Transcribed with Otter.ai
Guest Steven Heller
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Hey, everyone, welcome to unique ways with Thomas Girard and audio podcast that a real design legend on today. He’s an American art director, journalist, critic, author and editor who specializes in topics related to graphic design. Please join me in welcoming the one and only. Stephen Heller, welcome. Welcome to me. Thank you.
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Are you ready for 20 questions? Ready for 20 questions? 21 even?
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Okay, here we go. Tell me a little bit more about yourself. What do you do?
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Well, what I do lately is try to stay awake.
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But what I usually do is I run a
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or co chair a graduate program at the School of Visual Arts called MFA design, designer as entrepreneur, and I’ve done that for 25 years. Prior to that, I was at the New York Times as an art director, first of the op ed page and then of the book review for 3333
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years, and I write every day a column called the daily Heller, and I’ve written over 200 books on design or popular culture or Whatever you want to call visual communications these days. I great for the audience. Steven and I, you know, don’t know each other, but I know him from my design school days 20 years ago. But more recently, I saw the episode with Mara portini, where he does such a great job of introducing you, I thought, Wow, what an opportunity.
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Number two, what’s a key piece of knowledge that makes you different?
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Well, that’s a good question.
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The key piece of knowledge that makes me different is knowing about myself,
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I think more and more particularly with
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internet available to everyone, artificial intelligence becoming much more prevalent, I know what everybody else knows.
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I’ve read many of the same books that you and millions of other people have read I’ve seen the same television shows. There are things that I’ve written about in the past that once you put them out into the world, other people know them, and other people become even more expert at knowing them than you do. So I would say just knowing myself is the answer?
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Great. And I just want to flag the episode that we had with Debbie Melman. She’s also at the School of Visual Arts. Great, great episode there. So, number three, why this? Of all things? Why do you do what you do?
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Well, it kind of came to me,
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in a sense, I had no choice. I believe in such a thing as fate, and as I wouldn’t go so far as to say predestination, but
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because I do think we all have control of what we do and when we do it most of the time, but I was born with a certain set of abilities and skills and maybe even talents, and it led me
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to working in art forms, and those art forms At the time that I came of age, which was the
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60s and 70s, of which I’ve written a memoir called Growing up underground
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that led me to working on newspapers and from newspapers, I’ve learned about illustration, I learned about design, I learned about typography, I learned about writing, I learned about communicating with others. So it just kind of
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went along like a nice flowing stream.
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I probably could have done something else if I had followed that leaning, but this is the leaning that I follow.
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Great. I’m number four. Some people struggle with but the question is, what does your future look like?
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Dark.
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I’m 72
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according to my cardiologist, I have another
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20 years to go in the genetic life cycle. I see the next 20 years hopefully as being
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relatively healthy and
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up.
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Period of time when I can absorb more knowledge
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and figure out something to do with that knowledge, how to make it work for me and for others. And
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so that’s about as far as I can go, futuristically,
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great. And number five, we say, is unique to this podcast. The question is, let’s talk about location. How does the notion of place play into what you do?
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Well, I live in New York. I live
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I work in an office where I am right now at the School of Visual Arts, which is only about
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a 10 minute walk from where I grew up,
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and some last yesterday, we had a alumni lunch, and it was only about five minute walk from where I grew Up.
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New York is my city.
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I’ve
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written a few books on New York.
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I have a son who is called New York Nico.
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That’s his nom de camera, I guess. And he’s well followed on Instagram for
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uncovering the unusual in the city and so place has a huge role in my life and in my psyche and
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in my future plans, which is not to leave New York City unless I have to like we did during the pandemic.
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Great. And if you guys are liking the New York City episodes, check out the Timothy Goodman episode. He really defines himself by place and by being in New York
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number six, if you had to start from the beginning, what advice would you give your former younger self,
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stay the course.
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You know, there are times when I look at
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my past and I ask myself if I had any regrets having written this memoir growing up underground
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the counter culture in New York,
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I realize I have no real regrets. I have
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lists of things that I would have liked to have done if I had the ability, or if I had the time or I had the inclination,
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but I would say to myself, do what I did, because I’m relatively content having done what I did,
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nice. And what’s the day in your life like?
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Long because I have insomnia, which means when I go to sleep, I don’t go to sleep, and when I wake up, I’m really woken and I have to do work every day,
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on weekends. Lately, in the last year or so, well, certainly since COVID, I’ve taken to taking naps, but mostly
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right before
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getting on the zoom with you, I was writing a piece for my daily Heller column. And
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you know, I have a list of things that I have to write before I can get up out of this chair and go into another room.
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Nice.
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Lifelong Learning is a popular topic these days. How do you stay up to date?
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Well, like everybody
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in the morning or in I don’t know when everybody does it, but everybody does go to the internet to find out something or other, whether it’s funny animals or not so funny news stories coming out of the Ukraine.
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I look at the New York Times every day in its physical form and in its digital form.
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I talk to people who are knowledgeable since I worked for the times I still stay in touch with some people who are still there from when I was there. And I read a lot.
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I certainly read as much as I can,
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given that
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reading as a has the tendency to
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make me doze, and if I doze while I’m reading, I fall asleep for an hour, and then I wake up, and then it’s the insomnia time coming in to play.
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I love that. Shout out to my two typography students from the Ukraine. I hope you guys are listening.
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Number nine, what tools do you use? Are you a digital nomad?
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No, I don’t use many tools at all, since I don’t design.
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I use other people’s hands and other people’s eyes and other people’s brains
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so they become my
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extension. I wouldn’t call them tools.
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They’re not artificial intelligence. They’re quite real intelligence that extend my thoughts and ideas into something that’s concrete. I type on a
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computer, I have a beautiful Mac with a lovely retina screen, but that’s the extent of my tool, using that and
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maybe a rock to hammer something into a piece of wood,
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nice and halfway here. Number 10, how do you deal with work? Life Balance?
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Work for me is life. Life is work.
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The balance part somehow comes in the middle.
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I am married to a designer, a wonderful designer, a genius designer.
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So we talk about the work she’s doing, and we talk about the work I’m doing, but not all the time, and
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we just came back from Rome a couple of weeks ago after not being able to travel for five years, and but that’s always been a work destination. For 10 years, my co chair at the School of Visual Arts leader Talarico, and I and my wife, Louise Feeley,
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we’ve had held classes in Rome and Venice, so the balance is slightly tilted towards the the work,
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the enjoyment comes, I suppose, in watching movies.
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I like seeing things move. I like stories being told. I like actors acting. I like watching their craft.
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But other than that,
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I don’t have hobbies.
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Cool, cool number 11, if you weren’t doing what you do now, what would you be doing?
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Well, that’s almost impossible to answer,
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simply because it would suggest that there’s something else I want to do. There are lots of things I’d want to do that I am incapable of doing, and as of this stage of my life, I’d be totally unable to do them. But if I had my druthers, if the slate was wiped totally clean, I would want to be an actor and I or a director.
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I would like to be somebody like Michael kitchen on foils war, the
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BBC series that went off the air about five or six years ago.
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Awesome. And what would you not like to do with your career?
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Most everything else,
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I don’t want to work for a major corporation where
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it’s all business and no play, but I don’t want to work for a major corporation that,
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underneath its skin, does bad things.
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I wouldn’t want to go into politics.
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When I was a kid, I worked at democratic clubs in New York. So I got to meet politicians including JFK and LBJ.
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I think the responsibility of a politician to both be representative of
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all people and
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prejudicial.
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In terms of their constituency, is a terrible
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tension to have to live with.
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Do you have a favorite word, quote or sentence?
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I like the word?
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Fuck a lot.
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Okay, and how about a least favorite word, quote or sentence.
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I don’t like hearing the word fuck.
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If you had to pick one word to describe yourself, what word would you choose?
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Steve,
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what keeps you up at night?
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Just about everything
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once I hit the pillow, everything that got clogged up in my brain during the day kind of leaks out and it’s hard to push back in.
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And so one thought leads to another thought, which leads to another thought, which leads to an idea which leads to, well, I can’t wait until I get up so I can exercise this idea somehow. And then I
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fall asleep. For the brief time that I fall asleep and I forget the idea. So it’s kind of like a version of Groundhog Day. I have the same stuff go on every night and every morning, I forget about it.
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You have a dream you’re chasing.
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I’m sorry. Give it a dream you’re chasing? No, I have a dream that’s recurring,
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but I wouldn’t say I’m chasing it. I mean, it’s a variation on
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being in
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a place that’s very familiar, but at the same time totally unfamiliar.
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For example, there’s a recurring dream where I’m walking up a mountain road and I’m going in through these small New England towns, and I know I’m headed towards my house. I have a house in the mountain
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the Berkshires, but nothing around me is the same.
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The house is kind of there, but there are all these other things that are there too,
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and that recurs, and it’s kind of unnerving, but at least I know I’m asleep when I’m dreaming it
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final stretch number 18, what inspires you,
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what inspires me most, is other people’s creativity. I
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mean, there are so many things that can inspire one. It’s one thing to pick. One thing is like becoming a monk or
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going into a convent or whatever. But
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when I watch
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film or TV shows where the acting is fantastic, that inspires me when I
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look at design work that comes through my door, either by my students or by other people, and it’s fantastic. I am inspired. I’m jealous
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when I hear somebody speak
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articulately
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and cogently and with ideas and using words that are not cliched, I’m inspired
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and reading.
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I’m always inspired by really good writing and always grateful to really good editors.
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How about any advice you’d like to share?
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I’ve given up on advice. I mean, I have a student every hour come in for some sort of advice, and
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I realized that there’s only so much I can say that can be really helpful, and it’s on a situational basis. You know, there, if somebody is just saying, How do I get a job? I go through the litany of
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wrote phrases and uh, formula. If somebody asks me something more personal, then I can become more philosophical or less, as the case may be,
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but I don’t really give advice anymore.
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Great. Dan. Number 20. How can our listeners keep tabs on you? What’s our call to action? Should we pick up the memoir you’re talking about?
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Yeah, everybody should pick up the memoir I’m talking about because I’d like to sell some copies.
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But I also feel that, and I’ve gotten good response on it, that it is.
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A book that I’m glad I wrote. There’s
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a lot of personal background that leads into how I became what I became in 1966 to 1976
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and although it’s only 10 years in my life, and it’s a part of my life that’s passed, and probably a part that your listeners haven’t even lived through. I think it would be a value,
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either as something to look at and compare to their own lives, because I think there’s a universality about it, or just for the enjoyment of it, or just for the enjoyment of thinking. Boy, this guy’s got a memoir out, but he’s a dumb ass.
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You know, that shed and Freud thing that people enjoy having
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awesome well, thank you so much. You know, you’re part of this absolute blessing of a streak here with Jessica helfen, Timothy, Goodman and Richard Saul Wurman, all you guys at once has been absolutely amazing and fantastic. You know, I think a lot of our listeners can potentially be very changed by by hearing you speak. So I’m so glad to have had you on. Thank you so much. My pleasure. Thanks for asking you.
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