The blogosphere and the rest of the media is flooded with stories of how all kinds of people, on the right and left, were awakened, engaged, infuriated, befriended, inebriated, etc. by William F. Buckley, and since I never met the man, listened to the man, or read the man’s magazine until my in-laws just this last Christmas gave me a gift subscription, I’m feeling a little left out. Then I remembered, I did have an encounter with him… sort of. The following is a brief excerpt from my book… the subject is Gail Palmer, the faux-porn directress (that’s a long story, told in the book) and her strange, brief career as a media celebrity back in the late 70s:
All during that period, nobody ever asked whether or not this young, attractive pornographer actually was who she said she was, even as she was saying it on the Mike Douglas show, in a debate about pornography with John Davidson and William F. Buckley. Davidson admitted that he and his wife enjoyed the occasional erotic film, because, let’s face it, we’re animals and sex is part of our nature. Buckley responded by noting that the Nazi death camps were also “part of our nature,” and that as civilized human beings we had an obligation to rise above our natures. Gail just looked around and seemed happy to be there.
Whatever else you might say about WFB, the man never backed down from a chance to chat in front of a camera. As for his opinions — Nazi death camps = porn? — let us not debate them here (except to note, as I think we must in this day and age, that he was a creature of his time, and thus profoundly wrong, on the subject of gay rights) but it is something to note that everybody talking about him today, of whatever political stripe, praises him as a warm, generous human being. We all should strive for such a legacy.
In the future, everyone will be on YouTube. Specifically, all the odd videos taken of you will migrate to the site. Back in 1999 or so, a local band here in Chicago called OKGO was invited to appear on a public access cable show called Chic-A-Go-Go, in which local bands lip-synched their songs while pretending to play their instruments. OKGO said to hell with that, and choreographed a dance number. But who should pretend to play the instruments? The then-girlfriend of Damian Kulash, lead singer and guiding light of band, worked at our show, and Damian had become close to a lot of people at Chicago Public Radio. Thus, in this video, they are backed by the Chicago Public Radio All-Stars: me on bass, Gretchen Helfrich on lead guitar, Jerome McDonnell on keyboards, and yes, Ira Glass on drums. BTW, I can’t play the bass, so note my too-energetic attempts to fake it. OKGO has gone on to greater things, and much more interesting dance routines, but the seeds of their genius is here.
Much like somebody with a fear of heights constantly stares at tall buildings, in a kind of sick fascination, I am drawn to really vicious reviews, particularly of books and plays, which I myself have been known to write. Here’s a great one. For some reason, the phrase “grates his cheese” made me laugh. (A tip of the blog to anyone who gets the reference in the title of this post.)
My wife and I had the wisdom of only seeing the nominee for Best Picture that actually won. Let’s hear it for efficiency! Sure, we might have enjoyed, say, “There Will Be Blood,” but why see a picture if it’s not, officially, the Best?
But that’s not why I’m writing. The night we went to see “No Country for Old Men” last November we arrived at the massive cinderblock octoplex about half an hour early, so we decided to duck into another theater for a while. We had to choose a movie that we would never actually want to see from the beginning, because obviously we might ruin it for ourselves, so we chose “August Rush.” And we watched about nine minutes of it (for the two people who saw it, it was the sequence in which Robin Williams, trying to be creepy, discovers the musician prodigy) and I turned to Beth and I said, “This is the worst movie ever.” And she agreed, because “August Rush” had, deeply embedded in each frame, its own gestalt of badness. It was fractally bad.
This is a quality that only pertains to movies, I guess, because only movies combine so many different artistic forms… a fractally bad movie has to have bad cinematography, script, acting, music, makeup, production design… but more than that, an overarching Grand Theory of Badness, in which some kind of evil genius has conspired to make sure that not only are each element bad in and of themselves, but the totality must create its own kind of badness, which, in turn, seeps back into each frame.
There are many bad movies which reveal themselves as bad only at the end — say, “Unbreakable,” which had a “twist” ending so ludicrous that it kind of sloshed back and made the pretty impressive proceedings before it instantly bad, like a row of counters in a game of Othello turning over. And there are countless bad movies that are bad because of one horrific flaw… such as Sofia Coppola’s performance in “Godfather Part III.” But in a fractally bad movie, every element is seemingly chosen for its absolute badness. The ur-text of this school of criticism, is of course, “Showgirls,” the only movie I can think of in which even the costumes were awful. “Alexander the Great,” was another… from the computer generated armies to Colin Farrell’s wig. Can you suggest any?
(And try to resist listing the classic, horrible, low budget disasters, like “Manos: Hands of Fate.” There has to a chance it could have been good to begin with.)
UPDATE: In response to some comments:
First, thanks for the corrections as to how to spell Mandelbrot and also about the correct title for “Alexander.”
There seems to be some dissent as to the question that “Unbreakable” is, in fact, a bad movie. To which I say: You’ve got to be freaking kidding me. It turns out that he’s really a superhero? Because, as Samuel Jackson intones ponderously toward the end, since comic books are so appealing they have to, you know, be true? Eventually? Kind of? Come off it. Superheroes were invented by skinny Jews in New York City; see The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay. Look, dawgs, I love me some comic books. But combining superheroes with M. Night’s insane level of pretension was like serving a corn dog on fine china.
I’m going back to Aspen, Colorado next weekend, to do a solo appearance at the Wheeler Opera House on Friday, February 29th. I’ll be talking about the history of Wait Wait, telling some stories from the past ten years, and reading from my book. Information here. See you there, I hope.
Like a lot of people interested in politics — okay, like everyone — I’m spending a lot of time today parsing the John McCain — lobbyist story. I’m particularly looking at it through the lens of the rhetorical analysis that I present in the “Lying” chapter of my book. Not to say that McCain is lying — I have no idea what’s true or isn’t. But it’s interesting to analyze his press conference this morning as a public performance.
For example, in the book, I point out how President Clinton, when first confronted with the Monica Lewinsky allegation, kept trying to move the topic from “did I have sex with her” (which of course, he did) to “Did I ask her to lie about it?” which, he always maintained, he never did. (As I point out in the book, there’s some evidence he actually did, but if so, it was never proved.) This is natural — any good general wants to pick the best ground for a fight.
So, I was interested in the first statements from the McCain campaign and then from McCain himself this morning — it was all about whether or not he’d betrayed the public trust, presumably by using his office to benefit the lobbyist. Not whether or not he’d canoodled with the woman in question. That, to me, was a strong indication of where, at least, they wanted to have this argument. However, this morning, McCain gave a very clear, if extremely brief, denial of the “intimacy” allegation… here it is, in its entirety: “No.”
Will that go down in history along with Clinton’s “I didn’t have sex with that woman?” It seems, at the very least, calculated to be more forgettable if proven untrue. A friend who works in Washington press circles tells me that the big problem with adultery stories is that newspaper standards call for someone with first hand knowledge of the affair to go on record. Which means that one of the two (or more!) parties has to confess, and that almost never happens. In fact, one could argue that Clinton’s greatest failing was not his flings, but the people he chose to have them with… unreliable, flighty, prone to talk about it. McCain, like the thousands of experienced pols who’ve come and gone before him, would never have made that error, so we may never know what happened.
A caveat — I like McCain. He was one of our first “big time” guests, early in the show’s history, and was extremely gracious and friendly, both then and later when I got a chance to meet him in person. But this story is red meat for a show like ours, and we’ll do our best with it. Tune in this weekend to see what we came up with…
For reasons that must remain obscure for now, I asked the NPR Reference Library to dig up Tom Junod’s famous 1998 Esquire profile of Mr. Rogers. It’s a remarkable portrait, and a terrific piece of magazine journalism… it walks right up to the line of being about its own style, rather than its subject, but never crosses it. I wish I could post the whole thing here, but since Esquire hasn’t posted it online I can’t either. However, a moving excerpt (one of many, it’s hard to choose) after the gap.
This is not the sort of thing I usually blog about, as it would seem to be far outside my area of expertise (along with most topics of importance.) But as all the papers are reporting, Fidel Castro is stepping down from power, ten months shy of the fiftieth anniversary of the day he seized it, December 31st, 1958. And since one thing we know about El Caballo is that he really, really loves to be in charge, one can bet he’s got no choice: be sure all the papers are preparing the actual obituaries, in addition to today’s political versions.
However: in the course of researching and writing this movie (or, technically, the first draft thereof) I learned a lot about Fidel, much of it that was surprising to me at the time. For example: I had thought that Fidel always had been a communist revolutionary, and that the exiles who so bitterly opposed him were all associated with, and benefited from, the Batista kleptocracy that he overthrew. Not true. Fulgencio Batista, at the time he fell, had very few supporters outside his circle of cronies — as a CIA agent said in my original script, the problem wasn’t that he was a dictator, it was that he was so bad at it.
Fidel, on the other hand, was a popular hero, a young angel of democracy, beloved in Cuba and (this was more surprising to me) in the United States. During his years fighting his guerrilla war in the Sierra Maestra mountains, he commanded support from both the American press and public, and from the burgeoning Cuban middle class, and even civic minded members of the upper class and military. He promised to restore the democratically elected President, who had been overthrown by Batista. He promised elections, freedom, peace, prosperity, in essence, to allow Cuba to finally join the First World, as, perhaps more than any other Latin American nation at the time, it was ready to do.
But as is now part of the legend, he betrayed each and every one of those promises. Within the first year of the New Cuba, he declared himself a Communist, and said he had always been one. (Whether or not that’s true has been a subject of some historical debate.) He nationalized industries, seized private property, executed people without trial, and turned on any of his former supporters who objected, imprisoning many and seizing their property and businesses for the state. The core of the anti-Castro exile community came over in the great emigration from the island beginning in 1960, and was comprised, in many cases, by those who knew Castro, who had supported him, supplied him with money and weapons, and had been personally and permanently betrayed.
So, despite his best efforts, Castro will never rise into the top ranks of evil dictators: he never killed or imprisoned as many as Stalin or Hitler, and in terms of pure violent repression he was rivaled even by other Latin American dictators, many of whom got a pass from our own government because they were, at least, anti-Communist. But without question, his betrayal of his friends, his country, and his people is the most heartbreaking. He took a proud people, who trusted him to make them free at last, and instead enslaved them.
I wish some of this had gotten into that movie. But it did have some damned good dancing, didn’t it?
It turns out there’s an organization called AMPPR (Association of Music Personnel in Public Radio) and they’re having a convention this month. I was asked to contribute some thoughts about my techniques for interviewing musicians… I didn’t realize I had any, but decided to think about it anyway. Here’s what I sent in.
I don’t think of myself as an interviewer of musicians… but I do interviews (in the context of our “Not My Job” game) and thanks to our excellent bookers, we’ve had a good selection of musicians on the show, especially in the last two years or so. We’ve talked with Branford Marsalis, Nancy Griffith, Yo-Yo Ma, Melissa Etheridge, John Mellancamp, Herbie Hancock, Corky Siegel, John Pizzarelli, and of course, Weird Al Yankovic. If I have any particular advantages as I’ve talked to these and other artists, they would be these:
1)I’m almost entirely ignorant of music. I have a tin ear, and no particular expertise beyond that of a casual fan. Which means that I never start a question with the phrase, “So, on your fourth album, you replaced your long-time keyboardist with a well-known session player…” While interesting to the musician, and perhaps flattering as well (which I think may be the point of asking a question like that), this kind of granular inquiry is alienating to the listener who, statistics indicate, is as uninformed as I am.
2)I was once a playwright, meaning that I, too, once sat in a room, trying to come up with something new, and then had to go sell what I created to a perhaps unwilling public. While there are a lot of differences between music and theater, particularly commercially, that at least gives me a starting place with musicians. How do they decide what to do next? How sensitive are they to critical response? How much of a responsibility do they feel to their audience, versus to their own creative impulse? How much pressure to they put on themselves to do something new? How do they deal with the ever-present tension between business and art?
3)I host a comedy show. Nobody expects us to conduct a “serious” interview, so we don’t have to… we can ask goofy questions in the hope of getting an equally goofy response. Thus, for example, instead of asking Melissa Etheridge about the politics of global warming, I can ask her how hard it was to find a rhyme for the phrase “Inconvenient Truth.” Most times, the musician not only responds in kind, but takes an audible pleasure in being allowed to be silly, or even provocative, and says things he or she wouldn’t say in more serious interviews. For example, we asked a series of musical guests their opinion on what is the sexiest instrument. Unsurprisingly, Weird Al thought it was the accordion.
Gawker, for reasons known only to them, excavates a bit of Conan O’Brian’s past and digs up me with it. It’s all true — including the tackle, the only time I’ve ever done that in my life — and it’s also true that I remain a little annoyed by how Conan and the Lampoon stole our thunder. They, in essence, pranked a prank… I think the prank that Jess and I thought up was more subtle than theirs. I guess that’s why Jess is at the Wall Street Journal, I’m at NPR, and Conan is a multi-millionaire. (Thanks to Reed for sending me the link.)
