Marc Spitz

I think I’m officially old. Last night I found myself smoking a cigar and kvetching about the state of “business.” I used to watch my parents and uncles and grandparents do this after Thanksgiving dinner when I was officially young. Now I am one of them, a little thicker, a little grayer and a lot more worried. My great grandfather was a haberdasher. After JFK people stopped wearing hats and his business was dead. I think I’ve inherited the same shit luck with my choice of vocations. Free MP3s/Napster being my bare-headed and vigorous JFK. I am cooking up a book project that will address all of this in an entertaining way. More on this later, I hope. It’ll be the Dr. Zhivago of music journalism. Or maybe I’ll be the Dr. Zhivago of music journalism. I don’t know. Dr. Zhivago is a pretty big movie, as Lee Donowitz say. I interviewed the guy who played Lee Donowitz. Saul Rubinek, for Maxim. Did an oral history on True Romance a couple of years ago. Interviewed most of the cast. Everyone except Christopher Walken, actually. Took me almost as long as the Bowie book, parts of it anyway. Took me as long as, let’s say… the 90s in the Bowie book. Oral Histories, a lot of work. But I think I’ve mastered them. I make them swing pretty like a young Julie Christie. It was a good cigar but I think I’m still queasy. I know not to inhale, like a cigarette. My grandparents used to have a music box in their home in Canarsie that would play the theme to Dr. Zhivago whenever you wound it up. Why would someone purchase something like that? The economy must have been strong.

I used to take the LIRR out to the Five Towns every Thanksgiving. When I was in college, I’d always take care to bring the weirdest and most aggressive classmate, just to fuck with my family. One guy, a poet who I was enamored with at the time, did jump rope with no rope in the den all night, zooted out of his head on weed. Actually that was the first thing we all did once I pulled my little Toyota into the driveway. I used to bring girls home too. I didn’t bring a girlfriend home last night because I have no girlfriend and there was no home anymore (my mom and stepdad sold the Long Island house a few years ago and live on the upper west side now) but the energy was closer to the girlfriend-assisted visits. The times when I really wanted to be accepted as normal and suburban. As opposed to the times I wanted to delineate myself from the suburban doofuses (some of them in my own family) by showing up stoned with the most glorious young weirdo at school that year, hungry for my mom’s kugel. Thanksgiving can go either way, is what I’m saying. It’s the one day of the year that I really take a look at myself and wonder where I’m going, and last night it was obvious, I was going and perhaps staying straight. I went home, watched eight episodes of Bored to Death in a row and was dreaming of affairs never had by midnight. The polarity of Thanksgiving used to be really well exemplified by local tv. On Thursday they would show every old King Kong movie, including offshoots like Mighty Joe Young, and Son of Kong. On Black Friday they’d show every Godzilla movie, and sometimes conclude, just in case anyone missed the subtext, with King Kong vs. Godzilla (I believe Kong wins this). My inner Kong vs. Godzilla probably started waging battle back in the late 70s and early 80s when I’d plant myself in front of that shit and not move even during the Crazy Eddie commercials. This was Thanksgiving pageantry to me. Occasionally football, but really the two giant monsters at war for ratings, and, I guess, dominion over Japan. My better an worse angels. Not sure which was which. There were some Godzilla movies when he wasn’t the villain so perhaps Godzilla? I’ve lived in New York most of my life but I’ve never been to the parade once. I barely ever watched it on TV. Does Santa Claus still close the show? I caught a bit of it yesterday and was shocked by how… queer it is. I think it’s great that gay culture has mainstreamed so much that Alan Cumming can disco dance to “That’s Life” aboard a float sponsored by a major corporation (followed by Cyndi Lauper singing some crap disco song in a pink turret surrounded by princesses).

Like Adam Lambert, they all should be tithing Bowie. I’m still thinking a lot about critics because I’m still getting reviewed. The Amazon reviews have sort of balanced in my favor which is nice. They too are polarized. Some love the book, others not only dislike it but seem to be offended by its conceits. I was once chastised by Julian Casablancas from the Strokes for not going to see the film Bewitched (Will Ferrell and Nicole Kidman remake of TV series) because it got such shit reviews. “You won’t see a movie if it gets bad reviews? Even if you wanted to see it?” he asked, instantly making me feel old and weak. In a rare moment of honesty, I admitted as much. “Well, it was really funny.” I caught some of it on cable a few months after that and he was right. Sitting through something like that, in my defense, on your bed is a lot easier than sitting in the Cineplex Odeon or wherever. But I thought about Julian and Will Ferrell the other night when I watched Funny People. That movie got a ton of hype, came out and made no money and is considered a flop, but it’s actually the best movie about Jewish middle age angst ever made: that having a big dick, having money guilt, the selfishness and fear, and immaturity and lusting after skinny blondes. At one point Adam Sandler calls up Leslie Mann, who he’d serially cheated on and with regard to her beautiful children with her new husband, actually says “I could have had those kids with you!” There’s a certain insanity to our collective modern Semitic (and Show-bizzy) rationale that the movie nails. And Adam Sandler and Seth Rogen are really brave and honest about presenting it. It’s not a self-hating Jew movie, it’s oddly, a self-accepting Jew movie. Unlike Curb Your Enthusiasm, everyone learns something at the end, which is, I think, kind of weak, and I say that as a compulsive writer of happy endings. Even the Bowie book has a tacked on happy ending. It’s a cultural or ethnic tick I think (look at the play scene at the end of Annie Hall) Why do we insist that everything work out in art. I should have been a stand up comic. I’m funny and always have been able to make people laugh in tense situations, in bars, in my journalism, and my plays (and in large biographies where some will have you think it’s wildly inappropriate). I once wrote a stand up bit for myself but I chickened out. Was going to perform it during an open mic thing at a friend’s bar. Funny People made me wish I’d done it. In a way, this blog is like my stand up. I can present real pain and insecurity and anger and… the positive emotions too, but entertainingly and, most of the time, completely under my control. Maybe I’ll start late. Like Sally Field in Punchline. But… funny. Anyway, I have no idea why anyone thought that film would appeal to anyone but male Jews with show business ties and gray hairs. Nobody knows anything.