andrew stout

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Hi, there. Do you like 8-bit video games? Do you like love? Of...

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 13:48:00 -0800

Hi, there.

Do you like 8-bit video games? Do you like love?

Of course you do! So check out this incredible short film called “Joe”. It was made over the past year by a Geneva-based artist named Laetitia Butyn and is presently my favorite thing on Earth.

Also, consider checking out more of Laetitia’s work at Timtimsia.com. You won’t regret it.

I hope you enjoy your weekend. Really, I do! Though you might find it weird I’ve given it so much thought. But what can I say? My emotional intelligence is off the charts!

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[Flash 10 is required to watch video.]

Still Solving Riddles

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 06:40:15 -0800

For The Economist online, I talked with Björk. It was a blast! And I also learned a lot about science and songwriting.

Björk Guðmundsdóttir laughs, a lot. It’s the only time while talking she doesn’t sound like “Björk”, the pop star Alex Ross once called “the most famous Icelander since Leif Erickson.” Otherwise, Björk the interviewee trills in the same register as Björk the singer, with a Nordic inflection that lilts as it rolls. Hers is a voice made for tall tales and torch songs. The laugh keeps things grounded.

Today, Björk is speaking and giggling from her home on the Icelandic coast, having been connected to me by telephone through a London PR office. She’s overlooking the Atlantic as she fields my questions. It’s the last day of summer. Our shared task is to discuss her new project, “Biophilia”. But because we both seem unsure how to approach this dense cluster of ideas we instead begin by talking about a dizzying assortment of other things, none of which likely to sell copies of the new album.

Read the entire story here.

Translating Ai Weiwei

Fri, 05 Aug 2011 11:26:07 -0700

For The Economist, I wrote a story about Lee Ambrozy, who spent the last three years translating Ai Weiwei’s Chinese blog into an English language book.

After Lee Ambrozy moved to Beijing in 2004, she quickly grew accustomed to the spectacle that trailed Ai Weiwei wherever he went. The first time she saw the artist and activist in person, he was accompanied by five video cameras. Some passersby cried out for “Teacher Ai”; others stopped to bow. But Ms Ambrozy, an art-history student with a social science background, could only laugh. The scene was like something from a Eugéne Delacroix painting — and Mr Ai, detained by Chinese officials earlier this month, was still a couple years from earning his musket and flag.

Then in 2008 she received a call from Mr Ai’s office. The artist was looking for a translator, someone who could turn his controversial blog into a book. “The caller immediately offered me the job,” Ms Ambrozy said over the phone. “Anyone who knew what they were doing would have asked for a sample translation or tried to set up a meeting. But she didn’t. She just sent me the text.”

Read the entire article here.

—ANDREW STOUT About | Journalisms | Tumblr | Twitter

An Interview with Mike Sacks

Fri, 05 Aug 2011 11:12:00 -0700

Last week, I rang one of my favorite writers, Mr. Mike Sacks.

It did not go well.

Listen to the audio here.

—ANDREW STOUT About | Journalisms | Tumblr | Twitter

Nerd Lib

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 08:22:00 -0700

For The Economist, I talked with Mr. Simon Pegg:

In less enlightened times, nerds were damned to the fringes of society. Their knowledge of triffids and wookiees was ignored, their habit of layering T-shirts over T-shirts mocked. But the nerds have risen up. Today they are recognised as an influential, moneyed elite. They build multi-billion dollar corporations from secret algorithms. They star in their own TV shows and film franchises. They are elected President of the United States and they attract most of the lovelorn rubbernecking at my neighbourhood coffeeshop.

But mainly, nerds get book deals. So many book deals, in fact, that they seem to have forged a new literary genre: the celebrity nerd coming-of-age story.

Simon Pegg’s memoir, “Nerd Do Well: A Small Boy’s Journey to Becoming a Big Kid” (Gotham Books), is the latest to chronicle a famous sci-fi fan’s self-actualisation. I caught a few moments with Pegg to talk about this phenomenon.

Read the entire story here.

—ANDREW STOUT About | Journalisms | Tumblr | Twitter

Sorting Out Thurston Moore

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 20:41:00 -0700

Last summer, I was standing in line at a bookstore.

Okay, that’s not a promising start to a rock feature. I’m aware of this. It’s always best to begin these things with a bold declaration. Something like: “Mr. Big is back!” Though the problem with such pithy beginnings is they’re often false. Because Mr. Big is never coming back. Not to the pop charts, at least. But I really was in line at a bookstore. And Thurston Moore was standing right behind me.

Read the entire story here.

—ANDREW STOUT About | Journalisms | Tumblr | Twitter

Friends Without Benefits

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 20:41:00 -0700

For The Economist online, I wrote about Ralph Sassone’s debut novel, The Intimates:

By the time we get to know them they’re in their mid-20s: Maize is a reformed “college slut”; Robbie is a romantic idealist. She’s straight and he’s gay. She’s an unpublished writer, he’s an intern at a newspaper. New York is their oyster—picked clean. These are the unsated lives Ralph Sassone has braided into his debut novel, “The Intimates”.

The book is billed as a rare story of a male-female friendship free of sexual tension. Yet “The Intimates” isn’t the dogged exploration of platonic love the book-jacket promises. The plot is too full of sexual misadventures for that. The author spends much of the book describing Abercrombie-like specimens (“muscles ripple”; a “beefy butt” winks; T-shirts invariably cling to the torsos they cover). In Mr Sassone’s rapturous details of still-ripening bodies, there’s something of Tom Wolf’s very sexual 2004 novel “I Am Charlotte Simmons”. The lingering impression is of a story told in a voice we might call “pederast omniscient”.

Read the entire article here.

—ANDREW STOUT About | Journalisms | Tumblr | Twitter

The Voice

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 20:40:00 -0700

For The Village Voice online, I spoke with a longtime hero, Laetitia Sadier:

The voice is both plaintive and bright; beguiling and stark. It knocks around a quiet range of expression, yet it sings directly—of Marx, erotic transgression, and “the Dinosaur law.” And it might have cheekily soundtracked a Volkswagen commercial or two.

The voice belongs to Laetitia Sadier and after 20 years with avant-pop bands Stereolab and Monade, she’s released her solo debut The Trip. If the comparisons to the ‘Lab (as she calls them) are unavoidable, that’s only because Sadier’s voice is so distinct. But The Trip boasts by far the freshest set of sounds Sadier has made in over a decade. She was at her home in London when I rang her on a recent Friday night.

Read the entire article here.

—ANDREW STOUT About | Journalism | Tumblr | Twitter

Michael Bay, Aphorist

Mon, 04 Jul 2011 10:17:00 -0700

“I can officially say I’ve probably thought more about robots on earth than anyone in the past year-and-a-half.”

“Every guy’s been in that circumstance by the pond or the lake, where the stud comes up to you and gives you shit.”

“I’ll take 30 kids into a screening room.”

“Death threats freak me up.”

“A lot of the older ladies, like 35, 40, they are like, ‘I didn’t want to come here. I didn’t want to see this.’”

“This one lady goes, she said this great line. She goes,’We’re tired of the suits and the whatever.’” (attributed to One Lady)

”Raising Arizona was such an instrumental movie in how I’ve done some of my commercials.”

“We’re fucked if you don’t do Transformers 3 right now.” (attributed to a Paramount Pictures executive)

—ANDREW STOUT About | Journalism | Tumblr | Twitter

Future Days

Fri, 24 Jun 2011 15:53:00 -0700

Yesterday, I spoke with Ryuichi Sakamoto about one my very favorite bands, Yellow Magic Orchestra. Thanks to the Internet’s own yellow magic, our conversation is already available for the trolls.

And for you, too.

Have you heard Yellow Magic Orchestra? They just might be the best pop group ever.

Now, if you’re the kind of reader who’s suspicious of such shameless hyperbole (and huzzah for you if you are), then consider these crunchy, fact-like nuggets: In 1978, when YMO released their self-titled debut, there was nary a thing called synth pop. Five years later, after the group split, the Tokyo band’s bleeps and blips were firmly embedded in global pop music, where they’ve remained ever since. In that half decade, YMO’s sound matured at a pace rivaled only by the Beatles in the mid-’60s. Their debut’s zany exotica-disco spoofs quickly evolved into a sensuous musique concréte perfected on the last two albums of their classic period, 1983’s Naughty Boys and Service. For YMO’s members — Ryuichi Sakamoto, Haruomi Hosono, and Yukihiro Takahashi — it was quite a ride. The gleam of those times was vividly illustrated by this 2008 exchange in the Guardian:

“We were very big,” sighs Sakamoto, “that’s why I hated it. We were always followed by paparazzi.”

“Yes, and teenage girls,” says Hosono. “They would literally chase us down the street and rip our clothes to shreds.”

“I quite enjoyed that,” says Takahashi.

Read the entire post here.

—ANDREW STOUT About | Journalism | Tumblr | Twitter

Lay It as It Plays

Tue, 14 Jun 2011 20:43:00 -0700

I wrote about John Darnielle and his fabulous Mountain Goats for SF Weekly:

“I’ll tell you a very funny story,” John Darnielle says. This is probably not the first funny story he’s told today. Nor will it be the last. Today is a publicity day for Darnielle. When it’s over, he will have talked to more than a dozen members of the music press. And tomorrow, he will do it all over again. He has submitted to this grind to promote his upcoming six-date tour, which he will embark upon to remind listeners of All Eternals Deck, the hyperliterate indie folk album he put out last winter with his band the Mountain Goats.

It’s a measure of his hard-won success that the dozens of journalists who’ve requested his time have been corralled into two days of 15-minute phoners. Darnielle is less available these days than he once was. That was back before his shows became events around which a whole generation of hapless Young Werthers arranged their Moleskine planners. But today, on this warm Friday afternoon in spring, and by the grace of the songwriter’s team of publicists, we have been made captive to Darnielle. There is hardly time to follow-up on his breezily expressed pontifications. We imagine this is what it’s like to be one of his many dedicated followers.

Though after 20 years, 13 albums, and a fanbase so fervent as to warrant a feature two years ago in New York magazine, Darnielle can afford to be his own person. Much of the humor in the story he’s about to tell us hinges on that fact.

Read the entire story here.

—ANDREW STOUT About | Journalism | Tumblr | Twitter