The View from the Cheap Seats

by Neil Gaiman

  Every now and again my copy of Art and Artifice, the one Jules Fisher gave me, has disappeared, which means that several times in the last decade I’ve discovered how very hard it is to get a new copy. (Each time I’d given up my original copy surfaced again. I have stopped wondering where it goes when it’s not on my shelves. I probably wouldn’t like the answer.) It’s one of many reasons that I’m delighted Art and Artifice is being republished for a wider audience. Enjoy.

  * * *

  My introduction to Art and Artifice: And Other Essays on Illusion by Jim Steinmeyer, 2006.

  * * *

  The Moth: An Introduction

  I was given a list of all the things the organizers wanted me to do at the PEN World Voices Festival in New York. Everything seemed straightforward except for one thing.

  “What’s the Moth?” I asked. It was April 2007.

  “The Moth’s a storytelling thing,” I was told. “You talk about real-life things that happened to you in front of a live audience.” (There may have been other answers in human history that were as technically correct, but that missed out everything important, however offhand I cannot think what they are.)

  I knew nothing of the Moth, but I agreed to tell a story. It sounded outside my area of comfort, and as such, a wise thing to do. A Moth Director, I was told, would call me.

  I talked to the Moth Director on the phone a few days later, puzzled: Why was I talking about my life to someone else? And why was someone else pointing out to me what my story was about?

  I didn’t begin to understand what the Moth was about until I turned up for the run-through beforehand, and I met Edgar Oliver.

  Edgar was one of the people who would be telling stories that night. He tells a story in this book. You get the story in these pages, but you do not get Edgar’s gentleness or his openness, and you do not get the remarkable accent, which is the sort of accent that a stage-struck Transylvanian vampire might adopt in order to play Shakespeare, accompanied by elegant hand-movements that point and punctuate and elaborate on the nature of the things he is telling us about, whether Southern Gothic or New York personal. I watched Edgar tell his story in the run-through (he managed to cut about ten minutes when he told it on the stage, and it was as if I’d never heard it before) and I knew I wanted to be part of this thing, whatever it was.

  I told my story (in it I was fifteen and stranded alone on Liverpool Street Station, waiting for parents who would never come), and the audience listened and laughed and winced and they clapped at the end and I felt like I’d walked through fire and been embraced and loved.

  Somehow, without meaning to, I’d become part of the Moth family.

  I subscribed to the Moth podcast, and every week somebody would tell me a true story that had happened to them that would, even if only slightly, change my life.

  A few years later, I found myself on an ancient school bus, being driven through the American South, with a handful of storytellers, telling our stories in bars and art museums and veterans’ halls and theaters. I told them about how I found a dog by the side of the road who rescued me, about my father and my son, about getting into trouble at school as an eight-year-old for telling a very rude joke I’d heard from the big boys. I watched the other storytellers telling pieces of themselves night after night: no notes, nothing memorized, always similar, always true and always, somehow, fresh.

  I’ve visited some of the Moth “StorySLAMs,” as people who are randomly picked come up and compete for audience love and respect, I’ve watched the stories they tell, and told my own stories there (out of competition, before or after it’s all over). I’ve watched people trying to tell stories fail, and I’ve watched them break the hearts of everyone in the room even as they inspired them.

  The strange thing about Moth stories is that none of the tricks we use to make ourselves loved or respected by others work in the ways you would imagine they ought to. The tales of how clever we were, how wise, how we won, they mostly fail. The practiced jokes and the witty one-liners all crash and burn up on a Moth stage.

  Honesty matters. Vulnerability matters. Being open about who you were at a moment in time when you were in a difficult or an impossible place matters more than anything.

  Having a place the story starts and a place it’s going: that’s important.

  Telling your story, as honestly as you can, and leaving out the things you don’t need, that’s vital.

  The Moth connects us, as humans. Because we all have stories. Or perhaps, because we are, as humans, already an assemblage of stories. And the gulf that exists between us as people is that when we look at each other we might see faces, skin color, gender, race, or attitudes, but we don’t see, we can’t see, the stories. And once we hear each other’s stories we realize that the things we see as dividing us are, all too often, illusions, falsehoods: that the walls between us are in truth no thicker than scenery.

  The Moth teaches us not to judge by appearances. It teaches us to listen. It reminds us to empathize.

  And now, with these fifty wonderful stories, it teaches us to read.

  * * *

  This is an introduction for The Moth: This Is a True Story, 2015.

  * * *

  VII

  MUSIC AND THE PEOPLE WHO MAKE IT

  “I think that night may have lasted a thousand years, one for every ocean.”

  Hi, By the Way: Tori Amos

  Hi, by the way.

  I met her first on a tape, and then we spoke on the phone late at night, and then one night I went to see her play piano and sing.

  It was a tiny Notting Hill brasserie, and Tori had already started when I got there. She saw me come in and smiled like the lighting of a beacon, played “Tear in Your Hand” to welcome me in. The room was almost empty, save for the owner, who was having his birthday meal in the middle of the room. Tori sang “Happy Birthday to You,” then a song she’d recently written called “Me and a Gun,” pure and dark and alone.

  Later, we went off through Notting Hill and talked like old friends who are meeting for the very first time. On the empty subway platform she sang and danced and acted out the video she had made that day for “Silent All These Years”—one moment she was a Tori in a box, spinning around, the next a small girl dancing past a piano . . .

  That was several years ago.

  I know Tori a little better now than I did that night, but the wonderment she inspired then has not faded with time or with familiarity.

  Tori doesn’t ever ring me. She sends me strange messages by other means, and I have to track her down in odd countries, negotiate my way through foreign switchboards. The last time she wanted to tell me that they served great pumpkin ice cream in the place across from the recording studio, a continent away.

  She offered to save me some.

  And she wanted to tell me she sings about me on Under the Pink. “What do you sing?” I asked.

  “‘Where’s Neil when you need him?’” she said.

  Tori is wise and witchy and wickedly innocent. What you see is what you get: a little delirium, a lot of delight. There’s fairy blood inside her,* and a sense of humor that shimmers and illuminates and turns the world upside down.

  She sings like an angel and rocks like a red-haired demon.

  She’s a small miracle. She’s my friend.

  I don’t know where I am when you need me. I hope the pumpkin ice cream doesn’t melt before I find out . . .

  * * *

  I wrote this for the tour book for Tori Amos’s Under the Pink tour, in 1994.

  * * *

  Curious Wine: Tori Amos II

  Riding a train through America I’m seeing a side of the country it prefers to keep hidden: it’s truly the world on the wrong side of the tracks, a world of tumbledown tarpaper shacks, abandoned cars and boarded-up buildings. Now—as I type this—I’m somewhere in North Texas, riding the train through a swamp, watching an eagle circle and the play of light through the dusty leaves. I’m listening to Tori go
ing to Venus and back.

  “Suede,” she sings, music swirling around her voice like eddies in the current of the swamp-river. “Anybody knows you can conjure anything by the dark of the moon.” It’s a song like black chocolate and woodsmoke, shimmering and remote. “Suede,” she sings.

  It’s too hot outside, but winter is becoming imaginable once more. Summer is rotting in a haze like a neglected peach. The album plays over and over.

  Remembering the first time I heard these songs, in early summer: I had spent the day in Dartmoor, visiting friends (Terri’s Pre-Raphaelite cottage, with its magic kitchen and elegant messages written in gold on every wall; wandering the Frouds’ house, made even more otherworldly by the fact that they weren’t actually there, just Brian’s paintings and Wendy’s elfish dolls smiling and leering at you from every corner of their concertina-maze of a world). I had fetched up in Martian Studios at the end of the day like a stray puppy in need of a home.

  Outside the train window now: a wall of red earth strewn with a hundred glass bottles; a seat ripped from a school bus alone under a tree; pines and willows and a vast tangle of wild honeysuckle.

  “What red wine is this?” I asked Tori, that night, when the world was quiet and dark.

  “I’ll send you a bottle,” she said. It was a marvelous wine, gentle and wise.

  Sharing secrets on the sofa: I told her of the baku, and the fox and the monk. She played me the new album, told me its secrets and its stories, “Lust” and “Bliss,” apologizing for a rawness of the mix (which I believed but could not hear), and I settled back and listened.

  The curious wine made me expansive. I imagined the story I would write about it: I would tell the tale of each song through descriptions of twelve imaginary albums.

  It is a greatest hits album, I told her, from an alternate universe.

  Of course it is, she said.

  I think that night may have lasted a thousand years, one for every ocean, and at the end of it I slept on the sofa, rag-doll floppy from the fine red wine, dreaming of the glory of the eighties and wondering why I had never noticed it at the time.

  Traveling still now: passing a sudden thunderstorm in the hills of New Mexico; then the stately Californian windmill fields and hills signal that the train is leaving the real America and entering the world of the imagination.

  And I meant to tell you about my Happy Phantom dream, and how she smiled and said, “I know I’m dead, but why are they making such a fuss about it!” and to talk about the way that she smiled. But we’re pulling into Los Angeles now, and it’s time to stop writing.

  And I’m drunk on a curious wine I tasted several months ago, having traveled to Venus and back.

  * * *

  The introduction for Tori Amos’s To Venus and Back tour book, 1999.

  * * *

  Flood: Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition, They Might Be Giants

  Not to put too fine a point on it, I was, in my mind, already too old for music to matter, too old for an album to change me and definitely too old to buy singles. I was twenty-eight, driving to Gatwick airport when I heard “Birdhouse in Your Soul” on the radio, and it changed my life. And this is the odd thing: I didn’t listen to music radio. Then, as now, it was Radio 4, or cassette tapes. But I was listening to music radio as I drove, and “Birdhouse in Your Soul” came on, and I made a mental note and remembered the name of the band—They Might Be Giants, just like the film, where George C. Scott thinks he is Sherlock Holmes (the title comes from a conversation about Don Quixote, who fought a windmill thinking it was a giant—and what if he was right?).

  When I got to London I went straight to a record shop, and bought everything they had by They Might Be Giants (Lincoln, and They Might Be Giants). They didn’t have “Birdhouse in Your Soul.” Flood had not come out yet.

  What I loved about They Might Be Giants was that they made stories. The words were put together in a way that left holes I needed to fill in order to know what was going on. I became, whether I liked it or not, a part of the songs.

  I called Terry Pratchett, because he loved stories too, and told him that I’d found something he’d like better than chocolate. “Shoehorn with Teeth” became the theme song of the Good Omens signing tour. When we were under stress, we would sing it together. We were under stress a lot.

  I bought “Birdhouse . . .” as a single, the first CD single I’d bought. There was an Ant on there too, crawling up someone’s back in the nighttime.

  I bought Flood as soon as it arrived in the shops. In a break from They Might Be Giants tradition it didn’t sound like it had been recorded in someone’s back room. There were guest instrumentalists, a lush sound, strange samples. It still sounded like They Might Be Giants, but this time they were bigger giants.

  The songs were, for the most part, dispatches from an alternate universe, slices from stories and lives we would never quite know. That didn’t stop me thinking about them, though, or making up my own tiny stories to go with them.

  It was the first album to come with its own theme, for a start. The world would end, but that was all right, because this album had begun. Yes. It had “Birdhouse in Your Soul,” a song by a proud night-light who is descended from a lighthouse. It had “Lucky Ball and Chain,” which looked back on an unusual marriage.

  It had “Istanbul (Not Constantinople),” which I was sad to discover had never been performed as a sand dance by Wilson, Keppel and Betty. It had “Dead” on it, a song about final things and the meaning of life. “Your Racist Friend,” which comes into my head whenever I find myself having a conversation with anyone who begins a sentence with “I’m not a racist, but . . .”

  It had “Particle Man” on it, finest of all superheroes. Terry Pratchett liked “Particle Man” so much that he put a watch with an Aeon Hand in it in one of his stories, which I thought was very unfair, because I had wanted to steal the idea for a story myself.

  “Twisting” made me sad—I was certain there was a suicide in there somewhere. “We Want a Rock” was surreal in the best sense: it only made sense if taken literally, and then it gained a dream-sense. Perhaps everybody does want a prosthetic forehead, after all.

  I think that “Someone Keeps Moving My Chair” is really called Mr. Horrible, and I am afraid of the Ugliness Man.

  It had “Hearing Aid” on it. A song with an electric chair in it that somehow seemed to be filled with sweetness and gentle age.

  “Minimum Wage” put visions of stampedes in my head, with the cowboys all carrying placards. “Letterbox” was the kind of tiny horror movie in a box I loved, its lyrics all tumbly and twisted.

  “Whistling in the Dark” is what we all wind up doing, after meeting people who are not unkind, but still leave scars.

  “Hot Cha” never will come back. The prodigal son will remain uneaten.

  “Women and Men” was an Escher drawing in my head. The lyrics unpacked to contain the lyrics, the people will cross the ocean into the jungle forever. “Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love” is a perfect phrase, almost as beautiful as “cellar door,” and it is up on the screen in my mind in a movie of black and white and sapphire blue.

  They Might Be Giants wrote a song for themselves, and it explains the band’s name and everything else about them. Hold on to the merry-go-round.

  We are all in a “Road Movie to Berlin.” Or at least, we are all in a road movie, and some of us will wind up in Berlin in 1989, if we just keep going.

  And now it’s the future, and Flood came out a long, long time ago. The floodwaters are still rising, along with the ocean levels. Some things never go out of style.

  * * *

  Liner notes for the twenty-fifth-anniversary release of They Might Be Giants’ Flood LP.

  * * *

  Lou Reed, in Memoriam: “The Soundtrack to My Life”

  “There are certain kinds of songs you write that are just fun songs—the lyric really can’t survive without the music. But for most of what I do, the idea behind it was to try
and bring a novelist’s eye to it, and, within the framework of rock and roll, to try to have that lyric there so somebody who enjoys being engaged on that level could have that and have the rock and roll too.” That was what Lou Reed told me in 1991.

  I’m a writer. I write fiction, mostly. People ask me about my influences, and they expect me to talk about other writers of fiction, so I do. And sometimes, when I can, I put Lou Reed on the list too, and nobody ever asks what he’s doing there, which is good because I don’t know how to explain why a songwriter is responsible for so much of the way I view the world.

  His songs were the soundtrack to my life: a quavering New York voice with little range singing songs of alienation and despair, with flashes of impossible hope, those tiny perfect days and nights we want to last forever, important because they are so finite and so few; songs filled with people, some named, some anonymous, who strut and stagger and flit and shimmy and hitchhike into the limelight and out again.

  It was all about stories. The songs implied more than they told: they made me want to know more, to imagine, to tell those stories myself. Some of the stories were impossible to unpack, others, like “The Gift,” were classically constructed short stories. Each of the albums had a personality. Each of the stories had a narrative voice: often detached, numb, without judgment.

  Trying to reconstruct it in my head: it wasn’t even the music that sucked me in, initially, as much as it was a 1974 NME interview I read when I was thirteen that hooked me. The opinions, the character, the street-smarts, his loathing of the interviewer. He was in the Sally Can’t Dance phase, drugged out, the most commercially successful and most mocked album of his career. I wanted to know who Lou Reed was, so I bought and borrowed everything I could, because the interview was about stories, and stories that would become songs.