Man in the Car

Sat, 20 Sep 2008 16:40:37 -0700

I’ve written previously on this blog about the time I spent in Paris during the wee early ‘90s. It proves to have been a seminal few weeks, but more about that another time. Right now, I want to concentrate on the afternoons spent at The Hotel Montelambert.

As you may or may not recall from prior entries, I was hanging out on the left bank avec my brand new son, Grey. He was about six months old. And babies being what they are, he spent a fair amount of each day napping – a habit of which I am so in favor. So in the afternoons, after a morning of wandering about aimlessly, always ending up confronted by some piece of unexpected Parisian magnificence, Grey on my back, we’d retire to our cozy-chic room at the Hotel Montelambert, where he would nap and I would draw, write and/or watch British MTV. (I’m not sure why it was British MTV, given that this was Paris, but that’s what we had.) This would be 1991, so as Grey slept, I was being entertained by the likes of MC Hammer, C&C Music Factory, R.E.M., E.M.F. and Chesney Hawkes. Perhaps “entertained” is overstating it.

I remember a commercial they were playing in heavy rotation at the time. It was shot in black and white in that Joe Pytka style of the time. It interspersed images of a young man on a bus, clearly traveling around the world, a knapsack on his lap, gazing out the window at Earth’s many wonders with cuts to his dad driving around England in the rain in a very nicely appointed Jaguar, gazing out the windshield, clearly having seen the known world and feeling satisfied that his son was now experiencing same. They both appeared very safe, very happy and very comfortable. The idea of the ad was that this distinguished, grey-haired Jag driver (I think he was sporting a beard) was tooling around the English countryside, proud, self-assured and confident, while his son, about to start college, tools around in a bus, seeing the world, equally proud, self-assured and confident. Everyone, it seemed, was well taken care of. It stands to reason the ad would have been for some financial institution, but I don’t remember. (The fact that I don’t remember the advertiser qualifies this as failed advertising, but I digress.)

The rooms at the Montelambert were small. Beautifully decorated and warm, but small. I’m sure they still are. Consequently, the TV was on a wall beside the bed rather than facing it. I remember half-watching this particular ad while I sat in a chair by the window, making a drawing of Gray fast asleep under that big TV.

So that was eighteen years ago. (Seventeen and a half to be completely accurate, but let’s just call it eighteen.) A lot of water under the bridge, indeed, but in so many ways just a dash from one side of the bridge to the other in time to watch the sticks emerge from under the trestle.

I’ve always prided myself on maintaining an unapologetically unsentimental attitude toward parenthood. Which is to say, I have reveled in every phase, every year, every moment of my kids’ lives without a moment’s nostalgia for a time when they were younger, smaller or easier to pick up and move around than they presently are. To me, it has been their growth, exploration and gradual independence that have been most thrilling and satisfying.

Yes indeed, having watched my son learn to walk, learn to speak, learn to use the loo, learn to read and learn to surf, I think I was proudest the day he got his driver’s license. That day he became something else – fully independent, I guess. I did not shed a tear that the little boy was gone; I beamed at this fantastic young man careening away in a car he bought himself, leaving only a cloud of dust and a muffled yelp. Well done.

So it came as no small surprise to me when, a month ago now, I found myself giving him a hug in front of the Border Grill in Santa Monica as he got into his car to make the trip up to his new college digs in San Francisco - I felt something so totally profound, devastating and sublime I can’t, even now, put it into words. Joy, loss, pride, finality … Goddam. The closest I can get to describing that emotion is to say that, at that moment, the moment in front of the Border Grill, it felt like the past eighteen years had been condensed into that crescendo at the end of A Day in the Life – an escalating, maturing, progressively wonderful thing, so glorious, so chaotic and so, so quick.

He drove away ecstatic and well fed, and I could hear that long, slowly fading, final chord. That major C that lasts forever.

After a couple of moments of pulling myself together, the valet brought up my car. I paid the guy and got in. I drove through Santa Monica and down the California Incline to P.C.H. It was a beautiful and warm late summer night, and I had the windows down. And that ad from the Paris hotel room came back to me. It hadn’t crossed my mind since the last time I saw it all those years ago. Miraculously, I find that, despite the pandemonium and emergency, the volatility and inconsistency of life, love and parenthood, I am indeed proud, self-assured and confident. As I’m sure Grey is, in his car, driving off to his new life.

The Ledger Event Boomerang

Sun, 10 Feb 2008 21:44:48 -0800

I was in New York a couple of weeks ago for a photo shoot. The studio put me up at the Soho Grand which was very nice of them. It was my first time staying there. Famous people like to stay at that hotel because they let guests bring their pets. And famous people like that, evidently. To my taste, the place is a bit shabby. I got the impression that when it first opened, twelve years ago, it was probably shining and splendid, but no one has bothered to keep the place up. So it feels kind of worn, but not in a particularly comfy way, more in a way indicative of there having been too many dogs around the place, lying on all the furniture. The bar is good, though. Lovely, in fact. A bar with some wear, even dog wear, is a good thing, not so much a hotel room.

My first day there I had a meeting in the bar with Mary Ellen Matthews, the photographer we’d be shooting with in the coming days. She was lovely and very much on the ball. Very energetic with a lot of great ideas. She does all the photography for Saturday Night Live and has done so for the past 15 years – ah, the stories she must have. It was midafternoon, and we both had a glass of Chardonnay. Soon thereafter Ryan, my friend from the studio, showed up having just arrived from JFK. He ordered a dry Martini, and I immediately had drink-envy.

I guess we sat there for about an hour talking. I was so happy to be there on that mangy sofa, hotel guests buzzing all around. I’d spent the morning walking around SoHo, having lunch with a friend and trying to buy myself a decent hat (it had been snowing and the high temp was closing in on 20 degrees). I was privately reveling in being in my favorite city. From the bar I could hear the street outside – the horns, the voices and the sirens. It might have been the wine, but those sounds were like a sonic welcome mat.

I got back up to my room at about 5:00 and instinctively checked the news on my laptop. (I’ve always been a news junkie; I got that gene from my dad.) The CNN site had one of their yellow and black banners across the top of the home page to indicate something big had gone down, “Actor Heath Ledger dead at 28.”

Wow. How sad. And unexpected.

The CNN piece went like this:

NEW YORK (CNN) -- Actor Heath Ledger was found dead Tuesday of a possible drug overdose in a Lower Manhattan apartment, the New York Police Department said Ledger was found naked and unresponsive, facedown on the floor at the foot of his bed by a housekeeper trying to wake him for an appointment with a masseuse, said police spokesman Paul Browne.

“Weird,” I thought, “I’m in Lower Manhattan.” (It’s always about me, isn’t it?) I read more, and it turned out he’d been right around the corner from me on Broome Street. Those sirens I’d heard while I was enjoying my Chardonnay were headed to his apartment. I’d met Mary Ellen at the bar at 3:30; we had a nice, productive meeting, and an hour and a half later I was back in my less-than-opulent hotel room checking my email. Around the corner, at 3:30, a masseuse found Heath Ledger’s “naked and unresponsive” body, and an hour and a half later every little detail of that tragic discovery was being read about all over the world by millions of people. Myself included.

I’ll call this an event-boomerang.

Something happened within a few hundred yards from me. The news of that event was immediately cast out to the world in as minute detail as possible, only to arrive back on my laptop, so close to where it began. All within an hour and a half. Or less.

I did some work. I made some calls, answered some emails. In every piece of communication there was some mention of Heath Ledger’s death. I got one delightfully Hemmingway-esque email that read simply, “Heath Ledger died.” Okay. Thanks.

It was dark by this time, and looking out of my 11th floor window I was surprised to see a swarm of police cars lining 6th Avenue below me. Cherrytops a-flashing. I counted over 70 of them. It was quite a sight. I took a picture and emailed it to my friend Cole.

Why the hell would you need 70 police cars at a place where the one person in question is clearly not going to be making any trouble?

Turns out they were removing his body from the apartment. But still, 70 cars?

It was the NYPD’s way of saying “Heath Ledger died.” Only in a more bombastic way. “Heath Ledger died, and that’s a really big deal, as you no doubt have read by now, and he died right here in New York City!” More like that.

Later that night I had dinner with Ryan at Da Silvano on 6th. I love that place. Very cozy and, no, you cannot bring your pets. We both had pasta and enjoyed a great bottle of Barolo. I had that same feeling I’d had earlier in the day. That feeling of being so comfortable and happy to be in the city. I was happy to be alive. And dumbfounded that death comes to everyone. Like it did to Heath Ledger while I was a few blocks away trying to find the right hat.

Just Looking

Sun, 6 Jan 2008 21:10:58 -0800

Once again, I’ve lost my camera. I’ve looked everywhere, and after a solid two weeks of thinking it’ll show up somewhere, I’m now coming to terms with the fact that it’s gone forever. I blame the holidays. All that driving around to people’s houses. This was my third little digital camera in as many years, and it was a pretty good one. It was a Canon. Good quality and small enough to carry around anywhere, or leave anywhere without noticing.

I’ve always taken a lot of pictures. Used to be I’d take a SLR with me everywhere. I’ve got stacks and stacks little black and white photographs I took over the years. Some of them are pretty good. And then of course everything changed when I got my first digital camera a few years back. I was still taking the same kind of pictures, but now they only existed in the ether. I guess I could print them out, but it’s not really the same.

It’s a different experience, taking pictures with a little digital camera, mostly because I miss the experience of closing one eye and looking through the viewfinder – in essence, shutting out the rest of the visual world and framing the piece I’m interested in within that rectangular window. It’s a very private experience. (Melissa points out that I also do this when looking at myself in the mirror.) Using the screen on the back of my wayward Canon is kind of cool in a WYSIWYG kind of way, but as I’m taking the picture, I can still see the rest of the world around the little bit of it I’m trying to capture. Which is distracting. And it’s far from private. Someone standing behind me as I take a picture is likely to say, “I think you missed it, pal.”

I imagine someone saying that to Cartier-Bresson as he snaps a picture of a man about to step into a large puddle.

I was recently given a vintage Leica by a friend. It’s something I have wanted all my life. I was thrilled. It’s a beautiful thing and weighs about as much as I do. It’s solid metal and glass. This is the camera used by everyone from Cartier-Bresson to Annie Leibovitz. It’s the Fender Stratocaster of cameras. Only not quite. It turns out the value of these wonderful machines has plummeted over the last few years, since the advent of digital photography. And I guess I understand why. For as much as I appreciate its provenance, its craftsmanship, its indestructibility and its general gravity, my Leica is a bear to use. Which makes me appreciate Cartier-Bresson all the more.

The ease with which we all take pictures today, as well as the shear volume of pictures we take, gives everyone moments of Bresson-like singularity. They’re bound to happen now and then.

(It’s astonishing to realize how few pictures Bresson actually took.)

I’m not giving up however. I am determined to use my Leica, and determined to get used to using it. Unlike my Canon, I know exactly where it is at all times. It would be extremely hard to lose. Right now it’s on a side table in my bedroom. I’ll let you know when I’ve used up all 36 exposures.

Hidden

Sun, 18 Nov 2007 21:20:27 -0800

Lately I’ve fallen into something of a restaurant rut. This happens to me from time to time. I find a couple of places to eat where I’m so happy and comfortable, I forget to go anywhere else. It happened to me a few years ago with Opaline on Beverly. I just couldn’t stop going there. I was pretty well inconsolable when it closed after only a couple of years. That chorizo stuffed squid, now only a distant memory. So sad, so sad. There are worse problems to have, I know.

La Vechia on Main Street in Santa Monica and Hal’s on Abbot Kinney in Venice are my most recent perennials. La Vechia in particular is very difficult to avoid. The food is great. The menu changes all the time. The service is spectacular. The atmosphere is always buzzing. And the prices are pretty good. So, you know, ...why not?

But variety is the spice of life, and I’ve been thinking that I should broaden my culinary horizons. The other night as we were pulling up in front of La Vechia Mel began waxing nostalgic about all the places I used to take her when we had just started dating.

“But you hated most of those places,” I said.

“I know, “ she replied, “But at least you were really trying to impress me.”

I was indeed. And I guess it worked.

So yesterday, Saturday, I was looking at some restaurant listings online, and came across a new one – Hidden, on Main Street. Never heard of it.

&c., &c.

So we went, and it was magnificent. We were sitting outside under the heat lamps; I was exactly where I wanted to be. Hidden is, appropriately, hidden. There’s no sign outside (though they’ve got a great logo.) It occupies the space where Schatzi used to be, if that means anything to you. (Schatzi was an Austrian restaurant, owned by the Arnold Schwartzeneger. As you get off the elevator from the subterranean parking lot, there’s a life-size mural of Arnold blowing stuff up. Pretty cool.) The menu is all over the place – Italian, Vietnamese, Sushi and Tapas – all of it there on one menu without any sense of irony. Wonderful.

Wonderful because that’s exactly what I want to eat. We ordered a pizza and assorted tapas things. It was all delicious, and we were so happy about our surroundings that as each plate arrived, one after the next, we were both hoping we’d ordered enough to keep us there all night.

I’m kind of suspicious of Tapas. It seems like an easy way for a restaurant to charge huge amounts of money for tiny amounts of food. So my feeling is, if that’s the case, the food had better be pretty goddam tasty. And this was definitely the case. My favorite, hands down, was the fried Shitakke mushrooms with truffle infused Pecorino. Insanely good. They were tiny, delicious and weirdly filling.

Other things we ate: A vestigial but scrumptious cheese platter, crazy-good eggplant Parmagian, the ceviche-of-the-day (for real) and some miniscule-hilarious-and-wonderful kobe beef tacos. All this with a bottle Chateau St. Michelle Chardonnay which, quite frankly, was so good I felt like I should be paying more for it.

The pizza arrived last – thin crust, tomato, basil, mozzarella covered with Parma prosciutto. Holy crap, it was good.

To top things off, as we were, well, loitering over a plate of chocolates and sharing a glass of Sambuca, we looked up to see our friend Paulo smiling at us. We would always see Paulo at Via Veneto, a great Italian restaurant across the street, and it turns out Hidden is owned by the same people – one of whom is Paulo. I like Paulo; he looks like Armand Assante, and he always makes a big fuss over me and Mel. (It’s probably just Mel that he’s making a fuss over, but I enjoy the contact-fuss.)

I guess we were there for just under two hours even though it felt like more, and mean that in a good way. The place has been open for two months and has gold-mine written all over it. We left feeling full and happy and like we’d just discovered a really great secret. We got in the car and headed off to Hermosa Beach to hear the world’s greatest living blues guitarist. Another great secret. And another story.

E Street Revisited

Sun, 4 Nov 2007 21:24:07 -0800

I went to see Bruce Springsteen at the L.A. Sports Arena this last Tuesday. It was a great show. The guy still has it all together. And so does the band. He was jumping around and hitting all the high notes. Dousing himself and his guitar with water out of a bucket between songs. He just never let up. It was grand.

So that was this Tuesday. October 30. 2007.

Before I left for the show I skimmed some fan websites to find the set list he’s been using for this tour. Turns out he changes the set list slightly every night. (That’s just so damn cool.) I also learned that Tuesday night marked the 27th anniversary of Bruce’s first show at the Sports Arena when he’d just released The River.

I was at that show! I was sixteen. I was there with my friend Shawn.

So as you might imagine, throughout the evening I was keenly aware of the passage of time. Or rather, I was keenly aware of how the passage of time hasn’t changed much of anything.

Twenty-seven years is a good long stretch of time. It’s a significant chunk of any lifetime. It is, in fact, the entire lifetime of Jimi Hendrix, John Wilkes Booth, Brian Jones, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Robert Johnson and Kurt Cobain. (One of those people was not a musician.) So to be standing in the exact same spot awaiting a concert by the exact same guy twenty-seven years on gave me pause. I looked around and took inventory.

Here’s an abbreviated check-list:

• The LA Sports Arena is, as far as I can tell, exactly the same. The lights are the same. The seats are the same. I have no idea what they do there when Bruce Springsteen and the E Street band aren’t playing there, but whatever it is, it doesn’t put much wear and tear on the place.

• The crowd is the same. By this I mean they are the same people, just twenty-seven years older. Which means they are, on the whole, comfortable, slightly over-weight and extremely polite. And it would seem that the last quarter of a century has been goodl to Springsteen fans. They’re all still wearing t-shirts and jeans, but it looks like they just picked them up from the cleaners. At that first show there was still a very faint air of danger; this is entirely gone.

• In October 1980, there was a war going on in Afgahnistan.

• In October 1980, U.S. relations with Iran were getting pretty dodgey.

• In October 1980, Iran was at war with Iraq.

• Bruce and the E Street Band look young, vivacious and healthy. Yes, they do. Whether or not this is surgically enhanced I don’t know, and I don’t care. I remember that first show clocked in at well over three hours. I was sixteen, and I was exhausted just from watching. This one lasted for just over two hours. Bruce is 58. I’ll give him that extra hour.

• In October 1980, I bought The River from Licorice Pizza Records. It was a three disc set that I played over and over on my Dad’s new Bang & Olufson turntable. I bought Bruce’s new album, Magic, from iTunes, and I listen to it over and over on my computer at work. It’s like CD’s never existed!

• The Space Shuttle is still our only vehicular choice for manned space flight. Plane flight is still exactly the same, only now it’s way less fun and in no way glamourous. Speaking of which, they got rid of the Concorde. Cars look pretty much the same and still run on gasoline, which costs exactly the same amount now as it did then when you figure in inflation.

• The internet has certainly changed things, but not in the way we expected or hoped the future to be. It’s more of a utility, like running water or natural gas. It pumps information into your house or office. Any and all information. And that’s pretty cool. And I’m sure it’s changed the world in a very profound way. But it’s not really palpable. It’s not a gleaming futuristic thing.

• Cel phones are certainly gleaming futuristic things. And looking around the Sports Arena, I guess that’s the one big thing a time traveler from 1980 would notice. Everyone is either talking into one or looking at one, and for the most part they all look pretty bitchin'. (The phones, not the people.)

• We have not yet figured out time travel. Though this particular evening comes pretty close.

. •In October 1980, I was in a band that played mostly covers of The Beatles and The Who. Today, I am in a band that plays mostly covers of The Beatles and The Who only now we mix in some Tom Petty (I see that as progress), and our equipment is pricier. (Though it should be noted that I still play the same black Les Paul I played in 1980.) 

And so on...

All this made me think, “If I ever write a book about the future – the future we all think of as the future, the future of flying cars, replicants, phasers and warp-speed – I sure as hell won’t mention any dates. Like George Orwell did. 1984 - kind of a let down. I think it would great to make a movie version of 1984 and set it in the real 1984 – lots of big hair and bandanas. It would be fantastic. I would ask Flock of Seagulls to write the soundtrack.

2001 was an even bigger let down because when that movie came out it seemed like all that stuff was right around the corner. We’d be on our way to the moons of Jupiter in no time! They could have called it 1991, and everyone would have been fine with that. But three years after 2001 came out we stopped going to the moon, and we had to make do with the space shuttle. As we have done now for...27 years.

A couple of years after I went to that first Springsteen show, Bladerunner was released. I guess Bladerunner is the present gold-standard for movies about the future. I think one of the reasons for Bladerunner’s continued popularity stems from the fact that in the middle of the film there is a long scene in which Deckard, the hero, hangs out in his apartment by himself, drinking heavily and fiddling with his television. Which mirrors the circumstances of a majority of the film’s viewers. The film gives them hope. If they hang around their apartment watching videos and getting hammered, sooner or later Sean Young will show up at their front door and have sex with them. Bladerunner takes place in 2017, which is ten years from now. Not a lot of time to fill Los Angeles with flying cars and sex replicants, but you never know.

Bruce played five encores. The crowd was going bananas. He surprised everyone by playing Kitty’s Back, a great song off his second album, recorded when he was all of 23. It was perfect and extraordinary. At 58 he was packing that song with all the energy, sweat, swagger and bombast of the young man on the record.

I’ve always lived under the assumption that the carpet could be pulled out from under me at any moment, and the world will change forever and most likely for the worse. (And people tell me I’m an optimist.) This certainly can and does happen. It happened to everyone on September 11, 2001. I’m not fool enough to think that anything can last forever, but I’m happy to observe that there are some sublime facets of life that hang around for a very long time. And it’s good to revel in them. And be here, now.