5 awareness that the essential values through which one…lock cat
2. Washington Post with “Three Books on Hipsters.”
Their affinity for tight jeans, shaggy hair and Pabst Blue Ribbon beer is easily mocked, but the principal criticism is that they’re frauds.
11. Rose Metal Press is having a fund drive! For 5 years RMP has been putting heart-imploding hybrid/slash/flash into your taped coins/eyes/tattoo tails/synapses. You get stuff, too. Give.
14. Cult Pulp Fiction at Sabotage Times. Or:
Pretty soon, my feverish teenage brain was boiling over with descriptions of high-class orgies, anal penetration and amyl-nitrate-fuelled orgasms.
236. Did someone on this fucking site already link to this long un-cut interview of DFW from 1998? I don’t know. I don’t. If so, some HTML god will most likely remove it and you won’t even see these words. Fuck.
9. Did you hear Steve Martin was so blar they had to offer a refund? Why was he boring? He talked about art. Martin says:
“So the 92nd St. Y has determined that the course of its interviews should be dictated in real time by its audience’s emails. Artists beware.”
Get off my lawn! Yeh but Steve, you’re trying to sell a book. You are Steve Martin. You manipulated, man. But I like it. This goes under one of my favorite genres of public readings: You expected this, I’m going to give you that. Recently, I went to see a semi-famous memoir writer and she ignored all that and read a dry history of religion. you could hear the air crackle as expectations tumbled into walls. Hissing. Andy Kaufman reading Great Gatsby. Ever been to one of those readings? Like WTF? They glow.
Tags: david foster wallace, hipsters, Pulp, rose metal press, steve martin
“That’s just—it raises hair on your body. In places you don’t even have hair.”
Recently, at a reading, I was saddened by how boring and rout the questions were. It was as if the interviewer had no intention of giving the audience even a glimpse into how/who the author really was. Superfluous interviews are just that. What’s really sad is that the audience couldn’t realize how lame they might seem for hating a discussion of “art” with an artist. I don’t want to know how Steve Martin feels about working with 12 kids on Cheaper by the Dozen, unless he’s the type of person who can take that question and turn it into something much greater, deeper, important, than it is (something DFW seems to do consistently). I guess I expect authors (not really SM, it’s true, but authors I have read and enjoy and believe know something important, have good insights) to have those same good insights, and to make good points, and to have enlightening things to say in interviews.
It’s like, I don’t really care if steve martin had fun hosting the oscars. I don’t care whether or not dfw likes lobster. I want to know what these things actually mean to them, what it means to host the oscars, what it means that the oscars needed two hosts, that maybe it’s a sign of his inability to carry an audience on his own, or to draw one at least. Or that eating lobster is a much bigger decision than we usually recognize.
There are some people that are satisfied with just knowing that they “had fun” or “liked it.” Those just seem like really stupid, shallow questions, and their answers are equally shallow and stupid, and add nothing at all whatsoever ever.
To be fair to Steve Martin (not someone I normally do this for), the book was about art, the interview was a publicity thing for the book, and it was advertised as such. They were discussing the contents of his new book. No one in the audience had any right to assume he would talk at length about anything else–it doesn’t fit the pattern of your other examples. Or are you saying that public personalities (including comedians and semi-famous writers of memoirs) should stick to what they’re known for? Should they consider themselves, and not their work, the product?
You don’t get your money back if a band doesn’t play your favorite song. 92nd Y should have told those people to fuck off.