q & a: 5
All you interrogators have been awesome—this is the last go-round, really, because tomorrow I have to go to California and find a place to live. I'll be gone for a week at minimum, I hope not longer. In the meantime the Iowa crew (McColough, Marlowe) has popped up on Blogspot.
what was your favorite song that enamel played? who was your favorite enamelite (besides you of course)? why did enamel burn so bright so as to fizzle by year 2?
My Enamelites are like my childrens; I loved them all. Any four-piece band with that much erotic energy was bound to be fractious. The same thing happened to Tin Machine. I always loved "Build Up." Or "Building Up?" Fuck, what did we call it?
what, at this point, do you think of love as a thing you both wholly possess yet need to share?
I think there are semantic problems with referring to "love" as a noun, sort of like calling "time" a noun. Who owns it? What color is it? What is its net weight? One doesn't get anywhere asking questions like that. To me love seems to be a mode of being; I still have this Taoist-type view of it being a way that one can follow, and if one is attuned to its promptings and follows them sincerely and without overanalysis, then one is seldom steered wrong. Well, obviously it's very easy to fuck yourself up by doing this. But you're unlikely to hurt the other, which I still feel is the point.
what was your favorite place you have lived thus far?
My current apartment is by far the coolest that I've inhabited, and as a city Portland can't be beat. I moved here for terrible reasons and with no plan in place, but that should not obscure this town's excellence.
if you could completely master one skill in life, what would it be?
At the moment the idea of becoming a world-class cellist is awfully appealing. Unfortunately I started about twenty years too late.
do you ever feel nostalgic, and if so, what are the most common things you feel nostalgic about?
Do I ever. I moved back to Tucson solely because of nostalgia over the landscape, and I still feel that way; I entertain dreams of buying a low-budget "ranch" in rural Arizona consisting of a converted trailer on a few dozen acres of rural land. It would be an excellent refuge. I think often of my senior year at Stanford, which was certainly the best (or at any rate happiest) year of my adult life.
can you pinpoint any specific sentence you have said to someone in your life that you wish to retract or re-phrase besides the MathCounts girl?
Honestly, nothing is coming to mind. I've had relatively few bitter arguments in my life. I suppose there are times when I didn't tell someone off and later wished I had, but those are all far in the past and it's probably for the best.
DID you FINALLY get a copy of l.a. riots EP?
No! Have you been hiring a dyslexic to write the address labels?
