kottke.org posts about interviews
From an interview by Kicker Studio of London designer Crispin Jones, where he says that the broad definition of design is perhaps not so bad.
On one level design is horribly inarticulate word - it has no real meaning nor way of encompassing all the things that are classed as “design”. This weakness however means that the discipline is kind of without boundaries. I think design allows you to engage with the contemporary world and engage in shaping the world: we’re living in a golden age of products/services as technology matures and people integrate it into their lives.
You may have picked up on this by reading kottke.org over the years, but I think that designers, architects, entrepreneurs, filmmakers, writers, scientists, et al. are all engaged in doing the same kind of thing, more or less, and that working “without boundaries” and borrowing the best aspects of many disciplines is one of the keys to maximizing your creative potential. (thx matt)
The House Next Door is on a roll lately. Today they’re featuring an interview with Glenn Kenny, a film writer who edited the three articles that David Foster Wallace wrote for Premiere magazine.
Dave would often be commissioned to do pieces at 5,000-7,500 words so he understood that at a certain point in the process it was quite possible this would happen, but in a way he was constitutionally incapable of keeping to a word length. It was a tacit agreement you had with him when you commissioned a piece that you were going to get something long. But if you can run a piece that long, he’s one of the cheapest first rate literary writers out there-you pay him X amount of dollars per word, but you get five times the words.
Kenny also wrote a short piece on his blog shortly after Wallace died.
In a 1989 interview for Dutch television, Pixies frontman Frank Black talks about his songwriting process as creating a “poetic structure” with the melody and letting the lyrics flow from there. The Dutch graphic design studio Experimental Jetset took inspiration from Black’s approach.
When we get an assignment (which usually comes in the form of a question, a theme, a problem or a riddle), we feel as if the solution is already enclosed in the assignment itself. The design is already there; it just has to be released. Like the fist from Frank Black’s shirt.
Petri Purho, the rapid-prototyping enthusiast and mastermind behind Crayon Physics Deluxe, talked to The Onion’s A.V. Club about the puzzle’s point, the process, and winning the prize.
“I didn’t want to do a cheery kids game, where you’d have bright colors and cheerful music.”
thx john
Speaking, as we briefly were, of Big Think, they have several short video interviews of Michael Lewis about the current financial crisis and other things. Worth a look see.
Filmmaker Mike Leigh’s description of how he works with his actors in movies reminds me of (unsurprisingly) relaxed concentration and deliberate practice.
When it comes to the crunch it really is about having actors who are totally able to think deeply about their characters while at the same time, once we developed those characters, for them to be absolutely organic and able to respond emotionally to anything that comes their way. When it comes to thinking about how a character talks, there are literary and language considerations. For actors to be able to differentiate between themselves and the characters they are playing while at the same time remain in character and spontaneous requires a sophisticated combination of skills and spirit. The bottom line is this: For those that can do it, it’s a natural combination and they don’t think twice about it. For those that can’t do it, they can bang their heads against a brick wall from now till kingdom come and they still won’t get there.
Leigh’s acting example — that there are two distinct people at work, the actor and the character — is interesting to think about in the context of sports. I wonder if any athletes approach working on their games in this way, differentiating between the player who performs and the person who analyzes the playing. Plenty of athletes refer to themselves in the third person (Rickey Henderson!), I wonder if that’s why.
An interview with Alissa Hamilton about her new book, Squeezed, reveals that that fresh orange juice you’re buying might not be so fresh or even orange-y.
In the process of pasteurizing, juice is heated and stripped of oxygen, a process called deaeration, so it doesn’t oxidize. Then it’s put in huge storage tanks where it can be kept for upwards of a year. It gets stripped of flavor-providing chemicals, which are volatile. When it’s ready for packaging, companies such as Tropicana hire flavor companies such as Firmenich to engineer flavor packs to make it taste fresh. People think not-from-concentrate is a fresher product, but it also sits in storage for quite a long time.
(thx, oli)
Michael Lewis talks a little about his writing process.
I’ve written in awful enough situations that I know that the quality of the prose doesn’t depend on the circumstance in which it is composed. I don’t believe the muse visits you. I believe that you visit the muse. If you wait for that “perfect moment” you’re not going to be very productive.
Video interview with Pixar’s Andrew Stanton, director of Finding Nemo and Wall-E. Among other things, he talks about two things that enabled the success of Pixar: the creative egalitarian dictatorship of John Lasseter and the ability of Steve Jobs to protect everyone from any outside business pressures and just create.
Howling Fantods has published an old interview of David Foster Wallace from 1993. The interview was conducted by Hugh Kennedy and Geoffrey Polk and ran in The Whiskey Island Magazine. A generous excerpt appears below:
Wallace: […] The writers I know, there’s a certain self-consciousness about them, and a critical awareness of themselves and other people that helps their work. But that sort of sensibility makes it very hard to be with people, and not sort of be hovering near the ceiling, watching what’s going on. One of the things you two will discover, in the years after you get out of school, is that managing to really be an alive human being, and also do good work and be as obsessive as you have to be, is really tricky. It’s not an accident when you see writers either become obsessed with the whole pop stardom thing or get into drugs or alcohol, or have terrible marriages. Or they simply disappear from the whole scene in their thirties or forties. It’s very tricky.
Geoffrey Polk: I think you have to sacrifice a lot.
Wallace: I don’t know if it’s that voluntary or a conscious decision. In most of the writers I know, there’s a self-centeredness, not in terms of preening in front of the mirror, but a tendency not only toward introspection but toward a terrible self-consciousness. Writing, you’re having to worry about your effect on an audience all the time. Are you being too subtle or not subtle enough? You’re always trying to communicate in a unique way, and so it makes it very hard, at least for me, to communicate in a way that I see ordinary, apple-cheeked Clevelanders communicating with each other on street corners.
My answer for myself would be no; it’s not a sacrifice; it’s simply the way that I am, and I don’t think I’d be happy doing anything else. I think people who congenitally drawn to this sort of profession are savants in certain ways and sort of retarded in certain other ways. Go to a writers’ conference sometime and you’ll see. People go to meet people who on paper are just gorgeous, and they’re absolute geeks in person. They have no idea what to say or do. Everything they say is edited and undercut by some sort of editor in themselves. That’s been true of my experience. I’ve spent a lot more of my energy teaching the last two years, really sort of working on how to be a human being.
Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED talk shares a kinship with what Wallace is getting at here.
The Atlantic’s new business blog has an interview with Michael Lewis.
A related thing is that there was blind faith in the value of financial innovation. Wall Street dreamed up increasingly complicated things, and they were allowed to do it because it was always assumed that if the market wanted it then it made some positive contribution to society. It’s now quite clear that some of these things they dreamed up were instruments of doom and should never have been allowed in the marketplace.
(thx, djacobs)
In his latest post for his NY Times blog, Errol Morris talks with three photographers — one each from Reuters, AP, and AFP — and has them select their ten favorite photos of George W. Bush.
He popped out that door, and when the door opened and he came through it, the look on his face was like no look I’d ever seen on George Bush’s face in my life. […] And I said, “If he wasn’t just back there behind that door crying, I don’t know what that look on his face is.” Because he just looks absolutely devastated as he comes through this door after essentially ending his eight year presidency. And it’s just really striking. He just looks absolutely devastated.
The interview with the last photographer is the least interesting because he refuses to interpret any of the photographs but his set of photographs includes at least 3 photographs that I had never seen before and that weren’t “published extensively in the United States”.
A longish interview with Steven Soderbergh about his Che movie and filmmaking in general. The first question is about how all his movies are related.
The good news is that I don’t have to know if there’s a link. Wells had a great quote once where some critic asked him a similar question. He said, “I’m the bird, and you’re the ornithologist.” I don’t really sit down and think on a macro level how or if these things are connected. They obviously are in the sense that I wanted to make them. And so there must be something in them that I’m drawn to.
Soderbergh also talks about following your interest when choosing projects and not worrying so much about the money.
Yeah. And I’m a big believer that if there’s something you really want to do, don’t walk away because of the deal. I see it happen a lot. I see people walk away from things because they didn’t get the deal they wanted.
The New Yorker has a too-short excerpt of an interview with Barack and Michelle Obama done in 1996 as part of a “photography project on couples in America”.
There is a strong possibility that Barack will pursue a political career, although it’s unclear. There is a little tension with that. I’m very wary of politics. I think he’s too much of a good guy for the kind of brutality, the skepticism.
Update: Le Monde ran a more extensive excerpt of this same interview in French…ABC News had it translated into English. (thx, marshall & stacy)
Video of Willard Wigan’s work. Wigan makes exceptionally tiny sculptures that fit on pin-heads or within eyes of needles. He once lost a sculpture of Alice in Wonderland:
I think I inhaled her.
Some of the parts of his sculptures are no bigger than human blood cells and to steady his hands, he works in between the beats of his heart.
The stillness of it is very important — you have to control the whole nervous system, you have to work between the heartbeat — the pulse of your finger can destroy the work.
(thx, alex)
Gothamist posted an interview with Janeane Garofalo yesterday. I was struck by Garofalo’s answer to a question about her acting career slipping away after the 90s.
Oh yeah, of course. It ended around 2000. I had a lot of work in the ’90s. And then for females especially, as you get older — I’m 44 — it’s really difficult for a 44-year-old woman to get acting work. That’s just the nature of the beast. And because it’s an elective profession, it’s hard to complain about it because nobody makes you do it. Also I did a lot of mediocre stuff towards the end of the ’90s and then sort of the novelty wore off. And then I left acting to work at Air America for two-and-a-half years.
When I decided to go back into acting, it wasn’t very easy. “I took two-and-a-half years off, but I’d like to work again. Please hire me.” It sort of doesn’t work like that. So I’m just sort of grateful anytime someone wants to hire me. And TV seems to be one of the only places where older women can seek employment. Unless you sort of get lucky. There’s a saying: “you’re always just one part away from being back at work in film” for women especially. So I’m just waiting for someone to give me the green light, “Oh, let’s hire Janeane again!” I think I’m on the “has been” list until I’m not. It’s like a game of Red Rover and somebody says “come over.” Or you can create your own work, but I’m not really a screenwriter. I don’t really feel like I have the story to tell. It would just be creating content for the sake of creating content.
An interviewer wouldn’t dare ask that question of some other actors and if they did, may have received a defensive or angry answer. Garofalo answered it honestly, which is why we like her so much.
The Onion AV Club has an interview with Darren Aronofsky about his new film, The Wrestler.
The more we thought about it, the more we realized the connections between the stripper and the wrestler were really significant. They both have fake stage names, they both put on costumes, they both charm an audience and create a fantasy for the audience, and they both use their body as their art, so time is their biggest enemy.
Toddler or not, I’m getting out of the damn house to see this movie.
Great two-part video interview with Sol Sender about designing the logo for the Obama campaign. Includes some early design sketches and other designs that made it to the final phase. (via quips)
Some advice from Gary Hustwit, director of Helvetica and the upcoming Objectified, on interviewing.
“My process of interviewing people is I do not interview people,” said the cheerful Hustwit. “I’m trying to get them to forget that they’re being interviewed.” He accomplishes this by avoiding the word “interview” in his communications with subjects and going into a meeting with a list of conversation topics, never a list of prepared questions.
On the occasion of the upcoming Criterion release of Bottle Rocket on Blu-ray, the AV Club interviewed Wes Anderson. I love this bit about working with Gene Hackman.
But Gene, I don’t think loves being directed in the first place, and I had a lot of particular ideas for the way some things were to be done. He just wasn’t getting a huge kick out of it — but I don’t know that he ever does. The main thing is that everything he was doing was great. Even though he can be belligerent, there’s a lot of emotion there. I was always excited to be working with him, even when I was a little scared of him, just because this character that I’d spent so much time working on and was so invested in was being brought to life — not only in all the ways that I’d wanted, but something quite beyond.
An interview with a translator about the difficulty of dubbing The Wire into German.
To bring over the style of the speech out of the slums or ghettos, we haven’t used very exact, grammatically correct German. Nobody says “Wegen des Fahrrads” (because of the bikes), rather “wegen dem Fahrrads” (‘cause of them bikes), for example there we use wrong German. Here and there we’ve used other phrases, sometimes with an English or American sentence structure.
The interview itself was translated from German to English. (via panopticist)
In this video interview, long-time online community expert Randy Farmer explicitly references the broken windows theory and its application to online spaces. He tells an anecdote about how the quick deletion of trolling questions from the front page of Yahoo Answers led to a decline in the number of trolls. (thx, bryce)
A short interview with Michael Lewis about the book he just edited, Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity. In compiling the stories, Lewis was surprised at how little good writing he could find about upcoming financial hard times.
How little there was worth reprinting. I had six interns digging up all kinds of stuff, and I looked at 20 times the amount of material that appeared in the book. I assumed there would be lots of stories predicting each panic before the panics actually struck. But there was very little. Afterwards you’d have a flurry of literary activity, and then everybody was on to the next thing. Still, there was a common thread: You were watching America’s growing financial insanity.
Steven Heller spoke with the designer Sol Sender about his iconic Obama “O” logo.
Well, the “O” was the identity for the Obama ‘08 campaign and the campaign is over. That doesn’t mean that the mark will be forgotten; I think the memorabilia from this campaign will have a long shelf life and will stand as a visible symbol of pride for people who supported the candidate and for those who see it as a representation of a watershed moment for our country. As far as having another life, I can’t say. Perhaps the 2012 campaign will hark back to it in some way.
Sender’s web site has a bit more info on the development of the Obama brand.
Afternoon todo list -
3pm: Listen to Radiolab’s season premiere about Choice live on WNYC or online.
4pm: After the show’s over, head on over to The Morning News for their inaugural TMN Talk, a live text chat with Radiolab’s Jad Abumrad. The chat will begin here at 4pm.
Great interview with Matthew Weiner, the creator of Mad Men. Gender roles are a big focus of the show, something that wasn’t necessarily apparent in the first two shows when I thought it was going to be some sort of lopsided misogyny-fest.
And the big intellectual skirmish going on was “Is it great that we’re so different, men and women, or is there no difference at all?” No difference at all is where is started. Let’s have equality and legistlate it like that. And then it became so much more complicated when you added sex to it and biologically the relationship is always sexist in some way. What’s sexist in the office is fuel in the bedroom. We’re wired that way to some extent. Women become more aggressive and it becomes strange for men.
(via fimoculous)
The musician Tricky talks about Englishness in this interview.
We’ve always been violent, but now it’s stupidity, people kicking heads in for no reason. When I was a kid we used to fight or rob the people we wanted to fight or rob, we didn’t walk along the street, kick someone’s head in, and film it on a mobile phone. Now you’ve got a guy stood at the bus stop, minding his own business, and eight guys jump him and beat the fuck out of him, or stab him to fuck for no reason. It’s like these video games, you can go on a video game, shoot someone twenty times and they get back up again. I don’t want to sound like an old man, but when I was growing up we had films like Get Carter and Scarface. Scarface was one of the best gangster films ever. But those films were more about the threat of violence that makes it a violent. Now people use violence as a marketing tool, that’s the problem we’re having right now.
Tricky also rightly defends English food; I’ve never had anything bad to eat there, at least in London.
In 1996, an editor from Rolling Stone named David Lipsky spent a lot of time with David Foster Wallace and wrote a biographical piece that was eventually not published in the magazine. When Wallace died last month, RS sent Lipsky to interview his family and friends. The resulting piece, The Lost Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace, is a unique combination of a look at a writer at the top of his game and a man at the end of his life. It was very difficult for me to read, for reasons which I may never really understand. Wallace meant a lot to me, full stop.
Here are some bits from the article that resonated with me. On the about-face that happened with his professors a University of Arizona after The Broom of the System1 was published:
Viking won the auction for the novel, “with something like a handful of trading stamps.” Word spread; professors turned nice. “I went from borderline ready-to-get-kicked-out to all these tight-smiled guys being, ‘Glad to see you, we’re proud of you, you’ll have to come over for dinner.’ It was so delicious: I felt kind of embarrassed for them, they didn’t even have integrity about their hatred.”
On expectations:
The five-year clock was ticking again. He’d played football for five years. He’d played high-level tennis for five years. Now he’d been writing for five years. “What I saw was, ‘Jesus, it’s the same thing all over again.’ I’d started late, showed tremendous promise — and the minute I felt the implications of that promise, it caved in. Because see, by this time, my ego’s all invested in the writing. It’s the only thing I’ve gotten food pellets from the universe for. So I feel trapped: ‘Uh-oh, my five years is up, I’ve gotta move on.’ But I didn’t want to move on.”
On self-consciousness:
“I remember this being a frequent topic of conversation,” Franzen says, “his notion of not having an authentic self. Of being just quikc enough to construct a pleasing self for whomever he was talking to. I see now he wasn’t just being funny — there was something genuinely compromised in David. At the time I thought, ‘Wow, he’s even more self-conscious than I am.’”
On fame:
At the end of his book tour, I spent a week with David. He talked about the “greasy thrill of fame” and what it might mean to his writing. “When I was 25, I would’ve given a couple of digits off my non-use hand for this,” he said. “I feel good, because I want to be doing this for 40 more years, you know? So I’ve got to find some way to enjoy this that doesn’t involve getting eaten by it.”
On shyness:
He talked about a kind of shyness that turned social life impossibly complicated. “I think being shy basically means self-absorbed to the point that it makes it difficult to be around other people. For instance, if I’m hanging out with you, I can’t even tell whether I like you or not because I’m too worried about whether you like me.”
And I don’t even know what this is all about:
“I go through a loop in which I notice all the ways I am self-centered and careerist and not true to standards and values that transcend my own petty interests, and feel like I’m not one of the good ones. But then I countenance the fact that at least here I am worrying about it, noticing all the ways I fall short of integrity, and I imagine that maybe people without any integrity at all don’t notice or worry about it; so then I feel better about myself. It’s all very confusing. I think I’m very honest and candid, but I’m also proud of how honest and candid I am — so where does that put me?”
You have to get the magazine to read the whole thing; it’s worth it. Rolling Stone also has an interview with Lipsky about the article.
[1] Oh to have been wrong about the prediction I made here. ↩
An interview with the North London Turk, who was one of the biggest heroin dealers in Europe.
Me, my former brother-in-law Yilmaz Kaya, and an Istanbul babas [godfather] named the Vulcan founded the Turkish Connection — that’s a network that smuggles heroin from Afghanistan across Turkey into Europe. Up until the early 90s, Turks had been bringing it in piecemeal. An immigrant would bring in ten keys, sell it, buy a shop in Green Lane and pack it in. We were the first to start bringing it in 100-kilo loads. Stack ‘em high, sell ‘em cheap…
(via gulfstream)
Deborah Solomon recently interviewed Charles Murray for the NY Times. Murray is the author of the recent book, Real Education, which argues that 80% of all college students should not be pursuing a bachelor’s degree.
Even though the interview is pretty short, Solomon shows how Murray’s scientific views don’t jibe with his political views, namely that you don’t need smart, able people running the country.
What do you make of the fact that John McCain was ranked 894 in a class of 899 when he graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy? I like to think that the reason he ranked so low is that he was out drinking beer, as opposed to just unable to learn stuff.
What do you think of Sarah Palin? I’m in love. Truly and deeply in love.
She attended five colleges in six years. So what?
Why is the McCain clan so eager to advertise its anti-intellectualism? The last thing we need are more pointy-headed intellectuals running the government. Probably the smartest president we’ve had in terms of I.Q. in the last 50 years was Jimmy Carter, and I think he is the worst president of the last 50 years.
The cognitive dissonance inside Murray’s head must be deafening.
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