....PrinceGate....

By C.J., Star Tribune

Last update: November 26, 2008 - 5:01 PM


As suspected, New Yorker mag contributor Claire Hoffman didn't write up her gay-marriage-is-wrong interview with Prince from notes or a tape recorder.

In an interview Hoffman gave to brianmpalmer.com, she is quoted about the process. Last week, a New Yorker spokeswoman told me it stood by the interview and would not discuss whether a tape recorder was allowed.

"I just interviewed Prince and he wouldn't let me use a tape recorder or my notepad," Brian M. Palmer's website quotes Hoffman as saying. "I walked out and sat in my car and wrote for an hour. I don't have long chunks of dialogue, but I was able to remember stuff."

To Palmer's question about whether she normally tapes interviews, Hoffman responded: "For the magazine stuff I normally try to tape. You can have longer dialogue. But for newspapers, I don't just because you don't have enough time. I'm a pretty fast writer, just from doing newspapers."

While having quotes attributed to Prince that suggest his new-found religious faith is fueling an intolerance for human rights is unfair, Symbolina kind of gets what he deserves by refusing to allow reporters to tape record him or TAKE notes.

As guarded as Prince is, I have wondered whether he has some record of the interview, which took place at his L.A. home, where he provided the food for an interview that the New Yorker titled "Soup with Prince." (Which I have, naturally, renamed "Soup with Nuts.")

Twin Cities writer Neal Karlen's 1985 Rolling Stones interview of Prince may have been the last in which he allowed himself to be tape-recorded. "I guess I have the last tapes of him," Karlen told me. We talked last week, when I asked Karlen and Janet Charlton, of L.A., both longtime reporters on Prince's unusual behavior, to pretend they could crawl into his brain and speculate on where any of homophobia might originate.

Noting that "a lot of his audience is gay," Karlen said he's never picked up on anything from Prince that seemed even vaguely homophobic. "He was still so into this androgyny. You hear these stories about him at Central High School walking down the hallway in bikini underwear and a rain coat. He does these things because he can. That hasn't changed since he was in the eighth grade," said Karlen, who strongly suspected that the problem with the New York interview was related to Hoffman not having any notes.

"Did she talk to him for five minutes? She probably was asking him about California repealing gay marriage, and he's had his own bad luck with marriage. It seemed like throwaway [lines]. When you think he's never made one statement that's come to rebound on him, why would he want to say that? There must be some reason he said that." said Karlen, whose 1990 Rolling Stone interview was sans recorder or notes. Karlen feigned a bladder infection, which he was flushing with Coke, so he could keep running to the restroom to write down quotes on toilet paper, claiming he had a bladder infection.

"He hasn't gotten a lot of press lately," said Karlen. "He's very canny. He knows what he's doing. Part of his control thing is that he had a really good idea about public relations."

The woman behind janetcharltonshollywood.com said Prince's New Yorker remarks, if accurate, were "not a good move on his part." She wonders, "Is he going to talk more on this?"

While a fan of Prince's music and eye for fashion, Charlton said this controversy is in "another reason why mixing religion and politics and government is a huge mistake. Looks like Prince possesses some kind of religious fervor right now. I guess he's more religious than ever."

When Charlton asked me whether I thought his intolerance for human rights carried over into the voting booth, I told her it was my understanding that Jehovah's Witnesses didn't believe in voting. "Oh, that's a blessing. I guess gays won't have to demonstrate in front of his house because he doesn't vote anyway," laughed Charlton.

C.J. is at 612.332.TIPS or cj@startribune.com. E-mailers, please state a subject -- "Hello" doesn't count. Attachments are not opened, so don't even try. More of her attitude can be seen on FOX 9 Thursday mornings. Including Thanksgiving Day around 8:15 a.m. when she'll have an obvious observation about the Obama Administration's management and budget guy Peter Orszag

Please let this shit GO!

But, will Prince come forward and offer an explanation or apology?
Karlen and Charlton can dissect Prince's decision all they want, but this is futile.

I knew that CJ would be all over this...lol...

SoulAlive said:

And without a "symbolina" in sight

Dayclear said:

LondonStyle said:

but we'll blame it on the absence of a tape-recorder if we say something really stupid and it goes to print.

@ Dayclear's pic, CJ, Prince...just errthang.

chillichocaholic said:

I saw a "Symbolina"!

union119 said:

Ya know something, even if it was tape recorded or checked by him first and printed word for word people are going to read what they want into what was said, because lets face it...even the bible itself is open to interpretation and wehn u print something u can put in tone of voice

Claire Hoffman does not enjoy being critiqued. Criticize and you will be accused of being full of venomous hate, misunderstanding everything she has written having a knee-jerk hysteria reaction in a corner with a knife exploding with rage.

http://newsweek.washingto..._hate.html

Blog Readers, Why Be Haters?
I've been writing this blog for four months now and the main lesson I've learned is that commenters here on the topic of religion have little ear for nuance and much propensity for deep and energetic anger.

At first, it bummed me out to read all these screaming comments weekly, seemingly willful in misunderstanding everything I'd written. The pitch of the comments seem particularly incongruous to my reality as I'm generally mild-mannered and would rather listen than talk--that's why I became a journalist. I rarely have an opinion that is answered with a scream.

I was advised to ignore the craziness. People familiar with the site and other religion blogs said there was something inebriating in the combination of the anonymity of the web and the radicalism of religious opinions that made people react with venom.

So this last week I wrote a short post wondering at the degree to which the German state had cracked down on Scientology and deemed the religion a threat to their constitution. Is it irritating that as a reporter I've spent months of my life researching and writing about Scientology, interviewing former members, photo copying property records, wondering at being followed myself only to receive hundreds of comments on a blog post accusing me of being misinformed or, more bizarrely, a Scientology patsy? Yes. Yes it is.

So my question for readers of this blog is this: what gives with all this knee-jerk hysteria around discussions of religion? What makes you stop your project at work and explode in rage about these topics in this forum?

I don't want to seem flip. I certainly make my living by communicating and I do feel like a miscommunication has been made when I get sincere and heartfelt emails from those who have been hurt by the Church of Scientology. In saying that the Church was largely about self-improvement, I referred to their entry-level doctrine. The discussion was about why the German state would feel a rather marginal and odd religious group, with a taste for nautical uniforms, would be a threat to their constitution. That seems weird to me and even more important, makes the German government look kind of like pansies for spending a lot of money surveilling and punishing people who mostly walk around modeling their emotions and listening to the recordings of LRH. Right?

But there's a larger trend here and an important one: many readers seem predisposed to be offended or infuriated by the most banal of questions. How can there be any reasonable or even enlightened discussion about Scientology or for that matter the Mormon history of polygamy or the place of prayer in public or Obama's religious views if we are always in a gnashing tail spin? It feels like the audience out there on the web for these topics are already in a corner with their knives out. Is there no room for a little gray in the area of religious belief?
Posted by Claire Hoffman on May 12, 2008 11:39 AM

thequiet1 said:

Nonsense. You completely misunderstood her polite blog post.

Efan said:

chillichocaholic said:

most folks have taken issue with the "gay comments"

hardly anyone has taken issue with his lies about why he moved to L.A.

similarly, his comments about rich people remaining unaffected by the economic crisis have been largely ignored.

his political opinions may be, in essence, correct, but hardly anyone noticed how ignorant they were, in context with the extreme importance of the recent election.

fact is: Prince only released a "i've been misquoted statement" about the thing his fans took issue with.

why not the rest?

therein lies the answer to whether he was truly misquoted or not.

if most of us had taken issue with what he said about President Obama for example..

he woulda bin sayin he was misquoted about that.

he covers his ass in the place it is most at threat.

SoulAlive said:

Hey, she gotta keep a roof over my head.

Dayclear said:

CJBabyDaddy said:

DITTO.....Shut Already, DAMN

mzsadii said:

-----
"at Central High School walking down the hallway in bikini underwear and a rain coat."

WTF nobody today or back in the 70's was wearing that in High School. I think all of these reporters are hacks.

In addtion, since when did P say anything about Gay Marriage at all in that interview and when did Gay Marriage become human rights issue.

I don't remember ever reading anything about Prince walking the halls of his high school in that stuff but I do remember reading something in the early 1980s in "Right On" magazine about Prince walking the streets of Minneapolis in bikini underwear, leg warmers, and a closed trench coat. That's been so many years ago, I can't remember all the details, but if I remember the article correctly, it was suggesting that it aroused Prince to do this. Of course, back in those days, Prince told the magazines anything shocking. Maybe the reporter is confused and thinking of this incident.



Whether Prince said anything at all about gay marriage really only matters to Prince fans because most of the rest of the world thinks he's a closet queen anyway. His opinion is also just one of a celebrity and doesn't change anything. As for when did gay marriage become a human rights issue though, it became one when we decided to stop being denied our rights and fight for them.

Dayclear said:

Never

Hope Prince learned a lesson from this. Bet he didn't want the recorder because his hatred would be even more vibrant if you could hear it from his own lips

"I just interviewed Prince and he wouldn't let me use a tape recorder or my notepad," Brian M. Palmer's website quotes Hoffman as saying. "I walked out and sat in my car and wrote for an hour. I don't have long chunks of dialogue, but I was able to remember stuff."

This sums it up for me. Prince could be the most homophobic person in the world, but shitty reporting is shitty reporting. The statement, "I was able to remember stuff", illustrates a huge lack of journalistic credibility.
[Edited 12/1/08 11:29am]

skywalker said:

It illustrates that Prince is an idiot for allowing shit to be made up because he refuses to be recorded

skywalker said:

No, it's not a lack journalistic credibility, when you're trying to abide by the ridiculous limits set upon you. How many people make note-taking prohibited when granting interviews?

Karlen talked about pretending to have to hit the bathroom every few minutes, just so he could take notes. Lying to your interview subject isn't exactly what they teach in J-school, either. But, it's obvious that's what people have to do, if they're going to score a Prince interview.

The bottom line is he doesn't care about journalistic integrity. If he did, he wouldn't have stupid rules about interviews. It's all a game about being able to deny what gets published or broadcast.

Yeah lil dude wants it both ways, the no tape recorder rule is a longsatnding tradition with him so he can deny what he says.
He also seems to have a very flexible moral fiber, bends almost anyway he chooses.
[Edited 12/1/08 18:44pm]

I have been a fan for a longtime and I bet he doesn't believe in Gay Marriage ,but I don't think he's HOMOPHOBIC at all nor does he HATE ON GAY PEOPLE. I do think he should allow Tape-Recorders if he wants word for word VERBATUM.

union119 said:

Why did he move to LA?

syrinx7 said:

He likes LA as the climate is warmer during the winters. Also he said there are more professional people in the business there.
[Edited 12/1/08 18:57pm]

ThreadBare said:

Thank you for recognizing the truth

SupaFunkyOrgangrinderSexy said:

-----
He refuses to let the interviews be tape recorded because they have been put out on the market and sold. I am really surprised some of you do not know this.
I know this because I own one of the interviews from the "Dirty Mind" period