This Week’s Best Profile – Pavement

I’ve tried to get into Pavement multiple times  – and wrote about the experience here – but something just hasn’t clicked. I did however thoroughly enjoy this GQ profile of the band’s maestro, Stephen Malkmus, by the ever-hit-or-miss Chuck Klosterman. He’s in hit mode here:

There’s an inherent problem with writing about Pavement: People tend to know nothing or everything about them…Over the span of five albums and nine EPs, Pavement became a decade-defining band, widely regarded as essential and game changing (at least among those who cared). Malkmus is completely aware of this. This being the case, I return to our discussion about Jay McInerney: Since just about everyone now concedes that McInerney’s self-perception as a writer was adversely impacted by the avalanche of criticism he received in the years following Bright Lights, Big City, I ask Malkmus if he’s had the opposite experience: Does being endlessly told you’re a genius make you feel like one? Did having so many people insist that Slanted and Enchanted was brilliant change the way he now thinks about those songs?

“Of course it does, in a way. But no matter how much positive feedback you get, it’s never enough.”

The whole, relatively short-ish profile, is here.

Chuck Klosterman on Interviewing

Chuck Klosterman is a divisive writer, one whose opaque references to Mork and Mindy and Xavier McDaniel thrill some and confound others. I fall somewhere in the middle (like most, I suspect), thrilled 40% of the time, confounded another 40%, and generally appeased for the remaining 20%. Chuck’s got a new book, and here he talks about interviewing with the Washington Post:

I had 45 minutes with [Britney Spears]. The assumption is that you can’t do a good piece with that limited access…[but if] you want to ask questions that change or amplify or improve the way someone would experience [her] art, forty-five minutes is more than enough time. [Journalists assume that], if you spend a week with someone, you’ll pick up on details of their life. But no one is ever going to act like themselves around a journalist. If somebody spent a month with me and wanted to write a story about me, I wouldn’t be myself.*

More (surprisingly) good stuff, if you click through. It’s brief, I promise.

*That involved a lot of bracketing.