Still Alive
I want my MTV
I am always early to everything. When I was younger, it was a neurotic impulse to show up to any event a half-hour early; now I usually arrive a more sedate five minutes before show time. When I caught the cab from 94th down to Times Square last Friday morning I overestimated the time it would take the refugee from Alpha Centuri behind the wheel to screech and power-slide fifty blocks. I ended up in front of the Viacom building twenty-five minutes before my press escort was due to pick me up, twenty minutes before I was supposed to hook up with my photographer.
So I went for coffee. Whenever I’m in Times Square, I always have to resist the urge to crane my neck upwards to all the screens surrounding me – I have to fight to not look like a tourist. I found the first Starbucks and ordered something called a Chai latte that tasted vaguely sweet and then walked around for a while, earphones blaring David Bowie, soaking up the bustle and the steam.
The story was ‘inside MTV.’ The climax of which, hours later, I got to stand on the little piece of tape marking the blind spot for the swinging cameras of Total Request Live, surrounded by shrieking little kids. After almost being accidentally elbowed in the head by Elijah Wood and watching the MTV staff making cement for Shakira to make hand-prints in for pop posterity, went to visit my NYC editor down the street. We ended up having drinks at the Algonquin.
Afterwards, Ian and I did a sort of NYC-in-ten-blocks tour: We had the famous thin pizza, saw the neighborhood political march, passed by a filming of ‘Law and Order,’ swung by the riverfront, and then back to the train station, where I caught the 8:50 back down to D.C. I spent the train-ride writing; spent the cab ride writing; booted up the laptop and got to work when I finally got home in the absurdly early hours. Fifteen hours later the story was finished, and I crashed asleep for a few minutes on Ben’s couch after uploading it to my NYC editor.
Happy Monday, Motherfucker
Call them Big Shot Publicity: the kind of New York firm with a roster of the movers and shakers, players and groundbreakers. Close your eyes and you can imagine their offices, stark wood and gleaming chrome fifty floors up, and assistants with mouthpieces scrambling like ants in Armani. They represent your cover-boy or –girl for whatever issue of the magazine you’re working on at the moment, and they’re late in getting you the email interview they promised a few weeks ago.
Monday morning and you’re in absolutely no mood. You want to be in bed. You want to be in bed with someone else, but your ‘someone else’s seem to be in New York, or Chicago, or in relationships, so you’re stuck holding the pillow. You’ve had a Red Bull and a cup of strong black tea so far, and that’s not enough. Back in the day, all of three years ago, you used to bounce back from the weekend’s chemical stimulation in no time; now you feel empty, hollowed-out. You dial the assistant-to-the-publicist at Big Shot. No answer. You try the main number.
“Hi,” you say, pile-driving the cheer into your voice, “is [publicist] there?”
“What’s this about?” Whatever assistant-to-the-assistant picking up says.
You mention the interview.
“I’m going to transfer you to her assistant,” the assistant-to-the-assistant says.
“I just tried her assistant. She’s not in.” Tone like: do not fuck with me on this.
The assistant-to-the-assistant transfers you anyway, and – Holy Smokes, Batman! – the assistant actually picks up this time. “Hello, this is…”
“Hey, it’s Nick. Any luck on the interview?”
Pause.
“Well, unfortunately there’s been a bit of an incident with the talent…”
As in, the talent just crashed their brand-new Diablo into a bridge abutment. Or got arrested in Oklahoma for cocaine possession. Your Rock Star or Movie God in major-league legal trouble, it’s as American as apple pie or the lone gunman on the roof. But it doesn’t solve my problem. I probably already know what the ‘incident’ in question was, given my near-religious reading of Salon, Gawker, and every other site that uses the Web, that ultimate telecommunications marvel of the modern world, to instantly broadcast photos of supermodels shoveling Bolivian marching powder up their perkily enhanced noses.
Flipping back in time-space to NYC last week, four hours off the train and locked down finally in my seedy hotel on the Upper West Side, a girl I know curled up with me, and for some reason I find myself talking about how much this actress made last year versus that actress, and how much of a gross percentage of box office gross another star demands per picture.
She turns head so her chin is resting on my sternum, cocks an eyebrow while still keeping her eyes shut, and says, “Do you spend all day on the Internet?”
Pause.
“Um, sometimes.”
Jack
Jimmy Bedford is master distiller for Jack Daniels. With his southern-fried accent and the cell-phone clipped to his expensive slacks, he could just as easily be any other Tennessee ol’ boy done good – Colonel Sanders, if he shaved the beard and went into alcohol instead of chicken. “You hang around a place long enough, eventually they think up something for you to do,” he says when someone asks him how he got into the job.
He was at the Press Club last night, before Bradley went and showed me his photos from New Orleans. Bedford had his assistants bring out three different kinds of Jack, poured each of us three glasses, and had us absorb the quote-end-quote “vanilla and caramel favors.” To someone who almost never drinks hard liquor, save for the occasional screwdriver or rum-and-coke, it pretty much tasted like burning. But he was nice enough to sign over an unopened bottle to me – a trophy that could go up next to the plastic severed foot signed by Chuck Palahniuk – and afterwards Sylvia wanted to watch the end of the Yankees game, so we trotted over to the fratboy Disneyland of the ESPN bar to watch. Then came home, and crashed out.
I am always early to everything. When I was younger, it was a neurotic impulse to show up to any event a half-hour early; now I usually arrive a more sedate five minutes before show time. When I caught the cab from 94th down to Times Square last Friday morning I overestimated the time it would take the refugee from Alpha Centuri behind the wheel to screech and power-slide fifty blocks. I ended up in front of the Viacom building twenty-five minutes before my press escort was due to pick me up, twenty minutes before I was supposed to hook up with my photographer.
So I went for coffee. Whenever I’m in Times Square, I always have to resist the urge to crane my neck upwards to all the screens surrounding me – I have to fight to not look like a tourist. I found the first Starbucks and ordered something called a Chai latte that tasted vaguely sweet and then walked around for a while, earphones blaring David Bowie, soaking up the bustle and the steam.
The story was ‘inside MTV.’ The climax of which, hours later, I got to stand on the little piece of tape marking the blind spot for the swinging cameras of Total Request Live, surrounded by shrieking little kids. After almost being accidentally elbowed in the head by Elijah Wood and watching the MTV staff making cement for Shakira to make hand-prints in for pop posterity, went to visit my NYC editor down the street. We ended up having drinks at the Algonquin.
Afterwards, Ian and I did a sort of NYC-in-ten-blocks tour: We had the famous thin pizza, saw the neighborhood political march, passed by a filming of ‘Law and Order,’ swung by the riverfront, and then back to the train station, where I caught the 8:50 back down to D.C. I spent the train-ride writing; spent the cab ride writing; booted up the laptop and got to work when I finally got home in the absurdly early hours. Fifteen hours later the story was finished, and I crashed asleep for a few minutes on Ben’s couch after uploading it to my NYC editor.
Happy Monday, Motherfucker
Call them Big Shot Publicity: the kind of New York firm with a roster of the movers and shakers, players and groundbreakers. Close your eyes and you can imagine their offices, stark wood and gleaming chrome fifty floors up, and assistants with mouthpieces scrambling like ants in Armani. They represent your cover-boy or –girl for whatever issue of the magazine you’re working on at the moment, and they’re late in getting you the email interview they promised a few weeks ago.
Monday morning and you’re in absolutely no mood. You want to be in bed. You want to be in bed with someone else, but your ‘someone else’s seem to be in New York, or Chicago, or in relationships, so you’re stuck holding the pillow. You’ve had a Red Bull and a cup of strong black tea so far, and that’s not enough. Back in the day, all of three years ago, you used to bounce back from the weekend’s chemical stimulation in no time; now you feel empty, hollowed-out. You dial the assistant-to-the-publicist at Big Shot. No answer. You try the main number.
“Hi,” you say, pile-driving the cheer into your voice, “is [publicist] there?”
“What’s this about?” Whatever assistant-to-the-assistant picking up says.
You mention the interview.
“I’m going to transfer you to her assistant,” the assistant-to-the-assistant says.
“I just tried her assistant. She’s not in.” Tone like: do not fuck with me on this.
The assistant-to-the-assistant transfers you anyway, and – Holy Smokes, Batman! – the assistant actually picks up this time. “Hello, this is…”
“Hey, it’s Nick. Any luck on the interview?”
Pause.
“Well, unfortunately there’s been a bit of an incident with the talent…”
As in, the talent just crashed their brand-new Diablo into a bridge abutment. Or got arrested in Oklahoma for cocaine possession. Your Rock Star or Movie God in major-league legal trouble, it’s as American as apple pie or the lone gunman on the roof. But it doesn’t solve my problem. I probably already know what the ‘incident’ in question was, given my near-religious reading of Salon, Gawker, and every other site that uses the Web, that ultimate telecommunications marvel of the modern world, to instantly broadcast photos of supermodels shoveling Bolivian marching powder up their perkily enhanced noses.
Flipping back in time-space to NYC last week, four hours off the train and locked down finally in my seedy hotel on the Upper West Side, a girl I know curled up with me, and for some reason I find myself talking about how much this actress made last year versus that actress, and how much of a gross percentage of box office gross another star demands per picture.
She turns head so her chin is resting on my sternum, cocks an eyebrow while still keeping her eyes shut, and says, “Do you spend all day on the Internet?”
Pause.
“Um, sometimes.”
Jack
Jimmy Bedford is master distiller for Jack Daniels. With his southern-fried accent and the cell-phone clipped to his expensive slacks, he could just as easily be any other Tennessee ol’ boy done good – Colonel Sanders, if he shaved the beard and went into alcohol instead of chicken. “You hang around a place long enough, eventually they think up something for you to do,” he says when someone asks him how he got into the job.
He was at the Press Club last night, before Bradley went and showed me his photos from New Orleans. Bedford had his assistants bring out three different kinds of Jack, poured each of us three glasses, and had us absorb the quote-end-quote “vanilla and caramel favors.” To someone who almost never drinks hard liquor, save for the occasional screwdriver or rum-and-coke, it pretty much tasted like burning. But he was nice enough to sign over an unopened bottle to me – a trophy that could go up next to the plastic severed foot signed by Chuck Palahniuk – and afterwards Sylvia wanted to watch the end of the Yankees game, so we trotted over to the fratboy Disneyland of the ESPN bar to watch. Then came home, and crashed out.
posted by NiK @ 2:55 PM
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