Doseone interview: “I may not be much else in this world but I guarantee you I am getting to rapper heaven.”

Published in The Believer, Oct. 2007.

Adam Drucker, better known by the alias Doseone, has said his initial attraction to rap was as much about the “persona/ego projection” as a love of words. Drucker cut his teeth on the rap-battle circuit, exchanging rhymes with Eminem and other MCs, until his friendships with like-minded musicians led to the creation of the Anticon collective/record label, which fuses hip-hop to indie rock, ambient music, poetry, and experimental noise.

Although Drucker has recorded several solo albums, his primary efforts have been collaborative. With the trio cLOUDDEAD, he worked with Yoni Wolf (Why?) and producer David Madson (Odd Nosdam) to create a pair of critically acclaimed albums that pasted non-sequitur raps onto sleepwalking funk beats and archaic keyboards. His most consistent collaboration has been with producer Jel (Jeffrey Logan) as Themselves. The duo has joined forces with German indie-rockers the Notwist as 13 & God and with other musicians in their current project, Subtle.

Read the complete article in The Believer.

Interview with Paul Beatty, author of White Boy Shuffle

Originally published in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, March 2006

In Hokum, an anthology of African American humor, novelist Paul Beatty finds comic value in stump speeches, stage banter, sermons – and boxing braggadocio.

Paul Beatty grew up reading from the oppressive white hegemonic literary canon of Mad Magazine, Archie Comics, the Green Lantern, and Joseph Heller paperbacks snagged from his mother’s bookshelf. In the introduction to Hokum, Beatty’s anthology of African American humor, he explains that he didn’t awaken to the strength and beauty of black literature until college. “My crew of conscious brothers and I were sitting in the student union rehashing books we hadn’t read and dictating laws of governance for countries we’d never been to,” he writes, when they were interrupted by a stoned classmate who proceeded to gargle Amiri Baraka’s “Sacred Chant for the Return of Black Power and Spirit” through a half-masticated mouthful of cheese pizza.

Best known for his hilarious and upsetting first novel, White Boy Shuffle, Beatty studied under Allen Ginsberg and got his start at the Nuyorican Poets Café alongside the likes of playwright (etc.) Sarah Jones. The pieces he’s gathered together here make for an unusual humor anthology by any standard: Hokum combines political speeches with boxing braggadocio, experimental poetry, blackface minstrelsy, radio sermons, movie scripts, comic books, and blues stage banter. There’s also a scene in which Osama bin Laden tears out Santa’s eyeball.

Read the complete text at San Francisco Bay Guardian.

What’s So Funny About Peace, Love, and Kim Jong Il Bashing? An Interview With Bruce Cumings

Published in The Fanzine, March 2007

University of Chicago history professor Bruce Cumings has written about the politics of both Koreas for over 25 years, most recently in North Korea: Another Country and Inventing the Axis of Evil. He has been outspoken on the need for normalization of U.S.-North Korean relations and a diplomatic solution to the nuclear stand off. Cumings’ work has also been critical of U.S. support for previous South Korean dictators, such as Park Chung Hee and Chun Doo Hwan, who came to power through military coups and used torture and assassination to silence critics and repress labor movements. In this interview he gives a perspective on North Korea not often heard in mainstream news coverage and describes his own experiences under South Korean dictatorships.

For the interview check out The Fanzine

Vollmann interview about Sarajevo, astrolabes and the importance of literacy

Originally published in The Fanzine, March 18, 2006

William Vollmann has written many, many books, with most of them clocking in at around 1,000 pages. He recently won the National Book Critics Award for Europe Central, a series of linked short stories dealing with the World War II conflict between Germany and Russia. His 3,500+ page epic examination of the history and motives of violence, Rising Up and Rising Down, was published unabridged by McSweeney’s in 2003. His signature topics include crack, prostitution and the European conquest/slaughter of North America, as well as his own feats of journalistic derring-do in the world’s most heinous war zones. Vollmann has lived briefly at the magnetic north pole, interviewed opium warlords in southeast Asia and spent time with white supremacists and militant animal rights activists. His most recent book, Uncentering the Earth, examines the social impact following Copernicus’ discovery that the earth was not the center of the universe. It is a story of the complexities and imperfections of the natural world butting heads with the elegance of ideology. I spoke with him over the telephone from his home in suburban Sacramento.

Read the complete interview at The Fanzine.

Poets & Writers: William T. Vollmann on Writing with Integrity, Bending Genres and Humanizing the Villains

Originally published in Poets and Writers, Feb. 2006

The author of fifteen books, including eight novels, three short story collections, a memoir, and a ten-volume treatise on the nature and ethics of violence, William T. Vollmann is often associated with his most controversial subjects—crack and prostitution among them. He is also characterized by a few signature stunts, such as firing a pistol during his readings and kidnapping a girl who had been sold into prostitution and turning her over to a relief agency while writing an article for Spin magazine.

But these anecdotes provide too narrow a lens through which to view perhaps the most audacious of contemporary writers—one who defies genres, word counts, and normative morality. In his work, Vollmann has continually focused his attention outward, always going to extremes in order to comprehend the world views of people unlike himself. He has worked as a correspondent from some of the most heated war zones: Iraq, Cambodia, Somalia, and former Yugoslavia.

Read the complete article at Poets and Writers.

Photojournalist Mimi Chakarova on Sex Trafficking and the Kashmir Conflict

Originally published in Bitch magazine and then reprinted in Alternet, June 2005

When Mimi Chakarova was in Ghana working on a photojournalism project, someone in a car full of young men grabbed the strap of her camera bag and attempted to drive off with it. Chakarova wouldn’t let go of the camera case, and was dragged behind the car for half a block until the case’s double-stitched strap broke. “I just couldn’t stand the thought of some German tourist buying my Leica for $100,” she says.

Chakarova, a documentary photographer who teaches journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, is currently immersed in two long-term projects, one documenting the military standoff in Kashmir and the other focusing on the sex trafficking of women in Eastern Europe. Born in Bulgaria under communism, Chakarova grew up in a village “running barefoot and playing with the chickens.”

Read the complete article on Alternet.

Dennis Cooper Interview: Fourteen Hills

Originally published in Fourteen Hills, Summer 2005

Filled with bored kids, heavy metal, violence as communication and brutal sex, Dennis Cooper’s books read like a bloody head-on collision between Georges Bataille and Christopher Pike on the only strip of highway in a vast arid teenage wasteland. There are no survivors in the mangled vehicles, but the car’s tape decks are still blaring raunchy guitars.

The George Miles cycle, Cooper’s five-book magnum opus (Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, Period) aren’t sequels to each other but instead are linked more by obsession than plot line. Each book in the cycle is a complete stylistic makeover from the others, fluxing from sensual to cartoonish. A touring rock band that murders their dimwitted fans; a young zine writer sexually abused by both his gay adoptive fathers; a narrator, disturbingly also named Dennis, who dismembers beautiful young men who resemble an old love he can’t shake. Awful things happen in Cooper’s books, but they are also oddly revelatory and imbued with a strange kind of tenderness and compassion.

A longtime resident of Los Angeles, fame is as much a part of the air he breathes as the carbon monoxide particulates. As a journalist, Cooper has interviewed Keanu Reeves, Leonardo DiCaprio, Courtney Love and John Waters. His most recent novel, My Loose Thread, began as a non-fiction examination of high school shootings before taking on a life of its own.

Tom Bissell Interview: Kyrgyz Uprising

Originally published in Alternet, April 2005

A mere three weeks after a mass uprising which resulted in a parliamentary upheaval, little Kyrgyzstan seems to have faded into the background — losing ground to the Pope and Terri Schiavo.

The former Soviet republic, sandwiched between Kazakhstan and China, has been the site of what many have been calling a democratic revolution comparable to those seen in Georgia and Ukraine. After observers reported rigged parliamentary elections, an uprising began in the southern part of the country and quickly spread to its capital, Bishkek. On March 24th protesters raided the presidential compound and president Askar Akayev fled to Russia and later resigned in a videotaped speech.

After the initial fanfare, the bloom may be off the rose. As politicians vye for power in the new government, the democratic ideals that may have sparked the uprising are getting short shrift. Meanwhile, the West’s attention lags; Kyrgyzstan is of little strategic interest, aside from its potential to spark a Democracy domino effect throughout Central Asia.

Author Tom Bissell has focused his fiction and nonfiction energies at the Central Asian region. Once a Peace Corps volunteer in Uzbekistan, he has gone on to publish two books about the post-Soviet republics of Central Asia. His first, a travelogue called Chasing the Sea, encompasses everything from environmental disaster tourism to smuggling money to the families of dissident journalists, all of it set to a soundtrack of pirated copies of Eminem and Depeche Mode. His most recently work, God Lives in St. Petersburg, is a collection of short stories about the region. His writing is full of uncomfortable truths, brilliant dexterous language and skeptical of any and all political ideology. He speaks with Ben Bush on the lingering effects of Soviet domination, rampant corruption, religion and American influence.

Ben Bush: In your book Chasing the Sea, you have a fairly positive portrayal of [former Kyrgyz president Askar] Akayev, how has that changed in light of recent events?

Tom Bissell: As relatively liberal as Akayev was, he came of political age in the Soviet system, which was as corrupt and perilous an environment as any, and I think in recent years he began to look around at his fellow Central Asian autocrats and dictators and realize that his slightly more open approach to governance wasn’t doing him or his country any good. Rather than have the life of an admirable failure, he just decided to grab onto everything he could. Kyrgyzstan had been known as the nicest place to go to in Central Asia, where the cops were least likely to shake you down, and I think a lot of people attribute that to the atmosphere Akayev had created, but I have been really shocked by the corruption of the last four years. It had become a distressing situation and I’m happy with the events in Kyrgyzstan, but it is unfortunate that the one guy who least deserved it has been chased out of his country. Karimov, Turkmenbashi, or Nazarbayev – I would have preferred to see any one of those three go. It does seem Kyrgyzstan is in a bit of a jam, and it’s very nerve-racking to see what’s going to happen next.

Read the complete article at Alternet.

Mono Pause/Neung Phak Interview

Published in The Fanzine, Aug. 2005.

Each night of Mono Pause’s cross-country tour in 2002, masked men came onstage, threatening to kill them if they continued to play while a voice with a heavy Eastern European accent announced over the sound system, “Tonight’s concert by Mono Pause has been canceled. Please find the exit and leave.” In most cities some audience members, skeptical of the staged event, lingered to see the show. However, according to band members, of all the venues they toured, Los Angeles was the only city where the crowd immediately cleared out.

Based out of Oakland but with strong roots in River Falls, Wisconsin, multi-faceted experimental rock group Mono Pause operates under many names but are perhaps best known under the guise of Neung Phak – a loose Thai translation of “Mono Pause” (also conveniently the name of a Lao dish of chicken, coconut and banana leaves). The band plays interpretations of catchy Southeast Asian pop, disco and traditional music and also writes their own songs in a similar style. Band members Mark Gergis and his brother Erik have traveled extensively throughout the region and were inspired by nightclub bands there and the tapes they made of shortwave broadcasts, sometimes basing a song around a 30-second snippet interrupted by static from one of these tapes without any knowledge of the identity of the original performer.

Read the complete article at The Fanzine.

Chalmers Johnson: “Things that can’t go on forever, don’t.”

Originally published in Clamor Magazine, Spring 2004.

Chalmers Johnson is a professor emeritus of political science from UC San Diego and president of the Japan Policy Research Institute. He served in the Navy during the Korean war and crossed the Pacific Ocean twice on a tiny boat which was prone to rolling and had a top speed of 10 knots. After a lifetime as a supporter of Cold War foreign policy, Johnson’s most recent books Blowback (2000) and Sorrows of Empire (2004) present thorough criticisms of the United States’ shift toward empire building and its repercussions of ongoing warfare and the loss of civil liberties.

In 1967 Johnson was recruited by CIA director Richard Helms to work as a consultant for the agency. At the time, Johnson was a professor of political science at UC Berkeley defending the Vietnam War to a campus that was revolting against it. “The best reason to keep national intelligence estimates a secret, I once told my wife, was their utter banality. Perhaps they were so highly classified because it would have been embarrassing to have it known that such conventional journalism passed for strategic thought in the Oval Office.”

Read the complete interview at Clamor Magazine archives. Clamor, like all too many other magazines, has passed into the great beyond.