Nails It!

Robert Redford (quoted by Ebert)

"Paris Hilton doesn't have anything to do with anything."

Those Good Old Days

I am a Good Old Days contemporary and am here to say it wasn't just no sex. I'm afraid there also wasn't any dope and and there wasn't much rock and roll. Teendom in the 50s was a sad darn thing, I'll tell you. Don't know how we made it thru. Also, no mobile phones, no freeways, no jet travel, no In-N-Out Burger, no plastic of any kind, no FM radio, essentially no TV, no painless dentistry, no acne treatments, no xerox.... I could go on. Surely there will those who think it was a better, simpler time, but it is unlikely they were there, and I know my own children had a lot more fun and are healthier for it.

(cross posted from pal Roger Ebert's blog)

Fair and Balanced

Tocqueville wrote of his own journalism: 'I never gave in to the temptation to tailor facts to ideas rather than to adapt ideas to facts.' Nice, huh? Wish I could say that myself, but truth is I don't know very many of us who really can. Sad, huh?

(for the quote and a darn good time I am indebted to Greil Marcus' A New Literary History of America)

Dope for the little ones

I'm due to attend a meeting of a non-profit next week. they think I know how to get them in the news and I like what they do. But it reminds me:

I was working for a non-profit, doing some movies, and sat in on their Board meeting to make a report or something. Group, which did good deeds in public schools, had reached a fund raising agreement with Ben and Jerry's ice cream. Mail the specially marked ice cream carton top to Ben or Jerry and my organization gets 25 cents for its work with school children. Something like that. So I'm half listening as the ExDir reports that they've decided on a name for the Ben and Jerry boxtop promotion. It will be called 'Lids for Kids'. I woke up to tell them I thought that might not be a good name for the program.

Sometimes I wish it had gone through. Just to see what happens.

New World View

We did a renovation thing on the apartment by the Bay. Hired a recommended tile guy who turned out to be Cuban. Not his parents or relatives, born there. He sent Michel to lay the stone-- and a lovely job too. Michel is from Chile. (Op. cit) The crew that moved the bearing wall so we could have a normal-sized shower was from Bulgaria. The cabinets and counters, were built by East Oakland Chinese and installed by a Thai. We bought the flooring from a Russian and it was put down by a pair of Mongolians. This is the small job non-unioin construction work force in the Bay Area in the early 21st century. How cool is that.

'K' for 'Killer'

He was my apartment mate in Chicago when we were both going to school there. Older, wiser, much more sophisticated. John L and I hooked up and agreed to get the place, moved our boxes of stuff in, and I took off for a weekend of fun elsewhere. Sometime during that weekend John's girlfriend jumped out of the window of the apartment and died in the courtyard below.

So when I got back one evening John wasn't there, and shortly the police were. They took me in to some Northside cop station and without offering much in return, asked questions about John. I didn't give them much, which was a problem for them, and they made it one for me. Kind of a stand-off. To be fair, on their side it was an unexplained death and a possible witness who wouldn't tell them anything. To me fair, on my side, they wouldn't share either. That lasted a good deal of the night. It was another set of detectives coming on shift who told me that the death was suicide, John was totally in the clear, and that he had checked himself into the hospital for his mental state. When he came out he had the letter 'k' tatooed on the inside of his shoulder and said it stood for 'killer', which he felt himself to be. We moved and shared the new, much nicer, and deathless apartment for a but more than a year. Then he moved in with a girl and ultimately I lost track of him. Alas.

Bedside Manners

Went in to see the doctor, Alan G, whining about a list of ache and pains. This and that. Alan listened to the whole complaint and said, 'Tom, nature doesn't care about you anymore.' Jesus, Alan! 'Yup, it's all gravity and desiccation from here on out.' Great.

So that very evening, by wonderful coincidence, I had dinner with friend Chuck, also a physician, and told him the story. Expecting.... what? I don't know. But in fact what Chuck said when I finished was, 'Did you want a second opinion?'