Heather Gold

Joni Mitchell is my art teacher

“One slap on the wrist for playing by ear and I went underground for 10 years.” Joni Mitchell played music when she was very young and then a piano teacher smacked her with a ruler (not an unusual practice at the time) when she began to play by ear at one lesson rather than “have the masters under [her] fingers] as she reported in her CBC interview. That shaming and discouraging attitude and most of all the thinking and quibbling that comes with that way of interacting sent her creative self and spirit hiding underground. She didn’t try music again for 10 years. That’s what I take her to mean by what she talks about at 29:00 above when she discusses why she produced herself. I used to sit at the piano when I was very young and play my feelings. One of my clearest, purest emotional moments was there. Then my mum heard me and laughed at me or commented.
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Fix This Movie – Lincoln, Brave, Wreck It Ralph. Our podcast experiment. What do you think?

Mariko Tamaki and I write a lot, perform a lot, read a lot and see a lot of movies. We know as artists what it’s like to have someone just tell us what’s wrong with what we made. It’s a very popular hobby. It’s one of the many parents of the blended family known as the Internet.

Anyway, after having high high hopes for Young Adult (especially because of how much we like Diablo Cody. Ivan Reitman, Charlize Theron and Patton Oswalt’s work) we found ourselves trying to figure out *how* we could have made it better. We play this little writing game after every movie now and decided to try it as a podcast. So we made one. We discuss Lincoln, Brave and what it can learn from Wreck It Ralph. Tell us what you think. Do you want to hear some more? Any movie in particular?