I am Interviewed by a Prolific Skateboard Academic
Prolific pop culture critic and academic Roy Christopher wrote one of my favorite non-fiction books of the past five years, Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines The Future, which I’ve lovingly placed on my bookshelf right beside classic cultural texts Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation by Jeff Chang, Cut ‘N’ Mix : Culture, Identity and Caribbean Music by Dick Hebdige, and How Music Got Free by Stephen Witt (not as monumental, but a personal revelation).
“An aging BMX and skateboarding zine kid… [who] holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin” and who currently teaches at the School of Communication at the University of North Florida, Christopher says of himself that he “marshals the middle between Mathers and McLuhan.” I simply call him a skateboard academic! And marvel at his knack for on-point puns: “Ch. 1 Endangered Theses;” “Ch. 2 Margin Prophets;” “Ch. 7 Return to Cinder;” “Fear of a Hacked Planet.” He’s got some catchy soundbites too: “Ch. 6 Let Bygones be Icons,” “we’re not passing the torch, we’re torching the past.” The pranks match the deceptively playful, but historic topic of his book: DJs as hackers “retrofitting, re-functioning, and willfully misusing the techno-commodities generated by the dominant culture.’”
I met Christopher in 2019 when I came upon his Dead Precedents reading at Elliott Bay Books. Knowing nothing of him beforehand, and suddenly captivated, I asked an audience question (which I never do) about William Gibson and Caribbean music. We ended up getting drinks next door at Oddfellows with his wife and our mutual friend, Charles Mudede (who had emceed the whole bookstore event.)
We have stayed in touch ever since; meaning, I subscribe to Christopher’s newsletter, and I’m continually awed by his non-stop writing and non-stop mind. I asked him to blurb my book The Night of Electric Bikes earlier this year, and he did.
In a cool turn of events, Christopher interviewed me this past weekend and quickly posted it on his blog this afternoon.
I seem to talk a lot about Billie Holiday. Here’s the third mention out of four or five: “for me, Billie Holiday’s small club dates in 1930s and ‘40s Manhattan are one of the crowning achievements of human kind’s city experiment.”
I also describe my long lost “Transit Singles” project as “kind of a mess” and take a stab at describing my current project:
Over the course of the collection, these wayfinding poems become less about city geography, and start to chart other paths: events that lead to events, books that lead to books, thoughts that lead to memories.
These shorter wayfinding poems are paired with larger poems about retail kiosks in subway stations, ancient Athens, Joshua Tree, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, affordable housing, kiss and rides, greenhouses, Hermes, and other city subjects.