I watched Lebowski today. Umpteenth time.
Seemed like a good idea after Trump tweeted that Meryl Streep was over-rated.
The Dude never disappoints.
Put my world today in proper perspective, he did.
Turns out, Trump was wrong!
A lifetime of wanting to believe our Presidential leadership has left me with shaky sea legs as our voyage with President Trump at the helm fast approaches. Sensing icebergs over the horizon, his doubters have developed a default of doubt for his tweets that cannot be a good thing for our future as a country.
The rug really pulled the Dude's room together.
Life lesson learned: when someone urinates on your rug, clean it up!
Trump is pissing all over us everyday. And why would he stop? Doing it has gotten him here, about to become 45th President of the United States of America?
#WarnWorld2017
#TrumpWorld2017
#TheDudeAbides
Monday, January 9, 2017
Saturday, January 7, 2017
January 7, 1989
Twenty-eight years ago today, also a Saturday, I was married at the Ingleside Inn near downtown Palm Springs.
It was a beautiful sunny day. It was my third and final wedding.
As a lifelong baseball fanatic, I put myself on the matrimonial bench for life when that marriage ended a dozen years later. Strike three and all, you know.
My memories of that day are bittersweet, as only seems appropriate for a third wedding.
Guests at that wedding included legendary movie director George Sidney and his wife Jane, the widow of Edward G. Robinson as well as Joe and Molly Youngerman and my best man Glenn Gumpel, all work friends. Also my business partners and their wives and various pals from the time.
Today, many of them are dead, with the rest of them flushed down life's swirling dervishes into the oblivion of my past.
When my third wife informed me she was moving to Savannah alone on July 31, 2000 my marrying days from the 20th Century came to an inglorious conclusion.
Seventeen years later, I am happy to report that no more marriages have invaded my space in the 21st Century!
With that resume, my observations on married vs single life would seem to offer value to those less experienced. If not, at least my notations in this journal may find someone else trying to figure out how we all fit together.
#WarnWorld2017
It was a beautiful sunny day. It was my third and final wedding.
As a lifelong baseball fanatic, I put myself on the matrimonial bench for life when that marriage ended a dozen years later. Strike three and all, you know.
My memories of that day are bittersweet, as only seems appropriate for a third wedding.
Guests at that wedding included legendary movie director George Sidney and his wife Jane, the widow of Edward G. Robinson as well as Joe and Molly Youngerman and my best man Glenn Gumpel, all work friends. Also my business partners and their wives and various pals from the time.
Today, many of them are dead, with the rest of them flushed down life's swirling dervishes into the oblivion of my past.
When my third wife informed me she was moving to Savannah alone on July 31, 2000 my marrying days from the 20th Century came to an inglorious conclusion.
Seventeen years later, I am happy to report that no more marriages have invaded my space in the 21st Century!
With that resume, my observations on married vs single life would seem to offer value to those less experienced. If not, at least my notations in this journal may find someone else trying to figure out how we all fit together.
#WarnWorld2017
Sunday, January 1, 2017
WarnWorld2017
January 1, 2017
The beat goes on...
NewYearsDay on Sunday seems wrong.
Even the fucking Rose Parade won't happen until tomorrow!
NFL Sunday bumps all in today's USA!
Trump has become de facto President.
Obama is packing up boxes of office supplies,
While taking actions worse than stealing the W's from WhiteHouse keyboards!
Let it go...seems like sound advice.
2017 marks 50 years since my high school graduation;
Reunion in August promises to be my last road trip,
from Sherman Oaks to Toledo and back?
Limited mobility rules my world so I will try to go;
It's by no means certain.
Writing this record of random thoughts on a mostly regular basis
Is my ambition for preparing to face my fellow 67 year old Toledo Woodward High School
Classmates unseen or communicated with since 1967.
My idea is to write in my voice at the reunion,
Like talking to fellow 2017 survivors.
What have I learned?
Number one, nobody gets out alive.
Jim Morrison tried to tell us but stubborn we are,
So death creeps near first then blusters and rants till
His sickle drips death on our shoes.
Also, that humor is our best defense from accepting #1
While waiting in God's waiting room.
Have you heard the one about the kid from Toledo who ended up in Hollywood?
It is a laugh riot!
The beat goes on...
NewYearsDay on Sunday seems wrong.
Even the fucking Rose Parade won't happen until tomorrow!
NFL Sunday bumps all in today's USA!
Trump has become de facto President.
Obama is packing up boxes of office supplies,
While taking actions worse than stealing the W's from WhiteHouse keyboards!
Let it go...seems like sound advice.
2017 marks 50 years since my high school graduation;
Reunion in August promises to be my last road trip,
from Sherman Oaks to Toledo and back?
Limited mobility rules my world so I will try to go;
It's by no means certain.
Writing this record of random thoughts on a mostly regular basis
Is my ambition for preparing to face my fellow 67 year old Toledo Woodward High School
Classmates unseen or communicated with since 1967.
My idea is to write in my voice at the reunion,
Like talking to fellow 2017 survivors.
What have I learned?
Number one, nobody gets out alive.
Jim Morrison tried to tell us but stubborn we are,
So death creeps near first then blusters and rants till
His sickle drips death on our shoes.
Also, that humor is our best defense from accepting #1
While waiting in God's waiting room.
Have you heard the one about the kid from Toledo who ended up in Hollywood?
It is a laugh riot!
Saturday, December 31, 2016
One last thing about 2016...
As we rapidly close in on that time where the calendar flips one year, my thoughts speed up kaleidoscope images from this milestone mess of months whose sausage assembly process yielded us new President Donald Trump.
The age of Obama is over for now, maybe forever.
In a flash of history, the Democratic Party has gone from arrogantly assuming the inevitability of President Hillary to reeling stunned from the bitter rejection of blue voters up and down the ballot.
Life lesson learned: it ain't over until it is over.
Thanks Yogi.
Onward and upward with the arts!
The age of Obama is over for now, maybe forever.
In a flash of history, the Democratic Party has gone from arrogantly assuming the inevitability of President Hillary to reeling stunned from the bitter rejection of blue voters up and down the ballot.
Life lesson learned: it ain't over until it is over.
Thanks Yogi.
Onward and upward with the arts!
Friday, December 30, 2016
TrumpTwitterToday: "I told you Putin was a smart guy!"
TrumpTwitterToday: "I told you Putin was a smart guy!"
As we bid a thankful adieu to 2016, 2017 is busting to roll out its unique take on life, history, death and all other manner of life forces.
Donald Trump used to be just a guy on TV. Now he runs the world.
How in the fuck did that happen?
There is an added measure of pain and bitterness in our annual assessment of 2016 as a prognostication for what is to come. As wretched as our 2016 In Memoriam list looks, Trump and Putin doubling down with each other using nuclear threats offers me the deja vu comfort of my Lake Erie beach boyhood living past the imminent threat of the Soviets nuking Toledo, Ohio.
Which is to say the ever shifting sands of the possibility of millions dying from nuclear warfare becomes "reality" far too soon.
What will be will be. Que sera sera.
As we bid a thankful adieu to 2016, 2017 is busting to roll out its unique take on life, history, death and all other manner of life forces.
Donald Trump used to be just a guy on TV. Now he runs the world.
How in the fuck did that happen?
There is an added measure of pain and bitterness in our annual assessment of 2016 as a prognostication for what is to come. As wretched as our 2016 In Memoriam list looks, Trump and Putin doubling down with each other using nuclear threats offers me the deja vu comfort of my Lake Erie beach boyhood living past the imminent threat of the Soviets nuking Toledo, Ohio.
Which is to say the ever shifting sands of the possibility of millions dying from nuclear warfare becomes "reality" far too soon.
What will be will be. Que sera sera.
RIP Debbie Reynolds
And now this.
Debbie missed Carrie too much so she checked out of this juke joint and left us to be reunited.
Dying of a broken heart is a thing the docs say on TV. Surely in this case it is the smoking gun.
The last year I worked on the Oscar telecast in 2008, I was set to begin the gig in the show's Century City production office the Monday following Thanksgiving. That Sunday night, I followed up a notice I read in the Daily News about Debbie Reynolds celebrating Christmas in a Burbank neighborhood. It was already dark when I located the site and walked past season's lights and decorations in a real middle class Norman Rockwell dream.
Debbie Reynolds got her big break in 1948 when she won Miss Burbank and this night she was there to remember. With a couple of hundred of her subjects encouraging her stories, she told us intimate highlights from her career, including the time she got what she wanted from some military brass by following him everywhere to make her case. Finally, she won the argument by joining the general to do their business in a two holer outhouse.
Not your typical talk show remembrance, nonetheless unsinkable.
I still smile thinking of Debbie and Carrie, and I always will.
Debbie missed Carrie too much so she checked out of this juke joint and left us to be reunited.
Dying of a broken heart is a thing the docs say on TV. Surely in this case it is the smoking gun.
The last year I worked on the Oscar telecast in 2008, I was set to begin the gig in the show's Century City production office the Monday following Thanksgiving. That Sunday night, I followed up a notice I read in the Daily News about Debbie Reynolds celebrating Christmas in a Burbank neighborhood. It was already dark when I located the site and walked past season's lights and decorations in a real middle class Norman Rockwell dream.
Debbie Reynolds got her big break in 1948 when she won Miss Burbank and this night she was there to remember. With a couple of hundred of her subjects encouraging her stories, she told us intimate highlights from her career, including the time she got what she wanted from some military brass by following him everywhere to make her case. Finally, she won the argument by joining the general to do their business in a two holer outhouse.
Not your typical talk show remembrance, nonetheless unsinkable.
I still smile thinking of Debbie and Carrie, and I always will.
Wednesday, December 28, 2016
RIP Carrie Fisher
I worked with Todd Fisher on a documentary during 2007 where we used his sister Carrie's home on Coldwater as the location for interviews.
Her house was famous for having been owned by the iconic movie designer Edith Head and it sat on a rise up the hill from her mother Debbie Reynolds's home as their three home, multi-structure compound created a secluded universe that existed somewhere between Walden and Woodstock. Carrie had an extended patio eclectically decorated mixing anything dramatic and visually interesting. It led to a vine covered hill with stone steps leading past her tiny but cozy writing workplace to a fenced in pool and poolside lounges. I remember walking up from her parking lot past her room full of exercise equipment including treadmills wondering if rich people bought stuff but failed to use it often just like real people.
Our interviews were mostly in various parts of Carrie Fisher's patio. It was another tough time for Todd as his wife was dying from cancer which claimed her a short time after our interview schedule finished.
One interview with a famous actress was done inside Debbie Reynolds home and I can recall soaking in what it must have felt like to be Hollywood royalty. Stuff that now rates as merely content in our Trumpian world of truthiness used to be history or at least private. That's part of what made Carrie Fisher special, her unflinching need to share her ideas, opinions, laughter with everyone lucky enough to be in her orbit, if even only for a little while.
Bye-bye Carrie...RIP
Her house was famous for having been owned by the iconic movie designer Edith Head and it sat on a rise up the hill from her mother Debbie Reynolds's home as their three home, multi-structure compound created a secluded universe that existed somewhere between Walden and Woodstock. Carrie had an extended patio eclectically decorated mixing anything dramatic and visually interesting. It led to a vine covered hill with stone steps leading past her tiny but cozy writing workplace to a fenced in pool and poolside lounges. I remember walking up from her parking lot past her room full of exercise equipment including treadmills wondering if rich people bought stuff but failed to use it often just like real people.
Our interviews were mostly in various parts of Carrie Fisher's patio. It was another tough time for Todd as his wife was dying from cancer which claimed her a short time after our interview schedule finished.
One interview with a famous actress was done inside Debbie Reynolds home and I can recall soaking in what it must have felt like to be Hollywood royalty. Stuff that now rates as merely content in our Trumpian world of truthiness used to be history or at least private. That's part of what made Carrie Fisher special, her unflinching need to share her ideas, opinions, laughter with everyone lucky enough to be in her orbit, if even only for a little while.
Bye-bye Carrie...RIP
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