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Two bits of cool fan-created CK art! First one comes via a Redditor who commissioned this piece:

The artist is tan.drine on Instagram.

Charlie's new look in the City Arts &Lectures interview inspired our friend and BCKster Sarah, whose other work you can check out here:

Nice, eh?!

Antkind proved too much Kaufman for Miller:

I’ve long had a weakness for obsessive, neurotic, paranoid, and comically vain narrators, but Charlie Kaufman’s overstuffed, formless first novel, Antkind, may have finally cured me of it.

[...] Yet Antkind also has flashes of wit and even beauty, often just at the point when the reader has started to wonder if Kaufman wants her to suffer as much as the benighted B.

[...] Why, then, is Antkind so often tedious when Kaufman’s films are, for the most part, entertaining and delightful? Could it be something so simple as the constraints of cinematic form, the fact that you can’t make a three-month-long film because every minute of a movie costs a lot of money, typically other people’s money? That the limitations collaborators impose on a genius can end up rescuing him from his own hopelessly dithering solipsism? It could. Other people may be hell, according to Sartre, but sometimes they can save your ass—or at least stop you from crawling up it. (Source)

She was a little drunk, and the resulting tweets were trending.

The thread began with a tweet that simply read “Drunk” and began ending with one that read, “I am goi f to sleep. My husband has asked me five hundred rimes@if I am alright. That means it’s go to sleep o’clock.” At some point in the middle, she tweeted: “Ok a newborn colt rocks it totally and he thought my hand was his mom. It was not. He has tasted life’s infinite tragedy. As I mentioned Earlier I am inebriated.”

Entertainment Weekly pronounced that she stole “our hearts with drunken tweetstorm.” The A.V. Club dubbed the thread a “choice read,” and Vogue called it “the pandemic comic relief we needed right now.” Comedian Craig Cackowski performed a dramatic reading. (Source)

Drunk, or smoking orchids?

Here's what I think is so far the best Antkind video interview with CK. Pulitzer-winning author Andrew Sean Greer read Antkind twice, so maybe that accounts for it. It's a fun watch with some interesting tidbits, questions we haven't heard before.

He'd probably hate hearing that his By the Book is as Kaufmanesque as you can get, but oh my god it's true. If you do not like Charlie, you will not like this. If you do like Charlie, you might like this.

What books are on your nightstand?

Not to split hairs, but I don’t have a nightstand. I’m living in a temporary place for reasons too tedious and painful to get into here. There’s not much furniture. In the bedroom, such as it is, I have only a sleeping bag and a floor lamp. There are a few books next to me (I’m currently in the sleeping bag), books I ordered for research purposes. I’m reading Toynbee’s “A Study of History” and Tsiolkovsky’s “The Will of the Universe,” although the truth is, I am having trouble focusing lately. I spend long hours staring at the old, stained mattresses in the dump outside my window, as I shelter in place in this unfamiliar apartment. There is so much unexplained in my new, small world. The strange noises emanating from my neighbors’ apartments; the constant dropping of large items on the floor above me, the clinking of hundreds of wine bottles, as the neighbors across the hall carry them daily to the trash room. The screams. (Source)

I love how the next line is the question "What’s the last great book you read?" YEAH, LET'S JUST IGNORE THE THING ABOUT THE SCREAMS.

Anyway. It all gets weirder from there, but it's a good way of giving you a little taste of the oddball humour that lies within Antkind.

It's getting clooooser. EW has a short interview with Charlie, in which he talks Ending Things. Also a couple of stills from the film that I don't think I'd seen before.

“I don’t set out to do a mindf---,” the Oscar-winning filmmaker says. “I’m not setting out to do something that ‘tops’ some sort of brainteaser I might have done before. But there’s no question that I’m trying to build on the stuff that I’ve already done. [...] Loneliness and hopelessness and regret — these are things that are part of the fabric of this film." (Source)

Here's a quickie nutshell interview with NPR's Scott Simon. Antkind spoilerish, no huge scoops, but worth the listen--especially if you've been skipping the video interviews for lack of time.

If you're here for a hard hitting story, keep scrolling. Otherwise, here's something pretty cute:

Redditor 90s-Kid has a story about Charlie doodling on a restaurant menu.

When Synecdoche, New York came out, I was working at an Italian restaurant in Santa Barbara back in 2009 to pay for college. Charlie Kaufman and his family came in to eat. [...] Anyway, I got to wait on his table, being as respectful as possible. I watched as he was illustrating on the back of our menu and couldn’t wait to see what he was drawing purely from his brain with no filter. [...] He was very nice and we spoke for a bit on when I’d start and then he left. I noticed he left the drawing, so I grabbed it and ran after him to sign it. He laughed and said, “you want this??” “Hell ya!” He signed it and waved with a smile. Charlie Kaufman has done so much for my life without knowing. Thank you Charlie Kaufman. (Source)

Full story at the link.

Charlie's Chicago Humanities interview is now publicly available, yay! This is the one I wrote about the other day.

Stuart Kelly from The Scotsman? Not a fan.

it is without a shred of humanity. There are novels that feature truly dislikeable characters: Ignatius Reilly in John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy Of Dunces, Antony Lamont in Gilbert Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew, Francis Xavier Enderby in Anthony Burgess’s quartet of novels.They are all bombastic, delusional, self-pitying and egotistical. But there is pathos in these characters, whereas it would take preternatural powers to be sympathetic to B. B. is the wokest woke person that ever awoke[...]

It’s as if, without the restrictions imposed by cinema, Kaufman thinks it is his right to just chuck in any passing fancy. [...] Antkind may well be called postmodern, probably by people who use the word postmodern to make themselves seem intellectually superior at cocktail parties. (Source)

That's okay. Not everybody likes the things we like.