I broke my right arm in 1971. Mom and my siblings were watching an oil well being drilled at night in the vacant lot two houses down in Campo Verde, Tia Juana, Venezuela. The Club is in the foreground; right above the words “photo courtesy,” you can see the giant swimming pool where a nineteen-year-old…
Thirty-three years and counting
December 27, 2023
My friend Joe Cady dropped in for a visit today. In Ghosts and Ballyhoo, he’s The Punk Who Set Me on My Course (pages 17 to 20). Unfortunately, I’d set my camera to take time exposures or something, so all the images of Joe in Tim’s house came out blurry and yellow. Here’s the best…
The Golden Age of Duh
December 26, 2023
In some ways it’s a scary time to be alive. A huge number of people will believe whatever you tell them, as long as it fits in with their preconceived notions. Yesterday Said Tayeb Jawad, the Afghan ambassador to the US from 2003 to 2010 and current Diplomat in Residence at Johns Hopkins University, tweeted…
A gift from the boogeyman
December 25, 2023
One of the scariest people I ever knew was a man I’ll call “Miguel,” who lived across the street from us. He was a former gang member who looked and sounded exactly like the actor Danny Trejo. Miguel was married and had three children. He was a mechanic and truck driver, and he suffered from…
The first Christmas without Mom and Dad
December 24, 2023
This is the first Christmas without Mom and Dad. What I feel mostly is strangeness. When you get to be old yourself—I’m fifty-one—it’s incredibly bizarre to no longer have access to people who were there your whole life. Dad’s dying process was so sudden, unnecessary, and ghastly that when he finally passed away, it was…
Improvement is not always conscious
December 23, 2023
Those of you who’ve read Ghosts and Ballyhoo may have noticed that I make only one mention of Tony Levin, on pages 42-43. This was not deliberate. My friend Steiv Dixon and Carmen were Levinites, as they called themselves. They introduced me to Tony Levin’s best work. As a result he became one of my…
The upside of being Christopher Walken
December 21, 2023
I love Christopher Walken. His acting career, I mean. I know nothing about him personally, except for one quote that describes me perfectly. We’ll get to that in a minute. He’s always great, even if the movie isn’t. Some of his best performances are in Catch Me if You Can, The Rundown, Sleepy Hollow, Suicide…