Josh Brolin on working with the skimpy dialogue in No Country for Old Men:
You have to figure out different ways to convey ideas. You don’t want to over-compensate because the fear is that you’re going to be boring if nothing’s going on. You start doing this and this and taking off your hat and putting […]
Alex Ross writes about the life and music of John Luther Adams.
Adams is an avid art-viewer, and is particularly keen on the second generation of American abstract painters: Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, Jasper Johns, and Joan Mitchell. There are more art books than music books on the shelves of his studio, a neat one-room cabin […]
This interview with Bill Bishop, about the increasing social segmentation in America, has some cool tie-ins with a book I’ve been loving lately, Lawrence Levine’s Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Levine touches on the changing use of public space in the early 1900s as “Culture” was increasingly associated with the wealthy, and […]
There’s a really good, really funny interview with Richard Price in the Believer:
I have to be a little intimidated by what I’m writing about. I have to feel a little bit like I don’t think I can do this, I don’t think I can master this, I don’t think I can get under the skin […]
An interview with Mythbusters:
We’re just trying to see what happens. And we have relatively little time and a whole lot of curiosity, so the most efficient way to get there is what we do, and that often happens to be some form of science… That being said, the fact that we don’t have formal training, […]
This interview with Philip Gourevitch is mostly about interviewing, but I like this, too:
My guilty pleasure reads are things that are just fabulously written. I don’t know how to say it without it being pretentious—I’ll read a chapter from Moby Dick or Adventures of Huckleberry Finn at random, where the language is just rocketing around, […]
This fictional Paris Review Interview with “Constance Eakins” is a clever bit of promotion for The Mayor’s Tongue. Here’s a pdf of the interview [1.5mb]. Eakins started with comics:
Interviewer: Was it when you ran away from home that you began to feel that you were going to be a writer?
Eakins: No, I always wanted to […]
From an interview with Christian Landers, he of Stuff White People Like:
We have a generation of white people who want nothing more than to distance themselves from being white. They need to believe that the earth is being destroyed by evil white people, culture is ruined by the wrong kind of white people, and that […]
I like this bit from an interview with Ellen Lupton, talking about common design pitfalls: “My students avoid printing out their work, to save time and money, but then they are disappointed that it doesn’t look good. I explain to them that everything looks good on the screen, because of the glowing light and the […]
Terry Gross interviewed Chuck Close a couple years ago. Chuck Close is known for his super-large portraits built up from smaller bits. For some reason I just really liked his interviewing style. [via 43 folders]
Nick Hornby interviews David Simon, of The Wire fame:
There are two ways of traveling. One is with a tour guide, who takes you to the crap everyone sees. You take a snapshot and move on, experiencing nothing beyond a crude visual and the retention of a few facts. The other way to travel requires more […]
A panel interview with Seth and Chris Ware conducted by Ivan Brunetti, told in comics form. I love the way that Gordon McAlpin, the cartoonist, mimicked each of their styles when they had the floor.
Chip Kidd interviews Milton Glaser: “My father was a kind of a metaphor for the world, because if you can’t overcome a father’s resistance you’re never going to be able to overcome the world’s resistance.”
From Nathan Ihara’s review of the Paris Review Interviews, II: “the art of the interview requires something very different from a mere investigation of the mechanics of fiction. Leave theory and technique to the essay or manual. An interview is a wonderful art form, similar to a one-act play, with an unswerving goal: to expose […]
I’d never thought to look for it before, but I wish I had: interviewer Charlie Rose has an amazing online archive.
A couple weeks ago, NPR hosted an awful interview with Sigur Ros. Incredibly painful to watch. They recently followed up, bringing in music writer Jancee Dunn to help with a director’s commentary to find out where all the suckage came from.
Photographer Michael David Murphy had a video interview with Alec Soth a little while before Soth’s lecture for Atlanta Celebrates Photography.
An interview with Alex Ross:
I thought I had no choice but to write about the 20th century; it’s such an extraordinary body of work that is relatively little known, especially in terms of your average educated person who can tell a Picasso from a Jackson Pollack and has read widely in contemporary literature and knows […]
Alex Ross talks with Robert Siegel on NPR about 20th century music. Ross’ new book, The Rest Is Noise, is coming in a few days—looking forward to 640 pages of music history goodness!
Bonobos are in the news again. A while back there was a an article about bonobos in the New Yorker. And in the current issue of The Believer, an interview with primatologist Frans de Waal, who is gently criticized in the New Yorker article. It’s a good read, aside from lousy economics in the third […]
The Guardian has collected some of the great interviews of the 20th century, featuring Fidel Castro, Marilyn Monroe, the Sex Pistols, Malcolm X (pdf), Marlon Brando, and more. Each of the interviews also has an accompanying essay to explain the context and historical significance.
A pretty good interview with Seth Godin. “The thing is, the stuff that’s for everybody is already sold to everybody. So you can’t win by being more average than average, because that slot’s taken.”
An interview with Michael Cook, who explores municipal drain systems and other subterranean infrastructure.
Even people I know who self-identify as urban explorers aren’t at all that interested in undergrounding – especially not in storm drains. A lot of them just don’t see the actual interest. It’s not a detail-rich environment. You can walk six kilometers […]
“I’m on the New York State Council for the Arts now, and every so often some other member talks about sending notices to college English departments about some literary opportunity, and I say, Send them to the chemistry departments, send them to the zoology departments, send them to the anthropology departments and the astronomy departments […]
A brief interview with William Gibson. Not a lot of new material, but I love this: “I’m a very pro-art kind of guy, but I’m not that visually literate. My inner redneck looks at something and says, ‘Oh, that’s so cool.’”
There’s an Amazon interview with Douglas Wolk about his new book, Reading Comics, and another recent interview with Newsarama.
TMN has a great photo gallery up: Still Life by Martin Klimas. They’re wonderful photos of statues in the midst of shattering. The martial arts figurines are particularly enjoyable.
Khoi Vinh posted a brief interview with Stephen Coles, one of the fellows who worked on the massive reference, FontBook.
The Paris Review has been popular for years for its interviews with writers, focusing more on the authors’ methods and craft, rather than their products. The Paris Review Interviews, Volume I collects 16 of those interviews over the last half-century, a selection of novelists, poets, screenwriters, and even an editor. One of the unique aspects […]
New York Magazine has a good profile of economist Tyler Cowen and his new book, Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist.
Lately there have been a couple good interviews with William Gibson in anticipation of his book, Spook Country. From his talk with the College Crier:
One of the assumptions that I had was that science fiction is necessarily always about the day in which it was written. And that was my conviction from having read a […]
Janice Harayda pulled a very interesting quote from poet Philip Larkin—he isn’t a big fan of poetry readings. The quote comes from an old interview in the Paris Review. I just finished the anthology Paris Review Interviews, Volume I, by the way. Very, very good reading. [via bookslut]
Kind of a brain-stretching discussion about PhDs in Design and design research & scholarship. Lots of good feedback in the comments.
An interview with Chris Ware. “I think storytelling is one of comics’ aesthetic hurdles at the moment, which was the novelist’s problem 150 years ago: namely, to take comics from storytelling into that of “writing,” the major distinction between the two to me being that the former gives one the facts, but the latter tries […]
An interview with Joanna Newsom. On her time studying composition at Mills College:
My music generally retains an interest in melody and harmony and some sort of meter– it might be a polymeter, but some sort of meter that repeats for more than one bar. But a lot of these ideas that I was interested […]
A long, excellent interview with Steven Johnson. A smart, knowledgeable interviewer can make such a huge difference.
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