A Quote by Dan Chaon

I knew I wanted to play around with genre-esque imagery, and the identity theft stuff came in the middle, when I was figuring out how the characters were connected to those images.
The music video director really wanted to incorporate the imagery of guns into 'Nega Dola' because the lyrics are very aggressive. It kind of portrayed a very strong image. So that's how we connected weapons and the imagery of a dangerous atmosphere.
I got lucky when I was a teenager when we were booking bands at university. Those gigs were the greatest two hours in my life and there was nothing else I wanted to do. I knew my passion early, which is always the tough part of life, figuring out what makes you tick.
My biggest problem in middle school was catty girls, cliques, and trying to figure out if I wanted to be a part of one of those, just figuring out who I was and all that.
Making photographs that dealt with the understanding of who I am as a gay man and dealt with the process of accepting that, and also accepting what I'm into sexually, what sexually arouses me. So I was making these images not necessarily knowing what they were about, but just putting it out there - that mode of thinking or consideration of my own desires, and also the much larger conversation around images that deal with ideas of sexuality and how those images are distributed and then accepted or understood by whoever is viewing those images.
In Indiana, I knew the offense in and out. I knew spacing; I knew personnel. I knew the offense, how coach wanted to play me. So when I just wanted to take over and control the game, I could.
I feel like we're looked at as either completely nonsexual characters or overly sexual characters, and I feel like that affects how we're treated in the public space by men. I believe that women of color experience street harassment in a very hyper way. So I wanted to draw these women in their very normal, regular states and put those images out there in the public for people to see, instead of these other, very sexualized, images of women.
When I look in the mirror I see the woman I knew I wanted to be as a child. When I was a young girl, I had a vision of the woman I wanted to be. And I often reached out to women of color in America for inspiration. My mother would regularly buy Essence and Ebony. I would look at those magazines filled with images of professional, intelligent women of color who knew who they were, who enjoyed who they were, and who were surrounded by other people who enjoyed who they were. When I look in the mirror, I'm really glad that that's what I see today, but it took awhile to get here.
In the lifetime of one person, we went from figuring out where we came from to figuring out how to get rid of ourselves.
My favourite genre lies inside myself, and as I follow my favourite stories, characters and images, it sums up to a certain genre. So at times even I have to try to guess which genre a film will be after I've made it.
I knew exactly how I wanted it to play, but you are never sure until you watch the projected images reflect off the screen. That's when you know it worked.
If it were the Clinton people, they'd be sitting around figuring out how to pull themselves out. Instead the president is continuing to go around the country and peddling Social Security, which the needle is not moving on.
As a viewer, I'm personally less interested in the damaged, white, middle-class male figuring out his dreams and more interested in maybe an underdog figuring out how they're going to survive in a world that doesn't necessarily invite them in.
GOOD AS NEW was born out of the idea of writing a play where the stakes were high and the collisions were of a verbal nature. Also I wanted to write a play where people were smarter than I was, and more alive than I feel normally. I became interested in the idea of characters who would surprise me. I guess one could argue that nothing comes out of you that wasn't within you to begin with, but maybe there are ways to trick yourself into becoming more an observer or an advocate for the characters.
We hear a lot about identity theft when someone takes your wallet and pretends to be you and uses your credit cards. But the more serious identity theft is to get swallowed up in other people's definition of you.
Just as black and white, when mixed, make grey, in many ways that's what it did to my self-identity: it created a murky area of who I was, a haze around how people connected with me. I was grey. And who wants to be this indifferent colour, devoid of depth and stuck in the middle? I certainly didn't.
Stanley Kubrick knew we had good graphics around MIT and came to my lab to find out how to do it. We had some really good stuff. I was very impressed with Kubrick; he knew all the graphics work I had ever heard of, and probably more.
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