By tak­ing things out of con­text, you actu­ally can cre­ate a truer mean­ing for some­thing than it had in the beginning.

inter­view by Todd

Instead of stick­ing a pair of scis­sors into a co-worker’s neck or drag­ging the uncrossed blades from pelvis to col­lar­bone as a piece of per­for­mance art, he works with a steady hand, lib­er­at­ing images from old mag­a­zines and stick­ing, for instance, a house­wife who looked like she just huffed oven cleaner right into The Apoc­a­lypse, or rid­ing a dinosaur, or revil­ing from a steam shovel, or becom­ing the queen of Egypt — in effect, pulling up the blinds of tra­di­tional con­sumer con­text, deflat­ing the tires on the shiny rims of the Amer­i­can Dream, and strip­ping back a cou­ple lay­ers of skin from polit­i­cal beasts; he qui­etly lac­er­ates and, in the process, gets to a new, darker heart. At first look, nothing’s wrong — with the cap­ture and re-arrangement of images from their intended pic­ture lan­guage, cropped so close you can’t see the line, his art looks like a photo. For instance, an idyl­lic, innocu­ous scene with a ‘50s Betty Crocker repli­cant whip­ping a meal into place. Look closer. Maybe a dog’s peer­ing for­lorn from a win­dow in the oven. Or the baby’s bot­tle is a nuclear war­head. Or Reagan’s not mow­ing a lawn or a car­pet, but a tall shag of peo­ple. Men fish for money. It’s not to say that Winston’s heavy handed or has a ham for a brain. Far from it. With no short­age of humor or light­ness in a fun­da­men­tally grim sit­u­a­tion, much of his work simul­ta­ne­ously oper­ates on an extremely polite, soft talk­ing, artis­tic level. And this is how I found Win­ston, the per­son: cut­ting into loaded top­ics with dex­ter­ity, wit, and a firm grip on the lamp that shines across the face of America’s pop­u­lar cul­ture. On a final note, since the adver­tis­ing bud­gets of mega cor­po­ra­tions have come to far exceed most coun­tries’ gross national prod­ucts, civ­i­liza­tion, for the first time in his­tory, has taken on a com­mer­cial assault akin to the 24-hour B-52 car­pet bomb­ing of North Viet­nam: non-stop hot tur­bu­lences, dis­ori­ent­ing buzzbomb noise, supra-fast flashes, cre­at­ing many vac­u­ous craters in not only the land­scape but in the public’s mind. Think of Win­ston as a bomb shel­ter against the assault, or bet­ter yet, the media who picks select pieces off the pocked bat­tle field and glues them together how he thinks they should have been in the first place…

So, what do you do?

As lit­tle as pos­si­ble. I try to syn­the­size every­thing that i see in con­tem­po­rary cul­ture into its real mean­ing and in order to do that I have to con­dense many images because our cul­ture is so image based. I con­dense what are, to me, the high points into com­po­si­tions that betray their true meaning.

Por­tray or betray?

Betray, because the true mean­ing of some of these things is really hid­den in con­tem­po­rary cul­ture and I think to show what it is really say­ing is a betrayal from what the ori­gins are. They want you to think that this won­der­ful food or soap is ter­rific, and if you don’t buy their food or soap, you’re not going to get laid or have a nice car or have a won­der­ful life or have 3.2 chil­dren, whereas my thing is that their soap is really just poi­son. It poi­sons the envi­ron­ment and it poi­sons you and you wind up enrich­ing them because of giv­ing them your money for blah, blah, blah. So, by tak­ing things out of con­text, you actu­ally can cre­ate a truer mean­ing for some­thing than it had in the begin­ning because of adver­tis­ing… All of these things are com­ing from old adver­tise­ments and illus­tra­tions some­times, but mainly old adver­tise­ments from the ‘40s, ‘50s, and ‘60s. Their orig­i­nal inten­tion was to lie to you. That’s what pro­pa­ganda is all about. Not that all pro­pa­ganda lies, but to prop­a­gate any­thing just means to tell your ver­sion of it. But com­mer­cial ver­sions of telling you any­thing is gen­er­ally done to enrich them mon­e­tar­ily at your expense. I don’t know why I have such an axe to grind over that, because I’m a happy par­tic­i­pant in enrich­ing them myself. If I had more money, I’d spend it on more crap. More plas­tic shit. I’m not really much of a saint when it comes to those things.

How old are you?

Do I really have to tell? Any­one who knows their arith­metic will know how old I am if I say that I was born in 1952. Right at the end of the Korean War.

Why should punk rock­ers who have had a hard time get­ting over their bad selves be famil­iar with your work? Why would some­body who’s a hard­core punk rocker… How would they know Win­ston Smith?

Peo­ple know my work mainly from Dead Kennedy records and from some things in Max­i­mum Rock ‘N’ Roll or just other under­ground punk scenes dur­ing the period of the late ‘70s through­out the mid and late ‘80s. I guess even into the 1990s because there was a resur­gence of the punk trip. I think when the Gulf War came along, I think that actu­ally added… I don’t know if one thing had to do with the other, but there was a protest move­ment that built up. Instead of the frumped-out hip­pies who, after the Viet­nam War, had turned to tele­vi­sion and cocaine and money mak­ing, these frumped-out punks — I don’t know what they turned to, but — just becom­ing slack­ers, but I think when the Gulf War came along in 1991, that a lot of peo­ple woke back up again and fig­ured that, well, this is some­thing that a lot of half-old farts like us had bet­ter stop, and enough of them are old enough now where they are half-old — they were teenagers in the late ‘70s and now they’re in their early 30s or older and now they’re mature adults in a cer­tain sense and they actu­ally have the where­withal to do some­thing about soci­ety although we’re all con­trib­u­tors and we’re all steeped in what our soci­ety does, both good and bad. And who knows, maybe it’s been around long enough that there’s been a mar­ket­ing aspect. I never though punk rock could ever be co-opted by the main­stream; it’s so ugly and so tawdry and off– putting and so repel­lent that I was always think­ing, “Great, this is some­thing that won’t be that flower-power, hippie-dippy, love bead shit and no head­bands and san­dals can be sold to pro­mote K-Mart. Because you could go to some dime stores and see all this flow­ery crap with all this hope­ful hand-woven stuff to the hip­pies being re-marketed from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s to the main­stream and it would just join and sud­denly every prod­uct in the world was being mar­keted in that direc­tion. And I didn’t think punk rock would ever do that, although unfor­tu­nately, it actu­ally has. The main­stream has actu­ally embraced it, which shows how far the main­stream has sunk.

When did you first think of, “Hey, I wanna cut out some scraps of paper, glue them together, and make some­thing”? Did you have other artis­tic avenues before that or was the pro­gres­sion to collage?

The first time that occurred to me to cut out pic­tures and glue them together was some­time in late 1958 and I was prob­a­bly about 6 years old then. I recall being shrieked at by my mom because I cut up one of her art books. It had Michelan­gelo and Leonardo and I cut out pic­tures of the Mona Lisa and put Mickey Mouse’s eyes on her. I thought it was really clever. I think I got my behind pad­dled severely, so I had to cut up things that weren’t her prop­erty. Years later, when I was in high school in the late ‘60s, there were no Xerox machines at the time. You couldn’t go down to the Kinko’s and push a but­ton, so I would draw pic­tures out of old mag­a­zines. The fear of being pun­ished was so strong — even when I was a teenager, I refused to cup up any­one else’s mag­a­zines. I’d draw the pic­tures and then cut out the draw­ings and then col­lage those together. And that had a cer­tain effect — being able to draw helped because I was able to repro­duce, at least to my sat­is­fac­tion, what I was draw­ing. Although, unfor­tu­nately, it all had the same tone. It was all black and white draw­ings, it wasn’t color. Also at that time, the pic­tures that I’m using now didn’t have, for me, any nos­tal­gia fac­tor because they were too recent.

Going back to the first time you cut out scraps of paper and started glu­ing them together. Have you ever huffed the glue just for fun?

Yea, it’s great. It’s my favorite high. [laugh­ter] Next to angel dust, it’s my favorite drug. Actu­ally, the glue I use is Uhu glue, and it’s a Ger­man glue and you can get it at the dime store. Unfor­tu­nately, there’s no odor. No aroma. There was no high. Any high I get is…

Purely artis­tic. [laugh­ter] What’s the newest tech­nol­ogy that you’re really excited about?

There’s a new tech­nol­ogy for repro­duc­ing pic­tures of lim­ited edi­tion prints onto fine art or archival paper. The new technology’s called Iris Prints and it’s a form of repro­duc­tion that involves the art­work being scanned by com­puter and then com­puter out­putted onto can­vas or archival paper. It’s very high qual­ity ink and very high res­o­lu­tion so it’s actu­ally the clos­est I’ve ever come to using a com­puter in my work. Peo­ple ask all of the time what com­puter I use to do this. I don’t do this on com­puter. The only dig­i­tal action is my dig­its. Razor blades and glue. Some­times I wish I had a com­puter just because it might make life eas­ier, only I sim­ply don’t have the patience to deal with com­put­ers. I think I’m too old-world for that or I’m just too old for that. You can’t teach old dogs new tricks. Maybe some­day — I even said that in my book — I will get hip to using com­put­ers about the time that implanted mind con­trol com­put­ers are the stan­dard. I will still be using some archaic Mac. In fact, the one I got — I actu­ally own a com­puter that I bought about three years ago that I’ve turned on about five times. I don’t know how to turn it on or off with­out help. I must say it was tem­po­rary insan­ity. I don’t know why I bought it. It was cheap. It was a cou­ple hun­dred bucks and it was a garage sale com­puter. My friend said, “Oh, if you’d had that com­puter on your desk 10 years ago, it would have been the fastest com­puter on the planet and now it’s land­fill. You were over-charged.” And peo­ple ask what I have on my com­puter and I tell them that on my com­puter are a pair of ten­nis shoes, a hat, and a can of cat food.

Have you ever attracted a fan that you wish you never had? Has there been any­thing non-productive?

For the most part, peo­ple who write or email me now (my girl­friend knows how to run the com­puter) usu­ally have said pretty pos­i­tive stuff. Peo­ple have been, over the years, very sup­port­ive about my work, they also tell me how my work may have opened their eyes about some­thing or inspired them or given them encour­age­ment, which I think is what we’re all here for. This may sound really corny, but I think we’re all here to encour­age one another because life is so hard that it’s pretty bleak for most peo­ple in the world. We’re kind of lucky where we are, but for the most part, encour­ag­ing oth­ers is really where it’s at. So it’s nice to know that peo­ple are encour­aged by it, although I have got­ten a cou­ple of things from peo­ple over the years that are pretty zippy. Years ago I would get these giant con­tain­ers from a lady named Julia in Eng­land and Biafra would get them too. They were some­times long, ram­bling let­ters like some­one was read­ing someone’s diary. “OK, good,” I’d think. “Now what does this have to do with any­thing?” And there would be long dia­tribes and there would be these boxes that were obvi­ously pretty expen­sive to send from Eng­land filled with news­pa­pers — The Daily Press. I kept look­ing through them try­ing to find…

Some­thing against you or appropriate…

Is there some­thing like a mes­sage? It was just your stan­dard news­pa­pers and tabloids and some­times I’d go through them and would see a lit­tle cir­cle that would say, “Win­ston and Biafra” and there’d be a lit­tle arrow point­ing to a house or there’d be some cryp­tic thing. The woman may have unfor­tu­nately have had some cer­tain psy­cho­log­i­cal prob­lems. Biafra actu­ally fig­ured out that she’d been in a home some place and had man­aged to get to the post office and was, from time to time, able to send us stuff. So that was a lit­tle dis­turb­ing to know that she had my address, but it was really nice that she was over in Eng­land and not here. I have a few peo­ple come up to me at shows or my expo­si­tions or at book sign­ings who want to kind of chal­lenge me over the art­work. “You must be some kind of com­mie.” And I say, “The work just speaks for itself” and it turns out they were Rea­gan sup­porter types and had been lis­ten­ing to Rush Lim­baugh and so they saw me as a con­ve­nient tar­get who rep­re­sented the other side, the anti-Christ or what­ever. I would say that for the most part, peo­ple… If they like it, they really like it; if they don’t like it, they don’t men­tion it. I’m a non-entity to them, which is fine for me.

What’s the largest cache of images that you’ve got­ten? Have you ever scored a mother load?

Years ago I used to buy old mag­a­zines for 5 or 6 for a quar­ter. I would get old war-time Life mag­a­zines from the ‘40s for 50 cents apiece and then the last cou­ples of years because of the vin­tage craze… Everybody’s into vin­tage now. Every­thing that’s 10 years old is called “vin­tage” now. So peo­ple would say, “Oh, that’s vin­tage so there­fore this mag­a­zine that was for­merly 50 cents or a dol­lar and a half is now 5 dol­lars.” $2.50, $3.50, $4.50, $5, $10, $20, $1000. I even had some­body who wanted to sell me some of their old mag­a­zines and then they said, “You need to take care of these” and I said, “I’m not going to take care of these. I’m going to cut them up.” And then he wouldn’t sell them to me. I should have said, “Yeah, I’m going to give them to my grand­mother. I’m going to put them in lucite. I’m going to put ‘em in a time cap­sule.” No, some­times I feel bad when I cut them up because I feel like, “Oh, these are things that should be pre­served, but the fuckin’ library of Con­gress has them. I don’t have to pre­serve every­thing. I’m not an archive.”

You’re not a historian?

I really do enjoy the his­tory fac­tor of it a lot, but some­one did point it out to me once. They said, “Well, actu­ally you are pre­serv­ing them in your own way. You’re tak­ing images that would have oth­er­wise never seen the light of day any other way. They were cast-off, com­mer­cial images from before the war or the ‘50s, stuff that peo­ple had for­got­ten about. That gen­er­a­tion that’s past now and those prod­ucts no longer exist and the whole ratio­nale for sell­ing them no longer exists. And so you’re actu­ally res­ur­rect­ing this as a cul­tural icon.” So that made me feel bet­ter. I bought it. [laugh­ter] “OK, I agree with you.”

Accord­ing to the artist Crumb — the piece of art that he did that peo­ple almost imme­di­ately iden­tify with him was “Keep on Trucking”…

Oh, was it The Mr. Nat­ural Guy?

Right. But it’s also the bane of his exis­tence. Is there any piece that you’ve done that would fit that bill? Is there any­thing that you’re glad you did, cer­tainly, but peo­ple iden­tify you way too imme­di­ately with it?

I would say what peo­ple iden­tify me with mostly is work done in con­cert with the Dead Kennedys. Biafra referred to me a few times in arti­cles as the artis­tic con­science of the Dead Kennedys. The bad con­science. I think that, per­haps, the cross of dol­lars, the cross of money, is the one thing that peo­ple iden­tify with. They iden­tify it with, per­haps, not me, but they iden­tify it with the band. The DK logo is also some­thing that peo­ple make cheap t-shirts of. The cross was some­thing I made quite some time before I knew Biafra and I made it specif­i­cally because of peo­ple mak­ing money off of religion.

Peo­ple can make money off of any­thing. Sell­ing land­fill if they want but to rip off money from lit­tle old ladies liv­ing off of their retire­ment fund and peo­ple who maybe aren’t ter­ri­bly deep thinkers or aren’t schol­ars in some­thing else. They either end up giv­ing Jerry Fall­well and Pat Robert­son all this money and other peo­ple in between who are sev­eral lay­ers down. That kind of thing is what really irked me and I grew up in Okla­homa and that was the bible belt and I’d see a lot of this stuff. I’d see peo­ple flock to these guys. Not that I think I’m much of a deep thinker or a big scholar, but, god, I just feel bad for these peo­ple who are being ripped off. To me, it has noth­ing to do with Jesus, it has to do with the fact that their idol, what they wor­ship, is dol­lars, and they were doing it over his dead body. That’s essen­tially how it breaks down.

A cou­ple of ques­tions about the piece “Idol.” Why did that take 3 years to do?

Because the first date is the date of cre­ation. The sec­ond date is the date of pub­li­ca­tion because I had to alter it. The Secret Ser­vice came by and they said, “You really can’t print it the way you’re doing this.”

The Secret Ser­vice? Really?

Yeah. Well, we were warned, actu­ally. They said that this could con­sti­tute legal prob­lems and it was their first record and Biafra fig­ured, “Ah, let’s not fuck with this, we’ll fuck with it later.”

I noticed that there’s dou­ble eyes on the pyramid.

Yeah, you noticed that. Good. Actu­ally, I was kind of happy that that hap­pened. At first we were kind of bummed that we had to change it, but it gave us a chance to change it in a much more sin­is­ter way than it would have ever been if they hadn’t ever intruded.

Forked tongue out of Wash­ing­ton. Snakes over the cru­ci­fied hands.

See this part right here? That’s on the dol­lar and to me it looked like a rat­tlesnake tail, so I made this as the back of a rat­tlesnake. I think it was a lit­tle while later that on my ranch I had to dis­patch a rat­tlesnake that was going to kill my cat. It was about as long as my base­ball bat and just about as thick, and I didn’t have a gun at the time — they were locked up some place — but I had a sword. It was a renais­sance faire sword that I’d carry around when I worked at the faire — a cos­tume sword — and I stabbed the snake. I made sta­tion­ary with it. I sued the snake skin and the rat­tle and, in fact, on the day I was pho­to­copy­ing it, I had to go answer the phone and the shop lady went to put some­thing in the pho­to­copy machine and opened it up and went, “Yeah­hooww” because she saw the snake and there is a vis­ceral thing to see­ing a snake (espe­cially when it’s unex­pected). So she shrieked. I sent some let­ters to Biafra on that stuff and unbe­knownst to me, he cut them all out and put them all over his next record, “Let Them Eat Jelly Beans.” That snake became more famous in death than he ever was in life. My cat, 101 (its name)… I had it hang­ing on the wall for a long time, and I’d wake up in the mid­dle of the night hear­ing this “prrr-prrr,” think­ing that I was hear­ing a rat­tler in the room and in the morn­ing the rat­tle part was all gone. He had gnawed it all off. Good ‘ol 101. So, yeah, I was able to change a lot of things on that cross. Like the atom bomb at the top that made the UPC…

With the 666

…Behind the INRI thing

What’s INRI?

Usu­ally over the cross is “INRI,” the abbre­vi­a­tion from Latin, “Iesus Cristos Rex Ebreo.” some­thing about, “Jesus Christ, king of the Jews” which is what the Romans put over the thing to mock him. So I replaced that with the anti-Christ sym­bol because money essen­tially, if you want to get abstract about it, money is the anti-Christ. The bible says you can’t serve God and mammon/wealth. It’s mam­mon that’s become their god, not that I’m a bible thumper, but there some­thing about our culture…It’s what in our cul­ture we’ve absorbed, what becomes promi­nent in our cul­ture. And in the “United States of Amer­ica” I took out the let­ter “s” so it’s the United State of Amer­ica, and then behind the 1, I made it into a Ger­man iron cross. I had a cat named 208 so I changed the ser­ial num­ber to read 208 there and I put it as series 1984. And then I put two eyes over the pyra­mid and it says some­thing like New World Order over it in Latin so I just changed to read “Nuit,” which I think is French for “Night.” On a few record art­works, I would put my name at the bot­tom right-hand cor­ner to be indis­crete. Unfor­tu­nately, by the time the record got made, it had to be cropped here and there to make it fit and then, boom, my name’s gone, and it’s not like I’m mak­ing a big for­tune doing this any­ways. So you’d like to get credit if you’re not get­ting any money for it. By and by, I learned a les­son from Michelangelo.

Incor­po­rat­ing it into the middle.

Appar­ently, peo­ple thought when he made the “Pieta,” an incred­i­bly beau­ti­ful statue, that they though tit had to have been made by Leonardo. “Only a mas­ter like Leonardo DaVinci could make this.” And he hated Leonardo and Leonardo hated Michelan­gelo. They were rivals. He was 20 years younger and it was a dif­fer­ent gen­er­a­tion. That was the old shit and he was the new shit. He went in the mid­dle of the night and he carved on the sash across the Madonna’s Chest, so it said, “Michelan­gelo Buonar­roti made this.” (I made it, damn it, and nobody else. It’s mine.) So on some things I actu­ally wound up putting my name in the mid­dle which peo­ple may have thought, “Oh, this guy has an enor­mous ego.” Well, not quite as much as that, it’s just because I fig­ured that if it was in the mid­dle, then it can’t get cut out. So it’s right under­neath the torch, right above the hand of Lady Lib­erty on the “Bed­time for Democracy.”

What other jobs have you taken to keep your­self fed?

For a long, long time, I worked dig­ging ditches. [laugh­ter] For the last 17 years I’ve lived on this ranch up in north­ern Cal­i­for­nia and I’d do car­pen­try for peo­ple. I’m not much of a car­pen­ter; I can swing a ham­mer, but that’s about it. That, and I worked at a solar power com­pany for a while doing pack­ing and ship­ping and stuff. I did lots of illus­tra­tion work for local mag­a­zines and illus­tra­tion work for news­pa­pers. A few years ago for a cou­ple of years in a row I was work­ing at a pho­to­copy place which was great because my work is basi­cally based on pho­to­copies. I even told the owner, “Do you real­ize that by hir­ing me, it’s like hir­ing an alco­holic to work in a brew­ery?” I was push­ing that but­ton all day long, but he was very cool and he very much liked my work and I think with­out his help, a lot of what you see around me wouldn’t even exist because I wouldn’t have had the oppor­tu­nity to exper­i­ment with things. So that was actu­ally very good. Now I’m suc­cess­fully “self-unemployed.” I don’t know how suc­cess­ful that will be in the future, but at the time I’m still here and I actu­ally do have some­what of a roof over my head even though by this time next month or next year I could be liv­ing behind a 7–11 eat­ing out of a dog food can. “Mighty Dog. Mighty good. Mmm.” Maybe I could get a job adver­tis­ing that: “Win­ston says: Mighty Dog is great.”

Have you ever got­ten into any trou­ble with the images you’ve used from a copy­right stand­point? Have you ever been approached by that?

Knock on wood. So far, no. Most of what I use is copyright-free and it’s so old that it’s over with. I try to stay away from pho­tographs of inspanid­u­als — pho­tographs of celebri­ties. I’m not going to use a pic­ture of Sina­tra or Coca– Cola or Dis­ney. These guys will clob­ber you if you try to do that. I also take pic­tures out of con­text; pieces of “ele­ments,” is what I call them. Like here you have some­body hold­ing a fish. Well, he was hold­ing a flash­light orig­i­nally and I put a fish in his hand so the fish came from another piece. The fish came from maybe a famous paint­ing or some­thing. But being taken out of con­text, it no longer is asso­ci­ated with that paint­ing or that prod­uct — fish food or what­ever it was. If I ever get hauled into court, I guess I’ll have to prac­tice say­ing that again in front of the judge. [laugh­ter] “I’m just a work­ing stiff try­ing to get by, your Honor.”

Name some of the bands that you made up. That you said were play­ing at the Mabuhay Gardens.

WE used to do these posters. When I first started out, I didn’t know a whole lot of peo­ple in the scene in the late ‘70s. I knew dif­fer­ent bands and stuff and would go to shows. It wasn’t like I was asso­ci­ated with them in any sense so in order to do band art, I wanted to show peo­ple in bands what I would do. They would say, “Well, what kind of style do you do?” So I’d make up some bull­shit bands. Names of bands that didn’t exist. The Clip-Ons, Lenny and the Spit­wads, PTA, the Dip Shits, Anony­mous Tech­ni­cians — a whole series of weird, bull­shit bands. The Clones, The Rejects, and one called Half Life and then Biafra reminded me that there was prob­a­bly a band called Half Life in almost every major Amer­i­can city. Cer­tain ones were pretty obvi­ous names. They were really obvi­ous and by and by, some bands took names just like them. I’m cer­tain I had noth­ing to do with it. They came upon them on their own, I’m sure. Biafra has a long list of the most repul­sive com­bi­na­tions of names that are pos­si­ble to have… They could never have been thought of by any­one else. I mean, other peo­ple could think of them, but it’s not like it could be dupli­cated by acci­dent. George DiCaprio (Leonardo’s father), I was hav­ing lunch with him — - not to drop names or any­thing — but he has his own long list of names that were so funny that as I took a drink of beer when he was telling us these names, I spit out my beer. It’s the only time I’ve ever done that in real­ity. It was so fuckin’ funny. And he was say­ing, “Gee, I wish there were bands with these names.” I can’t remem­ber it, though. My mem­ory fails me. It’s Alzheimer’s. It’s incip­i­ent, advanced Alzheimer’s. Don’t do drugs, kids. Either that or do lots of them and if you do, share them with me.

What’s the biggest light­bulb that’s gone off when you made a con­nec­tion that wasn’t there before — like putting a strate­gic bomber in a lady’s arms — or was there one idea that was the cat­a­lyst for a lot of other ideas that came along that burst upon you?

That’s a good ques­tion because that’s hap­pened. There were some things that I know were water­marks of evo­lu­tion that changed the course of things — the con­cept that less is bet­ter when it comes to com­po­si­tion. Imagery is more effec­tive when it is most direct visually.

Have you ever met some­body who Win­ston Smithed you that used your images or ideas that you’ve used and done it to you?

Yeah. Actu­ally, one time I saw a zine — this was a hun­dred years ago, like in 1979 — and I saw a zine at a lit­tle punk shop some­where in San Fran­cisco and it was exactly my pic­ture, only the guy was in a dif­fer­ent posi­tion, and it was the guy cut out and put into another pic­ture and he was float­ing the wrong way and I thought, “Oh man, they ripped me off.” But then I thought no, they couldn’t. If they had cut it up, the part behind it wouldn’t even be there. So it means that who­ever did this had to have got­ten the orig­i­nal stuff and did it on their own sep­a­rately and decided where to put it because oth­er­wise the fig­ure would be gone — there’d be a hole there and it wasn’t there. It was nice and clear. You saw the back­ground as it was in its entirety. So I got in touch with this cat. His name was Keith Ulrich and I think he lived in Pasadena at the time. I have not heard from him for years and years. We cor­re­sponded. He sent me a lot of his work and he did incred­i­ble col­lages and he just hap­pened to be using the same stuff I was using and the same idea occurred to him as it occurred to me only he made it a lit­tle bit trip­pier by mak­ing this guy float­ing around where I put the guy on solid ground. That was kind of cool. And then I’ve had peo­ple send me things or I saw pieces of my work pho­to­copied from my books or records cut up and made into col­lages and the first time I saw it I thought, “Oh, they fucked up my thing,” and then I had to think about it and I real­ized, “Oh, wait a minute, that’s what I do.” The rea­son I’m doing what I’m doing is to fuck up other people’s things. I’m screw­ing up other people’s hard work. And so I thought, “More power to him.” That’s fine. And there’s this guy named Joachin; he is in a band called The Hell­worms that has anew record out on Alter­na­tive Ten­ta­cles and he does really cool col­lages. He made an entire col­lage based on one of my pieces and with­out know­ing it, used that same piece; exactly the same pic­ture; the Last Sup­per and put a bunch of my fig­ures in this Last Sup­per thing and he didn’t even know that that was one I used myself. That was irony on top of irony. He sent it off to me and said, “Look, I hope you don’t mind my doing this. It’s just kind of a thank you note for what you do.” I thought it was totally cool. It was an honor to have some­one make some­thing out of what I’ve done because now I don’t feel bad for all the things that I’ve ripped off of other peo­ple. One time I met an artist who was one of the com­mer­cial artists in the ‘50s who made some pic­tures that I’d used and when I met him, he men­tioned that and I went, “Oh, man, I hope you don’t mind… It’s strictly for laughs. I’m not get­ting rich off of this or nothin” and he said, “Oh, no, I totally approve.” Art is art. Even in the his­tory of art where peo­ple see paint­ings and then a gen­er­a­tion or later it changes to a dif­fer­ent style of pant­ing, but it’s because those artists would study the work of the past and then alter and change it. None of us have any orig­i­nal ideas. We all for­mu­late them off of the things we have grown up with. So many of the 1950s images of house­wives make them look as though they just had a nose full of cocaine and their eyes are big and they’re so happy to wash that pan. Happy white guys with lit­tle bow-ties. That was the image peo­ple wanted to live up to, but I’ve seen some things from other coun­tries, espe­cially from behind the iron cur­tain, that I think really hit the nail on the head because they live that life. The live what we protest against.

Secretly, do you wish that Rea­gan was still president?

Yeah, yeah. I wish Newt was still around. I would join the Repub­li­can party just to get votes for the bas­tard [laugh­ter]. We made these shirts: “Newt Hates Me.”

Yeah, I even told the guy I made them with, “We should go out and cam­paign for Newt so we can keep ped­dling these shirts.” Actu­ally we could re-sell the shirts by writ­ing under­neath the image of Newt, “I Voted,” because the vote that took place when the Repub­li­cans lost all those seats in the mid-term vote here in Octo­ber and the Repub­li­cans lost pretty much big time after they thought Mon­ica was going to help them win. Mon­ica helped them lose and Newt had resigned prob­a­bly for a lot of rea­sons and he knew he didn’t have the votes to remain the speaker, but who knows, maybe Larry Flynt has some shit on him. I told Biafra that when Rea­gan had com­pleted his sec­ond term, “God, now that Reagan’s no longer pres­i­dent, we’re gonna be unem­ployed real soon. Now what?” Rea­gan was only Bush in sheep’s clothing.

Rea­gan looked bet­ter, though.

He was a bet­ter actor. Peo­ple think he was a bad actor, but he was actu­ally a very good actor. He swin­dled the pub­lic and the world into think­ing he was a Pres­i­dent for a long time.

Eight years.

I call that…

Pretty damn good act­ing. Have you ever wished that the worlds which you cre­ated would come true and that you could live inside of them?

H yeah. That’s why I wish I’d shown you this video tape I had. I was doing this inter­view for this woman from the Cana­dian Broad­cast­ing Tele­vi­sion Com­pany and she was ask­ing me “Why do you even do these silly pic­tures?” I pointed to a pic­ture called “Enough is Enough.” [It’s in the new book. There’s a platy­pus all har­nessed up to a lit­tle cart pulling a pygmy hippo down the road and chil­dren hold­ing bun­nies and space­men and robot dolls] And I said, “Well, because I wish that there was a world where a platy­pus could trun­dle down the road with a pygmy hippo in the back of a cart and a mete­orite would be com­ing down and a man would be being chased by a dinosaurs in the back­ground and a clown would hold a sledge­ham­mer up to the meteor.” But there aren’t any worlds like that, so I make them up myself and I do these things to cre­ate my own lit­tle dream states and night­mare states. Although on the same level, I’m glad that these things don’t exist in real­ity. It would be pretty scary.

Have you ever dreamt of dri­ving an Austin Healey into ancient Egypt, run­ning into a snow­man [refer­ring to the piece “Eclipse of the Gods”]…

Yeah, the snow­man is def­i­nitely in the wrong neigh­bor­hood and in the wrong time of the year for him. [laugh­ter] When I was a teenager I used to draw rooms where all of these span­er­gent things would be put together because I couldn’t cut them out so I would draw them in and make these sur­real envi­ron­ments. It was dur­ing the craze of the pop art thing in the late ‘60s, like Roy Liecht­en­stein, and I kept think­ing, “Well, why not? This could be. You could make one of these. It could be this way.” If you cut them out pre­cisely enough and assem­bled them closely enough, they would appear to be the way they are. My thing and my per­sonal style is that I try to make these things look as though they were born that way. I’ve actu­ally had peo­ple look at cer­tain pic­tures I’ve done and there will be two or three sub­tle changes and they’ll think, “Well, what did you do? So what? Big deal. There’s no change here.” And I’d kind of point out that, “Oh, here’s a fish com­ing out of this guy’s hat.” I wanted to cre­ate the illu­sion that you should be relaxed while look­ing at them and then be star­tled by the things that you notice; the nuances that you see that are out of place and then per­haps that would sur­prise or shock peo­ple in a cer­tain way.

Have you ever been accused of being a “bas­tard artist?” You don’t cre­ate any­thing your­self. You don’t paint any­thing, you don’t draw any­thing with the col­lages and the montages.

Every now and then I have to paint some edges to make them match up with some­thing else, but I try to avoid that. Even though I can draw, I def­i­nitely can’t draw as well as some of the peo­ple who I rip-off. I had some­one tell me about 10 years ago, “Win­ston, what you’ve been doing for years and years, that’s all the rage now back in New York. They call it ‘appro­pri­a­tion.’” Unfor­tu­nately that didn’t help me. [laugh­ter] It doesn’t mean much to be a pio­neer. I rarely have peo­ple get com­pletely on my case over that. I guess that I change things sig­nif­i­cantly enough and make enough alter­ations that it does cre­ate a new work of art, a new com­po­si­tion. And not all of them are works of art. They’re sim­ple com­po­si­tions. I may like them, but they’re not mas­ter­pieces in any sense of the word. It’s funny, too, because you never know what peo­ple are going to hit on. Some things that I like a whole lot because they mean some­thing to me and it’s rel­e­vant to me but it doesn’t grab any­body much. Other times I’ve had things I’ve liked because they were kind of inter­est­ing to make and I liked it at that moment, but later it didn’t grab me but other peo­ple just flocked to it and they said, “Oh, this has such deep mean­ing.” And that’s OK. Even if it has no mean­ing toe, if it has it to them, then that’s what art’s all about. I t means what­ever you bring to it. I have peo­ple inter­pret things good and bad. Some­times peo­ple will look at things and go, “Oh, that things’ about ani­mal abuse. You’re ter­ri­ble.” No, I’m not talk­ing about the abuse of ani­mals. I’m not into that. This is strictly pygmy hip­pos being taken down the road by a platy­pus. Mar­su­pial abuse is prob­a­bly the proper term. You can’t sec­ond guess peo­ple. You can’t take guesses of what they’re going to be offended by or intrigued by so my thing is just to do what I do. These images are in our cul­ture that we’ve all grown up with or we’ve all seen in one form or another or we haven’t seen those images but have seen the things that have been cre­ated through their inspi­ra­tion. Not every­one has seen cer­tain ads that I’ll use, but they’ll see the things that were made by peo­ple who did. There’s a gen­er­a­tional dif­fer­ence between it and it all con­tributes to the great cos­mic swarm that makes up our soci­ety and our civ­i­liza­tion, and when peo­ple see things they brig to them what­ever bag­gage they have psy­cho­log­i­cally, emo­tion­ally, or men­tally. I have things that I’ve made because I just thought they were funny look­ing and one guy would look at it and go, “Man, that reminds me of a story I heard when I was in Aus­tralia about one of the first men on the moon that said he saw a Russ­ian base there and that he couldn’t be quoted in the Amer­i­can news­pa­pers.” And I’m all, “Whoa, back off, this is a pic­ture of a space man hold­ing a fish.” It was called, “The Fish on the Moon” or “The Fish That Knew Too Much” and this guy’s like, “yeah, this was the astro­naut who knew too much and they had to silence him because he claimed that he was up there and there was a Russ­ian base. He was one of the guys on the Apollo 16 or 15 and in the United States. Every­thing he said was com­pletely blacked out from the media and he had to go to Aus­tralia to get it on the air.” It could be bull­shit or not, but the thing is is that he had a dif­fer­ent take on it and it had noth­ing to do with what was going on when I made it. We could look at a paint­ing by Michelan­gelo or Bot­ti­celli and think, “Well, we can see clearly that Bot­ti­celli meant that this is an alle­gory between good and evil but maybe he just made it because he got the money up front. I can just hear the guy who com­mis­sioned the art­work: “I want a naked chick over here and a babe over here, I want another babe over there and I want a water fall in the mid­dle.” [laughter]

And make her hair flowy.

Same thing with “The Birth of Venus,” the woman on the half shell. She was a beauty pageant win­ner in Flo­rence at the time. She was a big star. She was appar­ently a very nice woman, beloved by every­one, and she died very young. Bot­ti­celli was hired to glo­rify the prince’s con­cu­bine. It was his girl­friend. He was mar­ried and had kids and this was his mis­tress. She was the cousin of Amerigo Vespucci, the Flo­ren­tine nav­i­ga­tor for whom they named Amer­ica. She died at age 24 of con­sump­tion (tuber­cu­lo­sis). A lot of peo­ple died young in those days because of con­sump­tion. Nat­u­rally she caught pneu­mo­nia. She had no clothes on… what did she expect?

Are there any nec­tars of cre­ativ­ity for you — food stuffs? Like Garry Lar­son of the Far Side said that he just got tanked up on caf­feine and what­ever came out came out.

I get tanked on Chi­anti and what­ever comes out comes out… Beer is my favorite drug. That’s prob­a­bly not a very good thing to say to peo­ple because it’s obvi­ously not good for you. Too much of a good thing can screw things up, but caf­feine… I like cof­fee, but not really to work by. It doesn’t really jazz me up so much. I do most of my work at night. I’m very noc­tur­nal. I prob­a­bly was born in Hong Kong because my cir­ca­dian rhythm is com­pletely the oppo­site of every­body else’s . That’s one thing Biafra and I have in com­mon. We are up ’til 3 or 4 in the morn­ing and don’t wake up until noon or one o’clock at least. That would be early for us. I’ve been an insom­niac all my life. When I was doing the cover for Green Day, I fin­ished it, finally, and there was kind of a dead­line for get­ting it done. It took me a cou­ple of weeks to get all of the pic­tures together. You have to find a mil­lion pic­tures, go through those mil­lion and then find a few thou­sand and go through those few thou­sand and find a few hun­dred. You whit­tle those down to a cou­ple of dozen. You cut out a hun­dred of them and you have a dozen or so images and you select the ones that will work, but you have to go through all of this high-grading to get to that point and that took a cou­ple of weeks. And finally, in all of three days, I worked and worked and worked on that and at one point I just didn’t go to sleep and I was up for 35–36 hours and then I got it fin­ished. Then I called up Bill and Tre and said it was done and that they could come and get it and they said, “Well, bring it to the stu­dio down­town so we can check it out.” And I go over there and I’m still zip­ping along ‘cuz I’d been awake for 38 hours by that time and I’m on a sec­ond wind but I’m really buzzin’ like I’m on an acid high almost. Sleep depri­va­tion, essen­tially. Every­thing was glow­ing and fuzzy. I get there and they imme­di­ately loved it. In fact, they rec­og­nized cer­tain things. The title of that piece for “Insom­niac” is actu­ally called “God Told Me to Skin You Alive” and Bill rec­og­nized it imme­di­ately (being an old Dead Kennedys fan), it came off the first poster we made for the DK’s first LP. There was a Jack T. Chick car­toon with a lit­tle arm com­ing out of this Armaged­don car­toon about the world com­ing to an end. There was this lit­tle bub­ble com­ing up but you don’t see any­thing past the paper. It says, “God Told Me to Skin You Alive!” So they were jazzed on that and at that time, the work­ing title for the record was going to be “Tight­wad Hill,” which was one of the songs on the record, and they kept say­ing, “Well, do what­ever you want.” I was like, “Do you want this? Do you want that?” “No, just do what­ever you want.” Which was cool because it meant that I had free reign. I had no con­straints. Usu­ally peo­ple say, “It’s got to have horses or fly­ing saucers in it. No dol­phins and no chick­ens.” So I felt pretty free to do what I wanted and when I got it done, he said, “How long does it take you to do this?” “Well, over the span of the last few weeks I sorted through ten mil­lion images to get to this point, I fin­ished the whole com­po­si­tion in the last 36 hours,” and he said, “How could you stay awake that long?” And I replied, “It’s easy for me, I’m an insom­niac.” And we hung out for awhile and I went back home and slept for 24 hours. When the record came out, they called it “Insom­niac.” It was prob­a­bly a big coin­ci­dence because there’s no song on the record called insom­niac, but I won­dered if they and taken it off of that expe­ri­ence. Maybe I deserve an extra roy­alty check. I’ll have to talk to Tre about that. [laughter]

Have you ever walked into a store or gallery and said, “Hey, I did that. I’m Win­ston Smith” and they didn’t believe you?

Often I’ve come into places and seen things, espe­cially the things that are out of con­text that I did, but they were bootlegs or the things that I know are clearly unau­tho­rized repro­duc­tions of the work and I would say, “Oh, I made that, blah blah blah” and they’d go, “Oh, shit. Really? Naahh.” I’d have to tell them that I wasn’t going to sue them or any­thing but that they were bootlegs. It’s kind of fun because I’ve seen my work in Rome. I saw it in Lon­don and back east in sev­eral places where they were clearly bootlegs and the guy would say, “Yeah, I’ll give you this for half price”. Another guy said, “Oh, then you should have one for free. Have one for your girl­friend, too. Take another one for your mum,” jus so I wouldn’t get uppity about it. I wasn’t try­ing to wig on him, I was just sur­prised. I don’t mind. Again, I can’t get on anyone’s case over it because I, myself, have made a career out of wip­ing work from other peo­ple -real artists. [laugh­ter] Only one time i was in Flo­rence — I was going back there for a visit and I was show­ing some friends around — in fact it was the assis­tant guy from Alter­na­tive Ten­ta­cles there for the musi­cal con­ven­tion of alter­na­tive music in 1989. I hap­pened to have a shirt they gave me in Lon­don that was a DK logo shirt and I just had it on. We’d gone to see the statue of David by Michelan­gelo at The Acad­emy of Fine Arts which is the school I went to in Flo­rence. I wasn’t a very good stu­dent, but I was there. so we walked out of the place with the statue and the woman I was trav­el­ling with and I walked down the block to the front door of the acad­emy and I was say­ing, “Here is where I went to school and where I would hang out in front of the “log­gia,” (the porch), every­day, wait­ing for the doors to open.” Then we go into the court­yard and on the wall is a giant DK logo painted with a paint brush and my mouth just fell open. “Son of a bitch!” I took a pic­ture imme­di­ately because I wanted to send it to my mom. “Mom, I’m not in the acad­emy, but I’m on the acad­emy. I finally made the big time!” So I’m tak­ing a pic­ture and this guy comes upon his Vespa and he takes his hel­met off and he was talk­ing Ital­ian and he said, “What the fuck are you doing? Are you some kind of tourist? Fuck you, man.” and I said, “No, no, no, I’m tak­ing a pic­ture because that emblem over there on the wall is this emblem I made.” and he said, “Oh no, you just have that shirt. Blah blah blah blah blah (in Ital­ian)… Win­ston Smith.” And this woman who doesn’t know Ital­ian says, “How does this per­fect stranger know your name?” So I said, “Well, that’s me and I’m tak­ing the pic­ture because it’s…” “Nah, that’s bull­shit, man, you’re not even Amer­i­can, you’re Flo­ren­tine.” (Because I speak flu­ent Flo­ren­tine. Florentine’s the dialect of Flo­rence. It’s not like reg­u­lar Ital­ian so if you were a for­eigner, you’d prob­a­bly come with a bro­ken accent and I didn’t have that. I had grown up there. I had proper pro­nun­ci­a­tion. Even though it’s bad Ital­ian, its’ good Flo­ren­tine. It’s like speak­ing Cock­ney or some­thing.) So I’m rap­ping away with him and you could tell he was a bit s toned. “No way, you’re a local boy.” I pulled out my pass­port and showed him. “Oh man, you could get into a lot of trou­ble fuck­ing with pass­ports like that. You could get into a lot of trou­ble with an Amer­i­can pass­port.” He puts his hel­met back on and on his hel­met there’s a mask­ing tape DK logo across the mid­dle of it — a home­made thing. He gets on his bike and takes off and he wouldn’t believe it… He prob­a­bly went home and said, “Man, I ran into this joker today.” Which is kind of cool because I had no idea I would even be known there. When I look at records and things, even when I was a teenager, I wouldn’t really study who did what and who pro­duced this. I’d like it and appre­ci­ate it and that was about it. That’s where it ends with me. I’m not much of a fan type. I’ve never really been a fan of any band… Except for Gwar. Gwar is my one major fan thing and also my new major fan thing is Storm [Storm and Her Dirty Mouth] — the singer in San Fran­cisco who’s the hard­est work­ing girl in show busi­ness and I’ve been a Storm groupie for­ever. Other than that, I’m not really a fan of any­thing. [laughter]

What’s the largest ele­ment that peo­ple have gone and said, “I’ve been look­ing at this piece for a while, but I didn’t see (and fill in the blank)?” What’s the largest hid­den ele­ment that peo­ple didn’t see that they came around to see?

One thing is a bit of an opti­cal illu­sion and it was intended that way, but I always thought it was so obvi­ous that it couldn’t’ be mis­taken. But it shows you how, visu­ally, peo­ple react. It’s “The Spot­light” — the piece I made that a is black and white draw­ing of two peo­ple stand­ing in front of a spot­light, hold­ing a cou­ple of bot­tles of beer in front of a table at a club. Well, from a dis­tance it looks like a skull and that took quite a while to come up with. I had to make many draw­ings with my glasses off by can­dle­light. I dew it and then would take it and put it across the room and look at it and see if it worked then I’d come back and draw some more, put it back on the other side of the room with a can­dle next to it. I went back and forth a dozen times before I could get that just right on. I have actu­ally encoun­tered peo­ple that can look at it… “What do you see? The vase or the two pro­files?” It’s a thing in the brain. It’s just how the right brain and the left brain work. Some peo­ple see it faster than others.

A lit­tle bit of depar­ture, but what do you love most about liv­ing in Amer­ica today? What advan­tages do you think you have over liv­ing in other places.

My work prob­a­bly would not be as eas­ily given out into the pub­lic if it were not for pho­to­copy machines which have, of course, been around for 30 years. I think that we do have other advan­tages over other coun­tries. Like it or not, we have cer­tain free­doms that other peo­ple don’t have that we take for granted here. Unfor­tu­nately, a lot of our free­doms are backed up by the U.S. Marines and we can pay a dol­lar and a quar­ter for a gal­lon of gas and every­one else is pay­ing four and a half dol­lars. And why? Because of the U.S. Marines. We’re used to going to the pumps and pay­ing a dol­lar and a quar­ter and we’re used to flip­ping on the elec­tric lights mag­i­cally. It’s just like sci­ence fic­tion. Push a but­ton and the house heats up. Where I’ve been liv­ing on my ranch for years, I’ve got kerosene lamps and I’ve got to go and chop wood to make the house warm; throw it in a fire box. In the rest of the world with the excep­tion of Amer­ica and Europe that’s how it really is. Europe is essen­tially the 51st Amer­i­can state. They don’t like to think of it as that, but that’s what has hap­pened, unfor­tu­nately. We have advan­tages that other peo­ple don’t have as far as free­dom of speech.

I say in the sec­ond book, the new book, Art­crime, that it’s easy for me to sit in my stu­dio and slice up lit­tle pieces of paper, put them together and think I’m an anar­chist and a big rev­o­lu­tion­ary which is horse shit. [laugh­ter] If i were really in a posi­tion to have to deal with that, I’m afraid that I’m so much of a cow­ard that I’d keep my mouth shut. If I were in El Sal­vador or Nicaragua or from some Nazi coun­try in cen­tral Amer­ica that has death squads wan­der­ing over the coun­try side shoot­ing preg­nant women because they’re all rebel com­mu­nists. (Their atti­tude is: if you shoot a preg­nant woman, you kill two com­mu­nists for the price of one bul­let.) It’s easy for us to protest and make remarks about things because there are no sig­nif­i­cant reper­cus­sions, whereas in this coun­try, the only sig­nif­i­cant reper­cus­sions that they can hand to you are eco­nomic bars. You can get put in jail if you knock some­body off or stick up a bank, but the way of pun­ish­ing peo­ple in Amer­ica is to eco­nom­i­cally deprive them and make it really hard and bit­ter for you to deal with all of the expenses that are nec­es­sary to live in the United States by fuckin’ up credit cards or your mort­gage or your stu­dent loan, just makin’ it really hard for you. A friend of mine made this obser­va­tion once; he said it’s all about rent. He said in the ‘50s and early ‘60s you could live in San Fran­cisco, for exam­ple, and have a nice lit­tle apart­ment and maybe a part-time job or full-time job and have time and energy and money left after you took care of your expenses to maybe go out and protest things. It’s like they fig­ured, “We don’t need any­more of this horse shit. We’ve got to stop these peo­ple from being able to have this leisure time.” There was a thing about mak­ing life much more dif­fi­cult to deal with so that you wouldn’t have time to inter­fere with them doing what­ever they want to do. “Them being the gov­ern­ment, cor­po­ra­tions, what­ever. They don’t want you inter­fer­ing. “Get back to work. Keep your noses to the grind­stone.” Peo­ple began think­ing, “All I want is to come home from work and watch a lit­tle TV and be left the hell alone.” The screws started tight­en­ing around the late ‘60s. I think Nixon’s re-election in 1973 was the end of the “‘60s era.”

Have you ever sold a piece of work and then seen it for sale for a gross amount?

No. I wish. It would be a big ego boost. It would mean I could go find an attorney.

Have you ever thought about chang­ing your name?

It’s kind of too late for that. I already did that more than 20 years ago. Way more than that, actually.

What was your first name?

It was a typ­i­cal Irish name. My family’s Irish and Scot­tish. In fact, my dad, one time, looked at my book and even though he approved of my being an artist, he dis­ap­proved of some of the sub­ject mat­ter because he was your typ­i­cal older, con­ser­v­a­tive, World War II vet­eran, Nixon sup­porter type and he looked at the book and said, “You never did tell me why you changed your name.” And I said, “Look at my work, dad. Don’t you think it’d be eas­ier for me to change my name than for our whole fam­ily to change their name? And he sort of nod­ded, “Yeah, I guess you’re right.” After that he was thank­ful that I was being so con­sid­er­ate of the fam­ily honor.

When you were talk­ing about Green Day, you said you had lit­er­ally thou­sands of images. How do you orga­nize your archives?

I don’t. I tried that 10 or 15 years ago. I tried to put all TV sets over here all the snakes over there and all the guns, wed­ding pic­tures, etc… and I spent a cou­ple of months sort­ing through things and putting them into dif­fer­ent piles and then I real­ized I’m dyslexic. I knew I was dyslexic to begin with but I real­ized that my being dyslexic, that was the totally wrong way to go about it because now I’ve com­pletely for­got­ten where these images are. They’re all sep­a­rate and I can’t even get to them because I don’t see things as words; I see things as images and if I don’t see them, they don’t exist to me. If they’re not directly under my nose, they’re not there. That’s why every­thing in my life is so clut­tered. I can’t put things on com­puter discs and I can’t put things in draw­ers. They all have to be out. If not, what’s out of sight is out of mind. That’s the story of my life. That’s why I didn’t grad­u­ate from high school. That’s why I flunked alge­bra four times. I just don’t have that kind of mind to sort things into dif­fer­ent com­part­ments. I would trade any­thing to be able to do that. I would love to have that kind of mem­ory and sort­ing men­tal­ity. It would really help me in what I do. To find an image, I have to go through every­thing I’ve got. Bil­lions and bil­lions of images to find it. A mon­key hold­ing a chain­saw. It’s like try­ing to find a name in a New York City phone book when it’s not in alpha­bet­i­cal order. It would take you years. In fact, it’s a big draw­back ‘cuz some­times if I’m doing illus­tra­tions for peo­ple and the dead­line is next week. “Can you drop every­thing you’re doing and make a pic­ture of an aard­vark fly­ing over the Empire State build­ing?” So then I have to find the aard­vark and I know I’ve got one, but I don’t know where it is. I know I have the Empire State build­ing, because I just saw it last week. Some­times I’ve gone through a pile of shit and found it right at the bottom.

Doing the cover for “The Sky is Falling and I want My Mommy” [Nomeansno and Biafra] there was some­thing I needed to have… It was a pair of cars that were crash­ing. I had the entire com­po­si­tion done in a cou­ple of hours and I spent about 4 or 5 hours until dawn to find that piece and it was lit­er­ally under my nose. I’d gone through 16 stacks of paper. “I know it was here. Did i eat it?” [laugh­ter] I finally found it and it worked, but it was one of those strug­gles that was like salmon swim­ming upstream. My orga­ni­za­tional skills are nil and the fact that I can keep things together as well as I have is a mir­a­cle. Dyslexia has its limitations.

Do you ever asso­ciate what the band is releas­ing to what you pro­duce? Do you lis­ten to “Breed, Spawn, and Die” from Lard? Is there any direct cor­re­la­tion to that or does some­body say like what Green Day said, “Go with what you have. What ever you want to do.”

Actu­ally, for Lard, I had made that piece over one week­end. I had not done any­thing for a long time. I had bro­ken up with some girl­friend of mine and hadn’t done any work for a long time, so sud­denly over that week­end I finally had the free time and I did all this stuff. When I went and showed this lady I knew and showed her my new stuff she said, “You should break up with your girl­friends more often. You’re get­tin’ some good stuff.” In fact, she looked at that one piece with the steam shovel about to eat the lady hold­ing the baby [the Lard cover] and said it’s a real Bud­dhist piece. The title is “Wel­come to the World ” and it’s like, here you’re born and this is what you have to deal with. You’re fed into the machine psy­cho­log­i­cally, phys­i­cally, eco­nom­i­cally, every­thing. Even if you’re a baby you become a con­sumer and a pro­ducer. When Biafra saw that, he saw it as a poten­tial cover so it was selected with­out my hav­ing to puz­zle out any­thing from his work. I was off the hook. I didn’t have to lis­ten to the music. [laugh­ter] One of my favorite things is that they’ve done is “Lard.” The song “Lard.” “What we need is llaar­rdd.” That’s actu­ally a won­der­ful song. One of my favorite things of all that Biafra ever par­tic­i­pated in was “The Witch Tri­als.” That was the coolest piece of music. Chris­t­ian Lunch, Klaus, and this guy who used to be in the Dead Kennedys — Car­los was his name. I don’t know where he is. I haven’t seen him in a long, long time. I think he may have been in on “The Witch Tri­als.” That was a great record, though. Real funny shit. We need more clas­sics like that one.