Whose Fault Is That: This interview has been in the works for way too long because of my serial procrastination and your move to Berlin. Tell me something interesting that’s happened since we first spoke.

Petra Cortright: there have been so many things since we first spoke i dont even know where to begin!

WFIT: What’s the most fun you’ve ever had?

PC: the most fun always involves the beach/swimming in the ocean

WFIT: What’s your favorite video on youtube?

PC: the one of me scratching my dog olly’s head the webcam was very fucked up and recorded this weird sped up video and it looks like im scratching him really fast and he is licking really fast, but the vidoe makes me miss him so much i can hardly watch it anymore he’s a bug

WFIT: What were some early experiences with internet culture that you think led you to the art you’re making today?

PC: i fell in love with google image search the first time i used it in 5th grade, my first search was “trees”, i also talked a lot on aim a lot it was a bit pre txt msg for me like in 5th/6th grade i didn’t have a cell phone yet and i loved the emoticons and the chat culture and that has really stayed with me

WFIT: You’ve done a lot of moving around. How have reactions to your art changed from location to location?

PC: the work has 70% suffered 30% flourished from all the moving. i love traveling, i hate moving. i’m not a good mover. i have nightmares baout my baggage being too heavy (always is), flight delays, cancellations, losing boarding pass, showing up at the airport on the wrong day, my computer equip getting broken, security checkpoint, customs, lugging bags around, losing bags, layovers, just — ungh. and hey guess what!! i’m @ the airport right now!!! i;m at LAX flying to frankfurt and then to back berlin. the 70% suffering has just been exhaustion,,stress,,anxiety,,depression which provides no room for creative energy or work ethic. in the end i think the work gets better when youre settled and have support and time to explore new things and really push yourself. i dont think i am at that point yet but im getting closer. the 30% positive part is obviously all the new worlds/landscapes/countries/cultures i have gotten to see. it takes time to process what i have seen and it takes time to seep through into the work.

WFIT: What is it about animated gifs and webcam videos that attracts you?

PC: i try to be better at this but i am a really impatient person. gifs and webcams are so fast, low file size, load fast, they are almost scraps. i like not having the commitment of working with hi def vid/images. it just sucks how serious you have to be, it requires too much thinking. gifs are lil treasures of the internet, its so great when you stumble onto a huge unknown index that you hadn’t seen before. i like working with things that i find, but i also like making gifs myself but the ones i make myself are usually pretty heavy file-size wise. for webcams i like the challenge of limitation with the “default” effects. anyone could use the webcam software i use so i want to be the one to do it first and do it weird and do it unique. there are plenty of videos on youtube that have the exact same effects that i have used in some videos but there is such a huge different with those videos and what i am trying to do with my videos.

WFIT: One of our favorite parts of your work is the way it highlights the generation gap in a really roundabout way. Have you considered or observed your art’s effect on people unfamiliar with internet culture?

PC: there are a lot of aspects of my work that address internet culture but i would also like to believe that a lot of the pieces can stand alone purely on beauty and aesthetic grounds alone. sometmes in net art things are too smary and smart ass-y internet jokes that 99% of everyone is never gonna get. even if the internet references pass over some heads all my work is so extremely visual and people can enjoy it on that level alone.

WFIT: What’s the best advice you’ve ever gotten?

PC: this is a silly answer cus its smiths lyrics and im already loling as i type “IT TAKES STRENGTH TO BE GENTLE AND KIND”

WFIT: Name one thing you wish you did more of and one thing you wish you did less of.

PC: more exercise less worrying

WFIT: What would you say is your most ridiculous fear?

PC: i’ve been near panic attacks worrying about all the things that could happen to our chihuahuas milo and olly. they love to sleep in the bed curled up right by our sides and i read somewhere or actually i think my sister told me that people have rolled over on their chihuahuas and crushed them during sleep. also our neighbor has this huge stupid hummer and my mom said olly almost got hit by it one time. our cat bon bon was eaten by a coyote and i guess if a coyote was out during the daytime and the dogs were roaming in the yard that could be really dangerous.it all makes me sick i dont wanna tlak baout it anoymore!!!!!

WFIT: What’s something you think I might be missing out on that I should check out?

PC: if youre living in new york youre missin out on a sensible quality of life

WFIT: In another interview, you refer to my current home of New York City as a “stain on this earth” and say it “brings out a real sickness in people.” I’m not entirely prepared to disagree, so where do you suggest I move next?

PC: yeah, i have said nasty things about new york. lately i’m trying to be more positive so i will try not to go down the nyc complaint list in too much detail. i was disappointed that it didn’t work out for me there. i fought hard to try to be comfortable there but i ended up paying deeply for all the disasters, both financially and emotionally. my close friend recommended that i read julia child’s my life in france which i started/finished on the flight over here. (im in the frankfurt airport now anyways the book is about how she fell in love with french and found her lifes passion (late in life (late 30s!!!) in cooking. it is nice to feel the energy and zeal she felt from being in a place that she loved with many people that she loved doing what she loved. new york was never a place where i was full of that kind of love and energy, i grew bitter and apathetic because i never felt comfortable there and i wasn’t as inspired as i wanted to be. the lack of landscape was very draining for me. there are not enough trees for me in new york, also the species of trees are so boring. the city parks are so boring. the deciduous forest is so boring. it is the same 3 trees over and over, and sort of low compact forests and you cannot see more than 5 ft. i went outside of new york only a little but it was unimpressive. i feel so inspired when i get to drive around california, everything is so vast and so many beautiful and different landscapes. berlin is so green, there are so many trees. there are lots of huge cool secluded parks and a short train outside the city and you are in real nature with lakes and wildflowers and hikes. it’s hard not living by the ocean but i am excited to check out the south of germany as well. this answer got out of control so in short i suggest you move somewhere that is inspiring with lots of friends and cool landscapes, wherever that happens to be for U

WFIT: If you had to guess, where do you think you’ll be a year from now?

PC: I;ll be getting marrrrrieedddd in santa barbara, california!!!

Joe Bernardi interviewed Petra Cortright in July 2009. Petra’s completely awesome website can be found here, her youtube videos can be found here, and she can be found on Twitter here.

Whose Fault Is That: When did you first discover world-building?

Chris Wayan: Science fiction and fantasy. The term is common in sf circles, though of course they usually mean building a world entirely of words. On the physical side, I think I was most influenced by Poul Anderson and (more recently) Kim Stanley Robinson in his Mars books; they showed how planetary-scale factors interact to shape quite local matters–even the shapes of bodies. On the sociological/cultural side (and also presentation and style!), Le Guin and Tolkien were my role models. They all kept it just words on a page, though.

Only Tolkien had decent maps–books like Red Mars, Green Mars and The Dispossessed disappointed me on that level. So imaginary maps were a logical step and I started doing that in my teens. Then in the seventies I saw an an art-magazine article on two Italian metalworkers who built a skeletal alien planet several meters across, with girders for meridians, seas of empty air, and continents of steel. I can’t remember their names now–one was Remo, I think, because they named a continent Remolia. What got me wasn’t their world’s features or plausibility, it was just that they built their imaginary world on such a big scale. It felt almost pornographic, dangerous to me–to parade your fantasies so openly, so solidly. Out of the closet!

Then in the nineties, in San Francisco, the California Academy of Sciences built a walk through time. Each geological era had a room of its own, with fossils and dioramas and a globe showing Earth as it had been in that era. They were terrible! Puffy continents colored battleship-gray, with vague mountain ranges–they looked like moldy bread dough or scabs or wet cement. No icecaps, river systems, or hints of climate or vegetation, so they didn’t give you any sense of the times–was the world hot, cold, wet, dry, covered in ice? Couldn’t tell by these suckers. But they were art, not mere maps–for they DID express emotion. INSTITUTIONAL emotion. They expressed fear. The fear of making a mistake, or offending someone’s pet theory, or suggesting knowledge where there’s only guesswork. The fear of looking unscientific! The result was more misleading than any opinionated speculation could ever be.

That was a deep lesson. I wanted to build a better planet, a vivid, specific, opinionated planet…

WFIT: When did you realize it was something you could do? What was your first planet like?

CW: Well… you didn’t ask for a whole history, but you got me curious. Never thought about the project historically, didn’t make many project-notes. I do keep a general journal, so I’ve reconstructed the history from casual mentions there.

One weekend in late 2001, I biked by a flea market behind Cellspace in the Mission District. I bought a globe for a few bucks. At home I started playing with it–pried it off its stand, tilted it so the tropics turned polar and poles turned tropical. Suddenly an intellectual problem snapped into focus: “We have one pole on land, one under the sea. So we have one cold pole–Antarctica–and one mild. Could Earth be tilted so we had two Antarcticas, or none? ARE there orientations where land or sea is under both poles? How would all that ice–or lack of it–affect sea level and climate?” It turned out there were a couple of solutions for each. So I got out my drill…

That first globe became Seapole. With no polar land to build up big icecaps, just sea ice, it was a warm place, almost a vision of Earth as it will likely be in a few centuries–yet the climate changed purely from geography, not from high CO2 levels! Surprised me.

Found an old globe in a thrift shop, and built Shiveria–land at both poles. These two were a paired study in contrasts. Done fast, with relatively simple painting and relief.

I was hooked. I did three more alternate Earths–Turnovia, Jaredia, and then Dubia, which took much longer since it’s by far the most accurate and detailed projection. I knew it had to be since it was so explicitly political, people would nit-pick if it wasn’t exact. It burned me out. By late 2002 I was ready for something different.

I’d just read Robinson’s Red Mars trilogy and wished it had a decent map… so I did Mars Reborn.

I thought Venus Unveiled would be similar. Wrong! A much harder project because NASA’s maps were relatively rough, its features were little-known and needed more explanation. Also, the terraforming was hell. Mars rolls over and begs; Venus spits acid in your eye, you know? But because I invested so much time in the research, I wanted to show it off with detailed, ground-level tours. It grew into the first true webmaze, the first novel-length site. Became the model for all the rest, really.

In 2004 I tried an imaginary landscape: Serrana. But I gave myself training wheels by making it a tribute to Le Guin’s anarchist world in The Dispossessed. Geologically and ecologically it’s different, but the coastline and general layout are recognizable–the Anarres that Le Guin might have conceived today, with thirty years of advances in planetology. Serrana focused more than Venus on evolution, species, culture; and I started drawing and tossing in way more sketches of landscapes and creatures. I have a lot of affection for that one. But then I’m an anarchist; they’re kindred spirits.

The first purely imaginary worlds were Lyr, Tharn and Pegasia, all conceived around the same time, but done gradually over several years. The detailed Venus-style tours took much longer, Lyr especially, where logistics were a problem: finding flightways that covered the planet but had sea-crossings tourists could handle. Pegasia of course is still in progress since it involves reader participation–design a species!

Xanadu was a little side project, a break from the immense complexity of Lyr. I did a burst of work on it as data about Titan poured in, but when we didn’t find ethane seas but just lakes I was disappointed and slacked off. I’m waiting until the poles are properly mapped and then I’ll go back to it, I think.

After painting that giant globe of Lyr, with oceans seven times the area of Earth’s, I was so getting really tired of blue. So I decided to sculpt a relief globe of Io for fun. Wow, those colors. Lilac, white, rich browns, black, mustard, brick red, even lemon-yellow (sulfur is weird chameleon stuff). The sculpting was fun too–mountains 11 miles high! Second only to Mars, and way steeper. Spectacular if you could stay alive long enough to see it. Io’s the first straight realism I’ve done. Well, Io lacks hi-res mapping in spots, so there’s some interpretive guesswork, but it’s basically scientific portraiture. I haven’t even photographed it yet since it’s not Planetocopian; no what-if premise, and no life. Just color.

The Caprice series (Siphonia, Abyssia and Inversia) are half-done and it’s hard to say what’ll happen there. I’m slaving away on Siphonia’s regional maps and tours at the moment, feeling a bit constrained because it’s just Earth 90,000 years from now, on the rebound from a surreal catastrophe. So the land’s fascinating–undersea formations–but the creatures and societies can’t be as fanciful. I keep feeling grumpy that I can’t change the gravity and make up exotic critters…

Abyssia will be next because I have the globe all ready for final painting–all the research and relief is done–and it’s a relatively easy world with fairly small landmasses to map and tour.

And I need an easy one before tackling Inversia, which will be a toughie. 2.5 Earths-worth of detailed landscape to describe, and my mental model of Earth leads me astray–on Inversia, mountains are valleys, lands are seas and so on. On the other hand both Abyssia and Inversia have counterfactual premises, so while the geography and the climate are constrained, their evolution is wide open. I get to invent species freely…

WFIT: It’s extremely impressive how complex these scenarios are, what kind of background do you have in the sciences?

CW: Spotty and mostly self-taught. Courses in anthro, botany, zoology, but I didn’t major in them. I constantly read ethology (animal behavior studies), but I ignore theory and just want stories from the leading fieldworkers so I can draw my own conclusions. I follow the exoplanet hunt with interest, but the astronomy is mostly extrapolating from our own planets and moons. Close study of their surfaces has really paid off–NASA has some good map sites; google “planetarynames”, all one word. I’m finally learning to consult Wikipedia on physical chemistry, where I’m weak. The math? Mostly by hand. Just a few dozen core facts let me estimate most parameters of other planets. Our atmosphere’s greenhouse effect is about 15 degrees Celsius, surface temp increases as about the fourth root of insolation, gravity by the cube root of a world’s mass (assuming the same density–fat chance!); air pressure on Mars Venus and Earth vary by 10,000:1 while gravity’s range is barely 2.6:1, so postulate way more atmospheric variation than gravity… And so on.

Academic courses don’t focus on what you need to build plausible planets; you have to glean these bits and apply them.

I did audit a lot of environmental science classes at UC Santa Cruz, not for credit, just because I was fascinated; though that was decades ago when the science was primitive.

A turning point for me was Ken Norris’s class on marine mammals. One day he described a couple of puzzles about sperm whales. Why such a gigantic “melon”–a huge chamber in the skull full of tons of oil. Yes, it’s an echo chamber, generating a long train of clicks, but why’s that better than single sonar pulses? And why do sperm whales have such long jaws they can open incredibly wide, at right angles to their bodies? Can’t get great leverage like that and it’s a hydrodynamic drag.

In a flash I saw that click-trains of that sort would be unique–each whale’s slightly different in size. If you had a directional antenna that was exactly the same length, it’d resonate preferentially to your own click-train; other click-trains, even slightly off, would damp out. The long jaw matched the length of the “melon”, the resonator, almost perfectly! The jaw may be a directional antenna! It wouldn’t amplify so much as tune out OTHER whales’ sonar. In a pitch-dark melee of whales and giant squid that could make all the difference…

I mentioned it to Ken in passing, but I was just a humanities student sitting in on his class after all. I realized if I wanted to prove it, I’d have to switch to environmental science, spend the next decade fighting to convince professors I was serious, struggle for grants, build models and/or get cold and wet for a few years, to test my solution. Or I could leave it for others to verify, and get on to the next puzzle! I was better at pattern recognition than follow-through and I suddenly knew it. I just didn’t have the patience for science. What I was, though I couldn’t articulate it then, was an artist whose raw material was science.

WFIT: On your website you state you’re not human. What effect does that have on the worlds you build?

CW: A lot. By that I meant that both my self-image and my orientation–sexual and nonsexual–are not (very) human. Such declarations are common among furries, and though I guess they sound extreme, there’s a lot of truth in it. I identify with other species more readily than most humans since I can’t see a gap between animals and me. I find it easy to imagine how I’d behave if I had to rely on sonar, or I had a light-triggered migration instinct, or a strong estrus cycle, and so on.

But I mean it in a non-furry way too. I’m mildly autistic–my own sensory and mental world is very different from the average human’s. For example, I recognize people mostly by their voices and movements not their faces–I can’t recognize friends or even relatives that way. Normal human brains have a subroutine dedicated to distinguishing and remembering faces. Not mine. On the other hand, patterns–music, art, even puzzles–leap out at me.

Temple Grandin describes the results very well in her book Thinking in Pictures, and to some extent in Animals in Translation and Animals Make Us Human. Not all autistics understand animals especially well but I happen to be more like Grandin than most–and she’s used her autism to help her build animal care facilities. My mentation seems a lot like animal thinking amped up–an animal that’s learned to use human language as a sort of pidgin, but who feels his way to solutions along very different lines. Even when I do math I don’t use formulae; I sniff all around it like an otter, hop all around it like a nervous raven. Lots of wasted motion in human terms but I need a feel for the whole situation.

I generally read and understand animal emotions better than human ones.

What it all means for world-building is that I don’t struggle to step outside my culture and species. I’m already half-outside. Sometimes I peer in the window enviously like Peter Pan, but not often. So crowded in there! I’d get claustrophobic.

WFIT: When developing a new planet you paint on the oceans, spin the globe and let your unconscious work out the complex systems like climate. What is that like? Can you describe what’s happening or simply how it feels?

CW: It’s strangely like interpreting a dream. Or the early phases of songwriting. This mental state, is not unique to the arts; it’s also how Darwin assembled his case for natural selection, I think. It’s not the “Aha!” phase but the slowly bubbling stew before it. Data collection in which you deliberately refrain from premature theorizing, coming up with a too-simple answer. In a complex system, there are so many variables interacting there’s no logical way to solve the equation–if you single out any thread you’ll lose the others. You have to suspend judgment and just sit with the whole, visualizing it all as vividly as possible. Slowly pieces of it, usually around the fringes, come clear. You feel your way into the center. It’s slow. Like untying a knot…

WFIT: How do you relate to your planets? Pride, love, something else? Which one are you most proud of/do you love the most, etc.?

CW: I imagine living on them, of course; I can’t build them if I don’t.

Love? I always love the one I’m working on the most. Or hate it. The obsession can get frustrating. I got tired of building Pegasia–all those empty continents crying out for species–but a few months ago I started adding some regional maps and better tours, and fell in love with it again. Now I’m doing the regional tours and maps for Siphonia, and fixing the globe (chipping and resculpting, I mean, not just theory); so I’m in love with it now, for its sheer scale and diversity (well over twice the land surface of Earth; by far the most ambitious world so far in that regard).

But over time I get perspective. What am I proudest of? Venus, Lyr, Tharn, Serrana perhaps. Not Dubia though I get so many comments on it. But anyone could have done Dubia; I’m puzzled they hadn’t already, since it’s such a persuasive shock, seeing in detail just how different Earth will be if we go on. Seeing your home town under water. But the more exotic ones are closer to my heart.

Love… where would I live, if I could? Oh, somewhere I could fly, with lots of different peoples–terraformed Venus, or Lyr, or the trenches and crater-oases of Tharn. Or Pegasia, if only some readers would submit some simpatico natives to inhabit it (Plenty of room still, hint hint! So far they’re all kinda lizardy… nobody I’d date.)

WFIT: What kind of responses do other people have to your worlds?

CW: What are the most common? Lemme think. In random order:

1: Enthused, clueless gamers. “Great maps! Where are the guns? You can’t kill hardly anybody! Your aliens need bigger breasts!” A minority ask to use the landscapes and maps to base (usually war-) games on. Kinda missing the whole point. But the truth is, if asked, I still say sure, go ahead. Why not? There’s a culture in David Brin that has glyphs for certain truisms–they have one word for “boys will be boys.” I won’t rain on anyone’s parade, even if it’s a military one.

2: Readers who resonate with one particular planet or species. Lots more closet centaurs out there than you’d think. I find their comments quite insightful–and I suspect it’s because they come from the same place my building the planets comes from. I’m not objective–I see myself there and feel my way into what my urges and loves and hates and habits of thought ARE as a tree-squid or taurlope or lebbird. It’s fun to talk with readers who do the same–experience it from the inside. Personally I think these people are the ones with the potential to become interesting f/sf writers; technical skills you can build, but empathy’s vital. Without it, you get stiff dead models, just a blueprint.

3: People who just find the orbital photos beautiful. They often want to know what computer program I use to generate them. Heh.

One curious quirk: quite a few of these readers find the planets lovely but a little unconvincing because I show so many coastal deserts. Don’t I know that rain comes off the sea and deserts are inland? I puzzled over this a long time. Earth has lots of coastal deserts, so why would so many people deny their existence? My best guess: because almost no one lives there. Southern California’s about the only heavily settled coast and the real desert’s to the south. I’m sure my Baja readers, all one of them, believe in coastal deserts! And gdye to y’all down in the Kimberly, and the Namib, and Western Sahara and Atacama… But city people really don’t live on Earth. They live on Human Earth–a much smaller world.

4: Requests for help from other planet-builders, or fantasy/sf writers wanting maps or help with existing lands that don’t feel right. I love these requests, they’re so interesting. But I’m slow to answer, cuz I often have to feel my way into the problem and that takes a while. So be patient, I WILL come through…

5: Suggestions I fix errors, about half of which I decide really are errors. The worst I’ve made was that on Tharn and Pegasia I extrapolated carelessly from Jupiter’s system (self-taught, remember?), got caught with my orbits down around my ankles, and had to rewrite whole tours… I still have doubts about nutation and tides there, though I think they’ll be far less that some physics-literate readers have warned; they forget that the warm rock of these giant, tectonically active moons is very flexible. Continents will bulge too. Tides will be only a fraction of the theoretical amounts–but those are huge, it’s true…

An error several readers want me to correct is my claim that the dim red light of small suns will tend to evolve bigger eyes. Wavelengths of visible light are so much smaller than retinal cells that readers assume this couldn’t possibly matter. But retinas are incredibly inefficient; in mammals only about 1% of working retinal cells send signals the optical system recognizes as useful! Lens problems, too, tend to make eyes blurrier than they should be for their size. It’s not easy making cameras from goo. So eyes are often about a hundred times larger than you’d think they need to be for a given “pixel resolution.” Strong evolutionary pressure–as in small birds, who need to keep their head-weight down–can force efficiency and shrink them some, so it’s debatable. But my assertion wasn’t idle.

Anyway, a lot of folks write in with comments and suggestions based on their specialty. They’re often pretty fascinating even if it’s really too late to rethink the whole thing, as is true with most of the older worlds. The ones still in progress are the ones you can affect the most.

6: Readers who either love or hate the furriness. Too pinuppy, too cute, or they like it, the sensuality feels welcoming… Maybe the split vote here has more to do with whether you like to mix sensuality and emotion with your intellectuality, or keep them separate. Or maybe it’s just a question of taste. Is your sexual orientation and identity strictly human, or not? The split has a long history, long before the word furry came up; before science fiction really addressed sex and sublimation at all. Golden Age sf was split between “A galaxy full of humans and humanoids”–the Star Trek model, though of course it was the make-up costs that limited them, not philosophy… versus “a galaxy of weird beasties with weird viewpoints. And rayguns. And tentacles. Lots and lots of tentacles. Oozing, slimy, dripping…”

I fall in between: I do “weird beasties you’d rather hang with than the jerks next door.” I disappoint the claw-and-tentacle fans, I’m afraid. My designs don’t go for novelty at any cost. I do appreciate that art, and there’s a lot of it out there; much thought goes into some of those designs. I know my limits; I can’t compete! They’re like race-car designers; at most, I’m modifying stock designs. But I’m not going for bizarre but viable organisms. What really turns me on is the behavior and worldview of my creatures, and daily life on my worlds–not exoticism per se.

7: Critiques on the evolution of other beings and societies. These can be fascinating. The most notable strand: readers (so far all male, interestingly) who feel my worlds are too peaceful, too cooperative, too nice to be true. (Maybe I’m repeating myself and these are just the smart end of #1, above). “Serrana” consciously argues my theories around this. How to summarize this debate?… Here goes.

Wishful thinking? Sure, Planetocopia’s partly that. But it’s an art project, not pure science. I build possible worlds I like; I don’t deny more dystopian worlds are possible. They are; we live on one. I just don’t think they’re stable; and in deep time, unstable things are rare.

Beyond the question of whether Planetocopia’s a representative sample, I just LIKE pacifism, feminism, animal rights, free love, low-tech utopias; I gravitate toward scenarios that interest me and that I don’t see much in science fiction today. Sf caters to a human audience raised in a monospecific culture that thinks violence is fun and machines are where it’s at. But building dog-eat-dog worlds is neither challenging nor original. I build hippie utopias partly because others don’t. (And I build deeply forking hypertexts, rather than write sf novels because webmazes lets me cover landscape and ecology in ways that are hard for commercial writers with their linear narratives.)

But I can’t deny that writers (of both books and games) building harsh worlds are perfectly justified in doing so; they have a model at hand. But… how many worlds-at-war or singularities up at their crest are we gonna see out there, really? They can’t last. Punctuated equilibrium makes more sense to me… and culturally, equilibrium has to be mostly cooperative or at least tolerably peaceful.

Anyway, this issue is one that comes up a lot, in various guises and flavors. The lack of violence bothers way more people than the sex. So I’ll probably keep creating make-love-not-war societies; it hits a nerve.

WFIT: Finally, what’s next for you? More Planetocopia? Other projects?

CW: Just finishing the planets on my plate now–populating and writing full tours for Pegasia, Siphonia, Abyssia, Inversia–will take a couple of years at least. Inversia’s so damn big…

I need to know more chemistry to do Xanadu (cold, methane/ethane world) and Blisteria (a hot but still water/carbon world) properly, so they may wait a few years.

Planetocopia still takes more time most days than any other creative project, but I’m also:

1: Songwriting and playing in a surrealist band, The Krelkins, as we slowly record our first full CD.

2: Building the World Dream Bank. Dream stories, poems, pictures, songs. I’m trying to contribute at least one piece a week myself, and edit and post others’ dreams as they come in. Send me your craziest dream!

3: Trying to figure out how to print and distribute a finished graphic novel, Dreamtales. About 250 pp of bizarre dreams–furry, pacifist, erotic, Planetocopia-like dreams. Full color. Better art and tighter writing than Planetocopia. Funnier, sexier, weirder. I’m proud of these stories and hope they’ll be out soon.

4: Drawing new post-Dreamtales comics, a few dreams but many not–my first non-dream comics. Slow, slow, slow. The world’s slowest cartoonist, grrr.

5: Doing a series of paintings straight out of my dreams. Razi and the Holy Wino of Shasta is a good example. In fact, I’m writing up this here interview to avoid emailing some JPGs to a local gallery to propose a show…

6: Mulling over a Planetocopia book. Frank Jacobs of the Strange Maps site is doing it now, and our sites have parallels. Suggestions anyone? What would you do like, how would you focus it–what’s in what’s out?

7: Sculpting a set of furry dream-figurines, including some Planetocopians, like a Tharnese lebbird. Currently finishing a wolf-ballerina made of (drumroll please) spackle.

Current non-art obsessions:

1: The San Francisco International Film Festival. Of planetocopian interest: I rather liked the world-building in BATTLE FOR TERRA despite its scientific silliness. Ooh, pwitty art nouveau pwanet! Wish they’d spent more time on Mala’s life, culture, town, world before starting the war. I’ve SEEN a war, thank you. Haven’t we all.

Also liked: NOMAD’S LAND. Weak start & end but the hour in the middle’s amazing. People like the Kalash are very much like the societies I’ve been portraying. They DO exist. And for most of history and all prehistory they were in the vast majority.

2: Getting solar panels up on our house. Already installed CF lightbulbs, efficient fridges and heaters, and I bike most places. When I have to drive I get 35-40 mpg. C’mon, people, at least insulate your house and switch to a scooter or an old Civic or something! Get outa that big ol’ oil barrel! Y’want a livable planet? Then act on it!

David Cole interviewed Chris Wayan in May 2009. Spend a few hours getting lost at Planetocopia and the larger World Dream Bank project.

Whose Fault Is That: How would you describe your job as it relates to S-S, Z Gun and any affiliated ventures?

Scott Soriano: To start, I hope I never consider what I do with either S-S or Z Gun as “a job”! The record label is my baby and I am responsible for everything from birthing to changing diapers to teaching it to make a Scotch and soda for daddy. The zine has two mommies - me and Ryan Wells. We share in our responsibility to create a horror child.

WFIT: Were there any records or specific experiences that galvanized your interest in underground music or, more specifically, running a label?

SS: As a teen, I was snorting speed and playing football with fellow neighborhood shitbags, when one of them started singing the Sex Pistols’ “Bodies.” Hearing “fuck” sung three times in one line, followed by the word “abortion” sent me off on my bike to Tower Records, where I lifted me a copy of “Never Mind the Bollocks.”

It literally changed the way I heard music. Real anger was okay. Smart and primitive could exist side by side. It killed pretty much every piece of received wisdom about music that I had trapped in my teen mind. Hearing Ornette Coleman, Blind Willie McTell, and Folkways Ethnic records taught me that raw energy existed in more than underground rock & roll.

I also realized that while genres are good for trying to communicate to others about music, to approach music as a set of genres restricts how I heard music. Chum that into a philosophy and it probably has something to do with how I approach the label.

“Pushing Buttons” by Nothing People

WFIT: What were your motives when you began putting out records? Are they any different now than they were then?

SS: I’d like to give you some high minded reason for starting S-S (with Sakura Saunders, who is no longer involved), but really it was sitting in on Chris Woodhouse’s first sessions with the A Frames and thinking “I want to put this on a record.”

The second release (a 7″ by early 80s synth punk band The Decay, nabbed from a cassette) was also something I wanted to put on a record. I’d like to say that one motive was to crash the stupid genre ghetto walls that punk and underground music seems to love, but that might have come a bit after the fact and is never the main motive. The main motive is “I want this to be on a record.”

WFIT: As the proprietor of a predominantly-vinyl record label, editor of a print-only zine and longtime employee of a used bookstore, how would you explain your type of archival impulse to an audience accustomed to digital immediacy and convenience?

SS: Vinyl & print archaic? Bah! The digital world convenient? By what measure? Too many assumptions in your question that, while might be status quo, are crap. Analog and print seem natural to me. Analog sounds better than digital and it lasts. Print still dominates the book industry and will for years to come. If the format changes and (more important), it is better than what it replaces, no need to resist it.

WFIT: Have there ever been any records you’ve desperately wanted to release but wound up being unable to?

SS: The only “dream project” has been a Fugs box set. The stuff is all out there on different labels but it would take an entity like Rhino to pull it all together. Too much legal bullshit for me.

WFIT: While most of your record label contemporaries tend to focus on a niche, the stylistic variations across the S-S catalog speak for themselves. Aside from matters of personal taste, how do you reconcile the wildly differing aesthetics of bands like the A Frames, Hue Blanc’s Joyless Ones and Les Club Des Chats under the S-S umbrella?

SS: I guess if I listened to just one style or genre of music than I’d think that the artists I release have “wildly differing aesthetics”, but I don’t. They don’t sound the same, sure, but only shitty labels put out bands that sound all the same, and I don’t aspire to have a shitty label.

Perhaps if I was putting out Los Llamarada, Puccini, and the Carter Family, I’d have something to “reconcile”, but, even then, I am sure I’d worm my way out of justifying what I do.

“Cola Ohne Coka” by Krysmopompas

WFIT: In a recent interview with the Washington Post, Matt Whitehurst from Psychedelic Horseshit refers to Terminal Boredom as the new Rolling Stone and claims that “the bigger heads on Terminal Boredom are ruining music today.” I’m not about to make any claims regarding Matt’s sincerity or sobriety in that interview, but I was wondering if you had any thoughts about TB becoming a strange and increasingly accurate arbiter of what will appear on, say, Pitchfork within six months or a year.

SS: Ha! I think you mean TB predicts what will be covered on Pitchfork by a year or two! Listen, this is nothing new. Fan-based media such as print zines, web zines, fan blogs, message boards, etc. are always going to be out in front of the professional music media. It doesn’t matter if it is the mid 70s with the zines Back Door Man or Bomp! trumping Rolling Stone or later with Sniffin Glue and Search & Destroy embarrassing NME or Crawdaddy.

If you want to find the interesting stuff going on in the 80s you turn to Flipside and Forced Exposure, not Circus and Spin. Well, today you have Terminal Boredom being more timely and relevant than Pitchfork. Of course, Pitchfork is going to pinch ideas from Termbo! It is either that or rewrite one-sheets given to them by record labels, which is pretty much standard procedure for pro music press.

That said, nowadays, the influence of the music press, whether it be fan-based like Termbo or industry based like Pitchfork, is overblown. There are just too many sources of opinion to turn to, too many ways for fans to interact with each other, and many more options for music fans to immediately sample music without the music press acting as gatekeeper.

Hype on Terminal Boredom might be able to sell out a 7″ pressing of 300 but that is hardly the influence of Rolling Stone of the 60s & 70s, and to think otherwise shows that you need to expand your world. At best, Termbo is a tip sheet. You find people you trust (the bigger the head the better…or at least the bigger the hat) and use them as a buying guide until the stuff they rave starts to suck. And you find out before the herd. That’s what fan media is supposed to do.

WFIT: In In a climate where the only other print music zines are catch-all monoliths like Razorcake and MRR, what led you to produce Z Gun, a sporadically printed zine with scattershot subject matter?

SS: When we created Z Gun, Razorcake and MRR didn’t even enter our minds. I am sure if we would have thought of them as “monoliths”, our first impulse would be to attack them. But MRR is like an old friend who is starting to babble to himself and Razorcake? I didn’t know it still existed! It does? Well, congratulations Razorcake!

So I guess you can say what led us to produce Z Gun was lack of anything that framed punk or underground rock & roll or outsider music or “scattershot subject matter” or whatever you want to call it, as one single, uhhhhh, sound spirit. “Sound spirit”, listen to me. Next comes drum circle theorizing.

“Miaou-Miaou” by Les Club des Chats

WFIT: Do you see the internet as a threat to the very existence of print media and physical music, or do you think collectors and enthusiasts will persist and endure?

SS: When the phonograph was invented, John Philip Souza claimed that it would lead to a “marked deterioration of American music and music taste, an interruption of musical development of the country…” and that the musician would be replaced by “the mechanical device” and that all would stop singing.

He ranted, “Singing will no longer be a fine accomplishment; vocal exercises will be out of vogue! Then what of the national throat? Will it not weaken? What of the national chest? Will it not shrink?” Oh pooh on “threats to very existences.”

WFIT: S-S has a history of reissuing awesome records by bands that have been passed by or otherwise slept on. Assuming you can’t breathe new life into every gem that comes along, what are some near-forgotten acts of the recent past that you think merit similar treatments?

SS: Nothing in particular or rather too much in particular to note. I’d like to see something (beside Mutant Sounds blog) documenting the DIY cassette underground of the Seventies & Eighties. Or recordings of the National Chest and the National Throat.

WFIT: Aside from merely staying afloat, do you have any long-term goals for either S-S. or Z Gun?

SS: With S-S. and Z Gun, I don’t think about the long term and don’t think about “staying afloat.” It is all about what records or issue I am working on at the time. Beyond that, it is for the soothsayers to see.

Joe Bernardi interviewed Scott Soriano in April 2009. S-S records can be found (and ordered from) online here, with Z Gun’s online presence here. Scott also blogs about rare and strange records at Crud Crud.

Whose Fault Is That: In case there’s anyone reading who might not have lent much thought towards something like game design, could you briefly describe what you do?

GW: Sure. In short, I make video games. Most of my games are written in a language called Actionscript 3 for the Flash platform, so they can be played in a web browser. I’m responsible for the graphics, the programming, and the design of the games. My most well-known work at the moment is probably (I Fell in Love With the) Majesty of Colors.

WFIT: What would you guess it is about (I Fell in Love With the) Majesty of Colors that made it more well-known than your others?

GW: Well, I should begin by saying that I’m very new to actually making games. I’ve played with game development in the past, but Majesty was only the second video game I’ve released, except for a piece of interactive fiction or two in college. But I think that Majesty’s appeal is that it provides a very unified aesthetic, and makes players feel what it would be like to be a titanic, tentacled horror from beneath the waves who really only wants to be loved.

WFIT: It’s interesting that you mention Majesty having a unified aesthetic, because I was going to ask you about how your games all feature radically different visual styles from one another. Could you go into why you’ve opted to do that? What would you say informs your artistic choices across the various games?

GW: Well, what I try to do is fit the art to the game. Majesty is really a very simple game, with simple controls and a simple-minded protagonist, so I went for blocky pixel art, which is both easy to make and evokes a simpler era of video games. With Bars of Black and White, I wanted the strong black-and-white aesthetic combined with sketchy line drawing to reflect the fact that the protagonist’s perceptions of the world are not entirely… accurate.

Exploit’s graphics are meant to evoke the way we all imagine hacking should be like: neon geometric symbols, binary streaming past, and simple vector art on primitive displays.

WFIT: Considering you place such a strong emphasis on the unique graphical identities of your games, do you have any background in visual art or anything like that?

GW: I don’t have much art training. I took occasional art and cartooning classes growing up, and I did a weekly comic in my college newspaper called “The Absolute Sum of All Evil”. So I suppose I would consider myself an experienced amateur.

WFIT: What was it that attracted you to game design?

GW: I’ve always loved video games. I grew up with them, and I’ve always wanted to make my own. I’m a very creative person; my head’s always full of ideas. I’ve done some fiction writing, some cartooning, and a few other things, but I find interactive entertainment the most interesting. There’s this huge potential in video games, and we’ve only cracked the surface of what they can do.

WFIT: What are some of your favorite examples of game design, past or present? Things like experiences in games you thought were great, standout features, or narrative methods.

GW: Wow… that’s a tough question, since there are so many. I highlight a lot of stuff that I find interesting on my blog, Ludus Novus. But let me think of a few:

Shadow of the Colossus for the Playstation 2 was an incredibly emotional work. It’s a game where you’re battling immense creatures called Collosi in order to resurrect your dead love. The game is just effused with sadness. It makes you feel awful for killing these majestic creatures, while still motivating you to keep doing it.

Planescape: Torment is a classic roleplaying game for the PC based on Dungeons & Dragons. Unlike most D&D games, though, you spend most of your time having conversations with people instead of fighting. Planescape: Torment continually asks the question “What can change the nature of a man?” It gives a lot of answers over the course of the game, but never holds one up as the correct one.

Knytt is a small, freely downloadable game where you control a little furry animal who’s exploring a strange landscape. It manages to create better atmosphere with a few hundred pixels and some sound loops than any multi-million-dollar triple-A video game title. I could go on and on. I write a column twice a month for GameSetWatch called “The Interactive Palette” where I highlight an interesting technique in some interactive work and examine it in detail.

WFIT: It’s interesting that you mention Knytt’s simplistic, intuitive appeal versus a more mainstream game. I realize this is something of a broad question, but could you highlight what it is that you think such mainstream games are missing?

GW: Well, I definitely don’t want to come across as one of those people who are impotently scornful about mainstream gaming. There are some amazing works being done by big companies: Portal and Prince of Persia: Sands of Time are two of my favorite games in recent years. But because mainstream games are money-driven, and because the current state of the art is so complex, big game companies can’t afford to take too many risks. In order to keep huge game studios and publishers running, they need to make games that appeal to a broad spectrum of customers, and they need to avoid alienating too many of the fans.

The strength of independent game development is that a 2D game can be made by a couple of people over the course of a year or two and can be totally innovative and amazing. That’s World of Goo. Or you can make a whole bunch of rapid-fire games that don’t take long to code, and might not appeal to everyone, but they’re unique and clever and weird. Cactus and Increpare are two amazingly prolific developers who make some really cool stuff.

WFIT: I know this is a subject you’ve gone into a bit elsewhere, but what would you say it means to be an “indie” game developer?

GW: That’s a controversial topic. In my opinion, an independent game developer is one who can make games independently, without having to worry about the influence of a publisher or client dictating what they should be doing.

Of course, by that definition, Valve (the creators of Half-Life 2) is an independent developer. So my definition might be a bit flawed.

WFIT: I know you’re particularly fond of the sponsor-driven revenue model that sites like Kongregate have adopted. I’m not particularly knowledgeable about things like this, but I’d have to guess, then, that Kongregate stays out of your creative hair even though they have sponsors to worry about?

GW: Definitely. The way all my games have worked is that I have made the game from start to finish first, and then offered it up for sponsorship. Effectively, Flash portals competitively bid to sponsor finished games. That means that I get to maintain creative freedom, although it does introduce uncertainty. I’m never quite sure if a game is going to get sponsors interested at all.

One thing that I’m seeing more of is established indie game developers moving into the Flash platform. It’s a great way to make actual money for making free games.

WFIT: Could you ever see that sort of bid-based revenue model moving into other media, like print or video?

GW: I’m not very knowledgeable about the business side of things, but it’s definitely possible. It’s very similar to how fiction publishing works now. Many authors finish novels before submitting them to publishers. The thing about print and video is that there’s much more involved in publication. I don’t have to wait for a book to be printed and distributed; I can accept a sponsorship for a game, have the sponsor’s logo in the introduction, and have it up on their site in under 24 hours. But with the increased popularity of digital distribution for all forms of media, I can see the Flash-style sponsorship model working for other stuff. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Youtube or Hulu sponsoring some independent films or shows, and I think it’s already happening some with shows like “The Guild.”

WFIT: That’s true. I’d like to switch gears a little bit and talk about your podcast. On the podcast, your style of speech seems somewhat stream-of-consciousness. Has that intellectual exploration ever produced ideas that you ended up working into a game?

GW: My brain definitely works in an intuitive, random-access fashion. I’ll often come up with an idea that’s just a flash of an image. Majesty started that way. I keep a list of one-sentence game and story ideas that come into my head as I’m struggling with insomnia or taking a shower. A couple of examples: “Game that simulates a talk show, w/ player choosing topics & callers,” or “Sad game, sad like Randy Newman. Player character is Death?”

WFIT: Those are solid ideas. Would you ever consider developing a more traditional longer-form game for, say, a console?

GW: I’d definitely consider it. Nintendo recently made an announcement that suggested that WiiWare games might be able to be implemented in Flash, which would fit nicely with my workflow. However, for a game to be well-received on a console, it needs a lot of work put into it. We’re talking years of work. At the moment, I’m happy making a game in 1-2 months. It lets me experiment with different things and avoid getting bored with an idea.

But if anyone’s offering me a position as a lead designer, I might consider it.

WFIT: Aside from your game-a-month project and continuing the podcast, do you have any other plans for the future?

GW: Hmm. I’m not sure how much I’m allowed to say, but I’ve been talking with a portal about doing games exclusively for them. Some of those would probably be some of my monthly games. Apart from that, my April game is going to be a piece of interactive fiction, which I’m finishing up right now. Although the piece I’m doing won’t exactly be a classic-style text adventure. It’ll be a little weird.

Joe Bernardi interviewed Gregory Weir on March 18, 2009. Links to all of Gregory’s games, as well as his blog and podcast, can be found at Ludus Novus.

Whose Fault Is That: I’ll cut to the chase: where do these incredible photos come from?

Superbomba: Can I tell you instead about one of my favorite places to find photos? It’s this store that is so stuffed full of junk that only one customer can fit in there at a time. You open a drawer and it’ll be full of buttons or matchbooks or old bits of paper. There is even stuff hanging from the ceiling — if you look up there’s a small old rowboat, ice skates, Simpsons toys, airways bags, cameras. This old guy owns the shop and he just buys everything he finds, I think. The first time I met him he told me about how he has 6 storage garages full of stuff he couldn’t fit in the shop. The last time I saw him he told me that he’s now got 12 of them. I can’t even imagine what they contain — nothing he has is very well maintained but you can find incredible treasures there. He must be a secret millionaire or something because I can’t understand how he would make enough money to afford more than a loaf of bread and a few bottles of whiskey each day. He doesn’t care if you just want to sit there for a few hours and look through the hundreds of old photos, which are all jumbled together and usually pretty filthy. I’ve found so much amateur smut there, too. The only thing I don’t like about the place is that I’m always scared he’ll die on me.

WFIT: What do you look for in a photo?

SB: I like extremes. Really boring or really interesting. Full of nothing or really over the top. I like anything where a person looks sad or awkward or nuts. I like anything creepy but most stuff seems sinister to me when taken out of context. I love faces! I’ve so many photos of people with really odd features and messed up hair, like they were made of out spare parts or something. Anything excruciatingly mundane or banal. Ultimately I look for whatever entertains me or captures my imagination somehow.

WFIT: Have you ever had any strange responses to your photos?

SB: Not really. Some people get a bit hostile about them, like I’m trying to do something other than just have a bunch of photos I like. The best response was a comment left on Flickr by some guy who obviously thought I had uploaded a self portrait - “i like ur boobs its big and sexy”

WFIT: What do you do with your time besides post amazing photos on the internet?

SB: I like to look at photos of baby animals on the internet. I also like having disco parties in my lounge room, sleeping, anything involving rollerskates and hosing things. Oh, I have a job too, which takes up some of my time.

WFIT: If you were going to the moon for an extended stay and you could only bring three of your photos, which ones would they be?

SB: The one of the poodle looking at the poodle cake. The girl falling off the cliff. The kids with Scooby Doo. I think they would all suit the moon.

WFIT: What do you think about when you look at those photos?

SB: I could get so corny and philosophical about this but I’ll try to restrain myself.

The dog cake photo is kind of a cautionary tale for me. I mean, baking a cake in the likeness of my dog and then sharing the cake dog with the real dog is something I would consider. Seeing that idea in photo form kind of makes me remember to not get too mental.

The cliff girl is perfectly imperfect. I want every photo I take to look like that. So much is wrong but that all makes it right.

The Scooby Doo kids are just silly. It was taken in 1984, before I was even born, but I can remember being that age and how ace it would have been to be on a fake TV with Scooby and Shaggy. I think it would feel the same for me now, at 22. I hope so.

WFIT: If you could hang out with one person from your photos, who would it be?

SB: The little guy in this. He kills me. I love him.

WFIT: Lastly, and most importantly, do you like Super Bombad Racing for PlayStation 2?

SB: Oh whoa, that actually exists! And it’s about Star Wars?! I feel ripped off.

David Cole interviewed Superbomba in March of 2009. Please, please view her entire, ridiculously large collection online.

Whose Fault Is That?: What is your favorite year, whether you were alive or not, and why?

Kyle Parker: I guess it has to be from this decade because I don’t know anything about history, and if I think too far back in my life I can’t remember anything in terms of whole years. And I think every year since 2002 has had some sort of terrible shit in it. So I guess I will say 2001. I turned 14 and had a girlfriend for the first time. That was neat.

WFIT: Your illustrations have a sort of immediate, messy evocativeness to them that often seems stream-of-consciousness, but their tendency to be concise and profound suggests otherwise. To what extent are your pieces off-the-cuff, as opposed to thought out in advance?

KP: A lot of my work from 2006 was more stream-of-consciousness because I was living alone in a small room in San Francisco and just drawing to keep myself awake for as long as possible. But besides that I mostly think them out in advance. Most of the time the words come to me first and stick in my head until I put them on paper and try to make a drawing to match them. Sometimes the drawings are planned in advance, too, and sometimes they are improvised. I don’t have one fixed method and many drawings are arrived at differently.

WFIT: Compared to your impressionistic musical output, which can get pretty impressionistic and noisy, your body of visual art is relatively grounded in meaning. Can you think of any reasons why this might be?

KP: Well, the music started in late 2007 and I think since then my visual interests have slowly started lining up more with the musical ones. In the past my drawings were mostly grounded in figures and speech bubbles and all that, and sometimes they still are but not as much. In the last year especially I’ve gotten more interested in abstract color forms and patterns but I’ll still attach words to them. These are similar to my songs for me because there’s no rhythm or lyrics and the only way they can communicate concretely is through the title.

WFIT: Do you have a favorite conspiracy theory or unsolved crime? I am
partial to the Dyatlov Pass Incident.

KP: This doesn’t exactly fall into those categories but I read about the Miracle of the Sun last year in a Robert Anton Wilson book and that sounded pretty good.

WFIT: Your drawings have the aura of something created during a boring
algebra class or meeting. Would you say your creative process involves on-the-fly production such as that, or are you more of an I-will-sit-down-and-draw-now type?

KP: I definitely try to sit and draw, with very mixed results. I am usually struggling between the methods of only drawing when you feel like it versus forcing yourself to keep drawing until you make something you like.

WFIT: What would you say is the best thing that’s happened to you as a result of your drawings?

KP: It’s hard to think about. Any sense of fulfillment or purpose drawing ever gave me did not last long enough to embed it in my memory, so that’s probably not it. I do have a necklace that was given to me by a beautiful girl I met a year and a half ago. If I never drew anything I would not have met her or the necklace. So.

WFIT: Is there one of your drawings that you think best encapsulates whatever it is you’re going for? This is probably just a fancy way of asking if you have a favorite.

For a long time it seemed to be this one from 2006:

because I remember making it and how it seemed to just fall out of me. The songs and drawings that I always like most are the ones that feel like I had almost no part in making. Like I technically own them but I didn’t create them. I think the most recent drawing that I felt this way about was this one:

WFIT: To what extent would you say the often hilariously resigned atmosphere of your illustrations is representative of your overall worldview?

KP: I have not looked at it this way very consciously before but the drawings do tend to stick pretty closely to how I’m looking at life at the time. When I started at 14 or so the drawings were happy and goofy because life was happy and goofy. Then for a couple years everything revolved around being alone and dying, and later it was failing and dying. Then in 2007 I barely drew anything, so who knows what worldview that reflected. Then last year life was a weird dream. And now life seems to be some beautiful terrible joke.

WFIT: What are some artists, any medium, current or otherwise, that you hold as inspirations?

KP: Whenever I see an artist’s work that should inspire me what I usually think instead is “this person is already doing what I have been trying to do; why am I doing what I do?” So instead I try to not look at their work at all. I am also afraid of seeing things I admire and then subconsciously ripping them off in my work later. Some of these people are Chris Johanson, Dave Shrigley, and Mike Mills.

Comic artist CF also has work that I admire and don’t look at very often, but he does inspire me more directly through his general attitudes toward making music and drawings. Ideas like “Let your ambitions die” and “Don’t take it so seriously”.

WFIT: On a similar note, are there are any musicians or illustrators currently working that you think deserve more attention?

KP: I think anyone I know of is already getting the attention they deserve, which is good.

WFIT: I’m a fan of your photography, particularly your cityscapes and portraits. Why’d you stop photographing in 2007?

KP: I didn’t really stop taking photos I just stopped updating them on the website. I put them up there to add more content to the site but I always got the sense that nobody really cared about them. I am sitting on a lot of photos but I don’t know how I feel about putting them online. I have mostly been lending them out to friends as cover art for their music and stuff.

WFIT: Do you have any artistic plans for the future? I feel like your art is particularly well-suited for a print collection.

KP: I’ve had a book contract signed with a small press company for a while but I honestly have no idea what the status is on that.

Other than that I just started reading a self help book about “regaining your creativity” so we’ll see how that goes. And sometimes I have fantasized about getting involved in the gallery world just to take some of those absurd amounts of money thrown around and donate them to charity. It is all up in the air, really.

Joe Bernardi interviewed Kyle Parker in March 2009. Kyle has a portfolio, and his musical project, Infinite Body, can be found on Myspace.

Rich Jacobs: Apparently Sun-Ra was from Saturn.

Jason Polan: Really?

RJ: Yeah, that’s what he claims.

JP: How’d he get here?

RJ: I don’t know. Probably through Philadelphia.

Whose Fault Is That: Maybe we can start by–

JP: Identifying ourselves?

WFIT: Yeah, sure.

JP: I’m Jason Polan. Hey Rich, identify yourself.

RJ: I’m Rich Jacobs.

WFIT: What are you guys–

JP: And who are you?

WFIT: Oh, I’m David.

JP: Now we’re official. Where’d you get that paper?

WFIT: There’s a Japanese dollar store near here.

RJ: I saw a drawing.

WFIT: Yeah, I’m trying to learn how to draw.

RJ: That’s Stravinsky. That’s my favorite Picasso.

JP: We should do a trade, I really like that.

WFIT: One of the things that really draws me to your work, Jason, is that it seems like you spend more time producing and interacting than you do thinking or worrying about your work.

JP: I take everything very seriously but I don’t want it to seem that way, I guess. So, yeah.

RJ: You think undercover-ly?

JP: Sometimes I think under the covers. I like the idea of people seeing a finished product and being excited about it. I don’t necessarily want them to see how hard I had to work to get it that way. Somebody was asking me questions about my films and I said, “You know what? I don’t know if I want to talk about this.” I don’t want people to know that I’m stressed out when I’m doing it, or that there are things going into the equation other than me just drawing. Because I want it to be very simple and fun. Like you’re watching the thing and you’re not worried that I’m gonna mess up.

WFIT: Rich, I don’t actually know that much about your work.

RJ: That’s okay, I’m just a beginner.

JP: Rich is one of my favorite drawers. And people.

WFIT: What do you like about Rich’s work?

JP: Actually, that’s a good thing to talk about. I met Rich at an art show once and he’s one of the nicest people I know. I find that I judge people’s artwork on how much I like them. So, I’ll like somebody’s artwork a lot and then I’ll meet them and they’re not a super nice person so I’ll be put off a little bit and I’ll have trouble enjoying their work.

WFIT: That makes sense for you, because you put your own self out there with your work. Since that’s how you perceive other people’s work, it makes sense that’s how you would create yours…

JP: Yeah, I want it to be fun and I want people to enjoy the experience. I don’t want them to be uncomfortable. I just want it to be simple and easy. But I’m willing to work really hard to get it that way, I guess. What’s this guys name?

WFIT: Stravinsky, a composer.

RJ: One of my favorites. Stravinsky wrote The Rite of Spring. When he played it, the audience had a really weird reaction to it and started tearing up the seats of the theater and throwing them. It was almost a pre-punk moment.

WFIT: Have you guys ever had any responses to your work that surprised you?

RJ: I remember when I first started I went through this phase where I started showing in galleries, so all these different types of people would be seeing my work and then all these middle-aged housewives kept buying and collecting my artwork and I couldn’t figure out what I had done to induce that. But it only lasted for two years. My theory, which is probably not correct, but I thought maybe they sent faxes to each other telling each other about it. I can’t figure out how they knew. I didn’t have a website or anything, so… I think it was probably due to faxes.

JP: It’s the fax machines. And when those went out of style that’s when they stopped buying your work.

RJ: Yeah.

JP: I did a project called “The Thrilla in Manila” where I was drawing with a lady in a gallery and we invited people to come draw with us. A lady came in and dropped off her son, so we watched him for like an hour. Before she left she whispered to me, she said, “Draw with him. Talk with him.”

RJ: Sometimes growing up I had a hard time talking, communicating verbally. I was kinda shy so I turned to drawing to make that happen. I think with a lot of artists they tend to draw more and talk less. But, it’s funny, because we’re talking about it…

JP: It’s funny to be interviewed about that.

RJ: It’s interesting, because I think that’s what’s at the very essence of making art, the kind of need to communicate. The need to get out what you have inside of you. I always found it interesting that people think of art as a special thing. To me, it was, “Oh, that’s just how I talk.” I feel the same way when I see someone dance or doing something that I can’t do. That’s just how they’re talking. But, for myself, I’m very awkward and it’d probably hurt people’s feelings if I danced. So, I try to just draw.

At this point, we realized that Jason’s parking meter was about to run out. We decided to move the interview to a Taco Bell in Pacifica that Jason and I are both fond of. During the ride (despite my plea to not say anything of interest) Jason recounted a visit to a Taco Bell in Alaska. I should also note here that Jason is the creator of the Taco Bell Drawing Club.

JP: I’m just warning everyone, I might order more.

WFIT: So, we’re here at the Taco Bell in Pacifica.

JP: This is an official meeting of Taco Bell Drawing Club: West Coast Edition.

WFIT: Can you tell me that story again about Alaska?

JP: So, I was in Alaska and I went to a Taco Bell, I think it was in Anchorage. I ordered my meal and I showed them my Taco Bell Drawing Club membership card and I said, “Do you guys accept these here?” and the guy who rung me up said he had to go ask the manager. The manager came up, inspected the card, and said, “We don’t accept these anymore.”
I pointed out, “Well… I made it myself.” I got my food we were all having fun drawing and then he came over and gave me a certificate for ten free tacos. That’s the story of the Alaska Taco Bell. How is the volcano taco?

RJ: It’s pretty serious.

WFIT: Since we’re at Taco Bell, can you tell me more about Taco Bell Drawing Club?

JP: Yeah, I was spending a lot of time at Taco Bell drawing, because I like Taco Bell and I like drawing and they have free refills. I’d sit there for a long time and I thought I’d invite people to draw with me. The real important part is the membership cards because people like having membership cards. I was traveling around a bit and I invited a lot of people in the club. Now there’s over a hundred and twenty members around the country. So that’s the story of Taco Bell Drawing Club.

WFIT: How many Taco Bells have you been to?

JP: I’ve probably been to three hundred Taco Bells.

WFIT: And out of all of the Taco Bells, this is the best one?

JP: I think this might be the best one.

RJ: You should tell them that.

JP: I will.

RJ: But you’ve gotta put it in context, say that you’ve been to three hundred.

JP: “If you knew how much I like Taco Bell, you’d understand how important this is, what you’re hearing.”

JP: Is that a good burrito?

RJ: Yeah, but you have to put a lot of sauce on it.

JP: Oh, tell them you’re secret about the sauce.

RJ: The trick is to get a mild and a hot, because the mild tastes better but it’s not hot enough. So you gotta mix both together.

JP: The hot doesn’t have a good taste.

RJ: That’s my theory.

WFIT: I’m impressed that even though you’ve been to three hundred Taco Bells — so you’ve probably been to Taco Bells thousands of times — that you get two plain hard-shell tacos.

JP: I always order something different when I go up. I just make the decision when I go up there. But, I think the best menu item at Taco Bell is the hard taco. That’d be my take.

WFIT: Is there anything that they’re removed from the menu that you miss?

JP: Tostada was always my favorite. Sometimes they’ll make it for you but it’s not usually on the menu. But they brought it back for a while when they did that Crunch Wrap Supreme thing because the center shell was the tostada shell.

WFIT: Those Fully Loaded Nachos look like they could be turned into a tostada.

JP: It’s kind of like a fancy tostada. Did you like the double decker?

RJ: I liked it because it was weird. The texture was really weird.

JP: It was almost slimy.

WFIT: I was a big fan of the Cheesy Gordita Crunch.

JP: That was a fan favorite.

RJ: Tell me about that one.

WFIT: It was a similar thing where it was two shells and there was cheese in between them instead of beans.

RJ: That sounds cool.

JP: So yeah, Taco Bell Drawing Club is very open. Anybody who sends me an email saying they drew at Taco Bell, I’ll send them a membership card.

WFIT: Are there clubs that exist outside of New York?

JP: Yeah there’s a Chicago one, one in Florida and there’s one in Kansas. The Chicago one is every week, the New York one is every week, the Florida one is pretty regular I think.

WFIT: Have you approached Taco Bell about this at all?

JP: Yeah they sent me a letter. Because… I’ve been sending them a lot of letters. They sent me a letter saying, “We appreciate what you’re doing. Here’s gift certificates for your Taco Bell visit.” And they sent me twenty-five Taco Bell bucks. So they’re aware of it, someone there is.

RJ: I wonder if they have video surveillance and you could make a video of every week you went there. That’d be pretty awesome.

JP: It would probably be a pretty depressing video. What else can we talk about? I want to make this an extensive, substantial interview.

WFIT: We only have twenty more minutes right?

RJ: Say something super heavy.

WFIT: The conversation was getting pretty heavy before and now it’s about Taco Bell.

JP: Yeah, what we were talking about?

WFIT: Have you started any projects and got pretty deep into them and realized there was something wrong and you had to stop?

JP: Yeah. Usually I’ll think of the title first. So I’ll think of, like, “The Every Piece of Art in the Museum of Modern Art Book” and then I’ll have to do it. So the exciting part is the thinking of the title. The other exciting part is when it’s done. But the working at it… you need to have a lot of stamina. So there was one I did where I came up with the idea of a book called, “All of the Hair on My Head” so I had my mom shave my head and we had all the hair in a bag and I was gonna draw all of it and make a book of it. And I got seven or eight pages in and it was literally a pinch of hair. I didn’t realize how much work it was gonna be. So then I quit. And it was failure of a project.

RJ: You can go back to it later.

JP: I still have the bag of hair.

WFIT: You like drawing collections and things of large scale. It sounds like when you create an idea for a project you do something that’s specifically going to lock you into something long…

JP: But, I don’t even think of it that way, it’s just ridiculous. I did one called, “An Entire Bag of Popcorn” where I drew every piece of popcorn in a bag. I just like the fact that you can hold onto an entirety. Luckily, the ones that I’ve thought of have mostly been ones that I can do. Like the hair one was not.

I did one called “All of the People in the Phone Book” because there was a phone book in Skykomish, Washington and their phone book was a front and back piece of paper. The population was like 217. I got to meet a lot of the people there. So, yeah, a lot of the projects are endurance challenges, almost.

WFIT: What projects are you working on right now?

JP: I have an art show that’s up right now in East Hampton, New York and it’s called “Points of Interest”. I was driving in Michigan and I saw a sign that said “Point of Interest” and there was nothing around it, so I didn’t know what it was signifying as interesting. And I thought that itself was kind of interesting, so I decided for this art show to make a book called Points of Interest and I just picked things that I liked and I drew them out in East Hampton, near where the gallery was. I drew a bunch of things like shrubs or street signs that I liked and those were the points of interest and we did a small edition of the book that also came with a sign that I made, a “Point of Interest” sign so that people could decide their own points of interest.

WFIT: And you’re still working on “Every Person in New York”?

JP: Still working on that one. People ask me, “When are you going to be done?” I think that’s funny because I’ll just be working on it forever.

WFIT: Once people stop moving to New York you can have a goal set.

JP: Right. People take that one very literally. It’s just been funny that people ask me those questions, like, “What do you with tourists? Do you draw tourists?”

WFIT: Who are some artists that you really admire right now?

JP: An artist named Derek Erdman. He’s from Chicago. He’s one of my favorites now, he makes a lot of work that’s very available to people. My friend Katie McDonough is a really good drawer. Rich is one of my favorites. Mostly people that make their work available to people and are very approachable, I guess. It’s that idea where you produce a work and if somebody really likes it I want them to be able to have it and I think it’s something that I appreciate when other people also have that feeling. Did that make any sense?

WFIT: Yeah, it definitely did.

RJ: Round two.

JP: What’d you go with, another volcano one? I’m gonna get some more. I’ll be right back.

WFIT: What are you working on right now, Rich?

RJ: I’m curating a show at a museum in Holland. That and working on a collection of 80’s skateboard magazines, self published zines.

WFIT: Do you work mostly here in the Bay Area?

RJ: That’s where I live, I moved here a little over a year ago from New York.

JP: Don’t look at this. You guys get one guess what the sauce on the volcano taco is called.

WFIT: Lava?

JP: Yeah.

RJ: Did you ask for extra lava?

JP: I asked, “Can I get it minus the sauce?” and she said, “The lava sauce?” and I said, “What!?”

RJ: That’s awesome.

WFIT: What differences do you see between New York and San Francisco?

RJ: For art, it’s a lot more of a tradition in New York. There’s such an infrastructure for it, there’s more of a collector-based art market there which is good and bad. It’s definitely more structured. It’s a little more open here, but there’s a lot fewer opportunities… I try to exist in and out of the real art world. I try to only deal with it when I need to. I like to encourage people to self publish a lot. I don’t think a lot of artists know what to do once they’ve made the art.

JP: Yeah, I steal a lot of those ideas from Rich.

RJ: I know some really great artists who would never show their work if I didn’t ask them to. I feel sad about that. I like to help those people, give them an outlet.

JP: Have you guys had this before?

WFIT: That is a tiny little thing.

JP: It’s a cheese roll-up, like what you’d make in sixth grade in the microwave when you got home from school.

RJ: That’s amazing.

JP: It’s seventy-nine cents.

WFIT: Impressive. Is there anything you know about Taco Bell that most people don’t?

JP: The most exotic thing is an Enchirito. Do you know the Enchirito?

RJ: Oh, yeah. They still make those?

JP: Yeah, that’s always the thing. I ordered one in New York the other day and the girl at the register didn’t even know what it was. It’s on the menu. The only rogue Taco Bell menu item is the Nachos Supreme. Usually the prices of the items follow caloric value. The nachos supreme doesn’t follow that. It’s like $1.89 usually, but it’s got 800 calories in it. Whereas the hard taco is like a dollar and it has 250 calories and it goes up from there.

WFIT: I feel like I had a bunch of things I wanted to talk about then Taco Bell totally took it out of me. Rich, you talked earlier about lots of different ways you can communicate, like dance which is something you can’t do. Do either of you guys have mediums or ways of expression you wish you could do?

RJ: I’d like to explore sculpture more. I have a strong interest in that. I like photography a lot and I don’t dedicate myself enough to that. So, maybe pursuing those avenues would be fun for me.

JP: I wish I was smarter, I wish I could do crazy experiments and figure things out.

RJ: Having a budget would be nice, too. That’s always been a limitation.

JP: Yeah, to experiment more with crazy things.

WFIT: What would you do if you had an unlimited budget?

JP: I’d make movies and stuff. I think that would be fun.

RJ: What about podcasts?

JP: I’m blogging about this right now. I think a movie would be a fun way to do collaborative projects. When you’re drawing, you’re drawing by yourself but when you’re doing a film you just find the good people that you’re comfortable working with.

RJ: One of my ideas that I’ve never realized that I’d really like to do is incorporate all of my ideas. It would be sort of a film project but it would include dimensional and three-dimensional artwork, almost like start-stop animation style. I like the idea of having the composition move. Like with a painting you have a composition and it just stationary. But if you could frame that and all of a sudden it started moving, that’d be kinda fun.

JP: I’d fund Taco Bell Drawing Club myself, I’d get everyone free food every time we went.

WFIT: You could just make a private Taco Bell.

JP: But I like trying all the different ones. I thought about that when I was younger, like if I had my own Taco Bell. But then I thought, no, I like going and finding the new Taco Bells.

WFIT: What are some of your favorite movies?

JP: I like the movie “The Red Balloon” and I like “Koko” and I like “Yi Yi”. I like the movie “The Third Man”… I like the movie… “Back to the Future One, Two and Three”.

WFIT: Maybe to close it out, since we don’t have much time left, can we come up with a project that we can all work on? We’ll start a project right now.

RJ: What if we drew tacos?

JP: Through the whole book? Just a bunch of tacos? What’s that hand thing that you did? The way you hold a guitar?

RJ: Taco riffs. You know how when people play heavy metal they’re like jh-jh-jh-jh-jh they make a taco out of their hand? So…

JP: The project will involve: death, despair, happiness, sadness, explosions, animals, exotic animals, farm animals…

RJ: What if we made fictitious Taco Bell items?

JP: We could do that, we could do a Taco Bell menu of mythological creatures.

RJ: A fantasy menu, things that they should make at Taco Bell like horchata Slurpees.

WFIT: Can we do it?

RJ: Fantasy Taco Bell. You know how people have Fantasy Baseball Leagues? Fantasy Taco Bell League. I bet you could get that going on the internet.

WFIT: If Taco Bell shut down, where would you have your Drawing Club?

JP: Nowhere, I’d shut down.

David Cole interviewed Jason Polan and Rich Jacobs on December 16, 2008 in San Francisco and Pacifica. You can see more of Jason’s projects at his website.

Addendum: This eBay listing censors “Fiddle-fucking” to ” F*************.” Classic.

Whose Fault Is That?: It seems, understandably, that Crank Yankers and the Jerky Boys seem to be the the only touchstones critics ever bring up regarding JFAL. Just as understandable, though, are the ways in which a track called “Morris Day Has Worked Up an Appetite” is different than a call where a guy screams the same word over and over into the phone until the other party gets annoyed and hangs up. Do you feel any creative camaraderie with the people behind those other collections of calls?

Andrew Earles: In the context of the form/end result (the calls), my answer is no. Regarding the behind-the-scenes creative process, well, my answer is, again, no, though it’s not as definitive a “no.”

Jeff and I have been creating and obsessing over our own ideas of Awkward Humor, and those of others, for years. At the risk of sounding like a jaded underdog, the current trend of what I like to call “Awkwardsploitation” is based on ideas - not our (Earles and Jensen) grossly obscure ones, mind you – that have been bouncing around under the radar for years and years. Speaking for myself, I don’t wish to be lumped in with “quirky” or “uncomfortable” art because these terms have been neutered to mean “aggressively mediocre and safe” if they mean anything at all.

Not that you were doing this, but it appears to be the cold side of the pillow for a lot of people. That means it causes a rustling in a lot of people’s tool belts, if you get my drift. If not, I mean it results in resounding, raging hard-ons across the pop-cultural board with fans and progenitors alike.

Conversely, in that we mess with people over the phone, we are always compared to some types of community-college comedy favored by those that shine in the recollection of lines from Office Space, Wedding Crashers or saying “Schweeet!!” (wherever the fuck that originated from) at birthday parties, dinner parties, backyard barbeques, etc.

Our closest brethren in the undefined micro-genre of Prank Phone Call Comedy remain Longmont Potion Castle as well as Gregg Turnkington’s Great Phone Calls title from the early-90’s. Bootleg Jim Henson creations calling to have a doorway widened or crane rented so that a several hundred-pound spouse can be moved from one room to another…this is a healed-over, once-festering wound on the comedy landscape.

Lots of disparate things are still festering, however. Another big difference between Earles and Jensen and Crank Yankers is that we pace around our respective apartments struggling to come up with decent phone call ideas, and don’t have the luxury of a call center full of comedy writers hemorrhaging outtakes until a famous comedian or comedienne jumps in to deliver the voiceover goods. In that sense, I’d like to capitalize on a seemingly fresh (but actually age-old) trend and proclaim right here, for the record, Earles and Jensen Present…Just Farr A Laugh Vol. 1 & 2 (The Greatest Prank Calls Ever!), to be the world’s only lo-fi/shitgaze prank call release.

As far as calling someone up and threatening to “kick their fucking ass” ad infinitum, we have a loosely-held “no cruelty” rule with our calls, and that approach appeals to semi-literate half-wits, sure, but this is coming from a guy that almost soiled his jeans while repeatedly watching a YouTube clip of high school kids yell obscenities from a car window.

WFIT: A huge portion of the humor in JFAL lies in the characters you manage to develop throughout short, ridiculous phone calls. I am pretty sure, for example, that I know more about your version of Morris Day (dances on the bar, is friends with Michael Bolton and Bob Geldof) than I do about the real Morris Day. How much of the characterization in JFAL was planned out beforehand and how much was made up on the spot?

AE: Well, I’d say 30/70. The Morris Day call was a late-night, spur-of-the-moment applesauce helped along by chemicals (maybe). I’d wager that absolutely no planning went into that character, if you want to grace it with such a generous title. Bleachy was born when Jeff came across a woman, or man, named “Bleachy Washington” in the Memphis phone book. After 25 or so calls, the character was in place. The celebrity impersonations are simply our fantasy versions of the source material. “The Party Doctor” was a character I assumed for Tom Scharpling’s The Best Show on WFMU.

I did about four of those as live call-in bits, then carried it over to the single-take call that appears on disc 2. Generally, some characters are afforded, at best, an afternoon of development. Relatively speaking, we hammered out a lot of calls and spent an unusually long time (revisiting it over the course of a day) on the idea behind “Room Silencing Religious Call.” Others get thirty minutes and some notes on a scratch pad. A large majority were not even conceived as characters, but just happened the way you hear it after following some very rough outlines.

WFIT: What is the funniest prank phone call you’ve ever heard?

AE:I can’t answer that. I can merely rattle off some golden examples, rather than pinpoint the funniest call I’ve ever heard. Jeff purchased a random prank call CD off of eBay back in 2002; supposedly recorded by a gentleman that had committed suicide. Subsequently, his friends found the tapes and compiled the best moments. I want to it originated from the Carolinas or Virginia. The caller taps a classified section for people selling normal items, cars and bed frames and such, then calls very late at night/early in the morning. They were very simple:

“Yes, I’m calling about the Volvo you have listed for sale.”

“Ok…it’s…”

“NOT INTERESTED!!!”

His longer calls were unbelievably funny and often uncomfortable. The notorious “Mark Knopfler” calls floored me as a teenager and hold up surprisingly well. Most of Gregg Turkington’s Great Phone Calls album is top-shelf, and a huge influence on JFAL. When I was 18 or 19, it just showed up in the bin of my local indie store…I had no idea what it was about. Remember, there was no “Neil Hamburger” at this point, and I’m pretty sure Gregg was running a label and working as a roadie for Mr. Bungle when he released that album. It blew my mind.

WFIT: A host of washed-up celebrities are mentioned and/or impersonated throughout the record. I’ll forgive Jermaine Stewart for not keeping abreast of the indie comedy world, but have any of the them, to your knowledge, caught wind of it? Additionally: What’s with the fixation on assistants to and siblings of D-list celebrities?

AE: The reasoning behind calling as a personal assistant or sibling is multifold. For one, it presents a far more believable situation, thus keeping the recipient on the line longer. Otherwise, the idea of certain entities having a personal assistant at all is, well, sort of funny. And it allows third-person exposition that’s often much funnier than the alleged celebrity talking about themselves.

WFIT: If you could prank call one musician and one United States president, living or dead, who would you choose?

AE: President? F.D.R. Just want to see if I could pull one over on him.

Celebrity? Bill Drummond.

WFIT: One of my favorite moments on JFAL is during the “Everyone Loves a Good Bootleg Garfield the Cat” call when the restaurant employee, faced with an extremely straightforward impression of Garfield, attempts to come back and falls completely flat. Has anyone ever come through with a legitimately funny counterjoke?

AE: Oh yes. When Jeff called me at 3 A.M. on 3-way and then called Amy Sedaris, who was (and still may be) listed in the Manhattan phone book. Referencing her appearance on Leno or Conan (I forget), in which she claims there’s something funny about everything, no matter how tragic, negative, awful, etc, or something like that, Jeff asked her what was funny about two totally unknown, unsuccessful, inspired, good-looking, and charismatic guys calling her at 3 A.M. Or something like that. She answered by unleashing, and I cannot stress enough how exclamatory her demeanor was, a barrage of “FUCK YOU! YOU FUCKING ASSHOLES! IT’S FOUR IN THE FUCKING MORNING!”

When he called back to ask, “What about now?” she pretty much repeated her answer. True story. No, it was not taped.

WFIT: Have you ever fired a gun? If so, when?

AE: Yes. My father was an old man by the time I was born. My mom was his second wife, and the marriage boasted an age difference of eighteen years. He was a fighter pilot in both WWII and Korea, plus, he was one of the first twenty or so pilots to fly a jet fighter in combat. There’s a display honoring my father at the Naval museum just north of Pensacola, Florida.

Point being, the house contained some guns. His closet was an arsenal. He was close with my uncle, who always had access to or owned a fair amount of rural land, and at an early age, I hunted fowl before losing the stomach for it. So I was familiar with shotguns and .22 caliber rifles, but didn’t touch a firearm between the ages of 14 and, say, 28. In recent years, however, I’ve patronized a few firing ranges (using the pistols provided by the establishment) and I keep a well-concealed, 12-gauge Browning pump-action shotgun for home protection. Don’t tell my girlfriend! Memphis is a very dangerous city.

WFIT: Who holds your vote for best record label of all time?

AE: That’s easy. Matador Records.

Honorable Mentions: Crucial Blast, Reflex Records, and Touch & Go.

Most Fascinating Record Labels of All Time Due to Certain Stretches of Particular Attributes: Homestead, SST, Ace of Hearts, Rough Trade, Casablanca, and Too Pure.

WFIT: In my completely anecdotal and probably inaccurate experience, when most people think of current rock writing they either think of essentially anonymous “music bloggers” or of Chuck Klosterman. Who would you say are some music writers presently doing good work?

AE: John Darnielle, Eugene Robinson, Andrew Earles, Gerard Cosloy (but it’s mostly sports writing on his blog, cantstopthebleeding.com), William Bowers, Bob Mehr, David Dunlap Jr., Cintra Wilson (not really a music writer, but probably my favorite entertainment-based scribe of the past 10 years…funny lady), and a handful I’m forgetting. Yes, I gave some friends props. Most of the rest are sycophantic whores carrying extra hankies in which to wipe the excess turds gathered around their respective pie-holes. I can be one of those, too, but only part of the time.

WFIT: Do you have any plans for future comedy-type audio releases or any other major projects in the pipeline?

AE: Jeff and I hope to complete JFAL Vol. 3 this year. And Jeff and I hope to have it released by Matador. We have some earth-shattering material in the can.

Joe Bernardi interviewed Andrew Earles in December 2008. Andrew has a blog, and Earles and Jensen have a Myspace. Both seem as good a way to stay in the loop as any.

Whose Fault Is That?: This is going to be a crappy interview question but just for my sake… can you clarify what your positions are in the band? Who sings? Who plays what?

Anthony Atlas: Yeah I play guitar and sing.

Sean Paul Presley: What’s your name? *Laughs*

AA: I’m Anthony. *Laughs*

SPP: I’m Sean and I play guitar and backup sing… co-sing? Co-sing. You write all the words–

AA: I sing while Sean concurs.

SPP: He sings, I agree.

AA: There’s a drummer now, Eric, who politely declined to come here and be interviewed with us, ’cause he figured he wouldn’t get a word in edge wise. I told him we’d just pretend he was here and make up answers for him. His name is Eric Butterworth. He put out the Nodzzz 7″ when Pete Hilton was our drummer. That’s the person I started the band with before Sean was here. Pete lives in Bulgaria now, teaching English.

SPP: Eric put out our 7″ and went to a bunch of our shows and we figured that it made perfect sense for somebody who already liked the band and was devoted enough to put out our first 7″ that he’d be a perfect person to play drums. Plus, he’s a pretty sweet dude, so… Yeah, but not the interviewing type… Where as me and Anthony are just… aces. *Laughs*

WFIT: When you guys met to work on your demo how did it come together? Had you had songs written or—

SPP: Well, Anthony and Pete kinda had sketches of three songs. The 7″ came off the demo sessions. We recorded how many songs for the demo? Fourteen?

AA: Lots of songs didn’t make it on the demo.

SPP: We wrote an incredible amount of songs in the first six months that we were jamming together. And we even had more songs that we didn’t record. Maybe a small handful. So we had a big, big pool to pull material from.

AA: That demo was important because I think it shaped what the band was going to be about, as far as releases. If it didn’t make it to the demo, it probably wasn’t going to make it to the show after that. I remember just looking at the track listing and trying to get a feel for what we were doing. All these different song titles, I would stare at the back of the CD demo and ask, “What does this all mean?”

SPP: Yeah, it was perfect. Doing something like that is like streamlining your idea of how you want to be represented by sound and image.

WFIT: How intentional was that? Did you guys have a specific sound or idea behind the band?

AA: I had a rough aesthetic mode which I brought to every song. But, after every song was finished I was always nervous that each song was so different than the next. The demo seemed to me to be all over the map stylistically. But I’m confident now that was a good thing and basically indicative that we weren’t going to be very restrictive with our music.

SPP: I feel like Anthony is pretty much in charge of the aesthetics of the group and I think knowing Anthony as well as I do, he’s very intentional about that. I’ll hand out anything I can think of where you refine it a lot more.

WFIT: The sound that you guys have has very clear touchstone influences. Is that intentional or shared tastes?

SPP: I think we all share influences. Even though we have really strong influences, I feel like we never postured what we really love. I feel like we always try to restrict ourselves, if something was maybe too much like a certain genre or too much like one band I feel like we wouldn’t really allow it.

AA: It just helps to know, for me, that if we want to reference something indirectly Sean will be able to do that. Like knowing that he knows all the words to every Byrds song. I just feel confident that we can get really poppy and professional if we want to be.

SPP: We love The Kinks as song writers so we’d want to have a song that was goofy like The Kinks but never sound anywhere near like The Kinks. Just in terms of structure and maybe sound aesthetic. Never a formula, I don’t think…

WFIT: Has there been a time where you wrote a song you liked and just didn’t feel like it had the right aesthetic for the band?

AA: All the time. Songs that came off with too much power I felt skeptical about. Because Pete was a technically advanced drummer who was in a metal band. Sometimes I think he can come through a song real dramatically and it just seemed like we were Mudhoney or something. Not that those songs weren’t good in their own right. We’ve canned songs for not feeling right.

SPP: We’ve canned tons of songs.

AA: Ones I’m really embarrassed to think about.

SPP: But I feel like all that is really important. Even writing a song to eventually can it is a pretty good lesson. Even if you’re creating bullshit or stuff that you can ultimately joke about, I don’t know, I feel that’s all part of the process… you can’t refine what you really like unless you’re canning stuff that you don’t like, but still creating stuff that you don’t like.

AA: There’s bands which I think operate spontaneously and can write and record the same album in a day. But for Nodzzz I think we’re a bit more conscious and uptight about what we release and what we play live. At least I am. But I do find it valuable to write a totally awful song but to finish it as such. I feel like I can at least express myself that way. That doesn’t sound right, that sounds like acoustic Green Day or something. *Laughs* It’s weird, the more you play music the more difficult it gets to write the songs I want to write.

WFIT: Did you build the 12” as a whole record, a whole idea?

AA: I think that what saves records is sometimes just a good sequence. I remember when we were arranging the tracks for the 12″ it didn’t play right and then I think we came across a sequence, the one that’s on the record now, and it suddenly just felt like a record. There’s a variety of different sounds on that thing and different lengths. I was worried it would just feel like a compilation of different Nodzzz songs. But with the attention we paid to sequencing, I’m more confident that it feels like an album. There’s a few songs that didn’t make it.

SPP: Certain songs sit in the archive for a long time, like a sweater that you grow out of.

AA: All of a sudden they just don’t fit on you anymore.

SPP: Exactly. You gain weight and your belly is sticking out.

WFIT: When you guys look out and see the music scene in San Francisco, what do you see and what do you feel is happening here right now?

AA: I see a handful of people striving to transcend the difficulties of doing art and music here. It’s really hard to do a band here I think. You have to travel distances, you have to find places to play and practice, which are expensive. Beyond those difficulties, there are people who are doing some really good things right now, which is inspiring. If I wasn’t doing this band I’d have already moved because the difficulties of doing things here. I’ve stuck with it, I’m happy that I did because right now I finally feel that our peers and the scene that we’re attached to are building something our own.

WFIT: Can you describe that scene and your peers and what you’re building?

AA: I don’t know, it’s not a DIY perspective, but it is “sustain your own experiences.” I know a lot of people complain that the city isn’t fun. But all of a sudden it seems like people I know are entirely occupied doing great things, so—

SPP: When we first started playing music — maybe it was because we weren’t really into who was playing music — it seemed somewhat dormant to me in San Francisco like, I don’t know, two years ago when we first started jamming.

AA: I agree.

SPP: It just seems like there’s a really solid handful of bands in San Francisco right now that probably started jamming around the same time we did that we’re really thrilled about. I know when we first started we didn’t know of any bands that we were really too stoked about. But I feel like, now, two years in, we’re in the company of bands right now that we think are pretty incredible.

AA: Grass Widow, Brilliant Colors, Traditional Fools… Those are bands that Eric, the drummer, is putting out… And there’s uh—

SPP: I mean, that’s all I was thinking of. *Laughs* Eric kind of has the market cornered in San Francisco. Each one of those bands is really solid and knows what they want to sound like and it seems pretty important. All their music sounds pretty important.

AA: I’m wary to say that what’s happening now is a moment that should be recognized…

SPP: No, not at all.

AA: Because when you do that it tends to just sort of deteriorate anyway. I find it to be reinforcing and inspiring that there’s really quality rock and roll, punk music being made. I think that a scene can get really healthy if it gets, in a way, competitive. Not in a nasty way, but in a healthy way.

WFIT: You’re touching on a point about sincerity… Is sincerity a point that you consider when you’re writing music?

SPP: If you’re trying to have fun, then you’re sincere about having fun. So even if you write a party song, if you’re posturing to write a party song then it’s insincere.

AA: Yeah. For me, I only enjoy a song when it still feels like it’s part of what I want to express. So a song can quickly deteriorate and die if it doesn’t have sincerity added into it. With Nodzzz, I never worried about trying to become or attain a certain mode or persona. It’s probably one reason why I find it hard to represent our band when people ask us what we sound like, what we do.

WFIT: How do you answer that question?

AA: I usually just say, “Well, nothing weird.” I said this before, we’re not trying to reinvent the Pop wheel. And therein lies our uniqueness. It seems like a lot of bands superficially invite some sort of strange quality or some provocative quality. It doesn’t necessarily correspond to good songs, I don’t know (pause) I hope that doesn’t sound arrogant.

SPP: I don’t find it arrogant when you say what separates us is that we keep it so fucking real. We’re not trying to do anything crazy.

AA: Yeah. Well, you asked before about touchstone influences and I know the New Zealand pop scene is a heavily cited history right now among indie bands or whatever. But for them, one of the influences that I relate to is social. Martin Phillipps from the Chills said the one thing that all the Dunedin/New Zealand bands had in common was a loathing for stage personas.

Just the idea that you didn’t need to reinvent yourself to be in a rock and roll band is something I find is important for the Nodzzz. I want all the flaws, all the ineptitudes and everything that makes us human to be part of our music. I think that would be where our sincerity and our authenticity comes from.

AA:Is it okay to drink water while I—

SPP: Yeah just don’t swallow it.

WFIT: What did you guys put in your mouths?

AA: Is that an interview question?

WFIT: Yeah, that’s an interview question.

SPP: It’s this stuff called snus which I guess is Swedish technology that Camel kind of stole. It’s spitless, smokeless tobacco that eats away at your gums and satisfies.

AA: It says on the side, “Warning this product may cause gum disease and tooth loss.” But at least it doesn’t say cancer and death.

SPP: We’re just trying to lose our teeth without using heroin.

AA: But apparently it’s been popular in Sweden for a while. We just toured with Love Is All and they were all addicted to it. I didn’t know until the last night and they were all… snusing? So we traded the American Camel bullshit for the original. It was more potent. I don’t smoke cigarettes and I don’t have a nicotine habit yet –

SPP: I do!

AA: — but all day at work yesterday I couldn’t keep this shit out of my mouth.

WFIT: But you don’t have a habit.

AA: No, no, no, yeah. This is real new and this morning I woke up with a headache and I was like, “Oh, I need tobacco.” You need to tell me what a tobacco addiction is like. I don’t know what the symptoms are.

SPP: Well, a good physical sign would be waking up with a headache.

AA: Really?

SPP: Probably because you’re not used to it and you had tobacco overload.

AA: But we’re interested in the world around us, so if it involves putting snus in our mouths.

WFIT: So what do you guys do outside of music?

SPP: I work at a grocery store. It’s a lifestyle.

AA: I keep busy with a lot of visual projects.

WFIT: What kind of work do you do as an artist?

AA: I do weird drawings, kind of… unhappy graphic stuff. I feel like I could be a one panel cartoonist if I tried. I couldn’t be a comic artist. But, all that finds its way into the flyer art for the band. It’s one of the reasons why I enjoy doing the band because it can keep the other things I’m interested in in good practice. I also walk around San Francisco with my friends enough to feel vaguely part of the city as a young person.

SPP: Just hangin’.

AA: Yeah. I think that if the band was to suddenly stop I would move to New Jersey, New York and either go to school again or maybe get serious about an entirely different field that I’ve studied.

SPP: Yeah, I actually thought that today. If the band wasn’t going on I’d probably start business school.

AA: Between my siblings, one of us was going to do art. We all started doing art in high school, I’m the only one that ended up doing something creative — mainly, primarily. So I think I’m kind of carrying that torch in my family. They’re really supportive of me. My mom calls me up and leaves me messages where she sings Nodzzz lyrics. She watches YouTube videos of the Nodzzz before she goes to sleep. She says it gives her a lift.

But, I don’t know, I’m 24, I feel like it’s a strange time to be doing a band. Because in your twenties you want to evolve your skills which will equip you for your thirties and forties. I’m really worried about doing the band so intensely that I’ll ignore my other skills, my other interests and the only thing I’ll be able do is a band. I’m not happy about that.

SPP: It’ll probably just really help you to realize that you should probably be doing something else when the life of this band is over. *Laughs*

AA: Just that unhappiness, that worry?

SPP: I mean, by the time this is over I think both of us are gonna realize, well, uhh… that was fun.

AA: It’s weird just to gauge what’s going on with this band. It seems like a party just to even come to a coffee place and talk about the band, like a privilege.

WFIT: You both have an expectation that the band is going to end–

AA: Yeah, I feel realistic and cynical. I’m apprehensive about becoming emotionally attached to a band, because it’s so defined by your youth. And I just think I need to be resigned to the fact that it’s going to end soon and just not define myself by the band, even though it’s what I do right now.

SPP: Not to be quoted out of context and put in gossip mags that the Nodzzz are ending soon. There’s no end in sight. I’m fully aware of certain travel opportunities, certain artistic opportunities, creative satisfaction that a band provides. But it doesn’t seem realistic to see this as still the same fun project ten years down the road.

AA: It’s not a sustainable identity. Not to take gospel from the Rolling Stones, but if you watch old documentaries of them at the peak of their popularity, they were really cynical about what they did. Brian Jones was like, “I want to be a graphic designer.” They scoffed at the idea of calling themselves musicians. They thought musicians played music all day, devoted themselves to the craft. They were making rock ‘n’ roll songs and enjoying it in the very present tense.

SPP: The thin line between work and pleasure.

AA: There’s weird ways to become an old man through a band, like the guy from Devo, he just grew out a pony tail and became an A&R guy, right? Gerald Casale? One of them became a record label dipshit with a pony tail.

SPP: If you’re a band in Los Angeles or New York that received any notoriety you either perpetually play in bands for the rest of your life or you try and work your way into the industry and become a liason for a recording label and find new, hip artists.

AA: Well, in San francisco you have this interesting community of punk people who the people most devoted to it end up living at MRR [MAXIMUMROCKNROLL -- Ed.] and devoting energy to that magazine. It’s like the DIY version of that or something. There are places and communities which can keep you involved in this very kind of fleeting thing. I say fleeting, I just mean that as I get older I want to do things that are more considerate. I’m not sure whether punk music really gives a fuck about people.

WFIT: Since we’re closing out the interview, maybe I can hit you with an attack question. Some of the coverage that exists on Nodzzz has referred to the name of the band as “terrible”… Do you want to address those critics?

AA: Yeah, yeah, yeah. See, I’m happy that people think it’s terrible because secretly I’ve always thought it was terrible too. But I’ve had friends who are like, “No, that’s a great band name! How did you come up with something so good?” So, now that I know people don’t like it, it just confirms my fears and I feel better.

SPP: I think that was always kind of the idea of the name, too. It didn’t take us a long time to settle on it, which was knowing how exhausting — being in bands before — how exhausting and stupid it is coming up with a band name because I feel you grow out of it at some point anyway if the life of the band is longer than six months. So the band name really has no meaning and I think it was intentional.

AA: You can hit the lottery with a great band name that, in itself, is artistic and meaningful. We just didn’t happen to hit upon that name.

SPP: *Laughs*

AA: It’s also an indicator of where we came from. If we wanted a more marketable identity, we’d probably have a different name. We might be called, uhh… like, umm… Neil Young or something. But I don’t stress about the Nodzzz. What I’ve noticed lately is there’s other bands with repeated letters.

SPP: We’re getting a lot of flak for that.

AA: A certain mainstream indie rock publication lumped us in with this growing scene of superfluous consonant letters which is entirely coincidental and kind of a shock that other bands at the same time repeated these letters in the middle of their name.

SPP: Ours is at the end though.

AA: At various points we had a subtitle to our band name which was “The New Jersey Dads”. Our dads were from New Jersey, mostly. And we thought maybe we could become dads from New Jersey. But there’s some Ds in there and an N so it’s a related name.

SPP: If we chose to spell dads with a Z at the end—

AA: To what extend does a band name mean anything?

SPP: Right. In my experience, all the best band names are really crappy bands. And some band names, if there was no substance, would’ve been really bad band names. But I probably associate their names being great because they also made really great music. Like, I don’t know, what’s that band? The Rolling Bears? The Rolling Stains? I don’t find it important. I just wanted to make sure we had a name that didn’t take itself too seriously. I think we definitely succeeded in that.

AA: Yeah. In LA apparently on the radio when they play our song, like, “this is from the No-Dees.” I don’t know why it’s so phonetically difficult to read the name. And people have a weird mental lapse when they look at it, they go, “oh, the No-Doz?” That’s fine, though. That’s what the name sponsors. I think at this point the idea of a fixed band name is just a limited idea, so there’s bands now with more dynamic names. You can change your name, you can add letters. We can even have a maternal name.

SPP: Or we could have the word Crystal in our name.

AA: Crystal Nodzzz.

SPP: Crystal Nodzzz! Crystal Dads?

AA: Crystal Shit.

SPP: Crystal Shit!

AA: Crystal Shit!

SPP: There’s just like a flux of bands with the word Crystal in their name.

AA: Well, let’s do it. Let’s try to end this interview and rename the band. Ideas for a new name. We’ll just spontaneously think of new names for the band.

SPP: Okay.

AA: Okay.

SPP: Uhh… Snus and the Teeth

AA: Uhh… umm… Moby… Moby Dick?

SPP: Umm…

AA: No, no, no. Hold on.

SPP: Norwegian… Norwegian… Norwegian… Wood.

AA: Norwegian Wood is pretty fucking good. Uhh… maybe we are awful band namers.

David Cole interviewed Anthony Atlas and Sean Paul Presley on December 16th, 2008 in San Francisco. You can keep up to date with Nodzzz via their blog or their MySpace.