Do you ever think that the qualities that make you great are actually problems?
Oh, yeah. But the things that make a person average are also problems. The things that make someone not good at anything at all are a problem. If you want to be the greatest of all-time at something, there’s going to be a negative side to that.
Tag: gq
The Strange Tale of the North Pond Hermit
“With no audience, no one to perform for, I was just there. There was no need to define myself; I became irrelevant.”
Russell Brand and the GQ awards: ‘It’s amazing how absurd it seems’
The glamour and the glitz isn’t real, the party isn’t real, you have a much better time mucking around trying to make your mates laugh.
Russell Brand and the GQ awards: ‘It’s amazing how absurd it seems’
The NBA’s Most Stylish Players: GQ.
Even Westbrook has his limits, of course—Kanye’s infamous leather kilt, for instance. Though in his next breath Russ allows that he’d “be open to it if it were a slimmer fit.”
The NBA has had fashion moments before—Clyde Frazier wearing his wide-brimmed Borsalino on the cover of Esquire, the introduction of the Air Jordan in the mid-‘80s, Allen Iverson bringing cornrows, baggy jeans, and garish jewelry from the hood to the hardwood in the late ’90s—but the sine waves of high fashion and locker-room style have never synced up quite like they do right now.
The one time I got a bunch of prizes, I just assumed I’d win them all. […] I really saw something in myself and I thought, ‘Oh, my God. I really did want that thing!’ Some part of me was disappointed that I got tricked into thinking it was important. I told myself, if that happens again, I don’t want to do that. I’ve since realized that it was good I didn’t win, because I wasn’t ready.
Bill Murray on the zen of not winning the Academy Award for his role in Lost in Translation.
Tent City, U.S.A. – George Saunders – GQ
A field study, in these Hard Times, of the Homeless (as observed in the H Street Encampment, Fresno, California). Being an examination of who they are, how they think, and what they do.
See also the excellent Homeless in Sacramento: Welcome to the new tent cities.
My Father’s Fashion Tips – GQ
The turtleneck is the most flattering thing a man can wear because it strips a man down to himself—because it forces a man to project himself. The turtleneck does not decorate, like at tie, or augment, like a sport coat, or in any way distract from what my father calls a man’s “presentation”; rather, it fixes a man in sharp relief and puts his face on a pedestal—first literally, then figuratively. It is about isolation, the turtleneck is; it is about essences and first causes; it is about the body and the face, and that’s all it’s about.
This is a surprisingly great interview with Jason Segel (via Austin). My favorite bit:
I had two friends in high school who sort of showed me how a piano works. And I just spent two years being terrible at it until I was good at it. That’s just me. There’s no way I’m actually intrinsically talented at writing, acting, playing music, puppeteering. It’s that I’m willing to be shit at them for a while, until I’m good at them.
Mark Larson 