I’m certain, 80%, that I would make an awful TV/radio host - questions smacked in gross blunder. Either they would be overwrought in their zeal or torturous in their inanity.
Raising questions are tougher than answering them, I surmise. Now that I’m just home trying to be healthy again, I have the opportunity to watch talk shows and this I realized, good interviews are largely handiworks of good interviewers more than interviewees.
Robert Smith of The Cure once grouched over tiresome questions “What’s your favorite drink?” and the likes, constantly tossed at him. A music journalist seeking reprieve asked him what question did he want to address. The Cure frontman, with no trace of irony, recommended, “Why are you so scarily good?” Nice one.
Creative artists, I suspect, bemoan to describe their creative process, not only because it spoils the magic or disrupts the intimacy but I bet, even they themselves, cannot fully articulate how a spur of an idea grows arms and legs and wings.
Who’s that director who said that once he knows how his film is going to end before he even begins shooting, he sees no point doing it or words to that effect? Haay! The name is just in my mindyard, buried in oblivion. I hate it when I forget tidbits, just frigging hate it, argh!
Anyway, journalists and talk show hosts are fond of cornering artists to disclose their favorite song or album or novel or film among the artists’ body of work. That’s pretty toxic.
It came as a mild shock that in the latest biography, Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life, a product of 17 years of research by one Gerald Martin, the Colombian author of stupefying, spectacular sentences confessed that his best novel is “The Autumn of the Patriarch” released in 1975.
I don’t know which surprised me – that he was actually able to pick a favorite because I sort of expected him to demur like most artists or that of all clever things to tell, he had to select a novel which this non-fan hasn’t read. That’s not hip, Gabriel.
Somewhere in our small house, two novels are buried in a cobweb of dust. Sure, safe choices for a non-fan: “100 Years of Solitude” and “Love in The Time of Cholera”. I read “Memories of My Melancholy Whores” at Powerbooks (yippee!) without paying a single cent.
Memo to self: scour friends’ libraries because you can’t afford to buy books.
Martin, the author of the latest biography, suggests that “The Autumn….” is loosely based on Fidel Castro with whom Marquez shares in his own words, an “intellectual friendship” with, something Marquez is heavily criticized for by fellow writers. Without reading the book yet, I risk disagreeing. Marquez is such a passionate, partisan individual, the fact that he can actually pick a favorite among his novels needs no greater testament. He is super-loyal to Fidel and I fairly remember an article of his spirited defense of Pres. Clinton at the time of the Lewinsky brouhaha, fanning the hypocrisy of the conservative right. I think, more than any other written work, that write-up is my most admired. I don’t think he is capable of painting a caricature of a friend with whom he shares a tight connection with.
Mario Vargas Llosa with whom Marquez had a quibble with and a public fistfight in 1975(something to do with a lover, so goes the speculation) which led to that black-eyed photo of Marquez circulated about 2 years ago branded the latter as “Castro’s lackey.”
Novelists, we gasp at their lack of inventiveness in name-calling.
Raising questions are tougher than answering them, I surmise. Now that I’m just home trying to be healthy again, I have the opportunity to watch talk shows and this I realized, good interviews are largely handiworks of good interviewers more than interviewees.
Robert Smith of The Cure once grouched over tiresome questions “What’s your favorite drink?” and the likes, constantly tossed at him. A music journalist seeking reprieve asked him what question did he want to address. The Cure frontman, with no trace of irony, recommended, “Why are you so scarily good?” Nice one.
Creative artists, I suspect, bemoan to describe their creative process, not only because it spoils the magic or disrupts the intimacy but I bet, even they themselves, cannot fully articulate how a spur of an idea grows arms and legs and wings.
Who’s that director who said that once he knows how his film is going to end before he even begins shooting, he sees no point doing it or words to that effect? Haay! The name is just in my mindyard, buried in oblivion. I hate it when I forget tidbits, just frigging hate it, argh!
Anyway, journalists and talk show hosts are fond of cornering artists to disclose their favorite song or album or novel or film among the artists’ body of work. That’s pretty toxic.
It came as a mild shock that in the latest biography, Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life, a product of 17 years of research by one Gerald Martin, the Colombian author of stupefying, spectacular sentences confessed that his best novel is “The Autumn of the Patriarch” released in 1975.
I don’t know which surprised me – that he was actually able to pick a favorite because I sort of expected him to demur like most artists or that of all clever things to tell, he had to select a novel which this non-fan hasn’t read. That’s not hip, Gabriel.
Somewhere in our small house, two novels are buried in a cobweb of dust. Sure, safe choices for a non-fan: “100 Years of Solitude” and “Love in The Time of Cholera”. I read “Memories of My Melancholy Whores” at Powerbooks (yippee!) without paying a single cent.
Memo to self: scour friends’ libraries because you can’t afford to buy books.
Martin, the author of the latest biography, suggests that “The Autumn….” is loosely based on Fidel Castro with whom Marquez shares in his own words, an “intellectual friendship” with, something Marquez is heavily criticized for by fellow writers. Without reading the book yet, I risk disagreeing. Marquez is such a passionate, partisan individual, the fact that he can actually pick a favorite among his novels needs no greater testament. He is super-loyal to Fidel and I fairly remember an article of his spirited defense of Pres. Clinton at the time of the Lewinsky brouhaha, fanning the hypocrisy of the conservative right. I think, more than any other written work, that write-up is my most admired. I don’t think he is capable of painting a caricature of a friend with whom he shares a tight connection with.
Mario Vargas Llosa with whom Marquez had a quibble with and a public fistfight in 1975(something to do with a lover, so goes the speculation) which led to that black-eyed photo of Marquez circulated about 2 years ago branded the latter as “Castro’s lackey.”
Novelists, we gasp at their lack of inventiveness in name-calling.
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