Author Interview – Rocco Sweetheart Johnson

by Lane Chasek

 
 

Jokes Review’s new book series, Egregious Pulp, is an egregious, pulpy, NC-17 imprint that harkens back to the days when genre fiction and other forms of “low-class” literature weren’t as esteemed as they are today. This was a time when sci-fi and detective novels were printed on cheap pulp-fiber paper (hence the term “pulp fiction”), and whenever readers were done reading said novels, they’d either burn them in order to cook dinner (hence the term “pot boiler”) or wipe their asses with Chapter 7. 

Rocco Sweetheart Johnson’s Meth Pirate Town is the first title in this brave new series. Meth Pirate Town follows the debauched story of Frank, a one-eyed, multiply terminally-ill drug-, porn-, and slum-lord, and a cast of students, prostitutes, and cops who intersect with Frank’s attempts to build an empire. It’s a novel about meth labs, porn production, affordable housing, and the intricate financial landscape of the sex-work industry. I got in touch with Johnson via email and wound up with the following interview.

Lane Chasek: Well, let’s start things off personally. How did you get from the womb to where you are right now?

Rocco Johnson: I’ve been stomping around the urban wastelands of greater Los Angeles for most of my life. That’s how it started and probably how it’s gonna end.

The first word I thought of when reading Meth Pirate Town was “Dickensian.” Or maybe Tom Wolfe with more drug use. Who would you say your influences are? Am I close with Wolfe?

Yeah, Wolfe is on point. It’s hard to complain about a book like The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. I like anything with a sense of mania or stylized enthusiasm. Plus an unusual cast of characters.

Here are a few names. Alejandro Jodorowsky, Donald Barthelme, Eve Babitz, François Rabelais, John Waters, Bukowski, Palahniuk, Kōbō Abe, Philip K Dick.

I understand this is your first novel, but I’m always interested in learning about the process behind the novel. Was there a draft before this one? Was this the offshoot of a different project? Or was this more of a rapid-fire first-go-around situation? Really, what’s your process for writing a narrative like this?

I wrote this by hand in a notebook. Using different colored pens. When you flip through it, it’s a crazy, multi-colored mess. I have many notebooks like this. Meth Pirate Town is the first full novel I’ve transcribed from the notebooks, but I’ve probably got a few other novels in there. Definitely a lot of rants, screeds, scribbles, and thoughts.

The protagonist, Frank, uses lube that’s a byproduct of crystal meth production, which is an idea I don’t think Breaking Bad ever touched on. Where did this idea come from?

The book was partly inspired by my time living in an old apartment building where my neighbors on the other side of my bedroom wall, I’m pretty sure, had a meth lab. And I had some reasons to believe my landlord was in on it. So my roommates and I talked about meth a lot. It was a wild time. I imagine “meth lab lube” must have come up as a funny idea at some point. And I must have written it down.

I did watch Breaking Bad, by the way, but not till long after I’d written Meth Pirate Town. All the meth references I have came from my time living in that dumpy apartment.

I understand you currently live in Los Angeles. But as I was reading Meth Pirate Town, I couldn’t help but think of all the similar run-down neighborhoods I’ve encountered in cities like St. Louis and Detroit. It had a real Rust Belt flavor. Did you construct the setting for your novel with a specific slum in mind, or would you say you drew inspiration from a more abstract, Platonic ideal known as “slum”? What does “slum” mean to you?

The town in the book is a mishmash of places I’ve lived or visited–mostly in California but also some other places. There are a couple of clues in the book about where things took place. Somebody really familiar with California cities could probably piece together the geography.

I love words like gutter and trash. Filth. Dirt. Shit. And slum of course. I haven’t thought about it much beyond that.

Porn is a recurring motif in Meth Pirate Town, and this is one of those rare novels that touches on the artistic and cultural merits of porn as a genre. Tell me your thoughts on pornography.

Frank, the main character in the novel, is just really into porn. It’s really deeply ingrained in who he is as a person. He sees everything in the world as something to turn into a porn film. This is a fantastic proclivity for him to have as a character because it makes everything he does kind of goofy and absurd.

The book could be read as a commentary on the dark side of the porn industry. There’s definitely an undercurrent of that. The main female character ends up where she is (as Frank’s muse and secretary) because she’s had a really hard and traumatic life. Surely working for Frank wouldn’t have been her dream job before, for example, she got addicted to meth. But she’s also a champion and fully enjoys her life. So in a sense there’s a meta-commentary that, even despite the horrors of the particular industry you work in, there’s still a lot of enjoyment to be had from life. 

There is quite a lot left to explore in the genre of porn literature. Aside from the book Blue Movie by Terry Southern, there aren’t too many porn-centric books that are really worth reading. My favorite book vaguely in this genre is One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding by Robert Grover. Hilarious book with a really memorable narrator. But–like most great books–it doesn’t totally lean into the porn elements enough to truly be in the porn genre.

While on the subject of porn: I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who watches lesbian porn. Not even lesbians. Yet everyone seems to agree that lesbian porn is popular. Why is that, do you think? 

OK, for this question I had to cheat. I had to stop and read some articles to find out. The experts say that women enjoy lesbian porn because it centers female pleasure and doesn’t just show women from the perspective of the male gaze. 

And, to pull a quote from the Atlantic, men like lesbian porn because “men are most aroused by visual cues that emphasize youth and downplay drama and emotional complexity. … The only thing better than one nubile, personality-free woman is two of them.”

Fascinating. 

Also I’m down for some lesbian porn and so is Frank, so that makes two of us.

What does the future hold for Rocco Sweetheart Johnson? Any new novels on the horizon? Maybe a short story collection?

I hope to have a story collection finished soon. I’m also getting more into filmmaking and am working on a few (nonpornographic) short films. 

Lane Chasek (@LChasek) is the author of the nonfiction book Hugo Ball and the Fate of the Universe, the poetry/prose collection A Cat is not a Dog, and two forthcoming chapbooks, Dad During Deer Season and this is why I can't have nice things. Lane's current pride and joy is an essay he published in Hobart about Lola Bunny and the latest Space Jam movie.

Interview with Brian Duncan, Jokes Review's New Fiction Editor

 
 

JOKES: Can you tell us about your background?

BRIAN DUNCAN: I grew up in the central valley of California, in a town near Merced that most people haven’t heard of named Atwater. It’s a small town, but it continues to have a big influence on my life and ideas. It’s a stop along the truckers’ Highway 99; a hot plot of dirt and suburban homes and lakes crisscrossed by asphalt, canals and railroad tracks. A local airbase, Atwater Air Force Base, was shuttered there in the early nineties, and at least half the town, all military people, moved away. Opportunists swooped in to fill the void in the local economy, in one case promoting the vision of an “Atwater Theme Park.” I still remember passing the small storefront they’d set up—it had TVs in the window playing rollercoaster footage nonstop. After the city’s checks had been cashed, they skipped town of course.

This theme of mundane tragedy followed me through a pretty miserable three-year stint in high school in Utah, followed by much better times in Santa Cruz, then traveling around Mexico and Argentina and Chile, then San Francisco. While in SF, I earned a degree in Computer Science from SF State, much to the surprise of myself and my family, who always thought I would go into the arts. The truth is that I always loved computers as a hobby, and found the certainty and clarity of the discrete world very comforting. Also I wanted to know more and I didn’t think I had the discipline to study it on my own. This degree helped me move on from office jobs into programming jobs. I worked at the wild company that did tickets for Burning Man, among others. It paid the bills, but I still longed for a creative career, opportunities and community, so went back a few years later and got an MFA in Creative Writing, so there you go. During my time in that program, I served as the Associate Fiction Editor at Fourteen Hills, the grad student publication.

How was our experience as an editor at Fourteen Hills?

It was tough at times, exhausting, and we didn’t always agree—surprising, right? Still, I really enjoyed working at Fourteen Hills. It was eye-opening to see behind the curtain for the first time. I did novel things like reading the slush pile, sent acceptance and rejection letters, solicited work from emerging writers, talked to local bookstores, and led discussions with staff readers, many of them undergrads. I should also note that since it was part of the MFA program, the whole Fourteen Hills experience had a meta-quality to it; that is, I was working at a lit journal while also learning about how one works at a lit journal. In that framing, I did things that I probably wouldn’t normally do. For example, I read every short submission in its entirety even when I knew right away it wasn’t a good fit, just so I could practice putting into words why I thought so, using evidence from the submission to back up my opinions.

Overall, I got to experience first-hand how much hard work, dedication—and debate—goes into making a publication come together. It is a true cliché that putting together a lit journal is a labor of love.

Are there any common mistakes you’ve seen writers make? Or any advice you’d like to give to writers submitting to Jokes Review?

Advice

When in doubt, submit. In the past, I’ve sat on pieces I’ve written that weren’t “perfect” yet and watched as their relevance and potency slowly dwindled away. Don’t be like me. It would have been worth sharing those pieces with others. Nothing will ever be perfect and you will always change and grow. Phillip K. Dick often wrote very flat characters (gasp), but had amazing ideas that only grow in relevance to this day (see: Predictive Policing). I’m so glad I can read his stories because A. they were submitted in the first place and B. they were published.

Common Mistakes

The number one most common mistake I see are pieces that hinge on dramatic events, but the drama isn’t earned. Or, in other words, they hint that “feels” should be felt but deliver no feels. Examples: Someone is sobbing, or breaking stuff, or punching someone, and the reader feels nothing other than a generic sympathy toward the idea of Loss, for example. I would go so far as to say that this is a Great Blindspot, and that 9 out of 10 writers will need to actively study how to earn dramatic emotion rather than relying on intuition. My advice is to study how other authors do it. Describing an emotional reaction is just the tip of the iceberg and sometimes it’s not even necessary. In most cases, when reading, you will anticipate an emotion before it’s even described, because as an empathetic human being you understand how a specific someone would respond to a specific situation.

You recently moved from San Francisco to Sacramento. How was your experience living in SF? What do you like about living in Sacramento?

I came to SF fifteen or so years ago, for the same reasons as a lot of others have—to find a sanctuary from what I saw as an oppressive culture of puritanical, guilt-inducing patriarchy. SF to me represented the idea of safety, for example, when it came to how you formed your family and friends and represented yourself in the world. I longed for the idea of a place where people could just be who they were, out in public, without the culture hammering them down like the nail that sticks out. In many ways, I found it to be that, because it was and continues to be for so many people, because collective ideas are powerful.

It is of course not so clear-cut as all that in reality—there’s no escape in sight from what bell hooks called the “imperialist, white-supremacist, capitalist patriarchy.” Who you are allowed to be has large class, gender and racial components. Existing class divisions have only accelerated in recent years in SF.

Sacramento for me represents a fusion of my childhood in a hot, suburban Central Valley and my adulthood in San Francisco. In some ways feels like a return, and in other ways, like something completely new. I’ve regularly visited family and friends in Sac for years, so the shift from the Bay Area did not feel so abrupt. It’s relaxed here; live and let live. There’s great local businesses and cafes. You can camp out on a lawn with friends and watch the sun set and not worry about catching the last BART train home. It represents unexplored possibilities for me, music to find, creatives to meet. I found Jokes Review here, which I am thrilled about.

Do you have a favorite bookstore in SF or Sacramento?

Green Apple on Clement street will always have a place in my heart, of course, and I’ll visit whenever I’m in SF. So far in Sacramento, I’ve visited Capital Books the most. Three floors of books, LGBTQ friendly and local. They also have a roaming bookstore cat and a solid manga collection. I love any bookstore where it’s hard to leave because I want to live there. I value loving curation, endless possibilities, and being left alone to explore.

What are a few of your favorite authors?

Haruki Murakami
Toni Morrison
Ursula K. LeGuin
William Styron (Sophie’s Choice)
Chinua Achebe
George Saunders (whom everyone recommended to me after reading my work)
Ted Chiang

If there’s one book you’d recommend, what would it be? 

This is so difficult to answer! I’ll pick the latest book that has taken up residence in my soul: Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo. It’s a polyphonic trip into purgatory and an examination of how a single person’s power can shape the world and create a sort of Hell others are trapped in—and so much more. So relevant in the days of Musk and Bezos. Also, it was also a big inspiration to a young Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who, in the forward of a newer edition, related how his author friend threw the book down in front of him one day and said “Lea esa vaina, carajo, para que aprenda!” (rough translation: Read that shit, for fuck’s sake, and learn!).

Follow Brian on Twitter or Instagram @solfugit.

Author Interview – Gabe Congdon

 
 

Gabe Congdon has a blast writing. You can tell that immediately. There are many great qualities to Congdon’s work, but the fact that his zest for life leaps off every sentence makes everything else icing on the cake. So even though I’ve never been a massive fan of the Renaissance, I knew Gabe would make it something special. And, oh my god, did he not disappoint.

How to Renaissance, Gabe Congdon’s new book released by Jokes Review, is for anyone—literally anyone—who appreciates the facts that life is awesome and humanity is weird. Because that’s what you get from Congdon on a sentence-by-sentence basis: a zest for life and a lot of weirdos—mostly painters, priests, and sculptors, along with a few warlords and poets.

Below is my interview with Gabe Congdon, where we discuss his new book, his unique writing style, and the creative life. To read more from Gabe, check out his story “Sandcastle,” published in the inaugural issue of Jokes Review.

Peter Clarke: When did you first develop a love of the Renaissance?

Gabe Congdon: Before I answer this question, let me just say real quick, that Joke’s Review is the shit. Their last issue was a manifesto issue and their current issues is a flash fiction one. Who else is doing that? They have a book series about non-fiction artistic movements and individuals. But most importantly they have style. As Sontag says, you gotta have style and JR does. Writers all across this green and brown world, all writers conform to the JR style. That’s what’s it's about; word is bond.

Anyway, It’s kind of how I put it in the work. I read a pop history book called The Feud That Sparked the Renaissance. All these names I knew about came alive. People used to be real characters back then. They were not only living gnarly lives, they were creating these pictures of incredible clarity. In an essay by the Late Great John Berger, Berg says we like the Ren because we like it’s clarity. It’s the motif that makes this epoch stunning in its bright harmony.

Tell us about your inspiration to write How to Renaissance.

I’d been toying with the idea but after two or three failures I was ready to set it aside. Didactic non-fic aint my bag, man. Whenever I write fiction, my art history shit waltzes in without much effort. So this project really took me out of my wheelhouse. But then Pete Clarke said that he was doing a book series about artistic movements, and I thought, well, at least I have someplace to send this thing.

You say upfront in the book that you avoided certain parts of the Renaissance—such as the Medici and the northern Renaissance. How did you decide what to focus on in the book?

Well, when I would tell people about the project they would ask, “Which part” and I’d say “the whole thing,” and they’d say, “Huh, it’s just a big era.” And I’d say, “fuck you man.” But yeah, what came out was what came out. I cut lots of sections cause they wouldn’t snuff. The book was meant to be an expressionistic personal view rather than a be-all account.

Who’s your favorite Renaissance artist?

Tough one. Obviously Michelangelo is my guy. I admire his drive. He knew what he was about and he focused on the work. When he wasn’t sculpting or painting or architecting, he’d go home and write poetry about God. And later, Berlioz would put music to some of them poems, and some of them tunes are alright. Besides that, I’d say Caravaggio (like all of us Cormac McCarthy reading dudes) even if he is from the Baroque.

You’ve mentioned how the Renaissance helped to reaffirm optimism in humanity, something that seems to be lacking today. Do you think we’ll ever again have a sense of widespread optimism? Can art help with that?

As my friends and I say, that’s a tough Hillary Duff (hehe, Duff. Just like the Simpsons beer. I hadn’t connected those two before). What the what was, was the plague. The 14th century was one nightmare after another, but the survivors of the plague saw life in a way that the earlier ages couldn’t have seen. Their optimism is one of the remarkable characteristics of the time. So, would it take such devastation to bring about another such flowering? Perhaps. That’s what Zizek says. Ziz says, “Don’t worry, something bad will happen.” Me I don’t know. I doubt it. Thing being, that people spend a lot of time with art. When people binge, they bask. They’re vegging out on art. Obviously fiction matters. We can take hope from that.

As a writer, you have a really unique style—a goofiness and irreverence that’s entirely your own. It seems like you’re having fun no matter what you’re writing about. How did you develop this voice and style?

Whoever came up with this question, thank you. That’s very kind to say. The Simpsons were big for me. I watched a lot of sitcoms as a tadpole. In college, my creative writing teacher gave me Donald Barthelme and that was big. I didn’t know such things could be made. Let me tell’ya, I cracked open Snow White the other day. I didn’t know shit about lit back when, now I know stuff, and I thought maybe Donald might’ve shrunk. He has not. That book’s like sixty years old and it’s still fresh zane. Barthelme stays modern the way Picasso does.

Besides that, writing comedy almost appears easy because what we’re expecting is a laugh. We’ve earned our direct deposit if someone chortles. All you philosophy and dramatists, us of comedy look on you and ponder, how so you know when to start the next scene? Least that’s what I think. For comedy, we’re all the same when we laugh. No walls are standing. No us and they, no language barrier. Just gut wind.

Beyond writing, you’ve mentioned previously that you also act and make films. Tell us about your film projects.

I did some commercial acting as well as some independent films. It was mostly FX work; I make a good monster. I ditched that life, I didn’t really like the work. For a time my friends and I had a web-series called &@. It was tremendous fun. The best lesson learned was that anything was possible. No matter how crazy a line might be, it could be represented somehow. It disassembled because it was a lot of thankless work and we all grew interested in our own projects. However, the &@ crew has got together recently, we’re putting on a play of a Seinfeld episode in a living room. It’s super fun.

What’s your take on the term “Renaissance man”? Given your diverse creative interests, do you think it’s something to strive to be?

I’m a Sontag guy. Sontag says, if you like an art you should like all the arts. I subscribe. If I were a sculptor, I would want the playwright to look at my work. Same for everything. So I’ve tried to. It’s one part respect and one part thievery. You bet your ass I steal that shit. All I have to do is change some stuff and I’m in the clear. Like the Feud thing, I’ve yet to get a cease and desist. But seriously, I do believe in openness. Being aesthetically available. I pick up books I think I won’t like and prove myself wrong, (Let’s get a hell yeah for Middlemarch) I sat through a four hour John Cage performance and loved every second. I don’t want to discriminate about anything. That’s my philosophy. And both Sontag and I have met people who were doing incredible work and didn’t know who Proust was. That was a lesson for me to learn, I foam at the mouth much less now.

What projects are you working on now? Do you have any more books, stories, or films in the works?

Honestly, no. This Renaissance ting hugged me for a few years. Well, I guess this would’ve been the time to talk about the whole Seinfeld thing. Anyway, what I’ve been doing lately is poetry. For me, if I was talking to a writer, and say they wrote non-fic, and even got picked up by a mag or J, and I’m like, hey nice, that’s big game, then they say, but recently I’ve been writing poetry, I always thought, that’s a baaaadd sign. (Why? Game respect game and writing poetry is the toughest of the four.) Now I’m doin it and it feels incredibly tremulous. But anyway, I don’t know. I don’t want to give up on short stories either. Short stories are the shit. They’re what divides a soft reader from a true book rat. Ya say, you read short stories? and they’re like, no, and then it’s like, well fuck off then.

Author Interview - Darlene Eliot

 
 

“Wait… What did I just read?”

This was my first thought after reading “The Stand-In,” a work of flash fiction by Darlene Eliot, which appears in the recent issue of Jokes Review. In general, I don’t particularly care what a story is about so long as the voice and the style are strong enough or unique in some way. Eliot’s story passed this test easily. I loved the humorous rage that came through on every line. But still—what was this story?

Then it struck me: it was a ghost story—obviously! But it wasn’t a typical ghost story. It subverted genre expectations in a strange and goofy way, and all to very humorous effect.

As it turns out, this is a trademark of Eliot’s work: playing with various genres elements to create something new. She describes her stories as “suburban tales,” and she has a wide range of artistic influences that have helped shape her particular style.

Here is our interview with Darlene Eliot, where we discuss her writing style, her influences, and more:

Peter Clarke: Jokes Review gets shockingly few submissions from people who live in the San Francisco Bay Area, even though we’re based here. It’s hard to escape the feeling that the Bay Area’s time as a literary hub might be over. What’s your experience being a Bay Area writer? Do you think it will ever again be known as a literary hub?  

Darlene Eliot: I’m a Southern California transplant who moved to the Bay Area just before the pandemic. Timing is everything, isn’t it? I’ve always romanticized the Bay Area, admired its literary history, its beauty, the ever-changing weather, and its ability to reinvent itself. With everything that’s occurred in recent years, another reinvention is about to happen, literary scene included. I’m excited to see it happen.

How would you describe your writing style?

My short stories are dark around the edges, sometimes speculative, sometimes dark-humored, sometimes creepy. Most are suburban tales with elements of dread, but I like to throw in some sweetness too because, contrary to popular belief, it still exists in the world.

You mention in your bio that you're inspired by film editors and composers. Can you explain how film editors and composers inspire you? Are there any particular film editors or composers you have in mind as inspirations?

I admire them because they join projects already in motion and have to revise things on the daily. It’s a huge challenge, along with the ups and downs of collaboration. I’m inspired by their ability to work in service of someone else’s vision. I doubt there are any egomaniacs in film editing especially because, when their work is at its best, it’s invisible.

My favorite film editors, past and present, are Thelma Schoonmaker, Dede Allen, Sally Menke, and Walter Murch. Sometimes I put their films on mute, watch how they cut the scenes, and think about how that applies to storytelling on the page. How would this sequence work better if I tried it a different way? The same with music in a scene. How does it enhance or subvert what’s happening between characters?

My favorite composers are Bernard Herrmann, Terence Blanchard, Michael Giacchino, Danny Elfman, Alexandre Desplat, Hans Zimmer, and of course, John Williams. I listen to their music while writing and sometimes to silence my inner critic. Music really does soothe the savage beast.

You’ve said in the past that you're a fan of cross-pollination between genres. What do you like about mixing genres? Do you have a favorite genre combo? Or any favorite writers who play with multiple genres?

I’m fascinated by hybrid writing and incorporating other forms to tell a story. It can be charts, ads, recipes, portions of poems, novels-in-flash, fictional obituaries. Gwendolyn Kiste’s “Sister Glitter Blood” gives the reader instructions on how to play a haunted board game. I love it when writers take a familiar premise, toss it in the air, reconfigure it, then take you on a ride you don’t expect.  

Your story “The Stand-In” is possibly the strangest ghost story I've ever read, totally subverting my expectations about how ghosts behave and interact with the world. What inspired this story and its unusual premise?

The story was inspired by a “what if” conversation with my partner. We were talking about movie depictions of the afterlife and people wanting departed loved ones to send them a sign. He said, if that was possible, he would want me to do it. I felt the opposite and said it would freak me out if he tried to communicate from the afterlife. He looked sad. It was only for a split second, but his reaction caught me off guard, especially because he knows how jumpy I am. I thought about it days later and also thought about the waiting room scene in “Beetlejuice,” which makes both of us laugh. I imagined the camera moving past the counter and into the back office and thought, What’s going on back here? and the story emerged.

What writers have influenced you the most? What are some specific ways you've been influenced by other writers (perhaps in terms of style, voice, writing routine...)?

Ray Bradbury, Shirley Jackson, Helen Oyeyemi, Neil Gaiman, and Sarah Hall.  Ray Bradbury and Neil Gaiman acknowledge the speculative darkness, but there is humor and playfulness mixed in with the menace and struggle. Shirley Jackson and Helen Oyeyemi introduce dread and haunted pasts into everyday circumstance. Sarah Hall’s stories of transformation have unexpected sensory details that make you squirm. All of them have mastered “things are not what they seem” and taken it a step further. 

Who’s an underrated modern novelist that you think more people should read?

Savage satirist Dawn Powell. When Fran Lebowitz, with a collection of over 10,000 books, recommends an author, you listen.

What is the last great short story you read?

It’s hard to narrow it down. There are three that come to mind. “On the Sudden Appearance of Many Large Invisible Floating Spikes” by Aidan O’Brien,  “Oreo Arroyo” by Vanessa Hua, and one I return to often because it reminds me of my family background and also feels like a metaphor for writing, “Fern Gully” by Jonathan Escoffery. Completely different styles. All thought-provoking and wonderful. 

What projects are you working on now?

A collection of short stories, notes for a novella, and trying not to be so jumpy. 

For more about Darlene, visit DarleneEliot.com and follow her on Twitter @deliotwriter.

 
 
 
,

Stupid Lucifer! - Interview with Demon Wrangler

,
Demon Wrangler Image.jpg 
It's like — “if the guy that built Salvation Mountain fronted Iggy & The Stooges.”

Sacramento-based musician Sam Eliot is known for his beautifully-crafted lyrics. He writes lines with the delicacy and insight of Leonard Cohen, the clever irony of Lou Reed. Here’s a typical Sam Eliot line, from his 2012 album, Monte Sereno:

 

“My love is as strong as the bars on the window
of a 24-hour liquor and lotto,
and I can let people in,
but it all depends on what exactly I’ve got
and what exactly you’re needin’.”

But this all changed with his latest project, a new band called Demon Wrangler.

“Demon Wrangler is not about songwriting at all,” he told me. “The songs are intended to be kind of stupid.”

This new project is such a departure from Sam’s previous work that you have to wonder if it’s a joke. It turns out, it is. But also, it’s not.

To get the full story behind the new band, I interviewed Sam via FaceTime as he walked around downtown Sacramento. The interview is below, lightly edited. But first, take a moment to enjoy Stupid Lucifer!

 
 

PETER CLARKE: The songs are all Christian. Is Demon Wrangler making fun of Christian music?

SAM ELIOT: That’s all in the eye of the observer. Even making it, there’s a part of me that’s like, this is fucking hysterical, and then there’s a part of me that is just dead serious about it. … This whole project just started vomiting out of me and I don’t really know what to make of it myself. I don’t know where the humor ends and the seriousness begins.

I grew up really religious, and it feels like a way to explore my own roots. … Outside of any Christian boundaries, the underlying thing behind a lot of the songs is a hyper contrast of forces—and championing the forces of light rather than the forces of dark.  

What initially inspired it? Did it start as a song that grew into album? And was it a joke that then became more serious? Or the other way around?

I was at the studio working on a song for one of my solo records. I had Mike Farrell in there laying down some guitar on it. And he had to go to rehearse with his other band, Th’ Losin Streaks, so he left. I was starting to break everything down and pack up to go home. But we had gotten this really great guitar sound. So I was like, I’m going to spend the next hour trying to make a song really fast. Just as an exercise. And I did that. I just laid down this crazy-ass drum beat, laid down this crazy-ass guitar, and then I grabbed the vocal mic and pressed play. I didn’t have anything written. I just started screaming into the mic, like, nonsense. And that was Stupid Lucifer. I recorded Stupid Lucifer in twenty minutes—from top to bottom and mixed it.

I remembered I finished it and was like, “What is this? What the fuck is this?” And as I was sitting there, everything just started clicking in my head. And I was just like, it’s as if Iggy Pop got really into Jesus but still did heroin. It’s this whole clashing thing. Like, people that are religious are going to hate this. And people that aren’t religious are going to hate this. And I was just like, “This is the best thing I’ve ever made.”

For three days after that, I couldn’t sleep. I was having this manic awakening. I just started getting force fed everything I needed to do for this Demon Wrangler thing. I went into the studio the next day and recorded two more songs just like that. 

It’s like the David Lynch thing: Creativity can be like fishing and you’re going for these big fish. And every once in a while you land a fish and you’re like, fuck, what kind of fish is this? It came out of you but it’s almost alien to you at the same time. That’s how the Demon Wrangler thing felt initially, where I’m getting a serious download from the universe.   

So you played all the instruments and everything?

Yeah.

 
Demon Wrangler Sam Eliot Interview.png
 

It’s funny because it doesn’t sound at all like you, but then again it’s like, this is definitely Sam. You haven’t tapped into this before, but it’s purely you.

It feels like I tapped into a deep unconscious part of the mind. And deep down you’re afraid of God; you’re afraid that all these wackado Christians are actually right and there are cosmic forces at play. And I believe that to a certain extent.

It’s definitely not a goof on people of faith of any kind. That’s definitely not my intention. More than anything my intention is to talk about taboo things. In our culture, religion is not fuckin’ Thanksgiving dinner conversation. It’s weird that at this point in history, you can talk about your pussy anywhere, but, dude, the punk rock boundary is talking about religion and faith and spirituality. … And religion undergirds our entire social fabric, so it’s like, gotta talk about this shit in a way that’s honest.

Your music has always done the Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan thing where you reference the Old Testament symbology. And this is almost like your New Testament symbology moment. Is that a fair observation?

I think it’s more explicitly about that… This whole first record, I’m trying to present some kind of cosmology that uses the language of religion in a broad sense but isn’t— I don’t know. I thought about shopping this whole thing as a kind of Christian rock band, but I felt that was kind of disingenuous.

Is Demon Wrangler now a band? Or is it a side project of Sam Eliot?

It’s as much a band as there can be a band in 2020, when you can’t play shows. … It is going to be something I’d like to do as a live band. … And at this point I don’t even know if Sam Eliot is a spinoff of Demon Wrangler. I don’t even know anymore.  

The Demon Wrangler project almost begs for an explanation in the sense that… Your first instinct is to ask: What the fuck is this? Is this a Christian record? Is this a Satanic record? Is this a mistake like someone pulled a Tommy Wiseau? Like they tried to make the most perfect record of all time, but then it was so bad that it’s good? It’s hard to tell. But that’s the beauty of it.

Yeah, in my mind, when this all started hitting me, this was like—if the guy that built Salvation Mountain fronted Iggy & The Stooges. Or like, you know, the worship leader at your Christian megachurch decided to eat a strip of acid two hours before service.

 
 

Follow Demon Wrangler on Spotify and Bandcamp. You can also follow Sam’s other musical ventures, Sam Eliot and Duke Chevalier.

Peter Clarke is the editor-in-chief of Jokes Review. He’s the author of the comic novels Politicians Are Superheroes and The Singularity Survival Guide. Follow him on Twitter @HeyPeterClarke.

Author Interview – Brianna Ferguson

 

by Peter Clarke

brianna+eff+author+interview.jpg
 

“On the very day he met Jenny, Sam’s penis fell off. For weeks, it had been hanging by a thread of rotting zombie flesh, but he hadn’t found the courage to yank it the rest of the way off.”

These were the first two sentences I ever read by Canadian fiction writer and poet Brianna Ferguson. It caught my attention, to say the least. Before I even finished the first page of this story, I sent it over to our fiction editor, Mark Dwyer, alerting him that we were going to publish this story.  

Brianna often grabs the reader with something shocking or even unsettling. But it’s clear she’s not just writing for the sake of cheap shock value. Her stories include thoughtful passages, clever dialogue, practical examinations of life’s basic struggles—hallmarks of great fiction. It’s the combination of all these elements, plus the shock value, that makes Brianna such a pleasure to read.

Since publishing Zombie Mine in the summer 2017 issue of Jokes Review, we’ve published three other stories and one poetry collection by Brianna, making her our most frequent contributor.

To find out more about her unique style, here is our author interview with Brianna Ferguson:

PETER CLARKE: Your stories are always strange, unexpected, sometimes even a little unsettling. How would you describe your style? Do you associate your writing with any particular genre or movement?

BRIANNA FERGUSON: I generally start out with a “what if this happened to someone” kind of idea, and I’ll take it from there. Usually, my “what-ifs” are like “what if you suddenly had glass powers and that somehow tied into the inevitable, lonely death of the whole planet,” but yeah, usually it starts out with something like that and just sort of takes off.

I really like books like Warm Bodies where the whole zombie genre is kind of played with and moulded into a social commentary. I love when people take old monster stories and use them to say something about our society as a whole. I haven’t read much Asimov, but I’ve seen a lot of movies based on his work, where robots are used as a kind of modern Pinocchio to discuss what counts as a human life or a valuable life especially. That’s a big theme in a lot of my writing—people or humanoids being judged simply because of the bodies they were born into.

What writers have influenced you the most? If you could get coffee with any writer currently living, who would it be?

Some of the less-alive authors I absolutely love would be Virginia Woolf, JD Salinger, and Charles Bukowski. All three of them really opened my eyes to what was possible in poetry and prose.

I adore Miranda July and would happily get coffee with her any old day of the week. Same goes for Cat Cohen, Lionel Shriver, and Colin Barrett. We Need to Talk About Kevin has been my favourite novel for about a decade now, and I’ve read July’s The First Bad Man and No One Belongs Here More Than You so many times I’ve had to get replacement copies. 

Do you remember the first story you wrote?

It was about a gal on a train who thinks she’s headed off to a spa for pregnant women, but she’s actually lost her mind after discovering she couldn’t have kids. It was my first foray into exploring through literature the fact that I myself can’t have kids. At the time I thought it was pretty mind-bending, but I think I’d die if it ever resurfaced long enough for a human being other than myself to read it.

Do you have any writing rituals?

I basically always have a coffee going, so definitely some writing and coffee overlap from time to time, but no. Pretty much I go for a walk, and as soon as I’m away from my computer or any sort of modern conveniences, I’ll get ideas and have to rush home and get them down. That’s pretty much the process. I have to be a little afraid I’m going to lose whatever little shred of creativity my brain decided to cough up. Fear’s a fabulous motivator for me.

It seems like a lot of writers grew up in small towns. You and I both have that in common. Do you think there’s anything about rural life that draws people to become writers? Are there any advantages to being a writer in a small town?

I think that any time the brain really gets to stagnate is good for creativity. I’ve worked a lot of boring office jobs where I just sat around all day, and my god, if boredom of that level doesn’t force the brain into new, creative places just to stay alive, nothing will.

It’s nice to have time to myself to write and to think my own thoughts, but no, I think I wrote the same amount no matter where I’ve lived. It’s not about the place, after all. Bukowski said something really great about how if you’re going to write, you’re going to write, no matter what. Too many people get too bent out of shape buying the right desk or sequestering themself in the right way, and it’s really not about that. It’s about being awake and alert and forming ideas and opinions and writing those ideas and opinions down whenever you can. 

As a teacher, what are your thoughts on the next generation of readers and writers? Are kids still drawn to books, to the writer life? 

I definitely had a handful of stand-out readers and writers in every class, but I couldn’t say how similar or different that is to other generations. There were definitely those few students whose eyes lit up whenever I started a new literary unit of some kind, and if they can hold onto that spark of excitement, we’re in good hands. But who knows. I’d barely started to consider writing when I was in high school. It was just something I did sometimes. Mostly I wanted to be an actress or a trophy wife.

What projects are you working on now?

I’m in grad school right now, and for my Master’s thesis I’m working on a novel about a high school student who finds out she’s intersex. I’m also finishing a poetry manuscript I’ve been working on for like five years, and another one I’ve been working on for about a month. The first one’s about nihilism and beer and trying to make sense of existence without a spiritual framework. The second one’s basically just endless confessions, which is super purgative and super fun. I haven’t had a book published yet, but then, I haven’t tried yet, so yeah, I’m hoping all three get out there in the world pretty soon. 

Works by Brianna published in Jokes Review:

For more about Brianna, visit Briannaferguson.ca or follow her on Twitter @brianna_eff.

,

What's the Future of Sound Poetry?

,

As the author of “Hugo Ball and the Fate of the Universe: Adventures in Sound Poetry,” Lane Chasek is an expert in all things sound poetry. Chasek’s book goes into detail exploring the history of sound poetry and bringing the unique art form up to the present moment.

In my recent interview with Chasek, I was curious about his thoughts on the future of sound poetry. Below is a selection from that interview, where Chasek discusses this question.

- Peter Clarke

Do you think sound poetry has a future as a poetic form?

Lane Chasek: Sound poetry will be around forever, I think, but it probably won’t gain popularity anytime soon. In its purest form it just doesn’t appeal to a mass audience. It’s always been a niche genre, but I don’t mind. There’s something special about discovering a writer or performer like Jaap Blonk and only one or two of your friends really “get” what he’s doing. You can share that forever.

However, even if sound poetry isn’t popular in its own right, its children certainly are. And by children, I mean the ways in which sound poetry has influenced music. Scat singing, for example. Even if someone doesn’t know about sound poetry, they’re probably familiar with scat singing, whether it’s Mel Torme or Scatman John. But let’s face it, even jazz has become pretty niche.

I think where we’re really seeing sound poetry’s lasting effects is in the newer generation of rappers, especially the ones who get labelled as “mumble” rappers. Which isn’t a fair label. “Mumble” implies that their style is lazy just because it’s occasionally nonsensical. If there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that nonsense can be an artform. When someone complains that an artist like Lil Uzi Vert doesn’t use complex, sprawling rhyme schemes like Pharoahe Monch, I can’t help but laugh. It’s like comparing Hugo Ball to Alexander Pope. They’re different artists, they have entirely different goals. A lot of this newer music focuses on mood and the sonic experience more than the lyrics themselves. This isn’t the devolution of rap — it’s proof that the spirit of the first major sound poets is alive and well in the 21st century.