Q: "Ode to a Metal Band Sticker, Seen on a Highway Tollbooth Change Dish" is one of your most poignant works.
A: Well, they used a really intense font on the sticker, and I felt I had to match that intensity.
Q: The artistic process...
A: There were skulls, too.
Q: The happenstance, the world's minutae, do they play a vital part in your artistic process?
A: Hey, I was just amazed that someone decided to call their band "Fuckbucket".
-- from Marc Heiden: The Berlin Interviews, pg 274.
Fucking brilliant, and absolutely one of his best. Why isn't this one better known? It seems to have had a spotty performance history, I suppose. There's no clear sympathetic figure, but it's not as though Shakespeare's tragedies usually have a crowd favorite, and the lead character in this is charismatic as hell. It is the Rome of Julius Caesar, but it is the infected world of Macbeth. Coriolanus himself is a masterful creation, just a shade below Macbeth in the ranks of characters driven sick and desperate by their own pride and ambition. The supporting cast is one of Shakespeare's tightest - (almost) no extraneous clowns and such - and one of his best, especially the adversary, who seems to have every bit the complexity and life of the lead, and Coriolanus's mother, about whom companion volumes to the Hamlet ones could be written. The plot is simple, clean and jaw-dropping until the very end. I could direct a production of this play that would make hundreds of thousands of dollars and garner national attention if someone would give me the money and resources. I mean, just in case you had said money and resources and were wondering what to do with them.
