Glass Shallot by Adam Baer

The Pressure to Say You're OK on the Stupid Cancer Show

 The Stupid Cancer Show had me on for a second time last night, and it was a roiling good time. The entire show's funny and informative, and my segment at about 24:30 takes us through an op-ed I wrote for the Los Angeles Times called The Pressure to Say You're OK. We also discuss asking the hard questions as cancer survivors--which include money questions and billing practices for a chance at financial transparency--as well as how recently the hospital associated with my alma mater (Johns Hopkins) decided I owed them thousands of dollars without me ever having seen a doctor there! Crazy but true, and the hunt for money to pay for this imaginary medical work only took a year to quash. Listen to the show right here.--Adam Baer

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Here's something charitable you can do before 2016 that will cost you nothing. Accept and defend “health diversity.” -- Adam Baer, The Los Angeles Times

On Leonard Bernstein, the Serenade, After Plato's Symposium

So it's Leonard Bernstein's birthday. Maybe you know him as the composer of West Side Story. Maybe you know him as a former NY Philharmonic conductor. But as many of you also know Bernstein was a great composer outside of the theater, and his concert music is very moving . One of my favorite violin concertos is a piece he wrote called the Serenade, After Plato's Symposium. It's a piece about love, and each part or movement is focused on a great speaker in the Plato work (for example, there's a Socrates section). It's a really cool and engaging way to put philosophy to music, or rather, to show how music can be inspired by a specific collection of ideas and talks. It's also rich with emotion and sometimes a lot of good fun. Here's a great recording of one of the more expressive portions with Bernstein conducting. I hope you have a chance to listen to it soon, and then if you like it, to seek out the whole work.--Adam Baer

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Good Morning by Gustav Mahler

One of the most important musical experiences of my life was participating in a young orchestra at Tanglewood that would learn and then perform Gustav Mahler's First Symphony, also known as the "Titan." It has one of the most life-affirming evocations of "good morning" baked into its first movement (just allow it to bloom), and it has been a sort of personal anthem for me.  Today is Mahler's birthday, and the best thing that I can do to share this experience with you is to recommend listening to this recording below. (And if you can't handle something so long, try the first movement, and then make your decision.) I owe a lot to this piece -- and to this composer. I hope that you may come to feel the same way, too.

--Adam Baer

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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

 

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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.

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Aaron Copland on his Birthday: The Violin Sonata by Adam Baer

Celebrate Aaron Copland's birthday w/this lesser-known piece of music, dedicated to a lieutenant who had died in the South Pacific. I played, among other things, this piece in my first jury at Peabody Conservatory of Music, and the looks I received from the uber-traditional violin teachers (my judges) made me shake. It was an untraditional choice -- a "cop-out," one of them said. But the more annoyed she looked, the better I played. For a Tanglewood kid there was no greater honor than playing Copland, especially in a room that was full of people craving Paganini.

*If you want to learn more about Copland have a look at an old-school microsite that I created, edited, and produced for NPR in 2000 when we celebrated the Copland Centennial.  -- Adam Baer

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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

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The Day Paul Mazursky Changed My Life (RIP)

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"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.

 

 

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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.

Adam Baer

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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.

RIP, Paul Mazursky.

 

                    -- Adam Baer, @glassshallot

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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

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..."

LinkedIn Congratulations

I appreciate how LinkedIn asks you to "congratulate" a connection on his/her birthday. One's best accomplishment is, to be sure, Not Having Died Yet.

For more comments about managing to stay alive, check out my new advice column at The Awl: "Ask Somehow Still-Alive Guy."

Thanks, and live strongly skeptical about people who tell you to Live Strong,

Adam Baer

 

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.

 

 

Morgan Babies

I was recently in New York, spending time with family, when I learned of my baby nephew's seemingly natural affinity for Lee Morgan. His father, my brother, would keep it on in the car as we drove around the city, and then in his home. I'd missed listening to it while watching New York, or any east coast city, roll by. The playing, clarity, stands alone. Morgan sadly didn't make it past 33, and he would have been only 75 today. But he's still very much alive for many of us, including the newly born. 

The Future of Sheet Music, My Family's Literature (Spring '13 VQR Essay)

In 2004, when I first wrote about digital sheet music, for the New York Times, pre-iPad, new gadgets were just being sold to display it for traveling musicians like David Bowie's bandmate Mike Garson and violinist Izthak Perlman, both of whom kindly spoke to me for the story. But sheet music has always been a weirdly tense topic, full of salespeople and schemers: Back then, Harry Connick, Jr. (who, of all technologists, has a patent on a digital sheet music reader), had chosen not to comment on the topic but the way my editor had re-arranged my reporting on his lack of interest angered his representative, enough to insinuate legal threats (so, basically sheet music made friendly Harry Connick want to sue me). Then there was the CEO of one of the companies who claimed repeatedly that he had nothing to do with another, which we only found out after digging through his lies to us after the fact. The story -- its subtext, anyway -- turned into a piece about two companies suing each other. Not our intention.

Sheet music should not inspire fights and deception. Or should it?

In my new Spring 2013 VQR piece, "Sound + Vision," I argue that sheet music is literature (a method of storytelling), and I try to explain how it functioned that way for my family as well as discuss its future and some advocates' fears that fewer people seem able to and interested in reading it now more than ever. Is that true? It's hard to know, and I hope that my guess is wrong. What I do know is that a lot of people are creating innovative sheet music solutions for the digital space, and that despite music-budget cuts, plummeting keyboard instrument sales, and music store deaths, a lot of kids and adults want to play music. It's no surprise that the world is always changing, but notated music is in fact coming along for the ride. And thank Life that it is. I want more children to grow up being read to from the piano, or some kind of instrument, and being able to read that way themselves. 

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

Cancer Brought me to David Rakoff (RIP) -- by Adam Baer

Cancer brought me to David Rakoff. Like him, I survived Hodgkin’s Disease as a young adult. Directly following my graduation from college it occurred to me that I should curate and edit an essay collection about young people whose ascents—not into careers so much as full adult lives—had been quashed or at least delayed, sometimes chronically, by infirmity. He quickly agreed to write a piece for my book, and he kindly referred me to the late Lucy Grealy (Autobiography of a Face), a cancer survivor herself, who agreed to contribute to the anthology, too. I would pair hugely successful talents like these writers with my own work and that of other young writers who had yet to break through.

I never got around to completing the project. Soon after its conception I fell ill again, had to work, had to make excuses not to devote time to something that could not finance my hospital holidays. It was a shame, not least because it kept me from getting closer to some of the great people who would have contributed to the project. Soon, we lost Lucy Grealy. But David kept on writing, living.

Before I knew it, I’d moved to Los Angeles, lost touch with some of these more senior literary influences, found myself picking up piecemeal work just to get by. This happens when you’re riding the bumps of chronic illness and the effects of the sub-lethal treatments you have weathered: frightening, sometimes random occurrences, perhaps secondary cancers, that can keep anyone unfocused, on edge. Waiting. But I kept reading and listening to David.

Recently, to my delight, I learned from a magazine that I could not publish a specific essay they liked because the publication had already commissioned one from David that touched on similar subject matter. “You’ve been Rakoff’ed,” it was said. I felt proud. I was glad not to have published something so that the world could have more David. I’d get them next time, find another outlet. In my last very brief note from David he apologized for a “long delay” in responding to me. He’d only taken a few days. Months go now before I might write or hear from a very close friend. David lived in Realtime.

This is not a formal memorial essay or an obit. I didn’t know David well enough to write the former; the latter I leave to the death-writing pros. I just want the world to know how much this man meant to me and to my work. I sometimes lose track of my projects, find myself derailed for one reason or another—an MRI, fight with the insurance company, a need to pay my rent, self-imposed punishment and exile for not being Half-full enough. But I was about to revive this anthology project soon (enough already with believing that if I finish it I may end my own story) and ask for David’s contribution again.

His life, the idea of it—albeit in a disconnected, remote way, perhaps how some of us feel that we know those who send us e-mails—helped keep mine moving forward. That void will not be filled by another more senior, more accomplished, more everything writer. What's bizarrely sad about the loss of David Rakoff is that his first piece about illness concerned his guilt for having only a lower-stage case of Hodgkin's. He wrote about feeling like a "cancer tourist." As a colleague remarked this morning: "wonderfully self-effacing." 

David will be deeply missed, on the page, the radio, the stage, and very occasionally, in the inbox. He gave me hope, direction, without knowing it, and despite our now-searchified, GPS'd world, that is often a very hard thing to locate.--Adam Baer

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

 

 

Did Facebook Delete A Writer's Attempt to Use Timeline as a Narrative Tool?

Today I posted "content" in an attempt to use Facebook Timeline in a humorous, narrative way; I was kidding a little, but I thought it could be fun to really use the software to create a comedic, serialized micro-narrative made of short status updates. The post was commented on by a couple of friends, and then removed by someone other than me. I then discussed this in another status update with those same friends. That was then promptly removed by someone other than me. I then reposted the content twice, and now I do not see any of this on my page. If Facebook would like people to care about its IPO -- and that's a foregone conclusion, they do, because billions of dollars are concerned, but let's talk about regular people -- they should not delete writers' attempts to use their tools to create and engage with an audience, in jest or more serious ways. The aforementioned content (copied below) is far from genius and merely average, but I posted it here, which is less "buggy" a virtual "place" and likely watched by fewer programmers who police and react to user content. Perhaps this was all just FB software problems...but if so, who can trust FB with content you do not backup elsewhere. I mean, what if this stuff was actually good?

Here is the attempt at humor I posted, related to the ABC Show Revenge. Do you find it inappropriate?

"When I was 10, a high-school senior in my Monte Cristo-like neighborhood was hired to hang out with and shoot hoops with me before my parents returned home from work. One day, the kind young man suggested I find someone to buy me a tape of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run.” So, I did, and the next time he appeared, he “borrowed” it, never to return or answer our many calls again. Now, as a rational adult, I plan to use Facebook Timeline, narratively, to track down this man for a final confrontation. Would any of you care to follow this meaningful adventure? I shall call it “My Facebook ‘Revenge’ / Season One: Born to Run.”

I shall move slowly, follow clues, keep my emotions at bay, and friend anyone close to this man and his especially heinous crime, crossing each one off my list one by one. It will be sweet to one day recover this low quality recording, if it still exists, uncompressed and possibly warped. But the ultimate prize will be hearing this man sing under duress the lyrics: “The highway's jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive / Everybody's out on the run tonight but there's no place left to hide.”

 

AFTERNOON UPDATE: Facebook was briefly down this morning, and I wouldn't want to think they'd target one person, so it's quite possible that's what happened. Still, the "dangerous"  keywords used in my posts could have triggered a moderator or bot to remove them at different times (people observed their staggered removal individually), and the critique and untraditional use of Timeline the day after FB's IPO announcement is definitely something they might try to quash. 

The important issue remains: Can we trust FB to hold our original life-content as Timeline promises? I'd use a few backups, and make sure you already own the rights to anything you publish anywhere.

Leasing Los Angeles

The piece in text form, here.--Adam Baer

"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

 

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!"

--Adam Baer

extremely original facebook-status updates from my network, posted during tonight's debate

In Chronological Order, from the most recent:

1. Mr. V "is mad that Joe the plumber just charged me 250,000 to unclug a drain."
    COMMENT: "I want his publicist. Dude's gonna be on Entourage next week."
2. MS. X "is watching the debate. thank you dvr. thank you."
2. MS. Y "thinks an angry old man sitting across the table from world leaders is NOT something I want."
3. MS. A "wouldn't call Palin a "role model" for this woman."
4. MR. C "is wondering if anyone knows a good plumber."
    COMMENT: "Plumbers do not pay taxes. They get paid in cash. And like waiters, they do not declare and pay taxes on a good portion of their independent income. Most plumbers make more than teachers, police, or fireman. So the candidates should have picked a teacher or lumberjack or barrista as an example"
5. MS. A "pro-choice doesn't mean pro-abortion, a-hole."
6. MS. F "thinks Obama is a class act."
7. MS. T "is thinking McCain doesn't know he's on split-screen."
8. MS. E "thinks McCain looks and sounds desperate"
9. MS. F " is amazed at Obama's restraint."
10. MS. F "wants to know what the Great Society was... I must not have been paying attention in American history."
11. MS. F "thinks McCain is really grasping..."
12. MS. G "is debate."
13. MR. V "is not going to hold back when watching the debates."
14. MS. J "knows her autistic kid is in good hands with Sarah because she 'understands special-needs children.'"

10 days since updating anything on Facebook, and I have to say, I feel such so clogged with  unexpressed emotion, I just don't know what to do...

too many connections

interlude

THE CHIPS ARE FALLING.

forget the desert: moses was all about the waterfront

"Try to see it my way" or "Welcome to LA, Rock-band mediator edition"

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

shallot origins, or old family records sometimes yield more than tales about ridiculous grudges

vintage shallot

When I was just getting started and the Atkins diet was everywhere, I did a little humor piece for McSweeney's. But in the spirit of a doctor who just told me to cut out carbs--are we really that advanced Mr. Cedars?--let's reminisce from the days of meat.

REVIEWS OF NEW FOOD
"Atkins Beanit Butter"

by Adam Baer

You're fat. You need to lose weight. You eat too much, but there's certainly got to be a way around that. At least that's what you thought when you started Atkins. But now you're finding that the mesmerizing tray of salted chicken-thighs glistening in the Ron Popeil Showtime Rotisserie isn't enough for a solo low-carb dinner. Your three-pound chuck steak family-pack, broiled to perfection, is flying right though you by the beginning of Must-See-TV. Your $9 block of Parmesan is light fare, despite your cardiologist-brother's characterization of it as "the most potent mass of cholesterol I have ever seen anyone ingest." You need something to really stick to your ribs. But you can't gorge yourself on PB&Js like you did when you ditched ninth-grade chem lab to run back to your house and binge while attacking your father's porn collection. You've made a "mature decision" about how you will "view food" and the "act of eating." And that's where Atkins Beanit Butter comes in. With less than one gram of "Net Carbs" per two-tablespoon serving, there's no stopping your nostalgia for tongue-slathering Skippy. Gorge on the nut-buttery goodness of this high-protein soy product and feel completely at ease that you haven't cheated on your new, disciplined "lifestyle choice." Spreadable on new Atkins Bran-A-Crisps, and a perfect lead-in to a bowl of Atkins Nutlettes—the "crunchy crispy" cereal-and-milk-flavored treat sweetened with the low-glycemic "Sugar Not" for those carb-controllers hankering to revisit memories of midnight dorm-room Fruit Loops.

-------

Also check out "Vote for me: A Commodore 64"--a humor piece back when we thought Obama was a Mac! (For the record, all forms of computers are hating me this week, and I work on PCs but hate Vista.)

why everyone loves my alma mater (at least in hollywood and baltimore)

Because it looks the part. (You know, once you make it past all the faux-yuppification into the still-rougher-than-South Bronx crimes scenes.)

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.

vacanze da vacanze romane

Having been here for a week, for the fourth time in my life, it's pretty easy for me to confirm how much Rome and my adopted hometown of Los Angeles are alike. In Rome, everyone immediately looks you up and down, even the cheesy bridge-and-tunnel kids with the badly gelled hair who live miles from Cinecitta; everyone's pazzo, doing something unusually complicated on unusually expensive cellphones, especially when driving; and style trumps all (addendum: most Romans, outside your immediate family and favorite Hugo Boss salesman, will be nice to your face and speak crap behind your back). Tired of these inescapable Hollywoodisms as well as the tourists in every corner of the city (and every Dior, D&G, and Armani store)--even in the small, unusually good dining rooms and bars of the former slaughterhouse district, Testaccio--I recently sought refuge in my father-in-law's alpine region of Abruzzi (home as well to half of Madonna's family). Good thing, too, because aside from the best saffron, game, sheep's milk cheese, and mountainous national parkland in Italy, Abruzzi  (though it's been called "The Next Toscana," think more Colorado than Napa) also benefits from a lack of tourism. Which doesn't mean you won't find great restaurants and hotels here; just that they won't be overrun with tacky, in-your-face, fanny-pack-waisted Rick Stevesians and the guidebooks that they love--or worse, B-level American celebrities. After a fast two hour jaunt east from Rome, last week, I arrived in the small, rustic town of Campo di Giove, set deep under the imposing Majella mountains and just minutes from the medeival city of Sulmona, birthplace of Ovid and that Confetti (candied almonds) your significant other will likely adore as much as L. Locals, and there are plenty of young, single ragazzi still hanging in their hometowns--make sure not to say you are single as one friend did; you will get an invitation to a family dinner for the wrong reasons). Inadvertently stylish in 80's threads they don't care about (unlike some of the chic-geeks in Sulmona), these kids may win you over with genuine friendliness as quickly as, say, the freshly made annelini with speck and ricotta (which would no doubt be on tomorrow's Babbo menu if Batali ever scootered himself over), at the no-frills La Scarpetta di Venere. At this thin-aired pine-perfumed spot, on a recent night, the young locals gathered to watch Rome play Inter in soccer while scarfing down pizze (I recommend the local prosciutto as a topping; it's deeper in color and richer in flavor, with more substance, than the overbought Parma stuff you can find in any Dean and Deluca), taking turns saying hello to our Zia (yes, young people, in certain places still have respect for elders).  In the morning, you might want to follow my lead and dodge a brown bear, a few wild boars, and a wolf (if I was kidding, this would be mentioned with some degree of whimsy), while riding the funicular up to Gran Sasso d'Italia (the rock of Italy), the highest mountain in the country, for fantastic hiking and even a look at a hotel built by Mussolini in Campo Imperatore. It's true: I have a home here--in the city you see above--and thank god there's no Wi-Fi. I, however, never mind a night at the albergo diffuso Sextantio, a recently finished preservation-minded design hotel built out of the intact medeival Abruzzese town of Santo Stefano di Sessanio, right in the national park, where Philippe Starck bathroom fixtures sit in restored cave-like brick rooms for the socially conscious yet aesthetically driven travelers some of us know we have become. I'm OK with this kind of tourism; the place was purchased over ten years ago and painstakingly restored with natural materials allowing locals (those who remained) to enjoy a better quality of life each month. As the manager, Giovanni, tells me, it's not for everyone. You have "niche" clienti, I tell him. Yes, he says, nich-a. Like the philosopher? Not exactly, I say, but hotel managers who think philosophy at the drop of an Abruzzese wool cap definitely are a niche group. Ho capito, he replies: I GET you. Then we eat a few chunks of local pecorino, talking soccer, while an American in a rented Alfa drives by, almost hitting a deer, he is so focused on the combination of his G.P.S. system and the panino he bought at an Auogrill on the autostrade. Oh, Abruzzi, am I hurting you--and hence slowly poisoning my escape--with such a post?  I will have to care for you as I introduce you around.--A.B.

an even trade: la farmers' markets for campo dei fiori?

How different are Italy's farmers' markets from California's? Having morphed into an Angeleno over the last few years, it's a tough question to answer, especially comparing swank Los Angeles and central Roma. In Larchmont, land of Yuppified Hollywood, you can find, on a Sunday morning, some of the freshest farmers' purple cauliflower, blood oranges (well, no longer this week), meyer lemons, and fava beans. But today, in Roma's Campo dei Fiori, all was alive and well even if I could not find blood oranges there either. I admit that I moved to California from New York after a decade-long love affair with Italy. For me, it was an escape from Washington Heights to America's Italia. I found even Hollywood (well, its hills and lemons) Italian. Still, while I didn't today venture so far into the unvisited Roma as my T+L colleague Gary Shteyngart did last year in Testaccio (Campo dei Fiori is, after all, one of Roma's most famous markets, filled with tourists and lame ristorantes selling everything from panini to "real, Italian" pizza and gelato as well as an amatriciana and carbonara for the Carmella Sopranos of the world), it was nice to be in the company of some fresh zucchini flowers, yelping fish salesmen, and plant seeds that honestly declared their status as "semi-Italian." What that means, I am not sure. But how many people in Los Angeles are from Southern California? And just where did they get their blood orange varietals? Allora...--AB

Not Just Hall of Famer Rod Carew

Aside from people asking me if I once had a relative named Max (my last name is Baer; Max Baer was a famous Jewish boxer), I never really thought about the influence my people had on athletics. That is, I never really thought about their influence beyond what I as an agnostic but cultural Jewish self-identifier gleaned from "Great Jews in Sports," perhaps the funniest book in the world, which was given to me as, it was to many a doughy young student, as a tacky Bar Mitzvah gift so new men might read about Sandy Koufax and dream of being more than violinists, lawyers, studio heads, and writers. At last, however, "Orthodox Stance," Jason Hutt's documentary about Ukranian boxer and Orthodox Brooklyn Jew Dmitry Salita proves that I don't have to return to old stories about Rod Carew to get inspired about an athlete who knows his Torah. The film, which opens tomorrow at LA's Laemmle Music Hall Theater, follows the 21-year-old from the Starret City boxing club as he and his 80-year-old African-American trainer move from relative obscurity to a deal with boxing impresario Lou DiBella and an honorary mishpucha that includes Hasidic musician Matisyahu. What the film doesn't explore—why this mild-mannered kid with friends of all faiths and colors turned to a conversion-happy chabad and extreme boxing discipline in the wake of his mother's sudden death to cancer, and why his brother and father aren't really a) religious or b) a part of the story—seems to hang in the air like an uneaten matzoh ball. But the boxing footage is fantastic. Dmitry, a welterweight, may dress like any hood from Brighton Beach, but he lays into his opponents with the passion of a young Sylvester Stallone. It's also good fun to watch Dmitry scuffle with his extremely stoic brother: he shouldn't wear a wrinkled suit to a press conference ("But it's DKNY," his brother exclaims). And it's cool to know that a pro boxing outfit will delay your matches beyond Shabbat so you don't have to piss off God just to knock down another heathen. Of course, the flick's no "Rocky Balboa." It's much more real and hence mildly dry. But in an age when a Hasidic actor's shunned by his Williamsburg community for attempting to act in a film with Natalie Portman, it's cool to see a present-day Great Jew in Sports balance his jabs and High Holiday prayers.

"Orthodox Stance" opens April 11 at Laemmle's Music Hall. 9036 Wilshire   Blvd (Doheny)
Beverly Hills, CA 90211. 310-274-6869. www.laemmle.com

Striking Out: Writing Without the WGA in LA

[Cross-published at The Huffington Post]

"So, are you on strike?"

"Nope."

"But you're a writer?

"Not that kind of writer. Not right now."

"Then what do you write?"

"Articles, columns, essays. You know, for newspapers and magazines. I'm also working on a book."

"Oh."

"Well, at least you don't have to picket."

"That's true."

* * *

Before I moved to Los Angeles, it was nearly fantastical to be a writer for reasons that went way beyond in-the-moment job satisfaction. I lived in New York City. I worked for a newspaper but also freelanced for magazines and book publishers. I reviewed and reported on operas, records, and books. ("That's work?" my friends in other professions would ask with jealous glints in their eyes. "That's what we wait for the weekends to enjoy!") As a writer, I might every now and then eat at a popular, brand-new restaurant or visit an unusual city. I wrote essays and sometimes just had to reminisce. Other times, I spoke to unusually influential people: a musician, famous businessperson, TV personality. There were truly smoky book parties to attend -- illuminated by the presence of seasoned authors dancing in lockstep through clouds of unedited wit. And when I was working-working, I stayed home, comfortably, or hit local cafes, while my nine-to-nine friends claimed to feel trapped inside the institutions that had claimed their lives. To be a writer in New York City--one that left the house -- meant seeing people actively reading your articles on the street. Living the life you often wrote about. Being a beloved cog in the urban wheel. You were a vital part of society, and even if you didn't rake it in, you garnered some respect, if only for trying your hand at the profession.

As an Angeleno, the rules changed. Here, Writers with a capital W didn't just speak to top showrunners on the phone for 20 minutes; they had lunch with them at Katsuya. Three times a week. Because they worked with them. Here, Writers got re-si-duals (I often had to say the word slowly so as to stave off a complete meltdown about the fact that jokes people had written in the past continued to pay for their organic lattes well into retirement). Here, Writers drove fancy cars, owned (even small) homes, and could afford to have children! They had kick-ass health insurance. A strong union. Retirement plans. Acupuncturists! Lawyers on retainer. Abs!

One time, after just having arrived in L.A., I even saw a Writer dating one of the world's biggest female movie stars; he wooed her with his words, a local friend said. (The words she had heard via a surround sound theater -- L.Ron forbid she would have had to find them in a publication that she would have had to read.) In L.A., being a Writer meant something else entirely -- studio development deals to just, well, "develop"; weeks in the Maldives; enough money to actually buy the eco-friendly hybrid cars and organic produce. That oh-so-coveted status that connotes respect, at least in LaLaLand.

The tales of woe Hollywood Writers told -- "Moron actors make so much more than us; we might have to go on strike; my Mac just broke and now I have to buy a new version of Final Draft; they didn't even buy my script for low-six figures, and now they're not going to make it until 2010..." -- just didn't seem to elicit very much sympathy in me. Of course, screenwriters existed in New York, too, but they were a lot harder to find and seemed to co-exist more naturally with other scribes. Here, print writers (at least the majority of us) were definitely second-class citizens.

Of course, I still told people that I was writer when they invariably asked my profession at social gatherings, and sure, I still felt -- and feel -- lucky to be able to make a living the way I do. But when it was clear I wasn't a Writer (as in I hadn't created The Sopranos or even just the shmucky Comedy Central show of the month), they usually didn't care to speak about very much. Hell, neither did I; I just spotted J.J. Abrams on the other side of the room, too.

Yes, there are novelists here as well as the occasional literary celebrity. But c'mon -- we all know most of 'em are just in town to lunch with the agents that had arranged for the optioning of their work. Or else they wrote Bruce Wagner-like novels and delved into print work to be oddballs. Alterna-scribes. Or else they worked for local media, including one of the best newspapers in the country. In any case, they didn't quite blend the same way.

But for just a few months in Los Angeles, that wasn't the case. There was a Strike! The Writers -- and yes, even those without all those fancy deals and high wages, even those truckloads of unemployed Writers who were still clamoring for a chance -- didn't have anything to do. They flooded my favorite café. Asked what I was working on. Seemed to care. "Oh, you get to visit faraway places and then write about them for travel magazines? You get paid to read your favorite authors? To dig into a true-life news story that has gotten you so worked up, you want to get to the bottom of the mystery? To pen an essay about your opinions?" There were even moments of genuine jealousy. That is, before the Writers learned what a top newspaper or even a national magazine paid for an article. You could tell them you got $700 for a newspaper feature or ten times that for something in a men's monthly -- it didn't matter. "You mean you don't get something for those stories every year?" they'd ask. "You mean that's just a one-time payment?" That's when I realized: These men and women didn't need a travel magazine assignment to see Italy. They probably rented villas there at the drop of a hat.

It has to be chronicled for posterity: Most Los Angeles writers who haven't yet joined the WGA and continue to peck away at careers in writing for publication -- don't degrade us by calling us journalists; here "journalist" is almost as bad as "paparazzo"; it doesn't mean you're smart, sadly -- had their moment in the sun during the Writer's strike. We supported our Final Draft-clicking brethren. Some of us even picketed with them. But there never was a time like these last few months for non-screenwriters in Los Angeles. Hell, I even got a table at Katsuya on a Saturday night. At 8 p.m.

Am I sad that some of my friends and screenwriting colleagues are about to go back to work? Not at all. Some weren't working to begin with, and some weren't making all those millions even if they have jobs. I kid about all the screenwriters rocking the high life. I know it's just a minority. Of course, I'm not sure that their New Deal is as awesome as they say it is -- is it me or will ABC just cycle old Lost episodes off the web before the 17-day cutoff, leaving plenty of Writers without pay for some of the most heavily watched Web streams? But I am not sad. I also mess around with scripts. Who knows: One day, maybe someone will option one of my articles or books, and then I'll adapt the thing and become David Duchovny in Californication. Maybe I'll even get wealthy enough to have a drug problem. Or become friends with an actor who continues conversations even though he just got a role on a new network sitcom.

Let's just not forget what a glorious time it was to be a non-WGA writer in sunny Hollywood, throughout the 2007-2008 winter. I hear that a "journalist" -- you know, one of those guys who wrote some book probing the cultural history of a culinary condiment -- even got a date with a real movie star. Ok, she's just on a cable series. But still. That's progress.

* * *

P.S. Today, I received an extremely kind letter from a top screenwriter, regarding an article he wrote. But don't get too excited -- the guy is also a fantastic playwright from neither New York or L.A., and never let any of this nonsense go to his head.

floating

Looking Back at the Happies

It's been over 10 years since the publication of this article about Los Feliz. I'd be scared to ask the author of this article how she feels about the neighborhood now that you can spend $30 for a piece of conventionally raised fried chicken at the cafe around the block from my house.

Mayo Dispatch 10: Medical Tourism and Bad Eats

[Note: Please scroll down to Mayo Dispatch 1, and then scroll up for each new dispatch, if you're interested in reading this account of my time a the Mayo Clinic in a chronological way. Otherwise it will just run in retrograde. Herewith, dispatch 10. ]

I have to prepare a last Mayo Dispatch, as I'll be kicked out of my Hilton in less than an hour, forced to roam Rochester's tunnels and skyways until the last shuttle of the day(!) can get me to my plane four hours early. Yes, there's no shuttle to the airport here after 4:15 p.m. on Saturdays. I don't get it either. But one of the nice things about being stuck in the tunnels--or rather one of the decent things I found do to in the tunnels--was traipse about a bookstore the way I once did as a young New Yorker. There's a large one adjacent to one of these tunnels, and I've spent time there, inside its "cafe," drinking subpar mochas while I page through 10 mags  and a few new notable books in each sitting--an activity that once made me want to be a writer and eventually led to me meeting my wife. Still, I haven't really done this since moving to Los Angeles--maybe it's the fact that you have to drive everywhere there. In New York, you just often have to kill time on foot--so where do you go? Bookstores and coffee shops. At any rate, it was at the Rochester superbookshop where I noticed a great and large "official" tome celebrating the Sopranos, written by Brett Martin with the cooperation of the cast and producers. Martin, a writer whose works have appeared in some of the same mags as mine (although let it be said, that he has truly outdone the author of this here Shallot with a hilarious and moving output of articles and essays for GQ, among others for This American Life, Vanity Fair, and beyond), seems to have won (hell, earned) the ultimate score here for Sopranos fans, of which I consider myself one. The book is extremely entertaining and does feature some information that has escaped even some of the show's scholars, but I also must admit that I had so much time to kill in the bookstore, that I read the whole thing. The point of all this? That sometimes you need a little distraction, and if your favorite TV show of all time is over, you didn't bring your DVDs, and you're stuck in a bookstore, well, by all means look for the official book celebrating your favorite show and see if it isn't great. Martin's book, for its part, deserves to be purchased wildly as a holiday gift, not just read in a store by word-mooching latte drinkers, so maybe get this one for your brother, dad, mob-crazed sister, or cousin--and certainly get it for anyone needing to dissolve from scary real life into pop culture references and diversions. It's fun to read about how Robert Iler basically got his role as A.J. just by repeating "What? No fucking ziti now?" 30 times in a tiny room on 72nd Street. But Martin has also elevated his book's genre with spot-on cultural criticism and articulate (but fun to read!) spotlights on issues in the show you may have never explored. Kudos.

How has the Mayo portion of my life ended? Well, last night we attempted to give Rochester's one tapas restaurant a try, and ended up with some seriously mediocre and overpriced food, one example of which had to be sent back. (I hate doing this, but honestly the food tasted like dirt, and I cook with sihtake mushrooms all the time, so I love the flavor that was supposed to permeate this risotto.) But Rochester being what it is--you mean my expensive plate of crap isn't great simply for being expensive?--the chef then sent the waitress back to tell us that he thinks the food tastes great and that we're wrong, but that he'll gladly do us the favor of removing the plate from our tab. How kind, I thought. After we just spent $12 on individual drinks (in Rochester!) with perhaps a quarter of an ounce of alcohol and endured your terrible pizza--excuse me, "Neopolitan pie"--as well as picked lemon aside one tiny piece of chicken that tasted like Ajax. One thing that appears certain about downtown Rochester is that while it remains podunk, some uppity entrepreneurs are attempting to upscalify the place and rob monied or simple less podunk Mayo travelers while flauting faux-sophistication. 

Have you ever heard of medical tourism? As medical charges increase in the U.S. and people don't necessarily want their procedures done at the nearest facility, it appears that a large group of travelers are hitting new cities and even leaving the country to receive medical treatment. And when these people aren't being cracked open like lobsters, sometimes they want to eat some. It seems like Rochester may be on the verge of turning into a medical tourism hotspot--it already has the built-in traveler base. But as it does, Mayo patients and even those traveling here for business need to be careful. Eating at one of these faux-gourmet restaurants is sort of like asking for psychotherapy from a schizo locked in an asylum. Other restaurants in town have been similarly Emeril-ized, but they aren't as offensive in their attempts to swindle. They either serve over-complicated food or bad attempts at the classics. This is much more acceptable to me. Nonetheless, read your Chowhound, and then still open your mouth with caution.

Mayo Dispatches likely to end now, though I may return with more info and commentary. But I have some nice newspaper articles to run on the west coast tomorrow, and I'd love to get back to some of the day-to-day. Keep your eyes open, however, for a large piece about this experience. It's definitely going to be a part of a forthcoming book as well as a script being developed with a partner right this very second. And yes, we can do this, even during the strike. (Thanks to all of you for writing, too.)

And now I walk out of hell and into the urban. Well, I fly, and it will take more than half a day to get there, but you get the drift. --Alexander Superpatient, Dec. 15, 2007 

Mayo Dispatch 9: Clinically Photogenic

Enlarge the above picture to learn about how Mayo has "one of the oldest and largest programs of medical photography in the world." Next draft pic? Mario Testino. Tell me you can't see it: "America's Next Top Model," Mayo Clinic Edition.

As Charles Mayo would have it (click on and enlarge the above pic to read his thoughts on how to tech people to stay well), this young man looks beautifully preserved.

"A surgical procedure should be planned so that the patient, with the least possible risk and loss of time, will receive the greatest possible benefit." Charles Mayo offered these words, seen in this exhibit of surgical tools, on display for anyone en route through the main building's subway level walkway. Did he have thoughts in 1930 on whether or not people would ever want to see the tools--even the historic versions of what we now employ--used to open up their body cavities for life-threatening procedures? America needs to know.

In the aforementioned subway level mall that takes many people to their hotels or healthy fast food establishments (we all eat the lowest cal sandwich at Subway, right?), there's an actual store run by the Mayo Clinic for sufferers of sleep apnea. This is both extremely useful and extremely hilarious.  'No more sleepless nights' is not what I think of when I see that Darth Vadaresque mask in the bottom right corner. But if it will stop the snoring that keeps Lina painfully watching Carson Daly as I sleep with the remote tucked under a leg or head or something else, I say, let's get into the holiday spirit and patronize the joint

Mayo Dispatch 8: The Penultimate

We were comfortably shocked with our final MMD meeting yesterday. He was a lot more openminded and seemingly more concerned than we had anticipated--understandable given our experience, but it craved noting. And, drumroll!, he also provided what might be an answer to the problem--but it is, to be fair, the easiest of answers and may not have popped up until now due to time as opposed to proprietary Mayo technology or insight.  If it's not the answer, we're only a little further beyond square one and must move on. We'll move on anyway, leaving Rochester tomorrow at last for the Big Pomegranate I still call home. But it should be chronicled that if I hadn't asked yesterday's skin-sensation technician to test the right foot instead of the left, where I have permanent nerve damage from ankle surgery, she would have followed her orders to test the left, even though this information had been conveyed to MMD on Day One.

MMD also asked me if there were any other tests that I felt needed to be done. I appreciated the question--a doc who respects his patient's education about his own condition?--but I also didn't really feel that a doc should be asking a patient this sort of question and wondered if it wasn't just patronizing ego-candy. We want to believe in you, MMD--just do everything if you doubt yourself. Nonetheless, the man may have come through (or rather, my system may have made things more obvious, finally), and we'll find out more through the mail in the coming weeks.

So: Don't think you always come to Mayo for one (extended) visit and return with a cure, or even an end to your medical journey. That's sort of a misconception, and it should be known more widely that this place is much more like a major city university hospital than it is some super-unusual rare disease "let's get everything figured out immediately" kind of place. That said, some of its tests have been unusual and helpful, and it does figure out mysteries in one-week periods for others, I'm told. That's just not the majority. Too many people have told me that they return here frequently--not for treatment but for more chances to discover the culprit.

Another interesting Mayo fact: the docs don't trust pathology from outside labs. They believe their techs and docs do everything best. Which may be true but seems impossible in all regards on every day of the week. So they often hold onto biopsies from you longer than other places, and they also want to redo much of the testing themselves and then take their answers over anything else. It's less-than-curious in that creepy George W. Bush kind of way, and I worry about that sort of over-confidence and narrow-mindedness in every respect. But yes, they are good here. Retractions aren't necessary. But contractions of criticism about this place are. It's both less special and unusual than it wants to be, but it's also a fine, praise-worthy medical center. Let's just stop referring to it with religious devotion. In my case, it is helping me move in the right direction; it's not putting a stop to the trip.

Funny Rochester fact: We can't seem to find any movies to see here that don't have something to do with Christmas or fantasy or disease except for "I'm Not There," which we've seen.  I said to Lina: "That's an awfully artsy movie to be playing in a town obsessed with Fred Claus, I Am Legend, and the Chipmunks" (Could we combine both movies and pit Will Smith together with his cheeky friend Tom Cruise Hubbard?) But then I remembered where Bob Dylan grew up: Minnesota. It's also the place he eventually escaped, though. Thank J.C.--and Alvin--for that.

P.S. Some more fun facts about Rochester:

1. "Fine dining" establishments--and I use that term loosely--are open at 4:30 p.m. for dinner! Who's racing me to the early bird special? You don't ever need reservations here.

2. Hotel housekeeping employees *will* knock on your door at 8 a.m. if you don't have your Do Not Disturb door-hanger in full view on the outside of your temporary home.

3. The one store in the mall that sells mod home accessories--think Eames chairs and Alessi kitchen accessories--serves free chocolate toffee straight from a kitchen in Minneapolis! (That's how bad they need business...)

4. If I had gone to grad school in Minnesota--their MFA in creative writing dept once offered this here syntactically challenged blogger a fellowship that would have included having me teach a class on Hemingway--I might have had to come here pretty often for checkups.

5. Every time you have an test at the Mayo Clinic, the tech who comes to get you from the waiting room asks you to repeat your name and birthdate. I have tried variations on Alexander Supertramp just to see if I might get a smile or a scowl. I usually just get a  straight-faced: "Whatcha say?"

6. Lots of older folk here use the term "You bet" to say "anytime" or "you're welcome." Where does this habit come from? Was Minnesota a gambling hotspot at one time? Tell us in your next convoluted series, David Milch!

Mayo Dispatch 7: Digital Nature Interlude

There's probably nothing better for your spirit when you're foxholed up in a medical society--and this *is one contained medical community; everyone here has something to do with Mayo--than to escape it as thoroughly as you can. That proved physically impossible for us over the past few days. But thankfully we arrived with an academy screener of Sean Penn's "Into the Wild." I don't know that the movie was the best I've seen. But I do think Penn outdid himself in terms of visual and visceral scope. The film transports you (and in my case, reminds me why I've avoided a fulltime corporate job since the year following my undergraduate degree). I also don't believe like others that the flick necessarily glorified its protagonist: it showed him in frequent states of potheaded smuchkification for all his innate intelligence, ascetism, and Emory degree. Some people are just goofballs, and the film seemed to be honest about that. That Supertramp died so closely to supplies, a highway, and help seems only to enforce that notion. Maybe Penn could have made that more explicit about those facts. And maybe there could have been less original Vedder in the soundtrack. But locking up in a dark hotel room with a laptop DVD viewing session of this film after spending a day grappling with the unique blend of Mayo invasiveness and impersonality really brought Lina and I back home. L.A. may have the worst air in the country but it provides a lot more access to nature than Hell's Kitchen. After the flick, I put myself to bed re-reading Krakauer's Outside article, and thought yet again: This man is an extremely clear writer, but I don't know what his prose legacy will be. Which is not to say that every writer needs to be a great stylist. I love my plain sentences, my purist storytellers, my adventurers who return with tales that defy linguistic elan. But it seems to me that Krakauer's greatest feats have been finding (or living) content and packaging material with his pen. No pun intended. Still, "Into the Wild," the film, was about the best thing I could have watched last night, and Penn deserves some serious recognition for his work. Perhaps Krakauer or the new gen of Krak-type writers should look into the young pioneers who venture into the depths of the elite medical world as patients; these extended trips and transfixing diagnosis procedures should be viewed as intensely as wilderness. There are certainly more ways out of Denali--if you're smart.

Mayo Dispatch 6: Purple Haze & One Inspirin' Gift Shop!

Earlier today, I recorded a little podcast (still in digital form thanks to voice-recorder software that’s failing to work with my Vaio) as Lina and I traversed the built-in skyways and "subways" (sans any actual train system) that link many Rochester buildings with different Mayo towers--so you can grab a Subway sandwich on your way to a shoe shine and lame doo-dad shop before getting stuck with needles or donating your kidney to science. Despite those virtues, however, it's a bizarre and poorly designed infastructure crippled (pardon the term) with counter-intuitive turns and connections. In fact, it's easier to walk outside to many places, including our "connected" hotel. But it's Minnesota, and there's snow on the ground. So if you’re in a wheelchair, like so many people here, it’s best to roll in comfort. On the other hand, many of the walkways are super-warm, and if you’re not in a wheelchair but also have some trouble doing a lot of walking (it can be miles to get back to your room through the indoor hallways), the “subways” only cause you more distress.

A funny tidbit about our podcast: We recorded it on the device we used to record the consult we had with one of Mayo’s top surgical minds. He really was the most impressive person we had met here. He offered to go beyond his assessment (that issues on the surgical side of my condition are stable) and “shop around” his thoughts to other surgeons and radiologists, concluding with a letter he’d send to both my home and temporary holiday-season address in New York. It might have been illegal to record this conversation, and I know this. I haven’t looked into Minnesota convo-recording laws yet. (I know it’s illegal in Cali but not in New York, for instance.) Still, it’s good to have a record of exactly what docs tell you. And if they’re not admissible in court later down the road (I’m more than half-kidding), so be it. Conversation tapes don’t always have to be legally made to inspire doubt on the part of lawyers and judges. Sometimes tapes lead to cause for investigation! In this case, it was just nice to know we have our surgeon’s thoughts on record.

We’ll perhaps use the recorder, tomorrow, with more ambition. We meet with MMD (my [primary] Mayo Doc) after his series of tests to learn his concluding thoughts. He moved up our appointment from Friday to Thursday even after I left him a note at his giant departmental desk explaining that we hope he received our biopsy slides from NYC (finally confirmed minutes ago), and that we hope he consulted with specialists who could be helpful in this mystery diagnosis procedure—in our case a neuro-immunologist and/or stem-cell-transplant-experienced oncologist who has seen patients with my history as well as some other specialists. Our response to this note? We received a newly printed itinerary of medical appointments from a secretary at the surgeon’s office an hour later. In other words, there was no personal communication. We just got a sheet saying that we now have appointments with specialists in the aforementioned departments next week and in January. Meaning, MMD expects us to stay in Rochester, M.N. for one week, doing nothing, to see the first doc, and then return in January to see the other before seeing him again.

Hell no to this, we say! MMD had his chance to be comprehensive and unusually helpful on Day One. We came to him for the Mayo approach of piecing together something complicated. He took his time, wasted ours, and didn’t think big or involve his colleagues in other departments, thereby breaking the unwritten but widely believed promise that Mayo does things differently than other hospitals. As I explained to Lina, it’s not that Mayo is renowned for always gathering a group of famous minds around a table to discuss your case from every perspective; it’s that they’re famous for the corporate, branding-specific concept of “group practice”: putting top specialists in one center together so you can be referred around in one medical center, thinking you’re getting the best of everything (often the case, but debatable) before a final decision on your case is rendered (also often debatable).

In the instance of the aforementioned baby with possible cystic fibrosis, the system seems to have worked: the parents arrived, thinking their kid had stomach problems, and were soon sent to a pulmonary doc who moved things in different directions for them. Neurologists—particularly the sort who don’t deal with the brain but with the nerves in the limbs, say—don’t seem to be as insightful and broad-thinking, even though their disorders often involve the complicated immune system. In my experience, the majority of them are technicians: they check your reflexes, prick you with pins, gauge your muscle potentials with needles, and then shock you with electricity before reporting the results. We came here for more: To meet a doc or team of docs who can do all this stuff with expertise in other fields of medicine and more systemic strategies. Let’s see if we get such results; after today’s events, we’re not optimistic.

Lina says that if MMD asks her tomorrow why a wire is sticking out of her sleeve (the wire from our voice recorder), she’ll say it’s connected to the battery that runs her wee, little heart. When she first said that, we laughed sarcastically. HAHAHA. Now that it’s been more than an hour since the comment, the thought seems to hang in the air like a matzoh ball. There's more gravity and truth in the mix.

Some comedy!

Because now that MMD has changed my last appointment with him, we do have a free 36 hours in Rochester. “It could be fun staying here,” said Lina. “We could go to the mall and holiday-shop!” We call this the D’Orazio optimism, but even Lina couldn’t convince herself and started laughing at her suggestion. Still, I don’t think she was kidding 100%, and I’d much rather see this quality in my partner than the “survivor realism” coloring my consciousness—a worldview most people would probably just call "depressing negativity tinged with black humor" despite my attempts to explain that I refuse to artificially “think positive” when I don’t have data supporting the future arrival of positive news. Is there something actually wrong with just not thinking or taking things as they come as opposed to “thinking positive?” I think I can still be buddies with Lance Armstrong and the Us Weeklyish live-strong camp while maintaining a little internal relativism and not trusting that everything is gonna be OK (unlike other patients here, J.C.--to say nothing of "Adonai"--and I never got along, believe it or not).

Perhaps I should have bought myself some prayers (yes, they're for sale!) in the Mayo Clinic gift shop (seen above), outside of which Mennonite volunteers direct people into elevators or explain where the history of Mayo exhibits lie deeper in the Rochester “subways.” I’d prefer reading Steve Martin’s newest book, in which he breaks down the germination of his absurdist comedy. This is a guy who knows something about how the world works. (It doesn't.)

Lastly, inspired by a Conan O’Brien rerun I watched on my laptop, here’s a medical SAT-style analogy:

(Most) neurosurgeons are to (most) Peripheral Nerve Neurologists as Confidence is to what? The answer: Lawsuit-worried, non-committal wishy-washiness found in people who watch their own asses before doing anything else. Seriously: Our surgeon today was oh-so-cool. He actually seemed to believe in what he was saying, cementing the notion that it's guys like these who should be consulted on all matters--even if they're wrong. Perhaps we should have asked him where to eat dinner--at least he would have said something with conviction. Last night, we had some "authentic" Chinese noodles that make 99-cent ramen taste five-star. But if he had told us they were good as we desserted on one shared Twix, we would have given him a badass high-five.

More as it comes…

P.S. We’re currently in a Hilton, and there’s a copy of Conrad H.'s “Be My Guest” in the bureau drawer (such pride on which to draw--huh, Paris?).  I’ve never seen a copy of this book even though I’ve stayed in Hiltons, so I find it sorta fun. Looks way more pleasant to read than more Mayo brochures—on everything from local activities (support groups, Dutch restaurants, yoga) to self-prep for various diagnostic tests. (My favorite directive? "Don’t use any mind-altering drugs for 18 hours." Who can—and should--stick to that? Talk about making your life really lame.) I shall perhaps give the kitsch book a shot after scouring the Internet for something about how to avoid making bad decisions like flying to the middle of nowhere for a Costco-quality attempt at getting all the medical advice you can from a so-called “elite institution.” What we’ve learned from all this so far? You don’t need to land in Rochester, M.N. for a comprehensive attempt at getting to the heart of a serious medical manner. You just need to find a well-connected doctor with a big, generous, highly functioning mind who actually cares about you. Meaning, it may be even less possible now than before.

But don’t leave this blog all blue: Remember, I’m the one who’s still kinda purple! And I have to say: It’s fun not seeming like an obvious Eastern European-brewed Ashkenazi-Caucasian Jew all the time. Especially in the friendly heartland, don'tcha knowww…

p.s. Says Lina to me: "I think you find inspiration in the tragedy of this trip, Ad." To this I just smile. "Well, shoot, inspiration is my middle name."

Mayo Dispatch 5: One liners

It was a day of tests, as you've read, so I really didn't have time to prepare anything cohesive. But here are a smattering of short thoughts.

+They give you light-up beepers at Mayo radiology. It's just that when your little red box lights up, you're not on deck for a seared ribeye.

+Today I had a fat aspiration. It's a test rarely done elsewhere. It has nothing to do with how fat I am, apparently, which is nice. But I still couldn't help asking the practitioner inserting the needles into my belly if she could take out a little more than planned. I wasn't met with a laugh, sadly.  I'm sure I was the 23rd person with that question today. But that's what they get for aspirating my fat. Trust me, it's some cultivated shit. I'm one well-fed, free-range, mostly Kosher bastard (which means a juicey breast). Whether or not I'm stress-free, however, is another matter.

+When I fist arrived, I was given autonomic nerve functioning tests, wherein I was tilted on a bed and given blood pressure tests as well as fitted with little round disks that burn and poke at you like saucers tipped with needles. (Fun? No. But not half as cruel as many of the things here people are asked to do.) During the test, the technician asked me if I knew anything about cold weather coming from L.A. I told her I am an original New Yorker. She then asked me why I moved to L.A. Was it for your job? she asked. Partially, I said. What do you? she asked. I'm a writer, I said. Oooh, she said. Movies, TV, books, or magazines? I do a little bit of everything. Whoa, she said. Do you write under your name? Of course, I said. Are you going to Google me? Not until you leave! she said, violating HIPAA privacy laws in an entirely new way.

+Which led me to wonder: What happens to famous people at Mayo? Are there names called out in the waiting rooms the same way they call ours?

+That didn't seem like much of a concern in the radiology dept. I was left in a long hallway of wooden stalls waiting to be called while a professional dairy farmer who looked to be about 25 ("Won the family's 200 acres when I hit 19," he said) and a machinist ("Shoot, I enjoyed loggin' for a few years in there between working on heavy equipment") chatted each other up, Brokeback-style.This wasn't completely new to me. I'm not some weirdo who's never met people without MFAs in poetry. But it was kind of odd listening to them size each other up, literally, while I stood there text-messaging like a wannabe-man. At the end of the day, it should be noted, however, that we were all wearing big blue gowns and looked equally like fools. And that we were all called for a similar test. Apparently you can need the same test if you write blogs or carry logs. Not surprising, but worth mentioning, I think, if only to provide you the image of the type of men who hit this place up. (I.E. For all of its rep as being a medical destination among the movie stars and America's wealthiest, I really haven't seen anyone here, including me, who doesn't look like he or she will pay through the nose for this care. Said the dairy farmer: "Sure is hard on the checkbook, this place. Then again, there's really no point to the checkbook if you're not kickin'.")

+Apparently, it's crazy in Rochester to ask the one food delivery service which Chinese food is the best. Are you getting a feeling that they don't like those antitrusts up here? If so, it only applies to cabs and Chinese food. Not doctors.

+At any rate, Lina believes word is spreading about us in town as if we're some couple of big-city hardasses who need to be avoided. Huzzah.

+One thing's for sure: Just because you have the checkbook for Mayo doesn't mean you have the brains to understand what disease you've just learned you have. Very sadly, a young mom on our shuttle phoned her friends incessantly this afternoon proclaiming happily that the mystery was nearly solved with her baby and that he "probably just has cystic fibrosis." A dark note to end on, I know, but it had to be mentioned. Her father sat next to her shaking his head in what could have been disappointment. For his sake, I hope he didn't know any more than his daughter--at least not for the moment. (One potential wrong-assessment possibility, of course, is that the baby could have also been up for more dangerous futures than CF. Immediate death, perhaps. Still, it was an odd thing about which to hear a young mom make four happy phone calls. In public.)

+Someone--a young doctor, actually--asked me today how "my axons" are performing. Then he laughed. I felt bad for him so I gave him a half smile and returned to trying to get my phone to provide me some information on the heart attack of known serial killer Alex Trebeck. What is...karma? Oops! Lost a halo...

Mayo Dispatch 4: All Bidness (Sorry!)

It was an unusual first day at the clinic-or maybe it wasn’t? I’m a newbie. I’m young and look healthy, remember? Anyway, nothing really much happened. After mall-walking through an enormous lobby, replete with fleets of empty wheelchairs (not including my friend above), we checked in at a massive desk and then received notice that there was no confirmation on whether or not my biopsy slides or reports had arrived from NYC.  Routine for hospitals (on the sending and receiving sides), but I was surprised there were no additional attempts made, especially given the “exceptional” service. I was, however, called in for my first consultation early. That was new. 

My Mayo Doc (MMD), the young man of the no-biography, was pleasant enough. (So pleasant, in fact, that I forgot to tape our conversation for your listening pleasure. Because that's what it would be, readers, right?) Still, when MMD found out that the biopsy slides hadn’t yet arrived, he asked: Why didn’t you just have the procedures done here? After waiting nearly one month for these biopsy results, after knowing that such results do take weeks, I answered plainly, “Because I wanted the results to be here for the clinic to assess.” He smirked, I think. But I don't wanna assume.

In fact, I couldn’t tell if he was laughing at me or just being smiley in that way that health psychologists (like Lina) teach med students to be (so regularly lacking are they of human social skills, that such classes are necessary). But MMD  seemed genuinely friendly. His rundown of my medical records and subsequent exam wasn’t exactly detailed (though maybe he’s the type who keeps a lot to himself). I also had to remind him that it might be beneficial for a certain type of surgeon to assess an MRI that I had given to his desk assistant. (I wasn’t told whether or not he had actually seen the film, but he agreed with my comment. Thankfully, I took the chance to make it.)

Then, I was told I’d have a number of days full with tests and that we (me, Lina, and MMD) would meet on Friday to learn “what [he] thinks.”  Kind of odd and independent for what I believed to be a “group approach.” Especially given that I wouldn't have chosen this person based on random biographical information--or the research he's produced. Of course, it’s possible there’ll be discussions about my 10 lbs of medical data (yes, I carry these in hard-copy form; more on that later in the week). I wasn’t told about group assessments, though. Instead, I was given a sheath of papers, stapled together with an itinerary of some basic and unusual looksees – including a tissue aspiration I had never read about. (100 points for originality, Mayo.) So, that’s what will happen for the next couple of days.

Test. Test. Test. Maybe some lunch. Maybe some water. Maybe I won’t wear my coat to the hospital tomorrow because it’s so damn cold here, every building is overheated to the point that you always feel like you’re in L.A.—you know, short of The Hills cast eating brunch at the table next to you. Another thing: You (meaning I) come to a major medical center for a chance to get to the bottom of a mystery condition most likely linked to a cancer you once beat but must remain careful about, and there’s no mention of including an oncologist or immunologist on the team? I mean, maybe an onc will get a phonecall from MMD, but I wasn’t told about such plans. Oh, MMD, you sly devil, you.

Bottom line, though? I feel as if I’m spending a lot of money—to say nothing of Lina’s time (mine at this point is besides the point)—and may be in store for nothing more than more confusion. Or at the very most, a few blanket statements that I can’t even trust given how casual all of this has seemed, despite the official testing, for which the hospital will be able to bill my insurance company thousands and make me sweat. I’m sorry I’m not 90 and disabled yet, but young people who aren’t children still deserve to be taken seriously. Let’s see how it goes tomorrow. So far, the trip’s just been more of a chance for Lina and I to be silly among a very barren midwestern city full of (literal) sickos. Only to then return to the hotel to watch Heidi and Spencer fighting it out in my beautiful homeland. Oh, the hills. We miss you and your fabulous moving photography of Angel Ciudad.

P.S. I know some of this hospital-trip reality (and disparagement) could be in bad taste for those whose last hopes lie in M.N. But I'm already here, and I need to be here, too. You gotta allow me some shenanigans. Even if the strike was over, TV just wouldn't be enough for me right now.

P.P.S. Guess what city only has only one taxi company to service it? Rochester, M.M. And guess what? They don't have enough cars to handle all the people who need to get to the Mayo Clinic for early morning appointments. So as much as you hate driving on thick sheets of ice, rent a car (and boycott the taxi company at the number 507-282-2222. They're not just a small taxi company; they're run by morons unique to the low -IQ businesses peppered throughout the city). Then again maybe you'll be smart enough to stay adjacent to the Mall of Medicine, a strategy we chose because we're not Sultans. Yet. You heard it hear first.

Mayo Dispatch 3: Waffles and Wha?

The wind howls in Rochester like the cries of nearly dead WalMart employees. 

Last night, we ate at the one Italian restaurant said by Chowhownders to offer quality sauce. Lina called it Ragu on a good day. My capers were as hard as, well, use your imagination.

Today, at breakfast, a nice old man asked me: "You goin' for a ride?"

I asked him: "Wha?"

He said, "To the clinic. When you going?"

I smiled, genuinely, and said, "Thank you."

Being vague can be fun.

Plus: How did he know I was going to the clinic? Was he watching my tears stream into the plastic bowl of froot loops on my table just moments before?

I kid. I didn't eat Froot Loops. Or weep.

That is, not until I saw two waffle irons set up to sear right next to a brilliant machine that dispensed  artery-clogging batter into plastic cups for your carb-induced suicide pleasure. See above for a picture of said device. If I were Tim Burton, I would have used it for a scene in "Sweeney Todd." Who says meat pies are the only ways to dispose of your victims?

* * *

Note to self: Get a good look at the Rochester business) eco-system. There have to be people in town to do business at or around the Mayo Clinic. Big Pharma reps. CT Scan techs. Construction reps. Hell, medical professionals. On our plane, there was a young sharp-looking whippersnapper with a garment bag that said "University of Pennsylvania Hospital." I've never been much of Philly fan, but is it really worth a year of your life to even come here for a fellowship? Probably, but at what cost? What's more, where do the rich docs and their families live? Not in this iced-over ghost-town. Although, if they did, I could potentially see their children starting some righteously innovative rock bands. Isn't that what happened in Scandinavia? Oh, I forgot: Scandinavia is far more interesting than the heartland of the U.S.A. Or is it? Do they have our waffle tech?

Mayo Dispatch 2: The Trip

“Lily Allen or Dylan?”

“Dylan,” she said.

Despite her activist dance card and Brown degree (a liberalism earmark as her righter-wing but lovely father would have it), Lina, my new wife, had always considered Dylan a downer. That is, until today.  (Or maybe she still considered him a downer; the important thing is that she felt ready to accept him, or at least roll on his page.) It was, to be fair, 6 .a.m, and she was, I admit, driving my car to the airport—driving isn’t impossible but it's also not super-easy anymore, so I’d recently relinquished my role as main family locomotorist, which can sometimes make things a little one-sided (I help out by d.j.ing superior tunes, of course).

We were heading out of town—not on a merriment-filled Decemberist holiday trip but to LAX, so we could connect in O’Hare with a peashooter full of wheelchairs and breathing machines up to Rochester, M.N., home of the Mayo Clinic. (There. For now on, I will use the definite article before the hospital name except for when I refer to the place as simply "Mayo," all creamy and white and cold as it seems.)

Was it coincidental that “Blood on the Tracks” was the album rocking the Altima sound system? Was it a Dylanesque “simple twist of fate” that Lina and I married each other just over a month ago and were now all tangled up in more blue—and black, red, and brown--than we ever would have imagined as happy New York daters just over five years ago? (It's not like I had a clean medical history, but we thought all was on the mend.)

It wasn’t a surprise—that’s for damn sure. The wedding, in fact, was a premeditated respite from the doctor-seeking, the diagnosis-receiving, the MRI-taking, and pathology decoding. We had some serious shit hanging over our heads, but we decided to postpone it all to get together and do the deed we felt had almost already been done after committing to each other so fully in LA once Lina arrived to begin her PhD in health pysch, researching the chronically ill and the way their infirmity affects their social, personal, and inner lives (appropriate, you think?). And no, the wedding didn’t go as planned. How could it have? Who deserved it to go well more than us? And was it coincidental that we would arrive for our plane to Chicago (nay, Mayo) just one gate next to the American Airlines planes leaving for Cabo, where we spent our pre-honeymoon flight-waiting eating the same crap Burger King breakfast. 

More important and cultural (this *is the new Glass Shallot, after all—tomorrow, it becomes another blog, perhaps the same one it was yesterday or one-legged version of what it will be next Friday at noon), Lina had just come to appreciate Dylan more from seeing “I’m Not There,” Todd Haynes’s chopped up and self-re-interpreted meta biopic of the poetic Minnesota-raised troubadour starring Cate Blanchett. “Someone’s got it in for me, whoever it is I wish they cut out quick.” That was the spirit this morning even though we had promised to make the trip as wacky and wild as only a bunch of sarcastic rejuveniles would have it.

So what’s with all the gloom? You want to laugh, right? 

Here’s something.

This morning, I argued with the oh-so-prescient guy working the long-term parking on La Cienaga in the hell-section of L.A. surrounding LAX, which is oddly a few miles from shiny Manhattan Beach and all its Starbucks-pumped boogie boarders.

It happened--the argument, that is—because upon parking my car in his safe-seeming lot, he told me I had to leave him my car keys.

“Why?” I asked.

“It’s policy.”

“My policy is never to give anyone my car keys.”

“You gotta relax and enjoy your trip, man.”

Wrong thing to say.

“Do I?”

“Yes. Relax, mi amigo.”

“Do you know where I’m going?”

“It’s vacation time, man, you should relax.”

“How about if I was going to bumblefuck Minnesota for cancer surgery?”

Yes, I assumed he might even understand the word “bumblefuck”; I like to give people the benefit of the doubt. And I wasn’t of course headed to Mayo for cancer surgery, per se (though who knows what’s in store for me and my friendly white blood cells?). Still, I was about done with all this SoCal braindeath. All the halfwitted garage workers and baristas and copy-shop owners saying how “Relaxed” they are and how smart it is to be like them.

No more “calm downs” from people spitting out explanations of nonsensical “policies” I find unsatisfactory. Apologies, Southland, for having the agency to express a thought based on intelligence. But aside from your dearth of employees with even some basic street smarts (Upper Manhattan, when I lived there, wasn’t exactly filled with physics professors, but ask the guy washing your car the best strategy to do your business taxes, and you might be surprised with his answers), this trip was helping me become myself again. I speak kindly and clearly to people—especially to people who are about to serve me food, watch my car, take blood from my arm. So don’t tell me to relax when my voice isn’t raised, and I simply refuse to follow rules I can’t endorse.

“Well, look man,” the schmuck replied, “You don’t have to get all excited.”

I wasn’t excited, as I’ve just explained. I know what excites me, and it’s not conversations with parking attendants on the 6 am shift.

“I’m just not leaving my keys, dude,” I said. “And I’m not letting someone like you tell me that I have to when I’m about to pay $200 to leave my car in a spot from which it will most likely be stolen anyway.”

“Well, you can pay ahead of time and not leave the keys.”

“Really. Is there a reason you didn’t tell me that before?”

“You didn’t ask.”

“Take my credit card,” I said, now completely dispassionate and wanting to move things along as quickly as possible. “21 days of parking. Ring it up.”

I held out my Amex and looked him plainly in the face.

“Look, man, I am verrrry sorry for what you‘re goooing through….—

“Please take my credit card.”

“Ok, ok, just relax man, relax, relax.”

“If you tell me to relax one more time, sir, I might actually get, well, less than relaxed and cause all of us some trouble. Do I have to ask you to take the card again?”

He took the card. I did relax. Then Lina and I stood outside the garage only to receive an offer from another garage’s shuttle driver offering to take us to the airport for $10 since our free shuttle was running late..

“Please thank him for his generosity,” I told the nicer lady-attendant at our garage who had presented us with her neighbor’s charitable gift. “We’ll just wait.”

And we did. And we laughed. And then Lina did a little dance.

Herewith, the love of my life making every nonsensical and frustratingly contemporary situation better.

Go, Lina!

  (Click on below arrow to launch Quicktime.)

***

Two more Mayo trip highlights so far:

1. When we waited for 20 minutes to exit our plane to Rochester so a disabled man could leave first, the flight attendant said that we would all get extra halos for our patience!!! I currently wait for my gift from the J man. And grow impatient. Some angel.

2. There is nothing in Rochester except lots of white, and it's 4 degrees here. I feel like I'm in that terrible John Cusack and Billy Boy Thorthon movie set in Kansas on Xmas eve. You know, the one when they try to rob the mob and everything goes topsy turvy.  Except, I'm not here to do something as fun as steal money, hang with strippers, and then almost get shot.

More a'comin'...For how often do you get the skinny on an experience like this from a dude who should be sitting in Los Feliz dive bars laughing about how Kiefer can't join us for a Guiness 'cuz he's locked up in Glendale for being stupid?

P.S. Am I scared that I have to be here? Many have written with this question. The answer is yes. But not any more scared than I was two years ago when I began noticing the progression of this weird syndrome messing with my muscles and nerves. Not any more scared and frustrated then I am when world famous docs in NY or LA tell me they don't know what to say. It's just that now that people believe me it seems more real to everyone else. So I'll be as flip and honest about it as I feel like. And at the moment, I don't feel like cryin'. I've got DVDs to watch and access to a world renowned medical system just begging to be assessed and skewered-my forte. But let's hope none of that's necessary and we can just do Quicktime dance videos for the rest of the week. I know Lina's got a lot to teach me. The question is: Can you compete?

Mayo Dispatch 1: The Getting Ready and Holding Steady

I will soon land in Rochester, M.N., home of Mayo Clinic and, well, very little else. I am not excited--I've been told to prepare for a short-term residency of five to seven business days. But as some readers of my recent health writing may know, there's a bit of a mystery going on here. And guess what? Just because I published an essay, written at one point in time, in a major men's magazine, diagnoses and docs can change. Or in my case, miracle meds may disappoint and due to a lack of any better advice, all the major docs in a major city may pass the buck up to Minnesota, because, really, why try anything else when you can cost your patients thousands of dollars and divorce yourself from failure?  Heartening in this ego-driven, diagnosis-starved medical environment, no? But for young adult survivors of the mystery conditions that arise after sub-lethal cancer treatments--we first-gen crazy-chemo-and transplant mutations (call us The Chronics) often forced to research our conditions and communicate personally with the top of the toppiest docs via e-mail, so as not to miss out on something groundbreakingly helpful--this ain't anything newsible.

In my case, of course, there's something odd and apparently less-than-obvious hoppin' with my immune system. The result? Some damage to my peripheral nerves (think carpal tunnel in more than a few locations). But don't be scared: I look normal (and isn't that what really matters?). I just don't run up Runyon Canyon or bench 180 anymore. Plus, sometimes the hand slips when I'm mincing the shallots or trying to open the wine.  Ok, I have a lot more serious complaints, but, seriously, you'd never know it from looking or even hanging out with me, and I'm not letting it impact my work. (Though, for those people who do look different, I'll probably be in your shoes one day, and I'm down with your sitch. Keep on rollin', and I'm sure I'll see some of you on the pea-shooter out of Chicago.) Indeedio, I'm writing more than ever now. I have to. I have the impetus. Medical bills pile up, I'm newly married, and the more I write, the more the cash flows. Besides, this is my passion. At least that's what readers and editors tell me. Gotta follow your dreams.

Anyway, I plan to record and comment on what happens at Mayo for a multitude of reasons, not least to provide a candid report card on the most elite medical institution we know written with a real live young man's point of view. In the past, I've used some of the esteemed hospital's sources for magazine stories, and I've read many of their studies. Impressive--by golly. Still, I haven't been given an appointment there with anyone that competes, bio-wise, with any of the bigwigs I've seen at other top U.S.  hospitals. And maybe that's actually great: I haven't yet found too many famous researchers who exactly care about the people in need of their science, but I haven't looked everywhere (just 88% of everywhere), so I'm not that negativo yet. It's just that me and the corporate "branding" initatives, well, we don't mix too well (see my quick and dirty rejection of a publisher's offer to have me do a new-era Chicken Soup for the Soul). I just find it hard to trust a corporate approach, whether it's choosing Time Warner Cable for their excellent customer service (ha) or putting my faith in a guy about to shoot new, clean antibodies up my arm simply because he wears a white coat with words that come up a lot on Google when people are worried about spine cancer.

There's an "integrative"--"multi-specialty, group practice"--approach at Mayo, of course. Which is not to say that they push wheatgrass on you but that you're seen by more than one doc and discussed by teams in a concentrated amount of time. That's good, because I have issues concerning multiple specialties and subspecialties. I'll need the brain waves of--and more important, some human concern from--oncologists, nerve specialists, immunologists, endocrinologists, neurosurgeons, and others. One thing I'd like to make clear, though: nothing's happening to my brain. So apologies to anyone who thought I might get: cooler, nicer, stupider, or funnier from the progression of this insidious little condition. None of it's going to happen (you may be less bummed than me, believe it, champ), though I must say: my sense of humor has definitely skewed darker over the years (certainly in the more marketable direction), and if I have to thank something for that it's the stem-cell transplant in 1997 that saved my life from Stage IVB Hodgkin's Disease. Thank you, baby stem cells. May you never meet anyone from cold-ass Washington, D.C., right or left wing, and may you please keep on working as hard as the Los Angeles firefighters who saved our home last spring.

But to your question, readers: Is this here Shallot blog-thing becoming a diseased man's message board? Fear not. I can't stand those Google hell-bombs anymore than you can. But how many people visit the Mayo Clinic (should I precede the place's name with a definite article or not?) after my kind of multi-year diagnostic experience gone wrong. And less people have a viable way to chronicle the experience, and perhaps help, enlighten, and entertain some people along the way. Shallot to the rescue. Just know I'm certainly not doing it to "express myself." I don't need that kind of release. Trust me. If I did, you'd be watching a movie or reading a book about me now instead of reading this measly blog. I haven't ever been ego-maniacal enough to go gonzo on myself in quite that media-whorish a way. But stay tuned. For now, meaning this week, I just want to take good notes and fill people in on what the experience will be like. I'm generally private about this stuff (national essay, excluded), but now that I'm finding my close friends so removed from my day-to-day medical reports--to say nothing of some family--I might as well open up the floodgates. So, in summary: Keep on rockin' in this high-co-pay, insurance-fraudulent world and check back in tomorrow. I may well have something more interesting to discuss other than my serious need of a very warm winter coat and decent sushi delivery.

**Mayo Fun Fact #1:

 The hotel I've reserved in Rochester includes the following text on its Web site description of its town as a "fun" city with much more to offer than medical services. Talk about great marketing copy and an uplifting spirit for those in distress:

Adventurer, novelist, and Nobel Prize winner Ernest Hemingway was admitted to the Mayo Clinic in 1960. Diagnosed as suffering from depression, he underwent two months of electric shock therapy. Unfortunately, the treatments were not successful, for in July of 1961 the man who wrote such masterpieces as "A Farewell to Arms" and "The Sun Also Rises" returned to his Ketchum, Idaho, home and committed suicide.

What inspiration for a young writer descending on fair Rochester. I should be so lucky, no?