Writer Chris Dahlen

If Only I Could Grill David Byrne Again

Chris Dahlen writes scripts for video games and covers pop culture for a number of websites and magazines; he is also the former editor-in-chief and co-founder of the gaming journal Kill Screen. Before moderating a panel on the role of video games in education, he sat down in the Zócalo green room to talk about the surprising joys of being a freelancer, singing Puccini in his car, when McDonald’s just seems right—and what he would do over if he had a second chance to interview David Byrne.

Q:

If you could be any animal, what would you be?


A:

Cats have a good life. We have a pet cat, and he seems to have a pretty good gig. He’s part of the family, but he also is autonomous and can kind of lead his own life and do whatever he wants. He has it pretty worked out.


Q:

What surprises you most about your life right now?


A:

I freelance a lot, and when you freelance you stumble into opportunities. I got to write haiku in a video game this year. I got to be a lot of virtual people on the Internet. You never know what’s going to come up next; you check your e-mail and some new opportunity shows up.


Q:

What game do you still play that you thought you’d outgrow?


A:

Tetris. I still think Tetris is probably the best video game in the way that chess would be the best board game. It may not be the one you play every day, but it’s so the platonic ideal. It’s such a perfectly simple game, it’s so easy to fall into it.


Q:

What’s your go-to karaoke song?


A:

I don’t know; I’ve never done karaoke. If I had one, oh man, that’s so hard! I’ve been listening to a lot of opera lately, so it’d probably be something from that which would be really embarrassing. I finally got into Puccini, singing along to that in the car, and I don’t even know what the lyrics are. That’s powerful stuff!


Q:

What’s your favorite plant or flower?


A:

I had a bonsai tree once; it took me a few years to kill it, so I’d have to go with that.


Q:

You’ve interviewed some cool people. If you got one do-over, what question would you want to ask again?


A:

I interviewed David Byrne once, and I asked him about a song where he and Brian Eno sampled worshippers chanting from the Qu’ran, and it’s actually sacrilege to capture that on tape. They were asked to take it off, so later releases don’t have that song. I was asking him about that, and he didn’t want to get in a whole discussion about it. I remember looking at the transcript again and thinking, boy I wish I had dug into it a little more.


Q:

When did you last eat fast food?


A:

Probably a week ago. McDonald’s. I still like eating McDonald’s when I’m on my way home from an airport or something.


Q:

What’s your favorite condiment?


A:

I would have to go ketchup, right? Just lifetime eating. I’ll go with ketchup.


Q:

What do you wake up to?


A:

I have an alarm clock that’s tuned to NPR, but it’s kind of quiet, so it’s sort of almost this murmur of news—you can’t even make it out—and that’s just enough to wake me up. I don’t like a lot of loud noises first thing in the morning.


Q:

Where would you like to travel to next?


A:

Last year I worked on location clues for the Carmen Sandiego game for Facebook, so I had to look up 66 different cities and come up with at least 50 interesting things to say about each of them. I’d love to go somewhere in Japan, Thailand, or China—there were just a lot of things in those countries that I didn’t know anything about.


*Photo by Aaron Salcido.
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