Michael Shapiro's Blog, page 2
July 18, 2022
Book Passage Travel Writers and Photographers Conference, August 8-11, 2024
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Book Passage Travel Writers and Photographers Conference, August 18-21, 2022
July 17, 2022
Press Democrat, Feb. 3, 2022, Actor Peter Coyote explores Zen wisdom and self-criticism in new book
I may not have chosen a lucrative career but there’s no one better than Peter Coyote to help me see that there are far more valuable riches than money. Bottom line: I didn’t earn much for this story but got to spend nearly three hours with Peter at his home in the west Sonoma County hils, drinking coffee, telling jokes and talking to him about his books, his life as an actor and his political activism. Here’s an excerpt from the story, for the full feature, click here to read it in The Press Democrat.
Now an ordained Buddhist priest, Coyote is a modern renaissance man with more than 140 acting credits, including playing the scientist Keys in “E.T. the Extra Terrestrial.”
He’s a guitarist, singer and songwriter, and the author of two memoirs, “Sleeping Where I Fall” about the counterculture figures he knew in his youth, and “The Rainman’s Third Cure” about his mentors.
Photo of Peter Coyote by Alvin Jornada of The Press Democrat
Yet he may be best known, or most heard, as the authoritative narrator of Ken Burns’ documentaries, including “The Vietnam War,” “The Roosevelts” and “Country Music.”
Vulture, an online culture magazine, called him “God’s stenographer” and said, “His calm, cowboy-around-a-campfire timbre is basically the voice of America.”
At the Zen center, Coyote began teaching acting and “started to realize there were certain parallels between meditative states and the freedom of improvised states.”
He began experimenting with masks, and “learned that if I worked with you by giving you exercises that would push you against the edges of yourself, I’m going to change your feelings.”
By enacting scenarios “where you don’t have time to think, you have to leap into ridiculous situations. Your life is not at risk, but your ego is at risk.”
Coyote celebrated his 80th birthday last fall, and though the pandemic has halted his in-person classes, he occasionally conducts mask workshops online.
“In 40 years of doing these classes, when I put a mask on you and hold a mirror up in front of you, I’ve never had a person not discover a character, cold sober, and have 10 minutes of absolute freedom, no self criticism, no self consciousness.”
Coyote calls these tastes of liberation “enlightenment light.” Then he makes his pitch for meditation and explains that we have no fixed self.
“There’s no organ that corresponds to yourself. It’s just an awareness,” he said.
June 10, 2022
AFAR, June 2022: I Love Debauching People: The Trailblazing Ways of Ireland’s Greatest Travel Writer, Dervla Murphy
Dervla Murphy with her dog, Wurzel.
“So how did your event go yesterday,” Dervla asked, laughing at the word I’d used to describe an appearance in Lismore the night before to promote my book, A Sense of Place.
“Is ‘event’ too grand a word?” I responded.
“No, it’s just that the word amuses me,” Dervla said. “To me, event suggests something really momentous, really important. So when I’m told I’m having an event in Edinburgh or wherever, it’s as though I’m coming along and creating an earthquake,” she said with her hearty laugh. “It’s ridiculous.”
I wasn’t offended in the least – she was right as always unpretentious and down to earth. When she died at age 90 in May 2022, AFAR magazine asked me to share my memories of Dervla, as a literary hero, colleague and friend.
Below is the opening of the story, to read it in full on AFAR’s site, click here.
In 2013, as I arrived at the iron gates guarding her rustic house, Dervla, then age 82, greeted me with a powerful bear hug and thrust a can of beer into my hand. I hesitated—it was still morning and I’d only been up for a couple of hours. Dervla laughed and toasted debauchery, saying: “I love debauching people!” A bit hunched due to a shoulder injury, Dervla ushered me inside and brought out a salad of boiled potatoes, hard-boiled eggs, and a loaf of home-baked brown bread. Then she emerged with an armload of beers. “The drunken orgy’s underway!” she hollered in her resonant Irish brogue. “I’m a wreck!”
AFAR , June 2022: I Love Debauching People: The Trailblazing Ways of Ireland’s Greatest Travel Writer, Dervla Murphy
“Come over for lunch. You can help me get a few things done ’round the house. Ever since I hurt my shoulder, I haven’t been able to do any hoovering,” said Dervla Murphy, Ireland’s most intrepid travel writer, when I let her know I was coming to the southern Ireland town of Lismore in 2013, where I’d had a book talk scheduled. I’d met the sturdy and informal author when we were panelists at the Key West Literary Seminar in 2006. That was a long way from Ireland: powder-blue skies, pink taxis, and abundant sunshine—Dervla had just returned from a reporting trip to Cuba for a book titled, The Island That Dared.
Dervla Murphy with her dog, Wurzel.
“So how did your event go yesterday,” Dervla asked, laughing at the word I’d used to describe an appearance in Lismore the night before to promote my book, A Sense of Place.
“Is ‘event’ too grand a word?” I responded.
“No, it’s just that the word amuses me,” Dervla said. “To me, event suggests something really momentous, really important. So when I’m told I’m having an event in Edinburgh or wherever, it’s as though I’m coming along and creating an earthquake,” she said with her hearty laugh. “It’s ridiculous.”
I wasn’t offended in the least – she was right as always unpretentious and down to earth. When she died at age 90 in May 2022, AFAR magazine asked me to share my memories of Dervla, as a literary hero, colleague and friend.
Below is the opening of the story, to read it in full on AFAR’s site, click here.
In 2013, as I arrived at the iron gates guarding her rustic house, Dervla, then age 82, greeted me with a powerful bear hug and thrust a can of beer into my hand. I hesitated—it was still morning and I’d only been up for a couple of hours. Dervla laughed and toasted debauchery, saying: “I love debauching people!” A bit hunched due to a shoulder injury, Dervla ushered me inside and brought out a salad of boiled potatoes, hard-boiled eggs, and a loaf of home-baked brown bread. Then she emerged with an armload of beers. “The drunken orgy’s underway!” she hollered in her resonant Irish brogue. “I’m a wreck!”
May 7, 2022
Old Crow Medicine Show’s catalog goes deeper than ‘Wagon Wheel’ – Press Democrat, July 8, 2022
Screenshot of front of The Press Democrat’s entertainment section on July 8, 2022.
Most editors don’t mind if you write a bit longer than assigned. I was asked to write 900 to 1,000 words about Old Crow Medicine Show for The Press Democrat, so it would have been fine, for example, to submit 1,100 words. Yet my interview with bandleader Ketch Secor went so well and was so fascinating that I asked my editor if I could go even longer. “We will make room, no worries,” she wrote back. I wrote 1,650 words which occupied the majority of the front page and a full page inside the paper’s entertainment section. These days, when print space is so tight, publishing a long story in its entirety is just about the highest compliment an editor can offer. To read the story in full in The Press Democrat, click here.
Below is an excerpt from the end of the story, about the band’s famed adaptation of a lost Bob Dylan remnant.
When writing “Wagon Wheel,” Secor sensed it was special, calling it a “blessing” and saying it carries a bit of magic. “When you say something’s blessed, it means it’s holy, in the way that four aces is a holy hand. I know that when I have a really hot hand, it scares me.” Asked if the song has ever been an albatross, Secor said, “It’s hard to feel anything other than appreciative of having been able to hold the holy hand, even though it’s mostly stolen and half borrowed, and passed along too.”
Old Crow’s carnival-themed video of “Wagon Wheel” — filmed at a fairground in Smyrna, Tennessee, with a cameo by Gillian Welch — has had more than 70 million views on YouTube. But that pales in comparison to the nearly 360 million views of Darius Rucker’s version of the song.
Secor was happy the song was covered by Rucker, “one of only a handful of African American recording artists” in country music, because “the genesis of the song was African American.” That “contributes to the kind of the holiness of having a hot hand and passing it along. I’m really appreciative that it was saved” for Rucker, Secor said. “Somewhere up there, if the Great Spirit cares anything about American popular music, then this was a divine decision.”
February 17, 2022
Fran Lebowitz doesn’t care what you think, Press Democrat, Feb. 10, 2022
Fran Lebowitz on the cover of Outside magazine in 1983.
As I prepared to interview Fran Lebowitz, my friend and colleague Tim Cahill told me that she’d appeared on the cover of Outside magazine. This surprised me so I did a bit of digging and ended up writing this sidebar to accompany my story — click here for my story in the Press Democrat. Below is the sidebar about Lebowitz’s unlikely appearance in Outside.
A hard-smoking New Yorker and avowed city dweller, author Fran Lebowitz was perhaps the least likely person to be featured in Outside magazine.
Yet she graced the cover of the August 1983 issue. You might never know by looking at the image that the photo was shot in Manhattan.
Here’s how it happened: Lebowitz — who had written, “To me the outdoors is what you must pass through in order to get from your apartment into a taxicab” — was approached by Outside magazine to be the subject of a feature story. “I don’t know how to camp,” she told them.
A persistent editor persuaded her. Lebowitz headed for the great outdoors with writer E. Jean Carroll and photographer George Butler.
She brought a Brooks Brothers suitcase and wore a camel hair coat because, she said, she didn’t own a down jacket.
The trip was one night on private land in Pennsylvania, or maybe it was New Jersey. She can’t remember. What she does remember is that it was deer-hunting season and she heard gunshots. To prevent becoming the punchline of a local news story — she could imagine a hunter being quoted as saying “I thought she was a deer” — she asked to go to a nearby store to buy some orange clothes.
Butler had brought steaks from Lobel’s, an esteemed New York butcher, and they grilled them and ate under the stars.
“We finished this dinner. It was like eight o’clock,” Lebowitz told The Press Democrat.
“So I said, ‘What are we going to do now? We’re in the middle of nowhere. But I remember on the way here on the highway we passed a movie theater. Why don’t we go to the movies?’ They said, ‘We can’t go to the movies. That would be cheating.’ … And they put up the tent, one tent, which I really objected to.”
Some time after the trip, an editor called Lebowitz and said they needed to re-shoot the photos.
“I said, ‘I’m not going to the country again.’ So we went to Washington Square Park (in lower Manhattan), near where I lived at the time.”
In the photo, Lebowitz is sitting on the grass and wearing her camel hair coat, her left arm leaning on her suitcase, a metal camping cup by her side.
“They made a tent,” she recalled. “I sat in front of the tent, and they took a very close picture. And that’s what was on the cover of Outside.”
February 9, 2022
Bluesman Robert Cray says ‘goodbye old friend’ to Eric Clapton, Press Democrat, Dec. 3, 2021
After a decade of honing his craft and playing gritty clubs, Robert Cray burst onto the blues scene in the mid-1980s and became a global sensation. None other than B.B. King anointed him as the great blues hope who could carry the torch to the next generation.
Cray played with John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters; he opened for Eric Clapton and became good friends with the self-proclaimed guitar god. In 2021, Cray was slated to open a series of arena shows for Clapton, but after Clapton and Van Morrison collaborated on an anti-vax anthem, Cray told his old friend that he couldn’t participate in the tour.
From the story: “I’m not associating with anybody who’s going to be that selfish,” Cray said in a phone interview. The message of “Stand and Deliver,” starting with the line, “You let ’em put the fear on you … but not a word you heard was true,” is “just the total opposite of what I, and people I know, are all about,” Cray said.
The song, written by Morrison, gets even more provocative in the second verse when Clapton sings, “Do you wanna be a free man, or do you wanna be a slave?”
Comparing mask mandates and public health efforts to slavery “was just way out of bounds,” Cray said. “You know, he’s playing this kind of music (blues) that came about through slavery.”
After 35 years of friendship, Cray contacted Clapton, thinking he could have a productive conversation about “Stand and Deliver.”
Cray was wrong. He said Clapton has become “standoffish” recently and that he dismissed the slavery line as a reference to British servitude centuries ago.
Clapton has “a huge voice, and he could do so much for people during this crisis,” Cray said. “And he’s not using it the right way.” …
Throughout his career, Cray has walked his talk, and his withdrawal from Clapton’s tour didn’t sound like a difficult decision. “It’s more important now” to adhere to one’s principles, Cray said. “You have to fight.” In his music, as in his life, Cray has long been willing to take a stand. And deliver.
January 13, 2022
National Geographic, September 2021: Jane Goodall joins campaign to plant a trillion trees by 2030
In 2021, a colleague asked if I’d like to interview Goodall about her Trees for Jane initiative and I leapt at the chance. The best part of this interview may have been hearing about a tree Jane loved when she was a child. She spoke to me from the home her family has occupied since that time, looking out the window at that very tree.
“When I was a child, I loved Beech so much. I did my homework up there. I read books up there. I went to the tree when I was sad. When I was ten, I wrote out my own version of a will,” Goodall told me. It stated that her grandmother, who owned the house, would leave Jane her favorite tree. “She signed it and left me Beech.”
Until sheltering in place began in March 2020, Goodall had been on the road up to 300 days a year, imploring adoring audiences to care for the planet and all its inhabitants: the chimps, the trees, the humans, fish great and small, and everyone else. But the pandemic sent Goodall back to her family home, where she tirelessly continued her work via Zoom conversations and presentations.
I first met Goodall in 2007, in an interview in her hotel room, where we spoke for about a half hour. She was warm and gracious and though I was probably one of thousands of people to interview her that year, she gave me her undivided attention and was genuinely warm and interested in my life. She truly walks her talk.
After the 2021 interview, Goodall said she remembered me which I found astounding because it had been 14 years since we’d spoken at length and also because she’s said she has a disorder that makes it hard for her to remember faces.
Even better, Trees for Jane co-founder Jeff Horowitz told me, “Jane loves you; she thinks you’re a great interviewer.” It doesn’t get any better than that.
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