Illiterate Magazine

Interview conducted by Avi Sherbill of Josephine & the Mousepeople

What is your earliest memory of love?

My mother and my father got divorced when I was pretty young, and we lived with my mom. Me and my little sister, and my mom lived there. And then my dad came over one night and he broke the window. He put his hand through our front door. Our front door had a little glass window, so he cut his hand through the glass, and he was bleeding all over the place, and my mom was like “go out of here, I’m going to call the police!”, and he was like, “I love you guys! I just want to see my kids!”. Then she called him a cab instead of the police. He told the cab driver he was going to cut him in half, so the cab driver left. But I just remember him screaming, “I love you!”. That was the first time I remember somebody telling me they loved me.

What was your first memory of hate?

I never really got hated on until doing this. I was always a pretty friendly person, I never did nothing to harm anybody, and I guess now that I’m in the spotlight a little bit people want to hate on me. I don’t know why people really do it — hate on someone who doesn’t bother them. I mean I put myself out here to do what I do, and I guess for that, I deserve it. I can be hated on. I just didn’t think… The things people hate on me for usually aren’t even right or true. I’ll get like “Die Fag” (laughs) on my myspace you know. It’s like “Alright”. Without getting too philosophical, you can’t be in too good of a place if you just want to hate on other people for no reason. I think when you find happiness you probably don’t really care so much to hate on anybody. I think luckily I’ve got a lot more people that dig me than hate me, or are indifferent maybe.

One of the members of the previous band that we interviewed said that he hates to love getting messed up after shows, that he needs intoxication.

After shows?

Yeah after the show, and in a way I’m sure having a bunch of girls around is a lovely situation, but is there a downward sadness that happens?

The downward is that you could have too much of something. So a lot of times it could look good like, “wow there’s no way this situation could go wrong” and then before you know it they’re all gone, or the one you wanted is gone and then there’s all the other ones. So I don’t really like to get messed up after the show. I mean I hate anything that makes me vulnerable. Sometimes I hate being human, but I love it. But just all those things that make you human could be a pain in the ass. But now I’d say I’m as least human as I’ve ever been. My needs and desires I have less, but now I’m stuck on one other thing. I’d like to get my health back. I guess I hate being strung out.

Do you think having girls around it almost leads you to a surface level in which you can’t approach something multidimensional?

A multidimensional relationship I don’t think is possible for me right now. Not so much because of this — because I have real friends and girls that I do get more than this from it — but I do have a daughter that’s almost 12, so it’s not so much that my career’s stopped me from having a real serious relationship, I’d say the combination of my daughter and my career, and if I had a girlfriend she’d be pretty low on the list, which would suck for her, so I couldn’t really give back what she would need. I don’t want someone to be that tough. The level of toughness that a girl would have to be to be with me now, I don’t know if I’d want a girl that tough. I had a serious relationship, and she started off where she could deal, and then it got a little too much, and now she’s worse off than ever. It’s not my fault ‘cause I ain’t god, but it  kinda sucks and it bums me out. She was a real pretty girl, on the ball, had a good job. When I met her I had to borrow forty dollars to take her out, she had more bread than me. Man just the  alcohol thing, she’s not in a good place right now, it kinda bums me out and I just don’t want to go there right now.  I just hang out with my daughter. She’s in a good school, she just got into a private school, like a French school, so I’m just going to do that, I’m into that. I’ve got plenty of time. So then for a while I would just hang out with whatever girls. Now I’m trying to find some kind of happy medium. It would be cool to have some sort of conversation with them.

What were you like when you were your daughter’s age?

A lot worse than her. She’s never been intoxicated, not even on a sip of alcohol or anything. I’d already started drinking when I was 11. I’d already started cigarettes when I was her age. I went to a methadone clinic with my dad. It was just a bad time, I got in trouble a lot. I was about to start selling weed by the time I was 13, loosing my virginity, just a lot of things she doesn’t need to know from.  I grew up in Los Angeles so it’s probably easy to grow up there quick, period. And with my parents and stuff, I probably grew up a little quicker than I needed to. I think maybe with her, she has more time to be a kid, and I would just like to keep that going as long as possible.

Was there Judaism going on in your life at that point?

No. That didn’t happen until I was older, I kind of found that myself. My mom with her second husband, she kind of did the Buddhist trip and the hippie trip when we were kids. My real name is a Tibetan name. We did the high holidays with my grandparents. I really liked Passover because I drank — you know I was already an alcoholic. The adults could do four glasses and the kids could do four sips. So I would finish the whole glass and refill it so it looked like one sip was missing. Then I’d do it so it would look like two sips were missing, so it was a big mess. Then I would take off my clothes and dance around and all the grown ups would laugh and thinks it’s funny. But I don’t think they would have thought it was that funny if they had known what was in store. So I would say, like the High Holidays and my grandparents were in the Holocaust, so it was like that, but there wasn’t so much a God kinda thing. And then my mom got into it and then I started studying mystical books, and then I got married and she [my wife] converted and I had to go to the conversion class, and they made me do a lot of stuff, so while I wasn’t doing it I had to keep Sabbath, and then I started reading more books. I tried to find old translations. I could read Hebrew, but not know what I’m reading. So I found these old mystical books, from the 1500’s and 1600’s, like the Ari Zahl, or the Shumach or Rabbi Nachman, like different people, I like that stuff. I still like it. I still study all that, and I actually think I’m probably more connected with the universe now than I was then.  A lot of it was fear based, and I didn’t want to be like my father and all that stuff. But since then, we’ve all gone back to normal. We took everything we learned, my mom doesn’t wear a wig anymore, I don’t cover my head, I had like peyos and a shaved head.

So you were an orthodox Jew?

More Hassidic, not Misnagdim

What’s your relationship to Rabbi Nachman?

I still like Rabbi Nachman. I don’t think I need a Rabbi, but if I did, it would maybe be him. I think he’s very similar to me. But all of those guys died young. My father died of tuberculosis, same as Rabbi Nachman. I don’t want to die from tuberculosis, and I chain smoke. I quite cigarettes, but I still chain smoke other stuff. I wouldn’t want to go out that way, like literary, a lot of people say Kafka took Rabbi Nachman’s style. But my relationship to Rabbi Nachman would be very different than the Breslov or Hassidim that are out there now. ‘Cause I think they’re all crazy. Everyone is crazy, even the people that are against the crazy people are still crazy.  It’s so hard, there’s so many  fences now, that it’s not even the same thing. It all started with Adam and Eve.  When He [God] said, “Don’t eat the apple”, then Adam added, “if you touch the Tree [of Life] then you’ll die”. That’s a fence, and that ruined everything, because then the snake pushed her [Eve] into the tree and then she touched it and he said, “See? You didn’t die”. So then she goes, “If I didn’t die from touching it, I’m not going to die from eating it”. So I mean, what they call Judaism now, I don’t even know what it is. I think it’s time, not for Scientology or anything, but it’s time for us to shed our bodies or something.

I think there’s a relationship between Rabbi Nachman and what your saying, where a person who has an internal struggle, he has to let it out into the world. He has to just scream it out. I think you have this way where you have this very easy time of being soft and memorable while having a harder lifestyle.

Thank you. My mom seems to think that I’m doing something good for the world from the back of the room — something like you said. Rabbi Nachman said there are Rabbis that aren’t Rabbis. They’re not even real people, they’re actually demons. So for real, that’s what it is.

So if you weren’t doing this what would you be doing?

(everyone laughs)

I better get going.