ward robinson

Download: Mikki and the Mauses “What To Say”

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

(from The Problem With Male Sexuality VHS out now on White Noise)

Anthony Anzalone—the big cheese in Mikki and the Mauses—is the kind of guy that finds pleasure through lived experience, like going to Disneyland on his birthday just to people watch. Having just finished their first West Coast tour, Anzalone gladly finds time unwind the mind behind the Maus-ian madness. This interview by Britt Witt.

Anthony Anzalone (vocals/songwriter): There is tons of retarded teenage history with the name—not to mention Walt Disney is one of my biggest heroes. He was really crazy and he lived in his uncle’s garage when he was 26 and I find that really inspiring. I’ve read five biographies about him. He was crazy and didn’t give a fuck. By the time he was 24 he had gone bankrupt four times and lived in his work studio and didn’t have a bed or anything. He barely ate and didn’t want to do anything but draw cartoons and I think that’s crazy and awesome. If you want to do something, you have to do it like that. So he kept trying to start an animation business and kept running out of money and getting fucked or getting his characters stolen from him. And then he moved to L.A. into his uncle’s garage and just kept doing the same thing and I think that’s really rad. The whole idea of Disneyland was he had a really hard time getting sponsorship because everyone was like, ‘You’re crazy! This is a waste of money! This is fucking nuts!’ And he was just like, ‘I don’t care!’ And he went and did it anyway and took out a mortgage on his house and spent all the money in his company so that if it went bad, he’d be totally broke again forever. The whole concept of Disneyland is basically he just wanted to make a place that did nothing but make people happy. And I think that there’s kinda no more nobler cause that you could have. Life totally sucks a lot of the time, and so for someone to put everything they had out on a limb so that other people could be stoked on life—or just get away from the shitty parts of life for a little while—I just find all of that really rad.
Is he your idol?
Anthony Anzalone: Yeah—I mean, he made a place specifically to make people happy! Disneyland sucks now—it’s all fucked up, but his original idea was really amazing and Mickey Mouse was like an altar ego for him so I just stole it. It’s really Walt Disney’s spirit that I think is rad. Disneyland gets grimier every year. Walt Disney had such integrity. He could have made millions of dollars making sequels to shit like Snow White, but he would never allow sequels or anything because he always wanted to push forward with new ideas and techniques. And now you have like Little Mermaid 7 And A Half: The Witch Trials and it sucks. They just took his name—‘Let’s take it for all the money we can get.’ Which was never his idea. I was just at Disneyland the other day and one of the biggest bummers that I saw there—and this is the kinda shit that pisses me off—they changed Tom Sawyer’s Island to The Pirates’ Lair Island and that’s so fucked. Just following this trend to sell more Chinese plastic swords with lead in them when Walt Disney had named that island after one of his favorite characters that is important to all of American culture with the first great novel and a real depiction of growing up like a boy in America. And it’s totally fucked now. They don’t need to do that shit. Walt Disney actually did want it always changing—that was part of his vision. But I don’t think he just wanted things to change to follow trends—in three years everyone’s gonna be really sick of Pirates of the Caribbean Part 18.
What other meanings are part of the name?
Anthony Anzalone: A weird aspect of it for me is that I’m really into physics and the physical world that we live in. I think at some point we will be able to really do anything we think of except turn into cartoon characters—like, that will never be able to happen. And I’m really into the idea that life is an ultimate failure, always, of never conquering your desires—that will never happen. I’m heavy into evolutionary psychology. It’s basically this idea that the reason that we find things beautiful or moral or scary—the reason that we smell things! That evolutionary sense that we have that’s like ‘just don’t die’ is our brain is constantly telling us and causing all these reactions to everything but it essentially has no purpose because that’s all it is—‘Just don’t die.’ There’s no goal, there’s no winning or losing, there’s no right or wrong—all these concepts that we grew up with, like Christian-based Western philosophy, are kind of retarded and outdated. I don’t mean that in a super negative way—I don’t mean that life is an ultimate failure in a negative way! It kind of represents that in a way—that I will never be a cartoon character. Which isn’t even something that I necessarily I want to do—it’s just the idea of never getting what you want.
What do you think of the Twilight Zone-style idea that the best way to punish someone is to give them exactly what they’ve always wanted?
Anthony Anzalone: Essentially you’re never going to be fully satisfied and that makes total sense to me. One thing I think about a lot is that people work really hard to climb Mount Everest and they get to the top and then they’re alone and cold and miserable and they stay for five minutes and they’re like, ‘I want to fucking get out of here—this sucks.’ It takes ten years and hundreds of people have died trying to climb that stupid mountain and you get to the top and you just feel shitty about it. And I think that essentially sums up the theory of happiness where you’re never going to be satisfied by getting what you want.
You grew up in Arizona—what made you move to L.A.?
Anthony Anzalone: Cali DeWitt. I met Cali—he runs Teenage Teardrops records. I was on the verge of having no friends and then we met and came to Los Angeles and I learned that the world is not a small suburban town anymore. Then I moved to Tokyo because I didn’t have a band and I wanted to do something exciting and not go to school. I was there for a year illegally. I had a band over there called Gokon and I taught English illegally and I was a bartender.
What made you come back?
Anthony Anzalone: The fact that I can’t live there without work permits. Legal bullshit.
Can you speak Japanese?
Anthony Anzalone: Like a retarded 5th grader.
How did you manage living in Tokyo for a year just speaking English?
Anthony Anzalone: My friend that I lived with didn’t speak any English so we taught each other our language. Like he would hold up a beer and I would say ‘drink’ and he would say ‘nomu’ which is Japanese for drink. It was a long series of conversations like that. So my Japanese is mostly slang and basic needs.
Then you came back to L.A. and started Mikki and the Mauses?
Anthony Anzalone: Yes. With Josh Savin who plays guitar, Jeff Lynne who used to be in Wires on Fire and is a friend of mine, and Chris Collins who is the drummer. We get along really well. We all met through the Internet which is really weird. It started out as a solo thing that I was doing in Tokyo and then when I moved to L.A., I turned it into Mikki and the Mauses because I wanted to play with other people.
And you just did your first tour.
Anthony Anzalone: It was great—it was really weird. We did it with my buddies from Japan, Moment Trigger. A lot of fun. We played at this place—Apgar House—which was basically Lost Boys in the middle of an abandoned city. It was total debauchery and right next door was a crack house that got raided the next day. It was a pretty amazing post-apocalyptic world that we went into.
Does something need to be weird before it can be ‘great’?
Anthony Anzalone: I don’t really believe in something being good or bad. I think it’s a very noble cause that all you can do is constantly find new ways to do things. I can see that as being weird at the start because its foreign. In that sense, I do think that things have to be ‘weird’ to start because you’re dealing with something new—which is more interesting than the shit that you already know.
How and why did you release an album on VHS tape?
Anthony Anzalone: We recorded pretty standardly and I decided to edit a bunch of really terrible animation that I learned to make in high school on it. It made sense for the songs in my head. I spend a lot of time alone and in my own head, which makes things very confusing.
Do you spend a lot of outside time with the band?
Anthony Anzalone: I live with Josh but we don’t hang out that much—I mean, we go to shows sometimes but we don’t go to bars. We’re all antisocial weirdos that like to learn retarded obscure knowledge constantly. Basically I feel like I play music for 14-year-old boys who are really confused about their sexuality. I basically just want a bunch of 14-year-old male friends to tell them that it’s going to be OK because I think that time of life is shitty. It’s a mission to have someone to hold hands with.
Was that period of your life really confusing for you?
Anthony Anzalone: Yeah—totally retarded. I was raised Catholic and it was gnarly. I was this really really fucked up kid that didn’t know shit and kinda was fed whatever was on TV as lik, ‘Oh, well, this is not the same thing that I already have’ but it totally was. Then I finally started to see bands and music and hear other shit…basically I was a 14-year-old that was a transvestite and liked Marilyn Manson. And then I started finding out about Iggy Pop and shit like that and was like, ‘Oh, whoa—I don’t have to be stupid, there’s good shit out there!’ I kind of hope that if some kids out there feel like that, they’ll see my band and be like, ‘Oh, OK—cool! I don’t have to wear these fucking rainbow socks or paint my nails anymore.’
Are you still making your poetry zine?
Anthony Anzalone: Yeah, and I have an anthology coming out that I co-wrote with Spencer Moody that is coming out on Teardrops. I really hate poetry though—I think it’s the lowest form of art. I hate the Beats and the whole Beatnik culture and hippies. There is some good stuff but the majority of it is just this self-centered crap that just wastes all these words and then people take that and they copy that and they take even more meaning away from the idea of poetry. And then eventually you just end up with these whiney self-centered complaining people who don’t even know why they’re writing poetry or what the purpose is. And so whenever I try to write it, I try to rescue it from the crap that it is—it’s pretty egotistical.
What are you doing to change it?
Anthony Anzalone: The poetry that I write, it’s not at all recognizable in that sense. They’re never longer than two sentences and they’re very structured and they’re very self-deprecating to themselves which I feel like points out the elephant in the room: ‘Yep, poetry is terrible! We all know it! Let’s work on this.’ I always have the zines with me and give them away for free. Cali is going to put out a 12-inch split with us and Deracine and he’s going to put out the book as well. I think when the record comes out we’re going to tour in Japan as well.
What are your plans from here on?
Anthony Anzalone: We have the 12” split coming out, I think we are going to do another 7” with White Noise and then we might do a Valentine’s Day tape with love songs. There’s no real goal when it comes to playing music like we do—it’s not like we’re going to make money or that it’s a goal that we have.
So what do you do to make money?
Anthony Anzalone: I work like four jobs. I figured out that if I stay really busy then I tend to have less time to be self-centered.
What are you most proud of about yourself?
Anthony Anzalone: Pride is a weird word for me. I don’t feel particularly proud of anything and I don’t really feel ashamed of anything anymore. I’m going to do what seems to be most efficient for any kind of goal that I can see. Any time I follow that I’ve been okay with myself.
You described your music as ‘if Brian Eno didn’t know how to write songs’—what did you mean?
Anthony Anzalone: I am just heavily influenced by the idea of trying to mix stuff that hasn’t been done. But I also don’t know shit about music and never knew how to play an instrument. Like I had a guitar and then just did it, so I don’t know anything about technique or music theory or any of that stuff.
Why did you make Mikki and the Mauses t-shirts with copies of other band t-shirts?
Anthony Anzalone: I just silk-screened over used T-shirts because the idea of making new T-shirts is like… disgusting to me and wasteful when there are things like thrift stores with money that goes to helping homeless people instead of some—I don’t know, some guy getting money who I picture having a monocle and a cigar. So we took only used T-shirts. Some of the ones we went over were other bands that we like. We put our logo on their shirt so we’re basically like some weird Chinese bootleg company.
How do your fans like this?
Anthony Anzalone: People always like something they already know. So it’s an easy thing to do.

MIKKI AND THE MAUSES WITH RAPTOR, CANDYFLIP, RELIGION, THE TREES AND SHINES LIKE GOLD (DJ SET) ON TUE., JAN 5., AT THE AIRLINER, 2419 N. BROADWAY, LINCOLN HEIGHTS. 8 PM / CONTACT VENUE FOR FURTHER INFORMATION. MYSPACE.COM/THEAIRLINERCLUB. MIKKI AND THE MAUSES’ THE PROBLEM WITH MALE SEXUALITY IS AVAILABLE NOW FROM WHITE NOISE. VISIT MIKKI AND THE MAUSES AT MYSPACE.COM/MIKKIMAUSMUSIC.