Levon Helm   by Larry Getlen

The Last Waltz, Martin Scorsese’s filmed documentation of the final performance by The Band, is often referred to as one of the greatest concert films ever made. Levon Helm, The Band’s drummer and the voice on several of their biggest hits, thinks of it in a slightly different manner – as “the biggest rip-off of all time.”

The 60-year-old Helm, who sang on Band hits such as “The Weight” and “The Night They Drove Ole’ Dixie Down,” sounds exactly like a good ole’ grizzled southern boy should. His voice is worn beyond a rasp – it’s more of a grind. His demeanor is genteel, even when he expresses bitterness, and his biggest laughs emerge when he discusses situations where he’s been wronged the hardest. The Last Waltz, according to Helm, unfairly became the Robbie Robertson show, and coming from Helm there could be no bigger insult, because when Helm discusses his former Bandmate, you can almost see the bile ooze from his mouth.

“I hate the motherfucker,” Helm candidly declares. “I’d kick his ass if I can get to him. He’s a thieving, lying son of a bitch.”

According to Helm, sometime before The Last Waltz, Robertson teamed up with The Band’s manager Albert Grossman , and together with their lawyers and accountants, they “ended up with all the loot.” Helm says that he and fellow Bandmates Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, and Garth Hudson came out of The Band with almost nothing.

Much of this hinges from the fact that Robertson received songwriting credit on most of The Band’s output, which Helm calls “an outright goddamn lie.” When asked about Robertson’s songwriting ability, Helm fires off. “If he’s such a great songwriter, why ain’t he wrote something since we left?” Laughing, he continues. “He ain’t wrote nothing since Garth (Hudson) left him. That’s just bullshit. Garth wrote half the music The Band ever done. Anybody who knows music knows that.”

The reporter asks Helm about “The Weight,” one of The Band’s best known songs, and Helm describes how each member of The Band contributed to the whole. “’The Weight’ is just like ‘Life is a Carnival,’ or ‘The W.S. Walcott Medicine Show’ and ‘Ophelia’ and all the rest of ‘em. It is a collaborative effort. Now you could say that Robertson was 60 percent responsible for the lyric, that Richard was 20 percent and maybe Rick got another 20, and I got 5 or 10, then you talk about the music. You could give Garth chord credits and all that stuff, but the people who handle that stuff don’t work for Garth. Or Richard or me. They work for Robbie and Albert.”

Helm claims that Robertson’s deceit carried over to The Last Waltz, which Helms says clearly portrays Robertson as The Band’s leader. “Robbie’s up there doing all the singing and all the playing, and the camera’s on him all the time,” describes Helm. “He’s leading the band, he’s up their conducting. I mean, did you ever see a Band show?”

Helm’s memories of that time often come back to his feelings toward Robertson, although they are tinged with humor. In discussing The Last Waltz period, Helm talks of Robertson’s close relationship with Scorsese (described in more detail in the excellent book about that period in film history, “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls”). Helm expresses resentment for the two or three years they spent overdubbing and putting the final touches on The Last Waltz, and talks about how they became “blow buddies,” saying “their wives kicked them out and they moved in with each other, and they just…poor guys. You know, that looks OK in Hollywood, but it just looks weird everywhere else.”

The Band continued in many variations, sans Robertson, after The Last Waltz, even after the 1986 suicide of keyboardist/vocalist Richard Manuel, whom Helm says did “the real singing” in The Band. Their most recent album was Jubilation, released in 1998. But when Danko passed away last year, that was it. According to Helm, Danko was the glue that held The Band together, and his death meant that the group would meet the same fate.

“I miss him every day,” says Helm of Danko. “Rick’s death left a big hole in our lives. He was our neighbor and brother and partner and we miss him every day.” For all his animosity toward Robertson, Helm considers the other Band member as brothers, declaring “I’d stay in the foxhole with them.” Helm describes his other remaining Bandmate, Hudson, as a “true musical genius,” saying “he’s the only guy I know who can play percussion instruments, woodwind instruments and brass. Plus he can play accordions and other stuff.” An interesting statement, considering that Hudson was The Band’s keyboardist.

Unfortunately, it seems that many of Helm’s endearing memories of The Band have been tainted by the animosity toward Robertson. “The best memories was the musical memories,” says Helm. “All of a sudden we just, by trial and error, hit a groove, where just about everything we tried would work. We got a head of steam going around the end of Big Pink recording that carried us into the next record, The Band record, and half of Stage Fright. Of course about that time the truth became known, that Robbie and Albert were sure enough in bed with each other, and that’s when the collaboration stopped.”

For all their talent as musicians and songwriters, The Band probably gained their greatest renown for their role in one of rock and roll’s truly historic moments, serving as Bob Dylan’s back-up band on his 1965 tour, his first playing electric guitar. The tour was controversial, to say the least, as Dylan’s fan base was shocked by his switch to electric guitar. For Dylan purists, it was a betrayal of their folk ideals, and Helm and his bandmates felt the brunt of it so heavily that Helm, despite the enormity and historical significance of the opportunity, left the tour.

“They used to boo the hell out of us,” recalls Helm. “It’s funny, it doesn’t sound like much when you’re talking about it, but when you’re playing a song and you get through and everybody claps and says ‘yay,’ it’s fun. But when you play it and get through and everybody goes ‘booooo,’ you just can’t imagine. It sounds awful. It made me crazy after a little bit. I was laughing on the outside but crying on the inside.”

Helm returned home while the rest of The Band finished the Dylan tour. Dylan then went back to Woodstock to compile a film of the tour, putting the other Band members on retainer to help him out. Soon, they began writing many of the classic songs that would eventually form the “Music From Big Pink” album, and enticed Helm back into the fold.

Despite his reluctance, Helm still sees that experience as one of the biggest of their lives. “That time really opened the door for us into the recording and songwriting world,” says Helm. “That’s what the Basement Tapes was about – Bob’s songwriting lessons for us. We would get together, and Bob and Richard would swap lyrics on typewriter, and the rest of us would be huntin’ chords on little patterns and stuff. We got a lot of music out of that room.”

While music has been the anchor of Helm’s life, he also had quite a bit of success as an actor. Helm had a neighbor in Woodstock, New York named Brad Dourif. Dourif, a veteran actor who provides the voice for the murderous doll in the Chucky movies, worked on a movie in the late Seventies called The Eyes of Laura Mars, and introduced Helm to co-star Tommy Lee Jones. Later, when Jones was cast for Coal Miner’s Daughter, he suggested Helm for a role, and Helm got to make his acting debut in one of that year’s most widely acclaimed films. Helm has made ten more films since, including The Right Stuff, Smooth Talk, and Feeling Minnesota, and closely compares acting to his experience as a musician.

“The ensemble aspects make it a lot like playing music, and I try to look at it in a musical kind of way,” says Helm. “When I worked with Sissy Spacek or Tommy Lee Jones in a scene, I would go about it like they were singing lead and I’m singing the harmony part, and I’m trying to back them up and guard their gun sack, musically. I just try to look at it that way, and associate the director for the producer, and the prop manager for the road manager, and so forth.”

Helm says that acting in another film is always a possibility if something good comes his way. But right now his current band, the Barn Burners, is his main focus. The act, which features Helm’s daughter Amy on vocals and piano, currently plays Delta blues and standards, and is working on original material, hoping to record a CD after the current tour. But for Helm, it is clear that the good and bad times of the past, soured by disputes with Robertson and the deaths of Manuel and Danko, are now to be left in the past. For he makes it clear that while he loves playing live and will continue to do so, the Barn Burners will not play any songs by The Band.

###

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

An Unbelievable View (published September 19, 2001)

On the morning of the attack, our writer in New York looked out on a city that would never be the same

by Larry Getlen

From the roof of my five-story walkup in Brooklyn, less than a mile from the East River, I saw the dense black smoke creeping like a sheet of moss up the walls of the twin towers. Ignited jet fuel billowed from the majestic glass and steel structures, creating a harrowing inkblot on the New York City skyline – a skyline that, moments later, would be horrendously altered.

People the world over share our grief right now, as so many have lost friends and loved ones in this unbearable atrocity. But for those of us in or near Manhattan, an area so compact that almost everyone here viewed some portion of the tragedy live, the memory burns a little deeper.

After the first tower fell, the crystal clear vision of towers teeming with smoke had been replaced by a dense sheet of ashen gray. I was running from roof to apartment and back, absorbing news and sights, trying to make sense of it all. Returning to the roof at one point, a neighbor got breaking news on the phone.

“The second tower just went down!” he yelled.

In my haze, I either didn’t hear, or couldn’t comprehend, the word “second.”

“Yeah,” I said. “The tower went down about 20 minutes ago.”

“No. The second tower.”

Now I got it. Standing what seemed like mere feet from two of the tallest buildings in the world, separated by an impenetrable wall of smoke, I needed my neighbor to tell me that one of them was not, as I thought, directly in front of me.

Anxious to be around people, I walked along Court Street, just blocks from Brooklyn Borough Hall. People wore paper masks or covered their faces with small towels. Debris resembling large snowflakes fell all around us. A man carried a piece of paper, possibly a magazine page, its border charred throughout. An oddly generic burning smell engulfed us as if coming from down the block. For its texture, it could have been a tire fire.

A suited man in his 20s, carrying a briefcase, strode down the street blanketed in soot and ash, his eyes intense and unblinking. His hair was dark gray around the edges from debris – a gray distinctively darker than the gray of age, a gray built of particles, soot, dirt and remains.

At my friend Kenny’s apartment, I called my mother, who lives in Weston (FL). She told me that our cousin Lenore worked at one of the Towers, and they hadn’t heard from her.

Kenny and I walked along the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, which borders the East River and has a glorious view of New York’s skyline. Hordes of people stared, almost half of them with cameras, all taking the same exact photo of a dense cloud of smoke.

We stopped at a grocery store, and a twenty-something with an expensive camera consoled a friend who was bitching about the price of film. “Dude! You’re gonna make $10,000 with these pictures.”

He was, of course, an idiot. The real moneymaking shots – two planes merging into buildings like keys into locks; people who minutes earlier were making coffee and checking e-mail despondently leaping to their deaths; fireballs and rubble that would decimate a symbol and destroy the security of a nation – had already been taken and filed.

Moments later, this vile, loud-mouthed douche latched his hooks into a cute blond woman. “You can’t let this get you down,” he said loudly. “It’s OK to mourn, but you have to move on. Enjoy your life. Do something beautiful today.”

Kenny and I cringed. Move on? Do something beautiful today? It just happened! Survivors and fatalities alike, my cousin possibly among them, were trapped in rubble, praying for life. And he’s ready to move on?

Minutes later, he directed his wisdom toward me. “We can’t be upset…Do something beautiful today.” Can’t be upset? Right. I’m not usually a confrontational guy, but this was not your average day.

“Hey shithead, I have a cousin who works in that building who may be dead, so shut the fuck up. Go make money with your camera. Asshole.” I then told him in no uncertain terms to go inside, and he took my advice. Kenny and I shared our only laugh of the day.

Back at Kenny’s apartment, I spoke to my aunt, who told me that Lenore hadn’t gone to work, a coincidence I would hear repeated throughout the day. We discussed the odor and debris that permeated the city, and my aunt, a typical Brooklynite, blurted out, “People here are skeeved out, thinking the ashes are people’s bodies.”

Later on, near my apartment, I noticed a woman with a piece of paper similar to the one I’d seen earlier – charred around the edges, solid in the middle. She said it was debris from the explosion that had floated into our neighborhood.

I returned to my apartment around 5:00, drained and weary. A charred odor filled my living room. I breathed it in, wondering if the remains of victims now permeated my lungs.

Back on the roof, I looked at the spot where the towers had been. The dark gray smoke had proven fertile and blossomed, enveloping half the sky, but remarkable in its stillness. I saw a piece of paper, about 4” x 6”, charred around the edges and slightly browned in the center, in the corner of the roof. It looked 20 years old.

It seemed to be some sort of guideline for fabrics.

“Of wool or fine animal hair (459)”

“Of synthetic fibers (659)”

“Of artificial fibers (659)”

Questions raced through my mind. Who’s was this? What did he or she do for a living? Might I one day find myself in conversation with them about the nature of natural vs. synthetic fibers? Or was that knowledge buried under a pile of rubble, crushed under tons of steel and glass, or incinerated by the flame ignited by a jet deliberately full with fuel?

I have inserted the piece of paper into protective plastic. I will either put it on my wall, or in a book. I’m not sure why – I don’t think I’ll need a reminder of this day. Of all my memories, this one surely will not fade.

Maybe it’s my way of paying homage to the victims. Maybe it’s my way of saying that no matter what abominations are committed upon this country, no matter how heinous our experiences at the hands of people dedicated to our destruction, I will not let them stop me from living my life.

And maybe, just maybe, memorializing one of the victims of this tragedy is my way of doing something beautiful today.

###

My City of Ruins (Published September 11, 2002)

New York’s resistance to change may be the key to its survival. It certainly is to mine.

By Larry Getlen

When City Link asked me, the magazine’s resident New Yorker, to write about the one-year anniversary of the September 11 attacks from a New Yorker’s perspective, I knew it would be my most emotionally challenging assignment since the piece I wrote last year about the attacks themselves.

There are countless reasons for this – most of them obvious – but perhaps the most prominent reason is that ultimately, I don’t feel qualified. And I mean that not as a writer, but as a person.

How can I possibly hope to encapsulate and represent the thoughts, feelings, fears, resentments, and even hopes of eight million New Yorkers in response to the most horrific event of our time?

Because as any New Yorker knows, asking one person to represent New York is as ridiculous as assuming that the concept of “a New Yorker” represents a solitary breed. What makes this city magical is that it is not one city, but many. Williamsburg hipsters wouldn’t be caught dead on the Upper East Side. The Puerto Rican stores of my neighborhood have no symmetry with the French bistros popping up right across the street from them. And Coney Island remains a rare vision of New York’s past, an area less connected to modern-day New York than to black and white movies, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Bowery Boys.

Plus, while everyone in New York suffered on September 11, no matter how unifying the experience was, anyone who lost someone in the towers suffered on a level that those of us who didn’t – including those of us who were here, seemingly inches away, watching the buildings burn and crumble – cannot possibly comprehend. For us, the events of September 11 represent losses on a far more abstract plane – a loss of innocence and invulnerability, a loss of what little faith in the goodness of mankind and freedom from existential fear we might have had left, a loss of the world’s greatest skyline. But those losses are as grand as notions of heaven, and ultimately, as difficult to grasp and define.

What one sees on the outside, at brunch with friends and at holidays with loved ones, on the faces of passing strangers and in snippets of cell phone conversations gleaned while buying the morning coffee, is a city that has gotten on with its life. On any given day this summer, Times Square was a creeping cattle car of tourists. Subway platforms radiated unbearable heat, and sweat was the great equalizer, drenching rich and poor, lawyer and poet alike. Thousands of people packed every inch of the Bryant Park lawn every Monday night, leaving nary a visible blade of grass as movies like “Young Frankenstein” and “The Grapes of Wrath” unspooled free of charge to the delight of all, planes soaring virtually unnoticed overhead.

And just as enjoyment and leisure maintain, so too do discourtesy and greed. At Ground Zero, tourists and residents congregate at the viewing stands daily, straining to see the infamous footprint, the ghost and shadow of architectural awe and dashed dreams. Meanwhile, directly across the street, exploitive merchants sell what seems to be the same book published under two different titles – “Day of Tragedy” and “Day of Terror.” The books feature the same pictures of the towers burning, which, by now, are as familiar as the image of Armstrong’s moon landing or the photo of the Hindenburg crashing. I recently saw a young woman even smile for a photo with the wreckage in the background, as if she were on Waikiki Beach, or standing before the Eiffel Tower.

But these observations belie insight, for they are not truth, but projection and façade, images of functionality that may be fiction or docudrama but, either way, broadcast the illusion of perseverance. Actual strength or failure of will and character in the face of challenge and adversity is internal. Therefore, the only experience I can truly relate, on behalf of my fellow New Yorkers, is my own. And when I think of September 11 and what I wish – no, need – to reveal, one emotion stands out: guilt.

Like the rest of the world, I first watched the towers burn on CNN. I soon realized, however, how that was the equivalent of watching a boxing match on TV while sitting ringside, and ran to my roof to watch the horror in visceral 3-D, without the aid of satellites and electricity.

Later on, I deduced that since the towers could be prominently viewed from my rooftop, they must have been visible from my street, had I ever glanced skyward.

“Must have been,” I write, because I never noticed.

That’s because the Twin Towers, in the eight months between my return to New York after an eight-year absence and their tragic collapse, were a peripheral ornament to me, meshing with the trees and utility poles and clouds that followed me in my travels. I had made my way through New York life every day for almost a year on that street with the towers prominent for all who chose to enjoy the view, and yet as hard as I try or wish, I will never remember looking up on my way to the subway, or to buy groceries, or to workout, and using the towers as my marker, their sheer voluminousness practically daring you to notice anything else. The towers were one of New York’s greatest pleasures, and while we’re all deprived of them now, I’ve been stripped of their memory thanks to my own obliviousness and complacency, my own absorption in life’s minutia, my own failure to stop, just once, and smell the proverbial roses.

Which is exactly the sort of myopic malaise that supposedly evaporated in the wake of September 11, right? Our uncanny ability to take life for granted and our failure to appreciate the wonders of life and how lucky we are to be alive in the United States of America crumbled with the towers, with the event representing a new awakening, an era of outward concerns. Isn’t that’s what everyone said – that none of us would ever be the same?

Well, here’s how September 11 ultimately changed me.

In the article I wrote for this magazine the day after the attack, I told of a piece of debris, most likely a page from an instructional manual of some sort, that floated for two miles or so along the airborne wreckage from the World Trade Center to the roof of my apartment building. I wrote of how I preserved the charred page in plastic and intended to frame it, place it in an album, or in some other way use it to pay tribute to those who were taken from us.

Well, want to know what I eventually did with that piece of debris, preserved in plastic with such care and reverence?

Nothing.

It sat atop my desk for months, often in the midst of other papers, tapes, CDs and Post-it notes. Initially, I always made sure that it remained on top, never covered or buried. Eventually, though, it got mixed in with the rest of my papers, with articles I pulled off the Internet or correspondence from clients. When I would notice this, guilt would set in, so I would place the page back on the top of the pile.

The charred page floated from disheveled spot to disheveled spot around my office and finally settled in a closet, reclining comfortably on a rarely-used camera bag. It never saw a frame or an album – and it couldn’t possibly have happened any other way.

You see, I’m a pack rat. The kindest description ever applied to my apartment – in fact, to any apartment I’ve ever lived in – is that it looks like a writer’s apartment. Throughout my life, I’ve always had way more papers, books, CDs, and general crap than any apartment should ever contain, and my organizational systems are always wholly inadequate for the task. So invariably, piles of notes, receipts, and magazines create worlds of their own, rendering every place I’ve ever lived seemingly one file cabinet short or one storage room too small. That’s how it has been since I was a teen, and now that I’m far beyond those years, I have long since accepted that like it or not, that’s how I’ll always be.

My pledge to put the World Trade Center debris in a frame or album was made with good intentions – you know, that thing the road to hell is paved with – but truth be told, I’ve never framed or albumed anything in my life. My high school diploma? Not sure where it is. Probably in a file somewhere. Pictures of my young nieces, whom I love dearly? Loose in a drawer. The original copy of my first article for Esquire Magazine? Sitting in a gym bag, at the moment, except for the rare days when I actually make it to the gym, at which time the article (and many other important documents) get placed on my bed, and then returned to the bag upon my return.

So what ultimately happened with that charred page from the World Trade Center is that, much like the tragedy itself, it was slowly integrated into the fabric of my life.

George Carlin does a great routine where he says that non-biodegradable plastic won’t destroy the environment as some fear, but that the Earth will eventually adapt into a new organism called “Earth plus plastic.” And so it is with my World Trade Center debris, and so it is, I believe – if we’re being truly honest with ourselves when not providing the media with solemn sound bites – with New Yorkers and September 11. We have adapted, and we have integrated.

A New York-based comic named Jonathan Corbett makes the case for why September 11 should not become a national holiday. His reasoning is that it will eventually become just like other American holidays – treated with solemnity for a few years before becoming an excuse for lazy days off work and barbecues, with MTV promoting their “What’s the 9-1-1 weekend,” and T.G.I. Friday’s imploring customers to “come on down to Ground Beero!”

The routine is funny because of the truth it speaks in asserting how solemnity often fails to endure, even in a case this extreme, and in the process states a truth that few of us want to admit. But what’s unsaid here is that that failure of reverence may not be a bad thing.

For what it really says about our city, and our country, is that we adapt, and in integrating the horrendous, can remove some of its power to dictate terms. And yes, oftentimes we trivialize in the process – we’re certainly not perfect, and who’s to say where balance lies – but still, that may be a better alternative than being ruled and driven by constant enmity and fear.

September 11 has not, as the media would have us believe, changed us all. In fact – excluding those who suffered direct and personal losses in the tragedy – I’d say that as individuals, September 11 didn’t really change any of us. Those who were thoughtless cretins before the tragedy remain so, and those who were kind of heart retained that wonderful quality. We are still, and will always remain, the same people we have always been. Only now, September 11 is, and will forever be, a part of us.

###

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

So why, then, does anyone in their right mind agree to participate in National Novel Writing Month?

I am grateful that this is a question I never bothered to ask – or that, perhaps, I am in something less than my right mind.

The idea of National Novel Writing Month, (or NaNoWriMo, as its known colloquially), is, as stated above, to start a novel from scratch (or virtually so – you can have a vague idea, notes, or even an outline. I barely had the first of these) on November 1. Then, by November 30, you are to have written at least 50,000 words of this novel. The implication is that this should be a “completed” (although in no way submittable) work, although that’s not a requirement.

Whenever I mentioned to people unfamiliar with it that I was participating this year, the response was invariably, “what’s the prize?” They seemed to expect that participants – and there were over 167,000 in 2009, over 32,000 of whom reached the 50,000 word goal – were angling for representation, publication, a cash reward of some sort, or the internet’s more common currencies, virality, buzz, and fame.

But the prize is none of these things, because a 50,000-word novel (or novel excerpt) banged out in a month will probably be close to unreadable, nevermind deserving of publication. No, the prize is something else, and potentially something even greater (and I’m not referring to the downloadable “winner’s” certificate you can type your name into and print at will if you complete the verified 50,000 words).

The prize – much, I suspect, like the morning pages attached to The Artist’s Way – is that you write. You write every day (or almost so), you write furiously (because you have so much to do in so little time), and you write – theoretically – without self-consciousness or self-censorship. The prize of NaNoWriMo is that you get your creative juices flowing. That’s really it – and that, my friends, is a lot.

I decided to participate in this year’s NaNoWriMo last November, shortly after that year’s session began. I had never thought about it before, but as I saw friends update their Facebook status with word counts and enthusiasm, it occurred to me how strongly I needed that sort of creative spark. Three years ago, I wrote two drafts of a screenplay. I received some very good feedback on what I had, got it to the “it just needs a final polish” stage in the eyes of some (although I suspect a bit more work than that was required), and then….life happened. No one thing, just everyday life, that thing that is the death of so many creative works.

We’ve all heard some version of the phrase, “if you want God to laugh, make plans.” That’s because for most people, I suspect, life operates on two distinct tracks – the life we want, and the life we have. Then, the perpetual challenge of life is the attempt to merge these two tracks. Writers – or any others in creative pursuit – have a similar, and additional, challenge. There is our creative life – that project that drifts through our mind, that other project we started and put in a drawer, the third one we outlined then planned to work on the following weekend, only that weekend mysteriously never came – and then there is real life, the life of work, friends, family, obligation, conflicts, watching “Mad Men,” reading “Mad Men” recaps, Facebooking, tweeting, and the numerous other distracting facets of everyday existence.

Over the years, I have, like most, converged all these roads with varying degrees of success. But the past three years – for no one single or simple reason – my professional and personal roads paved right over my creative one.

So when NaNoWriMo approached, I saw it as a way to re-ignite my dormant creativity.

Halloween night, I set my iPhone alarm for 5:30 for every morning of that first week. That day, I had given the project some passing thought. I knew I wanted to write a satirical comedy dealing with politics and media – maybe something about a scandal. (Not coincidentally, this also describes that long-neglected screenplay.) And that was it – that was all the planning I did for the month of hard work to come.

I woke up at 5:30 on November 1, showered, put up a pot of coffee, and was at my desk just after six. I opened a new filed, titled it, “National Novel Writing Month,” and without any forethought, found myself typing, “The man in the black derby was late.”

Hmmmm. OK. Intriguing, I guess. Not too crappy for a first sentence. Let’s see where this goes.

By two hours later, I had created a senator, his top aide, the mystery spy with the antiquated hatwear, and the beginnings of the scandal.

Over the next few weeks, characters and plotlines flowed, as did scenes and lines well-written and otherwise. The effort to bang out words often came easier than expected; the effort to do so without judgment, as the official NaNoWriMo web site advises, proved impossible. Sex scenes emerged that hopefully avoided the cheese of books with Fabio on the cover; political speeches flowed that hopefully aren’t ham-handed and cliched. The emotional battles between a congressman and his wife mostly hit the right notes, I think – I could see them remaining almost intact in the movie version. Then again, is it possible to forge full steam ahead on a project such as this – on any attempt at a novel, really – without some sense of ego and self-delusion?

As for work flow, the thirty days of NaNoWriMo had some stops and starts. To make the 50,000 word total, you need to average 1,667 words per day. After keeping pace the first week, I fell off horribly in the second, missing four or five days. By week three, I was far behind goal, and now needed 2,500 words a day – even through Thanksgiving week with my family – to make my goal. But I was determined and got back on track, and 2,500 words per day often became 3,000-4,000. I wrote on planes, I wrote in coffee shops, I wrote in the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel, I even once wrote in the passenger seat of a generous and patient co-worker’s car.

By the final days, plot and characters had coalesced in revealing ways. The senator and his aide from the first scene faded in importance, emerging more as devices for political and media response to the book’s other events than as a fully-formed characters. The senator’s opponent, however, became the book’s complex lynchpin, and the people around him acquired a richness that sometimes caught me off guard.

The man with the penchant for derbies never returned.

Over the course of the month, I became well-acquainted with my congressional loose-cannon moralist; his put-upon blue blood wife; the aide with the unenviable task of juggling a campaign and a scandal; an opportunistic dunce with aptitude for naught and hunger for all who might just, in the long run, become some people’s favorite character; and his wife, a woman with nothing who suddenly finds herself with everything – perhaps too much. For only thirty days of effort, I was rewarded with all these characters and more, every one of whom rumbled up from my subconscious as if by their own free will, and all because I was willing to put in the time and effort it took to give them the chance to appear.

On November 30, I typed the final words of my NaNoWriMo experience, bringing me to 50,075 words written in the month of November – officially making me a NaNoWriMo success story, and giving me a project I now have every intention of continuing.

That project, of course, is merely at a very early stage of its first draft, with all the slop and incompleteness that implies. These 50,000 words are only about one third or one quarter of the story. The writing itself is of a pronounced first-draft quality at times, an inevitability when banging out 2,500 words per session. The characters and settings need greater physical definition; far too many react to something at this point by “smiling” or “staring.” I still haven’t decided which state the book is set in, although I do have it narrowed down to three finalists. There are too-long paragraphs of expository inner monologue, and, since this draft was intended to help me invent characters and plot, details are often presented with an unnecessary Rashomon-like thoroughness, just so I could figure out exactly what the hell was going.

But all of this is to be expected in a first draft, especially one created under these conditions. The greater bottom line for me is the joy at having set such a challenging goal and then meeting it, and the thrill I have felt in the seeds of accomplishment – in creating characters I enjoyed creating, developed a vision for, and now feel compelled to accompany on a longer journey. By the end of the month, I was feeling not just a warmth toward my characters, but an obligation, as if they were creative beings that had been sequestered from the world for far too long, just waiting – much like striving writers – for a chance to show the world what they can do.

With any luck and a few years of hard work, I will give them just that.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Ronnie James Dio, who died this morning after a bout with stomach cancer, was revered in the metal world while also representing, to many outside of it, the typical heavy metal cliche. The man who claimed to bring the devil horn symbol to metal (the raising of the forefinger and pinky in salute was something, he said, he picked up from his Italian grandmother) dressed in theatrical black velvet and leather, and tackled lyrics strewn with tales of devils, dragons, and rainbows with the same sincerity Barack Obama has when addressing the oil spill in the Gulf.

But to those of us who reveled in the excitement of a Ronnie James Dio song or performance, it was exactly this earnestness, careening madly and purposefully through an ironic world, that made the man so special. Dio’s music was often melodrama, but it was always in the service of optimism and joy.

While much of Dio’s music was special to me, a standout will always be the first song on his first album with Black Sabbath, “Neon Knights.” Alongside a defiantly simple but propellant statement via riff from Tony Iommi, a bold first step in the Sabs’ post-Ozzy existence, Ronnie easily matched his new band members’ kinetic metal energy and bombast while blending it seamlessly with the bright power of his own musical legacy to date.

Hardly in search of conventional narratives, Dio’s otherworldly poetry nonetheless did what any great creative fantasy should do, in that like these lines from “Neon Knights,” it enveloped the listener in another world.

Circles and rings, dragons and kings/Weaving a charm and a spell/Blessed by the night, holy and bright/Called by the toll of the bell/Bloodied angels fast descending/Moving on a never-bending light/Phantom figures free forever/Out of shadows, shining ever-bright.

Dio’s music was not always about the creation of stories (although it was sometimes that as well), but about the weaving of just these sorts of dreamscapes – sparkling and mystical raw settings onto which readers could implant their own detailed visions of his world.

I had the privilege of interviewing Ronnie James Dio twice – in 2000, and again in 2007. During our 2000 conversation, for his Magica album, we discussed how in his later days with Sabbath his lyrics had briefly shied away from fantasy, but that his fans clearly preferred his more natural lyrical inclinations. Then, Ronnie gave me some of this thoughts on the nature of death and the afterlife (or lack thereof).

…for Dio, who’s latest album, Magica, tells of a fantasy world where, as in much of his writing over the years, good battles evil, writing about reality left both him and his fans unsatisfied. “I’ve done things that haven’t struck fantasy at all,” recalls Dio, “that were much more socially realistic. I got very angry at the world around me, and felt I couldn’t speak in terms of dreams. I spoke about how if one doesn’t have a goal, then life’s pretty well non-existent. Looking around me, I got so angry at the injustices, especially for young people – no employment, drugs running rampant, disease everywhere, over-population, especially the AIDS situation, and it got me angry that nothing was being done about it and people were dropping like flies.”

But Dio found that addressing life’s everyday problems was the last thing his fans wanted from him. “I kept hearing from Dio fans that they loved the way I write, and wished I would go back to writing the way I did before. They said it gave them hope, it gave them a chance to think, so I changed, and wrote Magica. It was a reason to revert to writing the way I had.”

Dio describes Magica as “a morality play – good vs. evil,” saying that its “what life is all about.” Dio thinks of life in these absolute terms.

“There is good and there is evil,” he explains, “and in my belief it resides in each human being. I’m not a believer in an underworld, or an overworld, although I use those analogies as many writers do, because we don’t really know if there is or there isn’t. Death is the only time we’re going to find that out. So in my belief there is no heaven, there is no hell, it’s here on earth. That’s what this is all about.”

(Photo by fürschtua)

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

At the end of every episode of his hit CBS sitcoms “The Big Bang Theory” and “Two and a Half Men,” the show’s creator, Chuck Lorre, has some fun with the vanity cards, the quick title shots that flash on the screen for a second promoting a show’s production company. (Remember “Sit Ubu, sit?” That was a vanity card.) Lorre actually writes mini-essays on his, so fans with TIVO or DVR can pause the TV and read them. And for those without, he keeps them on this website.

On the vanity card following last night’s episode, Lorre told how a production company in the nation of Belarus has created a show that is a completely ripped-off version of “The Big Bang Theory” called “The Theorists.” The characters are called Sheldon, Leo, Hovard, Raj and Natasha, and the show is more than just a shadow of its inspiration – each episode is basically a translation of the episodes here!

And the worst part, according to Lorre, is that nothing can be done, because the production company is owned by the government of Belarus.

A search of our beloved Internet unfortunately failed to uncover any video of this future Peabody winner (if you uncover any – please send!) but we did find some fine still photos of the cast. Imagine the cast members of “The Big Bang Theory” shot up with a quart of vodka per day and aged twenty years – welcome to “The Theorists.”

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

But what many may not know is that earlier in their careers, Stewart and Weiner were roommates, living together in a crash pad in Soho back when Stewart was first hitting New York’s stand-up clubs, and Weiner was working for then-Congressman Chuck Schumer. (Technically, Stewart was actually rooming with a girl Weiner was dating, and Weiner was the boyfriend who moved on in.)

I interviewed Weiner for City Scoops magazine last year, when a mayoral run still looked possible, and asked him about his relationship with Stewart. Weiner, who said that he and Jon were still friends, surprised me with some negative comments about “The Daily Show,” calling it a “scam,” accusing it of fostering political cynicism, and claiming it had a “corrosive effect” on politics. Here’s the exchange:

LG: Have you been on “The Daily Show?”

AW: No. I don’t have a book. You gotta be selling something to go on his show.

LG: Well, if you run for Mayor…

AW: If I become Mayor, then they’ll probably waive that requirement. I wouldn’t want to go…I don’t know.

LG: Because it would be too weird?

AW: No, I love Jon’s show, and I TiVo it and watch it every day. But I think it has a bit of a corrosive effect on my business.

LG: In what sense?

AW: Its entire ethos is to make fun of politicians. Colbert’s worse…or better at it, I don’t know. I guess it’s really not fair to say it’s corrosive. It’s just that for a remarkable number of Jon’s viewers, that’s the sole source of news, and that’s both good and bad. It’s good that they’re gonna get it somewhere, and if it’s gonna be at a comedy show I’d rather it be there than Bill Maher or something like that. But on the other side, I don’t like the idea that there’s such a cynical view of politics and government.

LG: But you understand why that cynicism exists, right?

AW: Do I understand why that cynicism exists? Yes. I think it exists because of Jon’s show.

LG: Do you really?

AW: We could have the circular argument if you want. I think it accelerates itself. I think there becomes a feedback loop that’s corrosive. Congressmen do dumb things, yes, then are highlighted for doing dumb things, and highlighted some more, and people watch it and say that congressmen do dumb things, and so then when another congressman does a dumb thing, it’s like, “Well, my audience wants to watch a congressman do a dumb thing,” and then the audience laughs at the congressman doing a dumb thing, and then Jon says, “Hey, I got a great scam here, lemme go find another congressman doing a dumb thing,” and where do I get in? Where do I get in not doing a dumb thing? Not being a bozo?

LG: Have you ever expressed that to Jon?

AW: Oh yeah, we had…yes. The answer is yes.

LG: What did he have to say?

AW: The argument was somewhat predictable.

LG: Well, after last night, we know very well how Jon argues. (This interview took place the day after Stewart’s takedown of CNBC commentator Jim Cramer)

AW: What I thought was interesting about last night was the irony of watching the comedian be critical of the news guy for being funny.

LG: I don’t think that was the reason…

AW: …at the crux of it, it was the news guy defending himself by saying, “I’m being an entertainer. I’m being funny.” And the comedian saying, “Dude, don’t do that. You be the serious one and I’ll be…” which is kind of a theme of Jon’s joust with the “Crossfire” guys. The irony with Jon…we have to remember that Jon was critical of “Crossfire” because it dumbed down the debate. Some of my concern about Jon is that, it’s smart, but it can be just as corrosive, because we’re being treated like we’re dumb. And maybe some of us are.

Weiner’s comments to me were widely reported at the time, appearing on Politico, Wonkette, New York Magazine, and Gawker. So will Jon address these accusations on tonight’s show? Stay tuned.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

The first general assumption is that it’s a remake of the 1984 Alex Cox film “Repo Man,” a new wave/punk classic featuring Emilio Estevez and Harry Dean Stanton as repo men living lives of druggy abandon while the music of Iggy Pop, Circle Jerks and Fear plays in the background. If you’ve never seen it, put it on your Netflix now – it’s a film with addictive energy that makes Emilio’s descent into Mighty Ducks territory all the sadder.

Turns out, though, that “Repo Men” has nothing to do with that film, but is actually a dystopian-future film about a society where artificial human organs are for sale – and, if you don’t pay your bill, for automatic repossession. So while fans of the first film breathed easy, the plot sounds very similar to that of “Repo: The Genetic Opera,” a garish emo-punk opera released last year that achieved semi-cult-hit status, and which I can’t describe in full because I spent nearly three hours after watching it scratching at my eyes and ears with the tenacity of a mountain lion clawing at a dead gazelle trying to remove its sights and sounds from my mind. It was fucking ghastly, like someone took every silly, messed-up idea they had since they were six and threw it up on a movie screen. Consider this: It co-stars Paul Sorvino; Sarah Brightman, the best-selling soprano of all time; and Paris Hilton. Is there any way the three of them make sense together in one project?

After seeing it, the answer is clearly: no.

But while fans of that movie are gearing up the “irate” meter, for me, “Repo Men” is a clear throwback to a classic Monty Python sketch from their film “The Meaning of Life,” a movie the Pythons have described as their least favorite for the subdued creative inspiration that went into making it, but which I find equal to their earlier outlings. There’s a scene in the film called “Live Organ Transplants,” which features John Cleese and Michael Palin ringing a man’s doorbell to inquire, “Can we have your liver?” They then establish that the man has a liver donor’s card – and do their nasty repo business. It’s a classic scene – and remarkably similar (minus its comedy) to the plot of “Repo Men.”

So was “Repo Men” ripped off? Or with organ black markets a reality in certain countries and economic upheaval a societal constant, is it simply one of those creative notions that has a certain inevitability?

Either way, it’s interesting to see who the film will piss off most. Stay tuned – it’s currently scheduled to hit theaters March 19.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

So March 1 marks the beginning of the next battle in the last night wars, and as for the battle after that? Well, if we all keep our fingers crossed and pray really hard, it just might come in early September, as Conan O’Brien enters the fray on Fox as direct late night competitor # 4 (against Jay, Dave, and Stewart/Colbert.)

In the meantime, here are some thoughts/links on the astounding battle now behind us.

1. ESPN’s Bill Simmons, who correctly predicted that Leno would be back at The Tonight Show helm within a year back in March, tells New York Magazine’s Will Leitch that Conan’s show “sucked” at 11:30, that he was “too whiny” in how he handled it, and that if he does land at Fox at 11:00, he’ll fail there as well.

2. The Los Angeles Times’ Neal Gabler, in a piece that includes some fascinating background on how networks became so focused on younger demographics and why that might be a mistake, calls Leno’s ultimate victory here the revenge of the dorky over the hip.

3. Newsweek’s Joshua Alston lays out a road map for Jay Leno to rehabilitate his image, but unfortunately repeats the now established media fiction that Conan “lost his job.” He didn’t. He quit.

4. Johnny Carson’s longtime head writer says that all the hosts – Dave, Jay, and Conan – could learn something about class from his former boss, who he believes would just tell the whole lot of them to man up.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.