when i was in college he was the first rock star i ever interviewed. he was hilarious and dirty and funny and weird and gross
and the perfect person to break my cherry with.
we talked about the Replacements, Reagan, Bush, Debbie Gibson and I laughed the whole time.
When I tell you I’ve had the luckiest life, I mean it.
But look how luckier Ken Layne was:
RIP Mojo
when i was in college i was overly blessed. i was on the radio every week, wrote in the paper every day, i got to read and write around all these smart kids in the college of creative studies where you were rewarded for being creative instead of punished.
and i worked all these crazy jobs.
the best was being an editor at the daily nexus. to my great lucky they let me write for all the desks including being allowed to write numerous opinion columns.
back then on campus everyone read the paper. not only were we award winning but it was very funny and in the opinion pages no topic was taboo.
apparently one of them made their way to the real paper, the santa barbara news press and when they were looking for someone to write a column in their “Student Voice” deal, i got a phone call (there was no email back then).
they were gonna pay me $50 to write a column, but it had to be specific to the campus. that was easy, our campus government approved an expensive recreation center that they barely vetted. in hindsight we were right, but that thing is pretty damn cool.
the problem was, i didnt like the news press. mostly because they didnt hire any of us after we graduated. they had one guy and that was it. meanwhile we were extremely good, winning state, beating all the big schools usc, ucla, berkeley, the daily nexus should have been a pipeline to that paper.
so after i turned in my piece i got a phone call, they wanted to know a few things about me for the front page. anything look odd?
honor roll? me? excuse me as i die laughing.
also, it showed how little the news press knew about ucsb, creative studies doesnt have grades, how would i have a 3.9 gpa?
also, isnt that something you should be fact checking, particularly on something youre putting on your front page, in color (which was expensive back then)?
regardless it was dickish, i shouldta done it. not that anyone would have noticed. but it fed into my belief that that paper needed more nexus ppl over there
because where do you think i learned
fact check every damn thing
She sold the ads, smoked the Camels, and stayed out of our way, which had to be hard.
How hard? Once I produced a 12-page special section in the paper, just on where to get fucked up on campus and in IV. It was mostly about shrooms and LSD. Fryday Magazine. She didn’t bat an eye. She sold the ads for it.
And that was just me! There were literally hundreds of us who passed through those doors during her decades there trying to push the limits to see if the sky would fall. It never fell.
Just the opposite.
Only once did Tybie, pictured, take me aside. I used the phrase “sorority tart” once in a column and she said, “you’re better than that Tony.”
I asked “’tart’ bothers you? I began a piece ‘Fuck fuck fuck’ the other day and ‘tart’ bothers you?”
She said, “that other piece was art. It was poetry. ‘Tart’ is something any Bozo would type. You’re special.”
I’m misting up thinking about her. She gave us all the freedom. The most valuable gift you could bestow a young person.
Without her finding creative ways to finance our paper – a freaking daily paper with no adult supervision – we would have had to study or some shit.
St Peter is hearing some great stories tonight.
-30-
i deserved it
do i come right out and bash the people who bash the king of all media?
no, but you don’t have to be a genius to see what im up to when i debunk nonsense online.
why do i waste so much time doing it?
at the world famous Daily Nexus, I had very few bosses. mostly because they made me an editor of different desks pretty quickly, which is normal in college since theres so much turnover and so few people willing to dedicate their lives to the paper
but one of my bosses was Dougie Gyro
i reached out to him the other day about the design of the Hear in LA website that has gotten me to stop my momentum
i am really struggling with it because i am no design expert and i am desperately trying to make it look like something i am not: elegantly professional.
doug gave me the best advice which is actually something he told me he learned from Apple’s Guy Kawasaki
don’t worry, be crappy.
which basically means, whoever it is youre trying to impress so hard either
does not care about you one but
or
can see through the facade and only cares about the content youre actually creating
warts and all
so make your Drudge Report design if you’re Drudge, it’s the You that matters
and thats why i am so grateful that the Lord put me in Santa Barbara when he did because so many of my friends are that wise
and one day i hope to be too.
where every day i am writing about a job i had.
i started with my first job at McDonalds and yesterday i wrote about working at the Daily Nexus in college.
this is a picture of me and former EIC pat whalen reading Friday’s paper that morning.
nobody’s there because we didn’t have papers on Saturday but somehow we both ended up there
as did Joel Brand who took this picture.
back then it was rare to take pictures but Joel was/is rich so he not only had a camera but a damn good one, and knew how to use it.
so pat and i were reading the paper, going over every story. writing, design, humor, killer lines.
i remember one day we did this he totally insulted the arts section i had done that previous night.
i was like, youre kidding, right?
he spoke slurry like hunter s thompson, and whispery
“i dont kid this early in the day.”
then he started red penning things.
i was stunned.
a several months later we were on that same couch, and like in this picture, nobody was in the newsroom.
not even joel.
i had been fired by pat’s best friend larry for telling him he couldnt submit his dumbass pre-write about Sinbad at the Pub because it was late. Larry said, but im the EIC. i said dont you understand, if everyone sees that even the rules apply to you, then i’ll never have a story submitted late again.
i was running something crazy like 20 pieces a week in our 8 page section.
he said, if you dont run this you’re fired.
i said, you cant fire me, the section isn’t put to bed.
so Larry watched me work all night and when we were done he said yah fired.
a few months later he hired me back because the Gulf War was starting and the paper needed a few more writers.
pat negotiated a summit where larry would leave me alone, i would be a co-news editor but i had to stick it out.
well, that war was a bummer. and i was writing stupid stories like people getting flag poles to show their support to the troops. i hated everything, so i quit.
so larry told pat, see i told you he’d quit. screw you tony, youre banned.
i was a senior, i had a girlfriend, i lived a 10 minute walk from the beach, fine, some time off so i could live like a normal student for my last few months in college. works for me.
but then the california collegiate awards deadline was approaching. no one had called me to see which of my arts sections should be submitted for state.
which is how i ended up on that couch with pat, like i was telling you.
i said, pat, which ones are they submitting.
he said, none, they’re going to submit the Video Guys’ sections. i said, dude, let video guy have three issues and i have three issues. and we went through the ones that should be mine.
and during spring break we all went up to sacramento
and for the first time ever the daily nexus won best arts section in state
and it was mine.
and i won it in a dress
and as i was walking up to get my little plaque i could hear pat
with his elongated delivery
irony of ironieeeeeeeees!
so yes, i love this picture.
and mr w. patrick whalen.
he was the illustrator of the Daily Nexus.
he was so good i made him my assistant arts editor because i wanted his art on the cover of our section every week.
he always delivered.
after college when i was transferred up to Frisco i needed a place to live and he had a spare room in his apartment on 22nd and Folsom.
we had a mice problem. there was a hole in the apartment somewhere. but he had these giant snakes in a fish tank.
he let them out to roam. they ate all the mice and slithered back into their tanks.
todd was the first person i met who said its ok to have dinner consisting of nothing but vegetables.
we even tried it a few times.
those were the days of AOL. id sit in my room on a 14.4 modem writing poems in the poetry rooms and sexting the girls who i hope were women. it was pretty easy to tell the fakers, but you never know. i probably said something to some dudes without knowing it.
ah frisco.
todd and i saw the OJ chase together because he loved hoops even more than i did, especially anthony mason and patrick ewing.
so as we were watching the game they broke in with the slow Bronco chase and we got to see parts of LA that we missed.
little did i know that Todd would slowly become one of the biggest names of skateboard design.
i didnt know how far his fame had reached until i was back home in ILL a year ago and in our crappy mall there was a skate shop and i asked the kid if he knew about Todd and among 100 boards he quickly picked out the 5-6 that he designed.
he said he drove to the city to get Todds autograph back when he was doing a book signing.
so many talented friends at the Daily Nexus.
we were all so lucky to have had each other.
because if you are the only one with weird ideas, gross pictures, or stupid plots to change the world:
it’s nice to have a room full of others who, instead of vetoing you, say,
“you think that’s weird, check this shit out.”
the kids invited me to write on the nexus walls with chalk
pretty sure what i wrote is the culmination of my drug taking experiences
boiled down into three words.
Here’s the Pixies song that’s sorta about him:
because the world is bizarre, about once a year i end up speaking to large groups.
my favorite place to speak is the daily nexus. and yet i still get nervous.
i worry im going to be boring
i worry they wont think im “cool”
i worry im gonna waste their time.
as i drove to work today i thought about a rough outline in my mind
And then I’m going to pass out a copy of my favorite opinion column from my college days and tell them that anything is possible at the Nexus. It is your job to push the envelope, not retract it.
a mysterious stranger at ask lana asks this mysterious question.
Are you proud of TONY? Notice, I didn’t ask: are you proud of your ACCOMPLISHMENTS, but asked if you’re proud of YOU! Mothers and gods aside; I’m not asking if you are WORTHY of someone’s respect or love or admiration; I’m asking if what you think and feel and believe and how you behave and shit makes YOU proud. Pride doesn’t just come from actions; a lot of it comes from how we THINK; our attitudes, not just our personalities. You can have a great PERSONALITY because you have restraint and know enough not to step on any toes or ruffle any feathers; but!!!!! Attitude is that feeling you have about shit on the INSIDE! Are you proud of THAT? Why or why not?
no. none.
pride, like jealousy, is foreign to me and always has been. probably since school when i would write or do something that i thought was spectacular and the teacher would say “meh”. at that point i learned whatever alleged “pride” i had didn’t matter in the formula.
also theres this: the few times i have achieved great success it was always a team effort. thus the feeling i had was Fortunate, not Pride. i was lucky to have been on the lake park high school marching band drum line. i was sooooo lucky to write at the daily nexus. and likewise i was so lucky to get hired and then get to run LAist with all the great people i got to work with. all of those so called individual awards or stories or poems or actions were learned from my surroundings or inspired by the spirit. my input was minimal other than staying out of the way of imminent greatness.
when i went to the Times and we were hugely successful, that was a variety of things: an interesting math theory regarding (frequency of posts By talented reporters Plus SEO plus great editing plus timing multiplied by Digg/Reddit). but none of it would have happened if i was not allowed the green light to try it on all of the desks at the paper (luck times patience). the theories derived not from my head but from the total feedback from the Technorati Top 100: boingboing did it, so lets try it. it had little to do with me.
even when i blog something good on this blog or think about this blog as a whole, pride does not factor in because this is merely an evolution of keeping a diary in school in a wired notebook to creating a web site to then using blogger and now wordpress.
is the farmer proud when the seed and water and dirt makes a fruit? no, he thanks God and moves on.
of course there are exceptions. this is the only one i can think of.
while at UCSB, at the Nexus, i was given an internal award from my peers. they voted me the best arts and entertainment writer of the paper my junior year. i was proud because there were probably 10 other people who could have won that. our paper was stacked. we’d win best in state for that section that next year and the next couple of years.
so to be voted positively by the people i respected the most meant more to me than when i won state the next year for the whole section.
because duh we were better than everyone else, but how were we viewed internally: that always fascinated me.