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Pop Culture
Aug 19, 2017, 07:00AM

We Were Always Horribly Ambiguous

A 1996 CTheory interview with writer/disruptor R.U. Sirius vs a 2014 Daily Beast interview with actor Ron Perlman.

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R.U. Sirius: There's something to be said for the stress that makes us all want to kill each other and make really cool web pages.

Ron Perlman: Took me a while to learn to say those, but once I did, it saved a lot of what could have been very destructive impulses.

Sirius: Well, it’s a legal matter now.

Perlman: Somebody told you that in a movie, man.

Sirius: Which means that the essentials should be given away free, unconditionally.

***

Perlman: They’re just basically things that you put on and take off.

Sirius: Yes. But subversion isn't really subversive any more. Maybe the wired elite think that’s hip.

Perlman: That’s for the world to decide.

Sirius: You can find our dirty fingerprints, our rhetoric, all over their advertising style.

Perlman: It was basically saying, this is a precious thing we have, this life, so goddamnit, stand for something.

***

Sirius: Wait and see how it unfolds.

Perlman: So as I was writing the book, since it wasn’t going to be one of those actor’s memoirs about how many women I’ve fucked, because it can’t be about that, what can it be about?

Sirius: The book announces itself as an act of sabotage on the surface, and fails as that, again on the surface.

Perlman: I feel like I don’t have much time left.

Sirius: We were always horribly ambiguous.

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