Opus No. 1

A character trait that I’ve tried to adopt recently (with moderate success) is to never tell anyone about something that I might accomplish until I’ve actually accomplished it. You’ll be familiar with this habit if you hang out with artists: everyone is always on the verge of big parts and personal shows and record deals. It’s excusable while we’re young, I suppose, and exciting to talk about opportunities and possibilities, to stay up to date with each other’s budding careers. But if we keep confusing what we almost did (or, often, what we had the slightest chance of being not even tenuously involved with, like that time I hit on Jena Malone at The Continental) with what we’ve actually done, we risk becoming a bunch of farcical blowhards.

So, as a single mitigating instance to compensate, however insufficiently, for all the things that I’ve claimed to be about to do but never got around to doing (applying to various institutions and for various scholarships, writing letters and proposals to various writers and intellectuals, undertaking various physical and intellectual regimens), it is now official: I have been published in a magazine. A print magazine; I got one in before the whole industry floats over the brink of the inky waterfall of obsolescence. Copies of the article are already being disseminated throughout the northeastern seaboard and beyond.

I interviewed the mighty Swedish neo-Balearic slow dance duo, Studio, for Futureclaw magazine. Futureclaw is a young publication but it already seems to have found its voice: like an artsier Vice, and without the tiresome, disaffected (albeit occasionally funny) cruelty or presumption to objectively supreme hipness. If you want to check out Futureclaw and you don’t live in an area where it’s available, you can access the whole Fall 2008 issue here. My interview starts on page 59. (You’ll have to forgive the Paris Review-wannabe opener.)

Oh, published. It’s somewhere between baking and losing your virginity. (Right, Denver?) Once you hit the stands, you only want more! Speaking of which, I might have something coming out next month in a bigger mag – but, well, we’re still negotiating, so, like, I really shouldn’t have mentioned it.

~ by ohkrapp on September 18, 2008.