He moves from town to town, renting this apartment and then that; he stays in, playing his guitar, writing, putting songs together, painting, working on his novel. He wants to be a stranger (Deleuze would say: to become imperceptible. They called Burroughs El hombre invisible, didn’t they? (see them before they see you. Avoid them)). He tours; he plays in bare feet, if he is happy, you can see it, but if he is not, he will not hide that, either.
Bill Callahan: I have heard the new songs he’s playing on his new tour, which are as fine as everything he has done. I won’t try, in a few lines, to invoke them. Sometimes I dream of writing a short book on Smog – for, say, the new series on albums from Continuum Press (I would write on The Doctor Came at Dawn, which is an album I like to say is absolute, that is, it has no relation to anything else). Yes, a short book, to get away from anything academic (the poison of the academy, which kills anything it touches): limpid, resonant …
Derrida always said you must incorporate the signature of what you write on in your own signature. That’s why he is critical, in a recent book of interviews, of Deleuze, Foucault, even Lyotard: none of them, he seems to say, takes the written risks that he takes. Except Lacan. And it is Lacan he acknowledges (but Derrida is in conversation with a psychoanalyst). So a book on Smog would have to be Smoglike and Bill Callahan’s signature would have to sing in my own. My words would have to sing with his voice, resonating with it.
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