Remembrance of Bike Rides Past

Feb 2005, "The Gates" 

A recent NYC history blog post about a statue fragment - more on that in a moment - reminded me how much a simple half-bike attachment (pictured above) ended up playing a key role in my maintaining a connection to my daughters after my divorce.

As a freelancer working at home whose wife worked full-time, I'd been more involved as a caregiver than most Dads. I bought a tag-along for my bike, and installed a seat on the front bar for my younger daughter, and we often tooled around the city to appointments on it -- in those pre-bikelane days often riding on side streets and even sidewalks to avoid traffic.

Central Park dogs

The rides were filled with adventures we wouldn't have had any other ways; once, we passed a parked bus, and the driver used his PA system to inform me that my daughter was not pedaling and simply taking a free ride, shaming her into action.

Weather permitting, I'd take my older daughter across the park to her school on the east side, and we would count the numbers of dogs we passed (once we hit 100!) or clock the number of different state license plates we spied.

After moving out, I wanted to do everything I could to provide continuity and stability. But all I could afford was a one-bedroom sublet -- on alternate weekends they gamely slept on the pullout couch -- and then I got a TV writing job in L.A., which would help me pay for their schooling, but pull me even farther from them.

The kids were able to visit me, and took a quick shine to year-round beach weather and showbiz; my older daughter even made an impromptu cameo in an episode of West Wing. (That's her smiling at Bartlet as he takes the stage around the one minute mark.)
But I didn't want to lose a foothold of their real lives back in New York.  My younger daughter was just starting kindergarten.  Luckily, my boss let me take a few three day weekends to return to the city to maintain custody.  Unbenownst to my kids, those visits also usually included a trip to lawyers' offices or court to hammer out the divorce details, so it was important to me as well to have as much normalcy outside those difficult hours.

The bike came in handy as a way to extend our too-brief time together -- instead of putting them on a school bus, we'd have the adventure and conversation during the trip. (It also, it turned out, absolved my older daughter of the social discomfort of explaining to busmates why she wasn't getting on the bus at her usual stop, something I hadn't anticipated.) The "tag-along," as we christened it, gave us an identity, even a community; we'd excitedly point out other parent-child bike combos en route.

So even after my sublet ended, and I stayed in hotel rooms and apartment swaps, I still kept the bike around and took them to school on it when weather permitted. We fell into a regular route across the park and then emerged at Fifth Avenue south of the Met, and trial and error taught me the least-travelled street was East 80th. We started to look forward to the regular sights as reassuring talismans: the "Doggie Gym" on First Avenue (right) became so popular we'd actually leave for school earlier so we could stop and watch through the windows.

But our most beloved marker along the route was a head. A lopped-off statue head, sitting idly next to some trash cans outside a brownstone just east of Madison Ave. on 80th street. We became so fond of it we would wave and yell "Hi, head!" We had no idea where it was from, or what it was doing there, but it was definitely one of those "only in New York" sights.

Of course, the girls grew up. My younger daughter moved from the front-seat to the tag-along, and my older daughter rode her own bike (see photo up top, at Christo's remarkable Gates exhibit).

The tag-along was not without its mishaps: in 2005, I was  trying to be safe by riding my daughter to school on a sidewalk, I was surprised by a car pulling out of a recessed garage (left). I stopped short, and the whole weight of the bike and a half and its two riders -- landed on my ankle, tearing a ligament.

I limped her the rest of the way to school and then straight to the orthopedists. It was the beginning of the end of the era.

Trying to keep the three of us together, I did briefly own a tandem bike that I tried to hook the tag-along to, but it was laughably unwieldy.

Eventually I passed the tag-along to a neighbor with an age-appropriate daughter. I've moved back and forth to LA a half-dozen times for work my kids are now in high school and college, and now if I am lucky enough to grab either for a bike ride it's on adult bikes.

But yesterday I got an email from the Ephemeral New York about the sculpture head that brought me back -- and made me wonder about its magic powers. It turns out the New York Times' architecture critic Chritopher Gray had explained its origin in 2004 -- right around when I was doing my school shleps.

The house at No. 52...was owned until 1998 by Jerry Hammer, a theatrical producer, who now lives in Beverly Hills, Calif., but left the statue when he sold the house. Mr. Hammer said that in the 1960’s he was riding in a limousine with the developer Zachary Fisher, who motioned to the old Ziegfeld Theater, at 54^th Street and the Avenue of the Americas, and said he was going to demolish it for a new office building.

Mr. Hammer said he pointed to a limestone head on the front of the building and asked Mr. Fisher for it as a joke. “Then,” he said, “about four months later, I hear noises outside, and it’s a truck with a crane, and a head, and they ask me where I want it.”

So the head came from the Joseph Urban facade of the old Ziegfeld theater -- built in 1927, financed by William Randolph Hearst, first home to the musical Showboat, later a movie theater and then a TV studio (Perry Como and the Emmys both broadcast from it.)

I think the woman is one of the two flanking the upper part.

So what's the magic power? All these years later, both my daughters are firmly ensconced in the theater, both at their schools and in their lives. Maybe that head was an augur.

The Aggravating Aggregatorsphere

"I'm sure you've seen this," someone emailed me, with a link to the story on a website called "The Daily" about Aaron Sorkin cleaning house on the show I'd worked on, HBO's The Newsroom.

Actually, I hadn't, nor had I ever heard of the website before. (Thankfully, I at least already knew the news, having been notified by email the previous week, because sometimes in this business, as with my last job working on Eliot Spitzer's show at CNN, you learn such news about yourself from the press.)

What troubled me, more than the public nature of my personal job situation, was the reporting -- which got cut and pasted and parroted endlessly over the next 24 hours in places from The Hollywood Reporter to Entertainment Weekly to New York magazine's Vulture column to the Huffington Post, The National Review (!) and way, way many other places.

It was inaccurate and lazy.  As it drifted through this aggregator foodchain, maybe one writer would add some opinionating to it, like Grantland, but none of it was based on any further reporting. Nobody has the budget to do anything any more but repeat, and the rush is to get it on your website fast before people start going to someone else's website instead.

Basically the information in these dozens, perhaps hundreds of stories, remained the same four bullet points:

• that only one writer was retained -- not true. (Three were.) 
• that her name is Corinne "Kinsbury." (it's Kingsbury). 
• citing a Sorkin quote in Vanity Fair (below), that all the writers do is "research" 
• and quoting an HBO spokesman that such turnover is "nothing out of the ordinary.”

The sum total of reporting, as far as I could tell, was one unnamed "source" who said he'd fired everyone but his ex-girlfriend. The Hollywood Reporter led with reporting that contradicted this -- yet still repeated it:

According to HBO, the Aaron Sorkin drama set behind the scenes of a cable news network is replacing about half of its writing staff, though one source close to the show tells The Hollywood Reporter that everyone on the show's writing staff except for Corinne Kinsbury has been let go.

Even Grantland, which decided to make a "point" about the firing, did so with a lot of hyperbolic extrapolation and presumption:

The real question is whether this was a par-for-the-course power move from a controlling showrunner or the first sign that the very noisy drumbeat of criticism... has reached Sorkin’s well-tanned ears. While it’s never a good thing to see anyone out of work, it’s the second scenario that’s preferable. Just like his unlucky in love male leads, Sorkin’s undeniable gifts are always at their best when paired with a tough-minded foil, someone who will stand up to the speechifying and push back against the predictable plots...

Corinne and ex Tate Donovan
at NYC Newsroom premiere

Anyone wanting to find out how to spell Corinne's last name need only have looked at IMDB, or even Google. They might have even had fun with the fact that she had a cameo in episode 5 as the stripper. Even better, they might have found out what she actually contributed to the series, which was a lot of the 20-something romantic plotlines. But instead it was enough reporting to just say "ex-girlfriend."

Anyone wanting the accurate number of writers who were cut -- or chose not to return -- could have found out with a well placed phone call or two. Anyone who really believed Sorkin employed eight writers to merely do "research" needs to really examine what that would mean. And anyone who thinks nobody in the room "stood up" to him doesn't have any concept of what the real, very hard and rewarding job of writing for Aaron is.

Writing for Sorkin -- and I have done some for all four of his shows -- means throwing 100 ideas at him that he will reject 99 of. That he will belittle and wrestle and often turn into something else. But he walks into the room every episode not knowing what he wants to write, and walks out with episodes finished.

We all worked really hard for him, beating out plots, scenes, historical scenarios, speeches, etc., for him to put in his genius machine. Yes, he writes the scripts.  And, unlike when he was up against network deadlines and 22 episode seasons, he even rewrote them, to notes from producer Scott Rudin, HBO, and yes, even the writers' room.

Also: why didn't anyone research HBO's statement? Was there this much turnover between seasons one and two of Sex and the City or Sopranos or Six Feet Under or The Wire? What about patterns in Sorkin's hiring?  The two seasons of Sports Night, the four he ran West Wing --  he never had the same writers' room twice. Why is this? 

There are a lot of potential answers, it's not my place to provide them here. But back when I was reporting for Rolling Stone, at least one reporter would have tried.  

Speaking of reporting, that huge April Vanity Fair spread on The Newsroom included this little parenthetical aside about Scott Rudin by writer James Kaplan: "(And, who, I should note, has optioned my 2010 Frank Sinatra biography for film.)" Were no other reporters available? It's the kind of blatant conflict of interest VF editor Graydon Carter would have flagged in his days at Spy. And if I were in Kaplan's shoes, I wouldn't have felt comfortable taking the gig. But that thinking makes me a dinosaur. 

What's scariest about the propagation of this particular simple-minded news story is that I actually know something about it, so I can see the holes. So it means there's a lot more out there I'm reading that is just as unvetted. In the internet-dominated era, how often are we digesting information that has been similarly turned into presumed knowledge and hardened into fact, almost impossible to unravel or correct?

That is one of the burning issues that helped inspire Aaron and all of us at The Newsroom to begin with. And it is clearly far from being settled. 
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Update, August 1, 2012: Deadline Hollywood just posted a story quoting Sorkin at the TCA's denying the facts of the firing story. Deadline gloated how wrong the original Daily story was -- but didn't do any reporting itself. A lot of what Sorkin claimed is also easily checkable.  I leave it to others to find out what's what. 

Moving (Part 1)

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.

All-Area Access

The recent brouhaha about the Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings and his warts-and-all reporting that led to a general's resignation got me thinking about the cost of access.

One of the coolest things about being a journalist was getting invited to media-only events like Paul McCartney performing songs from a new album, buying house seats for otherwise sold--out Springsteen shows, visiting movie sets, or getting backstage at concerts. But with them always came the queasy feeling that you were going to be "nice." Or at least nicer.

[The rainbow array of passes above is from the Live Earth concert in 2007, back when Al Gore was known for his environmental work, on which I helped write material for the TV broadcast. You can see how many levels of VIP there are in today's world.]

Of course there's never an explicit deal made for these perks, but

Apart but not apart

In recent days a lot of friends are experiencing the rupture of sending their kids off to camp. Four or eight weeks apart! I  of course miss my kids, but I learned to cope with long-dtstance parenting and supervisory gaps a long time ago, and while it's never perfect, I have learned that you can still be a good parent without having daily contact.

Branded

Last night in one of those self-destructive insomniac moments, I read a news item about a "hot" screenwriter who sold a baseball movie idea based on a news story, who already has four other projects going. Now more than ever, success begets success. Anyone else pitching the same idea would be deflected -- "Baseball movies don't sell" etc etc. The executives all want to be in business with this guy because others are already in business with him.

If you choose something everyone else has picked,