76. Matt Went to the Movies

Matt thinks nobody makes art from pure motives: some desire for money or recognition gets into every piece of work, even if it's three percent of the reason and the artist doesn't know it's there. Alex pushes back with David Lynch painting every day. He also thinks Martin Scorsese now makes films to leave tally marks on film history, pointing back to older work so it doesn't go dormant.They argue about whether success and security make ego easier to set aside, and whether the flow state credited to Miles Davis and Duke Ellington is real or a romantic myth. Alex describes a musician in a small village who plays every day and wants nothing from it. Matt asks what if the musician is trying to impress someone.Alex has seen "You Can See Everything," Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, and thinks it may be one of the most honest things he's seen. Matt hasn't seen it yet. Without spoilers, they talk about how the project started and what the finished film suggests about why it was made.The episode closes on a Kurt Vonnegut story about going out to buy one envelope, and his line that we're dancing animals. That leads to screens, which Matt calls the magic rectangle, and to whether AI assistants leave people less present with each other.Mentioned in this episode"You Can See Everything" (A24, 2026), directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance OppenheimKurt Vonnegut's envelope story, from his 2005 PBS interview with David BrancaccioAlec Soth, "Charles, Vasa, Minnesota" (2002), from "Sleeping by the Mississippi"Martin Scorsese, Terrence Malick, David Lynch, Akira Kurosawa, Cecil B. DeMille, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Bob DylanSupport the show If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a rating and/or a review. We appreciate and try to read all of them. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode. Ask Us a Question: https://studiosessionspod.com/#askWebsite: https://studiosessionspod.com

Someone who knows Matt's work better than he knows them wants him on a demanding project, and he asks what a person like that has to bring to win him over. Alex calls it reputation. The catch-22 is that nobody lets you do something until you've done it before. Around new people, Matt sometimes slips in a credit, partly from ego and partly so they'll talk to him at the right level. Alex hates having to prove his credibility. He'd rather talk about what he's proud of than hand over five LinkedIn bullet points. If Joel Meyerowitz has to convince you he's a serious photographer, Alex says, that's your problem. He doesn't want art reduced to the resume it produces.Matt thinks the best pitch to a photographer might be the simplest one: we love your work, do it here. When he doesn't know someone well enough to trust them, he looks for something that makes him believe in them. Alex's advice to anyone commissioning an artist is to stop doing their thinking for them. He used to give designers the fixed requirements and ask them to take a pass at the rest. Near the end, Matt says he senses the energy of a place like a divining rod, but isn't sure he'll ever catch it in a photograph. William Eggleston, Alex says, has made several volumes of photographs of ghosts.Mentioned in this episode: TCM's The Plot Thickens: Stanley, Joel Meyerowitz, Martin Scorsese, Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused, Daniel Arnold, William Eggleston's Election Eve, Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Thomas Anderson on Charlie Rose, Warren Buffett, David Lynch, Stephen Shore.-AiSupport the show If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a rating and/or a review. We appreciate and try to read all of them. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode. Ask Us a Question: https://studiosessionspod.com/#askWebsite: https://studiosessionspod.com

Alex spent years feeling he was wasting his time, and now thinks he was filling a bucket that’s finally pouring out. One of the things pouring out is an acting workshop, which takes Matt back to acting school, where he spent most of his time managing his lines instead of acting. Improv was the only performing he loved, because it’s all listening and responding. Alex thinks improv is writing without the edit.Matt says it feels like the old Alex is back, after years when making things for a living had him going through the motions. Alex also built a new website for the show, and Matt sees their differences fitting together in it. It holds every word we’ve said, so you can follow how our thinking has changed. On AI, we agree that image generation misses what a photograph is, something captured. Alex argues that writing a personal letter with AI skips the reason to write one, which is finding out what you feel. Near the end, a young customer at a friend’s shop thought the staff picks weren’t for sale, and we figure she’s never known a store where the staff point out the good stuff. -AiMentioned in this episode: studiosessionspod.com, GeoCities, TCM’s The Plot Thickens: Stanley, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, Whose Line Is It Anyway?, Office Space, Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, Claude, ChatGPT, Home Alone, Slap Shot, Jackie Chan’s Police Story.Support the show If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a rating and/or a review. We appreciate and try to read all of them. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode. Ask Us a Question: https://studiosessionspod.com/#askWebsite: https://studiosessionspod.com

Once a week, a cozy bar in Omaha has jazz, and on certain nights the room feels like magic. One of us wants to make a concert film there in the spirit of Jazz on a Summer's Day and The Last Waltz, on the original Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera, an old Super 16 digital camera that records to one SD card. Between us we own three, and they're tougher than we expected: a 256 GB card holds about 90 minutes of raw CinemaDNG, and others have shot past an hour without overheating. The short film one of us wrote is pushed to spring, and the jazz film is how he means to keep moving until then.Brian Eno came to treat his work as a practice rather than a job. One of us wants that, with his friends' names in the credits as the most permanent record he can leave. The other has old hang-ups about being on set and would rather help edit, as long as the edit doesn't swallow weeks of family life. We riff on the 6-hour cut of a 14-minute short. Talking over that script, one of us saw the other recognize his own younger self, which leads back to 2008, before the Canon 5D Mark II, when there was one narrow way in. Short films still earn nothing, we agree. It ends on Hollywood, where one of us reckons talent without attention is no currency.Mentioned in this episode: Bert Stern's Jazz on a Summer's Day, Martin Scorsese's The Last Waltz, the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera, CinemaDNG, Brian Eno, the Canon 5D Mark II, the Black List.-AiSupport the show If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a rating and/or a review. We appreciate and try to read all of them. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode. Ask Us a Question: https://studiosessionspod.com/#askWebsite: https://studiosessionspod.com

At a yard sale in Malvern, Iowa, one of us asked the woman running it about old cameras, and her husband climbed into the rafters of his barn and came down with a dusty 8x10 view camera, which he gave us. The bellows are full of holes and there's no lens, so it needs a restorer. One of us has been in a creative flood for 3 months and fears that if he stops, it all stops; the other's momentum feels more like a frenzy. The one in the flood passes on an idea he heard: the obstacles are the path itself, and each one is a chance to be creative.An Instagram video mocking cliché photographs, like a faded pink door on a brick wall, gave one of us a small crisis, since he's taken plenty of those. Whatever you've scrolled past, we agree, steers your eye. Martin Scorsese started with about 40 years of film history to absorb, and anyone starting now has 130, which one of us calls an advantage. Brian Eno played Fela Kuti for Talking Heads as they made Remain in Light, and it changed the record. Near the end come Eno's Oblique Strategies cards, which one of us has put on his website. The first says to push to an extreme, then ease back, and the last asks for the simplest fix, which one of us learned to hunt for in Apple tech support.Mentioned in this episode: Winston Churchill, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Stanley Kubrick, Adam Sandler, Orson Welles's F for Fake, Stone Temple Pilots, Talking Heads' Remain in Light, Fela Kuti, Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies.-AiSupport the show If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a rating and/or a review. We appreciate and try to read all of them. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode. Ask Us a Question: https://studiosessionspod.com/#askWebsite: https://studiosessionspod.com

madebyalex.onlineLast episode of "season" 3!One of us has a Squarespace site he means to redo, and watching the other build madebyalex.online with Claude has him tinkering. The builder has wanted his own corner of the web since customizing MySpace pages in 2004 with Web Design for Dummies from the library. AI finally let him build one without years of learning to code. He's off almost every platform now, and the other runs the podcast's YouTube channel so he never has to see its numbers. His reason is what he calls effective creative entropy: an algorithm deals you 6 cards when you think you're holding 52.Every story and essay on the site can be printed, and he sees it as the center everything else grows from. He wants people to find something there, then go live their lives, and thinks of the site as a garden, planted a little at a time. He'd like to hand the homepage to guest curators, each choosing and ordering 5 of his photographs with a note on why, so he can see his work through someone else's eyes. Nothing is tuned for search engines, and it does all a site can to keep AI models from training on it. Near the end comes the old habit of keeping 10 bookmarked sites to work through on an afternoon. The last question is whether the site has him making videos again: loosely, he says, just him talking to a camera.Mentioned in this episode: madebyalex.online, Squarespace, Claude, the IndieWeb, Neocities, GeoCities, Kevin Kelly's 1,000 True Fans, Tim Berners-Lee, Louis C.K., Buy Me a Coffee.-AiSupport the show If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a rating and/or a review. We appreciate and try to read all of them. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode. Ask Us a Question: https://studiosessionspod.com/#askWebsite: https://studiosessionspod.com

One of us is convinced the next big change in computing is an operating system you talk to, one that writes whatever you need on the spot, down to a VHS effect for the video you're editing. The other doubts anyone is waiting for new hardware. When his MiniDV capture broke, an AI built him an app to fix it in about an hour while he read, and his cameras and computer haven't held him back in 7 years. We disagree about most of it, happily, down to whether a perfect assistant would make most people's lives much better.One of us expects a backlash from people so burned by technology that they'd rather work with their hands. The other offers a chair: whoever invents it can't own it, and nobody goes back to the floor. The reply is that we've been sold too many chairs, and the rock was fine. Later the chair's champion concedes that inventions start simple and grow into new problems, like the Seinfeld where George gets a security guard a chair and the guard sleeps through a robbery. Then the chair gets turned on the website one of us built for his writing and photographs, which he owns and hopes will wear in like a watch, and where the only number shown is how many pieces are up. The rest waits for another episode, because the other has a Friday drop to post.Mentioned in this episode: Apple, OpenAI, ChatGPT, Claude, Seinfeld.-AiSupport the show If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a rating and/or a review. We appreciate and try to read all of them. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode. Ask Us a Question: https://studiosessionspod.com/#askWebsite: https://studiosessionspod.com

We start with the show. Owning our own feed means no platform can switch it off, and when we finally have guests, we'd rather hear how someone thinks over a long conversation than listen to the story they've rehearsed about themselves. That leads into how friendships last once everyone is an adult with too much to do. Most of our closest friends turn out to be the people we're making something with, because a shared project is what keeps a phone call from feeling like time stolen from the work.One of us picked up a phrase that's hard to un-hear: people are either listening or waiting to talk. We use it to get at conversational narcissism and the industry that sells ways to transcend your ego, and why we'd both rather learn to work with the ego than pretend to be rid of it. We think making art works the same way. You work something out in yourself and put it into the world, hoping someone else finds a piece of themselves in it. The second half is a study in reading a room, set mostly in restaurants, with a waiter who refills the water mid-sentence and a steakhouse where one of us warns the staff to expect a three-hour dinner. It ends back on photography, with our photo walks and the gallery we keep talking about opening.Mentioned in this episode: Marc Maron's WTF, Rick Rubin's Tetragrammaton, conversational narcissism, and Omaha's Au Courant, Yoshitomo and Sullivan's Steakhouse.-AiSupport the show If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a rating and/or a review. We appreciate and try to read all of them. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode. Ask Us a Question: https://studiosessionspod.com/#askWebsite: https://studiosessionspod.com

One of us pulled over to photograph an old pickup and a beat-up basketball hoop, and 30 seconds later the owner was walking him through his garage. The man, in his 80s, has a '69 Camaro under a cover and a drawer of hot rod t-shirts he's never worn. He turned down a portrait, but gave his address and said to come back any time. None of it would have happened without the camera, and neither would the portraits one of us took of a woman who cried as she sold him the Nirvana shirt she'd bought as a teenager.A topic card about quitting sends us two ways. One of us thinks of the line in Mad Men about Don Draper only liking the beginning of things, and wonders if that's why he left acting and screenwriting. The other hears it as advice to deal with nagging chores at once and keep a room like David Mamet's, with a typewriter and a bed. The one who left screenwriting once wrote five pages a day for years in LA, and a spec script went out to every studio and didn't sell. Facing two or three more years to get that close again, he felt like a 37-year-old still in single-A ball, and stopped. It ends in a sauna with two strangers who talked about their plans like Tarantino characters.Mentioned in this episode: Mad Men, David Mamet, Alec Soth's Sleeping by the Mississippi, Ingmar Bergman, Louis Malle, Casey Neistat, Stephen King, Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another, the Nikon F5.-AiSupport the show If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a rating and/or a review. We appreciate and try to read all of them. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode. Ask Us a Question: https://studiosessionspod.com/#askWebsite: https://studiosessionspod.com

One of us stayed out for a 9 o'clock showing of Backrooms and came out more excited about a new movie than he'd been in years. It reminded him of Primer, a cheaply made film about 2 engineers who invent a time machine by accident. With Sinners and Marty Supreme doing well too, we wonder whether original films are coming back. Asked for the best feeling he's ever had leaving a theater, one of us starts with The Matrix, then goes back to summers when his dad, a teacher, took the kids to Terminator 2 at a single-screen theater in Crystal Lake, Illinois. He takes his own kids to the movies now for the same reason.Horror is where we split. One of us grew up on a great-aunt's ghost story about a little boy's orange tricycle that moved on its own after he died, and loves scary movies because they're a ride you can get off. The other can't suspend his disbelief for horror, though pro wrestling gets him, since the best storylines have some truth in them. The Shining lands differently after marriage and kids, when you can see a sliver of Jack Torrance's self-importance in yourself, though never what he does with it. We both know the frustration of being pulled out of a draft the way Wendy pulls Jack out of his. It ends on the idea of going to photograph some local pro wrestling.Mentioned in this episode: A24's Backrooms, Shane Carruth's Primer, Ryan Coogler's Sinners, Josh Safdie's Marty Supreme, Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, Paul Thomas Anderson's Phantom Thread, The Matrix, Terminator 2, Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, Film Streams.-AiSupport the show If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a rating and/or a review. We appreciate and try to read all of them. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode. Ask Us a Question: https://studiosessionspod.com/#askWebsite: https://studiosessionspod.com