xtcian

soft-shell crab roll

6/30/04

Since Tessa are in that indefinite parcel of time called "your child-bearing years," we've had to be careful about sushi, because apparently there's all sorts of mercury that will give your baby three heads and gecko-like scales. The FDA put out a notice and even a list of all the different mercury levels in your favorite seafood, but the whole thing depresses my lovely wife to no end. Not only is it one more goddamn thing to worry about, but she actually loves sushi and it means effectively giving it up until the year 2014.

While salmon has very little mercury, it has plenty of PCBs - basically the green sludge that oozes out the back of factories in Elizabeth, NJ, finding its toxic path of least resistance to the nearest river. The government is supposed to protect us from this shit, but I wouldn't be surprised if the Bush Administration wanted to re-classify dioxin poison as a dessert topping.

Sure, voyagers on cross-country plane trips can look out the window and see vast stretches of unspoiled Western terrain, but have you ever taken the PATH train to Newark? It is like the Disney ride through Bubbling Purple Horrorville. Gurgling streams of steaming, rust-colored death syrup - all clawing its way into your womb to do terrible things to your babies.

During history class, I used to look at historical characters from the Dark Ages with pity – oh, look at them, stuck in that pre-antibiotic world with such awful teeth, bad paintings and hundreds of years away from a light bulb. I found them frustrating, even pathetic, until I began to realize that people from the future will look at US as an even Darker Age, because we'd had a choice, and chose to be fuckin' morons.

'scuse me while I kiss this guy

6/29/04

Michael Angelo Stuno and his boyfriend Jeff are visiting us this week – along with downtown Manhattan's Joan of Arc Kelly Wachowicz – thus meaning you weren't going to be allowed small talk at dinner. No, these are the kind of people who delve straight into the aorta of modern thought, activist politics, and couples therapy.

After three hours of tossing around different ideas of how to be in a relationship (Michael and Jeff have been with each other for 15 years and were married in SF this spring), Michael asked me if I was going to write about it in the blog. I responded that it usually takes 3-4 days for an idea to percolate before I bother any of you with it, just as it is rare that you dream about something that happened to you that day.

Stuno replied that people dream about things that happened that same day all the time, and I realize that I post all KINDS of shit in here that has had less than about 20 seconds to "percolate." I suddenly worried: how much of the crap I say do I actually believe? Sometimes it seems like it breaks down like this:

Why I Say The Shit I Say (in percentages)
To keep the conversation going: 40%
To be a gadfly provocateur: 27%
Parroting something I'd read: 19%
To make it appear as though I'm engaged in my surroundings: 11%
Because I actually believe it: 3%

Or maybe those numbers should be reversed, and I'm actually more sincere than I think I am. Either way, I can't believe the amount of garbage I've inflicted on conversations since about 1977. Is it too late to apologize?

Iraqmaninoff

6/28/04

One of the commenters asked why there was no discussion of "Fahrenheit 9/11" on the blog, which I just saw this evening. I feel like the Web is so chock of armchair leftist pundits dying to register their intensely-held feelings on their weblogs for their small, disturbed following, so me discussing the film is a bit of a cliché before I even start.

All I can say is that the movie made me unbelievably sad. It's a pretty joyless affair, and it makes the current polls – showing Kerry and Bush in a tie – seem incomprehensible. After watching this film, you wonder how a country as enlightened as America fell for something so cruel and cynical, and how this administration is still in the running.

Michael Moore tends to pick easy targets, is endlessly manipulative with his edits and background music, and occasionally blurs a fact or two en route to his bigger point. That drives some people bonkers, but for me, I'm just glad he exists. I don't mind that he's a clown, because he's our clown. Critics say that us liberals should be held to a higher standard, fight calumny with nobility, but that hasn't worked so far. Rush Limbaugh sways millions of Americans by being a fat populist playing loose with the truth, so why can't Moore get a pass when doing the same?

It all raised a bigger question for me. The movie assumes that the Bushes, Cheneys, Saudis and everyone with $$$ all colluded to bring Iraq to its knees. The question is whether or not that should be a "conspiracy," when really, the entire debacle looks like a few powerful people utterly blinded by their own nepotism. Seriously, these are a bunch of morally repugnant oil guys who have terrible friends: each other.

I'm not convinced this war was fought over oil, but it doesn't matter one way or the other. I'm much more fascinated in how disastrously incompetent these folks are at controlling the world. Seriously, if they had their act together, there would be no Michael Moores making films. Bush would be ahead by 25 points in the polls, and Iraq would already have the Playboy Spice Channel.

No, the great thing about these bastards is their unique mix of hubris and ignorance. The gamble they took on Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction" was right up there with the Battle of the Spanish Armada, Napoleon (and Hitler's) decision to invade Russia in late autumn, and New Coke. I'm sure they thought "well, he has to have at least ONE canister of mustard gas in there," and even that would have been enough to convince ill-informed Americans that the war would be justified.

I wonder when it dawned on them that they would never find anything. Was it a slow revelation or a bolt-upright-in-bed epiphany?

The fact that "F9/11" was made, that Kerry is running with Bush neck-and-neck, that Iraq is a disaster area... I dunno, if I'm going to have a conspiracy, I want the perpetrators to be slick, secret, all-knowing and full of charisma, not these numbskulls.

THWACK!

6/27/04

For those of you how know me, you'd know that my appearance on a golf green at 10am this morning would come as a bit of a shock. First, I have never played nine holes of golf in my life. Second, I'm not what you'd call an "early riser."

But there I was regardless, because Jamie Block wanted to, and I have to tell you, golf is fucking fun! All those years I spent rolling my eyes skyward, begrudging incontinent 79-year-olds in their pleated polyester pants, believing golf was the end of all creative thought: well, I suppose I was kinda fulla shit.

Let me be clear – any golf course located where there is no naturally-occurring water should be firebombed (except my dad's house). The links in Santa Fe, Palm Springs and Las Vegas should be returned to the yucca trees and dusty sands that once owned them. But a little place up here in the Taconic Valley that doesn't even need sprinklers? Excellent.

I shot a 44 on the 9 holes, which wasn't bad for being an utter tyro. One of my pitching wedge shots plopped straight in the hole from about 20 feet out. Block had an eagle shot from about 25 yards. I like golf. Maybe I'll buy "golf shoes."

However, after nine holes, then spending the afternoon laying down topsoil in the garden, then standing over a grill that wasn't cooking anything, I had to take a Vioxx. A Vioxx is this very expensive pill that I got for my back problems a few years ago, and now they serve to quell my raging body when I've asked too much of it.

In the interests of being 37, I would like to make the following complaints:
1. my lower back on the left side hurts all the time
2. I can't get drunk anymore without 2-day hangovers
3. my neck is too big (Tessa says it isn't, but what does she know?)
4. I have to take lactose-intolerant pills
5. I make "old man" noises when I sit down in a chair

Please tell me I'm not alone. Does anyone else have complaints about being over 30?

singing in the dead of night

6/24/04

Okay, I blew that one up real big so that you can see how INSANE the packaging is on this product. Now, I realize I can get pretty riled up by environmental issues, and my sense of humor about chlorofluorocarbons is probably a little less acute than your average redneck grillin' Beefmaster Franks on his FlameMaster 4000, but GIVE ME A FRIGGING BREAK!

That SD card is the same size that fits in your Palm Pilot or your digital camera, i.e., roughly the size of a man's thumbnail. And the packaging, consisting of 80 lb cardboard stock and dual-bond plastic SO STRONG that it takes a BOXCUTTER to get through it, is BIGGER THAN a SMALL TELEVISION.

Oil to make that plastic, trees felled to provide the cardboard backing... couldn't they have made a nice game of Boggle™ with those materials? They stopped making the "long box" containers for CDs – finally – but replaced it with this?

Determined to wash the bad taste of mercury and dioxin out of my mouth, I went around to the back of the farmhouse to see why our bathroom fan wasn't working – and of course, it's because a family of blackbirds has moved into the vent.

The vent itself is about 12 feet off the ground, so I leaped off a windowsill and grabbed this picture by thrusting the camera in the hole, then falling backwards onto a shrub that stabbed me forty-seven times. But even though it's a little blurry, you can see the little baby blackbird with its mouth wide open, and that made me feel a lot better about the world.

(click image for bigger)

quiogue

6/23/04

You were the first girl who ever liked me, and though I haven't thought of you in about five years, I watched "Children of a Lesser God" tonight, the same movie you and I saw in the theater, holding hands the whole time. I remember how deeply I wanted them to get together, and how I utterly longed for you and I to last.

You were just like the deaf girl – totally mysterious, angry, bitter, bizarrely pretty, and just enough of a wounded animal to invoke every ounce of protection in me. That night, when you hallucinated and told me the ingredients to an exotic bomb, I don't know, I didn't think it was possible to want anyone more.

When you came to visit again, and slammed the dorm door in my face, I walked around campus in an apoplectic haze, shattered. I didn't know it then, but I resolved never to be hurt by another girl again.

Spring summer fall, spring summer fall, and gradually, I lost all track of you. I had heard whispers of a motorcycle accident, of marrying someone in the military, of three kids. Myself, I can't imagine being happier where I am, with such a wonderful person who agreed to marry me, and the layers of amazing people that revolve around us, as we do them.

But for a brief moment tonight, I glimpsed into that tiny window and felt the sharp pang of a moment missed.

heaven knows I'm gouty now

6/22/04

They cancelled the 2004 Lollapalooza tour today, and when I found out who was on the bill, I gasped: Morrissey, The Pixies, the Flaming Lips, Wilco and Sonic Youth. Naturally, I assumed those bands would usher in a whopping fan base desperate to hear their heroes, but nobody is buying a fucking ticket.

And then it hit me, as usual: the line-up that would make your average WXYC DJ go cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs is likely to make your 15-year-old yawn in disdain. We have to face facts: The Pixies, Smiths and Sonic Youth were all making records in 1986, which by my count was 18 years ago. When I was 19 in 1986, I saw the Smiths and the Cure play at the L.A. Forum.

But I was NOT going to see The Strawberry Alarm Clock, The Rascals, the Monkees or anything else from eighteen years before that, i.e., 1968. Those bands seemed like jokes to me, worthy only of derision or the clandestine, guilty sing-along in the car. These teens probably look at the Pixies the way I looked at Creedence Clearwater Revival: I knew I was supposed to like them, but I could really care less. I was way more into the Naked Eyes CD.

Someone said that music fans in their thirties were far less likely to stand around in a hot open-air mosh pit to see their old favorites, to which I say: no fucking duh. However, I don't think Jon, Bud, Chip or I would have gone to a Lollapalooza when we were 18 either. I didn't mind moshing to the Sex Police, Johnny Quest, My Bloody Valentine and the Heels' victory over Duke in 1992, but there's no way we would have driven outside of Chapel Hill to get peed on by strangers. If someone's peeing on me, I'd rather know them.

ordered enchiladas and I ate em

6/21/04

Driving back to the city for only one day – especially in the midst of all this writing we're doing – can be a total pain in the ass. However, nothing is more important than getting that rat bastard out of the White House, so we got ourselves into the John Kerry fundraiser being held on 24th Street and being respectful, I got myself into a tie.

Star Jones was the emcee for the evening, and she looked awesome. She's also genuinely funny, which I didn't know (since I avoid shows like "The View" with abject fear), along with comedian Andy Borowitz, who said "fucking" a lot. So did Chris Heinz, John Kerry's stepson, and I have to tell you, it instantly put me at ease. Whatever happened to "fucking" in normal discourse? It felt like 1979 again, and I was home.

above, Star Jones; below, Chris Heinz

Chris Heinz has a little bit of the ol' John Kennedy Jr. thing going on – exact same hair, same ease with a crowd. Chris, however, is a very smart guy, and handled the questions with the ease of someone who actually has answers. He told the crowd not to worry if they didn't see any Kerry ads; put simply, nobody is spending a dime in places like New York or California where the Electoral votes are already wrapped up.

He encouraged everyone to do some grass-roots work in swing states, since they are really the only places that matter in the election. Tessa and I have decided to go to Pennsylvania and see how much trouble we can cook up.

I was going to talk to Chris after the shindig was over, but then I found out that the DJ was NONE OTHER THAN Q-TIP HIMSELF! Besotted, I wandered over and told him he was responsible for some of the best cultural moments of my post-adolescence. For those of you who don't know, Q-Tip, along with A Tribe Called Quest, made albums that were transcendentally beautiful hip-hop. Not only did he write "Left My Wallet in El Segundo" and "Luck of Lucien," but he was responsible for the "electric eye" rap in the middle of "Groove is in the Heart" by Deee-Lite. He was UNBELIEVABLY nice.

spazzing out with the too-cool Mr. Tip

Meanwhile, Tessa talked to one of her faves, the amazing actress Patricia Clarkson:

Say what you want about New York, but if you stay here long enough, you do get to tell your heroes how much you love them.

remains of the day

6/20/04

Greetings from the shortest night of the year!

There's something terrific about the ambient light of the gloaming sun, still barely visible at 10pm. It hints at infinite possibility, undeniable optimism. I know it drives people crazy near the Arctic Circle, the "white nights" and all, but for now it's simply brilliant.

You read it here first: the weather the last two days has been the best in three years. Zero percent humidity and 74 degrees, with sky sporting about ten clouds. It was the perfect day for a quick jaunt over to Claverack, NY, where Merchant and Ivory � yep, THAT Merchant/Ivory � were having a benefit dinner for their foundation.

The entertainment was an Indian dancer, very beautiful, who gave a long performance that made me actively miss my friends Jyoti and Swati, the incorrigible twin Indian girls at Carolina during the Purple House years ('92-'95) who made a habit of drinking hard, keeping the nights brisk, and performing some of the most beautiful, intricate synchronized Indian dancing I've ever seen. I love the way Indian dancers use their eyes; most other cultures ignore the face while dancing (which leads to the famous "white man's overbite" practiced by most Baby Boomers dancing to "Boogie Oogie Oogie.")

At dinner, we sat with Andrew Solomon and our excellent compatriots Ben Feldman (our lawyer) and his partner Chip. The food was exquisite until I bit down on some sort of relish from the salad table that was so, um, unfortunate-tasting that I nearly hurled.

Good thing I didn't, because as we got up to leave, Ismael Merchant himself wandered over to Tessa and me, asking us how we liked Columbia County, inviting us to dinner, and generally being a fabulous Old World host. That guy does it right, lemme tellya.

After that, he went back to talking to Salman Rushdie. I was dying to ask Mr. Rushdie how on earth he survived a decade of fatwa but that's what starfucking morons do, and I'm only half of that.

I thought he looked quite handsome in person

We ran home to catch the West Coast satellite feed of Clinton on "60 Minutes," and you have to admit it was pretty good television. Even near the end of his presidency, I was still defending Clinton to the hilt, because I always really liked the guy. We met him in Chapel Hill in early 1992, and since that day, my respect for him has been unassailable.

Yes, yes, Monica Lewinsky blah blah blah fucking blah. I NEVER CARED. And neither should you, really. If you were embarrassed by Clinton's White House indiscretions, but give George Bush a free pass on his lies, then you have some serious thinking to do. In fact, go sit in the corner right now. When you're done, explain why Bush can lie and cause the death of roughly 11,000 people, while Clinton is dragged through the Fires of Hell for a blow job. America, I'll never fully understand you, and I don't know if I want to.

wetness and wistfulness

6/17/04

Yesterday we went to the Farmers Market at Union Square to pick up some seedlings for the great Tomato-rific Plantathon at our farm on Saturday. You bastards are lucky I stopped writing on the weekends, or you'd be forced to hear about my new tomato heirlooms: the Pink Brandywines, the Yellow Zebras, the Abe Lincolns, and all the other rare finds that are going to be enjoyed – in about ten weeks – with goat cheese and basil.

The Farmers Market at Union Square is a bizarre beast: there are all these little kiosks selling organic cilantro and pear cider, but they are dwarfed by Sony's tent labs, where you can fiddle with the latest 7 megapixel camera-phone-videorecorder and the Plasmatron 4000. In a way, that's my fantasy. I want to live in a house that was built in 1673 and has drafty transom windows – but also has a 87" LCD television and T3 wifi. We've tried to do that with our humble little farm, but there's only so much you can do with rural DSL. The farm behind us doesn't even have that.

Speaking of technology getting ass-reamed by nature, Sean, Tessa, Jordana and I went to the Apple Store in Soho for some iBook TLC (and so Tessa and I could ogle all the cool shit) and we got caught in the kind of delirious rainstorm downpour that would have cost a movie production $75 million in cost overruns. I'd say five inches of water fell in 45 minutes, and as my wife and I jumped 18-inch-deep puddles on the way to Mulberry Street, I marveled at how much I've missed rain since spending spring in Los Angeles.

At the indoor church hoops court, my buddies and I changed clothes and promptly got sopping wet again with the sweat of each other – it's sweltering in there, and the humidity offers no respite.

As the game ended, I made the miserable trek back to Brooklyn, and I longed for the days of 1995 or so, when Scotty and I were living in Chapel Hill, and we'd just sneak into Royal Park Apartments and swim off the day's sweat in their giant pool. We had nowhere to go, enough money for a decent beer (or in my case, hard cider, cuz I'm twee), grab a slice of "cheddar and broccoli" at Pizza & Pasta and see what the night would bring.

We always smelled of chlorine, but we were in good shape and had a marvelous time. Even Chip lost weight that summer. Now we are all spread out again, and I find myself missing the commune.

Scotty in our room, Pink House circa '95

Ask-The-Exec!

6/16/04

Yes, that's right, kiddos! Today we have a real live junior TV Exec in our midst, and she said she'd answer all our burning questions about the inner workings of television. So ask away, 'cuz Jen rocks the house, yo. She's honest, cool, dashing (and taken, boys and girls).

I'll start:
Hey Jen, what was your biggest heartbreak of a series that you loved, but it failed?
What spec script do you never want to read again, as long as you live?

you nip, I'll tuck

6/15/04

One of the ways to get yourself noticed in Hollywood is to write a "spec" script, which I believe stands for "speculation," "speculative" or "speculum"- but I'm not sure which. The idea is that you pick a show on television that is most like the show you want to work on, and write your own episode containing the established characters.

Sounds easy, right? Except that unless you have some sort of insider knowledge, you don't know the current gossip, and you can end up writing a spec script that nobody will want to read. For instance, let me impart this wisdom to you about this television season:

1. Agents are glutted with "Six Feet Under" scripts right now and are tired of reading them. Having seen the first episode of the current season, it seems to me they might take a look at some of them anyway.

2. Last year, there were a bunch of comedy pilots written around the premise of a cooking show, but after Emeril's ill-fated project, all of them died. This year, the theme everyone keeps seeing is the "formerly rich kid" comedy.

3. Last month, this one guy got a great gig after writing a spec script for M*A*S*H, a show that has not been on the air for 21 years.

In that light, I joked with my cast that I was going to write a "Webster" spec, and sometimes a bold, stupid move like that is just what you need. My wife and I, however, decided to go with a current Fox comedy (try to guess which one) and we're now choosing a drama just so the bases are covered.

So I put it to you, blogosphere: have you ever seen "Nip/Tuck," "The Shield" or "Joan of Arcadia"? And if so, whaddya think?

blindness escapes me

6/14/04

Ten years ago, I was living on a farm outside Chapel Hill, NC with my beloved friends Annie and Greg. One cold afternoon, Ann said she wanted to go hiking on our property, so I agreed. Curiously, I took my contact lenses out and put on glasses, which is something I NEVER used to do during the day (childhood psychoses, etc., but I'll get to that some other time).

During our hike, a sharpened branch stuck out of a tree, and I saw it too late – it hit the center of my left eyepiece, and threw my glasses to the ground. I was sure then, as now, that I would have been blinded in that eye if I hadn't uncharacteristically donned glasses a few minutes before. What's more, I heard a voice say "That was the first time. You will be tested twice more." And I believed it.

Two years ago I was stapling insulation to the underside of the house upstate. The staple gun was designed by Swedes or something, so it was hard to tell which end was which. I guessed incorrectly, and it sent a staple right under my eyeball, only a half-inch away. "Number two," the voice in my head said.

Today, I was roto-tilling the garden, which is incredibly hard, loud and dangerous, especially when you're doing it with a 6hp beast that looks like a villain from an early Superman comic. After tilling about 1600 square feet, I was exhausted, sweat pouring all over, barely able to stand up. I took off my Carolina hat, removed my sunglasses, and tried to wipe my forehead.

Stuck in my glove was a thistle-covered stick, and as I went to my brow, it stabbed me just below the right eyelid. As blood went down my face, I shouted "NUMBER THREE!" did a little dance, and happily chucked the stick into the cow pasture.

O Canada, my maple leaves

6/13/04

It pays to have friends in other countries, especially if you decide you can't live in your own – you know, if a certain somebody gets re-elected – which is only one of several reasons we love to hang out with Peter Rukavina and his family. Down from their digs on Prince Edward Island, the Rukavina clan joined us for a picnic by the Bash Bish Falls and walked with us around the farm, while Peter counseled me about my growing desire to quit blogging entirely.

While up on the hill, however, I checked in on our baby maple sapling, the one that is replacing the tree that fell down the night before I proposed to Tessa. It seems to be thriving, and since I can be quite boring, I have been taking pictures.

our li'l maple tree in October, December and June

look for light in everyone

6/10/04

I attended a Quaker Middle School Graduation today in Boston, and anyone familiar with the Friends knows these things are handled by "silent meeting" – basically, all 500 parents and well-wishers sit in an auditorium with the graduates in complete silence until someone is moved to say something.

Coming from a tightly-wound-up antebellum-repressed prep school in the South, this sort of thing seemed like Communion on Planet Xenon to me; I couldn't imagine anything more foreign. At my school, we sat through – nay, endured - the semi-coherent philosophical ramblings of low-rent religious minds pontificating on the merits of good breeding. Sure, the classes were taught by masters in their fields, but the pomp surrounding assemblies and graduations was almost too much to bear.

This Quaker graduation, however, pushed the limits of my boundaries. The gymnasium was well over 95 degrees inside, and they turned off all the fans to ensure silence. At first I was annoyed, then pained - then curiously, a wave of acceptance came over me. I began to think about my own graduations, the measuring sticks these kids were going to use to mark time in their lives, and then I visited old friends in my mind whom I haven't spoken to in 18 years.

In short, it began to sink in what a "silent meeting" actually accomplishes; as long as you get past the first five minutes of short-attention-span hysteria, your mind actually does dilate into a kaleidoscope of other thoughts. Everyone in the gymnasium had a paper fan, so the meeting, though technically "silent," filled with the ambience of wafting air and crinkling paper. It was a little like John Cage's concert piece 4'33" – in which the ambient noise of the audience IS the piece.

After an eternity, someone was finally moved to speak. The first fifteen or so were wonderful. Then, after ten more, a tipping point occurred, and every single person seemed to want to get a word in. Finally, after a couple of hours of this, a participant used the silent meeting – and graduation itself – to vent a past romantic grievance. Sensing a runaway train, the principal of the school quickly grabbed the arms of those next to her, signaling a chain of hands that meant the meeting was over.

We stumbled outside, where the sub-tropical heat had broken into a cool spring thunderstorm. It was the first time since March that Tessa or I had seen or felt rain, and we stared upwards as though we never thought the sky capable of such moodiness.

hate, Hate, HATE!!!

6/9/04

Okay, so I'm up here in Boston and had a great experience today, and it's also Chopin the Dog's 14th birthday AND I know I just blogged about Reagan and everyone got mad at each other and one of my virtual friends is gone because of it, and then I found myself talking about abortion which I swear to god I NEVER do...
BUT...
Please take a look at George Bush's re-election page. That bastard sack of gnu-poop Bush is riding Reagan's still-warm shriveled corpse for political benefit, and it makes me SO FUCKING SICK I COULD JUMP INTO A SWIMMING POOL FULL OF "ICY-HOT."

Has he no shame? More importantly, why did this particular act make me so INCANDESCENT WITH RAGE when there are so many other things to be angry about?

I can only hope that not one single undecided voter in a swing state could be so chunk-minded as to equate Bush with Reagan. Because, as much as a rat bastard Reagan was, Bush would not be fit to caddy for the Gipper at Sawgrass. And even if they thought Bush and Reagan were ideological soulmates, the "memoriam" page on the re-election homepage is so gutlessly smarmy, so acid-drippingly cynical, that I would hope most rational humans would see it for what it is: the pathetic lather-face of a boy pretending to shave with his daddy's razor.

land meant for you and me

6/8/04

Toledo, OH to New York

Jesus, that was a long trip – 5 days from Santa Monica, CA to here in the gliding hills of New England. 3020 miles, 75 gallons of gas in the Prius, which means an average of 40.3 mpg (a little low because we were hauling two bikes, which docked about 8 mpg on average). That's about three SUV-sized tanks of gas, which isn't bad. I'm so tired I can barely put fingers to keyboard. So is the car.

But to give credit where credit is due – I would like to thank:

1. "His Dark Materials Book 1: The Golden Compass" by Philip Pullman
2. The Starbucks with Irish Crème Syrup outside Des Moines, IA
3. The iPod by Apple Computer
4. The makers of various toilet seat covers found in Kansas
5. The new Nantucket® Salad at Arby's
6. The indie coffee shop in Iowa City with Macadamia Nut Syrup
7. Gummi Sour Brite Crawlers
8. Rain-X Windshield Protectant©
9. The FOM™ lumbar support pillow (neon green) from Brookstone
10. the love of a good woman

moaning myrtle

6/7/04

Iowa City, IA to Toledo, OH

My buddy Oliver wrote to me, saying he'd listened to the "His Dark Materials" novels (as Tessa and I are doing right now) and wanted to hear the verdict on Cuaron's "Harry Potter" movie. It's funny how the two book series seem to flirt with each other – both contain witches, a certain level of magic, and a young "chosen one" protagonist – but they are also coming at it from vastly different latitudes.

"His Dark Materials" owes more to "The Odyssey" and various journey-based books like the "Chronicles of Narnia," while the Potter novels draw more from the British canon of school dramas and the orphanism of "The Secret Garden." Comparing the two is apples and oranges, but as audio books, they are both A+ experiences.

I owe an incredible debt of gratitude to J.K. Rowling: it was her first three novels that got me through the initial PTSD I suffered after September 11, and the last two books accompanied Tessa and me through both the Iraq war and our honeymoon. Her incidental characters are the stuff of genius, and the names alone – dementors, the pensive, patronus, even Lucius Malfoy – are totally brilliant. Her novels also got me into the op-ed pages of the New York Times (an edited version can be read here without paying the archive fee).

The first two movies were okay by me, mostly because they existed. I loved seeing the crane shot of Diagon Alley, and the feast at Hogwarts, even if the rest of the movie was wooden and hokey. Cuaron, however, gets it in the most basic way, by showing the 3rd book to be not so much dark, as darkly comic. I'm a huge sucker for time travel anyway, and the scenes with Hermione's time-turner were EXACTLY as I'd imagined them in my head.

There was a lot this movie left out, obviously. No love interest for Harry, no Snape making the potion for Lupin, no real tension behind Sirius Black's quest for Harry. But I think this is more a flaw with the material rather than the director – it could be that the Potter books are getting too large, complicated, bizarre and subtle to make good movies. My feeling is this will be the best movie of them all, both past and future, because it was an almost-perfect meeting of a long book with a great director. The other films will have to edit out so much that it will cease to be anything approximating the original.

Cuaron had fun, and that's all I wanted. Chris Columbus' movies felt too focus-group-tested, and reminded me of the Hardy Boys with Nancy Drew as Hermione. When the Whomping Willow kept eating the bluebirds in "Azkaban," I knew we finally had a director that was as secretly sadistic as J.K. Rowling herself, and that, my friends, was more than worth the price of admission.

our 40th

6/6/04

Santa Monica, CA to Iowa City, IA

We left California with so many balls in the air that it felt almost unnatural to be zooming out of town with the bikes strapped to the back of the Prius - it's almost like we expected somebody to stop us at the gas station in Barstow and demand that we return. We're leaving things in LA in the capable hands of Fate, and I just hope It knows what It's doing.

A quick glimpse of the Friday-traffic-to-Las-Vegas from a mountain top was all we needed to know; we took a southward journey through Arizona, which ended up being excruciatingly, excruciatingly hot. We got out of the car at one point, and it was the diametric opposite of "The Day After Tomorrow": our faces were flash-frozen with searing heat. The car said it was 110 degrees in the shade, but that seemed low.

We stopped at the only store in that part of Arizona, which contained several signs saying "WE KNOW THESE THINGS ARE OVERPRICED, BUT WE'RE IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE, SO STOP COMPLAINING." To make matters more bizarre, there was no direct way back on the interstate, so we had to take the ancient Route 66 through the god-forsaken desert. I officially dubbed this picture The Last Place in America You Want To Be When You Get a Kidney Stone:

Anyone who has been to Eastern Colorado knows it's about as boring as North Dakota, but it provided a little shortcut here to Iowa. At first we succored ourselves with the Satellite Radio, but all of the news was about Reagan dying, so we delved into the Audio Book of Phillip Pullman's "His Dark Materials," which, by the way, is fabulous.

"His Dark Materials" - which has a plot involving barbarians from the Russian North - actually got me thinking more about Reagan than any lugubrious newscast of his memorial. I should have expected that he was going to receive a eulogy from every network, and breathless recounting of his enduring "vision," but I had no idea it would be so out-of-control as to make us sick.

Here's the truth as I saw it: he was President when I was 12 until I was 20 - an incredible span of my life - and I hated the guy. He was mean-spirited, simple-minded, lacked all nuance and only believed in "Morning in America" if you happened to be white. He never did a thing for minorities, ransacked environmental controls and he gets reductive, laughably ham-minded credit for toppling Communism. His speeches on how he Believed in America were just like the 1980s: hollow, decadent, and full of mousse.

On a personal note, he was a Big Movie Studio guy who took away the tax deductions for independent film investors, thus killing the creative end of the movie industry for decades. Want to know why movies were so amazing in the '70s and now they all suck? He's your man.

The day he joked about the "missiles flying towards Russia" off-camera showed what this guy was truly made of. He began the Republican tradition of "moral certitude" in place of "facts." He shares George W. Bush's low-rent populism; his total incoherence and asleep-at-the-wheel grasp of specifics is passed off as "charmingly homespun," and like Bush, he got away with it.

He filled me with fear, and made me feel very, very alone. And worst of all, he's the spiritual godfather of every right-wing campus politico nut you ever knew in college, the kind of guy that is now running for the House of Representatives in Virginia and hopes to make sure you have no control over your own uterus.

When I first learned he had been elected, it was 1980 and I was living right here in Iowa. I was very young, but I knew something dark had just happened. Now, in my thirties, I'm back, it's an election year, and I'm fighting for the light.

guarded optimism

6/3/04

When I was 25 years old, I basically won the jackpot: I was asked to be a contributing author to a book that ended up being successful enough that I didn't need to look for work for about two years. Those were two "Chapel Hill years," mind you, which meant that $15,000 could see you through 24 months of rent, movies and middle-shelf bourbon.

publicity still from 13th-GEN in 1993; clockwise from top left: me, Neil Howe, R.J. Matson, Bill Strauss

I kept waiting for my life to take off, you know, for the book to propel me into the stratosphere. As soon as the sales came in, I would find a girlfriend, I would be able to write novels, I would be able to do anything I want. I have to say it was my Dad who brought me wisdom I was unwilling to hear: "no one artistic event changes everything."

I rested on my pathetic laurels instead, and paid for it by having Nervous Breakdown #1 in 1994. Later on, when we were finishing financing for the Pink House movie, I became convinced that certain elements, once finished and paid for, would propel the movie into the stratosphere. Again, my dad cautioned me about putting too much stock in any one artistic event, and again, I was schooled by moments of abject despondency when things didn't change.

You are still you in the morning, I came to understand, and thus I've tried to remain as process-oriented as possible. It is with that frank realism that I approach tomorrow's meeting: it will be Tessa and I in a room with a very important entity. If they choose to work with us, it could mean a sea change in the way we will be viewed in the entertainment cosmos.

Or not. I pray for it to go well, but I am relieved by understanding that the Chaos Theory only works if individual moments in your career promise to play well with all the others.

le plus ça change

6/2/04

Our trip to Los Angeles ends on Friday, when we will be motoring back to New York - actually, Boston - in a record four days. I thought I'd try to encapsulate my trips here, just so I can see how the last three months have rated, you know, comparatively.

1980 - Came here at age 12, lived with my cousin Mark in a tent in his backyard, worked catering with my uncle, played hoops, had a deep crush on one of my female cousins, and had a FABULOUS TIME. A+

1986 - Came back after my freshman year in college, worked catering for my uncle again, but was roundly derided as the worst caterer they had seen in 20 years of business. Went broke, alienated my family, was a typical jerk teenager. D+

1988 - Moved here for a few months in the dregs of my parents' divorce, watched my little brother and sister sink into deep angst-filled depressions, played lots of basketball by myself, worked for $5/hour stocking record albums. C

1990 - Upon graduation, moved here and went so stark raving broke that I had to live on a brick of cheddar cheese and a loaf of Brannolaâ„¢ oat bread for one week. Finally got job as New Line Cinema's first intern, and promptly mailed rejection letter to the wrong big-time director. Rear-ended by reggae drummer and lost job (documented here) and retreated back to North Carolina in desolate shame. D-

1997 - Turned 30, and came to Hollywood to shepherd a road-trip screenplay of mine that had been optioned by huge agency. Had meeting with Dreamworks who said they had just bought movie "Road Trip" the day before. Project died. Sank into deep depression by 2nd year, thoughts of suicide in the 3rd. Left town with less friends than I started. F

2004 - Invited by Fox TV to put on a show, was a huge success. Noticed by people in the industry, pitching a bevy of great ideas, loving my wife who turns out to have a gift for TV writing. Meet tons of great people, have fun practically every night, writing at a good clip, played hoops with same cousins from 1980 and had a FABULOUS TIME. A+

1980 and 2004

joys of 9-year-old technology

6/1/04

I'll tell you right now: I'm the biggest gaybot ever when it comes to new technology. Like Garrity, I can't help but have the latest updates of everything, and I read Gizmodo with the kind of primal longing usually reserved for 3rd graders planning a trip to Magic Mountain.

That said, there were two bandwagons I was late to jump on: the iPod, which I only bought long past the time when it was cool - and a webcam, which I finally got working TODAY.

Obviously, webcams were one of the first reasons anyone got broadband, and chicks were undressing for them way back in 1995. I always considered them vulgar, intrusive and useless. But something about the new iSight at Apple gave me pitter-pats and slight vasocongestion, so I saved up money from my paper route in 1981 and decided to buy one.

Problem is, I don't know anyone else with an iSight to chat with, so we bought one for Sean & Jordana as well. With a minimum of fuss, I logged on to the computer around sunset tonight in Santa Monica, while Sean did the same in Queens (pitch black outside).

The picture quality is fabulous, so don't let these screen shots sway you - I blew the image up to fit the gargantuan screen, so it became pixelated. When kept at the regular size, it was like watching television, only the shows were set in our living rooms 3200 miles from each other. There was only a slight delay, and the audio was impeccable.

Sean took us on a guided tour of his apartment (recently re-arranged) and we showed him the sun setting over the Pacific Ocean and the plants blooming in our back yard. HOW UNBELIEVABLY AWESOME IS THAT?

Yeah, so it won't feed the Sudan, and it won't fix the financial woes of South America, but I'm still enough of a Poindexter Spaz to find this technology cooler than the Pink Floyd The Wall Laser Show.