Wes
I pulled this picture from a New York Magazine article on Wes Anderson. The caption for this picture reads "Wes Anderson at Deyrolle, his favorite taxidermy shop, in Paris."
So, Anderson has been to more than one taxidermy shop. (Taxidermy: Greek for the arrangement of skin) And, although cool and erie, I think having a baby elephant (over Wes' left shoulder in pic) mounted is more wrong than the other animals I see stuffed in the pic. Why is that?
The photographer did an awesome job capturing Wes in the above picture.
Here's a quote from the article:
Anderson often finds himself in situations like this: real-life circumstances that have the same absurd, art-directed quality as his films. You may be tempted to shake your head and simply say that Anderson has been incredibly lucky, which is true, but that doesn’t give enough credit to his talents—not just as a director, but more generally as someone who has constructed a life almost preposterously conducive to the pursuit of fantastical whims.I like that phrase: "someone who has constructed a life almost preposterously conducive to the pursuit of fantastical whims." The phrase made me think of Demetri Martin's interview on NPR yesterday when he talked about his decision to quit law school after his second year and become a comedian. It's the budget version of the life Wes has fashioned but no less meaningful probably.
At a certain point, one month into law shcool, he realized that he didn't like what he was doing each day. But he had no other plan or version of himself that wasn't a lawyer. He remembers doing some specific soul-searching and thinking, "OK, I'm dreading each day I go to school. Not because it's too hard. There's just no passion. I'm not excited about what I'm doing." So he did little thought experiments. "Forget about money, status, or what anybody thinks about me. When I wake up in the morning, what activities would I look forward to doing? What, physically, could I spend my time on that I could get excited about?"
"The second part of that is how do I get money for that. So what do I like doing? I like joking around with my friends."
He goes on to talk about working at his greek parents family business growing up. I laughed when he recounted his stories. "They made me work there from age 11. I had to work in a windowless basement. I'm in a basement with my grandfather. My job was to skewer shish-ke-bob. 50 cents an hour. I had to take the meat out of this lemony . . . You're hands get all corroded. And then I had to put meat on metal sticks for 50 cents an hour. And I was a bad worker."
Every hour he would ask for his 50 cents and he would try to get a watch from one of those carnival games. He wanted immediate gratification.
So funny. I think every kid with immigrant parents who had a small business has a similar story. I would scrub collars for five cents a shirt. Immediately cash out and run to the liquor store next door or the Thrifty's nearby and either get twix bars or those rubber bouncy balls. It's weird to think about now. At the age when you want those type of things, when all one wants in life are candy and toys, there are immigrant parents trying to instill values into their kids with forced manual labor.
Another quote I like from the article:
Coppola and Furches decide to kill some time by completing the Times crossword puzzle; they are soon stumped, and turn to Anderson, an amateur crossword junkie, for assistance. “Mind if I hold the paper?” Anderson asks, setting the crossword in his lap, pulling an erasable pen from his pocket, and casually taking control of the situation. He gives the sense that everyone is participating, working together, and yet—as he fills in one answer after another—it becomes clear that the end result would be the same if Anderson were sitting there alone.“I think we’re just being entertained,” jokes Coppola.
“Oh, no—I couldn’t do this without you guys,” says Anderson, a statement that comes across as both true and false.
Vampire Weekend
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