Studio Sessions

Rick Rubin says to treat personal work like a diary entry, and the idea finally clicked for one of us while he was rewriting a video about Final Cut Pro. He stopped thinking about how viewers would react and wrote what he actually believes. His channel, he decides, is a book club, where it's safe not to understand something. Then he tells us about a time that safety broke. In a playwriting class in grad school, he read Camus's name aloud the way it's spelled, having never heard it said. He still thinks about the professor's correction, though he allows he may have brought his own insecurity to it.

A film set needs the same safety. Bradley Cooper told Spike Lee he wants no chairs and no video village on his sets, to keep everyone in the work. One of us was a stand-in on Harold Ramis's The Ice Harvest. Nobody told him to stand down, so he was right beside Ramis and John Cusack while they talked through a scene. Ramis gently sent him off, then let him watch from video village. Between setups, Ramis would bring out a guitar for the extras and stand-ins. One of us counts it among his biggest compliments that a model said his shoot felt like therapy. Quentin Tarantino likes to remind his crew they're making a movie. It ends on an overnight shoot, with extras overacting in the hope of being noticed.

-Ai

Show Notes:

Rick Rubin Clip we’re referencing - https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vNEH4RZwb_g

Jiro Dreams of Sushi - https://www.magpictures.com/jirodreamsofsushi/

Always Sunny in Philadelphia Meme - https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/pepe-silvia

R1 Rabbit - https://www.rabbit.tech/

The video I made about Final Cut Pro - https://bit.ly/3SJc0GG

The Photographic Eye - https://bit.ly/3Iabzju

Tetragrammaton with Mark Andreessen - https://bit.ly/3OO3d4U

The Century of the Self - https://www.youtube.com/@justadamcurtis9178/videos

Camus - https://www.britannica.com/biography/Albert-Camus

In The Soup - https://letterboxd.com/film/in-the-soup/

Bradley Cooper & Spike Lee - https://bit.ly/49CvcMY

Eyes Wide Shut - https://letterboxd.com/film/eyes-wide-shut/

Maestro - https://www.netflix.com/title/81171868

The Ice Harvest - https://letterboxd.com/film/the-ice-harvest/

Alec Soth - https://alecsoth.com

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After a long break over the holidays, one of us turns up having bought 18 cameras for $150 at a farm out in rural Nebraska, found on Facebook Marketplace. The other sits down and says he's nervous. The podcast has passed 50 subscribers and drawn comments from strangers, so now there's something to live up to. We lean on an idea Rick Rubin gave in a podcast interview: treat personal work like a diary entry, because a diary is the one place there's no point lying.

The nervous one has a habit of dropping projects about a quarter of the way in, once they start to feel expected of him. After one video essay on Saul Leiter and another on William Eggleston, he lost interest in the form. What pulls at him now is documentary, the kind Werner Herzog made in Encounters at the End of the World and Louis Malle made in an American farm town. The other manages expectations all the time, with a long, honest post to his YouTube audience and with his kids before a trip to the store. The nervous one fights them instead, and even a text message that breaks his focus can feel like an intrusion. It ends on the controlling streak we share, and the old line about the road to hell being paved with good intentions.

Mentioned in this episode: Rick Rubin's Tetragrammaton, Saul Leiter, William Eggleston, Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World, Louis Malle, Jimmy Stewart.

-Ai

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We start on snobbery. Martin Scorsese calls comic book movies theme parks, and to us it never sounds like a put-down, because his knowledge comes out as love. We both own up to snobbish streaks. One of us was the kid eating sushi at 15, and his mother told him he had expensive taste. That leads into Ira Glass's idea of the gap: your taste runs ahead of your ability, and the only thing that closes it is making more work. Some people never start because they can't stand falling short of their own taste.

We built this podcast to feel like sitting down for coffee, and setting it up, one of us found the gap small for once. We have a group of friends who could have been making short films together all along, so the advice we give ourselves is to take stock of what we already have and take the mountain 100 feet at a time. The other block is waiting for the right conditions. One of us stopped writing for a couple of months while he waited for his sister's old Apple iBook, as if the screenplay couldn't be written without it. Near the end, one of us remembers a story Scorsese tells about Casino. He kept a take where the camera visibly bumps a table, because Sharon Stone's performance in it was the right one.

-Ai

Double Indemnity - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Indemnity

Martin Scorsese on Comic Book Movies - https://bit.ly/47It05m

Rushmore - “Unlock it!” - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6jYV4eZ1v0

The Gap by Ira Glass - https://vimeo.com/85040589

Alex’s 16mm Project - https://www.alexccarter.com/motion-picture/revlon-16mm-film

John Mayer Video - https://youtu.be/_eWrQzNJgC8?si=uTaSRUTJh5_Fg7lr

Scorsese & Casino - https://youtu.be/2BFHDK_u62M?t=1158

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As one of us heard it, Guy Clark woke up in the back seat after a gig, wrote a line about getting off the L.A. freeway on a napkin, went back to sleep, and found the napkin 4 months later. The song that came of it is our case for writing every idea down. We both used to leave ideas unwritten, trusting the good ones to come back, and have both given that up for notebooks. We agree the first idea is rarely the best one, and that the best one only wins when nobody's ego is attached to it. Sometimes that means going back to the first idea after all, the way Bruce Springsteen kept the bedroom demos for Nebraska.

One of us half-remembers Alec Soth saying he had to stop walking into places sure of what he'd photograph. The same risk hangs over a project one of us has in mind: portraits of the people running Fourth of July fireworks tents. The good collaborations we've had run on what-ifs. One of us has had the other kind, with directors who used him as an unpaid writer to serve their own careers. At 44, one of us realizes he has run every creative idea of his life through one question, whether it could make money, without ever noticing. It ends when a doorbell rings and he has to go pick up his daughter from preschool.

-Ai

Show Notes:
The Century of the Self - https://bit.ly/48IPbcy
The Louisiana Channel - https://bit.ly/48IPm7I
The New Yorker - https://www.newyorker.com/
The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin - https://bit.ly/3uWDvEp
Moleskin - https://www.moleskine.com
LA Freeway by Guy Clark -    • L.A. Freeway, Guy Clark 
Nebraska by Bruce Springsteen - https://brucespringsteen.net/albums/n...
Sleeping by the Mississippi by Alec Soth - 

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We'd filmed 10 episodes and released 3 when we recorded this one, and one of us walked in with a familiar doubt about who we are to be doing it. The answer we land on is the feeling of leaving a long talk with a friend and needing to go make something right away, which we'd like to bottle for anyone who doesn't have that friend. Leonard Cohen stepped away from music in 1973, sure he had nothing left to say, and came back once he'd lived some more. We think experience feeds the work and comfort can starve it.

So we talk about giving in to chaos. One of us ran a marathon in Duluth after a week of 12-hour shoot days on about 6 hours' sleep a night. He stopped fighting it and ran a fine race. He and his partner once left for Colorado with no plan and started up a trail at 2 in the morning. The next night they camped on a peak they've been trying to match ever since. It doesn't take a trip, either: one of his biggest experiences in months was a fire in his own neighborhood, found only because his window was open. It ends in Highlands, North Carolina, where frozen pipes had closed the hotel. The fallback, a dingy motel with a fireplace and TCM playing all night, gave him one of his best nights of the last 5 years.

Mentioned in this episode: Leonard Cohen, Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller's Plexus, Marcel Proust, Turner Classic Movies.

-Ai

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We shot 3 or 4 days of a documentary together more than 2 years ago, and not one clip has gone into a timeline. One of us keeps waiting for the right conditions, enough money in the bank to vanish into the edit for 2 weeks, while the small photo videos he makes in 2 days keep piling up. Underneath it, we suspect, is fear. Part of what drew one of us into performing was a high school production of Inherit the Wind, where he watched another student hold the whole auditorium and thought, "I can do that." Talking it through, we decide that what he wanted was all that attention.

Rick Rubin's The Creative Act says the work comes out truest when you aren't attached to the result. The artists we keep returning to couldn't help themselves, like Kurt Cobain filling his journals or Basquiat working on 6 paintings at once. For one of us the unmade project is a photo series in Nashville, meant to record something that was disappearing. A year and a half ago he could have bought a $200 plane ticket, and now the moment has passed. Our answer is to start when the urge hits. In Stutz, Jonah Hill's documentary about his therapist, steady small progress is called a string of pearls. For one of us, the next pearl might be a 20-page zine of all the garden hoses he's photographed.

-Ai

If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a rating and/or a review. We read and appreciate all of them. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode.

Show Notes:

The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin - https://sites.prh.com/thecreativeact

Henry Miller book - title coming soon

Townes Van Zandt - https://townesvanzandt.com/

Kurt Cobain Books - https://bit.ly/41i1mdD

Jean-Michel Basquiat - https://www.basquiat.com/

Stutz - https://www.netflix.com/title/81387962

Teo Crawford Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWf395XFeGA

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Steinbeck opens Travels with Charley by describing how the sound of hooves on pavement still makes him restless, and it starts us on the world that exists off the internet. The best restaurant you've ever eaten at might not even have a website. One of us has a serious Facebook Marketplace habit. He drove to a Casey's gas station in Missouri Valley, Iowa, to pay $20 for a Canon A35F, and realizes mid-story that he's doing what he did as a kid in the late '90s, ordering vintage Star Wars toys from the back pages of Starlog magazine.

Film is supposed to be the analog escape, but one of us says his mostly gets scanned by a lab and edited on a computer, so he's really still shooting digital. The other has rolls that exist only as negatives and darkroom prints, and it took him a while to accept that they're just as real as a file. On a family vacation, one of us shot roll after roll of scenery and hardly any of his family, because they wouldn't make content. The talk turns to loneliness. We're both introverts, and one of us feels lucky to have 3 friends in Omaha he can call for a movie or a round of golf. It ends on how a mountain makes you feel small and connected at once, where a screen can make you feel like the center of everything.

Mentioned in this episode: John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley, Facebook Marketplace, the Canon A35F, Starlog magazine, the Digital Bolex D16, Vivian Maier.

-Ai

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We start by asking whether YouTube could be a place to show photographs, like a gallery or a book. One of us has been making videos of his own stills set to music and ambient sound, with no YouTuber on screen, but they don't feel like the real work yet. Something closer to it comes from home. With two young kids, the house fills with stuff, and one day it overwhelmed him. So he photographed the towels in the shower and the toys on the floor with a Ricoh GR Digital II, then propped up his iPhone to film a storm and recorded his kids talking. He's calling it Replete, after a word he found in The New Yorker.

The bigger project is a documentary we shot together, which he can't bring himself to start editing, because it would push aside the paid work for 2 or 3 months. We call that Steven Pressfield's resistance and talk about chipping at it 30 minutes a day. The other of us is at peace writing a screenplay tied to Nashville a little each morning, with no deadline, though he hasn't booked the flight for a photo project there. At 44, the one with the documentary still feels behind, and wonders whether acting school, screenwriting, YouTube and now photography were each a kind of lottery ticket. In the end, he can't control the mess at home, but he can photograph it.

-Ai

Show Notes:
Joel Meyerowitz - https://www.joelmeyerowitz.com
La Jetée (1963) - https://www.criterion.com/films/329-l...
Ken Burns - https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/
Matt was wrong about the Ricoh camera he owns. It's the Ricoh GR Digital II - https://bit.ly/3QYQe21
Matt's Photography Channel - https://geni.us/PhotoVideosYT
The War of Art by Steven Pressfield

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The one word of career advice in The Graduate is "plastics". Our use of the word comes from Steinbeck's Travels with Charley, and it means work pressed out of a mold so more of it can be sold, the way Topo Chico felt different once Coca-Cola owned it. One of us loved the original The Vanishing, a subtitled film, and can't stand the American remake by the same director. It added movie stars and a new ending, chosen because it tested better, and lost all the feeling.

We wonder whether complexity is the real trap, since it flatters the ego. One of us spent an afternoon painting his electronic typewriter red and wrote nothing that day. Van Neistat spent $3,200 fitting a GoPro with interchangeable lenses and ended up, in his words, with a more fragile version of his DSLR. Willem Verbeek has gone the other way: on a 9-day trip to buy a car in Canada and drive it home, he shot a single roll of film, and one of us thinks he's making the best work of his career. It ends at Walker Repair, where Kevin Walker built one working Canon Sure Shot from the best parts of several he had on hand, and the first model in the series was waiting on the counter for $60.

-Ai

Alex referenced a movie called "THE FOLLOWING" during our conversation, and he meant to say "THE VANISHING" - link below. 

Show Notes:

The Graduate: https://www.criterion.com/films/28578-the-graduate

Travels with Charley in Search of America by John Steinbeck: https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/classrev/charley.htm

The Vanishing (1993): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vanishing_(1993_film)

The Vanishing (1988): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vanishing_(1988_film) 

Coca-Cola Buys Topo Chico: https://bit.ly/45UR0B6

Fake Plastic Trees by Radiohead: https://youtu.be/n5h0qHwNrHk?si=0vXqkBPG_VRKxQ2U

Van Neistat GoPro Video: https://youtu.be/tPv83XxkrWo?si=VddLvDGgzCsBtw8i

Willem Verbeek Canada Road Trip Video: https://youtu.be/I6ESg2Fdtn4?si=oULCDAZ3YPf3HHQ-

Seinfeld Episode with John Cheever’s Letters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyT3jlANQ_Q

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A woman walking out of the surf at Manhattan Beach, board in hand, went up on Instagram as "Lone Surfer". We wonder whether even that says too much, since the word "lone" tells you how to feel before you've looked. The photographer who took it once gave a film-school exercise a French title he'd gone hunting for, and he winces at it now. William Eggleston doesn't title his photographs, though his books have names, so we try to find the line. A book or a film almost has to be called something. Orson Welles told Peter Bogdanovich that Paper Moon was so good a title he didn't need to make the movie. A single photograph might say more with nothing under it. One of us puts it as poetry versus documentation: a document needs a title, and a poem can do without one.

Explanations can do the same damage. On a walk through the Denver Art Museum, every wall label that explained a painting spoiled what one of us had worked out for himself. There's a painting at the Art Institute of Chicago that one of us visits on every trip and wants to know nothing about. Near the end we try and fail to name this episode, and one of us brings up the question he used to ask in grad school: whether an idea is merely cool or actually connected to the work.

-Ai

If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a rating and/or a review. We read and appreciate all of them. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode.

Show Notes:

Sunny Sixteen Podcast: https://bit.ly/46rFG0y

William Eggleston - The Democratic Forest: https://bit.ly/3rMNdYE

William Eggleston’s Guide: https://bit.ly/3LUHXZS
Joel Meyerowitz - Cape Light: https://www.joelmeyerowitz.com/cape-light

Joel Meyerowitz - Aftermath: https://www.joelmeyerowitz.com/aftermath

Matthew’s “Lone Surfer” photo: https://bit.ly/408stYl

Jackson Street Booksellers (used book store in Omaha): https://bit.ly/3PR10p3

Alex’s Photo Project “The Gates of the Garden”: https://www.alexccarter.com/photography/gotg

Paper Moon: https://bit.ly/45udyZs

Gregory Crewdson: http://www.gregorycrewdsonmovie.com/

Walt Whitman’s Poetry: https://whitmanarchive.org/

Alone Together by Aristotle Roufanis: https://aristotle.photography/

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick: https://bit.ly/3PWcx6I

The Shining: https://letterboxd.com/film/the-shining/

Denver Art Museum: https://www.denverartmuseum.org/en

Matt’s Favorite Painting from The Art Institute of Chicago: https://bit.ly/3to1k78

Support the show

 If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a rating and/or a review. We appreciate and try to read all of them. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode. 

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Website: https://studiosessionspod.com