Bluebird

Just discovered my writer's forks

Been contemplating things lately. Sometimes I go too deep, quite frankly. Then I found out I have double writer's forks--one on each palm. Associated with natural talent in the written word, it's when the head line ends by sitting into two strong lines. The longer and clearer the fork, the greater the ability. Hmmmmm.

My dancing architect

Methinks India Jane has a tussle ahead with her right brain/left brain desires.

Bourdain on Bourdain

 My Favorite Mistake

Anthony Bourdain on the wild life that killed his culinary career.

Anthony Bourdain.

As told to Ramin Setoodeh

I was lucky enough to go to the Culinary Institute of America in my 20s, and my big mistake was that I was offered a chef’s job very quickly after I graduated, and I took it. I did that rather than going to France—or even staying in New York, but taking a low-level position at a great restaurant and putting my nose to the grindstone. Once I started down that path, years later I was still working in a procession of not-good restaurants. The lowest of the lows is cooking food for people you hate in a restaurant you hate, with no pride.

I was about getting the biggest paycheck then, so I could see music, smoke expensive weed, do cocaine, that kind of life. It was less important to me that I would get good at my craft. I deluded myself into thinking I was good. And by the time it occurred to me that I’d never worked for a three-star chef, I didn’t have the skills. It was late in the day.

After I graduated, I was working with friends in a restaurant in SoHo called WPA. We helped bankrupt the place in short order. We thought we were creative geniuses, and created a very chef-centric menu that was not what the dining public wanted. We were cooking out of our league. It was not a professional operation. We behaved like a cult of maniacs. I liked the life that went with being a chef. I was getting laid, I was getting high, I was having fun. I had no self-control. I denied myself nothing. I had no moral compass. At age 44, I had never had health insurance. I hadn’t paid my rent on time. I was 10 years behind on my taxes. I owed AmEx for 10 years. I was still living like a college kid—worse even. I essentially partied my way out of a big-league career.

A lot of young cooks who have read Kitchen Confidential ask me for career advice. I tell them if you’re serious about cooking and your craft, do the opposite of what I did. I learned a lot of important skills from my mistake that served me well in both publishing and television. I think the skills I learned as a junkie are skills of determining if this person is full of shit or not. I’m never going to be the kind of person who talks about himself in the third person or has the red M&Ms weeded out of my bowl. You know what you see in the mirror when you’re waiting for the lady on the subway to fall asleep so you can take her purse? I’m a pretty good judge of human nature.

Hüsker Dü in book form

Hüsker Dü From the Inside, in a Memoir

By DWIGHT GARNER

Brendan McWeeney

Among the many reasons to like “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” is this: its theme song, “Dog on Fire,” was written by the former Hüsker Dü guitarist and singer Bob Mould.

Brendan McWeeney

Bob Mould

SEE A LITTLE LIGHT

The Trail of Rage and Melody

By Bob Mould

With Michael Azerrad

Illustrated. 403 pages. Little, Brown & Company. $24.99.

Enlarge This Image

 

“Dog on Fire” — the bouncy version on “The Daily Show” was recorded by They Might Be Giants — doesn’t exactly capture Mr. Mould’s signature sound. When people talk about Bob Mould and his guitar onslaught, the adjectives tend to be of the sort CNN anchors use when describing natural disasters: enormous, deafening, slashing, chaotic, flattening, consuming. These things are meant as steep compliments.

With Hüsker Dü in the 1980s, his band Sugar in the ’90s and as a solo artist, Mr. Mould has made many kinds of music, some of them acoustic and quite spare. But he’s best known for making, long before Nirvana, metal music for the kind of people who don’t like metal, or at any rate the kind of people who wouldn’t be caught dead flashing the Devil horns hand sign or reading Aleister Crowley. His songs matter so much to so many people, myself included, because of the introspection and pain he manages to layer into them behind and below their sonic brutality. There’s a high signal-to-noise ratio.

One of the pleasures of Mr. Mould’s new memoir, “See a Little Light,” is watching him try to conjure up words to describe his own majestic din. “Imagine the sound of someone starting up a chain saw in preparation for clearing a parcel of overgrown land,” he writes in one early, wobbly stab. Later he calls a song “the musical equivalent of the sound of throwing a box of glass off the roof of a house.” Another song is likened to the sound of “someone regaining consciousness in a hospital after being pounded for hours with bare knuckles.” Hey, you think, he’s getting closer.

“See a Little Light,” written with the rock journalist Michael Azerrad, is on some levels a typical, and typically flat, rock memoir. There are road stories, bad record label deals, dim memories of greasy sexual and pharmacological buffets. Mr. Mould’s drugs of choice included “trucker speed,” crystal meth and cocaine. When in Kansas, he’d stop in to “smoke pot and throw knives” with his friend the writer William S. Burroughs.

Scores are settled. He pokes another beloved Minneapolis band, the Replacements, because it “didn’t give back” to other bands the way Hüsker Dü did. He pours gasoline atop his long-running feud with a founding member of Hüsker Dü, Grant Hart, and then pulls out a Bic lighter.

There’s rock world gossip. Michael Stipe of R.E.M. liked to force some guests to enter his house, humiliatingly, through a window. Mr. Mould was in the running to produce “Nevermind,” Nirvana’s breakthrough LP. The guitarist Chris Stamey complains, while playing with Mr. Mould on tour, about the volume.

“Alex Chilton took this ear, and you’re not taking this one,” Mr. Stamey said, pointing to his other. The author describes his weird detour into script consulting for World Championship Wrestling.

There’s even a big emotional revelation (Mr. Mould may have been sexually abused as a child) that’s ready-made for afternoon television. At the book’s end there are tidy clichés about redemption that made me groan.

In more important ways, however, “See a Little Light” isn’t typical at all. Most centrally, it’s an audacious and moving account of Mr. Mould’s coming of age as a (mostly closeted) gay man in the macho alternative rock scene of the 1980s and 1990s. The book is impressive, too, for its author’s radical unwillingness to ingratiate itself. He was famously severe onstage; mostly, that’s what he is here.

Mr. Mould’s book is also frequently well observed. It doesn’t leap out of the box like a cat, the way Bob Dylan’s and Keith Richards’s memoirs do. But the nice moments start early and maintain a steady drip.

Mr. Mould was born in Malone, N.Y., a small town near the Canadian border, in 1960. His father was a TV repairman; his mother was a switchboard operator. His father, who sometimes beat his mother, was paranoid. (He’d leave a tape recorder running when he left a room.) But Mr. Mould’s childhood was, he reports, relatively un-insane.

He learned to play the guitar early and started Hüsker Dü, a trio, while attending Macalester College in Minnesota. (The band’s name came from a 1950s Swedish children’s board game of the era, and means “Do you remember?” in Swedish.) The band got famous fast, and released its first studio album, “Everything Falls Apart,” in 1982. Mr. Mould dropped out of Macalester.

Hüsker Dü played faster and louder than almost any band of its era. The noise was an evocation of, and a cover for, Mr. Mould’s roiling emotions. He knew he was gay at 5, but throughout most of his career he fled from the stereotypical gay lifestyle. There was nothing campy or effeminate about Bob Mould.

After the years with Hüsker Dü and Sugar blow past, “See a Little Light” changes, and so does Mr. Mould. He begins to seek out pieces of what he calls “the big gay puzzle” and, typically for him, does nothing halfway. He gets buff. He becomes a D.J. and makes electronic music. He begins to describe himself as a “bear” and hangs out in leather bars.

Mr. Mould had several long-term relationships, but once those end, his libido begins to roar the way his guitar did. He writes about his fondness for gay military porn and sleeps with “someone from every branch of the military.” He has so many one-night stands that he learns to “keep a Costco family pack of toothbrushes on hand” because he is, he says, a “thoughtful whore.”

Among rock memoirs I’ve read, “See a Little Light” calls out to be a serious comic book, a graphic memoir. Sex aside, it’s a book with an interestingly Manichean, superherolike worldview; its author calls his younger self a “Miserabalist” and he wrestles with “the darker side of life.” This is the kind of book in which relationships are discussed using phrases like “mutually assured destruction.”

The critic Lester Bangs used a phrase, “imperative groin thunder,” to describe the loud, raw music he loved most. Mr. Mould’s music brings that kind of thunder. Some of the time, and in surprising ways, so does his book.

R.I.P. Laura Ziskin

Laura Ziskin dies at 61; producer of 'Spider-Man' film franchise

Ziskin helped break the glass ceiling for women in Hollywood. In nearly three decades as a producer and studio executive, she had a profound effect on what contemporary moviegoers watch.

Laura Ziskin had a hand in a wide range of films, including "Pretty Woman," "No Way Out" and "As Good As It Gets." At the time of the first "Spider-Man" film, in 2002, many doubted the appeal of comic-book films. The movie went on to gross more than $400 million around the world. (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times / February 7, 2007)

By Steven Zeitchik and Nicole Sperling, Los Angeles Times

June 13, 2011, 12:34 a.m.

Laura Ziskin, a veteran film producer who helped break Hollywood's glass ceiling for women, has died. She was 61.

Ziskin died Sunday of breast cancer at her home in Los Angeles, said a spokesman at Sony Pictures, where she had a producing deal and made many of her movies in recent years.

Ziskin, who had fought a seven-year battle with the disease, also founded a nonprofit televised event, Stand Up to Cancer, that has raised more than $200 million for cancer research.

Best known for producing all the films in the "Spider-Man" franchise — including the upcoming release "The Amazing Spider-Man" — Ziskin had a profound effect on what contemporary moviegoers watch. In nearly three decades as a producer and studio executive, she made or oversaw a wide range of films, including the 1987 Cold War thriller "No Way Out;" the 1990 Richard Gere-Julia Roberts romantic comedy "Pretty Woman;" and 1997's James L. Brooks' Oscar-contending dramedy "As Good As It Gets."

Born March 3, 1950, in the San Fernando Valley to Mae Lee and Jay Ziskin, the latter a writer, Ziskin graduated from USC's School of Cinematic Arts in 1973. She began her Hollywood career as an assistant to Jon Peters, a veteran producer who would go on to head Sony Pictures. As an assistant, she worked on the 1976 remake of "A Star Is Born."

Her first producing credit came with the 1985 dramatic comedy "Murphy's Romance" starring Sally Field, with whom Ziskin formed a production company, Fogwood Films.

Over the next quarter of a century, Ziskin showed an adept hand at both comedies and action movies, the last particularly unusual for female producers at the time. She produced the Dennis Quaid-Meg Ryan 1988 remake of the noir classic "D.O.A." as well Gus Van Sant's 1995 black satire, "To Die For," and lighter fare such as Bill Murray's 1991 comedy, "What About Bob?"

But by far her most significant filmic legacy is "Spider-Man." At the time of the first film, in 2002, many in the industry doubted the broad appeal of comic-book films, but Ziskin pressed forward. The movie, starring Tobey Maguire, grossed more than $400 million around the world and paved the way for the superhero fare now standard during the summer film-going season.

One person close to the production of "The Amazing Spider-Man," with Andrew Garfield as the webbed hero, noted that Ziskin was extremely involved even as her cancer began to spread in recent months.

Although Ziskin had been based on the Sony Pictures lot for years, during the 1990s she also headed a division at 20th Century Fox that was responsible for the kind of serious dramas Hollywood studios rarely make anymore, including "Courage Under Fire," "Fight Club" and "The Thin Red Line."

Ziskin also produced two Oscar telecasts, in 2002 and 2007. Her first effort was notable for landing Woody Allen, famously averse to awards-show hoopla. "Woody wouldn't let us tell anybody. Not even the network knew," she recalled to The Times after the show. Ziskin was also the first woman to produce an Oscar telecast on her own.

Ziskin was a creature of Hollywood; in addition to working on a wide range of movies, she married screenwriter Julian Barry, with whom she had a daughter, Julia.

After the couple divorced, Ziskin became the life partner of Oscar-winning screenwriter Alvin Sargent. More than two decades her senior, Sargent was a veteran Hollywood hand, having written films such as 1966's "Gambit" and 1973's "Paper Moon"; he would also write a number of films Ziskin produced.

Outside the film world, Ziskin was best known for her efforts in helping to found Stand Up to Cancer, a research initiative she founded with Katie Couric, former Paramount chief Sherry Lansing and others. The organization held a high-profile Hollywood telethon that drew on the star power of the media and entertainment world to raise money for cancer research.

At the Producers Guild Awards in January, Ziskin's voice was weak when she received the group's "visionary" award. She spoke about cancer's destruction on families and the importance of encouraging cancer researchers to collaborate on their work. "In my world, the hero always defeats the villain, the boy always gets the girl, and cancer is no more," she said.

But perhaps her most lasting legacy will be her admission to the inner circle of A-list producers, for decades considered an all-boys club. In Mollie Gregory's 2002 book about females and Hollywood, "Women Who Run the Show," Ziskin had one of the most memorable quotes.

"Men have built the cities, made and defined the culture, interpreted the world. At no time in recorded history have women been culture-makers," she said. "Movies are arguably the most influential, important medium in the world. They have a tremendous cultural impact. Because women are now making movies, then women's ideas, philosophy, point of view will seep into that culture. And that's never happened in history. Ever, ever, ever. We can't even see the impact of that yet."

Ziskin is survived by Sargent and her daughter, Julia.

Jessica Walter at 70

In the Park and Then the Wig

By ROBIN FINN

James Estrin/The New York Times

For Jessica Walter, now appearing on Broadway in the Cole Porter musical “Anything Goes,” Sunday morning provides a little time to catch her breath between shows.

THE WEE HOURS I don’t get up too early because I’m recovering from doing two shows on Saturday. I get home from the theater around 11:30 or midnight, and it takes me until 2 to unwind. I’ll look at my computer or else I’ll read; right now I’m reading this wonderful book, “A Widow’s Story,” by Joyce Carol Oates. Of course, if I wasn’t working I’d be waking up in the country on Sunday. Yes, I’ve given up my weekends to be in this show, but are you kidding, it is so worth it! I’m having a ball.

WALK WITH REGGIE I try to get up by 9-ish and quick take the dog for a walk in Central Park. Reggie was a “release” from Guiding Eyes; he kept leading his trainers into light poles, so he was deemed temperamentally unsuited to be a service dog. He was 18 months when we got him; now he’s 7 and weighs 90 pounds. The walking is good exercise for me, because I’ve got to fit into my costumes. The evening gowns are very, very tight!

BIG LATE BREAKFAST I like to eat a late breakfast so I can go through the show without eating anything. We might grab a bite at Popover or order from Barney Greengrass. I’ll have Nova, bagels, cream cheese, whitefish, one cup of coffee and a diet cream soda. It has to be diet soda, which is a joke, considering all the stuff I’ve just eaten.

WIG TRICK I get to the theater by 1 because my wig takes 25 minutes to put on. Nathaniel Hathaway is the wig master for the show, and he has this great trick he does with an 89-cent nylon cap. It’s like an instant brow lift. First he pin-curls your hair, then he puts on the wig cap and pulls it down tight in the back and suddenly you’ve got that deer-in-the-headlights look. The microphone goes on, and then it feels like the wig is being pinned to your brain; it hurts a little.

TEATIME The happiest moment is around 4:45 when the wig comes off. I take out the pin curls, and for a while I look like Shirley Temple. Sometimes I check in on my 90-year-old Aunt Ann after the matinee; she lives in Penn South, and we’ll have a cup of tea.

THE GETAWAY I zip back uptown, and Ron will be waiting on the sidewalk with the dog; then we’re off to Pound Ridge. When we hit the Merritt Parkway and everything’s green, there’s this big sigh of relief; the stress just goes away. It’s like when you see the ocean.

DINNER IN We’ll stop at Scott’s Corners Market for something casual; a cooked chicken, or maybe some meatballs and a salad, and we’ll make pasta when we get home. The house is on three acres, all deer-fenced, so Reggie probably goes in and out 10 times in the first hour. After dinner we’ll watch PBS or HBO or read. Just relax.

WHAT 70 LOOKS LIKE? Workwise, I’m busy, but I’m healthy. I don’t smoke, I rarely have a glass of wine. Maybe I’m the new 70. Speaking of age, I just ran into Betty White at a TV Land function; she’s still so sharp and funny. I said, “Betty, you know, all the great work you’re doing, it’s very encouraging!”

Sad memorial for Fifty-Foot Woman Actress

Alone in life, Yvette Vickers is somewhat less alone in death

At a memorial service for the former Playboy model and horror-film actress who lay undiscovered for nearly a year after her death, her half brother shares what little he knows of her mysterious life.

 

Flowers and a photo are seen before the Beverly Hills memorial service for Yvette Vickers on Friday. (Stefano Paltera / For the Los Angeles Times / June 3, 2011)

By Mike Anton, Los Angeles Times

June 4, 2011

If she hadn't starred in the 1950s cult horror films "Attack of the 50 Foot Woman" and "Attack of the Giant Leeches," if she hadn't posed nude for Playboy, few would have asked how 82-year-old Yvette Vickers could have died in her Benedict Canyon home and remained there undiscovered for nearly a year.

But Vickers did that and more. The voluptuous blond with bedroom eyes appeared on television and Broadway and in minor movie roles until her career petered out in the 1970s.

And so when her mummified body was discovered by a neighbor in April in a home overgrown with ivy and littered with clothes, junk mail and letters, it rated a couple of newspaper stories and an obituary that listed no immediate survivors.

Authorities eventually found one: half brother Perry Palmer, 85. On Friday, he offered a eulogy — an attempt at explanation, really — for Vickers' lonely death during a brief memorial at All Saints' Episcopal Church in Beverly Hills.

"I thought there might be more people here," Palmer said to the 29 who attended — mostly his family, Vickers' neighbors and a few friends who had lost touch with her. "I'll unload my whole thing on you anyway."

It's a story right out of Hollywood. Palmer and Vickers shared a father, Chuck, a saxophone player with a wandering eye for the ladies.

Chuck Vickers and Palmer's mother, Ruth, divorced. Chuck went on to marry a woman who suspected, correctly Palmer says, that her husband still loved his first wife.

"It was a 50-year love affair that lived only in the hearts of Ruth and Chuck," Palmer said.

As a child, Palmer didn't know his real father or his sister Yvette; his mother remarried a level-headed insurance salesman and Palmer's last name was legally changed. It was only when he was about to enter the military that his mother shared her secret: He had a sister.

Palmer got to know Yvette and admired her success.

Vickers was a Playboy playmate of the month in 1959 and "proved to have the perfect look for 1950s drive-in films, along with episodic television," film historian Alan K. Rode told The Times. The low-budget "Attack of the 50 Foot Woman" gave Vickers her first leading film role, a movie that The Times once described as "one of the best bad movies ever made."

She also appeared on Broadway and was a regular on TV in westerns and other fare. For a time she was best known for her 15-year relationship with actor Jim Hutton and her affair with Cary Grant, according to her All Movie biography.

"She was an effervescent, beautiful woman," Palmer said.

But because of their divergent upbringings, they were never close. Eventually they drifted apart again.

"We'd send her letter after letter. No response. We'd send Christmas gifts. No response," Palmer said in an interview before the memorial. "The only address we had for her was a post office box."

Palmer said his sister suffered from macular degeneration, a condition that robbed Vickers of all but her peripheral vision.

The last time the two spoke was in 1995, when their father died at the age of 91.

"I asked her, 'You going to have a memorial?' " Palmer said. "And she said, 'No, all of his buddies have died. I don't think anyone will come.' "

He didn't want the same for his sister, Palmer said.

"I just thought she deserved some recognition given that she was lying there for so many months undetected," he said. "She was a recluse."

Why, exactly? He couldn't say. And after a half-hour, the memorial ended with Palmer having been the only speaker save the priest.

It wasn't Yvette Vickers' whole story. But it would have to do.

Lord love a character actor

Main Course

Christine Baranski: ‘I Was Never Beautiful’

David M. Russell/CBS; Ben Hider/Getty Images; Everett Collection; Isabel Klett

Left, Christine Baranski in “The Good Wife”; right, in “The Birdcage”.

By CATHY HORYN

Published: April 15, 2011

CHRISTINE BARANSKI arrived at Michael’s, the media hangout on West 55th Street, at 12:30 p.m. on the dot. A somewhat later arrival would have guaranteed an entrance, a gust of warm curiosity, but as she passed the empty tables at the front, the few patrons nosing their menus, I realized, or perhaps remembered, that such impromptu moments were best not left to chance. I should have reserved for 1 p.m.

Apparently, though, Ms. Baranski didn’t feel the need to contrive scenes, least of all small ones. Occasionally, over the next three hours, her voice hit a haughty key — Diane Lockhart in “The Good Wife” raising a triumphant glass of Scotch — but this was to be expected and savored, like Gilda’s hair. She had on a sparkling cream dress (Saint Laurent, she revealed), with a necklace of gold chains, and her own lustrous mane looked freshly washed. She asked for my portion of bacon on her Cobb salad, which eventually she consented to have wrapped (“I feel guilty”) and a cup of coffee, followed by a cappuccino (“for dessert”).

Between 12:30 and 3:15, when we left the table and Ms. Baranski automatically put on her dark glasses and we walked leisurely up Fifth Avenue to 68th Street, where we said goodbye, she gave the impression that she had nothing better to do. The dark glasses startlingly brought her celebrity to life and deflected a dozen stares outside Bergdorf’s, but during lunch I don’t think she noticed that the news mavens Barbara Walters and Arianna Huffington were seated two tables away, nor they the actress.

Of course, that is how it should be. Who cares, right? Yet she observed something about New York that threw a different light on all those confident people. Although her remark was made about another occasion — a recent cocktail party Ms. Baranski attended at the Time Warner building, where many literary stars and journalists were present — it seemed a valid comment about the cultural shifts taking place, when the world you know is suddenly not the world you possess.

We had been talking in a meandering way about careers and marriage. For 27 years Ms. Baranski, who is 58, has been married to the actor Matthew Cowles, the black sheep member of a family with ties to Cowles publishing and Drexel banking who has made a respectable living playing bad guys and white-trash types, beginning with a small part in “Midnight Cowboy.” “He’s the one you should be interviewing,” Ms. Baranski said.

I asked her how they met. “We did an Ibsen play in Garden City, Long Island,” she said. “And he asked me if I wanted to ride home on his motorcycle one night. He was this shaggy blond-haired guy who smoked unfiltered Mexican cigarettes. He was really exotic. I was in my early 30s. He loved riding around lower Manhattan — back when SoHo was a little dark. Anyhow, that’s how our romance began. We lived in a few funky lofts downtown. I was doing ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ in Central Park. That’s the first role I played in New York that got some real recognition.” In fact, Mel Gussow, in his review in The New York Times, raved that her Helena was the show’s “single stylish performance.”

That was 1982. Eventually the couple moved to Litchfield, Conn., where Mr. Cowles’s family had an old homestead, so they could raise their two young daughters with fewer hassles. For several years in the mid-’90s, when she was playing the mouthy Maryann in the sitcom “Cybill,” Ms. Baranski commuted to Los Angeles, while Mr. Cowles stayed home. Today, their daughter Isabel Cowles, 26, is a law student, and her sister Lily, 23, is doing graduate work in anthropology at Oxford.

I said, knowing the answer, “They didn’t want to follow their parents into acting?”

Ms. Baranski looked at me and then toward the busy room of diners, her ski-bump nose coming into sharper view. “I almost consider that an achievement, I must tell you,” she purred in her Juilliard-trained voice.

All this talk about former haunts led Ms. Baranski to observe: “We’re kind of all over-stylized. Did you read the Patti Smith book?” She meant “Just Kids,” Ms. Smith’s memoir of the ’70s and ’80s. “God, I loved that.” She then mentioned the Fran Lebowitz documentary — had I seen it? “Well, she talks about how New York of the ’70s belonged to artists and intellectuals and people coming with big dreams. Now it’s for people with money and tourists.”

Still in this vein, I told her I’d picked up the recent New York magazine issue about apartments, with a touching piece by Gay Talese.

Ms. Baranski grinned. “I was standing behind Gay Talese last week. I was at a screening of the Jerry Weintraub movie. We were up in the Time Warner building, with that beautiful view. I was standing behind Gay Talese, who was waiting to get his martini. I thought, This is such a New York moment. Everybody dressed in black.”

She paused, brooding. “The city kind of doesn’t belong to them anymore.”

“Oh?” I said, interested.

“Don’t quote me on it,” she said, in a higher key.

I preferred to — it was innocuous enough. And, anyway, she can’t be the only person to have this thought. She had begun our conversation by saying, “I got here in 1970,” simple enough words for a girl of Polish descent from Buffalo, but words uttered by a million people with similar dreams and sweltering apartments and, like her, scholarships to prestigious schools. She delighted in recalling how she received $1,000 for being “the most hard-working economically needy student” in her Juilliard class, with the expectation that it was to be used for living expenses in the coming term. “And of course I took that money and was at the passport office the next morning,” she said with a laugh. “I was actually able to go to Europe for two months. I remember 10 days in Paris at the cheapest hotel.” Ms. Baranski sighed. “I just felt such a sense of pride that I did that. I was 19. And I did it alone.”

Yet in another way, Ms. Baranski seems uniquely positioned to comment on fame. Her career has had a strange imperishability without ever really ripening. Not only is she in a hit television show, “The Good Wife” on CBS, but she is also playing a dramatic role, after years of doing comedy and musical comedy. As Ms. Baranski herself once noted, she seems in a perpetual state of being “discovered.”

This first time was legitimate — as Shakespeare’s Helena. Then, in 1995, at the age of 42, with two Tonys, Ms. Baranski took the plunge into sitcoms, finding a new audience with “Cybill.” Fans reacted to her deadpan and taste for fashion as if she had buzzed down from Mars, one writing, “Who are you? Where did you come from?” “Cybill” led to Mike Nichols’s hiring her for “The Birdcage,” the 1996 film in which many people first discovered her charms. The following year, Ben Brantley of The Times opened his review of “Promises, Promises,” a revival that turned on her performance, with a plea: “Christine Baranski, come home!”

When she got the role in “The Good Wife” shortly after finishing “Boeing-Boeing” on Broadway, she said the drama’s creators, Robert and Michelle King, didn’t ask her to read for the part of Diane Lockhart. But she heard that the pilot’s director had some reservations. “He didn’t know my work,” she said. So she decided to meet them in Los Angeles. She was going anyway because her friend Chuck Lorre, the creator of “Cybill,” was getting a star on the Walk of Fame.

“On my way back to the L.A. airport — I love stories like this,” Ms. Baranski said, her eyes shining. “Literally the car was waiting. I went in and met Robert and Michelle. David Zucker, the producer, was there. And I had a great meeting. We talked, and two days later I got the job.”

Although it’s Alicia, Julianna Margulies’s character, who carries the show, Diane has emerged as its surprising moral center — tough, liberal, flawed but essentially principled — and with a sexy boyfriend to boot. The sporadic appearances of the gun-toting, conservative Kurt — who lately suggested that Diane chuck her career and come away with him — have taken some of the cling out of her Dolces, to the delight of middle-aged fans.

“I know!” Ms. Baranski exclaimed. “How cool is it that the writers gave me a love interest. I can’t tell you how many women come up to me and say how cool it is that it’s the woman who says, ‘My job is too important right now.’ I love it!”

By 3 p.m., the restaurant was virtually deserted. Ms. Baranski, who is usually on the set two or three days a week, didn’t seem in a hurry. I asked about her weekend plans. “Oh, spring cleaning,” she said happily. Of course, we discussed clothes — Ms. Baranski, who has a great figure, told me she flew to Paris last summer just to see the Saint Laurent retrospective. But I was more curious to know what she thought of her looks. Not being a beautiful woman, she has had to keep people interested in other ways.

Ms. Baranski agreed. “I attribute the longevity of my career to the fact I didn’t have to carry that mantle. I was never beautiful so I’m not unbeautiful. I may not have been a leading lady, but I had great clothes and funny lines. I think I had more flexibility.”

The next day, Ms. Baranski sent me an e-mail thanking me for lunch. The note began with a line from Tom Stoppard’s play “The Real Thing,” which earned her her first Tony — “Happiness is equilibrium... shift your weight.” She thought that she and her husband had done a lot of weight-shifting in the last 27 years. The missive ended with Ms. Baranski noting that her jaunt to Paris last summer was “my first solo trip to Europe since that adventure at the age of 19 ... in the words of Joni Mitchell, I was ‘a free man in Paris.’ ”

What, you were expecting substance?

Beyond reason, or when the celebrity mistakes himself with any semblance of intelligence/attraction:

Critic’s Notebook

Belligerent and Boozy, and That’s Just the Audience

By A. O. SCOTT

Published: April 3, 2011

DETROIT — Charlie Sheen chose Detroit as the starting point for his “My Violent Torpedo of Truth/Defeat Is Not an Option” live performance tour. Before his show at the Fox Theater here on Saturday night you could speculate on a metaphorical link between the city and the star: phoenix rising from the ashes or shattered wreck of former glory. Either one might have seemed appropriate.

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Carlos Osorio/Associated Press

Charlie Sheen began his tour at the Fox Theater in Detroit on Saturday.

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Geoff Robins/Agence France-Presse -- Getty Images

After the Detroit show, audience members showed their displeasure with Mr. Sheen, and the feeling appeared mutual.

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Carlos Osorio/Associated Press

Charlie Sheen's show included a ragged mix of video clips, loud music and profane monologues.

As it happened, Mr. Sheen and Detroit proved to be a disastrous match. The Fox, a lavishly ornamented, carefully restored 5,000-seat show palace evoking a lost golden age of spectacle, is beautiful, but the scene there was ugly, as a boisterous, liquored-up capacity crowd greeted Mr. Sheen with cheers that quickly turned to boos. The show — a ragged mix of video clips, ear-splitting music, profanity-laced monologues and clumsy attempts to encourage audience participation — did not so much end as collapse. After a little more than an hour Mr. Sheen turned the stage over to a rapper he said would “wake up” the increasingly belligerent spectators, or maybe calm them down. After a Snoop Dogg video, the house lights went up, and though the headliner briefly returned to trade insults with a mostly empty house, the evening clearly had not gone according to plan. If there ever was a plan.

You could say that Mr. Sheen and the audience failed each other. The ticket buyers did not show him the “love and gratitude” to which he felt entitled, and he did not give them the kind of entertainment they thought they had paid for. But you could also say that the performer and the audience deserved each other, and that their mutual contempt was its own kind of bond. The ushers, in their black gold-braided uniforms, retained an air of inscrutable dignity in the midst of an orgy of depthless vulgarity. Everyone else in the room — onstage, backstage, in the $69 orchestra seats — had to swallow a gag-inducing, self-administered dose of shame. And no, the journalists who traveled to Detroit to gawk and philosophize at the spectacle are not exempt from that judgment.

What did Mr. Sheen think he was doing? What did the people who snapped up all those tickets expect? What they got, much to their displeasure, was a warm-up set from Kirk Fox, a tall, skinny stand-up comedian who never really had a chance. The booing started early, and as Mr. Fox struggled through his act he tried, masochistically, to embrace the hostility, trashing his own jokes and praising the crowd for being “unified” in its hatred of him. The people wanted Charlie Sheen.

And then they didn’t. Mr. Sheen, taking the stage after a chaotic rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” sung by two spangly blond women, brought two other blond women (excuse me, “goddesses”), who helped him choose a shirt to wear. (They also set fire to a shirt that appeared to have been taken from the wardrobe closet at “Two and a Half Men.”)

He settled on a white, button-front Detroit Tigers jersey with the name Warlock on the back, which inspired some cheers. Other attempts to rally hometown favor were not as well received. “How many people here are holding crack?” he asked. “I’m not smoking crack,” said Mr. Sheen, who has notoriously bragged about “banging seven-gram rocks” of the stuff in the past. “But if I were smoking crack, what better place than Detroit?” Oddly, the wave of applause he seemed to expect did not materialize.

The problem was not that Mr. Sheen’s material was offensive. You are likely to encounter much more obscenity, crude sexual humor and aggression at any comedy club in America, at least on a good night, and the patrons will be in no mood to complain. The problem was that Mr. Sheen did not really have any material, and certainly nothing new. After a loud montage of movie clips — mostly violent snippets from films starring Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and other actors whose ranks Mr. Sheen might at one time have aspired to join — he delivered a kind of mock State of the Union address that sent the evening tumbling irretrievably toward disaster.

With a gonzo grandiloquence that suggested some acquaintance with the early work of Allen Ginsberg — or at least the possession of a thesaurus, the collected rants of Dennis Miller and a pile of Rolling Stone back issues — Mr. Sheen reeled off what he called a “Manny-fest-oh.” “Tonight we trade our vanity for insanity,” he bellowed. “Our stupidity for smart-idity.” Declaring himself the “battle-tested leader” of a vaguely defined movement for freedom, he invited Detroit to bask in “a night of absolute redemption, a night of winning.”

Then — not to bore you with too many details — Mr. Sheen, star of the beloved “Major League” movies, played a little catch, showed part of a short film he wrote and directed long ago, sampled some fan videos and presented some of his own, including a remix of the interview that appeared on “20/20” last month. In short, the best parts of the show were either already available on, or best suited to, YouTube. And Mr. Sheen, whose skill and professionalism as an actor have remained steady through much of the tabloid mayhem of his personal life, proved not to be sufficiently nimble or inventive as a live performer to hold the attention of a large and restless mob.

That is the technical interpretation of what happened Saturday. The show was no good, and the public protested. But then there is the cultural analysis, which in the end is only slightly more interesting. Mr. Sheen is hardly the first celebrity to mistake morbid, hysterical curiosity for adoration, or to think that he could extend his fame by finding the right alloy of self-mockery, bravado and false populism. His act, such as it was, vacillated between sentimental declarations of solidarity with the audience and reminders of his own superiority. “I have two goddesses,” he said to one heckler. “How many do you have?”

Of course the people in the seats — fans, rubberneckers, critics — were guilty of a complementary hypocrisy. We profess dismay at Mr. Sheen’s long history of drug abuse and violence against women, but we have also enabled and indulged this behavior, and lately encouraged his delusional belief that he could beat the toxic fame machine at its own game. The price of a ticket to one of his shows represents a wager that it is impossible to lose. The audience that walked out of the Fox could feel righteously ripped off and thus morally superior to the man they had paid to see, who seemed to feel the same about them. Win-win!

So now the question is: Will the shows go on? Will career suicide become Mr. Sheen’s new career? Or is he finished? I know I am.

Charlie Sheen’s tour stops at Radio City Music Hall on Friday and Sunday. Details are at charliesheen.com/tour.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/04/arts/charlie-sheens-violent-torpedo-tour-flops-in-detroit.html

Women on top

A Club for the Women Atop the Ladder

Hollis Rafkin-Sax

Melanie Sabelhaus, former deputy administrator of the Small Business Administration, spoke at a Belizean Grove event in 2010.

By PAMELA RYCKMAN

Published: April 2, 2011

ON the site of a 17th-century monastery in Cartagena, Colombia, a sort of Illuminati of the business and political worlds  gathered in February for their annual winter rites.

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Tina Fineberg for The New York Times

Women backing women: Ann Kaplan, right, a member of Belizean Grove, helped Alexa von Tobel, center, with seed funding for her company. That led to an investment by a venture capital firm where Theresia Gouw Ranzetta, left, is a partner.

Drawn from government, banking, technology and beyond, its members form a rare  — and global — power elite. Each has been tapped, in Skull and Bones fashion, by an existing member. Each searches out and grooms new talent —  people who can add to this group’s considerable wealth, knowledge and power. 

But men need not apply: this exclusive club is women-only.

It is called Belizean Grove, and if you haven’t heard of it, you’re not alone. Founded 12 years ago, it operates mostly under the radar. The first time it received any real public attention was in 2009, when it became known that Sonia Sotomayor, now a Supreme Court justice, was among its 125 or so members. (She has since quit.)

Despite its low profile, Belizean Grove is fast becoming what could be considered the world’s ultimate old girls’ club. Perhaps that’s no surprise, as it is modeled on one of the nation’s most exclusive old boys’ clubs, Bohemian Grove. That hush-hush group, an extension of the 139-year-old Bohemian Club in San Francisco, has counted so many rich and powerful men among its ranks — including the presidents Eisenhower, Carter, Nixon and both Bushes — that it sounds like something out of a Dan Brown novel. Indeed, in 1942, the men of Bohemian Grove, who meet each summer under a canopy of redwoods in Monte Rio, Calif., dreamed up the Manhattan Project.

Some members of Belizean Grove are working on a mission of their own: the White House Project. Its goal is to have a woman elected president.

“Grovers,” as the members are known, tend to be in their 50s and 60s, and though most are not household names, they represent a rare confluence of wealth and influence. They serve as directors of companies including Xerox, Procter & Gamble, NYSE Euronext, Nasdaq, Nordstrom, DSW, PetSmart and REI. Some previously held high-level positions at blue-chip companies but then left to form their own businesses.

Members also include a Canadian senator and the chief operating officer of the Episcopal Church. Many are Americans, but others are from countries including Colombia, Ecuador, Iceland and New Zealand.

Grovers have capitalized on their network by cutting deals, making multimillion-dollar investments and hiring and mentoring up-and-coming businesswomen. Along the way, the group has become a model for a growing number of women’s business networks.

Members say they have worked and invested together and helped one another join corporate boards, but they are hesitant to reveal details of specific deals. Above all, Grovers protect one another’s privacy. 

 

FOR four days, members convene at a site, generally somewhere in Central or South America, and stretch out on a beach, drink some wine and talk. Conversation flows freely, from topics like leveraged buyouts and international diplomacy to the problems of simultaneously managing the care of children and elderly parents.

Catherine Allen, a Grove member who is C.E.O. of the Santa Fe Group, a strategic consulting firm, puts it this way: “We leave our egos and business cards at the door. It’s about: ‘I have this problem. I’m a C.E.O. of a corporation, what should I do?’ and this becomes a sounding board because there are other women who have been in similar situations.” She adds: “It’s about learning from each other, enriching our minds, developing true friendships. There’s a real generosity of spirit.”

The group emerged informally and without an agenda. The Grovers originally gathered because they otherwise had few outlets for their concerns as they climbed the corporate ladder. But their meetings have led to a continuing dialogue about business, with members gaining access to capital and connections outside their established circles.

Belizean Grove has connected the top women in technology to the top women in finance, to the top women in media, to the top women in law, to the top women in retail, and so on. By reaching horizontally across industries, veteran businesswomen are building critical mass and wielding more influence.

“Women in tech, media and finance have invested together,” says Ms. Allen, who has embarked on a secondary consulting business with three other Grovers. “Many sit on the same venture boards. Many got there because of other women who also sit on those boards.”

 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/business/03grove.html