Here’s a link to my latest feature in Vanity Fair. The story is called “Searching for Robert Johnson” and it’s about a New York City guitar salesman named Zeke Schein,who found and purchased a photo on eBay—see the thumbnail on the left—that, he is convinced, depicts the much-mythologized blues legend and guitar virtuoso who wrote “Cross Road Blues”, “I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom” and “Sweet Home Chicago”. Only two known photos of Johnson have ever been seen by the public, and Zeke’s attempts to determine whether he had found a third proved to be quite a tale. Click here to read it.
]]>Following last night’s screening of Gomorra, an invitation-only crowd headed to Osteria del Circo for dinner and a brief question-and-answer session with the filmmakers that was moderated by writers Gay Talese and Nick Pileggi. Among the topics of discussion was a scene near the end of movie, in which a high-end dressmaker, who has learned the hard way that his employer is mobbed up, watches television footage of the actress Scarlett Johannsson arriving at a premiere in an elegant gown identical to one he has been involved in manufacturing. At the post-screening discussion, the film’s director Matteo Garrone explained that in Roberto Saviano’s book, Gomorrah, from which the film was adapted, there is a similar scene depicting the actress Angelina Jolie and a dress at the Oscars. But, Garrone explained, “we could not get the rights” to archive footage of Jolie at the Academy Awards. Instead, the director added, “we got the rights of Scarlett Johansson in Venice,” presumably at the 2006 film festival there where the actress wore a vintage gown to the premiere of The Black Dahlia that appears to match the one depicted in Gomorra. Garrone explained that Johansson’s gown was then copied and reproduced in various stages of construction for use in his film. Added Garrone, “I don’t know if Scarlett Johansson knows she is in the movie.”
]]>If you have any connection to Italy, be it familial, spiritual or even culinary in nature, then there’s a movie you should see this fall. It’s called, Gomorra and if, like me, your notions of Italy are largely romantic, then prepare to have your eyes opened and your pulse quickened. Directed by Matteo Garrone, Gomorra is the film adaptation of Gomorrah, a book by investigative reporter Roberto Saviano that I somehow missed when it was published in the U.S. last year. According to The New York Times initially sold an “astonishing 600,000 copies” in Italy—almost 2 million copies worldwide since then—and resulted in its author going into hiding with 24-hour police protection because it angered some of the people depicted within its pages.
The subject of both Saviano’s book and Garrone’s film is the Camorra, the Neapolitan mafia, a violent, vampiric presence that is sucking the life out of the Italian region of Campania, of which Naples is the capital, and, increasingly, exerting its corruptive influence on a global level. According to the Times, since 1979, the Camorra has killed more people than the Sicilian mafia and the Irish Republican Army, and its tentacles extend to Campania’s ports, the fashion industry, drugs and industrial waste disposal, the last of which has poisoned the land and led to an increase in cancer in the region.
I haven’t read Saviano’s book (though I certainly plan to), but judging from the reviews, it’s a powerful literary work, and the kind of sprawling story that’s difficult to turn into a compelling film. But Garrone has done a masterful job. Make no mistake, Gomorra—like the book’s title, a play on Camorra—is gritty, bleak and disturbing, and, unlike so many American mob movies, devoid of romance, but, boy, it gets under your skin. (In Italy, more than 2 million moviegoers have seen it, and not only did the film win Grand Prize at Cannes this year, it will represent its mother country in the foreign film category at the Oscars next year.) At the screening I attended, Martin Scorsese introduced the film, and he talked about how, without any exposition or traditional narrative, Garrone immerses the moviegoer in a strange, violent world where it’s impossible to get your bearings.
The central setting of Gomorra is a drab dystopian neighborhood consisting of multi-level cookie cutter apartment complexes, shadowy stairwells and confusing concrete byways that could be found anywhere. “You don’t know what country you’re in; you don’t know what city. You don’t know what street it is. You never know that,” Scorsese explained. “You’re just dropped onto another planet, and you’re on your own.”
]]>Like the residents of that Neapolitan neighborhood—Garrone interweaves the stories of a handful of its residents—the moviegoer is never sure who’s to be trusted and who’s to be feared; who’s in power and who’s a target. The bromides of honor and loyalty that comprise the underpinnings of so many American mafia movies are as paper-thin as the Euros that someone always seems to be counting. And violence is not only omnipresent, it’s a rite of passage. One of the film’s most unforgettable scenes involves a string of adolescent boys waiting their turns to don a homemade bullet-proof vest and brave a bullet to the chest. Upon reviving, one boy is told that now, he is “a man.” What would the Catholic Church say about this terrifying method of confirmation?
For Scorsese, that rare American filmmaker who has depicted organized crime with gut-wrenching realism, “one of the great strengths” of Gomorra “is that there is no exit” to the world Garrone depicts on film and no end. “You sense that the only way out for the people in the film is going to be bad,” he told the crowd, but that, “no matter what happens to them on that screen, you know one thing: the world you are experiencing in this picture will continue to exist.” And spread. A crawl at the end of Gomorra asserts that the Camorra has invested money in the construction of the Freedom Tower on the former site of the World Trade Center in Manhattan. And after watching the film’s scenes of illegal industrial waste dumping, I’ve got to wonder if any food products grown in that toxic earth have been imported here.
The makers of Gomorra, Scorsese said, brought “a ferocity of commitment” to the film that he called “an indictment not only of Italy, but, really, of the modern world.” And seeing Gomorra, as I did, on day that the stock market had plummeted due to our nation’s financial crisis—a crisis caused largely by modern financial contracts known as derivatives—it was hard to disagree.
]]>This past summer, I wrote a profile of comic Chris Elliott that Rolling Stone posted on its website in September in conjunction with the magazine’s comedy issue. I got a quite a bit of feedback on the piece—Elliott’s fans are an avid, loyal lot—some of it expressing frustration that I had not written about two comedy specials Chris had done for Cinemax in the late 1980s: Action Family and F.D.R.: A One-Man Show. The thing is, I had intended to include them in the story, until I realized I’d already written 5,000 words—twice as much as my editor had wanted—and decided not to tempt fate any further. But now that I have my own blog, in which I can gas on about anything —Hey Tina Brown, I’m not wearing any pants!—I figure this is a good place to weigh in on those specials since they rank as some of Elliott’s best work.
If you’re not familiar with Action Family or F.D.R.: A One-Man Show and you don’t know a reputable dealer of Elliott bootlegs, then read past the jump where I’ve aggregated the YouTube links. The bad news is you have the watch them in 10-minute increments. The good news is, they’re really funny.
]]>In my Rolling Stone story, I observed that Elliott was particularly brilliant at exploding the cliches and conventions that television audiences have been conditioned to accept as funny or dramatic, and the Cinemax specials do exactly that. In Action Family, Elliott and his co-writers, Matt Wickline (his first writing partner at Late Night with David Letterman) and Sandy Frank, grafted well-worn 70s sitcoms gags—such as the inane mealtime chatter from The Brady Bunch and the flushing-toilet sound from All in the Family—to the hackneyed, macho elements of 70s crime dramas (think Mannix and The Streets of San Francisco) then sutured in a kitchen’s sink worth of nods to British sitcoms, the end credits of Star Trek and that early hallmark of pay cable: arbitrary nudity. The resulting half hour is almost as unsettling as it is funny because Elliott and his collaborators make you realize that so much of television is just Pavlovian conditioning. Fortunately, Action Family—and most of Elliott’s comedy, for that matter—works as de-programming programming. (In Action Family even the laugh track is used as a weapon against complacency.) Once you see his stuff, you won’t be so gullible the next time you watch TV.
But enough with the smarty-pants stuff. The main reason for loving Action Family is it’s damn funny. Elliott plays a plaid-suited private dick—never was the term more appropriate—with a dark mop of Dave Starsky hair and what looks like a .357 Magnum in his shoulder holster. But, at home, as the cliche´ goes, he’s a different man. The noirish jazz soundtrack gives way to a laugh track, the loud jacket gets traded in for an even louder sweater, the hot-shit hair turns out to be a wig, and Elliott morphs from flinty hard-ass to schmaltzy head of a rather perverse family unit: the actress portraying his wife looks old enough to be his mother; his college-age daughter sits down at the dinner table completely naked; and his two youngest children have quite a bit of bloodlust coursing through their tiny frames. (“Hey Dad, let’s kill him!” his younger daughter says of her old sister’s boyfriend at one point.)
Action Family has a lot of great moments in it. David Letterman puts in a short-but-sharp cameo that begins with him calling out, “Hey! Jerk!” to Elliott as they sit in their respective cars at a red light. Elliott’s father, Bob Elliott (of Bob & Ray) makes an appearance, too, as a hotdog vendor who ends up brawling with his son. (Actually, there’s no attempt made to hide the skull-cap wearing stunt man who doubles for the elder Elliott in the scuffle scenes.) And at the show’s end, Chris does a weirdly impeccable impersonation of David Cassidy as the Action Family makes like the Partridge Family and lip-syncs to “Somebody Wants to Love You.”
One thing that I’ve long wondered about Action Family is whether it played a role in inspiring Spike Jonze’s great 1994 video for The Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage”, which also sends up 70s crime dramas. Stylistically, the two productions are quite different, but there are enough similarities—just look at the hairpieces—to suggest a connection. (For the sake of comparison, I’ve placed a link to the video at the very bottom of this post.)
Speaking of connections, if you’ve followed Elliott’s work closely, you’ve probably noticed that he seems to have a real affinity for making fun of Roosevelts. His depiction of Teddy Roosevelt as the flatulent (“Wee-hoo!”) mayor of New York in his 2005 novel, The Shroud of the Thwacker was hilarious, as was his own portrayal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the second Cinemax special, FDR: A One Man Show. When I interviewed Elliott, he explained to me that he was actually “doing Robert Vaughn as Roosevelt,” which, he said, not too many people got. (Vaughn, perhaps best known as the star of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. played a number of dead presidents in his day, including F.D.R.) I know I didn’t get it until Elliott told me, but I still find FDR: A One Man Showlaugh-until-you-cry funny because of the flagrant way in which it fucks with our tendency to blindly accept that movies and plays about historical figures are historically accurate. Nothing could be further from the truth with Elliott’s portrayal of F.D.R., which begins, preposterously and hilariously, with an anachronistic montage of audio and video that includes Martin Sheen’s “Shit, I’m still only in Saigon” line from Apocalypse, Now and Survivor’s Rocky III theme “Eye of the Tiger.” And it only gets sillier from there. My favorite moment is when Elliott, who didn’t even bother to shave for the part, broaches the subject of homely Eleanor Roosevelt. “Eleanor was not my first choice for a wife. Would she be yours?” he asks the crowd with a chuckle, before adding: “No, actually, I was interested in her sister What is the lingo of today? ‘A real piece?’ Well, that’s what Trudy was, a real piece of ass.”
From what I can tell, these two Cinemax specials were once available together on a single VHS videotape, but they’ve never been issued commercially on DVD. The funny thing is, when I interviewed Elliott this past summer, he told me that he probably could arrange to have these specials reissued in a digital format, but didn’t think there’d be any interest. As I pointed out in my Rolling Stone story, Elliott doesn’t like to dwell in or on the past, and I respect that about him. But I don’t think I’m alone in hoping that he’ll reconsider re-releasing these two specials, or at least providing a digital copy to Netflix.
]]>The police presence at my local subway stop was impossible to ignore this morning. The folding table that the NYPD occasionally sets up to search through backpacks was placed just to the right of the turnstiles, so that even if you and your bag weren’t singled out, the cops could eyeball you as you swiped your Metrocard. There was also a muted quality to the city today, as if the strivers and overachievers had turned down the volume on their ambition out of respect for the 2,751 who died in the Sept. 11, 2001 World Trade Center attacks.
But there’s no question that most New Yorkers have pushed past the fear and the tension that came with taking the subway or an elevator to the high floor of a skyscraper. Our delusions of invincibility, which evaporated in the heat and the horror of seven years ago, have returned (just in time, it seems, to get us through a scary financial downturn.) The other day my wife arrived home from work to tell me that shortly after she walked into the car of a downtown express train on the A,C,E line at 34th Street, the conductor announced via loudspeaker that the train was being held in the station due to an “unattended’ bag.” Eerily, after hearing this, my wife noticed that a rather large and full-looking black messenger bag lay unattended on the floor at the other end of her car. She exited the train and watched as a number of people did the same, only to move to an adjacent car, presumably deciding that they would rather risk death than take the local.
]]>Spotting a transit worker on the platform, my wife informed him of bag’s location. “Tell him,” he replied, jerking a thumb at one of the express train’s conductor who was running toward them. “I know,” the conductor told the Mrs. after she repeated her story, and then he jumped back on the train and announced, again via loudspeaker, that it was being put back into service. And so, late for an appointment, my wife inexplicably jumped back onto the car that contained the unattended bag, which was still very much unattended. On the car with her, she told me, were approximately 15 people, some of whom had never gotten off the train while it was being held in the station. When my wife, who is a fashion designer, first got on the train, she noticed the woman with the handheld because she was wearing a beautiful chiffon top with puffy sleeves and sateen shorts. (“It was sophisticated and hot—an Yves St. Laurent flashback from the 70s,” the Mrs. told me when describing the outfit. That is how she talks, in an Australian accent, no less.) And, according to my wife, not only did the hottie with the handheld remain on the train while it was held in the station, she didn’t notice the still-unattended bag until the train had started moving again and a heavyset woman sitting next to the Mrs. began talking about it. “Whatever happened to ‘If You See Something, Say Something’?”, wondered the heavyset woman.
“I did say something,” my wife replied.
“Why didn’t I get off?” said the woman in the chiffon top suddenly sounding alarmed.
“Why are we still on here?” said the heavyset woman.
Answered my wife: “I don’t know
]]>In the early days of Manhattan Cable—now Time Warner—a man who called himself Ugly George could be found on the system’s Channel J, which was a public-access channel devoted to sexual content: porno film loops, escort service ads and The Robin Byrd show. George, whose given surname is Urban, was a chunky, homely guy who roamed the city dressed in a silver Lost in Space-style jumpsuit and shouldering a portable video-recorder backpack to which a handheld camera was connected. Upon encountering a busty and/or attractive woman, George would attempt to coax her out of her clothes and videotape her for broadcast on his Channel J show. Despite having a face for radio, as they used to say in the pre-Sirius days, and a body that wouldn’t be out of place on The Biggest Loser, Ugly George had a pretty impressive rate of success with getting women out of their clothes. And though, personally speaking, five minutes of George’s work was enough viewing for a lifetime, I always admired his originality and his moxie. It’s one thing to roam around the city asking women to take off their shirts for your camera, to do it while wearing a silver space suit and backpack that looked like a jerry-rigged version of something that the Apollo astronauts wore when they walked the moon—well, that took real balls. And for me, George embodied the unreconstructed, in-your-face New York City spirit that drew me to this city in the first place.
My last conversation with Ugly George was in 1998, when I interviewed him for my Transom column in The New York Observer about a website, he was starting up. The fact that George was talking to me while pumping nickels into a pay phone didn’t exactly instill me with confidence that his venture would succeed, but I found it heartening that George was attempting to adapt to the times, even if the porn that was on the Internet even then made George’s stuff look like outtakes from The Benny Hill Show.
]]>Well, strangely enough, the other day, I was walking into the Barnes & Noble book store on West 66th Street and there standing on Columbus Avenue with his video rig on his back was Ugly George. He wasn’t wearing silver—earth tones were what I remember, but he looked healthy and even serene, not like a guy who’d been subsisting on the media fringe for the last two or three decades. Even stranger, not long before this encounter, I’d received a phone call from someone looking to track down Ugly George who had read my Observer piece on the web and wanted to know if I had a contact number. I didn’t, and so when I saw George outside the Barnes & Noble, I attempted to strike up a conversation. I was genuinely interested in seeing how he’d been faring in the digital age. But, for whatever reasons, George was not interested in talking to me. He completely ignored me—he was actually pretty brilliant at it—and despite several attempts to connect with him, I gave up. Perhaps I should have dropped my trousers and waggled my ass for him, but then Barnes & Noble probably would have terminated my member’s discount card. I’ve since gone on the Net to find that George does have a website, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to determine if it’s active without giving him my credit-card number. But, hey George, if you’re out there and you read this, e-mail me. I’d love to catch up.
]]>I’ve been thinking a lot about the increasingly ephemeral/unstable nature of celebrity. That’s not a new concept, clearly, but what if that instability could be expressed in terms of the baseline of digital technology: binary code? Which brings me to my rather unscientific theory: the proliferation of celebrity media has reduced the many gradations of fame to just two: you’re either a 1 or a 0; relevant or irrelevant. Being a 0 doesn’t mean that you’ve been forgotten, just that, at the moment the measurement—or judgment—is made, you hold no value for the celebrity media machine. And that means that the qualitative judgments that you or I may make regarding an actor or a singer/songwriter, no longer apply.
Daniel Day-Lewis may be the finest actor of our generation, but, right now, almost a year after the release of There Will Be Blood, he qualifies as a 0 on the binary scale of celebrity because his name is not attached to any projects currently being flogged by the celebrity press. (Day-Lewis’ reluctance to do interviews really has nothing to do with it.) Paris Hilton was a 1 for a long time because she made a porn movie and dated a couple of Greek shipping heirs. A few weeks ago, she was a 1 because of her response to John McCain’s Obama attack ad. But, shortly before this little PR moment, she had been a zero for a long time.
So, here’s the most controversial part of my theory: 1 = 1. In other words, if, at the same time that Daniel Day-Lewis’s next movie is released, news breaks that Paris Hilton was involved in a threesome with John Edwards and Rielle Hunter that was captured by Hunter’s video camera, then all four will be 1’s again, even though, on so many levels, there’s simply no comparison.
]]>My good friend the Dylan freak often quotes these lyrics—from “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”— when he gets tired of hearing me bitch about how things aren’t the way they used to be. And even though I’ve always been a Springsteen-over-Dylan kind of guy, I’ve grown to love those lines. They work as both a kind of prayer against self-pity, and one of those little mantras I keep repeating to myself right before I do something potentially foolish or fatal—like start a blog. As I sit laboring over this first post—beginning has always been the hardest part for me—I have very little idea where I’m going to take this. I’m not even sure I’m cut out for blogging. For me, the Devil, and maybe God, too, are in the details, and details are the first things that get cut when brevity is the order of the day. I also fear that I’m just too old-school in terms of my journalistic upbringing and mindset to be able to make this thing fly—that my attempts at blogging will be about as appealing as a bald, paunchy guy in a t-shirt and cargo pants trying to rock out among the lithe, long-haired and barely clothed beauties at a Vampire Weekend concert. And yet, I can’t help but think that I spent four years working for one of the original blogs of the pre-Internet variety, the gossip column Page Six, where I learned how to combine reporting with perspective in 20 lines or less. I was good at it then. Let’s see what happens now. Time to be born.
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