Untitled #3

by Grace Jones

  20.

  Bare

  As I finish off this book, as far as it goes, I am also finishing off a film that I have been making for a few years with the director Sophie Fiennes. She made a film, Hoover Street Revival, about my brother Bishop Noel and his ministry at the City of Refuge Church in Los Angeles, making a connection between the idea of the church and what theater must once have been like, the pure performance at the heart of both. She treats Noel as an artist as well as a priest, sampling his sermons, speeches, and the uplifting sound of a gospel choir, and watching how he inspires a troubled black community through sheer force of will. It’s amazing to watch how Noel transforms the idea of God, and the word of God, after how he was brought up, making it something that can do good, whatever the circumstances. Chris Blackwell saw him deliver a sermon once and said he was the greatest performer he had ever seen.

  Sophie also made two films with the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, The Pervert’s Guide to the Cinema and The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, which will blow your mind if you love film, dreams, fantasy, and reaching out to the edge of thinking. I think the film we have been making together will completely contradict this book, or confirm it, or complement it, or all three—it will be about one of the Grace Joneses in this book, or some of them, or none of them.

  I am also finishing a short film with Chris Cunningham, who directed mesmerizing videos for Autechre, Aphex Twin, Björk, and Madonna. This will be astonishing, if we do finish it, and in that sense working with him is like working with Trevor Horn and Jean-Paul Goude. The project could go on forever—there is perhaps no limit to a piece that is about there being no limit, to thought, to art, to dreams. I feel he could modify and manipulate me forever, looking for some impossible sweet spot, or some obscene end point, just like I think Jean-Paul could. They are both chasing the definitively unfinished, and in a way keeping what they do secret. I share that sense of delaying the end of something, of working on something over years and avoiding having to complete it. If someone asks me what scares me, I will reply: Finishing. If you are reading this, then I did finish this book. Or at least, I pretended to. Ultimately, you never really want to be finished.

  The film with Chris is based on a fashion shoot, what I called an anti-fashion shoot, which we did for Dazed and Confused magazine. If those glossy Scavullo Cosmo covers in the 1970s of split, doomed Gia and shiny, happy Christie Brinkley symbolized the world of fashion that pretends everything is fine, these photographs dig into the pressure and violence of the truth. They represent how I survived the superficial and often sick modeling world because I was interested in photography and image as a method of telling stories about my relationship with reality, in analyzing the shady processes of a devious world. I was never interested in selling myself, but in discovering myself, and how I am always on the move whether anyone knows or not.

  These photographs were themselves based on a truly revealing short film Chris had made called Rubber Johnny about a hyperactive, shape-shifting, mutant child. Ugliness bends around to beauty and back again. A book he compiled to accompany a DVD release of that film was rejected by the Italian printers, who said that they flatly refused to print it on moral grounds. They said they didn’t want their workers to catch even a glimpse of some of the images. Such a reaction makes me very optimistic about the future of art and film.

  In these photos, I become the stripped-bare, shape-shifting freak of nature somewhere between a speck of dust and a landscape. They are bleak, wounded nude photos in the tradition of Francis Bacon, some of them showing me pressed against glass, capturing yet another sticky, shape-shifting birth. The series is Helmut Newton from hell. It shows how photography, and image, and the telling of a story, even in fashion and entertainment, can still move on and don’t need to recycle other styles and fashions. Chris does not fake or glamorize the depraved, but he does celebrate it. I love how Chris doesn’t copy what I once did but refers to it, and explores where the story, where my mind, has moved since my first images and performances. His photos of me represent volatile continuity, not dreary, nostalgic sentimentality. He’s investigating how, through my body and mind, I try to make sense of the material and spiritual world around me.

  The film and photos are about power, in the way the Jean-Paul pictures were. They’re photographs that are at the service of the mind. They are about how the body speaks a completely different language, a continuation of the Haring body paint. They’re about how I know more than words can express. I might meet the Queen, scream for the tennis players, and charm the pants off today’s chat show hosts, but I don’t let go of the dark, of the skin of me, the ageless age of me, the riotous comedy of me. All the things that have always interested me in terms of inventing who I am, making myself up from scratch and always adding to that invention. Chris is a black comedian like me, really: He giggles a lot; he has fun with his work however disturbing it gets, and the best comedians go to the darkest places because they thrive on breaking taboos. (One thing I often think I should try that I haven’t yet is some stand-up comedy. I’ll bring my whip in case no one laughs.)

  Also, as I finish this book, I am recording a new album with Ivor Guest. We split up during the recording of “Hurricane,” but there was enough creative momentum and togetherness for us to complete it. We remained close friends, but I don’t think we thought that we’d make another album together. Then one day at about the same time we both had the same idea. Africa. The rhythms of Senegal, Congo, Mali, Nigeria mixed up with my life. It was too good an idea to resist. The disco trilogy was followed by the Compass Point trilogy; and then Slave to the Rhythm, with Trevor Horn, which was out on its own, was followed by two albums on Capitol Records that never became the third trilogy. The album I am making now is perhaps the second in a trilogy that started with the Hurricane album. The last one in this trilogy might be my final album, or I might not make another album and there will be another aborted trilogy, another empty space. Perhaps I’ll just stay at home, somewhere, keeping myself to myself, bloody-minded, opening up the next bottle of wine, aiming for the stars. Or I might simply end up singing my favorite arias as a way of studying and celebrating beauty, and analyzing the death of beauty, and how all things slip like sand through our fingers. I will release them one by one, because I’ve got all the time in the world, until I reach some sort of planet-shaking climax, a final act, a whirling octopus mix of acid trip, tidal orgasm, and the ultimate feeling of being free.

  * * *

  I still talk to Chris Blackwell about my music, as I have done for thirty-five years. We sit on the veranda of his house high in the Jamaican hills, which is so secluded it makes Noël Coward’s Firefly seem as accessible as a country pub. We sit under a dusting of stars, taking it slow at the end of a perfect day, on the brink of the unknown. Far away from crowds, schedules, and clocks. The flickering candles will soon be snuffed out. The amazed crickets grow in volume; breezes sweep over the high trees that surround us in the dark, still looking like the looming dinosaurs I used to imagine when I was young. I have to say goodbye in a short while, but there’s always something else to talk about.

  We both have strong ideas. He is of the persuasion that I play my next shows by mostly concentrating on my old songs. He doesn’t think I should play the new songs I am recording. Maybe one song, not the whole album. I want to go on tour and play the whole record, because for me, it is always about what I am doing, not what I have done. I still sing those songs, my favorites, for my fans, and they are a big part of my show. I now go out to play shows not to dwell on my past but to put it in a new context, because of the songs I am doing now, and who I am now. The past should not stay fixed, but should itself move with the times. I do believe you can change the past, and that is one way to change things now.

  Chris thinks the audience doesn’t care about any new album. Being stubborn, I am determined to prove him wrong. I want another chance to not let him down. I want to be the student who, having learned from the mas
ter, now turns around and shows him a new path.

  My attitude is: I’ll give you some of what you want to hear, because I love that as well. But I am not going to ignore my new album, even if I have to play a three-hour show. I am not going to keep repeating myself without introducing where I have moved to now, visually and musically, which will connect with where I have been, and with where I am going. There are still missing pieces of this jigsaw puzzle to find. I’m still planning my next assault.

  I refuse to believe that people only want to hear my old songs. They want a show, and I will give them one, like I always have. I am going to go out onstage naked except for some Haring-inspired body paint and a grass stalk, like a member of the Igbo tribe, a loner following her own pattern of thought and feeling straddling many ancient cultures and multiple assimilations. There will be a tree onstage, looking like an octopus, with long, thin, brown tentacles bare of leaves hanging down from a twisted root. Surrounding the stage, stars, as though we are spinning through space.

  I’ve never been one to chase hit singles, to do the bleeding, boring obvious. In the end, it is how I perform it. It is all about the theater. The theater is where I belong, across whatever stages, whatever screens, whatever spaces, pages, and sites, always taking revenge on reality, and I will do it in such a way that I will make Chris Blackwell eat his words. He taught me to stand up for myself. Well, that’s what I am doing.

  I will get Issey Miyake to design something for me that is Igbo-Japanese-Jamaican. Future-tribal, pitting opposite sensibilities against each other. Beautiful painted bare bodies and straw and dust and the drama of drum to ward off danger, summoning my ancestors, creating links with the wisdom of the world, and taking the old music with me into this new vision. There will be no place for the hoola hoop in my depiction of Africa. The hula hoop will be put aside.

  When I am onstage, I am not hiding behind a band, behind a lazy medley of obvious greatest hits. I am doing what I have always done. I have to have total confidence to do what I do onstage, because I am standing there on my own. I am not sharing it with a stage full of other characters, with repetitive magic tricks. I am performing alone. That’s where I thrive. No distractions. Me. Focused. On me. Perfecting my ideas. There is no other energy flowing around me from other places so that I can simply wave my hands in the air and get everyone to sing along with me like we are at a kiddie party. I am performing, with my deep simplicity, and from that simplicity comes the power. It all comes from me and out of me.

  I don’t scatter myself. My image is scattered but I am not. I grew up using my imagination to make reality work for me. In order to make a connection with reality, I made up a world where I could live. I fought to generate self-confidence. I worked hard to feel safe. That’s what I do now. I stand out, because that’s what I had to do when I was young, to make sure that I existed.

  In films that has been a problem. They won’t cast me to be part of a group, because I stand out too much. I can’t be part of an ensemble cast, because I stand out too much. Why didn’t I get that part in that film? It was only a small part! They say, You stand out too much. I really do try sometimes to blend in, but it doesn’t bloody work. I stand out too much. I don’t fit in.

  That’s okay. I’m not like anyone else. It’s too late to change.

  I think of myself as someone who is always adding to what they do, as part of a never-ending story, and the latest chapter is as valid as anything else. I am always becoming something. I am always turning into something else. That’s how I started, and that’s how I want it to be now. Otherwise, it’s like I have given up on the energy that made me what people wanted to see and hear, that I now simply live off what I was, not what I am. I planted a seed, and I watched it grow.

  If people complain that I am not doing enough of my old material, not performing all the hits, I will stand in front of them, a formlessness that engulfs all form. I will put on another hat, crack my whip, scatter fireflies, fix them with a five-thousand-year-old stare, fit to fight to the bitter end, becoming a ghost with the passing of time. I will be ready for the afterlife, for my bones to be buried in the mountains of Jamaica, or the canals of Venice, or the dark side of the moon, or under the ground in the cities I’ve lived in and loved. And I will say: Do you want to move forward with me, or not? Do you want to know where I am going next?

  It’s time for something else to happen.

  After

  GRACE JONES

  RIDER—PLEASE READ CAREFULLY!

  THIS RIDER IS HEREBY MADE PART OF THE ACCOMPANYING PERFORMANCE AGREEMENT FOR GRACE JONES. PURCHASER AGREES TO MEET THE FOLLOWING REQUIREMENTS AT PURCHASER’S SOLE EXPENSE.

  1. All contractual commitments supersede this agreement and the ARTIST has the right to cancel or move a performance up to 7 days prior to event to fulfil these commitments.

  2. SECURITY—PURCHASER agrees to provide adequate security to ensure the safety of all performing ARTISTS, auxiliary personnel, instruments, equipment, costumes, and personal belongings, before, during and after the performance. Security personnel shall keep the stage free of any persons other than those directly involved with the performance. Security personnel shall be stationed outside dressing rooms from ARTIST arrival at venue, continuously through ARTIST’S departure and especially when ARTIST is on stage. A member of the security staff will be provided to meet and escort ARTIST upon arrival and lead ARTIST into the venue and dressing room. Under no circumstance will ARTIST be led through the public prior to the show.

  3. DRESSING ROOMS—PURCHASER agrees to provide dressing rooms: including one (1) large dressing room for the sole use of ARTIST. The keys are to be given to Artist’s Road Manager upon the time of arrival at venue. No person other than ARTIST and Artist’s entourage shall have access to the dressing room without the prior permission of Artist’s Road Manager. If possible, dressing room should be located in No Smoking area of venue. Dressing room will be comfortable and clean with heating or air-conditioning as appropriate to climate and will be furnished with comfortable chairs and couches, table, lined trash can. Dressing room will be located within easy access of hot and cold running water and private toilet (not public restroom).

  GRACE’s dressing rooms shall be equipped with:

  Dressing Room 1:

  6 Bottles of Louis Roederer Cristal Champagne

  3 Bottles of French Vintage red wine (e.g. St Emilion, Medoc, Bordeaux)

  3 Bottles of French Vintage white wine (e.g. Sancerre, Pouilly Fuisse)

  2 Dozen Findeclare or Colchester Oysters on ice (unopened)—(Grace does her own shucking.)

  2 Sashimi and Sushi platters for 8 people

  6 Fresh lemons

  1 Bottle of Tabasco sauce

  1 Fresh fruit platter for 8 people

  6 Bottles of Coca Cola

  12 Bottles of still and sparkling water

  12 Bottles of fresh fruit juices

  Wine glasses, champagne flutes, tumblers (all glass, no plastic)

  Cutlery and sharp knife

  1 Oyster knife

  1 Make up mirror (no neon strip lighting, only opaque white bulbs)

  Fresh towels, clothes hangers, clothes rail

  3-4 Bunches of flowers—prefer lilys and orchids

  Sofa and arm chairs

  Wardrobe Room (next to Grace’s dressing room):

  1 Iron and ironing board

  1 Steamer

  1 Clothes rail

  Clothes hangers

  1 Full length mirror

  Dressing Room 2:

  2 Cases of decent lager beer, chilled

  1 Case of still water

  1 Case of sparkling water

  Large selection of carbonated soft drinks

  Large selection of crisps and snack foods

  Production Office:

  Phone line, desks and chairs

  Free high speed internet access via wireless / Ethernet connection

  2 Cases of still water (for stage and crew)

  Select
ion of chocolate / sweets including Minstrels, Maltesers

  Catering must also be provided on site, at regular meal times, at all times

  Grace’s band or crew are on site. Buffet breakfast and cooked lunch and dinner where appropriate, with vegetarian options available.

  **Purchaser agrees to pick up bar tab for Artist and entourage**

  4. PRODUCTION—PURCHASER agrees to provide a professional sound system with sufficient speaker and amplification systems to produce top quality house and on-stage sound without distortion or feedback. System to include:

  5. GROUND TRANSPORTATION—PURCHASER agrees to provide first class ground transportation for Artist’s entourage to and from airport, hotel, and venue from Artist’s arrival through departure. Transportation must be a Stretch Limousine to be used at GRACE’s discretion.

  6. MERCHANDISING—ARTIST shall have the right but not the obligation to sell souvenir programs, posters, and other merchandise and to retain 100% of the receipts. ARTIST reserves the right to confiscate part or all of any unauthorized “bootleg” merchandise being sold in or around the venue.

  7. GUEST LIST: Grace is entitled to a minimum 20 person guest list w/tickets available for her to distribute.

  8. WORKMAN’S COMPENSATION—ALL PURCHASER employees will be covered by Workman’s Compensation and Disability Insurance. No employees of PURCHASER will look to ARTIST for any type of compensation or coverage.

  9. AIR TRAVEL—Purchaser is responsible for the airline arrangements for members of the group (Windows and Aisles are mandatory). Flights must be fully flexible.

  Grace’s flight info is as follows:

  2 x First Class roundtrip tickets for Grace and travelling companion (These must be fully flexible tickets)

  5 x Economy roundtrip for travel party (1 sound engineer, 2 dressers, 1 musician, 1 manager)

  *** Airport VIP Service for Grace and her companion must be provided:

  on departure (curbside-airside) + on arrival (airside-curbside) for ALL flights relating to the event.***