5 | Kurt Eisenlohr

Photos and words with the author of Stab the Remote

Q: What is the last book you read?

A: Lou Reed: The King of New York, by Will Hermes. I didn't want it to end. In a way, it didn't. Lou Reed's life beats your eternity, ha!

Q: What is the last book you started but didn't finish?

A: Seek, Reports From The Edges Of America & Beyond, by Denis Johnson. Great book. Extremely dark, funny. I had to get away from it. But ain't that America? I will get back to it soon. Oh, I just started reading Joel Gion's book, In The Jingle Jangle Jungle, Keeping Time With The Brian Jonestown Massacre. Absolutely fantastic! I was reading it in bed the other night and a bedbug crawled across the book and I smashed it, spraying blood across page 130. It's 103 degrees today, no AC. With fucking bedbugs. I'll spare you the ongoing nightmare. The book is currently in my freezer. Joel did a reading at Powell's Books last week. I told him the book was for my brother, and that he was turning 50 at the end of the month. Joel wrote: "Mike! Drive 50!" Then we drove to a bar, where I didn't drink. The book will remain in my freezer until the apartment has been sprayed and any eggs that may be on it are killed dead by arctic temps. However, I keep taking it out, reading a bit, putting it back. It's that good!

Q: If you had to describe Stab the Remote to someone who could only communicate via visual shapes, what would you draw (or paint) them?

A: I already drew the answer to that question on the cover of the book. I'll stick with the blood red squiggle. I'm faded like an old photograph today, ghostly gray suggestion sitting in a chair, or maybe I'm just lazy. Apologies to the person who can only communicate via visual shapes. The struggle is real. 

Q: If you had to recommend one artist for someone to look further into (new, old, any medium), who would it be?

A: The person (persons) who threw soup on the Mona Lisa, or, more recently, spray-painted Stonehenge orange. Raging against the death of everything is the best art of all. Oh, and the work of Jennifer Robin. Volumes of unpublished manuscripts already sitting on the shelves of eternity's library. Two of them will be released into the physical world soon. You can't expect me to pick only one person. Come now.

Q: What are you up to next?

A:  I'm looking at photographs I've taken over the last two years, and continue to take, with vague plans of putting together a book, but a book like that would be expensive, and rent is 70% of my income. I can barely afford to be alive at this point in time, so yeah. Writing costs nearly nothing save one's sanity but I no longer know who I'm writing for or why. Shadow on the wall, where did you go? Where did I go? One of my brothers died in 2023. I have a lot of questions to ask him. Maybe I should type them out. Tell me everything, Chris. Allen Ginsberg asked, in one of his early poems, "Joan, what kind of knowledge have the dead?" I, too, would like a reply. I could write an entire book, I imagine, to my old friend Brett Ashba, attempting to explain why I drifted out of contact with him, stopped returning letters, 25 years ago, all the emotional wilderness and events between then and now. We've been exchanging postcards since my brother died. To tell him on a postcard that it wasn't personal, that there is and always has been something deeply closed off and muted about me, simply won't suffice. He deserves a book length answer. Because he is my friend, and I owe him that. It could actually be a one line book, come to think of it: "Sorry, old friend, I am mentally ill." Or maybe I will draw nothing but blood red squiggles from here on out, and call it good. Seems likely but one never knows. For instance, there's an unhoused person who paces up and down the alley below my apartment window at night, a giant of a man with black bushy hair and a wild Rasputin beard, a blanket hugged around himself, sobbing, repeating the same string of words over and over: "I want out of here, I wanna go home, I wanna die, I wanna die, I don't wanna die now." I heard that mantra last night and it broke me, I felt an overwhelming sorrow, bone deep. Fear, as well. I couldn't shake it this time, woke up with it. I've also seen him in the daytime, two and a half miles away, in the neighborhood where I work. "I want out of here, I wanna go home, I wanna die, I wanna die, I don't wanna die now." It occurs to me that I am that person. And the people of Palestine. The list goes on. And unless you are sitting on a mountain of money, so are you. I could write a lot of things, but I don't, and for the same reason I stopped writing to my friend. I feel paralyzed. What's next for anyone?