Moping In Style (A Tribute to Adam Green), featuring Jenny Lewis, Sean Ono Lennon, Father John Misty, Devendra Banhart and more is available now from ORG Music. Click here to check it out.

Previous episodes:

Episode one: Green Sahara

Episode two: Zach Phillips

Episode three: Zully Adler (GOATY Tapes)

Episode four: Mickey Miles

Episode five: Kurt Weisman

Episode six: John Andrews & the Yawns

Episode seven: Pedrum Siadatian (Allah-Las/Paint)

Episode eight: Kamikaze Palm Tree

Episode nine: Mark Neeley

Episode ten: Jaimie Wolfe

Episode eleven: Amigous Argentinous

Episode Transcript:

Opening song: Adam Green, “Never Lift a Finger”

Salvador Cresta: Well, perhaps the most recognized facet of Adam Green is his musical career, which spans the last 25 or 30 years. In fact, a tribute album to Adam has just been released called Moping In Style, a double LP that includes versions of his songs performed by artists such as Sean Lennon, Regina Spektor, Devendra Banhart, Jenny Lewis, The Libertines, and many other great artists. 

Today, I want to focus on Adam’s drawings and paintings and on his work as creator and protagonist of his film, Adam Green’s Aladdin, which I saw one night several years ago and saw again recently having a few beers. And I said to myself, “An interview with Adam Green about Aladdin.” So here we are. Hello, Adam, how are you? It’s a pleasure to have you here at Midnight Music Review in the Attic. Are you in New York? You’ve lived there all your life, right? 

Adam Green: Hi, thanks for having me. I’m in Brooklyn right now: Brooklyn, New York. I’ve lived in New York for my whole life. I was born in White Plains and then I grew up in the suburb of Mount Kisco, New York, and my parents moved to the city when I was 17 years old when my dad got a job as a professor at Columbia University. So I came with them.  

Salvador Cresta: Fine. Well, first of all, let’s watch this commercial that was made for Adam’s movie, Aladdin. 

Commercial: The world can be a pretty dull place. We do the same things day after day. Eventually people start to want something different. People really want to shake it up sometimes. At least they think they do, because when something truly strange comes knocking on the door, well, they want no part of it. 

In a world where everyone is seeking everyone else’s approval for every little thing they do, we’re here to tell you that Adam Green’s Aladdin isn’t approved by anyone but ourselves. Hell, they preferred if we all just went away, but if we did, then you wouldn’t see this and this or this and what the hell is that? Who’s that guy? Where’s his face? Don’t even get me started about this right here. Yes, if you want something really different, we’ve got just a bag of weirdness for you, Adam Green’s Aladdin, where anything can happen. See you soon. 

Salvador Cresta: You wrote the script, painted the sets, are  the protagonist and recorded all the music for the film. In the commercial it says that it was rejected from a lot of festivals, including several important ones like Sundance, Tribeca, New York. Is that true? You sent it to all those festivals and they rejected it? Because I think they should have considered your enormous work as a creator, even if they should have made, perhaps, a special category to include it like “art film by a multidisciplinary creator creates a whole DIY world” or something like that.

Adam Green: Yeah, so that’s unfortunately true. When I was finished with the movie, I mean, I’m a film outsider, but I was working with real screen actors like Natasha Lyonne, Macaulay Culkin, and Alia Shawkat. I kind of assumed that the film would play at film festivals and I submitted it to the ones that I’d heard of. But yeah, kept on getting all these rejection letters and people didn’t really want to play it. Eventually some festival, like Queens World Film Festival that did it at the Museum of Moving Image played it and gave us an audience award, and I think actually it won some kind of little film festival in Italy. But basically, yeah, it was rejected from pretty much all the film festivals. And I actually don’t really feel like people really understand what the movie is. I mean, if you kind of think of it as something that’s kind of a visual art project, you would kind of miss the fact that the script took years to write. 

And then I feel like if you just look at it as some kind of weird surrealist script, you would be overlooking the fact that it took a team of a gazillion people, tons and tons of hours to make this completely handmade world. And in a way, almost the opposite of the sort of Dogme 95 thing that I grew up with, that sort of where you’re supposed to use sort of the real things that are in the room. This is actually the opposite of that. This is a world of complete artifice, where every single object in the entire movie is a handmade constructed sculpture. I don’t know, I just think that people were kind of confused by it 

Song: Adam Green, “Fix My Blues” 

Salvador Cresta: Adam, where did you set up all those sets to film the movie? We could say that it is a film made of cardboard, paper mache, and glue? God, where is all that now? It’s in your attic. You financed the film through Kickstarter. How much money on glue did you spend? 

Adam Green: Yeah, so the Adam Green’s Aladdin movie was filmed in a 5,000 square foot warehouse in Red Hook Brooklyn over a very sweaty summer. It was a really hot warehouse with no air conditioning and we built 30 rooms out of cardboard and paper mache and paint and glue, and about 500 props that went into the rooms. And then when we were done filming, the people that worked on the movie took a lot of the props home and then unfortunately a lot of it was destroyed. And then I kept some for an art show. Eventually, some of it got sent over to Switzerland for a show at the Foundation Baylor Museum, and then back to New York, and a lot of it ended up kind of broken and stuffed into a very crowded storage space in Red Hook that I still have. And who knows if it will ever see the light of the day again. 

But in answer to your question, yeah, I probably spent thousands of dollars on glue and house paint and all kinds of things. We raised about $50,000 on Kickstarter, but it ended up costing a ton more than that. We ended up having to get investors, my friends, Swiss investors that were from Zurich, that helped fund the movie, and even that wasn’t enough, and I ended up having to fund a lot of it myself. So it was a real expensive endeavor, but well worth it. And also if you want watch the Adam Green’s Aladdin movie, you can watch it for free on YouTube, just type “Adam Green’s Aladdin full movie” and oh, and there’s a documentary about how sweaty and nuts the production was called, The Making of Adam Green’s Aladdin, and watch that documentary on YouTube as well. So yeah, so there’s lots of documentation of this crazy summer. 

[Film clip]  

Salvador Cresta: I found a video of an exhibition at the whole gallery in New York with many of the paper and the shared objects you created for the film. Is it true that you made them with recovered telephone books? I don’t think anyone in New York would have imagined that their phone book would end up becoming an asparagus chair or a shit sandwich. 

Adam Green: Yeah, it’s true. I mean, one thing about paper mache and the way that we would do it is it’s kind of making a mummy where you dip strips of newsprint into a mixture that we would make out of just glue and water; you do multiple layers. And so we needed a ton of newsprint, and it was still kind of the tail end of the time when they would drop off phone books in front of everyone’s door. Figured people weren’t really using them. So we would just go around the neighborhood scooping up phone books, and one of my favorite things about it was that there were the yellow pages and the white pages, so you could do a layer with the white pages and then you could do the next layer with the yellow pages so you could tell the difference and see what you had already covered. So yes, that’s a good strategy: use different colors or newsprint if you want to make multiple layers of paper mache. 

Salvadore Cresta: This statue effort maintains distinctive characteristics of Garfield the cat; is a synthesis of the character, all that deformed head of Michelangelo from the Ninja Turtles, which in the movie is the head of the storage eunuch. So you take characters of popular culture and you reduce them to a minimal compact expression like a symbol, which in fact reminds me a lot of pre-Columbian writing. What does this process mean to you? 

Adam Green: Yeah, so basically at some point I took the facial features of popular characters, cartoon characters like Garfield, Elmo, and Big Bird, and I reduced their facial features down to these simple cubic square kind of reductions, sort of like an alphabet of building blocks, and I could use these building blocks to reconfigure them to make architecture and design out of ’em. And I called this “alphabet house face.” So, “house face” is a sort of symbolic logo, sort of alphabet of my universe, which is called Regular World. So in this sense, the entire world is built out of hybrid materials, so there’s sort of encoded with this sort of sentimental language, I guess, of childhood. Yeah, so that is the terrain. That is the world, the sort of metaverse that the movie takes place in is made out of those pixels.

Song: The Moldy Peaches, “On Top” 

Salvador Cresta: Here we are seeing a little more of Adam’s art. The way you have distorted Mickey Mouse, who I think you call The Comedian, into a totem, a monstrous deity from a primitive culture, or a mandela, or even in this terrible paper shoe. Look what this obelisk has gone through. This is a series of drawings of saints, God, and this Donald Duck, beaten by a violent drug, decomposed, pierced by a tornado of knives, and finally, compacted and transformed into a possible letter of an alphabet that only exists in your mind. Adam, tell me more about all this. I’m fascinated by what you do. 

Adam Green: So yes, so the Mickey Mouse series is from an art show I did called the Transfiguration of the Comedian for an art show in Athens, Greece. And so yeah, so Mickey Mouse in my Regular World universe is known as the comedian and sort of like a cartoon god. I’ve gotten interested in the idea of the transmigration of the soul as an avatar—and I wanted to show the different ways, the kind of just different ways that this sort of soul could journey from everything It could get sort of sliced and diced as a sausage in time space, or it could be sent from the beginning of time to the end of time as an avatar shooting down a blockchain tunnel. Or it could be actually almost have a mystical afterlife experience where it could attain some kind of a transcendence or it could almost be cross sectioned or even put up to the face of reality as sort of almost like a sausage or a Rothko, a Rorschach Rothko, an animal pressed up against the slide. I was looking for all these different ways this soul could be pixelated or it could be somehow cosmically stretched or mutilated or even sedated or anesthetized almost to submission. 

So there was all these sort of different ways that the soul was treated in this show, and these are just different ways that emotions I was having, I was trying to illustrate in the, but in a way, I think I take a symbol like Mickey Mouse that I’m very familiar with how to draw the anatomy of, and then this way I can torture the symbol until it can do whatever I want it to do. That’s sort of my strategy towards working with symbols. I think I’m a symbolist artist. 

[Film clip] 

Salvador Cresta: Well, here we see the sultan’s palace, which is a mix of Big Bird and Garfield coming to what is said in that scene. Tell me, Adam, looking at the world as it is today, do you think the sultan has finally won the war against privacy? As you say in one part, everybody always is feeding off of everybody’s privacy? 

Adam Green: Yeah, well, I just think that it’s really hard these days to even talk about privacy because I feel like when people do talk about it, they rarely start with the foundational statement that privacy is something that we value and we think is important. And so even if we’re going to talk about suspending it for a reason to achieve some kind of specific societal goal, that it’s still important and we still want to try to keep it. I just don’t hear people talk about it that way, and I don’t feel the sense that people around me really care that much about privacy. People are always like, “Oh, what do I have to hide?” It’s like, well, it’s not really about that. I mean, I just think that society as a whole benefits from people kind of feeling comfortable. They have generally kind of an autonomy to do what they like [and] unless they want to share it with people, it’s kind of generally not people’s business if it’s not really harming other people. Anyways, well see. So I don’t think that anything’s really going to change unless people actually start saying that privacy is important to them and making decisions based on that. 

[Film clip] 

Salvador Cresta: You know, when Uncle Gary says on the mountain “all technology is natural,” I always found the term “artificial intelligence” confusing because in fact, computers are made with elements extracted from the earth, from nature. There is nothing artificial. Uncle Gary is talking about that. 

Adam Green: Yeah, I think that sort of the idea was if you look at your iPhone, your iPhone is in fact natural. I feel like sometimes when I’m looking at water, I feel like I can see electricity running through it, almost like there’s gleaming microchips inside of the water. And I feel like in a way, the ocean is sort of nature’s iPad. I think a lot of the way language is used in Aladdin is to try to use the idyllic meaning of words like the platonic ideal. So something like the iPad becomes a tablet as much as a tablet that Moses received the 10 Commandments on or something. 

Sometimes I think when I’m writing on my phone notes, I feel like is this sort of idyllic tablet almost like I think actually in Jewish mysticism like Kabbalah, there’s sort of an idea that the Torah was written with a black flame on white flame. And this is actually to me what the iPhone notes looks like, when you’re writing on the notes. It looks like you’re writing that way. So yeah, I think that there is sort of a funny kind of back and forth in Aladdin between nature and technology and maybe conflating them and saying they’re the same thing. 

Salvador Cresta: Adam, tell us something about the equation. God equals humans divided by nature plus aliens. 

Adam Green: So yeah, so the equation God equals humans divided by nature, plus aliens is an equation that is given by Uncle Gary in the movie that’s played by the genius comedic actor Jack Disheel, who also plays the Sultan—does double duty. And yeah, I just think that that is honestly just something that I thought of when I was really, really stoned. I wrote it down on a piece of paper and it just seemed completely true to me, and I just put it in the movie because it just seemed like it was true, and I hope people can relate to it. 

[Film clip] 

Salvador Cretsta: Alladin tells the princess that ironic is what comes after modern. Could you expand on it a little? 

Adam Green: That was really because when I was growing up in the nineties, people would kind of criticize artwork by calling it ironic. People would say, “Oh, did you hear this song? It’s just some stupid ironic song.” Or “Yeah, this movie is just some dumb ironic hipster BS.” So I was thinking that maybe people could own it because a lot of art movements got their name from people criticizing it, like impressionism and Fauvism. Those were originally negative things that were said about those artists. And then that became the movement’s name. So I was thinking, yeah, maybe all the art that’s made after the postmodern era might be lumped into being something that was just categorically called ironic art. Regardless of whether the people who made it were being incredibly sincere, they were self-conscious enough to understand postmodernism to the point that they had a context for themselves and that they were participating in an ironic art movement regardless. So maybe those institutions, like MoMA or the Tate Modern, if there was a new museum that had only art that was sort of postmodern and beyond could be called the New York Museum of Ironic Art or the Tate Museum of Ironic Art or something. 

[Film clip] 

Salvador Cresta: Adam, when are you going to release an album that is a pack of cigarettes with a QR code to download it? It would be so great. 

Adam Green: I still think that’s a good idea. I mean, maybe you could put out an album with something that people were going to use anyway, like some toilet paper or a bottle of conditioner or maybe like a six pack of beer so that people didn’t feel like they were just wasting their money. But I honestly feel also like if everyone that bought an album of mine back in the day gave me a few dollars now I would be set for years. So that would be pretty good. 

[Film clip] 

Salvador Cresta: Tell me about the Magical Americans. What the leader says when he’s decapitated at the end is so true. We must change the nature of what we wish for otherwise, with infinite printing, we are going to fill the cosmos with asparagus chairs, vampires in submarines, pointy bolts, and infinite shit. In fact, we have already collapsed a planet. 

Adam Green: Ralph is the head of the Magical Americans, which is a rebel army that’s pitted against the totalitarian and materialistic sultan of Regular World land. The rebel leader Ralph is played by the great actor Macaulay Culkin. He gives a speech to the people of the town saying they have to change the nature of what they wish for. You see what’s been happening is that my lamp in the movie is a 3D printer, and it’s been printing out all of these wishes for people like some of them that you mentioned, like asparagus chairs and pointy boots and jellyfish algorithms, the hair from last year’s haircut, everything you’ve ever lost. In a sense, there’s sort of this idea that it’s going to print out an analog version of the internet and fill the world with crap. This movie script was written in the wake of the Occupy Wall Street movement. So there was definitely something in the air about that we had to change the nature of what we wish for or the planet was going to collapse and the economy and the world was going to collapse. 

I think it actually reminds me a little bit of this sort of AI doomsday scenario called the paperclip theory, where it’s in this sort of thought experiment and AI is sort of told to build a paperclip and then ends up not only building a paperclip endlessly with absolutely no governance of what it’s doing, but it would kill you to build a paperclip out of your belt or it would fill up the whole planet with paperclips and junk. And yeah, so the idea of an ungoverned machine with no hand outside the machine to regulate it would just sort of ruin the world without even trying. So yeah, that kind of reminded me of that. But yeah, definitely the idea of printing out an analog version of the internet was sort of the idea of that statement. 

Salvador Cresta: Sorry, Adam, I wasn’t paying attention to you. I’m on Thanksr. Well friends, now we’ll leave Adam Green’s Aladdin and watch an animated trailer that was made to introduce one of Adam’s graphic novels, Subcultural Karate Turtles, featuring his song “Red Copper Room.” 

Song: Adam Green, “Red Copper Room”  

Salvador Cresta: Well, Adam, can you tell me a little about your graphic novels, Subcultural Karate Turtles and War And Paradise? I was looking at War And Paradise from the free PDF that can be downloaded from your website, and I thought it was just as great as your movie, one great idea or concept after another. 

Adam Green: Thank you. Yeah, so I do kind of see myself as a writer, as sort of a collector of concepts, and that’s something I’ve done since I was a teenager with a notebook. I just sort of decided that I was going to write down all the concepts that I was thinking of in my head and collect them as a giant never-ending scroll of ideas. And I kind of just draw from that. I mean, I’ve been writing in a never-ending scroll for over 20 years, and I have lots of lines and also lots of kind of dialogue that I’ll make up stream of consciousness, and I’ll give the lines to different characters that I have in my head. And every few years, I’ll make a movie or in these cases, graphic novels. And the story behind the graphic novels is pretty much that I wanted to make them as movies, but I couldn’t get funding, so, so they became graphic novels. 

For example, War And Paradise is from a screenplay that I wrote for a movie, and it’s exactly the same as the movie I was going to make, but I drew it with my friends, Toby Goodshank and Tom Bayne. We just sat around a kitchen table listening to Billy Joel for five or six months and drew this epic graphic novel War And Paradise that illustrates a war between humans and these sort of robotic insects that are manufactured by a sort of Google-like company. And there’s a giant conspiracy in the afterlife involving a sort of almost like Rodney Dangerfield as Donald Trump-type character. 

So yes, you get kind of an exploration of the afterlife and I read a lot of different texts about the afterlife, everything from Egyptian kind of things to the Tibetan Book of the Dead and Christian afterlife, different kinds of afterlives. 

And then the Subcultural Karate Turtles is a graphic novel that I also did with Toby and Tom, but it’s basically, it’s sort of about cultural theory. I mean, I consider myself to be a subcultural artist, and so I grew up looking up to other subcultural artists such as William S. Burroughs, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Harry Smith, Pati Smith and Basquiat, and those are the Ninja Turtles and the Master Splinter in the case of my Ninja Turtles. And they live in a subterranean subcultural layer of consciousness. And then when they arise above ground, they’re in the mainstream, which in this case looks a lot like the era or the time of the Japanese woodblock prints. So like the Edo era, Japan and the Floating World. So yeah, anyways, that book is actually presented as aliens that are at kabuki play about subculture, and then the curtain opens, and then you see this play about subcultural karate turtles as the kabuki play, it actually has the kabuki tropes, different kinds of themes from kabuki, devices from kabuki, which I was researching about during the quarantine. So these are some interesting comics, War And Paradise and Subcultural Karate Turtles. Yeah, you can actually get PDFs from them. You can just download PDFs of those comics from my website, adamgreen.info if you want to read them on your iPad or something. Or you can order physical copies of those books from Pioneer Works. Pioneerworks.org I think is the physical publisher of those comics. So either way, check ’em out. Thanks.  

Salvador Cresta: And please, Adam also tell us something about Medieval: 1,000 years of Dark Ages. 

Adam Green: Medieval:1,000 Years of Dark Ages is an epic poem that I wrote a few years ago. It is a dystopian epic poem where the future is seen in medieval terms, and it has all these concepts like crusader knights that are invading Silicon Valley, Jerusalem, or like three-headed quadrillion errors that are hosting these crazy decadent ketamine banquets and drinking out of noise canceling chalices, or the freaker wizard Merlin, who is hacking the hard drive of the universe, and an avatar soul migration, almost like the Renaissance where avatars are kind of entering into the afterlife through the blockchain. It was this sort of interest that I had at the time in this sort of eschatological medieval, or sorry, eschatological and messianic idea of AI and yeah, basically, oh, and you can actually watch an animated movie of this poem where I read the poem and then it’s animated like a medieval scroll by my friend the animator Tom Bayne with drawings that I did. 

And you can watch that on YouTube just type “Medieval: 1000 years of Dark Ages Adam Green, full movie.” There’s one version that has parts one through five, all as one big 45-minute movie and you can watch the whole poem. I hope that you like it. 

[Poem clip] 

Salvador Cresta: Well, right now I really want to poop. So we’ve reached the end of this episode, which was number 12. That’s one whole year of Midnight Music Review the Attic. Thank you very much, Adam, for being with us tonight, sharing your work. I am a fan of what you do and it has been very interesting to listen to you. We’ll see you in the next episode. Goodnight. Bye-bye.