About – Roy Christopher

June 2, 2016

Doug Stanhope’s Digging Up Mother on Splitsider

I have a bit about Doug Stanhope‘s new memoir, Digging Up Mother: A Love Story (Da Capo, 2016) over on Splitsider today.

Here’s an excerpt:

The book, as it states right on the cover, is a love story and a memoir. If you want to know what he’s done since his last DVD or since the last time you saw him live, check Youtube. Most of this book happens before that was even possible. Many a buried back-story is unearthed here: Doug’s earliest days as a road comic, when he actually lived on the road – in his car. His stint as an innovative, master cold-calling telemarketer. One-nighters, hell gigs, middling, featuring, telling jokes to the elderly on a tour bus, and “making it” in all of its elusive meanings. Many days and nights of performances, beverages, and substances. There’s quite a lot of the latter, and Mother is there for every phase, step, and bump along the way.

Read the full story here.

Many thanks to Doug, Bonnie, Bingo, Chaille, Brett, and the whole Unbookables/Panamint Lifers crew, as well as Adam Frucci at Splitsider.

April 26, 2016

“Swarm Cities” on How We Get to Next

Very happy to announce my first piece for Steven Johnson‘s How We Get to Next. Their theme for April is “Metropolis,” so I did a little piece about what I’ve termed “swarm cities.”

Here’s an excerpt:

Our capital-driven, networked societies produce, more than anything else, ephemeral things — that is, things that are built, not to last, but to disappear and be displaced by newer versions of themselves. As David Byrne wrote in his Bicycle Diaries, cities “are physical manifestations of our deepest beliefs and our often unconscious thoughts, not so much as individuals, but as the social animals we are.” If our collective consciousness is flitting and flickering from one thing to the next, so shall our cities follow suit.

They even used my sketch of Anish Kapoor’s “Cloud Gate” sculpture here in Chicago:

Many thanks to Ian Steadman and everyone at How We Get to Next, Read the whole piece here.

March 12, 2016

HKRB Logo Design

My friend Alfie Bown runs the Hong Kong Review of Books. In addition to running some of my illustrations, he recently asked me to come up with a new logo for the site. I woke up a few days later with an idea.

Somehow the shapes in the negative space of the letters just fell into place.

The B was the only part I struggled with since it looked more like an 8 in my original sketches. The other letters seemed obvious. I hinted at more of a B-shape by having the background outline bisect the circles. It’s still the weak point in the legibility of the logo but also possibly the most visually interesting part.

Here it is with some color:

And then I did one more iteration for good measure:

This is only my second requested logo design (Rapper friend Alaska was the first). Thanks to Alfie Bown for the opportunity.

February 21, 2016

Illustrations for the Hong Kong Review of Books

Thanks to Alfie Bown, I am now doing illustrations, like the one below of Umberto Eco, for the Hong Kong Review of Books.

This sketch was done from his photo on the cover of MIT Press’s reissue of his 1977 book, How to Write a Thesis (MIT Press, 2015). I’ve been experimenting with quick sketches with very little planning, partly to capture that hot space, and partly because I just don’t have time to do the kind of labor-intensive drawing I want to do.

Thanks to Alfie and the HKRB! Umberto Eco, R.I.P.

April 7, 2015

Dead Precedents on Repeater Books

I am proud to announce that I have signed a contract with Repeater Books for my book about cyberpunk and hip-hop. Titled Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future, the book uses the means and methods of cyberculture and hauntology to thoughtfully remap hip-hop’s spread from around the way to around the world. Its central argument is that the cultural practices of hip-hop culture are the blueprint to 21st century culture, and that an understanding of the appropriation of language and technology is an understanding of the now.

Here is an excerpt from the first chapter, “Endangered Theses”:

Though their roots go back much further, the subcultures of hip-hop and cyberpunk emerged in the mass mind during the 1980s. Sometimes they’re both self-consciously of the era, but digging through their artifacts and narratives, we will see the seeds of our times sprouting… My original guiding premise was that hip-hop culture provides the blueprint to 21st century culture. After researching and writing this book, I am even more convinced that this is true. If we take hip-hop as a community of practice, then the cultural practices of the culture inform the new century in new ways… The heroes of this book are the architects of the future: emcees, DJs, poets, artists, scholars, theorists, writers. If they didn’t invent anything but reinvented everything, then that everything is where we live now. Forget what you know about time and causation. This is a new fossil record with all new futures.

Repeater was founded by the crew that brought us Zer0 Books. Their mission statement is as follows:

Radical change is possible and necessary but only if alternative thinking has the courage to move out of the margins. Repeater is committed to bringing the periphery to the centre, taking the underground overground, and publishing books that will bring new ideas to a new public. We know that any encounter with the mainstream risks corrupting the tidiness of untested ideals, but we believe that it is better to get our hands dirty than worry about keeping our souls pure.

I’m super excited to be working with Tariq Goddard, Mark Fisher, Matteo Mandarini, Alex Niven, and Tamar Shlaim on this project, and to be joining authors Christiana Spens, Dawn Foster, Steven Shaviro, Steve Finbow, Eugene Thacker, Kodwo Eshun, Pamela Lu, Adrian West, Graham Harman, Mark Fisher, David Stubbs, Evan Calder Williams, Alberto Toscano, and others on Repeater.

Dead Precedents will be out on March 19, 2019.

March 20, 2015

Bookshelf Beats Interview

Bookshelf Beats is an interview site run by Gino Sorcinelli. He interviews different authors and writers about their favorite books. For mine, I chose James Gleick‘s Chaos (Viking, 1987), a book that blew my head wide open during a tumultuous time in my late 20s.

Here are a few excerpts:

My life while reading Chaos went through a total upheaval. The start-up company I was working for was purchased and shut down, I broke up with my girlfriend of six years, and I moved from Seattle to San Francisco to work as Slap Skateboard Magazine’s music editor. It seemed like a dream job, and one toward which I’d been working for a long time. By the time I finished reading Chaos, though, I knew I wanted to do so much more. After a month, I left Slap and worked my way into graduate school. I hadn’t been a heavy reader up to that point, but I haven’t stopped reading several books at a time since reading Chaos nearly 20 years ago.

…[T]he first tenet of chaos theory is “sensitive dependence on initial conditions,” more commonly known as “the butterfly effect.” Small changes at the start of any dynamical system can have huge ramifications later on. If we apply that to the time of my discovery of Gleick’s book and its content, I can’t say whether or not I’d be here talking about it now if any of those factors were different. The book changed my life.

There are many major interests and introductions that have landed me where I am now, but reading Chaos was one of the biggest bifurcations. Chaos theory was largely borne of phenomena that had been filtered out by other scientific and mathematical methods. In part it teaches you to look between things and not leave anything out. Once I started reading other books about science and media, I spent a while trying to distance myself from my past in skateboarding, BMX, ‘zine-making, and music journalism. I eventually realized that it all goes together, it all has its place. Now I refuse to choose between being nerdy and getting my hands dirty.

Many thanks to Gino for the opportunity to talk about the book, Steve McCann for loaning it to me way back when, and James Gleick, of course, for writing it. Read the whole interview here.

January 5, 2015

The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies

I am proud to announce that I’ve been asked to contribute a chapter to The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies, edited by Eduardo Navas, Owen Gallagher, and xtine burrough. The collection includes essays by Lev Manovich, Mark Amerika, Kembrew McLeod, Aram Sinnreich, as well as the editors — a whopping 41 chapters in all! My essay, which has largely been hashed out via posts on this very website, is titled “The End of an Aura: Nostalgia, Memory, and the Haunting of Hip-Hop.” Using the tropes of hacking and haunting, as well as a chunk of thought from Walter Benjamin, it deals with the question of memory in a time of easy digital reproduction. Of the essay, Navas, Gallagher, and burrough write in the Introduction,

His inquiry is realized as an actual literary critical performance. Christopher’s text by and large comprises a series of quotes by divergent authors, ranging from cyberpunk to hip-hop, which take the shape of an intertextual collage that turns into a case study of authenticity in the time of constant digital reproduction (p. 6).

Many thanks to Eduardo Navas for inviting me to contribute and to Barry Brummett for pushing me to write about this idea in the first place.

The collection is out now!

March 2, 2014

The First Time I Heard My Bloody Valentine

I have an essay in Scott Heim’s new collection The First Time I Heard My Bloody Valentine. I’m super stoked to be sharing pages and experiences with musicians like Bob Mould, Christian Savill of Slowdive, Ian Masters of Pale Saints, Kellii Scott of Failure and Veruca Salt, James Chapman of Maps, Gazz Carr of God is an Astronaut, and my man Alap Momin of dälek, among many others. The book is available for the Kindle, Nook, iBooks, and other e-readers. Below is the cover, designed by Joel Westendorf.

Here’s an excerpt of my piece in the book, in which I describe the first time I saw My Bloody Valentine live, and the girl I shared the show with:

The next hour or so is difficult to describe without sounding like a complete imbecile. My Bloody Valentine makes the loudest, most beautiful noise I’ve ever witnessed. It doesn’t wash over you as much as it just plows right through your being. You’re not hearing it with your ears as much as you’re feeling it viscerally with your guts. While their records strain the constraints of recording technology, their live presence bends to no such limits. It is akin to standing near an airliner as it taxis toward takeoff or a tornado ripping through trees. It’s strong, certain, and it hurts.

This is the sixth entry in Heim’s The First Time I Heard… series. Other acts include Joy Division/New Order, Kate Bush, David Bowie, The Smiths, and Cocteau Twins.

August 28, 2013

Herc Your Enthusiasm: Ice-T’s “The Coldest Rap”

As part of HiLoBrow‘s “Herc Your Enthusiasm” series, named in honor of legendary DJ Kool Herc, which consists of 25 posts by 25 critics about old-school Hip-hop tracks, I was asked to contribute one from 1983. That was kind of an in-between year being just after the reign of Kurtis Blow but before Run-DMC became the Kings of Rock. Fortunately, 1983 was the year of Ice-T‘s “The Coldest Rap.”

Here’s an excerpt:

Ice-T’s first single, “The Coldest Rap”/”Cold Wind Madness (a.k.a. The Coldest Rap, Part 2)” (1983) consists of a two-part rhyme-fest of boastful wordplay. The single is backed with “Body Rock,” an electro-dance number that puts in extra work trying to explain what Hip-hop is all about. Past all of the playful posturing and woefully dated structure, one can hear the seeds of Ice-T’s lyrical heyday. His distinctive delivery, his cadence, his occasional turn of phrase, and his gift for innuendo all shine through, hinting at his future success on the mic. “The Coldest Rap” is a player anthem, a party song, a Hip-hop trope that Ice-T would revisit throughout his recording career. The power production team of Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, who were then core members of Morris Day’s band, The Time, as well as close associates of Prince, provided the backbone for the track. They stretch out a bit on Part 2, but Part 1 is all Ice-T’s, though the track originally had female vocals on it. “They stripped the girl’s vocal out,” he told Wax Poetics in 2010, “gave me the instrumental, and I rapped over it that night in the studio.” In spite of the single’s inauspicious origins, Ice-T sounds as authoritative as ever, if not as focused as he would become a few years later. “Those were just some rhymes I had in my head,” he said.

So maybe Melle Mel and Kurtis Blow are the most revered and remembered emcees of the time, but Ice-T was in the mix, and he was just getting started.

You can read the whole post over on HiLoBrow. Many thanks to Joshua Glenn for the opportunity and Jeff Newelt for the push.

March 1, 2013

The Haunting of Mitch Hedberg on Splitsider

Eight years after his death, Mitch Hedberg’s unique style of standup continues to haunt open-mic stages and playlists of millions, as well as our daily conversation. I commemorated his humor and haunting over on Splitsider.com today, thanks to Samantha Pitchel and Adam Frucci.

Here’s an excerpt:

I was at a bar in Seattle called Lynda’s with [Hedberg’s road manager, Greg] Chaille and several other comedians on the two-year anniversary of Mitch’s passing, and we all went around the table telling our favorite Mitch jokes.

“Last week I helped a friend stay put,” started one comedian. “It’s a lot easier than helping someone move. I just went over to his house and made sure that he did not start to load shit into a truck.”

“I had my hair highlighted because I thought some strands were more important than others,” offered someone else.

“An escalator can never be broken, it can only become stairs,” added another. “Escalator temporarily stairs! Sorry for the convenience!” everyone finished in unison.

“I think Pringles’ original intention was to make tennis balls,” I chimed in, “but on the day the rubber was supposed to show up a truckload of potatoes came. Pringles is a laid back company, so they just said ‘fuck it, cut ‘em up!’”

During the blackout in the desert, Chaille built a bonfire in the campground across the road from the Panamint Springs resort. We all soon reconvened there, clumsily finding our way through the dark desert where Mitch’s spirit still lingered. Shortly after his death, comedians from all over the country gathered in Los Angeles to honor Mitch’s memory. “If I didn’t get a chance to say hello,” friend and fellow comedian Doug Stanhope wrote on his website after the show, “it’s because it was hard to talk.”

Read the full story here.

Thanks to Bill Minutaglio and David Patterson who were early readers and commenters on this material, and many thanks to Lynn Shawcroft, Greg Chaille, Doug Stanhope, Brendon Walsh, Emery Emery, Brett Erickson, Kerry Mitchell, and especially Mitch Hedberg. Rest in peace. You are missed.