Elisabeth Donnelly

YEEZUS/WALT WHITMAN

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 14:51:00 -0400

“If you walk into an old man’s house, they’re not giving nothing. They’re at 100 percent exactly what they want to do.”

“Yeah. I love the fact that I’m bad at [things], you know what I’m saying? I’m forever the 35-year-old 5-year-old. I’m forever the 5-year-old of something.”

“Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself; I am large – I contain multitudes.”

I’m officially living in the New York metro area (and, er,...

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 10:07:00 -0400

I’m officially living in the New York metro area (and, er, starting to look for an apartment in Brooklyn or so, wish me luck! Share secrets!) and it’s been very good so far and feels like an exciting and productive move on my end. In some ways, I didn’t choose to live in upstate New York (thanks, love) and I never liked the Albany area much, despite the two wonderful friends I had there, genuine love and appreciation for the works of William Kennedy and William Kennedy himself, and the New York State Writers Institute, which is a goddamm treasure. (Here is a challenge: try making friends when you work at home and are too old for college stuff but too young for baby stuff and hate jam bands, very sensitive folk music by Woodstock natives, 90s bands - Spin Doctors, 311, Third Eye Blind, they live! - and 90s cover bands and live upstate. It is hard. The friends I had I mostly had met before moving.) I mostly liked its proximity to other places in New York and Massachusetts: Saratoga, Williamstown, Great Barrington, Hudson, Northampton if I felt ambitious.

Honestly, the smartest thing I did while living upstate was choosing to move 40 minutes south to Catskill, New York, which was in the upper corner of the Hudson Valley, with the Catskill Mountains (yes, kind of confusing) fifteen minutes away on one side and across the river, the fairly touristified Hudson, New York, which is its own strange ecosystem thanks to the presence of Manhattanites with country homes and proximity to Bard and Great Barrington/Berkshires stuff.

In Catskill, we lived down the street from where Thomas Cole lived. He was one of the leaders of the Hudson River School movement in painting. He painted the Catskills, Kaaterskill Falls, and the view from my house:

The sunsets in Catskill are amazing. There’s a valley between the mountains and the river. The moisture in the sky creates a lot of clouds most nights, and each sunset is a slow-mo reflection of light bending into impossible shades of orange and purple before hiding behind the hills. There’s a quality of light there that’s very difficult to capture well with just one photo: to get the real colors of the sunset, the land needs to be blacked out and in shadow, or vice versa. That’s why it was nice to look at Hudson River School paintings to say, wow, that’s where I lived! I don’t know much about painting but I think the act of underpainting made a difference in replicating the sunsets, prepping the canvas with a color like a strong blue or golden-tinged white so that bit of color could come through in the end product. (All I know about underpainting I learned from an insane BBC documentary on cinematographer Christopher Doyle, where he went to Hong Kong and watched women apply makeup and compared that all to an underpainting.)

We were in this beautiful, picture-perfect postcard of an area - on one hand, on the other hand the main street in Catskill is basically abandoned - but it was hard to replicate it through photographs or art, and I think it was an accident of the light. I’ve driven through Big Sur, an area so gorgeous that it makes the most committed amateur photographer appear to be Ansel Adams 2, and Catskill - and the Hudson Valley as a whole - is just as beautiful, but impossible to photograph well. A funny state of being. I miss being around that sort of reckless beauty, but I know what I’m getting in return is rich as well.

This was a fairly long intro to what I wanted to talk about, which was running in Catskill. I had thought that I hated running. It is a terrifically boring sport, and it does nothing for my psyche on a daily basis. But it is cheap and keeps me fit so I have to do it.

Running in Catskill was magical.

We had two routes: one across the Rip Van Winkle Bridge, a 1.5 KM bridge that spanned the Hudson River, with views of Olana on one side and the Catskills on the other. When we would run by it early in the morning, the fog would still be on the river, spinning light through the farms and trees. We saw deer and foxes on our run. Birds chirped.

The other route was down a road that ran alongside the Hudson River. There would be abandoned haunted houses on the way, gorgeous mansions from the 1800s now chopped up into sad upstate apartments and in elegant disarray, houses topped off with Widow’s Walks, giant mansions with views of the river and mysterious tour buses parked in the driveway (our theory was that it was Natalie Merchant), and a house behind a large brick fence that had elaborate gates with the family crest painted on it and lions topping each corner - for the last, of course, when we ran by there the first time we made tasteless jokes about how this house could’ve been an inspiration for Stieg Larsson. Each time we ran it was like running in a V, with a steep downslope and a satisfying upslope, the sort of path that leaves your calves aching and your thighs burning and it’s a wonderful feeling.

I don’t have those kind of paths to run right now. I have the Original Suburbs of America, the sort of landscape that renders running into something joyless and monotonous, passing the same charmless houses, the same erratic sidewalks, the same springy outdoor tracks at high schools, always an impossible quarter of a mile. The sort of route that argues for music (if you have any better-than-The Fall running music recommendations, I am all ears!) or a running buddy. In Catskill, I could wander.

But then again, I was also running across a bridge named after a fictional character who, running away from his nag of a wife, fell asleep for twenty years thanks to drink and missed the war; a good, sturdy metaphor for what it’s like to live in the country, sometimes.

tandess: SORRY SOMETIMES THIS SHOW JUST ACTUALLY RADIATES JOY

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 15:25:59 -0400

tandess:

SORRY SOMETIMES THIS SHOW JUST ACTUALLY RADIATES JOY

I wrote about some state capitals for The Awl. Somebody on...

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 10:25:00 -0400

I wrote about some state capitals for The Awl. Somebody on twitter said “I got Sacramento about right,” which is all I want, really, after spending time in the bus station there.

Haircolor inspiration.

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 18:36:49 -0400

Haircolor inspiration.

Elizabethtown, Cameron Crowe, 2005

Wed, 29 May 2013 17:05:15 -0400

Elizabethtown, Cameron Crowe, 2005

"I had a more pressing social problem: I did not know how to tell a white lie. I didn’t even have the..."

Wed, 15 May 2013 16:14:00 -0400

“I had a more pressing social problem: I did not know how to tell a white lie. I didn’t even have the grace to realize when you should tell a white lie. In my own well-meaning way, I was becoming a bit of an asshole. “I plead the fifth” was my catchphrase. In England.”

- I wrote a funny essay on modeling and being a well-meaning American asshole in Europe for The Paris Review.

"“She did not answer. From her feet the ground sloped sharply into view, and violets ran down..."

Tue, 14 May 2013 10:00:21 -0400

“

“She did not answer. From her feet the ground sloped sharply into view, and violets ran down in rivulets and streams and cataracts, irrigating the hillside with blue, eddying round the tree stems, collecting into pools in the hollows, covering the grass with spots of azure foam. But never again were they in such profusion; the terrace was the well-head, the primal source whence beauty gushed out to water the earth.

Standing at its brink, like a swimmer who prepares, was the good man. But he was not the good man that she had expected, and he was alone.

George had turned at the sound of her arrival. For a moment he contemplated her, as one who has fallen out of heaven. He saw radiant joy in her face, he saw the flowers beat against her dress in blue waves. The bushes above them closed. He stepped quickly forward and kissed her.”

”

- A Room with a View, E.M. Forster

At the drive in, photo by Stu Sherman. This photo has...

Mon, 13 May 2013 18:47:00 -0400

At the drive in, photo by Stu Sherman. This photo has everything: stars and the light of the projection house.

Photo

Wed, 08 May 2013 15:24:20 -0400

It is strange that a memoir from 2003 can seem so utterly out-of-place and dated, but yes, this...

Mon, 06 May 2013 11:45:00 -0400

It is strange that a memoir from 2003 can seem so utterly out-of-place and dated, but yes, this book is about ten years old and talks about a media world that doesn’t exist anymore, where the urge to be young and make something of yourself manifests itself in one glittering issue of a magazine called Bleach.

Anyways, there’s something reflective and quiet in Strawberry Saroyan’s memoir that feels like it would resonate, specifically, in the medium of Tumblr, where thoughtful women would post some relevant quotes that could zip around the internet. The book reads like she tried to write several riffs on Goodbye to All That, with varying degrees of success. I think the essay “Ambition” is quite good, and worth trying to find, but overall, the book doesn’t stick with me, so much. It is also annoying to look up old reviews of this book to find that yes, even in 2003, women writing memoirs about their lives in their 20s, and the confusion therein, were of course called “narcissistic,” and the fact that Saroyan’s grandfather is a Great Writer is a strike against her and the reason for the book’s existence, obviously.

These flinty, faulty arguments are exhausting, yes? We need a test to see if this argument is bullshit. Look at a piece of art. Do you like it or not? If you didn’t like it, if it didn’t resonate, do you need to make up some reason for its existence like a Greek myth that says why this particular person got something and you didn’t, or, do you need to explain the reasons why you didn’t like it, explicating said reasons from the text?

It would be absolutely naive to say that the circumstances of, for example, Lena Dunham’s existence - just growing up in New York City, or the charm that you have to learn when your parents are artists and you talk with people at openings, a very useful charm, I would think (a charm that I do not know if I have, or if I learned it, well, it happened four years ago, at most, and it does not work on my family) - did not leave her ahead of others in the ways that New York University kids have the jump on New York media internships, there’s a lot behind every wunderkind and a goodly percentage of the time, it is money, but I’m starting to feel like that’s just part of the system, and that’s the better thing to rail against - instead of the same tired argument against the one true girl genius of the month, whoever she is, at the moment.

Mark Wahlberg: has his own nutrition supplement called Marked,...

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 10:26:55 -0400

Mark Wahlberg: has his own nutrition supplement called Marked, has his own family burger joint called Wahlburgers.

Bowling with Joe Swanberg

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 09:19:22 -0400

[Last one, I promise! There’s a Greta Gerwig cameo in this one. I was one of the first people to write about “mumblecore.”]

Indie filmmaker Joe Swanberg

The director pals around Davis Square with his peers during the Independent Film Festival

By Elisabeth Donnelly
Globe Correspondent

The instant Chicago-based filmmaker Joe Swanberg stepped out of a car in front of the bustling Somerville Theatre last Thursday night, he ran into friends. And they couldn’t resist ribbing him about all the attention he’s been getting, particularly as part of a rising group of young directors making films on the cheap who are referred to as the “mumblecore” — so named for the verite speaking style of their characters. Swanberg had just come from a retrospective of his work at the Coolidge — not bad for a 25-year-old — and fellow filmmakers Nate Meyer and Craig Zobel gently teased him about being a celebrity.

Swanberg and his cohorts were in town last week to show their works at the Independent Film Festival of Boston. Swanberg was here last year with his feature “LOL,” which skewered 20-something males and technology, and this year he brought his third full-length, “Hannah Takes the Stairs,” about a woman’s relationships with three men. He’s been busy editing his fourth film and acting in films made by friends he’s met at previous festivals. Last year, he even managed to pay the rent with film-related odd jobs, such as shooting behind-the-scenes footage for the upcoming “Cabin Fever 2.”

For Swanberg, Thursday was the calm before the storm. He started the night answering questions about his work at the Naked Eye College Film Festival. He talked about his ambitions (“I still haven’t figured out how to make any money”), inspirations (citing documentaries, not, as assumed, early John Cassavetes or the French film “The Mother and the Whore”), and his work’s frank sexuality (“I don’t get why nudity is such a big deal”).

After telling the Coolidge audience that “technology is democratic,” Swanberg got a ride over to Somerville and headed to the filmmaker’s lounge, perched in the upper reaches of the Somerville Theatre building. Among the Connect Four games and Red Bull on ice, he found his fiancee Kris Williams, “Hannah” star Greta Gerwig, and “travel buddy” Michael Tully. Tully is also on the festival circuit (for his documentary “Silver Jew,” on the rock band the Silver Jews) and he and Swanberg have ended up on all the same flights to places like Nashville and Sarasota. Swanberg walked over to Tully and greeted him with a kiss on the cheek. The two were dressed alike in Western shirts of differing plaids. After greeting Tully, Swanberg ran around the room saying hi to friends, his complimentary messenger bag, already covered with autographs by festival participants, slung across his back. Williams was by his side, discussing the documentary she just saw, “The Killer Within.”

Soon Swanberg and his pals headed over to Sacco’s Bowl Haven for a festival-sponsored night of candlepin bowling. “I love bowling with filmmakers,” said Swanberg, “because we’re all arty but we’re secretly such competitive bastards.”

The “Hannah” team — Swanberg, Williams, and Gerwig, plus Tully and Meyer — ended up in a rather silly match-up against another skinny filmmaker team, bowling backward, flinging balls, repeatedly mistaking Red Bull in plastic cups for beer, and dancing.

The dancing was prompted by the impeccable DJ skills of Gerwig, who switched up a Dave Matthews-heavy playlist to one stocked with the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones, and David Bowie. “As long as you stick with Bowie on the jukebox, you’re fine,” said Gerwig as “Life on Mars” blared through the speakers.

“Tully, you’re a master!” Swanberg cheered in broad Midwestern tones after a good roll. The self-deprecating Tully returned the praise as Swanberg took his turn, saying, “Joe knows the trick that diving in and making it [the film] is the victory.” Gerwig added that an audience member in Sarasota, Fla., told her: “I didn’t like the movie, but ya’ll seem like really nice folks.”

The friendships and collaborations that come out of these festivals are key, Swanberg said: “This is what it’s all about.” Many of the actors in “Hannah” are successful independent directors and writers whom Swanberg met on the festival circuit. Boston-based Andrew Bujalski, who plays one of Hannah’s suitors, was in Austin working on his new film and therefore absent from the festivities.

The Clash’s “White Man in Hammersmith Palais” came on the loudspeaker, and Swanberg sang along, doing a soft-shoe down the lane. “It’s exciting to get some attention,” he said, “but I feel like everybody just wants to get back and work on things.”

Originally published on Friday, May 4, 2007.

Wayback Machine: Claire Messud at the Toy Store

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 10:10:00 -0400

[Claire Messud is a genius and this month’s The Woman Upstairs is probably the best book of the year: check the vintage Gawker reference! Also, I have decided that Girls’ Alison Williams is real-life Marina Thwaite. Today that sort of gilded girl would be on a TV show. And if you compare/contrast my piece with the New York piece, clearly Messud is awkward/not media savvy, per se - but it’s the writer’s choice how to present said quotes. For what I was writing, I thought she was hilarious, and charmingly self-conscious and aware of the inanity of our particular interview set-up.]

The acclaimed author sorts through Mad Libs and crayons at Henry Bear’s Place in Cambridge

By Elisabeth Donnelly

“It’s a little baffling,” said Claire Messud, talking with the cashier at the Cambridge toy store Henry Bear’s Place about the success of her fourth book, “The Emperor’s Children.” When the cashier said he had just received the book as a gift, Messud replied, “Oh, it makes a good doorstopper.”

“The Emperor’s Children,” which is being released in paperback next week, is much more than a doorstopper, though. It received ecstatic reviews and ended up on the major best books of the year lists in 2006, even inspiring the normally snarky media gossip website Gawker to sincerely ruminate on who could play Messud’s characters — Jeff Daniels as patriarch Murray Thwaite — for example in a possible film. A friend forwarded the Gawker piece to Messud, and “it made me laugh,” she says. She revealed that she didn’t really know some of the younger actors cited in the piece, such as Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, bandied about as the serpentine Ludovic Seeley. Messud wasn’t sanguine about the possibility of a film on the horizon, although she noted that Ron Howard’s production company had optioned the book.

On a dank and unseasonably cold Wednesday, the chic Messud, clad in an olive marching-band-style jacket with big gold buttons, had a long to-do list. One of her primary tasks was putting together a travel pack for her two young children. That Friday, she and her husband, Harvard professor and literary critic James Wood, were taking the kids to visit family in Scotland. Messud lives in Union Square, and as it turns out, she and I are neighbors. “We could’ve stayed in Somerville, gone to Sherman’s Café, and you could’ve watched me do laundry,” she quipped.

She had other pressing matters, such as a book review for The New York Times that was due, but Messud was looking for gizmos, gadgets, and books to entertain her children on the lengthy plane ride. However, in “a hideous confession,” she admitted that her children would probably be happier with a portable DVD player. Starting over by the books, between the Harry Potter cardboard cutouts and “An Inconvenient Truth” for younger readers, Messud perused the display of Mad Libs on the table. “I hate Dora. I can’t get Dora,” she muttered, kneeling and flipping through the books before deciding on a Pirate Mad Libs.

After asking whether magnetic truck cutouts would amuse a small child more than once, (the consensus was no) she checked out the Shrinky Dinks and the dinosaur eggs that “hatch” in water. As she browsed, Messud talked about the fact that she has always been a fiction writer; she worked as a journalist for a while, but it wasn’t her forte. She spent a year in Syracuse’s MFA program but ended up dropping out and moving to England, where Wood was living. As she searched unsuccessfully for the crayons among the shiny gadgets, Messud gently chided herself: “I’m being a eejit! A ninny!”

It has been a hectic year of promotion for “The Emperor’s Children,” and Messud is close to the end of book readings and signings. (She’s on the market as a professor in the fall.) The success of the book has been gratifying, but Messud noted that “the one thing it hasn’t been good for is writing another book.” And crafting her beautifully composed Henry James-ian sentences takes time — four years per book on average.

The “satire” tag has been applied to “The Emporer’s Children,” but for Messud the label is limited — “It doesn’t involve compassion,” she says. A first draft of the book played more satirically, but she took a different tack after Sept. 11. Compassion is important to Messud, right down to the characters she writes about. Even though they move in a world of privilege, she said, “I have compassion for them.”

Before long, Messud had a pile of books and crayons to amuse her children on the plane. Going to the cashier, she whipped out her frequent-buyer card and joked that this travel pack was integral to having “more resilient children.” Messud has been traveling frequently this year, and under Wood’s watch, the kids have been eating candy for dinner and own 12 new toys, she said. It’s a funny story. Messud is a sly wit, and it’s striking how she’s just as funny as you would expect from the droll humor in her writing. After gracefully acknowledging the compliment, she noted, rhetorically, in a line that could fit into her book, “Don’t you find in life people are a lot more unfunny than you wish?”

Originally published in The Boston Globe Friday, June 22, 2007

"[Claire] Messud is listening stoically, and I begin to wonder if she might even be a little jealous..."

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 09:54:00 -0400

“[Claire] Messud is listening stoically, and I begin to wonder if she might even be a little jealous of this unhinged narrator.”

- One of the comments on this New York Magazine profile of Claire Messud and James Wood (imagine you are married to Wood, and how people treat your writing as a result, including in this profile. Frustrating) notes “You have failed to capture Claire’s charm, humor, and warmth,” which I think is quite correct. I found this profile to be predatory, sloppy (Milton Academy is not, as implied, in Connecticut) and sexist - like the similar Fiona Apple piece - even if it’s clear that the author admires Messud’s faultless novels and writing. He also does not understand the dynamics of Cambridge and Somerville that are captured quite well in The Woman Upstairs.

Photo

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 14:41:51 -0400

Wayback Machine: Simon Pegg, Edgar Wright, and Nick Frost in a SUV

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 07:40:00 -0400

[Fun interview to do, genuinely nice guys. On the Hot Fuzz DVD special features, there is a quick shot of my big head backstage when they’re in Cambridge, MA. I only learned about it from two dudes that I didn’t know so well separately telling me. Very odd. I saw Simon Pegg in NYC years later and we had a quick chat and it was very pleasant and I felt like I was moving on up in the world. Also, let’s be honest: look at that Joe Cornish, who made an awesome film!]

In the midst of a whirlwind world tour to promote their new film, ‘Hot Fuzz,’ the jokes are fast and furious

By Elisabeth Donnelly
Globe Correspondent

“Sweden, New Zealand, Australia, the UK for four days, Amsterdam, then New Amsterdam, New York, and then we came to Washington, and then here,” said the floppy haired Edgar Wright, director of the new cop spoof “Hot Fuzz,” the follow-up to 2004’s much-loved zombie romantic comedy “Shaun of the Dead.”

“In two days we’ll be in Chic-aaaago,” added actor Simon Pegg, attempting the rounded vowels of a Boston accent.

“All in the span of about three weeks,” finished Wright, “We’re slightly going on dementia where certain phrases get stuck in a loop.” Wright and “Fuzz” stars Pegg and Nick Frost were in junket land, where the city changes every 36 hours and nearly every second of their time is devoted to working on their online video blog, charming their legion of ardent fans at regional “Hot Fuzztivals,” and giving the press interesting quotes — such as Wright’s assertion that ” ‘Hot Fuzz’ is [‘Armageddon’ director] Michael Bay meets Agatha Christie.” (A more accurate quote would replace “meets” with a rude and hilarious sexual innuendo)

The multitalented funnymen, longtime collaborators also known for the cult British TV show “Spaced,” were jet-lagged and exhausted yet committed to providing the best “Hot Fuzz” preview screening experience possible. The 30-something Fuzzers convened in the lobby of the new Ritz-Carlton early Sunday afternoon before heading to Cambridge for the screening. Pegg, who is skinnier and more attractive than his shlubby film persona suggests, was the first one to appear, wearing a navy-blue army cap pulled low over his eyes. Wright was late as usual, and Frost, (“I call him Frosty and he calls me Peggy,” Pegg said) had disappeared for a smoke. In a surreal touch, a basketball team arrived at the hotel, and a continuous stream of extremely tall men poured into the hotel while Pegg talked about his and Frost’s night at “Old Bar or something,” where he drank so much that he ended up buying a commemorative T-shirt.

Once the “Hot Fuzz” team, including video blogger Joe Cornish, was accounted for, the four Brits jumped into the shiny black SUV that was taking them across the river to Harvard Square’s Brattle Theatre.

Cornish grabbed the front seat, turned on his camera, and pointed it at the back seat: “Act like I’m not here,” he said, then giggled. “I feel so anarchic not wearing a seat belt!”

“We’re constantly talking or blogging,” said Wright. “We did loads of it on the film, because we blogged our way through the shoot. Where did web blogging come from? Where did the actual verb come from, it’s medieval “

“It’s weblog,” added Frost.

“It’s when they used to record things on logs.” Cornish joked.

“Big logs,” Frost said.

As the van went past Fenway Park, Frost and Pegg put their faces to the glass. “What’s Fenway Park like?” asked Frost, “Is it the home of the big green wall? Is it covered in ivy?”

“The last time we were here, in 2004,” he said, “they won the World Series.”

“We bring good mojo,” said Wright.

“Fenway Paaark,” Pegg said with an improved Boston accent.

Frost kept peering out the window with a curiosity befitting his naïve comic persona, asking, Where’s Harvard? Where’s MIT?

Pegg and Frost had a ready response to the eternal “Spaced” query, “Can dogs look up?” — an ad-lib that stuck thanks to a shoddy dog trainer on the set.

“They can’t. They really can’t.” replied Pegg.

“They can move their eyes up, but they can’t pivot their heads,” said Frost.

It makes sense, Frost explained, because dogs “have no airborne predators.”

In Cambridge, the Harvard jokes began.

“There’s a lot of tramps here,” Frost said. “They’re very smart tramps.”

“Can I have 5 dollars for my Michel Focault book?” Pegg asked.

The car pulled up to the Brattle, and the Fuzzers spilled out, transforming from loopy junket men to rock stars pressing the flesh.

They said “hi” to the cowed crowd before being whisked backstage via a circuitous route around the back of the building and through a side door. “This is just like ‘Goodfellas!’” Wright said happily.

And then it was time to leave the stars to their duty. Their fans were waiting.

Originally published in The Boston Globe Thursday, March 29, 2007

Post Ranch Inn, Big Sur. I have a bad case of wanderlust, was...

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 14:05:00 -0400

Post Ranch Inn, Big Sur. I have a bad case of wanderlust, was looking at Big Sur properties on AirBnB, and oh my lord they are expensive. Big Sur is one of those places that you visit and come away convinced that you can take an amazing photograph.

Wayback Machine: Kristin Gore at Jillian's

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 11:29:00 -0400

[This couple divorced, Kristin Gore was nice, her book Sammy’s Hill was remade into that lost David O. Russell project which sounded deranged and full of potential, when writing for The Boston Globe people often cite the Red Sox in an effort to ingratiate, but little did they know that I was raised agnostic.]

The former vice president’s daughter stops by Jillian’s to whip her husband at foosball

By Elisabeth Donnelly

“The problem is that Paul played hockey, which made him better at foosball,” joked Kristin Gore, blue eyes sparkling, as she squared off against her husband across the foosball table.

Gore, 30, and Paul Cusack, 35, had tickets for that night’s Red Sox game, and they were starting out nearby at Jillian’s with a bar-game challenge and some drinks: water for Gore, who is allergic to caffeine,and a special shiny bottle of Red Sox Budweiser for the red-haired Cusack. A native of Westwood, Cusack comes by his Sox-fan status by birth. Gore, daughter of Tipper and former vice president Al, big Red Sox fans since their college days in Boston, was raised with a love of Fenway Park. In a sea of Matsuzaka shirts, Gore stood out in her white pants and blue shirt: “I have a hat and jersey at home in Los Angeles, but my in-laws [whom they were meeting at the game] will be dressed in the full regalia.”

It’s a big week for Gore: Her second novel, “Sammy’s House,” a sequel to her 2004 debut “Sammy’s Hill,” was just released. The laugh-out-loud funny books follow the adventures of 26-year-old Samantha “Sammy” Joyce, a healthcare-policy wonk working for a senator in Washington, D.C. “Who knew healthcare would be hip?” said Gore, who has worked as a comedy writer on “Futurama” and “Saturday Night Live.” She began writing about Sammy in her spare time, working on a play featuring the character. “I love her,” said Gore. “She’s just a good time.”

“It worked for me on a comedy level because she’s in healthcare and she’s a hypochondriac,” said Gore, whose comedy-writing skills were developed during her college days working on the Harvard Lampoon. “In college, the funniest people I met were Lampoon writers, so that shaped my writing. You spend more time on [Lampoon writing] then your classes. To do what you love, that’s a coup.”

Gore is working on a screenplay for “Sammy’s Hill,” which David O. Russell is attached to direct. If all goes well in Hollywood, they could be in production by the end of this year. For Gore, her time with the famously combative “I Heart Huckabees” director has been wonderful: “I love him. First of all, his work is so brilliant,” said Gore, who owns Russell’s “Three Kings” on DVD. “We have this great relationship. He’s a total sweetheart.”

“You got it? You got your game face on?” said Cusack, talking trash over the foosball table. Then Gore scored while Cusack was distracted, explaining his work with the nonprofit X Prize Foundation, which is devoted to “radical breakthroughs for the betterment of humanity.”

She handily beat him, by the way, about 5 to 2. “I have memories of watching my parents playing mini-golf and getting way too competitive,” she said. Her family members are some of the first readers of her work — and she can tell if they’re lying — and she said they’re “psyched” about her particularly creative endeavors. She had fun writing skits when her Dad was a guest on “Saturday Night Live,” particularly the skit spoofing “The Bachelor” in which the former presidential candidate chose Lieberman (played by Chris Parnell) as his running mate while they were in a hot tub.

Gore is venturing out into screenplays in LA, and some of her additional work includes shepherding books into film. “I love books so much,” said Gore, “so if they can be made into good movies, I’m happy to help.” She’s also working on a third novel, “diving into a fresh, fictional world” that’s radically different from the Sammy books. Her name may be on screenplays, but the best way to get an idea of the funny Gore comes from her books: “I still like novel-writing best,” she said, “it’s where I have the most control.”

Gore and Cusack are very East Coast in demeanor, having lived in D.C. and in Boston, but they love LA’s mountains, beaches, and wonderful absurdity. Gore mentioned that the recent Star Wars Convention was near their house. “It was amazing. There were 30,000 people,” said Cusack.

“Was there an Elvis storm trooper?” asked Gore, certain that she saw one. The couple teased each other about the existence of the storm trooper until Cusack grabbed his phone. “This is when I realize I’ve become ‘that guy,’ ” he said. And Gore was right — there it was on his phone, a storm trooper in a clunky white costume and a flashy Elvis pompadour.

Originally published in The Boston Globe July 6, 2007

Wayback Machine: Guy Fieri at the Copley Place Mall

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 09:49:00 -0400

[This is, of course, from 2007. And I must say while the guy’s “brand” is annoying, he was very personable like a friendly drunk uncle.]

At the Copley Place mall, the Food Network star proves that his future’s so bright, he has to wear shades

By Elisabeth Donnelly

Trying on Food Network chef Guy Fieri’s red Spy sunglasses makes a girl feel as cool as LeVar Burton playing Lieutenant Commander Geordi La Forge on “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” A slim pair of shades with rectangular mirrored lenses, they give an air of “mac” (as in “mac daddy,” to quote Fieri) to Fieri’s perfectly put-together look: bleached spiky hair, tattoos of grenades and horseshoes, and chunky gold and silver jewelry that he affectionately refers to as his “bling.”

Although Fieri’s biker look is a bit intimidating, in person he’s the same guy you see on TV: warm, friendly, charismatic, and a bit of a goofball. At the Copley Place mall a day before a Simon’s Super Chefs weekend of cooking demonstrations and autograph signing (he would spend more than two hours doing this at the Northshore Mall, and two more at the South Shore Plaza), Fieri’s goal was to check out the Sole Mio Sunglasses store. He’s a collector after all, and owns about 80 pairs.

His red Spy glasses matched his red Tex Wasabi’s T-shirt from the “rock ‘n’ roll sushi BBQ” he owns, with dueling logos of a cowboy riding a koi fish and a geisha riding a bull. Fieri’s tattoo artist did the lively cartoon logos, and Fieri loves them: “He busted it out so fat.” Back to the subject of his many pairs of sunglasses, Fieri noted, “As metro as that is, I sometimes [coordinate].” He then pointed out that his flip-flops come with a bottle opener on the bottom and proceeded to wrap a blue cloth napkin around Super Chefs producer Richard Gore’s head. Gore was wearing a Hawaiian shirt, and the head wrap accentuated his sushi chef look.

Before Sole Mio, Fieri went into the kitchen store Williams-Sonoma. A 30-something California native who owns four restaurants there, Fieri took a particularly modern road to “celebrity chef-dom”: He won the second season of “The Next Food Network Chef” last year. Fieri was initially apprehensive about the reality show process, but “my buddies saw the first year of the show and said, ‘Aw dude, you can totally do that.’ ” Fieri sent in a video on the last possible day and beat out 10,000 contestants on his way to hosting “Guy’s Big Bite” and “Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives” (the latter of which has featured Kelly’s Diner in Somerville.)

According to Fieri, his cooking career started when his mother got tired of her 10-year-old son’s complaints about her eggplant parmesan. His first attempt at a meal was a steak, some red sauce, and raw pasta that he crumbled up and put in the sauce. After taking a bite of the steak, his dad said, “This might be the best steak I ever had.” Laughing, Fieri admitted his father said something like that at every meal.

At Williams-Sonoma, Fieri chatted up the manager and talked about the three knives every kitchen needs: serrated, boning, and chef’s. He was particularly passionate about “honing down” his knives, a process of redefining and aligning the vertical tip of the knife that he likened to “making a mohawk.” After noticing the pristine 25-year-old aged balsamic vinegar on the shelves, he rhapsodized about the value of the vinegar. “It’s so misunderstood in American culture,” he said, citing the story about an Italian father who leaves a tub of balsamic vinegar to his son, who ends up selling it for two villas and a Ferrari.

“People get too lost in gadgetry,” said Fieri, and he pointed out products that actually are useful — the lemon/lime hand juicer for one: “I’ve been using them like crazy on my show,” he said. The sight of an old-fashioned apple peeler inspired Fieri to think up an instant recipe that uses the machine to peel a potato into a long, curly string, which is then fried with garlic, parsley, and parmesan cheese.

Fieri headed to Sole Mio, talking about his love of sunglasses. “I am the master of all bling,” he joked. In fact, he’s figured out another way to wear sunglasses: on the back of his head. It’s the perfect place for storing sunglasses, and with such a sweet collection, ranging from Oakleys with a Bluetooth and iPod fitting to the aforementioned Spys, losing a pair would be a bummer. Heed his advice: Fieri is evangelical about his sunglasses, and while simple, the back-of-the-head trick is remarkably effective. Just one of the many fun facts you can learn from Fieri.

Originally published in The Boston Globe Friday, June 8, 2007