I really like these interviews. They are infinitely better than those e-mail questionnaires I used to get all the time in high school. These are written for me, personally and I enjoy answering them much more than "last person you talked to on the phone:" type questions.

Anyway, here's the new interview. Jenn's interview of me should be coming soon, and I guess it'll be the last one for a while unless someone else wants to play.

Interview questions courtesy of Briana Mowrey

1. society at large seemed to fall out of love with the grunge phenomenon somewhere in the mid to late 90's. like the death of the dinosaurs, do you, as a still current pearl jam fan, have a theory why grunge bit it hard?

Well… I could ramble on about this for a long time. This is, of course, my opinion. If any of this is factually incorrect or if you disagree with any of it, let me know.

A major part of it is that grunge musicians (for the most part) didn’t want to be rock stars. They didn’t want to be icons like that, and (again, for the most part) resented society’s (particularly corporate America’s) acceptance of them. What they were doing was most definitely anti-social. Not in the “I don’t want to go to a party, I don’t like crowds” kind of way. Like in a “The system we live in is fucked” kind of way.

When the system you’re trying to lash out against accepts you as part of itself, it’s gonna piss you off. You watched as more and more people started following grunge, the angrier the musicians got.

Eddie addressed this particular point (in some documentary I saw a few years ago)—when ad agencies began to use the “Seattle Image” to sell products, they were all outraged.

Now grunge music as a social phenomenon did fall off. This was partly because these things tend to travel in waves (and I guess it was time for an era of shitty pop music again), and partly because grunge musicians seemed to be doing everything they could to stop being popular. It is completely ironic that the most popular song to emerge from the grunge music is “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” a song that mercilessly mocks Nirvana’s own pop-culture fan base.

Pearl Jam, the band I’m most familiar with, has never not wanted fans, as it were. I’m not sure that made sense… I’ll try again. It’s not that they didn’t want people to like their music, to follow their music—it’s that they wanted people to follow it from themselves not from society telling them it was cool. The social acceptance of grunge drove them to lash out harder. Eventually society found the next fad. Boy bands, I guess.

It’s all twisted, because if you think that THE MAN had never picked up on grunge as something new HE could possibly sell, there’s a huge possibility that most of us wouldn’t know the name Kurt Cobain. Grunge may have left Seattle, but it surely wouldn’t have gained the following that it did.


2. kathy bates, esteemed oscar-winning actress, shocked her viewing public when she appeared in the buff in the recent film "about schmidt". why hasn't john lithgow stepped up, and gone the full monty?

A little back-story:

I was riding in the car with my mother one day. She said to me “You know, you remind me of Russel Crowe.”

I said… “OK… thanks… I think.”

She said “You know, you’re both good actors, you’re both handsome, you have some similarities.”

I said,again “Thanks.”

There was a moment of silence.

My mother said: “You know, John Lithgow isn’t that attractive and he’s gotten a lot of good roles!”

You can imagine what this sounded like to me. I knew she didn’t mean it “that way” but it’s become somewhat of a joke over the years.

When I told this story to Briana, she told me a similar story in return. When complaining that she would never get roles because she was (supposedly) unattractive, her roommate responded with “A lot of not typically beautiful actresses get roles… you know, like Kathy Bates.”

Now to answer the question:

I believe I actually screamed out in terror when the Notorious K.B. disrobed in About Schmidt. If Lithgow were ever to get naked, it might cause irreparable damage to members of the audience. He’s thinking about his fans.

For all those readers that are my mother I KNOW WHAT YOU MEANT, I DON'T THINK YOU THINK I'M UGLY.


3. to your knowledge, why haven't the programmers of the nba games for x-box programmed any of the players to cry after their team is defeated?

Hey, remember when the Lakers kicked the 76ers asses in the finals two years ago? I do.

Also, I don’t know what the x-box programmers do. I do know that I have a PS2. Which you’re never allowed to play again.

4. what would ever give my mom the impression that we're doing "it"?

I guess when she walked in on us mid-coitus it was pretty hard to get a different impression.

For all those readers that are my mother, that last statement was SAID IN JEST!

5. finally, i know this might be a hard topic for you, but, father's day was just last weekend. we all know your father perished tragically as a result of friendly fire in the gulf war. how do you commemorate father's day now?

Again, Briana set me up with the opportunity for some back-story if you know what I mean. Zing.

NYU freshmen are required to take a class called “Writing Workshop.” It was your basic essay-writing course. I was really bitter about having to take it. Then I decided that I might as well have a little fun with it as long as I was at it. None of these people knew me. So when it came time to write personal essays, I created an entire life-story for myself and wrote from that perspective.

Some people might call this sort of activity “lying.” I like to think of it as “an in-depth character study.” I wrote about my experiences as an army brat. I did have to go onto the army website to find the location of army bases. It was a really in-depth character study.

Anyway, you can read the two essays that reference this stuff here and here. (These are .doc files) Neither of them are very good, but one great thing about writing about how your Dad died is that the professor is hesitant to give a bad grade.

I never did tell them that I made it up. When my professor e-mailed me after the semester and told me that the head of the expository writing program Pat C. Hoy (who fought in Vietnam and who writes about it) wanted to meet with me to discuss our shared experiences with war, I though the joke had gone far enough. I ignored the e-mail and that was that.

I’ve tried to feel badly about it. I just don’t. It made the class entertaining, at least. And my dad got a good story to tell when he’d tell people his son had killed him off in essay class.