SASHA GREY / THE INSPIRATION SERIES
Follow
the curiosity.
Records, character journals, and the creative
possibilities of being interested.
By Rob Urban
A record can send you looking for another record. A film can give you a question you want to write about. An experiment with sound can become a collaboration.
That movement of curiosity is what interests me in Sasha Grey’s creative life.
Her interviews are full of the particulars of making things: tape loops, character journals, lyrics, mentors, and the problem of finding time for the next project. Those details give her range a texture that a list of occupations cannot.
They also make her an engaging person to encounter as a fellow enthusiast. She describes discovering artists through other artists, following an interest until it becomes something she wants to try herself.
I admire that readiness to participate. Loving a form can lead to the vulnerable, absorbing business of making something in it.
01 / LISTENING
One record opens
another door.
In Jamie Peck’s 2011 Village Voice interview, Grey describes following the influences of musicians she liked. OutKast led her toward Kate Bush and John Coltrane.
It is a familiar pleasure for anyone whose interests have expanded through an unexpected connection. One artist becomes a guide to another part of the world.
She also discusses aTelecine’s work with tape loops and the challenge of giving that studio practice a satisfying live form. The group was considering different versions of tracks for listeners buying digital releases and those who already owned the physical recordings.
These are appealingly specific creative questions. How does a process become a performance? What could a different format offer someone listening?
I like the attention to the encounter itself. Making music includes imagining how another person will find it, hear it and spend time with it.
02 / COLLABORATING
How quietly can
a melody travel?
The conversation becomes still more interesting when Grey and Richard Fearless discuss their work on Death in Vegas’s Transmission with Hanna Bächer for Red Bull Music Academy in 2017.
Fearless emphasizes the trust involved in having Grey write her own material. Grey describes the difference between writing something and then sharing it in rehearsal.
They get down to the sound: maintaining melody while singing very quietly on “Mind Control,” and the growing intensity of the performance on “Transmission.”
That is the kind of detail that makes collaboration worth understanding. A voice has volume, distance, texture and feeling. The musical decision lives in those particulars.
I appreciate hearing both artists explain the work. Each has something the other can respond to. Trust becomes useful in the small experiments that allow a performance to find its shape.
03 / ACTING
A character begins
in a notebook.
Grey’s account of preparing for Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience offers another view of that attention.
In John-Paul Pryor’s 2009 Dazed interview, she describes keeping a detailed character journal and sharing it with the director. She also met with escorts as research, while the casting director supplied anonymously written blogs.
She distinguishes creating this character from performing as an extension of herself. Mannerisms and personality had to be considered.
The journal is the detail I find especially engaging. It is private work undertaken to give a public performance an interior life. A character has to want, assume and misread things in ways that make sense to the actor.
It is also a useful invitation to look at the actual craft. Preparation gives us more to consider in a performance than the familiarity of the person’s name.
04 / WRITING
The work has
an ordinary day.
In her 2022 conversation with Elle Nash for The Creative Independent, Grey describes writing as an interest that began in childhood. She names Anthony D’Juan as a friend, mentor and collaborator on screenplays.
She also describes the practical difficulty of dividing time among work that supports her and projects she wants to develop. At the end of a day, she sometimes records what she managed to accomplish.
I appreciate that ordinary detail. Creative range can look effortless from the outside because the finished credits conceal the decisions about time.
Her account makes room for the unfinished and the gradual. A person can be ambitious about the work and still need a way to see what happened on a particular day.
D’Juan’s place in the conversation matters, too. Independence can include trusted people with whom an idea becomes clearer.
05 / RETURNING
A fictional world
has more to offer.
Grey’s official book catalogue documents The Juliette Society, published in 2013, followed by The Janus Chamber and The Mismade Girl.
The series is adult fiction. Its published descriptions follow Catherine from film studies into journalism, with questions of desire, self-understanding and the stories surrounding other people.
The continuity across three books is what interests me here. Returning to a fictional world gives an author room to revisit a character from a changed position.
A series asks what can still become interesting about this person, this situation, this set of questions. The next work has a relationship to the previous one and its own reason to exist.
That ongoing commitment adds another dimension to Grey’s public work. A reader has several distinct books to seek out, each with a title and a place in a longer project.
What I value across these accounts is the pleasure Grey takes in having interests with somewhere to go.
Listening can become recording. Research can become a character. A conversation with a trusted collaborator can help a writing project take shape.
Her earlier adult-film career belongs to her history. So do the specific choices she has made in these other forms. A generous account of an artist makes room for the work to accumulate.
I want an essay like this to offer that room. There are recordings to investigate, interviews worth reading, and collaborators whose names deserve attention. The particulars make a creative life more interesting.
Curiosity is a good place for a reader to begin. It has certainly given Grey plenty to make.
Sources: interviews published by The Village Voice, Red Bull Music Academy, Dazed and The Creative Independent; and Grey’s official book catalogue. Linked throughout. Book discussion concerns the published descriptions. Interpretation by Rob Urban.