Blog – Rolf Potts

“Las Vegas is hard to capture in art without leaning on cliche. The movie Casino doesn’t lean on cliche because it created the cliche. The Hangover created the cliche for this next generation. Culture is is causing people to act a certain way when they get to Las Vegas.” – Tod Goldberg In this episode of Deviate,…

“That first day in Mumbai, there was the slum to the side of us, there were sports cars that would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars next to people walking with no feet next to 200 people crammed into a bus. Separating those layers in a nuanced way lifts the writing that shows that…

“All writing is trying to destroy a stereotype, and the individual that you’re writing about — the figure in the landscape — is actually the ideal.” —Paul Theroux Paul Theroux‘s highly acclaimed novels include Blinding Light, My Other Life, and The Mosquito Coast. His 1975 book The Great Railway Bazaar is credited with revitalizing the genre of literary travel writing, and…

“”When I was in the third grade my teacher announced to our class that Ronald Reagan had been shot. When she asked if we had questions, I raised my hand and asked her if the Indiana – North Carolina basketball game was still going to happen that night.” – Chuck Klosterman In this episode of Deviate, Rolf,…

“A joke is kind of like a little life-lesson in addition to being funny. If your joke is really good, there’s a little nugget of truth in it.” – Cedar Van Tassel In this episode of Deviate, Rolf and Cedar discuss why kids want to be paleontologists and astronauts, and the existential “book” Cedar wrote when he…

“When we don’t foster local filmmaking traditions, we end up making movies about what we think life is like in the cities we do see movies about.” – Jason Bailey In this episode of Deviate, Rolf and Jason talk about how being from Kansas influenced their careers as travel writers and film critics, and the long cultural…

This week I appeared on Yonder Radio, an hour-long audio show and podcast produced by the Center for Rural Strategies, to talk about my feature-length found-footage video essay Kansas Never Plays Itself, which draws on a century of film to analyze how cinematic shorthand shapes the public’s imagination of places. What’s the name of this…

“I asked everyone if they were lonely. All the guys my age said ‘no, I’m too busy; too much going on.’ When I answer that quickly I’m either lying or it’s something I’m afraid of.” – Andrew McCarthy In this episode of Deviate, Rolf and Andrew talk about why Andrew took a USA road trip to reconnect…

“I think you have to pick your battles when you’re collaborating with people.” – Kim Krizan Kim Krizan (@kimkrizan) is the Oscar-nominated cowriter of the Before Sunrise movies, and the author of Spy in the House of Anaïs Nin. Notable Links:

“I wish I loved sports, and particularly football, a lot less than I do. It consumes too much of my memory and too much of my time.” – Chuck Klosterman In this episode of Deviate, Rolf talks about why he’s talking to Chuck Klosterman’s former roommate Michael Weinreb about Chuck’s book Football, rather than Chuck himself (2:00);…