(English) Robert Longo, R. 1953) is an American contemporary artist known for his work in various genres.
Biography
Robert Longo was born on January 7, 1953 in Brooklyn (New York), USA. He studied at the University of North Texas (Denton), but dropped out. Later he studied sculpture under the direction of Leonda Fincke. In 1972 he received a grant to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence and left for Italy. After returning to the United States, he entered Buffalo State College, graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1975. At the same time, he met with photographer Cindy Sherman.
In the late 70s, Robert Longo became interested in organizing performances (for example, Sound Distance of a Good Man). Such works were usually accompanied by the creation of a series of photographs and videos, which were then shown as separate works and parts of installations. At the same time, Longo played in a number of New York punk rock bands and even co-founded the Hallwalls Gallery. In 1979-81 the artist also worked on a series of graphic works "People in the cities".
In 1987, Longo presented a series of conceptual sculptures "Ghost Objects" (Object Ghosts). The works from this series are an attempt to rethink and stylize objects from science fiction films (for example, "Nostromo" - that was the name of the ship in the movie Alien). A similar idea (but embodied with real props that were used on the set) can be found in the work of Dora Budor.
In 1988, Longo began work on the Black Flag series. The first piece in the series was a US flag painted in graphite and visually similar to a painted wooden box. Subsequent works were sculptures of the US flag made of bronze, each of which was accompanied by a signature title (for example, "give us back our suffering" - "give us back our suffering").
In the late 80s, Robert Longo also began making short films (for example, Arena Brains - "Geeks in the Arena", 1987). In 1995, Longo directed the science fiction film Johnny Mnemonic. The film is considered a cult classic for the cyberpunk genre. Keanu Reeves played the lead role.
In the 90s and 2000s, Robert Longo continued to create his hyper-realistic images. Works from the Superheroes (1998) or Ophelia (2002) series look like photographs or sculptures, but are ink paintings. Pictures of the series Balcony (2008-09) and The Mysteries (2009) are painted in charcoal.
In 2010, Robert Longo created a series of photographs in the style of "People in the cities" for the Italian brand Bottega Veneta (Bottega Veneta).
In 2016-17 The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art hosted the Testimonies exhibition, which showcased some of Robert Longo's work to the public.
Robert Longo currently lives in New York, USA. Since 1994, he has been married to German actress Barbara Sukowa. The couple has three children.
The study is an analysis of the film "Johnny Mnemonic", the only feature film directed by artist Robert Longo.
Alexander URSUL
A number of questions arise when looking at a painting. How could a man who became famous for his charcoal drawings, in particular, the Men in the Cities series, be brought into directing? And also directing such a blockbuster with a stellar cast? Robert Longo , of course, a commercial artist. His graphics are trendy, they show how style dominates everything today, and most importantly, life and death. Robert Longo is a postmodernist. And so it can work with everything, absolutely everything. But why did he choose science fiction to express himself? And for the film adaptation - a work in the cyberpunk genre? What came of it? Is this movie a notable phenomenon or a passing one?
To begin with, let's turn to what experience Longo had with video before Mnemonic. In the 1980s, he directed several music videos: the video for the song Bizarre Love Triangle by the British rock band New Order (see below), the Peace Sells video by the American thrash metal band Megadeth, the video for the hit by the American rock band R.E.M. – The One I Love and others. free-falling, but unable to fall, etc. In the video for Megadeth, the director relishes a close-up of the performer's singing—no, screaming—lips—later we'll see close-ups of protagonist Johnny Mnemonic's lips and clenched teeth. Clips were regularly shown on TV channels like MTV.
Longo's love for music is not without reason - in his youth he organized the Menthol Wars punk band, which performed in rock clubs in New York in the late 70s. You can listen to one of the songs here:
In 1987, the artist made a short film (34 min.) about a group of New Yorkers - Arena Brains. I couldn't find this job online. But there is a work of the same name by the artist Longo (see appendix), where an image of fire is added to the head of a man who is clearly screaming, with bared teeth (a visual image that repeats in Longo's work), where the brain is located. Brains are burning, burning?
(Stills from Megadeth's Peace Sells video)
(Still from "Johnny Mnemonic")
(Longo's work called Arena Brains)
The next step in Longo's career as a director was the work on the second episode of the fourth season of the project "Tales from the Crypt" (Tales from the Crypt, This'll Kill Ya series) of the American channel HBO. "Tales from the Crypt" is a cult series based on comics in certain circles. Each 30-minute episode is a different story in which people do bad things and get paid for them. For several years, 93 horror series were shot, one of which was entrusted to Robert Longo. The director's assistant was the artist's nephew, Christopher Longo (future sound engineer in Hollywood).
“I died, and this man killed me” - these are one of the first words spoken in this “tale”. The series "This Will Kill You" is dedicated to a certain laboratory in which a new drug is being developed - h24. Two scientists - Sophie and Peck - are under the leadership of the self-confident upstart George. One day, instead of the medicine that George needs, his colleagues seem to accidentally inject him with h24 serum, but the new medicine has not yet been tested on humans. The series features sex with an ex, a love triangle, paranoia, hallucinogenic visions of people covered in bubbles, and murder.
Turning to, it can be noted that Longo often fills the camera on its side to get unusual angles. The same manner will be present in "Johnny Mnemonic". Double exposure is also actively involved. Some plans are designed with the dominance of one color, for example, blue (compare with the use of charcoal in the artist's drawings).
A couple of clips, a short film and one episode - this is Longo's entire experience in creating videos (before "Mnemonics"). Pretty small. But it is already possible to draw conclusions from it. The groups for which the artist made videos, although they work in the "youth" genres and are underground at first, become commercially successful. This "Tale from the Crypt" series, like Longo's music videos, seems to us to be clearly part of popular culture. However, the question remains whether Longo played with style in these works, whether he appropriated it, or whether he simply worked for his own pleasure in a new specialty, earning money.
Now we finally begin to analyze the film "Johnny Mnemonic".
What's on the surface? Blockbuster 1995. Genre is cyberpunk. Budget - 26 million dollars. Star cast - Keanu Reeves (who became famous at that time for the film "Speed"), Dolph Lundgren (action actor), Takeshi Kitano (the same Japanese actor and director), Ice-T (actor and rapper), Barbara Zukova (wife of Robert Longo , starred in Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz), Udo Kier (played many charismatic anti-heroes in Hollywood films) and others. Musical accompaniment from the creator of the soundtrack to "Terminator" - Brad Fiedel. The screenwriter was one of the founders of the cyberpunk genre in literature - William Gibson, the author of the primary source story "Johnny Mnemonic" and a good friend of Longo.
Initially, Gibson and Longo wanted to make, according to them, an auteur film with a budget of no more than one or two million dollars, but no one gave them that kind of money. The movie has been in development for over five years. Gibson joked that he completed his college education faster than they made this movie. At some point, according to the authors, they came up with the idea of making a movie with a price of 26 million dollars, and then they were willingly accepted.
(Illustrations below: Longo's sketches and footage from the Johnny Mnemonic movie itself)
What is this “information age tale,” as science fiction writer Gibson calls it, about?
At the beginning of the film, we are brought up to date by means of text running from the bottom up. In the not too distant future, in 2021, powerful transnational corporations will rule the world. In a world completely dependent on electronic technology, humanity is suffering from a new plague - nervous exhaustion syndrome, or black fever. The disease is fatal. Opposed to the dictatorship of corporations are oppositionists who call themselves "Lotex" - hackers, pirates, etc. Corporations, in turn, hire the yakuza (Japanese mafia) to fight the rebels. There is an information war going on.
In a thoroughly cybernated world, information is the main commodity. The most valuable data is entrusted to couriers - mnemonics. A mnemonic is a person with a brain implant who is able to carry gigabytes of information in his head. The protagonist - mnemonic John Smith - does not know where his house is. He once deleted his memories to make room in his cybernetic brain. Now his head serves as a hard drive or even a flash drive for others. John, of course, wants his memory back. His boss offers to work as a courier for the last time in order to get enough money to return the memory. Of course, the hero gets into trouble - the amount of information that he took on himself is doubled. If you do not get rid of this data within 24 hours, he will die. And on the heels of the hero are professional killers - the yakuza.
A hero without a past. In a black suit and white shirt and tie. There is a socket in the head - a connector for wires. Standardization plus aesthetics.
They hunt for his head - in the literal sense: they want to cut off his head in order to get to the information. The hero must run towards the goal - he must deliver the information stolen from the Farmak corporation.
With the help of special gloves and a helmet, Johnny becomes one with the technology, penetrates the cybernetwork, the Internet of the future.
Longo seems to be playing with the genre. There are many clichés here: the hero wakes up in bed with another random woman, Mnemonic beats up enemies with a towel pen, villains in cowboy hats laugh like hell, the disappearance of a random savior at the moment when the hero turns away for a couple of seconds, two dunce guards who do not notice the enemies, as well as betrayals, a love story and a happy ending with a kiss against the backdrop of a burning building.
Therefore, it is better when you look, not to take it seriously, but just enjoy the action.
On the one hand, the film looks like complete trash. Here you have a yakuza with a laser from your finger, and a crazy preacher - a cyborg, with a huge knife in the form of a cross (here I recall the Longo series "Crosses" - Crosses, 1992). But on the other hand, there is a subtle work with style. Longo knows his stuff. Not everything is so simple - there is something to appreciate.
Yakuza with a laser named Shinzhi - why did he end up without a finger? The Japanese mafia has a rule - if you are guilty before the boss, you must cut off your own finger. So, this killer, pursuing Johnny, turned his disadvantage into dignity. The phalanx of the finger was replaced with an artificial tip, from which the villain takes out a molecular thread that can instantly dismember the human body (which, by the way, happens from time to time in the frame).
Shown in the film and the confrontation of the new and the old. The yakuza boss, played by Takeshi Kitano, honors traditions, knows Japanese perfectly, has samurai armor in his office, and even human qualities slip through him - compassion and conscience. And his successor, the killer Shinzhi, is immoral, dishonest, does not know Japanese, and betrays his boss for power.
The preacher who kills for money for new implants, brilliantly portrayed by Dolph Lundgren, is an appropriation of the characteristic image of a fanatical villain from Japanese animation - anime (see appendix). It is not for nothing that in one of the initial scenes - the scene of pumping information into Johnny's head and a shootout - the anime "Shinjuku - Hell City" (Demon City Shinjuku) is on TV. In general, cartoons, films of the noir genre, etc. are watched here and there in the film. Longo once admitted that he likes to watch cartoons - this is also confirmed by his series about superheroes (Superheroes, 1998).
The theme of modified life, the theme of cyborgs was touched upon by the artist later in the project Yingxiong (Heroes), 2009. By the way, notice that the series is named after the Chinese word for "hero". The Asian influence on technological progress is acknowledged by the artist.
Longo creates an insane society in which the sun never shines (the environment is bad - there is a special dome over the city), the society is divided into successful clerks from corporations and beggars dying from diseases from the slums.
The characters use a variety of weapons - from huge futuristic pistols, knives and crossbows to grenade launchers. Guns are an important topic for Robert Longo (remember his project Bodyhammers and Death Star, 1993).
Visually, the film is pleasing to the eye. There are stylish littered plans of smoking tunnels and streets of the cities of the future. You can see a creepy and interesting shot with severed fingers and vegetables on a cutting board. Or a mountain of switched on TV screens, personifying the madness of the information society.
A shot of a row of jammed TVs with empty frames in front of them suggests that the TV is now framed by art. The artist Longo makes something from parts of popular culture. In an interview, he says that in the late 70s and early 80s, art galleries were dead space, but the places where he got inspiration were rock clubs and old movie theaters. This culture was the artist's day food source.
One of the scenes shows a nightclub of the future - kitsch hairstyles, crazy makeup, strange people dancing to a rock aria, androgynous bodyguards, a bartender with an iron mechanical arm, etc. The Lotex rebels also look ridiculous - they wear dreadlocks, face tattoos, they themselves are dirty and unsociable. And at their base they keep a reasonable dolphin named Jones (by the way, this reasonable dolphin was originally a drug addict, but later the scene with the drug-taking dolphin was cut out). Yes, in places it is unrestrained trash, but it fits into the atmosphere of the film, into the atmosphere of cyberpunk.
You can even try to analyze the film using . Johnny Mnemonic wants to figure out who he is. Recall. Wake up. Ultimately, Johnny is faced with a choice - he learns that in his head is the formula for the cure for black fever, he can save millions of lives.
The key monologue of the hero Keanu Reeves - Johnny: “All my life I tried not to leave my corner, I had no problems. Enough for me! I don't want to be in the garbage, among last year's newspapers and stray dogs. I want good service! I want a washed shirt from a hotel in Tokyo!” Johnny still copes with himself, saves humanity, finds his love - the beautiful cyborg rock warrior Jane, wearing chain mail (Dina Meyer), and finds out who he is. His memory returned. He ceased to be a blind vessel for other people's knowledge.
Johnny's mother turns out to be Anna Kalman, the founder of the Farmak corporation, who died a few years ago, but continues to live in the cybernet. Johnny's mother was played by Robert Longo's wife, Barbara Zukova. Thus, Longo, as a director, with even greater reason is the father of the movie character.
The problem of white collars - people from offices - has already been touched upon by Longo in his most famous project - "People in the cities". Johnny can be seen as one of those "urban".
The film had a very active promotion - they sold accompanying products (t-shirts, etc.), launched a website on the Internet, created a computer game based on the film, and Gibson even appeared at various meetings with players and spectators. However, this did not even help recapture the budget. Johnny Mnemonic grossed $19 million in US wide release. True, the cult film "Blade Runner" by Ridley Scott also once failed at the box office.
The film "Johnny Mnemonic" seems to us to be an important milestone. Later, the Wachowski brothers would quote him when creating their trilogy "The Matrix" (surname "Smith", black suits, cyberspace, Keanu Reeves in the title role - fighting, running away, using meditation, Zen practices, etc.).
William Gibson compared the experience of making the film to showering in a raincoat and trying to philosophize in Morse code. Longo says in an interview that it was a rewarding experience, but he often didn't know how to set up those "damn cameras" and what he wanted from the actors, he had to demonstrate on himself in front of the whole set of 50 people.
The funny thing is that most people from the Russian-speaking segment of the Internet know about Longo only from this film. Here, for example, is one of the typical comments about Mnemonics: The film was shot by Robert Longo, who, apart from this, didn’t really shoot anything else, but his name cannot be forgotten due to this picture.».
Longo, as a postmodernist, refuses to distinguish between . It brings the previously underground cyberpunk genre into the mainstream. Johnny Mnemonic is a beautiful and atmospheric example of cyberpunk. This is a well-made mainstream movie. But not as stupid as it seems at first glance.
Application:
Images of priests-murderers.
- Preacher Carl, the cyborg from Johnny Mnemonic.
- Alexander Anderson is a character created by mangaka (Japanese comics writer) Koto Hirano. Anderson is an operative of the thirteenth department of the Vatican - the organization "Iscariot" in the universe of the manga and anime "Hellsing". negative character.
- Nicholas D. Wolfwood, aka Nicholas the Punisher, is a character created by mangaka Yasuhiro Naito, author of the Trigun manga. A priest who wields a large cruciform weapon. positive character.
Robert Longo Untitled (Guernica Redacted, Picasso’s Guernica, 1937), 2014 Charcoal on mounted paper 4 panels, 283.2x620.4 cm, overall Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, London . Paris. Salzburg
Your project in Russia is closely related to archival work. What draws you to archives?
Everything is simple here. I like the opportunity to immerse myself in the material, to learn more about it than others. The archives of the Museum of Modern History were magnificent: these long corridors with hundreds of boxes seemed to be in a cemetery. You go to one of the boxes, you ask the caretaker: “What is it?” They answer you: "Chekhov." Of course, I was most interested in the works of Eisenstein and Goya. The works of the second were a gift from the Spaniards to Russia in 1937.
I immediately remember your exhibition in 2014 in New York, where you redrawn with charcoal the paintings of the great American abstract expressionists. Both now and then these exhibitions, on the one hand, are group exhibitions, but on the other hand, they are your personal ones.
AT Gang of Cosmos I researched the post-war period, a very interesting period in American history. I was fascinated by the difference between a brushstroke and a stroke of charcoal. It can be said that I translated the works of Pollock, Newman, Mitchell into black and white. Of course, I took canonical works that are more than just works, since they have their own context around them, which interested me no less. Abstract expressionism appeared after the world destroyed itself and rebooted again in euphoria. Then the country had hope, but in 2014, maybe there is less of it.
In "Evidence" you, Goya and Eisenstein become co-authors of one exhibition.
This is Kate Fowl's idea, not mine. She came to me with this idea because these two artists have always fascinated me. In no way do I put myself on the same level with them, they are a great inspiration, a story. Interestingly, Eisenstein was very fond of Goya. And Goya at one time created storyboards, although cinema had not yet been invented. Goya and Eisenstein were engaged in the examination of time. I feel that as an artist, I act as a reporter covering modern life. Perhaps today it is easier to do this, because the artist does not depend on the state as much as Eisenstein, or, like Goya, on religion. But we focused primarily on the beauty of the image. For example, they excluded texts from films so as not to get hung up on plots.
Have you changed the feeling of time for 55 years of creativity?
Historically, times today are more complex, frightening and exciting than ever before. The same Trump is an idiot, a moron and a fascist who threatens the security of the whole country if he is elected. I am not a political artist and do not want to be one, but sometimes I have to.
Yes, for example, you have a painting depicting the riots in Ferguson.
When I first saw photos of Ferguson in the newspapers, I didn't believe it was the USA. I thought maybe it's Afghanistan or Ukraine? But then I took a closer look at the uniforms of the police and realized: this is happening under my nose. It was a shock.
For me, dystopia has always been associated with the 1980s, which I did not find. But according to films and books, it seems that it was then that a dark future was predicted, in which we begin to live now.
Everything changed on September 11, 2001, it's a completely different world now. The world has become more global, but on the other hand, more fragmented. Do you know what the main problem of the USA is? This is not a nation or tribe, this is a sports team. A sports team always wants to win. Our big problem is that we do not know how to live without constant victories. This can lead to disaster because the stakes are always high.
Charcoal lends itself well to depicting a bleak future.
Yes, but I always leave a degree of hope in the work. After all, a work of art is always about the beauty that the artist sees in the real world. I try to make people think when looking at my paintings. In a way, my paintings are designed to freeze a bit the endless pipeline of images that appear every second in the world. I try to slow it down by turning the photo into a charcoal painting. And besides, everyone draws - here you are talking to me on the phone and probably scribbling something on a napkin - there is something basic and ancient in these lines, and I collide this with photographs taken sometimes in a second - on a phone or a soap dish. And then I spend months drawing one image.
You once said that you create paintings from dust because you use charcoal.
Yes, I love dust and dirt. And I like to realize that this is how cavemen painted. That is, my technique is one of the oldest in the world. Prehistoric.
You are so fond of antiquity and at the same time filmed cyberpunk "Johnny Mnemonic" - something radically different from your main passion.
Well you noticed. The irony is that the Internet has become the same caves where people have fun in a primitive way.
Do you remember the time without the Internet. How it was?
Oh yes, that time. Interestingly, the internet has allowed me to find images that, in the old days, would have forced me to subscribe to magazines or go to libraries. The Internet gave me the opportunity to get to any picture. He made me think about the volume of images that appear in the world every second.
At the Museum of Modern Art "Garage" exhibition opened "Evidence": Francisco Goya, Sergei Eisenstein, Robert Longo. Eisenstein's film stills, Goya's engravings and Longo's charcoal drawings form a black-and-white postmodern mix. Separately, at the exhibition you can see forty-three drawings by Eisenstein from the collection of the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, exhibited for the first time, as well as etchings by Francisco Goya from the collection of the State Museum of Contemporary History of Russia. ARTANDHOUSES spoke with the famous American artist Robert Longo about how difficult it was to stand on a par with the giants of art history, about the self-sufficiency of youth and his experiences in cinema.
How did the idea for the exhibition come about? What do the artists Longo, Goya and Eisenstein have in common?
Exhibition co-curator Kate Fowl heard me talk about these artists, how they inspired me and how I admired their work. She suggested that I collect our work together and make this exhibition.
I have always been interested in artists who witnessed their time and documented everything that happened. I consider it important that in the works of Eisenstein and Goya we see evidence of the eras in which they lived.
While working on the exhibition, you went to the Russian state archives. What was the most interesting thing about working with archival materials?
The museum's amazing team gave me access to places I would never have gone myself. I was struck by the archive of literature and art, its huge halls with filing cabinets. As we walked along the endless corridors, I constantly asked the employees what was in these boxes, what was in those. They once said: “And in these boxes we have Chekhov!” I was struck by the very idea of Chekhov in the box.
You also met with Naum Kleiman, a leading expert on Eisenstein’s work…
I went to Kleiman for some sort of permission. I asked, what would Eisenstein think about what we are doing? Because I felt that the exhibition was quite boldly conceived. But Kleiman was very enthusiastic about the project. We can say that he approved in a certain way what we were doing. He is an amazingly lively person, fluent in English, although at first he claimed that he hardly spoke it.
Is it difficult for you to compare with Goya and Eisenstein? Is it difficult to stand on a par with the geniuses of the past?
When Kate asked me if I would like to participate in such an exhibition, I thought: what role will be assigned to me? Probably helpful. These are real giants of art history! But, in the end, we are all artists, each lived in his own era and depicted it. It's important to understand that this is Kate's idea, not mine. And what place in history I will take, we will know in a hundred years.
In your interviews, you often say that you steal pictures. What do you have in mind?
We live in a world saturated with images, and you can say that they penetrate us. And what am I doing? I'm borrowing "pictures" from this insane stream of images and placing them in a completely different context - art. I choose archetypal images, but deliberately slow them down so people can stop and think about them. We can say that all the media around us is a one-way street. We are not given a chance to respond in any way. And I make an attempt to answer this diversity. Looking for images that are archetypal from antiquity. I look at the works of Goya and Eisenstein, and it strikes me that I subconsciously use in my work motives that are also found in them.
You entered the history of art as an artist from Pictures Generation. What motivated you when you started borrowing images from the media space? Was it a protest against modernism?
It was an attempt to resist the amount of images that we were surrounded by in America. There were so many images that people lost their sense of reality. I belong to the generation that grew up on television. TV was my babysitter. Art is a reflection of what we grew up with, what surrounded us in childhood. Do you know Anselm Kiefer? He grew up in post-war Germany, lying in ruins. And we see all this in his art. In my art, we see black and white images, as if they came off the TV screen, on which I grew up.
What was the role of the critic Douglas Crimp in organizing the legendary Pictures exhibition in 1977, where you participated with Sherri Levin, Jack Goldstein and others, after which you became famous?
He brought together artists. He first met Goldstein and me and realized that something interesting was going on. And he had the idea to travel around America and find artists working in the same direction. He discovered many new names. It was a gift of fate for me that at such a young age I was found by a great intellectual who wrote about my work. (Douglas Crimp's article on the new generation of artists was published in the influential American magazineOctober. - E. F.). It was important that he put into words what we wanted to express. Because we were making art, but we couldn't find the words to explain what we were depicting.
You often depict apocalyptic scenes: atomic explosions, sharks with open mouths, diving fighters. What draws you to the topic of disaster?
In art, there is a whole direction of depicting disasters. For me, an example of this genre is Gericault's painting "The Raft of the Medusa". My paintings based on disasters are something like an attempt at disarmament. Through art, I would like to get rid of the feeling of fear that these phenomena generate. Perhaps my most striking work on this topic is the work with a bullet mark, which was inspired by the events around the Charlie Hebdo magazine. On the one hand, it is very beautiful, but on the other hand, it is the embodiment of cruelty. For me, this is a way to say: “I'm not afraid of you! You can shoot me, but I will keep working! And you would go far away!
You shoot movies, video clips, played in a musical group, draw pictures. Who do you feel more like - a director, an artist or a musician?
Artist. This is the freest profession of all. When you make a movie, people pay money and think they can tell you what to do.
Are you not very happy with your film experience?
I had a difficult experience filming « Johnny Mnemonic. I originally wanted to make a small black and white sci-fi film, but the producers kept interfering. As a result, he came out about 50-70 percent the way I would like to see him. I had a plan - for the 25th anniversary of the film, edit it, make it black and white, re-edit and put it on the Internet. That would be my act of revenge on the film company!
You were a member of the artistic and musical underground in the 1970s and 80s. How do you remember those times?
With age, you understand that you are not entering the future, but the future is approaching you. The past is constantly changing in our minds. When I now read about the events of the 1970s and 80s, I think that it was not at all like that. The past is not as rosy as it is portrayed. There were also difficulties. We were without money. I went to terrible jobs, including working as a taxi driver. And yet it was a great time when music and art were closely linked. And we really wanted to create something new.
If you could go back in time to when you were young, what would you change?
I wouldn't do drugs. If I were talking to my young self now, I would say that in order to expand the boundaries of consciousness, you do not need stimulants, you need to work actively. It is easy to be young, it is much more difficult to live to old age. And be relevant to your time. The whole idea of destruction in youth may seem cool, but it is not. And now for more than twenty years I have not drunk or used any stimulant substances.
