Militia Man Doug Martin Speaks:
The Hog Frost Interview

Answer--Well, I cooked a pig with his son once in Oxford, Mississippi--I can tell you that. He's got an illegitimate son that has a band somewhere in that state. They call him Duff, and Jimmy Duro is his real name, I think. He plays in the band called The Tangents. See Larry Brown's essay on the death of Charlie Jacobs in the new music issue of the Oxford American. Charlie played sax with Duff and the Tangents. Elvis used to date Duff's mom in Tupelo. I was staying with the southern writer Larry Brown. I just mentioned him, alright? We were at this photographer's house named Tom Rankin. Some kid at the university made a small film of it, but I've never seen it. Guy looks just like Elvis. I was in his car with him getting wasted a block from William Faulkner's grave. That's why Blaine put that "stick from his grave" in "Song for Hogs and Frost." Elvis's son told me his old man used to take him on tour and make him sing and play guitar at gatherings, make him sing "Love Me Tender" and shit. Nobody believes my story, but hell, Larry Brown knows a lot of famous people.

Jimmy Carter asked him to go on a fishing trip with him, but Larry felt like he had to stay at the university in Ohio and teach. I told him the hell with teaching, but he didn't go. And anyway, I've been told that if you get really stoned and play the hidden techno track on our CD and watch old Elvis movies at the same time that they fit mimetically together. I think it was a reliable source. I don't know if that answers your question or not. But, yes, I like Elvis, and feel kinda like a part of his family now.

Question--You used to do performance art, right?

Answer--Ya. I let a live chicken out in a classroom once. It's was a piece called Icarus-something-or-other. The prof was reciting Ovid, and we had one guy throwing a dead bird up and down on the window ledge, next to the pencil sharpener. And Einstein Icarus was doing equations on the board, and Larry Bird Icarus was bouncing a basketball. I was the common house fly Icarus, among other things. My mother in the piece was watching a video of Chris Burden crawling across glass, and whenever I made too much noise she hit me with a flyswatter. They ended up putting the dead bird on my head and back, and they dragged me out of the classroom. By that time I was dead you know, flew too close to the sun.

I passed out worms on bread to the audience in another piece. But I did many things that I can't discuss in print. It would be illegal and the law needs no more excuses to come after me.

Question--Do you think the Government has your phone bugged?

Answer--Yes, sometimes I do. And sometimes I don't. Weird things have been happening with my phone. Sometimes my caller i.d. doesn't have information on it when the phone rings. Of course, the Copyright office has the CD, and I'm sure someone from the F.B.I. has listened to it. Just look at the cover. Plus, we have knowledge from a reliable source that the Associated Press was looking over our website just yesterday.

Question--You have obsessive-compulsive disorder?

Answer--Ya. I wrote a 400 page memoir on it during a severe breakdown I was having during the Oklahoma City bombing. I was translating Beowulf from the Old English at the same time, which is really a difficult language to translate. I let the literary agent that sold the Godfather see 80 pages of it. He said it was too dark. No one would ever buy it. Which is a lie. Millions of people have this disorder and I will find someone to publish it. I'm mailing it to publishers right now. I'm gonna get me one of those cameras to put in my apartment and broadcast my mental illness over the Internet. It'll be like performance art. I have one song about OCD on the CD, the one that talks about how the crickets sound like Ross Perot. It kinda sounds like Vic Chestnutt, and I'm glad. I'm really into Vic.

Question--Jim Blair, your banjo player, used to play with Garth Brooks, is that right?

Answer--Ya. Him and Tom Skinner (who hooked us up with Jim) used to play in Garth's band here in Stillwater back in the pre-Nashville days. Jim's mom worked with the legendary Bob Wills as an agent, or promoter, or something. I guess he grew up on the road.

Question--What do you wish you would have done differently on the CD?

Answer--Well, we had planned to get a horse that plays guitar to record with us, but that didn't pan out. We ran out of time. His name is ICE. You might have seen him on the Letterman show a few years back. He lives outside of Stillwater, and every night when his owner pulls in the driveway in his pickup, ICE walks out and greets him. See, his owner changes chords on the guitar while the horse strums it with his nose or whatever horses have. ICE just jams on that 6-string. It's quite amazing to see. The CD was recorded in a week. If we would have had more money we would have taken our time, added more instruments, gotten ahold of more resisters, etc. We thought about hiring a prostitute to cuss me out during parts of "I've Been Telling My Mom I'm Gonna Get a Sexchange," but we didn't have enough money.

Question--How are you promoting the CD?

Answer--Well, Blaine's thinking about doing some performance art in England, something that might get him arrested. It would be easy to get it banned in Oklahoma, but I'd like to have a job teaching next year and that might not happen if we did.

Question--What's your live show like?

Answer--Well, we have two kinds of shows. Blaine was on PBS in Tulsa the other day, giving a lecture on the public school system in Oklahoma. It was taped earlier, of course, before he went to Oxford. That's one kind of show we got. The other shows? Well, we're playing the historical Cain's Ballroom in Tulsa soon. It's a place where everyone from Hank Williams senior to the Sex Pistols have played. It's the place where Bob Wills used to do his first radio shows from. And we're gonna have this guy juggle fish on stage with us. And we want to have a chick come up from the crowd and cut my hair during one song. You know, all that Glamor Rock shit. I'm also thinking about tying a piece of bacon to the end of my guitar and letting Derek's dog, Sam, jump up and down trying to snatch it for an entire song. We played a gig before Blaine left for Oxford and he was wanting to fire a shotgun on stage, but his shotgun was back at his parent's house in Hydro, and he didn't have time to go get it. We're looking for some hot girls in camouflage that will sell our cds at shows for us. I like to do that Babe Ruth stance every show or two. You know, use my guitar like a ballbat, and point out in a specific direction into the crowd. It makes me feel important.

Question--Some people have questioned the authenticity of your press release . . .

Answer--Well, that's their problem, Daddy Zeus. Everything in that press release is true. About me stealing parts of Robert Frost's cabin, about Miss America asking Blaine out on a date. Hell, it's printed on American flag stationary. The only part that may be a bit exaggerated is the part about me having ESP. I do know that things are going to happen, but what I have pre-knowledge of doesn't seem to be as important as the events my mother has pre-knowledge of. And both of our pre-knowledge abilities don't happen daily, of course.

My mother once predicted that my uncle-by-marriage would kill my cousin. Everyone, including myself, thought she was crazy. It happened. He was trying to kill all the male Martins. Said he had a vision that God didn't want us to make babies. I guess the females were allowed, according to God. I remember a few days before, Carl, my uncle-by-marriage, pulled up in my driveway and just sat there. I was watching a meteor shower. That meteor shower that just came to Earth, the one on Nov. 17. Well, that wasn't that shower, but it's interesting because I was born the last time that November shower came to earth, two days before it on November 15, 1966. When it came back this time I was freaked out because Mark Twain was born and died during the same comet. My students were more than happy to remind me. Anyway, Carl was thinking about shooting me during the other meteor shower, but he just drove off. Probably afraid someone would have seen him.

Question--Do you really believe the world is going to end on Bill Gates birthday, as one of your songs declares?

Answer--It makes perfect sense to some people.

Question--When is Bill Gates' birthday?

Answer--Well, that is something you might want to find out on your own sometime soon, buddy.

Question--You and the Rhodes Scholar have talked a lot about revolution. Can you discuss this? And when did this revolution begin?

Answer--First of all, we have to get one thing straight. Some resisters believe that Rhodes Scholars are part of the plot to help the UN take over the U.S. during the New World Order. Blaine is living proof that that theory is incorrect. Secondly, it depends on what type of revolution you're talking about.

Question--You mean there's more than one you're interested in?

Answer--Yes. The literary revolution, I feel, began when I stole a piece of Robert Frost's cabin at the Breadloaf Writers Conference. That was a symbolic act that the literary world must be destroyed as it now stands. All the great writers destroyed tradition and the literature of their times. Some, like Ezra Pound, went crazy in the process. He was charged with Treason against the U.S. Government. But that doesn't make him crazy. The problem with the literary world is it's a big lie. Poets and fiction writers teach their classes, tell their students that they too may one day have a tenure-track job, a few books on major presses. They say this so that they can sell books. It's not true. A majority of the literary contests in this country are rigged. Judges know who they are going to pick to win before the contest is even announced. Many times it's past students of theirs. I have much evidence, but I don't want to start in on that. People can email me if they want specifics. Or send me a S.A.S.E.

Anyone familiar with the literary world, anyone that is not a groupie to the system, understands that what I say is true. My suggestion, besides starting your own presses, is to quit taking Creative Writing classes, quit going to readings where your teacher's best friend who has the syntax of a fourth-grader is reading, quit buying their books. Save your money to print your own, because none of them are going to call their editors up and have them look at your manuscript. Secondly, even though we are near the turn of the century, people are still writing the same cliched poem from the early 80's. I don't read literary journals any more, and I no longer work on any. But I had my students in the library the other day and happened to glance at one of the so-called prestigious periodicals. There was a poem in there about a photograph or a painting, I can't remember. This is an early 80's sort of poem, a cliche. It's been done over and over.

These so-called writers have nothing else in their imagination to write about. They've led boring lives. They steal their work from boring writers, and they don't steal cabins. Anyone that has a vision different than their own about the way the world is is censored, kept out of print. They are scared of people who are truly different. It somehow makes them look like where they are coming from is wrong, is the same lack of vision the general populace has, and it is. No one wants it thrown into their face that they have no unique way of looking at the world. That their breakfast is the same breakfast as the dishwasher down the street, but less interesting. As for the music revolution, it started with the DIY idea, and is still going strong, but could become more organized. I think the Internet is helping along those lines as we speak.

Question--What do you think about football?