Merrill Markoe's Blog, page 4

Bob Dylan’s Xmas lights: A Final Wrap Up

This year, since I have a monthly column for VICE, I wrote up the past 6 years of light snooping into one big piece. I re-visited every set of lights from 2008 to present. Here are this year’s lights. For an explanation, you can read the whole piece HERE. In case that link isn’t working, here is the URL: http://www.vice.com/read/i-have-an-un...  Visit often.  They count the page views.

Happy Holidays everyone.

 

 

 

WORLD EXCLUSIVE: An interview with Neil Diamond’s Chair

Forty three years after Neil Diamond released his hit song, “I am I Said,” the much maligned chair from the chorus has decided to come forward and set the record straight.

 

A Dylan Christmas MIRACLE

UPDATE:

With only a few days to go until Christmas, an amazing thing has happened. A brand NEW second string of lights has been added to the annual Bob Dylan display. This is a sign that this will surely be the most amazing Christmas ever. Or that a new member of the staff has been upgrading the lights for some reason. Perhaps because I am making everyone punchy. Either way: Merry Christmas everyone. Merry Christmas.

(If you missed the original post: HERE )

Bob Dylan Xmas 2013

For an increasing number of people, The Holiday Season isn’t really officially under way until we all spend a moment of quiet contemplation with Bob Dylan’s Christmas decorations.  I have been doing this annually since 2009, making this my fifth year as curator of this semi-sacred event. Sometimes it seems to me that the rest of the weeks of the year are merely antipasto plates and hors d’oevres, leading up to this final special entree.

Okay, it doesn’t really seem like that to me. I’m just trying to be festive.

I apologize. I will try to be more honest in 2014.

And now we begin.

To get into the proper frame of mind, click the following video and one of Bob’s Christmas songs will play as a background to our guided tour. Go ahead. Click. I’ll wait

Okay:  here we go. Odd that it took me until last year to finally realize that the main string of lights are up all year round. My guess is that they’re too difficult to get out of that hedge without wire cutters. Of course, they only are turned on during the weeks before the holidays and it is one of the lesser known holiday miracles,  almost like a modern day story of Chanukah, that they continue to work year after year without maintenance. They should have burned out by now, yet they remain lit; an electronic tribute to his long career. And this year, as we look at them once again, we see the now familiar classic annual strategy ; A simple string of uneven lights, with a familiar double loop toward the lower right. As time goes on, and the color wears off the bulbs, it begins to look as tho they are trying to spell something.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It almost looks like an M. At first I thought it might be the beginning of the word Merry.  Or perhaps  an homage to me and the scholarly work I do here. But then I cracked the code and realized the lights present a graph upon which we see a broad annual assessment of his year.

There is one last area of lights, further back, behind the main gates. It is a winter wonderland of sorts. Here we see a display of candy canes and reindeer and a few other things I can not make out. All I can say about this one is that it is a work in progress; much more elaborate this year than ever before. So KUDOS!

And with that  The Holiday Season is now OFFICIALLY open. I bid you all a Merry Everything.

 

PS: If you’d like to take a stroll down memory lane, here are the links for a look at this display thru history. By which I mean, over the last four years.

A Dylan Christmas 2009

A Dylan Christmas 2010

A Dylan Christmas 2011

A Dylan Christmas 2012

 

Puppyboy in Put a Ring On It

My dog Puppyboy is now 17. He’s kind of blind and very deaf and not especially spry, although for his age he still gets around pretty well.  But I was going through some old footage yesterday, looking at Puppyboy in his prime. And lo and behold, I realized that he had pre-dated Beyonce and her big hit by many years. He was trying to tell me about it. He did all he could to tell me. But I was too blind. Oh well. Shoulda listened more closely.

I hosted the WGA 101 Best Written Shows thing

In the beginning of June I hosted/moderated an event at The Writers Guild theater called “101 Best Written Shows.” The afore mentioned list was compiled by Guild membership voting.  I was amazed and thrilled that they asked me, and also fairly terrified since the duties involved interviewing a lot of my TV writer heroes as well as trying to amuse them. It was a pretty intimidating thought.

Bottom line: I was so grateful to The Writers Guild for their health insurance which paid for my surgery in February that I said yes. And ended up having the best time I’ve had so far in 2013. Now its up on You Tube. So Voila.

In Ep.#1 there are speakers welcoming the group. I’m the third one in. I make a short hopefully humorous speech and introduce the first panel members, Carl Reiner and Norman Lear. They were amazing and hilarious and they are the content for Ep#2.

#2

#3 Now joining the panel are writer legends James L. Brooks, Steven Bochco and Gail Parent.

#4 And if that wasn’t enough…NOW Vince Gilligan, Matthew Weiner, Ronald Moore and Wiinnie Holzman join the group. If these names don’t make you dizzy, you better google them. They wrote shows you LOVE. And I say that knowing nothing at all about you.

#5 Time for Steve Levitan, creator of Modern Family. What a stellar bunch. And what a cool night for me.

 

Puppyboy at 17

Puppyboy is the first dog I have owned who made it to seventeen. That’s pretty rarified territory for a large dog. Naturally there are age related problems. That said, I didn’t realize that as an older dog, he would become so much more refined. Yes, its true that in his senescence, he now occasionally poops in the house. But I was unprepared for the fact that he was going to prefer to eat all his meals with a fork.

Here is Puppyboy doing what he did best in his youth.

How not being able to walk taught me how to write.

This is a shortened version of a piece I read at a Skirball Center/Beth Lapides/Say The Word event that was called THE NEW ME.  I decided to put this part of it up here because what I learned might be useful to someone else.

It all started when I woke up one day last fall and couldn’t walk.

To cut to the chase: after 30 some odd years of eating health food and taking a million vitamins and doing the best possible exercise 6 days a week (yoga, pilates, the gym, swimming), it still turned out that I didn’t have any cartilage left in my hips. It didn’t seem possible.  I owned and used a goddam juicer!  I took glucosamine/chondroitin and MSM and calcium supplements every day. In fact I had so many vitamin bottles that there was almost no room on my kitchen counter for cooking.  I didn’t eat sugar. I was a vegetarian. I went to yoga and did “hip openers”. I meditated. Why  did I eat all those horrible health food candy bars if not to keep stuff like this from happening?

I felt a little bit like a Buddhist monk who had gotten sick from chanting OM.

Turned out I had to get hip implants.

So, the way this played out in real life was that I spent most of January and February not moving much. On the bright side…well, there really wasn’t a bright side to not being able to walk except maybe that sitting around in bed was no longer connected to an accusation of being lazy. Here is an entry I made in my diary from that period.

But then something weird and kind of magical happened. While I was waiting to have my new robot parts installed, I had a big revelation about writing.

Writing is what I have done for a living for the last 35 years. And when I say that the process was not the least bit enjoyable, it is only because I would struggle to find words strong enough to describe how agonizing it had become and how much I had learned to hate it.

Just to give you a tiny bit of my history: Original Recipe Merrill started out with a degree in art. I was a painter. But then,  I reinvented myself in my twenties as Merrill2.0. I switched from painting to writing because it was a better source of income. 

Still I used to get a real buzz from the act of painting that I never got from the act of writing. And I now believe it has to do with basic brain function.

While I was bed ridden I started reading a lot about the 2 hemispheres of the brain. If you’re not familiar with this stuff: the left brain is the hemisphere that handles all of life’s homework: the organizing, the structuring of patterns, the math. Its not much fun over there but its what we use to pay bills and make to-do lists .  We get things done in an organized fashion because of the way our left brain works. And of all the creative arts, the only one that is centered in the left brain is writing.

The right brain is where all the fun stuff like music and painting takes place. The right brain is intuitive and provides us with a kind of global interactive awareness of our surroundings.  Its where the floaty dreamy drifty enjoyable nirvana stuff lives. When I used to paint, I would marvel at how I could sit down to paint, then get up and not know where the last 5 hours went.

When I wrote,  however, I would marvel at how I sat down, wrote one painful sentence, then wasted 40 minutes on some stupid slide show I didn’t even want to look at on Huffingtonpost about 8 surprising diet foods that won’t help you lose weight. Then 5 hours of baby animal videos later, in order to get myself to start writing again I’d have to envision myself wrestling me back in to a chair, then punching myself repeatedly in the face until I gave in and wrote at least one more sentence.  After which I’d declare myself victorious! “A job well done!” I’d cheer, patting myself on the back as I would pour myself a drink and time permitting, another one. And then, if all went well, I’d be too drunk to write. So off to bed!

But back to my big visionary discovery about how to write:

In January, while I waited for my February 21 surgery date, my immobility caused all my daily rituals  to change. I used to get up at 6 AM and go out to the driveway and get the NY Times. (Yes,yes…I know I am the last person alive who still gets the paper delivered. And I know it’s a ridiculous  waste of money. But I’m pretty sure  that I alone am what is keeping the NY Times from bankrupcy.  And I  can’t really handle bearing the sole responsibility for the collapse the NYTimes.) 

Anyway, the point is that I could no longer walk to my driveway.  It felt like 5 miles away. But because I was still waking up at 6AM I needed some way to fill my morning.  So one day, out of desperation, I decided to try and write.

I had an idea for a play but whenever I sat down to write it during the afternoon, the Nazi voices of my left brain wouldn’t let me. They berated me, explaining at length that the premise I’d picked was too problematic and that I didn’t know my characters well enough. Obviously I needed to do more research, then rethink the whole thing from top to bottom.  Even my imaginary ritual of punching myself in the face to make myself start writing couldn’t get the ball rolling.

But on this particular morning, my inability to walk caused me to try to write before I was even awake.  And to my complete surprise, I effortlessly wrote 15 pages. The same thing happened when I tried it the next day. And the day after that.. And the day after that. 

And so it came to pass that in the six weeks before my surgery, I wrote a rough first draft of my play.

That is how I learned something amazing that I never knew before: first thing in the morning, when I have that sleepy brain that I used to think was useless… while my head still feels like it is full of ground fog and wrapped in flannel and gauze…before the hive of sleep bees buzzing around me has dispersed… THAT is the best brain to use for writing!

Writing is somehow much more easily accessible to me when I am still half asleep because the Gestapo members in my left brain are not able to begin dominating til later in the day.This discovery so amazed me that I thought I should share it, in case it helps anyone else with this problem. I also think its important to hand write the first draft.

One other thing: I also recommend writing with a pen when you are working on a first draft.  I think the act of writing by hand seems to connect to right brain activity. (Re-writing on a computer might left brain…I say as tho I know what I am talking about.)

On February 21st I had both hips replaced.  By March 21st I was walking AND writing painlessly every day. I was so thrilled to welcome back two things I really feared I might never enjoy again that I see this as the beginning of the All New Merrill4G.

All New Merrill 4G sees Merrill 2.0 as a girl who had a stick up her butt. I still eat healthy, but Merrill 4G has cut way back on the vitamins. I’ve also decided that cake, cookies and candy are an  acceptable part of a smart health food regime. One day when I was in the hospital, I had chocolate cake for dinner.  Well, what was I supposed to have? More of that green juice that put me in there?

But most magical of all, Merrill 4G actually likes getting up in the morning and writing with ease for 3 or 4 hours every day. This new method always works… as long as my head is still half asleep. Merrill 4G understands that the clear-minded over-caffeinated head is better used for paying bills and running errands or working out at the gym. Plus, by getting my writing done in the  morning, if there’s any time left over in the evening  and I want to get back into my right brain, I can paint.

So far the NEW new me is having a lot more fun than all the versions of the old me combined. That breathtaking magic tricks like walking and writing came out of being bedridden is an act of the supernatural that truly blows me away.

Walking, writing and cookies: the cornerstones of Merrill 4G.

PS: Dr. Eric Johnson at UCLA is a great orthopedic surgeon. If you have to get hip surgery, may I humbly recommend you look in to the type called ‘anterior.’

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Dylan Christmas 2012

  The holidays mean many things to many people. One thing it always means to me is another chance to soak up the style and artistry of Bob Dylan’s Christmas decorations.

Masterful as always, this year’s display forms an understated but singularly festive curvilinear line on the recently trimmed hedge that he uses as his holiday canvas :modern yet classic, like the man himself. For 2012 Mr. Dylan is offering us a more pointed arc than in previous years, at a slightly higher pitch and elevation, the better to showcase the unique way he is able to combine the abstract and the traditional. But once again, after a few lilting uplifting loops of color, we see the double downward dip of lights that some call”Dylan’s noose”.a curious and unsettling divertissement that is open to interpretation like so much of his work.

Not as visible this year is the delightful ‘winter wonderland’ section. Below we revisit a taste of this work from 2011. Note how he has given us a tableau that is somehow playful while at the same time a study of the stark realities of Christmas.

Piece I wrote for WSJ on coping with post election stress!

Wall Street Journal
November 10, 2012, 10:00 AM ET

Surviving Post-Election Blues
(Or Reds, Depending)



By Merrill Markoe

Aren’t we all a little sick of being a country that operates like a big dysfunctional family, so perennially disgusted by each other that we dread holiday gatherings? Isn’t everyone fed up with living in our Two-Conspiracy-Theory System, wherein the minority party spends four years trying to prove how the majority party is dismantling the Constitution? Isn’t there some way for us to live in harmony with those whom we accuse of hastening the apocalypse?

I’m talking to you, senators and congressmen who govern by tantrum…as well as to assorted friends, Romans, countrymen and teenagers who are too busy texting. It’s important to remember that most of the time, we’re all in this together (though I can easily be talked into excluding those who refuse to look up from their smartphones).

In the name of finding more civil, adult ways to communicate, allow me to offer some of my time-tested methods for defusing touchy postelection situations.

First, before any potentially explosive get-together, be sure to do lots of physical exercise. Studies have found that “tired” looks almost exactly like “loving serenity.”

Obviously, it also makes sense to call a moratorium on all partisan gloating. Toward this end, remember that silence can be just as infuriating as name-calling. So no more rocking back and forth while whistling and making that face with the raised eyebrows and the faint smile that says, “Don’t look at me. I didn’t say a damn thing!”

At the same time, be sure not to take explosions of political rage personally. Instead try to identify which childhood trauma may be at the root of these outbursts. Then hug that person gently and whisper, “I hear that you are angry. I hope you know that I’m here for you if you want to cry.” Then, as you dry their tears, take out your cellphone and share a few of your favorite animal videos. Don’t forget the one with the cat that is a door stopper enthusiast. Hey! Where has all that seething hatred disappeared to now?

Or here’s an idea that always works: Have a pity party. Everyone is always saying, “Don’t have a pity party,” but that’s because most people don’t know how to throw a good one. The key is to invite a large number of vain people who are upset about thinning hair, gaining weight or developing nasolabial folds. No matter what their political inclinations, anyone exposed to this crowd for just a few minutes will be unable to focus on anything but an escape plan.

If none of the above works, remember that the best counterattack is an unexpected response. When your uncle says, “People don’t want a democracy. They want a baby sitter!” pause for a minute, then say, “I can’t figure out who you remind me of. Who’s that blond actor in his 30s who was in that cop-buddy movie? Or was it a reluctant superhero? Ryan someone? Or Brendan?” This will launch you into a soothing whirlpool of undifferentiated celebrities and their interchangeable movies, which can last as long as necessary.

In the end, the key to getting along is finding the things on which everyone can agree, thereby redirecting free-floating anger toward a common enemy. So begin to collect the names of obnoxious drunks, conspiracy theorists and deluded people hoping to break into show business. If they aren’t available to attend your gathering, the same result can be achieved by serving chicken nuggets and tuning a prominently placed television to some grotesque reality show…maybe the one where cretins ruin the lives of perfectly nice catfish. A rousing discussion of worthless pop-culture egomaniacs and pink slime is just the thing to show political antagonists how much common ground they share.

Which is why I would like to propose that in 2016 we do things a little differently. Clearly, we now live in an era where our elections, like our winter holidays, go on for about a year. So how about if next cycle we soften things up by adding Election Trees, red, white and blue lights, and gift giving? This would not only stimulate the economy but also create new, more traditional avenues for releasing partisan anger. After all, there’s nothing like a holiday celebration for bringing Americans together while also offering an outlet for their pent-up rage.

Ms. Markoe is an Emmy Award-winning television writer. Her latest book is “Cool, Calm and Contentious.”