Photoshop’s Original Manipulator Renders Quietly
Let’s play analogies. Bill Gates is to Microsoft as who is to Photoshop? Give up?
“Most of the time, when I walk around, I’m pretty anonymous,” says Thomas Knoll, the 52-year-old Photoshop creator and software engineer. “But I can walk into any bookstore in the country and find the section that I created.” Knoll continues to retain a hidden-on-the-bookshelf profile despite Photoshop’s revolutionary reach across the creative industries and pop cultural landscape.
At its simplest, Photoshop is an image-editing program. On a grander scale, Photoshop has transformed the way almost every artistically inclined profession functions. Though other like-minded softwares exist, Photoshop has long reigned as the indisputable industry...
Poolhall Hijinx with the Young Star
Max Thieriot is arranging the balls on a pool table inside a billiards hall above a nail salon in a Koreatown strip mall. We’re the only ones in the joint, and the Korean gentleman who has us marked down for an hour decides to turn up the volume as a Foo Fighters song comes on the radio. Thieriot’s making sure that stripes and solids alternate but his mind is off at the racetrack.
“I race the Baja. There’s three Baja races; the Baja 500, the Baja 1000… It’s pretty full on. There’s a lot of people who spend a lot of money and there are lots of big teams with big sponsors. I drive my dad’s racecar,” says Thieriot as he breaks, sinking a stripe. One after the other, stripes drop into the pockets. We’re here to talk about the actor’s upcoming film...
A Man, A Plan, A Legendary Literary Quarterly
When I go to meet Lorin Stein, I’m expecting to find the man I’ve read about in various profiles: Lorin Stein owns a manual typewriter. Lorin Stein drinks martinis, smokes cigarettes in his office. Lorin Stein is a flirt, a social creature, a man-about-town, a cosmopolitan intellectual, and, as of April 2010, the newest editor of The Paris Review, which happens to be one of the world’s most legendary literary magazines.
It’s a lot to anticipate. And there he is, suddenly, appearing from his back office in The Paris Review’s Chinatown loft, extending a hand and giving a firm shake.
He’s tall, thin, and brisk—neatly buzzed hair shows off a bald head and elfish ears, and blue eyes that he fixes on me as we take our seats in his office...
The Debonaire Bass Specialist on Crafting Dancefloor Killers
“I’ve never played in France,” Fred Falke marvels on a phone call from his studio in Toulouse. “I know it sounds weird, but I never get any requests from France.” This comes from a guy who, along with his sometimes collaborator Alan Braxe, helped define early-21st century post-Daft Punk house music from France.
So why haven’t the French asked him to DJ when so many of his records have been soundtracking filthy nights amongst dance floors across Paris since 2000? Who knows and who cares? It’s their loss. Falke would rather use his studio in Toulouse as a bat cave. He retreats there to craft his thick, deep house tracks, which exploits his training in classical piano and his later days as a bass player in various “crappy...
The Comic Filmmaker’s Intentional Communities
David Wain is chatting away about his new film, Wanderlust, an oddly affecting comedy about two recently unemployed Manhattanites (played by Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston) whose financial tailspin forces them to relocate to a free love commune. This is the fourth feature Wain has helmed since attaining cult status back in 2001 with his debut Wet Hot American Summer, which, despite being beloved, was made for two million dollars and grossed only about two hundred thousand. “I almost sold my apartment just so I could keep going.” So Wain knows a thing or two about financial panic.
Even more illuminating might be Wanderlust’s other major obsession: communal living. It’s a motif that has already figured prominently in Wet Hot’s...
Clandestine Paris Nights with a Lovelorn Scribe
“...Then did i finally kiss her?” a narrator from one of Chicago-based penman Adam Levin’s short stories dangles in front of the expectant reader. “Fuck you.” Fuck you for even asking.
Levin’s collection, Hot Pink, out in April from literati titan, McSweeney’s, harbors an attitude towards the rituals of romance, yet the stories are as tender and harmless as they are cocky and ignoble. Much of this range relies on Levin’s comic specialty—youthful spectacle—but also his love of the chase in its various forms: a story about being 17 and hormonally surging; a story of a mechanized social experiment based on finding a girl that looks “like the kind of slutty-looking girl who says that girls in miniskirts look slutty”; or a story about a missed...
Cocktologists Crush on Fortified Wine, Darling The beagle is restaurateur Matt Piacentini’s latest New York City venture, a pre-Prohibition style cocktail lounge lined with blueberry and cream-patterned wallpaper. It is warm and familiar, decorated with framed vintage etiquette columns, winking at a more formal time and entreating you to put on pearls or a top hat. And what’s wrong with that? There is much to be gained from revisiting the past, not least of which are long-lost recipes for tipple. Bar manager Dan Greenbaum is one of a handful of mixologists across the country reviving classic sherry cocktails to the delight of serious drinkers in the East Village. “Sherry?” says Greenbaum, feigning the look of confusion on a...
