It’s not exactly mixed media, but it’s kind of like that. I first came across the term in a book called The Theatre of Mixed Means: An introduction to happenings, kinetic environments, and other mixed-means performances by Richard Kostelanetz. It was a seminal work in my development, featuring interviews with La Monte Young, John Cage, Ann Halprin, and others concerning work that blended techniques and ideas from various artforms, dissolving many boundaries between them in the process. Robert Rauschenberg’s theatre pieces I found particularly amusing.
In my work, all of that adds up to a cosmically-scaled fiction project that uses prose and verse writing, songs, photography and video, graphic design, zines, comics, and any means or materials I have at my disposal to tell the complete story. “Mixed Means” is the essential composite form of the Wolf Note Collective and all its many stories and songs and images and films.
I don’t like the sound of the phrase cosmically-scaled. That sounds too hippy or too bloated or both.
It may be both or neither of those things. I don’t really care either way. I follow my muse, not critics. That’s why I don’t read many music or film reviews, I have never used Twitter, and I don’t subscribe to periodicals that feature this type of writing. It’s not that I never read them, but I wait until after I’ve had time to think about the work I’ve just read or seen or heard and form my own view on it. When I do read them, I often disagree. Usually with old, classic work I don’t find the consensus to be far off the mark, but with newer things I don’t find much value in critical readings because too often they either spoon-feed the reader some key concepts they want them to understand or they misinterpret things, or they use a political checklist to assess a work’s worthiness or unworthiness.
I call my work cosmically-scaled because primarily it’s fiction, specifically fantasy fiction, like The Lord of the Rings or Dune—I group Dune and LOTR in the same category, excuse me, due mainly to the world-building elements—with an infrastructure of an invented world, complete with its own history and prehistory, economy, geology, political and authority structures, physics and astronomy, mythologies, competing religions, and so on. That might not be apparent in a story where the groop almost burn down the house they’re living in thanks to an ice-skating mishap, but it’s there, most obviously in stories with ancient or medieval or far-future settings or stories with magic and monsters.
It seems to me you’re dealing with themes of—
Let me stop you right there. I am happy to talk about how I do the work, processes, and so on but don’t ask me about the themes. Let’s just say that the result and the process are the same thing, and what it boils down to is a type of unification. That’s all you need to know about the themes. If you like the work and you want to spend some time thinking about it, then think about it. But don’t look to me to validate or denounce your theories.
Do you have a speaking position?
In my view, sex, sexuality, gender, and identity are all fluid things, within certain physical limits. For instance, I can’t change the fact that I’m a white latino. Mom’s side of the family was from Mexico and Dad’s was from the isles, I think Ireland and Scotland. I can ignore the history and culture of one or both of those but it won’t change my genetic makeup. But to answer your question I am an Autistic single father with ADHD and anxiety, White/Hispanic (or Latino, or Latinx, if you prefer, doesn’t bother me either way), gender fluid or gender non-conforming or just plain non-binary (he/him/they/them, both “masculine” and “feminine” attributes which are expressed in cyclical alteration or overlapping, but I typically mask as a simple male most of the time,) and omnisexual, that is, attracted to all genders to varying degrees. I could go deeper on all this stuff but I don’t know you that well and it’s personal.
The 1960s seem to have a particular resonance with you. And the ‘90s.
I don’t really know why that is. With the ‘60s I mean. With the ‘90s its obvious and I don’t try to resist it or make too much of it but that’s when I was an impressionable teenager. I don’t adhere to that attitude that the music of my formative years was the best but it imprinted on me in ways that are predictable and perhaps inescapable. But I can remember certain times when cultural artifacts from the ‘60s jumped out at me. As a preteen I liked war movies, in particular Vietnam war movies. It was the first time I started to really notice songs. British Invasion, Motown. Later on, in history classes, the idea that it was a particularly tumultuous time period struck home with me. As I entered college and began to learn a little political science and more history and start to develop an anti-capitalist stance, the social upheaval of the era resonated, as a belief was seeded in my late teens or early twenties that things were just as bad now as they were then, but maybe we were just less organized. There was just as much shittiness in the capitalist system to resist, if not more, than in the 1960s. The Mixed Means book, now that came out in ‘68 and the interviews were with artists who were well known in that decade.
It’s not so much a self-consciously retro thing. I don’t often consciously imitate the tropes of that era or any other, and I don’t subscribe to the internet culture which venerates some particular past time or place to the point of having ‘60s or ‘90s mood-boards and band t-shirts and the right shoes or hairstyle for the time or any of that, and I definitely don’t feel like I should have been born in some other decade, like some of those tie-dye wearers that I got stoned with as a college student. It’s more that from my point of view the parallels in Timespace are obvious. We live in at a point of vast social upheaval in some ways similar to past times. I grew up paying attention to that stuff and I draw on it continually, but use it unconsciously.
In particular?
Specifically I paid attention to in my formative years what I considered to be fringe guitar bands that incorporated extended techniques and dissonance and the generation of Downtown music that preceded that, guitarists like Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca, and before them, La Monte Young, and before that any eastern music I could find, especially anything that utilized drones. I believe that a performer and the song itself, even in an entirely conventional setting, they have these hypnotic qualities, and these qualities may be exploited to harmonize a room or whatever performance space. The original gang of CBGB bands but especially Blondie. Madonna, Andy Warhol’s Factory as depicted in Factory Made, Gillian McCane and Legs McNeil’s Please Kill Me, Paul Jordan Smith, the unholy trinity of Reed/Pop/Bowie, a psychedelic complex of cannabis, LSD, Hesse, Castaneda, Luis Buñuel’s films, Breton’s manifesto, all the early 20th century art movement manifestos for that matter. Burroughs, Borges, The Kids in the Hall, Syd Barrett, Andy Kaufman, Cindy Sherman… I can’t pull them all together off the top of my head but I was exposed to their works at times when my mind was particularly opened, and they made lasting impressions on me and, at least from my point of view, the lines from their work to mine are pretty straight.
You seem reclusive by nature. But not shy. What is the connection between these aspects of your personality and your status as an unknown underground artist?
It’s a causal relationship. I am shy. But I mask to a high degree in order to socialize. It is an enormously draining use of neuronal configuration. I have a string of disastrous interpersonal anecdotes and ruined relationships that might have been avoided or at least blunted had I been diagnosed with Autism earlier. But the cookie didn’t crumble that way.
The other variable in this equation is desire. In my view, desire is the fundamental element in all life, the spark that animates everything. My desires, my fantasies about “the art life” have everything to do with the work itself and very little to do with the publicization of it, or seeking interviews or gallery representation or any of the professional moves that would help me gain the resources to fulfill the vision. It’s a real stumbling block. Add that to a pretty deep anti-capitalist, anti-commercial stance and voila. I’d like to overcome this, at least a little, because if I could get some attention and some cash flow I could possibly do more elaborate, higher quality work and develop an audience with which to communicate via the work. I just never feel like I have an adequate skill set or even the motivation most of the time to get my work “out there.”
What is the Wolf Note Collective’s elevator pitch?
What? I don’t understand the question.
If you were to summarize the Wolf Note Collective so that someone unfamiliar with this work could understand it, how would you do that?
“The Wolf Note Collective was a failed parallel-universe multimedia franchise, a long-running, unsuccessful collaborative effort between a loose-knit group of losers in Texas and South Carolina who all pretty much hated each other and then died together in a warehouse fire.”
I believe I read that already, here on your website. Or maybe it was on your Bandcamp.
So?
Well, I was hoping you’d give us something fresh.
Oh Jesus you asked me for a short description and seeing as I’ve already got one I used that. This isn’t even a real interview.
Look, I’m trying to help you here. I don’t have to be here at all. I can tell my editor not to run this interview.
Sizzlin synapses—who gives a shit? Nobody reads your rag anyway. Let’s just get back to some real questions before I call this off.
Fine. That sounds good, actually. How would you characterize the intersectionality of your work, specifically the way your personal character is reflected in the stories, songs, and visual presentation?
I said I don’t talk about the themes.
You seem very angry. Like you’re easily triggered.
Fuck this we’re done. And fuck you too. Goodbye.
What draws you to hoaxes?
Finally.
Finally what.
Finally a question.
Wow. Flattering.
Hey I can’t help it if you’re sensitive.
Do you treat everyone this way?
Probably. God I hope not, which reminds me, this has gone too far and I must apologize. I went on the offensive and for that I’m sorry. But you know that aggression masks insecurity. I expose myself by going on the attack. But maybe recognizing fundamental insecurities can help me to overcome them. If I even overcome one of them, like this one, the tendency retaliate in a nasty way when I wrongly perceive a slight, well that’ll be an improvement. It is a social block.
It still doesn’t excuse how you talked to me.
I’m sorry. I will try not to let it happen again and treat you with kindness free of judgement. I’m sorry I judged you.
We’ll give it some time. If you show me you can be good, we may see ourselves talking again sometime in the future.
To your question, hoaxes. How much time do you have?
End
