Friday, July 11, 2008

Monday, July 7, 2008

Friday, July 4, 2008

Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Monday, June 30, 2008

Friday, June 27, 2008

Thursday, June 26, 2008

Love over Gold

Eventually, I suppose I'll get 'round to posting something besides obituaries and YouTube clips, but this was too delicious to pass up.



And to anyone who says you can't build a relationship around coffee, I present as evidence to the contrary my five-year unconsumated mutual flirtation with a certain barista at Starbucks.

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Over 200 dads left ceremony at intermission to go to nearby sports bar…

High School Tony Awards Honor Nation's Biggest Drama Club Nerds

I just wanna fuckin’ dance

Where the hell is Matt?

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Monday, June 23, 2008

Awesome dorkwads

My interview with George Carlin

Back in late 1998, I was still writing regularly for the Post-Dispatch as a freelance entertainment reporter, having left the paper full-time a couple of years after the launch of the "Get Out" magazine. Working from home one cold late December day, I received a call from my editor with an assignment that at once thrilled and terrified me.

I was to interview George Carlin.

I'll admit to occasionally being a little star-struck and one of the perks of writing for a major metro daily was now and then having an excuse to sit down with people I admired or, in Carlin's case, kind of worshipped and asking them anything I wanted. Carlin was coming to St. Louis the following month for a concert at the Fox Theatre and I would have 15–20 minutes by phone to chat with him.

But here's the thing: As deeply cool as this assignment was, I was scared shitless. I had every Carlin album, I'd seen a dozen of his concerts live, I'd watched his cable comedy specials and I knew his career pretty well. I also knew that, as you might deduce from his genius rants on language, that he was incredibly smart and that he did not suffer fools gladly. No, scratch that. He didn't suffer fools at all. Colleagues warned me that Carlin was a notoriously difficult interview. One misstep and it'd be all over.

And so it was with some trepidation that I picked up the phone at the appointed time (thankfully we weren't meeting in person; I'd probably have wet myself) and called the telephone number of a hotel where Carlin was staying on the road. A few minutes later, I was put through to his room and, after some extremely brief pleasantries, we had our chat.

To my delight and fascination, it was more than a chat, though. Warned that I'd have only a few minutes, I got through my list of things I definitely had to ask pretty quickly and each time I thanked him for his time and offered to ring off, the conversation would veer in another direction. Our 15 minutes turned eventually into almost an hour and a half. It was like getting my own private little George Carlin concert. No, not a concert...a salon. The topics were wide-ranging, the language precise, the wit exquisite. I still have and treasure the two cassettes on which I recorded the conversation—at Carlin's insistence, the interview was taped; he hated being misquoted.

Perhaps someday I'll get around to transcribing the whole interview. I've reproduced the printed version of the piece I filed below. It's a significant truncation of the interview, of course, intended only to accompany a calendar feature on the upcoming concert, and was edited even more from what I submitted. This was originally published on January 22, 1999.

For those of you just joining us, Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings, there's more to the Kennedy name than a dubiously talented former MTV veejay, and George Carlin has not always been a long-distance telephone service pitchman.

In fact, had you taken a survey just a few years ago, Carlin might have ranked just behind the pope in a list of those least likely to be flacking for a phone company. These days, though, it's all about marketing, Carlin will tell you. Not that he's happy about it.

The acclaimed quintessential counterculture comedian brings his latest show to The Fox Theatre Saturday night, one in a series of road dates leading up to the broadcast of his 11th live Home Box Office comedy special.

"It's the best show I've ever done," Carlin says. A biased opinion for sure, but still a significant pronouncement considering Carlin's knack for telling the truth - and the vast body of his comedic and satiric work that precedes this outing.

Carlin, 61, got his start in radio at the age of 19 while serving a brief stint in the U.S. Air Force. In 1959, he teamed with newsman Jack Burns at KXOL in Fort Worth and the duo began developing comedy routines. Their partnership lasted two years. Carlin moved on to solo gigs, performing in folk clubs and coffeehouses, where more progressive audiences were drawn to his wry, cynical comic style.

It was in this setting that Carlin developed many of the set bits that gained him extensive television exposure, among them the "Indian Sergeant," "Hippy Dippy Weatherman" and "Wonderful Wino." Carlin became a regular guest on shows with Jack Parr, Mike Douglas, Merv Griffin and Carol Burnett.

By the late '60s and early '70s, the American "counterculture" was taking shape, largely from the same audiences that had laughed with Carlin in the coffeehouses years before.

"I think that particular period was unique because it was the beginning of the effective use of mass media by people with an axe to grind of any kind," Carlin said. "It was also fueled by some very new cultural frontiers being breached, and that was the drug and the sex aspects of life."

That environment freed Carlin to perform routines that mirrored his own beliefs. Sexual and social mores could now be discussed more frankly, an opportunity seized by Carlin and contemporaries such as Elaine May and Mike Nichols, Lenny Bruce and troupes such as Second City and St. Louis' own Compass Players.

Today, Carlin continues to perform 150 live shows on the road each year, mostly mid-range concert halls and showrooms. What happened to the counterculture?

"We do still have people who feel opposed and counter, but society learned to co-opt those people a long time ago. It learned that back in the '60s, how to turn hippies into marketing tools," Carlin says. "That's what happens with punk or the music of the day, any of these things that have a chance of solidifying an opposition are co-opted by the culture in its own interest.

"I don't think the culture does it consciously to head them off; I think it just does it because it's good marketing. I think most kids in school now are just there to find out how to get a good job because we've become nothing but consumers in this country."

That may be at least something of a benefit, at least for a performer who retains the attitude of the radical coffeehouse comic while selling out the big houses. Still, the encroachment of consumerism on nearly every aspect of daily life is a source of disappointment to Carlin.

"I'm not even thinking left- or right-wing, any of that kind of stuff," he says. "It's disappointing that a species with this magnificent brain and all of the potential we were given by nature to objectify things, to be able to speak about things outside of ourselves, and to be able to have abstract and conceptual thought, these things are wonderful gifts that we're squandering.

"The balance between cooperation and competition has gotten to a dangerous imbalance. Competition is now the boss, whether it's friendly competition in business or who's got the best suburban utility vehicle, it's just a soulless, soul-deadening pursuit of goods and power and money and position.

"That, and this ignorant belief that there's this man up in the sky watching everything, is dispiriting and discouraging to me."

Ah, yes: religion. It's a notion Carlin himself has little use for, but a topic he exploits mercilessly in his manifold rants on human folly. Organized religion will certainly figure prominently in what Carlin calls his "points of attack" in his new stage show, including "praying as a specific, democracy ... and the hypocrisy of 'all men are created equal,' a good strong attack on men, white people, policemen, airport security and germs and the slavish devotion to children's welfare in this country."

In other words, a typically rich assortment of things that stick in George Carlin's craw, peppered with trenchant observations on language and its butchery by commercial culture.

"I see this as art," Carlin says. "I know it's entertainment, I know I'm a stand-up comedian and I don't shrink from those descriptions but I know there's a process of art at work in interpreting the world and presenting it back to the audience in an altered form.

"That's why I think my voice has grown and changed over the years because I've been open to the art side as opposed to strictly stand-up entertainment. I really enjoy finding what's in my heart and mind and what I can do with it."

Of course I bought two…

Quite the bargain, I'd say.
Walgreens, June 20, 2008