Editor of
Editor-at-large at Death & Taxes Magazine, contributor to The Week, Interview, and Vice Magazine.
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Ultimately, Ebert brought the ability to debate and talk about movies into the mainstream; his greatest legacy may in the long run not be the movie reviews themselves. It may simply be opening several generations to an idea that has been there all along: the discussion of art between two people can be a powerful thing, revealing sometimes more about the viewer than the piece itself.
I wrote a few hundred words on Roger.
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What if I were to tell you that love only lasts 12 months?I’m sitting in a coffee shop staring out of the window again and watching half of Brooklyn go by and I see someone, a woman, who catches my eye. She’s about 5’8″, brunette, with almond-shaped eyes. It’s close to Valentine’s Day, and I let my mind wander for a short while. I think about what might happen if she came into the coffee shop, ordered something, and happened to strike up conversation with me. I think about going on a first date, a second date, what she might look like in an old t-shirt of mine, all in the matter of twenty seconds or so. I snap out of it. I’m daydreaming.This happens a lot. Probably more than I’d care to admit. After all, being a staggeringly attractive and exceedingly humble freelance journalist like myself has its perks – I get to work from home, and more often than not, coffee shops. The mind tends to wander.
But let’s just say that the coffee shop girl and I DO end up talking today, start dating, and eventually settle down. What if we were to fall in love? What then?
When someone first falls in love, a protein molecule called NGF – nerve growth factor – spikes in the brain. These feelings of “being in love” wear off after about a year. Twelve months. After that, one can only hope that you’re compatible and that interests in companionship overwhelm the brain’s reliance on the “thrill” of NGF. What NGF does is light up the ventral tegmental area and the caudate nucleus, two areas in the brain associated with reward, pleasure, and motivation. Ever feel like you can change the world when you’re newly in love? Much of it is due to the high levels of NGF. But NGF is just love’s initial rush, says neuroscientist Andrew Doan, MD, PhD, of Temecula, CA – “NGF is merely the hook that makes us want to get into a long term relationship. The human brain builds up a tolerance to NGF over time unless it’s stimulated by something new. People more susceptible to addiction are more likely than others to ‘fall in love’ – anything to get those NGF levels back up to where they were.”
It’s also worth mentioning is that “Love” – rather, the chemical reaction in the brain associated with it – reads much the same in brain scans as certain mental illnesses. In a 2006 study cited by National Geographic, researchers found that the brains of those heavily in love acted not dissimilarly than those of patients with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. This is your brain telling you something: don’t fall in love. It may hurt you.
So, was Robert Palmer right? Should I might as well face it? Am I “Addicted To Love“?
“No,” said Andrew, “I don’t think you can be.” The brain, he says, has a tolerance for activity. “You have to do the same thing over and over to create pathways… and have to do more of it to get the same high.” Therefore, it’s not entirely possible to get “addicted to love” – merely the feeling of it.
“Love is so complex because there multiple highs associated with it,” he added. “Buying flowers, dinner, those kind of things all contribute to the overall high. Healthy love is a sense of satisfaction distributed amongst unlimited activities.” However, those with an unhealthy perception of love will create pathways in their brains which will get to NGF quicker than those with healthy perceptions of love. While the person with an unhealthy perception of love might ultimately recieve bigger hits of NGF in the short term, over the long term they’ll grow more tired of love faster and faster.
People who overuse these connections in their brain will start to switch those behaviors out for more and more drastic measures. This perfectly explains philanderers like congressman Anthony Weiner, he says. “He became so addicted to the high of being wanted by a woman that he became addicted to the immediate gratification of feeling accepted. Which is why he continued online relationships with scores of women.”
I try and describe to him the woman that had walked by earlier. Brunette, almond eyes, hips that you could set your watch to, hair like a caramel waterfall, the kind of face that would make a man want to learn French. Could that be love? Is there such a thing as love at first sight?
“Yes and no,” he says, “When you see a woman walk by and you start getting twitterpated, you’re tapping into memories that have been encoded your whole life.” Clearly, I must have some happy childhood memories involving brunettes with almond shaped, he says. “Your eyeballs contain 1.2 million nerves each. That’s a huge response system for your brain to handle and it does so in about .1 of a second. So when you see a pretty brunette girl walking down the street your mind has already sent 2.4 million neural impulses to the back of your brain to process her.” Much in the same way one can hear a song and immediately feel affected by it, such is what people call “love at first sight,” he explains.
This all seemed pretty intense. What I had assumed was a complex idea – romantic love – is a simple chemical reaction. What’s more, the “high” of the NGF protien wears off after about a year. After that, it really is just a matter of being compatible with someone. It seemed to make the process of falling in love quite dull.
“Is there hope for romantics? Can something like ‘The Notebook’ actually happen?” I ask him, citing the 2004 Gosling/McAdams cheeseball epic in which (spoiler alert) one elderly partner is brought back from the brink of dementia by being read their old romantic writings.“Yes,” he replies, “In Alzheimer’s patients, the first thing to go is short term memory. If the connection one has in their brain is old enough, though, it has a much harder time being forgotten.”
“So, nobody truly forgets their first love?” I ask him.
“Look at it this way,” he says, “Malcom Gladwell says that if you spend 10,000 hours practicing something, you can become an expert. You can learn something new in half an hour and master it in 10,000 hours. If you spend 10,000 hours loving someone – roughly a year – you can become a master at it and beat your brain’s predilection to NGF.”
“So you can beat your own brain chemistry?” I ask.
“Yeah.”
I thank him for his time. I hang up the phone and pack up my stuff, ready for a long walk back home from the coffee shop.
On my way out the door I hold it open to… interestingly… the girl from earlier. Brunette, almond eyes, hair like spilled root beer. She smiles. “Thanks,” she says.
Maybe she’s the one, I think.
Or maybe I’m just telling myself that.
I wrote about love for Valentines Day.
Hope you enjoyed it.
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Love Is A Losing Game: 1,000 Words On Amy Winehouse.
I wrote a longer piece about Amy, who I think was a much more fascinating artist than we ever gave her credit for.
While nothing I write her will bring Amy back, I set about writing this more as an ode to not what a great artist she could have been, but what a great artist Amy truly was. Sure, she had her setbacks, and yes, they are well documented. Many view her as nothing more than a warning to young starlets who ‘traverse the trapeze of fame’ or whatever half-thought-out adage some wanked and jaded music writer wants to throw in at the end of a snarky paragraph. But the fact is that, unlike Lohan, or Spears, or Sheen, or other people lauded for their addiction problems – Amy’s artistic output – even during the time of her own undoing– is staggeringly good and just as relevant as it was then as it is today.Billie Holiday had her own demons, too, although they were much less documented than Winehouses’s – and we have come to appreciate Holiday’s ouvre. It might be time to do the same for Amy Winehouse.
Read the full thing here.
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I did some actual journalism and wrote an article about internet addiction for The Week magazine, and interviewed the head of an Internet Addiction Rehab. Here’s an excerpt.
Researchers have noted a rise in something called Digital Attention Disorder — the addiction to social networks and computers in general.
How does it work? More than 50 years ago, psychologist B.F. Skinner was experimenting on rats and pigeons, and noticed that the unpredictability of reward was a major motivator for animals. If a reward arrives either predictably or too infrequently, the animal eventually loses interest. But when there was anticipation of a reward that comes with just enoughfrequency, the animals’ brains would consistently release dopamine, a neurotransmitter in the brain that (basically) regulates pleasure.
What does this have to do with the internet? Some researchers believe that intermittent reinforcement — in the form of texts, tweets, and various other social media — may be working on our brains the same way rewards did on Skinner’s rats.
“Internet addiction is the same as any other addiction — excessive release of dopamine,” says Hilarie Cash, executive director of the reStart program for internet addiction and recovery, a Seattle-area rehab program that helps wean people off the internet. “Addiction is addiction. Whether it’s gambling, cocaine, alcohol, or Facebook.”
And thus begins my contributions to The Week!
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You’re a Good Stalker, Charlie Brown.
I wrote this for Vice Magazine.
Charlie Brown the character is known for being entirely self loathing and somewhat creepy when it came to his obsession with a certain “redheaded girl,” a character based off of a girl from cartoonist Charles Shultz’s own life. Shultz dated a woman named Donna Mae Johnson for three years before proposing, and was devastated when she said no and promptly married a fireman. Shultz ended up writing about the “little red headed girl” for the rest of his life in the Peanuts comic book strip.Perhaps Peter Robbins’ obsession is another case of an actor (or artist, or what have you) getting too involved with their own character. Perhaps it ain’t. Perhaps it’s just another case of a creepy guy being creepy.
Quite a few performers end up taking their characters home with them. By no means am I correlating Robbins’ creepo factor with Heath Ledger’s marvelous acting, but Heath’s involvement in his Joker character (for 2008’sThe Dark Knight) was apparently a factor in his death. Plagued by insomnia after the movie, he began taking strong sleeping meds, along with his usual amount of regular recreational pills. Ledger was found dead with a sizable amount of Oxycontin, Valium, and Xanax in his system. While this is arguably a tragedy, it is also another case of someone taking their homework home with them and refusing to let it go.
Those who read the tabloids regularly are used to the tired ol’ story of a child actor flaming out like a roman candle with drugs and alcohol, perhaps in Peter Robbin’s case it just took an extra 45 years to manifest itself. Imagine being a child star. Now imagine portraying something as famous as the character of Charlie Brown. One can imagine that that sort of “woe is me,” self-deflating headspace that Robbins inhabited for 45 years since his childhood role as Brown may have fucked with him beyond belief. Not to add insult to injury, but has anyone heard from Snoopy since the Peanuts specials went off the air? No. Little dog stayed Joe Cool about the sitch and is unflappable.
Mind you, a lot of people can play a character and leave it be at the end of the day. And it should go without saying that there isn’t any excuse for making death threats or stalking or everything else Robbins (allegedly, although the evidence is overwhelmingly against him) did. To offer someone any sort of pass for what amounts to personally terrorizing someone would be remiss. But perhaps, maybe in some “TV movie of the week” capacity, we can understand just how fucked the inside of his head must have been from being lumped together with such in an iconic character all his life. It warped him.
Good grief, indeed.
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I wrote an article on Claire Danes being the whitest person of the year 2012 for the new Funny Or Die magazine “The Occasional” … which is out today!
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I interviewed pop starlet Sky Ferreira for Interview Magazine. Take a read here.
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Interview: Camilla Blackett, writer for The Newsroom.
I was lucky enough to interview Camilla Blackett, one of the writers for HBO’s The Newsroom. We talked a lot about the show, it’s quasi-rival Girls, what it’s like to work with Aaron Sorkin, and tea.
What I don’t understand is how HBO’s “Girls” was basically untouchable to criticism and “The Newsroom” was somehow cast in this wholly other light. I don’t really think that’s fair. One of the big points of criticism I’ve read about “The Newsroom” is that it’s painted too idealistically… I don’t think that’s true at all. If anything, “The West Wing” was painted “too idealistically” in how the executive office actually works. What I think people don’t get about “The Newsroom” is that… having gone through such a divisive last-four-years especially in news media… that people are jaded by any sort of idealism coming from it.
At the end of the day… it’s a TV show, and it’s escapism. If you want to watch the actual news you can watch the actual news. I work with a bunch of idealists, I work under a boss who is an idealist. A large part about it is that he really gives a shit. He cares about how the news is told and that fantasy of how awesome it would be if you could do the news your way. How wonderful it would be if we could have a completely well-informed public who are talking about real issues. Not, like, tragedy-porn like Nancy Grace. Of course it’s idealistic to think that. That’s what we want to give our audience. -
PONY BOY: YOU HAD ME AT FUGAZI.
I interviewed Pony Boy (aka the lovely and extremely talented Marchelle Banadini) for Vice. We talked about Fugazi, stalkers, and masturbation. Par for the course, really…
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Andrew Charles Kahn Has Three Names.
I interviewed Andrew for Vice Magazine. He picks the songs for Apple commercials, as well as various movies and TV shows. We got sufficiently wasted.
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Glenn is, without a doubt, one of my favorite writers, and easily my favorite magazine writer. I wrote this long read for D&T about him and what his work means to me.
I had a meeting yesterday at a big building with a small name. I sat in a chair and talked about matters to another guy who reminded me a lot of my good friend Eric Martin. It was the kind of meeting you go to where you put on a blazer and a nice shirt. These are things you learn the hard way: after 25, you are expected to own a nice shirt and a nice suit jacket. Preferably ones not pilfered from Goodwill. Invest, amigo. Invest in something of quality and it will last a lifetime.
I read somewhere that the best way to get through meetings or interviews, for that matter, is to imagine that you just sat next to them on a bus. This might not work as well in the business world but it sure as shit works for when I run something at Interview mag; god knows I’d like to sit next to Kristen Ritter on a bus for half an hour. Wouldn’t we all.
Somewhere in the ether of misguided intention I started talking about what made me want to get into magazine writing in the first place, or what drew me to it. Contrary to (un)popular belief it is not simply because I enjoy using the letter “I” as often as possible, nor is it the fact that my ego is an untended garden. Well, possibly. But I have some time to kill so I’ll talk about a great influence.
After high school I took a year off because I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I took classes at a community college and sat around reading a lot, watching a lot of movies, and generally absorbing as much as possible. It was a very happy time for me and I’m incredibly lucky to have had parents who were willing to let me figure out what the fuck I was going to do.
I used to go to bookstores a lot, chain bookstores, the few indie ones there were, and I’d take my Mom’s old cookbooks (she worked, at the time, at a cooking school, and had boxes of them) and return them for store credit. Sorry, Mom. I don’t think I’ve ever told you that. It only happened a few times. That is a lie. It happened enough times for Barnes & Noble to put me on some sort of swindler’s list.
I’d pick up magazines, too. I picked up whatever looked interesting. I ended up picking up a lot of GQ and Esquire and Details from around that time (‘02, ‘03) and poring through them, reading and rereading, sometimes out of boredom and others out of sheer love of reading some of the articles. I ended up doing the acting thing in college (because you’re only young once and, fuck it) but I still kept buying the magazines. Buying the magazines was the one single constant through the five, six years I spent ping-ponging around Chicago and Los Angeles.
Out of all of the magazines I bought over that five year period I remember reading Glenn O’Brien’s Style Guy section over and over and over again. It was the first thing I flipped to when I opened up the magazine. Being older and wiser now and having read a lot more of his work I can honestly say that the Style Guy column isn’t his best work (that falls under his book “How To Be A Man” which should be required reading in schools) but it was the thing that grabbed me the most.
A lot of magazine writing is fairly straightforward. There are some BRILLIANT exceptions, like The Golden Suicides, Consider The Lobster, The Falling Man or even Frank Sinatra Has a Cold, but by and large a lot of magazine writing is economical. You get in, you say the facts, you get out. There isn’t anything wrong with economy, not at all, and I’m paraphrasing here, but people often sacrifice voice for economy. There is (as always) a balance.
In the Style Guy column Glenn gets letters from readers about fashion. They ask him questions from the inane (“What kind of dress shoes to wear with jeans?”) to the sublime (“What kind of ascot can I wear into the board room?”) – it leads to a lot of unintentional comedy. Glenn answers in the most droll ways possible, often using some weird anecdote or pithy remark. The point being: it might be a column about clothes, but it is also a column about how to handle yourself in a cool, calm, and collected fashion. It is the sartorial writing equivalent of a Bill Murray movie, or a Bugs Bunny cartoon. It is still one of my favorite things to read regularly, in any publication.
I’ve always had a theory, if you will join me down this tangential cul-de-sac, about why Bugs Bunny is the most American popular character of the last (too lazy to actually look up the number) years. Bugs is a lovable jerk, and I think that is true Americana, right there, that deep down we all sort of wish we were the slightly-removed voice of ironic distance – close enough to partake yet just far away enough to observe the weirdness of it all. This is the basis of the vast majority of American humor: observation. The majority of the rest of the world, I’ve found, when left to their own humor devices, are very keen on humor deriving from situations as opposed to the slight detached distance that American humor provides. This is by and large a sweeping generalization. But it is grounded in reality. When I traveled to the rainforest in Ecuador last year I stayed at a hotel in the middle of nowhere and what was on the TV in the bar? Seinfeld. Really.
Glenn’s column and Glenn’s writing in particular reminded me of how I thought. I was both shocked and amazed that here, on the pages of a magazine, was essentially the kind of catty, pithy shit that I might be thinking in my head at a party. It made me buy (or sometimes steal) the magazine each month. I honestly can’t remember who the fuck was on the cover of any of them but I can remember Glenn’s takedown of someone who realllly wanted to wear socks and sandals. Glenn didn’t give too much of a shit. It showed. And it was wonderful.
Glenn was the first editor of Interview Magazine, hired by Andy Warhol, and also the first person to ever have the title of Editor-at-Large, when he worked at High Times in the mid-to-late 1970s. He got that title because he was rarely in the office, preferring to work from home. People would ask where he was and the rest of the High Times staff would say “he’s at large” - like on a wanted poster. The first thing I did when I got hired as an editor at D&T was give myself that title. I mean, shit, I work from home, too. But it gave me great satisfaction to give myself the same title as he did.
Another tangent: I tripped over a blurb a few months ago from someone saying that “people should grow out of their early influences” – it was an article about Bukowski or something, and there is a case to be made about people that ape Charles’s work and live by the “tortured artist” mentality in particular. I put down the whiskey bottle and got vaguely into wine and grew out of that phase, thank god. But I digress.
I think it is important to have these early influences, and to hold on to them. They are your totems, your talismen, if you will, through the rest of your life or career or what have you. When you’re 30 you’ll look back on the foundation you built in your late teens and early 20s. Especially good ones like Glenn. He’s no Orwell, but he has an incredible way with words regardless.
He has, of course, been doing this since before I was even born. He started at a time when New York media could mean anything and the publishing scene wasn’t full of the big, perilous buildings like the one I was in yesterday. I can only imagine what the publishing / magazine industry would be like if it was run with the same kind of punk-rock energy as we try to put in at Death & Taxes. It is sort of like the suit jacket: invest in something of quality and it will last a lifetime. Style costs something but it will last a lot longer than the economical dry-wall that most writing/art/media is, now.
There are few voices in the media landscape these days – a perilous thought if there ever was one. One of the first things to go in any industry, when the money gets tight, is style. Style is often seen as superflous and not a necessity. Economy rules all in this day and age, amigo. And I’m not talking about clothes; well, maybe I am. But clothes come and go. A voice can last forever. And what is a voice but style with words?
Style is what happens when you stop caring about what other people think and start caring about how you see yourself. Glenn’s column, at least, showed me what actual style was. And at a great age to be shown that, too.
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I wrote this long read for Death & Taxes. It is about internet television and Seinfeld and why his show, Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee, really matters right now.
Please read the whole thing over on D&T (where you can watch the videos I talk about). By all means, click through.
Jerry Seinfeld made a web television show episode with a 90 year old man and a 86 year old man and it provided one of the best ten minutes of film, period, of the year. An argument could be made that the presence of three of the greatest comedians of the last fifty years were on screen, and you would be halfway correct, because they are legends. But what is important about “Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee” and specifically Jerry Seinfeld in particular is that he is doing internet television.
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It was less a band playing than a giant multimedia performance. Of course the band was playing perfectly in time. The (probably) rehearsed banter was perfect. You know who else plays impeccably, with rehearsed between song banter? The Rock-a-Fire Explosion.
Review: Gotye, live in NYC at Radio City Music Hall | Death and Taxes
I reviewed the Gotye show. Really happy with how this review turned out! Click through to read the full thing.
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Good news, everyone! You can now get both of my books for $8 each (Life’s Rich Pattern and Brother Louie) on the Amazon Kindle store.
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Grandpa.
I’ve never told this story. Well, in much detail. So here goes.
I never really got along well with my grandpa. He wasn’t a very nice guy. A lot of people have rosy stories about their grandpa, you know, giving them Werthers Originals and telling them stories about “The War” (capital T capital W) on their knee. Mine wasn’t really the case.
The most he saw of the war was the inside of a building in England, for all I know. The family joke was that he just took the two pages on “teeth” in the medical journal and ripped them out and never really fought… but he’d talk about it like he was there. He was that kind of person, I guess, if you were to be picky about people’s stories. And to talk about them like this when they aren’t around to defend themselves. Not that he would have.
I don’t really believe in God. Not with a capital “G”, anyway. I don’t believe there’s a personable “thing” at the end of this that will judge you, rather, that you are your own judge, and that your own hell is the one you put yourself through. A lot of people don’t realize their discrepancies and that’s the biscuit you take when you sign up for any sort of reward list RE: religion RE: guilt RE: shame RE: any sort of anything, really. You are – at the end of this – the only thing short of a court of law that can ever really judge you. Now I’ve gotten that out the way.
I plan to one day write about this side of the family, so I’ll keep this short, and paraphrase it, and hopefully the overriding message of “FOR THE LOVE OF GOD THERE IS FUCKING BEAUTY IN THIS WORLD” will overscore the words I type into a bullshit computer on a bullshit running tab that is this “blog.” But hey, why not. I could get hit by a bus tomorrow, so fuck it, here’s a story.
Grandpa was not entirely dissimilar to Royal Tenenbaum before he died, in that I think he understood how much of a bastard he’d been to so many people, and that, truthfully, if I may be so bold to say, he had been, to many people in this world.
The guy was a fucking genius, for starters. There’s a family story about how he managed to keep the power on for the village something something “family story that gets passed around” something something “stories that are told when someone dies.” There were a couple of stories that came out after he died that made sense – were the missing puzzle pieces, I suppose. He wasn’t a “great” man. He was a bit of a bastard. He wasn’t a kind man. But towards the end I personally believe he was conscious of this and tried to rectify it.
How he died was pretty interesting.
After spending some 84 years of being a bastard, he developed a brain tumor towards the end. He denied it. He was in and out of hospital for a little while; his brain slowly going; his wit – what there was of it – forgetting who he was talking to mid-sentence. Truth be told it was a strange thing for the family to go through. Here was the source of much misery going forth unto a place where we would not know.
So he’s losing it, little by little, and when something like that happens to someone you know, it’s always difficult. Again – he was a very confusing guy, if you had known him. I wish there was a way for this to translate off of the page. It’s hard to capture the prism of identity in a few short words.
So my Grandma is watching from the window one day, after he gets back from the hospital, and from what I was told he told her that he was going to go for a walk. This wasn’t unusual. He did like to go for walks, often with the dogs, which he didn’t really like, just put up with. So he goes for a walk.
My Grandma is watching from the window as he gets upon the 4ft tall wall by their house at the time. The wall leads onto farmland. The wall had been there forever.
An 84 year old man gets up on a wall at 3 in the afternoon and starts balancing himself as he’s walking along, like a child would. Again. Like a child would. From what I was told he had his arms outstretched and he’s –
– and I guess that’s when it hit him.
Something clicks, and he’s off the wall.
Done-zo.
No more. Tumor overrun brain. Something. Chemical.
Click.
Off of the wall.
There are members of my family that never quite forgave him for who he was when he was alive. But he went out like a child. He went out in a moment of… honestly… I can’t even give it a name. He went out in a moment of clarity that (in my mind) makes up for (or at least gives somewhat of a poetic end to) the person that he had been for so many years.
He forgot about everything else, and decided to get up on the wall as if he was a child and walk across it with the gaiety and playfulness that some of spend out whole lives trying to forget. And he found it. Right at the very end of his life he found some sort of clarity.
And, no matter who he was in the rest of his days on this earth, to that moment at the very end of his life, I can only applaud.
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