Homer Flynn Hypno Magazine interview, May 1994
In May 1994, Homer Flynn of The Cryptic Corporation was interviewed by James Call for Hypno Magazine, in an article titled "The Residents: The Eyeball Speaks", in promotion of the Freak Show CD-ROM.
The article was transcribed by a fan named "Sabrina" in the 1990s for the now defunct semi-official fan site RZWeb; it has been archived here for posterity by a Mysterious Spanish Lady.
The Residents: The Eyeball Speaks
I have been sitting here trying and I can't. I can't think of a group more famous than the Residents who are also more unknown. And what's more, the reverse of that is also true! For nearly 20 years they've been making and recording a large body of some of the most purposefully strange music ever made by people. I'm sure they are people. Words like underground and avant garde apply, but are also wholly inadequate in describing both the impact and the place they have made for themselves in the music world. A world which in the mid seventies was completely unprepared, Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart notwithstanding, for music so extremely odd. It was with obvious and perverse glee that the Residents began twisting very basic notions of music inside out. Even the serious underground was at a loss, finding them, well... goofy. There had not been created a context for a music which flouted both convention and the avant garde so profoundly. It was this uncompromising musical anarchy and sense of humor that began to delight a small but ever increasing cadre of aficionados. The Residents weirding way has teched not only music, but movies, performance, comics, graphics, TV and video too. Now, a stunning CD-ROM opens up a brand new world for them to apply their quirky vision and has focused unprecedented attention on the group. I called them to find out what I could about this new stage in their kooky career. With a few sections of palaver deleted and some minor editing this the way the conversation mostly went.
Homer Flynn: Cryptic Corporation.
James Call: Yes, Homer Flynn?
HF: This is Homer.
JC: This is James Call from Hypno Magazine.
HF: Uh, hello James.
JC: You may have heard, I called a few months ago about some trouble I was having with the Residents video, Video Voodoo?
HF: Somebody was telling me about it. You were having some sort of trouble with your wife or something.
JC: Mother-in-law.
HF: Mother-in-law. Even worse.
JC: I had it sent to my son. She was upset by the Renaldo and the Loaf video.
HF: That would be the one.
JC: I had called to find out if anything like that had come up before.
HF: It has been mentioned once or twice, but never anything that strong.
JC: Yea, she wanted to send it to the FBI. I guess she actually did. Nothing ever came of it though.
HF: They haven't come here. Have you seen the Freak Show CD-ROM?
JC: Oh, Sure.
HF: I keep waiting to hear some sort of flak from that.
JC: Really? What would you expect flak on?
HF: The thing that's actually been commented on the most, and one of the things I would have found to be the tamest, was the phone sex in Herman The Human Mole's trailer. Its obviously suggestive, but certainly nothing explicit.
JC: Well, as a matter of fact I did put my three-year old on Freak Show and he had a wonderful time. Once I had shown him how to click around through the thing he remembered spots he liked and knew how to get back there. Have you heard about children's experiences with it?
HF: I have an almost three-year old myself. She'll be three next month.
JC: She plays with it?
HF: I haven't gotten her really navigating yet. She likes to sit on my lap and have me go around places. She loves Wanda. Wanda is absolutely her favorite. We'll go bring Wanda out, and have her, you know, suck worms a couple or three times. At that point she wants to go into Wanda's trailer.
JC: My son liked the Mole Man. He liked to wander around in there. As a matter of fact he'd spend quite a few minutes opening and closing those windows that are on the inside, you know where the faces jump out. He'd just laugh out loud. Um, why did you guys decide to do a CD-ROM?
HF: It offered possibilities of fulfilling the promise of the ideas more completely than strictly music, or music and the comic. It was a way to realizing the ideas in a more complete form.
JC: It seems to me to chronicle the Residents in a way that was entirely appropriate to the Residents and in a way nothing else could. Like a historical document.
HF: It certainly does do that. You mean like in the Residents trailer?
JC: Right, particularly there. How did the people thing come about? I picked up the graphic book about a year or two ago. Had the CD been advanced at that point?
HF: Yeah. It had been advanced at that point. It actually had been advanced to Voyager about...it will be three years in the summer. And the graphic novel was in production. The Residents have had many contacts with computer people. They started doing all the music on computer, I don't know, probably around 1988 or '89 is about the time that it started changing over. It really started accelerating at that point. And being here in the Bay Area so close to the nerve center of all that and with all the contacts that the people began pushing them in that direction without them really knowing what it really was about, but I think early on just had an intuitive sense that this was something that might work for them. And they realized that once the visual material from the comic book was there and the music was there, well you know, there's a good portion of something, let's see what could be done. I think the real missing piece that made it all come together was Jim Ludtke.
JC: Yeah, well that's my next question: who is Jim Ludtke? Where did he come from?
HF: It's kind of an interesting story. I had worked on a music video, the Don't be Cruel video which was all like desktop publishing stuff and was putting together this Residents kind of like compilation program to I Scream in New York in 1990, I think. And I was trying to figure out a way to piggyback the production of the video in on the production budget of I Scream. We needed somebody to help. The problem was how to get the computer graphics out of the computer and onto video tape. At the time it was a real problem. Somebody had met Jim and told us that he knew a little bit about this. I went over to his apartment, met him, and he was a great guy. He lived close to the video studio and so he packed up his computer and brought it over there and helped with the process of dumping the computer graphics into video. At that point we sort of made friends. When it came time to work on another video which was Harry the Head from the Freak Show album, Jim said he would love to be involved in any way possible. So things just sort of evolved out of that. At that time he was living in New York. Shortly after that video was done he moved from New York to San Francisco and that made a collaboration much more realistic.
JC: We were immediately impressed with the rendering of the CD-ROM of Freak Show. In fact the CD-ROMs I have seen before were some real basic kind of games, the encyclopedia one and so I wasn't at all prepared for the sophistication of Freak Show.
HF: Yea, Jim is great. I mean he's like, as far as I've been able to tell, when it comes to 3D modeling in animation, he's the guy on the Mac. There are people that do this kind of work on silicon graphics machines and much higher-end stuff, but there's nobody doing this kind of thing on the Mac. Did you see Wired a couple of months ago with Sonic the Hedgehog on the cover?
JC: Oh yeah, I did.
HF: That was Jim's. And it's all this incredible 3D model. All done on the Mac, modeled and then rendered out.
JC: That's wild. Of course, we're all Mac here and we've got some people that are blowing me away on graphics and animation. So I have an idea what you are saying about Jim. You know, it seems to me like an entirely new medium. As you click through and go into the tent you can go to the right or the left or forward or back. It's kind of like the same choices you would have going into any room. So it resonates to reality in a very strange way.
HF: I've sort of referred to this, and I've done a lot of demos, I just finished a week of PR in New York and I have sort of referred to this as pseudo virtual reality. Because if you are thinking of virtual reality as a form, its really all there. You don't have all the choices of virtual reality, looking in any direction, moving in any direction.
JC: But it feels that way. Right, you can't look in 360 degrees, but it feels like that.
HF: To me what you get, even though you've only got a small window to peer through, the feeling that you get is that there is a complete world on the other side. And to me that's really what the idea of virtual reality is all about.
To Be Continued...
See also
External links and references
- The Hypno interview at RZWeb (archived via archive.org)