The Home Movie

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.

All I Want For Christmas is My Two Front Keys

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 visit 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.

Escape from "A Wonderful Life"

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.

Divorce Is Hot

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

My Father's Watch

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

Burt & Elvis (Guest Blog for East Portland Blog)

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

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

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.

I Couldn't Believe My Eyes

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.

Diet Soda Diet

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,

Strike Buddy Struck

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:

"Hello, I'm John"

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.

The First Cover

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 1984 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 in the book Rolling Stone: The Complete Covers 1967-97, covers of The Village People, Jimmy Buffet and Kris Kristofferson 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 others. 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.

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Update: in February, 2019, I went to an event at the Canadian Embassy in NYC honoring Paul Myers' new book on The Kids in the Hall, another RS subject of mine. In attendance were Kid Dave Foley and Paul's brother Mike Myers -- and Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth, who I hadn't spoken to in 32 years.

When I reintroduced myself, Tina said the exact same thing she had said back then: "Oooh, the hatchet man!" and started blaming me for the band's discord. I patiently reminded her that in fact they had not really been speaking to David by the time I got to them, and how they aired their feelings through me, not because of me. She calmed down and complimented me for not running away and graciously posed for this pic. 

Reunited with the Tom Tom kids at an embassy, Feb 2019

Meanwhile, Byrne had still remained aloof from any reunion possibilities, despite THeads providing half the songs in his Broadway show American Utopia - the half the audience responded to, honestly. Over the years I keep spotting him in the same audiences as me - everywhere from the Wooster Group to the Public to the Met Opera. I have not approached him. 

Byrne spotted at The Magic Flute, June 2023

In fall 2023, as I write this, the Heads are in a full-fledged revival brought on by the happy discovery of the original negative of Stop Making Sense in some Oklahoma warehouse, new prints (including IMAX) and a remix, and they've been talking to each other and the media endlessly, from its premiere at the Toronto Film Festival to CBS Sunday Morning. 

In interviews they discuss how the concert film was so good that they feared they'd never match it. (And indeed the one time they reunited, at their 2002 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction, they were a little stiff, hobbled by a bad sound mix as much as internal tensions.) 

But maybe, just maybe.....

The Rush to Judgement

As the TV show I'm helping produce debuted this week, I was reminded that there's a huge difference between making something and consuming it. And an even wider gap between making it and critiquing it. Especially now, in the blogosphere.

When I was a journalist, process fascinated me.