Alex Osman - Author of Scandals Interviewed by Ben Dreith
Alex Osman is a writer, musician and artist raised in rural Pennsylvania, now living in Austin, Texas. His new collection of poetry, Scandals (Filthy Loot) speaks in a white-noise whisper cranked up loud. The decadent, wholesome symbols of Americana flicker like some many incandescent bulbs above scenes beyond good taste, in hotels and backroads. Like Genet, Osman debases the saints and elevates the depraved and forgotten, depicting America in alternating strokes of grace and violence. Beauty and disaster flow in slow motion, like a car crash, forcing us to watch as all these sins are sanctified.
I spoke to Alex about some of the ideas that went into the book over a series of conversation conducted over the phone from my apartment in New York, which he told me he finds constricting. Osman prefers open skies and highways and speed and familiar nooks where devotion and evil mingle in the language of the outer limits.
Alex Osman: There’s this thing called strömming, or something like that. It's a can of pregnant herring that they ferment for some odd amount of weeks. And then the can actually starts to expand, because it's basically toxic at that point, but they eat it, and it's supposed to be the worst smell in the world. You can't even really get it imported into America, because it's like a hazard, because if it opens, it'll clear out the entire plane.
Ben Dreith: Maybe blame the Puritans, but it feels like there’s so little room for the refinement of the strong or the disgusting in our culture. But even though we revile these things, we’re still fascinated by them.
AO: When I talk to people who have had squeaky clean childhoods and when they talk to somebody for whom a lot of crazy shit was normalized in their house, their worldview is completely shattered.
BD: You mentioned your being sober for a few years. How has sobriety approached the way you approach your art? Does it make you write about drugs differently?
AO: A lot of times, when I was high, creating was the last thing I wanted to do. I couldn't get a lot done, because I'd spend so much of my time nodding off on my couch with music videos playing in the background. But I was also spending more time talking to strangers, going on walks, and gathering inspiration and notes based on what I heard, saw, and experienced. Now that I'm sober and off opiates, my work ethic has been far more consistent and disciplined, but on the other hand, my social anxiety and general depression have come back, so it's a little harder to bring myself to leave my apartment to find inspiration. But it's also kind of a product of my setting, feeling like I don't fit in my city and largely feeling too overwhelmed and underwhelmed at the same time to even want to get out there. Ultimately, I'd rather be sober and anxious, than high all the time and watching myself turn into an asshole or a total joke again. On the other hand, it feels like complexity has gone a little out the window since the 80s and 90s, and things are more black and white and separated into "good vs. bad"." before the "I never want to make things black or white.
I think the way I approach drugs in writing now is more reflective, writing about my experiences and feelings from a different pair of shoes without becoming an "After-School Special" writer. I'm not here to judge or scold or warn anybody. I'm just documenting and showcasing without telling you how you should feel about it.
BD: Do you think that showcasing gross things in a transgressive way is still as impactful as it was in like the ‘80s and ‘90s?
AO: You can't really make anything that pushes that boundary anymore, because we've seen it all. But specific forms of grotesque scenes aren’t really seen in the media. But so many people just watch Trainspotting and think “I can write a heroin story” – I hate that shit so much. On the other hand, it feels like complexity has gone a little out the window since the 80s and 90s, and things are more black and white and separated into "good vs. bad". I never want to paint like a black or white picture. I like what Marilyn Manson was trying to do early on: starlet for one name, and then like a serial killer for the other, and seeing the good and bad in both.
BD: Television and media play a huge role in Scandals.
AO: I watched a lot of TV growing up. Contemporary stuff but also ‘50s and ‘60s TV. They never really focused on a lot of like, the more like unsavory things. It was more like this picture perfect, like false life. For a lot of people who grew up watching TV and movies and worshiping celebrities. When they see something that they don't normally see on TV or movies or anything, it's it is kind of a shock to them. And I think with the celebrity worship, people put them on a pedestal, and whenever they're caught up in some kind of a scandal, they immediately throw them away.
For many, the cure for loneliness is television. Whether we're actually paying attention or just having it on in the background, it's like a companion. I wanted to kinda take it in a literal sense, where people believe they're friends with TV show characters, specifically ones from an era that were more the "white picket fence" type that never really showcased what's on the outskirts. As a kid, I was obsessed with wanting to know what happened when an episode ended, when the camera was turned off. Does Andy Griffith have affairs with the cast members of Gilligan's Island? Is Arnold from Diff'rent Strokes secretly stealing Mr. Drummond's vicodin and selling it to The Fonz? Was a one-off character murdered? Is there horrible crime and tragedy that the camera won't show? I took it a step further and started writing about the imaginary secret lives of these characters, which progressed to imagining the secret lives of people in real life and then blending the two like the mind of someone all-consumed by the screen.
When I was writing the first handful of poems for this book, I was high, lonely, and watching a lot of TV, people-watching, hanging out with homeless people, and trying to navigate the world alone for the first time in my life, which I definitely needed. But I met several people who were so lonely, they would have fake conversations with their TVs or confess things they felt guilt over that they never had someone in the real world to talk to about, almost out of an emotional necessity to cope with being alone. I found it extremely heartbreaking, but also really beautiful and interesting, the idea of the imaginary intersecting with reality and being able to provide relief.
BD: Car crashes feature as almost sublime moments throughout the book, why have you given them such a central place?
AO: Just how American it is. Cars and car crashes in general. But also the way people treat car crashes as spectacles. When they see one, they can't really look away, and sometimes end up in car crashes themselves while rubber necking. I'm also trying to relate that kind of spectacle to this kind of outsider culture, what happens at back roads, things that people in cities weren't really used to, but they also can't, even if they want to, look away. And it makes a lasting impression, whether they see like a dead body in the car crash, or if they see it happen, or the aftermath, it's always a spectacle.
A scandal is like a car crash where everyone rubbernecks, and the worse the collision, the more people watch. A scandal results in the flipside of celebrity worship, which is often total damnation. People hold celebrities up on a pedestal as if they're the fictional characters on TV, but when we get a glimpse of what their lives are like when the camera turns off, when the episode ends, it's like people lose sight of what it is to be human.
BD: You’ve mentioned loneliness a few times, and how you feel most at home in the very scenes where you’ve set a lot of this book.
AO: Scandals is certainly a response to the loneliness and isolation I feel in Austin, writing about what I hoped the city would be and what I miss about where I grew up, all the "stranger-than-fiction" moments you would witness on a daily basis. Me and my girlfriend took a trip to Indiana recently where we met a toothless pervert carny named Zipper and a midget dominatrix named Shorty at a bar, whose mother has an onlyfans account where she shoots videos of herself eating Doritos with her shirt off. And then this beautiful moment happened where we listened to "Beth" by Kiss on the jukebox until the power went out, and everyone drunkenly sang the rest of the song together in the dark, all while James Dean lookalikes and fanatics walked around outside. Austin just isn't like that in any way, despite bludgeoning you over the head with tacky "Our city's so weird" billboards and t-shirts. I felt so at home and happy in Indiana, these are the kind of people I love, feel safe with, and want to hang around, the kind of people and happenings that inspire me.
Alex Osman lives in Austin, TX. He is the mind behind the power-electronics/death-industrial project A Need to Be Shot. His written and photographic work include Problem Child (Expat Press), Burgermeister, The Kennedy Vertigo, and Scandals (Filthy Loot).
Ben Dreith is a writer and journalist living in New York. He is the U.S. editor for architecture magazine Dezeen. His interviews and essays have been featured in a number of publications including Document Journal and Expat, and his fiction has been in Forever Magazine and X-R-A-Y.