Category: Conversation

Marlon On Marlon… The Brando Tapes

Stevan Riley, the director of Listen To Me Marlon :

When Marlon was talking about acting, he’d say that your brain is your enemy. The first thing you must do is shut off your brain and just focus on feeling. It was about accessing emotions from the past for the character, which according to the method would involve you delving into your own past as well. Then, once you’d accessed the character emotionally, you’d bring your brain back in and figure out all the character’s mannerisms. The small details about what they eat, whether they’ve got fluff on their jumper they pick off on a regular basis – just tiny details you could stack, stack, stack so that they were there in your subconscious mind and you could then ditch them when the director said “Action!”

→ The Guardian

The Financial Times And The Future Of Journalism

John Cassidy interviews John Ridding, the F.T.’s chief executive :

With my time almost up, I asked Ridding if he believed that the existential threat to serious journalism had now passed. “Well, I never believed in the existential threat to journalism,” he said. “I believed in some major challenges to the business model that supported journalism. But we were very confident—it was almost an instinctive belief within the F.T.—that quality journalism has a value, and that there is a business model … if you have the confidence to charge for it. Remember, when we did start charging online, we were regarded as sort of freakish, particularly in the U.S., particularly on the West Coast of the U.S. But we fundamentally believed that if it’s quality journalism, people will pay for it. That’s been vindicated.”

→ The New Yorker

Michel Houellebecq : It’s Not My Role To Be Responsible

Credit : Richard Dumas
 
Some intellectuals said Houellebecq had been “irresponsible”. The media pressed him to apologise. Where once he was a bolshy rebel outsider, he now has a godlike status as France’s biggest literary export and, some say, greatest living writer – so what he says counts. But he denies any “responsibility”.

“It’s not my role to be responsible. I don’t feel responsible,” he says. “The role of a novel is to entertain readers, and fear is one of the most entertaining things there is.” To him, the fear in Submission comes in the dark violence at the novel’s start, before the moderate Islamist party comes to power. Was he deliberately playing on a mood of fear in France? “Yes, I plead guilty,” he says. For Houellebecq, the job of a novelist is foremost to hold a mirror up to contemporary society.

→ The Guardian

Remembering Eric Wright

From left to right : MC Ren, Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, Ice Cube

Could N.W.A have existed without him?

N.W.A would have not existed without Eazy-E. No doubt in my mind. He was bold and not scared of anything. He was 21, 22, I was 16 — to me he was fearless. That’s what he brought. “I don’t want to do no corny ass records that try to get on the radio. I want to do hardcore records about what the hell is going on around here.”

Credit : Timothy White

→ Billboard

The World’s Greatest Jeweller

Poppy Brooch, diamond, tourmaline, and gold, 1982
 
Unlike the big, heavily branded jewellery firms—Cartier, Graff, Harry Winston—JAR has just one small shop, a blank-fronted place in a dull plaza in Paris, and doesn’t spend a sou putting adverts in glossy magazines. Or indeed anywhere. Because secrecy is JAR’s secret weapon. You won’t find the shop’s address in any directories; as a rule, would-be customers have to be vetted and introduced, like Freemasons, by a friend. Rosenthal himself maintains a Garbo-like silence in the face of the press, giving only a handful of interviews in his 37-year career and—at least partly for reasons of security—never, ever allowing himself to be photographed.

→ Intelligent Life