WHY DO YOU DO IT? WHAT DRIVES YOU?
I don’t know what I am. That’s why I do this … read, write, scrape my insides like the underside of a saucepan. No explanation, just a need, a clatter behind the ribs. Maybe that’s the answer: the need is the answer. There’s no higher thing. It’s not about meaning. Not about clarity or identity or clean little truths. It’s a long blur of static … wanting something without knowing what. Writing is the act of looking into the distortion and not blinking, the scratch that won’t settle, night sweat and the sour smell of bodies after a bad dream, ghosts thinking they’re real. Maybe I’m just one more. Maybe I don’t even qualify. But I keep doing it. I write. That’s all. That’s the whole thing. What drives me? People said I couldn’t. I didn’t argue. I just kept going. It’s entertaining to entertain people.
WHAT IS ONE THING YOU DO FOR SANITY MAINTENANCE?
Delay by creating sideways. Nosebleed into other art forms. Score the destruction in Mattress Grave hymns. These are my music projects … part data corruption, part psychic purging. Music built from failed sleep, junk electronics, industrial hiss, dream-rot and memory static. Mattress Grave is a bad signal, where I go when I’ve given up on comfort.
WHAT IS THE SCRAPPIEST THING YOU’VE DONE TO MAKE OR SAVE $$?
Mopped and unclogged a thousand piss-wet floors, held limbs in road trauma wards, sold drugs that didn’t exist, pure placebo, pure profit, baked Black Forrest cakes on nightshift, rode ferries to nowhere to scrub holiday homes that reeked of sunscreen, domestic violence, seasickness and divorce, washed cars in the sun while my fair skin peeled. Did every menial thing they offered and begged for a coin and a curse.
YOUR TASK IS TO PRESCRIBE ONE BOOK OR FILM TO THE COLLECTIVE. WHAT IS IT?
HIGH AND LOW by Akira Kurosawa. 1963. Watch it and feel the structural design of power shift under your feet, no one gets out clean, it slices the world into two, the hilltop mansions, the gutter steam … makes you sit in the split. It’s a crime film, a moral autopsy, a corporate parable that melts into noir illness. There’s a remake on the way, but the trailer looks like the whole things been driven through a Netflix content blender, warmed-over prestige pulp and puke, all gloss, no grit, full of piss. The original is a slow-burning fuse to something real and dark … that’s fun yeah?
Current obsession?
PARASOCIALITE by Brittany Menjivar. I’m only halfway through this but the book is a twitching portal, some glitched cherub who is shot through with chrome and cumulus, entry costs are your third memory of love … this is where I am at. I’m also, in a constant obsession with Dream Boy Book Club … the publisher - have been for years. Every book is like some haunted VHS of Lohan and Spears, sleep paralysis stuffed with glitter glue. It’s not literature, it’s pop leakage, brain-matter zines stitched with bubble-gum, books eating sugar until they shriek. I couldn’t really ask for more. If I was going to construct the perfect press in my head, it would be Dream Boy Book Club. If I was going to construct my idea of a complete writer, it would be Menjivar, a complete writer is defined not merely by their output, but by the totality of their presence: the clothes they inhabit, the music they absorb, the architecture of their social media feed, the integrity of their published work, the ambition of their forthcoming projects, and the cultivated detachment inherited from the cool, indifferent figures who came before them. That’s how I see it.
MOST USEFUL FAILURE?
Letting the wrong thing live too long, whispering job titles, suicide and safe plans. Now I know how to starve what wants me quiet.
In regard to writing: half shits, half giggles … all reckless.
WHAT ARE YOU CURRENTLY WORKING ON?
I’m working in a non-fiction space about Manahatta … the 1921 film as flicker-script, as broken timecode, writing it in total subjectivity, film grain under the eyelids. It’s not history … celluloid as séance, tracking what’s already vanished. Writing it for Index Press and their Dromer Book Series – it’s a Grant Maierhofer construction. I feel bad as I jumped right into it and now I’m in the place where I’m not sure how to end it. Maybe the end is not knowing how to end it.
DISCIPLINE OR ANARCHY?
Strict discipline to get the work done, routine and focus, but beneath that order, chaos, wildfire as the end result, a belfie hell.
