So, I've been doing a podcast with the writer Eva Hagberg called Recoup that has earned some attention from the LA Times. In this episode, however, I speak with my spouse, who is a clinical psychologist and neuropsychologist. But the episode is really funny. It's not a pandemic / coronavirus episode, and I urge you to check it out. Thanks for all the positive attention and five star reviews on Apple. We're getting so many listeners from all over the world, and as terrifying and sad as this pandemic period has been it has offered me, as a homebound lifer of cancers and rare diseases, a lot of light and hope. If you don't want to head over to your podcast app of choice you can listen to this episode below with an embedded player. Thank you again, and please share. It's word of mouth that's really helped us so far, and we want to keep doing this to help people. You can always write in to us with your questions or concerns about uncertainty, chronic recuperation, disability, social isolation, and everything in between at [email protected] -- Adam Baer
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April 23, 2020
May 24, 2016
May 14, 2016
J.S. Bach Violin Week with Gidon Kremer
Each of the six Bach sonatas and partitas for solo violin feels like a day of the week to me. Of course, there's nothing for Day 7; Bach was religious. I've thought a lot about this idea, and I've realized that the reason I feel this way has to with each musical work's key--for example, d minor is dark, serious and somber; C major pure; E major ebullient. But it also has to do with each piece's specific mood, the musical ideas, the harmonies, the statements. That they appeared in the Bach violin work manuscript in this order matters, too, although why start the first sonata on a specific day? Did the Bach pieces help shape the way I feel about days of the week or vice versa? I'll never know because I've been playing them since I was very young. Here, below, I've associated each work with each day of the week, as played by Gidon Kremer.--Adam Baer
Monday -- Sonata No.1 in G minor
Tuesday -- Partita No. 1 in B minor
Wednesday -- Sonata No. 2 in A minor
Thursday -- Partita No. 2 in D minor (including the famous Chaconne )
Friday -- Sonata No. 3 in C Major
Saturday -- Partita No. 3 in E major
August 25, 2015
July 07, 2015
June 16, 2015
Go to Music School -- Just Go to a Better One
A few days ago, an op-ed columnist in the New York Times wrote that he didn't think his kid should transfer into a music school. Today, Fred Bronstein, dean of the Peabody Conservatory of Music, responded in the Times. It's a strong, smart statement that takes the piece's headline literally, emphasizing "training" musicians "attuned to their communities" who should be "effective communicators, educators, entrepreneurs, audience development experts and citizen-artists." But there's more to be said on that issue.
I'm a former Peabody student, and I say that if you have the talent and determination, you should go to music school. It's one of the best things that I ever did with my life. It filled my soul and trained my brain to accomplish many other things, including serious writing projects. I'm a big believer in the humanities, and as a musician from a family of musicians, I wanted the immersion in music that they had enjoyed beyond the pre-college music conservatory. But I simultaneously attended Johns Hopkins' separate Arts & Sciences undergraduate program, and I graduated in 2000, a bad time to go to music school. Back then, the older classically oriented ones like mine (Peabody is the country's first conservatory), weren't designed yet to teach students what they really needed to know as the Internet was growing. They were experimenting. But schools that emphasized popular genres like the Berklee College of Music were leaps and bounds ahead, especially with respect to getting students fluent with digital and business.
The issue now isn't really whether or not you should go to music school. It's how strong is the school you want to attend? How well will it train you to be a musician-plus today? Sure, you can go to music school, study an instrument, composing, history, and theory--and you can learn the practical stuff on your own. But you really ought to ensure that you have your sights set on the realities of our time and that the music school you choose really does teach all of its students (maybe even as a "core") the following: business (especially entrepreneurship but also management, marketing, arts administration, contract negotiation, and financial skills); technology (app development, coding, UX, digital production for all genres [hip-hop, pop, songwriting, etc.], recording, video, engineering, music and sound editing for media/entertainment); music education; writing; arts advocacy; film/media composing; and IP/copyright law, as well as perhaps public health (!).
I have long appreciated Columbia University's "core curriculum." Music schools have always had a version of their own, consisting of theory, ear-training, lessons, etc. But now they need new ones full of required courses and skills assessments--it's not just about supplementing music classes with languages and the humanities or intros to the good things that Bronstein mentions (Peabody is lucky to have him). Courses in these subjects need to be authoritative and leave students with strong skills. They need to be practical and effective. I'm asking for a lot, but that's what the world asks of you as a musician, or as any kind of creative professional. So, schools: Please partner with media companies, music publishers, tech startups, small businesses, independent artists, more community schools. Add incentives. Stress the requirements beyond music skills. Stress that these are music skills.
I studied the violin at Peabody while attending Hopkins, but I live in Hollywood now, consult on music and work as a writer, journalist, and editorial content strategist. My first job out of college was at NPR; they hired me to be a cultural producer with a specialty in digital, but getting that gig was a bit of blind luck (although I knew how to code), based mostly on the fact that I'd published music criticism in the Washington Post. I would have benefitted so much from even a few of the aforementioned extra classes. Recording was available at my school, but it was a highly specialized degree program track. So, too, music education. These things were not stressed as necessary for everyone. But they were, and they are critically necessary now. A student at a great music school shouldn't have to learn Logic in an Apple Store.
What's great, though, is that Peabody is now poised to do this as an entity owned by Johns Hopkins University, and Bronstein says he's devoted to the cause. But it should be reiterated that I graduated from college 15 years ago, and Peabody was not moving on these things nearly quickly enough, even though it had been owned by Hopkins for a while. I have great hope for future music students, but also some words of advice: Double-degree program with a university. Or, even better, something new and singular that blends two types of schools like Hopkins and Peabody more seamlessly. That's what I tried to do with my program, and eventually I only took one degree (my Arts & Sciences B.A.). The Music School as a template for higher education needs to evolve more quickly and comprehensively for the sake of all musicians as well as those who will move into other fields while using their music skills. The great music that we love will be thankful.-- Adam Baer
June 03, 2015
May 12, 2015
April 22, 2015
Beyond the Boundary Principle, A New York Times "Couch" Essay -- by Adam Baer
When I first heard that the New York Times was running a series of Opinionator essays about psychology and psychotherapy called "Couch," I was pretty sure I'd have something to submit. I've not only a seen a few professionals in this field over the years, but the woman I married eventually became a stellar clinical psychologist and neuropsychologist in Los Angeles. I like to kid that she's never had the good fortune to be my doctor, but that's of course true: I was never her patient, and she wasn't in this line of work when we met. She first started as a scientist, a researcher. At any rate, I decided that I'd write a piece about the key psychologists in my life, especially because two of them had massively differing approaches, and in fact, one passed away while seeing me with the same disease as me -- and never told me she was sick (such are boundaries). If you've made it this far, here's the link to the story that ran in the New York Times Couch series. Have a read and tell me if you still don't approve of strict boundaries like those which the selfless cancer therapists live by. I hope this honors them in some way. -- Adam Baer
p.s. Some people upon reading this piece don't get the sense that I had tried to honor these people in my life while still being truthful about my experiences with them. The very act that I have told these stories is an act of honoring them, and one can't change a couple of intriguing non-fiction stories into pure praise when one is composing this sort of journalism piece. I also did leave out a lot of info about my experience and both characters (as well as my wife). I don't want to have to say this -- I hope that some people get it -- but the piece itself is in a way a commentary on what we should share and what we shouldn't. And that every case is different, so hard and fast rules may exist but must like music be interpreted with good taste (for example, I could have shared my wife's name and advertised for her, but I didn't; nor did I want to intrude on the life of someone else's family). Thanks to all who read and corresponded with me about this essay. It wasn't easy to write but I felt that it could do some good to share it, and I hope it brings attention to the clinical psychologists (Ph.D.s) who work with cancer patients and their families while continuing to contribute to important research. If you want to donate to a cause look up the good people in your area who do this, and help them.
February 13, 2015
Jenji Kohan Has a Husband, His Name is Christopher Noxon, and We Spoke About his Stellar Novel
The congenial Christopher Noxon knows what it means to be a Plus One (something about weed, the color orange, and a talented woman called Jenji). Anyway, we talked about this subject and Chris' new novel Plus One for The Believer. You can buy the book here: http://www.amazon.com/Plus-One-Christopher-Nox…/…/1938849426 But you can read our interview by clicking here.
November 14, 2014
November 03, 2014
My Rare Disease, and the One Guy Who Might Erase It -- by Adam Baer
A lot of you know I've had cancer(s). That it's been tough, that I've been given the chance to write about it. And that I am lucky to have great health insurance. However, what many readers may not know, even if you've read my work, is that buried in a piece for Harper's Magazine that I published I talk about having a malignant tumor in the base of my skull (not my brain) called Chordoma. The piece makes it clear that I continue to live with it. But to make it more clear, this is one of the rarest diseases in America, and very few people, save for the generous experts who have to date saved my life with surgery and radiation and management, know what to do with chordomas, including a lot of doctors and researchers.
Of course, we're living at a time when a researcher might figure out an ever-better treatment. But a tiny portion of the population may not realize that this silent, fatal disease and its treatments force us to perpetually fight terrible side-effects (among them, the very serious condition of social isolation), and that if this is just one of the cancers you have/have had, life is never "OK," even if you do your best to make everyone around you feel like it is, lest you seem stranger, weirder, more of a reminder of everyone's mortality, a guilt-inducer. Rarer.
At any rate, the guy linked to in a few sentences is pretty much the only one of our generation, without an MD or PhD, working really hard to lead research and other programs that may help people with this specific rare disease. He and his foundation deserve serious support. His name is Josh Sommer, and his non-profit is called Chordoma Foundation. I'm ashamed that I haven't been more vocal about him and his work over the years, and that most times I don't want to read about this one of my diagnoses. But on a day like today, when I have questions about a certain drug that I need for one late effect of a previous cancer treatment, something that might make my chordoma worse, a question that cannot be answered, I feel lucky that Josh is doing what he does. This call for support is long overdue.
I hope that you read about Josh, and back his group. I learned that I have (a) chordoma because of an incidental MRI taken because of headaches. That means that many other people can have it, and that it can be less rare than we think, because who gets head MRIs for no good reason, and who looks into the heads of the deceased? I'd hate to learn of one more person suffering from this deadly problem, but it's highly possible, and that -- not any sympathy for my situation -- is why I posted this. People with chordoma are often told they may only live seven or ten years.
Some of us who've had the advanced treatments and surgeries are optimistic about living a lot longer, but we could be wrong. Josh, and the people he's working with, are not living in the vagaries; they are living and working for change in the now, and they don't feel their job is done with just one magazine article that appears to be a book review. I hope that I can help them more, and that you may decide to allocate some of your disposable income and time to help them, too. -- Adam Baer
November 01, 2014
"A Good Life in the Hollywood Hills"-- Holiday Magazine, April, 1970
An April, 1970 magazine article on life in the Hollwood Hills:
"The cliffdwellers cling precariously to the brush-covered slopes of the Hollywood hills, sharing the common perils of fire and flood. In the late fall, when the humidity drops and a warm wind whips through the canyons, the hills may suddenly explode with flame. In the rainy season, when the naked cliffs crack and slide, the mortgaged wickiups come tumbling down. But the true cliffdweller always returns to his wildlife refuge. He trades in his charred Porsche, patches his pool, rebuilds his house-with-a-view and again settles down to enjoy the comforts of his mountain lair." ...
"Laurel is Southern California’s semi-tropical version of Manhattan’s East Village. Mediterranean villas dating back to the first hoarse days of talking pictures are hemmed in by dilapidated shacks owned by absentee landlords. The canyon’s natural fire hazards have been intensified of late by shaggy young nomads who turn on in the blackened ruins of burned-out mansions where Theda Bara may once have dined. The daily life of the community swirls around a small shopping center, “The Square,” which boasts the old-fashioned Canyon Country Store and a pleasant cafe, the Galleria."--1970 article from Holiday magazine on what it's like to live in the Hollywood Hills.
October 22, 2014
The Believer Interview with a Luthier (who makes guitars for Arcade Fire, The National, Beck, Cat Power, Fred Armisen) -- by Adam Baer
A number of years ago, well before this subject was written about elsewhere, I learned about, met, and began interviewing, the Silverlake-area guitar luthier and music-shop owner Reuben Cox who uses found materials to make equisite instruments that harken back to a period of American guitarmaking that has slipped away. Reuben, a photographer with credits from The New Yorker and New York Times, had opened a place called Old Style Guitars on the eastern/southern edge of the neighborhood -- before it had become hip. Still, bands like The National would drop by and play secret shows in his driveway. And quickly, the place became a node, a scene, for some of the best elite rock musicians in the country: You could see Richard Reed Parry from Arcade Fire there, Chan Marshall, Devandra B., Bobby Womack, Beck, Sufjan Stevens, Alexi Murdoch, Andrew Bird, tons of studio players, even Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein. It was something like a micro Laurel Canyon for our time, inside a little box with lots of wires and wood. But it's hard to place significant articles about such esoteric subjects in the focused, news-oriented consumer magazines. So, I waited, and then an option to do something creative came up with one of my favorite magazines, The Believer. Now, I have turned the piece, which at last ran in The Believer's 2014 Music Issue, into a multimedia digital thing, with videos of The National playing at the store, a fetishistic guitar slideshow, and even a video of Arcade Fire using one of Reuben's guitars in Helsinki. Check it out at this URL, where I hope that it will live for a long time. http://logger.believermag.com/post/100588053844/interview-with-a-luthier-i-e-someone-who-makes
My thanks for reading, watching, waiting, and listening.
July 01, 2014
The Day Paul Mazursky Changed My Life (RIP)
"What are you talking to me for?" asked Mel Brooks. "You need to talk to more Jews. Younger JEWS. Call Paul Mazursky."
Brooks was speaking to me for a Rolling Stone magazine piece about funny studio-executive notes. I'd heard of Mazursky's name, knew some of his movies, but had not connected that identity to the guy who had acted in recent episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm, the character "Larry David" would eventually kill via stress.
Mazursky had directed various important films about romantic relationships, had shared my New York background. I didn't know if the magazine would use his quotes, but I'd thought they'd appreciate me trying to get some good stories from someone who had been around some amazing sets.
I went to Mazurksy's Beverly Drive office, told him that Mel Brooks had sent me.
"What does he want?" Mazursky asked. "Oh, right. You're the kid."
"I'm the kid," I said. I was in my late twenties.
Next, Mazursky asked me about my background. He wanted to know everything. He'd said that he'd read something about me, something about cancer that his assistant had showed him. He told me very funny stories about the author Isaac Singer. Oh, and did I have cancer?
I said that it was hard to answer that question: Does anyone who has been diagnosed with cancer ever stop having it?
He laughed.
"My daughter," he said. "My daughter--"
Silence. Then tears.
Mazursky broke down in front of me. He bawled. His daughter also had a tumor, he'd said. She'd just been flown to a top hospital near us. He didn't know what to do. He was looking into "the guy who worked on Ted Kennedy at Duke."
Did I have suggestions, connections? What could they do?
The phone rang. Mazursky answered, gestured at me to stay.
"Yes, OK, that's the guy," he said on the phone. Then to me: It's Jeff Berg, you know him?"
Mazursky was speaking with one of Hollywood's most powerful talent agents who had been helping him make contact with a specific surgeon. He kept me in the office while he spoke with him. Then we talked some more.
I gave him the best contacts that I had, including one top neurosurgeon at Cedars-Sinai who had graced the cover of Time magazine.
He asked me to stay. "Let's talk," he said. "I'm sorry--"
"Don't worry," I said.
Then I sat in Paul Mazursky's office for an hour while he asked me more about my various medical problems related to surviving multiple cancers, the people I knew, the doctors, the therapies. He was suffering.
Eventually, he got a call from the hospital doctor that the agent had recommended. He answered the phone but asked the guy to hold before thanking me, saying that I should come see him again.
"I have so much to tell you about my career," he said.
I have this entire experience taped on one of my many old Olympus voice recorders that doesn't work with my Mac.
I shook Paul's hand, thanked him, reassured him that his daughter would be OK (as if I could know).
Then I went home and watched three Mazursky movies in the next couple of days.
I would not write about this experience until now, the day that I learned of Mazursky's death. His daughter had, in fact, died sometime after our meeting. But I am thankful that I got a chance to spend time with Paul, perhaps lend a hand in the moment, an ear, whatever.
I should have called him back to check on him and his family, but I kept putting it off. He had help, I told myself.
I don't put things like that off now.
May 03, 2014
March 28, 2014
Rudolph Serkin Helped Curtis Student Buy Rare Violin
There are many untold stories to share about the monumentally important pianist Rudolph Serkin, who would have celebrated a birthday today. But one that very few people know is that he gave one of my formative violin teachers, the late Mitchell Stern*, the down payment to buy a rare Guadagnini violin. Their relationship had been fostered at Philadelphia's Curtis Institute, where Stern had been a student who'd won many awards, including the Leventritt Competition. *(I once told a story on NPR about how Stern had helped me through illness while being ill himself.)
At any rate, here's a video of the great, generous Rudolph Serkin playing Beethoven's Emperor Concerto. --Adam Baer
Adam Baer
October 05, 2013
A Los Angeles Autumn, Raymond Chandler-style
So many silly faux-facts in this LA Weekly listicle about Autumn in LA, so let it be said, this naturalized Angeleno born in New York longs not for "the seasons" or Autumn in New York" but rather for the winds Raymond Chandler mythologized in the following quote the Weekly is so smart to remember: "There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Ana's that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen..."
July 31, 2013
July 25, 2013
Serge Koussevitsky, Tanglewood, Lineage
Tomorrow is Serge Koussevitsky's birthday, but I want to celebrate him today, get a jump on the festivities --I can link to his recorded performances tomorrow.
Who was he? Pictured above, next to the taller (!) composer Aaron Copland, he was the commandingly sensitive Russian-born conductor who, along with Copland and others, taught the young Leonard Bernstein, and who created much of what the Boston Symphony's Summer home in the Berkshires, known as Tanglewood, became.
Tanglewood is where my family was forged, and so there's more than simple lineage there for me as a music lover.
I wrote about this subject for NPR last year when Tanglewood turned 75, but as my family would visit the festival at least once each summer, so shall I celebrate it annually.
Here's the short, somewhat-evergreen piece that I wrote about Tanglewood and how its lineage intertwines with that of my family for NPR: http://www.npr.org/blogs/deceptivecadence/2012/07/05/156288431/tanglewood-my-familys-transcendental-homeland
I have Koussevitsky to thank for many things, including that piece, and I'm not the only one. (See this link for a letter from Bernstein to Koussevitsky that I quote in the NPR piece.)
To think of what life was like for the young Bernstein, learning from the master Koussevitsky, and from Copland, some 70 years ago: All that I can say is that it's not just one film but a series of them from many perspectives that could never tell the stories well enough.
Koussevitsky, who led some of the most important live concerts of his day (some preserved on record), commissioned among other works Ravel's Piano Concerto, Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms, and through his foundation had a hand in the creation of Copland's Third Symphony (including the famed Fanfare for the Comman Man), as well as Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra and Britten's Peter Grimes, to say nothing of other staples of modern concert music.
A lot of people think of Bernstein and Copland when they think about Tanglewood, but the main music shed, where big concerts are held, is named after Koussevitsky, and sometimes I think that the whole 20th century in concert music could be named after him. Or at least include his name prominently, along with others.
Koussevitsky was driven by gratitude for music, for composers, and for those who loved making and listening to music. I'm grateful simply that he existed; in a practical sense, I might not have seen the light of day without him.
May 25, 2013
A Resonance in Dissonance (In which I try to learn to try to learn to love music that I once disliked.)
Can you learn to love music you just don't jive with? I tried to find out by trying to find out, and I wrote up my experiment in an essay for this Sunday's Los Angeles Times. (Note: In no way does this piece attempt to satirize experiential critical journalism. Not at all...)
The piece also discusses the fact that dissonance is not just an objective term but a subjective, personal issue (i.e. I find some Offenbach awfully dissonant). The essay's headline was actually "Dissonance" when I last signed off on the piece, and I would have loved to discuss this issue more--you can say that piece is coming soon.
At any rate, here's a resource page for those interested in trying out the "potentially horrific" playlist that I used for my terribly scientific experiment.
1. Schoenberg's "Pierrot Lunaire"
2. Conlon Nancarrow Study for Player Piano No. 7
3. Stravinsky's Agon
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cDCbHJYZ88
4. Berio Sequenza III
5. Berio Sequenza X
Other pieces you may want to try that you may love (or want to try to learn to love):
Henry Cowell's The Banshee
**I should also note that I first read reports about the Australian study on the websites of NPR Music and The Atlantic (first report here). I noted these reports in my original final draft, and I would have liked it if those sources were kept in the text, but they were edited out. The online version of the piece also has pretty much the same headline as the NPR blog's piece; before it went to print, when I last saw it, my piece's headline was "Dissonance." In print now it's "A Resonance in Dissonance," which is great and shows us why editors often make pieces much more enticing.
*Lastly: I wish I could have written more about the music specifically. (I'd even included a bit in the original draft before cutting about some tonal music that I can't stand, and how I consider that personally dissonant.) Relatedly, this morning, I received a constructively critical note from one of the aforementioned composer's family members that initially implied that I'm closeminded and/or undereducated, and that I would like a lot more of the man's work if, and I'm paraphrasing, "I had ever listened to it." (And this was one of the nicest notes I've received.)
But here's the thing: A) I've listened to about 97% of it in my lifetime, and I did say that I love certain pieces, as well as that this composer is important. And B) If anything, people should know that articles like this cannot run longer than a certain length, usually, and that I wasn't allowed by space constraints to get into any one musical piece or composer with much depth. I also included references to other great works by this composer that might get people interested in him. I hope that they listen to them, just as I love to listen to much Dissonant music.
The most important motive behind an essay like this -- which is, to be sure, light fare, with a few chuckles about music, research studies, itself, and its author, for that matter -- is to get people to try and listen to more music that they think they may not like. I appreciate reader notes like these, though; I know that it's hard to understand how things work behind the scenes for writers.
What I hope a piece like this does is show that someone with a background in serious concert music can like a lot of other genres of music, that young people also care for concert music (and for advocating for it), and that one should open his or her ears, give everything a fair shot, and then, after much listening, feel free and unfrightened to be human and open and vocal about what he or she likes.
April 16, 2013
New Way to Read Music -- Not Especially Noteworthy
Recently, I published a VQR piece on the future of sheet music, including a bit on new apps and notation literacy. In related news bloggers are pointing out a new music notation system called Hummingbird (depicted above). I looked it over, tried it out. It borrows its method of displaying rhythm from piano rolls, showing us the amount of time a note should be held, like GarageBand and other music software. What's more, it points up for sharps and down for flats, which a demanding violin teacher might do with a pencil. Aside from that, it's deceptively complicated and requires learning different symbols. How much easier it would be for someone who has never learned music, or lacks a teacher, is questionable.
New systems (and apps) are best when they solve problems, but learning to read Western music notation isn't a problem that requires a solution. It's not easy. But like learning to read English, it's eminently doable, and fraught with fewer variables and exceptions. Reading Western notation—and there have of course been many precursors to what we use now, as well as many alternatives, including Braille and an integer-based system—has also proven to be good for your brain, and we don't need to simplify it. The current sharp and flat note symbols work fine; you just have to remember them.
Hummingbird appears to be a nicely designed dumbing-down, and not an especially noteworthy one in an age of design-fetish and how-to videos. Shortcuts—like guitar tablature—should really be shortcuts. This new system basically just makes reading music different, and it doesn't seem to allow for new ways to notate sounds that we cannot yet notate. I'm in favor of new music technologies and notation systems, but Hummingbird should first show me why Western music notation is a problem, and why Hummingbird is a necessary alternative. For now, especially given our abundance of online music-education resources, it's not.
For more information about alternative music notation systems that may solve what some perceive to be standard notation problems, check out The Music Notation Project.
January 20, 2013
Lautner Photography: At Home on Ice
In the course of researching my recent VQR essay about architect John Lautner, I interviewed the Lautner scholar and architect Frank Escher, who Benedikt Taschen chose to restore the "Chemosphere" house displayed on the cover of the VQR winter 2013 edition. Escher, who wrote a book about Lautner and was present to chronicle the rebirth of love for the architect's work in the late 1990's*, gave me a great interview, and some of that conversation, of course, could not make it into the piece.
One of the more interesting bits that had to hit the cutting room floor concerned Lautner's apparent love for the act of photography. Sure, Julius Shulman and many other professional photographers shot gorgeous pictures of Lautner's work. But according to Escher, Lautner was a "great photographer himself." The architect apparently took thousands of photos over the course of his lifetime, which may not be unusual for an architect now but was not always the norm.
"He used the camera the way other architects use a sketchbook," said Escher. "He constantly documented what was around him. There are thousands of studies of clouds, caves, rock formations, waves -- sometimes quite abstract. And if you look at those subjects and realize what he was looking at through a camera you start to read where his architectural forms come from."
"There's a very clear interest in the sort of natural biomorphic form in Lautner's work, and it comes from his really intense connection to nature," Escher continued. "This starts when Lautner is very young -- the way he's brought up, what he enjoys. Throughout his life, he traveled a great deal."
Escher told me about how one of Lautner's trips may surprise people who associate him with Southern California, heat. "Lautner once took a trip to Alaska and photographed glaciers, producing gorgeous images," Escher said. "These almost formal studies of ice formations, how glaciers melt, or how ice melts on water, or clouds, or those desert landscapes -- these are where he developed his formal interests."-- Adam Baer
*And who generously shared his contacts in the Lautner world.
January 15, 2013
If You Were Cool, Rich, or Bad Enough to Live Here, You'd Be Home -- John Lautner in Hollywood
Very proud to have my John Lautner houses-in-film essay in the winter 2013 edition of VQR. If you'd like to read the text and see the great photos, most by Elizabeth Daniels, in full size, here's the PDF. You can also read the text more easily here. And be sure to catch other great pieces in the issue -- which, really, is a great print book to buy and hold -- by Mickey Rapkin, David Kipen, and many others. Here's how to subscribe.
I will be posting related material throughout the week. Please stay tuned! -- Adam Baer
September 07, 2012
Beastie Boys' ‘Paul’s Boutique’ Remade by Cheeba, Moneyshot & Food
‘Paul’s Boutique’ remade [music link].
Description: "3 years in the making, 3 DJs working with over 150 tracks to recreate one of the seminal sampling albums of all time, at last Cheeba, Moneyshot and I can reveal ‘Caught In The Middle Of A 3-Way Mix’. Our tribute to the classic Beastie Boys album ‘Paul’s Boutique’ remixed and re-imagined from all the original samples plus a cappellas, period interviews and the Beasties’ own audio commentary from the reissued release. Add to this a custom illustration from Paul’s Boutique super-fan and all-round great guy Jim Mahfood, taking time out from recent art duties on Tank Girl, and you have an alternate version of the album. The mix was over half way finished when we heard the tragic news of Adam Yauch‘s passing this May so this is also our nod to his memory, RIP MCA."
August 10, 2012
July 05, 2012
NPR: Tanglewood as My Family's Transcendental Homeland
Today I have an essay on NPR Music about Tanglewood as My Family's Transcendental Homeland. It's also about Tanglewood as a homeland for story, and why storytelling keeps alive the things that we love. It's positioned on NPR's classical side but while I would never want to encourage anyone not to check out that site, I want to make it clear that I call artfully composed music written for the concert hall "concert music." I hope that this piece will appeal to people who listen to a variety of musical genres -- like me. The mentions of EDM, Tears for Fears, and Jane's Addiction are not just inclusions for color but signifiers that hopefully help render a full picture of our musical world. The piece may also appeal to you if you've ever failed to fit in somewhere and had a crush on radiant European musician who allowed you to kiss her. All good things.-- Adam Baer, @glassshallot
April 22, 2012
Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Veep) on Her Funniest "Note" [Exclusive, R-rated]
A few years ago, Rolling Stone kindly published a piece of mine about the funniest "studio notes" actors, writers, directors, and comedians have received from Hollywood producers and network execs. It was intended to be an oral history about receiving chortle-worthy criticism, a way to use these "notes" to tell some of comedy's best secret stories, and I hope we accomplished that goal, to some degree. (Note: the headline was not my first choice, but I am a team player, and I had a lot of fun working on the piece and eventual pride seeing it in RS.)
It was a dream assignment: I interviewed a score of hilarious celebs, producers and directors--from Mel Brooks and Garry Shandling to younger talents like David Wain ("Wet Hot American Summer"), Paul Scheer ("The League"), and Nick Stoller ("Forgetting Sarah Marshall" and "The Five Year Engagement").
Everyone cracked me up, and the piece generated serious interest from one of the world's biggest book publishers. So I took some of the quotes from my many funny interviews that Rolling Stone had not picked for inclusion (page-space is limited at magazines), and my agent and I went out with a book proposal about how this could be a hilarious narrative project, especially given my access to so many people in the entertainment industry. Eventually, and ironically, the senior publishing exec didn't think the book would make money (I still disagree), and the project, which could now be a brilliant multimedia thing with video, great for iPads, was tabled.*
Alas, one of the many funny things Rolling Stone could not include--sadly rendering my collection of interview subjects 100% male--was my unforgettable, if short, interview with Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who stars tonight in HBO's new series "Veep." I share this gem with you now. Word, for word, and I have this on tape, this is what one of the funniest actresses in comedy told me, on the record. Addendum: Julia Louis-Dreyfus is a lovely, generous woman, with guts of steel, and I don't doubt she will continue to be a hit with audiences everywhere -- and to reiterate, I would not have posted this if she had not given me the quote on the record.
FUNNIEST STUDIO NOTE: JULIA LOUIS-DREYFUS
"I have only one story that comes to mind, and I leave out names because that's a better idea.
But when I was very young and had just started on “SNL”--I believe I was 20--I did a sketch in which I played John DeLorean's wife...
In that sketch, my hair was blown out straight -- because her hair is straight.
So, we did the show, and the following day, I was called into one of our producers' offices (as a side note, I should say that I have naturally curly hair), and he said to me, “Julia, I got a call from a bunch of NBC executives after last night’s show, and they said that after seeing your hair straight, they all wanna fuck you.”
This was apparently his way of trying to entice me into straightening my hair for the rest of season.
Needless to say: I was young and naïve, but I was so shocked that anyone would say anything like that, I just burst out laughing in a hysterical way. I didn't know what else to do.
Years later, when "Seinfeld" was becoming somewhat of a hit, I ran into the same producer at NBC again.
And he said to me, “Hey, Julia, I see they're letting you do your hair the way you want now."
That's apparently all he took away from my “Seinfeld” contribution.
The irony of it was that not only did I make my hair curly on "Seinfeld," which may have been a huge mistake now that I think about it, but I enhanced the curl and made it HUGE!
I wonder if that hair wasn't some kind of reaction.
I was saying: 'Not only is this hair going to be curly, it's going to be crazy curly. Take that, motherfucker!!'"
*Tabled in this case means I stopped pursuing it. I'm open to pursuing it again, though, especially with a new class of today's funniest people.
February 23, 2012
Why the Oscars Need a "Best Soundtrack" Category
Today I have a piece in The Atlantic in which I persuade the Academy Awards to create a "Best Soundtrack" category that would honor the artistic work of insightful music supervisors, who should be given the same awards as art directors and other creative film staffers. There wasn't much room to get into a large discussion of the best soundtracks ever created much less those of this year. But as I wrote, the "art is in the curating of the mix," and in that spirit, I offer you up the one-song but internally eclectic soundtrack to my life. OK, seriously: that song and this one.
UPDATE: A reader commented on the piece with an intelligent response. The comment and my reply are below.
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A "Best Soundtrack" category would be interesting... although it would immediately create confusion among viewers with the "Best Original Score" category, would it not?
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Adam BaerIt could, and I'm a big supporter of composers. One idea, then, is to create two categories for music: "Best Soundtrack" and "Best Original Music." That way scores can continue to be awarded individually, but the rare individual song could be singled out as well. Is it easier to write a song than a score? That's not really the issue, especially when many of today's scores are bits and pieces of incidental music cues. This would allow us a chance to still award composers for their important work (something important to me) and offer an award for a full soundtrack, including a score and playlist of pre-written/recorded songs.--Adam Baer
Update #2: The other strategy they could employ is two music categories: Best Music Direction (like art direction, which would include soundtrack), and Best Original Music. --Adam Baer
February 02, 2012
November 17, 2011
May 24, 2011
"Speak, Malady" in Harper's; "Speak, Memory" Still Rightfully Everywhere
My recent Harper's essay, "Speak Malady," in which I rock, roast, and melt at medical tourism meccas Boston, M.A., and Rochester, M.N. [PDF link] --Adam Baer
April 16, 2010
Medical Marijuana in LA: "Hit and Miss" in the Financial Times Magazine (FT Weekend)
This weekend, The Financial Times Magazine runs a hopefully informative and humorous personal essay [PDF] about my mysterious health travails and experience with LA's medical marijuana world at an crucial point in the battle to legalize cannabis in California. It's also online in web-friendly html page-format here, @ FT.com.
Naturally, I thought long and hard about what kinds of supplementary material I could offer on my blog. But we sadly only present words and stuff we can roll and/or bake into Web code Glass Shallot. In that spirit, then let me offer a small chunk of text my editors and I had to cut at the last minute for page-space. It concerns the first dispensary I visited in Hollywood, one of the shops LA will close, where the system -- and the product -- actually worked very well. (Text below)
"More concerned with convenience than finding a boutique shop that sold Valrohna chocolate cupcakes, I first visited Druggie Christmas Tree Girl’s dispensary: a dank space above a seedy Hollywood motel, manned by a hulking Middle Eastern guy with a shaved head, wearing an elegantly dizzying Ed Hardy T-shirt. He screamed my name the way some thug had screamed at Jason Statham in an action movie I once reviewed. Naturally, I trusted him.
“What iz dis?” the guy asked, taking my letter through a little hole in the wall that separated the real store from the waiting room.
“It’s my doctor’s recommendation," I said.
“I never see something like dis, yo.”
“Well,” I said, “It’s real.”
“I see dat, dude. But I still gotta call.”
Yes, this sketchy drug-dealer type was calling a nationally lauded physician because of me.
He left the window, I heard some mumbling. He reappeared minutes later.
“You in,” he said. “He OK it.”
“You spoke with my actual doctor, not some nurse or assistant?” I asked.
“Totally,” he said. “Now whaddayou want?”
I walked into a tiny, smoky space through a cage-protected door, and he showed me some 10 canisters of fragrant weed. I asked for something to alleviate pain – nerve pain, if that meant anything?
“Bubba Skunk,” he said. “That’s you shit.”
“That’s my shit,” I concurred, handing over $50 for a pill bottle filled with buds.
“How much should I use?” I asked.
“Howev much you want, homeslice.”
Then I left, and as I waved my new drugs around the seedy eastern side of Hollywood Boulevard, as a man in a doo-rag drove by me on a miniature bicycle powered by a tiny motor, my wife grabbed the bag and told me to hide it.
“But it’s legal,” I said.
“But this isn’t Brentwood!"
November 25, 2009
Avatar's Zoë Saldana and Chef Jose Andres: A Writer's Struggle
I struggle, like all artists, and nowhere is this more evident than in the rough-and-tumble assignments I completed last fall for publication in a variety of December magazines: a short Details magazine profile of Zoë Saldana (above) and a Hemispheres feature on chef Jose Andres. Sometimes I must also dig ditches.
June 01, 2009
September 15, 2008
dfw
"There's part of me that wants to get attention and respect. It doesn't
really make very much difference to me. Because I learned in my 20's
that it just doesn't change anything. And that whatever you get paid
attention for is never the stuff that you think is important about
yourself anyway. So a lot of my problems right now is that I don't
really have a brass ring. And I'm kind of open to suggestions as to what
one chases. There are real abstract ideas about, you know, what art can
be, the redemptive quality of art, and you know, kindness to animals.
All the cliches that we can invoke. But ...the people who most interest
me now are the people who are old and who have sort of been through a
midlife criss. They tend to get weird, because the normal incentives
for getting out of bed don't tend to apply anymore. I have not found
any satisfactory new ones. But I'm also not getting ready to jump off a
building or anything."
David Foster Wallace, 3/27/97
June 23, 2008
yvette siegert: benching books from times square with zeal
Yvette Siegert, the young and exceedingly talented Columbia instructor, poet, and New Yorker editorial staff member, has finally been given a public forum in the form of, yes, a blog. New Yorker blogs may be obvious references, but what you should know about Siegert, the author of The Book Bench, is that she's not only a voracious and reliable book-scene correspondent; she's eminently qualified to tell us the backstories behind the books while remaining highly literate in the world literature field and so damn likable that you would never go wrong following her advice about what to read. Way to go, New Yorker! You've got a blogger who will literally change the way the magazine reaches the online book world and the readers to whom it caters. See The Book Bench as soon as possible, and watch for much, much more from Shallot friend Siegert.
December 27, 2007
this country is funny!, or why the kennedy center honors is crap
Last night, for the thousandth time in Oprah knows how many years, the Kennedy Center Honors award show--in which a lame cultural center with Presidential branding puts living celebrities in royal wax to be lovingly caressed forever--aired on national television. I'd love to see the ratings, given how the strike's certainly hurting TV. This year CBS won the gig. And who can blame them for going after it? It's easier than picking off with a .22 Starbucks-deprived writers in organized lines to buy their family's one meal of the day outside a Studio City taco stand. Or something.
The Kennedy Center clearly seems like the Smithsonian of the performing arts to too many people. But in typical Shallotosian fashion, I'm here to dispel that myth. Not only does the Kennedy Center present merely decent--and some great--concerts and shows in an ever-inventive cultural world (i.e. the National Symphony is no LA Phil, and I'd sooner hit up any house in NYC for something truly worthy than jet down to Foggy Bottom for some stuffy Washington run of whatever). The KC presents this work with a semantic tie to the government. Whether it's because it receives so much national funding or simply because of its name and location, many Americans consider the Kennedy Center the definitive word on what's what in the performing arts (and they've probably never been there.). Hey, George Bush is in the audience! (And it's not a tractor-pull.)
This year, to be fair, the teary eyed tributes went to some well-deserved culture-makers. Scorcese--say what you will about how he can't end a movie: the guy pretty much exemplifies the American dream, and he can do just about anything with a scene. (Although, it's always much better when DeNiro, Keitel, and some of his other super-talented friends get to liven up his frame. Let's just say, for the record, that Matt Damon and Marky Mark don't really substitute into that equation too well despite all The Departed's "acclaim," such as it was at the moment of the film's release.) But at least Scorcese is a scholar of his trade and something of an original. And at least Bob DeNiro made every audience member swoon with his small gestures of man-love, sending deep appreciation through the air with wireless precision in every micromove of his hard-won Downtown NYC mouth-wrinkles.
The question with this segment of the show is why the cognitively delayed Cameron Diaz opened the Marty-love session and continued to narrate his life-montage. Cameron Diaz? For one role in Gangs of New York? If you're trying to make a statement about how the younger generation cares for Marty, get Leo. Get him! Go! I know he's probably holed up with some coked-out model halfway across the world shooting someone else's movie about organized crime in a green world--but Something About Mary's JT-loving Goofball doesn't deserve the gig just because she looks OK in a party dress. But again: The Kennedy Center knows very little about which it speaks, and they probably just thought: This is TV! Let's get us a Big Star! You know, A Blonde Charlie's Angel! That she really had nothing to do with Scorcese's career clearly wasn't an issue.
What? No Keitel? Pesci? Bob Dylan? No Spielberg, Jack, or Daniel Day Lewis? (Assuming they would even come if asked--and sure, they probably were.) Coppola was fine, but he recently told a major magazine something sorta not so nice about Marty. Awkward. Plus, he really didn't seem like he wanted to be there. A private island, winery, or plate of bucatini was calling. But then you remember: Francis finally has a new "independent" movie coming out. Better make nice with the Amirricans. There's no way in hell that he really thinks Goodfellas is better than the Godfather.
Then, in proper Kennedy Center fashion, a lot of time went to a comedian. Granted, the comedian--Steve Martin--deserved an entire two-hour show devoted to his oeuvre. But the KC always loves it some comedy and then short-ends the director or composer on the bill. In this case, the KC programmer-on-crack really disappointed with Steve Carell and his try-too-hard facetiae winning the chance to intro Martin. I'm sorry: He was funny in the 40 Yr Old Virgin, but this Office crap--to say nothing of his "I"m a comically awkward leading man in rom-coms who looks like the male version of Ellen Degeneres" thing--hardly qualifies him to speak about arguably the most original humorist of the past 35 years. But let's face it: Who wants to fly out from LA to DC for a night? Marty Short made a brief appearance in a terrible tribute to Martin's trash-SoCal vaudevillian history--but he should have been the one speaking. Or how about Carl Reiner--director of The Jerk? Where was Victoria Tennant? Goldie Hawn? Billy Crystal? Danny Ackroyd? Where was David Remnick from the New Yorker reading from Martin's new memoir? Instead, the KC just put on a "so bad it's highbrow" interpretative dance with long-legged Rockette-types to symbolize Martin's achievements. I dug the Scrugs banjo bit. But there should have been someone up there with some conceptual-humorist weight on that stage. Someone with some literary acumen. Again, KC, why can't you do this right? You're on network TV now!
But the evening didn't improve with its tribute to pianist Leon Fleisher. A classical kid raised by two New York concert pianists, I always felt like I knew Fleisher. Like he was the powerful alpha force in my family who had taught my Dad how to play Brahms, roar, and eat steak, and I had just yet to meet him. But then I did meet him. In Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony, where my parents had fallen in love and I spent some time as a teenage violinist. It was a dark and stormy night. For reals: My friends and I were running home from a concert in a deluge, and Fleisher picked us up in his ratty Subaru for a ride back to the dorms. I felt like I was in a Werner Herzog movie.
Later, at Peabody, as a violinist, some of my best pianist friends studied with the Godfather of the ivories. He was omnipresent if usually invisible on the campus and a best friend of my violin teacher, the estimable if lecherous Berl Senofsky. I attended music theory classes hearing the pounding tenths of his students in the background and returned to my room across the plaza to listen to his recordings of the Brahms D minor. But he never felt to me like he was a part of the real Peabody--the majority of the students were mediocre for conservatory level musicians, and the orchestra never rivaled that of Juilliard or even the Manhattan School, to say nothing of the Curtis Institute, where Fleisher also taught--with, it must be said, performer-pedagogues at a level of achievement that matched his better. Mostly, Peabody was full of so-so brass players, violinists without the star-virtuosity to win major jobs or solo gigs, and lots of really undereducated opera singers along with the occasional star pianist and freak harpist.
That said, the KC decided to honor Fleisher--via a slick Yo-Yo Ma delivered speech--with a (quite condensed) short film about his early success, the loss of his right-hand dexterity (to focal dystonia), his comeback, his Peabody teaching career (one line), and then a performance of perhaps Beethoven's worst work--the Chorale Fantasy--as played by perhaps Fleisher's least emotional student Jonathan Biss (a guy who never attended Peabody). In front of the still-remedial Peabody Orchestra! C'mon. Let it be said here: Peabody is really close to D.C. in a lot of ways. This was political. And convenient. And Biss: Ok, he hits the notes, but when I think of Fleisher I think of masculine power. Brahmsian world-shaking power. There were other pianists for this job. I'm thinking they were just booked. But why mention Peabody and then show Biss as if he attended the school? Bizarre. Tangential but still had to be noted.
It was obvious: So much about this show had to do with availability and bad image-conceptualizing. I won't even get into why Diana Ross--honored much more appropriately by SNL's Maya Rudolph every now and then as we snore--was allowed to share the stage with the aforementioned monuments of the arts. And I'll leave alone Brian Wilson. Ok, I won't: Lyle Lovett singing God Only Knows? Hootie and the Blowfish? Could we find people with less of a right to re-image the Beach Boys? Even Paul McCartney and his little mandolin would have been better. (Though, who can afford him?)
The point of all this rambling is that the KC--and let's not forget that Caroline Kennedy, its gleaming honorary daughter, now introduces this comedy of errors --really needs to step it up if it wants to follow through qualitatively on the notion that it's America's premiere cultural presenter. Many of us know it's not. But fine, keep the charade alive.
Just try harder. Be smart. And for fuck's sake, if you're gonna celebrate someone like Steve Martin, get out of your highbrow box that tells you stiff, leggy dancers loosely interpreting Martin's past might seem like a good idea and put something up there with some substance and wit. Last night's show just phoned it in at a time when live TV programming from the nation's party-town capital really had a chance to beat its competitors during a WGA strike. Maybe it won the numbers--that's not my field. But it sure as hell didn't deserve them.
December 16, 2007
A New Definition of Eco-Conscious
There was a time when Umberto Eco meant the world to me. I was a young college student, flooded with the "brilliance" of the postmodernists, and eager to lap it up. But I always found it sort of funny, all this meta-thinking about meta-thinking, all these linguistic symbolisms and academizing of pop culture. I even remember a friend and I mocking the titles of our new university classes: "Towards realizing deconstructionist comprehensions of the French fry's representation in popular culture as a symbol of both deliciousness and death." '"The Popular Semiotics of "Is": "To be" in our political theater." You get the idea.
At any rate, Umberto Eco was often our voice of reason. He took the postmodern movement somewhere sensible. He made us laugh, he laughed at himself, told great tales, and he qualified what soon became a rampant nonsense-parade.
So I wanted to like his new book: "Turning Back the Clock: Hot wars and Media Populism." That's why I reviewed it in today's S.F. Chronicle Book Review. But things didn't go exactly as planned.
Have a read: "Eco takes critical look at war, Mel Gibson in 'Turning Back'," San Francisco Chronicle, December 16, 2007
November 12, 2007
margot at the wedding -- and in the sun
So, the main subject of this story, submitted to the Sun before this weekend, offered similar quotes to another paper that got the scoop over the smaller kids yesterday (the result? some fast omissions by a great editor -- this isn't a unique problem). Still, I think the story's worth reading if you're interested in films about borderline writers and their brethren--though I won't blame you if you're not!
Noah Baumbach On Family Island, New York Sun, 11/12/07
June 02, 2007
style for sale
If you know LA, you know that Angelenos go ga-ga for Eames chairs or any semblance of the fact that they have so-called mid-mod style (even though, I'm told, the mid-century revival is "so over."). I am not, I should admit, a card-carrying member of the mechanized mid-mod subculture (i.e. those who buy mass-produced items that lose their individuality when everyone has one), but dammit if you won't find a Herman Miller fiberglass shell-rocker in my East Side living room. So, when Modernica put on its annual warehouse sale today in the warehouse district, I trudged on down, both to perhaps look for a new find and to observe my fellow consumers in their natural habitats. It was a sight: hipsters everywhere bonding over the desire for molded fiberglass and Noguchi coffee tables so they could all share the same interior design. Five young men about my age were so impressed with my find (four rich, teal side-chairs which I've now decided to sell, they look so inappropriate at my true mid-century dining table) that they began to speak to me about what I do for a living, and how we're "all so similar" (I'm a software designer, said one, I'm a producer, I'm a musician, I'm a writer; We are all cool enough for this furniture!). Below, find some imagery of the experience, including a shot of the hardest working man in mod furniture sales: Sam, the guy who was switching Eiffel bases off some chairs and replacing them with rolling bottoms or wooden legs at the speed of light with one straight-edge screwdriver (god forbid one of us ends up with the shell we want on a substandard base). Oh, and you could also enjoy with your furniture gluttony Saturday an electronica-spinning DJ and free drinks all while being sold on a slew of new lofts just off the 5 freeway in an area that wouldn't even amount to Greenpoint, Brooklyn, 15 years ago, it's still so raw and devoid of human character. View on, and decide whether or not we were buying the chairs or the chairs were buying us.
February 12, 2007
January 29, 2007
returning thoughts
Heaving breasts, the color rosa, the pig-centric kitchen prowess of Mario Batali (if he were the world's *second* most gorgeous woman): The most striking aspect of Pedro Almodovar's Raimunda in “Volver”--other than her physical exquisiteness-- is that she is a person—not just a woman—who moves forward, no questions asked. Forget returning: Raimunda is progressing.
Much has been written about Almodovar and his love for women—I personally enjoy this proclivity of his as I do his fascination with the dead. And much has been made of his problem with men (see Anthony Lane; note: usually love his reviews, this one not so much). But gender arguments aside, Almodovar has written a character that can weather insanity-inducing winds, rape, incest, worse, loss, and then the ultimate shock: seeing it happen to her daughter. Raimunda may live in a land that only Almodovar could create, but she is very much of our time and place. It seems fitting that the people I gel with best now are the pro-active, the surviving, the people who get things done and take care of even the dirtiest business. The ones who forge on despite petty, negative obstacle-characters or terrifying news. Avoid confrontation? You’re not one of these people. Leave things unsaid, conflicts unresolved, people you love on hold? You, too, don’t apply. You don't treasure life, and you'll be remembered that way. This doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you--or that I'm someone who should even say such a thing--only that I know I loved Volver because I am psychologically attracted to those men and women who are more Raimunda-like than those who aren't. The reasons are personal, but my point here is to say that Almodovar has--yes, as many critics have written--created yet another fiction that only he could dream up, in a place that only could exist in his head, but that his is also the best fiction: the type that feels real, of this earth. Raimunda is, underneath it all, a brave life-lover who only wants her serving of it with all the trimmings, and that's what Volver's about. Our new reality. Ghosts, fucking, cancer, and insanity included. (If only Clive Owen's character in "Children of Men" could have met her when their fates crossed in filmland. Maybe at an awards show...)
December 30, 2006
new york times glosses up crazy david lynch
If enlightenment and, well, Bliss, overtook you as you read this weekend's New York Times story on David Lynch and his "shockingly peaceful" life as a proponent of Transcendental Meditation, I'm sorry to say that the puff piece completely missed the mark on this extraordinarily creepy marriage. Instead, it chose to gloss over the Absolutely Cultyclimate of Mr. Lynch's attempt to snatch the brains of young people--especially those with means--who just perpetually want to learn a little about their favorite movies. Want a trustworthy first-person account of Inland Empire's finest and the cool buddies he's mind-melded with over at the Maharishi's? If world peace is the only thing driving David Lynch, Tom Cruise is, in fact, my long lost alien Messiah.
You read it here first: Lynch Mob.
December 11, 2006
this is not an exhibit
A return to life, a return to blogging. I was in LACMA yesterday for the first time in two years. After brunch in West Hollywood it seemed easy and casual enough to pop over for a look at the Magritte exhibit--when did it ever seem easy to pop over to MoMA? I took this as a positive--so before long we were parking our cars near the bubbling tar pits and paying $20 to walk on a carpet decorated like a blue sky with clouds--a nod to Magritte's surrealism, ah. What a strange and sad exhibit: While it showed us plenty of the more important Magritte works, there was a decided lack of progression--of order; that is, unless you were intrigued enough to ask one of the Bowler-hatted guards where to look next, as if he or she might have had an answer for you. (Do you like wearing the hat today? I asked one. It's Ok, he said. It's chilly this afternoon.)
No, as you walked through doorways carved ever so bizarrely--ah, this must have been the semiotic experimentation Magritte wanted for us--it was much easier to spot a work by a contemporary artist interpreting Magritte than, say, a true pipe picture from yesteryear. It was a decidedly un-MoMa type of show (especially noticeable when a middle-age man elbowed me to get at the bowler-hat display so he could strike a historical, philosphical image on Wilshire), and we felt robbed. A downer of a blog post, perhaps, but LA is a major art center. Sure, I get it: This is the county's museum of art--it has to appeal to everyone, and make money. But hell, that's still possible while doing a great artist like Magritte better. I shouldn't have to look forward to my time in the gift shop and then leave the museum with a wall-ready print of David Hockney's Mulholland Drive (with the words LACMA so obnoxiously scrawled in curves above the actual image) when I come down to L.A.'s leading art center for a look at something specifically un-Californinian.
[Hockney's Mulholland Drive: Oh-so-ready for the living room thanks to LACMA.]
July 24, 2006
My watch is gone, my watch is gone: The Mondaine Life
See this Mondaine watch? Like it? I do.
I should. My wife bought it for me as an engagement present, and I adored it the minute it jumped out of its box. Of course, it didn't really jump, but I like to think that it did. I like to think that this watch can do anything, because it can certainly disappear.
Back in 2000, when I first found an image of this watch in Rome, it seemed unlike most of the watches around. Here was the anti-Swiss Army, the non-Swatch. The problem is that now the rest of the world loves Mondaine watches, too (although try to find the chronograph version of this one -- it's no longer made).
Watches and I, we've been lovers. As a kid, I read Esquire and GQ, cover-to-cover, paying close attention to the timepiece ads. I recall regularly borrowing the maximum amount of back issues from my local library, and gawking at the watch-faces. "I only read these for the articles," I once joked to the research librarian, who had seen me purposely photo-copying Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese. The irony isn't lost on me now as I write for style-oriented magazines (sometimes about gadgets), but I still love seeking out timepiece ads aside long-form journalism. They belong together.
As a kid who grew up in a town where many people lived beyond their means, the watch ads seemed realistic, sold images of a men's life that existed. Maybe, one day, I, too, might find myself wealthy and sport a historic Omega. The imagery of douchebaggery was couched so heavily in quality even during the early 90's that I didn't think about the virtues of many guys I'd seen with a version of my wrist-envy.
But I never got over my timepiece obsession. I didn't--and still don't--consider it superficial. "Time is the most valuable thing I could possess." I wrote that sentence in a childhood journal when I was 11 years old.
Today, I don't like ostentatious watches, and I basically wear the same pants everywhere. I appreciate design, but things aren't as meaningful to me as an adult. Perhaps that's why I lose lots of them. Often things that represent important moments in my life. Things are just carbon, I rationalize. I can always make more money, replace them. Pieces of matter are just pieces of matter. Everything important is invisible.
* * *
I stayed away from watches for years--first, because I played the violin, and later, because I didn't like anything constricting my left wrist. More recently my reasons have been existential. Still, I've always felt somewhat naked without a watch--too casual or unadorned, childishly free. This is nice when I'm at the ocean, or hiking the hills, trying to work up a sweat, but it has not felt great in work situations.
Given this history with style, I'm now repulsed by watches that brag about one's bank account. But the scale has tipped in the former direction over the last few months. It has something to do with getting older, I think. It concerns wanting to get on a track, focus. Get a few objects--things you care about that you can feel with your hands--and hold onto them. Someone who will always be missed said that to me once.
So when family members offered to buy me a watch last winter, I became excited. Then, instantly, I couldn't decide on one. It seemed like nearly--just nearly--as big a commitment as something human--say, taking on a mate. My watch would be my watch--at least that's how I would want it--and I would never attempt to purchase more than one. (How wasteful.)
Moreover, I wanted something that might make me look a little more respectable in selvage legs. That way, I could dress down to a lunch meeting and still seem somewhat serious. (LA, if you don't live here, is full of people who dress supercasually but usually wear one serious piece of something to remind you they're not homeless--or, on the other end of the spectrum, that they're fabulously rich. The fun, I think, is never completely knowing the difference.)
This sent me searching for a watch. And when I say searching, I mean hunting (like, with weapons and scopes and anxiety about accidentally shooting a living thing). I looked at the men's mags, I looked in J.C. Penny. I looked at men's wrists at restaurants, often receiving strange turn-glances I couldn't shake for an hour. (No: I didn't want wrist implants.)
I couldn't find anything I appreciated and admired. I was as turned off by the expensive heavy lifters as I was by the Citizens. The middle of the road pieces were equally boring. I wouldn't get a watch just to get a watch. Maybe all watches were inherently less than ideal. Who needs the time anyway?
Then I found it. The watch that I'd imagined even before making a conscious attempt to search for it. The neatly designed guy at the top of this page. The Mondaine evo chrono. Based on Hans Hilfiker's 1940 design for the Swiss Railway, it wasn't a clunky diving watch that says, "I own a plane." Nor was it something too fancy or overpriced. I appreciated its utilitarian design. I loved the way its red second-hand jumped forward before each minute. I loved the stainless steel case, its circular solidity, its lack of jewelry, the straight lines, and those other little circles clicking around, making sense of the universe in ways I could not fathom.
I'm now told that the thing gets people into the London Design Museum for free, and that it's revered by watch-seekers, even those who throw down thousands to own an IWC that looks like a Timex. I liked it before I knew any of this. I considered it indubitably clear, loved how light it felt on the wrist, its simple black band. This was a watch I could wear all the time. And it said just a little about me: That I appreciate good design. That I consider clarity an art.
Which is why I was floored when my fiance read my mind--after learning all about how nuts I am concerning what I put on my wrist--and actually gave me the watch I privately loved for our engagement. I hadn't expected an engagement gift. I didn't know prospective grooms received anything other than a story to tell others about buying The Ring. Maybe others don't; I do appreciate how lucky I am.
But I am also now saddened in the wake of what happened last Friday, when, at 300 Medical Plaza, Los Angeles, the building that houses the practice of a haughty UCLA doctor, in Westwood, my watch was lost. Maybe forever.
It might be of some significance that I had been nervous to see this doctor. Not because of what he might decree. But because he probably wouldn't have anything to say. These days, I get sent to lots of doctors because of some medical mysteries. This is an age when doctors don't have to ponder if the out-loud thinking could be used against them in a court of law. That doesn't apply to many of them, of course. I've had excellent doctors. But lest we forget, doctors, and there are a lot of them, are just people like you and me, and some of them, like many Americans, don't want to work very hard. Someone's either special--communicative, and willing to go the extra mile--or he's not. Humanity, insight, and accomplishment in our meritocratic culture often don't go hand in hand with anything else.
Pardon the tangent, but this is what was consuming me as I left my latest unproductive appointment with a world famous specialist: when I forgot to put my watch back on after the exam as I trodded out the room with loosely tied shoes. I didn't realize I had left the watch there until an hour later as Lina and I ate lunch in a restaurant, calming our nerves with artisan cheese.
I nearly regurgitated the food when the thought hit me. My watch. Not here. I spazzed. A wanna-be starlet at the outdoor cafe scoffed. I sipped some ice water and cleared my throat. I looked at Lina squarely. I gargled without trying, eggplant still in the throat.
"It's gone. My watch. I lost it."
"You lost it?"
"At the doctor's office. I left it there."
"Oh, god. You got me worried. I'm sure it's still there. Wait, are you sure you left it there? They probably have it. It's probably at the desk. Someone turned it in."
"I know I left it there," I said. "Remember how when I signed out, I didn't have it on my wrist to tell the time?"
"Yeah," said Lina. "And I also remember you having it to check the time on your way in."
"It's been so nice not to have to look at my phone to tell the time anymore."
"You lost your watch."
"I lost my watch."
"We'll go back."
"I'll call."
"You'll get it back, don't worry."
"Ok," I said, realizing only too well what the watch signified, how I'd feel if Lina had left her very expensive diamond ring anywhere but on her finger.
Did this seem like I didn't care about our engagement? About staying on the new path? That I took the whole thing all too lightly? Or worse, did it seem like I might not take it lightly but that I would drop it anytime some smug doctor with four important degrees on his wall would take the time to look me over? How could I have a family if I couldn't remember my watch after a doctor appointment? I was unhinged.
Then, in my wife's eye, I saw a tear.
I had lost the closest thing to an engagement ring I had ever received -- from the only woman I would ever want it from. I would get it back, though. Or would I?
Cut to: Driving hurriedly across Wilshire. Calling all kinds of automated machine-people at UCLA who couldn't, wouldn't connect me to a person. Checking the floor of my bag a million times to make sure I wasn't crazy. Racing around the medical campus' circular driveway, jumping out of the car and almost tripping into a closing elevator door.
* * *
[Note: The following change of tense must be accepted, because you're reading a blog...]
I'm in the basement of the building now, galloping into the doctor's office. I slow down, calm myself, so no one thinks I'm crazy (hah, this is neurology).
I explain the deal to the lady at the desk. She takes me to the room I used. The examination table flaunts fresh white starchy paper. The doctor is gone, the halls empty.
"It's not here," she says as she checks the floor. "It wasn't turned in."
"Who else was in here besides the doctor?"
"He saw you," she says, "then moved to another room."
"Who cleaned the room?" I ask.
"I actually cleaned the room," she says. "I didn't see it. And it would have been turned in if you left it here."
"I definitely left it here."
"Then it would have been turned in, or I would have found it," she said.
"Maybe the doctor has it?"
"Maybe. I'll have him call you when he returns. Maybe he took it and forgot to drop it off."
"Maybe..."
Was this a viable option, though? Could an Ivy League-educated chief of neurology have taken my beautifully utilitarian and artful watch/engagement gift?
I asked my friend Joe a couple days later, after repeated phone calls to the hospital and no results.
"Why couldn't he have taken it?" he said. "I bet there's a better chance he took it than the receptionist/room-cleaner. Those guys are meglomaniacs."
I agreed with him. My doctor had seemed meglomaniacal, no offense to other doctors I love.
But why would a Neurology Chief -- I imagined he led a tribe -- need a watch like mine? Didn't he earn a healthy six figures?
"It was a pretty nice watch," Joe said. "It wasn't fancy, but it was beautiful. Some people like to steal. Turns them on. Doesn't matter if they treat people with cancer or ALS."
"It was beautiful, wasn't it?" I said. Surely, a fancy doctor could also get off on stealing his patient's stuff. Or I could have just dropped it in the garbage pail. It's nice to fantasize.
I thought about my history with watches. How I never felt I was meant to have them, but simultaneously desired one. Not least some kid's yellow swatch in third grade, the one he could take into the pool his wealthy father had just christened.
I thought about how this one watch symbolized something about me I wanted to share. How my fiance had secretly known this without my having told her, and how she had found it for me. How I had slapped it onto my wrist before she had had a chance to engrave something on the back of it for me, stamping it mine forever.
Something about my impetuosity--my carelessless with objects; my deep reasoning for sometimes, randomly, challenging the world to take away what matters; my anger with people who don't take me seriously; my need to punish myself for continously seeking them out (even in a medical building), even when I know the right people are to be found elsewhere (perhaps a naturopath's house?)... Something like this had ripped this watch out of my reality.
I no longer had a reliable way of clocking time. I now had to take my spotty battery-dependent BlackBerry out of a pocket. I had to make an effort to get on the same wavelength with the rest of society, to now return to the out-of-it feeling I often walk around with; the half-there, half-gone attitude that always sees me nodding at others while I think about more pressing or bothersome concerns.
This was all somehow wrapped up in choosing a watch, wearing a watch, keeping a watch, and realizing that I had found the right person in my wife, confirmed the thousandth time when she had found the watch I had always wanted (i.e. when she had located for me the part of myself I'd always wanted to develop as I matured).
My friend Joe joked as he often does that this was yet another bad meta-sitcom script happening as my life. The rich doctor who has to steal your watch.
"Yeah," I said. "In the bad meta-sitcom, I'd return six months later, and he'd be wearing the watch. I'd ask him where he got it, and he'd say his wife had given it to him for his 25th wedding anniversary, how he'd always hated watches until this one, had never wanted to know the time if he didn't have to, had never liked wearing something on his wrist. Then I'd stare at him and he'd stare back with a smirk. A lone clarinet would play. Nothing would be said, and I'd cut to another scene with me driving home and arriving at my next meeting, an interview with a watch designer, late."
"That's exactly what it'd be like on a bad meta-sitcom!" Joe said.
"Yep," I agreed. Then I looked at the oven clock, a digital readout, across my kitchen to see what time it was. I had a men's magazine article due. A piece about some object for a periodical rife with ads for objects.
"Can you buy yourself another?" Joe asked.
"I can," I said. "Thankfully, the thing didn't cost 10 grand. And I didn't have the one Lina bought me for soooo long, right? I could get another now, re-write my memory like a hard-disk or flash memory, and in twenty years never even remember this mess. In the end, it's just something you wear on your wrist. It doesn't mean anything, right?"
"Sure," he said.
"Sure," I repeated.
Then I realized my oven clock was late. I had fifteen minutes to write an ode to another piece of matter that someone else could fetishize. The bad meta-sitcoms lack satisfying conclusions. Here was something I could count on.
Update (January, 1, 2011): The replacement watch my wife purchased for me after losing this one (!) was lost today in New York City, possibly in the garage below my brother's apartment. Mondaine no longer makes this specific model. My wife forgives me, and I wear a $30 Timex that receives compliments daily.
Update (January, 1, 2014): We found another one of these watches in Europe. You can't have it!
