Jake La Botz

Posted on May 14, 2012 by daysofyore

Jake La Botz is an actor and musician from Chicago. He has released six albums under his own name and toured internationally and famously around American tattoo shops. The first time you see him play knocks you out. Nobody really picks a guitar like Jake anymore; he learned from some of the best Chicago bluesmen that ever lived.

He’s also an actor, with past roles in Steve Buscemi’s Animal Factory, the remake of Rambo, which also featured two of his songs, Lonesome Jim, Sinners and Saints, and Fully Loaded, among others. He also has parts in the upcoming Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and Walter Salles’ version of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road — he’ll head to the Cannes Film Festival later this month for the premiere of that one. The Los Angeles Times recently called his performance as “The Shape,” the Satan-esque narrator of Stephen King and John Mellencamp’s just wrapped musical Ghost Brothers of Darkland County, “slithering, salacious, manipulative, delightful” and The New York Times said the show “comes alive” in his “every bravura entrance.” As one of the actors in that show, I can attest: people went nuts for the guy.

His history is as authentic and roller-coaster wild as he is now generous and calm.

You grew up in Chicago, right?

Yeah, I grew up with my dad. He was a masters degree dropout, a socialist. He was in SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] in the 60s. I was born in San Diego and we moved back to Chicago when I was three. And my dad was this self-made intellectual guy. He was probably a teacher’s assistant or something when I was a little kid. He had a lot of different gigs, he eventually became a truck driver.

The idea of being a socialist even then was all about infiltrating the industrial workplace – this way of life. Like a lot of grandiose socialists, they thought they’d be the leaders of the revolution. It’s made me pretty bitter about the hardcore leftist scene these days, at least from growing up in that world.

Was he an artist at all?

He was too dogmatic, I think, to ever be an artist full time. There’s something about really dogmatic people, where being an artist isn’t really possible. Art has to transcend dogma. He was one of those guys where — things were very black and white. And art can’t really be expressed in black and white. But he did have dreams of being a poet. I remember his room was plastered with rejection notices… Continue reading →

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h a p p y b i r t h d a y !

Posted on May 7, 2012 by daysofyore

Happy birthday to The Days of Yore!

In May 2010, Lucas and I posted our first Days of Yore interview to a Tumblr we had created after a beer-spiked walk in Williamsburg in which we got each other worked up about how much we really wanted to hear the stories of famous artists’ early days – what they were like when they were struggling like us. The founding of The Days of Yore was in some ways a means of self-preservation. We needed the inspiration and the gritty tales to hold on to just as much as it turned out you, the readers out there, were yearning for them to not only entertain you, but also to prop you up on poor Ramen-filled afternoons.

The first interview we published was with bestselling writer Gary Shteyngart, who was kind enough to sit down and tell us about his yore long before we had a track record of interviews, or even so much as a template of a site. We had nothing to show him, nothing to prove that the site we had dreamed up would actually turn into anything. He agreed anyway. So did Kristen Schaal, a hugely popular comedian whose initial “yes” made us giddy with excitement. Anne Fadiman answered an email so gushing that she must have laughed in embarassment for the adoring young woman who had written it. Siri Hustvedt and Thomas Roma invited us into their Brooklyn homes to talk for several hours at their kitchen tables – the first in what would be a long series of endlessly generous and welcoming home visits.

What I am trying to say here is thank you. On the two year anniversary of The Days of Yore, I want to express my continued admiration and gratitude to all the early artists and writers we interviewed who took a leap of faith and agreed to be a part of this project, as well as the fabulous artists we continue to speak with every week. If you’re a fan of the Yore, or if this is your first visit, take a moment and do what we did this week: revisit the first dozen or so interviews from back in the spring and summer of 2010. Those DoY pioneers made the site what it is today, and we want to celebrate our two-day mark with them in particular.

I also want to say thank you our readers, especially the ones who have been following us faithfully for these years and who continue to share interviews that interest or move them. You are why we continue to do this.

On this two year birthday of the little site that could, we are also getting unbelievably close to publishing the 100th DoY interview. Can you believe it? 100 interviews with writers and artists and musicians and actors telling us how they lived and what they thought about, what they doubted and what they feared, once upon a time when they were just like us…and maybe like you.

Astri

Editor and Co-Founder

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Nick Harmer, Death Cab for Cutie

Posted on April 30, 2012 by daysofyore

Nick Harmer plays bass (as well as keyboards, guitar and backing vocals) in the hugely popular alternative rock band Death Cab for Cutie. To date, Death Cab has released seven studio albums, five EPs and one demo. Their first LP, Something About Airplanes, was released in August of 1998. Their big break, the album Transatlanticism, was released in October 2003, with songs appearing in the soundtracks of the films Wedding Crashers and Mean Creek and the television shows The O.C., Six Feet Under, CSI: Miami, and Californication. The album Plans was released in August 2005 and was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Alternative Album, received Gold Status in 2006 after charting on Billboard for forty-seven consecutive weeks, and was certified platinum by the RIAA in May, 2008. Their most recent album, Codes and Keys, was released on May 31, 2011. Writing of the band’s live performance style, The Chicago Tribune noted that they play songs “as if they were meditations, travelogues and hallucinations.”

The Days of Yore spoke with Harmer over the phone from his home in Seattle. He was gracious, funny, and delightfully easy to talk to.

You were born on an army base in Germany. Did you stay there for a long time?

My father was an officer in the army, he was a Lieutenant Colonel when he retired, and we moved around a lot because of that. I was born in Germany and was there for maybe two years, at most. From there we skipped around. We lived in Japan, in Kansas, just lots of places before we finally settled in the Northwest where I went to high school and, after that, to college.

When you moved back to the States you lived in Puyallup, in Washington State. I read somewhere that you thought Puyallup was an oppressive environment to grow up in. Why?

I knew a lot of people who were dreaming of getting out of there. And the options for fun and exploring things were very limited. Puyallup is probably most known for being the town in the state of Washington that churns out big football players. And I had no interest in football. [Laughs.]

It is very much a small town – small town values, small town stuff. I guess the oppression, or the repression anyway, was that you really had to work hard to come up with things to do that were different and fun. This was a time before you could hop online and track down like-minded folks and make friends.

I found myself in this small group of friends, going to Seattle to go record shopping. I was in bands all throughout high school so I was playing in people’s garages all over town, wherever we could make noise. But then always getting shut down because of noise. We could never have concerts.
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Sanford Biggers

Posted on April 23, 2012 by daysofyore

Sanford Biggers is a Los Angeles-raised artist based in New York whose arresting visual expression through mixed media has intrigued critics and audiences alike for over a decade. His most recent solo exhibition, The Cartographer’s Conundrum, at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, was listed as one of the top 20 shows to see in 2012 by Artinfo.com. Other recent solo shows include Sweet Funk: An Introspective Survey at the Brooklyn Museum of Art (2011) and The Cosmic Voodoo Circus at the Sculpture Center in New York (2011). His work has been featured in countless significant exhibitions across the United States and the world, including at Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and Tate Modern and Tate Britain in London, UK.

Biggers is the recipient of a jaw-droppingly long list of awards and grants and he has been given residencies in Germany, Poland, Japan, and Hungary, as well as all over the United States. He was just awarded the 2012 Fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin (to take place in 2014). He earned an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1999 and attended the prestigious Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1998. He currently teaches at Columbia University.

This interview took place on a lazy Friday at the decidedly debonair artist’s studio in Harlem.

Were you a scribbling kid?

I scribbled, but I also used to run into a lot of problems in school because I didn’t pay attention in class at all. I was always hanging out with the bad kids. Although I was smart enough not to get too caught up. But the only classes where I actually paid attention were the arts and crafts classes.

Were you doing art at home too?

Not until my teenage years and then I started scribbling a lot more. I started doing graffiti, actually. That was very popular at the time – we’re talking the 80’s now. Rap music had come out, and break dancing had come out, and all of us just jumped into that as an art form. So I was breaking, I was DJing, I wasn’t rapping, but I was doing graffiti. I used to do graffiti on jeans. I would be in the back of the class and some girl would give me her jacket and I had my pens while the class was going on, she’d give me fifteen dollars and have an original artwork on her jacket….things like that.

Biddybyebye, 2006, plastic and metal, 24in x 41in, courtesy of Mary Goldman Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

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n e w b e g i n n i n g s

Posted on April 16, 2012 by daysofyore

It is April and spring is definitely upon us. As the snow melts and the crocuses poke through the hard dirt, as the outdoor cafés open and you bring your tupperware lunch outside to a bench, as you – daringly – take those warmer-weather clothes out of the top closet and shove your heavy overcoat into a street-salt-crusted corner, as the parks of New York, Stockholm, and Paris fill with yous in your flouncy skirts and bare shoulders, it is time for new beginnings. Anything can happen in the brief crack between seasons. And in those seasonal cracks of life. This is the time for high risk, high reward. As spring floods sun into your days, allow yourself to shed new light on where you are going and who you want to be.

To celebrate spring, I have put together some favorite snippets documenting new beginnings from the DoY archives. Enjoy!

Astri
DoY Editor

Thomas Roma, photographer

I ended up with a job on Wall Street, on the floor of the American Stock Exchange. (…) I did very well and I loved every minute of it. This was 1967 to 1971. So, I was a trader during the best years on Wall Street. Enormous camaraderie, collegiality, it was a wonderful experience.

In the middle of my time on Wall Street, I got involved in an automobile accident and sustained a brain injury. (…) The recuperation process meant sitting, bolt upright. I did it next to a window. I couldn’t watch television because it would give me headaches and I couldn’t read because my concentration wasn’t good enough. So I would look out the window. One day, my older brother visited me and he brought a camera. A strange camera, an East German model, I don’t even know how it made it into the country. He sold me that camera for 35 dollars. I was mostly photographing the life of the squirrels that lived on my block, morning, evening and night.

That was the beginning. I found it extremely satisfying to look at the world and have it become this other thing, this photograph, that was related to the thing I saw but was also something else that didn’t exist before I made it. That was really fascinating to me because on Wall Street I was well compensated and really creative, but at the end of the day, a bell rings and then there is nothing. Whatever beautiful thing you did, whatever the performance was, whatever connection you made, it was gone forever. (…) With photography, I could actually make something. The performance led to something. I was actually changing the world in a substantial way. It was real.
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Carrie Moyer

Posted on April 9, 2012 by daysofyore

Carrie Moyer is a prominent American painter who began her career of powerful visual expression as one half of the public art duo Dyke Action Machine! (DAM!) – an early and influential queer agitprop powerhouse that was founded in the nineties and was active for seventeen years. During that time, Moyer also designed graphics, posters, and agitprop for numerous gay and lesbian activist organizations, including Queer Nation, the Lesbian Avengers, and the New York City Anti-Violence Project. Moyer has been represented by CANADA Gallery in New York City since 2003. Her writing on art has been published in Art in America, Artforum, Modern Painters, and The Brooklyn Rail, and her essays have been featured in a number of anthologies, including Queers in Space: Communities, Public Spaces and Sites of Resistance and To The Studio Reader: On the Space of Artists.

Moyer has a BFA from Pratt Institute, a MFA from Bard College, and has been a student at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She is the recipient of many grants and awards, including a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant, an Anonymous Was A Woman Award, the Elaine de Kooning Memorial Fellowship, and the National Studio Program at PS1/Institution for Contemporary Art in New York. She has been awarded residencies at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony and has taught at a long list of universities, including Yale University, Pratt Institute, and The Cooper Union. In 2010, she was named to the Board of Governors at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Art at Hunter College.

The Days of Yore sipped hot apple cider with Moyer at an outdoor café on an unseasonably warm winter afternoon in New York City. She was generous with her stories and her friendly, crooked smile.

When you were a child, did you have an idea of what an artist was?

I did, because I had a mother who wanted me to be an artist.

Really? That’s not always so common.

She was very romantic about artists, and she did certain things to facilitate that. My parents were working class, but she would buy these big rolls of paper for us to draw on. Instead of toys, she’d give us art supplies.

Carrie Moyer, "The Tiger's Wife," 2011. Acrylic on canvas. 60 x 48 inches


And did you dive right into that?

I was always the kid who was good at art, definitely. I won little grade-school prizes, stuff like that. My parents were hippies when I was a child, so they wanted us to do Something Else.

That is interesting, because many people that I speak with experience resistance from home, or some form of family discomfort about their decisions to be alternative, which inevitably going down an artistic path can be. But you almost had a pressure to go there!

Well, as I grew up my parents—especially my mother—didn’t understand that nobody wants to be a starving artist. She had a romantic idea about what it would be. When I graduated from art school and I told her I was going to learn word processing because I thought that would be a good way to support my studio, she got very upset. She was like, “Don’t go into office work! Just eat pasta every night!” She thought I was going to become a secretary.
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Ernest Hemingway

Posted on April 2, 2012 by daysofyore

Ernest Hemingway is one of the most acclaimed writers in American history. He began his career as a beat reporter, but soon moved to Paris and fell in with the other writers and artists of the Lost Generation. He is the recipient of a Nobel Prize for Literature, and the author of many celebrated works of fiction, including Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises, The Old Man and the Sea, and A Moveable Feast.

Though he died in Idaho in 1961, he met The Days of Yore at a diner on the Upper West Side of New York City in 2012 for an interview.

I’m not sure you’re allowed to smoke in here.

I’m aware of the rules.

You’re already on your ninth cigarette and we’ve been here three minutes.

I’m all out. Is there a place around here to get more?

We just sat down. Do you want to eat first?

[Hemingway stands and leaves the diner. We walk to a nearby bodega.]

So, growing up, were your parents involved in writing in any way?

My father was a doctor and my mother sang songs. She sang for a living. They wrote grocery lists and minimal essays. They did not write in that sense of the word. My father taught me to hunt. My mother taught me to sing. I enjoyed both.

Can you sing something for me now?

Don’t belittle this.
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Susan Orlean

Posted on March 26, 2012 by daysofyore

Susan Orlean is an American writer whose book The Orchid Thief, which profiled the Florida orchid expert John Laroche, was adapted into a screenplay by Charlie Kaufman and became the cult Spike Jonze film Adaptation. Orlean’s movie-muse career didn’t end there. The film Blue Crush was in turn based on her article “Life’s Swell”, which was published in Women’s Outside and featured young female surfers in Maui.

Orlean’s work has also appeared in Vogue, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and Outside. She has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1992. Her magazine pieces have been compiled in two collections, The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup: My Encounters with Extraordinary People and My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who’s Been Everywhere. Orlean has also served as editor for Best American Essays 2005 and Best American Travel Writing 2007. Her most recent book is Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend , a biographical history of the dog with the same name, which she spoke about on the Colbert Report.

Orlean is also a master of the 140-character narrative. An avid Twitterer, this interview came about when she characteristically responded to a fan tweet from The Days of Yore.

What was growing up in Cleveland, Ohio like? Were books a big presence in your childhood home?

I grew up in a suburb that placed a very high value on education and on social responsibility – it was an unusual community and a wonderful place to grow up. I probably dreamed of living somewhere more exciting but I realize now it was an exceptional environment. Books were important to me – we went to the library several times a week, and my parents encouraged us to read as much as possible.

What did you want to be when you grew up?

I wanted to be a writer from almost the minute I could imagine “being” anything. I didn’t know what that meant, in practical terms, and I didn’t know anyone who was a writer, professionally, but I knew I wanted to tell stories and see them published.
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Cheryl Strayed

Posted on March 19, 2012 by daysofyore

Cheryl Strayed is a novelist, memoirist, and essayist who ignited a huge fan base (and a line of merchandise) when she told a reader to “write like a motherfucker” in her beloved, anonymous advice column, “Dear Sugar” on The Rumpus. Each week as Sugar, Strayed applies the balm of her personal experience to the most intimate problems of her readers: a “living dead dad” who lost his only son to a drunk driver, an ex-liar and thief given to shame, a teenager hot for body flab. In February 2012—after two years of public speculation as to the identity of Sugar—Strayed came out as the fierce-hearted and frank voice behind the pseudonym.

Under her own name, Strayed is the author of three books. Her critically acclaimed debut novel, Torch (Houghton Mifflin, 2005), is set against the backdrop of Strayed’s native Minnesota and illuminates the sorrow, love, and survival of a family grieving the 38-year-old wife and mother they lost to a flash battle with cancer. The upcoming Tiny Beautiful Things (Vintage, due out in July 2012) will deliver a collection of “Dear Sugar” essays. And in Wild, her highly anticipated new memoir, Strayed recounts the year that—at age 26, newly divorced, dipping into heroin, and reeling from her mother’s death—she set off on a 1,100-mile solo hike along the Pacific Crest Trail. Wild will be released by Knopf on Tuesday, March 20th. (That’s tomorrow.)

The winner of two Pushcart Prizes, she has also written stories and essays published in The Best New American Voices; The New York Times Magazine; The Washington Post Magazine; Vogue; Allure; Self; Brain, Child; The Missouri Review; and elsewhere. Two of her essays, “Heroin/e” and “The Love of My Life”, were selected for The Best American Essays. Strayed makes her home in Portland, Oregon with her husband, the filmmaker Brian Lindstrom, and their two children.

On a break from multiple appearances at this year’s AWP conference in Chicago, Strayed spoke with The Days of Yore over lunch at a busy diner. We found her to be animated, funny, and quietly authoritative. We were also delighted to discover that when she’s not writing essays or fiction, or reasoning out your private dilemmas as Sugar, she’s secretly inventing the gadgets you’ve always wanted, like a diary with a key that actually works.

What first compelled you to write things down?

My love of books from a young age. I remember my early reading experiences as epiphanies; I remember reading and feeling the need to close my eyes because it was amazing to me that you could make images and feelings with words. It was powerful, not in a way of controlling but of moving, and I wanted to do that.

My mother used to read books out loud to me. My family was not educated, but she read me Black Beauty and Bambi. Not the kids’ versions: the full novels. I was four and five and six. They’re amazing books, but I wouldn’t read them out loud to my six- and seven-year-old, because you know, they shoot the deer. There are brutal scenes where Black Beauty is beaten.

So those things influenced me: my mother reading to me, and how riveted I was. I started writing stories as soon as I could write. Remember those diaries with the little key? And the key would never really work? I got my daughter one for Christmas, and it’s the same damn thing. We’ve got all this technology, and we still can’t make a diary with a key that works.

We should market one together. We could make a lot of money.

Girls across the land would thank us! The way to become rich is not to write, but to do something like that. When I was a waitress in the early nineties, when there was a lot more smoking, I worked in this French bar in Portland and thought of a hat with a big bubble on top. A tube would connect the bubble to your arm. You’re holding a cigarette, it sucks the smoke up, and then you have this bubble-of-smoke hat. Granted, people wouldn’t want to wear it. Maybe it’s not as good an idea as the diary lock. It was inspired by those frat-boy beer hats, you know the ones?

Yes! Now, if you could make a beer hat that was also a smoke-absorbing hat—

We could call it Frat Party.
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Charles Baxter

Posted on March 5, 2012 by daysofyore

Charles Baxter is the author of five novels, five short story collections, three poetry collections, and two books about literature and writing. Among his awards are a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. His third novel, The Feast of Love, was a finalist for the National Book Award. His two books about literature and writing—Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction, and The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot—are coveted references on analysis and craft.

Baxter’s fiction places readers in the distinctly Midwestern yet wholly recognizable psychological landscape that his characters inhabit: in love, in doubt, in transition and contradiction, in wry self-awareness, and in the semi-buoyant mire of their private regrets and equally private hopes. As the novelist and critic Claire Messud put it in praising his 2011 book, Gryphon: New and Collected Stories, Baxter “presents us to ourselves simultaneously as we would wish to be and as we fear we may in fact be.”

He is an expert storyteller, a highly regarded teacher and speaker, and one of the most thoughtful people you could hope to have a conversation with on a winter afternoon. The Days of Yore met with Baxter in a coffeehouse in Minneapolis’s warehouse district, across the river a ways from where he teaches creative writing at the University of Minnesota. We sat near a window, through which Baxter occasionally inspected the street as he paused to reflect on a question or comment on a passing car.

Let’s start off with failure. Specifically, early failures and what comes out of them. You’ve said that in your twenties and early thirties, you completed three novels before ever publishing one.

Three or four, depending on what you count. One of them I revised so much, it really qualifies as a different book, but it still didn’t sell. My first book wasn’t accepted until I was thirty-seven years old.

Those early books didn’t sell as novels, but you later salvaged parts of them in stories?

I did. But that’s the second act, the part I didn’t know was coming.

What did you learn to do in that first act of attempts that put you in motion toward such a lovely and successful second act?

One of the things I did was stop writing novels, because each novel was taking a year or two out of my life. I discovered that if you make a big mistake writing a novel, chances are you’re going to go weeks or months or maybe even finish the novel without realizing the mistake that you’ve made. If you make a mistake writing a story, you’re not going to lose a year of your life and you may well be able to figure out what the mistake is right away.

I had to teach myself a lot of this because I hadn’t been in a creative writing program. What I had been in was a Ph.D. program, and that’s very different. There’s another part to your question, though, and that is: What keeps you going when everybody tells you that they hate your work?
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