I’ll Never Write My Memoirs

Metadata

• Author:: [[ Grace Jones and Paul Morley ]]
• Full Title:: I’ll Never Write My Memoirs
• Category:: #books

Highlights

• Where it ended up was the fault of the white, straight music business, which drained it of all its blackness and gayness, its rawness and volatility, its original contagious, transgressive abandon. (Location 2528)
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• There was also a robotic quality to my performance, a mix of the human, the android, and the humanoid, and that was also disorienting to those expecting to see a black woman essentially act either like a passive black woman playing along with the rules, or a strong, defiant black woman blasting through the rules with what were still essentially compliant black “soul” elements. (Location 4256)
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• Theatrically, I was not thinking, This is a way of finding a different way to be black, lesbian, male, female, animal. I didn’t want my body language to betray my origins. I wanted to use my body to express how I had liberated myself from my background, ignored obstacles, and created something original, based on my own desires, fears, and appetites. I was using my body as a language. A language that comes from a dark continent. And dark is dangerous. (Location 4261)
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• You don’t necessarily realize that you are onto something as you are doing it. It blossoms as you do it, and it turns into something that happens to be unique. At first, when we performed it live, people didn’t clap. They didn’t understand what the fuck was going on. And then jaws dropped. There was a slight state of shock. I could feel it coming off them, but of course I couldn’t react, as I was acting as if in a play. I was in another reality. It wasn’t Grace Jones onstage: it was Grace Jones playing Grace Jones, with the help of other people playing Grace Jones. I couldn’t come out of character. (Location 4283)
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• Orson Welles once told me on a talk show, The Dinah Shore Show, that I raped the audience. I had just performed a song, and to be honest, in the confines of the TV studio, I was not particularly extreme. For me, fairly reserved. There was still enough of the drama for him to see something. He said, “Certain people seduce an audience, flatter an audience, beseech an audience. Grace, you rape an audience—your show is a sexual assault.” He meant it in a good way. . . . (Location 4303)
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• I remember this one time when Keith and Andy were waiting for me because Keith was going to paint my body, and Andy was going to watch and take photographs. I was late. They waited two hours. They waited patiently, because they expected it to happen. When I did arrive, on the back of a motorcycle, Keith was fine, because, he said, as soon as the task at hand was under way, I was totally committed. I was in the moment. (Location 4561)
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• I survived on corporate parties for quite a few years when I wasn’t making albums, fed up with what was expected of me, fed up with being treated as though my best years were behind me. Making personal appearances helped me carry on being my own sugar daddy without having to engage with a music industry that really didn’t suit me in the 1990s. The mix of fashion and music is perfect for the luxury brands. You can live well on five or six events a year. They spend an absolute fortune on these parties. The money they spend on the flowers alone is staggering. I find out what they pay for flowers, and I make sure I am getting paid a little more than that. You find that they have paid $200,000 to fly flowers in from some exotic country, but they only want to pay the artist $50,000. I say, “I don’t think the flowers should be more than me. I should be the big flower, the big, unusual flower. The flower that costs the most. The people are not there waiting for the flowers to appear.” That’s one way of putting value on what you do. (Location 4667)
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• You can tell why there are so few female film directors. It’s the same with any job that society has decided can only be done by a man: They find ways to undermine and undervalue a woman doing that job. And the fact that you end up saying “they” makes you sound paranoid. But there is no doubt that a particular job is usually for the boys: If a woman tries to do it, she is treated as though she is doing something wrong, even perverse. What are the chances of (Location 5040)
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• There was this world where friends and friends close enough to be family were disappearing around you, leaving you feeling very vulnerable. AIDS was a dreadful, chaotic amplification of the deathless facts of mortality that we evaded while we partied in the ’70s. After the years of hard partying and sweating because of pleasure, it was becoming more and more a case of sticking around. Hanging on as people very close to you suddenly dropped out of sight. Keith worked until the end. He couldn’t stop. He had so much to say. He should still be saying it. It’s a world he helped to create. He should still be watching it, reacting to it, drawing it, brightening it. He was doing exhibitions all over the place up until two weeks before he died. He wasn’t even in bed for those two weeks. We all knew. It wasn’t talked about much. We didn’t have the words. I didn’t have the words. (Location 5082)
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• Any little scratch, feeling under the weather—vague symptoms, rashes, infections, marks on the skin, it was surely coming to get you. It was not a good time. You think you are next. Everyone in your circle, your crowd, might be next, the ones you had been hanging around since the days when you would have quick, glancing encounters with people as you passed through a city, a club, a party, a scene. The world seemed to accuse a certain section of people as though they had brought it on themselves through their careless, deviant behavior. Those were dangerous days, but we didn’t know it at the time. We thought we were unstoppable. Tina Chow was one of the first women to be infected. She was diagnosed in 1989, having contracted it in the mid-’80s after an affair with Kim d’Estainville. He was quite a notorious bisexual playboy, and she knew at the time she was being a little naughty. Naughtiness was not meant to lead to such devastation. (Location 5094)
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• I was in the hospital with Angelo when he was very ill, shrinking in front of my eyes, and the closer you were to it in the flesh, so to speak, the more you began to understand about the reality. Some people would run away from visiting those dying in the hospital, but for many, seeing their friends ill cleared up of some of the preconceptions and prejudices that were circulating at the time. It cleared away the mud and misreading surrounding the epidemic. It made it more real, and somehow, even as it was awful, less vague and horrible. It was something that could be dealt with, and what was important was to face up to it, not turn away from it and keep it amorphous. Keeping it a puzzle was helping no one. I still feel there was a conspiracy. If you hang out long enough with Timothy Leary you realize how the government is always asking for new lethal poisons to be invented. For security reasons, for defense reasons, to control populations, they would synthesize a substance that was not meant to exist in nature. Spies need to be killed, terrorists executed. Usually the government has the antidote. This might have been something that they started to develop, and then it got away from them before they were able to discover an antidote. The way AIDS appeared out of nowhere, it makes you wonder. They blamed it on fucking monkeys. Oh, yeah, of course. Makes perfect sense. I think someone high up took a look at what was happening in the New York sex rooms in the mid-’70s, in the secret Studio 54 chambers, the straights that swung, the colors that mixed, and the gays exploring everything, and thought, We need to sort this out. They spiked the punch. I remember when I did my shows during the ’90s, I started to change some lyrics to acknowledge those who had gone. I imagined all my friends who had died were watching me and I was keeping some sort of flame going. For me to shed the depression and guilt I felt, that I had survived the parties, it was as though when I was onstage it was my job to keep them alive. I would do a riff about seeing them in the light; I would stare into the spotlight on me to the point of blindness, which is why I often wore sunglasses onstage, and talk about them being in the light, still alive. I would completely believe that my friends who had died were all around me, and that we were still together. Doing so helped me balance a little better on the tightrope. (Location 5251)
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• After he died, I found out that he always kept a photograph of me inside his wallet. He didn’t think I had let him down, and he never turned his back on me. I thought he was ashamed of me, but he carried a photo of me around with him. However far apart we might have traveled at times, I think he was always praying for me and protecting me. After he died, my mom carried on where he left off. As my brother Noel says in a sermon he often gives in church, “Other people often pray for you more powerfully than you can pray for yourself.” (Location 5360)
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• I have to be particularly choosy about who I enter a relationship with. I always was, but I am even more so now. Because I feel as though I am many ages all at once, it becomes increasingly difficult to set out on a relationship with someone of a certain age who perhaps feels more fixed. I am an energy in search of energy. There aren’t many places you can go where the energy you want hangs out. (Location 5611)
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• I come from the underground. I am never comfortable in the middle of the stream, flowing in the same direction as everyone else. I think people assume that’s where I want to be, famous for being famous, because as part of what I do there is a high level of showing off, but my instinct is always to resist the pull of the obvious. It’s not easy, especially when you have had any sort of success, because then people want you to repeat what it was that made you a success, even if your instinct is to move on, or to want to change, or have other ideas. My biggest success came not because I was chasing it but because I was following through on my impulse to change. What was exciting about those early Compass Point sessions was that we were making something that sounded new, that came from the outside. We weren’t chasing fashion. Later, that kind of sound seemed fashionable. At the time we recorded it, it sounded almost uncannily, riskily fresh. (Location 5716)
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