Hands On....

Schnooki

2012-01-22T21:59:00.000-08:00

Fred Stoller's entry into my life was emblematic of his personal gestalt -- which he's turned into an unlikely career.

You know when you're at a cool party and then someone latches on to you and they're kind of annoying but persistent and you can't shake them and then you give up and realize there's something inimitable about them that is compelling?

That's Fred Stoller.

Phil Rosenthal's awesome screening room (LA Times)

We met at one of those parties you always imagine take place in Hollywood yet never dream of getting invited to. But in 2002, during my year on West Wing, my Rolling Stone buddy David Wild brought me to the home of Everybody Loves Raymond creator Phil Rosenthal, who has hosted Sunday night movie screening pizza parties [right] with his wife Monica Horan (who played Brad Garrett's wife on Raymond) since they met in New York in the 80's.

Among the two dozen or so guests were several character actors, writers, and the like. The house was beautiful but not ostentatious; the entry hall was hung with framed autographs Rosenthal had collected from his idols, including, if I'm remembering right, Billy Wilder.

Before that night's screening of Woody Allen's Radio Days (Rosenthal had been re-screening all of Woody's movies) I hung out in the kitchen and ate slices from pizza boxes off the large island (apparently Phil has since upgraded to pizzas from Mozza), and eventually out of the cast of characters emerged -- Fred.

Fred was tall, lean, anxious, nasal-voiced and Brooklyn-born. He told me he'd been working on a memoir about his piecemeal, freelance experiences on the fame's fringes called "Maybe We'll Have You Back" - -the noncommittal statement told by TVproducers to itinerant guest stars like Fred their entire careers.

I was wary, but intrigued.

I'd been a big comedy fan since childhood -- and written a lot of journalism about comedy, including editing two special issues of Rolling Stone on the topic. And I had never read or heard of a book told from the point of view of someone like Fred. Someone like, well, these guys:

"Fred, Ed, Ted, and Fred" (Willard, Begley, Lange, Stoller)

Stories from a journeyman character actor about how different stars behaved, of rating gigs by how good the food is, of trying to fit in and make enough of a mark without stealing the stars' limelight(s).

Fred had started out as a standup. Here he is in a Young Comedians special hosted by Dennis Miller.

If you think he's exaggerating about his mother -- who had warned him he was "too depressed to be a comedian" -- here's a clip of him and her from the early days of Comedy Central. He says only the last line was scripted.

After landing a role as a series regular on a 1990 sitcom with Harold Gould and Esther Rolle, Silver and Sons, which lasted all of four episodes -- Stoiller carved a modest career out of being typecast as schnooks (his word) and nervous neurotics on many of the major sitcoms of the era.

He'd been Raymond's annoying nearly twin cousin Gerard (ultimately appearing in eight episodes):

If you look at his IMDB page (currently up to 94 titles!) you will see a disproportionate number of his guest roles -- on Jesse, Verionica's Closet, even a voice on The Penguins of Madagascar - - have been named "Fred." It's common for stars of sitcoms like Mary Tyler Moore or Ray Romano to have characters named after them, but not so for a guest star. It's because he's just always so Fred-like. (They also often stole routines from his stand up, as you can see in this clip with Dom Deluise.) He played "Fred the [annoying] pharmacist" on The Nanny (four times), Fred and severn OTHER schnooky characters on Murphy Brown, plus non-Freds on Friends, Seinfeld, Suddenly Susan....and of course his cartoon self on Dr. Katz.

He had some memorable moments in movies, too, including as the "Get off the phone" guy in Dumb and Dumber (my kids loved watching the last part backwards on VHS):

Stoller even spent a year on Seinfeld's writing staff, turning a true story that had happened to him -- in which a friend who gave him a sportscoat never seemed done with Fred's attempts to repay him -- into the classic episode "The Soup."

When you're a writer or editor and you meet someone who says they have written something and ask if you can look at it, the best option is almost always to declare that you never, ever do that. But I know a good story -- and title -- when I hear one, and my latent editorial interest from my journalism days was piqued.

So back in 2002, against my better judgment, I had Fred email me pages and send a VHS tape of his reel (this was also BYT -- before YouTube).

Fred was funny, both onscreen and on the page. And self-aware. His childhood idols weren't characters played by Clint Eastwood or Harrison Ford, he wrote, but Dustin Hoffman's Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy.

On several auditions, directors have said to me, "Don't be so pathetic," when I had no idea I was being that.

Sure, a lot of it was raw, but there was a real voice and story there. I spent hours with printed-out pages helping him find a shape and narrative, then tried to help connect him to book editors, but the whole thing kind of faded away.

Fred's first action figure

Last year I reconnected with Fred via -- where else? -- Facebook. I was happy to see he was still getting regular work, including as a writer and voice of "Rusty the Wrench" on the kids' series Handy Manny (very proud of the plastic toy based on his character, which spoke in his own voice [right]).

He started posting about an autobiographical independent movie he wrote and starred in, Fred & Vinnie, about his even more sadsack buddy who lives vicariously through Fred's "stardom" and then comes to L.A. and Fred can't get rid of him. Directed by Raymond writer Steve Skrovan, it showed at several festivals.

In "The Gate Show" webisodes Fred recently created for Comedy Central, he found a character who ingeniously matches his position in showbiz: the guard at a studio lot deluded into thinking he is hosting a talk show from his booth, and that the people who drive up -- Howie Mandel, Sarah Silverman, Bob Saget, and others -- are his (increasingly exasperated) "guests."

TMZ has been picking on Fred on slow news days because he spends his non-working days hanging around the outdoor Grove shopping mall and they can usually get some good soundbytes out of him.

Fred's name also came up on the Chris Rock episode of Marc Maron's always fascinating WTF podcast. Discussing Eddie Murphy, Rock mentioned that Eddie - who did standup back when Fred was doing it -- had out of the blue asked Chris how Fred was doing. Maron and Rock shared a chuckle about that.

So, almost a decade after I'd first met Fred and helped with his writing, I was reminded of his manuscript. But this time, I realized that technology had caught up to him. Stephen Toblowsky, the prolific character actor (Ned from Groundhog Day, Californication, et al.) had done well with a Kindle Single, Amazon's new e-publishing venture. The Singles are longer than a magazine piece but shorter than full-on books, and share a healthy percentage of the proceeds with the author. And, it struck me, Fred's material and similar public stature seemed perfectly suited for this new format.

I sent an email to the editor, David Blum, who I knew from my journalism days, who turned out to be a Fred Stoller fan. A few emails later, he and Fred decided to make a stand-alone chapter about Fred's year writing with Larry David and Jerry at Seinfeld. Fred wrote some new introductory material:

Being a perennial guest star is like being a foster kid who's passed around some really great foster homes. I would love for one of them to keep me, but it's a hell of a lot better than being abandoned.

"Published" in a matter of weeks, at $1.99, My Seinfeld Year has quickly became one of Kindle Single's best-selling titles. You can sample part of it free, and don't need a Kindle -- either read it "in the cloud" (online) or download an App on your laptop/device.

Fred & Fran reunited in TV Land.

Meanwhile, Fred continues to get regular work. Most recently he reunited with The Nanny Fran Drescher on her new series Happily Divorced in his old standby role -- waiter schnook.

A while back, Maron taped a WTF podcast with Fred, and, in typical Fred style, Stoller felt after the fact that he'd been diverted from telling the stories he wanted to tell. So Maron agreed to do a followup phone call with Fred which he tacked onto the show.

The do-over reminded me of how my night in 2002 at Rosenthal's had ended. We had piled into the screening room, armed with fresh popcorn from a popcorn machine, and I took my wallet out and put it on the seat beside me during the movie. Afterwards I thanked Rosenthal profusely, left and went home -- only to realize that my wallet was back in my seat.

I had to drive back, buzz the gate intercom, explain my situation and go back inside. These were people who did not know me, remember. Monica let me inside and I saw to my horror that everyone else had left.

I sheepishly slunk over to the chair, fetched my wallet, thanked them again profusely, and slipped out into the night, cursing myself for my faux pas.

At that moment, I felt exactly like....Fred Stoller.

Law & Disorder

2012-01-16T17:38:00.000-08:00

Damien Echols, Jessie Misskeller Jr., and Jason Baldwin in 1993

Misskeller, Echols and Baldwin in 2000 (above)
Echols, Misskeller and Baldwin in 2011 (below)

I'd hoped to spend this three-day weekend relaxing and catching up, but instead I got angry. And maybe that's what MLK would have wanted.

A friend mentioned that HBO [full disclosure: my current employer] was airing all three Paradise Lost documentaries, in conjunction with the premiere of # 3. I was only vaguely aware of them, and at first thought they illustrated three different topics on a theme. So I set the DVR.

What I discovered, glued to my chair for seven hours, was that instead it was like a hellish version of Michael Apted's ongoing Up series [left] -- following the same characters from different economic strata over decades. (The new one showed at the New York Film Festival, got a DGA nomination and is nominated for the Documentary Oscar.)

In the case of Paradise Lost, it took three documentaries and a mind-blowing 18 years -- plus the involvement of celebrities like Eddie Vedder, Johnny Depp and the Dixie Chicks -- to rectify the miscarriage of justice that wrongfully convicted three innocent Arkansas teenagers in the murders of 3 eight-year-old boys.

The trilogy contains enough twists and turns, villains and false theories
to rival last year's fiction series The Killing, and even the "victory" leaves a cloud over many of the participants (including, in some ways, the filmmakers, whose cameras affected the proceedings and who inevitably became part of the story -- see the New York Times review).

I realized why I had probably missed the first two installments, in 1996 and 2000: back then I was the parent of two small children, and probably blocked out anything involving crime-scene photos of grisly child murders.

But today as a parent of teenagers, I am horrified at the horrendous wrong done to the "West Memphis 3" pictured above, who were all 18 or under when falsely accused and convicted, when their only apparent crime was being "different."

We like to picture murder investigations like TV dramatizes: everything falling into place thanks to tireless shoe leather and savvy. (The much-parodied doink-doink music cue of Law & Order reinforces this lockstep dance.)

But the reality is probably closer to what's depicted in these documentaries: local cops pressured to find a culprit, with no real knowledge of evidence gathering, autopsy analysis, or forensic patterns.

A month into the fruitless search, the police cornered Jessie Misskeller, Jr., who had an I.Q. of 72, and badgered him for 12 hours. Only the last 45 minutes was taped, and even in that small portion, you can hear him being pushed to change his answers to fit the facts of the case. He implicated -- or rather, corroborated the police's implication of -- his fellow teens, whose main crime seemed to be having long hair, wearing black and listening to heavy metal.

Damien Echols was additionally punished for changing his name to "Damien" and reading up on Wicca; he ended up with a death sentence, whereas the other two merely got life sentences without parole. Never mind that there was no evidence even placing them near the crime scene or capable of the physical acts required to do what transpired. The community, pent up for revenge, descended on them, especially the parents of the dead children.

As I learned from a recent radio interview, even the filmmakers thought they were guilty when they first showed up to make the movie.

In the second installment, seven years later, the story is dominated by a "Save the West Memphis 3" group inspired by the first film. And -- like in the Up series -- several participants from the first film think better this time and refuse to participate, including all but one of the parents of the murdered second graders.

But that one is a doozy. John Mark Byers -- whose wife died under "indetermined circumstances" in the interim -- gives the filmmakers a knife as a gift that turns out to have blood on it; claims to have a brain tumor; goes to his wife's grave and returns to the scene of the crime, staging an insane pyromaniac ceremony consigning the teenagers to hell. He ends up taking a lie detector test and when he learns he passed it, he declares, somewhat self-defeatingly, "I knew I was innocent!" and high-fives the tester.

Yet by the current installment, Byers -- along with the filmmakers, it's implied -- is convinced the criminal is one of the other parents, Terry Hobbs, who sued Dixie Chick Natalie Maines for defamation and instead ended up casting more aspersions on himself.

But the filmmakers -- and the new lawyers for the defendants -- aren't out to solve the crime any more, they're out to salvage the lives of the teenagers who have now spent half their lives behind bars. They uncover new evidence, new expertise on the old evidence, including DNA that exonerates all three from being anywhere near the crime scene.

SPOILER ALERT.
[Though it won't spoil your appreciation of the movies, and it's been in all the newspapers].

With the new movie about to come out, a new trial pending that would even more clearly embarrass the Arkansas police, prosecutors, and judges, as well as cost millions and open them up to civil lawsuits, a deal was offered: In exchange for time served, the three were allowed to plead guilty while stating their innocence for the record. This is known as an "Alford Plea," which was established in a previous case.

Baldwin, to his credit, did not want to play along: he wanted a new trial to prove their innocence once and for all. But he realized that he might be jeopardizing the life of Echols, so he relented.

And in the end -- after 18 years and FOUR movies (see below) -- the boys who were imprisoned on a false, forced confession, walked free only because of another false, forced confession.

[***UPDATED: another documentary about the same case (?!) produced by Peter Jackson, West of Memphis -- which also gives Echols a producer credit -- will premiere at Sundance this month. Click here for the trailer. It turns out Jackson paid a lot of the bills to uncover the new evidence. And has new witnesses who corroborate what Paradise Lost 3 implies about who actually did the crime.*** UPDATE #2: Now a planned feature docudrama has cast Colin Firth and Reese Witherspoon. Where were all these people when the happy ending wasn't written yet? ]

One can only wonder how many prisoners in America without the benefit of cameras, HBO, et. al., languish under similar infuriating circumstances. For a nation obsessed with Casey Anthony going free, this is a much worse crime against humanity. And, lest we forget, the killer(s) of the 3 boys still roam free.

Dodging the Clusterflick

2012-01-08T16:05:00.002-08:00

This is clusterflick season -- when studios jam the multiplexes mining for Oscar gold. Theoretically I could be going to a new movie nearly every night. Yet in the past two weeks I found myself preferring to go to revival houses -- three times.

I am not delivering a screed about how they stopped making good movies in 1980; in fact, two of the three movies were 2011 releases I had missed on the big screen. But I am weary of Oscar season, our meager reward for enduring another summer of ever-worse remakes and sequels. (Eight of 2011's top eleven grossing titles so far were sequels -- the other two were Thor and Captain America -- and Mission Impossible 4 is still climbing into that list.)

Last night I had a lively debate with an erudite couple who had the polar opposite reaction to me on two Oscar contenders: Young Adult (they liked, I hated) and The Help (I liked, they hated). That's what makes this a ballgame, I guess, but I wonder if in a year or two we will even remember which movies were nominated.

2011's most romantic scene?

I have enjoyed some of this year's crop -- most thoroughly The Artist [left] -- but I can't argue with people who didn't like it, and also have been wildly disappointed by several
(Young Adult, J. Edgar, Extremely Loud, Almodovar's The Skin I Live In, The Descendants, Tinker Tailor). Even though I think Dragon Tattoo is probably good, I just saw the Swedish one and don't feel up for a second round of brutal rape scenes; I am sure Hugo is fine and will get there eventually. I have been too let down by previous biopics to get psyched about Marilyn Monroe or Margaret Thatcher being co-opted into "bravura performances." My fear is that I won't be emotionally involved in the story, I'll just be marveling at craft.

And when I hear news like the National Film Critics naming Melancholia best film of the year, it only reconfirms my suspicion that these days award-givers are making decisions either out of compromise or to be "different" -- and that by next year even they won't remember their choices.

Fool me once, shame on you.
Fool me twice...

The old movie I saw in a theater was Hitchcock's Vertigo [right] which I wanted my daughters to rewatch on a big screen. Yes, yes, we can have a debate about whether that makes me a good dad or a bad one; it certainly teaches them something about men and relationships they may not be ready for, but it also makes San Francisco look nice. [Footnote: Kim Novak is taking out ads complaining of The Artist's use of a theme from Bernard Herrmann's score from Vertigo. Crazy?]

The others were the Oscar-contending documentary Project Nim [up top] at the New Beverly, a pleasantly scruffy double-feature screen salvaged from closure in 2010 by Quentin Tarantino; and Super 8, J.J. Abrams' ode to his childhood and his hero Steven Spielberg, which was showing at the American Cinematheque's Santa Monica outpost, the Aero [left].

My response to both helped me bettter understand why I had opted not to see, say, Mission Impossible 4.

Had I watched Project Nim on HBO or DVD, I might have turned it off when it got too disturbing. And in fact someone in the sparse audience walked out of the New Beverly. Directed by James Marsh (Man on Wire), Nim moved me through a wider range of emotions than any fiction film in a long while.

It tells the troubling story of a chimpanzee who in the early 70s subjected to a misguided and muddled "scientific study" by a shady Columbia University professor, in which Nim was taken from his mother as an infant and "raised" by humans variously in a brownstone on the Upper West Side, a 28-acre estate in Riverdale, and then gets cast off to much less cushy and more life-threatening habitats.

There's tons of vintage footage as well as recent interviews with several participants in this process, which involves professor/student sex, a mother who breastfed Nim and dressed him in sweaters, and others who shared joints with him, all summed up by the mother's daughter who finally just blurts, "It was the seventies." Meaning, the post-sixties, anything-goes hedonism and narcissism on display in The Ice Storm is much worse here, and you can't take your eyes off it. Everyone projects their own needs onto the poor chimp

But then Nim -- and the film, and the audience -- made it through, thanks to the only truly sympathetic -- and empathettic -- character: Bob Ingersoll, a "teacher" who kept track of Nim for years and took responsibility for what happened to him. If you make it to that part of the movie I challenge you not to tear up. Here's a brief taste:

Coincidentally, the 1970's were also the setting for the other half of my 2011 playback.

I think I initially dodged Abrams' Super 8 -- as of this writing, the 20th-highest grossing movie of the year -- because the first teaser-trailer made it look like a high-tech, supernatural thriller. That appeals to many audiences, but not me.

The best part of the movie is autobiographical and owes more to Stand By Me than Close Encounters or Alien. A bunch of engaging, well-characterized Ohio pre-teens with a camera are trying making a zombie movie. Then Things Go Haywire, Spielberg-style -- a train crash, a government cover-up, a scary alien visitor, etc etc. This trailer does more justice to the human side of things -- the recently widowed Dad (Kyle Chandler) and his son (Joel Courtney) trying to connect, the hot girl (Elle Fanning) everyone pines for, the bossy chubby director (Riley Griffiths), the kid who's always blowing things up, the kid who's always throwing up.

At the screening I attended, there was a Q&A with Abrams afterwards, and the interviewer quoted Spielberg (who produced Super 8) saying this was really the "first J.J. Abrams movie" -- because his previous directorial efforts were reboots of Star Trek and Mission:Impossible.

Dennis Muren, Michael Giacchino, Ryan Lee, Gabriel Basso,
Elle Fanning, J.J. Abrams, (Burtt obscured) and Geoff Boucher

Also on the panel were Dennis Muren and Ben Burtt, the ILM visual and sound pioneers who worked on George Lucas and Spielberg's landmark movies, who tried to keep the CGI more reality based for the 70's style of the movie than is now being employed for, say, Mission Impossible 4 (which Abrams' company, Bad Robot, produced).

Abrams told the audience his favorite movie is actually The Philadelphia Story and candidly admitted that he hadn't quite melded the two genres he was trying to wed.

Afterwards I was trying to figure out why the movie wasn't as engaging as its role model, E.T. Yes, Abrams grew up in the business and sold his first movie idea before he graduated college ( I wrote an early item for Esquire about his screenplay for Regarding Henry when he was known as Jeffrey Abrams). Yes, he is aping Spielberg (he employs the "Spielberg close-up" as many times in this one movie as Spielberg did his whole career) -- but Spielberg is mimicking people when he makes his movies too.

(Side note: Abrams also ripped off himself -- the contentious dynamic between the dark-haired good-guy character played by Chandler and the shaggy blond-haired ne''er-do-well father of Elle Fanning played by Ron Eldard [above] is eerily reminiscent of the Jack/Sawyer dynamic in Lost [below]).

I'd like to believe that not all things are going downhill. Maybe the audience shares responsibility. Are we less open a culture than we were 30 years ago, more jaded by movie effects and conventions?

I certainly give props to Abrams for trying to bring some humanity to the genre and the movie theater (even as he produces MI4). But it's the chimpanzee's story that sticks with me.

[UPDATE: Project Nim won the DGA best documentary award on January 29, after failing to get an Oscar nomination -- partly due to the controversial Oscar doc process. ]

Reviving the Blog: Heroes of 2011

2012-01-01T11:50:00.000-08:00

2011 was a tumultuous year -- internationally, nationally, in Facebook redesigns, and, in some smaller ways, personally. That means I should have been blogging more, not less.

Yet as I got swamped by year-end round-up articles, I realized -- not only am I still catching up on early episodes of Homeland -- I haven't written a post since the Charlie Sheen Roast, which was so long ago that one of the roasters has since passed away.

Along the way I posted on Facebook -- frequently -- about things like the NY Times' egregious overkill on the tragic Stamford fire. A blogger can get lazy when there are more readers and respondents there than here.

But the self-taskmaster in me says it's time to catch up. My nominees for heroes of 2011 -- in a moment. First, some thoughts on the vexations of Blogging, which most people warned me had to be "branded" (i.e., single-topic) and needed a consistent publishing date and frequency for it to ever amount to anything. I got the most page views when I wrote about my past experiences with cult figures -- Terrence Malick and Albert Brooks -- but I didn't want to get stuck writing rehashes of pieces I had sworn off writing in the first place.

Spitzer & Parker (sans dog)

As much as I intended "Hands On" to be Unmediated Me, a few months in I got hired at CNN and was warned to be "careful" about what I wrote. Rumor had it that someone had recently been fired for simply writing on Facebook about company layoffs -- which had already been public.

And when I was enlisted to write the show blog for ParkerSpitzer, my very first entry got me in trouble -- all I did was describe Eliot tripping over the gate on Kathleen's office door protecting her blind rescue dog. My boss thought it was fine. Eliot and Kathleen thought it was fine. But I got called on the carpet. Turns out there was some sort of corporate policy against any pets at the office that Kathleen had skirted; I had unwittingly provided an exposé. I was relieved of my show blog duties.

Journalists often step in it without even realizing they've done so. Back when Beverly Hills Cop 2 was coming out, Rolling Stone assigned me the Eddie Murphy cover story.

But before I could meet Eddie, I was told his manager, Bob Wachs, wanted to "vet" me. He told me he had rejected another writer because he didn't think Eddie would get along with her, mainly because she was a woman and "Eddie always runs around in his underwear" and his posse asks questions like "Did you fuck her." I somehow passed THAT test but then was told I also had to interview the film's producers first.

Simpson & Bruckheimer

I dutifully showed up to meet Jerry Bruckheimer and his partner, the late infamous Don Simpson, and asked as many polite questions as I could to satisfy their egos.

At one point I mentioned the fact that Eddie had a team of two managers, Wachs and his Comic Strip co-founder Richie Tienkin, and asked them about their own partnership and how things were divided.

After this meeting, I found out that, unbeknownst to me or anyone else, Eddie's two managers were in midst of a fractious split-up, and that Jerry and Don had decided I was doing an exposé. The interview with Eddie was cancelled.

I ended up writing a snarky piece about Eddie being surrounded by Yes Men and handlers called "FREE EDDIE MURPHY" [left] that covered things like a paternity suit, his obsession with Elvis, and his poor choices in movies, and the magazine went with a Paul Simon Graceland cover. Murphy's career has only recently recovered from the slight. (Joke.)

After ten years away from such maneuverings, I hoped to be able to write a blog that -- even when looking back at such pieces that I had been happy to leave behind -- would shed some insight into showbiz, TV writing, journalism, parenting, divorce, and anything else that moved me.

But even after leaving CNN in August, I found myself again having to be a cautious blogger, because my new job -- writing for Aaron Sorkin's HBO series set in the world of cable news -- is also closely guarded.

It won't air till next summer, and all HBO has shown is a brief nondescript shot [right] in its trailer for 2012. I couldn't even brag about Jane Fonda being cast as the Ted Turner-like mogul until it was old news.

Meanwhile, rabid fans are already circulating old versions of the pilot script, which has led to a lot of frustrating misinformation in the blogosphere -- including even the name of the series, the name of the fictional network, and the last name of the anchorman played by Jeff Daniels.

What I can tell you is that the challenge of the show ideally will be what will make it pay off. Unlike The West Wing, The Newsroom is set in the real world -- i.e., instead of fake Senators and Presidents and Supreme Court Justices, we're dealing with the real ones, and the news that's being covered is from recent history. The pilot takes place on the day of the BP Oil Spill; by the time the series airs, that will be more than two years in the past: long ago enough for the details to now be murky -- and to add some perspective -- yet recent enough for it to still have relevance. Some days in the writers room our brains explode but when it clicks, it's beyond rewarding.

There's my roundabout transition to bring me to my own take on recent history: the people who for me gave 2011 oomph and hope amidst a dismal economy and troubling political grandstanding.

1) JESSE LAGRECA (pictured up top)
It started out with an iPhone video. An unassuming guy at Occupy Wall Street being interviewed by a Fox News reporter, trying to get the OWSer to criticize Obama and the alleged "lack of message" provide the kind of soundbyte Fox would air. Instead he schooled the Fox guy so thoroughly that the interview didn't air. But a bystander's recording of the interaction wound up on YouTube and turned Jesse LaGreca into an articulate leader for a leaderless movement. He ended up on NPR (at one point appearing on a panel with Spitzer), speaking at the Capitol and elsewhere and gave me hope that something might actually come of the sit-ins. If nothing else I hope he runs for Congress.

2) LOUIS CK
The best episode of TV I saw this year was utterly unclassifiable -- Comedy? Drama? Documentary? Political statement? And then the guy who did it also funded his own stand-up special, sold it for $5 download via the Internet, made a million bucks -- and donated the bulk to charity.

The comedian Louis CK achieved every comedian's dream -- a sitcom based around his persona, on HBO, no less. But even though Lucky Louie was really funny and smart (check out the link) -- it was staged on an obviously artificial Honeymooners-style set but dealt with modern issues and language -- it lasted only 13 episodes. Most comedians would figure, that was my shot, and go back to stand-up.

But Louis is one of the hardest-working and self-challenging guys in showbiz. He went back to the drawing board. and cut a unique "just deliver episodes for this budget, no notes" deal with FX that has inspired jealousy from not just every other comedian -- but every other TV creator.

The series, Louie, hit a peak with the episode "Duckling" (it's mature-audience content on the web, so you are required to register to watch) in which he goes to Afghanistan to do a USO-type show for the troops (and actually filmed there), with a baby duckling in his backpack that his daughter made him bring along as a kind of good-luck charm. Along the way Louie allows himself to look bad in several ways that most lead actors and actresses just don't. And the way it played out was charming, moving, and inspiring.

3-4) WAEL GHONIM and ETHAR EL-KATATNEY
America likes to put faces on history. Even though the Arab Spring was a mass movement helped along by Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook, the biggest rallying point was the Facebook page called "We are all Khaled Said," named after a young Egyptian tortured to death by Alexandria police. The page was administered by a Google executive named Wael Ghonim who, two days after the massive January 25th protest, was detained by authorities for 11 days. After his release, his emotional and articulate speech -- and his refusal to take credit -- made him a sought-after US TV guest. On 60 Minutes he said:

"Our revolution is like Wikipedia, okay? Everyone is contributing content, [but] you don't know the names of the people contributing the content... Revolution 2.0 in Egypt was exactly the same. Everyone contributing small pieces, bits and pieces. We drew this whole picture of a revolution. And no one is the hero in that picture."

In stark contrast to most of our political figures. That's what makes him a hero.
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On a smaller scale, Ethar El-Katatney, a remarkable 23-year-old award-winning Egyptian blogger and TV journalist educated at the American University of Cairo, provided CNN's audience with an articulate, youthful view of the revolution that helped make it tangible to us.

After Mubarak's initial speech at which he didn't resign, she said she felt "Punk'd." She described the freaky dissonance between Eqyptian State TV and reality. In order to stay awake till 4 a.m. to appear live on our New York based show, she would stay awake by watching reruns of Grey's Anatomy.

Happily after graduating she got a grant to tour America and speak to journalists around the country here, and has since appeared (thanks to some of my former CNN colleagues) on Charlie Rose and MSNBC's Up with Chris.

5-6) BERNIE AND BARNEY
When you work on a cable news network for a year, you quickly learn a lot about our elected officials. Some of them play hard to get (John Boehner), most of them are, or turn out to be, full of themselves or full of crap (Sorry, Anthony Weiner), and there are only a couple of truth-tellers remaining not kowtowing to PACs and other special interests.

Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont, the Senate's only true independent, and retiring Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank, were always a joy to have on the show, because they saw what was happening and didn't varnish it.

The very frank Barney

The more and more that money infiltrates the system in the wake of Citizens United, I don't know how many more such people will be attracted to public service and make their way through the treacherous straits to get elected.

7) JEFF TWEEDY
The anti-hero hero.

For a while I was addicted to Aimee Mann. When I met her I told her she was the patron saint of my divorce. She asked "Is that a good thing or a bad thing?" Now I know what she means. Having moved on from her bleak view of relationships, I needed a new guru, and I found one in Wilco's Jeff Tweedy, who is every bit as jaded but somehow more of a romantic.

In June I dragged my kids through a downpour to bear witness to Wilco at Mass MoCA for the Solid Sound Festival; I brought my girlfriend to see them in Central Park in yet another wet outdoor show. But the musicianship and spirit of the band and crowd kept us all warm.
And -- speaking of weather - in December Tweedy showed up to help out the meteorologist at WGN while doing five shows in the band's hometown of Chicago, and even that he did with his inimitable laconic existential panache.

8) SHAILENE WOODLEY

I didn't love the movie The Descendants, as much as I wanted to. But as the father of two teenage daughters, I was totally mesmerized by the performance of Shailene Woodley, who was nineteen when she filmed it and previously mostly famous for the cable series The Secret Life of the American Teenager, which I had not seen.

I pray her career flies more Emma Stone than Lindsay Lohan.

9) DON LEMON
My first reaction to meeting Don Lemon was that he was too young to possibly be a national news anchor. But he just looks that way. Damn him.

My next reaction was he was a brave guy for writing a memoir about being gay, in an era when many of his peers clearly think that's not the way to go.

But what made him my hero were his attempts to point out and push back on politicians' stock talking points, and his inability to tow the line when he was asked to be silly in the way that news anchors sometimes are.

Jon Stewart first called attention to these latter moments, but Lemon has not backtracked, instead embracing them fully. On a network whose new slogan is "The only side we take is yours," trying to thread the needle between Fox and MSNBC, Lemon has made the third party seem more human and honest.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

CNN Anchor Don Lemon Appears Not to Care for CNN

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog

The Daily Show on Facebook

10) ELIZABETH WARREN
You know maybe I spoke too dispiritingly about noone replacing the Barney Franks of the world. Elizabeth Warren, like Louis CK, refuses to give up. After she took on Tim Geithner, all of DC seemed to unite to stonewall her from becoming head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau,

But Warren then decided to take on Masschusetts Senator Scott Brown, and anyone else who tries to stop her.

Ron Paul called her a socialist -- there's no higher mark of honor. And at a public meeting, a Tea Party member called her a "socialist whore" to her face.

I call her a good end point for the first post of 2012.

A TALE OF TWO COASTS: Charlie Sheen and 9-11.

2011-09-11T20:10:00.000-07:00

"Life is so full of noise and speed, that any opportunity we afford ourselves to stop and think about deeply serious things is a gift, and we should take advantage of it." -- New Yorker editor David Remnick on NPR, 9-11-11.

"Drugs couldn't kill me, sex couldn't kill me, the press couldn't kill me. Two and a Half Men couldn't kill me....I'm Charlie Sheen, and in here burns an eternal fire. I just have to remember to keep it away from a crack pipe." -- Charlie Sheen at Comedy Central Roast, 9-10-11.

I knew I was in for a surreal experience when I scored a ticket for the taping of the TV roast of Charlie Sheen. But I hadn't fully thought through the stark juxtaposition with the national commemoration of 9-11 the next day, and the contrast it painted between the two coasts.

Both involved revisiting troubling sights and sounds that had dominated the news, trying to conjure symbols of resilience and and self-awareness, and a lot of handwringing about whether the revisiting was exploitative or fetishism.

So: On one coast they were reading psalms, names of the dead, and singing "The Sounds of Silence"; on the other they were making jokes about spousal abuse, drug abuse, violence against hookers, and Sheen losing custody of his children.
"Don’t you want to live to see their first 12 steps?" joshed Jeffrey Ross (dressed as Gaddafi). "The only reason you got on TV in the first place is because God hates Michael J. Fox," snarked put-down specialist Anthony Jeselnik.

The hot mess panel of roasters also included 80-year-old William Shatner, the incomprehensible Mike Tyson, and Jon Lovitz, who seemed to have been paid to accept jokes about his double chins, perennial unemployment and sexual deviancy.

I was happy, in a way, not to be in New York and forced to relive the visuals of buildings burning and disintegrating, bodies falling, America shaken from its sense of security and primacy. But spending the weekend in a city that thrives on illusion -- and its own sense of primacy -- was disconcerting.

When I first moved west for a TV writing gig in June 2002, the TV and movie lots were under tighter security than America's airports. Guards inspected every car trunk, looking under the chassis with mirrors on long poles, so convinced were the studios that they were the obvious target for terrorists who hated everything about America.

Wrong.

I actually don't mind LA the way some New Yorkers do -- I have made my peace with the downsides (traffic, minimalls, the caste system) and concentrated on the upsides (weather, beach, living space).

But as I made my way into Stage 27 of Sony's Culver Studios, I realized the very public, packaged and perverse Charlie Sheen meltdown signified something troubling about the town, and about the country, that hadn't resolved itself for me. Imagine if his dissolution and implosion had happened in the weeks or months after 9-11. Would he have gotten the endless magazine and TV coverage (and coverage debating why there was so much coverage)?

Somehow in the ensuing decade, while losing our national upward trajectory and economic health, we chose to distract ourselves in celebrity foibles and talentless time-wasters like the Kardashians and Octomom.

I was happy to see that when Charlie came out on stage -- riding the front of a train with Slash playing guitar -- instead of looking like a wastrel at death's door, he seemed ruddy and together. Who knows how long it will last. While some of the comedians gave lip service to the idea that the night was an "intervention," of course it was simply a chance to remind everyone that he'd called his Two and A Half Men boss a "Jew-Kike," given up a $1.8 million a week salary, and beaten up women.

The next morning was 9-11. I drove around listening to NPR's wall-to-wall coverage about the World Trade Center, people's experiences of the day, the lessons we have learned, and the lives and loss still echoing a decade later.

Emotionally exhausted, when I got home I decided to watch an escapist movie I hadn't seen since the 70's, the Robert Redford diamond-theft caper The Hot Rock. Of course, there's a crucial scene in the movie where the catchphrase is "Afghanistan Banana Stand" which no longer seems quite so comical these days.

But even more surprising to me was to see this helicopter sequence when the crooks are trying to land on the roof of a police station to retrieve the stolen diamond. Shot in 1972, it shows the World Trade Center still being built, at one point flying past the still-empty floors of one of the towers.

It reaffirmed for me that as much as we like to find escape in Hollywood, there are always reminders everywhere that bring us back to reality. Good luck, Charlie.

HOW "AWAY" IS SLEEPAWAY CAMP?

2011-07-30T11:22:00.003-07:00

When my brothers and I were kids, we went off to a sleepaway camp in Maine [right] for eight weeks. And we were away.

Sure, I would write letters home -- more often than many kids who only did so on nights they had to hand over a letter to gain entry to the dining hall.

And my mom wrote me back, envelopes stuffed with Times clippings and Mets gossip. My parents would drive up at the four-week mark for visiting day to put faces to the names of my counselors and bunkmates.

But I don't think I spoke to them on the phone more than once a summer, and they really had no idea what my day-to-day life was. (This was only somewhat less true during the school year when I lived with them.)

That isn't quite the case nowadays. Though my daughters are "away," I feel quite apprised of what's going on. And, in the age of helicopter parenting and TMI, I don't know whether that's a good thing or not.

First, today's sessions are shorter -- three or four weeks instead of eight -- in part due to our accelerated pace of life, but also because of how expensive camp has gotten. So it barely feels like any time elapses between putting them on the bus and getting them back.

During their stay, the camps do their noble best to cocoon the kids: cell phones are forbidden, the Internet is not accessible. Calls from home are limited to once a week.

That blackout is pretty novel in a world where I can be shopping in Portsmouth and send comparative photos with my phone to my girlfriend in Colorado to get her opinion. Or where my friend traveling solo in Vietnam this summer has been so good about posting photos and videos of her trip and Skyping to the point I feel I have more contact with her across the globe than I do when she's home in the East Village.

But despite the camp's ban, technology is a two-way street, and while campers are blissfully offline, the camp has proved as active a correspondent as my friend in Hanoi.

When I was a camper, my parents were sent a souvenir folder with two 5x7s -- a formal portrait (like those above) paired with a shot of all the kids in my bunk that year. I don't know if we even got it till school had already started back up.

But in the 21st century camps send out frequent email updates and maintain websites with daily blog posts and hundreds of photos that parents can access and download. The picture atop this post, for instance, I pulled from the camp website, of my 13-year-old hugging a friend. A private moment, made public.

The first few days of camp I went to the website to check on my daughters' arrival. But then I let it slide, partly because it's laborious to scan the images for ones of your own kids, but it also felt slightly creepy: There were pictures of meals, dances, trips. I felt like I was spying on their private time.

Since the kids are in the Facebook generation, I am sure the are happy to have all this documentation and public display. But I didn't want to spoil hearing about these experiences from them, and wanted them to tell me what they chose to, instead of having me monitoring them like a security camera.

Another reason I was glad I didn't keep checking in, was eventually the camp posted photos of sets and rehearsals [left] of shows, which would have lessened my enjoyment when I drove up to sit in the live audience for the performances.

In terms of my communicating with them, I no longer had to rely on the vicissitudes of the US Postal Service. I could simply email the camp and they'd print it out. But the girls only wrote me back once, partly, I think, because they are so used to texting and emailing that the writing of a letter seems like churning your own butter.

What is the effect on the girls of being the online generation forced to go offline? I found out when my 13-year-old had a 24-hour hiatus before the start of a second session of theater camp and I took her off-campus.

Besides tastes of non-camp food and shopping, I also gave her some access to the Internet -- her BlackBerry was allowed out of lockup, and I lent her my laptop so she could update her Facebook and Tumblr pages.

Here's what struck me. She'd been out of touch with her best friend back in New York for three weeks. So what did she do? Text her -- incessantly.

"Call her!" I said. "Nah, that's okay," she said. This is the weird dichotomy of today's technology: we are more in touch but not as connected.

My 17-year-old, who is heading into her senior year of high school, instead of staying at camp, headed off to a city to take a two-week pre-college arts course. She got her phone and Internet back and after we talked on her first day, I swore to myself to just let her be and not monitor her experience.

But -- unprompted -- she has been sending me photos of the building where her class meets and the campus, and has been texting and emailing and calling.

I realized I like that she feels I am there for her, in ways I didn't always feel my parents were there for me. And her communications don't seem like dependence, just sharing.

But I also wonder how altered my relationship would have been with them - -and what it would have meant for my development -- if, when, say, I'd been backpacking in Europe after college, I'd had this walkie-talkie-with-camera connectivity instead of just exploring the world.

I know my mom probably would have liked it. But feeling away is a precious thing.

Good Swimming/Bad Handwriting

2011-07-14T12:14:00.003-07:00

My late mother was part amphibian; she preferred a Best Western with a pool to a Ritz without one. And so I spent my brother's wedding weekend in a horrible Best Western in Seattle. My late Dad swam a mile every morning before going to work.

And as much as we try to rebel against where we come from, I, too, am happier in the water than out of it. I prefer a lake, but when you're in New York City, where a fire hydrant sometimes is all you have, a pool shimmers like a mirage on the desert.

A friend once invited me to lunch poolside on the roof of the Soho House [left]. It was gorgeous, but like most hotel pools, also small and highly self-conscious making -- like swimming on stage for people whose main concerns are suntanning, immersion, or peacocking. I knew I was never going to pay a membership fee to swim laps that are shorter than a Mack Truck.

A few years ago my girlfriend and I
decided to beat the summer heat one day by swimming at Central Park's Lasker Pool (in winter it's a skating rink right).

We happily packed bags, lugged towels, made our way to the gated entrance. But then a guard blocked our path.

We were sent away to buy a padlock for a locker, and told we could only wear white t-shirts (apparently dark ones could conceal weapons -- or could signify gang colors). When we returned after properly rearranging ourselves, everyone was ordered out of the water: the pool closes daily between 3 and 4. When we finally got in the water, it was refreshing, but somewhat chaotic, and somehow we never made our way back there.

But this past winter we moved to lower Harlem, and Lasker is a brisk ten minute walk from our apartment. And this week, via Internet search, my girlfriend learned that Lasker, like several other city pools, offers lap-only swimming times in the mornings and at dusk. This was too good to be true.

On Wednesday I stumbled out of bed and into a bathing suit, grabbed a towel, and within 15 minutes I walked right in and was in the water, along with maybe 50 fellow New Yorkers.

Some of them had ridden bikes to get there, some of them had serious swimcaps and goggles. One middle-aged woman sort of half-paddled around, mostly chatting up the lifeguard. One young woman stopped me between laps to ask me how I did my breathing between strokes. Turns out she had been walking her dog past the pool the previous day and seen people in the water, and decided to just go for it, without any previous swimming training. I did the best I could to explain it, but I learned how to swim around age six and hardly can remember how to break it down -- it's just instinctive, like breathing on land.

After the 8:30am whistle cleared us out, I walked home refreshed. Today I went back and ran into a college classmate who was doing the same morning swim ritual. But as we entered, she was waved through and I was stopped by the guard.

I learned that -- being New York City -- my rookie experience was a little too bureaucracy-free to be true. I was supposed to have filled out a "membership card" with my info and an emergency contact, and flashed it on entrance and handed it over to the staff before I got in the water. This, unlike the white t-shirt rule, made sense -- if a swimmer, say, dies of a heart attack, the city needs to absolve itself of liability and find next of kin.

I filled out the form in my best handwriting -- unfortunately, I learned handwriting around the same age as swimming, and it never got any better. So when i got the card back and the end of the day, I discovered that I have been logged into the city's system as "David Hanahan."

If my girlfriend ever gets a call about this guy I hope she responds.

A Death in the Musical Family

2011-06-18T21:43:00.001-07:00

R.I.P. Clarence Clemons. It is truly the end of an era.

The E Street Band was the closet approximation to a family I ever saw on a rock and roll stage. After keyboardist Danny Federici died of melanoma, the family soldiered on, but it's hard to imagine anyone replacing or subbing for Clarence's signatrute throaty tones or onstage bravado.

When I saw the band on the last tour there was something in the air that felt like it might be the last time we were all in the same room together -- maybe Bruce sensed it too, that's why he did some cncerts where they performed entire albums start to finish, to make sure he touched all the bases.

I first saw Bruce and Clarence play at New York's long-gone Palladium in 1978 -- that's 33 friggin years ago. I once drove all the way to a little bar called Lock, Stock and Barrel in Fair Haven, NJ on the rumor that he was going to be playing - -and he was, with Southside Johnny, Garry Talent and a guy named Stormin Norman on piano. (Thanks to Google, I found this nice tribute Norman wrote when Clarence was ailing.)

I posted some videos on Facebook but this is a more permanent place to put them.
When introducing the band at the end of the night, Bruce always saved Clarence for last and gave him the biggest build up. The master of the unverse, king of the world, the mayor of half of Bayonne.

On this Father's Day he leaves behind four children. Bye, big man. Thanks for the many many soaring solos -- in fact thanks for every tambourine shake and bass background vocal. Thanks for your ho-ho-hos on "Santa Claus is Coming to Town." Thanks for your crazy suits and hats.

[The black and white videos are from a concert in Passsaic around the same time as I first saw them play, miraculously the place had an in house video system.]

An instrumental built around "the C"

Ho ho ho.

Guesting on (and taking over) an Aretha Franklin song.

Scooter and the big man bust the city in half.

And, finally, Jungleland.

Clear Eyes. Full Hearts. Can't Win?

2011-06-18T11:28:00.003-07:00

I am an Emmy voter. And boy was I happy when buried in the mailbox onslaught that included discs for Gene Simmons' Family Jewels and George Lopez and Lifetime movies and that Kennedys atrocity, I got the complete set of the 13 episodes of Friday Night Lights final, fifth season (above). Last night I devoured the last three episodes, which will air in the next couple of weeks on NBC.

Kyle Chandler as Coach Eric Taylor

Well, not devoured, really, I kept hitting the pause button, to wax nostalgic over a familiar face like Adrienne Palicki and Jesse Plemons who had graduated and left seasons ago -- but really, to just extenuate the inevitable final lights-out. Because nothing like it will come this way again any time soon. A realistic show about people with realistic relationships, feelings, hardships and triumphs in this era of Jersey Shore, Glee and Desperate Housewives, was a major miracle.

It's part of the sad saga of FNL's undeservedly checkered airing career that instead of there being a hugely anticipated finale night like The Sopranos that everyone tunes into at once, many people will have already seen it.

DirectTV helped keep the show in production by paying for early airing rights, so their subscribers saw the finale months ago (and passed along burned discs to friends who couldn't wait). Others will just wait for the DVDs or stream it on Hulu or Netflix -- or not bother at all, having been told too many times that it's good for them.

Even though I myself work in scripted TV -- and vote for Emmys -- I have become guilty of this "I'll get to it later" approach for many serialized dramas. There are only so many hours in the day (and night). And this means shows like FNL suffer at Emmy time. (To date, its only victory was in 2007 for casting.)

The online guide for Emmy balloting

The Emmy voting process starts with a fill-in-the-dots ballot with numbers corresponding to every eligible series [left]. But for the writing awards, individual episodes are nominated by their writers and then the top ten get into the pool of 5 final nominees.

Some shows pit many of their episodes against each other. While Mad Men, 30 Rock and Modern Family don't seem to have suffered too badly from this, other shows probably miss out on getting nominated at all by not focusing on one best episode to focus the first round of balloters. Trying to marshall their chances, this year FNL only put one episode forward -- the finale, "Always," written by showrunner Jason Katims.

Friday Night Lights was one of the classy shows chosen by Kevin Reilly during his brief run at NBC (he's now at Fox, an even harder place to class up). It premiered in fall 2006 alongside Studio 60, a show I was out in L.A. writing for. The same way I wrongly dismissed Lost as some kind of attempt to fictionalize Survivor, I thought FNL was mostly about football, and didn't think it would last.

But a few seasons later I was back L.A. in another writers' room, and everyone there was obsessed with Friday Night Lights. They hung on every new episode, passed around DVDs. And so finally I borrowed season one and ripped through all 24 in a few weeks.

I instantly understood their allegiance: the show was able to realize things that few writers' rooms can achieve. A working, complicated, parenting marriage; realistic, heartfelt teenage characters with real problems, all beautifully underwritten and surprisingly believable (thanks in part to shooting completely on location instead of soundstages).

Does it have a chance to get nominated for best series, and win the Emmy? I hope so. Its momentum seems so fractured at this point -- it's not on magazine covers, it got relegated to Friday night airings during the second half of the TV season.

As far as the writing nomination, a finale, while snagging sentimental "last chance" votes, is not always the best episode to judge a series by. First of all, it's up against pilots -- this year, the one for AMC's The Killing seems a shoo-in. And a pilot's main function is to explain the series to the uninitiated, and entice them to watch more. It can be labored over for months or longer, whereas ongoing shows are usually up against a million deadlines and constraints.

(The Killing is actually an interesting comparison, because it had the added help of being a very close remake of a Danish series; whereas while FNL began as a kind of spinoff of a book and movie, from the get-gp had a completely new set of characters, and by the end had actually reinvented itself by moving the coach to the poor side of town and giving him a whole new cast of teenagers to manage -- quite an achievement, that will be at best confusing for those who are just looking at this season's DVD's).

But also when a series is trying to wrap up several story threads dating back over several seasons for the dedicated viewers, it can't possibly be a stand-alone, self-evident episode for a judge to watch cold.

From the finale of "The Wire"

I know this from experience, because the very first episode I saw of The Wire was its final episode -- and I didn't vote for it.

The reason why sheds some light on how difficult is for longtime serialized shows coming into Emmy season. It's humanly impossible to have watched every episode on the initial ballot, there's an intermediate, not very publicized step in the Emmy process, that narrows down the 10 finalists to the 5 actual nominees, and I participated in it in 2008.

The Emmys understandably want to make sure the nominated shows have actually been viewed by the nominators. So the people who narrow down the list volunteer to sit in a dark movie theater and must watch 5 episodes in a row, then take a break, and then watch five more. You rank them from 1 to 10 and the top five vote-getters become the final nominees.

Well, in 2008, alpabetically The Wire was the last one to screen. So we had already seen 9 dramas, and the scenes I saw -- including, improbably, a bunch of black cops singing a Pogues song -- seemed a little farfetched and treacly. It was like walking into a movie late and never quite catching up. The episode ended up getting the nomination, mostly as a parting salute, but it lost to a MadMen.

Not long after, I mainlined he entire series of The Wire in a month or two, andit became my favorite eries ever. I wholly regretted having seen the last episode in advance. But I would also say as its biggest fan that the final season was its most uneven, and the finale wasn't even the best written one that year.

I'm happy to say that the final Friday Night Lights is a worthy choice if it does get nominated. There's an amazing plotline in which the life of the daughter of Coach Eric and Tammy Taylor resonates with what's going on with them, and they learn hard-won lessons from each other. And you see enough about the lives of the past characters who have returned to understand their emotional journeys.

So what will happen this year? Last year, FNL didn't get a best drama nomination -- even though there were six instead of the usual five - but did finally eke out one for writing, It was up against both the finale of Lost and the pilot of The Good Wife., but the winner was one of two nominated MadMen.

I am hoping that the critics darling finally gets its due, but even if it does, it is done and gone and in the DVD/streaming bin. I will sorely miss it.

Malick & Me

2011-05-28T14:56:00.021-07:00

A lot of my journalism isn't on the Internet, but when people write to ask me for a copy of an article, it's never, say, when I took the Beastie Boys to Graceland. No, what they clamor for-- still -- is a piece I did 25 years ago, that by now has become my equivalent of a defining first hit single that a band never recovers from. But -- as I often tell actors who bemoan being identified with one role -- it's better to have one of those than none, right?

It's a piece I'm proud of -- the 24-year-old me spent six months reporting it, for pittance pay, for a magzine that few read. The reason for its legend is the subject: visionary, esoteric director Terrence Malick, who at the time hadn't made a movie in the seven years since his previous movie, Days of Heaven, a gorgeous big-screen fable which itself was seven years after his peerless low-budget debut, Badlands, a fictionalized version of Charles Starkweather's killing spree -- and had stopped giving interviews even earlier.

Malick's of-necessity cameo in Badlands as a man who
stumbles on the killing spree. He's never acted before or since.

One school year I screened 146 movies here.

After being obsessed with Malick's films from viewing them repeatedly at the Harvard Square Theater revival house [right], I painstakingly tracked him down
only to have him reject me. But "Absence of Malick," published in now-defunct California magazine in November 1985, was the first piece to try to make sense of his disappearance, and oddly none of the facts have changed that much since then. [For the first time ever, I've made it available for instant pdf download here.]

A generation later, in a move as audacious as his movies, he's held on to the firm, polite refusal to join the ever-exploding world of hype. In the interim, he's become the movie world's J.D. Salinger. But unlike Salinger, he still creates art and puts it out there, albeit slowly -- his new film Tree of Life, is only his fifth in 38 years.

Malick's maintained mystery is all the more impressive now than when he started in the '70s, in the world where most studio movies are a franchise and have been noted to death.

It's a sign of the power of his silence that New York magazine went to the extreme of faking a Malick interview by cobbling together quotes he actually said, some of them decades old, writing new questions to pretend it was current. In trying for whimsy, though, all they did was look dumb and hungry for web hits. (I'm not playing along. But what I did find through them was this previously unpublished translation of a 1979 French interview which is fascinating -- Malick's philosophy and use of life experience don't ruin your viewing, they enhance it, which makes his reticence all the more frustrating.)

In the impressionistic, elliptical new movie, one of the few complete sentences spoken onscreen by the female lead, Jessica Chastain, is when she points to beauteous clouds overhead and excitedly tells her sons, "That's where God lives!" For a certain generation of filmmakers, actors, and nerd moviegoers, that is where Terrence Malick resides -- up in the rarified ether that Stanley Kubrick used to inhabit.

Check this out, if you're not one of the 2.3 million who already have (or maybe the 23,000 Malick obsessives who watched it a hundred times each?):

Even when Tree of Life was given the Palme D'Or at Cannes last week -- i.e., the hypefest to end all red-carpet galas -- its writer-director did not speak or take the stage. I searched for a photo of him and found the above security cam-style "Where's Waldo" shot. Because a sighting is like seeing Sasquatch, as journalist Jeffrey Wells has written.

The movie is widely reviewed, and I won't waste your time adding much to that conversation. The plot is basically: when one of three sons dies in a 1950's Waco family with a brutal Dad, people grieve, and the oldest son relives his sketchy memories. It's apparently based on Malick's own childhood, though as with all things Malick, details are hard to come by.

But with Malick it's not the plot, it's the themes and the execution. Themes like Grace (acceptance) versus Nature (aggression). Nearly every shot is mind-bendingly gorgeous and yet naturalistic; the performances of the kids and the etching of fragmented childhood are unparalleled. There are definitely problems -- like a 15-minute sideshow by Kubrick FX man Doug Trumbull about the creation of the universe that Malick had been planning since back before I wrote my article. But it's certainly a use of cinema you don't get from many Americans these days -- the Coens, maybe Darren Aronofsky.

But he clearly has no thought of pleasing the popcorn-eating public. Even the Coens, who have not sacrificed a whit of integrity or control, aren't this esoteric, although Ethan was a philosopy major at Princeton, the way Malick studied it at Harvard. The Coens are also amusing themselves and us more than they are trying to express earnest treatises on the Meaning of Life.

[Funny aside: when Joel and Ethan hit the scene in 1984 with Blood Simple, they did so much press to get it on people's radars, they got sick of themselves, and went into hiding, or at least diffidence. I was assigned a piece on them by Esquire -- which would eventually run in Rolling Stone -- and the way I ultimately got them to agree was when they found out I had written the Malick piece, because they were obsessed with him too. They asked me to play them my painful five-minute taped phone call with Malick when I finally located him, and I acquiesed. Hearing it they felt so sorry for me that they allowed me to tag along with them to Cannes when they announced their next movie, Raising Arizona; to their upper West Side office to watch them write a scene from it, and then down to the set of the movie. So I have Malick to thank for that.]

So how did I get to Malick? A little luck, and a lot of shoe leather, which, back in pre-internet days of 1985, meant long distance phone calls. Some of the people in his camp were of the viewpoint that if Terry didn't want to talk, neither did they. But some people spoke to me and then gave other people the thumbs up. I remember meeting the actress Brooke Adams in her New York apartment, and she clearly had never had an acting experience like working with Malick, and had had no idea how the movie was going to turn out. Martin Sheen wanted to talk because Malick basically made his career. Malick's college classmate Wally Shawn didn't want to talk, but his answering machine message rejecting me was so great - and so Wally Shawn -- that I quoted it to lead the article, which may or may not have pissed him off. Editor Billy Weber (one of FIVE editors listed on Tree of Life) was incredibly helpful. And Bill Weld, who had been a roomate in college, and would later end up Governor of Massachusetts, was very useful without having any movie knowledge at all.

Many more people turned me down than talked to me. Typical was the reaction of Sissy Spacek, who starred in Badlands (and married Malick's art director Jack Fisk): "I just want to check this with Terry first. Do you know how I can get in touch with him?"

But when you're reporting a story like this, it's not about getting the big names, or even the quantity, it's about getting the right person. And the guy who provided my "Rosebud" turned out to be another college classmate, Jacob Brackman, who had served as a producer on both Malick's films.

Brackman recently - couldn't find a vintage photo.

When I got the okay to go meet with him, I did some research and discovered that Brackman -- who at the time was just over 40 -- had an amazingly wide-ranging resume: staff writer for the New Yorker in his twenties (including a 25-page essay about the meaning of The Graduate), then film critic at Esquire. In 1970 he wrote a poignant op-ed in the New York Times just a few years after college trying to explain the meaning of the deaths of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix to who he perceived to be the square readers of the NY Times op-ed page, beginning "Most likely, neither Jimi Hendrix nor Janis Joplin meant much of anything to you." He wrote a few movies including the 70's Nicholson/Bruce Dern brother drama The King of Marvin Gardens, a Broadway musical based on King of Hearts, and co-wrote several songs for Carly Simon including the astonishing top-ten hits "Haven't Got Time for the Pain" and "That's the Way I've Always Heard it Should Be."

When I drove up to his home in upstate New York, I didn't know what to expect, but he was warm and incredibly erudite and insightful. He knew Terry well, remembered the process of the movies in incredible detail, and spun wondrous phrases.

After our talk, afraid his candor might alienate Terry, who he hadn't spoken to in years, we agreed he could go over a draft with me to make sure the offensive passages might not be attributed to him. I took his name off one where he said during the Days of Heaven edit, "the decision was made to go broad -- more Tolstoy, less Dostoyevski, a big canvas in which the people get smaller and the performances get less important." He laughed and told me that Terry would know only he could have said it, and it was fine. When I left his upstate manse this grand old man in his early 40's called me "Old Sport," and I realized that I was like the Nick Carraway to Malick's Gatsby. [UPDATE: Brackman also spoke with journalist Nathaniel Penn for this new, worthy GQ online piece about the making of Badlands.]

Part of what I discovered in my quest was the kinds of things that can shatter you when you've idolized someone: the meticulous movie Days of Heaven actually turned out to be largely an editing room fabrication -- the original script bears no relation to the finished film, which includes a lot of "B-unit" footage and was salvaged with a voice-over, which is now Malick's modus operandi. But you know what? It doesn't matter how the sausage gets made, it's the vision of the final product that matters. It's that kind of medium. He had enough instinct of what he was after and how to make something great of that.

What troubled me more was that it sounded like Malick had gone a little bonkers, decamping to a garrett in Paris, trying to make a movie about the creation of the universe by shooting close-ups of lizards dressed to look like dinosaurs. (He uses CGI in Tree of Life, which, like the scenes of modern-day America, almost seem like selling out -- as Anthony Lane points out, Malick had never previously shown an image of America post 1950's. Personally I feel he's a better documenter of existing nature than a manipulator of it.).

I had originally pitched the piece to Esquire, which, as I've written here earlier, didn't want to do it unless i could guarantee speaking to Malick, because they'd been burned on a "write-around" about John Lennon that was printed right before he died that ended up to have a lot of mistakes. So I landed at California magazine because Brackman had written for its editor Harold Hayes when he was the grand master of classic Esquire from 1960-73, and made an introduction.

Harold Hayes, 1965

Hayes was ornery with me in that way that grizzled veterans can be with youngsters. He said he'd pay me $1500, which, for 6 months work, was barely going to cover the expenses, but it was going to get published, my first big feature in a magazine. He assigned me to the editor Andy Olstein, who did a lot of work helping me cut the classic obsessive first draft into something publishable. I can still pick out phrases Olstein added because they don't sound like me, but for the most part, he was incredibly helpful.

And then, out of the blue, I accidentally found Malick. The piece was mostly done, but I had a few more numbers of people who knew him I'd been dragging my feet about calling, and I thought, well, shit, I better be completist about this. Someone had told me that Reverend Jim Tucker who had taught Malick in high school still saw him regularly, which most people I spoke to did not. So I thought I better just make sure some of my suppositions at the end aren't way off base.

I called Tucker's number in Austin, Texas, and I got him on the phone. I said, "Hi, I'm David Handelman, and I'm doing an article about Terrence Malick." Before I could go on, Tucker cheerfully said "I think the best thing you should do is call him yourself. Hold on, let me see if I have his number." And suddenly I was mouthpiece to ear with Malick, after all these years of idolatry and months of learning everything about him, and I was caught totally off guard. But then again, so was he.

I told him everyone I'd spoken to, I told him I'd gone to college with one of his college buddies' daughters, I told him what a fan I was, that I just wanted to know what he was up to. Boy, was I sweating. Careful what you wish for.

His silences were painful. My friend Bill Zehme did a great Warren Beatty piece for Rolling Stone where he actually timed the silences. But at least Beatty wanted to be heard. I only quoted the very first thing Malick said to me: "Well, I, I, uh, I guess I don't want to talk about it." before he told me he wanted to go off the record, but then what he said was so innocuous I paraphrased it and didn't feel dirty for having done so. I was so paranoid about who had given me Malick's number, I obscured it in the article.

I recently dug up the cassette and listened to it again. What I realized, to my horror, is that if I had just told him I wasn't going to use any of it and just wanted to talk to him, I probably would have had a conversation with him. A friend of mine recently met Malick at the Austin Film Festival and they talked about classic romantic comedies and Preston Sturges. Why didn't I do that? Argh, the journalist's hat.

Anyway, the piece led me to other feature assignments, it didn't stop Malick from making The Thin Red Line, The New World, or Tree of Life. But most of all, I worried that longtime friend Brackman would end up in the doghouse. So I was happy to see that when the titles came on at the end of Tree of Life, the first name in the special thank yous after Malick's (third) wife -- is Jake Brackman.

So, there's that. Here's hoping Terry's got more movies in his bag of tricks up there in the clouds.

Drumming Thomases

2011-05-24T13:17:00.014-07:00

As I bulleted up to the Beacon Theater to see Elvis Costello for the umpteenth time, delayed by tornadoes (not local ones, but covering Joplin at CNN), I paused to consider, honestly, somewhat jaded, what part of this evening would be able to provide a transcendent moment for me.

It's not that I'm hard to please (well, I am, but not on this count), it's just that my Elvisgoing is second only to my Brucegoing in terms of sheer hours logged agog on my feet, and I occasionally suffer from having heard certain songs live so many times -- for example, "Pump it Up" -- that it's hard for them to still have meaning. I start craving the obscure, or the complete reinvention of a song, or a guest appearance (as when Elvis himself showed up to sing "Higher and Higher" with Bruce at Madison Square Garden) to kick this concert into the category of Not Just Another Elvis Show.

Having read up about Elvis's tour, which features a spinning wheel of song titles [right] spun by audience volunteers and a go-go dancing cage -- neither of which promised transcendence -- I was hoping he would perform one or both of the Beatles covers on the wheel -- "And Your Bird Can Sing" and "Girl." But I would be equally happy to hear the chestnuts he'd been excavating from the mid-80's King of America/Blood and Chocolate albums -- the last time he played New York with this spinning songbook -- back when I worked for Rolling Stone and Elvis played five nights at a legitimate Broadway theater, having traveled light years from his punk origins.

Turned out, the moments that truly moved me -- mesmerized me, seared onto my brain, left me breathless -- had nothing to do with Elvis at all. Nor was it the guest cameo (on "Lipstick Vogue" by Alex Turner of Arctic Monkeys, whose name holds as minimal impact for me as Elvis Costello's name did for my dad when he was my age).

PETE THOMAS

No, the surprise was that it was all about drumming. Intergenerational drumming.

When it comes to rock and roll, at times I feel like I've let my kids down -- I have a daughter who is about to turn 17, the age I was when I first saw Costello in concert, yet she has only a passing knowledge of his extensive songbook, has never seen him live, and -- though she did see some Springsteen shows when she was younger -- really hasn't been to a legit rock show as a cognizant teenager. Her passion is theater; if we're in the car, she switches the radio to the Broadway channel.

I don't expect her to embrace the music of my generation any more than I was going to embrace the opera that my dad sat around the living room listening to, but I feel like her disaffection reflects something changed in pop music -- wide-appeal, important bands like U2 and REM really haven't been replicated; the instantaneousness of iPods and MP3s and uploaded concert YouTube videos have made the chores involved with obtaining tickets and attending a concert seem almost as antiquated as TV without DVR.

But that disaffection clearly did not ruin rock for Tennessee Thomas, the daughter of Pete Thomas -- Costello's most constant sideman since the Attractions formed after the recording of 1977's My Aim is True (which Elvis cut with a group called "Clover"). (Keyboardist Steve Nieve is also still very much displaying his genius stylings; the original bassist has been replaced by the cheerful if not dynamic Davey Faragher.)

The extra wallop packed at the concert was genetic: a second kit was set up behind is and was manned -- womanned? -- on a half-dozen songs by Tennessee -- who, the last time the spinning songbook played New York City, was only two years old.

As she started pounding, I didn't realize I had already seen Tennessee on the big screen (in Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World, above), I also didn't know she had her own band The Like [right] or had been touring with Zooey Deschanel's She and Him.

None of this mattered. All I could see was this amazing synchronicity -- father daughter drumming, borne of genes and study and yet also distinguishable. She had all of dad's moves and rhythms, but her own gestalt. And it created a visual legacy for the kind of propagation of musical heritage that Elvis has always been a major proponent of. (Setlist here, thanks to Sal Nunziato.)

I was reminded of a photo shoot by Annie Leibovitz done in 1987 for the 20th Anniversary Issue of Rolling Stone, that I did the interviews for -- a whole bunch of offspring of rock and rollers, from Carnie Wilson and John Carter Cash to Otis Redding and Mike Nesmith's kids. [Below]

Interviewing them at the time, not much older than them, I mostly felt sorry for them -- growing up in a world where your name gets you places and favors but, hey, even Julian Lennon couldn't sustain a career.

Today, the morning after the Costello show, I turned on Sirius's E Street Radio channel, and the guest deejay was Ali Weinberg -- daughter of Springsteen's drummer Max. This seemed bizarrely synchronous. (Ali's brother Jay is the drummer offspring -- he toured with Bruce when Max had to return to his day job at Conan (below); Ali has played accordion onstage with Bruce. (right)

Ali's deejaying triggered all kinds of responses in me. First of all, she played "Murder, Incorporated," saying it was one of her favorites. I smiled because it's a song I have a little history with.

Back in college I had obtained a fifteenth generation cassette dupe of a demo of the song from the 1982 Born in the USA sessions. I couldn't understand a word of it, but it was unlike anything else I'd heard Bruce do. So when I finally had my one and only audience with Bruce -- backstage at the taping of the final Letterman NBC show in June 1993 -- I took the opportunity to tell Bruce he HAD to release the song.

"Yeah, there's a lot of them that people want," he said in his cheerful, sheepish way. "No," I insisted. "That one is different." I felt a small burst of pride when he released a greatest hits album in February 1995, and one of the few new songs he added to it was Murder, Inc. -- though in the liner notes he credited fans who held up banners at shows requesting it. (Sigh.)

Ali ended her hour-long record-spinning by playing back-to-back live versions of "Radio Nowhere" -- one with her Dad on drums, one with her brother. It was commendable -- she was literally saying that her brother was not following in her father's footsteps, but charting his own distinctive course.

That's how I felt watching Tennesee, also. It wasn't just that she was a girl with Laura Dern bangs and retro It-Girl fashion stylings, and her dad was a shaggy grey pub rocker; she had her own musical vibe. But also held her own. And -- like magic -- "Pump it Up" was re-energized for me.

UPDATE 1: Clip of Pump it up....skip to 3:08

UPDATE 2: the sound's not great but here's the best visuals of the dynamic duo on PUMP IT UP and WHAT'S SO FUNNY 'BOUT PEACE LOVE & UNDERSTANDING from May 23rd show. @1:00 mark @2:22 @4:40 @6:50.

Too Big To Talk

2011-05-16T21:36:00.005-07:00

This is the time of year Emmy voters like me get barraged with screener "For Your Consideration" DVDs. Sometimes I'm grateful: a chance to catch up with the terrific British period miniseries Downton Abbey. Sometimes I'm tickled: Wow, they're hoping to snag a nomination for Gene Simmons' Family Jewels. And sometimes I'm just baffled: when did I miss the "epic eight-part miniseries" The Pillars of the Earth (right) with Ian McShane and Donald Sutherland?

But no DVD was more welcome in my mailbox this year than HBO's Too Big To Fail. Not just because of the mind-boggling all-star cast, including William Hurt, Paul Giamatti, Billy Crudup, James Woods, and Cynthia Nixon. Not just because I work for Eliot Spitzer, who foretold, and tried to stem, the burgeoning Wall Street calamity. Not even just because the book it's based on (left) is written by yet another writer alumnus of my high school named Sorkin.

But because I had my own history of writing lines for a few of these characters -- the real-life Chairman Richard Fuld Jr. (played on HBO by James Woods) and President Joe Gregory (played by John Heard) -- back in 2005, three years before their empire would collapse like a house of cards. It's a tale that is funny, sad, and more than a little telling. So I'm going to tell it.

In 2005, I had just finished mastering another new skill set -- writing for TelePrompters and anchor "reads" -- for the syndicated Jane Pauley Show, a job I had moved back to New York for because it had a "guaranteed two-year" contract.

Long story short, it ended after only seven months, and I was once again cast upon the freelance waters. I found some work at CNN, writing copy for NewsNight with Aaron Brown.

Then a friend called with an intriguing possibility. The folks at marketing at Lehman Brothers -- actually the department was called "Marketing Solutions" -- wanted to make an Orientation Video to welcome the new young turks they recruited each spring.

Though I knew little about banking, my resume and some sample work earned a meeting in the sleek Lehman Times Square building (above) with its wraparound tickers modestly broadcasting things like "WHERE VISION GETS BUILT." I soon learned they would be providing me with a ton of written and video material, including:

a MESSAGE DOCUMENT to give me "an idea of how LB talks" about the important issues I should include;
several documents about the company's culture, including a DIVERSITY BROCHURE and a LIFE BALANCE BROCHURE spearheaded by Joe Gregory;
Transcripts of rambling speeches Fuld had given to new recruits earlier in 2005;
and lastly, a PHILANTHROPY NEWSLETTER -- which I was soon told to "disregard."

They hired me, at a figure that was about 10 times higher than I would have gotten for a similar amount of effort on a magazine article. I got 50% up front.

But here was the rub: I had to write an entire video -- start to finish -- putting words in the mouths of Fuld, Gregory and Chief Strategy Officer Dave Goldfarb about their own company. And the materials they gave me were full of corporate gobbledy gook like this:

We don't want to be the biggest. But we do want to be the best. We are achieving all that by building creative, focused operations that work closely together to make the most of the firm's capital, both human and financial.

Now this kind of stuff might work on paper, or from a professional announcer, but it certainly doesn't sound good if you're the CEO speaking it aloud off a TelePrompter. So, being a journalist, I asked, couldn't I get just five minutes with the executives, to at least hear them read the copy aloud and go over it to put it in their own voices?

The women in marketing solutions got very nervous. They said they'd get back to me. But they acted like I'd asked to see the Wizard.

It turned out they themselves had hardly ever been in the same room with these guys, and had no intention of asking them for any more of their time than the few minutes of filming. In other words, these guys were Too Big To Talk To -- even for a project that seemed crucial to defining their company's face to its employees.

Fine. I did what I could. I just dug up the script on my computer, and I will spare you most of it. I tried to show how Lehman had survived through so many historical changes...my slogan was "Lehman was there, and now YOU are here." (Hold your applause.)

THEIR slogan, on the other hand, was "ONE FIRM," which frankly I couldn't quite wrap my head around, but I did what I could. Here are my closing lines for Fuld. Looking back at what happened in the next three years, I'm not sure who should be more embarrassed :

The future just got even brighter – because you’re here. You’re going to be the next generation of leaders keeping this firm on top. And the good guys do win. Welcome aboard.

Of course, the whole project ended up being killed without ever being filmed -- the way things often go in Hollywood, but at least I was spared multiple rewrites. It's foggy now but I remember having the impression that the concept had never been run up the flagpole with the higher-ups, and that my work wasn't rejected on its merits but rather the whole idea was scuttled.

Don't worry, I got paid in full. The banks back then, they were printing money.

Quick (Spring) Break

2011-03-26T21:17:00.006-07:00

As your kids get older, you see them less -- it's just part of the bittersweet bargain of doing the job of parenting. They gain their own social life, independence, and workloads; as teenagedom hits, most weekends, even if you're a city family, your only way to achieve quality time is often during transportation to an event.

But the school calendar does carve out a few oases to look forward to -- Summer, Christmas, and Spring Breaks. In New York, while public schools get a week in February and a week in April, private schools give two conjoined weeks at the end of March.

A nice chunk, but I always wondered how easy it was for families with two working parents to manage. It was one of the few things that divorce actually made easier.

Well this spring, through a peculiar set of circumstances -- including plans to visit colleges with my older daughter, being needed at work, and my younger daughter being invited by a classmate on a great trip leaving 36 hours after finishing her vacation with my ex -- I found myself looking at a spring break with my younger daughter totaling only 12 hours, on Friday.

In my head, I immediately concocted a super New York day: maybe welcome spring to Central Park with a rowboat ride?

Bouchon Bakery Grilled Cheese

Maybe lunch at someplace she'd never been like Bouchon Bakery [right], a trip to a museum (though she doesn't like to stare at paintings, MOMA has a design history of the kitchen she'd love, as a budding chef, below.)

Instead, I had a textbook case in managing great expectations. First of all, it actually snowed the day before, the temperature was in the 30s and even the robins told me to stay out of Central Park.

Then my request for a day off didn't go through because so many other people were already out, so I had to go in for several hours to produce a segment.

My dauhgter was jetlagged, slept in, and when I picked her up from her mom's, she wanted to go out to her favorite breakfast place -- a diner [right].

Ironically, as I told her what to expect at CNN -- we found ourselves sitting across from Joy Behar.

Then it was off to work. She enjoyed meeting everyone and, because she's made her own YouTube videos on her laptop, I introduced her to a kind editor -- Jon O'Beirne -- who let her sit in as he deftly produced an 18-second piece on Thomas Jefferson and Tripoli.

At lunch she opted for the CNN cafeteria. She came into the control room to watch my piece tape, and then I suggested we head over to MOMA.

No dice. She was wiped and wanted to go home and hang out.

We watched the Modern Family with Nathan Lane she'd missed while away, then Aaron Sorkin's cameo on 30 Rock, where Studio 60 (on which I'd worked) got teased. She quite enjoyed it, and hopefully she didn't focus on the episode's stellar joke about fans of Entourage mailing HBO douchebags as a campaign to save the show.

Then I made her spaghetti and meatballs, the clock ticked down to when I had to drive her to her friend's apartment where she'd be leaving the next morning. I didn't think I could suddenly interest her in March Madness basketball, and she seemed too tired for Scrabble.

Then I remembered: right before break she took exams which included an English section on Great Expectations -- maybe she was interested in seeing the classic David Lean film version.

Now, at this point you may fairly accuse, what kind of Dad are you? Your poor kid already got dragged into 4 hours at your office and you wasted another hour of TV! Why didn't you read to her, or find out what her hopes and dreams are?

Well, I've written about my occasional dunderheadedly inappropriate movie choices for my kids.

But the fact is that I've learned that sharing the right movie at the right time can be a meaningful experience. And my kids, god bless 'em, love black and white movies (at least good ones). And who could not be gripped by this opening?

She totally got into it, welcoming each new character by name as they showed up -- though she was disappointed by a few casting choices; she'd pictured Jaggers as slick instead of portly, and found grown-up Estella lacking.

When it was done and I drove her and her suitcase to her friend's house, I thought back over our twelve hour spring break and realized that my own great expectations hadn't been quashed, just modified. Which is always how it goes. Bon voyage, honey!

The Albert Einstein of Comedy

2011-03-16T21:24:00.006-07:00

Today Deadline Hollywood announced that Judd Apatow is in talks to cast Albert Brooks in his next movie, as Paul Rudd's father. For most of today's young moviegoes (unless they caught his guest shot on Weeds), Albert's mostly known as the voice of Nemo's dad in Finding Nemo.

I hope Apatow helps fix that. Because for a certain generation of comedians and moviegoers (his), this is amazing news. To us, Albert can do little wrong (excepting the scary-looking remake of the Alan Arkin-Peter Falk comedy classic The In-Laws. I refused to watch).

My first question was, what took Apatow so long?
He has done well by other heroes like Loudon Wainwright and his entire Freaks and Geeks cast.

But as far back as 1997, I did a New York Times Magazine piece on the comedy clique borne of Fox's swiftly cancelled, Emmy-winning Ben Stiller Show on which Apatow had been the head writer at the ripe old age of 25. And in the piece, everyone cited Albert as their comedy icon -- including Apatow, Stiller, Janeane Garofalo, Andy Dick, Bob Odenkirk and David Cross of HBO's Mr. Show, Margaret Cho, Kathy Griffin, Mary Lynn Rajskub, and Dana Gould. (Back then they didn't have Twitter pages or websites, and it was kind of a coup to assemble them all -- though the photos aren't online.)

As Gould put it,

''It wasn't an explosion like punk was in London in 1976. It was a gradual, subtle, social thing. What we had in common was we all thought Albert Brooks was the funniest person on the planet. We all wanted to become him, to write and direct and act in really harshly funny movies.''

I profiled Albert for Premiere for the 1996 movie Mother which, while uneven, hit very close to home for me. But that piece isn't online, and didn't allow all this excellent clip linking. So indulge me.

Albert (born Albert Einstein, the unfunny joke bestowed by dad comedian Harry Einstein, stage name Parkyakarkas) grew up in show biz and went to high school with Rob Reiner and Richard Dreyfuss. I first became aware of him through two genius albums. My favorite, favorite recorded routine ever -- more than Carlin, Pryor, Cosby, Cheech and Chong -- is this one from Comedy Minus One, now out of print again. This version is from a 1972 Flip Wilson Show, somewhat stiffer than the one on the record, but still a tour de force. It is like the ultimate American Idol spoof, three decades in advance.

And stand-up (see the Carson clip up top) -- but he walked away from it all after a kind of breakdown in a Boston nightclub.

Lorne Michaels brilliantly hired Albert to do seven short films for the first season of Saturday Night Live, including a video version of this how-to 1971 piece Albert wrote for Esquire.

They've never been released on DVD by themselves, but happily Michaels recently relented on his embarrassment about some of the clunkers in Season One and allowed its release on DVD.

Martin Scorsese was a fan, and in 1976 cast him in a light comic role in the otherwise heavy classic Taxi Driver (above) as a co-worker of Cybil Shepard.

To be sure, Albert had many shooting-self-in-foot moments in his career, like turning down the Billy Crystal role in When Harry Met Sally because he thought it was too Woody Allenesque. But as Gould attested, Albert's early movies are classics, ahead of their time, all worth renting -- yet many people I know have never heard of them, much less seen them. He wasn't as prolific or profitable as Woody Allen. But there's nothing like them.

1979's (!) Real Life [above, co-starring the irascible Harry Shearer, later of Spinal Tap fame] brilliantly spoofed the invasiveness of the camera in the verite series on PBS called An American Family (itself a forerunner to reality TV -- and which HBO, 31 years after Brooks, is now doing a docudrama about called Cinema Verite with James Gandolfini, Diane Lane and Tim Robbins.)

I would argue that 1981's Modern Romance is his masterpiece. Albert plays a movie editor -- and it would be worth it alone for the sequences of him trying to salvage a crappy sci-fi movie starring George Kennedy, for a nutty director played by his TV creator buddy James L. Brooks (no relation). In this sequence he and the late Bruno Kirby (who did take part in When Harry Met Sally) try to please an unpleasable sound mixer (Albert Henderson), assisted by a music mixer played by Albert's brother Cliff Einstein. If you click through on nothing else, at least take five minutes for this:

But the true genius is his ability to nail the psychodynamics of destructive relationships. He spends the entire movie breaking up and reuniting with his girlfriend, played by a very game Kathryn Harrold (who, around that time, was his real-life girlfriend, and later played of Larry Sanders' long suffering wives on The Larry Sanders Show, on which Apatow also wrote).

In this clip, his brother Bob Einstein (aka Super Dave Osborne, later on Curb Your Enthusiasm as Marty Funkhouser), sells a despondent newly single Albert some running gear.

In 1985's Lost In America, his exuberant attempt to recreate Easy Rider by cashing out the family nest egg, gets waylaid when his wife gambles in Vegas. Albert, being Albert, thinks he can be the one guy who doesn't have to pay up. In this scene he argues with another legendary TV creator and filmmaker, Garry Marshall.

In 1991's Defending Your Life, he wrestles with the issue of whether the type selfishness we saw in Modern Romance might be enough to keep him out of heaven. (It's got a great, unheralded Meryl Streep performance.)

After a classic car crash sequence, Albert ends up on trial in his idea of purgatory, where people can eat all they want -- defended not very enthusiastically by a lawyer played by Rip Torn (who -- are you following this? -- was supposed to play the Jack Nicholson role in the real Easy Rider, but got into a fist fight with Dennis Hopper -- and who would also later star in Larry Sanders.)

As a coda, I'll skip to his career-making performance in his buddy James L. Brooks's Broadcast News, itself a timeless classic that bears revisiting. Jim Brooks somehow extracted the best of Albert's neuroses and made him more sympathetic, loveable, and tragic. Albert plays the smarter choice of a love triangle for Holly Hunter -- multilingual, morally upright, but too sweaty to be an anchor, and he loses the job and the girl to the smoother, shallower William Hurt.

Judd -- please give him something great.

From Mom's Mixed-Up Files: George C. Scott

2011-03-06T22:20:00.007-08:00

My mom was an energetic correspondent, especially when aggrieved. I inherited this trait from her. But I had no idea how deep hers ran.

When she died, I found a treasure trove of letters, in which she complained about everything from construction on the Whitestone Bridge [right] on opening day at Shea Stadium to PC Richard on the failure not only of her DVD/VCR combo, but on its website's woeful inability to calculate the number of miles between her house and the nearest repair center.

Often she was a Donna Quixote tilting at windmills, but occasionally her advocacy did bear fruit; after she sat at an intersection down the road from her house and kept a log of traffic light changes and cars backed up behind people waiting to make a left turn, the village actually installed a left-turn lane.

But I was completely surprised to find among the weary bureaucratic responses to her single-spaced diatribes, a few letters from celebrities.

Partly because I myself had, as a teenager, done the same thing (see my blog post about it here), and gotten responses from people like Michael Palin of Monty Python [left] and John Belushi, en route to becoming a professional celebrity pursuer at Rolling Stone.

But I was also surprised because she'd framed some letters she'd gotten when she was younger from the likes of Adlai Stevenson, but these writers shoved into a folder deep in the recesses of her house -- Kurt Vonnegut and George C. Scott -- were pretty impressive "gets."

My mom wrote to Scott to compliment him on a TV series
I had never heard of, "East Side West Side." Scott, then 36, had mostly been a stage actor; he had already been in The Hustler but had not yet been seen in Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. (It should be noted that when she wrote him, she was 26, with a 2-year-old -- me -- and was soon to be pregnant with her second kid.)

I looked up East Side West Side just now [photo up top] and discovered it's exactly the kind of show I would (hopelessly) want to watch or write for, nearly a half century later. It aired on CBS in 1963-4. Scott played a social worker; the supporting cast included Cicely Tyson, Elizabeth Wilson and Richard Dysart. Amazingly for the era, the subject matter included prostitution and statutory rape.

According to Wikipedia, although the show got eight Emmy nominations (and won one for directing, for an episode with guest star James Earl Jones), advertisers didn't support it, and several stations in the South refused to air it. Eventually Tyson's character was replaced with Barbara Feldon, but it still got cancelled. It's not available on DVD.

Scott's letter to my mother is an amazing artifact. Not just because he hand typed it, not just because he included his home address (albeit mistyped), but because he predicts the TV universe decades later.

In case you can't see this on your computer, he writes of "enervating skirmishes with the network" and then concludes:

We can only hope the future of commercial television will be freer and more mature. Failing this, perhaps pay television will give the more selective viewer the representation on public airways which is presently denied him. With little faith in the former improbability, I intend to support the latter eventuality.

According to IMDB, Scott tried episodic TV a few more times late in his career: playing the title role in the 1987 sitcom Mr. President. created by the impressive triumverate of Johnny Carson, Gene Reynolds and Ed. Weinberger and co-starring Madeline Kahn, more than a decade before The West Wing. He also played a retired cop in 1994's Traps, and the following year was in a failed Mary Tyler Moore newspaper drama called New York News (which boasts an amazing roster of writers, and directors including Michael Apted and Lost's Jack Bender).

It should be noted that HBO's first hour-long drama, Oz, did not air until 1997; Scott died in 1999, but hopefully he knew he had been onto something. Today his son Campbell is living proof of the diversity of the cable universe, playing the complicated Boris Kuester von Jurgens-Rateniczon on USA Network's Royal Pains [right].

Still, I'd like to see those episodes of East Side, West Side.

The Outsourced Consumer

2011-02-17T04:48:00.003-08:00

When you buy a new apartment, you try to make the right consumer decisions the first time, so you don't live with a mistake. My last apartment, when I did the Ikea scrum with my daughters, I thought a round dining table would be perfect. I brought it back home and it didn't fit. Luckily I could bring it back and swap it out for a drop leaf rectangular one.

In my new place, some decisions have come easily. Though I've lived with my girlfriend for five years, she had moved into my preexisting place, so this is the first time we've set up a non-sublet home together. We've had very few disagreements about furniture, rugs, closets, etc., and it's gone very smoothly. No regrets.

But the vacuum cleaner decision nearly broke me.

My last apartment, I only had an electric broom, which, living with three long-haired women and a long-haired cat, was in a constant case of fullness. But we really didn't have closet space for anything bigger. For the new place, I wanted to make one of those "lasting decisions" that tend to paralyze me.

For some reason, I couldn't buy into the Miele/Dyson snobbery. Partly because no two friends I polled agreed. One swore by the HEPA filter Electrolux he'd been given as a post-9/11 bounty by FEMA -- though he said the bags were so expensive he pulls the dust out of the hole by hand. Another swore by the plain Sears canister he had, but he touts Sears for everything, and when I had looked into the washer/dryer he pushed, it scored poorly.

Another friend who had access to Consumer Reports sent me their listings, but when I clicked through to several of them the customer comments all were dire. "No good on wood floors" "Noisy" "Bags tear" etc. Why can't there be a vacuum choice that's as clearcut as, I dunno, an iPod?

After much websurfing and wringing of hands, I found a snazzy white Sears HEPA cannister [left] which is not without its drawbacks -- its wood floor attachment is puny, for instance, and the bag fills up pretty quickly. But it cost half as much as the Miele/Dyson equivalents and works great.

When i ordered it, the website was spectacularly unclear about which model bag to order with it. Unlike Amazon, B&H Photo, or other sites, which list accessories without you even looking for them, Sears seems shocked it even has the ability to sell you something outside of a store environment. When I called the toll free number to ask a worker, it was pretty clear I had been routed to a cubicle in India, where they didn't even know what a vacuum cleaner bag WAS.

But after doing my friend's trick once of pulling the dirt out of the bag, I decided, this is too messy and counterproductive, it's time to bite the bullet. So I read the model number off the bag and, after considering cheaper knockoffs, ordered two sets of 8 Kenmore bags from the Sears website. I ordered two because shipping was the same as one, and I didn't want to have to deal with this again for a while.

When the box came, however, inside was an invoice for two, but only one set of bags. I called Sears to fix this.

The gentleman in India spent 20 minutes grilling me on this. Was the box damaged in any way? No. Was there any indication the other item had been shipped separately? No. Etc etc. At the end I expected him to do what any other retailer would do -- apologize and send out the missing item immediately. We weren't talking about a missing $250 vacuum, after all, just $15 of paper bags.

Instead he told me there would be a 5-7 day "investigation" including grilling UPS about its handling, all of which was infuriating to me. He said he would write up an email detailing my case and send it to me. It never arrived. Instead he sent me not one but two email "customer service satisfaction survey" emails. I filled one out with the lowest scores possible.

When I was a kid in suburban New York, Sears really represented the heartland. Before I was old enough to demand Levi's, my mom bought me Toughskins jeans there; every Hanukah, I awaited the Christmas Wish Book [right] almost as much as the holiday itself. When it arrived I went through it, scissors in hand, cutting out photos of my personal wishes.

So I still held out some antiquated hope that Sears wouldn't, couldn't, completely fail me. I wrote to the customer care email address, hoping to bypass India and find someone who could help. I mentioned that this was probably the last time I would try to use their website.

I immediately got this chipper, semi-coherent reply, which, had I concocted it for The Onion or New Yorker "Shouts and Murmurs," I couldn't much improve upon. I share it with you in its entirety, except for the ad for other Sears products.

Good Morning David,
Thank you for contacting Sears.com.
I'm sorry to hear that you did not receive one of the two items for which you placed order under the order# 209814821. I apologize for the inconvenience. Please accept our apology.
David, normally we check all the items before we ship. However, I'm not sure how this has happened. It's a very rare issue and I'm sorry it happened in your case. We will always stand behind our products and will help you to resolve your concern to your satisfaction.
I have forwarded this issue to our specialized team that is Item missing request team, so I kindly request you to give us some time to work on this issue. I appreciate you to receive the response from us within 5-7 business days. If not let us know.
Our motto is to help our customer's with all their quires and resolve them to your satisfaction. Sears always Values and Respects its Customers. Customer satisfaction is important for Sears.
If you have any questions regarding this issue or with any issue. Please feel free to email us, so that we can help you further. We thank you for your patience and cooperation. We are here for you! Please reply should you have any further questions.
We value your business and look forward to serving you in the future. Have a wonderful day!
Sincerely,
Stephnaie K (skanniy)
Sears Customer Care

Next time I'm going with the cheap generics.

Forgotten, then Gone

2011-02-10T22:28:00.006-08:00

Although New Yorkers love to lord their city over everyone else's hometown, to be honest, they often brag about places they don't actually patronize. Kind of like the folks who brag about their iPhone app capabilities when all they really do is play the same video game every day.

You talk about how great all the museums are, and then totally fall into the habit of only going to them if someone's visiting from out of town. You have a favorite restaurant you recommend to people, when deep down you realize the last time you actually ate there was years ago and you have no idea if it went downhill.

As life accelerates (in truth, when did it ever not?), I feel more and more of these New York attractions slipping through my fingers, and now and then I make conscious decisions to reinvigorate them.
Last year, for example, after I inherited my dad's car, I swore I would start following up on the sort of outer borough ethnic dining tips touted by Cheap Eats in New York magazine or by the Voice's Robert Sietsema. (I own the book to the right, which I just realized was published almost 15 years ago -- I should probably chuck it.)

They always sound so good, but the subway ride there and back seemed too laborious. Since pledging that extra effort, I have dined at exactly one place -- Pies 'n' Thighs. Not that it wasn't amazing.

If I stop and think about all the resources of New York I am not availing myself of, I could go mad. Perhaps the category of nonpatronage that makes me feel worst is little mom and pop places that always define a neighborhood.

In 1985, when interviewing Fran McDormand about the Coen Brothers, she introduced me to Shopsin's, the amazing, unmarked restaurant run by an eccentric couple [right] that in 2002 would be immortalized by Calvin Trillin. She swore by it -- of course, she lived around the corner with her Yale Drama buddy Holly Hunter -- but she was right. I swore I'd eat there every month.

In the twenty years between that first visit till Shopsin's was forced to relocate a few blocks away, I think I made it there for breakfast a total of three times.

I tried the new place once. Although it retained the insanely dense menu [left] and self-styled paintings, it lost about 90% of the charm of the original.

When Googling I learned it had re-relocated to Essex Street several years ago, which I guess exposes how deep my support truly ran.

I was reminded of my enthocentripocrisy a few mornings ago when I found myself back in the West Village early for an appointment and was hungry for breakfast.

I remembered this amazing artifact of a bygone era called Joe Jr. [top] at the southeast corner of 12th street and Sixth Avenue.

Back when I was not yet writing for magazines, when I was temping and editorial assisting and trying to figure my way into the world, a few kind mentors took pity on me and gave me advice. One was Adam Moss, then at Esquire (and now the editor of New York magazine), and another was Peter Kaplan [left], who at the time was an editor at the business feature magazine Manhattan Inc., which started some great writers' careers like John Seabrook, but would got belly up in 1990 because of the '87 financial downturn.

Peter was exactly the kind of guy I had hoped to meet when I decided to go into journalism: an old-school eccentric who had roomed with a Kennedy in college, admired Preston Sturges, and spoke in long pauses that made you wait for the next pearl of wisdom to emit, every now and then you realized he had completely zoned out and forgotten his own point.

And Peter loved to eat at Joe Jr., which was around the corner from his apartment, before he moved to suburbia. It was old-school, like him. Nobody knew who Joe or Joe Jr. were any more. It was just an unpretentious greasy spoon where you could befriend the waitresses and spar with the cashier and get the same square meal every time. No frills.

So on this recent morning I went by there and was shocked to find the sign stripped, the innards gutted, and the creation of a new faux-country-kitchen place well underway.

I went home and Google taught me there had been a huge community outcry when it closed, after 45 years -- IN JULY 2009.

Man, am I out of touch. And then I Googled Peter, who had fled the editorship of the New York Observer when it was sold in 2009, and found out belatedly that last summer he'd been named editorial director at Fairchild. And that two of his former Observer editors, Jim Windolf and Peter Stevenson, both of whom I know, have been infamously Haiku-Tweeting in his honor as "Cranky Kaplan" and "Wise Kaplan."

All of which adds up to the fact that I had to eat a pretty sad and unmemorable breakfast that day, and that you can lose track of people and places without realizing it until they're gone or renovated. So try to have those breakfasts at your favorite places with your favorite people more often. I'm just sayin'.

Let it Stop!

2011-02-01T03:51:00.001-08:00

I woke up today to see that ominous gray sky. Looked out the window down at the street -- oh no, the frosty menace is back.

It wasn't always this way between us.
When I was a kid, I loved snowstorms. The snowflakes inspired those scissor-happy paper window decorations. We'd head for the hills with our Flexible Flyers [right]. (Today, with the plastic-shells and inflatable tubes, I have a hard time understanding how those two-runner sleds ever worked.) . The best of all was a snow day, when school and time stood still for the blanketing beauty of a blizzard.

I also had some perilous encounters with the white stuff as a kid. Most notably when I tried skiing on an intermediate slope my second day up on skis ever, and wound up careening into a rock and being carried down in a toboggan, temporarily immobilized (and, for a much longer period, humiliated).

Last week, my dad's car (it's mine now, but I still think of it that way, especially because I would probably not choose a small-trunked, two-door, convertible to ferry my family around and park on city streets -- was buried [above] by the combination of a foot from the skies and two feet from the plows.

This thwarted my chance to get it inspected in a timely manner (more on that in a future blog post called "Check Engine Light"), but also, by the time I had a few hours to dig it out, it had gotten so encrusted that, after turning away two other street volunteer shovelers, I enlisted a man named Tito, who, despite having a broken plastic shovel and no gloves, whipped through the remaining icecaps with lightning speed, for which he was handsomely rewarded.

New York has already had over four feet of snow this winter, after several consecutive winters with only one or two storms the whole season. And today's is just adding insult to injury.

Here's what I've realized: Snow is not for grown-ups.

This point was driven home to me the year I tore a ligament in my ankle. I was working at the time on the short-lived CBS show Love Monkey, and our showrunner, Michael Rauch, had found us a really cool writers' room in a loftlike building in Tribeca. Its only downside was you had to climb two flights of stairs to get to it. So, being practical (and masochistic), I put off getting my ankle operated on until the job was finished, not wanting to have to use crutches for six weeks going up and down those steps.

The show was cancelled before we could even hold the wrap party to celebrate the filming of our seventh and final episode. The only upside was it meant I could finally get my operation. I did, went home on crutches, and then the next day it snowed. And snowed. And snowed.

"A record snowstorm," crowed the New York Times: 26.9 inches. [right]

And there was me, on my crutches.

Slip sliding into Central Park to take my kids sledding, (The snow was so deep, we were able to sled down what in normal conditions were staircases). Stumbling around the city and in and out of subways (since no cabs were to be found). It was one of those "God Says Ha!" memories.

This recent spate of snow has even got my kids grumbling. They were excited to miss two days of school...but my older one missed a day of chorus rehearsal and now has to show up for one on a day she formerly was going to have off. The weather was so cold that sledding was short and sweet. And soon enough it was that horrible New York grey piles that make it impossible to cross streets, to park, or to throw out garbage. This leads to some pretty sad sights.

The only way to remember the childlike wonder of snow is to take out the camera. So that's what I've done.

Unloading

2011-01-30T09:10:00.003-08:00

When you move, it's imperative to throw out as much as possible in advance. But you can't always predict what will work in the new space until you've lived there.

So I knowingly paid movers to schlep several things uptown, despite the fact they would soon be history. One of the more embarrassing and unwieldy was the 65-pound, 27" diagonal, perfectly working Sony [above] I had bought when I moved into my old place in 2004. I mean -- I work in television, for chrissake.

I had never bought into the plasma extravaganza. But now LEDs were too good and cheap to ignore. So within a few weeks of moving, I bought a Samsung and a new TV cabinet to house it, and the Sony became the world's biggest doorstop.

Not wanting to dump it on the sidewalk, I posted it on Craig's List.

I was asking $99 (on Amazon someone was selling a used one for $200, and that didn't include shipping) -- along with a bunch of other furniture from the old place that served us in the transition until our new lives took shape: dressers, a bookcase, even the Ikea table this TV had sat on [below].

I priced them to move. From my point of view, people were paying me to get rid of my trash. They were doing heavy lifting of objects I'd otherwise either have to transport to Housing Works, or sit around all day waiting for a donation vehicle to arrive, or toss out and add to the landfill crisis.

When I first posted my items, I got a flurry of inquiries. I would write back right away -- and hear nothing. I realized it was a little like internet dating, where people put out a million feelers but quickly move on, and don't even remember who they wrote to, and leave nothing but hurt feelings in their wake.

But I also learned it was pointless to post ads early in the week. The only serious buyers didn't really shop till right before a weekend, when people actually have time (and vehicles) to come see and take things.

In one thrilling 24-hour period, I unloaded nearly everything I had advertised. It became almost like a reality show, several people interested in the same dresser competing to see who could get here first.

I helped one very tiny mother of four who lived in Queens wrestle a dresser into her mini-van, moving carseats and baby formula out of the way. She was thrilled that the dresser matched another one she already owned. Another buyer wanted a bookshelf, he only said once he'd already arrived, because he thought he could put LPs on it. When he realized the cubbyholes were too small, instead of stomping off, he cheerfully took it, saying he'd find something else for his albums.

But only one person expressed interest in the TV. Dor was moving on the Sunday and he was a haggler. Dor wanted me to let him have the TV for free if he took the table, then he granted he'd give me $49. He also wanted one or two of the dressers. I kept him posted as they slowly were winnowed away.

By Sunday morning, I just wanted to unload the TV. I texted him to come get it. He wrote back that it wasn't worth it to make the trip with his truck for just one item. So we both moved on.

I posted an offer of the TV on Facebook, and a friend - a TV critic -- recommended I try Freecycle, where she'd unloaded her old-school set.

I joined -- and entered a world from another dimension. A world where every day is a Christmas Wish List, and nothing should ever cost anything. Or be thrown out. Here is a brief sampling. It conjures an entire David Foster Wallace novel (or at least Harper's piece).

Yes, I'm offering free bananas. They're yellow and fresh. I have way too many to eat myself. Pickup in midtown at any convenient time for you. Thanks!
Greetings! I am preparing to move and am in need of a lot of bubble wrap. In light of our weather conditions, I will be traveling via train and prefer to pick up in Bronx or Manhattan. However, when the snow clears a bit, I can drive and pick up anywhere. Please contact me via e-mail. Thank you in advance. Peace and Blessings,
In great need of a working Boost Cell Phone. Someone stole my phone. And, Accessories if you have. Thank You and May God Bless,
I need a svelte loveseat I can smuggle in to my dorm (we're not supposed to have outside furniture), hopefully one that could fold up or be taken easily apart and packed in a box or suitcase. This is a good example: http://www.overstock.com/Home-Garden/Bentwood-Folding-Loveseat/4611515/product.html?cid=123620&fp=F but anything similar would do.
Offering a box of comedy supplies: -a dozen oversized red buttons with "Make 'Em Laugh" printed on them -- when you hit the button, you get several seconds of laugh track -a package of whoopie cushionsI'd love for someone to take the whole box! Pick-up is in the Times Square area. Items can only be picked up Monday thru Friday, between 9:00AM and 1:00PM.
Hello I would like some weights to work out with...anything 20lbs or under. Thanks!

I don't think this is just a sign of a bad economy and high unemployment. The demands, and their specifics, were mindboggling. I was thrilled when a woman actually wrote in looking for a free TV for her kids room, she didn't care if it was not a flat screen, but -- she wanted it to be at least 36" -- and she was willing to pick up only in Queens.

My inbox is now flooded with these emails, so I will probably remove myself from the list. But it's been a bracing reminder that even in this most urban of areas, there's a whole world of people who live off the grid and set their own rules. And, thanks to the internet, are able to find each other.

Meanwhile, I still have the TV, and it's going to go out to the sidewalk -- if the snow ever goes away. Now. does anyone on Freecycle have an extra Blu-Ray?

* UPDATE: A friend read this blog post and said she wished she'd known because she wanted it. 24 hours later it was hers -- gratis.

City Porch

2011-01-16T11:16:00.002-08:00

People who live anywhere but New York City take outdoor space for granted. In L.A., the only other city I've lived in my adult life, even the shit-ass lowliest apartments often had balconies (and sometimes swimming pools). The last time I lived there, for the same price as my grungy New York apartment, we had a whole house with a yard, a hammock, a hot tub, and a resident pet bunny. We barbecued -- even in February.

One of the nicer aspects of the Upper West Side apartment I rented in 2004 turned out to be its fire escape.

Sure, the paint job was decrepit and probably lead, the satellite dish towered over us, and there was only a 3x6 foot area available for humans. But on warm spring and summer days we would put out a fleece blanket and read, play cards, or even nap.

In spring and fall, the fifth-floor faux-terrace afforded us great views from above of the blocks' trees in their white-flower stage and then their colorful foliage stage. And when snow fell, we could measure its depth on the metal railings.

(The rest of the year we tried not to notice the underwear and shoes that had somehow gotten tangled in the branches.)

Even Jasper, the cat, appreciated the fire escape, because there were always pigeons and doves coming by to roost, providing his version of a nature TV channel. One spring, Sydney called me to the window to see a flock of bright green parrots had landed in a tree across the way. (Sadly, my camera didn't capture them).

So one of the most appealing aspects of the new Harlem apartment we just moved to was the fact it had a real, full-fledged balcony, up on the eighth floor in a fairly low-rise (at least for now) neighborhood. No more worrying that if I fell asleep I might fall through the opening. When the weather turns warm, we could get real outdoor furniture. maybe a grill.

But already, every day we see seagulls and hawks flying around at eye level, and it struck us -- why not get a bird feeder? Surely there are species who don't want to eat the frozen McDonald's bun detritus, who will immediately seek out a real bird-driven restaurant with such a nice view. So we went online, and discovered there are a lot of bird feeders for sale. None of them seems particularly geared toward a city apartment balcony, so we just had to wing it.

Well, we're three days into the experiment, and you might see this and say, wow, the birds have already eaten nearly half a tube's worth. But that's not actually the case. What we learned the hard way is, it's pretty windy up on the 8th floor. And the feeder has been making slow gyroscopic turns, spreading its seed below kind of the way the sand trucks spread on snowy streets. Every now and then we peer over the edge to see if birds have landed on rooftops below to gobble up the spillage. But none of them has figured out where it's coming from, so we're just left with this weird prop jutting out from our railing, slowly winnowing its contents to an unheeding city.

I guess the moral is, you can't always force the city to give you a country feeling. Still, the views have been nice.

Moving (Part 1)

2011-01-13T08:15:00.006-08:00

Many people find moving traumatic. But I was never one of those people.

Growing up, I was the opposite of an army brat: my family only moved once my entire childhood -- and that was to a house a few blocks away, which was larger, so we didn't have to throw anything out.

When I went to college, I spent two years in dorms, then got my own place for two years. After I graduated, I lived with my parents while kickstarting my journalism career, rented a few NYC apartments, then bought a place and remained there for 12 years.

Then my marriage ended, and my living situation became....entropic.

In that first year of separation, I lived in three different friends' apartments, surrounded by their stuff. At the last one, which I actually sublet, I went to Ikea to fill in the gaps.

In the next few years, I would come to make that trip to Ikea more times than I could have ever predicted.

Then I got invited to write for season four of The West Wing.
It seemed like a long-term prospect. The show had won Emmys every year, it was in the top 15, and its creator, Aaron Sorkin, was one of TV's few namebrands.

Of course, my divorce lawyer warned me not to take the job because it would probably increase my financial obligations. But I needed the fresh start.

I found a great apartment in a classic West Hollywood building (left). I got some free furniture from a fellow writer who was moving in with his girlfriend and then headed back to Ikea to fill in the gaps.

It hurt to be so far from my kids, but I flew back every month to see them, staying in the sublet I kept going. And when they came to see me, they fell in love with L.A.

The biggest trauma of that move was delayed: halfway through the year, I decided it didn't make economic sense to keep the apartment in New York for once a month visits, I could stay in a hotel. So during a trip back in February I hired a UHaul to get out of my friend's sublet.

Then there was a blizzard.

I found myself pulling an all-nighter driving furniture up to my parents' and to my ex-wife's country house. I remember I went inside to see my former cats and they seemed almost feral.

I got back to the apartment at 5 a.m., drove the UHaul back to the dealer and caught a cab to the airport to catch a plane back to L.A., completely delirious.

Later I learned that I had accidentally left the door to the apartment ajar. Nothing happened, but my friendship with the apartment's owner has never been the same.

And, as it turned out, I should have held on to the place. Because West Wing's ratings tanked, the costs of the show were skyrocketing, and a few months later, Sorkin departed. Seven of the staff's eleven writers, including me, were not asked back. I didn't land another job for the following TV season, and found myself 3000 miles from my kids with no income to pay for a return to New York.

I ended up engineering several apartment swaps on Craig's List so I could spend more time with my kids.

I got a job in June 2004 to work as the only writer on the Jane Pauley Show, a guaranteed two-year gig hosted by "America's Sweetheart." The girls came out to L.A. for a farewell, and helped me pack up the place (right).

Back in Manhattan, I found an affordable rental in a somewhat seedy building -- no doorman, no laundry -- but it was a three-bedroom, which allowed my daughters their own bedrooms when they stayed with me. So what if my own bedroom had been carved out of the living room?

I splurged on nicer furniture at Crate and Barrel (and, yes, filled in the gaps from Ikea).

Then the show was cancelled after seven months.

Over the next four years, I moved back and forth to L.A. twice more for staffing jobs. Having learned my lesson about moving, I simply mailed myself boxes and sublet furnished places....filling in the gaps with Ikea. It was a good life -- no more snowstorms -- but always felt as temporary as the tattoos Nancy would get at Venice Beach (left).

Of course, part of me found it exhilarating: new experiences, new neighborhoods. And when I think about it, I've never had a job longer than four years, so I'm sure the peripatetic bent is an extension of my freelance mindset.

Which itself was probably a pendulum-swinging reaction to my parents, who never left that house we'd moved to in 1976, and over the three ensuing decades gradually turned it into a virtual 5000-square-foot self-storage unit.

After they both died suddenly within 18 months, my brothers were finally forced to make the hard choices about their stuff -- and our own that we'd let fester there. My brothers took so much they hired a moving van to drive it to the Pacific Northwest; I made off with a couple of boxes, stored a few pieces of furniture at a friend's (and have since told him he can get rid of them). I was kind of glad I had been forced to streamline my life.

But now I had some money from the sale of the house, and started a new job at CNN. It felt like it was time to leave the rental apartment I'd been calling home for over six years, surrounded mostly by college students or families who'd been there forever.

I thought, before I hit 50, it would be nice to really set up a home with my miraculous, lifesaving girlfriend Sydney, who had moved in with me five years ago and saw me through two of the moves back and forth across the country and the deaths of my parents.

So I contacted a realtor to do some casual apartment hunting -- and we fell in love with the second place I looked at, in a new building in Harlem.

In retrospect, I realize all my life I had always lived in old buildings and houses, and somehow the newness helped mark a fresh start. After lowballing and waiting out the sellers, I bought it. (Not without some major trauma inflicted by Wells Fargo Bank. More on that some other day.)

Sydney cautioned me: was I sure I wanted to take this on? Among life's biggest stressors were deaths of loved ones (check), starting a new job (check) and moving. Why voluntarily sign up for another. My feeling? Since I was already numbed, let's just get it over with.

This attitude, of course, did not really work, since I had forgotten that moving is one of those tasks in life that has no end, only the vast middle. But I wanted a sense of home (and the end of hemorrhaging rent) that comes with ownership. Little did I know what I was in for.

To be continued.....

The Home Movie

2010-12-26T11:46:00.006-08:00

Remember home movies, which were silent, short clips that cost money to develop so you were careful what you shot?

In today's New York Times op-ed, Frank Rich writes about the above home movie, Disneyland Dream, by amateur filmmaker Robbins Barstow about his family winning a trip to Disneyland. In 2008, it was enshrined in the National Film Registry alongside many films including The Terminator and the terrific Elia Kazan/Budd Schulberg satire A Face in the Crowd.

Rich was waxing elegiac about a bygone hopefulness in middle-class America, but for me the primitive technology is as much a part of what's been left behind.

Barstow's film achieved Library-of-Congress status 50 years after he made it, partly because in 1995 he added narration to the silent film. Who has time to do that these days?

Every point-and-shoot camera and iPhone
can now shoot video or even HD video. It can be uploaded to YouTube or sent to America's Funniest Home Videos and shared with the world. But how many home videos will ever get to the extended narrative, amateur-yet-polished stage of Barstow's film, to have long-lasting, universal appeal a half century from now?

When I was a kid my dad bought a titling kit and an 8mm editor and at some point we actually spliced together some footage and animated some titles using puppets and magnetic letters. Who has the time for that in 2011? (Addendum: Obviously, faster ways to title exist. I mean, who has time to go back and cut together pieces of video into a coherent narrative.)

As I prepare to move apartments, I am confronted with VHS copies of my mom's home videos of my kids when they were little. Because she held the camera away from her eye, because she didn't have a great sense of framing, because the video kept rolling, a lot of these could use editing. If I transfer them to DVD, they'll be easier to store, but will I ever go through them?

These days my daughter can shoot, edit, and post You Tube videos in less time than it took me and my father to stop-motion a puppet spelling out "T-H-E E-N-D." Which is good, since we ended up boxing up the editor and titling contraptions in our basement with other lost causes. (Barstow's own "The end" is cleverly stop-motioned using tape made by his trip's sponsor, 3M, right.)

But where will all today's visual information ultimately reside? Will the Library of Congress start archiving Funny or Die videos? Will families spend enough time together not texting or shooting photos to tell stories like Barstow's?

All I Want For Christmas is My Two Front Keys

2010-12-25T06:07:00.008-08:00

Nobody told me there'd be days like these, especially the night before Christmas Eve. It's a tale of keys lost and found that Rube Goldberg could not have charted.

Parker Spitzer was airing a pre-taped greatest hits -- including the excellent stocking stuffer of Gene Simmons on his v isit to the Anne Frank house -- so I had a rare day off. My girlfriend was in Colorado with her folks, my kids were out of town with their mom. So it was Errand Day.

I went to the hospital for blood work, bought a washer-dryer for the new apartment in Harlem we're moving to next week, bought a watchband for my Dad's watch. I brought some things to the new place and discovered the bed I'd ordered my daughter had arrived.

Then I drove up to Hastings (left) to do the errand I'd been putting off for a year, since my parents' house sold -- dealing with the 15 boxes (and two Advent stereo speakers) I hadn't wanted to throw out and didn't have room for in my old place, that a friend had lent me storage space for. Turns out, I won't have much more room in the new place, so it was time to be brutal.

I pulled a bunch of family photos out of the ugly and decrepit frames - that alone eliminated a box. I took three boxes of books I thought I would want to keep -- Modern Library, Complete Shakespeare, etc., and pledged to bring them to the Strand (right).

I looked at my father's old wooden Navy chest and realized that, while it was sentimentally significant, it's a pretty beat-up and eyseore piece of furniture -- and that most of the family files I'm saving inside it are things I don't want my kids to have to deal with some day. But I couldn't bring myself to take action yet.

I rolled down the metal door to the storage bin, locked the door and returned the key to the desk. They have no garbage at the facility -- they must have realized that otherwise everyone would just come out and eventually throw out everything in their lockers.

I took out my car key and drove back to my current apartment. I reached in my pocket for the keys, and I found my Harlem keys, but not my house keys. I was locked out. What the hell? Had I left them in Harlem? In Hastings (where the facility was now closed)?

Let me repeat, my girlfriend was in Colorado, my kids were out of town. I started picturing trying to climb up the fire escape. Or hiring a locksmith to break in the door, not what you want to do one week before moving.

Then I remembered: my neighbors have a set of our keys. I called them.

"Sorry, your girlfriend took them a few weeks ago when she couldn't find hers, and never gave them back." Oh.

"But wait, the guy across the hall, his mom found a set of keys hanging from a mailbox....I think they took them inside." Oh.

Oh, crap. I had retrieved the mail, gotten distracted, and left the key hanging. What an idiot. But wait, Why hadn't you called me? "We weren't sure whose they were." OK.

They buzz me in the building. I knock on the guy-across-the-hall's door.

"Hey, you have my keys?"

"No, my mom's 83, she wasn't sure which mailbox she took them from, so she left them downstairs on the shelf by the mailboxes."

Oh.

Too impatient to wait for the elevator, I run down the stairs. No keys. One last hope: that the Super, a surly and somewhat inconsistent gentleman, saw the keys and pocketed them instead of leaving them out for all to take.

I go down to the basement where the Super lives. One of his inebriated minions sits in the garbage room, sorting through the recycling (I think he takes the bottles in for deposit money). He tells me he hasn't seen the Super.

I take out my cell phone and call the Super. For the first time ever, he answers right away. I find out he's just on the other side of his door.

"Did you find my keys?"

"Jes, Mister David."

He comes out. He tells me, completely sincere, that he did me this big favor. He took my keys, went up to my apartment, unlocked the door, threw the keys inside, and pushed the button on the doorjamb to lock the knob. My keys, he proudly informs me, are safe inside my apartment. Locked in.

The human mind is a mysterious thing.

I am flabbergasted. As I start to sputter, he thinks I am angry that he has gone inside my apartment.

"Mister David, I trust you, you trust me, I no touch anything."

"No, no, no. I have no keys! I can't get inside! You knew I had no keys!" He looks confused. "Why didn't you call me?"

"I no have your number." (I have been living in this building for six and a half years. I tip him every Christmas and shmear him a $20 every time he so much as plumbs my bath drain.)

It's a Christmas miracle of idiocy. I remember, luckily, that my actor friend Mark, who lives two blocks away, is the reason my girlfriend never gave the keys back to the neighbors -- she gave them to him over Thanksgiving so he could feed the cat while we were away.

But it's December 23rd -- what are the chances he's home?

I call. He's home. He finds the keys. We meet. I get the keys. I unlock my apartment door, and there on the floor are my keys and mail. Genius.

The cat is happy too. He gets dinner.

Merry Christmas!

Escape from "A Wonderful Life"

2010-12-19T05:32:00.004-08:00

Each Christmas, the chestnuts are taken out of mothballs to pull at our heartstrings and pocketbooks. Linus shames the cynics with his Biblical message, Bing and Bowie cryogenically reanimate their intergenerational pa-rum-pa-pum-pum, and Scrooge and George Bailey rediscover the meaning of life.

Well, I have a slightly different tradition.
I've always been something of a noncomformist when it comes to sentimentality. Not that I'm unsentimental. I just hate being forced into it. For instance, when John Lennon was killed, I had a college radio show the next morning. Everyone else was playing "Imagine" and "Give Peace a Chance" and I spun "Happiness is a Warm Gun" and "Run for Your Life." I felt it was an equally valid way of paying tribute to John -- and saying the world was a dark fucked up place for eradicating him.

My tradition is, I like to watch "Escape from a Wonderful Life."

In 1996, the influential improv troupe that had come to New York from Chicago, the Upright Citizens Brigade [right] -- Amy Poehler, Matt Walsh, Matt Besser, and Ian Roberts, and my former Rolling Stone colleague Jay Martel -- took advantage of a bizarre loophole in the copyright to Frank Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life," which put the video into public domain.

Comedy Central, still in its scruffy pre-South Park days when the Daily Show starred Craig Kilborn, let the UCB recut the movie down to about 50 minutes, and redub all the voices, telling a very different story.

In "Escape from It's a Wonderful Life," George Bailey is suicidal for wholly different reasons: because he's an aspiring actor who really wants to do action movies like Pulp Fiction but instead is forever trapped in retelling this treacly story. He runs around with satchels of cocaine while his brother tries to jump the maid. Everyone around George is furious with him for not sticking to the script.

It's not on You Tube (I can only imagine the rights situation) but can be downloaded in three chunks via Real Player here. (Definitely opt for the "Hi-feed" option.)

Fifteen years later, the comedy still holds up. George complains about the producers exploiting him, not giving him a raise for 50 years, while his fellow actors plead with him to get with the program. As his father puts it, "The whole family, the whole town, is counting on you to play the lead in what has become the quintessential holiday film classic." Mr. Potter is the big evil producer, fielding calls from Ted Turner about colorization. George wants the movie to have aliens instead of angels. Eventually the cast tries to do the movie without him.

I guess it's just the teenaged nonconformist in me who identifies with poor George.

Don't worry, in the end he still has a Merry Christmas. Hope you all do too.

Divorce Is Hot

2010-12-09T20:16:00.003-08:00

Divorce is a rite of passage -- like losing your virginity, marriage, becoming a parent, going through illness and losing your parents -- that you can hear about forever, but not really understand until you've experienced it yourself.

But unlike those other examples, which are generally honored and supported by societal rituals, divorce is quite isolating. There aren't greeting cards or parties or showers, there are only ruptured friendships, an underlying sense that you might be contagious, or that you have torn up the societal contract.

So I was fascinated to read that with much fanfare, prominent divorcees Nora Ephron and Arianna Huffington have unveiled

a new tab on the already swollen pages at Huffington Post, right between "Health" and "Art." "Divorce" has apparently already scurried to among the most popular pages.

Ephron famously made her first big foray into romantic comedy with the script based on her divorce-a-clef on Carl Bernstein, Heartburn. (Only now, all these years later, as I type this, do I realize it's not just a joke about her cooking hobby, it's also a pun on her real ex's name.)

Contributors to the HuffPo Divorce page have included a few friends of mine, and I am certainly interested in the subject matter. But I can't really bring myself to click on the link. Partly because like the rest of the site, it's so celebrity heavy. (I really don't care about Courtney and David Arquette, honest!)

But here's the real reason why it's hard to "go there": because it hits too close to home. No, I don't mean I can't bear reading such pieces. I mean it's annoyingly similar to an idea I had pitched for years. Once, quite specifically, five or so ago, between TV jobs, I was trying to rustle some magazine work, and I had a conversation with an editor at O magazine -- though to be fair, it really could have been any of a number of magazines, that went something like this:

I suggested that I write a monthly column for them on divorce.

I had been through one but was on the other side, I knew several people who were going through divorces, some of them so messy you needed to wear a butcher's apron, others so civilized you couldn't quite comprehend that the couple was actually split. I knew that it was a rich and vibrant world full of all the emotional hot buttons magazine editors love: sex, love, money, children, real estate. And that nearly 50% of marriages, no matter how well intentioned at inception would end up there, so it was certainly relatable. At least as much as cooking or books or other regular columns. Every divorce was its own story.

Here's what I was told. They didn't think there was material for a monthly column on the subject. They wanted a single reported piece on "The State of Divorce, 2005" or whatever year it was. They wanted me to find THE couple whose divorce personified and profile them, while quoting other people to support this thesis.

This is nuts. And it's one of the biggest challenges in being a freelance writer. You have to basically do all the legwork for something whose wordcount would never pay back the effort.

But on top of that, the assignment was both silly and impossible on a practical level. Who should I anoint as the personification of today's divorce? The couple who shared the same apartment so their kids wouldn't have to move, and did things like leave dirty dishes in the sink or an unmade bed as silent fuck-yous? Or was it the couple who still sat on either side of their child at a rock concert?

The whole point of my pitch was that there was no one story, and more than the New York Times vows column would pick one marriage to represent all marriages for an entire year. So I said no.

In the intervening years, having seen the weird and unexpected ways my divorce and others have impacted on our generation's children, I have relentlessly pitched TV executives that there is a rich vein to be mined in a TV series centered on a group of teenagers whose parents are divorced.

I did research with a group of New York City school kids and hearing their anecdotes remembered the adage that real life stories can often be richer than anything a fiction writer could make up. There was the girl whose Dad stayed upstate when her mom moved to the city for a corporate job, and then the mom flew out of town for work and left her 17 year old alone to cook, do laundry, and supervise herself.

It was all much realer than anything on Gossip Girl or Glee or even my beloved Modern Family the other shows about kids this age, with the exception of my also-beloved Friday Night Lights. Even the otherwise truish Parenthood, gets a little convenient when it comes to dealing with Lauren Graham's character's recent divorce: it seems mostly to show the hardships of being a poor single mom (and the benefits of being an available MILF). The ex has been out of the city and offscreen (though that might finally be changing). There's no questions of custody, money fights, divergent parenting styles, playing the parents off each other, the mixups and annoyances and hilarity that happen when you're impossibly split.

But everyone I pitch the divorce-based show says it seems "negative" or "limited."

Trying to add literary pedigree to the idea, I adapted John Updike's novel Marry Me as a screenplay. It's a microscopic satire about two Mad Men-era couples and infidelity (though, true to the 1960's it only glancingly deals with the children).

At one point my agents got it to a rep for a terrific actress who's just the right age; the feedback was that she had just gotten married and "didn't want to deal" with the subject matter. Sigh. I don't think that's how Meryl Streep picked roles at that age.

A few weekends ago, I was intrigued that the New York Times' navel-gazing column Modern Love ran a piece by a woman who was the child of divorce, as is her husband, and they swore they'd never do the same to their kids. She started musing, "I've begun to wonder if there isn't something positive about divorce that we could incorporate into our marriage."

I started to think, wow, this could be revolutionary. But it turns out, she just wants her husband to cook more. Lady, that's not what divorce is.

Now I read on the Huffington Post that Fran Drescher and her ex-husband have collaborated on a pilot called "Happily Divorced" that they sold to TV Land based on their experience, in which, as it turned out, he happened to be gay. Highly relatable -- if you're Liza Minnelli or Carrie Fisher.

Still, maybe the topic is starting to get out there. Maybe HuffPoDiv will start to generate book deals and movies the way Modern Love sometimes does. There are zillions of other side-splitting stories out there still waiting to be told.

My Father's Watch

2010-12-06T00:05:00.003-08:00

When my brothers and I were divvying up the stuff left behind in my parents' house, we laughed over the fact that my parents never threw anything out. I found a set of dessert goblets they'd been given as a wedding gift in 1958, that they'd moved to their new home in 1960, and then again to their next (and final) home in 1976. When I found them in a top cupboard, they were still wrapped in newspaper from 1960, meaning they had sat unused for 16 years, then been moved -- and sat untouched for another 33.

They saved boxes from every piece of electronic equipment, in case it ever had to be returned under warranty, and then kept the boxes long after they'd replaced the equipment (and usually kept the outmoded/wornout/broken piece itself too).

The most emblematic find
of our scouring of the house were these can openers in the basement [right] which had all obviously lost their ability, and been superseded by an under-cabinet model in the kitchen, yet they stood in silent vigil in an old coal bin area. Did my dad save them in case he needed parts?

At the end of the week, my brothers hired a moving van to carry tons of furniture, a piano, a snow blower, and dozens of boxes, across the country. I, being a New York City apartment dweller, already had so much of my own crap stowed there that I had to retrieve, that I didn't have room for much more. I took a bunch of photos winnowed down from a plethora of albums, and some personal mementos, including things like my Dad's broken watches, which he'd kept on his dresser. They seemed small and personal enough that I didn't have to discard them just yet.

My younger brother had asked if I could resuscitate one of them. I brought it to the old-worldish watch repair shop tucked away in Grand Central. But they told me it must have gotten waterlogged at some point, because the works were beyond repair. They basically would have to rebuild the whole thing from scratch, and it would cost a ton. We just kept the watch as is.

Today when I was going through some of the things I had carted back to the city, I found a few more watches, including the one my Dad wore at the time of his death, a heavy Swiss Army model. When I looked closely at it. I saw the calendar date was still at "2." The self-winding mechanism had ceased to move the watch forward since the date of my Dad's death (Feb. 2, 2009).

I thought of two things: one, a passage in Paul Auster's terrific memoir about his own father's passing, The Invention of Solitude.

Three days before he died, my father had bought a new car. He had driven it once, maybe twice, and when I returned to his house after the funeral, I saw it sitting in the garage, already defunct, like some huge, stillborn creature. Later that same day I went off to the garage for a moment to be by myself. I sat down behind the wheel of the car, inhaling the strange factory newness of it. The odometer read sixty-seven miles. That also happened to have been my father's age: sixty-seven years. The brevity of it sickened me. As if that were the distance between life and death. A tiny trip, hardly longer than a drive to the next town.

I also recalled when, as a young kid, I went into my grandmother's bathroom years after her husband, my dad's dad, had died, and found his electric razor still in the medicine chest.I had opened it up and found beard shavings -- perhaps the last cells of him.

I own several watches which have all stopped working because ever since I got a cell phone, I stopped wearing one. Occasionally this screws me up, if I'm on the subway too far underground to get a signal, but mostly I don't miss the encumbrance.

I put my father's watch on my wrist, and found the metal snap-band he used too tight.

I learned in that moment that I have thicker wrists than him, even though he had thickened around the middle by age 77. I guess that's no surprise, he was always a thin-boned guy. There's this photo of him getting his Eagle Scout badge, I think, where his legs look like a flamingo's [right].

But I think I'm going to get a new watchband and try wearing the watch from time to time. Maybe it will be a way to honor and remember my dad, to take his watch for a drive. To put some more miles on it.

Burt & Elvis (Guest Blog for East Portland Blog)

2010-12-05T09:03:00.003-08:00

I've always loved getting assignments. Dave Liljengren at East Portland Blog has been asking guest writers to post about a video of their choosing.

Since he was paying the same as I pay myself, I said "Sure."

Click here:
http://www.eastportlandblog.com/?p=3150

Double Takes

2010-11-21T16:47:00.002-08:00

Zosia Mamet on "Mad Men" (left)

In the old days, actors who lucked into a recurring role on a TV series faced the double-edged sword that people might not be able to ever think of them as another character. (Hello, Shelley Long!)

But lately a small cadre of talented actors are showing up on multiple, quality shows and playing a wide range of characters, simultaneously.

One of the first reappearing actors I noticed was
Kim Dickens [left], who within a few years was breathtakingly convincing as: a prostitute on Deadwood, as Sawyer's fellow co-artist girlfriend on Lost, as Matt Saracen's wayward mom on Friday Night Lights, and as the hardworking chef on Treme [below, right].

So, why the new multi-casting? Several factors are involved. I'm sure part of it is the current Hollywood caution of "round up the usual suspects." And of course sometimes it's a new series trying to draw on the fan base of a previous hit, as when Flash Forward poached Lost's Dominic Monaghan and Sonya Walger.

But sometimes there are shows like The Wire and Mad Men that are just so stellar that everyone in town watches and wants to re-use the actors (Hey, there's The Wire's Idris Elba on The Office! There's Mad Men's Maggie Siff on Sons of Anarchy!)

Sometimes it's that the showrunner of one series (Friday Night Lights' Jason Katims) also runs another show (Parenthood) and values an actor beyond what we've seen. (He brought FNL's Minka Kelly onboard Parenthood.)

But also, the new cable series model of 13 episodes has freed up actors from prohibitive contracts and work schedules in ways that weren't possible before. And creators and audiences would rather see great acting than a constant churn of new starlets.

Whatever the cause, I find myself doing double takes -- wait, Gabriel Byrne's daughter on In Treatment (Mae Whitman) is now Lauren Graham's daughter on Parenthood. And his son is played by the suddenly grown-up Alex Woolf of the teen idol Naked Brothers Band.

Here are three young performers who have shown remarkable double dexterity in the past TV season or so: Zosia Mamet as Joyce the lesbian who befriends Peggy on Mad Men and the wayward teen friend of Mae Whitman's on Parenthood; Allison Brie as Pete Campbell's uptown wife Trudy on Mad Men and the repressed Jewish Annie on Community; and Michael B. Jordan, who sported dreadlocks on The Wire as the young drug dealer Wallace, then transformed as Friday Night Lights' Vince Howard from the son of a crack addict and inmate to a star quarterback; and as of late October showed up on Parenthood in a mustache and wholly different guise, as a homeless volunteer coordinator that Haddie gets a crush on. They convey the confidence that we'll be seeing more of them.

Allison Brie on "Community"

Allison Brie on "Mad Men"

Zosia Mamet on "Parenthood" (left)

Michael B. Jordan on The Wire and Friday Night Lights

Michael B. Jordan on "Parenthood"

Fighting City Hall

2010-11-21T12:43:00.005-08:00

In New York, if you want something done, you invariably have to do it twice. I was reminded of that adage when I got a piece of returned mail this weekend with 27 cents postage due.

One of the great things about living in New York is not needing a car.
It's nice to have one to get away to places like the Berkshires, the Hamptons, or the Lower East Side. But I hadn't owned a car since getting divorced nine years ago -- even when I lived in LA three times, I rented from friends, which proved fortuitous when the jobs ended and I could just pack my bags.

Then my dad died and I inherited his two-door convertible, the last car I'd choose for New York. The soft roof seems destined for vandalism, and the car is cramped for more than two people (or two suitcases - right).

I decided for sentimental and practical reasons not to sell it just yet.

But paying to garage it -- $300 to $700 a month, what people in most cities pay to rent an apartment -- on top of the $2000 a year for insurance, seemed doubly insane.

So instead I returned to the alternate-side-of-the-street dance, which requires Manhattanites to move the car at least twice a week for street cleaning [left]. My neighborhood's not too bad in terms of finding a spot (and not being broken into), and my hours were flexible. And if you get one ticket a month, it's still cheaper than any garage.

Then I got a real job.

For the first month or so, I had to be in at 8 a.m., which meant positioning the car the night before instead of being able to move it in the morning.

Most of the time it worked well, but last month came the night from hell, when I spent an hour listening to a World Series game while cruising up and down blocks searching for a space that would remain legal. (Sometimes I think I'd be better off just sitting parked on one block waiting for someone to leave, but there's a whole art form to circling certain blocks that become ingrained if you do it long enough.)

Finally I found a spot on Riverside Drive, which looked close enough to the mandated 15 feet from a fire hydrant. Though the space was actually pretty far from my apartment, it was around the corner from where I was going to have to return in a few nights to pick up my daughter to drive her to my place.

So I locked up and walked the mile home.

When I returned with my daughter two nights later, we found under the windshield wiper the sickeningly familiar orange envelope [above that is the color twin and psychological equivalent of the Monopoly "Chance" cards [right] that augur the opposite of holiday cheer.

I examined my summons: it had been written up after midnight, and accused my car of being a lackadaisical 12 feet from the hydrant instead of 15. Splitting hairs, Mr. late shift cop, eh?

I had my camera with me but the night was pitch black; the below is the only useable photo I got.

I paid for a 5x7 print of the photo, wrote a succinct letter, and popped it in the mail in a manila envelope, with a first-class stamp and another for a second ounce.

The Hearing By Mail Unit is admittedly an improvement over how you used to have to contest tickets -- in person downtown at the Municipal Building [right]. The amount of time it took to wait for a judge was rarely worth the money saved.

Since the hearing by mail option was implemented, I've had a 50% or better record at getting unfair tickets dismissed, so there was no harm in trying.

A mere SEVENTEEN DAYS LATER, the post office delivered my own envelope [top] back from wherever such decisions are made with a "returned to sender" obscuring the address, saying I owed 27 cents more postage.

Imagine the manhours and labor it involved to pull it from the pile, bring it all the way back to me, and how that 27 cents might have been better spent.

So I wrote up ANOTHER letter to the Parking Violations Bureau, affixed it to the still-sealed envelope, and put that within ANOTHER manila envelope, and this time I peppered it with several 44 cent stamps.

I have no doubt that the PVB will now reject my claim as being outside the legal time limit. And then I'll have to protest their finding. And so it goes.

POST SCRIPT: In the interim, I got another notice informing me that because I had not responded in time, my fine had gone up $10 for nonpayment and would continue to do so every 30 days. I still held out hope.

Then testerday, January 4th, I got a suspiciously thin envelope in the mail from the NYC Dept. of Finance. (The fact that the tickets are administered by the Dept. of Finance should tell you all you need to know about how important these tickets are to the city's revenue.)

I opened it expecting it to say I was guilty, guilty, guilty, please pay $135. Instead -- who'd a thunk it -- case dismissed! Fine reduced to zero! But it wasn't because of my photography, my letter writing skills, my legal prowess or my mastery of the US Postal System.

The judge stated that the summons had been "incorrectly drawn." Who knows what the cop did, folks, but my advice is, you might as well protest your ticket, because there's always a small chance that someone else screwed up even more than you did.

I Couldn't Believe My Eyes

2010-11-16T18:29:00.005-08:00

I was sitting in a theater last Thursday, marvelling at the visual inventiveness of the British production of Brief Encounter, when I rubbed my right eye -- and the whole stage dimmed about 75%. I did it again and realized that my left eye had a huge floating fuzzy spot in the center of my line of vision.

Holy crap.
By the dramatic end of the show, I was emotionally drained, but only partly because of the ill-fated lovers onstage.

As I've aged, I've often debated whether losing hearing or eyesight would be worse -- and decided I'd rather lose hearing -- partly because I'm already on that path. I started missing parts of conversation and turning up the volume on the TV (and finally resorting to subtitles).

I saw an ear doctor who told me my right ear has about 15% hearing loss, especially at high frequencies, and that the loss of "cilia" inside the ear was irreversible. Whether it was from too many rock concerts as a kid, or headphones, or hereditary (my dad was an inveterate shunner of hearing aids, much to everyone else's dismay), I was going to lose hearing.

I came to terms with it, even humbly trying a pair of those assisted hearing earphones when I sat in the back row of a play.

But I didn't count on also dealing with the vision thing, at least not at this age. My dad and his mother both had cataract surgery -- in their seventies. My mom's grandmother had glaucoma and her mom had macular degeneration. But -- in their seventies. I am old, but not there yet. Right?

I actually have gotten through most of my life without even wearing glasses, except for between first and third grades, when I wore hornrims for astigmatism in my left eye. Then my sight "got better," and I've passed eye exams ever since.

Of course, recently I had the typical middle-aged struggles with menus in dimly lit restaurants, or the tiny font on a cell phone. (And, yes, Playbills in Broadway theaters). I broke down and bought reading glasses, but usually forget to bring them anywhere.

This dimming of my eye, however, came out of nowhere, and so of course at first I was in denial. I decided it was the aftereffect of a meeting I'd had a week earlier in an office where the sun was setting out the window; I self-diagnosed it as a "sunspot" that would fade. Because that's what it looked like. [Right]

But through a full Friday at work, it didn't. If I closed my right eye, I couldn't see what I was typing on the computer.

So Saturday morning I put out feelers for opthamologists, and then remembered that at a high school reunion, the women had all swooned for a classmate who now was doing lasik surgery and providing eyewear to developing nations. I emailed him, he sent me his cell number, and I described my symptoms. He told me he's not comfortable diagnosing over the phone, and that I should make an appointment for first thing Monday morning, but thought it sounded like I had Central Serous Retinopathy, which usually clears up on its own in 6-10 weeks.

The condition didn't improve over the weekend, so by the time I rode my bike to his office Monday morning, I was looking at the autumn leaves in Central Park, wondering if this was the last time I'd see them in 3-D. I actually stopped my bike at The Pond, where I used to go for lunches when I worked at Rolling Stone in the 80's, and took this picture with my phone:

When I got to his office, I read some charts, the right eye was fine and the left eye, I could only see the largest letter, and there were wavy lines around the edges. My 20/30 vision had ballooned to something like 20/150.

He started doing more and more tests and pictures of my eyes, and I started to feel like I was in Gaslight. He spoke in hushed tones with a colleague, and then told me I needed to see a retinologist -- RIGHT AWAY. I was immediately thinking I had a brain tumor. But no, he said it looked like Retinal Vein Occlusion, a build up of blood behind my eye, not draining, interfering with the workings of my retina.

He explained it has causes like high blood pressure or diabetes and has a much more uncertain return to normalcy. And he was particularly concerned because he saw a sign of it around the fringes of my right eye too.

Yikes.

As you might imagine, by the time I took the subway down to the retinologist, my blood pressure couldn't have been higher. I met with an intake assistant who asked about family history, and then a technician, who took pictures of my retina with a bright flash that would have blinded anyone, and who then put a needle in my arm to put a dye in so it would go behind my eye (which took only seven seconds) to get a better read on what she saw. I was told it would turn my urine flourescent yellow. Fun!

She took my blood pressure and -- surprise surprise it was 161 over 95. (Back in may at my annual physical it was like 120/80).

The retinologist looked at my eyes and told me many facts. At the time I hung on every word, but now can't quote them back. She said I should see my GP "Right away, today."

What she wanted was for him to check my blood -- for diabetes, BP, and other things -- all of which were tested back in May and were fine, and if anything I have been healthier since then, cutting out Diet Coke from my diet, etc.

She also told me that trying to help my recovery, there were two injections she could give me, one of which is an off-label use of a drug made for macular degeneration, which costs $50 a dose, and a new one just approved by the FDA for my condition, which costs like $2000 a dose, which meant it would take a few days to get my health insurer to approve it.

After we discussed the pros and cons, I said let's just do the cheaper one now and get going on the cure, instead of me having to wait three days (in order to give the drug company extra cash).

Then came the actual injection. When I was in college, I fell in love with Kubrick's film A Clockwork Orange. I went to see it every time it showed at the local revival house. One Halloween some friends and I even dressed up like "Droogs." I was not affected by the ultraviolence perpetrated against women, the elderly, etc.

But I always got squeamish during the scene near the end when Alex is being "cured" of his ultraviolence by having his eyes propped open, and moistened with drops, to force him to watch movie scenes.

And yet here I was, lying back on a chair, and the doctor propped my eye open, applied drops of painkiller "this is going to sting a little bit" and then -- please sit down -- PUT A NEEDLE IN MY EYE.

It felt like a poke or a pinch. And then it was over.

After making the requisite followup appointments and having her call my GP, I went across the street and got some low-dose aspirin (to thin my blood, just in case), and some eye drop antibiotics. I had some pizza. Then went up to my doctor.

He looked listened and took blood and blood pressure; by the time I left, and he told me I probably didnt have the diabetes or hypertension-related version. Voila! My blood pressure had calmed down to 130/80.

That night, I went out to another Broadway show -- Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. I don't know if I found the bloody part as funny as I might have a few days earlier, but I was happy for the distraction.

Today I returned to work, still, for all practical purposes, one-eyed. I eschewed wearing a patch, and my eye is just closed a little compared to the useable one. I will get the blood test results later this week; I am going back for more eyeshots once a month.

In the meantime, when I remember to, I am savoring sights with an intensity bordering on the immobilized protagonist in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

For now, the hearing aid can wait.

Diet Soda Diet

2010-11-14T10:59:00.001-08:00

I was a caffeine freak in college. But not in the usual way. My freakishness was my lack of addiction. Nobody believed me when I said I didn't drink coffee. (I also never took No-Doz or speed.) I liked the smell of the beans, but to me the drink smelled like mud. I associated its aroma with cigarettes, my parents' dual intakes when I was a kid (though Dad quit smoking at age 40), and I never wanted any part of it.

If I wanted caffeine,
I sipped some hot tea. The college cafeteria carried Salada, which had cheery fortune-cookie-like aphorisms on the tag [right] like "If you don't try, you can't fail." Written, I'd hazard to say, by failed writers. I moved off-campus in part so I could buy my own brand and escape this nagging.

I didn't really get hooked on diet caffeinated soft drinks until I got into TV writers' rooms. The environment was a marketer's dream: physical need -- being locked in a small space with endless hours of slogging and waiting and slogging -- with easy access, an unlimited free supply. Before I knew it, I was drinking diet soda like it was water, and my capillaries were never the same. But all over show business were examples of powerful people like Jeffrey Katzenberg and Bill Clinton who mainlined it, almost like a badge of honor of their tirelessness.

My usage peaked in 2004-5 when I was the sole writer on the syndicated Jane Pauley Show, an experience which deserves its own post. For now I will just say that it was a dream setting -- 30 Rock, down the hall from Saturday Night Live -- with terrific colleagues, combined with the nightmare of a smart host not physically or mentally suited to the task at hand.

I worked from 8 am till midnight, 5 or 6 nights a week. And I downed Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi with the faith that it was the only thing keeping me from passing out. After seven months, the show was cancelled, and my usage waned, but never really went away. I kept 2-liter bottles in the fridge alongside orange juice, milk and other essentials. My kids teased and then hounded me about it.

I told myself at least I wasn't drinking caloric soda like the people Mayor Bloomberg criticized (except when I indulged in the occasional exotic Mexican Coke [right], which may or may not actually use sugar instead of fructose). I tried Diet Coke Plus which included vitamins, but it didn't taste good.

This year I got another daily grind job, and I soon ratcheted up the intake again. I was having a 20 oz. bottle in the morning, and another when I got logy around 3 p.m. I thought, this isn't so bad -- one of my coworkers comes in every morning with two or even three venti Starbucks on a tray.

But I noticed something funny: my body was having the opposite reaction to what I intended. As soon as I drank them, I was getting more tired. Whether I was getting inured to the caffeine or tricked by the fake-sugar, my system was crying uncle.

So about a month ago, I just stopped, cold turkey. After a week, I posted on Facebook that I'd received my one-week diet cola sobriety chip, and friends applauded or marveled at my ability to walk away from "crack" and asked if I was having horrible headaches.

The answer is, no. Of course, I haven't completely dumped caffeine and stimulants: I usually have an iced tea at some point during the day, and woe is me if there's chocolate around.

But I am no longer a walking barrel of dyspeptic liquid. And I have been sleeping fine on weeknights and taking a nap or two on weekends. And I haven't gained any weight. I don't imagine I'm going to change other diet soda addicts' minds on this subject, but at least I've cut back my plastic-bottle imprint.

Strike Buddy Struck

2010-11-07T11:05:00.003-08:00

Last Saturday I heard a brief news item on the radio: some unidentified person had leaned over a subway track to see if the train was coming, and got struck by one as it entered the station. I shuddered, shook my head and promptly forgot about it.

Two days later, a writer friend in L.A. emailed me: "Isn't Will Rokos a buddy of yours?" Yes, I wrote back, why? He wrote back: "You didn't hear what happened to him on the subway?"

I still didn't put it together. Part of it was my brain didn't want to go there. But also, it didn't make sense:

as far as I knew, Will was in L.A., writing for Southland -- his first staff job, at an age when most TV writers are sent to the glue factory. (Many brownie points for his boss, John Wells, for hiring him.)

I read this email on my phone while was walking down a street. With one of those horrible foreboding feelings I googled "Will Rokos" and "subway," and what I read made me sit down on a nearby stoop. Will was indeed the accident victim, and he was in Bellevue Hospital, unconscious.

Despite having an Oscar and Writer's Guild nomination for best screenplay (he co-wrote 2002's Monster's Ball), Will is completely unpretentious, one of the nicest guys you'd ever meet -- family man, generous, salt of the earth. And a great writer.

I got to know Will when he was on my hodgepodge Writer's Guild "Strike Team" for three months starting in November of 2007. After Colbert and Stewart went back on the air while the strike was still on, my team was assigned to circle outside the W. 54th street studio where Colbert tapes, holding signs and occasionally chanting while ticketholders were filing in. (It's otherwise a pretty desolate block, pedestrian-wise.)

Writers are not the bullhorn-toting, screaming sloganeering type. Occasionally we'd rally around a momentary cause, like when then-candidate Mike Huckabee crossed the line to be on Colbert.

But mostly what we did was socialize. All these writers from different backgrounds and in different fields spending time together instead of home on their computers or locked into writers' rooms all day.

Occasionally some big-name writers joined in, like Robert Benton (Bonnie & Clyde) and Richard Russo (Nobody's Fool). But most of the time it was an increasingly frostbitten handful of soap writers, screenwriters, and TV writers, all of whom had somehow dogged it out without being forced by work and agents to relocate to Los Angeles (at least not full-time.) And Will was one of the most gracious, reliable and impassioned ones.

Going on strike wasn't easy for any of us middle-class (or unemployed) writers. I hadn't been on a show in nearly a year, and my mom had just died -- but we were striking because the Internet was bearing down on us like a DVD/VHS Mack truck and we couldn't stomach the studios' claim that they weren't going to make any money off it.

Will was one of the hardy souls who showed up day-in, day-out. And as we walked in circles, I learned of his fascinating career path: he grew up in the fake-sounding Hickory Flat, Georgia, went to Ohio State, and ended up as an actor in New York. He wrote (and appeared in) an off-Broadway adaptation of "The Ox-Bow Incident", played small parts on soap operas, and -- according to an internet search I just did -- wrote a movie about a Korean-American vampire that got made. (No sign of it on DVD.)

January 22nd, another cold day on the picket line, the news spread through the ranks that Heath Ledger had been found dead. Will looked shocked and devastated. I had forgotten: Ledger had played Billy Bob Thornton's son in Monster's Ball. Will knew him.

Monster's Ball, a dark, controversial movie about the affair between a prison executioner and the widow of one of his victims, is one of those scripts that wins respect but often never makes it to screen. Will talked to me about his collaboration with an actor he'd been in a play with, Milo Addica. (I just read an interview with Addica to remind myself of some of the details.)

They wrote it in Addica's tiny Santa Monica studio apartment in eight months in 1995, originally as a vehicle for them to star in themselves. But then it got "hot" in that alluring/infuriating Hollywood rondelay: Sean Penn wanted to direct himself and DeNiro, then Oliver Stone was interested....they gave producer Lawrence Bender the option for free, then wrote seven drafts and three polishes for free. It eventually wound up getting made six years later on a miniscule budget, directed by Marc Foster, with Thornton, Ledger and Halle Berry (who also got an Oscar nomination).

By the time it was released, Rokos and Addica were no longer a team.

When I met Will, he had written an amazing pilot, originally for Christina Wayne when she was at AMC, called Copper, about police in New York City during Abraham Lincoln's administration.

It's completely original, filled with genius period details -- primitive forensics, pigs wallowing in garbage-strewn streets, kerosene lamps. The copy of the script I have is October 2006; I am sure he worked on it long before then, and I know that he and Tom Fontana were asked to develop a "bible" for an entire season's worth of episodes. The idea was to shoot it in Dublin, which apparently looks like New York in 1865.

When Wayne left AMC in Feb. 2009, and Nikki Finke ran an item on her website, Will posted this, using his actual name, in characteristic heartfelt style:

"Working with Christina Wayne at AMC was one of the best experiences in my professional life. As a writer, I found her to be an extremely supportive, respectful, and creative executive. Wherever she lands, I hope to have the opportunity to work with her again."

Last I heard, Wayne was lobbying Starz to make it. She has been something of a patron saint of long-gestating scripts: when she picked up Matt Weiner's Mad Men, it had languished unproduced for nearly 7 years, despite David Chase himself exhorting HBO to produce it. [Disclosure: I am developing a script with Wayne.]

Luckily for Will, this past June, the Copper pilot got him his first staff job, on Southland. I found out only in September, when he sent out a mass change of email address email. When I wrote him for details, he wrote back that the job was

"intense but everyone is great and i'm extremely grateful to have the work. Will be in LA for the rest of the year, though.... not getting to see much of the family."

So when I heard about him being struck by the train, having been a TV writer who spent three different seasons in LA, 3000 miles from my own kids, I immediately imagined what might have happened. He probably came in for Halloween weekend to see his wife and teenage son. Maybe he took the redeye -- that's what I used to do -- and he probably was just a half-step off because of it.

A mutual friend tells me that in recent days Will had emerged from unconsciousness and is getting better every day. I'm not religious but I'm putting out as much positive energy as I can.

The last thing Will emailed to me was about the fate of Copper. He wrote:

"Think Copper at Starz is more a long shot than close. But it's still alive. I'll keep hoping."

Amen, brother.

"Hello, I'm John"

2010-10-22T22:47:00.002-07:00

Simon and.....

A lot of people are down on the Internet these days, for many good reasons. (Myself included, in this space.)

I have weaned myself from online Scrabble, at least, but when I see my 13-year-old daughter enmeshed in building her new Facebook page, in my head I start to hear the song "Cat's in the Cradle."

Tonight, however, after a long workweek, I came home to one of those wonderful free-association web experiences that led me to an amazing video, which, while hardly obscure -- it's closing in on a million views -- I had never seen before.

And which, more than all the produced tributes to John Lennon around the occasion of his birthday a few weeks ago, bracingly reminded me of the one-of-a-kind way he wore his icon-hood, like a shaggy bathrobe.

I found it thanks to a Facebook "friend" (i.e., someone I've never met) who posted a video from the recent autism benefit hosted by Jon Stewart.

In the clip [below], Chris Rock and a bewigged Tracy Morgan (who I keep calling Tracy Jordan -- I mean, at this point the line is pretty blurry) sit on stools, classic folksinger style, and start earnestly warbling ye olde English ballad "Scarborough Fair."

Then on to the stage wanders Paul Simon, who, of course, with the naturally bewigged Art Garfunkel, recorded the version everyone knows, back before Tracy was born. Simon shows his Saturday Night Live comedy chops, and they banter raucously as the younger comedians mangle the song.

Then Simon -- who turned 69 last week, folks -- segues into Snoop Dogg's "Gin and Juice." An inspiring mash-up.

When I clicked through to the YouTube posting of the video, there in the right-hand suggested column -- thank you Lord Google -- was a clip from the 1975 Grammys, the presentation of "Record of the Year."

It's an amazing artifact in many ways. Like the above clip, it deftly blends the old establishment with the new. But in the older clip, it's Simon who's the younger veteran -- 35 years younger, with vintage 70's grooming -- alongside a guy I never would have guessed participated in Grammy Awards -- John Lennon.

This was just before Lennon went into his recluse-daddy phase, and he is loose and ironic, but game, in that inimitable way the world had enjoyed for more than a decade.

Awards shows haven't evolved very far since then; the overblown sets, the dated topical humor (Claudine Longet! [right] Perez Prado!). The self-deprecation and mutual needling. The celebrities not quite fully owning the cue-card writing, but going along with it as a hoot, and then actually enjoying it, despite themselves.

Most of all, of course, there's the timeless truism that, against enduring, classic nominated songs -- Elton John's "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me," Roberta Flack's "Feel Like Making Love," Joni Mitchell's "Help Me," Maria Muldaur's "Midnight at the Oasis"......the victor is Olivia Newton John's "I Honestly Love You," which these days is mostly listened to with irony, as it was in the summer-camp production of Xanadu in which my Facebooking 13-year-old performed.

But there's also a surprise guest who accepts the award.
It's worth the wait. Thanks, Facebook. Thanks, You Tube.
And thank you John. You are missed.

The First Cover

2010-10-17T18:52:00.004-07:00

In retrospect, it's bizarre that the Talking Heads hadn't had a cover of Rolling Stone until January 1987, by which time the band had been around for a decade and was on the verge of disintegration. Whereas several of their CBGB's cohorts had covers back in the day -- Patti Smith (1978), Blondie (1979) -- and although the Ramones never got one, the Sex Pistols and the Clash did.

The Talking Heads weren't punk,
they weren't mainstream, they'd charted out their own territory, starting out with art-school faux-primitivism, then getting deeper via influences like producer Brian Eno and African music. Jonathan Demme's 1985 documentary Stop Making Sense captured one of the most vibrant, visually arresting concert tours by any genre of band. But still, no cover.

The late 70s/early 80s, when I had my teenage subscription, was one of the eras when founder/owner/editor Jann Wenner leaned more toward Hollywood (and the LA music scene) than he did cutting-edge music. Researching to write this, I was shocked to find int the book Rolling Stone: The Complete Covers 1967-97, covers of The Village People, Jimmy Buffet and Kris Kristofferson on during this era. But hey, it's Jann's magazine.

Their snub turned to my advantage, however. Because some other cover fell through and Rolling Stone decided to give them their due, perhaps somewhat shamed by the fact that stodgier Time magazine had put frontman David Byrne on its cover in October, 1986 (right) anointing him Rock's Renaissance Man by dint of his directing the movie True Stories. In that piece, composer Philip Glass was quoted saying that Byrne's other projects were more interesting than Talking Heads. The band hadn't played live for three years, and hadn't recorded in 18 months.

At that point I had freelanced some features for Rolling Stone, but they had mostly been fringe stories -- a profile of Eric Bogosian (who did an off Broadway show called Sex Drugs and Rock and Roll), another of a preacher named Brother Jed who roamed from college to college preaching....against Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll.

An editor -- Jim Henke or David Wild -- called to ask if I was interested and available to do the Talking Heads piece, quickly, to be the first cover on the newsstands after the annual year-end double issue. Most everyone on staff was taking well-deserved holidays. This was my big break, like when the dancer in 42nd Street is injured. I was 25 years old. And I walked into a great story.

Because the Talking Heads had virtually ceased to be a band. In 1981, drummer Chris Frantz and his wife, bassist Tina Weymouth, had formed a side project, Tom Tom Club (right), which outsold all previous Talking Heads records; keyboardist Jerry Harrison, a veteran of Jonathan Richman's original Modern Lovers, also made solo albums and produced for othrs. And for True Stories, Byrne had pushed them into the background, merely as his back-up band.

This kind of situation can be perilous for a band (and its fans) and possibly disastrous for a journalist. But in this case it turned out to be a goldmine. The Heads-- who I met with separately -- were practically communicating through me. Without prompting, Tina Weymouth volunteered two dreams she'd had: in the first, Byrne had advertised rehearsals for the new tour in the newspaper, and ended up with novice musicians instead of the band; in the second, the band went on stage and didn't play a single note, but was hailed as conceptually brilliant. "Even in my dreams," she told me, "David could do no wrong."

And I had my lead. Tina, never one to be shy, went on to say that "David assumed credit for everything that happened in Talking Heads, and we allowed it to happen." Frantz, though more jovial, complained about being tricked into participating in a 1985 NY Times Magazine story that he thought was about the band but turned out to be about Byrne: "I practically beat him up, I was so mad!" Harrison, while more philosophical, did note that "If there was anything the Talking Heads was always about, it was restraint...David's had so much press now that he's beginning to take on a larger-than-life image."

Sometimes photographers don't let you go to the shoots, which is understandable; I wouldn't want them around when I am trying to report. But Richard Corman let me go to CBGB's (Harrison's idea) with the band, via limo, which also got me great stuff. They hadn't been there in years; it was dank and dirty and a long-ago. They loosened up and had some of the camaraderie that I'd hoped for as a fan. But also, Byrne somehow positioned himself above the others. (Outtake, right)

A few weeks later, as I recall, Kurt Loder was taking a leave of absence to co-write Tina Turner's autobiography(eventually it would become the basis of the movie, and Kurt would migrate to the new kid on the block, MTV), and I was offered a staff position on the magazine. And for that I have to thank the Talking Heads, for their candor amidst what must have been a brutal time. (They didn't officially break up until 1991).

In my years at the magazine, I remained something of a fringe guy. I was never going to get the interview with the former Beatle, Springsteen, Dylan -- I was too far down the pecking order. But there were days I was grateful for that. Instead of transcribing the latest tablets from the mount, or getting the thousandth interview with someone, I got people on their way up like the Beastie Boys, the Coen Brothers and Jane's Addiction, or stories like this (the Pogues comes to mind -- and, later in their career, Jane's Addiction again) where there was enough strife that all I had to do was be sympathetic and then make sure the tape recorder worked.