Hell, Noses, Pants

Hell, broken noses, and the precise circumstances under which my pants ended up on the floor—that, apparently, was what I decided to discuss when Style and the Family Tunes sat me down for an interview. I’m not entirely sure what they were expecting. Probably something with more coherent opinions about fashion.

Style and the Family Tunes was one of those magazines that actually worked—glossy without being emptied of content, the kind of thing that could sit between a Vogue and a record crate and belong in both places. While everyone was writing obituaries for print, they kept producing something worth holding. They’d talked to people like Jette Stolte and Sascha Funke, which put me in reasonable company and gave me an appropriate amount of performance anxiety going in.

There’s a specific problem with interviews, which is that the version of yourself that exists in conversation doesn’t survive transcription cleanly. You’re either duller on the page than you were in the room, or you sound like you were trying harder than you were. I apparently landed somewhere in the territory of hell and physical injury and public undressing, which I think means I was relaxed. Or possibly nervous. Difficult to say in retrospect.

The piece ran. I read it back and thought: yes, that’s more or less the person I am when I’m not being careful about it.