Q&A with Al Burian

Al Burian is a self-published punk reporter documenting the lives of runaways, temp slaves and barflies?as well as his own coming of age?in the multiple cities/countries he's called home in his 31 years. The bassist for the Chicago art pop band Milemarker and a columnist for both Punk Planet and hardcore mag HeartattaCk has been documenting the lives of friends, girlfriends, coworkers and strangers since the mid-90s, amassing a cultishly admired string of witty zine memoirs under the name Burn Collector. The first nine issues of his work ('95 to '99) were collected in a book he self-published in 2000 (you can find it for $10 at amazon.com; also, early issues can be sampled at www.mindspring.com/~spynation/burn.html). The latest issue of the zine, Burn Collector 12?which focuses on a winter spent drinking and ending a relationship in Chicago?came out recently.

You said that the idea behind the name Burn Collector is that you are a self-described "wine taster of unpleasant experiences." How do you go after the darker aspects of your life and not get burdened down with being depressed about them?

Oh, I'm depressed, I'm depressed [laughs]. That's kind of where the persona comes in, where it's not really fully honest, and that's where it gets kind of weird in terms of talking to people and having them feel like they know me. I don't want to be a bummer and I don't want to put across that everything sucks and it's hopeless. I'm certainly not having a great time and laughing it off all the time, but when it comes down to the way that I'm going to construct something in retrospect, I try to present it so it's somewhat hopeful or amusing. I'd like to idealize myself as sort of finding that middle ground between humor and cynicism.

What makes you want to share these really personal details of your life with strangers?

I guess the initial impulse is trying to combat a feeling of anonymity?the idea that you don't know who I am but here's this thing that offers a little glimpse into who I am. I'm not going to be able to have a conversation with everyone in the world, but in some way maybe I can pass off this surrogate conversation, even if it's kind of one-sided.

Generally when I'm writing, there will be that moment where I'm just like, why am I doing this? Why would anyone want to read this? This is totally embarrassing. That's the moment when you have to be like, stop, print it out, send it off. Because that's the moment where if you give it another week thinking about it, you're gonna second guess yourself and be like, oh, I can't show this to anybody.

Toward the end of your book you say you have two mood-lighting settings?naked lightbulb and total darkness. Is that still accurate? Do artists need to live in emotional extremes to make really strong work?

I don't know if it's true that an artist needs to have extremes. One thing people have criticized me for is like, oh right, you rent a closet and live in it so you can feel bad about it so you can write about feeling bad about living in a closet. And for me that's kind of secondary. I'm not trying to suffer so I can make art. I do like to experience things extremely, because it's always better to feel something than to not feel something, and the best days, or the most memorable days, are the ones where something drastically changes?whether something horrible happens or something great happens.

Actually, I feel like I've shifted what I'm interested in writing about or expressing artistically into more mundane things. I think if you read that whole book?and I've never actually sat down and read that whole book, so I don't really know how it comes across if you read it in a sitting?but maybe you get that sense like here's something crazy I did. I went cross-country in a bus and I met all these crazy people and by the end it's like I live in a town and I have this job and it's a little more boring. It's a little too easy to be like I hopped a train or I did whatever sort of crazy thing that you haven't done. It's more interesting to try and express the everyday things in a way that people can relate to.

It's interesting reading about you interacting with different pockets of the population?bored teenage boys, crazy people on the bus. Too often people just live in their own little world, but you're always pushing different subcultures in your work.

A lot of it comes from being in the punk subculture?or whatever you want to call the subculture that I'm involved in?where it's so easy to get closed off in it. I feel like it's really easy for me to find people like me everywhere and be around people who have my same interests and my same background or same record collection, and you can pretty much sequester yourself in these little mole tunnels. So I try not to talk about people who are just like me. A big problem in the world, even in a broad political sense, is that people just can't communicate with each other.

Do you ever feel you make things happen so that you'll have material for Burn Collector?

I really try not to. I think that's why I find myself writing more about everyday kinds of things. I don't want to go out and do something crazy so I can write about it... Another thing that's sort of strange is that I find people will try to do things around me or will try to tell me some crazy story or get me involved in some crazy thing 'cause they're like, "I want to be in your zine."

What's an example of a Burn Collector audition?

People saying these weird things like, "Oh my ex-boyfriend broke into my house and wrote all these crazy things on the walls, do you want to come over and see it?" And that's where you're just like, "No, relax dude."

When you talk about a fanzine it implies that you're a fan of something, though. I'd always seen these people who made zines about their favorite bands, and I guess my initial impulse was I'm a fan of these people and I just want to make a fanzine documenting all my favorite people. So I'm always psyched when I can bring people in. The new Burn Collector is about Chicago. It's strange, because being in Chicago and actually talking about people I'm hanging out with right now and telling these anecdotes where I can run into people who are like, "Man, I just read that, that's not how that happened," that's kind of strange for me. I ran into a guy the other night?and this was the first time this happened?he was like, "You know, I was just reading that zine, and I came across this character Steve, and he was like this real pathetic guy who'd just been dumped and was all bummed out about it, and I couldn't help but think that that was probably me, you know, my name being Steve and all." And I was like, "Yeah, I didn't change your name or anything."

So it was him.

Yeah, it was totally him. I was like uh-oh, I'm finally gonna get punched out. But he took it pretty well. I said to him, "I put you in there and I didn't change the name because I'm proud of my friends. I want to document their quirks."

You write straight from memory?

Burn Collector 11 started to be more fictional and I really hated it. I think of myself more as a reporter. Unless it's gonna compromise somebody in some way or really embarrass somebody, why change things? Reality's already interesting enough.

I saw on some website that you sold the rights to your book to a movie company. Is that true?

I didn't sell the rights, but I did talk to somebody about it. It's funny, this guy got in touch with me and was like I work for this production company and I'm into your book. I was in New York and I met the people he worked with and it was one of those classic situations, like as soon as I did that it was on the Internet that I sold the movie rights. It was a really funny meeting actually, because it was all these totally New York filmmaker dudes who were trying to assure me that they were hip and with it and they had this whole like, "Don't worry man, we really respect you, we're not going to make [Burn Collector] into Reality Bites or anything like that." And of course, I'm like, "I totally want you to make it into Reality Bites. That would be my dream, to have Winona Ryder in it."