NY Post / Alexa for Men Magazine / Cover Story
Chief of Smarm Reid Scott Suits Up for Another Season of Capitol Scheming on VEEP.
Reid Scott and I met up for coffee (news flash: he drank tea) at LAMill in Silver Lake. Here’s how it all went down.
Gillian Jacobs Goes Back to School
A profile of actress Gillian Jacobs I wrote for NYLON.
She was not wearing this bikini for our interview.
Ever have trouble deciding what to wear? Now imagine you’re Beyoncé (as I often do).
This is a profile I wrote about stylist B. Akerlund (Beyoncé, Britney, Madonna) in the NY Times. It was a fun story to report, and hopefully it is fun to read, as well.
Cut Copy Profile / NYLON Magazine
Rich and single? Hire these ladies!
The High-End Matchmaking Service for Tycoons (my recent piece in New York Times)
Justin Bartha (that guy from “The Hangover”) Profiled for The Aesthete
Ever wondered what the deal is with that guy from The Hangover? Turns out he’s a really nice guy, and his name is Justin Bartha. Read my profile at The Aesthete.
Norway. Amazing.
Yes, I took these photos. On my phone.
How to Survive the World Air Guitar Championships, aka The Hangover Cure that Changed My Life
A couple of weeks ago, prior to the US Air Guitar National Championships at the House of Blues in Los Angeles, I was bemoaning the hangovers I knew awaited me since we foolishly decided this year to schedule the air guitar national finals a mere weekend before the World Air Guitar Championships in Oulu, Finland.
As host and “Master of Airemonies” for these events, my job is to set an example of inebriation for the competitors and crowd, as I often say from the stage: “One important rule here, please don’t be sober for this. It will just look stupid.”
So there I was, bemoaning my chronic hangovers, with their accompanying headaches—headaches so bad I cannot lay my head on my pillow and usually am forced to down 4 Advils and take 45-minute scalding showers in order to relieve the pain—when my friend and air guitar compatriot Mr. Hot Lixx Hulahan (aka Craig Billmeier) said, “A friend of mine claims to have a great hangover cure. I’ll email him.”
And, let me tell you — it changed my life! I’ve now road tested this thing in three countries with countless alcoholic beverages—from beer to Jägermeister to whisky to wine, and plain and simple: it works. On the worst days, I woke up with a very mild headache and general feeling that I had not gotten enough sleep (I was averaging 3 hours/night in Finland). But in general, I felt great.
The guy, to whom I owe an immense amount of gratitude, just wrote a blog posting detailing his prescription. I didn’t really follow this to the letter, mostly I just took the vitamins he suggested. Though I generally avoided eating red meat, the one night I did gorge a plate of Swedish meatballs, I noticed the hangover was stronger than the other days. Still, I no longer had the splitting, debilitating headaches of hangovers past.
So, THANK YOU AARON PROBE! And may this help the rest of you!
In short, go buy two bottles of vitamins:
•Vitamin B complex (with no added vitamin C in it)
•Milk Thistle
I took 1 of each pill each evening, about an hour or two before I started drinking, and then another 2 pills when I got home at anywhere from 2 to 5 in the morning. I woke up feeling great!
From Garden to Gullet: Doing Farm to Table at Home
There’s another great piece by Mark Bittman in the NY Times today highlighting research that suggests that getting Americans to mere eat one more fruit or vegetable per day would lower health care costs and save lives:
Each additional serving of fruit or vegetable would reduce mortality from cardiovascular disease by about 5 percent, to the point where if we all ate the recommended amounts of fruits and vegetables, we’d save more than 100,000 lives and something like $17 billion in health care costs.
I’ve been doing my part by growing herbs, fruits and vegetables in my garden at home. Here’s what I’m growing at the moment:
Kale, arugula, 4 varieties of tomatoes, 4 pepper varieties, basil, sage, rosemary, thyme, mint, shiso, kumquats, oranges, lemons, limes, persimmons, blueberries, and strawberries. Obviously everything is not at harvest stage at the same time, but the summer has been amazing.
Today, for lunch, I made an omelette with sautéed chopped shishito pepper, diced cherry tomatoes, basil and goat cheese, with a side salad of kale tossed with olive oil, sea salt and brown rice vinegar.
Few things in life are as satisfying as picking things from the garden, cooking them, and then eating them.
Nothing Really Matters: How I Spent My Summer of 2013
How to Shop and What to Look for When Buying an Antique Stove
A friend of mine who fronts the excellent band Ponyboy just bought a house in Nashville with her husband, and today she emailed me with this question:
I remember really liking the stove you used in your renovation (just from pics) and wondered where you found them and if they were pricey? Just trying to do a few upgrades.
Such a rock and roll conversation, right?
Well, it turns out I actually had some advice for her. These are lessons I learned when renovating my house—the house I recently wrote about in the Home & Garden section of the New York Times.
Here’s what I told her:
I found my stoves on Craigslist – they were in pretty mediocre shape when I got them, but I had them serviced and then re-chromed all the chrome pieces.
The cost was $800 for 2 stoves, delivered. Servicing was about $125 and rechroming was $500 for the 2 stoves. One is a Gaffers and Sattler (harder to find, don’t recommend as parts are weird and hard to replace) and the other is an O’Keefe & Merrit – these are everywhere, and places do restore them. See if you can find one already restored if you don’t want any hassles.
Do a search for “antique O’keefe stove nashville” and see what comes up or check craigslist. If you find one on craigslist, make sure you go through it stem to stern to make sure everything lights and works. I didn’t, and I wish I had!
Then I quickly checked Nashville craigslist and found this ad for an O’Keefe for $200.
If you’re looking in Los Angeles, these stoves are everywhere. Just be sure to make sure to light every burner and the oven and broilers. You’ll save yourself a lot of headache that way. Here are some photos of my stoves, post refurbishing:
If you need service on the east side of LA, I loved this guy at Eagle Rock Appliances.
If you need any parts re-chromed (if any of the chrome is rusted) I took mine to General Plating, south of downtown. They weren’t very fast or cheap, but they did a great job and I couldn’t find anything cheaper.
The Gaffers and Sattler stove is in my house, and the O’Keefe is in the guest house I rent out on Airbnb.
Bon Appetit!
Hot Off the Press: Fall Out Boy Profile in July ’13 Issue of Nylon
Here’s a story I did on Fall Out Boy for the latest issue of NYLON.
They all turned out to be very nice, interesting and well-spoken gents. Their performance on Conan was pretty hilarious—referencing, for no particular reason, Spinal Tap.
Literary Death Match: Finally, I Won Something!
Last night I competed in my first Literary Death Match in Los Angeles. Miraculously, I didn’t have to go first (though I was in the first round and did lose the coin toss) and I did not take second place, as is my tradition in air guitar.
It was a lot of fun, and the readers and judges were all hilarious and utterly enjoyable. Kurt Braunohler was particularly genius, and if you’ve never seen his show Hot Tub at the Virgil every Monday night (that he co-hosts with the amazing Kristen Schaal), you should.
I read my recent piece from the New York Times, which I’m currently working on adapting into a book.
The show was very much like an air guitar competition, though there was no 4.0-6.0 olympic figure skating scale scoring, just a winner/loser for each round. The second round was “Pulitzer Prize Pictionary,” which I only won because someone shouted to me the final book, “The Color Purple.”
When I got home, Whisky wanted to wear my medal. How could I say no?
Here’s who competed:
* Margot Leitman, a Moth Grandslam winner & author of Gawky: Tales of an Extra Long Awkward Phase
* Travis Sentell, screenwriter/novelist and author of Fluid
* Kathy Ebel, TV writer (Cold Case, Law & Order) and author of Claudia Silver to the Rescue
* Dan Crane, co-author of To Air is Human: One Man’s Quest to Become the World’s Greatest Air Guitarist (and called “Bill Murray trapped in the body of Sid Vicious…” by The New York Times)
THE JUDGES
Literary Merit: Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers & Telex from Cuba (a National Book Award finalist)
Performance: Ali Wong, comedian extraordinaire, who’s appeared on The Newsroom & VH1’s Best Week Ever
Intangibles: Kurt Braunohler, comedic genius, co-host of Hot Tub comedy show
From the archives: The Easy Leis singing “Beauty Hula”
I was looking for something the other day and came across this version of an amazing Polynesian song my old band The Easy Leis used to perform in Brooklyn.
I remember us all listening to a cassette tape of this track, transcribing a few words at a time, then rewinding it, playing back. It took hours and our transcription was entirely phonetic but it sounds pretty close, at least, to a non-speaker like myself…
Here’s a video of an “actual” version of the track.
[youtube url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loEeS46yvNs]