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My Timothy Hutton Interview, et. al.

Published by tomdog December 10th, 2008 in General and Interview. 0 Comments
Timothy Hutton

Timothy Hutton - photo by Tom Lewis

Had an great week last week! Got to interview, in person, the incredible actor, Academy Award-winning Timothy Hutton. Hutton is someone I really looked up to as a kid for his roles in Taps, Ordinary People, and The Falcon and the Snowman. Turns out he’s a real technophile: loves the web, his Mac, ESPN.com, and Boston Dirt Dogs. He still lives in New York which I was mistaken about and has some interesting perspectives on how basic cable is taking on the Big Three networks in terms of well-produced original content.

Hutton was on tour promoting his new series on TNT, “Leverage”, and had just come in from Chicago the night before. He was a little grizzled but still calm, suave, and just-friendly-enough. This is a man who has been performing for as long as I’ve been alive so I imagine he’s used to these kind of situations.

Since he’s someone I’ve been familiar with over the years I didn’t have to do too much research prep. I was happy that I knew enough about Hutton’s vastly underappreciated A&E “Nero Wolfe” series to engage him. “Nero Wolfe” is the show that brought high-quality original programming to basic cable and it made classic mysteries interesting and fun to watch with a distinctly American flavor, unlike what we get in the form of British imports on PBS or BBC America.

I think the pilot for “Leverage” was very good but I’m not so sure about the rest of the series. I’ve only seen the first (post-pilot) show and it seemed like it was done by completely different writers and another director. But if you like Hutton then there’s definitely something there to enjoy. I hope they are given enough time to work out the kinks.

I was unhappy that I couldn’t record the interview with my Flip camera but I’ll be posting on that over at Needlemine. Here’s how the interview looked at LAist.

Below is the unedited audio of the interview recorded at the Four Seasons in Boston.

The other voice you hear on the recording is Al Norton from “Two Tivos to Paradise” who split the interview with me:

Then the day after this interview I gave a presentation on Web Analytics. Including Q&A it took about an hour and fifteen minutes. A little longer than what I wanted but it seemed like information that people wanted to hear. I had plenty of questions during key slides and I thought it went well. The technical college I did the presentation at asked me to teach a course there on analytics - I’ll have to get back to them soon.

Another Moment of Internet Serendipity

Published by tomdog November 18th, 2008 in General. 0 Comments

I’ve interviewed comedian Brian Regan a couple times this year, first in April for LAist and then last week for Bostonist. The always friendly and charming Regan was great again, actually I think the second interview went better than the first, maybe because I’m improving (hopefully).

Then a couple days after the interview went up, I got followed on Twitter by GridIronGoddess because of an LAist link I think (she’s got a great -ist idea, I hope it comes through). GridIronGoddess knows more about football than any of my guy friends, even the ones pretending to be sports geeks. Well she went to my post from the 15th and saw that I had interviewed Regan, who it turns out is a personal friend of hers. Ironically, the very night she read my blog post and Bostonist interview, she had been out to dinner with Regan’s wife and Brian called in to check in with her and to let her know how the Boston show went. It’s a small, small world.

The end result is that I have a new friend on Twitter, a real person, not some fake auto-follower, who likes stuff like Malcolm Gladwell, social networking and internet marketing geekery, and who happens to be friends with one of the greatest comedians around. It restores one’s faith in the system.

A Week Chock Full O’ Comedy

Published by tomdog November 15th, 2008 in Interview. 1 Comment

Had some very busy evenings this week - thank goodness the vast majority of entertainment folks live on the West Coast.

On Tuesday I interviewed comedian Brian Regan. He’s a longtime comedian whom I was fortunate enough to interview earlier this year for LAist. This time I interviewed Regan for Bostonist because he was headed to Boston for a gig. He’s playing  big time theaters now which is pretty impressive, and he’s doing very very well. A great interview this time, a lot looser than the one back in April, and of course Regan was friendly and charming as usual.

Then, via my friend Julie Wolfson, I got a link to Breckin Meyer, longtime writer and provider of many voices for Cartoon Network/Adult Swim’s “Robot Chicken”, probably my most favorite animate program of the last several years. “Robot Chicken” airs its second “Star Wars” special this Sunday at 11:30pm. I talked to Meyer on Wednesday night as he was leaving the next day to go to Lucasfilm in Northern California, to screen the special for George Lucas and a team of employees there.

On Friday night, I talked to comedian Jen Kober - she’s starting an all-female travelling cast of Southern comedians and is kicking off the concept on Monday at the Comedy Store. She seemed pretty cool to talk to, I’ll probably talk to her again when she comes to Boston in December. Now I just need to write that interview up tomorrow and I’ll almost be caught up with interview work.

Give a listen to the interviews and let me know what you think!

My Election Day Experience

Published by tomdog November 4th, 2008 in General. 2 Comments

This was probably the 10th time I’ve gone to vote at the same local precinct over the last 7 years. Because of it’s relative proximity to my house I’ve gone there at virtually all times during open polling hours - from before 8am to just before 8pm.

My polling place is in an elementary school in a low-income part of town, it’s a nice place, neat and well run with happy children. In fact, it’s inspiring to be casting a vote during the day and listening to children laugh and play.  This is also a part of town that probably has its highest proportion of black residents for the entire city and probably the entire county.

Despite the high percentage of black residents, I have never seen a black person at the polling place, either working or voting, other than the neighborhood cop who always stands in the lobby during election day.

Today was the first time that I saw black people there and a lot of them. Black people made up 3/4 of the voters when I was there and there were enough people to actually create a line, the first time ever in my 7 years of residence. People were excited - it was a pretty awesome experience. I asked a friend who went to the same polling place some 6 hours later and she related the same circumstances so it wasn’t some random hour that I chose to appear at.

—-

After I left the polling place I had to go to the hardware store on what is our Main Street. After finding the batteries I needed I came out and went to my car which was near the pharmacy. There was a blackman and woman near the entrance of the pharmacy, they waved at me and called to me “hey, can you give me a ride?” I never give anyone a ride anywhere but I could see that they needed help - the man was very large and unsteady on his feet despite the cane he held to prop himself up. They needed a ride to get some food and to be taken back to their van. I said sure, let’s get you in.

I cleared the garbage in my back seat over to one side to get the man’s wife in there. Then I lifted the man’s huge legs into the footwell of the passenger side as he couldn’t do it himself. They wanted to go to the Burger King drive-through and get some Jr. Whoppers, their only food of the day. They had just spent most of the money that they had allotted for day on prescriptions for the man. They wouldn’t let me buy their lunch or otherwise help them out other than providing them with a ride. I took them back to the boarded up house that their van was parked behind. They’d been living in the van for a few days after having to leave a relative’s house because they were having family problems. We’ve had nights in the low 20s. “I almost froze the other night” the man said. After helping lift the man’s legs out and getting him up they thanked me and went behind the house to the van. “Pray for us” they said.

—-

I went to the post office, to check my PO box for the first time in 3 weeks. While standing in line, the woman in front of me was cooing to her baby son. The woman in front of her who had a bit of a Russian (or related) accent, starting talking to her about children. “What’s it like to have a son? I just don’t think I could get it, it would be so foreign to me”. They had a pleasant conversation with the Russian woman concluding “My daughter and I have this bond, we are inseperable” and hugged herself. She went to the counter with her change-of-address form and the clerk told her she would have to redo the form. The clerk asked the woman, “What is this address you are changing from?” She said, “It’s a homeless shelter in Woburn” [across the state]. “And what is the address you are changing to?” asked the clerk. “To a homeless shelter here, my daughter and I heard there was space here, so we came here.”

—-

This is the reality.

I’m elated that Obama has won the election. I promise to get involved in doing something to reverse the path of destruction established over the last 8 years. While I was presented with a lot of suffering and crime during the time I lived in cities like San Francisco, I’m shocked to experience this, in my face, in the beautiful and bucolic, rural area that I live in. I live in a small city of 33,000 people, if this is what’s going on here then I can’t imagine what’s really going on “out there”. Look around, open your eyes, what is happening right under your nose? Going into the voting booth won’t solve this anytime soon.

Rogue Cheddar - Live on KCSB from 1992

Published by tomdog October 20th, 2008 in General and Music. 6 Comments

It’s in mono - sorry about that. Got it off of a tape I found in the house.

Jamin O’Brien was the host of this episode of KCSB Live. Jamin’s now a TV and film director and producer in New York City. I think we sounded pretty good.

Rogue Cheddar live on KCSB from January, 1992:

I remember it was really cold below Storke Tower. I remember not being able to hear anything in the studio earphones. I remember drinking beers outside. I remember loading up afterwards and thinking we did really well despite not being able to hear a goddam thing. Jamin was really cool to us and excited about us playing on the show. I remember it was late at night and that’s how we got away with some expletives during a couple songs. Too bad we didn’t play our Minor Threat “Salad Days” cover, because this is what these were.

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