Arts Features + Journalism
One dozen samples
Matt Groening
Talking for hours on end at Groening’s fantabulous old house on Malibu Beach.
Tenacious D
A flatulent and partially nude conversation with bandmates Jack Black and Kyle Gass at the Four Seasons Beverly Hills.
Andy Kaufman
Lots of lots of many words, featuring actual research and several sandwiches, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of Kaufman’s death, or “death.”
Tim Burton
In a strange hidden room in the basement of Lowe’s Santa Monica Hotel, Buron and I spoke of everything except the film he’d just directed, Big Fish, which earned me a nasty letter to the editor. Another cover story, and Burton turned in a lovely drawing for the cover, but the new art director destroyed it with shitty typefaces designed by six toddlers and a fetus, so I swiped this publicity shot from IMDB.com.
Jonah Hill & Michael Cera
Stars of Superbad discuss Mike Judge’s Office Space, the beauty of McLovin, and possibly more.
Jim Jarmusch
An hour of leisure and misdemeanor thievery at the Château Marmont, coinciding with the release of Broken Flowers.
Peter Case
“Every day I just woke up and did what I had to do, all day. It was all right in front of me. There were no phone calls being made, no letters being sent. There was the Coffee Gallery, the drunks and blues musicians in there; and the bar on Grand Avenue, and there’d be some guys in there; and the winos on the street and street musicians. That was the whole world. I probably had as much commerce with them then as I do now with all the people I talk to all over the world on the Internet, all in one 20-block North Beach radius.”
Daniel Lentz
In case you’ve been following something other than Lentz’s career: An excellent chef, he was the first American awarded First Prize in the Stichting Gaudeamus International Composers Competition in Holland, the first-ever recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship in electronic music and the first Los Angeles classical composer since Stravinsky to be signed to a major record label (Angel/EMI). Just a fine, fine, really good cook.
The Pleasant Probation of Tommy Chong
“All they knew,” Chong says, “was that my popularity commanded their attention. They couldn’t give a shit if it was the stoner character that they put in jail, or me. It was all the same to them. They just wanted to show the entertainment world that we’re vulnerable. ‘You do something that we don’t like, you’re going to end up in jail.’ That’s the message they put out.
Mike Kelley
“I did these pieces because I was at the video store and got a box of free film posters. And they’d been sitting around for a long time, so I decided to rent every movie that I have a poster for. I rented all these movies, and I pulled out the little sections of sound that interested me and sampled and looped them. And that led me to the sculptural thing. I said, ‘Well, I just want a comfortable thing to listen to the sounds with.’ Like a pillow. So you can lie in your bed and hug your pillow while you’re listening to the sound. So the aesthetics of a lot of the pieces are, in a lot of cases, playing off the posters. In some cases not.”
Microserfs, a novel by Douglas Coupland
A mean-spirited yet wholesome book review from 1995, based on what seemed like decades of scientific research. An editor at our local daily liked this enough to give me an assignment in its now-defunct Sunday Book Review. I learned this from a lengthy voicemail, which Libby Molyneaux and I listened to at the same time. And cracked up at the same point in playback, and proceeded directly into a maelstrom of tears and laughter by replaying, over and over, the editor saying, flatly, “You amused me — intelligently.”
