Friend of a Friend: Mark Fullmer

Friend of a Friend spotlights people of interest to the greater AMR community: poets, rockers, artists, aesthetes, and assorted bon vivants. The series is called Friend of a Friend because all the interviewees are my friends, and hopefully you’ll be their friend too once I introduce them to you. – Nick Courage

DISCUSSED IN THIS INTERVIEW: origin myths and the dessicating santa ana winds; making suckers out of the Ayn Rand Institute; aesthetic revolution (and your place therein); self-obsessed soul bearing/a Taiwanese pianist; the sun-drenched coasts of Ios and the girls with their pouty breasts; moving eastward; tweeted roadtrip manifestos; GK Chesterton; Mark Fullmer quantified; creative output v. thanatopic fear; light pornography; what you think about when you think about nothing; cathected life-as-art moments; childhood aspirations; when the tree exploded; description… in lascivious detail; interrobang hypotheticals; drinking grappa with davy salinger; &c.

NICK COURAGE: Mark, it feels like i’ve known you for a long time, and we’ve been involved in various adventures and pursuits together… but i think to most people – including, on some days, me – you’re this very mysterious character. Maybe it has something to do with being birthed amidst the hot winds of the Santa Ana (?), i don’t know. So before we get distracted: is there any sort of basic, underlying, Joan Didion-esque truth or origin story that you’d like to get out into the public sphere?

MARK FULLMER: As to my life, I suppose the dessicating Santa Anas provided me something of a, shall we say, sandpapery birthing, which clearly explains all the mysteries that are Mark.

Wait….mysterious? Me? Well, I may seem to lurk in fetid shadows of dank dark secrecy, but really it’s just this: I don’t talk much about myself (let’s ignore the occasional urge to spout life’s tidbits through the Facebook feed. January 2009 year-to-date: MARK WENT VEGETARIAN….MARK DID HIS TAXES IN 17 MINUTES FLAT…MARK JUST WALKED 30 MILES IN 12 HOURS).

One thing I always liked that Didion said was about how we tell ourselves stories in order to live, and that we live by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.

So… no real story here, just a few desperate silhouettes of a bygone mark in time:

It was after two months’ rooming with a close friend that he realized I’d been working the night shift at a local hotel

It was only weeks before semester’s start that I announced to family and faculty I would not be continuing my PhD

It was years after I’d stopped taking lessons that I realized how profoundly influential my trumpet teacher was

It is noon. I just cracked a Natural Light. Ingredients: water, barley malt, cereal grains, yeast, hops

Tears bubbled once in my eyes in Boston, on a long-distance call to my brother

In a filled auditorium, awaiting a concert, I briefly attained zen. Then someone coughed.

Highest score in Scrabble: 512. Lowest score in school: C-.

It was many muses ago that I first felt the writer’s fire.

I was, I am, I someday will not.

Peace. Om. Amen.

NC: Before we get into the more tangible (like, for instance, that you just inspired me to go pick up some high life): your answer is mysterious, shamanistic. Will I be able to get you to talk past the penumbras in this interview, or will we be forging an origin myth biography-reading future girls can squeeze their thighs to? Because I can do either, but you should know that – despite your (impressive!) facebook status updates – you’re widely considered to be somewhat mysterious…

mark & bat – mysterious (boston, c. 2006):

MF: Well alright. You’ve coaxed it out with your cloying.

The real story of one comrade in arts. But let’s get one thing clear before we embark on this sick potboiler of depravity: we’re sharing this—purely, purely—for the aforementioned thigh-squeezing delight of wide-eyed novitiates to AMR’s aesthetic revolution.

:::::::Lacuna:::::::wriggle:::
:::::Wittgenstein:::::::

parody:::::::merde:::::::entropism:::::::libraryshelf::::::::

nammyohorengekyo:::::::blackcoffeewithchickoree::::::salviadivinorum::::::lacuna:::::lacuna::::::
lacuna:::::::lacuna

Author’s note: I just typed three pages’ worth of self-obsessed soul bearing about college nights spent on the floor of my rented bedroom in South-Central L.A. with a 26-year old Chinese violinist and a pint of sherbet as we talked about “real” music and pawed at each other like desperate animals, searching for invisible strings. About lying late afternoons in a dorm room with an 18-year old Taiwanese pianist as she traced the crests and cirques of my bare chest with her pinky finger, the one that hit Chopin’s high E-flat so coquettishly.

But it all seemed so empty and pointless and cliché. Everyone has their wild moments, and mine are nothing new.

And that’s not the real me, anyway. Just things I’ve done. So let’s be honest, shall we? What about the fact that this writer was raised attending a church that has since been labeled a cult? That must have had something to do with constructing him. What about the fact that he planned to be a classical trumpet soloist, only to have those plans dashed by embouchure problems? It made him turn to literature, which he loves. What about the fact that at his most productive moment in grad school—to the very day!—he suffered a heart arrhythmia which subsequently limited (at least psychosomatically) every aspect of his life?

I’m a lover of thought, but to my own detriment (I once had a girlfriend tell me, at the intermission of a West Side Story production, that I really, really didn’t have to analyze/every/thing). I’m a lover of music, but I’m ashamed that I don’t have the same punkish, visceral passion about groups or underground beats as some, nor the solipsistic elitism of the classical musicians with whom I once hobnobbed. I sometimes feel like a fake, because I have just enough knowledge in film, art, song, lit, and drink to sound in the know. But to be honest, I’m a charlatan, a half-manic who never goes whole-hog. I admire, I envy, I loathe the guy who can give up everything else in his life to memorize Scrabble words. I kowtow, I resent, I curse the teacher who dedicates every night and weekend to making herself a better teacher.

Take two, here, has turned into a couch-hugging talking cure, and we don’t need an autohagiography, or a blogosphere confessional. What we need is manifesto.

In a nutshell, me: I quixotically dream of peace in a cafe in Middle-of-Nowhere Kansas, life as a short order chef, where to quote Philip Larkin, I’d work all day and get half drunk at night. But instead, I stay in suburban Southern California, teaching freshman comp, because I can. I write about things I know little about. I sing about emotions I barely understand. But don’t get me wrong. This all makes me happy, too. I suppose we all need our objet petit a.

NC: Oh Mark, I promised myself I wouldn’t talk about french psychoanalytics in these anymore… so I’ll just say: I’m glad that all your psychic loitering makes you happy, and that we’ve uncovered one substantive truth from the pell-mell facts above: lady preference. Occidental novitiates, look elsewhere!

Seriously, though, there’s something to be said for an objet petit a, but: is there something you’d rather be doing, somewhere you’d really rather be? I’ve always felt that you’re ridiculously and variously accomplished, and would like to be able to peer pressure you into self-fulfillment if I can (it’s the least I can do). As we say in LA – the swampy one – the world’s your erster.

MF: Peer pressure me away, please! You’ve done it before, you know. I recall one summer when you and Bat Matthews invited me to dig in with the Brooklyn gang, and I’ll tell you this: I considered it, even researched local college jobs. So what the fuck happened? I suppose inertia set in…and then a relationship with an actress-turned-investment-broker here in SoCal complicated it. But now the gamine is gone (we broke after an artistic disagreement about her Brando impression. seriously.) and now, like it did Edwin Merrick for a time, the single life suits me just fine. I’ve always been the life-in-a-suitcase type, and feel the flaneur in me growing stronger by the day.

There’s nothing I’d rather be doing, per se–I’m still writing and painting and drinking and theorizing and singing –but hold me to this: I’m ready to be doing it elsewhere, wherever I can find the dernier cri in experientialism.

“still can’t say goodbye” – m. fullmer
click to play!

NC: That’s funny, I once broke up with a girl because of something she said about American vs. European letters (although, you know – in retrospect, that may’ve just been an excuse). And speaking of relationships: lately I’ve been having a sort of tumultuous one with the city — things were said, more important things weren’t. So I feel like i can’t directly peer pressure you to make the coastal shift. But I will recommend these three books (and one movie), and if you’re not Eastward bound after checking them out then I wouldn’t have been able to sway you anyway:

Three books

Low Life: Lures & Snares of Old New York, by Luc Sante

Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara: A Memoir, by Joe Leseur

February House: The Story of W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and
Paul Bowles, Benjamin Bitten, and Gypsy Rose Lee Under One Roof in
Wartime America, by Sherrill Tippens

One Movie

The Cruise, starring Timothy Speed Levitch

MF: Thank you, thank you, thank you for the recommends. I’ve been on a biography kick recently, and since I love Ben Britten and admire W.H. Auden, February House will probably be my first read on that list. I’m currently reading the autobiography of G.K. Chesterton, who’s my literary crush of the moment right now (he regularly forgot where he was headed, which I can relate to; he was 6’4″ and nearly 300 pounds — less relatable; and when asked to write an essay for The Times exploring “what’s wrong with the world,” he wrote back “Dear Sirs, I am. Sincerely yours, G.K. Chesterton,” which I find delightfully droll).

Hmmm…I don’t know if this is rude to do, but I think I’mma co-opt this interview temporarily for my own base and depraved ends and ask you, Mr. Nick Courage, two questions. The first is simple and straight: what’s coming out of the Courage camp as far as art/song/word goes these days? The second I’ve actually been wondering for quite some time, since, in fact, our very early days in grad school together, but have been too timid to ask. You have a sizable opus already, you make ever-frequent facebook/myspace/twitter/goodreads/amr posts, and your rambunctious get togethers are so freakin full of energy. Your writing, even, sometimes feels like it’s on benzedrine. And everytime I’m with you, life seems to be moving pedal-to-metal (and petal-to-medal) [ed: !], which I find enviously great. So the question is this: what do you think, are you a functional manic?

NC: If you’re going to co-opt the interview, I’m going to invert the questions. So, second one first: am I a functioning manic? I looked that up, just to make sure. From Clinical Assessment and Diagnosis in Social Work Practice:

“A manic episode is a distinct period in which a person’s predominant mood is elevated, expansive, or irritable to the degree that there is serious impairment in occupational and social functioning. Manic episodes may be characterized by any of the following symptoms (at least three are present): unrealistically inflated self-esteem, a decreased need for sleep, pressured speech, racing thoughts, distractibility, an increase in unrealistic goal-directed activity, and involvement in activities with a potential for painful consequences”

So yea, part of me thinks I’m no different from anyone else in feeling that I got some idiosyncratic neurological glitch… but I also know a lot of you may have nodded your heads knowingly when you read that description. Except I don’t think I have a chemical imbalance… more a deep-seated, agnostic fear of time slipping away. All those symptoms, in my case, are curated: you gotta up your ego if you want to engage in “unrealistic goal-directed activit[ies...] with a potential for painful consequences”. Which is just social science slang for Attempts at Art, right?

And Mark: this minute I’m spending writing to you about time… it’s discreet. It’s already half gone. So even if I’m worn out from a job full of a thousand – or a hundred, or even just two – daily suicides, I feel like I gotta do something to reclaim some of that day. A lot of that reclamation is just celebration in the face of mundanity. But if I’m alone, it’s only when I’m writing or painting or making music that I can’t feel myself inching toward old age (if I’m lucky, right) — or am too distracted. I imagine a lot of people feel that way? Or maybe it’s a self-indulgent, young way to feel. It’s definitely a little morbid, but it’s more a jazz funeral than any sort of Dickensien bereavement.

[Before I bum anyone out, I feel like I should add that celebration in the face of mundanity is probably the take-away. The rest of it is all just arm-chair self-analysis. I'm told that even at my most depressed I seem pretty happy.]

So: I figure there are two ways things’ll go: either my life as I’m trying to deliberately live it will have painful consequences — but I’ll have lived it, you know? — or it won’t, and’ll be a sort of sweepstakes winner situation instead. Either way (and I’m trying to not allow for grey areas in this, so just “Either way”) I’d like to enter myself into the drawing as many times as possible. I like the suspense. There’s also the issue of not knowing how long I’ll be viable artistically, you know… I’d like to get as much done and have as much fun as I can while I can. What if there’s a food apocalypse? What if I get hit by a car? What if my brain is transplanted into a car post-singularity?

For the record: I imagine I’ll subtly disagree with this answer tomorrow… but it’s what I wrote. No take backs!

First question: What’s coming out of the Courage camp? Not as much as I’d like… it’s making me anxious. I was working on a novel tentatively titled American Burlesque… which I still may work on, but that’s been set by the wayside. I’m still working on my series of Rockabilly Monster portraits. We’ve redesigned AMR for the new year. I have tentative plans to do two sets of zines, one-offs… One of them entitled THE MONSTERS collecting 4-6 “books” I wrote and illustrated from 1-6th grade (annotated); the other: Friend of a Friends. I was working on getting a little more shoe-gazey with my rock recordings until I got a variation of carpal tunnel. It’s sort of a down time; this winter was a hard one, so I’m trying to refresh and gear up for INVINCIBLE SUMMER 09!

Also, believe it or not, these Friend of a Friend interviews take a lot out of a guy.

MF: I also hear of your plans to act in a film project, playing a curiously courageous bon vivant upon the streets of New Orleans, and by your manic vacation facebook/tweets, it sounds like you may be doing research for this role now (late June). Plus, of course, you’ve been the lurking half-sideman, half-interviewee to Rachel Rabbit’s punkish AMR podcasts (I’ve been particularly enjoying your apoplectic laughs in the background as Mike Milazzo talks of what’s-his-name eating his weed).

Your jazzfunereal reclamation project is ferociously shoe-gazey itself, and magnificently inspiring, and I fistbump it from California (right now, Nick, I’m sitting among forgotten bookstacks of the local CSU, February House open to page 113 (part 2, December 1940-February 1941)).

That feeling about artistic viability running dry is for me the ubiquitous eternal hell, even though I pretended just yesterday in my writing class the thing was easy (“You simply just have to BECOME the writer, folks!” … I even told my students about your pipesucking, coffeepotting persona). But your line above that resonates most with where I am, right now, is that come painful consequences or sweepstakes, you’ll have prepared for the food apocalypse car-brain transplant on your own terms. Let me explain.

A week ago I went on a roadtrip. I packed my car with tent, sleeping bag, canned food, hallucinogens, audiobooks, notebook, preconceived notions, extra socks, guitar, and tripodded my trusty videocamera to the passenger seat, voyeur’s monocle pointed toward Denver. Then I drove. I drove to the fungal sole of California and to Mexico, then headed east to the Grand Canyon, then through Taos up to Denver and the seediest motel ever (who’s ever heard of tiled walls in a motel?), and on and on at 108 mph through flat Utah and whorehouse Nevada and I painted “Just Hitched” on my car, because it felt right and funny, and then through Napa and Big Sur and back to Los Angeles.

just hitched:

In the 7 days and 3779 miles, I wrote 58 poems in the form of 140-character tweets and got hours of footage I will soon edit down into a 10-minute mysticotelegraphic panegyric. Here’s one poem:

No. 18
Mile 887
Flagstaff, AZ
11:30am

Lunchcounter encounter with a prescient chick &
G.I. Joe blowing in the wind
ravages me with eternal placental paternalism 4 holy humanity.

But beyond the juvenilia, I came back with something else (AMR bombshell scoop imminent). I’m at a point in my life where…well, it’s like I’m at the apogee of comfortability, because I live lowrent in a friend’s house with a pool and jacuzzi at my daily disposal, I have a stable job teaching writing at community colleges (and wonderful, wonderful students, one of whom just declared in an email that she loves me “immensely,” which simultaneously broke and mended my arrythmic heart (because, Nick, she IS my objet petit a embodied!). But with that comfort comes quiescence, and I have been too long (3 years!) in Californian quiescence.

seedy motel:

So I’m leaving. I’m heading east. I have decided not to renew my teaching contracts after the fall and instead pile all earthly belongings (not many) into my Mini Cooper, paint something crazy electric on the window, and just. head. east.

I can’t say I’ll make it to Brooklyn immediately, though that’s theoretical mid-range goal. I’ll most likely find a place near Taos and (let’s hope!) a job, and I’ll remake myself in the ashes far past Phoenix. I’m looking forward to it.

NC: So. This is where we are, two people in motion – you, I think, less ambiguously so. You gotta keep moving, right? (right?)

MF: Rightrightright. Not that I feel I have any authority to speak for all artists, but it seems to me–as I think it seems to you, Nick–that the whole settling-down-becoming-comfortable-(and therefore complacent)-thing is the antithesis of the drive to create, whether that creation takes the form of words or chords or even just life. That almost sounds counter intuitive–wouldn’t financial stability, square meals, and happiness enable more creation? For me, no. For me, I’m at my most productive when life is most frenetic–I think back to grad school, where I was writing new stories, filming my screenplays, acted in a student film, editing a literary journal, singing in a choir and painting, all while teaching the GRE and college writing–oh, and filling my head with highfalutin literary theory.

chet baker & the heyday:

So for me, the easiest way to find that productive place is to MOVE–literally, physically, decisively, corruptingly. I think it’s really all about surrounding ourselves with people who aren’t complacent, who are doing things, who give us healthy artistic competition. I mean, how could you NOT create when a floor above you W.H. Auden is poeting and below you Ben Britten is decomposing America and Gypsy Rose Lee is writing erotic murder mysteries down the hall?

It’s like artists are fundamentally reptilian, needing to bask in the baking sun of desert and shed the skins of previous periods or else risk becoming simply technicians who crank out five-cent wind-up replicas of themselves in blue and green technicolor bakelite.

tweet tweet:

NC: So that poem, those images, the whole man-on-a-mission road trip thing – really striking, visceral. I’m sold. Let’s get past the creation though, since a lot of artists read these things and are always professionally curious about next steps. What’re you gonna do with it all, nuts and bolts?

MF: To answer this, I’d like first to offer my myopic reading of the artistic pulse of our generation and hear yeas or nays from the Brokelyn Courage coast of the nation. So. With the whole web 2.0 millennial milieu, where there’s something like 1 million bands on [poor & dying] Myspace and where poppish idol reality contests sell albums, in a time where people aren’t buying newspapers (much less lit mags) and words are sold piecemeal as digital Kindling–what I’m trying to say is–in an era where everyone can art, recognition has to be measured in something other than ticketsales and galleryopenings.

Now that’s nothing new for anyone reading this, because we’ve long eschewed the bloated corpse of mainstream art. You read biographies of artists who struggled before they received recognition, and you go to hindu church services where they say you need to find ways to live a spiritual life while functioning in the modern world, but part of me wants to become an artist monk in loincloth and moldy ginsberg beard who could care less about recognition and the modern world. Nevertheless, we artists need an audience, because we are all, profoundly, performers.

So we need to find a new kind of recognition. Biographies won’t be written about us, except those circulated amongst ourselves (Nick, I’ll play Sal Paradise to your Dean Moriarty in a kilter heartbeat! and then we can trade parts!) so for me, the nuts are about establishing a critical mass of likeminded people (and that’s why a community like Taos or Fairfax or Williamsburg beckons), and the bolts will be having a built-in audience (publishing on the web).

Some people who decide they want to devote their life to art often set measurable goals of 1,000 words a day or one submission to a publisher a week or someshit, and I think that’s very sensible. For me, though, that’s incapacitating, the equivalent of a literary enema.

cathected quixoticism, 2006:

I’m sorry. This is sounding hopelessly vague and bohemian. More nuts and bolts and less quixoticism: I’ll probably rely on online freelance editing and possibly some teaching to pay the bills, but the paradigm shift (and you don’t need to MOVE to make the shift, I just want to) is really about not being a [fill-in-the-blank] who also happens to write, but a writer who pays the bills by [fill-in-the-blanking]. I have a novella in mind. I have many short films in mind. But mostly I have a buddhist life-as-art thing in mind.

NC: You have a really funny story about the Ayn Rand Institute that I’m always re-telling badly. Can we just get it on record so I can route people here…?

MF: Oh man! that IS a story. This was back in my rambling construction worker days when I was remodeling rich Orange Countians’ vaulted ceilings into lovely little lofts. In the office one day, I’d happened to notice that a new client had an @aynrand.org email address. I’d made the Rand rounds by then, wading through anthems and fountainheads and shrugging atlases–as most intellectually pretentious collegiates do, between talking dirty to existentialism and fellating relativism, and for a time I’d been perversely inspired by Ayn Rand’s self-interested self.

But here I was going to meet, MEET! a guy employed by the Ayn Rand INSTITUTE, and I was fascinated to see an honest-to-goodness objectivist mucky-muck, and even better: to do it when he didn’t know I knew! It got me wondering. What would a man so sold on Galtic principle do if one day he ran smack into old John G incarnate?

When we arrived on the jobsite, I was primed for performance. I let the foreman do all the talking. I didn’t initiate a handshake or nod, just held my best Gary Cooper jowls pointed westward, chest thrust and puffed in proper defiant objectivist defiance.

The man himself (who, I would learn, headed fundraising for the ARI, which now seems ever so slightly completely antithetical to the whole Ayn Rand puja) was unremarkable–short, balding, a sort of George Costanza-type objectivist who spoke equally unremarkable smalltalk.

I on the other hand was on stage. As we inspected the job, I dropped dirkish lines casually about the mass of men being sacrificial lambs to involuntarily servitude and the heroism of independence. At some point, I noticed a funny look on his face, a look that grew as I heroically measured support beams and gazed off into the western sky at resolute nothingness.

I don’t recall the exact words, but at one point he said something about me being quite the interesting fellow. Later, after I’d spat out a terse disquisition on immolation, he stuttered “You know….” and then trailed off into embarrassed thought.

I don’t know if he thought he’d found the 15th Dalai Lama of objectivism or something, but finally he took me on up to his inner sanctum, up the stairs to his very bedroom, man! and to a wall with a bookcase chiffonier, and with an expression on his face akin to usentering the holy of holies he drew the doors on this very sexy chiffonier and laid forth the goods–rows upon rows of ARI VHS videopamphlets–and before i knew it, he started burdening my arms with carefully selected videos. He never mentioned Ayn Rand.

I left that jobsite with an armful of feeble notions that I’d been fantastically philanthropic, playing the geisha fantasy-maker and making a man BELIEVE that there were real people who innately embodied his close-held ideals. Except that, of course, objectivists eschew philanthropy.

I never saw him again, but whenever I remember it, I like to imagine the man, muttering to himself, muttering beneath bated breath in his lofty home, muttering the echoes of thousand-page Russian emigre philosophies, muttering “Who is Mark Fullmer?”

narrative & note from a young faux-objectivist:

NC: Back to the buddhist life-as-art thing (and that jouissance we were talking about earlier):

I was with you for one of the more ridiculously cinematic moments in my life, with you and Matt Sebold. It was after a… was it a comprehensive theory exam? We were exhausted but celebratory, and you brought some 40s to our teaching fellow offices afterward. We had some drinks – obstreperous – then we made our way to the bluestone bistro (across from my apartment on commonwealth avenue) and shared a pitcher or two outside.

It had been raining, but the light was nice and the air was summer cool. And I think we three were just feeling very cathartic… when a white passenger van skidded across the train tracks bisecting commonwealth avenue and into a tree about 20 feet from us. And the tree… was some sort of flowering tree, and it just exploded, deep pink petals projecting out like hundred dollar fireworks.

I’m literally just recounting that moment as I remember it, not trying to inflict poesy on it. I think about that exploding tree all the time. Do you remember that day? The same way I remember it? Should we theorize it? Or is it just a moment? If it’s just a moment… should we erect some sort of shrine to it? Or was it a cathected moment, a monument regardless of our remembrances? Or is that just the treacle of memory making a fool out of everybody?

MF: You are not inflicting or inflecting anything upon that deliriously and gorgeously weird moment (of COURSE I remember it!), and we must enshrine (painting? obelisk? cult?), for it was surely and truly jouissance…and that is all is exactly as I remember it–except for one thing. I thought we were INSIDE the cafe when it happened. Funny. The other thing I remember is how in my periphery I saw not the van moving–because cars were whizzing by in the periphery all the time–but the sudden freezeframe halt of the van by the tree, and then that lovely thwump of sound in the stillness (it wasn’t a car-crashy sound, as I recall, but more like a timpani muffled as soon as it was struck)–and then, in the silence, those surreal snowy petals pillowfighting just as you describe it!

NC: Now I can’t remember where we were. Transported, in any case! The important thing is: I know I’ve been jumping around a little bit, off topic – but I asked you those last two seemingly incongruous questions as a sort of response to your call for yeas or nays from the Brokelyn/Courage coast…

Because the fact is, I’m actively biography-ing you RIGHT NOW, Mark, because even though information dissemination/communication has arguably become more democratized… I definitely don’t think everyone can a) art or b) live artfully, not anymore than they could before the internet age, anyway. Forget what the graphic designers and ghost writers say. Art is obsession, art is lived, it’s cathected – imbued with the collective experiences of the artist – and then, on top of that, somehow transcendent, divine. Anyway, I’m not blowing any minds here. But that… quality… is most definitely earned; not everyone on the wild and woolly internet can afford the price of admission. I’m interviewing you because I think you earned it, are earning it, and you’ll just have to trust me that I’m not pandering here.

And I think the mark of the artist, the one who’s in it for the long haul, is that s/he continues to earn it regardless, buoyed by an ineffable desire for something that’s similarly ineffable. So maybe these Friend of a Friend interviews are my attempt at a new kind of recognition, or maybe this is just more traditional artistic mythologizing. I’m not sure, but I want you to know – in your wind swept santa ana core – that some people will break through all the fucking noise and be recognized regardless. And I say the more Beat Buddhist, less sensible the better.

I’m not sure if that’s a Yea or Nay.

MF: I think it’s an ineffable both, friend.

What you say makes me want to shout bookjacket blurbs from the bottom of my lungs (“Friend of a Friend doesn’t mythologise or canonise, but rather amplifies, infects, resuscitates.” “These interviews pockethole-joint Courage’s compatriots and seed them across cyberspace in memetic fractals so that everyone who can’t art can.” “These interviews legitimate and desecrate lowbrow and highbrow in one fucking swell foop.” “…simultaneously intimate pillowtalk and performative marxism.”). Ha. That was fun.

[ed note: I'll be saving these blurbs in my pocket for later on]

NC: Speaking of ineffability and Friend of a Friend, I feel like this interview is closing in on itself, but you’re still as mysterious as when it started. Maybe that’s a factual quality, though… as concrete as things get…

MF: I’m sorry. Narrative lines upon disparate images and all…

NC: Along those lines: I was just talking with (mutual friend and grad school study buddy) Lindsay D-V a few weeks ago, shooting the breeze about AMR and this Q&A, and she feels the same way. I asked her, “if you could know anything about Mark, what would it be” and she said she’d like to know what you think about when you’re alone. Which struck me as an intrinsically sexy question – I’m not sure I’m the one [[mark interrupts! "Yes, and oh! and Wow! that is a deliriously sexy question!"]] to pose it. But, I do feel duty bound to quantify you a little before this thing’s over, for the fans, so if you’ll bear with me:

MF: Realize, first, that as I browsed the questionnaire below, I was doing this mix of har-har guffawing and hypnotic nodding at the fact that THESE are what REAL interview questions should always, always be. Realize, too, that I began writing my responses while teaching class (well, okay, my students were writing their midterm exams, but still)–which was delightful, even if it means I’ve gone rogue-teacher. Finally, realize that these questions were so invitingly creative that I struggled against the temptation to lift off from grounding them in the oh-so sought after tatters of quantified Mark reality. Nevertheless, all my answers are truly true… except for one small exaggeration in #1.

1. At what time, and where, were you born? Full moon? Planetary alignment?

It was a Big Sleep kind of night, rainy, gritty, through which my parents raced past Disneyland in a 1976 yellow Datsun hatchback. Apparently I exited the chute rather quickly, and the nurse who helped was reported to have exclaimed “Oh my, look at his muscular legs!” Without missing a beat, umbilical cord still wriggling, I parried, “Your tits ain’t bad, either, babe!” Actually, the hospital building that birthed me was later converted into community college classrooms, which just so happened to be the place I taught my first course after grad school. In the first session, when I informed my students that our very classroom just might have been the maternity ward where I was born between bloody thighs triumphant, two students gagged.

2. What did you aspire to be as a child?

I didn’t know what, exactly, I would be doing, but I was adamant, adamant that it should involve wearing a three-piece suit to work and carrying a leather briefcase. Today, in honor of this question, I did just that (see class picture of my teaching tradition “Bring Your Stuffed Animal to Class Day” below! Reader’s can delight with a sort of ‘where’s waldo?’ for the briefcase. Rogue-teacher, I’m telling you!). So what does this three-piece and briefcase dream mean? I think it belies my deap-seated desire for order and structure (funny, because sometimes the artistic side of me abhorrzz that shit).

no desires for love-feasting; mark was already surfeited:

3. Your first month at college (undergraduate), how was it? Your last month?

My first month was rancid–literally. It was a hot August in south-central los angeles, I’d just moved into my 5th floor dormroom that overlooked Leavey Library (this in the days with college dormrooms on 5th floors has no suicide guards) and my dormmmate, to whom I’d been randomly assigned, had a serious aversion to water. Seriously. I think he only bathed four times during our first year together, and I remember waking one morning to his girlfriend whisper-pleading beneath bodyodor-soaked sheets of their small college dormbed that he please, please! take a shower. Also, it was a very musical first month. We didn’t turn the radio off once during that whole year, so I also remember waking many mornings with KROQ blasting Sugar Ray’s “I just want to fly” and groggily trying to determine whether it was Mark McGrath or my roommate making that eerie interlude whistling.

My last month was very, very lonely, but also pregnant with promise: I was commuting an hour into Los Angeles to save rent money, had given up music as a career and had sadly self-inflicted pariahdom from almost all my music school friends; at the same time, I’d got my first semiserious encouragements from two professors on my creative writing (one on a Wodehouse-styled satire entitled “A Superior New Year,” and another on an existential story referencing Luis Bunuel’s 1928 film, Un Chien Andalou, entitled “The WeakEnd”). Most importantly (and what would prove to be most formatively), I was planning to move to England (which I did, and a part of me never came back).

our man, doing everyone proud (oxford, the salad years):

4. Most cherished memories: 0-10 years, 10-20 years old, 20-29 years old? No need to impose a freytagian structure – this will be implied.

Age 4: Fragment: the warm red carpet of the culty christian church I attended and the equally warm love of an encompassing, womblike god that I subsequently and gradually discarded. I have a pretty abysmal memory of my early years, but one thing I can see and feel so real even to this day is our family cassette player which I spent hours with, plugging in one tape of uber-authentic lo-fi hippie church songs after another. These were, I suppose, my equivalent of the “Funky Butt” dance hall for the young Louis Armstrong.

Age 17: On one windy Wednesday night among nights when I still cared about ego and achievement, I climbed the steps to a stage in a rehearsal hall for the Orange County Youth Symphony. I’d received a letter that my audition had resulted in a placement in the orchestra, but I hadn’t been informed where in the trumpet section I’d be seated. I climbed the risers back to the back row where the trumpets sat, maneuvered past music stands and worked my way up the trumpet section until I stared, half-dumbfounded and half-justified, at my name on the stand of the principal trumpet seat. At that moment, I had /arrived/!

Age 23: At the top of this interview, I asserted that I’d attained zen once, briefly, in a filled concert-hall. I may actually have reached it twice. The second zen might have occurred on a train ride home from Bath with my best friend and platonic lover at the time, who sat across from me in the English countryside sun, snoozing her little head off. We spent that ride home in silence, but in untouchably perfect silence.

5. When creating art: self-loathing or mythologizing? And afterward?

Straight up! In the creative moment, it is most often neither, but rather abnegation…annihilation. Of course, in more intellectualized moments of arting, I do wallow in creation-myth, but it’s usually a self-deprecatory kind of mythologizing. And afterward it’s always self-loathing. My forthcoming roadtrip poetry collection is perfect illustration: when the image for a poem originally struck, I was simply a vehicle (pardon the pun) to transmute into words the mystic artistic exhilaration of that very American mecca. In revising the poems, however, I often thought about the mark I was etching upon the pages, borrowing kerouac mystique, sexologizing, cultivating plasticine bodhis. Now that it’s done, the loathing has set in: the thing I like most about the collection is the cover art–a bad sign.

6. Flaneurie: Is it about you, or is it about them?

As much as I wish it were otherwise, I’m embarrassed to admit that all my flaneurie is almost always all about me.

7. Pretend I can grant you a wish, given it’s a sort of be-all, end-all lifestyle fantasy wish. Verbalize your wish here:

The answer came immediately, and after ruminating, I’m convinced it’s not simply a fancy-of-the-moment (nor do I think it’s simply because you’re the one asking, Nick). February House! a bohemian collective of poor-as-dirt artistics and one wealthy burlesque (you sure Amy and Merkin aren’t up for buying a warehouse where we can Noah-ferry our menagerie of pets into animalistic artism?). [ed: I'm pretty everyone is up to buying it but - sadly! - no one can actually afford it.] Open, sesame!

8. Now: actualize that wish. What was your immediate reaction to this prompt?

Having had my wish granted, I’m surprised by four things: (1) You can never have too many underwear parties. (2) Nick’s right: 40z do taste better in champagne glasses. (3) This wish is totally possible! (4) Where do we find the stripper?

9. What do you think about when you’re not thinking about anything? Does this usually happen on the bus, in coitus, or not at all?

I actually think about this question alot, sometimes even when I’m not thinking about thinking about it. Well, it certainly doesn’t happen during sex, which for me more often feels like a confusing philosophy seminar (take 2: …which for me more often feels like acting in a play where I haven’t learned the lines or stage directions). (Oddly enough, busrides, especially crowded ones, feel eerily like anonymous orgies.) I do often wonder, though, what floats in the detrital white-noise of others’ minds.

For me, I often run these wacked-out fantasy-trip conversations that I might have with somebody in some hypothetical situation. That or my mind wanders to an apparently random memory. In either instance, my mind gets stuck in a feedback loop on words or turns of phrase, the actual sound of things and the emphasis, repeatedly endless variations on a theme. When I inadvertently and inevitably mouth something, I snap out of my nonthinking and sheepishly check to see if anyone saw me talking to myself.

10. You wake up in the middle of the night, covered in mud in a canvas pup tent. You’re a grenadier; your breath smells like grappa. Is this temporal and spatial anomaly acceptable to you. And: What do you do?

In the late summer of that year we sat in a tent in a field that looked across other fields and into the sea. I’d got the trenchfoot and my toes had bulged as though they were six months gone with child, but then it had left. My friend Mathias was going to kill himself on Tuesday. With my last 50 franc we’d purchased a bottle of port to celebrate, Vichy port, and I now took another pull from the bottle and looked at the bottle and wondered why my breath smelled of grappa. With the summer had come the mud and there mud was all around us. It was good mud. It was woman’s mud. I’d been out drinking the day before with my drinking buddy davy salinger. He called the mud Buddha mud and I called him a damned fool and then we fought like damned fools out there in the hot sun. In the afternoon we drank brandies.

11. Institutional canonization or artistic escape?

Oh jebus, escape all the way! and I think everything in this interview supports that. In the forward(!) to my forthcoming poetry collection, I argue there’s an art to roadtripping, but also that roadtripping is a perfect metaphor for the artistic endeavour. By which I mean:::the open road:::it’s somewhere between artifact and artform, between here and there, between going and being, and is, at base, a great and glorious prisonbreak.

speaking of — mark (with students) as pedagogical powerhouse/institution:

12. Let’s go out in style, shall we? You’re sitting in a cafe on the sun-drenched coast of Ios, drinking coffee that’s more solid than liquid and admiring the girls and their pouty breasts. Suddenly: you realize a truth about cliche, but don’t write it down because one of these girls is your dream girl. Describe her in lascivious detail.

I knew in the instant I saw her she was a nursing student. This was not so much because of her white, near see-through scrubs and well-worn huarches, but by that far off nightingalean care in her eyes, her sad, sleepy eyes that I knew would save me every night from myself and wake me every afternoon with a cup of Jameson and chickoree coffee. As I watched her, still in my metaphorical pup tent, she took deep drags on her Lucky Strike cigarettes, throw-life-to-the-wind drags, squatting and body accordioned at shoulder and elbow and hip and knee like a jacob’s ladder.

I sensed that on her days off she wore phantasmagoric DIY hippie shirts while walking barefoot down asphalt walkways of her college campus. She drank orange juice out of the carton, danced naked to Bach’s Brandenburgs, and felt deep down that the bourgeoisie could not exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production and thereby the relations of production and with them the whole relations of society.

As she stood and straightened, I saw that she had an imperfect nose and just enough cellulite on her upper thighs to remind us that we’re all beautiful. Her small, uptilted breasts were thinking of Nietzsche, and then there was the birthmark right below her left nipple, the one that I would forever tease her looked like garrison keillor in profile. Between her legs, her soursweet lawrentian fig led protest marches against exploitation, and licorice-moochers. Her name, I somehow knew, was Sophia, but she and I would never call each other by name–there would be no need.

But most of all, as I sat there sipping my coffee sludge, feeling the very orgones of her humanity, I felt how it would feel when she hugged you, how every time she clung to you it was as if she was trying to weld herself, meld into you, osmose skin to skin, tendon to tendon, and felt how in that desperately epiphytic embrace, her heart beating in Amma-like determination against yours, she really had a plan, she really had a stufenplan, for she knew that she, Sophia, was here to teach us, all of us, that we are, each one of us, beautiful.

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