I started Wooooo years ago for fun. I went to my friend Andre and said, “I want to make a zine with just interviews in it; silly interviews like they have in Big Brother.” He said, cool, he’d lay it out. So I set about gathering the interviews. The first person I interviewed was Michelle Williams. She ate her breakfast everyday at the café where I worked, and she also lived across the street from me in Chinatown. I told her what I was planning and asked if she’d be down for an interview. She said yes, so we went out, got drunk, and I asked her some dumb questions. It was great. Then I approached one of the guys from Blonde Redhead, the lead chick from the Donnas (remember the Donnas?), and a bunch of other interesting people for interviews. Months later, the first little issue of Wooooo came out and I started to believe I was a writer. I obviously wasn’t; I was an interviewer. Transcription is not writing. Nevertheless, I did more interviews and worked hard at cultivating a “journalist” type image. Eventually I found myself doing legitimate, paid magazine work and I thought “This is all right! I might just quit the service industry!” And I did. I became officially freelance, or, as we freelancers like to call ourselves, “poor.”
Now, two hundred years later, I’m still doing interviews and I’m over it. I’m not over-it over it, but I really hate the sound of my own voice when it’s not coming directly out of my face. I interviewed a guy today– an artist– and he was super nice, just the nicest dude you could want to talk with on the phone, but at around the twenty-minute mark in our conversation I thought, “Shit. This will take forever to transcribe.” Then I remembered: I’m not transcribing anymore! Someone else is! So instead of cutting our chat short, like I normally would, I leaned back, put my feet up, and just kept my lips and ears flapping for another half an hour!
Genius. Thanks new intern who I haven’t named yet. You rule.

Look at this picture of Leo Romero doing a backside this-and-that. Don’t you wish you weren’t old and fat?