Interview

ANDERSON: I think they may only go to Oklahoma. There’s something called the Chisholm Trail, but I don’t know if that one goes up that way or has anything to do with cattle. That’s a good one for Wikipedia. In three minutes, we could have our biggest misunderstandings cleared up. Are you reading anything during your travels?

COCKER: I’m getting towards the end of The American Short Story: Volume 1. It takes me a long time to get through things. It’s a good collection—it starts just postwar and then keeps going after that. I think I’m at about 1985 now. I’ve only got a few stories left.

ANDERSON: I love reading short stories.

COCKER: Well, I’ve found it good because I’ve discovered a few writers I’d never heard of before. It’s like getting a compilation album, where you might find two or three artists you like, and then you go and investigate them a bit further.

ANDERSON: The Internet has accelerated that process. The thing I was saying about The Menil Collection—that’s something everyone goes through, where they learn about one thing or one artist, and it then connects you to three others, and that then connects you to three others. You follow this path like you might if you were spending time in a library. But now, while you’re reading about something, the other things that it refers to are highlighted, and you can just click on them, and that takes you instantly to the next thing. I do like Wikipedia.

COCKER: You’re saying that it’s a positive thing?

ANDERSON: Well, I would say that some of the things that I’ve learned a bit about recently, I wouldn’t have necessarily put the effort into learning about otherwise. And so I like libraries and the slower process as well, but I do enjoy this Wikipedia.

COCKER: It’s funny now how you can intensely investigate one very particular thing, and then it can lead you to other things through links and stuff like that. It’s like you’re going on this selective, very precise detour. But then it is strange because with it being so quick, there must be a difference. Like you said, before the Internet, you’d maybe get interested in something and then you’d have to go to a library in a different town to find out more, and then that would give you a lead. It was kind of like detective work,
and you would accumulate knowledge over a much longer period of time.

ANDERSON: Maybe you would retain more of it.

COCKER: But now it’s like you suddenly go into, like . . . What’s that drug that takes you on a very short but intense kind of psychedelic trip? I think it’s called DMT or something like that.

ANDERSON: Mescaline?

COCKER: It’s called . . . something. There’s one that I heard about where apparently it only lasts about 40 seconds, but while it’s happening, it’s very intense, and you sense that the time goes all weird so it seems like you’ve been tripping for four hours or something.

ANDERSON: That could be an analogy for the way we learn on the Internet.

COCKER: Well, in a way it is, isn’t it? Because you suddenly kind of binge on information about this one thing and you maybe learn a year’s worth of research in an hour.

ANDERSON: I will learn all about this drug right now just by typing “40-second hallucinatory trip” into Wikipedia.

COCKER: Right, and then you’ll probably find out where you can get it online.

ANDERSON: And there will be a direct link to a generic version. [both laugh] I had something else I meant to ask you. Did you enjoy your trip to the North Pole?

COCKER: Oh, yeah. I didn’t quite get to the North Pole, but I got to the west coast of Greenland. For the readers who don’t know why I went there, I suppose I should explain: I went on a trip organized by a group called Cape Farewell, and they take creative people on a boat to the North Pole. It’s kind of a climate-change-awareness thing. So I went for that reason, but I also went because Iwas curious to see what the Arctic looked like.I knew that I would probably never go there under my own steam.

ANDERSON: I followed your travels via the Cape Farewell website. Do you have to be English to go on that trip?

COCKER: No.

ANDERSON: Right, because Ryuichi Sakamoto went, and he’s not English.

COCKER: Laurie Anderson was there too.

ANDERSON: I want to go on this thing. Maybe the people running it, if they read this article . . .

COCKER: I could try to put in a good word for you if you want, Wes.

ANDERSON: That would be great.

COCKER: The trip I took was probably the most luxurious one—usually they go on a much smaller boat, like a wooden boat, with maybe only 20 people onboard. But the one we were on was a decommissioned Russian research vessel. Normally, the boat takes pensioners on a kind of eco-cruise.

ANDERSON: So it was quite comfortable.

COCKER: Yeah, and I much preferred the comfort version.