Metro Pulse/Music/Lydia Lunch

What:
Lydia Lunch with Reality Asylum

When:
Thursday, Oct. 23, 9 p.m. (Unlike typical Pilot Light shows, Lunch will take the stage promptly at 10 p.m., so get there early.)

Where:
The Pilot Light

Cost:
$10

Lydia Lunch plays public psycotherapist with her art

by Joe Tarr

There's not much in a Lydia Lunch piece that one could call uplifting.

These lines, from "Miserable Bastards," which she'll be reading tonight at the Pilot Light, are typical: "You can't save anyone from themselves. You will lose everything attempting to play savior. You will never ever heal the terminally wounded.... They'll never feel beautiful enough no matter how beautiful they are to you. They'll never feel loved enough no matter much you fucking adore them.... They won't be happy until you're as miserable as they are."

She started her career at the age of 16 shrieking and fronting the "no wave" group Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. Since then, she's tackled just about every other artistic medium, including spoken word, film, photography, acting, and poetry. Through most of her art, she's taken a confrontational approach.

"I'm always focusing on the negative. Which doesn't mean I don't think what I do has a positive result," Lunch says. "But these issues have to be dealt with—they're real issues. The extremes of passion, obsession, they're my calling cards."

She's sitting in the restaurant of the downtown hotel, while baseball fans fret over the Cubs-Marlins game on a large screen TV nearby. One of the more outrageous and thoughtful provocateurs of the past three decades, Lunch seemed nevertheless quite at ease in sleepy Knoxville. "Oh, I love the South," she says, adding that she lived in New Orleans for a few years and has considered moving to North Carolina.

It's her first trip to Knoxville, however. She's in town to shoot still photography for the Asia Argento movie being filmed here. For someone who writes regularly about death, murder, suicide, rape, and drug abuse, she's remarkably warm and welcoming. But she's pretty easy to get fired up. Just ask her about politics or American culture.

She's also fronted 8 Eyed Spy and has collaborated with several other musicians, including Nick Cave, Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, Michael Gira, and Marc Almond. She lent her chilling vocals to the Sonic Youth song "Death Valley '69."

She's worked on, written or starred in some 30 films, including several of Richard Kern's underground movies, including The Right Side of My Brain and Fingered, where she explored the themes of sexual violence and desire.

Recently, she published the fourth volume of Sex and Guts, an anthology edited with Gene Gregorits, with whom she's also working on a novel.

Lunch frames her art as an attempt to be free and express herself. "Most people are not free and they don't even realize it. There are so many methods in which our time and attention are stolen from us. TV, video games, sports, rock music, radio, the computer—all of these things steal our time and energy and leave very little time left over at the end of the day," Lunch says. "The consumer society is set up to force you into work so you can want and therefore buy more things so it can keep you in your little cubby and prevent you from any kind of protest or creativity."

Does Lunch feel free? "I feel very free, I strive for freedom. I strive to be liberated from any kind of push, pull, habit, ritual. But sometimes you get swept up in things. That's what my goal as a public psychotherapist is all about, is calling myself up on my repeated infatuations, desires and obsessions and trying to straddle that fine line between decoding them and not falling victim to them. Without having to eliminate them altogether."

Talking politics with Lunch can be a bleak undertaking. She has little faith left in the political system and not much hope it can be fixed, short of some kind of revolution. "Right now the political systems is in such a lockdown and such a corporate stranglehold that there's very little hope," she says. "So I don't know what the solution is. I am not a solutionist, which is what people have complained about me for years. I'm not a politician. My job is not to offer solutions false or otherwise. I can only articulate the dilemma we're in.

"If history repeats itself, which is does, and we're in the '50s, which we are, I hope the '60s or a reinvention of the revolution that happened in the '60s is coming again," she adds. "And I'm very positive about the war protests that happened all over the world."

In the meantime, Lunch says she'll just keep doing what she's always done. "I'm just an outspoken woman who has an extreme amount of passion who feels a need to be heard and to create."