Refusing George Clooney’s Burrito
By Tom Nawrocki

It was an early October afternoon, still a hot part of the year in Hollywood, when I first laid eyes on George Clooney. We were in the lobby of a low-slung brick studio in Burbank where Clooney was to record the commentary for the Good Night, and Good Luck DVD; I was there for Rolling Stone writing a story about DVD commentaries. He’s not very tall for such a manly heartthrob, maybe five-eleven in his big clunky black shoes. But goodness, is that man ever tan. This was a Saturday, so he wasn’t working at his day job and I don’t think there was any makeup involved, but George’s hair is dark brown verging on black, and the skin tone of his forehead was just a shade or two lighter than his hair.

We got down to business around 2pm, with Clooney and his co-writer/producer/old friend Grant Heslov taping their audio track with more than their share of grogginess and false starts. About 20 minutes in, a hesitant voice came in to the headphones from the control room: “Excuse me? Your lunch is here.”

In came a whole bag of steak burritos from some dive across the street. George had ordered way more food than he and Grant wanted, just in case the random publicists and technicians in the room were hungry. Now, you might think that George Clooney is so rich he can afford to buy burritos for the entire adult populace of Burbank, but just as likely, he knew that there was no way he was paying for any of this. Someone at the front desk paid for these burritos long before George had a chance to. When you’re George Clooney, you can order a hundred burritos and always expect someone else to cover for you.

Clooney made it clear that this was not just his lunch but his breakfast, but the rest of us seemed to have eaten. There was at least one steak burrito unclaimed in the bag, and George, rather generously, I thought, asked me if I wanted it. No thanks, I said. (I had had lunch already at In-n-Out Burger, where I have nearly all my post-morning meals when I am on the West Coast.)

“You’re gonna regret it,” George said. “These are really good burritos.” He undercut his own case a few minutes later, when a publicist mentioned to him a recording of an Edward R. Murrow speech that had been downloaded to the Internet; Clooney replied, “I’m gonna download that burrito in about 10 minutes.”

The rest of the afternoon unwound rather unspectacularly, although we did talk briefly about baseball as we parted. It was the last weekend of the 2005 regular season, and in the parking lot, George spoke enthusiastically although not very knowledgeably about the postseason permutations still in play. And then he and Grant were off, in a big black Jaguar, no doubt in search of women who would not refuse George’s burrito. I bet they didn’t have to ask very many of them.

Afterward, I told a friend of mine that Clooney seemed like just about the happiest guy on earth that afternoon. “If that bastard’s not happy,” he replied, “there’s no hope for the rest of us.” There’s not much hope for me, anyway — for various reasons unrelated to the quality of the work, the story never ran, in Rolling Stone or anywhere else. Good Night, and Good Luck is already out on DVD, so it will never run. I haven’t bothered watching the movie again. But I have had the occasional burrito.

The Situation and the Story is an incisive meditation by Vivian Gornick about the peculiar demands and rewards of personal narrative.

“To fashion a persona out of one’s own undisguised self is no easy thing. A novel or a poem provides invented characters or speaking voices that act as surrogates for the writer. Into those surrogates will be poured all that the writer cannot address directly—inappropriate longings, defensive embarrassments, anti-social desires—but must address to achieve felt reality. The persona in a nonfiction narrative is an unsurrogated one. Here the writer must identify openly with those same defenses and embarrassments that the novelist or poet is once removed from. It’s like lying down on the couch in public—and while a writer may be willing to do just that, it is a strategy that most often simply doesn’t work. Think of how many years on the couch it takes to speak about oneself, but without all the whining and complaining, the self-hatred and the self-justification that make the analysand a bore to all the world but the analyst. The unsurrogated narrator has the monumental task of transforming low-level self-interest into the kind of detached empathy required of a piece of writing that is to be of interest to the disinterested reader.”

Interestingly, Gornick has caught a bit of flak for her admission that nonfiction memoirs (her own included) don’t necessarily have to consist of facts and nothing but. Here is her elaboration on what she meant.

Which way does the SMITH audience lean on the question of truth and truthiness?

In the post-Labor Day crush of gallery openings, there’s one that personal media-heads will not want to miss.

On Tuesday the 12th, Lucas Samaras: iMovies premieres at the PaceWildenstein gallery (534 West 25th Street in Chelsea).

The 69-year-old Greek-born Samaras has been involved with portraiture for decades; for his 1979-1981 Sittings series, he invited friends and acquaintances to his studio, where he cajoled them into stripping nude and striking poses for a large-format Polaroid camera. Since the dawn of the century, Samaras has gone digital, and in his exhibition at PaceWildenstein, the tables have turned. The Sittings photos showed a clothed Samaras looking on at the antics of his unclothed friends. The current work is a 25-channel video installation; the focal point is a five-minute iMovie called Ecdysiast, in which Samaras himself removes his clothes and mugs for the camera’s distorting lens. The 24 other videos in the installation show footage of Samaras’s friends and acquaintances — including famous art-world figures like Chuck Close, Jasper Johns, and Claes Oldenburg — as they watch Ecdysiast.

Five other video works in the show are each made up of between four and six short films apiece. Many of these flms were shot in Samaras’s 62nd-floor Midtown apartment, and offer takes on slices of ordinary life.

I want to see this show for several reasons. First, because although Samaras doesn’t enjoy the wide name-recognition of Close, Johns, or Oldenburg, he’s been influential in certain art circles for decades. Second, he’s made particularly deep footprints in self-portraiture; the New York Times points out that he was photographing himself in various costumes and identities long before Cindy Sherman achieved fame for her similar approach. Thirdly, I’m beyond intrigued by the assertion that Samaras used the “Bump” filter on iMovie to distort the image of himself in the Ecdysiast movie. Is this the same filter that everyone I know is obsessed with using to take funhouse-mirror pictures of themselves with the built-in “Photo Booth” feature on their MacBooks? If so, I’ll be tickled to the core to see how this dorky popular fad translates to a high-art setting.

Lucas Samaras: iMovies runs through October 7.

For those of you not hip enough (or recent enough graduates of college/high school) to be on Facebook, a little background: recently, Facebook redesigned its site, adding in what it called “News Feeds.” Essentially, what this meant was that anytime anyone signed in to the site, they could see what all their friends had been up to. For instance, if I wrote a comment on someone’s “wall,” all my friends could then see whose wall I had posted on, what time I had posted, and what I had written. Similarly, if I announced that I was now in a relationship, added new photos, joined new groups, anything like that, any of my friends could see it.

Facebook’s users flipped out. Reportedly, 600,000 have joined a group petitioning Facebook to get rid of the news feeds. Everyone, it seemed, was freaked out by just how much information was now available, and how quickly.

To be honest, I didn’t like the new format, and I initially figured most of my friends I saw complaining about it, on Facebook and elsewhere, had the same issue I did: the new format was, well, ugly. Not so — as one user put it, “It’s making it so much easier for people who want to do stalking to stalk. Facebook users really think Facebook is becoming the Big Brother of the Internet recording every single move.”

Ultimately, I think, this comes back to what I’ve said here before, and what I wrote about in this article for Salon.com: my generation has convinced itself that what it posts on the Web, that most public of forums, is somehow private. Because of the reporting I’ve done, I’m aware of the fact that nothing of what we do online really is private. For people who hadn’t yet come to that realization, the truth was suddenly, and literally, staring them in the face.

A mea culpa from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, posted to the home page of the site, follows after the jump. After reading it, I get the feeling that they felt the same way I do — they know, from working in the industry, that there is no privacy in social networking. They must have mistakenly thought their users realized that by now, and would want something like these news feeds. It’s a gigantic misstep; as John Cassidy wrote in the New Yorker a few months back, part of the appeal of Facebook (as opposed to MySpace) was that it seemed more private, since it restricted who exactly could view your profile. (The article’s not online, but the San Francisco Chronicle’s “Tech Chronicles” blog discussed that point a little here.) Now that the illusion’s been busted, I notice groups on the site talking about all sorts of Facebook privacy violations — one accuses them of selling user photos to advertisers, for instance. (I tried finding the language the group references to prove Facebook’s doing that, but couldn’t, so I can’t confirm that one way or another.)

My guess is that Facebook’s lost a lot of its users’ trust, and, because it’s an issue of an entire world of illusions shattered, they’ll have a hard time gaining it back. That’s going to be a big problem for them.

(more…)

And no, it won’t be at the hands of any bears: as this week’s video reveals, it’s because God is very, very angry.

This one’s the new hot viral video in the liberal blogosphere; it features Fred Phelps, the preacher who has become famous for protesting at military funerals and declaring that the deaths are just punishment from God for homosexuality in America. Seems Colbert and his partner in sin, Jon Stewart, had a little fun at the Emmys, with Colbert calling the audience “Godless sodomites.” As you can imagine, Phelps was more than a little upset by this — seems only he has the right to call people Godless sodomites. (And worse.)

And yes, I’m mostly putting this up to make fun of the obviously deranged Fred Phelps. But there’s a SMITH-ian aspect to this too. Yes, it’s probably a negative thing that Phelps can get on the air and broadcast his hatred worldwide, but what he’s doing here is something anyone can do now, and that’s undoubtedly positive. You don’t need to be on a network to get your views across in this day and age, not when you’ve got YouTube.

The best writers don’t hold back. They not only tell the stories most of us don’t normally reveal, but they do it well. I was thinking about this while I read Factotum by Charles Bukowski. The guy told his hard luck, hard drink, hard women stories in a brutally honest and straightforward way, with a poetic charge careening masterfully at the end of every line.

What got me reading Bukowski again recently was watching the Born Into This documentary. I wrote about that at 52projects.com. You watch that documentary and think, How did he get all that writing done?

The answer, or at least one answer to that question, is in his poem “So You Want to Be A Writer?”:

“if it doesn’t come bursting out of you,
in spite of everything,
don’t do it.”

And in terms of not telling the story, the poem covers that as well:

“if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you’re not ready.”

The first ten people who leave a comment about Bukowski (and come on, we all have a thought or feeling about Bukowski and his writing, a favorite Bukowski book, a “how I discovered Bukowski” tale), will get a free copy of Factotum.

We’re deep into the September 11 anniversary stories, some conspiratorial, some innovative, some fresh and fascinating (like a story today in the Times called, aptly, Old New Yorkers, Newer Ones, and a Line Etched by a Day of Disaster). Tomorrow, we’ll have up a round-up of some of the sites we’ve returned to over the years for varied but all very personal takes on the story.

Understandably, a lot of us have September 11 fatigue. I don’t. My connection to September 11 isn’t any more personal than that of anyone else living in NYC at the time who didn’t actually know anyone who died (although my cat got sick on September 12 and never recovered and I blame all toxic stuff in the air). One thing 9/11 did was solidify my thinking about why and how we tell stories.

I did an interview about SMITH with a woman from Writer’s Digest this morning and she asked me why I started SMITH. A lot of reasons, some of which I yammered on about a while back here, but a lot of which I don’t talk about unless I’m really in the mood (which I guess I was today). See, of all the stories on 9/11 the one that stuck to my bones above all others was the Portraits of Grief, those small obits of unknown people that a lot of us read day after day in the months following the attacks. Sometimes we read these stories of Michael D. D’Auria: Success in the Kitchen or Dajuan Hodges: A Dancer and a Ham while alone in our homes; other times sobbing in a subway car while surrounded by strangers. But the song remains the same: the best way the newspaper of record could tell the biggest story of lives was by doing so one person at a time. These people weren’t famous, these people didn’t by most standards leave celebrity-style lives. But when reporters did the hard, hard work of talking to their friends and family, they found something fascinating or heroic or wonderful or weird or wild to say about each and every person who died on 9/11.

Everyone has a story. And everyone’s story deserves to be told. And that’s why we started SMITH.

First of all, some good news:

Josh Wolf has been released from prison. He’s free on bail (really, on his own recognizance, which some legal observers think is a sign the court believes he has a case) as a panel of the Ninth Circuit considers his appeal. Wolf told reporters he’ll go back if he has to. His blog has the latest updates, as well as a transcript of the speech he gave upon being released.

Also, via Crooks and Liars, news of a case to watch:

The California Supreme Court is set to hear arguments in San Francisco Tuesday on whether someone who posts a defamatory comment by another person on the Internet can be sued for libel.

Two civil liberties groups say the court’s eventual ruling, due in three months, could have far-reaching implications for free speech on the Internet.

While the case before the court concerns individuals - a Canadian doctor seeking to sue a women’s health activist for posting a third person’s comment about him - the court’s ruling could also determine whether Internet service providers can be held liable when they knowingly allow defamatory remarks to be posted.

Kurt Opsahl, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, said last week “it would be a disaster” if the state high court allows such lawsuits.

“The Internet would not be the rich and diverse place it is now,” Opsahl said.

No Stars for Connie Chung
By Michael Finkel

It was quite possibly the most hallucinogenic thing I’ve ever seen, not counting my experiences on hallucinogens. Check that. It was the most hallucinogenic thing I’ve ever seen, including all experiences on hallucinogens. The sky was pulsing in great van Gogh swirls of nail-polish pink and glow-stick green. It was the northern lights, the aurora borealis, in full astral splendor.

This was in 1994, in Lillehammer, Norway. I was there, working as a minion for CBS television’s coverage of the winter Olympics. The CBS headquarters was essentially a windowless basement bunker. I’d stepped outside for a bit of fresh air when the heavens exploded. I watched, alone, for a few minutes, then decided I needed to tell someone else about this, perhaps even gather a camera crew to record it. So I walked back inside. And there, sitting not 20 feet from the exit, was Connie Chung.

I’d been in Norway for a couple of weeks by this point, and hadn’t actually uttered a single word to Ms. Chung. Now, however, I did.

“Have you ever seen the northern lights?” I asked her.

“No,” she said. She was dressed smartly, anchorpersonishly.

“Well, they’re out right now,” I said, excitedly. “They’re incredible!”

She gazed at me with a blank look on her face.

“I mean they’re literally right outside that door,” I continued, pointing at the exit. It would have required approximately 10 seconds for her to walk and see the lights. But she just sat there. I was a young man at the time, not so jaded as I am today, and the thought of a journalist not being interested in experiencing something new — something so amazing and just outside the door — was beyond my comprehension. I couldn’t let it go.

“You don’t want to see them?” I asked.

“No,” she said.

I still couldn’t let it go. “No?” I said, perhaps a touch impudently. “Why not?”

“These shoes are uncomfortable,” she said, “and I don’t feel like walking in them.”

It had all the details of a perfectly tailored meta meme. Working mom wrenches herself from warm bed, heads to a NYC airport in the dark, watches the last vestige of her plane comfort (Burt’s Bees lip balm) get confiscated, and doesn’t even finish her coffee before it’s time to board. But, she does get to watch a TV news update, featuring the Forbes.com writer (male, of course), who took such an offensive posture that masses of psychotically busy working women were inspired to find a non-existent second to get to their keyboards and fire into the ether. And honestly, crackberry web-browsing being slightly more efficient, I might’ve joined them before a well-meaning flight-attendant turned me off. Who, incidentally, wouldn’t have been there in the ideal world of said Forbes writer. I mean, the reasons - economic, political, cultural - of why his premise is insane, not to mention, inane, are too long and tedious to list.

So. People wrote emails. Posted comments (thousands of them). Just another day, right? Mass opinionating. So what? Well, the story got pulled.

Let’s talk about that. Snakes on a plane plot-changes, check. American Idol chosen, done. CNN.com vote cast, yep. But in this case, we’re not talking entertainment or user-choice. We’re talking old media. Uniquely patriarchal, financially-based old media. And when that particularly stodgy magazine not only ripped down the story, but Mr. Forbes himself apologized, a small barely perceptible crack appeared in the glass ceiling, and the real power of human outcry became evident.

The posting/re-posting of the male vs female point of view will keep feminists, genderologists and humorists busy for awhile. But the real story has to be how this week, a whole lot of people took an old media pundit to task. The peeps took to their keyboards. And, old media (rather rapidly) responded.

How sacred are online stories? Apparently, when enough outrage is voiced, not so much.