Search Results for: interview

Interview with a Pepper-sprayed UC Davis Student

Longreads Pick

We were never warned that we were going to be pepper-sprayed.

Lt. Pike walked up to my friend, and I am told that he said, “Move or we’re going to shoot you.”

Then he went back and talked to a few of his police officer friends. A couple of other officers started to remove people who were sitting there, blocking exit. Pike could have easily removed us, just picked us up and removed us. We were just sitting there, nonviolent civil disobedience.

But Pike turned around and I am told that he said to the other officers, “Don’t worry about it, I’m going to spray these kids down.”

He lifts the can, spins it around in a circle to show it off to everybody.

Then he sprays us three times.

Source: Boing Boing
Published: Nov 20, 2011
Length: 8 minutes (2,131 words)

Pulp Fever: Interview with John Jeremiah Sullivan

Longreads Pick

With some of these pop pieces, partly what you’re doing is writing your way out of a confused admiration for the subject. But Axl retains his power to disturb, always his greatest weapon. I don’t remember there being much resistance from the Quarterly. Which suggests either a level of confidence for which I’m grateful, or a level of drug abuse that is worrisome. Granted the brakes did screech a little when I called Joel from Bilbao asking if we could put Axl on the cover. His manager had said it was the only way we’d get an interview. (We didn’t do it.) In retrospect that was dumb of him/them, as it would have been killer PR for Axl and that incarnation of the band to grant us an interview, PR that didn’t really materialize further down the road; but Axl is not always focused on the smart thing to do; he asks himself instead, what is the most “Axl” thing to do?

Source: GQ
Published: Nov 3, 2011
Length: 15 minutes (3,852 words)

Eddie Murphy: The Rolling Stone Interview

Longreads Pick

What ever happened to your signature laugh, by the way?

I don’t laugh like that anymore, somehow it doesn’t come out. It’s weird to change something that’s as natural as that. But it started out as a real laugh, then it turned into people laughing because they thought my laugh was funny, and then there were a couple of times where I laughed because I knew it would make people laugh. Then it got weird. People came up to me and said, “Do that laugh,” or if you laugh, someone turns around and goes, “Eddie?” I just stopped doing it.

Source: Rolling Stone
Published: Nov 10, 2011
Length: 27 minutes (6,767 words)

Interview: Julian Barnes, The Art of Fiction No. 165

Longreads Pick

INTERVIEWER

So you chose novel writing as a profession.

BARNES

Oh, I didn’t choose it as a profession—I didn’t have the vanity to choose it. I can perhaps now state that I am at last a novelist, and think of myself as a novelist, and can afford to do journalism when it pleases me. But I was never one of those insufferable children who at the age of seven is writing stories under the bedclothes or one of those cocky young wordsmiths who imagine the world awaits their prose. I spent a long time acquiring enough confidence to imagine that I could be some sort of novelist.

Published: Dec 1, 2000
Length: 34 minutes (8,735 words)

Interview: Mike O’Brien

Longreads Pick

The make-out game Seven Minutes In Heaven can evoke painful memories of awkwardly fumbling through puberty in a dark closet at a junior high boy-girl party. But Mike O’Brien, a former Chicago performer in his third season as a writer for Saturday Night Live, is slowly helping replace those memories with more enjoyable ones of Kristen Wiig, Amy Poehler, and Tracy Morgan hanging out with him in his closet in his new NBC web series, 7 Minutes In Heaven. O’Brien and director Rob Klein place celebrities in a small closet with cameras, suits, ties, hats, and only O’Brien. For a few minutes, they share the tight space with O’Brien as he asks them a barrage of quick-hitting, mostly nonsensical questions, such as “Please talk about ways that you are or are not similar to a horse.”

Source: Onion A.V. Club
Published: Oct 6, 2011
Length: 15 minutes (3,971 words)

Interview: Vanessa Grigoriadis and the Art of the Celebrity Profile

Longreads Pick

The whole Justin Bieber thing is a complex, bizarre incident. First of all, I was totally into Justin Bieber in a way that was really unappealing to anyone who knows me as a woman in my thirties. I was constantly going, “Omigod look at this video; he’s so cute! Come see how cute he is!” I was super excited about this assignment. Typically, I fly to these places and throw on a pair of pants and could care less what the subject thinks of my relative attractiveness, and for him I literally bought a skirt and got an iron and ironed it and put together a cute outfit. Then of course when I saw him I couldn’t believe what a pedophile I was. I was like, This is a child. A true, actual child. I’m clearly not interested in him anymore. It was some midlife crisis thing for me. And, look, it works on all these women, I’m not alone in it.

Source: jonahweiner.com
Published: Sep 8, 2011
Length: 12 minutes (3,199 words)

Shel Silverstein Stars & Stripes Interview, 1968

Longreads Pick

“I couldn’t draw any officers, so I started working on sergeants. I had nothing against sergeants but that’s all I could get and I went after them until finally I was told all I could attack were civilians and animals. But they even made zebras off limits to me because they had stripes. … As much as I fought the Army while I was here, it wasn’t that the Army did me any harm. It did me good, taught me things about life and gave me freedom to create. The Army gave me an outlet for my work and it was great for me. because of my experiences. Guys I know that are in the most exciting work in the world still look back on their Army life as the happiest time of their lives.”

Author: Hal Drake
Published: Dec 8, 1968
Length: 12 minutes (3,145 words)

Interview with Trey Anastasio

Longreads Pick

“Today what I do is—I do this every night we play—I have a little quiet moment where I picture some guy having a fight with his girlfriend, getting into his car—the battery’s dead—then he gets to the parking lot and it’s full. Meets up with his friends. Comes into the show. I try to picture this one person having their own experience, and I picture them way in the back of the room. And I try to remember how insignificant my experience is, and how people’s experiences with music are their own thing.”

Source: The Believer
Published: Jul 1, 2011
Length: 24 minutes (6,012 words)

Aaron Sorkin Interviews David Carr

Longreads Pick

“The robot part is that he moves his elbow and content comes out. While he’s chatting, he’s also tweeting and blogging—and, you know, I’ll think that’s cute, and then the next day he’ll be on the front page with a synthetic piece about the analytics of television or new media, which he also covers. If Brian (Stelter) wasn’t such a decent guy, I would actually slip something into his food or quietly suffocate him with a pillow.”

Source: Interview
Published: Jun 13, 2011
Length: 18 minutes (4,519 words)

The Fresh Air Interview: ‘South Park’s’ Trey Parker and Matt Stone

Longreads Pick

Mr. PARKER: So let’s make it look like it was “Family Guy” and not us. So then that gave us the whole idea for the show, that we would put “Family Guy” in the show and only have Muhammad appear in the “Family Guy” part. So if they ever saw a still of it on the Internet, or they ever saw anything, they’d know it was “Family Guy” and not us. And then they would get bombed and not us.

Source: NPR
Published: May 28, 2010
Length: 36 minutes (9,159 words)