Ted Turner and I have a very special relationship.

When I was a kid in the ATL, there was no cable television. There was WTBS, Channel 17 – the SuperStateion! – running an endless and constant array of cheesy sit-coms, classic Hollywood movies, game shows, wrestling matches and a ton of Bugs Bunny cartoons. Even the late-night news fare was askew, with a news desk that was as accessible and irreverent as anything else that came on their airwaves. They seemed to come out of nowhere, and suddenly they were everywhere – and at their helm was Ted Turner, that swashbuckling iconoclast, a maverick in the truest sense of the word.

I didn’t know exactly what Ted did all day long, but I knew that this station was his and subconsciously in my little kid heart, I thanked him for it. Why? With a father and a mother, two older brothers, two younger brothers and one tv set, there were a lot of people to please – and somehow, this one little channel managed to pull it off. There was no one to tell me that I shouldn’t watch this particular line of programming, or that it was in poor taste, or that I shouldn’t watch television at all. In a strange way, I felt as though it belonged to me, because so much of what they programmed made me so happy.

Don’t get me wrong: I didn’t live on the couch. With so many brothers afoot, I was a sturdy, athletic little tomboy of a girl. My parents were extremely traditional, so I was cooking, cleaning and running the house before I hit puberty. We lived on several wooded acres, so there was always plenty to explore in the great outdoors. I was a voracious reader – i learned how to read when I was three years old – so books were a great escape.

What I realize now is that as an artist, WTBS/Channel 17 was a really important part of my childhood. Every time I watched any of that programming, I was doing my homework. Each old movie was a chance to watch a great director at work on every level — to absorb the mise-en-scene, to let the dialogue swing through my head like a melody, to ogle the clothes, the hats, the accessories, to unhinge the elaborate musicals, to understand what made it good or bad and why. Bugs Bunny cartoons were filled with show tunes and tin pan alley songs and strange ditties and so many obscure vaudeville references and gags that I watched so carefully and so often that in my head they were commonplace.

Funny thing. I took it for granted that everyone had this kind of an “education” — and I was wrong, wrong, wrong. God knows everyone needs it. Even now, I will talk to other artists – actors, writers, whatever – and there are all these movies and tv shows and cartoons that they have never seen and/or can’t reference, stuff that’s an integral part of the very fabric of this industry we call entertainment and the pop culture we all swim in as citizens of the world. Oh, well. As an artist, I never wanted to be that kind of uninformed.

So yes – my time glued to the tv watching Ted’s station was very important.

It was with all of this and much more that I picked up Ted’s autobiography Call Me Ted.

The book is an easy, straight-forward, accessible read, in part because it sounds for all the world like Ted is sitting next to you, telling you all of this himself, with an occasional antecdote from a business associate or family member to augment whatever he’s saying and give insight into the person Ted really is. Ted is very honest and is quite candid about his childhood traumas, his sister’s illness, his father’s suicide, and so many of the intimate details in his life.

Here’s one that floored me: he was sent to boarding school at the age of four. That alone would be enough to upend most people but Ted bounces back from this with all of the resiliency of a bright red rubber ball. At one point in his youth, he simply makes up his mind to be positive and not dwell on the bad things in the past.

And yes, I was loving all the antedotes about Fidel. I keep wanting to run away to Cuba and meet Castro and learn how to speak Spanish once and for all, before he dies and they turn Havana into a strip mall. So I was more than a little jealous that he got to meet him, and go hunting and fishing and the whole nine yards.

After a certain point, though, I realized that much of what Ted said sounded canned, rehearsed. Like he’d told these little vignettes a thousand times before, at this gala or that dinner party or to this dignitary or some good ol’ boy around the way. And along the way, he glossed them into such a high sheen that sometimes they blindsided me. It was like that with the stories everyone else told, too. Even the negative things that happened — “there goes Ted, shooting his mouth off again!” — turned into clever twists that only undid him momemtarily. Ted didn’t spend a lot of time dwelling on the past. He kept it moving. I suppose there’s a lesson in there for all of us.

There were lots of details that he clearly wasn’t about to fork over, like the intimate goings on regarding his three marriages. But nevermind the personal details. The book really comes alive on this whole other level when it delves into the anatomy of the art of the deal. There are moments when he swoops in and conquers by the sheer velocity of his vision and his unswerving belief in it. When you consider all of the factors – he doesn’t really have the hundreds of millions of dollars necessary to pay for whatever he just bought, for example, but he has 30 days to come up with the money…and he does! – you find that he is literally doing what can only be described as the impossible, again and again and again. And in so doing, he created an empire and defined news media for an entire generation.

But Ted wasn’t necessarily doing the impossible, and he was hardly a fluke. His success is a result of years of hard work, a dizzying amount of sacrifice, a lot of well-thought out planning and execution and a tenacity that i recognize all too well in myself. He never sits back on his laurels and says, Enough. He simply can’t leave well enough alone. He constantly reaches for more — and for excellence, for doing a job well — and he’s really strategic about it. It’s the way he thinks. It’s who he is.

I was profoundly disappointed to learn that Ted basically abandoned his family for the sake of business ventures and yachting competitions. His children were raised by his second wife and a black man named Jimmy who worked for Ted’s father when he was a kid. (Too bad Marlon Brando didn’t have a decent wife and some real help. But then, I suppose I could say that about a LOT of famous people.) Then again, I’m not so sure that he would have been able to accomplish as much as he had if he’d stayed home and made his marriage and family a priority. Clearly, his temperament isn’t suited for such a life. But it was more than this. He seemed to be completely open, and yet i sensed that he was as closed as a fist, and i couldn’t say exactly why.

As the book went on, i realized that the litany I sensed in the book’s delivery and presentation had echoed throughout his life. There were certain personal issues that Ted simply didn’t want to deal with, certain places he would not go — and understandably, this in part led to the demise of his marriage to Jane Fonda.

Still and all, he soldiers on with his philanthropic work, his business ventures as a restauranteur, his travels — and as God would have it, he gets to be a grandfather. Throughout, I love his style. The way he calls rich people on their BS, the way he’s worth nearly a billion dollars at one point and he wears the same suit and drives the same car year in and year out. I love the way he mouths off to the press and gets himself in so much hot water, he’s still feeling the heat several decades down the line. What i think I really love is his panache, his nerve — the thing that drives him, that has him out thinking everyone in the room, thinking ahead of whatever anyone thinks is happening, whether it’s a conversation or a corporate merger. It burns through the sheen and the gloss like some sort of cleansing fire.

I suppose all of this begs the question “What makes Teddy run?” There’s something explosive in there, embedded inside the glint of his willfulness. In reading this book, there were moments when I thought I actually glimpsed it.

you can learn a lot from biographies/autobiographies. this was no exception.

when it comes to rock and roll excess, who can separate truth from fiction from legend? when i saw the book i thought, cool — i can hear all about it from him. and that’s kind of the way the book goes, except that it augments what he says with what everyone else says: roadies, ex-lovers, business partners, damaged hippie freaks, ex-managers, fellow musicians and everything inbetween. all of that stitched up together gives a fuller picture than him, telling it like he remembers it. more often than not, everyone else reinforces whatever he says, and there’s the co-author with a timeline and photos and other documentation in case anyone goes off track. nice detail all around, especially when things go straight to hell and then get even worse.

him in the early days, riding around on a motorcycle wearing a leather cape. his love of/insistence upon three ways and little harems to take care of him. that whole hippie commune mentality, that share everything/everybody-in-and-out-of-everybody’s-house at all hours /everybody having sex with each other lifestyle. and him being a dick at any and every given opportunity because he thought he was soooooo great.

i don’t know. i think david crosby has a beautiful voice and he’s written some beautiful songs but after reading this and barney hoskyn’s “waiting for the sun” i think neil young is sooooooo great.

everyone else in rock and roll that does this level of drugs and debauchery for as long as he did dies in a pool of their own vomit. not “the cros” — probably because he got sent to prison for several years, and that’s what ultimately forced him to get clean. i knew some junkies in my day but at one point, just about everyone decided they didn’t want to die and they stopped doing it. somewhere in the 80s (the 80s!) he was looking at his rotting teeth and his swollen ankles and the sores and severe burn marks all over his face and body and he’d cry and feel sorry for himself and do some more freebase. (yikes-a-doodle-doo.)

and this was the guy that melissa etheridge chose to borrow a cup of sperm from to have not one but two kids with her then partner julie cypher? they couldn’t find jeff beck or something?

i don’t smoke and i don’t even do drugs and this book made me want to stop drinking coffee and eating meat and freaking detox whatever funk i had out of my system, just get it off of me. i just wanted to steam and sauna and take three showers and thank Jesus i never tried heroin. or cocaine. or freebase. or crack. or whatever everybody’s gotta be smoking or snorting these days. whatever.

and wow. he and his girlfriend jan (who was even more strung out than he was) got clean and sober enough to get married and have a kid. i read that and i had to put the book down and when i did, i thought, the human body is a miraculous thing. or as the old black folks down south would say, He’s a wonder-working God.

bizarrely enough, i knew all their songs so well that when they were mentioned in the book, i could hear them in my head. and i’ve never owned any of their records. even now, i don’t sit around listening to any of their songs. they were on permanent rotation that hardcore on the radio when i was a kid.

PS: um, yeah. this is kind of a must-read. especially if you’re a musician and you want to half-way know your rock and roll history.

this book was an engrossing read that augmented barney hoskyns’ “waiting for the sun” — a book that gives a pitch-perfect overview of the history of the music business in california — with clarity and insight. in “hotel california”, hoskyns really zeroes in on the meat of it all — that period in the 70s where rock and roll was shifting away from hippie idealism/art and towards materialism and greed/money. to hear such lurid stories about the soundtrack of my childhood was beyond entertaining. i simply couldn’t put it down.

i kept hearing the songs in my head (the lyrics of jackson browne’s “here come those tears again” come to mind) and going over the lyrics with an “aha” every so often — “so THAT’S what he was singing about!” — that kept me on the edge of my proverbial seat.

i don’t know. maybe i didn’t need to know that graham nash wrote “our house” about his happy domestic life in that a-frame house in laurel canyon with joni mitchell, and that she was probably the love of his life. and vice versa. maybe i didn’t need to know that she dated his bandmate david crosby initially. and jackson browne. and james taylor. and that in 1974, rolling stone magazine awarded her “old lady (read: girlfriend) of the year” — but i’m glad that i do know the backstory, for all the songs that came out of these relationships/circumstances. it gives them that much more dimension, for better or worse. and it makes me want to listen to these songs i’ve been reading of.

i hope to high heaven that no one ever figures out what/who i’m writing about. heh.

i lovelovelove this book. why?

he’s got this conversational tone, like he’s at your elbow walking you through it all — whether it’s a sample sale or your own closets or a seasonal sale at loehman’s. he’s high brow but he’s accessible and so effortlessly self-deprecating that you find yourself wanting to like him even if you really didn’t think you would. he’s smart and he’s cool and he uses what are commonly considered to be complicated things (like kierkegaard, for example) to explain something very simple (how you present yourself is a reflection of who you are — be your authentic self at all times. accept who you are and be that person when you get dressed.) and makes it all easy to digest.

i saw my closets (and myself) so differently after reading this book. the dresses i was holding on to, out of sentiment; the pants i was hoping to fit into but couldn’t (but would, someday, believe me); that blouse i never wore. no wonder i swung the closet door open time and time again, only to say “i have nothing to wear.” and i didn’t — that is, nothing that reflects who i am NOW.

i’m an artist, so this is how i dress anyway. i pride myself on not dressing up like anyone else. but it had me thinking in another direction about clothes and presentation. and for me, that’s always a good thing.

very simple. makes sense. we should all do it. especially if we live in nyc.

this was a dga flick i took my friend to see, so i was sort of doing my homework — but it’s like that for every movie i watch nowadays. no, it wasn’t especially brilliant. but it was worth it to watch someone in hollywood take a stab at telling an unconventional international contemporary war story — and for some great moments from gere and howard.

joined the director’s guild this year. figured i’m in s.a.g. i’m a blackgrrl on a budget. i may as well get as much bang for my buck as i possibly can. i’m doing the math, so i figure with the price of a ticket hovering somewhere around $11.50 or so in the city these days, i’ve got to see every movie they’re showing this year with my friend to make it worth my while. i couldn’t sit through 2 1/2 hours of “into the wild” — i’m sure it’s glorious — but i did see the latest richard gere flick, whose name escapes me.

my friend knows the drill. we show up, we stand in line, we get in, we grab good seats, if we can. no smoking, no food, no drink. seriously, not even water or gum. it’s worth it, to see first run movies before anyone else does.

enter “elizabeth: the golden age” with surprise! everybody’s favorite british manly man clive owen as sir walter raleigh. i got so lost in how lush this movie is, how it told the story visually, how the costumes were so overwhelmingly beautiful at times, how the lighting set the mood at every turn. every frame, so sumptuous and bursting with the feel of it all. just beautiful.

that being said — elizabeth herself is flawed and human and alive, so full of fear and intelligence and beauty that it took my breath away. the first “elizabeth” made blanchett a star. this one will probably get her an Oscar. she gave a great performance and totally commanded the screen in all the right ways.

i can’t say wonderful things for the storyline, which wasn’t meaty enough for me but it told the story that it wanted to tell, so i went with it. it didn’t get into the specifics, just the historical highlights as we glimpsed some personal moments. it was worth it, to see blanchett’s performance, to see those costumes, the whole set up. hey — this is what i do. this is the business i’m in. i have to see these movies.

lovely, lovely turn for samantha morton as the queen of scots. her tenderness in the end at her beheading was sweetness and light.

who doesn’t like chuck berry? who doesn’t know one of his songs? who doesn’t associate his sound with some feel-good moment in their lives?

how hard it was, to extricate all that feel-good momentum from whatever i thought i knew and read this book – an honest, forthright, factual account of his life and “hard times” that basically involved jail, porn, gobs of money, lawsuits, racism, mistresses of every ilk, voyeurism, and of course, sex with white women. oh, and rock and roll. it was nice to finally untangle fact from fiction because people eventually made a habit of accusing him of all kinds of things that he wasn’t guilty of. some of it was circumstance — clearly, there were plenty of white people who didn’t like the fact that he was a successful businessman and that he lived in a beautiful home and that he was financially independent. on the other hand, some of it, he brought on himself. that crime spree that he later called “kid stuff” put him on the radar as far as the law was concerned. and that rock and roll stuff (sex, sex and more sex, and drugs) confirmed a lot of what everyone thought they knew.

there’s a lot to learn from his mistakes. i’m walking away with three things:

1. keep your nose clean. avoid the police and illegal business at all costs — including drugs.

2. be fiscally independent of rock and roll, in every way possible. that way, you won’t be at its mercy.

3. when you do your music/your art your way, put on a great live show because that’s a part of what you’ll be remembered for.

this movie wasn’t as good as “Capote” but the characters were really well drawn out and so much more interesting overall — especially the lead, macguire. what an astonishing performance. he was meant to play that role. what a shame that this flick didn’t get more attention if only for his sake. i mean, wow. his physicality, his voice — it was uncanny, how closely he nailed it all. there were moments when he seemed to become capote, so much so that hoffman’s version seemed somewhat two dimensional in comparison. and it’s true, i couldn’t help placing them side by side in my mind’s eye. (just wait until the joplin biopics comes out soon — one with melissa etheridge and the other with lili taylor — and see if you can’t compare them.)

so sure, “capote” may be a stronger movie overall – but the great acting and the warmth in “infamous” is what puts it over the top, and makes it well worth watching.

this oates book is effing brilliant.

it read like prose so i thought it would be perfect for a hectic week of bouncing in and out of subway trains. anything to distract myself from my daily commute to Where-ever.

i couldn’t have been more right. or wrong.

frightening in it’s intensity, yet so sparsely written and easy to digest that the emotional whollop it packed hit me in the back end of my subconscious long after i’d finished it, this is an ordinary woman’s story through and through. and yet, there was so much more. bits and pieces of it floated back to me in my everyday life, like fuselage washing up on a beach from a plane wreck. i found myself checking to make sure that it wasn’t my plane that went down — because after a certain point, it felt like it.

it may be one stroke of paint across that canvas she’s creating, but it’s broad, it’s heavy and it’s vivid. and i never, repeat NEVER read enough fiction from, about or by women. it’s an endlessly fascinating thing, to feel it echoing in you as you are hearing it leap off the page from someone else.

and no, i’m not going to launch into the storyline. not even the ending, yes, that one, the one that left me staring off into space absentmindedly for the rest of the afternoon. i’m the kind of person that loves to cut to the chase for the most part but i really don’t want to give it away. you should unravel this profoundly disturbing brilliant bit of fiction for yourself.

light summer reading, indeed.

so nice to see so many women on screen — rotten to the core, beautiful to behold and quite a bit inbetween — telling a woman’s story, one that was really involved and moving and somewhat bizarre at times but it held me until the end. and there are scenes that still pop up in my head, which is the mark of a good movie in my world.

i highly recommend this.