Studio Sessions

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...

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 moti...

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...

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...

madebyalex.online

Last 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...

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.

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...

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.<...

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...

One of us is back from a family week in Estes Park and Rocky Mountain National Park, and like every trip, it makes Omaha look better. He counts trips like that as a form of creative expression: a loose plan with room for things to unfold. An article says Anthony Bourdain made No Reservations that way. One of us once spent a film-school weekend in Berlin with no hotel booked. Then we get to the friction that keeps one of us from riding his motorcycle to Nashville through the Ozarks. The other would like to drive the old highways...

Daniel Arnold's new book from Loose Joints has no text beyond its title, only pictures sequenced by an editor at the publisher and a few blank pages we puzzle over. One of us, close to finishing something long, remembers Josh Safdie sounding close to tears in an interview because the first question after Uncut Gems, a decade in the making, was what's next. He still sees the appeal of moving straight on. Arnold built his book walking miles a day with a camera, and now anyone can flip through 10 years of those walks in 20 minutes and ask when the...

One of us came out of an Omaha used bookstore with a $25 book on Henri Cartier-Bresson, after passing up a $75 Martin Parr on the display. Reading about a photographer who came from money lands differently in a tight month. His weekly drop of new finds at a vintage shop, the other suggests, has taken the place of the shoot-and-post cycle that can be toxic to photography. His YouTube video predicting that Apple will bring back its Aperture software went from 800 views at bedtime to 25,000 by morning, a thrill that sits oddly next to a thin business account.

...

In 1903 Rainer Maria Rilke answered a young poet who had sent him verses to judge, and began by saying that criticism is the thing least able to reach a work of art. Then he told him to stop looking outward and ask himself, alone at night, whether he truly had to write. One of us reads it still frustrated by opening night at the Joslyn Art Museum, where a show of photographs from the Amon Carter Museum began with a talk neither of us liked. One of us found it narrow, the other underprepared, when all it had to...

One of us watched a video of a woman of 93 still repairing oil pump valves and teaching a man in his 40s the job, and saw his own future in it. He studied fine arts and expects to work forever, by choice. That opens a talk about the usual measures of success, like the house and the 401k, and the pressure they put on anyone who lives otherwise. In 1927 E.M. Forster wrote that a novel can't escape its humanity and is lifeless without it. We borrow the idea: strip the humanity out of a family's life and what's...

We switched off the bright light because it wasn't the mood, and let the cameras suffer for it. That starts a talk about living with things of quality, which isn't the same as expensive. One of us spent nearly four hours picking through a man's house after he died. The other thinks AI is making physical things matter more. The man had built his own stereo receiver from a Heathkit, a box of parts he soldered himself, while one of us used to ask a HomePod mini for jazz and never learn who was playing. Knowing how your things...

If making the work is water, content is food coloring, and once it's in there's no getting it back out. One of us never expected what his video channels would bring: a feeling that an audience is waiting, like a plant that dies if nobody waters it. He had begun them partly as an archive of his own life, the kind he wishes he had of his father's, even a staged one. Vivian Maier took her pictures while working as a nanny, which makes us wonder whether a day job keeps the water clean.

Offered an imaginary...

We start on a worry that making videos about photography turns the pictures into content. Good work takes time: photographs one of us shared, taken over three and a half years, had no thread until he had a reason to look. One of us used to stock a friend's shop with any t-shirt that had The Exorcist or a band on it, however badly made, until the friend asked what those shirts said about the place. In photography, the cheap shirt is a lens comparison video made because those get views. One of us compares his first YouTube channel...

More of a fun for us one here.

One of us opened Facebook Marketplace to find a Leica M11 and a Leica Q2 for sale, listed by a woman selling her father's cameras. He offered to make a short film about her father's photography in exchange for a discount, but she preferred cash at the price a used-camera dealer had quoted her, and the M11 dropped from $7,500 to $4,800. The other, who happened to call that morning, came away weighing the Q2 at $2,500. We half expected a scam, until a young family let us in with the Leicas...

One of us sold an old Nikon lens on eBay for $425 to a buyer in Switzerland. Then a stranger on TikTok pointed out it was a rare early version, with a very low serial number. He prices more carefully now, and it paid off: a sealed Donkey Kong 64 he paid $30 for turns out to sell for around $1,000. The gallery we spent two episodes planning has fallen through. The artist already working in the space got the chance to take it over, and sharing it would have meant every decision went through a committee. We stepped back, and we're still...

We still don't have a name for the space. An hour of brainstorming with ChatGPT, until one of us hit the usage limit, turned up mostly pretentious ideas like the Greek word kairos. A few names stuck anyway: Room, and Keyframe, which one of us read out from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, where it means a moment that seemed like nothing when it happened and turned out to begin a new chapter of your life. Our friend's shop is called Lost, the kind of name you hear once and know is right. Every name in Star Wars works...

A friend who deals in antiques and vintage in Omaha's Old Market has a bigger space sitting free for a few months, and we can sublease it cheaply. We've wanted somewhere to show photographs for years. The man behind one empty building laughed at the idea in a voice message, and a gallery owner one of us approached wanted the show to be his. This one would be ours, beside our friend's furniture and glasswork, with no price tags. We picture a place people come to hang out, with slide viewers so visitors can build their own slideshows, and...

After every new year, a group of friends used to meet for coffee and talk goals, and over the years the goals turned from revenue targets into a picture of the year we want. This episode is that conversation. For one of us, 2025 was the slowest year he's had and the most present in a decade. He's turning 30 and wants the groundwork laid this year: his website live, photography back in focus, a few short stories published and a long-running screenplay finished. He has thrown away more work than he's let anyone see.

The other remembers a...

One of us has been watching a YouTube channel of video essays about art, a voice reading over striking old footage, and sent it over. The other recognized the footage as Jonas Mekas's, taken from one of his documentaries with a fair-use note and no credit. We don't name the channel. What bothers us is the gap between a channel arguing that art should stand apart from commerce and a method that looks like good branding. For contrast there's Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master. Seeing it on 35mm, one of us realized that Philip Seymour Hoffman's cadence sounds like...

One of us went alone to an anniversary party at A Priori, a vintage clothing shop in Omaha run by friends, and brought a '90s Polaroid to give the owners pictures of their own night. That opens a talk about why we want what we want. A Big E Levi's jacket one of us thrifted for $4 got recognized by vendors at a local market, and he admits that being recognized felt good. We try to tell a love of well-made things from a hit of dopamine.

At an earlier event at A Priori, a designer who...

One of us has been reading James Carse's Finite and Infinite Games in the sauna, and he reads us what he highlighted. Carse sets a society, fenced in by its boundaries, against a culture, open to its horizons. Artists, he writes, make ways of seeing rather than objects. The Renaissance, in his telling, opposed no one, and one of us takes that as a test for whether an idea is worth following: it can't need an enemy.

A retired engineer on a plane gave one of us a phrase for what we do here: when he has...

One of us spent the day back at work on the Trans-Siberian Orchestra's tour show, in a room with a close friend and the show's designer, working out his part in something its fans come back to every year. That same morning he'd filmed B-roll alone and wanted nobody near him. So we talk about both ways of making. Casey Neistat says he can't work with other people, yet he still has someone watch his cuts. We wonder why the lone genius has become the story we tell about making things, when it took a crowd of people to...

After two years and 50-some episodes, we admit the show has been on autopilot, so this one sets some guardrails: bring ideas worth an hour of talk, and use the show to hold each other to what we say. One of us realizes how long our Friday photo walks have been on hold when we're back in downtown Omaha's Gene Leahy Mall and he notices how big the trees have grown. The other has lost two weeks to a cough, and with them the early mornings, when he writes best. He wants the script he's worked on for a...

One of us is writing something he won't talk about yet, and treats it as training, worth doing even if nobody reads it. The other shares everything, sometimes to his regret. Orson Welles once said he'd written scripts covering the whole range of human feeling, and luck decided which got made. Then comes a new idea, sparked by John Cassavetes explaining the fake play he wrote for Opening Night: two actors, each married to someone else, who fall for each other and can only act on it on stage. It reminds one of us of Edward Albee's The Goat...

One of us has 30 recordings of his vinyl hauls sitting unedited in a folder, some from January. They may be the purest thing he makes, made with little thought for who watches. That leads to artists who follow their own interest and make the audience catch up. Mac Miller left frat rap behind and kept changing until he died. One of us draws a line down the middle of Paul Thomas Anderson's films, with Boogie Nights and Magnolia on one side and The Master and Phantom Thread on the other.

Sponsorships can make one of us feel...

One of us is building a personal website in the spirit of the old internet, with a visitor counter, a guest book, photos sorted by year and month, and '80s cool jazz playing on a loop. It takes us back to the GeoCities site one of us once built line by line in a computer lab at Iowa State. To the one building the new site, posting to Instagram feels like selling something even when he isn't, while a website of his own is like showing a friend the shelves he built.

One of us got...

One of us spent $450 at an estate sale and came home with a Leica, two old press cameras, a Koni-Omega Rapid 200 that its owner used for crime scene photos, and a typewriter. We wonder where the vintage boom ends, and whether everything built before the '70s will just keep getting more expensive, now that one company gets up to $300 for a refurbished Walkman. His typewriters sell fast at a friend's shop. He owns about ten himself and types his record labels and eBay notes on them. Short letters to friends are his next thing. A letter teaches you...

We play David Foster Wallace's 2005 commencement speech, This Is Water, and one of us hears Groundhog Day in it: Phil Connors lives the same day until he stops believing he's the center of the universe. Wallace calls that self-centeredness our default setting, and says the real work is choosing what to pay attention to, even in a slow checkout line. One of us has been practicing it at home, where dirty dishes and a kid's questions can feel like obstacles to his work. It takes the edge off, he says. We talk about blind certainty, and how this show...

Part two of two. 

At the end of The Cable Guy, the satellite dish breaks and every TV goes dark, so people pick up books and go for walks. We start there, and with a worry about YouTube: if you pay people for views and hand them AI, the platform floods with slop. It's the cobra effect, named for a bounty on cobras that led people to breed more of them. Then one of us notices how much of what he loves is old, like the Jurassic Park shirt he just bought, or the 1978 Superman theme, which t...

Part one of two.

One of us cleaned up an Apple iPod Hi-Fi he found at a thrift store, and the 3-minute video he made about it passed 780,000 views on TikTok in two weeks. Only a few thousand people followed him because of it. He could chase that number with a hyped-up voice and the right subtitle font, and he doesn't want to. A friend on Discord recently told him his story-driven videos about old tech feel like old YouTube, before what people call the MrBeastification of everything. We talk about platforms that reward the content over...

About seven friends, the two of us included, get together to watch movies, lately the original cut of Star Wars, and nobody has to work to keep an evening going. We take a minute to appreciate how rare that is. The show itself is about to start its third year. Then one of us describes the second Polaroid SX-70 he's been testing, all metal and leather, and we ask whether things built to last are coming back. Artifact Bag Co. makes leather bags meant to last a lifetime, and a documentary about the Hermès Birkin bag shows a c...

OpenAI put out a video of Jony Ive and Sam Altman having espresso at Café Zoetrope in San Francisco, talking up a device built around what they call a magic intelligence in the cloud. One of us has seen it, and his question is what it will cost us, the way smartphones and social media cost us our data and our attention. The other calls himself pro AI, as long as it takes the bad problems and leaves the good ones to us. The worry is that people will hand it the good problems too, and it will do t...

Larry McMurtry wrote that people go to Los Angeles for the stars, and that the people at the top there have the job of creating desire for the whole world. We wonder whether it still holds, now that social media manufactures desire from anywhere. One of us, who used to live in LA, remembers weeks of 14-hour days in a windowless room in Burbank, and the nights when a show reached the theater and he drove home up the 101 feeling he was on his way. He also remembers a meeting at 20th Century Fox, where an executive asked what...

One of us has been seeing what cheap, forgotten Leica compacts can do, like a 2005 D-Lux 2 that's a Panasonic underneath. He has also caught himself wanting a new Leica M11, so we try to work out why we want objects at all. A true luxury, we think, can wear and age without losing its function. The other once bought a Leica M9 that cost more than his car, and was too scared to take it out of the house. The one who wants the M11 calls the cheap finds filling his studio "ambition-based purchases." At the moment you buy...

One of us came back from Badlands National Park wearing a sterling silver bracelet he made himself. A silversmith in his late 60s, camping out of his truck, stopped to talk about bison and coyotes one evening. The next morning, Easter Sunday, the man offered to teach him, and they spent 6 hours on the back of the truck hammering a bar of silver into shape. Afterward the man showed them a video he'd been filming when they pulled in the day before, and said he had known he needed to teach them. It comes in a year when we're...

On every film set something goes wrong, and the job is to find the problems and solve them. We start there, and with Werner Herzog, who dragged a real boat over a real mountain to make a film. One of us has been thinking about comfort, partly because he had just spent 2 days on two eggs a morning and electrolyte water to prepare for a colonoscopy at 45. Afterward he caught himself wanting cereal and a cookie as a reward. We suspect a lot of people treat the small frictions of their work the same way, which may be why...