Contributor Confab: Trav S.D.
"This current benighted age desperately needs a super-injection of imagination, nonsense, and madness in its art."
Impresario, historian, vaudevillian, musician, playwright, director, actor, author, theoretical physicist (okay, I made that last one up - or did I???)… Trav S.D. might well be tired of being referred to as a Renaissance man, but that’s his burden to bear. There is no corner of show business that has not been brightened by his formidable talent and encyclopedic knowledge. It should come as no surprise, then, that his list of skills also contains “poet,” as evidenced by his slips slips contribution “Six Short Anthropological Lectures, Organized by Sound,” a curio cabinet of nonsense verse that signifies a mind in love with language and learning.
ss: If you could unilaterally add one amendment to the U.S. Constitution, what would it be?
TSD: I have drawn up a list of about 20 proposed amendments. Getting rid of the electoral college system heads the list.
ss: Ghost, vampire, werewolf, or zombie? Why?
TSD: To be? Or to enjoy? Believe it or not I have given the matter a great deal of thought from the creative end, and I have it narrowed down to two. I would love to try to solve the challenge of making a properly scary ghost movie. To my mind about 98% of them fail. I love to watch these movies and how directors try to solve it, and I often like the stories, but am almost always disappointed by the "manifestations," if you will. I have my own idea of what it should be like, something Gothic, something Victorian - I have the feeling most contemporary directors assume that my approach would be too basic, but how could it be, since nobody ever does it that way? After ghosts, I would choose werewolves. Vampires and zombies have been done TO DEATH. They need to go far, far away. But, of course, it would be just like them to come back. It's what they DO.
ss: What geography has had the biggest impact on your life and work?
TSD: As I go through life, it has occurred to me that I was ineffably blessed in being born and raised in a college town on the Northeast corridor smack dab between New York City and Boston, where people read books, know a little about history, maybe have even seen a play or two. I'm a working class kid, so I often think that I really did dodge a bullet being where I'm from, when I hear what growing up is like in so many other parts of the country. The first step in escaping is knowing there's somewhere else to go, and where the door is.
ss: What's the book everyone seeing this should read if they haven't already?
TSD: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll. I think this one book has been more influential on all the pop culture that came afterwards than most people realize. ALSO: this current benighted age is hung up on literalness, comprehensibility, and, worst of all, "relatability." It desperately needs a super-injection of imagination, nonsense, and madness in its art. It might be the only thing that can restore reason, order, and sanity to our politics.
Here’s Trav bringing his poem to life in a new dimension at the slips slips Issue 1 launch event (introduced by Eliza Stamps):
See more of Trav’s work at Travalanche
Learn more about slips slips at slipsslips.net
Submissions for slips slips #2: Dialogues are open until August 31. You should totally send us something!
We always DO return 🧛🏼♂️🧛🏼♀️🧛🏼