On June 6th, 2013, Mel Brooks will be presented with the 41st AFI Life Achievement Award, but this post is about his Tomato and Onion Omelette.
Bon Appétit talks cooking, coffee, and career with
Mel Brooks, Omelette King.
posted by Room 641-A
on May 19, 2013 -
23 comments
Claire Messud: “A woman’s rant” [National Post] "Over the last week, discussion surrounding Claire Messud’s new novel, The Woman Upstairs, has shifted from the book to an
interview its author recently gave to Publishers Weekly, in which Messud took issue with the following question: “I wouldn’t want to be friends with Nora, would you? Her outlook is almost unbearably grim.”
[more inside]
posted by Fizz
on May 10, 2013 -
23 comments
The JV Club is a podcast
[iTunes, SoundCloud] hosted by comedian, actor and SF Sketchfest founder
Janet Varney. The podcast takes the form of a longform interview with an actor, comedian, writer, or someone else that Varney wishes to interview. The conversation usually focuses on the childhood and teenage years of the interviewee, who is always female, and the interviews frequently get very raw and emotional. The first guest was
Christina Hendricks, and some of my favorite episodes were the interviews with
Kerri Kenney Silver,
Maria Bamford,
Tig Notaro (who came on
again),
Stephanie Escajeda,
Morgan Walsh,
Erica Rhodes,
Lynn Chen, and
Susan Orlean.
posted by Kattullus
on May 10, 2013 -
9 comments
"Women get flustered under fire. They're too fragile, too emotional. They lack the ferocity required to take a life. They can't handle pain. They're a distraction, a threat to cohesion, a provocative tease to close-quartered men. These are the sort of myths you hear from people who oppose the U.S. military's evolving new rules about women in combat. But for women who have already been in combat, who have earned medals fighting alongside men,
the war stories they tell don't sound a thing like myths"
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Apr 25, 2013 -
49 comments
We have made the act of killing and shooting so fun, but we’ve also taken the importance out of it by piling so much of it in. You don’t ever have to think about the concept of pulling a trigger, because even if you run out of bullets, we’re going to give you so many more bullets! So many more people to shoot! In fact, even if all the people in the game aren’t enough, we’re gonna give you Horde mode! You can kill people until you can’t kill them anymore!
The writers of the controversial
Far Cry 3 and
Spec Ops: The Line discuss the past, present and future of FPS's.
Part 1,
Part 2,
Part 3
posted by empath
on Apr 14, 2013 -
78 comments
"Relatives don’t really show me any examples, but there was a point where my daughter, who is about to turn 20, when she was in her early teens, she thought it was a hoot when she was mad at me to compare me to Hitler. She’d look at me with a very mischievous look and say,
'You know, you’re acting just like Hilter.'"
posted by vidur
on Mar 13, 2013 -
55 comments
"Naming restricts. Once restricted, it’s easy to be judged and punished. Identity is more subtle, more liquid, I hope."
An interview with Richard Siken, a poet whose work is easy, entertaining even, yet ferocious as all hell. If you're new to Siken,
Scheherazade is a short introduction to the man and his style.
You Are Jeff is a prose poem in twenty-six short, brutal chapters.
Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out is one of his best: "You get magic gloves! A fish that talks! You get eyes like flashlights! / What more do you want? / I make you pancakes, I take you hunting, I talk to you as if you're / really there." He also
paints.
posted by Rory Marinich
on Mar 8, 2013 -
21 comments
Makers: Women Who Make America is a sweeping 3-hour documentary of the movement for women's equality in the last half of the twentieth century. Airing this month on US public television, it's accompanied by an
online archive of videos of interviews with individual women in leadership across a variety of fields. Leaders and activists, celebrities and pioneers, and everyday women retell the story of their awakening, organizing, and world-changing efforts.
posted by Miko
on Feb 28, 2013 -
5 comments
"Dan hates himself; he also worships himself, and the fact that 90 people will come to every show that we do, and they'll love him — I think it's an experiment in finding out whether or not those people are being sincere. 'Do they really like me, or do they like the idea of me? Am I good person? What if I came out onstage and didn't do a show? What if I just rapped about fucking your mother? What if I didn't do anything? What if I took my shirt off, and I'm fat? What if I go off my diet? What if my girlfriend came out and told you I called her a c---? Would you still like me?'"
Dan Harmon and Life After 'Community'
posted by Rory Marinich
on Feb 28, 2013 -
52 comments
Donald Richie , American author, journalist, critic and expert on Japan, dies at 88.
Smilingly excluded here in Japan, politely stigmatised, I can from my angle attempt only objectivity, since my subjective self will not fit the space I am allotted . . . how fortunate I am to occupy this niche with its lateral view. In America I would be denied this place. I would live on the flat surface of a plain. In Japan, from where I am sitting, the light falls just right – I can see the peaks and valleys, the crags and crevasses.
-- from The Japan Journals, 1947-2004
[more inside]
posted by Ice Cream Socialist
on Feb 19, 2013 -
23 comments
Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, which turns 50 next month, transformed the lives of women across America. ... Gail Collins, author and columnist for the New York Times, wrote the introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of The Feminine Mystique. Collins may be best known for her sharp and witty voice on the Times's Op-Ed page. In 2001, she became the first woman to serve as Editorial Page Editor for the New York Times, a post she held until 2007. Collins grew up in the kind of "typical" suburban household Friedan described. But The Feminine Mystique, released when Collins was in college, sparked the second wave of feminism and shaped the landscape Collins would enter into.
An Interview with Collins about her own experiences, childcare, the rise of female breadwinners, and what she sees for women in the future.
posted by infini
on Jan 29, 2013 -
9 comments
After a few weeks of
well-reported rumors that Lance Armstrong was going to confess, he publicly admitted to years of doping in the first of a two-part interview with Oprah Winfrey.
[more inside]
posted by entropone
on Jan 18, 2013 -
209 comments
Duane Michals:
An unofficial celebration. From
portraitist and pioneer of the
photographic narrative [Warning: sidescrolling] to
metaphysician and
poet, Michals' work has done much to promote the idea of photography as an inventive art form. As a gay artist, an oft repeated
factoid about Michals is that he has not been involved in gay civil rights; Michals' response to this claim is simple: "I think anybody who does any piece of art or work on a political subject is an activist. A person has to be what he wants the world to be."
[NSFW: Nudity]
posted by Lorin
on Jan 8, 2013 -
2 comments
Indoors
Two men sit in this room, spinning non-linear yarns about the creation of interactive fiction. One sits at a small table. Another stands by a shelf along the wall, which is filled with many grey, rectangular objects that you can't quite make out from here.
You can see a small door, a small table, a shelf,
Dave and Steve here.
posted by Malor
on Dec 22, 2012 -
15 comments
"We had a bunch of extras from the community, St. John the Baptist Parish. It was cool, re-creating this history with black Southern extras whose families have lived there forever. They knew what went on back then. Then there was a social-dividing issue between the extras that mirrored the ones between their slave characters in the movie. The ponies were pretty, and they looked down on the extras playing cotton-picker slaves. They thought they were better than them. And the people playing the house servants looked down on the people playing the cotton pickers. And the cotton pickers thought the people playing the house servants and the ponies were stuck-up bitches. Then there was a fourth breakdown, between the darker skinned and the lighter skinned. Obviously not for everybody, and it wasn’t a gigantic problem, but it was something you noticed. They started mirroring the social situations of their characters, being on this plantation for a few weeks."
Playboy
interview with Quentin Tarantino for the upcoming
Django Unchained.
[more inside]
posted by mannequito
on Dec 11, 2012 -
78 comments
Why People Really Love Technology: An Interview with Genevieve Bell The thing I love about Intel researcher Genevieve Bell is that she finds surprising things by looking at what's left out of the dominant narratives about technology. She finds data that's ignored because it didn't fit into the paradigm of, say, how people adopt technology. The dominant narrative is that young men determine the popularity of phones, computers, websites, and the like. But when Bell looked at the data, the story we told ourselves about how the world worked was not reflected in the numbers.
That's why I wanted to talk to her about what gadgets people around the world might be using over the next decade. I figured she was someone who could look past the conventional wisdom and find the missing pieces of the future
posted by infini
on Nov 29, 2012 -
30 comments
Guys don't want casual sex: "This stereotype 'tells us that guys are primarily interested in sex, not relationships... This contributes to the notion that guys are emotional clods who are incapable of connecting with their partners because, hey, they’re just guys, and guys are only interested in sex.'... the Wake Forest University professor lays out the current data on young men’s sexual desires and behavior to make a case against this insidious stereotype." Salon interviews
Andrew Smiler, author of
Challenging Casanova: Beyond the Stereotype of the Promiscuous Young Male.
[more inside]
posted by flex
on Nov 19, 2012 -
122 comments
"The Ideology of Hatred": An interview with Niza Yanay - "Once we understand how hatred operates as an apparatus of power relations, and particularly how the discourse of hatred is motivated and mobilised in national conflicts, serious questions about misrecognition, veiled desires and symptomatic expressions arise. These questions have, to a large extent, been left unaddressed in studies of hatred between groups in conflict."
[more inside]
posted by flex
on Nov 15, 2012 -
13 comments
Charlie Pierce is a longtime sportswriter and author who has, among other things, reported for
Grantland,
Slate, and the
Boston Globe, paneled on
more than a few games of
Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!, and
fished diapers out of trees as a state forest ranger. He's also made a name for himself as one of the sharpest and most incisive political columnists since Molly Ivins. The lead writer for
Esquire's Politics Blog ever since a
caustic article on former Delaware Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell
cost him his Globe job, Pierce has churned out
an uninterrupted stream of clever, colorful, and challenging commentary on the 2012 election season and its implications for the nation's future, dispatches often seething with eviscerative anger but shot through with deep love of (or perhaps grief for) country. Look inside for a selection of Pierce's most vital works for some edifying Election Eve reading.
[more inside]
posted by Rhaomi
on Nov 5, 2012 -
73 comments
Kim Han Sol is the son of Kim Jong Nam, who is the eldest son of Kim Jong Il, the recently deceased North Korean dictator. In this English interview for Finnish TV with former United Nations Under-Secretary General Elisabeth Rehn, he talks about his life, refers to his uncle and current DPRK Supreme Leader, Kim Jong Eun, as a 'dictator,' and says he never met his grandfather. [
Part 1 (interview begins at 1:35)] [
Part 2]
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken
on Oct 18, 2012 -
22 comments
You can accurately judge a person just by looking at their shoes, psychologists say. "Researchers at the University of Kansas found that people were able to correctly judge a stranger's age, gender, income, political affiliation, emotional and other important personality traits just by looking at the person's shoes."
Virginia Postrel responded: "The study made a solid contribution to research on first impressions, but it was hardly earthshaking. By getting so much attention, however, it demonstrated a sociological truth: People love to talk about shoes. Even those who dismissed the research as silly often felt compelled to call radio stations or comment on websites, providing details about their own choices. Why this fascination with footwear? "
[more inside]
posted by flex
on Oct 15, 2012 -
159 comments
Although three members of Pussy Riot "have been sentenced to two years each on the absurd charge of 'hooliganism motivated by religious hatred,'" they remain unbowed. In this
GQ interview Nadya Tolokonikovoy relates that "prison is a place for ascetic practices," and states "In any case, I'm happy I got two years. For every person with a functioning brain, this verdict is so dumb and cruel that it removes any lingering illusions about Putin's system. It's a verdict on the system."
posted by mr. digits
on Oct 2, 2012 -
69 comments
