Don Juan's Reckless Daughter

Possibly one of the most incredibly moving & beautiful sequences ever to end a film.

Oh darlings!

I don't know what to say. I want to say beautiful things but I have no mind for them anymore. I want to give the blood of my womb and the sweat of my brow and the jointwork of my fingers to something, but I simply cannot fathom how this (livejournal) audience receives anything I ever say anymore.

In short, I believe you are either too much in love with me or you are too disgusted with me to ever ever ever say anything to me every again.

You know how every second of your existence is swallowed up either by self-doubt or by a too-finely-tuned sense of irony? Or by an all-too-objective distance from Self, Sense, Vocation?

(Yes I do know, what do you mean?)

I mean: I want to say beautiful things but I have no audience for them anymore. And anyway, who wants to hear about somebody who is "satisfied," or "happy" with their place in life; who among you wants to know of joy or accomplishment or what rewards come from concerted effort?

Very few, I suspect. So then I don't know what to tell you, because I can never ever ever speak of my discontents. I can't talk about work (coworkers are reading!), I can't talk about love (lover is reading!), I can't talk about friends (friends are reading!), I can't talk about writing (other writers are reading!) in any true fashion.

So, simply, maybe this is heading towards a friends-only forum??? Which is altogether besides the point, because the readers I write for are the ones who aren't even my friends to begin with.

But to change things/minds/moments altogether: and to speak of those things we cannot name!

1) I am in the most passionate love/hate relationship with my job right now. Everything is changing, nothing is staying the same. Just keep checking our website for the latest updates. Most of which contain the unspoken statement: "GOOD FUCKING LUCK GETTING A STUDENT LOAN HAHAHAH SUCKERS!!!"

I am altogether always all for change, which is coming fast and furious and without mercy. I am also altogether always for the kids I meet here, the kids who drop by my office to shake my hand and compliment me on my music and eat my candy and sit in my chairs and talk to me about everywhere they've ever been, the places they lived before they lived here: Kansas City, Dubai, Iraq, Baltimore, Iceland, Colombia, Oxnard. If you said "hey carrie where do you want to go when you die and go to heaven," I'd say film school, and I'd say this school for sure. I love love love this place but I hate how hard it is for these kids to get here. But good lord above do they make it worth my time when they're here.

What am I obsessed with right now? Oh lord, you know, the usual:

LOST
Tumblr
Raymi
Dan Simmons
Salad
Not eating carbs
video games
Getting skinny (er)
Looking at pictures of hot dogs and mac n' cheese.

In exactly two days I will have reached my one year anniversary of blogging for LAist.

In that time, I have:

Interviewed Olivia Munn
Interviewed Junot Diaz
Received a free Nintendo DS
Gotten on the front page of Digg with a post about getting Facebook-hacked
Been entertained by a few other media job offers
Gotten a few free meals
Attended some wicked cool events
Pimped out my Sylvia Beach projects (Honor Student, Mitchbag, Mae Shi)
Met a lot of people
Made a lot of friends

Which overall is pretty good for a gig you don't get paid for. And yeah -- meeting Olivia Munn was definitely the coolest. I mean:




Hot & hilarious, you can't get better than that.

Although the "making friends" thing and the Nintendo DS are also pretty awesome.

HAHAHA JAY KAY! Friends are the best, hrmmrm.

No, you know what, I take that back: the best thing was being able to write about L.A., duh.

Hiiiiiii

I am embarking on Two Projects today:


Bombay Sliders with Garlic Curry Sauce (nom nom nom)

And reading good sci-fi





(I'm going to write a sci-fi novel, I've decided; I'll start out with some short stories and move on to the big stuff once I decide major questions like "aliens or no aliens?" "robots, ninjas, or pirates?" "maybe robots ninjas and pirates?", etc.

Friday night was fun; I even remember a lot of it.

Hey, you know who's the craziest fuckin mofo on the entire internet?

RYAN ADAMS!!!!!!

He has a blog, if you haven't heard.

I kind of love it. It's cheesy to like Ryan Adams, right? I think that's the latest. Well doesn't change the crazy. Here he is dying his hair:



I mean.

Okay now back to my regularly scheduled programming of being a totally cheesy stalkerish weirdo. And cooking dinner.

The Mae Shi Versus Orochon Ramen. All photos by Carrie Meathrell

So I think The Mae Shi are robots.

I know, I know – they look like your typical cute-as-shit L.A. indie band, but start talking about the Book of Revelations and cybernetic intelligence with them, and you’ll start to get this funny inhuman feeling. And they’re certainly not clunky, "Forbidden Planet!" style robots, but super smooth Cylons, like something out of a Dan Simmons novel: they look just like us. But the shit they’re saying? "Basically supercomputers are being built and we’re going to have to deal with that in the next ten years. It's a part of evolution. The singularity is already happening, is the argument." See? Robots. Totally.

The new album, Hlllyh, does nothing to dispel this alien sensation. It's both post-apocalyptic and post-modern, almost as if the sentient Moravec-machines from the sci-fi novel Ilium managed to download Black Flag, Klaus Schultze, OC punk rock, and Talmudic commentaries, devise a mathematical equation from it all, process it through ProTools and Melodyne, and then spit back out a hyperactive 21st century punk rock concept album about a vengeful Christ reaping the world for souls.

Aliens. They’re definitely aliens. Alien robot rock gods. They're playing Spaceland this Friday night at 8:30pm with PRE, if you want to study the evidence for yourself.

Point is, I needed to devise a Turing Test, and where better to do it than Orochon Ramen? This fabled ramen joint, located in a down-at-the-heels Japanese plaza in Little Tokyo, is home to the reputed Special #2, a bowl of fire so intense it has sent countless Yelpers mewling back to their cushy internet cuddle-fests. Orochon takes polaroids of any hapless soul who manages the heroic feat of finishing a bowl of this Liquid Death within thirty minutes.

The Mae Shi at Orochon Ramen

So I figured, if I could feed the Mae Shi the Special #2 and they survived -- nay, if they managed to continue making music despite the fires burning in their collective bellies, well -- they had to be robots. Or aliens. Sexy hard-rocking alien robots. Or whatever.

“A lot of [the album] is referencing Revelations,” drummer/singer/producer Brad Breeck explains. “That song 'Pwned' is like an apocryphal chapter – but it’s sci-fi, what could happen in the Bible if aliens got involved!” The record has a frantic energy to it that’s closer to the fire and brimstone of the Old Testament than the lambs and lovin’ of the New:

he said burn em up salt the earth
do it fast make it hurt
forget about salvation
they’ve got a new destination
he said melt the ice crush the stone
peel the skin grind the bone
here’s a new sensation it’s called destiny manifest
GET ‘EM OUT OF THOSE BODIES!!!!

Breeck, a twenty-something In N’ Out enthusiast who cites “Goonies” and Britney Spears as major inspirations, continues. “What would things be like if the Revelation happened in Genesis, before the covenant had been fulfilled and Christ had come? The apocalypse would have been just pure reaping of souls, it wouldn’t have been this like grand entrance that we’re told about in Revelation, it would have been like ‘I don’t give a shit, you’re done!’ That song’s about the cheapness of this creation, how little value it could have to a creator who could just make another Creation, like, 'you guys are just raw materials for my next project!'”

Jeff Byron and Jon Gray test the spicy waters of the Special #2

LAist: That sounds like a sci-fi novel to me.
Brad: The nature of the Old Testament god is kind of sci-fi.
Bill: That song in particular really captures the fury of that idea of the manic street preacher, the crazy guy on the street who’s preaching these apocalyptic messages, with this fury. And he’s totally wrong, but he gets your attention, though, makes you feel a certain way.
Jeff: Do souls die in the apocalypse too or just the world? I always thought of the apocalypse as just skeletons flying around, but maybe I’m getting that confused with Harry Potter.
The Mae Shi: You can upload souls to computers! There’s all kinds of stuff being done, sans mathematics, that leaps logic. Like Melodyne, direct note access. Basically supercomputers are being built and we’re going to have to deal with that in the next ten years.

Can you explain what this has to do with your new record?
Brad: Oh, it’s all about inventing a new language, speaking without vowels, cause we don’t need it, we can understand each other anyway, we’re just quickening the process. I actually just made that up right now.

They do that a lot – make shit up on the fly, toss jokes around like hacky sacks, pull off totally insane flights of rhetoric that can’t even remotely be represented on a page. It’s the kind of thing that happens in a family, albeit a family that seems to accumulate and slough off members at varying intervals.

Bill Gray (bass/vocals) and Jonathan Gray (vocals/keyboards) are cousins. Tim Byron, who co-founded the band, has left touring duties to pursue law school, although he will “parachute in once in a while to say "what's up?"’ He is brother to Jeff Byron (guitars/computers/vocals), who’s homies from way back in the day with Breeck and Ezra Buchla, their recently departed singer. (Corey Fogel, the craziest dude you’ll never meet, was also at one time a major player.) They’ve all “attended The University of Life at one time or another, among various other well respected institutions of higher learning,” although new drummer/photoshop expert Jacob Cooper confesses to attending “one month of community college, I think it was called LOL college.”

But the band now is already working on a follow-up to this year's Hlllyh, a new EP with the brand-new lineup that will hopefully lead into another record this summer. (Read Pitchfork's rave review of Hlllyh here.) They played an inhuman number of shows at this year's SXSW (eighteen in six days), and describe the Austin experience thusly: "SXSW is a city in Austin, where it's all music all the time. It’s a different dimension, where lots of scantily clad underage girls are puking all over up in the street and people are trying to sell you Dentyne Ice even though they’re giving it away for free other places. And the girls get mad at you cause they’re hotter than you. And lots of sun. See, normally Austin doesn’t have that much sun, but it comes out when you’re really hungover. Obviously we were drunk all the time."

You guys have had a lot of “staff changes” over the past year or so. How does that affect the writing process?
It’s actually very interesting. For the last record, there was one staff change. It’s really broken down into everybody does what they can, and a lot of times, if you feel up to it, you volunteer for a project, and if you’re not up to it, somebody else volunteers you for it. There are certain tasks for sure: if there’s a bass part that nobody really volunteers for, Bill has to play it. If there’s a guitar part that nobody volunteers for, Jeff plays it. It’s a default system. We have our default positions, but everybody does their own thing too – every record has been done very differently. This new EP, we had a formulated way of doing it, but it’s always going to be different every time.

This record seems to have a certain conceptual tightness and concrete theme, a calculated structure. Obviously you were thinking about how it should be listened to as a whole.
The shape of the record came after we had everything. We knew from the beginning that we were going to make a record with this theme, with this big narrative, but the actual shape of the record came after we had all the pieces together. Some were added really late in the game to try to fill in a hole – it was a long process of making puzzle pieces and putting them in place.

One of the interesting puzzle pieces is the track “Kingdom Come”, which is its own epic journey in the middle of two fantastic, accessible songs, “Run To Your Grave” and “I Get (Almost) Everything I Want.” You guys are known for these short intense songs, then you bring in this 12 minute long dance track, right in the middle of the record!
At some point we decided we wanted to make a dance track, then at some point it became about trying to trick people into making this really long journey away from the record. Or, if they don’t want to take the journey, they’re forced to get up and turn over the record. You think of a vinyl record, Abbey Road has side A and side B. It was just an idea.

When we first wrote that 12 minute long song, it was actually 23 minutes or whatever, and our record label made us shorten it, which is completely arbitrary and stupid -- I mean, if you’re really going to take the journey, and it’s that different from the rest of the record, you could make it five hours long – you either take the journey or not.

Now it’s the new iPod generation, people really do just listen to one song off a record, they listen to their music on shuffle – that’s something we just have to deal with. But, part of the art of the thing is the way the record is organized, people still do really care about that. But then again it’s also a challenge to us to think that people might be listening to things in a different way.

Bill Gray and Brad Breeck contemplate Orochon's famed ramen

The ramen arrives, in a hapless shuffle of orders and utensils. Jeff, who had specifically requested “spicy food” for our interview, had inquired if perhaps “Special #2” could be prepared even hotter – “like Special #5? We’ve eaten whole habaneros before,” he tells me conspiratorially. Twice.

The management declines to adjust the menu, and The Mae Shi must be content with #2. Jeff inspects the broth, which is almost maroon, and thick with chile particles. “It doesn’t look that hot.” Robots! And in fact, both he and Jonathan (the three others decline to go #2, as does this reporter, who hangs her head in shame) finish their bowls in the allotted time, despite simultaneous consumption of beer and near-constant complaint over the sheer volume of the soup. I am impressed. Jeff leans in and shrugs his shoulders. “It really wasn’t that bad.” The others point out politely that Jon is dripping with sweat. Bill, who hasn’t even subjected his palate to the spice assault, is already craving a cigarette after these collective gastronomical efforts.

Perhaps they weren’t aliens after all. I still wasn’t convinced.

It’s funny to me that people often describe you as “ADD Rock”.
Mae Shi: We’ve played those songs so many times, I don’t think anyone with ADD could actually pay attention to playing the songs over and over as many times as we have.

We made this rule that we really don’t really follow, but for a long time it was really true: that we could never repeat anything more than once. In a normal song you hear the same thing five times, and there’s no reason to do that. The history of 20th century classical music has proven that is the case. Form is overrated. Especially on a record like “Terrorbird,” some people were saying “oh your songs are so short. They’re great, but they’re so short.” Well, listen to them again! There’s just as much information or more than there is in a regular song. The Minutemen made some of the best records ever out of very short songs.

But for this record we decided we would do chorus and verse. Cause it’s really fun! It’s an effective tool! If you’re reading a book, you’re not going to read it back and forth, back and forth. It’s all linear, it’s all – what if you read a book, that went: “she went to bed. She pulled the covers up over her head. She went to bed. She pulled the covers up over her head.”

Bill: But think about it, we are a very visual society. I mean, I think Mark E. Smith had it right, when he said repetition the whole point of the musical agenda – all you have to do is repeat something and you have a song.

We embrace that with all the electronic music that we make. People always talk about – “Oh if it’s a good song, this is the structure it has to follow.” And that’s totally not true – structure makes it easier to understand a song, but it doesn’t make it good. What if they made all the houses in the suburbs the same? Wait, they do! You know?

Run to your Grave is a super hit song though, dudes.
Brad wrote it. It was the song that started this record. It was either that or a song with the working title “System of a Down.” Brad came to us and said “Run To Your Grave,” and we were like “ehhhh….I don’t know, it doesn’t really sound like us,” but in the end it was kind of validating – we can make a record without Ezra. It was hard to even think about how we were going to make a record without Ezra, and this was one song where it was like – “Brad can sing it!” We tried to find another person to sing the song, we all tried singing it together, but then it just worked.

And then you got everybody in the world to be in the video.
We never do anything ourselves as a band, we’ve always relied on other people, we put out a DVD of friends making music videos for us, and how much we’ve relied on friends. We’re gonna keep doing videos, we have so many ideas for crazy videos.

Bill: The ideal situation though if we had time and the resources I think it would be way better if we made all the videos ourselves because I feel it would be more cohesive. I always get bummed with other people doing our videos for us. Because – well, and this is something our old bassist Tim came up with. It’s that this band is a vehicle for everything else we want to do – like if I want to design a t-shirt or make a website or make a video, I'm going to use the band to accomplish those things.

Jeff: Or paint my car.
Jacob: Or go to college. Or finally learn English! [They go on one of their skittering jokes again.]
Bill: I feel like we’re letting that idea down if we don’t do things ourselves.

Jeff: We make music using any means necessary – if we only have the means to do a certain thing, we’re going to. I always think that iMovie is a perfectly good way to edit a film. If you’re good at using it, why not? If all you have is a camera phone, then why not make a video using that? If that’s all that you have, but you still have all the ideas there, why not make the most of it?

Jon: Everybody that I know I could pretty much say I met through music. Almost all of my friends I met through a friend and even that initial friend I met through music. Even Bill, he’s my cousin but I still feel like he’s my music friend, cause that’s where we bonded. Even as kids, we didn’t like each other, you know, he thought I smelled and he hated me. It was like a forced visit at his house -- our moms made us hang out.
Bill: I was a bigger dick then.
Jon: Then we played music together, he started playing guitar and he found out I played guitar, and from there --
Bill: Jon taught me how to rip. We fell in love through music. If it weren’t for music we would have killed each other.
Jon: If it weren’t for music you would have stayed weird and I would have stayed weird. Oh wait a second --

What makes playing in LA different?
We love LA. It’s a love-hate. It’s a shitty place to live, you can’t get food stamps like you could if you were living in San Francisco or Portland, but there are so many opportunities. The best part is being a band in Los Angeles. Nobody likes to go to shows in LA except for a select group of people, and those people are really fun. They’re all up on stage while we’re playing.

Do the kids dance?
Well, hell, we’re gonna boogie down. We’re gonna have a real Mae Shi hoedown!

The Mae Shi with a Japanese aerospace hero.

When we emerge from the restaurant, it’s started to rain. For a moment, they stop being machines and turn into real boys, taking turns sliding over slick pavement into the street. There’s a statue of some Japanese aerospace dignitary outside of the courtyard that becomes a prop for an impromptu photo shoot. These guys fall into camera-ready positions almost too easily -- and suddenly I notice that there's a rocket ship attached to the statue they’re standing under. Of course! Robot aliens! This is where they parked the thing!

Jeff says, “Come on guys, it’s time to go make music.” They climb into their ship, and just like that, no more bodies, only souls.

The Mae Shi are playing Spaceland on Friday at 8:30pm with PRE if you wanna hitch a ride. Buy tickets here.

I am writing a band interview/profile and it is very hard. Luckily I have stumbled upon the trick of pretending they are actually aliens, a la Herzog, and it is helping.

I have learned a good tip though: when writing about a band, listen to their music exclusively for three days straight and the alien metaphors will trickle off your tongue that much faster. Also, an early, easy dinner and a nice cup of wine. Plus headphones, there is no time for distraction with this nonsense.



I am afraid I never could have been an academic and a cook, the time constraints are just too many for a leisurely dinner-preparer such as myself. I had to buy ready-made sauce and pasta tonight, and though it was good, I did -- oh you know it already don't you?

I have also learned that my writing veers towards the weird.

Come with me to Spaceland on Friday, 8:30pm please! You like rock shows!

I went to the pre-opening media party for the new Father's Office location in Culver City tonight -- with my dad. HA HA I went to Father's Office with my father!

But it's also funny that my dad was the first person to take me to the original SM location back when I was in college, and he was always the first to take me to cool places like Asahi Ramen and El Tepeyac. He was really interested in talking to me tonight about blogging and newspapers and writing and media and photography, and I realize all of a sudden how much those things are my interests because they're his interests and we both get excited over the same things.

Also, I noticed how easily he talks to other people, and how social and friendly he is -- partly cause he's a salesman by trade, so I guess that's his gig. But it's the exact same way I talk to people in social situations, and it's funny because I always think I'm just like my mom, but I'm soooo much like my dad too.

So that was cool. But also TONY HAWK was there and NANCY SILVERTON and omg probably lots of other people but I didn't recognize them. And the food was pretty good, and the beer was awesome, and it's bigger than the old one, so that's cool.

Anyway this is kinda what it looked like



Blargh people!



Bob was our bartender, he was cool.



Yum.



OMG Nancy Silverton!

It was pretty fun but now I want my honey to come home so I can pass out happily.

ALSO christ the Mae Shi are robots yes that is my angle this is also torturing my soul writing is hard and I am going to be two days late.

Junot Diaz at the Hammer Museum/Osmany Rodriguez for LAist

The thing about author Junot Diaz is, one minute he’s on the phone with you, rapping about meringue, Malcolm X, comic books, and how shit never gets done on time in the Dominican Republic – and the next minute, he’s winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. He describes himself as just another ordinary, poor immigrant kid from Jersey, but the book tells a different story: that of an author alive with passion for his roots, for language, and for the moments of silence, linguistic and cultural, that can bring a family together and also tear it apart.

LAist was just one of the multitudes to heap praise on "Oscar Wao", which appeared almost eleven years after his previous effort, the short story collection “Drown" . The novel has also garnered a National Book Critics Circle award for fiction, and has been nominated for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. If all that weren’t enough, he’s even up for a James Beard Award for an article on New York’s Dominican restaurants that appeared last year in Gourmet Magazine.

Diaz admits, however, that awards don’t mean much to him when it comes right down to it: “My friends all think I'm so crazy. I'm more worried about the next text than I am like, enjoying resting on these laurels. I need to learn to do that more, I'll live longer if I do. It's tremendously gratifying, of course, that people are interested in the book and want to read it, that there's been this much attention given to a piece of fiction that's about a crazy Dominican family, of course, it's wonderful. But for me, that feeling lasts only pico-seconds. I really just want to write stuff that only takes five years to finish!”

We spoke with Diaz by phone last week (before his Pulitzer win was announced) about language, politics, gender, and how “Oscar Wao” was originally conceived as a multi-media experience, complete with an illustrated section that would mimic the comic books Oscar so loved.

Interview conducted by Carrie Meathrell and Osmany Rodriguez

(AP Photo/Jim McKnight)

Would you ever write a book in Spanish?

Naw. I mean, I basically learned to read and write in English, and I think that in the end that's probably going to be my life's tongue. But you never know, I never think about it in that way. What’s crazy is the way that the politics of these languages work in real life– people kind of forget that for most young people, the language that they're saddled with wasn't a choice. I came over [from the Dominican Republic] so young that speaking English wasn't a choice, it was a basic form of reality on the ground.

Is “Oscar Wao” being published in the Dominican Republic? Are you going do any press for it there?

Yes, it'll be out in September. The thing is, in Santo Domingo, it's really all up to the folks over there, and everything's very last minute. So there's no point making plans for six months from now. So far I have to go back to Santo Domingo three times this next two months for literary stuff, so I'm sure something will come up in September. Everything is done in Santa Domingo last second, you know?

So your Spanish is still pretty good, but how's your Nerdish?

It's terrible. That’s the more honest truth – my Sindarin and Quenya are just terrible now!

Yet sci-fi and fantasy genres play a huge role in this book. You build so much of the book around references to The Lord of the Rings, The Fantastic Four, comic books, Dungeons and Dragons – how does the fantasy world work in this book?

My sense of it is just sort of the mythic dream of what the United States is – I don't think that's any more or less ridiculous than somebody believing in and organizing their lives around Lord of the Rings. It's all make believe in some ways, it's just some of it is more respected than others.

What about the academic resistance to sci-fi and fantasy as a genre? Why can’t these genres be used to say something significant about our modern moment?

Everyone has an obsession with everybody else’s language. There's a lot at stake for people who are disqualifying or disavowing certain linguistic registers and valuing others. It's basically the way we organize ourselves: literary criticism, yes, Tolkien, no. If you talk to MFA people, it always goes like this: creative writing yes, literary criticism no. The reverse is also true for literary critics: criticism yes, creative writing no.

I just find it so bizarre that people who work on language have these opinions. Being against a language form is just as absurd as Canute the Beast trying to order or command the sea. It's more about your own craziness than anything about the way the language works. So you really can't be – I'm not looking for excuses to restrict linguistic registers at the border, I'm looking for excuses to deploy all sorts of language. Through my own educational process I was always being told by one group or another that one language is good, one language is bad. Even people who are supposed to be defenders of language, they'll always sneak in their biases, you know: "I think it's really really great, but don't bring any sci-fi stories into my class."

Let’s talk then about the kinds of words that are okay to use and the kinds that aren’t. You use the word “nigger” a lot in this book. Have you gotten any pushback from people about being a Latino writer and using that word?

It's one of those things, I mean -- there's a ton of child rape in this book too. Does that mean I'm a child rapist, I endorse child rape? I mean, the word nigger exists in the world. And some people aren’t okay with a Latino writer using it, and you know what? That's really cool! That's the difference that we're talking about, is it real life or is it art? When it comes right down to it, so child rape should only be represented by child rapists? Or if you represent child rape in a book, does this speak to your relationship with child rape? Or is there something far more complicated going on, with the concept of representations, or the concept of deploying "taboo" language and who deploys it? I don't ever remember Oscar calling anybody nigger, or Lola using that word – it's coming from Yunior specifically.

It's easy to assume that because there's one person in a culture or group using that word, that everyone's using it. But I find that part of what the book is about is about who uses what language and how they're using it. There is something about the way Yunior uses language that is worth really interrogating. I totally understand people's political decisions about language, vis-a-vis their decisions about their practice and their life, but I just feel like when issues of representation are up in the air, you have to use a much wider palette. We're trying to talk about the world. I guess this isn't an essay about for or against the "n word", it's sort of a larger argument about the world, so that everything in the world, positive and negative, should find its way into a book. There's something surprisingly reductive about how people are always trying to scratch books out of existence. That means we've got to get of almost everything by Mark Twain!

I mean, after all, Malcolm X is of Caribbean descent. He's not purely African American descent, if I remember correctly, part of his family is either from St Lucia or St Croix. [Editor's note: Malcolm X's mother was born in Grenada, in the southeastern Caribbean sea]. So he shouldn't use it either, right?!

What I find interesting is that I'm neither for nor against who should use certain words or not. But there's a tremendous amount at stake in trying to control how language is used.

Did you ever think about writing “Oscar” in comic book form?

There was supposed to be a whole illustrated chapter, this was supposed to be one of those multi-media texts. But as so often happens, the book wanted to be what it ended up being. So all my smarty-pants ideas about the book, they were just for naught, for naught!

Would you ever think about writing a sci fi genre novel?

It all depends. I had ideas about this book, but those ideas quickly – my conscious, executive ideas were undone by the power of the unconscious masses. I mean, yeah, I wouldn't mind making the executive decision and try to write a straight up sci-fi novel, but at the end it would just be all about Dominicans again! But I'll give it a shot one day, I'm sure. I guess I always start in one place and end up usually ten thousand miles away.

Photo of Junot Diaz and Mona Simpson in conversation at the Hammer Museum/Osmany Rodriguez for LAist

Lots of people ask you about why it took you so long to write this book.

It's an easier question to ask than to read the book carefully and talk about it.

Now that it's done, is it worth it? I mean, do you say to yourself, I spent all this time on this book, I feel like I did it right, that it was a worthwhile experience?

I don't know – in the end, what I'm really thinking about is, I hope the next one doesn't take that long! The immediate applause is interesting – and you're like "hey, this is great!"
But what I'm really thinking about is the future. I'm really thinking about -- what's going on now? What's coming up next? How's everything going to work? I think that that's more on my mind than anything else.

The book was recently optioned by Miramax. Would you be involved in a film version of “Oscar Wao.”

Well, they haven't even cut the check, so you know! These things take so incredibly long. I could say "yeah!" and then tomorrow, I'll be completely gone from the situation. It's one of those things where only when it's done, can you say you had anything to do with it. That's the way the movie business works. As long as the tiny little check they gave me clears, they can do whatever they want with it!

A lot of this book focuses on different types of masculinity, specifically Dominican masculinity. Yunior on the one hand is a player, he’s very promiscuous, and then on the other hand you have Oscar, this nerd who can’t get a girl to save his life, and he’s terrified of dying a virgin. How were you trying to represent a male Dominican experience?

The one thing this book cautions you about is thinking about itself as a totalizing text – because it's the opposite of disappearing, it becomes too present, it becomes a dictatorship. The whole problem with authority and with having one person who's an expert, one text that explains it all – you know, a “Dominica-nomicon” – you know, it becomes dictatorial. And if anything, this is a text that is terrified of dictatorships. Part of what I'm very much interested in is a sort of multi-determined, complicated, nuanced look at how New World masculinity plays itself out in a local area like the Dominican Republic. I mean, I could be wrong, there's lots of unconscious stuff here more than conscious stuff, but I thought the DR was the kind of case study for a larger argument about the world, how that developed, what are some of its lures and what are some of its dangers.

How hard was it for you to get into the female subjectivity, to view things from the perspective of Lola, Belicia, La Inka?

Ones of the good things is that I wasn't trying to direct it, it was all being filtered through Yunior’s voice. What I was happiest with, even though these women are being filtered through this aberrant, weirdly masculine, polymathic voice, what I wanted to get across was that the sense that you were encountering the female subjectivity despite all this white noise from Yunior. That a voice like Yunior could, without losing itself, render what it's like to be around these kinds of women.

But the reader reacts very viscerally to a character like Belicia – you can’t help but get angry at her, for her violence towards her children.

But man, you know – people are fucked up! You know, our vision of ourselves is always so much more positive than who we really are. The thing with Belicia – in my mind, that was a very honest representation of her. But most of us? Nobody knows who we are. And what if somebody jumped into your head, you know? And got to see everything that you are, all the sorts of things you thought about, all your cowardice and fear: the representations would be a little bit rougher than you're accustomed to. I hoped everybody would be able to see her despite her bitchiness, to see her longing.

I guess because all my life I've grown up around Dominican women, I have sisters who were a huge impact on me, I've been dating a Dominican woman more or less for the past ten years. Part of me feels, as an artist, if I can't create a tribute, or at least a map of the world I encountered being around certain kinds of Dominican women in the 90's and the 2000's, I'd feel, like, lame as an artist. I mean, I've spent all this time with them and they would be like come on, is that the best you can do?

How did the research process work for you? How did you research the historical aspects? What about the nerdy Parts?

The real tough stuff was the historical stuff. It was a ton of raw research, it was just me and there was all this work I was doing just getting the information, and there was all this information I already carried inside of me, because I was such a history nerd, and I am such a history nerd, and it's all this crap I carried inside of me, you know. I had all this stuff inside of me, and it was just interesting to find out how I could make all these connections, in my head. What was the hardest thing was to create these two webs [of the present-day narrative and the historical narrative], these two structural webs that worked with each other; one web of signification and of plot and structure with that kind of nerdish stuff? And then one that showed all this information about all this nerdishness, I didn't want to be completely fluent in nerdishness, I wanted to have this narrative, so that if you follow the nerdish references to a logical conclusion it organizes the book in a different way, and it allows you to see the book quite differently – and then the sort of historical arguments that are being made in the more historical sections, if you actually follow them to their conclusions, or if you ask yourself, in both areas, what is missing? And why is it missing? And you begin to fill in all sorts of kooky ass information.

So yeah, man it took a lot of work, but what took more work out of that was how to do this, so that both sections worked with each other, and that both sections depending on how you entered them, or how you engaged them, would create a different book.

And that's what I wanted to do. If you follow the historical argument, you would have one kind of book, but if you got off on some of the nerdy shit? It creates a totally different book. And I wanted the book to be different books, so you're not just like, oh so the difference is that Oscar has hair here or doesn't have hair there.

I read so much, interviewed so many people, and then you also have to become fluent in this stuff, it’s not just knowing it, you have to talk and think it for months and months and months. I mean, you can't crack fucking jokes about this shit unless you know it inside and out.

You speak very highly of your experiences in college, at Rutgers University.

You're a poor fuckin kid from Dominican New Jersey, from a neighborhood you never left, I mean I certainly never met a girl who liked to read. Never met an activist, you know? Going to college was like immigrating again except it wasn't as fucked up, it was actually kind of fun. I mean, it wasn't fuckin paradise, I mean, I worked my way through college, delivering fuckin pool tables. I mean, I know kids who say they worked their way through college and they had a fuckin work study job at the library, you know? I was fuckin working my ass off, so it wasn't a fun ass joke, but compared to what immigration was like when I was a kid? I was like, shit yeah, this is great! You get ass, people invite you to smoke weed, you meet people from all over the world, you read books you can't believe ever could have been written. You get with activists, you get to travel, you know.

Nothing startles me on a daily basis more than what we’re all capable of, and how things can work out if we’re just given a little bit of support – all these institutions that are supposed to be nurturing young people, and this country that’s supposed to be all youth-positive, there is just no support for young people. It takes so little to catapult someone into another universe, but they don’t even want to give you that.

I look at myself – anyone can say what they want about themselves, but when I was fifteen years old, I wasn’t a fuckin special kid, I was like every fucking kid I knew. And we all had dreams for ourselves, but the specificity of those dreams and the power of our longing made us feel exceptional. But you know, on an objective level there was nothing special about me. I keep thinking about almost every young person I’ve met was a lot like me, and certainly not better, just how little it would take to send these kids places that the whole world needs, not just they need. It just startles me.

Every time I reflect on my work, it’s like okay, I did this, it was tough and shit, but the kind of support I got they’re not even giving out anymore.

What sort of advice would you give writers who are just starting out?

Can I expand the franchise a little more? I don’t feel that my organic unit is ‘the writer.’ I feel my organic unit is poor immigrant kids who want to do something to make themselves feel valuable. Maybe writing is a part of it, you want to feel valuable and fuckin productive. The hardest thing in the world is to maintain any sense of hope in a country that doesn’t give a fuck about you. And whether it blows you up in Iraq, maybe it triples your student debt, while you’ve got your back turned?

The hardest thing in the world is to maintain a positive outlook, and I have failed many many times to stay positive, but you know what? That has been more to my detriment than anything else. I’ve never failed the way that I fail when I have gone negative. And it’s weird, even when shit is really tough, if you stay positive, it sounds really Pollyanna-ish, but it’s a lot easier to get shit done and get out of that fucking hole. But it’s tough, man, when you’ve got a boot on your neck, to say “ohhh, gotta stay positive!” I have a lot of respect for the kids I meet, and you know everybody says “oooh this generation, it’s going to hell, blah blah”, and I’m just like, “Shut the fuck up, man.”

An individual person thinks that they have enough knowledge and capacity that they can judge a collective? I’m like, what? That’s the ultimate height of absurd arrogance. I’m just like, yo, whatever, man. Even if young people don’t do anything, they’re still worth it for the very fact that they’re on this earth, you know.

Thank you so much for talking to us.

Thank you guys. Just try to make me sound good, okay?

We will make you sound awesome.

one of the things I'm most proud of is the BLT Salad I made last week, good call me:

Head of romaine, chopped
Cup or so of baby tomatoes, quartered
1/3 package bacon, cooked
Croutons (I made my own from sourdough bread & parmesan)
Anchovies
Parmesan cheese to garnish

Caesar Dressing:
3-4 cloves garlic (? I am the worst at measuring things EVER, I never really do it, I cook by touch/taste mostly)
Half tin of anchovies
Heavy pinch of kosher salt
One raw egg (boil it for like 10 seconds if you're worried about germies)
A few good splashes lemon juice (to taste, obvs)
1 tablespoon mustard (For this dressing I used straight-up yellow mustard, like French's. It was actually a stroke of genius because it was such a simple bacon salad, the plain mustard made it really taste sandwichy.)
Olive oil (drizzle in, whisking, until it gets to a good consistency, basically you have to taste it all the way through).
(Secret ingredients: a teaspoon of sugar and a shake or two or three of Worcestershire sauce).
Pepper, but only at the end. More salt to taste.

I recommend making your own Caesar whenever possible; it's probably better for you than bottled stuff and it's fun to play with ratios of mustard, anchovy, seasoning, etc. Mine is obviously very garlicky & anchovy-y, I love that stuff. But overall it's a good salad dressing technique to have down.

Mix them all together, obviously.

OMG this was such a cooking nerdout.

Here are the fine gentlemen I'll probably be hanging out with Saturday night unless I am too old and lazy to go out, please watch this ten times and send it to all your friends:


Yeah, I know, my mom is proud, they haven't released the one where I co-star as one of Ulysses S. Grant's many pissed-off girlfriends.

But hey kids, stick with me and look the places you'll go!

Junot Diaz Wins Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

I know, one week he's schooling me on interview technique (it was difficult but if I can just bring myself to listen to the transcript I'm sure I'll find lots of good stuff to write down), the next week he's winning the Pulitzer! Bob Dylan is totally going to call me tomorrow and be like "Mrflrmrlmf ehhhh WAHHHH Laist mrfl!" And I'll be all like "Dude I totally get it."

But really, we've got sights quite humbly set on Werner Herzog and Eddie Vedder now. HAHAHAHAH!

WELCOME TO HEAVEN:


It is a wonderful place to spend an afternoon; coincidentally enough TNT was playing all three LOTR movies back-to-back yesterday. It was a day of rest.

Oh and these guys were real fun:



They're playing Spaceland on April 18th, I am so there and if you are even remotely in the neighborhood you should come too!!! Serious!!!


Do they still play basement shows?

Anyway. You're getting the picture. Now off to the "producing results" part.

1) Damn we bought a couch. We went down the street, put our heads together, and MADE COUCH BUYING HISTORY, seriously it was a beautiful feat of teamwork, and we get our new giant (wide) stain-resistant couch tomorrow. For the win INDEED.

2) In a similarly remarkable feat of lunch-time serendipity, I emerged from my geographical haze for long enough to remember the little Armenian deli right around the corner from our place, where we both found falafel sandwiches to our satisfaction.

3) And we bought my mom a birthday present. Plus we get to go bowling with four-year-olds tomorrow for Niece Lauren's birthday, omg won't that be fun and not filled with screaming and slobber.

And all afternoon I've been tutoring myself on Photoshop and playing "Beautiful Katamari" and Wii Sports and making tomato sauce and that feels pretty productive considering the similarly remarkable night out I had with my co-workers, in which we inadvertently crashed a child's karaoke birthday party in Burbank.

Not to mention the bizarrely themed "Speed Racer" adult birthday party (which took up EVERY TABLE IN THE PLACE, ANNOYING), maybe it was a movie wrap party? I don't know. Weird. Anyway, this place was filled to the brim with crusty Old Folks and ten-year-old children, yet it was a dirty ol karaoke bar.

Sigh back to thinking about writing fiction and psyching myself up to transcribe interviews.

that Junot Diaz interview almost killed me. MAN was that stressful.

But I went out for ramen with the Mae Shi tonight and MAN was that fun.

Phew. More later?

so fucking nervous, you guys. 

Today I made reallly reallllly realllllly good stuff:

corn-tomato salsa
chipotle guacamole
roasted tomatillo salsa
peruvian-inspired aji sauce

and it was enjoyed by ALL WHO ATE IT at a very nice party I went to that others missed out on.

And tomorrow I am interviewing my very favorite new author
and on Tuesday I am interviewing members of my very favorite new band with whom I will be eating SPICY FOOD
and I'm gonna see what else I can hook up for this week cause hell, I'm on a roll

and I can't spell right now.

And it's all pretty funny shit.

I hope Heath & Zach & Lindsay have good pictures of when we turned all the lights out and went out for ice cream in the middle of the Bike District.

Looking at the Google search results for my name (which, can I say, nobody in the ENTIRE WORLD possesses except for me, how many of you can say that NOBODY ELSE ALIVE has the same name as you? hm?) SOMETIMES I can understand why sometimes some of you might get the wrong impression of me.

P.S. Molly Lambert of This Recording has the best post on Javier Bardem I've read yet. THERE IS A NAKED PICTURE OF THE MAN CUPPING HIS OWN MANNESS for chrissake, thankyouJesus. Also, Molly, are you in my brain reading my Tumblr account, cause I mean christ, I was all over that Joseph Gordon-Levitt/Claudia Schiffer spread too.



Sighhhhhhhh.

I am extremely excited about life right now.

Junot Diaz emailed me BACK.

Adam McKay is in TOUCH with my PEOPLE. (Okay, so my people=Oz, but we're a TEAM!)

The Mae Shi are the slackers, but as we have learned today, you cannot stop the RAWK.

Jesuschristalmighty, who knows Werner Herzog's people? The way my day is going, I'll be having lunch with him by Thursday.

IT HAS COME TO MY ATTENTION

that certain students of a certain high school in a certain neighborhood well-beloved of this author have become, ahem, aware of this blog. Not only are they aware, but they have created an entire FACEBOOK PAGE devoted to said author's beloved Life Partner, and are now brandishing said Facebook Page (access to which is blocked for our Hapless Heroes) as BLACKMAIL FODDER in order to achieve some sort of RECOGNITION on this our very personal internet forum.

SO. We have reached an impasse. We must strike a deal.

And so. Freshly aware of my responsibilities to impose the RIGHT sorts of influences on young minds, I display for you some VERY IMPORTANT LINKS that you should imbibe, my young friends, and hold in your hearts as you venture off in search of your respective Brilliant Futures.  In return for your careful and thoughtful perusal of these links, I will in return offer you several possibly unknown facts about your Beloved Teacher.

Raymi:



Lest you think she is just some hot Canadian chickie who posts exquisite photos of her food and her whimsical cat, let me assure you that she is in fact a sharp-shooter of a writer and a comic genius to boot. I have never read anything ever that made me feel so *okay* about myself and my hatred of annoying seat-kicking, wrapper-crackling movie-theater patrons.

Tony

Is the kind of editor you would want to have if you were ever out adrift in the blogging/journalism world. The LA Times thinks so, and so do I.

Honor Student

Because Coach Wiener is brilliant. And also they hang out with me at work and I heart them.

This song:


Because they are tops on my interview list.

Patrick O'Dell



go to New York and come back and talk to me when you're famous.

THIS RECORDING

Go to Brown and come back to me when you have created the perfect blog.

p.s. Jacob Soboroff also went to your school and he is pretty rad.

p.p.s. I don't even have to give a shout-out to laist, do I? Nope didn't think so.

SO NOW WHAT WE'VE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR:

1) Yes he really does play video games all the time. Yes we have approximately ten consoles and hundreds of games. Yes I don't mind at all.
2) If he were left to his own devices he would eat only: 1) his own arm. 2) Microwavable Hot Pockets. 3) Take-out Indian food.
3) But yes, he loves to eat and will try anything, including escargots, which we enjoyed recently.
4) I am not allowed to talk about tattoos.
5) Yes we have an entire room in our apartment that is just for books, and he might actually have more than I do.
6) His favorite things to do on the weekends are go to Costco and visit my parents. He's a liar if he says different.
7) Babies and dogs love him and want to stare into his eyes.
8) Yes he does everything I tell him to do.
9) Yes he loves his job. Seriously. He speaks VERY highly of his students, he knows they work hard, and he is happy to go to work every day and hang out with cool, smart kids. (As am I. Except different kinds of kids.)

OKAY ARE YOU HAPPY NOW. Actually if you haven't noticed we are quite boring and old and we love to stay home on the couch and watch Food Network (oh but also I am kind of awesome and a big deal if you haven't noticed that either). (SO BE NICE cause I have the internet on my side.)

Sigh I don't know, I told you we were boring, what else do you want to know?

feeling g-d RANTY today, scratch that, actually been feeling it the last WEEK or maybe MONTH I don't know I am disgruntled about some things.



(Disgruntle face.)
You always know when I'm unhappy cause I get all quiet and my jaw starts to workin and then five minutes later I'm like BAM HERE ARE FIVE WELL-THOUGHT-OUT REASONS WHY I AM RIGHT.

Anyway, whatevs, went to Junot Diaz tonight at UCLA (OMG NERDGASM) and now I'm disgruntled about how my FORMER PEERS ignore me and I go to say hi and I am like this lonely puppy with a paw outstretched, flapping in the wind and nobody wants to pet my head. I would have gone up to Dennis and been like "WHOOOOOO HUGS!" but by that point I was totally crushed and felt awkward enough to die.

"Friends of English" more like "Not Friends of English."

Then this 13-year-old asked an awesome question and I wanted to devour him whole. Then some other people asked dumbass questions about "do you consider yourself a Dominican writer? Caribbean writer? writer of African descent?" and "were you afraid the Spanglish of your novel would turn off a certain part of your audience?" but Diaz rocked the shit out of the answers and it made you feel good because he Just. Owns. It. and you know he's that guy that would totally be down for doing a j and watching, like, the extended version of Fellowship.

Oh hai remember guys I have a Tumblr account, all the cool kids are doing it, trust me, heard it here first.

yumwatch.tumblr.com

I MEAN come on look at that Penguin theme I've got going on, you know you're jeals.

Now K. has an iPhone so our lives are totally ruled by technology and for our next purchase instead of a leather or fabric couch I think we will get one entirely made up of laserbeams.

This marriage announcement is one of the coolest and bloggiest things I've read all day, thanks to one of the coolest and bloggiest guys I know, Tony Pierce.

I'm happy to say I have met both parties involved and they are indeed seriously nice people who I am always glad to see out and about -- in real life and on the internets.