Extract 1
Kinky Friedman: I'd
just like to say that I'm very pleased to be here. I'm 58 years old, and
I read at the 60-year old level! Growing up, I remember what Joseph Heller
said, which is, 'Nothing succeeds as planned.' My goal was to be a country
star as a child, and if that's what your goal is as a child, you'll wind
up a best-selling novelist every time. That's just what happens to you.
I went to school at the University of Texas in Austin, where I was in
a very highly-advanced liberal arts programme known as Plan II, mainly
distinguished by the fact that every student in the programme had some
form or other of facial tic.
Upon graduation, I went into the Peace Corps, and I worked for two years
in the jungles of Borneo as an agricultural extension worker. My job was
to help people who'd been farming successfully for over two thousand years
to improve their agricultural methods. And also my job was to distribute
seeds downriver to the natives. In two and a half years the Peace Corps
failed to deliver any seeds to me and I was eventually reduced to distributing
my own seed downriver. That had some rather unpleasant repercussions.
While over there, I did get this tattoo: I think I can show you, here.
This is a native kayan tattoo. These are former head-hunters, now a very
gentle people. This is a dog. It's a stylised dog. It's done with real
nails, hammered, it's pig fat nailed under the skin. It's a very bloody
process. They wrap your arm in banana leaves. You chew betel nut and you
smoke a jungle cigar and you drink this rice wine called tuark. And the
experience makes you so high you need a step-ladder to scratch your ass.
I mean it's a real mystical sort of experience. The only downside of it
is that your arm has to be buried in a gentile cemetery because of ….
So it's surprising to me that I have now become a friend of presidents.
It is rather shocking. I guess I was a pen pal of Bill Clinton's for many
years. Towards the end of the pen pal relationship, Bill invited me to
the White House and this was a big dinner for Neil Simon and Robert Redford,
and Lionel Hampton, I believe. And there were several hundred people there,
and there were people casting asparagus upon my cowboy hat, because I
was in my high rodeo drag at the time and I was wearing my hat indoors
as, I've often observed, cowboys and Jews, the only thing we have in common
is that we both like to wear our hats indoors. And we attach a certain
amount of importance to this.
So people were bitching about it and I was looking for my name place.
Finally I found it and right next to my name it said: The President. Of
course sitting next to the President at his table, afterwards everybody
was saying: 'Oh, who's the interesting man in the cowboy hat?' And Bill,
to his great credit, on the other side of me, he placed a woman named
Sherry Lansing who was head of Paramount Pictures, and she said, 'You
know, the President says your books would make wonderful movies, Kinky,
but who do you see playing Kinky?' And I told her, 'I see Lionel Richie.'
And negotiations broke down from there anyway.
But I think the President that might be less known to the people is George
Bush. It is said, a reporter told me recently, that I am George Bush's
favourite author, or did I know this? I was very flattered to know it
and of course he is not really a voracious reader. But I've come to know
him, George, through Laura.
His wife, Laura Bush, runs the Texas Book Festival, and to her great
credit the majority of authors she invites do not share her husband's
political views. She is very wide open about this. So I didn't know George.
He was Governor of Texas at the time. And when I met him, they were having
a party for the Book Festival at the Governor's mansion. And Larry McMurchie
had failed to show up and he'd left his name tag out there in a little
basket in the entrance way. So I took his name tag and slapped it on my
preachin' coat, and I was drinking Chivas Regal that evening and I was
pretty well walking on my knuckles. By the time I got to the Governor's
mansion, I was smoking a cigar and people started coming up to me and
saying: 'Mr McMurchie, you have done so much for Texas. We just really
appreciate your work.' And you know, I didn't want to burst their bubble,
so I said 'Thank you kindly.'
And Larry McMurchie is a shy little bugger, you know. He was really doing
a service for … And people would say, 'I can't believe that I'm talking
to Larry McMurchie!' And I'd say, 'Thank you kindly.'
Well apparently George Bush was watching this and, as I was thinking
of having another Chivas Regal, he was just thinking of running for President
at that time. So he whispered something to his security people, and I
thought I was being 86ed from the event you know, but they didn't throw
me out. So, towards the end of the evening, I found the security guards
and I asked them, 'What did the Governor tell you?' And the guy told me,
he say, 'The Governor said: I want that guy for my campaign manager.'
So that was nice.
Then he was elected President and I, I was probably for Gore during that
period of time. Not actively, I mean, but I you know I mean, I haven't
voted in, I haven't voted since I ran, well, we won't get into all this.
It's such a long time.
But at any rate, I write a monthly column for Texas Monthly Magazine
on the back page of the magazine. In this column I've mentioned George's
name and he sent me a letter saying thanks for mentioning his name in
Texas Monthly, without using any curse words. Then he invited me to the
White House to do a reading and to spend the night there. Now Bill never
asked me to spend the night there. I just visited, you know.
So I wrote George back and told him I've got four dogs, four women and
four editors and would it be possible for the four dogs and four women
to stay with me in the Lincoln bedroom when I visit the White House. So
George writes me back from Camp David, and what's really sick is that
he has the time to do this! No, everybody needs a pen pal. We all need
a pen pal. Everybody needs a friend. So he wrote me back and he said he's
not sure about the four women, but the four dogs, maybe.
So I started liking George pretty much then.
[…]
So at any rate I went up there and I read something for the Bush's Christmas
dinner type of thing. And it was very successful. I did not play any music,
but I kind of walked around like a little Jewish Mariachi reading this
thing at all the tables. And it was very successful. And he took me to
the Oval Office at midnight, with just the two dogs, Spot and Barney,
and George and me. He showed me the War Room and he told me that he had
a growing appreciation of Sharon, that he was liking him more and more.
This was after 9/11 but it was before …
And I told him I thought he had played a poor hand well, you know, after
9/11. That he was doing well. And that's where I think he is. I think
he is a really, I think he's funny and people don't know that he's funny,
but he is funny and he's a, he has conquered his own demons. I mean he
was a terrible alcoholic at one time. And of course my opinion is: You
should find what you like and let it kill you, you know. But he chose
to struggle with it and he became a Christian. Remember what Gandhi said
about Christians, 'They sound like nice people. I'd like to meet one of
them some time.'
Extract 2
Well I think the policy is never to take the detective out of his milieu.
You don't want to do it, and the few times it's been done, it's not been
real successful. I think Conan Doyle did do it well with The Hound of
the Baskervilles, I guess, and a couple of other times. But in general
it's not a good policy. I do it basically out of ennui but I like Conan
Doyle. I really am very, very tired of the mystery genre and it's become
a glut of. Some of the greatest ones, we mentioned Raymond Chandler, but
I also like Rex Stout and John D. MacDonald, who are three writers that
I don't think ever got their due in literature because they were prisoners
of Van Dam Street. The Prisoner of Van Dam Street is the title of a novel
I've just written which is a mystery but it has virtually no mystery in
the book. But it's really dark and very funny, I think. And since right
now my best book will always be my next one, as long as I can remain kind
of miserable and now that's very important.
I've discovered that, I was talking to Ned earlier about the Van Gogh-Hank
Williams connection, about people who interweave their lives too closely
with their work. Sometimes, if you write to pay the rent, you know accidentally
you can write something great. I mean all the great works have been done
that way. No one has ever set out to write the great American novel or
great literature, paint a masterpiece and done it. It's always done accidentally.
And it's done by people who are miserable, unhappy, and who die in paupers'
graves.
Paupers' graves are very important for the future and I would mention
not only Van Gogh but Mozart. Who else do we have? Edgar Allen Poe, Anne
Frank and Jesus, who didn't even have a grave. The last two of them didn't
even have graves. This is very important if you want to impact the future,
if that's what you're interested in, and most of us are.
[…]
Question: Kinky, a lot of the characters in your books are real
characters. How many of them have complained about what you've said about
them?
Kinky Friedman: Well that's a good question. I have no friends.
These are people that I've known, and I don't know too many authors that
use the real names of the real people in their books, but I think they're
all rather flattered to be in the books, and particularly now that we
finally have got this movie thing happening. I had a major decision to
make a month ago which was whether to go with the Australian movie people
or the Hollywood movie people to make a movie version of the book A Case
of Lone Star about a guy who thinks he's Hank Williams and is killing
a lot of people and performing at the Lone Star Café. [interjection
from Chair] He does kill a guy named Ned. That's right.
But there are all of these actor types that want to be musicians and
the musicians, of course, want to be novelists. But you can mention about
six big actors who want to be musicians and have a band and travel around.
Billy Bob Thornton is one of them. And we're liking Billy Bob as Kinky
right now. The script is written. I went with the Australians, thinking
that, you know I've never really seen a bad Australian movie. Have you?
I mean, even Crocodile Dundee was kind of cute, you know. But whatever
they do. And Hollywood, you haven't really seen a good movie in years.
So we're going with the Australians, and so we might have a movie now,
and I think that that would be very interesting. I'm looking for kind
of the J. R. R. R. R. R. Tolkien effect to occur.
I am going to try to give more succinct answers here if I can.
Question: I think it was in God Bless John Wayne, there is a passage
about you as a boy playing in a chess contest with 39 others in Houston.
Is that fiction or autobiographical?
Kinky Friedman: No, that's real. The Grand Master at the time
was Samuel Reshevsky and he played 50 of us all at the same time, and
I was the youngest person there. I was seven years old. I got the picture
of me playing with Reshevsky is on the back of Blast from the Past. He's
the man standing up. The guy sitting down who looks like Senator Joseph
McCarthy is just a local kibitzer. But Reshevsky told my father he beat
everybody there, and he told my Dad that he really is sorry to have to
beat his son but he has to be very careful playing children, he said,
because a loss to a kid is headlines, you know. It would destroy his career.
And of course that came about then later with Bobby Fischer and some of
these other young…By the way, the Bobby Fischer thing is really weird.
Where is he right now? The Philippines or someplace? Do you know anything
about him?
Ned Temko: Only what I read. You can't trust newspapers.
Kinky Friedman: He's done very well for himself. No, it seems
like he's, you know, like mentally masturbating in a mental hospital somewhere
as we speak. All right.
Question: Hi. Do you have a following in Israel? And are you translated
into any other languages?
Kinky Friedman: Yes, we've got, the books are translated into
Hebrew and they're in about 18 languages. They just went into Croatian
last month. Yeh, the books are in about 18 different languages.
I was telling somebody that when I was in South Africa, God Bless John
Wayne, this was six or seven years ago, God Bless John Wayne was No. 1
in South Africa when I got there. And when I left two weeks later it was
No. 3, which is not a particularly good sign.
Question: Do you find the crime genre restrictive?
Kinky Friedman: Yes I do. And of course like most mystery writers
I don't believe I'm writing mystery novels. I think I'm writing psychological
dramas about some shit, you know. But really I've lost interest a long
time ago, so I think mysteries are good because they offer resolution
and they tie things up nicely which is: life is more sloppy than that.
Also, I think the great ones like Sherlock Holmes ride entirely on flavour
and insight into human nature, and that's why Miss Marple is one of my
heroes, because she has great, great insight into human nature. Another
one, of course, is Georges Simenon who was Belgian. And Simenon seems
to be rather forgotten these days. I think somebody told me Waterstones
doesn't have any Simenon books any more. The guy said they dropped them.
Well, I mean, times change and whatever. But this guy could write a great
novel in about two weeks. That's really how I first started writing, was
reading a biography of Simenon, who was a horribly immoral, amoral person,
but was a great writer. And he wrote this character, Inspector Maigret,
and he never described the man, but he was always walking around with
his hands in the pockets of his raincoat. Walking around Paris with, he
was smoking his pipe, you know, and he was watching you. He was watching
the people. And most of us never do that. I mean I'm here, you know, trying
to answer questions in a charming way or whatever the hell I think I'm
doing and whatever you're doing, and we're not really, really observing
other people the way Inspector Maigret did.
That aspect of mystery writing is really charming, and all this procedural
crap I mean, that's another kind. Coming from Texas I'm interested in
places far away. I mean I like Agatha Christie kind of stuff, but I've
read almost every mystery that was written. The only good ones are written
by dead people. The books written by dead people are good books and there's
one book I've read that I liked by this guy Paul Theroux who is [interjection]
Yes, he's alive. But he is a pointy-headed intellectual guy. I mean I'm
not fond but I've never met him, but I don't think I would like him. But
I like his book Hotel Honolulu which I'd like to recommend just as a really
good book for those of us who like Hawaii, you know.
Question: How long does it take you to write a book?
Kinky Friedman: It doesn't take long at all. I have to actually
slow the process down because my editors don't you know, they don't think
the work is as great as, you know, if I do the thing in two months, they're
not that impressed with it. And of course, editors, you know the role
of editors is to take something great and make it good. That's what they
do.
Ned Temko: I do that for a living!
Question: I read an interview with you in the newspaper, a local
one, this week and I was wondering, are you really a fan of George W.
and his policies in Iraq?
Kinky Friedman: I don't know. I'll pass on all the political stuff.
I would just say that he plays a lucky hand again. He's playing very high
stakes poker and so is Tony Blair, and my basic idea is that they're going
to come out of this looking really good. And if they don't, I mean it's
really going to be unpleasant. I mean, if it goes wrong, then I think
George is a lot like the American cartoon character, Mr Magoo, when he
will fall off a ledge 10,000 feet down and land on the ledge right below
it and he'll think he's just walking along, you know. And he's lucky in
that way. And a person who loves Las Vegas as much as I do can tell you
that that's just key. It's very important. And I will sail with George
because I think he's going to be lucky this time.
Also I think, I think Saddam is a wonderful guy. I really do. There's
a man who's been a bully his whole life and he's, for rightly or wrongly
and with bullies I guess there is no wrongly, he's come up and found somebody
bigger than him. And that's all that's happened. Karma, you know, it's
just got him!
Question: As a mystery writer, what is the mystery of writing?
Kinky Friedman: It's a two-part question. Well I think I would
refer to a life I think can be pretty well described: my friend Slim Dodds
I knew as an American Negro, he was not an African-American. He was just
a black man in Texas whose cats were always going into the neighbour's
garbage cans, and they asked Slim: 'Why are your cats always going into
our garbage cans?' And Slim said, 'They wants to see the world.'
