Charles Andrew Bothwell was born and raised in Jacksonville, FL to a hardscrabble Texas railroad-man dad and Kentucky photographer mom. These days, he’s best known as Astronautalis: Dungeons & Dragons player, tattoo artist, history scholar, itinerant MC.
Astronautalis drops This Is Our Science September 13, an album overseen by Modest Mouse producer John Congleton and featuring Tegan (of Tegan & Sara). It comes a week after Bumbershoot, where he performs each day of the festival. Music is only a portion of his presence there, though. Along with his full-band set on Saturday, he’ll play moderator/ranter in the three “Why This? What That? Why Now?” panels devised by One Reel Arts Programmer Chris Weber. City Arts spoke to Astro in advance of his prolonged visit to his former home of Seattle.
How did you get involved with Bumbershoot?
I lived in Seattle for about three years. I moved there for a girl. She left me about six months after I got here, in a real messed up way, and I was looking down the barrel of having my ex be my landlord. I was like, “Oh good!” I was about to go on tour again and needed someplace to stash my stuff, and (Bumbershoot programmer) Chris (Weber) and his ex are friends of mine from doing Rock Lottery in Denton, Texas. I got thrown a life preserver at a time I really needed it. It was gonna be a temporary thing, but we got along swimmingly. I then moved to Minneapolis in June 2011.
I’ve never played Bumbershoot before. The festival circuit is kind of a strange beast; you put your foot in the door of one of them and then you into more of them. I’ve just been grinding out on clubs, for example—I’ve been self-booked for over seven years, with my manager and a friend and I handling emails and stuff, just doing it ourselves. As for Bumbershoot. I’ve been there plenty of times, but this time I’m playing!
How did Chris present doing the “Why This? Why That? Why Now?” panels to you?
He came over and asked me and I’d known about the year previous, but I didn’t actually get to see it, as I was on tour. But I’d talked to him about all sorts of things through the process for this one, over the butcher’s block in the kitchen where everybody sort of hung out at our house. And I was super-fascinated. It’s sort of super-exciting and super-nerve wracking, because it is a new direction, certainly for my work to be going in. I told Chris, “Yeah, man! Let’s do it!”
You seem like the perfect host for something like this: I know your stance on censorship and, well, you’re known as a history nerd.
Yes! Certainly those two! It’s funny, because the guy that we ended up getting for “Why Nerds?” [Ben Thompson] runs this really amazing blog called Badasses of the Week, which has been collected into a book. He writes these hilarious, 1,000-word essays on bad-ass characters from history. I originally found out about him because he was my Dungeon Master for my D&D game in Seattle. I found him out of my own nerdiness, because my favorite thing to do when I came home from tour to Seattle was to play D&D. “Nerds” was definitely the slam dunk for me!
And censorship, yeah—I can get a little hot and bothered about that one. The interesting thing is that as rap music is no longer a subculture, rap music is just our culture now, where every pop song is mostly rapping, and the line between Young Jeezy and Britney Spears is almost completely blurred. It’s amazing to me that when you listen to pop radio, huge swabs of songs are totally censored out. And this is something that we’ve come to accept. What does that mean about our appreciation and connection to the music?
Anything else in the “Why This?” line-up you’re personally looking forward to?
The “Why Revolution?” I’m personally really excited about, because [hip-hop producer X:144] is this guy I pitched who I’ve known for years, but I’m certainly not friends with or anything. He’s friends with a lot of my friends in the rap community, an Egyptian born hip-hop producer who grew up in Florida. And he happened to be in Egypt setting up a recording studio when the revolution happened. He gave a really interesting perspective on the events, too, perspective that wasn’t really touched on at all in the exhaustive news coverage that was done. He was a Twitter message away. That to me is the most interesting thing: to be stranded in the middle of a country in a revolution. And especially for someone like me who has such a romantic connection to American history, in a country that is built on such an incredible revolution, but I am so astoundingly removed from that in actuality. That’s the one I’m most pumped about.
I think for me “Old Timey” is going to be hilarious because we’re gonna get like a cavalcade of steampunk and civil war recreators that we’re gonna parade out! These communities are fascinating. With steampunk, it’s like how Joy Division weirdos became fullblown Goth kids, and now to sort of like keep that, but also become gilded age dandies? So amazing.
The original thing about the “Old Timey” is how people buy $500 iPhones, and then use them to only mostly take pictures that look like they came off of $5 cameras. I’m one of them.
CHRIS ESTEY