Alex Ross Perry was born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania in 1984. He attended the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and worked at Kim’s Video in Manhattan. He is the director of the films Impolex, The Color Wheel, Listen Up Philip, Queen of Earth, Golden Exits, Her Smell, Pavements and the new documentary Videoheaven.
Three Great Things is Talkhouse’s series in which artists tell us about three things they absolutely love. To mark the July 2 release of writer-director Alex Ross Perry’ s epic new documentary Videoheaven, a three-hour paean to video stores narrated by Maya Hawke, longtime Talkhouse contributor and NYC indie stalwart Perry shared some of the things he loves the most. — N.D.
Baking with Yeast
One thing I do that has become very important to me is baking. But beyond that, what I truly like is attempting to teach myself some new form of that – potentially failing, making mistakes, having a learning curve and then immediately trying it again. For the past four years, I’ve gone through an ongoing quest to successfully cook with yeast, which has long been my Achilles heel, and I feel like I’ve finally perfected it. Countless times, I mixed yeast into the warm water and it didn’t rise, so I had to throw it away. Or I’d think it was right and put the dough aside, then three hours later find it was exactly the same size, so I’d have to throw it away and start over. I derive a lot of joy from that repetitive trial and error, just because it’s end result-oriented. At the end of it, you have a thing. But it’s also process-oriented, because it takes forever and you have to be on top of it and pay close attention, so I enjoy that too.
With baking, it might take about a day to make it, but then about a week to eat it. And to me, that’s a fun balance. When we moved out of the city, something really fun we started every other week is doing an at-home family pizza night. I make the dough with my daughter Thursday night; she’s kneading it and having a blast. And then Friday morning, she gets to see how big it is. She’s so excited. And then when she comes home from school on Friday, she gets to smash it and stretch it and put everything on it. By the time we eat the pizza Friday, it’s been a 24-hour process. She’s impatient and just wants to eat the pizza at every stage, but it’s extremely rewarding. And then, in most cases, we end up making enough pizza to last us through Sunday, because we don’t just make one pizza, we make four or five. It’s basically very easy, but it’s a long process and you just have to be patient, which kids are not. But I am instilling that in her; it’s a fun lesson.
Cycling
My favorite thing to do is go cycling. I have a French road bike, a hand-me-down Peugeot which is incredible. When I lived in Brooklyn, near Prospect Park, I’d ride in the park four or five days a week, doing an hour of laps, which was simultaneously exercise, meditation, solitude and relaxation, all wrapped into one. That routine was so balancing for me and physically very vital.
Since my family and I moved to the country at the start of the year, though, I haven’t spent one minute cycling. I haven’t yet found an easy 10-mile, no-cars bike loop near our house. Also, it was freezing cold until April, and then I tore my MCL, so I’m going to end up missing all of the spring and summer cycling, which is truly a noticeable loss in my life.
Cycling, for me, is king, and an exercise bike in the house is just not the same thing. I’m not there for the motion of the pedals, I’m there for the constant focus and reactive quality to every stick on the road in front of me, every turn, every other rider. It’s not about just moving my feet in a repetitive manner, it’s about an ongoing, organic understanding of where I’m going, even if that is the same loop every single day. And it’s different every day. A different rider, different weather, different wind, all that can affect things. A route can be the easiest thing one day and then brutally difficult the next. And for a decade that sort of daily repetition has been so crucial for me.
Years ago, I had a junk bike that I bought at some shop in the East Village, and then my good friend who’s a maniacal cyclist and has four or five bikes he’s built from scratch from imported parts, sold me his “worst” bike – which was light as anything and the best bike I could ever aspire to have. The first time I rode it, I felt like the bike was doing half the work for me. It was a real boost to my life. There’s an incalculable number of times I’ve had a looming creative problem in need of solving, and then I’d go for a bike ride and figure it out within half an hour, because I finally had complete freedom of thought. A solution would appear, as though by magic, as soon as I was away from my desk.
Being a Tourist
A third thing that is important, and that I feel like most people neither understand or relate to, is how much I really love being a tourist. I enjoy travel, and being a filmmaker means I get to travel fairly often to various cities. I didn’t have a passport until I was 20 and didn’t leave the country at all until I was in college, but now, whenever I’m anywhere for three or four days, I’ll see as much as I possibly can as a tourist. Everyone at every film festival I’ve ever been to will laugh at me, because when they ask, “What did you do today?,” I’ll say, “I went to the local art museum, to the local history museum, to the post office museum, to the horse-drawn carriage museum …” And they’ll say, “What? I’ve been coming to this festival for 10 years. I’ve never even heard of those places!”
I just look at TripAdvisor’s top 10 things to do in the city, and then do all of them. A lot of people when they’re on vacation just want to find the cool neighborhood where the artists live, go to a cafe and feel as though they live there. That’s fine, but if I have four days to see Barcelona, I want to check off everything that everybody who goes to the city wants to do. I’m basically combining TripAdvisor and Atlas Obscura so that I’m going to the top five most important tourist things, and then also going to find the wax museum or the doorknob museum or the globe that’s in a room the size of an apartment that some maniac built in the ’70s.
I just love being the tourist and going to the most basic places imaginable and getting the souvenir, buying the postcard, getting the magnet, and just accepting, I’m not too good for this. I’m not above this. If I’ve never been to a city before, I just want to lock in on being the best tourist I can be. We were in Venice last year for Pavements, and so I took my kid on a gondola ride on the canal. It was stupid expensive, but with a kid, I just want to do the biggest ticket item that’s going to make her feel like we were really in Venice.
