xtcian

spirit of the staircase

5/31/06

I mean, really: what business was it of mine anyway?

Every time I take a cool, hard stare at myself, I'm stunned at the level of "control" I seem to desire. Why can't I just let people live where they want to live, make the mistakes they're going to make, and understand that my involvement, while occasionally cute and very occasionally germane, doesn't necessarily make anything better?

I so wish I hadn't said anything, just enjoyed the company and not worried about Changing Anyone for the Better. Perhaps it was all those years fighting to be heard by a family with too many voices and conflicting agendas, maybe we all learned the lesson that to get what you desired in our house, you had to scream, cajole and manipulate. That might have worked in that microcosm, but the greater world sees the plan, and like God, it laughs.

Everyone knows I'm just here on a thread of coincidences anyway, right? A few unmade beds and a wrong left turn, and I'd still be back in some house somewhere, suffering from a surfeit of ideas and a poverty of cash, nursing crushes and resentments on roommates and wondering if the Insurgency had begun and I missed it.

Who says I have any idea what the right path is for anyone else, when my own journey was fraught with such bullshit? I feel like the opposite of the "Footprints" parable, with the worst of times being littered with a gazillion footprints in the sand, and my path being as garbled as cursive. If someone had come to me in my lowest hour and been even the slightest bit judgmental, I'd have told them to fuck off but fast.

I am calling a moratorium on my advice. I begged my friends to move to a place that was quickly attacked with three thousand perished, what the fuck do I know? I have set people up on dates because I liked the idea of them being together, and only served to embarrass myself. From now on, I am just trying to be a worker among workers, no more dime-store interventions, no master plans.

I'm here as a favor, through the kindness of strangers, through the good graces of those who love me. In return, I can provide witty banter, an hour or three of in-depth analysis of minutiae, a three-shot latté with Macadamia Nut syrup, pretty much any pop song on guitar, and a trundle bed for you to rest on. I will try not to presume anything more.

l'État, c'est la Bug

5/30/06

Sometimes, in the whirlwind of living the trees at the expense of the forest, I keep these blogs with very little sense of the larger picture. I've looked back upon certain entries (since it will be me and maybe a family member who will ever do so) and wondered what the hell I was up to, you know, in general.

So, future self, we're spending one more day in New York before gathering up little Lucy and flying to Nice, France on Thursday night. Nice the city, not the adjective, although I'm sure it'll be much more than just nice. My dear old friend (and oft commenter) Jiffer, the beautiful maid from Door County, Wisconsin will be marrying Ingo, the handsome Italian/German lad she met the very last night she was in college.

I'll try to blog from there, since it will be worth etching in digital stone, and apparently there's wireless all over the Côte D'Azur. After three days there, we're scooting up to Paris, where we Craigslisted a sweet little flat in the Marais district for a week. I plan on doing some writing, walking in several gardens with my wife, and dipping meat into a fondue pot. That is, as long as Lucy lets us. Our current refrain is "I woulda seen London, I woulda seen France, if it weren't for Lucy's underpants."

From there, it's back to NYC for a week of business (and hopefully basketball), and then we hunker down in Los Angeles for the television development season until the fall. It's a good plan, and we're sticking to it.

In the meantime, Paris is not a city I know that well, so I'm soliciting advice from those who have been... namely, where do you think we should go, as long as it can accommodate a stroller full of cuteness and the time it takes for me to walk off three shots of espresso? Is there anything you wouldn't miss for the world? Qu'est-ce qu'on fait?

jarts still not unpacked

5/29/06

I'm always a bit loath to mention get-togethers on here because they can seem exclusionary or boring to those who weren't in attendance, BUT... I had an amazing birthday, and the Jartacular went off quite swimmingly. I'm always too busy trying to get the talent show to work and trying to write questions for the quiz show to take pictures, so I usually leave that up to the infinitely more talented (Susan Stava and Lars Lucier).

somehow, this always happens: the cows gather to watch us grill hamburgers

Sean and Jordi got me one of those labelmaker guns from the '70s, yo!

the post-quiz-show dance-off went into the witching hours

a couple of hot chix I met at the party

cumpleanos

5/25/06

Hi, I'm Ian. It's 12:06am on May 26, and it just became my birthday six minutes ago. To celebrate, I quelled my cold with a shot (and a half!) of NyQuil. Everyone have a fantastic Memorial Day weekend and KEEP ROCKING!!!

what's your pleasure

5/24/06

Lucy had a temperature of 105.1 last night, which was odd, not because she temporarily became the hottest human being I've ever touched, but because the rest of the night I couldn't stop thinking about 105.1 FM, a radio station I loved when I was a kid. It was one of those stations that played all the new music first: REM, early Thompson Twins, Erasure, the Vapours.

Then one day they said they were switching to an "Urban Contemporary" format. And sure enough, I tuned in at 8am as the station switched over. Their first song? "Celebration" by Kool and the Gang. I have never been so depressed by a song in my life, and now, when I hear it, I feel gloomy.

Lucy's temperature is back to around normal - you know, because babies are made of rubber and titanium - but her worried parents need a little more time. Plus, I need a song to get "Celebration" out of my head. Suggestions welcome.

hearts and bones

5/23/06

After my "entertainers, don't bore me" rant yesterday, Sean wrote something that shouldn't be ignored, namely that the general populace has less respect for artists than the artists do for the general populace. Also, any rallying cry for art to be entertaining can necessarily be like Homer pounding the set, screaming "stupid TV, be more funny!"

I'd like to clarify the point. I have been to a lot of productions over the last fifteen years that have had several fatal flaws. In no particular order, here are some:

1. Artist writes play or movie and thinks that sarcasm, snark or pop culture references can take the place of plot.
2. Artist writes play or movie and purposely obfuscates the material, and when you wonder what the hell is going on, you are told it is "non-linear" or "a tone poem" and thus artist can get away with whatever he/she wants.
3. Artist writes perfectly brilliant pop song, then purposely dumbs it down or makes it sound bad so as not to appear "twee" and then calls it "lo-fi."
4. Artist releases slightly sub-par material into the universe but figures nobody will notice, and besides, they're lucky he bothers to make art anyway.

Obviously, I think number 4 is the worst because I've seen it in myself, or at least I occasionally see it in things I've done since 1990. This is going to sound like braggadocio, but everyone in my family has always been effortlessly good at pretty much everything they try. Not GREAT, mind you, but good enough to seem impressive. It has always been this ability to impress that has made us - or should I say, me (not to speak for anyone else) - unbelievably lazy during certain times when I should have been working the hardest.

I won't say which things I've done that have borne the mark of this sort of nonchalance, but it pains me even now to think how much better certain projects could have been. It was only when I dropped 45% of my ego that I was able to see these compromises for what they were. You don't have to be in AA to realize you're just a worker among workers.

Here's the double-edged sword of modern artmaking: most modern artistic success seems just random enough for a lot of folks to give up trying hard. Also, there is this persistent idea of "the natural," the person who walks into an artistic endeavor with absolutely no training and is better than everyone else (this is talked about in acting circles all the time). However, I don't think would-be artists understand how impossibly rare a "natural" is, especially in anything that requires more than instinct (everything from writing... to, say, the violin).

And artistic success still comes from an unbelievable amount of dedication. It's when you start confusing fame (a cast member from "The Real World") with talent (a cast member of "Wicked") that you fool yourself into a level playing field.

My bigger point is this: excellence. It is a word that means everything when it comes to people at the highest form of their craft, and at some point in the last fifteen years, it also became a punchline. But when I exhort artists to "have their characters move from Point A to Point B" or to "SAY SOMETHING," I don't necessarily mean to be funny, to shout, or to have stuff explode. I only mean to be excellent.

Before, I'd work on long projects, like a novel or a screenplay or a musical, and invariably, at some point, something wouldn't quite work. I used to glom over it, figure than none of you would catch it, and it was good enough anyway, and besides, you were lucky I was doing even THAT much work. I don't behave that way anymore.

Those little errors, those little compromises went from being unseen hangnails to full-blown infections, too late for treatment. Any sliver, no matter how small, works its way to the surface. These days, I stop in my tracks and FIX THE PROBLEM right then and there, in the pursuit of excellence. You may not actually "like" what I come up with, but god dammit, it's not going to be for the lack of giving a shit.

I'd rather "go for something" and fail, even if that something was a small, quiet reflection. Listen to Paul Simon:

One and one-half wandering Jews
Free to wander wherever they choose...

If you aren't going for excellence, even in a tiny moment like that, I'm through with you. Oh, I'll stay after the show and congratulate you and buy concessions to promote the idea of art, but you'll have wasted the biggest joy: true commiseration with a fellow human being who, for a split second, actually knew who you were.

wake up!

5/22/06

Every May sees the finale of your favorite shows, but it feels like I've been saying goodbye to a bevy of them lately. I've already bemoaned the short-lived wonders of Heist, Eyes, In Justice and Arrested Development (among others) but the last few weeks, two of my favorite shows ever have shuffled off this mortal cathode ray coil: "The West Wing" and "Alias."

Series Finales are very hard to pull off; the best ones in history came from eleventh-hour bursts of inspiration, like "M*A*S*H" and especially "Newhart" (where Bob Newhart wakes up in his apartment next to Suzanne Pleshette and says "I had the weirdest dream..."). Usually, however, they're self-indulgent, plodding and sad in the wrong ways.

"West Wing" was an offender in this case: it seemed like a lot of busy work, very little plot, and people looking at empty rooms with wistful smiles. I liked watching it because I love the characters, but they did not "dance with who brung 'em," given the repartee associated with Aaron Sorkin's creation.

"Alias" fared much better tonight, if only (as I have) completely suspended all disbelief and stopped groaning at some point in Season 3. Here's the thing about "Alias" - as crazy as it was, it was always human. Even in tonight's finale, as Sydney was kicking someone's ass in a maximum security Italian prison, she was on the earpiece to her dad Jack, who was back in Venice rocking her child to sleep on the kitchen counter.

I will miss Marshall, Lena Olin, Carl Lumbly, and even the wooden Vaughn. Most of all, I think a Series Achievement Emmy should go to Jennifer Garner, who kept that show afloat with stunning intensity and wonderful acting that belies her genetically perfect/bizarre face. The casting in that show, clear down to minutae like Sark and the "Sloane Clone" (Joel Grey) was always spot-on perfect, and Michael Giacchino's score was consistently brilliant.

My soft spot, in both "Alias" and "West Wing" goes to Allison Janney (C.J.) and Ron Rifkin (Arvin Sloane) because they're both friends with Tessa's crowd, and they're both some of the nicest people on earth. Ron even played with Lucy in the front yard a few weeks ago!

with Allison Janney and my hair, 2002

The bigger point is this: it was always cool to talk about how both "West Wing" and "Alias" weren't as good as they used to be; "the show lost focus when Sorkin left," "Season 2 was the only good one on Alias," all that crap. For me, that meant that those two shows were merely 20 times better than anything else, rather than the usual 40.

Coming up with a good TV series pitch is hard. Coming up with a pilot is very hard. Coming up with one good season of a show is very, very hard. And getting a show to stay on the air for five years with millions of viewers weekly is damn near impossible, but these two shows did it, and usually did it with magic.

I've been to a lot of theater lately, and I've sat through a number of movies and plays, and what has struck me is how disrespectful certain artists are with my fucking time. In a play, you've got what - an hour or two? - to say anything you want, and you've chosen to say nothing? I saw a showcase full of short plays the other night, and I was FLABBERGASTED that each writer had five minutes and did almost NOTHING with it.

Life is too fucking short, and you've got me captive. I'm there, in my seat, I've paid money, I drove, I've gotten a babysitter, I'm yours. Tell me something. TELL ME ANYTHING. You've had weeks of preparation and a lifetime of experiences. GIVE ME ONE OF THEM!

In medicine, the Hippocratic oath begins, as everyone knows, "First, do no harm." I would like to demand a Hippocratic oath for entertainment: "First, do not bore."

People may have had their problems with "West Wing" and "Alias," but things MOVED from Point A to Point B, usually with a flurry of activity and a soupcon of intrigue. They may have been silly, they may have gone over-the-top, but they NEVER bored.

If there's one thing I try to do with your time each weekday, it's NOT TO BORE YOU. When the day comes that I have truly nothing to offer, I will close up shop, no questions asked. Everything I've done in my artistic life has been in the service of avoiding boredom for both you and me. I don't always bat a thousand, but I'm still swinging; in "The Pink House," I tried too hard, in our TV specs, we got it right.

Either way, I'd like to issue a declaration to my generation, to those writing novels and movies and television shows: wachet auf! Arouse yourself from your solipsistic slumber and make some art that MOVES! Write something where a protagonist goes from A to B! No more looking out the kitchen window at a swingset, no more using the word "azure," no more stories where the lead never gets out of the bathtub! STEP UP TO THE PLATE AND SAY SOMETHING!

let my cameron go

5/21/06

Hey starfuckers! Who would have thought we'd see more fah-moose people in NYC than a month in Los Angeles? Here's how it works: Tessa and I end up next to - or in the vicinity of - famous person. Being from Eastern Iowa and the South, I still believe in the magic of movies and entertainment and haven't been jaded by decades of celebrity. Thus I start wagging my tail like a Labrador puppy.

I nudge Tessa and say "hey, isn't that [insert famous person here]? She says "no, it's [insert another famous person here], what the hell is wrong with you?" I tell her to talk to the famous person, because Tessa is always one degree of separation away from all of them, and I'm usually about three.

She tells me to quit bugging her, so I go up to Famous Person and say, "aren't you [insert first name here]? My wife knows [insert other name here] and she said you were awesome to work with." Almost always, the celebrity is delighted to chat with any kind of inside pool (or theater gossip) and before long, they are playing with Lucy, and then Tessa comes over and she and the famous person talk about stuff. It's awesome.

This has allowed me to meet several of my heroes from youth, as well as folks from movies whose lines I use every day. For instance, last night at The Caine Mutiny on Broadway (starring our fabulous Geoffrey Nauffts, I ended up sitting right next to Jeffrey Jones, known to you as Ferris Bueller's principal.

Anyway, he has a line in "Beetlejuice" about Otho "viciously rearranging his environment" that pretty much defines Lucy wherever she goes, so we struck up a conversation with him, and eventually he and Tessa started talking about theater stuff. Score!

Earlier in the week, we were in Massachusetts buying baby food when Lauren Ambrose (Claire from "Six Feet Under") ambles up to the bulk aisle and dispenses some oats. Five minutes later, she and Tessa are talking about the high school they both went to.

Oh, and later last night I slid against Bradley Cooper in the men's room (I'm a huge "Alias" fan) and then we ALMOST thronged ourselves into Julia Roberts, whose play is up right next to "Caine Mutiny".

Sean always makes fun of my little adventures in starfucking, and I admit it's fun, but here's my ground rules: I only talk to people when there's an "in," I only bother people if I've actually loved a specific thing (or piece of art) they've created, and if there is none of these things, I don't even look at them as they pass out of respect to their privacy.

You know how many times Jeffrey Jones hears "there goes Ferris Bueller's principal" whispered each time he passes a crowd? Think of how much worse it is for the truly famous. They don't need someone else looking deep into their eyes in a frantic longing to see what makes them so ineffably special. I'm more than happy to embarrass myself in front of a private hero and let the A-list superstar glide by.

these robeez were made for stumbling

5/18/06

There was a request from one side of Lucy's godmothers for pictures of The Bug, so please allow me to indulge a little. I can't say these are rampantly iconoclastic, because we're just enjoying Lucy's newfound toddler status and bask in the glow of her penumbra. Truly, it's her world, and we're just living in it.

Probably her best friend is Hank Drucker, son of Jesse Drucker and Nell Casey. Hank is six weeks younger than La Luce, and the two are like twins, the same size (she's 15th percentile in weight, and so's he) and they totally love to hug and eat with each other. Platonically, of course:

She's been demanding her own spoon to feed herself, which meets with mixed results. I know every kid has a picture like this, but the diaspora of mango covering the kitchen was insane. She got most of it in her eyeballs:

She loves the farm and the cows, especially now that she getting the idea she can actually "go" where she wants, by, you know, "walking." This spring has been especially beautiful upstate:

This picture is for my mom, who got her the jammies for Christmas. She has another 4-5 months before they'll fit, but she loves to tool around like a spacewoman:

Oh yeah, she loves to be naked. I don't know why Tessa took her shirt off for breakfast, but it was met with immense pleasure:

God, I love this little punkinboots! (Although you're lucky you weren't in the car with her for two hours this afternoon)

would you pour me a martini, lovey?

5/17/06

All this talk of Catholics, recovering or otherwise, coincided with a question Tessa asked tonight: namely, is WASP - White Anglo-Saxon Protestant - a redundancy? More specifically, are there any White Protestants who aren't already Anglo-Saxon? If you take "Anglo-Saxon" to mean any Germanic tribes that invaded the Celtic island of Britain and thus became "the English," you've got precious few white people left to work with.

I came up with a semi-lame answer, and Tessa thought of a semi-good one. I seem to recall that the French Huguenots were Lutherans (or Calvinists) at a time when the rest of 16th-century France were all Catholic. They were accepted at first, but by the time Louis XIV came around in the 1680s, they were all getting their ass kicked and fled to various places, including America.

Thus, any descendents of the French Huguenots that landed in America - notably New Paltz, NY and parts of South Carolina, would not technically be WASPs, they'd be WFNPs (White Franco-Norman Protestants). Yes, I know the Normans conquered the Anglos and Saxons and messes that up, but you gotta give me some props for getting that far, dontchya think?

Tessa's idea centered around the Scandinavians who settled the Midwest part of America, folks like Kent's wife (my sister-in-law) Melissa, who has lived in Iowa her whole life and comes from Norwegian stock. The Norse were polytheists with an extensive mythology until Christianity came around in the 1100s to make them thoroughly boring (no more raids, pillagin' - nothing!)

Since they are primarily Lutheran, that would mean that Melissa is no WASP - she'd be a WVP (White Viking Protestant) - along with all her friends in North Dakota and Minnesota.

Look, I know the term WASP was invented to describe preppies and monied families who send their kids to Exeter and Dartmouth, as well as a way to differentiate between themselves and other White People like Catholics and Jews, but if we're going to use a term, why can't we just call them White Protestants? It seems like a weird way to set yourself apart from a couple of Huguenots in Charleston and my sister-in-law. Or am I missing something?

extra! extra! mrs. frances best stays for week-end!

5/16/06

I'm lovin' the recent troubles the Bush Administration has been getting into - for a quick précis, you can't do better than Jon Stewart's brilliant video clip about the phone tapping surveillance scandal perpetrated by the Powers That Be. When I say I'm lovin' it, it's because I don't actually care that much about the topic. Yes, it means that BushCo™ has officially rolled up the Constitution and smoked it, but I confess this is an issue that doesn't get me enraged like so many others do.

Perhaps it's because I think it's funny how many billions and billions of phone calls they have to go through - kids whining to their mothers to pick them up from violin lessons, ninth graders gossiping about the new cute kid in biology class, old farts complaining about their goiters, and then me leaving messages on Lindsay's answering machine about his basketball skillz. They say it's the biggest database in human history, and you know what? They can have it.

Its effectiveness in fighting terror has got to be downright laughable. I can't imagine a terrorist stupid enough to discuss plans on either a landline or a cell phone, and even then, did they get the guy from NUMB3RS to come up with an Aural Algorithmic Syllable Enhancement Matrix© to weed them out? No, this is a nice time to watch our Administration twist in the wind, and I'm feeling nothing but good old-fashioned schadenfreude as our Simian-in-Chief's numbers sink into the roaring '20s.

It was on my mind today, however, when I went through some of the research materials I gathered while writing Tessa's book. Here is a detail from the local Columbia County paper printed May 12, 1939:

Man, talk about surveillance! You couldn't do ANYTHING without the locals finding out!

How about Hughes Dearlove entertaining his twin brother from Oriskany? Can't Georganna Steuerwald spend "part of last week" with relatives in peace? And for the love of god, can't you leave Pearl DeGrosso and her "operation" alone? Big Brother in 2006 is scary, but in 1939, if you got hemorrhoids, you might want to hide in your larder.

god waited patiently in the days of noah

5/15/06

We just got back from visiting Tessa's family in Cambridge, MA, and though it's always wonderful to hole up with them for a few days, I really do have to say something about the weather: UN-FUCKING-BELIEVABLE. We found ourselves in Boston in the middle of the worst continuous rainstorm with the most flooding since 1938, even beating out The Perfect Storm in buckets of water dumped. I know a blog about the weather has a half-life roughly that of unrefrigerated haddock, but you people should really experience this.

The worst part, as I'm sure you can imagine, is the dreariness. It'd been raining for five days before we got there on Saturday; it rained all weekend, and the forecast promised three more days of it. It's all anyone could talk about. We stopped at a pizza joint outside Harvard Square, and the old ladies and cops sounded like they wanted to kill themselves.

We keep telling ourselves to soak it in, because once we go back to Los Angeles, we won't see another raindrop for four months. The sun, especially for those of you living in the San Fernando Valley or in the flats of Hollywood, can have its own sort of oppression; when you see a big bank of clouds in August, you find yourself wishing it towards you.

But here and now, it's a lot to take. When we got back to Columbia County this afternoon, a freak band of clouds split up, and the sun came out for forty minutes. It was unthinkable joy, just pure delight. When we were kids in London, we used to joke about the BBC's weather forecast: they would call for "sunny intervals," which literally meant forty-five seconds of sunlight. When the sun would break through, someone would shout, and we'd all run outside and take a picture of ourselves, thus all the shots from that era are incongruously sunny:

during a "sunny interval" at Michelle's birthday party, London 1977

So during today's sunny patch we took Lucy to meet the cows, who she adored. But we couldn't stay out long, because something worse than abject sun or neverending rain came along. A brutal bout of it, too. Apparently the worst piece of weather humans can experience, leading to uncontrollable anger, depression and suicide, is wind. Thank god we have each other to huddle around.

island of la grande jatte

5/14/06

I've mentioned it before, but the Speaking of Faith audio programs on public radio just keep getting better, and inspired some pretty basic questions before we went to bed the other night. One of the oldie but goodies is "how do you reconcile unthinkable evil in a religion with a beneficent God?" - you know, the one that always flummoxes the 9th graders in their Introduction to Theology class.

SOF tackled the question, and many interviewees of several religions said, basically, that all things are measured against evil, and thus any Deity is necessarily defined against how bad the world can be. I can buy that, I suppose: the worthiness of our entire lives is based on consequence - if there were no choice, then things would be utterly boring, and god knows there would be no Art.

However, if you take Occam's Razor and then ask the question again, the Razor will say this: if we know there to be unthinkable evil, and don't necessarily have evidence of a cognitive Creator, isn't the more likely answer "we don't actually have a cognitive Creator"?

This is where religion breaks down for me - Agnostics (and their rude dinner guests, the Atheists) have this bad rap of being godless jerks who hate all religion. In fact, it couldn't be farther from the truth. My agnosticism tells me that ALL religions have an equal chance of being true. I consider the world/universe so big, so beautiful, so ineffably wonderful that I have accepted that I will never know who created it or why I am here.

I think we're all on a Need To Know basis with our Creator, and while I have immense respect for many religions, I've always found most of them to be unbelievably presumptious. To have a book that explains where we are from, where we are going? To have a belief system about the afterlife? I find these things unspeakable, and like describing the color blue, the harder you try, the more you've lost me.

And so I have forsaken religion because I think these things are too big for me, AND I'M OKAY WITH THAT. I don't need any guide, any reasons. Some people do; that's fine, but I get all the God I need when the buds open on cherry trees, when Jerry Stackhouse dunks on Cherokee Parks, when my lovely daughter took her first breath. I prefer to think of our meaning as a pointillist picture, thousands of dots that come into focus when you aren't trying.

But here's a problem: as any of my friends can tell you, I'm a BIG SUCKER for RITUAL. I crave tradition and repetition of "sacred" acts almost to a fault. I am always moved to tears at the little rituals my friends have, the songs my school sing, the oranges in the stockings and the stories about my brother Kent as a toddler.

Take, for instance, the UNC Swim Test. This week will be the last time it will ever be required, and I think that's a horrible shame - not because I loved the fuckin' swim test, but because when we all got up there in our trunks, we were re-enacting something that 20-year-old classmates had done for a hundred years. When something like that is lost, it is lost forever.

There is some special thing that used to be done at UNC from 1818 to 1907. Some great tradition that made everyone laugh and spun stories for generations. But in 1907, some too-cool seniors decided they'd never do it again, and the last ones to remember died twenty years ago. What was the tradition? I have no idea, and nobody ever will.

Part of our annual celebration at the farm is just making sure that my friends and Tessa's friends have a High Holy Day. It may be silly, we may never play Jarts, but by god, it occurs. It happens. Even the worst ones are pretty damned good.

Being agnostic really sucks for those of us who crave ceremony. Religion not only provides answers for those who need them, but it also means you get together and say things, mean things, that your forefathers said and meant for thousands of years. How are the rest of us supposed to compete? I admit that's one part of the Church, whatever yours may be, that makes me lost with envy.

yucky old blanket

5/11/06

This has been a nutso week for us in New York, which means I've neglected my duties on the blog, but I just wanted to say a quick word about my brother Sean, whose birthday was today. We both consider ourselves lucky to have married such incredible women who not only put up with our peccadilloes, but find us charming - and recently we both started playing golf at the same time, so that we can talk shit outside rather than over email.

Along with my sister Michelle, we all feel like we were POWs of the same prison, i.e., my family's house during the '70s and early '80s. Curiously enough, I felt like I was a terrible big brother to both of them, so venal and miserable that I fought them for every scrap of comfort there was to be had. Our relationship had deteriorated so badly by the time we were teenagers that we got into a fight with actual rocks and huge clods of dirt - our grandmother, babysitting at the time, called us "simpletons," and if you knew Klea Worsley, you knew we'd really fucked up.

Sean had friends and girlfriends from day one, and if you've read any sample entry from this blog over the last four years, you'll know that I did not. However, despite our shared but utterly separate misery, Sean always made me laugh more than any motherfucker on earth, and when we got older and the unbelievably moronic battles from 1983 sloughed off like dry snakeskin, we had the instant advantage of each others' company.

Nobody else knows what we went through, only the three of us, and occasionally my older brothers Steve and Kent. It's so important to me, this commiseration, that I'm a little hellbent on making sure Lucy has a brother or a sister. We will think about another kid when she turns three (that's the plan, anyway) but it won't be the atavistic longing of my ex-Mormon loins. It will be because I think it's a terrible loss to miss out on the adult relationship of siblings.

Yes, the Battle of French Fries in the back seat of the car from age 6 to 16 is an UNBELIEVABLE DRAG, but in most cases, it really does mean everything in the world a few decades later. I can say it now: I really am thankful for wanting to kill my brother for telling Eric's sister I had a crush on her, now that we are much older, know all the stories by heart, and are very much alive.

good stories only happen to those who can tell them

5/10/06

We saw a wonderful little play tonight in the Village (The Mistakes Madeline Made) and it served as an unrelated clarion call to me and Tessa about what kind of writers we want to be, and what kind of life we want to have.

Moreover, it reminded me that I have not answered the question that has been asked in the comments section for six months now: what the hell is going on with our TV deal? First, I should say that there are two reasons I've been so stupidly coy about it - first, T and I are writing partners and since she doesn't really have a say on this blog, it wouldn't be fair to represent her on here. Secondly, you have to play your cards extremely close to your chest in the business for your own survival's sake.

There are other people who keep blogs about being in the entertainment industry, but many of them do it anonymously, and I'm sure several are in producerial positions where a blog can only help. I think we're in a position where any gossip, story updates or... anything on here has the possibility of getting in our way. As you might have guessed, keeping this blog alive despite any ability to talk about our current livelihood has been fairly excruciating at times.

However, most of the networks will be announcing their new shows for the fall this week, and though our particular show won't be on it, I have to say that we got farther in the process than any first-timer dared dream. Just getting a script deal - meaning that a major network paid us handsomely to write a pilot - still raises hairs on the back of my neck. You can go decades without getting that far, and we did it in our second season of being in LA (and our first season when we knew, sorta, what we were doing).

It was a script that was loosely autobiographical on Tessa's behalf, and we'll definitely revisit it over the next few years as other projects take shape. Having this under our belt also greases a few wheels, and we've committed to giving television our full attention for the foreseeable future. I mean, it's fun, right? As I constantly say, we're in the midst of a mini-Golden Age, and the electricity going around the television studios these days is pretty thrilling.

In the meantime, we are in New York City, filling up with the stunning humor and intellect of our friends, saturating ourselves with amazing stories acted in front of us by fearless artists, and watching Lucy awaken to the world with wonder. When we work, we are tucking away unheard-of ideas, snippets of dialogue and bizarre plot twists for the next season, beginning in a few short weeks.

Oh, and I didn't answer another question: the secret in the barn wasn't a huge deal or anything, but I found a note left in pencil fifteen feet up on one wall, on the second floor:

Altered in Photoshop for clarity, it says "Henry Haywood, Aug. 9, 1891." It took me months to find out he was an eighteen-year-old carpenter's apprentice who no doubt climbed an old ladder and signed his name while nobody was looking, just so a piece of him could live on into the future. 113 years later, I found it.

But what if it had been a clue to something else? A message meant for a future owner? A treasure, a warning, a story? Stow that thought away, and use it for another project.

first of the Mohicans

5/9/06

It's harder and harder to pull off surprise parties as you get older, as the subtleties of your actions, even if they are the tiniest bit off, can resonate as profoundly odd. We did manage to surprise Tessa at Scottadito tonight; she always suspects I'm up to something in the 2nd week of May, but she's never sure quite what. Sometimes I surprise her with an ice skating adventure, sometimes I give her an iPod, and occasionally, I propose marriage.

This year I gave her something two entire years in the making: a book I wrote and illustrated called "The Almost Entirely True Story of Knob Hill Farm." Our place in Columbia County was once a "guest house" called Knob Hill Farm, built in 1818. I began the project as a 1st Wedding Anniversary present (you know, the "paper" anniversary) but instead, I went down the rabbit hole.

For months I scoured the upstate public libraries, pored through baptismal and birth certificates, leafed through countless ancient maps in Massachusetts, studied the local Indian tribes, and put the pieces together going back to the seventeenth century. Finding the original ledger for the farmhouse goods dated in 1823 sealed the deal, and we even uncovered a secret in the barn. I managed to whittle it down to 25 pages with photographs, and when I finally finished it - about eight minutes before her surprise dinner - the massive bête noire lifted.

There's a ton of cool stuff in there, but you know how I like picture re-creations. I'm a real sucker for 'em, I tellya.

above: Bob Nelson Sr., 1959; below: me, 2004

ellen valentine

5/8/06

When you read this, it will be the birthday of a particularly cool chick I know, a woman that I refer to as "my wife" when I really want people to get out of my way. She got mad at me a few weeks ago when I said she stopped reading my blog, because she thought it made her look unsupportive. So she really does still read it (as long as I'm not delving into another futile discussion of politics) and I wanted to tell her out in the open that she is the coolest chick since Cleopatra, Helen and Penelope.

She says that her birthday has been rendered somewhat meaningless with the birth of our little punkinboots, but I think denying your One Special Day makes you not only a masochist, but a commie. If anything, she needs her birthday more than ever, because so much of our mental energy has gone into The Bug. We promised that we would never become the kind of parents that lose themselves in Utter Babyland, and having a great birthday is the best vaccine.

I loved the recent story that quoted a study saying if stay-at-home moms actually got paid for their work, they'd get $131,121 a year. If that mom had another job, the overtime work of also being a mom at home would net $85,876. What makes that study so cool is how specific the numbers are; no fucking around!

I'm assuming that study dealt with absentee or "I work all day so don't bother me" dads, but even if it didn't, a man's inability to understand the core of a woman is disturbingly shabby. I'm not trying to be all twee and boring, but I largely gave up comparing myself with Tessa after three weeks of dating. All I can do is put forth my best, and occasionally hit a 3-pointer at the buzzer.

Thirty-something years ago in a hospital room in Texas, my girlfriend sprang forth in a Taurus with Leo rising. Over in San Jose, I was just beginning to form my preference for the female gender. Oh, thank god they collided!

Tessa and Sandy, 1970-ish

slipping a mickey

5/7/06

We're back in Brooklyn, NY and COULD NOT be happier. The weather here is astounding and a quick jaunt through Prospect Park and 7th Avenue with Lucy answered many soul questions I didn't know were being asked.

I could go on and on, but here's the deal: on the plane flight out here, just before takeoff, I took a Xanax pill and washed it back with some crappy champagne they were offering. Usually I can get 2-3 decent hours of sleep out of such a medicinal treatment, but - as of this morning, I slept thirty-one out of thirty-six hours. Unbelievable. I fell asleep mid-sentence while talking to my wife last night.

Tessa says it's because I've been running and lost a bunch of weight and my body mass is different. I say the flight attendants were giving away free champagne because it had unprocessed heroin in it.

Either way, I have been floating in a dreamscape and not exactly the most Johnny-on-the-spot father and husband. I feel like I need to go out and hunt bison for my family to make up for it. So that's what I'm doing instead of writing a blog. See you when I've got some meat!

knowing the way to san jose

5/4/06

Before we go back to New York for a month or so, Lucy wanted to show everyone what she learned to do last week!

And only a few minutes later, look how much better she got!

Yeah, YouTube automatically turned them sideways, but whatever - I'm so proud of our little girl!

pair of 45's made me open my eyes

5/3/06

The subject of "tantrums" came up a few days ago, which I imagine is the spectre beheld by every new parent whose cute little McCuddle Bumpkins begins the inexorable march towards brief bouts of existentialism. I should know, apparently mine were the stuff of legend. Every family member my senior loves to spin tales of my Poison Squirrel Dances© and the various onlookers who thought I'd surely ingested three gallons of paint thinner.

We've had no tantrums with Lucy, who by most accounts is passionate, but not to pointless abandon, and usually resorts to her rest state of giggling before long. But we do have to think about what kind of parents we'll be, now that we live in the age when "I'll give you something to cry about" is no longer approved by the American Academy of Pediatrics.

It's the fine line, right? The space between "draconian rulemaker" and "anything goes" must be wide enough for all of us to walk; the former creates kids that lash out against authority in fits of self-destruction, and the latter creates kids who wander through life in vague fits of despair because they have no boundaries against which they can bounce off greatness. Or variations on those themes; you get my point.

Our own upbringing was better and worse than both of those: I felt like we were praised a lot and punished a lot, and occasionally for the same act. The mercuriality of our hosts rendered my brothers and me a little unfit for society, but that's for another blog.

This I do know: I hate any rules being imposed on me whatsoever, but I have historically craved an obedience to a higher structure. This was thrown into sharp relief at my fraternity in college: the Chi Psi Lodge, a ragtag group of intellectuals who wanted to take over UNC, take over the world, and find some girl who would have sex with us, in that order.

As much as I despised the goose-stepping Southern faux military thinking of my prep school, I was more than happy to fling myself at the mercy of my elders at the Lodge; in fact, I think my passion for deference verged on the homoerotic. When I was elected Assistant Social Chairman my sophomore year - which meant cleaning up for a year before actually assuming any duties - I ADORED throwing away beer bottles until 4am because I truly believed I was contributing to the magic of the place.

One night, my junior year, an elder Chi Psi named Marty Clark and I found ourselves talking to the same very lovely girl. Getting drinks, I told him I was thinking of asking her to our formal, when he looked down and said he was thinking of the same. With glee, I told him that I respected him as an Elder Bro and that he should do it. He went on the date and stayed with her a few months, while I pined a little, but somehow the pain felt good. It was for a purpose. In that moment, I understood the medieval self-flagellators who lashed themselves with chains to promote inner ecstasy.

I know when I mention fraternities on here, 3/4ths of you roll your eyes, but if I hadn't had that experience with those 150 guys, I may never have understood men at all. As it was, it took me years to become fluent, as the Gribster will surely attest. Especially in my later years, when I got complacent with success and began to act like Kurtz from "Heart of Darkness".

Yesterday, I started going to a pick-up hoops game in Rustic Canyon, and though I was being über-deferential, I nearly got into a fight with a guy who was jawin' his face off at me. His implacable rudeness, after two attempts at ignoring him, made me want to take a tire iron to his kneecaps. These people sniff me out. So I have both these authoritative problems going on: deference and belligerence in equal parts.

What happened when I was a kid to make this so? Well, scratch that - who cares? The better question is: what kind of parent can we be to Lucy so that she sidesteps these problems altogether? How can we deal with her tantrums and our limits while making her feel part of something bigger, not so shut-off, not so stuck on her precious solipsism like her father?

Today "Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress" came on the stereo, and she bounced up and down like a mosher circa 1992. I thought how wonderful it would be if she learned to play bass, but then I thought, fuck that. There's always chick bassists - why can't she play lead?

are you still there

5/2/06

I went back to the old house yesterday. Vines were overgrowing the staircase leading to the mottled and mildewed door; locked, but the back windows always gave easy purchase. A little shove, and they burst open, and the familiar smell whooshed out like an old sepulchre being pried open.

I had come for some old negatives, long rumored to be in a hallway closet never cleaned, but they were no longer there. Nor were the residents, each of whom had moved out when their fear of change was overcome by their misery. It was palatial, the old house, and each room had died month by month, first losing heat and then electricity. An ancient being whose fingers and toes fell off, then the major organs shut down until nothing was left but the husk.

The floors were the same, I had stained them charcoal, treated them with chemicals. The tile was still there, as we had grouted and all began to loathe each other. Still, the house was cold, bitter cold, the last nook in the mountain to have snow in July. Perfectly situated for no air to come or go, an anaerobic capsule stuck in the Hollywood Hills.

I remembered some of our housemates, rotten people with filthy habits, long ago having lost any sense of decency. I remember the ones that had come from small towns to live in the glitter city, and how they nurtured their resentments and petty quibbles to the status of Greek myths. And I also remembered myself in those hallways, stuck in that room, drinking concoctions of equal parts guilt, shame and indignation.

That kid had sneezed in my soup; I was broke and could not buy another, so I ate, knowing full well I would be sick. And sick I was, for a full month, unable to breathe even though the sun was shining in some other canyon. I took to starting romances just so the first flush of possibility might puncture the gloom.

It was the house where fun, spontaneity and gleeful happenstance went to die. Keep rolling the dice in those rooms, and see how many permutations of "seven" there really are. Nobody came out the better. It was a study in reverse engineering, turning crushes into divorce, and the big ideas into a silent phone.

I saw my name on the wall where we all measured our height, and I felt sad for it, remaining at six feet high in this place, but some things were written in pen. All the other names dotted the different heights, like a memorial for those lost. We etched our names, did our time, and the back window let us out as easily as it had let us in. I went back to the old house yesterday, and I will never do it again.

superego, meet your id

5/1/06

Whatever you do, don't watch this video of Finnish group Armi & Danny singing "I Wanna Love You Tender" in 1978. I repeat, DO NOT WATCH IT. You will be scarred, you will need therapy. I have filled bathtubs full of Listerine, dived in, and still I do not feel purged from this.

Also: do not view the Alien Loves Predator cartoons starting from the first one in the archive. Your will to continue your day job will gradually subside, and you'll get dry macular degeneration from looking at the internet for too long.

While you're at it, don't peruse these brilliant cartoons drawn by Nick Gurewitch [fixed - see comments], as it will make you wonder what YOU were doing for the first two years out of college. Drawn in the style of Edward Gorey at one glance, and the "Nancy" comics in the other, these stunning pieces of nihilism will give you the nightmares your inner child deserves.

But whatever you do, don't you DARE watch this video of Kitty versus Puppy! You will be overwashed by gallons of UNBEARABLE CUTENESS!!!!

Anything else not to do today?