An interview with Diamanda Galás
Diamanda Galás has long been one of my favorite musicians. While her music is difficult to categorize, it fits under the “experimental” umbrella somewhat, although this is a bit of an oversimplification. With her four-octave vocal range and unique approach to musicianship, Galás has utilized her platform to bring attention to numerous social and political issues throughout her career—including (but not limited to) the AIDS epidemic (Masque of the Red Death trilogy and Plague Mass), severe mental illness (Schrei X, 1996), and the Armenian, Anatolian Greek, and Assyrian genocide (Defixiones: Last Will and Testament, 2004).
With help from Galás’ PR team, I had attempted to schedule this interview in 2022, after she released the album Broken Gargoyles—a project that began as a sound installation at the Kapellen Leprosarium in Hanover, Germany. None of my pitches to various music news sites were accepted, so I decided to wait until her next album release to try again.
Unfortunately for me, the same thing occurred this time around. Given the state of the music journalism world—and online media in general—this development was not particularly surprising. I think Galás’ music and her point of view is important enough to be covered in depth, so I was beyond grateful that she took the time to talk to me earlier this month. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity in parts.
I wanted to ask: how the pandemic has been for you?
Well, for me, I don't know. This isn't a good thing, but I spend an inordinate amount of time-- practically all my time--alone. Because of this, there was no change. I've been living in San Diego, California. I came here when my mother got very, very ill, and then I just stayed here. I'd been moving back and forth between New York and San Diego for a long time, since both of them were ill, and so being in San Diego during the pandemic, I don't know.
It's been more of a literary home for me. A lot of writing, an extreme amount of writing, and I think. I spent some time writing essays concerning my total fear, my complete fear for people in nursing homes for the very old, 1/3 of whom expired during--much more than that, actually--but during the [pandemic]. I knew what was happening. It was just intuitive, that they were being moved out of nursing homes and put into shelters. And that people with COVID were being moved into the nursing homes and that people were dying. I just knew it, because when we've studied certain paradigms concerning illness and disease, we learn what the marks of them are, what the mark is, and what the results are.
And they're not different. They have their differences, but the similarities have to do with the stigma, and old people have the worst stigma of all. I am absolutely appalled that, whilst all of these people had been complaining about their own issues, people have not been standing up for the old, many of whom cannot speak for themselves, because they're too weak. It's just disgusting. It's like, "Hey, man. Don't you realize that only in 20 years, that'll be you? Don't you have any--can't you think beyond your kitchen? What the fuck is wrong with you?"
That bothers me a lot, because every time that there's an epidemic of any kind, the weakest people go under the wheels immediately, the fastest, and so we've seen this throughout every epidemic. We've seen this, and within many different categories that persons we'll refer to as levels of “infirmity,” there's always a preconceived notion of what a person cannot, should not, and will never be able to do. And so, one has to determine that for oneself always, because otherwise, there's somebody waiting right outside your door, ready to put you somewhere. You know what I mean?
Yes.
I'm obviously not talking to someone that doesn't know what I mean, but it's just the limitations. For example, remember the mandatory retirement age was 65, I believe, years ago, and now, a person can be older. But still, there's an understanding that is spread in many different age groups, and particularly, among the very young, that it's alright to insult people who are considered diseased. And there always must be a group of people who are considered diseased persons. And now, that person, those people, are the old.
You had the AIDS stigma. Now, it goes around, it comes around to different diseases. And then, now, it's the old, because we have to have a scapegoat. I've observed this in many instances in which someone will be talking to me and say, "Yeah, but that person is...the person is too old to do this and to..." And I'll say, "Too old to do what? Will you write me a list? Too old to do what?"
I have an example. My father was in his 90s, and he was diagnosed with dementia. I went over to him, and I read a poem by […] Constantine Cavafy, because I wasn't sure whether he would understand it. And it was a poem about homosexuality, so it was a poem about Cavafy's fear when he's walking down the street with his lover that people will know that they're lovers. So, I read it to him, thinking that my father wouldn't probably know any more. And he turned around. He [had been] sleeping on the couch for many hours at this point. He turned around, and he gave me this look. He says, "Tell me, are you a member of one of those clubs?"
I laughed so hard. I said [to myself], "How stupid are you?"
[Laughs] Whoa.
"You just showed your father what a moron you are."
Wow.
Right? And there I said, I was so happy. I was so, so happy, because this was his first language. And I took him, we went over to the kitchen table. I said, "Would you read this other poem for me?" And he just continued to read a series of poems and explain them to me. I said, "So, it's because he didn't remember the last five fucking presidents. Isn't that so?" American presidents. You know what? I don't think I even remember the exact order of the last five presidents. I have to think about it.
It's just, maybe I don't give a fuck. Maybe I think that the president himself or herself is not actually implementing anything in the government in the first place. And the committee behind this person...and this is the model for the person with the presidential face, so to speak, that was voted for. You know what I mean? This sort of numbers game, "draw the clock" and all that shit, it's like, "Really? Well, we have an analog clock and we have a digital clock. Which one do you prefer?" That kind of thing, I got caught out myself with that one. And then I wrote the woman a letter. I said, "That test is wrong, because people conflate the two now. You have to ask a more neutral question." I got really angry at her for this.
But anyway, what I'm saying is that […] my father can't remember one or two things that he considers unimportant to himself, but he can translate ancient Greek. He can read Cavafy's Greek, which is a different Greek than the Greek that is written now. And still, you know what I mean? He can do that, but oh, but he's got dementia. I said, "You know what I think we must do? We must write down, again, a list. What is it that he can do? What is it that he can't do? Because that person is still a teacher of Greek philosophy, English literature, Greek literature, all these things. And you're telling me he can no longer think?"
Right.
That is like taking a knife and putting it into someone's skull and heart. It says, "You are useless. You can no longer think for yourself." So, why would a person survive? Why would a person want to live in that capacity? I think of all the grinning faces during the COVID epidemics, of older women with the same hairdos, sitting on the lawn in front of the nursing homes, and I shriek. I shriek. So, anyway. That's the end of that. It actually makes me really unhappy talking about it.
I'm sorry.
No, no, no, no. Don't be sorry. Don't be sorry. Usually, I'm not so unhappy talking about it. Usually, by this, I mean I can separate myself from my emotions in this, but for some reason today, I have trouble doing that. Which is strange, but we all change our point of view, I mean, perspective when we're discussing things. Sometimes, it feels closer. Sometimes, it feels distant, more distant, you know what I mean?
Yes.
I'm ready for your next question.
Alright. One of the aspects that I've really been impressed about with your live performances is the breadth of songs that you've covered during some of your shows, among them blues classics, folk songs from around the world, and then more popular musicians, like Frank Sinatra and The Supremes, and I was wondering—
God, I love the Supremes. The Beatles came to this country and destroyed rock 'n' roll, okay? That's my feeling. A lot of people love the Beatles. Whatever, but the music of the Supremes...I mean, those were real, those were chord changes. Those were sophisticated chord changes that came from Eastern Europe, and all the pop songs Frank Sinatra sang and the Supremes, all those songs were written, they come from the Eastern European traditions of Chopin and Liszt and all these composers, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin. And they often are credited to the singer who sings the songs—like, Diana Ross didn't write these songs, okay?
But what's really bothersome to me is that people will say these things like, "You know, she's done a lot of blues records." And I'll say, "What?" About this record, I even heard, "Oh, this is a blues record." And I'll say, "What are you fucking talking about? There isn't one goddamn blues on this record. Blues means 1-4-5. 1-4-5. It does not mean anything less than or more than 1-4-5. Would you stop already, you moron?" I'm thinking, "There's two rebetiko songs here. There's one ranchera. And really, is there something wrong with your hearing?"[…]
I was wondering if you could just talk a little bit about how you select the songs that you cover, and what the composing and arranging process is like?
Okay. What happens is, I'll hear a song, and as soon as I hear the song, it has to hit me really hard. And then, if it does, then I feel the necessity to do it. Then, what usually happens is I'll listen to it, and I'll just sit at the piano and play the changes, because I learn by ear. That's what I do.
That's the first thing, and then, I'll look at the words. Now, if the words are incredibly dumb, then I can't do the song. I just can't. I won't do it. But oftentimes, the words are really good in these songs. In these songs that have really sophisticated chord changes, oftentimes, they're very good. And so then, I will basically do my own. I'll take the chords, and I'll voice them, and I'll add...when you say C7, I may make it into a C7 plus nine, which means I go to the ninth note of the scale. It'll be a D sharp, let's say, if it's a D. If it's a C7 plus nine, it'll be C, E, G, B flat, D flat or C sharp. But I won't necessarily include all of those notes, because my voicing may be just three out of the four notes, or even two out of the four notes.
That's one discussion of voicing, but then you have the left hand to consider. [My] left hand or the voicings come from playing with my father a lot, who was a bass player and a trombone player, so I learned that the left hand is really the bottom of the band, and it's the most important part. I think the left hand is more important than the right hand. The way I play it is. It comes from more the school of Fats Waller, then Errol Garner and that style of piano playing, those styles where they're playing the bass. They're always playing the bass.
I have very big hands. I don't know why I'm saying that. A lot of Greek women say, "I have very big hands, you know?" Because they pick olives in the garden all the time in Greece. "Good for slapping you too, you know?" And then there's some very soft, beautiful hands, but they're really enormous. Anyway, that's the beginning of it. And then, you have the verse and you have the chorus, and so you may decide to put an intermezzo in [...] some people do middle eights, whatever it is that you also hear.
Something that you might want to put at some part of the song, so that you can improvise another melody that's related to the song. Again, the voicing is really important, and the more I learn a song, the more complex the voicings become. Sometimes, the songs become more simple in a sense. Okay, by this, I mean, when I say more complex, I mean I might just decide to do the root note. Let's say it's a C7 plus nine. I might just do the C and the plus nine, just play those two notes and only those two notes. Though the voicings change all the time, and the more you play the song, the more free you get […] mentally. You get to make decisions.
That's one of the dreams of playing pop songs or standards with sophisticated chord changes. Now, if we were to talk about a lot of songs that are called pop songs today, I would not feel the same way, because a lot of pop songs today are really kind of stupid. They're stupid. They're elementary in the sense that they don't take advantage of what chord changes mean, and what chord changes mean is a transition from one mood to another. […] A chord progression is spelling out an emotion that's associated with the lead story of the song.
And without chord changes, people are intentionally saying, "We're going to just […] suspend the emotions. We're just going to deal with one emotion." Say it's a love song. Since when does a person have only one emotion during a love affair, right? It's part of the vocabulary a musician has, whether a person's saying, "Okay, I'm a rap singer." "Well, okay then. Well, why don't you bring some chord changes to the song?" "Well, I don't know chord changes." And I say, "Well, if you don't know chord changes, then fuck off."
I know that's nothing to talk to you about, because I'm really interested in a master's [...] a person who's a master of his craft. A master's vocabulary in arranging a song. I'm not interested in amateurs. […] For example, if you have a compendium of words to choose from when writing an essay, why would you choose to only use 200 words when you have access to 5,000, let's say? Let's say, they'll say to you, "You may not use more than 5,000 different words."
I've been met with some really obscene requests this year as far as writing, unbelievable. Un-fucking-believable. Why would you choose to do that? Okay, now, if it's a condition of a composition that a person will say, "This is your vocabulary," a person might make that request of another composer to see how clever that person can do in exhausting the permutations of 200 words. Or saying, "Okay, you can only use these sounds," like the French concrete composer Pierre Henry said he did a piece for a door and a sigh.
In fact, all he had at his disposal was the sound of a sigh, the sound of a door closing, opening, whatever sounds can be made from that operation. Then, he had to do tape manipulation of those sounds, and he came up with something was so astonishing that I had to think a lot about what I thought I was doing as a singer. […] This was many years ago. I said [to myself], "You're doing nothing as a singer. Look what he did with just a sigh and the sound of a door closing and opening. You're doing shit. Who cares whether it's done by the human voice or not? This man has given you a gigantic repertory of sounds, and you think that it matters that you do it with the voice? It doesn't matter at all."
What matters is, of course, the technique, but the mind behind the technique. A lot of composers will do that intentionally, and a lot of writers will do that. Let's say that you want, in an essay, to intentionally repeat certain words, let's say. You want to, but that is your choice as opposed to your limitation, right? And this is the problem I have with a lot of writers in the music business that are not writers. They're not writers. They're not musicians. They haven't studied music, or they've studied one music, which this is impossible, because if you have an ear, you're never going to want to choose one music alone. That doesn't make sense. […]
Now, when you say "one music," you mean just one genre or one type?
Yeah, one genre, let's say. I find that impossible, because if you've studied one genre, then you're going to immediately hear parallels with music from another quote genre unquote. You would have to be an autodidact. I don't know if that's...that's not the word. Maybe it is the word. I don't know. You would really have to be important, and what the word is on paper... "No, I will never do this kind of music. Okay, well, because this song falls under that title, I refuse to be interested in it." I don't see how a musician can do that. I don't know how. I don't get it. I don't get it.
And I don't think any great musicians would ever, have ever been interested in that. You know, ever. Ray Charles used to say, "Why wouldn't I sing country music? I sing soul. I sing R&B. I sing everything." And sure enough, he did. And he wasn't doing it to prove a point. He wasn't doing it to prove a point. He was doing it, because that's what he heard. He didn't make anything of it. He just made something out of the fact that people said he should not do country, because it was somebody else's music. He just said, "No, I heard that. Therefore, I'm playing it." That's it.
But...shit. I forgot where I was at.
Oh, that's okay.
I completely forgot. Yes, I was at the Beatles. The Beatles came here, to America, and they simplified the chord changes. They used a higher level of production, yeah, sure enough. But the thing is, is that what we have, in a lot of the songs where you had the changes are Eastern European, but the singing used a lot of glissandos and a lot of scales that are not notated scales, but coming out of blues traditions or other vocal traditions that people like the Beatles didn't know shit about.
And so, their singing comes off to me as very digital rather than analog, in the sense they don't sing the notes between the scales, the notes between the pentatonic scale. There's lots of notes, if you're singing soul music, that you've got to be able to hear, that are not notated. And so, they made this very elementary music, for me especially, because I was raised playing in my father's dance band, and I had to play 400 standards a night with no notation, no note paper, nothing.
Wow.
Yeah. My father said, "That's a musician's job. I'm not bringing you a fake book." Sometimes, I'd use a fake book, but very rarely. A fake book is a bunch of songs in one book that have very elementary notation, words, and that's it. The elementary notation for the song, the chord changes, and they have the words. One day, he didn't bring the fake book, he says, "You don't need it anymore. Use your ears." And he said, "Anyway, when a drunk comes up to the piano and insists on singing the same song in four keys, because she's drunk, you might as well throw the fake book away. You've got to use your ears."
I love that story, because it's absolutely true. And that'll train you. That'll train your ears. And then, anyway, coming from an experience like that to suddenly having to appreciate something that seemed very remote like the Beatles, I just could never get it. After you've been to the Supremes, why go to the Beatles? Why would you want to? Yeah, I just don't get it. I don't get it.
Yeah. Personally, I am Beatles neutral. I know they're very influential, but I'm just like, there's [music] I'd rather listen to. […] So, if people want to be fans, that's fine. It's just not my thing.
Yeah, there it is. […] What I always associated it with is an obscene and inordinate and not understandable level of optimism of happiness. With every little note: bounce, bounce, bounce. "Yeah, you bounce into the fucking street. I'll tell you when the car's not coming." That's how I feel. There's an expression I've used a lot, which is, "No, I don't open the door first thing in the fucking morning.” Why would I? [I’d] have to see the fucking happy faces across the street, clapping. As soon as I see that, I want to mow them down, bam. That's not part of my existence. Get out.
It's just the way it is. Some people like to do that, and I'm not saying I don't like to laugh. I love to laugh, but I don't…there's laughter, and then there's just...I don't know. You can tell the difference when you hear it. There's a laugh, there's a giggle, there's a something. There's different characters, you know? I admit that's brutal. That's very brutal. That's very unfair, but so is life. Such is life.
I have days like that too, where I'm like, "Why is everybody so happy?"
[…] It's just brutal. It's brutal. It's brutal. Well, anyway. I'm ready for your next question.
Alright. I was wondering if you have any songs that you attempted to cover that didn't quite work out as you expected.
Ha. Probably several. Probably several, and let's just think. […]
Oh, one thing I wanted to say is, I've done two songs, they're both called "The Thrill Is Gone." Now, many critics, and I empathize, because I guess they don't hear the difference in the chord changes, although I don't understand that, but nonetheless, I won't be too cruel. They feel that I've done two interpretations of the same song, but they actually—-one song was written by B.B. King. The other was covered by Chet Baker. I don't know who it was written by, and they are completely different. The character of the songs is completely different. The songs, one is talking about the end of a love affair, and the other one is still in the love affair, but kind of vacillating.
One is [singing] "The thrill is gone, the thrill is gone away." That's the B.B. King one. The other one is [singing] "The thrill is gone, the thrill is gone." Okay, those don't sound alike, you know what I mean? I'm like, "What the fuck is wrong with you guys? Don't you even hear the changes are different. The melody's different. The words are different." I'm like, "Wow. Maybe you didn't even listen to the song, right? You just saw the title and that was it?" But I hate being insulting, because some of my favorite writers have, for some reason, made that mistake, and I don't want them to feel that I'm laughing at them. I'm just kind of shocked. But that was just a point I wanted to make, because no, I didn't cover the same song for years.
But the other songs, oh, well, because of my father, I think "Stella by Starlight" is an old song that I would want to do for him. And another song I'd want to do for him would be--there are love songs that he used to sing to my mother. Especially if he had [an outburst]. He had a bad, bad temper when they fought, and he wanted her to forgive him, which would take her a while, but [he would sing] "All The Things You Are." Oh my God, my God. […] He had a wonderful voice, and he had the vocabulary of a Greek tragic actor. Those Casanovas, they generally do. But he wasn't a player. He didn't play around, but he just had one of those personalities, those Greek personalities, kind of like our favorite Greek, who was actually an Irish-Mexican, Mexican-Irishman, Anthony Quinn. He got all the Greek roles, [with] that personality.
It's very interesting, because Greeks never get Greek roles. I mean, we never never get to play... They wouldn't consider using, Hollywood wouldn't consider using a Greek actress for the part of Maria Callas. Forget about it. And Sparta…500?
300?
Yeah, 300. I don't remember, because it might as well be the Indy 500 to me. Plus, they were all English actors, you know? We never get to play Greeks, ever. I heard a reason the other day. You will be bewildered, but, "Yeah, in order to get a Greek actor, you have to go all the way to Greece."
Okaaaay.
What the fuck? And this was written by a Greek, a Greek-American, you fucking stupid fucking people. Really, you have to go all the way to Greece to get a Greek actor. "Oh, I see. I had no idea. Really?" And even if that were the case, what would be wrong with that? I mean, how many English actors have we brought over here [since] the beginning of time? "Oh, I see. Maybe it's 100 drachmas more." I'm joking. "100 drachmas more to get a Greek." But then, you don't have to pay them anything. Because he's a Greek, he's not going to expect what an Englishman will expect. It's truly incredible. It's incredible.
I mean, you have this role of Maria Callas, one of our greatest Greeks. But no, no. She's not good enough. We're not good enough to have one of our countrymen play her. And really, that's such an insult. It's an insult, and it happens over and over again. And I guess it brings me into the subject of why I did this song "O Prosfigas," and it really is the refugee. And it has a lot to do with the fact that people have forgotten that Greeks themselves were the refugees from the olokaftoma, which is the genocide of the Greeks, the Armenians, the Assyrians, the Yazidis, the Azeris. You will know this.
But it is forgotten that 70% of Greeks in Greece are part-Anatolian, which means...I don't use the word "Turkey," because that's a made-up name by the Turks, but they're from Byzantium, from Asia Minor. They're Middle-Easterners. And so, they talk about the Greeks, the European Union and Turkey talk about the Greeks, and they say, "They're being irresponsible to the immigrants." And I'm thinking, "What are you talking about? You are not giving the Greeks the money they need to do this." The old people on those islands, they don't even have enough money to help the immigrants. And there's no way that they can accommodate that many people.
If you have 1,500 people coming to Samos every day, how the hell are the Greek citizens […] supposed to manage that? They don't have the money that Turkey has, although Turkey is not doing too well financially. But there's a situation that Americans don't know about. They don't know that the European Union have been paying Turkey to take the Syrians, for one thing, and put them way far outside of the country, put them near the end borders of the country, very far from Istanbul, very far from people who can implement the paperwork that a person in asylum needs to be able to go into Europe.
They're put away intentionally, because Europeans don't want Syrians. They don't want Afghanis. They don't want the immigrants anymore on their shores. They haven't wanted them for years. They never wanted them, and now, they're paying Turkey to hold them, put them in camps. And Turkey says, "Yeah, for this amount of money." They have a deal going on, and what they've done is they've used the press. [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan controls 95% of the press in Turkey. And then, of course, the Europeans again are doing this kind of immigrant deal with them. They're going to print whatever Erdogan says.
His claims are that the Greeks are responsible for the problems with the immigrants, and he is himself putting these people in asylums, in insane asylums. He's putting them in prisons. He's putting them in buildings that have nothing. They have no toilets. They have nothing. And he hates the Syrians. [He’s] the worst kind of a racist. If you are not Turkish, he does not recognize you. The word "gabur," which was a word used by the Turks for "infidel", is now used by him to describe persons of the same religion. […] He's calling Syrians "gaburs." What people don't understand is, they have the simple idea that there is Islam. They don't understand that that's a gigantic discussion. They don't understand that.
And the Greeks know it, because we have no population left in what is called Turkey. We have no population. They were mutilated. The genocide preceded that by 17 years of the Holocaust, which was named that after the Holokaftoma, means "burning of a whole," "burning of a race." But now, if you go online, you will not see the Holokaftoma anymore. It will only be used as a translation for the Holocaust. Our Holokaftoma disappeared a month ago from Google, from all those places that people go online. Bing, whatever, Yahoo. It doesn't exist anymore.
This is Turkish. This is a Turkish media thing. They are cleaning it up. They took the Hagia Sophia, and now it's Muslim. It's Islam. It's not the highest cathedral for Eastern Orthodoxy. No, there's prayer rugs in front of it. […] Nobody protests what has happened to Orthodoxy. Or nobody protests all the genocide that deals with the Greek Orthodoxy, with the Armenian Orthodoxy. But if there's any, any genocide of any group within the province of Islam, people are out on the streets screaming. I would like to know why that is.
And I would like to know why it is that, when I did Defixiones, about all our genocides, in 2004, why there were very few [reviewers] reporting about that. When I did the performance, there were only complaints. In Melbourne, […] the writer did not go to the performance […] and he complained about why “we should be subsidizing, in Australia, the performance of foreigners.” And I thought, "Foreigners. Okay, foreigners? Really? You are in Melbourne. Melbourne is like a Greek capital." There's a gigantic amount of Greeks in Melbourne, who loved the performance, who were very supportive of the performance, and he was complaining that I didn't do Hadjidakis. He was complaining that I didn't do Georges Aperghis. He was complaining [that] I didn't do them "in English instead of Greek. Because these are great Greek writers. We should be able to understand them."
I said, "Then pick up the fucking program book, and you'll see the English right next to the Greek."
I actually saw your Defixiones show when you came to San Francisco [in 2006], and I still have the program.
You know, our electronics broke down on stage. It was horrible. The first night, all of the interfaces, something happened, and it was, for us, a nightmare. The second night, it was perfect, but the first night! But, worse than that, a writer wrote--I use seven to eight languages[…] I spent years learning to speak those languages, let alone sing them. The guy wrote, "How can we trust if she is speaking these languages?" And I thought, "Are you out of your mind? Do you think I would go up on the stage--when I'm dealing with the genocides of these peoples--uneducated?"
I mean, that was the most difficult part of the entire performance, is to go up and sing in Armenian. That was huge for me. It took a gigantic amount of work, and I was celebrated by the Armenian community. But, for someone to write that, I could've sued him. I don't have the money or the time for that, but I was very, very, very shocked. I was very hurt by that. It's because people didn't take the time. "Oh, really? You're going to go to Tosca, and you're going to complain because it's sung in Italian. And because you don't understand Italian, you're going to say, 'Well, did the singer even sing Italian'?"
Right, or complain about supertitles. "How can we trust that it's being translated?" It's like, "Well, it's right there."
Well, I don't use supertitles. Everyone was saying, "You should use supertitles." I said, "Fuck supertitles. I'm not going to use it. You have your goddamn program notebook." Because the Greek tragic theater came to New York. I'm telling you, the National Theater of Greece, they [came] and they did Medea. They got bad reviews in the papers for doing it in Greek.
Okay! Wow.
Yeah, I know, and they had supertitles, and they had a channel you could turn to hear it in English instead of Greek. Yet, they complained. I said, "I see you don't recognize that the language of the Greek theater is what the meaning of each sentence is? You don't recognize that no translation will ever be able to recreate the meaning of the original Greek. You think that Euripides can ever be done in English. Do you really think so?" It cannot be.
I've seen Zoe Caldwell. I've seen actors try it. It stinks. It stinks, you know? It's not Greek. It's just not Greek. That's it. How many people complain that Spanish, that when you do rancheras here, that they do it in Spanish? I haven't heard anyone complain about that, and that's because they know they're dealing with a powerful percentage of Spanish speakers in this country. But with Greece, they assault us all the time. I went to London, and I did the performance there, and I got crucified for doing the performance using all of the languages. I got crucified for using the languages of the populations that had been executed. This is, you know, I really have to apologize to you, because I'm angry, but I'm not angry at you.
I completely understand.
Do you understand how happy [I am] that I get to talk to you, because I get to talk to such an intelligent person?
Thank you so much […] I'm going to skip a couple questions here, and the question that I really have been wanting to ask you is, I know that your work is pretty intense, and I'm just wondering how, when you're not on the clock, so to speak, how you separate from that? Or take time to relax?
You would be shocked. I hope you're ready to be shocked. I, like so many other people in the world, watch forensic programs. I really do. I think I like some of them, only some of them, the way I like reading Sherlock Holmes. I like mysteries. I also like the research, because I had studied biochemistry a while ago. I like forensic research. I find it fascinating. I think I will have to cop to that, and I'm really sorry to all of those who were thinking otherwise. But the truth is that, unfortunately, I do so much research all day that, after a while, my mind, my eyes are tired. I'm just exhausted. Do you know what I mean?
Yeah, I do.
I would have to say that. And I have to say that I enjoy that escape very deeply. Nobody better take it away from me.
Yeah.
I have to say that I consider it a great pleasure to talk to you, and I hope one day we'll do this again.
Yeah, likewise. As I said, I've admired your work for a really long time, and it was really great to talk to you and hear about your career, and also some of the music theory stuff that I'm not [fluent in]. I tried to learn guitar once upon a time, and it didn't quite take.
Yeah, but you can do it. You can still do it, even if it didn't take at first, because you'll remember those things.
Yeah, I might pick it up again some day. I don't know.
And you might learn the piano or something, because the one thing I regret is that I had taken up guitar, and I didn't continue. I regret that. I regret that. I mean, life is not over, but still. I think, always give those things another shot, because give something a shot that resounds in a different part of your brain or that gives you more resonance in your skull. The more things we have access to, the richer we are.
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