In the days before file-sharing (how’s THAT for a cold open?), you would either listen to music at a friend’s house, read reviews in the papers and the trades, find books - BOOKS - that reviewed records and make little lists that you’d keep in your wallet. That’s if you were a music idiot, which I was.

Unlike other friends, who could take it or leave it, I believed completely in the redemptive power of music. I had gotten myself in a pretty dark place in college and what I was listening to was only making things worse. It was excellently played and recorded music - please don’t think I lapsed too far that way - but it was ominous, sad, fatalistic stuff full of junkies and early endings. I had to do something, so I prescribed myself new music. I went to the record store and found cheap vinyl three record sets of The Temptations, Smokey Robinson & the Miracles, and the wonder of the world, Marvin Gaye. The recovery was almost as quick as when a baby takes its first double-dose of amoxycillin for an ear ache. I tambourined right back to a good frame of mind. For, whatever the limitations of the Detroit music, it was inherently innocent and happy and virtuoso. None of this dead babies crawling on the ceiling stuff.

If you really wanted to buy music and not tape it off a friend, you’d take your list into a record store and try to find it alphabetically in its genre. If the record store was a crappy chain, good luck finding anything off the beaten path. But there were some wonderful places where there were people just like me, only more so, buying the records. To walk out of one of these places with a hard-to-find album (or later, cd) was such a great feeling.

Of course I treated my music like gold. I cleaned the heads on my tapedecks, and had the record-cleaning kits. I laughed at my friends who did it every time the same way my couldn’t-care-less friends laughed at me for doing it once in a while.

And I cultivated vampiric relationships with other music loving nuts. We all fed off this music. They would come to my place and walk off with a handful of albums (later cds) and would impress me by having them back to me by the next day. They would have stayed up all night taping them. I respected this protocol and did the same when I borrowed.

Flash ahead a few years and one of my longtime music-vampire friends let me look over his collection and I was thrilled to see many new purchases I hadn’t bought yet. I picked up this cd too (see above) and said, “What’s this?” He said, “Put it in your pile. I won’t say another word about it.” That meant he didn’t want to turn me off by overpraising it. I put it in the pile with maybe ten other cds and took them home for a night of taping.

Chris Whitley. Living With the Law. Holy Christ! Even now, when I click it out of stasis on iTunes, it just grumbles up from the ground with intense confidence. The lyrics are poet laureate excellent, the guitar like Robbie Robertson’s, the voice plaintive and strong and unafraid. My friend was right. The thing comes out of the speakers like a ghost train.

The story goes that the label’s producer was responsible for the overall tone and sound, and that Whitley and he clashed over it. The producer was right. This happens. See Todd Rundgren fighting Andy Partridge over the direction of “Skylarking,” for another example where the producer knows best.

A National Steel guitar, tumbleweeds blowing past a busted windmill in a dusty Southwestern setting, and the songs’ narrators at the end of their collective ropes eking out an American hardness. Not happy music, no. But beautiful. So, so beautiful. Put it in your pile. I’ve said too much already.

“Gonna swing my scythe, got a hand upon the handle
Gonna shade my children ways I understand
Milk the trigger, kill the hunger
Staring down this broken land

So fetch on up your greasy apron
Spread your lover in the straw
Hear me baby, I’m nearly crazy
It’s hard living with the law”

One of my desert island discs.

To hear excerpts:

iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/living-with-the-law/id157301322

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Living-With-The-Law/dp/B00138KM4C/ref=sr_shvl_album_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1358975484&sr=301-1

I don’t know Daniel Day-Lewis, but I tell myself I do. I’ve heard all the stories you have. The method actor who stays in character when the cameras are off, who insists upon being called by the character’s name, the man who was plucked away from a cobbler’s bench in Florence when Marty Scorcese came calling about “Gangs of New York.” How much of this is true I cannot say.

His performances are riveting. The characters he plays can be very intimidating and intense. At the Golden Globes he maintained a mostly unmoving but regal face until he finally laughed out loud at something directed toward him from the stage. That’s the Daniel Day-Lewis I would wager is real.

In interviews he’s very solicitous, very thoughtful. That augurs well, I tell myself.

But something else I learned about him raised him up to the highest possible level of esteem. While filming “The Crucible,” Day-Lewis met Rebecca Miller, daughter of playwright Arthur Miller. They soon after married. Here’s where I take an interest in the story. Miller and his third wife had a son, also named Daniel, who has Down syndrome. At a week old, the baby was institutionalised. While the child’s mother visited him weekly, Miller would have nothing to do with him. This was common at the time, as hard as it is to believe now. People thought such occurrences reflected poorly upon them. Poor genetics, a judgement from God, you name it. No, I’m serious. Can you believe the garbage people lived with back then?

There is no mention of Daniel Miller in Arthur Miller’s memoirs.

Day-Lewis, after learning of his missing brother-in-law, visited him with Rebecca and forged a relationship which is said to continue. He pushed for a father/son meeting, which wasn’t all the fireworks one could wish for, and, six weeks before Miller’s death, convinced him to relent and name his son in his will.

I therefore like this Daniel Day-Lewis and would gladly shake his hand with both of mine and, what is more, pay for his coffee, and am not at all intimidated by him. He’s all right by me.

“The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

The guy was colossal. Look at that face. He was a shark. He once stood on his pedals on Alpe D’Huez after a horrible, grueling ascent and turned back to look at his sole competitor, the German Jan Ullrich. Everyone else, the peleton, the domestiques, the super-domestiques, had been ground to a fine white powder. There was ruin on Ullrich’s face. Lance turned back toward the summit and danced on his pedals, as the commentators liked to say. He blew the place away.

Who is this man? Is he a god? everyone seemed to ask. How can he do that? How can one man be so much better than other men?

Well, now we know.

We also knew, if we had read the papers even scantily, that cycling had been a tainted sport for a very long time. We pretended that Lance was clean. We wanted him to be clean. He insisted he was clean. Defiantly so. There was nationalist fervor involved. USA! USA!

How had a man been able to rise from his deathbed and compete with the best, and best-juiced, athletes in the world? And then prevail?

Well, now we know. How could it have been otherwise?

He ran a better doping shop than his competitors and he ate their lunches. No foolin’.

If you do this and you have some morals, you try to justify this by saying you’re leveling the playing field. If you’re a ruthless sociopath, you run the thing like a gang and a conspiracy, and you neutralize defectors, naysayers, and perceived threats by inflicting pain in whatever form you can muster be it legal, reputational or loss of employment.

We saw a man humbled in his interview with Oprah. Is he only playing at being humble? He chooses his words very carefully. If he coerced teammates, if he irks the wrong people, if he admits to doing things a certain way, then his former sponsors will be able to take more of his money away, the last thing he has left.

But whether he really is humbled or is merely playing humbled is a moot point, at this stage. He’s sad and hurt. And that’s the point. He’ll have to carry on the rest of his life as one whom sponsors will avoid, whom former worshippers will spit upon, as a man who brought desolation to his sport and who riddles with holes the one good thing he built, his cancer foundation. It will be a miracle if it can carry on. He hurt a lot of people and the effects will be felt for a long time.

Then again, there’s never been a better time to be a disgraced celebrity in the history of the world. One or more television shows will be built around him, and he will have an income.

But the empire he built is gone. And that is what was most important to him. He’s left with nothing.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert … Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
- “Ozymandias”
Percy Bysshe Shelley

And that, dear friends, is how a hack finishes an essay.

I read Suzy Soro’s “Celebrity sTalker” the other day and enjoyed Suzy’s hilarious and embarrassing celebrity anecdotes, which are quite good and - rare these days - improve over the course of the book rather than front-load it. Get it, enjoy it. Read it poolside or in the comfort of your cabana. Read it in your cubicle for all I care. But do read it. (http://www.amazon.com/Celebrity-sTalker-Stories-Thinks-Celebrities/dp/0615741320/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1355971527&sr=1-1&keywords=suzy+soro) But what also struck me is that something about her inventive and digressionary style put me in mind of another writer, someone I hadn’t read in over thirty years. Let the wavy lines drop here as harp music falls like rain and come with me, friends, on yet another trip to YESTERYEAR.

The funny thing about being a kid is that you’re convinced every feeling you have is the most important feeling ever and that no one has ever had that feeling before. Your friends are spear carriers in this tragedy you call life and your parents - just look at them! - have obviously never felt anything in their lives. This is what I call the isolating pleasure of extreme narcissism.

Well, that was me. I did like to read, though, so I had that going for me, and if I was ignored long enough I’d get on my hands and knees, head sideways, reading the spines on people’s bookshelves.

Yes, I was awkward. Groan. Yes, I was gangly. Yawn. Nobody understood me. Eyes blink twice, slowly. I didn’t fit in. Except I did. But I didn’t feel like it. I wanted to fit in with those people over there, not with these ones here. These chuckleheads who don’t UNDERSTAND me.

Let’s just say I hadn’t found my niche and leave it at that.

In my grandparents’ house on a weekend stay, I found a few paperbacks by Jack Douglas. I believe they were “Shut Up and Eat Your Snowshoes” and “The Jewish-Japanese Sex & Cook Book and How To Raise Wolves.” Everything else on their shelves was about nice, but unimaginative men founding leper colonies and becoming saints, or about this other nice fellow who was pulled to pieces for his faith and now has box seats in heaven. On the landing of my grandparents’ stairs was a little alcove for religious statuary and…you get the picture.

My grandfather never, ever discussed religion. God bless him for that. I think he was along for the ride.

Anyway, these books were a revelation for a boy stuck in a house with his early-to-bed, early-to-rise pious grandparents where I can still hear the clock ticking and see the dust motes floating more slowly than can be believed in my mind’s eye. The books I’d read up to that point had been dull tracts about virtuousness by narrators who talked down to the young reader. Jack talked across to you as if you were sitting with him in his living room and you both had your feet up on the coffee table and whiskies in your hands.

They were very conversational books, very digressing, very funny. There is the aging comedy writer settling down in Canada with his Japanese wife Reiko, baby Timothy and pet wolves. All while he’s writing and sending jokes back to Laugh-In and other television shows.

There was inside dope on show business, insider stories about the comedians and actors of the time, memories of writing for this one or that one, and plenty of fish out of water stories in the present tense about a Hollywood man living in the woods and being greatly misunderstood by the hayseeds, and vice versa. The locals always seem to get the better of him. This becomes a theme across the books, particularly in ‘Benedict Arnold Slept Here” where he purchases and runs an inn in Connecticut.

I asked my grandmother if I could take them home and read them. She waved a nonchalant hand as if to say “Someone brought that trash to my house, you may take that trash away.” There was no leprosy in them, you see, and certainly no one being pulled into fifths by horses.

When I got home I went to the library and got out the rest of Douglas’ output, which was considerable, and I studied them minutely like a monk in a stone tower. What the librarian must have thought I cannot guess. I tried to think like the author, to try on his worldview. It felt much more gratifying than the swill I’d read up to that point, Tom Sawyer excluded. I began to work some of JD’s conversational gambits and observational kind of comedy into my banter, with positive crowd results. I felt a warm glow spreading over me. I know what I want, I said to myself. I want to make people laugh.

Why hadn’t I thought of this before? This was, perhaps, the germinating seed in my becoming a writer, a private comedian. My hat has always been off to you, Jack Douglas.

I haven’t gone back and re-read any of them because I fear there’d be a certain amount of sag when viewed through all that’s happened in comedy and comedic writing and the world since then. There would be a certain amount of corniness and of-its-time-ness and some of his premises would doubtless be seen as hackneyed by today’s readers, but for the time he wrote, he was pretty hot stuff. He could go on the Tonight Show and make Jack Paar wet his pants. He wrote jokes for Bob Hope, Red Skelton, Bing Crosby, George Gobel, Woody Allen, Jimmy Durante and was on the staff of a bunch of shows.

I often had to push a pillow into my mouth as I screamed with laughter at two in the morning so my parents wouldn’t know I was up late reading yet another Jack Douglas memoir with a flashlight. He could be that funny with a phrase or an observation. So maybe I will go back and read them.

So, Suzy, when I tell you that you remind me of Jack Douglas? I hope you take it as a compliment.

One generation passeth away and another generation cometh, but the earth abideth forever. I spent a few days at the bedside of a dying relation recently. She had mentioned to me previously that if she were on life support, the hospital was instructed not to withdraw it from her until I arrived. Living several thousand miles away, I gulped when I heard this. Luckily that scenario never came to pass. She knew death wasn’t far off and coyly asked me to visit last week. A few days before my arrival, she went into a two-day, hard-to-rouse sleep. The flights were pushed up accordingly. When I got to her house, she was in bed but heavy-lidded and staring straight ahead. Her home health aide seemed pleased that she had finally been roused but I was shaken by the sight of her. The cancer had wasted her away to skin and bone. Her pallor was grey and bloodless. She was able to speak, but even up close it was nearly impossible to make out what she was saying. She was restless. She kept saying things like “I want to get out of here.” Now and again she would throw off her bed covering and try to get out of bed, which would surely have occasioned a fractured hip or a smashed skull. Her health aide was frantic about this. I reasoned with my aunt, persuasively I thought. “How can you count on your reactions when you can hardly hold a cup to your lips?” Shortly thereafter, she demanded to be dressed and taken out for a walk. She settled for a lap around the house. It was impressive, but the toll it was taking was evident on her face. This was A Grand Statement. When she was safely tucked away in bed I returned to her bedside. The glint in her eye was a playful ‘I told you so.’

The next day was not good. By noontime she was unable to drink from a straw and had to hydrate with spooned pieces of crushed ice. She could be called away from her fog of opiated suffering only with great effort. Sometimes she would turn her head and look at me and the eyes were uncomprehending. I would smile reassuringly and rub her hand. That was a terrible feeling. ‘Am I recognizable to her?’ ‘Does she know I’m here?’

But it never does to have your courage fail you in moments like that.

There were no more words from her that day. The next day she slept. She never opened her eyes at all. Morphine or ice chips put into her mouth leaked out again. I thought back to the parade around the house and wondered at what I’d seen. I sat by her side for much of the day and night. I didn’t worry her with small talk. But I sat there. From time to time I put my hand on her arm or hand and rubbed or gave a squeeze.

I was witnessing something, and she and I were simply being. Be-ing. There’s no point in trivializing it. I was witnessing one human’s transition from life to death. It’s the most natural thing in the world. We will all have to do it at some time or other. It was hard work. She labored. But the fire was in the engine room by now and it must have scorched the pain impulse panel, because she didn’t groan or toss and turn or make faces. She breathed in and out, in and out, and seemed to sleep, though it was really a coma.

There was something inherently noble about the whole thing. I suppose there’s something noble in all lost causes, if the losing combatant plays by the rules and somehow manages to keep her dignity in defeat.

That’s what I was seeing: someone at her most vulnerable and at her absolute weakest, picking up her broken shield and her dulled spear and motioning gamely for Death to get back into the arena. God, do I love humans.

For several hours in the night it was just we two and I was able to tell her just how much I loved her and how proud I was to know her and that it was okay to put down her shield and spear. There are other ways of winning, I said, quoting one of my heroes. A few hours later she put her things down and was quickly consumed. I wish you could have seen her.

The only line from a movie that has the power to make me gasp with emotion every single time is this one: “Ladies and gentlemen: a toast. To my big brother George. The richest man in town.”

The baser parts of our personalities call out to us all the time. I’m not saying we always want to slug people, or push them down or pull their toupees off, but the rougher parts of our natures, the ones that would probably help us survive if we were dropped into the middle of the Amazon with only a Philips Head screwdriver, the rougher parts I say, are the ones that urge us to ride a little harder on those around us. Brusqueness, withdrawal, tunnel vision, lack of sympathy, maniacal focus on a task, feelings of superiority, becoming indignant enough to believe that one’s own views can be the only ones worth considering because WHY ELSE WOULD I BE SO INDIGNANT, and so forth. Or arguing with ill-educated persons and believing that you have shredded the philosophies they hold dear merely because they are poor in the ways of debate, or as hot-headed as you or, God forbid, bad spellers.

I’ve seen plenty of this the last few days. From all sides. It has not been very nice.

Look up at David Niven. He was certainly not the most handsome man in the world, but he brought a terrific summing-up of himself with him wherever he went. He was present, as they say. He was not an amazing actor, but he never lacked for work. He was loved by everyone in Hollywood. By all accounts he was nice. Nice. What does that even mean, nice? Nice has become a third-rate word, but believe me, it’s one of the best and is long overdue for a renaissance. There is certainly not enough of it around to suit me.

Nice. A smile for everyone. An accordance of respect to each one. An enlarging of one’s personal space to encompass, even for a few moments, the space of another and to grant that person full, autonomous diplomatic privilege and honor. Bonhomie, good will, and politeness that delves into the comforts and anxieties of the other, with none of the touch-me-not or the will-you-look-at-the-time.

Did you look that waitress in the eye when you ordered? Was yours a kindly eye? Did you very nicely pretend that her hundred-times-a-day spiel about being your server was unique and interesting to you? Your being nice could take her right out of her rote behavior and bring joy to an otherwise dreary and unremarkable day.

That old fellow in the doctor’s waiting room with you. He’s being brave, but he’s exceedingly nervous. He asked you if you saw a show on tv last night. You’re reading a magazine. What do you do? Grunt and go on reading? Most do, you know.

“No, I didn’t see it, but my friends tell me it’s a wonderful show. What happened last night?”

He works off his nerves by talking. You nod and smile and where appropriate, respond. You do not demand 50+ percent of the conversation. Contrary to what you may believe, you are not giving up your rights and you don’t have to continue this particular conversation forever, but you can let this person know that he’s not a spider, that you both tacitly understand he’s in want of some human reassurance in a time of need and that you will gladly reassure him (and in doing so, will also forget for a few moments your upcoming blood draw), and that you are both creatures under the same sun who a hundred years hence will be buried for an eternity within five miles of each other, or perhaps be sprinkled along the same beach. So why not get acquainted now and chew a little bit of the fat?

We live too much within ourselves, and we stare too much into our screens. Look up once in a while and practice, at first clumsily and later with relish, the niceness of being nice and bask in the enervating effect it has on those around you. People will suddenly find their inner U.N. Building and fall over themselves, stamping visas and conferring diplomatic privileges back to you. Sometimes everyone will smile as though he’d just been promoted, Christmas-bonused & transferred to the head office in Paris.

Look at Niven again. If you were sitting beside him in an airport terminal, you wouldn’t want him to be glowering down into his phone. The loss would be crushing. You’d want him to confer upon you his warm fellow-feeling, his beaming smile. You’d delight in his turn of phrase or perspicacious comments on something happening behind you. He’d sincerely ask how you did, where you lived, where you were going and why. Your answers would delight him. You would be very, very happy that you had met him. He was nice.

HOW TO BE SHERLOCK HOLMES: When happening upon two fighting dogs and their severely strained owners in the park, relieve the social anxiety at once by urgently saying, as though a recording angel were taking dictation, the following things in this order:

The dead girl was left-handed, and a tee-totaller.

She knew her killer. Knew him intimately.

She had recently inherited some money, and a sheep farm in Lancaster. LOOK AT THE GOOD COUNTY MUD ON HER INSTEP, IDIOTS.

She was menstruating, as are sixty percent of the people present. (Do not be tempted to modify this claim if the dog owners are men.)

She herself was a member of no less than two secret societies, and had traveled to Singapore in the last week.

After finally acknowledging their baleful stares, say, nastily: “Did you learn NOTHING at The Royal College of Flash Burgering?” And turn on your heel, stomping off across the heath while reciting the capitals of eastern Europe & violently windmilling your arms.