My buddy Ed has been soliciting requests to be interviewed. Unfortunately, concomitant with the ego boost of having someone ask you to talk about yourself is the obligation to actually furnish them with a proper answer, and moreover to put it up on the internet, for all to see.

The second part of the interview game is: if anybody would like me to come up with 5 piercing, trenchant and sympathetic questions perfectly tailored for them, that they might go on about themselves for this long, they need merely post a comment below and I will be obliged to give satisfaction.

Is there a cultural element to the Scandinavian domination of hyphen metal? If so, is it an element of the bands or the audience?

I dunno, man. I’ve started writing an answer to this one a couple times, and I think the problem is that where metal dipped considerably in America in the 1990s, there remained really vibrant, passionate metal subcultures all over Europe; and those have only gotten stronger as metal as gotten more popular in the English-speaking world.

I don’t know why Scandinavia, in particular, has been so fruitful, but it’s less anomalous in the context of European metal in general. Germany, for instance, has been an incredibly rich metal country for years and years: power metal, speed metal, and thrash have all had vital, independent and long-lived scenes there.

So in that context, the Scandinavian scenes are just more scenes—and the plural is useful there. I think that Scandinavia still has an exoticism to many Americans which I don’t really catch, any more, and thus the notion that Finland, Sweden, and Norway are be particularly culturally distinct might encounter skepticism. But to be honest Sweden was invigorating worldwide death metal while Norway was still, metallically speaking, in its diapers, and Sweden’s contributions to black metal have always, with a handful of notable exceptions, been strictly secondary to Norway’s. And to the Swedes and the Norwegians—and thus to the metal community at large—Finland is just full of its own truly deranged souls.

Now. All that said, Scandinavian metal—Black metal and viking metal in particular—has for some time now been leavened with a real cultural and geographic influence from the area. This is a clear case of metal first, cultural influence second—I don’t think that Scandinavia is, truly, any more hospitable to metal in an aesthetic sense—but the musicians there have long drawn on the severe climate and landscape as well as the norse history of the area. Norse myth, folk legends, fjords and pine forests have been fertile inspiration for Robert Plant, J.R.R. Tolkien and Enslaved alike. I should stress, though, that the first Swedish and Norwegian death metal bands were kids singing about slasher movies, just like everywhere else.

Cast the live action Metalocalypse film, drawing on the members of current or past metal bands, living or deceased.

This one is kind of a cheat, since several of the characters in that show are more or less overtly based on actual metal personages themselves. I have restricted myself to musicians who play the same instrument as their characters, in most cases.

Nathan Explosion: George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher, from Cannibal Corpse

William Murderface: Geezer Butler, from Black Sabbath (Geezer Butler is not nearly as unpleasant as Murderface. But they have the same hairstyle.)

Pickles The Drummer: Devin Townsend, from Strapping Young Lad (Devin isn’t a drummer, but Pickles is pretty transparently a Devin clone. I mean, dude’s got a skullet.)

Skwisgaar Skwigelf: Michael Amott, from Arch Enemy

Toki Wartooth: Kirk Hammett, from Metallica (though Hammett is neither a rhythm guitarist nor Norwegian, no other musician so perfectly exemplifies the sweet, second banana man-child.)

Briefly discuss the cultural and or technological catalysts that give rise to the evolution of logographic writing systems over alphabets.

This question is actually based on something of a false premise; there are no logographic writing systems in current use. Rather understandably, logographic systems—systems in which a single unique character or grapheme will stand for a word or morpheme—predate alphabets, but in reality it’s the alphabets which evolved out of logographies. Chinese, the logographic system which most readily springs to mind, has in fact also evolved out of the confines of strict logographic representation such that the majority of Chinese words involve a combination of different characters, including a combination of characters for semantic and phonetic notation.

One of the commonly mentioned advantages, though not a catalyst per se, of logographic (or pseudo-logographic) systems is that they are decipherable independent of the evolution in the spoken language to which they refer. Further, people speaking a range of mutually unintelligible dialects can still understand the same text—as a catalyst, you could get chicken and egg, but culturally the notion of China as an enormous area comprising numerous linguistic populations certainly requires either a linguistic convergence or a mutually intelligible writing system. My understanding is that the effect across time is somewhat muted in the modern world, as the literary conventions and word definitions in Classical Chinese render it highly difficult for the student of modern Chinese to read.

What was the best meal you’ve ever had and what made it so special?

I am horrible at remembering things like this: best meal, favorite singer, favorite painter. When I was very young, I had the notion that for pretty much every kind of thing in the world, there was a definitive, objective Best, and all I had to do was find out what each one was. I knew that Picasso, for instance, was the best painter in the world, though I’m not sure I was particularly familiar with his work.

Almost all of my meals of note were remarkable because they were at restaurants that my friends and I routinely went to. Most were in high school, when we couldn’t cook very well and had more disposable income. The Indian Café, on 107th St., was one such place: my group of friends from school—who overlapped significantly with my band—and I would go there really often. My friend Michelle would guzzle margaritas. I always ate everyone’s papadum, because I was the only one who liked ‘em, and I always ordered the lentils.

As far as actual meal experiences—I can’t tell you the best meal I’ve ever had, because I remember awfully few. The best meal I’ve had in recent memory, though, Robyn and I had a couple months ago, to celebrate our 1-year anniversary. The place was Basso 56. It was pretty fancy—definitely fancier than a usual Saturday night—but not so fancy that we had to hold back in ordering. What made it so lovely, for me, was the degree to which it underscored the value of the whole experience in a properly good restaurant. We ordered appetizers, salads, entrees, dessert, and digestifs—quite a few more courses than usual for me—and each one was excellent. Just as impressive, though, was the service: our waiter was attentive and friendly without being obsequious or fake, and authoritative and skilled without being snooty or intimidating. It was excellent service, and, far from simply providing us our food while it was still hot and managing not to fuck anything up, enhanced the experience every step of the way.

You have been asked to typeset your favorite novel. Which font do you choose?

But not which novel? For the sake of readability I will pass over your choice of terminology, and pretend you had said ‘typeface’. That’s a tough question to ask, I think, because naturally one’s choice of face for the body of a book has to not only stand on its own in terms of aesthetics and visual interest, but also stand in harmony with the general aesthetic of the book, content-wise, and perhaps most of all with the design of the rest of the book.

Naturally I don’t have a cover to consider, so I’ll go mostly on terms of visual interest. My favorite novel—and again my inability to cite favorite things comes into play, here—is probably Heller’s Catch 22. So we’ll want to keep things twentieth century, American, and middle of the road in terms of style; no late-period calligraphic revivals nor Italian Old Styles. Which is nice for me, because in the past six months or so I’ve found myself most consistently drawn to the faces of the 19th and early 20th century, especially newsprint. The development is quite evident and fascinating to see: from cheap and inflexible Scotch Roman types, printed on lousy paper with lousy ink, up through the first faces actually designed for the medium, like Melior—they all, even the former, have a robust charm, and their imperfections and slightly old-fashioned look, heightened by the fact that so many extent examples were printed from hot metal and other devices less advanced than our current digital presses.

So I think it would be interesting to lay our book in that period. I would choose Oxford, ATF’s 1892 revival of Binny & Ronaldson’s Roman No. 1. Oxford itself has not survived the following century’s succession of printing technologies, but happily it seems to have been the subject of its own revival, just very recently: Monticello.