https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=JyONgwyKEGA
So I’m talking today with Nina Paley who’s a brilliant animator and she’s making a variety of short films which I guess are going to be joined together into a longer film that feature Old Testament themes and she’s the creator of the animated musical feature Sita Sings the Blues. Her adventures in our broken copyright system led her to join questioncopyright.org as artist in residence in 2008 where she produced a series of animated shorts about intellectual freedom called Minute Memes. More recently she made This Land is Mine which is an absolutely brilliant, shocking, devastating and also aesthetically impressive film about Israel, Palestine, Canaan, the Levant and that’s intended for her new feature film Seder Masochism and you can find a lot of Nina’s pieces of that film online and I would highly recommend watching them. We’ll cut a couple of them into this interview so that you can see what she’s up to. So I guess there’s two things that we could really talk about. I think the most important one obviously is your work but I guess the second one is your concern for intellectual freedom and your feeling with regards to copyrights. Copy is not that stealing a thing leaves one less left copying it makes one thing more that’s what copying is for copying is not that if I copy yours you have it too one for me and one for you that’s what copies can do if I steal your bicycle you have to take the bus but if I just copy it there’s one for each of us making more of a thing that is what we call copying sharing ideas with everyone that’s why copying is fun but let’s let’s start let’s start by talking about you first tell tell my listeners and tell me who you are and where you come from and and what you’re about you want to know about my identity I guess that’s it yeah trust me to identify myself I don’t trust myself there well that’s okay you’re the best source we have today actually I’m not I am not sure about that I mean I think most of us would agree that I’m an artist and currently an animator I guess I’ve been doing animation since 1998 before that I was a newspaper cartoonist I still do comics from time to time not very often I mean I guess the thing is I’ve just been I just came back from a bike ride and I’ve just been thinking about identity like all the time and how incredibly unreliable it is and how I don’t respect it including ways that I identify myself well I guess that’s part of being an artist you know because people who are artistic are high in trade openness and that gives them a very fluid identity I mean it’s an advantage because people who are high in openness can think loudly and they’re always coming up with creative ideas but it does tend to make their identity rather pluralistic and and and sometimes unstable and that can also be a problem well I guess I guess it’s not even that it’s fluid it’s not like oh I don’t identify this way one day and this way another day it’s just I don’t really currently have much respect for the idea of identity at all and I could you know say all kinds of things about myself but you know does that actually do me any good well let me ask you a couple of basic questions where do you live good I live in Urbana Illinois that’s verifiable all right and where were you born I was born in Urbana Illinois so you’ve been there your whole life essentially no I left when I was 20 I moved to Santa Cruz California I wanted to be a hippie I failed but then you know I was already out on my own so I briefly moved to Austin Texas that didn’t work out I moved to San Francisco in 1991 I lived there for 11 years in 2002 I followed my then boyfriend actually we were legally married so my then husband to India which is the subject one of the subjects of Sita Sings the Blues and then later in 2002 I moved to Brooklyn New York and lived in various places in New York for a total of about 10 years I moved back to Urbana in 2012 right after my father died and here I am and so why did you move back to Urbana after all that adventuring first I was done with New York even though I really loved New York especially you know my first five years there it was fantastic I kind of achieved more than I even expected I would be able to and started to just get I don’t know the love affair with New York kind of wore off and I wanted a little more peace and quiet and I wanted cooler summers and I didn’t want to smell garbage everywhere all the time uh I had an opportunity to move back here because my dad died my mom was threatening to sell the house I joined the Occupy movement Occupy Mom’s House trying to keep her from selling the house ah but so you actually had a specific demand with your Occupy movement but it failed she sold the house anyway but I’m living in her new house I see yeah I was I was dating somebody that lived here and that has ended but I actually really like it it’s much more relaxed and inexpensive I get lots of fresh air I take lots of bike rides and I don’t really care about uh the I’m just less stressed out yeah I care about my identity less yes well you have plenty of adventures obviously so I guess and it must take a fair bit of I would think time of quiet and and and some isolation in order to work on your animation yeah well I achieved that quite an isolation in New York actually by just living in New York in an apartment by myself I would rather live in New York than visit New York because when you live there you can actually control your environment somewhat and you can shut everything out whereas when you’re visiting you usually have to be out all the time being overstimulated right yes well it’s definitely an overstimulating place so you when did you start doing your animation I started animating as an adult in 1998 before that I had done some animation when I was 13 years old using a borrowed super 8 camera and I just completely stopped because I was in central Illinois and there was no support for doing animation there was no way I could have advanced beyond the neighbor’s super 8 camera but then in 1998 I was burning out of my daily comic strip and wanted to do something and borrowed somebody else’s super 8 camera and in 1998 it actually was easier to advance especially in San Francisco where a lot of people were doing independent film and yeah I just picked up where I left off I did you know plasticine clay stuff on super 8 and shared that film with a band called Nick Phelps and the sprocket ensemble that did live music to animation and that was really fun I was being gratified by audience feedback and so I made another film on 16 millimeter and then my next film was drawing and scratching on 35 millimeter and then my next film after that was drawing and scratching on IMAX film which is 70 millimeter really big frames and then I got into flash macromedia flash and I’ve been digital ever since and are you using macromedia flash now what’s your primary technology a lot of those clips for satyr masochism were animated in macromedia flash adobe bought flash and crippled it and ruined it in the opinion of many flash animators so I’m still using macromedia flash from 1990 no 2007 is that when my copy of flash is from I don’t know macromedia flash 8 it only runs on older computers actually I think it might be from 2006 or 2005 so I have this old mac here running os 10.6 because it won’t run on any more recent machines and you know it’s like impossible to integrate with a modern video editing system so I have a new mac as well and the newer parts of satyr masochism I’m using a program called moho pro 12 which is kept up and runs on modern computers yeah it’s funny how sometimes software peaks in terms of complexity and usability and then goes downhill you know I think we’re seeing that not just with software but with computers all together like personal computers I think peaked around 2007 maybe 2010 and they’ve been getting worse ever since like any sort of upgrade to operating systems just means more surveillance and less user freedom at this point yes as well as a steep learning curve yeah somewhat annoying if you happen to be an expert with the previous system yeah anyway I don’t know if I don’t know if I can keep animating digitally because it you know like the software that I’m using now moho I just found out that the person that created it and was an integral part of its team this whole time just left the company so you know moho’s fate is unclear and I’m like if I have to learn a whole other piece of software again I just don’t know if I can take this anymore I mean I’m so fluent with flash it took me years to become fluent at all with moho yeah well that’s another thing is that you know it takes a long time to become an expert user of a complex software program and then when it shifts the ground shifts from underneath you it’s rather disheartening because all of that expertise is essentially disappears and I guess it’s part of what we’re experiencing as our technology advances fast enough so that our lifespans are too long really to keep up you know we get we get uh outdated and superannuated on about a five-year rotation and it does get exhausting yeah well maybe I’ll just die early won’t have to worry about it oh yeah well that’ll solve the problem then you won’t finish your film and that seems like a bad idea well I’m going to finish this film I finally see the light at the end of the tunnel for sadermasochism good for you so so let me ask you some about that so now you made this land is mine when was that that was that in 2012 I think it was that’s the first scene that I made so this line is mine god gave this land to me this brave a to me and when the morning sun reveals her hills and plains ah where children can run free so take my hand oh and when you are with the help of god I know I can be so with the help of god oh to make this land our home if I must to make this land our own this land so it’s going to be the last scene in the film but it’s the first one that I made I see and what what possessed you to make that so I knew I wanted to make a movie about Passover because I was raised observing Passover although not much else and so I was doing research I had never seen the movie Exodus you know that movie yeah I’d never seen it so I watched it as part of my research and I learned that the theme music had lyrics written to it by Pat Boone and that it was a really popular song in the 60s tons of artists did it I had never even heard it before so I heard it and I just thought it was ridiculous right this land is mine god gave this land to me I mean any everyone would say that right everybody every group feels that way about the land that they’re on every single one so the absurdity of it was just apparent in the song and you know there wasn’t even really a process of coming up with a concept for it it was just that was what the song evoked for me was just showing how every single person or not every single person but every single tribe has that attitude towards their land and so saying that this land is yours and god gave this land to me gives you no authority at all because that’s every I mean that’s just what it is to be a tribe living on land so what sort of what sort of reaction did you garner from this land is mine this land is mine is the most popular thing I have ever made it’s been viewed on various channels more than 10 million times and you know many people like it in terms of criticism the criticism seems equally divided between people that say that I’m a Zionist and people that say I’m an anti-Zionist so it’s either a really anti-Zionist film or it’s a really Zionist film I see so you can just add that criticism together and sum to zero and ignore it yeah well I’m really flattered by it right because if people that passionately you know on polar opposite sides are saying that then I feel like I’ve really done something right well you’ve definitely done something right I mean I think that was the first film of yours that I saw and then I’ve watched many of them I think everyone I could get my hands on since then and it struck me in a variety of ways I mean the first thing that’s it’s let’s say strange about your animation is that it’s this it first of all you have great taste in music I copy the best you certainly do and how do you get permission how do you get permission to get oh you don’t I don’t really really and how’s that how’s that working out for you well okay in the case of this land is mine it’s pretty clear cut fair use because the song the film is parody like I said right you know it it’s literally a parody of those lyrics and you know that’s very use okay okay uh I actually think most of my uses are fair use they’re transformative but a lot of uses are clear cut as parody so that’s actually a really interesting issue with the film and how is this film going to be released and how’s it going to be shown because there is no no way I am going to ask for permission to use this music particularly music that entered my head as a child which I did not consent to and I had no control over it of course nobody has any control over what goes into your head right like you go out in the world and music is playing it goes into your head and yet once it’s there that part of your head that it occupies belongs to a corporation and I’m just done asking corporations for permission to use what’s in my head which they put there okay so you basically solve the problem by saying to hell with it I’m going to do this I’m going to do this no matter what and you’re going to iron out whatever difficulties there are with that as you move along that’s what it’s like it’s an illegal film I mean in the case of Sita Sings the Blues I made Sita Sings the Blues when I was I was certainly questioning copyright but I didn’t really see it as a completely bankrupt institution so when that film was done I cleared all the rights which was an incredibly difficult process and required hiring intermediaries because the rights holders don’t talk to normal people so if you do make a film and you don’t have permission to use the music in it you can’t simply ask for permission they won’t talk to you so you have to pay lawyers and intermediaries just for them to even listen to you to tell you how much money they’re demanding which is inevitably an absurd amount that you can’t afford but I ended up spending a mere seventy thousand dollars to make Sita Sings the Blues legal to show for free and legal to share for free if I you know wanted some other model it would have been more than that right seventy thousand dollars just to be able to give it away but I’m not doing that with a new film the new film I’m making an illegal film all of my music choices have to do not with their licenses but with the content and meaning and resonance of the songs most songs have a kind of cultural resonance that is related to the point in time they were circulating for example This Land is Mine you know refers directly to this period of the 60s yeah it has a cultural resonance because of that which a new song if I like commissioned a new song sort of like that it wouldn’t have the same meaning at all no definitely not songs like that they pick up it’s really interesting to watch what happens to a song across time because it picks up it’s embedded in a context in that context grows and develops and transforms this the song a song is really a mutable entity you know it transforms tremendously as it moves across time yeah and that and that meaning comes from the audience it doesn’t come from even the person that wrote it let alone the copyright holder right the value of it comes from us okay so back to this Land is Mine so when I watched that it produced a lot of mixed feelings I mean the first was that it was it’s very blackly humorous and you know you have this stirring propagandistic anthem like music in the background it’s it’s sort of overblown the singer you know he he amplifies the emotional resonance of it and then you have this just non-stop carnage in the background to this to this stirring music and then but what’s really strange about it as far as I was concerned is that it’s eerily beautiful and and that’s something that’s that seems to be a perverse and remarkable element of all of your films is that they deal with extremely harsh realities metaphysical and and genuine but you have this amazing capacity to generate these complex beautiful images and to set them in a you know and in an equally beautiful relationship to the music and so I mean I didn’t know what and still don’t know what to make of the film because you don’t often see what you might describe as stunningly beautiful satire stunningly beautiful artistic satire I don’t know Mad Magazine was pretty stunningly beautiful back back in the day it had had like the best artists working for it yeah that’s true that’s true but you’re you’re there’s an element to what you’re doing especially with the juxtaposition of the music that seems to elevate it in my opinion to something like the level of high art what’s high what’s low well thank you I thank you for the compliment I can’t really respond any anything other than thanking you so your aesthetic sense and the style that you developed do you do you have sources for that do you have influences that that that helped you helped you develop that particular style I mean I know it’s a foolish question to ask artists where they get their ideas but I’m I’m wondering how it is that you came up with the concepts that you’re working with well graphically some of the style is determined by the software that I use so this land is mine and all the song scenes and satyr masochism are flash and flash the way I use it it’s what we call a cutout style where I’ll draw shapes and I’ll I’ll move them in relation to each other but the shapes themselves don’t bend or anything they’re just cut out is a animation technique where people would literally cut out shapes from paper and move them around under a camera so that’s part of the style with this land is mine in particular I was looking at ancient Assyrian art and ancient Egyptian art some of that is reflected there’s like a little border of flowers which comes from Assyrian art um yeah those are the things that I’m looking at those are the main things uh cut out style and the Assyrian stuff and so when you when you made this land is mine did you have the satyr masochism film in mind or did that emerge afterwards now I knew I knew I wanted to make this film about Passover and that’s why I watched Exodus and that’s how satyr masochism I mean that’s how this land is mine came to be so I I just knew I wanted to do a film about Passover I didn’t know what it was gonna be because I had never read the Old Testament before and reading Exodus was of course an eye-opener um and the film I don’t I didn’t imagine what the film was going to be like when I started it other than the topic I would work around but the way the film is actually shaping up is a surprise to me so we should probably walk everyone who’s listening through the film itself so you’ve created a variety of what appear at least to be at the moment to be animated shorts that detail out different episodes in in the biblical narrative surrounding essentially surrounding Moses there’s more to it than that but certainly surrounding Moses and so yeah does the film does the film essentially concentrate solely on Exodus or there are other elements of of Old Testament stories that are you that you’re including it’s really just Exodus but also you know Leviticus and and Deuteronomy and Numbers all have bits of Exodus in them right right so it’s basically the story of Moses it’s a story of Moses right it’s the story of the Exodus and then the establishment of the you know the tabernacle and the priesthood and the religion right that’s sort of the I mean it’s regarded as the birth of the Jewish people right right and so now you said that when you were growing up you observed Passover but not much else yeah so but you’re it’s it’s not unreasonable I think to observe that there appears to be something like a deep religious sensibility in your in your work I mean you seem to be treating the stories with a tremendous amount of respect and so what what do you what do you think’s welling up from inside of you to do that well I’m glad you recognize the the respect any respect for this was like I I approached these stories with an open mind and an open heart and was expecting to find some wisdom in them when I began this project I thought I’m going to explore the religion of my father my father came from a religious Jewish family but he wasn’t really religious when I was growing up although he had he he wanted us to observe Passover I guess as part of our he wanted us to have some Jewish identity he wanted us to be in touch with our heritage as Jews but it was a bit muddled like we we were forbidden from observing any Christian holidays there was no Christmas in our house whereas a lot of secular Jews do observe Christmas there was like a really half-assed Hanukkah and there were no other high holy days and my dad was an atheist so after spending years reading many different versions of Exodus and commentary on it and things relating to it and trying to understand it and trying to find some way to connect to it what happened was I realized that I had found the religion of my father and that was atheism so I became sort of a born-again atheist reading this stuff my my neutrality towards the religion changed to a kind of abhorrence towards it which is which is not to take away from its importance you know as a cultural foundation right like I live in western culture and these texts are stories that everybody knows to some extent and you know they’re very important and I respect them for that reason that they’re like a cultural touchstone for everyone but I did not emerge from Exodus with it you know I had like less connection to God than I had ever had in my life I actually had like a spiritual crisis like you know it was really hard for me to have any kind of sense of a power greater than myself after reading this and and working with it and and that’s also been the case as a consequence of doing the animation yeah because you know animation is like a meditation when you when you made an old story it’s just a long grown out meditation on it and sometimes insights can pop up while you’re working on it I mean it’s just like in your face every day I mean I have a there are insights that I have one of them a lot of them are comparative religion insights because the previous film was Sita Sings the Blues so in this film I included Aaron a lot and Sita Sings the Blues I left out Lakshman who is uh Ram’s brother and I decided not to do that here even though with a lot of these stories when they’re turned into films Aaron is made into this minor character and a lot of things that Aaron does in movies they show Moses doing them like casting the staff down and it turns into a snake that was that was Aaron’s business but anyway I showed Aaron in this and I thought about how both stories have these brothers they have like the big important memorable brother and the other brother who actually carries out quite a bit of the work um that’s a similarity and of course both stories also have a really gruesome scene after what we normally think of as the end like with Exodus especially growing up with Passover I’d always thought the story was you know the Hebrews were slaves and then you know they were free right like the end is they’re free they cross the red sea they get away from the Egyptians hooray and of course what actually happens in the story after that is there’s this Hebrew on Hebrew slaughter because of the golden calf and a whole bunch of those Hebrews who were liberated they die yeah well liberation turns out to be a very complicated thing yeah you know it’s funny when I when I watched the Americans go into Iraq you know with their initial optimism and then the absolute disintegration of the Iraqi state I thought well and then the failure to produce something you know stable as a consequence I thought well a little bit of Exodus would have gone a long ways it was quite funny in some sense because in a black way because of course the people who invaded Iraq who planned the invasion or um were at least nominally committed Christians and I thought well they took out the tyrant like just as the Hebrews escaped from the tyrant let’s say but you know Exodus lays it out pretty clearly as you escape from tyranny into the desert and that’s no joke and it’s 40 years right it’s three generations before the desert disappears and in the desert there’s nothing but inter-tribal warfare and the conflict around new emerging values which is of course the conflict between the idolization of the golden calf and the necessity for the new rules that Moses imposes it’s no picnic and I mean a lot of the Old Testament is like that even I’ve been doing a series of lectures I don’t know if you know about this but I’ve done 12 lectures on the Old Testament that have actually become quite popular I think the first one has about three quarters of a million views and I’ve been attempting to treat the stories with as much respect as I can because like you I believe that they’re they’re foundational stories and I would say that my respect for them has actually grown and and and my relationship with whatever you might regard as transcendent has been improved by that but be that as it may even in the story of Abraham you know he’s called forward by God to go out into the world he’s an old man by that time right he’s 75 years old he should have left his family his father’s house and and his kinsmen long before but God calls him on an adventure to go out into the land of the stranger and to leave his home and you know it just goes terribly badly for Abraham I mean the first thing he encounters is a famine and then he moves into the tyranny of Egypt and then you know the pharaoh takes his wife so it’s one of the things that you can say about the Old Testament is that it’s not naively optimistic in any sense of the word yeah but the Passover story kind of is as it’s as people observe it like when you read the Passover story it’s just this nice part and that like I say that other part that later chapter we never discussed that at Passover and you know the closest will come is 40 years in the desert like I did know that the Jews wandered the desert for 40 years I didn’t know they killed each other right and and this is something that’s similar to the Ramayana because the Ramayana is frequently told without the last chapter without the Uttarakhand which is the difficult part right which I think is the richest and most interesting part of the whole story so I focused on it and Sita sings the blues but but yeah I mean I think that what the most valuable parts of these stories are the most difficult and they’re the parts that are left out and most people don’t know about you have to actually read them yeah well they are the most useful parts because life is full of difficulty and so if you over if you leap over the parts of the stories that are pessimistic and dark then you miss part of what the stories are trying to teach you about how to prepare for catastrophe I mean it says obviously in the Exodus story the fact that the Hebrews escaped from tyranny is presented as a good thing and even as something that God wills but it’s by no means a straightforward passage from tyranny to the the promised land I mean and Moses doesn’t make it to the promised land right he he dies before he gets there yeah and even the promised land is not nearly as much fun as it’s been as we have been led to believe right like they’re they’re constantly the Jews are constantly falling short right they’re constantly angering God they’re never getting their shit together you know God just keeps you know God’s ambivalence towards them persists yeah yeah well well and I also think that’s very realistic because there are very few times in life where even if you’re not suffering from the tyranny of other people or or yourself that it’s very difficult to walk the proper straight and narrow path and to keep everything organized and to keep things going properly I mean there’s no there’s never any shortage of severe challenges yeah so and that even if you’re chosen by God let’s say there’s no shortage of severe challenges you also see that in all the other stories in the Old Testament I mean even when God is walking with someone say like Abraham or Noah for that matter it’s pretty still pretty much non-stop carnage I mean Noah Noah has his family together and his generations are perfect right and he walks with God so he’s properly oriented in the world but he still has to build the ark and and get through the damn storm and and and and be humiliated by his children at the end and it’s it’s it’s a very rough business so in the in one of your uh shorts and I don’t know the name of it it’s the one where the I guess it’s the one that specifically deals with the Passover where the Egyptian firstborns are all killed yeah yeah what’s that one called death of the firstborn Egyptians there we go there we go an appropriate title I can’t help but harbor the suspicion that you had a fair bit of sympathy for the Egyptians yeah well you know they had some great art yes yeah and you do a wonderful job by the way of incorporating that into that film it’s that one is spectacularly beautiful well thank you and they had religion and uh uh I mean so doing visual research for this project there’s not a lot of really great ancient Hebrew art possibly or probably because it’s against the religion to make art you’re not supposed to make graven images so in terms of coming up with a style that evoked this I had to I was looking at art from the region and I was like oh it’s all Egyptian and Assyrian those are the ones those are the people there that made the art fantastic art it breaks my heart that that’s supposed to be evil right that that that art which actually moves me when I look at it is what we’re supposed to smash right like that’s that’s what we’re commanded to destroy because it’s it’s all full of idols um I am not down with that so I you know just naturally was going to sympathize with the Egyptians this is all yeah well there’s a there’s a real tension there that I think is worth thinking about you know because I understand why from a psychological perspective I understand why there was an injunction against making images and you know you see the same thing acted out right now with ISIS say in the Middle East where they’re destroying well for example all the great Buddhist art and all those ancient monuments which of course is an absolute and utter catastrophe but but they’re following the religion I mean they’re following it better than we do right right well so so the conundrum seems to me to be that and this is also played out in the story of Exodus with the golden calf is that you know the the idea of God is supposed to be something at least in principle that that you can’t really grip that you can’t really encapsulate you know that you can’t dogmatically represent because then it turns into an idol and and an idol and ideology are very much the same thing and I think ideology is terribly dangerous you know because you take something concrete like an axiom of some sort that’s very concrete and then you make that your highest value and it narrows you and and restricts you and also makes you incredibly dangerous and so the idea that there’s a great danger in idolization I think is a is a very very powerful notion and so I think that’s what informed the restrictions against making graven images of God because you end up confusing the image with the transcendent reality right and then you think that you understand it and you have it in your hands but it certainly does seem to have some pretty dramatically negative consequences when the consequence of that is the absence of visual art in any profound sense and also this injunction to destroy you know the idols of well of the foreigner or or of the of the person who’s heretical or or and I’m not exactly sure how do what would you say I’m not exactly sure what the mediating path is between those two extremes I mean I think a real artist and and and I definitely think that you belong in that category is someone who isn’t using idols as representation because you’re using your artistic talent to push beyond what you already know like it’s a form of exploration rather than a form of canonization or or categorization right it’s a it’s a it’s a journey into the unknown and an extension of the way that people think and I think of that as a way of uniting with the transcendent rather than trying to encapsulate it in some sort of formulate box but there is a great danger of that kind of formula formalization so anyways there is that danger and that’s that is of course the commonest interpretation of the injunction against idols but I think that I mean it’s it’s never borne out right it’s like any injunction against that kind of idolatry has never resulted in the absence of idolatry ever and we can clearly do it with abstract concepts we can clearly do it you know we clearly don’t need images to do this so you could argue that you could do it with words just as effectively you knew of anything you knew of anything and so it doesn’t work I wondered while I was working on the film whether it might have been a simple and misunderstood injunction against using Egyptian hieroglyphics and that it was a requirement to use Semitic written language rather than Egyptian because Egyptian hieroglyphics are full of things that fly in the air and things that crawl on the ground and things that swim in the sea and men and women all that stuff because I was working on these little animated hieroglyphs and I was like maybe it was just this which would have made sense right because because they are anti-Egyptian when when these stories were written down and they were promoting the Semitic language that’s what you were supposed to use right well now we put it in some sense in the same category as the dietary prescriptions right because the best evidence for the reason for those dietary prescriptions isn’t hygiene or anything like that it’s don’t eat the food that you’re that the people who worship other gods eat right and yeah there’s a variety of useful reasons for that and certainly one of them is that it it it well it’s a price and an advantage is that the people you eat with are your kinsmen and your tribesmen pretty much by definition and so if you share a palette if you if you share a menu and there and you share restrictions it’s much easier for you to socialize with the people who have the same restrictions that you do so it seems to be a reasonably intelligent way of keeping a culture cohesive and well it certainly it certainly worked for a very long period of time and so that that would be an idea that’s in keeping with that is that you certainly don’t use the idle representations of the people who you are not because then you integrate with them and your and your culture disappears right and you don’t use their language and you don’t use you don’t write down things that they can read right but so so much of these of the books of moses were about be different from your neighbors like don’t let your neighbors corrupt you you are different from your neighbors and interestingly i was raised with that right like my father the atheist jew was adamant about you know not doing the christmas things when i went to school uh you know they would have christmas projects in the winter and he would say just tell your teacher you don’t have to do this project because you’re jewish he never said you don’t have to do the project because you’re an atheist just because you’re jewish right right and so we maintained some sort of difference in spite of not actually practicing jewish religion really yeah well that’s one of the things that’s always been interesting interesting to me about judaism particularly and a mystery i would say and you know i think there are very many ways of believing in god and one way of believing is conscious and that would be the sort of belief that you can state as i believe or i don’t believe and i think in some sense that’s the weakest form of belief and it’s also the one that’s most easily undermined i think the more profound forms of belief are ones that you act out they’re like a dance in some sense and they’re built into your behavioral coding and and they’re not so easily criticized and undermined because they don’t really operate at an intellectual level no like like for example watching your videos um it it’s not they’re not reducible to an intellectual exercise you know i can’t watch them and and and first of all i can’t say exactly what it is that you’re up to and even if i could lay out a reasonably comprehensive description of what you’re up to which which would be by no means complete it wouldn’t be easy for me to mount an intellectual attack on that because because of your use use of dance in some sense with the cutouts and your use of imagery and your use of music it it puts the entire discussion on a plane that can’t be easily reducible to an intellectual discussion and so in judaism you see this and and this is the case i think with the atheist jews um perhaps most self-evidently is that the rituals are kept and the division is kept and the encoded actions are kept and the person might say well i don’t believe in god and the proper objection to that might be something like well you might say that you don’t believe in god but you sure act it out but it seems to me that you know people have asked me about my religious faith which is a question that i find quite intrusive and um not that no not that people don’t have the right to ask it because they certainly do but i mean i’m i’m sufficiently um ignorant about my own orientations in some sense to not know exactly how to answer that but one answer that i find quite useful and i think fairly truthful is that i certainly act as if there’s a god and and then the rest of it i leave i suppose in some sense in a cloud of of as of yet incompletely explored ignorance because i do believe that human beings have a relationship with the transcendent now i see that manifest itself in in great art for example where people seem to be able to reach beyond themselves to produce something that’s of spectacular lasting intense emotional and practical significance that’s the realm of inspiration you know and i don’t think that we understand that very well at all and i don’t think that we understand consciousness very well as well at all in fact and i think it is a fundamental element of being so but but it is interesting and in in your in your work too like i see and it’s interesting to hear you talk about it i see a profound religious what would you call it uh uh well i see a profound religious spirit at work and it’s so interesting to me that that your experience of of reading exodus and also doing these animations has actually for you been a an increased sense of divorce from the from let’s say the realities of the text yeah but you know that i so the word i used to describe it is i was bereft uh after spending all this time with them because the more time i spent with the tests the more time i spent working on this the the just the other less connected to anything i would call god i felt and after i finished those scenes it took me a really long time to get inspiration for finishing the film i guess i finished the last scene of it of the moses parts a year and a half ago and i just could not continue work on the film because i was thinking like more moses more old testament and it just made me feel sick every time i approached it well is is it possible to just out of curiosity that that was a form of something like spiritual exhaustion because i mean your films are very very serious and they’re and they’re and they’re very complex and so i i kind of wonder too if you just haven’t like drained yourself of of of inspiration as a consequence of working on this for so long i mean they’re very complex deep themes and you know as you said they do sit at the bottom of the culture and it’s no joke to mess around with that kind of thing that’s that’s true but i i now see what i was missing i mean i’ve i’ve my muse has returned so i you know i could say that i’m not religious but i clearly practice like a religious person because i have a muse and i’m inspired by my muse and i have faith in my muse and i even have prayer that i say to my muse so uh that’s you know that’s that’s a sort of religious lifestyle i would say spiritual one anyway yes well you okay and so you said that you even pray to your muse tell tell me tell me about the muse okay well would you like to hear my muse prayer sure it’d be amusing okay our idea which art in the ether that cannot be named thy vision come thy will be done on earth as it is an abstraction give us this day our daily spark and forgive us our criticisms as we forgive those who critique against us and lead us not into stagnation but deliver us from ego for thine is the vision the power and the glory forever amen so that certainly seems to me to be a like i would think of that as a as a mantra to open up the gateway between you and this transcendent force that allows people religious inspiration i mean and you’re doing something like clearing out your ego and and i think it is very interesting that it’s associated with the with the uh the lord’s prayer and especially with regards to you know you make this interesting identity between criticism and temptation you know and one of the things of course that does interfere with you should lead us not into stagnation yes but yes but deliver us from criticism i think you said didn’t you yeah lead us not into stagnation but deliver us oh wait wait but deliver us from ego oh boy um oh forgive us our criticisms as we forgive those who critique against yes yes that that well and the criticism that that that’s a very interesting element of it too because it’s often the case like one of the things that i teach my students when they’re writing is to get the critical spirit the hell out of the way to begin with you know because what people try to do is produce and edit at the same time yeah and you actually can’t do that what you have to do is open yourself up to the to the to to the creative process and all of its errors because when you first start it’s going to be very much error ridden but you have to allow yourself to manifest that error ridden spark of creativity to begin with and keep the criticism at bay and also the ego element i think is extremely interesting because to the degree that you’re trying to bend your artistic production to the proximal demands of your ego then you actually you pollute it you you propagandize it and you reduce it i would say to something like an idol because it then it then it’s to serve some other master rather than whatever it is that is supposed to be in some sense flowing through you totally agree totally and that serve the other master that’s a good way to put it i have a real problem doing work for money i love money um and what i like to do is do my work and then encourage people to send me money uh but the whole this whole thing where somebody says i’ll give you this money if you do the work i’ve done that it’s just called being a professional artist and it never works out for me i mean it i did this uh segment of this commercial film ironically it was kalil jabran’s the prophet uh all animated and i did it for money i got paid well i thought i was never going to animate again after that because it burned me out so badly it was a really unpleasant process because the authority in this was not my muse the authority was the people with the money really so you were subjugating the money you were subjugating the greater to the lesser yeah and if i do that even a little bit it’s it’s the feeling is horrible and i can i liken it to how i imagine prostitution like all the warnings about prostitution and what it what it does to your soul even if you think it’s hunky dory um i i can relate to that when i do the work for money it’s really different yeah than when i’m doing it okay so back to your prayer so now you modified the lord’s prayer yeah and so did you write that down like how how in the world did you come up with this and thank you for actually telling me i’m quite amazed that you did because of course it’s a peculiar thing and i mean that in the best possible sense yeah but it seems also to be quite a private thing well i’ve been out about it since i mean the thing with sita sings the blues is it was like such a profoundly weird experience making that film and it was so much like the channeling and it was so much just getting out of my own way um that i i did want to share that i mean because people would ask me these questions oh how did you make that and it’s like i don’t i don’t really know yeah well you just said it’s quite profound you said you got out of your own way yeah you know and one of the things that that that i’ve been struck by with regards to both the prophetic tradition in the old testament and also the the the passion story in the new testament is that there’s a tremendous emphasis in those stories uh on getting out of your own way you know because the idea is supposed to be and this is part of the idea of the dying and resurrecting hero of course is that you’re supposed to let everything in you that gets in your way burn away and die so that whatever can flow through you that that has true value and that’s oriented to the words the highest good let’s say which i think is what you’re doing when you’re establishing a relationship with your muse is that there isn’t anything that’s part of the ego part of the critical capacity that’s that’s inappropriate or part of let’s say worldly concerns that’s interfering with your ability to reach beyond yourself and that’s that’s a holy calling i would say it’s and maybe it’s the primary holy calling i think i certainly think it is it seems to me to be the case and i i do think in some sense that’s what artists act out when they’re really being artists because they’re they’re establishing a relationship with the source of inspiration whatever that is and it’s not like we understand that we don’t understand that it’s something that’s very very deep yeah i do feel or i do believe if i have beliefs i do believe that regarding it as something that comes from elsewhere something bigger than yourself is for me helpful i don’t i don’t like this idea that it’s all me i i’m connected to other people i’m connected through culture and through language which is culture and through art which is culture i mean i’m just like a fish swimming in a sea of culture right and uh what we call creating is really you know absorbing and and processing all of this culture that i’m a part of and just expressing a little bit out i’m very dubious of the idea of originality for example i wrote a essay about that on the cult of originality i think that’s delusional yeah well maybe the cult part of the originality idea is that it’s it that it’s tied up with ego yeah because i think that people can be spectacularly original but i don’t know if you get to attribute that to their ego you know to that part of them that you call me and the mind is a very strange place because there’s obviously a part of it that we i that that that we identify with as ourselves that would be the me that would be the ego and it’s it’s obviously it and it’s the thing i think that is capable of generating um egotistical criticisms and and standing on principles for self-defense or for dominance display or something like that that’s you know it’s sort of a it’s it operates at a relatively low level of moral virtue but then there’s parts of us that are obviously far beyond ourselves you know and that’s the part for example that generates dreams and visions and perhaps even ideas because well one of the things i really liked about reading carl young one of the things he made me really conscious of was the fact that and nicha of course talked about this in the same way to some degree is that it’s not so much that you have ideas it’s that one you could say no no don’t be so sure about that the ideas have you yeah so there’s that and then the next thing is well it isn’t so much that you think up the ideas it’s that you encounter them if you open yourself up to the possibility of encountering them and it is like a process of discovery rather than a process of origination let’s say yeah and that’s also so you could say even if you’re like a biological materialist which i actually don’t think you can be because biological materialism doesn’t help us account for consciousness in the least so far we don’t have a good theory of consciousness well wait but you’re saying like a biological materialist theory of consciousness because i’m a biological materialist i mean i think biology exists well yes right like of course i just don’t i just don’t think that it provides it isn’t sophisticated enough to provide answers to some of the most fundamental questions about human existence like the fact that we’re conscious right now i agree with that and you know the idea that you just expressed that when you’re in a creative when you’re engaging in the creative process with whatever it is that you’re praying to let’s say that you’re opening yourself up to something that’s beyond you now you could say that that comes from deep within the human psyche which is a psychoanalytic way of thinking about it and and i think a reasonably appropriate way of thinking about it but i don’t think it’s any more reasonable in some sense than making the than generating the hypothesis that you’re opening yourself up to unknown forces in the cosmos because i think that’s just as it’s just as intelligent an account for the phenomena as the as the as the former one i mean we are in contact with things that are beyond us and i do think that that’s that’s a large part of what the artist actually demonstrates and and keeps it and keeps in front of people i think beauty in particular is a powerful force for that and and that’s i mean when i’ve watched your videos really they they’re so beautiful that they they virtually bring me to tears especially in combination with the music because i’m very sensitive to music but you have this unbelievable capacity for for grace and for color and for and for deep respect for the music which i think is also really quite remarkable like you’re you know i often see movies that use good music but they don’t have much respect for the music they’ll they’ll cut it you know in the middle of a phrase or something like that i remember the movie magnolia was a real exception to that that that movie uses music beautifully and woody ellen is very good at using music beautifully and so is who is the director of the shining um cubric i mean he loves music and and his his his his work uh um clockwork orange has some of the same kind of perverse beauty that some of your animation has you know because he he used those great beithoven pieces that that were that were transformed into electronic music by walter wendy carlos and uh and set these brutal scenes of mayhem to beautiful music which was also i think a very profound thing to do it kind of i mean of course germany is the home of nazism and it’s also the home of beithoven and bock and so you really can’t separate those things in some sense and so okay so let’s go to the copyright issue to some degree now now you’re you’re not a fan of the idea of copyright and and that’s that’s interesting to me because it has been arguably a reasonably um um efficient way for people to let’s say protect theft of their protect themselves from theft of their intellectual property although i would say that’s broken down quite badly now for people like musicians because their their work is so distributable are you against copyright for all forms of intellectual property or why don’t you tell us a little bit about your your ideas well you say that as if intellectual property exists what is intellectual property well i guess to some degree i’ll take the easy way out and say that’s a legal issue but i would you know i would say that at least to some degree intellectual property is the consequence of of of abstract work knowing you because it’s it’s certainly possible to work abstractly constructing something like you’re constructing your movies or perhaps a book and it seems to me that it’s not unreasonable to propose that that deserves some of the same ownership protection that a physical entity would like a i’m not i’m not sure that there’s there there’s some level of similarity between you owning your house and not allowing other people in and you owning the more abstract work that you’ve done but i’m not and i’m certainly not attempting to engage you in an argument about the benefits of copyright i presume that you have a very well thought through stance on this and and well it begins with it begins with acknowledging that culture is not property it just didn’t and what we were just talking about a few minutes ago or where does this stuff come from you know it comes from something bigger than ourselves we were just talking about you know we do not actually originate this we certainly work but i didn’t originate any of the work that i’m putting out there i mean i gestated it but we don’t own children either you know we let our children go out into the world if you if you want to own your child for 96 years and you know control everything well then that serves you right you get exactly what you deserve if you do that you get a dead child basically you get a crippled you know non-human being and the thing with cultural works is they like i say i’m a fish swimming in there you know it’s like water what happens when you enclose water it becomes stagnant it becomes nasty it becomes toxic um it has to you know i know that for my own work it has to go out in the world and it has to continue circulating and for me personally copyright interferes with that because you put a monopoly around something if i one person or even if i license my copyrights to others when when it’s centrally controlled it does not move and i did a lot of experiments the sita sings the blues and by far the best way to get it into the world is to just let people carry it into the world right right well that’s certainly what they have that’s certainly what i’ve experienced as well you know and and people are also taking my lectures and cutting them into pieces which is not something i expected and then putting up pieces of different length on on um on the on the net and i’ve had companies contact me and say you know for a for a fee we’ll more or less hunt these people down and enforce your copyright and i thought well no i’m i’m i’m more thinking about the message in a bottle approach to this and i’m willing to let it go where where it to let the wind blow where it wants to blow let’s say you could put it that way and also you’re making more money that way because as you just pointed out people are sending people want to support you they want to support you because they actually see your work right if you were taking down all these all these instances of your work getting seen because of copyright fewer people would see your work yeah the audience is the most efficient distribution machine that exists it’s definitely been the case for me and i’ve been fortunate too because i’ve been involved in some political controversy over the last year some people that i know um who who who have been involved in say let’s say broadly similar political controversies have been demonetized on youtube you know and i’m outside of that because everything i put up is free and people are perfectly willing to support me but i mean i’m it’s also very fortunate and a new thing that this these new platforms for direct support of creative people let’s say have just emerged and developed which is you know thank thank god for that because it’s very difficult for creative people to monetize their production yep so so now all right so our is just to say something about more on this with with my films going out for free the benefit to me is that far more people see them that way than would see them if i were trying to control them and trying to get people to pay me to see the things so i made more money releasing seat to sings the blues for free than i ever had before in my career where everything was copyrighted the consequence of all my comic strips being copyrighted is that people just don’t see them so yeah so just like releasing it is good but the other aspect so that that’s the benefit to me the benefit to society is that you overcome like a form of societal brain damage when you ignore copyright and i gave a talk called copyright is brain damage you can look that up but if you if you look at all of us are neurons in a great mind and all of us transmit and receive information copyright blocks that function or in an attempt to control that function i mean of course you can’t you can’t have a brain with totally uncontrolled you know firing of synapses that’s that’s madness but i really think that each human being shares work that they love so if you just let humans share work that they love and you know they naturally will not share work that they don’t love then you end up with a really healthy system and you know really good works are going to succeed in that system whereas controlling things with copyright is this artificial damage to that system well and there’s also been a fair bit of crookedly in relationship to that in recent years and i would say perhaps disney is more responsible for that than any other organization you know and so it was disney that was instrumental in getting copyright extended from 50 to 75 years and i really did think that that was a form of crime because some of those early disney movies and i would put pinocchio in that category particularly are are incredibly culturally significant and to forestall proper discussion of those cultural artifacts i think is truly damaging and it was a travesty that that that copyright extension was granted over and over again and disney is not the only one i mean most of our cultural heritage is controlled by five big corporations almost everything now i mean everything is owned by someone and once it’s owned it can be sold to someone else and it all ends up in the hands of you know biocom and sony everything so now with regards to copyright do you do you draw a distinction what about patents and things like that do you think that they are technically different now i have a problem with patents although my expertise is not in the area of patents so the one legal concept that is classified as intellectual property which is a misnomer that is not completely fundamentally bankrupt is trademark because trademark theoretically has something to do with fraud and you know you need you don’t need but people desire some mechanism to to uh control or punish fraud so right trademark alone would be that it’s not usually used that way it’s usually abused as as much as anything under the intellectual property label but at least it has some you could make some excuse for it to exist right right so yeah well i mean part of it i guess part of the claim for the protection of originality we might say is also the protection you could argue for for the for genuineness you know like i might want to know that and maybe legal protection can help with this that i might want to know that the thing that i’m watching or the thing that i’m consuming is actually produced by the person who said that they produced it so if i go on your website and i watch a nina paylee animated short i want to make sure that it isn’t something someone copying you and using your identity as a as a as a form well it’s a it’s a form of parasitism essentially so yeah i mean but the thing is i don’t i don’t have a lot of need for that largely because i do free my work so most people are aware of something that’s by me is by me you know there’s i guess some danger or the way i might invoke trademark law is if somebody edited something of mine everyone’s welcome to edit and redistribute it but if they said that the edit and redistribution was mine it was like no you know like like the work i did is mine but you have to take responsibility for that edit and redistribution i’m not responsible for your edit and redistribution so if they add some message to it that is not mine i don’t want that attributed to me and i suppose i could invoke trademark or something to to do that i don’t know i could invoke something but really what you would do is just go and say hey i never said that yes well that’s a lot simpler than engaging in legal battles which you know are roughly the equivalent of a fairly serious disease yes i took a legal vow of non-violence i just don’t want that system yeah well it’s certainly a way of keeping your life simpler and unless you know unless you get attacked by something that’s truly malevolent and of course that can happen from time to time okay so let’s go back to satyr masochism so it’s going to come out in 2018 and i’m very much looking forward to that yes i bet okay so a couple of things is um you know it’s it’s so interesting because when i watch your your shorts i i i remember a couple of them that have moses wandering through the desert with the pillar of light leading him on you know and cloud pillar cloud yes that’s that’s right the cloud yes and and you’ve animated that in a very interesting way and it’s got a kind of grandeur as well which again spoke to me of something approximating a profound religious sensibility which is partly why i was um surprised by your comments about the let’s say the intellectual effect of your endeavors on your on your relationship with belief but you’re just talking to my ego this interview this is an ego to ego talk well you know i think now and then we managed to make it a muse to muse talk well maybe a little bit but maybe a little bit interview me you’re going to hear from my ego yes yes yes well that’s always the danger in talking to artists yeah right because i think generally when you speak with artists you speak to the inferior part of them not not because their ego is inferior compared to the ego of other people but because the part of them that you would like to communicate with is actually the part that’s generating the art right it’s already doing its communication exactly that’s why i would rather i mean in general it’s like i speak better through my art than any other or it’s not even i anymore right it’s but whatever my my artistic expressions are more worthwhile than my talking head yes yes absolutely absolutely and i mean part of the reason i wanted to do the interview though was to find out what your ego thinks of all this as well as to take the opportunity hopefully to bring your work to to perhaps to some people who don’t know about it yet and okay so now you’re making this magnificent uh production about exodus and about the old testament and that’s a pretty strange thing to do let’s say in the modern world um what do you have any sense of what you’re hoping that will accomplish i know i know that you want to launch it and see what happens and that there’s curiosity associated with that but but do you have do you have a hypothesis or a theory about what it is that this is doing in the broader sense how you’re contributing to the cultural conversation i i’m sure that i do i can’t access those thoughts right now uh but i’ll learn a lot more once it once it goes out all right well i’ll focus it a bit okay you know in the in the pinocchio movie of course this is a very ancient theme in order for the puppet the marionette whose strings are being pulled by forces beyond his control in order for him to become real there’s a variety of things he has to do he has to learn to tell the truth and he has to learn not to be a neurotic victim and he has to learn not to be an impulsive pleasure-seeking uh uh victim of totalitarian processes all of those things but then he has to go down to the bottom of chaos itself and rescue his father now i can’t help but think that that’s part of what you’re doing i mean and you said it yourself in the interview right because you said that you were attempting to make some connection with the belief of your father and to make some sense out of it and so you are in fact going into the the void let’s say to rescue your father from the belly of the whale and and you know it seems to me that we’re in a period of of chaotic instability in our culture that that actually has a fair bit of danger associated with it and that i’ve felt a strong impulse to go back to these original stories to find out what they are and and and and to establish them to reestablish them let’s say as foundation or whatever that might mean and it might be my imagination but it seems to me that that that’s associated that that’s akin in some sense to what you’re doing with exodus well yes and when i set out i did set out to connect to my father you know rescue my father uh but what i have learned in the past year is that actually i’m looking for my mother and i think i found her okay well now now obviously i’m going to have to have to ask you to elaborate on that i don’t know if i can in words right like i’m still in the process of doing this but it’s like it’s like i have been seeking to connect with this this father this god the father and also my own father which i didn’t have the best connection with nothing you know nothing really terrible or anything just never really connected with him and i i’ve longed for that right like a lot of my life because the culture tells me that that’s really important you know like and all the all the psychologists say you know oh this is a really important thing so my whole life it’s been like oh you know maybe i wouldn’t be messed up about this or that thing maybe this is a daddy issue you know i gotta get right with my dad even though he’s he’s dead and i’m just like looking and looking there and it’s like wait i i missed something right like it’s my mother it’s it not it’s all of our mothers and you talked about the original stories you referred to the old testament text of the original stories well they’re not you know we have most of the history of human religion was not these stories as far as as far as i have read or learned the early human conception of the divine was female everywhere and we have broken the connection to that and actually the story of exodus to me what it is is it’s the the solidifying of the that change that it was a long gradual process of moving from goddess to gods and goddesses to just god just one god but i’m reaching further back and i realize you know when i when i found that and when i started working with that earlier religion where we have no text for it all we have is some artifacts many artifacts from all over the world and beautiful symbols and of course there’s that uh book by eric neumann the great mother which talks about all the symbols yes i was just going to bring up that book yes i read that sucker cover to cover that you read the origins have you read the origins and history of consciousness i have by neumann i have not but i did i would i would highly recommend it but let me just let me just that’s the point yeah i’m with you i i like them although he writes like a lead weight uh it was just good to immerse myself in that so definitely that is what i was longing for and back to the old testament those things are in the old testament they’re all portrayed as the other and the enemies and what we’re trying to stop out but they’re in there so so in that way i relate to the old testament not the heroes of the old testament moses and aron and them i i take uh inspiration from the stiff-necked people you know it’s like oh the stiff-necked people they’re disobedient i’m like yes that’s great you know those are the if there’s if there’s any history to this which there probably isn’t but it’s like those are the ones i’m descended from the bad ones um anyway what was like see i don’t know it’s interesting because in the pinocchio story and and in the classic stories of of journeying to the belly of the whale or journeying into the underworld it’s often but not always males who are doing it and rescuing their father and it isn’t obvious to me psychologically what happens when a woman goes to the underworld to rescue her father it isn’t clear what she’s going to discover there you know and it seems to me that you’re you’re you know you’re using your creative pseudopods to sort of feel out that territory and discover what might be there so and that seems very important too because obviously there’s there’s a problem in our culture and the problem is how what is exactly the the relationship between femininity and women and these let’s call them patriarchal religions i mean there’s you know one of one of yung’s criticisms of of christianity and of course this is also evident in eric neumann’s work is that there’s there’s a trinity obviously in christianity let’s say and it’s fairly comprehensible there’s god the father and that’s tradition and there’s the holy spirit and that’s you might think about that is the mousse and there’s god god in the sun form which is you know the human being who’s who’s vulnerable and mortal and who’s destined to live on earth those are nice elements of the divine but there’s a missing fourth as far as yung was concerned and he thought of that as sometimes constituted by the figure of satan so that was where evil fed it but also sometimes constituted by femininity itself and and that those two things were often conflated as well because they were the other and uh and that is a complicated technical problem because it’s not obvious it’s not precisely obvious what the divine model is for women especially now that they have control over the reproductive function because they’re sort of half women in the traditional classic biological sense half female but also in some sense half male because they have that freedom now control over the reproductive function sadly i mean if we lived in that world we could we could talk that way but it’s no practically speaking women really don’t live because of it you mean because it’s unreliable well for one thing uh are you talking about like uh hormonal pills birth control pills i’m talking about birth control pills okay well like i can’t take them right like they you know they have horrible side effects for me and quite a few women yes definitely so it’s not like it’s not like oh we invented this pill i mean that’s actually one of the that’s like a great example of you know our patriarchal society right like a pill like that could be developed for men men wouldn’t tolerate the side effects in fact they were developing a pill like that for men and then they cut the experiments short because men weren’t weren’t tolerating the side effects which were no worse than the side effects for women but women are going to tolerate that shit because there is well the price is much higher yeah we’re physically more vulnerable anyway it’s like never ends uh all the old this is why i believe in biological reality by the way this is why we’re biological materialists just because regardless of my identity regardless of my ideas you know every month i’m doubled over in pain and you know having like very real consequences of right of my biology well and you you just did a a short about the great mother and now you know i wondered if you had read noyman’s book when i saw that because i thought oh there’s because that is an absolutely great book and as i said i would recommend origins history of consciousness it’s it i think it would help answer some of the questions that you were talking about today i believe you yeah so and and you know it was the book that you said he wished he would have written which is a hell of a thing for someone like him to say because he was a remarkable genius and so um so so i guess that the the new film and what’s it called the one that features the great mother godmother yes exactly and so is that now that seems importantly related to this issue that you brought up about rediscovering the connection with your mother by going to yeah yeah i don’t mean my actual mother i mean the the mother you know the great mother right uh i mean i live with my actual mother she’s great and everything but we’re we’re on a metaphorical place yes yes um yeah and that that actually is the first scene of satyr masochism so i did the last scene first and then it took years for me to figure out what the first scene is oh so that interesting yeah so that’s just like and there’s going to be no introduction and no explanation it’s just that’s going to set the stage for the exodus stories that that follow well look um thank you for talking with me thank you for being with me i think that i wish you the best of luck with your film and i hope that exactly what should happen with it will happen thank you and i’m going to steal liberally from your films to illustrate this interview if you don’t mind and i’ll try to be very respectful and careful with the editing excellent but actually copying not stealing oh yes copying okay well thank you very much it was a pleasure talking with you thank you thank you likewise all right okay bye