You know, most of the books I read on, and I've only read a couple, you know "today the society's control" type of stuff. You know, this grip on society type of stuff, it's just like "oh yeah this generation, they're just a bunch of idiots that sit there and watch TV and smoke dope and the internet is nothing to get excited about, it's just you can see already, it's just people doing Twitter and playing on Facebook and stuff, there's noth..." But no, there's some anticipatory potential in these technologies.

You know, I mean, you think about what it could mean to have a camcorder and follow around Socrates.

[Titles]
I know that
I don't know,
I don't know
I don't know

Interview with John Maus (ft. the wind and the crickets)

[Cut to John]
Yeah no, no I'm John Maus and I'm here talking with, what? What am I talking with?

[You're talking to Smetnjak. We're the non-paid spoiled brats of the world. Enough about us. How do you feel about the way your album We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves has been represented in the media?]

Ahhhh ambivalent, of course, do you know what I mean? It was the first time that I was dealing a tiny bit with those, with more kind of dubious mechanisms, that are more wrapped in with making sure the thing is more visible and this kind of, in other words they aren't strictly DIY, so, you know, in the name of punk rock I felt a little ambivalent about that, you know the manufactured hype and things along those lines. But then I always like to make the disclaimer that my vocation isn't politics, right? I don't want to make a medium of politics, I want to make music! But then you've got to think about the bullshit the minute you represent the thing or try to share the thing with the situation and inevitably it involves those political dimensions.

[The dangers of visibility.] (2:06)

You have to concede, you have the outrageous belief that in this case it will be exceptional. Do you understand? Somehow, it will explode, it will mark a redistribution, it will speak to something else than those inhuman mechanisms, when I bring this to bear. But again, I think we have to be really careful here, right? Whether our question is about music, about an artistic procedure, versus a political, do you know what I mean? I'm not saying there isn't certainly an overlap somewhere, but essentially right, they're disparate trajectories.

So yeah, after the fact, bringing it to bear, dealing with these mechanisms, I've said once before, a thing's visibility usually speaks to its untruth, doesn't it? But I also held the caveat that there are of course exceptions to this, in popular music, I think of something like The (Sex) Pistols, the punk rock thing, or even Nirvana, right? Where the thing is omnipresent but there is perhaps an element of something else, an inhumanity, a singularity, or whatever you want to call it, in there.

It's disgusting, of course I feel violated, and I feel complicit, and I feel like I must have been in the midst of a fever dream and Lucifer came to me and I didn't even know it, or something like that, do you know what I mean? But the only thing we can do at this point is try to rip it down, right? I mean I'll go hide, I promised myself I won't let it get to the point where I'm wearing ass-less chaps and just smiling and doing exactly what I'm supposed to.
[You are still living in the Midwest.] (4:06)

Yeah, yeah, I live in the country, in Minnesota, about two hours south of the nearest city. I mean it's a strange place, I think it perhaps uniquely speaks to the whole political situation of our generation in the sense that when I was a kid, about 86', there was one of the last stand-offs between old, new-deal, if you're familiar with this term, labour and Reagan. There was a strike in the town and the one factory in my town is the place that makes spam, you know spam? That's what they do there and so there was a stand-off and, of course, labour was crushed and the whole town transformed overnight to like a refugee camp, cause they brought in all the third-world labour to blow out hog brains for 3 dollars an hour or whatever. So it's an interesting story, I get the impression you guys are interested in politics, so I talk about that. But yeah, I live there by myself, I hate that, I wish I had friends like you that I could talk with and stuff like that. And I always refused, I don't like this whole romanticizing solitude type of thing, maybe that's too complicit or speaks to some kind of individual or something like that, but at the same time too, the more I'm there, the more I kind of see the whole essential solitude thing in the work, you know, that there is some kind of strange truth to that notion, you know? I don't know, I'm sorry if I'm rambling.

[Hiding from exposure?] (5:44)
I don't see it! I don't see it! That's the beautiful thing about being in the middle of nowhere, is I kind of get to hide my head in the dirt, you know what I'm saying? The people in Austin, Minnesota, you know what I mean? But it is still in a teacup, right? I mean the whole, the type of music and all this stuff we're doing, I mean it's not at the level of, you know, some of the more dangerous things, I wouldn't think.. But no I'm not.. We're not visible yet. If we were truly visible the whole thing would be undone, do you know what I'm saying? It would be undone! I see this about Ariel, he hasn't been represented yet. If he was represented there would be no need for art anymore.

[Let's talk about work. You seem able to do a lot of it.] (6:37)

No, I'm not, I'm very unprolific! I'm very very unprolific, I got, since 1999, I got those three albums. I mean, at the peak of it I was doing a song a month, back in 2003 or whatever. Which I think is very relatively unprolific. I mean most people, right, I get the impression, I could be wrong, they smoke dope and make beats.

[The post-modern condition of laissez-faire is not the kind of work we have in mind.] (7:02)

You know, that's what precisely it's been about and it's very very difficult, I mean how do we do it? I mean it's an impossibility, it's an unspeakable thing, who knows, right... You know I'd want to ascribe a lofty thing to it like love, you know, or something like that, imagination for a world where we'd be emancipated, or whatever, you know this kind of thing. But you know, you mentioned the postmodern condition, this kind of thing, and your man from Slovenia has this idea, right, that it's universally taken for granted, the theses of post-modernism... But at least in the States that's not... I mean maybe in a provincial discourse in a university that's true, but you go talk to folks, you know, just that you meet everywh... They don't take the theses of postmodernism as their starting point! I mean, in our television shows, with the liberal television shows, they take the dialectic of enlightenment for granted. They believe there's a positive truth that they have a grasp on, they believe in humanism, in liberalism, in this kind of thing. They don't take the language games and all that stu- that there is no meta narrative, they all believe in meta narratives and stuff like that, you know what I mean? (...) I don't wholesale disagree with that, I think there is something to be learned from that, for lack of a better word, post-modernism. For whatever reason this word has fallen out of favor.....
But yeah yeah yeah, I mean, there's something to what was embodied in that, on a deeper level, that I think is worth salvaging.

[How does one bring oneself to work in the face of the imperative to consume, communicate, enjoy?] (8:58)

That's the whole Pitiless Censor idea, right? That's the whole We Must Become Piti- you know, therefore, you know, since the situation is so sure of its ability to control, therefore we must become the pitiless censors. It's, it's, you, you know I ran--and there's an insanity in that that can ultimately be self-destructive. I mean, not speaking philosophically, but just speaking from my own experience, right, to actually... do the insanity of committing yourself to that idea, I mean, there has to be a tiny bit of compromise in that. But that's the very idea, right? The way we do it is through the work, right? Maybe? Whether it's art or, which, you know, I, you know, I tell myself that what I kind of decided to make a medium of.

But there's politics, too, and I think, at least in the States, I can't speak for Europe, it was a remarkably impotent generation, politically speaking. It wasn't very creative. There wasn't any [pause] And I think we did cool mu- you know, radical music with pop and stuff like that, but there wasn't any corresponding radical work done in politics, I, I don't think.

There are, you know they have the, Invisible Committee or whatever in France, do you know this? The Coming Insurrection, this pamphlet, you know, there was a couple things and we had
we have Occupy Wall Street, but nothing that met the horror show of Abu Ghraib!
d'you know what I'm saying? We got this great guy, he died a couple years ago: Hunter S Thompson, do you know him?
He talked about this Abu Ghraib, he was an American hero and uh, that was a fucking unbelievable horrowshow and there was not a politics creative that was adequate to it...
but I think we won music and probably science, too--I don't follow it carefully enough-- but there was science and there was thought and maybe it hasn't come out yet, but I imagine people our age have probably had interesting...but yeah politics I mean yeah, at least in the states we just sat on our fucking hands while the state humiliated human beings
[11:28]
[Titles]
The horror... of distraction.

And television is a great example of this, it really is my uh, my, my opiate. You know what I'm saying? Like, I mean I lie to myself, I tell myself "I'm only watching this because it mimics, with perfect precision, the corporate situation." This cooking competition show that I'm watching. You know what I mean? But I can't be sure of that.
[11:51]

I grant that all of us, who have paused for just a second, understand that that's a horror. Do you know what I'm saying? That's an absolute horror. See the, I guess I do understand that this is something that I guess I imagined we all took for granted. See and talking to folks this last year and a half, uh, or whatever, I was really surprised to find out it wasn't. Like for instance in the States I made a really stupid remark about record stores, and everybody thought I was saying, oh I was happy that these poor guys were going out of business and stuff like that. So I was writing some of the guys and saying "look, you know, it was out of context, blah blah blah, what I really meant is, you know, I hate the inhumanity of representation and capital-" and all this. So I'm talking to this guy and he's like "well what's wrong with capital- you know- capitalism is great," you know what I mean? "It's the best," you know, so I was really surprised, that there is, you know I really thought that we all took for granted that the society of the spectacle, or whatever it was, was the supreme culmination of alienated humanity or whatever.

[Titles]
There are emancipatory potencials in the spectacle as well. [13:04]