Austin Confidential

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decided to go to Austin and they were roommates and when they got to Austin, Corky looked around and he looked at the Chronicle and he said, "This is the paper I wanna work for," and he looked at the gossip column and he said, "This is the job I want." He used to tell the story, he said, "The only way I knew I could get that job was to get rid of the person who was writing it, so I introduced her to my roommate and married her off." And, in a sense that was true. That was why I was really mad at myself later, because I did the thing that girls always do, "Oh, I'm married now, I don't need to do this nightlife thing anymore." And I quit going out all the time. I didn't quit writing, but I quit doing the scene and that was the first time I really pulled myself out of the scene.

S- What was going on at that time?

M- That was the New Sincerity. New Sincerity was really hot back then, so it was like, True Believers and Zeitgeist and Doctor's Mob and Dharma Bums and all those bands all the time. It was really kind of fun.

S- I can't see as how it would've been too terribly hard to rip yourself away from [the New Sincerity] scene, though.

M- Yeah, I had already kinda made the break from going out all the time so by the time we moved in '88 I wasn't so attached to it.

S: One of the things that I just have to ask, since we did it with out last rock critic interview and it was such a smash, we want you to talk some trash about your fellow writers in Austin. You want me to talk trash? But see, the thing is that I really get along with most of them. Like who?

S: Andy Langer is a great place to start.
I introduced myself to Andy because I'd see this guy who was obviously full of himself blow into the Chronicle periodically. I'd seen his byline before and wondered who he was, so I introduced myself to him. Here's the deal; I have three younger brothers. I have a beta male brother, an alpha male brother and one who's gay. And almost all men fall into one of those three categories. And Andy is most like my alpha male brother. So that's the way I relate to him. With Andy, it's talk, it's industry talk and it's figures and statistics and hot gossip and stuff like that. And he's absolutely amazing in the way he gets down to the dirt. He's really cool in that. He also really annoys the shit out of me sometimes because he so brusque and he's so single-minded sometimes he's hard to deal with. But he's twenty years younger than I am so I write some of that off to his being young, too. With that much of a gap between me and the other writers, that's why I have that real kind of maternal thing with them.

S: Do you have any fond memories of Rob Patterson's time at the Chronicle?
Ah, no. Rob Patterson is a good writer and Rob has a lot of things to say about a lot of people, because I think he thinks he got screwed out of a lot of stuff in town, but I think he probably screwed himself out of it. I wish him luck in his freelance career because it's tough.

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