A fun thing to say in almost any situation:
“Fuck shit! Fuck shit ass!”
Hi, I’m Deniz!
- An Anecdote
3/28/09 - - - A Picture Of The Expression On A Bakery Employee’s Face As She Watches A Woman Who Has Been Tied Up Get A Cock Shoved Down Her Throat
3/25/09 - - - My review of the new P.O.S. album, pre-editing:
3/24/09 - - - Bukowski explains why his writing is like his writing, all covert:
3/21/09 - - - Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens debate which one of the big three “new atheists” is a bigger douchebag: opening statements
3/19/09 - -
- Incidents
5/30/09 - - - Best Death Metal Song Title From The Netherlands:
5/24/09 - - - An Observation
4/29/09 - - - What is a novel?
4/6/09 - - - On Reading
4/5/09 - -
Deniz’s Kickass Spicy Mac’n'Cheese
A Recipe For Those Who Cook Shitty Food Out Of Boxes But Still Want To Feel Like They’re Making Real Food
Instructions:
Make a boxed mac’n'cheese dinner of your choice (I prefer Kraft’s 3-cheese shells).
Cook the noodles like normal, but when the time comes to add the sauce mix, milk, butter, and whatever, also mix in:
1 small dollop of Mrs. Renfro’s habañero salsa (you can substitute for the super-spicy salsa of your choice, but Mrs. Renfro’s is the fucking best and you should have it in your home if you like spicy food (and if you don’t like spicy food get the fuck out, leave, now), her green jalapeño salsa is the best thing you will ever dip a chip in, so spicy but also so flavorful!)
2-3 little splurches of Tabasco (again, you could use a substitute, but again, Tabasco is the best)
1 nice drizzle of Cholula (ditto) (if you’re not familiar with Cholula, it’s a delightful little mild-but-flavorful hot sauce)
1 handful of grated pepperjack
1 healthy shake of garlic powder
1 whole bunch of curry powder
1 copious amount of grated black pepper
1 light dusting of another spice of your choosing (I like Penzey’s 4S!)
(these amounts are calibrated to one regular-sized box. If you use more boxes or a large box, multiply the quantities appropriately)
User Testimonials:
“Dude, this fucking mac’n'cheese, holy shit, this is the best fucking mac’n'cheese I’ve ever had. You just eat one little spoonful of it and then sit there while waves of aftertaste roll over your tongue. There are like five layers of aftertastes here. This fucking rules.”
-Deniz
“Wow, I really liked that, and I don’t usually like mac’n'cheese at all!”
-Deniz’s girlfriend
“Um, it’s pretty okay I guess.”
-Deniz’s roommate
Episode 3: Mr. Denton on Doomsday
[this post is part 3 of a 156-part series, "The Twilight Zone"]
Synopsis:
This episode begins in the American west, the old-time west of the Western. We meet the town drunk, Al Denton, a man who has no money and must live on the charity of the men of the town, who will buy him drinks if he amuses them with a song.
Denton used to be a champion gunman, but some traumatic event in his past shifted him from that path to the one he follows now. He does not sing very well, but sexy ladies feel bad for him anyway.
One day, Denton finds a gun in the dirt, and, drunk out of his mind, he picks it up and begins to carry it with him. One of his tormentors, a tall thin man in black with thick lips around a mouth that slices his face open from cheek to cheek, ragged strands of hair stylishly swaying down below the brim of his hat, notices the gun and instead of soliciting a song from Denton, he jokingly challenges him to a duel.
The man in black poses with a hand against the saloon, his face amused and coyly expectant, welcoming the phallosymbolic bullet it knows is coming its way.
Denton makes wild drunken gestures with his gun-hand while explaining to the man that he doesn’t want any trouble, and then Denton’s gun goes off, shooting the gun right out of the man’s hand.
The men of the town rush Denton into the bar to celebrate his victory, and the man in black rushes in behind them, legs and back bent with anger and face wild, demanding a rematch. Again, Denton gesticulates and accidentally fires, this time shooting the chandelier from the ceiling, and it falls into the man in black, knocking his gun out of his hand and him to the floor. This whole time there has been a man standing at the door of the bar watching, and at this he smiles all knowing and satisfied and walks away.
Scruffy, drunken Denton declares that he thinks he will have a shave, because he is a badass.
The man in black stands up indignant, and gets all in Denton’s face, but Denton just slaps him full across his thick smooth cock-hungry lips. At this, the sexy lady who has been sympathetic to Denton from the first pulls off her strapless dress and stands before him naked but for her high-heeled shoes, her hair sculpted and face made up and ears dangling masses of glittering metal, and she fucks him right there on the floor in front of everybody while they watch silent, hands down their pants and their faces contorted into twisted hungry sad shapes.
In his postcoital confession to the sexy lady, it is revealed that Denton used to be the fastest gun in town, and he was constantly forced to duel every fast and fancy man who owned a gun. What drove him to drink was when he killed a 16-year-old in a duel, leaving the kid there in the dirt on his face bleeding to death with Denton’s bullet in him. And now he knows that the stream of challenges will begin again, only this time he’ll be the one shot to death, because he’s not up on his skills.
As the barber begins to give him that shave, we can see a reflection in the window of the barber shop: that same man who watched the duel earlier is watching the shave now, smiling the same haunting smile. And the screen fades to black.
With his face smooth and his hair combed, Denton is quite pretty.
Two men walk into his house and one of them says, “Tall man. Doesn’t usually wear his gun. Blond hair.” A reverent description of the revitalized Al Denton. And then he describes an opponent who has challenged Denton to a duel. Denton replies, “Tell Mr. Grand I’ll be there tomorrow night. I’ll wait for his pleasure.”
Denton tries to practice his gunwork but his hands are all shaky and he can’t hit anything. It really was just drunken luck the night before.
And then that night, there’s the fucking guy who keeps watching Denton, a rather fanciful-looking man in a black frock coat, staring up at Denton’s window, smiling his creepy smile. Denton runs down and confronts the man: “What are you doing, you creepy pervert, just standing there leaning on your cart with your hip jutting and that smile on your face like you’re looking at my body under my clothes and you like what you see?” The man informs Denton that he is a traveling salesman and he understands Denton’s predicament, that he has a potion, an elixir, a male enhancement formula which will fix Denton’s inability to perform. It only lasts ten seconds, but if you time it right that’s all you need. The man insists that Denton try the potion out now, so that he knows how to use it later: “Let’s test the merchandise.” And Denton drinks it down.
Indeed, ten seconds was all he needed.
In return for his service, the man gives Denton another potion for his engagement the following evening, for no charge.
The next night, at the bar: in walks a young blond vision of adonis, smile radiating from the shining-white teeth in his creaseless face. This is the man Denton must grapple with in the grueling embrace of intimate man-to-man conflict. Denton knows he can win. If he drinks the potion down at just the right time, ten seconds will be all it takes. But the other man, this smooth white figure, this unmarred tribute to human beauty, he has the same potion! They both drink it at the same time, then stand there staring at each other’s bodies, concentrating, concentrating, until at once, at precisely the same time, they shoot their pieces from each other’s hands and stand there breathing heavy, spent.
The two champions, mutually victorious, come together for one final moment, their faces close, and decide that their time together has blessed them both, and that man who gave them their enhancement potions, he smiles knowingly at them with lecherous eyes, having had the best vicarious orgasm of his life through their performance, and then he trots away on his horsecart full of viagra to the next town, and the next pair of men he can trick into fucking in front of him for his pleasure.
The end.
Some Notes On The Relation Of Comics To Literature
A Hurried and Last-Minute but Hopefully Coherent, Readable, and Informative—but I’ll Settle for just Tolerable—Dispatch from a Guy who reads both Books With Pictures, and Books Without
[in november '08, in the corporeal paper-bound wake, ali jaafar and i published an article about the literariness of comics, which we were both very excited about. we thought it would be awesome to make the thing itself into a comic, but though the idea was cool, it came out somewhat illegible. this is the original document which i sent to ali some 70 minutes after we decided we wanted to co-write a thing about comics and literature, already after the deadline for that issue of the wake. it is something of a reissue of that printed article, something of an artifact of the wake's production process, something of an attempt to make my ideas about comics available in a legible form, and it's also my selfish little way of showing to those who could read that tiny handwriting which ideas were mine and which were ali's.]
Are comics literature? I would say no, because to me the word “literature” implies text, and the thing that makes comics such an amazing medium for art is their use of images not as supplementary but as integral. I’m not saying it can’t be convincingly argued that comics should fall under the moniker of literature, just that I prefer the idea of comics as a separate art form from literature, though I do believe that comics are just as legitimate as a medium. That is I think the central point of my position: comics are separate from literature, a different thing than literature, but not a lesser thing.
One of the primary reasons why I think this split is important is because of the versatility of the comics form. Just as not all prose is literature, not all comics are literary. In fact, comics, though somewhat underexploited in this area, are perfectly suited for the quick and effective conveyance of information, as shown by Larry Gonick’s “Cartoon Guide to…” series, covering physics, chemistry, statistics, sex, etc. The ability of comics to provide non-narrative non-fictional non-literary information borders on a universality that is impossible in text, as evidenced by the preference towards comics above prose in documents such as airline safety manuals (those little illustrations of how to assume crash position and attach your oxygen mask fit perfectly into Scott McCloud’s definition of comics in the essential Understanding Comics).
In the most straightforward sort of narratives, where the artist is unconcerned with exploiting the peculiar potential of the form and is instead attempting to use it only as a medium for the story, comics and prose literature do approximately the same thing, and comics even have a bit of a leg up. In a comic panel there is potential for incredibly detailed description of the sort that would take pages and pages of text, and not only that but the description is absorbed instantaneously and without the possibility of misinterpretation which is always present in prose description (if the drawing is good, of course). Though prose literature has produced much greater works than comics, this is not because of the respective potential of the forms. One reason is that the stigma associated with comics as a “low” artistic form (more on this in a second) has kept serious artists intent on creating serious work away from the medium. This problem is thankfully going away. Another reason is that comics are very time-consuming to make, as it takes exponentially more time to draw than to type, and for that reason are also very hard to revise, and as any writer knows, revision, often thorough and extensive revision, often complete rewriting of a finished piece, is necessary to produce work of the highest aesthetic and structural quality. This is a problem not so easily overcome. However, it is not insurmountable, it just requires an incredible dedication and work ethic in the artist, a belief that bettering your work is worth the frustration that will be created by throwing out what you’ve spent hours drawing in the process of re-working a story.
An interjectory and rude rejection of anti-comics prejudice:
If the only music you had heard was Katy Perry’s “I Kissed A Girl,” your ignorance would not justify your saying that music is an illegitimate art form. If the only movie you had seen was Death Race, your ignorance would not justify your saying that film is not a serious medium. If the only book you had read was The Da Vinci Code, your ignorance would not justify your saying that prose literature has no capacity for transcendent aesthetic value. Likewise, just because the only comics you know of are pulp superhero stories doesn’t make you anything but stupid for denying the potential of comics as a medium. Comics can tell almost any story, and can convey almost any information. In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud uses the metaphor of art forms as pitchers of liquid. The pitcher is the form and the liquid is the content. To drink from a pitcher, not like the taste, and then blame the pitcher instead of the liquid is just plain dumb.
Returning to the line of argument before the interjection: though comics and literature are similar when used as simply as possible to convey information, the two become wildly different when the aim of the artist is to, in some degree, experiment with the form. Since almost all writing and almost all comics exploit their particular form in some way or another, the sort of purely narrative use of form described above doesn’t actually exist in anything but theory. Therefore, I am not arguing above that comics are a superior form to literature, just making a theoretical point about their relationship to each other, and their comparative potential.
Though comics are effective as a conveyor of information, I think they get really interesting when artists make use of the peculiarity of the comics form. The seamless blending of images and text is capable of doing things that are unimaginable in any other art form. This is both why I don’t think comics should be considered literature and why I do think comics are very important as an artistic medium: comics are not prose literature, comics are not movies (despite the historical link between comics and animation), comics are not the same sort of visual art as painting or sculpture. Comics, though they draw from both prose and painting, are a form of their own, with unique potential to do things that no other medium can (the key to this is spatial juxtaposition of imagery; for a good example of what I mean, read Rebecca Dart’s “Rabbithead”). It is for this reason that the stigma on comics must be lifted, and why comics should be regarded with serious interest by those who care about art. It is also for this reason that I reject that argument that comics should be regarded as another form of literature: this degrades comics and denies them their amazing uniqueness and unique power.
Recommended reading:
Fiction (ranked in order of straightforwardness and ease of comprehension to those without pre-existing familiarity with the comic form, easiest first):
Shortcomings by Adrian Tomine
Black Hole by Charles Burns
Watchmen by Alan Moore
Cages by Dave McKean
Jimmy Corrigan by Chris Ware
Dogs and Water by Anders Nilsen
Literary Memoir (ranked in order of mass appeal, most mass-appealing first):
Maus by Art Spiegelman
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
Blankets by Craig Thompson
Fun Home by Allison Bechdel
Non-Fiction/Informational (not ranked at all):
Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud
The Cartoon History of the Universe by Larry Gonick
A Treasury of Victorian Murder by Rick Geary
Anthologies (also not ranked):
Best American Comics
MOME
[and i'd like to add The Bottomless Belly Button by Dash Shaw to the list of fiction, somewhere towards the bottom. it didn't make the original article, because i had not yet read it.]
Self-Deception
In 1979 Gur & Sackheim developed a questionnaire to test how much people lie to themselves. The questions follow (in their study they asked participants to rank their responses on a scale of one to seven, which is bullshit because the questions are phrased yes or no, and deal with words like “ever” which it is impossible to respond to with gradients).
1. Have you ever felt hatred toward either of your parents?
2. Do you ever feel guilty?
3. Does every attractive person of the opposite sex turn you on?
4. Have you ever felt like you wanted to kill somebody?
5. Do you ever get angry?
6. Do you ever have thoughts that you don’t want other people to know that you have?
7. Do you ever feel attracted to people of the same sex?
8. Have you ever made a fool of yourself?
9. Are there things in your life that make you feel unhappy?
10. Is it important to you that other people think highly of you?
11. Would you like to know what other people think of you?
12. Were your parents ever mean to you?
13. Do you have any bad memories?
14. Have you ever thought that your parents hated you?
15. Do you have sexual fantasies?
16. Have you ever been uncertain as to whether or not you are homosexual?
17. Have you ever doubted your sexual adequacy?
18. Have you ever enjoyed your bowel movements?
19. Have you ever wanted to rape or be raped by someone?
20. Have you ever thought of committing suicide in order to get back at someone?
The idea behind the questionnaire is that the more of these questions you say no to, the more you’re lying to yourself. This seems problematic to me for a bunch of reasons. One problem is that the test assumes that the respondents are being honest in their answers, which is not necessarily going to be the case considering the subject matter. Many of these questions, especially when asked in a face-to-face interview, would provoke negative responses from people who are just embarrassed to say certain thoughts they’ve had out loud. Another is that the test assumes all 20 items to be universal experiences, which I don’t know how you could prove. Some questions are worded problematically as well (in particular #3 and #12). Still, it’s interesting to think about. I give a hearty fuck yeah to pretty much all of the questions, but there are a few which I’m not so enthusiastic about, and the nature of the test forces you to confront certain things about yourself if you examine your responses to it in light of its aims.
I’ve heard that studies show that people who lie to themselves a lot are happier and more successful than people who are honest with themselves, people who “see things as they really are,” so to speak. But I find the claim that any of the relevant factors can be examined objectively to be extremely dubious. If anybody has any information about those studies and their methods, let me know.
Antony and the Johnsons – The Crying Light
I am not qualified to review this album. This becomes clear almost immediately as I begin listening to it. It simply is not made for me. I know how to listen to death metal, I know how to listen to rock and roll, I know how to listen to hip-hop and I know how to listen to post-rock, but while I listen to Antony and the Johnsons it makes me tense how vocal-centric the whole thing is. I think, “Where is the drumbeat? When are the instrumentals going to do something interesting? Where is the rhythm?” Which if that kind of stuff makes you uncomfortable while listening to this record, clearly you don’t know how to listen to this kind of music. Because it’s all about Antony’s voice.
Which brings me to the next reason why I probably shouldn’t be reviewing this: I fucking hate Antony’s voice. I hate the tone and tenor of it, I hate its smoothness and how he always sounds a little too low, how his voice is always arcing down even when ascending a scale. And I really really fucking hate how he over-vibratoes everything. I’ve hated his voice since the first time I heard it on a Current 93 album (which to be honest, the only Current 93 song I like is the one by Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy).
And not only that, but I hate his lyrics, how everything is kissing everything else while inanimate objects cry.
To a certain extent, I buy into the idea that good art stems from an understanding of the listener’s expectations. What a good artist does is satisfy or defy those expectations, generally a bit of both, and to do either he must understand them. Being a good critic, then, requires understanding of those expectations as well, because otherwise you can’t tell if the artist has done a good job, you can’t even really tell what he’s doing at all. And that’s the position I’m in: the bitching above is not informed criticism of a sub-par work of art, it’s a manifestation of the uncomfortability and frustration brought on by my engagement with an object of art that is outside the realm of my knowledge.
But people who get this sort of music seem to be going pretty nuts about this album, so if you’re into mellow and somber melodic vocalizings, maybe give it a spin. Me, I’ll stick to music that’s about guitar and beats.
Homovore (2000)
[this post is part 2 of a 6-part series called "A Critical Investigation of Cattle Decapitation’s Six Full-Length Albums"]
Label: Three-One-G
Runtime: 21:39
Tracks: 16
The sound:
This album sounds pretty much like the last one, just better-produced. Though the guitar tone is the same, you can hear it much clearer, and the same goes for the drums and vocals. The low-end vocals are a little higher in the mix this time, and you can hear pretty much every bump in Travis Ryan’s throat. I liked it better when everything was muddy, because when you can hear everything clearly it stands out a lot more how sloppy they play. The drummer especially. I don’t know who was drumming for Cattle Decap on this record, but if he ever asks you to join your band, don’t let him. The first track on this record is a goddamn epic at three minutes and twenty-eight seconds, and there are three other tracks over two minutes on the album, all four of which resort to extended periods of chugging with varying degrees of lack of success. The few decent moments on this album are the straightforward grind/thrash parts, but they keep attempting grooves and nonstandard chord progressions and failing horribly. You can tell that they were trying to break out of grind formulas with this record, but it’s not working for them; this is probably the worst grind album I’ve ever heard.
The rhetoric:
Lyrical themes involve humans being eaten, sometimes by animals and sometimes by other humans, general pointless human carnage, disgusting fantasies of deformed freaks, and the gross-just-to-be-gross. The humans being eaten songs are pretty clearly attempts to provide a vegan shock to listeners dedicated enough to read the lyric sheets and think about them by recontextualizing the things we’re all desensitized to from PETA ads, making them shocking again by applying them to humans. The rest is just a manifestation of Cattle Decapitation’s allegiance to gore. There is a song that starts with a sample that says, “To know death, you have to fuck life in the gall bladder.” There’s a song about shitting into a tube going into your mouth.
John Steinbeck is in agreement with this band on considering mechanized farming to be the brutal rape of nature.
There is a song about interbreeding between cattle and men:
“Brand new strain of tender meat
Half bovine
Half man
All beef”
Song titles of note:
“Open Human Head Experiments With Bleach Lacquer And Epoxy”
“Colostomy Jigsaw Puzzle”
“The Roadside Dead (Detrunked Stumpification Through Roadrash)”
“Bathing In A Grease Disposal Unit”
Lyrics of note:
“An excursion in science
Becomes a bloodbath hosted by nature
…
Blunt force facial restructurization”
from “Mauled”
“Bumbling retard with scab for a head”
from “Open Human Head Experiments…”
Two full songs, because they’re pretty great:
“Joined At The Ass”
“Freak of unthinkable proportions
Perfect candidate for abortion
Future double-suicide from shotgun blast
Rectally twins-and joined at the ass
Some things deserve to die
Severed siblings with a surgical knife
Buildup of waste at articulation
Installed colostomy for shit irrigation
Purchased for science and mutant research
Human guinea pig
Waste not, want not
How can there be a god
That brings atrocities to its creation
Born into hell-mandatory torment
Biologically malformed, existance is futile
We bring disease
And physiological agony
Nobody ever said that life was easy”
“Wine Of The Sanguine”
“This is my body
Pourous, flagella-like due to decomp.
This is my blood
Fermented well-aged sanguine
Putrid cocktail
Decayed red blood cells now reliquefy
Human pruno of dead blood
Absinthe of rotted plasma
Drunk of the fluids that once flowed
Hallucinations due to prolonged fermentation
Menstrual sauvignon ”
And what is basically the Cattle Decap Manifesto:
“It’s all around you
In the air you breathe
In the food you eat
In the bed you sleep
In the rotting meat
Ever looming presence of rot and disease
…
Fuck this world we live in
And fuck its ugly inhabitants
Long live the stench”
from “Human Jerky and the Active Cultures”
Episode 2: One For The Angels
[this post is part 2 of a 156-part series, "The Twilight Zone"]
The metaphysics of death:
It turns out death is a man, and he either has no name or his name is “Mr. Death,” it is not clear. He wears a suit, his hair is slicked back, and he carries a little book around with him which though it is the size of a small notepad contains pretty much all the information about everybody. He can teleport around a room all creepy so that during a conversation whenever you turn your back on him when you turn around he’s sitting somewhere else. He refers to death as “departure.” Only people who are gonna die soon can see him. He forewarns people who are going to die of natural causes, but he can’t warn people who are going to die violently or in accidents. If he touches a flower, it dies right there on the spot.
If you want to bargain with death, you totally can. It turns out there is a set of three rules written in lawyer-speak which you can capitalize on to live a little longer:
1. Hardship cases: your family or friends would suffer greatly because of your death.
2. Priority cases: you are a statesman, a scientist, or someone else on the verge of a great discovery.
3. You have unfinished business of a major nature.
Death gets flustered when you pout. Apparently he has a quota to fill because if you manage to trick him out of killing you, he just kills a little girl instead and then stands there staring at her corpse writing notes in his book like it’s no big deal. Do not fuck with him.
Death’s emotions are manipulable, and if you are very persuasive you can hold his attention so long that he misses his appointments, sitting there staring up at you, mouth squirming into different shapes, face sweating so much it makes his hair droop down into his eyes as he buys luxury clothing products in fits of orgasmic spending, tied to this miracle-salesman by the sound of his enthusiastic voice and his tales of incredible materials for ridiculous values.
The moral of the story:
Death is cooler in The Sandman, even though everything else Neil Gaiman has written reads like shitty fanfic.
P.S. OH SHIT THERE REALLY IS A HEAVEN OH SHIT OH FUCK
Obscura – Cosmogenesis
How to know exactly what this album sounds like without listening to any of it:
Band named after a Gorguts album.
Fancy-sounding science-word album title.
Song titles all about outer-space stuff.
Fretless bass.
Ex-members of Necrophagist.
Boom. Reviewed.
I got all excited about that last little bit of information, but really all it means is that there is flawless shredding on this record. The stuff that makes Necrophagist such a standout, their neo-classical melodicism and listenably technical songwriting, that’s all Muhammed Suiçmez.
Speaking of which, when is that band’s new album coming out? I bet it’ll be better than this one. Not that Obscura is bad, they’re undeniably solid. Just they’re about the least progressive “prog-death” band I’ve ever heard. Nothing will surprise you here if you’ve ever heard Gorguts or Death or Cynic.
So I guess if you’re nuts about prog-death, you should probably listen to this record. But I doubt that applies to many of you reading this.
Check this out: I just brought up a band you’ve probably never heard of, just to let you know that it’s mediocre. What a delightful service I’ve done for you.
An Interview With Warren Oakes of Against Me!
[an interview i did with the drummer of against me! was published in a february '08 issue of the wake. because the internet is really cool and you can write long things without having to worry about paper and space, here's an uncut transcript of that interview.]
Transcript of my 1/31/08 (approximately 4:30 PM) phone conversation with Warren Oaks, drummer of Against Me!
He is a very nice dude with a very nice beard and was very nice to me.
Warren: Hello?
Deniz: Hey, I’m glad I caught you.
W: Yeah, I’m actually in the middle of bowling right now, how’s it going?
D: It’s going good, how much time do I have to talk to you?
W: Whatever you need, I’ve got time to chat between bowls if you don’t mind.
D: Yeah, no problem. I’d like to start by saying that your beard is like a beacon of inspiration for me and always has been.
W: Well thank you very much.
D: This is going to sound like a generic, filler-type question but I’m actually really interested: What records are you into right now, like what are you listening to?
W: Uh, let’s see. Right now I’m on a bit of an instrumental music kick, so I’ve been going back into the vaults and listening to a lot of Do Make Say Think, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Tristeza, Six Parts Seven. Those four have been on pretty heavy rotation. I’m also into some Minneapolis bands, actually, like Plastic Constellations. And Awesome Snakes, of course.
D: I really like the artwork Steak Mtn’s been doing for you.
W: I just got a nine, by the way.
D: Congratulations.
W: Thank you, thank you. I’m gonna try to pick up a spare here real quick.
[conspicuous absence of pin-falling noise]
W: I didn’t get it.
D: You guys go back a little with Steak Mtn, right?
W: Yeah, he’s originally from Florida, the Tampa area, and I grew up in Sarasota so I’ve actually known the dude for quite some time. As a band we’ve been working with him since he designed a cover for a 7-inch we put out on No Idea.
D: I actually found out about Against Me! and combatwoundedveteran at the same time.
W: We coexisted for a little while but we never shared a stage with them or anything.
D: I found out about both of you guys way back from the No Idea website.
W: I remember seeing them play a house show with a bunch of local grind bands, and it took them longer to set up than to play their set. Which I thought was kinda awesome.
D: That sounds just like them. So you guys are touring pretty much all the time, right?
W: Yeah, last year we played nearly 200 shows, and with travel days and days off on tour it ended up being about 250 days away from home, and we were mixing our record some of that time. The actual time at home totally off was minimal, a lot of the time at home we’re practicing, or writing, or rehearsing, working on transitions between songs and stuff like that. It’s definitely a full-time job.
D: What’s that like on your life, do you just not exist outside the band?
W: It’s made me realize who I’m really close with. Any peripheral relationships don’t last, people who you’re really tight with are the only ones left standing. They’re very patient people, thankfully, and they appreciate what they can get from us, which is nice enough.
D: What’s it like being on Sire?
W: It’s been really great so far, actually. They’ve been very supportive, and they’ve been good to their word. They pretty much let us do our thing and support us in that. They haven’t really tried to intervene or steer the band in any way, they’ve just gotten behind us. We say we want to do this tour with these bands and they say alright cool do it, and we say we want to put out this 7-inch with these songs on it and they say alright fine. We’re still functioning the way that we’ve always functioned as a band, and they are just funding it, pretty much.
D: On the We’re Never Going Home DVD you seem to be lampooning major labels and their scouts. What changed between then and your deal with Sire?
W: The courtship process, the way that all those labels were coming at us, was totally ridiculous, and I didn’t say anything at that time that I would take back, or that I regret. It just came to the point where we felt like they were the label that we wanted to distribute our music, and we really believed they were the best choice for us, and to not do it because we were afraid of what people might think or because we were worried about some backlash that might come or because we wanted to cater to people… I think what it really came down to was that we didn’t want to spend our lives haunted by what-ifs, and we didn’t want to take anybody’s word for it. We’re one of the last bands, probably, to have gotten a major label record deal of the old school. Now every single label’s trying to find bands and get a piece of the touring revenues, get a piece of everything that they do as a band, and we were one of the last bands to just get a record deal. We felt that the timing was right, and that it was the only chance we’d really have to have this experience, so we just decided to go for it. It’s our only life so we figured take the experience while we still have the chance.
D: How was working with Butch Vig, was it different from other producers you’ve worked with?
W: He was great. We definitely let him get more involved than we ever let the producer get before. We actually spent some time with him during pre-production, which we’ve never done, just playing the songs and sharing a practice space with him. I was playing with a click track and trying all different speeds to play the songs at, to find what the ideal paces for different parts were, and working out all the transitions so we could make sure everything was smooth. He was involved in the whole process, which we’ve never done before, and it was rad. We definitely became friends in the process and it was a really fun, educational experience.
D: On the old Against Me! Records a lot of the songs have really catchy, prominent drumbeats, like I recognize songs like “I Still Love You Julie” and “We Laugh At Danger (And Break All The Rules)” by the drumbeats, but I don’t hear that as much on the new record. It seems like the drums are a lot less prominent in the songwriting. What’s your involvement in the songwriting process?
W: It was definitely a different approach with this record. The record was written while we were on tour, so there weren’t any songs that came from just jamming or fucking around. Tom wrote all the songs and gave them to us all written and arranged. The progressions and the lyrics were all written out. All of us added our own contributions, but on previous records it was a different approach. We had time off to work on the songs together. For sure there’s always been songs that Tom wrote from start to finish, but for this album he wrote all the songs, and we figured them out while we were moving, practicing at sound check.
D: I see you getting a lot of acclaim for your new record, but always in places like Spin and Rolling Stone, showing up on year-end lists with Jay-Z and Radiohead and Kanye West and the like, and I don’t see you showing up in less mainstream journals anymore, but the places like Spin are always calling your album the “punk” album of the year. That seems bizarre to me because as far as I can tell you’ve tried your best to distance yourself musically and lyrically from that scene and succeeded, but now the pop press that’s covering you won’t let go of the idea of you as a punk band. How do you feel about the press you’re getting and how it’s different from the press you used to get?
W: I think it’s kinda interesting, I wonder actually how any of the old records would’ve been received if we had been on the radar of these magazines. I feel like they weren’t even aware of our existence before, so to them we’re kinda coming out of nowhere, and I think compared to most of the bands on their radar we definitely are really rough around the edges and we definitely aren’t as slick and polished as a lot of the bands that they’re hearing. It’s an interesting phenomenon. I’ll be doing an interview and they’ll say, “So you guys are a new band, huh?” and it’s like, “Well, I’ve been in this band for seven years.”
D: “You know, we’re on our fourth album…”
W: Yeah. For a lot of people we’re totally coming out of nowhere. It’s interesting to talk to people who say, “I think you really sound like Nirvana!” or “This is the punkest thing I’ve heard all year!” and you just have to wonder what their context is, what other bands they’re listening to.
D: One of my friends brought home a copy of Spin magazine and I was flipping through the album of the year list and it was everything I expected to see right up to the #1, and then it’s you guys with a full-page spread, capping a list with nothing that sounds even remotely like you. It was just bizarre.
W: Yeah, that was kinda bizarre for me too. It’s definitely flattering, because it’s not just one person’s opinion but a lot of people at the magazine who are listening to a lot of different things and really engaged in music and really considering everything that came out. A lot of people would write it off but I take it as a compliment, for sure.
D: I want to talk about your new album, New Wave, and a lot of my questions have to do with the lyrics, which might be unfair to ask you about considering that you didn’t write them but I figure you can at least give it a shot, right?
W: Yeah, I might not be able to field them that accurately, but you can try.
D: I’m saying this in the spirit of the song “Piss and Vinegar,” in particular the line “just say what you’re really thinking.” That song, which as far as I an tell makes fun of bullshit pop bands, has a line about publicity photos, and in the Spin spread there’s a full-page photo of you guys all hanging out in the woods or something, and it seems pretty ridiculous. Or like a lot of your lyrics now are about the silliness and stupidity of the music industry but then you’ve got Butch Vig dance remixes, which seems contradictory as well.
W: There’s certain things that we can control and certain things that we can’t. We’re pretty conscious of our own aesthetic, and we don’t want to be presented in a way that we think is cheesy. You don’t want somebody to make you look like a chump, and so we try to assert as much control as possible over what kind of photo shoots we do and how they come out, and have as much approval over as much of that as possible, but in the end, you take pictures with somebody for a couple hours and they’re gonna take the picture they want. There’s been dozens and dozens of times where we’ve been in a situation where we’ve been told, like, “Stand against this brick wall and you look over there and you pretend like you’re looking over there” and we’re just like, “No, we’re not doing this.” We’ve pulled the plug on tons and tons of situations like that where we could just feel that we were gonna get cheesed up. It’s constant maintenance. And I think Butch Vig making dance remixes of our songs is awesome. I listen to electronic music, and I would open our entire catalogue to anybody who wants to make any kind of remix of any of the songs. Whether they want to make some industrial song, or make a total rave song, I’m totally in favor of that, I think deconstructing music in that way is awesome. I’m definitely open to that. As far as how you come across in media presentations, how MTV will make you look, and magazines, it’s constant maintenance and it’s definitely not easy. It’s given me a newfound respect for bands like the White Stripes that invent a whole costume and fake story about themselves just so they can totally control how they’re presented. Even if it’s in a totally manufactured way it’s better than just letting somebody else make those decisions for you.
D: So it’s like a pitfall of your success, the PR stuff. What you have to deal with in return for being popular.
W: Well, I think you encounter that on any level. I’ve done interviews with tiny ‘zines and when I got a copy they ended up saying bizarre things about the band that I didn’t expect, and comparing us to bands we don’t like, and I couldn’t help feeling that they missed the point altogether. I think that it happens at any level. Sometimes when you’re talking to people you feel like they totally get it and it’s resonating, and sometimes you feel like, “Wow, they didn’t get it at all.”
D: It’s just a risk you take by being presented at all.
W: Yeah.
D: A lot of the songs on New Wave seem to be about stasis, about being ineffective, like “White People For Peace” about the ineffectuality of protest songs, or “Americans Abroad” with the line “while I hope I’m not like them, I’m not so sure.” It’s interesting that a lot of the record seems to be about feeling guilty and not knowing what’s right and not being able to make change, a lot of it seems even sort of bitter, and it’s admirable in a weird way that those things can be made into such catchy songs, but is there a point to it that I’m missing?
W: I appreciate that Tom’s been really careful about lyrics. There’s a big risk, especially as a band which a lot of young people listen to, that you can come across like you have all the answers, and you’re telling people what’s right. There’s certain bands that we’ve toured with that have come across like, “Okay here’s a political issue, here’s what’s wrong with the situation, and here’s the right way to respond to it.” They come out with this manifesto, like they’re presenting the answers to you. That’s something that has always rubbed us the wrong way. I’m much more interested in hearing a question posed in a new way that makes you go, “Hmm, that’s a interesting concept,” and turning it over in my mind myself than I am in hearing somebody say, like, “You know what sucks? The police, man, the police really suck.” I think that to put a question mark at the end of what you’re saying has more of a point than just coming out with blanket statement of like, “This sucks, this is right, this is wrong,” and so that’s something we’ve always shied away from. People have always said to us, “You’re a political band, you’ve gotta get involved in this organization and you’ve gotta get behind that cause,” but we don’t endorse anything besides the music that we make.
D: I agree completely. I was just thinking about your older lyrics compared to your new ones and they’re strikingly similar in that respect if not thematically. And I thought it was stupid even when I was 16 when all the punks had this huge backlash against you because you “weren’t anarchists anymore.”
W: You and me both. But I mean that’s coming back to the same thing: even when you feel like you’re totally connected with people and what you’re saying is totally resonating, when it comes down to it you find out that maybe they never really understood you in the first place. What they were taking away from it wasn’t necessarily what you were intending. I guess that’s one of the dangers of making any kind of art: you can’t follow your art around and monitor how it’s received. You create it and then you just have to let it go.
D: Like Ian MacKaye from Fugazi: “You see my mouth, and see that it’s moving, and say ‘hey man, I know where you’re coming from!’ Bullshit.”
W: Yeah, absolutely.
D: I have to admit that I’m not a fan of your new stuff. But the 16-year-old still hanging out inside of me who used to get all his friends together and gather around the drumset in his basement and pick up a guitar and yell all your songs at the top of his lungs really just wants you to tell mean old adult me why I’m wrong.
W: Haha, well, I don’t think you are. I think uh,
[pause, bowling pins crashing]
W: I hear it all the time. People say, “Your old stuff’s better, I like it more, I connected with it in this way,” and I think that there was an intersection of a time and a place when a lot of people were really ready for what we were doing exactly when we were doing it, and it connected with a lot of people in that really intense way, and I think for those people to expect us to be with them step for step as they evolve individually, and for us to evolve as a band on a parallel track with them and continue to connect with them in that intense way every step along the way is unrealistic. If there was a band that could do that, that could evolve with a generation, at every passing year to be like, “alright, here’s what we’re all thinking about this year, and this is what we’re all concerned about now, and these are the choices we’re being faced with today,” I just don’t…. I think it’s a little too much to ask for a band, especially because we haven’t been living a parallel life to a lot of the people who have been listening to our band. What we’ve been experiencing has been pretty different, and pretty bizarre for us, and a lot of the lyrics are talking about what we’ve encountered as a band and what we’ve been forced to think about: traveling and touring and working on records. A lot of people are like, “Wow, I used to really get where they were coming from and now I don’t” because they’re not in bands that tour 10 months out of the year, and a lot of the songs are coming from that place. I think that a lot of the lyrics are trying to find that universal common ground where you don’t have to be in a band to appreciate it, but at the same time it would be dishonest for us to talk about things that we aren’t living.
D: I think it’s always really depressing when bands just stay the same, album after album, and I really respect that you’re moving in new directions, whatever they may be.
W: Why thank you.
[long pause punctuated by bowling pins]
D: Well that’s all I have to ask you unless you have anything extra to add.
W: Um, well, how’s the weather right now in Minneapolis?
D: It is really fucking cold. It’s zero degrees, wind chill of -15, and when you go outside it’s like, “Oh, it’s really pleasant out!”
W: I’ll actually be there pretty soon, so I’ll be suffering with you.
D: Where are you playing at?
W: Oh, um, I’m not sure when we’re coming there on tour, but actually Minneapolis is my home away from home, I spend a lot of my downtime there.
D: I’ve always had a great time every time I’ve seen you at the Triple Rock.
W: Yeah, it’s a good place, good people, for sure. I love it.
D: Umm… Have you been doing well at bowling?
W: Not too well. I got a 109.
D: Well, you can blame me for this game.
W: Alright I will. Actually, I’m sorry, I didn’t even catch your name.
D: Oh, my name’s Deniz.
[bowling pins]
W: What is it?
D: Deniz.
W: Very nice to make your acquaintance.
D: Yeah, you too. I’ll see you next time you’re in town.
W: Yeah, absolutely, I’ll be there. Thank you very much. Thanks a lot for your time and for your interest and for your support. I definitely appreciate it.
D: Alright.
W: Take care. Stay warm.
D: I’ll do my best.
W: Bye.