John Waters is the best. His killer movies like Pink Flamingos, Hairspray, and Cecil B. Demented will teach you all the things you could find out about art, American insanity, and the special joy that comes with revelling in your individual freakishness. He shares yet more wisdom as a filth elder in his latest book, Mr. Know-It-All, which might be the best of all his literary works (sorry, Art: A Sex Book), and never simply because it includes his ode to the long-shuttered NYC sex club, Night Shift (a fake park overrun with zonked-out tramps), that photo of him with Justin Bieber, or the story of how he tripped on LSD last summer, aged seventy-two, together with his old pal Mink Stole. It’s a memoir that doubles as an education in the right way to live as a gleeful weirdo, in love along with your own obsessions. It’s sly and hilarious and form of heartwarming. No person else understands human perversity with more hi-def sharpness or delight than John Waters. 

He also knows tons about beauty. On the planet of John Waters, that has nothing to do with everybody else’s zombie-brained rules about what’s cute this season. Take into consideration his childhood crush on the Wicked Witch from The Wizard of Oz, his deep knowledge of Rei Kawakubo, the self-styled ‘drag Godzilla’ swagger of his legendary leading lady Divine (R.I.P.) or the rancid punk fairytale costumes in my personal favourite of all his movies, Desperate Living. For Waters, true beauty is something extreme and discombobulating and latest. It mutates what ought to be outrageously tasteless and ugly into stuff so hot it makes your brain melt. The John Waters school of beauty has influenced, oh, everyone in Party Monster, Ursula’s look in The Little Mermaid, Leigh Bowery, Chloë Sevigny’s costume design for Gummo, and lots of major fashion creatures— yo, Jeremy Scott! 

I had tea with Mr. Waters in London last autumn because we’d been corresponding over email ever since he devilishly endorsed my book of essays, This Young Monster, in The Latest York Times. He told me a great deal of wicked stories then. Yup, it was wild. Mr. Know-It-All is identical to that: a personal audience with the Pope of Trash. Fast-forward to our phone conversation for Dazed Beauty this summer. Naturally, I spent the entire thing grinning like a hyena.  

Congrats on the book, John! I feel it’s the most effective one.

John Waters: Thanks. I tell a variety of stories in it.

Lets start along with your acid trip?

John Waters: Oh! I all the time wondered what [doing LSD again] could be like. I haven’t taken drugs in fifty years. I mean, I’ve tried them but I don’t smoke pot anymore and cocaine I never did that much. I all the time had experience with acid and I did it from about 1964 to about— probably Pink Flamingos, I don’t know, I did it lots! So I believed I’d do it again within the book. But then because it got nearer, I believed, ‘I even have to get really good acid!’ because I don’t know what it’s like nowadays so it took eight months to get it and I got it [from someone] near Timothy Leary, regardless that he’s dead. It was a lot better than I ever had after I was young. I don’t think young people should do it but old individuals who did it fifty years ago and never had a nasty trip possibly should try it again.

Yeah!

John Waters: But now all of the young kids do that micro-dosing, all this pussy shit. And it was really strong. If I had known that I’d’ve been really terrified, especially if I had seen Gaspar Noé’s Climax movie— speak about a nasty trip! But I’m glad I did it. I was hallucinating: I used to be seeing little mice running around but they didn’t scare me, they were friendly, and the photographs were spinning and the flowers were growing…  I did play the identical music that I used to play, Dionne Warwick, when she sings, ‘A house shouldn’t be a house/A chair remains to be a chair…’ but I was the chair! And I didn’t exit since it was Bear Week. I don’t know that I could handle Bear Week in Provincetown on acid. I don’t think I could’ve handled anything, I can’t even imagine that folks have sex on LSD— 

Nooo.

John Waters: Since it seems so bizarre.

Possibly that’s their thing! One in every of the belongings you write about, too, are ecosexuals…

John Waters: Oh, yeah! I’ve examine them but I personally have no idea an ecosexual, I don’t think, because they lick plants and talk dirty to trees and bury themselves in mud and writhe around— [laughs] I suppose I even have to respect that. If I used to be walking through the woods and saw that… Mary Oliver was my friend, the poet, and she or he all the time wrote about nature and she or he used to crawl around within the woods and check out to consult with animals and pretend she was a badger…And once [a badger] bit her! And I said, That’s what you get! 

It could be an ideal visual to see someone fucking a tree.

John Waters: Oh, I had fucking a tree in A Dirty Shame! Trees are nature’s porn: all of them have vaginas and penises, all around the park. 

Like, remember Paul McCarthy did that [installation], The Garden, with the guy fucking a tree?

John Waters: And didn’t Sarah Lucas do [a picture of] a tree and switch it the wrong way up so it’s like a crotch? I feel that’s where all of it got here from but I’ve never seen anyone licking a tree. My favourite is talking dirty to a tree: ‘Shake those leaves off, bitch!’ 

‘Peel that bark off, lick that sap!’ 

John Waters: Yeah, lick that sap! 

Do you understand about voring?

John Waters: No, what’s it?

Individuals who prefer to imagine they’re being eaten.

John Waters: A cannibal bottom. 

Exactly.

John Waters: That’s why Jeffrey Dahmer was the final word top because he was tremendous until you said, ‘Oh, I feel I’ll be leaving now!’ but, you understand, if you happen to eat someone they’re really not leaving.     

They’re with you perpetually.

John Waters: I suppose everybody has their reasoning, that’s what I find fascinating, people get so obscure of their sexual taste. It would take years to seek out one individual that will put up with that.   

That’s the amazing thing about that movie, Zoo [2006 documentary about a Seattle man who died having sex with a horse]. 

John Waters: I like that movie!

A stunning movie, all those truckers having sex with horses, but they didn’t even know that their thing til any person emailed them a video, like, ‘Get a load of this.’

John Waters: That’s the Web: [people] get was ISIS, they lose their minds [politically], they only gotta get off that computer! It really sucks people in like that Cronenberg movie, Videodrome, it changes people’s entire personalities.

It’s the largest drug of all. And Debbie Harry’s in that and she or he sings in Polyester— did anybody ever ask you do a music video?

John Waters: People have asked me perpetually. Green Day was the primary one, right once they got here out. However the only ones I desired to do was that song [by Richard ‘Dimples’ Fields], ‘She’s Got Papers on Me’ or that Ike and Tina [Turner] song, ‘All I Can Do Is Cry’ where it’s their wedding and Ike is marrying one other girl and Tina’s screaming and flipping out. 

I used to be wondering in regards to the time you met Fassbinder with [legendary director of luscious1950s melodrama] Douglas Sirk too…

John Water: I met them on the Berlin Film Festival. Douglas Sirk had on a white suit, looking like such a gentlemen, and Fassbinder was slobby as ever. They’d made a brief movie of a Tennessee Williams story that Fassbinder starred in and Sirk shot it.

Wow.

John Waters: And I saw it and it was in German so I had no idea what they were saying. 

Was Fassbinder speaking English?

John Waters: He pretended he couldn’t until you complimented him! He was great.    

[Fassbinder’s 1974 movie] Fear Eats the Soul, like, one among the good movies about geronotophilia. 

John Waters: Sex with old people. I’m for that, obviously.

You’re an enormous advocate for that.

John Waters: Well, I try to not be! [laughs] Actually, Mr. Know-It-All is the sequel to all my other books. Shock Value ends with Polyester so I speak about all the films I’ve made since. Crackpot was essays on things and this book is essays on things like Gristle, my crazy [imaginary] restaurant, or my brutalist dream house, after which Role Models was in regards to the individuals who gave me the liberty to wanna be who I’m today and I’m trying now to pass on that advice to young people in order that they’ll do the identical thing.

Yeah, it’s illicit wisdom.

John Waters: Tarnished wisdom!

Oh, did you want Twin Peaks: The Return? I remember writing to you, like, ‘You’ve gotta watch it!’

John Waters: I loved it! Are you kidding? It was just like the Ozzie and Harriet show. Every week that used to finish with Ricky Nelson singing alone within the bar and [Twin Peaks: The Return] all the time ended with the bar every night. How [David Lynch] ever got that through the Hollywood system— I give him great respect. Imagine the executives watching that episode where you’re inside an explosion for twenty minutes. 

Oh, sooo good. That was my favourite one. The girl with the bug in her mouth at the top. It was like his [Fassbinder’s fifteen hour epic] Berlin Alexanderplatz.

John Waters: Yes, it was [laughs]. I even have that John Waters camp every yr, and he has a version of it, too, out in LA, he has his own version of ‘Jonestown with a blissful ending’. 

I feel [Werner] Herzog’s teaching at a clown college, like, the Ringling Brothers college, too.

John Waters: Oh, God, I didn’t know that! He’s got a latest movie coming out…

It’s him interviewing [former Soviet leader] Gorbachev. Have you ever seen Chernobyl yet?

John Waters: No, I’ve heard about it.

It’s got the most effective radiation sickness prosthetics ever.

John Waters: Oh! One of the best make-up to me was [2018 Swedish movie about trolls in love] Borders, did you see that?

I like that movie.

John Waters: I believed they were really deformed! It was higher than any Hollywood movie make-up. It’s an ideal movie.

There’s a bit in Chernobyl I feel you’d like where they must kill all of the dogs which were infected with radiation, and also you see this avalanche of dead dogs falling right into a grave.

John Waters: Do you understand that book about London called The Day All of the Cats and Dogs Died where, in London right before [the Blitz], they told everyone to kill their pets they usually did! 

That’s a movie.

John Waters: Imagine! An entire book about it! What number of copies did that sell? I had it on my coffee table.

You recognize once you were gonna marry Johnny and Winona—

John Waters: Oh, the press blew that up! I told him, ‘You’re so young.’

You possibly can’ve played that album of castrated opera singers…

John Waters: Oh, I own it! I still see Winona. But we didn’t discuss the music… [laughs]