Ben Yakas

A four-part interview series with Jack Douglas, a pivotal rock producer in the 1970s who worked with everyone from Patti Smith to the New York Dolls, from Aerosmith to Cheap Trick, from Miles Davis to The Who. That included a decade-long working relationship and friendship with John Lennon; Douglas was in the studio with Lennon the night before he was killed.

Sketchy Interviews was a recurring series on Gothamist I started in which I did "visual interviews" with some of the best illustrators, cartoonists and graphic artists working in the city.

"We are, for better or for worse, for whatever dysfunction there may be in there, we are a family. We've been through things together that nobody's been through. And I just think that, that's not something to be taken lightly."

Andy Warhol is credited with producing over 10,000 pieces of art in his lifetime, a truly impressive amount of work. But Warhol's got nothing on Steve Keene, who has created more than 300,000 paintings, and is widely considered one of the most prolific artists in all of human history.

"I love the fact that this turned out to be a tragedy. When we started this process, we didn't know that the biggest, most heartbreaking antagonist to Jimmy McGill would be his own brother, Chuck."

"I think that, especially with the Avatar people, that's just so much of the fun of the show...finding just how people form communities in the smallest, most intimate kind of niche ways."

"I think sometimes I've looked back at some of my own work and seen it as a little overstuffed, with either lyrics that are trying too hard, or just things that I see like, oh, he's trying to be funny or smart or something. And I don't believe this guy right now. He's bullshitting me."

Artist Jane Dickson lived, worked and raised two children in an apartment on 43rd Street and 8th Avenue during the late '70s and early '80s, documenting the rapidly-changing landscape of the area with her drawings, paintings, and photography.

"That's what's interesting to me about the human experience, is that we all think we're trying to do the right thing, and we end doing the wrong thing."

The interview doesn't always make sense, but then again, neither does throwing footballs around in tuxedos, or a drug dealer confronting a high schooler who looks like he's 40-years-old on a green screen roof, or yelling at someone to leave their stupid comments in their pocket. Sometimes not making sense is its own kind of sense.

"What's the story about? It's the story of women's enslavement. That's part of this story. It's a major part of it. But repression and control and fear are all in it together and until the repressed and the repressor get on the same page, nothing is going to shift."

"With a lot of people, they don't know they're racist. They just think somehow that there are a hundred thousand white men who could do the job of president better than Obama could. It's just this sickness we have, like the Civil War didn't end. It's not just the South, it's people everywhere."

"[There are] so many languages and smells and experiences you can have on just a one block radius, that you can't get anywhere else if you went to another country."

His instantly recognizable New Yorker covers, which feature keen observations and romance-tinged glimpses of life in the city, are among his most famous works.

"Somebody once said to me, 'The worst part of working at The Simpsons must be that you can't go home and watch The Simpsons.'"

"There's something about the way that Bob puts music together that...you don't really understand except that things are happening when you don't expect them to happen, and he's taking you to places emotionally that you wouldn't normally expect."

"[Trump] is a bit like Brent. The big difference between him and David Brent is that Brent is a bit of a loser. That's why Brent has our sympathy more, because he's struggling. He's against the odds. Whereas, Trump was handed the winning ticket from birth."

"There was a real intimacy and a real beauty in the way people were interacting with each other on the beaches that is not quite the same at a city park or on the subway. At the beach, it was almost like people forgot other people were around."

One of the standout stories of season two of Master of None is "New York I Love You," a joyous standalone installment that takes the vignette format of the show and runs it to its logical conclusion.

"I think it's also been a show about people on a wheel who keep jumping into new projects, new relationships, new loves, and kind of hoping that this is the one that's going to finally make them complete. This is the one that's going to finally shape them, only to realize that's kind of a never-ending cycle."

"I think of this idea that exists out in the world: the only guy who can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. I don't know if that comes from real life, I think that comes from stories, from the stories we're telling and putting out there, and I wonder if we are taking enough responsibility for that."

"I believe that if ethics were a mandatory class for all human beings on Earth, and everybody had to learn about the basic philosophies of good and bad, right and wrong—in a non-religious way, in a non-tribal way, where it's just purely like these are what thinkers think about right and wrong—I think that most of the problems in the world would go away."

(You can read part two of the interview here)

"I think that's one of the great paradoxes of the show, right? Because, we're laughing at so many things that are wrong, but at the same time, maybe we're just all drowning in this politically correct world that we have to live in now, or that we try and live in. And Larry is constantly popping those balloons."

"So I think there's an element of that: I've just got to do as much as I can. Time's running out. And time goes so quickly. I've got to keep writing and keep trying to produce work."

"You say to someone, 'I’m gonna read a poem to you,' they’re either gonna run away or cover their ears, or just think this is a curiosity, but if they hear one on the radio when they’re not expecting it or see one on a billboard or on commuter trains, then it gets into them before they’ve deployed their anti-poetry shields."

"Maybe I'm just too overly romantic about it, but there's something special about skate culture."

"Six MacGuffins is never anyone's first choice, Ben. [Laughs] It's a lot of MacGuffins."

"Jimmy did a lot of things that were wrong, he had a lot of collateral damage in his world, but he was very naïve about it, or carried away, or just kind of oblivious to those kind of things. And in this last season he did some stuff that was very pointedly self-interested and destructive. And he just carried on doing it even though he was fully aware of the bad parts of it."

[Also check out interviews with Saul castmates Rhea Seehorn and Jonathan Banks]

"It’s what I wanted since I was a kid, finally somebody writing about my music. That's what I used to collect: magazines of all my favorite artists. So it's kinda the dream."

"I do pop onto Twitter now and again and I love the fact that the audience are still trying to work it out. They want to know but they don't want to know. The amount of people that I've got on the street who dive out in front of me, who beg me for a little spoiler—it's all over the place, and it's great fun. I'm loving it."

[Also check out an interview with Ser Bronn about loyalty, Lannisters & dragons]

"The only thing I think we were a little rusty at, honestly, was gauging how many stories we should pack into an episode. There was this backlog. Larry was sitting on all these awkward situations like Smaug the dragon and now he's ready to share them."

[Also check out interviews with Curb castmates Susie Essman & JB Smoove]

"The thing I think is really different about this is I controlled the mix of the music, and they kind of encouraged and allowed me to really change the music."

[Also check out this interview with bassist Scott Devendorf about the making of I Am Easy To Find]

"I'm hoping that young people see the magic in it...I don't have to be the President of the United States. Why don't you run, and I'll support you? I need you all to get involved. I want people to say, 'if Jimmy can do it, I can do it.' That's magic. "

"It was a sound in my head and never, for a second, do I have any doubts about that. Sometimes there’s a question, if you get asked, 'What makes you think that you can write for women?' Stuff like that. I was never given a choice. I never needed to have permission to write for a woman because I had a woman character come to me, like a muse, and demand to be written for."

"I remember the first time we ran it, I was like, 'I don't like yelling at Gil.' And by the end of Broadway I loved yelling at Gil. I would stomp my feet and I started screaming, and being mad so much."

"I've been listening to records for so long that they're just in my bloodstream. They've become me, you know what I mean? Whatever influenced me became me and so I just kind of reference myself in them, if that makes sense."

Gordon connects the improvisatory nature of Body/Head's music to the No Wave music and art scene she had come up in when she first arrived in New York in the '80s. "If you're playing improv, you're actually incredibly vulnerable."

"People say, 'Well you're glorifying the mob in this movie. You're glorifying your father in the storytelling here.' I say absolutely not...when his end came, he was handcuffed to a bed and his death certificate said he choked on his own vomit and blood, okay. So I don't see any glory in that."

"We really helped reinvent what a bar band was. We redefined the entire bar band scene without knowing we were doing that."

"But that's been one of the special things for us: that people come away from it saying something like, 'Oh, it's different than I expected. It's sweeter. It's heartwarming.' So, I love that. And also, hopefully, for me as a creator or artist, this serves an example of me not wanting to put myself in any boxes, like I only want to do sketch comedy or parodies or something like that."

"I'm a very rules-abiding, polite individual, so I suppose I get a lot of my vicarious rudeness out through writing them. I think toxic is a good way to put it, I would not argue with that.

" I like sci-fi and fantasy where it feels like the world has existed before the movie starts and will continue after that. Lord of The Rings feels like that, Star Wars feels like that. So with this movie, one thing that we really wanted to do is feel like these characters have existed before, but more importantly will exist after the movie is done."

"I think it was triggering to people. It was a very truthy show. People really, really cared so much about the authenticity that it was almost like a constant stream of fact-checking the whole time, but these are fictional characters."

[Also check out an interview with GIRLS castmember Alex Karpovsky]

"But renewal for me, there's been a career renewal for me, which I'm very grateful for, and I'm not going to say that it's come with a cost, because yes people have come up to me and just beat that to death. People will thank me, congratulate me, they beam some kind of positivity toward me all day every day about the Trump thing."

"So if you're in Hawaii on Valentine's Day, and you just like go out there into the surf, Michael may be out there just raging, talking to the moon."

"We like to say if Philip and Elizabeth worked as hard on their relationship, and communicated as much about their feelings and their relationship as we do, there would be no show."

"I was chasing those pairings. Not necessarily folks who are in direct conversation with each other, but folks who I believe were rich writers and storytellers who, combined with another rich writer and storyteller, could build out an arc of an evening that felt like a single experience."

"I'll tell you what my terror was: knowing who I wanted to be as an actor. Knowing what I wanted to achieve as an actor and knowing deep down, really knowing deep down, I wasn't there."

Creators Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch talk about the original GLOW TV show, Ruth & Debbie's complicated friendship, controversial romantic pairings, and a little film called Captain Marvel.

"I think you have to be willing to take little atoms of your own personal experience, take a little slice of the most extreme emotion in your life, and then make a song out of that. That's not who you are as a person, but it's an element of human experience, and it might be one that a lot of people can relate to."

"Good narrative to me has three essential qualities to it: it has to have been coherent, surprising, and inevitable. And trying to get those last two right, trying to get to something that surprises but also feels like it has to have developed in the way that it did, is almost an oxymoronic feat."

"I'm gonna just take my time and write music how I want to and when I want to, and tour as much as I can, and hopefully that provides some kind of longevity so that I can keep doing this. And not necessarily ride the hype wave onto the hype beach and wash up."

"It’s fun to play a vampire once or twice, but then having to play that character again and again in a TV version, I think would be too much for us. We decided to trick other actors into doing that."

"I personally am someone who does believe in the power and importance of forgiveness and redemption, but I think that needs to be earned and I think there's a lot of work that needs to be done to get it."

"Jimmy McGill hurts people inadvertently. Saul Goodman just knows that someone's going to get hurt."

"It's how you greet change that says a lot about you as a person. And I don't think it's unique to comedians, a lot of people have a real need in themselves that no one should tell them what to do. I think you see that a lot in comedy."

"I remember in 2011, [we would] talk about wanting to build an artistic community based around one project that could involve different jobs, different directors, different writers, different groups. That was part of the initial goal of the whole enterprise. So to see it in fruition, and then maturing, is really exciting."