Faded: New Novel

Denver, CO 

FADED is now available.

I cranked out a new novel in the summer of 2023 and edited it in January 2024. FADED is the first book that I wrote, edited, and published via the new house in Denver.

Here's the book description:

Jackson McCool is the son of a prominent Beverly Hills psychiatrist, and for three years has quietly impersonated his now-ailing father in his medical and therapeutic practice. His success in this ruse is largely in thanks to his eccentric roster of self-absorbed patients, denizens of the entertainment industry who crave nothing more than a loose prescription pad and someone to listen to their complaints.

While providing an empathetic ear to Hollywood types, Jackson is also slinging (and ingesting) painkillers with his best friend, retired pro football player Mingus Christmas, as well as providing counsel at all hours to Westley Bolinger, the front man of a globally touring emo band. However, when suspicions arise and nefarious outside forces aim to expose him, Jackson must not only prevent his house of cards from falling but reckon with his own reasons for wanting to keep this charade alive.

A story about the ebbs and flows of fame on the fringes of Hollywood, FADED makes us question impermanence, ephemera, and celebrity culture.

FADED is currently available as a paperback and ebook (for those Kindle fans).

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And here's a brief podcast with change100 about FADED including some behind the scenes info and Easter eggs.

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My recent novels have an accompanying soundtrack which I curated via Spotify playlists. Once again, I created character-specific playlists (similar to GUARD THIS mixtapes). FADED has three playlists... if a character made a mixtape or playlist, what do they listen to?

Jackson McCool: The protagonist who wrote two books on music history/criticism. His playlist includes... Sly and the Family Stone, Steely Dan, Curtis Mayfield, Wilco, New York Dolls, David Bowie, Grateful Dead, Rolling Stones, Phish, Beck, LCD Soundsystem, Tribe Called Quest, Chicago, Circle Jerks, Tom Petty, Edgar Winter, Doobie Brothers.

Ophelia McCool: TV producer and actress who is married to Jackson. Her playlist includes... Jungle, Parcels,Neal Frances, Grizzly Bear, The National, St Vincent, Hole, LCD Soundsystem, Fiona Apple, Phoenix, FLeetwood Mac, Wild Belle, Arcade Fire, The Smile, Mazzy Star, Dua Lipa, Nuetral Milk Hotel, Brittany Howard, Muse, Dandy Warhols, Concrete Blonde, Khruangbin, The Go-Go's.

Mingus Christmas: Former pro football player who breeds exotic cats and Jackson's best friend. His playlist is hip-hop heavy and includes... Sugar Hill Gang, Pharcyde, Warren G, Ice Cube, 2 Pac, Al Green, Cypress Hill, ODB, Run DMC, Snoop, Dr Dre, NWA, Fun Lovin' Criminals, DJ Khaled, Kuris Blow,  Donny Hathaway, Biz Markie, Too $hort.

FADED is currently available as a paperback and Kindle.

When It Rains in L.A.

Los Angeles, CA

Mayhem. Locals go friggin' berserk at the slightest rain drop.

Four Towns

Los Angeles, CA

Four weeks. Four cities. A little same, a whole lot different. I only spent a couple of days in SoCal in December, whereas I divided my time between New Orleans, Miami, and the bulk of the Christmas holidays in NYC. The constant movement is a good thing. It jogs the brain. The constant dissonance between new and old can be an ultimate mind fuck... if you let it. Or it can be a lazy afternoon basking in the soothing warmth of yesteryear.

Los Angeles. The ubiquitous sunshine makes the holidaze seems more fake than a relgiious holiday that got hijacked to sell shit we really don't need. Nothing says I love you more than a pair of socks, or a new sweater, or a piece of electronic equipment that will become obsolete in six months if it doesn't break first. I was never really into Christmas trees (i.e. utter waste of money) until I moved to LA because I need something to make it feel like Christmas. The constant sunshine doesn't mesh well with Christmas... and the weak ass attempt with palm trees and Christmas lights is more laughable than applaudable as the denizens of Southern California desperately try to get in the Christmas spirit. Nicky knows no other holiday season (SoCal Xmas) because she is one of the rare citizens of the City of Angels who actually grew up in LA and has no other childhood point of perspective of waking up to an actual White Christmas. Me? Wasn't jungle bells written about last minute holiday shopping in New York City? In the urban decay of Gotham in the 1970s, the only thing that didn't smell like urine and rotting garbage was the rare scent of Christmas trees that invaded almost every major street corner. It's a sense memory that has been imprinted on my brain along with a numb face. It's supposed to be cold as fuck at Christmas and your nose gets numb because you spend a lot of time wandering around the streets while shopping for gifts (in the pre-Amazonian era), or spending late evenings staggering around shitfaced drunk admiring the foggy gasps of breath that roar out of everyone's mouths while hopping from Christmas/holiday party to party to party either company parties (ranging from low-end to baller bankster) to friends' tiny apartments to the odd, random party you randomly crashed in a bar somewhere. In the modern era, the LA holiday party is drenched in artisan, gluten-free hipsterfied chow and ironic blinking lights and superficial guests that are silently judging you but more worried that they'll look "pasty" in their next batch of selfies because everyone is sweating their asses off in a rare public display of their winter wardrobe. No one walks anywhere unless it's to the valet, so any sensible party people are making a cameo before Ubering to the next party up in the hills before all the medium-passable quality of drugs are inhaled by dilettantes and all the hardened dope fiends are haggling over a couple of frail lines of shitty-ass baby laxative, which you paid dearly for in actual time and mental anguish by listening to the same douchenozzle with shitty blow prattle on about his latest script conference with someone you're supposed to be impressed with and all you keep wondering is if your Uber driver knows a better coke connection.

New Orleans. Shit got crazy. Either I'm getting old, or I forgot about the darkness that oozes underneath Bourbon Street. Maybe it's a little of both. Liquor is a a true pestilence upon this land. Too much of liquid anything makes everyone's eyes look mean. I felt a little safety being with my brother, who still resides in the Bronx, and hanging with two medical doctors, a lawyer, and Iraq War vet. Just in case shit got too crazy, we had a small, yet elite crew of professional party people. When you're running AlCantHang with the bulls down Bourbon Street, the last thing you want to have to do is pull someone out of a potential all-out street brawl. Testosterone and liquor can always be tempered with cool heads, but it only takes one idiot to incite an ass-whooping. Yeah, it sounds a lot worse than the reality that everyone was safe as long as we stuck together and didn't do anything too stupid like wander off solo in the wrong direction where the shadow people can jump your schwasted ass and snatch your valuables before they haul ass back into the shadowy side streets. Partying always comes at a cost, but without a high risk, you don't get that big payoff. It's sort of like going on an animal safari and praying you don't get trampled by a stampede of irate giraffes. But New Orleans was rough without the usually indulgences of food and liquor because I had some minor dental surgery a few days before the trip and I couldn't drink heavily with the prescribed meds (it felt strangely uncomfortable actually waiting in line to acquire pharmaceutical products for a real pharmacy) and could barely eat at all because my mouth hurt too much. The first bit of solid food I had in days occurred as soon as I arrived in the French Quarter and Otis handed me something wrapped up in a napkin. Fried chicken. Damn fine-ass fried chicken. I tore into it like a vulture picking apart the dead carcass of some unlucky roadkill. Maybe the abundant dark energy was so prevalent because I spent three nights  extremely sober, which was the most coherent trip I had ever taken to New Orleans in 20+ years.

NYC. Can you ever really go home again? My favorite time of the year is also the most stressful. I equally love/loathe Christmas in NYC because... well... you know... family shit. It's never easy, but we all have to deal with it somehow. I've lost my patience the last few years. It's the product of a near-death-experience when you come out the other side not giving a fuck anymore and you come to a moment of clarity like, "Why am I wasting my time with people who will never change?" But it's the city that really brings me back. The ghosts. The memories. The forgotten memories are the best presents... just taking a wrong turn and walking down a street you had not walked down in two decades is enough to trigger an avalanche of memories. The mind is a masterful magical kingdom... and you can truly bend time and space by accessing your memory banks, but sometimes you lose too much time like I do, wandering streets that I had not wandered down in years... both physically and mentally. An old friend once said our childhood rooms are like museums to our own self, usually curated by whatever parent or family member still lives there. My childhood room is barely recognizable, but there's plenty of memories in boxes and cluttered inside a gigantic closet. I could spent a month in that room getting lost in forty years of living. But too much navel gazing is a bad thing, but too little insight into your past is also a dangerous thing. You need a healthy balance, which is the key to self-awareness. Never forget where you came from, but never forget it will never truly define where you're going because you're the one driving the bus. Or something like that.

Miami. A whole other country/city/nation state. Miami will someday sink into the ocean. Might take 500 years or 5,000 but someday most of Florida will be all underwater and delegated to a series of island chains off the coast of the US of A. Call the city water you want... New Cuba, or North Cuba, or Los Miami, or whatever... it's definitely not America anymore. I spent a lot of time covering the Latin America Poker Tour, so my time in Miami felt more like being on the road in a foreign country than visiting the southern most city in America. Miami has always been driven by its own unique rhythm, but the confluence of international travelers, ubiquitous sunshine and cheap drugs makes Miami one of the rowdiest destinations on the planet. But like any of those party-centric small cities whose magical reputation turned its legacy into a much larger city than actually exists. Miami is not so much a city as it is a state of mind. Miami... the constant flow... it's a great place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there. If anything, I got to end the year by spending a semi-romantic week in a tropical paradise with my girlfriend, who desperately needed a real vacation after a rigorous work schedule. Plus I got the added bonus of seeing old friends from college... the coolest type of friends who don't guilt trip you or make it awkward to reconnect. Oh, and one of my favorite bands played four concerts so life ain't too bad when you have all the elements for a guaranteed fun time.

Four towns. Four weeks. Last year ended like most years... on the road and hopeful for a new year.

The Richard Linklater Nudge

Miami, FL

When I was 20, I was heavily influenced by two films by Richard Linklater -- Slacker and Dazed and Confused. I saw Dazed in the movie theatre about 15 times in college. We'd all get blazed to the tits in the parking lot and sit through the film, which was set in 1976. That was unheard of because period pieces on the 1970s were few and far between in the early 1990s.

Linklater is more important to me than you think. He inspired me to embark on a creative path and make movies. If this were Bob Evans talking, "When I was a kid, I really really really wanted to work in the pictures."

When I graduated college, I had aspirations of becoming a director. A true pipe dream. Right around the same time, I saw Reservoir Dogs by Tarrantino and Clerks by Kevin Smith. Those three filmmakers -- Smith, Tarrantino, and Linklater -- inspired me to apply to film school even thought I was a longshot and way behind the curve. I studied more film theory in college (I had a minor in Film Studies, but I was a double major in Political Science and Philosophy) than the actual nuts and bolts of film making. As a result, without any student films to boast of, I was rejected from NYU Film School. Not once, but twice. I eventually got into a film school in Vancouver, British Colombia only because it was sorta open admissions. If I had the money at the time, I would have gone. Or I should say, if I had a family that shared in my vision, I could have borrowed the money from them, but they thought I was crazy. They were really miffed when I quit a job on Wall Street (I was in a bond trader training program, but utterly miserable and thought I'd do the job for a couple of years to save up to buy equipment and fund film school) to pursue the creative arts. They thought I was wasting a college degree on a hopeless venture. I'm glad I never listened to my family because I never would have gotten to where I am today by listening to their poor advice, like the one time an uncle told me to take the NYPD exam because it paid overtime and had good benefits.

Alas, film school was never meant to be. I stayed in NYC and continued the path I was on... humping shitty job after shitty job and using whatever money I made (or won from gambling) to fund travel adventures (some of which included Phish tours and Jazz Fest). I often think about what would have happened if I went to film school in Vancouver, but that fork in the road happened twenty years ago, so it's impossible to figure out what would have happened.

I was aiming for one direction but I ended up in another. Simply put, I started writing screenplays because I was broke and could not afford camera equipment. These days everyone has a video camera on their phone, but in the early 90s, you had to have some cash (or at least a credit card) to buy a camera and film. Oh, yeah... film was expensive. Not to mention other equipment like lighting... because lighting is everything. Without the financial means to become an auteur film maker, I focused on the writing aspect and dug deep into screenwriting and humping shitty day jobs with the hopes of some day buying a camera. Well, somewhere along the way, I lost sight of the initial goal and ended up writing full time. Screenwriting was pushed aside for other mediums. Funny how life works out like that. You aim at one target and end up hitting the bulls-eye in another.

Today's guest on WTF Podcast is Richard Linklater. Marc Maron conducted a great interview with one of my favorite film makers... and one of the holy trinity of directors that helped give me the nudge in the right direction. Maron asked Linklater about his most recent film Boyhood, which was shot over 12 years using the same cast. That ambitious and arduous effort alone is worthy of an Oscar for best director. Linklater will get a nomination, but I doubt he actually wins because Hollywood is rigged and those fancy awards are bought/paid for behind the scenes. Linklater has never been one of those Hollyweird insiders and those fuckers like to take care of their own, which is why if Boyhood wins anything... it will truly be an upset. But hey, I love a underdog.

A great interview unveils a few hidden gems, and this one had a bunch. I never knew Linklater had earned a baseball scholarship... so now the re-make of Bad News Bears makes a little more sense (I still have not forgiven him for that... the original is in my all-time Top 10 films). He also had an coincidental six degrees of separation with Matthew McConaughey... because both of their fathers knew each and played college football as teammates at Houston in the 1950s.

Link to the WTF Pod with Linklater.

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UPDATE....

Here's Linklater's interview with Vice about the making of Boyhood...

Conversational Gridlock in the Land of Sunshine, Freeways and Botox

Los Angeles, CA

In high school, our homeroom (called "advisement") lasted 15 minutes. NBC late night programming dominated our morning conversations.  

I started watching Late Night with David Letterman to keep up with the inside jokes and "Top 10 List" by taping the show at 12:30am, an hour after my bedtime. I usually fell asleep watching Cheers reruns at 11pm, then woke up a half hour early to watch the highlights on my VCR and fast-forwarding through the commercials.

On Monday mornings, homeroom/advisement was devoted to recapping Saturday Night Live, which ranged from sharing our favorite bits to outright attempting to act out a sketch. By definitions, all Monday mornings suck but the devotion of my classmates to SNL made Monday mornings palatable.

Flash forward to this morning. I wandered over to the local diner and made sure I let the quartet of LA cops exit first before I found a seat near the front, which had the best (natural) lighting, something I preferred because I life to read a book, a real-life book with pages and everything, instead of ogling my phone like every other schmuck in the joint.

A trio sat in the front booth: middle-aged guy dressed like he was a 16-year old skater kid, plus two younger women, one of whom wore psychedelic yoga pants that had the same color scheme as Jimi Hendrix's Axis: Bold As Love album. Actually upon closer inspection, one of them was obviously from Botox City, a sure-fire clue she was at least in their 40s, yet she dressed also like a teenager. It reminded me of that line from Greenberg: "In L.A., all of the kids dress like superheros and all of the adults dress like kids."

I didn't notice the front booth when I walked in, but I immediately overheard their raucous conversation the moment I slid into my seat. They were semi-arguing about freeways and the quickest way to get from Culver City to Silver Lake. Trying to fade traffic is common chatter among native Angelenos, but this animated booth prattled on with exaggerated SoCal-accents.

I had a instant flashback to my high school homeroom... OMG... that booth was re-enacting a sketch from SNL, specifically The Californians.

If you don't watch SNL anymore, there's a really bad recurring sketch (so bad, it's fucking rad) called the Californians. It viciously mocks two things: 1) trashy afternoon soap operas with atrocious acting, and 2) how people in LA smugly speak to each other... never in complete sentences but peppered with driving slang. Every installment of Californians eventually includes multiple discussions on the fastest way to get to a specific destination, and which shortcuts (side streets and tertiary routes) will be the best way to avoid traffic.

It's funny because it's true.

A lot of viewers don't like Californians because they just don't get it. And a few locals don't dig it because they can't take a fucking joke. The rub is simple... traffic is ubiquitous in LA and almost all of SoCal... yet that's all anyone every talks about that does not include themselves.

My typical conversations in Los Angeles usually fall into three categories:

Q: "What did you think of the new Wes Anderson flick?"
A: "Jesus... traffic was awful."

Q: "What did you do this weekend?"
A: "Jesus... traffic was fucking brutal."

Q: "How's the latest draft of the screenplay?"
A: "Jesus, that traffic. Took me forever. And then I couldn't find parking."

I forgot to comment about the "parking situation" in the LA universe. Besides bitching about traffic, the second biggest complaint is parking... the lack of street parking, or how the valet guys steal everything.

Technology alleviated the traffic headaches for like a week before everyone else downloaded the same fucking app. Even when I look at different traffic websites or an app, the results are always the same... big fucking red streaks to indicate gridlock. Red streaks everywhere.

In a bastion of self-absorbed vapidness, the pinnacle of braggadocio is eschewing technology and relying on knowledge of the quickest routes and locals' shortcuts in a city paralyzed by gridlock. But, here's the rub... It ain't going anywhere. Yet, everyone likes to 1) complain about their former shortcut not working anymore, or 2) brag about knowing the best alternative routes. Dirty secret? In reality, #2 is not the case because the best-kept shortcuts are never truly revealed because if you gave up your sweet alt route, then everyone else will eventually take it thereby causing yet another traffic jam. Instead, they give you the "second-best" route.

For fuck's sake, I can't believe I'm writing about this. See, I've been corrupted and co-opted and I don't even drive a fucking car.

So the front booth...

I tried to convince myself that they were acting out the most recent Californians sketch from SNL. But after a couple seconds I realized my assessment was totally off base. One of two of them might have been actors, but they were not performing or doing a bit. Nope. This was real fucking life. And that was how they really fucking talked. The three loudly argued over the best routes. One of the women talked so fast I wondered if she was railing lines of Adderall at the table. Holy shit. I assumed her prescription speed kicked in? How is anyone that chatty at 8am, unless they've been up all night hoovering foam.

They were loud and annoying and I hated them instantly. I usually give someone five minutes to prove to me that they are a moron, yet in this instance it took all about 15 seconds to decide I would like to take three, dirty, rolled-up socks and stuff them into their yappers.

I chastised myself for being so judgmental. Buddha wouldn't have done that. Right? I should be more patient and tolerant, even in the land of the Californians.

Then again, Buddha wouldn't be sitting in a greasy diner trying to read a Joan Didion book while a bunch of highly-vexing hipsters and Botox queen argued about who had the best routes to Silver Lake.

"Like, when in doubt, take Fountain..."

City of Wet Angels

By Pauly
Los Angeles, CA

Cats and dogs.

That's one of the first cliches I heard as a little kid. My mom used it to describe really bad, hard, fast rain that we'd get from time to time in the NYC area.

Cats and dogs.

Dogs and cats.

It never rains like cats-n-dogs in LA, but it's pouring right now in an torrential manner that would be considered cats-n-dogs territory.

Raining on and off last couple of days. Sunny SoCal is getting dumped on by Mama Nature. More like getting pissed on. Crazy shit, only crazy because it's rare to hear one of those emergency messages pop up on the TV suggesting we move to higher ground because of the rain. I live in the slums of Beverly Hills... so the higher ground is implied. It's the flash flooding and landslides you have to cope with. Heck, our alley had poor drainage and flooded a few inches in a manner of minutes.

California needed the rain. The state suffered from a terrible drought. Worst in decades. It's the first bad one since I moved out West.

Hollywood is a magical place where dreams are manufactured. Winters are non existent in paradise. The amazing (near-perfect) ubiquitous weather spoils so many denizens of Los Angeles, so anytime there's a hint of precipitation falling out of the sky, everyone FREAKS THE FUCK OUT for no reason whatsoever. All because little droplets of the water fall from the sky.

Sweet Jesus, Los Angeles freaks are fucking freaks for freaking the fuck out about fucking water, man. What the fuck?

Those Hollywood Freaks cancel plans when it rains. Seriously. They stay home and grind social media and whine incessantly about how it is raining, meanwhile everyone else in the country mocks them for being a bunch of wussies for getting all bent out of shape because of a little water coming from the sky.

LA Freaks stay home from work and they don't go out and watch local TV news delivered by spray-tanned, botox talking heads spewing fear and paranoia about the dangerous water falling from the sky.

The collective anxiety about the dangerous rain forces people inside and they order in take out food, so if you try to order food it will take three to five hours for your delivery to arrive. Sure, the roads are somewhat empty except tourists, drug couriers, rent-a-hookers, and other delivery drivers. But even the empty roads cannot overcome the redonk backlog of take out orders. Drivers are swamped with deliveries. To complicate matters, half of the delivery force is also freaked out and called in sick, because they're afraid of driving in the rai.

The city of wet angels grinds to a halt.

Those Real-Plastic-Franken-House-Wives of Beverly Hills are morbidly afraid of the rain. Those vapid ditzes cancel everything. Nuking their social schedule: cocktail-drenched lunches, purse-dog grooming, shrink tune-ups, spinning classes, spa day or mani/pedi day. Everything. Cancelled.

Those Hollyweird douchenozzles and sleazebuckets? They cancelled all their meetings and screenings and rub-n-tugs in Koreatown. All because of a little water. Maybe their souls are so marinated in evil that those greedy fuck-stains will shrivel up and die from those tears from heaven?

Rain days. Yes, that's what LA freaks do. They take rain days. Similar to taking a day off back east or in the Midwest when it's snowing (moderately). There is some legitimate concern and public safety issue when it rains for the first time in months with slick, slick freeways. So many accidents in the first few hours after a storm. Truly dangerous with oil and gunk accumulation.

Winter in LA is a joke according to my East Coast standards. There's really two seasons... the "winter" and the rest of the year. Nicky gets bundled up anytime the temps dips under 60. The winters in SoCal are super mild.

At worst, it's in the mid-50s and rains a bit in January and February. LA gets roughly 50% of it's rain (14.2 inches per year) in the first two months of the year. The actual rainy season is four months (Dec thru March) and LA gets 85% of its rainfall in the four month span.

Shit, it's been dry the last few months. That's bad news for farmers in the central valley. It's dangerous for potential brush fires up and down all those hills scattered about... all that prime real estate can go up in a flash. The reservoirs were low. SoCal's water problems have been well documented in Hollywood. Just watch Chinatown with Jack Nicholson.

Nicky gazes out her office window and sees the LA River (actually more like the viaduct you see in so many movies like Terminator 2). The good-old LA River was barely a trickle the last few months... until now.

The rain arrived. The freaks got more and more nervous and paranoid with each droplet. Hard. Rain. Hard. Buckets. Cats-n-dogs. Stream in my alley. It never rains that hard in SoCal. Yet... it happened.

Karl Rove's weather machine has been working overtime in 2014. I got fucked during the polar vortex at the start of the year and stuck in NYC for 10 days until I could finally get back to balmy LA. But no complaints right now. That rain freaks out my neighbors, but I love it. We needed it.

I crank out some of my best work when it rains. That's why I missed living in Seattle. It was always the absolute perfect writing weather in the 206. Something about the sounds of the keys on the keyboard meshing with the rain sounds. Fleeting moments of harmony. Rhythms of nature and that kind of stuff.

Noah Baumbach made a movie about me with his film Greenberg. Seriously. I'm fucking Greenberg... a moody New Yorker who is a fish out of water in LA, oh plus he doesn't drive. In Greenberg, the main character "Greenberg" plays a song for his brother's assistant Florence. He mentioned that LA-area DJs only played that song when it was raining. But at the time, the weather was its usual sunny self, yet Greenberg played the rain song anyway. Pretty obvious what's going on inside his twisted noggin. Although pleasant and sunny in real life, in Greenberg's universe, it's raining, which is why he's playing the certain rain song that ONLY gets played by well-adjusted disc jockeys when it's raining outside.

Sunny outside. Sunny inside. That's the ultimate goal (pursuit of happiness).

Rainy outside. Sunny inside. That's the type of people I like to be around.

Sunny outside. Rainy inside. Well, that's Greenberg. I am Greenberg. I am rain.

Rainy outside. Rainy inside. Rainy all the time. I like to make my own rain. Makes me appreciate the sunny days... whenever they return.

Here is that little number by Albert Hammond... It Never Rains In Southern California....

Morning Pollution

By Pauly
Los Angeles, CA

Shower running.
Wake up.
Snort the coffee.

Eardrum piercing screeching baby.
Listless daddy, exhausted mommy.
Pebbles of poo.

Cavalcade of homeless dumpster divers.
Mexican Santa Claus and Fred Sanford doppelganger.
Aluminum cans crunching; plastic bottles smushing.

Empty green craft beer bottles.
Passive-aggro donation fund.
Trickle down hipster-economics.

Green-cardless gardeners.
Blowers strapped to their backs.
Spraying power-vacuum-sized packets of earaches.

Another illegal raking the scraps.
Metal scraping against concrete.
Another ear-jolting mess; bad vibrations.

The fat Berbers refurbishing the slum.
Power saws whirling and swirling.
Annoying buckets of noise.

Another cherry stargazer arrives.
While another dream withered up and dies.
Millions of shattered dreams for sale at the 99 cent store.

Dejections, rejections, no more callbacks.
Jilted dreamers.
Pilot title is: Dunzo.

A hairdryer moaning.
If they all go on at the same time, will it cause a black out?
Perfect hair is God's work.

A honking horn.
From a pissed-off mom whose turn it is to carpool.
Those two jewish kids are always late.

Helicopters circling above.
Aerial cacophony.
Ghetto birds, paparazzi, and traffic copters.

Garbage truck coughing.
Garbage man in greasy overalls casually rolling the dumpster bin.
Smashing over potholes.

A hungry cat meowing for food.
A dog barking for attention.
A Facebook addict frowning about the low number of "likes".

A mechanical juicer liquifying fruit.
Bacon sizzling.
Ivory Coast blend percolating.

Alarm clock buzzing and buzzing.
Lost in slumber.
Deaf in real life, but attentive in the slumber world.

Car door slamming.
Engines starting.
iPod cranking.

Shower running.
Wake up.
Snort the coffee.

Binge Watching: House of Cards 2.0

By Pauly
Los Angeles, CA

"Mr. Vice-President... that is just shy of treason."

"Just shy. That's politics."

***

I've written extensively about the newest phenomena. Binge watching. In the 90s, we called it being a "stoner film/tv geek." Get a whole bunch of weed, a stack of VCR tapes (rentals from Blockbuster... remember those?) or DVDs, and sink into the couch for an extended viewing session that lasted until the weed ran out, or until you passed out.

Binge watching. Americans have voracious appetites for everything. Beer. Cigarettes. Hate. Fast food. Sports. Celebrity worship. Anything Kardashian. And kittens. Let's not forget about fucking kittens. Sometimes when I think the world is about to implode with a financial meltdown or the start of WW3, I look at a kitten and all those bad thoughts vanish and I think... awww how cute, wonder if little kitty knows how much we're fucked?

Ignorance is bliss.

Binge watching. Something sinister out of the minds of Orwell/Huxley (see Amusing Ourselves to Death). Humans addicted to consuming entertainment in copious amounts. But that's what we want, or at least, we think it is what we want. An escape. A cheap escape. Without having to acquire/pay for drugs/booze, but more importantly, a quick/easy escape without paying the high price of addiction. Life is harsh, so we want to just numb our senses. Losing yourself for a dozen hours into something else. You now have a legit excuse to go a little crazy and embrace your couch and the warm, loving glow of the TV/laptop screen.

Binge watching. It's fun. Trust me, I'm an addict. If you're gonna do something, go balls to the wall. Don't dabble. Fuck this one episode at a time bullshit. Go full-blown muthafucker insane over something. Like fist through a wall, or a Pookie-crack binge. Whether it's binging on kitten memes or playing pocket pool... bring it. Bring your A-game. If you're gonna do something, really fucking do it.

That's why binge watching is becoming a national obsession. It gives us an excuse to be gluttons. I love it. Binge watching is the combination of sloth and gluttony. It's the complete opposite of jogging or fitness fads like Jane Fonda aerobic VCR tapes, Chrissy from Three's Company pitching Thighmaster, that long-haired fitness freak Tony Little, Tae Bo, and the poor fucker who invented stationary bicycles. I'm sure there's a few serious A-type personalities that incorporated Netflix viewing to their workout routine, but for the most part Americans (and some Canadians too) buried their asses into a couch this weekend and watched 13 episodes of the new season of House of Cards.

Perfect timing. Three-day weekend (Presidents Day is a federal holiday on Monday) plus it's Valentine's Day. If you don't have someone special, then you had a date with Netflix. Then again, I was a rare lucky soul who had a significant other who also hated Valentine's Day and she wanted to avoid over-crowded restaurants in favor of getting blitzed on Bubba hash and binge-watching HOC.

HOC episodes are roughly 45 minutes (minus closing credits and FWD through the opening credits). Actual viewing time of all 13 episodes could be accomplished in approximately 10 hours. I think the average American watches around 33 hours of TV per week, or 4-5 hours per day. If the average person devotes their average daily viewing to HOC, then it will take about two full days to watch it all.

But some folks want to watch it all in one sitting. 13 at once. That's the point of these Netflix releases, right? I did it thrice. With both seasons of HOC and the last season of Arrested Development. (FYI... I slowly watched OITNB, but excited to see a second season coming.)

13 in a row? Really not that tough to accomplish considering someone like me from the "TV" generation (Donald Fagen refers to Gen Xers as "TV babies" because we were raised by television). I did not do it all at once. Rather, I probably banged it out over a 36 hour period. I watched the first episode within the first hour it was release, caught 10 more on Friday, and finished off the last 2 episodes on Saturday morning.

I was in bed and couldn't sleep the other night. I had gone to bed early to wake up and write. Nicky was sound asleep, but I couldn't pass out. I picked up my phone and realized that HOC season 2 was released at Midnight PT. All 13 episodes. It was almost 12:30am. I fired up the first episode and watched it via phone... in bed. When the first OMG moment happened, I click off and looked on Twitter and noticed that thousands of others had a similar reaction to a shocking reveal in the first episode.

It was funny, yet curious, to see how others reacted to the "OMG now fucking way!"moments in real time via Twitter. I felt there were two OMG moments... in the first episode and a later episode toward the end... and I could tell how far friends (and strangers) were based on similar reactions.

When Nicky woke up to go to work Friday, I encouraged her to watch the first episode over breakfast and coffee.

"Trust me. You don't want it to be ruined with spoilers by the time you get to work. Someone in your office might have stayed up to watch the first episode, or you'll find out about it via Twitter or those show biz sites you frequent."

Nicky reluctantly said yes. I felt she was humoring me more than anything. But after it was over, she was glad I told her to watch it. By the time she got home from work ten hours later, the word was out. She would have been spoiled.

Binge watchers. I'm one of those poor fucktards. Binge watchers devouring HOC in the first 16 hours were in a unique situation because they had free time and the ability to consume it all on a weekday (Friday). That group included students, unemployed, sick people, retirees, artist-types like myself, or folks who worked from home but decided to watch HOC instead.

For working class 9-5 folks, their first chunk of free time happened on Friday night when they got home (save for a few west coasters who watched an episode or three when it debuted at Midnight PT). Maybe those 9-5ers got as far as halfway on Friday night, but most likely they knocked out three or four episodes and finally polished it off on Saturday. I assume the majority of HOC consumers watched the bulk of the new season Saturday and completed it on Sunday. I'm sure Netflix has specific metrics. Would love to see those.

But I saw a shocking number.... 15% of ALL Netflix users watched the first episode of HOC within 24 hours of its release. Yes, so sick.

I also assume there were a bunch of people who simply didn't have the time (work, kids, Valentine's Day, holiday weekend, bad weather) to engage in binge watching, or in two/three batches. I'm sure they'll slowly watch it over this week and maybe spread it out over a month. But that's tough to do with the material for HOC.

Optimal viewing? Watch three at a time and then spend an hour going back over the previous episodes to watch anything you missed.

Of course, I had a rare chance to watch it twice in the first 48 hours. Nicky was on a much different schedule because of work. So I watched most of the episodes a second time on Friday night and again on Saturday when Nicky binge-watched. I tailed her binge! But for something like HOC, it was necessary so I could fill in the blanks and figure out shit I overlooked or missed.

HOC is broken up into chapters... not episodes... so it feels more like a novel. Sometimes chapters seem boring in books, but you can speed read, skim, or move on. Tough to do with a TV series if they are releasing them the old-fashioned way at one at a time at set intervals. As a novelist, I want to write short chapters to keep stuff moving along. But it's not easy with TV. Sometimes there are a few episodes in a series that seem like nothing is happening. Those are enough to alienate casual (or new) viewers. However, in a binge series like HOC, that snoozer of an episode represents a small portion of your viewing time that day, so it doesn't irk you as much.

With so much fucking entertainment available in the internet age coupled with reduction in attention spans in our ADHD culture, you better create something compelling otherwise you'll lose out to the alternative. You have to fight serious psychological disorders such as FOMO¹ and the fact there's something else more exciting out there that is just a click away on the dial or via a rabbit hole search on YouTube.

Binge watching is not a brand-new 21st century invention. I can count days and weeks I lost watching college basketball since I was a wee one. March Madness is catered to hoops enthusiasts and it is a gambling junkie's wet dream.

In college, all we needed was a VCR and tapes to engage in binge-watching marathons. Usually it would be a bunch of Seinfeld eps or The Simpsons jammed onto a 6-hour VHS tape. I remember the time a couple friends of mine had some liquid sunshine and we were blotto forever it seemed, but still not completely sober so we rode out the buzz and watched Linklater's Dazed and Confused three times in a row before we felt like we could properly re-enter Earth's atmosphere. In between the second and third viewing, we went to McDonalds to get biscuits just after it opened at 6am. We then housed the biscuits and watched Wooderson and company for a third time.

When DVD technology came along, you could have binge on your favorite directors or blow through your entire library. Then entire TV shows were released via DVD, so you could catch up with an entire season in one sitting. DVD collections became an arbiter of taste and pop culture coolness. As my pal Shaniac said, "You used to be judged on what DVDs were on your shelf."

But those were the origins of binge watching. Technology and the internet aged ushered in opportunities to binge watch anything. Kitten videos. Hockey fights. Every episode of Cheers.

***

House of Cards is sort of like a postmodern version of Shakespeare blended with Machiavelli yet set in the treacherous hallways of DC. The original show appeared in the U.K. and was based on politics in the 80s. I still have yet to see that but I will try to binge watch that someday.

I adore the Claire character (Robin Wright). She's like Lady Macbeth meets Hilary Clinton on steroids. The true Ice Queen. And the Frank character (Kevin Spacey)? Sleazier than sleaze and corrupted as fuck all. He's the type of shifty guy who would fuck you in the ass and make you pay for the Vaseline. I love how the Frank character talks directly to the camera. Sometimes it feels like Ferris Bueller grew up to become a smarmy southern politician.

HOC almost made me miss the politics game. Almost. I studied southern politics under one of the greatest minds in the political science realm (Dr. Merle Black, who has a twin brother named Earl who is also a well-known poli sci professor at North Carolina). I never missed a Dr. Black lecture, which says something because I skipped class all the time in college to follow the Grateful Dead or bong out on the couch watching ski flicks like Aspen Extreme and Ski School. Seriously. I never went to class and found the littlest excuse to avoid a classroom. But Dr. Black's lectures were something I would never miss. Such a captivating speaker and he really explained how backroom politics really worked... and not how we thought politics worked after being brainwashed by the MSM. I learned more about politics through Dr. Black (his courses and reading his books) and reading Fear and Loathing On the Campaign Trail '72 book² than anything else combined.

I was thisclose to pursuing a career in politics. Not as a politician, but using my poli sci degre as a minion. I had worked on two congressional campaigns in college. I guess I'm a mush. Both my candidates lost, including Ben Jones, otherwise known as Cooter from Dukes of Hazzard. Jones was the incumbent (he served two terms as a congressman from Georgia), but he got stomped (only winning 33%) by his opponent, a fellow named... Newt Gingrich.... who was more crooked and twisty than Lombard Street (in San Francisco). I had hoped Jones would win his re-election bid, because I would have hit him up for a job after college, but I backed the wrong pony in that race. Instead of sticking around Atlanta and working tirelessly on different elections, I put aside politics and migrated north. I returned to my hometown of NYC to pursue a career on Wall Street (with a pitstop at an art museum while I was procrastinating the inevitable recruitment as a bankster). In college, I figured I'd be a pollster or grunt in the trenches. I could only imagine a potential career trajectory if I stuck around Atlanta and became one of those congressional staffers... I'd be 41, wearing cheap suits, gobbling pills and writing speeches for low-hanging fruit in DC.

It's funny that House of Cards is a show about politics. Sure, it's fictional and waaaaaay out there, but it's funny how we're being constantly distracted. Sleight of hand. Divisive politics. The powers that be don't want you to pay attention to their affairs. They want to keep you occupied and busy. They don't want you to have free time to think, because if you actually think about things... you start to realize what's really going on and how bad they've been fucking you and lying to your faces.Then there are some people, a small group of folks who figured shit out and know exactly what's up, but they know better than to rock the boat. It's like some Sun Tzu shit about not fighting battles you can't win, but focusing on winning the war. Well, it's better to just load up the bong and binge watch a show about crooked politicians than to actually try to oust those slithery used-car salesmen in DC.

---
FOOTNOTES:

1. Huxley is laughing right now at that big bar in the sky where other writers hang out, drink forever without getting hungover, and troll on hacks like Ayn Rand.

2.  Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 was actually the first time I read anything by Hunter S. Thompson, but it was not on Dr. Black's syllabus. I read it for a different poli sci class.

A Cocktail of Optimism for Taylor Hicks

By Pauly
Los Angeles, CA

The mornings, well the pre-mornings, when everything is still foggy and its still a little dark out and there's the first hint of daybreak tearing down the edges of the sky. The stillness of the early mornings present the most promising moment of the day. It's when you're full of hope and optimism. Overflowing and overjoyed about the possibilities. It's because you forgot about all of the stuff that weighs you down and all of the bad shit that was bugging you out was momentarily erased from your memory banks. Eventually reality sinks in and you quickly remember everything you wanted to forget, and that optimism is shredded into little frayed pieces of pessimism until you make the conscious decision to ignore it.

Some mornings I'm staring at a picture, a signed picture, of Taylor Hicks playing the blues harp. For a two or three week period, he was one of the most famous people in America. But fame is fleeting. The southern guy with salt-n-pepper hair had a shot at winning American Idol many moon ago when the show was the most talked-about program in the land of the free. Hicks used up the majority of his fifteen minutes of fame with Idol. It was more like fifteen days of fame. I had seen him once before at the same coffeeshop while his star was rising and rising and rising. I guess he was staying in the general vicinity and liked the food. I know I do. Greasy spoon diners are getting harder and harder to find. Maybe the comfort food helped him feel a little more at home while he was basking in the ubiquitous sunshine and helping fabricate reality by being a main ingredient for the entertainment biz machine. I wonder if he knew that that moment in the photo was "as good as it gets" before he woke up one day in some generic, sterile motel room in the middle of nowhere, wondering where his entire career went off the rails.

I looked up at the picture of Taylor Hicks and got an unhealthy dose of reality. I was filled with optimism and promise until I saw the picture and remembered how brutal this town is for creative people. It swallows up more people every day and they disappear into obscurity while a fresh new batch of dreamers step off the tarmac at LAX, or exit the freeway. The minute they arrive is the minute their dreams start dying.

The mornings are always the most ambitious before I remember all of the bad, crusty shit that can drive you nuts... if you let it. I shrug it off. Most of the time, I'm teflon and just gut it out. Yes, the world is a dark, chaotic, and meaningless place but that doesn't mean I can't have a good time. There's a certain amount of safety in know all of this means jack shit. But every once in a while, I wake up with a glimmer of hope that's quickly shot down out of the sky like a paper airplane trying to win a dogfight against an F-15.

I woke up this morning and wandered over to the coffeeshop. Along the way, I saw an old Russian lady smoke a cigarette while scooping up a pile of shit with a plastic bag from Ralph's. Around the corner in the alley behind Jack in the Box, a homeless man bundled up in a blanket was trying to catch the last bit of shut eye before he was kicked out of the alley by the morning sounds of commerce, whirling leaf blowers and grinding garbage machines. At the coffeeshop, I could not stop looking at Taylor Hicks while I ate my pancakes. Sure, there were other pictures of actors on the wall. Some much more famous than Hicks will ever be. But they're not out on the road somewhere with a bunch of other burned out musicians completely weary and wondering how long they can stay awake before remembering about how miserable life can be trying to scrape together a paltry paycheck on the road and thousands of miles away from home.

Writing to Live and Feeding F. Scott's Vampire Monkey

By Pauly
Los Angeles, CA

This article hit a little too close to home: Writing to Live in Hollywood.

I saw a few haunting parallels between Fitzgerald washing up in Hollywood and myself and Las Vegas. I sold out and ditched my original artistic prime directive in order to make a quick buck and earn easy money shilling online poker to essentially keep the party going.

Fitzgerald ended a long chapter in his life as a novelist in New York City and headed West to sunny California. One of America's premier fiction writers sold his soul to the suits running the big studios during the golden era of Hollywood. Fitzgerald wasn't stupid; he was a washed-up writer and following the money. They were printing so much money in Hollywood that even a neophyte screenwriter with zero experience like him had a crack at a few bucks, so he signed a contract with MGM and cranked out a bunch of crappy, passion-less screenplays. I think I read somewhere that Fitzgerland was making the equivalent of $1,000/week (in 2013 dollars).

Every week, Hollywood fat cats raked in millions and millions and millions of dollars from box offices all over America and flowing freely right back to the bank accounts of the major studios. Fitzgerald was not the only novelist who supplemented their income by writing (or ghost-writing) for the studios. William Faulkner was so far gone at that point in the twilight of his career that he was perpetually shitfaced so his assistant handed in his pages.

Fitzgerald was stalked by demons the majority of his adult life. Large mutherfucking demons with claws and roving band of starved, blood-sucking monkeys. He could only slay those beasts with the bottle. He wrestled with those fierce alkie demons and always lost. Night after night. The vampire monkeys jeered and shat in their hands and threw it in his general direction. It was an expensive war and cost Fitzgerald his health and dragged him deep into debt.

Fitzgerald died at the age of 44 of a heart attack, but he drank himself to death. Fitzgerald got caught up in a nasty cycle of abuse and self-doubt and could not escape. Quicksand. Instead of sand, it was booze. He headed to Hollywood because it was the only place that could pay for his rampant alcoholism (in addition to medical treatment for his bat-shit crazy wife Zelda), but being stuck in Los Angeles and struggling to write shitty dialogue for pathetic third-rate B-films drove him even more insane. He got stuck in a rut, which sent him into a deeper depression, so he drank even more. And more. And more. Poor fucker never had a chance.

I sort of turned to poker and Vegas to cover the tab for my addictions -- mostly travel and music. I felt as though I had to go through hell for 2 months every year so I could have a groovy 10 months. That was the sacrifice I made... but I was also selling out. I flocked to Vegas every summer to follow the money. It was the only place I knew where I could get paid rather well to write (and be myself) and I was stuck in that cycle because of lifestyle maintenance. It took me seven years, but I finally realized it wasn't worth it.

I got into poker by accident. I thought I had a once-in-a-lifetime experience covering the 2005 World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. The plan was have one crazy summer and that was it then return to NYC and the dream would be over. It turns out I never went home. The dream continued... and continued. I headed out West and stuck around Vegas, like so many other innocent people who got seduced by the gambling scene, or sucked into the Vegas' black hole of depravity and immorality.

I bailed from Vegas before I became a full blown junkie or lost all my money betting on sports, and washed up in Hollywood of all places. I considered myself one of the lucky ones. I actually left Vegas with some money in my pocket. Most of the people I know who moved to Vegas chasing the Dream Americana either went broke, or went crazy, or got totally ambushed by a nasty addiction and fell prey to "The Sickness" which is full-blown immersion into a vice that totally sucks your soul dry. Pick one... a) drugs, b) alcohol, c) gambling, and d) sex. The Sickness comes in multiple choice form.

Fitzgerald passed away unable to fade depression  and demoralization and the lingering effects of hardcore alkie abuse. He arrived in Hollywood mostly forgotten as a novelist and dismissed as a "one-hit wonder." Even when he died, the critics were not extolling Fitzgerald's virtues like many college professors do today.

Check out Writing to Live in Hollywood.

Lefsetz's Slanket (Fiction)

By Pauly
Los Angeles, CA

Coffeshop. Santa Monica. 10am. Two guys sat in a booth. One, former A&R guy at a major record label, is loosely wearing a suit. The other one, an actor, looks like he just woke up.

"I was up early," said the actor as he shoveled a ham and cheese omelet into his face. "I had an early audition. Crack of dawn. Fast food commercial."

"Was it for breakfast or something like McMuffins?"

"Nah, flatbread sandwiches. National campaign. If I land that, I can finally pay off my credit cards and I can go home and visit family for Christmas. But right now, all I care about is getting the call back. The next few days are going to be torture. Hey, I'm in the wrong biz. The music industry. That's where it's at. I should have been more serious when I was nine and took piano lessons."

"The music industry? No way. Just as bad if not worse than acting. It's like the worst wrung of show business."

"Even worse than reality TV?"

"Reality TV brings in more dough than scripted TV. Nah, music biz is up there with infomercials and politics. I should say, it's down there with infos and those talking heads."

"Really? Music biz that bad? Worse than infomercials?"

"At least people, albeit stupid people, will buy something they see on an infomercial. Whether its a Snuggie or Ginsu knives... doesn't matter... it's a real, physical product that you can't steal from the internet. They ship products that kids can't steal via the internet."

"You can buy knives and slankets on the net."

"Sure, you can. Maybe it's cheaper too. Maybe not. But you still have to pay for it in a traditional business transaction. It's not like kids today stealing 99.9% of their music. When was the last time you went to a record shop and bought a CD?"

"God. I don't know. I think I bought a Beatles Greatest Hits once at a gas station when I was on a road trip up to Maine and the rental car at Logan had a CD player but no AUX ports or satellite radio."

"When was the last time you paid for a full album on iTunes?"

"I think I bought The Strokes new album Angels a couple summers ago."

"That was two albums ago. Why didn't you get the last one? Because you streamed it on Pitchfork, like everyone else, right?"

"Yeah, I did... it was free. I got to listen to it for free."

"But you didn't pay a cent to the band, or the record company. Sure, you boosted the traffic to Pitchfork, and they probably cut a deal with the band to stream it exclusively, but for the most part the majority of people listening to the new Strokes album are not paying for it. How much of your iPod is filled with pirated music? 50%? 90%? Kids today in highschool? They never paid a dime for music in their lives."

"I'm starting to sound like one of those old farts. When I was a kid, blah blah blah. But it's true, when I was in college, we still had dial up so I couldn't download music. In high school I blew money on music and movies. CDs. DVDs. Movie tickets. Concert tickets. Gas money. A little grass and cheap six packs. That's why I worked at the fucking Blockbuster in Nashua. I fucking hated it, but I got free rentals and it paid for music I really wanted badly."

"You worked hard to earn money and then spent it on music. Nowadays, kids just go online and download that shit for free. They have no semblance of what it means to pay for art."

"What ever happened to 'You get what you pay for?'"

"In this case, kids have access to an entire encyclopedia of music -- the entire history of music from Bach to the Beatles, from Beethoven to Beiber. And with access to all that rich history, what kinda of music is selling now? Fucking dubstep. Robots fucking. Douchey, uncircumcised Swedish dorks with laptops. That's today's 'rock' stars. No more Ziggy Stardust. No more Robert Plant. No more long haired dudes drinking whiskey, toking grass, and lighting up the garage with the loudest music they could. It was happening in the 60s. In the 70s. Event in the 80s and then the 90s, and then just stopped at the start of the 00s. Now, no one is trying to form bands with their friends. Instead, it's solo solitary dudes with their laptops. Sitting in the dark in their mommy's basement. Alone. Mixing. Mashing. Cuisinarting all these hooks and drops that these dopey fucking kids with zero taste think is straight up dope. It's dope. Dope for dopes. And they're blowing tons of cash on this dope. Electric Daisy and shit like that. Sure, I fucking hate the Eagles and it's the epitome of corporate rock and roll, but at least there's some bit of art in it. Albeit watered down, there's still a bit of soul in there. This glitch hop is soulless. I cannot believe what's going on."

"The drugs are getting stronger and the music is getting worse."

"Zombies shoving Ecstasy up their asses and in their coochies.No wonder we're doomed. All this new shit lacks any sort of edge. It's too narcissistic. Totally lacks a sociopolitical edge. Punk was political. It was about the have-nots rallying together to fight the man. Dylan was inspired by protest singers from the first half of the 20th Century. The earliest days of hip hop were all political. Jay Z said hip hop was like CNN for black communities. It's how they got their news. Then it all became about material pursuits. Bling. Dealing drugs. Hoochie mamas. And this electronic dance music craze? Where's the politics in that? Sounds more like static. Loud static. Feed kids enough drugs and they'll dance to anything."

Obey. Consume. Watch TV.

By Pauly
Los Angeles, CA

Jonathan Lethem wrote a book about the cult classic film They Live. It was as though Lethem live-blogged the film, but in book form. The book is short but we get his take on John Carpenter's film -- scene by scene -- because it's layered with tons of symbolism both overt and covert. I was kind of cool experience to read a few chapters, then watch the film for a few minutes, and go back and read a few more chapters and watch a little more of the film, etc etc etc.

My brother and I were huge WWF fans when we were kids. Roddy Rowdy Piper was billed as the bad guy and every Saturday morning we'd see some of his douchebaggery. The best moment? He beat up Jimmy 'Superfly' Snuka with a coconut. We were excited to see a movie with a wrestler in it. This was still the late 80s before wrestling really blew up and it helped propel their top stars like the Rock into the real big leagues -- Hollywood. The Rock was able to become a true crossover star from deflecting metal chairs to his head to carrying a big budget Hollyweird film. But with They Live, Roddy Piper was able to get top billing in a B-film that flirted the line between cult sci-fi fantasy and campy straight-to-video fodder. We watched it a bunch on videotape and thought it was a cool flick about aliens featuring a favorite wrestler.

Watching They Live as an adult is mind blowing because the cheesy factor of the plot (not to mention how bad it really was) really covered up the incendiary subversiveness of the film. Simply put, according to Carpenter we've been brainwashed by the powers that be. As a result, we're a nation of TV addicts, which is we're either slaves, sheep, zombies, doped up, or sleepwalking through life. The glowing box in the living room is truly the opiate of the masses and we're all complicit by participating in the culture of consumption, even though we want to break out of that dreadful cycle.

There's a documentary called They Live We Sleep, which is a much more tin foil hat version of Lethem's book. But it's short (thirty minutes) and an eye opener.


They Live We Sleep is a nice companion piece to Lethem's book and the actual film. At this point, whenever I watch the film, I'm purposely looking for different pieces of hidden symbolism. Sort of like those maniacal fiends who comb through Kubrick's films frame-by-frame.

Silky Back Roads

By Pauly
Los Angeles, CA

Miles Davis was freaked out by technology. New musical instruments in the early 80s really sent him into a frenzy.

"If you don't match those social sounds in the air like synthesizers," warned Miles in his raspy, sand-paper voice, "No one wants to hear it."

Miles could walk through walls. But he was spooked.

Yes, he could walk through walls. Like the hosts. Through them. Materializing on the other side. defying psychics. Like Star Trek kind of shit.

**

Dylan wanted to be known as a "song and dance man."

Heavy speculation on the transformation. After the crash, Dylan was a changed man. Fourteen times over. Maybe fifteen?

"You do not want to go where I have been."

The champions of change are inspired to rush forward, but still prepared to throw down in a bloody brawl against angry lynch mob of hooligans, fueled by the bitter backlash.

Living in the past is cool until somebody gets hurt.

The fragile ones demand that their heroes remain suspended in time. Never to move forward, or take three leaps forward without their permission.

**

In the early 60s, Jerry Gracia bummed around Palo Alto. He was banging Standford chicks and sponging odd rich college kids, who kicked him down jugs of wine and cigarettes. He held different odd jobs with older derelicts, drunks mostly from the other side of the tracks. He befriended a black guy who sometimes ran dope for gangsters in Oakland. He's bring Jerry along with him to these black bars all over the Bay Area. Jerry would play a few songs for the old black junkies, who got a kick that this goofy white boy knew how to play the blues.

While Jerry was not  bumming smokes off college kids, he sometimes moving furniture for $20 a day. His pal Ken Kesey was eating mushrooms and acid and reporting his findings to CIA... and getting paid to do so. Not quite the Burning Man experience. Rather a bunch of square, humorless, serious-looking scientists in lab coats and clip boards. Plus the occasional suit and spook in a black suit.

**

Diluted lemonade is what the Man hopes to pass off as the real thing. Water the fucker down. Sweeten it up. Whatever it takes. More dilution equates to increased quarterly profits.

A tinge of sadness hung over the toothless cowboy sitting in the corner and lamenting over the smarmy show business types who screwed him over.

The choices were being at the center of the hurricane or utter seclusion. Exile or a suicide mission?

He chose self-imposed seclusion. The silence made him deaf.

**

The evening was dominated by art school rejects. Lots of skinny black ties and silver pinky rings. Stark collection of vented up anger. Visionary malcontents. Short-haired lipstick lesbians with tambourines and purple jorts.

Real World LA Flashbacks: Cowboy Guy, Drunk Irish Dude, and the Chick Who Got Knocked Up By Kenny Anderson

By Pauly
Los Angeles, CA

1994. My friend Mophy told me about the Real World. "It's these kids living in a house out in LA and everything gets filmed."

Mophy lived off campus and had cable TV. We didn't have cable in my fraternity house and I got four or five fuzzy channels including the "Superstation" TBS (because we lived in Atlanta). In the early 90s, TBS only aired Braves games and Andy Griffith. Instead of TV, we watched a ton of movies (VHS tapes) and played video games (NHL 94, Mortal Combat, PGA Tour).

I hung out at Mophy's apartment and bonged out and watched my first episode of reality television that's wasn't COPS. I missed the first season (New York), but got my feet wet with the second season. The house was in Venice. Seven strangers. Getting wasted in front of cameras. The cast of the Real World: Los Angeles (Venice) were still the guinea pigs. That was 20 years ago.

Nowadays, everyone gets their own reality show. That's the updated version of Andy Warhol's fifteen minutes of fame. In the 21st Century, at some point you will appear on a reality show.
 
Real World LA had an interesting cast of characters. One of the girls (Beth from Cleveland) was an aspiring actress and she became the first smarmy character to manipulate and really work the cameras in hopes of it getting her big break. Most reality show participants have aspiring show biz dreams, but what they don't realize is that their reality show is the pinnacle. It's as good as it gets. Very rarely do they break out into sitcoms and feature films. Otherwise, they get recycled on other reality shows. It's like being a baseball player who had a cup of coffee in the pros, but gets stuck dicking around the minor leagues for the rest of their career.

What reality stars du jour never realize is that they'll never get more famous than that moment. It's all downhill. Fast and steep hill down too. I found that out the first week I started dating Nicky and we went out to a ritzy sushi joint in West Hollywood. An Oscar-winning author sat on the patio (Nicky and her boss had referred to him as "frog face") and one of the Red Hot Chili Peppers sat two tables down from us. But it was the pretty girl at the bar that caught my eye. She was a former cast member of Road Rules (another MTV reality show) and like most aspiring actors, she showed up in LA and got a harsh dose of reality. Unable to book any commercials or roles, she turned to bartending to make ends meet.

One minute your face is splashed all over MTV and the next you're pouring drinks for one of the Chili Peppers and an Oscar winner. Hollywood is a tough fucking town, especially for reality stars... the red-headed stepchildren of the entertainment biz.

Tami, one of the Real World Venice cast-members, was called an NBA groupie by Chuck Klosterman in his infamous essay about the Real World (he was comparing archetypes from St. Elmo's Fire). When I watched the show on Mophy's couch in 1994, Tami was an aspiring singer in a waterered-down, third-rate knock off of Destiny's Child. When the singing career never went anywhere, she looked to NBA players for a fat paycheck as one of their "baby's mama." She even married Kenny Anderson¹ who was like a god among mortals. Kenny Anderson was one of only two highly-touted teenagers² that I was super geeked out to see in real life.

In the "small world department of six degrees of Kevin Bacon", one of my roommates (when I lived in Brooklyn) was from the same hometown in Kentucky as the "Cowboy Guy"country singer who always wore a cowboy hat. Anyway, Mophy said his favorite character was the Cowboy guy because he sat around and watched TV all day.

I identified with Dominic, the drunken Irish band manager. No stereotypes there, eh? In the first episode I saw, Dom had passed out on the beach. Shades of Three's Company when Jack Tripper tied one on at the Regal Beagle and took a nap on the beach. Dominic struck me as the kind of guy who would have been the village drunk no matter what century he lived in.

At one point they kicked out the TBG (token black guy). David Edwards was a comedian but he supposedly roughed up Tami and got booted off the show. He was the first person to get kicked off a reality show and he wasn't the last. He was replaced by a white lesbian. I loved that she showed up one day wearing a shirt that said something to the effect, "I'm not a dyke, but my girlfriend is." Beth the Lesbian (not to be confused with Beth the self-absorbed actress) freaked out Tami for some reason.

I don't remember much about the rest of the cast (and I don't want to Google it, otherwise I fall down another rabbit hole and lose 17 hours watching old episodes of the second season of the Real World). But there was some toe-head surfer dude (who looked like your typical frat boy date rapist) and there was a tough Latino chick who was a cop.

Without cable, I watched a couple of episodes of the Real World at Mophy's flat but that was it. After graduation, I stuck around Atlanta for the summer before I returned to NYC and got a job at the museum. I didn't even have a TV during my first year back from college. When I moved to Park Slope to share an apartment with Ursula (who went to high school with Cowboy Guy), I finally got a TV and cable. I recall binge-watching a Real World LA marathon and that's how I caught up all the episodes I missed. I found out MTV were airing single episodes of the first season... Real World NYC. I started taping those (ah, via VCR) and eventually caught up on the first two seasons.

In another small world situation, Ursula and I worked with a girl we called Jersey Jen (we worked with six Jens). Anyway, Jersey Jen went to high school with Eric Neis (cast member from original Real World NYC). She said Neis was kind of a dick because his father was a NBA ref and he thought he was hit shit, but his sister was really cool and laid back.

I watched the third season of Real World: London with my roommates in Brooklyn. Ursula had a huge crush on the British dude. I fancied the Australian model. But that's a post for another time. Just like the story about how I played poker with Trishelle from Real World: Las Vegas. It'll have to wait until I have more time. For now, it's back to work.

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FOOTNOTES:

1. When I was a kid, Kenny Anderson was like a god among mortals. Anderson was the best high school basketball in NYC and maybe even the country. He snubbed a scholarship offer at UNC because he "didn't want to be a pony in Dean Smith's stable." Anderson also went to college in Atlanta... at Georgia Tech. But Emory was a DIII school so we never played Tech. Luckily I watched Anderson play a lot in NYC.

2. I've only been super excited to see an 18-year old phenom twice in my life. Once was watching Kenny Anderson scrimmage at my basketball camp (when he was a senior at Molloy), and the other was getting a first glimpse of Annette_15 (a wunderkind online poker pro from Norway named Annette Obrestad who held her own against the world''s top pros as a teenager still in high school), when she played in one of her first live poker tournaments in Monte Carlo.

Feed All the Kangaroos

By Pauly
Los Angeles, CA

"Steely Dan? My 12th favorite band."

Nicky was shocked... that I had a list and that Steely Dan was up so high.

Of course, I didn't. I was fucking around with her. But I'd say if I had to rank bands (no solo acts) it's around there.

"Steely Dan was in the Top 10, but they got nudged out by My Morning Jacket (10th) and LCD Soundsystem (11th). Hence. Twelve. Steely Dan. My 12th most favorite band."

There are two types of people in this world.....

1) People who like a few Steely Dan songs.
2) People who think Steely Dan sucks.

The haters are like 99% of America. Steely Dan fans are in the 1%. Which is funny, because you really have to be a One-percenter in order to afford a ticket to a Steely Dan concert at the Nokia Theatre in downtown LA. Seriously.... $295 for a pit? $175 for an orchestra? Even the cheap seats (with added costs like juice and other corporate shakedown fees) were $60 for the privileged of sitting in the last four rows of the mezzanine in the back corner of the theatre. No man's land. Where the sound was muddy and drunkards loudly talked and spilled over-priced warm beers on everyone.

I listened to a significant amount of classic rock on the radio in my teens and 20s, so at some point you cannot listen to a couple hours without hearing at least one Steely Dan song. Usually it was Peg. Sometimes you'd hear Reelin' In the Years. I always thought it was funny that Diane Court's dad from Say Anything listened to Ricki Don't Lose That Number in one scene when he was elated and driving down the street and singing along.

In college, Jerry had Steely Dan's greatest hits and he used to play it all the time because he loved Peg. That's how I learned all the lyrics. I lived next door to Jerry that year, so after the first week or so, I had Peg down. The rest? Not so much.

I was swamped with work and exhausted after finishing up a crash course on the upcoming NFL season. I had a couple (looming) deadlines, a book to read (before Monday), and a couple of fantasy drafts to prepare. But I still wanted to squeeze in a quick concert. Steely Dan. Downtown at the Nokia Theatre. I heard they were performing the AJA album -- all seven songs -- plus a smattering a greatest hits. On this summer's tour, Steely Dan performed the same setlist every show which included four songs off of AJA.

The music of Steely Dane is something of an acquired taste. About a decade ago, my friend Tony gave me MP3 copies of every Steely Dan album. I no longer just had a few single tracks. I had access to deep cuts. I didn't really dig into the archives until I moved to California a few years later. I discovered that Walter Becker and Donald Fagen from Steely Dan were displaced (writers) from NYC living in Los Angeles, which felt like another planet to them. I decided to explore their music and lyrics, especially from their AJA album, in hopes of finding someone who understood the abrasive adjustment period I was struggling with as a New Yorker lost in the shadows of Hollyweird.


The more I listened to Josie (see video above to hear it on vinyl), the more I realized it's the appropriate vehicle to described my particularly twisted NYC-to-LA experience. Eerily similar to Becker/Fagen's fish-out-of-water trip through Hollywood when they moved out here in the late 60s/early 70s. They relayed that East Coast vs. West Coast artistic and emotional struggle through various lyrics and grooves throughout the AJA album.

Nicky was not keen on going to Steely Dan. For one, she didn't like the music. The other was the crowd.

"I'd be like the youngest person there," she protested. "We'd be in a crowd of 7,000 people who are my parents' age."

When I first started dating Nicky, I used to play a lot of Steely Dan because it drove her nuts. She hated it. I mean really hated Steely Dan. I'd put on Peg and in my cheesiest disc jockey voice, I'd scream "Two for Tuesdays!" (even if it was Friday) and then when Peg ended, I'd play a second Steely Dan song. And a third. And a fourth. Until she gave up and ran out of the room. Hey, I don't give her shit for loving showtunes and singing along to Glee. Then again, she recently found out that I saw the Disco Biscuits 27 times in concert, and she was mortified. She's still processing that nugget. I'm surprised she's still with me.

She said she wouldn't go to Steely Dan (even if I paid for her ticket), but insisted that I go by myself. She'd even give me a ride downtown and drop me off.

Raging solo at Steely Dan? Yeah. No one else I know digs them as much as me (aside from Lee Jones and G-Money). I always wanted to start a Steely Dan cover band, but I always got rejected. Besides, Huey Lewis songs are much easier to play.

I have no problems going to concerts, or even movies by myself. I love the intimate feeling of being one of the only people in a theatre. And concerts? It's a lot easier moving around if you're by yourself. I'd really like to investigate different parts of the scene at the Nokia Theatre, but it was not a general admission show, I couldn't roam around.

I was eying a single pit ticket (third row, center) via Stub Hubb. The seller originally priced it at $400, or a $105 mark-up. By mid-afternoon, the seller dropped it to $300. Three hours to show time, it dropped to $275. Over the next hour, the price dipped down. First to $250. Then $225. Then $195. At that point, the seller freaked out and decided to do anything to sell it, even if he took a $100 hit. I set my baseline at $125. I just had to wait another hour until the seller got desperate and dropped it by another $50 bucks. $125 seems steep, but it's third row center and like half price from the amount that those greedheads Walter Becker and Donald Fagen were trying to milk from their (wealthy) fans. I refused to pay $275 for a pit.... but $125 was doable. When am I going to see Steely Dan again? They're old and might never tour again. I had an option... $60 in the nosebleeds with the hoi polloi, or up close with the rich hippies for only $125?

Too bad the ticket got sold ninety minutes before show time. It never came down from $195. I kept refreshing the page until the listing vanished. A fan decided that $100 discount on a third row seat was worth it. Fuck me. I had had only two choices left online... spending $150 for the far corner of the orchestra, or $60 up in the cheap seats.

Or, I could take my chances out front with the scalpers. But would there be any? Most of the pro ticket mongers would be across the street and circling Staples Arena. Taylor Swift was the hottest ticket in town. According to Lefsetz, Taylor Swift is one of the few acts that could sell out Staples for a multi-night run. Her tickets were going for $200+ online and those were shitty seats so far up that they might as well be listed as "roof tickets." Shit, anything close in the 100 levels would cost at least $400-500. I'd hate to be the dad who got stuck shelling out $1,000 on a pair of tickets.

There's a hyper-profitable demand for Taylor Swift... today. Maybe in thirty years she'll be churning out water-down, slower versions of "greatest hits" shows at small theatres. She's the "it" girl today. Who knows what tomorrow will bring. She's just one meltdown and two-week cocaine/pills/vodka bender away from beginning the second act of her E! True Hollywood Story.

That's today's music biz for you. The juicy demographics that actually spend money on concerts are older people with oodles of money to blow on bands they loves as a teenager/twentysomething, or teenagers feasting on pop music. Nostalgia acts from the 70s are one of the few ways you can get away charging $200-300 for a ticket (e.g. Roger Waters, Bruce Springsteen, Eagles or Steely Dan). Otherwise, you have to be today's mega-star du jour (e.g. Taylor Swift or Drake) in order to rake in a triple digit price tag. There's very little in between... unless you're a country act. That shit still sells. And that's why suits loved Taylor Swift. She came up through the country ranks but she had crossover appeal.

Man, I miss the days when I could see 5 bands for $5 at a divey music venue. Nowadays, those millennials have to drop $100 to hear an obnoxious kid on a laptop playing a bunch of abysmal tracks that sounds more like robots having a gangbang with a rabbit unleashing a blood-curdling scream to  as its getting skinned to death.

The drugs are getting stronger and the music is getting worse. That's the best way I can describe Skrillex.

At least I feel young at a Steely Dan concert. Sometimes at Phish shows, especially during the summer, I feel like I'm the old fart in the crowd. This is becoming troubling for me because I intend to never stop going to concerts. Then again, no matter where I go, I feel like I'm the misfit and outsider, so this is a universal feeling.

I often have random flashbacks of being 17-18 and wandering through the crowded hallways at Madison Square Garden or the Omni as the youngest person in a sea of tie-dye at a Grateful Dead show. I was like the little kid who ran away from home to join the psychedelic circus. And now 20+ years later, I'm the middle-aged balding guy at the show trying to relive old glory days. No wonder my Colorado friends poker fun at me by calling me "Brett Favre" because I'm a jaded vet ddicted to painkillers and hobbling around the parking lot.

Steely Dan? Wading through a sea of old hippies... I'm a spring chicken.

* *
Becker/Fagen discuss in lengthy detail about the process behind making AJA (recorded in 1977) in this mini-documentary...


Cameron Crowe wrote a great article about Steely Dan back when he was in his early 20s. It appeared in Rolling Stone in late 1977. Check out Steely Dan Springs Back: The Second Coming.

Story of My Life

By Pauly
Los Angeles, CA

This scene from Greenberg sums up me in LA...

For more about my fascination with Greenberg, check out Whiskey and Ice Cream.