No Boycott Here

Let’s get this part straight, right up front. I dig the Dalai Lama. His brand of Buddhism is straight up, pure, as far as I can tell. I even heard him speak, or one of his top guys once in Denver. I wore the red string around my neck or wrist or wherever it was. Even lost my girlfriend at the time to our spiritual advisor who’d turned us on to the Dalai’s appearance, then ran around holding on to ‘her’ hand before the last little spiritual retreat we had up in Keystone. Greg, his name, he smoked cigarettes, I remember, the only spiritually impure activity that he admitted to. Besides probably boinking my girlfriend, a lovely spiritual seeker who was seeking enlightenment from the big huge male totem, it appeared.

Anyway, now that Tibet is blowing again, in trouble with the big Feds from Beijing, we hear from the usual Hollywood suspects prescribing all kinds of solutions for the trouble. I love it when the Hollywood crowd gives us a conscience. An easy checklist we can follow to ease our worldwide political pain.

It usually involves asking someone else to make the sacrifice.

This time they’re calling on athletes. Right. They’re the ones who train and compete just about their entire lives for the opportunity to represent their countries, themselves and their sports on the world’s biggest stage. Just give it up for old Tibet, ‘cause Hollywood says so.

No, Mia Farrow, Quincy Jones, Steven Speilberg, Ang Lee. Why don’t you give up your career, the proceeds from your next movie? Call on America to boycott your next project instead of asking athletes worldwide to give up their quest.

Athletes can’t just pick up the phone and get a studio deal or a movie script to shoot with a major star packaged up from CAA. Ever been to an Olympic Trial, say, in Track and Field? Ever seen what athletes go through, four or five days of races, heats, competitions, to get on the team that wears the colors of the USA, to march in the opening ceremony among thousands of beautiful athletes in native garb from every corner of the world?

Give it up for Tibet, Mia? This is their one shot, lady, their one chance to compete at this level. They don’t get a lifetime pass from a couple of movies that lets you cash it in at the bank for the rest of your days, make a phone call and get a part, a script for ‘older women’ that the old Hollywood gals all say is so missing in today’s film industry. These athletes get their one time ‘part’ the old fashioned way. They win it.

So you want peace in Tibet? Free the monks? Then boycott your own projects, Hollywood. Give up yours, and stop asking the athletes to give up theirs.

Like I said, I dig the Dalai. But I’m not giving up mine, and I’m sure not hoping athletes give up theirs.

Hollywood, it’s time to look in the mirror. Send a film crew over there, do a documentary. Cover the games in that grand style we used to see in the older games, from Rome and Tokyo. Do it in great detail, use the industry to show us. But don’t ask us to give up what is meaningful to us, to close a door on athletic achievement. Close the door on your own projects, if you want to boycott. Or use the industry to focus our attention. Just don’t send Al Gore or Michael Moore. Send someone who isn’t trying so hard to impress us. Someone who won’t try and cash in a trip to Tibet or Beijing for an Academy Award. Send a film student crew, an AFI project team. Make us feel good about what you’re doing, and try and not turn it into a celeb-fest with Angelina or Brad or Mia or Richard Gere grabbing headlines instead of carefully showing us the way.

Me? I’m digging into Olympic preliminaries, getting ready for the trials and the competitions and the games.

Maybe I’ll take a movie DVD and light it on fire and dump it over the back deck. My own protest against Hollywood.

Let the Games begin.

Jump Start

Mom is doing fine, she says. She had cataract surgery yesterday and I think I was a little jumpy. I told her on Tues I didn't want to call her yesterday, the day of the surgery, so she spent the night with a friend and I got a hold of her today and she sounds fine. She said they wanted her to stay with her friend last night because her blood pressure was pretty high. She sounded fine this morning and is going back in today to change the bandages. Maybe I should have gone up there.
I about bit Gene’s head off yesterday on the phone. No real reason. Probably a little jealousy in there too...hot Asian girl friend, business going well, closing deals...
OK, I feel better
Kee Mo Tay

Everybody Knows Lonnie

Everybody knows Lonnie. I pick him up and we go to lunch. The hostess, Denise, the lady who I had talked to about Ray Charles and some of the musicians she had worked with in the music industry when I was in a couple of weeks ago, she knows Lonnie.

The waitress knows Lonnie. She knows me too. She knows what I want before we even sit down. Chicken salad sandwich on sourdough. Lonnie orders a cheese omelet.

Robert comes by. He always keeps his sunglasses on. He starts to invite the waitress over to sit with us and I say Robert you’re pickup lines are starting to wear thin. He says I’m not trying to pick up anyone. Just trying to socialize, have a little conversation. If you can’t talk to the girls on a nice sunny day like today, what’s the use, he says.

I love you man, I say to Robert .

I’m going to tell Lonnie about you and my blog, Okay? I tell Lonnie that I’d run into Robert about three times in thirty six hours and finally I’d showed him a chapter from the novel and he read it and then he put it down without saying anything. I said, what, you don’t like it and he said hey, I didn’t throw it away, that’s something. His way of encouraging writers, I guess. I asked him if he'd looked at my blog and he said he saw something I sent but he didn't read it. So when I saw him a couple of days later he was talking about one of his girl friends and how she’d been hesitant or something with his brash come-ons and I said, hey, why don’t you just read my blog? We get together, what, once every six months? And the conversation is ninety nine percent you, I said, and one percent me, so read it, okay?

He emailed me that afternoon. I like the grey background, he said. I emailed back, just read it! He sends back this policy he has. A statement that he doesn't read anything literary and some other stuff about how he doesn’t have time and he just reads law books and don’t take it personally buddy boy just go with the flow. I tell this to Lonnie.

Robert grins, hiding behind his sunglasses. I love you man, I say.

The food comes and Lonnie has this huge plate with a cheese omelet and rice and beans and my sandwich looks small. Robert looks on. He lights up a Marlboro from a green box.

Denise comes out and banters with us, asks Lonnie how he’s been and asks him if he’s still with his girl friend. He says no, they broke up. That was a year ago. Denise says oh, I didn’t know. She asks Robert if he needs anything. He doesn’t have any food and he’s smoking. He says no, unless you want to give me a neck massage. He rubs his neck. She laughs. Oh not now, she says, I’m working but that’s the kind of thing that’s for after work. She leaves and I look at Robert. I love you, man, I say, and slap his knee.

Robert gets ready to leave and we shake hands. I invite him to our festival we’re planning, me and Lonnie. It’s blues, barbecue, baseball, beer, broads, beans, stuff that starts with B, I say. My place. Listen to some music. Robert says yeah, maybe, unless I’m fucking Clara. Beer and barbecue, I say, and Robert says yeah, unless me and Clara are fucking. I don’t want to interrupt that, I say, but you got to eat. He gets up.

Lonnie says he’s been laying low. The cheese omelet looks really good, all gooey, hanging down from the fork. My sandwich has stale bread.

I’m fine, Lonnie says, just laying low. Sometimes I just get tired of people. But you’re okay? I say. Yeah, I’m okay, he says. I stayed in the house for the entire day yesterday, he says. Just watched movie after movie after movie. Hamlet, he says. The best. Laurence Olivier, he says, and I say, yeah, he’s the best. He ran down his top five Shakespeare movies; Olivier in Hamlet, then Othello with Orson Wells and Romeo and Juliet and The Taming of the Shrew with Burton and Taylor. Henry V with some guy I don't know.
Albert says he’ll send me over some of his poetry, but only the old stuff. Not ready to go public with the new stuff, he says, and I say I’m not the public, and he grins. Later he says he’ll send over some older stuff but warns me that it’s kind of amateurish.

I think people who write poetry have heart and soul and are brave. I didn’t tell Lonnie this, but I think he knows.

I Got Invited To A Lecture About Jesus

I just got invited to a lecture about Jesus. "The greatest man the world has ever known." That’s what the woman said at the door when she handed me the full-color flyer. “The address is on the back,” she said. She was smiling the whole time. About thirty seconds was what I allotted her. Door time. Her friend was smiling, too. She was standing a few feet away out on my sidewalk. It was ten o’clock in the morning.

I smiled and said ‘okay’ in a big voice. They smiled. She had blonde hair and was about sixty years old, I think. She wore lipstick. I wondered if they were out in force today in the neighborhood, leafleting the folks who need some morning inspiration. I need some morning inspiration, too. How did she know? I’m not knocking Jesus. He seems to be coming at me from different places.

Yesterday my friend Jim and I had lunch and he told me he thought I might like a book. He took it from the trunk of his car and gave it to me. “How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization.” For a moment we stood in the parking lot at Coco’s next to the Home Depot talking about Galileo and whether or not it was a good idea to put him in jail for agreeing with Copernicus that the earth wasn’t the center of the universe.

Earlier in the morning I’d forwarded an email from Father Mike and his television show to Gene. Gene had emailed back asking me to stop sending him stuff like that. He doesn’t think he can be saved. It would be a challenge, I agreed.

There are a couple of really nice churches in the neighborhood where I live. I met a man at the deli counter last week. I started talking to him. He said he was really enjoying life, retired now. He was a retired minister at the First Church of Christ. I told him that my mother’s new minister had been from the area and he seemed interested in talking to me until the counter guy gave him his sandwich and then he said good bye it was nice talking to you and he disappeared.

You never know who it is when the doorbell rings at ten o’clock in the morning. Usually it’s a neighbor, or one of the landscape guys or a handyman that’s coming over to look at your garage or your ceiling to make an estimate on what it costs to repair it because the deck leaks. Sometimes Maury comes over. He’s on the home owner’s board and knows all kinds of stuff and likes to keep up on the repairs in the neighborhood. Usually he rings the doorbell and then he knocks real loud. I try and stay upstairs when I hear that.

I talked with my editor yesterday. She has some good suggestions for my novel. There’s a lot of work to do. She’s positive about the project without giving away any false hope. Second drafts are like the early rounds of the NCAA tournament. Anyone can get a last second shot at the buzzer and post a victory. It’s the later rounds where the pressure starts to build and the little schools with the big hopes and out of reach dreams and the clean white cheerleaders go up against the big boys, the Duke’s and UCLA's and find out what it’s really like under the boards where they pound you. My story is good and the characters resonant and now I have to really clean things up and rocket this thing on until it is ready to try and sell.

I finished up ‘Ham on Rye’ by Charles Bukowski last night. The alter ego character Henry Chinanski pummels his way through a rough childhood into young adulthood with a swagger and a fear and the knowledge that beneath it all he just wanted to be left alone in a room somewhere. It was chilling and brave. The front cover is one of the best that I’ve seen, done by a guy named Milan Bozic. It’s just a guy in big red gym trunks in a fighting pose. Perfect. The kid taking on the world.

Duane over at ‘Magic Door’ says two writers sell out in his used book shop. Same two writers who have always been hard to keep, he says, in all the shops he’s had. Bukowski, and Hunter S Thompson. Just can’t keep ‘em in stock, he says. He calls those guys his top drawer or something like that. Top of the line. Sure fire, big sellers. His ‘A’ list writers he sells too, right under the top drawer guys. Hemingway, Steinbeck. They sell. Not like the top of the line guys. So I’m reading Bukowski. Trying to figure out how he does it.

You Wanna Move That Case of Books From Biography over to Fiction? Yeah, right over there...thanks

Sister blew whistle on Margaret B. Jones, who said she was a foster child in South L.A., but really grew up with family in Sherman Oaks.

By Bob Pool and Rebecca Trounson, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers

March 4, 2008

The gripping memoir of "Margaret B. Jones" received critical raves. It turns out it should have been reviewed as fiction.

The author of "Love and Consequences," a critically acclaimed autobiography about growing up among gangbangers in South Los Angeles, acknowledged Monday that she made up everything in her just-published book.

"Jones" is actually Margaret Seltzer. Instead of being a half-white, half-Native American who grew up in a foster home and once sold drugs for the Bloods street gang, she is a white woman who was raised with her biological family in Sherman Oaks and graduated from Campbell Hall, an exclusive private school in the San Fernando Valley.

"and so, down the road behind the hog farm where the old man was sucking on the corn cob pipe with his dentures soaking in a paper cup next to him, he taught me how to play the blues..."

Cody Diablo's Convergence

So I’ll just stuff a couple more twenties into the G-string and keep the snarky comments to myself. No more raised eyebrows and muffled sneers at the Tropical Lei when Felony or Destiny tells me her real goal is to write a screenplay or study veterinary medicine. Nope. I’m a believer now, for them, and for me. There’s real light at the end of this here tunnel. In the year when Miss South Carolina or wherever that was couldn’t even complete a sentence and got a ticket to the talk show circuit to tell us all about how the intelligence implants weren't working, now we have a real life tattooed stripper/phone sex operator on the red carpet, now she’s walking on stage, holding by God the golden statuette and shit, she won the Oscar for best screenplay and wore a leopard print dress with a tattoo on her arm.

Keep on grinding, baby, right here, a little bit to the left, that’s it. Here, keep these bills, some contributions to the literary legacy of leggy babes everywhere who blog and keep hope alive out here in scribe-land.

And hope rings out for the Wilma Flintstone-Jane of the Jungle dress designers who’re probably having their own celebration this morning in coffee houses all over the garment district. Look for animal rights activists to check the bloodlines on that skimpy piece of fabric.

All seriousness aside (as Steve Allen used to say and let’s not plagiarize anymore then necessary, given the political and creative climate convergence going on) even though the Academy Awards show was a big blah with a blah host and a blah songwriting category with a bunch of boring Disney tunes virtually handing the award to a fairly deserving couple of unlikely musicians, Diablo Cody was a knockout. I missed most of the red-carpet segment so I can’t say whether she was on an even playing field with the glamour babes strutting on the pile; Renee Zellweger was hot and is she really available? Man, is she working out ‘cause she looks shaped and is Jessica Alba married? I must have missed that and she’s about ready to pop and still looks great. . . Shout out to Pomona. . .So while the Cohen brothers and producer Ivan Reitman laude Cormac McCarthy and his novel ‘No Country For Old Men’ -and the story goes that Reitman grabbed screen rights to the novel early on before the book even appeared on book shelves- from the other end of literary consciousness comes a winner perhaps born out of strip clubs and phone sex dialogue honed in the vernacular of one-way conversations with greasy lonely men too isolated for sustained social discourse and banished to 1-900 romantic fantasy. Don’t knock it. Diablo says it was good training. Peel back layers of phony posturing and fake elegance, they say, to get at the heart of the human condition. Sounds like she’s got it going and maybe the shakeup of the writers strike combined with her come-hither leopard look ignites a storm of gritty neo-realism to splatter onto the screen. Let’s hope.

If Elmore Leonard has really been lurking around in Venice Beach as reported in the local rag there and Quentin Tarentino has an open couple of months to review screen plays I could see the three of them connecting in some wild new tale of 21^st century pulp. I hear that Charles Bukowski is still selling well and what better inspiration do we need? Diablo, you go, girl... Don’t forget to tip those dancers out there working real hard tonight…that’s right…take care of those beautiful ladies…Coming up it's a three-for-one lap dance special for all you aspiring screen writers and novelists out there…grab your favorite lady and get that three-for-one deal here at the Tropical Lei…eight dollars for a Sprite? Thanks hon, keep the change. And talk dirty to me.

Party Lines

EXCERPT FROM ESPN.COM FRIDAY FEB 22 2008:

The 1998 party at Jose Canseco's house in Miami may have started out as a gathering of friends and family. It has turned into an event worthy of congressional testimony and a source of "evidence."

There is a photo of Roger Clemens at Canseco's house during the June 1998 party, according to the New York Daily News -- a photo that would contradict Clemens' sworn testimony that he never attended the party.

Richard Emery, one of the lawyers for Clemens' former trainer, Brian McNamee, said he was aware of the existence of the photo. "We have reason to believe it's reliable evidence," Emery told the Daily News. "We believe there's photographic evidence that shows Clemens was at a party he says he wasn't at."

The event is a key point in the steroids investigation involving Clemens. It is mentioned in the Mitchell report, and was a focal point during the Feb. 13 hearing before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.