Fall is officially here, which means beautiful colors, piles of leaves and time for your favorite girls to get naked and roll around in all of nature's glory. You've gotta love this time of year! (image) (image) (image) (image) (image) (image) (image) (image) (image) (image) (image) (image)... more

Fall is officially here, which means beautiful colors, piles of leaves and time for your favorite girls to get naked and roll around in all of nature's glory. You've gotta love this time of year!

























Fashion Notes

Take a hint from nature, Forever21 has some cute ways to incorporate the Fall leaves into your wardrobe.

If you are living in a warmer climate (like here at SGHQ) this Leaf Print Maxi Dress is perfect and on sale for $10.99! For everyone else, you can match this Vintage Paisley & Leaf Tunic with a tall pair of chocolate boots and a coat to make a stylish Fall outfit and its only $19.80. Not into dresses? Take a peek at this Leaf Trim Knit Top for $14.90 or this Marabou Print Tee for $8.80.

Norstroms has a Nick & Mo Bouclé Jacket in a bold teal or berry with leaf cut outs that is a steal for $88.00.

Bling

Accessorize your outfit with some leaf inspired jewelry.

Forever21 has some cute choices like these Lacquered Leaf Dangle Earrings. At $4.80 they're the perfect accent to your ensemble. Forever21 also has the layered look, which is very in this season. Check out the Fallen Leaves Necklace for $14.80 or the Leafy Pearl Chains for only $6.80!

Betsey Johnson has some great must have leaf jewelry pieces, like this Stretch Beaded Jungle Bracelet for $50.00 and this matching Large Lucite Leaf Ring on sale for $35.00.

You should also check out her Lucite Leaf & Chain Earrings for $45.00 and the
Layered Chain & Leaf Necklace on sale for $31.50

Over Sized Sweaters

Over sized sweatshirts are the perfect way to keep cozy this Fall. Match it with the perfect pair of leggings and you've got one cute outfit! Urban Outfitters is a one-stop-shop for all your baggy needs, try their Ecote Crop Cable Dolman Sweater for $48.00 or this BDG Cozy Pullover for $38.00. You can also match dresses or tunics with leggings or tights to get the same look, like the Silence & Noise French Terry Tunic on sale for $29.99.

Colors

Use the season as a color pallet. Warm, rich, cozy colors are always in for the Fall.

Guess has a great selection of coats. This bold Charlotte Belted Coat for $198.00 is a must and it comes in three different colors. Kenneth Cole's New York Satin Trench is a fun way to brighten up any outfit and it's 50% off, on sale for only $199!

Fun Extras

Scarfs! What more is there to say. Check out this Nubby Striped Scarf with Lurex from Urban Outfitters packed with Fall colors now on sale for $10!

Want to spend a little more? ShopBop.com is the perfect fix for all you designer needs. Try this Virginia Johnson Leaves Scarf for $198.00.

Check back for more Dirty Laundry and let SuicideGirls show you the best way to (un)dress.

Evan Williams describes himself as "an American entrepreneur, originally a farm boy from Nebraska, who's been very lucky in business and life." This statement might be true if he was merely responsible for one giant leap in the Web 2.0 world. However, as someone partly responsible for two... more

Evan Williams describes himself as "an American entrepreneur, originally a farm boy from Nebraska, who's been very lucky in business and life." This statement might be true if he was merely responsible for one giant leap in the Web 2.0 world. However, as someone partly responsible for two monumental jumps forward, one has to conclude that he's being over-modest by attributing his success to luck rather than his capacity for vision, tenacity and good judgment.

In 1999, Pyra Labs, a company Williams co-founded, launched Blogger, a web-based service that put easy to use blog publishing tools in the hands of the masses and helped fuel the proliferation of the web log phenomenon. The company was sold to Google for an undisclosed sum in 2003. Williams however had caught the start-up bug, and left Google the following year to co-found Odeo.com, an aggregator and search engine for podcasts. The Odeo concept never really took off, but a side project started at the company did. The original five-character SMS shortcode-friendly name for that venture was Twttr.

Odeo was reorganized and re-branded as Obvious Corp. in 2006, and Twitter, which had added a couple of vowels to its name, became the center of attention. After winning SXSW's Web Award in March 2007, Twitter was spun off as an entity unto itself. Since then, Twitter has grown exponentially, with usership increasing by 900% this past year. The site has leapt over giants like LiveJournal and Linkedin in terms of monthly visits, rising from #22 (in Jan '08) to #3 (in Jan '09) in Compete.com's list of the Top 25 Social Networks.

Unlike other, increasingly cumbersome, social networking sites, Twitter's success lies in its simplicity. It has stayed true to its original concept: delivering brief Facebook style status updates to social groups in real-time via SMS. The service, which can also be accessed via RSS and the web, combats our propensity for digital diarrhea (which was, ironically, enabled by the likes of Blogger), by asking one simple question and limiting posts in response to 140 cellphone-friendly characters.

We tracked down Evan Williams (Twitter's CEO as of October 2008) -- via Twitter of course -- to ask him about the rules he tweets by, the people he follows, and his vision for the service's future.


Nicole Powers: Twitter has progressed way beyond the "What are you doing?" concept and has become a hub for group dialog and a place to let random thoughts fly. Have you thought about replacing that question?


Evan Williams: Yes, we have thought about that. It's a question about the question, because it worked really well to make Twitter approachable, and clear, how to use it. This was something I saw when I worked on Blogger for a bunch of years, we didn't have any direction at all for people, and it was this intimidating thing...kind of like a blank sheet of paper, so we tried to make Twitter very focused. Just say what you're doing, it doesn't have to be profound, or interesting, or anything. But, obviously, it's also limiting. Most users get beyond that and realize just from observing how people use it that they don't have to take that terribly literally. But in some ways I think it trivializes what's going on, and it does limit people's perceptions -- especially new users I think. We're still struggling with that. I wouldn't be surprised if we change it at some point, but we haven't made any decisions.

NP: Have you any thoughts on what you'd change it to?

EW: My favorite option is "What's happening?" That sounds a little too like we're trying to be hip, but I think the most accurate thing to say would be "What's happening?" Because what Twitter really is is what people are doing and what's happening around them, and some of the most interesting news cases are when people are reporting on things that are around them, or events. "What's happening?" can also apply to yourself, what you're thinking about or what's happening in the world that you're commenting on.

NP: How about a simple "Wassup?" That covers what's happening and what you're thinking.

EW: Yeah. Maybe.

NP: Because it's so new, we're still figuring out social etiquette on Twitter. What rules do you personally tweet by?

EW: I personally don't like to have a lot of rules. I'm sure I do have my own rules but I always hesitate to imply that there's any rules, because I think the beauty of Twitter is that people use it however it works for them. I think it changes depending on how many followers and what people are expecting from you. For the majority of users Twitter's very much about people that they know or people who are close to them, the friends and family type use. It's very casual. You can tweet about things that would be mundane except for the fact that you care about this person, and maybe you're interested in what they're doing at the moment. Right now I have over a hundred thousand followers so I try not to let that freak me out, because, if I did, I think I'd become much less interesting, trying to be interesting too much. So I don't know if I have any rules beyond that, but I try to just still be personable and personal and not trivial but not think about it too much.

NP: In a way "micro-blogging" is a very confusing moniker for Twitter because those that blog and tweet like yourself, know the two forms of communication have a very different feel and purpose. A blog is a more formal, well thought out thing, and Twitter takes the pressure off blogging because it really is just a thought thrown out into the world. What mental criteria do you use when you express in the different forms?

EW: They definitely overlap. One comment on the term "micro-blogging", it's not one that we've ever used to describe Twitter. We see micro-blogging as one of the many use cases for Twitter. There are people who use it very much like a blog, although blogs are used in every possible way so it's hard to even define what that means. Twittering has definitely impacted how much I blog. I hardly ever blog now, and I've blogged for years. I think, in a lot of ways they serve the same basic purpose, which is having a thought and wanting to share it with the world. The main difference for me is whether or not I want to take the time to flesh out something a little bit more on a blog, and that just comes down to the length I think.

NP: I like your less is more approach. I sort of feel that when photos went from print to jpeg, and when text went from paper to websites and blogs, in a way we became overwhelmed with a compulsion for what I call digital diarrhea. All of a sudden there were no limits imposed by cost, and we're actually learning now that we need to impose limits on ourselves, and that's a lesson that Twitter's teaching the masses with the strict 140 character count.

EW: It's something that goes very well with the fact that there's more and more voices out there, and more and more people who are publishing and saying things that are interesting to pay attention to. At least having some constraints on the verboseness of everyone's thoughts is helpful in order to tap in and listen to more voices.

NP: It's like a conversation that no one's allowed to hog.

EW: Yes. Exactly.

NP: Twitter has created a new hierarchy of celebrity. [At the time of writing] Stephen Fry, who's a relatively unknown here in the U.S., is the leading non-presidential Twitterer* (according to Twitterholic Barack Obama has the largest Twitter following). Fry is way ahead of Britney Spears for example. Are you enjoying how Twitter members have reshuffled the world order, and created one of their own?

EW: [laughs] Yes, definitely. I think it's very early, and very exciting for us to see the celebrities outside the geek world adopting it. It's really exciting with someone like Stephen; Stephen is really understanding it and using it as a medium of its own rather than just a promotional vehicle for other things.

A lot of celebrities are looking at social media, and are considering that they have to have a social media strategy, and Twitter and Facebook and all these things need to be incorporated. It'll be really interesting to see how that fleshes out over the next few months. I remember in the early days of blogging, when I was a popular blogger for the first year or two -- it was a very good sign when I became not a popular blogger and people who were much more skilled in that medium became the attraction rather than the geeks.

NP: Are there any celebs that you might not have followed in the real world that you now follow because of the way they tweet?

EW: Yeah. I don't follow many in the real world, but the ones I've been enjoying on Twitter, well Shaquille O'Neal is an interesting example. I'm not a basketball fan, in the same vein with Lance Armstrong, it's not a world I would pay much attention to, but I follow their twitters and it's interesting to see their lives and what they're talking about. Rainn Wilson is another one. Rainn plays Dwight in The Office, the U.S. version, and he's hilarious. His Twitter persona is somewhat like his character on the show. He just started but he seems to be taking to it.

NP: The way certain celebs use Twitter actually takes the power away from the paparazzi and the vacuous celebrity mags and blogs. Celebs are actually letting followers know what they're really thinking and doing, which is a genius way to combat the rumor-mill.

EW: Yes. And some have become very aware of that. Certainly Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore have been talking about that aspect. It was hilarious, a couple of weeks ago Demi actually posted a picture of a paparazzi on TwitPic, completely turning the tables, and she made some jokes laughing at him.

NP: It seems like a very special time on Twitter right now, very reminiscent of the early days of MySpace, before it became commercialized. One of the beauties of Twitter right now is that you're focusing on building it and getting it right before you monetize it. As a user and a fan of your own service, do you worry what will happen once the twits invade Twitter?

EW: [laughs] I don't worry about the things that we're going to do because I think there's a lot of opportunities for monetization that actually enhance the user experience, and enhance what people are already doing. I think the dynamics are different than say a MySpace, where they sort of had to put a lot of ads on there on the pages that maybe work against the flow of what people are trying to do. With Twitter, I think there's a lot of opportunity to help people and make money at the same time.

Once of the things we've been talking about for a long time is search, and how we want to build that more and more into the product -- search is an area of course on the web that's always been highly monetizable. We don't expect Twitter search to have the same type of ads or work as well as web search, but I think when people are seeking particular information there is an opportunity to answer their queries, and there are people who want to be among the answers to their query. So monetizing search I think will make a lot of sense in the same way that Google have ads in their search that don't interfere, and in many cases help the user experience.

What I do worry about more, and we're seeing it somewhat today, is as Twitter gets bigger and bigger there are people who are trying to game the system, and basically spam it for their own gain. It gets harder and harder to deal with. Most popular properties, Google and Facebook and MySpace and everybody else, have to deal with spammers, and we are now too, and we'll have to invest more and more into that. I think that's the bigger threat...obviously I'm biased, but I don't think our own monetization efforts will be something that users reject.

NP: Your service is free, as is much of the internet. Are we getting to a point where people need to start valuing the stuff on the net? Now that we have micro-blogging should we have micro-payments for the content and services that we use?

EW: People have talked about that for years and it hasn't seemed to work for one reason or another. I think the economic climate that we're in, and getting deeper into, is definitely going to bring up these questions again. How should these things be paid for? Obviously they cost money. Advertising has been the default answer, it hasn't been the only answer, but over the short history of the web it's been the one winning answer time and time again for most mainstream services. Whether that will still be the answer -- I don't know. I tend to think that a combination of subscription and advertising probably makes sense for most services, and we see a likelihood that the same will be true for Twitter.

I think there's pretty good reasons why micro-payments for content haven't worked out that well, and, in part, it is there's just so much competition for attention -- it's still the scarcest commodity -- and there's always people who are willing to do something for free, and so you have to be really special and rare to be able to charge money, at least for content.

NP: You've recently announced a $35 million injection of venture capital. You still have a relatively small 29-person headcount, so what are you planning to spend it on?

EW: Well, we also have a good amount of money left in the bank from our last financing. But the reason the we did that, took that investment, is basically because we feel like we're just getting started, and our growth is phenomenal, and as that continues over the next few months and couple of years, our cost is definitely going to go up substantially.

We need to grow the team in a lot of ways right now. I mean it's great that we're so small but it's also painful in some scenarios, so we have pretty ambitious hiring goals across all aspects of the company. We're going to keep the majority of the people technical, and product and engineering will continue to be the bulk of the company, but we're really thinking long term.

We don't know all the ways we're going to use that money, hopefully we'll keep a lot of it in the bank. If we never need a lot of it, that's great, but in the climate we're in we don't want to assume too much, and we don't want any short term concerns to distort the potential of our long term vision, and our investors and the boards and everybody is very on board for building a very long term viable company. We need to do that step by step, and we need to invest a lot to get there.

NP: What additions and refinements would you like to see on the site?

EW: There's a ton of stuff we want to add and improve but the interesting thing is for most of Twitter's history the vast majority of our resources have gone into just keeping up with the growth. There were some fairly publicly painful scaling issues early on. Really, up until about six months ago, we had really bad reliability problems. The product has really changed very little since we launched it, and it a lot of ways that's very good.

I think simplicity is definitely key, but we think there's a ton of ways it can be enhanced. One is to make it just a lot easier, especially easier to get started. As we're seeing more and more mainstream users coming on the service, we have a lot of awareness right now but we want to get a lot better about turning that awareness into engagement. It's still way to hard when you first find out about Twitter to really make it useful and interesting -- that comes down to finding people to follow, connecting with your friends, understanding even what it does and what the concept is. There's a lot to do just on the user experience.

NP: It's interesting how you do adapt Twitter, and make it work for you. For me, the initial idea of having all these updates by cell phone horrified me, because I'm one of these people that's over-connected rather than under-connected. So the way I use it -- I don't even connect it to my phone -- but I use it as almost a ticker-tape of the collective consciousness on my computer.

EW: Do you have a client on your computer of just the website?

NP: I guess I should use a client so it automatically updates. I mean, talk about collective consciousness, today the one thing that dropped onto our Twitter radar has been TwitterFox, the Naan Studio application which does updates via Firefox.

EW: Yes, and we hear that a lot, people find how Twitter works for them, and a lot of times they love the SMS or they hate the SMS and a desktop client or an iPhone client really works for them. That's one of the beauties of it. We've been really fortunate with our third-party developers, who have built a lot of these alternative ways to experience Twitter, and they've added a lot of value. What we haven't done enough of, and this goes back to were we need to improve, is helping people discover those different ways, and really walking them through what the different options are, and just ramping them up from an uninitiated state to get them engaged.

NP: As you expand, and get more mainstream users, and perhaps less responsible users, will you have to police the site more? I know that you say you hate rules, but for example, Google have recently started more aggressively policing Blooger's content. Can you see a point where you're going to have to have a department to police in the same way other social networking sites do?

EW: I probably wouldn't use the term "policing." We already do have people dedicated to suspending accounts if they spam or are otherwise violating our terms of service. That will definitely have to continue and be a bigger part of our efforts. Part of that will be technical and algorithmic ways to discover fishy behavior and part of it will always have to be manual review.

In cases where it's clear cut and people are definitely being nefarious, then it's actually a little bit easier to deal with than when people are gaming the system in some way but are fairly legit users in other ways. For example there's what we call aggressive following. It's something a lot of people do in order to get attention. As you know when you follow someone, most people will get an email and then they'll check out your profile and those people will follow you back, out of obligation or some other reason.

NP: Right. There is this social etiquette that makes you think if they're following me I should follow them to be polite.

EW: Exactly, and we really hate people feeling obligated to follow someone, especially when that person's just following someone in order to get attention. So part of that is user behavior and the social norms that need to develop around Twitter, so people understand that they don't need to do that. And then also discourage or de-incentivize someone from doing the aggressive behavior, because I think that lessens the value of the network for everyone.

NP: You don't want it to be reduced a popularity contest, with people collecting friends but not adding to the conversation.

EW: Exactly.



*Since writing this article, Britney Spears has overtaken Stephen Fry, marking the end of an era of geek rule at Twitter.

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"If I'm such a commodity, how come nobody went to see The Good German," Steven Soderbergh asks at one point during our conversation. He’s being half-facetious and half-serious when posing the question. At 46, Soderbergh has already earned every professional accolade a film director can,... more

"If I'm such a commodity, how come nobody went to see The Good German," Steven Soderbergh asks at one point during our conversation. He’s being half-facetious and half-serious when posing the question. At 46, Soderbergh has already earned every professional accolade a film director can, including the Palme D'Or for his debut, Sex, Lies and Videotape, and the Oscar for his drug war opus Traffic. His frequent collaborators now include George Clooney, Julia Roberts, and Brad Pitt (who is starring in his forthcoming adaptation of the controversial state-of-baseball tome Moneyball). Yet Soderbergh remains a stubbornly anonymous filmmaker, difficult to nail down in terms of style or subject, removed from the public eye, and without a cult following that can be roused to seek out his smaller, more experimental films.

The one adjective that sticks is prolific -- Soderbergh has directed twenty films in as many years, produced several others and racked up a library of television credits, an output that's rivaled only by his latest collaborator, porn ingénue Sasha Grey. At 21, Grey has nearly 200 blue movie titles under her belt, as well as various music and art projects and a swelling public profile that's quickly becoming indistinguishable from stardom. She was a name even before she and Soderbergh teamed up last fall to make The Girlfriend Experience, a slice-of-life indie drama that documents the travails of an emotionally distant, high-dollar Manhattan hooker named Chelsea, who offers a sophisticated brand of personal service that transcends mere copulation.

When Soderbergh called up SuicideGirls last week, we talked sex, money, movies and baseball.

Ryan Stewart: While I was waiting on your call, I was reading an interview with Sasha. Here's an interesting quote: "One thing Steven and I definitely have in common is we're not really into critics." Is she on point?

Steven Soderbergh: She's on point. But the reasons for that might not be identical. What came up during the course of making the movie was that I said after Traffic I'd stopped reading reviews. I'd never read a lot of them, but after Traffic I just stopped completely. That's probably where that came from. You'd have to ask her why she takes that position, but my position at the time, that year, after winning the LA and New York film critics awards, I really felt like, this can only get worse. [laughs] Nothing about reading reviews from here on out is going to enhance my life at all. Whereas, for Sasha, there may be a different issue at play.

RS: James Gray, the director of Two Lovers, told me he resents reviews because often the reason a scene doesn't work is because an actor didn't show up on time, or something like that.

SS: Yeah, I know James, I'm sure that's true. I want to work on instinct. I don't want to be self-conscious and for me it's just a potential distraction or more of a background noise that I want to eliminate so that I can work quickly and clearly. Also, I'm not a result person, I'm a process person. What I really like is making them and I'm content to judge them by my own criteria later. But at the time I just want to make them. I want to make them for the amount of money and time that I've been given to make them and then I just want to move on to the next thing without agonizing.

So, when I stop making them, then maybe someday I'll sit down and look at them and determine for myself what my success rate was. Right now, it's just not relevant. Except if you're making a certain type of movie -- an art-house movie -- and you know from a business standpoint that if you get terrible reviews it's going to be very difficult to get the audience to show up. But in terms of what they say, it doesn't change the movie. Pixels don't get re-arranged because a critic said something. Also, when one film comes out I've usually already made something else or I'm in the middle of something else, and my head has moved on.

RS: Do you shed a tear over the mass firings of film critics that are occurring, or is that out of your field of vision?

SS: It kind of is, yeah. I don't like to see anybody get laid off, but it's not surprising, even from a cultural standpoint. Technology has made everyone a critic. The idea that you can distinguish yourself by how you write and what you write is diminishing rapidly. There just isn't a forum for it the way there was when Pauline Kael was writing for The New Yorker and she could write whatever the hell she wanted. And frankly, the other part of it, which has nothing to do with critics, is that that movies don't matter anymore.

RS: You really believe that?

SS: Well, culturally. Let me be more specific. They are more influential than they've ever been and less important than they've ever been. They're influential in terms of how people act and how they dress, and also what they laugh at. But in terms of importance? In terms of what they can do for us, how they can enhance us? I think they've never been less important than they are right now. There was a period of time when that wasn't true, but that time has passed. I think it's still the dominant art form, but I don't think it's an important art form anymore.

RS: What's the emerging important art form?

SS: I don't know that there is one yet. Gossip?

RS: Interesting. The movie certainly touches on the relentless ability of capitalism to spit out the old and usher in the new. Do you admire that efficiency? Do you fear it?

SS: Both. I don't judge it, it just is what it is. It isn't going anywhere. It's wound into our DNA. I'm fascinated by it, and at the same time it terrifies me. What I liked about it for the movie was coming at it from an angle I wasn't privy to. This woman has this specific job in the upper echelon of a specific business, and I thought, wow, that's an interesting way to talk about value attribution.

RS: Do you believe there's a point at which the commoditization of one's self becomes distasteful?

SS: No. It's a myopic point of view to assume that only entails a transaction that involves money. Everybody is trying to get what they want all the time. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that. My whole criteria is 'is everybody getting what they want?' That's how I judge fairness or morality -- parity. Not by the act itself, but by 'is everybody getting what they want?' But I've also had the experience of injecting myself into a situation where I thought that one of the people could not possibly be getting what they wanted and that there was a grave imbalance there. I was told, in no uncertain terms, to mind my own business.

RS: Was this a business situation?

SS: It was a personal relationship, some people I knew. I just felt like "I can't watch this go on anymore," and I said something and they both sort of turned on me simultaneously and told me to shut up. So I learned a lesson and the lesson was that I can only ask "why" when it comes to something that I do. I stopped asking "why" when it comes to the other person. I really did, after that. I went, "You know what? They're right."

RS: More specifically, then, do you find the notion of fake intimacy, a la a "girlfriend experience" to be intellectually offensive?

SS: I don't know if I believe in fake intimacy, or that there is such a thing. Chelsea is getting the "something else" from her boyfriend, you know? That illusion of stability or whatever it is. From the outside, I don't know that I can make the call about whether someone is being really intimate or falsely intimate. I can make that call about myself, but I have to ask you this: If I feel like I am being falsely intimate, but the other person doesn't, what does that mean? If they are getting out of it what you'd get out of a genuinely intimate situation, but I'm not, does it matter?

RS: Tough one.

SS: I know! And I'm not saying I have the answer, but it makes me wonder, because in this situation, if you ask those guys, by their definition, it's genuinely intimate. And since this situation is all about their definition, what does it matter if she's being falsely intimate? That's part of what I thought was interesting about the idea for the film, that it raised all these sorts of questions about fake and real.

RS: Maybe "prostitute" is an outmoded word. It seems to have lost much of its meaning.

SS: I think it's a word that only has a legal meaning now. The cultural meaning of it is so blurry and could be used in so many contexts that, as you said, it's almost meaningless. If the definition of being a whore is that you're doing something that you wouldn't ordinarily do in order to make money, that's 95 percent of the people I know. Most of the people I know do not like their work, or they wish they were working somewhere else. Somebody pays me for my time, that's my job. That's what I do. Two people reaching an agreement that doesn't involve theft or assault is really none of my business. And I don't view the [sex] act as sacred. It's just not an exalted activity to me. That's really the crux of it. There is no evidence I can see that there's anything special about it.

RS: The culture certainly retains a hyper-sensitivity to the monetization of bodies, though. Actresses, in particular, will often feel that a nudity requirement corrupts their artistry. Julia Roberts is a good example -- she once said that any nude scene she did would be in a documentary.

SS: Well, you're talking movies now, I'm talking about prostitutes. But I think she's right. You're talking about someone who has a certain persona and who is a brand, in a way, and she has a certain idea of what that brand is and it doesn't involve shedding her clothes on screen. And that's cool. There are other actresses who feel like its part of their brand to do so.

RS: Did you have these kinds of quasi-philosophical discussions with Sasha, or were most of your talks more practical?

SS: Yeah, the stuff we talked about was more practical. I talked to her about method more than anything else. I knew that if I could just get her to be her, then we would be fine. I talked to her about how we do this, how big the crew is, what the pace is, stuff like that. We didn't really have a need to talk about it conceptually, and I knew from seeing her other work that she was fearless and that there wasn't anything I could think of that she would have a problem with. As it turns out there was nothing extreme, but it was good to know that if I needed her to do that, she would.

RS: When you watched some of the more extreme videos in her filmography, what was your reaction?

SS: It made me feel pretty square! I don't need very much, so I guess my reaction was, "Why is there all this extra activity?" I'm still stuck in first gear as far as that stuff goes, and she's pushing the envelope really far. And that's cool, there are people out there who, that's what turns them on, but I'm still in that place where I'm just marveling that it exists at all. I don't need a lot.

RS: You've somehow been tagged over the years as a director who is very reserved and demure when it comes to on-screen nudity.

SS: I guess that's just not the interesting part of it for me. When you get down to the technical aspects of it, that's just not the interesting part, in terms of movies. I'm interested in the lead-up and the aftermath, because that's the part that separates one person from another. When you get to the actual act itself, although Sasha would disagree, I don't find that there's an incredible amount of variance. And I'm not making porn. If I was trying to make a movie to turn you on sexually, then I would do all that stuff, but that's not what I'm making. I'm making a movie that's supposed to make you think or laugh or compare your life to the characters on screen. I'm not making something that's designed to make you take your pants off. And if I want that in a movie, I'll go and find one of those movies. That's what it's about for me.

RS: Stanley Kubrick thought he had figured out how to make dramatically compelling porn. One of his many unfulfilled ideas.

SS: Yeah, and Terry Southern's book Blue Movie is a great riff on that idea. Kubrick was certainly no scaredy-cat when it came to nudity on-screen. Also, Michael Winterbottom has taken that idea and done it. He's taken a sort of mainstream or legitimate indie movie and put explicit sexual activity in it, but even though all those obstacles have been cleared, I don't think the landscape has been altered and I certainly don't feel the need to imitate it, you know? I feel like Michael did that, so, okay great, I don't have to do it.

RS: Money is one of your pet subjects -- even Erin Brockovich was explicitly about money.

SS: Yeah, I'm fascinated by it. Not because I want to acquire it, but I'm fascinated by the force it exerts. Also, I'm interested in class issues and as soon as you start talking about class, you're talking about money. I think as a subject it's very compelling and complicated.

RS: You seem attracted to the idea of class-busting, in particular. Chelsea the prostitute sitting in a fancy restaurant is almost like Tony Montana saying, "Here I am, rich people - get over it."

SS: I like that idea. I like the idea of someone who is willing to behave in a way that proper society views as transgressive and then parlays that into access. I think that's a really interesting idea, and why shouldn't they? If that's their only way in and that's important to them -- and I'm not saying it should be -- but if that's important to them and that's their way in, then great. But you're right, there is a sort of renegade ethos in play. I don't know if I could ever do a gangster movie, but there are a couple of things I'm working on where that's absolutely at play. I mean, look, I'm getting ready to do Moneyball, and it's front and center in that movie.

RS: Did you see Chelsea as a practitioner of sabermetrics? She's always taking notes about what the client liked and didn't.

SS: Sure, absolutely. There's no wasted material, everything is relevant. You should be looking at everything and analyzing it, in order to exploit inefficiencies. That's what sabermetrics is all about, and yeah, that's how her mind works, for sure. Chelsea is exploiting the inefficiencies in her competitors or in the business in general. Like you said, she writes the stuff down because she feels like there is currency in knowing that some guy doesn't want to see her wear the same thing twice and is also smart enough to notice, therefore she has to be smart enough to wear something different every time. Or know that if he mentioned a book in passing that she should have read it by the next date -- she's looking for ways to create an edge for herself.

RS: Moneyball will be tough to dramatize, I'd imagine. A book about statistics and management techniques.

SS: Yeah, but I think we have a way in, making it visual and making it funny. I want it to be really funny and entertaining, and I want you to not realize how much information is being thrown at you because you're having fun. We've found a couple of ideas on how to bust the form a bit, in order for all that information to reach you in a way that's a little oblique.

RS: Do you have a huge problem with steroids in baseball? Some would say it's just another edge.

SS: Well, I'm frustrated by what I see as the inconsistency of the position. Darryl Strawberry's book just came out. He talks about how all through his career guys were popping greenies. Greenies were in Ball Four, also. So, that was there and may still be there -- it's been around forever. It was just accepted, basically. What are you supposed to say? If you're just a member of the population, like you or me, and you injure your leg or your shoulder, you will often be given a steroid to accelerate the healing process. Well, these are people who make their living through their bodies. Are you going to say to me, "This guy who makes a living off his body needs a steroid to heal because of an injury and we're not going to let him take it," but if you were injured you'd be allowed to take it? We're not going to let him get back to doing his job because we banned it?

That's where, to me, it starts to get a little weird. And that's supposedly a separate thing from "Oh, I'm on a program throughout the season to make me gain thirty pounds of muscle?" They can't even heal themselves when there's a legitimate use for it, so I don't know. On the one hand, yeah, I wish the game were clean, on the other hand, I don't know how you make it clean.

RS: What's the downside to leveling the playing field by making everything legal?

SS: The downside is the destruction it wreaks on their bodies. What happens is the muscles grow, but ligaments don't. That's why these people turn into glass. Their tendons and ligaments cannot withstand the pressure. They weren't designed to withstand the pressure that results from building up your muscle mass at that rate. That's the reason you see these guys running to first base and their hamstring snaps. In the long run, it's probably not great. In terms of a level playing field, if it can't all be clean, then I don't know, I guess it should all be not clean! It's really tricky, but the good news about baseball is that it tends to resist most attempts to alter it in any significant way. It adapts itself. It's not simply a power game.

RS: We talked about branding earlier. You're not a brand and don't seem to want to be. What's the upside?

SS: Experience and anonymity. The fact that I'm not an identifiable brand is very freeing, because people get tired of brands and they switch brands. I've never had a desire to be out in front of anything, which is why I don't take a possessory credit. That's why, if I can help it, I don't like having my picture taken or doing television. I don't want to be out in front of this stuff at all.

If I could convince people to go to the movies without doing interviews, I would do that, but I can't convince anybody of that. So, it's all upside to me. On a movie like this, [the distributor's] rationale is, "We're selling this movie on your back." And my answer is, "Well, if I'm such a commodity, how come nobody went to see The Good German?" I mean, I did more interviews for that movie than any I've ever done and nobody went, so clearly it doesn't mater. I can't convince anybody of this, and as you know, there's a whole cottage industry just in the junketing now, so do I have to now tell everybody that that ecosystem is going to die because I don't want to talk anymore? I don't know the answer.

RS: So, what if there are no more professional film writers and critics around to ask you questions in five years?

SS: People will have to just figure out based on the ad in the newspaper whether they want to see the film. I know I can come up with better ads than most people.

RS: The poster for The Girlfriend Experience is definitely great. I love the ambiguity of the four-letter word.

SS: Isn't that beautiful? That was a positive byproduct of the MPAA saying that we weren't allowed to have F***. So we said, okay, then we'll just make it four stars, and then I immediately thought, oh, there are lots of four-letter words and that's actually better, you know? See this movie with someone you blank.

The Girlfriend Experience opens May 22nd in select cities, and is available now on demand.

Barry Yourgrau caught up to ramble with Kevin Canty, whose novel "Into the Great Wide Open" is the wrenching, cult-favorite story of troubled teen lovers, Kenny and June. The book packs a remarkable intimate authenticity, a graphic in-the-moment aliveness, its metaphors blooming right out of... more

Barry Yourgrau caught up to ramble with Kevin Canty, whose novel "Into the Great Wide Open" is the wrenching, cult-favorite story of troubled teen lovers, Kenny and June. The book packs a remarkable intimate authenticity, a graphic in-the-moment aliveness, its metaphors blooming right out of narrator Kenny's fleeting teenage states of mind. Written in the mid-90's, this was Canty's first novel, the second of his four books. He lives in Missoula, Montana and teaches writing at the university there. For starters, the talk was about weather, and how "Into the Great Wide Open" got started.


THIS BOOK CAME ABOUT IN AN ODD WAY


BARRY YOURGAU: How's the spring out there, out in western Montana? You been living there long?

KEVIN CANTY: Yesterday it rained, then snowed, then hailed, then snowed some more -- all in the space of ten minutes. Spring here is a joke. Apart from that, though, it's nice enough; a long cold winter with plenty of time and gloom to write, and the weather in the summer here is perfect every day. I went to college here a long time ago, moved away, I've been back here teaching for seven years now and liking it fine.

BY: So "Into the Great Wide Open"... How'd idea for it come to you, how'd it develop?

KC: This book came about in an odd way. I had been working on another novel -- actually I was under contract for it -- and I kept getting stuck and getting stuck and getting stuck. I was starting to feel pretty desperate. And I had the last fifty pages or so of the novel, the island stuff, sitting around on my desk as a short story that I couldn't get to work. And then one night I woke up at four in the morning and I thought, I know what's wrong with that story: it needs two hundred pages of something else before it starts. And then I thought: I can just drop Kenny the lifeguard in there and he'll make it way more interesting.

I got out of bed and started writing and literally wrote the first draft in six weeks, writing every day. It was crazy. I was in such a hurry that I didn't really want to stop for trivialities and furniture and so I just stole stuff from my own adolescence and the people I knew in DC. Anybody who knew me then got something stolen from them: somebody's house, somebody's mother, somebody's car. The central characters and their fates I made up but everything else is real, more or less. So it's the most autobiographical book and the least autobiographical at the same time.


NOT FOR A MILLION DOLLARS


BY: Regret is such a big part of love, no? Cocteau has this line (he took from someone?): The true paradise is the paradise lost. Do you think everyone's 'first love' feels that way?

KC: I don't know. I think people tend to feel that first love really strongly, because, you know, they're kids, they feel everything strongly. They don't have the scar tissue. Also they don't have any sense of self-protection -- risk feels good, any kind of risk. So you have this big powerful emotion and this sense of recklessness working together and you're going to get a wreck once in a while. Everybody screws up.

BY: Do you feel a special link to teens?

KC: Not really. I mean, I sympathize. But I wouldn't want to be seventeen again, not for a million dollars.

BY: Was it emotionally hard writing the book (and it was your first novel)?

KC: It was. You couldn't sell out the experience, couldn't sell out the emotion. I felt that any tiny hint of an adult voice or an adult judgment in the book would kill it. I didn't want it to be something cute or distant or removed; I wanted that sense that Rilke talks about in Malte Laurids Brigge where he revisits the past and finds all the old unsolved difficulties still waiting for him there. I wanted the matters of this book to feel as huge and impossible as they did to my seventeen-year-old self. In a practical sense this meant a lot of listening to loud rock music in the car, driving too fast and beating on the steering wheel.


UNEXPECTED BURSTS OF FEELING


BY: You cite various writers in "Into The Great Wide Open" - Frank O'Hara especially. You also mention Isaac Babel, his book Red Calvalry. He's a favorite of mine, is he someone dear to your heart?

KC: O'Hara and Babel were really important for me at the time, and they still are. I go through writers all the time. These days it's Dickens, who I discovered I never read in high school (either that or I was too stoned to remember). Basically I like all the people I'm supposed to like: Raymond Carver and Flannery O'Connor and Joyce and Chekhov. Lorrie Moore can write a short story and so can Wendy Brenner and George Saunders.

I also have a liking for the Kafka strain, Bruno Schulz and Robert Walser and Nabokov and W.G. Sebald; I like the formal restlesness, the unexpected bursts of feeling.

BY: If you were asked these days to recommend one book, which one?

KC: It would depend on the day, the hour, the mood. The best book I read in the last year was "A Tale of Two Cities." I'm rereading "The Moviegoer" by Walker Percy now and that would be a hard one to beat.


JAPANESE TOURISTS; SOUNDS KIND OF HORRIBLE AND RIGID


BY: How important is poetry to your work as fiction writer?

KC: The restaurant at Chico Hot Springs here has a breakfast buffet, all kinds of stuff, and the other year I watched a busload of Japanese tourists who were there for the waters come through and try to make sense out of and they couldn't: ketchup on the pancakes, yogurt on the scrambled eggs etc. That's more or less they way I am with contemporary poetry -- I don't know who's who or what goes where or what the movements are but once in a while I find a poet that I love. Lately it's Malena Morling and Lynn Emanuel. Emanuel's book "Then, Suddenly--" has been a big mysterious influence on my writing over the last couple of years.

I'm always trying to make my stuff sound like what it means. I move my lips when I write; I think I write more for the ear than for the eye, and that's where there's plenty to learn from poetry.

BY: So where do you work, at home, at office? Longhand? On computer? Any routines you care to share?

KC: I have a lovely office in a converted garage behind my house. I get up every weekday morning, read the paper, have a cup of coffee and report to work by eight o'clock. I work on a computer and I try to write a thousand words a day. The only reason I have a writing life at all is because I have these habits and I keep to them. If I sat around waiting for inspiration to strike, I would still be waiting.

I know this sounds kind of horrible and rigid but in fact I really like this time.


TOM PETTY


BY: What music you listening to these days? And while you were writing "Into The Great Wide Open?"

KC: The top of the pile in the living room: Charlie Patton, Radiohead, Jerry Douglas, Bjork, Billie Holliday, Steve Earle, Yank Rachelle's Tennessee Jug Busters and Sacred Steel Live. I play guitar myself and I gravitate toward blues, gospel, anything that doesn't feel manufactured.
I was listening to a lot of Tom Petty and Rolling Stones and Replacements when I was writing the book, for obvious reasons.

BY: 'Desert Island' question: which two books, two CD's, two movies, would you take with you to a desert island?

KC: Let's see: Gravity's Rainbow, which I reread every couple of years anyway, and some great big collection of Chekhov's stories. Exile on Main Street. The Robert Johnson box. Chinatown, and The Lady Eve.


THAT WAS A REAL EYE-OPENER


BY: Are you a big movie fan?

KC: I used to be, before I had kids -- now I just catch everything on DVD.

BY: Ever write for them? Is there movie interest in your work?

KC: I write a novelization from the film script a few years ago, for the movie "Rounders." That was a real eye-opener, a real education in the differences between the two genres. I think now that if I had what I thought was a good idea for a movie, I would write it as a short novel -- a form I know -- and let somebody with a real feel for screenwriting convert it. It's a completely different approach.

A German writer and director is working on an adaptation of "Into the Great Wide Open" now; he describes his vision of the movie as "a Last Tango in Paris for teenagers." We'll see. There's been a lot of discussion and flirtation around this book but nothing ever happens.


THEY KEEP ME ALIVE; POTATOES


BY: Your most recent book was "Honeymoon," a book of stories. What are you working on now?

KC: I have two novels underway, neither of which I can stand at the moment.

BY: And you teach. How do the kids now compare to say a few years ago? And is it hard balancing teaching and your own writing?

KC: I like the teaching, like the students, they keep me alive and thinking. Right now I'm working with the best crop of students I've ever seen. I do hate the way it sucks up my time, and if i never go to another faculty meeting again it will be fine with me, but overall it would be graceless of me to complain. It's interesting, pleasant work, and there's not too much of it.

BY: There's quite a literary scene out in Montana, Tom McGuane (one of the granddaddies) et cetera.

KC: There continues to be a writing scene here -- Montana's famous for writers the way Idaho is known for potatoes. There's kind of a tribe here in Missoula; we see each other at parties, we go to each other's readings etc. I don't think of myself as a "Montana writer," though I did set one of my novels here. There's something deadening about the regional writer.


THE HABIT


BY: So if you had one piece of advice for young writers, what is it? What was the decisive moment, as it were, for making you as a writer?

KC: This may seem obvious but it took me a long time to get it: the people who succeed as writers are the ones who work at it, who can find the time and place in their lives to do the daily work of getting better. I mean, nobody would think that you could learn to play piano just by wanting to play piano really strongly, or by listening to a lot of piano records -- you would learn to play the piano by studying under an experienced teacher and then by practicing a lot. But somehow people expect to sit down and crank out a finished novel in the first sitting with no serious experience. Once in a while, it's true, somebody will get lucky. But mostly it's just romanticism.

So my one piece of advice would just be to work, to make a habit of working. The rest of it will take care of itself. And i think it's a mistake to think in terms of decisive moments. Everybody wants the Writing Fairy to come down and put the crown on your head and announce to the world that you are A Writer but it doesn't happen. You work every day, your work gets better, at some point it gets to a place where a stranger can read your work for pleasure -- the only finish line there is.


AN OBSCENITY


BY: Okay, now let's dive into the heavy public stuff: what's your thinking about this war? Are you troubled about what's happening to this country? Do you think country handling 9/11 afermath properly?

KC: In brief: I think this country is being run into the ground by short-sighted profiteering jackals. This war is an obscenity. The events of 9/11 have been hijacked by Bush and his corporate pals to further their ambitions for profit and control. I have several other opinions, equally popular, but it makes me angry even to think of it so I will drop the subject.

BY: Any book or publication giving you personally good guidance on what's going on (eg, the Chris Hedges book, "War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning")?

KC: Sorry, no particularly good answer on this one.


LIFE IN MISSOULA


BY: Do you miss city life at all?

KC: I do miss city life. We travel, we get around, but it's not the same. It's one of the shifts in the American writing scene -- the center of gravity used to be New York and Boston and now it's more dispersed. Part of this is cost of living, part of this is the rise of the writing program and the fact that so may writers teach in them, but now the writers I admire are more likely to live in Berkeley or Livingston, Montana or Gainesville, Florida.

What I do get out of life in Missoula, besides fabulous trout-fishing, is an extra couple of hours every day. We lead lives of eccentric convenience: my office at the University is a five-minute bike ride away, the grocery story a ten-minute walk. There are no lines for anything anywhere. There are several excellent bars here and a nice long cold winter to get your work done in. It's really not so bad.


WAY OF LOOKING AT THE WORLD (GETTING BACK TO THE BOOK)


BY: Pardon this, but I'm always curious: getting back to the book, if you had a chance to revise "Into the Great Wide Open," any changes you'd make? Anything differently?

KC: The short answer, I think, is everything would change. My writing, my thinking, my ideas about what it is to live and what a novel should look like have all changed in the time since I wrote it -- which is not to say, particularly, that they have changed for the better. The novel is a snapshot of who I was when I wrote it, a reflection of a particular time and place and way of looking at the world.

BY; And the way Kenny responds to writing, that innate sensitivity -- he simply 'gets' words and language and literature -- was that you too at his age?

KC: I came to writing slowly. I spent a long time out in what is jokingly called the "real world," making a living and generally enjoying myself, before I went to graduate school at the University of Florida, which was my first step. I had written a fair amount in college but I never had the discipline to get my work done, to really finish a story. Some of this I attribute to the malign influence of marijuana. I mean, if you're in a racket where the difference between the right word and the almost-right word is life and death (it's the difference between the lightning and the lightning bug, as Twain said), you don't want a drug in your system telling you that everything's all right.

The parallels between me and Kenny have more to do with our lives as readers, as lovers of books and learners from books. Which I always was.


CHARACTERS ARE LIES


BY: So how old exactly are you, and where'd you grow up? Where'd the model for Kenny's lost fuck-up of a dad come from (no names necessary)?

KC: I'm old, and getting older. I went to high school in Washington, DC -- though I moved to Montana as soon as I legally could, for a variety of reasons. As I said somewhere above, almost all the furniture of the novel is stolen from life, though not, in the case of Kenny's father, my life. And in fairness I should say that he started out as one particular person but grew in the course of the novel into an entirely different one; he's too important in the novel for him to be true to life. Characters are lies, you know? They are invented for the purpose of performing their roles in the book.

What interested my bout that time, going back to write about it, was that the children were growing up with no particular useful guidance from their parents, not good modeling of adult behavior. The adults were as self-absorbed and self-indulgent as teenagers. This is kind of a punk attitude but the situation was going on for a while before the punks got hold of it. How do you grow up without these models? That's one of the big questions of the book.


Barry Yourgrau is the star and co-writer of the film, "The Sadness of Sex," based on his book. His most recent book is "Haunted Traveller."

You know who Chuck Palahniuk is; he's inspired a generation of fucked up outsiders and insiders alike. He lit the fuse that sent my imagination projecting forward towards creative bliss and artistic freedom. His reach extends so far that even if people don't know his name, they at least know... more

You know who Chuck Palahniuk is; he's inspired a generation of fucked up outsiders and insiders alike. He lit the fuse that sent my imagination projecting forward towards creative bliss and artistic freedom. His reach extends so far that even if people don't know his name, they at least know one of his works. Since Fight Club -- his first published novel -- Palahniuk has grown as a writer and his audience has grown with him, enjoying every second of this wild ride through the world's dirty subconscious. He is the father of Tyler Durden. He blew Shannon McFarland's jaw off. He gave us false messiahs and pre-op trannies. And we love him for it.

I compare the experience of interviewing Chuck Palahniuk to interviewing Darth Vader; he's that big a deal to me. Take one look at his cult following, book sales, and works optioned for film, and you'll find that he's a big deal to a lot of other people too. After a ton of research, I gazed inward--both as a fan and as a curious person--and compiled this interview. Palahniuk did not let me down and handled my questions so gracefully that I couldn't help but be even more impressed by the man. He makes it look so fucking easy, doesn't he?

If you haven't read Palahniuk, start with Invisible Monsters, or Rant, all of his stuff his genius. Or dive right in with his newest release, Snuff -- a novel about porn, sex, parenthood, secrets, bronzer, and love. Check it out here.

Garrett Faber: In a quote taken from '96 you say, "Life becomes about maintaining this static perfection. Things just sort of stop and they're no longer growing… Once you convince yourself things are perfect, then you stop growing and you stop evolving. It's sort of the death of things." It's safe to say now that you're pretty established and comfortable. How do you stop yourself from reaching that static perfection or resting on your laurels?


Chuck Palahniuk: My challenge is still to entertain myself and the group of writers I meet with every week. That, and I'm always explaining away my best writing tricks, trying to teach them over the Web. Of course, this gives me a better understanding of how I write, but once I reveal the method I'm forced to invent a new method. New tricks. Beyond that, each book is something you can only write at that specific moment in life. I could never write Fight Club now, so I'm glad I wrote it back then. Even the parts I now see as weak. Every stage of life has its own special sucky aspects that can only be vented and resolved by turning them into a story, a song, a painting, etc.


GF: What is your relationship (if any) with Trent Reznor?

CP: I look forward to working with Trent on the Fight Club musical. Cross your fingers.


GF: Now that you've got money, what are some of the most beautiful things you've witnessed or experienced that you wouldn't of been able to do or see without money?


CP: Some very sweet junkies took me to stand under the center of the Eiffel Tower, at midnight, the moment when the lights shut off. It was a total stunning surprise. All that blazing light blinks out in an instant. From glaring brightness to black. My French friends say it's the best thing to see in Paris. It feels the way I imagine death will.



GF: How do you feel about the n-word being used so often in mainstream music and life. Should it be censored or is it just a word? Does it still have power?



CP: What a tiresome word. I couldn't give a crap about words. Give me an obscene gesture any day.



GF: At the end of Fight Club, there is a quote, "Yeah. Well. Whatever. You can't teach God anything," which I thought was brilliant. What is your relationship with God like now?



CP: My understanding is that God wants me to do certain tasks with my life, and I'm happy to do those if God comes across with a steady-enough reward of Percodans.



GF: What was your experience as a journalist like? What led you to stop doing that, those years before your books were published?



CP: My degree in Journalism left me with $12,000 in student loans and a reporting job that paid $5.50 an hour in 1986. Poverty and the boredom of attending city council meetings, and school board and planning commission meetings, drove me from the Fourth Estate.



GF: What's the craziest porno you've ever seen?



CP: At a stag party, a friend who used to assist a cosmetic surgeon started pointing out the scars on each actress, indicating how their skin had been pulled and plumped and sewn back together. Talk about killing a mood. I've never found porn erotic since then. It seems like just another episode of "Animal Planet."



GF: What was the last, cool expensive thing you bought? From any slick gadget to a thousand dollars worth of Sushi...



CP: I paid for chemo for a friend's dog. Expensive, but worth it. Dog lived six extra months.



GF: What's the current status on your books becoming films?



CP: Either Survivor or Lullaby and they're both optioned and in development. Rumor is that Lullaby will begin shooting before the end of 2008. Diary is also optioned. This month, we're negotiating and selling the option on Rant.


GF: In one interview you said, "More often it's easier to be sarcastic, to be ironic, or to be absurdist rather than express sentiment." I find that a lot of people feel that way. Do you think that people are getting out of touch with expressing their emotions?


CP: So many people are expressing their feelings so readily on Oprah, on Dr. Laura, on the Web. Such ready honesty has flooded our lives, and been used to manipulate us into buying soap and cola. In response, most of us distrust those easy emotional expressions. We'd rather meet people who withhold their stories of abuse and sexual fetish, at least until they get really, really drunk.


GF: Do you have any gnarly stories about the Portland Cacophony Society?


CP: Those bad puppies. They recently crucified a huge stuffed rabbit outside the front doors of a Southern Baptist, mostly African American, church during the sermon on Easter Sunday. How can I get behind such immoral hijinx?


GF: Excerpts of your work appear in magazines, like Punch Drunk and random Choke chapters appearing in Playboy, and Mister Elegant appearing in Vice Magazine. How do you make these things happen?



CP: My agent, Edward Hibbert, sends the story to the editor of the magazine who usually says, "No fucking way." Except the New Yorker, which just stamps the envelope "Return to Sender."


GF: In another interview you spoke about the process of writing screenplays, saying that you thought they’d be really easy but instead they turned out to be really difficult. Have you gotten any better at writing screenplays?



CP: No. But it's stopped being a goal. Except I am working with the writer Amy Tan, on an adult feature called The Joy Fuck Club.



GF: Have you read the Bret Easton Ellis book Glamorama? What did you think?



CP: I loved the line, "Big arms are the breasts of the '90s."



GF: Have you been in any gnarly fistfights since the one that inspired Fight Club?



CP: No, but I live in hope.



GF: What are your top five favorite romance films?



CP: Klute... They Shoot Horses, Don't They?... Fight Club... Harold and Maude... The Graduate.


GF: On your Wikipedia page it says that some fans believe that you are embarrassed by your homosexuality. How do you feel about that statement?



CP: Hah! I'm only ashamed that I can't swim and can't spell. Never trust the Wiki.



GF: It's said that Rant is the first of a Sci-Fi trilogy. How hard was it to write that story with its oral biography style?



CP: The oral biography is the best, most-fun style -- ever. It's like cutting film because you don't need wordy, clumsy transitions between different perspectives and statements. You can take advantage of how smart and sophisticated movies have made your reader.



GF: As a character, how does Rant Casey hold his own against Tyler Durden, Cassie Wright, Missy Wilmot, Carl Streater, Victor Mancini, Shannon McFarland and Tender Branson? Do you ever feel the urge to have characters from other books make guest appearances? Thinking back, which character would have made the most successful crossover character?



CP: Actually, I'd choose either Oyster from Lullaby or Denny from Choke. Probably Denny because he's a character people can root for, and want to see happy.



GF: Have you had any fatherhood urges yet?


CP: No such luck. I FedExd some sperm to Ann Coulter only she misinterpreted the gesture and dragged the FBI into the fray. Talk about overreacting. Did I mention that I can't spell?



GF: Could you tell us a little more about Pygmy? Where did the story come from? Where do you go to write it and what do you do for research?



CP: All last summer I took lessons so I could speak German on tour in Europe. After all that work I went on German national radio and said stuff like, "It's amazing how many Germans have been inside of me..." My publisher forbade me from speaking in any language but English. So I figured, why not write a novel the way I'd tell the story in my terrible German? Poor English skills are always funny, look at Borat, Cabaret and "Me Talk Pretty." And the humor sparked by the clumsy language allows me to tell a fairly gruesome story about a child-aged terrorist sent to destroy America. And it's a romance. Sigh.



GF: What are some of the most intense nightmares you've ever had?



CP: My dead grandmother telling me I've already been condemned to hell. She wasn't at all happy.



GF: Do you still do that thing where you send awesome gift packages to people who write you? What do people say to you in the letters?


CP: Every human face you ever see... they've suffered some terrible shit. People write about their own fatal illness, dying loved ones, drug addictions -- and they make their stories so funny. So many letters break my heart and make me laugh at the same time. With so much shit happening in the world, it's worth some effort to make sure a few good things also just -- happen. That's why the gift boxes. It gets me high, knowing somebody is about to get a package full of surprises; it spreads the manic high of Christmas throughout the whole year.




GF: In one interview you said, "Any 'artist' makes a living by expressing what others can't—because they're unaware of their feelings, they're too afraid to express those feelings, or they lack the skills to communicate and be understood. Being fucked-up isn't required. In fact, it tends to cut careers short." You've done a great job of not fucking up and being a great prolific and awesome writer, how do you keep that up?



CP: Ken Kesey once said, "It takes two people for an offense to occur -- one to offend, and one to take offense." My goal is to always keep this "job" fun. Always stay one book ahead of the critics. Never, ever read book reviews -- good or bad. Always listen to people with the expectation that they'll tell you something brilliant. Don't take offense. Don't violate Ann Coulter's restraining order.


GF: October 17th 1998 was the day you quit your regular job, thanks to your writing. What happened on that day?

CP: My friends threw me two going-away parties. I phoned a soup kitchen and volunteered to start serving breakfast to bums and winos the next morning. That night, I went to the Dada Ball, a costume party, and danced the rumba with a writer friend, Caroline. My costume was, I dressed as a waiter. People gave me drink orders all night and never got anything. Maybe I am going to hell.


For more information on Snuff (out now), check out Chuck Palahniuk’s official website: http://www.chuckpalahniuk.net/

Also, don't miss the new trailer for the upcoming film Choke, based on Palahniuk's novel of the same name.

And in case you missed the hilarious promo videos for Snuff, you can watch them below.

Chitty Chitty Gang Bang vs. Chuck Palahniuk


The Wizard of Ass vs. Chuck Palahniuk


Twilight Bone vs. Chuck Palahniuk

The Cove is a new documentary that exposes the horrific flipside of Flipper. Shot in the historic town of Taiji, Japan -- which is the birthplace of modern day whaling methods -- the film follows activist Ric O'Barry in his crusade to save the 2,000+ dolphins that are captured and/or slaughtered... more

The Cove is a new documentary that exposes the horrific flipside of Flipper. Shot in the historic town of Taiji, Japan -- which is the birthplace of modern day whaling methods -- the film follows activist Ric O'Barry in his crusade to save the 2,000+ dolphins that are captured and/or slaughtered in a remote cove there each year.

Before O'Barry became an activist he was an unwitting beneficiary of the dolphin trade. A one-time dolphin trainer (the mammals are closely related to whales), O'Barry first made a name for himself in the 1960s working on the Flipper TV series. "I feel somewhat responsible because it was the Flipper TV series that created this multi-billion dollar industry," says O'Barry, who older and wiser is appalled at the idea of dolphins in captivity in zoos and amusement parks around the globe. He now works for the Earth Island Institute, trying to save these wondrous creatures from this fate -- and worse.

His undercover work at the cove, exposing the atrocious practices of the Japanese fishing industry, caught the attention of former National Geographic photographer Louie Psihoyos, who directed the movie about O'Barry's work at the cove. Using high-tech hidden surveillance equipment, the duo were able to capture the covert activities at the well-guarded cove, that had – up until now – been hidden from world view. Even the Japanese dolphin industry it seems is aware that it must remain concealed if it is to continue.

At the end of the film, O'Barry storms the International Whaling Commission with footage from the cove that convinces many to disengage from the corrupt organization which sets whaling quotas which are intertwined with the issue of tolerance for Japan’s dolphin trade. For O'Barry, giving interviews in support of the film is the next step towards exposing the practices of those in the dolphin trade who are happy to perpetrate unmentionable cruelty and ply mercury laden dolphin flesh that in truth is too toxic for human consumption.

Fred Toepl: What were you feelings as you saw the results of your efforts in the film?

Ric O'Barry: I recognized at that point that The Cove is indeed the light at the end of the tunnel. There is a light at the end of the tunnel and it's not an oncoming train. It's the sunshine. When this film gets out in Japan, before the Japanese people, you're going to see a lot more of that. I was thrown out of the room literally into the street but I was trying to bring attention to it. Everybody in that room is talking about 1000 whales in the southern ocean.

FT: While you were in the IWC room itself, a lot of people saw the video and you got some people to start changing.

ROB: Well, people in that room are not talking about the 23,000 whales that are being slaughtered in Japan. They're only talking about the 1000 in the southern ocean. That's what I was trying to do is bring attention to those 23,000. It's not even on the agenda. It's not discussed. So at that point, in fact today and tomorrow are the last two days of the International Whaling Commission meeting this year in Portugal and they're now talking about it as a result of that action. So that activism paid off big time and people are seeing The Cove movie at the IWC this year. So I think a lot of these countries in the Caribbean are going to drop their support for the Japanese government once they've seen this movie, once they've been exposed. The IWC's never been exposed before as the ship of fools that they really are. They're totally ineffective. It's a waste of money and a waste of time and nothing happens. That's been exposed for the first time.

FT: According to the film, Dominica was the first country to leave the IWC. That couldn't have been the only one as a result of your harrowing presentation at the IWC. Was it?

ROB: There will be others when this film is in theaters in those countries, in St. Lucia, in St. Vincent and all of these countries. I think they're going to be embarrassed and they're going to be exposed for basically prostituting themselves. You don't read about that. You don't see that. Nobody knows about that. Well, this film is going to break through all that and you're going to see all of these countries dropping their support for the Japanese government.

The movie is the activism. It is the activism and the more popular the movie becomes, the less popular harming dolphins and other whales is going to become. I must have done 25 interviews today and so many people have mentioned that they expect this to be nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary. If that happens, the Japanese government cannot deal with that kind of massive international PR nightmare, and it will shut down the cove finally, and may take whaling down with it.

FT: It also shows how activism can be effective. You might have some abstract idea of saving the dolphins, but this is a way to dramatically show results.

ROB: Well, when we were at Sundance, Sting came out of the audience and he became an activist. He said, "What can I do to help?" He'll be going back to Japan with me and he can get the media attention that I can't there. Also, a few days ago, I was at the film festival in Nantucket. By the way, I won the two top awards there as well. But Ben Stiller jumped out of the audience and said, "What can I do to help?" I said, "Come with me to Japan because you can get the media attention that I can't get." He's coming to Japan. So these people have become activists and I think we're going to see a lot more of that.

FT: Were you working full time in this cove area?

ROB: Well, I spend most of September through March there and I bring CNN, the BBC, anyone who will come. The film company was just one of many people I bring there. They came and they may never come back again. They'll move on to another film but I will go back there soon and that's where I spend my time and try to figure out what to do next. I don't really know what I'm doing or what I'm going to do next but I know that showing up is the most important. That's the first step. Show up and sometimes what you have to do is made known to you a few minutes before you do it. That's how I met these people, Louie Psihoyos who's made this film. He called and said, "Can I follow you around with my camera?" I said sure. He was there a few days later. So yeah, what I have to do is just go there and be there. Now it's gotten so dangerous I have to wear costumes.

FT: Like your medical masks?

ROB: Yeah, well, I've got wigs and I've got dresses and helmets to look like fisherman. I've got a lot of different disguises.

FT: How do you afford to commit yourself to this work?

ROB: Well, I work for Earth Island Institute in Berkeley, California, although I don't have to go to the office. I spend my time out -- "on the dolphin trail" they call it. So they pay me a salary. It's a full time job. People can get this information and take action by going to our website which is SaveJapanDolphins.org. People can actually do something at that website.

FT: Where else are problem areas besides this cove?

ROB: Well, Okinawa, Iki Island, but we want to stay focused on this one cove because when it does shut down, it will shut down, it will shut down for a reason. What is the reason? The reason is the product is contaminated. It's poison. Once that's established, you could take that into Okinawa and to Iki Island and to the Solomon Islands where there is a dolphin slaughter and to the Faroe Islands where there's a dolphin slaughter. I've been going there, and I'll be going back there again, so that work goes on, even though the film company will move on to another subject.

FT: What would you like to do after The Cove comes out?

ROB: Go back to Japan and finish the job. That's what I will do.

FT: When this inevitably happens, do you retire?

ROB: No. I mean, I'm going to be 70 my next birthday so I jumped off the cliff a long time ago. There's no turning back now. I might as well keep going until the trip is over. There's a lot of work to do. There's a lifetime of work there.

FT: Is there any reasonable argument for keeping captive dolphins for educational purposes for children?

ROB: No. No. No. It's very black and white for me. Captivity for dolphins is wrong. It's a question of ethics, not of science. The educational line is bogus. The proof of that is Japan. Japan has 50 dolphinariums, 50 places you can swim with them and see them. If you talk to them or talk to Sea World or Marineland or Seaquarium and say, "Why are you displaying dolphins?" They will tell you education and research. We only protect what we know. It sounds logical that we need to display dolphins so people can become sensitized and then they'll protect them. But you only have to look at Japan to see that that's a fallacy. 50 dolphin areas in Japan translates into hundreds and millions of people [that] have been educated. Yet when I'm in Taiji, I can't find one person who has been to these dolphinariums themselves. In fact, it is the captures that are going on in Taiji that are the economic underpinning of the dolphin slaughter. They get up to $148,000 for each [live] dolphin. At least that's what the ones that were sold to the Dominican Republic Ocean World, were sold for. So they're rewarding the fisherman for their bad behavior.

FT: You need only see the footage to see it's wrong.

ROB: Yeah, well that industry, that's a $2 billion a year profit industry in the U.S. alone. They don't spend one penny of that. $2 billion is a lot of money. They get that every 12 months. You'd think they would spend a few dollars to try and shut down the largest slaughter of dolphins in the world but they don't. They don't show up except to capture them and to collect dolphins for their swim programs.

FT: Does this go for all species though? Should we not keep any animal in captivity?

ROB: Well, look, I don't sit at the right hand side of God and have the answers to all these questions. I only know the dolphins. If you go to the L.A. Zoo and take a look at the snake exhibit, even a cold-blooded snake with a small brain is given more consideration than any dolphin in captivity. If you look at the dolphin, they're sound organic. That's their primary sense. Our primary sense is light. We're visually oriented, their primary sense is sonar, sound. They're in a concrete box…so captivity is more stressful for dolphins than it is for any other animal in the zoo. That's why the mortality rate is so high. So I don't think it has any value. It's not a form of positive education. It's a form of negative education, bad education.

FT: In the press you've done, have you had any antagonists trying to refute your claims?

ROB: Not yet but I think the captive industry will, when the movie comes out. Every action has a reaction and they're going to react to this because this movie's so powerful that when people see it, they're going to think twice before they buy a ticket. I'm telling people at that website I just gave you, we're asking the public to not buy a ticket. That's the solution to the problem. It's based on supply and demand like any other industry. If I'm wearing ivory, I'm the reason the elephant is becoming extinct, not the guy in the jungle with the shotgun. It's me, the consumer. So it is true with this multi-billion dollar dolphin captivity industry. The solution is don't buy a ticket.

I had a guy here a few minutes ago ask me, "Well, how about the kids in the inner city? They would never see a dolphin if we didn't have it in these places." That's true but these very same children are never going to see a snow leopard. So what do we do, go to the Himalayas and drag a snow leopard into the room for them?

FT: The film is so harrowing, is there a less graphic way to educate?

ROB: Well, I don't know. The real challenge was to make this entertaining and apparently the filmmakers were successful because it has received a standing ovation in every screening I've been to, including Sundance. People are laughing, they're crying, they're cheering and there's a standing ovation at the end and they say, "What can I do to help?" So apparently it is entertaining or they would have walked out. It's winning all the audience awards so apparently it is entertaining.