Hello. I’m Gavin Edwards, the public speaker and the New York Times-bestselling author of The Tao of Bill Murray, the ’Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy series, and Kindness and Wonder: Why Mister Rogers Matters Now More Than Ever. If you’re interested in hiring me, click here for more information.
This past weekend marked the twentieth anniversary of Guns N’ Roses’ messy yet magnificent magnum opus, Use Your Illusion. Honoring that occasion, the excellent Maura Johnston, music editor at the Village Voice, made herself a single-disc edit of the sprawling two-CD album–something I did for my own entertainment five years ago (although any honoring of the fifteenth anniversary on my part was purely accidental). You can compare my 16-song mix with Maura’s 12-cut selection: we have a surprisingly low amount of overlap (just six tracks)–but like all right-thinking people, we agree that the album should close on “Estranged.” (Thanks to Chris Molanphy for alerting me to Maura’s edit.)
Congratulations to the lovely and talented Melissa McCarthy for her Emmy win last night. McCarthy and I had a thoroughly enjoyable lunch together a few weeks ago, at which we ordered more fried food than we intended to. You can read a short excerpt at the Rolling Stone website, or check out the George Harrison issue, which just migrated off newsstands (flip it over for “comedy’s new wave”). Something that didn’t make it into the piece: physical injury in the pursuit of comedy.
Her greatest moment of Groundlings glory: breaking her nose onstage. “I wrote this scene where I was trying to make my coworker jealous, so I kept sending myself balloons and flowers.” She was supposed to do a seductive dance with a mylar balloon, and then pop it, so the scene could begin. Except, McCarthy discovered during a preview performance, mylar doesn’t pop easily. “This five-second dance turned into two and a half minutes that felt like an hour, of me in a full sweat, my wig half-off, punching this balloon. I was holding it against my face and diving onto the stage. The eighth time, it popped–and I slammed my face into the stage.” The upside? “The scene got in the show!” she says brightly.
Photographed in Brooklyn in late August. I lived in New York City for almost twenty years and never saw a baby pigeon–apparently, one has to be visiting.
A few months ago, I told you about a long interview I conducted with Rivers Cuomo of Weezer for the British magazine Huck, in which we discussed many of his tweets and his state of mind when he composed them. Unless you frequent skate shops in the UK, you probably didn’t see a copy of the article (although an excerpt was online)–but now, the whole thing can be read on the Huck website. (They’ve got a funky interface that lets you read the entire issue in a groovy fashion but inhibits linking directly to individual pages–my article starts circa page 32.) See him grapple with the eternal questions, such as “How can I make myself more attractive to young, Hispanic females?”
Photographed in 2005. Eventually I was able to think of the WTC site as a construction project rather than a mass grave–but I never really got used to the immense high-security hole in the ground.
In the fall of 2001, I lived on 176 Broadway in New York City, one block away from the World Trade Center. It took me a long time to make even rudimentary sense of what happened in my back yard on September 11th, and ultimately flipping a coin and taking photographs proved the best therapy. But I wrote about the events of that day a few different times, as if they would taste any different when I chewed on them some more. Below, you can read a long letter I sent to everyone I knew in October 2001, trying to explain what had happened to me and (my then-fiancee, now-wife) Jen. I don’t know if it’s cathartic for anybody except me, but I think it has documentary value, at least.
I live one block away from the World Trade Center. No, that isn’t true any more–my home is now one block away from a mass grave and 200 million tons of rubble.
Trying to understand The New York Times’ effect on man, I wrote a profile of Mr. Hugh Laurie that appeared in this past Sunday’s edition of the paper (in the Magazine section). You might still have it by the side of your couch, or you can read it here. Laurie, aside from starring in House, has an album of New Orleans blues, Let Them Talk, which came out yesterday in the United States. Allen Toussaint did the horn arrangements for it, so I asked Laurie to tell me a Toussaint story.
“He was making a record with Elvis Costello, half of it in Los Angeles and half in New Orleans. A friend of mine knew Elvis and said, ‘Do you want to come along to the studio and listen to them play?’ They had a 13- or 14-piece band with a big horn section. Elvis sang, is it ‘Freedom of the Stallion’ or ‘Freedom for the Stallion’? [The latter–GE] Whatever, it’s a beautiful ballad. They’d done a couple of takes, and they both came into the control room to listen. Elvis said to Allen, ‘What did you think?’ Allen, who’s very gentle and professorial, said, ‘I think that at the end of the song, it should feel as if the voice has been lifted to heaven on the wings of the organ. The voice should be born aloft on just the organ.’ Elvis said to the engineer, ‘Allen thinks the organ should be louder.'”
I love having mysteries in my daily life, but I’m even happier when they get explained. Exit Through the Gift Shop provided me with a narrative for a lot of the mysterious street art and billboards I had been seeing during my first couple of years living in Los Angeles (although I’m still not certain how much of the movie was true). Similarly, I’ve long marveled at the house nearby me with nineteen replicas of Michelangelo’s David on the front yard (even posting some photos), and wondered who lives there. Much to my surprise, today’s Los Angeles Timesanswered all my questions, starting with the occupant: never-made-it singer Norwood Young, who’s moving out after a decade and a half. (Although Young’s website, which launches the video for an excellently insane confessional therapy ballad on its front page, either called “A Work in Progress” or “Getting Back to My Me,” opens up a whole new set of questions.)
Like a salmon swimming upstream, I have returned to the pages of Details. Well, one page: the last one in the new (September 2011) issue, which has my short interview with Steve Jones. Not “Jonesy,” the Sex Pistol with the much-missed radio show–this Steve Jones is the charming rake who will be hosting The X Factor, the new Simon Cowell talent competition on Fox. I interviewed Jones in his trailer next to a hangar at the Santa Monica Airport (where the show was filming some promo spots). He kept urging me to sample the dried mushrooms that had come with that trailer, but I resisted. You can get the resulting micro-interview on newsstands now, or check it out on the Details website.
As mentioned previously, I’ve been writing some cover stories for Playboy. Indeed, I have one out now: I interviewed Rachel Oberlin, better known as Bree Olson, even better known as one of Charlie Sheen’s “goddesses.” If you’d like to know more about Sheen’s sex life, his Patek Philippe watches, or his Apocalypse Now obsession, you can read the resulting piece on the Playboy website here (that particular page is JBSFW [just barely safe for work], I think, depending upon your workplace.)
If, however, you just want to know which Colonel Kurtz monologue in Apocalypse Now was creepily echoed by Charlie Sheen during his full-frontal publicity assault, I can tell you that here: it was Kurtz’s speech about the Vietnamese children getting their arms hacked off after being vaccinated by American soldiers. Or as Sheen employed the metaphor: “The run I was on made Sinatra, Flynn, Jagger, Richards–all of them–look like droopy-eyed, armless children.” Two and a half men, indeed.
This past weekend marked the twentieth anniversary of Guns N’ Roses’ messy yet magnificent magnum opus, Use Your Illusion. Honoring that occasion, the excellent Maura Johnston, music editor at the Village Voice, made herself a single-disc edit of the sprawling two-CD album–something I did for my own entertainment five years ago (although any honoring of the fifteenth anniversary on my part was purely accidental). You can compare my 16-song mix with Maura’s 12-cut selection: we have a surprisingly low amount of overlap (just six tracks)–but like all right-thinking people, we agree that the album should close on “Estranged.” (Thanks to Chris Molanphy for alerting me to Maura’s edit.)
