Man, did I ever go out of my with that post title. My point is, part 2 in a series of essays on my life in video games is available now, at The Morning News. The latest installment of the ‘Consoles I Have Known’ series is titled ‘The Most Competitive Man Alive’. It even has an audio-only section, for extra-fanciness.
One day, I shall rule the nerds.
I sat in on Public Radio International’s “Fair Game” last night to talk about the hip-hop and R&B artists who were recently named in the massive steroids probe. The segment ran quite long, and unfortunately a lot of fun stuff was cut out, but I had a really good time interviewing Dr. Don Catlin, possibly the most reviled man among Olympic athletes. He’s the doctor responsible for starting up the drug screening laboratory for the Olympics, and he’s an expert on the positive and negative effects of steroids and human growth hormones. He was also very accommodating when I asked him how many bullets my muscles would be able to stop if I were taking steroids, and which had a greater risk of type 2 diabetes: prolonged use of HGH, or hanging out in 50 Cent’s ‘Candy Shop’, spending all day licking his lollypop.
You can here the whole Fair Game broadcast here, though my segment is right at the top of the show.
Do you have a computer??? If so, this month’s RADAR 100 list is now online, too. 100 Ways We’re Trying to Go Green. I’m really happy with the way this list turned out, and which of my items were chosen. However, among my personal submissions that did not make the cut, this was probably my favorite: Conserving energy by switching to low-fives. Here were a few more I liked that didn’t make it into the 100:
And the winner of my “I am the only person who will find this joke amusing but I’m going to submit it, anyway” award for this list: Switching from bottled to boxed water
The Morning News has been kind enough to publish a multi-part series of autobiographical essays about video games, written by me. The series is called Consoles I Have Known, and first essay, titled, “A Very Weird and Blocky Future,” is available for eyeballs today.
Now online, just in time for your company’s grim holiday party…RADAR Magazine’s 100 Secret Santa Gifts You Should Probably Steer Clear Of. I hope you have a nice time reading our stuff.
Lately, I’ve been doing on-air pieces for a fun, daily public radio show called “Fair Game.” I like them over there, and it’s pretty rare that I write (or talk [or think]) about anything remotely topical.
Anyway, my most recent piece is on yesterday’s show, which also featured an interview with Slash and an in-studio performance by Andrew Bird. So there’s that. My piece is at the top of the show and I apologize if my razor-sharp comedic “asides” are a bit mumbly on the microphone, but that’s only because I’m a very passive-aggressive improviser.
You can here the archived show as a podcast or MP3, online right here at this wordlink.
A few weeks ago I attended an art opening for the painter Mark Greenwold. Mark is the father of my oldest childhood friend and, in my opinion, a tremendously gifted painter. Not just “that’s so cool your dad makes paintings and stuff” gifted, either. More like “these should be seen alongside John Currin and, fuck it, Paul Cadmus and David Hockney and any other sorta contemporary figurative painter you might get excited about.” His paintings are small—they take him a very long time to complete but, judging by the show, he’s working faster than he did when he was a young man—and they’re obsessively detailed and difficult to take your eyes off. There’s a lot happening on the canvases. A lot that someone with a degree in Art History or Psychology could tell you more about than I can.
The opening was held at the DC Moore Gallery on Fifth Avenue, near Central Park South. That gallery is nowhere near Deitch Projects or any of the white-box modern art joke shops along West 24th and 25th Streets. There was not a line around the block for the opening, teeming with teen and post-teens wearing plastic novelty versions of Mark’s eyeglasses, and everyone kept their breasts in their bras, and their bras in their shirts. Cobrasnake didn’t make it out for the show. It was not sponsored by a triple-distilled vodka infused with guarana.
If there seems to be a note of anger or bitterness in my tone, it’s because I sort of felt it on Mark’s behalf. (Although, speaking with Mark at the show, I suspect he feels some of it as well.) It’s just so frustrating to see truly great art seen by so few, when everyone lines up for miles to ogle Terry Richardson’s disposable camera photos of “strange” with post-coital sweat oiling their necks and naked chests, or Ryan McGinley’s out-of-focus pics of his friends hanging brain on their sleeping bag-snuggled buddies, or pissing off warehouse rooftops in the first after-after-party streams of sunlight. At the show, which I really loved for both personal and fairly objective reasons, I couldn’t help but be struck by this natural imbalance.
Which makes it that much sweeter that the New York Times crystallized (and better articulated) these very same thoughts in an incredibly positive review of the show. Of course, it stinks that the review is colored by the same feelings of iinjustice, placing Mark in the role of the written-off and overlooked missed opportunity in the art world. (Which he isn’t, of course; I think he actually sold a great number of the paintings in his retrospective before this review, and before the show’s opening.) It’s just nice that a few more people might get to see some pretty powerful work, although I guess it probably won’t attract the thousands of people who prefer to attend art shows where the most common comment about the work are “You see that shadow? That’s where the photographer was masturbating out of frame,” and “oh, snaps–there’s Courtney Love!”
Yesterday was a very long and runaround day, so I’ve decided to timestamp it. This will, of course, is interesting only to me and to others it will probably feel somewhere between confusing/distracting and self-absorbed/braggy, depending on how predisposed you already are to disliking me, or to reading people’s websites just to reinforce negative opinions of them/manufacture higher opinions of yourself. OK, go!
After Halloweening it up like crazy the night before, I woke myself up at 7:30 am. (something that most of you squares do each and every day, i realize, but it’s hell on bohemian types like myself who usually roll out of bed at 5:45pm, swab the genitals with a damp washcloth, pull on some pants, hit the stage and just dazzle for 7-12 minutes and then go back to sleep like some kind of housecat with a drinking problem) I used that unreasonably early wake-up call to finish writing an editorial for Fair Game, a public radio show I enjoy very much. Finished it too late to make a dentist’s appointment (11am–sorry, teeth!) but just in time (11:15) to make it to a meeting (12:30), then to a client’s office, where I received editorial feedback (13:12) and had to send back re-writes by 15:00. At 16:00 I received the final script, hopped in a cab, gave the script a once-over, and made it to the studio (16:25), made water in the VIP bathroom at WNYC (16:28), and recorded the piece on the radio, live. (16:34 – 16:40) You can here it by clicking on this word.*
Headed right back to Brooklyn (ETA 17:22), watched the “TiVo” episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm on my DVR. (sorry to get all lingo’y on you with the various technologies with which i am intimately familiar — 17:38-18:04) Packed three changes of clothes in a couple bags, two for me and one for Lisa, and headed back into Manhattan. (18:32) Arrived at Lisa’s office (19:03) so she could change clothes, then walked to a friend’s cocktail party. (19:31) We go all the way up to her apartment floor and started to feel guilty that we didn’t bring wine or anything, so we headed right back down in the elevator (19:33) and to a liquor store next door where we deliberated over wine and vodka, a process made more difficult because neither of us knows anything about wine and neither of us wanted to spend $50 on a bottle of nice vodka. Finally, chose a wine, headed back to the party, talked, ate cheese, nuts, chocolate. Then I grabbed my bag filled with two changes of clothes and split (20:43), at which point I raced to a club in the East Village to help provide “background” acting for a friend’s independent film. (21:08) Lisa joined me later (22:30) and I was supposed to stay there until 01:00 but all the scenes were filmed outside the club, on the sidewalk, and the temperature dropped about 20 degrees in an instant so, fearing the creeping presence of pneumonia and seeing there were more than enough colorful extras gathered outside the club already, I slipped out early (23:03) and grabbed a slice of pizza (23:10) before finally heading home again. (23:48) Tired and haywired as the day was, I still do prefer being busy to having lots of free time. But it would be nice to sit in a chair and read, or sit in a movie theater chair and stare. Or pick up a chubby-looking gamepad and shoot guys in the face for a little while.
*It is really worth watching this short video clip from the Senate Commerce Subcommittee hearing that inspired this editorial piece, especially if you’re a fan of uncomfortable squirming. C-SPAN really does make the best reality television programming.
The most recently published RADAR 100 list is now online, too. That means I get to share it. I think it’s my favorite so far: “100 Self-Help Books You Can Do Without.”
I don’t know how you feel about Gawker (and that is not an open invitation to tell me), but last week they published their first book, Gawker’s Guide to Conquering All Media, a product made of pulp and ink and, strangely, not one single photograph.
Why am I telling you all of this? Because I was responsible for some of that pulp and ink, by filling the Gawker book with my writing. And because several other very funny people I know also lent their writing to it, and I figure that’s a good thing.
If you ever find yourself trapped in a book store, under a pile of copies of this book, and you think to yourself, “this is probably going to be a terrible way to die, and yet even in this tragic position, I can’t help wondering what Todd Levin has written for this book that is literally about to squeeze the last bits of air out of my lungs…” then you can save some time by flipping ahead to “Book to Film” section, or the “NPR Fundraiser Premiums Wishlist” or the “Know Your Radio Formats” chart, or the “Spotlight on Music Bloggers” checklists, or a couple other things I’ll leave to the imagination.
There are, as I mentioned earlier, many other very funny sections written by professional comedy writers that I could also recommend, but this is my selfish web site. In any case, I stand behind (nearly all of) my contributions to this very important book that is sure to be remembered through the ages.
I co-authored this book, which Publishers Weekly called "a hilarious and addictive page-turner." If you'd like to call it things, too, you can buy it.