Category: Interviews

Posted on

Alexis Desolneux: Heresy for Hire

Once upon a buzz in the conquest of cool, there was a thing called brand hijacking. This was the phenomenon, sometimes frowned upon, of a brand being supposedly inadvertently associated with a certain subculture or movement. Think Pabst Blue Ribbon, Tommy Hilfiger, or Converse Chuck Taylors. It turns on the idea that the image of a brand belongs to the market, not to the company that cultivates that image.

Alexis ascending. [photo by Matt Coplon]
The only antidote is an image so strong that there’s no other way to take it. Over the past several years, Alexis Desolneux and his crew of flatland misfits (Sebastian Grubinger, Michael Husser, George Manos, and Matthieu Bonnécuelle) have built just that. Heresy is a BMX brand that operates like an underground record label. Think Dischord. To wit, in DIG‘s 99.5 issue, Print is Dead, Brian Tunney appropriately called them his “BMX Fugazi.” They’re dedicated to their craft, independent as fuck, and really, really good at what they do.

My journey to Heresy took much longer than it should have. In looking for a new flatland frame to build up last year, I found myself taking several steps backward. Even when I thought I’d found a proper solution, it was only a stopgap. BMX lends itself to nostalgia in weird ways, and nostalgia is a quicksand that’s difficult to avoid. I realized I was caught up in a bit of it when I found Heresy. As their slogan goes, “You are your path.”

After watching all of their videos and finding out everything I could about the brand and the riders behind it, I built up my own Heresy frame with as many of their parts as I could get. Given my fast fandom, I knew I needed to talk to their leader.

Roy Christopher: Let’s go all the way back, Alexis: What got you into BMX in the first place?

Alexis Desolneux: I would say the woods near home which had many dirt paths and a few small hills, watching motocross racing on TV as a kid in the 70s  or in dirt bike mags, finally seeing photos of early BMX racing in the US: It was mind-blowing and echoing what we were trying to do with our crappy little bikes in my small hometown next to Paris. I’ve  always loved riding my bike, ever since I was a 5-year-old kid.

RC: What was the catalyst for starting Heresy?

AD: I started Heresy from going through rough times (a serious riding accident, losing my main sponsors while my wife and I just had our second baby…) and just realizing that I had no choice but going for what made more sense even if that meant starting from zero. But the origin is the riding. I really needed that AscenD frame to exist. I was also at a point where I had already contributed to designing products for other brands. I also had my first go with a short-lived project named L’essence in the early 2000s. In that sense I had no choice but to go for an all-or-nothing kind of decision. I was 39, and it felt right and exciting to create something from scratch, or regret it forever.

RC: Music seems to be integral to the aesthetic of the brand. Was that intentional from the start, or does it just come from being a music fan?

AD: It definitely is integral to the aesthetic of the project. But I let things go as naturally as possible with Heresy. Music has been fueling my riding and my life in general ever since I was a kid, I was exposed to what was considered dangerous music early on, thanks to my brother. I remember playing his AC/DC Back in Black tape in 1980 or his Kinks album when no one was home, I was a 9-year-old kid and loved it. Later, in the 90’s, I was involved in the DIY hardcore scene playing in bands, trading records and driving to shows all over Europe. That and the whole ethos about making it happen when no one will do it for you (which was a common thing is that underground music world) are foundation for Heresy. It goes beyond being a music fan and grabbing elements of someone else’s aesthetics to re-create an identity, instead we hope to pay hommage to those who inspire(d) us by seeing Heresy as a unique filter for an essence, or just a feeling, something that is shared by many about riding, music, and life in general.

Obscured, 2011. [photo by Stephane Bar]
RC: The Heresy riders have styles that are not only different from riders in the sport but also different from each other. How did you go about assembling such a diverse team?

AD: I care about their passion, their fun, their free spirit, and their absolute commitment to make their ideas or vision reality. I sacralize the riding because in a time when BMX Flatland is growing, consequently its representation in the mainstream is spreading. It’s a predictable thing to happen in our society when a maturing sport is being developed and gaining recognition. I’m taking part in that process as a judge on some big events because I care to keep the progressive factor alive in flatland. But that’s a very different agenda from running a project like Heresy.

In that sense the riding is sacred because its nature is to exist before anyone else’s agenda affects it. Competition, advertising, television, show-business… flatland can be many things these days and these various systems will usually affect its presentation and push the riders to adapt, consciously or not.

Fine, but that’s just not what we emphasize with Heresy. We care to highlight the riding that remains unaffected, how an individual can self-express through flatland as a medium and expand his riding with no boundaries. Naturally, Heresy is also a representation but obviously miles away from another kind of representation like a flatland contest. There is a lot of light being put on the best contest riders these days, I just want to put light on other excellent riders as a contribution to make the picture more complete.

RC: What’s coming up for you and Heresy?

AD: Just riding as much as I can. It keeps me happy. It always did. For Heresy, new pedals, re-stock on pegs, BBs, headsets… AscenD frames coming out this year: V3 for the 19’’ & 19.5’’ sizes, V2 for the 20’’ & 20.5’’. We’ll also definitely have some projects with the team… Stay tuned.

Posted on

Shabazz Palaces: A New Refutation

The history of hip-hop so far can be seen as split down the middle by the deaths of Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur. In the most oversimplified of terms, there was a reset when street sounds gave way to club bangers. Wu-Tang and Nas stepped aside for Missy and Puffy. Few survived.

Ishmael Butler has been on both sides of that divide. His old New York crew, Digable Planets, was all over the place in the early 1990s, and his new Seattle outfit, Shabazz Palaces, is firmly a part of the future, though he doesn’t necessarily see time and space like that. Time and space, like reality itself, are human constructs. “Every serious artist hopes not to be a success but to escape the gravity, the pull, the prison of their times,” Charles Mudede tells me. “Ish, I think, is the only rapper who achieved escape velocity and is now free in space.”

Of the 1993 Digable Planets song “Time & Space (A New Refutation of),” Butler told Brian Coleman in 2007, “That song title was part of the title of the album. It came from Jorge Luis Borges. I was reading a lot of his stuff at the time… Everything he wrote was metaphysical and circular, and things didn’t always happen for any reason. Time and space are conceptual and can only relate to you as an individual” (Check the Technique, p. 169-170).

— Shabazz Palaces: Ishmael Butler and Tendai Maraire
[photo by Victoria Kovios]
After having released one of the most slept-on records in the history of music, 1994’s Blowout Comb (Pendulum), Digable Planets split up in the mid-1990s. They haven’t recorded any new material since, but they’ve been performing live again since 2005. Don’t get it out of sync though, Shabazz Palaces is still Ish’s main focus. Their two (!!) new records, Quazarz: Born on a Gangster Star and Quazarz vs. The Jealous Machines (both for Sub Pop), come out in July.

Roy Christopher: Now that you’ve done Digable Planets and Shabazz Palaces simultaneously, how do you approach those two projects differently?

Ishmael Butler: I would equate it to how black families have family reunions like every two years. It’s like that: Getting back to a familiar situation that you don’t do that much, but when you do, it’s fun, it’s special, and it always reminds you of your home and where you came from. It also makes you think about how you behaved and how you relate to and how you seize the time in the present, you know? So, it’s like going back to that music is romantic and nostalgic combined, wrapped up in this present thing that you can touch, but it’s still coming from the past, from a past that was very formative. So, it’s hard to describe, but I don’t think of it like I’m doing them at the same time because I’m really not. The Shabazz thing is now, and Digable shows are shows of older music because we haven’t done any new music.

RC: Would you say that both projects are informed by science fiction?

IB: Yeah, the first book I ever really read cover to cover was this book called Z for Zachariah (Atheneum, 1974). I always liked science fiction movies. I always liked reading science fiction. Octavia Butler came to me in my twenties. I read a lot of that. Then of course there’s George Clinton. I don’t really call that science fiction, but I call it imaginative reality… Where you exist because you believe in different realms, different worlds, natural words, supernatural worlds. You look at a cat like Clinton, and you’re like, “oh, he’s wild,” but he’s living in these alternative realities different from ours but no less real. I came onto that early in life.

RC: The Afrofuturism movement connects the concept of alienation from science fiction with the history of the African diaspora being stolen from their homeland for slavery. Do you think this is a useful connection to make?

IB: I like the alien aspect of it only because white people were the first to construct this reality that was concrete, had reason, and had form and hierarchies and categories, and you could understand everything, you know? That just wasn’t something that African motherfuckers were concerned with. We didn’t need to lord over the land and the air and the space and ideas and people – not to that extent. So, when those that did came into contact with us and saw us, that was the birth of science fiction. This notion of a reality and that we had broken that reality therefore set into motion all these needs to put hierarchies and to control and to enslave and to have land and borders and all of this kind of stuff. I feel like we are the alien. We deal with this realm in a totally different way than anyone else. And I think that it’s shocking and disorienting and calls into question reality. Imagine seeing some niggas in West Africa back then! Who knows what they were capable of doing!?

4j6TcLiANW8

What we did and what we knew and the things we had connections with, it was mind-blowing. It blew people away, and it set into motion all of these things like science fiction and abstraction and cubism and surrealism and all that stuff. I feel like we were catalysts to all of that stuff just by our existence. I look at the Towers in Luxor or the Pyramids or different types of structures, and I’m like, yeah, there was some different type of shit going on. I don’t think anyone knows what it was, and there are all kinds of theories that are interesting and entertaining and brilliantly conceived, but no one really knows… Something else was happening! It appears obvious to me. I hear that when Clinton and those guys get down, when Prince gets down… There’s something else at work in these constructions that these people are making…

RC: How do we tell this story right?

IB: If you could somehow get this point across: Every culture–forget race–every culture invented and was the author of certain enlightenments and certain constructions. Now, inside of that culture there’s skin colors that come from this certain culture. You heard me say I’m not talking about skin: I don’t see race like that. White people came up with this code for everything: We got language, we got writing, we got history, which we’re going to give an accurate account of… How?! How you gonna give an accurate account of a battle?! All these men that died can’t read or write, and they’re operating at the behest of someone who’s in control who’s going to author this history! So, forget history altogether! I can’t even fuck with it! These are just serial tales that vaguely hint at reality and the truth of some days past as far as I’m concerned.

I think you’ve got to figure out how to tell a language-less, history-less story, that is all about expanding the now rather than conquering and controlling the future. That’s where all this quote-“Afrofuturism” comes from is sly motherfuckers who was loving the moment so much that they wanted to blow more air and blow more space into the moment and push it out and hold it as long as they could. That’s what grooves and loops and sustaining one groove and one rhythm does: it bends time and melts it and blows bubbles in it. That’s what this Afrofuturism stuff is about.

6TWNaMRlNj8

If you came here across the sea in the hull of a ship, and you land, and you start to live this new life in this new territory where it gets extremely cold, and there’s all these kinds of seasons and abuse and terrors is being pushed upon you. Every minute of every day you live in oppression and terror of the sort that no one can even imagine anymore, no movie can show you anything close to what actually happened. Simple survival, waking up, standing up, greeting the sun, breathing in and out… You’re a futurist. You’ve tapped into something that keeps you moving that’s stronger than really anything we’ve ever seen before from humankind. Imagine getting used to that on a cellular level–you’re breathing that now–what’s going to be the result of that? I think we all are futurists.

Posted on

Clay Tarver: Gone Glimmering

I first came across Clay Tarver in the very early 1990s. His guitar playing drove two of my favorite bands back then: Bullet LaVolta and Chavez. The former was, like a lot of the bands of the time, a hybrid of punk, metal, and some third strain of rock that was brewing but had yet to boil. I noticed producer Dave Jerden’s name on the back of several CD jackets in and near my player: Mother’s Milk, Nothing’s Shocking, Facelift, Symbol of Salvation, and Swandive. Swandive (RCA), Bullet LaVolta’s last proper record, came out the same day as Nirvana’s Nevermind (DGC), September 24, 1991. They broke up not long after.

Clay Tarver

Tarver’s next band, Chavez, recorded two of the best records of the decade, both of which sound as firm and fresh now as they did then. Gone Glimmering (1995) and Ride the Fader (1996) helped Matador Records maintain a hand in the choke-hold on the decade-defining sound (The other hand belonged to Sub Pop). Along with Matt Sweeney’s lilting vocals, it was Tarver’s guitar that formed that sound. I’ve always considered him among players whose guitar sound is their band’s identity. Think John Haggerty, Bob Mould, J. Mascis, Steve Albini. Here, just listen to “Break Up Your Band” from Gone Glimmering (1995):

bKr45j6S_qQ

I saw Chavez play in Seattle in 1996, and after the show I went to say “hi” to Clay. I shook his hand and introduced myself, then noticed that I’d interrupted a three-way conversation-in-progress. There were mildly annoyed dudes standing on either side of me. I soon realized I was standing between Greg Dulli and Donal Logue, two of Tarver’s old friends and stars in their own right. Dulli is the lead singer of the legendary Afghan Whigs, and Logue, though he’s done tons of other things, was the dad on Fox’s Grounded for Life (2001-2005) and currently plays Harvey Bullock on Gotham.

I recently asked Donal about Clay, and he had the following to say:

Clay Tarver is smarter and more talented than anyone I’ve ever met, but the super-human thing about Clay is he’s never been an attention-seeker or used any of his insanely unfair talents in some kind of narcissistic pursuit. He was the last word in any conversation regarding art or politics, but (and this is hard to articulate), he was never a dick about it. He was always just right, and his thinking was always at another level. High school all-state basketball star? I wouldn’t have known it unless his family told me. One of the best guitarists of all time? His own kids didn’t know he played guitar. No one has influenced me more than Clay Tarver. It’s impossible to describe Clay Tarver in a sentence, Roy, so I don’t even want to try!

Donal reiterated that the thing he finds so amazing about Clay is his modesty. “What really blows me away,” Donal said, “is how he avoided any kind of self-serving behavior, despite his gifts and talents.”

Silicon Valley

Toward the turn of the millennium, Tarver made the switch from music to movies and put together some outstanding and memorable clips in a place where it’s difficult to stand out. He directed the “Jimmy the Cabdriver” spots for MTV, which featured Donal as a greasy, fast-talking cabdriver, directed the ubiquitous “Got Milk?” commercials, and co-wrote the feature film Joy Ride (2001) with J.J. Abrams. He now serves as a consulting producer and writer for HBO’s Silicon Valley. Tarver recently signed on to script the sequel to Dodgeball for Fox, but he says that’s not likely to happen. He also owes Greg Dulli a phone call.

Roy Christopher: You’ve been on stage as a guitarist and are now writing scripts and producing. How do the two roles—one out in front of the crowd and one behind the scenes—compare? Which do you like better?

Chavez : Gone GlimmeringClay Tarver: Well, the first question is easy. Being on stage is one hell of a lot more fun. And not because you’re the focus of the attention, of all the applause, etc. To me, it’s more about getting some kind of visceral gratification for what I’m doing as it happens. It’s tremendous.There’s nothing like performing with a group, in front of people, where you’re kind of all in this special moment together. Writing is the opposite. Writing is all about creating that moment for others. Sometimes fool proofing it. It’s about craft and discipline and serious self-editing. And I suppose I enjoy the challenge. I do. Even in music, you can’t get on stage without doing the hard work of writing. But writing’s not fun. Look, I feel very fortunate to be doing what I do. I’m creatively challenged to the hilt. But I’d be lying if I told you I don’t miss playing whenever I wanted to.

RC: Man, the 1990s were a weird time for music. Looking back, it seems like genres were bending and blending in such odd ways. What do you like these days?

CT: Huh. I don’t know if I agree with you. For me, my favorite time of music was the Creem magazine days. Genres were all over the place. Any issue could have Cheap Trick, Aerosmith, The Sex Pistols, Blondie, KISS, Nugent, Elton John, Rick Derringer, and Bowie.

The 90s were more a generational thing to me. I was glad to be a part of it. But it was much more sort of straightforward. What am I into today? Not much new… Tinariwen… Queens… Still listening to a lot of Dennis Wilson and Glen Campbell… Love the Master’s Apprentices… Saw John Prine for the first time recently and loved it.

RC: Fair enough… Donal Logue and Greg Dulli are two guys whose paths have crossed yours at various times over the past twenty-odd years. Tell me about the connection among you three.

Bullet LaVolta: SwandiveCT: Donal was my roommate in college. And he was Bullet LaVolta’s road manager and general best friend. He came on tour with us.

In Champagne, Illinois the day of the World Series Earthquake — 25 years ago last month — we met and have all been friends ever since. In fact, I owe Greg a call right now (he lives right near me), and he gets real pissy when I owe him one.

Donal and I later did the cab driver things. I’d gotten a job at MTV when I moved to New York to start Chavez. That’s actually how I became a writer. They wanted to turn it into a feature so I thought I’d give it a try. I figured if I ever wanted to direct more stuff it would be a good skill to have. The movie never got made. But it gave me my career.

It’s funny. I never wanted to be a writer. I was one of those guys who, when I finished college, was thrilled to never write another paper again. Now fucking look at me…

RC: Ha. Speaking of, you’re a writer and consulting producer on HBO’s Silicon Valley, which is hilarious and accurate as far as my experience in start-ups has been. Have you worked in that world at all?

CT: Nope. Never. But Mike Judge did a million years ago. He’s the creator of the show, and a guy I’ve done feature work with for something like 15 years. (A great musician, by the way. Sick stand-up bass player. A pro before he got into animation.) Also, Alec Berg (our show runner) has a brother who worked in that world. Between us we read, did research, went on trips up there. But we also have really serious advisers who help us. We’re in the midst of Season 2 right now… Really in the trenches.

RC: Awesome! I can’t wait to see where it goes next… Okay, having been successful in two different areas of entertainment, do you have any advice for those aspiring musicians or writers out there?

CT: Ya know, people always want to “break in” to music or film or whatever. But I always found that to be a weird phrase. I think you just do what you want and hope people like it. And now, more than ever, that’s possible. Music’s great because there’s no barrier to entry. You have instruments and guys and you just go do it. If people like it, there ya go. Film is obviously more expensive. But, Christ, there’s so many different ways to get stuff out there. People make shorts and bits and all kinds of stuff. And if it’s good, usually people will find it. I say just keep doing. Keep making stuff. Keep at it.

RC: I know you’re working on Dodgeball 2, but what else is coming up?

CT: I’ve got some stuff in the works. Dodgeball 2 doesn’t seem like it’s going to happen. But I’m hoping to keep at it with Silicon Valley. I have some pretty exciting feature things kicking around. And I’m even making a music-based TV show. But in truth, who the hell knows?

Posted on

Gareth Branwyn: Borg Like Me

Gareth Branwyn

Over the past 30-odd years, writer Gareth Branwyn has been amassing an impressive body of work on the fringes of cyberculture. He wrote for bOING bOING when it was still a print zine, did his own zine called Going Gaga before that, was an editor at Mondo 2000, WIRED, MAKE, does book reviews for WINK, has edited over a dozen books, and is a regular contributor to my own Summer Reading Lists. He’s stayed as jacked-in to our current technoculture as one can be, for as long as there’s been a jack. His new book, Borg Like Me & Other Tales of Art, Eros, and Embedded Systems (Sparks of Fire Press, 2014), collects almost 300 pages of his pieces from all over the place. It’s like a cross between a very personal, edited collection on cyberpunk and a zine anthology.

The last time I interviewed Branwyn (in 2001), he told me,

One of the great things about being so bloody old is that I’ve had a chance to experience every flavor of fringe media from the mid-’70s on. I caught the tail end of ’70s hippie media, then the punk DIY movement of the ’80s, then the ’zine publishing scene of the ’90s, and then web publishing in the ’90s.

I finally met Gareth IRL at Maker Faire in Austin in 2008, and we haven’t had a genuine sit-down in over ten years. Once I got my hands on a copy of Borg Like Me, I knew it was time to catch up with him again.

Borg-Like Mail.

Roy Christopher: After all of these years, what finally prompted the collecting of all of these pieces?

Gareth Branwyn: This is a book I started putting together years ago, before I became the Editorial Director at MAKE. But that job was so all-consuming, I knew the book would never happen if I stayed there. So, I left early last year and immediately launched a Kickstarter campaign. I also thought I had a very fun and innovative idea for a collection of this kind, what I call a lazy man’s memoir. I collected content from my 30+ year career and then wove a new, personal narrative around it, via deep intros to the pieces and new essays that helped flesh out the “story.” These (hopefully) create a narrative arc and a point to this book that makes it more interesting (and far more personal) than just a collection of my best writing.

RC: The title of the collection has a very personal connotation that people don’t necessarily know about. Tell us about your very close relationship with the machine.

GB: Well, as I like to tell people: I have an artificial hip, a rebuilt heart, and I take a biological drug that’s bioengineered from mice proteins. So I am literally a chimera—part man, part machine, part mouse. But as I make the point in the book, we are all so heavily mediated by technology and cutting-edge medical science at this point that we are all now cyborgs–part human, part machine.

The book’s subtitle, “& Other Tales of Art, Eros, and Embedded Systems,” also reveals more than people may be aware about me. Over the course of my career, I’ve written about far more than technology. I’ve written a lot about art, music, relationships and love, the occult and spirituality, and various aspects of underground media and culture. I even wrote a column for a sex magazine many years ago. This book is something of a coming out for me, revealing more about the breadth of my interests than I ever have before to a widespread audience. I’m like an onion, man. Layers.

RC: You’re primarily known as a writer through your writings on technology and technology-influenced cyberculture, yet you claim not to be that into technology. What gives, man?

Borg Like Me stamp.GB: Well, that subtitle was a little bit of an exaggeration for effect. I’m not in love with technology for technology’s sake. I’m most fascinated by how people actually use technology, and how they bend (and even break it) for their own purposes. As I say in the book (referring to the William Gibson quote “The street finds its own uses for things”), I’m more interested in the street than the things.  Because I’ve written extensively on how-to technology, such as robot building, people think of me as a real hacker, a real geek. But I’m not. Most of my geek/hacker friends like to tinker and problem solve tech for its own sake, for the challenge. I don’t. I just want my tech to work. As I once said in a MAKE bio piece once: “I’m more of a puffy-sleeved romantic than a pocket-protected geek.”

RC: One of the images from Jamming the Media that has always stuck in my head is that of you and your then-four-year-old son Blake leaving the darkened room of blinking lights that was your media lab at the time. Tell us about his involvement in Borg Like Me.

GB: That’s from the introduction to Jamming the Media, a piece called “The Electronic Cottage: A Flash Forward.” I included that in Borg Like Me. Because of my work in cutting-edge tech and media, Blake grew up completely immersed in early personal technology tools. They all came completely natural to him. He’s a 27-year old digital artist and game designer now, living in the Bay Area, and I think that early immersion is a reason why. He and I used to do things like create animated cartoons in HyperCard by drawing animation frames by hand, scanning them into the computer, and then creating crude animations by flipping the hypercards really fast. I think we even put music on some of them. And one of the games I got for review, Creatures, had a huge impact on him and made him declare he wanted to be a game designer. Hell, he even did some kid reviews of games and early LEGO Mindstorms in Wired and The Baltimore Sun. 

When he was a kid, I actually used to fantasize about him growing up and being some sort of artist, writer, or other creative type, and us collaborating on stuff. So it was was a dream come true working together on this book. At one point, I joked that he was acting as my project manager. So we decided to make it official. He was very pro about it and really did help keep me on track. He also did a ton of incidental art, icons for the book and such, did animation elements for my Kickstarter video, and graphics for the KS campaign. He also co-designed the rubber stamps I created to accompany the book, which I use on all of the mailing envelopes and letters I send out. It really does feel like the book was a collaboration between us. There were so many deeply gratifying aspects of doing this book. Working with him was definitely a highlight.

Borg Like MeThe book was also something of a “getting the band back together.” I worked with 18 artists from my old zine and early cyberculture mag days, people like Mark Frauenfelder, Danny Hellman, John Bergin, Shannon Wheeler, William Braker. There are some 30 illustrations in all.

RC: The artwork was the next thing I was going to ask about. You beat me to it… Twenty years ago, you wrote that “hackers represent the scouts to a new territory that is just now beginning to be mapped out by others.” How would you adjust or amend your conception of the hacker since?

GB: Well, the territory has certainly been mapped, and settled, and over-developed, and large tracts of it sold to the highest bidder. I’ve told people at several of my talks recently that, in the 1990s when I was writing about the “frontier towns of cyberspace,” I never for a moment could have imagined that my parents would now spend almost as much time online as I do. They are the most un-techie people I could imagine and yet they have his and hers desktop computers, laptops, smart phones, and at least one tablet. 

But I think that “hacking the future” process is still happening. I was on a panel at SXSW this year, with Bruce Sterling, Cory Doctorow, and Chris Brown. The subject was basically: What happened to the cyberpunks? Sterling focused on the darker side of things (as he is wont to do): The Silk Road busts, Cody Wilson and 3D-printed guns, Eastern European cybercriminals, and the like. While I think that’s all relevant, I argued that I think lots of cyberpunks became makers. A lot of the people I worked with at MAKE were very involved in early-90s cyberculture. I think, for many of us, we got tired of the overemphasis on virtuality, hyper-mentality, and the denigration of “the meat,” and so there was something of a corrective swing back towards physicality, getting your hands dirty. Mark Frauenfelder (bOING bOING) has an interesting theory about this. In the 90s, when everyone was hacking software and the net, to share your work, all you had to do was send a file or link. But as soon as microcontrollers and other physical computing hardware became readily available and people started hacking with that, suddenly, you needed to show your work off in person. From this grew hardware meetups, hackerspaces, Maker Faires, and the like.

One of the frequent takeaways from Borg Like Me that I’ve heard from readers is that (in the essays about early cyberculture) there’s a palpable sense of frontier spirit, passion, and a sense of just how powerful and potentially revolutionary these democratizing tools can be. These days, when net neutrality is at stake, it’s good to be reminded of the promise and potential that all of this networked tech initially offered. Sure the techno-cultural changes have been deep, and in many ways profound (we take for granted the power of that globally-connected device that we carry, forgotten, in our pockets), but the drift towards mundanity and big media subsumption is insidious and steady. If the “You know, back when I was a cyberpunk…” stories in my book can inspire today’s mutant change agents in even the smallest ways, I’d be thrilled.

RC: Music is another deep interest we have in common. I love the “Immersive Media Notes” spread throughout the book. Diving into media headlong while writing is something I advocate regularly. Do you have specific “writing music,” or do you play whatever you’re into at the time?

GB: Music has always been so deeply interwoven into my life, even before I met my late-wife, a musician, and lived with her for 22 years. I can’t think of many things in my past without thinking of the music that soundtracked those experiences. As I was writing the book, I noticed how many pieces mentioned music, were about music, or had music attached to them in my mind. So I created those “Immersive Media Notes” so that readers could listen to the music associated with that piece before, during, or after. The idea was inspired by the essay “By This River” (and the Eno song from where it gets its name). That song is so hauntingly beautiful to me and completely encodes much of my relationship with my wife. I felt like people HAD to listen to that track to better appreciate the feelings I was trying to convey in that piece. It’s funny though – I actually added the “Immersive Media Notes” at the very last minute, even after the book was in first proofs, and it’s one of the things that always gets mentioned by readers/reviewers.

RC: What’s coming up next for a Borg like You?

GB: I’m working on a number of projects. For my imprint, Sparks of Fire Press, I’m working on two new chapbooks in the Borg Like Me series. The Eros Part is a collection of my writings on love, sex, and muses. I promised this as one of the premiums for my Kickstarter campaign. Then I’m working on a follow up to my popular Gareth’s Tips on Sucks-Less Writing. I’m excited about that. I think there is some great new material in there. I’m also working on a big project I’m not at liberty to talk about, but if it comes through, it’ll be amazing. Oh, and I’ve also been working on Café Gaga, which’ll be a periodic podcast of things that are currently holding my attention. And I continue to do regular reviews for WINK Books, a gig that I really love. So, I’m definitely keeping busy!

Posted on

Johnny Ciggs: Gritty City Cesspool [by Mike Daily]

“Music is pretty much the only thing that has ever mattered in my life,” says Johnny Ciggs, a major member of the Gritty City Family. I was introduced to this creative crew of rappers and producers by my man Tim Baker over at SYFFAL. He sent me the clip for “Hunnid Dolla Bills” by Fan Ran, Skweeky Watahfawls, and the dude Johnny Ciggs [embedded below]. I’ve been following the fam ever since. Johnny’s “Write Like the First Day” (featuring Fan Ran) off of his 21 Tracks About Malt Liquor, Fat Asses, and Other Ill Shit mixtape has been my go-to hype song for a minute now. Vee Aye All Day.

The following interview was conducted by my close friend and colleague Mike Daily with photos by Sirus the Virus. — Roy C.

Johnny Ciggs

Johnny Ciggs and the Gritty City Family from Richmond, Virginia are killin’ it. That’s what I heard from my professor Roy Christopher, so I followed up on it. I liked much of what I heard and saw. They rock shows, throw backyard pool parties and close bars—literally, as key members of the crew serve alcohol to make a living. The rawness is real. All too real, at times. In Fall 2013, I picked up a few CDs direct from Johnny Ciggs as he was passing through Portland on a road trip and conducted the following interview with him.

Mike Daily: I like the video that shows you guys bootlegging power from your neighbors’ house with the extension cord.

Johnny Ciggs: [Laughs.] Yeah. That was funny. We didn’t have the money to pay our electric bill for like two months. I was sayin’ to Sirus [the Virus], “We gotta pay that bill, man.” And he was like, “Yeah, I know. We should do that.” We just kept sayin’ that like every other day for two months. I woke up that Monday and my clock was off and I was like, “Why is my clock off?” For a while there–me and Sirus livin’ together—we were both makin’ no money at all. I can’t remember what song it is—I think it’s on Toilet Wine—I talked about splittin’ ramen noodles on the kitchen floor because we didn’t have any furniture and all we had was a pack of ramen noodles. I think the thought of bills—now that we’re makin’ a little more money—scares us still. We act like we’re still broke like that.

alAJPTChfqU

MD: You said “makin’ a little more money.” Is that from music?

JC: No, I wish. We actually just got lucky and got a good bartending gig at a good bar in town. We were both servers for a while but we were barely scrapin’ by. We knew all the bartenders at a bar down the street and Sirus was lookin’ for a job. He got one up there and then got me a job up there. I don’t make much money off the music itself but I make money off the merchandise like t-shirts and hoodies. I don’t think it would be enough to live off of but it’s just nice to get a little bit, so we can buy supplies like the new mic we need, CD cases…stuff like that.

MD: Is that where it’s at now with music in general? Shows and merch over music sales?

JC: Yeah. Especially at the level we’re at right now. We’ve got a pretty decent local following. Instead of thinking that we’re owed something at the level we’re at now, we just want to get people to hear us, so we’ll go hand out CDs for free, hang out with people and find out what kind of stuff they’re into. We’re out around town all the time so we’re basically working on connecting our faces to the brand. We’d be foolish to try and sell our CDs for 15 bucks or something. That’s how you turn people away. We’re trying to bring people in. New music is everywhere. You have to give people a reason to care and separate you from the rest. Where music is at right now–where everything’s free and there’s so much stuff and the whole scene is watered down by the internet and everything–it’s really hard to ask—at least in my opinion—to ask for money, when you’re just tryin’ to promote yourself. I spent like 300 bucks gettin’ these CDs printed for the trip. I’d rather do that–that’s a few bar tabs. I’d rather just stay in a few nights here and there to get the CD out, you know, than spend 300 bucks for a headache.

MD: In that “Power Outage” video, there’s a BMX bike sitting there. Whose is that?

JC: That’s Pandemic’s. He rides that around town. It’s the worst bike in the world. I had to ride it to work one day. It’s terrible. The seat’s super low and the bike’s just tiny in general. It doesn’t ride like a normal BMX bike. It rides like no bike I’ve ever ridden before in my life.

MD: Does it have brakes on it?

JC: No.

MD: Do you guys skate?

JC: Not all of us. I came up as a big skateboarder. I’d ride skateboards ever since I was a little kid, and then startin’ when I was like 14, I really started gettin’ into it. I still skateboard here and there—mostly just mini-ramp. Not as much as I used to. My passion kinda died out a little bit probably like three, four years ago. A lot of my friends who skated left Richmond, and then the mini-ramp that I would go to all the time, a tree fell through it, and it was just kinda like, “What the hell now?”  Skweeky [Watahfawls] was a sick skateboarder in his day too, but he doesn’t skate much anymore either.

Johnny Ciggs in the studio.

MD: That’s right around the time you must have started rapping.

JC: Yeah, so it just kinda worked out. I still like to skate when I can–it’s just hard to do. I work like 12 hours a day and then the rest of the time is all spent recording, writing, rapping or whatever the hell we’re doing.

MD: The first raps you made, how did you know how to make bars and choruses?

JC: Well, I’ve been a drummer my whole life. I started drummin’ when I was a little kid. I just understood it. I didn’t even really understand how to write bars necessarily at the time, but just like I do these days, I basically used every syllable as a drum hit–that way I would stay on time. My first verses would just round out to 16 somehow by chance. Sixteen is the basic length of a rap verse. It just kinda worked. It changed my writing once I realized how to count out the words by bars though. With that, I was able to write more cohesive verses and build my own formula on how a basic Ciggs verse should be put together. What gave me more trouble was taming my voice and getting a smoother flow. When it comes to hooks, I hate them. I can write them, but I don’t enjoy it. That’s Sirus’ department. He loves writing hooks.

MD: You said you favor flow over lyricism, but you do have some lyrical lines.

JC: Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, I do have the ability to get lyrical. The fellas always make fun of me when I start makin’ mythology metaphors and stuff like that. I just don’t want it to sound like rappers trying to sound overly lyrical. That just bothers me. It didn’t always but now it just really bothers me. I like there to be a little style. A lot of rappers who are trying to be too lyrical will come out with some seriously intelligent shit, but it will have no personality and will be the most boring shit you’ve ever heard in your life. I feel like there’s certain rappers—who I won’t name names—that could be great rappers. They’re already great, but they could be even better if they just dumbed it down a little. Not even “dumb it down”—that’s a bad way to put it. But just not try so hard and make it a little more natural. I don’t want to hear what a rapper thinks he should spit or what he or she thinks will blow away their listener. I just want to hear rappers spit what they spit. That’s all I do. The lyrical ability comes naturally to me. I worry more about rockin’ on a track. And the only way to really rock in my book is to have a nasty flow. Peace to Treach.

MD: Do you do storytelling, would you say?

Johnny Ciggs: 21 Tracks...JC: That’s something I want to get back into. I used to do a lot of storytelling earlier on. On my first mixtape [21 Tracks About Malt Liquor, Fat Asses, and Other Ill Shit, May 2012], there’s a few stories. What I’ve heard is my greatest track ever is “Street Stories,” where I tell two stories with a middle verse from the homie Che Broadway. I really like storytelling. I’ve just kinda gotten away from it on what we’ve been workin’ on lately. I’m plannin’ on gettin’ back into that. The album I’ve been tryin’ to figure out how to put together, I think I finally got a feel for it. There’s gonna be a lot of storytelling on that one.

MD: When you say “tryin’ to figure out how to put together,” do you already have the beats in mind? Do you have the concept for the words?

JC: I’ve got so many beats for this album, it’s ridiculous, but I still need more. With Gritty City, the thing is there’s no politic’in’ your way into it: You gotta get down with us. We’re all really good friends. We all hang out all the time. It’s just been a rough year. We just lost another member of Gritty City, Joe Threat—Rest in Peace. And it’s just, you know, with stuff like that, it’s just been… This was supposed to be the year where we were gonna do 16 releases, and it hasn’t worked out. We’ve still been doin’ a lot, but there’s been other stuff gettin’ in the way. I just want to do an album that reflects on the lifestyle and things I’ve seen—more than just the punchline rap and stuff like that. Which is fun, but I feel like people wonder where exactly everything we talk about comes from. I just want to more blatantly go out there and put it out there and talk about the life we lead, and reflect on that—get into my head about thoughts I have, doubts I have, the whole bipolar nature of my existence. I want this album to have more to offer and be more personal than my past releases. I feel a lot right now, I just gotta figure out how to say it. Don’t worry though. There will still be plenty of the classic Johnny Ciggs rawness on there, too.

MD: What do you mean by “lifestyle”?

JC: I don’t even know how to explain it without sounding like we’re totally out of our minds. We’re just fuckin’ crazy. [Laughs.] I’ll put it like my homie Seap One (R.I.P.) used to say before he passed: “Lemme tell you bout this life…” If anyone ever asked him what he meant, he would laugh and shake his head and repeat himself. Let’s just say we have a good time.

MD: You guys work full-time jobs and you’re prolific, making music every chance you get. That’s “lifestyle”, right?

JC: Yeah, that’s lifestyle. It’s just what goes on. We talk about the way things have happened in our lives and everything. We took the harder route, maybe you could say. We all have had our problems with just bein’ stupid kids and gettin’ in trouble. We’ve seen friends pass from drugs. Some people have recovered from drugs and now they’re doin’ this. We all drink too much and stuff like that. And just everything that goes along with that—the crazy women that come around. Just…whatever. I mean, I can’t even really explain it in a sentence. That’s why I’m trying to figure out how I’m supposed to do it—back to the original question—I can’t figure out how to say it. Fan Ran said it the best. He’s like, “What you gotta understand is 99% of people ain’t as crazy as we are.”

MD: How many guys are in Gritty City?

JC: There’s eight of us total, including Seap and Joe. Delta Automatik, Skweeky Watahfawls, Pandemic, Fan Ran, Sirus the Virus and myself. Those are the artists, but we’ve got friends all over the town like the Divine Prophets guys. Fan Ran is in Divine Prophets as well, which is an old Richmond group. I don’t know if you all have heard of them, but that was like the big Richmond hip-hop group, forever. And they actually just lost their producer this year as well: R.I.P. Chadrach. We hang out with those guys all the time. I don’t know if you heard in the songs, we talk about Main Street Mafia. There’s a strip in Richmond where it’s like the dive bar scene, and we all just hang out around there and get smashed and make rap music. That’s basically it. Then we also got extended fam like the homie Devious Kanevil, Oktober 9, The Fugitive 9 crew, which is family ties right there. We got members married to the same mob and shit: RT, BC Music First, Sleaze. There are a few rappers that show their face around the Gritty City house pretty regularly. We love all of them.

MD: How old are you?

JC: I’m 29.

MD: I first heard about you guys in a text that Roy Christopher sent me: “Check out Adam Zombie and The Gritty City Family (especially Skweeky Watahfawls and Johnny Ciggs): Richmond, VA is killing it.”

JC: [Laughs.] Skweeky Watahfawls is my favorite rapper. That dude is hilarious. What you gotta understand about Skweeky Watahfawls is: Skweeky Watahfawls is the biggest asshole on the face of the earth. He’s a douchebag, asshole, drunk piece of shit, and I love him. But he’s a fuckin’ dick. That’s what’s so funny…I feel like people appreciate him for his lyrics, but if you know that guy personally and you listen to some of the stuff he says, it is just the funniest shit you ever heard in your fuckin’ life. This is another one that’s just unexplainable in words. He is hilarious, his wit is incredible, he’s super smart and then on top of that, he’s just a fuckin’ dirtbag so it’s just like a perfect mix. He’s like a comedic rapper, in my mind. When me and him write together—we work on a lot of songs together—we’ll go line for line, just tryin’ to make each other laugh. And if we laugh the whole time we’re writin’ it, then it’s gonna be a good song.  But back to the original question, yeah, Richmond, VA is killin’ it. There is a lot of good hip-hop happening and I’m honored to be able to say that I work closely with most of my favorite rappers in town. This city will be on the map here soon. Just wait.

MD: Does Skweeky have a solo album?

JC: He’s workin’ on it. We’re about halfway through. He was livin’ at my house before Seap was livin’ there and we were workin’ on his stuff pretty heavily, but then he moved and got a different job and things just changed. There’s been a lot of shiftin’ around lately. It kind of got put on hold but it’s gonna be real sweet. It’s good. He’s almost got more of like a Beastie Boys sound on it. Where other guys do more like hardcore and soulful hip-hop, his has got a few rock samples on there and things like that, but it just really works with the way he raps, so it’s good.  It’s called Cocaine ‘n Demons.  Keep your eyes peeled for that one.

[Note: As I was wrapping up the article, Johnny Ciggs said in a voicemail message: “I know your boy Roy Christopher and you had been askin’ about me and Skweeky Watahfawls and everything. I don’t know if y’all care but me and him in the past couple weeks started an album together. We’re about halfway done with it and just wanted to give y’all a heads up on that. It was actually kind of influenced by y’all though so we thank you for the compliments. We decided to run with it, do somethin’ together, so hopefully y’all will like that when it comes out here in the next couple of months.”]

MD: A friend of mine said that he considers himself one of a thousand rappers out there. I was really surprised to hear that because I think he’s a great artist. Do you think like that?

JC: You mean sayin’ that I’m just one of a thousand guys all tryin’ to do it?

MD: Yeah.

Johnny Ciggs: Toilet WineJC: I don’t really consider myself that way and I don’t consider really anybody in my group that way. I had trouble explainin’ the whole lifestyle thing, but it’s like…what we bring to the table is more than just like, you know, “Yo, I’m an MC, look how dope I am at rappin’.” It’s more than that. A huge part of it is really just personality. We’re not gangsta rappers and definitely not anything like all those club rappers out these days. We’re not doin’ that. We’re not really followin’ any sort of mold. We’re just touchin’ on what feels right, and I really do feel like it’ll help us stand out in time. There are thousands of other rappers out but a lot of them dudes are just boring. Even a lot of those “real hip-hop” rappers out these days are wack as fuck, even more wack than the music that they supposedly hate. We can rhyme, man. That’s one thing I know for sure. I’d put my team up against anyone. We are hip-hop, even when we’re drinkin’ bottles of Bud and listenin’ to hair metal. We’re original and anyone who crosses paths with us realizes it. We’re about to release some “day in the life” videos and cribs episodes and shit. We feel like we’ve done enough music–now we’re tryin’ to show people who we are. We don’t just make this shit up. People ask us, “Where do you come up with this shit?” I’m like, “I live it at my house. I just sit back and watch, if I’m lucky enough that night to not be directly involved. Some total fuckin’ weirdos come through there. And what happens next… It makes for some good rap music.”

MD: What’s it take to stand out now?

JC: I don’t know. Just somethin’ original. I don’t even know if what I do is actually original, but it’s fun and I never stray from being myself. Because of that, the product is what it is. I feel like our music is good on its own but I really do want to start puttin’ more faces to the names—gettin’ some more videos out there. Not just music videos. We’ve got video footage from the past three years of us just hangin’ out. I’ve got a video comin’ out that’s a day in the life of Joe Threat and Johnny Ciggs. Every day that we were able to hang out—like probably three days a week—he and I would get up, get some food, maybe go check out the swap or whatever, and then do a track, and then we’d go out to the bar and close the bar. It was just these crazy, super eventful days that we were doin’ every time he and I kicked it, for months. We were like, “We should videotape this.” So we did a day where we just basically videotaped ourselves all day on just a standard day that me and him would have. Just little things like that. I’m tryin’ to find ways to make us stand out as a crew of characters–not just another group of drunken rappers. Everybody’s funny, everybody’s got their own works, everybody’s got their own style. Everybody’s a general in their own way. The world must know about it.

fHDRQjnLlec

MD: How long has Sirus been writing?

JC: I don’t know…two years; three years? He started rapping because he was staying on my couch for a while and I was recording myself all the time. Next thing we knew we had some songs together. I’ve been rappin’ three-and-a-half years, so no longer than that. Sirus is like my best friend. I’ve known him for like 10 years. We used to beef over graffiti way back when we were livin’ a couple neighborhoods apart from one another. I like his stuff a lot. He’s got some real funny verses, which fits his style perfectly. When he first started rappin’, he didn’t even understand how to ride a beat. I’ve got Sirus verses that are just all over the place. He just stuck with it and now his shit’s nasty. I love seein’ that progression. He didn’t even ever really wanna be a rapper—-he just did it for fun–and he’s still havin’ fun with it. He’s made incredible progress. He’s dope now. He’s among the Virginia elite.

MD: What’s the story behind your track “Hunnid Dolla Bills”?

JC: It’s a beat that Fan Ran originally gave to somebody else and they never did anything with it. We were just sittin’ around my house—me, Skweeky and Ran—not really doin’ shit, and Ran was like, “You guys wanna write to this beat? I really like this beat. I wish that somebody would do somethin’ with it.” So we wrote to it. It was funny because Skweeky…that was when he first started workin’ with us, and that’s totally not his type of beat. He was like, “I can’t write to this shit.” He’s more into faster boom bap-type beats. He did it anyway. That was the second verse he did with us. He had just moved to Richmond. He killed it, too. Me and Ran came real correct on it and it just became a monster of a track. That track was a total accident and it’s our most popular joint. It blows my mind.

ObimF2v_aSI

MD: How popular is it? Did it get a lot of downloads?

JC: We don’t even have it up for download. I need to do that. We did that video just for fun. It was this hot-ass day. We were all hungover as hell and we went out and shot a video for it–just havin’ fun. That video… I haven’t checked it for a while, but it’s got 1500 views, which is probably the most views we have on any of our videos. Which I know is nothin’ in the grand scheme of things, but you know, I’ll take it. That video was the one that those guys at SYFFAL did a write-up on, and that was the first time we saw anybody from out of town talkin’ about our shit except for some people that we had met personally, but that’s different. They said they got it through that dude Roy Christopher. I don’t know, I guess people just like it. Alaska and Blockhead did a write-up of the pool party video, which had us all crackin’ up. Blockhead called us “suburban whigs,” and we were dyin’! It was funny as hell. That video was actually shot in our backyard in the city, where we live. I know who Blockhead is—that’s cool. He didn’t give us the best review, but at least he said somethin’… Even though his facts were mad twisted. Shout to SYFFAL.

Bf2fXAO45yA

MD: Blockhead? The producer of Aesop Rock’s early stuff?

JC: I guess.

MD: I wrote to Roy Christopher and said that I wanted to get some Gritty City stuff on CD, but it seems that isn’t how you’re rolling for distro, unless it’s local. Roy wrote back, “Those guys don’t have money to make CDs!”

JC: [Laughs.] We have ways of making CDs but yeah, a lot of times it’ll be like just a few. And then we’ll get money together and do like a hundred copies of whatever’s newest. We got our little hustle for how we can get that cheap, so it works. But the only one we’ve ever done professionally was the Delta [Automatik] CD, the first one [The Resume]. We saved up for that for like two years, and then we realized gettin’ it professionally printed was expensive as hell and not worth it. So we’ve just been doin’ our own packaging now. Because like you said, it’s just a local thing. There’s no reason for our shit to be shrinkwrapped. Half the time when we’re givin’ out CDs, I’m givin’ ‘em to someone at a bar. They say, “I’m gonna listen to this on the ride home!” And hopefully they do. Drunk people don’t need to be unwrapping shrinkwrap while driving. But yeah, it doesn’t need to be like that anymore, because it’s all digital now, which I hate to see because I’m a collector of music myself. I don’t download anything, except I’ll download my own stuff just to have on my iPod or whatever–if I even remember to do that. I’ve got like one or two of our CDs on my iPod. It is really sad to see that that’s goin’ out, but nobody really seems to care except for me and I guess you and maybe like five other people I know, tops. But no, it really is too bad. I like hard copies. Like I said, I’m a collector. I’ve got thousands of CDs and records that I’ve just been collectin’ my whole life. I refuse to not release hard copies.

MD: Can you name some stuff that you’re stoked that you have in your collection that you revisit and listen to for inspiration?

JC: Wu-Tang Clan’s like my favorite group ever. Them or Mobb Deep were both like neck-and-neck. I think Wu-Tang’s got the upper hand. I could go on forever, man. LL Cool J is the greatest rapper of all time. AZ, Nas, guys like that are right up there too. Cam’ron is my shit. I got so many hip-hop CDs, it’s out of control. I recently revisited Motley Crue stuff. It had been a couple years since I really got into them. I love Motley Crue–up until the late ‘80s. I lost interest, let’s say, after probably their fourth or fifth CD, if it even goes that far. The stuff that people don’t realize I liked, which kind of makes people laugh, is I absolutely love Luther Vandross and R Kelly. I just can’t help it. Bobby Womack, Poet 1 and 2. Awesome. Barry White. Marvin Gaye. He’s great. Dokken, Van Halen, ZZ Top. It doesn’t stop. Music is pretty much the only thing that has ever mattered in my life.

MD: What stuff do you currently have your eye out for?

JC: Fred the Godson. He’s the nastiest rapper out right now–new rapper. That guy… I slept on him forever. My roommate would play his stuff and I just didn’t even really listen–I don’t know why. And then the other day when I was in L.A., they had a Fred the Godson and the Heatmakers CD. The Heatmakers I’ve always loved—-beats they made over the past probably like 10 years now. And I was like, “Alright, I’ll buy it. It’s only six bucks. Whatever.” And I just loved it. And then I went and revisited the mix tape that Sirus had been playin’, and it’s just nasty. That guy’s just real clever. He’s got good concepts, good flow… He’s a good rapper. That’s who I’m checkin’ for these days. I just got the new Alchemist and Prodigy CD—-Prodigy and Mobb Deep–and that’s a great CD. Besides that, when it comes to new hip-hop, I’m not really checkin’ for too many besides Raekwon. Raekwon is the king of rap music and no one notices for some reason. No one is doin’ what Rae does. He’s everywhere and he’s not showing any sign of slowing down. But yeah, rap ain’t offerin’ me much else these days. I’m not tryin’ to hate on anybody. I’m just listenin’ more for old soul and hair metal. [Laughs.]

—————

The Sickness of SeapBonus Track: The Sickness of Seap by Seap One:  “Seap One’s one and only album, the album that released a couple weeks before he passed—The Sickness of Seap–is on there and that album is fuckin’ bananas. It’s a look into his life, his problems, his shortcomings. It’s a pretty sad album but it is beautiful at the same time. It’s an album about depression, drug use, jail, wishing he could do certain things and stuff like that. It was an honor to be a part of that one. I didn’t know we were gonna lose him right after that but the whole process was great and it was awesome workin’ with him.”—Johnny Ciggs

—————-

Contributor Bio:

Mike Daily is a novelist, journalist, zinemaker, spoken words performer and co-creator of the Plywood Hoods freestyle BMX team. He lives in Oregon. Daily is at work on his third novel, Moon Babes of Bicycle City, which will be published by Portland’s Lazy Fascist Press.

Posted on

Mouth of the Architect: New Day Rising

When it comes to my musical interests, I find myself very prone to phases. Someone will ask me what’s good, and I’ll always have to qualify that I’m in the middle of some phase or another. I can spend months listening to nothing but prog rock (e.g., Yes, Rush, The Mars Volta, etc.), weeks researching post-punk (e.g., Joy Division, Talking Heads, etc.), post-rock (e.g., Mogwai, Jesu, God is an Astronaut, etc.), or a year digging the depths of black metal (e.g., Wolves in the Throne Room, Fall of Efrafa, etc.). Two genres seem to remain stable through all of this: Hip-hop and some strain of metal, and Mouth of the Architect has been in regular rotation since The Ties That Blind (Translation Loss, 2006). Along with Cult of Luna‘s Vertikal (Density Records) and Deafheaven’s Sunbather (Deathwish, Inc.), their forthcoming Dawning is one of my most anticipated records of 2013.

Mouth of the Architect

One night in the summer of 2010, I was driving to my parents’ house in Alabama listening to The Violence Beneath (Translation Loss, 2010). I was zoning out on the back roads, marveling at the many stars and massive moon in the sky. When the last song came on, I was surprised to know all of the words. It took half the track for me to realize it was Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes.” Like any good cover song, it was true to the original version while being wholly its own.

While they get lumped in with the usual suspects of post-metal (e.g., Neurosis, Isis, Pelican, etc.), Mouth of the Architect’s sound is subtly different in distinctive ways. It’s metal and majestic, heavy and heavenly, gruesome and graceful, and difficult to describe in detail, but you’d be hard pressed to confuse them with anyone else. In what follows, I asked guitarist and vocalist Steve Brooks about the new record, cover songs, and their place in the loose subgenre they find themselves in. With families and the subsequent responsibilities, Dawning set for release from Translation Loss on June 25th, a tour imminent, and ten years honing their sound, it’s a new day and high time for Mouth of the Architect to rise and shine.

Roy Christopher: What did you guys do differently on Dawning from on previous records?

Mouth of the Architect: DawningMouth of the Architect: The process of writing and recording this new record was drastically different from any other record we have ever done. I guess the biggest difference would be that we recorded it all ourselves at our guitar player Steve’s studio, so a lot of it was worked out during the recording process. Also, we are almost never all in the same spot at the same time so a lot of it was written in short bursts, when we could get together, and then revise over the internet. We all have jobs, wives, other commitments, and now kids… so we can’t sit around whenever we feel like it and jam all day like we used to. So, we resorted to recording bits and pieces and emailing things back and forth… and it actually worked out pretty well! From the standpoint of songwriting, we did the same thing we always do but with a little different perspective. We are a little older now and while we still appreciate the heavy, doomy genre that we have always been classified in, we don’t necessarily feel that way all the time now, so we made the songs a little more laid back… a little more accessible… added some cool singing harmonies and whatnot. Surprisingly enough for us we found it more fun to play and sing these new songs, even if it is more difficult than screaming our bloody heads off on every song.

RC: Mouth of the Architect has been together for 10 years. Has the world changed or have you changed?

MotA: Yes and yes… I would say the band as a whole, us as individuals, and the world have all changed a lot over the last 10 years. Mouth of the Architect has continuously undergone member changes like it’s our job. Not to say that we like to change members all the time, but that is just the way it goes down. So, Jason and Dave are the only two original members left in the band now, though Steve and Kevin have been in for six or seven years now, too. As individuals there has been a marriage, a military deployment, serious injuries/surgeries, new businesses started, new bands started, and a new child born… So lots of big changes going on with us that has changed our attitude about life in general a bit. The world still sucks as much as it always has. We have just gotten a little older and more accepting of the suck.

RC: It seems like there’s more of a space for what you guys do now than there was early on.

MotA: I don’t know if I would say that there is more of a space for “post-metal” now or if there are just an abundance of bands doing it. We’ve been tagged with the “sounds like Neurosis and Isis” thing forever, and it’s just stupid. While I do see how Mouth of the Architect and other bands like Neurosis, Isis, Pelican, etc. would be considered to be in the same genre, I don’t make the connection that any of them are trying to sound the same or to be categorized. Every band is influenced by the music they like and there has been a lot of good stuff coming out in the last 15 years in this genre. So there have been more bands coming out that are influenced by all that good music, thus creating more of a “space” for it in the scene. You could say the same thing about “nu-metal” as well–even though everyone knows it’s garbage. I think our kind of doom/prog/post/rock/metal whatever has been relevant to the way a lot of people in our generation feel about life, and that is why it has become so prevalent and successful in the last 15 years ar so.

RC: What prompted the Peter Gabriel cover on The Violence Beneath?

The Violence BeneathMotA: We just like to do cover songs for fun. We had been going back and forth for a while about what song to do and couldn’t make a decision, so Jason and Steve kind of just decided to do a version of “In Your Eyes” to see how it would translate. Everyone was into it after they heard the rough draft so we just made the decision to do it and started jamming it at practice a little. That track was more of a studio project, like the new record. I think we only played it out twice. We have been trying to find another good one to do for a possible split release later on this year too. It’s just a lot of fun to do covers of songs we grew up with and make them our own.

RC: What else are you guys working on?

MotA: Musically, Steve has a solo project called This is What I Believe that you can find on Facebook, and Jason has a solo project called Rusted Hammer that you can find on Facebook as well. They merged those 2 projects into an audio visual show a couple of times that was pretty cool. Kevin Schindel is the frontman for Neon Warship and they have been doing really well lately. You can find them pretty much anywhere online. Right now we are just getting ready to hit the road with Mouth of the Architect for two months solid. Check out our Facebook page or our website for tour dates and any other updates. We are really excited to be going out with our good buddies in Intronaut again this year and getting back to Europe again.

RC: Anything else you’d like to bring up here?

MotA: We are really happy to be working with Translation Loss Records again on this new record, and I’d like to give a shout out to John Lakes, who will be filling on for Kevin Schindel on the upcoming tours. Check out our guitar player Steve’s recording studio, Sound Architect Studio, in Detroit on Facebook. Dave Mann also blows glass: Check out DaveMannGlass on Facebook as well. Really looking forward to seeing all of our friends from the road again this year. Thanks for the interview as well It’s been a while since we have done any touring, album release, interviews, and the like. It’s good to be back!

Posted on

Mike Daily: Writing is the Solvent

I remember the first Aggro Rag I ever got. It was the thickest zine I’d ever seen. Its sixty pages weren’t folded as much as they were just curved in the middle, struggling against their own bulk. The product of one Mike Daily, Aggro Rag was the premier BMX zine. Heavy on the goings-on of The Plywood Hoods out of York, Pennsylvania, their tricks and travels, and the national BMX scene of the time, Daily’s rag rivaled the national glossies for writing and relevance.

Mike Daily [photo by Jared Souney]
For life. [reppin’ at Nemo HQ; photo by Jared Souney]
Daily came to visit me a couple of times when I lived in San Diego the first time. This was early in the millennium and he lived just up the 5 in L.A. At the time, Daily was easing out of the BMX scene having worked at both Go: The Rider’s Manual and BMX Plus! during the 1990s. All of this is significant because I’ve been in touch with Daily since the mid 1980s through Aggro Rag and The Plywood Hoods’ Dorkin’ in York videos. For those spinning outside the orbit of freestyle BMX for the past thirty years, more background will be needed here.

The Plywood Hoods were like an indie-BMX Bones Brigade, like the Bulls with Jordan: a tight-knit crew of innovators who fidged high-tech, flatland maneuvers that it took the rest of the sport years to catch up to. It’s no hyperbole to say that  Kevin Jones, Mark Eaton, Brett Downs, Mike Daily, Dale Mitzel, Jamie McKulick, John Huddleston, John Doenut, Jym Dellavalle, and various others utterly revolutionized flatland BMX. The rest of us only knew about this because two members of the crew were also budding media-heads. Mark Eaton made the legendary Dorkin’ in York videos that made the Hoods legends themselves, and Mike Daily made Aggro Rag Freestyle Mag. In the pre-web underground BMX network, those were the go-to sites.

Aggro Rag Freestyle Mag! The Complete CollectionAggro Rag documented Hood hijinks from 1984 to 1989 the went on hiatus until last year’s reunion Hip-hop issue (to which I was proud to have contributed an interview with Aesop Rock). Now, like Garry Scot Davis’s Skate Fate, all the old ones have been collected into one, bright pink anthology of underground 1980s BMX freestyle history. As Mark Lewman put it to me: “If you want to know how it felt to be a 16-year-old freestyle fanatic in the mid-1980s, this is your manual re: how to roll. Those who recognize the name Aggro Rag, this book is already on your want list.” Oh, and it’s not just the zines bound up all pretty, there’s a bunch of new content as well, including exclusive new interviews with Kevin Jones and Dave Mirra, a foreword by Andy Jenkins, and an introduction by Mark Lewman.

As if that weren’t enough, Daily teamed up with Sub Rosa to put together a limited edition, Aggro Rag frame. It’s a new version of their already limited Pandora DTT (double top-tubes, holmes) frame, an updated version of the very one I currently ride. Along with Daily, Chip Riggs (whom some of you might know from later issues of Aggro Rag) did the graphics on this thing, and he had this to say:

The main goal with the project from Sub Rosa’s end was to pay tribute to what Mike had done with Aggro Rag and the Plywood Hoods to contribute to the sport and culture of Freestyle. We certainly wouldn’t be where we are today if it wasn’t for what Mike and the rest of the Hoods did. In regards to the frame we were trying to put together something that had a direct connection with the zine and that time period while still making something that was modern and ridable by today’s standards. I feel like we achieved everything we set out to do with the project and I hope people are as stoked with the outcome as we all are.

In keeping with other zine-like ephemera, Sub Rosa only made 43 of these things.

The Sub Rosa x Aggro Rag Pandora DTT frame

More than just a highly motivated, well connected, BMX media-maker, Mike Daily is a man of letters, a one-man creative spigot constantly spewing out inspiring solvents. During our time in Southern California, Daily released a collection of poetry and artwork (Stovepiper with contributions from Charles Bukowski, Bill Shields, Hugh Gallagher, Andy Jenkins, Greg Higgins, and many others) and wrote not one but two novels (Valley and Alarm). I used the release of the Aggro Rag collection as an opportunity to get dirty with Daily.

Roy Christopher: Let’s go all the way back: What prompted you to start Aggro Rag in the first place? I didn’t start a zine until I saw them in Freestylin’. What gave you the initiative to get one going?

Mike Daily: You’re talking with a guy who had Max Leg Gaters. Remember when some Pro BMX racers sported “gaiters” on the lower legs of their leathers? I know Clint Miller wore them when he was sponsored by Torker. So did Mike Miranda and Billy Griggs when they were on CW. Gaiters kind of made sense for motorcycle motocross racers because they kept high-velocity mud splatter out of the insides of their MX boots. The fad didn’t last long in BMX, though. How could it? Leg Gaiters were basically ventilated-mesh/nylon bell bottoms. (And the ‘70s were over.) The extra space to display company logos wasn’t worth the hazard of getting your pant-legs caught in the chain/sprocket. Pro Guard plastic chain covers failed for the same reason. However, Toby Henderson did make Pro Guards look cool when he was on Hutch.

Terry Cables

Terrycables were a different story. I loved Terrycables: the dual rubber hoods for both the brake lever and the barrel adjuster on the caliper, the rectangular checkerboard logo silver foil stickers, the black and white patches for the jerseys. Terrycables were expensive, but I thought they were worth it because of how totally trick they looked. I took my first Terrycable (which I had mail-ordered direct from the California manufacturer) to Brian Peters’ house and asked Brian’s dad if he could install it for me. Terrycables were an MX-influenced aftermarket BMX product, and Brian’s dad Rich was handy with motorcycles. Mr. Peters removed the Terrycable from the bag, selected a wire-cutter from his wall of tools, and in one fluid motion–with absolutely no wasted energy–he clipped the metal cylinder off the end. I knew enough to know that the part he’d just cut off was the cylinder head made to fit inside the brake lever. Mr. Peters read the directions from the cardboard packaging, and confirmed. He apologized and began setting up soldering equipment. Two hours later, installation was complete. Brake-pull was crunchier than a rusted-out hand-grip exerciser, but damn did that Terrycable look trick on my Supergoose. T-rick…

Accessories. I went all-out on the BMX accessories: Haro lightning bolt number plate, SST Dirt Skirt, JT Racing wet weather gloves and Flite donuts to protect your thumbs from the grip flanges. Taking cues from Deric Garcia and “Chicken George” Seevers, I stacked multiple donuts on my grips to get maximum power-pull from the ends of the handlebars. My friend Dan Ahearn took donut-stacking to the next-level: his MXL-gloved hands barely fit onto his Oakley B-1B grips that were mounted on Galindo bars that already had bar end extenders inserted in them. I lived and breathed BMX, as they say—as so many of us did. My zeal for BMX accessorizing carried over into freestyle when I got more into “trick riding” in 1984. The GT that I’m riding in the photo taken at the first performance of the Plywood Hoods—one of the photos introducing Aggro Rag #4 (March ’85) in Aggro Rag Freestyle Mag: Plywood Hoods Zines ’84-’89: The Complete Collection—had been my dialed-to-the-max race bike. I’d added grip tape to the top tube and installed Skyway Tuff Wheels with Tioga Comp ST (stadium) tires, Skyway thread-on “axle extenders,” GT bolt-on fork standers, a front brake with Potts Mod and, of course, a Dyno D2 brake guard. I’d also replaced the three-digit number on my Haro number plate with “PLYWOOD HOODS” and added an abundance of stickers including Michigan J. Frog, which I got for a quarter from a gumball machine. I was 16 years old in that photo.

Aggro Rag Freestyle Mag!

Printed matter, I found—ZINES–could be “tricked out” very much like a bicycle. It was such great fun accessorizing the pages with photos, stories, drawings, random clip art and ransom note-style lettering techniques, then immediately photocopying them “on the cheap” in an array of colors. Not too many different colors, though: Zines needed to be reproduced with enough black and white inside to give them the proper lo-fi look, and readability.

RC: I totally agree. There was a while there where you purposefully drifted away from BMX. What caused your turning more toward the cultural marginalia?

ValleyMD: “Purposefully”—I like that. The astounding heat of the San Fernando Valley where I lived from 1992-2001 would seem to be the main contributing factor in my drifting away from BMX over the years. Reluctance to put myself in more danger than I might’ve been able to handle at the time. In ’96, I broke my ribs on a shopping carts-railing at a Safeway on Reseda, for instance. I focused on writing a sustained work, which became my first novel, Valley. Andy Jenkins helped me edit the work-in-progress and later accepted Valley for publication. Andy designed the book and released it on his imprint Bend Press, “The Smallest Book Company,” in November 1998. Andy organized a book release party for me at L.A.’s The Garage, and Flogging Molly played at the event. When he was Editor and Art Director of Freestylin’, Andy had occasionally taken time to correspond with me by mail—often enclosing stickers. He’d always encouraged me since I was a teenager living in York, PA. Here’s the summary that Andy wrote about Valley:

Valley is a humorously visual story narrated by main character, writer/student, Mick O’Grady, as he ambles through his days in a sort of haze attempting to make sense of the numerous mysteries unraveling before him—from the odd-ball people he meets and associates with (a giant poet, drunken ex-linebacker, lost master journalist [Earl Parker], wired meth-head, etc.), to the margin scribblings, receipts and photos he happens upon in used books by his favorite authors. O’Grady’s literary inclinations result in curious overanalyzation—a practically itemized account of everything around him, the ordinary included. At one point he notes that a vending machine in the lobby has no “Q” button on it. Not 26, but 25 letters. Lost in his wonderment after buying the drink, he forgets it on top of the machine…

A.J. and Mark “Lew” Lewman are endless inspirations. Everyone who grew up reading their stories and enjoying their unique contributions to Freestylin’, Homeboy, GO: The Rider’s Manual, DIRT and Grand Royal shares the same feeling: gratitude.

I got more into poetry, fiction and music while I was finishing college at California State University of Northridge from 1993-1998, that’s for sure. Poetry: Kenneth Patchen, Jack Kerouac, Lew Welch, Steve Richmond. Fiction: Ronald Sukenick, Richard Brautigan, Kevin Sampsell, Mark Leyner. Music: Jawbreaker, Giants Chair, Mudhoney, Screaming Trees/Mark Lanegan, Elliott Smith. I know that reading an article you wrote and published in your zine Front Wheel Drive, Roy Christopher, got me to go out and find CDs by Shiner, a Kansas City band I listened to and liked. Thanks for that blue and white Shiner sticker you sent me in 1995. I still haven’t stuck it.

RC: Nice! Tell me more about your spoken performances. I only caught one of them in 2007 when we both lived in Portland. I remember someone making fun of me because I knew all the words.

MD: You knew all the words to “Drum Machines,” I remember that! Thanks, Roy. The words to “Drum Machines” (recited from my second novel, Alarm) are:

I wish there was a radio station that just played drum machines. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Eureka! Eureka. I just thought of something. I seem to have just thought of something. It’s like a comic. A four-panel comic. In the first frame one guy says to another guy, ‘Who’s your drummer?’ In the second frame it’s just a close-up of the other guy and he says, ‘Electricity. He goes by electricity.’ In the third frame the first guy says to the other guy, ‘Where’s he live?’ In the last frame is another close-up of the second guy and he says, ‘In a hole in the wall.’ And he’s looking at the reader. Whoa. I’m not paying attention. I’m swervedriving. I feel like crying. It’s raining. I exit the freeway and pull into a Krispy Kreme. I drive up to the window. I find my lucky two-dollar bill that I got in tips when I got on the mike at open mike and didn’t care if I messed up. And I didn’t mess up. A guy in a red, white and blue tracksuit said I tore shit up. I’m not making this up. I unwedge a nickel from the dash for the difference. ‘Two-oh-five out of two-oh-five. Here’s your three glazed originals and one extra one just for coming to Krispy Kreme! Have a nice night, sir!’ I drive off. I wish there was a radio station that just played drum machines. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

Here’s a clip of that very piece [runtime: 6:59]:

RpE5dIpC0PM

The spoken-word performances resulted from wanting to “talk” my writing without having to read it from a book or printed-out pages. I got my start doing spoken words in the late ‘90s when I worked behind the counter at an all-ages coffee house called Cobalt Café. Rick Lupert still runs an open mike night there. After I moved up to Portland, OR, at the beginning of 2002, I sought out local venues offering open mike and I participated. I ended up meeting Alarmindividuals who remain some of my closest friends to this day, like Pecos B. Portland author and friend Kevin Sampsell inspired me the most to move here. After I bought his great book How to Lose Your Mind with the Lights On (Future Tense, 1994) at a Tower Records in Northridge, CA, I read the short story/poems collection cover to cover in one sitting. Since the early ‘90s, Kevin had been publishing chapbooks of his work and writing by others. Chapbooks are cheaply printed publications that are often self-produced by the author or poet. These “cheap penny books” originated in Great Britain in the 19th Century and were geared more toward the lower end of the market (the masses). In almost all cases, chapbooks were read for recreation and then discarded. I documented my deep appreciation for Kevin Sampsell’s work in Alarm, the novel and double CD that I put out myself in 2007.

RC: So what brought you back to BMX so fervently?

MD: I’ve always owned at least one 20” bike. I haven’t always ridden the bikes, but I’ve never been without one. In 2009, I decided that I wanted to rebuild the ’85 CW California Freestyle set-up that I had ridden in 1987, when I was most into flatland. My inclination to complete The Build was the best thing I could have done for myself. It was a tremendous feeling cruising that ride down the street after Shad Johnson at Goods BMX dialed everything in for me. With friend and fellow zineguy (Jargon of Delinquents) Luke Strahota, I went to an old school BMX get-together that year to check out the vintage show bikes. By chance at the gathering, I met Lisa Grossman, who raced BMX for factory JMC in the early ‘80s. I’d forgotten that Lisa and I had been pen pals when we were both 13 years old (she lived in OR, I lived in PA). The following year, Luke and I attended some jams and began meeting new friends from our scene and others. “Full circle” may be a cliché, but it’s an apt description for the fervency. Luke, by the way, is a talented drummer (currently bandleader for The Satin Chaps). A handful of times I’ve had the opportunity to perform my fiction to his live beats.

RC: Tell me more about Moon Babes of Bicycle City. We riffed a bit in 2010 on all the different types of bicycles being ridden these days, but I know nothing of the book’s premise.

MD: The first sentence of Moon Babes of Bicycle City is:

South of Roswell, north of Hope, east of an Apache reservation, west of Dexter and Lake Arthur lies Bicycle City, New Mexico.

Since I started working on the novel in 2010, I’ve filled numerous sketchbooks with research and riffs in anticipation. It doesn’t matter if it’s a Mead composition notebook, a perfect-bound blank book from Michael’s or a ‘70s-era Wonder Woman personal journal survivor with a 3D cover…my approach is to let myself get a little sketchy with the work—have fun with it–so “sketchbooks” is how I refer to them. Glue sticks and collages are involved, and so is acrylic paint. I prefer writing with pencils and using typewriters. After publishing Aggro Rag Freestyle Mag! “The Hip-Hop Issue” Number 13 zine in August 2012, I received a generous gift of files via U.S. mail from a fellow rider and enthusiast on the east coast. The shared digital library grants me full access to all the BMX and freestyle magazines I’d read so many times in my youth, I had memorized parts of them—including many issues I’d missed. I’ve been hesitant to insert the discs and see what’s on them. I can say this: I’m looking forward to it.

Sketchbooks

I had to shelve work on the novel in 2011 because I needed to get the Aggro Rag book done first. I couldn’t have completed Aggro Rag Freestyle Mag! Plywood Hoods Zines ’84-’89: The Complete Collection if it wasn’t for Bizarro novelist and friend Cameron Pierce, who initially had helped lay out most of the original 12 zines for the collection, and my friend Chip Riggs, whose contributions in graphic design and website development were extensive, to say the least. Cameron Pierce is my Tour Guide for Moon Babes—he’s my Editor and eventual publisher on his small press, Lazy Fascist. Read any one of his mad, inventive novels for insight to why Cameron has my utmost respect. Can I recommend one? Abortion Arcade. It’s a collection of three novellas published by Eraserhead Press (my favorite of the three is titled “The Roadkill Quarterback of Heavy Metal High”).

Moon Babes of Bicycle City is a book about the demented Moon family—Rodderick, Chatauqua and daughters named Suzue, Araya and Ukai—living in a bike clubs-ravaged New Mexico town where cars have been outlawed and the terrain is a world like no other. The family members struggle in a run-down environment to survive deceit and loss, is more along the lines of what happens in the book.

One thing I learned from my own struggles is this: Problems are funny.

Conflicts, hardships, disappointments: They arise.

They’re funny in that regard.

RC: True. Anything else you want to mention here?

MD: I worked hard on Aggro Rag Freestyle Mag! Plywood Hoods Zines ’84-’89: The Complete Collection for over two-and-a-half years. I have a daughter and I work 40+ hours a week. It was my after-hours goal to get this collection done and get it done right so I can move on this year to finish my new book. Thanks Tons to everyone choosing to pre-order a signed book direct from me with the package deals offered on aggrorag.com until Wednesday, March 13th, at 11:59pm PST. I’m expecting to ship all preorders worldwide from Oregon before the book’s official date of publication, 4.3.13.

Thank you, Roy Christopher, for the opportunity to give A’s to Q’s I hadn’t yet been asked. There’s sound reasoning behind why I chose to become one of your students by studying your work both in print and online. I knew there was some reason I hung out with you.

——-

Thanks to Mike Daily, Jared Souney, Mark Lewman, Ronnie Bonner, and Chip Riggs for helping me get this piece together.

Posted on

Aesop Rock: Perpendicular to Everything

Anyone who questions the lyrical skills of Aesop Rock isn’t listening carefully enough. Or at all. His records reward the repeated listen, the close reading, the attentive ear. His beat-building abilities are on par with his bars making him the complete Hip-hop package. Put that together with his visual art background and his knack for surrounding himself with creative friends of all stripes, and you’ve got one of the most interesting artists of the twenty-first century.

I met Aes in 2005 while backstage at the Showbox in Seattle, and though I have tested our bond by embarrassing myself in front of him many times, we’ve been friends ever since. Whether it was dumping a box of shirts into the street after a show or drunkenly crying during Kimya Dawson’s set at Home Slice Pizza during SXSW in 2011, Aes has always had my back. He’s a good dude that way.

Aesop was most recently one-third of Hail Mary Mallon along with fellow Def Jux expatriates Rob Sonic and DJ Big Wiz. When the following interview went to press, Aesop Rock had a brand new record out (Skelethon on RhymeSayers Entertainment), and was on the road, “until forever,” he said.

Roy Christopher: Last time we hung out, I got kinda tipsy and annoyed the shit out of Rob Sonic. The time before that, I did the same and dumped a box of your merch all over East 10th street. Why do you even still talk to me?

Aesop Rock: Hm. These are facts. You dumped the merch, but you were trying to help so that gets a pass. The other was at a SXSW, so on one hand, exposure to drunken company is expected. Still, you are technically an adult. I want to like you.  Our friendship is so complex. It’s like a strange riddle whispered into an elder sled dog’s ear seconds before starting his final Iditarod. What does it all mean?  Who is Rob Sonic really? Why is Roy drunk and crying at a mid-afternoon, outdoor gig behind a pizza shop? Then I think to myself, “Ah, we are all dogs in this race. It’s cold as shit and there’s a lot of ground to cover. Mush!” That and you have been extremely supportive of me for many years, and I appreciate it a lot.

RC: Oh, of course! The last time we talked formally interview-wise, you said, “As I get older I get less obsessed with details and more obsessed with finding real general ways of saying a lot. Like an old man who doesn’t speak much, but when he does it’s some weird, clever statement that somehow sums up everything: That’s what I wanna be.” Does that statement still stand?

AR: That’s gross. Don’t quote me to me, man. I am a fucking supreme idiot. I think I obsess over some things, while other things go completely neglected.  Obsession is the spice of life – you discover something, your brain gets zapped and you are alive in a new way, actively seeking information, being productive, finally finding some details worth paying attention to, etc. Musically speaking, I know I have reworked individual lyrics and sounds to extremes nobody who wasn’t obsessed would bother with, or redoing things that sound exactly the same to others 800 times until it hits what I was looking for – whatever that means. Details rule, and I assume are emphasized by the stuff we neglect, whether artistically, life-istically, whatever. You might leave an obvious fuck-up untouched because it’s the right fuck-up. Different things take different amounts of attention to become realized. Sometimes you wanna cut paper slowly and precisely with scissors to get a clean edge, sometimes you wanna tear it to show the rip. That’s my updated take on “details,” which I just re-read and feel is as vague as my 2005 version, with way more words. The second half of my ’05 comment sounds beyond douche-y, and I’m sorry I put you through hearing somebody say those words out loud. Let’s say that we’re officially even for the merch drop now.

RC: Deal. You’ve really taken to the web lately with Twitter and various websites. What’s the aim of 900 Bats?

AR: It’s pretty much aimed at not having any aim. Albums take me a little while to make, and I guess I wanted to have a home for some public fuckery, beats, videos: just an outlet for crap when I felt like making it, as well as contributions from others looking for the same. I had some like-minded friends and we made 900 bats. Sometimes I stay super busy with it and try to gather content, make stuff, etc. Other times it goes untouched for weeks. I think it’s a tiny arena where I can be creative with zero pressure or expectations, and I hope the others that have added things to it feel the same. It’s been hard to keep up with now that I’ve been consumed with Skelethon stuff, but I find it a rewarding outlet to have when I need it.

RC: New York City seems like the place to be for Hip-hop, but you bounced to the Left Coast. How’s the Bay Area different from New York for the way you approach this stuff?

AR: I have a really different life than I had in NY for many ever-evolving reasons. It was a big move. It’s not a bus-ride away, which is the furthest I had ever lived previously. I kinda nurse this need to be alone while yelling about feeling lonely. That has led me to a relatively isolated life. Socializing in general, in the sense of hitting a bar at night, etc. never was my thing, but now that I live out here I find it even easier to escape/hide, to a perhaps unhealthy extent. Making songs has always been something I did at night while other people were out, or at least that’s what it felt like. When I was younger, painting was like that: I would rather make some shit than go out. Jumping to the other side of the country enables that for better or for worse. It kinda seals the deal on a lot of the socializing because quite frankly I don’t really know very many people here. The approach feels like “me vs. me” more than ever.

RC: When you’re not messing around in the studio, you’re out on the road. Which do you prefer?

AR: I prefer the studio because I like making things. That said, because Rob, Wiz and I are all over the country these days, touring is a nice chance to hang with those guys. Because songs have felt like the byproduct of antisocial behavior for me, hitting a point in my life when someone was like “ok, time to tour!” – I was just like… “ummm what?” I mean, in ’01 I finally quit my day-job to do my first official “tour,” and I sorta freaked out and didn’t even end up going. It felt like the exact opposite of what I was putting into the songs, and I just couldn’t wrangle it in. It still feels that way. “Performing” is an awkward thing for me. I kinda hate it. I love it, but I kinda hate it. I mean it feels undeniably fantastic to be in a room with people getting loud for you and your songs, but I will never not find it fucking terrifying. I think over the years I have adapted to the point of coping, but the entire “on tour” experience hasn’t been something I have found comfort in. Regardless, I’ve seen a million faces, and I’ve rocked them all.

RC: This is for the premier BMX ‘zine, so I have to ask, you ever ride BMX?

AR: Skateboarding played a gigantic roll in my youth, from elementary school through my young 20’s. In maybe 7th grade however, I was coaxed over to the local dirt track behind Pumpernickels restaurant. I’d say for about a year or so I abandoned skating and rode a bike. I enjoyed it, but ultimately had picked up skating again by the time high school came around. BMX is sick as fuck and I will still sit and watch that shit any time.

———————-

Here’s the video for “Zero Dark Thirty” from Skelethon [runtime: 3:32]:

Dbd4h1kaFlY

———————-

Ed note: This interview originally appeared in Mike Daily’s Aggro Rag Freestyle Mag #13: The Hip-hop Issue in July, 2012. As that issue is now nearly out of print, I’m posting it here by kind permission of Mike Daily for those that missed out. Many thanks to him, Chrissy Piper, Dana Meyerson, and, of course, Aesop Rock.

Posted on

Erik Blood: Aural Sex

Confession: My all-time favorite band is Oingo Boingo. It’s been that way since Keith Vandeberg introduced me to them in the sixth grade. Oingo Boingo showed me that music could be about something, that it could evoke meaning as well as feeling, that it could tell stories as well as be rebellious. I found out much later that mastermind Danny Elfman also scored films. This made sense to me, given what his band had taught me about the power of music.

Erik Blood will soon release one of the best records I’ve ever heard. The only thing that my Oingo Boingo anecdote has to do with this is that, in addition to making music that feels good as well as means much, Blood also happens to score films. The ability to put music to images undoubtedly aids the ability to create images with music. Touch Screens (2012) illustrates Blood’s vast skills in the area. His work echoes eras past, but its sources remain untraceable, folding in on each other just when you get a taste. This is stuttery, gooey, taffy-like pop in the vein of Brad Laner and Kevin Shields, but Blood puts these things together with that third thing, the thing that comes from more than just nailing the essential tension between tradition and innovation. With a porn-related concept and a cover reminiscent of H.R. Giger’s painting for Dead Kennedys’ Frankenchrist poster, Touch Screens is ripe for controversy — The early-Prince kind of controversy, who incidentally also did music for films.

Music is a four-dimensional plotting grid that often describes hundreds of moving vectors for us, at once and in real time. It implies a capacity to manipulate information for which we have scarcely given ourselves credit. — Roger Hyde

“Most of [the shoegazers] couldn’t rock their way out of a paper bag,” once quoth Simon Reynolds (DuBrowa, 2002). Not so with Erik Blood. There’s as much Loop as there is Main, as much Anton Newcombe as there is Courtney Taylor-Taylor. I also hear some Can and Neu!, which he claims he likes but doesn’t consider an influence. “Though I guess everything one hears is an influence,” he concedes. Blood broadcasts these soundtracks from some unplaceable future, some unknown space out of time.

There are songs, but we were thinking differently. I personally was thinking in terms of chamber symphonies. A little bit loud and noisy, but the same thing. And not bound only to words. — Holger Czukay, Can

Prior to his latest, porn-influenced release, Blood recorded The Way We Live (2009), and the score to Steven Richter’s Center of Gravity (2011), as well as working with Seattle’s inimitable Shabazz Palaces and TheeSatisfaction, among others.

Roy Christopher: Touch Screens incorporates so many sounds from so many eras, yet still sounds fresh. Without giving away too much, are you consciously alluding to particular pieces of the past?

Erik Blood: There are times that I borrow sounds from the past or even try to emulate an era, but I didn’t try to do that with this album. I just made sounds that I knew how to make and made up sounds I hadn’t made before. The only thing I consciously did was try not to be too conscious of what I was doing. If it sounded good or made me feel something, I’d keep it. I threw away the stuff that didn’t.

RC: Tell me about the Touch Screens story. I know it’s all about pornography, but unlike actual pornography, the record is often warm and very human.

EB: It is about porn, but it’s not pornographic and I am not trying to make any statement about pornography. I have a fascination with pornography that comes from growing up in a time when it wasn’t readily available to young people like it is today. It was friend’s parents and older brothers usually who had a tape or a magazine that we would all gather around to check out. It was fun and exciting and usually the actual porno was fun and exciting. I’m talking “golden age” shit like Radley Metzger (aka Henry Paris) and Joe Sarno, later in life Joe Gage and Wakefield Poole. My album is at times a love letter to those films and those times as well as a little nod to some of the actors. Other times I’m just describing a sensation or experience related to pornography.

RC: So, it’s a concept record, but there’s also this feeling that the voice is used as just another instrument.

EB: I’ve always thought of the voice as an instrument. It’s a purveyor of melody above all else to me.

RC: How has Hip-hop on one end and your music for films on the other affected your songwriting techniques?

EB: I don’t think I approach them any differently because my aesthetics aren’t different. They may change or expand, but they’re always there, a filter that everything I do has to pass through. Every project I do, or new venture, changes and expands my palette but it’s always me the music comes through.

RC: Seattle is my adopted home, and I’ve always found living there (four different times) strangely poised between isolation and connection. How does the city resonate with you and your music?

EB: It’s hard for me to say because I’ve lived here my whole life. Born in Tacoma, I moved to Seattle at 18 and never left. Sometimes I feel like that wasn’t the best thing for me, but I’m also really happy with my life and my work, so I don’t have a real issue with it. Seattle’s a beautiful place and even if I decide to leave it, I know I’ll be back.

RC: What’s coming up for you next?

EB: I’m working on “scoring” a 45-minute slideshow for this thing called Slideluck Potshow that’s going down in August. Also doing a lot of mixing in the lab this summer. Hoping to get started on some new Shabazz tracks very soon. And after the album comes out, I’ll have a nice little Touch Screens remix EP to put out with mixes by Shabazz, OC Notes, Crypts and a few others.

—————

Here’s the trailer for Touch Screens [edited by Brian O’Shea; runtime: 2:04]:

UBwhUqSMKTU

References:

Hughs, Rob. (2011, November). Masterworks: Tago Mago by Can. Prog, No. 21, pp. 56-59.

Hyde, Roger. (1996, Spring). Priests of Another Knowledge. Whole Earth Review, No. 89, pp. 94-99.

DuBrowa, Corey. (2002, March/April). Going Blank Again: The History of Shoegazing. Magnet, No. 53, pp. 55-64, 106-107.

Posted on

Ian Bogost: Worthwhile Dilemmas

Partially fueled by Jane McGonigal’s bestselling Reality is Broken (Penguin, 2011), “gamification”—that is turning mostly menial tasks into games through a system of points and rewards—became the buzzword of 2011 and diluted and/or stigmatized videogame studies on many fronts. Gaming ungamed situations is not all bad though. Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies (1975) were tactics for gaming a stalled creative process. In an interview with Steven Johnson, Brian Eno explained, “The trick for me isn’t about showing people how to be creative as though they’ve never been like that before, but rather trying to find ways of recontacting the natural playfulness and curiosity that most people were born with.” When it becomes exploitative, it becomes a problem.

Enter one of the most outspoken, prolific, and creative videogame scholars working today. Ian Bogost is a professor at Georgia Tech and co-founded videogame design company, Persuasive Games. Among his many books are  Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism (MIT Press, 2008), Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (MIT Press, 2010), and How to Do Things with Videogames (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), as well as A Slow Year: Game Poems (Open Texture, 2010), the latter of which which includes four videogames and many meditative poems about the Atari 2600. His latest is Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), which calls for an object-oriented approach to things as things and for thinkers to also become makers.

Roy Christopher: While reading How to Do Things with Videogames, it occurred to me that videogames really are the medium of the now. They encompass so much of everything else our media does and is. Was this part of your point and I just need a late pass?

Ian Bogost: Maybe it would be more accurate to say that videogames are the least recognized medium of the now. In the book—in the first chapter even—I argue against the conceit that games have not achieved their potential. That’s true of course, but what medium has achieved its potential? But in that context I was speaking against researchers, critics, and designers who talk about everything videogames are not, but could be: akin to film, or novels, or textbooks, or what have you. The book tries to show that videogames are already a great many things, from art to pornography to work to exercise.

But all that said, videogames are hardly a dominant medium. What is instead? Some might say “the Internet,” but that’s wrong too, although the reasons it is wrong are surprising. As Marshall McLuhan taught us, media contain other media. But weirdly, even though we access the Internet on computers, the former actually has relatively little to do with the latter. The Internet contains writing, images, moving images, sound—all “traditional” media in common parlance. McLuhan’s idea of the Global Village was meant to rekindle the senses overlooked thanks to the age of print, and in that sense TV and the Internet have succeeded in realizing that vision. But the result turns out to be just the same as TV and radio and print, except any of us can create the equivalent of a publisher or a broadcaster.

Videogames, by contrast, have different properties than these other media. They model the way something works rather than describing or showing it; they offer an experience of making choices within that model rather than an audiovisual replay of it, and they contextualize that model within the context of a simulated world. Now, to be sure, that sort of approach is very “now” in the sense that we SHOULD be interested in the complex, paradoxical interrelations of the moving parts in a system. But at the end of the day, it’s just easier to watch cat videos on YouTube and spout one-liners onto Twitter. In some sense, videogames both are and aren’t other media. They do what other media do—and some things they do not—but they do them differently.

RC: The idea of attaching rewards to menial tasks is understandable, but the current buzz around gamification seems to miss much of the point by filtering out what’s actually good about games. You’ve been quite vocal about the ills of this trend. What are we to do?

IB: If videogames both have and haven’t arrived as a mature medium, then the proponents of gamification want to pretend that the work is done and now we can settle in to the task of counting the profits. The basics of this phenomenon are simple enough: marketers and consultants need to surf from trend to trend, videogames are appealing and seductive but complex and misunderstood, so the simple directive to apply incentives to all our experiences both satisfies the economic rationalists and ticks off the “game strategy” box for organizations.

The irony, not lost on many, is that as virtual incentives like points and reward programs have risen, so tangible incentives have gone into decline. We used to provide material incentives in the form of things like compensation, benefits, perks, and so forth. Now we use JPEGs and 32-bit Integers.

In fact, just as I was writing this response, a friend told me about a novella someone wrote that appears to be an introduction to gamification. It’s called “I’ll Eat This Cricket for a Cricket Badge,” written by a marketing consultant with the improbably-parodic-sounding name Darren Steele. The description reads, “This is the story of Lara, a senior director at Albatron Global. Today she learns she has 24 hours to prepare for a once-in-a-decade meeting with ‘The Brotherhood,’ the triumvirate of terror that founded the company.” Imagine if these gamification shills spent even a fraction of the energy and creativity they devote to swindling on the earnest implementation of worthwhile ideas. In fact, I can’t even tell if the novella is serious or not, the world has become that ambiguous.

As with most things, knowing what to do about it is harder than mere critique. And in that respect, it’s always dangerous to fight against marketers and consultants. Though often stupid, they are also very smart. Or better yet, they often use their savvy to appear stupid or simplistic, so that we’ll let them into our homes and our minds.

In that respect, one possible strategy of opposition is to infiltrate the consultancies and corporations themselves. To create our own highly leveraged solutions-oriented roll-out for it-doesn’t-matter-what service. It’s too laborious and time-consiming to convince people to make games in earnest, so to combat gamification we need to seed a distraction, a new trend that will dissipate this one. Media theory as consultancy counter-terrorism.

RC:  A set of tactics like Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s “Oblique Strategies” seems a better tack for bringing gaming ideas into other areas of creative problem solving.

IB: Eno and Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies were originally meant to spur ideas for artists, but now we see similar idea cards being used in design and business too (the famous design firm IDEO released something similar a few years back). And given our Facebook-status and Twitterified media ecosystem, there seems to be a strong interest in aphoristic world views. And for that matter, Jesse Schell developed a series of cards around his theory of game design, which he calls “lenses” in a textbook called The Art of Game Design. So there are some precedents for bits-and-pieces idea generation around games.

But there’s a chicken-egg problem at work here too. In order to be susceptible to the surprising solutions of idea generation, you still have to be conversant enough in those ideas to give them life. For example, many of the phrases on the original Oblique Strategies cards are meant for musicians (the deck’s original creative context), and if you are not a musician, it’s hard to imagine understanding how to “mute and continue” or “left channel, right channel, centre channel” unless you were already well-versed in musical concepts. Admittedly, these are pretty basic ideas, basic enough that even a layperson can grasp them, but that’s only because the experience of recorded music is so universal. The basics are shared as a literacy. But that literacy had to come from somewhere, and until the literacy is developed for games, design tools for their increased application will remain mired in ignorance. To use games, we must know games, but to know them we must have used them.

This is why progress will be stochastic. In How to Do Things With Videogames I argue that games will have arrived through incremental examples altering, increasing, changing our ideas of what games can do. I didn’t use this language there, but it’s a kind of accretion, in which the medium grows bit by bit over time, eventually developing a larger and larger gravity. This process is both recursive and compounded, in the sense that individual successes feed back on our overall comfort and knowledge, becoming candidates for the kind of idea generation that Oblique Strategies exemplifies.

RC: Cow Clicker is like your hit song that won’t stop playing. People’s missing the point seemed to prove its point further. Even with its persistence, did you accomplish what you set out to do?

IB: Cow Clicker is so much bigger than me now, it’s not even possible to know if it did what I set out for it to do, or if that’s even a desirable outcome. There’s an Internet adage called Poe’s Law, that says that it’s often difficult or even impossible to tell the difference between extremism and its parody. It was originally coined in relation to discussions of evolution within Christian forums, but it’s been generalized since: a parody of something extreme can be mistaken for the real thing. And if a real thing sounds sufficiently extreme, it can be mistaken for parody.

The best example of this phenomenon these days is The Onion. There’s a whole website, literallyunbelievable.org, that collects reactions from readers who mistake Onion articles for the real deal, such as the fuming reactions from folks who took seriously headlines like “Planned Parenthood Opens $8 Billion Abortionplex.” And then on the flip side, it’s become common to hear people say of undeniably real headlines, “Is this an Onion article?” The lines between reality and absurdity have blended.

So, it’s clear that Cow Clicker is far weirder than my original intentions. Rather than reflect more on whether or not I succeeded, I’ve started asking other questions. What happened? is certainly one of them, and I’m not sure I’ll ever wrap my head around it. Perhaps more interesting: What can I learn from it? or even What’s next for Cow Clicker. The latter question just terrifies me, because I’ve tried so hard to distance myself from the madness that running the game entailed. But it’s also short-sighted. After all, Cow Clicker was popular. It still is. People like clicking on cows! What can I do with that observation, what can I make that takes that lesson in a direction unburdened by the concerns of obsession and enframing? Is it even possible? In any case, I’m not giving anything away when I say that I don’t think I’m done with Cow Clicker yet. Or better, I don’t think Cow Clicker is done with me.

RC:  Video games inform most of your work, including your new title, Alien Phenomenology. Tell us about your foray into object-oriented ontology and its link with video games.

IB: Object-oriented ontology seems like an obvious match for media studies. Any scholar or creator of media interested in the “thingness” of their objects of study has something to gain from OOO. In addition to (or even instead of) studies of political economy and reception, we can add studies of the material history and construction of computational devices. In other words, “materialism” need not retail only its Marxist sense, but also its realist one: not just political economy, but also just stuff.

I suspected there would be productive connections with object-oriented philosophy, and I remember waiting for Graham Harman’s Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Open Court) to be published in 2002 so I could read it and apply it in my dissertation. I’d been following the emergence and growth of speculative realism with interest, but from afar.

Then two things happened. First, I started thinking about the idea of a “pragmatic” speculative realism, one that would embrace some of the first principles devised by the movements’ true philosophers, but that would put them to use in the service of specific objects, but looking beyond human experience. That thought was in my head since 2005 or so.

The second thing was the Atari. Several years ago, I learned how to program the 1977 Atari Video Computer System (VCS), the console that made home videogame play popular. Nick Montfort and I were working on a book on the platform (Racing the Beam; MIT Press, 2009), about the relationship between the hardware design of the Atari VCS and the creative practices that its designers and programmers invented in those early days of the videogame. The Atari featured a truly unique custom graphics and sound chip called the Television Interface Adapter (TIA). It made bizarre demands on game makers: instead of preparing a screen’s worth of television picture all at once, the programmer had to make changes to the data the TIA sent to the television in tandem with the scanline-by-scanline movement of the television’s electron beam. Programming the Atari feels more like plowing a field than like drawing a picture.

As I became more and more familiar with this strange system, I couldn’t help but feel enchanted by its parts as much as its output. Sure, the Atari was made by people in order to entertain other people, and in that sense it’s just a machine. But a machine and its components are also something more, something alive, almost. I found myself asking, what is it like to be an Atari, or a Television Interface Adapater, or a cathode ray tube television? The combination of that media-specific call to action and my broader interest in object-oriented ontology more generally catalyzed the project that became Alien Phenomenology, a book about using speculation to understand the experience of things, of what it’s like to be a thing.

RC: What’s coming up next for you?

IB: There’s a concept in sales, the sales funnel. It’s a structured approach to selling products and services that helps salespeople move opportunities from initial contact through closing by structuring that process in a number of elements. Those might include securing leads, validating leads, identifying needs, qualifying prospects, developing proposals, negotiating, closing the sale, of course, and then managing and retaining the client.

In sales, it’s always best to keep the contacts and leads elements at the top of the funnel very full, because those opportunities will winnow away through attrition, disinterest, loss, and other factors. You tend to have far fewer proposals and negotiations than you do contacts.

I often think about my upcoming creative work through a similar kind of structure. The “creative funnel,” we might call it. We can even use some of the same language: leads, opportunities, commitments, publishing, and support, or something like that. In any case, I tend to throw a whole lot of stuff at the wall (lead and opportunities), because I know that far fewer of those ideas will actually be realized.

In the leads and opportunities column, I’m currently working with my co-editor Nick Montfort to support a number of new books in the Platform Studies series, the series we began with Racing the Beam. Those include both popular and esoteric game consoles and microcomputers. As for my own writing, I’m trying to identify which of a number of books I’ll pursue next… I’ve got one planned on game criticism (a series of critical pieces on specific games), one on games and sports, one on Apple, a book on McLuhan and metaphysics (with Levi Byrant), the crazy kernel of a follow-up to Alien Phenomenology, and a book on play that I would call my attempt at a Malcolm Gladwell-style trade book. Who knows which if any of those will ever come to fruition.

As for commitments, Levi and I are finishing a collection called New Realisms and Materialisms, which we hope will paint a very broad portrait of the different ways of thinking that take those names, applied to a variety of domains, from philosophy to art, architecture to ecology. I’m also desperate to make some new games… I’ve got a small iOS puzzle game in the works, and a larger, weirder piece that should open at the Jacksonville Museum of Contemporary Art in the fall of 2012 and see a general release shortly thereafter.

And I’m closing, if you will, on a big game infrastructure project, the Game-O-Matic authoring system. It was funded by the Knight Foundation two years ago as a tool to help journalists quickly and easily make games about current events without specialized game design or programming knowledge, and it’s just about to release into beta. The system is sort of magical: it takes a concept map (a diagram of nouns with verbs connecting them) and turns them into a playable game. Folks can sign up to use it for free.

I’m currently struggling to take seriously my own idea of “carpentry,” the practice of making things that do theory (described in Alien Phenomenology). I’m trying to expand my theoretical output beyond books, but I still love reading and writing, so I hope I’ll end up with an interesting menagerie of new little creatures over the next few years.

References:

Bogost, Ian. (2011). How to Do Things with Videogames. Minneapolis, MN: The University of Minnesota Press.

Bogost, Ian. (2012). Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis, MN: The University of Minnesota Pres.

Eno, Brian & Mills, Russell, with Rick Poyner. (1986). More Dark Than Shark. London: faber & faber.

Eno, Brian & Schmidt, Peter. (1975). Oblique Strategies: Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas. London: Brian Eno/Peter Schmidt.

Harman, Graham. (2002). Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects. Open Court.

Johnson, Steven. (2011). The Innovator’s Cookbook: Essentials for Inventing What’s Next. New York: Riverhead.

McGonigal, Jane. (2011). Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. New York: Penguin.

Montfort, Nick & Bogost, Ian. (2009). Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.