The Cultural Gutter

building a better robot builder

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." -- Oscar Wilde

Horror Talk interviews Champion Mojo Storyteller Joe Lansdale

“Writing and reading are not all of me, but it’s an important part of me. I am thinking about slowing down a little, but we’ll see if that happens. I’ve thought about that for years, and sometimes I do slow a bit, but then I start right back.” Joe R. Lansdale talks more about ebooks, [...]

Gary Groth Interviews Maurice Sendak

The Comics Journal has published a goodly excerpt of Gary Groth’s interview with illustrator and writer Maurice Sendak. “And one of the passions I have about children is, we don’t know what they see, we don’t know what they really hear. And occasionally they are polite enough to let us in.” Make sure to click [...]

RIP, Donald Richie

Writer Donald Richie has died. Richie is best known for his writing on Japanese culture and film.  The Japan Times and The New York Times have obituaries. Fora.tv has a conversation with Donald Richie in 2009, “Life in Japanese Film: Donald Richie.”

A Conversation with Steven Soderbergh

Director Steven Soderbergh has a thought-provoking conversation with Mary Kaye Schilling at Vulture: “You’re supposed to expand your mind to fit the art, you’re not supposed to chop the art down to fit your mind.”

Interview with James Nguyen

Friend of The Gutter, Robert Mitchell interviews Birdemic director, James Nguyen.  They discuss film-making, Birdemic: Shock and Terror, Birdemic 2 and what people can do to reduce their negative impact on the environment.

RIP, Nagisa Oshima

Director Nagisa Oshima has died. Oshima directed numerous films exploring sexuality, death and power of all kinds, including: In The Realm ff the Senses, The Empire of Passion, Japanese Summer: Double Suicide , Cruel Story of Youth and Taboo (starring a young Tadanobu Asano). He was also a pioneer of television, directing many documentaries for [...]

Interview with Jim Munroe

Jim Munroe appears on Radio Free Skaro to talk about his feature film, Ghosts With Shit Jobs.

Serpico Now

The New York Times profiles Frank Serpico: “Pacino played Serpico better than I did.” (via Andrew Nette)

RIP, Jack Klugman

Actor Jack Klugman has died. Klugman is probably best known for his roles on the tv shows The Odd Couple and Quincy, M.E. and he had roles in classic tv series such as The Twilight Zone, Inner Sanctum, Playhouse 90 and Alfred Hitchcock Presents.  His last role was in Daywalt Fear Factory’s Camera Obscura horror [...]

Interview with Lilli Carré

Comic Book Resources interviews comics artist and animator Lilli Carré: “Our lives can be reduced to a series of non-stop, never-ending choices, big and small! A lot of my stories have characters that are caught in a state of ambivalence and frozen in indecision, or who actively make a change that flips the tone of [...]

Interview with Lee Byung-hun

Paul Quinn interviews actor Lee Byung-hun  (The Good, The Bad, The Weird; I Saw The Devil) for Hangul Cellulloid. “Every actor, especially the beginners, if they’re asked ‘Do you eventually want to be a star or a real actor?’ will answer that they want to be a real actor and not a star, 100%. However, [...]

Profile of Jill Thompson

TimeOut Chicago profiles comics creator Jill Thompson. Thompson’s the creator of Scary Godmother and co-collaborator with Evan Dorkin on Beasts of Burden. “Thompson’s dad started buying comics for her, first Archie, then superhero stories. ‘That was like my crack,’ she says. ‘What did I have in my little nerd-girl schoolbag? Spider-Man, X-Men, Conan the Barbarian. [...]

Remembering Bob Clampett

Cartoon Brew remembers animator and puppeteer, Bob Clampett.  

RIP, Koji Wakamatsu

Director and producer Koji Wakamatsu has died. Wakamatsu had just been named filmmaker of the year at the 2012 Busan Film Festival. Wildgrounds has an interview, which Kimberly Lindbergs of Cinebeats helped translate, Keyframe has an obituary and Subway Cinema had a brief overview of Wakamatsu’s career paralleling a 2008 retrospective in Los Angeles.   “Divisive, exploitative, [...]

China Mieville Interviewed By A 12-Year-Old Boy

China Miéville is interviewed by Skelli Scar, who offers Miéville an excellent suggestion: “Lastly I have a suggestion for you, why not write a short story about what the Olympics would be like in Un Lun Dun?” “This is a startling and excellent idea. Immediately various sporting events are suggesting themselves to me. I am [...]

Chuck Jones on Bugs Bunny, Wile E. Coyote, Road Runner and Porky Pig

The Chuck Jones Center for Creativity uploaded three videos of Chuck Jones drawing and discussing Bugs Bunny, Wile E. Coyote & The Road Runner, and Porky Pig. (And a Daffy Duck bonus video)

Interview with Carrie Brownstein

Carrie Brownstein talks about Portlandia, Wild Flag, and nostalgia. “[A]s we went into the second season and now the third, the analogy we used was a record. Your first album can be a series of singles – like “here’s our opening thesis” – and you have a couple of hits. It might not be cohesive [...]

Interview with Naoki Urasawa

Anime News Network‘s Rebecca Silverman interviews mangaka/comics creator, Naoki Urasawa. “[A]fter last year’s earthquake and tsunami I went to visit the afflicted areas. People I met, victims of the disaster, told me how much they had always liked Master Keaton as a character. I wanted to do something for them, to cheer them up, so [...]

Interview with Tim Gunn

One hour 28 minutes with Project: Runway‘s Tim Gunn at Parsons New School of Design in 2008.

RIP, Helen Gurley Brown

Helen Gurley Brown, Cosmopolitan editor-in-chief and author of Sex and the Single Girl has died. The New York Times has an obituary. Natalie Wood starred in Hollywood’s adaptation of Sex and the Single Girl.  John Stewart talks to Helen Gurley Brown, Dave Chappelle, Christopher Hitchens and Tony Hawks on his BBC talk show, Where’s Elvis [...]

« go backkeep looking »
  • Support The Gutter

  • Of Note Elsewhere

    “It’s easier to tell the same stories everyone else does. There’s no particular shame in it.

    It’s just that it’s lazy, which is just about the worst possible thing a spec fic writer can be.

    Oh, and it’s not true.”

    Kameron Hurley writes about lazy writing, cannibal llamas, female soldiers, and women here. (Thanks, James!)

    ~

    Patton Oswalt’s multi-franchise super-movie described in his Star Wars filibuster from Parks and Recreation, animated.

    ~

    Corrigan Vaughan writes an open letter to “Fans of Geek Things“: “I appreciate that you think I have a nice rack and that some of you even find my friends and I to be pretty. That’s very kind. I’m not, however, super in love with the fact that having a rack at all seems to preclude me from being considered a ‘real’ fan.”

    ~

    The Black Girl Nerds Podcast discusses Black girls and women in the Heavy Metal industry with author and journalist Laina Dawes and Ursula “She-Wolf” Parson from Hear Evil News.

    ~

    The Hollywood Reporter interviews director Takashi Miike about his new film, Shield of Straw: ” In Japan now, films are very safe. When I was young and went to old cinemas, they had a distinctive feel, an adult smell about them. As you got in your seat and the lights went down, there was a feeling of excitement: What if the film is scarier than I thought it’s going to be? You’re taken into that world. Nowadays, you can sit in the theater and know it’s going to be safe. That’s good for business, but not for filmmaking.”

    ~

    The Atlantic profiles Spectral Motion, creators of monsters, “effects, and other mechanical grotesqueries that have since become household nightmares, if not names.”

    ~

  • The Book!

  • Spilling into Twitter

  • Obsessive?

    Then you might be interested in knowing you can subscribe to our RSS feed, find us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter or Tumblr.

    -------

  • Weekly Notifications

  • What We’re Talking About

  • Thanks To

    No Media Kings hosts this site, and Wordpress autoconstructs it.