An Interview With: Nouk Baudrot
You may remember Nouk from a recent post. I became very intrigued with his style, and I had a few questions for him which turned into an interview, with topics ranging from personal responsibility to what exactly style is.
“You can always judge a person coming out of the supermarket, being the most hilarious fashion mishap on earth. But don’t waste your time and energy on it, eventually all the derision makes you bitter and takes away the ability to be really, and truly happy about the one person coming out of the supermarket being absolutely magnificent.”
clusterflock interviews: Hillman Curtis
Hillman Curtis is a designer, author, and filmmaker whose work has informed, inspired, and influenced a generation of designers interested in the possibilities of new media. His books include Making the Invisible Visible: Process, Inspiration and Practice for the New Media Designer and On Creating Short Films for the Web, a book that was instrumental for me as I set out to film my own documentary. His series of interviews with artists and designers continues to set the standard for video on the web. This interview was conducted via email and I am grateful for his participation.
Can you give us a brief overview of your career? How did you get started, what led you here?
I started designing in ‘95 or ‘96. I was a rock musician and had just been dropped by MCA records. I had made a small amount of money from a publishing deal and I took the money and bought a used Mac II. I had made all of the band’s posters and flyers and — having come to the obvious conclusion that I was through with the music business — thought I’d have a go at design. I worked my way up to an Art Director position at Macromedia and from there started hillmancurtis.
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clusterflock interviews: Jason Kottke
The second in a series of clusterflock interviews, Jason Kottke, of course, runs kottke.org and has been instrumental in shaping contemporary blog culture. I had the pleasure of guest blogging at kottke.org a few weeks ago, and the experience prompted me to want to know more about the person behind the site, the process of creating what kottke.org has become, and the pressures associated with running it. The interview was conducted by instant message and edited from there.
I wanted to start by finding out how you got to this point, what the process of creating kottke.org was.
Well, I’d been putting stuff online since early 1995. First, a personal site, then a site called 0sil8, which was a series of experiments in design, writing, etc. Pushing the limits of HTML. kottke.org started as an online diary for me because I wanted something I could update continually, not just once a month or every two months. I drew my initial inspiration for the site from the online diaries of the time…not so much from other weblogs. The process was very gradual. No planning, really. I almost never plan anything out…I just head towards things that hold my interest.
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clusterflock interviews: Susannah Breslin
As I mentioned yesterday, clusterflock is adding a new feature — a series of interviews with people who have made a niche for themselves on the internet. The first interview is with Susannah Breslin from The Reverse Cowgirl. I published a short fiction of Susannah’s many years ago at elimae and since then have followed her writing on sex, pornography, and the human condition closely. I am thankful for her willingness to participate as the first in the clusterflock interviews series and hope that you enjoy the interview as much as I enjoyed talking with Susannah.
Tell us a little about the inception and history of The Reverse Cowgirl.
I launched Reverse Cowgirl 1.0 in late 2002. At the time, I was living in Los Angeles and working as a freelance writer and writing about sex quite a bit. There were things that I couldn’t “sell” to magazines–because they were too graphic, too weird, too out there. So, blogs were spawning, and I realized that was a place where I could write whatever I wanted about whatever I wanted. My biggest influence at the time was Daze Reader; these days, sex blogs are a dime a dozen. For personal reasons, Reverse Cowgirl went offline a year later, but I relaunched the blog, Reverse Cowgirl 2.0, nearly two years ago. I’m not interested in running a blog that’s a links dump for sex stuff; there’s plenty of that out there already. I write about sex-related things that are new, interesting, and in some way beautiful. Increasingly this year, I’m trying to make the blog more personal. So, I’ve been writing more about my life and my thoughts on the complex subject of sex.