When I first started, there were, like... two or three critics that you thought, 'Alright, I hope I get a good review from them.' And now there's millions of them.
The first time I saw a review of one of my permaculture books was three years after I first started writing on it. The review started with, "Permaculture Two is a seditious book." And I said, "At last someone understands what permaculture's about."
I read reviews of critics I respect and feel I can learn something from. Right now there are a lot of bottom-feeder critics who just have access to a computer and don't necessarily have an academic or cinema background that I can detect, so I tend to ignore that and stay with the same top-tier critics that I've come to respect. I like reading a good review - it doesn't have to be favorable, but a well-thought-out one - because I very much appreciate the relationship of directors and critics.
When we launched our [ Vogue] site around five years ago, I had already started this process on paper. We are now building an enormous portfolio of photos, we've uploaded two million photos and we have three people that review them.
I always kind of divided the gay guys I met up into two groups when I first started coming out. There were the guys who thought there was something fundamentally wrong with them and hated themselves and were so burdened with shame and internalized homophobia. It just really paralyzed and shredded them. And then there were guys like me who thought, "I'm fine, everybody else is crazy. My church is sick and the family's crazy, but me? I'm fine."
I never started doing the videos because I thought they were going to get millions of views. I started doing them because I was at home, and I was bored.
A nice pickle they were all in now: all neatly tied up in sacks, with three angry trolls (and two with burns and bashes to remember) sitting by them, arguing whether they should roast them slowly, or mince them fine and boil them, or just sit on them one by one and squash them into jelly.
During intermission she peeked out at the theater, watching it refill. When it was almost full and the lights blinked on and off, she saw three people file in through the center door and her breath caught. Time lapsed as they walked down the center aisle: three teenage girls all in a row. They were so big, so bright, so beautiful, so magnificent to Carmen’s eyes that she thought she was imagining them. They were like goddesses, like Titans. She was so proud of them! They were benevolent and they were righteous. Now, these were friends.
I built a career on negative reviews. I didn't get a good review ever until Fran Lebowitz gave me a good review in Interview. That was the first good review I got in 10 years.
When critics ask you if you feel vindicated by other critics - I didn't like critics then, and I don't like them now. There you go. I've always been outside the mainstream, and it stayed that way.
I definitely did not like my body when I first started sports. I didn't like my body just in general as a teenager. Being a girl and a teenager with two prosthetic legs and two hands that were misshapen that had so much reconstructive surgery on them, I thought my world was over - put a zit on top of that, and then my life is completely over.
You discover two things when you're a teenager. One, that your parents are not the idols that you thought they were when you were growing up, if you had nice parents. And two, that you have power over them, and you can upset them and confront them and attack them.
We don't make movies for critics. I've done four movies; there's millions upon millions upon millions of people who've paid to see them. Somebody likes them. My greatest joy is to sit anonymously in a dark theater and watch it with an audience, a paying audience.
There are television critics, movie critics, and theater critics too who I like and who I follow and I get genuinely bummed when they don't like something that I've written because I usually agree with them.
If critics were harder on the musicians that they love, there would be better songs. But as they grow older and they lose their talent, critics refuse to let them know that and protect them, and they get to the point where they put out music that just isn't up to the levels where they've already been.
When I first started, in 2006, it was an exciting time. Independent, cool, weird artists were being successful, and magazines were writing about them, and people were getting played on radio that were, like, really good.
I started to have almost a realization that a lot of the evangelical leaders I looked up to and found hope in - I started realizing a lot of them just weren't the people I thought they were.