an interview with

Will Oldham

regard-ing the cold and

to support the short movie

The Lonely Life

by David Michael Aho

This interview took place after two 90 degree days of shooting the short movie, The Lonely Life, in central Texas.

interview by Morgan Coy

Come see the WORLD premiere at the Scottish Rite Theater Feb. 28th, 2013.

The party line is that I prefer the heat to the cold. I don’t like even the air conditioning. I don’t like the winter time. In bed at night, my legs get cold, but they don’t get cold in the daytime so I can wear shorts in the winter. I have heard that freezing to death is not a bad way to go... So that’s exciting to have that kind of a relationship with hot and cold.

What is your relationship with cold?

Do you think better in heat?

No! And who wants to think better? Probably think better in cold. Probably do many things bet-ter in cold. But that’s implying that things that we do better are bet-ter. I think there’s a release and a freedom that comes with heat. The inability to do something “better” or even well: if you can’t do it, then you just can’t do it. Cold makes you work harder and makes you do bet-ter, and is that a good thing? I’m not sure that it is.

What things are good frozen?

For the most part it seems that things that go into the freezer, probably should have been con-sumed when they were fresh. The freezer’s probably good for people who need to preserve food, but we don’t need to preserve food. It’s a place to put excess. It’s nifty that there are car-casses that have been frozen for a long time. That’s really neat. But the things that we put on deep freeze, like in the freezer or in our

own brains, have been cropped and butchered. Once you pull them back out, you can’t discern any of their original purpose anymore. So what’s good frozen? Yeah, a frozen margarita. Some-times. Popsicles. I had a popsicle today, it was pineapple and chili pep-per, and that was pretty good.

What circumstances would have to come about for you to have yourself frozen with the plan of having your-self unfrozen in the future?

You mean where you make the decision prior to death? Ah. If somebody else wanted it. Not just somebody. Yeah, I can’t imagine the circumstance. An outlandish possi-bility would be that in twenty years, I’ll have seven kids, I’ll be terminally ill and they’ll say “you’re going to die within six months, but we’re five years away from a cure,” and the

whole family was like, “Come on! You know you’ve got another ten years after that. Do it.” And then I’d say, “Okay, let’s try it. You know, let’s fucking try it, let’s do it.” But I would still want to have a normal life span. I wouldn’t want to wake up in 2025 and have to live 75 years more or something like that.

What do you think the process of being frozen alive would be like in an institutional setting?

I imagine it would feel like, what freezing to death would feel like. I would guess that it would begin with an injection of some sort. And then it would be a gradual shut-ting down of things. And I think that it would be, based on the gradual shutting downs that I have experi-enced, I think it would probably be totally fine. Thawing out would be awk-ward. When I say two or three

days, it’s not taking into consider-ation the fact that there would prob-ably be a big transition period of the body and the brain and the vessels and everything. Regaining func-tion, which would, who knows, take a month to six months. A year or something like that, and I don’t think it would be that nice.

What would your strategy be to rein-tegrate yourself into the future?

If I was frozen at the behest of somebody else, I would put all of the responsibility on them to reintegrate me into the future. One hundred and ten percent. If those people weren’t there? I might walk around for a couple of days and then I’d commit suicide. You know? Just walk around because it would be super interesting, but I have no desire to start life over again. It would be super cool to check things

out, but I would be lost, I would be out of place. Something could happen. There could be an amazing new series on TV in 2041 and I’d be like, you know what? I’m going to stick around, this is pretty good shit.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Have you ever heard of a book called good morning midnight? It’s a favorite of mine. It’s written by a guy named Chip Brown. It’s a biography of a guy named Guy Wa-terman. He was a Jazz piano player and then later he became a speech writer, I think he wrote speeches for Nixon, he wrote speeches for GE. And then he became a rock climber and then he became a sort of inten-sive climber/hiker. And a Home-

steader. And at a certain point, I can’t remember, maybe he was 80, he walked up on a trail that he had spent a lot of time on, you know in the middle of winter in Vermont, with a wind breaker on, and let it just go after that. He had two sons, he had three sons, but two of them were also sort of outdoors men, moutain-eers. and both of them, prior to his death, both, disappeared on cold expeditions. One in Alaska, one, maybe in Colorado, I can’t remem-ber. But it’s had me thinking about cold, for a long time.

Trailer

Cryonics Institute