it's a profile/interview show about important and/or influential new yorkers. they can be natives, transplants, people who have left, celebrities, unsung heroes... as long as they're new yorkers in some way, and they've left their mark on the city, we want to profile them.
the show's won a bunch of awards and we've profiled about 180 people at this point.
ANYWAY, HERE'S WHERE YOU COME IN.
i need to come up with people to profile.
so, if you ever have an idea of someone to profile, email me at abrahamjosephross at gmail dot com or abraham.riesman at ny1news dot com.
i need your ideas. especially with slightly obscure new yorkers.
the colbert report out-dailyshow's the daily show with this hilarious/fascinating retrospective of bush and the press. i didn't even KNOW about most of these clips! what a personality this president has!
thank god for jason sudeikis—he's all SNL's really got, now that mccain and palin are out of the picture. i mean i love fred armisen with all my heart, but even he knows that he can't do a good obama.
i look forward to bits like this, and to actual real-life joe biden mistakes!
...the sight of jesse jackson with tears streaming down his face and his fingers in his mouth, like a child?
not to mention the scene at NBC election central afterward, when tom brokaw, ann curry, AND chuck todd all had to fight back tears of emotion. only brian williams stayed calm, but that's because he's brian fucking williams.
front page of the drudge report as of 11:49pm EDT, october 7, 2008:
also, did anyone else notice that obama was the one who (a) used 9/11 as a talking point, (b) quoted the bible, and (c) said "holocaust" before his opponent did? are we in the bizarro universe??
today, beck hansen, born bek david campbell, sold to us as beck, had a double celebration. now's as good a time as any for me to tell you his secrets.
but first, the auspiciousness of today, july 8th, 2008. cause for celebration #1: beck had his 38th birthday. cause for celebration #2: he released his 12th (or is it 10th? or 8th? it depends on whichalbumsyoucount) LP, modern guilt. it's great, but i'm too much of a fan to judge it with much objectivity. feel free to read what everyone else thinks. (i'm particularly fond of the rolling stone review.)
and so, with that double-whammy as a time-peg, i figured it was high time to do something i've meant to do for a long, long time: write down what he told me behind closed doors in the autumn of 2006.
mtv has a little sub-division called mtvU, aimed at college students, and they have a show there that they put out periodically, called "my shot with..." it's pretty simple: they give college kids the chance to interview their pop-culture idols. in 2006, with the information hot off the presses, the high lords of mtv sent word out to beck fans that they could sit on the interview couch with mr. hansen. i applied, went through several vetting processes, and got the gig.
on october 20th of that year, i entered the mtv studios, planted myself on a designated sofa, and after a bit of delay, he entered the room. we talked for about 45 minutes. i can't really describe the rush, but that's not important. if you want a more detailed account of how it all felt, here's a memoir i wrote about it (sans secrets) right after i did the interview, but before it was aired.
here's what mtv aired (sorry for the watermark—it was one of my first dvd rips, back in 2006, and i was using lame freeware):
(oh also, i've lost a lot of weight since then. don't judge.)
now, here's the thing: they butchered the interview. they took 45 fascinating, revealing minutes and cranked out a 3-minute set of soundbites primarily aimed at selling the CD. can't say i exactly blame them, but it still feels shitty. and more importantly, they destroyed the remaining footage. it's gone forever.
but i have my memories.
so, without further ado, here are some points of interest that beck told me, and which have been lost to time until now. choose to doubt me, if you want, but i swear to god he told me all of these things:
1999's midnite vultures was originally going to be produced by richard d. james, aka aphex twin. how much of a wild insanity fest would that have been? apparently, the deal only fell through because richard was buying a new house at the time.
the only song he hates performing is "debra"—a huge fan-favorite. he said people took it as a satire of R&B slow-jams, a reaction that made him uncomfortable, because he wanted to write a genuine slow-jam—no mocking intended. he didn't want to mock a genre he loved so much.
despite his reputation as a secretive fellow, he thinks he doesn't hide his faith, his home life, or his real self—what you see on stage or in the hour of DIY videos he made at his house is basically all there is, given how tour- and recording-filled his life is. he was surprisingly calm when he talked about the topic of his personal life, even though i said "faith" (and i saw the producers cringeing, what with the flak he gets about scientology). he really felt that there wasn't anything to hide. (take that assertion for what it's worth—the anti-scientology types out there won't buy it, i'm sure.)
nevertheless, he let me in on the raising of his then-two-year-old son, cosimo henri. it was a-do-ra-ble. i asked him if he sang songs to put his son to sleep, and he said yes. i asked if he sang his own hits, and beck laughed and said, "no, see, he forces me to write new songs." apparently, cosimo would say things like "daddy, sing your song about the airplane," and beck would say, "but i don't have a song about an airplane," and cosimo would then just demand that beck make one up!
also, he said cosimo was weirdly inspiring, given that he was at an age when kids don't really know what words mean, so they'll just string together bizarre sentences, based on how the words sound. dammit, beck had an example, but i have forgotten it.
he was a huge proponent of filling his website with tracksthatwouldneverseerelease anywhere else — like three nickdrakecovers that he abruptly posted just a few weeks prior to the interview — because he didn't really know how to fit lots of his songs onto albums. i mean, where would those nick drake covers go on an LP of mixed-genre acoustic funk?
he'd just seen orson welles's f is for fake, and recommended it to me.
working with michel gondry is freaking insane, because you have no idea of what his general vision is going to be—he just tells you to do things, and none of it makes sense until you see the finalproduct.
UGH HERE'S WHAT FRUSTRATES ME: i know i asked him (a) about how his music is received differently in japan, and (b) whether he has strange dreams, and i KNOW that he had interesting answers to both questions, but they're gone, like tears in rain.
man, when i started this post, i thought i was going to be all proud of myself for what i remembered, but now i'm just angry at what i forgot. i'm not sure i'll be able to sleep comfortably tonight. well, maybe some director kept a copy of the full thing somewhere, and it'll surface someday.
but in general, it was the first time he'd ever talked candidly about his personal life, which is a big deal for beck fans. but mtv (and his handlers) probably didn't really want you to see that stuff.
you should read zev chafets's NYT mag profile of rush limbaugh. it's a quick read, and an interesting one, if not terribly provocative or deep-digging.
anyway, the main reason i blog to you now is because of one section in it, from a conversation zev and rush had about other broadcasters:
At dinner the night before, Bill O'Reilly's name came up, and Limbaugh expressed his opinion of the Fox cable king. He hadn’t been sure at the time that he wanted it on the record. But on second thought, “somebody’s got to say it,” he told me. “The man is Ted Baxter.”
well, after years of pressure, i finally started watching "lost" earlier this month. at the urging of a certain lady-friend, i plowed through the last few eps of season 1 this weekend. hella worth it.
basically, i'm telling holdouts like myself: it's okay to come out of your holes. i know that JJ abrams has hurt us before, but i think it's worth it to stick around for this one. just watch the pilot, and you'll be into it. there's lots of silly daddy issues in the first season, but if you're willing to not pay too much attention (like, watching over dinner after a long day at work), then it's hella good, and you get to the great parts.
seriously. JJ hurt us in the past, and will in the future, but i think it's okay to give in to this particular temptation. comic book writers write it now! brian k. vaughan!
within a couple hours of the time of death, the NYT city room had a story up about various local new york politicians' responses to the loss of tim russert—a buffalo man at heart.
it's a good piece, but it raises two interesting questions. why is it that, recently, the NYT city room only seems to be at the forefront of breaking, local new york stories when there's a celebrity death? heath ledger being the other example, of course (and both stories were done by the ever-talented sewell chan).
the other question (which probably has an obvious answer, but should be raised nonetheless): why aren't any of these immediate stories pointing out that his work with moynihan and cuomo were on Democratic campaigns? the obvious answer, of course, is that obits and quasi-obits are no place for partisan bickering... but still, it's a bit misleading to talk so much about his work with those two stalwarts of new york Democratic politics, and not even mention the word, "Democrat." this omission goes for all the stories breaking right now.
let me put it this way: if he were anyone other than a man with a reputation for being non-partisan, would that crucial partisan detail be left out?
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