(Via.)

(Via Shaun Usher.)

Related post: “Edmund Wilson Regrets…”

—David Ogilvy

(Via Letters of Note.)

—Richard Mitchell, The Graves of Academe

(Via Michael Leddy.)

Q: How on earth were you able to gain the incredible amount of authorial control that you have over Louie? Have you had to battle with FX over any particular jokes/concepts/creative choices?

A: I got it by demanding it and refusing to do the show any other way at all and by having the leverage that I was completely willing to walk away without doing the show and by agreeing to an extremely low budget so that they could offset the risk of giving me this freedom because they are risking less money.

Elsewhere Louis talks about how he edits his TV show by himself on his MacBook.

The whole thing reminded me of Bill Cunningham’s sage advice, “If you don’t take the money, they can’t tell you what to do.”

Related viewing: Mike Monteiro’s “Fuck You, Pay Me” talk.

Waiting for the cable guy, books you’ve lent out and want back, books you want to read, pick up some marmalade at the store, get gas.  Stars – they’re just like us!

(Via Michael Leddy.)

More.

(Via Snarkmarket.)

—Donald Knuth

—Quentin Crisp

—Geogre Sanders

—Donald Knuth

—Alain De Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

—Jesse Thorn, Fast Company, June 2011

(See also Mike Monteiro’s “Fuck You, Pay Me” talk.)

Tom Waits in Coffee and Cigarettes (2003)

From Elizabeth Gilbert’s June 2002 GQ profile of Tom Waits:

“‘Children make up the best songs, anyway,’ he says. ‘Better than grown-ups. Kids are always working on songs and throwing them away, like little origami things or paper airplanes. They don’t care if they lose it; they’ll just make another one.’ This openness is what every artist needs. Be ready to receive the inspiration when it comes; be ready to let it go when it vanishes. He believes that if a song ‘really wants to be written down, it’ll stick in my head. If it wasn’t interesting enough for me to remember it, well, it can just move along and go get in someone else’s song.’ ‘Some songs,’ he has learned, ‘don’t want to be recorded.’ You can’t wrestle with them or you’ll only scare them off more. Trying to capture them sometimes ‘is trying to trap birds.’ Fortunately, he says, other songs come easy, like ‘digging potatoes out of the ground.’ Others are sticky and weird, like ‘gum found under an old table.’ Clumsy and uncooperative songs may only be useful ‘to cut up as bait and use ’em to catch other songs.’ Of course, the best songs of all are those that enter you ‘like dreams taken through a straw.’ In those moments, all you can be, Waits says, is grateful.”

(Article via Austin Kleon.)

Further listening: Radiolab’s “Help!”

Required reading.

—L. P. Jacks

(Via Swiss Miss.)

—Melvin Sokolsky, Wraparound Magazine 1.4 (2004): 16.

—Siegfried Kracauer, “Boredom” (1924)

“Once we hit the studio, it was just all focus on the music. All focus was one hundred percent on the music. There were rules: no Twittering, no e-mailing, no blog-watching – no stupid questions. All of this stuff is posted all over the walls. A wall of questions, for inspirations. ‘What would Mobb Deep do?’ All types of stuff.”

—Pusha T (née Terrence Thornton) on working with Kanye West on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

(Quote via Vulture; image via Complex.)

—Alan Jacobs

October 26, “Resign!”; October 28, “Resign!!!”; November 4, “Resign?”; November 7, “Resign!”; November 8, “Don’t resign”; November 9, “Resign!”; November 16, “Don’t resign!”; November 23, “Resign”; December 7, “Don’t resign”; December 9, “Teach here next year.”

He eventually retired in 1907.

Source: Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club

(Via Design Observer.)

—Frank Gehry

(Via Unbeige.)

(Via.)

Wake up around 11AM. Have some coffee. Call my kids, and my wonderful mother. I then shower up. Read fan mail. Have lunch. Back on the phone. Read a book or write some thoughts down. Have dinner. Phone. Pushups. Then I listen to ESPN on the radio. Read the bible, then sleep. That’s my day.

Wayne (née Dwayne Michael Carter, Jr.) is currently serving a one-year prison sentence at Rikers Island for attempted possession of a weapon after a gun was found on his tour bus in 2007.

Last month, he literally phoned in a verse he wanted appended to Drake’s “Light Up.” Best lyric: “Behind bars, but the bars don’t stop / Recording over the phone / I hope the call don’t drop.” Indeed.

(Via.)

Related posts: “100-Year-Old Master,” “Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Daily Routine,” “Donald Trump’s Daily Routine,” and “John Waters’s Daily Routine.”

(Via.)

(Via.)

—John Heilpern, “Uncharted Waters,” Vanity Fair, June 2010.