Enrique Symns unpublished, two years after his death

On August 14, 2008, I interviewed Enrique Symns in a tiny apartment that the people from Revista THC helped him rent, where he contributed an unmissable column and I contributed whatever I could. He greeted me drinking fernet, wearing dark gray sweatpants and a flannel shirt tucked in, of course. It was 11 in the morning and he was about to turn 62. His body looked 82. His mind, 22 or 120.

We were supposed to talk about the show he was putting on, for an interview that was going to run in one of the outlets where I worked, but we ended up talking about whatever he wanted, and my editorial supervisors decided to kill the piece because of his statements. Symns died 15 years after this interview, and in that time he probably changed his mind many times over. Today, nearly two years after his death (this coming Sunday, March 16), this zero-bullshit outlet that is 421 revisits those furious remarks.

1/1/2000, THE GREAT RESET

"If I were to start a new cultural magazine, I'd make it cover only things that happened after January 1, 2000. For example, Citizen Kane is no longer the greatest film in history, give me a break -- the greatest in history is Inland Empire, by David Lynch."

THE DESERTED CINEMA

"I never go to the movies anymore. The last films I saw were a year ago. The final Bourne trilogy installment, which I really liked, and a very funny one, typically British, Death at a Funeral. I like going to the movies to have sex with a girl. I like having sex at the Abasto cinemas, because the good thing about them is you can watch seven movies in a row. You stay all day and nobody notices. Having sex in the bathrooms of those cinemas is extraordinary at noon, when there's nobody around. And sometimes there are screenings where not a single person shows up and you can have sex in the back of the theater. I'm of the opinion that the bed was an invention designed to put an end to sex, because you don't shit where you eat and you don't fuck where you sleep."

PROMISCUITY AND BLOWJOBS

"My generation was pretty promiscuous, but I never felt afraid. I'm one of those who believe the immune system is a state of mind. Besides, I never shot up -- with a needle you could really get screwed. If I had been shooting up, things would've been different, or if I'd had violent anal sex like transvestites, gays, or the brave couples who hire rent boys. That's why gays have been moving away from anal sex and dedicating themselves more and more to oral. According to ancient legend, when Adam divorces Eve he goes off with a girl who sucks his dick, who is Lucifer. She taught him the arts of oral sex and he was marveled forever, he stayed with her for something like 100 thousand years. That's why it's what men love most throughout the history of Humanity: getting their dick sucked."

THE BATHROOMS OF ROCK

"Bathrooms are one of the places where I like to fuck. At the beginning of the '80s it was very common, and there were more people in the bathrooms than on the dance floors. But then people stopped fucking in bathrooms and started doing coke, and sex took a back seat. There are many fantastic places to fuck: the elevator, the kitchen table, any old hallway, a rooftop terrace. Having a partner that adventurous is fantastic. But the bathroom at rock shows, in the rock world, is one of the most incredible places."

ARGENTINE ROCK

"In this country they're stuck in the past, still talking about '80s rock. And meanwhile Argentine rock is submerged in the most obscurantist era of its history from a creative standpoint. For me, the advertisement of horror is La Renga, Bersuit, and Los Piojos. The deformity, after monumental bands like Soda, Virus, or Los Redondos to a lesser extent. Sumo is the greatest band in Argentine rock, but because Luca came with extraordinary knowledge and the local musicians had precarious knowledge, like Skay who was a poor imitation of Dire Straits. Soda was truly monumental. The test of rock and roll is the trio and they passed it. And Virus I think is the best pop band in Spanish in history. On the other hand, here in Argentina we never moved beyond the song format, there was very little progressive rock and experimentation, no albums like those by Jethro Tull or Pink Floyd. An adventure may have been Vox Dei, with La Biblia, but here we were always tied to the song format and Spanish is a shit language because 'sifon' has to rhyme with 'Colon' and 'Peron.' It's impossible for there to be a Lou Reed in this country."

NOBODY PLAYS LIKE THE RADIOHEAD GUY

"Pink Floyd is the greatest band in the history of music; it won't be the Beatles or the Stones that endure, it'll be Floyd alongside Bach. Rock has Saxon DNA and if you're not English don't touch the guitar because you're a fool. Nobody in this country plays like the Radiohead guitarist. After Radiohead and Tool, rock started over -- you have to forget about Led Zeppelin too. My fetish album and album of the century for me is OK Computer, which hasn't been surpassed. And I like bands like The Mars Volta and others I've been listening to for a while, like Tool, Massive Attack, or Portishead, which is the one that started it all for me."

A WRONG MAN

"I am a wrong man, but perhaps only from error can conclusions about existence be drawn. A wrong man is a man who from the very beginning of his life lived in error. And wrong is not a put-down; what I mean is that I always lived outside the system, I didn't do school, I didn't work, everything I stole from the street and learned by living. I never managed to become a man, to live the joy of the man who has a picnic. I didn't want that, but what do you do? Drive around in a car watching families, doing coke and trying to flee the shadows chasing you? I believe that all poetry and art come from misery. Life is pure suffering, a tremendous injustice, and a necessary vengeance that must exist."

THE LITERARY ADVENTURE

"The greatest literary work is the life you live. Salgari wrote all of Sandokan's adventures with a geography map, without leaving a hotel room. But then you have London, Melville, or Conrad, who lived many adventures. Castaneda, no -- Castaneda was a con man who liked screwing his disciples, nothing more. Which doesn't deny that he was an extraordinary writer, but the Don Juan stuff was stolen. It was one of the most extraordinary literary periods I've ever known, anyway. Who cares if it was a rip-off. And if it's original then he's a genius, because he invented an entire cosmology."

THE WRITERS OF THE FUTURE

"In Latin America there hasn't been real writing in a long time. Latin American literature is done, it's exhausted, 'magical realism' is dead -- it's phantasmatic like all literature written about the past, especially in Argentina, where it seems like if you're not a Peronist you can't write. But in the United States you have the ones writing toward the future, who write about the city: Paul Auster, Richard Ford, Raymond Carver. There's Houellebecq in France, but he's the only one -- after Bovary, France never had great writers again. And if you have to pick the best of the 20th century, they're all Americans: Henry Miller, Hemingway, Faulkner, and we're not even counting Bukowski. Here you have Sabato, who writes badly but nevertheless produced that extraordinary text that is the Report on the Blind, which I don't know who he stole it from."

TOLKIEN, LOVECRAFT AND THE MYTHS

"The movies ruined everything, but everything Tolkien wrote was extraordinary, with a magic I had only known through Holderlin and Lewis Carroll, who wrote psychedelic books as if he had taken LSD. Lovecraft is important because, beyond the quality of his texts, he brings us closer to the horror of the cosmos, more than Poe. Lovecraft is the account of an unspeakable event that has to do with the abyss and the real origin of mysteries -- it's remarkably similar to primitive mythologies, ancient mythologies so sinister that they propose the question and the answer to life can never be found."

HIS BEST WRITING

"The editorials of Cerdos & Peces are the best pieces I ever wrote. It's no accident they influenced so many people. To write an editorial I'd stay up with a courier, a 16-year-old kid who died of AIDS, poor thing, and I'd stay up doing coke and whisky. To write a single page I had to reach an elevated state. And some of those texts fascinate me because it's as if someone else wrote them. I read some and I ask myself who wrote them. It's as though something that wants to be said says itself and uses your body. In prison, when I got locked up, my way of defending myself was talking. I arrived in Buenos Aires and Pan caliente hired me, and Clarin came looking for me -- me, who had never written a damn thing. I started getting the idea that I had a certain magic. I never wanted to name it but I always referred to it as a form of shamanism."

THE ROCK SHAMAN

"If I had to choose a trade it would be answering questions -- I'm almost shamanic at that. You either hit people with the shot or you don't. After splitting from the rock groups I tried doing monologue shows but they exhaust me, also because I'm sicker and older, and I can do it but only with company."

THE STAGE

"The stage is the greatest rush that exists in life; nothing compares to a good or bad moment on stage. When you fail up there it's excruciatingly painful. And when you nail it, it's an ecstasy greater than a fuck in the Abasto bathroom. Semilla Bucciarelli used to shit himself right up to the end; I like those guys because they never fail -- if you're not scared before going on, if it doesn't generate an adrenaline rush to go out and face the audience, then leave. Playing for 10 thousand people is hard, but playing for 50 with a guy staring you down like a dog is harder."

THE BALD GUYS AND THE BETRAYALS

"The bald guy from Bersuit betrayed me, but I betrayed Indio Solari first. I liked the piece Martin Perez wrote about my capacity for betrayal. I always warned my enemy I was going to betray them. And with Indio, they don't owe me anything -- I attacked them over the Bullacio affair. But Pelado Cordera abandoned me. When I met him I had split from Los Redondos, and in between I was with Los Piojos too and I got bored, I thought they were idiots, with that fairy Ciro, who likes older men. And then I ran into Pelado at a club around Once and he says 'Dude, I'm not going to betray you like Indio did.' And when the money and fame came their way, they abandoned me after years of being with them."

THE PACT OF THE SPECIES

"Man, by breaking the food chain, became his own enemy. He's the only being with intraspecies aggression; he commits murder out of resentment, hatred, jealousy. We're a bad bug, a wretched creature, an alien being that has betrayed every pact with other species. Can it be stopped? No -- we are the demon of the third millennium. Luckily there are viruses, which are the only enemy we have left and they're indestructible. They can't die, they were never born, they're the only enemy we have and they'll hound us forever, because they've been chasing us for thousands of years."

THE COUNTRY OF NECROPHILIA

"Argentina is a country full of violence, lies, and betrayals, everything that happens in a collapsed society like ours. All the conversations of the right-wing middle class are an advertisement for absolute silence, where Todorov's phrase that 'Never as in this era has speech been so forbidden' becomes evident daily. And nobody takes responsibility for the collapse and the suicide and the necrophilia that guide our society, where the only thing that gets done is searching for the victims of the AMIA and Israeli Embassy attacks, the dead from Callejeros, the disappeared. It's a country defined by the past, more than the rest of South America. A sick society within which Peronism is a sinister, diseased virus running through a society that is fascist by nature. We are nationalists and the Americans are patriots. If we had a war, they'd crush us."

LIFE IS OVER

"Life is a bore. There's no more life, it ended long ago. What's left is a boring amusement park. We're in the era of global terror and the restrained man, who no longer lives, trapped by his fears, his family. The family is the most sinister place, and the root of capitalism is the couple, with the invention of love that makes the closed circuit of the economy even more miserable. A man in love is an imbecile, but love is a word they invented in 1240. Before there was Thor and now the storm, before a God and now a meteorological phenomenon."

LOVE AND THE COUPLE

"Freud says love is a socially accepted state of psychosis, where one projects onto the other person what one lacks. And then he says the encounter between man and woman is impossible, because man seeks in woman his mother, and that's the worst thing about men; and woman seeks in man a God, that's why there are groupies, because they're searching for the mystery. The man who surrenders to marriage is dead. There is fascination and being swept off your feet by someone, but that has nothing to do with living together. Between solitude and the group, this obstructing device called the couple was inserted. In Paraguayan tribes, in the center live the single people, who fuck, jerk off, do drugs. And then a woman kidnaps them and takes them to the outskirts and they can never go back. Marriage is the death of sex. The bed was the only way to stop people from fucking in the bathroom, standing up -- now THAT is fucking!"

RELIGION AND MYSTERIES

"Religion was born in the deserts and crawled like a sick reptile into the cities, but the mystery was in the forests, like in The Lord of the Rings. Obviously, how could that not exist. The tomb of the marvelous became the miraculous, and by putting miracles in the middle, religions ruined everything. For human beings, ecstasy is forbidden: the use of shamanic drugs and exacerbated, promiscuous sex taken to the point of jouissance. To put it in perspective, pleasure is a piece of Bazooka bubblegum and jouissance is LSD. That's why some drugs provoke that tremendous exacerbation of sexuality directed into two territories: either compulsive masturbation or what became known through Michael Douglas, which is sex addiction."

WE ARE ALL EXTRATERRESTRIALS

"Gods are nonsense, an invention of priests. There are mysteries more profound, painful, and sinister in the cosmos. The genetic code, the spores. There is no terrestrial life here. We are all extraterrestrials -- us, fleas, rabbits. They're studying spores in New Jersey whose membrane is 100 thousand times harder than steel, so they can survive cosmic chaos. Here, the soup was generated, the broth. When the water cooled, what happened is a mystery. And these are mysteries that have nothing to do with God, who is an invention like the postal service."

THE MONKEY PAINTED AND MADE SOUNDS

"'Artist' is a new word; before they were 'officiants.' Art is a craft. There are three or four poets per century: last century it was Pessoa, Artaud, Rimbaud -- the rest write nonsense. The artist is a thing that shakes the world. The artist-man is broken, destroyed, ravaged by what happened to him. Except Picasso, who's the only bastard who was happy, filthy pig, and died drawing instead of getting his dick sucked. But in general the artist is a being who wants to escape or tries to understand. The most marvelous art is music; writing is bullshit. Music and painting are millennial, they speak of the soul of the monkey we are, savage: the monkey painted and made sounds, he didn't write. An artist is someone who is escaping and finding a way to do so, in the same way that Buddha sat down and awakened, and then thousands of fools believed that by sitting down they would escape too. Then comes imitation, the academy, the servility of the devotees."