Venue Buffalo
Date printed:2000

A Talk with Writer/ Performer
Nicole Blackman
VenueBuffalo's Daniel Haskin talks with noted writer/performance artist Nicole Blackman on her new book of edgy poetry Blood Sugar, her spoken word on the new Recoil cd, and the artist on the web.

Nicole Blackman's work has been called beautiful, fierce, and utterly hypnotic. Her words flow within a sexually dark world of angst and despair, but yet show great humor and survivorship.

As a poet/performer Blackman pulls no punches. She has been published in numerous anthologies, and collaborated in spoken word with prominent alternative bands, KMFDM, the Golden Palomino's, and most recently on Recoil's new cd, Liquid .

Blood Sugar, is a scathing collection of current and previously published work by one of genX's most provocative writers. It is the dark side of pop culture turned on it's ear. It's words are born from club life and dark rooms. It's born from that space between your eyes or that scar across your thin wrist. This is Blackman's best work to date and it rings of desperation and hope.

except from Victim . . .
I feel the motion of the car before I open my eyes.
The air is blue-black, brown-black, black-black.
Smell of gas, oil, animals.
I'm in the trunk.

My wrists and ankles tied.
Tape over my mouth
it almost covers my nose
but I can breathe barely.
I must have been here for hours,
everything's stiff and my head throbs
like someone's drumming on china.

Poems like Holy ring out like a paean to a bulimic life and death as an almost angelic religious experience and Daughter serves as a cautionary tale for a mother to her unborn child. An almost Amazonian philosophy.

One day I will give birth to a tiny baby girl
and when she's born she'll scream
and I'll tell her to never stop.

Blackman speaks from the depths of despair and from the heights of pure passion. VenueBuffalo is pleased to speak to Nicole about her work, her life, and the business of music.

The Interview:
DH: Your work is powerful . . . but yet playfully dark, with a sense of humor. How would you describe the place you pull these images from?
NB: I don't really feel that I "pull" the work, it "pulls" me. I never know where an image is going to come from, but I know the difference between hearing The Voice That Tells Me Stuff and daydreams, etc.  It's like the difference between a quadrophonic sound system and a crappy AM radio.

The work often comes out of overheard bits of conversation, graffiti on the subway, misheard song lyrics, and the newspaper, but I do feel that there are messages that float around for a reason and when I see a quote that seems to glow in the newspaper I know I'm supposed to use it in something. I can't really explain it better than that. I know when I'm being directed toward something, and I know that if I don't use the message somehow that I might not be directed to the right messages in the future. It constantly feels like a test, like I'm being given something to see if I know how to use it. So far I guess I've done all right because the images and clues keep coming, but it's a constant concern that if I don't use the information properly I won't get any more.  That's the one thing that honestly terrifies me.

What is the philosophy behind your work?

I don't have one, but I feel that my work isn't a failure because it's not what people expect or want from me, I think if it succeeds, it's because I'm writing work people aren't ready for. I refuse to write about topics other writers have covered well (romantic love, nature, etc) because there are so many things I haven't seen in poetry. I'm fascinated by the stories that keep digging at me, like the woman in "Black Box" who steals the cockpit voice recorder because it's the only way she can hear her dead husband's voice.

When I know I haven't read about a topic in poetry before, then I know I'm on the right track.

Much of the collection seems to be about surviving, or at least trying to, such as In the Movie Now, Fifteen She Learns and The Ambitions Are, etc., except for, of course, Victim . . . Victim is extremely raw and visual. Like all of your pieces it's the imagery that grabs the reader. How did Victim come about?
"Victim" is different from all the other pieces and I'm more careful with it than any other. I was watching the news one evening and they showed a missing woman's face on the TV screen and I just knew she was already dead. I don't know how, but I did. A few days or weeks later, when I was working on another poem on the computer late at night, I heard a voice telling me something very clearly, so I typed it in and tried to get back to my work. She kept pulling at me and told me the story quite distinctly, as if I was taking dictation, and I had no idea how it was going to end. The phone rang suddenly and it was a friend inviting me out but I was in such a daze that I mumbled I couldn't go and tried to get back to the story but the woman in the story stopped talking to me and I couldn't feel her presence again. I left the piece half-finished and switched it off for the night. When I went back to it a week later, I re-read the piece and when I got to the interrupted part, I felt her near me again as if she said "We need to finish." And we did. When we got to the very end, I was nearly in tears and when she told me the end I just sat there for an hour or so, in shock. She never spoke to me again.

I don't pretend to understand that process, but I feel very protective of that piece and when people ask me for permission to do "the killer's response," I'm horrified.

America makes murderers into anti-heroes and I think "Victim" focuses our attention on the women who are usually simply known by how they died ("cheerleader in phone booth," "waitress at truck stop," etc).  We learn everything about how these men were raised, what they liked to eat, the music they listened to, etc etc, in what we claim is our interest in "studying" their symptoms and motivations so we can prevent it in the future, but really we're just looking for traits so we can identify with them ("Do I have it in me to be a murderer? Does anyone I know?") or feel smug in the knowledge that we're superior to them morally, but it's just voyeurism wearing a policeman's hat.

People are sickly fascinated by how her body was found, what she was wearing, how he disposed of the body.  Anyone I ask can tell me a list of serial killers' names but I bet you can't name a single woman they killed or tell me what she was studying in school or what the names of her pets were. If I was given that poem for a reason, I plan to take good care of it and make sure she's not further exploited.

How much from your life flows through your writing?
Some. Not much. All of it. I don't tell. It's not important. What's important is how a piece made YOU feel and/or how it changed you in some small way. Besides, the people in my life know anything they say can and will be used against them so it's not an issue.

Two of my favorites from Blood Sugar are Daughter, and Twilight. There is so much angst and desperation. Do you consider your work cathartic in any way?
I'm often asked to do "Daughter" at readings so I guess that's a favorite and I think I know why. When I wrote it, I wanted it to be an amazon poem, to be what your mother should have read to you instead of telling you to "be pretty, be sweet, be nice" (the titles of my three chapbooks, for exactly the reason that there was nothing pretty, sweet or nice in them).

Imagine instead of telling young females to pay attention to their looks, find a man, raise children and be gentle and kind to everyone, that we "reprogrammed" them by changing the lifestyle manual to say: take risks, change often, be shocking, and shock yourselves. Do you have any idea HOW revolutionary and powerful those changes would be around the world? It would be an entirely different planet. While I know it won't ever happen like that, I love planting those images in my readers' and listeners' minds and seeing what grows from it.

Subversion. My favorite.

As far as live performance goes, I feel better when I get something out of my system that's been chasing me around for a few days or years and, yes, it feels physically exhausting to work something out on stage, but I always walk away from "Fifteen, She Learns" glowing and light. "The Bad Shepard" or "Victim" however have been known to send me off stage in tears, physically unable to talk to anyone for a half hour. For the time that I'm inhabiting that person's skin, it's like channelling. Sometimes exuberant, sometimes draining, but always worthwhile. I learn something every time. I just try to leave a space open for things to happen and they always do.

From your past 'musical' collaborations, how do you compare your writing experiences between the bands KMFDM,  the Golden Palominos, and the new work with Recoil?
The track for KMFDM was written a few years prior, and it was adapted from a longer piece "Indictment" that was on a 7" released in 95, when I was asked to open for KMFDM, so that was different from the GP and Recoil work where most of it was written specificallly for those albums. Neither Sascha, nor Anton, nor Alan changed very much of my work. There were only two parts that were dropped from the Palominos and Recoil recordings that exist in my head and in the book but don't appear on the CD, and that's a pretty good ratio for those collaborations.

Has working with certain musicians influenced you?
I wasn't a big Depeche Mode fan growing up, I really liked "Black Celebration" (Note: Dark tendencies developing early...) but stopped listening to them when every annoying kid I detested starting wearing DM shirts and going on and on about them. I loved "Personal Jesus," though. I think that bass line could make any girl a stripper...

When Alan first contacted me about doing something on the new Recoil album, and I heard the demos I thought it would be fun and a great challenge. All of my friends were fainting when I told them what I was going to England to do and I didn't understand the big deal, but when I got a copy of the DM greatest hits new cd and listened to it on the flight over, I nearly chickened out. "Oh shit, he IS really good..." His arrangements and audio tricks just stunned me.  Thankfully I brought him over a few bottles of wine, and lots of presents for his daughter Paris and had a brilliant time....the best time I've ever had recording. The copious amounts of alcohol must have had something to do with that, I'm sure

I write to the music they give me, rather than have them put something to music (which always comes off sounding cheesy). The work Anton gave me was very dark and cinematic in scope and it was quite evocative. I often write to music, especially film scores that don't have lyrics, so it was easy to put the cd on and my studio headphones and lie down in the dark in the living room and "watch the movie" that played in my head. The music told me what was happening to these people and I simply wrote it down.

In the case of "Chrome," for the Recoil album, I was working on it late at night when I was staying at Alan Wilder's house and I was having trouble understanding why the voice in the story did and said the things she did (does she really mean it when she says she's through? does she still love him? is hate the opposite of love or is indifference?), but I wasn't getting any answers so I gave up for the night. When I went to sleep I dreamt about the story and discovered the answers so I woke myself up out of the dream just enough to write a few important lines about how the piece ended. I couldn't find my notebook so I tried to write on my hands and arms.

The next morning, I realized my pen hadn't written very well on my skin, but had only scratched it. I raced downstairs to the kitchen and poured hot, salty water on my arms to "raise" the red marks of the story. Alan was making coffee and looked at me as if I was a bit mad, but when I gave him a demo of it in the studio later that day, he didn't say anything about my rather odd "process." Whatever works, I guess.

Were the pieces Want, Chrome, and Breath Control written primarily for the Recoil project or were they more or less published works before hand?
Want was written prior, and adapted for the track he gave me. Breath Control and Chrome were written to those tracks specifically.

Some artists carry a persona around when it is time to perform. In a recent interview with Jarboe (ex-Swans) she mentioned that she has many different characters in her music that she brings out. I can see that in your writing also, but is that something you tend to use in spoken word performance?
I don't think I have a persona per se, but I find I get weirdly funny between poems if I'm in a strange mood, as if I need to lighten things up between pieces. It depends on how focused I am. If the room goes dark in a kind of  tunnel vision, I know i'm in the absolutely right place emotionally because that's when I go on automatic pilot and the voices speak through me most clearly. I don't know how else to explain that but I should research it a bit more and figure out what is going on there.

Are you drawn to electronic and ambient/trance music as a soundtrack to your word play?
That's just what I've been approached to do so far. I don't really seek out collaborators, they tend to find me.

As a spoken word artist how spontanious are your performances . . . have you ever gone off on an automatic writing thing?
Two that were nearly purely automatic were "Victim" and "Twilight," but other than that, I tend to sew up and rip apart poems and re-stitch them a bit over time, but they're usually 75% done when I first put them on paper. After a year or so, I leave them. If I want to write about the subject again from a different perspective, I will, but that poem should be a photograph of that moment in time. Gwendolyn Brooks taught me that and she's right.

What are you listening to lately?
The upcoming Jack Off Jill album "Clear Hearts, Grey Flowers," which is a brilliant album. I've known Jessicka for a few years and I'm so fucking proud of her on this CD. The songs "Vivica" and "Cinnamon Spider" kick me so hard. I told her something that a fan wrote to me: I wish I had a little sister to give this to, so I could be her heroine.

My boyfriend is on tour with NIN right now, so I've seen them a lot on this tour and it's always interesting to hear the live versions of songs and then compare them to the studio recordings and see the choices an artist makes in interpreting something on album or in concert.

I sleep with the television on. It affects my dreams dramatically.

Are you planning a 'Nicole Blackman' album in the near future?
Hope so. I have a lot of verrrry interesting people tentatively lined up. I want them to do one track each so it sounds like a cool mix tape your friend made you. I told Sean Beavan (who did a glorious unreleased remix of "Victim" with my boyfriend) that I want him to produce it. Since he's been busy with No Doubt, Guns N Roses, God Lives Underwater and other projects, though, I'm not sure I can afford him anymore! John and I were in his hot tub in LA a few weeks ago, so maybe next time I'm out there, I'll ply him with cocktails until he gets woozy and relaxed and says yes....

It's interesting that you are at once the writer/artist and a music publicist (your day job) . . . do you find a conflict sometimes?
I used to, but I'm not doing much music PR anymore. Now it's mostly voiceovers for commercials (Ford, Chanel, Wisk, Maxwell House, WNBA, Eckerd Drugstores, PBS and tons of public service announcements), and ICM has represented me for two years. I enjoy it a lot more. I got so fed up with record labels and what they were doing to my friends' bands, that I'm not sure I could work with one in the future. The industry is so fucked it's hard to find hope in it anymore.

When Dead Inside came out, I know that a lot of writers and editors listened to it not just because the Golden Palominos were a media cult band of sorts, but because they knew me and were curious to see what I'd come up with. I have to say it certainly changed my working relationships with writers. A lot of music writers said they heard "Victim" and then didn't know what to say to me the next time I called them pitching a band for a story.

A few writers didn't know it was me on the record, and said "Did you know there's this spoken word performer also named Nicole Blackman?" I'd just laugh and say, "Yeah, I hear she's crap..."