HOW "AWAY" IS SLEEPAWAY CAMP?

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.

Good Swimming/Bad Handwriting

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

A Death in the Musical Family

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.

Clear Eyes. Full Hearts. Can't Win?

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.

Malick & Me

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

Drumming Thomases

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.

Too Big To Talk

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.