Undeniable Mitchellness

My main concern in life right now is that Elvis Mitchell may not be getting sufficient props. I first came to know of him as the host of KCRW’s The Treatment, which you might call the Bookworm of film and style. Like Michael Silverblatt, Mitchell conducts not interviews, with all the question-prewriting and formal rigidity that term entails, but conversations. (Also like Silverblatt, he’s restricted to half an hour, but I’ll take what I can get.) He writes film criticism in print and has done so since the eighties — thus doing his part to break down that bothersome wall inexplicably constructed between criticism and all other pursuits — he’s hosted various television programs, he’s lectured at colleges, and he possesses two-foot dreads.

Further evidence of Mitchell’s undeniability:

• (from Popdose) “I’ve never been in a situation on my radio show or when I filled in for Charlie Rose where I’ve had a list of prepared questions given to me. I just can’t think that way. I’ve always found when you’re sitting in front of somebody and you’ve got a list [of questions], their eyes go to the list, they’re not looking at you, they’re trying to see what the questions are and trying to count the questions so they can get done with this and go meet somebody for a drink or go make their flight.”
• (from Undercover Black Man) "When I walked into the restaurant, Elvis was in there smoking a cigar. I thought they shot people for that in L.A. Elvis said it was cool. 'They know me here.'"

• “I went back after being out of school for six months and not wanting to go work in an auto plant. ’Cause I knew that I was basically too shallow to be a real working man for a living.”
• “I don’t have a publicist. You would’ve thought I did, but I don’t.”
• (from Film.com) “[James Lipton] sits down with that stack of questions, and like a prosecutor he never asks a question that he doesn't know the answer to. And for me that's where it gets interesting, where I want to start is the question that I don't know the answer to and with any luck they don't know the answer either, and it becomes a conversation about that. You know, there's a kind of connection you make when people are just weighing things out. Sometimes it gets to be that moment when somebody says ‘I've never said this before,’ because in conversation we tend to not say that kind of thing. But, you know, that's the kind of thing that happens.”
• (from New York magazine) “Mitchell is known for his opportunism as much as his talent, and he has a great ability to generate opportunities for himself. Often too many, to the point where it could be an editing adventure to track him down to get him to file.”
• “‘Elvis has this sort of Candide-like air about him,’ says Outside executive editor Jay Stowe, who edited Mitchell at Spin (yes, he worked there, too). It’s not naïveté, exactly, but an aura of doing what he wants and seeming surprised, in all innocence, when people take offense.”
• “He often invites his students to the Enormous Room, a campus-area bar on Massachusetts Avenue, to see one of his teaching assistants D.J.”
• (from Wikipedia) “On April 27, 2008, Mitchell was returning from Toronto to Detroit when border guards found Cuban cigars and $12,000 in cash on him.”

Comments

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hah....pretty dreads and cig ))