‘The Wine of Summer’ is a beautiful film about love lost and found, and the complexities of life while discovering who you are. It was filmed primarily in and around Barcelona, and the imagery is breathtaking.
Language and poetry are endlessly fascinating. The most brilliant work can be so sparse yet so full of meaning. That’s what I’m looking for in a song: imagery to describe things in ways that are perfectly concise. I’m constantly trying to find one hard, crystal thing.
I remember when I started writing lyrics, I was very grand. I tried to use a lot of symbols,because I thought that’s how songwriting should be – with imagery and metaphor. I figured, after a while, maybe I should just write it as I would say in real life.
Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be.
Africa should not again face isolation or stigmatisation based on ignorance and unrepresentative imagery.
King Princess is like an attitude. I take comfort in it as kind of a shield to exist in, where I can make cohesive art. And it’s androgynous, which is intentional. It’s important to me that my art exist in a kind of neutral space, genderless to some degree. And give the listener some imagery to hold on to.
The more I’ve gotten interested in writing about history and making sense of myself within the continuum of history, the more I’ve turned to paintings, to art. I look to the imagery of art to help me understand something about my own place in the world.
When I watch a movie I don’t really care too much about the plot – not that it isn’t important, but what I remember is the visual imagery, something that happens in an individual scene.
Like Robert Mapplethorpe, Helmut Newton, and so many others before me, sexual imagery has always been a part of my photography.
We can tell from the imagery a tomb was looted from a particular period of time, and we can alert INTERPOL to watch out for antiquities from that time that may be offered for sale.
Things like ‘mad as a hatter’ or ‘grinning like a Cheshire cat’, are so powerful that music and songs incorporate the imagery. Writers, artists, illustrators, a lot of them have incorporated that.
Poetry carries the imagery which is large enough for the kind of life we want for ourselves.
When you’re a kid, you learn whatever your parents think until you start taking in media. Because all your friends are your age as well, media is the third parent that you ever have. So I think about that a lot, what visual imagery is teaching us, and media in general having a huge impact.
When it comes to influences, we are influenced not just by Japanese and overseas metal acts, but J-pop acts too. One Japanese rock band we’re particularly fond of is Seikima-II. We were attracted by their brand of devil imagery and of course, their high-quality musicianship.
‘Betsy’ is one of my favorites because it is the one to which I’ve imposed the least clear narrative. To me, it’s so much more about the feeling – desperation – than any kind of story at all. There’s very little imagery or character development; it’s just about a deep and desperate search for something.
With any hallucinations, if you can do functional brain imagery while they’re going on, you will find that the parts of the brain usually involved in seeing or hearing – in perception – have become super active by themselves. And this is an autonomous activity; this does not happen with imagination.
Everyone knows that when you look at a television ad, you do not expect to get information. You expect to see delusion and imagery.
I’ve done some effects shots. I’ve done some compositing. And in ‘Just Like Heaven’ did a lot of, like, motion control and things like that. But never done, like, computer-generated imagery in action.
I think I make better use of language and imagery than when I started out.
Most of the time, as an artist, I can be self-indulgent, fulfilling my own impulses, embracing imagery that contains poetry on my own terms, without immediate regard to an audience or the particular placement of my finished work.
There’s such an extreme feeling to be in love, especially in quite an emotionally destructive relationship, where you’re both kind of really bad for each other, but you love each other so much. Those extreme emotions, I think, can only be described with extreme imagery.
The religious imagery and fairytales that formed our shared cultural references have been replaced by the cult of celebrity. Marilyn is the sex goddess, Camilla Parker Bowles is cast as the wicked witch, Che Guevara is the revolutionary. Celebrities have become visual shorthand for narratives that shape our lives.
The ability to have somebody read something and see it, or for somebody to paint an entire landscape of visual imagery with just sheets of words – that’s magical. That’s what I’ve been trying to strive for – to draw a clear picture, to open up a new dimension.
