Audio Interview: Whit Stillman Discusses Damsels in Distress

Ever since 1990′s Metropolitan, writer-director Whit Stillman has been documenting the foibles and mores of elite WASPs the “urban haute bourgeoisie.” His latest film, Damsels in Distress, is set at fictional Seven Oaks College, and explores the efforts of Greta Gerwig as Violet Wister, Analeigh Tipton as Lily and Megalyn Echikunwoke as the posh London accented-Rose, to reform the slovenly boys of the school’s frat house. Along the way, they team up to create the Sambola, the dance craze of 2012.

In this ten minute interview Stillman discusses:

• Why it’s been 14 years since his previous film, The Last Days of Disco.
• How the independent film market has changed since the 1990s.
• How Damsels references both Metropolitan and Last Days of Disco.
• When we can expect to see 1994′s Barcelona on Blu-Ray and/or in the Criterion Collection.
• When we can expect Stillman’s next film.

And much more. Click below to listen to our interview:

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For the rest of podcasts at the PJM Lifestyle blog, start here and keep scrolling.

Interview with the Authors of The Unofficial Mad Men Cookbook

Judy Gelman and Peter Zheutlin are the co-authors of The Unofficial Mad Men Cookbook: Inside the Kitchens, Bars, and Restaurants of Mad Men. Knowing how much I love the show (at least in its early seasons — get back to me when this season is over…) my wife gave me a copy of the book for Christmas, and I was surprised at how thorough and accurate the authors’ research of Mad Men, and early ’60s drinking and dining in general was. If you’re planning a Mad Men-themed party, or simply want to make the same kind of Old Fashioned that Don drinks, Roger’s favorite Oysters Rockefeller recipe, or heck, Pat Nixon’s Date Nut Bread, this is your book.

Among the topics we discussed are:

• While aesthetics in general may have arguably gone downhill since the swank suit and skinny ties of the early 1960s, food has actually gotten much more varied. How basic were the dining and drinking choices in Don Draper’s days? The answer may surprise you.
• How did the authors compile a list of all of the food and drink shown on the show?
• How cooperative were the restaurants that are still around, and mentioned in the show in working with the authors?
• Have they met any of the cast members since writing the book?

13 minutes long, click here to listen:

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For our previous podcasts at the Lifestyle blog, click here and keep scrolling.

Radio Show on Negative Images of Men in the Media

I was on the Brian Wilson show discussing my PJ Lifestyle posts on the negative portrayal of men in the media.

You can listen here.

Andrew Klavan: At the Corner of Hollywood and New Media

Ed Driscoll (L) Andrew Klavan (R), during the November 2011 NR Cruise.

Novelist, screenwriter, GBTV.com and PJTV contributor and PJ Media columnist Andrew Klavan and I spoke on Sunday for a 22-minute long podcast interview, in which we discussed:

• The shock news last week of Andrew Breitbart’s passing away.
• The tone of the left when the news broke.
• A follow-up on Drew’s PJM post back in November, in which he asked, “Why don’t we make more attempts to seize the mainstream back from the dishonest left?”
• How the conservative novelist can construct a moral universe.
• Shows about nothing, and Hollywood’s love of the nihilistic universe.
• “The Ten Hardest Movies To Turn Off Once You Start Watching Them,” and what they say about the future of the movie industry.

I’ve admired Andrew’s work ever since seeing True Crime with Clint Eastwood in a San Jose theater back in 1999, and have featured his PJTV material numerous times on PJM’s Sirius-XM show during its run. But I had never spoken with Andrew before the National Review Cruise this past November. So it was great to ask him some thoughts on new media, Hollywood, conservatism, and the future of the movie industry.

Click below to listen to our interview:

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(22 minutes long; 22 MB file size. Want to download instead of streaming? Right-click here to download this show to your hard drive. Or right-click here to download the 7 MB lo-fi edition.

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For the rest of podcasts at the PJM Lifestyle blog, start here and keep scrolling.

Audio Interview: Thomas Hibbs on ‘Shows About Nothing’

What connects seemingly disparate works such as The Silence of the Lambs, Cape Fear, Mad Men, and Seinfeld? It is the philosophy of nihilism, first popularized by Friedrich Nietzsche in the late 19th century. But in the last few decades,  how did it become the dominant worldview of Hollywood? In 1999, Dr. Thomas S. Hibbs, currently the Distinguished Professor of Ethics & Culture and Dean of the Honors College at Baylor University, wrote the original version of Shows About Nothing: Nihilism in Popular Culture. Last month, Baylor University released an updated version of the book, which explores shows and films that have debuted since Hibbs’ original work was published. In this half-hour interview, Hibbs discusses:

• How post-WWII Hollywood originally explicitly rejected Nietzsche and nihilism, before ultimately embracing him with open arms.
• Why horror movies eventually eradicated God for charming nihilists who fashion their morality as “beyond good and evil,” such as Dr. Hannibal Lecter.
• Seinfeld: the sunny side of nihilism.
• How man successfully threw off the encumbrances of authority and tradition only to find himself subject to new, more devious, and more intractable forms of tyranny.
• How aesthetics came to usurp morality.
• Mad Men’s Don Draper: the man in the gray nihilistic suit.
• Can Hollywood move beyond nihilism?

Click below to listen to our interview:

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(29 minutes long; 27.2 MB file size. Want to download instead of streaming? Right-click here to download this show to your hard drive. Or right-click here to download the 5 MB lo-fi edition.

If your browser/Internet connection balks at the Flash player above and/or downloading the audio, click on the player below, or click here to be taken to YouTube, for an audio-only YouTube clip.  Between one of those versions, you should find a format that plays on your system.

For the rest of podcasts at the PJM Lifestyle blog, start here and keep scrolling.

Audio: Dr. Helen & Amy Alkon on Men’s Issues

My interview with Advice Goddess Amy Alkon on men’s issues is now up at Blog Talk Radio. You can listen to us discuss paternity fraud, men’s reproductive rights (or lack thereof), domestic violence, and how men can learn to survive in a female-centered world:

Interview: Michael Anton on The Suit

Late last month, I spoke with Michael Anton, former speechwriter for Rupert Murdoch, George W. Bush and Condi Rice, and deputy foreign policy advisor for the 2008 Giuliani presidential campaign, on The Suit: A Machiavellian Approach to Men’s Style, his sartorially-oriented parody of Machiavelli’s The Prince, written in 2006 under the pen name of Nicholas Antongiavanni.  As its subtitle and nom de fashion hints, it’s a book aimed towards businessmen, professionals and those entering the political arena on how to use the business suit to their advantage. I spoke with Michael in 2006 when the book first came out for a Tech Central Station article, and it seemed like a natural fit to do a follow-up here at the Lifestyle blog.

Anton discusses:

• How a man can improve his style while making a minimum of aesthetic and financial disasters.
• How does a businessman square looking sharp with the trend towards business casual?
•  How does a politician use the rules of fashion to his advantage?
• Anton’s take on the no-tie look that seems to be catching on amongst the on-air talent on TV channels such as ESPN, CNN and MSNBC.
• The continuing influence of the artwork created for Apparel Arts, an otherwise forgotten 1930s-era publication (later spun-off into both GQ and Esquire), on menswear.
• We also discuss the fashion styles of Mitt Romney and Rick Perry. Unfortunately, we recorded this interview before Herman Cain’s recent rise in the polls, and I very much regret not getting Anton’s take on Cain’s sartorial choices. (Good excuse for a possible follow-up interview next year though.)

Plus a preview of Michael’s upcoming articles in City Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, and the Weekly Standard.

16 minutes long; click here to listen:

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For our previous podcasts at the Lifestyle blog, click here and keep scrolling.

Interview: Terry Teachout on Armstrong, Mencken, and Middlebrow

If Terry Teachout, the drama critic for the Wall Street Journal who also blogs at About Last Night, sounds particularly refreshed in our latest podcast, it isn’t because he stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night. Shortly before our interview, he and his wife had recently spent two nights at Frank Lloyd Wright’s landmark Seth Peterson Cottage, one of the last residences that Wright designed, in Lake Delton, Wisconsin.

Beyond that experience, Terry and I discuss:

• The life and death of America’s mid-century middlebrow culture.
• Louis Armstrong’s place in middlebrow culture.
• Satchmo at the Waldorf, the play that Terry wrote about Armstrong, which recently debuted.
• The interaction between a counterculture and the dominant culture.
• What would Mencken, an earlier biographic subject, think of the Blogosphere?
• The dangerous challenge of revising a Broadway play for contemporary audiences:  “Is the Text of a Classic Ever Sacred?”
• The sequel to Teachout’s book on Armstrong, Pops.

11 minutes long; click here to listen:

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For our previous podcasts at the Lifestyle blog, click here.

Goin’ Mobile with Rob Long

Rob Long, a former executive producer of TV’s beloved Cheers, columnist at National Review “On Dead Tree” and the co-host, along with Peter Robinson and James Lileks, of Ricochet.com, stopped by this past Friday for a half-hour discussion. Well, perhaps “stopped by” isn’t quite the right phrase, as Rob conducted his half of the interview from his car, on the way up to Napa Valley in Northern California for a wedding this past weekend. Fortunately, thanks to his bluetooth headphone, he wasn’t pulled over by any overzealous CHP officers for driving and podcasting, which can result in 7 to 10 years of hard time in California’s dreaded Steve Allen Memorial Prison.

Among the topics discussed:

• The CEO of Starbucks has called for an end to partisan rancor. Given that the price of a monthly Ricochet membership is tied to the price of grande latte at the flagship Starbucks in Seattle, does this signal a moratorium on new podcasts?
• What is it like for a conservative working in Hollywood?
• Was Cheers a liberal TV show?
• Is Los Angeles now the most puritanical city on the earth?
• Is living — and dining well — the best revenge against the puritan left?
• Is TV’s small screen shrinking President Obama’s stature?
• And more!

30 minutes long, click here to listen:

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For our previous podcasts at the Lifestyle blog, click here.

Interview: Roger Kimball on 30 Years of the New Criterion

Roger Kimball, a fellow Pajamas Express blogger, the editor of the New Criterion magazine, and the publisher of Encounter Books, took time out from “battening down the hatches” on Friday in anticipation of Irene’s arrival to talk with us on:

• The 30th anniversary of the founding of the New Criterion magazine by Hilton Kramer and Samuel Lipman.
• What culture tells us about the nation that produces it.
• Where modernism went wrong.
• How the New York Times became “Gray Lady Down,” to coin an Encounter Books title.
• What it’s like publishing as the industry goes through a series of rapid changes.
• Encounter’s latest title, Confronting Terror, 9/11 and the Future of American National Security, a compendium of essays by leading voices in law and policy, edited by Dean Reuter and John Yoo. (The American Enterprise Institute will have a forum in New York on September 8th with Yoo, Andrew McCarthy, Richard Epstein and others to tie in with this book.)
• And some thoughts on the 2012 presidential election.

20 minutes long, click here to listen:

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The VodkaPundit Chronicles

Steve Green, your friendly neighborhood VodkaPundit, the genial host of PJTV’s long-running Week In Blogs and Hair of the Dog shows, and along with Scott Ott and Bill Whittle is one-third of PJTV’s Trifecta series, stops by for a podcast chat.

In a ten minute interview, we’ll discuss:

• How does one remain a bon vivant in the age of Mike Bloomberg, Michelle Obama, and the regressive nanny state?
• Sinatra: man, myth, legend, or all three?
• The state of pop culture in Big Media, and the state of the Blogosphere’s DIY ethos.
• And perhaps the most important question of all: what goes into the perfect Martini?

Click here to listen:

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(10 minutes and 2 seconds long; 9.18MB file size. Want to download instead of streaming? Right click here to download this week’s show to your hard drive. Or right click here to download the 2.87 MB lo-fi edition. And for our earlier Lifestyle podcasts, start here and keep scrolling.)

Interview: Hugh Hewitt Talks with Roger Simon about A Better Life

Roger L. Simon will be discussing his new movie, A Better Life, on Hugh Hewitt’s talk radio show at 3:40 PM Pacific time today. Consult your local listings to find a station near you.

And click here to see where A Better Life, which Charlie Martin recently reviewed here at the Lifestyle blog, is playing in your area.

Update: Audio added, courtesy of Hugh’s producer, Duane Patterson, and used with permission. Click below to play:

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(7 minutes and 19 seconds long; 3.35MB file size. Want to download instead of streaming? Right click here to download this week’s show to your hard drive. And for our earlier Lifestyle podcasts, start here and keep scrolling.)

DIY Culture Versus Old Media: An Interview with Glenn Reynolds

Glenn Reynolds should need little introduction to PJ Media’s readers, but just in case you’re beaming in from another temporal plane or quantum singularity, he’s a pioneering blogger, whose Instapundit.com is PJM’s flagship blog, and he hosts the long-running Instavision show on PJTV.com. He’s also the author of An Army of Davids, which explores do it yourself culture in everything from making your beer to making your own recorded music and video.

It’s the latter two subjects we’ll be discussing here (perhaps we’ll explore DIY PBR in a later podcast). We’ll also discuss:

• Why Old Media has regressed in style and content even as the quality of DIY media improves.
• The state of the Blogosphere.
• What the demise of the Borders bookstore chain says about the future of books, electronic media, and the physical retail store.
• What’s happening with overturning the ban on incandescent bulbs.
• Would Hollywood environmentalists give up their TV shows and private planes to protect Gaia?
• The British phone hacking scandal (and its American equivalents) and battlefield prep for the 2012 election.
• The state of the presidential race.
• And more.

Click here to listen:

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(16 minutes and 30 seconds long; 15.2MB file size. Want to download instead of streaming? Right click here to download this week’s show to your hard drive. Or right click here to download the 5.75 MB lo-fi edition. And for our earlier Lifestyle podcasts, start here and keep scrolling.)

Primetime Propaganda Declassified: an Interview with Ben Shapiro

Ben Shapiro’s Primetime Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV, released at the end of May, quickly became a sensation in the television industry last month, in large part thanks to its brilliant marketing campaign, which, as Ben mentioned during our interview, was inspired by Andrew Breitbart’s brillant, drip-drip-drip rollout of James O’Keefe’s ACORN sting in the fall of 2009. Just as O’Keefe exposed ACORN’s corruption, and Breitbart the Obama-friendly Ruling Class tilt of the media, Shapiro recorded many of the TV industry’s biggest behind the scenes players admitting on tape that of course primetime television skews left, as do the hiring practices of the industry that produces it.

Much like Bernard Goldberg’s earlier exposes on television’s news departments, this didn’t exactly come as a shock to any conservative who had been following television for the last several decades. But having industry insiders come clean was certainly a welcome change, and a turning point for both the industry and its critics.

But why does that bias exist, particularly when historically, so many of TV’s biggest hits have been more or less apolitical? That’s the subject of the first half of Shapiro’s book, which is a brilliant history of the politics and worldview of the primetime television industry, from the days of Uncle Miltie to M*A*S*H to Murphy Brown, all the way to the Obama era. 

In very tangible way, this portion of Shapiro’s book is both the sequel and conservative counterweight to former SDS member Todd Gitlin’s left-leaning earlier guide to the industry, Inside Prime Time, which has served as a college textbook (including one of the courses I took on the media a quarter century ago.)

When Gitlin wrote Inside Prime Time in 1983, cable was beginning its ascendency, but there was still plenty of money to be made by everyone in the TV industry. Today, as Shapiro writes, the handwriting is on the wall for television as we know it — and the last chapter of his book describes a sense of cultural exhaustion that pervades the industry today, in much the same way that so many of the products advertised on the networks aim for a rather venerable demographic. And when those viewers shuffle off to the great living room in the sky, television as we know it may begin to ebb away. (In a way, that process has already slowly begun, since terrestrial over-the-air-TV is no more.)

What comes next? As Shapiro writes in Primetime Propaganda:

As the television industry morphs into an Internet/television cyborg, the market is beginning to open for nonliberal creators and executives. The process we are watching in relation to the print medium applies also to television—more and more creative minds and sponsors are being given the means and the methods to contribute by the cheapness and convenience of the Internet. The Internet is Prometheus, and it has brought fire down from the television gods. All that is left is for men and women with diverse political viewpoints to learn how to use it.

If you’re thinking of taking him on the offer, Shapiro’s book should required reading to avoid the network mistakes of the past. And for the would-be television mavens of the future to avoid the biggest mistake conservatives make when they go into the entertainment industry: producing strident agitprop, instead of telling a great story that can grab an audience emotionally (or make them bust a gut laughing, or both), but one that just happens to be conservative.

In the meantime, click here to listen to our interview:

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(20 minutes long; 18.3 MB. Want to download instead of streaming? Right click here to download this week’s show to your hard drive. Or right click here to download the 5.75 MB lo-fi edition.)

Interview: Lileks Meets the PJ Lifestyle Blog

“Lifestyle blogs often have a PC bent; it will be refreshing to have one for the rest of us.”

– Dr. Helen Smith, in her first post here at the new PJ Lifestyle blog.

Speaking of which, welcome onboard! This is the place where we’ll be discussing movies, TV, music, the sort of food and tobacco products that would cause Michelle Obama and Michael Bloomberg to have a serious case of the vapors, and anything else that doesn’t fit into the rest of the PJM homepage or the Tatler. Not to mention the pop culture of the past, and the gadgets of the future. As you can see on this section’s homepage, you’ll be hearing from many of our PJM and PJTV all-stars on these topics.

And we’ll be having a fair amount of video and audio podcasts as well. First up, to give us a sense of the pop culture of the past and present, and the seismic shifts in the culture over the years is columnist, pioneering blogger and multimedia maven extraordinaire James Lileks:

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(18 minutes long; 16.3 MB. Want to download instead of streaming? Click here to download this week’s show. Or click here to download the 5 MB lo-fi edition.)

James and I discuss:

• How much can you learn about a time and a place by observing its pop culture?
• What is the “Overculture” — and what is its current state of health?
• What an era’s fashions say about it.
• And Interior Desecrations, both then — and now.

For more from James, stop by The Bleat at Lileks.com, and his daily Pop Crush blog at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Skinny ties optional; no jacket — with or without skinny lapels required.