http://thestoryofastory.tumblr.com/

Hemingway mixes some drinks

Tue, 29 May 2012 22:58:45 -0400

“Who wants a Papa Doble? Papa Doble: two and a half jiggers Bacardi white-label rum, juice of two limes, half a grapefruit, plus six drops of maraschino, pour the whole mess with shaved ice in an electric mixer and you’re ready to rumba. I invented the damn drink and I hold the house record in drinkin’ ‘em: seventeen.”

—Fake Hemingway to fake Gellhorn et al., Hemingway and Gellhorn

Dickens covers a beheading

Wed, 23 May 2012 17:14:00 -0400

Received giddily by mail today: A Treasury of Great Reporting: “Literature Under Pressure” from the Sixteenth Century to Our Own Time, by Louis L. Snyder and Richard B. Morris

There’s work in here by London, Twain, Greeley, Hugo, Liebling, Hersey, Pyle, Hemingway, Winchell — and hey, a woman! West! — and it’s so big and heavy it’ll someday need its own moving box.

Here’s a passage from Dickens, 1840s, covering the beheading of a highwayman in Rome:

He had refused to confess, it seemed, without first having his wife brought to see him; and they had sent an escort for her, which had occasioned the delay.

He immediately kneeled down, below the knife. His neck fitting into a hole, made for the purpose, in a cross plank, was shut down, by another plank above; exactly like the pillory. Immediately below him was a leathern bag. And into it his head rolled instantly.

The executioner was holding it by the hair, and walking with it round the scaffold, showing it to the people, before one quite knew that the knife had fallen heavily, and with a rattling sound.

When it had traveled round the four sides of the scaffold, it was set upon a pole in front—a little patch of black and white, for the long street to stare at, and the flies to settle on. The eyes were turned upward, as if he had avoided the sight of the leathern bag, and looked to the crucifix. Every tinge and hue of life had left it in that instant. It was dull, cold, livid, wax. The body also.

There was a great deal of blood. When we left the window, and went close up to the scaffold, it was very dirty; one of the two men who were throwing water over it, turning to help the other lift the body into a shell, picked his way as through mire. A strange appearance was the apparent annihilation of the neck. The head was taken off so close, that it seemed as if the knife had narrowly escaped crushing the jaw, or shaving off the ear; and the body looked as if there were nothing left above the shoulder.

Nobody cared or was at all affected. There was no manifestation of disgust, or pity, or indignation, or sorrow. My empty pockets were tried, several times, in the crowd immediately below the scaffold, as the corpse was being put into its coffin. It was an ugly, filthy, careless, sickening spectacle; meaning nothing but butchery, beyond the momentary interest, to the one wretched actor. Yes! Such a sight has one meaning and one warning. Let me not forget it. The speculators in the lottery station themselves at favorable points for counting the gouts of blood that spurt out, here or there; and buy that number. It is pretty sure to have a run upon it.

The body was carted away in due time, the knife cleansed, the scaffold taken down, and all the hideous apparatus removed. The executioner: an outlaw ex officio (what a satire on the punishment!) who dare not, for his life, cross the Bridge of St. Angelo but to do his work: retreated to his lair and the show was over.

Scenes from a writer’s life: Vol. 1 Sometimes non-writers...

Tue, 01 May 2012 17:05:00 -0400

Scenes from a writer’s life: Vol. 1

Sometimes non-writers ask what it’s like to be a writer. They think they already know the answer. It must be great to work at home. To spend your days “creating.” How fun! How rewarding! How liberating!

Not long ago, some writer, I can’t remember who, wrote that she dresses like such a scary person when she’s writing that the UPS guy, or the Fed Ex guy — somebody in short pants — took one look at her and asked, “Are you OK?”

Who gave the General Public the impression that writers lead Pottery Barn lives, anyway, and what should we do to that person? (I do own some Pottery Barn items. They died of dust.)

The above is an actual scene from my actual apartment. The only change between this captured moment and the moment I decided to shoot it: The Bumble&Bumble product fell off the windowsill when I decided to shut the window and stop heating the city of Boston.

Understand that this is COMPLETELY ABNORMAL. Usually there are WAY MORE hair-care products in the bathtub.

It’s either good-Grady time or bad-Grady time. Bad-Grady can’t get his shit together and walks around looking like he might’ve just murdered someone:

It’s a testament to the stereotype about writers that I can find only bad-Grady photos to show you, and none of good Grady, from the end of the book/movie, when he has successfully married and procreated and now is wearing a nice turtleneck, combing his hair and neatly stacking his pages.

I envy the writer who needs to clean in order to organize her thoughts, or to clean in order to write an opening, or to clean in order to find the right structure. I need the opposite. I need mayhem. Only when I’m finished can I boil everything, including myself, and start over. I’m OK with this. Landlords, often, are not. But that’s their problem.

the nine stages of Story, as told by my house

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 00:41:34 -0400

the nine stages of Story, as told by my house

You write like a girl

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 14:10:00 -0400

I’ve been reading, retweeting, listening to, etc., all this stuff about women being underrepresented in this year’s National Magazine Awards categories. I can’t add much to the dialogue but I’ll underscore this point: No one’s saying the judges intentionally discriminate against female writers. The real problem is the size of the welcome mat and the fact that while we women often publicly and happily support male long-form writers, we often don’t get the same consideration in return:

“The thing about the National Magazine awards is that the byline gap’s symptomatic of the overall problem in assigning to women,” said Ann Friedman, the executive editor of GOOD magazine. “It just sort of nicely forces a conversation that we should be having anyway.” Magazines with mostly male editors often have more male writers in their networks, a factor that influences how many editors assign pieces. And women who write long-form pieces for the most prestigious magazines can have a hard time getting editors to connect with certain topics.”

OK but stop right there. Does “certain topics” assume we’re all dying to write about our menstrual cycles? Let me tell you a few of the long-form ideas I’ve pitched to magazines in the past couple of years — (I’ve shortened these to summaries as opposed to full-on pitches) — and you tell me if they’re “girly,” whatever the hell that means:

>There’s a great narrative somewhere in the big federal case about the excavation of Indian artifacts in Utah/Colorado. Huge case — 24 defendants charged with stealing/plundering on public or tribal lands. A longtime undercover federal informant just killed himself — the case’s third suicide. A prominent doctor had been one of the defendants before killing himself, too. I’m intrigued by a drive-by factoid that appeared in a NYT story last year, about the central location of all this, the town of Blanding, Utah: “Many whites say Blanding, which had been raided before, has been unfairly singled out in a region where universities and museums once paid residents to dig up artifacts. … Many expressed outrage that residents were being portrayed as ‘grave robbers.’” Something there.

>Joe Stack, the Texas engineer who got pissed at the IRS, posted an online manifesto against governmental idiocy and greed, torched his house, drove to the airport, got in his plane, and crashed it into the IRS building in Austin. He died and so did an IRS worker, and another guy is recovering from bad burns and other injuries. Stack’s daughter called her dad a hero for speaking out against the government in a time of economic crisis (and later took it back), and the families of the living and the dead have meanwhile tried to come together. The lucidity of Stack’s suicide note and utter lack of a mental health record are interesting. Usually suicidal tendencies show themselves beforehand but not with this guy—he seemed stressed but “normal.” And usually suicide notes make no sense; they’re all over the place. Stack, in his letter, nailed something a lot of Americans are feeling — that’s the larger story.

>Here’s one I’ve been dying to write for years: the weird story of Jack Ridley Harper, a former Miami Dolphin turned alligator poacher. The feds caught him with freezers full of alligator meat. By that point he was a well-known marina owner, tarpon tournament host, and fishing guide, a fixture in the swank island scene in Boca Grande, Florida.

Mostly he fished for tarpon. Sport fishers love tarpon, a big, bug-eyed, flashy coastal fish — silver king, silverfish. The Boca Grande Pass was full of them. March through July, tarpon converge on the pass and spawn there, making for some of the best tarpon fishing in the world. At any given time a guy can drop a hook into the chop and pull up one of 200,000 tarpon just waiting to be caught. When Harper decided to start a fishing tournament, locals laughed at him. Nobody would pay $50 to come fish, even with a $1,000 prize payoff. But Harper, “the consummate outdoorsman” as one newspaper called him, saw money and started his tournament, which turned into a big-money, nationally televised event. This was in the late ‘70s and Harper was 10 years out of an NFL uniform and fully into the deck-shoes life. Boca Grande was coming out of its construction slump with the Sea Grapes condos, all of which sold within 90 minutes, Harper handling 11 of the sales himself.

And so on, for the next 20 years. By 2001, Boca Grande was upscale. You couldn’t get a tool shed for the price of a used Toyota. The presidential Bushes vacationed there. Harper bought a home in a gated community and his little marina had become Millers Marina Inc., with T-shirts that read, “Home of the World’s Greatest Tarpon Fishing.” Harper had become a Renaissance man but had a secret bloodlust.

Alligator hunting in Florida has a long, colorful history. Florida banned alligator hunting for a while because too many gators were dying. The alligators spent the truce years recreating themselves and now there are more than 1.5 million, so many that it’s legal to hunt them again, within limits. The US Fish & Wildlife service and state regulate hunting by lottery. But around 2006 the alligators were back. In May 2006 (when I first started checking into this story), alligators killed three people in one week alone: one snatched a young jogger off a bridge, one dismembered a homeless woman and scattered her body parts in a canal, and one killed a vacationing Tennesseean who was snorkeling in a creek.

Maybe the abundance of alligators led Harper into the lawless side of oudoorsmanship, who knows. He started stalking and killing more gators than the Florida Fish & Wildlife said any hunter lawfully could. It took them nearly a year to catch on, with investigators following a paper trail of faked hunting permits, all addresses leading back to one Jack Ridley Harper, age 57. At the time, the law allowed two kills per year; Harper killed 74 in just one one-year period, and sold off the meat.

Harper ultimately pleaded guilty to five charges. A judge sentenced him to five years’ probation, ordered him to surrender his airboat, his fishing license, and probably that cooler. He also had to pay the State of Florida $15,000 for the cost of its 11-month investigation. Bizarre narrative with, surely, some transcendence. [Note: The Atavist wants this one, which is awesome. Touch it and I kill you. But before they said yes a million other editors said no.]

>I’d read a definitive profile of Philip Roth.

>I’d read a profile of the badass film director Kathryn Bigelow.

>What about those Arizona sweat-lodge deaths? Spiritual leader James Arthur Ray faced manslaughter charges in the deaths of three people who collapsed and died (18 others were hospitalized) during one of his popular “Spiritual Warrior” events near Sedona. I’m kind of fascinated by the whole guru culture and the lengths people will go to to remake/cleanse themselves — the people they’ll follow, the activities they’ll agree to. Ray bragged about being rich at one time but now can’t post bail. Something there.

So, I don’t know. Maybe these are terrible ideas, or maybe I didn’t pitch them right, or maybe I don’t have the right credentials or connections, or maybe I just suck. I’ve written my share of navel-gazers, largely to pay the rent, but so what? When the magazine world starts handing out as many contracts to women as to men — allowing us a reliable income, and the kind of financial safety net that engenders the best reporting and storytelling — chances are we can be a little more selective with our subject matter.

Maybe the issue is that some editors assume that only men can be trusted to pull off certain reportage, or a certain point of view or voice.

This isn’t about being fair for fairness’ sake. It’s about mining talent from all areas. It’s about resisting the urge to earmuff it every time this subject comes up. Whenever we try to talk about this stuff we’re accused of being shrill. You’d be shrill, too, after trying to spoon-tunnel your way out of the dungeon for so long. Am I exaggerating? Nope. Not really. (And don’t accuse me of hating men: I love men! I don’t love the clubhouse they’ve built for themselves but otherwise they’re cool.)

Point is, don’t assume female long-formers can’t hang or that there just aren’t that many of us out there. We’re out here. And we’re working with the same tools as the dudes. Or, well, almost.

New!:

Particularly mind-boggling reactions to this post, to date:

1. A typical comment (always - always - from a dude): “Yeah but how many women’s pieces got submitted?” Seriously? That particularly dense argument actually underscores the problem. If we’re underrepresented in the entries (“We can only judge what’s on the table,” one juror, a woman, said) it’s because we’re underrepresented on the page. And we’re underrepresented on the page because men land the majority of major long-form assignments. Statistically speaking we have to fight just to stay in the game. If somebody can prove me wrong on that, bring it and I will crow the correction.

2. In a subsequent conversation a high-level industry guy basically said — and I’m not even kidding — that men’s magazines in particular will do nothing to address the disparity issue simply because they don’t need to. He said they make money without having to resort to recruiting new talent. There’s no financial incentive to be “adventurous” with assignments. So, there’s an answer. According to that model, we’re (a) too much of a risk; (b) not worth a damn thing.

3. Comment from anonymous reader: “One more evidence that men do it for themselves and women should learn from them, toughen up and stop being so damn PC. Do it for yourself and your sisters, lady!” Very helpful. Thanks! You know what men “do” for themselves? Each other, that’s what. Scientific evidence shows that this has always been the case. Cavemen used to invite buddies over to marvel at their new buffalo-hunt etchings and gleefully circle-jerk around a campfire. Twitter’s the new campfire.

—@williams_paige

"When morning came, I was surprised to find a treeless, undulating grassland stretching for miles..."

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 10:41:52 -0400

“When morning came, I was surprised to find a treeless, undulating grassland stretching for miles under a bright blue sky. Huge bales of hay sat on the camel-colored hills and herds of cattle, horses, and heavy-shouldered buffalo grazed the land on either side of the main road that crosses the reservation from north to south. The Missouri River was up and running again after eight years of drought, and it wound along the eastern edge of the reservation with a lazy luxury, the lacy tops of trees that had sprouted up during the long dry spell just visible in the center of the wide river, waving as they drowned.”

- A bit of loveliness from Katie Dobie’s Harper’s piece on sexual assault in Indian country, an ASME finalist.

10 lines to love: Kate Boo

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 10:21:00 -0500

At the sentence level alone, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Katherine Boo’s unsettlingly gorgeous epic about life in a Mumbai slum, already distinguishes itself as a teaching resource. And these lines are just from the prologue, people!

“He had deep-set eyes and sunken cheeks, a body work-hunched and wiry—the type that claimed less than its fair share of space when threading through people-choked slumlanes.”

“A modest, missable presence was a useful thing in Annawadi, the sumpy plug of slum in which he lived.”

“More cranes for making more buildings, the tallest of which interfered with the landing of more and more planes: It was a smogged-out, prosperity-driven obstacle course up there in the over-city, from which wads of possibility had tumbled down to the slums.”

“Each evening, they returned down the slum road with gunny sacks of garbage on their backs, like a procession of broken-toothed, profit-minded Santas.”

“Abdul’s mother was the haggler in the family, raining vibrant abuse upon scavengers who asked too much for their trash.”

“Abdul didn’t dare voice the great flaw of his father, Karam Husain: too sick to sort much garbage, not sick enough to stay off his wife.”

“To Abdul’s right, disconcertingly, came quiet snores: a laconic cousin newly arrived from a rural village, who probably assumed that women burned in the city every day.”

“Some days the lips were orange, other days purple-red, as if she’d climbed the jamun-fruit tree by the Hotel Leela and mouthed it clean.”

“But most of them would gladly blow their noses in your last piece of bread.”

“Zahrunisa Husain was a tear-factory even on good days; it was one of her chief ways of starting conversations.”

Previous Lines to Love: Ben Hecht, from 1001 Afternoons in Chicago.

Coming soon: Annotation Tuesday!, the Zanesville edition

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 09:55:47 -0500

It’s impossible to talk about one Zanesville narrative without examining all three, so stay tuned for the full line-by-line autopsy + Q&As with all three of these fellas:

18 Tigers, 17 Lions, 8 Bears, 3 Cougars, 2 Wolves, 1 Baboon, 1 Macaque,  and 1 Man Dead in Ohio
By Chris Heath
GQ
March 2012

A little before five o’clock on the evening of October 18, 2011, as the day began to ebb away, a retired schoolteacher named Sam Kopchak left the home he shared with his 84-year-old mother and headed into the paddock behind their house to attend to the horse he’d bought nine days earlier. Red, a half-Arabian pinto, was acting skittish and had moved toward the far corner of the field. On the other side of the flimsy fence separating them from his neighbor Terry Thompson’s property, Kopchak noticed that Thompson’s horses seemed even more agitated. They were circling, and in the center of their troubled orbit there was some kind of dark shape. Only when the shape broke out of the circle could Kopchak see that it was a black bear.

Animals
By Chris Jones
Esquire
February 6, 2012

The horses knew first. Terry Thompson kept dozens of them on his farm just west of Zanesville, Ohio, a suffering river town and the seat of Muskingum County. Most of the living things in Zanesville had been born in Zanesville, or in the county at least; Thompson was one of the few importers. He had a particular eye for the unwanted. His horses weren’t pretty animals except that they were horses: worn-out chestnuts, muddy grays, a semihandsome paint named Joe. There was even a donkey and a fat little pit pony in the mix, and now they were together in the pasture, more tightly packed than usual, running in a wide circle. They were rolling almost, the bunch of them moving slowly at first and now finding their old legs, picking up speed like starlings, like the bands of a hurricane.

Man or Beast?
By Jonah Ogles
Cincinnati magazine
March 2012

Terry Thompson knows all 56 of his animals by name. There is Solomon, the white tiger. There is Jocelyn, the pregnant tiger. Elsa, the lioness cub that puts her paws on the counter to snatch a piece of meat. Simba, the very first lion Terry ever owned, the one he bought as a sickly cub 14 years ago.

The narrative rat

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 13:27:51 -0500

I never can resist using this one in class as an example of some basics:

S.F. kids spend recess toasting the best rat who ever lived
Steve Rubenstein, Chronicle Staff Writer
November 23, 2002

They raised their grape juice cups at Lakeshore Elementary School in memory of Jupiter the rat.

“He was a great rat,” said fourth-grade teacher Rich Mertes. “Possibly the greatest rat in the world. And he never bit anyone.”

Jupiter was so great that more than 100 kids elected to skip recess Friday in order to attend Jupiter’s funeral, held inside Room 106 at the school on Middlefield Drive in San Francisco.

Jupiter died Thursday of old age in Mr. Mertes’ arms, moments after the dismissal bell rang. He was 2.

For the funeral, the door of his empty cage was left open. The purple tissue box inside that was his home was vacant. On top of the cage was a letter to Jupiter from the class of fourth-graders.

“If you can read this, Room 106 is very sad. If you could read this, I will miss you. I hope I will see you again. I hope God will help you.”

Read the rest here …

Henry Miller’s writing commandments, courtesy of Michael...

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 15:27:00 -0500

Henry Miller’s writing commandments, courtesy of Michael Kruse and Wright Thompson and a whole chain of others on Facebook.

If you want a job in magazines* you should probably...

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 18:24:00 -0500

… wear something other than cargo pants, flip-flops and a see-through T-shirt to the job interview, even if you are a designer. For one thing, dressing nicely shows respect. For another, we don’t need to see the full curve of your fonts to know you’ve got edge.

… never call us “mister.” Research the design director/editor/professor/whatever well enough to avoid calling a she a he. Otherwise you’ll never hear from “Mr. Wang” or “Mr. Williams” no matter how awesome you are. (Also, we’re not besties so why the super-casual “Hey” greeting? “Dear Ms. Wang” will do. Once we’re in “yo” territory we’ll let you know.)

… do your own legwork. If we refer you to someone else, you really do not want to follow up with, “Can you send me her email?” If you can’t track down a simple email address on your own, go work at Starbucks.

… read the freakin’ email. Don’t respond with “What’s your direct line?” when our phone number is clearly visible in the signature of our email.

… read the freakin’ magazine. If our magazine is about seahorses you’d better have a killer reason for pitching us on wildebeest.

… follow up with a thanks. Write an email. Send a note. Do it within 24 hours of the meeting. No need to get all novella or obsequious about it, just say thanks so much for meeting with me, to let us know you’ve got some manners, because chances are that’s how you’ll treat sources/photographers/artists/writers/etc. when representing the magazine.

… be truthful about your credentials. If you got a graduate degree from Harvard Extension School, don’t say you graduated from Harvard. If you fetched coffee and took dictation at Rolling Stone, don’t imply that you ran the joint.

… get our permission before listing us as references. It’s weird to get a call out of nowhere from some editor/art director saying, “So, Sally says you guys are tight!” when in reality we knew you for 10 minutes and truly cannot speak to your work ethic or your consistency of skill or your mind or your character.

… spell stuff right. We’ve seen emails written entirely in lowercase, emails that amount to the equivalent of grunts, emails confusing their/there, hear/here—if you’re aiming for the round file, congrats, you’re there.

… think twice before wrinkling your nose and saying “Are you sure?” during editing, if you get to that point. Editors can be wrong—and the good ones will admit it—but chances are the tempering forces of experience make us right, even if you are a genius.

… avoid saying, before having demonstrated anything close to the skills required, “So can you put me in touch with The New Yorker?” Because we will just roll our eyes and walk away.

—Chin Wang and Paige Williams

*Or newspapers, or online, etc.

Fortunes

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 10:45:00 -0500

My friend @JeffGordinier emails a poem a day by a range of poets. These often save me. I open the inbox and there waits a perfect moment of clarity or beauty or humor. Here’s today’s. It appeals on all levels but especially, maybe, to creative types. Enjoy.

Fortunes

You are just beginning to live.
You are original and creative.

You have a yearning for perfection.
Your winsome smile will be your protection.

You are contemplative and analytical by nature.
You will take a chance in the near future.

You have an active mind and a keen imagination.
Listening is half of a conversation.

You love sports, horses and gambling but not to excess.
From now on your kindness will lead to success.

Your luck has been completely changed today.
Be direct, one can accomplish more that way.

You will get what you want through your charm and personality.
You will enjoy good health, you will be surrounded by luxury.

Someone is speaking well of you.
Now is the time to try something new.

— David Trinidad

Your memory sucks

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 13:02:00 -0500

The great war reporter Ernie Pyle supposedly rarely took notes. Truman Capote professed to have a memory so flawless he could recall entire conversations whole. (Sorry, TC, not buying it, and neither does Joshua Foer.) Even in intense, fast-moving situations some journalists take zero notes because they believe they can remember everything: the precise sequence of actions, who said what, what people looked like or were wearing. (Again, not buying it.)

Cops can tell you about the fallibility of human memory. Ask 10 witnesses to describe the same event, or even the same person, and most of the time those witnesses will say 10 different things. Even those of us trained in observation and detail get it wrong, especially under pressure. I recently ran a surprise observation/scene exercise in a class full of world-class journalists and not a single person remembered everything correctly. Nor did I. In this exercise some students have been known to get even a participant’s race wrong.

“… More than half of what we experience is inaccessible to memory within a single hour,” Ed Cooke writes in a recent edition of The Guardian. (Thanks for the link, @AlisonLoat.) Which is scary/instructive.

I use this checklist with students but it’s solid for all of us who are in the business of telling true stories. We’re all students of the craft, no matter how long we’ve been in the game.

>Don’t assume your memory is perfect, even if you’re highly decorated and have been in the field a bajillion years (and maybe especially if you’ve been in the field a bajillion years).

>Cross-check sources’ recollections, if possible—via other sources, video/audio footage, personal observation. (Remember the scene in Shattered Glass where Chuck Lane makes Stephen Glass take him to the site of the alleged hacker convention and learns first hand that the space was closed on the day the convention supposedly happened. You can thank @penenberg for that one; he’s the one who busted Glass.)

>Document: Write it down, film it, record it—whatever you have to do to freeze it accurately in time.

>Look for paper trails—and be skeptical of them. Witnesses to the same event may recall the details differently but consensus leads—if nine of 10 witnesses said the suspect was 5-8 and one said 6-3, you’re going with the 5-8. And if you have the pleasure of a solid paper trail, read everything. What if you stopped w/the witness who reported 6-3?

>Practice better observation/focus/recall techniques. There’s books about this stuff.

>Review the facts as soon as you’ve experienced them. The 19th century German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus found what “has become one of the few certainties of neuroscience: namely, that all memories grow continuously weaker, but that the rate of ‘decay’ lessens each time you review the information,” according to the above-linked Guardian piece.

>Make no excuses. “Oh but that’s more or less what happened”—not good enough. “Fact checking will fix it”—a dangerous and sloppy journalistic work ethic.

You, as the reporter, are the first line of defense. Your goal should be for fact checkers—should you be lucky enough to work with them—to find little to nothing to correct. (Never happens but still, a worthy ideal.) If you’re doing your job you won’t be missing the larger substance of the story by paying attention to the details.

Here’s a whole candy store of recent stuff about memory.

Have memory/reporting tips/checklists of your own? Ping me @williams_paige and I’ll add ‘em.

how many writers does it take to change a lightbulb?

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 03:47:00 -0500

If you use this at your next party, and don’t lie, you know you will, you may thank this dude, Mike Pope, a technical editor at Microsoft in Seattle.

Q. How many writers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A. Ten. One to change it; nine to think they could have done it better.

Q: How many writers does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: But why do we have to change it?

Q. How many editors does it take to change a lightbulb?
A. Only one; but first they have to rewire the entire building.

Q: How many editors does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: I can’t tell whether you mean “change a lightbulb” or “have sex in a lightbulb.” Can we reword it to remove ambiguity?

Q: If you want to change a lightbulb, how many editors do you need?
A: The way this is worded does not conform to our style guide.

Q: How many senior editors does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: You were supposed to have changed that lightbulb last week!

Q. How many copy editors does it take to change a lightbulb?
A. The last time this question was asked, it involved senior editors. Is the difference intentional? Should one or the other instance be changed? It seems inconsistent.

Q: How many copy editors does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Copy editors aren’t supposed to change lightbulbs. They should just query them.

Q: How many programmers does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: File a bug on that and we’ll triage it.

Q: How many localization program managers does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Sorry, we already handed the lightbulb off, so we can’t change it.

Q: How many copy editors does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Just one, but it takes at least three passes.

Q: How many copy editors does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Depends on just how married the author is to the old lightbulb.

Annotation Tuesday! Amy Wallace + Garry Shandling + GQ

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 11:58:00 -0500

Reading Amy Wallace’s profiles is like sitting around your favorite bar with your favorite super-witty friend and talking about people over cocktails: You come for the companionship and vibe, you stay for the juicy details.

It’s hard enough to profile the famous because public figures don’t reeeeeeally want to be known anymore, but Amy, a GQ correspondent and Los Angeles magazine editor-at-large, gets in there every time and brings back something revealing. Is it her Yale brain that code-cracks walled personalities? (Yes.) Is it her tact? (Yes.) Her doggedness? (Hell yes.) Her background as a reporter and business editor at the Los Angeles Times and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution? (That too.) She writes all kinds of magazine stories—about vaccinations and autism for Wired, about a karma-centric prep school for Vanity Fair, about the killer Betty Broderick for Los Angeles, about the wah-wah guitar pedal for a former New York Times column on creativity and innovation—but today we’re focusing on her profiles.—Paige Williams

First:

@williams_paige: To me profiles are extraordinarily hard. You make it look easy. How? Do you follow a certain philosophy/strategy?

@msamywallace: Well, thank you, first of all. I really enjoy writing profiles – mostly because I think of them as puzzles. I wish I could say loving to do them made doing them easy. If you take it seriously, writing profiles is anything but. Without getting too earnest, writing a profile of someone is a big responsibility. You are charged with figuring the person out.

@williams_paige: You’ve profiled Charlie Sheen, Jerry Lewis, author James Ellroy, HBO honcho Chris Albrecht, Variety editor Peter Bart, so many others—who’s the hardest person you ever had to profile? Let me rephrase that. What was your most challenging profile and why?

@msamywallace: It’s all about access. Jim Carrey gave me 59 minutes in a featureless office he clearly never spent any time in and then saved most of his best quotes for the photo shoot (which luckily I attended). But great secondary interviews can help salvage a terrible primary interview. I’m a big believer in doing secondaries, ideally before I sit down with the subject. If things are going to go well, they’ll only go better if you’ve done your homework beforehand with people who really know the person. If things don’t go well, good secondaries can’t make up for it entirely, but they can go a long way.

@williams_paige: What’s the weirdest thing that happened while hanging out with a celebrity?

@msamywallace: Russell Crowe got “angry” with me, seeming to take great offense when I asked him if the fact that he’d just been cast in the first big movie that would allow him speak in his own New Zealand accent appealed to his sense of national pride. He reacted as if I’d called him arrogant (which I was so mystified by that I asked him point blank, “Do you think I just called you arrogant?”) But the whole thing felt slightly staged. Like he wasn’t really mad, he was just testing to see how I’d react. At the end of the interview, he insisted that I stay and listen to the entire CD of his band, 30 Odd Foot of Grunts, as he sang along. Later, I talked to another journalist who’d interviewed him the same day (!!) and she said he picked a fight with her, too. That weird enough?

@williams_paige: What’s in your personal literary canon, nonfic or fic? Top five.

@msamywallace: I’m never good with lists. Here are a few books I admire: Larry McMurtry’s Leaving Cheyenne; Alex Kotlowitz’s There Are No Children Here; Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kittredge; Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars.

@williams_paige: What’s the ideal profile subject?

@msamywallace: Someone fascinating, relevant and accessible.

@williams_paige: Whom would you most like to profile and why?

@msamywallace: I know, but I’m not telling because I’m approaching them right now.

@williams_paige: Ha. Fair enough. You’re an incredibly organized person, which allows you to work faster than a lot of people but with terrific verve and impact. Were you born this way? I know you’re going to say you have to be organized or you wouldn’t get it all done, but be more specific. Do you, like break down your LA mag stuff for certain days of the week, GQ stuff the rest of the week, work only at night, etc.?

@msamywallace: I am organized, but not as organized as you suggest. I basically do what needs to be done when it must be done. Nights and weekends are, alas, rarely off-limits when it comes to work. I’m a part-time editor-at-large at Los Angeles magazine, so I tend to spend at least a fraction of each day there. I’m a correspondent for GQ. Thank god for my iPhone, because it keeps me on schedule.

@williams_paige: You worked in newspapers for a long time before moving into magazines—how did you make that switch?

@msamywallace: I worked in newspapers for years, but during my last few years at the LA Times I really wanted to become a magazine writer. I was tired of writing around what I didn’t know. And I really had begun to believe you could say more that was true in good long-form writing. I’ll get to what I mean in a minute.

I wrote several pieces for the LA Times magazine when Kit Rachlis (who later became editor of LA magazine) was there and I learned a lot from him. Around that same time, Matt Tyrnauer, an editor at Vanity Fair, got in touch with me after reading an obituary I’d written in the newspaper of superagent Swifty Lazar. I did several TINY pieces for him, but it kind of got me hooked. Anyway, after Kit went to LA magazine, he asked me to come join him. And another person he’d lured away from the LA Times, Jesse Katz, and I spent a lot of time talking about the difference between newspaper and magazine writing.

One story that we talked about a lot was Ron Suskind’s 2002 Esquire piece, “Mrs. Hughes Takes Her Leave,” about White House press secretary Karen Hughes. It starts with this unbelievably great scene of Suskind and Hughes’ “unheralded house husband” standing in the kitchen waiting for her one frigid morning. The husband—who used to have a solo real estate law practice in Austin—is out of work, having followed his wife when she was called into service by George W. Bush, and it’s a little awkward, their small talk. And then Hughes comes downstairs and she and her husband talk a little about how conflict of interest laws have hindered his ability to start his own life. And then, Suskind writes:

I look at them both, and they look at me, and then all of us seem to look at the glass coffee table, where Muslim scholar Bernard Lewis’s What Went Wrong? is atop a stack of must-reads. Then no one says anything. “So, let’s get out of the house! Get going! ” Karen shouts finally, like a fire captain after the crossbeam collapses.

I can’t tell you how much Jesse and I talked about that paragraph (even though the REAL punchline of the lede was that six weeks after they met in the kitchen, Karen Hughes resigned and took her family back to Texas). We loved the way Suskind acknowledged his own loss of words in that moment, let alone his own presence (usually a no-no in newspaper writing). We loved that he was part of the scene, but not in a gratuitous way—in a TRUE way. The only reason the husband was so revealingly awkward was because a reporter was there. So Suskind used that and fessed up to it and didn’t try to erase himself from the picture. And as a result, we learned so much. Nine years later, I’m still talking about it.

@williams_paige: Why does everybody think you’re Irving Wallace’s daughter? How’d that rumor start?

@msamywallace: Not too complicated. Irving Wallace has a daughter named Amy who co-wrote The Book of Lists with him (I remember reading it as a kid). When I saw she was speaking once in L.A. I went and introduced myself to her. It was funny. She said people confuse her with me as well. The weirdest experience I ever had with this doppelganger issue is several years ago when I went to a party and met a lawyer who asked my name. When I told him, he said, “That’s funny, I have a client named Amy Wallace.” I asked him what she did. He said, “Oh, she writes for the Calendar section of the L.A. Times.” I was stunned. “No,” I said, “that’s ME.” It was so weird. I guess he represented her, but had conflated our identities. Very, very odd experience.

Quick interjection to remind readers that this is the seventh installation of Annotation Tuesday! and that the first six can be found here:

#1: A Women Went Missing but Never Left Home, by Michael Kruse, St. Pete Times
#2: “The Falling Man,” by Tom Junod, GQ
#3: “The Wreck of the Lady Mary,” by Amy Ellis Nutt, Newark Star-Ledger
#4: “Almost Human,” by Mary Roach, National Geographic
#5: “Mrs. Kelly’s Monster,” by Jon Franklin, Baltimore Evening Sun
#6: “The End.” by Ben Ehrenreich, Los Angeles magazine

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Comedian’s Comedian’s Comedian
GQ
August 2010

BY AMY WALLACE
PHOTOGRAPH BY DANIELLE LEVITT

Toward the end of February, in the first-class cabin of a United flight from Hawaii to Los Angeles, the only man on the planet who has hosted late-night talk shows, appeared on late-night talk shows, and created an iconic TV series that parodied a late-night talk show encountered the man who had just been famously ousted from a late-night talk show. I love this opening scene. Had you heard about it, or did it come entirely from Shandling in his kitchen? And I love the opening sentence because it rolls and builds so beautifully, but with a sort of playfulness—it establishes tone. Did you immediately recognize it as your lede or did you toy around with other openings?/pw Garry mentioned it to me and I zeroed in on it. We met twice and the second time, I asked him to repeat the story in detail./aw

Garry Shandling was in 1A. How’d you get the 1A detail? /pw Conan O’Brien and his family were three rows Both were from Garry, then checked with Conan. The two men are close friends, and their unexpected proximity made Shandling happy—so happy, he says, that he asked a flight attendant to deliver O’Brien a present. “Mr. Shandling can’t finish his cookie, and he thought you might want to have the rest,” In class we talk a lot about scene reconstruction—importance of; hazards of—and about reporting for Story. What do you think/worry about when reconstructing scene, particularly with regard to dialogue? How do you report/present dialogue, especially semi-long passages of dialogue such as this one, and be sure it’s what happened? /pw When it’s possible, I check the scene with several people who were there. Then I make judgments about what’s agreed upon, what’s subjective. Obviously, when the reconstructed scene serves one person’s interests over another’s, that requires extra checking./aw the woman told O’Brien, presenting the crumb-littered plate. Minutes later, Shandling looked up—way up—to see the six-foot-four-inch redhead planted in front of him, an exaggerated scowl on his face.

“This is the way you treat me, with the broken cookies?” O’Brien asked Shandling, his voice slightly raised Another great detail—how’d you get it? /pw Garry basically acted out this scene to me. I wrote it, then checked it with Conan./aw to make sure the comedy could be heard over the jet engines. “When I let you get in line with me and my wife and get your ticket ten minutes earlier? This is what you do?”

“Let me see if I understand this correctly,” Shandling responded, almost yelling. “I, out of the generosity of my heart, offer you food. And you have the nerve to walk up to my aisle and harass me and heckle me in front of this passenger”—Shandling nodded to the stranger in 1B—”who I don’t know?”

O’Brien turned to Shandling’s stunned neighbor, who will surely be dining out on this story for the rest of his life. “I’m sorry you have to sit next to him,” O’Brien said. “You know, if you call ahead and you find out Garry’s on the plane, they will allow you to switch seats.”

It was a coincidence, these two funnymen being on the Big Island at the same time. Shandling, who had recently completed final reshoots on his first acting role in years—a U.S. senator in Iron Man 2—was enjoying one of his frequent retreats to the Waipio Valley, his favorite place to meditate and ponder the universe. (While he stops short of calling himself a Buddhist, he is a serious student of dharma.) O’Brien, who just weeks before had parted ways with NBC and The Tonight Show, was on what is perhaps best described as a forced vacation. This is the sort of nut-grafy raison d’etre thing that has to exist but that’s so hard to insert. You always do it gracefully: get in, get out, get back to the moment. In your early drafts do you ever overcomplicate/overexplain/oversignify? Please tell me you do. /pw Of course I do. The nut graf is essential, but can almost feel cliché at the same time. It’s definitely a challenge to do it in a way that doesn’t feel obligatory. People need nut grafs to know why the hell they should spend all this time reading your story. So write them, then rewrite them. Then do it again and again./aw The timing was “synchronistic,” Garry says, recalling that they hung out so much in Hawaii “that Conan’s wife was jealous.”

“We were able to spend some time chatting about, uh, Love this little “uh” move. Some writers might feel compelled to delete it because that’s what Journalism has trained us to do: delete the little connectors, but in this case the speaker isn’t stalling or misspeaking, he’s cueing, and the “uh” is important in terms of intention/comedic delivery, and you paid attention to that. So say something about that. /pw I always record my interviews with profile subjects because I think the rhythm of how they talk is important to capture and I can’t get that without transcribing precisely. With a comedian like Garry who thinks a lot about timing and delivery, that’s even more important. Sometimes such detail enables you to mimic their rhythms in your writing. Other times it helps you pick the best quotes./aw the turtles and anything else that might be going on in our lives,” Shandling says as we stand in the kitchen of the vast Spanish-style home where he lives, alone, in the hills above the West Los Angeles enclave of Brentwood. You can see the distant ocean out the window, past a grassy oasis and Garry’s rock-lined pool. He looks tan and fit, if a little rumpled, in an untucked striped button-down, baggy cargo pants with a tiger emblazoned on one leg, and beige Prada sneakers. I never know how to ask people what they’re wearing and I sure as hell don’t recognize Prada when I see it. In profiling celebrities, the subject of attire/accessories must always come up—do you bust out with that question and get it over with or do you just recognize Prada when you see it? /pw In this case, Prada was just written on the side of the shoe, thank God. Same with the Pumas that Matt Damon, who I profile in GQ in January, was wearing. But mostly I don’t ask and don’t describe labels. In this case, I thought it was interesting – Garry’s a jock, but he still wears Prada sneakers. It felt like a remnant of his being a big dog in Hollywood, which he was quite publicly for years and now still is, but on the down low. Occasionally when I’ve written for women’s magazines, I know it’s required, and I ask it right away, or at a natural break early on, just so I don’t forget. But I can’t recognize most designers and usually would rather read a great visual description than a label name./aw When I press, he acknowledges that yes, the topic of O’Brien’s future came up. “Conan’s completely free now,” Garry says with a solemnity more gurulike than you’d expect from someone who got famous making jokes about his hair. “He doesn’t have to fit into someone else’s mold.”

But what Garry really wants to talk about is that hand-me-down cookie. “I’d eaten half, and the other half was in tiny crumbles and pieces,” he says, still delighted. Asked what kind of cookie—oatmeal? chocolate chip?—he adjusts his black baseball cap and takes off: “I asked the same question, and they said, ‘It’s an airplane cookie.’ And I didn’t want to ask what that was exactly. I was frightened.” A beat. “I was in a situation once over water where they said they were having a technical problem with my cookie. I said, ‘Oh, my God, what are you going to do?’ They said, ‘We’re going to have to switch cookies. Give us ten minutes.’” Backtracking to the tape recorder question. You’re obviously a fan./pw I’m a devout tape recorder user. I think it’s essential for a profile. How people talk defines them, and you can never capture that in handwritten notes. Plus, I like to be nimble in an interview, to pay attention to what’s happening in the moment (which I guess is partly what this story was about). I can’t do that if I’m simultaneously trying to remember and scribble down what the person is saying AND formulate my response in the same instant. Transcribing your own tape is one of the world’s world chores (hearing your own dopey responses is torturous). But it is worth it./aw

He’s not merely riffing. It turns out that the man who is widely credited with redefining the sitcom, introducing self-referential humor to the masses, and paving the way for Seinfeld, The Office, and Curb Your Enthusiasm, Again, the subtle slip-in of background/context PLUS the currency of his new material, which presumably is why you’re profiling him. You obviously need this material in the opening section but I like how you scattered the context/nuts instead of jamming them into one spot, a hard habit for a former nut-graf-trained newspaper reporter to break, no? /pw As I said above in my ode to Ron Suskind, it takes work and concentration to break newspaper habits. I’m grateful to my newspaper experience for teaching me so much in terms of reporting. But when it comes to writing, one must wean one’s self of the tricks/tropes that newspapers use. Because people are bored with them./aw has been working hard on something new. Little breadcrumbs of currency/relevance start here …

“I have this very abstract idea in my head,” he confides. “I wouldn’t even want to call it stand-up, because stand-up conjures in one’s mind a comedian with a microphone standing onstage under a spotlight telling jokes to an audience.” That kind of comedy is fine, he says, but for him it’s in the past. Shandling is striving to exist … and continue here… —and thus to be funny—completely in the moment. “The direction I’m going …and here… in is eventually you won’t know if it’s a joke or not,” he explains, describing his new act, … and builds here… which he has been quietly testing … and boom, action, ends here. /pw in clubs where his name never appears on the marquee. “What I want to happen is that I talk for an hour and the audience doesn’t realize it is funny until they’re driving home.” I’m so satisfied with this opening—it makes me want to keep reading the piece. You haven’t insulted us with some thin non-account of a person you clearly don’t know. Which leads me to the most irritating of profile openings. Forgive me if you’ve done this but I’m talking about the breakfast/lunch/dinner scene: “As Famous Lady sits down to breakfast I notice she’s twig thin with black clouds under her eyes, and I’m shocked and vaguely worried about her fragility as I order the lumberjack platter and she orders air, but she’s still majorly sexy and I think I could probably sleep with her if I tried.” But then I also feel sorry for the writer because clearly there’s no access and he had to make do with whatever the handlers gave him. How do you get around the food-as-metaphor setup? /pw Okay, first of all, have you read Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad? Because there is a chapter in it that is a spoof of this very thing, the celebrity profile built around a brief restaurant meal. I read it right before I interviewed Matt Damon and loved it so much I brought a copy of the novel to him, and our interaction about it is in the profile (on newsstands soon!). Obviously, if we had our druthers, we journalists would always want to encounter our celebrity subjects in an environment they would naturally be in (Shandling in his house, or in recreated scenes in Hawaii or on the basketball court; Jerry Lewis in his memorabilia-strewn office). When you can’t have that (Matt Damon wasn’t letting me anywhere near his house) you have to try for something that at least will allow you to see your subject interact in vaguely real ways. Meals at restaurants will rarely give you that, in part because we’ve all read the scene where the celebrity interacts with the waiter or with the adoring fan who comes to the table. As Egan’s great novel captures, that has just been done to death, and we can’t bear to read it anymore./aw

BASKETBALL 
Every Sunday he’s in Los Angeles, Shandling calls the game for noon. The invitation-only crowd gathers in his kitchen to drink coffee, and at twelve thirty everyone heads out the patio doors, past the pool, and down a series of steps into the lower yard. Nice description without describing. By walking us out you’re describing via action. How are you reporting this as Shandling’s leading you around?/pw He walked me around. I tape recorded it as he gave me the tour, and also took notes of the layout/visual landscape./aw As is the custom, the first person to reach the half-court grabs a leaf blower and sweeps it clean. Then they play: three-on-three to seven points, win by two. When only the regulars show—they include Sarah Silverman, Kevin Nealon, David Duchovny, and Friday Night Lights creator Peter Berg—no one sits out for long. Are you here for this? You’re watching these guys play? Where are you while they’re playing? What are you doing? I’d feel like a tool, sitting there watching, but you’re too cool for that. Who’s got the best jump shot? Does Sarah foul a lot? Also, I once saw Duchovny walking through Washington Square Park alone, holding a Tiffany bag; he’s super tall. That’s all I got. /pw I wanted to come to one of the games, but the timing didn’t work out. Instead, I asked Judd Apatow, David Duchovny, Sarah Silverman, Kevin Nealon and Peter Berg to describe the games to me. (Secondaries will save your life!) Other times, you’re lucky to get on the court. Sacha Baron Cohen and Adam Sandler have played, as have Ben Stiller and Billy Crystal. Judd Apatow plays infrequently, but only, he says, because “Sarah’s better than me, and it’s shameful for me, as a man, to accept that.”/aw

The sweat, the speed, the lack of pretense—it gets sort of elemental. “It’s stripped-down,” says Peter Tolan, one of Garry’s best friends and a former chief writer on The Larry Sanders Show, Shandling’s pioneering metacomedy on HBO. “People show themselves truthfully in a time of competition, and that’s what he’s interested in.” After a few hours, Shandling leads everyone up to the house to eat takeout and watch sports on TV. There is no agenda at Camp Garry, as Silverman calls it. So interesting, that she participates in this. How do they treat her? Are they respectful/cool? /pw Sarah Silverman is beloved, and for good reason. The woman is deeply smart. Every story I’ve interviewed her for, she’s helped me, not just with great quotes but with some higher level of analysis that I immediately incorporated into my thesis. More important as it relates to your question, Sarah’s got game. They all respect her./aw But it’s not a party—Shandling is adamant about that. Instead, it’s something of an incubator. Aficionados of Sanders may recall an episode in which Duchovny, playing himself, admits to having sexual feelings for Sanders. That’s just one moment of TV genius that was hatched on Shandling’s court.

“I was guarding him,” Duchovny recalls, “and you know, my pelvis was near his rear end, which happens sometimes when you’re guarding a man. And I said, ‘It would be funny if I had a crush on you but I was straight. I don’t know what that means, but that seems like it would be funny.’ And Garry said, ‘Yeah. Yeah. Your instincts are good.’ Garry’s always talking about your instincts.” Did DD tell you this in the moment or later? What’s it like to try to interview four famous people at once? Do you ever get nervous? Tell that story about the time you got nervous and what Shandling said. /pw Well, in this case, I wasn’t interviewing several people at once – I was talking to Duchovny on the phone. It’s hard to get very deep with a lot of people at the same time. Group interviews are better for capturing their interactions with each other. The story you’re referring to happened during my first four-hour interview with Garry, when I asked him a question and it took him an hour to answer. That’s coming up below, and I’ll annotate it there. /aw

Conan’s not the only one to use Shandling as a sounding board. For the past five years especially, the 60-year-old comic, who counts both George Carlin and Johnny Carson as mentors, has devoted himself to mentoring others. A generation of people at the top creative rungs of Hollywood credit Shandling with shaping both their material and their careers. More relevance. Did you know this going in and use it as part of your pitch or did the fact emerge during the reporting? /pw I knew it going in, thanks to Garry’s publicist, Alan Nierob, who is one of the greats—by which I mean, he actually really knows his clients. He’d told me that Garry had this ongoing association with so many funny people in town, who relied on him (quietly) to backstop them. I confirmed it, obviously, but it was helpful to know going in. So many publicists simply pitch clients based on their latest projects and don’t know much about what makes them tick. Alan is different./aw

“There are so many people who lean on him to be their sage in these matters of what’s dramatic—not just what’s funny, but what’s effective, and what’s real, and why what’s funny is what’s real,” says Robert Downey Jr., who compares Shandling to “a Jewish E.T. He’s kind of vulnerable while at the same time very probing. And he’s got serious opinions.” I’ve always wondered how it’s possible to maintain any dignity or objectivity whatsoever while in the presence of someone like Robert Downey Jr., who to me is sort of, like, perfection (and whom Matt Klam, with brilliant brevity, once compared, in this same magazine, to a family member who “went crazy last Thanksgiving and tried to fuck the turkey, but is fine now and applying to law school.”) I doubt I’d ask a single coherent question. How do you stay cool/discerning? Did you do these satellite interviews in person or by phone? /pw This was on the phone. Downey, like Silverman, is just a brilliant analyst. The twirling plates analogy he offers a few paragraphs down was just pure gold. I was excited to talk to him—I’m a fan—but I was so focused on what we needed to cover that I didn’t stammer./aw

Iron Man 2 director Jon Favreau dubs him “the Godfather.” Baron Cohen sought Shandling’s advice on both Borat and Brüno. Silverman says Shandling has taught her how to embrace the silences during her stand-up act. And Apatow still counts the night Shandling hired him to write jokes for the 1991 Grammy Awards show as “the biggest break of my career.” Apatow later wrote for The Larry Sanders Show, and their collaboration continues: Shandling often attends table reads of Apatow’s films and gives notes on the scripts. (Apatow says Shandling had a “monumental” effect on The 40-Year-Old Virgin.) “There’s nobody better in the world than Garry at telling me what’s working and what’s not,” Apatow says. “I’m just very lucky that I’ve had his input.”

Shandling says his collaboration with talented friends only leads him farther along his path toward mindfulness. Not long ago, he had a circular enso inked on the back of his neck. “It means ego emptiness—impermanence,” Ooh I like that—not the neck ink, which would hurt, but the idea. In a lot of these profiles you must deal with absolutely massive egos—how do you strip all that away and get to who the person really is, or is it ever really possible to get to who the person really is? /pw That’s a big—dare I say almost a Buddhist—question, Paige. Of course, I’m tempted to say, “You tell me.” I think it’s possible to get down to who the person really is, but they have to be willing to reveal themselves to you. I have told Garry since this piece ran that I couldn’t have done it without him, and I wasn’t being polite. He leaned in and threw down. He gave as good as he got. We were in it together./aw he says. We’re in the living room, checking out his speakers—a six-foot-tall pair of Alexandria X-2 Wilsons Such a good detail and one with audience in mind. This is GQ. Boys want to know what kind of speakers other boys buy. /pw Even for a girl like me, these speakers are hard to miss. They’re HUGE./aw that he calls “the best rock ‘n’ roll speakers in the world”—when he leans forward to show me the tattoo. It mimics what you see, he says, “if you take incense in a dark room and you twirl it fast. It looks like a solid circle. And it isn’t.”

Downey likens being with Shandling to watching plates twirling on the tops of sticks that are balanced on the tops of other twirling plates. I know what he means. When I ask Garry why he chose Iron Man 2 as his comeback movie, here are the topics he explores on his way to an answer: the emotional pull of the Olympic Games; a recent boxing match at Madison Square Garden; the Dalai Lama’s admission that he dreams about sex; the importance of being aware; the unmarried status of the greatest religious leaders; the appeal of powerful women; the four ulcers he had by 1998, after the sixth and final season of The Larry Sanders Show; how it feels to land a punch; the difficulty some men have expressing emotion; his love of Jerry Seinfeld; his respect for the Coen brothers; his disdain for cynicism; his fondness for the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh; dogs; the familiarity of every noise in his home; and the way his mother answered him when, as a child, he asked what she thought of him. (“‘What do you think of me?’ is what my mother said. “It was a stalemate.”) I love this labyrinthine move, and as a writer I love doing this move, don’t you? Using the discursiveness instead of feeling overwhelmed or frustrated by it. The discursiveness is character—plus you get to tell stories within stories and play with cadence and juxtapose weird ideas. /pw Okay, this is the moment you were asking me to describe. So, I write it funny here, but during the seeming eternity when Garry wasn’t answering my question, I was getting nervous. I knew I had limited time with him and I had certain ground I wanted to cover, and we were on Question #1, basically, and I was getting nowhere. I kept trying to steer him back to the question, and he kept taking off on new tangents, and I’m sure I looked progressively frantic. So finally, after I tried to nudge him back on track for the umpteenth time, he could see I was worried and he leaned forward and said simply, “Don’t worry, you can come back.” And at that point I relaxed and thought, I’m going to let this go at the pace it needs to. Which was, again, sort of what the story was about. But Garry gave that to me. If I hadn’t known I could come back an interview him again, I would’ve kept trying to force my version of order on the experience. And it wouldn’t have been as good, by a longshot./aw

“I’m coming back to you,” he reassures me, sensing that I’m lost. “When I give notes on a script, I say, ‘Guys, I may drift, but it’s part of the process.’ So I’m aware that I’m drifting, but I’m grabbing a lot of stuff.” It takes fifty minutes, I laughed out loud here. I love that you timed him. Did you really look at your watch, note the time, or note it via the recording? /pw The beauty of a digital recorder./aw Exactly./pw I know exactly how long it took. but eventually he answers. Except that all of it is the answer./aw

“Favreau called me in Hawaii, and he said, ‘I know everything about you, and I have a hunch that I know what you can do as an actor that you haven’t done yet.’ If only we had writing angels who came down and said the same thing, and who handed us pens and said, “Go! I know you can do it! Write!” Have you ever had that in your career? /pw Have I had writing angels who swooped down and filled me with a bright light? No. But I’ve been blessed with a LOT of great editors: Kit Rachlis, who I mentioned; Brendan Vaughan at GQ; Mary Melton at Los Angeles magazine; Michael Caruso, now at Smithsonian; Mark Horowitz and Mark Robinson at Wired. People who gave me opportunities, people who urged me to do stories I didn’t want to write for the wrong reasons, people who improved my copy immeasurably and took the time to try to understand what I was going for./aw And he got my attention,” he says, his voice suddenly doubling in volume. Here’s another place where the recorder came in handy – I didn’t have to remember how he raised his voice. I could hear it./aw This is a habit of Garry’s as he explains: “Anytime my voice raises like that, it’s because I’ve locked in,” he explains, then veers back to his story. “It was that fast. None of this is about ‘Oh, I got a part!’ It’s so much deeper. Jon Favreau called me up and said, ‘What are you doing, man? I think you can act, and I don’t think this is the time to withdraw. And I’ll put you in with Don Cheadle and Sam Rockwell and Robert Downey Jr.’”

I mention that Peter Tolan told me that Garry’s greatest desire is to be taken seriously as an actor.

Shandling looks down at his Pradas. “Here’s what I’m very sensitive about,” he says, pausing for a good thirty seconds before he raises his head. “You’re right.” Then he laughs. “I would only rephrase it this way: I want to take myself seriously as an actor. And to know that I can be free enough and strong enough and courageous enough to express myself in emotional ways that are a little bit harder than standing there telling a joke.” Now we’re getting down to the guts of it. All profiles have to mine a little soul but this revelation feels sincere and strong, to me. Was it what you expected? What happened in the two or three beats after he said this? /pw We were really clicking in this interview. I’d done my homework—watched everything he’d ever done, obviously, but also talked to a lot of people who knew him really well. So that laid the groundwork. But Garry was in a mindset where he wanted to be honest. He wanted to be understood. He wanted me not to get it wrong. And he was willing to help me. It was an intense experience, and this was a moment where the intensity of it was palpable. He’s always funny, even when he’s deep. But there was an intimacy to our conversation. Because he wasn’t just cracking wise. We were talking about some of life’s big shit./aw

BOXING 
In 2007, Shandling released Not Just the Best of The Larry Sanders Show, a curated collection of favorite episodes that fans had been awaiting for years. For their patience, they were rewarded with something far more interesting than the normal box set—a series of unscripted, one-on-one conversations between Shandling and some of the big names who had appeared on the show: Sharon Stone, Carol Burnett, Jerry Seinfeld, Jon Stewart, Tom Petty. The idea that motivated these DVD extras was at once simple and complex: Shandling was trying to walk his talk, to coexist with people who meant something to him and to make room for something—anything, even nothing—to happen. Exactly. God, Shandling as guru—never thought I’d see the day. I’m not ready to tattoo GARRY across my shoulder but he seems to be asking the right questions, paying attention to the right impulses. Do you ever sense that a story subject is giving you mumbojumbo and then have to figure out how to break through it? How do you know when they’re spinning you? /pw People spin you all the time. There’s no surefire antidote to it, other than asking good questions. Garry, though, wasn’t spinning. If you haven’t watched these DVD extras, you have something big to look forward to. They are truly fascinating – unlike anything else, just like he intended./aw “The truth is in the emptiness,” he likes to say. So he set up a camera and let a little emptiness in.

He spent a full year producing the “visits,” as he calls them, consumed by the idea that the DVD-extra form—usually so canned and predictable—could be something vastly more ambitious. Some of his friends worried about him, he went so deep into the project. Then they saw the results. Together these sit-downs, which at Baron Cohen’s suggestion Shandling labeled “Indulgent Visits with My Friends That Are Meant for Only Me to See,” comprise the rawest, oddest, most genuine moments you may ever see famous people subject themselves to on-camera.

One of the visits, with Alec Baldwin, takes place in the ring of a Santa Monica boxing gym. As the men circle and jab, they talk about humor, aggression, fear. Baldwin says he was mortified when he first guest-starred in a Larry Sanders episode in 1993. “I was scared,” Baldwin says. “You are fucking eighth-degree-black-belt funny.”

“That’s how I feel with you in the ring,” Shandling says. “I’m going to allow you to hit me so hard that I don’t have to—”

“Work again for the next five years?” Baldwin taunts.

“Finish these DVDs,” Shandling growls.

Baldwin was right, of course. Shandling hadn’t been working much—at least not in ways that are visible to the rest of us. Which is why, on his first day of shooting Iron Man 2, he found himself reflecting on his life as he sat on a raised dais with his tie cinched tight, pretending to run a Senate hearing as the cameras rolled. “I’m in front of 500 people and the Joint Chiefs,” he says of the scene, in which his character, Senator Stern, pounds a gavel, trying to get Downey’s Tony Stark to turn over his high-tech armored suit. “And I’m thinking, Oh, my God, the last thing I did was the voice of a turtle.” Laughed out loud here too. No further comment. /pw The guy has his timing down. /aw

He is referring to his last acting gig: the 2006 animated movie Over the Hedge, in which he voiced a turtle named Verne. After this, I had written the following, which I cut for space to keep it moving: When I note that most people didn’t even know he was in it, since we couldn’t see him, his voice drops to almost a growl. “Count your fucking blessings,” he says. “Write that down. COUNT. YOUR. BLESSINGS.”/aw

Not that Shandling has to work. He made a pile on It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, his first series, and an even bigger fortune on The Larry Sanders Show. (The complete Sanders DVD set—all 2,800 minutes of it—will be available in September.) Post-Sanders, though, two back-to-back projects—the 2000 comedy What Planet Are You From? and the disastrous 2001 flop Town & Country—didn’t deliver on expectations. Since then, he has grown accustomed to people asking where he’s been. “I never used to know how to explain. Finally I said, ‘Uh, I travel with Daniel Day-Lewis!’” he says. “Do you have to win the Oscar for someone not to bother you about it? Daniel Day-Lewis, he goes for six years to learn to make shoes in Italy. ‘Fascinating!’ But with me they’re going, ‘Why?
What happened?’” I love this bit of insight. So you spent how many hours with him total? Did it feel like enough? Does it ever feel like enough? Do you ever leave a profile subject’s presence and go, “Oh shit I don’t have it.” Do you interview the friends/colleagues after you’ve met the subject or before, or does it depend? /pw I spent about nine hours with Garry to assemble the piece. I spent 11 hours with Jerry Lewis. But that amount of access is rare with “talent.” Usually, you get a few hours, and some follow up time on the phone. So yes, when it comes to celebrities, I often feel like I wish I had more. As for the friends/colleagues question, I’ve sort of already answered it. By accident, I stumbled into the wisdom that doing secondary interviews first is the trick. The director Cameron Crowe helped me immensely with my Matt Damon interview (which I guess isn’t a huge surprise—he used to be a journalist). You’ll see in the lead of the piece, he gave me an idea that helped me define the entire structure. But in general, if you can talk to someone who really knows your subject well BEFORE you interview them, it helps./aw

Shandling grew up in Tucson, where his mom, Muriel, ran a pet shop and his dad, Irving, was a printer. His older brother, Barry, died of cystic fibrosis when Garry was 10, and he has said he thinks the loss made him contemplate things most kids don’t have to. I’m glad you didn’t get into this. A lot of writers would’ve tried mining it for meaning, and perhaps forcing an insight. Why didn’t you? /pw Well, I asked him about it, but by that time I’d read 10 other interviews in which he was asked about it. I could tell he was kind of done, and I didn’t push it./aw His brother died. It was awful. Next. Garry studied electrical engineering at the University of Arizona, then switched to marketing, he says, because he couldn’t bear the thought of actually being an engineer. The less demanding major left him with more free time, which he filled by writing comedy routines “as a test, to see if I could do it.” One day in 1968 he heard that George Carlin—then a superstar—would be performing in Phoenix, a two-hour drive away.

Shandling had never been in a nightclub, but he tracked Carlin down. “He was standing by the bar. I said, ‘Hi, Mr. Carlin. My name is Garry Shandling, and I wrote some routines for you.’” Carlin was polite. He wrote all his own stuff, he said, but if Shandling would come back tomorrow, he’d look his jokes over and they could talk. Shandling drove home to Tucson, then turned right around the next day and came back. I love this anecdote. What prompted it? Did you ask him how he got his start? /pw I had read that Carlin had inspired him to quit engineering and take the plunge. I asked Garry to tell me how. This was the story./aw

After that night’s show, Shandling recalls, “he takes me into the back room, which is like the clubs where I work now, and there’s my material on his little table with marks on it.” Carlin walked him through the twenty or so pages one at a time, and then he said, “You’re very green, but there’s something funny on each page.” This observation of his was so kind/generous, and instructive, I think, in dealing with people who want to be writers: look for the good where you can, for the glimmer of something real. What do you tell younger writers when they come to you for advice? /pw I agree, wholeheartedly. You’ve got to blow on the sparks so that the fire will catch. I work with young writers all the time, and try to give as much positive feedback (where merited) as I can. In my 20s, I was a clerk at the New York Times in a system (now dismantled) in which we were all evaluated regularly to see if we had the makings to be Times reporters. At one point, I got a written evaluation that said (and I shit you not), “We see no evidence of a brilliant mind at work in these clips.” I have never forgotten that (or the name of the person who wrote it). It shapes the way I deal with every writer, young or old./aw Very earnestly Carlin added: “If you’re thinking of pursuing this, I would.”

The beats of Garry’s life from the time he moved to Los Angeles, at age 23, through the end of the Sanders show have become comedy-nerd lore: Great setup move, telling us that of course we already know all this because we’re in this club but here’s the litany again, just in case you forgot. /pw Yes, my great editor at GQ, Brendan Vaughan, and I talk about this all the time: How to move quickly through the legend stuff (or leave it out altogether). The aforementioned Jesse Katz and I used to joke that this bio stuff was called “the log cabin,” and you had to figure out new ways of building it every time./aw his sitcom-writing gigs (Sanford and Son; Welcome Back, Kotter); his serious car accident that made him quit TV writing at age 27 to do stand-up (“That was my big shift—I felt like I had a calling”); his first appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in 1981, which led to a regular guest-hosting gig; his discovery of Roy London, the esteemed acting coach, at age 34; It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, which debuted on Showtime in 1986 and ran for four seasons.

It’s Garry Shandling’s Show was a sitcom that made fun of the conventions of a sitcom. The theme song was a guy singing about this being the theme song that ran while you watched the credits. The characters came in and out of Shandling’s supposed apartment, but Shandling himself also ran around the set and talked directly into the camera about the plotlines, his co-stars, his hair.

After a short break, he came back with The Larry Sanders Show, which first aired on HBO in August 1992. The show mixed on-air footage of a talk show with behind-the-scenes glimpses of how that show came together—the bookers, the network execs, the writers in the writing room, and most vitally, Sanders’s sidekick, Hank “Hey Now” Kingsley (Jeffrey Tambor), and his producer, Artie (Rip Torn). The guests were all real celebrities, playing themselves. Shandling played Sanders; many people thought the two were one and the same.

Just before the first season aired, Shandling was approached by NBC to host a real talk show in David Letterman’s old spot. He remembers talking the idea over with Roy London, who had worked on Sanders, advising on scripts and occasionally directing. “I would say, ‘Roy, can I grow as an artist going on TV every night?’” Wow. We see his intention—not about fame/validation as much as reaching his creative potential. Am I reading that right? If you need to go back and clarify stuff with these subjects, given their inaccessibility, how do you do it? /pw If they feel you’ve taken them seriously in the interview, typically they’ll get on the phone one more time. When I was doing a profile of Viggo Mortensen for Esquire a few years back, I had a big post-interview back and forth with him via email—he was the engine behind that, actually. He wanted to clarify some things he said. But most people will follow up on the phone if you ask. But you’ve got to have a specific need. You can’t just request some time to shoot the shit./aw The question was its own answer. He turned the offer down.

In the second season of Sanders, London died suddenly of AIDS-related complications. Shandling was devastated. “When he died, I really thought about quitting,” he says, suddenly looking a little smaller in his overstuffed chair. This detail, the chair, brings us back to his house/the interview, reminds us where we are in time. /pw “I worked with him on every episode of every show that I had done. He was a genius. I relied upon him for my acting and writing and sometimes life notes.” He pauses, overcome. “I’m sorry. I’m looking down because it’s hard for me.”

Shandling soldiered on. The pace was unforgiving. On Monday morning, there’d be a table read, then Tuesday rehearsals and a few days of shooting. “I would come home every Friday morning at 2 a.m. from shooting, and I’d have to get up to meet the writers at noon Saturday to go over the script for Monday. I would give them notes, and then they’d go and write a draft and come back on Sunday, and then I’d give notes on that. And get up and go to the table reading Monday.”

Fighting fatigue, he’d gobble Excedrin, grabbing them from a watercooler in his office that he kept filled with the stuff. That, he cautions, “will burn a hole in your stomach. It’s an incredibly effective medication, and I would like to be the spokesperson for it. But you want to stick to the dosage.”

The hard work paid off; the show was brilliant. The episode “Ellen, or Isn’t She?” revolved around Sanders’s efforts to get Ellen DeGeneres to come out on his show. It ran in the months before the comedienne was about to come out for real on her show. (On Sanders, though, while he’s trying to get her to admit her lesbianism, the two of them have a one-night stand.)

Apatow says the main lesson Shandling taught him on Sanders was that the curtain that separated backstage from onstage was just a metaphor for how we all hide our true selves. “He always talked about how it’s incredibly rare for people to say what they mean. People are lying a great deal of the time.” That was the root of the show’s humor, Apatow says: the disconnect between “what people are trying to project versus what they’re actually feeling.”

By the end of Sanders, Shandling was dealing with disconnects of his own. Your transitions are always good and feel organic. What’s the secret? /pw Actually, I’ve been accused rightly of being too fond of transitions. Often in editing we take them out altogether. This may be a newspaper habit I’m still breaking: the holding of the reader’s hand a bit too tightly, as in: “Come THIS way, and I will explain [too much] why you should!” I think I’m weaning myself off this. Good editors help./aw His relationship with the actress Linda Doucett, who starred as Hank’s assistant on the show for years, had ended badly. His relationship with his longtime manager, Brad Grey, was over. Garry filed suit against Grey in 1998 for breach of fiduciary duty, alleging that Grey had gotten greedy with Sanders, taking half ownership and a producer’s fee on top of his manager’s cut. (The 1999 settlement included a mutual exchange of TV rights, as well as a cash payment to Shandling of at least $4 million.)

Romance has always been a challenge for Garry. Despite his expansiveness on most other topics, he’s evasive about love. “I have spent a lot of time studying the issue of relationships, how I grew up, my parents’ influence on me,” he says when I ask him why he’s single. “I’ve talked to a therapist, I’ve looked inward spiritually at myself, and what it seems to come down to is—” the slightest pause—”that I’m a Sagittarius. Oh my God. Yes. As a fellow Sagittarius I can confirm it: we’re screwed. /pw I’m a Libra. I would like everyone to be happy, okay?/aw Please don’t make me reveal more than that. It’s tough enough as it is.”

After Shandling quit Sanders, he rented a house in Malibu. He slept and read a huge amount. He and Tolan thought up a series built around the conceit that heaven was run like a multinational corporation. (Shandling would’ve played God.) But Garry begged off. “I was still working on myself, on my path—with Daniel Day-Lewis.”

During this period, Duchovny suggested he try boxing. Shandling took to it instantly. “The art of boxing is seeing spaces and being able to take shots,” he explains. “The hitting and being hit have to become one. Your reactions have to be so in the moment. There’s no time to think.”

Garry rises from his chair and leads me through the house, past the Buddhist prayer flags and the many-armed statuary, Nice. Love this. Love that you didn’t call it by its actual name but rather described it literally, which let us feel vague about it along with you. We visualize a “many-armed statuary” better than we’d conjure whatever god it actually represents. I don’t know the name; I’m not up on my religious iconography. /pw Well you see, unlike Garry’s sneakers, this lady with the many limbs didn’t have her name stenciled to her forehead. But just as you say, I kind of liked not knowing. The readers gets to be me for a second, wandering around Garry’s house./aw toward yet another outdoor patio, where a heavy bag hangs from a chain. Before we get to it, though, he turns off a hallway and into his study, where a well-worn copy of GOAT: A Tribute to Muhammad Ali, a 792-page book of photographs, lies open on a low bench. It’s an enormous book, measuring twenty by twenty inches and weighing in at seventy-five pounds. Nice details about the heft; how’d you get it? /pw The Taschen website. Ah, the Internet./aw Its binding is cracked, Garry has studied it so much. Now he leans over it, flipping to a photo of Ali in the ring.

“A beautiful man,” Shandling says, appraising the boxer’s fluid stance. “He’s had to put all this training in. But there’s a way that he’s still relaxed. It’s hard to describe. He’s at peace. He’s empty-headed. He’s all instinct—because he’s got his technique worked out.” He pauses. “This is how I work.” Ok now here I have to ask: Did you wrestle with whether to cut the “He pauses. ‘This is how I work.’”? To me, the preceding sentence suggests the same thing, or at least suggests intention. /pw When Garry pauses, he REALLY pauses. It felt like it belonged there./aw

Suddenly he launches into a story about Ali during the fifth round of the 1974 Rumble in the Jungle, when Ali said to George Foreman, “This would be a bad place to get tired.” That, Garry says, “is also what a comic would do. This would be a bad place to get tired. To this day Foreman says, You know, that got to me! It’s humorous, the idea that someone would say that in the ring. And you’re going to see how these things all tie together, because they’re all exercises in being in the moment.”

When I suggest that boxing, like comedy, is about rhythm, he nods. “My trainer, Dave Paul, he said, ‘G’—he calls me G—he said, ‘G, you have an unusual rhythm of your own that’s sort of, uh, no rhythm whatsoever. And yet that works for you, because they can’t figure you out.’ So sometimes when I’m in the ring, it’s like you can’t tell whether I’m about to tell a joke, or throw a punch, or start a punch and not finish it, or pass out. So some guys can’t read me. They come in close—just like when an audience leans in. And then I have a flurry.”

Shandling takes me into a storage room to retrieve a DVD of Special Thanks to Roy London, a 2005 documentary about his late friend that he often hands out to people he thinks will be interested. While rummaging for it, he finds a poster that he and Paul made. It’s designed to look like a classic promo for a heavyweight bout, with two fierce-looking fighters standing back-to-back. Both of them are Shandling. In big block letters at the bottom it says, garry shandling vs. himself. Too good. Each of your section kickers ends on some revelatory bit of inner Garry. I love that you were paying attention—he’s looking for one thing, you’re noticing (and using) another. What compelling detail did you hate to lose, to leave out? Anything? /pw God, I wish I were doing this a year ago – I could tell you exactly. I just went and looked at my GARRYsnips file (this, actually, is a little window into my process: when I cut things out that don’t fit, I put them in a Snips document for safekeeping). Here’s a great quote from the cutting room floor: “I don’t know that Buddha would have put himself through hell whether he went on at 10 o’clock or 11:30,” Shandling says, taking a swipe at Jay Leno, the man who took O’Brien’s seat. And I love this episode, the description of which we cut for space: The show was at its best when the characters tangled directly with this dichotomy. Like the episode in which Larry [Shandling] gives his Artie [Rip Torn] a top-of-the-line Phantas pen as a gift, then complains that Artie doesn’t seem grateful. Artie’s response? He tells Larry he was only being taciturn because he knows Larry gets nervous around emotion. Artie goes on to reassure his boss of his true, hidden gratitude: “Inside it’s all tears, cartwheels and a hard-on.” /aw

BUDDHISM 
In 2006 the UK’s Channel 4 aired a special called Ricky Gervais Meets…Garry Shandling that became an instant sensation among connoisseurs of comedy. The premise, which Gervais had already tried out with Larry David a year earlier, was for the British comedian to pay a visit to one of his heroes. They’d talk about the craft of being funny. Hilarity would ensue.

From the moment the two men meet, in Shandling’s kitchen, it’s clear something is wrong. Shandling seems put out—irritated, even. “Don’t touch me,” he says when Gervais puts a hand on his shoulder. Gervais appears nervous, confused by Shandling’s disapproval. As Shandling puts his contacts in over the sink, Gervais scolds him for putting the lenses at risk, and Shandling looks so peeved you think he may call the whole thing off. “What are you, controlling?” he asks. “You’re giving me advice on how to put my contact lenses in?” When a distant buzzer sounds, Shandling says it’s his “ass detector, and it’s gone off because you’re here.” Gervais tries to get Shandling to follow him outside. Shandling won’t go, turning instead to the camera to comment on Gervais’s obliviousness. Gervais responds by emitting his loud, high-pitched squeal of a laugh. He’s on the ropes, and he’s not quite sure how he got there. And that’s just the first five minutes. Only later will Shandling ask Gervais why he makes fun of people with cerebral palsy. Only later will Shandling say, pointedly, “I’m starting to get the feeling that you’re not comfortable around Jewish people,” or ask, “Does that make you feel better about yourself, to attack me?” This anecdote cleverly serves the story because it brings us back to Shandling’s soul questions, plus, in a meta way, it gives us another scene. We see action. We get dialogue. We hear their voices. /pw Yes, there a lots of ways to have active scenes, even when you didn’t witness them./aw

In certain circles, the Shandling-Gervais smackdown has risen to the level of an unsolved mystery. People who know Shandling get asked all the time: What was going on, exactly, that led to the most awkward forty-seven minutes in the history of television? Neither man has ever explained it, not in public and not to each other. But when I ask Garry to do so, he looks relieved, as if an anvil has been lifted off the top of his head.

“Oh, good,” he says, and begins to talk. Nice. Breaking news. /pw Yes, in comedy circles, this was considered a scoop./aw

While completing the DVD extras for Sanders, Shandling had been struck by the idea that Gervais would be a great addition. Though he’d never appeared on the show, Gervais had spoken openly about how Sanders inspired him. So Garry called Gervais and asked if he’d do it. The answer was yes, but Gervais also had a request. While he was in Garry’s home, could they also shoot his Channel 4 show? Shandling agreed, and all was well until the day of the dueling interviews, when wires got crossed. Garry says he assumed they would shoot the “visit” for the DVD extra first, because “that laid-back, not-on tone is good preparation for saying, ‘Let’s turn it on’” later, for Gervais’s special.

But when Shandling walked into his kitchen, he realized instantly that Gervais thought the Channel 4 special was being shot first. Gervais was on—extremely so—and so were several cameras. Garry could have said something but wanted to see what would happen if he played it out. What if he stayed in the same low-affect head space he was in to do his DVD extras? Could he reach Gervais without explicitly identifying the problem? Could he bring Gervais’s energy level down? Huh. What did Gervais say about this? Did you try reaching him? /pw I did. No comment./aw

“It’s fascinating, really,” Garry tells me. “We both became locked into the shows we were each doing, and it became a bit of a boxing match. Because he’s trying to get me to do the show that he needs, and I’m trying to get him to do nothing. I was trying to pull Ricky into the moment.” Did you buy this? Was there some master plan at work or was GS just being an ass? Clearly you need it because on this note you extrapolate and begin to move toward the end of the piece. /pw Well, I bought it, but – as the transition below seeks to point out, he wasn’t owning how aggressive he had been. Watch this video on Youtube. It is PAINFUL./aw

A great boxer makes his opponent fight his fight, on his terms. A great stand-up takes control of a room. There’s a reason comics say their best shows “killed.” Making people laugh is, at its simplest, an act of domination. And Shandling dominated Gervais. I tell Garry their interaction looks more hostile than he will admit. He offers me an organic-turkey sandwich. Great timing, these two sentences. Did you take the sandwich? Did he fix it for you? /pw I took the sandwich and ate it with gusto. It was prepared by a chef – which is one detail that I think fell out of the piece./aw Garry is rigorous about eating healthy and he does it by only having good food (cooked by someone else) in his kitchen. “A lot of funny people have a way of looking at life and commenting on it,” he says. “Now, there’s another leap to take, which is: Are those funny people actually integrating their life into their work? I still search for ways to put it. It’s living art. I see it as living life as an art. And part of that’s the comedy, and part of that’s the acting, and part of that’s the basketball, and part of that’s the boxing.”

And part of that is, of course, the Buddhism. Garry’s been meditating and keeping journals that chronicle what he calls “my path and how I’m growing and where I’m at” since his twenties. The first time he was asked to guest-host The Tonight Show, he wrote in his journal. “I sat down—I have it in my book—and I said, ‘This is about becoming one with The Tonight Show,’” he says. (And yes, he still keeps a journal. “I probably write once a week,” he says. “This week there are three pages filled with the words, ‘I’m in GQ!’”)

As a misty rain starts to fall outside, I tell Garry that all his talk about process has made me think about my own process Yep, totally. /pw about the conventions of the interview, the seeming need for straightforward answers, and the stress that arises when such answers do not come. “You’re not the first person to have said that,” he says. “You want to know what the world is about? No one knows what to think. If we could just embrace not knowing for a second, we might have a chance.

“It’s all right not to know,” he continues, his voice kind, like he’s soothing a scared child. “Just calm down a minute. I give you permission to not know. That’s the key. Only from there can come answers.”

All over the house are notes Garry has scribbled to himself in a near illegible hand: on the refrigerator full of healthy food he pays a chef to prepare, on a paper plate lying on the counter, on a piece of lined paper wadded up in his pocket. More than once while I’m with him, he will consult them, saying distractedly, “Let me see what I had written down here.” But it’s just a feint, a way of creating space, of distracting his opponent.

“I’m going to jump,” Garry warns, signaling a subject change. His voice goes up again. “I feel like I’m on the edge of a new phase. Nobody knows it. I don’t discuss it. Honestly. But now is the time to discuss it, strangely enough.” He smiles, and his face goes soft. “Before it’s too late.”

BEING 
Seven years ago, when the world-renowned Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh was invited to speak at the Library of Congress, he asked Shandling to fly to Washington, D.C., and introduce him. The two men know each other well—Shandling has spent time at the monk’s monastery outside San Diego—and the funnyman was flattered by the wise man’s request. The chaplain from the House of Representatives spoke first—”he gave a prayer that was, um, long and dry, to be honest”—so when Shandling arrived at the podium, he got right to the point.

“You’re probably wondering why I’m here,” he recalls telling the audience of about 2,000 dignitaries and religious leaders. “First of all, humor is a wonderful way to deal with our suffering, because if we can laugh at our troubles, we can feel better. Thich Nhat Hanh is a special man who has helped millions with their suffering with incredible technique. But he doesn’t know real suffering, because he has not dated as much as I have.”

Afterward, Shandling heard that the monk had only seen his introduction later, when he watched a videotape of the event. And this is how Hanh responded: “This guy really knows how to work a room.”

Shandling will always know how to work a room. But something has happened to him that has altered his approach. Without prompting, friends choose similar language to describe it. Robert Downey Jr. calls it Shandling’s “molting phase.” Peter Tolan compares it to shedding a skin. “Garry is interested in people showing themselves truthfully, either by action or by what they say,” he says. Which is what interests us as journalists. /pw Yes. I think that’s part of why we got along like a house on fire./aw

“Artistically, your need to entertain sometimes throws up a barrier to getting to that truth. But I think he’s sort of shedding that as time goes on. He’s much more comfortable saying, ‘Hey, look at this. It might not be traditionally funny or what you expect from me, but there’s something to it, isn’t there?’”

Ask Shandling to explain his metamorphosis and he starts by describing an interview he saw with the snowboarder Shaun White about preparing for the Olympics: “He said, ‘Well, you know, I built a half-pipe in the middle of the mountains where I could go practice alone. It had a foam pit so that I wouldn’t hurt myself when I worked on my tricks.’”

Shandling’s foam pit is a place called the Comedy & Magic Club, in the coastal town of Hermosa Beach. For months he’s been dropping in occasionally, without warning, trying out his new Zen approach to laughter. This is interesting—were you compelled to go see him do a surprise performance in hopes of getting a scene, or did you in fact go see him do this and decide not to use it? /pw I begged Garry to let me see it. I really thought that was the only way to end the piece. But he wasn’t performing while I was reporting. And besides, it wouldn’t really be a foam pit if I were there. He never came out and said that, but I sensed it./aw “I say: ‘Hi, I have so much to talk to you about. I’m sorry I’m late, because I was driving here’—and I’ll start talking about that. And I keep going on that and go off on something else and then on something else. But then I say, ‘I have to try to get to the stuff I wanted to talk to you about.’ So that by the end of twenty or thirty minutes, I say to them, ‘Oh, my God, I’m out of time! And I didn’t get started!’ And they get it!”

Shandling has always said his most enduring comic influence is Woody Allen. Allen “was unexpected at the time when he broke,” Shandling tells Gervais during a rare un-cringeworthy moment in that Channel 4 special. “He was fresh and new. And it was a different sensibility.” There’s something about Shandling’s voice when he says it—insistent, reverent—that suggests he can imagine no greater accomplishment.

Sarah Silverman is one of the people who have actually seen a recent Shandling performance, at a monthly comedy gig called Sarah & Friends that she organizes at the Los Angeles club Largo.

“He did forty-five minutes of the most rock-solid, vital, mind-blowing tears-from-laughing set,” Silverman recalls. “He was so vulnerable and so honest, but at the same time a powerhouse. It was like seeing Garry Shandling at his peak—and it was. But it wasn’t some memory of something gone by. It was a whole new thing. It was exciting.”

When I press for details, she says, “He talked about his face. He talked about going on Bill Maher and talking about stuff on that show that he cared about. And then going online the next day, and every comment about it was ‘What did Garry Shandling do to his face?’ And he was like, ‘I didn’t do anything to my face!’ And then he watched it on TV and said, ‘Oh, my God, what’s happened to my face??’”

Silverman compares Shandling’s new approach to what Eminem did for rap. “You know how rap has always been my phone and my car and I’m awesome and saying my name over and over again and my jewelry and my money? And it wasn’t until Eminem came along that vulnerability was brought to it? He raps about the embarrassing things about his own self instead of posturing.” She pauses. What Shandling is up to, she says, “feels like a change occurring in that vein. I don’t think the point of it is polish.
The act is the process.”

The act is the process. The process requires a foam pit. The foam pit makes everything possible. And, I realize, I’m in it. I’ve been in the foam pit with Garry since the first minute I met him. So good. Did you really realize it while you were there? Or did you understand it by talking to Sarah later? This revelation totally works structurally because you’ve been building to it and we didn’t know it—we’ve been in your foam pit. /pw Sarah helped me, as she always does (she’s brilliant on Damon, too). This realization didn’t come during the interviews, at least not consciously. It came while reading and thinking about the interviews./aw

“You’re getting the whole spew out,” he tells me. “I mean, it’s so honest that I just don’t know what to say. The truth is, once you open yourself up to this process of being in the moment, stuff starts to happen in the moment. You’re going to say, ‘Garry, all fascinating! But I’m lost.’ So I understand. But I’d rather give you this—because I’m impulsing off of you. “See the point?” Garry asks. “You’ve already seen the act. It’s like this. With a few less lulls.”

*****

Amy Wallace is an L.A.-based magazine writer and former Los Angeles Times reporter who shared in two staff-wide Pulitzer Prizes: in 1992, for coverage of the Los Angeles riots, and in 1994, for coverage of the Northridge earthquake. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Wired, Vanity Fair, GQ, Details, Esquire, the Nation and the New York Times Magazine.

Mississippi Thanksgiving

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 11:39:00 -0500

Two recipes, as told to me by my Aunt Zet

Chicken and Dressing

“Cook your chicken. Everybody says it’s better to do a hen than a chicken. You get it at the grocery store; you don’t have to go out and wring its neck or anything. Put it in a big pot and cover it with water and cut you up at least one onion and boil it till it’s done. If it’s a hen you’ll know it’s done when you can take the leg and wiggle it and pull it away from the hen. If it’s chicken it’s got to boil an hour and a half, and a hen a couple of hours.

“Cook it in a big pot—you’ve got to have lots of that broth, see. Put in your salt and your pepper and at least one onion; two wouldn’t hurt.

“Then you gotta cook your cornbread. You know how to cook cornbread. You’ll have to have that black skillet almost to the top to be sure you have enough. You’re gonna crumble up that cornbread in your pan, ever’ bit of it, and get two pieces of loaf bread—if you don’t have loaf bread, don’t go out and buy it, but if you have any get a couple of slices and mix it in with the cornbread. Then cut up two large onions and about eight eggs—everybody says the more eggs and onions, the better it’ll taste.

“Mix all of it up and pull all the chicken off the bone and put it in there.

“Put your chicken in there and then get the broth and put it in there. Throw all that in the pan with sage and butter. You get the sage at the grocery store. It’s in the spice column.

“So: cornbread, loaf bread, cut up those two big ol’ onions, you’re gonna pull the chicken off the bone, you’re gonna pour that broth in there, you’re gonna put two sticks of butter and then sprinkle that sage. This is where it gets to be tricky: I don’t know how much. Just dump it all in there and stir it with a big ol’ spoon. I sometimes mix it up right in the pan I’m gonna put it in, or I have one of these big Tupperware bowls. But it really doesn’t matter.

“Put it in the oven at the top, not way down low or you’ll burn the bottom. 350 degrees. Shake your pan, and when it don’t move, it’s done.”

Sweet Potato Casserole

“Get you three cups of cooked potatoes, mashed up. One cup of sugar. A half-cup of butter. Two eggs. One TABLESPOON vanilla. Put all these in a mixing bowl and mix it with a mixer. You’ve already scrunched up your potatoes with a fork. Then you put all that in and beat ‘em. Two or three minutes. Then pour ‘em in a casserole dish.

“The topping is one cup of brown sugar, one cup of pecans, half a cup of flour and one-third cup butter. Now DON’T MELT YOUR BUTTER. Put the butter in a bowl with your flour and brown sugar and cut it. Cut it with a fork. Soften it by letting it lay out where it won’t be so hard to scrunch up. But mash it up and stir it and cut it back and forth with a fork. I even use a knife sometimes and cut it all together that way. It ought to be something you can take and crumble with your hand. If you melt that butter, it changes the texture and then you get into a spoon deal.

“Just mix it all up with a fork and put it on top of the casserole and bake it for 20 minutes at 350 degrees.”

Annotation Tuesday! "The End." by Ben Ehrenreich

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 22:18:00 -0500

OK, so my students always accuse me of being obsessed with death. Death sneaks into their reading materials and assignments, and makes me look maudlin. But seriously what else is there? (My second favorite topic is, alas, absurdity, but we’ll talk about that some other time.) If I designed a nonfiction course on The Literature of Death—and I may yet!—Ben Ehrenreich’s “The End.” would make the cut for its creative, gutsy, voicey look at The Inevitable. He explores death within the context of a particular city—a city built upon an industry that twists/resists/parlays reality. Kinda meta.

The idea worked beautifully for its literary home, Los Angeles magazine, a longtime hunter-gatherer of distinguished long-form journalism. The magazine has published some of the country’s finest nonfiction writers, including J.R. Moehringer, Steve Oney, and Amy Wallace, and has a history of world-class editing—Kit Rachlis led the magazine to several thousand National Magazine Awards and now the fabulous Mary Melton is doing the same. This story by Ben won last year’s National Magazine Award for feature writing.—Paige Williams

To start:

@williams_paige: How did this story come about and how long did you work on it?

Ben: The short answer is that I’ve always been somehwat death obsessed. My original idea was to write a story about the distribution of death in LA—who dies and how. I had seen some intriguing statistics from the county: it’s almost a statistical anomaly if a white woman gets murdered in LA, while death by homicide is a constant possibility for African-American men. Some of that information made it into the final piece, but as I began researching more, I became more interested in what happens after you die, and less interested in causes of death. I worked on the reporting on and off, while working on other projects, for about six months.

@williams_paige: Death in the abstract can be a tricky topic—how could you be sure it wouldn’t repulse people?

Ben: I couldn’t. But I did everything I could to draw the reader in. And I tried to be restrained with the icky stuff.

@williams_paige: You’re a nonfiction writer and a novelist. You’ve written about the death of the book and the death of a young immigrant. Where do you find your ideas? What appeals to you?

Ben: See above. I don’t think death is a favorite topic, but it is all over the place. It’s lurking somewhere in every story. (The skull grinning at the banquet, to paraphrase William James.) If you don’t take pains to shut it out, it strolls right in. I always find myself saying that my next big story is going to be about puppies, but it never works out that way. I wouldn’t say that I’m attracted to the darker stuff, but the stories that I find urgent don’t tend to be very jolly ones. If everything’s fine, why take the trouble to write about it?

@williams_paige: I have to ask whether, as the son of the amazing Barbara Ehrenreich, you grew up with pencil and paper in hand, and whether you felt some a certain responsibility to writing and/or activism. Do you feel compelled to write about social issues because of your mother’s work? Is your sister also a writer?

Ben: When I was younger, if anything, I tried not to be a writer. But we don’t get choices in these matters, and my mother certainly provides a model for me—of integrity, commitment, courage, independence, sheer stubbornness. I don’t know that I feel compelled to write about social issues because of her work. It’s more that I grew up in a household in which politics was ever-present, lived, and very real. It was and is inseparable from other arenas of life. And yes, my sister, Rosa Brooks, is also a writer. She had a weekly [op-ed] column in the Los Angeles Times for several years.

@williams_paige, aside) Rosa Brooks, to be clear, is another badass. Among other things she’s a human rights/national security expert, a Georgetown law professor and a former deputy assistant secretary of defense who founded a Pentagon office on humanitarian policy.

@williams_paige: Students always want to know about writers’ overarching process, so how do you work? Where do you work? When? Are you a rituals person and if so how so?

Ben: No real rituals. I write in the morning because that’s when my head is clearest and I have the most energy. I rent a small office, write there and at my desk at home.

The End.
Death in L.A. can be an odd undertaking
By Ben Ehrenreich
Los Angeles magazine
11/1/2010
8,698 words

You’ve made some bargains. Right away, you address the reader. Why tell the story in second person?/pw I like the way the second person jars the reader, pushes them out and then pulls them back into the work. It breaks down the fourth wall, to borrow a metaphor from theater, forcing the reader to acknowledge their relationship to the text, explicitly involving them in its creation through the act of reading./be We all have. Maybe you allow yourself a single Tommy’s burger every six months. Maybe you’ve given up meat altogether, or red meat anyway, most of the time. Maybe you’re serious about this and you’ve given up all refined grains and any processed anything; the extra buck a pound to buy organic seems a reasonable sacrifice. You’ve given up booze, cigarettes, pills, cocaine, sex with strangers. You tell yourself you don’t miss them. You wear sunscreen and eat flaxseeds. You go to the gym on breezy Sundays when you’d rather lie around. You go to yoga classes even though the chanting makes you want the world to end. You sold your motorcycle years ago. You cross at the light and look both ways.

No matter how many sacrifices you make to Lady Death, no matter how rich the offerings you lay before her altar, she will know where to find you. When she comes, she will hold you tight, and she will never let you go. Don’t be frightened. She takes us all.

Even here in Los Angeles, in the glow of so much newness, she takes 60,000 of us each year.1 That’s 164 each day. Imagine them all lying side by side, napping forever without a snore. The sun goes down and rises again, and 164 more are sleeping beside them, resting cheeks on shoulders, ears on arms. Very cinematic. That come from drinking the water in L.A.?/pw Our water is very pure. We steal it from faraway counties./be One day you will join their still parade. Chances are good—about one in four in L.A. County—that death will grab you by the heart. “Death will grab you by the heart” is so good because it extends the personification of death and also gives us a slightly new way of thinking about heart attack. What kind of discussions did you have with yourself, or with Mary, about how far to take the personification? The Lady Death idea could have turned on you but didn’t./pw This was quite literal. I was at various points thinking about La Santa Muerte, the cult of Holy Death that has become increasingly popular in Mexico over the last few years, in which death is personified as a saint and worshiped in rituals that mix Catholic and indigenous sources. There are temples to Santa Muerte all over the immigrant neighborhoods of LA. I explicitly mentioned her in earlier drafts—that dropped out, but the personification remained. /be Coronary disease is by far our Narrative students and I are always talking about authorial presence and how much of oneself to include/reveal. Why the “us” and “our” and “we” for this story? To maintain the idea of universality/inevitability? Or because it’s gentler, given the topic?/pw It seemed crucial to this story to involve the reader, to bring it home that this story was about them, that they had something in stake in it./be leading cause of mortality, as it is in the rest of the country. L.A.’s specific inequities, though, travel as deeply through death as they do through life. In this and other ways, death maps life. If you’re an African American or a Latino male and you die before 75, you’re more likely to die of homicide than any other cause. The same goes if you’re of any race or either gender and you live in South L.A. If you’re white or live west of La Cienega and it’s not your ticker that gets you, it will most likely be an overdose, or a car crash, or lung cancer,2 or your own hand—murder is not even in the running. Walk us through the reporting, if you would. How did you begin? How did you proceed? What public records and other sources did you use?/pw I used some public records—the facts above are from a report commissioned by the county. I dug around, called a dozen or so offices until I found the researcher who had written the report (which at the time was unpublished). I started with the county coroner, who was less than media-friendly. So mainly I called funeral homes, interviewed at least a half dozen funeral directors until I found a few who were open enough to put me in touch with the people they worked with in other sectors of the industry (the embalmer, the transporter, etc.). Most people don’t call back, so you have to be a (polite, persistent) pest./be

Whoever you are and wherever you live, you will go. Kinda Dickensian here, the repetition. (“Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooges name was good upon ‘Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail. Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.”) Why use repetition here and in the sentences that follow?/pw I mainly understand prose through rhythm. It has rhythms whether we’re aware of them or not. Better to be aware and in control. Repetition is one way of establishing a beat./be You will not be you anymore. Not exactly. You will be a corpse, a cadaver, a decedent, a “loved one.” You will be remains. The death industry employs more euphemisms than politicians do.3 Someone will find what’s left of you. A child, spouse, or parent. A nurse or passerby. Whoever it is will call for help. At home, at work, or in the street, he or she will dial 911. In a hospital, hospice, or nursing home, someone will call your doctor, who will check one last time for vital signs, declare you dead, and fill out the proper forms. A nurse will remove your clothes and close your eyes. (Not just for modesty’s sake: Rigor mortis hits the eyelids fast.) He or she will tie a tag bearing your name, which you can no longer speak, This detail—“which you can no longer speak”—is the hardest to bear, for some reason. Did that one just jump into your boat or did it come in revisions?/pw I think that was there from the first draft./be onto one of your toes, cover you with a plastic shroud, and wheel you to an elevator and thence to the morgue. In most hospitals it is in the basement. You will be rolled from the gurney into a refrigerated drawer. The door will close behind you. It will be dark and cold, but you won’t care.

Power Words 

So here you are, dead and alone. More repetition. Did it depress you, reporting/writing this piece?/pw No, not at all, actually. It was much cheerier than most of the stories I work on. There’s no human cruelty here, no horrific injustices. All of that is upsetting, depressing. Death is just death. No getting around it./be Chances are you didn’t want this, but your wishes were ignored. You now build some distance and take to another plane—it’s the same point of view yet it’s shifted./pw Whatever happens to the part of you that you recognize as somehow quintessentially you (call it soul, self, spirit, spark), the other part isn’t finished yet—the fleshly part, the limbs and guts that ached and pleased you in so many ways, the meaty bits that you vainly or grudgingly dragged around for all those years. That piece is still of interest to the bureaucrats. It is still a potential source of profit. In your absence its journey is just beginning. Ah now this seems to be the point of the story or at least a parallel narrative./pw Yep. Here we go./be

The path forks before it. Which way it goes will be determined by the cause of your demise. All the state wants is a death certificate: Think of it as a letter from your doctor excusing you from paying income tax forever. The county, though, wants to know why you died and if there might be a reason to push the cops and the courts and the jails into motion. The coroner holds the key to all that machinery. The key itself is what you once called you. If you have not been under the care of a physician for six months, if you die during surgery or as a result of injuries sustained in an accident or an assault (self-inflicted or otherwise), or if there’s any suspicion that your death might be something other than “natural,” your next stop will be the Los Angeles County Department of Coroner—which is, assistant chief coroner Ed Winter 4 tells me more than once, the busiest such department in the country.

It investigates 18,000 deaths a year, dispatching 36 investigators5 to the far edges of its jurisdiction—from Lancaster to Long Beach and West Covina to Catalina Island, from oil tankers and cruise ships anchored off the coast to jets on the runway at LAX. This story is such an interesting way of looking at L.A. life and culture. (Yes I meant to say “life.”) It’s an unexpected perspective. How did you come to the idea?/pw We live in a highly death-denying culture, and more so in L.A. than probably anywhere else in the country. This made actually talking about death seem particularly intriguing here./be One of those investigators will come to you. He or she (let’s go with she, because more often these days the investigators are women) will search your pockets for ID. If you are at home, she will nose around for medical records. She will interview relatives, witnesses to your final moments, and the police at the scene. She will photograph and examine you. You’ve seen this part on TV. When she has finished, she and a driver will load you into the rear of a white county van and take you on one last drive down one last freeway, through one last Sig-Alert, off that final off-ramp onto Mission Road. At the corner of Marengo Nice specificity juxtaposed with … they will pull into a driveway at the side of an elegant old brick building. … a half-detail—“an elegant old brick building” as opposed to its name or purpose. This gives me, the reader, a bit of relief and also latitude to do my own imagining./pw Good!/be They will open the back of the van, roll you out, and take you inside, where you will wait quietly in the coroner’s fridge until one of 25 overburdened pathologists is ready to examine you.

Winter, a 61-year-old goateed ex-cop with a cranky sort of charm, squints and counts the day’s cases on his computer monitor. It’s 9:30 in the morning. “Since eight o’clock, I’ve gotten one, two, three, four, five more,” he says. “Got an undetermined, a child. Got an accident, 63-year-old male. Another accident: unknown male Caucasian, 30 to 40, found unresponsive by passerby at a construction site. And an unknown male found floating in the ocean dressed in T-shirt and jeans, Pacific Coast Highway.” He stops reading and looks up. “We’re frigging always busy.” This is, technically, our first scene, and introduces us to a distinctive character. I like that you handed him the mike; quoting him gives us our first voice other than your own. What were the challenges of populating a story about dead people?/pw The challenge was of the abundance-of-riches variety: the living characters were all sufficiently interesting that it was more of a question of what to leave out./be

It’s not just the dead. The telephone rings, and it’s a reporter. He has questions about Brittany Murphy’s husband.6 Winter puts the call on speakerphone Love that you didn’t use the call or further allude to it; was it uninteresting?/pw What mattered most here was that he has to deal with so much celebrity death, his attitude towards it, so the fact of the call and his reaction to it were more interesting to me than anything the reporter said./be and rolls his eyes. When Winter and I first met a few weeks earlier, he pushed a sheet of paper across his desk. It was an inventory of celebrity deaths the coroner’s office had investigated during the previous year. Michael Jackson’s name was listed twice.

In the lobby Winter introduces me to Lieutenant David Smith, a genial, dapper man of 46 with a white handlebar mustache, who supervises the department’s identification and notification division. Right now Smith’s mind is on other things. “Part of the issue I’m dealing with here,” he tells me in the elevator, Nice, using the elevator—continues the motion./pw Ideally, a single vehicle will get you around a story. That rarely happens, but in the end, it’s the motion that matters./be “is extremely overweight bodies that have to be cremated.” By state law, if nobody picks you up after 30 days, you will be incinerated.7 In bureaucratese this is called “county disposition,” or “county dispo” for short. Smith located a private crematorium willing to kindle his uncollected dead, but it wouldn’t take bodies over 350 pounds. He found a mortuary in Orange County that wanted seven bucks for every pound over 350, but even it topped off at 400 pounds. “I had one the other day who was 710 pounds,” Smith says. The problem seems to have been solved: Odd Fellows Cemetery in Boyle Heights specializes in the incineration of the truly obese and charges a flat rate of one dollar a pound. Just, wow. Never knew this issue/cottage industry existed, or that L.A. even had enough morbidly obese people to make disposal a problem. What were the biggest surprises when reporting this story?/pw Yeah, we’re a pretty skinny bunch compared to most Americans, but not all of us, apparently. The biggest surprises tended to be things like this, the discovery of worlds you wouldn’t have imagined exist. Like, say, the challenges of applying makeup to a child’s corpse. (Kids don’t wear makeup, so it’s that much harder to avoid making them look ghoulish…)/be

Again, death maps life. County budgets are tight, and more families can’t afford funerals. L.A. County will charge your next of kin $352 to pick up your ashes (cremains, if you prefer), which is about what Forest Lawn wants just to chauffeur you from your deathbed to its oven door. Arresting phrase, “chauffer you from your deathbed to its oven door,” for its syncopation/juxtaposition of ideas. “Chauffeur” charges the sentence whereas “drive” or “take” would’ve wasted an opportunity for a memorable image./pw Verbs matter! Nouns too, but sentences hang on the verbs./be So more families than ever have to settle for the grim anonymity of “county dispo.”

Smith’s main responsibility is to identify you and notify your family that you have died. If the investigator sent out to the scene was unable to make a positive ID, you are for the moment a John or Jane Doe. These categories, Smith says, are further subdivided into “soft Does” and “hard Does.” You are a soft Doe if you were found locked in your own apartment, for instance, and the investigator is pretty sure you are you—but you are too decomposed for anyone to be certain. Your fingers are too far gone to yield prints, but Smith’s people8 should be able to confirm your identity through dental records or X rays. You are a hard Doe if you were discovered in an alley or in the trunk of a car and you didn’t have your wallet and there was no one around who knew that you were you. Then the only real options are fingerprint databases and DNA, and the latter is likely to be on record only if you’ve been convicted of a felony.

Once they’ve pinned a name on you, Smith and two other investigators will start looking for your family. If they turn up an address, they’ll send a letter out. If they find a phone number, they’ll call. “We notified somebody through MySpace one time,” Smith says. The phone calls can be tricky. Some people laugh on hearing the news. Some are apathetic. Some start screaming. “If the phone just drops, we call 911,” Smith says. “We don’t want another case.” Sometimes the next of kin are in denial. “You have to use the power words: ‘They’re dead.’ ” What elicited this interesting litany of responses? Did you ask how people react upon being contacted?/pw Yes. I wanted to know what it’s like to spend your days delivering the worst news people will ever get./be

Your family might demand to come in and see you one last time. This generally means they can’t afford a funeral and want a chance to say good-bye. County rules forbid them from viewing you in the flesh, so the best Smith can do is show them a photo. “I’m good with Photoshop,” he says, “so if the face looks really bad, I’ll try to remove as much blood as possible, take the bullet out of the head. Decomposed bodies I can’t do much with.”

If your family members really miss you, Smith says, they will talk to your photo as if you could hear them. Sometimes they will pet it, as if you could still feel their fingers on your face. You’ve brought the POV back down to the personal, moved from general to specific, which returns us to the overall idea that death is singular. The detail about relatives who talk to photos is haunting—did that, and the petting detail, come organically or did you have to push for it? I admire that you took the petting detail one step further, back to the personal, with “as if you could still feel their fingers on your face.”/pw I don’t remember having to push for it. If they were willing to speak to me at all, most of the people in these industries talked and talked and talked. They rarely get to talk about their work—most people are too creeped out to listen—so they were eager for the chance to unload, to tell all the stories that they keep bottled up./be

All the King’s Horses 
If you become a coroner’s case, you have a decent shot at being eviscerated within a few days of your death: Pathologists employed by the coroner perform about 7,800 autopsies a year, though many of those are partial autopsies, in which the examiner inspects only the specific organs that catch his or her interest. In the 1960s, autopsies were performed on more than half the patients who exited the hospital through the morgue. That number has since fallen to less than 10 percent. Insurance companies loathe spending money on the living and are even stingier with the dead. This has opened up a market niche large enough for Vidal Herrera to park his Hummer in. Fantastic. So much cleverer than the usual expository “He drives a Hummer” or “He pulls up in his Hummer.” /pw Perhaps you’ve seen it. It’s white and emblazoned on both sides with the name of his company: 1-800-AUTOPSY.

Herrera is 58 and stocky, with a trim white beard and a round, lively face. The guys in the neighborhood call him “Muerto.” Today, standing in the courtyard of his Valley Boulevard compound in El Sereno, /pw How fitting, “El Sereno.” he is wearing a T-shirt that says What happens in the morgue stays in the morgue. In addition to performing complete autopsies for $3,000 a pop and harvesting and transporting donated organs, Herrera rents mortuary equipment to the studios for film and TV shoots and has a side business producing custom “coffin couches”—cut-down caskets transformed into sofas. He shows me one in silver and black with a Raiders logo embroidered on a cushion.

Despite his nickname, Herrera’s vivacity is uncontainable. He takes me to his office and tells me about his years with the coroner’s department, where he worked as a morgue attendant, a photographer, an autopsy assistant, and finally for five years as an investigator. So he’s not a pathologist? Wow./pw Nope. But there must be one present at each autopsy. See Dr. Grey, below./be He talks about a woman in Compton eaten by her cats, about the time he retrieved a “floater” from a drainage canal in Lomita and his clothes filled with maggots, and about his last day on the job in 1984, when he ruptured three disks in his spine trying to lift an obese pastry chef who had shot herself. “She reminded me of a gorilla,” he says, and recounts his subsequent struggles with depression and the revelation that he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. Until a psychiatrist told him otherwise, he says, he had thought that his recurring nightmares of mutilated corpses were normal. On one wall of his office, among Halloween props and Grateful Dead posters, is a framed caricature of Herrera grinning in black surgical scrubs. A speech bubble above his head reads “A chance to slash is a chance for cash.” Wow, “bring out your dead” indeed. These guys would have to be unsentimental, though, or else go mad. Did you get the urge to either explore or defend the survival mechanism of clinical coldness?/pw As a journalist who frequently goes to some pretty awful places, I wasn’t put off or surprised by the self-protective dark humor. Herrera was particularly mercenary , but he was extremely open and honest about it all. Compared with the professionally sentimental but no-less mercenary corporate types that I met at, for instance, Forest Lawn, I found him quite refreshing./be (“Professionally sentimental” = awesome./pw)

If your survivors have suspicions about the cause of your death and can afford to put their minds at ease, they can call Herrera or one of his eager competitors. If they do, you will end up like the 60-year-old woman now lying naked on Herrera’s stainless-steel autopsy table. She is short and overweight and hasn’t breathed in five days. “Hasn’t breathed in five days” is so much more artful—and relatable to the reader; personal—than the expected “died five days ago” or “has been dead for five days.”/pw Her arms and lower legs are tanned a yellowish brown, but her belly, breasts, and thighs are a startling white because all of her blood has drained to her back. Her toenails are still crimson with polish. Herrera dons blue latex gloves and a long, black rubber butcher’s apron for the occasion, but he’s there only to watch. His autopsy assistant, Sean Sadler, will do the honors, along with a pathologist who asks me not to use his name. I will call him Dr. Gray.

Sadler begins with a Y-incision. Had you ever observed an autopsy before? How’d you do?/pw This was my first. I was a little nervous about it, mainly afraid of humiliating myself by needing to vomit or run from the room, but I did fine. One learns to disassociate extremely quickly. But I did find that for a few days I had a hard time looking at people in the street without imagining their viscera./be Using a scalpel, he slices down from each shoulder to the sternum and from there to just above the black snare of hair beneath her navel. The patient does not flinch, not even when Sadler peels back the skin of her chest with a retractor, causing her breasts to loll on her biceps. Sounds gross to say this but very nice./pw Thanks!/be He cuts through her ribs with pruning shears, pausing to observe the softness of her bones—osteoporosis, he suggests—and the fractures left by whoever had attempted CPR. He trims away the heavy yellow fat around her heart, slices through the arteries and veins, and hands the once vital organ to Dr. Gray, who weighs and dissects it on a plastic cutting board. The lungs come out next. Sadler works the scalpel under the patient’s chin to loosen the organs of her neck: the thyroid and parathyroid glands, the esophagus and trachea. He goes organ by organ, handing each to Dr. Gray, who slices and studies them, then drops a sliver of each into a jar of diluted formaldehyde. He traps another sliver in a plastic cassette for the toxicologist and tosses what is left into the “gut bucket”—a small, wheeled trash can at his feet. Wow. Almost primitive./pw Yeah, in the end, despite all the scientific and bureaucratic trappings, they are in the business of cutting people up./be

In the end, when her torso has been reduced to what is called a “canoe,” and her skullcap rocks on the table beside her right shoulder, Great precision of detail. How were you reporting in the autopsy room—notebook + tape recorder? Or notebook only? Or …?/pw Notebook only./be and a single drop of blood-brown water hangs like a tear beneath her eye, Dr. Gray decides it was her heart that killed her, although she also had pneumonia and a terrible back injury—four inches of spine swollen and saturated with blood—that must have kept her in constant and excruciating pain. He shows me her butterflied heart. The two halves of her mitral valve don’t quite match, which means more to him than it does to me. In this case I kinda wanted to know what the mismatched mitral valve DID mean…/pw I believe that in an earlier draft, those secrets were revealed. She died of a heart attack. Though it wasn’t just the mitral valve that revealed that. /be

If it were you instead of her, you would not recognize yourself. The yellowy red mess inside of you would seem to have little to do with even your most intimate understanding of yourself. You would be startled by the pleasant purplish hue of your liver, the graceful drape of your small intestines, the stubborn white ball of your skull. The smells you release would surprise you, I admire that you didn’t attempt to describe the smells—the absence of description and the “would surprise you” work toward the idea almost as powerfully./pw Thanks. Often, saying less accomplishes a lot more./be as would the awful groaning crack your spine makes when Sadler pries the vertebrae apart to get at the tender cord. But since the worst indignity—your death—has already occurred, do you think you’d really mind?

*****

A Happy Life 

If your death is sufficiently unremarkable that the coroner has no designs on your remains, you will likely avoid the invasive curiosity of the county and go straight to the funeral parlor that will handle what are politely called “the arrangements.” If the funeral director has the staff on hand, he will send a man with a van to fetch you, but chances are good that he will subcontract the task to someone like Angelo Patrick.

Patrick runs Patco Transportation Services. When I meet him at a Denny’s in Hollywood, he is wearing a black suit and tie and a flawlessly white shirt with two golden pens protruding from the pocket. There is a somber intensity to him that is barely disguised by the softness of his voice or the formality of his speech and bearing. Patrick grew up in South Carolina and earned a degree in biology, but in 1971, there were not many jobs in the sciences for a black man in the South. Two years later he moved to L.A. and enrolled in mortuary school.

In the decades since Patrick graduated, the “death care” business, once known as the “dismal trade,” has changed sharply. Beginning in the late 1980s, the industry underwent a massive consolidation. Racing to corner the market before baby boomers started dying off, a few giant firms—the largest of them being Houston-based Services Corporation International—began buying up hundreds of independent mortuaries and cemeteries. Usually the conglomerate kept the individual locations’ original names but combined their operations—and jacked up prices.9 The traditionally American send-off—a viewing at the funeral home, followed by services at the church and a motorcade to the cemetery—gave way to the corporate all-in-one. The big cemeteries now have mortuaries, chapels, and even florists on-site, which cuts out the old side industries. So-called first-call services like Patco are among the few subsidiary contractors that have survived the shift. Graceful compression of time/industry history, getting us back to the characters./pw Thanks. That’s often the hardest trick—weaving in and out of larger narratives, specific scenes./be

Technically, Patrick’s job is fairly simple. The mortuary calls him and tells him where you are. And back to the personal, so much more compelling than “tells him where the body is.” /pw He drives to the address, knocks on the door, rolls you into a sheet, ties off the ends, hoists you onto a gurney, wheels you to the van, drops you at the mortuary, and waits for his next call. “There’s never any funny stuff,” he says. “The dead, they don’t say anything.”

His work, however, does have its complications. First, there is “decomp.” Patrick can tell it will be an issue before he even parks, when he sees the police officers standing at the far end of the sidewalk smoking cigars to cover the smell. Great detail, about the cigarettes. Did Patrick volunteer this or did you ask a specific question that yielded it?/pw He was another one who needed very little prompting. A thoughtful, introspective man who, I’m pretty sure, had never been asked to speak in any depth about his work before, or about his thoughts about mortality./be Aside from the odors, there are fluids to deal with and parts of you that stain his clothes. Stairs can be a problem. You don’t get any lighter when you die. If you’re a pack rat or a hoarder, you will make Patrick’s task still more difficult. You might have too much junk around for him to wheel you out, which means he’ll have to carry you. Sometimes he can’t find the dead for all the trash that crowds their homes. Oh my God I imagine people all over L.A. County started looking around their rooms. How did this piece change the way you work, or live?/pw I’m not sure that it did. On some subconscious level, it may have helped me to deal with my own anxiety about dying. And it made it very clear to me that I don’t wish to be embalmed./be Yeah totally with you on that./pw

Then there are the living. Patrick remembers one large tattooed fellow who did not want to part with his mother’s remains. “He had just come out of prison. He didn’t want Mom to be dead yet. It took six guys, his uncles, to hold him down on the floor while I took the body and ran—literally ran.” Another man threatened Patrick with a hammer after Patrick had covered his wife’s face. “She’s going to suffocate,” the man said. Patrick uncovered it.

“You get them in the bathtub, on the toilet, in the bed, in the backyard. Everywhere people go, we pick them up,” says Patrick, leaning over his eggs and grits, which he does not touch. “From the littlest person to the most important person. Musicians, Indian chiefs, whoever. I pick them up.”

Patrick was raised a Baptist. When he was 12, he watched his father die of a heart attack and found he could no longer believe in the God who had taken his father from him. He married an observant Jehovah’s Witness and became one, too. Religion, he says, “offered the possibility that I might one day see my father again.” His work has eroded that faith. Patrick is 60 now and no longer married, and he doesn’t bother himself with God. “When people die, I don’t know where they go, just like I don’t know where we come from,” he says. “I see a lady die at 115. I see babies die at three months—I can hold the baby in my hand. I see kids die at 3, 4 years old. I see teenagers, rich people, poor people, white people, black people. Everybody dies.”

The only ones that disturb him, he says, are the lonely ones, the ones he finds decomposing in their living rooms, surrounded by empty bottles with the television still on. He remembers a woman he found lying on her kitchen floor. She had been there for two weeks even though her daughter lived just four doors down.10

Patrick smiles a tight, sad smile. “It’s like the Epicurean philosophers Wow, he really said “It’s like the Epicurean philosophers say”?/pw Yep. He was a fascinating guy./be say, ‘Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.’ There’s a lot of truth to that. How much of your life are you willing to be unhappy? How much of your life are you willing to give up? What is a happy life?” So this is also a cautionary tale. /pw

*****

Euphoria 

Los Angeles holds a special place in the history of death. Interesting way to set up this section, considering we don’t connect the dots until about L.A.’s specialness until later./pw A placeholder for now—just to promise that we’ll return to this./be Until relatively recently, Europeans “were as familiar with the dead as they were familiarized with the idea of their own death,” writes the French historian Philippe Ariès. They painted decomposing cadavers in manuscripts and carved them on church walls. Starting in the high Middle Ages, though, Ariès argues, Western attitudes began to change: “Death, so omnipresent in the past that it was familiar, would be effaced…would become shameful and forbidden.” By the middle of the 20th century, the British anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer was writing about “the pornography of death,” observing that “natural processes of corruption and decay have become disgusting”—just as sex had been rendered obscene by the Victorians. The dead had become an affront to the living.11

Neither Gorer nor Ariès knew quite what to make of the United States, which in many ways followed the general Western trend, banishing decay from polite conversation. At the same time, Americans ritualize death in a manner extraordinary to Europeans. Until a few years ago, even a basic working-class American funeral—from the open-casket display of the chemically preserved and cosmetically improved decedent to the long, slow procession of cars to the graveside—matched a level of pomp reserved across the Atlantic only for the most celebrated dead.

Southern California, home to the theme-park necropolis Forest Lawn, came to represent the apotheosis of America’s disturbingly “euphoric” approach to mortality, to borrow Ariès’s term. Angelenos not only failed to tastefully ignore death, they did everything they could to render it sunny, cheerful, lifelike. To Evelyn Waugh, who parodied Forest Lawn in his 1948 novel The Loved One, such vulgarity was symptomatic of the “endless infancy” of West Coast culture. To the journalist Jessica Mitford, the “American way of death” was a crude product of capitalist manipulation: We had elaborate funerals because the funeral industry was able to charge us more for them; Forest Lawn’s kitsch was just a sophisticated strategy for lubricating the checkbooks of the grieved. All so interesting—Forest Lawn has no doubt been profiled, excuse me, to death and could have had its own section here, but I’m glad it doesn’t. Any conversations about that?/pw Probably because it has been covered so much, and because so many celebrities are buried there, the management was extremely wary of press. They gave me a very stiff (forgive me) VP to interview, otherwise politely blocked access. I had enough strong material from elsewhere that it didn’t seem worth chasing them./be

No aspect of American funereal ritual has been more consistently alarming to foreign observers than embalming, Wow, I did not know that. Did this piece lead you to make any decisions about your own future “arrangements”?/pw No, but it did give me a lot more reasons to want to be cremated./be Oh right, you said that. See? Obsessed./pw which is practiced nowhere else in the world with the near universality that it achieved in North America. Mitford characterized embalming as expensive quackery, a recently revived pagan practice without roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition. The funeral industry’s insistence on its hygienic necessity, she argued, lacked any scientific or medical foundation. Waugh was better humored about the practice, if no less horrified at the notion of being, as he put it, “pickled in formaldehyde and painted like a whore, / Shrimp-pink incorruptible, not lost or gone before.” Clearly you read broadly on the subject. Will you name a few of the relevant books that kept you company throughout the research? Also, whom, if anyone, did you read, in terms of lyricism and/or tone, in order to prepare for the writing? Or do you usually go in cold?/pw Philippe Ariès’ Western Attitudes Towards Death and The Hour of Our Death particularly shaped my thinking while I was writing the piece. Jim Crace’s novel, Being Dead, which I read several years ago, was certainly an influence as well. I don’t think there was any one text or writer who influenced me in terms of tone or voice./be

To Kenneth Schenk, however, embalming is an art, perhaps soon to be lost. Schenk could not be more different from Mr. Joyboy, Waugh’s priggish, pink-eyed chief embalmer. “Through the whole sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll era I was known as the rebel embalmer,” he says with more than a hint of pride. Schenk is a trade embalmer, which means he freelances for the few remaining independent mortuaries. He is 70, and his hair stops well short of his collar, but back before it turned its current lustrous white, he wore it to the middle of his back. He came to L.A. from Florida in 1960 and did his apprenticeship with the legendary Jack Lowry, who famously embalmed Jean Harlow and who, Schenk says, “mixed his own fluids at Pierce Bros. down in the basement.”

In those days L.A. still had a “Mortuary Row”—a string of grand funeral homes with high-ceilinged lobbies and marble staircases stretching along Washington Boulevard. Fantastic bit of local history to include—we back up and see/experience the city./pw Yeah, this was an unexpected delight, mortuary-LA’s lost glory…/be Sitting in a booth at the Pantry downtown, Schenk waxes nostalgic about that now invisible geography, long since sliced in half by the Harbor Freeway and transformed into a jumble of repair shops and warehouses. Spearing a bite of coleslaw with Russian dressing, he tells me exactly what he will do to you if you fall into his able, practiced hands. Curious about why you give us the restaurant scene and have him explain himself over coleslaw. There were a few ways you might’ve rendered this, in other words: Having him walk us through an actual embalmment or talk about his work from some more relevant place. Did you intend contrast or …?/pw Yeah, for contrast. Coleslaw has never seemed so unappetizing./be

You will be there waiting for him when he arrives in the mortuary’s prep room.12 He will put on a paper gown and latex gloves. He will wash you and position your limbs. He’ll insert small, nubbed plastic disks beneath your eyelids to make sure that they stay shut. He will suture your lips closed, and if they don’t stay shut, he will Superglue them.

When he’s ready, Schenk will select his fluids, taking into account the time that has passed since your death (the longer it has been, the stronger the chemicals), the cause of your death (some medications interact poorly with embalming fluid), and the color of your skin (“Formaldehyde,” he says, “will turn a white person a nice shade of green”). He will choose a spot for his incision, usually the carotid or femoral artery. He will lift the artery with a steel hook and insert a plastic injection tube attached to an embalming machine. Another tube will go into the corresponding vein. Schenk will turn on the machine, adjusting for pressure and flow, and it will pump preservative fluid in through your arteries, pushing your blood out through your veins, into the sink, and down the drain.

The process lasts about an hour, depending on your size and the condition of your circulatory system.13 Then Schenk will poke a pointed, hollow instrument called a trocar through your abdominal wall. It will act as a sort of siphon, sucking gases and liquids from your intestines, stomach, bladder, heart, and lungs. “It’s not for the weak of heart,” Schenk says. Once you’ve been sufficiently cleaned out, he will inject more embalming fluid directly into your organs.

If you’ve been autopsied, all this will take a little longer and cost a little more. “Basically the arterial system is gone,” Schenk says, so he will have to inject fluid directly into each of your limbs and both sides of your brain. Then he will sew you up “nice and tight.” All that’s left is makeup, hairstyling, perhaps a touch of the “restorative arts” if disease or injuries have damaged your features. An eyelid, a nose, even an ear can be sculpted out of beeswax. Beeswax. Wow. Who knew./pw

Not long ago Schenk got a call from a mortuary offering him a job everyone else had refused. “It was a gal that had been murdered and put in the trunk of a car and not found for 12 days, and it was the heat of the summer.” Schenk demurred, but the funeral director persisted. “Miracles can be done,” Schenk says. “We preserved this gal and made her viewable. The family was almost ecstatic.”

Once, he says, “during the hippie era,” he embalmed a fallen rock climber whose long hair, matted with blood, had been shaved and stuffed into a bag. Schenk washed out the blood and painstakingly laid the hair out to dry. One at a time, he matched the strands by length, texture, and curl and, as patient as his silent client, reconstructed the climber’s coiffure. “It takes a guy that has an artist’s eye,” says Schenk, beaming. “Not everyone can do it.” Could you talk a little bit about why you chose to end this section this way, or to go into detail about Schenk’s skills? It seems we’re moving toward various states of accompaniment for the dead but perhaps that’s wishful thinking./pw I was intrigued by these men’s pride in their work, in the existence of these crafts that most of us would rather not think about, but that people pour their whole lives into. Also that men like Schenk are able to find an opportunity for artistry, something to boast of over coleslaw, in situations that most of us would merely find tragic./be

*****

1,550 Degrees 

Maybe you’re not fond of worms or maybe you’re claustrophobic. Perhaps you’ve read Jim Crace’s novel Being Dead, which lovingly chronicles the decomposition of a murdered couple, or the chapter in Mary Roach’s Stiff about the stages of decay, from elementary autolysis to full-blown putrefaction (when you become “soup”). Maybe your imagination suffices to make you prefer quick, purifying flame. Or perhaps you’d just rather be portable: No one stays put for long these days, and urns pack more easily than caskets. Maybe you’re Buddhist and believe the flames will help you cast aside the now useless shell of this life so that you can move unencumbered to the next. Or perhaps the thought of being scattered to the breeze feels more like freedom than any other image of eternal rest you can conjure.

Whatever your reasons, you wouldn’t be alone. According to a funeral industry data tracker, inaptly named Vital Statistic Analyses, more than half of Californians were cremated in 2009. Wow that’s high. Was curious about whether Californians cremate more than any other state or whether such a detail would’ve even been meaningful considering the population./pw I don’t remember if California was significantly higher, but everywhere in the US, increased cremation rates are the trend./be In Greater Los Angeles cremations have gone up 40 percent over the past five years. The trend is recent: In 1970, fewer than 5 percent of Americans met that final flame.14 Philippe Ariès calls incineration “a manifestation of enlightenment, of modernity” and suggests that, as “the most radical means of getting rid of the body and of forgetting it, of nullifying it,” cremation is the method best suited to the abstraction and uprootedness of modern life.

It is also a lot cheaper. A bare-bones cremation at downtown’s Armstrong Family Malloy-Mitten mortuary will set your survivors back $665, less than a third of the cost of the lowest-end burial plot at Forest Lawn (not counting casket, vault, memorial plaque, embalming fees, burial charges, and carnation boutonnieres). If you’re not afraid of fire and you choose to go that way—or someone chooses for you—your mortuary will likely dispatch you to a crematorium. Few mortuaries cremate their own, and few crematoriums deal directly with consumers. An employee of a transport service like Angelo Patrick’s will drop you off at the crematory door, fill out the requisite paperwork, and depart confident that you will be much easier to carry when he returns to pick you up. You use humor here and there, and it works. Mary Roach has a similar skill. How much did you play with humor in this piece, considering the subject matter, and where did you dial it in? Can you give us some examples of lines/ideas you ultimately cut for the sake of message/tone?/pw I don’t remember specifics, but I did cut a few lines. I knew the piece had to be funny if it was going to work, but also that it would require a very light touch, that anything too heavy would destroy it./be Specifically, you will fit in a five-by-seven-by-ten-inch box, and you will weigh between three and ten pounds. “I call that radical weight reduction,” says Aida Bobadilla, who manages Odd Fellows Cemetery in Boyle Heights, the same Odd Fellows that David Smith at the coroner’s office contracts with for the fiery disposal of the morbidly obese. And was there any discussion on lines like this one, from Bobadilla? It seems somehow crass for a person who specializes in caring for the remains of the morbidly obese to make fun of them. Or am I misreading?/pw I suspect that few of her clients have complained./be Good point./pw

The process is simple. “It’s very much like you’re cooking,” Bobadilla says. A pale, slender woman with dark eyes and a sudden, flashing laugh, she is 63 but easily could pass for 50. Sitting on the couch in the lobby, she looks me up and down. “You, three hours,” she says. “Me, three hours.” This quote helps me understand something about how people like her see the world. Perspective. /pw Heavier folks take longer. Lieutenant Smith’s 710-pounder took six hours. They are also more complicated to burn. Fat produces a great deal of heat,15 which means that someone has to be there standing by to regulate the chamber’s temperature.

State law requires that you be combusted in a container, which might be a cardboard box or a hand-buffed walnut casket with mattress springs and quilted velvet lining. Once it has burned away, you will, too. “We direct the flame toward the torso,” Bobadilla says, “and the flames feather out to the extremities.” If for any reason you roll to one side or otherwise attempt to flee the flames, a technician may open the door to the retort, as the cremation chamber is called, and nudge you into place with a pole. The retort will rise to 1,550 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to turn most of you to vapor. “The skin melts, the skin bubbles, and then it’s gone.”

And the smell? I ask Bobadilla if her neighbors complain about the scent of singed hair and roasting meat. Back to primitive ideas. Animal. Calculated wording choice?/pw Sure. We are meat./be She assures me that the temperature is too high for anyone to notice anything. At most, “you may smell like paper burning,” she says, and that’s probably just the casket going up. Here’s a question: Instead of relying on others to describe the smell, why not observe (if possible) a cremation and describe for yourself? Not possible?/pw I tried. They don’t even let the families watch./be Cremation chambers are designed to capture any unseemly emissions. The only way to tell that someone’s cooking, she says, is to search the sky above the smokestacks for wavy lines of heat.

When all of you has burned that can be burned, the technician will turn off the gas and rake out what little is left: charred and brittle fragments of bone—sometimes a femur or a piece of skull will be recognizable. He or she will collect these shards of you in a metal pan, allow them to cool, then pass a magnet over them to catch any metal intermingled with you: eyeglass frames, fillings, buttons, zippers, the cotter pins, springs, and hinges from your casket.16 Bobadilla once found a gold fingernail.

You are at this point officially cremains. In a large industrial blender you will be processed into powder. Your relatives will not want to find chunks. You will then be poured into a gusseted plastic pouch, which will be sealed and placed inside a “temporary plastic urn”—i.e., a box—wrapped in brown paper, and meticulously labeled inside and out. The mortuary will send someone to get you, and you, more portable than ever, will have a lot of options.

You can stay in your plastic urn and go straight to the back of the closet. You can express your personality until the end of time in an urn shaped like a golf bag, or an angel, or a duck. You can doze Back to the opening image of the dead napping forever without a snore. /pw in a locket on a loved one’s neck. You can rest eternally in the Buddhist Columbarium atop the highest peak in Rose Hills Cemetery, commanding a view (if only you still had eyes!) of the entire L.A. basin, from Catalina to Mount Baldy and beyond. You can be scattered at sea to commune with the fish. You can be packed in fireworks and rocketed into the heavens. But you cannot be scattered on the infield at Dodger Stadium, or the outfield, or anywhere in Disneyland at all—do not even ask. Ha. What led you to the no-nos?/pw I had been asking funeral directors about unusual requests. These ones, it turned out, were pretty common. I have a vague recollection of a story of someone running out into the outfield in Dodger’s stadium, emptying an urn and dashing back to the stands./be

Odd Fellows is also a cemetery, so Bobadilla walks me outside to show me the Civil War graves It’s weird to think about Civil War graves in LA or even in California./pw We do have history here, we just, you know, bury it./be and tell me about the ghosts—not just the ones that she sometimes spots flitting around the office but the one she’s only heard about: the Phantom Lowrider. People arriving for funerals have told her they’ve seen it in their rearview mirrors. Some say it’s white, others black. No one can describe the driver’s face. When they turn to look, Bobadilla says, “there’s nothing there.”

I walk around and don’t see any ghosts. There’s a funeral going on to my right, a family gathered around a grave. They’ve hired mariachis. Right now they’re singing “Amor Eterno,” and the tune is so perfectly sad that the air above the graveyard seems to expand a little. I circle past the mourners and back to the gates until I see it—a low chimney of beige brick just behind the lobby where Bobadilla and I had been sitting. She was right. There is no smoke, but the palm trees and the eucalyptus on the far side of the smokestack are shivering and slipping, as if the sky itself has lost all confidence and allowed the atmosphere to sag. Plenty of sobering notes/moments in this piece but to the great credit of your restrained and almost (appropriately) clinical tone, this is the first time I feel a little bit sad./pw Good. I don’t mean that cruelly, only that that was the idea, that the sadness that hovers over this story should be allowed to leak through in places. Like this one./be

*****

The Moment You’ve Been Waiting For 

Then there are the holes. If you feel sometimes that the surface streets are just that, surface, that the concrete and asphalt crust of the city is hiding something big beneath our feet, you are right. In 2003, construction workers digging a drainage canal for the Playa Vista condo complex unearthed the bones of 396 Gabrieliño-Tongva Indians at the edge of the Ballona wetlands. The site is now a soccer field. Two years later on the other side of town, crews working on the Eastside extension of the Metro Gold Line found the remains of 174 people, most of them Chinese laborers, just south of Evergreen Cemetery. Some of the graves dated to the 1880s. At that time, and for decades to come, Chinese could not be buried alongside white Angelenos and were consigned to a potter’s field outside the cemetery grounds. They have since been moved into the cemetery proper and rest on the other side of a low chain-link fence from the current potter’s field. This information serves the idea that death is happening, has happened, all around us. In class we often talk about theme, and the thru-lines of theme. This information beautifully serves theme. /pw

If no one else will, you can count on the county to put you in a hole. Once officials have given up finding someone to take you off their hands, you will be cremated, says Estella Inouye of the county’s Decedent Affairs Division. You will be stored for three years and then buried, along with everyone else who died that year, in a mass grave behind the county crematorium. This December, Inouye expects to inter the unclaimed remnants of at least 1,700 people who died in 2007. It will be crowded down there, but everyone will have at least a little privacy: The ashes stay in their urns. “I don’t have the staff to be scattering,” Inouye says.

If you are lucky, you will be neither so poor nor so alone in death that you will end up in the county’s care, which means that you might find a plot on the other side of the fence at Evergreen, beneath the brown grass with the dead elite of yesteryear: the Lankershims and the Van Nuyses, the Rimpaus, Hollenbecks, and Breeds. It is peaceful there. Birds glide from tree to tree. Families sit in the shade on folding chairs, sharing a meal six feet above someone dear. Traffic is a distant oceanic hum. Lovely, birds to hum. You’ve kept most of your sentences simple, modest. How would you describe your voice? How would you hope others would classify/describe it?/pw I would have a very hard time describing it. It’s a bit like trying to describe your own face. A writer friend once referred to the “muscular lyricism” of my prose. Which, I think, was nice of him./be

Cemeteries are quieter and most of them are greener than the cities of the living that surround them, but these cities of the dead are not so different otherwise. They are, for instance, just as segregated. At Evergreen you’ll find an outlying Armenian neighborhood, sprawling Mexican sections (someone has spelled out the words “te amo” in small stones at the foot of a new grave), an inner circle of shiny headstones engraved in Japanese, and an early stratum of dead whites with streets named after them.

Evergreen is unusual in that it never banned the burial of African Americans. The same cannot be said of the original Forest Lawn in Glendale, where the giant wrought-iron gates for decades refused entrance to blacks, Jews, and Chinese—even after they had been reduced to permanent passivity. Today all paying guests are welcome. At Forest Lawn, though, the apparent democracy imposed by the lack of headstones—everyone gets the same bronze marker flush with the grass, which makes mowing that much easier—hides a rigid real estate hierarchy that reflects L.A.’s own, from lumpen, lowland subdivisions to gated hilltop mansions. Anyone can stroll through the Courts of Remembrance or the Wee Kirk o’ the Heather (satirized by Waugh as the “Wee Kirk o’Auld Lang Syne”) or meditate beneath the stained-glass replica of Da Vinci’sThe Last Supper, but if you want to visit the elect who rest in the Garden of Honor,17 a sign on the locked gate says you will need a “golden key of memory, given to each [plot] owner at time of purchase.” Jim Wilke, park vice president of Glendale Forest Lawn, will not tell me how much such a plot might cost, except that it reaches “into the six figures.” Ugh. What reporting challenges did you face with this piece? What did you hope to do or learn that you were unable to do/learn?/pw There is a considerable code of silence among people who work with the dead. Since Jessica Mitford, they have rarely received any good press, and they pretty universally (and correctly, I suspect) figure that their success relies on their silence, i.e. that people don’t want to know what they do, that we’d rather just have them make grandma disappear in some dignified manner. This mainly meant that I had to talk to three or four people before I could find one who was willing to speak openly with me, or even to return my calls. And it meant that I was able to do a lot less than I wanted to. I wanted to witness a cremation, an embalming, a make-up artist at work on a cadaver. (State law forbids the presence of unlicensed personnel in mortuary prep rooms.) I wanted to ride along with the coroner’s inspectors, but post-CSI the coroner is less open to that sort of thing, and stopped answering calls when I started to press./be

It was not Forest Lawn’s ill-concealed class structure that Waugh and Mitford found so distasteful but the cemetery’s brash modernity and autocratic cheer.18 Forest Lawn was designed to be “as unlike other cemeteries as sunshine is unlike darkness,” declared founder Hubert Eaton (“The Builder”) in his “Builder’s Creed,” which begins with his assertion that “I believe in a happy eternal life” and goes on to banish every symbol of judgment or even grief from its architecture.

The mantle of necrological innovation, however, has been passed. When Tyler Cassity bought Hollywood Forever cemetery in 1998, one of the goals, says longtime friend and executive vice president Jay Boileau, “was to revolutionize memorialization.” Technology, Boileau and Cassity believed, could transform funeral practices that hadn’t changed significantly in millennia. Ultimately they hoped to do away with the material side of death, preserving just a shred of DNA and a digitally archived memorial to the departed: uploaded interviews, documents, photos, music. “We pretty quickly realized that rituals have meaning to people,” says the 40-year-old Boileau, who with his shaggy hair, jeans, and untucked shirt looks more like a graphic designer than a cemetery executive. “People want to come to the cemetery, they want a headstone, they want to have a funeral.”

Boileau now keeps busy curating Hollywood Forever’s cultural programs, bringing concerts and screenings to the mausoleum lawns, letting the living party where the esteemed dead—Cecil B. De Mille, Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, Dee Dee Ramone—sleep. His ambitions, though, have not shrunk. When I ask what he wants done with his own remains, Boileau hesitates, then answers that he has hoped for a while to establish an ossuary at Hollywood Forever. “I’ve offered my skull to adorn the door,” he says. “Why not, right?”

Cassity, in the meantime, has been pushing innovation in a different direction, toward “green burial”—no embalming, no casket, no headstone, native grasses instead of fertilized fields of sod. In 2004, he bought Fernwood Cemetery in Marin County as a pastoral, live-oak-and-eucalyptus yin to Hollywood Forever’s glamorous urban yang. The trend is spreading. Joshua Tree Memorial Park, the only cemetery offering green burial in Southern California, boasts hand-dug graves. So far it has only done two green burials—one in a wicker coffin, the other in a shroud.

Chances are that you will spend eternity in something more substantial, a repository somewhere between a $195 fiberboard #1650 Alternative Container and the $25,000 polished bronze Promethean.19 Chances are also good that your burial will be more corporate and industrial than breezily bucolic. Dave Worker takes me through the routine at Whittier’s Rose Hills Memorial Park and Mortuary, the largest cemetery in North America and possibly the world, where he is the park superintendent. “We average 30 a day, six days a week,” Worker says. Much of his job is logistical: dispatching crews and plotting traffic, making sure that processions do not collide, that tractors don’t block the lanes for hearses. Wearing black jeans and a striped shirt, his gray hair slicked neatly back, Worker, who is 46, looks more casual-Friday than Quasimodo-Gothic. He sends his grave diggers to Dale Carnegie seminars to sharpen their communication skills. Wow./pw Yep./be

Two days before your funeral one of Worker’s workers will locate your plot and paint a perfect 40-by-96-inch rectangle around your hole-to-be. Another will come by later with a sod-peeling machine and roll the rectangle of grass into three tidy cylinders. Next comes the dig team. No unnecessary back pain here: Worker’s crew will use a backhoe to scoop out six and a half feet of earth. It won’t take more than 20 minutes. On the day of the event a setup crew will install a “vault-lowering device,” into which they will place the bottom half of your vault.20 They will then cloak the border of the hole with artificial turf, unfold a few chairs, and erect a canopy to shelter your guests from sun or rain. Did you observe burials here?/pw I observed several pre- and post- stages, but I didn’t want to disturb anyone’s actual funeral (in the best of circumstances, a stranger with a notepad makes people nervous), so except at a considerable distance, I didn’t impose myself during an actual burial./be

Now it’s your cue, the moment you’ve been waiting for. You make your entrance. Your pallbearers roll your casket from the hearse and shoulder you up and over to the grave. They set you down in the vault so that your casket creates “a sort of visual focal piece” for the ceremony, as Worker puts it. Somebody says something. Somebody cries. Probably they pray. You can’t hear anything. Your lid is closed, and you’re dead. Back to the opening’s repetition./pw Somebody turns a crank and lowers you slowly into the ground. Somebody removes the straps and the lowering device. The show is over. Your mourners embrace. They exchange tissues and comforting words. They leave you there in your box at the bottom of your hole. The staccato delivery here does two things: moves us almost breathlessly through the process and structurally suggests simple finality. You’ve got some lovely varying language in here, from the collision of “Somebody cries. Probably they pray.” To “in your box at the bottom of your hole”—an image we all should probably think about in those moments when we’re feeling petty or greedy or etc./pw I wanted these short, quick sentences to build momentum, to give a sense that we are racing towards something (the end), and also to echo the sentences in the lede, to let that structural symmetry act as another cue that we’re coming to the end./be

Don’t despair. Worker’s crew has not forgotten you. With a special dolly they lower the lid of the vault over your casket. They seal you in with tape. The backhoe returns. Somebody shovels the dirt on top of you while someone else tamps it down around the edges of the vault. They roll out the sod. They water it. They collect the flowers, the canopy, the chairs. They work steadily. They have other graves to dig and other graves to fill. They leave you there. You’re done. I love this two-word kicker. What others did you consider?/pw That was it. It came out on a first draft and was clearly the one./be

Ben Ehrenreich is a contributing writer for Los Angeles magazine and author of the novels Ether and The Suitors, which Booklist described as a “richly imagined novel loosely based on Homer’s Odyssey and inspirited by a dazzling display of verbal gifts.” This past spring “The End.” won the National Magazine Award for feature writing.

Annotation Tuesday!, the index:

Index: Annotation Tuesday!

Sat, 12 Nov 2011 13:23:00 -0500

#1: “A Brevard Woman Disappeared, but Never Left Home,” by Michael Kruse, St. Pete Times
#2: “The Falling Man,” by Tom Junod, GQ
#3: “The Wreck of the Lady Mary,” by Amy Ellis Nutt, Newark Star-Ledger
#4: “Almost Human,” by Mary Roach, National Geographic
#5: “Mrs. Kelly’s Monster,” by Jon Franklin, Baltimore Evening Sun
#6: “The End.” by Ben Ehrenreich, Los Angeles magazine
#7: “The Comedian’s Comedian’s Comedian,” by Amy Wallace, GQ

A thing I love (thanks, Jimmy Chen and htmlgiant.com)

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 21:08:37 -0400

A thing I love (thanks, Jimmy Chen and htmlgiant.com)

Photo

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 13:20:50 -0400