Sensitive Skin

This is a somewhat self-serving post, as I've been published twice now in my friend's online/print magazine, Sensitive Skin, but it still warrants writing about because the magazine is so damned good.

Described by publisher/editor Bernard "Buddy" Meisler as "Post-beat, pre-apocalyptic art, writing and what-not," the original incarnation was in NYC's Lower East Side beginning 1992, revived a little over a year ago from his current home in Marin County. With a reservoir of good will, contacts and eye for edgy, neo-bohemian literature, art, music and video, there's a wealth of great material in each issue, especially the one just released, Sensitive Skin issue #7.

Aside from an excerpt from my own screenplay, Little Punks, with an inspired-by-true-life story of meeting legendary New York Dolls guitarist/co-founder, Johnny Thunders, there's a brilliant piece on being a Bad Girl by my good friend, Erika Schickel, plus writing by Rob Roberge, Díre McCain, Marguerite Van Cook, Drew Hubner, John S. Hall and City of Strangers, a video by Flame Schon, art by Shalom Neuman and Janice Sloane and music by contemporary composer Mike Fink and Bay Area jazz combo LaMacchia/Myrner/Feiszli.

You can order print copies or just read it online. The magazine maintains an active Facebook page as well, which is a lot of fun. In 2011 there are so many more opportunities for the magazine to go viral than there were in 1992. One can only hope it continues to grow in readership, as I believe it will grow in stature.

And, if there's one piece not to your fancy, there's always another one a click -- or page turn -- away.

The Return of the Dick

Former Vice President Richard Bruce Cheney, the man who was acting President for George W. Bush's first term, the man who has done the most damage to America since the year 2000, is back with his memoir. Don't even think about an Amazon link for this one.

It turns out he's such a continuing asshole that those he smears in the book, including Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice from the same Administration, are calling him out on it. Whatta guy.

Here's the list of questions someone should ask him on the tour. Got to imagine he's an ultimate "get" for The Daily Show. Think he has the guts to go up on Jon Stewart -- and think Stewart would do any better with him than he did with Rumsfeld?

And, by the way, how much had you been drinking when you shot your best friend in the face?

Even better: Did You Tell Scooter Libby To Leak Valerie Plame's Identity As A CIA Agent To The Press?

Songwriters

Just lost two, Jerry Leiber of Leiber & Stoller, rock & roll, and Nick Ashford of Ashford & Simpson, Motown/soul. I love great songwriters, this hurts.

Leiber:

Jerome Leiber was born on April 25, 1933, in Baltimore, where his parents, Jewish immigrants from Poland, ran a general store. When Jerry was 5, his father died and his mother tried, with little success, to run a small store in one of the city’s worst slums. When he was 12, she took him to Los Angeles.

It was while attending Fairfax High in Los Angeles and working in Norty’s Record Shop that he met Leonard Sill, a promoter for Modern Records, and confessed that he wanted to be a songwriter. After Sill urged him to find a pianist who could help him put his ideas onto sheet music he met Mr. Stoller through a friend, and the two began writing together

“Often I would have a start, two or four lines,” Mr. Leiber told Robert Palmer, the author of “Baby, That Was Rock & Roll: The Legendary Leiber and Stoller” (1978). “Mike would sit at the piano and start to jam, just playing, fooling around, and I’d throw out a line. He’d accommodate the line — metrically, rhythmically.”

Ashford:

Nickolas Ashford was born in Fairfield, S.C., and raised in Willow Run, Mich., where his father, Calvin, was a construction worker. He got his musical start at Willow Run Baptist Church, singing and writing songs for the gospel choir. He briefly attended Eastern Michigan University, in Ypsilanti, before heading to New York, where he tried but failed to find success as a dancer.

In 1964, while homeless, Mr. Ashford went to White Rock Baptist Church in Harlem, where he met Ms. Simpson, a 17-year-old recent high school graduate who was studying music. They began writing songs together, selling the first bunch for $64. In 1966, after Ray Charles sang “Let’s Go Get Stoned,” a song Ashford & Simpson wrote with Joey Armstead, the duo signed on with Motown as staff writers and producers.

They wrote for virtually every major act on the label, including Gladys Knight and the Pips (“Didn’t You Know You’d Have to Cry Sometime”) and Smokey Robinson and the Miracles (“Who’s Gonna Take the Blame”).

While writing for Motown, Ashford & Simpson nursed a desire to perform, which Berry Gordy Jr., the founder and patriarch of the label, discouraged. They left the label in 1973 and married in 1974.

God bless the creators.

R.R.

Clearly a smart guy, Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin is a wonderful interview subject. Witness this recent interview at Google, to an overflowing room, with some great questions:

His thoughts on power and the difficulty of ruling, towards the end of the hour, are particularly smart and interesting.

Geek on.

Harvey Legend

It's all over now, the voice of Cleveland, Harvey Pekar has passed on at age 70. His sarcastically named autobiographical comic book series, American Splendor, which he wrote and had a variety of artists starting with the world-famous R. Crumb illustrate, entered the mass culture with the hilarious, inventive, reality-fiction mixing movie version released in 2008, starring Paul Giamatti as Pekar and Hope Davis as his wife, Joyce. Per Giamatti today:

"Harvey was one of the most compassionate and empathetic human beings I've ever met," Giamatti said in a statement. "He had a huge brain and an even bigger soul. And he was hilarious. He was a great artist, a true American poet, and there is no one to replace him."

The obits above are well-worth reading, as is his perhaps most notable work, Our Cancer Year, about his struggle with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. He was also famous for his guest spots on David Letterman, until he went on to tirade against NBC owner General Electric's labor practices and got himself banned from the show, also well-documented in the movie.

For all his success, here's where Pekar netted out:

Success did not seem to ease Mr. Pekar’s existential predicament. “Of course I don’t think I have it made by any means,” his alter ego said in a cartoon in Entertainment Weekly in 2003. “I’m too insecure, obsessive and paranoid for that.”

Now that this great American original has gone to the great comic book store in the sky (the afterlife being something he surely never believed in), he's now American legend. I predict a long afterlife for the fine works he left behind, even as he has changed the perception of comic books forever and inspired others who have already followed in his path.

Nice job, Harvey.

Sad

David Mills, RIP:

David Mills, a veteran television writer who worked on the award-winning series "ER" and "The Wire," died after collapsing on the set of his latest production. He was 48.

Mills died Tuesday night in New Orleans, said HBO spokesman Diego Aldana. Doctors at Tulane Medical Center said he suffered a brain aneurism, according to a statement Wednesday from Mills' latest production, "Treme."

Mills was on the set of the new HBO series as it filmed a scene at Cafe du Monde in the French Quarter when he was stricken and rushed to the hospital where he died without regaining consciousness, the statement said.

More:

Mills began his career as a reporter for The Washington Post, before turning to screenwriting. Besides "ER" and "The Wire," he worked on the HBO drama "The Corner," "Homicide: Life on the Street," "NYPD Blue" and was executive producer and writer of the short-lived NBC miniseries "Kingpin," about a Mexican drug cartel.

Mills started his television writing career with Simon, a longtime friend and "Wire" creator, in 1994. The pair wrote an episode of "Homicide" that year, for which they won a Writers Guild of America award. Mills won Emmys for co-writing and executive producing the miniseries "The Corner" and an Edgar in 2007 for "The Wire."

Not terribly well-known outside the industry, he's one of the unique fraternity of great modern television writers, one of "the family" for his work on Homicide: Life on the Streets and The Wire.

Set your DVR for Treme on HBO to catch his fine last work.

Winter Lion

Roger Ebert may be on his way to the big bijou in the sky but he's living life to the fullest through his writing, which is at his smart populist Midwestern best. Not only are his movie reviews as accurate and enjoyable as ever, if not moreso as there is a freedom in his writing that seems a heightened version of what he had before, but he's also dead-on politically again, opening his Thursday "A Letter to Rush Limbaugh" with:

You should be horse-whipped for the insult you have paid to the highest office of our nation.

He then excoriates the Satanic Limbaugh for discouraging contributions to Haiti via the Red Cross link on the White House website, drumming up paranoia that it'll put his listeners on the Barack Obama campaign mailing list.

But it's the poignant blog piece from January 6 that's being passed around the Net, where Ebert reveals his feelings about no longer being able to eat or drink. It's elegaic without self-pity, and even has a movie title, "Nil by mouth:"

I dreamed. I was reading Cormac McCarthy's Suttree, and there's a passage where the hero, lazing on his river boat on a hot summer day, pulls up a string from the water with a bottle of orange soda attached to it and drinks. I tasted that pop so clearly I can taste it today. Later he's served a beer in a frosted mug. I don't drink beer, but the frosted mug evoked for me a long-buried memory of my father and I driving in his old Plymouth to the A&W Root Beer stand (gravel driveways, carhop service, window trays) and his voice saying "...and a five-cent beer for the boy." The smoke from his Lucky Strike in the car. The heavy summer heat.

For nights I would wake up already focused on that small but heavy glass mug with the ice sliding from it, and the first sip of root beer. I took that sip over and over. The ice slid down across my fingers again and again. But never again.

He writes about how many memories are coming back now, that it's all there, events long ago sparked by a scene in a movie that was shot in a location near the memory. He talks about not missing food and drink as much as the company, :

What I miss is the society. Lunch and dinner are the two occasions when we most easily meet with friends and family. They're the first way we experience places far from home. Where we sit to regard the passing parade. How we learn indirectly of other cultures. When we feel good together. Meals are when we get a lot of our talking done -- probably most of our recreational talking. That's what I miss. Because I can't speak that's's another turn of the blade. I can sit at a table and vicariously enjoy the conversation, which is why I enjoy pals like my friend McHugh so much, because he rarely notices if anyone else isn't speaking. But to attend a "business dinner" is a species of torture. I'm no good at business anyway, but at least if I'm being bad at it at Joe's Stone Crab there are consolations.

When we drive around town I never look at a trendy new restaurant and wish I could eat there. I peer into little storefront places, diners, ethnic places, and then I feel envy. After a movie we'll drive past a formica restaurant with only two tables occupied, and I'll wish I could be at one of them, having ordered something familiar and and reading a book. I never felt alone in a situation like that. I was a soloist.

And as a man who not only embraced the Internet but created the most thriving individual movie critic's website, he closes with a deep understanding of how it's allowed him to connect personally with his readership:

So that's what's sad about not eating. The loss of dining, not the loss of food. It may be personal, but for, unless I'm alone, it doesn't involve dinner if it doesn't involve talking. The food and drink I can do without easily. The jokes, gossip, laughs, arguments and shared memories I miss. Sentences beginning with the words, "Remember that time?" I ran in crowds where anyone was likely to break out in a poetry recitation at any time. Me too. But not me anymore. So yes, it's sad. Maybe that's why I enjoy this blog. You don't realize it, but we're at dinner right now.

Let's hope he hangs in there, without severe chronic pain or debilitation, for longer that anyone expects.

As long as he can type.

Author Author

This is why, at heart, I'm such a big fan of Barack Obama:

This was especially true last March 13, when the incendiary sermons of Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright, blew up all over the cable networks. On that Thursday, Obama had spent the entire day and evening in the Senate. That Friday, after enduring a series of tough interviews, Obama informed Axelrod and campaign manager David Plouffe, “I want to do a speech on race.” And he added, “I want to make this speech no later than next Tuesday. I don’t think it can wait.” Axelrod and Plouffe tried to talk him into delaying it: He had a full day of campaigning on Saturday, a film shoot on Sunday, and then another hectic day campaigning in Pennsylvania on Monday. Obama was insistent. On the Saturday-morning campaign conference call, Favreau was told to get to work on a draft immediately. Favreau replied, “I’m not writing this until I talk to him.”

That evening, Saint Patrick’s Day, less than seventy-two hours before the speech would be delivered to a live audience, Favreau was sitting alone in an unfurnished group house in Chicago when the boss called. “I’m going to give you some stream of consciousness,” Obama told him. Then he spoke for about forty-five minutes, laying out his speech’s argumentative construction. Favreau thanked him, hung up, considered the enormity of the task and the looming deadline, and then decided he was “too freaked out by the whole thing” to write and went out with friends instead. On Sunday morning at seven, the speechwriter took his laptop to a coffee shop and worked there for thirteen hours. Obama received Favreau’s draft at eight that evening and wrote until three in the morning.

He hadn’t finished by Monday at 8 a.m., when he set the draft aside to spend the day barnstorming across Pennsylvania. At nine thirty that night, a little more than twelve hours before the speech was to be delivered, Obama returned to his hotel room to do more writing. At two in the morning, the various BlackBerrys of Axelrod, Favreau, Plouffe, and Jarrett sounded with a message from the candidate: Here it is. Favs, feel free to tweak the words. Everyone else, the content here is what I want to say. Axelrod stood in the dark reading the text: “The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made.… But what we know—what we have seen—is that America can change. That is the true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope—the audacity to hope—for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.”

He e-mailed Obama: This is why you should be president.

When critics say "Obama gives a good speech" as if the tongue-tied child-speak of George W. Bush somehow led to great policy, it irks me no end. Obama writes a great speech. Years ago I attended a three night seminar with Martin Scorsese who ultimate said that unless he had something of value to say, all the technique in the world was for naught.

Obama almost always has something of value and interest to say.

I like writers. They're the smartest people in the room. (Witness Tina Fey, so much more than just a performer.) Most politicians with books have ghostwriters. Theodore Roosevelt was the last President to write his own stuff. When Obama got to the Senate, he and Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) bonded over they fact that they were the only Senators that wrote their own books. Obama is believed by his team to be the best speechwriter among them. He writes at night, in the wee hours. Right on.

The whole GQ piece linked above is tremendous, starting with an early appearance to a meagre audience at a bookstore to promote Dreams From My Father, Obama's memoir, which sold diddly the first time around. Then, republished after his electrifying 2004 Democratic Convention speech, it ran right up to the top of The New York Times Bestseller List.

Writers know what it means to toil by their lonesome to make something that works. (I'd argue a lot of computer programmers have related experience.) Vaclav Havel, the playwright who went on to lead the first free government in Poland is a great example. To be a successful writer you need vision, a strong sense of self, some understanding of humanity, and a stick-to-it-ness even when nobody in the world cares or wants you to stick-to-it.

Decent qualities in a politician, wouldn't you say?

< 1 Month

For your Sunday morning newsgathering pleasure, I once again present the President-Elect who may have had more press conferences since being elected than the current White House resident has in eight years:



By the way, I'm about halfway through his initial autobiography, Dreams from My Father, and am happy to report that my man-crush has only deepened, as he seems to have grappled with the same political and racial concerns my friends and I were constantly discussing at the same time (late 1970's through mid-1980's), and reaching most of the same conclusions. However, he was doing it as a community organizer, theory-into-action.

Props to the man.

Writers

Support writers. It's as simple as that.

Daily Show version here.