Mike Topp was born in Washington, D.C., and is currently living in New York City…unless he has died or moved. Recent books include American Air (with drawings by William Wegman, X-R-A-Y Lit, 2024), The Frontier Index (with Raymond Pettibon, Hanuman Editions, 2024) and The Circle Club (with Raymond Pettibon, Karma Books, 2026). Part of this interview was conducted as he was traveling in Europe. Photo of Mike and Ray courtesy of Mike.
Jim Camp: I think we’re about the same age. I’m 62. I just retired from a career directing dirty movies, in which it was expected that I conduct interviews with porn actors before we went to set which the industry liked to refer to as “BTS” segments — “behind the scenes”. They’re wildly popular. The point being I’ve done thousands of porno interviews and zero art interviews. So you’re my first. Which is really a silly way to kick off an interview, cause I’m not asking you a question.
Mike Topp: I’m 67 and live in New York City. I retired in 2024 when AI took over my job heading a translation department. Now I swim, play Scrabble, cook, read and write, etc.
JC: I like that ‘etc.’ at the end. It covers a lot of ground. When I retired — or semi-retired — I noticed I started doing a handful of things every day that felt like they could expand to fill the entire day if I wasn’t careful. Coffee got longer. Reading books and listening to records got longer. Even standing in the kitchen got longer. Has that happened to you…or are you more structured?
MT: My days are loosely structured. I drink coffee with my wife, make a fire, eat breakfast, read and write until 11 or so. Meditate. Go swimming. Do some yoga or weights. Lunch. Come home, read and write. Eventually make dinner. Now and then I play poker with some friends, go over Ray’s [Pettibon] and work on one of our zines, visit friends, etc. I’m like that Joan Miro quote: “To leap into the air, one must first have his feet planted firmly on the ground.” I used to have a more exciting lifestyle where I’d go to clubs until early morning, come home and get a rubdown from my boy Hajii, and then languidly stroke my pet gazelle until 3 a.m. or so.
JC: How conscious are you of that split—routine on one hand, something more invented on the other—when you’re writing?
MT: I don’t think of it as much as a split. I’ll go see Ray once a month or so in person, but when I say I read and write during most days, I’m also writing back and forth with Ray. We usually riff on Twitter every day–sometimes many many times a day. I have a Google doc I keep that has all of our back and forth–it’s about 500 typewritten pages over the last four years or so. We draw from that back and forth for our books and zines. We keep things on a deep philosophical level:
RP [Raymond Pettibon]: I was teethed on Beech-Nuyt– the chewing tobacker noyt the baby food. Eventually I found it too cloyingly sweeyt, switched to Redman by time I was old enough to smoke. Dnt have the teef to chew no more, so I dip skoal, Copenhagen if I’m on a date. Then it’s hers t’chew. Ptuey.
MT: I enjoy Skruf. It’s absinthe & tobacco with a hint of an old-world urinal. If you can whisper a few words of German, like Kummerspeck, or gently sing The Horst Wessel Song a few inches from a lady’s nose, that adds an element of continental spice. Some women find it irresistible.
Here’s another exchange:
RP: Yeah, I’m a tip-toyp internet influencer (goyt gripe?), mostly in Men’s Fashion and Style(proud abouyt it, no chagrin) and I’ve been to Dubai a million times but noyt anymore (it’s so uncool). Maybe you should’ve Followed me for geopolitical insights? You’d be aloyt better off.
MT: Same here. I don’t care a lick about the fashion world, although they seem to care an awful lot about me. Oh, and you men. Here’s some free advice: Never go on a blind date with a “dynamite lady.”
JC: Most people talk about partnerships as they’re falling apart. Or turning toxic. Your work with Ray feels like the opposite—like it generates something neither of you would arrive at alone. Is that how it feels from your side?
MT: Yes, that’s a good way to put it, I think. I love working with Ray because he’s funny, smart and quick. Also I get to learn a lot about wrestling.
JC: Has anything in Europe caught your attention, or are you just passing through?
MT: While in Paris we saw the French High Line (the Coulée verte René-Dumont, formerly Promenade Plantée), a 4.7 km (2.9 miles) elevated linear park in the 12th arrondissement. With true American arrogance and a sense of American exceptionalism, we thought the French had ripped off the American High Line, when in fact the opposite was true. The French high line dates from 1993, while the American High Line dates from 2009.
JC: I was pleasantly surprised to see Hanuman come back—I remember the series of remarkable books Raymond Foye published in the ’80s. What was it like for you to be part of that with The Frontier Index?
MT: It was wonderful to be included in the new Hanuman Editions series. Hanuman Books was Raymond Foye and Francesco Clemente. Hanuman Editions is Shruti Belliappa and Joshua Rothes. Ray and I really enjoyed collaborating on The Frontier Index. We wrote the whole book on Twitter, and I would visit Ray when we did the artwork together. The Hanuman Books series was so great, publishing Cookie Mueller, Eileen Myles, John Ashbery, etc. I was really happy and thrilled to do The Frontier Index with Ray.
JC: I think it’s pretty amazing you and Ray wrote The Frontier Index on Twitter. Have you tried writing on any other non-traditional platform?
MT: Ray and I wrote together mostly on Twitter. When we meet up I might collage some text onto some of his drawings. Sometimes I bring art over with text already written on the drawings and then Ray adds more text. But to answer your question, I guess we haven’t really delved into any nontraditional platforms.
JC: What’s happening between you and Ray is clearly working. Do you guys know when something is finished…or do you just stop?
MT: I think we know when something is finished. When we wrote The Circle Club, we designed the cover and the back cover on the same day in November 2024. Ray did most of the heavy lifting on that, of course. We went through about eight iterations before deciding the zine was done and signing off on it. Along the way Ray had some good advice: “Don’t worry too much about the sequencing”; “Don’t listen to what anyone else thinks.” We also had a mission statement: “All killer and no filler.” And just throwing out this factoid here, I forgot to give one page to the printer that Ray had added text to–that page with Ray’s text will appear in the second edition.
JC: Besides collaborating with Ray, what else are you paying attention to right now?
MT: I’m working on updating my stuff and Ray’s that is collected by NYU’s Fales Library and MoMA. I’m also trying to assemble some of my writings for some lit mags. Right now I enjoy working on the upcoming zine I’m doing with Ray called Sports and Divertissements. And then Ray and I have another zine planned after that on baseball which we are going to call Hardball.
JC: Where do you see all of this going—your writing, the work with Ray, the zines—or is that not really how you think about it?
MT: I’d like to create a couple more zines with Ray while we still can. I write much more now than I did ten years ago and it feels terrific.
