Friday, January 9, 2009

Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Monday, November 3, 2008

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Thursday, October 2, 2008

Monday, September 29, 2008

An empty seat at the Mighty Wurlitzer

It seems as though every day another obituary signals the clock running down on the time when people deserved to be called "entertainers". Stan Kann has died. He was 83.

With no offense intended to the achievements of a certain local sporting legend, for those of us in the entertainment business, Stan Kann was "The Man".

Saturday, September 27, 2008

Saturday, September 13, 2008

David Foster Wallace

Author David Foster Wallace has died. He apparently hanged himself in his Los Angeles area home. He was 46.

I spent the day with Wallace in 1997, shortly after he'd received the MacArthur Foundation grant and while he was on the road touring for the publication of Infinite Jest, and interviewed him for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

David Foster Wallace sits at a conference table in the International Writers Center at Washington University's West Campus in Clayton, sipping coffee and chewing toothpicks, an oral substitute for the cigarettes he forswore a few months earlier.

"I'm 35 years old," the author of Infinite Jest says as he begins to describe himself. "I've been doing this for 13 years. I think I'm pretty good, but I don't think I'm real good yet."

This is a rare moment of conciseness for Wallace, whose prose is filled with convoluted but perfectly logical sentences that sometimes seem to go on for pages. Hailed by critics as the most gifted chronicler of his generation, he clearly doesn't believe — or read — his own press coverage.

Although his first two books, a novel and a collection of short stories, showed the promise of a rising new writer, Wallace really caught the attention of critics last year with Infinite Jest, his second novel. It's a 1,079-page work set mostly at a tony tennis academy and a drug rehabilitation halfway house in the near future.

Infinite Jest is actually an assortment of loosely related stories. At its center is the tale of three brothers, the Incandenzas, and the shadow cast over them by their father's suicide. A side plot concerns a band of wheelchair-bound terrorists seeking to control the eponymous "Infinite Jest," a film believed to be so entertaining that it puts anyone who views it into a blissed-out haze. Another side plot follows Don Gately, a drug addict who will found a new religion.

It is a complex book that Wallace insists is just as long and involved as it needs to be.

"The version that I turned in was about 500 pages longer than what came out," he says, "which in and of itself isn't terminal for me, but there's a lot of that 500 pages that didn't really need to be in there. It was very hard for me to listen to the editor, but I did it."

When Little, Brown published Infinite Jest, the book hit store shelves accompanied by an intense six-month publicity campaign. That, coupled with the critical notice Wallace's previous work had garnered, established the media-shy writer as the new literary celebrity.

Wallace, however, is pragmatic about the "publicity tsunami."

"Because of the economics of selling books right now, it has a lot to do with the big stores and with (the publishers) not getting a lot of returns," he says.

"The publishers don't really care if anyone actually reads it, they just want (consumers) to buy it from Barnes & Noble so they don't get a lot of copies back.

"I would rather that fewer people bought it and the people who bought it actually read it, but that's coming from my own ego."

His ego, Wallace acknowledges, is fragile and a large part of why he doesn't care to read reviews of his work.

The high that comes from celebrity, he says, is too seductive and too dangerous to the work of writing to succumb to it. Although first noting his respect for their work, he points to the examples of friends and contemporaries who enjoyed early success and weren't as sheltered from the hype.

"I thought, for instance, Bret Easton Ellis' book Less Than Zero — it's not Dante, but for the guy's age and for the moment — there was magic in it," Wallace says. "And I thought the same thing about Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City."

Wallace tries to put the attention paid to him in perspective, and he gets a lot of help from his friends.

"I'm protected in a lot of ways that I think certain other people aren't," he says. "I'll have this chat with a newspaper, which will mess me up for a few days because it makes me feel more important than I really am, but then it'll go away and I'll go home and my closest friends aren't writers and life is very real."

Home for Wallace is near the campus of Illinois State University in Normal, Ill., where he teaches writing and literature. He grew up in Urbana, where his father was a philosophy professor at the University of Illinois and his mother an English professor at a community college.

"I mostly teach the freshman classes that the other professors don't want to teach and think I'm very gracious to do so when in fact I much prefer it," Wallace says.

Part of the joy of teaching entry-level courses, Wallace says, is introducing his students to works that engage them on their own turf.

"There's an Amy Homes story called 'A Real Doll' about a pubescent boy's affair with his sister's Barbie doll and that story's actually created a few literature majors at ISU," Wallace says. "They had no idea that a story could be that sick and smart and spiritually sophisticated and speak a language that's the same language as their own."

Wallace is taking the year off from teaching, thanks in part to a fellowship he received earlier this year from the MacArthur Foundation, the organization behind the so-called "genius grants." The five-year award, worth up to $75,000 annually, has given the author the freedom to concentrate on his own work.

While giving him the luxury of a sabbatical, the grant has also brought an odd kind of pressure into Wallace's life.

"There are a whole lot of things about it that are real nice that aren't what people would imagine," Wallace says. "They very nicely did a thing in my hometown newspaper that made it sound like you get all the money at once and it's tax-free, so every friend of mine who is some wacko investor came to me with ideas about silver futures and like that. In fact, what it is is like five years of a teaching salary.

"But I quit smoking a few months ago, so I haven't been working very well. It's very easy to run this guilt thing on myself, like when your parents are paying for college and you're screwing off. You feel like 'Oh, God, I just cost the MacArthur Foundation 50 dollars and all I did was watch a movie.'"

Wallace is working on several projects now, mostly short fiction. He says he feels no real pressure to produce another work on the scale of Infinite Jest anytime in the near future.

"I don't have any real desire to have a best seller," he says, "mostly because I think the sorts of books that become best sellers are not really books. They're sort of like television you can carry around with you."

He's content just to write and enjoy his time away from academia. He's not concerned with the critics who have branded him the literary spokesman for his generation.

"I feel that there's such an irony about anybody talking about a spokesman for my generation," Wallace says. "By definition, there can't be a spokesperson because there isn't a collective.

"I do love the term 'Generation X,' though. I don't know why people roll their eyes at that.

"A generation identified by a variable. That's deep."

Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

And so should you…

Recommended for anyone who works on the web—even duffers, hobbyists and "other duties as assigned" folks like I—the second annual Survey for People Who Make Websites from our pals at A List Apart.

Take a few minutes and do it!

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Sunday, July 13, 2008

Friday, July 11, 2008

Friday, July 4, 2008

Monday, June 30, 2008

Friday, June 27, 2008

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Monday, June 23, 2008

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."

Sunday, June 22, 2008