Th-Th-That's All Folks!
For reasons within and beyond our control, Arriviste Press has ceased to
exist as an ongoing publishing entity. Managing Editor R A Miller has left
for other creative pursuits, and the legions of talented writers and
contributors who helped make this site remotely entertaining during the
past five years have all assumed much better jobs than the ones they had
here.We intend to keep the archives
live on the Web for as long as possible, so please enjoy the fruits of
some talented laborers instead of finishing that PowerPoint presentation
your boss expected yesterday. |
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Baby Makes Three:
Arriviste Press' Third Title Due May 15th
The Adventures of the Pisco Kid, the sick, sarcastic, satirical
sibling of Life As a Loser and My Friend W officially hits
store shelves in mid-May -- but word from the underground is that copies
are already available on Amazon.Read
an excerpt of Michael Standaert's dark comedy about a reluctantly
over-achieving rodent exterminator here, and check out an interview with
the author (interviewed by, well, the author, of all people)
here. |
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Three
Close-Ups at a Good Moment:
Carice van Houten in Black Book
Paul
Verhoeven's World War II era masterpiece Black Book owes much of its
success to the nimble and delicate performance of its leading lady Carice
van Houten. For the role of a young Jewish war survivor who joins a Dutch
resistance group after barely escaping a massacre that claims the lives of
her family, van Houten chose to play the complex character of Rachel Stein
with a naive blitheness that registers as a tour de force performance.
Read van Houten's chat with Arriviste
Regular Cole Smithey
here. |
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Quick Hits
Yayyy! Quick Hits is back and again
spreading the love to all our inked-up, hair-mussed, indie rocker friends.
This month we feature a super-stuffed edition
of the Hits with tracks from Explosions in the Sky, Cynthia Mason,
Prosser, My Teenage Stride, and Minmae -- and as always our music files are free and
legal to download, so have a blast without sweatin' the RIAA.
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With Alternadad,
Neal Pollack Gets Real
“Hipster parents have
always been around, and now an entire generation has reproduced and
there’s a debate over whether to give up your pre-parent identity when you
have a kid. There’s an unwillingness to give in to mainstream kiddie
culture, so parents are playing movies, TV and music that they like to
their kids, and it’s a very mild cultural rebellion,” says Pollack in an
interview with Arriviste regular Carl Kozlowski.
Read more about Pollack's identity crisis
(or lack thereof) here. |
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February 2007 |
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Winning Isn’t Anything:
Caltech’s men’s basketball team cracks
a 22-year losing streak…
“You’re congratulating
me, but really, for what? We’re still 1 and 207,” Beavers Coach Roy Dow
commented after the team’s win against Bard.
Well, maybe they're losers in the
statistical sense of the word, but Arriviste regular Carl Kozlowski
figures if the typical NCAA athlete logged as many hours of study time as
the Caltech Beavers, you'd see a few more 200-loss basketball programs. |
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Quick Hits
Yayyy! Quick Hits is back and again
spreading the love to all our inked-up, hair-mussed, indie rocker friends.
This month we feature tracks from Polly Panic, The
Popo, The Memory Band, and The Silent Years -- and as alwaysour music files are free and
legal to download, so have a blast without sweatin' the RIAA.
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December 2006 |
Still Weird After All These Years
"I don't think that
people who illegally download songs should be treated like criminals --
unless, of course, they're illegally downloading 'Weird Al' Yankovic
songs, in which case, of course, they should be handcuffed and tortured,"
Weird Al Yankovic tells
Danny Gallagher.
In the past Weird Al has openly mocked gangsta rappers, but on his latest
dish he takes on Canadians, and now he's facing real trouble. |
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Quick Hits
Yayyy! Quick Hits is back and again
spreading the love to all our inked-up, hair-mussed, indie rocker friends.
This month we feature tracks from Lylas, The
Radium Screen, and Jetpack UK -- and as alwaysour music files are free and
legal to download, so have a blast without sweatin' the RIAA.
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Can Amy Berg Deliver Us From Evil?
"When I called
[O'Grady], he
was very candid on the phone right away. He had a lot to say and felt
comfortable to share it with me. He didn't agree to go on camera, but for
five months he allowed me to tape phone conversations. Finally he decided
that he would participate in the film, and that was something that had
never been done before...
Documentary maker Amy Berg
discusses her film
Deliver Us From Evil with Arriviste regular Cole Smithey. |
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September 2006 |
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A Girl's Best Friend?
Some guys, when they get jilted by their fiancée, sit in front of Sports
Center for days on end. Tom Zoellner took out his frustrations on the diamond industry, and
the rest of us are better off for it. The result is The Heartless Stone, a
comprehensive study of the history of diamonds in the American courtship ritual -
and Big Marketing's role in fueling the fire. (Hint: It appears they
lit the match...)
Zoellner speaks about traveling the globe to
research this controversial and somewhat secretive industry for his most
excellent book
here.
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Runaway Train Back on Track
Soul Asylum isn’t "most bands," and in the face of overwhelming adversity,
its members regrouped to honor their bass player Karl Mueller’s dying
wishes and record another CD in the hopes of showing they still had “it” –
a fact they proved in July when they returned with The Silver Lining
and
managed to sell it to the same big label they had in their heyday.
Carl Kozlowski speaks with guitarist Dan
Murphy and reviews
the band's ups and downs since their Grammy. |
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Bagger of the Year
Today kids can conjure American Idol,
America's Next Top Model, and half-a-dozen other reality-TV fame farms
for their get-big-quick fantasies. But back in the day, you worked your
way to the cover of the Life cereal box the hard way, starting with "Paper
or plastic?"Dave Demerjian takes us
back to the time when people still read newspaper inserts in his funny
debut
fiction piece for Arriviste Press. |
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Summer 2006 |
Goldhagen is No
Accident
"Being a young
novelist in New York City, where there are so many talented young
writers, is kind of like being Wonder Woman back on her home planet. On Themyscira she’s just Diana, everyone can fly and dodge bullets with
bracelets. It’s wonderful and horrible."
But really it's wonderful... if you've
just published a book called Family and Other Accidents and your
name is Shari Goldhagen. New York's newest new, new thing talks about her
stellar debut here.
(To read an excerpt,
click here.) |
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Cartoon Character:
Keanu Reeves Thinks
Deeper
"Artistically, I hope to be able to make films that entertain, but also
have redemptive qualities that the we, the viewer, can take in and be
affected by in a positive way."
Reeves
said that -- and some
other stuff -- to Cole Smithey at Cannes. |
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Paul Gilmartin is Representin'
"I love it when people
ask me real questions. I love it when people get upset at my character
too. I've had people fucking hate the character, and I don't know if they
don't think it's fake or if they're conservatives."
That's Paul Gilmartin's
take on his latest standup character, the former Representative Richard
Martin. He explains his double life to Danny Gallagher
here.
(Or hear Richard Martin
in his own words here.) |
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Not Your Father's Techno
Look right.
That freak in the Mohawk programming beats in his bedroom may be the 21st
century's Bob Dylan -- and he probably won't pen a single lyric.
James Sandham checks out
the Toronto breakcore scene in his
debut for Arriviste Press and winds up
questioning the way we value and judge creativity. Damn you, decaying
society. Damn you to hell. |
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May 2006 |
Gretchen Mol Will Whip Your Ass
Gretchen Mol is stunning for her uninhibited,
spot-on portrayal of 1950s S&M pin-up queen Bettie Page in director Mary Harron's partial biopic.
Although limited by a script that reveals more skin than depth of
character, Mol inhabits Bettie with a purity of intent that carries the
film."It was
that lack of self-consciousness that she had while she was posing. I
thought if I could get 50% of that, I'd be in good shape. I really knew
that was the key to her talent in front of the camera -- that complete,
healthy attitude about her own nakedness and her lack of shame," Mol told
Cole Smithey when they met in Manhattan recently.
By the end of the
interview, only
Smithey was blushing. |
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Moby Dick In an X-Box?
It has been
commonplace to dismiss video games as trash entertainment, but can
video games become recognized as classics -- in the same sense that
The Great Gatsby, Citizen Kane, and Who's Afraid of
Virginia Woolf? are?
First-time contributor Dave Davis explores
the literary state of the next great medium in the context of three
recently released state-of-the-art games: The Godfather, Oblivion, and
Indigo Prophecy. Will one of
these be the
fodder for a new generation of PhD theses? |
The Godfather as Pixel Play |
Fatherhood for Idiots:
ESPN’s Mike
Greenberg
I said to
my wife, "Your need to deal with our problems is interfering with my need
to pretend they do not exist." It doesn't make any difference how
successful we are, it doesn't make any difference how smart we are. That
does not change the fact that once every four and a half days, our wives
will look at us and think to themselves, "My God this guy is an idiot."
So Mike Greenberg relates
to Danny Gallagher as they discuss his new book, Howard Stern's looming
embarrassment, and why it must suck to be Michael Jordan.
Check out the full
interview here. |
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April 2006 |
No Dummies: Two Pros Vent About Venting
"Ventriloquisim
was a dark art and just like black magic, [it] came from another dark art
called necromancy and that was basically talking to dead people. You would
go to a ventriloquist and they would channel this demon voice, a spirit
voice, and that spirit voice would tell you things and you would pay them
like you would pay a fortune teller."
Jay Johnson, interviewed
here
with fellow ventriloquist Jeff Dunham, brings the world up to speed on
ventriloquism's past -- but the question is/; does it have a future? |
Jeff Dunham & Friends |
Gone But Not Forgotten (Unfortunately)
Gary Braver is a
hypochondriac’s worst nightmare… probably literally. He supplements his
living writing medical thrillers, and his latest topic is Alzheimer’s Disease and a
remarkable new drug that reverses its effects – but lest you think the
Northeastern University English professor has developed a sudden streak of
optimism, rest assured the benefits pale in comparison with the side
effects.
Braver traded e-mails with us about
Flashback, which has
baby boomers popping their Xanax like Junior Mints. |
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Church and State:
”Josh Lyman” Talks God and Government
"I think that one of
the eternal questions is, is God a really wonderful writer, or is He the
worst writer?" says Whitford. "If we did an election on the show
where what happened in 2000 happened, and the candidate’s brother happened
to be governor of the deciding state -- it would be just unbelievable."
As West Wing reaches its
term limit, Bradley Whitford (aka Josh Lyman) reflects on the
record-setting Emmy machine with Carl Kozlowski. |
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The Worst Movie Never Made (Yet)
Like Armageddon,
the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, and a vehicle for Larry the Cable
Guy, there would come a day when the world would be subjected to the
dumbest movie ever made, a movie so dumb that it would become the most
popular movie ever… even before anyone has had a chance to see it.
Well, fear now because that movie is upon us, and it's called
Snakes on a Plane.
How do you critique a movie that no one
has seen yet? Danny Gallagher shows you right
here. |
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