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Phoebe Bridgers
Speaking of: There was a Spotify billboard in L.A. featuring you that had a tagline about hitting the road with a guitar — what’d it say? “Hitting the road with six strings and a U.T.I.”
Right. It made me wonder, if that line got approved, what got rejected? They all came from my tweets. But there was one that was, “I was sexually active before I stopped wetting the bed.” Which, if you flip it, sounds like I was assaulted when I was a kid. But the truth is that the last time I wet the bed I was like 20. It runs in my family. What I loved is that the person I was dating at the time — I did it, and I thought, Are you kidding me? I woke them up and was like, “I’mreally sorry but I totally wet the bed.” And they were like: “I’m tired. I’m going to just scoot over.” Then I never did it again. It was like a magical fairy-tale solution. All I needed was acceptance and someone who didn’t give a [expletive]and the problem was solved. You look back at what you obsessed about when you were younger, the stuff that made you go, “I would evaporate if anybody ever knew,” and then you turn into an adult and realize no one cares. Your world is biggest to you. Which is good to remember.
Art is for everybody
Keith Haring famously believed that “art is for everybody,” stating that “art is nothing”
Quality or Quantity
The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work — and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
6 tips
Mike Birbiglia’s 6 Tips for Making It Small in Hollywood. Or Anywhere
“One thing you have to offer in your work is yourself.” I disagree. I think it’s the only thing.”.
Jonah Hill on taste
You know what, the one thing in common with all of it is? Taste. If you like my acting, you like my taste. If you like my directing, you like my taste. And if you like how I dress, you like my taste.
So I might fail. But clearly the curation of this stuff is the through-line, right? So if you can curate a movie and all the music and shots and actors and clothes and everything, and you curate how you dress and people write about it? You could probably create and curate your own stuff.
Sick in the Head
All the quotes I saved from this book.
“People ask me about improv, and I tell them improv is just the final icing. You need a structure. It’s like, if you’re going to commit suicide, you need the building to jump out of.”
Albert Brooks
“But you learn more from fucking up than you do from success, unfortunately. And failure, if you don’t let it defeat you, is what fuels your future success.”
Chris Rock
“You allow the actor to be, as opposed to do. People are fascinating , they don’t really need to do much.”
Gary Shandling
“It’s Lena’s show, and we’re all there to help her. Some weeks she may love our ideas, she may love our whole script. Other weeks, we’re just trying to feed her so she gets excited and goes off and writes a script without us.”
Judd Apatow
“I feel comfortable in the process, but when it’s over, I don’t actually get — I enjoying being in the middle, working toward something, because there’s a feeling of safety. I feel like I’m doing something.
Judd Apatow
“Every day there’s a surprise, something you didn’t expect. And that’s the joy of making movies.”
Mike Nicols (this applies well to advertising)
“If you always want less, in words as well as things, you’ll do well as a writer.”
Jerry Seinfeld
“If I go into the morning meeting and I have clarity, and I can articulate that clarity, everybody’s day is easier. If that doesn’t happen, it’s my fault.”
Jon Stewart
“Especially cancer. I’ve always found cancer an amusing weapon — I’ve always found, ah, anything that creates tension, tension and release, and cancer creates major tension.”
Michael O’Donoghue
“If somebody’s going to give me money to make a movie, I’m going to be very collaborative with them and listen to their concerns, but it’s also my job to protect the idea of the film because, without that, we’re all lost.”
Spike Jonze
“When I finished Her, I thought, Okay, I’ve done everything I can to give this as much love as I could give it and now it’s gonna go off and be what it’s gonna be. If it gets moved I’ll be proud and if gets hated it’ll hurt, but I also know that what I have done with my friends and collaborators will never change.”
Spike Jonze
“You have to see the world differently than the audience does.” Like you have to put yourself in a state where you see the world differently than the audience does, because then you will surprise them with your choices.
Stephen Colbert
John Cleese on Creativity
Creativity is almost always: unlearned. Ask young children, “Are you creative?” They’ll all raise a hand. By age 16, none of them will because they’ve had their creativity gently squeezed out of them by those who think conventionally.
I don’t worry about: unproductive days. I learned from Graham Chapman on Monty Python that no matter the distractions, over a week we’d get 15 to 18 minutes of sketches completed. Knowing there’s an average takes the pressure off.