My son posed the above question to me recently, wondering why the most African-American-identified sport in the U.S. doesn’t have one single transformative historical figure the way baseball has Robinson. By a stroke of good fortune, GQ has just re-posted in its archives an article I wrote in 2001 addressing this very question.

The first men, plural, to break the color barrier in the NBA were a low-key group, in part because the NBA was still a low-key league, barely on its feet, when integration happened in 1950. Also, the integration of the NBA was less momentous than baseball’s because blacks and whites had already played basketball with and against one another at the college level. I’ll never forget how Earl Lloyd, the first black man to log minutes in an NBA game, framed this for me: “Most of the people who played baseball at that time were from below the Mason-Dixon Line, and most of ’em never seen a college. I mean, you got some guys from down south—hell, their first pair of shoes were baseball shoes! But my teammates were very intelligent, man.”

Nevertheless, for the NBA’s black pioneers, there was still struggle, tension, and the constant potential for slights and humiliations. Not always the stuff of happy reading, but I’m at least happy that, for once, I can answer one of my son’s questions with more than the usual distracted “Uh, we’ll look it up.”

May 14, 2012  Link  General Posts  

A Tour with Photographs by the Docent, Mr. Kamp’s Younger Brother, David

In 1981, Ted Kamp left central New Jersey for the wider world, unaware at the time that he was a curator. He was simply a young man beginning the journey into adulthood, which would take him first to the campus of Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY—its non-coeducational past still sufficiently recent for his father’s more paleolithic friends to remark with lewd grins, “Isn’t that a girlie school?”—and then to Chicago, and then to the greater Los Angeles area, where he resides today.

What Ted Kamp did not yet know was that his mother was possessed of a sufficiently strong sentimental streak that she would leave his oblong attic bedroom more or less unchanged in terms of décor as the years, and then the decades, flew by. Some furniture would be shuffled and rearranged, some closet contents would be hauled off, but the walls—ah, those goldenrod walls would remain exactly as they were left in 1981, which is to say, as they had remained for the better part of the 1970s, since Ted Kamp seldom edited, “redid,” or subtracted from his wall décor; rather, ke kept making incremental additions to his thumbtacked collage of American sports and cultural ephemera. By dint of this cumulative approach to decorating, and his mother’s subsequent willful resistance to making over his room, even after he no longer occupied it, Ted Kamp created an Inadvertent Museum of the Seventies. Come have a look.

Fig. 1


The oldest piece in the collection is most likely the NEW YORK KNICKS WORLD CHAMPIONS poster (Fig. 1). It gives every indication of dating from 1970, the first of the Knicks’ two championship years in the seventies, featuring as it does not only the stalwarts Willis Reed (No. 19), Walt Frazier (No. 10), Bill Bradley (No. 24), Dave DeBusschere (No. 22), and Dick Barnett (No. 12), but also Cazzie Russell (No. 33), who was swapped for Jerry Lucas of the San Francisco Warriors at the end of the ’70-’71 season, and Mike Riordan (No. 6) and Dave Stallworth (No. 9), who, together, were sent later that same year to the Baltimore Bullets in return for the great (and conspicuously absent from this poster) Earl Monroe, a cornerstone of the Knicks’ 1973 championship team.

Your docent’s efforts to date this poster were initially thrown off by the presence of Phil Jackson (No. 18, the “1” on his uniform obscured in the photo). Jackson, though a Knick since being drafted out of the University of North Dakota in 1967, missed the entire 1969-70 season as he recuperated from spinal-fusion surgery. Yet he is shown in game action, reaching for a rebound. This is what crossed up your docent, who vividly remembers Jackson playing a crucial if graceless and hirsute reserve role on the ’73 championship squad.*

The suspicions of ’73 provenance were compounded by the fact that Ted Kamp did not ascend to his attic lair until some point in the mid-seventies. It is the hoariest of exercises to trot out a Brady Bunch reference when discussing things seventies-related, but it is nevertheless apt to note that it was on March 23, 1973—mere weeks before the Knicks clinched their second title—that ABC aired “A Room at the Top,” the Brady Bunch episode in which Greg Brady claimed the attic as his own baroquely decorated, single-occupancy bedroom. Precisely when Ted Kamp moved to his new custom-modified attic bedroom is lost to the ages, but it was certainly some time after “A Room at the Top” had aired, and it is not a stretch to imagine that Ted Kamp and his parents were at least partly inspired by the episode to imagine that their modest three-bedroom home’s large attic, if tidied up and retrofitted with electric baseboard heaters and nautically-themed curtains, would be a better place for Ted Kamp to spend his time than the small second-floor room he had shared with his older sister, by then pubescent and very irritable, since 1966.

One can only conclude that the makers of the NEW YORK KNICKS WORLD CHAMPIONS poster generously chose to include Jackson despite his inactive status during the ’69-’70 season, and that the poster sat idly, rolled up somewhere, until Ted Kamp’s attic room and future Inadvertent Museum of the Seventies came to be.

* It’s hard to articulate, given his silken Zenmaster demeanor now, how awkward, shaggy, and perspiratory Jackson’s style of play was: all elbows and flashes of armpit hair, every move to screen his man maximally effortful, every joule of energy expended.

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April 28, 2012  Link  General Posts  

The WNEW on-air staff circa 1977, with Pete Fornatale second from left.

For a disc jockey, Pete Fornatale had a nerdy voice. But it was soothingly nerdy—imagine the friendly, reedy bleat of Ned Flanders of The Simpsons, only tamped down by Jackson Browne instead of hopped-up on Gospel.

Fornatale, who passed away on Thursday at the age of 66, was the beau idéal of the FM D.J., and I was lucky, in my youth, to happen upon him in his 1970s heyday at the New York station WNEW. In 1977, I was a pre-teen growing wary of the Top 40 AM station that I listened to regularly, WABC: the rote playlists, the noisy commercials, and the unctuous baritones that all their D.J.’s seemed to have, the aural equivalent of pompadours and bad dye jobs. What broke my faith in WABC for good was a family car ride on August 16 of that year, when we heard the station jock on duty announce, in the same brassy, hustling tones with which he’d earlier introduced Leo Sayer’s “You Make Me Feel Like Dancing,” “Elvis Presley diiiiiiiied today!” Good god, did these men not have souls?

My older siblings were already listening to WNEW, where Fornatale had worked since 1969, and I followed them there. WNEW had what would prove, in retrospect, to be an all-star stable of free-form FM pioneers, among them Scott Muni, Vin Scelsa, Alison Steele, and Dennis Elsas, but Fornatale was the one who spoke to me, literally and spiritually. That voice, which to my AM-trained juvenile ears sounded so wrong for radio, made him seem like an underdog, a dork among the cool kids, which suited my own self-perception. And the eclecticism of his shows was liberating. It wasn’t hip to like the Beach Boys at that time, but I loved them and Pete played them, and he was unafraid to intermarble the strange, twitchy new music of the nascent New Wave (e.g., the B-52s’ “Rock Lobster” and Talking Heads’ “Pulled Up”) with the denimy, singer-songwriterly sounds of Browne, James Taylor, and Joni Mitchell.

My brother was on WNEW’s mailing list and late in ’77 received a giant wall poster (above) featuring all of the station’s D.J.’s peering through the windows of an old train car, its exterior graffitied (suitably for the period) with the slogan BUILT ON SOLID ROCK. It was gratifying to discover that Fornatale looked exactly as I expected him to: skinny, bespectacled, and bearded—your kindly adjunct professor of rock studies.

In the 1980s, I fell out of love with radio, and so, it seems, did Fornatale, who felt increasingly marginalized by formatting strictures and the rise of shock-talk. But the streaming-and-podcast era brought me back into the fold, with one station in particular, WFUV-FM, which broadcasts from the campus of Fordham University in the Bronx, enchanting me with its remarkably vintage-WNEW-like spirit. How apt, then, that this station turned out to be not only the very place where Fornatale got his start as a college sophomore in 1964, but also the place where he finally found a proper home again in his later years. (Scelsa and Elsas have also found safe haven at FUV.) Fornatale hosted a Saturday program called “Mixed Bag,” each week devoted to a specific theme; as recently as two weeks ago he was on the air, commemorating the centennial of the Titanic’s sinking with a characteristically all-over-the-place playlist.

The big WNEW poster still hangs upon a wall of my brother’s old bedroom, which my septuagenarian mother has never bothered to redecorate, rendering it an unwitting shrine to the FM era. Pete and his colleagues smile out at a poster on the opposite wall of the Willis Reed-era Knicks, and a few feet away from a tacked-up still of James and Carly from the No Nukes concert film, and near a novelty bumper sticker that reads JESUS SAVES—BUT MOSES INVESTS! It’s precisely the kind of mixed bag that would have made for a great Pete Fornatale show.

Listen here for an amazing 1977 in-studio appearance by an uncommonly chipper Brian Wilson on Pete Fornatale’s WNEW show.

April 27, 2012  Link  General Posts  

The Super Bowl is two weeks behind us in the rear-view mirror, and “Tangled Up in Blue,” my New York Giants-miserabilist radio program with Peter Richmond on NPR station WHDD, is on hiatus until August. But I couldn’t help yammering on a bit more about my team, my childhood, my adulthood, my father, my son, and the way all of the aforementioned vortically whirl around in my head every time I watch the Giants play a football game. This essay, from The New York Times Magazine, is as concise an explanation of what I’m talking about as I can manage.

February 19, 2012  Link  General Posts  

Since last August, I have been doing a radio program on the tiny NPR affiliate WHDD with my fellow writer Peter Richmond. It is about our tortured New York Giants fandom, and it is called “Tangled Up in Blue.” Now that the New York Times has given it some attention, I’ve heard from a number of people who say, “How can you complain about a team that has won three Super Bowls and is playing in its second Super Bowl in four years?”

My answer: Easily. With the caveat that our Giants “miserabilism” is ridiculous. It was Peter’s idea to call the program “Tangled Up in Blue,” and mine to subtitle it “Radio’s New Home for New York Football Giants Miserabilism.” The word “miserabilism” is an evocation of my memories of kids my age who loved the Smiths and the Cure in the 1980s—kids who took a perverse pleasure in how mopey/sad the music of Morrissey and Robert Smith made them feel. Watching the Giants is an emotionally excruciating experience, but it’s also one of the experiences that Peter and I hold most dear.

Herewith, some ways in which Giants miserabilism is ridiculous and some ways in which it is sensible.

Giants miserabilism is ridiculous because the team has not had a losing season since 2004.

Giants miserabilism is sensible because it was only last season that, with the team leading the Philadelphia Eagles by 21 points at home with less than eight minutes remaining in the fourth quarter, the Giants surrendered four unanswered touchdowns and lost the game 38-31, effectively losing a division title and a sure playoff spot in the process. (Lesson: NEVER relax and assume a lead is safe.)

Giants miserabilism is ridiculous because the team has been in the thick of the playoff hunt until late in the season in nine of twelve seasons since the year 2000.

Giants miserabilism is sensible because even defensive captain Justin Tuck is prone to lie awake in his bed on Sunday nights, at a complete and utter loss to explain his team’s sometimes inconsistent play. He says things like “I mean, it doesn’t make any sense to me. Do I need to see a shrink?”

Giants miserabilism is ridiculous because it’s just a spectator sport, you can’t win ’em all, and we should count our blessings that each season offers the promise of renewal and pleasant surprises like Victor Cruz.

Giants miserabilism is sensible because even the team’s reigning patriarch, owner John Mara, totally “gets” the miserabilism thing, agonizing through every game, saying the team’s 8-8 finish in 2009 “felt a lot more like 2-14 to me,” and wistfully observing, just as Peter and I are wont to do after a close victory, “It would be nice to have an easy one, but I don’t think that’s in our DNA.”

January 31, 2012  Link  General Posts  

In the February issue of Vanity Fair, I have a profile of an artist I’ve long admired but had never examined in depth until the magazine offered me the privilege of doing so: Lucian Freud. You can read the piece online here, or, if you prefer a richer photovisual experience, you can buy an actual hard copy of V.F. on the newsstand or get the pixel-rich iPad app version. (This will sound like graceless product-hustling, but the resolution on the iPad app is amazing, allowing you to see the brushwork of Freud’s paintings in a way that even print doesn’t permit.)

As a putative professional, I am seldom stirred with fanboy goofiness when interviewing or meeting a subject for a story, but I must confess that I was inordinately excited to meet... a dog. Namely, Eli, the unassuming whippet who appears in several of Freud’s later paintings. Here is a snap I took in London of Eli with his master, David Dawson, Freud’s devoted assistant and a frequent sitter for the artist himself:

January 20, 2012  Link  General Posts  

A lot of buzz in the soul-patch-o-sphere about Elvis Costello’s recent appearance with Elmo on Sesame Street. I must confess to ambivalence. I’m a devoted fan of both cultural institutions (meaning E.C. and Sesame; Elmo hasn’t earned the designation), and I’ve enjoyed some of the celebrity star turns on PBS’s flagship kids’ show. My problem isn’t with the cognitive dissonance of New Wave’s Angry Young Man doing children’s television, for anyone paying attention since Costello’s marvelously hokey “Spinning Songbook” tour of 1986 knows that E.C. forsook that persona a Zuckerberg’s-lifetime ago and has since embraced mainstream showmanship with humor and élan. (I loved him on Stephen Colbert’s Christmas special.)

It’s the song choice and Muppet choice, I think. That they reached back to the Angry Young phase, and specifically to one of the very first blasts of it—rejiggering the almost-debut 1977 single “(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes” and its statement-of-purpose opening line, “Oh, I used to be disgusted/ And now I try to be amused” as “A Monster Went and Ate My Red 2” and “Oh, I want to count to ten now/ But it’s something I can’t do”—well, must every act of cultural transgression eventually be defanged and cutesified? (And with Elmo in E.C. drag, no less?) Personally, I would have much preferred a remake of the 1982 song “Tears Before Bedtime,” both because it lends itself to kiddie interpretation and because, with its weird multi-tracked backing vocals, it already sounds like it’s a duet between Elvis Costello and a bunch of Muppets.

A larger point: It feels like every famous person traipses down the Street nowadays. I rather miss the innate Sesame-ness of the celebrity appearances of my childhood, when it seems that the visitors were always righteous and beautiful black people like Lena Horne and Richard Pryor, dropping by while in the neighborhood to uplift the race. Somehow, the latter-day cameos by the likes of Seth Rogen and Michelle Monaghan just don’t have the same oomph. (Though there is something compelling about the wrongness of Robert De Niro’s legendary master class with Elmo, which upset adult viewers while leaving small children puzzled.)

As much as I understand the universal love for Sesame Street and every decent famous person’s innate desire to appear on it, I’d rather some public figures in the arts remain indisputably of the adult world, never deflating their own mystique by counting to ten or reciting the alphabet in the presence of talking felt. Herewith, a list of well-known people who should never appear on Sesame Street:

Tom Verlaine of the band Television

Tilda Swinton

Raekwon

Patti Smith

Jim Jarmusch

October 23, 2011  Link  General Posts  

It is the way of things that everyone has a kind of proprietary feeling towards a famous person after that famous person dies—“He spoke to me more than anyone!”—so let me preface what follows by humbly stating that I am just one of millions whose life was significantly impacted by the late Steve Jobs.

But it is fascinating to consider this impact in biographical terms, to realize how personal Jobs made personal computing. By dint of having a good childhood friend whose dad was a professor of engineering at Rutgers University, I was one of those kids who had early access to an Apple II computer, which the professor’s family kept in the basement. We were given free rein to use and abuse this machine, and we flipped avidly through computer magazines to follow the doings of the two Steves, Jobs and Wozniak, as well as the people who were designing Apple II games. Our hero was a Persian-American programmer named Nasir Gebelli, who, working first for Sirius Software and then his own Gebelli Software company, came up with design-forward games that looked better and hummed along more elegantly than the noisy dreck that most other software companies were producing back then. We spent hours playing such games “By Nasir” (as he tagged them) as Phantoms Five, Space Eggs, and Gebelli’s then-audacious 1981 leap into 3D vector graphics, Horizon V. (I still conflate these games with the Who song “You Better You Bet” playing on the radio.)

Much in the same way that the 12-year-old Jobs had the gumption to call up Bill Hewlett of Hewlett-Packard on the telephone, my friend, the engineering professor’s son, decided one day in seventh grade that he should simply call up Nasir Gebelli in California to discuss his ideas for new games. Gebelli, far from being affronted, offered my friend a job—an opportunity that, given child labor laws, my friend had to pass on. (My friend did end up working at Apple years later, though.)

In the winter of 1984, our junior year of high school, we saw Jobs’s famous “insanely great” introduction of the Macintosh computer. My friend’s uncle on the other side of his family was by this time running a software company that took an early shipment of Macintoshes. (You called them Macintoshes back then; even Jobs wasn’t yet hip to the power of abbreviated branding.) Through that company, I was able to receive a corporate discount on my first personal computer, a Macintosh 512k (a ton of memory back then) that I took with me to college as a freshman in 1985. That school year was a tipping point. At its beginning, I was the only person in my residence hall to have a Macintosh, which proved to be a good ice-breaker socially; most of my colleagues (I kid you not, youngsters) had arrived on campus toting typewriters. But by the school year’s end, about half the kids in the hall owned Macs, and the university had set up a computer lab equipped with Macs for public use.

I still have the 512k Mac in storage, its veal-colored casing (to use Tom Wolfe’s perjorative phrase for the plastic housing of early personal computers) yellowed by time. It was the first of approximately 21 Apple devices I have owned, up to and including the iPad 2 that I’ll use next week, when I’m abroad, to Skype in my part of the Thursday-night Giants radio show that I co-host on the nation’s smallest NPR affiliate. (It’s called “Tangled Up in Blue,” if you care to listen to loony, undisciplined ranting about football.)

I’m not an ardent-enough techie to call myself a fanboy, and maybe that’s a good thing—and the reason I actually met a girl and married her—but I was, and am, a fan of Steve Jobs.

October 7, 2011  Link  General Posts  

This month I have a post up at Vanity Fair’s site about the extraordinary and improbably inspiring story of how George Harrison mentally and spiritually endured the horrific attack upon his person in 1999, its details courtesy of his engaging widow, Olivia. It is a companion piece to the brief spotlight I wrote in V.F.’s October issue about the new Martin Scorsese-directed HBO documentary about Harrison.

I can’t bring myself to engage in the “favorite Beatle” game—the whole thing wouldn’t have come off without all four of them—but I must confess to an abiding interest in George, who seemed the most intellectually curious and the best prepared for a life outside of Beatledom. Eleven years ago, as Vanity Fair prepared its first music issue, I was given carte blanche to pursue my dream of writing a profile of George. After months of petitioning, going through (glass?) onion-like layers of intermediaries, I received a call one August morning in 2000 from a publicist who’d been deputized to handle me, and he was delivering happy news: “George is quite keen to do it.” I was instructed to sit tight the following day, when I would receive a second call laying out the logistics and details of how I was going to meet Mr. Harrison at his estate, Friar Park.

The call never came. I waited one day by the telephone, then half of another, before an apologetic call came from the same publicist, informing me that Harrison was compelled to give a deposition or attend to some other kind of business regarding the legal case against the intruder who had invaded his and Olivia’s home. I was told that the matter of my Vanity Fair profile of George would be revisited in due time. But, sadly, that time never came. Shortly thereafter, George fell ill again with cancer, too ill to do a lengthy interview. He died in November of 2001.

While I’m Beatle-linking, here is a link to one of the few pieces of writing I’ve ever done that I am unequivocally pleased with, a thingy that ran on V.F.’s Web site last year called “Lennon at 70!” Reaction to it was sharply divided, but it was written, if I can go all Yoko on you, with love.

Like a lot of mere civilians, I cannot get enough of the Beatles’ story. To me, it was the best narrative of the twentieth century, in fiction or nonfiction. The four of them were at once a blank screen upon which all the fads and morés of their era were projected—teenybopper-ism, Indian mysticism, psychedelia, anti-war activism, postwar materialism, etc.—and four very strong, fully formed, sui generis personalities. No writerly embellishment can better the stories that they gave us.

October 4, 2011  Link  General Posts  

I used to work with a man named Walter Monheit™. He was an extraordinary fellow, like a character out of an old Preston Sturges movie come to life in the downtown Jonathan Demme-monde of the 1980s. Walter died last week. Over at Vanity Fair’s site, I’ve paid him tribute.

August 10, 2011  Link  General Posts  

In 1976, my brother, three and a half years older than me, purchased a Jethro Tull greatest-hits collection with the curious title M.U. — The Best of Jethro Tull. (I’ve since learned that “M.U.” is Brit-speak for “Musicians’ Union,” but it still doesn’t make sense as a title.) Back then, albums often came with bonus mini-poster inserts, and my brother covered the walls of his room with them: the oblique Egyptian-pyramid images that accompanied Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, the Eagles’ hairy-gothic band portrait from Hotel California, the collage poster from the Beatles’ White Album...

But the Tull album, the one the least consequential musically to our family, offered the poster that remains lodged in my brain: a “Last Supper”-style image of the band’s second and third lineups reunited over drinks and coffee at a banquet table:



As is the way of childhood, when the days seem to stretch out forever, I spent hours, ages, contemplating the strange creatures in this photograph: their ostentatious finery*, their prodigious facial hair, their palpable merriment; they were my own Sendak Wild Things. (Ian Anderson, in the center, seems to be roaring more than laughing.) They were also magnificently named: one was called Jeffrey Hammond-Hammond, another Barriemore Barlow. For some reason, I was most obsessed with bassist Glenn Cornick, the bespectacled fellow second from right in the crocheted hat, glasses, and floral-print shirt.

I puzzled over these creatures, wondering if, should they ever have come upon me, they would have beaten me up or welcomed me into their band; it could have gone either way. Now, when I regard this image, I love the weighted-down heaviness of it—the dark brick, the dark fabrics, the straw-covered chianti bottles, the gauche flower arrangements. There’s something wondrous in all the baroque ugliness, and I can see how a child, any child with this image tacked to a familiar wall in his home, could get lost in it. I should add that this Tull poster remains intact, on the very closet door where my brother put it up in ’76; my mother still hasn’t taken it down. And I am still taken in by it.

* When I was still a regular contributor to GQ, I suggested to its editor, Jim Nelson, that the magazine restage this photograph as a fashion shoot, using models in clothing that evoked the clothing that the Tull members wear here. I figure that Paul Smith alone must have the duds to match these pretty closely. But Jim didn’t go for it.

June 20, 2011  Link  General Posts  

Because I am working on a book about the 1970s in America, and because I was a child in the 1970s in America, my research occasionally takes a turn for the emotional-primordial. Stumbling upon a certain informational tidbit doesn’t merely jog the memory but all five senses, too—as if a pump-mist of retro atmosphere has suddenly been pump-misted into the room.

I had hazy memories of a prepubescent pop duo, boys, who made the rounds of TV one summer with their chipper songs, one of which was a paean to Amy Carter, the First Daughter. My research on Jimmy Carter’s presidency led me to discover this pop duo’s long-forgotten name, the Keane Brothers. Upon learning this, I naturally did the Google/YouTube thing and found this particularly beguiling TV ad for the Keanes (courtesy of the Museum of Classic Chicago Television). The sultry female voice-over seems at odds with the teenybop product being pitched but is very much in keeping with the humid languor that fell over 1977. Also interesting to note that tween fashion has cycled ’round completely—this is exactly how my son and his friends look and dress today.

It turns out that 13-year-old Tom (piano) and 12-year-old John (drums) Keane had their own short-lived CBS variety program that year, a summer fill-in show. That, and their corresponding promotional appearances, must be what I remember. The YouTube clips of the Keane Brothers evoke a side of the 1970s that historians who were adults in that period never capture: the summery poptimism, goofy as it appeared. The seventies were not all darkness and malaise and Nixonian villainy. For me, these clips bring back that patina of sweat everyone had at all times back then—not a desperate salesman’s flop-sweat but the lightly worn consequence of activity, man-made fibers, and the matted, moppy hairstyles we all had. I feel the phantom patina on me now. I think J.J. Abrams was feeling it when he made Super 8.

Here is a clip of the Keane Brothers from their CBS program that, at around 2:26, shows them performing the Amy Carter song, “Amy (Show the World You’re There).” (You must first endure a tedious intrusion by a frizz-haired grown-up impressionist, though it does offer an intriguing glimpse of the vestigial vaudevillian ethos that still held sway in variety TV back then.)

June 14, 2011  Link  General Posts  

Tonight (May 23), at 9 p.m. on VH1, comes a TV show I co-produced, 50 Cent: The Origin of Me. It’s where genealogy meets gangsta rap meets antebellum craziness meets pottery. Really.

And, going forward, the show will be viewable in full on VH1’s Web site.

More details here.

May 23, 2011  Link  General Posts  

I’ll admit that I am a latecomer to the phenomenon that is 13-year-old Rebecca Black and her viral anti-hit single, “Friday.” But I finally heard and watched it after seeing the Colbert-Fallon cover, which was enjoyable even without the original point of reference. And I’m so glad I did. “Friday” is wonderful and goofy and upliftingly wrong. As a video-song combo (with over 103 million YouTube views as of this writing), it is outsider art on a mega scale: what would have happened to the Shaggs had the Shaggs come into existence now rather than in the late 1960s.

The Shaggs were three sisters from New Hampshire whose father willed them into becoming a pop band in 1968 and underwrote the recording of their sole studio album, Philosophy of the World. The sisters, Dot, Helen, and Betty Wiggin, were not terribly keen on being musicians, but they were obeisant daughters and they produced something breathtakingly strange: unintentionally microtonal and polyrhythmic music that defies writerly description. (Have a listen to “My Pal Foot Foot,” their ode to their cat—and a disturbing snapshot of eastern New England inertia and vowel sounds in that period.)

Rebecca Black, too, had her recording underwritten by her parents, and “Friday” is equally strange and incompetent, if glossier than the material on “Philosophy of the World.” A Southern California girl whose mom and dad are both veterinarians, Black grew up plugged into the world, unlike the culturally and geographically isolated Wiggin sisters. So her video features the requisite memes of professionally made teeny-bop and hip-hop music videos: cruising with friends in a convertible, having a house party, wearing one’s hair flattened, ceding a few bars of the song to a rent-a-rapper. If Austin Wiggin, the domineering dad of the Shaggs, had had the tools at his disposal that Dr. and Dr. Black have now, he no doubt would have produced something like this.

Yet no amount of autotune or Final Cut Pro sheen can counter the fact that there’s still something very Shaggs-y—i.e., wrong—about Rebecca. Her flat affect and noncommittal vocals suggest she’s not totally up for a performing career, not a natural dynamo like the turbo-driven young guys and gals on American Idol. Perhaps, like Dot, Helen, and Betty, she was goaded into this whole undertaking.

Still, I have to admit that both the Shaggs and Black make me do something that contemporary pop singles seldom do: smile. Partly, it’s a laughing-at-them thing, which I feel a little guilty about. But it’s also a pleasure taken in the real-girl naïveté on display, the lack (for once) of precocity, god-given pipes, and golden looks. And that enunciation in Rebecca’s chorus (“It’s FRY-yee-day, FRY-yee-day”) is amazing—the unsought bridge between Liam Gallagher and Valley Girl-speak.

April 15, 2011  Link  General Posts  

A couple of years ago, a young writer and comic I know named Eliot Glazer came up with a brilliant, simple idea. He created a Tumblr account called My Parents Were Awesome and invited his readers—mostly young adults, people in their twenties and early thirties—to contribute photographs of their parents before they were parents. The premise, as explained in the homepage mission statement, was simple: “Before the fanny packs and Andrea Bocelli concerts, your parents (and grandparents) were once free-wheeling, fashion-forward, and super-awesome.”

That might overstate things (many current parents have been dorks since their teens), but Eliot’s invitation brought in hundreds of wonderful Instamatic-style portraits of now-middle- and senior-aged people in the suede-fringed and granny-squared splendor of their own young adulthoods, circa the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. Now this uncommonly warm and welcoming blog has become a book, also called My Parents Were Awesome, that expands upon the site by inviting contributors not only to turn in photographs, but to write testimonials to these parents and the lives they lived beyond their Mom and Dad roles.

I’m a bit old for Eliot’s contributor demographic, but he flattered me by asking if I could adapt my GQ essay on my late car-salesman father for the book, and so I did. The book, published on April 5 by Villard Trade Paperbacks, is fun, moving, and inspirational without being the scary kind of “Inspirational”: a celebration of family that doesn’t moralize to death. It might be a little heavy on Hebraic contributors—I’m one of two writers who delivers a testimonial to a dad named Seymour, and there are three contributors named Rachel—but there’s a sweet universality to the way everyone, with perspective, grows to recognize that one’s parents have led fascinating lives outside of the house, away from the dinner table, free of the minivan.

April 4, 2011  Link  General Posts  

“People think I’m some obscene perfectionist,” the Chicago chef Charlie Trotter told me. “But I have coined a term for myself. I think I’m more of an ‘excellence-ist.’ And there is a difference. I’m interested in monitoring every little detail.”

I did a profile of Trotter for the New York Times. As a magazine-trained person, I still haven’t mastered the quick in-and-out of newspaper writing; the article looks long in print and online, but it contains about a tenth of the thoughts (and, okay, the self-indulgent bits of writerly nuance) that I wanted to include. I won’t yammer on too much here, but I will say that Chef Trotter has long intrigued me, in that he’s not the vision of the “celebrity chef” that we have come to know in the last two decades: the smiling, eager-to-please, camera-ready showman.

Trotter is an intense man who calls himself not only an “excellence-ist” but “a devout Ayn Randian.” With his wire-rim eyeglasses and scrubbed appearance, he looks like a nineteenth-century burgher. All of this puts him at odds with the liberal-humanist bent (and facial-hair-friendliness) of today’s food world—but that’s part of what I find refreshing about him. He’s true to who he is, even if that doesn’t make him fashionable or lovable—and he still runs one of America’s best kitchens.

The Times article focuses on the extent to which Trotter, whether through stubbornness or the simple passing of time, has been eclipsed by younger, more marketing-savvy chefs. But one conclusion I came to, which didn’t make the article, is that perhaps he is his generation’s version of André Soltner, who ran New York’s Lutèce and couldn’t be bothered with being anything more than the chef-owner of one great restaurant.

Trotter didn’t totally agree with this characterization, in that he can be bothered with dreams of expansion and off-site restaurants. But he did recognize in himself a bit of Soltner and a bit of his idol, the Swiss chef Frédy Girardet, also a one-restaurant guy until the day he retired. “I can relate—the only time Girardet ever missed a service was the day that the city of Lausanne gave him a key to the city,” Trotter said.

“So is that, ultimately, who you are?” I asked.

“Perhaps it is,” Trotter said. “Perhaps it is.”

March 30, 2011  Link  General Posts  

At this point, I think it’s well worth revisiting my totally ignored speculation from a year ago on what it would have been like had Simon Cowell’s Idol replacement been the celebrity with the name most similar to his: English character actor and Orson Welles biographer Simon Callow. I maintain that Callow would have made for better TV than J-Lo.

February 9, 2011  Link  General Posts  

It was thirty-three years ago this week that I awoke one morning to the usual sounds of older siblings rustling and Dad shaving at the sink, this benign familial din differentiated from that of any other day’s only by my mother asking my brother, “Did you hear about the guy from Chicago who died?” This I found puzzling—I thought she was referring to some resident of the city of Chicago who had expired. Only after I’d come downstairs to the breakfast table, where I listened to the news on the rock station WNEW-FM, did it become clear that she meant Terry Kath, the guitarist in the band Chicago, the guy who sang lead on “Make Me Smile” and “Colour My World.” He had accidentally shot himself in the head, fatally, while playing with his handgun in an inebriated state.

Maybe it’s because this week has been so brutally cold, or maybe it’s because I’m writing a book about the seventies, but this buried memory flashed into my consciousness today. We were a Chicago-loving household back then. If you know the band only from the eighties era of plinked-synth ballads and multi-tracked Peter Cetera vocals, reconsider. They were a damned good band in the early to mid 1970s, one that realized with tight horns, tight songs, and a good rhythm section the vision that prog rock got wretchedly wrong: complex, full-sounding, big rock music that wasn’t gloppy and overegged. I say without shame that side two of their 1970 double album Chicago II, the bulk of which is taken up by “Ballet for a Girl in Buchannon,” a seven-part song suite written by the trombonist James Pankow and sung mostly by Kath, is one of most emotionally evocative pieces of music I can listen to: the soundtrack to long family car rides, summer nights humid with hamburger fumes, and other irretrievable moments of a patchwork-denim early youth. Those shaggy, paint-splattered young men on the cover of 1975’s Chicago IX, their first greatest-hits collection, seemed like gentle hippie freaks rather than menacing rockers, akin to the outgoing, not-flagrantly-druggy backpackers we met atop the mountains we were constantly hiking in the seventies:

Everyone in a cold climate falls victim at this time of year to seasonal affective disorder, the winter doldrums. I wonder now how much mine are informed by the death of Terry Kath. It was a brutal and coldly final tragedy, especially in freezing January, and especially as it fell between the November ’77 death of one grandfather and the February ’78 death of the other. And it introduced to me the sacred Rock Snob tenet of the Sanctity of the Original Lineup: No band can ever again be considered whole and truly good without all the members who were in the band at the time of its initial success. I knew, even in my tadpole phase of Rock Snobbery, that Chicago, the real Chicago, was done for. It’s entirely possible that the spiky, exhilarating Talking Heads and Clash records my brother was already playing would have smothered my Chicago-love anyway. But this was a cruel, forced curtain-drop.

The record business moved faster then, and it wasn’t but eight or nine months before Chicago reemerged with a new album and a new guitarist, an alarmingly poodle-haired, visually acontextual fellow named Donnie Dacus. I remember watching this broadcast in October 1978 of Chicago performing its comeback single, “Alive Again,” and recognizing the song as a credible facsimile of the old Chicago, but, alas, not quite the real thing. (Though I was unfair to Dacus, who, despite his ridiculous hair, was a perfectly fine musician and vocalist on his own terms.) It would be egregiously hacky to say that this was the end of my childhood innocence, but it was certainly an end—a punctuation point to a chapter of my childhood.

January 25, 2011  Link  General Posts  

“Nothing less than a world championship is acceptable to our team.” This is a declaration constantly trotted out by sports organizations, whether in training camp or on the eve of a championship game, and it’s utter bollocks.

I’m thinking about the “Nothing less than” trope because today, in the wake of the New York Jets’ playoff loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers, I’ve been hearing a lot of an equally dubious trope: “Same old Jets.” Same old? This team, with a youngish coach and a core of young players, has made it to two consecutive conference championship games! They’ll probably be a good team for several years to come. And that is, for a fan, a pretty great set of circumstances.

I’m not even a Jets fan; my football team is the Giants, who finished 10-6 and didn’t make the playoffs. If I may make an unfashionable admission, I enjoyed the Giants’ past season (in that masochistic, pain-as-joy way endemic to diehard sports fandom) because the Giants had a winning record and were in the playoff hunt until the end. That’s really what is acceptable to me. If I had a chance to rewrite the “Nothing less than” aphorism, I would rewrite it as “Nothing less than a team that is solid year in and year out, and is in the playoff hunt until late in the regular season, is acceptable.” What’s more, I have endured Giants teams that have had terrible seasons of double-digit losses, yet still I’ve returned to my seats in the Meadowlands when the next season rolled around. So if I’m being truthful, I must make the still-more-unfashionable admission that even a losing team, while dreary and soul-crushing and self-worth-abnegating, is kind of acceptable.

It’s understandable why coaches like the Jets’ Rex Ryan and owners like the Yankees’ Steinbrenners deploy the “Nothing less than” formulation, since it stokes the fans’ hopes and the players’ self-belief. But if you’re a true sports fan, you have to disengage from this all-or-nothing approach, which, in most years, will lead to bitter disappointment. (And, in the Wrigleyville neighborhood of Chicago, to nihilistic despair.) The most apt summation of true fan bliss I ever heard came from John Madden, back when he was still calling NFL games on Sunday afternoons for Fox. I can’t recall which game it was or even which season it was, but it was around Thanksgiving time, and it was a close game between two NFC conference rivals. “It doesn’t get any better than this,” Madden said in that unforced merry way of his. “Late November, it’s gettin’ cold, playoff spots on the line.”

My own favorite part of any NFL season is this “Madden period,” late November to early December, when enough of the season has unfolded to shake out the awful teams, but still, there remain many teams in the hunt and many games that matter. Maybe it’s because my early years of Giants fandom were defined by truly bad teams—from age 7 to age 14, they were a losing team, with double-digit losses in all but two of those eight seasons—but for my team to still be standing in that late-autumnal Madden period is, really, all I ever hope for. Playoff berths, playoff wins, Super Bowl championships: the rest is gravy.

January 24, 2011  Link  General Posts  

...is me. Let me tell you about a story-idea memo I sent to the editor of Vanity Fair in October 2008, when it looked increasingly likely that the Obama-Biden ticket would prevail over the McCain-Palin one. Here’s what I wrote:

“I think it would be a great story, if the polls prove correct and the Obama-Biden ticket wins, to do a Sarah Palin profile a few months after the inauguration, after she has returned to being governor every day, the national parade has moved on, and the national G.O.P. isn’t policing her every press appointment and utterance.

“The idea would be for me to go to Juneau and interview her in March or April, for a story to run in May or June. And it would be a ‘What I’ve Learned’ piece—what, with a little perspective, she has learned about the country, the national campaign process, and herself.

“Whatever you think of her, she’s endured the most whirlwind three-month period that probably any national candidate for office has—from little-known and reasonably well-regarded governor to heavily scrutinized, heavily polarizing, heavily mocked figure on the national stage. (Just watched her on SNL, where all these things were in play, as well as the sheer culture shock of her hanging out backstage with Lorne.) And factor in the fact that she gave birth just a little over four months before McCain chose her as running mate, and that some time between that birth and her being tapped by the G.O.P., she learned her 17-year-old daughter is pregnant.

“Whether she’s prone to self-examination or not, I think she won’t be able to help but look back on the year 2008 and think ‘Good God! That was everything life could possiblty throw at me! How did I get through it?’ And I’d genuinely love to hear the answer to this question once she had some distance from it all.”

I know, I know—what a rube! I actually admired the way Palin had taken on the entrenched, patronage-driven political culture of Alaska. And I thought that she had taken an inordinate amount of sexist crap on the campaign trail (as had Hillary Clinton) just because she was a woman. Though I in no way believed Palin to be qualified to be vice president of the United States, I thought there was a good chance she would grow, admirably, from her 2008 experience.

I never remotely imagined that she would resign from office eight months later.

And that—as we now know, two books, a couple of reality shows, and thousands of tweets later—was just the beginning. Even recently, after the Gabby Giffords shooting, I somehow had this goofy, naïve expectation that Palin would rise to the occasion, as nearly every political figure on the national stage has. Instead, she spoke bizarrely of “blood libel” (which I know from long-ago Hebrew-school vocab tests to mean something other than what she perceives it to be) and made the moment about herself.

So what would have happened had I actually sat down with Palin in early 2009? Probably, I’d have fared as well as the bow-tie guy on The Hot Box with Avery Jessup.

January 15, 2011  Link  General Posts