Jeff Ross is, I think, one of the best comedians working today. Somehow though, I only recently got around to watching his latest special for Comedy Central, which had been languishing on my TiVo for some months now. It's called Jeff Ross Roasts the Border and I wish everyone who weighs in on the various debates about immigration would watch it before they harden their positions.
Ross went to a Tex-Mex border town to perform and he also shot conversations with folks on both sides of that border. It's a funny show but it also gives you a chance to "meet" some of the people who'll be most affected by what this country decides to do about letting people come in and maybe stay in. Give it a look…which you can do one of two ways. There's an online version you can watch right here and it also reruns this weekend. It's on Comedy Central at Midnight, between Friday night and Saturday morning on my cable channel. Your source of TV may vary.
That's Jeff Ross Roasts the Border. Well worth your viewing time. The televised version is in a 75-minute slot and the online version runs 50 minutes. I'm not sure if the difference is just because of fewer commercials or what.
Have you been watching Seth Meyers? His "A Closer Look" segments are some of the smartest political humor I've ever seen on television. Here's the one that's on tonight's episode…
A question I get now 'n' then on this blog is "When do you sleep?" For some odd reason, folks look at the time stamps on my posts and get intrigued by this matter. One wrote recently to ask, "Is the time I see on the posting the time you yourself wrote it and posted it or is it posted via some sort of timer?"
Answer: Via the software here, I can post via timer — I could specify that this post would go up tomorrow morning at 5:27 AM — but I rarely have any reason to use that function. Sometimes, I write something and post it as soon as I finish it — as I will do with this post. Sometimes, I write all or most of a post and then manually put it up hours or even days later — as I will not do with this post.
I generally sleep five hours a night…sometimes, six. I do not seem to able to do much more than six at a time. Every once in a while, my body demands an extra hour in the form of a nap later but that is a fairly recent development and a sign of getting older. I don't think I ever took a nap between ages three and fifty except when ill.
Until I was around thirty, I often had trouble falling asleep. I'd lay in bed for hours — or for what seemed like hours — wide-awake, trying to calm my mind, which felt like a race car, revved-up to the max, waiting for the "GO" signal. It was especially bad when I was traveling and sleeping in a bed not my own. I finally figured out I was doing two things wrong, one being that I was underestimating the impact of caffeine on my system.
I've never liked coffee but I was getting plenty in Cokes and Pepsis. And being someone who occasionally has trouble with "the local water" in another city, I was consuming two or three times as many colas when I traveled. Once I realized how they were affecting me, I made a rule: I'd still drink them during the day but after 6 PM, I'd only have 7-Up or ginger ale. That helped my sleeping a lot and it also helped when in 2006, I gave up carbonated drinks completely. It has been a good thing for me that just about everywhere you got, you can now get bottled water fairly easily.
The other thing I learned to do was to find good stopping points in my writing. Before, I'd reach a point in a script where I had no friggin' idea what should happen next and if I gave up for the night and went to bed, I'd lay there trying to solve the problem. Now, I try to knock off and head for the mattress before I get to one of those points…or I stay up until I put a good dent in it. I also adhere more to two pieces of advice I often give other writers but occasionally forget to follow myself…
One is: If you get stuck on page 22, go back to page 19 and try it again from there.
And the other is: Have a little confidence in yourself. Maybe you can't solve it now when you're weary and functioning on about a third of whatever fraction of a brain you use at your best. But it'll be easy if you get some sleep and get the other two-thirds back.
This brings us to the question of what hours I sleep. Let me tell you about a writer I knew many years ago named Artie…
Artie was a good friend and a good writer but I thought he agonized way too much over his writing. Working hard does not have to mean working tense and he had this idea that he couldn't write anything good unless he was in Crisis Mode. Each script had to become a life-or-death struggle with various demons waiting to destroy him if it was not good. And of course, there was no such thing as getting it done even one day before the deadline.
The last few days before something was due, he'd labor all night, guzzling coffee and various stimulants to keep him at the keyboard. When he absolutely had to sleep, he'd set an alarm for two hours, then it was back to rolling that boulder up the mountainside. I don't think he ever got any of those scripts in on time but he'd usually come close enough…and then once one was in, he'd crash. For days. At some point, his life became largely disconnected with this thing called a clock. If you asked him what hours he slept, the answer was — truthfully — "Whenever I have to."
Photo by m.e.
He did not sleep 10 PM to 6 AM or Midnight to 8 AM or any regular pattern at all. Monday, he'd sleep 3 PM to 7 PM, then Midnight to 4 AM, then on Tuesday from 11 AM to 5 PM, then he'd be up all evening and all night, crashing at 6 AM. He'd sleep all day Wednesday, then barely on Thursday. If I needed to phone him, I had no idea of a proper time to call. He was as likely to answer at 3 AM as he was at 3 PM. Once, I did call at 3 PM and woke him up. Barely conscious, he asked me what time it was and I told him it was three. He asked, because he honestly didn't have a clue, "AM or PM?"
For what I could observe, this was not good for his health. It certainly wasn't good for his career. He couldn't reach editors because he was asleep when they were in their offices. He'd make doctor appointments and then not show up for them because he was sound asleep. He could buy his groceries at all-night markets but for days, he needed to go into his bank to clear up a problem and could never somehow synchronize with the hours the bank was open. One morning, I got up at 8 AM and found an e-mail from him that read…
Please do me a favor. I have a 10 AM appointment with [name of producer we both worked for] but I've been up all night and I'm not going to make it. I can't find an e-mail for his office so please phone them when they're open and tell them I won't be in.
The e-mail to me was time-stamped 6:45 AM. That was, I guess, when he was going to bed. He ended up losing that job and then the best one he could get was one that required him to go into an office every day and write there from roughly 10 AM to 6 PM. He couldn't do it. He physically couldn't discipline his sleeping so he could be there with a full night's sleep at 10 in the ayem. After that, he had trouble getting work and his health got bad and the rest of the story is pretty unpleasant.
What he got into is a potential hazard for freelancers who can set their own hours and there have been times when I find myself slipping into it. It's not bad for a few days now and then but eventually it creates problems — problems with my health, problems with my career and just plain problems functioning as a human being. I need to be awake more or less when the world around me is awake and when the people in my life are awake.
I'm fortunate I don't need eight hours a night. Sometime between 1 AM and 3 AM, I start to feel drowsy enough that I can sleep and with luck, I also feel like I'm in enough control of what I'm writing that I can leave it for a while and not keep writing it in my head. That's when I'm off to bed, which means I get up between 6 AM and 9 AM, which is close enough to the normal world to not cause any problems for me or anyone else.
Still, I occasionally slide into an odd sleeping pattern for some period. It often happens when I'm writing for someone in another time zone, especially on another continent. One night, I was pounding away on a script for a producer in France and around 3:00 AM, I decided to call it a day. Before I could, I got an e-mail from said producer, wanting to know if I'd be available for a very important conference call in two hours — 2 PM their time but 5 AM here.
That's sometimes how it starts. Other times, I get so engrossed in work that I suddenly find, much to my surprise, that it's 4:30 AM or even sunrise. That can throw my life off for days and that's when I do my darnedest to get back to some normality. I keep thinking to myself over and over, "I have to get off Artie Time, I have to get off Artie Time…"
Back here, I said someone oughta write up the kind of articles we'd be reading if it came out that Bill Clinton or Barack Obama had paid a whole lot of loot to a porn star to hush up about their relationship. My buddy Bob Elisberg took the suggestion.
By the way: I really don't care a whole lot about Donald Trump's sex life or how faithful he's been to his wife. Oh, I guess I can imagine some scenario where it might matter to me…like if it turned out that because of some affair he was trying to keep secret, an elected official was being blackmailed into passing legislation or something like that. But I do not care about any sexual doings between consenting adults and long as they're really adults and really consenting.
What does bother me is when Republicans scream "Scandal!" about something a Democrat does and aren't the least bit outraged when a Republican does it…or vice-versa, meaning Democrats looking the other way over a Democrat's transgressions. I don't like seeing the concepts of what's right and wrong corrupted for political gain…but then, I'll bet that you don't, either.
I've been reading some very eloquent articles today about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. today. I wish I could write one.
Dr. King was not all that visible on my personal radar in 1968 when his life was tragically ended at the age of 39. I knew him as a symbol of equal rights, and I have never not been in favor of them but I wasn't much into the specifics of that struggle. I remember hearing someone on TV (not Dr. King, obviously) once say, "I will never discriminate and I will never allow discrimination around me. More than that, I cannot do. If everyone would just do that, there would be no discrimination." I suppose that was my credo then…but as I later came to realize, it was nowhere near enough. Everyone else was not going to adopt it.
I was in high school at the time and still more politically conservative than any reader of this blog is likely to believe. Actually, I suppose I didn't like Democrats or Republicans very much and didn't see any leader anywhere that I thought was worth following. Even when someone said things with which I agreed, they said or did other things that killed my enthusiasm for them.
Dr. King was assassinated on a Thursday, as I recall. On Friday, not a lot of lesson plans were followed at University High School. I believe the principal (or someone) had told all the teachers to put that kind of thing aside and just try to have some sort of "dialogue" among the students. We did not have a lot of black kids on campus but we had several black teachers and enough Hispanic and Asian students to feel like a racially diverse mix. I do not recall any racial tensions at that school during my three years there except perhaps on that Friday.
It was in a class called (I think) U.S. Government that the "dialogue" we were supposed to have got a wee bit testy. The teacher was Mr. Kivel, a white, doughy-faced gent who was maybe forty years old at the time. As I think of him now, he reminds me of Chris Christie back when that man seemed like kind of a nice guy to even his political opponents — the Chris Christie who hugged Barack Obama after the hurricane, not the Chris Christie who began working hard for the votes of those who hated Barack Obama.
Mr. Kivel got into a very real, intense debate with a student whose name I recall as Jesus. It may not have been but that's what I remember. He was of Mexican ancestry and was heavily involved in some way with "inner city" groups and gangs and what we then called — because they called themselves that — Negroes. He was not himself black but it did not seem wrong that Jesus spoke about how they felt, what they wanted, etc. It was pretty much the same thing his people wanted.
It was even what all the white folks in the room wanted: Everyone is equal, everyone has equal opportunity, race doesn't matter in anyone's pursuit of life, liberty and happiness. The debate was over how soon one could reasonably expect that to get there.
Jesus said it had to happen immediately. Mr. Kivel said it can't. These things take time. A lot of minds have to be changed. Jesus said they need to change A.S.A.P. because summer is coming and this town is like a powder keg waiting to explode. Most cities in America are powder kegs waiting to explode and the murder of Dr. King has lit the fuse.
This was less than three years after we had the Watts Riots in Los Angeles and we all still remembered the looting and burning…so it was a scary conversation. But it was also a healthy conversation because while there was considerable emotion between Mr. Kivel, Jesus and a few others who chimed in, everyone was friends at the end and you heard the phrase "I see your point" a lot. I would guess that if we could replay it now and compare it to what has happened since then in this country, we would find that each of them was about half-right.
What you would not hear on that replay is me saying anything. I remember a bit of an inner jolt as I realized I had absolutely nothing to contribute to this conversation — no insights, no opinions, no suggestions…not even a coherent question to ask. It was obviously an important topic in the world in which I lived but I didn't know enough about it to have a thought that was more than about a quarter-inch deep.
That night, since the newspapers and TV screens were filled with stories about Dr. King and his causes, I took the opportunity to learn a little about him and them. I was too far back to get completely up to speed but I'd like to think I made a decent start. I'd also like to think that I wasn't the only one who made that effort.
This is a series of articles I've written about writing, specifically about the problems faced by (a) the new writer who isn't selling enough work yet to make a living or (b) the older writer who isn't selling as much as they used to. To read other installments, click here.
I ended our last installment by quoting this from a message that I received from a fledgling writer…
Isn't it all a matter of who you know? You know an awful lot of people and you've worked a lot. Isn't that what it's all about? You hire someone on one project and then they hire you on their project? Isn't that how it works?
Since I teased this installment, another writer wanna-be wrote to me and said, "I'm waiting anxiously for this chapter because my inability to sell anything seems to flow from just what that guy said. I have to somehow get into a position of being able to hire others before others will hire me." That is absolutely not so.
I've been sitting here for some time now, trying to think of a time when I hired someone and then they hired me or vice-versa. I get the feeling there is one but if so, it's happened so rarely that I can't recall it. I can recall a number of times when people I hired or knew well probably could have offered me work or bought my writing and didn't, and I'll talk about that later. But no, the kind of quid pro quo you describe has not happened much if at all.
What I regard as my first professional sale came about because I studied a locally-produced magazine, wrote up some some pieces that seemed to be the kind of thing they were buying and then went to their offices with them. I steeled up my courage — which was then in need of considerable steeling — went in and told the receptionist I'd like to see the editor to show him some submissions. She checked with the editor who said he was busy but would see me if I came back an hour later. I left, had lunch, came back an hour later and sold him three of the five pieces I'd brought.
Later, he bought some more and also recommended me to the editors of other magazines published by the same company. Those gigs led to others at other firms, plus the work I did for that company led to me getting involved with a couple of local public relations firms and writing press releases 'n' things for them. But that phase of my career all started with a stranger buying my work and other strangers buying my work.
Here is something I learned: One job often leads to another. This is assuming you do it competently, of course. It doesn't always lead to another but it often does — sometimes immediately, sometimes much later.
I next got into writing comic books. That started with meeting a man named Jack Kirby and him liking something of mine he'd read. He was a total stranger on the day we met and yet that same day, he recommended me for a job and then he later hired me. Then I worked for Disney Studios writing foreign comic books, a position that my friend Mike Royer told me about. I, in turn, helped Mike get his job working with Kirby…but that's not a case of him hiring me and then me hiring him.
Writing the Disney foreign comics led to me writing the Disney American comics which led to me writing other, non-Disney comics which came from the same publisher. By the time I was nineteen, I was writing at least three comic books a month. That led to me writing for other publishers.
I got into writing live-action television because I met and teamed up with a writer named Dennis Palumbo. Among Dennis's many skills was that he was much better than I was at approaching total strangers and asking for a meeting. He got us in to see one producer neither of us had met before and that producer ended up buying a series idea from Evanier and Palumbo, plus he also recommended us to other producers he knew.
One of those producers gave us an assignment on a prime-time show he was producing and that led to us signing with one of the top agencies for writers in Hollywood. Thereafter, the agents there sent us to meet other producers (total strangers) who hired us and then when Dennis and I decided to unteam, the agents sold us as singles. One day, one of them sent me to meet the people at Sid and Marty Krofft's company and they hired me for one show…and then another and another and another…
I haven't had an agent for twenty years. When my last one quit the business, I was working steadily and never got around to replacing him. I don't know if I ever will because I still get calls from people who have some silly reason to think I can deliver what they need. It may end tomorrow but today, I have a paying assignment to jump on as soon as I finish this.
It really isn't that different from when I found a good plumber and I recommended him to friends and some of them recommended him to their friends and some of those people recommended him to their friends and so on. The guy got a reputation in some circles as a good, responsible plumber and so he got a lot of calls. If you develop a reputation as a good, responsible writer in the right circles, you'll get a lot of calls. You may not get the ones you want when you'd like to get them but someone will eventually want you for something that will fit.
So it really isn't a matter of "I hire you, then you hire me." At least, it's never been that way with me. To be honest, there was a time when I thought it would work like that and was miffed and mystified that it didn't. I came to realize that when you're in a hiring position, you can't be thinking, "Okay, who do I owe?"
First and foremost has to be "Who is the right person for this position?" That might be the same person but most of the time, it isn't…and if you just think of which buddies you can swap assignments with, you won't be in a hiring position for long.
A recurring topic on this blog, because it's an interest of mine, is people who were convicted of a crime and later totally exonerated. This happens often enough to make me, as it should make anyone, extremely uncomfortable with our justice system. One problem is prosecutors who, having sent someone to prison, don't want the embarrassment of having that conviction overturned and maybe have it be suggested that they cheated somehow to get that conviction. Often, they act like it's a bothersome technicality that DNA testing or other evidence proves that they guy they insisted did it didn't do it.
In this article, Lara Bazelon discusses this problem. And in this one, she summarizes seventeen cases where there was hard proof someone was wrongly convicted and the prosecutors still tried to keep the person behind bars. It's one of those things that I'm amazed isn't cause for more outrage.
An early commercial for Spaghettios. Spaghettios must be the easiest hot lunch in the entire world to prepare and yet for some reason, there are hundreds of homemade videos online wherein someone teaches you how to open the can, dump the contents into a bowl, put the bowl into a microwave for one minute, take it out and then eat the spaghettios with a spoon. I am not posting one of those. I'm posting this commercial because it has a voiceover by the great Paul Frees…
I don't think I know the language well enough to do it but I think someone should write the article that a right-wing pundit would write and the speech that a right-wing political office holder or candidate would write if it had turned out that Bill Clinton or Barack Obama had paid off porn stars to keep a relationship secret.
No, let me amend that last part: "…if it had turned out that there was this much evidence that Bill Clinton or Barack Obama had paid off porn stars to keep a relationship secret." It wouldn't have to proven without a scintilla of doubt for that article to be written or that speech to be given. Take the reports about Trump and porn stars, replace Trump's name with Clinton's or Obama's and tell us what Sean Hannity would have said.
I won't write it and I won't run it here but if someone does write it, I'll link to it.
Also, it turns out that the online news site Slate had this story about Trump and one of the porn ladies pretty much nailed down a few weeks before the election. They never ran it because they didn't have it absolutely nailed down but it's out now because The Wall Street Journal believed it had sufficient verification.
Slate is thought of as a largely left-wing site, though on most days you can point to an article or two there from the other side of the street. Right now, there are probably folks praising them for having high-enough standards that they didn't run it because it didn't yet meet a high-enough bar of proof. And there are probably folks out there vilifying them for sitting on a story that was a lot more verified than most of what was being hurled then at Hillary Clinton. Could it have swung the election the other way?
Maybe. I don't know how I feel about this. It's the old argument over whether it's foolish to play fair when your opponent is cheating and stands to get away with it.
While we all ponder that, let's watch as some Republican leaders express tepid outrage. It'll be wrong but not wrong enough to stop supporting a Republican president. The rest of them will probably try to pretend it never happened. I like the ones who try the ol' Climate Change Dodge. They'll say, "I'm going to reserve judgment until all the facts are in" and then they'll never agree that all the facts are in.
I was born in Santa Monica, which is a city in Los Angeles County. As Wikipedia notes, Santa Monica is surrounded on three sides by "the city of Los Angeles — Pacific Palisades to the north, Brentwood on the northeast, West Los Angeles on the east, Mar Vista on the southeast, and Venice on the south." On the west is this place called the Pacific Ocean.
My folks and I lived in West Los Angeles but we were in Santa Monica all the time. My father's office for a long time was in Santa Monica. My high school was a few blocks from the border between the two cities. I went to college at first at U.C.L.A. and later at Santa Monica City College. And we often went to The Penguin.
The Penguin was a coffee shop at the corner of Olympic and Lincoln. It opened in 1959 (when I was seven) but it somehow felt like it had been there forever. When I was aged 17-23, I took dates to movies out on Third Street in Santa Monica and then we'd go to the Penguin for a late dinner and/or ice cream.
So I have happy memories of being there with my parents and perhaps my aunt or an uncle. And I have happy memories of being there later with my first girl friends. It was a lovely place in the "Googie" style with friendly serving personnel, plus it had cartoon penguins all over, even in the men's room. I've never had a hamburger that was better than the ones they served at the Penguin.
Some time in 1988, I read in the L.A. Times that the Penguin was soon to close its doors forever. I hadn't been out that way in years and I instantly decided I had to go there one last time before it went away forever. Easy to say, maybe not that easy to do. It was a busy period for me just then and I kept putting it off and putting it off until one day when I suddenly began worrying I was putting it off too long.
That evening, I was supposed to take my current lady friend, Angela, to a four-star steakhouse in Beverly Hills and I asked her if she'd indulge me: Could we instead go to this cheapo coffee shop out in Santa Monica? I don't think she understood why but she agreed and we wound up having a very nice dinner there.
Around the time the check came, she even asked me, "Can we come here again?" I asked the waitress when the place was shutting down and the answer to Angela's question turned out to be "No." It closed a day or three later and the building then sat empty for a few years.
Around '91, it amazingly became an outlet for Dr. Beauchamp, a local dentistry chain that advertised that even if you had rotten credit, they'd give you some sort of payment plan for getting your rotten teeth fixed. The insides of the Penguin were gutted but they kept the big neon aquatic flightless bird out front. I think the city may have insisted on it. Every time I drive past it, that sign reminds me of the aforementioned happy memories.
And now comes the word that the Mel's Drive-In chain has acquired the property and is repurposing it back into its original purpose. The tables will have phone charging stations and there will be a juice bar and organic offerings…but if the Penguin had stayed in business, it would have all those things by now. Since the standard Mel's menu ain't all that different from what was served at the Penguin, it may be a very effective restoration.
This article will tell you more about it and show you some pictures. When it's open again, I'll go there with, I hope, realistic expectations. I won't expect it to be 1960 again with me sitting there with my parents and my Uncle Nathan. I won't expect it to be 1972 again with me sitting there with Lynne after we'd just seen Slaughterhouse Five at the Criterion out on Third Street. I'll be happy if the burger's anywhere near as good.
This is a video from May 2009 of President Barack Obama going to a Five Guys to get some burgers to go. In a way, this was kind of a stunt. NBC was shooting a day in life of the Chief Exec — you'll notice him ordering for Brian Williams — but it was also a nice moment to see the Leader of the Free World mingling with ordinary folks. He was cordial and approachable and he talked to everyone he could, asking most of them about themselves and their occupations. He did this kind of thing from time to time.
Can we imagine Trump doing this? Sure, though he wouldn't be in shirt sleeves and the only conversation would be him telling everyone how successful he was. And then for days after, his speeches would be about how everyone told him what a great job he was doing.
Yes, I know a lot of Trump supporters are cheering the sorta-alleged "shithole" remark which he's sorta-denying. Some of them would love it even more if he'd come out and utter uncoded, Nazi-style racist tirades against anyone who isn't Caucasian and damned proud of it. But I still think a lot of his boosters are cringing that he's alienating allies and swing voters left and right (i.e., politically left and politically right) and hampering his own effectiveness to get things done.
If I wanted to see D.J.T. check off certain items on his "to do" list, I'd be moaning over each day's faux pas or divisive tweet and muttering, "This is not going to help." Right now, it's like he's out to give ammo to those arguing he's outta his skull and the nation needs to 25th Amendment the guy right out of the Oval Office before he presses that bigger button that he doesn't actually have on his desk.
Whatever his base wants to see him accomplish, it's not going to be any easier if/when Republicans lose one or both halves of Congress. Or before that could happen, more and more Republicans in Congress feel the need to distance themselves from the man.
Me, I'm fine with Trump's self-immolation. The more of it, the merrier. I just have this long-held belief that any public servant's approval rating is less than the pollsters say it is. We tell survey people we love Our Guy because he's Our Guy. But I don't think people who say they love Trump love Trump as much as they say, just as I didn't think those who said they loved Obama loved Obama as much as they said. The big difference is that Obama fans like myself were frustrated that he couldn't get more things past a Republican Congress, whereas Trump fans are frustrated that he can't get more things past a Republican Congress.
Okay, I give up. A million years ago on this blog, I tried out the theory that Donald Trump was not exactly a racist. It seemed to me that the "them" in his "them or us" was not black people or brown people so much as it was non-successful people. Even if there's some truth to that, it's becoming a distinction not worth making. Forget I ever mentioned it.
Of course, the other "them" in Trump's world is anyone of any color or financial status who doesn't serve the needs of Trump's greed and ego, genuflecting to him, going along with the delusion that he's accomplished more than any prior president in his first year, burying lyin' Hillary in the popular vote…and hey, how about those record crowds at his inauguration? And also, I see the guy who couldn't serve in the military because of bone spurs is now telling us what a great athlete he was in college.
Here's some other stuff that might interest you…
Dylan Matthews reads Trump's interview with the Wall Street Journal so you don't have to.
Matt Taibbi reads Fire and Fury by Michael Wolff so you don't have to.
German Lopez lists some good reasons to believe Trump has always been some sort of racist.
William Saletan looks at the talking points that Trump repeats over and over (there's been no colluson, there's been no collusion, there's been no colluson, there's been no collusion, there's been no colluson, there's been no collusion…and did I mention there's been no collusion?) and concludes that he doth protest too much.
And Paul Krugman reminds us of some of the brilliant, rational things done so far by the Very Stable Genius.
A source tells me that Stephen Colbert's staff is working very hard to try and get Trump aide Stephen Miller on their show. If they aren't, they should be.
