alt Hacker NewsAnd from this year: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/werner-herzog-isnt-afraid-f...
I found the whole thing utterly fascinating. Especially the way he talks about Los Angeles.
"Los Angeles is the city with the most substance in the United States."
" First and foremost, cultural substance. But don’t forget that there’s a huge amount of industry there. When you fly into Los Angeles, you see all these industrial areas, flat roofs, gigantic factories. Reusable rockets are being built within the perimeter of the city. You don’t have this factory in the Bronx. You don’t have it near Wall Street. Of course, people immediately think the superficial side, glitz and glamor of Hollywood, that’s what I don’t mean. But serious art — all the artists that made New York important, there were late 1940s, early 1950s. The last straggler in a way was Andy Warhol. It’s a place where you consume culture, New York. It’s generated, in Los Angeles. The painters are living there nowadays — not all, but some very important ones. Writers, mathematicians. Also stupidities, like crazy sects, yoga classes for five-year-olds. I mean, it’s grotesque. Great universities. LACMA is going to open very soon and all of a sudden you will have one of the two, three most important museums in the United States. I mean, it has great museums already, and it’s going to be big. You see, I’m the one who says it at a time where nobody believes it, nobody notices it, and it’s wonderful to articulate it now."
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I always enjoy hearing from him because he’s so unorthodox and I never have any idea the approach he’s going to take when giving an interview or answering a question.
And I always feel the need to point out that Grizzly Man was a truly good movie. I’d heard about it for years and based on the premise expected to have a low brow appeal, something for dumb people to feel superior to someone. But no, it was a respectful and in-depth character study (with some downright poetic narration) and probably Herzog’s best movie.
Right, and for example LA is actually full of concealed oil wells pumping oil in the middle of the city (!).
https://www.noemamag.com/its-oil-that-makes-la-boil/
> Fifty-four tightly clustered, slanted oil wells — the last of the Salt Lake Oil Field — sit snuggly between Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s and San Vicente Boulevard. In fact, the Beverly Center’s odd, curved footprint is designed to accommodate the drilling site, which is hidden by a wall along the street. The wells are almost completely invisible, dwarfed by the mammoth mall and the sprawling Cedars-Sinai Medical Center across the street — the hospital where I was born and where I later dropped my friend off to meet his wife for an ultrasound appointment.