get them out of here!

In 1968, Andy Warhol famously predicted that “in the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes.” Here’s the problem: nobody is content with fifteen minutes anymore. Used to be, quasi-celebrities understood when their fifteen minutes of fame had elapsed. Tawny Kitaen rolled around on the hood of a Jaguar in 1985, and then she mercifully disappeared. And it’s not like Whistle Pops ever made a comeback. They had their moment.

I remember watching “Match Game” in the seventies, and though I didn’t have the razor-sharp pop-culture awareness I have now, even then I would see ‘celebrities’ and think “why are these people famous?” Oh, I get it…they’re famous because they’re celebrities.And they’re celebrities because they’re famous. And the dog chases its tail, and so on, and so on, and blah blah blah.

Now, I’m kinda old-school when it comes to language. Well, except for using ‘kinda‘ and ‘old-school’. I can’t help but have the nagging feeling that if one is to be called a ‘celebrity,’ then one should have done something worthy of being CELEBRATED!And even the definition of ‘celebrity’ has been watered down to where most reality ‘stars,’ to rework a Dorothy Parker quote, run “the gamut of talent from A to B.”

NBC even had a show called “I’m A Celebrity—Get Me Out Of Here!” I still remember the promo for the show this week began with the most promising tease I have ever heard: Ten celebrities are dropped in the jungle. Unfortunately, that phrase was not followed by and are left there to die. Now that would be ‘must-see TV.’ Renew it every year, and every year we would get rid of ten more barnacles on the hull of American culture.

Seriously, I’ve always had a problem with reality TV (and remember the days when ‘reality’ and ‘TV’ were two different things?). If you’re going to put people in dangerous situations, in theory to see if they can survive, then I say, let it play out. Don’t give us some deus ex video where we know that if someone gets their ass bitten by a poisonous tree lizard they’ll end up ok—let’s see if they can really survive.

Tell me ‘Survivor’ wouldn’t be more compelling if, after dividing the attention-mongers into teams, the camera crews and host simply packed up and left them on the island. A couple of years later, send the crew back in to see if that annoying investment banker or the plucky waitress have morphed into Brando at the end of “Apocalypse Now.” You want to deprive these people of the basics, take away the cameras–see if they can survive without attention. It would have all the wacky of “Lord of The Flies,”, but with commercials.

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apartment roulette

After living in Chicago for three years, and in Minneapolis for eight years before that, when I came back to Minneapolis I was kinda freaked to realize that I had turned into—a midwestern guy. Sweet Jesus at the State Fair! Grew up in SoCal, always loved New York, and apparently finding my true home simply required splitting the difference, geographically.

By the way, I loved Chicago. It had everything I liked about New York, but was cheaper and had nicer people. Granted, I could never find a decent deli that knew how to make egg salad like Murray’s, but Chicago has a heart and a soul that feels just about right. Besides, my two favorite spectator sports are baseball and politics, and there ain’t nothin’ like Chicago for sheer surrealism in both. Following the Cubs AND livin’ in the land of Daley—now that’s a veritable carnival of weird, and as a writer, it was like gold.

I was a bit put off by the notion of settling, once and for all, in Minneapolis. I don’t mind Minneapolis, in the way one doesn’t mind eating a casserole (sorry–‘hot dish’), or a comfortable pair of Dockers—they serve a purpose, they won’t annoy anybody, but they won’t ever thrill you, like lobster bisque would, or…whatever the thrilling analogy to Dockers would be.

And yet, I’ve decided I’m good with ‘comfortable.’ Sure, as a writer, I wanted the diversity of New York, and in Minneapolis, a diverse neighborhood means a mix of Norwegians AND Swedes, (it’s not so much a melting pot as it is a nice layer cake). But trying to find a place to live in New York was like trying to find Middle Earth on a map.

The Girlfriend and I might be looking for another place here soon, and I am so glad I don’t have to look alone, because that process can kick your ass. When I last tried to move to New York, I realized I probably wasn’t gonna find a place I could afford in Manhattan, so I started looking at Craigslist for roommate listings near New York that might be affordable.  Now I hadn’tt spent much time in the Outer Boroughs (which always sounds like where you’d get exiled to in Soviet-era Russia), but I had seen a couple of Spike Lee films, so I figured I’ve got a handle on the area, and as far as knowing my way around Jersey, I have “Clerks” on DVD.

There are some phrases you see in more than a few roommate ads, and I guess it’s been a while since I’ve looked into shared housing, but some of them seem a little strange. I think my favorite is when the person posting asks for “no drama,” which puts me in a bit of a quandary as an actor. Does that mean I can’t rehearse at home, or just that I can’t actually mount a full production of “Death Of A Salesman” in the common area? And I’m a little put off if all the roommates in the place are described as mellow, or as the kids say, ‘chill’–I’d be worried I’d be walking onto the set of a Judd Apatow movie. Do I watch too many movies? Anyway, if a couple of the guys living there were a little less ‘chill,’ they probably wouldn’t have to look for a roommate. I also saw a variation of this (which I hope was a typo) that described two ‘chilled’ girls…

I was actually offended by one ad. Guy in his twenties, great place, great location, and right as a I was visualizing moving my suitcases in and learning the schedule of the J train, he writes “please be around my age, older people tend to be set in their ways, and that’s a drag to live around”…I was actually gonna send him a nasty email, but I remembered my tv shows were on, and I never miss my “CSI.”

There was also a listing which might be the best example of ‘TMI’ I’ve ever read. Spent a little time looking at the Philadelphia listings (hey, it’s only an hour and a half by train), and was really tempted by an apartment that was listed right in the heart of the city. Free internet. free laundry, five minute walk to the commuter train, and this:

A cat lives there already that will fight other cats. A former roommate once took heroin and passed out in the middle of the night with the oven on. For obvious reasons, she’s been replaced.

First, note that the cat WILL fight other cats. Not ‘might.’ It will–as if, that’s what they have it for. Secondly…the roommate. Couldn’t just say she’s moved out, no, we needed the pulp novel, Billie Holliday visual. Yeah, she was replaced, but it doesn’t say whether they replaced her with another junkie who just doesn’t attempt any baking. While you’re at it, you might want to replace the cat. Oddly enough, this ad didn’t say ‘no drama.’

On a lighter note, I’ll share my favorite typos. One place seemed charming, and I think they meant ‘large’ furnished apartment, but the headline clearly said the apartment was ‘MARGE FURNISHED.” I imagine moving in, and there’s Marge–because, well, nobody had the heart to ask her to leave.

And my favorite–an apartment that conveniently has a ‘laundrymoat.” I’m thinking this may not even be a typo, but some medieval-inspired building feature, designed to prevent tenants from other building from taking your stuff out of the dryer. And that really couldn’t be a typo–I mean the ‘o’ isn’t near the ‘m’ or the ‘a’ on the keyboard!  They must actually have a ‘laundrymoat‘! I never pursued it, though–they might have a laundrymoat, but unless they have a security drawbridge, I wouldn’t have felt safe. It was New York after all.

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too much information

I know too much. Not in the counter-espionage, “I’m afraid you know too much, Mr. Dane, so we will have to eliminate you” sense, but in the sense that I know too much random, pointless information. For example, I know that the plastic thingy at the end of a shoelace is called an aglet. How is this useful? Unless I were to land a job in the fast-paced shoelace manufacturing industry (“I need that shipment of aglets by tomorrow morning or heads are gonna roll!”), there is absolutely no reason for me to remember this. Yet there it is, sitting on a shelf inside my head, there for me to access whenever I need it. Which would be never. But when I need to remember, say, the phone number of someone I promised to call—no, those seven digits are lost in the murky, pot-addled crevices of my brain—hidden, no doubt by ‘aglet’ and six other tiny, meaningless facts.

I’ve been reading trivia books since I was eight years old, which means I’ve been annoying friends and strangers for about forty years. In that time, I’ve told people that the Utah state bird is the California seagull, pointed out that Lincoln Logs were invented by Frank Lloyd Wright’s son, and explained that Gerald Ford pardoned Robert E. Lee of treason. I know that Edison got a patent for a method of making concrete furniture, I know that Jethro Tull was a horticulturalist who invented the seed drill, and I know that White-Out was invented by the mother of one of the Monkees. I even know that Steven Stills auditioned to be IN the Monkees! It’s a sickness! Did you know a cricket’s ears are on its legs? Of course you didn’t—why would you need to?!

It would be different if I could turn this vast pile of scrap knowledge into something profitable. But it’s not like ‘smart guy’ is a job description. I don’t think you can be a professional Scrabble player. You might suggest I try out for Jeopardy, but the problem there is my personality. The first time Alex Trebek did one of his patronizing “no, sorry—we were looking for a Turkish naval battle—remember the category” comments, I would knock over my podium and kick his haughty Canuck ass.

So here’s my crackpot theory. Suppose, instead of using only ten percent of our brain’s capacity, there’s actually only a finite amount of storage on our cranial hard drives. I believe that the fact that I still remember my address from when I was in junior high and the name of the crazy waitress I had sex with in Omaha in 1987 means that I have two less places to store important things. How else to explain that, despite two years of college French, I can barely order a croissant, and yet I can tell you that the raised reflective markers on California freeways are called Bott’s Dots. Sure, I know that Al Capone’s business card said he was a used furniture dealer, but there’s apparently no room in my head for how to do basic plumbing, or even sew a button.

I understand that scientists are close to developing a drug that will allow you to erase certain memories. Well, I’ll be the first in line at Walgreen’s to fill my prescription. See, I think we’ve got artificial intelligence all wrong. Instead of trying to make machines think like people, we should be doing a little reverse engineering to make our brains more like computers. Specifically, we need a ‘delete’ key.

I’m not talking about some ‘Eternal Sunshine’/’Dollhouse’ total brain wipe, just the ability to selectively erase bits of information we don’t need anymore. At one time, it was important for me to know all the lyrics to “Billy, Don’t Be A Hero,” but now, not so much. With the brain delete key, you would be able to unclutter the space up there and make room for what you need now. It would be like defragging your head. That uncle tells you in way too much detail about his penile implant? Nod, smile, and then hit ‘delete’. Your best friend gets drunk and shares with you that he always thought your mom was hot? Delete! Delete! Delete!

I suppose knowing a bunch of random trivia isn’t the worst quirk a writer could have. Goethe could only write if he had a rotten apple in his desk, and Proust kept a pet swordfish. L. Frank Baum came up with the name ‘Oz’ when he was looking at a filing cabinet with —wait, I’m doing it again, aren’t I? Sorry.

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