In 1997 I put out a zine called wow&flutter [.pdf]. It was an attempt to merge two of my main musical interests at the time, turntablism and experimental noise. I interviewed DJ QBert, DJ Spooky, John Duncan, and Daniel Menche, and reviewed records from the rapidly expanding releases of ambient, noise, and turntable artists. I lived in Seattle at the time, and there was so much going on in all of these areas. There were regular live events and several specialty stores, and I tried to bring them all together under the banner of sound experimentation.
wow&flutter was intended as part of a series, but the second issue, attack&decay, featuring interviews with Jack Dangers of Meat Beat Manifesto and Warren Defever of His Name is Alive, among others, never made it to press. I still love the idea of noise and hip-hop coming together, and there are others who’ve merged them in the meantime better than I could have imagined (e.g., dälek, clipping., Ho99o9, Death Grips, Cloaks, Justin Broadrick and Kevin Martin, et al.)
Two years ago, I moved from the Portland area to Southern Oregon’s Rogue Valley and met Scott Wozniak. Scott’s become a close friend. He writes poetry. He participates in readings and (yes, they still exist) slams. In 2014, during the first six months of his sobriety, Scott won $140 at a slam in Ashland. I told him he reminds me in some ways of Steve Richmond. He laughed. When we met, Scott hadn’t heard of Steve or read his poems. Familiar refrain in American Renegades poetry. Or Outlaw. Modern American Poetry. MAP. Whatever you want to call it. Why? Because there’s always someone you haven’t heard of or read in this realm. Realm meaning the underground scene or network worldwide. Which brings to mind Worldwide Pants, David Letterman‘s production company. Watch this video: On June 10, 1982, Allen Ginsberg appeared on NBC’s Late Night with David Letterman. Allen talked about singing mantras, poetry, rock and roll. He mentioned collaborating with The Clash, being friends with Bob Dylan, preparing to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (Viking Press, 1957) in Boulder, Colorado, and how he was inspired by William Blake. After the commercial break, Ginsberg performed a punk rock-paced poem backed by Paul Shaffer’s band.
— Allen Ginsberg on Late Night with David Letterman, June 10, 1982.
Scott Wozniak’s new book Crumbling Utopian Pipedream (Moran Press, 2017) features marvelous cover art by Marie Enger, a back cover blurb by poet and novelist Rob Plath, and 40 poems written by a “chaos enthusiast” who—when he isn’t “doin’ the blue-collar thing,” as he told Marcia Epstein on her Talk With Me podcast—spends his free time writing and “[s]hadowboxing the apocalypse,” opening lines from his poem “The Time for Doomsday Preparation is Over,” which goes:
Shadowboxing
the apocalypse
by throwing
punches
at the wind
seems more
productive
than banging
heads
against
bricks
in this
counterfeit
age
of reason.
Ladies and gentlemen, would you please welcome Scott Wozniak.
Mike Daily: The recent book review and interview by George Anderson in New South Wales, Australia, astounded me. Not many writers receive that kind of in-depth, insightful, “erudite” I think is the word, critical acclaim. You accomplished this with your second collection of poetry, Crumbling Utopian Pipedream, or CUP as I refer to it. Awestruck congratulations, my friend. What do you make of this?
Scott Wozniak: Quite honestly, I’m not completely sure there’s a whole lot to make of it. You know how things are in the small press world, especially poetry. You can rack up great reviews and remain unknown, except maybe by your peers. How far “acclaim” stretches is relative to how you perceive it.
The way I see it is this: George is one of those guys that writes great poetry himself, runs an awesome site dedicated to small press/underground lit, reviews books, basically shines a light on the scene, and has been doing it for a good amount of time now. The underground press survives thanks to guys like George, and there’s a ton of ‘em out there. You’re one of them, Mike. Guys who’ve been in the game a long time, writers who understand it’s up to us to keep the ball rolling.
Poetry, in particular, has been DIY for centuries. It’s a passion project. Ultimately, for me, if writers whose work I love, who I look up to, writers who’ve been doing this since before I was born, if those guys give me positive feedback, I’m stoked. I’m accomplishing more than I set out to accomplish. If I reach a wider audience thanks to these guys who have been grinding away for 10, 20, 30 years in the small press, because they just have to write, it’s in their bones, then I’m forever grateful. Because honestly, if not another soul on the planet read my words, I’d still be writing. So, I try to keep it in perspective. Sure, I like to hear that my writing connects with someone because I love that feeling of reading something that resonates with me. But, I’m a selfish fuck, a lot of times I’m writing for me. Clearing the trash out of the attic, you know? So, when I get a review like the one George did, I look at it more like he was very thorough and thoughtful, and paid my work huge respect on that level. I view it more as a reflection of his integrity and dedication to the small press than a reflection of how great my book is.
MD: The review drew attention to your choice to open CUP with an epigram by poet Doug Draime–
It’s then you see the crushing odds
and you know
you have
beaten them.
Somehow. You know
with the certainty
of your continued
breath.
–and since I had been unfamiliar with Doug’s work, can you tell us more about him, the impact his poetry had on you, and your personal interactions with him?
— Doug Draime
SW: Doug Draime is a legend, in my eyes, and deserves to be recognized as such. He had been publishing in the underground since the late ’60s, up until he passed away last year. I only became familiar with his work maybe six or seven years ago. I started noticing him on quite a few different poetry websites I would frequent and he would floor me every time. Then I came across one of his chapbooks that was included in the first Punk Rock Chapbook Series by Epic Rites Press. After that, I was in full blown fan-boy mode and consumed as much of his work as I could find. His full-length collection, More than the Alley, published by Interior Noise Press (2012), is still one of my all-time favorite books of poetry out there.
Eventually, a couple of years down the line, after I’d started getting work published, I discovered that he lived right down the road from me. This was a revelation. There aren’t too many writers that I idolized like I did him and he was living in my backyard, in middle of nowhere, Southern Oregon.
One evening I tracked down his email. I shot him a message, and, surprisingly, he messaged me back. We corresponded semi-regularly for the last year of his life. I had no idea he was sick at the time and he would always shoot down my offers to get a cup of coffee because he wanted to spend time with his family. Regardless, he would take the time to give me advice on writing, periodically critique my work, push me to submit my stuff, and generally taught me about being a kind, selfless person. I was just this random, poetry freak who started harassing him and he took the time to encourage and talk to me, even while he was sick.
I had built him up as this giant of poetry and assumed that he somehow managed to make a living off his writing, even though I’d read many, many poems where he would talk about his experience at some shit, dead end job. When I breached this subject, he laughed at me and brought me back down to reality, telling me, “Make no mistake, poetry don’t pay the bills.”
For this experience alone, I’m continually grateful. It removed any visions of grandeur I may have possessed and instilled in me the importance to just write, fuck anything else. Doug wrote incredible stuff, and got published for 40-plus years without the drive for fame. He wrote top notch poetry that tore into me like few writers have. He did this because writing was in his bones. Pure, no-nonsense love of the form, without any expectations. I know he was unaware of the impact that realization had on me, but it’s massive. That’s why I try not to put too much stock in things like good reviews. If I can just write solid work and remain happy with the joy that comes from the act itself, then I will have accomplished something holy. Recently, another writer/illustrator whom I highly respect, Janne Karlsson, read the manuscript of a project he and I are working on together and told me he felt it read “like a cross between Doug Draime and Nietzsche.” I don’t think I will ever receive a higher compliment.
MD: George Anderson asked, “Have you recently stumbled upon some new authors you haven’t read before who have impressed you?” You answered, “Man, there’s a ton of ‘em out there right now. I think the underground, or as my friend Mike Daily likes to call it, post-outlaw poetry, is alive and well. But a few names that are newer to me and very impressive would be Ryan Quinn Flanagan, Katie Lewington, Mather Schneider, James Decay, Paul Tristram, Jenny Santellano, Jamie Thrasivoulou, Matthew Borczon, and Benjamin Blake, to name a few.” Go ahead and name some others, expanding from contemporary writers to list your lifelong influences. Speak on William S. Burroughs, pro and con from your experience and current perspective, if you will.
SW: I hate doing these lists. I always feel like it’s some sort of, “Oh, look how well-read I am” B.S. that’s a way of proving to the gatekeepers that I belong here, wherever here is. I’m not saying that feeling is grounded in reality, I’m just saying that’s how I feel. But, since I know you’re a complete bibliophile and have a heartfelt respect for authors, I will comply…
Obviously, Bukowski is at the head of the list, followed, in no particular order, by Czeslaw Milosz, d.a. levy, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Bob Kaufman, Jack Micheline, Gregory Corso, David Lerner, Miguel Algarin, Kurt Vonnegut, Ken Kesey, Hunter S. Thompson, Jim Carroll, Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, Walt Whitman, Bob Flanagan, Iceberg Slim, Donald Goines, Dan Fante (thanks to you), Carlos Castaneda, Phillip K. Dick, Robert Hunter, John Prine, Richard Brautigan, Woody Guthrie, Hubert Selby Jr., Harlan Ellison, Frank O’Hara, Bruce Springsteen, Joe Strummer, Tom Robbins, Tom Waits, Jack Black (author of, You Can’t Win, not the other guy), J.D. Salinger, everyone who ever wrote for Marvel Comics, a slew of other writers I’ve forgotten, and of course, Mr. William S. Burroughs, whom I tend to have a bit of a love/hate relationship with. Maybe hate is too strong of a word, it’s more of a love/ehh (shrugs shoulders) relationship.
The reason for this is that I love him for the madman he was, and how his work is a true representation of that. He lived hard and wild and that is obvious when you read him. His book, Junkie, is a hard one to top, and a clear, honest representation of a crazy-ass junkie. His cut-up period of work, I could do without. Naked Lunch is, in my opinion, the best of that style. I could do without the rest of the Nova Trilogy. Sure, it’s “experimental,” and “revolutionary” but it’s fucking hard to follow. That stuff is like learning a new language, it takes commitment to see it through. But, in all honesty, he’s probably the only writer who got clumped into the whole “Beat” category that I never outgrew. I can hear the gasps of sacrilege pouring from your readers’ mouths due to that statement, but it’s true. I could explain my stance further but that would be a long exhaustive conversation better suited for another time.
Focusing on Burroughs, I love him because he was bat-shit-crazy and I can relate. But I also see the folly of his ways the more I reflect on my own mistakes. I mean, he did murder someone. It may have been a drug-fueled mistake, and who am I to say it didn’t torment him, but the fucker got away with it because he comes from a wealthy family. That rubs me wrong. Maybe it shouldn’t reflect on my opinion about his work, but if I’m being honest, it kind of does. I will spare you an expanded discourse, which would undoubtedly be filled with hypocrisy…for now.
MD: What do you think was meant by my allusion to “post-outlaw poetry”?
SW: I’ve milled this over a bit since I first heard you use the term, and to me it seems like just another label, like “post-punk,” that is lost on me. You did, however, clue me in to the fact that you view it along the lines of straight-edge, but less militant. So, with that taken into consideration, I’ve come up with this…
Where “outlaw” has a (suicidal?) tendency to glorify the over-consumption of drugs and alcohol, and the life led while in such a state of existence, “post-outlaw” visits these same themes from the standpoint of experiences lived, pointing out the destruction while also revealing the desire, struggle, and necessity of overcoming such behavior, with the hope that the reader may learn that it’s not all fun and games in the fast lane, and yes, there is a way out. Maybe the “post-outlaw” is one who miraculously survived the “outlaw” life and is now searching for higher meaning thanks to the destruction of their past? Or you could be saying that all the outlaws have come and gone, but I think we know better.
MD: I saw on Facebook that poet Alan Kaufman, Editor of The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1999), is 27 years sober this week. Last question: How essential has working a program of recovery been in maintaining your sobriety? I had thought I was an anomaly in sobriety since I had for years used will power and determination to not try to change how I feel. Now I’m aware that others with the DIY (Do It Yourself) mindset seem to have quit using the same method. Individuals who have posted or interviewed to this effect include musician, writer, and anchor at MTV News Meredith Graves (1 year); BMX racer, dirt jumper, street rider, and writer Scott Towne (6 years); and rappers Evolve (Sergio Hernandez, 2 years) and Blueprint (Al Shepard, 7 years). I was surprised to hear while listening to “Super Duty Tough Work with Blueprint and Illogic: Podcast 67: The Benefits of Sobriety” that Blueprint and I share the same sobriety birthday, May 15th (Print’s got a year on me). He didn’t mention A.A. or any direct principles of the program during his podcast with Illogic. Likely because when he quit, he quit. Done deal for him. The Book of Drugs: A Memoir (Da Capo Press, 2012) by solo artist Mike Doughty (former singer-guitarist of Soul Coughing, 17 years sober as far as I know) is one of my favorite books. In “An Indie Superstar’s Slow Road to Sobriety,” Mike writes about how going to meetings and finding out how to work the program saved his life. Yours?
SW: There is no question that working a 12-step program of recovery saved my life. I’m a drunk junkie of the hopeless variety. There is no logical reason that you and I should be having this conversation. By all accounts, I should have died long ago. I tried to get sober a time or two by using self-will and I never got more than a handful of weeks under my belt. I just couldn’t do it, until I did the work outlined in the book. I’m not blessed with the capability to just turn off my need for oblivion. I was aware of this fact for a long time, I just thought it was my lot in life. When I started doing the program, I thought it was bullshit and wasn’t gonna work for me because, you know, I’m unique. But as I got into it, something happened. What that something is, I’m still not sure, nor do I care to know. I try not to think too deeply about the how’s or why’s. I just do what I’ve been taught and it keeps me clean, plain and simple.
———
Contributor Bio:
Mike Daily is a novelist, journalist, zinemaker, spoken words performer, and co-creator of the Plywood Hoods freestyle BMX trick team. He lives in Oregon. Daily is at work on his third novel, Moon Babes of Bicycle City. Excerpts from the book are being recorded with Joe Gruttola.
Each time we move to a new city, we make memories as the city slowly takes shape in our minds. Every new place we locate (e.g., the closest grocery store, the post office, rendezvous points with friends, etc.) is a new point on the map. Wayfinding a new city is an experience you can never get back. Once you are familiar with the space or place, it’s gone. Since moving out on my own, I’ve gravitated toward cities: Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, San Diego, Austin, Atlanta, Chicago. Externalized memories built in brick and concrete. As David Byrne writes, 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” (p. 2).
[“Cloud Gate” drawing by Roy Christopher]
You can map out a whole city according to the weight of memory, like pins on the homicide board tracking the killer’s movements. But the connections get thicker and denser and more complicated all the time — from Moxyland by Lauren Beukes
Darran Anderson‘s Imaginary Cities (Influx Press, 2015) brings many of these unconscious thoughts out of our heads and into the light, mapping cities according to memories. Anderson humbly calls the book “a diminished non-fiction mirror” to Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1974), but it is a masterwork unto itself. As Calvino (1974) writes in that book, “The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls” (p. 11). Anderson’s book illuminates these interstitial crags and corners, yet it goes as wide as it does deep, digging through the details as much as minding the monolithic. It’s a book I will have to spend much more time with, as it deserves to be explored in depth, like any good city.
What is the importance of placing a memory? he said. Why spend that much time trying to find the exact geographic and temporal latitudes and longitudes of the things we remember, when what’s urgent about a memory is its essence?
— from Days Between Stations by Steve Erickson
I’m also interested in spending much more time with Dominic Pettman‘s In Divisible Cities: A Phanto-Cartographical Missive (Dead Letter Office/Punctum Books, 2013). Aside from Calvino’s Invisible Cities, this book’s form recalls only McKenzie Wark‘s Dispositions (Salt Publishing, 2002). These two books hint at their own genre. Locative love stories? Positional poetry? They’re nothing if not poetic, and and the style suits both the authors and their subjects. As Johannes Milner (1814) put it, “Poetry is not something to be activated and deactivated. It is a part of a process, a byproduct of simply being poetic” (p. 43). In Divisible Cities is definitely that, and Pettman’s subtlety is astounding. Download or buy it directly from Punctum Books or get lost in the interactive web version.
In the sagas it was said that humans dream with their hands, only their hands, and so have cities rather than sagas, monuments rather than memories. — from Easy Travel to Other Planets by Ted Mooney
Savage Messiah (Verso, 2011) is a compilation of Laura Oldfield Ford’s zines of the same name, chronicling the streets of London in various states of duress. I’ve never seen a zine or a zine collection that seemed this important. I’ve never even seen one with the potential to be this important. Ford’s writings and drawings map not only the city’s streets but also the lives underneath. In his Introduction, Mark Fisher calls the zine “out of time” but not “out of date”: “Savage Messiah deploys anachronism as a weapon. At first sight, at first touch — and tactility is crucial to the experience: the zine doesn’t feel the same when it’s JPEGed on a screen” (p. x). Indeed, Savage Messiah‘s return to the anarcho-punk aesthetic of the late-1970s is essential to Ford’s revival of that attitude. This is poetry. This is protest. This is London undone. Holding it in your hands is imperative.
Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist. — Kathy Acker
Early on in In Divisible Cities, Dominic Pettman repurposes the idea of mattering maps, those maps we make to and from the things that matter: “A map that generates territory, rather than the other way around… A map that does not represent cities that exist independently, but a map that brings cities into being…” (p. 3). These three books can be read as giant, sprawling mattering maps. Within them, there are vast and multiple new cities to be explored.
References:
Acker, Kathy & Wark, McKenzie. (2015). I’m Very Into You. New York: Semiotext(e), p. 135.
When I started doing zines as a teenager, interviews were an easy way to get something no one else had. I could get in touch with a band, ask them questions, and write up an original piece of content. It was fun and it lead me to magazine writing. When I moved the operation online, my first site (frontwheeldrive.com) was almost all interviews.
Andy Jenkins and I have had a similar relationship with interviews. We both started off doing them for journalistic purposes, then moved away from them for various reasons. “Interviewing folks meant that I was drawing a line between myself and the interviewee,” he writes in the introduction. “So, instead of being a peer, I was sort of an outsider” (p. 3). For Bend #24: Questions (Bend Press, 2015), Andy returned to the interview format to check in with a bunch of people who’ve inspired him over the years: He asked 27 people the same 24 questions. Interview subjects include Johnny Knoxville, Megan Baltimore, and O; skateboarders Jerry Hsu, Ed Templeton, Tod Swank, and Marc Johnson; artists Lori Damiano, Ferris Plock, Kevin Wilkins, Thomas Campbell, and Evan Hecox; and one of my favorite character actors, Bob Stephenson; as well as many other creative folks. Questions is inspiring, entertaining, and funny. Andy’s introduction says he did these interviews “not feeling the line” because he knows all of these people in one way or another. His art and designs have always been inspiring to me, but this time it’s the minds he’s assembled that make me want to go do stuff.
Life from a window
I’m just taking in the view
Life from a window
Observing everything around you
— The Jam, “Life From a Window”
I met Tobin Yelland twice: once while I worked at SLAP Skateboard Magazine in San Francisco and once while I worked at Skateboard.com in San Diego. He’s a super-nice guy with a keen eye through the camera lens. Life From a Window (Deadbeat Club, 2014) is Clint Woodside and Tobin’s travel log from Asia, including pictures from Shanghai, Seoul, Hong Kong, and Guangzhou. Candid expressions, odd artifacts, and haunting cityscapes adorn its 40, full-color pages. It also comes with two 4×6″ prints, one from each photographer.
I picked up a copy of Bogus Rendition#9 from the merch table at a the Watain/Mayhem Black Metal Warfare tour stop at the Bottom Lounge in Chicago earlier this year. Split between hopping trains and black metal, Justin Curtsinger tells great stories and does solid interviews. He’s traversed the US by train several times and toured with Watain and many other black metal acts, so his stories and interviews (with members of Watain, The Devil’s Blood, Soulgrinder, et al.) come from a far more personal place. The lengthy transcribed talks in BR #9 are as meandering as they are interesting. These are not promo-copy fodder. They’re just regular chats with the guys behind the set and sound. It’s a welcome change from magazine interviews. Reflecting on Watain’s 2013 tour for The Wild Hunt, Curtsinger writes, “I’ve found it harder and harder as time has gone on to write about other people who happen to be friends as if they are ‘characters’ in a story.” Though he admits that he’s not the biggest Watain fan, he acknowledges their importance, writing, “The reminder that life is whatever the fuck we want to make it and that following one’s heart on whatever obscure path one wants to take is not a pipe dream.” The 108 pages of Bogus Rendition #9 document parts of Curtsinger’s obscure path(s), and the world is better off for the glimpses it provides.
A member of both the black metal band, Light Bearer, and the hardcore band, Momentum (two of my recent favorites), Gerfried Ambrosch is also a prolific writer. Not surprisingly, his writing is ideologically in-line with his music. Among his zines are Atheist Morality: Why We Don’t Need Religion to Be Moral (Active Distribution, 2013) and Vindication of a Vegan Diet (Active Distribution, 2013). We Want Something More: The Poetry of Punk Rock (Active Distribution, n.d.) is a 100-page pamphlet-style zine that could easily double as a master’s thesis. It’s also informed by interviews — with some of the most important people in punk rock. Its back copy reads,
We Want Something More is an extended essay about punk lyrics. It features exclusive interviews with well-known punk rock and hardcore artists such as Ian MacKaye (Minor Threat, Fugazi), Jello Biafra (Dead Kennedys), Henry Rollins (Black Flag), Ray Cappo (Youth of Today, Shelter), Greg Bennick (Trial), Brian D. (Catharsis), Dan Yemin (Kid Dynamite, Paint It Black), Chris Hannah (Propagandhi), and others. The essay investigates the connections between song lyrics, poetry, visual and acoustic aesthetics, musical conventions, the D.I.Y. ethos, and radical politics in the context of punk and hardcore. Its goals are to demonstrate that punk rock and hardcore song lyrics are a fascinating literary art form and to give punks and hardcore ‘kids’ an understanding of lyric analysis and close reading by reference to some of the songs that have changed their lives. Moreover, the essay discusses the particularities of punk culture and the things that set it apart from other subcultures. Given its focus on radical politics, is punk a serious counterculture, or at least part of a wider countercultural movement? This essay attempts to answer such questions by looking at song lyrics and how they have both reflected and affected the political discourse of punk and hardcore. If you have a passion for punk culture and/or the written word, there is a good chance that you will find We Want Something More to be a very interesting read.
I don’t do as many interviews as I used to, but I’m still biased toward them and read them regularly. I mean, I do teach a class on interviews now, and my first book is a collection of them. Interviews can be weird and indulgent, but they can provide keys to someone’s work you admire. They also let that someone know that you admire them. In Bend #24, Andy Jenkins asks, “Do you like answering questions?” Ed Templeton sums it up, saying, “Yeah. It means someone is asking.”
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.
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.
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?
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.
The 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!
I started all of this writing stuff making zines in junior high school. It would be difficult to overstate how much that experienced shaped who I have become. While the means of production and the channels of distribution have changed since my days at the copy shop, there are still some zines circulating. Here are a few of the standouts I’ve gotten recently.
The first issue of Andy Jenkins’ Bend zine I got was #7, which came in the mail over 25 years ago. That issue changed my own preset limits of what a zine could be, of what a page could represent, of what could be done with pens, scissors, glue-sticks, and a copy machine. His layouts burst onto the page in ways not even the magazines he made at the time did. There’s something about the constraints inherent in this medium that makes some people shine.
Andy hasn’t stopped innovating though. His last few zines buck the traditional two-page spread layout of magazines for a more stacked-and-jumbled approach. It’s a schema that works well for issue #22’s theme: rejected work. Bend: Rejected (Bend Press, 2014) consists of Andy’s rejected design and written pieces between 2010 and 2014 for such clients as Beats by Dre, Lakai Footwear, Jackass, Girl Skateboards, Hundreds, Fourstar, and Moneyball, among others. It’s a collection of case studies of how great work can still not fit a client’s needs or just fall short of expectations. No two copies of Bend #22 are the same. Each one has a different set of rejected work and includes an original drawing by Andy (mine is pictured above).
Gareth’s Tips on Sucks-Less Writing (Sparks of Fire Press, 2013), an excerpt from Gareth Branwyn‘s forthcoming book, Cyborg Like Me, and Other Tales of Art, Eros, and Embedded Systems (Sparks of Fire Press, 2014), is a handy guide for writers of all kinds. First compiled one the eve of blogging craze 15 years ago, Gareth has continued to update his tips in the meantime. Because of its ever-updating status, he calls it “a work in perpetual beta.”
The subtitle to Gareth’s Tips is “Or, Everything I Know About Writing, I Boosted from Other Writers and Editors.” Having compiled a couple of my own sets of writing guidelines, I can totally relate. Gareth taps wordsmiths and editor-types like Mark Frauenfelder (bOING bOING, WIRED, MAKE, etc.), Mike Gunderoy (Factsheet Five), Rudy Rucker (duh), Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird), Connie Hale (Sin and Syntax), and Warren Ellis’s gonzo Transmetropolitan protagonist, Spider Jerusalem (pictured on the cover). Gareth’s also been doing this word-thing hisdamnself for over 30 years (at Mondo 2000, WIRED, MAKE, and bOING bOING—when it was still a print zine!), so he knows there are no rigid rules for writing, but that there is a lot of advice floating around—some of which can help guide you to better prose. Gareth’s Tips brings together some of the best.
V. Vale’s McKenzie Wark zine (RE: Search, 2014) is the 48-page transcript of an interview between the two conducted in late 2012. Wark was visiting Berkeley and Vale invited him over for tea. The zine comes with two hand-screened prints – one yellow, one pink. Wark is on one side and Abby the cat, who also inserted herself in the interview, is on the back. Perhaps a bit a head of me, Vale and Wark got into punk early on, Wark at age 12 in Australia. From there he got into the rave scene and the hacking underground. Vale follows the thread through these interests to the future, theming the interview with the question, “Where is all this going, and how do we keep our bearings and our punk outlook and philosophy?” If anyone can follow that line of questioning to fruitful answers with experience and erudition, it’s McKenzie Wark.
So this site and all the things attached follow from my own thread of punk and D.I.Y. print work. I do still love a good zine though. There’s something to the physicality of the pages in your hand and the focus on those pages that pixels on screens don’t afford. I hope the committed few continue to make them and new minds and hands pick up the practice.
From an early age it was instilled in me that people judge you by how you look, how you dress, how you wear your hair, how you carry yourself. My dad won’t leave the house to do business or see someone without styling and dressing appropriately. We communicate something through every stylistic choice we make. As Umberto Eco (1973) writes, “I speak through my clothes.” To wit, I have seen firsthand many books misjudged by their covers. Still, coming up with this stress on conformity alongside the drive for expression inherent in art, skateboarding, and punk rock, I can’t help but toy with the conflict. In the Summer 1988 issue of Homeboy Magazine, pro BMXer R. L. Osborn wrote,
My girlfriend doesn’t dig my Megadeth t-shirt. ‘You’re going to shave one side of your head? Holey Levi’s? Throw ’em away. Your hair’s too long. Your hair’s too short. Why does your hair look like a rainbow?’ Everyone feels the heat from friends, family, and whoever else about independent style, yet I can’t help feeling that sometimes envy is covered up with uncool remarks. Hey. let’s be straight about this, it’s your life, your feelings, and your own personal way of expressing yourself and showing the true you (p. 81).
The piece was accompanied by photos of street kids with wacky hair with odd angles and colors, leather jackets with lots of zippers, spikes, chains, and other scary accessories. I was 17 when that issue came out, and though Osborn’s proselytizing wasn’t the first time I’d been exposed to punk aesthetics, it stuck with me. So, when I saw my DIG BMX Magazine colleague Ricky Adam‘s new zine, I immediately thought of R. L.’s words.
Ricky Adam’s zine, Glad to See the Back of You (Trajectories, 2013), is full of tattooed attitude. It’s a compendium of punk self-expression mostly in the form of custom jackets with back patches. Back patches are largely the domain of bikers or crust punks, the latter of whom fill this zine’s pages. Punk back patches are often cut from old screen-printed t-shirts and hand sewn onto denim or leather jackets or vests along with other patches. The hand-done aspect of them is rarely disguised and gives the look a D.I.Y., provisional feel, and their literal patchwork lends them to subversive bricolage (see Hebdige, 1979). By mixing patches as signs together, punks engage in what Eco (1972) calls “semiotic guerilla warfare.” They express their lack of desire to reunite with the parent culture and celebrate, even parody, the alienation that causes it so much concern (Hebdige, 1979). The crust-punk style takes this alienation to the extreme. Its a war is waged against the established look via its sardonic and scathing rejection thereof (Brummett, 2008; Hebdige, 1979).
Greil Marcus (1989) outlines the complexities of punk’s signification this way:
[A] load of old ideas sensationalized into new feelings almost instantly turned into new clichés, but set forth with such momentum that the whole blew up its equations day by day. For every fake novelty, there was a real one. For every third-hand pose, there was a fourth-hand pose that turned into a real motive (p. 77).
None of this is new, and it might still seem juvenile, but the underlying sentiments haven’t changed. Who cares what’s been co-opted? And who knows what authenticity means anymore? My friend Mark Wieman recently observed how thick and long The Long Tail™ has become. There’s simply no real mainstream anymore, and when it comes to punk and authority, I still feel like my 17-year-old self. I don’t own a pair of dress shoes.
The punk aesthetic of doing it yourself isn’t about doing it like everyone else. It’s about liberating what’s unique about yourself, exposing what makes you you. As Osborn concludes, “Show us who you really are.”
——————–
Ricky Adam’s Glad to See the Back of You is out in a limited run of 300 (mine’s #154), so get yours now.
References:
Adam, Ricky. (2013). Glad to See the Back of You. Leeds, UK: Trajectories.
Brummett, Barry. (2008). A Rhetoric of Style. Carbondale, IL: The University of Southern Illinois Press.
Eco, Umberto (1972). Towards a Semiotic Enquiry into the Television Message. WPCS, 3, University of Birmingham.
Eco, Umberto. (1973). Social Life as a Sign System. In D. Robey (Ed.), Structuralism: The Wolfson College Lectures, 1972. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 57-72.
Hebdige, Dick. (1979). Subculture: The Meaning of Style. New York: Routledge.
Marcus, Greil. (1989). Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Osborn, R. L. (1988, Summer). Page 65. Homeboy Magazine, 80-81.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
MD: “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]:
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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 individuals 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.
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.
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Thanks to Mike Daily, Jared Souney, Mark Lewman, Ronnie Bonner, and Chip Riggs for helping me get this piece together.
The last few years have been hectic, and 2012 kept it moving in a big way. I’ll get to my personal stuff in a bit, but first, here are the people, events, music, and media that shaped my year.
Encounters of the Year: I had the honor of breakfast with longtime mentor and friend Howard Rheingold at SXSW this year. Howard has offered me endless advice and encouragement over the years online, and it was a true treat to chat with him face-to-face over a meal.
Also at SXSW, I was invited by my good friend Dave Allen to sit on a panel about music technology with Rick Moody, Jesse von Doom, David Ewald, and Anthony Batt, all of whom I am proud to now call friends. I’ll never forget the look on Rick’s face when I asked him to say grace at lunch that day.
We also ran into Hank Shocklee who was doing a panel discussion adjacent to ours. As the architect of the Bomb Squad, who produced such frenetic noisefests as Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and Fear of a Black Planet, as well as Ice Cube’s Amerikkka’s Most Wanted, Hank has been a hero of mine since high school. He hung out and conferred with us like we were all old friends.
Dave Allen, Hank Shocklee, and me at SXSW, 2012.
Comebacks have really made a comeback this year.
— Seth Cockfield via Twitter, December 3rd, 2012.
Speaking of Public Enemy, I caught “The Hip-hop Gods Classic Tourfest Revue” at The House of Blues in Chicago on December 5th. I hadn’t seen P.E. since 1991, and I’ve only seen them on package tours like this (once in 1990 with Digital Underground, Kid N’ Play, Queen Latifah, and The Afros, and twice in 1991, once with Sisters of Mercy, Gang of Four, Warrior Soul, and Young Black Teenagers, and again with Anthrax, Primus, and Young Black Teenagers). This time around it was them, X-Clan, Monie Love, Leaders of the New School, Wise Intelligent, Schoolly D, Son of Berzerk, and Awesome Dre. Chuck did a lot of talking and Flav did a lot of goofing, but the few songs that they did–both old and new–were absolutely on point.
Earlier in the year, I barged into Helmet’s dressing room at The House of Blues in Chicago to meet Page Hamilton. In my defense, I was looking for Ume‘s room, and once inside, I asked Page where it was. Before I left, I got Lily to take a picture of us together because people always say we look alike, to which Page quipped, “Yeah, but I’m 105 and you’re, like, 29.”
Page Hamilton and me backstage at The House of Blues.
Coup of the Year: Death Grips: As Christopher R. Weingarten explores in his “Artist of the Year” story on Spin.com, Death Grips showed how to use technology to get what you want, and then disappear before anyone knows what happened. They duped the internet, a major label, and their fans and became one of the most talked-about artists of the year. It goes, it goes, it goes…
The Return of Aggro Rag Freestyle Mag: While Mike Daily has been perpetually busy over the twenty-two years since he ruled the BMX zines, he brought Aggro Rag back out for one last issue before the zine gets anthologized in book form on new year’s day, 2013. The come-back issue boasts interviews with fifteen flatland undergrounders like Mark McKee, Aaron Dull, Gary Pollak, Chris Day, Jim Johnson, Derek Schott, Gerry Smith, and Dave Nourie. Being “The Hip-hop Issue,” the zine also features interviews with Dark Time Sunshine, Sole, and a review of Death Grips’ Money Store.
Mike Daily and Aesop Rock at the Crystal Ballroom in Portland, Oregon.
Daily even asked me to contribute an interview with my friend Aesop Rock, which you can read right here. Big props to Aes for bringing sketchy back this year with Skelethon, giving wack(y) haircuts on tour, sporting the hobo beard™. The steez is on lock.
Music of the Year:
I’ve clearly had a Gunplay problem this year:
Other than Gunplay mixtapes and my usual prog/post-rock fare (e.g., Radiohead, Mogwai, The Mars Volta, Eno, Baroness, Followed by Ghosts, God is an Astronaut, etc.), these are some releases I relished:
Erik Blood Touch Screens (Erik Blood): How much reference to previous work is the right amount? Thomas Kuhn called the dialectic between tradition and innovation the “essential tension,” and Erik Blood has found the perfect middle. To call Touch Screens unoriginal would be to admit you didn’t listen to it. Yes, 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.
“Most of [the shoegazers] couldn’t rock their way out of a paper bag,” once quoth Simon Reynolds. Not so with Erik Blood. There’s as much Loop here as there is Main, as much Anton Newcombe as there is Courtney Taylor-Taylor. I also hear some Can and Neu!, which Blood claims he likes but doesn’t consider an influence. “Though I guess everything one hears is an influence,” he concedes. I could listen to the last half of “Amputee” all damn day. “That’s the idea,” he told me. Blood broadcasts these soundtracks from some unplaceable future, some unknown space out of time.
With a pornography-related concept and a cover reminiscent of H. R. Giger’s painting for Dead Kennedys’Frankenchrist poster, Touch Screens is guaranteed to offend some. Don’t be scared, especially if you like your valentines bloody and your Warhols dandy.
JK Flesh Posthuman (3by3): To explicate the pedigree of Justin K. Broadrick would require a book-length exploration, but let’s try to nick the surface. He was a founding member of Napalm Death, invented and inverted genres in Godflesh, and happily drones in headphones in Jesu—not to mention stints in final, Head of David, Fall of Because, Ice, God, Techno Animal, Greymachine, and Pale Sketcher, among others. Now Broadrick revives his JK Flesh moniker to make some noise that doesn’t fit under any of his other active names. The sounds on Posthuman land between the lines and demonstrate that the disc deserves its own designation. Sure, there are echoes of past projects, especially Greymachine and Pale Sketcher, but this record has a soul of its own. A soul that deserves to be played very loud. These songs need to stretch out, to reach out, and to touch someone. “Idle Hands” sounds like some bastardized, end-of-the-world Hip-hop (apocalypse-hop?), the title track is the theme song to a spy movie with an all-android cast, and the other ones will satisfy your need for a soundtrack to entropy and the heat-death of the universe. No one knows what that would sound like better than Justin Broadrick.
Neurosis Honor Found in Decay (Neurot Recordings): Among the many burgeoning subgenres of post-metal, there is one band that is consistently named as a starting point: Neurosis has been bending and rending metal, punk, crust, sludge, drone, doom, ambient, folk, and other odd musical categories since 1985. Their latest, Honor Found in Decay (Neurot Recordings, 2012) more than illustrates both why they’re the godfathers of this sound and what exactly it is that all of their progeny are still trying to achieve.
On their tenth studio outing, the Oakland sextet gathers together pieces from their storied past to pull off a defining document of their sound. Honor Found in Decay is that rare record that serves the seasoned fan as well as the newbie. It continues their long and fruitful recording relationship with Steve Albini. The ten-plus-minute dirges are here (e.g., “At the Well,” “My Heart for Deliverance,” “Casting of the Ages”). The growling and wailing are in tact (e.g, “Bleeding the Pigs,” “Raise the Dawn”). The bulldozer grooves are as deep and wide as ever (e.g., “We All Rage in Gold,” “All is Found… In Time”). Like all of their releases since 1992’s Souls at Zero, this is nothing less than a monolithic affair.
Not that it doesn’t move them forward, but Honor Found in Decay feels like a summary of sorts—much like The Cure’s Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me and Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief were. And like those two bands, Neurosis has plenty to summarize: They’ve always pushed themselves in new directions and they’ve kept fans and critics guessing at every turn. Honor Found in Decay is just as complex and dynamic as the collective history that created it. It’s as lush as it is loud, as heavy as it is heady, and as mysterious as it is majestic. Your expectations will be immediately reached and quickly wrecked.
Other releases that stayed in the speakers and headphones include Deftones Koi No Yokan (Reprise), Baroness Yellow & Green (Relapse), The Mars Volta Noctourniquet (Warner Bros.), Sean PriceMic Tyson (Duck Down), and mixtapes by Waka Flocka Flame, Gucci Mane, Chief Keef, Alleyboy, and A$AP Rocky. Along with Gunplay (see above), Skweeky Watahfawls, Johnny Ciggs, Fan Ran and the whole Gritty City Fam are the finds of the year. Here they are with The Jam of the Year, “Hunnid Dolla Bills” [runtime: 5:23]:
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Video of the Year: Killer Mike “Big Beast” featuring Bun B, T.I., Trouble, & El-P: If this video doesn’t move you in some way, you’re probably dead. First of all, the pairing of Killer Mike on the mic and El-Producto on production is a match made somewhere south of Heaven: It’s dark, it’s evil, it’s raw, and it’s hard as fuck and the record they just did, R.A.P. Music, proves it many times over. Next, we have this straight bananas lead track “Big Beast,” including sick verses by Bun B. and T. I. that will remind you why they’re both Hip-hop legends, and a catchy chorus by Trouble. Then, we have this face-eating, car-chasing, enthusiastically violent video that has them all doing some ill shit (that’s El-P in the mask) directed by Thomas C. Bingham and produced by CFILM1 in partnership with Adult Swim. Like I said, check your pulse [runtime: 9:23].
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Movie of the Year: Looper.Rian Johnson is one of my favorite people on Twitter (his day-long stories about his beef with Jason Reitman are hysterical), and he’s finally made his Philip K. Dick movie. Time-travel is a trope I never tire of, and it’s used masterfully here, as in it stays out of the way of the story. Looper features stellar performances by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis, Emily Blunt, Paul Dano, and Jeff Daniels, but the real surprise was the young-but-amazing Pierce Gagnon. Watch out for that one.
Book of the Year: Nick Harkaway Angelmaker: A Novel (Knopf): Nick Harkaway’s second novel is a surrealist noir novel like no other. Angelmaker is heady and heavy, but Harkaway’s prose is giddy in its grasp. It’s a little bit steampunk, a little bit spy novel, a little bit mystery, and a whole lot of fun. As an added treat, I also got to interview him earlier this year, during which he told me of his writing, “…I suppose I have a tendency to use movie shapes — like the Classic Myth Structure George Lucas used for Star Wars — because they’re dramatic and recognisable and they keep you on track. Writing the kind of books I write, with lots going on, you need not to get lost. Structure helps. A story spine is vital. And so is knowing what the voice is, the tone. With those, you can go all over the map and come home safe, and you know it, and your reader gets that confidence in you and settles, so you can take liberties and amaze them. The less secure they are, the less likely they are to go with you when you do something unusual — and that unusual thing is often why you’re there, so that’s bad. They close the book. And once they do that, you have a hell of a time getting them to open it again.” Unlike several other books I read this year, that’s not a problem I had with Angelmaker.
Skateboard Video of the Year: Girl and Chocolate’s Pretty Sweet: You know nothing else came close.
Documentary of the Year: The Unbookables (Fascinator Films): The Unbookables are a loose band of comedians (emphasis on “loose”) handpicked by Doug Stanhope.This movie documents their 2008 tour of the middle of the country, from my own Austin, Texas through Kansas City, Missouri to Peoria, Illinois. The cast of characters (emphasis on “characters”) includes Brendon Walsh, Sean Rouse, Andy Andrist, Norman Wilkerson, Brett Erickson, Travis Lipski, James Inman, and Kristine Levine. The unfortunate star of the show is James Inman. If nothing else, this film documents how reckless behavior can bring people together as well as single one of them out.
The first gig is at Nasty’s in Austin, and one of my own University of Texas colleagues gets the narrative rolling by leaving drugs around for Inman to find, like an Easter Egg hunt with negative repercussions. I was at Nasty’s that night, and everyone killed. It was proof of both why these guys are The Unbookables and why they’re such revered comedians. Night two was a “chicken wire” show at Beerland during which chicken wire is draped in front of the stage and the crowd throws fruit at the comics while they attempt to tell jokes. True to its heritage, the show was a complete trainwreck with mostly just the comedians pelting each other with fruit. Few jokes were told as everyone just made fun of Inman.
Inman’s shady behavior continued through the gigs in his then-home Kansas City. He almost ditches the others as they get fired from the first show of the weekend there thanks to one of Travis Lipski’s tamest jokes. Tensions mount, Kristine Levine joins the crew, and the plot spirals out of control as our heroes reach Peoria. Luckily Brett Erickson is there to save the day.
There’s obviously a lot more to it than I’ve detailed above, but it’s not all worth mentioning. With that said, The Unbookables is a gruesome glimpse into the world of touring stand-up comedy, and it’s damn worth checking out. Props due to all involved — except Inman, of course.
Move of the Year: Austin to Chicago: Continuing the family trade, my girl Lily got into grad school at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, so we packed up and moved from the Tattooine of Austin to the Hoth of Chicago. Thanks to Zizi Papacharissi, I joined the adjunct faculty at The University of Illinois at Chicago. This will be the biggest, coldest city I’ve ever lived in, but we’re certainly enjoying it so far.
Many thanks to Chris Noble at Level Magazine, for which many of the reviews above were originally written throughout the year. Thanks to Tim Baker over at SYFFAL for turning me on to Gunplay and the Gritty City Fam. Mad thanks to Michael Schandorf, Adriane Stoner, and Zizi Papacharissi for making the transition to Chicago a smooth one. Onward.
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.
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Here’s the video for “Zero Dark Thirty” from Skelethon [runtime: 3:32]:
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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.
SW: There is no question that working a 12-step program of recovery saved my life. I’m a drunk junkie of the hopeless variety. There is no logical reason that you and I should be having this conversation. By all accounts, I should have died long ago. I tried to get sober a time or two by using self-will and I never got more than a handful of weeks under my belt. I just couldn’t do it, until I did the work outlined in the book. I’m not blessed with the capability to just turn off my need for oblivion. I was aware of this fact for a long time, I just thought it was my lot in life. When I started doing the program, I thought it was bullshit and wasn’t gonna work for me because, you know, I’m unique. But as I got into it, something happened. What that something is, I’m still not sure, nor do I care to know. I try not to think too deeply about the how’s or why’s. I just do what I’ve been taught and it keeps me clean, plain and simple.
My girlfriend doesn’t dig my Megadeth t-shirt. ‘You’re going to shave one side of your head? Holey Levi’s? Throw ’em away. Your hair’s too long. Your hair’s too short. Why does your hair look like a rainbow?’ Everyone feels the heat from friends, family, and whoever else about independent style, yet I can’t help feeling that sometimes envy is covered up with uncool remarks. Hey. let’s be straight about this, it’s your life, your feelings, and your own personal way of expressing yourself and showing the true you (p. 81).
![Mike Daily [photo by Jared Souney]](http://roychristopher.com/wp-content/uploads/mike-daily-freestyle.jpg)
JK Flesh Posthuman (3by3): To explicate the pedigree of Justin K. Broadrick would require 
Neurosis Honor Found in Decay (Neurot Recordings): Among the many burgeoning subgenres of post-metal, there is one band that is consistently named as a starting point: Neurosis has been bending and rending metal, punk, crust, sludge, drone, doom, ambient, folk, and other odd musical categories since 1985. Their latest, Honor Found in Decay (Neurot Recordings, 2012) more than illustrates both why they’re the godfathers of this sound and what exactly it is that all of their progeny are still trying to achieve.
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.