Snowboarder Shaun White continues to kick ass, having just won a gold medal at the X Games on superpipe, and is considered a leading contender at the Winter Olympics later this month in Vancouver. So it seemed like an opportune moment to remind you of this Rolling Stone cover story in my archives–I got the assignment on a Monday evening, reported it on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, wrote it on Wednesday, handed it in on Thursday, and read the galleys on Friday as the magazine went to press and I headed out of town for the weekend. A good week’s work.

posted 1 February 2010 in Archives, Articles. no comments yet

The flipwalk project is almost over: just (spoiler alert!) two more walks in Lower Manhattan after this one.

The forty-sixth walk took place on Independence Day of 2005; I believe I had some time to kill before I went uptown to watch the fireworks from a friend’s father’s river-view apartment. I have no idea why I didn’t go to the free Yo La Tengo show in my neighborhood.

As usual, that’s just a teaser image; for the complete photo (plus the story of how I got there), click here.

posted 29 January 2010 in Photos. no comments yet

Another excerpt from the Andy Warhol Diaries. They must have been watching a videotape:

Monday, August 22, 1977

When we got there, everyone was already watching the Wimbledon match between Bjorn Borg and Vitas Gerulaitis. Those last two weren’t there yet, they were having dinner together. The match went on for three hours, and somewhere in there Vitas came in with a girlfriend but Bjorn had gone home from dinner. The joke is always that Bjorn sleeps for four hours then plays tennis for two, and that Vitas plays tennis for two hours then discotheques for four…. There was a lot to drink, no cocaine. Everyone teased Gerulaitis that he was wearing his gold coke-cutter razorblade around his neck in the match. He’s in training now, he left early and only ate a plum.

posted 28 January 2010 in Excerpts. no comments yet

Before I traversed eleven time zones to reach China, I didn’t know much about the Great Wall. I had seen it meandering over most of northern China on just about every world map ever, so I knew it was large (and Chinese, I suppose). I knew that contrary to general opinion, you can’t see it from the moon (you can see it from a low earth orbit, but you can see lots of man-made things from there). And I had seen a photo of Richard Nixon standing on the Wall–the way I heard the story, when he paid his ceremonial visit, he made the keen observation, “This is, indeed, a great wall.”

In that Nixon picture, he was standing with a clot of dignitaries on the Wall. It looked wide enough to race Volkwagens on, and smooth enough that you wouldn’t wreck their suspensions. So when my wife and I planned a trip to China back in 2005, I thought hiking the Wall for three days would be a relaxing way to see the countryside. I was used to walking around New York City, and this seemed like it would be much the same: a historic sidewalk, albeit one that stretched for hundreds of miles. I convinced Men’s Journal to pay for an article on the adventure. (I then used frequent-flier miles for the trip, so I think our vacation turned a profit–which is why people get into travel writing, I suppose.)

The piece never ran; after I returned, Men’s Journal had its annual change of staff and direction, and the new editor-in-chief wasn’t keen on the idea. But you can read the article (and learn how the actual Wall comported with my expectations) here. The photo above is me standing on the Great Wall at dawn.

posted 25 January 2010 in Archives, Articles, Unpublished. no comments yet

Taken in Plano, Texas, the last week of November 2009.

posted 22 January 2010 in Photos. no comments yet

Michael Jackson released seven singles from Thriller, but he made videos for only three of them. (That wasn’t unusual in 1983–MTV’s proof of concept wasn’t yet firmly established.) How much would we treasure videos for the other singles today? A high-concept clip for “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin'”? A restrained but elegant video set on top of a Manhattan skyscraper for “Human Nature”? A staged concert performance for “P.Y.T.”? (My life feels complete without a video version of “The Girl Is Mine,” though.)

Determined to fill that cavity, Jackson seems to have made a video for every single he released for the rest of his career. And he learned the wrong lesson from the “Thriller” video: not that people like dancing and zombies (and dancing zombies), but that MTV viewers craved ten-minute short films. Lots of his videos got extended with narrative sections that doubled their length and made them age worse than skits on rap albums.

So at the time, “Smooth Criminal” felt like just another bloated Michael Jackson production: the seventh single from Bad, and one of five Jackson clips in this countdown. But it was a great, hard-hitting song. Jackson chants “Annie, are you okay?” over and over, until it finally sinks in that there’s no “Annie”–he can only be talking about himself, and he has no idea whether he’s okay or not. “Smooth Criminal” has that mix of paranoia and funk that marks Jackson’s best work.

There was a lot of cool stuff in the video, too: Jackson throwing a quarter across the speakeasy into the coin slot of the jukebox, Jackson crushing a cue ball, Jackson shooting a guy backhanded, thereby slamming him through a wall (leaving only a Looney Tunes outline). And of course, the dancing. Everybody remembers the crazy leaning, where Jackson and his dancers tilted their bodies at an impossible 45-degree angle, but through the whole video, Michael dances like a man possessed. His body takes him places he doesn’t want to go, leading him across the room and flawlessly executing one bit of choreography after another.

(That leaning bit was apparently not achieved by wires but by a patented system where pegs came up from the floor and held the specially reinforced shoes in place so that the dancers could lean. Jackson failed to make the necessary payments to maintain the patent and it expired in 2005.)

After a few weeks too many of having an overextended Jackson epic in heavy rotation, MTV would trim down the video to just the musical bits and everybody would breathe a sigh of relief. Jackson also released a four-minute version that some people call the “Moonwalker End Credits Video,” which almost completely lacks the cool stuff mentioned above, but I suppose has the virtue of being somewhat novel. And because this countdown was compiled by stoned interns, or maybe just some junior production guy who was stuck in the MTV office over the holiday break when everybody else had gone home, that is the version included on this year-end broadcast.

Most of the video looks like the ten-minute version, only with an editor’s finger permanently on the fast-forward button. Jackson, in a white suit and hat, zips down the street and bursts through the door of a 1930s speakeasy. He comes down a folding staircase very fast, and gets onstage. A cat walks across the keys of a piano. Everything is herky-jerky; the precision of Jackson’s movements is totally gone.

We get some extra footage edited in from Jackson’s Moonwalker vanity project: a dozen guys running down a rain-slicked street, wielding flashlights like they were automatic rifles. This is intercut with random footage of a kitchen exploding. Then there’s a gunfight between various black-helmeted stormtroopers. I can only conclude that this dramatizes the final battle royale between Julia Child and the authors of the Silver Palate Cookbook.

Jackson spins and spins like a windup toy, the tail of his jacket billowing out behind him. We also see him firing an old-fashioned machine gun and screaming. Nobody else on MTV was allowed to do this: anyone else who submitted a video showing gunplay would have it sent right back for a new edit. So on MTV, Jackson was pretty much the face of the NRA.

More fast-forward action: a pack of dogs running down the street, fire, ominous men dressed in black, cars moving fast. Jackson keeps spinning. The editing suggests that he’s on the concrete floor of a factory, protecting a small child from a platoon of fascist soldiers standing on the walkways above by shooting everybody in sight (no, really).

More herky-jerky dancing at the speakeasy, this time with the camera constantly zooming in and out, so we have even less sense of his body moving. There’s a whole lot of blurry white-suited movement. Femme fatales hold onto cats and smoke cigarettes. Then Jackson’s back at the factory–only he hasn’t shot everybody yet. He looks sharp in his suit, except for the long hair spilling out of the back of his hat. He shoots everybody again.

We get more dancing that would be impressive if watched at the right speed. It’s cut in with the fascist soldiers running around under bright searchlights, and Joe Pesci walking around in a tiny pair of sunglasses, commanding the soldiers with a bullhorn. I’m guessing he’s portraying the New York Times restaurant reviewer.

The editing gets frantic: Jackson leads a dance routine while a lot of impressionistic action suggests everybody closing in on the speakeasy: high-tech cars zoom down the street, streaks of flame burn, Pesci grins, things explode, men wield guns in silhouette, windows shatter, Jackson runs down the street with a dog, Pesci presses a big red button, Jackson gets brutally kicked while lying on the ground.

At the end–just before Jackson gives a final wink–we get a brief glimpse of the dancers doing their 45-degree lean, but it’s way too late. It’s not like this video made a lot of sense at any length, but edited like this, it feels like an Esperanto limerick.

“Smooth Criminal” hit #7 on the Billboard singles chart. You can see this version of the video here. (Or if you prefer, the ten-minute version here, or a five-minute version here.)

posted 21 January 2010 in 1988. 4 comments

Ethan Hawke’s got a new vampire movie, Daybreakers, which looks like one of Hawke’s periodic stabs at doing a smarter version of an action movie. (Those efforts don’t usually pan out the way anyone involved had hoped for.)

But it seemed like a good excuse for adding this article to the archives, detailing a late-night interview I did with Hawke in Toronto (while he was filming Assault on Precinct 13, another one of those stabs), drinking wine and eating Tofutti sandwiches. Happily, the piece was pegged to a much better movie, Before Sunset.

Not included in this piece for space reasons: our discussion of The 12-Year Project (possibly now titled Boyhood), the film he’s making with Richard Linklater tracking the life of a six-year-old boy up through high-school graduation. Due to be completed in 2013, it’ll be a compilation of a dozen ten-minute shorts, one shot each year. Ellar Salmon plays the boy; Hawke and Patricia Arquette play his parents. Hawke mused, “All of Rick’s movies work in some way on the notion of time.”

posted 11 January 2010 in Archives, Articles. no comments yet

What’s a group of sea lions called? Are they a pride? At any rate, this is a whole bunch of them frolicking in the water just off the shore of Santa Cruz, California, on Boxing Day 2009.

posted 8 January 2010 in Photos. no comments yet

In case you’re just joining us: I found some old videotapes of MTV’s year-end countdown of their top 100 videos. From 1988. Naturally, I’m working my way through the tapes, writing about each video (and commercial break). It’s taking longer than originally planned, but I march onward, fueled by the power of mullets and Kevin Seal.

Here’s the fourth hour:

#61: Heart, “There’s the Girl”

#62: John Cougar Mellencamp, “Check It Out”

#63: George Michael, “Monkey”

#64: Belinda Carlisle, “I Get Weak”

#65: Europe, “Superstitious”

#66: Richard Marx, “Endless Summer Nights”

#67: Prince, “Alphabet St.”

#68: Rod Stewart, “Forever Young”

#69: Midnight Oil, “Beds Are Burning”

#70: Debbie Gibson, “Out of the Blue”

Ad time: Commercial Break #13, Commercial Break #14, Commercial Break #15, Commercial Break #16.

(In the months since I wrote up Remote Control, Ken Ober died, much too young.)

And the countdown’s previous hours: #71 to #80, #81 to #90, and #91 to #100.

posted 6 January 2010 in 1988. 4 comments

Number of Google results for the following phrases:

“first banana”–92,500
“second banana”–88,200
“third banana”–39,100
“fourth banana”–4,010
“fifth banana”–1,830
“sixth banana”–292
“seventh banana”–522
“eighth banana”–344
“ninth banana”–9,070
“tenth banana”–264
“eleventh banana”–29
“twelfth banana”–40
“thirteenth banana”–270
“fourteenth banana”–10
“fifteenth banana”–617
“sixteenth banana”–113
“seventeenth banana”–110
“eighteenth banana”–57
“nineteenth banana”–3
“twentieth banana”–53
“twenty-first banana”–3
“twenty-second banana”–0

You have to go pretty far down the banana pecking order before getting to “no results found.”

posted 4 January 2010 in Tasty Bits. 4 comments