Boyd Rice has always been a busy guy. He spent the 70s busy contributing to RE/Search, giving Betty Ford skinned sheep heads on silver platters, and hanging out with Anton LaVey. He spent the 80s busy founding The Abraxas Foundation and championing the innocence of Charles Manson by editing The Manson File. And since the 90s he's been busy researching Gnosticism, Grail Legends, and Merovingian lore. Oh, he also holds down a longstanding fascination with Tiki culture. All of which kind of makes you wonder where he found the time to make some of the most interesting and explorartory music of the last quarter of the century with NON and maintain slightly fruity views on little matters like race and nationality. The last part is particularly interesting as he happens to be my older brother's biological father. And my mum is a nice Jewish lady. While Rice has never affected my home life (my brother was 18 months old when my mother met my dad and didn't meet Rice until he was in his early 20s), the release of Gavin Watson's Skins & Punks—with its portrayal of young, racially mixed kids and its compelling, extraordinarily human insight into a movement shrouded in (often misplaced) controversy—got me thinking that I certainly still had a few questions about Rice, his relationship with nationalism and my mother. So I called her up. She is herself a prolific writer who lives in Northern California by the name of Laurie Lessen who really likes books (you'll see) and for some reason she still refers to Rice as 'B'. I'm pretty sure she is not referring to Blair Waldorf.(That is my mum over there looking at a tree)Vice: Hi Mom.
Laurie Lessen: Hi honeybear!So how did you meet Boyd?
It was either 1976 or 1977. I can't remember for sure, and although I'm a habitual archivist and have approximately 147 journals from which I could comb to find the "facts" of my encounter with B., I'd rather rely on pure memory precisely because it's so unreliable, mutable, and indeterminate. It was 1976 or 1977, let's say 1977, and I was 22 when I left Detroit where I'd been living with a musician. So I went to visit my sister who was living in Mission Beach, California, a beach town outside the city of San Diego. I loved the ocean and eventually got a small apartment there. Now, it's very important I tell you briefly about the books in my life at that time because my books have everything to do with my meeting B.Isn't that sort of tangential?
No!OK.
I was for the very first time discovering the works of the French Symbolists: Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Nerval, Mallarme, Leautreamont, Verlaine! Everywhere I went I carried Rimbaud's, A Season In Hell with me. I was also mad about the Dadaists and Surrealists: Breton, Tzara, Picabia, Hans Arp, Eluard, Michaux. For a girl from the Midwest it was as if I'd died and stumbled, intoxicated by poetry, into heaven. Anyway, Mission Beach was a small, lovely world of surfers and jocks and drug dealers. It was wonderful. So how did I actually meet B.? Maybe because of the drugs, I can't remember the specific moment. I think I happened to meet a friend of B.'s on the beach, and it was decided that, because my interests coincided with him and his friend's, I was to meet them both at an exhibit at one of the universities in San Diego. It was a sunny day and I'm walking up a sidewalk and see my friend and next to him is an incredibly tall, slender young man with opium-black hair, dressed all in black from his long-sleeved black shirt right down to his black canvas slippers. When I get close and meet him face to face, I see he has shocking blue eyes and extraordinarily chiseled bone structure. By the end of the day I have learned this young man, B., who was maybe 19 or 20 at the time, is profoundly kind, gentle and, to use a totally banal word, nice.That's definitely not something that people would assume about him based on quick listen to NON, I don't think.
I know. Hold on, there's more. So here is a handsome and nice boy, but more important here is a boy who knows every one of the poets and artists I was into! And that seals the friendship. At least for a while. So we became friends and nothing more. Our friendship became physical three or four years later when I was living in Northern California. By that time New Wave and Punk had exploded on to the scene. Although my best girlfriend was into country music and rockabilly and was sleeping with Sam Shepard, I was into standing in dark corners, alone in the Mabuhay Gardens in San Francisco, or in my apartment listening to The Stranglers, Nina Hagen, Echo and the Bunnymen and Patti Smith, or hanging out with all these junkies who really had hearts of gold. At that time B. had disappeared from my life when all of a sudden I heard about his invention: NON. Soon we were back in touch. Now, B. was not a skinhead at that time. During the short time we were "together" his character didn't seem very different from when I first met him in Southern California. Perhaps he was a little edgier, but so was I. It seemed to me he was still kind but the more we hung out the more I came to realize that he was somewhat afraid of things, not obvious things, it seemed he was afraid of death, whereas I wasn't. I know it's an outrageously subjective claim to make, but I'm making it, nonetheless. He seemed to be afraid of little things like police with drawn guns, whereas I didn't bat an eye at things like that. Death didn't scare me and yet, B. did seem to be a bit a-quiver on the inside! And that surprised me more than anything, at the time, about him.So how does that person compare to the "character" who evolved over the next decade or so?
I didn't keep up with the character. Inadvertently, I was gifted with a pregnancy that saved me from the destructive life I'd been living. B. and I were together all through the torrential rains and flood in Northern California, of January 1982 and much was washed out of my body, but much more had entered. When the rains subsided B. was gone and he soon became irrevocably irrelevant to my life.You're obviously a Jewish lady, how do you reconcile the fact that he actively and vocally subscribed to race hate?
I cannot and will not reconcile B.'s skinhead/race-hate persona' as many years later over the phone, he assured me it was. Let me repeat: I cannot and will not reconcile B.'s skinhead/race-hate persona. A persona is, after all, the person we make others believe ourselves to be. The imagery and symbolism of hate is still, as far as I'm concerned, hate. Perhaps it's even a more pure hate, a hate enhanced due to the nature of art because the persona as mask is an art-speak. To make such a sham of art as well as language, as it looks like B. did, simply mortifies me. As a poet and a writer, I live my life by a code of, for lack of a better word, "truthfulness," and hate is only one particle of humanity's truth. So to cultivate hate can only be, in my mind, the opposite of genius because it leaves all complexity and innovation out of the mix. Hate is old, old, old, ancient. In my mind, it is still love and tolerance that is the most radical stance one can take. I know I'm all over the place here. Sorry. It's just that I get all worked up when I think about hate. God, it's so easy to hate. The difficult thing to do is to love. Who's courageous enough to do it? Is B. now that he's older? I don't know. I don't know him and don't really want to. I want to be around people who can teach me something more difficult. My children do that for me. So does my husband who I've been married to for almost 24 years! And poetry. Rimbaud and Baudelaire!How did you feel not being mentioned in any of the formal or informal biographies about him and NON and that whole time and movement?
I have mixed feelings about not being mentioned in B.'s biographies. Mostly I have felt enormously relieved. I didn't want the choices I made in my early twenties to contaminate my children's lives. But, because I am always concerned with the fact that women are so often, casually, and typically written out of history one way or another, I've sometimes thought, "Hey! What about me! I was in his life, too!" But that's just the pissy little girl in me whining. I want to be remembered for my own achievements, my poetry, my stories, my voluminous journals, my collages, and weird drawings. But the goal isn't to be 'remembered', anyway. The goal is just to keep on bringing forth the work. To work and work, poem after poem, day after day.ARIANNA REICHE
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Laurie Lessen: Hi honeybear!So how did you meet Boyd?
It was either 1976 or 1977. I can't remember for sure, and although I'm a habitual archivist and have approximately 147 journals from which I could comb to find the "facts" of my encounter with B., I'd rather rely on pure memory precisely because it's so unreliable, mutable, and indeterminate. It was 1976 or 1977, let's say 1977, and I was 22 when I left Detroit where I'd been living with a musician. So I went to visit my sister who was living in Mission Beach, California, a beach town outside the city of San Diego. I loved the ocean and eventually got a small apartment there. Now, it's very important I tell you briefly about the books in my life at that time because my books have everything to do with my meeting B.Isn't that sort of tangential?
No!OK.
I was for the very first time discovering the works of the French Symbolists: Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Nerval, Mallarme, Leautreamont, Verlaine! Everywhere I went I carried Rimbaud's, A Season In Hell with me. I was also mad about the Dadaists and Surrealists: Breton, Tzara, Picabia, Hans Arp, Eluard, Michaux. For a girl from the Midwest it was as if I'd died and stumbled, intoxicated by poetry, into heaven. Anyway, Mission Beach was a small, lovely world of surfers and jocks and drug dealers. It was wonderful. So how did I actually meet B.? Maybe because of the drugs, I can't remember the specific moment. I think I happened to meet a friend of B.'s on the beach, and it was decided that, because my interests coincided with him and his friend's, I was to meet them both at an exhibit at one of the universities in San Diego. It was a sunny day and I'm walking up a sidewalk and see my friend and next to him is an incredibly tall, slender young man with opium-black hair, dressed all in black from his long-sleeved black shirt right down to his black canvas slippers. When I get close and meet him face to face, I see he has shocking blue eyes and extraordinarily chiseled bone structure. By the end of the day I have learned this young man, B., who was maybe 19 or 20 at the time, is profoundly kind, gentle and, to use a totally banal word, nice.
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I know. Hold on, there's more. So here is a handsome and nice boy, but more important here is a boy who knows every one of the poets and artists I was into! And that seals the friendship. At least for a while. So we became friends and nothing more. Our friendship became physical three or four years later when I was living in Northern California. By that time New Wave and Punk had exploded on to the scene. Although my best girlfriend was into country music and rockabilly and was sleeping with Sam Shepard, I was into standing in dark corners, alone in the Mabuhay Gardens in San Francisco, or in my apartment listening to The Stranglers, Nina Hagen, Echo and the Bunnymen and Patti Smith, or hanging out with all these junkies who really had hearts of gold. At that time B. had disappeared from my life when all of a sudden I heard about his invention: NON. Soon we were back in touch. Now, B. was not a skinhead at that time. During the short time we were "together" his character didn't seem very different from when I first met him in Southern California. Perhaps he was a little edgier, but so was I. It seemed to me he was still kind but the more we hung out the more I came to realize that he was somewhat afraid of things, not obvious things, it seemed he was afraid of death, whereas I wasn't. I know it's an outrageously subjective claim to make, but I'm making it, nonetheless. He seemed to be afraid of little things like police with drawn guns, whereas I didn't bat an eye at things like that. Death didn't scare me and yet, B. did seem to be a bit a-quiver on the inside! And that surprised me more than anything, at the time, about him.So how does that person compare to the "character" who evolved over the next decade or so?
I didn't keep up with the character. Inadvertently, I was gifted with a pregnancy that saved me from the destructive life I'd been living. B. and I were together all through the torrential rains and flood in Northern California, of January 1982 and much was washed out of my body, but much more had entered. When the rains subsided B. was gone and he soon became irrevocably irrelevant to my life.You're obviously a Jewish lady, how do you reconcile the fact that he actively and vocally subscribed to race hate?
I cannot and will not reconcile B.'s skinhead/race-hate persona' as many years later over the phone, he assured me it was. Let me repeat: I cannot and will not reconcile B.'s skinhead/race-hate persona. A persona is, after all, the person we make others believe ourselves to be. The imagery and symbolism of hate is still, as far as I'm concerned, hate. Perhaps it's even a more pure hate, a hate enhanced due to the nature of art because the persona as mask is an art-speak. To make such a sham of art as well as language, as it looks like B. did, simply mortifies me. As a poet and a writer, I live my life by a code of, for lack of a better word, "truthfulness," and hate is only one particle of humanity's truth. So to cultivate hate can only be, in my mind, the opposite of genius because it leaves all complexity and innovation out of the mix. Hate is old, old, old, ancient. In my mind, it is still love and tolerance that is the most radical stance one can take. I know I'm all over the place here. Sorry. It's just that I get all worked up when I think about hate. God, it's so easy to hate. The difficult thing to do is to love. Who's courageous enough to do it? Is B. now that he's older? I don't know. I don't know him and don't really want to. I want to be around people who can teach me something more difficult. My children do that for me. So does my husband who I've been married to for almost 24 years! And poetry. Rimbaud and Baudelaire!How did you feel not being mentioned in any of the formal or informal biographies about him and NON and that whole time and movement?
I have mixed feelings about not being mentioned in B.'s biographies. Mostly I have felt enormously relieved. I didn't want the choices I made in my early twenties to contaminate my children's lives. But, because I am always concerned with the fact that women are so often, casually, and typically written out of history one way or another, I've sometimes thought, "Hey! What about me! I was in his life, too!" But that's just the pissy little girl in me whining. I want to be remembered for my own achievements, my poetry, my stories, my voluminous journals, my collages, and weird drawings. But the goal isn't to be 'remembered', anyway. The goal is just to keep on bringing forth the work. To work and work, poem after poem, day after day.ARIANNA REICHE