Ah, to be in San Francisco to see this Diebenkorn show.

Here’s 10 notes when starting a painting from Diebs, who is, as you all know, one of my heroes.

Over at the New Yorker, Anthony Lane delivers the finest tribute to Dutch Leonard that I’ve come across so far:

Once you hear the Dutch accent you can’t get it out of your head, and for innumerable readers it became a siren song. I fell prey to it in the mid-eighties. Leonard had a breakout, with “Glitz” (1985), and it led many of us to raid the back catalogue with glee. Some of the books weren’t easy to get hold of, and the hunt only sharpened our zeal. A friend and I ravened through whatever we could lay hands on; there is a strange, barely sane satisfaction in happening upon an author—or a painter or a band—and making it your mission to consume everything that he, she, or they ever produced. You rarely succeed, yet the urge for completeness is a kind of love, doomed to be outgrown but not forgotten. I have often pursued the dead in that fashion, but Leonard may be the only living writer who spurred me to such a cause.

…One proof of literary genius, we might say, is a democratic generosity toward your mother tongue—the conviction that every part or particle of speech, be it e’er so humble, can be put to fruitful use. If that means trimming the indefinite article, leaving us with a Albanian and a oyster, so be it. Nothing need go to waste. Richard again, aiming at the formal locutions of a police report, and missing by yards: “I cruised the street and the street back of the residence, the residence being dark, not any light on, but which didn’t mean anything.” So much dumb-ass delusion in so little space, and the linguistic shortfall squares with an overriding sense, throughout the novels, that our grip on the world—and this goes for all of us, not just the chancers and the thugs—is never as secure or as enduring as we would like. Marriages crack like plates; one side of the tracks has no concept of life on the other side, though it may harbor a risky desire to find out; and words will not stay still. That is why the movies inspired by Leonard’s fiction (a slew of disasters plus the odd success, like “Get Shorty,” “Out of Sight,” and “Jackie Brown,” which was based on “Rum Punch”) struggle to match his equilibrium. The souls that he surveyed, even when they were played by George Clooney and John Travolta, were unquiet and fairly uncool. Leonard’s gaze was cool, but, in all honesty, it belonged in a book.

I’m curious what Leonard’s reputation will be in 40-50 years. He sold a lot of books in his time but was also a critical darling. Not many writers enjoy both kinds of success but he sure did.

[Photo Credit: AP]

Here’s a collection of the first lines of Dutch Leonard’s novels.

Dig in. 

1950s

“Dave Flynn stretched his boots over the footrest and his body eased lower into the barber chair.”—The Bounty Hunters (1953)

“At times during the morning, he would think of the man named Kirby Frye.”—The Law At Randado (1954)

“Karla hesitated in the doorway of the adobe, then pushed open the screen door and came out into the sunlight as she heard again the faint, faraway sound of the wagon; and now she looked of toward the stand of willows that formed a windbreak along the north side of the yard, her eyes half closed in the sun glare and not moving from the motionless line of trees.”—Escape From Five Shadows (1956)

“Paul Cable sat hunched forward at the edge of the pine shade, his boots crossed and his elbows supported on his knees.”—Last Stand At Saber River (1959)

1960s

“At first I wasn’t sure at all where to begin.”—Hombre (1961)

“They were watching Ryan beat up the Mexican crew leader on 16mm Commercial Ektachrome.”—The Big Bounce (1969)

“The war began the first Saturday in June 1931, when Mr. Baylor sent a boy up to Son Martin’s place to tell him they were coming to raid his still.”—The Moonshine War (1969)

1970s

“Picture the ground rising on the east side of the pasture with scrub trees thick on the slope and pines higher up.”—Valdez Is Coming (1970)

“The train was late and didn’t get into Yuma until after dark.”—Forty Lashes Less One (1972)

“This morning they were here for the melons: about sixty of them waiting patiently by the two stake trucks and the old blue-painted school bus.”—Mr. Majestyk (1974)

“He could not get used to going to the girl’s apartment.”—52 Pick-Up (1974)

“There was a photograph of Frank in an ad that ran in the Detroit Free Press and showed all the friendly salesmen at Red Bowers Chevrolet.”—Swag (1976)

“A friend of Ryan’s said to him one time, “Yeah, but at least you don’t take any shit from anybody.”—Unknown Man No. 89 (1977)

“This is the news story that appeared the next day, in the Sunday edition of the Detroit Free Press, page one: FOUR TOURISTS DIE IN ISRAELI HOTEL FIRE Tel Aviv, March 20 (AP) – A predawn fire gutted an eight story resort hotel Saturday, killing four tourists and injuring 46 others, including guests who leaped from upper-story windows to escape the flames.”—The Hunted (1977)

“Mickey said, ‘I’ll drive. I really like to.'”—The Switch (1978)

“The gentleman from Harper’s Weekly, who didn’t know mesquite beans from goat shit, looked up from his reference collection of back issues and said, ‘I’ve got it!’—Gunsights (1979)

1980s

“In the matter of Alvin B. Guy, Judge of Recorder’s Court, City of Detroit: The investigation of the Judicial Tenure Commission found the respondent guilty of misconduct in office and conduct clearly prejudicial to the administration of justice.”—City Primeval (1980)

“One day Karen DiCilia put a few observations together and realized her husband Frank was sleeping with a real estate woman in Boca.”—Gold Coast (1980)

“In the winter of 1981 a multimillionaire by the name of Robinson Daniels shot a Haitian refugee who had broken into his home in Palm Beach.”—Split Images (1981)

“Moran’s first impression of Nolen Tyler: He looked like a high risk, the kind of guy who falls asleep smoking in bed.”—Cat Chaser (1982)

“Stick said he wasn’t going if they had to pick up anything.”—Stick (1983)

“‘He’s been taking pictures three years, look at the work,’ Maurice said.”—LaBrava (1983)

“The night Vincent was shot he saw it coming.”—Glitz (1985)

“Every time they got a call from the leper hospital to pick up a body Jack Delaney would feel himself coming down with the flu or something.”—Bandits (1987)

“Frank Sinatra, Jr., was saying, “I don’t have to take this,” getting up out of the guest chair, walking out.”—Touch (1987)

“Chris Mankowski’s last day on the job, two in the afternoon, two hours to go, he got a call to dispose of a bomb.”—Freaky Deaky (1988)

“The Blackbird told himself he was drinking too much because he lived in this hotel and the Silver Dollar was close by, right downstairs.”—Killshot (1989)

1990s

“When Chili first came to Miami Beach twelve years ago they were having one of their off-and-on cold winters: thirty-four degrees the day he met Tommy Carlo for lunch at Vesuvio’s on South Collins and had his leather jacket ripped off.”—Get Shorty (1990)

“Dale Crowe Junior told Kathy Baker, his probation officer, he didn’t see where he had done anything wrong.”—Maximum Bob (1991)

“Sunday morning, Ordell took Louis to watch the white-power demonstration in downtown Palm Beach.”—Rum Punch (1992)

“One evening, it was toward the end of October, Harry Arno said to the woman he’d been seeing on and off the past few years, ‘I’ve made a decision. I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anyone before in my life.'”—Pronto (1993)

“Ocala Police picked up Dale Crowe Junior for weaving, two o’clock in the morning, crossing the center line and having a busted taillight.”—Riding the Rap (1995)

“Foley had never seen a prison where you could walk right up to the fence without getting shot.”—Out of Sight (1996)

“Tyler arrived with the horses, February eighteenth, three days after the battlship Maine blew up in Havana harbor.”—Cuba Libre (1998)

“They sat at one of the sidewalk tables at Swingers, on the side of the coffee shop along Beverly Boulevard: Chili Palmer with the Cobb salad and iced tea, Tommy Athens the grilled pesto chicken and a bottle of Evian.”—Be Cool (1999)

2000s

“The church had become a tomb where forty-seven bodies turned to leather and stains had been lying on the concrete floor the past five years, though not lying where they had been shot with Kalashnikovs or hacked to death with machetes.”—Pagan Babies (2000)

“Dennis Lenahan the high diver would tell people that if you put a fifty-cent piece on the floor and looked down at it, that’s what the tank looked like from the top of that eighty-foot steel ladder.”—Tishomingo Blues (2002)

“Here was Antwan, living the life of a young coyote up in the Hollywood Hills, loving it, but careful to keep out of the way of humans.”—A Coyote’s in the House (2004)

“Late afternoon Chloe and Kelly were having cocktails at the Rattlesnake Club, the two seated on the far side of the dining room by themselves: Chloe talking, Kelly listening, Chloe trying to get Kelly to help entertain Anthony Paradiso, an eighty-four-year-old guy who was paying her five thousand a week to be his girlfriend.”—Mr. Paradise (2004)

“Carlos Webster was fifteen the day he witnessed the robbery and killing at Deering’s drugstore.”—The Hot Kid (2005)

“Honey phoned her sister-in-law Muriel, still living in Harlan County, Kentucky, to tell her she’d left Walter Schoen, calling him Valter, and was on her way to being Honey Deal again.”—Up In Honey’s Room (2007)

“They put Foley and the Cuban together in the backseat of the van and took them from the Palm Beach County jail on Gun Club to Glades Correctional, the old redbrick prison at the south end of Lake Okeechobee.”—Road Dogs (2009)

2010s

“Xavier watched two Legionnaires stroll out form the terminal to wait for the flight: dude soldiers in round white kepis straight on their heads, red epaulets on their shoulders, a wide blue sash around their waist, looking like they from some old-time regiment except for the short pants and assault rifles.”—Djibouti (2010)

“Raylan Givens was holding a federal warrant to serve on a man in the marijuana trade known as Angel Arenas, forty-seven, born in the U.S. but 100 percent of him Hispanic.”—Raylan (2011)

Bonus

“A time would come, within a few years, when Ruben Vega would go to the church in Benson, kneel in the confessional, and say to the priest, ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been thirty-seven years since my last confession…. Since then I have fornicated with many women, maybe eight hundred. No, not that many, considering my work. Maybe six hundred only.'”—”The Tonto Woman,” a short story that appeared in Roundup: An Anthology of Great Stories By The Western Writers of America (1982)

(In this case I think you need all of the above to truly capture Leonard’s touch. By the way, “The Tonto Woman” was made into a tasty short film that was nominated for an Oscar.)

“Joe Sereno caught the Odyssey night clerk as he was going off: prissy guy, had his lunch box under his arm.”—Naked Came the Manatee, a novel written serially by Dutch and 13 other mostly Florida-based writers including Carl Hiaasen, Dave Barry, James W. Hall and Paul Levine. (1996)

“They had dug coal together as young men and then lost touch over the years.”—Fire in the Hole, a short story published as an e-book (2001)

“A German prisoner of war at the camp called Deep Fork had taken his own life, hanged himself two nights ago in the compound’s washroom.”—Comfort to the Enemy, a serial published in the New York Times (2005)

[Photo Credit: David Guralnick / the Detroit News]

I contributed a short essay on “Buffalo Gals” to Herc Your Enthusiam, HiLoBrow’s series on old school (pre-1983) rap records:

There wasn’t anything like “Buffalo Gals” before, nor after. Though you could categorize it as an early sample record, in the vein of “Pump Up the Volume,” it’s really a novelty record, the brainchild of British trendsetter and former Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren.

For McLaren, style was substance. After a trip to New York where he saw Afrika Bambaataa spin, McLaren co-opted New York’s hip hop scene for his next record — the dancing, record scratching, the fashion (all of which are on display in the “Buffalo Gals” video). He flew New York DJs The Supreme Team to London to provide scratches, and got Trevor Horn, a successful young British producer — he had been part of The Buggles, whose version of “Video Killed the Radio Star” was in 1981 the first video ever played on MTV — to make the record.

“Buffalo Gals” is a culture clash of stuff — samples of phone calls, breaks, a synth bass and pads, the catchy “duck, duck, duck” refrain, the title chorus taken from a Piute Pete record, the scratching: “Oh, that scratching is making me itch.” It sounds like a bunch of stuff cobbled together but it works — and for DJs it goes with other records, because there’s so much in it.

Check out the rest of the series here.

Over at Narratively, Shannon Firth profiles our man, Michael Popek (aka “unmoderated”):

Michael Popek remembers visiting his grandfather’s four-story home in New Jersey, where anything that could be collected, was—stamps, toy train cars, cap guns, autographs, baseball cards. “There was a standing order not to touch any of the WWI grenades,” Popek says. As far as his grandfather knew, these were still live and active.

Those visits happened long before Popek, now 35, started gathering his own assortment of collectibles: things left between the pages of books, or as he calls them, Forgotten Bookmarks. It seems destined to happen, given that Popek comes from a family of collectors. He grew up in an old farmhouse in Oneonta, a small town in upstate New York. His father, Peter Popek, a former UPS deliveryman, started a book business in the mid-eighties, but only after coming upon a too-good-to-be-true deal at a local auction.

The offer was 5,000 books for $10. He paid an additional $10 for delivery. According to the elder Popek, no one wanted these books, including him. “We had no interest in books. We didn’t know anything about them. But we didn’t want to waste ‘em,” Peter Popek says. Within a few years, Michael’s father had filled a barn in the backyard with over 20,000 books. The Popeks also bought and sold antiques and owned a small shop in town, not far from their house. Slowly, though, the book collection muscled its way into the antique shop and took over much of the space.

[Photo Credit: Jessica Bal]

Over at Egotrip, dig this:

[Photo Credit: Malik Sayeed]

Woody, in the current issue of Esquire:

What people who don’t write don’t understand is that they think you make up the line consciously — but you don’t. It proceeds from your unconscious. So it’s the same surprise to you when it emerges as it is to the audience when the comic says it. I don’t think of the joke and then say it. I say it and then realize what I’ve said. And I laugh at it, because I’m hearing it for the first time myself.

I never see a frame of anything I’ve done after I’ve done it. I don’t even remember what’s in the films. And if I’m on the treadmill and I’m surfing the channels and suddenly Manhattan or some other picture comes on, I go right past it. If I saw Manhattan again, I would only see the worst. I would say: “Oh, God, this is so embarrassing. I could have done this. I should have done that.” So I spare myself.

In the shower, with the hot water coming down, you’ve left the real world behind, and very frequently things open up for you. It’s the change of venue, the unblocking the attempt to force the ideas that’s crippling you when you’re trying to write.

Oh, man, real good stuff on Robert Towne over at Cinephilia and Beyond. And even more at Screenplay How To.

Man, is this ever good.

Man, this is beautiful–George Saunders’ commencement speech at Syracuse University (click here for the video):

So: What do I regret? Being poor from time to time? Not really. Working terrible jobs, like “knuckle-puller in a slaughterhouse?” (And don’t even ASK what that entails.) No. I don’t regret that. Skinny-dipping in a river in Sumatra, a little buzzed, and looking up and seeing like 300 monkeys sitting on a pipeline, pooping down into the river, the river in which I was swimming, with my mouth open, naked? And getting deathly ill afterwards, and staying sick for the next seven months? Not so much. Do I regret the occasional humiliation? Like once, playing hockey in front of a big crowd, including this girl I really liked, I somehow managed, while falling and emitting this weird whooping noise, to score on my own goalie, while also sending my stick flying into the crowd, nearly hitting that girl? No. I don’t even regret that.

But here’s something I do regret:

In seventh grade, this new kid joined our class. In the interest of confidentiality, her Convocation Speech name will be “ELLEN.” ELLEN was small, shy. She wore these blue cat’s-eye glasses that, at the time, only old ladies wore. When nervous, which was pretty much always, she had a habit of taking a strand of hair into her mouth and chewing on it.

So she came to our school and our neighborhood, and was mostly ignored, occasionally teased (“Your hair taste good?” – that sort of thing). I could see this hurt her. I still remember the way she’d look after such an insult: eyes cast down, a little gut-kicked, as if, having just been reminded of her place in things, she was trying, as much as possible, to disappear. After awhile she’d drift away, hair-strand still in her mouth. At home, I imagined, after school, her mother would say, you know: “How was your day, sweetie?” and she’d say, “Oh, fine.” And her mother would say, “Making any friends?” and she’d go, “Sure, lots.”

Sometimes I’d see her hanging around alone in her front yard, as if afraid to leave it.

And then – they moved. That was it. No tragedy, no big final hazing.

One day she was there, next day she wasn’t.

End of story.

Now, why do I regret that? Why, forty-two years later, am I still thinking about it? Relative to most of the other kids, I was actually pretty nice to her. I never said an unkind word to her. In fact, I sometimes even (mildly) defended her.

But still. It bothers me.

So here’s something I know to be true, although it’s a little corny, and I don’t quite know what to do with it:

What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.

Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded…sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.

Or, to look at it from the other end of the telescope: Who, in your life, do you remember most fondly, with the most undeniable feelings of warmth?

Those who were kindest to you, I bet.

It’s a little facile, maybe, and certainly hard to implement, but I’d say, as a goal in life, you could do worse than: Try to be kinder.

And more:

When young, we’re anxious – understandably – to find out if we’ve got what it takes. Can we succeed? Can we build a viable life for ourselves? But you – in particular you, of this generation – may have noticed a certain cyclical quality to ambition. You do well in high-school, in hopes of getting into a good college, so you can do well in the good college, in the hopes of getting a good job, so you can do well in the good job so you can….

And this is actually O.K. If we’re going to become kinder, that process has to include taking ourselves seriously – as doers, as accomplishers, as dreamers. We have to do that, to be our best selves.

Still, accomplishment is unreliable. “Succeeding,” whatever that might mean to you, is hard, and the need to do so constantly renews itself (success is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it), and there’s the very real danger that “succeeding” will take up your whole life, while the big questions go untended.

So, quick, end-of-speech advice: Since, according to me, your life is going to be a gradual process of becoming kinder and more loving: Hurry up. Speed it along. Start right now. There’s a confusion in each of us, a sickness, really: selfishness. But there’s also a cure. So be a good and proactive and even somewhat desperate patient on your own behalf – seek out the most efficacious anti-selfishness medicines, energetically, for the rest of your life.

Do all the other things, the ambitious things – travel, get rich, get famous, innovate, lead, fall in love, make and lose fortunes, swim naked in wild jungle rivers (after first having it tested for monkey poop) – but as you do, to the extent that you can, err in the direction of kindness. Do those things that incline you toward the big questions, and avoid the things that would reduce you and make you trivial. That luminous part of you that exists beyond personality – your soul, if you will – is as bright and shining as any that has ever been. Bright as Shakespeare’s, bright as Gandhi’s, bright as Mother Theresa’s. Clear away everything that keeps you separate from this secret luminous place. Believe it exists, come to know it better, nurture it, share its fruits tirelessly.

[Photograph Credit: Ivan Sigal]

The making of “Come Clean.” Man, this record was unlike anything that came before it. I still bump it all the time.

[Photo Credit: _janekim via This Isn’t Happiness]

From the July-August 1991 issue of Film Comment, here’s a portion of Gavin Smith’s interview with Danny Aiello. They talk Spike, Woody and Fort Apache, the Bronx.

Danny Aiello: Me and Spike—we’re an unlikely duo, you know: liberal, conservative, midget. We’re great friends. I think Spike wanted me because he knew of my political beliefs…

Q: What was your basic idea for Sal? Something to do with him being a father to the people in the neighborhood?

DA: Yeah. I wrote that stuff. When I first saw the script, I said to Spike, “Why is this guy in the fuckin’ neighborhood? Why is he there? I mean, this is stupid. If you want to, you could go to Vietnam and make money too.”I had to resolve in my own mind, he was there because he wanted to be there. Because he liked the people there. Because he can’t be there to make money—in an area where you cannot get insurance, okay? I told Spike, we needed something in the picture saying that you can’t get insurance. Spike didn’t want to put that in. So at the end of the picture I also wrote the last monologue where I look at [Mookie] and he says, “What are you worried about? You’re going to get the fuckin’ money back from insurance.” And that’s not true. You don’t get insurance there. The premiums are just too high.

So I came back, and I said, “This ain’t about money. This is about, I built this fuckin’ place with my bare hands—every fuckin’ screw . . .”—this is what I wrote. I wanted to say “I don’t get insurance,” but I had to say something else.

Five minutes before we shot the scene between me and [John] Turturro, I wrote it. And he agreed with it. “Where am I going? I’ve been here for 25 years. You see these people, you see the kids? These people grew up on my pizza—yeah, you laugh, but I’m proud of that.” Now, I said this is too fuckin’ corny, no one’s going to believe it. But they did and it made him a full-bodied, complex fuckin’ character.

Q: Do you feel more drawn towards trying to find the vulnerability in the characters that you play now? You’ve played a lot of strong, violent guys.

DA: I have that in my life, it’s prevalent. I think it shows. But in the violent guys I play, always I’ve let an ounce of vulnerability come through. It may be very subliminal. I’ve often had black people come over to me and say, “Man, Fort Apache, The Bronx, yeah!” Now, remember what I did in that picture.

Q: You threw a black kid off a roof.

DA: I was an evil fuckin’ guy. But for some reason people loved the character. Now, I’m a little pissed off about that, because two big scenes were cut out of the movie showing that he was a sick guy. A scene with me and Paul Newman, where we almost had a fight early on, I throw a punch at him, I’m drunk, I miss him, I fall down the floor, and he goes to pick me up. I say, “Get your fuckin’ hands off me.” He says, “Come on, I’ll take you to the car.” He said, “You’re gonna crack up the car.” I said, “Who gives a fuck? Nobody gives a fuck.” And I walk out staggering.

Then the scene in which we see where he lived, in a dump all by himself, he lost his family, he had no children. The guy was suicidal. Instead, they knocked out these scenes, and what did you see? Me arbitrarily go up to the roof and throw a kid off. Never showed the sickness beforehand.

Directors, they look at the composite, and they’re not concerned with the explanation of the individual character. The actor goes from A to Z, only to have the middle of the alphabet cut out. I mean, that’s a terrible fuckin’ thing to go through.

Q: What’s it like working with Woody Allen? Youve done it three times, a play and two movies.

DA: Woody’s great. I love Woody. My big disappointment with Woody is that he didn’t give meBroadway Danny Rose. I was supposed to be the singer, the guy he represented. [Woody] said, “You’re my ace in the hole, Danny. If no one gets it, you got it.”My heart was broke when I didn’t get it. He screen tested every conceivable singer, and I was told everyone wanted me to do it—Bobby Greenhut, Gordon Willis. But you don’t tell Woody anything. He chose this guy [Nick Apollo Forte], and Woody later told me that he chose him because he was the guy. The guy was never an actor—he came with his own material, he had an album of Italian songs. And the guy was terrific. Everybody thinks I played that character.

Q: What do you notice about Allen as a director?

DA: I think when he casts you, he’s directed you. He knows who he’s got. And his directing is very minimal. He is an intellectual, but he speaks in the smallest, most understood verbal tones: Be a little less angry, be a little more angry; be a little less happy, be a little more happy; take the edge off the anger.

Q: And you’re fine with that.

DA: Yeah, I’m fine with that. I don’t think I did my best work with Woody. I think if there’s self-intimidation, with me it probably happened with Woody more than anyone else.

Q: What do you mean?

DA: I expected so much of myself working with Woody, I never felt totally free. I put too much on myself. If you were to ask Woody, Woody used to look at me and say, “When you shoot a 70 it’s a hundred for most people.” But I never understood that. I always wanted to give Woody more. And whenever I left the set there with Woody, I always thought, I have a lot more to give that I didn’t give.

Q: How about with Spike Lee? I’ve heard that actors have a lot of trouble communicating with him. Somebody who worked with him said he heard that the only actor who wasn’t intimidated by Lee was you.

DA: I must tell you no man has ever been more open to me than Spike. Totally free. Spike is a technical director, I think, more than a head-to-head director. Spike lets you go.

One disagreement Spike and I had, and it took place in front of a lot of people, with about three-quarters of the movie complete: the scene in which I break the radio. They wanted Radio Raheem to grab me by the neck and slide me down the counter with bottles bouncing off my head, and how did I know this was going to happen? They had a storyboard in front of me. And when I saw it, I grabbed it and I said, “Come here. I won’t do that.” He said, “What do you mean?” I said, “I don’t do that shit.” He said, “What are you talking about, Danny?” I said, “My fuckin’ character has integrity. You’re going to do a scene that’s been done a million times in cowboy pictures with someone being dragged down the bar with bottles. That’s wrong, it don’t work, it’s comedy time in the Rockies at a time that we don’t need comedy. This is a devastating moment in the picture. I won’t do that.”

The A.D., a great fuckin’ guy, saw what was happening and got everyone out of there and just left me and Spike there. So I said, “Spike, before I do that, I’ll walk off this picture. That’s how I feel about how you’re making a fool out of the character by doing that. I just won’t let it happen. First of all, if that was in the script at the beginning, that would have been a deal-breaker. I would have said, “I don’t do that.” So we talked and we talked, and then it turned out to be exactly what I wanted it to be, and ultimately what Spike wanted it to be. Drag me over the counter onto the floor—which was my son Danny, he’s the stunt man who did that. It worked better. It kept the tenseness of the moment.

Q: Was the action of smashing the ghetto blaster hard to justify?

DA: Yeah, the work happened to justify the act—I’ve always wanted to smash one. Very few people that I know in the city of New York have not at some time or other wanted to smash one of those fuckin’ things. So it didn’t take too much to raise my dander.

But right in the scene itself I had all that I needed. First of all, there were words used that were not scripted. Giancarlo Esposito called me a guinea bastard. When he called me that, I looked at him, I said, “What did you say, you nigger motherfucker?” That wasn’t scripted either. What we did was we got into street shit. I called him a black motherfucker; he said, “You guinea fuck.” And all of that was real. I’m saying real. We were shouting at the top of our lungs—and we didn’t shout in control. On the stage, if you shout, you’re totally in control. We were shouting out of control. I was losing my voice at times, which to me was great. That’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to let it go.

Spike was in the corner jerkin’ off, he knew that I’m an actor and I wouldn’t back up. He knew when he hired me that I could be in Bed Stuy and it ain’t gonna make a bit of fuckin’ difference, if someone calls me a guinea I’m gonna call him a nigger. That’s how I am. And he knew this. He’s smart. Well, what happened is, we’re in Bed Stuy—it’s an Uzi neighborhood, it’s fuckin’ drugs all over the street. This is bad. All the bodegas have bars. Patrons are not allowed in. That’s why you can’t get insurance there. Anyway, there’s about 400 people rimming the area while I’m yelling “You black mother”—they’re all outside. “You nigger cocksucker”—and they’re going, “Yeaahhh!” They’re screaming. Because the thing about these people is, individually or collectively, they admire strength. They admire fuckin’ balls. And they know that you’re the outnumbered one, and for you to rise above that fear, they admire that. This is who they are. They say, “Holy shit, this is the fuckin’ movies.” There was a lot of reaction. But right after the scene, we all hugged.

Q: They probably loved you for telling the truth.

DA: That’s right. If I became white bread and began to use softer words, it don’t mean shit. If I just said “black bastard” what would that have been? When I said “you nigger motherfucker” I was reducing myself to the language of those street people, which is what they do. It’s right for [Sal] to use that language. I thought he was a fair man. Even if he was unfair, he was unfair to everybody. He was unfair to his sons, and he treated Mookie probably better than he treated his own sons.

And another thing—about the pictures on the wall: I believe that as Danny Aiello. You don’t tell me who the fuck to put on my wall. That’s my house. To put the blacks on the wall would have made the character a bullshit character, it wouldn’t have made the character complex, it would have made him a placating phony fuckin’ ginzo. As a black person going there and seeing this man with his heroes, I would sit there and say, “This fucking guy is an honest man.” It was about a sense of freedom to put up in your place who you want.

The Hopper drawing show at the Whitney.

I’ve got more on Hopper over at The Stacks. 

Head on over to Kottke and check out the two videos on the making of a Steinway grand piano.

Photography was once an act of intent, the pushing of a button to record a moment. But photography is becoming an accident, the curatorial attention given to captured images.

Kottke curates a thoughtful post about the state of photography in an Instagram world.

Stephen Rodrick is one of our finest magazine writers and this spring he published a compelling memoir about this father, The Magical Stranger. Check out book excerpts in the New York Times; Slate, and a nice long one in Men’s Journal.  And visit The Magical Stranger website.

I had the chance to talk with Stephen about the book recently. Here’s our conversation:

Q: As a magazine writer you are used to dropping in on a subject and then you’re out. What was it like having to live with this material for a long period of time?

SR: Well, for my sanity and finances I kept my hand in the magazine game writing three or four pieces a year while reporting the book. That gave me some much-needed distance from all the heaviness that permeates the book. I remember I was writing the chapter on re-creating my dad’s accident and was sinking into the pit of despair, and next thing I knew I was in Malibu with Rick Rubin as he dodged the pot smoke from the guitarist of System of the Down and brought his own eggs to a restaurant before going to work out with the cranky doctor guy from Scrubs. The same thing with the Lindsay Lohan/Canyons story, I just returned from the Gulf where Tupper was struggling through his last cruise and we watched Iranian ‘fishing’ boats shadow the USS Lincoln’s moves through the Gulf. I flew off back through the protests in Bahrain and a few weeks later I’m in the back of Lohan’s Porsche as she flips off the paparazzi in Santa Monica. They were nice Fellini moments to break up trying to decipher the precise speed that my dad’s plane hit the water before disintegrating.

Q: Were there any memoirs that you read, and particularly liked, before writing yours?

SR: I was drawn to James Salter’s Burning the Days because he was a combat pilot back in the 1950s and wrote beautifully about the flying life. On the flip side, Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia is a novel that reads like a memoir and I’ve read that a half-dozen times. The two couldn’t be more different, but they both share a certain simplicity in the language that I loved.

Q: Have you always felt that this was the story one day you were destined to tell?

SR: I don’t know if I felt I was destined to write it, but it had been gnawing at me for years and i just didn’t feel I had the emotional strength to write it in the way I knew I wanted to do it. The final kick in the ass, was VAQ-135, my Dad’s old squadron, was phasing out the Prowler, his old plane, and I knew it was now or never if I wanted to follow his old squadron flying his old plane. They even got me up in a flight, which was one of the most frightening and meaningful moments of my life even if I did boot a spectacular yellow fluid into my barf bag.

Q: How did you arrive at the narrative structure for the story, shifting between your story from childhood through the present, with that of Tupper and the current Navy?

SR: It just sort of happened naturally, I’m not a big outliner, but I knew the chapters I wanted to write and they somehow clicked into place. I know I wanted to start at both of our points of entry: For me, the day my father was killed marked an obvious demarcation in my life. For Tupper, it was the day that he took command. From there, things sort of tumbled out naturally going back and forth between my journey and Tupper’s. I was hoping the reader would be able to see what life was like from the two perspectives: The son left behind and the father trying to do his job.

Q: Early in the story you talk about being described as “the magical stranger” by a friend who says that you have this remarkable ability to adapt to social situations and put people at ease.

SR: Yeah, as a magazine writer, you’re always the new kid, you don’t know where the bathrooms are etc. I don’t put on a persona when I go and talk with people; I’m just me, just a paying more attention me. With very few exceptions, I’ve been blessed to write about men and women I find fascinating so I don’t have to fake it.

Q: As a military kid you moved around a lot, always being the new kid. Is that charm, for lack of a better word, the ability to get people to feel comfortable, something that’s conscious?

A: That’s a really good question. Is it a nature or nurture thing? I was always the smartass from the start, but I don’t know if it was just the nature of my personality or part of always being the new kid and realizing that the best way to ingratiate yourself is to get people either laughing with you or laughing at you, whichever one doesn’t really matter.

Q: Has it ever gotten in the way of you forming intimate relationships–not with subjects so much, as friends, family?

SR: I’m not sure. There’s a restless nature in me that doesn’t always mesh with every-day life. I think the key is finding like-minded people who understand that and still love you anyway. I think one of the great things about doing the book was finding out that my purportedly straight-arrow dad was a troublemaker in his younger days. I’d always felt with my personality that I was an alien in my own family and a massive disappointment. I found a diary he kept when he was thirteen, the age I was when he was killed. And sure, he’s serving mass and getting scholarships, but he’s also getting called a punk by the nuns and hitchhiking throughout New England as an eighth grader. I went to his 50th high school reunion and a friend of his told me: The stuff Pete cared about, he was the best and smartest kid I ever knew, the stuff Pete didn’t care about he didn’t give a damn about and he’d stare out the window for the entire class. And that was gratifying to me because I’m sort of the same way. I found a precious connection that I never knew was there and eased my burden of never feeling like I could measure up to him. It’s like he was a statue on a pedestal that magically walked off it and put his arm around me and said, “Son don’t sweat it, I’ve done some dubious things. It’s ok.” There’s never been a man more excited that his dad was a teen fuck-up than me.

Q: You also say that it was your father who was really the magical stranger. How did you fantasize how things would have turned out had he not been killed?

SR: Well, there’s the fantasy and the reality. The fantasy is he would of came home and we would have probably moved to DC and he would have kicked me into shape and I would have ended up at Georgetown or one of the Ivies and gone on to be president of the United States. The reality is he was a devout Catholic while I was distancing myself from Catholicism quickly before I hit twenty. We probably would have fought over that. So, you just never know how it could have been. But I’d pay any price to have the chance to find out.

Q: You’re tough on yourself when you describe yourself as a kid. Now that the book is finished, have you let go of any of the harsh judgment?

SR: Ha! I wish. I think it’s hard to shake a childhood where everyone is constantly disappointed in you. Whether it’s a priest—later busted for pedophilia—telling you that “you’re the man of the house,” and then not stepping up or entering high school with one of the highest board scores and the vice principal telling your Mom at graduation that “Steve was the student with the most potential who did the least with it.” (Thanks Ms. King!). It’s hard to shake that even after having success as an adult. I still see myself as inherently lazy while my wife sees me as a workaholic. But I’m trying to give myself more of a break. Sometimes, I tell myself, Hey, you lost your Dad at thirteen when you needed him most and you might have stumbled, but you didn’t fall. You still turned out ok. You’re a man your father would be proud of. (Well, he wouldn’t be proud that I hate the Red Sox, but most things). I try to own that as much as I can.

Q: Did you emphasize your difficulties in the book for the sake of a dramatic arc?

SR: Nope. The one thing I wanted to do with my story and my family story and Tupper’s story was to keep it simple: This how this happened. This is how we dealt with it. One thing I can say is I lived this life, not just my own but Tupper’s life for three years. You can criticize my approach as artless, but I’ve never had much time for grandiose set-ups, faux Faulkner hand wringing, or 2000 words of throat clearing before you get down to the task at hand. To me, this is what my life and the life of the others I wrote about really were like, good and bad, dangerous and idiotic.

Q: I was compelled by how your family dealt with things by not dealing with them—the Rodrick way. When you approached your mom to talk about your father you discovered that you’d both avoided it in order to spare the other person’s feelings. Yet your mom seemed willing, appreciative even, to share her memories. Has your relationship for the better?

SR: It has. We sort of had this standoff for decades where she thought I didn’t want to talk about my father and she thought I didn’t want to talk about him. It really took me writing the book for us to breakthrough that wall. So thank you to the publishing world.

Q: How did she like the book?  

SR: Funny story. My mom is the only person in the book that I let read it in galleys. I went to see visit her in Michigan and stayed with my sister about 20 miles away. After she had the book for a few days, she told me she had read it and told me to come over for lunch and we could talk about it. I arrived, very nervous and sweaty. But she told me she liked it and that she was very proud. I was so relieved; we watched the Lions lose, had lunch and took her dog for a walk. It was perfect. I drove back to my sister’s and spent about 24 hours in a state of euphoria, blasting their stereo and dancing around in my boxers. But then my sister came up for work and just shook her head at me and said, “You’ve got to go and talk to mom again, she’s bitching about the book all over town.” (Mind you, all over town would be maybe five people).

I drove back over to her house with a single Xanax in my jean pocket not sure if it was for her or me. She let me in and said, “I don’t want to rain on your parade, but I come across as a bit of a bitch in the book.” I told that wasn’t other people’s take, but she said “It’s not anything you say isn’t true, but there’s no mention that even in the worst of the times, I kept you fed, washed your clothes, and car-pooled us all over town.” And she was absolutely right; I’d fallen into a somewhat myopic well on that subject. I was happy to add a few lines to the book to make it clear, it was the least I could do. My mom is a sweetheart who was left with three kids at 36, one who was a constant pain in the ass—that would be me. She did the best she could and none of her children were lost. We’re all doing pretty well and that’s a testament to her.

Q: I think you’re fair to your mom. What I found moving was that she apologized to you for being so hard on you back when you were a kid. To me that’s the real takeaway—parents do the best that they can.

SR: That’s it exactly. The Go-Betweens have a song called “Devil’s Eye” that has a line that goes “Sometimes, we don’t come through, sometimes we just get by,” and that. I think, is pretty true of the human condition. Saying you’re sorry and forgiving make the world go round. And Chipotle.

Q: You don’t really mention it in the book but did you seek out father figures, mentors, or just older men to hang out with as you’ve grown up?

SR: No, not really, probably to my own detriment. I know this sounds like something out of a cheddar voiceover in a Western, but I’ve always found more comfort in the company of women than men. Maybe it’s not surprising since I grew up with my mom and two sisters, but there it is. Not having a mentor professionally probably has hurt me at different points, but it’s also saved me from idol worship, which might be an even tradeoff.

Loudon Wainwright has a great song “One Man Guy,” that his own children, Rufus and Martha, sing probably to taunt him a bit. (My ex-wife hated that I loved it.)

The solo life that Loudon’s raves about as a young man comes across as sad in middle-age so I’ve made an effort to reach out and make more dude friends. But they’re all equals–Fed Ex delivery guys, Navy pilots, book editors–no one that I put on a pedestal as a mentor. I think part of that is because I always had my father on that pedestal, there wasn’t room for anyone else.

Q: It makes sense about being more comfortable around women, and not having room for mentors with your father looming so large. Have there been other magazine writers that, if you haven’t worshipped, then admired? Both in creatively and just how they conduct themselves?

SR: I fell in love with magazines as a kid reading Sports Illustrated, all those bonus pieces week-after-week. Frank Deford’s byline is the first one I distinctly remember. That’s not a bad one. His pieces are not-flashy, but funny and human. That’s something to shoot for.
Someone gave me Pat Jordan’s first memoir, A False Spring, and I’ve read it many times. I finally met him a few years back when I was in Florida on a spring training story and a friend suggested I meet Pat so he could finally tell me the difference between a curve and a slider.

I went to his house in Fort Lauderdale. We had a drink and either he or his wife was packing heat. There were dogs and birds screeching and Jordan kept telling me, “Get out of New York, move to Florida, you can live on 65 grand here, make 65, you’ve made your nut.” I was like “What is this nut you so speaketh about?” We went out for dinner and I think New York Magazine ended up buying a take-out steak for their dogs. And I thought, Now, here is a guy I can look up to.

Q: That’s great. In the book, you talk about sports and politics being a big deal for you as a kid but only touch on how music impacted your life. When did it become a major part of who you were?

SR: I’ve got a big weakness for the line of tart, clever British songwriters from Ray Davies to Paul Weller, to Damon Albarn, to Pete Doherty. Oh The Beatles aren’t so bad. My love of music started as a kid listening to transistor radio on my back delivering newspapers. I remember hearing Supertramp’s “Take the Long Way Home” at 12 or 13 and going ‘oh wow, this song isn’t a happy one. Guy’s talking about being the joke of the neighborhood, what he could have done with a little more time, and that his wife thinks he’s gone insane. And that was a Top 40 song!  I loved that you could tell a story in three to five minutes. I love the economy of language you need to write a great pop song.

The older I get the more I listen to it as I write to set a mood, if I need little anger/outrage I go with The Stones’ “Monkey Man” because of the great marimbas at the beginning, the swaggering guitars, and the bad/sublime lyrics: “I’m a flea bit peanut monkey, all my friends are junkies. That’s not really true. I’m a cold Italian pizza I could use a lemon squeezer.”  He’s an animal an unreliable narrator, and then pens worst line ever. Genius!

Q: “Monkey Man” is one of my all-time favorites. What were you listening to while you wrote the book?

SR: Half the World Away by Oasis. ‘So here I go, still scratching around in the same old hole, my body feels young, but my mind is very old,’ was sort of my personal motto for the book along with another line, “I’ve been lost, I’ve been found, but I don’t feel down.”  ITunes says I listened to the song 397 times. Perhaps that is too much.

Q: What was the reaction from the military guys you hung with after the book came out?

SR: I’d say 99% of them loved it and loved the Catch-22 tales I tell of squadron life. Of course, they’re human and they all wish I’d left the story about the time they buzzed Midway Island causing an ecological furor or sprinted across an Army base in Japan just in a kimono hoping to thank the base CO for his hospitality at 4am in the morning out of the book. But they’ve been so supportive, I consider myself lucky to have these nuts in my life.

Q: Beyond that, what has been the response from military families that you don’t know to the book?

SR: I’ve got some great notes on my website and people coming up to me at readings and saying, ‘I lost my dad in a helo crash when I was twelve and your book said all the things I couldn’t say.’ That means more to me than I can say.

Q: How do you feel—exhilaration, relief, let down?—now that it’s done?

SR: Well, like most of life it has been alternately spectacular and heartbreaking. The friends and family that have come up to me at readings and written to be about my Dad makes me feel closer to him than I ever felt possible. But there is a bit of postpartum depression that sets in when your book is done. Should I have spent another year on it? Should I have spent a year less on it? They’re no greater second guessers than authors. Well, except for Stephen A. Smith. I love that guy.

Q: What does it say about the world that you can spend three years on a book but one quote of Serena Williams saying something dumb and that’s what people focus on?

SR: There’s not a lot you can do about it: She said it, it exploded, and the rest of the story has sort of have been forgotten. That happens, but it’s frustrating because I think there’s a lot of stuff in the story that paints her as a real, live human trying to figure life out. But that’s the nature of the business. It’s all the nature of modern life if you search my name on Nexis—not that I would do such a narcissistic thing!—you’ll find eighty or ninety mentions of the Serena and Lohan pieces, and maybe five or six on my book. But hey, THAT’S SHOW BUSINESS.

Q: You do a lot of magazine stories on jocks and entertainers. Access is so difficult to come by these days. How do you work around the restrictions?

SR: That’s a simple one: unless I can get enough to spend enough time to write about anyone—navy pilot, tennis player, independent film festival guy– where I feel like I have a sense of who they are, then I’ll pass on the story. I’ve only done two or three profiles based on a single sit-down interview and I hated it. I know there’s a whole genre of magazine profile writing where the guy–and it’s always a guy–tap dances for 2000 words before you get a snippet of the guy he’s writing about. It’s like a 30-second commercial where you don’t know what the hell they’re selling until the tag line at the end. I’ll tell my editor to cut the story from 4,500 to 2,500 words just so I don’t have to play Three Card Monte for half the piece. I want to write ‘this is what the person was like from observing him and watching him in action not ‘this is what the person is like in my fantasy relating to my childhood in the coalfields of West Virginia.

Q: Last one. I wonder, do you still feel the same restlessness now that you did when you were a kid or even in your 20s?

SR: I do, but in a different way. Now I just want to have two residences, down from the four or five of a decade ago. I’d love someday to own a summer place up in Anacortes, Washington where the book is largely set. It is so goddamned beautiful and it’s 58 degrees and misty which is my kind of weather. It’s strange, I only lived there from seven to thirteen, but I feel that place is home deep down in my bones. I remember being in Dublin once and I heard some teen buskers playing this beautiful song “Learn to Be Still” and I was struck: That’s exactly what I need to do: Learn to be still. I gave them money and had them play it again. A little later, I found out it was an Eagles song. I took that as an ominous sign and kept moving.

Q: Ha. So, what’s next?

SR: Therapy.

This looks terrific.

Over at Newsweek, Andrew Romano interviews Rick Rubin:

Your taste—your ear—has been spot-on again and again, across genres. What’s the secret?

I never decide if an idea is good or bad until I try it. So much of what gets in the way of things being good is thinking that we know. And the more that we can remove any baggage we’re carrying with us, and just be in the moment, use our ears, and pay attention to what’s happening, and just listen to the inner voice that directs us, the better. But it’s not the voice in your head. It’s a different voice. It’s not intellect. It’s not a brain function. It’s a body function, like running from a tiger.

Instinct.

Yes. But being open to using your instincts instead of going, “Oh, that’s not going to work.” Or listening to the part of your brain that goes, “Oh, that’s out of tune.” Or the part of your brain that says, “That’s too loud.” You have to shut off all of those voices and look for these special moments—these moments that you accept you have no control over. So much of my job is to not think—to be open to what’s there, and then use my intuition to see where it takes me.

Via the essential Cinephilia and Beyond, here’s a good, long interview with Brian De Palma:

Over at audible, you can download the essay, “In Memory of a Friend, Teacher and Mentor” by Phillip Roth for free. Here’s more on the story at the Paris Review.

[Photo Credit: Dan Burn-Forti]