By Jeff Smith, on Sat Feb 15, 2014 at 4:31 PM ET (Check out Jonathan Miller’s “Why I Hated the Episode 1 of House of Cards.”)
I’m only one episode into Season 2 of House of Cards – unlike Jonathan, whose daughters are nearly grown, I don’t have any six hour chunks of time these days.
Also unlike Jonathan, I didn’t hate the first episode. Maybe I’ll change my mind after more episodes, but I quite enjoyed Episode 1. Sure, the Frank-Zoe (Kevin Spacey-Kata Mara) storyline infused Season 1 with some sexy tension – not to mention a scene that will forever haunt every father with an adult daughter who calls to wish him a Happy Father’s Day. But Mara is not irreplaceable on the show; I fully expect the emergence of another character who bring an erotic charge to the show. And frankly, I didn’t find Mara’s frequent coital disinterest – be it with Spacey or boyfriend Sebastian Arcelus (playing journalist Lucas Goodwin) – to be particularly sexy.
 Jonathan’s other critique – that Frank’s murder of Zoe was gratuitous and unbelievable – strikes me as more legitimate. But still, it’s understandable. As someone who compounded a ticky-tack crime (approving a meeting between two former campaign aides and a consultant who planned to send out a postcard about one of my opponents) with a much more serious one (lying to the feds about whether I was aware of said meeting), I totally get how things can escalate as one’s grip on power is threatened, whether by a federal investigation or a sharp, ambitious young journalist whose knowledge of your MO has become more intimate than you originally planned.
Did Frank set out to be a murderer? Of course not. At first he just wanted to put Peter Russo in a position of power where he could leverage him for his own use. However, when Russo became a serious threat to Frank’s ambition, he had to be dealt with. Perhaps not so brutally, but once it became clear that Russo had no interest in playing ball, Frank needed a solution. Was the murder of Zoe – in a crowded subway station –riskier than Russo’s murder? Undoubtedly. But once you get away with something once, it becomes much easier to believe you can get away with it again. (That said, Frank really should’ve worn gloves.)
Aside from the Mara debate, Episode 1’s final scene left me confident that showrunner Beau Willimon’s writing chops are intact. “Every kitten grows up to be a cat,” intones Frank, after greeting the viewer for one of the show’s trademark soliloquys.
They seem so harmless at first – small, quiet, lapping up their saucer of milk. But once their claws get long enough, they draw blood….sometimes from the hand that feeds them. For those of us climbing to the top of the food chain, there can be no mercy. There is but one rule: hunt, or be hunted.
And he is right. For most real-life politicians, this mercilessness takes a different form – cutting off a preacher who has made incendiary comments, or a prison-bound friend and colleague – but hey, this is television, and so to some degree we suspend reality. But the thought processes that cause Frank to desperately cling to power by any means necessary are as real as they get. Trust me.
By John Y. Brown III, on Fri Feb 14, 2014 at 12:00 PM ET
 Into week 5 of diet/fitness regime and down 13 lbs and 2″ in waist.
Without even holding in my stomach.
Very much.
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So what do you do when you are on a diet (and really committed to it) and are craving your favorite sandwich at Steak & Shake, a Frisco Melt, just as you are approaching a Steak & Shake restaurant?
And look up the calorie count and find out it has 1173 calories?
You suck it up. Feel the pain. And keep on driving.
And realize a piece of you just died.
By John Y. Brown III, on Thu Feb 13, 2014 at 12:00 PM ET I fully support YUM and think they are a great company and corporate citizen. But the other night I was parked across from a KFC restaurant and for several moments couldn’t stop staring at the logo rendering of Colonel Sanders.
It just wasn’t the way I remember the Colonel looking. I’m no Colonel Sanders expert and only met him a handful of times…But something about this logo image bothered me. This man pictured in the logo looked pleasant, harmless, bland, and a little metrosexual. Frankly, he looks more like a Walmart greeter (no offense to Walmart greeters) than one of the century’s great restauranteurs and entrepreneurs.
 And the Colonel often mumbled to himself while deep in thought about his exacting standards about whatever he was doing…..and never would have said something like “Today tastes so good.”
Colonel Sanders, as I recall him, was kind-hearted and generous but could be gruff at times, too. He always seemed like a proud and determined man, He was in many ways an artist. A perfectionist who demanded from others what he gave.
And he seemed to enjoy life. Seemed to suck out the marrow, in his own way, as Thoreau wrote.
 When it was time for me to leave the parking lot the other night, I pulled away slowly and stared again at the image of the Colonel on the KFC logo.
And decided if the new made-up image of the Colonel could meet the real Colonel, there’s a good chance the real Colonel may have taken a swing at him –and told him to get that silly grin off his face and for he and his apron to back in the kitchen. And probably given up on him ever looking as dignified as the man who came up with the 11 secret herbs and spices and left his unmistakable imprint–including his unique and distinctive appearance — on the world.
By John Y. Brown III, on Wed Feb 12, 2014 at 12:00 PM ET
At age 50 I am able, by and large, to order meals and shop like a “big boy” without always forgetting to add two or three additional items.
In fact, I always finish my orders with “And that will do it. Thank you.” to discourage any attempts to upsell me. But it never works. My full, well-considered and complete decision– made by a grown man–is ignored and always challenged as not well thought out and missing at least a side order of fries or the days special or a stick of chapstick at the checkout counter or an extra warranty in case what I am buying doesn’t work.
To combat this assault on my judgment, I am going to start ordering or bringing to the check out counter two or three extra items. After my order has been taken or charges rung up, and just at the moment I am about to be upsold, I am going to say, “You know, after some reflection, I don’t think I need the extra calories in those fries, please take that off my order.” Then after pausing add, “Tell you what, I really shouldn’t get that apple turnover either. It is unhealthy and they usually are cold anyway.” And keep going until the poor person at the register gives up on me for an upsell.
Same at retail stores. I will bring an extra two or three items to check out and then “down sell” myself. “You know, I won’t ever use these socks, let’s take that off my purchase, please.” And “Let me pass on the sun glasses, too. I don’t know what I was thinking. I guess like most adults I just can’t competently shop for myself” –and then laugh self-deprecatingly while looking confused and helpless.
I want to adopt this practice until I am even for all the attempts to upsell me. Which will take me about 15 years. Actually, only about 13 years. Well, I am going to say just 10 years. Let’s actually just make it just 8 years.
And, no, I don’t need an 8 year warranty with that decision.
Get the idea?
By John Y. Brown III, on Tue Feb 11, 2014 at 12:00 PM ET Find yourself in a hole? Then keep digging. Or flossing.
That is often my philosophy and never serves me well…but I keep doing it anyway.
Today I was trying to floss after lunch with a new dental floss, Oral-B. I didn’t floss for the last 35 years even though I would tell my dentist I was flossing “some” every time he would ask “Have you been flossing, John?” —but now I am flossing.
But this new Oral-B floss broke off between two of my teeth–and part of the floss actually got stuck between my two teeth. And then kept breaking every time I tried to “floss out the floss” that was now stuck between my teeth.
My first brilliant idea was to double-over the floss to fortify it. That seemed like it might work but after much careful and strenuous effort, the “doubled-over” floss broke, too, leaving yet a larger piece of dental floss now stuck between the same two teeth.
But I hadn’t finished digging yet.
Before I took up flossing with real dental floss, I found packets of sugar (or packets of a sugar substitute) worked well as a flossing mechanism. So I picked up a packet of Splenda nearby to try to wedge out the two pieces of dental floss now stuck between my teeth.
And now have two pieces of dental floss and a corner of a packet of Splenda stuck between my teeth.
I think I will fish out the piece of a Splenda packet and leave the floss for when I go to the dentist next time –and just wait patiently for him to ask me the inevitable “Have you been flossing, John?”
I’ll be ready! And won’t have to say a word.
By John Y. Brown III, on Mon Feb 10, 2014 at 12:00 PM ET
By John Y. Brown III, on Sat Feb 8, 2014 at 7:34 PM ET As a young boy my list of grown-ups I idolized included a long list of what you’d expect with any typical boy—athletes, political figures, a few movie stars (the character more than the actor, of course).
But when I was about 12 years old I was in a hotel room with a friend watching a movie that we were able to get through the hotel. It was Love and Death by Woody Allen. It played in the background while I played with my friend. But I kept trying to watch it. The humor was quirky and absurd. And when there was the scene of the view of a battlefield from the perspective of the generals (which was a pack of stampeding sheep instead of men fighting for their lives on the battlefield), I started laughing uncontrollably. I guess I thought it was brilliant and silly at the same time but it hit my funny bone from an angle and with a velocity I had never experienced before –and I stopped my playing with my friend altogether to watch this unusual and hilarious movie. And watched again a second and a third time before I stopped ordering it for fear my parents would get angry when they saw the bill.
A few years later I asked my mom to drive me to see the movie Manhattan. I heard Woody Allen had written it and starred in it. The same guy who wrote and starred in that hilarious movie I saw at the hotel when I was 12.
I didn’t like Manhattan as much as Love and Death, but left the theater a bona fide Woody Allen fan.
In high school, there were no VCR’s yet, but Louisville did have The Vogue and The Uptown art theaters which often played older and less commercially popular films, and I got to see many of the older Allen movies—Bananas, Take the Money and Run, and of course, Annie Hall, which I adored.
I wouldn’t let other kids in high school know about my Woody Allen fetish but I felt like he “got me.” Or at least, “I got him.” I was a smallish and philosophical kid that didn’t fit into any of the traditional groups or cliques in high school. Woody Allen’s humor provided a refuge for me. A sanctuary where I didn’t feel like as much of an oddity—and the pressure to be like everyone else would temporarily evaporate as long as the movie played, and I could even feel a surge of pride for being a humorous oddball who saw the world through a neurotic lens. Woody Allen helped me feel I wasn’t alone…and wasn’t defective or inferior.
As a college student living in Los Angeles for a year and a half and majoring in philosophy at USC — and still a smallish and slightly neurotic guy— I purchased a VCR and depended even more on Woody Allen’s worldview. I watched all of his movies at least several times. Some probably 10 or 12 times. They continued to provide me comfort in a world that wasn’t receptive to self-questioning, nervous, guys like me.
I also read his books: Without Feathers and Side Effects and Getting Even. And actually read each all the way through. Something I rarely did with any book even though I was a college student at the time. And I didn’t even get college credit for reading Allen’s books! And I bought a rare cassette of his early stand-up routines. Which I also found uproariously funny as well as finding a kinship with the humor. It wasn’t just comic relief any more but absorbing chunks of Woody Allen’s philosophy at life by this juncture of my fanhood.
I saw Woody Allen once at about this time in my life. My stepmother, Phyllis, was working for CBS news and living in New York. I visited her one weekend and we went to Elaine’s restaurant. Phyllis kept trying to introduce me at our noisy table to Pat O’Brien who was a sports colleague at CBS. But I couldn’t take my eyes of the two gentlemen seated quietly in the corner talking thoughtfully between themselves, Woody Allen and Dick Cavett.
Again, I was too self-conscious to mention—especially to a sports loving crowd at our table—I wanted nothing more than to meet Woody Allen. Inside I felt like one of those screaming teenage girls you see as the Beatles get off the plane for their first trip to the US. But outside I tried to pretend I was listening to a funny sports story I couldn’t care less about and laugh along with everyone else.
That same weekend in NY after everyone in my family was asleep I played a Woody Allen movie I had rented. My father woke up and got some ice cream and sat down with me and asked what I was watching. I told him and hoped he’d watch a few minutes and find the scene we were watching as hilarious as I did. He chuckled awkwardly as he had before when I tried a Woody Allen joke on him. I asked him why he didn’t like him more. He said, “Woody Allen reminds me of eating cauliflower. It just didn’t look very good and I never bothered trying it.”
In his defense, my father was never a very self-conscious person who would appreciate Allen’s humor and we just had very different taste in film. The night before I took my father to see the movie “The Gods Must be Crazy.” But we left after about 25 minutes when my father said it was too slow and he couldn’t figure out what it was about.
By the time I reached my 20s, I started coming into my own as a person and began to feel it was safer to acknowledge my Woody Allen infatuation. I read a piece—maybe in the New Yorker—about a young woman who secretly wanted to be Woody Allen, only a female version, who snarkily and with wry and sophisticated humor poked fun at others around her for being shallow. It was safe to come out of the Woody Allen closet.
Until recently.
When Allen was awarded the Cecile B Demille award for lifetime achievement at the Golden Globe awards last month. Of course, as always, he didn’t attend to receive his award. I felt like I had been vindicated in my adoration of Woody Allen’s work. But moments later I read about a series of Tweets from Mia Farrow and Ronan Farrow bringing up old accusations about child molestation charges about Woody molesting Farrow and his adopted daughter, Dylan, when she was 7 years old.
Initially, I am disappointed to report, I thought, “Oh, please. Enough already. Let the man receive this well-deserved award for his art without going there…..”
The next few days and weeks became a full-blown rehash of a shocking episode in Allen’s career that had stayed publicly buried for nearly 20 years where he and Farrow broke up after Woody fell in love with their then adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn and later married her. It was an ugly public battle and shook my worship of Allen to its core at the time. But I somehow mustered the denial and distinction between one’s art and personal life give him the benefit of the doubt to eventually continue my admiration for Woody Allen, although it would never quite be the same as before.
But this time –over the past few days—sifting through the sordid accusations and factual details again as an older and wiser man, I can’t deny that something outrageous and wholly inappropriate happened between Woody Allen and his young adopted daughter over 20 years ago.
I acknowledge that fact and am saddened to learn that you are never too old to become disillusioned with those you place on a pedestal. Or even find part of their life—which is inextricably part of who they are—despicable. And that is true even if you are a 50 year old fan and moved on from hero worship many years ago. But it still stings…and still hurts, too.
So, no, I won’t defend Woody Allen art or try to distinguish it from his personal life. But please don’t expect me –just yet anyway– to line up behind his ex-wife and adopted daughter and pile on Allen either. I would like to say that I won’t be doing that because it is a personal matter and should be handled in private. But the real reason is there is still a part of denial in me that my childhood hero was capable of doing such inexplicable things. And since I am only a fan—and not a direct player in this drama—in my defense and in defense of all similarly situated Woody Allen fans, I ask that you understand it is not the grieving of the public death of a man’s reputation that makes us unable to be objective right now. It is the grieving of the private death of part of ourselves.
By John Y. Brown III, on Fri Feb 7, 2014 at 12:00 PM ET
Mind tricks to help me regain my perspective.
I always worry on Sunday nights about the work week ahead.
The worry and anxiety of things to do and things undone start seeping in until they start to trickle and then flow to the point of being almost overwhelming.
When I get to that point, I play a little mind game with myself. I like to ask myself What if several abductors burst into my home right at this very moment and stormed into my office and kidnapped me and took me to some dark basement in the middle of nowhere where I couldn’t have access to wifi, what would happen in the larger scheme of things? In other words, if I couldn’t text any business associates, return emails to any clients or do any scheduled conference calls all week next week, what would happen?
And then I remind myself that probably the only noteworthy thing that would happen is that by this Friday my captors would be so sick of my constant jokes and rambling stories and irritating personal questions and odd ideas about life and requests for coffee with real half & half and Splenda at all hours and my endless proposed “deals” to bargain my way out of my captive state, that my captors would agree that it wasn’t worth kidnapping me and they would decide to return me to my home unharmed.
And I’d only miss out on one week of work.
And just running through that mental scenario helps relax me and get my perspective back by reminding me that –worst case scenario–I’ll still get everything done and be no more than a week late delivering it.
By Jeff Smith, on Thu Feb 6, 2014 at 2:53 PM ET Jeff Smith @JeffSmithMO Feb 2
Think Wildstein a distraction now. If he had the goods he’d be giving em up below radar. The ones feeling real heat likely Baroni/Samson.
Jeff Smith @JeffSmithMO Feb 2
Immunity grant Wildstein seeking pie in sky. 5K.1.1 letter in which feds request lenient sentence aftr substantial cooperation more frequent
Jeff Smith @JeffSmithMO Feb 2
The impt thing about Wildstein letter isn’t anything in it. It’s degree to which it may motivate others to flip while they still have value.
Jeff Smith @JeffSmithMO Feb 2
Once the feds have the dude you were gonna rat out, you’re useless – and your cooperation agreement evaporates. Thus the potential rush here
Jeff Smith @JeffSmithMO Feb 2
Federal targets are like poker players: the weak hands act strong, while the strong hands stay quiet. So Wildstein may be in real trouble here
Jeff Smith @JeffSmithMO Feb 2
Interesting to see Wildstein beg for attn. Feds have likely moved on to others with more/better cards to play on non-Ft Lee issues.
Jeff Smith @JeffSmithMO Feb 2
Big Christie problem now: tenuousness of power position renders notion that he’ll “take care” of allies who eat it increasingly implausible.
Jeff Smith @JeffSmithMO Feb 2
Smart- Legal survival trumps politics MT @lis_Smith “Christie has not taken q’s at a news conference for 21 days.” http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/01/31/nyregion/for-christie-a-governor-under-fire-super-bowl-brings-glee.html?from=nyregion … …
Jeff Smith @JeffSmithMO Feb 2
Bridgegate fed crimes a stretch. No breach of honest services statute post-Conrad Black. W/ WH hopes fading,obstruction for pol reasons nuts
Jeff Smith @JeffSmithMO Feb 3
Silly how pundits write, “just as things were calming down for Christie…” Things were heating up, not calming; most US Attys aren’t sieves
Jeff Smith @JeffSmithMO Feb 3
Pundit silliness #2: suggesting Wildstein’s letter indicates “heating up”. Media confuses letter aimed at them for actual event of import.
Jeff Smith @JeffSmithMO Feb 3
We knew from Day 1 Wildstein itching to sing; his letter impt only insofar as it might goad waverers to sing before their info made redundnt
Jeff Smith @JeffSmithMO Feb 3
A snitch can give the Feds every morsel he’s got, but if they already have it or if it’s not on the guy they want, he’ll get zilch for it.
By John Y. Brown III, on Thu Feb 6, 2014 at 12:00 PM ET
You know when you are at a social gatherings and talking to someone you just met and you feel you’ve got nothing else to say and sense they feel the same way?
Wouldn’t it be great if one of you could just say,
“Well. I don’t have anything else to say to you and am going to stop talking to you now and go talk to someone else.” And just leave.
I think that would be pretty cool. And appreciate hearing the clear-cut termination of our conversation.
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