All Things Pop Culture

Why don't women ever win reality show competitions?

2011-10-28T16:18:00.001-06:00

I was recently accused of not being a feminist so I ask the above question not because I broadly feel the world is full of misogyny, although perhaps it is, but because it's been something I've observed lately.

Mainly, I've observed that phenomenon on Top Chef, which is really the only reality show I watch. Bravo's Top Chef: Just Desserts just concluded and the winner was Chris, who was clearly the front-runner from the beginning. Still, two men, Chris and Matt, and a woman, Sally, comprised the final and per usual, a man came out on top. Don't get me wrong, I think Chris deserved the win. He was completely in control of everything he produced for the finale, including his chocolate showpiece, while Sally basically handed construction of her (gorgeous and superior, in my opinion) showpiece over to Orlando, an arrogant but brilliant builder of such whimsical things.

Still, I started wondering: why don't women ever win these things? In Top Chef, season six, Jen was a contender all the way to the end, but by the finale she had fallen apart (a performance she would repeat early in All-Stars). At the end, Michael Voltaggio prevailed over his brother Bryan, while Kevin seemed to have lost his cooking mojo during the two-month break between taping in Las Vegas and the finale in Napa.

And in Top Chef: All-Stars, two women -- Carla (Hall, now starring on ABC's The Chew) and Tiffany -- turned in such a good semi-final performance that for the first time ever the judges waived the rule and allowed them both to progress to the final. But both women failed to make the cut, and in the end, genius Richard Blais prevailed over upstart Mike Isabella.

Final Top Chef example: in season seven, Kelly Liken made it all the way to the final four and got to go to Singapore, but she didn't make it past that point. Having eaten at her not-so-exciting restaurant in Vail (see above link), I kind of understand why. That season seemed full of lackluster chefs, and the only person in the group who seemed to have any real talent, Angelo, fell ill right at the end so the final was sort of a fail.

I should point out that one woman, Stephanie Izard, has won Top Chef, prevailing over Lisa Fernandez and Blais (somehow) in season four.

OK, that's Top Chef, but what about other reality shows?

Let's start with the granddaddy of them: CBS' Survivor. The only edition of this show that I've watched in full, besides season one, was Survivor: All-Stars, in which Boston Rob Mariano ended up getting the girl - his now wife and mother of his children, Amber Brkich, whose last name lacked vowels -- but losing the game. Amber took home the million dollars, but since she concurrently agreed to marry Rob, it was a win-win for him. The couple went on to run The Amazing Race twice (but not win), and Rob has subsequently been on Survivor two more times, finally winning it all in his last outing, aptly named Survivor: Redemption Island.

So even though Amber beat the odds with her win, did she really? Amber didn't play All-Stars, while Rob did, and Amber has never come back on the show, while Rob is on practically as much as Jeff Probst at this point.

After 22 iterations, however, Survivor seems to come out pretty equal: men have won 13 times, while women have won nine (one woman, Sandra Diaz-Twine, has won twice).

Fox's American Idol also comes out nearly equal, with women four times and men winning five. A woman has not won since the show's sixth season, when Jordin Sparks was declared the victor.

Finally, women have won more rounds of Lifetime's Project Runway, with women taking home the trophy five times in nine seasons.

So, maybe I should pose a more specific question: Why don't women ever win Top Chef? Or maybe it's less about women and reality show competitions and more about women as chefs. Professional kitchens are notoriously male-dominated places, and the lack of well-known female chefs is a topic of frequent conversation in the food world. Maybe the question is really: why don't women prevail when it comes to cooking?

I think I get it: My take on Lost’s Season Five Finale, "The Incident"

2009-05-14T16:19:00.004-06:00

As a somewhat obsessive Lost fan and random blogger, one would think I would make like everyone else and blog ad nauseum about the show. But up to this point, I have not. I think that's because I'm usually too brain-boggled to form coherent sentences about it. To that end, I deeply admire EW's Doc Jensen, who not only manages to conjure coherent sentences in late hours, he also throws in tons of literary analysis, philosophy, religion and mythology while he's doing it.

So the fact that the season-five finale has motivated me to put my thoughts down and post them is surprising. Turns out, though, I finally have some things to say and no one to say them to. Thus this blog.

All along, my predominant theory about Lost has been that it's a show about redemption, and the island is some kind of underworld that helps people find that redemption. Not hell, but maybe purgatory.

Along those lines, at the center of most sci-fi stories is a Christ figure, who volunteers to sacrifice himself for the salvation of all mankind. This is true of Lord of the Rings, which has Frodo ultimately sacrificing himself to take the ring to Mordor and Mt. Doom; the Chronicles of Narnia, which takes the much more obvious route and has Aslan allow himself to be sacrificed on the Stone Table by the White Witch; Star Wars, except that Luke really only has to sacrifice a hand, but he's still the chosen one; The Matrix, in which Neo, which descrambles into One and also means New, gives up his identity to be reborn into what he is destined to be; and finally, Harry Potter, which was always my fear with that series, and which Darlton are vocally a fan of.

We also know that Darlton are heavily influenced by C. S. Lewis and Narnia – with references to the Lamppost (the Dharma station that houses Eloise Hawking and an actual lamppost that serves as a guide for young Lucy and her siblings in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe) and Lewis himself in the character of Charlotte, whose initials were C.S. Lewis. And Damon Lindelof at least is a huge Star Wars fan. I believe Damon has said that he's seen the trilogy about 70 times. Earlier this season, we had Hurley trying to rewrite Empire Strikes Back and deliver a perfected version of the script to the future in one of Lost's funnier moments.

While the show is chock full of symbols – from the red herring that Jacob was cooking up to the Egyptian hieroglyphics to those mysterious numbers (which now we know are the fictional Valenzetti equation) to the statue -- I've given up trying to assign a specific symbology to any one character in Lost. If anything, I've decided the show is way top-heavy and overly layered with symbols, to the degree that what they are pointing out becomes repetitive. I think many of the characters – particularly the more murky, seemingly immortal ones – blend many religions and mythologies to take on a mythology all their own. And often I think the characters are given deeply loaded names – Richard Alpert or John Locke or Daniel Faraday – in order to make you go hmmmm. Those names cast a shade of meaning over these characters, but they don't define who he or she is. I also think it amuses the hell out of Lost's producers to throw in some reference and watch the audience go nuts trying to figure it out for weeks.

I've interviewed Darlton several times and they don't make their plans any clearer to me than to anyone else, but I remember one specific interview where I asked them if they were ever going to answer all these questions they kept opening up. That seemed to particularly annoy them. I don't remember Damon's word-for-word answer, but it was something to the effect of "many of the answers to these questions are right in front of your face. Don't read more into them than you need to."

I started watching the show like that – not reading into everything but just sort of taking things as they were presented – and it's made the whole process a lot easier and clearer. I feel like the show itself often includes hints to stop looking for all the deeper meanings and just watch – for example, when Sayid told Jack to "hide in plain sight."

Finally, I've realized that Lost is never going to explain it all to me, and much of the interpretation is up to me. I think that's how it's going to end too, so people who are expecting a big complete, total reveal where everything is cleaned up and tied off at the end of next season are going to be sorely disappointed. This is a show that requires you not only to think for yourself but also to rely on yourself. To some extent, the show is what you think it's about. If you think the island is a spaceship and the events that unspool after next year's finale allow you to keep thinking that, then it's a spaceship as far as you're concerned and the producers are fine with that. I don't think they are particularly possessive about interpretations.

So, after last night's finale, here are mine:

Jacob and the guy everyone is calling Esau, which has a certain symmetry to it, are two entities – perhaps deities – fighting for control, kind of like how angels wrestled over good and evil back at the beginning of time or how God made a bet with Satan on how Job would handle every crappy thing that Satan could throw at him. Our little Losties, and the Dharma Initiative and the Hostiles, are just pawns in this endless game, which is essentially what the two deity-like guys agree to in the opening beach scene. There are lots of examples of Gods playing with humans like pawns – or black and white backgammon pieces – throughout mythology and religion. The Old Testament is one big story in which Jehovah endlessly messes with his chosen people. In the end, however, the good deity believes humans can pull it out, while the bad deity believes humans are doomed, and he's psyched about that and ready to speed up the process already.

These two – one clothed in white, the other in black – may be Jesus and the Devil or they may be the Egyptian Gods Ra and Apep or they may be some other gods, but I think it's clear that they represent good and evil. Or perhaps more accurately: faith in humankind and no faith in humankind. Lost gives us endless symbols to lead us in this direction. But who they are exactly doesn't really matter – likely they are two creations original to the show but influenced by all of these other mythologies I've already mentioned. What matters is what they represent, which is humanity's constant battle between its baser and better instincts: good vs. evil, free will vs. predestination, and most importantly, love v. hate. Jacob is betting the better instincts will win, while Esau is betting on baser.

That's why Rose and Bernard didn't need to join Dharma or The Hostiles. They'd already figured that one out. That's why smart Vincent decided to follow the love and hang with them. The rest of the Losties have a ways to go, however.

Our Losties are the latest to take the island stage in this battle. The stakes appear higher this time around: Esau seems to have taken over John Locke's dead body, which grants him some sort of loophole that allows him, through Ben, to kill Jacob, something he's been longing to do and apparently has been a long time coming.

But I don't believe Jacob is dead for one minute. Jacob chose to sacrifice himself to save the world. He's the one that lives in the shadow of the statue or "the one who will save us all," as so many avid viewers have now translated from the Latin. He's The One. In all things science fiction, being the one means sacrificing yourself to save the world. (Another thing that points to this: the flight on which everyone returned was Ajira 3:16. John 3:16 is the key verse of the New Testament: "For God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life." Ajira, by the way, means island in Hindi.)

In that final scenario, Benjamin Linus, always the dedicated slave who allowed himself to be used for a cause in which he believed blindly, became Judas, the betrayer, and completed the act for which he had been set up, for which he was destined. Someone pointed out that they found that scene to be like the one in Star Wars where Obi Wan Kenobi allows himself to be killed by Darth Vader but tells Darth before he dies that he'll be back stronger than ever. I'm sure that's what's going on here. Entities like Jacob aren't easily felled by the knife of one Benjamin. "And who are you?" Jacob asked Benjamin, before willingly allowing Ben to stab him.

Ok, enough about what was happening in 2007. Back in 1977, the Losties finally decide to go with Jack's plan to explode the nuke and stop (or cause – Darlton is definitely allowing us to spend the next six months wondering about that one) The Incident. I agree that the degree to which Juliet and Kate wavered on whether they supported Jack in this endeavor seemed silly and distracting, and I don't think I believe Jack that the reason he's back at the Island is to win Kate back. He might not really know why he's back though – I suspect it has something to do with his long-lost sister Claire and his nephew, Aaron. In any case, we finally got to the scene we've all been primed for – The Actual Incident – and once we got there the key factor was Juliet.

When Kate returned to the island, Juliet was suddenly faced with doubt about whether Sawyer loved her. That doubt made her act erratically – from taking over the sub and bringing the trio back to the island, to deciding she would go with Jack's plan. While it would be a serious overreaction, I think that irrational behavior was due to her interpreting and overdramatizing Sawyer's reaction to Kate's return.

In the end, however, she learned that Sawyer did really love her. Once she felt certain of that, she was literally able to let go.

Juliet then, and not the bomb, was Daniel Faraday's variable. She was the one that had a choice—and not one but many -- and her choices led to what finally happened. She exercised her free will and sacrificed herself to redeem Sawyer. That's what will change the future. I don't think Juliet will be back -- she was not touched by Jacob – I think she's fulfilled her destiny. This show is a big believer in self-sacrifice for love: it's what Charlie did for Claire; what Sayid would have done for Nadia – and did in a way; what Faraday did for Charlotte; and what Sun and Jin have now both done for each other.

When last I chatted with Darlton, I asked if next season was a return to season one and if we would find find the core Losties all back on the island, finally figuring out what their destinies are. Carlton Cuse said yes. So that's where I expect we'll start, but I've watched and written about this show long enough to know that will be but a tiny part of the picture. I do think this theme of The One and self-sacrifice for redemption – whether yours or everyone else's -- will be a big part of next season. I wonder if one or all of the Losties will find themselves in some way to be The One -- in fact, maybe one of them needs to step up and take Jacob's place. I know Jack annoys everyone, but if this theory materializes, my money's on him. In his scene with Jacob, he buys an Apollo bar and that struck me. Apollo, like Ra, is the sun god. He's also the god of medicine -- If Jacob represents Ra, an older god than Apollo, is Jack the heir apparent?

Biblical, Egyptian and Roman references aside, I think this show is really a sappy soap opera cloaked in sci-fi geekiness. Sun and Jin, Jack and Kate, Juliet and Sawyer, Desmond and Penelope – the ultimate reward is always love, always The Constant. In fact, that Constant – pure, unconditional love for which you are willing to sacrifice everything – is what people must have to survive a place like the island, a tropical gladiators' colliseum where everything you think about yourself is put to the ultimate test.

Lost is really like love itself: completely simple, and yet completely complicated.

TV's top 35

2008-04-28T09:48:00.004-06:00

The Post posted it: Here's their list of the top 35 shows ever. Check it out and see if you agree. FYI, the shows I wrote about were Oprah, Sesame Street and All in the Family, although that last one was pretty heavily edited. I think they ultimately went with 35 because it was just impossible to narrow the list to 25. I spent several hours on the phone having that conversation repetitively.

Off the subject a bit, B&C's Ben Grossman has this column online today about "fixing American Idol", which reportedly has caused some controversy because Fox didn't realize he was actually going to publish what they said and then get it linked all over the Internet. Anyway, it's an interesting take. Idol's ratings are down year to year, but it's a seven-year-old show and that's what happens to old shows. It's still the biggest entertainment program on TV.

Earth Day hangover

2008-04-23T09:58:00.003-06:00

I actually paid attention to some Earth Day related events and I came away feeling a little overwhelmed.

Sandra Bullock was on Oprah talking about recycling everything, eating nothing with dyes or pesticides, and doing research to make sure your candles are environmentally friendly.

Then I went to the Boulder Book Store to hear my co-book club member Heather Hansen talk about her new book, “Disappearing Destinations: 37 Places in Peril and How You Can Help Save Them” (note shameless, but worthwhile, plug).

Heather talked about securing carbon offsets every time you travel and always making sure you stay in eco-friendly hotels. Since I already feel largely overwhelmed by my life and the research it requires (how much of my retirement fund should be in bonds? What seafood is environmentally unsound to eat? How do you plant an organic vegetable garden?) I decided that I would just add one more simple act to my already simple environmental regime: I’m keeping grocery bags in my car so I don’t get new ones every time. I’ll also continue recycling, I’ll try to reuse Ziplock bags instead of just tossing them, I’ll replace my light bulbs with those more efficient spiral ones and I’ll check out carbon offsets for my next trip, although with the price of gas, who knows when that will be.

I'm all for saving the planet but since it makes expensive things (food, travel, clothing) even more expensive, it can be a little tough to incorporate. I think we all just have to do what we can immediately, and then do more if the opportunity presents itself. Don't they always say awareness is the first step?

There were lots of cool things going down online for Earth Day yesterday – here’s some links to a few of them:

Nasa’s Top Ten Photos of the Earth -- the first of these is posted above

Google’s Earth Day page -- Google just figures out the coolest online applications! Could Google Earth be any more enthralling?

The World Wildlife Organization’s Earth Day page

Discovery’s EarthLive page -- this is pretty amazing

Listphoria

2008-04-03T13:06:00.002-06:00

I love lists. I love reading them, printing them, posting them, checking the items off as I complete them -- it doesn't matter if it's my to-do list or a list of Oscar-nominated films. Crossing every item off a list, which rarely happens, always feels like a triumph. Like you really accomplished something, although I suspect it's a delusion. Once one list is done, another always awaits.

My NY Post editor just asked me to do a list of the top 25 TV shows of all time, which I feel sort of unable to realistically list since I haven't seen every show on TV. But due to my list love, I cobbled something together for him.

The shows I feel strongly about are the ones I've watched recently: Deadwood, Six Feet Under, Sex and the City (HBO in the glory days). But it did bring me back to some beloved shows of days gone by: Taxi, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Dick Van Dyke way back in the day, The Bob Newhart Show (has humor ever been drier?).

I did include some shows from today's TV: The Office, Lost and 30 Rock, although I'm not wholly convicted about any of those shows. I find them all uneven, although 30 Rock probably the least so. Lost wanders off track far too often and The Office is inconsistent -- sometimes it's pitch perfect (last season's episode in which the Dunder-Mifflinites have to play Survivor-like games to get Michael's job is the best of the series, in my view, followed closely by Boys and Girls, written by B. J. Novak) and sometimes it's almost intolerably awkward (Gay Witch Hunt in which Michael almost kisses Oscar. I hid my face.)

Shows that I'm LOVING right now: Showtime's The Tudors (which sadly I can only watch when Showtime takes mercy on me and sends me an episode) and HBO's John Adams. Paul Giametti and Laura Linney are stunning. I predict they will both win Emmys and the series will clean up come September.

Here's the list I turned in. I'll post what the Post ends up using later:

Lost
The Office (BBC and NBC versions)
30 Rock
The Sopranos
Sex and the City
Deadwood
Cheers
Friends
Seinfeld
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
The Dick Van Dyke Show
The Cosby Show
The Daily Show/Colbert Report
M*A*S*H
The West Wing
The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson
The Oprah Winfrey Show
Taxi
Saturday Night Live
The Little Rascals
Little House on the Prairie
Moonlighting
Six Feet Under
Star Trek
60 Minutes

Here's Time's list of the 100 best TV shows of all time, which includes several shows I couldn't fit on my list, such as All in the Family, The Twilight Zone and The Carol Burnett Show.

What You Should (and Should Not) Be Watching This Summer

2007-07-02T15:45:00.001-06:00

Worth staying inside for – give it a 'series record' on your DVR:

HBO's Flight of the Conchords – understated, but oh so hilarious

FX's Rescue Me – this show just socks you in the stomach with humor and tragedy and everything in between, but that sucker punch in the gut still feels really good

Guilty Summer Pleasure:

TBS' My Boys – I'm not saying it's Shakespeare, but it's still fun to watch. Season two starts in late July.

Lifetime's Army Wives – soapy, sexy, um, patriotic goodness. When's the last time you used those three words together?

USA's Burn Notice -- like The Bourne Identity only funny, breezy and sunny, even when our burned spy is shooting drug dealers in the knees.

Jury's Still Out:

HBO's Big Love – I know people who love this show but I'm still not one of them. I'm trying, though.

So Disappointing:

HBO's John From Cincinnati – I was a HUGE fan of David Milch's Deadwood but this show just makes no damn sense. In homage, I should say it makes no fucking sense.

Boring and Predictable:

TNT's Heartland

TBS' House of Payne

Horrible, But Expectedly So:

All reality shows on broadcast network television, which is pretty much what the Big Five are airing this summer. Oh, and repeats.

If nothing else is on, fire up the DVD player:

NBC's The Office – I'm slowly converting everyone I know into a fan of this show, which is my favorite thing on TV right now.

I still miss:

HBO's Sex and the City – so I stay up late to catch it in syndication and then watch uncut episodes I've already seen 95 times on HBO On Demand. Because Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte and Samantha are my TV friends.

Shows coming soon that I haven't seen yet:

TNT's Saving Grace starring Holly Hunter
FX's Damages starring Glenn Close
Lifetime's Side Order of Life (July 15)
Lifetime's State of Mind
Showtime's Californication starring David Duchovony (August)
TNT's The Company starring Chris O'Donnell

Look, I’m on Gawker

2007-06-26T12:13:00.001-06:00

But I'm in disguise as the intrepid "New York Post reporter." It's pretty funny that this ended up here because I didn't feel like I was being particularly aggressive, but maybe it's an example of not really knowing how you are coming off. I also think it's a result of my doing so many interviews – I've learned to get to the heart of the matter without thinking much about it. I also think Lauer and NBC also were more sensitive on this subject than I realized, so my basic questions got better answers than I expected. Finally, there was a Palm Beach Post reporter on the line that asked even more direct, more aggressive questions -- "what do you think about rumors that NBC offered to pay for an interview with Paris Hilton?" "what do you think of criticism by Phil Mushnick (also of the NY Post, but a sports writer so I'm not sure why he's talking about this) that the Today Show is so cross-promotional he can no longer watch it?" -- but he didn't get on the queue first so I ended up setting him up.

The really funny thing is that I was writing the story for the weekly TV guide section of the Post, but the daily section had no clue, so when they read this on Gawker they were like, um, who was the reporter on this call? The sad part was that I had to go teach aerobics so I didn't end up getting the daily byline for this.

I would also like to note that ruddy, garrulous Harry has really come into his own. He's like the JFK Jr. of England. If only I was 22 ... and smokin' hot ... and English ... oh, nevermind.

Matt Lauer: "No Quid Pro Quo" For Princes Harry & William

Today NBC's Matt Lauer participated in a conference call with journalists about the Dateline interview he did recently with Prince William and Prince Harry, and about the Concert for Diana that NBC is broadcasting on Sunday. But some journalists didn't want to play along—they kept asking him pesky questions about whether he'd gotten the interview with the princes because the network had ponied up $2.5 million for the rights to air the concert. Not surprisingly, Lauer denied it.

"NBC had been interested in the concert for a very long time," he said in response to a question from a New York Post reporter about how the network got involved with the interview and the concert. "Months ago, they told me they were pursuing the concert and asked me what my interest level was.... But we had been talking to the palace about interviewing the boys for a long time, long before the idea of the concert came up. Once NBC decided to do the concert, it seemed like a great time for them to speak if they were going to speak. Perhaps on this occasion the boys would speak out—then it was just a question of whether the boys would do it with me, or me over some other people at NBC."

Lauer claims he was forced to jump through hoops before the palace would approve the network's request to interview William and Harry, including having to send over tapes of his previous interviews. "I was very excited when I got the interview," Lauer said.

"Usually those types of interviews involve lots of chasing," the Post reporter prodded. "Because of the concert, was it NBC's guarantee that you would get the interview?"

"When the concert deal was signed, they hadn't decided they were going to do anything. There's no quid pro quo here," Lauer said. "But the concert gave us an enormous advantage, absolutely. It's a no-brainer."

Now, let's parse that. Lauer claims there was no quid pro quo, and if by quid pro quo he means, literally, that the network said to the princes, "Here's $2.5 million for the rights to the concert and now you have to give us an interview," then sure, there was no quid pro quo. But the second part of his response—"the concert gave us an enormous advantage"—seems to be what people are getting their boxers in a bunch about these days. Sure, there's no official deal. There's nothing that anyone can point to as concrete evidence that there was a quid pro quo.

"I was not in on the business dealings of this," Lauer said in response to another question. "If there had been a quid pro quo I wouldn't have had to go through the hoops I had to go through. There was nothing set on paper before we started making those calls."

Well, sure! But it also seems that Lauer—and the rest of the NBC News division—are almost willfully ignorant about the way that their Entertainment division works. After all, if Lauer keeps himself in the dark, he can reassure himself that it was his wonderful audition tapes that landed him the interview with the princes, not the $2.5 million that the entertainment division of the network paid the princes for the rights to the concert.

But Lauer will be hosting the concert for the network as well. So is he working there as a member of the NBC News team? Or as a representative of the Entertainment side? The latter seems more likely.

Here's the link to the item on Gawker

Sicko will make you sick

2007-06-19T14:25:00.001-06:00

I watched Michael Moore's latest documentary – Sicko – over the weekend, and I was surprised to find how angry, depressed and desirous of moving to France, home of the world's number-one health care system, it made me feel.

The movie starts with a simple premise that we all pretty much know: the American health care system sucks, lots of people don't have coverage, and everything you need should you fall ill might not be covered. But Americans are so used to this system that we tend to blame individuals for their stupidity if they don't have the kind of job that gets them covered. "I have a friends who are 45 and still don't have health insurance," said one friend to me. "I just can't deal with their kind of craziness anymore."

What Americans don't really know – because this would require actually knowing that there are other countries in the world besides our own – is that in many other countries, health care is free and universal. If you are having a baby in Great Britain, you just go to the hospital and have it. There is no stop at the cashier on the way out the door.

I think most people have a general idea of this, but they don't understand the implications. And we sort of toss it aside, anyway: "well, they don't have a military," we say, or "they pay 80% of their income in taxes." I myself have said these things verbatim.

And they may be largely true. Still, Sicko got me thinking that this was a pretty shallow way to look at the issue. Yes, many countries spend far more money on their universal health care than they do their military protection. Well, that's because we, or our government and its military, protects them. (Sort of.) One upper-crust Brit in the movie says this (not verbatim): "it's just a matter of what your country's values are: do you want to spend your money killing people or saving them?"

That got me thinking. I know it is necessary to have a system of national defense in place, but do we need to be spending billions of dollars each year fighting an impossible and unclear war in Iraq? Since 2001, we've spent more than $500 billion in Afghanistan and Iraq, according to warresisters.org (not the world's most bipartisan organization in the world, I realize). Meanwhile, 45-50 million Americans lack health insurance and 18,000 people die each year due to that lack, according to the U.S. Census and the Center for American Progress.

Moore takes these numbers and makes them personal: A two-year-old girl dies in a hospital, and a wife loses her soul-mate husband because the hospital board won't approve the experimental treatment that could save his life. That's saying: sorry, your ability to pay your medical bills far trumps your life – your life! – so please go home and die.

Does that really represent our country's values? Does it represent my values? Does the fact that I am personally doing nothing about this make me culpable too? In some ways, yes, I'm afraid it does. People say "the only way to change things is to vote," but I don't agree. Voting might get some new guys in power, but does it catalyze institutional change? Unlikely, considering the way our government works. The only way to bring about the massive change something like this would require is overwhelming, unrelenting grassroots demand for it, and at this moment, that kind of universal political will does not exist in apathetic, comfortable America.

People argue that Michael Moore's films are propagandistic and don't tell the whole story. I thought that myself watching Fahrenheit 9/11. But Sicko tells stories of personal tragedies that could have been avoided if we as a nation cared more about each other. Propaganda has no affect on that truth.

LA Times' interview with Moore

Time's interview with Moore

New York Times' review

Of course, the Post hates it
But it still gets a Tomatometer of 92% -- that means 'go see it!'

Once again, Seymour Hersh tells us about the lying liars of the Bush Administration

2007-06-19T13:18:00.001-06:00

There are very few journalists left who frequently uncover news so important that it could change the country's current course. The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh is one of the most prominent on that very short list. (The Washington Post's Bob Woodward is another.)

A Hersh story comes out about every three to six months, and each one usually manages to take some false assumption, tell the absolute truth about it, and turn the original perception on its head as a result. His latest piece tells the detailed tale of how former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his henchmen absolutely knew what sorts of torture had gone on at the Iraqi prison camp of Abu Ghraib but lied outright to Congress (and thus us) about it. Here's a link to the (very long) story -- The General's Report – it's worth a read if you have any interest whatsoever in knowing what sort of lies this administration constantly perpetuates.

I find it amazing that every time you scratch beneath the surface with this administration – and it's really just a very light scratching – you find lie upon lie upon lie. The entire Scooter Libby debacle was all about lying and the covering of lies. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales – whose job it is to uncover lies -- lies every time he opens his mouth, and he still has a job. It's amazing, and appalling, that we as Americans stand for it. We spent two years impeaching Bill Clinton because he had inappropriate sexual encounters with an intern and lied about it. OK, that wasn't great. But Bush's lies are killing thousands of people in Iraq and we are just letting it happen.

The Sopranos Comes to Abrupt but Fitting End

2007-06-12T15:40:00.001-06:00

I am coming out of nine months of unintended blog retirement because I just can't stop thinking about the finale of David Chase's masterwork, The Sopranos.

And apparently, neither can anybody else because that's all I've been reading about for days. Was it genius? Was it a rip-off? What was it?

I must admit I felt bored during much of the episode, and that's not an unfamiliar experience for me while watching the show. After September 11, 2001, I lost any desire to suspend disbelief and empathize with Tony and his gang of thugs. I know Gandolfini's nuanced portrayal of a sympathetic sociopath was part of the show's genius, but after he personally shot cousin Tony Blundetto's (Steve Buscemi) head off and bludgeoned the completely unlikeable Ralph Cifaretto (masterfully played by Joe Pantaliano in the role of his lifetime) to death, it just got hard to feel concerned about Tony's fate. Would Carmela finally leave him? Would he go to jail? Would he get popped himself? Would he consolidate power and become the mafia lord of the East Coast? At some point it became clear that no matter what happened in the series, Tony's end, like his life in general, wasn't going to be that great.

Still, we all kept watching.

For me, that was mostly because The Sopranos is so critically acclaimed, so beloved, that I couldn't ignore it. I make my living writing about TV and pop culture and The Sopranos has firmly secured itself a place atop both those heaps.

Having said all that, I found the show's finale fascinating and fitting. I don't know about perfect or genius or even satisfying, but appropriate and true to Chase's vision.

In my view, the show's final scene – which has members of Tony's family gathering at a diner for dinner – was Chase giving us insight into Tony's inner life. Every heightened moment in that diner was infused with tension, even though Tony was doing nothing more than sitting in a booth, ordering onion rings and greeting his wife and son. Was the mysterious guy at the counter finally going to whack Tony? Would Tony's entire family go down with him? Was something going to happen to Meadow as she had trouble parallel parking her Lexus? A regular Joe wouldn't even notice that these things were happening. For Tony Soprano, head of the New Jersey mob, any moment could be his last. While that's true for all of us, most of us aren't marked, and didn't just leave our mafia safe house where we were hiding out with an automatic for a few days waiting to die. No wonder the guy had panic attacks.

The show's final moment – when Meadow finally walked in the door and a quick shot of Tony's face abruptly cut to black and silence – was clearly left open to interpretation. Part of me believes that Tony met his maker (and that guy could not have been that happy with Tony) right then, and that was the end of his perspective and the end of him. That would jive with what seems to be Chase's view of death – final and empty when it comes. The series never gave us much warning when someone was going to meet his untimely end – Tony's hot-tempered nephew Christopher Motisanti (Michael Imperioli, who also wrote five of the show's episodes) didn't die in an exciting and bloody shoot-out, but quietly, at his uncle's hand. Bobby Bacala (Steven Schirripa) was taken down quickly in a toy store, a fitting location for the man-child he was, while Tony's adversary, Phil Leotardo (Frank Vincent), was shot point-blank in the head in front of his wife and grand-babies while he was just gassing up his car. Tony Soprano's life was constantly full of deaths like those – he knew his own death wouldn't be much different. In the meantime, he just lived to survive and enjoy his family, his gluttony, his gambling and his carnal pleasures.

The other way to look at it is that The Sopranos' lives went on, just without us there to watch. Chase leaves that to us to decide, which is in keeping with the show's existential framework. Jean-Paul Sartre would be pleased. And while the first view is appealing, the second probably makes more sense. Chase showed us the deaths of everyone else; maybe he just couldn't bear to finally take Tony out.

One of the reasons The Sopranos was considered TV genius was because it was true to life. It never became cliché or predictable or pandering, like much of TV (take that Grey's Anatomy). In both Chase's world and our own, life is unpredictable and doesn't offer closure. That was true of the entire series and especially true of the finale. Fans may have wanted more, but would we rather have show creators write shows that satisfy us or satisfy them? Ultimately, shows are better when the creator gets to be true to him or herself without interference from meddling networks or whining fans (and you take that, Lost). Would The Sopranos have been as good if David Chase allowed others to interfere with his vision? I'm sure it would not, which is why the show's finale was exactly right.

Some of TV's best comment on Sopranos finale

Chase speaks

Why Network PR People Are Retarded

2006-08-18T15:23:00.000-06:00

Today in the mail I got my 400^th press kit heralding the arrival of the new fall season. So far, due to these never-ending postal gifts, I have received the following: multiple copies of every fall TV pilot; one baseball hat embroidered with “CNU LA,” whatever that means; one bullhorn that only included two out of three AAA batteries and thus does not work so I cannot use it to bullhorn anyone. Wait, I found the missing third battery on the floor -- this thing is awesome! I am so effortlessly loud and annoying; one “House” t-shirt with a gross CAT scan of a brain on it; one hooded sweatshirt that very subtlely says “Prison Break;” and one broken pen set emblazoned with the word “Justice” on the pens, which work nicely and actually include a penlight on one of them. So those I will probably use.

In the past, I have also received cookbooks, glassware, blankets, jackets, books, CDs, a huge vat of red licorice that is now stale and sitting on my refrigerator, microwave popcorn, many many office supplies and so on and so on. My apartment is largely decorated by TV show chatchkes, and my office is largely supplied by paper goods with the names of TV shows on them. Like I have a “prescription pad” from “House” and actually another one from “Dr. Keith Ablow,” a syndicated show that’s premiering this fall. I tried to use them to write my own prescriptions for things like Ambien and Vicodin but for some reason that didn’t work at all. Plus someone at the pharmacy mentioned something about “felony” so I decided it was best to let the issue drop.

Truthfully, it’s mostly Fox that likes to send out these goodies and I’m not really that opposed even though I really doubt I’ll ever wear a t-shirt in public that’s displaying a brain. But what would be more likely to convince me to write (favorably) about any given program is if someone would send, say, Patrick Dempsey to my house for a visit. Or a pound of freshly ground Starbuck’s. Or some really good Belgium chocolate. Not that I really need these things – except of course, the Dempsey visit – but if they are going to waste the postage and the effort to send a bunch of crap to me in the mail, they might as well send me something I want.

So below, I’ve comprised a list of things I actually want. Please stick faithfully to this list, all you soliciting network publicists:--

Soundtrack to "Grey’s Anatomy." But if you fail to send this, network publicists, ha ha! I can just burn my friend Day's new copy.

Anything chocolate, even Hershey’s

Wine glasses, because mine sort of suck

New ski boots. And if you decide to go that route, I also would like new Atomic or Volkl Supersport skis, 160 cm, with new bindings. I like to ski bumps and trees, so please take that into consideration

Scuba gear, and a complementary RT ticket to Palau also would be appreciated

Ping golf clubs. I actually like my golf clubs, but it would be cool to have Pings.

VW Touareg, in this awesome navy blue color I saw the other day

New laptop because mine keeps overheating and shutting down and it’s super annoying. Plus it’s messing up the interviews I am trying to do with YOUR stars. See how you could help me out here while also helping yourself?

Baseball shirts, because I think I look especially cute in them. It’s OK if you want to put TV show names on these shirts, as long as you stick with cool TV shows, like "The Office," and not lame-o TV shows that I don’t like, such as "NCIS." Sorry CBS, but I don’t like all those crime shows and when you throw the military in there, well, forget it.

And of course, Patrick Dempsey. If Patrick isn’t available, Isaiah Washington, Eric Dane or Chris O’Donnell will do.

Thanks in advance, network PR people, or as I like to call you – flaks – for noting and meeting my needs. I'm looking forward to all the better flackerie that's soon to arrive at my doorstep.

I ask, the news responds

2006-08-18T15:15:00.000-06:00

With Thursday's arrest of John Mark Karr, main suspect in the unsolved murder of Boulder's baby beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey, I think we have our answer to my recently posed question -- Boulder: Eden of the Front Range or Home of the Devil? Well, Karr didn't really live here, um, ever, but he kind of looks like the devil, don't you think? Or maybe ET? In the interest of presuming that bonafide child molesters are innocent until they are proven guilty, however, I will stop short of saying that Karr is a) the devil b) guilty or c) an extraterrestrial.

Not to mention that his confession is the weirdest ever. First, he got all the details of the murder wrong. He says he raped her, but there's no evidence of rape. He says he drugged her, but there's no evidence of drugs. And he says he was IN LOVE with her, but there's no evidence of love or sanity really because who says publicly that they were in love with a six-year-old? And who writes said six-year-olds Christmas poems for random CU professors to go read to her once she is dead?

Anyway, being back in Boulder and all, I'm a little obsessed with this at the moment, but it should pass soon. My attention span isn't that long.

Boulder: Eden of the Front Range or Home of the Devil? Unclear

2006-08-16T14:02:00.000-06:00

Here's a lovely aerial (for some reason, that word was really hard for me to spell) shot of Boulder, where I now live, far away from the hustle and bustle of city life and really close to the hustle and bustle of small city life, which during rush hour can boast traffic that's about as bad as LA's, especially now that apparently almost every street in town needs to be repaired.

Anyway, Outside just talked again about Boulder as "the best place to live if you are a masochistic freak whose idea of a good time is to bike 120 miles up three mountain passes, but not so much if you are a fat, drunk couch potato who is easily made to feel like a slob." Outside's article on this well-discussed topic -- Boulder: pristine place of health and spirituality or home of the white and self-indulgent -- is pretty good. A friend of mine says that Boulder-bashing is almost as popular a past-time here as cycling, so be sure to also check out Marc Peruzzi's take: The Goretex Vortex.

An assignment that I love

2006-08-01T22:18:00.000-06:00

In my life as a freelancer so far, I've gotten to do some pretty cool things and I hope even cooler things are to come. But here's three stories I got to write for one of Publisher's Weekly's web sites. In each, I got to interview a screenwriter and then write a story about adapting a famous book to film. In this month's edition, I interviewed filmmaker Richard Linklater, novelist Armistead Maupin and screenwriter, director and producer Bob Dolman. It's really great fun and I'm blessed to have the opportunity. (For that, I must thank my wonderful editor Robert Rorke, whose birthday it is today.) Here's the link, which will only be relevant for the next month: http://www.pwbooklife.com/features3.html

The White Trash Chronicles: We go to the Demolition Derby

2006-07-30T11:35:00.000-06:00

In an ongoing quest to experience the best that white trash has to offer, a group of us went to the Demolition Derby in Longmont on Saturday night. That is definitely an event that only men would think of, although there was one woman driver in the field. She was out pretty fast though. Anyway, what woman do you know who would come up with building cars for the sheer purpose of smashing them into each other? Testosterone has brought all sorts of hilariously stupid activities into this world, like dating, for example.

The premise of the Demo Derby is this: take a beat-up shell of a car, like a 1965 Lincoln Town Car or a 1977 Ford Fury, put a driver’s seat in it, a gas tank in the back and gird the driver’s side for impact. Then go to a big outdoor arena in the heat of summer and crash into lots of other cars in front of a crowd of screaming rednecks, and us, who were playing redneck that night. The last car running wins.

I have to say there was something strangely compelling about the Demolition Derby. I’m not a big car fan – I tool around in my 10-year-old Nissan Sentra and besides the A/C, it’s working just fine – but I really enjoyed watching men in tank tops crash into each other. Cars had smoke coming out of them and were on fire, wheels and bumpers came flying off, entire back ends were smashed flat. Oh, and the half-time entertainment involved two tractors ripping a poor unsuspecting car in half.

After the whole thing is over – and it runs long, four and a half hours – you get to go down into the dirt arena and check out the cars. I wish I could do the destruction justice by describing it, but these vehicles are really effed up. And the guys who drive them just laugh and talk about how they’ll pull the side of this car out with their tractor and then weld some stuff on and bring it back out the next time.

Prize money for the Demo Derby runs about $2,500 - $8,000 for a win, which I think you basically put back into your piece-of-crap car, which your wife then bitches about because it is truly an eyesore on any piece of property and marks you most certainly the white trashiest of your particular neighborhood.

Here's a good link if you want to learn more about the Demolition Derby. The man known as Speedo, as profiled by PBS's POV in 2004, is a good example of how people become so immersed in these subcultures that they shape their entire lives.

The other sort-of great part about this Demo Derby, in particular, was that our little county fair accompanied it. So in between crash-fests, a few of us went out to ride a ride and get a snack. I say sort-of because it was an appearances-beat-reality type of affair. The rides looked fun but were kind of ramshackle once you got on them. Plus we did a super twisty-turny one and I was nauseous after that for a good long time. I started out laughing and screaming and then just queasily going “uhhhh” every time we were jerked around. In fact, it makes me nauseous now just remembering it. I think that's one clear sign that you are getting old -- spinny rides that used to be the most fun ever when you are ten are now like horrible torture. If I was a CIA agent or something and I got captured by Iraqi soliders, they could easily learn everthing I knew just by putting me on some super-spinny ride for 15 seconds.

Then the food seems great and fun and white trash – which it is – but it’s also really kind of gross. Burritos from a frozen box, fried funnel cakes and corn dogs, disgusting cotton candy that I once begged for, iffy pieces of pizza that have been sitting out, watery and expensive lemonade.

That said, it was all quite fun. It’s always eye-opening to take a wholesale dunk into other social cultures and find some people whom you probably otherwise would never encounter.

Shocking Hollywood announcements

2006-07-26T12:02:00.000-06:00

OK, I'm back home from press tour now and I still have a couple of press tour-related posts to put up, but I had to blog on this one because I found it hilarious. Hello, Lance Bass, of course you are gay. You are so gay that I see no need to make an announcement about it. On the other hand, I was watching the South Park episode the other night in which Tom Cruise and John Travolta literally won't come out of the closet and for some reason R. Kelly is there singing about how they need to come out the closet and then suddenly brandishing a gun. Unbelievably funny and also pointing out that some people should just go ahead and make an announcement already. But with Lance, I think we were already on to you man.

Now if the rest of N Sync would please come forward and clear some things up for us, that would be helpful.

Lance Bass: I'm gay

'N Sync singer worried he would harm group

Lance Bass is involved with Reichen Lehmkuhl of "Amazing Race."

NEW YORK (AP) -- Lance Bass, band member of 'N Sync, says he's gay and in a "very stable" relationship with a reality show star.

Bass, who formed 'N Sync with Justin Timberlake, JC Chasez, Joey Fatone and Chris Kirkpatrick, tells People magazine that he didn't earlier disclose his sexuality because he didn't want to affect the group's popularity.

"I knew that I was in this popular band and I had four other guys' careers in my hand, and I knew that if I ever acted on it or even said (that I was gay), it would overpower everything," he tells the magazine.

'N Sync is known for a string of hits including "Bye Bye Bye" and "It's Gonna Be Me." The band went on hiatus in 2002. Bass has also found headlines for undertaking astronaut training and failing to raise money for a trip into space.

Bass says he wondered if his coming out could prompt "the end of 'N Sync." He explains, "So I had that weight on me of like, 'Wow, if I ever let anyone know, it's bad.' So I just never did."

The singer says he's in a "very stable" relationship with 32-year-old actor Reichen Lehmkuhl, winner of season four of CBS' "Amazing Race."

Bass and Fatone, 29, are developing a sitcom pilot inspired by the screwball comedy "The Odd Couple," in which his character will be gay.

"The thing is, I'm not ashamed -- that's the one thing I want to say," Bass says. "I don't think it's wrong, I'm not devastated going through this. I'm more liberated and happy than I've been my whole life. I'm just happy."

Press Tour, Day Nine: He's Just Not That Into You

2006-07-24T16:37:00.000-06:00

This day, Sunday, started out with breakfast at the Ritz. Since it was an off-day – meaning no network was scheduled – non-network affiliated syndicators wanted to take advantage of the free time. This is a bit of a hard sell because we’re coming to the end of press tour and people are wanting to do non-press-tour type stuff, like laundry or exercise. To try to overcome that objection, Sony hosted a breakfast buffet with almost everything you could ever want in breakfast food – everything from ricotta pancakes with lemon curd to bagel pizzas with salmon to a toast bar including almost every possible toast topping (honey butter, peanut butter, almond butter, body butter, and so forth). I didn’t think at this point in the tour food would still prove a lure to many critics, but there was actually a good turn out to see Greg Behrendt, who is launching a syndicated talk show with Sony this year.

Greg is a funny guy. He’s been a stand-up for years, and he once held dreams of becoming a rock star. He made his fortune, however, by casually telling a woman that the guy she was dating was “just not that into you.” And boom, a star was born.

Greg used to be a consultant on Sex and the City, and the woman he said that to was a writer on the show, so it was immediately incorporated into an episode. If you aren’t a Sex and the City fan, let me refresh the scene for you: Carrie and Berger (my new boyfriend Ron Livingston) are having dinner with her friends, and Miranda is recounting the tale of a date she just had. When she completes the story, Berger reveals he didn’t want to come back to her place with her because “he’s just not that into you.” Miranda’s friends go into a frenzy of analysis and defend her to the end, but Miranda says, “thank you. That was the most freeing thing I’ve ever heard.” She then tries to repeat the line to a couple of younger women she overhears on the street to poor effect. She also accuses a later date of being “not that into her,” only to learn that no, he actually is having serious intestinal problems. So it’s not a hard and fast rule.

In any case, this line had a similar ripple effect in the country. Behrendt, with encouragement from his wife, Amiira, wrote a book called “He’s Just Not That Into You,” which shot to the top of the best-seller lists. The book offered pretty basic dating advice – if he’s not calling you or asking you out or generally paying any attention to you, it’s time to move on and get a new guy. But apparently women nationwide did not know this and the book shot to the top of best-seller lists. Behrendt ended up on Oprah, and even more books were sold.

Sometime last year, Sony decided they thought Behrendt was a good choice to host a one-hour syndicated talk show. He is charming, funny and relatable, but there’s some problems with this premise: 1) syndication is pretty much an impossible business, and all the more impossible for Sony because the company doesn’t own stations and has a hard time getting shows on good time periods. But this show was done in partnership with Tribune, which owns many stations, so perhaps that will prove helpful with the ratings; 2) I’m not sure how long Greg can jump off this “he’s just not that into you” schtick, and I’m not sure where it can go from here. 3) Even with Sex and the City, the book and Oprah, most people haven’t heard of this guy. People in Hollywood think that just because something’s a phenomenon in their little world, everyone in the U.S. feels the same way, and if they don’t, that’s their problem because they live in the rejectable “flyover” states. (Like Colorado, for example.)

That snobbery is all well and good when you are in your glassed-in office on a studio lot, but Hollywood suits would be better served if they paid attention to what the people want in the flyover states. Most of the country lives in those states, and those viewers are needed in order to make any show a success.

I wonder who will be first to write the headline in the likely event that Greg’s show fails: “Audiences just weren’t that into him.”

Press Tour, Day Eight: Interest Is Waning

2006-07-24T15:08:00.000-06:00

I’ve dropped off the blog for the past couple days and that’s a hazard because now I can’t remember what happened over the weekend. Hmmm ….

Oh, here’s some good gossip that I probably should have known already: I guess that Aaron Sorkin dumped The NY Times' Maureen Dowd (who also supposedly was dumped by Michael Douglas in favor of Catherine Zeta, although if Catherine Zeta shows up in the middle of your relationship, you just say 'you win,' and walk away) to date the tiny and spunky Kristin Chenoweth (she’s best known as Glinda in Wicked). He eventually put her on The West Wing. In the meantime, Chenoweth cut an album of “inspirational” music and appeared on the 700 Club and he dropped her like it’s hot. Cut to Studio 60, and we see Matthew Perry’s character breaking up with his sketch-comedy-star girlfriend, played by Sarah Paulson, because she’s a member of the religious right.

Once again, art imitates life. A friend of mine who himself is a wonderful writer recently told me that he’s just good at “writing about himself,” but I think that’s true for everyone. If you find yourself hanging out with me a lot, watch out, because you might find yourself a character on my next TV show. Wait, what's that you say? I don't have a TV show? OK, well, you might find yourself a character on this widely read blog then.

Anyhoo, I ditched out on most of Saturday’s happenings because I had to write a story so obviously I didn’t hang out with too many famous people while I was holing up with my laptop in the Ghetto TL. Saturday night was the NBC party and since it was 110 degrees here and NBC chose to have a Texas-style barbecue, it was quite the sweaty affair. We were really feeling for the poor people who had to man the sizzling grills.

Famous people in attendance and sweating: From The Office: Rainn Wilson, John Kryzinski and many of the show’s minor players but no Steve Carell (I chatted up my favorite movie star on Sunday night). I do love The Office so I gave a lame-o fan shout-out to Rainn and John and they accomodated my stalker tendencies quite nicely. From Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip: Aaron Sorkin, Tommy Schlamme, Matthew Perry, Bradley Whitford, Amanda Peet, Steven Weber, Evan Handler (played Charlotte’s husband Harry on Sex and the City); from Twenty Good Years: Jeffrey Tambor and John Lithgow (Ausiello called this show 22 Unfunny Minutes); from Kidnapped, Jeremy Sisto, who consistently was surrounded by a scrum of reporters, and then a bunch of people from shows like Friday Night Lights and Heroes that you have never heard of. I haven’t watched Friday Night Lights, but I did get the book from NBC for free. Heroes is an interesting pilot about people who have superpowers that they are just realizing. I thought the show was a little uneven, but it has promise, and it's already got tons of Internet buzz. And supposedly the show was a big hit at Comic-Con, the comic-book convention that was going on late last week in San Diego.

Having nothing to do with any of this, I just learned that one of the reporters here who asks actors questions like "what do you consider a healthy snack," and "what's your workout regime," making me want to yank my hair out in chunks, gathers all these quotes in quantity and then sells them to places like Esquire, People, US, whoever wants them. It's quite the interesting business venture -- not one I would want to get into because if I am ever caught asking an actor about their eating habits please kill me on the spot -- but still interesting. I mean, it takes balls to earn a living by asking people totally ridiculous questions, especially if you aren't Jay Leno or Stephen Colbert. In some ways, however, I think such "reporting" should be banned from the critics tour. This person is not acting as either a TV critic or a reporter, and posing such questions lowers the bar for everyone. What's more, it's often hard to get a word in edgewise with this person around, and sometimes I actually have real questions to ask. I'm just sayin'.

Press Tour, Day Seven: Drug habits are hilarious

2006-07-21T18:22:00.000-06:00

It’s always good to know that people in Hollywood can poke fun at themselves. Well, at least some of them.

Asked what he thinks about reality shows, Aaron Sorkin, creator and executive producer of NBC’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, said “I do think that television is a terribly influential part of this country and that when things that are very mean-spirited and voyeuristic go on TV, I think it's like bad crack in the school yard.” Sorkin was busted for possession of crack and other drugs in 2001, so it was no surprise when he then wondered out loud: “Why did I use that word?” Later, Matthew Perry, a former prescription drug-addict himself, responded to a question about playing a character that resembles Sorkin, his ostensible boss: “I think it’s most like bad vicodin in the schoolyard.” Overall hilarity ensued in the room. Perry’s co-star Bradley Whitford later mused: “I have never wished I had a drug problem before.”

Staying with the self-deprecation note, when Perry was then asked why he decided to return to series TV so quickly after Friends, he said “because this script was so good and The Whole Ten Yards was so bad.”

More notes from press tour to come but I need to go drink now.

Press Tour, Day Six: Ohmygod, Grey's!

2006-07-21T18:09:00.000-06:00

Today we visited the set of Grey’s Anatomy and I lived at least the initial part of the fantasy of many American women: I looked Patrick Dempsey in the eye and had a conversation with him. Obviously, I didn't get follow this encounter through to its preferred conclusion, but it was a good start. As my friend said, “if you tell me he’s a midget, I’m going to kill you.” This is because I had previously told her that David Krumholz (from CBS’s Numbers and the movie Serenity) is pretty much a midget and even if she puts platform shoes on him, she still probably wouldn’t want to sleep with him. I could be wrong about this, however, because Krummy had quite the hot young girlfriend, as did James Woods, who I find disgusting, so what do I know? Anyway, Patrick was quite doable, so no worries women of America.

I tried my very hardest to learn whether the delicious Eric Dane aka Mark “McSteamy” Sloan (link to http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0199312/for more info) would be coming back to the show, but I was shut down by Grey’s creator Shonda Rhimes’ absolutely no-leaks policy. Damn! But me and other fans were encouraged that the martinis at the ABC party were named McDreamy and the extra dirty ones were named McSteamy. To me, mainly because I am desperate and I have told the exec producers this several times, this was a very good sign. Or if nothing else, a very good drink.

Other than Patrick, I also met Sandra Oh, Ellen Pompeo (very briefly and she is no skinnier than any of the other anorexics that populate this town but absolutely adorable. See Old School for proof), Kate Walsh (she plays Addison Shepherd, wife of McDreamy) and Katherine Heigl, who is absolutely gorgeous and like Virginia Madsen, very skinny in real life, except with some boobs. I chatted with Peter Horton, who directs the show and we bonded over our mutual ownership of Keen shoes, and Betsy Beers, one of the exec producers. We then got to look around the set, which is vast and quite realistic. All in all, it was TV heaven, even though I am supposed to be a cynical reporter and all that. I don’t want to live in Hollywood but there are moments when I sure like visiting it, and this was one of those times. The scant hour we were granted was nowhere close to enough. I needed like an hour of solo time with each cast member. So much stalking, so little time.

I will say that touring a set makes you realize what people are talking about when they say that series TV is exhausting and difficult. It all seems wonderfully glamorous when you are watching it, but when you see the dark, cramped sets, and think about how actors are shooting takes over and over again for 12 hours a day, six days a week, you can see how it gets a little tedious. It's not all award ceremonies and red carpets, people. That said, it's not coal-mining or truck-driving either, so my sympathy for successful actors remains limited.

Anyway, after that wonderful hour came to a screeching halt, I was back on the eternal LA highway to return to the Ritz in Pasadena. There, I hung out with the stars of Fox’s My Network TV, which is basically going to be an English-language telenovela network for TV stations. The young stars of these shows are, like The CW pages, the hottest people I’ve ever seen. One of them is a supermodel on the side! Hanging with them makes me feel like there’s some other planet where they grow much more attractive people than they do on this planet where I live. Or vice versa. Either way, I don’t think we are members of the same species.

Also in attendance – Morgan Fairchild and Bo Derek. I chatted a bit with Bo and while I’m sure she’s amply Botoxed, she is gorgeous and tiny. She may be the planetary mother of this other species about which I was just talking.

My night ended with dinner at the Ritz with the NBC PR corps, which was delightful and relaxing.

Tom Skerrit: Is He or Isn't He?

2006-07-19T18:11:00.000-06:00

Tom Skerrit’s apparently not really in ABC’s Brothers & Sisters, but he still managed to pervade the show panel on Wednesday afternoon.

Most of this crowd has not seen the pilot of Brothers & Sisters, which looked great from the clip they showed, because they keep retooling and recasting it, and failing to put out a final episode. In the clip, Skerrit falls into the pool and his fate is not clear. So it was reasonable to wonder whether Skerrit, as the father of five brothers and sisters, would appear further in the show. Skerrit did not appear on the huge 14-person panel, indicating that perhaps his performance is just a cameo. And the show’s executive producers were very sketchy about whether to expect more Skerrit in the fall. When asked where Skerrit was, they said, “he’s working on a movie.”

This went on for quite a while until finally one intrepid reporter checked the ABC media site and read the following: “When the family gathers to celebrate a birthday, what they don’t know is that tonight the family patriarch will die.” This met with much laughter, and also seemed to settle the question.

Still, the question of Tom Skerrit remains unanswered. The web site no longer describes the show that way, and the press release about the show mentions both father and mother equally so maybe Skerrit is going to be a regular cast member. The producers did say repeatedly that the pilot had changed significantly.

Anyway, when the cast was asked “which member of the family will provide the comic relief?” (This was actually a much sillier question in practice, asked by the same reporter who asks most of the silly questions), the creator/EP said “Tom Skerrit.”

Raccoons Take Over TV

2006-07-19T16:15:00.000-06:00

In another example of the genius of the TV critic, the apparent star of ABC’s Men in Trees is Elvis the Raccoon. Elvis makes an appearance in the pilot as the destroyer of an ill-fated wedding dress, which is in Alaska for specious reasons anyway. The best part of this is that later in the scene, Elvis the Raccoon is played by a stunt double, Boomer the Terrier, who wears a raccoon costume as he runs down the stairs. Yes, I did just say that a terrier is wearing a raccoon costume in a primetime television program. Just in case you were wondering, Elvis and Boomer were both local hires. And although Elvis is nocturnal, he graciously agreed to work during the day. Elvis has at least a two-episode deal for the show, creator and showrunner Jenny Bicks revealed during the Wednesday afternoon session.

As B&C's Ben Grossman points out: When the panel starts focusing on the animal actors, you know the show has no chance. (See Ben's work at http://www.bcbeat.com, a blog sponsored by my corporate alma mater.)

Seriously, these are the things these people ask. And my absolutely favorite question: “For everyone in the cast, please tell us what character you play and describe him or her.” Even though watching the pilot or even just reading the fat binder each network helpfully provides would immediately clarify for this for you, moron reporter, without wasting our time with your horrendous question that you keep repeating during every single panel session.

I’m not alone in my hostility. After the third time this same moron reporter did this, about 50 other reporters groaned in unison.

Press Tour, Day Five: Charming Charlie

2006-07-19T15:00:00.000-06:00

I feel like it’s taken me until now to get into the swing of press tour. I’ve asked a question in every panel this morning (which requires seriously fighting for voice time while figuring out which side of ballroom you are on from the perspective of the stage. This is hard for someone with a bit of directional dyslexia like me) and I’m getting better about the schmoozing and chasing down people after panels (chased down Donal Logue today and Ben Silverman yesterday, among others). After you cover Congress, you learn how to fight your way to the front of the press scrum like a pro (even if you are a short girl like me) and apparently it’s a skill you never forget.

This morning started with a panel with new ABC World News Anchor Charlie Gibson, who was available via satellite from Cypress, where the U.S. military is conducting an “assisted departure” of American citizens as opposed to an evacuation, Charlie said. The big news from this panel was that they are changing the name from – stop the presses! – ABC World News Tonight to ABC World News with Charles Gibson. The difference, in case you didn’t pick up on it, is that World News is now available all the time via podcast, webcast and every other kind of cast, so it’s not World News TONIGHT but World News All the Time. But that was a little long and obvious, I guess. Some intrepid reporter also took up microphone time by asking why it’s with CHARLES Gibson and not Charlie Gibson, which is what everyone calls him. OK, true, but do we really care? In any case, the answer is that he signs his check Charles and he’s officially and legally Charles. Good that we’ve got that important issue settled.

Still, I was really impressed with ole Charlie. He managed to be charming and charismatic even via satellite, which is no easy feat. One of my NY Post editors (and I’m gaining more and more of those the longer I work with them) said that an old friend of his, Shelby Coffey, who started the Washington Post’s Style section, once said that it takes someone special to jump through the camera and make you feel like s/he is your friend and Charlie Gibson is one of those. That’s why Charlie, et al (Katie Couric) gets the big bucks. That’s actually totally true. Oprah is the queen of this. She’s all into big issues and she’s smart and all that, but what she really gets paid for is her ability to make every woman in America think she’s her best friend, all through the cold lense of the camera. It’s no easy feat, especially considering that many of these people (Oprah and Katie among them) are known for being nothing like their onscreen personas backstage.

Charlie sort of answered one of my longstanding questions: What the hell do anchors do other than read the news off the teleprompter? I still think that’s mostly what they do, but he argued that anchors should travel to foreign places – like Cypress and Jerusalem – during international crises because of the perspective they can gain, contacts they can meet, and the immediacy that all gives to the nightly newscasts. He said all that while being sure to credit the bureau chiefs that actually are doing the reporting and know what they are talking about, so I think that was a realistic answer.

He also talked about the perception that he is politically neutral, and then discussed what he thinks is the biggest political problem of the day: Congressional districts that are gerrymandered so as to assure a win for a political party. The fact that both sides do this (it’s also known as redistricting and it’s the practice of redrawing the boundaries so that a district mostly covers Rs or Ds) sort of evens it out, in my book, but I think he’s right that the country’s too polarized and that this is mostly due to political engineering.

“The thing that really fascinates and worries me, is how deeply divided we are,” he said. Last election, only two states flipped. We’ve gotten ourselves into a situation where there are very few states in play or in the middle. The disappearance of the political middle in this country worries me.”

He was really passionate on this point, which was good to see, and better than listening to Katie’s press-release soundbites on every single topic.

Finally, he said that about 122,000 people will probably run for president in 2008 because it’s the most wide-open election since the 1920s. True. Besides Hilary Clinton, name one Democrat that you think has any kind of shot at the nomination next year. And besides John McCain, who doesn’t actually have a shot, name an R. So there you have it.

For all you smut-heads out there who have not the faintest idea what I’m talking about with all this political mumbo jumbo, my apologies. I’ll return to my regular schedule of entertainment babble with my next entry.

Press Tour, Day Four: Life Isn't Fair

2006-07-19T14:12:00.000-06:00

My hobnobbing Monday night was limited to PR guys/friends, one Warner Bros. executive and an old friend from the Washington Post. Oh and sushi. The best part was the whole conversation devolved into what it always devolves into: What is the deal with Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’ baby? Someone here suggested they’ve failed to find one that looks enough like either of them. So I wasn’t such the social butterfly last night. Tonight I’m going to a friend’s for dinner so again no famous people on the docket.

Anyhoo, today’s been a little news free, but I did watch what I consider the best pilot I’ve seen so far: Ugly Betty. The show is an adaptation of Betty La Fea, which Salma Hayek and Ben Silverman purchased and turned into a series. It stars America Herrerra, who also starred in Real Women Have Curves, and America turns in what I’ve heard people call a courageous performance. I’m not sure what that means, but she does a great job – you relate to her and root for her and feel like the Ugly Betty title is a little unfair. (Salma, who is very ugly by the way – not, assured us that the title is meant to be sarcastic.)

The show, at least the pilot, is a great deal like The Devil Wears Prada, including some very similar plot lines. But while Anne Hathaway starts out a little bit preppy but still pretty, Betty’s got a lot further to go, including braces, horrendous eyebrows, terrible glasses and fashion choices that will shock even the most fashion-challenged. And Ugly Betty lets its characters go way over the top, unlike Meryl Streep’s understated performance in Prada. Vanessa Williams’ assistant is this stereotypical over-the-top gay man, but he’s pretty hilarious.

(Question from the audience to Vanessa Williams, who plays the show’s villainess: “Who would win in a total bitch fight – you or Meryl? Vanessa’s response, flexing her biceps: “Me, have you seen these guns?” Later, executive producer Ben Silverman confirmed that they were looking for the “fiercest bitch they could find,” and Vanessa fit the bill. She looks good but a little worked over, I have to say.)

Per usual, some of these critics are asking some shockingly ridiculous questions. One asked Vanessa: “Since you are pretty much the complete opposite of Betty, being so beautiful and all, do you find anything in her at all to relate to?” Vanessa’s response, after being visibly offended: “I’m 43, and you know as well as anyone that I’ve had some things happen to me.” Such as the discovery of nudie pics that robbed her of her Miss USA or America or whatever crown and the break-up of her marriage to LA Laker Rick Fox.

Here’s another awesome question: “Last year, you missed the South Beach panel due to a supposed death in the family. Was that just UPN’s excuse since they had already pulled the plug on the show?”

Vanessa: “Thank you for mentioning my father.”

So if you thought you had to be particularly smart or sensitive to be a TV critic, think no further. Many of them certainly aren’t doing too much thinking.

A surprise to me was the Help Me Help You panel, which stars Ted Danson as a group therapist whose own life isn’t running all that smoothly. The cast was generally cracking themselves – and us – up. I watched half the pilot during a break and I was laughing out loud. In one scene, the Asian girl with no social skills tells the man she met on J-Date that she dates Jewish men because she’s not threatened by them because she’s not attracted to them. Unfortunately, the pilot slows down in the second half, so we’ll see how the show goes.

My ABC day wrapped up with a panel on Daybreak, featuring Taye Diggs as a detective who must relive the worst day of his life – in Groundhog Day fashion – until he figures out who is trying to frame him. The show will take Lost’s place as it goes on hiatus from late November to early February. As a colleague of mine said, “I would pretty much watch him eat a bowl of cereal.” I agree, but this show looks like an endless drag. I myself don’t want to live the same day over and over again, why would I want to watch 13 episodes of it? Still, Taye assures us the show's not tediously boring: “I’m Taye Diggs,” he said, “why would I sign on for that?”

I could say, well, Kevin Hill, but that show started out good and went downhill. And in Taye’s case, the arrogance is warranted.

On a final note, I was saying to the same aforementioned colleague how unfair it is that people like Taye, Salma Hayek, Vanessa Williams and Sofia Vergara (she’s on Knights of Prosperity and she’s like the hottest person in the world. I’m not kidding. Check her out at www.sofiavergara.com so you can agree with me) are not only ridiculously, unworldly gorgeous, but they are also funny and smart and ambitious and talented. Taye (and Vanessa) can sing, for God’s sake. Salma executive produced an Oscar-nominated film (and she’s funny). Sofia is hilarious and has her own clothing line. I just think that God-given gifts should be more evenly distributed.

But as my colleague pointed out: “Life’s not fair.” And he’s right. Sigh.

Rob and Amber just keep on coming

2006-07-18T17:51:00.000-06:00

Seriously, how do these people keep getting TV shows? Besides their own "Newlyweds" type show, god forbid, Rob just a gig hosting some sci-fi mystery show on Sci Fi. If they get to have two shows on TV, really everyone should have their own show. But I think there's a reason why people live in houses and don't broadcast every part of their lives -- there's some things that no one needs to share.

From Variety:

"News Corp. cable network Fox Reality is ramping up production on originals, greenlighting its first docudrama series -- "The Rob and Amber Project."

Channel has ordered up 10 half-hours, which will follow married reality TV stars Rob and Amber Mariano, former participants on both "Survivor" and "The Amazing Race."

Linda Ellman and Rob George are exec producers.

After having been wed on CBS in 2005, the Marianos are looking to grow their reality show winnings. Specifically Rob wants to take up professional poker. Fox Reality series would follow the couple's move to Las Vegas and Rob's attempts to break into professional gambling, while Amber does her best to be supportive in the risky venture.

Fox Reality general manager David Lyle said "Rob and Amber" has several things working for it that would appeal to the channel's reality-crazed audience.

"We've grown up with Rob and Amber. We've seen their first kiss on 'Survivor' and watched their wedding. They're likeable and competitive," Lyle said. "What Rob's trying to do now, it's probably every guy's dream and every girl's nightmare."

Production is under way for a January premiere.

Elsewhere on the original front, Fox Reality has set for December "My Bare Lady," a competish in which U.S. porn stars travel to London and attempt to start acting careers on the West End stage. Lyle said a decision on a second season of gameshow "Solitary" will come next week. Series' season finale airs Monday."

Press tour, Day Three: Bloggity Blog Blog

2006-07-17T18:42:00.000-06:00

Ok, I was just reading the blog of TV Guide’s Michael Ausiello (http://community.tvguide.com/forum.jspa?forumID=700000049), and while I find him funny, at least I am not journaling my pee breaks. I initially wrote “and lunch menus,” but then I realized that yesterday I talked about breakfast, lunch and dinner, so let’s let go of the notion that I am not obsessed with food because I most certainly am.

That said, Rachael Ray’s mini-burgers at lunch yesterday were not that great, not to mention that they were hard to acquire what with the line and the constant running out of food. As I previously mentioned, however, the chocolate macadamia tarts were outstanding. I also stopped by Trader Joe’s (my FAVORITE) and picked up some interesting snacks, including soy and flax seed tortilla chips, naam yogurt and dill chips and chili-spiced dried mango. How much do I love TJ’s? Let me count the ways. I so wish they were in Boulder. If TJ’s would just come to the Front Range, then it would be the absolutely perfect place. I heard they were supposed to come to 29^th Street, but Wild Oats won out with the proposal to build a 35,000 square foot massive store. As all those who know me know, I LOVE grocery stores (we’re still on food) so it’s all good by me.

Anyhoo, these sessions in the ballroom are hilarious because now we have Wi-Fi and its like the best thing ever. Everyone is furiously typing through every session, blogging, emailing, taking notes. Anything but listening as far as I can tell. It's great though, because I can sit in session after session and check email and be in touch with the outside world instead of sitting here fretting about what I’m missing during the boring bits. And those are many.

Today was The CW, which is the squnched-together child (note the made-up words, I can do that because I’m blogging) of The WB and UPN. It basically feels like The WB with a lot of CBS people hanging around. So mostly it was a lot of blah blah blah except for the two following things.

First, apparently the new showrunner of the Gilmore Girls, David Rosenthal, was an obsessed stalker of Heidi Klum in a former life. Check out the details here: http://www.defamer.com/hollywood/gilmore-girls/new-gilmore-girls-showrunner-was-heidi-klums-1-fan-169246.php.

So when this very odd reporter from The National Post asked, essentially: “So, what was the deal with that whole Heidi Klum thing,” the response was extremely curt, as you can imagine. “Um, I’m not here to talk about my personal life,” Rosenthal said. Added Lauren Graham, who plays Lorelai Gilmore on the show, “We’re not talking about that. Next question.” It added quite a hostile touch to the panel, which was already a little bit rocky because the show’s creators and executive producers, Amy Sherman Palladino and Dan Palladino failed to negotiate a multi-year deal with Warner Bros. that they could live with and exited the show this spring. I don’t know how many of you watch it, but Gilmore Girls is a show with a very definite patter, and I expect the Palladinos’ departure will affect the show much like Aaron Sorkin’s departure affected The West Wing. In my opinion, these shows become something else when their original creator exits the building. Graham and Alexis Bledel, who plays her daughter Rory, were confident that the show would fare well under the new stalker leadership, but the critics weren’t so sure.

What’s more, while refusing to say anything bad about the Palladinos, Graham was pretty clear that the old regime was a bit of a dictatorship and that she’s liking the openness of the new regime. That is, until she starts being stalked. Just in case you were wondering, by the way, both Graham and Bledel are more gorgeous in person than on TV, if that’s even possible.

Chris Rock and Jada Pinkett-Smith provided the star power on a panel about The CW’s Sunday night African-American comedies, but the real stand-out, in my humble opinion, was Ali LeRoi, the real executive producer and showrunner of Everybody Hates Chris. When asked how Sunday Night Football was going to affect viewership of his show, he said: “I recommend that people stop watching football because it promotes gratuitous violence in our society. Instead, you should sit down with yhour family and watch family programs, which will promote a better, stronger nation.”

Later, the critics couldn’t stop asking about diversity on primetime TV and the lack thereof, especially the inability of the broadcast networks to successfully launch a black drama. After the panel brushed the question off many times, LeRoi finally laid it on the line: “At the end of the day, dude, you got to sell some soap. If you don’t sell some soap, the executives don’t care about you. Black drama, schmack drama. If you don’t want to deal with network executives, go write a book.”

But I don’t want to suggest that Rock wasn’t funny too. His response to this question, which was posed in the session for the last time by an earnest black reporter: “Do you ever think your life is going to be as good as white people? Give that one up already.”

Rock and LeRoi ended up giving shout-outs to Lost’s J.J. Abrams and Grey’s Anatomy’s Shonda Rhimes, both of whom populate their casts with people of all colors: “Shows like Grey’s are the model, HBO’s The Wire is the model. J.J. Abrams has done a fantastic job of involving different people in his show,” Le Roi said. “Except for Oz, that’s a black drama. Don’t cast a white guy on Oz.”

For those of you who have no clue what he’s talking about here, Oz was this violent prison drama on HBO in which lots of murderers tried to live and love together in a federal prison. Needless to say, there were lots of bad breakups between the inmates, which often ended in stabbing and other violent deaths.

Tonight is The CW party, which involves hobnobbing with lots of these people. I’m not sure how much I care, although I will say Donnie Wahlberg was incredibly smart and articulate on his panel this morning about new show, Runaway. So maybe I will deign to put down my drink for a minute and talk to him. Oh wait, what’s that you say, I am in Pasadena to talk to actors, not stand to the side drinking and making fun of them? Hmmmm.

Off the subject, while I spent the entire day ensconced in this air-conditioned hotel ballroom, apparently the President said “shit” on television today. That’s excellent. I wonder if FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, a Bush appointee, will fine him for indecency.

Press Tour, Day Two: It's Hot Here in LA

2006-07-17T12:25:00.000-06:00

Day two started with an omelet buffet and CBS bragging about a promotion in which they inscribe advertising messages on eggs.

Yes, that’s what I said. Soon, you will be advertised to while making your morning scrambled eggs, if you are actually able to read at that hour. Learn more at: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/17/business/media/17adco.html

We then listened to Katie Couric say absolutely nothing for an hour, after the omelet-making set off the fire alarms and made everything start a bit late. I think it’s ironic that journalist Couric gave some of the most vague and non-insightful answers I’ve ever heard. If she was on the other side of those answers, like most of the journalists here have been, she would have thrown her mike at her subject. That makes me wonder how much of a “journalist” Katie is, and how much she’s just a pretty, relatable face that successfully reads the news (all the time – on TV, radio, Internet – anywhere you are, she can be, in a sort of scary Big-Brotherish media development). She really did look great though.

The rest of the day was mostly famous-person free. I missed the Rachel Ray panel because I was filing, but I did eat some of her food for lunch, and it was mostly nothing great, although the chocolate macademia tarts were spectacular. The rest of the day comprised a panel on digital initiatives (yawn) and one on CSI, on which I bailed.

Sunday night I departed the world of TV, and returned to earth, having dinner in Santa Monica with my cousin and my visiting aunt. Margaritas and ocean views for everyone! We went to Gilbert’s El Indio on W. Pico (http://www.gilbertselindio.com/) and of course my cousin Birkleigh knew the manager. She’s such a funny girl.

TV Critics Press Tour in Pasadena, Day One: The Odyssey Begins

2006-07-17T12:20:00.000-06:00

TV Critics Press Tour in Pasadena, Day One

Arrived in LA today. All went well – got to the airport at the exact right time, walked right on to the plane, landed early, my giant bag was first off the carousel, walked right on to the rental car shuttle. I was rocking and expecting to start my ten-day TV odyssey early and relaxed.

Alas, this was not to be. I exited the rental car shuttle to find a line of epic proportions awaiting me. It took TWO HOURS to get my car at Budget (extremely hostile letter to the corporation to follow), with the line winding around the corner and extending on into infinity. I read half of The Red Tent during this wait, which was actually sort of pleasant. I’m rereading it again for Book Club and it’s just as good the second time around. Thank god I had a book or I would have gone postal like the ANNOYING jappy girl behind me, who never got off the phone or stopped talking about how horrible it was that she had to wait more than 30 seconds for the entire hour-and-a-half she and her boyfriend stood behind me. Finally, mercifully, someone came by in a Mercedes and whisked them away, never to annoy me again.

When I got up to the counter at Budget, one of the CSRs kept making irritating announcements, like “don’t take our your frustrations on us, it’s a company problem,” and I was like, “who the hell else do you expect us to complain to?” Hence, hostile letter to follow.

Once I finally got my zippy little red car with radio controls on the steering wheel, I took Sepulveda to the 105 to the 110 (because we like to talk like that about highways in LA) to the Ritz Carlton in Pasadena, which is a very lovely place and convinces you that you should definitely live in Southern California, even after the drive there convinces you that you never even visit the place, unless there’s some way to never drive anywhere ever. All roads lead to a traffic jam in LA. But Pasadena is sort of a different story – clean, lovely, wealthy, flowered – it’s really quite appealing.

I did make it to the Ritz in time to attend my first panel session, which was on the hour-long heist drama Smith, starring Ray Liotta. I had just watched the pilot last Thursday night, and found it slow, and at least one executive-type person at CBS agreed with me. The pilot, about a group of thieves that conduct the most violent heists network TV has ever seen, should have been fast and snappy. Instead, it was slow, plodding and humorless. And also hugely expensive, as all involved admit. The pilot runs 60 full minutes, and CBS plans to either premiere it 90 minutes or commercial-free (I expect 90 minutes), and the cast is about as high end as it gets, with Liotta, Sideways and Prairie Home Companion’s Virginia Madsen, House of Sand and Fog and 24’s Shohreh Aghdashloo, The Devil Wears Prada and The Guardian’s Simon Baker and Amy Smart, who is much, much smaller in person that she seems on TV. She’s looked tall in everything I’ve seen her in, but she’s possibly shorter than I am. There’s a lot of actors who when I see them I wonder how they broke in to the business. For example, How I Met Your Mother and Buffy’s Alyson Hannigan was in attendance and she’s just a tiny little average looking thing, but she gets a fair amount of attention wherever she goes.

Anyway, I digress, which I’m sure I’ll be doing a lot of. All the suits at CBS and Warner Bros. are thrilled to death regarding Smith, but when we watched it at a sparsely attended pilot night/aka Paige’s personal TV focus group, we were all more like bored to death. Those 60 minutes wore on, let me tell you. And when things are blowing up and paintings are getting stolen, being bored is the kiss of death in my book.

I missed the panels on Shark, starring James Woods, who showed up at CBS’s party at the Rose Bowl with his girlfriend, who appears to be about 40 years younger than he is and I do not exaggerate, and on Jericho and The Class. Which is too bad because I actually watched all those pilots.

Shark was better than I thought it would be, although someone asked me at the Rose Bowl how much coke I thought Woods was doing, and I have to say a fair amount. My more reasonable comment when I watched it is that movie actors are often too big for TV, and I think that’s really true with Woods. He comes off as manic in certain scenes of this show (and apparently during the panel as well). His 16-year-old daughter in the show, played by a gorgeous up-and-coming 21-year-old actress named Danielle Panabaker, looks older than his current blondie girlfriend. This is why I love Hollywood! But only to visit.

A lot of people said they liked Jericho, starring Skeet Ulrich and Gerald McRaney. Skeet looks AWFUL by the way – he’s already dried up and wrinkly and he has the weirdest vibe -- we chatted very briefly about the Budweiser we were drinking at the Rose Bowl bar. Anyway, my friends were all reading magazines during the Jericho pilot, which will have a separate plot running online as well, a la Lost, which is sort of interesting.

Finally, I personally hated The Class, CBS’s only comedy, finding the script silly and contrived and not funny.

In a non-glamour note, I’m staying at the Travelodge in Pasadena and it’s so white trash. It’s also cheap as dirt, which explains things, but it’s clean and cool and a place to shower and sleep so it’s all good. Would I rather be at the Ritz? Hell yes, but for the price the Travelodge is fine. And it has a fridge so I can store all the chocolate goodies the networks foist on us. Maybe I’ll put some fruit in there too in an attempt to be healthy.

For people who like this sort of thing, here’s the “famous” people I saw yesterday, besides the aforementioned ones: Numbers Rob Morrow, Cold Case’s Danny Pino (so cute), Charlie Sheen without new girlfriend (who went to highschool with a friend of mine) or visible restraining order, Jennifer Love Hewitt and her very average looking boyfriend, Rent, Prada and Cold Case’s Traci Thoms (who also is tiny and young, and she looks larger and older and more imposing on screen), CSI: New York’s Gary Sinise (also a slight man), The Unit and 24’s Dennis Haysbert, Scrubs and The Unit’s Scott Foley (and his non Jennifer Garner girlfriend, who was in NBC’s Heist) and CBS Chairman Leslie Moonves and his beautiful wife Julie Chen (also host of The Early Show and Big Brother). There also were a lot of minor stars wandering around, but a lot of them I didn’t really know. Like the cast of How I Met Your Mother – I’ve got no clue who those people are.

Oh, and I chatted with David Krumholtz, who stars with Rob Morrow on Numbers and plays Mr. Universe in Serenity, which is the movie I saw the night before I left for LA. It was funny to see him in a movie one minute and then in front of me the next. He is SHORT. (And so is Rob Morrow.)

Dominguez Waterfall

2006-06-05T15:26:00.000-06:00

This is where I took my one and only shower of the weekend, so I was highly appreciative of this location. We camped nearby, and it was cool to hear the water all night long. Showers under waterfalls are great, but also freezing and kind of painful. The sacrifices I am willing to make for clean hair!

Dominguez Canyon -- where we camped

2006-06-05T15:16:00.000-06:00

Typical me spent a whole weekend doing something really cool and took not one picture of the event. My excuses are as follows: 1) my camera was not accessible to me in the tippy canoe and 2) I looked like ass (as the above picture will attest. Well, actually, no it won't because I chickened out and didn't post it) and so was not as enthusiastic about photo-taking as I may have otherwise been. That said, it's not all about me so I could have taken pictures of other things besides my unattractive self. Anyway, I didn't, so I'm relying on the charity of others for the photos I do have.

This is a shot of where we camped on the last night, which was really cool. We sailed through red canyons all weekend, explaining where Colorado got its name "color red." I thought that floating in a canoe all weekend would be really relaxing and lazy, but turns out that's not really true. It was very fun, but it was a lot of loading and unloading, setting up and taking down, and so forth. Still, once you get into camping, there's nothing like being outside for days at a time.

Because I love space

2006-06-05T14:53:00.000-06:00

This is a picture of Titan, one of Saturn's moons as it peeks out behind Saturn's rings. The photo was taken from the scientific space craft Cassini, which shot the picture from about 1.1 million miles away. For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://www.nasa.gov/cassi

While this is sort of a random post, it's relevant because what I really want to post about is my float trip down the Gunnison River. We had a great trip and one of the coolest things was the night sky. When you that far out of civilization and that high up, you can really see some amazing stars and I so loved it.

Anyway, enjoy this for now and soon I will post all about floating the Gunnison. I was a canoe champion!

Lost bids good-bye for summer and I miss it already

2006-05-25T16:27:00.000-06:00

Ah TV. How I hate it, yet how I love it.

In my opinion, this was a great year for season finales: Grey’s Anatomy, The Office and now Lost. And I love the trend of super-sizing the finales. I know it’s a ton of work for the producers, but how awesome was a three-hour Grey’s or a two-hour Lost or even a 40-minute Office? I can’t complain.

The one finale that I thought sucked was Will & Grace. A) I don’t want to imagine them old and B) I don’t want to imagine them not being friends for 20 years and C) having their kids get together in the end, much like Will and Grace themselves did, is retarded, as is the idea of Jack and Karen living together, as is their stupid duet of “Unforgettable,” which I believe should be looked at as a “next phase of my career” demo tape. Lame.

Anyway, let’s talk a little Lost, shall we? People who don’t watch this show need read no further because you will have no idea what the heck I’m talking about.

The show has gotten even more unbelievably complicated, something I think that J.J. Abrams and crew cannot avoid despite themselves (see Alias for confirmation). I love that the show is complicated and deep and messy and unexpected, but it’s not a great tactic for winning new fans or keeping old ones who feel they can’t pop back in if they miss a few episodes. The age of the DVR is helping that scenario, but with only 10% of TV households using DVRs, producers shouldn’t really be counting on that factor to preserve their shows.

Now on to the part where I act like the characters in this show are real people: I have to say that I agreed with Jack and then Locke that the whole pushing the button thing was utter crap, but now we learn that in fact, it’s the whole deal. Now that Desmond has gone to the measure of last resort and used the “system failure” key, where does that leave us for next season? Is the magic of the island that healed Locke’s legs, cured Rose’s cancer and got Sun pregnant now off? And where are Locke and Eko – fighting it out in the hatch?

More unanswered questions: Are Jack, Kate and Sawyer going to go live with The Others? For how long? And who the hell are these people? Are they in fact “the good guys,” as non-Henry Gale said they were? I am proud to say that I always thought Henry Gale was the leader and I was right about at least one thing.

Finally, did Michael and Walt really get away? It’s possible because Harold Perrineau is not signed on a season regular next year. While his return is not ruled out either, it looks like murdering Michael made a clean getaway for now.

Just as I expected, the finale opened more questions than it answered, but it did answer some very important questions, like “why did the plane crash?” and that was a big one. Overall, I thought it was a better season finale than last year’s.

While I was savoring every minute of "Lost," it looks like most of the rest of America was watching Taylor Hicks finally take the "American Idol" crown that should have been Chris Daughtry's. I know it’s a big deal, I know 500 million people voted, I know it’s the highest-rated show on TV, but still, yawn.

In a totally irrelevant, non-TV aside -- I’m going on a float trip (traveling in canoes, camping on the shore, drinking beer -- good times!) down the Gunnison River this weekend, which should be a blast. Blog on that next week.

Have a great Memorial Day weekend! It’s one of my faves – first weekend of summer, a day off and no presents to buy.

Yes, I haven't posted since Halloween

2006-05-20T12:44:00.000-06:00

It's crazy how fast time flies and I've posted -- well, nothing. And not at Jack Myers either. This is good, because I've been muy busy with work, but bad in terms of keeping up with the bloggers. Anyway, I'm still not really posting, but doing some minimal updating. I also am trying to get my business web site up at Jumpcliff Press.

Here's a clip from my "comment of the moment" on Jumpcliff that I just posted. Somehow I'm going to get these two sites to work in tandem:

The Grey's Anatomy Finale

The first thing you have to know is that I am obsessed with this show. And I've written like ten stories on it, including about five cover stories for the NY Post, so I feel like my obsession is legitimate and profitable.

So let's talk about the finale.

In a word: Awesome.

Total soap opera, totally ridiculous from the POV of my friend Quinn, but still awesome. It had everything you wanted in a three-freakin'-hour finale. Drama, death, sex, ambiguity, hysteria. Katherine Heigl (empathetic intern surgical Izzie Stevens) deserves an Emmy. Ellen Pompeo (Meredith Grey) deserves me switching places with her so I can live forever suspended between hot Chris O'Donnell and hotter Patrick Dempsey (who I've interviewed twice, by the way) with the potential of possibly encountering supernova hot Mark "McSteamy" Sloan again in the ever-after.

OK, so I'm crushing on the men on this show like a teenage girl, but tell me a woman who isn't? Only the ones without televisions in my opinion.

My DVR is going to be on fire on Thursday nights this fall, recording Grey's. Hopefully Aaron Sorkin's new show, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, sucks or is moved to Wednesdays because no matter when Grey's is on, I'm watching.

New blog!

2005-10-31T11:32:00.000-07:00

I have a new blog at Jack Myers' Media Village, where I'm blogging, well, supposedly daily, but we'll see how it goes because if you check out this site you know I'm pretty slow about it. My blog is called TV Diva Talks Back, because sadly I couldn't think of anything better, and I'm basically going to just chat about the TV news of the day and anything else that comes to my mind. I'm also supposed to be running a forum on the site: Talk Back with TV Diva, so we'll see if anyone starts participating. I get compensated based on traffic, so I guess I should get to marketing!

Cassini flies by Saturn's moon Dione

2005-10-19T14:18:00.000-06:00

Even though I typically write about inane things such as TV shows and celebrity gossip, I've also always thought exploring space would be really cool. I even considered becoming an astronomer (not astrologer, although I've considered that too) but then I realized I would have to do physics and that wasn't going to work. That's why I went into writing, and even then sometimes I have to do math. Don't these people get the fact that if I could do math, I would be doing something that paid a lot better?

Anyway, here's the link to the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena's Cassini home page. It's a great place for wanna-be astronomers to hang out and regret that physics eludes them.

Amateur astrologers, go here: Susan Miller's Astrology Zone. It's a fave of all the people I know who have an unhealthy obsession with astrology.

More bragging and shameless self-promotion

2005-10-18T14:38:00.000-06:00

Adewale on the cover of the New York Post's TV Week

I do love to brag, but mostly I just want people to see the cover photo of this week's TV Week because it is so hilarious, especially if you are a fan of Lost. I wrote three stories for last week's edition, and the cover photo of Adewale blah blah blah (I still can't spell this guy's name even though I wrote a whole thing about him) is the best thing ever (well, besides Google Earth. And maybe Baked Ruffles). Other stories in the issue: one on the gorgeous Jaime Pressly, starring in NBC's My Name is Earl, who was the world's biggest pain in the ass to get on the phone, but it was completely her non-existent, non-working publicist's fault, and NBC agrees with me; and one on the equally gorgeous and actually very articulate Jennifer Love Hewitt, who is starring in CBS's Ghost Whisperer.

Added bonus on the Love interview -- I got to also talk to James Van Praagh, who is a famous medium and also the creator and exec producer of GW. He was so interesting, even if you think that stuff is total bunk, which I don't. I'm a total sucker for all that stuff!

Anyway, he said that since I'm a Scorpio with Pisces Moon that I'm super-intuitive and should become a medium myself. I actually think that would be really cool, if I could see or talk or sense any dead people. But since I have trouble communicating with real live people, maybe I should just work on those skills and leave the crossing-over stuff to others.

Google Earth is the coolest thing in the world!

2005-10-10T15:48:00.000-06:00

Get your own copy at earth.google.com. You can fly from Boulder to New York and then watch yourself zoom into the canyons of Manhattan. You can visit the Forbidden City of China and check out the temples, and then zip over to see the Great Wall. You can even fly to Aspen, click on the "restaurants" tab and see all the good places to eat and where they are located. Seriously, go check it out!

OK, I'm easily amused. Plus anything to avoid working!

I'm confused

2005-10-05T16:13:00.000-06:00

OK, I give up. Maybe I was totally wrong. Maybe all that jumping up and down on Oprah's couch really was Tom Cruise in love. In any case, after a barrage of hot Hollywood gossip today -- skankmeister Lindsay Lohan crashes AGAIN supposedly evading the ever-present paparazzi, and Nick and Jessica really are splitting up -- this little nugget comes out.

Now my cynical little head is spinning -- did they actually have sex or is this just Cruise trying to put to rest the rumors that he's infertile, hence adopting children with Nicole? (Watch for her pregnancy announcement soon.) Even though it seemed like the world's most obvious PR stunt, are they actually in love? Or do people actually go so far as to produce children in the name of publicity?

That seems like the most cynical thing of all time to me, so I might have to switch all my negative thinking and go with "in love." Because if these two got pregnant as yet another way to maintain Cruise's image, they are definitely on the fast track to hell.

And here's the lamest thinking of all on my part: Why couldn't Katie just stick with fellow Dawson's cutie, Joshua Jackson? He's adorable and he's not a crazy scientologist. Granted, he's also not the world's top movie star, but I for one still love his boyish charm.

LOS ANGELES (AFP) - Hollywood megastar Tom Cruise and his fiancee of six months Katie Holmes are expecting a baby. The "Mission Impossible" and "Top Gun" star's publicist and sister, Lee Anne DeVette, told People magazine that 26-year-old actress Holmes is pregnant with the couple's first child. "Tom and Katie are very excited, and the entire family is very excited," DeVette was quoted as saying. Cruise, 43, and Holmes, who was virtually unknown before starring in this year's "Batman Begins," first said they were dating just six months ago and announced their engagement at a press conference in Paris in June. DeVette could not be reached by AFP at the time of reporting.

2005-09-26T16:21:00.000-06:00

A shot of a different part of the same valley.

The Maroon Bells

2005-09-26T16:20:00.002-06:00

The famous Maroon Bells in Aspen with a fresh dusting of snow. This is the perfect time of year to see them, and I was lucky enough to be up in Aspen sharing a junket with Ross last week. The Maroon Bells are the most photographed mountains in the U.S., and they are named as such because of the red-colored rock that comprises them, and their bell-like shape.

2005-09-26T16:20:00.001-06:00

The path that leads into the MB valley.

2005-09-26T16:20:00.000-06:00

One of the hillsides in the Maroon Bell valley ...

2005-09-22T09:49:00.000-06:00

Ok, I may sound like a wacko but does anyone else think it's ironic that these giant hurricanes, caused by warmer-than-usual waters in the Gulf of Mexico (and thus potentially linked to petroleum-based global warming) are hitting towns -- New Orleans, Gulfport, Galveston, Houston -- where the majority of U.S. oil refineries are located? It almost seems like nature is making a direct attack on the industry that's heating her up.

Me at the top!

2005-09-20T10:36:00.001-06:00

See how I am a mountain goddess? I stayed about three minutes and then scurried back down to get out of the wind. I was like Chevy Chase in Vacation.

Lisa at the top of Triangle Pass

2005-09-20T10:36:00.000-06:00

For some reason I do not understand, my crazy friend Lisa loves strong, freezing wind so she calmly ate her chicken caesar wrap from Whole Foods while I ran back down the rocky mountain. Not being as well prepared, I ate my squished but delicious PB&J on the way back to camp. Oh, and chocolate, of course.

2005-09-20T10:35:00.001-06:00

Voila! The view. This picture doesn't do it justice, however. You can backpack up to Conundrum from this site (Crested Butte) as well, but going over this narrow and windy pass with a backpack on my pack does not seem appealing. It was hard enough on the easy Aspen side!

2005-09-20T10:35:00.000-06:00

On the way up to Triangle Pass. It was really really really (I can't really emphasize this enough) windy and cold. I thought I was going to get blown off the mountain and felt a bit like Frodo climbing up to the Cracks of Doom. But the view from the top was worth it.

2005-09-20T10:34:00.001-06:00

The valley behind our campsite at 11,200 feet.

2005-09-20T10:34:00.000-06:00

More scenery, which helped keep my mind off the giant pack on my back and my increasingly sore shoulders.

On the way up to Conundrum

2005-09-20T10:33:00.000-06:00

OK, I promised photos and blogging from my Conundrum trip, and here they are!

The trip was totally amazing, although I didn't take enough pictures to record everything. The hike in was long but not brutal, the weather was perfect and the moon was full. Sitting in the hot springs was fun, social and most importantly, warm. Getting out was a bit of a challenge since you had to scramble out naked, under the light of the full moon no less, and then get your towel quickly around you while standing in the freezing wind. But even that wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, and the hours spent sitting in the spring kept me warm in my sleeping bag all night long. Waking up to the sun peeking over a tall mountain and lighting the whole valley also was cool.

This picture is of some of the gorgeous scenery on the nine-mile hike up to the springs. I didn't take enough pictures, so refer to my picture of the springs in my previous posts to see what it looks like. Ok, it looks like a small mudhole, but it's really quite a magical place. Imagine 40-50 naked people all sitting in there together, howling in unision at the full moon on Saturday night. It was quite the rockin' place to be.

Backpacking. Why?

2005-09-15T16:02:00.000-06:00

I'm going on a backpacking trip to Conundrum Hot Springs near Aspen this weekend, and can I say that the scenery had better be pretty damn rockin' and the hot springs better be pretty damn hot because it's taken me three freakin' days to prepare for this trip! I don't know if I'm just mentally challenged or what, but this is now the second backpacking trip I've gone on (why, I do not know. That's a subject for a coming blog) and it takes me longer to get ready for the trip than to actually go on it. And why this takes so long, I also do not know, because the whole point of backpacking is to get as much stuff as possible into as lightweight form as possible and then shove into the smallest amount of space as possible. This would seem to indicate that it wouldn't take too to long prepare because by definition you don't need that much stuff, but sort of like technology, getting everything to be small and light requires many shopping trips and much careful consideration. So before we even set off for our nine-mile hike into the mountains, I am exhausted. What I think about all this craziness when I come back should be interesting. How did I go from city girl to backcountry girl in just one short year?

The pictures above are of the Conundrum Hot Springs, which at 11,200 feet above sea level are the highest in the country, and of scenery along the nine-mile path. (Pictures taken by some guy named Evan Ravitz, who was nice enough to put them on-line for me to steal.) Once I get over the pain of carrying my heavy pack for hours and hours, I actually think it's going to be an amazing time. And I think if I can carry a huge pack six miles up a mountain in three feet of snow, like I did last January, I can do this!

Oh, and one fun fact -- people sit in the hot springs naked, which my friends and family know is really not my bag, but I'm trying to be adventurous. (Maybe there will be a story to sell in all this? Ideas anyone?) Plus, I think it's going to be pretty cold up there, so I probably won't care too much at that point anyway. I'll just want to get get warm.

Is this sounding fun yet? I wonder if it's too late to bail in order to stay in Boulder and drink all weekend like I usually do.

Wish me luck -- blogging and pics to follow next week.

New Orleans: "It's hell on earth"

2005-09-15T15:50:00.000-06:00

This is an email I received from a friend of a friend about the real state of affairs in New Orleans. I knew it was bad but this somehow made it much more real for me than what I was seeing on TV. It's long, but it's very descriptive. I hope you will take a little time to read it. Also, this is a little late, but here's a link that will take you to all Katrina-related web sites, from the Red Cross to missing persons sites.

Everyone,

I just returned from my first trip to Louisiana this weekend since Katrina. I spent the entire trip back trying to decide if I wanted to tell you all about what is happening down there, because honestly if I had the choice, I would choose not to know. But in the end, I figured e-mailing you all was better than talking to each of you on the phone and over e-mail. It is beyond what you can imagine... it's hell on earth.

I flew into Baton Rouge, which sits about 80 miles northwest of New Orleans, and the city is destroyed, but not by the storm. There are over 750,000 refuges from New Orleans in Baton Rouge. People are camping on the side of the roads, in their cars if they have them, and all over the LSU campus. The first thing you notice is how outraged everyone is. The people of Baton Rouge don't want us here. There seems to be no plan for the New Orleaneans once they are dropped off in Baton Rouge, and everyone is confused, horrified, or worse. They know this is potentially a permanent situation, or at least the way it will be for the next several months, and it is safe to say they are as scared as the homeless and exhausted refugees that litter their streets.

My sister and I rented four houses in Houma, Louisiana, which is about 50 miles south of Baton Rouge or about 30 miles west of New Orleans. We spent the weekend moving our family there, then our friends, and then in the end, people we met that had no other options. When I left, we had perhaps forty people with another twenty on the way. It is an amazing thing to see: your best friends, your family, and everyone in between huddled on floorboards, makeshift beds, and sleeping bags.

It is truly like a nuclear bomb hit our city, and we are doing everything we can just to keep everyone housed, fed, and with water. Saturday morning, I decided to go into New Orleans. There were far too many people from our home unaccounted for, but beyond that, New Orleans is part of everything that I am; it's more than a city to those of us who call it home. It's part of your family, and with the stories of looting, flooding, and complete inability of the government to make the matter better, it was as if a family member was being slowly killed.

I was told by everyone it was impossible to get in and I would be arrested for trying, but I'm sure you call imagine how little that did to deter me. There is no way to get into the city. The roads that are open are being used to bring people out, and no traffic is headed into the city. I had a rental car, and I started to drive the 30 miles on back roads that I guessed wouldn't be flooded. I made it about half way before there was no way to get into the city by car. I loaded up a backpack with as much water as I could carry, two packs of breakfast bars, three canisters of bug spray, and an extra pair of shoes. Then I started walking.

From there, it was hell on earth. First, there is the climate. It is almost 90 degrees, and the humidity plus the still water everywhere has made the swamp come alive with bugs. Trying to describe the mosquitos is almost impossible. Do you know the sound of the wind in the north when a blizzard is happening? The "whirring" sound? That is the sound this many bugs make. You have to wear long sleeve shirts and pants, and you are drenched with sweat because of the heat.

The first group of people I met were very friendly. I traded my IPod for a kid's dirt bike so I could make better time, and they gave me some extra water. They did their best to warn me it wasn't safe to head into the city, but they didn't argue when I said there were people we couldn't find. They warned me about what neighborhoods to avoid, and they said beyond everything else, it was critical to stay away from the police. They would force you to leave by putting you on a bus destined for who knows where, and if you resisted, they'd shoot you. It was the first I saw of a constant epidemic: the police and the government are considered absolute enemies by Katrina survivors. At first, I tried not to judge and simply
considered that shortsighted, but over the next two days, I started to understand where it came from. I got into the outskirts of the city by about 2 pm... an upscale neighborhood called "Metaire," where most of the money of New Orleans lives. To even get that far had already involved about half a mile of swimming. There is no way I can get you to understand just how destroyed everything is. It's not just underwater - it's more that the swamps have risen over New Orleans. There are snakes and alligators everywhere, and the more you see, the more you realize the city isn't going to be livable for who knows how long.

And then there are the bodies. I first started seeing them as I crossed from Metaire into what is called "mid city." Have you ever been to Jazz Fest? The neighborhood you drive through to get there and the fairgrounds are called "mid city." It was the first place where I saw them. Before this weekend, I had only seen a few dead bodies in my entire life: traffic accidents, I once witnessed a shooting, and then funerals. I don't know how many dead people I saw this weekend. Some have been pushed against dry spots by what I am assuming are rescue workers. Others are just floating in the water. Then there are all the houses with red marks on them, meaning there is someone dead inside.

The most horrifying part of all of it is what happens when a body is floating in the water for two or three days. It's barely recognizable as a person. When you see one, it is riddled with mosquitos and who knows what else.

The other thing you have to understand is people are still everywhere. Any idea the media may have given you about a city-wide evacuation is insane. I found hundreds if not thousands of people in all the different neighborhoods, and they have no intention of leaving. First and foremost, they have nowhere to go. And having come from Baton Rouge, the people that did get evacuated are simply unloaded from the busses, told loose
plans of food that is coming, and told to hold tight and someone will come up with a plan. It's chaos.

Second, they don't want to leave. They don't trust they will ever be let back in, and they certainly are not going to allow their homes to be pillaged by the people crafty enough not to get kicked out.

Finally, they just don't believe the argument that the city will be unsafe and riddled with disease. The people still in New Orleans are our uneducated and angry masses. You know the people of the world that "don't believe" in AIDS, who thinks the government is out to get them, and don't understand why they should ever get jobs when unemployment pays just fine? Try convincing them typhoid fever is real.

But beyond that, they are armed and angry, they have already survived five straight days of no food and no water, and they don't believe those who haven't gotten them food or water are going to find a place for them to live. I know it sounds ignorant on their part, but can you imagine it? I was there on Saturday, five days after the storm, and still no one had been told where to go for food or water. People are surviving by breaking into each other's homes. It's chaos, and it's dangerous, and there doesn't seem to be a plan to fix anything any time soon. My main goal was to go to the homes of family and friends and make sure everyone was safely out of the city.

I grew up in the 9th Ward - it's one of the lowest income areas in the city, and it is also the sight of the first levy break. For me to get to my childhood home, I would have needed to dive down underwater just to get to the roof. I went to the second house we lived in after that. It's roof had been torn off, and there was a body floating not fifty feet away from the front porch. I wish I could say the journey to friends' houses fared better, but I can't. Most of the homes were either completely submerged, sitting in ten to fifteen feet of water, or just not standing anymore. I found three people I knew in all, and they set off for Houma that afternoon. Then I started to explore the city.

Like I said, it is hell on earth. The people are furious. They feel as if they have been abandoned. You have to understand, there is no power anywhere. The rescue crews are going through New Orleans proper, not all the neighborhoods where people live. Most of the city doesn't even think there is a rescue effort underway at all. It became clear to me the one thing people need is communication, and in the absence of communication, fear takes people over. I never realized how powerful the raw ability of communicating is. There is nothing more important to restoring order than giving the leaders an ability to get messages to everyone. I know you have all heard about people firing on helicopters. I'm certainly not saying it is right, but after being there, I understand. For five days, helicopters were flying overhead, but none of them are even so much as dropping water or food down for people. They fly by using loud speakers saying that anyone found looting or stealing will be arrested, and those are the helicopters that are followed by gunshots, from what I saw. I don't know who is controlling the message being given to everyone, but they need to be replaced. The only government group anyone has seen are the police with sawed off shotguns threatening to arrest everyone who is walking around on the streets. Everyone is scared about their future, about their friends and family, and about their city, and fear leads people to do amazing things.

Like I said, I'm not saying firing guns at the helicopters is the right thing to do by any means, but after being down there, I understand. When I left, I thought I was going to see the 3rd world, but it isn't the third world. It's a state of war. People don't even know who they are fighting, but they know they are at war. Twice, I had to bike at full speed away from gangs that came at me, and before I left the city, I had my cash, my backpack with my food and change of clothes, and my camera stolen from me. It's like a family member of mine has been possessed by a confused, frightened, angry force that can't be stopped. Every interaction with someone who is supposed to be helping, like the helicopters flying overhead or the police barking threats only makes it worse. When I left for New Orleans, I thought I wanted to help the people I couldn't find. But once there, I realized I was just trying to feed my selfish vanity of wanting to see the city in turmoil. If it was flooded and there was chaos, I wanted to see it and be a part of it. It was as if I was one of those idealistic kids who wanted to head off to war to seek glory. I'll never forget this weekend my entire life, and I'll spend years wishing I could. You just can't describe what it is like to see your hometown that you love, that is a part of everything you are, with dead bodies floating in the street and the people you consider "your people" firing guns at strangers and hating everyone and everything. It was one of the worst things I have ever felt or seen. It's a war being fought against no one.

But not all is ruined. I was thrilled to see the French Quarter, the Garden District, and the central business district were all ok. The shipping yards along Tchapitoulas were also undamaged. It is enough to make you believe the city can be salvaged.

I got back to Houma Sunday morning, and that is where the real work began. We've been trying to construct mosquito nets around the houses. Just using screen doors and screen windows isn't enough, because of how many people we have living there. Opening the door for ten seconds every hour can make the house unlivable. We managed to get a generator going, and we are using it to boil water, keep food cold, and charge up non-working cell phones (we can make calls out of state, but we can't receive any phone calls with in-state phone numbers). So many of you have asked what you can do, and I am sorry to sound pessimistic, but I just don't know. I wish I could say "donate money to the Red Cross," but I didn't see the Red Cross doing anything. The entire time I was there, I only saw Jesse Jackson and his buses, a huge congregation of busses from Baltimore (for some reason) bringing food and water, and private companies like Dysani, Evian, and K-Mart bringing supplies. The more you look around, the more you realize it is the private sector that is the only group that is doing anything. I genuinely believe private companies are going to do more for us than our own government, but I'm ignorant to the entire picture, I only know what I saw, so I don't want to judge anyone.

If you want to help, all I can say is there are different levels of help. There are 1,000,000 people that need homes and some semblance of a future. My sister, mother, aunt, and I are going to do our best to make a home for people in Houma. We don't need money, but we do need bodies. There is just too much to do. I'm going back on Thursday, and I hope to figure out an address for people to ship things to us. Right now, what we need more than anything else are: light sleeping bags (not designed for the cold) - battery chargeable power tools - mosquito netting by the square yard?- CELL PHONES with out of Louisiana phone numbers are CRITICAL We have enough breakfast bars and bottled water for now, and there is no power for preparing food as it is. There are stores to the north that can sell food once we have the power to make it, so that isn't needed, even though you would think it is. I know this sounds crazy, but if there could be anyway to make an outdoor movie theatre powered off a generator, it would do more good than you can imagine. New Orleaneans are social, and one of the biggest problems we have is not being able to be with each other... share the stress and find a way to deal with it together. It's being isolated from each other that is really destroying people's will. If you can, please consider opening up your home to people that need one. But as these people are strangers, I don't pretend it is something everyone will find comfortable. If you can, there is an amazing site setup to help you register as a host (http://www.shareyourhome.org/). Thank you to you all for everything you will do in the next coming months,

Nick

Yes, I'm obsessed with Crocs

2005-08-22T17:59:00.000-06:00

OK, I'm eventually going to get off the Croc thing, really I am, but I have to report that last night, while innocently eating delicious sushi, we spotted a man wearing the following outfit: light-blue linen pants and matching shirt, white jaunty cap, and PURPLE CROCS. My friend could not get over the Crocs, but I couldn't get over the whole ensemble. I mean, not even woven Italian leather sandals could have saved this disaster, but the application of the Crocs sent the whole thing over the top. And I really don't think this man was gay, just seriously fashion-challenged. This is what happens when fashion weapons like the Croc just fall into anyone's hands: Total wardrobe disasters that end up impeding on my simple sushi dinner. Well, my dinner also was impeded upon by crying babies and a capella fraternity singing groups, but still ...

Does this mean I'm going to eventually find myself buying, and horror of horrors, wearing Crocs? Is this like falling in love with your captors or something? Will I become the Patti Hearst of shoes? If you ever spot me walking along in bright orange Crocs, or any color really, please save me from myself. Tackle me, distract me, ply me with alcohol, whatever.

Well, ply me with alcohol no matter what sort of shoes I am wearing.

They're ugly but you can invest in them

2005-08-18T08:43:00.000-06:00

Boulder's journalistic bastion, The Daily Camera, had a lead story on Tuesday announcing that the Niwot-based company that makes those ugly Crocs is going public. Here's the link to that story: Crocs files for public offering. Here's also a link to the column I wrote way back in November about how absolutely ugly they are: link back to my November article discussing the hideousness of the Croc.

A stroll around Boulder indicates that investing in Crocs, the company, may be a good idea. I swear everyone is wearing those hideous shoes! I think it's a case of social norms -- everyone else is wearing them so why not? Meanwhile, I have yet to talk to a person, even those currently sporting Crocs, who does not think they are the ugliest things ever. "But they are so comfortable," they inevitably say. I don't think that's an excuse. I mean sweats are super comfortable, but I don't wear those everywhere I go. At some point, you've got to draw a line in the fashion sand. Even in Boulder, which is one big town illustrating What Not to Wear.

Wheel of Not-So-Much Fortune OR Faint Hearts Never Get on Game Shows

2005-08-15T10:03:00.000-06:00

Ok, I fully realize that I haven't posted in more than two months, and I apologize for that. The summer has just whizzed by what with socializing, traveling, and so forth. In an attempt to make it up to you, dear readers, I am posting the unedited version of a column I wrote that recently ran in the Boulder Weekly. As background, I actually did all of this in May, so it's still sort of too little too late, but it's better than nothing! I'll try to do better as we move into fall. Here goes ...

"In an attempt to chronicle important events in the Front Range’s pop-culture fabric, I trucked myself down to Denver last weekend to audition for Wheel of Fortune. You know, that game show that’s been the number-one program in syndication for like the past 20 years? The one you used to watch with your parents while your mom made dinner and you avoided doing your homework at all costs? The one that, right at this moment, you are surprised to learn is still on television? It actually still draws huge audiences, and this past May, became the number-one show in Denver at 6:30 pm on Channel 7, beating Entertainment Tonight.

The open auditions featured the following things: First, the WheelMobile, which is a tricked-out Winnebago that serves the duel purpose of toting the set and Wheel chatchkes (keychains, pens, hats, water bottles, travel mugs, you get the idea – nothing you really want) all over the country, AND promotes the show because it is bright yellow and has Wheel of Fortune painted all over it.

The event also featured fake Pat Sajak – aka Marty Lublin –a fairly hot guy amped on Red Bull who jumps around a lot and speaks very enthusiastically into a microphone. The thousands of fans who were gathered for their chance to be on Wheel of Fortune didn’t seem to care that Marty wasn’t Pat, and the few that made it on stage hugged him and slobbered on him just like he was actually famous. Which he isn’t. But who cares, they might be on TV! There was even a camera there from News 7, encouraging people to act even more stupidly than they otherwise would have.

Just to keep everything parallel in the universe, there also was a fake Vanna White –aka Kim Sullivan. Kim is a cute girl wearing a cheap-looking dress (guess the couture is saved for Vanna) who writes puzzle letters on erasable pads as opposed to turning lit-up panels. The touring version of the job is much tougher than Vanna’s, in my opinion, because Kim actually had to figure out where the letters went and then write them down. All Vanna has to do is look good and determine which of the very well-marked panels she needs to flip. It’s a job we all should aspire to: very little work for very much money.

The auditions were held at the Universal Lending Ampitheatre, right behind Pepsi Center. The place seats at least a couple of thousand wannabe contestants. While I overheard people at the nearby gas station say that folks had lined up at 4 and 5 am for their shot to be on the show, the Wheel of Fortune execs assured me that because the WheelMobile is primarily a good-will builder, promotional tour and a contestant search all wrapped up in one, they do everything possible to get every person that shows up a chance to get on stage.

The whole point of the WheelMobile tour – which drives around the country from April through November, hitting 22 cities a year—is to find contestants. In fact, it’s the only way the show finds contestants, other than occasionally testing people in Los Angeles.

People in line are handed “applications,” yellow, orange or blue slips of paper that include a bit of information about them. The applications are put into a spinning bin, like lottery ping-pong balls, and then a lucky few – about 30 per hour – win a spot on stage. Each would-be contestant is subjected to a very easy interview with fake Pat aka Marty, who always asked “what do you like to do in your free time?” (“My husband,” said one contestant. C’mon, keep it clean, people! Haven’t you heard about Janet Jackson and the FCC?) and then they play a quick game.

The interviews can take a bit of time because if you say you sing or rap or teach aerobics or cheer lead, you are subjected to performing that skill. This was no secret, however, because whenever said skill was mentioned Marty would say “did you say SING?” and then Miss, Mrs. or Mr. Contestant would be off to the races. I heard Amazing Grace at least three times, and one white guy rapped out to Kid Rock. He wasn’t bad, actually. Another woman said her life-long goal was to be a Denver Broncos cheerleader, but other than yelling “Go Broncos!” and leaping lamely one-half inch into the air, she hadn’t really gotten around to charting that course yet.

Once I realized that demonstrating high-energy antics, such as jumping up and down, and possibly performing in front of 1,000 or so strangers would be a requirement of this gig, I bowed out. In the spirit of full disclosure, I’ve been covering the business of television for a while now, and just moved back to Boulder from LA. I already had an in with the Wheel people, and since I can’t be on the show, for ethics’ sake, they weren’t really pushing me on stage. Still, I could have put my foot down and demanded that I run the paces, because that’s what I told them I wanted to do for this article, but I didn’t. I thought I was going to be in a room, play a little Wheel, maybe fill out a quiz or something. But bounding about and singing in public? Not for me. This is why I’m a writer and not a dancer, stand-up comedian, actor or anything else that requires public performance.

But getting on Wheel isn’t just about jumping up and down and screaming, says Lisa Dee, executive director of marketing and promotions for Sony Pictures Television, which produces both Wheel and sister game show, Jeopardy! It’s about having good energy, not freaking out in front of a camera and being able to play the game.

“I compare it to getting into a really good college – you have to have the whole package,” Dee says. Whatever, I wasn’t doing it. I was content to sit backstage and eat Quizno’s with the rest of the crew. I also tried to get fake Pat’s attention with a come-hither look and a wave of my toasted sub, but I think he was unimpressed by my wimpy stance. Plus, he was too busy fending off bouncy contestants.

As I was leaving, one of the tour producers tossed me a pack of brand-spanking-new Wheel of Fortune playing cards, which are round, like the venerated Wheel itself. So I can’t say I came away empty-handed. No chance to test wits with Pat or to win an all-expense paid trip to Hawaii, but my dignity was intact and I had a Wheel of Fortune-branded chatcke in my hand. Oh, and they bought me drinks aftewards so that probably counts for something too."

Lies, Lies and PR

2005-05-26T15:10:00.000-06:00

So let's get this straight: Tom and Katie ARE sleeping together and are madly in love and Brad and Angelina are NOT sleeping together and are not madly in love. Apparently the publicists to the stars either think the American public is comprised of a bunch of star-struck blithering idiots who will believe anything that is put before them OR they are so self-deluded that they believe their own spin and assume the rest of us are just following along like little lemmings.

What I find redeeming about this whole situation is not that Tom is going on Oprah and rolling around on the floor or that both Brad and Angelina continue to deny what has been clear as day to the Hollywood gossip community for months (motto of said gossips: where there's smoke, there's definitely fire. And in the case of Brad and Angelina, that fire is hot hot hot). No, what's redeeming is that no one believes any of it. Hallelujah! We've finally reached the point where the American public is savvy enough not to believe the spin.

If I was smart enough and employed as such, I would have written the same column that former Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown penned in the Washington Post today. After pointing out what we all know - hello, Tom, no one believes you so quit all the embarrassing antics - Brown writes that the Bush White House has taken a page from Hollywood in terms of how it runs its publicity. And the moral of the story is: don't believe anything that comes from Hollywood studios or the White House press office.

What's sort of interesting/obvious about Tom and Katie and Brad and Angelina is that all four of them have big movies to promote.

For 42-year-old Tom, his sex appeal has waned a bit. His last few movies have done okay, but they haven't been the guaranteed box office they once were. And while he's taken on a lot of risky roles, they haven't paid off the way he might have hoped. Jamie Foxx got all the rave reviews for Collateral, and ex-wife Nicole Kidman became an Oscar darling, while Tom has yet to reel in the big O. What's more, Tom continues to battle rumors that he is gay. What better way to combat that than by starting up yet another contrived romance with an up-and-coming starlet with her own movie to promote and career to further, even though she's young and baby-faced enough that some of us are more grossed out than titillated.

Meanwhile, 26-year-old Katie Holmes is promoting Batman Begins, her first big studio picture. And while she's certainly not carrying the film - those honors go to Christian Bale - it's also in her best interest to suddenly be seen as white hot and super visible. Voila! A couple is born and paraded about on Oprah.

Brad and Angelina have the opposite problem. They both still remain at the peak of their sex symbol status - in fact, most people forgive them for being together because they figure if the world's two hottest people want to get it on, who are we to stop them? But with Brad divorcing America's Sweetheart, Jennifer Aniston, it's in his best interest to remain on the down-lo with Angelina, particularly because he and Angelina have Mr. and Mrs. Smith coming out shortly and it doesn't look good if it seems like the two stars were canoodling on set before Jen was actually out of the picture. So those two are trying (but failing miserably) to keep a lock on what is now an open secret.

What I wonder is what would happen if everyone was just honest. If Tom came out and said, "yes, I am gay," not that I know that he is, but if he was and he did -would that really mean his career was over? And if Brad and Angelina said "yes, we did fall madly in love during the shooting of this movie and can you blame us?" would that mean that no one would go see this or any of their future movies as a result? Maybe no one will go see it anyway - you never know with movies. Plus, just because she's the hottest woman alive, there's plenty of Angelina Jolie movies no one has ever seen - Beyond Borders, for example. And I could go on.

If I ever wanted to be a movie star - and I never did because a) I love to eat way too much and b) I can't act - realizing that stars' whole lives necessarily become one big act definitely dissuades me. And what's worse, if the public finally gets wise and decides that act has become really tired, celebrities these days are going to new heights to stay in the public eye re: Britney and Kevin: Chaotic (or Catastrophic if you consider the ratings) or Paris Hilton's recent pornographic Burger King ad, which is not such a far cry from her widely-distributed Internet homemade sex video.

I'm not rich, powerful or famous, but at least I have the privilege of screwing up my own relationships, or lack thereof, in private.

Hey look, I'm famous!

2005-05-17T13:00:00.000-06:00

My blog got profiled by another blog -- Boulder's Dirt, which is a youth-oriented spin-off of the local paper, The Daily Camera. Here's the link to the little interview I did: All About ME. It's only a matter of time before I go worldwide. I'm talking global, people. Universal.

CNN goes from boring to ... possibly more boring

2005-05-12T10:26:00.000-06:00

My news intuition must have been going off (as well as my acute sense of snore TV) when I wrote yesterday. Changes are afoot at CNN, although three hours hosted by Wolf Blitzer is quite possibly worse than an afternoon block that includes Inside Politics, Crossfire and Inside the Blogs. Would it be so crazy to air original stories that were actually reported by people in the field and included footage, writing and producing? I know, I know ... too expensive. We wouldn't want to do anything to affect bottom line.

From Variety:

CNN's lone-Wolf strategy

Cabler axes shows, expands Blitzer

By MICHAEL LEARMONTH

CNN is reorganizing its daytime programming, creating a three-hour program anchored by Wolf Blitzer that will replace both "Crossfire" and "Inside Politics."

"Crossfire" had been put on notice by newly installed CNN U.S. prexy Jonathan Klein as an example of the kind of shoutfest he thought turned off viewers.

"Inside Politics" is anchored by Judy Woodruff, who announced that she will retire at the end of the May.

The moves -- the most significant since Klein took the helm of CNN late last year -- came of a challenge he issued to CNN staff to come up with new ideas on how the network could report on politics.

The winning proposal came out of the Washington bureau, where producers David Bohrman and Sam Feist proposed building a show around Blitzer that will address the day's top stories in politics, business, national security and world affairs.

Klein declined to say when the new show would debut, but part of the reorganization will begin Monday, June 6, when CNN replaces Blitzer's midday show, "News From CNN," with a simulcast of CNN International's "Your World Today."

The shift will free up Blitzer for an extended three-hour newscast in the afternoon and showcase some of CNN's international reporting, an asset Klein believes differentiates the net from the competition.

"We cover international news better than anyone, and we want to show it across the news group," Klein said.

A spokeswoman said it's unclear if jobs will be eliminated or shifted as a result of the changes.

In an internal memo, CNN EVP of operations Cindy Patrick said the changes could "eventually affect Atlanta staffing levels." The changes will cut a half-hour from "Life From ...," which is produced in Atlanta. The other shows affected are produced in D.C.

Memo also says the net is considering moving the control room and some staff positions for "Larry King Live" to D.C. from Atlanta. King now has a staff and copies of his signature sets in New York and D.C., but typically tapes his show in Los Angeles.

The Amazing Race, Phil and Pat, and lots of other rambling

2005-05-11T16:26:00.000-06:00

Amazing Race host Phil Keoghan congratulates Uchenna and Joyce

And the winners are: Uchenna and Joyce, who take home the million on The Amazing Race, in the show's most-watched finale ever. Rob and Amber came in second, foiled by two small things: a friendly pilot and an inability to find anyone in Miami's Little Havana who could translate English into Spanish.

Truth be told, Uchenna and Joyce completely deserved to win. They could have ditched their taxi driver at the end, whom they did not have enough money to pay in full, run in and won the million dollars. Instead, they stayed outside, begging for money until they had enough to pay the driver, and then they ran in and won. That's class.

What's more, viewers got to watch the couple's relationship get stronger and stronger. Joyce became determined to do whatever she needs to to have a child after the racers found themselves at an African orphanage full of smiling children. Joyce allowed her head to be shaved in order to win a leg of the race, even though she cried through the whole thing. And Uchenna proved himself to be a man of honor, hugging Joyce in the nook of his arm while she cried and he kept on swallowing his pride and asking strangers for money. Toward the end of the show, the couple confessed that they had been talking about splitting up, but running the 40,000 mile race around the world brought them back together and made them stronger than ever.

I have to admit that I found myself disappointed by Rob and Amber's loss, even though they drove by the overturned Jeep, because I just can't let go of my fandom. On the other hand, CBS paid for their wedding in the Bahamas and they won a bunch of trips on Race and they seem to be legitimately in love, so I'm not really crying for Rob and Amber.

I will say that Rob and Amber have proven that they are that very rare thing - true reality show stars - for two reasons. 1) They've either won the money or come super damn close twice. That's not a coincidence. And 2) Ratings for Survivor: All-Stars and The Amazing Race 7 were both huge, bigger than other outings of both long-running series, and Rob and Amber have to be credited with bringing viewers to the set. Or at least me.

So we all know what that means: On May 24, I'll be glued to the set, pathetically watching the creatively named Rob and Amber Get Married. And probably crying.

Random TV musings: Um, didn't CNN cancel Crossfire after Jon Stewart told the show's hosts they were ruining democracy? (Extremely excellent MTV Headline: Jon Stewart Bitchslaps Crossfire ) Because if so, I'm still waiting. This horrendous program remains on the air, because it shows up every day during my CNN watching. Oh wait, Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post reported in January that CNN was going to be including Crossfire as part of Inside Politics. Altogether it makes for one big snoozefest - Crossfire teamed with Inside the Blogs tied together by uninteresting newsreading.

In the same Washington Post article, CNN President Jonathan Klein said about Carlson: "There was zero fit between what he wanted to do and what we wanted to do. He's best suited to host a head-butting talkfest, and that's not the kind of program we wanted to do in prime time. . . . Our network is about roll-up-your-sleeves journalism, powerful storytelling."

Dude, have you watched your network lately? If you think reading from a teleprompter and interviewing talking heads all day long is powerful storytelling, then OK, it's super-powerful. Otherwise, not so much.

It happened and the world somehow did not end: The show I was most sad to miss in the past week was Dr. Phil's surreal interview of Pat O'Brien . We've met Mr. O'Brien before, and visited him at my new favorite blog: StuckinrehabwithPatOBrien.com (which sadly is over now because selfish Pat left rehab and returned to television. But you can visit the hilarious writer of this blog, who happily outed himself on May 2, at Utter Wonder.com.

It's unclear in this scenario who is exploiting whom because the exploitation sort of overlaps in confusing, swirling patterns until I feel like I need to take some drugs and check into rehab myself. (And then maybe I can get on Dr. Phil and become superfamous. Hey, I think I'm on to something here.)

Phil opens up the interview by asking Pat: "The studio did not coerce you into coming here?" Pat does not say what we're all thinking: "Hell no. They didn't have to ask twice. I know who signs my paychecks. Plus this is TV, man. TV!"

A little review for the 99.5% of you that don't follow the ins and outs of the media world: Megacorporation Viacom owns a bunch of companies, among them CBS and Paramount Domestic Television. Paramount produces both Dr. Phil and The Insider, so it should come as no surprise to anyone that a special featuring Pat's confession would be hosted by Dr. Phil and air on CBS during May sweeps. When TV executives suddenly realize that they have a star that’s going through a horrible time in his personal life, what do they do? Put him on in prime time! Have him tell Dr. Phil his most embarrasing personal secrets. It’s sweeps for God’s sake. Something's gonna explode soon, right?

Another TV kid tragically grows up: I'm not a big fan of Fox’s Malcolm in the Middle, but I ended up watching it on Mother's Day because my brother-in-law had control of the remote and he wouldn't let me watch Deadwood, which he referred to as that F@$& show, which isn't so incorrect, but it is the best show on television in my humble opinion.

Anyhoo, I could not fail to note that Frankie Muniz has finally reached the stage to which we all knew he was headed. Instead of being a cute little kid, he's now a really weird-looking, short teenager whose head is too big for his body. This seems to be the unfortunate fate of all cute child TV stars (see Gary Coleman and Danny Bonaducci). And don't try to tell me that Raven Symone is the exception. Just because you were an adorable child on The Cosby Show 15 years ago, does not, and I repeat, does not, mean you should get your own show on The Disney Channel.

Finally, here’s a list of things that are not actually news: the Runaway Bride; Paula Abdul’s alleged affair with American Idol contestant and developing television executive Corey Clarke; Priscilla Presley’s Elvis musings. A feature on the extend of Presley’s plastic surgery, however, might make sense for Primetime Live to do right after Extreme Makeover.

Very Original Headline: Hitchhiker's Guide Kicks Ass

2005-05-02T15:50:00.000-06:00

Update: Hey, we have better taste than I thought! HHG opened up number one at the box office this weekend, pulling in more than $21 million. That crushed the competition, with Sean Penn and Nicole Kidman's dreary looking The Interpreter taking second at almost $14 million. XXX The Sequel (whatever it's called) came in a diastrous third, earning not quite $13 million. Scarily, it looks like Vin Diesel made the right choice -- The Pacifier (Vin's spin on Kindergarten Cop) has somehow, someway crossed the $100 million mark. (Box office totals gathered from BoxOfficeMojo.com.

There's a lot of talk right now about the pre-summer movie market being in the doldrums. It's not that complicated: if the movies suck, people won't come.

Except for Hitchhiker's Guide, of course.

Movie Review: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

2005-04-30T17:35:00.000-06:00

Life, the universe and everything.

So before we even start, let's just throw out there that the answer is 42. Always has been, always will be. But that's not the big mystery of Hitchhiker's Guide - the mystery is what is the question? How do you correctly phrase the question of life, the universe and everything?

And so we commence the voyage of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a favorite of my sister Ashley and mine since early childhood. Back when we were just little girls, we would look forward to Saturday mornings - not for Scooby Doo or Smurfs, but to watch Hitchhiker's Guide and Dr. Who on the local PBS channel. This strange choice of programming for two young girls may explain some things - once we stayed up all night together, hanging out on our window seat and waiting for Luke Skywalker and Hans Solo to come walking up our cul-de-sac, and why we thought this might happen I still do not know. In any case, we greeted the feature-length, modern-day version of Hitchhiker's Guide with great enthusiasm. In fact, I was so enthusiastic that I braved yesterday's snowy weather to go to the movie theatre at 1 p.m. and secure us tickets for the 7:30 p.m. show.

Ashley handled her enthusiasm by securing mini-bottles of Jamison’s to sneak into her Coke during the movie, and I have to say, she did seem a little more unbridled than usual, perhaps to the disgruntlement of those around us. But we both agreed that the movie does a perfect job of staying true to Douglas Adams' wonderful original (Adams' books are so original and hiliarious that he practically defines the term original), while deftly using today's technology (and the Muppets) to update it.

Brit Arthur Dent (The Office's Martin Freeman) is having a very bad day. Bulldozers have arrived to tear down his house to make room for a bypass. Dent is busy blocking the dozers with his pajamaed self, when his best friend, Ford Prefect (played by Mos Def), shows up with a grocery cart full of beer to stall the workers. He then whisks Dent off to a nearby pub where he buys each of them three pints each, and explains that the world is going to end in 12 minutes. Dent isn't really grasping this, but when the world-ending Vorgons show up in huge intergalactic space ships and announce that Earth will be blown up to, ironically, make room for an intergalactic bypass, people are starting to catch on. Dent doesn't notice, so preoccupied is he about his house, but the people in the bar ask if they should lay down on the floor and put paper bags over their head. "Sure, if you want," Ford says. As the world comes to its promised end, there are the barflies, lying on the floor, paper bags on heads, for really no apparent reason other than that’s apparently what people in mass suicide cults seem to do. So runs Adams' humor.

Ford grabs himself and Dent a ride on the Vorgon spaceship, and then explains that he's not really from Earth, but in fact a writer for the galaxy's best-selling book: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which contains the answers to everything, even though most of those answers are quite useless. (For example, when Ford asks the Guide how to save someone from the Vorgons, it says "don't bother." And so forth.)

That begins a long space journey for Dent, throughout all of which he remains in his slouchy pajamas and terrycloth robe, while Ford stays clean as a whistle in a white suit. They soon hook up with the President of the Galaxy, Zaphod Beeblebrox, played whimsically by Sam Rockwell who takes the opportunity to cleverly mock current President of the Galaxy George W. Bush, as well as Dent's would-be girlfriend, Trillian, who was whisked away from him back in England when Zaphod decided to drop in on Earth and crash a London party.

("What did he have that I don't have? Two heads?" Dent asks Trillian. "A spaceship," she responds.)

The coolest part of the movie is when Dent and his guide for the moment, Slartibartfast, tour the mythical Planet Magrathea where planets are constructed. I don't know how they did this scene back in the late 70s and early 80s when the BBC made The Guide into a TV series, but with modern movie-making techniques, this scene was amazing. Dent and Slarti zip past planets under construction, mounted in a massive intergalactic sound stage, and when they reach Earth, workers are spraying water to make oceans, painting canyons red and landscaping houses.

The performances don’t really stand out, which is I why I didn't rate the movie higher. The actors do a fine job, but it's just way too hard to make something new of characters that rabid Guide fans already know far too well. To get too crazy would disappoint too many people, and that limits the actors' choices.

John Malkovitch shows up randomly as a spider-like preacher-man, essentially playing himself as always, and Alan Rickman mellifluously voices Marvin, the depressed robot.

Freeman as Dent and Def as Ford are perfectly cast. Zooey Deschanel as Trillian gets the most leeway, because if Ashley and I remember correctly, Trillian was a dopey blonde in the BBC original.

The thing that will always be best about The Guide is Douglas Adams' original concepts and his random humor, and this movie is successful because it remains so true to them. That's largely because Adams collaborated with Executive Producer Robbie Stamp until Adams' early death of a heart attack in 2001, so the film doesn't veer too far away from his vision. Spike Jonz (Being John Malkovitch, which may explain the actor’s appearance) was asked to direct this film, but he declined, recommending two English music-video directors instead. The pair of Hammer and Tongs, otherwise known as Garth Jennings and Nick Goldsmith, took the movie over and did an admirable job in their first feature film venture.

I wanted to use martini glasses as my star system, but this blog doesn't support symbols so I'm giving The Guide three and a half asteriks (what it does support) out of a potential five. I think Ashley would give it a full five. I asked her to write her own review and she said: "Brilliant!" and tottered off to make drunk phone calls. So that may be it from her.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: ***1/2. A lot of fun.

Springtime in Boulder

2005-04-30T16:58:00.000-06:00

Occasionally means blizzard. Bummer for me, who would be happy in 115 degrees in Miami, but great for all the skiiers. The ski lifts may never close!

Boulder today:

Winter returns -- April 29

Boulder just a few days ago:

Spring hiking on April 23

tulips on the mall

Boulder Theatre -- the best place in town to catch a movie or a band

Book review: Garlic and Sapphires

2005-04-28T21:42:00.000-06:00

When I was a little girl, reading was my favorite thing. I would while away hours at a time, my nose deep in a book, my brain somewhere else completely. To me, reading was better than TV, better even than the movies.

These days, older, not much wiser and much more distracted, I often long for nothing but an airplane or a beach so I can devour a book cover to cover, so quickly that it's a miracle I remember it at all. But there's very few books that convince me to surrender my whole weekend to it and a comfy chair.

Ruth Reichl's three memoirs - Tender at the Bone, Comfort Me with Apples and now Garlic and Sapphires - are those sorts of books for me. Reichl writes real life so that it feels like fiction, and her lush but simple prose about food makes me want to do nothing but eat.

Here's her description of water: "I tipped the liquid into my mouth and it was instantly flooded with icy coldness and a deep, ancient flavor, as if the water had come bubbling up from the middle of the earth." Some have said Reichl can be a little overzealous, and maybe that's true, but don't you long for a deep, cold drink of water right now? And I don't even like water.

In Garlic and Sapphires, one of the first restaurants Reichl reviews in her new post as the restaurant critic for the New York Times is Honmura An, a now-famous Japanese noodle house in Manhattan. About the restaurant's soba noodles, Reichl writes: "The noodles are earthy and elastic, soft and slightly firm to the tooth, and when you dip them into the briny bowl of dashi it is as if land and sea were coming, briefly, together."

After reading that, I have had an insatiable yen for noodles, a dish I love, but repeated visits to Noodles & Co., a Boulder chain restaurant, have not cured me. Mainly because everything I've had there that actually involves noodles sucks, frankly, although the non-noodled mixed grill is good.

Reichl's clear adoration of food explains why she went from obscure food critic at a small San Francisco weekly to the restaurant critic at the Los Angeles Times to the country's most powerful dining critic. The Grey Lady's snobby climate got to even Reichl, and she moved on to head Gourmet Magazine in April 1999, making it into a gorgeous monthly homage to food, wine, culture and the written word.

Like J.K. Rowling, another writer whose work I've inhaled, I can't quite put my finger on what makes Reichl's writing so compelling to me. Both women use simple sentences that convey exact but full meanings. You know Rowling delivers a precise image when you see the Harry Potter movies - every character from Harry to Hermione to Professor Dumbledore looks just as you imagined them. Reichl's books haven't been made into movies, but her goal is different. While Rowling is precisely describing characters and situations, Reichl's talent primarily is describing eating experiences. Having said that, she also creates memorable characters, and one wonders how much of them are real and how much of them are fiction. I'm always left wondering if the people she writes about end up insulted, dead, or so insulted that they died as a result.

Reichl's other books deal with her childhood and her eccentric parents, and then move on to cover her life in Berkeley cooking organic food in a commune in the 70s. Always she winds the food into stories, including her favorite (and always simple) recipes as part of the text.

The title of this book comes from Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot. Reichl's husband, TV news producer Michael Singer, cites it to her after a particularly horrible dinner with an unbearable food snob who won dinner with her at a charity auction. After Reichl behaves boorishly, lording her vast food experiences and knowledge over the self-described "food warrior," Michael walks out of the dinner at Windows on the World, feigning having had oral surgery that morning. Upon arriving home, Reichl questions her husband's abrupt departure. He quotes: "'Garlics and sapphires in the mud ...' I remember that when you got into this it was almost a spiritual thing with you. You love to eat, you love to write, you love the generosity of cooks and what happens around the table when a great meal is served. Nothing that went on last night had anything to do with that. ... There must be better ways to give," he says. "Don't give yourself away."

When I was Broadcasting & Cable's Los Angeles Bureau Chief, I thought a lot about how people treated me a certain way because of what I could or could not (or would or would not) do for them. Now that I am not in that position, those relationships have changed, as I expected they would. Reichl allowed herself to get caught up in the power of the country's most powerful paper, as anyone would. When she finally realized the pressure and the false power was turning her into a person she didn't like, she knew it was time to move on.

Reichl has lived a rich life, and done us a favor by capturing it on paper. But what annoys me is that she spends her whole life eating and remains slim. She told Salon.com in 1996: "I think I have a very good metabolism. I haven't gained or lost weight for years. I think it's partly that I'm not obsessed with it. I eat what I want. I probably eat a lot more when I'm cooking for myself, because I'm making exactly what I want made to my taste."

If I were a restaurant critic, I would certainly weigh 400 pounds. Definitely proof that life is not fair, or that some people are better suited to restaurant criticism than others. (Garlic and Sapphires by Ruth Reichl, 328 pages, The Penguin Press, $24.95)

Making money on Rob and Amber

2005-04-25T16:12:00.000-06:00

Here's a link to my latest story in the New York Post's TV Week: Why We Hate Rob and Amber.

It's a coincidence that I ended up writing about reality TV's hottest (and now married) couple, when I recently blogged on the same idea. But the TV Week editor happened to call me up and ask me to take on that topic, so I happily agreed.

But I have to admit that I'm back to rooting for them. Even though they were bastards for driving past the Jeep, well, it is just a game ...

Bush and the media

2005-04-22T09:26:00.000-06:00

Right-wingers think the liberal media have dictated the press for far too long, and they hate Clinton for the questionable choices he made in his personal life. I think, however, that the way the Bush regime is working to control the media (and then acting like the media have no relevance to them) is far more disturbing. This administration is completely ignoring the First Amendment; in fact, they are constantly working to undermine it. To me, the ability to know what is actually happening within the government my tax dollars support affects the quality of my life far more than knowing who is doing Clinton in the Oval Office. Eric Alterman's excellent piece at The Nation.com explains all this. Go there to learn a little something.

Schiavo memo surprise? Not so much

2005-04-08T10:39:00.000-06:00

Are all these newsies breathlessly reporting the "discovery" of a memo describing how Capitol Hill Republicans planned to use the Terri Schiavo case for political gain actually surprised? Are these people really this naive? Where's that hard-boiled cynicism these reporters are supposed to have developed by now? Wasn't advancing the Republican agenda the point of the whole endless thing, from which we were only saved by the death of the pope, which is also dragging on interminably? (Do I really need to see his 84-year-old corpse 65 times a day? People who really want to see that are camping out at the Vatican -- so we can assume the rest of us are okay with missing it. In fact, maybe some news organization should set up a temporary digital news channel to cover the pope and his funeral and so on so the 10 billion of us in the world who are not Catholic and don't care one freakin' whit can get on with our lives.) Anyway, didn't right-wingers keep Terri Schiavo on the front-burner so they could keep framing the debate on right-to-life issues in their favor? That's what I thought anyway.

So my reaction to this news that a staffer for Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) authored a memo that called the Schiavo case a "great political issue ... and a tough issue for Democrats" is ... who the hell cares? The poor guy, senior legal staffer Brian Darling, has since resigned, a pariah to the Republican cause. Um, hello, there's no way Sen. Martinez and his Republican counterparts weren't having this conversation. Maybe they didn't want it published by ABC News, The Washington Post and the Associated Press (by means of a memo assuredly delivered unto those prestigious news organizations by a lucky Democratic staffer who found a draft in a trash can somewhere and ran as quickly as possible to the phone) but they were certainly discussing all along how to turn Terri Schiavo into a political cause celebre.

That's what this story was all about. Schiavo long ago stopped being a brain-dead individual fighting for her right to lay in a hospital bed forever more and became a political issue, a way for Republicans to draw very bright lines on where they stand on these so-called right-to-life issues. That way of thinking - done best by Karl Rove - won George W. Bush the election. Republicans managed to turn San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom's attempt to do something nice for his many gay constituents by letting them get married into a major, divisive, election-day issue. At that moment, the election -- very helpfully for the Rs -- stopped being about the war and the morass it has become and started being about moral values. And when that happened, a little more than half the country (and more than enough) had no choice but to vote their conscience. Their God and their religion demanded nothing less. I can't blame those people for standing up for what they believe - I'm just saying that the Republicans are experts at taking over the debate and using it in their favor. Meanwhile, the Democrats barely play defense to Republicans' Super-Bowl worthy media offense, and their offense never leaves the locker room. That's possibly out of sheer terror, but it's all to the Democrats' great disservice and disempowerment. Air America isn't the answer, by the way, and Jon Stewart can't and doesn't want to solve the Democrats' media disconnect by himself.

Besides using Terri Schiavo as a Republican branding campaign, the Schiavo case also represents another chapter in the Republican Party's long-standing effort to brand liberals as anti-life, or more recently and more brutally, pro-death. That's pretty ironic if you think about it. Somehow the Republicans have managed to make liberals -- people who are typically anti-death-penalty, anti-war and pro-gun- control -- pro-death. But having said all that, liberals want choice for women, and that means death for unborn embryos, so that's pro-death. No big deal that most of those "saved" children will go into the welfare system that Republicans don't support, and later into a public education system that Republicans also don't support. No worries! Without much of an education, these kids will end up signing up for the Army where they can later die in Republican-led wars. Problem solved. In fact, maybe that's the secret reason why right-wingers are anti-choice - maybe they fear that with choice we won't have enough displaced people willing to go abroad and die in Republican-endorsed wars. But anyway, sure, it's those crazy liberals that are pro-death. Actually, I think they are just pro-death with regard to certain Republicans and radio talk show hosts.

When a story like Terri Schiavo or Elian Gonzales or even gay marriage shows up in the news and won't go away, assume anyone that can -- Rs and Ds -- is using it for political gain. That's how the system works. What's more important is who plays that game most successfully -- because that's who holds the power.

And for another, but similar, opinion on this subject, check out Eric Boehlert's piece at Salon.com .

Disillusioned

2005-03-29T22:16:00.000-07:00

This is a big shift from Terri Schiavo, right-to-life issues and whether or not cable news channels are actually doing a good job, but tonight I was laying around at home like a big blob (I know that's a lovely image. I wasn't totally blobolicious, I did manage to paint my toenails and fingernails, which of course I promptly screwed up). While painting away, I watched CBS' Emmy-winning The Amazing Race, which features Rob and Amber, the now-engaged winners of Survivor: All-Stars.

When I watched Survivor: All-Stars, I was impressed with the Rob and Amber combo. They played the game ruthlessly, but with skill and determination, and I believed they deserved to win even though most of the other competitors told them at the end of the game that they were the worst people they had ever met.

Sore losers, I thought during that last tribal council. And it was so romantic when Rob asked Amber to marry him on live television.

So tonight I'm watching The Amazing Race, rooting for my favorites Rob and Amber, and getting progressively more disgusted by their behavior. An older woman, Gretchen, fell in a cave and seriously cut her head, and all Rob had to say was that her doting husband, Meredith, probably pushed her so they could con everyone out of their money. After that, Meredith and Gretchen came in last. Instead of eliminating them, the show's host seized all their money and belongings, guaranteeing them even rougher going the next day. When the pair took up a collection from the other players the next morning, Rob refused to contribute, saying “it's a game” so he and his fiance weren't going to help.

Later in the race, another team literally rolled their jeep while driving in the African outback. Every other team stopped to make sure the two were okay; Rob and Amber just drove on, not even slowing down.

Competitively, that was the right decision, because it put Rob and Amber in second place at the end of the round when previously they had been losing more challenges than Rob could stand.

Turns out, the older couple managed to come in fifth, even without belongings or money, securing their place in the race. And the brothers who flipped their car came in sixth after a sprint to the finish, beating the endlessly battling couple who still said they planned to stay together even though it's apparent to all of America that they hate each other.

Still, I thought the right thing to do would have been to eliminate Rob and Amber for bad behavior, giving the fighting couple their spot. Not that the fighting couple was so much better - they were the only other team that refused to give Meredith and Gretchen money. But at least they slowed down to see if everyone was all right. At the end of the day, people's lives are more important than any game, even ones played on TV. Especially ones played on TV, because now we all know who Rob and Amber really are. And I was such a fan ...

Enough Terri Schiavo already

2005-03-26T12:41:00.000-07:00

I'm working on a story right now about conservative books, so my research journey has taken me to Fox News Channel and many conservative blogs - see Captain's Quarters, AnnCoulter.com, RichardPoe.com and NewsMax.com. If you are on this site, you have likely read some of my other posts, and you have figured out that I'm not a big fan of the U.S. conservative movement. As Andrew Sullivan points out, it's really more of a move toward fundamentalism and away from libertarianism, which is ironic in light of the fact that the 9/11 attacks, one of the major catalysts for this shift in the party, were perpetuated by fundamentalists, albeit Muslims not Christians.

Anyway, what I'm confronted with in all these right-wing places is Terri Schiavo. No big surprise, but it's opened my eyes a little. Even though I'm a member of the media, I have never understood how some of these micro stories become mammoth monster stories that take over the news agenda of the entire country. Why Terri Schiavo, Elian Gonzalez and Lacy Peterson? Why not the many, many other brain-dead, hospitalized victims; Cuban refugees; or murdered wives?

I still don't know the answer to that question, but what I did learn (or what I was reminded of), is the copycat nature of news in the U.S. Watching Fox News, which last Thursday was airing Terri Schiavo almost to the exclusion of anything else (except a brief dip into the Michael Jackson lawsuit), I remembered exactly why discussion of the case has taken over -- fear. If Fox chooses to cover Terri Schiavo night and day, and Fox is the cable news leader, then everyone else has to cover it night and day because of the fear that viewers will leave in droves, ratings will plummet and everyone at the network will lose their jobs.

It's that point I believe the cable news directors lose their judgement. I do think the Terri Schiavo case is an interesting and important debate on morality and the right to life or lack thereof, and I do think this country should engage that debate. I do not think it should black out the news agenda to the exclusion of most of the rest of the news. What's more, with so many 24/7 news channels available, plus the Internet, and so on and so on, couldn't someone get brave enough to drop coverage of the Schiavo case unless something actually happens? And when it does, couldn't they just report that, maybe analyze it a little, and move on?

To some extent, I think copycat journalism is just easier. Why go break new and interesting stories when you can follow what everyone else is following? Why analyze trends or provide real, useful information when you can just chase your competitor? Why waste time examining what is happening on the international front that none of us really know about?

I also know from experience that most news organizations are limited in their funding. News outfits aren't run as non-profits, unfortunately, and thus are obligated by their corporate parents and their stock holders to show a profit margin. As a result, even if CNN makes lots of money, the channel still is forced to adhere to a strict budget so as to deliver profits to the corporate bottom line.

Within that budget, reporters, editors, and producers all feel obligated to cover the day's news agenda, even if it is repetitive and boring. They don't want to look like they got beat by their competitor. And at the end of the day, all of those news teams have nothing left - energy, resources, inspiration -- with which to bring original stories. They've given what they have to the issue of the day, and so have the reporters from every other news service.

If the news channels could somehow get brave enough to architect their own agendas and stop worrying about what the other guy is doing, that would much better serve the public interest and educate the democracy. The cable news channels could leave the nitty-gritty reporting of these ongoing stories to the wires and the major papers, report them as obligated, and spend their resources on the cutting-edge, the new, the unknown.

It's up to us, the consumers, to let the news organizations know we are fed up with copycat reporting by turning it off and demanding something better. As members of a democracy, we are obligated to educate ourselves on the issues of the day and the decisions--both pending and completed--of our government. To cite my hero, Oprah: what I know for sure is that there's more going on out there than Terri Schiavo.

I'm Stuck in Rehab with Pat O'Brien

2005-03-23T15:44:00.000-07:00

I hate to be totally evil at someone else's expense ... oh, who I am kidding? I love it! Anyway, the following link will take you to one of the funniest things ever available on the Internet. Unless you live in Boulder and never watch TV and have no idea who Pat O'Brien is, BUT if you know anything about the TV industry at all, you will find this hilarious. So go there now:

I'm Stuck in Rehab with Pat O'Brien

Feel free to return and ask questions in the comments section of this blog.

Slacking

2005-03-17T13:59:00.000-07:00

OK, I have been a horrible, horrible blogger. I didn’t even blog about the Oscars, which I had been leading up to for weeks.

So what brought about this complete lack of responsibility to my blog and the four people who read it? The deadly combination of travel, laziness and illness – so I’ve actually had tons of things to blog on about but no motivation to capture it all on paper or computer screen, as it were.

I feel like the Oscars passed me by, but let me say a few things.

1) I found the ceremony boring – including Chris Rock. And even though I appreciated Executive Producer Gil Cates’ attempts to spice things up a bit by placing all the nominees on stage so that most of them could be rejected and then recorded trying to cover up their disappointment, I found the exercise crueler than even the everyday reality show. This represents people’s life work in many instances – can’t you just let them slouch in their seat when they lose, like they get to do at every other awards show? I hope that format does not become a trend.

2) I like Beyonce as much as the rest of us, but one song with her would have been plenty. Also, what the hey did Antonio Banderas and Carlos Santana do to that song from Motorcycle Diaries? I think that when the guy won he was relieved so he could come up and let everyone know that it was actually a good song before the Banderas/Santana combo got their hands on it.

3) I didn’t pick Million Dollar Baby, but my excuse is that I hadn’t seen it when I made my picks. I’m not sure I would have changed my votes, however. The movie really gained steam toward the end of the voting process, and the acting nods for Hilary Swank and Morgan Freeman really sealed the deal for Clint. Could Clint ever direct a movie that is not miserably depressing? Light-hearted is clearly not in his repetoire, as amazingly talented as the man is.

Meanwhile, I’m still seeing Oscar-nominated movies, even though the moment has passed. Last night, Mom, Ashley and I saw Pedro Almodovar’s Bad Education. In Ashley’s words: “I can’t believe I’m seeing movies about ass-sex with my mother.” And if it disturbed Ashley, you know it was over the top.

Parting comment: Why on earth does CNN insist on covering the blogs with their stupid stupid stupid segment called “Inside the Blogs” during Judy Woodruth’s Inside Politics. Word to CNN: a) computer screens do not make good TV and b) CNN (and all news services) is like the anti-blog, and as such, should not be covering blogs. It drives me crazy on a daily basis (yet I still persist in having CNN on all day because I need something to keep me company and bring me the news, and what are the options?).

And to my four regular readers: Since I have no travel scheduled until the end of July, I plan to be a better blogger in the future.

Hollywood Reporters, Gatsby Envy and total denial of one's true self

2005-02-03T10:05:00.000-07:00

One of the best things about having a blog is that I can just ramble endlessly, with great and fervent opinion, about just about any subject I darn well please. And I can do it without having to directly offend the person I believe has offended me. In fact, I can just passive-aggressively pop off right here on my own site.

Now, if I were a blogger worth my salt, I would have written about the State of the Union address even while it was going on. But since I was drinking wine and chatting with my mother throughout the entire speech, I really have no idea what that guy said except that he told us again he would be pushing for a constitutional amendment against gay marriage and that social security would be bankrupt by 2047 or something like that and that we don't have an exit strategy for Iraq. Wait, didn't we know all that already? I guess I listened a little bit. And I think that hug between the Iraqi woman and the military wife was staged. (Washington's picked up a few tips from Hollywood since Clinton was in office.)

Anyhoo, let's talk about something more interesting to me. (Because it's MY blog and this is all about ME and MY thoughts, right?)

LA Weekly's Nikki Finke, a talented and gutsy writer, has written the most self-serving response to Bernie Weinraub's revealing NY Times piece (see previous posting) that perhaps I have ever read. Link to it here, read the piece so you know what I am talking about and then come back: LA Weekly: Columns: Deadline Hollywood: Hollywood Reporters and Gatsby Envy

Finke shares with us that even though she's from old money, Hollywood money doesn't affect her. Unlike Weinraub, she is above all that Hollywood glam; she is perfectly happy in her shabby West Hollywood digs. She wouldn't mind driving a rented Chevy among the Jags and Beemers. No, she is in it for the integrity.

Give me a friggin' break. It's one thing to be above it all when you really are poor and have nothing to fall back on. It's another thing to slum when one plane flight back to the East Coast will win you a grant from Mummy and Daddy.

Actually, I don't know that Finke has access to the family money she boasts about, but even the fact that she mentions it renders her whole insufferable article even more ridiculous. Finke uses Weinraub's revelations to further herself. And if that's not vintage Hollywood, I don't know what is.

Sex beats crying any day

2005-02-02T17:40:00.000-07:00

Imelda Staunton as Vera Drake

Liam Neeson and Laura Linney as Alfred Kinsey and his wife, Clara McMillen

One thing about going to see all of the movies nominated for major Oscar categories is that you end up seeing movies that you otherwise would not have seen in a million years. Sometimes you wander upon a wonderful surprise; other times you feel like you are seated before an endless instrument of torture.

While the critics simply adored Vera Drake, I found myself wanting to slit my wrists while watching it. Not because it is so depressing, but because I was so very tired of watching not much happen.

On the other hand, Kinsey was a surprisingly humorous biopic about the most serious of scientist’s deep inquiry into the true nature of human sexuality. I didn’t want it to go on forever, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Dutifully working hard to see all nominated films, Mom and I went to see Vera Drake on Sunday. Mike Leigh (Secrets & Lies, Topsy-Turvy, not Lovely and Amazing as I thought) is nominated best director and writer, while Imelda Staunton is nominated best actress.

Not that it’s a bad movie. Of course, it is not. But it is a dreary, interminable, difficult-to-understand-the-dialogue movie. The weather was grey outside anyway, and the movie was grey inside. And while Staunton gives quite a performance as Drake, it mostly involves her crying for about an hour and a half. Well, the first half she’s a perfectly lovely and happy person—mostly going about her life, doing her work, giving cup after cup of tea to the less fortunate and managing to somehow successfully matchmake her terminally shy daughter—but then things change for the much worse.

During a police interrogation, Drake is questioned about her practice of doling out abortion-inducing services for the past 20-plus years, and we are forced to endure what seems like hours of chin-quivering hysteria in which Drake cannot talk or answer any questions. I felt heartless, but I was thinking “after choosing to perform this highly illegal activity for most of her life, wouldn’t this woman be somewhat prepared that the police would eventually catch on?” And frankly, even if she wasn’t prepared, couldn’t we cut past the crying and get to the part where something happens?

OK, maybe I’m heartless. Probably I am. But it is this kind of film that makes me question my movie-going taste. Clearly, Vera Drake is critically acclaimed. But why? It’s a fine movie, but it’s so hard to sit through. At the end, I didn’t feel particularly educated or entertained. I just felt happy the movie was over.

I had a similar experience to this when Tina and I saw Affliction, starring Nick Nolte, way back in 1997. (1997! Seven years ago??!! How on earth is that possible?) We sat in a tiny and freezing theatre in Washington, D.C.’s Dupont Circle and just suffered. Again, it wasn’t a bad movie, I guess, although it sort of seemed bad to me, but it wasn’t an enjoyable movie.

After Vera Drake, I had low expectations for Kinsey, which told the life story of famed sex researcher Dr. Alfred Kinsey, known to his students and loved ones as Prok (short for Prof. K). Oscar-nominated movies are often serious as a heart attack – not a glimmer of comedic light manages to get through. That wasn’t true with this film.

And that’s as it should be. Sex is funny. Not only is the physical act completely ridiculous, from an observer’s point of view, talking about it is also funny. Kinsey does a delightful job portraying the partnership of equals that Dr. Kinsey shares with his wife, Clara McMillen, known as Mac, played by Laura Linney.

Since You Can Count on Me, Linney has become a regular at these awards shows, and her performance in this movie demonstrates why. The performances in Kinsey, particuarly Linney’s and Liam Neeson’s in the title role, are understated and seamless.

In my view, Clint Eastwood took Neeson’s spot among the Best Actor nominees and it’s too bad. Eastwood is a brilliant filmmaker, but his role in Million Dollar Baby is vintage Eastwood – crusty aging guy shows that he has a heart. Neeson as Kinsey gives us nothing we’ve seen before from him. Neeson showed a different side as the noble Rob Roy or The Priest in Gangs of New York; in this movie, he’s an obsessed scientist who goes about collecting his evidence – whether it be wasps or human sex lives – with single-minded passion. He’s not really an exciting man, unless one finds intensity exciting.

Truthfully, maybe I enjoyed Kinsey more than Vera Drake because I was in a better mood when I saw it. Or maybe it was because I could understand every word of Kinsey and I got to laugh a bit. But either way, both experiences are what I love about going to see the nominated films – you never know what you are going to get, but you know you are going to see the best films the year has to offer. For better or for worse.

The New York Times explains why I left Hollywood

2005-01-30T13:57:00.000-07:00

New York Times
January 30, 2005
14 Years Later, My Hollywood Ending
By BERNARD WEINRAUB

LOS ANGELES

I CAME to Hollywood in 1991 thinking I knew quite a lot about the world and its ways. As a young reporter, I had been to Vietnam. Later, I covered Northern Ireland, several political campaigns and the White House under President Ronald Reagan and the elder President George Bush. On arriving, I was fresh from a sudden assignment in India after the assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. But only in my 14 years here - most of it spent covering the movie industry, the rest covering television and music - did I come face to face with some of the more startling, and not always pleasant, truths about human behavior, my own included.

On retiring (officially, this is my final week at The Times), it seems best to sort through this Hollywood tour. It began in a string of modest, even shabby, apartments - one of them, on Martel Avenue in West Hollywood, best remembered for the cluster of police cars, drug dealers and prostitutes on the corner. Along the way I married a studio chief, Amy Pascal, now chairwoman of Sony Pictures. For both of us, the liaison opened a rare two-way window on the inner workings of two worlds, moviedom and the press, that have long been locked in a messy but symbiotic struggle. But our marriage also changed the game. I won't speak for my wife and her own way of coping with career complications born of an alliance with a reporter, but I can say that our wedding, in August 1997, brought to the fore some of my own shortcomings. Clearly, I stayed too long on my beat, clinging to a notion that I could sidestep conflicts of interest by avoiding direct coverage of Sony, and learning too late why wiser heads counsel against even the appearance of conflict. But my marriage, and some of the events that tumbled out of it, also taught me something about the ferocity of a culture in which the players can be best friends one day and savage you the next.

When I finally asked to be taken off the movie beat in 2000, I laughed and said I felt like the Duke of Windsor. But I quickly caught a lesson in how chilly life as a former movie correspondent could be. In the past, I'd written about Jeffrey Katzenberg, then president of the Walt Disney Company. He returned every call quickly and often phoned me; he dished over pasta at Locanda Veneta about all the studios in town and became such a pal that I once showed him off-the-record comments made about him by Michael Eisner. That was wrong and foolish, and years later I still regret it. As soon as I stopped covering movies, Mr. Katzenberg stopped responding to phone calls. I was surprised but shouldn't have been.

Not every Hollywood moment involved operators like Mr. Katzenberg, nor were they all somehow tied up with my marriage. Fellow journalists contributed their share. In one remarkable episode about two years ago, Robert J. Dowling, the publisher and editor in chief of The Hollywood Reporter, threatened to punch me during a charity event. He was upset by an article I had written about two years earlier dealing with staff resignations after his newspaper failed to print an article about an inquiry by the Screen Actors Guild into whether the Reporter columnist George Christy had received pension and health benefits to which he was not entitled. Mr. Christy's column was soon suspended. (Peter Bart, the editor of Variety and a former Times Hollywood correspondent, went beyond Mr. Dowling: he sought to get me removed from the job because of an article I wrote saying that The Hollywood Reporter was catching up with Variety.)

The Hollywood Reporter scandal was, in fairness, pathetic and hardly on the level of Watergate or Iran-contra. And it wasn't akin to the unfortunate way even more serious journalists are co-opted by the overtures of a Michael Ovitz or the charm of a Joe Roth. Mr. Roth, a top Hollywood player, seems available at any time and is willing to schmooze with eager reporters as if he had all the time in the world.

Mr. Ovitz went a step or two further. Shortly after I arrived in Hollywood and met him, when he was at his zenith as chairman of the Creative Artists Agency, he offered to help if my children needed to attend private school or if I needed to find a hospital. I never took him up on the offers.

MY first day here, as I recall it, was in early September 1991. Having just come back from India, I was struck almost immediately by the prevalence of money, and the crazy economic gap between journalists and the people they covered. It was like dropping into Marie Antoinette's France. In Washington, reporters often lived next door to the people they covered. Whatever the income gap between a reporter and a lawyer or lobbyist - and it's considerable - your lives intersected. In the neighborhood. On the subway. At private schools. At parties.

Journalists in Washington do not feel diminished by their lower salaries. In Hollywood, many do. I did. Waiting for a valet at the Bel-Air Hotel to bring my company-leased Ford, I once stood beside a journalist turned producer who said, "I used to drive a car like that." Though I'm ashamed to say it, I was soon hunting for parking spots near Orso or the Peninsula Hotel to avoid the discomfort of having a valet drive up my leased two-year-old Buick in front of some luncheon companion with a Mercedes.

For many of us on the press side, the money gap leads to resentment and envy, compounded by a conviction that studio executives and producers are no better or smarter than the journalists who cover them. Initially, I was simply amazed. My first real Hollywood acquaintance was Dawn Steel, a producer and onetime studio chief, and one of the more dynamic figures in town. (Ms. Steel died of a malignant brain tumor in 1997 at the age of 51). Before leaving New York, I was in the office of Warren Hoge, then the editor of the Times Magazine, who said Ms. Steel would open the gates of the movie world for me. He called her on her car cellphone, which was still uncommon enough that I was dazzled. She insisted that I see her as soon as I arrived. I did so. Her house off Coldwater Canyon, behind gates and atop a winding road, was a sprawling, ranch-style home with panoramic views of the city on a huge plot of land. I had never seen a home like this.

What made it strange was that Ms. Steel was a girl from Long Island - smart, funny, neurotic. She had no airs. She and so many others in Hollywood seemed like people I knew. I grew up with them. And yet they earned bizarre amounts of money that lifted them into a different universe.

My first reaction was to write about that difference. Early on, for instance, I wrote about movie stars and executives trooping into a specially designed soundstage at Sony for the Hollywood Hunger project to benefit Oxfam America. Instead of simply writing checks, the celebrities sought what the caterer, Ruth Hedges, told me was "the actual experience of being poor and hungry."

So the likes of Danny Glover, Jackson Browne, Daryl Hannah, Whoopi Goldberg, Susan Sarandon, David Byrne and Graham Nash drew lots: 15 percent represented high-income countries and dined at fancy tables on stuffed breast of chicken, sun-dried tomatoes and radicchio, and salad with shrimp; 25 percent represented middle-income countries and sat on benches at wooden tables to eat rice and beans and tortillas off paper plates; and the majority, sat on the floor on a mat and had rice and water, as many people in the world do.

Almost as shocking (at least for me) were the gala events to raise money for ecological causes in the early 1990's. At one such event, 700 of the town's elite (Barbra Streisand, Robert Redford, Ted Danson, Jane Fonda) showed up at a soundstage in Mercedeses, BMW's, stretch limos and other gas guzzlers to celebrate Hollywood's commitment to the environment. The invitations said, "In the spirit of the event, we urge you to car-pool." It didn't appear that anyone did.

Detachment from the real, I soon learned, was closely bound up in the culture of stardom, and star behavior, alas, has a way of rubbing off on those of us who come in contact. At first, as I now hate to admit, I was fascinated by the idea of meeting movie stars. (After meeting a few, the fascination ended.) Maureen Dowd in Washington made me promise I'd interview Michelle Pfeiffer soon after arriving. As it turned out, she was my first star interview. She was promoting the film "Frankie and Johnny," in which, bizarrely, she was playing a frumpy waitress.

I met Ms. Pfeiffer at her office in Century City. I was tongue-tied. She talked about her character's loneliness and how she identified with the waitress. I nodded at whatever Ms. Pfeiffer said. She told me it was a fantasy that beautiful people couldn't look unattractive or weren't lonely or hurt. "It doesn't matter what you look like or how old you are," she said. "That's not relevant." Right. For a moment, I believed it.

At another point, at the Toronto Film Festival, I rushed through an interview with Billy Bob Thornton and Bill Paxton about their film "A Simple Plan." It was important for the two actors to promote their offbeat film and get an article in The Times. I cut short the interview and said, "Look, I've got to interview Cameron Diaz." The pair were dumbfounded. She was prettier and a rising star. She was more important. The fact that I had hurt the actors and embarrassed myself still rankles. Not a high point but perhaps the beginning of real understanding about a world that obsessively chases what's young, what's new, what has heat.

My most embarrassing moment in Hollywood was an interview with Jim Carrey that at least absolved me of star fever. The comedian, in a suite at Ma Maison Sofitel, was promoting his film "The Mask." I had taken medicine for a bad cold. The interview began. I was settled into an easy chair, facing Mr. Carrey with my feet crossed in front of me. As he began answering questions, I fell asleep. The next thing I knew, I was feeling somebody kick the bottom of my shoe with his foot. I woke up, mortified. Years later, I met his manager Jimmy Miller. I told Mr. Miller I had a confession: that I fell asleep while interviewing Mr. Carrey. Mr. Miller exclaimed: "So you're the guy! He talks all the time about a reporter who once fell asleep on him."

IN 1996, I met Amy Pascal for a business breakfast at the Peninsula Hotel. She had just been named president of Turner Pictures, a new company founded by Ted Turner.

Not even 18 months later, the company was folded into Time Warner.

As we began dating, I rationalized that I could avoid any hint of a conflict of interest by avoiding any coverage of Turner Pictures. By the time we were married, the next year, my wife had been appointed chairman of Columbia Pictures. I should have left the movie beat right then, if not sooner.

But with the agreement of my editors, who were confident I could deal with the issue, I felt I could continue covering the movie business, avoiding coverage of Columbia and its parent company, Sony, and leaving that to a colleague. It was a delicate balancing act that seemed to work for a while. But I underestimated how closely I would be watched, or how quickly Hollywood would jump on my marriage as way to get an edge in coverage by The New York Times.

Warner Brothers, once a high-flying studio, was at that time beset by a string of expensive movie flops and its parent company's music operation had a weak track record. With a colleague, Geraldine Fabrikant, I covered the failures at Warner, whose co-chairmen were Robert A. Daly and Terry S. Semel. The two eventually resigned.

Mr. Daly was furious and told friends and others that I should not write such articles because of my marriage, a view I came to share, though I remain convinced that the coverage was accurate and fair. Soon enough, an article appeared in Brill's Content, a magazine covering the news media, by Lorne Manly (now a reporter for The Times). It said that "two Hollywood sources" said Warner had offered my wife a production deal instead of "the high-ranking job she sought," and that "instead she headed to Sony." As I read it, the implication was that The Times's articles were written because I was personally peeved at Warner and not because the studio was experiencing failures like "The Postman" and "Sphere."

I wrote to Bill Kovach, the ombudsman for Brill's Content and a former Times Washington bureau chief for whom I had once worked, to complain about what I called the cheap and inept journalism at his magazine, which was itself financed by Barry Diller, George Soros and others. Would the magazine ever write about Mr. Diller or Mr. Soros? I asked in an angry note. Mr. Kovach responded with equal anger. In retrospect, the nastiness of journalists toward The New York Times - and me - should have been a warning that this was a losing battle.

Mr. Ovitz, who began complaining to The Times about my coverage shortly after I arrived, was soon trying to use my marriage as a lever to oust me. He visited The Times after I had written about his troubled management company, which he formed after his dismissal from the Walt Disney Company. At the time Mr. Ovitz was also facing problems because of a failed Broadway investment and a vain effort to start a football franchise.

"What does The New York Times have against me? Mr. Ovitz asked Joseph Lelyveld, then the executive editor, according to New York magazine. "Your football writer hates me, your theater writer hates me and Bernie Weinraub just killed me."

Mr. Lelyveld said: "What are you talking about? If I got all three writers in a room they wouldn't even know each other."

True.

In a later phone conversation, Mr. Ovitz urged The Times to dismiss me and finally shrieked at Mr. Lelyveld: "You don't know anything about our business! I can't talk to you!"

In mid-1999, Mr. Lelyveld came to Los Angeles. I began our lunch by saying that I wanted off the movie beat. Not because I was tired of it, but because it was being used as an excuse to attack me and the newspaper I loved. Mr. Lelyveld was visibly relieved. I had saved him from saying it was getting difficult for the newspaper. I asked about covering television and other entertainment. He agreed.

IN December 2001, less than three years later, I received a call from Julia Phillips, the once-hot producer of films like "Taxi Driver" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," who had drifted from center stage in Hollywood long before she wrote her classic tell-all, "You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again." To my regret, I asked her to hold on one minute while I finished on another line. As soon as I returned, Ms. Phillips said: "I'm dying. And I want an obituary in The New York Times."

Shortly after arriving in Hollywood, I had met Ms. Phillips late one chilly afternoon at the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel. I wanted to write about her as the author of a slash-and-burn chronicle that detailed the selfishness, duplicity, nastiness and greed of the Hollywood stars and executives she knew in the 1970's and 1980's. The book also revealed her own plunge into cocaine addiction.

Ms. Phillips said she was a pariah in town. "I saw these people for what they were," she said. In the years that followed I became friendly with her: she would call me periodically to either congratulate me on an article or criticize me, saying I was naïve or had been duped. At dinner at Orso, her favorite restaurant, she was brutally honest about herself and about the Hollywood crowd. "Don't trust these people," she warned me numerous times. "Don't trust anyone here."

I laughed and didn't really believe her. But with time I came to realize that she, more than Dawn Steel, had become my most reliable guide to the ways of what insiders still like to call "the town."

Responding to her call, I immediately drove to see her in her apartment looking out onto West Hollywood and, on a clear day, downtown. I said I wanted to tape-record some interviews for an obituary. And I asked if she wanted anything else. Ms. Phillips said she adored George Clooney and would love to see his latest film, "Ocean's Eleven." (Warner Brothers, which had tapes of the film, sent her a copy the next day.) I spent several days visiting and interviewing her.

Because of her book, Ms. Phillips was an outcast among Hollywood's elite. "At first it bothered me because I really didn't expect that kind of reaction," she said. "I thought people had a sense of humor. I really did.

"Understand, I wasn't a pariah because I was a drug-addicted, alcoholic, rotten person and not a good mother," she said. "I was a pariah because I lit them with a harsh fluorescent light and rendered them as contemptible as they really are."

Ms. Phillips died of cancer in the early days of 2002. I went to her funeral service on the rooftop of her apartment building and thought of what she said while dying. Was it an overstatement? I wonder. I'm part of the Hollywood world now. I can't deny it. I drive a Range Rover. I live in Brentwood. Not everyone is contemptible. Perhaps Julia Phillips was wrong. I hope she is.

If you can't brag on your own blog, then where can you?

2005-01-30T10:00:00.000-07:00

Is Simon's head superimposed in this picture? It looks too big to be real. Or not.

Here's a link to the NY Post's TV Week, where I sold a story this week. My story, with my byline and everything, is right on the cover!

A friend in LA said to me: "isn't the rule that if you get three stories in the New York Post, you get to write for the New Yorker?" I said "no, I think the rule is that if you get one story in the New York Post, you are forever forbidden from writing for The New Yorker."

So don't look for me there.

Buster's friend has two mommies

2005-01-28T11:40:00.001-07:00

Buster visits Wind River, Wyoming

Buster goes rock-climbing in Boulder

In case you were wondering whether the Bush Administration actually is an evil cabal of would-be dictators who are pretty sure that they know how everyone else should live, the following article should clear that up.

Written by the hilarious Lisa de Moraes, TV columnist for the Washington Post, the article discusses how PBS, in its all-too-familiar role as eternal political punching bag, caved completely to the Education Department (aka Bush Administration’s czar in charge of how schools should be run even most of the government’s money is going to Iraq).

DOE recently became aware that in one episode of PBS’ Postcards from Buster, the animated bunny visited real-life families in Vermont and learned, shock of all shocks, that two of his new friends had two mommies. The episode wasn’t really about that—it was about how to make maple syrup and cheese and how to speak English—but the two mommies were present and visible. In response to pressure from the Administration (a constant refrain of ‘if you don’t behave yourselves and portray the country in the way we want you to we will pull your funding’), PBS disintegrated like a wet cardboard box and decided not to distribute the episode.

This is not new behavior from PBS. And I have to say I don’t blame them, even though I do think they are pretty much a bunch of lily-livered cowards (what exactly is a ‘lily liver’? Does anyone out there know? And does lily have one L or two?).

The service gets only about 10% of its funding from the government – aka taxpayers. That’s not so much, but it gets the remainder of its money from corporate sponsorships and public fundraising. Constantly accused of having a strong liberal bent, PBS proves Republicans correct when it pulls stunts such as admitting that there are gay people in America. It also faces constant criticism from TV writers and other media watchers who gripe any time anything like a commercial shows up on PBS’ air. That means that if a voice-over comes on after a show saying “this presentation of Nova sponsored by Juicy Juice,” someone has a problem with it.

So, with Republicans looking for any opportunity to kowtow to conservative constituents and liberals watching closely for creeping commercialism, that doesn’t leave PBS with many places left to go to get its money. They end up having to kowtow to someone just so they can keep funding themselves.

According to what I infer from DOE’s objections to the Buster episode, this type of information could be damaging to pre-schoolers’ fragile brains. According to what I infer from preschoolers that I know, they could care less. Preschoolers don’t know that two women or two men or a black man and a white woman or an alcoholic and an enabler aren’t supposed to meet and mate. They just see kids and parents, fun or no fun, love or no love. It’s when the adults, with their closed minds and absolute certainty that things are supposed to be a certain way, get involved that things get complicated.

Of course, I am bringing my own closed mind to this debate, as I am demonstrating by writing this. My closed mind believes that it’s no one else’s business if two women or two men want to have babies. If you are opposed to that or if that disgusts you, that’s your business. What I don’t understand is why people feel so obligated to impose themselves and their way of thinking on others.

With regard to TV programs and kids, I always make two points: 1) there’s an off button and 2) there’s a First Amendment. That means that in this free country of ours most material—other than that which can be proven patently offensive, and that’s not much—should be free to be consumed. It also means that if you have chosen to be a parent, that requires parenting. And parenting requires monitoring a child’s TV watching.

For every parent that’s opposed to kids knowing that some people are gay, there are other parents who are all for it. Why should the pro-gay constituency be penalized by the anti-gay one? Why can’t the anti-gay constituency just change the channel? That's what we liberals do when we accidentally come upon Fox News.

Now, granted, it’s a lot to ask for parents to know the content of every PBS program and episode before their child sits down to watch it. And parents need to have channels where they feel safe letting their children hang out.

But it seems to me that this could be quickly handled by distributing episode information for TV guides ahead of time, and also issuing a warning statement prior to and maybe inside of the program. Even that seems a little Draconian to me, but in fairness, I don’t think parents should be ambushed by potentially objectionable content.

While I think that all the hullaballoo about Janet Jackson’s stupid breast is the most overwraught, pointless, useless debate practically in American history, I also think that Janet and Justin and whatever producers knew about the stunt ahead of time (and whatever they say, at least the two performers knew good and well what they planned to do), and that their 'impromptu' performance took away millions and millions of parents’ right to choose what their children see. That’s where the huge mistake was made. I wonder if Janet and Justin would make the decision again if they knew ahead of time that exposing her breast would threaten our freedom. And I don't think I'm being overly dramatic when I say that, given the debate and censorship that has taken place in this post-Janet world.

I believe people should be given information that allows them to make a choice. What I definitely don’t believe, and the constitution backs me up on this, is that material should be censored just because the party in power objects to it.

PBS's 'Buster' Gets An Education
By Lisa de Moraes

Washington Post
Thursday, January 27, 2005; Page C01

PBS was surprised to receive a letter from new Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, warning the public TV network against airing an upcoming episode of the kids show "Postcards From Buster," because PBS had already informed her office it would not send the episode to its stations, programming co-chief John Wilson says.

"We made the decision . . . [Tuesday] afternoon, a couple of hours before we received the letter from the secretary of education," Wilson told The TV Column yesterday.

"It came at the end of many days, maybe even a few weeks, of looking at rough cuts of the program and deliberating."

Spellings, who has been charged with the difficult task of fixing the nation's troubled public education system, took time out on her second day on the job to fire off a letter to PBS CEO Pat Mitchell expressing "strong and very serious concerns" about the "Postcards From Buster" episode. Specifically that, in the episode, called "Sugartime!," the animated asthmatic little bunny visits Vermont and meets actual, real-live, not make-believe children there who have gay parents.

For those of you unfamiliar with the spinoff of the popular children's series "Arthur," which combines animation and live action, each week, 8-year-old animated Buster and his animated dad travel to another locale, where Buster, armed with his video camera, meets actual, non-animated people, who introduce him to the local scene -- clogging in Whitesburg, Ky.; rodeo barrel racing in Houston; monoskiing in Park City, Utah; doing the Arapaho Grass Dance at the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. Additionally, Buster meets a family from a different cultural background.

In the episode that knotted Spellings's knickers, Buster goes to Vermont and meets children from two families, who show him how maple syrup and cheese are made.

At one of the homes, Buster is introduced to all of the children and to the two moms. One girl explains that one of the women is her "stepmom," whom she says she loves a lot.

One of the women asks the kids to get some maple syrup and some cheese for dinner, and to stop by the other home to borrow a big lasagna pan. In the other home, Buster is introduced to the whole family, including two more moms. Then the kids head off to get the ingredients, and Buster learns where syrup and cheese come from.

In her letter, Spellings reminded Mitchell that the show is being funded in part by the Education Department and that a principal focus of the law authorizing such "Ready-to-Learn" programming is "facilitating student academic achievement."

In the conference committee report for fiscal year 2005 appropriations, Spellings continues, Congress reiterated that the unique mission of Ready-to-Learn is: "to use the television medium to help prepare preschool age children for school. The television programs that must fulfill this mission are to be specifically designed for this purpose, with the highest attention to production quality and validity of research-based educational objectives, content and materials."

"You should also know," Spellings says, "that two years ago the Senate Appropriations Committee raised questions about the accountability of funds appropriated for Ready-To-Learn programs." A bit ominous, we think.

"We believe the 'Sugartime!' episode does not come within these purposes or within the intent of Congress and would undermine the overall objective of the Ready-To-Learn program -- to produce programming that reaches as many children and families as possible," Spellings wrote.
Why, you might wonder, given that preschoolers who watch the episode learn how maple syrup and cheese are made, not to mention useful English-language phrases (the series is also designed to help children for whom English is a second language).

Because, Spellings explained in her letter, "many parents would not want their young children exposed to the life-styles portrayed in this episode." She did not say how many is "many," or cite a source for that information.

Congress's point in funding this programming "certainly was not to introduce this kind of subject matter to children," she added.

Au contraire, says WGBH, which produces "Postcards." The Boston public TV station says it will air the episode and has offered it to any station willing to defy the Education Department, which, in fairness, did shovel out major bucks for this series and, therefore, understandably feels it has the right to get in its two conservative cents' worth.

According to Brigid Sullivan, WGBH's vice president of children's programming, the RFP -- that's government-speak for request for proposals -- on the show said Ready-to-Learn was looking for a program that would "appeal to all of America's children by providing them with content and or characters with which they can identify. Diversity will be incorporated into the fabric of the series to help children understand and respect differences and learn to live in a multicultural society. The series will avoid stereotypical images of all kinds and show modern multi-ethnic/lingual/cultural families and children."

Except, it would seem, children who have two mothers.

"We have produced 40 episodes," Sullivan said. "We have tried to reach across as many cultures, as many religions, as many family structures as we can. We gave it our best-faith effort. We have received hate mail for doing [an episode] about a Muslim girl. We've also received mail from Muslims saying thank you."

Buster, Sullivan said, has visited "Mormons in Utah, the Hmong in Wisconsin, the Gullah culture in South Carolina, Orthodox Jewish families, a Pentecostal Christian family -- we are trying to do a broad reach and we are trying to do it without judgment."

According to Sullivan, the "Buster" brouhaha started in December when, during a routine meeting of representatives from WGBH, PBS and the Education Department to discuss upcoming episodes, a WGBH rep mentioned that there might be some "buzz" on "Sugartime!" PBS insists that although it made its decision not to distribute the episode on the very same day that the newly appointed Spellings decided to fire off her letter, the decision had nothing to do with the kerfuffle brewing at Education over the episode.

Which, we've said before in similar situations, sounds great if you were born yesterday; otherwise, not so much.

"Ultimately we came to the conclusion that what was meant to be the background or backdrop of two families that happened to be headed by two mothers continued to find its way into the foreground," Wilson said.

"It's too sensitive to raise in a children's program," he added. "We know we have a number of kids . . . who don't have a parent or caregiver in with them watching to put it in context. At the end of the day what was meant to be a sort of background context of who this family is and who the parents are, overshadowed what the episode was really about, which was going to this part of America and learning about things that are uniquely Vermont.

"Yesterday afternoon we literally decided that it was an issue best left for parents and children to address together at a time and manner of their own choosing."

We asked all parties involved what they would say to the children who were filmed for this episode, and who expected to be seen on national TV and are now being told by the federal government that their families are not fit for other children to see on national TV -- at least not on any show that has received federal funding.

"That's a difficult question," Sullivan responded. "I guess I'd have to say from the producers' standing . . . it was our intention to include, not to exclude, anyone who is part of our society, and that for children to see a reflection of themselves on TV is an important part of their development."

"I've been thinking about that today," Wilson said. "Honestly, I feel for these families because they're real people, not actors cast and paid to do this, and I do feel bad that through no fault of their own and ultimately no fault of the producers they have been put in a situation they never imagined themselves in. To that end, I'm sorry for that."

An Education Department spokeswoman responded in a statement: "The episode is inappropriate for preschoolers. We are funding an education program for preschoolers, and one would be hard-pressed to explain how this serves as educational material for preschoolers. It's up to parents to decide for their children, not the government in a taxpayer-funded video for preschoolers."

We asked her to clarify what it was the department felt should be left to parents. She explained: "To decide when they want their kids to know about the lifestyles depicted in the film."

The Passion of the Right Wing

2005-01-25T13:42:00.000-07:00

Today, two interesting things happened.

The Passion of the Christ, to the surprise of no one who follows these things, was not nominated Best Picture of the Year.

And Ted Turner compared the popularity of Fox News Channel to the early popularity of Hitler.

So we see the country’s dividing lines pretty clearly.

On the right we have: Jesus and Hitler.

And on the left we have: Ted Turner and film critics.

Who knew things would fall out that way?

While I am not among those that believe The Passion of the Christ should be considered Best Picture of the Year just because it’s about Jesus, I have to admit a few things. First, it made more money than almost any other movie this year (ok, the third-most, according to CNN). Second, film critics and others among the Academy’s voting elite tend to be liberal, erudite and not religious. So I can’t deny that possibly some bias kept the Passion off the best-picture lists. Finally, I didn’t see the film (see comments below re: The Pianist) because I couldn’t rally myself to watch a two-plus-hour movie in Aramaic about someone getting beaten, tortured and ultimately killed. That is the way the story goes, and I’ve heard it plenty of times, but I didn’t feel like I needed to experience it in the movie theatre when I’ve experienced it in church all these years.

As for Ted Turner’s comments at the National Association of Television Program Executives in Las Vegas today: are we surprised? Ted Turner is always saying such things. What surprises me is that the outrageous comments of a washed-up media mogul continue to make news. But I’m writing about them, so I guess I have to take some responsibility too.

Here’s the thing. Just because a movie is about Jesus doesn’t mean it’s the Best Picture. Just because George Bush calls himself a Christian doesn’t mean we all need to vote for him. Just because Fox News is popular among the country’s redneck Republicans doesn’t mean its Hitleresque in stature. And just because film critics think that Closer is a good movie doesn’t mean that it is.

A little perspective, people.

It's Oscar Time

2005-01-25T08:51:00.000-07:00

Hooray! Hooray! The Oscar nominations are out!

I admit I have an unnatural enthusiasm for the Oscars. I don’t know why. I don’t feel the same way about any other awards show. The Grammys – out of touch and random categories. The Golden Globes – who cares what a bunch of foreign journalists think? The Emmys – the spoils go to the established so the voters don’t have to seek out any new television. The People’s Choice Awards – what do the people know? But for some reason, I have always loved the Oscars. In fact, it still annoys me that they moved Oscar season up a month (to put the high-rated show right at the end of February sweeps). It gives me less time to see the movies.

This year, I have already seen quite a few. After my stint in Hollywood, I learned that if you follow all these critics’ awards, by the time Oscar rolls around you pretty much know who is getting nominated. This year, I’ve already seen four out of five of the best picture nods (still need to see Million Dollar Baby). What I love about the Oscars is that it forces me to see movies I would never get myself into the theatre to see. I have to admit I still haven’t managed to make myself watch The Pianist, for which Adrien Brody became the youngest Best Actor winner ever, even after my Netflix DVD of it sat on my TV for something like five months. This year, my “I know I should” movie is Hotel Rwanda. Don Cheadle is a brilliant actor, and I’ve thought so since Traffic, but the topic is tough. That’s probably why I should see it.

One of the tragic things about moving away from Los Angeles is that I probably won’t have the opportunity to see all the nominated foreign films, documentaries and short films. Those get airings in LA (and DC) but most of the folks in Colorado are more interested in climbing the nearest mountain and skiing down it than going to the movies.

But enough of that. Since I have a blog this year, I’m going to go out on a limb and predict the winners of the major categories. Normally this is an activity I save for Oscar night, when I work hard to win the pool.

Leading Actor: As we already know, I believe Jamie Foxx is a lock to win this. Paul Giametti didn’t even land a nomination! And Kinsey, starring Liam Neeson, is scarcely on the nomination list, except for Laura Linney’s nod in the supporting actress category. I guess that’s a movie I don’t have to see, which is a good thing because it’s not here anymore.

Supporting Actor: Thomas Haden Church for Sideways. Why not? He’s won everything else. And it’s rare for an actor to be nominated twice (Foxx in Ray and Collateral). It’s unprecedented for him to win twice. Finally, if Closer (Clive Owen) wins anything, I’m going to throw up. No matter how very hot Clive is. (My vote for the next James Bond, by the way, although no one listens to me on such matters.)

Leading Actress: Hilary Swank for Million Dollar Baby. The actress once again transformed herself into another person, going so far as to drink glasses of egg whites in the middle of the night to help put on 25 pounds of muscle. This Oscar will confirm Swank as one of Hollywood’s top Actresses, not just a one-time winner.

Supporting Actress: Cate Blanchett for The Aviator, although she will have heated competition from Virginia Madsen for Sideways. Madsen has been the critical darling this year, but Blanchett is overdue and the Academy loves her. What’s more, Blanchett is a major leading lady and Madsen is scarcely known. Still, I’d give both actresses 50-50 odds. Natalie Portman is too young and she’s got a long career ahead of her, plus did I mention how much I hated Closer?

Directing: Martin Scorsese for The Aviator. Scorsese’s sweeping biopic about a subject that terrifies him is the most-nominated film this year. And, as mentioned before, Scorsese is probably the most overdue person in Hollywood. He probably should have won for Gangs of New York, but competition was tougher that year.

Adapted Screenplay: The most awarded film of the year got there because of a beautifully written script. Sideways should win this tightly-contested category.

Original Screenplay: If there is an Oscar god, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind will win this category. Was there any movie more original last year?

And finally, Best Picture: With 11 nominations, The Aviator is likely to win this one. No other movie nominated this year is as broad in scope or as commercially viable. Ray is largely a one-man show; Finding Neverland, while delightful and whimsical, doesn’t showcase big enough performances; Sideways is too small and intimate; and not enough people have seen Million Dollar Baby.

As a postscript, here’s what I want to know? Where is House of Flying Daggers in the Best Foreign Language Film category? That gorgeous movie deserved to be nominated.

Sideways

2005-01-12T21:47:00.000-07:00

the cast of Sideways

Note to Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney: Critically-lauded Sideways is a textbook example of how a movie can feel natural and effortless and still be guided by a great script and a great director.

In the movie, oenophile (I’m proud to say I got this word right on the first try!) Miles (American Splendor’s Paul Giametti) and aging actor Jack (Wings’ Thomas Haden Church playing a character whose life story mirrors his own) travel to Santa Barbara wine country to celebrate for one last week before Jack gets married. Along the way, they meet two women—Virginia Madsen’s wine-loving and luminous Maya and Sandra Oh’s exuberant wine-pourer Stephanie—and two affairs ensue. Threaded through the story is a study of two immature and dysfunctional men as they go about lives they can't stop messing up.

The acting in Sidewaysis so seamless that the audience doesn’t even know it’s happening. That’s why Church and Madsen are cleaning up all the critics’ awards thus far this year. And while his performance clearly was this critically-adored film’s heart and soul, Giametti is once again the victim of bad timing. He has no choice but to sit on the sidelines and watch Church and Madsen sweep up the accolades because Jamie Foxx has no peer this year. But without Giametti at the center—playing the sad-sack role he was born to—the movie wouldn’t have been the same.

After seeing Sideways, my sister Ashley noted that the mark of a great director is no sign whatsoever that he’s been there.

Counter-examples that prove that theory are Soderbergh’s focus-free Ocean’s 12 or disasterously boring K Street, a failed unscripted, unplanned series on HBO which featured real-life, not-too-attractive political consultants James Carville and Mary Matalin talking on their cell phones in the back of DC cabs while running from meeting to meeting. Both projects demonstrate that even visionary directors like Soderbergh--who unfortunately has fallen in love with this free-form filmmaking--benefit from a tight script, a carefully constructed plot and meticulous planning. Reality TV is fun and all, but even Survivor has writers. Alexander Payne’s quiet ensemble dramedy takes advantage of all those things. That allows Payne to turn a small, intimate piece into a legitimate contender for this year’s best picture Oscar.

No question, Miles and Jack are not honorable characters. At about the film’s halfway point, I was pretty sure that if I had been on such a trip with either of these people, I would have packed up and bailed on about day two, never to return a phone call from either of them ever again.

But Payne surrounds these two with women who make watching the disasterous pair more than tolerable, and even enjoyable. The dynamic between the group of four gives this film depth and warmth that Mike Nichols’ Closer, also a film full of unredeemable characters, lacks. We see growth, albeit miniscule, in both men, and more importantly, they reveal their vulnerability and insecurity to each other and to us. In Closer, Clive Owen has a marvelous breakdown at the strip club where Natalie Portman works, but that’s about it in terms of revealing moments.

My friend Tina said she didn’t think she was old enough to fully relate to Sideways. I don’t think I’m alcoholic enough to fully relate to it. The film is a lush portrait of Santa Barbara’s gorgeous wine country where Mom and I have twice enjoyed wonderful trips. But we drank far far far less than our hapless heroes, due not only to lack of desire but sheer physical impossibility. During the movie, I pondered whether I really really wanted a glass of wine or if I never wanted to drink again.

Still, I don’t think this movie is as much about age as it is about failure and fear, and somehow forcing yourself to take just that one little step that lets you climb out of all that.

As I said in my previous blog about Ray Charles and Howard Hughes, Payne likes to explore the life of the little guy: Matthew Broderick’s flailing high-school teacher in Election, Jack Nicholson’s doddering retiree in About Schmidt, and now Jack and Miles, two men no one should date, much less marry.

Still, through careful crafting, Payne comes much closer to showing us real life than any director out there I can think of. And his biggest trick is this: we love watching it.

Letterman strikes again

2005-01-12T19:41:00.000-07:00

I usually find Letterman overrated but this is hilarious, particularly because Letterman works for CBS, thus making it his favorite target.

Top Ten Proposed Changes At CBS News

10. Stories must be corroborated by at least two really strong hunches.

9. "Evening News" pre-show staff cocktail hour is cancelled until further notice.

8. Reduce "60 Minutes" to more manageable 15-20 minutes.

7. Change division name from "CBS News" to "CBS News-ish"

6. If anchor says anything inaccurate, earpiece delivers an electric shock.

5. Conclude each story with comical "Boing" sound effect.

4. Instead of boring Middle East reports, more powerball drawings.

3. To play it safe, every "exclusive" story will be about how tasty pecan pie is.

2. Not sure how, but make CBS News more like "C.S.I."

1. Use beer, cash and hookers to lure Tom Brokaw out of retirement.

Howard and Ray

2005-01-02T23:00:00.000-07:00

Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes in The Aviator

Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles in Ray

I feel a little weird blogging about movies when the statistics from Southeast Asia keep getting more mind-boggling by the minute, but since I’ve been going to the movies during the holidays while relief workers bring in food and supplies and bury bodies, I guess that’s what I’ll write about.

Ray and The Aviator – probably the two movies with the most collective Oscar buzz between them – offer the life stories of two talented, charismatic geniuses who tend toward self-destruction. Both stories illustrate the notion that burning too bright often comes with a heavy price, that genius and madness are frequently two sides of the same coin. Neither address the opposite question, the one that most of us deal with: is the price of a more careful life, the one that most of us live, a long, slow, uneventful ramble toward death and anonymity? And which is preferable?

I’m tempted to say that movies usually don’t deal with the quieter of these two inquiries, but occasionally they do. Alexander Payne’s About Schmidt tackled it – what does the end of a quiet, risk-free life look like? Feel like? Is it satisfying? But usually, the common folk aren’t interested in watching their own forms and foibles wander across the screen, they have enough of that every day. It takes big risk-taking, big gambles, to warrant an entire feature film about a life.

And both Howard Hughes and Ray Charles were big risk-takers, each of the sort that American society worships. Nevermind the costs: Hughes ultimately paid in madness, drug dependency and complete social ostracization; Charles in heroin addiction. One was overrun by his demons, the other ultimately redeemed himself, but to some extent, the stories run on parallel tracks. While both men faced the world’s challenges head-on, at the end of the day they each seemed not to have enough left within them to handle the trivialities of their lives. Hughes escaped into mental disorder masquerading as order and control; Charles escaped into women he didn’t love and a drug that clouded his exuberant and musical mind.

In one interview, Aviator star and self-made Hughes expert Leonardo DiCaprio says that when Hughes crashed a test flight into Beverly Hills apartment homes, it was like Icarus flying too close to the sun. Hughes never really brought himself all the way back after that one, and the injuries he sustained in that catastrophic wreck eventually led him to become addicted to painkillers, an issue the movie, chronicling the younger man, doesn’t address.

Ray Charles also had his Icarus moments, flying high, crashing low. He went from churning out number-one hits and negotiating for himself the most lucrative record contract the industry had yet seen to getting busted for heroin possession and eventually having to wean himself off the evil substance, a process that in itself should deter anyone from trying that drug.

Maybe such big personalities require huge counter-measures to balance them out. While the average 9-to-5er can smooth out the edges with a glass or two of wine at the end of the work day, maybe it takes much more to settle these types down.

And maybe it’s a requirement that such folk be forged from difficult circumstances. Hughes, although he inherited a fortune, was an orphan by the age of 17 and an only child. His mother, as portrayed in the movie, was overprotective and overintimate. Charles was the son of a poor but strong single mother, and he watched his little brother drown in an accident when he was 7, an incident that haunted him throughout the rest of his life. Soon after, glaucoma took his eyesight, leading him to discover his other gifts.

Without the risks these men took, there’s much that society would be without. Hughes helped pioneer commerical transatlantic flight and jet air travel, while Charles gave us an entirely new form of music, fought successfully against segregation and proved one more time that all races are created equal.

Perhaps we get some solace from sitting in a dark theatre observing the lives of people who beat down such adversity and go on to live so largely – see, we can say, if we live likewise we too will face madness or drug addiction, disasterous marriages or no marriages at all. If we take no chances, at least we won’t pay big prices.

But maybe it’s the combination of all of the above factors that led Hughes and Charles to seem so fearless and take such big chances. They placed big bets because they felt they had nothing to lose, and it was just those bets that made them feel like they had any place on this earth at all. Both men seemed fearless on the outside, while demons gnawed at them from within. Hughes was engulfed, while Charles fought past his scratching and clawing. It’s not lack of fear that defines courage, it’s the willingness to face that fear and proceed anyway.

Both movies also embrace some fearlessness: Martin Scorsese has such a fear of flying that the title alone of The Aviator nearly dissuaded him from doing the movie; Leonardo DiCaprio has dreamed for ten years of bringing Howard Hughes to the silver screen, with himself in the title role, making a potential public failure that much more intolerable; and Jamie Foxx took on a beloved icon and inhabited the man so completely that there’s no sign left of Foxx.

Since it’s but two months away, let’s address my favorite awards show of the year, the Oscars. The Aviator could win the Oscar for best movie, but Scorsese has a better chance of walking away with Best Director because he thoroughly deserves it, and Oscar often awards statues to greater artists in lesser projects if they’ve been overlooked in the past. (See Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe). Scorsese is probably the most overlooked, legendary director working today. (Quentin Tarantino would be another one, but he’ll get his soon enough.) DiCaprio will be nominated but won’t win, but Cate Blanchett, playing Katherine Hepburn, will achieve both.

As for Best Actor, Jamie Foxx’s time has clearly come. No other performance this year even comes close. What Foxx does in Ray is closer to channelling than acting.

As I said, I’ve seen a lot of movies over the break, so besides the above-mentioned picks, here are a few more. Both Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet will be nominated for Finding Neverland, which also should be nominated best picture. Winslet also has a shot at a nomination for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which also will likely win Best Original Screenplay and should. If there’s any justice in the world, Eternal Sunshine also will be nominated best picture, but it was a quirky movie released a long time ago and both factors could hurt it.

The South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami

2004-12-28T08:37:00.000-07:00

Here's a link to a help page about the tsunamis in Southeast Asia that have now killed an estimated 50,000 people -- it boggles the mind really. This page includes information and links about the tragedy as well as links to pages that are offering help. And if you are reading this, please take a moment to pray for these people.

The South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami

Home again home again

2004-12-22T22:41:00.000-07:00

I am so happy to have completed the Hawaii Diaries! I was thrilled to have gone, and now I'm so happy that I can blog onward. I got a little stuck in the past, feeling like I wanted to finish up about the trip before I could blog about other stuff, and then falling behind what with the holidays, work, etc etc.

I'm excited to say I've started teaching aerobics again. Just a few mellow step-sculpt classes at the local YMCA, but I've missed teaching more than I thought I would. I'm having a great time with it, and I picked it right back up like I'd been teaching all along. I'm planning to save all the money I make (which won't be that much because the pay is pretty low) towards going to a fitness conference in NYC March 11-13.

I've seen a few movies lately, and I wish I could motivate to write reviews of all of them but well, I can't. So let me highly highly recommend Finding Neverland, with Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet. It's full of heart and whimsy. I've loved it more than anything I've seen lately. I'd love to see Johnny Depp get his Oscar this year, but I suspect Jamie Foxx has it wrapped up. I haven't seen Ray yet (on the schedule for next Tuesday night) but the buzz tells me he's the leading candidate by far.

Let me not very highly recommend Closer, which I thought was filled with empty and selfish characters and was an unfulfilling story. It wasn't badly acted, I just didn't appreciate the premise. (and I didn't think it was that well written -- it was a little trite, says I who have written zero screen plays)

Ocean's 12 is less fun and less cool than the critics would lead you to believe. OK, it is fun to see all those flashy movie stars in one place -- and there's nothing wrong with Brad, George and Matt (playing a geek) together in one film -- but since K Street (which FAILED guys, hello!) Soderbergh seems to have lost sight of the importance of things like scripts, plots and rehearsals. Ocean's Eleven was so fun because the audience was in on the scam, which was tightly conceived and executed. In this movie, you are just as much in the dark as everyone else. And the reveal is foggy at best.

We also saw Motorcycle Diaries last night at my home away from home, the Boulder Theatre. This is a gentle, idealistic film. I thought it was a bit slow at moments, but I still liked it. The slowness probably contributes to the overall feel of the film, which focuses on profundity rather than speed. And Gael Garcia Bernal, as young Che Guevara on a life-changing journey, is one of those actors who accomplishes his work through his facial expressions. Aftewards Mom said "well, that was absorbing." That's a high compliment for any movie.

On my long movie list leading up to the Oscars: The Aviator, The Life Aquatic, Kinsey, Million-Dollar Baby, The House of Flying Daggers, A Very Long Engagement and Sideways.

The Hawaii Diaries -- the very sad eighth and last day

2004-12-22T22:04:00.000-07:00

Me at Java on the Rocks, doing the tourist thing

ok, I hate pictures of myself but here's us getting on to the little plane to tour the island

Hawaiian coast

valley from the air

view from the airplane

Friday, November 26, 2004

The last day. How incredibly sad.

We had to check out at 10 am, so we got that done and then we went back over Huggo’s way for breakfast – this time at Java on the Rocks (which becomes Huggo’s on the Rocks for lunch and abuts Huggo’s so it shares that amazing coastal view). I went back to Jack’s Diving Locker for a t-shirt, because overnight I had become totally obsessed with diving and diving culture, and we did some more various and sundry shopping.

That afternoon, we took a tour of the island by plane. Dad was sleeping part of the time, but I thought it was a pretty cool way to see everything. It’s amazing because you literally fly over the entire island in less than two hours. You fly over Kilauea, the big island’s only active volcano at the moment. The lava flows are slow but steady and cover eight miles. Flying over it is sort of unspectacular, in that you don’t go over a mawing crater or see red lava shooting into the air, which is sort of what I was expecting. Mostly, you just see miles and miles of bubbling black stone that covers everything in its path. When it hits the ocean, it cools immediately and breaks into millions of pieces, creating inaccessible black sand beaches that look like black velvet from the air. If you walk too close to the cracks in the lava, you risk plunging into the sea with the rest of the lava cliff. I was happy to be in a plane and not walking.

The interesting part is leaving that barren wasteland and flying past Mauna Loa to the Hilo side. Mauna Loa is a high volcano (is more than 30,000 feet high from the bottom of the sea) but it hasn’t been active in hundreds of thousands of years. That means that the Hilo side of Hawai’i has had time for green jungles to grow over water-carved canyons. That results in the 2,000 feet-high waterfalls you see in all pictures of Hawaii. There’s also the TKTK valley, where thousands of pounds of taro root used to be grown. That was one place I wished we could land and explore. It’s a green valley surrounded by two high walls, and it looks like a place where hobbits would live. (There are pictures of the valley above.)

Today, most of Hawai’i’s agricultural products are macadamia nuts. The sugar industry has moved elsewhere, and the people of Hawai’i no longer live on taro root. There still is quite a bit of coffee grown around Kona, however. We tried to take lots of advantage of that!

The flight ends passing over the Kohala Gold Coast, which is where all those spectacular hotels are, like the Waikoloa Hilton and the Hapuna Prince. Soon we were back at Kona airport and now we had nothing much left to do but eat dinner and fly away home.

I thought this part was going to be really long and hideous, but it wasn’t all that bad. The flight home was much more tolerable than the flight there – I think that’s because you aren’t nearly as excited to come home as you are to get there. In fact, I didn’t want to come home at all. Even as I write this (on Dec. 22, back in Boulder) I feel like I did then, returning to the mainland, wondering when I would ever get to go back to paradise.

The Hawaii Diaries -- Day Seven

2004-12-22T22:01:00.000-07:00

the whale shark

Thursday, November 25, 2004 Thanksgiving

Diving! This was an experience that changed my life. I’ve always wanted to get my SCUBA certification, but for some reason I’ve never done it. It’s not something that just jumps out at you, that you need to learn how to do. One of my goals when I moved to LA was to get certified, but it never happened. It requires coming up with several hundred dollars and I never could justify dedicating that money to getting SCUBA certified. Now I wish I had because I can’t believe I’ve lived this long without being a diver. Had I known, I would have scrapped this whole journalism idea and just cut to the chase and become a dive master on Kona in the first place.

After just taking the Discover SCUBA introductory class, which basically means just swimming aorund in the pool with a mask, tank and regulator, I was totally hooked. Besides wanting to move to Kona and become a dive instructor, I wanted to get open water certified as soon as possible. I was already planning how to budget for it.

Ten people went out on the boat with three dive instructors, plus the captain. I thought I would feel apprehensive at first but I just felt eager to get into the water. I had been so comfortable with the gear in the pool and I already knew what it was going to look like underwater and that all helped. When we finally dropped anchor and got in, I was raring to go.

I have to say, it was all I thought it would be and more. We basically just floated around, looked at fish and coral and rocks and hung out. But it is so much cooler to be breathing under the water just like you belong there. When you are snorkeling you don’t feel as much like you are part of things. When you are diving, you feel sort of lost in that new place, it lets you totally forget real life for a little while. Kind of like being a mermaid for a day.

On the second dive, we actually saw a lot more stuff. We saw a dragon moray eel, which is red and spotted and has two “horns” on his head. He stuck his head out of his hole for a long time and let us all get a really good look at him. Then a sea turtle just came swimming on by, calm as could be. We all went crazy looking at him. I don’t know why because I had just seen several of them two days before, but it’s still cool.

The day before I went diving, a whale shark had shown up in Kona, right off of the snorkel beach. The whole diving community was going nuts about that. They had all gotten on their radios and everyone had gone to check it out. The whale shark is 25 to 50 feet long—the ocean’s biggest fish—and is supposedly very gentle. They have about 300 rows (300!!!) of “tiny hooked teeth in both jaws,” according to West Hawaii Today, the local paper, but they aren’t very aggressive. Anyway, the picture up top is from the paper of that guy. I was kind of disappointed that I didn’t get to see him (and he showed back up on Friday) but I’m not sure what I would have done had I been swimming along and then run into a 25 foot fish. As you can see from the picture, people were just snorkeling right up to him and he really didn’t seem to mind. According to the paper, whale sharks are pretty rare around there. They generally like to live in warmer waters a little further south.

The diving community in Kona – like all communities really – is full of gossip. They had all heard about the woman that had to be rescued by our snorkel boat. I think it freaked people out because it happens so rarely, plus events like that are bad for business. Supposedly she was okay, but still in the hospital. The consensus among the dive masters was that maybe something had happened under water, she had freaked out, come up fast and held her breath, causing over lung expansion. Holding your breath when you dive is the worst thing you can do because then your body can’t regulate to the new atmospheric pressure you face as you go up and down in depth.

After all that diving excitement, the day came to an end way too quickly. We went on in and Mom and Dad picked me up at Jack’s, a newly converted diver.

That night, was Thanksgiving and we went to a Luau. It was something I wanted to do because I’d never done it before but I also thought it was going to be a little bit cheesy. It was a little cheesy, but I think I like that because I’ve enjoyed lots of other cheesy events this year – namely lots of things in Branson. There was tons of food – Hawaiian and otherwise – and I didn’t eat so much of it but it was fun to try it and to learn about it. Poi is as disgusting as everyone says it is by the way. In fact, I thought it was more disgusting the more I considered it, even into the next day. The show also was fun – the performers did dances from all over different island cultures. It’s funny because Hawaii associates itself with places such as New Zealand, Fiji and Samoa, but those places are thousands of miles away. California is actually closer and it’s 2,500 miles away. (There were no dances performed from California.) Hawaii really is the most isolated island chain in the world.

That night I was exhausted! It doesn’t seem like you are doing much when you are diving because you are just floating around basically, but it’s sort of like skiing – it really takes it out of you and you don’t notice until you finally settle down for the day.

Anyway, a most excellent day. So sad to be leaving tomorrow!

The Hawaii Diaries -- Day Six

2004-12-16T23:33:00.000-07:00

Mountain course view

Important shot -- Mom and I both cleared this pond and hit to the green. But we thought Mom's ball hit the lava and bounced into the water. We didn't know it was on the green until we got there. That was a big golf moment.

Wednesday, November 24, 2004

I feel like I am just finally settling in, but I also feel like things are coming to an end. I have no happy feelings surrounding going home. Not that I don't love home, because I do, but home is always there and now I'm in Hawaii! I so wish I could stay for an unlimited time, just freely enjoying myself, and then come back when I feel like it. Unfortunately, vacation doesn’t work this way.

This morning, we actually slept late and went to the little Mauna Loa pool before playing golf that afternoon.

On Sunday, we played the Kona Country Club’s Ocean Course. Today, we played the Mountain Course. I liked the Ocean Course better because it was flatter and more reasonable. The Mountain Course had all sorts of crazy things going on, hills and valleys and wacky carries. Keeping score was pointless. But the views were incredible. That's probably the main thing in golf -- enjoying the outdoors, the walk and the views. If you get too uptight about your swing or your game, all the joy goes out of it unless you are really super good.

After dinner out the last two nights, we ate in tonight. Lots of food to eat so that we don’t have to leave everything to the maids.

Overall, a pretty mellow day, although they are all also action-packed.
I’m going diving tomorrow and I am actually a little apprehensive because getting under all that water has always seemed scary to me. And the woman at the snorkel boat didn’t help.

The Hawaii Diaries -- Day Five (slowly getting there)

2004-12-16T07:32:00.000-07:00

Playful dolphins off the snorkel boat

Turtle love at Kapaluu

Needle fish

Kapaluu

Afternoon snorkeling at Kapaluu

Tuesday, November 23, 2004

This was the best day so far – snorkel, snorkel, snorkel. Who knew all that cool stuff was under the water? I guess I did know, but you don’t really think about it much until you are checking it out.

In the morning, we went out on the Pacific Dream Cruise. (I don't know that it was such a dream, but it was only $39 for all three of us because of our timeshare discount.) When we got there, it was only the three of us and one other guy on a sort of old beat up trimaran that could have held 50 people! Word was that an ocean liner that was supposed to have come in didn't, so business was slow. All the better for us, and we embarked on our essentially private cruise. We had a crew of three to our four, with Captain Kahani (pronounced Connie), First Mate Jordan and crew woman Astrid.

Kahani was just a little guy, but he was competent. I wondered right off why his tatoos were being removed and why he had taken out all five of his earrings, of which only the holes remained in his right ear. Given that observation, Mom later learned that his goal was to become a captain of a private yacht for $100,000 a year or so, but his tattoos were hindering him, so he was spending some $10,000 to get them removed.

Jordan, who was perhaps the most tan person I had ever seen, was a single mom but she was dating a guy who came from Leadville, Colorado. We didn’t learn that much about Astrid, other than that she was young and blonde and came from Hilo.

Chatting with Dutch, the other guy on the cruise, I learned he hailed from Holland, hence his name. His real name was Arthur and he didn’t really speak Dutch any longer. He was attractive, in his late 50s. I learned that he was actually half-owner of the company that owned Pacific Dream Cruises (or so he said) and had shown up on a secret scouting mission. He told me not to tell anyone, so I didn’t, although I pondered warning the crew. He wasn’t that happy with the state of the boat, which was 30 years old and needed painting.

The night before had been rainy and storms were predicted all day long. The morning opened cloudy and a bit cool, but rain didn’t seem imminent. The stormy weather from the night before had made the water a little rough, so we had to search for a place where we could moor up. After checking out one harbor, we went to another. Captain Kahani decided it was too rough there as well, but we did see a pod of spinner dolphins and that was so cool. They just swim up to the boats, check them out and hang out a little. They really are so social and seem to enjoy saying hi and swimming along with you for a bit. I wished we could get out and swim with them.

We ended up going back to the first harbor and tying up. Now it was time to jump in, a prospect I hadn’t really given much consideration to. The only time I had ever snorkeled before was at a snorkel park around Playa del Carmen and that was pretty easy peasy – like snorkeling for retards in a super giant manmade aquarium – awesome, but not really occuring in nature.

Still, I strapped on my mask, snorkel and fins and jumped into the water. Looking down, it was pretty much a watery wonderland – with all sorts of colorful fish swimming around. Jacks, also known as Chubs, hovered near the boat like stray dogs, hoping for some cast-off food (which they got, by the way). There were surgeon fish – deep black with a few marked white stripes – an irridescent blue-green fish the Hawaiian name of which I can’t remember. I saw one parrot fish way down there, and also a moray eel at one point. Lots of bright yellow fish, black and yellow and white angler fish with a big fin hanging over their snouts. It was cool to see all the life just there beneath the waves, something you never consider but that is always going on.

We snorkeled, ate lunch (hamburgers and hot dogs and grilled pineapple – the water slide didn’t work to Dutch’s sort-of secret dismay but the gas grill did) and then Mom and I got in for some more snorkeling. When I first got in, I looked below me to see a squadron of divers about 25 feet down, which was kind of cool to see. I was going diving on Thursday and it was fun to check out what they were doing.

Finally, I moved on, swimming and floating about the cove. I was out there for a long time, but everyone on the boat seemed relaxed and not worried about me so I just kept swimming. At one point, I looked up and everyone was standing on one side of the boat peering out and I knew they were seeing something cool that I was missing, but I couldn’t get back in time to see it. Turns out that was a whale and I was mad I missed it.

Anyway, I was still snorkeing away, absorbed in my own little world, when I saw a lot of commotion at the boat. I started swimming back and I heard a woman screaming in a very frenzied voice: “help her, help her, help my sister!”

At that point, I decided I had better get back in case they needed help or just needed to get on our way. When I got back, everyone was working hard to pull up a scuba diver, who seemed to be passed out because they were having a tough time getting her up. I wondered if the woman was breathing because you could tell she wasn’t awake. But things were chaotic and I just waited to get the information later.

Turns out, something had malfunctioned with her tank and she had inhaled a lot of water. After that, she panicked and grabbed her sister’s regulator but that didn’t help. She came up fast, never a great thing, and was disoriented and choking when she got to the surface. She just so happened to surface right at our boat, which was lucky (or providential, as my Dad said) for her, because she needed immediate help. She was alert enough to ask, but she passed out fairly quickly and started turning blue, according to Mom and Dad.

They got her up on the boat and on her left side so she could lay and let the bubbles, which happen when you surface too quickly, pass out of her system. She threw up a lot of salt water, but finally she was awake and breathing again. Very shaken, but likely okay. One boat, from Jack’s Diving Locker, took her and her husband back to shore because that boat’s divers weren’t in the water yet and it was a faster boat than our 30-year-old catamaran. Her boat, Kona Honu Divers, got all their people back on board before finally taking off.

Ultimately, everyone was okay, but it was both exciting and somewhat traumatic. Mom didn’t want me to stick with my plans to go diving on Thursday, but I was resolute because I had always wanted to try scuba diving and the chance doesn’t come up that often. Dad and I agreed that using the law of statistics – the “lightening strikes” rule, I like to call it – I was unlikely to run into trouble.

After that, we cleaned up and went on in. Dutch never told them who he was, but even though he said he was unhappy with the condition of the boat, he had to be impressed by the way Captain Kahani and the crew handled the emergency because Kahani stayed calm and in charge the whole way.

I so loved snorkeling that mom agreed to go with me to Kapaluu, the nearby snorkel beach, in the afternoon. Kapaluu is like one really really big aquarium and you can swim forever without it ever getting too deep. Actually, I wish I had spent more time there while we were in Kona.

Some of the pictures above are from Kapaluu, including the turtles, which is my favorite picture from the whole trip. It was so cool to just be snorkeling along and then run smack into these two turtles. (I was actually given a tip by a fellow snorkeler, but Mom and Dad both saw turtles here no problem.)

After snorkeling, Mom and I indulged in Mai Tais and I have to say, those babies are strong!

For dinner, we went back to Huggo’s. The meal was great, but the coolest part was looking over the balcony into the cove. We could see a moray eel (which Mom called "the creature," and we got sort of obsessed with watching it) sliding from tidal pool to tidal pool, hunting, and there were also herds of crabs (my own biological term), scuttling sideways along the rocks.

The Hawaii Diaries - Day Four (hooray! the pictures are here!)

2004-12-06T22:43:00.000-07:00

Hapuna State Beach

I don't know where I took this, maybe at the Hilton, but I think it's a really cool picture.

The pool at the Waikoloa Hilton

Mom and Dad on the bridge over the pool at the Hilton

Mom and Dad at Huggo's later that night

Monday, November 22

Unfortunately, two days have gone by before I’ve had a moment to sit down and write this so my memory of this day is not as fresh as it otherwise would have been. So, what did we do on Monday? Hmmm….

Oh, part of my memory blockage results from the fact that on this morning we finally went to the time share presentation. The presentation, given by a guy named Mike Ireland, was actually interesting, it’s just when we get into the closing and Dad gives his objections, that the whole thing gets unpleasant. Dad, a former salesman, loves to argue and somehow still believes that he can convince people of his way of thinking. It’s my opinion that the more you argue, the less chance you have to convince anyone of anything because they just get more angry and more stubborn. Let me add that this view doesn't mean I don't argue -- oh no, I do. And my efforts are to as little avail as anyone else's.

So we started down that process, but it came to a fairly abrupt end because I got annoyed feeling that Dad was being rude. Also, Mike just wrapped it up because I don’t think he really wanted to argue that much either. Dad also told Mike up front that we were just here for the discount so I think Mike didn’t feel that inclined to push.

In any case, once the whole time share thing and discounts were taken care of, things were much more relaxed. Our plans were finally … finally! … made and now we could just relax and enjoy.

That afternoon we drove a fairly long way to go to a big sandy beach with actual waves. Although I didn’t really like the drive (didn’t want to be in a car at all at any time), it was a cool thing to do because we got to see more of the island, which is actually a pretty barren place, mostly covered in black lava and shrubbery, with an occasional resort of golf course thrown in here or there. Besides checking out that beach – at the Hapuna State Beach Resort – we also saw a bit of the hotel there, the Hapuna Prince. Supposedly that hotel also has a golf course, although we didn’t see it. I wouldn’t want to be up at that part of the island because it’s pretty remote. Down where we are, we have great access to Kailua-Kona, which is an actual town, and I like having that.

That day we also checked out the Waikoloa Hilton, which is like the Disneyland of hotels. It’s huge, and a boat or a lightrail takes you from the initial lobby over to the mammoth pool. At the pool, which of course sits next to the rocky coastline, there’s a waterfall, waterslide and hanging rope bridge. It’s all quite elaborate. We were going to get a drink there, but the bartender was overwhelmed with making frozen drinks for thirsty and demanding tourists (such as ourselves) and Dad got impatient so we departed. Patience is not a virtue any of us possess, although I’m sure each one of us is convinced that we ourselves are much more patient than any of the others.

In any case, we got back into the Chevy Impala rent-a-car and headed back to our place. That night, we actually got cleaned up and went out to dinner at a place in K-K called Michelangelo’s. We went because we had a card to get a 20% discount on food and the restaurant was on the coastline. So we had italian food (Dad Italian sausage and peppers, Mom chicken parm, me spaghetti and meatballs) and it was lovely and actually quite a deal.

We then went to a place called Huggo’s for drinks, which also is right on the water. Huggo’s seemed like quite the place to be, although Dad didn’t like the music much (slow and piano bar-ish) and Mom had wanted to dance and that wasn’t happening. So we had yet another drink and then went home. (Too many drinks for Paige, Dad enjoyed pointing out.) We didn’t stick around Huggo’s that long, but the menu looked great and the setting was amazing so we resolved to come back another night.

The Hawaii Diaries - Day Three

2004-12-06T21:34:00.001-07:00

swimming at the Sheraton

Just before the 19th hole

waves splashing on the beach while Dad walks to the tee

Kona Ocean course

Sunday, November 21, 2004

This day started early. We had a 7 am tee time, which required checking in at 6:40 am. What was I thinking when I said I was willing to play golf early? I can’t even speak at this hour, much less hit a golf ball. But at least it would be quiet and still outside, and not so hot. Plus, we would get done early and be able to spend the rest of the day at the beach or the fabulous Sheraton pool.

Turns out, none of us slept well in anticipation of the early tee time. But once I got to the golf course, which was unbelievably beautiful and luxurious, I didn’t really care what time it was. The fairways were like carpets and the greens were fast and perfect; there were scarcely even any bare patches on them. Several holes butted up against the black lava coast line; in some cases, we had to hit over frozen bubbling lava. On hole seven, waves splashed up next to the tee box, spraying you a bit during your back swing.

Again, I’m really not a good golfer, but I had a great time. I could have gone in after 18, eaten lunch and come back out and played another 18. I took out my driver and hit plenty of good drives with it, only needing a mulligan one or two times. I cleared the lava no problem on the one hole where I had to get over some stuff. And very best of all, I chipped it in from about 25 yards on the 18th hole. What a way to finish up!

After lunch, Mom and I went over to the beautiful Sheraton pool and just hung out, while Dad stayed at the unit and took a nap. I think besides usually being tired, the jet lag has been hard for him to overcome, but he woke up from his nap quite perky.

I made dinner that night – salmon with mango salsa and broiled t-bone steak with rosemary and salsa fresca. Roasted green beans and potatoes and Hawaiian sweet bread rolls (which taste like Gramma A’s bread—for those of us who have had it—only maybe a little moister and softer. Very yummy.) Hawaiian coconut ice cream with chocolate syrup for dessert. That was delicious too, although the coconut ice cream didn’t really taste like the coconutty things we are used to on the mainland.

We talked about going out to the Kona Brew Pub to hear some music, but ended up staying in to watch Desperate Housewives. I have to say, TV fan that I am, it was worth staying in for. Thoroughly enjoyable. I could complain right now that vacationing with the parents makes one a homebody, but frankly, I think I’m the one that wants to stay home. They seem more than willing to go out, but I so love to cook, and I figure it saves money, that I’m just as happy being here once the sun goes down. That doesn’t speak well for any potential social life I might ever have again, but I think once you get past a certain age, you would rather get up, get out and get back. I’d rather spend my days being active and my nights at home, than my nights out and my days sleeping. I do sort of miss my party days, but this way is probably healthier.

After dinner, I took a not-so-hot tub (not cold either, but it could have been a little hotter) in the tub next to our unit. That was a relaxing thing to do right before bed, plus the Hawaiian sky was amazing. Big clear stars and a bright moon in a partly cloudy sky. I looked up and saw a genie riding on a magic carpet in the clouds. I looked down and saw my skin covered with silver beads as the hot tub jets shut off. I breathed in the alone time and thought about my life, about which I am often prone to anxiety. And I felt fully aware of the true value of being in the present moment and absolutely nowhere else.

The Hawaii Diaries - Day Two

2004-12-06T01:00:00.000-07:00

Kona sunset

Sheraton lobby

Keahou sunset

Mauna Loa pool

Saturday, November 20

Everyone was up early; Dad at 4:30 am, which is bad because it meant an early bed time and a sleepy day. But the jet lag is hard to overcome.

I actually managed to start the day with an hour of fairly rigorous yoga on my own. This was the only normal form of exercise I got while in Hawaii, other than golf and snorkeling. I found a hip-hop station on the radio and did a lot of sun saluations, adding some extra lunges here and there, and doing some floor poses. I fantasized about becoming an ashtanga yoga teacher in Hawaii. I would write my novel in the afternoons, sitting on my flower bedecked patio overlooking the golf course. Or maybe I would become a golf pro instead. Too bad I am utterly horrible at golf. But I digress.

We ate breakfast on the patio or the lanai as Mom calls it. Our view was of hole number two of the Kona Country Club golf course. It was fun watching foursomes come by and tee off. Unlike us, most people could hit a decent tee shot without taking a mulligan. Dad said people were already coming through at 6:15 am.

I’m no morning person, but as I get older I’ve noticed that I don’t mind getting up early as much as I used to. On the other hand, I said I wouldn’t mind playing golf early and now I was stuck checking in for a round at 6:40 am the next day.

In the distance, we could see the Pacific Ocean. What is sort of crazy about Hawaii is how small it is compared to the huge ocean surrounding it. It’s amazing planes flying in the dark can even find the tiny island chain. One degree off course and you’d end up in Japan.

After breakfast, and my yoga, and everyone cleaning up and various wheeling and dealing by my dad, we ventured into town. Dad had been told that if we sat through a timeshare presentation, we could get deals on various activities around Kona, so he was figuring that out with the concierge while Mom and I got organized.

The day was bright and sunny, with clouds clinging to the top of the nearby volcanic mountain range. Little beachy shops lined the main thoroughfare and small waves crashed on black-lava beaches. By 10:30 am, people already were frolicking in the surf. I wanted to be one of them.

The downer of the morning was that we found a woman in town who also sold timeshare presentations. In exchange, you got even better deals on various activities than we could get through Bebe at our complex, particularly a small airplane ride to see the volcano and waterfalls, but also on golf, snorkeling and other stuff. It seemed worth checking out.

Paulette, Ms. Timeshare, clearly had smoked a little too much Maui Wowie in her day. Fingers bedecked with every sort of jeweled ring, she explained everything in detail at least five times. She spoke in a business-like voice, but couldn’t remember anything we told her. Common sense eluded her. It took her three separate phone calls to rebook our golf reservation and she had to ask us at least three times how many rounds of golf we wanted to play. (Three people, three rounds. This is not brain surgery.) After about five minutes of Paulette, Mom and I wandered into the nearby ABC Shop and started buying touristy things like snorkel shoes, underwater cameras and small packs of macademia nuts.

After a while, we checked back to see if Dad was done, and he wasn’t. Paulette was explaining something for possibly the tenth time. She was getting more annoying by the moment. I am not helpful in situations like this. I have no patience anyway, and less patience for people who process information too slowly. I just wanted Paulette to make an appointment to see the time-share presentation, book our golf reservation at a discount and get on with it. But it was not to be that easy.

After an hour of so with Paulette, our negotiating was finally done. Everyone wanted a fruity drink anyway, but at that point we desperately needed one. Paulette was exhausting. At one point, Dad wanted to just bail her altogether, partly because he felt badly that he had to cancel his similar contract for a timeshare presentation with Bebe, the nice concierge at our place, but by now we were too far into the whole thing to bail. I convinced him to stick with it since we were about 80% there by this time, and we proceeded on.

Activity plans finally in hand, we went to Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. for lunch. A chain, the restaurant sits right on the shore. We sat at a table with waves crashing below us, and the sun beating on our backs. Finally, parents with chi-chis in hand, and me with a really big margarita, we were in Hawaii.

That afternoon, Mom and I fell asleep by our unit’s little pool. When we got up, I wanted to go on a walk, and Mom came with me.

Mom and I went walking around sunset. We went to the nearby docks and saw the sun descend into the vast ocean under a pink, red and orange sky. Locals and guys in their mid-thirties who long ago should have moved to the mainland and gotten a real job (or who are maybe smarter than the rest of us because what's so great about the mainland anyway?) were washing their boats and finishing up their day with tourists before heading off to the local watering hole. We randomly came upon the birthplace of King Kameahmea III, which was located in an overgrown tropical garden. Apparently no one was too concerned with the legacy of King Kameahea, just stuck back there as it was behind the dive shop parking lot.

On the way back to our place, Mom and I checked the giant new Sheraton resort that had just been built nearby. We went up to explore it and found an open lobby overlooking lava-flowed beaches. A giant, endless pool filled up the middle of the hotel, with waterfalls, a good long water slide and even a beach leading into the pool. I knew where I was going to spend my time when I wasn’t on the golf course, the snorkel boat or the beach. The pool was huge and the hotel was uncrowded. Who would notice that I wasn’t a guest?

The Hawaii Diaries - Day One

2004-12-05T23:20:00.000-07:00

Below is part one of the long-awaited chronicles of our trip to Hawaii (yes, I know everyone has been waiting for this with bated breath). Unfortunately, this is the most boring part -- it's just about the long long long flight to get there -- but you've gotta start somewhere. Happy reading!

Friday, November 19

After eight long months of waiting, my parents and I were finally on our way to Hawaii. Although I had never been there and I had always wanted to go, self-absorbed as usual, I hadn’t even really anticipated the trip, being too worried about whether my recent decision to become self-employed was going to work out or whether life as I knew it had come to a complete halt. But now the day was here, although far too early, and I was happy to be going.

It took about 0.05 seconds for anxiety, everyone’s regular travel companion, to appear. At about 5:45 am my mother appeared in the stairwell, bleary-eyed, cup of coffee in hand.

“Can we leave at 7 am instead of 7:30? I couldn’t sleep and I’m worried because we don’t know the toll road that well and we’ve never used that parking lot …”

“Sure, Mom,” I said. It was way too early to even talk.

7 am rolled around, and both parents were already in a bit of panic mode. The plane was taking off at 10:20. We only had 3 hours and 20 minutes to get to the airport, park, take a shuttle, check bags, which most certainly were going to get lost, and make our plane. Since it took about an hour to get to the airport, that left two hours and twenty minutes for everything else to go wrong.

Turns out, I had to admit the extra time did come in handy. The skycap at Denver International simply could not comprehend that I too was going from Denver to Kona and not getting off in Los Angeles. He checked two of our bags only to LA, so after holding up the check-in line, which grew longer and longer behind us, we had to go to a special agent to fix his error. By now, even I, probably the most experienced flyer among us, felt that if our bags all made it to Kona it would be a minor miracle.

Even with that little mishap, we arrived at our gate with time to kill and everyone ready for breakfast. We ate, waited at the gate and boarded without incident – except the McDonald’s counter worker not understanding my mother’s dire need for coffee.

The plane from Denver to LA took off right on time and we landed early. First leg completed. We had two hours to kill so we drank beers in a microbrewery in the United Airlines terminal.

By the time we finally got on the plane, of course, some gadget on the pilot’s console was broken and we ended up sitting on the tarmac for an hour. The guy next to me, who had a beer belly and a penchant for Coors Light, kept asking “Are we there yet?” in a loud voice, ostensibly to entertain his son. I was pretty sure he was doing it specifically to annoy me, because clearly the entire world revolves around me.

After what seemed like an eternity, we finally pushed away from the gate. We were on our way!

The plane ride was long – 5 hours and 15 minutes – and often bumpy. We had ravioli for dinner (not bad) and the movie was King Arthur (extremely bad). By the time we landed in Kona, it felt like I had done nothing else in my entire life besides travel to Hawaii.

But getting off the plane, 80 degree weather and humidity greeted us. The sweet scent of orchid leis wafted in the air and tank-top-wearing, sunburned people were everywhere, meeting friends and family. And best of all, all six pieces of our luggage, golf clubs and all, arrived intact. It all boded well for what was to come.

It was pitch black outside and we couldn’t really see a thing, except the flowers on the trees around the airport. It’s strange to arrive somewhere you have never been and have no idea what it looks like. Didn’t matter. After five minutes, I was ready to stay on forever.

The rest of the evening – it was about 8 pm in Hawaii by the time we rented our car and got it packed up – was spent checking in and getting groceries. We ended up with a perfectly sweet, two-bedroom (no pull-out couch in the living room for me! And my own bathroom!) unit in a flower-splashed area. Dinner was healthy -- some Maui potato chips and Coronas. It was 2 am for all of us and we were way tired. But tomorrow we were going to see where we actually were, what the golf course looked like and where the beach was. Sleep came easy.

New blog feature

2004-12-02T09:42:00.000-07:00

Just a brief notice to the few of you who are regular readers: I just added a feature, to be found on the right, under the links to other blogs, that allows you to subscribe to the blog by e-mail. This means that you will be sent all new posts by e-mail and you won't have to come to the blog via the web to see what I'm blathering on about now.

Garden State

2004-11-30T23:35:00.000-07:00

Natalie Portman and Zach Braff in Garden State.

I went to see Zach Braff's Garden State this evening at the Boulder Theatre (same place I saw the Warren Miller ski movie just a couple of weeks ago). I got there late, but just in time for the start of the film, which was only $6. And I was welcomed with veggie chili or chicken gumbo and an open bar. What could be better in a movie theatre! And even though I've heard nothing but great things about the movie, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it.

Braff's much-heralded indie film reminded me of Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation. Both are talky, slow and intimate. Garden State is hilarious, random and moving; Lost in Translation is quiet, lonely and subtly romantic. Both movies are intimate portraits of just a few characters. They both admit that life is random, but full of fate and mystery -- the "infinite abyss" as Braff calls it. They both recognize the shallowness of glamour and fame, and how much more valuable it is to find real love and a sense of place, no matter where one may actually be.

As human beings (or maybe just as Americans) we are all self-involved enough to believe that our one, single life is important. These small movies make the most of that belief. Our lives, our loves and our choices matter, according to these filmmakers. When we leave the theatre, no matter how boring and routine our day was, we believe in our innate greatness and beauty. We believe that magic might lurk around the next corner: we might go to a doctor's appointment or take an anonymous business trip to Tokyo and find the love of our life. We might suddenly decide to let go of lives that weren't going in desired directions and bravely pursue our real dreams. And we might find that we were wearing our real dreams all along like Dorothy's ruby slippers; we need only click our heels to realize that we were always standing in them in the first place.

The wonder of "small" movies such as Garden State and Lost in Translation is their ability to distill simple truths into broad statements about humanity. Natalie Portman's Sam in Garden State chatters like a valley girl; but she buries her umpteenth dead hamster with wisdom beyond her years. She's able to shed tears for Zach Braff's Large with ease, something Large wishes he could do. He falls in love with her open heart and spontaneous nature; she falls in love with his vulnerability and honesty. They are strangers who instantly know each other, not unlike Scarlett Johanssen and Bill Murray in Lost in Translation. Neither movie uses sex to make its point, and that's what makes them both so romantic and delicate.

Both movies explore the notion that there is someone for everyone. And after you watch them, you remember that some people immediately feel like home, while others never do. It's that feeling that makes you believe in fate and destiny, in soul mates and karma. That some people should get married one week after meeting and others should finally break up already. And it's that feeling, rare as it is, that gives life depth and light and hope.

The wonders of travel

2004-11-29T10:09:00.000-07:00

Boulder, Colo., behind my parents' house, around 10 am on Monday, Nov. 29

Keahou Bay, Kona, Hawaii, at sunset

Just a few days ago, I was standing on this dock, watching the sun fall into the turquoise ocean. Today, I am watching snow fall on a town blanketed in white. While I do love 80-degree weather, snow has its own charms. And I've flown a ton in my life, but it still amazes me that you can be in one place and then in another practically in the blink of an eye.

All I know is that the skiing is gonna be good this year ...

Bush Taps Gutierrez for Commerce

2004-11-29T09:39:00.000-07:00

Bush has made another cabinet choice, and it is another minority with a very interesting background. Kellogg CEO Carlos Gutierrez, who will become Commerce Secretary, succeeding Don Evans, was born in Cuba. His family fled the country when he was only six years old, and he began his career with Kellogg's in Mexico City.

One person commented that regardless of Condoleeza Rice's background, she supports an untenable war and therefore she should not be supported. I agree that the war in Iraq (but not in Afghanistan, which I wish had happened as soon as the Taliban showed up) is untenable and unwinnable and I completely understand not supporting Rice as a result. (and I'm so happy anyone is willing to comment!) Still, I have to say that I really appreciate Bush's picks for these top positions. If he puts a gay person in a cabinet role, then we'll really be getting somewhere, but that seems unlikely considering the administration's ridiculous position on gay marriage.

Following is the Wall Street Journal's early posting on Gutierrez. Also, watch this space because postings and pics from our trip to Kona, Hawaii are coming soon ...

Bush Taps Kellogg CEO
As Commerce Secretary

A WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE NEWS ROUNDUP
November 29, 2004 11:26 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- President Bush on Monday nominated Cuban native Carlos Gutierrez, who has been chief executive officer of Kellogg Co., to head the Commerce Department.

If confirmed by the Senate, Mr. Gutierrez would succeed Commerce Secretary Donald Evans, a Texas confidant of Mr. Bush's, who announced his resignation shortly after the Nov. 2 election.

The president announced his selection at the White House, calling Mr. Gutierrez "a visionary executive" and "one of America's most respected business leaders."

"We never imagined that this country would give me this great opportunity," Mr. Gutierrez told Bush. "I believe passionately in your leadership and the direction you've set."

Mr. Gutierrez was born in Cuba and his family fled the country in 1960 when he was 6 years old.

He is known as a charismatic and approachable executive, widely admired in business circles for reviving a flagging company.

Mr. Gutierrez joined Kellogg in 1975, beginning his career in Mexico City as a sales and marketing trainee for the Battle Creek, Mich., cereal giant.

Mr. Gutierrez subsequently held a number of jobs at headquarters and ran Kellogg's Canadian and Asian Pacific operations before being named president and then chairman and CEO.

He took over four years ago when Kellogg's cereal sales were sagging and soon acquired Keebler Foods to diversify and boost profits. He also put together an international top management team, which includes an Indonesian, an Italian and two Australians, as well as Americans.

Mr. Gutierrez is the first new member of Mr. Bush's economics team for his second term. Mr. Bush's chief economics adviser, Stephen Friedman, announced last week that he is leaving. Other changes also are anticipated.

Condie

2004-11-16T13:21:00.000-07:00

Condoleeza Rice

I’m not necessarily a big fan of Condoleeza Rice, mainly because she seems like a robot that has been programmed to do the Bush Administration’s wishes. I wonder about her personal life, which I assume she does not have, and I’m concerned that she doesn’t actually appear to have any emotions whatsoever.

That said, I’m suprisingly pleased about her nomination to the position of Secretary of State. With Colin Powell paving the way for African-Americans, it’s a further indication that race and gender barriers are falling at the highest levels. Granted, Condie is really a white Republican man trapped in a black woman’s body, but that’s okay. In fact, that’s probably how it should be. Judge a person by his or her values, work, accomplishments, skills and talents. By his or her words and actions and how he or she spends her time. It’s by those measures, and her clear loyalty, that Bush is giving Condie this promotion. Her race and her gender haven’t even come into question.

I don’t agree with her politics, but I admire her ambition, drive, loyalty and unbelievable work ethic. And I salute her for breaking all sorts of barriers, and doing it with grace and style.

Even though I was highly disappointed that Powell ended up agreeing to be the administration’s salesman on Iraq, delivering a false bill of goods to the U.N., and damaging his credibility in the process, I’m a bit sad to see him go. I saw him speak publicly before he became Secretary of State and he was amazing. Frank and funny, off-the-cuff and relaxed – he was born to speak before people. He’s a natural pitchman, and at his best, he could probably convince anyone to do anything (except perhaps delegates at the U.N.). Powell has been a role model for many, and I think in his post-Administration role he can rebuild hs image. Before he joined the Administration, Powell was doing a lot of valuable foundation and charitable work. To that he should return, and the world will benefit from it.

In the meantime, the Bush Administration has to be commended. It’s first two appointments are very high-profile minorities. And that’s definitely a good thing.