or
editing films, anything, you know, I was and still am a thousand percent cool with all of
that. Of course if women want to express themselves creatively, they shouldn't have to
deal with not just the physical, but also subtle or overt faux intellectual
condescension. So, I absolutely considered myself a feminist. And when I got to
Columbia, and there were actual riot girls, I was thrilled.”

“The rejection though, was immediate. I shouldn't say rejection. It was like the
socialist thing. It was, well we have to make you punk. You’ll have to wear these clothes
and you have to eat this homemade tofu and you're going to have to stop listening to
corporate bands. More rules and more formalities. One riot girl started giving me
zines. And every single fucking one was the exact same. I mean, it was truly mind
boggling. All these things could have just come out of a factory. They were as
interchangeable as McDonald's hamburgers."

“For something so restricted and doctrinaire, they didn't even seem to have any sort of
overriding ideology. And for supposedly being so progressive about gay rights and gay
issues I found they were shockingly regressive. Their reasoning for why people were gay
was to me, completely backwards. There was a denial that being gay had anything to do
with sexuality. The argument that I heard most often was that it was a deliberate choice
to subvert hetero standards. I couldn't agree with that. That was the Christian Right’s
argument basically.”

“You know, I am in my own world most of the time, and apparently I would walk past people
and I wouldn't notice them. So I walked past one riot girl, and she said hello and I
didn't acknowledge her. And then, the next time I saw her, I did what George used to do
to everyone, including me, and I had adopted it as a kind of affectation, is he would pat
people on the head. He'd be like, oh, we'll talk later, and pat, pat. So I had done that
for years, and it was meaningless. Playful, if anything. So between that and a
disagreement where she took the moronic second wave Dworkin line that pornography is
violence, I got a whole zine written about me and what a misogynist pig I am. And she
then wrote me a letter where I was compared to the Nazis. You name it, and it was in
there. So I called her up and I was like, what the fuck is this? And we talked for
maybe five minutes, and in that five minutes she told me that she’d been trying to get
Q101 to ban a Nine Inch Nails song because she found it offensive. And out of the blue,
she put me on speaker phone and I heard her say “this is the guy”. And with that, a group
of riot girls all joined in and started yelling things at me, including one of them
calling me a rapist. I hung up at that point.”

PART 7

“After the phone call, I saw her again at Columbia. And she was looking at me like she'd
won, like ha ha, wow I conquered the male pig, you know? And I just said to her plainly,
you're not talking about me. Whatever you're angry about in life has nothing to do with
me. She said something like, oh, I knew you wouldn't be able to handle the truth.”

“I had brought the letter with me. And my next class that day was psychology, and I was
in there with over twenty women. Out of the five guys in the class, I was the only guy
who'd shown up. So I showed one of the girls the letter and I asked her, so you're a
woman, and are you a feminist? She's like, absolutely. I said, OK, what do you make out
of this? And she starts reading it aloud and cackling at how stupid and narrow-minded it
is. Never mind the grammatical errors. Well, with that literally every other, no joke,
every other woman in the class gathered around her and they took turns passing this thing
around and guffawing at how fucking stupid it was. And that made me feel good. It was a
big fucking group of women of all races, classes, and an age range of 18 to about 60. So
I thought, okay I'm doing pretty good with a random cross-section of the female
population here. So that means far more to me than the ravings of some fucking cult
members.”

“Kristen was in that psychology class. I noticed her right away that semester. I
noticed that if I made some weird joke in class, she would laugh. And I was like, I got a
response like, holy fuck, you know? I was amazed. And so Kristen became this sort of
totemic thing in my mind. She was what I was not. She inspired me beyond belief. I
wrote Shedding Skins ten or fifteen minutes after I had finished my second conversation
with her. I ran into a room and wrote it.

“She was my equivalent of going to art school, I was educated and massively influenced by
her. I'm very fortunate to have met her at the age I did.”

PART 8

“I was writing material for Labotomy Eyes, and that was going to be the first book that
was a standalone piece of work, right? So, No One Will Ever Love You had been a
compilation. And so I was writing this collection of material and I kept adding to it
throughout the semester. And the dividing line to me was the writing of Epileptical
Illusion which would've been December, and then Shedding Skins was right after that. Late
Night Blues came after that. Coming Out, with one exception was all written in around
two weeks. This intense flood of material.

“I had written the Thinking About John Lennon poem in October, and that was probably the
ultimate of the super-righteous trying to synthesize the political and spiritual, etc. I
holed up for three or four days in my bedroom obsessively working on this thing and I
went to unveil my masterpiece. I read it to a bunch of kids in class who told me how
amazing it was. And Art Lange fucking hated it. He delayed giving it back to me a week
because his riposte took so long to write. And of course, I went through a two or three
day denial. You know like, what does this fucking baby-boomer understand about my fucking
art? And then eventually it was obvious that he was completely right. And I was way off.
It was going to be the grand finale, the big finish of Labotomy Eyes. I ended up burning
the master copy in what should have been the original ending of Shut Up Sarah. The
spirit and inspiration and greatness of Lennon deserves better than what I wrote.”
“I had a lot of other artistic influences that were starting to come in, and when I wrote
Epileptical Illusion, was when it became really obvious to me that I wasn’t writing
Labotomy Eyes material any longer. Funnily enough, it was the first good critique that I
got from Art Lange.

“Now I was in a different mindset. Different set of aesthetics. Previously, if ideas or

material was good at all, it was going to get used for something. And in the last few
days of 95, first week of 96, I had this kind of out-of-body experience of realizing, do
you really want this to be the book that you put out after No One Will Ever Love You? Do
you really want this to be the first standalone collection of material? It was this
weird revelatory sense that I had. And I was just thought, no, this isn't the right book
to put out. Like, if I put this out and do I really want Jon showing this to people in
New York? And I just thought, I have to do better. Plus, I already had this other
collection of material. And it was very obvious to me that what became Coming Out was the
future, the way to go, and that indeed, not only was Nazareth now in the past, but I had
shed the weird hung up self-righteousness and self flagellation of Labotomy Eyes.
Writing it was just a transition phase and I was really going forward now.”

PART 9

“The riot girl who wrote the zine about me. She was you know, the ultimate purist
activist about everything. Incorruptible. Perfect credibility. And within a few years,
she was doing dance recitals at the McDonald's headquarters in Oak Brook.”

“I met somebody who knows her, and for her constant haranguing about being gay, she was
never was. At all. She comes from money, and her husband comes from money. And they
live in some place like Lake Forest and they have like three kids. She claimed straight
edge. Nope, she drinks like a fish. All of it was a fraud. Phonier than Milli Vanilli.”

“The funny thing about the Socialists was somewhere in early ‘96 they started calling me
again. These two girls, calling several times a week and they wanted me to come to some
event in Hyde Park where the guests of honor were the surviving Freedom Riders. You
know, they were gonna have the meeting to create the ultimate utopia and then it’s going
to be blessed by the Freedom Riders.”

“And I told you know, to fuck off. But kept calling. So I picked up the phone and I mean,
they called five times in one day. I heard their voices getting ready to go into their
pitch, and I said loudly ‘Community Equals Death’, and hung up. And then they called
back yet again, and this time I didn't answer and they left a voicemail message, and
they’re like, cattily shit talking me with very put upon voices saying ‘I've never heard
someone so rude’.”

“Yeah, that's going to convince me to sign up for the revolution. Shit talking me on my
parents answering machine. Where's my hammer and sickle?”

“After our winter break, the poetry class had to re-group for the final project. Art
Lange wanted us to do a reading of everything we had submitted over the semester, which
to me was like another lifetime because I already had Coming Out done. I was dating
Kristen. You name it. And so I went up there and I read all of Coming Out. I was really
dynamic and aggressive and I was jumping around a lot and I was very loud and intense.
And I guess I scared the bejesus out of everyone in the class room. Everyone was like,
what the fuck? Because I had been very quiet up until that point. But Art Lange really
liked it. He was by his standards thrilled and overflowing with praise.”

“A year later, I was working on Political Glitter, and I ran into him by a Pepsi machine
and I said, “you know, your critiques really had this huge effect on me and my work, and
it was really important. And I feel like I'm writing much better now, and thank you so
much.”

“And he had no fucking idea who I was. I mean no recognition, that I was ever in his
class. Zilch. (laughter)”
EPHEMERA
Mom & Son, October 1995
Journal entry, 11-16-95
Journal entry, 12-5-95
Xerox art, December 1995
Xerox art, December 1995
12-24-95
RMAP09
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