Media
For Your Reading Pleasure: Article About Roger Maris and Friend
July 25, 2011. Check it out: Here's an article I wrote about Andy Strasberg, a San Diego sports agent and lifelong Roger Maris aficionado (and friend), who is helping to celebrate this, the 50th anniversary of Maris's record-breaking 61-home run season for the Yanks. The article was published in a magazine in June and just posted online. Click here and enjoy.
Recommended New Year Reading: Penzeys Spice Catalog
What do I know from spices? Not much, really. I know salt, pepper, and on those occasional occasions when I roast up a chicken (not long ago, actually, I made one to celebrate our 13th wedding anniversary—huzzah!), I will comb through our spice cabinets in search of a precious vial of Penzeys Poultry Seasoning. This is no easy task—the searching, I mean. Our spice cabinets packed with Penzeys are more crowded than a New York commuter train at rush hour.
What, you don't know Penzeys? People who do cook and are good at it (such as my wife, who learned about Penzeys from her mother; knowledge of Penzeys is apparently passed down from generation to generation, like a family heirloom) swear by the Wisconsin company's spices. Wouldn't cook without them, they say. Far better than the supermarket brands.
The other day when it was freezing outside, we made hot chocolate from the Penzeys Hot Chocolate Mix. The hot chocolate was tasty, and I enjoyed the directions on the jar too: "Hot Chocolate: Mix 1 rounded TB in each cup of milk. Stir well, simmer gently, sigh contentedly."
As I say, I'm not an expert (God knows) on cooking or spices, but I'll put my knowledge of publishing and magazines up against anyone, and the Penzeys spices catalog is a pleasant read even if you don't know your lemon peel seasoning from your lemon grass, or your paprika from your pasta sprinkle (one of my favorite Penzeys spices, by the way; I use it when I make spaghetti, another low-maintenance dish that I handle tolerably well).
Unlike so many product catalogs, which are just about selling products, the Penzeys catalog has a family feel to it, in large part, I suppose, because a family is behind it. In fact, in the holiday issue, long-time Penzeys fans were sad to learn about the passing of Bill Penzey, Sr., who started the family business in Milwaukee some 25 years ago. We learned about this in notes in the catalog by his son, Bill Penzey, Jr., who now runs the company. "As amazing as this year has been with the birth of our twin boys at the end of July," he writes, "this year has also hit me, and the entire Penzey family, with incredible sadness at the loss of my father Bill Sr. this fall. What a force, so engaged, so creative."
Family is a theme of the Penzey family business. Along with Bill Jr.'s notes, the catalog features short Reader's Digest-like features on Penzeys customers around the country, who share their favorite recipes and talk about their family traditions of cooking and gathering for meals around the table. In addition to its traditional mail order business, Penzeys, headquartered in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, is enjoying a big growth surge, having recently added new retail stores in Santa Rosa, Portland, Seattle, Raleigh, Colorado Springs, and elsewhere.
Here's hoping that amidst its growth, Penzeys hangs onto its family feel. Penzeys Spices, 1-800-741-7787. www.penzeys.com.
'The Social Network' and Operation Bullpen
[Here is an email I sent recently to the producer of the—someday, I hope—Operation Bullpen movie. A script based on my book has been finished and it is now being peddled around Hollywood although there are, as yet, no takers. I thought ‘The Social Network,’ the (relatively) new movie about the founding of Facebook by Mark Zuckerberg, has some parallels with the Bullpen story, as I say here…]
Hi L-
Saw "The Social Network" last night. I liked it and it spurred some thoughts on "Operation Bullpen," the movie. Give me just a minute or two to share them with you. "The Social Network" opened with a $24 million weekend box office and there's not a car crash or any violence to be found anywhere in it. That's reassuring, since I know that's one of the things you've heard from people about the Bullpen script: Not enough sex and violence.
Actually, "The Social Network" doesn't have much sex either, does it? No actual sex scenes, just party scenes and the suggestion of sex, but that's all. God knows the Bullpen story has lots more sex than that, with hookers and Vegas strippers and sex and drug parties on the Bada Bing boat. And it's got the criminal element to boot—the fact that all these formerly law-abiding guys are committing widespread fraud while being hunted down by the FBI. "The Social Network" has no big stars in it, unless you count Justin Timberlake, who's very good. Of course, it has a script by Aaron Sorkin, who's a superstar screenwriter and superb, and a hot director whose name I can't recall but who is clearly a hot property too. Interestingly, Kevin Spacey is one of the producers—isn't he Trigger Street Productions?—and clearly Kevin has a sharp eye for material, because he also produced "21." [ more ]
Remember "21"? I know you do. We talked about that one before. It was a sleeper hit that was No. 1 for two weeks in a row when it opened a couple or three years ago. It's based on the book, "Bringing Down the House," written by Ben Mezrich, who also wrote "The Accidental Billionaire," which was the book Sorkin used to write "The Social Network." Mezrich also clearly has an eye for stuff that Hollywood is looking for.
So both "The Social Network" and "21" were youth movies about gifted (and pampered and rich) Ivy League kids with some allusions to sex, very little violence (none in "The Social Network"), and lots of money. And of course "The Social Network has the glamour associated with being about the Facebook billionaire. But the story itself? It's basically about some legal proceedings and the makings of a Silicon Valley startup, founded by Mark Zuckerberg, the Charles Kane of his generation. The genius of Sorkin and the director is that they could make an entertaining movie of such thin material.
Okay, so hang with me, I'm coming to my point. The Bullpen story has many of the same elements as "21" and "The Social Network," except, of course, it's not about privileged rich kids. It's a working class story. But it is about young people, and it is potentially a youth movie. I've never seen the script for "Bullpen" (and I'm sure that's not the working title), but there is a clear potential story line in the character of Nate, the naïve young guy who starts as Wayne’s friend in the book. Wayne, the mastermind of the operation, takes him under his wing and basically teaches him to be a crook, brings him into the life, corrupts him, shows him how to rip people off. Nate makes millions of dollars selling fake memorabilia, buys houses, gets girls that he could never get before (just like Mark Zuckerberg), and basically achieves his corrupted version of the American Dream. And then, in the twist that makes the Bullpen story so powerful, Wayne ultimately betrays Nate and all his other friends and flips and goes to the FBI and turns in Nate and all the rest of his fellow crooks to save his skin.
So, again, I'm not trying to stick my nose where it doesn't belong, but if you tell the story from Nate's point of view—with Wayne as his slightly older Machiavellian mentor, along with the Marinos and all the other characters and stuff that are there—you have a youth-themed movie that teens and early twenties young people would really get into. You could potentially attract a bankable young star, as well as a late twenties, early thirties actor like Justin Timberlake who is playing the Wayne character. And the thing is, it's all in the story. You're not making any of it up. It's all there. That's what happened in real life. Thanks for listening-
Best, K
World's Best Magazine for Boys
Boys' Life: the best magazine for boys, bar none. Their target audience is boys, not just Boy Scouts or Cub Scouts, and they hit it out of the park. It's got jokes, it's got adventure (all done by boys, teenage and younger), it's got fiction, it's got gear, it's got machines, it's got science, it's got animals and the outdoors, and a boy doesn't even have to look at a screen to read it. My sons read it and enjoy it and get a lot from it (as do I), and they're not scouts, they're just fightin', rasslin', burpin', arm-fartin', won't-make-their-bed-no-matter-how-many-times-we-tell-'em, whinin', complainin', rambunctious, sometimes-miss-the-pot-when-they're-peein' boys. And hurrah for that!
A Writer With the Right Stuff
Deep into airplane literature these days, I am now reading The Right Stuff, a book that has—dare I say it?—the right stuff. Reading it makes me appreciate, anew, its author. I'm not as keen about Wolfe's later, fictional phase—Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full—but I worship his earlier, groundbreaking, positively transcendant nonfiction phase: The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline, Baby, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, From Bauhaus to Our House, and the remarkable people, places and things of The Right Stuff:
"Somehow Yeager [left] was like the big daddy of the skies over the dome of the world. There were even other pilots with enough Pilot Ego to believe that they were actually better than this drawliin' hot dog. But no one would contest the fact that as of that time, the 1950s, Chuck Yeager was at the top of the pyramind, number one among all the True Brothers."
"His wife was a brunette named Glennis, whom he had met in California while he was in training, and she was such a number, so striking, he had the inscription 'Glamorous Glennis' written on the nose of his P-51 in Europe and, just a few weeks back, on the X-1 itself."
"The X-1 had gone through 'the sonic wall' without so much as a bump. As the speed topped out at Mach 1.05, Yeager had the sensation of shooting straight through the top of the sky. The sky turned a deep purple and all at once the stars and the moon came out—and the sun shone at the same time. He was going faster than any man in history, and it was almost silent up here, and he was so high in such a vast space that there was no sensation of motion. It would take him seven minutes to glide back down and land at Muroc. He spent the time doing victory rolls and wing over wing acrobatics while Rogers Lake and the High Sierras spun around below."
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