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Filed under: Looked Into Tagged: Brian Palmer, Claire Hoffman, interviews, Prince
Perhaps, like me, you've heard about Claire Hoffman's interview with Prince in last week's Talk of the Town, even if you haven't read it yet. The one where, tapping a Bible, he's all, "God came to earth and saw people sticking it wherever and doing it with whatever, and he just cleared it all out. He was, like, 'Enough.' " (Okay, now I've read it, to get the real quote.)
Feel free to keep it meta with this interview of Hoffman by Brian Palmer, a rangy discussion of Hoffman's techniques and the journalists she counts as influences, at The New Yorker and elswehere. About her Prince interview, she reveals that he "wouldn't let me use a tape recorder or my notepad. I walked out and sat in my car and wrote for an hour. I don't have long chunks of dialogue, but I was able to remember stuff." (Wow. I interviewed someone on the phone last night with a notepad, and I'm not sure it will yield a chunk as long as the quote above.)
This revelation of Prince's tape-recorder prohibition puts a new angle on the claim, reported by Perez Hilton, by "Prince insiders" who say that Prince was misquoted and point to the fact that Hoffman...didn't record the interview.
Now, if I was doing this right, I'd interview Palmer, and then maybe someone would interview me....
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Some writing by Emily Gordon
- Review: A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore (for Newsday)
- Annotated slide show: a wet, festive 2009 Coney Island Mermaid Parade (for nycgo.com)
- Proposal: A better-looking MetroCard (for A Brief Message)
- Feature: Muslim immigration iconography in the Netherlands, and an interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali (for Print)
- Review: Does a redesign of The New Republic mean a change of tune? (for Print)
- Interview: four online obsessives and visual cataloguers, Kate Bingaman, Nicholas Felton, Ellie Harrison, and John D. Freyer (for Print)
- Review: King's Gambit: A Son, a Father, and the World's Most Dangerous Game by Paul Hoffman (for Newsday)
- Interviews: winning New Visual Artists Eleanor Grosch, Zigmunds Lapsa, Christian Cervantes, and Kate & Camilla (for Print)
- Profile: lindy hop legend Frankie Manning (for Newsday, with Robert Fouch)
- Feature: Rea Irvin, illustrator, bon vivant, and The New Yorker's first art director (for Print)
- Profile: screenwriter and novelist Joe Keenan (for Newsday)
- Review: My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World by Julian Dibbell (for Newsday)
- Review: Charles Dickens by Jane Smiley (for Newsday)
- Review: Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry (for Print)
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- Report: The New Yorker's redesigned website (for Print)
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- Review: The Complete New Yorker (for Print)
- Interview: Matthew Diffee on the appropriately inappropriate cartoons of the The Rejection Collection (for Print)
- Interview: Roz Chast on Brooklyn, pysanky eggs, and animation (for Newsday)
- Review: books about various New Yorker cartoonists by Liza Donnelly and Iain Topliss (for Newsday)
- Review: Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life by Linda H. Davis (for Newsday)
- Interview: Edward Gorey (for Newsday)
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Comments
O joy! Thanks so much for this!
Here's an angle that I haven't seen mentioned--according to Kevin Smith's movie An Evening with Kevin Smith, which is tremendously entertaining and features a long anecdote of an encounter with his Purple Badness, Prince has mic'd every room in Paisley Park, and the tapes are always running. Would Prince also so wire the "thirty-thousand-square-foot Italianate villa"? Hmmm. The little twerp may have nutty views--surely does have nutty views--but he's certainly shrewd about power. In the ordinary run of things, I'd suggest that few celebrities would have less credibility taking on the vaunted fact-checking department of The New Yorker, but I don't know.