May 15, 2013

So I am on the way to a nice dinner with wife and child and Mr. Bourdain emails me.  Seems someone named Andy Cohen, who is also involved in this sprawling and relentless medium of television in some important way, has gotten into a back-and-forth with Mr. Bourdain on Twitter.  And out of the blue, though I am minding my own business — which is something for which I rarely get any credit  – Mr. Cohen, defending himself on a matter of interest to himself and Mr. Bourdain, goes out of his way to shit on the HBO production of Treme.

I don’t know Mr. Cohen.  I understand he is with the Bravo Network and he was defending their show, “Top Chef,” from some negative publicity that resulted from that production having bartered for some of the BP-oil spill restoration funds as an incentive for filming in Louisiana.   And in contending with Mr. Bourdain’s suggestion that he mitigate that negative publicity by making a charitable donation of the money, Mr. Cohen was not content to argue the merits or flaws of Mr. Bourdain’s point, or, for that matter, the merits or flaws of taking the funds in the first place.  Instead, Mr. Cohen rushes to drag the Treme production into his defense, citing, in apples-to-oranges fashion, the fact that we have availed ourselves of the same Louisiana tax incentives that are standardized to every film production in that state.

Okay, I am largely indifferent to this debate.  ”Top Chef” and Mr. Cohen can do what they want.  And Mr. Bourdain can say what he wants about whatever Mr. Cohen and his show choose to do.  And they can go from there.

But I can’t be entirely indifferent to the shitty-ass, reach-around snark of some fellow who rushes to throw under the bus people about whom he has no knowledge whatsoever — and does so to gain a dishonest point in a fucking tweet war.  So, I reply to Mr. Bourdain’s email carefully, commenting not on “Top Chef” or Bravo, but asserting for what Treme did and did not do in New Orleans.  And Mr. Cohen, rather than reflect on why he dragged us into this and on any dissonance between his position and ours, he doubles down instead.  He tweets again that we should have voluntarily given the tax credits back to Louisiana.

Fuck Twitter.  In 140 characters, one can simplify anything to the point of stupidity, if not rank dishonesty.  And at that length, it’s way too easy to mistake easy sarcasm, or even a certain level of snide, with clever.  So, okay, Mr. Cohen called the tune.  But this will require more than a tweet or two, because real life is like that.  Here is a full answer to this gentleman’s bullshit in three easy stomps:

1)  ”Top Chef” sought and received funds from the BP spill money in a negotiation with Louisiana officials that “Top Chef” apparently sought as a unique predicate for its filming in the state.  I am not criticizing this, but I am noting that this is different from Treme availing itself of the standardized tax incentives that are provided to all Louisiana television and film productions, without additional or outside negotiation.

2)  Mr. Cohen is the executive vice president of development for the Bravo network itself, meaning, he sits astride the budgetary authority to just say no to any outside negotiations or givebacks that such negotiations might impose upon  the state of Louisiana.  His authority and standing is profoundly different from the producers, cast and crew of Treme.  We are not executive vice presidents at HBO.  We are vendors who agree to provide so many hours of television to HBO for an amount of money that HBO determines to be our budget.  We sign that budget and promise to live by it, and we do.  Given that our little drama isn’t exactly a runaway hit, if we can’t make the hours for the money offered, then HBO orders fewer episodes or cancels the show.  But in any event, the decision to walk away from a standardized tax structure that Louisiana provides to all film production would be a decision above our pay grade.  In short, if David Simon or Eric Overmyer or Nina Noble were an executive vice president at HBO — the very chair that Mr. Cohen occupies at Bravo —  we might have found any number of ways to restore additional money and support to New Orleans.  Shit, we might have found a way to renew the show for a full fourth season, and while we were at it, maybe buy up a half dozen New Orleans documentaries and give Lionel Ferbos an hour-long concert special to boot. (Which is probably why that gig will not be ours in the foreseeable future.)

3)  Although the budgetary authority rests with HBO and not with the Treme production, it is fair to note that for four years, HBO allocated additional funds to underwrite a long-term campaign by Treme to raise money for a series of 501c3 charities in New Orleans.  Between various fundraising campaign and events over the last four years and  direct donations by producers, more than $500,000 was left behind for the use of New Orleans non-profits.  What was in our power to do, we did.  Whatever we could leverage, we leveraged.  And what we promised those charities, we delivered.  Not as an offhand or after-the-fact gesture, but as a continuing effort to use the production and its resources on behalf of our host city.  We did the same thing in Baltimore, in fact, when filming there.  And to measure apples against apples, what Mr. Bourdain was urging on Mr. Cohen, as I understand it, was not a blanket prohibition against accepting advantageous give-backs from Louisiana, but instead a charitable donation of that benefit, or some portion of it, to help locals.

Again, I really don’t care what “Top Chef” or Bravo does or doesn’t do.  It isn’t my business.  But I do know that Treme producers such as Laura Schweigman — who was specifically tasked with extending our charitable reach for the length of the show’s run  –  were, along with many others in cast and crew, devoting additional time and resources for extramural fundraisers until the last weeks of  production, culminating a four-year campaign to leave behind a substantive thank-you to New Orleans, its culture and its citizens for hosting us.  For Mr. Cohen to flippantly imply that because HBO failed somehow to refuse the same tax rates that Louisiana offers to every production, we are in the same boat as “Top Chef” and its extended negotiations for a BP payout is just, well, horseshit.  Snide works well and seems plausible in 140-character morsels.  When laid out in detail, it’s something altogether different.  Sorry, but if Mr. Cohen is any kind of mensch and thinks about it for a little longer than it takes to type the first thing on his mind, he’ll see that an apology is owed.

April 22, 2013

 

I’m not much on tabloid gossip as news content, but Reese Witherspoon’s encounter with an Atlanta police officer, in which she tried to prevent her husband’s arrest during a traffic stop by playing the celebrity card, brings to mind one of my favorite Baltimore police stories. I just gotta let fly.

As to Ms. Witherspoon, who has already apologized, I offer only sympathy.  While I understand  it looks horseshit after the fact to be caught wielding fame in such fashion, the more honest and less hypocritical assessment is that all of us will use any card we think we have at the moment that our better half is taking cuffs. We gave to the FOP lodge this year?  A cousin is a state trooper?  A brother in law is a federal prosecutor? You loved Hill Street Blues?  Rodney King deserved as good an ass-whipping as he got?  Admit it, and lose the self-righteous sneer: If you could rightly claim that you were third in line to the British Crown and could get the Secretary of State on the cellphone to ream out the state trooper, you’d do so in a heartbeat to keep your drunken ass out of jail. Talk the shit now and hope it matters, because the next call is to a bail bondsman.  So this isn’t me piling on the latest stray celebrity. She took a weak, unthinking shot; it went wide.

No, I’m here only for the fun of remembering the day in 1983 when the son of heralded Sargent Shriver of the Kennedy clan — and the Kennedys are the highest branch of the American royal tree — was chagrined to find himself detained by Baltimore police officers outside of Memorial Stadium. He was trying to scalp a playoff ticket.

As the Northern District wagon pulled up on 33rd Street, the young scion, desperately reaching for something — anything — that might disrupt the process, blurted out:

“I’m Sargent Shriver’s son.”

The cops paused, handcuffs hovering.

“Sargent Shriver?  He’s my father.”

“Yeah?  Which District is he workin’?”

The look of momentary confusion that crossed the younger Shriver’s face sealed his fate.  The next sound was the click of the cuffs, followed by the metallic slam of the wagon door.   The Shriver story was told and retold in roll call rooms and radio cars for months afterward.  I concede that the verbal exchange between arrestee and officer never found its way into the actual incident report — though seldom does any dialogue ever get such a mention unless it’s evidentiary — but perhaps it is no more than station house apocrypha.  Certainly, it’s too good a story to check out, as we used to say in newsrooms.

In 1983, Shriver’s name certainly rang out in Baltimore.  He’d been the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 1972, and he was a Maryland native descended from a signer of the state constitution.  Given that much, it’s also the sort of tale that, if true, proves that on certain days, and in certain improbable moments, the indifferent and not-easily-impressed metropolis of Baltimore proves itself to be among the greatest cities in Christendom.

April 18, 2013

What is left to say?

A sane man’s contempt for the United States Senate must now be certain and complete. Given the inertia on even the most modest legislative response to the mass murder of schoolchildren, those still credulous enough to believe that our governance is representative of popular will are either Barnum-sized suckers, or worse, tacit participants in tragedies soon to come. An entrenched collection of careerist incumbents, chosen and retained through their singular ability to gather cash from money troughs over six-year intervals — and the unrestrained ability of capital to keep those troughs constantly full — none of this is worthy of any intelligent citizen’s respect or allegiance.

Never mind that the higher house of our bicameral farce is one in which 40 percent of the American population choses 60 percent of the representation; that millions of New Yorkers or Texans, say, are represented and served to the same degree as thousands of Montanans. And never mind that the lower house has now been gerrymandered to a point where a majority of American votes are guaranteed to achieve a minority of the representation — ignore, for the sake of argument, the ridiculous and antiquated structural impediments to popular will ever achieving a popular outcome. Don’t worry that mess. Just focus on the fucking money.

Our elections — and therefore our governance — have been purchased. Instead of publicly funded elections, instead of level playing fields, instead of processes in which the power of actual ideas prevails over the size of the bankroll, we have given our democratic birthright over to capital itself. A gun manufacturer’s opinion can be thousands of times louder than the voice of any grieving Connecticut parent. And the damage that  might come to political careers from individual Americans who wish to have gun laws require as much responsibility of gun owners as, say, motor vehicle laws? It pales when compared  to the damage that can come to political careers from a lobbying group backed to hilt by those who will profit directly from the fear and violence in our culture.

Measured against profit and political security, dead children mean nothing. Common sense is easily dispatched. Truth itself is expendable in any circumstance. Only cash still has meaning to those who claim to represent us.  And the cash will always be there, more with every election cycle. Unsatisfied with the profits that can be achieved within the context of actual representative government, capital has instead succeeded in buying the remnants of democracy at wholesale prices, so that profit can always be maximized and any other societal need or priority can be ignored.

That corporations are people was not the great effrontery of the U.S. Supreme Court’s evisceration of democratic principle. No, for all of its ugly tenor, that statement has long been true under the law; corporations have long existed as a concept by which business interests could have the legal standing of individuals.  Corporations-are-people got the righteous ink, but the venal sin at the heart of Citizens United  lies in the appalling equivocation that declares money to be speech.

One man, one vote? And may the best ideas prevail in an open and discerning marketplace of ideas? Please. When career politicians are obliged to contemplate the cash available for dishonorable votes, or the cash that will be delivered to opponents in the wake of honorable ones, how can any actual idea matter? Every day, there is less of this republic to respect, but in the United States Senate, there is little to nothing that remains. True, popular sentiment can’t be as easily undone in a national contest  of wide scope in which both parties are equally monied and mobilized, but it isn’t the American presidency that’s broken. No, it’s the legislative branch; cash money has wrecked Congress, and in doing that much, it has paralyzed American governance beyond all practical hope.

Only fools play a rigged game forever, and governments that elevate money and firearms over human life, that treat its people and their will with such indifference — such governments eventually lose not only honor, but credibility. People lose the reason to believe.  Eventually, a deep and abiding apathy prevails. Either that, or someone picks up a brick.

April 9, 2013

Apologies for the lack of activity here so far this year.  As it happened, the filming of the remaining episodes of Treme required my full attention, and following that endeavor, a couple of prolonged illnesses in the family required additional time.  And, well, I owe a lot of script work.

If you’ve read the introduction, you know that one of my fears in beginning a blog was that when things got hectic, I would be unable to properly service the damn thing.  Certainly, for the first quarter of 2013, this has been the case.

*          *         *

What prompts a rapid return is the recent news that former all-star Oriole catcher Gus Triandos has passed away.  There are better remembrances and obituaries of the ballplayer to be had, but I can’t help but provide a small, additional anecdote about the man.  It is a backstage story that deserves some corner of baseball posterity.

The tale begins with Richard Price, the noted novelist and screenwriter who was kind enough to grace The Wire with some of his script work for four seasons of the HBO drama.  Price is famed for the verisimilitude of his urban patois and his detailed characterization, but he doesn’t get enough credit, in my opinion, for his comedic chops.  Looking to bring a little of that out in a particular episode, we decided to lay a secondary storyline on him in which Herc and Carver engage in that essential debate of fractured masculinity:  You can screw any three women in the world if you have sex with a man of your own choosing first.

This barroom game, of course, only has one correct answer for entrenched heterosexuals:  No way.  Because the very moment that a participant makes any concession to his friends — “I can be on top, right?” or  ”Just a blowjob, okay” — he opens himself up for the usual locker-room derision.

“Can the guy be Steve McQueen?”

Sure.

“Nevada Smith-era Steve McQueen?”

Whenever you want him.

“And it’s just oral.  Not anal, okay?”

Just a blowjob.  No worries.

“Okay, I’ll give Nevada Smith-era Steve McQueen a blowjob if I can then do anything I want to Angelina Jolie, Audrey Hepburn and Jodie Foster, except Jodie Foster isn’t gay.  Deal?”

And the fixed coda:  ”Steve McQueen, huh?  That’s your thing?  I always knew you were a cocksucker.”

Even in these enlightened and expansive times, when judgments about sexual lifestyle are no longer publicly acceptable, such remains the standard banter of the heterosexual male.  And after assigning this very banter to Price for his episode — and doing so using the aforementioned example so that Price himself could stare at me and say, “McQueen, huh?  He does it for you?” — we sat back in our happy little writers’ room and waited.

When the script came in, Price had gone us one further, offering up comedy gold.  Not only had he accessed the essential lust and homophobia of our characters, but he had combined it with yet another straight-male elemental:  Sports trivia.

“This isn’t about sex, this is about giving a guy a break,” Herc tells Carver before offering up the name of  Gus Triandos.

Carver:  ”Who?”

Price had gone deep into his 1950s era baseball-card collection, which is considerable, believe me, and picked out the slow, lumbering Baltimore Oriole catcher of the late 1950s.  Triandos hit 30 home runs in 1958 to break Yogi Berra’s stranglehold on the All-Star Game starting catcher spot, and he had caught no hitters in both leagues, first for knuckleballer Hoyt Wilhem in ’58 and later, Jim Bunning’s perfect game for the Phillies.  He was well-enough known, in Baltimore at least, that the reference would knock Oriole fans on their asses with laughter, but not so well known that the humor inherent in the obscurity of Herc’s choice wouldn’t play.  And more, Herc catching a blowjob from Gus Triandos is a funny thought.  The choice itself implies a wonderful overthinking of the problem.  A mainstream Oriole reference — Herc on his knees before , say, Brooks Robinson or Cal Ripken — no, god no.   In Baltimore, that rolls into the territory of straight-up, get-a-rope sacrilege.

Herc explained his choice as a mercy fuck.  He had a card of Triandos in his collection, and the guy just had this big, sad face.  Why sad?  He had to catch Wilhelm’s knuckleball all those years.  Ball moved around like a greased pig. Triandos had to employ an oversized catcher’s mitt to have any hope of getting through a game without a dozen passed balls.

After the script was circulated and the entire writing staff gathered itself from the bout of collective laughter, I was suddenly filled with a sharp pang of guilty horror: Was Triandos still alive? Why not? He’d only be in his early 70s, I calculated. Christ. I mean, I know the guy is, legally, some sort of public figure as an ex-professional ballplayer, but how do you throw this joke up on national television without his say-so? I was nauseous at the thought of  big, slow Gus Triandos, now wrinkled and weathered and walking with a cane amid a copse of cherubic grandchildren. Yeah, great. Make that guy into a blowjob joke on HBO.

I told Price that while Gus Triandos was perfect, he needed to think of an alternate for Herc, and it should preferably be some celebrity or semi-celebrity who had already departed this vale.  Steve McQueen, say.  Because I was only going to do this for Price’s script once.

“Do what?” Price asked.

“We have a number for Triandos.  He lives out in California.”

“You’re gonna call him?”

“What choice do I have?”

“Oh shit.  Never mind.  I’ll think of someone else.”

“No, Triandos is perfect for this, inspired even. But Richard, when you speak of me in the days to come, remember what I did for you here and speak well.”

It is hard to describe how fast I was speaking when I got on the phone with Gus Triandos, trying desperately to turn the corner with the old fella, to make him see that the joke wasn’t really on him, but on this character named Herc, this big, lumbering narcotics cop in Baltimore, Maryland. No, no, he wasn’t saying that you had sex with him. No, no way. And he’s not even saying that you would want to have sex with him. It’s not about you. Really, trust me.

“I’m not sure I understand,” Triandos said.

“Okay, let me send you the pages.  I’m gonna send all the pages for this storyline.  And if you see what the joke is and you are okay with it, then great. And if not, we won’t use your name. Just look at the pages, okay?”

“This is a television show? Really?”

Christ.  I sent the pages off with little hope, other than that Gus Triandos said he would get together with his sons and they would read them and he would, eventually, get back to me.  Naturally, I imagined he would pick up the phone to call me and everyone with anything to do with this television show a pack of free-range assholes.

But four days later my cellphone rang and Triandos was on the line.

“I get it.  It’s pretty funny.”

“You get it?”

“Yeah, he feels sorry for me ’cause I had to catch Wilhelm.”

“Exactly.”

“Hey, I feel sorry for me. Catching Wilhelm was miserable,” he laughed. “Go ahead.  It’s not like you’re making me out to be gay or nothing. It’s just a joke.”

I never had a chance to speak to Mr. Triandos after that, to hear how that episode actually landed on him. But I like to imagine him enjoying the joke — and the improbable cultural reference — for years to come.

December 20, 2012

In the discussions that have followed the Newtown tragedy, I thought myself ready for just how much abstraction and distraction would be offered so that we might avoid focusing on the actual metallic instruments that fire actual projectiles that end actual lives. I’d heard it all before, and I assumed I’d hear it all again.  But no, I just encountered this essay, authored by Charlotte Allen.

For real.

Are the seeming adults who claim to be in command the National Review so committed to the ideological that they are ready and willing to twist childhood, or the culture and purpose of a classroom, or even the benign and essential role of the grade-school teacher, into something altogether hideous?

Read the Review and weep for our pathetic, feminized educator class, devoid of any shred of warrior ethos.  Oh, those ineffectual teachers, thinking they were there to teach young children, when so much more was clearly called for.  They went like Jews to the ovens — unready, underarmed, and outmanned, falling all over themselves to be victims when they should have just pulled their own semiautos from desk drawers and dropped the bastard. And let’s not forget those indulged, naive schoolboys who in a hardier culture might have banded together and rushed the gunman. What are these weak-sister parents teaching their progeny, when clearly our brave new world demands manly survival skills before middle school?  And what in hell are the colleges and universities conveying to our primary educators about the art and craft of teaching that it doesn’t include marksmanship and small-unit platoon tactics?

I read the essay twice, trying to convince myself that it was parody, that it was some unpolished overreach into tasteless satire.  But no, this is in earnest.  I link to it here to remind everyone that any serious discussion about gun violence must inevitably navigate into the white, molten core of pure, moronic venality.  That someone could be found to pen such an essay is remarkable enough.  Ten thousand chimpanzees banging at ten thousand laptops could not produce something so soulless, so utterly debased. But that the editors of any serious publication could then be induced to offer it on their pages without stomach-turning shame is simply epic.

It’s not enough for some to sacrifice twenty school children to our great god of the gun.  No, there are actually Americans prepared to throw childhood itself — and those in our society who commit their lives in service of that childhood — on the pyre.

God help us all.