 I’m extremely happy to say that my article on Scott Sharp’s ESM Racing team is on news stands now, complete with wonderful photos by Robert Holland.
For those of you that don’t live in South Florida but are interested in reading it, there’s a digital version of the article available here (I’d suggest using the zoom tool by clicking on the page).
It’s not often that one gets to hang out with a good bunch of people in the pits at Daytona, watching them race Ferraris. But I did, and I want to thank Scott, Yoyo, Cosmo, Ed and Derek for their time, the access, and the great conversation.
A quick story: Scott Sharp gave me a ride (in a hopped-up golf cart, not, sadly, a Ferrari) from the transporter to the pits for night practice. As he went wide around one corner I leaned over and told him he’d completely missed the apex. His response:
“Yeah man, by a mile. I totally blew that one.”
Like I said: a good bunch of guys.
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 I was recently digging through some my columns for Florida Weekly and landed on this one from December of 2010. It amused me; hope it amuses you. And yes, I’m aware that it’s not timely.
I dislike most mainstream comics. I find humor that’s very broad, obvious and hacky to be irritating, not funny. To rank anywhere higher than the level of what I associate with eighth grade, comics need to be smart and original, not derivative.
Guys like Doug Stanhope, Colin Quinn, Marc Maron, Dave Attell – and Bruce, Carlin, Pryor, Hicks, Kinison, and Michael O’Donoghue (one of my favorite satirists ever) before them, don’t (or didn’t) rely on bad pop culture references to get a laugh: they go much deeper and smarter.
Recently I was watching an episode of “Louie” (staring another smart and hilarious comic, Louis CK) , which generally consists of 22 minutes of smart and highly uncomfortable comedy that CK has clearly mined from deep within his not-insubstantial insecurities, and CK made this simple and profound statement to a stand-up audience:
“Finally I have the body that I want – and that’s a thing people really covet it’s hard thing to achieve, and I did. And I’m going to tell you how to have exactly the body that you want: you just have to want… a shitty body. That’s all it is. You have to want your own shitty, ugly, disgusting body.”
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 Good doggie, don't eat me. Click to enlarge. This article appeared in a different form in “The Mashup,” my weekly print column for Florida Weekly.
In a folder, under my bed, is a 1969 Christmas card from the St. Bernard’s school in New York City. The reason I happen to have this particular card is because a six-year-old version of me is on the cover, holding a leash attached to a dog twice my size (care to guess the breed?). The dog would clearly have no problem dragging me the length of Central Park (where the photo was taken) as a warm up exercise to eating me. In the photo, I’m wearing a very smart cap and Angus Young-style AC/DC shorts.
I attended St. Bernard’s during first, second and sixth grade. The last year I was there I didn’t quite fit in: I had spent those intervening three years at, for the lack of a better term, a hippie school. Constructed in the middle of a potato field in Bridgehampton (we moved out of the city for 3 years) it was predictably laid back, accepting, artsy and not the best set up for a return to an all-boys preparatory school. But during my first two years there I was very happy; apparently happy enough to be asked to represent the school on the front of its annual holiday card.
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 Ahmad Jamal, doing what he did. A quick note: some of you may have read this story already, in print or online; aggregating my work at one site can lead to this sort of thing. Apologies to those of you for whom this is not new.
On the night of January 16, 1958, at the Pershing Lounge in Chicago, Ahmad Jamal sat down to play piano. He was joined, as he had been on many nights previous, by Israel Crosby on bass and Vernell Fournier on drums. The three were artists in residence at the Pershing, and had been playing together for months.
On that Thursday night, though, Jamal’s performance would change a few things. It would change how people thought about jazz. It would change the way musicians approached their craft. And it would change how I thought about my father, albeit after he died, by becoming part of a gift he gave me.
It was a gift we never talked about, one he gave unknowingly, one I did not realize the value of while he was alive. But it was a gift all the same as I’ll explain in a moment. For now though, all you need to know is that January 16 was the night that Ahmad Jamal’s performance of “Poinciana” was recorded.
The song had been a standard in Jamal’s repertoire for long before the recording was made, and as I have no friends that were regulars at the Pershing in the late 50s I have no way of knowing if that particular night’s rendition was in some way different from those that came before or those to follow.
But that’s irrelevant; the fact that it was recorded and released on vinyl made that night’s performance incredibly important. Because that’s what would allow it to reach well beyond the confines of the Pershing, and last far longer than the few minutes it took to play.
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This article originally appeared in Florida Weekly.
Matt Flynn and Rob Bohrer of Palm Beach Gardens Fire Rescue stood stage right in the shadow of a pillar, their nearby gurney holding a full complement of emergency equipment. Both men were familiar with the Heimlich maneuver, a prerequisite for both being a paramedic and taking on today’s assignment: standing by at the 2nd Annual TooJay’s World Class Corned Beef Eating Championship.
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This article originally appeared in “The Mashup,” my weekly newspaper column for Florida Weekly.
Battles have been waged by major brands over market share since long before Gutenberg made it convenient to print marketing materials. You can go back thousands of years to find examples of hardcore marketing techniques designed to sway public opinion away from the opposition and into Brand X’s camp.
I’m sure that more than a few of the Mad Men wished they’d been able to employ some of those methods; had they been allowed to take some cues from the inquisition, for example, think how many more heretical Post Toasties buyers could have been convinced to switch to the one true cereal, the humble Kellogg’s Corn Flake.
Actually torturing consumers into changing brands hasn’t been socially acceptable since the Yugo’s demise, but that doesn’t mean that brands or their loyalists have become any less driven to prove that they’re the best on the block. The battles haven’t always been fought fairly and have, of course, led to some major missteps.
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This article originally appeared in “The Mashup,” my weekly newspaper column for Florida Weekly.
I think it’s about time David Lanschner gives me my turn with the orange juicer. In my very first entrepreneurial effort, my high school friend and I decided to enter the world of street food vending.
We lived in New York City before the island of Manhattan was made over into a Disney version of itself; becoming a food vendor didn’t require anything more than running down to Chambers street and buying a license. So I took my meager savings earned as a messenger after school, David ponied up a similar sum, and we headed down to the Bowery, then populated exclusively by homeless people and restaurant supply stores, to purchase what we needed to start a business selling fresh-squeezed orange juice and croissants.
We came back to my apartment with a low metal cart onto which we could mount a wire-frame basket to hold oranges, a cutting board that could also be mounted on the cart that would double as our juicer platform and a hand-operated orange juicer.
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This article appeared in slightly different form in The East Hampton Star, as well as “The Mashup,” my weekly newspaper column for Florida Weekly.
It was cold on the beach. 5 AM or so, waiting to set nets, fishing with the Havens crew in Amagansett. I was almost 15 and had left the boarding school I attended in ninth grade a bit before the end of the school year (long story).
I moved to my parents’ summer house in East Hampton where Doug Kuntz, an on-again off-again boyfriend of my older sister and in need of a place to live, was installed to keep an eye on me. He was my ticket to fishing with the Havens family, haul seiners for generations. Haul seining was taught to white settlers by the local Indians, and remained much the same over the centuries with the exception of 4-wheel-drive trucks with winches replacing hauling the nets by hand, and rowboats being retired in favor of twenty-foot motorized dories towed to the beach and launched through the surf.
Our dory would launch just before dawn when the truck towing it would back quickly and violently into the ocean and come to a sudden stop, letting inertia pull the boat free. While the truck pulled out of the water as fast as possible, sometimes with the help of a tow line already set in place and wrapped around a winch of another truck, the dory would power through the beach break, wader-clad fishermen preparing to drop nets after clearing the waves.
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 Well, he does look like he's been hitting the bottle...
This article originally appeared in “The Mashup,” my weekly newspaper column for Florida Weekly.
When someone takes the time to pair wines with breakfast cereals, as Gary Vaynerchuk did last year (if you’re wondering what to pair with Cap’n Crunch, it’s the 2007 Von Kesselstatt Spatlese Scharzhofberger Riesling), I think it’s time to admit that the obsession with pairing has gotten a bit out of hand.
Don’t get me wrong: I certainly like food, and I’ve been known to enjoy an occasional glass of wine with a meal, but the obsession some people have with claiming that the notes of fruit from the wind passing over the pear tree in the field adjoining the grape arbors sets of some part of the steak sauce is lost on me.
Call me unsophisticated, but for me wine pretty much comes in two varieties: wine that tastes delicious and wine that doesn’t. Picking out the subtleties of why it’s good or bad isn’t my bag, though I might well pretend otherwise if I were to sit down for dinner with the Queen of England (“why yes, your highness, I do find this to be a delightfully playful glass of the ol’ grape”).
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This article originally appeared in “The Mashup,” my weekly newspaper column for Florida Weekly.
The topic of moving came up at my house recently. Nothing definite, just a preliminary chat between spouses, but it’s a worrisome thought all the same. Years ago, before I was married, well before I had children, moving was a fairly common occurrence for me.
One year I moved to Washington DC and lasted almost nine months before packing up and moving back to New York. Not much time, I’ll admit, but longer than I had been able to stay in Houston the year before. Of course in my defense, I might have lasted in Texas a bit longer had I not come home from work one day to discover a mysterious set of tire tracks leading to my front door, and approximately one half of the objects that had been in the house that morning missing. CU349CP3GUUG
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I’m extremely happy to say that my article on Scott Sharp’s ESM Racing team is on news stands now, complete with wonderful photos by Robert Holland.
