The Reader Interview

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor-in-Chief of RogerEbert.com, the TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism, and the author of multiple books about the life and films of Wes Anderson. That last part is the most important for the purposes of this interview, for which he was kind enough to speak with Park Slope Reader. 2013 brought the first The Wes Anderson Collection, which celebrates and analyzes all seven of Wes’ films that were released up to that point. This February, The Wes Anderson Collection: The Grand Budapest Hotel followed as a second volume focusing on only Anderson’s most recent film. Here, Seitz talks about the differences between the two books, the fun of elaborate footnotes, and the surprise expense of novelty trinkets.

The major difference between your first Wes Anderson book and this one is that the first volume had everything; all seven of his previous films and analyses of each of them uniquely. Did you prepare for this one differently because it was only based on one movie, or was the process pretty similar?

We had a few options. One was to put out a second edition of the first book that included The Grand Budapest Hotel but we didn’t want to do that because it didn’t seem right to ask people to buy the same book twice, so we decided on a second book. Once we knew that, we had the opportunity to take a slightly different approach, really concentrate on a single film in greater length and great detail, and also to bring in interviews with other people. It wasn’t just me and Wes—now it was me interviewing Ralph Fiennes and interviewing Milena Canonero or Adam Stockhausen, their production designer. Then on top of that, more critical essays by people who knew more about each particular deal, and that’s how we ended up with Ali Arikan on the writing of Stefan Zweig and how that might or might not have influenced Wes Anderson, and Olivia Collette writing about the score (she’s a classical musician.)

That almost mirrors the narrator-driven and detailed structure of the film, and you also incorporate what might be considered extraneous information, such as the various actor career arcs or the Stefan Zweig excerpts. Was there a specific reason you wanted to include those?

I just thought they were fun. [In] the first book I did a little bit of that as well. In fact, there’s really three different books happening in the original The Wes Anderson Collection. One of them is this interview book with me talking to Wes, the other one is this collection of critical essays by me, and then you have the third book in the footnotes. Footnotes are kind of the sneakiest of the three books. Those are very digressive and almost random most of the time. I’m a huge fan of David Foster Wallace who would have these footnotes that would go on forever and a lot of times the footnotes would be things that there was really no rational, defensible reason why something was in a footnote but he would put one in anyway. Or it was a way of including things that he would otherwise have had to cut (laughs).

So we did even more of that in this book. At one point Wes Anderson and I are talking about the narration of his movie, and we both realize that there’s a possibility that we’re both talking out of our butts on this particular subject and he says, “You know, maybe we can check this.” And I said, “OK I’ll talk to my expert,” and I emailed David Bordwell who I know. He wrote me a very long email about the history of voiceover narration in cinema. It’s not really even a footnote. It spans two pages. I would say not all of them are defensible, but on the other hand, I think part of why these books have been the best is [because] they’re not all meat and potatoes; there’s personality to them. You kind of get a sense of the personalities of people who make books. Me and Martin Venezky and Max Altman.

There are the different aspect ratios and design aesthetics in this book, just as in the film. Did you have a hand in that or was that mostly your illustrator and your designer?

I told my editor I wanted this book to change aspect ratios like the movie did and I wasn’t sure how we were going to accomplish that. I had originally talked to my editor about having the page size change. At one point there were going to be three different sizes of paper stitched into the binding of this book and when you moved from one section to another the actual physical size of the page would change. We priced that and we realized it was entirely too expensive. Martin came up with another solution that was simpler and cheaper, which was to map the page. And if you notice, there’s three standard sizes for the book. When you’re in the interview sections it fills up the entire book. The critical essays are slightly smaller. And the interviews with Canonero, Fiennes, Desplat etc. are slightly smaller than that. So that’s our version of our change of aspect ratios.

You face a lot of those kinds of situations where you have your extravagant idea and then you have your realistic one. The original Wes Anderson Collection, very early on in the process we talked about selling it in a little box and the box would look like a little keepsake box like the ones you see at the beginning of To Kill A Mockingbird and you would open it up and the book would be inside and there would be seven little trinkets each related to his films. We realized that would cost $250 a piece to do so it was unrealistic so we just went with the book (laughs).

You’d have to come out with a Christmas ornament collection or something! (You can put that idea in your back pocket.)

We’ve discussed that. We’ve discussed putting the first and second book together, and you know if there’s a third book we’ll add that one as well.

You had a lot of fun with this one because you were only focusing on the one movie and you could have fun with the cover and the different aspects of it. Did you have ideas for different things that didn’t pan out design-wise or interview-wise that you’d like to share?

The big thing was the changing page size. I really wanted to do that because I’ve never seen that done before in a film book. If I had to do it over again, more interviews. But I say that understanding that if there were more interviews, there might be more pages, and then it might get more expensive and unrealistic again. I do believe that once a thing is done I like to leave it alone. I asked Wes about that in the first book. I said why is it that you don’t like the director’s cuts and he said that his feeling was once the movie is done then it’s “archival”. He said that means the thing is what it is, then I’m done with it. It’s a record of something in time and I don’t want to go back because I feel like I’m distorting history in a way. That’s his feeling. That’s why there’s never been director’s cuts of his movies. I don’t believe there’s been more than one or two deleted scenes. I don’t think he’s ever put a deleted scene on a DVD now that I think about it. I’m also in so many different things I can’t afford to obsess over what might have been. I don’t tend to make a practice of it.

At one point in the book you mention that the movie really feels like a culmination of his career. More melancholy moments, more overt comedic moments. Did you go into it wanting to talk about, say, Kumar Pallana even though he wasn’t in Grand Budapest because he had passed away, or was that something you decided to leave in because you felt like it was appropriate?

Talking to Kumar was…we were at the Algonquin hotel/bar and somehow we just got on the subject of Kumar who had died a few months earlier. We got on a level of discussion of a guy he worked very well with because he had been in a number of films and it was a classic digression. Kumar wasn’t related to The Grand Budapest Hotel. He wasn’t in it and there’s really no reason to include that section other than because it was about Kumar a lot and we thought it would be a nice gesture to his family.

There’s actually an entire other chapter of this book that we cut. It’s an entire other section where Wes called me up and said, “Hey, I would like to do a conversation where we don’t talk about The Grand Budapest Hotel—we just talk about movies.” And I said, “Okay!” So we talked for about two hours about all kind of things including train travel, Japanese animation, disaster films, and our childhoods in Texas. At the end it was fifteen to twenty pages of text, and it just seemed like too much so we cut it. So there’s digressions in the book, but it’s not nearly as digressive as it could’ve been.

Now you’re going to make people want a separate pamphlet of you and Wes Anderson talking about Japanese animation.

He actually knows a lot. It’s funny because he’d never seen any of that until his girlfriend Juman [Malouf] introduced him to it. So that influenced his work on Fantastic Mr Fox. He’s really into that stuff. We also talked about Steven Spielberg which is something we almost always talk about when we’re together just because we’re both major, major, major nerds for Spielberg.

For the first Wes Anderson Collection when you watched most of his movies you didn’t know you were going to write a book and analyze them on such a level. Is this the first movie where you watched it in advanced knowing in the back of your mind that you were maybe writing a book about it? Did it alter the way you went into it the first time in that screening room? Or did you just block that part out and watch it as you normally would a Wes Anderson film the first time?

Well the production process was different. In the first book you’re dealing with the conception and that I’ve seen [the films] when we were laying the book out and doing the chapter on each. I didn’t have any history with The Grand Budapest Hotel. I was experiencing it as a regular viewer, really. I mean, I got to see it slightly in advance of most critics. He showed me a nearly completed cut that had some color timing issues, maybe one or two audio issues, and incomplete special effects. That was in November of 2013, shortly after the book came out. I was able to see it just that time and then I did my first interview. I said to him before we even had a contract, “Hey, Wes, I have no idea yet if we’re going to be able to integrate this into a future volume of the book. If so, how about maybe we go ahead and do an interview just in case.” And he said, “Yeah, good idea—let’s do it.”

So before the movie was released I had seen it maybe three times and interviewed Wes at least two times. I did more interviews with Wes than I collected in the book. Breaking things into the three acts is a storyteller’s trick. Months of conversation at the Algonquin hotel happened. There are parts of the first conversation that I moved to the second chapter, and parts of the second that I moved to the third. It’s a case where you talk to somebody again and again and maybe the first time you talk about the costumes and the second time you go off on a tangent about the costumes again and it doesn’t make sense when you’re editing to be bringing up the costumes in all three acts. I always tell people that these books are documentaries in book form. That’s supposed to mean it’s not like you’re pointing the camera or tape recorder at somebody and this is exactly what happened. You’re arranging it, and you’re cutting things that are basically irrelevant or uninteresting. You make the experience as pleasurable as possible for the consumer.

As far as The Grand Budapest Hotel goes, my relationship with the movie kept getting deeper the more times I saw it. In that sense, I would say a major difference between the second book and the first is that my attitude towards everything was basically settled in the first book when the time came to make it. The only exception to that was Moonrise Kingdom. My experience with this movie is being formed as you read the book. You can see in the preface that I admit the first time I had only had one view of the movie—so my impressions are probably not going to be so deep, and they’re not. But then the second time, I had a chance to live with the film a bit more and my thoughts are a little more settled and a little more detail oriented. And then by the time you get to the third one, I’m thinking about the architecture of the story. So when I say it’s a documentary in book form, it’s not only a documentary about the movie in the form of a book, but it’s also secondarily a documentary about my making this book.

As you mentioned before, you talked to Anderson about the costuming, the set design, shot set up, and camera movement. What’s your personal favorite part of his movies—specifically this one?

I don’t know if I have a favorite part of work in his movies or [a favorite] thing that he does. It’s just too hard to say. It’s like saying what’s my favorite Monet painting. I don’t know. It probably depends on my mood. But I will say that the thing I keep coming back to again and again is his sense of loss that’s the driving force behind every one. That’s something that I connected to on a very deep level, even very early in his career. I think a lot of people did. His movies are not trivial concoctions because they’re about loss, they’re about death, they’re about mortality, they’re about things fading away and how you just have to make peace with that because you don’t have any control over it. That’s the reason why earlier in his career—before there was this consensus that he was an important or interesting filmmaker—people got quite defensive when Wes Anderson was dismissed or criticized or ridiculed, because they saw this seriousness in his films. Wes Anderson movies are a really great illustration of the idea that just because a movie’s fun doesn’t mean it’s not serious. He was always a serious filmmaker. Even going back to Bottle Rocket, which in many ways I still think is his lightest film overall. Maybe Moonrise Kingdom or maybe Fantasic Mr. Fox might be in a tie with it. But even Bottle Rocket deals with feelings of disappointment, youthful naiveté, emotional breakdown, mental illness, and criminality.

I actually just watched it this past weekend and it was really interesting. I haven’t watched it for maybe ten years. It is striking how present those aspects are so early in his career, and you don’t realize it the first time you see it or after you go away from it for a little while.

That last five minutes of Bottle Rocket feels like a preview of the rest of his career.

You can find bits of it in every one of his movies when you do go back through them, especially Owen Wilson’s performance.

Yeah, that moment when he’s walking away from Bob and Anthony to the prison and he’s all jocular and grinning and the hellraiser. And then it shifts in slow motion, and you see he looks back very subtly and you see that he’s terrified. I think Wes Anderson’s movies are contained in that one moment.

Last question. You have an Oliver Stone career book in the pipeline. Did you learn any lessons from your Wes Anderson books that you’re applying to that or are you approaching it completely differently?

I learned a lot about practical things—layout, materials, intellectual property, things like that. We’re definitely applying those. By the time we made the second book we knew what we were doing. And now with the Oliver Stone book we really knew what we were doing, so we’re able to mix it up. With this book, it’s not going to look anything like the Wes Anderson books. It’s going to be something completely new that people haven’t seen before. It takes its inspiration from Oliver Stone’s films, which are very different films to say the least. It’s much more of a biography. It’s practically a life story with critical analysis dispersed in there. This is a guy whose life and films are so strongly entwined that you really can’t separate the two. I think the trouble with this book is trying to figure out what is the best and most interesting way to reflect that visually. We’re still going back and forth on it.

It’s also a political book because Stone is a political filmmaker. I’m trying to reflect his worldview in this book and his worldview is a very disillusioned one. This is a guy who was a young Republican, the son of a stockbroker, a child of privilege. He has deconstructed all of the lies to become someone else and it’s been an ongoing process. He’s told me many times that he considers himself a work in progress and he’s seventy years old. So I would say if we do it right, this book is going to be a record of a person struggling to hopefully improve himself over the course of his life.

Right. I actually lied. I have one more question. I don’t know if you’ve thought about this at all or if you just take his movies as they come, but what do you hope Wes Anderson does next? What direction does he push or new thing do you think he approaches in his next film?

I wouldn’t presume to give Wes Anderson suggestions, but I personally would love to see him do a science fiction film—since I think he’s often heading that direction anyway. He made a casual comment in an interview one time where he said he had a fantasy of shooting a science fiction movie in space in actual zero gravity. I don’t think he was kidding.

Progressive Leadership in District 39

The Park Slope Reader had the great opportunity to speak with New York City Council Member Brad Lander who represents the 39th District in Brooklyn that includes Park Slope, Columbia Waterfront, Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, Windsor Terrace, Kensington, Gowanus, and Borough Park. Prior to joining the City Council he was the Director of the Pratt Center for Community Development where he led campaigns to expand affordable housing and create NYC’s “inclusionary zoning” program. Before that he spent ten years leading the Fifth Avenue Committee, an organization responsible for redeveloping neighborhood buildings facing abandonment in the early 1990s, creating and preserving affordable housing, and launching job training and economic development programs. He lives in Park Slope with his wife and two children.

We spoke just after elected officials and community leaders, including him, announced the release of the draft community-planning framework, “Bridging Gowanus,” that details shared values and planning recommendations for the future of the Gowanus Canal area. Priorities of the plan include investments in sustainable infrastructure, strengthening manufacturing, maintaining the mix of uses, and preserving and creating affordable housing.

PS READER: Congratulations on the release of “Bridging Gowanus!”

CM Lander: Thank you, it’s been a lot of work and a long time coming; we’re excited for the next steps. I come from working on community planning and community organizing and love the idea of getting people as involved as they can and helping inform the decisions that affect the neighborhood. Obviously, I’m lucky to represent neighborhoods that people really care about, and want to spend time thinking about a planning force.

In 2009, together with Melissa Mark-Viverito, now Council Speaker, you founded the City Council’s first ever Progressive Caucus, “with the goal of advancing policies to build a more just and equal New York City.” Can you describe some of what the group has been able to accomplish in these years?

We have to think about last term and this term, because they’re fairly different. Last term we were able to do some meaningful things. The biggest ones being passage of the Community Safety Act, which created the first ever NYPD Inspector General and adopting a prohibition on bias racial and other bias based profiling by the NYPD in a way that required us to override Mayor Bloomberg’s veto and make progress in the wake of the growth of “Stop and Frisk.”

Obviously those issues of policing are still with us, but the CSA was a really good step forward and came out of organizing with communities all over the city in very powerful, encouraging ways.

We passed a big expansion of paid sick days, and while I was very encouraged by the additional expansion in the beginning of this term, the bill that we passed last term took four years to pass, we also had to override mayoral veto, and at the time a speaker who didn’t even want to bring it to the floor, that was also a great campaign, something we were proud to do.

The NYC Living Wage Law was passed. It expanded the requirement for a business, corporation, or developer who gets a subsidy to pay a living wage to their workers.

Those are our three big legislative wins.

This term the accomplishment of growing the ranks of Progressives in the Council in the 2013 election and then working together to help Melissa Mark-Viverito become the speaker, the first person of color, the first Latina, the first Puerto Rican to hold citywide office, the first person of color, first Latina to lead the council, was obviously a very exciting accomplishment.

In 2011, New York City history was made when you and three other Council members joined the Participatory Budgeting Program. The program allows residents to vote directly on the allocation of part of the discretionary capital dollars in their district. Since then almost all of the City Council Members have joined the process. Can you talk about some of the District 39 projects that have benefitted from Participatory Budgeting?

The nice thing about Participatory Budgeting is it brings out great enthusiasm and energy and activity and, in my opinion, the projects are better as a result. We’ve made a number of intersections substantially safer. The intersection at Ocean Parkway and Church Avenue was one of the highest vote-getting projects. We’ve made some big investments in public libraries. The Kensington Public Library now has a community room that was made into a much bigger space for performances, and rehearsals, technology, and a dance floor. We have new technology both at the Carroll Gardens and the Windsor Terrace branches that people are using very actively.

There’s the new community composting system at Salt Lot on the Gowanus Canal, the Gowanus Conservancy, and some great changes in Prospect Park such as fixing flooding along some of the pedestrian paths.

The highest vote-getting projects in the first two years were to fix some horrible school bathrooms. The first year people looked at the terrible bathrooms in PS 124 and said, “We have to do something about that.” But because they were working and weren’t dysfunctional, the SCA wasn’t responsible. Participatory Budgeting is what got them fixed. The next year something similar at PS 58 happened and people said, “The School Construction Authority should really do more to fix bathrooms.” And the Council, last year, allocated an extra $50 million to fix school bathrooms as a normal course of business. So that’s a nice example of Participatory Budgeting helping to make a broader change in the budget.

You’ve long been an advocate for affordable housing, the New York Times referred to you as an “expert.” What do you see as some of the challenges facing District 39th in this arena? Please boast of your accomplishments here as well.

Affordable Housing, as everybody knows, is one of the hardest problems to solve in city as a whole and is very hard to solve in and around Park Slope. It’s a great neighborhood, and people want to live there. We work on it a few ways.

This year, one of the biggest things is that the rent regulations, the rent laws, are up for renewal in Albany in the spring. And those are the laws that cover the rent stabilized and rent controlled apartments, making sure that people can remain in their homes. Because they will have a modest increase from year to year, it is essential that we maintain that strength.

The Mayor’s new housing plan is also an exciting opportunity to create and preserve existing affordable units. In the neighborhood, back when I was with the Fifth Avenue Committee we were able to build and preserve several hundred units of affordable housing for families in the neighborhood. And those units, together with the public housing, the Wyckoff Houses and rent stabilized housing are what there is for low and moderate income people in and around Park Slope. I think the vast majority of people in Park Slope and, Brooklyn in general want diverse communities, but it’s so hard to get without subsidy and regulations.

You were the main sponsor for a recently introduced package of legislation addressing segregation in the schools. Can you talk a little bit about what this legislation hopes to accomplish?

District 15 is a really good example here. The student body in District 15, which includes not only Park Slope but Red Hook, Carroll Gardens, Sunset Park, and Kensington, is a pretty good match to the student population of New York City. While the district as a whole is diverse, just like the city, the individual schools—especially the elementary schools—are highly segregated for the most part. The legislation would, within the relatively limited powers of the Council, serve to shine a spotlight on the goals of less segregated, more diverse schools and give the DOE some tools for moving forward. There would be an annual report—which doesn’t exist now—that would track and measure progress toward school diversity.

The new PS 133 has a pro-diversity admissions process. It’s not a zoned school; it takes kids from District 15 and District 13 so it already has a broader poll of students. And then it reserves the first third of the seats for kids who are either English language learners or eligible for free and reduced lunch. So even though it’s in the heart of Park Slope, it’s maintaining its diversity and we believe that will continue over time.

Your public safety record is equally impressive having been a lead sponsor in the Community Safety Act, which required the appointment of an Inspector General to oversee the NYPD. Can you talk about some of the positive changes that have come about as a result of this appointment?

Let me start by saying that I’m honored to work with our local precincts, and the commanding officers, and cops who are on the beat. It is obviously important that every family in every neighborhood have a productive relationship with the police and have safe communities. We have a relatively new inspector, Captain Frank Di Giacomo, who is great. The prior commanding officer, Inspector Mike Ameri, really helped lead the way for the whole city on Vision Zero policing and policing for street safety. Recently, the 76th Precinct took some guns off the street. Traffic violence and traffic crashes remain a priority. There is a lot to do and I’m honored to work with the NYPD to do it.

My work with fellow Council Member Jumaane Williams and Communities United for Police Reform to advance a package of legislation to ensure community safety and that people’s civil rights are being protected led to the four-bill package of legislation known as the Community Safety Act.

You were an active proponent for Living Wage NYC that was set to ensure salaries of at least $10 an hour get paid to employees of projects that receive more than $1 million in city subsidies. It caused some contention with the last administration. Mayor de Blasio recently signed an Executive Order to Increase Living Wage and extended it to thousands more workers. How do you see this victory affecting the residents of District 39?

The Living Wage Bill specifically focuses on economic development projects where there’s a public subsidy or public contract, so it’s really about making sure that we spend public money in a way that people don’t get paid poverty wages. The Brooklyn Navy Yard is a good example of a project that gets economic development subsidies. Over time it will make a difference in creating more jobs and making sure that when we do use public dollars that we’re getting the best bang for the buck. And that will matter in areas around the Gowanus Canal where we’re hoping to grow more businesses and provide good jobs. We’ll make sure that we not only get more jobs, but that we get quality jobs.

Promoting Vibrant and Livable Neighborhoods has long been a priority of yours. What is your vision of the future for District 39?

We’re lucky to live in a neighborhood that is my opinion is one of the best on the planet, in terms of being vibrant and livable and walk-able. It’s not just me, the American Planning Association named Park Slope one of the top ten best neighborhoods to live in. We’ve got Prospect Park, such a diversity of small businesses, and a community that really cares.

One of things we’ve been working on for the last year is “Bridging Gowanus.” In the wake of the superfund designation—the chance to really get a clean canal, what we saw after Sandy, and given how much redevelopment pressure there is—we have a really important opportunity to plan and make sure that the community’s goals for the area around the Gowanus Canal guide the future there.

Editor’s note: This past October CM Lander weighed in on the relocation of Brooklyn Parole Headquarters from Downtown Brooklyn to Second Avenue in Gowanus by saying that “the lack of transparency and community engagement in the planning for a facility of this scale has been deeply distressing. I have long been a supporter of ex-offender reentry and community-based justice programs (I started one when I ran the Fifth Avenue Committee), and I know the importance of meeting the needs of formerly incarcerated individuals returning to the community. However, the planning process for this facility has fallen far short of what any community deserves from their government.  Despite multiple requests and several promises, not one single written word about the facility has been provided by DOCCS to the community.”

It’s been speculated that you might be the next Marty Markowitz, what can your constituents expect from you in the future?

For now, I feel very happy with what I’m able to do in the Council. My current term runs three more years and I have the opportunity to run for one additional term, which at this point I plan to do. So I’ve got a while more on the Council and there’s a lot more to do.

After attending graduate school in the 1990s at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute, you have made Brooklyn your home. What is it about Brooklyn, and specifically District 39, that energizes and motivates you?

What we’ve got in Brooklyn is something quite extraordinary. The diversity, the public and community spirit of a neighborhood where people really believe in solving problems together, in taking care of our public goods together are all things I love about Brooklyn.

When you are able to squeeze in some free time, what would a typical Sunday look like for the Lander family in Park Slope?

They’re always busy! I’m lucky to have two wonderful kids and a wonderful spouse to whom I’ve been married coming up on twenty years. My son’s a very active athlete in the 78th Precinct and other youth sports leagues, so there’s almost always a baseball, or basketball, football, or flag football game to go to.

My daughter working together with a group of friends, my wife Meg, and some other moms organized this dynamite event called “Girls Read for Girls.” It’s a read-a-thon inspired by Malala Yousafzai in which they get mostly girls, some boys, together at the library to read for a couple of hours and raise money for girls’ education around the world in places where it is challenged or in short supply. They had over 100 kids at the central branch of Brooklyn Public Library and together they raised, I think now it’s over $12,000.

My diner is definitely Daisy’s Diner, which is right over on Fifth Avenue between Ninth and Tenth Streets, right downstairs from my district office. That’s usually where we can be found for our morning coffee or breakfast. We went for a staff lunch last week to Table 87, which is a relatively new coal oven pizza place at Third Avenue and Tenth Street. So if people haven’t checked that one out yet I would urge them to, he’s even starting to manufacture frozen New York slices! Obviously there are so many, the list of favorite local places is long one!

This past July saw the fifth release from bestselling author, screenwriter and Park Slope mother, Amy Sohn. The Actress is a seductive, rags-to-riches Cinderella story where Prince Charming is not all he appears to be. Set against the backdrop of Hollywood glitz, the sexy page-turner, complete with film premiers, on-the-set scandals and duplicitous agents, also asks deeper questions about authenticity, loyalty, and power. How long can we look the other way when our values are comprised and hard-fought ambitions are at stake? While The Actress starred on the every must-read-beach-list, don’t let the season change stop you from delving into this captivating book.  We caught up with the Brooklyn native to discuss her latest work.

Park Slope Reader: Congratulations on your riveting new novel The Actress. Your two previous novels, Prospect Park West and Motherland took place in Park Slope where you currently reside. Can you describe the genesis of this Hollywood-centric book?

Amy Sohn: It’s not a total departure for me—some of Motherland took place in Los Angeles, and all of my books have had screenwriters and actors as characters. I felt I had mined as much of the Brooklyn BoBo parents demographic as I could, and I was interested in writing something different, set in a different locale. I had been a child actress and tried it briefly as an adult in my early twenties but I wasn’t very good. I wanted to write about a young actress who marries an older man and finds out her marriage is not what she thought. I also wanted to explore the darkness of marriage set against the backdrop of modern-day Hollywood, without making it about material possessions and glitz and glam. I feel I succeeded in that last goal.

Who were your inspirations for the protagonist Maddy Freed?

Many young ingenues from the 1940s to today—too many to name. But the biggest influence on Maddy was Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady. The book is an homage to Henry James’ book. I love the idea of a twentysomething whose inability to listen to anyone but herself is both her greatest quality and the source of her downfall. I found Isabel frustrating and I know some readers will find Maddy frustrating, but Maddy is authentic. How many of us can say we are proud of every choice we made in our twenties?

Maddy Freed possesses a dearth of self-awareness, yet is surrounded by strong, albeit flawed, female characters. Was this contrast intentional?

I think Maddy is self-aware, but she is also totally in love and that gets in the way of her better instincts. Bridget, her manager, was an important character for me—an older woman who rose up in Hollywood when there were few female role models. Even though Bridget is scheming, I understand her. She developed a tough skin because she had to, and now she’s remote and cut off from her own feelings. Kira is also one of my favorite characters, Maddy’s friend and acting partner. I wanted Maddy to have another voice out there showing her that there was another path to professional success than the one that Kira feels Maddy has taken.

The Actress has been referred to as “a Tom Cruise roman à clef,” with a smattering of George Clooney mixed in. Who were your influences for the Steven Weller character?

Steven is an amalgam, including men I’ve dated. That rakish older guy who seems really cultured until you start to scratch the surface, who claims to want an intelligent female partner but doesn’t want her to be smarter than he is. Good hair, great looks. He’s getting a little older and trying to figure out how to stay relevant. And of course, Steven was influenced by the Henry James character Gilbert Osmond, one of the best character names ever.

Your comprehensive knowledge of the Hollywood machine certainly required more than opening up “Page Six”.  What kind of research went into writing The Actress?

I consulted with entertainment lawyers, divorce lawyers, agents, managers, and publicists. I talked to screenwriters and a New School acting alum. I read Hollywood biographies and acting manuals watched many, many movies. It’s great to have Netflix as your procrastination/research.

Prior to becoming a writer, had you ever considered becoming an actress?

I had some success with theater acting in childhood and then went off to college, tried auditioning for about a year, and realized I didn’t really want to do it. I wasn’t studying and I wasn’t losing weight, against my agent’s advice. I booked a Law & Order and did some regional theater, which was fun, but I realized I didn’t like the lack of control that actors have. Writing was a way to make art without having to be allowed to do it.

You’re no stranger to telling a sexy tale, and The Actress doesn’t disappoint in this area. Yet, the novel asks deeper questions about authenticity and fidelity. Would you say this depth parallels your growth as a person and a writer?

That is a very flattering question! I feel this is my most serious novel. It definitely goes into darker territory than the Brooklyn novels, though Motherland is also very twisted. I am fascinated by the internal life of a marriage. I’m also interested in the plight of young women in Hollywood. I don’t think it’s a healthy place for them, though some of that is changing now that there are more women writer-creators.

If Hollywood is symbolic of disingenuous would you say Brooklyn represents the opposite?

Brooklyn can be very disingenuous too—all the coded language around real estate and class. There are not as many phonies in Brooklyn, though. Here the first question at a party is “What do you do?” In LA the first question is “How old are you?” In a way they are the same question but the LA context is, “How can I evaluate you—physically or monetarily—in relation to your time on this earth?”

I also notice that in LA people always say, “You look fantastic!” to each other. That is considered a high compliment there. Here we wouldn’t be openly looks-oriented; that would be seen as shallow. And there is definitely less plastic surgery in brownstone Brooklyn.

Any clues about what Amy Sohn fans can expect next?

I’m working on a screenplay involving women and madness.

Nicole Kear has been a beloved columnist with us at Park Slope Reader for more than a decade.  Little did we know, though, that during these past twelve years she was hiding a big secret.  Back when Kear was in college, she was diagnosed with a degenerative eye disease which doctors told her would eventually lead to blindness.  Over the course of the next fifteen years Kear had kept this diagnosis a secret from everyone except for her immediate family.

That all has changed, however, with the release of her debut memoir, Now I See You, a comedic, yet endearingly honest account of love, life, and starting a family before the lights go out.

We sat down with Kear to discuss her new book and “coming out” with her disease.

Park Slope Reader: When did you decide you were going to write this memoir?

Nicole C. Kear: Maybe five years ago I started working on a proposal for a different memoir—a mommy memoir, essentially like the stuff I wrote for Park Slope Reader—without the entire component of my eyes.  I completely left it out of the 100-page proposal.  My agent tried to sell it and unsurprisingly was not able to. After that didn’t work, I thought what can I add to this story to make it more compelling?  It’s like when you’re watching a movie and are like, yea…duh!

PSR: Was it an active or unconscious decision to leave that out?

NK: It wasn’t active at all.  It was a total default…like a crazy person.

PSR: As a writer, did you journal every day?

NK: No, I don’t even shower every day! The way that it came to be was my husband and I were going away for the night.  Finally he was like, “Nicole, you can write about your eyes.”  “Of course!”  As soon as he said that I was like, what’s wrong with me?!

It’s funny thinking about that now.  When I was in college and I got my diagnosis and still fresh, I took this seminar called 20th Century Feminist Spiritual Autobiography taught by a female rabbi and a nun and a minister.  We read these amazing memoirs about women and had to write our own.  I wrote this piece called “Star Light, Star Bright” and it is the college version of my book.  But so that is kind of where it started…then I became crazy and didn’t tell anyone for fifteen years so it became something that wasn’t a possibility.  So when my husband mentioned it, I thought, that is not only a great idea but the only idea.

PSR: That must have been terrifying though—this part of your life that you actively kept inside.  How did you go back to your memoir and add that component?

NK: I didn’t go back.  I started from scratch.  It’s a completely different book.  Even the characters are different.  Because you know at first, it wasn’t really me.  It didn’t have a huge life-determining factor to it.  It was a completely different novel.

I started to write and it took me so long to write something decent.  I had been writing for years and it had become so habitual to omit any reference to my vision loss.

So I was like, you know what?  I’ll write a scene.  I’ll tell the story of when my son was a baby and I was so tired that I tried to throw myself on the bed.  I didn’t see it, and I fell onto the floor.  So I wrote that scene and literally, I didn’t know how to write that and tell the truth of it.  I was so used to telling people the fake version.

PSR: Was that an emotional experience for you?

NK: Yes.  The good part about it was the humor.  I was able to find the humor in almost all of it.  It allowed me to feel comfortable doing it.  It’s depressing!  But because I gave myself permission to share the humor of it, that really tempered it for me.  It was difficult, but it was also enjoyable.

PSR: That was such a big component of the book.  It’s a heavy subject and a sad story.  But you have this way of balancing it out and this ability to laugh at yourself.  Was that something you always had with you growing up or did you develop that after your diagnosis as a way of coping?

NK:  That’s just an innate thing with me.  I’ve always had that temperament.  As I grew older, it’s something that I strengthened and turned to.  I’ve always been a person who likes to laugh, and frankly, make other people laugh.  I genuinely do feel like an optimistic person.  And it really does help just to laugh about it.

That was hard for me in writing about it, because there is a very fine line between being glib and humorous.  I really feel like my book is a tragic comedy.  It has both sides of the mask, and it is a delicate balance.  The first iterations of the book were very funny—or pathetically trying too hard—but they were trying to be funny.

I would share my drafts with my friends and they would point out that I basically didn’t talk about my vision.  I really didn’t want to discuss it! I thought it would be so heavy and depressing, so I put in as little of that as possible.  My friends and my agent really had to press me.  I was so scared of being too dark.  Extracting the raw honesty of it was really challenging for me.

PSR: Why the ongoing secret throughout your life?  Your career as an actress, as you explain in the book, prompted this decision.  Why keep it going throughout your life after the fact?

NK: Really it was force of habit.  In the beginning the reasoning was more that it was an irrelevant fact.  In my early twenties it didn’t hamper me at all.  I didn’t really need to tell people for any practical reasons…and then there were a lot of compelling reasons not to tell people because, as you say, I was an actress.  It’s so hard to get work anyway you don’t want to give people extra reasons, especially when they’re not relevant!

But then they became more relevant.  And I had become so accustomed to not telling people and compensating.  And it’s hard—this is the thing that’s difficult about any progressive condition.  It just keeps changing and it’s hard to keep changing along with it in response.  Change is difficult.  I was waiting for an obvious cut-off point, or a breaking point.  But it was more of a series of small rock bottoms, not enough to actually trigger any change.

And once you don’t tell people something like that, it becomes very awkward!  Imagine telling people “Oh I’ve known you for ten years and we’ve lived together, we’re roommates and I totally forgot to tell you this one thing!”  So I didn’t do it.  But now I had to do it.  It’s been so weird, but really good.

As I anticipated, it’s an uncomfortable conversation to have…especially within the context of “I wrote this memoir!”

PSR: Now that your children are getting older, they must have known—it’s something that has been part of their existence.  Did you think about them eventually spilling the beans?

NK: It’s true, it would have been untenable to keep this going.  Kids are big blabbermouths.  They were so young and they knew so little.  I gave them little kid-sized morsels of information.  Now they know more because they’re older, and it’s convenient because now everyone knows!

PSR: Was there any sense of betrayal from people that were close to you who didn’t know?

NK: There was no betrayal.   People have been so understanding.  Really.  And I think because now they can read the whole book about why I didn’t tell them and read the whole back story.  The best part about it is A. the release—that conversation’s over and I don’t have to dread it anymore—and B. it’s opened the door to new conversations and deepened friendships, as any act of honesty will.

A Q&A with Denise and Meadow Linn, authors of The Mystic Cookbook

Why did you feel it was important to write The Mystic Cookbook?

We wrote The Mystic Cookbook because we wanted to share the myriad ways that you can harness this pulsating power and infuse it into every dish you prepare. These meals can be transformative and can profoundly inspire and uplift the energy of anyone who eats them. Over the years, we’ve discovered that by embarking on such a culinary journey, you can activate the deepest spiritual wellsprings within you that can lead to powerful transformations and breakthroughs.

By living deliciously, you savor your life. By celebrating the vast array of colorful, flavorful, and delicious foods available to you, you celebrate yourself more fully. Food is both physical and spiritual nourishment, and we wanted to share some of what we’ve learned over the years about the way we eat being a metaphor for the way we live our lives.

I’ve heard you say that The Mystic Cookbook isn’t a cookbook in the traditional sense. What do you mean by that?

Although The Mystic Cookbook contains a number of delicious recipes, it’s actually more of a cookbook for your life. In addition to the recipes, there are also suggestions, activities, and meditations you can do to find the optimal ways to nourish not only your body but also your soul. Research has shown that when you enjoy your food, you actually metabolize it better. So not only is it more fun to relish a meal, but also it’s better for all aspects of your being!

Believe it or not, the way you approach food can have a dramatic impact on your life. While we often think of food as fuel, it sustains us on deeper inner and spiritual levels. By harnessing the secret alchemy of food, you can indeed bring increased joy, health, happiness, and balance into your life. In this way, The Mystic Cookbook is more than simply a recipe book; it’s a gateway into the inner recesses of your soul.

So, what is the secret alchemy of food?

Albert Einstein said, “Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.” This means the universe is filled with pulsating energy, whose vibration can be raised or lowered by our thoughts. Scientific studies have even been conducted that show that plants respond to different types of music and some even respond to human emotion. It makes sense then that the food we eat is filled with life-force energy. It’s influenced by the wind, rain, and sun, but also the energy of the land and the energy of the people who grew and raised it, as well as those who transported it, stocked the grocery shelves, and cooked and prepared it.

It’s said in India that a mother’s food is the most nourishing of all, because when she feeds her child, she’s feeding him love and nurturing, and not just the base elements necessary for fueling one’s body. Although this concept may challenge the way you typically perceive food, this is not a particularly new idea. For centuries ancient peoples have honored and prayed in gratitude to the plants and animals that provided for their sustenance. In France, the term terroir is used to explain how the land and every other aspect that makes a particular region unique add to the specific characteristics of a certain food. For instance, although cabernet grapes are now grown across the globe, they only taste like French cabernet when grown in Bordeaux.

In our modern society, most of us don’t have the time, space, or ability to grow our own food and often we don’t know the provenance of the ingredients in the meals we consume. However, all is not lost. Throughout The Mystic Cookbook, we offer a number of practical suggestions on how you can infuse your food with energy, raise its vibratory rate, and honor the people, plants, and animals that made your meal possible. For example, simply holding your hands over your meal before digging in or saying a simple grace can dramatically affect not just your energy, but also that of the food. Cherishing your food means cherishing yourself. This is the secret alchemy of food.

What is the relationship between foods and our spiritual path?

We tend to think of the food we consume as separate from us; however, as both ancient mystics and modern physicists have come to understand, everything is made up of swirling energy, which means that we are not separate from the universe around us. By understanding the secret alchemy of food and treating your daily meals as something hallowed, you can indeed deepen your spiritual path.

When you take time to savor the flavors, textures, and colors of the foods you consume, you take time to savor your life. Spending a few moments each day cherishing the seemingly small or mundane things, such as the crunch of a juicy autumn apple or the red and white patterns on the interior of a strawberry, you not only are appreciating your sustenance more deeply, but also you when you slow down enough to appreciate, your breathing slows and you become more relaxed. Not only is this good for your health as it will aid in digestion and metabolism, but also when you slow your mind, you’re more open to hear the whispers from God, Spirit, Creator (whatever you choose to call it).

How do our choices about food limit or expand our consciousness?

Believe it or not, many of us from a very young age make decisions about food that can greatly impact our lives in a myriad of ways both physically and spiritually. Research has shown that children, even as babies, can pick up cues from their caregivers about food preferences, and this can lead to lifelong feelings about particular foods. Additionally, without even knowing it, we often have physical or emotional reactions to certain foods based on decisions we made long ago, both early on in this life and sometimes even in a past life. For instance, if as a child your grandmother told you that eating spinach would make you strong like Popeye, as an adult you might find yourself subconsciously drawn to spinach when you need more physical and emotional strength. Alternatively, if you hold the belief that a certain food, such as French fries, is bad for you, regardless of its actual nutritive value, you will find ways (subconsciously, of course) to prove yourself right. When you eat that food, you might even feel ill, not necessarily from the French fries themselves, but because your belief system is so strong.

We live in a society in which many people think very little about their food choices and as a result have poor health and are not nourishing body and soul in accordance with their highest good; yet, there are others who think so much about what they eat that they become stuck in a rigid mindset.

Many people believe that growth comes from suffering, but in The Mystic Cookbook you say that spiritual breakthroughs can come simply by the way you eat. How is this possible?

Simply put, food is much more than, well, just food. By following a few simple steps and understanding the principles laid out in The Mystic Cookbook, you really can eat your way to a deliciously enlightened life! For instance, simply spending a few extra minutes truly enjoying and experiencing your morning coffee can change the entire direction or your day. Alternatively, creating a meal dedicated to abundance can open you to accepting and welcoming the bounty of the Universe to flood your life.

When we think of a spiritual path, we often envision meditation, yoga, fasting, chanting, or prayer. We don’t usually consider our everyday meals as a potential gateway to mystical transformation. Yet, the food you eat and your approach to it can be one of the most powerful pathways to spiritual renewal. Plus, it can be fun and delicious!

How can the color of our food, plates, and dining room affect our consciousness?

Believe it or not, the colors of the food you eat have a compelling impact on your life. Color in fruits and vegetables is an indicator of specific phytonutrients. For example, red fruits such as tomatoes contain lycopene and orange vegetables such as carrots have beta-carotene, both necessary for a healthy, balanced diet. However, color can also dramatically affect your emotions, your demeanor, and even how much you eat.

People who are angry or upset will often calm down in a pink room. Your pulse and blood pressure will go up in a red environment and go down in a blue environment. Certain shades of both blue and yellow can affect the way neurons connect in the brain. Some studies suggest that certain disorders, such as chronic pain, brain injury, and Parkinson’s disease, can be affected in a positive way by color. To enhance your life, eat a colorful diet for both nutritional and metaphysical purposes. Color alchemy works exceedingly well if you hold the intent, as you’re eating a food of a particular color, that the associated qualities of the color are being absorbed into your body. In The Mystic Cookbook there’s a detailed list of each color and its associated properties. We also give some suggestions on which colors bring about which moods in a dining room. For instance, orange can be a great color to inspire creativity and community.

In The Mystic Cookbook you use the phrase, “from nourishment to nirvana.” What does this mean?

Many people think of eating in the same way that they think of getting gas for their car. It’s something you have to do in order to keep going. Some view food as medicine and create strict guidelines for themselves about which foods are “good” and which ones are “bad.” And others yet, think of food as a treat, reward, or some form of hedonistic pleasure. Yet, there’s a place in the middle where the meals you consume can feed your mind, body, and soul and nourish your physical and spiritual appetites. These types of meals can, indeed, sometimes feel spiritual. However, it doesn’t necessarily have to be time intensive to eat in a way that transcends your physical need for sustenance. By taking a few moments to honor the plant or animal that gave its life for your meal or even by taking a few extra seconds to inhale the intoxicating aroma of a sun-ripened peach or sharing a meal with friends rather than eating at your desk at work, can indeed take your snack or meal from simple nourishment to a state of nirvana.

Exploring every corner, intersection, doorway, garden, and street side oddity, Matt Green has a mission: walk every block of all five boroughs of New York City.  This might seem like too hefty a task for even a long-time New Yorker, but Matt comes qualified for the job — in 2010 he completed a cross-country walk from Rockaway Beach, New York to Rockaway Beach, Oregon and catalogued all his small-town discoveries via photos and small blog entries on his website imjustwalkin.com.

So far, Matt has covered a little over 2,000 of his 8,000-mile inter-NYC journey since he started this past New Year’s (his trip across the country was, by contrast, a mere 3,100 miles), and on a Friday night last month, I met up with him on Crosby Street for an interview that took us over bridges, next to on-ramps, through parks, and down alleyways between the borders of Little Italy, Chinatown, Soho, and Tribeca.

So why, after walking across the country, did you decide to walk every block of New York City?

Partially this was a complement to the walk across the country where I saw the entire width of the country, but for like a second in every town, whereas here I’m spending years walking around and around the same place. So it’s just a much more in-depth understanding of one place. The walk across America was a good lesson in how people are the same all across the country, kind of like a breadth way of learning, and this is all about depth, just picking at this one place over and over.

You left your job as a civil engineer to start your walk across the US, and now New York. How did you mentally make that transition?

It feels scary particularly coming from that kind of background, because in no means am I close to starving, but it’s all those little things that I’ve just always had that you never give another thought to — like whatever TV show you like watching every week. It almost sounds silly to say it in hindsight, but at the time you’re like, “Man, I’d hate not to be able to watch this’ like that factors into this big life decision you’re making.”

I can definitely relate to that feeling.

[laughs] So yeah, that was tough. It was kind of a leap of faith, but I was really encouraged on my walk across the country because I spent so little money doing that walk. It’s just this very low-budget vacation, in a sense, and I had this reassuring feeling that if all else went wrong in my life, I could just keep doing this and I would survive. I’m sure it’d get old after a while, but I’d be relatively happy doing that. That made me a lot more secure in the idea that there are all these things that I don’t have that I used to have, but that I don’t need. I like music a lot, but I couldn’t listen to music on my walk — I didn’t want to burn through batteries in my phone listening to music, and I wanted to be able to hear what was around me while I was walking.

For a lot of people, the music thing specifically is a big thing for them. They’re like “I couldn’t go five months without listening to music.” We’ve convinced ourselves that we need all of these routines that we have, and I just didn’t have them. The bottom line is transitioning to this lifestyle where you need very little, and where you rely on the world to provide you with entertainment. Not to say the world’s providing you literally with all your sustenance, but you just free yourself from so many of the costs of life that you think are required.

What have you learned or come to understand from all the miles you’ve walked so far?

The thing that’s most important about it to me is not just the physical act of walking, but walking in an environment where you’re walking because that’s what you’re doing for the day, not because you’re rushing to get somewhere else or trying to get in shape. When you’re walking just for the sake of being out there and moving around and seeing new places, I think that it’s a very interesting and different way to see the city and start to get to know a place as big and as overwhelming as New York. Because for the vast majority of people — myself included — how do you even start with this city, you know? It’s such an enormous, unknowable kind of place. So you buy a tour book or a guide book, or you talk to a friend you know who lives there, or somehow you refer to these other experts to get advice on what’s worth seeing — like what’s historical or cultural, what are the important things that I’d be remiss to not check out. And when you do that, you’re letting these other people tell you what New York is. You’re just kind of following along passively, whereas if you just go on a walk and you don’t know where you’re going, you don’t know anything about it, you’re freed from those expectations and start to see what catches your eye. I think about it as a sideways way of learning about the city.

The diversity of the knowledge you start to acquire is pretty phenomenal. I’ve learned about all sorts of plants in this New York walk — like who would have thought — but you constantly see gardens and you start to wonder, “What is that flower that I’ve seen over and over?” Then you look it up, or in my case you call your mom and she tells you what it is. And I’ve learned about all these edible things that are growing in New York; I think I could survive eating plants I’ve run into.

Do you know about the little museum in this alley? This place blew my mind the other day.

Matt then took me down Cortlandt Alley between Franklin and White Streets to show me “The Museum”, a tiny, unmanned display of toothpaste bottles, misspelled food labels, and homemade self-defense weapons that works under the catchphrase “A SMART MAN’S GARBAGE IS A FOOLISH MAN’S FORTUNE & VICE VERSA.” We both took some photos and Matt jotted a few notes in his flip pad.

I bet you’ve run into tons of little surprises like that place.

Yeah definitely. Maybe I’m more interested in this because of my engineering background, but there’s so much fascinating infrastructure in New York, like layers of things under the streets and inside buildings that accomplish all these tasks that we take for granted. For example, there are all these vent towers that come out of the sidewalk, and most of the time you don’t even notice them, they’re just another thing in the city. There’s one in particular that looks like an air raid siren — it kind of sweeps up and there’s a little pyramid thing on top. So I started noticing these, then I finally had seen enough of them and I got really curious and took a photo, and someone on my blog actually knew what it was — it was a regulator vent for a natural gas line. Then I started noticing all these other vent towers of all these different shapes and sizes and designs, so I started learning about them, so it’s this funny journey that starts taking place when you notice something weird for the first time.

Hey have you ever seen this?

Matt leads me across the street to a small fenced-in patch of grass separating the intersection of West Broadway, Varick, and Franklin Streets called Finn Square.

This square is named after this guy they call Battery Dan. For part of his career he was a judge. These two kids got into a fight over this girl and got sent into court, and Battery Dan was the old-timey judge who would give you advice instead of lecturing you… [reads from sign] “Don’t try to compel a girl to love you if she prefers someone else. Get another to take her place. Don’t wreck or sell your body and soul for diamonds and automobiles.” And he was going to court one day in the Bronx and a dog chased after him and he climbed up a lamppost and started yelling for help. [notices a flower by the sign] Also, I just like this flower — it’s called a plumed celosia.

You’ve been exploring Brooklyn recently. What have your experiences been like there?

A lot of people talk about Brooklyn as if there’s something about “Brooklyn” — especially people who talk about Brooklyn hipsters like that’s what Brooklyn is. But man is that the tiniest little proportion to what Brooklyn is! I mean, it’s like two and a half million people or maybe more than that, so it’s essentially one of the largest cities in the country just by itself.

But in that way, that’s a good reminder of how incredibly vast Brooklyn is and how much diversity there is inside of it. I overheard this past summer someone talking about a meal that they had eaten that was prepared by this chef from some restaurant in Brooklyn, and he described it as “so Brooklyn” — “such a Brooklyn meal” — and I had this idea that at the end of this, to take a whole series of photos that I took in Brooklyn and just have “That’s So Brooklyn” on all of them, ranging from the Hasidic guys to the Hispanic guys playing volleyball to the black guy to —

The perfect ad campaign.. So how much do you plan out where you’re going every day?

I don’t plan it out too far ahead of time, mostly because I’m always running behind on the website trying to get my photos up and everything, so generally it’s the last thing I do before I set out. Today I scribbled half the route before I left the house, then I sat in the park and figured out the next segment. If I’m in an area where I haven’t walked much, it’s easier to just pick a street and go. But once you start filling in the streets, you have to be careful about where you’re going so you don’t end up stuck amidst these streets you’ve already walked.

You removed the donation button on your blog because you have enough funds to get you through early 2013. How has the experience of living off donations been?

When I first started the walk, every donation was really exciting. Like before that, when was the last time I was excited about $15, you know? So that was a really cool feeling. Then after the New York Times article came out, a lot of people started making donations, and I got enough to get through the whole year. It almost reached the point where it was routine, so yeah … the risk is that you run low and no one cares anymore, but it’s more exciting this way.

You’ve mentioned in interviews about your cross-country walk that people had these fears you’d get hurt or mugged, but you learned that people are a lot nicer than you’d expect. Would you say the same for New York?

Definitely. The major difference is that when I was walking across the country … [pauses] Oh, do you know what these are?

Matt stops us in the middle of Kenmare Street to show me a white tile embedded onto the road called a Toynbee tile. We cross the street, wait for a red light, then go back to read the tile while Matt tells me more about them. This one says “HOUSE OF HADES / BLACK GLOVES VS / THE MEDIA MACHINE / IN SOCIETY 2009.”

What did you think of the New Yorker/Tourist sidewalk lanes a couple years back?

Well I guess I’d have to walk in the tourist lane. You can look down on the tourist lane or you can look up to it, to people who actually care about what’s around them. And you know what? I think that mentality, like this anti-tourist, “— we’re the real New Yorkers” mentality, is an extremely lazy way to deal with the infinitude of New York. If you were a tourist every day and you were just breathtaken by all this stuff around you, you’d never get anything done. You’d always feel like you were missing out on something else. And the easy solution is to just be like “oh that stuff’s stupid, I’m gonna go to work and make my money like a man,” you know, like there’s this weakness or something about actually being interested in the world. It’s my belief that it is laziness and an unwillingness to experience it.

So out of all your New York walk experiences so far, do you have any favorites?

The great thing about New York City — and the great thing about just walking — is that you don’t really have a favorite part or area. There are certainly areas I’d like to live in more than others, but when you’re just walking through a new place, who cares? You’re just seeing somewhere new — some are more exciting, some are more peaceful, and there are all kinds of goods and bads mixed up, but the bottom line is it’s just exciting for me to be somewhere new, wherever it is.

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You can follow Matt’s progress on his website www.imjustwalkin.com.