Matthew Coleman occupies bandwith and minds on his Myspace. He also treats the gourmet readers to his regular Provocative Pages, of which we at PBHP simply can't get enough. He is, bdesides, the lead singer for The Ungodly Hours. Which doesn't prevent him from directing films. He is, in other words, an accomplished man.
Please tell us (in any order) : who you are, what you’re trying to do, why, what you’re actually doing, why the discrepancy (if any), and who you’d like to become.
My name is Matthew Coleman. I am a filmmaker and a writer. I write short fiction and have been the right hand man to Lee Rourke at an online literary forum called Scarecrow. On top of this I am currently wrestling with the soon to be released Social Disease magazine, as well as Faux Pas Magazine, which will be launched in March ‘07. And as all of this spins joyously around me I am editing a collection of cutting edge fiction with Andrew Gallix.
In a nut: I’m a provocateur out to perpetuate ‘The Provocative Pages’, which is a boisterous banner I write beneath. It is a kind of pastiche of pulp and pornography. But I am still an infant, an offensive child who curses aloud, who shouts expletives and laughs, an enfant terrible, of sorts, grappling with my words whilst full of shits and giggles. But it is still too early to see who this beast of a child will grow up to be, what kind of a man he shall become, what kind of a jabbering madman will be his metamorphosis? Will he still keep that look of lust in his eyes with the ping in his pants as he hops about the city full to the brim with a wild kind of energy that’s bursting at the seams?
Hell, only time will tell, and that bitch named time can be mean!
Do you draw inspiration from artists who don’t work in your branch, and if so: who, and why/how?
I never gave two flying shits for anything whilst growing up. I never read a book for pleasure until I was twenty. I had shit for sense, I truly did. But since I got turned on by literature and learning I’ve been self-educating myself fiendishly ever since, cramming Christ knows what into this spinning brainpan of mine that sits within my skull. I have soaked up so much, like a newborn child, that it seems dizzying on retrospective. So much inspires me, so very much. But the saddest thing of all is that I will never read every book I want to read, or see every film I want to see, its impossible, just utterly impossible that it drags one down a notch with the doldrums.
What do you reject, push back, loathe, steer clear of? Does it help you to exist?
I loathe a hell of a lot of things in this world, a hell of a lot, and too many to go into now, for it’d be a savage word lashing and my mood is far too delicate to leap sideways into the excrement of the world around me. But these things I reject and loathe have made me who I am, one way or another, they have effected my choices, my thoughts, my decisions, which in turn has carved out the character who I am, for good or ill. What I will say is that I spend most of my life with my head and my arse in the clouds and a lot of things escape me. I hunker down in the world of my own manifestation that bubbles away in my mind and there I sit there whipping the words out as they roll rapidly through me.
Who do you secretly – shamefully perhaps – admire?
I have read a quite a bit since my eyes opened up to books, a lot of American writers, you know, the usual suspects, and a lot of the great minds from France and Northern Europe. I’m a cinema junky to boot, especially world cinema and I’ll make it my personal mission to get my mitts on movies from every corner of the globe. Thinking more about this I may be bold to say that pornography, Henry Miller, Hunter S Thompson and William S Burroughs have certainly left a firm stamp on me as a lot of my writing can be intense, aggressive, and most of it deals with sex, in one form or another.
In truth I admire things that move me, jolt me, grab me by the throat and throttle me, no matter what they are. I want to be left breathless. I want to be beaten and I want to weep, for there is nothing finer than being kicked awake by a saying, a line in a book, a scene in a film, or a painting. I want intensity, I yearn for intensity, crave it, need it. As soon as this jolt happens I then hunt down everything that this creator has to offer the world and I inject it into my mind, my thoughts, my emotions. What is more joyous than finding a writer who grabs you so fucking hard and whispers so wonderfully at your self that you’re shaken so badly afterwards that you don’t know what to do? Nothing, there is nothing better, nothing as potent and powerful as that, and there are so many more people out there of sheer wonderment just waiting for you to stumble across them.
What’s your biggest fear regarding your art?
I do not fear anything with my art. As I said before I am an infant with it and have not yet to even begin to grow proverbial hair on my balls. Everyone reacts differently to art, everyone, and that’s its beauty. What can make some shit their pants with fear can make another shoot their wad. Some people seriously hate the things I write about, yet others are amused by the whole thing. That’s the way it is, the way it’ll always be. It is all a matter of taste. You just got to reach out to the ones who are down with a devious mind. But thinking more about this I suppose that the only actual fear I feel is that I would not be able to create. This would be death. I have to create. I go mad when I cannot do it and erupt into that of a detestable beast, a snarling son of Satan that one should keep locked away, forever.
Does your art relate to any political, social, or spiritual conceptions you may have? Should it?
No, I wouldn’t say so, not yet. For the last few years I have spent my time writing and writing, that is all I’ve been doing, just churning out short stories and fucking around with style, form, ideas, seeing what comes out and why. Trial and error, that is what it’s been with my writing and my film, a long series of trial and error, of seeing what works and what evidently doesn’t. I am not content with what I have done so far, and I have not even begun to say what I want to say. I am still practising, experimenting, just plain getting my kicks doing what I’m doing and still wanting to do more. I have become addicted, terribly addicted and I cannot stop.
Somebody put a leash on the fucker?
Fuck you, is my retort!
Hee haw!
In spite of/thanks to all the compromises made necessary by this our modern world, would you say that you are (un)faithful to yourself?
I am a bastard to myself. A swine and a scoundrel too. I am my own worst enemy. Shit, we all have to make compromises, and most of us, whether consciously or subconsciously, have to drown in these daily. If I was living ‘the dream’ I would not have to waste my time riding the rotten work horse to keep a roof over my head and a little food in my belly. But, because of the way the world works, I am not allowed to do this seemingly heavenly pleasure continuously, fuck no, I got to slash the hours of my life away for my little handful of pay. This is life, this is the compromise most of us have to make, this is what we do, this is what I do, but we do it because we have to do it. This is what makes me who I am, the swine and scoundrel too. We’ve got nothing to loose but our sanities, and most of us have shot those to shit a long time ago.
Look me in the eyes now: are YOU a procrastinator OR a dilettante?
I, good sir, am manic.
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