June 2010
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It occurred to me that I couldn’t even define literature—not even to myself. I could give very erudite and intimidating answers to other people, the sort of bullshit that anyone with an English degree can throw up as a smokescreen, but I didn’t have a substantive answer that I believed in. I didn’t know why I liked the books I liked. So I decided I would throw everything away, everything I’d heard in college and everything else. I decided I would trust only myself—what I really believed and felt to be true. Which, of course, didn’t exactly occur overnight: it probably took the better part of 2004. But it was a very conscious effort.
That was when things began to change. I think of it as year zero, though it was actually year ten. The cynical part of me says, Well, maybe it could have happened some other way—maybe you could have kept the cushy job and kept writing. But I really don’t think so. I think you really have to stare down the demons. You really have to know what making art is worth to you.
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“It’s getting to the point now where the iPhone camera isn’t just good because it’s with you, but good because it’s actually pretty good.”
—Daring Fireball: 4
“But isn’t part of photography about realizing the exotic within your own life and landscape, and recognizing the power and importance of it? When I get stuck, I tell myself, ‘Relax. It’s everywhere and everything. It’s all around you, and you just have to let it speak to you.’ It’s not about having to cross the great American West, or the deserts of China. You don’t have to do that. It’s right in front of your face; all you have to do is relax and breathe it in. Having said that, I have travelled quite a bit.”
—SEESAW MAGAZINE: The Knights Move - In Conversation with Paul Graham
“The Creators Project party was as vague as the enterprise seems to be, which is probably the point: to lodge a formless but sticky alliance of the Vice and Intel brands in the minds of young maverick types. To graft some of Vice’s urban hipsterism onto Intel’s aura of capable PC chip-making. And to validate Vice with the technological chops represented by Intel. Or something along those lines. What I ended up seeing was not a rebirth of either brand (nor a change in my perceptions of either brand) but a vision of what happens when guerilla marketing meets social networking meets mega corporate funding. Results so far are undetermined.”
—THE FUTURE OF ADVERTISING? | More Intelligent Life
“Being concerned with pleasing others can have a big impact on creative expression, acting as an insidious form of self-censorship.”
—Amber Benson on Writing: Creating is Kind of Intoxicating | The Creative Mind
“By the time Die Antwoord, the joke rap group from South Africa, took the stage, hundreds of drunk, sweaty guests shoved each other into every corner and crowdsurfed. When the frontman walked into the crowd, a ring of massive, flashing Nikon cameras formed around”
—Vice builds a big, sweaty hipster Carnival | Capital New York
“You should hammer one nail all your life, and I didn’t do that,” he wrote in a lament cited by his biographer, John Geiger. “I hammered on a lot of nails like a xylophone.”
—Gysin, In-Depth, at New Museum of Contemporary Art - NYTimes.com
“But it’s also situational,” Baron said. “In the ’90s, it may have been considered weird to do a zine. But now, when every motherfucker I know has a Tumblr, it’s like, there’s something really boring about Tumblr! And there’s something really boring about Twitter, and there’s something really boring about a new website. It’s all we look at all day. It’s all we see.”
—The new radical gesture: Repel the spiders from Mountain View! | Capital New York
“Markus, the primary shootist, is possessed of a few traits that have historically served people in his field quite well, evincing talents for flattery, patience, forceful composition, and tantrum-tossing arrogance. His delusions of grandeur are nothing less than effervescent: “A celebrity that gets photographed by us—it’s the ultimate moment in their career because they’re never gonna look better after.” Elsewhere, Markus tells the camera, “I like to consider myself the James Bond of fashion photography.” Though there can be no doubt that he does, he looks here more like a Bond bad guy. Shot from low angles, he is gaunt and monumental, and his hair glints a villainous white blond.”
—Bravo’s new reality shows skim the lowlights of the art world and celebrity photography. - By Troy Patterson - Slate Magazine
