Hello. I’m Gavin Edwards, a writer and photographer living in Los Angeles. You might know me from my work for magazines and newspapers (Rolling Stone, The New York Times, lots of other places), from my ’Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy and Other Misheard Lyrics series of books, or from my long-running career as a freelance know-it-all.
Photographed recently on Hollywood Boulevard.
Only in Los Angeles. Thanks for reading; I hope your 2011 was all it should be, and that your 2012 will be even more.
posted 24 December 2011 in Photos. no comments yet
I have another piece in The New York Times Magazine: this one’s a conversation with David Fincher and his editing team of Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall, breaking down a four-minute sequence in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. I’d always wanted to know more about editing: it’s an omnipresent but largely unconsidered aspect of what we watch. As the maxim has it, “editing is directing the movie for the second time.”
“The cutting room is this beautiful, tranquil place,” Baxter told me. “You get into this illusion that the film is yours.” The article will be a two-page spread this Sunday, or you can check out the slideshow version on the Times website now.
posted 15 December 2011 in Outside. no comments yet
I’m always happy to learn more about the state of the art in artificial languages, such as this article in yesterday’s New York Times. If that whetted your appetite for a historical overview of totally made-up dialects, you might enjoy a 1996 Wired article I wrote that delivers exactly that.
posted 13 December 2011 in Links, Outside. no comments yet
From “Owner of a Lonely Heart,” the 1983 chart-topper by Yes:
Look before you leap / And don’t you hesitate at all
Listen, Jon Anderson, I am perfectly willing to follow your commands down to the last detail, but you need to make up your mind.
posted 13 December 2011 in Tasty Bits. 1 comment
Today, I give thanks for self-referentiality; over the course of my life, it has made me very happy. And this week, it enabled me to write the oral history of the oral history of oral histories. Happy Thanksgiving.
posted 24 November 2011 in Outside, Self-reflexive, Tasty Bits. no comments yet
As you may have heard, legendary fantasy writer Anne McCaffrey died this week at age 85. I remember her work fondly; not only did it expand my imagination in junior high school, it provoked the opening paragraph to an article I wrote about Coolio fifteen years ago. To wit:
Coolio raps for a living, but he’d rather ride dragons. When he’s not onstage or in the studio, he reads and rereads Anne McCaffrey’s series of Pern fantasy novels. “I think it’s her compassion,” he says. “Plus I like the idea of speaking to dragons telepathically.” So today in London, Coolio has canceled a smorgasbord of phone interviews with Scandinavian journalists so he can restock his Pern library. Once he’s completed his collection, he plans to line them up in order and read them all again. Coolio strides into a large Dillon’s bookstore, locates the science-fiction section, and starts snatching McCaffrey’s novels off the shelves. He quickly considers each one before shoving it back or tossing it in the pile of keeps at his feet: Dragonflight, Dragsonsdawn, All the Ways of Pern, Firstfall, and Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern. But he scowls: There’s a glitch. “Where the fuck’s The White Dragon?”
(Excerpt from “The Rebirth of Coolio,” the cover story of Details, March 1996.)
posted 23 November 2011 in Tasty Bits. no comments yet
Before a recent trip to Santa Barbara, I had never heard of the acorn woodpecker, which drills holes in trees and telephone poles and then methodically fills them with acorns. (I wonder if acorn woodpeckers then have epic battles with raiding squirrels.) Below, a picture of the resulting acorn treasure trove, which looks like an Eames pattern to me:
posted 18 November 2011 in Photos. no comments yet
My apologies for the dilatory nature of posting here lately; I’ve been crazy busy working on projects that I can’t actually tell you about yet: although they are awesome, they’re being published anywhere from Halloween 2012 to Christmas 2013. But I’ll have some fun morsels for you shortly, including the next installment of the 1988 countdown. I neglected to mention my article on Jane’s Addiction coming together for a new album (behind the Rolling Stone paywall), but can I make up for it with a link to a short piece about an even more eagerly awaited reunion, that of Beavis and Butt-Head?
posted 17 November 2011 in Articles, Outside. no comments yet
Today is the fiftieth birthday of director Peter Jackson, the most famous New Zealander since Edmund Hillary. I’ve interviewed Jackson twice, and while he’s not really into self-disclosure, he’s been unfailingly genial and at ease with his own high-powered geekiness. Much as I enjoy The Lord of the Rings trilogy, my favorite film of his remains 1994′s Heavenly Creatures, about a real-life 1954 murder–go watch it right now if you’ve never seen it. As a small birthday celebration, I’ve added my 2005 Rolling Stone interview with Jackson to the archives–we talk about King Kong a lot, but also his weight loss and the then-nascent Hobbit project.
I lived for many years on Broadway, about two blocks away from Zuccotti Park, where the Occupy Wall Street protesters have encamped. (Although Zuccotti Park itself is not familiar to me–I believe it was fenced up and under renovation for most of the years I lived near it.) In recent weeks, Occupy Wall Street’s winding, random parade routes through lower Manhattan have reminded me of how I walked the same streets with a quarter in my hand. I never ended up at Zuccotti Park, but I did finish one walk a block away.
posted 17 October 2011 in Photos, Self-reflexive. no comments yet
