Night scene
Vice Magazine interview with David Simon
There are some people who are destined for celebrity or wealth or power, but by and large, the average American, the average person in the world on planet earth, is worth less and less. That’s the triumph of capital, and that is the problem. You look at that, and you think that’s what we’ve come to and that’s where we’re going and it’s like, Can you tell me another bedtime story about how people are special and every one of us matters? Can you tell me that shit?
Lois and Janet and all those other girls actually scare me down deep — They scare me because of their slinky beauty like snake-beauty…what do they want? Out of me? If they won’t give me a piece of ass because I’m a rowdy inattentive monk drunk, then why do they want to see me? They scare me like the Devil — Their intentions are not honorable.
Port interview with Tom Cramer
Overall I reject the idea of northwest art. If you go to Iowa or Missouri you can find artists who look a lot like Louis Bunce or Carl Morris. There’s this myth that Northwest art has this look but it doesn’t, they are fine artists of course but those same styles were present everywhere. Grant Wood looks like Willamette valley. The stuff that does seem regionally unique like Ed Ruscha, paradoxically often ends up becoming international. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner looks like northwest art; with his alpine scenes… we don’t have a proprietary claim on trees.
Editing him was sometimes a more painstaking process than editing most writers, but it was a genuine pleasure to engage with his intelligence and with his way of thinking about language, from how it supported narrative trajectory and character development all the way down to the punctuation. He was truly interested in the fine points of grammar, and every rule he broke he broke deliberately, with a specific artistic purpose in mind. Those long paragraphs—as off-putting as they can seem—were entirely purposeful.
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