Magazine

记者: Well changing gears a little bit. Tell me about the Adam Green magazine. What's that all about?

阿当: Yeah, it started out just as a magazine. I would just put it out myself - three different issues - at a certain point I had three of them out. They were different. Some of them were like carrying a pocket notebook. I've been carrying around a notebook in my pocket for years. Just writing down one-liners. Just stuff I didn't want to forget. So the first magazine was sort of like a collection of one-liners. Just a long list of them. Like eight pages. And the second one, I typed for, like, an hour a day for ten days as fast as I could, and then edited it down to something much shorter than that. Then the third one was a poem that I wrote on tour, and at some point, this publisher in Germany bought all three issues, and they asked if I would be interested in putting it out in a book form, and that's kinda what happened. I just met with them in Frankfort and they're very highbrow publishers. They were more than qualified to put it out. They asked me if I wanted to do the book. So, I said sure. I even gave them some additional material. Kind of like a long poem that I wrote at my apartment in Brooklyn over a few weeks. Now it's come out - it's also bilingual. They got a translator to translate it, so the first part is my original English text, and the second part is the German text.

记者: So is it always meant as a commercial thing or is it just something that you decided to do, and it's kind of turned into that?

阿当: Well, I don't know. I guess it's a thing I did to organize my thoughts. I guess I thought that people would maybe relate to it in some way. I guess it's just that the only way I've ever really made any kind of money in my life is by doing artwork, so it was kind of natural for me to take stuff I thought people would find entertaining in some way and compile it into something and put it into a book like that.

When I started out, it wasn't like I was making money at it. Every magazine was a dollar to buy. We sold a lot of copies, but it was pretty much the cost of printing it. It was more just a way to communicate with people, and I guess the way I'm running it is so that I get to pay my rent and stuff.

记者: I didn't mean it as a negative thing. It’s just in reading around things, I had seen some comments from people just talking about how you'd gotten more popular, and one of the things they sited was this - that it went from kinda this small thing, and now it's going to be published, and blah, blah, blah.

阿当: Well, you know, it's true - I mean I always had in my mind that those magazines could be a book because, like I said, they're very concise. I really pared it down. It's not like some journal or something. You know what I mean? It's really edited down stuff. I thought they could be like chapters in a book. But I didn't expect that it was going to be a book so soon. That just fell into my lap, you know, and you’d have to be retarded not to sign that book deal and put out the book that you have been writing that someone wants to put out. People are just totally insane, or just too young to understand that things work.