It’s raining again in LA. As I noodle around with this entry, the drops alternate between hard and soft but they’re constant and have been for hours. Another wet weather pattern is passing through, and it remains unusually cold.
But as one of my recent fares for Uber said, this damp and dreary winter is within the realm of possibility for Southern California. It’s just not a common event. That means it’s an outlier statistically—if you believe in statistics, that is. Not everyone does and I’ve learned to accept that.
I’ve learned to accept a lot of things living out here in La La Land. Anti-vaxx science denialism—what a mouthful!—springs immediately to mind, in part because I’m reminded of its influence every time I hit the john at the Improv, where, adjacent to the entrance, hangs a portrait of Cheryl Hines.
But comedy’s a big tent and anything goes. I wouldn’t have it any other way—primarily because a poster for the musical Anything Goes is propped against a wall in my Philly place, aka the fono-teknion, the “nightclub”-slash-social-practice agency that kept me alive during the hellish middle stretch of the pandemic. The spot now functions as my archive, retreat, and New York City pied-à-terre.
(See what I did there?)
It was reading about Cheryl’s husband’s family’s exploits in the forgotten publishing blockbuster The Kennedys: An American Drama (1984) that motivated me to write again. (A paperback version of that extensively sourced epic fairly launched itself to me from a Goodwill shelf this summer.)
If all these other Kennedys could write books, surely I could too, I remember thinking. After all, I’d already written a draft of a book: my dissertation on global gangster culture, which weighed in at roughly 150 pages. And like Bobby and fellow members of that clan, I’ve enjoyed my own struggles with alcohol and substances. If they could rein in their demons, so could I.
My desire to finally publish a book—a goal of mine since elementary school, when I hand-made a slim volume about a leprechaun for a class project—is another reason I’m committed to this scroll: as a way to rediscover my writing practice after an intentional period of non-writing-based performance.
The other night the Hole Master called me “William Sean,” a combination of my given name and a screen name I’ve employed over the years. As usual it was a canny read because I learned to write by absorbing The New Yorker cover to cover, albeit during the early Tina Brown era. The issues piled high in my walk-in closet at 13126 New Parkland Drive in Herndon, Virginia, where I read them at night with the lights in my bedroom off.
Some of William Shawn’s writers didn’t write after a time: see Joseph Mitchell.
Me? I don’t have to write either but it’s my fate. I only know who I am by the letters I arrange.
To wit: William Shawn fathered Wallace Shawn, the actor, playwright, and longtime companion of author Deborah Eisenberg, who taught fiction writing at UVA when I took poetry there.
Once again Substack trumpeted their “hands-off” moderation policy this week, and while that laissez-faire approach is a sign of the times, it’s not without its trade-offs.
Indeed, the Substack Reads email this week highlighted the work of NYU professor Jonathan Haidt, who—IMHO—plays fast and loose with the facts to prosecute his anti-woke crusade. (Perhaps I’ll post in the future about Haidt’s most recent “scholarship,” the 2018 co-written The Coddling of the American Mind, a derivative reprise of Allan Bloom’s Reagan-revolution classic The Closing of the American Mind…)
In the post shared by Substack, for example, Haidt declares that the scientific safeguard of “correlation”—which indicates a relationship between two or more variables, whether direct or indirect—should be abandoned in cases where a “one-factor” explanation (in other words, a single cause) is exceedingly obvious.
Putting aside the simple fact that there’s no solo factor for any phenomenon in the hugely diverse universe, the error of Haidt’s analytical method becomes clear when he uses an example to emphasize the urgency of his case: the “mental health epidemic” affecting “teen girls” that social media has reportedly caused.
But just as Haidt invokes a parallel to the consumption of sugar—which, in refined forms especially, is a proven health risk—he backs off, claiming that, unlike social media, “sugar consumption just harms the consumer” and not society overall. Never mind that this country has a diabetes epidemic!
Unlike comedians, however, who can and should say whatever they want, doctorate-holding academics like Haidt should at least uphold some semblance of logic in their arguments. And yet I learned the hard way that illogic abounds in academia—another reason I’m out of it.
By the same token, I heard conservative legal analyst John Shu tell LA’s local news radio this week that cancelling student debt is a “moral hazard” [from the 6:10 mark] that should be prevented by the Supreme Court—even though a moral hazard isn’t a legal issue but a moral issue.
Meanwhile, I thought this John—John Shu—was John Yoo, the conservative legal analyst who wrote the infamous White House “torture memos” rationalizing the George W. Bush administration’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” against people held for terrorism during the naughty Aughties.
But when I checked for that John’s views on financial relief for holders of public educational loans, I wasn’t surprised: he too advocates against it—a reminder of the close bonds between U.S. domestic and foreign policy.
Footnote: Here’s hoping Fox News goes the way of Gawker, though from the inverse angle. Fingers crossed!
My first production as a working actor was The Rookie: Feds starring Niecy Nash-Betts as a 48-year-old newcomer to the FBI.
I played—purely as background—a low-level gangster. Go figure.
With the Oscars ceremony just around the corner—and news that Chris Rock will exploit last year’s scandal in his live Netflix special this Saturday—I really appreciated finding this episode of Jada Pinkett-Smith’s Red Table Talk from 2021. In it, Niecy describes the transformative effect her wife, Jessica Betts, has had on her.
“I met the most beautiful soul,” she says [from 5:52]. “It was the first time in my life I had ever felt fully seen. And it changed me.”
Being fully seen—that’s what I experienced with Arthur, the most beautiful soul I’ve ever met. The rest, as they say, is la historia.