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Pop Culture
Jun 24, 2017, 07:00AM

I Had to Get Out

A 2017 Interview magazine interview with artist Mark Bradford vs. a 2016 BOMB magazine interview with novelist Nell Zink.

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Mark Bradford: You know, I grew up in a hair salon.

Nell Zink: People with magazines. Different world.

Bradford: Well, the climate was right for the story.

Zink: They’ll buy it. Because warthogs are just not polite. (laughs

Bradford: They show you what they want you to see and then you have to kind of disappear on your own and start talking to other people. So I grabbed my backpack and wandered.

***

Zink: I moved into this dark room and never looked back. 

Bradford: It blew my mind. I had to get out.

Zink: I tended to take sort of an ethical view of bands and their songs, but nobody wants to hear that, so I thought I could analyze and assess animals based on their ethical qualities. 

Bradford: Often people just want the easy narrative. 

Zink: Either that or it's some impenetrable prose poem full of modernist experiments I can't make head or tail of, which I'm expected to like and be interested in because I'm arty. 

***

Bradford: Oh, shut up.

Zink: Nope. You asked why I moved to Tel Aviv. 

Bradford: I’m pretty fluid. It's like trying to make a movie in the fast lane of the Santa Monica Freeway with the top down. 

Zink: The reduction in the cast of characters makes things more dramatic, and that's what Philly anarchism is like.

Bradford: I wanted to extend this conversation into something I call urgency. 

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