Diane di Prima: I was in somebody’s house, babysitting a house in Los Angeles while I was waiting to find out whether or not somebody was going to buy a book of mine, for a movie, which of course never happened.
Marcel Dzama: My back-up plan was that my grandfather has a farm in Saskatchewan and I was going to be a farmhand and I could just do art.
di Prima: You couldn’t be a beatnik if you didn’t know they existed.
Dzama: Maybe they’ll be the ones that survive.
di Prima: They disappeared in less than a year. I don’t care.
•••
Dzama: Actually our first date was going to a Spike Jonze film, Being John Malkovich.
di Prima: It was about General Electric moving in on the Navajo Reservation.
Dzama: There’s so many voices that everything is drowned out and you have to search for the ones you like.
di Prima: I don’t remember who those people were. One of the kids that I said that to in some reform school in Wyoming where I was teaching said, “Man, she must have taken a lot of acid.”
Dzama: Sometimes if there’s too much narrative I feel like I’m just telling the viewer the entire story and then that’s it.
•••
di Prima: Oh, everyone asks that.
Dzama: Oh yeah. There will always be that, I imagine.
di Prima: That was in 1968. No heat.
Dzama: I think we’re kind of doomed. Except for the polka-dotted men—I just see them as background choreography that’s going on for the main subject matter in the drawing, almost like back-up dancers.
di Prima: And the wardens, because they knew that we weren’t there for long, they let us come in on days that were visiting days.