From the Front Lines

Ten of us are sitting on the floor in the former cathedral of Hope Lutheran Church in Palm Desert, surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of large paper ballots, strewn everywhere. We’ve emptied our blue ballot boxes and we’re stacking the voted ballots in groups of 10.

Also on the floor are stacks of vote-by-mail ballots that people brought with them to the polls. There are also piles of “provisional” ballots, cast by those who either didn’t match our records or were voting out-of-precinct.

And it’s a mess.

The polls have finally closed after a grueling 13 hours of greeting voters, registering their attendance, verifying their information, instructing them on the vagaries of a four-page ballot filled with Propositions (written with the clarity of electronics’ owners’ manuals translated from the Korean) … and we are exhausted.

Two precincts are housed in this hall and neither of us is coming up with the right figures for the day. We’re a couple of votes off, first six, then three. Perhaps, we say to each other, some of the voters put their ballots in the wrong blue boxes, although, during the day I made myself quite annoying reminding voters that if they registered in the precinct to the left they had to put their ballots in the blue box on the left and vice-versa. I did this because ballots cast in the wrong box are not counted and we are charged with making sure that every vote counts. (At one point, apparently angry at the whole world, one voter shushed me when I yelled these instructions, raising my voice to be heard in this high-vaunted space. Thanks for that, by the way.)

We are quite the crew, all of us. Most of us are either retired or semi-retired and, youth will be served, we are being assisted ably by students from nearby Palm Desert High School and, under court order, also by a wise Latina who is there to assist any Spanish-speaking voters.

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The day starts at 5:30 a.m. with a stop at Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf where manager Cody and the morning crew prepared a coffee caddy for me to take to the polls, along with delicious pastries. (Polls run on sugar.)

At six, the crews arrive at the church and, uh-oh, we discover that the precinct inspector for 42045 has taken quite ill and will not be coming. Since I’ve been doing this for nearly a decade, election after election, I think we can manage but it is Diversion Unnecessary. (The ill precinct inspector landed in the emergency room.) We plow ahead anyway, waiting for a representative from the Board of Elections, our “Range Inspector,” a clinical psychologist and former cop with the patience of Job, to arrive and fill in, helping to set up the other precinct.

We spend the next hour getting ready, putting out the signs, making sure the “booths” (actually, suitcases) are ready, arranging our tables so that voters won’t be confused when they walk in and, with masking tape, sticking the various legal documents on surfaces where they can be read. We have one electronic voting machine but we have been discouraged, in a two-and-a-half-hour training program a week prior to the election, not to offer this as an alternative to the huge paper ballots. (Voting by machine was decertified when California saw what was happening around the country with computer-hacking and possible political shenanigans.)

At 7 a.m., we are ready for the first voter and so it goes, hour after hour for the next 13, as a steady stream of voters is processed through the system. As Precinct Inspector, I greet each voter, direct him or her to the proper line (the precincts follow a fairly predictable geographical pattern, based on their residences), then loosely supervise the processing of the voters (my crew is aces, a well-oiled machine), answering the odd questions (I live in Indio, can I still vote here? My ballot never came in the mail, what do I do?) plying the crew with caffeine and the protein and vitamins derived from pizza prepared and delivered by Papa Dan (quite tasty).

And, finally!, it is 8 p.m. And we are exhausted. But now comes the most important part of the election — collating the ballots, creating a ballot statement that shows the results and driving these results to the Palm Desert Library where a crew picks up the results and sends them to Riverside for final tabulation. And we are a couple of votes off in the tally. No matter how we try to reconcile the figures, the math is off by a little but it's a little like being almost pregnant. Clearly, one or two of these votes will not be counted here. Our only hope is that somewhere down the line, it will all fit together, that whatever tiny mistake we made, by either miscounting or by votes inadvertently cast in the wrong ballot box or simple mathematical error, it will all come out right.

I think of the folks in walkers who came to the polls; the aged couple in the car to whom I brought out the ballots to make sure they voted, the laborers who had to get to work but insisted on voting first, and the unfortunate voters who played by the rules but whose names somehow didn’t make it onto the rolls and who voted “provisionally,” meaning that their voices will be heard but not tonight… and I wonder.

Why are the county supervisors being so hard on the Election officials? Why this massive hurry to get the results? What would it hurt to delay announcing anything for a couple of days so there is time to reconcile the results?

I have never met the director who is under fire, the one who takes the heat every election season. I have no stake in any of the politics of this.

But, hey, isn’t there a better way to do this?

On the way to delivering the ballots to the Library pick-up area, I chat with another officer. We seem to hit upon an idea.

Why not hire two teams to work on Election Day? There’s the crew that handles the polling-place setup, the 13-hour day of voting, the long hours of making sure everyone who wants to, gets to vote.

And then at 8 p.m., they are sent home, replaced by a fresh crew of workers who, unfazed by a day of detail-oriented trivia and bushy-tailed enough to bring energy to the process, count the ballots and tabulate the results. Keep the Precinct Inspector on hand for that but send the rest of the crew home, mission accomplished.

A bit more expensive, perhaps. But do the math: How much was spent this time on the round-the-clock crews counting the mail-in ballots?

I probably don’t have a vote on trying this, of course. I’m just a cog in the machine. But maybe it will count.

The Mystery of To Kill a Mockingbird

Its being the 50^th anniversary of the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird, teachers all over the country, nay, the world, will be assigning this classic piece of literature to their classes. And, no doubt, cities around the country, in one of those gimmicks to get the slackers to read, will probably hold “To Kill A Mockingbird Days.”

So look for even more honors for its 82-year-old author, Harper Lee, the creator of the Finches — Atticus, Scout and Jem, not to mention the Underwood typist behind such immortal characters as Arthur “Boo” Radley, neighbor Dill Harris, accused rapist Tom Robinson and a host of other Southern archetypes vividly brought to life in this much-loved novel, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961, named “Novel of the Century” in a 1999 poll taken by Library Journal, and re-printed an astounding 40 million times, spending 80 weeks on the Best-Sellers List.

The book is not without controversy, however. The book entered the American lexicon at a very agitated time. I know this sounds silly in our enlightened age, but back then white people were actually frightened and angry about blacks’ and other minorities’ gaining political power and, get this, it was so antediluvian that some reactionary politicians thought about formulating a strategy to make political hay out of these resentments. Heck, some governors wanted to celebrate Confederate History without their mentioning slavery and angry folks carried firearms into town-hall meetings, declaring the 14th amendment to the Constitution unconstitutional. It was surely a different world back then; our American society has advanced so much, it’s hard for us to relate now to that primitive time.

But there’s another controversy about To Kill A Mockingbird which doesn’t get much press but still lingers to this day, namely: Who wrote the book? Are we sure it was Nelle Harper Lee? (And yes, Nelle is the correct spelling, according to her unauthorized biographer Charles J. Shields. Or as he quotes Ms. Lee secondhand, “It’s Ellen spelled backwards.”)

I raise this heretical question of Mockingbird’s true authorship because of an experience I had more than two decades ago in Branchville, South Carolina.

First, a little back story.

For two years in the early 1980s, I worked with a woman named Marie Rudisill an antique dealer from Branchville, helping her sort out and put into words her memories of the childhood and adult life she spent with one Truman Strekfus Persons Capote. She was Truman’s cousin (I think that was the relationship, the bloodlines get a little confusing, not to mention close) and Marie “Tiny” Rudisill lived with Truman, along with his other cousins, Jennie, Callie, Bud and Sook, in a large rambling home in Monroeville, Alabama, where Truman, from ages six to nine, was dumped by his parents, who Marie said, were quite fond of the high life. (Sook, who passed away years earlier, is the inspiration for the kitchen-guide in Truman’s wonderful short story, “A Christmas Memory.”)

I had met Marie years earlier when I was the editor of the magazine Writer’s Digest. One day Marie contacted our offices in Cincinnati, asking if we were interested in her memoir about growing up with Truman.

Duh. We were ever! So, in the spring of 1974, we published Marie’s evocative memoir. On the cover I put a laddie-picture of Truman in white shorts with the caption “Marie Rudisill’s nephew.” That was all. No mention of Truman. (Boy, did the publisher, Richard Rosenthal, hate that. “I was going for understatement,” I said in my defense. “You ended up with no statement!” he said in response.)

Even without the hypy cover lines, though, the magazine’s cover and Marie’s story earned a mention in Newsweek, although the snarky editors there couldn’t resist including the embarrassing fact that we paid a measly $300 for the memoir, troubling, considering I was trying to turn Writer’s Digest into a publication where writers could bitch about low freelance fees.

I called Marie’s story “Other Voices, The Same Rooms,” a play on the title of Truman’s remarkable book, "Other Voices, Other Rooms," about growing up in the South. And the memoir was filled with some very good prose: “The sidewalks [of Monroeville, Alabama] were paved but the streets were dirt, Alabama clay, which produced red mushy mire with the winter rains and a mass of restless dust in the hot summer,” for example. “Restless dust,” a nice touch, There were other surprising aspects of the memoir, and some a little freaky. “Surrounding the landscape, a tall fence made of animal bones drew our boundary line. Jennie had them hauled from an animal graveyard near Claiborne and had supervised the selection and laying of each bone. ‘No,’ she would say, ‘the backbone can’t be next to the foot, that ain’t right.’” A yard full of human bones? This was Southern naturalism at either its best or its nadir. In any case, it was a pleasure to publish it.

Not that this was Capote-strength prose, mind you. Few writers, for my money, have ever approached Truman’s early work. One of my favorite short stories is “The Grass Harp,” a character study of a young boy sent to live with relatives after his mother’s death, a situation that puts one in the mind of Truman’s own experience — to butcher a Southern expression. In this story, the owner of the house, Verena, a hard-nosed businesswoman (she owns everything in town and is held in low esteem by everyone who owes her money), lives with her withdrawn, child-like sister Dolly. (Playing the part of Sook? A character so tenderly and deftly drawn had to come from somewhere.)

Hell, let Truman tell it: “[After my mother’s death], that afternoon Dolly’s friend, Catherine Creek, came over [to the house] and packed my clothes and Papa drove me to the impressive shadowy house on Talbo Lane. As I was getting out of the car, he tried to hug me but I was scared of him and wriggled out of his arms. I’m sorry now that we did not hug each other. Because a few days later, on his way up to Mobile his car skidded and fell fifty feet into the Gulf. When I saw him again, there were silver dollars weighting down his eyes.”

In this great tale, Dolly invents a “dropsy medicine” with the help of Catherine (who could be Indian but no one is quite sure), and Verena along with a doctor from Chicago try to wrest the formula from Dolly, who will have none of this crass mercantilism. Together the boy, Dolly and Catherine escape the hard-nosed Verena and they run away to live in a China tree. OK, it’s a tree house but… The title comes from one of Truman’s great metaphors: “Below the hill grows a field of high Indian grass that changes color with the seasons: go to see it in the fall, late September, when it has gone red as sunset, when scarlet shadows, like firelight breeze over it and the autumn winds strum on its dry leaves, sighing human music, a harp of voices.”

One cannot begin a Capote story without plunging onward toward the end, his captivating style and his memorable phrasing tugging the reader along dusty streets into big empty mansions and up into China trees.

Critics like Alfred Kazin weren’t all that impressed with Truman’s later works like “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” but you will search high and low to find anyone dissing Early Capote. He is smack dab in the middle of great Southern Lit, true descendant of Mississippi’s Faulkner and Catawba’s Thomas Wolfe, a contemporary of Shelby Foote, Erskine Caldwell and Fannie Flagg and younger brother to New York Times’ crossword puzzle fave Zora Neale Hurston. That amalgamation of human interaction with nature that obtains in all of our best regional Southern literature came alive in Truman’s young hands (he wrote “Other Voices” at the tender age of 24).

So, yes, I’m a fan.

So, needless to say, when Marie asked me to help her with her memoirs of Truman’s life in Alabama, I was thrilled to play even this small part.

As it turns out, Marie had the scoop on all of the family’s unusual goings-on; events that I was privy to while helping her collect her thoughts for her pending autobiography. And she wasn’t shy about sharing what she knew.

Her stories about Truman, his idiosyncrasies (for example, he hated cut glass), his childhood prodigy-ness (he always had a photographic memory, Marie recalled, although I think the correct term is eidetic), his loves and his friendships made for amazing copy, copy that, eventually, got so juicy that I was sure the best parts would be excised by William Morrow & Co., the book’s publisher. (In any case, I was replaced on the project after a year, furtively and unexplainably.)

Truth be told, I don’t think Morrow had any clue as to what Marie was going to reveal in her book. They probably should have. I think the publisher was envisioning some sort of sweet nostalgic look back at the great author’s life. But if you think Marie was interested in sweet nostalgia, well, you didn’t know her.

One of the bombs she dropped while we were working together concerned Truman’s next door neighbor in Monroeville, Nelle Harper Lee. Nelle and Truman were BFFs all their lives. In my mind I pictured the two of them on hot muggy Alabama summer days, swinging on a tire hanging from a mossy tree. (The truth was probably a lot more prosaic but I do love me my Southern writers and all their clichés.)

Marie swore up and down until the day she died that Truman wrote Mockingbird as a gift to Nelle. As evidence she brought forth the fact that Lee never wrote another thing in her life after Truman left her for the thrills of the Big Apple. (Lee’s work with Truman, researching In Cold Blood, didn’t count, apparently.) And in Charles Shields' biography, he notes that Truman and Nelle "Ha-puh" Lee often wrote stories together on an old Underwood typewriter.

But sometimes Marie could confuse real life with stories from Truman’s books. She once told me that Truman’s father was an itinerant con man who would travel around the South with an Egyptian man scamming the local populace by “burying” the Egyptian and having people bet on whether or not the guy would survive. I’m told that these characters are featured in one of Truman’s short stories. Was it based on real life? Who could tell? I was merely typing as fast as I could. So whether or not Truman wrote To Kill A Mockingbird is either an elaborate story Marie concocted or whether it contains a kernel of truth is unknown. Maybe he critiqued her chapters, maybe he added details, or maybe he had absolutely nothing to do with it. With Marie’s death more than a decade ago, there is no way to check back with her.

Eventually Marie’s book came out and all that was left of my part in it was the first chapter that, word for word, was printed as I wrote it. Many friends urged me to take action but I never liked lawyers and by the time the critics got through trashing the book, I was pretty sure I didn't want to be identified with it, anyway. “Mean-spirited score-settling” was the way the book was described in USA Today.

So the question begs an answer: Did Truman write To Kill a Mockingbird? Or did just growing up around Truman make Nelle a gifted authoress? (Marie’s memoir contained some beautiful phrases; maybe it’s a Southern osmosis-thing, something in the water.)

I suspect that once you have written a classic book like To Kill a Mockingbird, the temptation is to avoid a sophomore jinx, one theory behind J.D. Salinger’s reluctance to put his work before the public again after his stunning first successes. Witnessing how the critics devoured Truman after the bombshell status of In Cold Blood — lesser lights shining rudely on his reputation, cowards sniping at him from safe perches, wielding viciously poisonous pens — maybe Nelle decided that her heart wasn’t in a life of letters.

Or, and wouldn’t this be wonderful? perhaps if and when Nelle passes, we’ll find trunks full of manuscripts, hidden away from public view. Like Emily Dickinson! Except this time, the story moves south from New England, back to a rural Alabama where “in rainy weather, the streets turned to red slop and the courthouse sagged in the square, where ladies bathed before noon and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.” (Lee). Or the South “where when leaving town you take the church road and pass a glaring hill of bone white slabs and brown burnt flowers.” (Capote.)

In any case, I’m not going to challenge Nelle Harper Lee. For as Capote noted in Shields' biography of her, she was a “sawed-off tomboy with an all-hell-let-loose wrestling technique.” And even at 82, I think she could take me.

How Hef Saved the Hollywood Sign

Back in the mid-70s, when I was senior editor at Oui Magazine (which Hugh Hefner co-owned with Hachette's Daniel Filipacchi), we ran a pictorial that we shot at the Hollywood sign with girls' being "romanced" by men dressed as Los Angeles policemen. It was pretty racy and I think there were some shots featuring a baton.

Understand that, compared with what you can see today, this was all pretty tame. But, legend has it, the outcry was so loud that Hefner had to agree to donate money to help restore the Hollywood sign to its original glory to get the city officials off his back. (He had just steered his ship into Los Angeles and was trying to be a good neighbor — not that we editors down below in the galley cared one whit.)

I see now that nearly 30 years later, he's made the final down payment on restoring the sign. And all because we wiseacres at Playboy Enterprises had a dumb idea to mix Hollywood history with modern-day soft porn.

You're welcome.

From the Inside

These dewy-eyed liberals crack me up.

On the night of November 5, 2008 when Barack Obama and Joe Biden were elected to the highest offices in the land, suddenly the world sprouted a pair of rose-colored glasses. Whoop-de-doo with all your change and your hope. Yup, it was all going to change.

Libs are such chumps.

Sure, Obama is overwhelmingly popular with “the people,” about twice as popular as his predecessor and four times more popular than our former vice president. And yes, all those folks who want a more fair and just system of economics, who want to see our government wrenched from the special interests, who want peace and love to flower in the Middle East, who want a “fair” piece of the pie are still on his side.

But guess what, tools, it ain’t gonna happen.

For the truth is, we Republicans still run things. We’ve still got the power.

And the reason for that is pretty simple. Our money runs the permanent government. (And a big shout-out to the Supremes and the Citizens United folks for making sure it’s going to get even better.)

The first thing these libs don’t understand is that, after 30 years out of power, they no longer control the media. I know we’ve been selling that hoary line about the “liberal media” long enough that the simpletons actually buy it, but we know the truth. Do you think Disney, GE, Time Warner and Rupert Murdoch are invested in the common man’s interests? Like they're suddenly going to experience a Jerry Maguire moment, and antagonize and alienate all that corporate advertising cash, start digging into what’s really going on? What is this, some kind of movie fantasy?

Grow up, idiot-lefties. Sure GE (but maybe not Comcast) may have let the occasional Maddow squeak through the gates, but at the end of the day, it’s our highly leveraged (and heavily mortgaged) managing editors with children in expensive private schools who decide what angles to pursue and what we in the Grand Old Party end up telling you.

Or are these glib-libs so oblivious they don't even notice that we've got a Karl Rove fan running the Washington bureau of Associated Press.

We’ve got nothing to worry about, fellow Repubs, the fix is in. Obama’s big plans for change in energy, climate change, healthcare and foreign policy are just a pointy-headed pipe dream. File it all under “No Way.”

On energy independence, for instance, that’ll be easy. After all, did anybody raise a peep when Exxon Mobil and Chevron made more money than any other corporations in the history of the world and gasoline hit four bucks a gallon? Of course not. We've washed enough lame brains out there, heck, they expect to be gouged at the pump, all in the name of free market capitalism. (And none of you had better let on why capitalism doesn’t work when monopolies corner the market.) Besides, who cares if they're cursing us in the local bars. We wouldn't step foot in one of those places anyway. And as far as anybody on TV complaining... well, don't those networks (even PBS) get a ton of money from the oil companies? We're home free. Worst-case scenario: Just get a bunch of goons to holler "Drill baby drill!"

Obama also wants to tackle climate change? That's rich. See, we've been paying stooge scientists for 20 years to come up with ways to make it seem like a natural thing. And do you think the pinhead-population was paying enough attention in science class to fight back? We really had a good laugh this winter when snow fell in record numbers over the Northeast. Luckily, the average voter was sleeping in science class that day when the teacher explained how water from the ocean evaporates into the air and falls as condensation and so they missed the part where if the ocean’s warming, more water is evaporated and, bingo! More snow! And we can also distract them by pointing to e-mail scandals that were featured on page one and whose denial ended up on page 52.

You bleeding hearts wanted universal health care and wanted to separate the insurance companies’ stockholders from their dough? Ain’t gonna happen. Wellpoint and our AMA buddies haven’t spent zillions of dollars lobbying our BFFs in the Senate for 30 years just to let them off the hook now. Besides, if the vote gets tight, all we have to do is scream “socialized medicine” and the lemmings pick up the chant and fall right off the cliff. God, I love simple bumper stickers. (And please don’t tell the unwashed that Obama’s plan actually transfers millions of taxpayer dollars into the insurance companies’ hands.)

Foreign policy? Those peacenik hippies want to dislodge our forces from the Middle East? As if. We know how to scare people real good. Drag old Rudy out, he’s always good for raising the hair on the back of people’s necks. And, let’s face it: If Obama can’t fight back against our boy Dick and his daughter, does he really have any fire in the belly for fascist Islamism?

Our friends, the defense contractors, know how to play this game. We may have hit a rough patch when Ike sounded the alarm about our cozy daisy-chain, but, he was Republican In Name Only, remember, and that was a long, long time ago. The Ikester (or Reagan with his nutty no-nukes pledges) wouldn’t get past Iowa today with that kind of talk.

The minute Mr. Obama tries to upset our little apple cart and pull out of Iraq and figure out a way to escape the clutches of Afghanistan, we'll simply hire some retired CIA operative or Blackwater, er, Xe thug to drop an incriminating bag of cocaine in the Oval Office or, hey, this is better, hire some underage boy to claim he slept with BHO. (Or do those lefties think Monica was an accident the last time a liberal Democrat tried to shake up our little club? You are too funny.)

All we have to do now is wait for the tide to turn against Obama and these liberals. After we get through with this naïve fellow, the suckers will wonder why in the world they ever voted for him in the first place.

Oh, and just in case all of that doesn’t work, well, we also have gotten quite good at stealing elections, in ways even Lyndon Johnson never thought of.

So enjoy your time in the sun, liberals.

We're just sitting back enjoying the show.

That’s our hopey-changey thing. And it's working out for us.

Outsmarting TIVO

DVR is great for that extra kick in time-shifting ratings (just ask Keith Olbermann or the creators of Lost) but it’s been heck on advertisers. People skipping past commercials is not what television pioneers had in mind when the economic model was set up. Trudging through commercials was supposed to be the price one paid for this “free” entertainment.

With DVR, however, folks are rushing through your work. All that time spent crafting and producing (not to mention the grueling getting-of-approval) of these works is being undermined by a nation of itchy trigger-fingers.

But don’t give up hope. Clever advertising agencies can still evade the DVR system and render it powerless. We just have to all work together and try any of the following little tricks.

1. If you’ve noticed, when you hurry through commercials with the DVR system, you’re still seeing the commercials only in quick-speeded up time. Why not create commercials in slow motion? That way, commercials, when hurried through on high speed, will be at the right selling speed.

2. OK, that’s stupid. We’re brainstorming here, remember, no judgments. How about this one: Notice that when you time-shift, you still catch the tail end of the commercial before the program begins again. Be sure to put your logo and message in that last frame and make it last longer. That way the viewer sees who paid for it and what you were trying to tell these folks who are in such a big hurry.

3. Trick the viewer. There’s a Nikon commercial featuring Ashton Kutcher taking photos at a wedding. In one scene he spills a tray full of Champagne glasses. Why not pull a Dick Van Dyke on your next commercial? Remember how sometimes Rob would come in the front door and greet Sally and Buddy and Laura and that smirky kid and fall over the ottoman but sometimes he’d dance around it? How about if, when you film a commercial you change some of the details so the viewer has no idea which version is coming up? In this alternative universe, for example, Ashton starts to knock over the Champagne-laden tray but doesn’t.

4. DVR people are heavy viewers. Sometimes they skip through commercials because they just saw them and, enough already. Why not create more and more commercials at shorter lengths and rotate them more frequently. And how about requesting cable stations to stop running the same spots over and over again? Cable is not that cheap anymore, folks. Creating more messages is more expensive, granted, but I hope you never told your clients advertising was going to be cheap and easy.

5. Finally, use your commercials to tell a serialized story so the viewer never wants to miss a chapter. That funny Tanqueray guy, for example, would be a great character to follow through a story. BMW created a storyline that ran only on its web site; why not use it as commercials? Ten second installments would go a long way to keeping viewers interested.

6. Those are some techniques agencies can employ. You’ve probably already got a dozen more ideas. But there’s one really big thing that the cable and broadcast networks themselves can do to retain viewership through the DVR-ad-shunning commercial block. Take a tip from the Graham Norton talk show on BBC. Snuck in between the commercials, Graham runs snippets of the interviews that are not in the show. Imagine if, during Law & Order, for example, the producers snuck in a montage of all of the cop-and-DA teams that have peopled the series since the beginning. Or all of the different hairstyles that the coroner has sported over the 20 years of the series' run. Or if during Ellen, the syndication stations ran vignettes of dancing audience members in the middle of the ad breaks. Every series has these little interstitial devices that usually end up on the DVD “Special Features” section. Use them during the commercials. Sneak them in between the spots so people have to stick around and not hit that funny button with the right facing multiple arrows.

Heck they might even start using the button with the multiple arrows going the other way.

Billy Joel Slams Palm Springs Indian Casino

Raise your hands. Who wasn’t surprised that Billy Joel would turn out to be such a jerk, someone who’d take a huge payday to open a casino showroom and then turn around and trash the place?

Me, me. Pick me. I wasn’t surprised.

A quarter of a century ago this year, you see, I had my own Billy-Joel-the-Jerk moment. It’s sort of our anniversary.

Back 25 years ago, I published the book Radio Eyes, which consisted of the lyrics of some of rock music’s greatest songs, interpreted visually by the best illustrators in the country. The songs ranged from the 50s’ “Heartbreak Hotel” by Hoyt Axton's mother to the 80s’ “Never Say Never,” — the writer of which, Deborah Ayall, now lives in Desert Hot Springs, they tell me.

This publishing thing wasn’t as simple as it sounds: The lyrics I chose were some of these writers’ most personal and interesting works. For instance, I could have picked “You Are The Sunshine of My Life” from the Steve Wonder songbook. Instead I chose “Cash In Your Face,” a searing indictment of discrimination in housing. You get the idea.

So we had to haggle with many of the writers and, in some cases, the writers wanted to see the illustrations first.

That part was easy: These illustrators’ names are probably not familiar to anyone outside of the commercial art world but they included all those men and women who do the illustrations on movie posters, greeting cards, book jacket covers and print advertisements. All of them did amazing work interpreting these lyrics.

Another snag: Because I didn’t have a lot of money to pay for the rights, my representative, Mary Williams of Mary Williams Music Clearance Company, God rest her soul, tried to get all of the songwriters and illustrators to work for a “most-favored-nation” fee, meaning no one got any more than anyone else. The whole process took two years and a good percentage of my hair.

But it worked out great for the most part. John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, James Taylor, David Byrne, Randy Newman, Elton John and Bernie Taupin, Frank Zappa, Alice Cooper, Brian Wilson and about 40 more writers all agreed to allow me to publish their works for the same fee.

And then my art director asked about getting the rights to Billy Joel’s “Scenes From An Italian Restaurant.”

Repressing a gag reflex (Billy Joel? In the same breath as Paul Simon?) I dutifully asked Mary to make the offer to Joel’s people.

Sorry, they said, Billy wants more money than all of the rest of them.

Radio Eyes: Great Rock Lyrics Set to Art came out; the book was featured prominently in the Swiss magazine Graphis (that’s a big deal, by the way), was featured on a "Radio Eyes Day" on a NYC radio station, and earned praise nearly universally (except from an LA Times’ reviewer, who tried to kill it in the crib).

And there were no scenes and no Italian restaurant in any of its 98 pages.

Billy Joel.

Jerk then. Jerk now.

In Defense of Rupert Murdoch

OK, I’m not totally impartial. After all, Murdoch hired me (four times!) when nobody else wanted to. Besides my stellar yet litigious work for TV Guide (see another post below), I worked on the launch of the cable FX Network (creating a USA Today parody celebrating its debut) and wrote the DVD catalogues for 20^th Century Fox’s films for three years. (He also fired me when he realized why I wasn’t able to get any employment — I’m a cheap and lousy reporter.) And so maybe I should hold some kind of grudge but, hey, I don’t hold grudges. That’s the advantage of ADHD.

The thing about Murdoch is that he knows what people want. Pure and simple. Remember when he debuted Cops on Fox? Up until that point, there were no network outlets that showed the hard white underbelly (covered partially by a wife-beater tee) of America. No, until Murdoch’s folks decided to glorify our country’s various police forces, cops were pretty sanitized on television and the criminals always looked groomed. Murdoch and his crew understood how to create popular, unconventional television. These are also the folks who also green-lit the hilariously subversive The Simpsons and Married With Children.

Murdoch has a down-to-earth impression of America, probably because he didn’t grow up here and has no stake in our false façade and our “exceptionalism” mythology. And because he has held up this mirror, he has changed the way we look at ourselves.

Take his latest smash success, Fox News. Combining opinion-journalism, similar to the Fleet Street model, with blitzkrieg graphics, overly amped soundtrack and bright primary colors, Murdoch has brought to the news-a-tainment industry his peculiarly Australian-outback rebel instincts. Which jibes quite nicely with what I call the American Aboriginal outlook. Call it right-wing crazy, call it whatever you want, Fox News is sure as hell entertaining. Start watching it and you can’t stop. It tells a story 24 hours a day: Democrats are evil, Republicans are heroes, and white Christian Americans are under attack. Compare that with the other cable news networks: MSNBC can’t decide from morning to night where it stands politically and CNN still thinks people want to be informed and told both sides of a story: Its approach is, hey, moonbats and wingnuts, we’ll hold your coats while you two fight it out. How quaint.

Murdoch telegraphs his punches. He isn’t sneaky, give him that. Did Dorothy Schiff really think that when she sold The New York Post to Rupee, that that paper would continue along its Murray Kemptonesque path, maintaining the turgid, politically correct newspaper she birthed? He made no secret of his disdain for the aloof approach of that paper.

And as far as the Wall Street Journal being corrupted by Murdoch? That’s a real hoot. Reading the reviews of the arts and entertainment in the Journal has always been an exercise in watching one writer after another look down disapprovingly on the starry-eyed dreamers and liberals in Hollywood and New York. The Journal always had the approach of Brit-Hume, the basset hound-like guy whose blasé attitude toward Washington mutters, “I’ve seen it all.” Don't be surprised when one day The Journal becomes the full-color paper, THE DOW!

The media used to be where we reflected what we wanted ourselves to be: Father Knows Best, Leave it to Beaver, John Chance-e-LOR’s stentorianism, Walter Cronkite’s wiping away tears, Mike Wallace’s going after the crooks. Murdoch has sure made a mockery of the phony impression we used to have of ourselves. He understands American human nature: We’re a bunch of resentful, prejudiced, greedy slobs who want something for nothing. And we’re proud of it. Murdoch knows us, warts and all. And so does anyone watching his television networks and newspapers.

Not that he’s a dictator. Rupert knows when to leave well enough alone when he buys media companies. After all, he’s left 20^th Century Fox to its own Holly-lib devices, ruling only on budgetary matters. (Who can forget the devastating portrait of our former vice president in The Day After Tomorrow?) The movies have enough magic in them already to repel even the Murdoch touch.

But his influence is everywhere else. Look at FX now, which couldn’t be further from the original vision its execs had when working on the launch. It’s become the home of such great, gritty and no-nonsense shows as The Shield, Rescue Me and the new who-can-look-away? series Damages and Justified. Imagine series like those on ABC-Disney...

And how about a round of applause for Fox Sports. Hard to believe, but before Murdoch started broadcasting football games, you had to wait until the commercial to get a score. It was Fox’s NFL coverage that put the stats on the screen during the entire game along with the other data we Americans love when it comes to sports. None of the geniuses at the “respectable” networks thought to do that.

And don’t count out his new business network, either. Poor CNBC. Those folks won’t be able to say one bad thing about the stock market or anything else associated with capitalism, lest they be accused of being “anti-business, socialist, Nazi-Commies.” I can see the campaign now: Fox Business: Unlike those other lame-stream outlets, we love business.

Of course that means, just like with Fox News’ fair and balanced coverage of politics, we poor viewers won’t know the truth about bribes, corruption, fraud and slimy practices until it’s too late.

Hooray for Rupert!

Hollywood Values vs. Washington Values

It’s easy for politicians to run against Hollywood. Like AM talk-show jocks, some politicians dearly love to play off people’s resentments. And who’s safer to resent than Hollywood stars? I mean, what a fat target.

Hollywood stars have more money than we do. They have personal assistants and we don’t. They have all day to look beautiful while we have to be at work. They’re more creative. They’re better looking. They’re slimmer. They enjoy their work. When they go out in public, people notice them, not like we, who fade into the wallpaper.

So resentment against Hollywood is an easy sell if you want to score political points. And when politicians get really desperate, like, say when their popularity hits the 20s and only the most gullible still believe a word they say, well, the long knives come out for Hollywood.

In the upcoming election season, expect an escalation in excoriating “Hollywood values.” So, let’s take a close look at these “Hollywood values.” And let’s compare them to “Washington values.”

In Hollywood, for example, it’s common for people to be so absorbed in their jobs that they work long hours. When I was writing on-the-set features, I marveled that, at midnight, the lights would still be on at the Paramount lot. Inside. Washington’s lights burn only outside after dark. Heads would be rolling at Paramount.

In Hollywood, people participate in a collaborative art form. They work together to solve problems. Take a look at the credits at the end of a typical movie; they run on and on and on and on. When was the last time you heard about collaboration in Washington? Abraham Lincoln brought together a “team of rivals,” as historian Doris Kearns Goodwin noted. These guys in Washington can’t even agree that it’s wrong to take a bribe, give people the same healthcare plans that they themselves get, or subsidize former soldiers’ college educations.

In Hollywood, you have to stay on budget. Sure, some “auteurs” go off the deep end once in a blue moon and create the occasional Heaven’s Gate or Golden Compass. But studios keep a close eye on every dollar. Contrast that with contemporary Washington. Who was watching that missing millions that disappeared off the trucks in Baghdad? Who keeps track of private defense contractors? Who totaled up the cost of that drug prescription bill? Imagine a Hollywood project being green-lighted this way.

In Hollywood, people have to get creative to solve problems. The scene’s not making it? Rewrite! The set doesn’t look right? Scrap it! The actor can’t cut it? Replace! When was the last time you saw Washington people get creative to solve problems? What would happen, for example, if the government mandated that all federal-fleet vehicles had to earn 40 mpg by the year 2012? Don’t you think that would force Detroit automakers to put thousands of engineers, builders and auto assembly-line workers back on the payrolls?

In Hollywood, the studios bow to the will of the public; the only criterion that matters is whether or not the public buys the product. Maybe the squeamish studio heads don’t want to make another Saw movie. So what? The people obviously want to see one and were eager (at least until they got sick of them) to plunk down money at the box office. That’s democracy in action. Contrast that with Washington values: In November 2006 and 2008, the people voted to get us out of the mess in Iraq. They sent the message: Iraq is box office poison. And so what happens? The military strategists ordered a sequel in Afghanistan. What kind of studio boss would keep his job throwing good money after bad?

In Hollywood there is attention to detail. One cannot imagine Brad Pitt’s agent, for example, not checking every line in Mr. Pitt’s movie contracts. Not the case in D.C. How many Senators voted to pass the Patriot Act without even reading it? Don’t these people have people?

In Hollywood, people leave others alone when it comes to their sexual proclivities. Nobody cares what you do in your bedroom as long as you show up for work on time and the public buys tickets. In Washington, your representatives get way too interested in each other’s sexual adventures. Heck, they even tried to overturn an election over some hanky-panky.

And here’s the final Hollywood value Washington ought to embrace. Success. You can criticize Hollywood all you like but the fact is more people than ever are watching Hollywood’s products on television, listening to Hollywood’s music, going to Hollywood’s movies and paying higher prices for them than ever before.

By contrast, Washington is creating its own product these days and how that’s going? Heck, not even the hix in the stix are buying the tix.

Jim Bellows: 1922-2009

Jim Bellows fired me.

NOT THAT THIS MADE JIM UNIQUE IN PUBLISHING. The road full of bosses who have canned my sorry ass is long and winding, from Jann Wenner (who practically threw me bodily out of his San Francisco Rolling Stone office) to David Packer (who told our staff at California Magazine that he should have done it years earlier) and many others too numerous to count.

MY FIRING OFFENSE WAS PRETTY GRIEVOUS IN JIM’S CASE. A movie star had told me, (I was a “National Writer” for TV Guide at the time) that her biographer had lifted her computer — I think they call that grand larceny, serious stuff  and, as it turned out under a gag order that she flaunted — but I went ahead and put it in a story, after checking its authenticity with only one other source, a tabloid reporter on Fleet Street. Of course, the biographer's wife threatened to sue and no amount of charm would make it go away. Jim, my editor at the magazine, tried to cover for my carelessness but the higher-ups in New York wanted blood and mine was tasty. Big lesson learned on that one, by the way.

JIM, OF COURSE, WHEN THE MOMENT CAME TO RID THE OFFICE OF ME,fired me in the unique way he treated all his writers. You had no idea what he was saying but through his pauses, hems, haws and bobbing, you got it. I was out.

BUT WE REMAINED CLOSE FRIENDS, probably closer than if I had continued to work for him.

HE FOUND ME AMUSING, LIKE SOME KIND OF PET. I MADE HIM LAUGH. Which, by the way, was easy. Jim was one light-hearted dude. He hated stuffy phonies like the ones he had to endure as a top editor at the Los Angeles Times, which he, legendarily, called “the velvet coffin.”

AND HE LOVED GOSSIP. Bring Jim a juicy story about someone famous and you could see his mouth open wide, his face light up. He’d even slap his knee the way people do in a cartoon.

AND HE WAS INTERESTED IN EVERYTHING.This is a guy who just knew that the Internet was going to be big, and went to work as editorial director for Prodigy, long before any of us even owned a computer. This is the guy who inspired the creation of two of the best magazines that ever existed: New York, when he was editor-in-chief of The New York Herald Tribune, and West, when he was at the Los Angeles Times. This is the guy who sensed that Tom Wolfe, who was unafraid to take on The New Yorker, would make a great New Journalist and that Gail Sheehy would be more useful on the streets of New York than in a lame home-ec, ladies’-style section.

BUT IT WAS HIS WORK AT THE LA HERALD EXAMINERwhere he brought it all together. Festooning the nearly moribund daily with a bunch of rebels, he created a must-read for a city that couldn’t care less about reading. But when that paper finally went under (it had been severely damaged by a six-year-old strike before Jim even got there), Jim then went on to star in many other different media. He served as an early managing editor of the TV show, Entertainment Tonight (before it became, as Homer Simpson calls it, Publicity Tonight) and then at TV Guide where the magazine became a real chronicler of the TV business. He knew a story when he saw it. And he hated laziness. “Begin at once and do the best you can,” read his calling card. Words to live by.

THEY SAY THAT JIM’S CAREER GOT ITS INITIAL START WHEN, while he was reporting on the Ku Klux Klan for a Southern newspaper, the Klansmen tried to besmirch him by pouring liquor down his throat.

I’M HERE TO REPORT THAT NO ONE, FROM THAT MOMENT ON, ever had to force liquor down Jim Bellows’ throat.

Which is just the kind of zinger Jim would want in his obit.

Just to make it interesting.