This article in the Times tells the story of Tania Head. She's made 9/11 her life over the past six years. She makes speeches and advocates for 9/11 type stuff, based on her harrowing tale of survival on that day in September. Too bad it's all bullshit! Yay Tania Head. You're crazy and good at it.
Lawyering is the only career my father asked me not to enter. He said that he'd prefer I became a ditch digger. Now I'm very close to living up to his high hopes and a recent story about a "legal letter"* Bill Clinton's attorney sent to a restaurant has crystalized why The Old Man felt this way.
Osso Buco is a swankyish Italian restaurant in the Village. Like a lot of joints in NYC it features a rogues gallery of low and high grade celebrity diners who have posed for photos with the owner. According to a couple of news sources a photograph of Chelsea Clinton has hung in Osso Buco for five years. The other day Clinton's lawyer sent a grouchy letter to the restaurant asking that it be removed. He said Chelsea didn't consent to this use of her photo. The lawyer implies that he's going to sue the pants off Osso Buco if the picture is not removed from display, saying, "We reserve the right to exercise any and all legal options available to us if you refuse to comply." Oh really? What legal options are available to you Perry Mason?
Osso Buco's management should tell Clinton's lawyer to take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut on a gravel driveway.
Chelsea Clinton gave her implicit approval for the display of the photograph when she posed for it. On these grounds any self-respecting judge would throw a "rights of publicity" or other nonsensical lawsuit straight out of court. Chelsea Clinton is not a dumb woman. The pictures of celebrities and politicians on the walls of Osso Buco should have tipped her off that the photo would be mounted on the wall. And she posed, said cheese and waited for the flash. That's consent.
The lawyer is probably acting without the input or consent of the President or his wife or their daughter. This is what must be stopped. Lawyers all over the world walk around inventing laws and legal threats on behalf of clients who don't really want the lawyer to do what they're doing. Do you think Bill Clinton, famous lover of food, really cares that his daughter's picture hangs in an Italian restaurant? No. No, he doesn't. If he knew that picture was up there, he'd probably hop in his limo and roll down there for a free meal. Then he'd have his own picture snapped. Avuncular old Bill doesn't want press about mean lawyers writing nasty letters to restauranteurs. He wants some good food to eat. This lawyer is doing what almost all lawyers do best: he's making work for himself. At the end of each week he sits down and tallies all the bullshit letters he's mailed off and pats himself on the back for doing such good work.
This case probably stikes a lot of lay folks as just another funny news story about the ridiculous excesses of celebrities, politicians and lawyers. It is all that. But it's a signifier of how certain lawyers have gotten completely out of hand. Like I said above, if Osso Buco goes to the mat the case will be tossed, when it gets to court. The shit of it is that in the meanwhile, Osso Buco will have to hire another lawyer to prepare the case. At $400 per billable hour, minimum, fighting the stupid request will add up to real dough, very fast.
With that in mind Osso Buco will take the picture down. Kudos to them for generating some PR for themselves. But in the meanwhile, this shitheel lawyer has shown the world that bullying letters get things done, and that we need all the lawyers we can get. Yay rule of law!
* The term "legal letter" drives me nuts. You're supposed to shudder when you get a "legal letter"--like, from a real lawyer--in your mail box. Don't. Lawyers are just like accountants, except instead of playing with numbers they play with words. They have no more power when they write letter than you or I do. They should chill the fuck out. I don't care how much money they spent on school.
YouTube has moved beyond peep fighting and sparkler bombs. Now it's got practically a whole Bob Dylan network of videos up there. Sadly, Dylan's proxy has disabled the embedding function for most of them. But it's worthwhile to follow this link to the video for the remixed Most Likely You'll Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine. It is awesome.
So James Frey got another book deal. This one for two million bucks. Boy, some people are upset.
I am not. But I've been confused by the outrage. Tons of books contain lies passed off as truth. The Bible for example, recounts this one story about a guy who walked on water, rose from the dead and supposedly reached the age of 33 without ever having sex or jerking off. It's also got a bit in there about an old man who built a boat big enough to carry all the animals in the world. If you can believe it, this all passes for non-fiction in some circles. More recently, Agusten Burroughs wrote a book about the people who were nice enough to take him in when his parents could not care for him. He recounted incidents both kooky and criminal involving these people. According to the folks who took Burroughs into their home, many of these incidents never happened. They went court. Evidently they had enough going for them that Burroughs settled. No one is calling for Burroughs' head on a platter. Why not?
When the Frey story first broke I thought it was a sophistication issue. A Million Little Pieces sold five million copies or something. Given that the vast majority of Americans never read anything at all, not even a cereal box or a street sign, I guessed that many of these angry folks hadn't read many other books. These people didn't know that writers don't always let the truth get in the way of a good story.
But I also noticed a gender-based trend. Women, it seemed to me, were really ticked-off at James Frey. Many of these women are incredibly sophisticated when it comes to books. How come they didn't understand that these are just stories?
If the men I spoke to cared at all, they considered Frey a panty-waist because he cowered before Oprah Winfrey. Some writers, male and female, were pissed because they felt Frey gave every writer a black eye. I say Frey slandered no one other than himself. That's not a category of libel recognized by US law, so what's the big deal. I mean aside from the fact that he pissed himself on Oprah.
I finally sorted out the obvious this morning. I have not read the entirety of A Million Little Pieces, so whatever impressions I've got may be totally off base, but whatever. Here goes. Frey's book was not funny. It was not charming. It was serious. Had it been whimsical or quirky, like David Sedaris's Naked, or Burroughs's Running with Scissors, I wouldn't be writing this dopey blog entry parsing the meaning and emotional impact of this particular mendacity. Some reporter busted Sedaris for fibbing earlier this year and the whole world yawned. If your lies come off as a goof, no one cares.
But AMLP was way serious. Serious like the boy with the dark hair and the soulful eyes who sits in the back of class and doesn't say much. He doesn't always do his homework. You know he's got some real shit going on at home. But he is so deep. And he gets into fights with other boys, but that's cool because you just know he would, like, protect you from those awful jerks that snapped your bra strap in sixth grade. Frey's book was like James Dean on the page.
And then it wasn't. It was all made up.
So now it clicks. Frey is a masher. He toyed with the feelings of his readers. They crushed-out on this poor fuck-up they read about and then they discovered he'd been lying to them. And the worst thing is that he did it for money.
Two weeks ago the New Yorker's Jim Surowiecki took on a question for the ages: why do airlines suck?
I'll give you the short answer. For the same reason dogs lick their balls: because they can. How else are you gonna get from New York to Chicago? On the train?
But all the same, I enjoyed each of the 958 words Jim took to say the same thing.
Jim Knipfel is among my favorite living authors. Primarily a memoirist, his first novel The Buzzing was the most underrated and unappreciated novel published in decades. I walked around in a daze for a week after I read it. A book hasn't affected me like that since I was twenty. So I'm excited for his follow-up Noogie's Time to Shine. At a time when everyone else seems to be quirky, or cutesy, when they depict losers or failures in print or on film, Knipfel's accounts are always bleakly funny. Heartbreaking, but never cute. Noogie's Time to Shine tells the story of an ATM stocker who siphons off $5 million dollars a few bills a time, and then goes on the lam. Based on a true story. I cannot wait for its publication date.
I don't understand the fuss about the Patriots trying to record their opponents' play signals. Why is this illegal? Would it be against the rules if the team used a notebook instead of a video camera? What a bunch of crybabies. Cheating is part of the game goddamn it.
I quit smoking almost exactly three weeks ago. This morning Darlene called from the New York State Quit Line. She wanted see how I'm doing. We chatted a bit. She told me, in very gentle but clear terms, that I am no better than a crack addict or a junkie--she did use those words. I agreed with her. We laughed. It was nice. I wanted a cigarette.
My friend Mike has given me the only truly useful advice in quitting. It went like this.
Mike: You know that feeling you get when you want a cigarette?
Me: Yeah.
Mike: You know, when you really want a cigarette more than anything else in the world.
Me: Yeah.
Mike: You know what you do when you get that feeling?
Me: Tell me.
Mike: Don't have a cigarette.
Me: Thanks, asshole.
For whatever reason people rarely believe me when I make statements of fact. For sometime I've been trying to warn people about the dangers of taking acetaminophen as a hangover cure or preventative. People usually tease me, call me a nut-job conspiracy theorist or paranoiac. This may be true, but I'm still right. Don't take Tylenol or any non-aspirin pain reliever when you've been drinking or if you plan to. Tylenol is not asprin, which is totally safe to take for a hangover. If you regularly mix acetaminophen with alcohol you can suffere serious side effects, like liver failure and death. It's true. Look it up yourself if you don't believe me.