Chip Kidd (2006)
Graphic
designer/author chats with Robert Birnbaum
The occasion for my third conversation with famed
graphic designer and New York personage Chip Kidd (talk
#1 / talk
#2) was his recent charm initiative in support of his career
retrospective monograph, Chip Kidd: Book One, Work: 1986-2006.
Kidd, who is variously and arguably credited with revolutionizing
book cover design (a claim which, if creditable, he will point out,
applies more to the entire Knopf design department under the direction
of Carole Carson Devine), is a lad of many parts. As has been acknowledged
previously, he is a published novelist (The Cheese Monkeys),
superhero and comic book devotee, book editor (Pantheon’s
graphic novels), tschotkes collector, New York bon vivant, and well-traveled
and frequent speaker to the global graphic design community—to
speak with the voluble Chipster is to engage in a joyful and far-flung
cultural conversation.
This time around Chip and I mull over commercial art, his work
at Knopf, the nature of the cover design problem, John Updike, artists'
monographs (including his own), graphic novels, his burden as a
novelist, Stanley Milgram’s landmark psych experiment, ballroom
dancing, being big in Japan, his middle initial, and lots of witty,
brainy, and urbane stuff.
Off camera (so to speak) we were talking about how much my son
loves the superhero book that Chip edited.
Robert Birnbaum: You’re one of Cuba’s
heroes.
Chip Kidd: Ah. It’s not me—that whole
book is about another person. I just put it together.
RB: You personify the book for him, since you inscribed it to him.
CK: How old is he now?
RB: Almost eight.
CK: Wow, he’s like the perfect audience.
RB: Yes, he is. Let’s talk about you.
CK: [laughs]
RB: Does it seem to you that in our time the line between commercial
and fine art is more and more blurry?
CK: Hmm.
RB: It’s almost non-existent.
CK: Oh, it exists. It exists big time. As is exemplified by the
sale of Damen Hurst’s, the resale of Damien Hurst’s
Pickled Shark for $8 million or whatever it was.
RB: A rare piece of comic art, a so-called collectible, never approaches
that price?
CK: I see what you are saying. No, the record,
for what it's worth, for an original piece of comic art was reached
this summer when the original art, the pen and ink drawing for Batman
# 11 sold for $175,000.
RB: What about Disney stuff?
CK: That’s a good question. Those I don’t keep up with
as much. Christie’s and Sotheby’s used to do one of
those auctions at least once a year. I haven’t seen one in
quite some time.
RB: That would be one way of understanding the divide between commercial
and fine art, but what about when it is critiqued? Part of what
I am thinking is that fine art has always been commercial art to
a greater or lesser degree.
CK: I totally agree.
RB: Many of those old masters painted by commission.
CK: Sure, it was all commissioned work, portrait
painting and all that stuff. But the divide is between what is perceived
as fine art to go into a gallery. For instance, I am having a show
in conjunction with this book. And Cooper Union is great and I really
like them a lot, but the options for having it elsewhere are pretty
slim.
RB: I just did a round-up of coffee table books for Boston
Common and in addition to your book I noted a book about Manalo
Blahnick’s shoes. If Armani can have a show at the Museum
of Contemporary Art and Ralph Lauren’s cars can have a show
at Boston’s MFA then—
CK: Right, where does it end? I don’t know.
This may sound cynical but they have really great PR machines and—
RB: —plus they give money to these institutions.
CK: Right, there’s so much more money involved.
RB: Maybe we should think of commercial art as art that sells things
as opposed to what is paid for by someone. That is, it’s not
about being commissioned; it's about the intention of the art.
CK: Right—the whole intention thing. It just all makes my
head spin. One of my best friends is going into the gallery business,
sort of a mid-life switch for him. He is going from being a banker
to being a photography dealer. And he really wants to do it right.
And he set up shop on 57th Street and it’s very fancy and
very expensive and I hope it works, but I just don’t know
how that stuff happens. He’s doing it because he loves that
stuff.
RB: Frequently a bad reason to go into a business.
CK: Yeah, we’ll see. I was approached—I guess it’s
all right to say this…Who cares? I was approached about a
year ago by Larry Gogosian, to completely remake all his stuff.
And we sort of danced around each other for a while and then he
decided he didn’t want to dance anymore.
RB: You mean redesign his collateral material?
CK: Yeah. He is practically an art book publisher in and of himself.
RB: His catalogues?
CK: Yeah, anyway, that didn’t quite pan out, which is probably
for the best. But it was an interesting idea.
RB: Of the few art books that Knopf publishes, you don’t
do them?
CK: In terms of covers? Some. Nothing that you would ever remember.
Nothing that even made it into that [the book]. We did a book on
photography by Phillipe Halisman.
RB: It must have been a while ago, early in your career?
CK: The early nineties and we did one called American Primitive
when outsider art was kind of hitting. But again with this book,
the frustrating thing was that as big and fat and overwrought as
it is there is still not everything in it. The most interesting
foray into designing an art book was one that I did in conjunction
with Chuck Close and John Guare wrote the text. It was about what
happened to Close’s career during and after his accident when
he became a quadriplegic.
RB: Who published that?
CK: Thames & Hudson. And that, I worked very closely with both
of them and really was able to bring something to it design-wise.
RB: Do you—I was really tempted to ask you if you read the
books [laughs] you design?
CK: Oh god. That, if nothing else, is worth the pain and suffering
of publishing this book, is finally we can get past that [question]
RB: Is a cover design a literary or a design problem?
CK: There’s a good question.
RB: Or, let me add, does it ever happen to you that you don’t
feel like you really grasp a book?
CK: My god, yes. It happens all the time.
RB: So?
CK: Then you sort of wing it or if it’s a freelance job and
I think I am just not getting it or I would do a disservice to it
by designing it, I’ll bow out. That doesn’t happen very
often.
RB: The reason I asked you about whether it’s an art or a
literary effort is that you may not have to fully grasp a book’s
meaning—
CK: I truly don’t understand Ulysses. I tried to
read it but I would love to do a cover for it.
RB: You could render it intelligently?
CK: I'd like to think so. Although, you could also argue that it’s
been done and done really well about three times. I suppose I would
want to design a cover for Ulysses because it is such a
seminal work, and it would be a kick to put my personal stamp on
it. That said, it's not like it hasn't been served well in the past
(as opposed to, say, Catcher in the Rye.) It's probably
just as well to keep my paws off it. So what’s the point?
I don’t know if you saw Updike’s piece in the New
Yorker last week.
RB: Reviewing that Princeton Architecture Press book? I have something
of a blind spot for Updike. I, of course, had to read the intro
to your book—which was fine. But I don’t know why I
haven’t been moved to read him.
CK: I am reading the manuscript for his new novel right now and
I think it’s great. I was skeptical when I heard the premise
but I am not at all now. Growing up, I perceived him as this total
rebel that freaked everybody out.
RB: Really? I had perceived him as mainstream.
CK: Yeah, as it says in the book, we grew up in adjacent small,
small towns in Pennsylvania and his dad was my father’s math
teacher and I grew up—people would talk about Rabbit Run
as that dirty, dirty book. I guess because they say "fuck"
in it and there is sex in it. But yeah, I think there was this perception
that everyone was glad that a famous writer came from our teeny
little town but also he was a provocateur.
RB: Perhaps it’s just my taking for granted someone who is
so prolific.
CK: Oh my god, I don’t know how he does it.
RB: Like Joyce Carol Oates. Though I do manage to read her work
every once in a awhile.
CK: Well, she’s a space being, that’s how she does
it.
RB: So this is a mid-career retrospective?
CK: Not if I die tomorrow [both laugh].
RB: In the normal course of events, in the visual arts, that’s
what this book would represent?
CK: I would hope so.
RB: And the show at Cooper Union does what?
CK: Everything in the book you can see it first hand and the sketches
and letters and things like that. I had two back-to-back shows in
Japan in 2001. And these galleries that are owned and operated by
a printing company in Japan called Di Nippon. And they feature graphic
designers in their gallery. Somebody had recommended them to me.
They usually like posters, big things, but I sent them a bunch of
stuff. They said, "Great, let’s do it." So putting
that together, it dawned on me how much stuff there was. It was
the first time I really attempted to collect it all in one place.
And I had gotten nibbles from publishers ("Hey, why not do
a monograph?") for the last six or seven years. I never really
took it all that seriously and so I didn’t pursue it.
RB: Because?
CK: Because I didn’t think I was ready. Early thirties. It
seemed crazy. Like I say in the back, the whole graphic design monograph
thing, it was a real novelty. When I was in school there was Milton
Glaser and Paul Rand’s book. That was it. And there was the
History of Graphic Design [Phillip Meggs’s 1982 book]
which was very important but something else entirely . . . and that
was it and we clung to those and pored over them and studied them.
And now there just seems to be one after the other, so I wanted
it to be, I wanted it to feel like it was time for it to exist and
it didn’t seem like it was time for it to exist. So I do the
show in Japan and then I am starting to think, "Well, there’s
a lot of stuff here now." Then that other thing came out. The
Veronique Veine book.
RB: [laughs]
CK: So that came and went. And before that had come out, basically
done but not out yet, Rizzoli contacted me. An editor at Rizzoli,
Ian Luna, contacted me, "Do you want to do this? We think you
should do it. And do it with us. In full color, large format—the
whole nine yards." And that was pretty impossible to say no
to. And [pause] I love the fact that they asked me to do it. I’m
a sort of "wait to be asked" kind of guy.
RB: [laughs]
CK: But then I had to say to them, do you realize this other thing
is going to be happening? And they said no. And I said it is and
this is what it is and I sent them galleys or whatever. And they
came back and said we think what we want to do is so much different.
RB: How did the Yale University Press monograph do?
CK: That’s a really good question. I have asked them myself
several times. It was like an unauthorized biography that I cooperated
with. And I guess I am glad it exists and it’s affordable
to students, which is good, which is one of the aspects of this
(the Rizzoli book) that I was mortified about.
RB: I don’t quite get the distinction between the soft-cover
version and the hardcover?
CK: It’s very slim.
RB: The hardcover has hard boards, that means it costs $20 more?
CK: Yeah, it's crazy. Rizzoli is not thrilled with that either.
It’s just kind of how things ended up. Their editor-in-chief,
once the books came in, said, "Wow, I wish there was a larger
distinction between the paperback and the hardcover." Aesthetically
there is a huge distinction, I think. Because of the whole objectness
of it. But originally we were going to have a jacket on it. And
then that seemed to be three more surfaces to deal with that I really
didn’t feel like dealing with.
RB: The three surfaces being the—?
CK: Front, back, spine, flaps—I guess I pulled the number
three out of nothing. Oh, and then the binding itself. And we were
so late with it and then the other thing was, at relatively the
eleventh hour, the guy that was working with me in this, a designer
named Mark Melnick who basically—he was incredible.
RB: He curated the book.
CK: He basically gave up his life for two years. He worked so hard
and he came to me at the end of January and said, "Not only
can we not include everything, just to include the stuff we should
include we are going to need a hundred more pages than we have the
allotment for now." And being in the business for twenty years,
I know what that means. And I went crawling back to Rizzoli and
I said, "This is the situation, we need these pages, I will
do whatever to make this work." So basically then we lost the
jacket, which was losing some of the expense. They had budgeted
for full cloth and I said, "No, no, no." At first they
were bewildered and their production person was excellent. She got
this from the beginning. The whole half-binding thing—which
the editor-in-chief did not like. And they are still biting their
fingernails that they are going to get a ton of returns because
of damage. So as a result of all this, the paperback is virtually
identical to the hardcover except that you don’t get that
feeling from it. Which is a shame. Somebody shaved this dog [Rosie
walks in].
RB: She had a mass removal operation. She is fine.
CK: Wow, that’s great.
RB: If you weren’t in this business and somebody was doing
a book on you, would you have just let them do it?
CK: It’s a strange—because it’s all about books.
It’s all about being in the book business. The whole book
is about being in the book business.
RB: I must say in sampling through it, it’s a sweet compendium.
The commentary from the authors you have worked with and all the
memoiristic tschotkes. It has a good feeling.
CK: I hope so. I certainly didn’t want to
write something and bitch the whole time. There is far more positive
stuff to reflect on than anything else. The authors were great.
They pretty much all came through. I was so emphasizing, please,
this is not a eulogy, not a gushing testimonial. Maybe you had a
bad experience or maybe a weird experience. And for the most part
they really all held to that. I wanted to get their point of view
of what this process was all about—what were they expecting.
 RB:
My understanding of this particular part of the book business, these
books don’t normally have large print runs—art books?
CK: It’s such a crapshoot because basically I am sitting
here before you now hawking nothing. There’s none left in
the warehouse, which I guess, is a good thing. They are all out.
And we were trying to add some more events and Rizzoli said we can’t,
there are no more books. They are doing a reprint.
RB: So that’s good, right?
CK: I don’t blame them at all but it’s
such a crap shoot with a big full color, and I knew this from the
graphic novels, the Chris Ware stuff and Dan Clowes, we sold out
of Chris Ware /Jimmy Corrigan very, very quickly. And you can’t
wave your magic wand—there's a six-to-eight-week process.
Rizzoli tends to err on the side of caution as opposed to overprinting—you
try and get preorders but you just never know.
RB: So going back for another printing for an art book is not like
going back for a novel?
CK: There’s no comparison. For instance we just published
the Joan Didion [A Year of Magical Thinking] and it’s
been a huge breakout success. And we have gone back to press five
or six times in a month. So, that’s a whole other ball game.
RB: To keep up to date, you are still gainfully employed at Knopf
as a book designer.
CK: Uh huh.
RB: Still an editor-at-large at Pantheon’s graphic novel
department.
CK: I just call it Pantheon’s comix division. The whole graphic
novel label is pretty much tattooed on our foreheads now. We can’t
really cover it up too well. It seems to work for everybody as "serious
comics."
RB: Was [Art] Spiegelman’s1 book
a graphic novel?
CK: Technically no. I forget it how he describes it now. Uh—it's
more his op-ed pieces on how he experienced 9/11 through comics
but through a broadsheet kind of way. Using old comics from the
first two decades of Hearst newspapers.
RB: How do you edit a book like Charles Burns’s [Black
Hole] book?
CK: You don’t. The whole label of editor, it’s more
about—
RB: —deciding to do a book or not.
CK: Deciding to do it or not, meeting with the sales force and
being a rah, rah, cheerleader, that it’s great and this is
why. The sales force, by now, is pretty great. They get it. And
there are design issues that have to be looked at. I'm not going
to go in and edit pictures or what the people are saying. That’s
not the kind of editing — it’s more like I am going
help shepherd it through the publishing process. And help figure
out—when the individual issues [of Black Hole] came
out, he did full color—
RB: Speaking of which, you also do work for Fantagraphics.
CK: I do freelance for Fantagraphics for Tony Millionaire, his
Maakies books.
Those are really, really great. I would love to figure out a way
to publish him at Pantheon—we keep talking about it. But anyway,
when the Black Hole individual issues came out they all
had full color covers on them, so then the question is, does Charles
want to include them in [the one volume] Black Hole or
keep them separate? And we decided, "No, let’s keep them
separate." So it’s this uninterrupted black-and-white
experience and I think it makes much more sense that way.
RB: So we have identified two parts of your life, and the freelance
and you are a novelist—published and—
CK: —and trying to be a novelist.
RB: Where are you with the sequel to Cheese Monkeys?
CK: Where am I with the sequel?
RB: You don’t have to answer.
CK: Nooo. I like this public self-flagellation about it. Complaining
about it is much easier than writing it. At the end of this year,
I will have missed my second deadline. Scribner has been extraordinarily
patient. And they are very nice and they say, "Okay, we just
need to know when you think you can get it done." And I just
don’t know what to tell them.
RB: I thought you were working on it on your last trip to Italy?
CK: I did. And I was approached by USA Today to serialize
it on their website. They had a program called Open Book.
At first I said, no, I couldn’t figure out a way to do it
and then I thought of a way to do it, so I said yes. What I worked
on in Italy was this seven small chapter serialization of the core
of the book. So that’s constructive and I got it done. The
whole thing centers on Stanley
Milgram’s obedience experiments. Which I may or may not
have brought up last time. So I basically did the experiment itself.
I am about 130 pages into it. It will be about twice that.
RB: Why do you want to do it?
CK: Because this is the book I originally set out to write.
RB: [laughs]
CK: All of a sudden, Cheese Monkeys grew out of the back
of it.
RB: If you are so busy and it’s so hard to stay on track,
it seems like self-flagellation is the least of your problems.
CK: No, you’re right. I just—I really feel like I—I
definitely have the drive to see this through. And it’s not
just to do it. It’s because this experiment to me is one of
the most fascinating—
RB: The one where people were—
CK: —torturing other people because they thought it was okay.
And that it was at Yale.
RB: And that it was just an experiment.
CK: Right.
RB: And that they weren’t really hurting the subjects.
CK: Even though they were screaming their heads off. Simply as
a piece of theater, it's amazing and I learned about it in freshman
psychology at Penn State. They showed us the films that were made
of the whole thing. I have never forgotten it. It’s set within
an advertising agency milieu. So then—
RB: How is this the sequel?
CK: Same character and there is a scene in The Cheese Monkeys
where he determines that his teacher had designed the Wrigley gum
wrapper when he was a young guy and so he, Happy the narrator, determines
that he designed it at this one particular firm in New Haven and
he decides when he graduates that’s where he is going to go
and try and get a job there because that’s what his teacher
did. When he’s there he gets a commission to do an ad for
the psychology department for Yale University.
RB: So your idea about the woman who moves to Florida and—
CK: Oh god—
RB: — and takes up ballroom dancing.
CK: On permanent hold. And then of course there was the stupid
Jennifer Lopez movie. And there was a play and both of which were
creamed. Some day I will go back to that.
RB: Could one surmise about your life that it is this endless list
of projects and enthusiasms that you whittle down but there are
always more? No real end to your aspirations?
CK: Yeah, I hope not.
RB: I don’t mean finality but natural breaks, ebb and flow?
CK: I don’t know the list is kind of organic and keeps growing.
Now I’m trying to work on the screenplay of Cheese Monkeys
with a director in Canada who optioned it.
RB: So you are big in Japan and big in Canada.
CK: Right.
RB: Like that Tom Waits song, "I’m Big in Japan."
CK: What about Alphaville? A new wave German band from the eighties
that had a song called "Big in Japan."
RB: And you are a collector of certain kinds of deco tschotkes.
CK: [laughs] Hardly a career.
RB: Who knows? What if you stumble across something extremely valuable,
like the piece that was featured in the New York Times,
a deco bar refrigerator?
CK: Oh that. [laughs]
RB: What’s your middle initial?
CK: "I," Iacone. My mother’s maiden name.
RB: My middle initial is "I," too. Isadore, my paternal
grandfather’s name. Have you taken up anything new since last
we spoke?
CK I will be coquettish and say I have taken up something that
I don’t really feel like talking about yet. [both laugh] How’s
that? That will enable me to see you a fourth time.
RB: I’ll wheedle it out of you somehow.
CK: How many people get to talk to you three times? I feel totally
honored by this.
RB: A few. I like doing that. Some people don’t come back
to Boston—it becomes less desirable.
CK: Why?
RB: There is a less receptive press for fiction. Booksellers are—there
are some fine reading series. But I hear from publicists that the
Globe doesn’t do much and the Connection
doesn’t exist and Chris Lydon does stuff but he doesn’t
like being part of the book tour. I don’t either. I’m
hopping off that train soon.
CK: Are you really?
RB: Oh yeah. I'm going choose my subjects more specifically, not
because they happen to be in Boston—these days that’s
too big a pool. Plus the book tour has become a whole other thing,
a cannibalistic monster.
CK: Think it’s doomed?
RB: No, it no longer suits my purposes. It’s too intrusive.
Plus as soon as I make it clear that I am not an annex to the tour
business, it will save me a lot of fussing and irrelevant stuff—since
I don’t like to ignore people the way I know many big city
media types claim.
CK: I know how you feel because when the whole graphic novel explosion
happened we got solicited all the time. And you keep having to say,
trying to think up ways to say, "Please, no," in the most
polite way possible.
RB: I already get wide-ranging and far-flung inquiries, which I
love but there is a diminishing return in the volume of inquiries,
requests and such. Speaking of which, as a veteran observer, what’s
marking the changes in the book business, in the twenty years that
you have been in it?
CK: Well—
RB: Are you even affected?
CK: I am and I’m not. Which is a non-answer. I am, in terms
of budgets shrinking and what we can do and can’t do in terms
of materials and full cloth binding is a figment of our imagination
at this point. The stamping seems to get worse and worse. I guess
what I am trying to say is certain technical things—but then
of course, Dave Eggers comes along and gets everything printed in
Iceland and it all looks sensational and they sell it for $19.95
and we all throw up our hands. But I am shielded from the whole
kind of corporate thing in a big way.
RB: Because?
CK: Sonny.
RB: What about Carole Carson Devine?
CK: She is responsible for the list, which is a huge responsibility,
but in terms of meeting whatever financial quotas Knopf is supposed
to meet or whatever, Sonny has to deal with that.
RB: People don’t say, "That book tanked because the
design sucked?"
CK: There might be a little bit of that muttered behind slammed
doors. But no, we don’t really dwell on the past that way.
RB: Do you get credit for a successful book?
CK: My career is riding on the backs of Knopf’s authors—
is how I totally see it. It’s not the other way around. This
[the book] would not exist if I did not work at Knopf and I wasn’t
working in a steady stream of really great books that became successes.
It’s the consistency of my name being on the flaps of the
Crichton books and Donna Tartt’s books, of Cormac McCarthy,
et cetera. It’s like a logo. The AT&T is neither a good
logo or a bad logo, but it so pervasive that it becomes a good logo
simply by default.
RB: I guess you are a brand. What would have happened if your name
had been Walter Piloski or something?
CK: I would be a total failure.
RB: [laughs]
CK: Really, this kicky, dopey name—everybody asked me if
I made it up when I first came to New York. It’s like the
name itself acts as this goofy logo.
RB: On the other hand, and I’m sure you have acknowledged
this and said it in the past, your colleagues are wonderfully talented,
also.
CK: They are. They’re great.
RB: And seemingly that department has stayed intact.
CK: Technically, I have been there the longest. I got there a
year before Carol—and a year before Sonny, actually.
RB: Archie Fergueson?
CK: He’s the art director of Pantheon.
RB: Barbara De Wilde?
CK: No, Barbara left quite some time ago. To be art director of—I
thought you read my book—o be art director of—
RB: Must I read every word?
CK: Yes, is that too much to ask? She left to be art director of
Martha Stewart Living magazine [and now House Beautiful].
RB: Who else is there?
CK: John Gall at Vintage, who is a genius. Megan Wilson, she has
been at Vintage for along time. We maintain a great level of camaraderie
in the office .We all genuinely like each other, like each other’s
work. Somebody will come in you office and say, "What do you
think of this?" Or "I need a 19th century line drawing
of a human brain." Or whatever. There is a lot of cross-pollination
with stuff, but I do feel I get the majority of the attention and
some of it I foster and some of it just happened.
RB: Well, you do a lot of public appearances, right?
CK: I get asked to come to a lot of schools. I get asked to do—I
just came from the University of Georgia where I was artist in residence
for three days. There’s lots of chapters of design organizations
throughout the country—I am going to South Carolina in two
weeks and I’m going to Texas and then I just cobble it together
to a kind of ersatz book tour.
RB: Plus the huge audience for comics and superhero culture, which
brings you—
CK: Believe me, a whole other—
RB: And your appearances in the New York Times Style section.
All that creates this critical mass, which is your "brand."
CK: Up until this book I never hired a publicist and people will
come up to me at parties and say, "Who is your publicist?"
I honest to god don’t have one. But now I can’t say
that anymore. For this book, I hired Goldberg McDuffie.
RB: Mark Fortier?
CK: Yeah, I took the plunge and hired them—I‘ve known
them for years. I’ve loved them as people and also I have
seen first hand what a great job they do. And I just thought this
is my one shot at this and I want to make a go of it. So House &
Home in the New York Times and a bunch of other stuff.
RB: Why is this relevant to the House and Home section?
CK: Because—well, maybe when you see the piece—it might
make sense. All my books and collections and all this stuff—it’s
like I try to make my apartment—when you walk into it, it’s
like walking into my head. This is how I think visually. This is
what turns me on. And it’s small, but I obsess over the details
of it. The way these things work, I think, Mark pitched several
ideas to them and that’s what they went with. Which was fine.
Nowadays everything is shot digitally, so they could show me pictures
as they were shooting them.
RB: So to quote Frank Zappa, this is phase three of lumpy gravy.
Anything more to tell me besides the thing you are not going to
tell me? Which I won’t beg for.
CK: I’m really not trying to be a tease.
RB: Okay, is there is any way in which the path of your life may
loop in a different direction?
CK: I’m hoping so, but as I get older—
RB: Have you taken up ballroom dancing?
CK: I’d like to take it up again. I took it in college. I
am getting to the point where I hope that in some capacity I will
be at Knopf and they give me so much freedom as it is, but I am
really hoping that the movie of The Cheese Monkeys is going
to happen.
RB: How about teaching?
CK: I taught for six years at the School of Visual Arts with Barbara
[De Wilde]. We taught senior graphic design, portfolio, and having
just come from three days of it at Georgia—
RB: You’d rather do the short stints.
CK: Yeah, and you know what? I suck at it. I really do. I had some
very good kids at SVA, several of whom have gone on to be really
good prolific book jacket designers, probably the best known of
which is a guy named Rodrigo Corral who does all of Chuck Palahniuk’s
stuff. This guy is great. It just became too much like doing community
service and we got caught peeing in public and in order to avoid
jail time, you know, "We’ll give back to our urban youth."
But on a lectern with slides and PowerPoint and an audience, I’m
fine. And I turn it into stand up and it becomes a big joke and
"Haha hah ha." Put me in front of classroom with kids
and I go over an assignment and—I don’t know how Sandy
does it. He’s teaching two classes this semester at Yale.
He’s just amazing. But even by a certain time he runs out
of things to say.
RB: Does he do it every semester or does he alternate?
CK: This year is unusual because instead of doing one class a semester,
he is doing two one semester and then he will be free the next semester.
He has an opera coming out. With Ned Rorem, based on Our Town
and then a composer named Lowell Lieberman and opera based on Nathaniel
West’s Miss Lonelyhearts. Sandy also has two more
operas in addition to those this year, believe it or not: Grendel,
by Eliot Goldenthal, to be directed by Julie Taymor (L.A. opera,
summer), and then an English translation of Mozart's The Magic
Flute, also to be directed by Ms. Taymor, for the Metropolitan
Opera in NYC (Winter '06). So yeah, the teaching thing, I’ll
do it in short bits but for an extended period of time—no.
RB: Okay, well, see you around.
CK: Hey.
I contacted Art Spiegelman for his view of
his book: "I dunno. It's all comics to me. When pressed I've
said I thought In The Shadow of No Towers, considering its board-book
format and scale, is more of a Graphic Novelty than a Graphic Novel..."
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Posted:
January 11, 2006
