Interviews – Roy Christopher

July 23, 2018

Juice Aleem: Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark

Once a member of the brain-forward UK crew New Flesh for Old, Juice Aleem has long since stepped out on his own. Griff Rollefson writes in his book Flip the Script that on Juice’s first solo record, Jerusalaam Come (Big Dada, 2009), Aleem “recuperates universalism by locating and privileging a pre-Enlightenment performative linguistics” (p. 196). In other words, he uses his lyrics to go back in time in order to envision a better future. His latest record, Voodu StarChild (Gamma Proforma, 2017), continues his quest to create not just better visions of the future but also better futures for real.

Friend and fellow emcee Mike Ladd tells me,

I first met Juice when on the Infesticons tour in the UK in 2001, I think. We didn’t have enough money to bring over the whole band so Juice filled in. Rob Sonic and I were so drunk every show that Juice did all the rapping. Mostly freestyle, I think. Since then, Juice has been a consummate collaborator and best friend. I know few emcees personally who are as introspective thoughtful and as studious as Juice. This man has volumes of knowledge at his disposal and dispenses them with a gentlemanly generosity… Juice will blow your mind on stage as a performer and off stage as a friend. Every time. Without fail.

I’ve been in touch Juice for the past few years, and I concur with Mike Ladd: He has always been genuine, generous, and supportive. Juice’s old crew, New Flesh, did some tracks and shows with the god Rammellzee back in the early 0s, so I had to ask him a bit about that as well.

Roy Christopher: Your first solo record, Jerusalaam Come, goes back to a precolonial time in order to imagine a better future. Is there an underlying aim with Voodu StarChild? If so, what’s the story?

Juice Aleem: Yeah, there are several themes and aims within Voodu StarChild. A lot of it is about people being aware of the magic inside themselves and understanding how that is under attack. How that hidden Self is dark, female energy, and it’s questioned at every moment. Our original selves are out of equilibrium in regard the male and female balance, and this album is a play on that. It’s not only a critique, but it has a few answers within on how I address certain parts of this for myself and those around me in regard to things like diet, family, love, and when to go to war.

For years we have been taught that Voodu is a bad thing, when it is our own personal rituals and practices that will do a better job of saving us than the politicians and the religious have done so far. There is nothing to fear in the dark.

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RC: In your book Afrofutures, you talk about hackers and whistleblowers. What do you see as the connections between them and hip-hop?

JA: To me there are many connections between them all. The hacker is the most obvious though with the wiretap on all the juicy insides of whatever tech is already out there. Using everything from drum pads and samplers to magpie the last few centuries of speeches, music, and commercials and turn them upside-in for the betterment of the practitioner and listener. Hip-hop is hacking.

The whistleblower is also well seen in hip-hop form, from P.E. telling us “Don’t Believe the Hype” to Kanye telling us “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people.” The moments are loads with little between. Hip-hop traditionally has been one of the biggest whistleblowers out there till recent years. I’m sure the new gen can get there too in between the adverts for big Pharma opiates.

RC: You’ve been organizing and hosting festivals and workshops and such. Tell me about those.

JA: Workshops have been a thing on and off since Lord Redeem started the Ghetto Grammar sessions back in the mid-90s. I helped out, then he and myself took it London and UK wide. Since then I’ve worked and tutored in many places including schools, youth centres, Uni’s, and even a few prisons. Even got caught up doing work in France in a prison outside of Paris.

It’s not sumthing I do everyday, but I like to bring it back now and then for certain projects such as my lyric-writing workshop as part of this year’s AfroFlux events within the B-SIDE Hip-Hop Festival here in Birmingham, UK. B-SIDE has been running three years now, and this year had around 10,000 visitors over the weekend in May.

I’m one of the core artistic directors of B-SIDE and the main person behind AfroFlux: It’s a concept where we look to celebrate the Black and brown thinkers and makers who don’t usually get the accolades while also applying hands on practical applications of cultural markers such as Afrofuturism. We have had a few stand-alone events and plan to expand on that with our partners in other parts of the globe.

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RC: You and I were talking before about Rammellzee. Did his work influence your own?

JA: In a way, but similar to other’s in his kind of cultural echelon, you don’t always realise till looking back, and also seeing that part of the reason you like them and their art so much is due to the parts of self that have a resonance within the artist you look at. Ramm is a perfect mirror for the things you’d never think would be reflected and magnified. There are things I had thought before I ever knew of Ramm, and to see a person not only having a knowledge of things but living them to the full is his real influence on me. Not just on my art but the living of it, being all aspects of my thoughts and creations.

— New Flesh Plus One: The Rammellzee as Crux (the Monk)

RC: You recorded a song with him with your old crew New Flesh for Old. What can you tell me about that session?

JA: We did a few songs, two of which made it to the Understanding album. They were a little out there, ‘cause those were the days of still recording songs in the same studio with people actually being there. So, having these songs come from Ramm rambling down the phone at all hours and us making sense of it was a real new thing. Then he sent tapes over to Part 2, and we edited the pieces we liked best. There was intended to be a whole series of stories from his Cosmic opera. “Mack Facts” was cool ‘cause we had a theme of this whole future arena style thing with us being the gladiators and Ramm as the announcer. Think of an intense episode of that Gwar, Mad Max show starring Sonny Chiba and Sho Kosugi as Nuba warriors on Plutonia. Speaking with him and listening to him so much on those tapes was kinda trippy, and how he’d take any little idea and run with it creating a session’s worth of vocals. This wasn’t your average 16 bars, but reams and reams of classic adventure rasped in an intense style that fully drew you in. We still have a few bits and pieces from those sessions.

RC: What’s coming up?

As per usual there are a lot of things happening. My three main things I’m gearing up for right now are a new festival in Birmingham by the name of High Vis Festival. It’s a bunch of art loving heads such as myself and graffiti writers like Mose, Panda, and Wingy who have decided to put on a festival highlighting comics, Street Art, Graffiti, Zine culture, and other visual movements with a strong ethic in serious Street Culture.

A couple of gigs with the Exile All Stars, which is myself, Mike Ladd and TIE. We have all been friends for a while and have promised to take new music and perform it. This is the promise.

The number three is from even longer ago, and it’s all about new music from Shadowless. We took the passing of one our brothers by the name of Defisis to cement the call for new tunes. Watch this space.

RC: Is there anything else you’d like to throw in?

JA: Do not be afraid of your own Voodu.

May 5, 2018

Bob Stephenson: Bit by Bit

My favorite actors tend to be those just outside the spotlight. I like character actors and supporting roles. Nicky Katt, Max Perlich, Kevin Corrigan, Steven Weber, Bradley Whitford, Don McManus, and Daryl Mitchell are some of my favorites.

A little further afield, I’m always paying attention to the background. I love Norman Brenner, who was Michael Richards’ stand-in on all nine seasons Seinfeld, and popped up on camera as an extra in 29 episodes. Ruthie Cohen, who aside from the the four main characters, was in more episodes of that show than anyone (101). How about that long-haired guy in the background damn near every scene of 30 Rock? Those are the real heroes.

My absolute favorite is Bob Stephenson. He was the priest-cum-football coach in Lady Bird (2017). You might recognize him as the airport security guy in Fight Club (1999), but he’s been in many other movies and shows you’ve probably seen: Felicity, Judging Amy, Without a Trace, Ally McBeal, In addition to Fight Club, he was also in David Fincher’s Se7en (1995), The Game (1997), and Zodiac (2007). He was in both incarnations of Twin Peaks (1991/2017). He’s been on the current number-one comedy (Big Bang Theory) and number-one drama (NCIS) in the country. And he was Ted the pilot in the greatest movie of all time, Con Air (1997).

Bob also has a deep punk-rock background, but we just talked about filmmaking.

Roy Christopher: How did you get started acting?

Bob Stephenson: I was a production assistant. I did that for about four and a half years. It was really my film school. I always knew I wanted to act, but I didn’t want to wait tables. I wanted to be in the thick of it – learn by experience.

RC: I have often aspired to act in many small roles. I always thought it would be great to have a résumé that read “Guy in Coffee Shop,” “Second Cop,” “Man #3,” and so on [I was a Papal Emissary on 2 episodes of The Exorcist on Fox and a Bike Messanger in a scene that was cut from an episode of Empire, so it’s coming slowly]. While your career has definitely surpassed that, do you want the Big Leading Roles?

BS: Heck yes! Of course I do. I would love that. I write quite a bit so I often write roles for myself that I’d love to play.

Bob in *Fight Club* (1999): “Nine times out of ten it’s an electric razor, but every once in a while… “

RC: Prior to your Father Walther character in Lady Bird, my favorite of your performances was in Fight Club. Both of those roles really display your keen sense of comedic timing and delivery. Do you feel a leaning either toward comedy or drama?

BS: Comedy for sure. But I like it all.

RC: You’ve worked with the best directors doing it, or at least the best Davids (e.g., David Fincher and David Lynch). Is there someone else you’d most like to work with?

BS: John C Reilly.

RC: You’ve also written and produced projects yourself. Do you aspire to exact a vision from behind the scenes over being in the scenes?

BS: Like I said, I write. I love writing and producing. Think I’ll leave the directing to someone else (though it would be fun to do that as well).

RC: What’s coming up next?

BS: About to pitch a TV pilot to studios. Writing another one as we speak. Both comedies.

April 29, 2018

Pat Cadigan: Eyes on the Skies

Widely regarded as one of the original cyberpunks, Pat Cadigan’s science-fiction roots run deep. Two of her first three novels won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. She and Robert Heinlein were friends. She’s edited sci-fi and fantasy magazines all the way back to the late 1970s. She’s been thinking about the future of humans and technology longer than most of us have been around.

In Ted Mooney’s novel Easy Travel to Other Planets (FSG, 1981), he writes,

The best way to prepare for the future is to keep an eye on the sky. That’s where everything else is not. Meanwhile, information pours invisibly across its friendly expanse, and it is up to us to absorb as much of it as our systems can tolerate.

“Cadigan’s work makes the invisible visible,” Bruce Sterling writes with emphasis. “Certain aspects of contemporary reality emerge that you didn’t used to see…” Aptly enough, Sterling and Lewis Shiner both use blades and bleeding to describe her writing. She has a cutting style that could only come from a very sharp mind. She was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2014, but I’ll let her tell you about that.

Though you’d be hard pressed to dig her out of her place in SF history, Cadigan has long since been looking up.

Roy Christopher: Given the techno-evangelism of the era in and form which it emerged, cyberpunk provided a cautionary corrective of sorts. Erika M. Anderson (who records under the name EMA) contends that we need cyberpunk’s skepticism now more than ever. Others claim we’re now living in the world that cyberpunk predicted and that it can no longer help us. Which is it?

Pat Cadigan: Damned if I know. I’m still skeptical but then, I’ve always been skeptical. I didn’t realize 2014 was the year cyberpunk broke—was there a memo or a newsletter? If it broke, how did it break?

Cyberpunk was identified as such only after it had been around for a while. The original writers, myself included, didn’t sit down and say, ‘Okay, what the world needs now is something called cyberpunk, and here it is.’ Cyberpunk was a reflection of the larger dissatisfaction and unrest in general, as well as a reaction against the old SF tropes.

I don’t disown cyberpunk, I don’t distance myself from it, and I’m still writing about things that interest and concern me, which is what I’ve always done.

RC: In response to the question, “What happened to cyberpunk?” you told Vice Magazine in 2012, “Nothing ‘happened,’ it’s just more evenly distributed now.”

PC: I remember saying that to someone, but I don’t remember when or why. I’ve experienced some memory loss since I had chemotherapy—there are things I no longer remember although I do know I used to remember them (If that makes any sense).

RC: Well, Cory Doctorow only pointed out that the older cyberpunks talk more slowly than the newer ones.

PC: The reason for Cory Doctorow’s observation is ridiculously easy: Older people talk more slowly than younger people because a) we do everything more slowly, and b) we’ve learned via experience the disadvantage of not thinking twice before we speak. Talking faster doesn’t mean you’re thinking faster—it just means you’re liable to blurt out something you’ll have to apologize for afterwards. I’ve dodged a lot of landmines by talking slowly.

RC: If we’re living in a cyberpunk world, how might we update the genre to help us through it?

PC: The genre updates itself. I started writing Synners in 1988 and finished it in 1990; it was first published in 1991. I wouldn’t write that book now—I’m thirty years older and so is the world. While I often deal with the same general themes, the trappings and details are different.

I’ve always been an end-user—i.e., I’m not a scientist or a technologist. I don’t build machines or write code; I’m the person who always gets the faulty monitor or the computer with the motherboard that shorts out, just like I always got the shopping cart with the wobbly wheel at the supermarket. So these are the things I’ve written about—how to cope in a world full of faulty equipment and unintended consequences. I’m still writing about that.

RC: In addition, your stories often play with the relationship between memory and identity. This strikes me as germane given our 21st-century media-madness. What initially invited you into that conceptual space?

PC: You would ask me that, wouldn’t you? I was always interested in the human brain, for one thing. And for another, when I was growing up, people always seemed to be telling me who I was, or who I was supposed to be. Or they’d assume I was whoever/whatever and expect me to confirm their assumptions—and then get put out when I didn’t. Women of my generation weren’t supposed to have the same ambitions as men. Men achieved, and we were supposed to help them achieve. There were women who achieved and there always had been, but in general, they were seen as anomalies. As society saw it, men had ambitions and women had biological clocks.

And those clocks were strictly regulated. As late as 1978, I was unable as a single woman to get maternity insurance along with my regular health insurance through my employer—I had to be married to qualify. When I was growing up, it was standard practice for health insurance companies to refuse to cover the birth of a child out of wedlock, or if the woman had a baby before she had been married for nine months, unless her doctor confirmed in writing that the birth was premature.

This probably seems far afield of your original question. But in fact, society has always been trying to tell me who I am. Now I’m a senior citizen and society is still at it, worse than ever. I went to a cell phone store one day to get some technical help—the sales person thought I wanted to know how to change the ringtone. It was all I could do not to clobber him with the phone. When my iPad went wonky after an update, I took it to the Apple store after re-setting it numerous times didn’t work. The man who helped me insisted on walking me through the re-setting procedure step-by-step, teaching me as if I had never seen an iPad before.

RC: Given our internet-driven aggregating and sharing, is all of this cultural recycling really that new?

PC: It may seem new to some people but no. In the old days, grasshopper, this was how we made textbooks and schools.

RC: I’ve been exploring similar territory in the context of hip-hop (i.e., sampling, nostalgia, etc.), and I’m finding lots of parallels between cyberpunk and hip-hop.

PC: Well, I can’t help you there. I listen to a lot of hip-hop, but I’m only a listener. For the last three-plus years, I’ve had my hands full with surviving terminal cancer for as long as I can. So far, I’m over a year past my original estimated date of departure. Still not doing what they tell me to.

RC: Is there anything coming up you’d like to bring up here?

PC: Just keep watching the skies.

————–

Works Cited:

Cadigan, Pat, 1991, Synners. New York: Bantam Spectra.

Mooney, Ted, 1981, Easy Travel to Other Planets. New York: Ballantine, p. 74.

Sterling, Bruce, 1989, Introduction, In Pat Cadigan’s Patterns. New York: Tor Books, p. ix.

April 23, 2018

Dominic Pettman: Human Matters

I first came across Dominic Pettman’s work through his 2011 book, Human Error: Species-Being and Media Machines (University of Minnesota Press), which I promptly wrote about because it connected so many things I am interested in. Not long after, he wrote a cultural history of my favorite animal, Look at the Bunny: Totem, Taboo, Technology (Zer0 Books, 2013). He had written several before, and he’s written several since. He is a professor at Eugene Lang College and also teaches in the Liberal Studies Program at the New School for Social Research. Pettman is currently both one of my favorite theorists and one of my favorite writers.

I can’t introduce him without pointing you to his In Divisible Cities: A Phanto-Cartographical Missive (Dead Letter Office/Punctum Books, 2013). It’s a poetic, aphoristic urban excursion. You can download or buy it directly from Punctum Books or lose yourself in Alli Crandell‘s interactive web version.

Roy Christopher: What would you say is your area of work?

Dominic Pettman: My official title is Professor of Culture & Media, so I guess that gives an accurate idea of the scope of my beat. In other words, pretty much anything is fair game! My university education in Australia was quite eclectic and promiscuous, and we were not encouraged to squat on a sub-sub-field as many are here in the States; so I never learned to get the laser vision that some of my colleagues have. When I arrived in the US in 2004, and people described my writing as “brave,” it took me a while to figure out that this was code for “crazy and reckless.” Nevertheless, it’s too late for me to hyper-specialize now.

I do, however, have enduring themes that I’m interested in, and my work pays particular attention to questions concerning the species-being of “the human,” especially in relation to the technical aspects of various libidinal economies and ecologies. For the past twenty years, my research has focused on neglected connections between philosophical ideas, psychological states, social anxieties, and cultural artifacts, with a particular focus on the media used to create and navigate these phenomena. While the objects of my research may seem quite different from project to project, they are all case studies relating to the three main questions animating my work: 1) how do humans use media/technology to symbolize their complex experience of time? 2) how do humans use media/technology to communicate their conflicted experience of intersubjectivity? and 3) how do humans use media/technology to perpetuate—or complicate—their ambivalent relationships to other forms of intelligence, such as animals or machines?

In one recent book, Infinite Distraction: Paying Attention to Social Media (Polity, 2016), I demonstrate the ways in which online sharing platforms “hypermodulate” our attention in order to more effectively control our behavior, via different digital rhythms and time signatures. In another recent title, Sonic Intimacy: Voice, Species, Technics (Stanford University Press, 2017), I ask why it is that humans have historically been considered the only being blessed with voice. I proceed from there to explore the notion that animals and machines may in fact have their own modes of “speech,” and may thus be trying to tell us something that we are currently incapable of hearing. A companion title, Creaturely Love: How Desire Makes Us More and Less Than Human (University of Minnesota Press, 2017) details some of the ways that desire makes us both more–and less–than human by looking closely at some canonical literary, philosophical, and aesthetic uses of animalistic themes, within the lovers’ discourse.

RC: You are quite prolific, having finished as many books as I’ve started in the same amount of time, as well as posting regularly online. Do you have an elaborate writing scheme and schedule? Are there really two of you?

DP: I’m somewhat abashed to say that I don’t. I’m not one of these people that write a little bit a day, and then—by the end of the year—I find I have 100k words ready to go. Rather I tinker a little bit with notes, as I circle the project, and then—when the moment feels right—I pounce, and work like crazy until it’s finished. I definitely need a clear block of time in order to bring a manuscript together–whether this be a Summer break or a sabbatical. Also, what you might notice is that my books are getting shorter and shorter. One day I aspire to be Agamben, and have even a haiku published as a book in a 5,000 point font. But I can work quickly. Infinite Distraction, for instance, was written during a four-week winter break. Of course, it sold more copies and got more attention than the book I spent several years on! There’s a lesson there perhaps.

But usually when people ask what the secret is, I tell them don’t have kids. Then again, my colleague, McKenzie Wark is a very committed father, and he is even more prolific than I am. Maybe it’s an Australian thing.

Seriously though, I do think that many academics or theorists—especially those traumatized by grad school—tend to be wary of sharing anything with the world until it is so polished as to be mortified. There is also a fear that if you haven’t read every single text even vaguely pertaining to your subject then you have no right to enter the conversation. But I prefer to see each book as a moment, or specific contribution, not the very last word on an issue. And this frees me up to address any gaps or unconsidered angles in a subsequent work.

RC: Since you write about so many different topics, I am curious as to what is coming up next.

DP: My current research, speaking generally, seeks more explicitly to “reanimalize the human,” in order to more consciously track the ways in which our historical sense of human purpose (“species-being”) is being challenged by, and responding to, new ethological discoveries, and a rather urgent new sense of ecological entanglement (not to mention mutual precarity).

I am in the midst of two manuscripts that emerge from this research. The first outlines a general “libidinal ecology,” beginning with the provocative notion (borrowed from Bernard Stiegler) that we are running out of libido, in the same way that we are running out of natural resources, like fresh water or oil. It begins by asking: “What is the carbon footprint of your libido?” – a quantitative conceit to clear the way for qualitative questions around desire, mobility, and media. Part of this project scans the archive of philosophical commentaries on human intimacy in search of seeds which never took root, but which have the potential to free us from the dangers of “peak libido,” and the associated impasses or afflictions of contemporary private life. Plato’s Symposium, for instance, offers an array of definitions of human passions, but only Aristophanes’s figure of the sutured hermaphrodite, fusing itself back together with its other half, has come to dominate the romantic imagination. What if we follow more nuanced accounts of what it means to be an individual among other individuals (none of whom, perhaps, are as in-dividual as they may like to think)?

The second project is more creative in spirit: an engagement with Vilém Flusser’s theory of mediated gestures. This collaborative endeavor, with historian Carla Nappi, experiments with the written and performative forms through which scholars might engage and communicate media theory. This has yielded a complete manuscript, Meta-Gestures, which gathers together short stories written in tandem, responding to Flusser’s original gestures, such as “the gesture of photographing,” “the gesture of making,” and “the gesture of planting.” Can only humans make authentic gestures? Or can this specific type of semiosis—less than an action, but more than an intention—be something performed also by animals and machines? Together, Nappi and I intend to make an audit of contemporary gestures made in response to intensifying digital imperatives, while also creating a blueprint of alternative gestures which (at least potentially) embody the kind of “freedom” that Flusser himself felt must follow the rather dismal options provided by the program industries.

Ultimately, this research is conducted in the service of recognizing, and fostering, not only new forms of intimacy and understanding between radically different types of being, but new conceptions of what it means to be human in a (productively!) dehumanized world.

October 16, 2017

Rita Raley: Tactical Humanities

A professor in English with appointments in Film and Media Studies, Comparative Literature, and Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Rita Raley studies all sorts of things that culminate in interesting intersections. She centers her study of tactical media, a designation Geert Lovink called a “deliberately slippery term,” on disturbance. Her book on the subject, Tactical Media (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), illustrates not only the ways in which media participate in events but also her own nuanced thinking about and through that participation. She and her colleagues have also been busy dissecting Mark Z. Danielewski’s 27-volume novel-in-progress (five of which are currently available), The Familiar, of which Matthew Kirschenbaum calls Raley, “perhaps his best current reader.”

Roy Christopher: What would you say is your area of work?

Rita Raley: Quite broadly, I would say new media (aesthetics and politics), contemporary literature, and what we might call the machinic and geopolitical dimensions of language in the present – by which I mean investigations of the transformations that have occurred in our reading and writing practices in tandem with the development and widespread adoption of computational platforms for everyday communicative use. Concretely, this last has led me to think about machine reading, writing, and translation – alongside of electronic literature, code poetics, global English, and networked forms of expression from spam to picture languages. At the moment I am grouping these forms and practices together under the rubric of the post-alphabetic.

RC: I haven’t read Danielewski since House of Leaves. How would you convince fans of that book to invest in the lengthy journey that he has only just begun with The Familiar?

RR: Life is short, our attention spans are shorter, and the perfect antidote to the sense that the world is slipping from our grasp is deep immersion in a serial narrative that prods us to be self-conscious about historical and planetary time on the one hand and our lived experience in the moment on the other. It rewards deep reading, as Danielewski’s texts always do, and there are ample pleasures to be found in the decoding of the text’s many puzzles and in the following of its lines of reference and inquiry out to other texts and bodies of knowledge, from AI to physics. But its pleasures are not only cerebral: it is at core – I want to say underneath its shimmering surface, which has been meticulously designed and crafted from cover to cover, but what I really mean is at its heart – a fantastic story. What might seem in volume 1 to be a set of stories (told in different genres, voices, and fonts) starts to converge over the course of the first season (volumes 1-5), and it’s clear that everything is moving toward a spectacular convergence that is either going to be apocalyptically destructive or truly regenerative and probably a bit of both. There are many things to say, and many things have been said, about what Danielewski does with and for codex as a medium and all of that pertains to The Familiar as well. What differentiates the project from House of Leaves and Only Revolutions – and I say this with the awareness that they are situated in a shared (or parallel) diegetic world – is the scale. That its planned run is 27 volumes makes this seem obvious perhaps but there is something different in the orientation. House of Leaves and Only Revolutions seem to me to turn in on themselves, opening up and mining abyssal structures or systems by which they then seem to be absorbed. The Familiar rather gestures out and beyond: Its span is Alpha to Omega, and it wants not to plunge us into the trapdoor beneath our feet but to show us the stars.

RC: Is there a such thing anymore as Humanities that are not Digital?

RR: No.

But to answer that more seriously, I would say all knowledge work in the 21st-century university has been transformed (How could it not be?), but computational media are just part of the story. Paradigmatic changes in scholarly methods and practices are evident across the disciplines, and they are all in part attributable to the development of new tools, platforms, and techniques, but understanding the significance of all of this requires some consideration of the evolution of the idea of the university: what is its function and purpose, now; what are its products; which constituencies does it serve; why should institutional culture be defined by vision statements, agenda setting, and entrepreneurial activity. So, indeed, there has been what is often termed a “turn” to quantification, visualization, and making as both the means and end of knowledge production, but this shift is by no means particular to the humanities alone.

To be even more serious, I think that at least some humanities scholars should continue to think about, and with, that which is not-digital – not in the sense of what has been left behind but rather in the sense of what cannot be captured. The accelerations that we seem collectively to sense – in AI research, climate change, and tribal realignments – are in fact real, and we need to put our minds to reimagining a world that is not only inhabitable but worth preserving. How can, and should, we live in common, with each other and with nonhuman things? For these questions the humanities need not only engineering but also the environmental and social sciences.

RC: I want to go back to your work on tactical media. How broadly do you define the concept?

RR: I remain agnostic about what is or what is not “properly” tactical media. If it seems like a nail, use the hammer. If it works – if it gets the job done, whatever the job – great. The only way to guard against the inertia, apathy, and depression that often results from defeat is to act, but at some level we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes a meaningful action. My own view is that now, in 2017, sharing ideas about the future and a common purpose are more important than sharing a definition.

July 26, 2017

Labtekwon: Margin Walker

Baltimore emcee Labtekwon has been described as “the Thelonius Monk of hip-hop” (Chuck D) and a cross between Jean Michel Basquiat and Nikola Tesla (Afropunk). He’s outspoken like any good rapper could be, skilled like any good emcee would be, and motivated like any good activist should be. He stays consistently ahead of and outside of the time the rest of us dwell in.

Labtekwon is an anthropologist, a professor, a writer, an emcee, and a skateboarder. As he says, “Books and songs are just different rivers and lakes with the same water.” His first record came out over two decades ago. This is your official wake-up call.

Roy Christopher: The phrase “heads ain’t ready” seems an appropriate descriptor of your art. Given how long you’ve been at it, do you think they will ever be?

Labtekwon: Well, a lot of pop stars bite off of me usually 2-3 years after I do something, so I think it’s more of an issue of mass media exposure and at present I think “heads” are “ready” for innovation and mastery. But in terms of American pop culture, historically the masses have never been connected to great art in real time, due to the nature of capitalism and what Adorno and Horkheimer call “the culture industry.” The vanguard of Black art is always detached to the mainstream perception via the entertainment industrial complex, and I understand that my art is a part of that cultural legacy of marginalization.

In terms of the microcosm of interaction with audiences at shows, folks recognize I make a very sophisticated and advanced form of art. Of course if you aren’t looking for something you may not know you are “ready” until you experience it. I only have as many listeners as there are people who hear my music.

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Ironically, I get direct personal encouragement from conversations with pioneers like Chuck D, Wise Intelligent, and Prince Po. People that really love the art know I am a modern pioneer in the 21st century. When emcees and rappers hear me they know I do difficult and trailblazing things artistically. At the present time though, I am pretty sure if more people knew about my music, I would have much more listeners. I make the art of our times, no retro. Pop culture is just a lagging indicator.

RC: After the three-part State of the Art series and the double-disc B.O.P., you took a little longer to release Sun of Sekhmet. Was there a reason for the break? Or did you spend that time putting together this record?

L: Actually, my mother passed away on March 5th, 2016 after a struggle with cancer. She started suffering more in late 2015 and I wasn’t in a space to make music during that time. I waited until after her funeral to complete the last project. The Sun of Sekhmet album was released on her born day of March 16th, in 2017 and that was a tribute album to my mother and father. The title reflects the nature of my mother, as Sekhmet is a Kemetic Neter that represents the warrior attribute of the divine feminine Neter; Het Heru. My mother was a Black woman of power, courage, intelligence, purpose and spirituality, so the double entendre is Sun (son) of Sekhmet.

But I do boxsets/anthologies, the current series is called The Craft of Imhotep and the B.O.P. album was part one, Sun of Sekhmet is part 2 and the 3rd installment comes out September 21st, 2017 and it is called Khunsu. So, I am actually releasing 2 albums in 2017: Sun of Sekhmet in the spring and Khunsu for autumn. The theme of the current series is each album emphasizes Neter from the Kemetic pantheon:

All of the titles explain the theme of each album, but the series as a whole addresses the demonization of Black Consciousness and a response to the assimilationist agenda.

RC: You’ve also written a couple of books.

L: My master’s thesis was a historiographical and anthropological study on the origins of Hip Hop culture, and I released it as a book called The Origins of Hip Hop Culture in 2014. My first book was essentially the history of the world from 0 AD to 2020 AD in poetry/lyrical form, and that book is called Labtekwon and The Righteous Indignation, released in 2012 which is also a music album, but I am a professional anthropologist, historiographer, and professor, so the convergence of my intellectual work is present in my art and vice versa. Books and songs are just different rivers and lakes with the same water.

RC: Do you still skateboard?

L: [laughs] I can still “ride” a skateboard, but I don’t “skate” anymore. Meaning I don’t spend 8-12 hours a day trying to master a trick like I did when I was really skating. I kind of transferred the energy I put into skating into rhyming. I used to split my time between skating and rhyming, but rhyming won.

RC: What’s next on the Labtekwon agenda?

L: Khunsu comes out September 20th, 2017, and I have a feature film coming out this year.

July 17, 2017

Mish Barber-Way: Flour Power

An energetic and angsty mix of hard rock and post-punk, Vancouver’s White Lung sounds like a well choreographed fist-fight between, say, Girlschool and Fuzzbox. The tense fusion of Mish Barber-Way‘s vocals and Kenneth William’s guitar-work sounds like no other band you’ve heard, and it makes for downright unforgettable songs. With four records released in six years, White Lung is as prolific as their songs are fast. The latest, Paradise (Domino, 2016), is stunningly seductive.

Even so, White Lung is only one arm of Barber-Way’s full-frontal haranguing of hegemony. As a Senior Editor at Penthouse, Barber-Way writes about things other folks don’t dare talk about. The taboo is her regular beat — in print and in song.

Roy Christopher: How did you end up on your current path?

Mish Barber-Way: Here’s where I’m at in my path right now: I am sitting at work in my office at Penthouse. I am on a tour break. I am not thinking about music. You know how I got to California? Because I was bored in my hometown of Vancouver. I had hit a ceiling as far as my writing career. Vancouver is a small-town masquerading as a big city. I just decided I was going to move to Los Angeles, and I told everyone I was leaving December 30, so I had to be held accountable. And I did it.

But you mean how did I become a singer in a band? I have been musician and a showboat since I was a child and got to know my id. I would sit in front of the mirror and watch myself shaking my hair around. I had one of those Playskool radios with a microphone attachment. I recorded myself hosting fake radio shows with my best friend. When we got older, we put on plays and imitated Madonna. During my childhood, I was a committed figure skater and dancer. That was my life. Everything. I was very self-disciplined and meticulous. I was extremely competitive and hard on myself. Then, I became a teenager, discovered punk and started learning guitar. I moved out young. I started a band called White Lung with my best friend, Anne-Marie Vassiliou. I finished my university education, but it took me so long because I had to work a few jobs to pay my way. I always liked writing. I knew I wanted to write. I did the thing anyone else does to get what they want: hustled my ass. I worked for free. I did internships and busted my butt at shitty night jobs. I worked hard and tried to learn. Along the way, I found my voice.

RC: Did you start as more of a writer or a musician?

MBW: I had been working towards both of these careers equally. The difference is that with music, I never expected to make money from it. I played in a band because I loved making music, and all my friends were in bands and that was our livelihood, not my bread and butter. When White Lung is writing an album, the lyrics are the most important thing to me. Of course, I want to make great choruses, and melodies, but the lyrics are my main concern. In that sense, I am more of a writer. I want to write a book soon.

RC: You write about topics most people don’t talk about. Do you think that if we talk often, openly, and loudly about sex and drugs, attitudes about them will change?

MBW: I wrote about those things mostly to keep myself in check. This interview I did explains it well. The confessional style of writing has become the it girl. Every girl and their tampon talks about fucking and drugs. It went mainstream with Elizabeth Wurtzel, and it ended with Cat Marnell. I did it because I grew up reading writers and lyricists who wrote like that. I thought it was the only way. I like confessional, bleeding-heart bullshit or heavy academic research. I like history. Women writers are all the rage right now! Feminism has gone mainstream. Feminism has gone mainstream. I am not entirely interested in identifying myself with this fourth wave movement, or really with any group. I just want to be treated as an individual. I am a feminist on my terms, not what is the popular rhetoric of millennials. Much of today’s online feminism takes no personal responsibility. It demands equality, while asking for special treatment. It calls masculinity “toxic,” which I disagree with for many reasons. It blames society, capitalism and the patriarchy for all women’s unhappiness, to which I also I disagree. While there is a lot of power and positivity in current feminism, I also find it fails to see the big picture. The older I get the more I want to live in the country and disappear. The world is way too noisy.

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RC: I recently painted a mural part of which depicted a skateboarding woman. I got shit for the fact that she was white. It struck me as odd that no one commented that it was a woman — not a dude — just that she was white. So, when the revolution comes, will there be a place for white women?

MBW: What revolution?

You should be allowed to paint whatever ethnicity you want. People are insatiable! They are never satisfied. Look at Mattel, and the Barbie make-over. Women have been complaining about Barbie’s impossible portions for decades. So, Mattel buckles under the pressure of the buyers and makes a whole new set of Barbie dolls of all ethnicities, shapes and sizes, and people still complained. It wasn’t enough. We are in a very, very special time in history.

June 28, 2017

Scott Wozniak: Shadowboxing the Apocalypse [Interview by Mike Daily]

Two years ago, I moved from the Portland area to Southern Oregon’s Rogue Valley and met Scott Wozniak. Scott’s become a close friend. He writes poetry. He participates in readings and (yes, they still exist) slams. In 2014, during the first six months of his sobriety, Scott won $140 at a slam in Ashland. I told him he reminds me in some ways of Steve Richmond. He laughed. When we met, Scott hadn’t heard of Steve or read his poems. Familiar refrain in American Renegades poetry. Or Outlaw. Modern American Poetry. MAP. Whatever you want to call it. Why? Because there’s always someone you haven’t heard of or read in this realm. Realm meaning the underground scene or network worldwide. Which brings to mind Worldwide Pants, David Letterman‘s production company. Watch this video: On June 10, 1982, Allen Ginsberg appeared on NBC’s Late Night with David Letterman. Allen talked about singing mantras, poetry, rock and roll. He mentioned collaborating with The Clash, being friends with Bob Dylan, preparing to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (Viking Press, 1957) in Boulder, Colorado, and how he was inspired by William Blake. After the commercial break, Ginsberg performed a punk rock-paced poem backed by Paul Shaffer’s band.

— Allen Ginsberg on *Late Night with David Letterman*, June 10, 1982.

Scott Wozniak’s new book Crumbling Utopian Pipedream (Moran Press, 2017) features marvelous cover art by Marie Enger, a back cover blurb by poet and novelist Rob Plath, and 40 poems written by a “chaos enthusiast” who—when he isn’t “doin’ the blue-collar thing,” as he told Marcia Epstein on her Talk With Me podcast—spends his free time writing and “[s]hadowboxing the apocalypse,” opening lines from his poem “The Time for Doomsday Preparation is Over,” which goes:

Shadowboxing
the apocalypse
by throwing
punches
at the wind
seems more
productive
than banging
heads
against
bricks
in this
counterfeit
age
of reason.

Ladies and gentlemen, would you please welcome Scott Wozniak.

Mike Daily: The recent book review and interview by George Anderson in New South Wales, Australia, astounded me. Not many writers receive that kind of in-depth, insightful, “erudite” I think is the word, critical acclaim. You accomplished this with your second collection of poetry, Crumbling Utopian Pipedream, or CUP as I refer to it. Awestruck congratulations, my friend. What do you make of this?

Scott Wozniak: Quite honestly, I’m not completely sure there’s a whole lot to make of it. You know how things are in the small press world, especially poetry. You can rack up great reviews and remain unknown, except maybe by your peers. How far “acclaim” stretches is relative to how you perceive it.

The way I see it is this: George is one of those guys that writes great poetry himself, runs an awesome site dedicated to small press/underground lit, reviews books, basically shines a light on the scene, and has been doing it for a good amount of time now. The underground press survives thanks to guys like George, and there’s a ton of ‘em out there. You’re one of them, Mike. Guys who’ve been in the game a long time, writers who understand it’s up to us to keep the ball rolling.

Poetry, in particular, has been DIY for centuries. It’s a passion project. Ultimately, for me, if writers whose work I love, who I look up to, writers who’ve been doing this since before I was born, if those guys give me positive feedback, I’m stoked. I’m accomplishing more than I set out to accomplish. If I reach a wider audience thanks to these guys who have been grinding away for 10, 20, 30 years in the small press, because they just have to write, it’s in their bones, then I’m forever grateful. Because honestly, if not another soul on the planet read my words, I’d still be writing. So, I try to keep it in perspective. Sure, I like to hear that my writing connects with someone because I love that feeling of reading something that resonates with me. But, I’m a selfish fuck, a lot of times I’m writing for me. Clearing the trash out of the attic, you know? So, when I get a review like the one George did, I look at it more like he was very thorough and thoughtful, and paid my work huge respect on that level. I view it more as a reflection of his integrity and dedication to the small press than a reflection of how great my book is.

MD: The review drew attention to your choice to open CUP with an epigram by poet Doug Draime–

It’s then you see
the crushing odds
and you know
you have
beaten them.
Somehow. You know
with the certainty
of your continued
breath.

–and since I had been unfamiliar with Doug’s work, can you tell us more about him, the impact his poetry had on you, and your personal interactions with him?

SW: Doug Draime is a legend, in my eyes, and deserves to be recognized as such. He had been publishing in the underground since the late ’60s, up until he passed away last year. I only became familiar with his work maybe six or seven years ago. I started noticing him on quite a few different poetry websites I would frequent and he would floor me every time. Then I came across one of his chapbooks that was included in the first Punk Rock Chapbook Series by Epic Rites Press. After that, I was in full blown fan-boy mode and consumed as much of his work as I could find. His full-length collection, More than the Alley, published by Interior Noise Press (2012), is still one of my all-time favorite books of poetry out there.

Eventually, a couple of years down the line, after I’d started getting work published, I discovered that he lived right down the road from me. This was a revelation. There aren’t too many writers that I idolized like I did him and he was living in my backyard, in middle of nowhere, Southern Oregon.

One evening I tracked down his email. I shot him a message, and, surprisingly, he messaged me back. We corresponded semi-regularly for the last year of his life. I had no idea he was sick at the time and he would always shoot down my offers to get a cup of coffee because he wanted to spend time with his family. Regardless, he would take the time to give me advice on writing, periodically critique my work, push me to submit my stuff, and generally taught me about being a kind, selfless person. I was just this random, poetry freak who started harassing him and he took the time to encourage and talk to me, even while he was sick.

I had built him up as this giant of poetry and assumed that he somehow managed to make a living off his writing, even though I’d read many, many poems where he would talk about his experience at some shit, dead end job. When I breached this subject, he laughed at me and brought me back down to reality, telling me, “Make no mistake, poetry don’t pay the bills.”

For this experience alone, I’m continually grateful. It removed any visions of grandeur I may have possessed and instilled in me the importance to just write, fuck anything else. Doug wrote incredible stuff, and got published for 40-plus years without the drive for fame. He wrote top notch poetry that tore into me like few writers have. He did this because writing was in his bones. Pure, no-nonsense love of the form, without any expectations. I know he was unaware of the impact that realization had on me, but it’s massive. That’s why I try not to put too much stock in things like good reviews. If I can just write solid work and remain happy with the joy that comes from the act itself, then I will have accomplished something holy. Recently, another writer/illustrator whom I highly respect, Janne Karlsson, read the manuscript of a project he and I are working on together and told me he felt it read “like a cross between Doug Draime and Nietzsche.” I don’t think I will ever receive a higher compliment.

MD: George Anderson asked, “Have you recently stumbled upon some new authors you haven’t read before who have impressed you?” You answered, “Man, there’s a ton of ‘em out there right now. I think the underground, or as my friend Mike Daily likes to call it, post-outlaw poetry, is alive and well. But a few names that are newer to me and very impressive would be Ryan Quinn Flanagan, Katie Lewington, Mather Schneider, James Decay, Paul Tristram, Jenny Santellano, Jamie Thrasivoulou, Matthew Borczon, and Benjamin Blake, to name a few.” Go ahead and name some others, expanding from contemporary writers to list your lifelong influences. Speak on William S. Burroughs, pro and con from your experience and current perspective, if you will.

SW: I hate doing these lists. I always feel like it’s some sort of, “Oh, look how well-read I am” B.S. that’s a way of proving to the gatekeepers that I belong here, wherever here is. I’m not saying that feeling is grounded in reality, I’m just saying that’s how I feel. But, since I know you’re a complete bibliophile and have a heartfelt respect for authors, I will comply…

Obviously, Bukowski is at the head of the list, followed, in no particular order, by Czeslaw Milosz, d.a. levy, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Bob Kaufman, Jack Micheline, Gregory Corso, David Lerner, Miguel Algarin, Kurt Vonnegut, Ken Kesey, Hunter S. Thompson, Jim Carroll, Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, Walt Whitman, Bob Flanagan, Iceberg Slim, Donald Goines, Dan Fante (thanks to you), Carlos Castaneda, Phillip K. Dick, Robert Hunter, John Prine, Richard Brautigan, Woody Guthrie, Hubert Selby Jr., Harlan Ellison, Frank O’Hara, Bruce Springsteen, Joe Strummer, Tom Robbins, Tom Waits, Jack Black (author of, You Can’t Win, not the other guy), J.D. Salinger, everyone who ever wrote for Marvel Comics, a slew of other writers I’ve forgotten, and of course, Mr. William S. Burroughs, whom I tend to have a bit of a love/hate relationship with. Maybe hate is too strong of a word, it’s more of a love/ehh (shrugs shoulders) relationship.

The reason for this is that I love him for the madman he was, and how his work is a true representation of that. He lived hard and wild and that is obvious when you read him. His book, Junkie, is a hard one to top, and a clear, honest representation of a crazy-ass junkie. His cut-up period of work, I could do without. Naked Lunch is, in my opinion, the best of that style. I could do without the rest of the Nova Trilogy. Sure, it’s “experimental,” and “revolutionary” but it’s fucking hard to follow. That stuff is like learning a new language, it takes commitment to see it through. But, in all honesty, he’s probably the only writer who got clumped into the whole “Beat” category that I never outgrew. I can hear the gasps of sacrilege pouring from your readers’ mouths due to that statement, but it’s true. I could explain my stance further but that would be a long exhaustive conversation better suited for another time.

Focusing on Burroughs, I love him because he was bat-shit-crazy and I can relate. But I also see the folly of his ways the more I reflect on my own mistakes. I mean, he did murder someone. It may have been a drug-fueled mistake, and who am I to say it didn’t torment him, but the fucker got away with it because he comes from a wealthy family. That rubs me wrong. Maybe it shouldn’t reflect on my opinion about his work, but if I’m being honest, it kind of does. I will spare you an expanded discourse, which would undoubtedly be filled with hypocrisy…for now.

MD: What do you think was meant by my allusion to “post-outlaw poetry”?

SW: I’ve milled this over a bit since I first heard you use the term, and to me it seems like just another label, like “post-punk,” that is lost on me. You did, however, clue me in to the fact that you view it along the lines of straight-edge, but less militant. So, with that taken into consideration, I’ve come up with this…

Where “outlaw” has a (suicidal?) tendency to glorify the over-consumption of drugs and alcohol, and the life led while in such a state of existence, “post-outlaw” visits these same themes from the standpoint of experiences lived, pointing out the destruction while also revealing the desire, struggle, and necessity of overcoming such behavior, with the hope that the reader may learn that it’s not all fun and games in the fast lane, and yes, there is a way out. Maybe the “post-outlaw” is one who miraculously survived the “outlaw” life and is now searching for higher meaning thanks to the destruction of their past? Or you could be saying that all the outlaws have come and gone, but I think we know better.

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MD: I saw on Facebook that poet Alan Kaufman, Editor of The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1999), is 27 years sober this week. Last question: How essential has working a program of recovery been in maintaining your sobriety? I had thought I was an anomaly in sobriety since I had for years used will power and determination to not try to change how I feel. Now I’m aware that others with the DIY (Do It Yourself) mindset seem to have quit using the same method. Individuals who have posted or interviewed to this effect include musician, writer, and anchor at MTV News Meredith Graves (1 year); BMX racer, dirt jumper, street rider, and writer Scott Towne (6 years); and rappers Evolve (Sergio Hernandez, 2 years) and Blueprint (Al Shepard, 7 years). I was surprised to hear while listening to “Super Duty Tough Work with Blueprint and Illogic: Podcast 67: The Benefits of Sobriety” that Blueprint and I share the same sobriety birthday, May 15th (Print’s got a year on me). He didn’t mention A.A. or any direct principles of the program during his podcast with Illogic. Likely because when he quit, he quit. Done deal for him. The Book of Drugs: A Memoir (Da Capo Press, 2012) by solo artist Mike Doughty (former singer-guitarist of Soul Coughing, 17 years sober as far as I know) is one of my favorite books. In “An Indie Superstar’s Slow Road to Sobriety,” Mike writes about how going to meetings and finding out how to work the program saved his life. Yours?

SW: There is no question that working a 12-step program of recovery saved my life. I’m a drunk junkie of the hopeless variety. There is no logical reason that you and I should be having this conversation. By all accounts, I should have died long ago. I tried to get sober a time or two by using self-will and I never got more than a handful of weeks under my belt. I just couldn’t do it, until I did the work outlined in the book. I’m not blessed with the capability to just turn off my need for oblivion. I was aware of this fact for a long time, I just thought it was my lot in life. When I started doing the program, I thought it was bullshit and wasn’t gonna work for me because, you know, I’m unique. But as I got into it, something happened. What that something is, I’m still not sure, nor do I care to know. I try not to think too deeply about the how’s or why’s. I just do what I’ve been taught and it keeps me clean, plain and simple.

———

Contributor Bio:

Mike Daily is a novelist, journalist, zinemaker, spoken words performer, and co-creator of the Plywood Hoods freestyle BMX trick team. He lives in Oregon. Daily is at work on his third novel, Moon Babes of Bicycle City. Excerpts from the book are being recorded with Joe Gruttola.

June 1, 2017

Chris Kraus: Wildly Contradictory

We have a tendency to want to keep the objects of our admiration in their boxes, like collectors. When one refuses to fit or stay there, we struggle with how to perceive them. It’s rare and getting moreso, but Chris Kraus is one of those un-box-able entities. Mixing theory, fiction, and biography, her writing confounds as it captivates. She’s mostly known for her art writing, but she’s also done performance art, film, and teaches at the European Graduate School.

Through their work with the imprint Semiotext(e), Kraus and her partners, Sylvère Lotringer and Hedi El Kholti, have facilitated works by Jean Baudrillard, The Invisible Committee, Eileen Myles, Kathy Acker, Jarrett Kobek, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Guy Debord, Julia Kristeva, Gerald Raunig, and Michel Foucault, as well as themselves and many others. As Rick Moody puts it, “Semiotext(e) has for a generation been the leading edge of the most incendiary and exciting intellectual revolution in the West.”

Kraus’s debut novel, I Love Dick (Semiotext(e)/Native Agents, 1997), has been adapted into a TV series for Amazon by Jill Soloway and Sarah Gubbins starring Katherine Hahn, Griffin Dunne, and Kevin Bacon. If that weren’t enough, her biography of Kathy Acker, After Kathy Acker (Semiotext(e)/Native Agents, 2017), is also coming out later this year.

Roy Christopher: For the uninitiated, what would you say your field of work is? Where do you fit? [This question feels like it should have a “check as many as apply” clause.]

Chris Kraus: Writing. Sub-categories — literary fiction; criticism.

RC: Is having your debut novel turned into a TV show more validating or terrifying?

CK: Definitely not validating — The real validation came early on, when these girls would show up at bookstore readings with their copies with hundreds of post-its and cracked spines.

It was initially terrifying, but then I realized — who cares? And they’re doing a really good job.

RC: Do you ever feel like a stunt person for your fiction?

CK: No. More like, the director.

RC: Some of us have the tendency to get ourselves into situations that might make good stories. In another interview, you called infatuation a “gateway drug for writing,” which strikes me as a similar, if unplanned, tactic.

CK: Yeah, the point is that nothing is planned, and what seems like a small incident can become huge. It’s all what you read into it.

RC: You wrote in Video Green (Verso, 2004), “I think stupidity is the unwillingness to absorb new information” (p. 101). This sentiment seems all the more germane now.

CK: Yes, unfortunately so. And there’s so much new information, it’s almost impossible to absorb.

RC: I was thinking about that quotation in the context of the current administration, and, more relevantly, the supporters thereof.

CK: Yes, and that would extend to “ourselves,” especially — the ones who didn’t see it coming.

RC: Finally, why isn’t there already a biography of Kathy Acker? I’m glad you’re the one who wrote this one, but doesn’t it seem like it should’ve already happened?

CK: Yes and no. It takes a long time to research and write a biography. Douglas Martin finished his doctoral dissertation on Acker’s work, When She Does What She Does, ten years after her death in 2007. Now there’s another Acker biography in the works by the Canadian journalist Jason McBride. I think the smoke of Acker’s image needed to clear for her work and life to be freshly considered.

RC: Yeah, there was definitely no box for Kathy Acker.

CK: No, she was wildly contradictory!

RC: Do you feel a kinship with her?

CK: Of course.

RC: Is there anything else you’d like to bring up here?

CK: Not yet. But thank you.

May 17, 2017

M. Sayyid: The Other Side

Around the bend of the millennium, New York hip-hop collective Antipop Consortium emerged as a voice of possible futures. The spaced-out mix and match of M. Sayyid, Beans, High Priest, and Earl Blaize was a welcome beacon to the hip-hop of the new century. Emcee M. Sayyid’s flow is “forward-leaning” and abstract, but also as contagious as the flu. He’s also the storyteller of the crew, with an unmistakable Slick-Rick-from-the-Dark-Side vibe. Just listen to “9.99” from Tragic Epilogue (75 Ark, 2000) or “Z St.” from Arrhythmia (Warp, 2002).

As with any collection of volatile forces, APC’s work as a cohesive group has been sporadic at best, with seven years between their last two proper full-lengths. As I wrote about the gap in 2009,

When Antipop Consortium threw down the progressive hip-hop gauntlet on 2002’s Arrhythmia they didn’t expect to have to reunite several years later to pick it up—but they did. Their recent Fluorescent Black answers every challenge presented on Arrhythmia and then some. It’s weird, it’s word, and it’s war. The lyrics are abstract but tight and the beats are quirky but banging—and the whole package will stomp a mudhole in your ass.

Their separate ways are always active in the meantime though, working with everyone from DJ Vadim and DJ Krush to Matthew Shipp and Bill Laswell. As Mike Ladd, who worked with Sayyid on his latest, Error Tape 1, tells me,

Like the whole APC crew, always beyond forward. Sayyid is honestly one of my favorite people in to work with in music. He always finds a way to push you further constantly challenging himself and those around him in the most positive ways. I’ve known this brother for almost 20 years and never seen his energy slip. Very, very glad we’re in the same town and still get to work together from time to time.

When I first got into APC, I read that M.Sayyid used to work with Mark Pauline’s rabid robot-art crew, Survival Research Laboratories. A fact he confirms below. He also tells me about working with several other familiar, formative names, including Andy Jenkins, Mark Lewman, Spike Jonze, and Nick Philip.

I only recently came across last year’s Error Tape 1, and have had it in rotation nonstop. The “1” in the title ominously hints at future further installments. Sayyid tells me there will be two. “I’m working on tape 2 now,” he says.

Roy Christopher: How long have you been in Paris? That has to be mad different from working in New York.

M. Sayyid: Yeah I moved here in fall 2013 with my wife who’s Parisian. It was super hard to get in the zone, but it had less to do with Paris and more to do with my own personal journey and difficulty finding my sound. Like most things worthwhile it took time for me to find my sound then it took time for me to understand my vocal character and what my strong points were.

It was about a two-year quest. Once 2015 hit, I had a comfortable studio and engineer vibe.

The biggest achievement was my writing. I had no one around me who could understand what exactly I was saying so it forced me to write from a different place–a place of deep honesty woven in pattern.

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RC: How did you end up working with Survival Research Laboratories?

MS: I used to read RE:Search Magazine when I moved to San Jose at 18 after high school. I was living in a house of art with Nick Philip and around a lot of Nor Cal skate culture.

One day I was in a gallery in Downtown San Jose, and the owners asked me to help them prepare an exhibition for Mark Pauline. I knew who he was from the magazine so I was pumped, and I worked that exhibition with him. Also my homey Chris Cotton was a technician for his Bay Bridge show (insane), so I was around that universe a bunch of times in 89-90.

RC: Did working with SRL inform your music at all?

MS: For sure, it was the “other side,” and I was a magnet for anything on the “other side,” and so were the [SRL] guys. So, when we met, we spoke a similar language.

RC: Your music always sounds like it’s beaming in from some alternate future. What else works its way in there?

MS: Hmmm… Definitely my obsession with Basquiat after his death in 89 changed what I thought was possible in the art-making process… I was in an art collective with Andy Jenkins, Spike Jonze, Mark Lewman, and a bunch of other BMX-related folks called The Basement. For literature it was all about Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Bukowski… Then musically it was rap and punk and people like Laurie Anderson.

Again, all of this was like a way to the “other side.”

RC: What else are you working on that you want to bring up here?

MS: Promos for Error Tape 1 (i.e., videos, short tracks, etc.). I provided musical direction and songs for a French television mini series that I’m also acting in called Aurore directed by Laetitia Masson coming out on Arté.tv in September… I’m also in the process of furthering my creative performance coaching work with a platform for artistic self improvement called “insyncro,” designed to combine a practice of meditation physical training and relaxation for working artist to improve process in art making.