Joel Keller

Thirty-six years ago today, my mother gave birth to me after what I’m sure was seventy-two straight hours of painful labor (I haven’t heard the story in years, but I’m sure the number of hours goes up every time she tells someone).

One thing I’ve noticed is that the more birthdays I have, the less I realize that the actual day is upon me, which is strange, since I used to like getting attention on my “big day” when I was younger. Maybe it’s because the years go faster as I get older, or maybe it’s because I’ve been busy keeping my writing career going, but the last couple of birthdays have come upon me suddenly, to the point where I tend to let the day pass just like any other day.

I’m not one of those people who throws themselves a birthday party or gathering; to me, turning another year older isn’t anything special. But every few years, I like to do something memorable — at least to me — on May 30, like when I saw my friend Tom’s (now defunct) band play an acoustic gig in Hoboken on my 30th birthday. It was such a nice, peaceful way to spend a day whose arrival I had been freaking out about in the months that led up to it (that’s a story for whatever memoir I happen to write).

Anyway, instead of prattling on about my birthday, I will utilize the power of Google and link to stories about events that happened on May 30, 1971. Those links will be after the jump.

(By the way, the pic is the cover of TV Guide from the week I was born. It seems perfectly fitting that it was of All In The Family, the hot new show of that television season.)
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I just read that the family of St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Josh Hancock, who was killed last month when his SUV crashed into the back of a tow truck, is suing just about everyone involved in the incident, despite the fact that Hancock was driving drunk at the time of the accident.

To quickly recap: Hancock had been drinking at Mike Shannon’s restaurant in St. Louis after an afternoon game. Despite having a blood alcohol level that was twice the legal limit, he got in his SUV. It was reported that not only was Hancock intoxicated, but he was also talking on his cell phone at the time he hit the tow truck. Oh, and he also wasn’t wearing a seatbelt.

As tragic as the situation is to his family, mostly everyone has to agree that Hancock was fully responsible for his own death. Everyone, that is, but Hancock’s family and the lawyers they hired. Not only are they suing the restaurant that served him those drinks, but they’re also suing the tow truck company, the tow truck driver and the driver of the stalled car that the tow truck was trying to remove.

Apparently, according to the suit, not getting your car out of the way after it stalls is now an actionable offense. Cripes. Leave it to the law profession to figure out new ways to screw innocent people. I mean, really; so what if the guy whose car broke down could have moved it to the side of the road? And the tow truck driver was just trying to do his job; apparently, he had just arrived a minute or two before Hancock crashed into the back of his truck. Hancock drank too much, he talked on a cell phone while driving drunk, and he wasn’t wearing his seatbelt.

I know the Hancock family is upset, and they think this might give them some closure on the matter. But why spread your misery to others who weren’t involved? Hopefully, they’ll come to their senses once their grief subsides a little bit and drop the suit. Either that or a judge will make them pay for the legal fees of at least the tow truck company and driver and the driver of the stalled car. They don’t deserve this nightmare.

A couple of weeks ago, I was scheduled to interview Gene Simmons for Radar, mostly talking about his reality show on A&E. The interview was scheduled for a Monday at 3 PM. The night before, I had gone out for dinner and got back at around 9:30. Right before 10 PM, I heard the phone ring, and I saw “Private caller” on my caller ID. Anyone who’s done celebrity interviews before knows that most of them have unlisted home numbers, so seeing “Private caller” on your caller ID is a sure sign that the caller isn’t a telemarketer or other annoyance. So, I decided to answer out of sheer curiosity. Here’s what I hear on the other end:

“Is this Joel? This is Gene Simmons.”

Yikes. He was calling to do the interview with me about 17 hours early. I told him that I was expecting him to call tomorrow afternoon. He said something about lawyers and bill payers and having not knowing where the day was going to take him tomorrow, so he can call me back if I want, but there was no guarantee. So I decided to just do the interview on the spot; I scrambled around and hooked up my recorder while I had the phone down on my table (so this means I put Gene Simmons on hold).

When I picked the phone back up, we had a good talk… he got annoyed at me once or twice, which is something I knew would happen based on some of the questions I wanted to ask. But overall it went well; I even got some good quotes out of him about politics and Sean Penn and that kind of stuff.

For some reason, I wasn’t that annoyed that he called early. It freed up my Monday afternoon tomorrow, and I got a good lead for my article.

The finished interview just got posted this morning. Interesting stuff.

I’m looking forward to hearing my friend Dan’s reaction to this interview; he’s a KISS fanatic, and he pasted the walls of our freshman dorm with pics of Gene, Paul, and company. Because of that, I was probably one of the rare people who listened to KISS right along with the college stoner staples like Pink Floyd. Hopefully he — and my buddy Mihir, who still goes to KISS concerts with Dan to this day — enjoys this.

Most people who know me know that I’m not an idiot when it comes to computers. Far from it, in fact; before I decided to take on the quixotic task of making a living with my writing, I was an Information Technology wage slave, working for a certain company that will remain nameless for the time being. Because of that, I’ve pretty much have certain computer-related routines down and I tend to do them quickly.

One of those tasks is switching to a new machine. At work, whenever I’d get a new laptop, it usually never took me more than half a day to get all my important data — mail, documents, etc. — transfered from one computer to another. By the next day, I was using the new laptop full-time and wiping the data off the old one.

So when I got a shiny (well, not that shiny, because it’s black) new ThinkPad T60 Widescreen (see pic above), I figured it would be four hours to get the data off my 2002-vintage Dell laptop and start working on the new machine.

What I didn’t count on were two things: a) I’m on my home network, not an office network, and 2) Windows Vista is a pain in the ass.
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I am not shy to say that despite the fact that I’m a straight male from New Jersey, I’ve always been a fan of Gilmore Girls. I started watching the show in season two, mainly because I had an unyielding crush on Lauren Graham and enjoyed watching her in whatever failing TV show she was in (her guest stint on NewsRadio is one of the first places I saw her, I think). But I was sucked in by Amy Sherman-Palladino’s funny, rapid-fire dialogue, the quirky characters she wrote for the idyllic town of Stars Hollow, CT, the buddy relationship between Lorelai and Rory Gilmore, and the difficult and frigid — but loving — relationship between Lor and her parents.

Anyway, after seven seasons — the last two of which were not as good creatively as the first five — the show aired its season finale last night. As with all the new episodes that have been on for the last year-and-a-half, I reviewed it for TV Squad. In short: I enjoyed the episode and thought the writers tied most stories up nicely, and the ones they didn’t tie up had satisfying conclusions. After such a bumpy season, it was a surprisingly understated and well-done finale. I’m going to miss the show, and I hope Graham (and Kelly Bishop, who plays matriarch Emily Gilmore) gets a chance to go to another show where she’ll show her skills and maybe get the Emmy voters’ attention. She sure as hell deserves it.

(UPDATE: I just found a blog entry I did about GG two years ago. It was in a “double-secret” blog I did in order to audition for my current job at TVS. It was good blogging practice, and I might have kept it up if, you know, someone didn’t decide to actually pay me to write about TV.)

In July 1986, I, like many Jewish teenagers in the suburban New Jersey and Westchester County — including, I found out 20 years later, a current friend of mine — took a series of “teen tour” trips, conducted by a company called Barron Tours. During those tours, I remember going to see Top Gun, listening to Billy Joel’s new hit “Modern Woman,” visiting the Ontario Science Museum in Toronto, getting wet on the Maid o’ the Mist, and for some reason getting excited about going to see Starship and The Outfield in concert. I was fifteen, and the thing I was most worried about was if my Nikes and Lee jeans were going to make me look poor compared with the tour members, who were all wearing Benetton shirts and Reebok shoes.

At the same time, somewhere in New York City, Lindsay Lohan was being born.

Jeez alou, I’m getting old.

For some reason, I keep thinking Ms. Lohan (who now, for some reason, is insisting that people pronounce her last name “LO-en” instead of “LO-han”) is older than she is. I wonder why? Is it because she’s been doing movies since she was ten? Or that she’s had more drunken, slutty fun in her formative years than two Tara Reids? It just seems like she’s been on our pop culture radar for a long, long time. It’s hard for me to believe that she’s still two months away from being able to drink legally, and she’s still four years away from being able to rent a car.

When I saw her on Conan last night, I was wondering what she’ll be like when she’s 30. Either she’s going to turn out fine, like Drew Barrymore did, or she’s going to look and sound like she’s about fifty, like the aforementioned Ms. Reid? I guess we’ll all find out together, won’t we?

One of my favorite things to do as a writer is to speak to people whose work I admire and enjoy. But then, it’s usually followed by one of my least favorite things to do: transcribing the recording I made of the interview.

I don’t like taking notes during an interview so I can concentrate on having a free-flowing conversation, but I pay for that later by having to take hours out of my day to type it all in, making sure I don’t misquote the person I was talking to. It’s friggin’ torture; I go so slowly sometimes that 45-minute interviews can take about 4-5 hours to transcribe.

Luckily, I’ve found a very nice woman who transcribes most of my stuff for me at a reasonable rates. But I had to get the following interview out at a certain time, so I transcribed it myself yesterday afternoon. Luckily a Yankee game was on (they lost 14-2) or the whole process would have driven me nuts.

Anyway, the interview was with Carter Bays, co-creator of one of my favorite current shows, How I Met Your Mother. I talked to him about the second season of the show, including MAJOR SPOILERS about the show’s finale, which airs on Monday (don’t worry, I mark the spoilery areas throughout the interview so fans can skip them). It went live on TV Squad about an hour ago. Enjoy it!

For a number of reasons, I didn’t get to as many movies at the Tribeca Film Festival as I wanted to. For instance, I couldn’t get in to see either The King of Kong, a documentary about a man who sets out to set the world record high score on Donkey Kong, or Autism: The Musical, a doc about a group of autistic students trying to put on a school musical. Oh, well. I guess I can always find them on DVD in a few months.

Anyway, here are my final two Huffington Post dispatches from Tribeca:

Here are some blurry cell phone pictures I took at the ASCAP Music Lounge, a fun TFF event for industry people attending the festival. In the photos, singer Ben Lee closed out his show by leading a sing-along from atop the bar at the Canal Room.

Finally, here’s a review of the movie The Killing of John Lennon.

Click here for HuffPost’s Tribeca coverage.

Here are two HuffPost reviews I wrote about movies I saw at the Tribeca Film Festival:

Review of Lovesickness, a Puerto Rican movie about three painful but funny love triangles (the most recognizable star in the movie is Luis Guzman).

Review of Chasing 3000, a sweet family film that chronicles two brothers’ road trip from LA to Pittsburgh so they can witness Roberto Clemente’s 3000th hit in person. Ray Liotta and Lauren Holly, among others, are in this one.

More reviews to come later in the week…