Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 994
September 30, 2015
HBO’s sexually-explicit mandate for “Westworld” extras is stricter than a porn contract
UPDATE: Deadline reports HBO denies the casting note came from the network. "The document that the background actors were given was created by an outside extras casting vendor,” said HBO in a statement. "It was not requested, written or approved by HBO, Warner Bros. Television, or the producers, and contains situations that we do not require of any actor. We are rectifying immediately the discrepancies in this vendor’s document with our actual on-set practices, which provide a professional and comfortable working environment for all performers.” HBO’s 2016 series "Westworld," based on the 1973 Michael Crichton film of the same name, about “a dark odyssey about the dawn of artificial consciousness and the future of sin,” is causing a stir not because of its plotlines, or its cast, which includes Anthony Hopkins, Ed Harris, Evan Rachel Wood, James Marsden, and Thandie Newton, but because of a particularly explicit casting call. According to The Hollywood Reporter, on Tuesday, extras were required to sign a consent form detailing exactly which kinds of nude sex acts they could expect to be required as part of their jobs. “The explicit consent form itself wouldn’t pass standards reviews at a broadcast network as it recites that the performer ‘may be required to perform genital-to-genital touching, simulate oral sex with hand-to-genital touching, contort to form a table-like shape while being fully nude, pose on all fours while others who are fully nude ride on your back, [and] ride on someone's back while you are both fully nude.” The form went on to say, “If you object to or are not comfortable with working on the Project for any reason, including the graphic nature, required Various Acts, and/or the Project Environment described in this Disclosure & Consent, you will not be able to work on this project.” That wording seems to leave little room for asking questions, getting clarification, or stating preferences as to what types of sex acts an actor might find acceptable. Union SAG-AFTRA (Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists) posted a notice to members of the Westworld production stating, “This is to advise all SAG-AFTRA represented background actors who signed this document that to the extent it conflicts with the SAG-AFTRA Television Agreement, it is unenforceable. The SAG-AFTRA Agreement provides that consent to appear in scenes requiring nudity or sex acts may be withdrawn at any time (consent may not be withdrawn as to scenes already shot).” As the Los Angeles Times put it, “It appears that the union’s true concern lay with the idea that its members may not comprehend that the SAG-AFTRA Agreement ensures that though they’ve signed a consent form, consent to appear in scenes requiring nudity or sex acts can be withdrawn regardless, so long as the scenes have not already been shot.” The wording of the original form is highly problematic, especially if extras are being told, whether directly or subtly, that they have little choice as to what they do with their naked bodies. According to The A.V. Club, “SAG-AFTRA, the union representing the actors, is sending a representative to be in attendance for the shoot, which it only does when it’s worried about potential infractions. The union worked hard to ensure that its members know they have the right to withdraw consent at any time, at least until the scenes are filmed, at which point their rights become akin to those of someone who posts selfies on the internet.” What struck me about the consent form was that it seemed even more overreaching than what porn performers are asked to do. Namely, performers seem to be being asked ahead of time to consent to various acts, such as “genital-to-genital touching.” I asked Kitty Stryker, head of production at porn company TROUBLEfilms, what she requires of her actors (Stryker has also acted in porn films). “We don't write contracts telling our performers what to do with their bodies,” Stryker told Salon via email. “They are encouraged to negotiate their scene offset ahead of time with their partner/s and to let us know how they want the scene to go. I imagine some companies might have contracts stating how much will be paid for what sexual acts, but that's not how we roll at TROUBLEfilms—you're paid the same regardless of sexual acts performed, gender, ethnicity, or ability.” If even porn companies aren’t requiring actors to sign on in advance to performing sex acts—or simulated sex acts—on camera, why should it be okay for HBO to? Refinery29 has suggested the contract terms were leaked in order to generate buzz about “how sexy” the show will be. Business Insider implied much the same with its headline, “This sexually explicit casting contract reveals just how kinky HBO's 'Westworld' could be.” Considering the vast coverage it’s gotten in a matter of hours, that certainly could be one possibility. A 2014 casting call for the show didn’t feature any language regarding sexually explicit acts. It’s fine if HBO wants to tout that it’s got a racy new show, but its sex appeal shouldn’t come at the expense of the express consent of its actors. I’m sure plenty of extras don’t mind getting down and dirty for the show, but they should at least know their rights and not be intimidated into agreeing to performing in scenes where they fear losing their job because they don’t want to spread their legs.
Kevin McCarthy’s silver-plated gift to Hillary Clinton: What his Benghazi blunder reveals about the GOP’s warped priorities
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy is, at this moment, the Democrats’ best pal. He went on Fox News last night to talk up his campaign to replace outgoing House Speaker John Boehner, and he ended up saying out loud and on television the one thing Republicans aren’t supposed to say about the House Select Committee on Benghazi: it’s all about taking down Hillary Clinton: This is an archetypal example of the Kinsley Gaffe: a politician accidentally uttering a truthful statement. Anyone who’s paid even cursory attention to the GOP’s treatment of the Benghazi attacks will likely have already concluded that the party’s interest in the matter is linked to Hillary Clinton’s presidential ambitions. But it’s still bracing to see one of the most powerful Republicans in Washington come right out and brag about how he and his colleagues set up a taxpayer-funded investigation to damage the political prospects of the opposition party’s leading presidential candidate. It’s downright scandalous, and precisely the sort of political corruption that Republicans argue is at the heart of the Obama administration’s response to Benghazi. No less remarkable is the fact that McCarthy offered up the politicized Benghazi investigation as an “example” of how he would conduct business as Speaker of the House. He just put it right out there and told Sean Hannity that the McCarthy Congress will be a series of investigations aimed at hurting the Democrats’ chances of electoral success. He’s also impugned what little credibility Benghazi committee chair Trey Gowdy enjoys, and he’s given critics of the committee all the reason they need to trash the committee as a disreputable and untrustworthy exercise in partisan scapegoating. One Democratic member of the Benghazi committee had already called for the investigation to be shut down, and other Democrats are doing the same in the aftermath of McCarthy’s remarks. The Benghazi committee has always been wrapped in obvious fictions that provide its members and supporters with the barest minimum of plausible deniability as to its true purpose. We were told that the committee was necessary because dang it, we still just don’t know what happened in Benghazi (just ignore the half-dozen or so official investigations that preceded it). Committee chair Trey Gowdy frequently asserts that he is concerned only with information that is relevant to the committee’s mandate (as he’s expanded the investigation to areas that, by his own admission, are outside the committee’s purview and have little or nothing to do with the Benghazi attacks). Gowdy also insists that he’s running a professional investigation that has no interest in partisan politics and is committed to learning the truth about the events that led to the deaths of four Americans (as it leaks at every given opportunity, feeding often misleading information about Clinton’s emails to reporters). McCarthy’s candor has robbed the committee of its already specious claims to credibility. And he’s handed Clinton a powerful weapon to use against her critics. The Clintons’ political history is defined in part by the self-destructive behavior of Republicans during the 1990s, who turned the congressional oversight process into a nakedly political enterprise to destroy Bill and Hillary. With the likely next Speaker of the House boasting about the Benghazi committee’s political agenda and holding it up as an example of how he’d run things in his chamber, Hillary can say it’s déjà vu all over again, and you’d be hard-pressed to disagree with her. 
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy is, at this moment, the Democrats’ best pal. He went on Fox News last night to talk up his campaign to replace outgoing House Speaker John Boehner, and he ended up saying out loud and on television the one thing Republicans aren’t supposed to say about the House Select Committee on Benghazi: it’s all about taking down Hillary Clinton: This is an archetypal example of the Kinsley Gaffe: a politician accidentally uttering a truthful statement. Anyone who’s paid even cursory attention to the GOP’s treatment of the Benghazi attacks will likely have already concluded that the party’s interest in the matter is linked to Hillary Clinton’s presidential ambitions. But it’s still bracing to see one of the most powerful Republicans in Washington come right out and brag about how he and his colleagues set up a taxpayer-funded investigation to damage the political prospects of the opposition party’s leading presidential candidate. It’s downright scandalous, and precisely the sort of political corruption that Republicans argue is at the heart of the Obama administration’s response to Benghazi. No less remarkable is the fact that McCarthy offered up the politicized Benghazi investigation as an “example” of how he would conduct business as Speaker of the House. He just put it right out there and told Sean Hannity that the McCarthy Congress will be a series of investigations aimed at hurting the Democrats’ chances of electoral success. He’s also impugned what little credibility Benghazi committee chair Trey Gowdy enjoys, and he’s given critics of the committee all the reason they need to trash the committee as a disreputable and untrustworthy exercise in partisan scapegoating. One Democratic member of the Benghazi committee had already called for the investigation to be shut down, and other Democrats are doing the same in the aftermath of McCarthy’s remarks. The Benghazi committee has always been wrapped in obvious fictions that provide its members and supporters with the barest minimum of plausible deniability as to its true purpose. We were told that the committee was necessary because dang it, we still just don’t know what happened in Benghazi (just ignore the half-dozen or so official investigations that preceded it). Committee chair Trey Gowdy frequently asserts that he is concerned only with information that is relevant to the committee’s mandate (as he’s expanded the investigation to areas that, by his own admission, are outside the committee’s purview and have little or nothing to do with the Benghazi attacks). Gowdy also insists that he’s running a professional investigation that has no interest in partisan politics and is committed to learning the truth about the events that led to the deaths of four Americans (as it leaks at every given opportunity, feeding often misleading information about Clinton’s emails to reporters). McCarthy’s candor has robbed the committee of its already specious claims to credibility. And he’s handed Clinton a powerful weapon to use against her critics. The Clintons’ political history is defined in part by the self-destructive behavior of Republicans during the 1990s, who turned the congressional oversight process into a nakedly political enterprise to destroy Bill and Hillary. With the likely next Speaker of the House boasting about the Benghazi committee’s political agenda and holding it up as an example of how he’d run things in his chamber, Hillary can say it’s déjà vu all over again, and you’d be hard-pressed to disagree with her.
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy is, at this moment, the Democrats’ best pal. He went on Fox News last night to talk up his campaign to replace outgoing House Speaker John Boehner, and he ended up saying out loud and on television the one thing Republicans aren’t supposed to say about the House Select Committee on Benghazi: it’s all about taking down Hillary Clinton: This is an archetypal example of the Kinsley Gaffe: a politician accidentally uttering a truthful statement. Anyone who’s paid even cursory attention to the GOP’s treatment of the Benghazi attacks will likely have already concluded that the party’s interest in the matter is linked to Hillary Clinton’s presidential ambitions. But it’s still bracing to see one of the most powerful Republicans in Washington come right out and brag about how he and his colleagues set up a taxpayer-funded investigation to damage the political prospects of the opposition party’s leading presidential candidate. It’s downright scandalous, and precisely the sort of political corruption that Republicans argue is at the heart of the Obama administration’s response to Benghazi. No less remarkable is the fact that McCarthy offered up the politicized Benghazi investigation as an “example” of how he would conduct business as Speaker of the House. He just put it right out there and told Sean Hannity that the McCarthy Congress will be a series of investigations aimed at hurting the Democrats’ chances of electoral success. He’s also impugned what little credibility Benghazi committee chair Trey Gowdy enjoys, and he’s given critics of the committee all the reason they need to trash the committee as a disreputable and untrustworthy exercise in partisan scapegoating. One Democratic member of the Benghazi committee had already called for the investigation to be shut down, and other Democrats are doing the same in the aftermath of McCarthy’s remarks. The Benghazi committee has always been wrapped in obvious fictions that provide its members and supporters with the barest minimum of plausible deniability as to its true purpose. We were told that the committee was necessary because dang it, we still just don’t know what happened in Benghazi (just ignore the half-dozen or so official investigations that preceded it). Committee chair Trey Gowdy frequently asserts that he is concerned only with information that is relevant to the committee’s mandate (as he’s expanded the investigation to areas that, by his own admission, are outside the committee’s purview and have little or nothing to do with the Benghazi attacks). Gowdy also insists that he’s running a professional investigation that has no interest in partisan politics and is committed to learning the truth about the events that led to the deaths of four Americans (as it leaks at every given opportunity, feeding often misleading information about Clinton’s emails to reporters). McCarthy’s candor has robbed the committee of its already specious claims to credibility. And he’s handed Clinton a powerful weapon to use against her critics. The Clintons’ political history is defined in part by the self-destructive behavior of Republicans during the 1990s, who turned the congressional oversight process into a nakedly political enterprise to destroy Bill and Hillary. With the likely next Speaker of the House boasting about the Benghazi committee’s political agenda and holding it up as an example of how he’d run things in his chamber, Hillary can say it’s déjà vu all over again, and you’d be hard-pressed to disagree with her.
Bridezilla, put away that bill: No, you can’t invoice your no-show guests
Is it bizarre, appalling, mean-spirited, or all of the above? That’s surely part of what’s going through the mind of a Minnesota woman who was sent a bill by the bride of a wedding she was not able to attend. Here’s the lead from the Minneapolis television station KARE:
It was a couple weeks ago, Jessica Baker was getting ready to go to a wedding with her husband when she got a call from her mom. "She called at the last minute and had something come up and said I can't make it," said Baker. Her mom was supposed to watch their kids. And since the invitation said no children, that meant no wedding. But then this week, she received a bill for the dinner they were supposed to have enjoyed.The bill came to $79.50 and came with a note: "This cost reflects the amount paid by the bride and groom for meals that were RSVP'd for, reimbursement and explanation for no show, card, call or text would be appreciated.” (The bill also included a helpful $7.95 service and tax charge.) Wow. So how to break this down ethically? Weddings are expensive – somewhere between $25,000 and $30,000, with significant regional variations between New York City and Alaska. (Minneapolis is probably right in the middle of the pack.) But they almost always involve a lot of fussing over the guest list. If you’ve had people flake on you after they RSVP’d to an enormously pricey party you chose to invite them to, you know it’s frustrating. Not only did you pay for their food and drink (two herb-crusted walleyes!), you had to leave out other people – colleagues from work, relatives, actual friends -- who you could have asked instead. But to send them a bill? Presumably, the bride and groom invited this couple because they liked them. So to treat them like patients who skipped a doctor’s appointment is a little weird. So what is Baker to do? Well, for now, she seems to be ignoring the bill. (Are there collection agencies that will pursue such a thing?) But besides venting on Facebook and speaking to a local television station, there’s not much else she can do. That’s why we’re delighted with a new technological wonder: A Yelp-like app for rating… people. The Washington Post describes Peeble this way:
When the app does launch, probably in late November, you will be able to assign reviews and one- to five-star ratings to everyone you know: your exes, your co-workers, the old guy who lives next door. You can’t opt out — once someone puts your name in the Peeple system, it’s there unless you violate the site’s terms of service. And you can’t delete bad or biased reviews — that would defeat the whole purpose.One of the app’s co-founders, Julia Cordray, sees it as a helpful tool: “As two empathetic, female entrepreneurs in the tech space, we want to spread love and positivity. We want to operate with thoughtfulness.” Well, given the way the web bullying, Yelp ratings, and crowdsourcing in general have gone so far, this persistence of good vibes is kind of hard to fathom. There are some safeguards built in, but they seem pretty easy to jack. It also makes us think of Evgeny Morozov's diagnosis of "technology solutionism." And isn’t the whole idea here a bit invasive? “Where once you may have viewed a date or a teacher conference as a private encounter, Peeple transforms it into a radically public performance: Everything you do can be judged, publicized, recorded,” the Post points out. “That justification hasn’t worked out so well, though, for the various edgy apps that have tried it before." Now, I’m afraid this whole thing is making my skin crawl. But sometimes, two wrongs do make a right. There are not a lot of people who deserve to be “rated” on a creepy site that quantifies human beings. But if anyone does, it’s someone who would sent a friend a bill for missing a party when childcare falls through. Let’s keep our fingers crossed that Peeble will be used to shame obnoxious behavior. And that it’s founders find a way to change the app’s name before it’s too late.Is it bizarre, appalling, mean-spirited, or all of the above? That’s surely part of what’s going through the mind of a Minnesota woman who was sent a bill by the bride of a wedding she was not able to attend. Here’s the lead from the Minneapolis television station KARE:
It was a couple weeks ago, Jessica Baker was getting ready to go to a wedding with her husband when she got a call from her mom. "She called at the last minute and had something come up and said I can't make it," said Baker. Her mom was supposed to watch their kids. And since the invitation said no children, that meant no wedding. But then this week, she received a bill for the dinner they were supposed to have enjoyed.The bill came to $79.50 and came with a note: "This cost reflects the amount paid by the bride and groom for meals that were RSVP'd for, reimbursement and explanation for no show, card, call or text would be appreciated.” (The bill also included a helpful $7.95 service and tax charge.) Wow. So how to break this down ethically? Weddings are expensive – somewhere between $25,000 and $30,000, with significant regional variations between New York City and Alaska. (Minneapolis is probably right in the middle of the pack.) But they almost always involve a lot of fussing over the guest list. If you’ve had people flake on you after they RSVP’d to an enormously pricey party you chose to invite them to, you know it’s frustrating. Not only did you pay for their food and drink (two herb-crusted walleyes!), you had to leave out other people – colleagues from work, relatives, actual friends -- who you could have asked instead. But to send them a bill? Presumably, the bride and groom invited this couple because they liked them. So to treat them like patients who skipped a doctor’s appointment is a little weird. So what is Baker to do? Well, for now, she seems to be ignoring the bill. (Are there collection agencies that will pursue such a thing?) But besides venting on Facebook and speaking to a local television station, there’s not much else she can do. That’s why we’re delighted with a new technological wonder: A Yelp-like app for rating… people. The Washington Post describes Peeble this way:
When the app does launch, probably in late November, you will be able to assign reviews and one- to five-star ratings to everyone you know: your exes, your co-workers, the old guy who lives next door. You can’t opt out — once someone puts your name in the Peeple system, it’s there unless you violate the site’s terms of service. And you can’t delete bad or biased reviews — that would defeat the whole purpose.One of the app’s co-founders, Julia Cordray, sees it as a helpful tool: “As two empathetic, female entrepreneurs in the tech space, we want to spread love and positivity. We want to operate with thoughtfulness.” Well, given the way the web bullying, Yelp ratings, and crowdsourcing in general have gone so far, this persistence of good vibes is kind of hard to fathom. There are some safeguards built in, but they seem pretty easy to jack. It also makes us think of Evgeny Morozov's diagnosis of "technology solutionism." And isn’t the whole idea here a bit invasive? “Where once you may have viewed a date or a teacher conference as a private encounter, Peeple transforms it into a radically public performance: Everything you do can be judged, publicized, recorded,” the Post points out. “That justification hasn’t worked out so well, though, for the various edgy apps that have tried it before." Now, I’m afraid this whole thing is making my skin crawl. But sometimes, two wrongs do make a right. There are not a lot of people who deserve to be “rated” on a creepy site that quantifies human beings. But if anyone does, it’s someone who would sent a friend a bill for missing a party when childcare falls through. Let’s keep our fingers crossed that Peeble will be used to shame obnoxious behavior. And that it’s founders find a way to change the app’s name before it’s too late.
America’s Pope Francis fantasies don’t make sense: Kim Davis shows why he was never going to be a progressive mascot
This just in: the head of the Catholic Church doesn't love gay marriage. Stunning, I know. Yet when news of Pope Francis's meeting with Kim Davis, currently America's most famous homophobe, leaked out on Wednesday, people seemed surprised. Pope Francis, that raging lefty, embracing such a bigot? Uh, yeah. The Catholic Church is an anti-gay institution. Francis has been on record many times expressing his hostility to gay marriage. He has been very careful not to change any church doctrine on homosexuality. The only reason to suspect that he wouldn't want to meet with someone like Kim Davis—a woman who went to jail in defense of her religious beliefs—is that it just looks so bad. More than anything, it's a highly divisive thing to do during a trip that generated so much broad-based goodwill, and it doesn't dovetail with Francis's progressive posturing on things like the environment or poverty or criminal justice. This is where we need to step back and remind ourselves of a few things: Pope Francis is an extremely canny political actor. He's been a master at managing public relations. He's successfully yanked the Vatican away from the dour, stolid sense of decay that hung around Pope Benedict. But it's a mystery why people thought that his clearly razor-sharp political antenna would only be tuned in a leftward direction. We're talking about someone who—putting aside the sincerity of his own views on issues like marriage or contraception—is leading a deeply conservative institution with an increasingly restless conservative flank. Those conservatives have been clamoring for Francis to be more vocal about their fun pet issues, like the issue of how gay people are bad. What better scrap of red meat to toss to that constituency than to meet with Kim Davis? The meeting was even in secret and in private, lending it an extra-special air. The only other such meeting that Francis held on his American trip was with victims of church sex abuse. The equating of the two issues is certainly offensive to many, but there will be a lot of homophobic bishops breathing a sigh of relief at the seeming importance that Francis placed on the marriage question. Above all, the Davis meeting should remind people that, despite his indie posturing, Francis isn't running for president of liberal America. He's heading a global religious grouping of 1.2 billion people. The insistence that we place him on some traditional left-right spectrum is maddening. What does it matter to him if people see an inconsistency in his rhetoric around climate change and his refusal to contemplate female priests? All religions are a jumble of contradictory rules and regulations; why should Francis be any different? The breathlessness with which his calls to end the death penalty—an entirely traditional Catholic line of thinking—was received is another indication that people are forgetting about who exactly they're dealing with. More broadly speaking, anybody wishing to spur change in the Catholic Church should look past Pope Francis. It is ordinary people, and people's movements, that will force change, just as they've always done. Look at Ireland, a country synonymous with Catholicism that became the first nation in the world to legalize same-sex marriage by popular vote. Catholic leaders there were left wondering how they would reconnect with the millions who seemed to have rejected them. Look at the ever-widening schism in the Anglican church, where some factions have decided that they can accept gay people and other factions haven't. Religions are living, malleable things. Their rules can be rewritten. Francis might not be the pope to lead that change, but who knows what will happen down the line?
Indiana GOP’s House Leader resigns after texting sexually explicit video of himself cheating on wife to everyone on his “Contacts” list
The controversial House Majority Leader in Indiana -- he cosponsored the state's "religious freedom" law -- resigned suddenly on Tuesday after a sexually compromising video was sent to all of the people on his "Contacts" list, the Advocate's Bil Browning reports. After news of the mass-texting began to circulate, Representative Jud McMillin (R) claimed that his "phone was stolen in Canada and out of my control for about 24 hours. I have just been able to reactivate it under my control. Please disregard any messages you received recently. I am truly sorry for anything offensive you may have received." But his "Canadian girlfriend stole my phone" defense apparently didn't convince many of his "Contacts" -- or at least, not the ones who mattered -- and so Tuesday night he released a statement in which he said that the "time is right for me to pass the torch and spend more time with my family." During his five years in the legislature, McMillin has crusaded to "protect the integrity of the institution of marriage," but the Advocate reported that the woman on the video he texted was not, in fact, his wife. According to his campaign website, he claimed that "the family has always been the foundation of our strength of community" and that "[i]n these times of turmoil the rest of the country could learn something from our example." It's unclear what the rest of the country could learn from his example at this time, other than -- perhaps -- opposing LGBTQ rights across the board could have karmic implications for conservative Republicans with a proclivity for taking videos of themselves cheating on their wives.The controversial House Majority Leader in Indiana -- he cosponsored the state's "religious freedom" law -- resigned suddenly on Tuesday after a sexually compromising video was sent to all of the people on his "Contacts" list, the Advocate's Bil Browning reports. After news of the mass-texting began to circulate, Representative Jud McMillin (R) claimed that his "phone was stolen in Canada and out of my control for about 24 hours. I have just been able to reactivate it under my control. Please disregard any messages you received recently. I am truly sorry for anything offensive you may have received." But his "Canadian girlfriend stole my phone" defense apparently didn't convince many of his "Contacts" -- or at least, not the ones who mattered -- and so Tuesday night he released a statement in which he said that the "time is right for me to pass the torch and spend more time with my family." During his five years in the legislature, McMillin has crusaded to "protect the integrity of the institution of marriage," but the Advocate reported that the woman on the video he texted was not, in fact, his wife. According to his campaign website, he claimed that "the family has always been the foundation of our strength of community" and that "[i]n these times of turmoil the rest of the country could learn something from our example." It's unclear what the rest of the country could learn from his example at this time, other than -- perhaps -- opposing LGBTQ rights across the board could have karmic implications for conservative Republicans with a proclivity for taking videos of themselves cheating on their wives.The controversial House Majority Leader in Indiana -- he cosponsored the state's "religious freedom" law -- resigned suddenly on Tuesday after a sexually compromising video was sent to all of the people on his "Contacts" list, the Advocate's Bil Browning reports. After news of the mass-texting began to circulate, Representative Jud McMillin (R) claimed that his "phone was stolen in Canada and out of my control for about 24 hours. I have just been able to reactivate it under my control. Please disregard any messages you received recently. I am truly sorry for anything offensive you may have received." But his "Canadian girlfriend stole my phone" defense apparently didn't convince many of his "Contacts" -- or at least, not the ones who mattered -- and so Tuesday night he released a statement in which he said that the "time is right for me to pass the torch and spend more time with my family." During his five years in the legislature, McMillin has crusaded to "protect the integrity of the institution of marriage," but the Advocate reported that the woman on the video he texted was not, in fact, his wife. According to his campaign website, he claimed that "the family has always been the foundation of our strength of community" and that "[i]n these times of turmoil the rest of the country could learn something from our example." It's unclear what the rest of the country could learn from his example at this time, other than -- perhaps -- opposing LGBTQ rights across the board could have karmic implications for conservative Republicans with a proclivity for taking videos of themselves cheating on their wives.
“Jerk,” “idiot,” “buffoon”: Voters choose brutal words to describe Donald Trump
Donald Trump may be riding high in the Republican presidential primary polls but he is not held in high esteem by most Americans, according to a new Suffolk University/USA Today poll.
The national survey found 23 percent support for Trump, with fellow political neophytes Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina tying for second place at 13 percent. Meanwhile, former Florida governor Jeb Bush's support dropped from 14 percent in the last survey to just 8 percent. Clearly a good showing for Trump, right? Well, only superficially at best, as a deeper dive into the numbers reveals real issues for the frontrunner. Trump, for his part, clearly hadn't read the entire poll when he tweeted his excitement: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/s... “Trump is the Jekyll and Hyde candidate — strong when among conservative voters but viewed much differently once Democrats and independents are in the mix,” David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center, said in a statement explaining the results. When 1,000 Republicans, Democrats and Independents were asked to describe Trump in word, the results were hardly flattering. 9.8 percent of respondents described Trump with either "idiot," "jerk," "stupid," or "dumb." Another 5.6 percent described him as "crazy/nuts," with 4.7 percent using the words "buffoon/clown/comical/joke" to describe The Donald. The most commonly used positive descriptor for Trump was "opinionated," "outspoken," or "frank" at 3.1 percent. Here is the full breakdown of one word responses to describe the GOP frontrunner and as you can see, they follow a similar sentiment:9.8% — "Idiot/Jerk/Stupid/Dumb" 6.0% — "Arrogant" 5.6% — "Crazy/Nuts" 4.7% — "Buffoon/Clown/Comical/Joke" 4.3% — "Unfavorable/Dislike him" 4.1% — "Egotistical/Narcissist/Selfish" 3.8% — "Bombastic/Showoff/Pompous" 3.1% — "Outspoken/Frank/Opinionated" 2.9% — "Entertaining/Entertainer" 2.7% — "Businessman/Successful" 2.7% — "Honest/Trustworthy/Truthful" 2.7% — "Cunning/Untrustworthy/Dishonest" 2.6% — "Blow hard/Boisterous" 2.6% — "Favorable/Like him" 1.8% — "Exhilarating/Exciting/Ballsy" 1.7% — "Aggressive" 1.5% — "Blunt/Brash" 1.4% — "Big mouth/Mouthy" 1.3% — "Unqualified/Incompetent" 1.2% — "Bully" 1.2% — "Disgusting/Despicable/Horrible" 1.1% — "Bigot/Racist" 1.1% — "Intelligent" 1.1% — "Rich" 1.0% — "Bold/Brave" 0.9% — "Obnoxious" 0.9% — "Ridiculous" 0.8% — "Different" 0.8% — "Competent/Capable/Intelligent" 0.7% — "Rude" 0.7% — "Leader" 0.6% — "Confident" 0.5% — "Scary" 0.4% — "Ignorant" 11.2% — Other 10.5% — Don't know/refusedTrump’s favorability was the lowest of the 10 candidates polled, standing at 27 percent. 61 percent of all voters also said they disapprove of him.
Donald Trump may be riding high in the Republican presidential primary polls but he is not held in high esteem by most Americans, according to a new Suffolk University/USA Today poll.
The national survey found 23 percent support for Trump, with fellow political neophytes Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina tying for second place at 13 percent. Meanwhile, former Florida governor Jeb Bush's support dropped from 14 percent in the last survey to just 8 percent. Clearly a good showing for Trump, right? Well, only superficially at best, as a deeper dive into the numbers reveals real issues for the frontrunner. Trump, for his part, clearly hadn't read the entire poll when he tweeted his excitement: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/s... “Trump is the Jekyll and Hyde candidate — strong when among conservative voters but viewed much differently once Democrats and independents are in the mix,” David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center, said in a statement explaining the results. When 1,000 Republicans, Democrats and Independents were asked to describe Trump in word, the results were hardly flattering. 9.8 percent of respondents described Trump with either "idiot," "jerk," "stupid," or "dumb." Another 5.6 percent described him as "crazy/nuts," with 4.7 percent using the words "buffoon/clown/comical/joke" to describe The Donald. The most commonly used positive descriptor for Trump was "opinionated," "outspoken," or "frank" at 3.1 percent. Here is the full breakdown of one word responses to describe the GOP frontrunner and as you can see, they follow a similar sentiment:9.8% — "Idiot/Jerk/Stupid/Dumb" 6.0% — "Arrogant" 5.6% — "Crazy/Nuts" 4.7% — "Buffoon/Clown/Comical/Joke" 4.3% — "Unfavorable/Dislike him" 4.1% — "Egotistical/Narcissist/Selfish" 3.8% — "Bombastic/Showoff/Pompous" 3.1% — "Outspoken/Frank/Opinionated" 2.9% — "Entertaining/Entertainer" 2.7% — "Businessman/Successful" 2.7% — "Honest/Trustworthy/Truthful" 2.7% — "Cunning/Untrustworthy/Dishonest" 2.6% — "Blow hard/Boisterous" 2.6% — "Favorable/Like him" 1.8% — "Exhilarating/Exciting/Ballsy" 1.7% — "Aggressive" 1.5% — "Blunt/Brash" 1.4% — "Big mouth/Mouthy" 1.3% — "Unqualified/Incompetent" 1.2% — "Bully" 1.2% — "Disgusting/Despicable/Horrible" 1.1% — "Bigot/Racist" 1.1% — "Intelligent" 1.1% — "Rich" 1.0% — "Bold/Brave" 0.9% — "Obnoxious" 0.9% — "Ridiculous" 0.8% — "Different" 0.8% — "Competent/Capable/Intelligent" 0.7% — "Rude" 0.7% — "Leader" 0.6% — "Confident" 0.5% — "Scary" 0.4% — "Ignorant" 11.2% — Other 10.5% — Don't know/refusedTrump’s favorability was the lowest of the 10 candidates polled, standing at 27 percent. 61 percent of all voters also said they disapprove of him.
September 29, 2015
Secrets of “Saturday Night Live’s” writers room: “The pressure was intense, but it was incredible”
Nearly 30 years ago, Second City alum Christine Zander was asked to audition for “SNL.” Her friend and frequent performing partner Nora Dunn was already on the cast and being kept on for the 1986-87 season, but Lorne Michaels was letting nearly everyone else go, and looking for new talent. Zander flew out to Burbank, did her bit, and … then ended up finding a job bartending. But a few months later, “SNL” called to offer her a seat in the writers room, headed by Jim Downey. Zander tells Salon that taking that job was one of the great decisions of her life. Though the schedule there was brutal—the work week began Monday afternoon and ran until late Saturday night—and Zander was often one of two women in a roomful of men, she says her seven years at “SNL” were some of her funniest, most creative, artistically liberated of her writing career. And they’d have to be: She was in a room with writers Al Franken, Rosie Shuster, Bonnie and Terry Turner, Marc Shaiman and Robert Smigel, and writing for cast members like her old pal Dunn, as well as Jan Hooks, Julia Sweeney and Mike Myers, among many others. Since leaving, Zander has worked consistently for nearly three decades, producing and writing on comedies such as “3rd Rock From the Sun,” “Samantha Who?,” “Nurse Jackie,” “Raising Hope” and, most recently, ABC Family’s “Kevin From Work.” She spoke with Salon about the first sketch she ever wrote for “SNL,” as well as some of her favorites; recounts her experience being a pregnant woman in a predominantly male writers room; reflects on the possible limitations of being on the cast for too long; and gives us a glimpse into the “SNL” writing process. Julia Sweeney had the most wonderful things to say about you. You two worked closely together at “SNL,” is that right? Yes. Julia came in and I was at “SNL” for seven seasons and I think she came in maybe the sixth season? We wrote together. It was so wonderful, so easy and fun. We bonded instantly. She’s just a great person and a great, great writer. And I worked with Nora. In 1986, Al [Franken] and Tom [Davis] came to Chicago looking to audition people [for “SNL”] because that show was such a disaster, with the cast. I didn’t get an audition. I was doing performance and stuff in Chicago. Were you at Second City? I studied at Second City and then I was just doing whatever I wanted to. Nora and I used to perform together on different stages in Chicago, different bars and things, doing kind of our own comedy characters. In the 1980s and ’90s in Chicago, you could perform anywhere. I think you still can, too. It’s such a great place to wet your toes and learn a lot. Then “SNL” hired Nora, and in ’87, they needed more people, so I got to audition for the show. They flew me to Burbank and I did eight minutes of original material. Other people were there, like Phil Hartman and Jan Hooks. Probably Lovitz. And I had dinner with Nora and Lorne after the whole deal and Jan got hired. They really made the right choice. They had you go to Burbank? Yeah. It was at NBC in Burbank, on the Johnny Carson set. They had people audition there. So I didn’t make it, but they were nice to me. Nora kind of kept the bug in their ear that I existed. Six months later, they called and said, “Do you want to come write?” And I was bartending, so I said, “Yes, yes I DO want to write!” Then that was it. I got there and I learned how to do it. I think Lorne would have been OK with me trying to be on-camera, but for some reason, I just decided that I preferred to cultivate relationships with the cast and write. And I’m glad I did because now it’s my 28th year of being in the Writers Guild and working constantly. Were there other women in the writers room at that time? When I got there, the only other female writer was Rosie Shuster. She was lovely, and took me under her wing. But it was mostly all guys. It was smaller when I was there—about 12 writers—and it was the greats: Jim Downey was our head writer and Jack Handey was there. George Meyer and Robert Smigel, Al Franken, Tom Davis, and A. Whitney Brown. And of course the cast wrote—they all collaborated. Shortly after I arrived, Bonnie and Terry Turner came. I became close friends with Jack and Al and Bonnie and Terry, so I wasn’t lonely. We’d all wander into each other’s offices late at night if we needed help or didn’t have any ideas and kind of hopped onto other people’s things. I mean, it was terrifying. It was really emotionally hard and physically hard. It is a young man/woman’s game. I think I ate one meal a day. The pressure was intense, but it was incredible. Now that I look back at it, there’s no anger. There’s no bad feelings. It’s just warm and fuzzy, wonderful. That feeling of how lucky I was to go to what to me was the best university in the world. That is a grueling schedule, I imagine, going non-stop from Monday afternoon to late Saturday night. Yeah. I think it might have gotten a little bit more structured now over the last 10 or 15 years, but it was a self-imposed terrible schedule. You didn’t have to start work at 5 on Monday. You didn’t have to come in at 4 on Tuesday. Everything was just on tradition from ’75—this procrastination, and start working late at night and work all night long and it all goes toward the Wednesday table read that you stay up all night for. Three years in, I had a baby, so I think I might have come in a little earlier, but I still stayed up late. It was hard. I can imagine. I can’t see a place like that being especially family-friendly. At that point, most of the guys in the cast had children. Al was a big family guy. He had a couple of kids and had been through a lot. I remember when I got pregnant, I waited to tell people until it was safe. Andy Breckman didn’t know yet, and he started to say, “Zander, you shouldn’t get pregnant now. It’s too hard.” We were talking about it somehow, maybe I was talking to Al and then Breckman came in and said, “What are you guys talking about?” “Oh, Zander was talking about getting pregnant.” My terrific memory from that was it spread around the office and everyone was happy, and then a lot of the guys put my name on all of their sketches so it was as if I had written on all of them. So, my experience being pregnant and being a woman on that show was it was pretty great because they had no idea what I was going through so they coddled me. Nobody was mad that I was pregnant. It was just, We don’t know what’s going on with her body so just be really nice to her. [Laughs.] Because they’re all young, except the older guys like Al and Jack. The thing that I did miss was there were a lot of great women that worked behind the scenes too who were very helpful and very considerate. You weren’t working with a lot of women. It was just Rosie and then when Rosie left, it was just Bonnie Turner. And then Marilyn Miller would come and go, but that was it for female writers. Were there cast members that you would pretty much work with exclusively? I was really close to Nora because we had been close friends in Chicago so we did a lot of stuff together. And then when we’d get something finished, I’d end up writing with other actors or other writers. I’d wander into Mike Myers’ office. He’d be writing something for himself and I’d help or co-write it with him. Or I’d go just totally conceptual with Jack Handey. It was really kind of collaborative but I did always feel like I needed to work on women’s things because you had to, you should, otherwise not a lot of people would. I’m not saying that men didn’t write for women because they did. What was your first sketch that you got to air? It was for Bill Murray and it was about a guy that Jan Hooks had met in a bar and she got totally drunk and slept with him. Basically, she just wakes up and he’s taken over her apartment and her life. He’s spoken to her mother. He set her cat free. He has plans for the future and he’s a nightmare. He’s this freeloading guy. [They’d hooked up] after she’d had one too many margaritas. I might add too that it was 1987, so we could still do fucking in bars. AIDS was there, but we straight people weren’t worrying about it. I always think of that too, because now you can do it, but everyone knows what you have to do to have that kind of sex. So how do you come to the table on Monday with fresh material, after having just finished late on Saturday night? You are exhausted, since you’re up late and you only have Sunday off. So at the Monday meeting, everybody’s going, “I have nothing.” Then you go in and you think on your feet and pitch something that just enters your mind that minute and try to get a big laugh. Whether or not you write, it doesn’t matter. A lot of times, people would have some concepts they’d thought about before or if they thought enough about the host and the host was cool or flexible, you could always pitch them doing some impression or something. It was always pretty lame but so ridiculous that you usually laughed. And we all laughed at each other because we wanted to get out of there. We wanted the host to feel comfortable. We never wanted them to feel bad. You try to be as entertaining as possible. Most of the time, I think the hosts were terrified. It wasn’t as if we’d worked on something for 48 hours and pitched an entire sketch. Jack Handey would pitch something like, “There’s a zoo and there’s a really unhappy leopard so he gets an ant to call in his colony to help him escape the zoo.” Everyone would say, “Am I in that?” Do hosts ever weigh in or want to participate in creating a sketch? After they have dinner with Lorne—they must still do this—they come back to the office and walk around into each office and check in. And that’s our opportunity to run ideas past them that we’re actually working on. They usually play along and say, “Oh, I’d love to be a riverboat captain and what would I do?” Sometimes they improvise and they’re funny. Other times, they’re just polite. It’s so awkward for them and so hard to do. I gotta say, I think I did 138 shows so I don’t remember anybody being an asshole in those moments when they’re visiting all of us. Nora and I did a sketch called “Attitudes.” That was a great one, if I do say so myself, but we had John Malkovich as our host and he was wonderful. He came in and we told him what we were working on and he was a driftwood artist and he improvised a great deal. He got the character immediately and that was really exciting—it turned out to be a really funny sketch. People put themselves in your hands because Lorne makes them feel comfortable. They know they have to behave because they’re at our mercy. Did you work with Jan and Nora on the Sweeney Sisters? When I first got there I would kind of help them. They would write those pretty quickly with Marc Shaiman because it was such a loose setup and mostly about the medley. Mostly the premise, like where were they? A banquet hall. Or a ski lodge. An elevator. So I would only help them out on that. Who were other people that you worked with? Did you work with Victoria Jackson? I put Victoria in things. I didn’t really put her as the lead in many things. She’d be in group things. But she has said in different magazines that I had given her the idea for the song “I’m Not a Bimbo,” which I’m very grateful for, it was very sweet. I did go up to her because everyone was complaining about her being a bimbo and I said why don’t you write a song called I’m not a bimbo? “Thank you Christine! That’s great!” [Said in a perfect Victoria Jackson voice.] You sound just like her! She’s astonishing. [Laughs] When she was on the show she was just a born-again and there really was nothing political she would speak on. Well, we didn’t have a black president then. Yeah, right. She didn’t care about that stuff at that point, except she did care about God. But she wasn’t that preachy when I was there. Frankly, since I didn’t feel like I had a handle on what I could do for her professionally or for her comedy, I wouldn’t engage. She would occasionally give us tapes that had some kind of born-again Christian speaker on it, but she was so jealous of Jan and Nora, there would be really ridiculous, hilarious fights where she would just accuse them of being the devil and stuff. I just kind of stayed out of that. I mean, she wasn’t abusive and she wasn’t insane at that point. It’s just so weird. God, seeing her at the 40th reunion was just awkward because the hate people have for her is palpable. She just looks crushed and weird when she’s in that crowd, she doesn’t look happy—it’s just not good. You’d left by the time Sarah Silverman came on the cast, yes? We were just ships passing in the night. I just remember that she was really young and she always wanted to do an Update piece about her vagina and nobody would let her. Gee, what a surprise. I think she’s a genius. It was the wrong place for her to be. She was great. People like her and Jenny Slate, who famously got fired from “SNL,” then went on to do just fine. Yeah, it doesn’t mean death anymore when you’re fired from there. I think more people become more successful and that’s because there are people who are wrong for the show but are really right for something else, they’re just so talented. Ben Stiller was there a short amount of time. It is a strange structure and it’s a strange place politically, so if you’re not right for that, you just can’t stay there. Michaela Watkins—brilliant and a great writer, and it just didn’t work out. For me, it just taught me a great deal. I think it’s harder for actors. I just think that that’s where true competition is. It’s stressful, week after week, wanting to get your stuff to air, seeing how many of your sketches get to air. As a performer, that’s what you do. Whereas as a writer, if you find yourself getting shafted every week, it would be extremely difficult and just crushing to your ego and you just feel like, “OK, well I guess my sense of humor does not really gel with the voice of the show.” That’s the message being sent. But also, for a couple seasons they overbooked the plane. There were just too many people in the cast clamoring for airtime. I would think it was like, not to mix metaphors here, survival of the fittest. Yeah, and the thing is too, I’ve always felt that being in the cast can be damaging if you want a career in movies. Not if you’re a guy, that usually works out, because you’ll do your silly guy movies if you’re funny enough. But because, it seems like it’s important that you have a persona that is relatable and real. What’s so genius about how Tina Fey managed her career was she did very few sketches and did the news, and then used it as a springboard to be a comedic actress and create her own roles where she isn’t a big broad character. Do you know what I mean? Like Phil Hartman, the genius that he was, was always in character, so he never was going to get a dramatic role or even a straight role in a comedy because he was never Phil Hartman in any of those things. Bill Murray—the most genius guy—there was always a Bill Murray persona that people fell in love with, that he was able to pick and choose after Ghostbusters, because financially he was doing so well, and do independent films where he’s cast in things nobody would think of him for. Like when he did “Razor’s Edge,” he demonstrated that he had dramatic acting chops and people saw how versatile he was. Right and then he goes away and then he comes back and he does “Rushmore.” And Sofia Coppola’s “Lost in Translation.” So they’re tiny and they don’t pay, but that doesn’t matter. They’re not Adam Sandler box office. When I was there, I think a lot of cast members felt like if they stayed longer than five years, they were a failure because it was supposed to be a springboard after five to greater things. But then people like Phil Hartman, who was such a utilitarian player, so necessary, and the king of the show, knew it was a great gig, and was paid well. But a lot of people felt like they had to get out after five. They knew they were ready or they knew they had some opportunities. As writers, it seemed like a lot of people stuck around. We all stuck around about seven or so years. That’s a brutal schedule to endure for so long, but I can also see how infectious it would be, like how hard it would be to give up. You’d get a kind of Stockholm Syndrome maybe. Well I was from Chicago. I’d visited L.A. once. I never watched sitcoms, I thought it was the greatest thing in the world. I moved because, I had a child and then my husband got a job in L.A. He was a writer too. I’m divorced now, but he’s a writer. So just thought well I’m going to move to California and I have to, because that’s where the writing jobs are for him. And I thought well what am I going to do now, I don’t think I’m going to write sitcoms. Then I ended up getting involved in those and the rest is history. And now looking back, “SNL” was the most artistically free place I’ve ever been. You wrote what you wanted and it got on or it didn’t. You didn’t get notes that said “You can’t say this, you can’t say that.” We had a head writer who would actually make your thing funnier. Jim was great with recognizing different voices, he would know what you were trying to attempt. Not every head writer has that kind of gift. You’re lucky if you have that, because a lot of people want it to sound the way they sound. And Lorne would just be “I don’t like that joke or you really think that works, too long, take that out.” He’d give those notes in between dress and air. Or he just wouldn’t like your sketch and then it wouldn’t get on. He’s not going to explain everything to you about why he doesn’t like it. So then you just go into your room and cry. That would be hard. Out here [in L.A.], from the very inception, people are telling you what to do. There [at “SNL”], you say I want to do a sketch about a woman who married her cat, everybody laughs and they expect to see it. They don’t tell you, how you gonna do that? Why is she going to marry a cat? There’s no question. Once you’ve been in the trenches there, you gotta be such a fast-thinking deft writer. I mean anything would seem like a walk in the park after that. You’re ready for anything. Yeah. You are and as far as the adrenaline and the nerves and the lack of sleep and the emotional rollercoaster of a week of live television, you come out here and it’s like, When am I going to get nervous, excited, or when am I going to feel horrible? And you do, I mean it’s kind of a rollercoaster in half-hour TV too, but it’s only about 30 percent of what you get there. And then if you’re doing the single-camera stuff, which most of us have been doing now for the last six or seven years, not exciting, it’s like a movie, slow and tedious. But it’s funny, not live TV with lots of jokes. What are your favorite sketches that you worked on? My favorites? Well, “Attitudes” was a favorite. And I always loved working on the “Pat” sketches with Julia. She created that, but we wrote a lot of those together. There was one I did with Julia that was a parody of a 1960s movie, that we called “Their Eyes Evolved to Be on Their Breasts.” Do you remember that? Yes, I do. It was really brilliant. You guys managed to do a lot of really great feminist sketches during a particularly dude-bro era of Adam Sandler and Rob Schneider. So to have the counter-balance of Nora and Jan and Julia .... Yeah, well Nora’s stuff was always so smart and her characters are so different than characters that people do. They are very feminist and they’re very smart, and her joke writing for her characters is really brilliant, it’s not stuff you see very often. I did a sketch, one of the first things I did the first couple of years I was there, Jack and I wrote a sketch called “Bean Cafe,” it was just set ups to fart jokes that were never paid off, and Tom Hanks did it. So it was things like “You know what is silent, but deadly,’ and it was about a spider, it wasn’t about a fart. It was just eight fart jokes never realized. We loved it. There was another sketch that I did with Bonnie and Terry Turner and what I love about this was we laughed so hard writing it and we started writing it at 4 a.m. It was with Christina Applegate where she played Cher. It was an infomercial called “Focus on Beauty,” hawking Lori Davis’s shampoo and conditioner. Remember when they’d do those infomercials about that kind of stuff and it’d may be be about 15 minutes long? Yes, really late at night, right? Yeah, after midnight and Cher did one, it was with her and her sister, her best friend and this Lori Davis—Chris Farley played her. She was a large blond lady. I just watched it recently and...my son loves it, and the hook for it was there is no alcohol in the product and it’s so exciting. I walked into their office and asked, “Hey, do you want to do this?” And we were immediately on the same page. We start laughing and then we just wrote it down. And it was so funny because when I knew Christina was coming, I always thought she could do it and everybody thought I was crazy. She thought I was crazy, but she did a really fine job. I later worked with her on “Samantha Who?” and when I first saw her on set, she said, “You made me do Cher!’ It must be really fun, as the hours tick on and you enter that punchy phase. The punchy phase was fantastic. It worked for all of us. I don’t think I wrote anything incredibly funny unless it was after 3 a.m. And now I can’t stay up past midnight working, I want to cry. So many of these jokes and sketches are part of the culture, the lexicon, really. I’ve always been blown away by people that know really obscure sketches. Because everybody responds to the recurring characters. I can think of things that Robert Smigel wrote that are really history-making, like “Get a Life with Shatner,” “Talking to the Nerds,” and things like that. When I’ve met somebody that remembers a sketch like “Green Hilly,” something I did with Jack Handey with Alec Baldwin and it was the ’40s and they’re playing tennis and he and Jan run in and he kisses everything and then finally kisses her, like he kisses a dog, he kisses a butler, and it’s just ridiculous, but then you think Oh my God, you like that specific sense of humor, that specific weird ass thing that we did, that’s incredible. That gives you the will to live. When we realize that it’s making somebody else feel really good, that’s so powerful.Nearly 30 years ago, Second City alum Christine Zander was asked to audition for “SNL.” Her friend and frequent performing partner Nora Dunn was already on the cast and being kept on for the 1986-87 season, but Lorne Michaels was letting nearly everyone else go, and looking for new talent. Zander flew out to Burbank, did her bit, and … then ended up finding a job bartending. But a few months later, “SNL” called to offer her a seat in the writers room, headed by Jim Downey. Zander tells Salon that taking that job was one of the great decisions of her life. Though the schedule there was brutal—the work week began Monday afternoon and ran until late Saturday night—and Zander was often one of two women in a roomful of men, she says her seven years at “SNL” were some of her funniest, most creative, artistically liberated of her writing career. And they’d have to be: She was in a room with writers Al Franken, Rosie Shuster, Bonnie and Terry Turner, Marc Shaiman and Robert Smigel, and writing for cast members like her old pal Dunn, as well as Jan Hooks, Julia Sweeney and Mike Myers, among many others. Since leaving, Zander has worked consistently for nearly three decades, producing and writing on comedies such as “3rd Rock From the Sun,” “Samantha Who?,” “Nurse Jackie,” “Raising Hope” and, most recently, ABC Family’s “Kevin From Work.” She spoke with Salon about the first sketch she ever wrote for “SNL,” as well as some of her favorites; recounts her experience being a pregnant woman in a predominantly male writers room; reflects on the possible limitations of being on the cast for too long; and gives us a glimpse into the “SNL” writing process. Julia Sweeney had the most wonderful things to say about you. You two worked closely together at “SNL,” is that right? Yes. Julia came in and I was at “SNL” for seven seasons and I think she came in maybe the sixth season? We wrote together. It was so wonderful, so easy and fun. We bonded instantly. She’s just a great person and a great, great writer. And I worked with Nora. In 1986, Al [Franken] and Tom [Davis] came to Chicago looking to audition people [for “SNL”] because that show was such a disaster, with the cast. I didn’t get an audition. I was doing performance and stuff in Chicago. Were you at Second City? I studied at Second City and then I was just doing whatever I wanted to. Nora and I used to perform together on different stages in Chicago, different bars and things, doing kind of our own comedy characters. In the 1980s and ’90s in Chicago, you could perform anywhere. I think you still can, too. It’s such a great place to wet your toes and learn a lot. Then “SNL” hired Nora, and in ’87, they needed more people, so I got to audition for the show. They flew me to Burbank and I did eight minutes of original material. Other people were there, like Phil Hartman and Jan Hooks. Probably Lovitz. And I had dinner with Nora and Lorne after the whole deal and Jan got hired. They really made the right choice. They had you go to Burbank? Yeah. It was at NBC in Burbank, on the Johnny Carson set. They had people audition there. So I didn’t make it, but they were nice to me. Nora kind of kept the bug in their ear that I existed. Six months later, they called and said, “Do you want to come write?” And I was bartending, so I said, “Yes, yes I DO want to write!” Then that was it. I got there and I learned how to do it. I think Lorne would have been OK with me trying to be on-camera, but for some reason, I just decided that I preferred to cultivate relationships with the cast and write. And I’m glad I did because now it’s my 28th year of being in the Writers Guild and working constantly. Were there other women in the writers room at that time? When I got there, the only other female writer was Rosie Shuster. She was lovely, and took me under her wing. But it was mostly all guys. It was smaller when I was there—about 12 writers—and it was the greats: Jim Downey was our head writer and Jack Handey was there. George Meyer and Robert Smigel, Al Franken, Tom Davis, and A. Whitney Brown. And of course the cast wrote—they all collaborated. Shortly after I arrived, Bonnie and Terry Turner came. I became close friends with Jack and Al and Bonnie and Terry, so I wasn’t lonely. We’d all wander into each other’s offices late at night if we needed help or didn’t have any ideas and kind of hopped onto other people’s things. I mean, it was terrifying. It was really emotionally hard and physically hard. It is a young man/woman’s game. I think I ate one meal a day. The pressure was intense, but it was incredible. Now that I look back at it, there’s no anger. There’s no bad feelings. It’s just warm and fuzzy, wonderful. That feeling of how lucky I was to go to what to me was the best university in the world. That is a grueling schedule, I imagine, going non-stop from Monday afternoon to late Saturday night. Yeah. I think it might have gotten a little bit more structured now over the last 10 or 15 years, but it was a self-imposed terrible schedule. You didn’t have to start work at 5 on Monday. You didn’t have to come in at 4 on Tuesday. Everything was just on tradition from ’75—this procrastination, and start working late at night and work all night long and it all goes toward the Wednesday table read that you stay up all night for. Three years in, I had a baby, so I think I might have come in a little earlier, but I still stayed up late. It was hard. I can imagine. I can’t see a place like that being especially family-friendly. At that point, most of the guys in the cast had children. Al was a big family guy. He had a couple of kids and had been through a lot. I remember when I got pregnant, I waited to tell people until it was safe. Andy Breckman didn’t know yet, and he started to say, “Zander, you shouldn’t get pregnant now. It’s too hard.” We were talking about it somehow, maybe I was talking to Al and then Breckman came in and said, “What are you guys talking about?” “Oh, Zander was talking about getting pregnant.” My terrific memory from that was it spread around the office and everyone was happy, and then a lot of the guys put my name on all of their sketches so it was as if I had written on all of them. So, my experience being pregnant and being a woman on that show was it was pretty great because they had no idea what I was going through so they coddled me. Nobody was mad that I was pregnant. It was just, We don’t know what’s going on with her body so just be really nice to her. [Laughs.] Because they’re all young, except the older guys like Al and Jack. The thing that I did miss was there were a lot of great women that worked behind the scenes too who were very helpful and very considerate. You weren’t working with a lot of women. It was just Rosie and then when Rosie left, it was just Bonnie Turner. And then Marilyn Miller would come and go, but that was it for female writers. Were there cast members that you would pretty much work with exclusively? I was really close to Nora because we had been close friends in Chicago so we did a lot of stuff together. And then when we’d get something finished, I’d end up writing with other actors or other writers. I’d wander into Mike Myers’ office. He’d be writing something for himself and I’d help or co-write it with him. Or I’d go just totally conceptual with Jack Handey. It was really kind of collaborative but I did always feel like I needed to work on women’s things because you had to, you should, otherwise not a lot of people would. I’m not saying that men didn’t write for women because they did. What was your first sketch that you got to air? It was for Bill Murray and it was about a guy that Jan Hooks had met in a bar and she got totally drunk and slept with him. Basically, she just wakes up and he’s taken over her apartment and her life. He’s spoken to her mother. He set her cat free. He has plans for the future and he’s a nightmare. He’s this freeloading guy. [They’d hooked up] after she’d had one too many margaritas. I might add too that it was 1987, so we could still do fucking in bars. AIDS was there, but we straight people weren’t worrying about it. I always think of that too, because now you can do it, but everyone knows what you have to do to have that kind of sex. So how do you come to the table on Monday with fresh material, after having just finished late on Saturday night? You are exhausted, since you’re up late and you only have Sunday off. So at the Monday meeting, everybody’s going, “I have nothing.” Then you go in and you think on your feet and pitch something that just enters your mind that minute and try to get a big laugh. Whether or not you write, it doesn’t matter. A lot of times, people would have some concepts they’d thought about before or if they thought enough about the host and the host was cool or flexible, you could always pitch them doing some impression or something. It was always pretty lame but so ridiculous that you usually laughed. And we all laughed at each other because we wanted to get out of there. We wanted the host to feel comfortable. We never wanted them to feel bad. You try to be as entertaining as possible. Most of the time, I think the hosts were terrified. It wasn’t as if we’d worked on something for 48 hours and pitched an entire sketch. Jack Handey would pitch something like, “There’s a zoo and there’s a really unhappy leopard so he gets an ant to call in his colony to help him escape the zoo.” Everyone would say, “Am I in that?” Do hosts ever weigh in or want to participate in creating a sketch? After they have dinner with Lorne—they must still do this—they come back to the office and walk around into each office and check in. And that’s our opportunity to run ideas past them that we’re actually working on. They usually play along and say, “Oh, I’d love to be a riverboat captain and what would I do?” Sometimes they improvise and they’re funny. Other times, they’re just polite. It’s so awkward for them and so hard to do. I gotta say, I think I did 138 shows so I don’t remember anybody being an asshole in those moments when they’re visiting all of us. Nora and I did a sketch called “Attitudes.” That was a great one, if I do say so myself, but we had John Malkovich as our host and he was wonderful. He came in and we told him what we were working on and he was a driftwood artist and he improvised a great deal. He got the character immediately and that was really exciting—it turned out to be a really funny sketch. People put themselves in your hands because Lorne makes them feel comfortable. They know they have to behave because they’re at our mercy. Did you work with Jan and Nora on the Sweeney Sisters? When I first got there I would kind of help them. They would write those pretty quickly with Marc Shaiman because it was such a loose setup and mostly about the medley. Mostly the premise, like where were they? A banquet hall. Or a ski lodge. An elevator. So I would only help them out on that. Who were other people that you worked with? Did you work with Victoria Jackson? I put Victoria in things. I didn’t really put her as the lead in many things. She’d be in group things. But she has said in different magazines that I had given her the idea for the song “I’m Not a Bimbo,” which I’m very grateful for, it was very sweet. I did go up to her because everyone was complaining about her being a bimbo and I said why don’t you write a song called I’m not a bimbo? “Thank you Christine! That’s great!” [Said in a perfect Victoria Jackson voice.] You sound just like her! She’s astonishing. [Laughs] When she was on the show she was just a born-again and there really was nothing political she would speak on. Well, we didn’t have a black president then. Yeah, right. She didn’t care about that stuff at that point, except she did care about God. But she wasn’t that preachy when I was there. Frankly, since I didn’t feel like I had a handle on what I could do for her professionally or for her comedy, I wouldn’t engage. She would occasionally give us tapes that had some kind of born-again Christian speaker on it, but she was so jealous of Jan and Nora, there would be really ridiculous, hilarious fights where she would just accuse them of being the devil and stuff. I just kind of stayed out of that. I mean, she wasn’t abusive and she wasn’t insane at that point. It’s just so weird. God, seeing her at the 40th reunion was just awkward because the hate people have for her is palpable. She just looks crushed and weird when she’s in that crowd, she doesn’t look happy—it’s just not good. You’d left by the time Sarah Silverman came on the cast, yes? We were just ships passing in the night. I just remember that she was really young and she always wanted to do an Update piece about her vagina and nobody would let her. Gee, what a surprise. I think she’s a genius. It was the wrong place for her to be. She was great. People like her and Jenny Slate, who famously got fired from “SNL,” then went on to do just fine. Yeah, it doesn’t mean death anymore when you’re fired from there. I think more people become more successful and that’s because there are people who are wrong for the show but are really right for something else, they’re just so talented. Ben Stiller was there a short amount of time. It is a strange structure and it’s a strange place politically, so if you’re not right for that, you just can’t stay there. Michaela Watkins—brilliant and a great writer, and it just didn’t work out. For me, it just taught me a great deal. I think it’s harder for actors. I just think that that’s where true competition is. It’s stressful, week after week, wanting to get your stuff to air, seeing how many of your sketches get to air. As a performer, that’s what you do. Whereas as a writer, if you find yourself getting shafted every week, it would be extremely difficult and just crushing to your ego and you just feel like, “OK, well I guess my sense of humor does not really gel with the voice of the show.” That’s the message being sent. But also, for a couple seasons they overbooked the plane. There were just too many people in the cast clamoring for airtime. I would think it was like, not to mix metaphors here, survival of the fittest. Yeah, and the thing is too, I’ve always felt that being in the cast can be damaging if you want a career in movies. Not if you’re a guy, that usually works out, because you’ll do your silly guy movies if you’re funny enough. But because, it seems like it’s important that you have a persona that is relatable and real. What’s so genius about how Tina Fey managed her career was she did very few sketches and did the news, and then used it as a springboard to be a comedic actress and create her own roles where she isn’t a big broad character. Do you know what I mean? Like Phil Hartman, the genius that he was, was always in character, so he never was going to get a dramatic role or even a straight role in a comedy because he was never Phil Hartman in any of those things. Bill Murray—the most genius guy—there was always a Bill Murray persona that people fell in love with, that he was able to pick and choose after Ghostbusters, because financially he was doing so well, and do independent films where he’s cast in things nobody would think of him for. Like when he did “Razor’s Edge,” he demonstrated that he had dramatic acting chops and people saw how versatile he was. Right and then he goes away and then he comes back and he does “Rushmore.” And Sofia Coppola’s “Lost in Translation.” So they’re tiny and they don’t pay, but that doesn’t matter. They’re not Adam Sandler box office. When I was there, I think a lot of cast members felt like if they stayed longer than five years, they were a failure because it was supposed to be a springboard after five to greater things. But then people like Phil Hartman, who was such a utilitarian player, so necessary, and the king of the show, knew it was a great gig, and was paid well. But a lot of people felt like they had to get out after five. They knew they were ready or they knew they had some opportunities. As writers, it seemed like a lot of people stuck around. We all stuck around about seven or so years. That’s a brutal schedule to endure for so long, but I can also see how infectious it would be, like how hard it would be to give up. You’d get a kind of Stockholm Syndrome maybe. Well I was from Chicago. I’d visited L.A. once. I never watched sitcoms, I thought it was the greatest thing in the world. I moved because, I had a child and then my husband got a job in L.A. He was a writer too. I’m divorced now, but he’s a writer. So just thought well I’m going to move to California and I have to, because that’s where the writing jobs are for him. And I thought well what am I going to do now, I don’t think I’m going to write sitcoms. Then I ended up getting involved in those and the rest is history. And now looking back, “SNL” was the most artistically free place I’ve ever been. You wrote what you wanted and it got on or it didn’t. You didn’t get notes that said “You can’t say this, you can’t say that.” We had a head writer who would actually make your thing funnier. Jim was great with recognizing different voices, he would know what you were trying to attempt. Not every head writer has that kind of gift. You’re lucky if you have that, because a lot of people want it to sound the way they sound. And Lorne would just be “I don’t like that joke or you really think that works, too long, take that out.” He’d give those notes in between dress and air. Or he just wouldn’t like your sketch and then it wouldn’t get on. He’s not going to explain everything to you about why he doesn’t like it. So then you just go into your room and cry. That would be hard. Out here [in L.A.], from the very inception, people are telling you what to do. There [at “SNL”], you say I want to do a sketch about a woman who married her cat, everybody laughs and they expect to see it. They don’t tell you, how you gonna do that? Why is she going to marry a cat? There’s no question. Once you’ve been in the trenches there, you gotta be such a fast-thinking deft writer. I mean anything would seem like a walk in the park after that. You’re ready for anything. Yeah. You are and as far as the adrenaline and the nerves and the lack of sleep and the emotional rollercoaster of a week of live television, you come out here and it’s like, When am I going to get nervous, excited, or when am I going to feel horrible? And you do, I mean it’s kind of a rollercoaster in half-hour TV too, but it’s only about 30 percent of what you get there. And then if you’re doing the single-camera stuff, which most of us have been doing now for the last six or seven years, not exciting, it’s like a movie, slow and tedious. But it’s funny, not live TV with lots of jokes. What are your favorite sketches that you worked on? My favorites? Well, “Attitudes” was a favorite. And I always loved working on the “Pat” sketches with Julia. She created that, but we wrote a lot of those together. There was one I did with Julia that was a parody of a 1960s movie, that we called “Their Eyes Evolved to Be on Their Breasts.” Do you remember that? Yes, I do. It was really brilliant. You guys managed to do a lot of really great feminist sketches during a particularly dude-bro era of Adam Sandler and Rob Schneider. So to have the counter-balance of Nora and Jan and Julia .... Yeah, well Nora’s stuff was always so smart and her characters are so different than characters that people do. They are very feminist and they’re very smart, and her joke writing for her characters is really brilliant, it’s not stuff you see very often. I did a sketch, one of the first things I did the first couple of years I was there, Jack and I wrote a sketch called “Bean Cafe,” it was just set ups to fart jokes that were never paid off, and Tom Hanks did it. So it was things like “You know what is silent, but deadly,’ and it was about a spider, it wasn’t about a fart. It was just eight fart jokes never realized. We loved it. There was another sketch that I did with Bonnie and Terry Turner and what I love about this was we laughed so hard writing it and we started writing it at 4 a.m. It was with Christina Applegate where she played Cher. It was an infomercial called “Focus on Beauty,” hawking Lori Davis’s shampoo and conditioner. Remember when they’d do those infomercials about that kind of stuff and it’d may be be about 15 minutes long? Yes, really late at night, right? Yeah, after midnight and Cher did one, it was with her and her sister, her best friend and this Lori Davis—Chris Farley played her. She was a large blond lady. I just watched it recently and...my son loves it, and the hook for it was there is no alcohol in the product and it’s so exciting. I walked into their office and asked, “Hey, do you want to do this?” And we were immediately on the same page. We start laughing and then we just wrote it down. And it was so funny because when I knew Christina was coming, I always thought she could do it and everybody thought I was crazy. She thought I was crazy, but she did a really fine job. I later worked with her on “Samantha Who?” and when I first saw her on set, she said, “You made me do Cher!’ It must be really fun, as the hours tick on and you enter that punchy phase. The punchy phase was fantastic. It worked for all of us. I don’t think I wrote anything incredibly funny unless it was after 3 a.m. And now I can’t stay up past midnight working, I want to cry. So many of these jokes and sketches are part of the culture, the lexicon, really. I’ve always been blown away by people that know really obscure sketches. Because everybody responds to the recurring characters. I can think of things that Robert Smigel wrote that are really history-making, like “Get a Life with Shatner,” “Talking to the Nerds,” and things like that. When I’ve met somebody that remembers a sketch like “Green Hilly,” something I did with Jack Handey with Alec Baldwin and it was the ’40s and they’re playing tennis and he and Jan run in and he kisses everything and then finally kisses her, like he kisses a dog, he kisses a butler, and it’s just ridiculous, but then you think Oh my God, you like that specific sense of humor, that specific weird ass thing that we did, that’s incredible. That gives you the will to live. When we realize that it’s making somebody else feel really good, that’s so powerful.
Letter to my pro-life Facebook friends: Please stop showing those photos
Unfortunately, there are certain tactics and argumentative gambits there are to be expected when voicing one’s support of Planned Parenthood and access to safe and affordable abortions. In fact, whenever I engage in an online conversation regarding reproductive rights, I expect to be called “selfish” or a “murderer” or be shown pictures of dead fetuses. But this time, I couldn’t have possibly expected these ploys to have such a negative effect on me. It wasn’t because I have had an abortion. In fact, I don’t hold any guilt or shame about my decision to terminate a pregnancy, long ago. A pregnancy that would have made me an unfit mother and left a child in an unhealthy environment. It wasn’t because, now that I am a mother, I’ve had a change of heart or have become more sympathetic to the plights of those who believe their beliefs should dictate another woman’s body. No, it was because I was once pregnant with twins and, at 20 weeks, lost one. It was because I carried life and death inside of me for the remainder of my pregnancy; teetering on an unforgiving plane of sadness and joy, both emotions bombarding me with an overwhelming and relentless cruelty. It was because, when I birthed my now 1-year-old son, I also birthed his dead brother and -- afterward -- could not bring myself to look at his remains. It was because, under the guise of kindness and a so-called respect for life, complete strangers are forcing me to look now. When pro-lifers share dead fetus porn -- usually misappropriated as fetuses that have been aborted but usually are, in fact, fetuses that have been miscarried -- they fail to realize that all women see those pictures. All. The woman who has endured her third miscarriage this year sees that photo. She cringes as she remembers the painful trip to the bathroom or the evacuation she braved, feeling the same tears that stained her eyes when she stared at the hospital ceiling. She swallows the heavy lump of memories, now lodged in her throat. She tries to forget, but strangers won’t let her. The woman that can’t have children sees that photo. She still has bruises from her second round of IVF, a constant reminder of the ways in which her body has failed her. She thinks about the embryos that died in her womb and wonders if strangers are judging her just as harshly. She feels crippled by a guilt she doesn’t want but cannot let go of, because now she knows the feeling of inadequacy is the only feeling she’ll have that’s related to childbirth. She tries to forget, but strangers won’t let her. The woman who works in Labor and Delivery sees that photo. She’s still exhausted from a 24-hour shift. The same one that ended while she was holding a distressed mother's hand through a stillbirth. Every picture leads the way for flashbacks of a petite, blue face or a devastated mother’s sobs. She tries to forget, but strangers won’t let her. The woman who lost her 2-month-old to SIDS sees that photo. Her child was a living, breathing human being instead of a fetus, and still, she is violently thrown into the moment she felt a cold body and a silent chest. She experiences the same rush of debilitating fear and callous panic and vicious hope, even though she knows how the story ends. She tries to forget, but strangers won’t let her. And the woman who, like me, made the choice to spare her body and mind the emotional torment of seeing the remains of a child who never lived sees that photo. A choice that was meant to protect her from the vengeful silence of night: when sleep eludes her and the back of her eyelids shows her what she would have seen in that delivery room. So, the next time you find yourself in the middle of a pro-life, pro-choice debate and you argue for the former, stop and consider the lives of the women you bombard with those photographs. You are not proving a point. You are not fighting for unborn babies. You are not a soldier for the sanctity of life. You are lazily engaging in the tactics and argumentative gambits that, sadly, we have all come to expect but still cannot completely comprehend. You are harming lives in the process. And that is not “pro-life."Unfortunately, there are certain tactics and argumentative gambits there are to be expected when voicing one’s support of Planned Parenthood and access to safe and affordable abortions. In fact, whenever I engage in an online conversation regarding reproductive rights, I expect to be called “selfish” or a “murderer” or be shown pictures of dead fetuses. But this time, I couldn’t have possibly expected these ploys to have such a negative effect on me. It wasn’t because I have had an abortion. In fact, I don’t hold any guilt or shame about my decision to terminate a pregnancy, long ago. A pregnancy that would have made me an unfit mother and left a child in an unhealthy environment. It wasn’t because, now that I am a mother, I’ve had a change of heart or have become more sympathetic to the plights of those who believe their beliefs should dictate another woman’s body. No, it was because I was once pregnant with twins and, at 20 weeks, lost one. It was because I carried life and death inside of me for the remainder of my pregnancy; teetering on an unforgiving plane of sadness and joy, both emotions bombarding me with an overwhelming and relentless cruelty. It was because, when I birthed my now 1-year-old son, I also birthed his dead brother and -- afterward -- could not bring myself to look at his remains. It was because, under the guise of kindness and a so-called respect for life, complete strangers are forcing me to look now. When pro-lifers share dead fetus porn -- usually misappropriated as fetuses that have been aborted but usually are, in fact, fetuses that have been miscarried -- they fail to realize that all women see those pictures. All. The woman who has endured her third miscarriage this year sees that photo. She cringes as she remembers the painful trip to the bathroom or the evacuation she braved, feeling the same tears that stained her eyes when she stared at the hospital ceiling. She swallows the heavy lump of memories, now lodged in her throat. She tries to forget, but strangers won’t let her. The woman that can’t have children sees that photo. She still has bruises from her second round of IVF, a constant reminder of the ways in which her body has failed her. She thinks about the embryos that died in her womb and wonders if strangers are judging her just as harshly. She feels crippled by a guilt she doesn’t want but cannot let go of, because now she knows the feeling of inadequacy is the only feeling she’ll have that’s related to childbirth. She tries to forget, but strangers won’t let her. The woman who works in Labor and Delivery sees that photo. She’s still exhausted from a 24-hour shift. The same one that ended while she was holding a distressed mother's hand through a stillbirth. Every picture leads the way for flashbacks of a petite, blue face or a devastated mother’s sobs. She tries to forget, but strangers won’t let her. The woman who lost her 2-month-old to SIDS sees that photo. Her child was a living, breathing human being instead of a fetus, and still, she is violently thrown into the moment she felt a cold body and a silent chest. She experiences the same rush of debilitating fear and callous panic and vicious hope, even though she knows how the story ends. She tries to forget, but strangers won’t let her. And the woman who, like me, made the choice to spare her body and mind the emotional torment of seeing the remains of a child who never lived sees that photo. A choice that was meant to protect her from the vengeful silence of night: when sleep eludes her and the back of her eyelids shows her what she would have seen in that delivery room. So, the next time you find yourself in the middle of a pro-life, pro-choice debate and you argue for the former, stop and consider the lives of the women you bombard with those photographs. You are not proving a point. You are not fighting for unborn babies. You are not a soldier for the sanctity of life. You are lazily engaging in the tactics and argumentative gambits that, sadly, we have all come to expect but still cannot completely comprehend. You are harming lives in the process. And that is not “pro-life."Unfortunately, there are certain tactics and argumentative gambits there are to be expected when voicing one’s support of Planned Parenthood and access to safe and affordable abortions. In fact, whenever I engage in an online conversation regarding reproductive rights, I expect to be called “selfish” or a “murderer” or be shown pictures of dead fetuses. But this time, I couldn’t have possibly expected these ploys to have such a negative effect on me. It wasn’t because I have had an abortion. In fact, I don’t hold any guilt or shame about my decision to terminate a pregnancy, long ago. A pregnancy that would have made me an unfit mother and left a child in an unhealthy environment. It wasn’t because, now that I am a mother, I’ve had a change of heart or have become more sympathetic to the plights of those who believe their beliefs should dictate another woman’s body. No, it was because I was once pregnant with twins and, at 20 weeks, lost one. It was because I carried life and death inside of me for the remainder of my pregnancy; teetering on an unforgiving plane of sadness and joy, both emotions bombarding me with an overwhelming and relentless cruelty. It was because, when I birthed my now 1-year-old son, I also birthed his dead brother and -- afterward -- could not bring myself to look at his remains. It was because, under the guise of kindness and a so-called respect for life, complete strangers are forcing me to look now. When pro-lifers share dead fetus porn -- usually misappropriated as fetuses that have been aborted but usually are, in fact, fetuses that have been miscarried -- they fail to realize that all women see those pictures. All. The woman who has endured her third miscarriage this year sees that photo. She cringes as she remembers the painful trip to the bathroom or the evacuation she braved, feeling the same tears that stained her eyes when she stared at the hospital ceiling. She swallows the heavy lump of memories, now lodged in her throat. She tries to forget, but strangers won’t let her. The woman that can’t have children sees that photo. She still has bruises from her second round of IVF, a constant reminder of the ways in which her body has failed her. She thinks about the embryos that died in her womb and wonders if strangers are judging her just as harshly. She feels crippled by a guilt she doesn’t want but cannot let go of, because now she knows the feeling of inadequacy is the only feeling she’ll have that’s related to childbirth. She tries to forget, but strangers won’t let her. The woman who works in Labor and Delivery sees that photo. She’s still exhausted from a 24-hour shift. The same one that ended while she was holding a distressed mother's hand through a stillbirth. Every picture leads the way for flashbacks of a petite, blue face or a devastated mother’s sobs. She tries to forget, but strangers won’t let her. The woman who lost her 2-month-old to SIDS sees that photo. Her child was a living, breathing human being instead of a fetus, and still, she is violently thrown into the moment she felt a cold body and a silent chest. She experiences the same rush of debilitating fear and callous panic and vicious hope, even though she knows how the story ends. She tries to forget, but strangers won’t let her. And the woman who, like me, made the choice to spare her body and mind the emotional torment of seeing the remains of a child who never lived sees that photo. A choice that was meant to protect her from the vengeful silence of night: when sleep eludes her and the back of her eyelids shows her what she would have seen in that delivery room. So, the next time you find yourself in the middle of a pro-life, pro-choice debate and you argue for the former, stop and consider the lives of the women you bombard with those photographs. You are not proving a point. You are not fighting for unborn babies. You are not a soldier for the sanctity of life. You are lazily engaging in the tactics and argumentative gambits that, sadly, we have all come to expect but still cannot completely comprehend. You are harming lives in the process. And that is not “pro-life."Unfortunately, there are certain tactics and argumentative gambits there are to be expected when voicing one’s support of Planned Parenthood and access to safe and affordable abortions. In fact, whenever I engage in an online conversation regarding reproductive rights, I expect to be called “selfish” or a “murderer” or be shown pictures of dead fetuses. But this time, I couldn’t have possibly expected these ploys to have such a negative effect on me. It wasn’t because I have had an abortion. In fact, I don’t hold any guilt or shame about my decision to terminate a pregnancy, long ago. A pregnancy that would have made me an unfit mother and left a child in an unhealthy environment. It wasn’t because, now that I am a mother, I’ve had a change of heart or have become more sympathetic to the plights of those who believe their beliefs should dictate another woman’s body. No, it was because I was once pregnant with twins and, at 20 weeks, lost one. It was because I carried life and death inside of me for the remainder of my pregnancy; teetering on an unforgiving plane of sadness and joy, both emotions bombarding me with an overwhelming and relentless cruelty. It was because, when I birthed my now 1-year-old son, I also birthed his dead brother and -- afterward -- could not bring myself to look at his remains. It was because, under the guise of kindness and a so-called respect for life, complete strangers are forcing me to look now. When pro-lifers share dead fetus porn -- usually misappropriated as fetuses that have been aborted but usually are, in fact, fetuses that have been miscarried -- they fail to realize that all women see those pictures. All. The woman who has endured her third miscarriage this year sees that photo. She cringes as she remembers the painful trip to the bathroom or the evacuation she braved, feeling the same tears that stained her eyes when she stared at the hospital ceiling. She swallows the heavy lump of memories, now lodged in her throat. She tries to forget, but strangers won’t let her. The woman that can’t have children sees that photo. She still has bruises from her second round of IVF, a constant reminder of the ways in which her body has failed her. She thinks about the embryos that died in her womb and wonders if strangers are judging her just as harshly. She feels crippled by a guilt she doesn’t want but cannot let go of, because now she knows the feeling of inadequacy is the only feeling she’ll have that’s related to childbirth. She tries to forget, but strangers won’t let her. The woman who works in Labor and Delivery sees that photo. She’s still exhausted from a 24-hour shift. The same one that ended while she was holding a distressed mother's hand through a stillbirth. Every picture leads the way for flashbacks of a petite, blue face or a devastated mother’s sobs. She tries to forget, but strangers won’t let her. The woman who lost her 2-month-old to SIDS sees that photo. Her child was a living, breathing human being instead of a fetus, and still, she is violently thrown into the moment she felt a cold body and a silent chest. She experiences the same rush of debilitating fear and callous panic and vicious hope, even though she knows how the story ends. She tries to forget, but strangers won’t let her. And the woman who, like me, made the choice to spare her body and mind the emotional torment of seeing the remains of a child who never lived sees that photo. A choice that was meant to protect her from the vengeful silence of night: when sleep eludes her and the back of her eyelids shows her what she would have seen in that delivery room. So, the next time you find yourself in the middle of a pro-life, pro-choice debate and you argue for the former, stop and consider the lives of the women you bombard with those photographs. You are not proving a point. You are not fighting for unborn babies. You are not a soldier for the sanctity of life. You are lazily engaging in the tactics and argumentative gambits that, sadly, we have all come to expect but still cannot completely comprehend. You are harming lives in the process. And that is not “pro-life."
“The Martian” and the big Mars discovery: Here’s why we have to go, no matter what it costs
I believe it was the film historian Mark Harris (also the undisputed heavyweight champion of Oscar bloggers) who first injected a note of cynicism into the furor surrounding one of the biggest scientific discoveries of the 21st century: Flowing water on the surface of Mars. Was it entirely a coincidence, Harris tweeted, that the very same week was also bringing us Ridley Scott and Matt Damon’s science-nerd extravaganza “The Martian,” the most pro-NASA movie in many years? Which is, by the way, a tremendously exciting popcorn spectacle, and also a portrait of extraplanetary survival convincing enough that it had my tech-obsessed 11-year-old companion on his feet cheering on several occasions. I'm pretty sure Harris was kidding, and did not think that NASA’s big announcement was a movie tie-in. But I also don’t think Matt Damon actually meant to say that he thought gay actors should stay in the closet, which was how a clumsy statement he made in a Guardian interview has been interpreted. But before we move on from the briefly titillating question of whether we will find unexpected life on another planet within our lifetimes to the far more important issue of Celebrities Who Say Dumb Things (which often feels like the central theme of the Internet, after amusing cat videos) – wait, hang on, let’s not move on, dammit. Let’s go to Mars. If this week’s unlikely coincidence of life and art is sending us a message from God or our alien overlords or the marketing geniuses of Hollywood, that’s what it is. I think we have to go to Mars. If your first reaction is to say we can’t afford it, or there’s too much screwed-up stuff to deal with here on Earth – well, sure. But that’s not the way the human species has ever approached things, and I believe that on some fundamental level it’s neither the right answer nor a true answer. Launching a new manned spaceflight program, alongside the current unmanned research missions that have immensely expanded our understanding of our planetary neighbors and the universe, does not mean giving up on addressing climate change or developing alternative energy technology or reducing poverty and inequality. It might, over the long haul, make those things easier to deal with, rather than more difficult. Science and technological possibility and human ambition are not zero-sum equations; one of the dorky but inarguable points made over and over again in Drew Goddard’s screenplay for “The Martian” (which is adapted from Andy Weir’s bestselling novel), is that ambition breeds innovation and innovation spurs on ambition. Yes, it will cost fabulous, almost unimaginable sums to develop and execute a human Mars mission like the one that goes awry in “The Martian.” If anyone were to propose a concrete number -- $100 billion has repeatedly been floated, but given the history of the space program that is almost certainly a lowball estimate – the inner Grover Norquist within all of us would rise up and vow to drown this pointless scheme in the cosmic bathtub. But that’s small-minded thinking from a nation that has grown distressingly hunched and small. In 1962, John F. Kennedy made that famous speech at Rice University announcing that the United States would put a man on the Moon before the end of that decade -- and it happened. In 2004, George W. Bush announced a plan to send humans back to the Moon by 2020 and establish a long-term base there to be used as a launchpad for missions to Mars and elsewhere. How's that been going? Among the innumerable signs of America’s imperial decline, few are clearer than our abandonment of a manned space program and the governmental defunding of numerous scientific disciplines. We have collectively decided – or we have permitted it to be decided in our names, which comes to the same thing – that science is not trustworthy and not worth it, that we’d rather cut taxes for millionaires and build up the national debt by pouring our grandchildren’s dollars into the black hole of permanent war and an omniscient security state. Sure, I can hear those murmurs of prudence and caution coming from the liberal quadrant too, which has grown hunched and small in its own distinctive way. As I was about to wrap up this article, I heard about Rush Limbaugh’s pronouncement that NASA was lying about the discovery of water on Mars in order to push a “leftist agenda,” and I could just rest my case right there. To a certain disturbingly widespread mind-set, scientific discovery and the advancement of human knowledge are suspicious in themselves, and likely to produce culturally unhealthy outcomes. Look at the mess Galileo and Darwin got us into! Of course the right knows or pretends that evolution is dubious, and that schoolchildren should “study the controversy.” How convinced are they, really, that this whole business about the Earth orbiting the sun – when common sense tells you otherwise! -- is not the cover story for a “leftist agenda”? Anyway, liberals – please don’t start in about how we need that money to feed the hungry, provide universal healthcare, make higher education affordable and clean up the environment. I’m in favor of those things too, but we’re not doing them anyway, and we won’t until we have a more realistic taxation structure in this country and can break free of the ideological hypnosis of austerity and privatization and “market-based solutions.” (Which was inflicted upon us by Bill Clinton’s administration and the Democratic leadership caste of the ‘90s, at least as much as by Reagan and the Republicans.) If we don’t have single-payer health insurance and a way to send every qualified kid to college and a realistic plan to land a woman on Mars by 2027, it’s not because we lack the resources. It’s because our minds have been clouded by lies and manufactured delusions, and because our priorities are hopelessly screwed up. Let’s assume that $100 billion estimate for a Mars mission is low, way low. Let’s assume it’s too low by a factor of 10, and that sending human beings to the Red Planet and getting them back in one piece would cost more like $1 trillion. Unimaginable, right? Yeah, it’s a lot – so much that it’s almost one-fourth the estimated total cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Which were super-necessary and did so much for humanity that we can’t possibly imagine having done without them. As for “The Martian,” if it’s a feature-length advertisement for the possibilities of a new human spaceflight program, it’s a damn fine one. If the sheer number of low-tech solutions stranded astronaut Mark Watney (Damon) must improvise in order to stay alive indefinitely on Mars -- after being left behind alone, badly injured and with little food or water -- beggars the imagination, each individual stroke of genius is plausible enough. Back on Earth, we have perhaps my favorite dork-moment in the movie (there are dozens of those, if not scores), when a young telemetry genius at NASA unveils his outrageous, breaking-all-the-rules plan to rescue Watney after more conventional methods have failed. His codename for the scheme is Project Elrond, and everybody in the room begins exclaiming about how that’s the perfect monicker for a secret meeting where a radical shift in strategy is decided upon, while the NASA P.R. official played by Kristen Wiig looks on in bewilderment, announcing, “I hate you all so much.” This is Ridley Scott’s most entertaining and energetic film in a very long time, and made me want to forget “Prometheus” all over again (having pretty well forgotten it once already). You can argue that the plot of “The Martian” doesn’t offer many surprises, but this is a movie of innumerable delightful moments and small discoveries, and even more of infectious enthusiasm. Goddard’s screenplay captures and distills the tirelessly geeky behind-the-scenes camaraderie of this massive technical exercise, and also the dedication and momentum that keeps pushing Damon’s character forward even when he is 99 percent sure he will die alone, millions of miles from home. In casting the large and delightful multiracial and mixed-gender ensemble of “The Martian,” which includes Jessica Chastain as the Mars mission commander, Michael Peña as a fellow astronaut, Chiwetel Ejiofor as the head of Mission Control in Houston and Donald Glover as the telemetry wunderkind who may save the day, Scott has done more than score identity-politics points. (Although I don’t doubt that such a motivation was in the mix.) He’s announcing that the infectious nerdy enthusiasm this film celebrates and embraces – and indeed proposes as the true solution to what ails us, embodied here by the reverse-Christ figure of one solitary dude trying to grow potatoes on a (presumably) lifeless planet – has spread far and wide, and cannot be stopped. These days it isn’t just bespectacled white boys (and Asian boys) who love physics and engineering and microbiology, who worship technology on its own terms and also for the human possibilities it opens, and who will take massive dorky enjoyment in being part of something called Project Elrond. Boys and girls and men and women of all colors and on all continents will thrill to this movie this week, as they have thrilled to the news that the red orb out there in space, which has teased us so long at the outer edges of human imagination and human possibility, may not be barren after all. Can we afford to go to Mars? We can’t afford not to.I believe it was the film historian Mark Harris (also the undisputed heavyweight champion of Oscar bloggers) who first injected a note of cynicism into the furor surrounding one of the biggest scientific discoveries of the 21st century: Flowing water on the surface of Mars. Was it entirely a coincidence, Harris tweeted, that the very same week was also bringing us Ridley Scott and Matt Damon’s science-nerd extravaganza “The Martian,” the most pro-NASA movie in many years? Which is, by the way, a tremendously exciting popcorn spectacle, and also a portrait of extraplanetary survival convincing enough that it had my tech-obsessed 11-year-old companion on his feet cheering on several occasions. I'm pretty sure Harris was kidding, and did not think that NASA’s big announcement was a movie tie-in. But I also don’t think Matt Damon actually meant to say that he thought gay actors should stay in the closet, which was how a clumsy statement he made in a Guardian interview has been interpreted. But before we move on from the briefly titillating question of whether we will find unexpected life on another planet within our lifetimes to the far more important issue of Celebrities Who Say Dumb Things (which often feels like the central theme of the Internet, after amusing cat videos) – wait, hang on, let’s not move on, dammit. Let’s go to Mars. If this week’s unlikely coincidence of life and art is sending us a message from God or our alien overlords or the marketing geniuses of Hollywood, that’s what it is. I think we have to go to Mars. If your first reaction is to say we can’t afford it, or there’s too much screwed-up stuff to deal with here on Earth – well, sure. But that’s not the way the human species has ever approached things, and I believe that on some fundamental level it’s neither the right answer nor a true answer. Launching a new manned spaceflight program, alongside the current unmanned research missions that have immensely expanded our understanding of our planetary neighbors and the universe, does not mean giving up on addressing climate change or developing alternative energy technology or reducing poverty and inequality. It might, over the long haul, make those things easier to deal with, rather than more difficult. Science and technological possibility and human ambition are not zero-sum equations; one of the dorky but inarguable points made over and over again in Drew Goddard’s screenplay for “The Martian” (which is adapted from Andy Weir’s bestselling novel), is that ambition breeds innovation and innovation spurs on ambition. Yes, it will cost fabulous, almost unimaginable sums to develop and execute a human Mars mission like the one that goes awry in “The Martian.” If anyone were to propose a concrete number -- $100 billion has repeatedly been floated, but given the history of the space program that is almost certainly a lowball estimate – the inner Grover Norquist within all of us would rise up and vow to drown this pointless scheme in the cosmic bathtub. But that’s small-minded thinking from a nation that has grown distressingly hunched and small. In 1962, John F. Kennedy made that famous speech at Rice University announcing that the United States would put a man on the Moon before the end of that decade -- and it happened. In 2004, George W. Bush announced a plan to send humans back to the Moon by 2020 and establish a long-term base there to be used as a launchpad for missions to Mars and elsewhere. How's that been going? Among the innumerable signs of America’s imperial decline, few are clearer than our abandonment of a manned space program and the governmental defunding of numerous scientific disciplines. We have collectively decided – or we have permitted it to be decided in our names, which comes to the same thing – that science is not trustworthy and not worth it, that we’d rather cut taxes for millionaires and build up the national debt by pouring our grandchildren’s dollars into the black hole of permanent war and an omniscient security state. Sure, I can hear those murmurs of prudence and caution coming from the liberal quadrant too, which has grown hunched and small in its own distinctive way. As I was about to wrap up this article, I heard about Rush Limbaugh’s pronouncement that NASA was lying about the discovery of water on Mars in order to push a “leftist agenda,” and I could just rest my case right there. To a certain disturbingly widespread mind-set, scientific discovery and the advancement of human knowledge are suspicious in themselves, and likely to produce culturally unhealthy outcomes. Look at the mess Galileo and Darwin got us into! Of course the right knows or pretends that evolution is dubious, and that schoolchildren should “study the controversy.” How convinced are they, really, that this whole business about the Earth orbiting the sun – when common sense tells you otherwise! -- is not the cover story for a “leftist agenda”? Anyway, liberals – please don’t start in about how we need that money to feed the hungry, provide universal healthcare, make higher education affordable and clean up the environment. I’m in favor of those things too, but we’re not doing them anyway, and we won’t until we have a more realistic taxation structure in this country and can break free of the ideological hypnosis of austerity and privatization and “market-based solutions.” (Which was inflicted upon us by Bill Clinton’s administration and the Democratic leadership caste of the ‘90s, at least as much as by Reagan and the Republicans.) If we don’t have single-payer health insurance and a way to send every qualified kid to college and a realistic plan to land a woman on Mars by 2027, it’s not because we lack the resources. It’s because our minds have been clouded by lies and manufactured delusions, and because our priorities are hopelessly screwed up. Let’s assume that $100 billion estimate for a Mars mission is low, way low. Let’s assume it’s too low by a factor of 10, and that sending human beings to the Red Planet and getting them back in one piece would cost more like $1 trillion. Unimaginable, right? Yeah, it’s a lot – so much that it’s almost one-fourth the estimated total cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Which were super-necessary and did so much for humanity that we can’t possibly imagine having done without them. As for “The Martian,” if it’s a feature-length advertisement for the possibilities of a new human spaceflight program, it’s a damn fine one. If the sheer number of low-tech solutions stranded astronaut Mark Watney (Damon) must improvise in order to stay alive indefinitely on Mars -- after being left behind alone, badly injured and with little food or water -- beggars the imagination, each individual stroke of genius is plausible enough. Back on Earth, we have perhaps my favorite dork-moment in the movie (there are dozens of those, if not scores), when a young telemetry genius at NASA unveils his outrageous, breaking-all-the-rules plan to rescue Watney after more conventional methods have failed. His codename for the scheme is Project Elrond, and everybody in the room begins exclaiming about how that’s the perfect monicker for a secret meeting where a radical shift in strategy is decided upon, while the NASA P.R. official played by Kristen Wiig looks on in bewilderment, announcing, “I hate you all so much.” This is Ridley Scott’s most entertaining and energetic film in a very long time, and made me want to forget “Prometheus” all over again (having pretty well forgotten it once already). You can argue that the plot of “The Martian” doesn’t offer many surprises, but this is a movie of innumerable delightful moments and small discoveries, and even more of infectious enthusiasm. Goddard’s screenplay captures and distills the tirelessly geeky behind-the-scenes camaraderie of this massive technical exercise, and also the dedication and momentum that keeps pushing Damon’s character forward even when he is 99 percent sure he will die alone, millions of miles from home. In casting the large and delightful multiracial and mixed-gender ensemble of “The Martian,” which includes Jessica Chastain as the Mars mission commander, Michael Peña as a fellow astronaut, Chiwetel Ejiofor as the head of Mission Control in Houston and Donald Glover as the telemetry wunderkind who may save the day, Scott has done more than score identity-politics points. (Although I don’t doubt that such a motivation was in the mix.) He’s announcing that the infectious nerdy enthusiasm this film celebrates and embraces – and indeed proposes as the true solution to what ails us, embodied here by the reverse-Christ figure of one solitary dude trying to grow potatoes on a (presumably) lifeless planet – has spread far and wide, and cannot be stopped. These days it isn’t just bespectacled white boys (and Asian boys) who love physics and engineering and microbiology, who worship technology on its own terms and also for the human possibilities it opens, and who will take massive dorky enjoyment in being part of something called Project Elrond. Boys and girls and men and women of all colors and on all continents will thrill to this movie this week, as they have thrilled to the news that the red orb out there in space, which has teased us so long at the outer edges of human imagination and human possibility, may not be barren after all. Can we afford to go to Mars? We can’t afford not to.
“We’re not living in a golden age of music”: Joe Jackson on why the ’90s were better than the ’80s and the “musical doldrums” we’re in right now
Joe Jackson’s catalog is admirably ambitious. While the crisp new wave pop he crafted in the late ’70s and early ’80s rightfully endures—whether it’s the manicured urbanity of “Steppin’ Out” to the crestfallen “Is She Really Going Out With Him?”—the breadth and depth of his work in the 30-plus years since is perhaps even more impressive. The 61-year-old songwriter/pianist has explored jazz, big band, blues and classical music, while delving into esoteric topics—everything from 1997’s “Heaven & Hell,” a song cycle about the seven deadly sins, to a long-gestating theater project focused on the life of Bram Stoker. Musically, however, Jackson’s new album, "Fast Forward," might be his most straightforward album since 2003’s “Volume 4,” which was itself lauded as a nod to his earlier, more pop-leaning days. Songs such as the effervescent “If It Wasn’t for You” and the vivid, darker “Junkie Diva” are supreme earworms, while “Neon Rain” has a sneering edge that recalls his punkest moments. The record’s plenty diverse, though: Jackson channels Antony Hegarty on the ruminative, wry title track, while the smoldering jazz of “Poor Thing” features sharp horns and percussion, and a cover of Television’s “See No Evil” is both reverential and celebratory. The album goes on sale Friday, but you can listen here: For Jackson, the process of assembling the album was quite different than previous releases: He recorded "Fast Forward" in four separate cities—New York City, New Orleans, Berlin and Amsterdam—with a different set of musicians in each. And so the four New York songs boast contributions from jazz guitarist Bill Frisell, drummer Brian Blade and Jackson’s longtime bassist, Graham Maby, while the slinky New Orleans section is marked by three members of funk troupe Galactic (drummer Stanton Moore, bassist Robert Mercurio and guitarist Jeff Raines) and a horn section. Incredibly, the idea to spread out the recording was “pretty recent,” Jackson tells Salon. “I just spent a long time accumulating songs. I was sitting on a big pile of songs, and I was looking for some way to organize them. [When] it started off, the idea was rather than doing a whole album was to work on three or four songs at a time, maybe do a series of EPs instead. It grew from there.” How did you choose which songs were recorded in each different city? A few of them were obvious. Mostly it was the musicians that drew me to those places rather than the places themselves, and a few of the songs were kind of obvious. I mean, like “Kings of the City” is definitely a New York song, “If I Could See Your Face” is definitely a Berlin song, and “Neon Rain,” I was thinking about New Orleans when I wrote it. So some of them were obvious. And then a bit later on, I thought having decided that I was gonna aim for those four places. I started thinking about maybe doing one song in each city that was very much associated with it. That didn’t exactly work out because I just couldn’t think of one for Amsterdam; there were too many for New Orleans. [Laughs.] So I abandoned that idea, but I did end up with a song from a classic New York album, which we did in New York, which was [Television’s] “See No Evil.” And a translation of a German song for Berlin, which was “Good Bye Jonny.” So there are some connections between the songs and the places, but it wasn’t a case of starting with a concept and then writing the songs to fit the concept. I don’t think I’ve ever done that, really; it’s usually been the other way around. Since there were such a diverse array of musicians you’ve collaborated with on this record, what did they all kind of bring to the process? Besides, obviously, very different textures and instrumentation. Yeah, I think one of the surprising things about it is how little difference there is between the four. [Laughs.] Because I think it’s all kind of unified by my writing and my singing and my playing, and my way of looking at the world. So I think that there’s a lot more similarities than differences between them. But there were certain things — I mean, I had been to a gig that Brian Blade and Bill Frisell did together and I met them afterwards, and there were a couple songs I thought they would be fantastic for, especially “Fast Forward.” And, you know, something like “Keep On Dreaming,” that’s just the kind of groove that Stanton Moore eats for breakfast. [Laughs.] So there were just certain people I thought, “Oh God, these guys would be great for this.” A few of the songs could’ve been done anywhere, to be honest, but you know, I ended up dividing them up, and in the process some things happened that I didn’t expect to happen. I mean, like the Berlin EP turned out to be the darkest of the four, and that sorta happened without really being planned. It’s the sort of thing that people think is deliberate, and it isn’t. But I really like them all equally. [Laughs.] If someone just asked me which was my favorite, no way I’m gonna answer that. When did you first fall in love with New Orleans musically? What about the city resonates with you? It was love at first sight. I first went there in 1983 on tour… [Laughs.] I can’t believe it’s that long ago. And I’ve been going back regularly ever since. Yeah, it’s a special place; I think everyone knows that, really. I don’t have anything to say about it that hasn’t already been said, but I like it. There’s a couple of places in the United States that are absolutely bursting with music. I mean, New York is one, but in a different way. In New York, it’s all more sort of “important” and expensive. [Laughs.] You go to New Orleans, and you hear amazing musicians playing for free on the street. It’s so much a part of the culture. You know, I like the generally bohemian vibe, I like the food… what could I say? It’s just a great place. You’ve lived and recorded in New York in very different times of the city’s existence. Was there anything sort of different making music there today as compared to any times in the past you’ve created there? Well… there’s a lot less studios than there were, that’s for sure. [Laughs.] I mean, I don’t know… I don’t know, making music is making music. You know, it’s me and the musicians doing what we do despite what’s happening outside. It’s definitely a very different place to what it was when I first came here, that’s for sure, but I’m not letting that stop me, let’s put it that way. Did you ever get to see Television in their original incarnation when they were around? What really drew you to covering that song? That was a hugely influential album at the time—I believe it was 1977 it came out. And it was one of the things that made me think something really interesting’s happening in New York, and that I would really like to go there. I don’t think it had occurred to be before I heard Talking Heads and Television. And, you know, a couple of years later, there I was: I made it to New York in 1979 on my first tour. So I think there was a bit of nostalgia there, and I was trying to think of a song that would have a connection to New York, without necessarily being some really obvious song about New York. So this is a song from a classic New York album. It’s a little surprising that you and Bill Frisell haven’t crossed paths creatively before now. What was the most gratifying thing collaborating with him? You know, there’s something about the way he’s able to just play one note and have it sound like Bill Frisell, it’s quite extraordinary. [Laughs.] I don’t quite know how he it does it. I mean, for one thing I’m not a guitarist myself, but he does seem to be able to create some kind of magic that I don’t really understand from the instrument. And, you know, he’s a nice guy and he wanted to do it. [Laughs.] He was very flattering about it—he loved the songs, especially “Kings Of The City,” which he played beautifully on, I think. He seemed like he couldn’t get enough of that song. Yeah, I mean, like I said, I met him and Brian Blade at a gig that they played together, and it turns out they were fans of mine. Brian especially was a huge fan of mine, which completely astonished me. I mean, you never know who your fans are. It’s so hard to be objective about anything like that. And I just thought, “I just have to work with these guys.” One project I know you’ve been working on in the recent past is a piece on Bram Stoker’s life. Has there been any movement toward getting that a wider release? Oh my God, yes, Stoker. Yes, there is movement. There’s always movement, but it just seems to be, like, one step forward and five steps back every time. It’s just incredible. I don’t know how anything ever gets produced in the theater world, really, if this is anything to go by. This has been going on for years and years and years. And it’s not uncommon. This is the first time I’ve worked in this area, and one time I said to the director, “If I knew it was gonna take this long, I don’t know if I’d’ve gotten involved.” And she laughed and said, “Well, I knew it would, and that’s why I never said anything.” [Laughs.] So it’s not unusual, apparently. But no, there’s definitely some things going on and it may happen next year, but I don’t wanna say. I just don’t know. I mean, there’s nothing I can do at this point. I mean, it’s not my world. I’ve become quite fatalistic about it. It’s a great piece— I mean, if it ever gets produced, I think it’s fantastic, but who knows? But actually one of the songs from it ended up in a rewritten version on this album: “Far Away” started its life as a song for Stoker. In the piece, it’s sung by Stoker as a young boy. And the music is substantially the same, yeah, but since I thought that song may never see the light of day, I rewrote it and then changed the lyrics and took it in a different direction, and it becomes a song about… Well, I like the idea of how—you know in a movie sometimes you’ll see the character as a child, and then time passes and you see the same character as an adult? And I thought it’d be cool to do that in a song. As a musician, it easier for you now to work on projects like that that might be overly ambitious? Obviously, there’s also the “Heaven & Hell” project that you did some years ago, as well, that was extremely ambitious. Yeah, that was the most ambitious thing I’ve ever done, I think. It was just something I wanted to do and see if I could do it. I think it sold somewhere in the double figures. [Laughs.] But anyway… When you really started going against the grain in regards of what people and labels might’ve expected of you artistically, what sort of resistance did you run into? I don’t know if I run into as much resistance as people might imagine. I mean, people don’t come into the studio and put a gun to your head and say, “Make this kind of record or else.” It’s not like that. It’s quite often after the fact, you know, you do a project that’s not all that successful, you’ll get people saying, “Oh, well, if only you did this instead…” or “If you haven’t done that…” Everyone’s an expert and no one’s an expert, really. I don’t know that there was a point where I deliberately went against the grain—that makes it all sound more kinda calculating than I actually am. I mean, I just always pretty much done what I wanted to do. For the upcoming tour you’re doing, what can people expect from it, besides songs from the record? Old songs and new songs as usual, really. I’m gonna be doing some songs solo as well, and apart from that, I think it’s good if people don’t entirely know what to expect. There are plenty of older songs that I like to play, but I don’t wanna be any more specific because I think it’s nice to have a few surprises. It is very difficult in this day and age to actually be surprised by something. Like when a record comes out, and you don’t know what it sounds like or what’s on it…. It’s refreshing when something like that happens. Yeah. Well, we’re not living in a golden age of music right now. I think that’s pretty clear. You know, I don’t think it’s all crap either, but it’s not a particularly interesting or exciting or important time. I don’t think so, anyway, and I think I’ve been around long enough to see that it’s not a straight line. [Laughs.] It’s very much a cycle. There are times when a lot of interesting things are happening, and there’s a real buzz about it, and there are times that are the doldrums. And I think we’re in the doldrums now. There’s really nothing much I can do as one individual to change that. All I can do is make the best record I can and really try to make it great. When you were first starting out, was there a sense that it was a really important time in music? Yeah, I did feel that that was an exciting time, yeah. And I think that, you know, as the ’80s wore on it got less interesting and I think things got more interesting again in the ’90s. So I think it’s just the way it goes. I read some of
your album analyses on your website
. You said you realized there was all this contemporary ‘90s music you enjoyed, that it was one of the few times your tastes were lining up with what was going on at the time then. Yeah, yeah. I actually think the ’90s was a more interesting decade than the ’80s, and I’ve had people disagree very strongly with that, so sometimes it has to do with very subjective things about the age you were at the time, where you were and what you were doing. It’s hard not to be completely subjective, but I just always had such an interest in such a wide range of music that I don’t think it’s just about what was important when I was in my twenties to me, you know? I’m very interested in early jazz from the ’20s and ’30s, for instance, not to mention people like Beethoven. [Laughs.] To me, music isn’t just something that accompanied my teenage years or something like that. Anything else you want to add? You know, if anyone asked me to describe my new album, or how I feel about it or anything like that, I just say it’s fucking great. I mean, I have no guarantees that anyone else in the world is gonna think so, so I think it may as well start out with me thinking that. If there’s one person that feels really good about this album, it really should be me. [Laughs.]Joe Jackson’s catalog is admirably ambitious. While the crisp new wave pop he crafted in the late ’70s and early ’80s rightfully endures—whether it’s the manicured urbanity of “Steppin’ Out” to the crestfallen “Is She Really Going Out With Him?”—the breadth and depth of his work in the 30-plus years since is perhaps even more impressive. The 61-year-old songwriter/pianist has explored jazz, big band, blues and classical music, while delving into esoteric topics—everything from 1997’s “Heaven & Hell,” a song cycle about the seven deadly sins, to a long-gestating theater project focused on the life of Bram Stoker. Musically, however, Jackson’s new album, "Fast Forward," might be his most straightforward album since 2003’s “Volume 4,” which was itself lauded as a nod to his earlier, more pop-leaning days. Songs such as the effervescent “If It Wasn’t for You” and the vivid, darker “Junkie Diva” are supreme earworms, while “Neon Rain” has a sneering edge that recalls his punkest moments. The record’s plenty diverse, though: Jackson channels Antony Hegarty on the ruminative, wry title track, while the smoldering jazz of “Poor Thing” features sharp horns and percussion, and a cover of Television’s “See No Evil” is both reverential and celebratory. The album goes on sale Friday, but you can listen here: For Jackson, the process of assembling the album was quite different than previous releases: He recorded "Fast Forward" in four separate cities—New York City, New Orleans, Berlin and Amsterdam—with a different set of musicians in each. And so the four New York songs boast contributions from jazz guitarist Bill Frisell, drummer Brian Blade and Jackson’s longtime bassist, Graham Maby, while the slinky New Orleans section is marked by three members of funk troupe Galactic (drummer Stanton Moore, bassist Robert Mercurio and guitarist Jeff Raines) and a horn section. Incredibly, the idea to spread out the recording was “pretty recent,” Jackson tells Salon. “I just spent a long time accumulating songs. I was sitting on a big pile of songs, and I was looking for some way to organize them. [When] it started off, the idea was rather than doing a whole album was to work on three or four songs at a time, maybe do a series of EPs instead. It grew from there.” How did you choose which songs were recorded in each different city? A few of them were obvious. Mostly it was the musicians that drew me to those places rather than the places themselves, and a few of the songs were kind of obvious. I mean, like “Kings of the City” is definitely a New York song, “If I Could See Your Face” is definitely a Berlin song, and “Neon Rain,” I was thinking about New Orleans when I wrote it. So some of them were obvious. And then a bit later on, I thought having decided that I was gonna aim for those four places. I started thinking about maybe doing one song in each city that was very much associated with it. That didn’t exactly work out because I just couldn’t think of one for Amsterdam; there were too many for New Orleans. [Laughs.] So I abandoned that idea, but I did end up with a song from a classic New York album, which we did in New York, which was [Television’s] “See No Evil.” And a translation of a German song for Berlin, which was “Good Bye Jonny.” So there are some connections between the songs and the places, but it wasn’t a case of starting with a concept and then writing the songs to fit the concept. I don’t think I’ve ever done that, really; it’s usually been the other way around. Since there were such a diverse array of musicians you’ve collaborated with on this record, what did they all kind of bring to the process? Besides, obviously, very different textures and instrumentation. Yeah, I think one of the surprising things about it is how little difference there is between the four. [Laughs.] Because I think it’s all kind of unified by my writing and my singing and my playing, and my way of looking at the world. So I think that there’s a lot more similarities than differences between them. But there were certain things — I mean, I had been to a gig that Brian Blade and Bill Frisell did together and I met them afterwards, and there were a couple songs I thought they would be fantastic for, especially “Fast Forward.” And, you know, something like “Keep On Dreaming,” that’s just the kind of groove that Stanton Moore eats for breakfast. [Laughs.] So there were just certain people I thought, “Oh God, these guys would be great for this.” A few of the songs could’ve been done anywhere, to be honest, but you know, I ended up dividing them up, and in the process some things happened that I didn’t expect to happen. I mean, like the Berlin EP turned out to be the darkest of the four, and that sorta happened without really being planned. It’s the sort of thing that people think is deliberate, and it isn’t. But I really like them all equally. [Laughs.] If someone just asked me which was my favorite, no way I’m gonna answer that. When did you first fall in love with New Orleans musically? What about the city resonates with you? It was love at first sight. I first went there in 1983 on tour… [Laughs.] I can’t believe it’s that long ago. And I’ve been going back regularly ever since. Yeah, it’s a special place; I think everyone knows that, really. I don’t have anything to say about it that hasn’t already been said, but I like it. There’s a couple of places in the United States that are absolutely bursting with music. I mean, New York is one, but in a different way. In New York, it’s all more sort of “important” and expensive. [Laughs.] You go to New Orleans, and you hear amazing musicians playing for free on the street. It’s so much a part of the culture. You know, I like the generally bohemian vibe, I like the food… what could I say? It’s just a great place. You’ve lived and recorded in New York in very different times of the city’s existence. Was there anything sort of different making music there today as compared to any times in the past you’ve created there? Well… there’s a lot less studios than there were, that’s for sure. [Laughs.] I mean, I don’t know… I don’t know, making music is making music. You know, it’s me and the musicians doing what we do despite what’s happening outside. It’s definitely a very different place to what it was when I first came here, that’s for sure, but I’m not letting that stop me, let’s put it that way. Did you ever get to see Television in their original incarnation when they were around? What really drew you to covering that song? That was a hugely influential album at the time—I believe it was 1977 it came out. And it was one of the things that made me think something really interesting’s happening in New York, and that I would really like to go there. I don’t think it had occurred to be before I heard Talking Heads and Television. And, you know, a couple of years later, there I was: I made it to New York in 1979 on my first tour. So I think there was a bit of nostalgia there, and I was trying to think of a song that would have a connection to New York, without necessarily being some really obvious song about New York. So this is a song from a classic New York album. It’s a little surprising that you and Bill Frisell haven’t crossed paths creatively before now. What was the most gratifying thing collaborating with him? You know, there’s something about the way he’s able to just play one note and have it sound like Bill Frisell, it’s quite extraordinary. [Laughs.] I don’t quite know how he it does it. I mean, for one thing I’m not a guitarist myself, but he does seem to be able to create some kind of magic that I don’t really understand from the instrument. And, you know, he’s a nice guy and he wanted to do it. [Laughs.] He was very flattering about it—he loved the songs, especially “Kings Of The City,” which he played beautifully on, I think. He seemed like he couldn’t get enough of that song. Yeah, I mean, like I said, I met him and Brian Blade at a gig that they played together, and it turns out they were fans of mine. Brian especially was a huge fan of mine, which completely astonished me. I mean, you never know who your fans are. It’s so hard to be objective about anything like that. And I just thought, “I just have to work with these guys.” One project I know you’ve been working on in the recent past is a piece on Bram Stoker’s life. Has there been any movement toward getting that a wider release? Oh my God, yes, Stoker. Yes, there is movement. There’s always movement, but it just seems to be, like, one step forward and five steps back every time. It’s just incredible. I don’t know how anything ever gets produced in the theater world, really, if this is anything to go by. This has been going on for years and years and years. And it’s not uncommon. This is the first time I’ve worked in this area, and one time I said to the director, “If I knew it was gonna take this long, I don’t know if I’d’ve gotten involved.” And she laughed and said, “Well, I knew it would, and that’s why I never said anything.” [Laughs.] So it’s not unusual, apparently. But no, there’s definitely some things going on and it may happen next year, but I don’t wanna say. I just don’t know. I mean, there’s nothing I can do at this point. I mean, it’s not my world. I’ve become quite fatalistic about it. It’s a great piece— I mean, if it ever gets produced, I think it’s fantastic, but who knows? But actually one of the songs from it ended up in a rewritten version on this album: “Far Away” started its life as a song for Stoker. In the piece, it’s sung by Stoker as a young boy. And the music is substantially the same, yeah, but since I thought that song may never see the light of day, I rewrote it and then changed the lyrics and took it in a different direction, and it becomes a song about… Well, I like the idea of how—you know in a movie sometimes you’ll see the character as a child, and then time passes and you see the same character as an adult? And I thought it’d be cool to do that in a song. As a musician, it easier for you now to work on projects like that that might be overly ambitious? Obviously, there’s also the “Heaven & Hell” project that you did some years ago, as well, that was extremely ambitious. Yeah, that was the most ambitious thing I’ve ever done, I think. It was just something I wanted to do and see if I could do it. I think it sold somewhere in the double figures. [Laughs.] But anyway… When you really started going against the grain in regards of what people and labels might’ve expected of you artistically, what sort of resistance did you run into? I don’t know if I run into as much resistance as people might imagine. I mean, people don’t come into the studio and put a gun to your head and say, “Make this kind of record or else.” It’s not like that. It’s quite often after the fact, you know, you do a project that’s not all that successful, you’ll get people saying, “Oh, well, if only you did this instead…” or “If you haven’t done that…” Everyone’s an expert and no one’s an expert, really. I don’t know that there was a point where I deliberately went against the grain—that makes it all sound more kinda calculating than I actually am. I mean, I just always pretty much done what I wanted to do. For the upcoming tour you’re doing, what can people expect from it, besides songs from the record? Old songs and new songs as usual, really. I’m gonna be doing some songs solo as well, and apart from that, I think it’s good if people don’t entirely know what to expect. There are plenty of older songs that I like to play, but I don’t wanna be any more specific because I think it’s nice to have a few surprises. It is very difficult in this day and age to actually be surprised by something. Like when a record comes out, and you don’t know what it sounds like or what’s on it…. It’s refreshing when something like that happens. Yeah. Well, we’re not living in a golden age of music right now. I think that’s pretty clear. You know, I don’t think it’s all crap either, but it’s not a particularly interesting or exciting or important time. I don’t think so, anyway, and I think I’ve been around long enough to see that it’s not a straight line. [Laughs.] It’s very much a cycle. There are times when a lot of interesting things are happening, and there’s a real buzz about it, and there are times that are the doldrums. And I think we’re in the doldrums now. There’s really nothing much I can do as one individual to change that. All I can do is make the best record I can and really try to make it great. When you were first starting out, was there a sense that it was a really important time in music? Yeah, I did feel that that was an exciting time, yeah. And I think that, you know, as the ’80s wore on it got less interesting and I think things got more interesting again in the ’90s. So I think it’s just the way it goes. I read some of
your album analyses on your website
. You said you realized there was all this contemporary ‘90s music you enjoyed, that it was one of the few times your tastes were lining up with what was going on at the time then. Yeah, yeah. I actually think the ’90s was a more interesting decade than the ’80s, and I’ve had people disagree very strongly with that, so sometimes it has to do with very subjective things about the age you were at the time, where you were and what you were doing. It’s hard not to be completely subjective, but I just always had such an interest in such a wide range of music that I don’t think it’s just about what was important when I was in my twenties to me, you know? I’m very interested in early jazz from the ’20s and ’30s, for instance, not to mention people like Beethoven. [Laughs.] To me, music isn’t just something that accompanied my teenage years or something like that. Anything else you want to add? You know, if anyone asked me to describe my new album, or how I feel about it or anything like that, I just say it’s fucking great. I mean, I have no guarantees that anyone else in the world is gonna think so, so I think it may as well start out with me thinking that. If there’s one person that feels really good about this album, it really should be me. [Laughs.]
