The reality is that James Gandolfini was a powerful character actor who brought emotion and gravitas not just to roles but to entire movies that could otherwise be dismissed as one-note films. I don’t need to go over them, that’s what IMDB is for, but what deserves some appreciation is his stage presence.

I had the great privilege of seeing him on Broadway in GOD OF CARNAGE with Jeff Daniels, Marcia Gay Harden and Hope Davis. To this day, that production is the best play I have ever seen and Gandolfini, in his restrained, disdainful rage, is the best performance I have ever seen on the stage. It was one of those performances that arrests you because he blurred the line between fiction and reality.I know that guy. That’s me. That’s my father. That’s my boss. You get the idea.

I think what was most unique about Gandollfini was, as a big man, he understood the power he could bring to a role and, conversely, he knew what he could do with a role if he deliberately restrained that power. You saw it in “True Romance”, “The Mexican” and “The Loop.” You couldn’t take your eyes off him and you knew, if you paid attention, that he was a big clue to where the story was going to go.

All of that is entertainment industry jargon, if I’m being honest, but where it intersects with what matters is in the realm of storytelling. You can’t tell a good story without a man like James Gandolfini. You can write words and craft scenes that are supposed to bring power and meaning to the screen, but without a guy like Gandolfini to bring emotion to the words and actions, they are nothing. They are words on a page.

James Gandolfini turned words on the page into meaning in our lives. There is nothing more you can ask from an actor. He will be sorely missed.

The Post-Apollo Creed Death Drive Down Memory Lane Flashback Montage

The Pre-Fight Training Montage & Match-Cutting Extravaganza

Violets are blue,

Just like your balls will be

If you come home with a bouquet of that cheap shit. Are roses really too much to ask? I raise your kids, I wash your vomitous underwear, I let you have sex with me. You do whatever you want, whenever you want. When is it my turn, huh!?? When is it my goddamn turn?!!? Oh, you brought me a giant box of chocolates too? Well fuck you very much. What are you trying to do, make my skin break out? Are you trying to give me diabetes? You wanna kill me and cash in my life insurance policy so you can drop the kids off with my parents and blow all my money on hookers and massages in Thailand. Or do you just want me to get fat again? You know we have a wedding in two months. You KNOW I have to fit into that tacky piece of shit satin bridesmaid dress. Do you know how bad fat rolls look in satin? DO YOU, YOU FAT PIECE OF SHIT!??? Of course you don’t because you’re gonna be spending the whole time staring at my little sister. Like she’d ever fuck you, you pathetic two-pump dickless shit bird. What was that? NO I DON’T WANT ONE OF YOUR WEAK-HANDED SOFT-KNUCKLED FOOT MASSAGES. Go sleep on the couch.

1) What do we call you now?

In the United States, we still call leaders by their highest achieved title, no matter how long it’s been since they served in that capacity. Clinton is still President Clinton despite finishing his second term in January 2001. Mitt Romney is still Governor Romney even though he hasn’t been in the Massachusetts state house in 6 years. We’re still ordering General Tso’s chicken to this day, and he died in like 1885.

So what do we call Pope Benedict XVI once he steps down? If I see him out in an informal setting, like at a sports bar catching a Bayern Munchen match or at a Chick Fil A copping some nuggets and diet lemonade, do I ask Pope Benedict how they hangin’? Or just Benedict? Can I finally compliment him on his delicious egg dish? Hollandaise and poached eggs is a divinely inspired combination.

At formal events, do we address him as Your Holiness? I feel like Your Holyishness might be more appropriate now. Speaking of which, the Pope has a direct line to God, right? So does Benedict have to give the new pope that number, or does God cancel it and get a new one that he gives to the new pope directly? If it’s the latter, I hope God has T-mobile, otherwise he’s getting fucked on those early termination fees.

2) Are you just another average Joe now?

Does the Pope get to keep the Benedict name or does he have to go back to being called Joe? I mean, there’s nothing wrong with the name Josef, but he chose to be called Benedict. It wasn’t chosen for him. That kind of volition should be respected, even if XV others in his position chose the same name before him. He should be able to keep it and decide when and where he is called which. Open bar — Joe. Sports bar — Josef. Titty bar — Benedict XVI.

In the words of Marlo Stanfield:

3) Do you get to keep the funny hat?

The Papal mitre is possibly the most famous hat in the history of headwear. Despite the fact that it looks like a folded napkin at a Rotary Club luncheon, there is no single royal crown or ceremonial headpiece whose image is more enduring. Maybe Christ’s crown of thorns, but I’d hardly call that a ceremony and who would wanna wear that shit anyway? Thorns are itchy.

Assuming the Vatican seamstresses make a new hat for each Pope and the one Benedict XVI currently wears isn’t full of old Pope sweat or something, I would totally want to keep it if I were him. Anyone can pass themselves off as a big deal if they buy a big ass bible or get some flowing white robes made (just ask the crazy preacher freaks on college campuses), but there’s no competing with the big pointy hat. It’s the ultimate trump card.

There’s a comic who does this bit about going to a cocktail party with an astronaut (I can’t seem to find it online) and the astronaut always being able to one-up your story no matter what it is. “Oh you survived cancer and completed a triathalon and then took your wife to Paris on the Concorde for a month for your anniversary? That’s so nice. I WENT TO SPACE.”

The Pope hat is like that. Of course, you have to deploy it judiciously. For instance, you don’t wear it to 7-11 to pick up some taquitos and Gatorade. That’s just gauche. But when the DirecTV guy finally shows up to install your satellite dish, maybe you put it on top of the TV as like a “hey buddy, why don’t you hook me up with all the channels for free this time” kind of nudge nudge wink wink.

I know that sounds baldly self-serving, but if dedicating your entire adult life to the service of God doesn’t also come with some mementos and ALL the Starz channels, then really what was the fucking point of it all?

4) Do you have to move?

Vatican City has diplomatic immunity, it’s smack in the middle of a gorgeous city, it has pretty buildings, a giant library and museum, and a phalanx of armed guards in funny looking tights. Minus the immunity, it’d be just like living at the Bellagio. Who in their right mind would want to leave that if they didn’t have to?

So if Benedict XVI gets to stay, does he get his own place? Maybe a little cottage like Mr. Bates and Anna in Season 3 of Downton Abbey. Or maybe a mother/daughter place with the new Pope, like practically every Italian-Catholic house in suburban New Jersey. That would be awesome, actually. It’s a ready-made buddy sitcom. I’d call it “Nope to the Pope”. It would be a stuffy, crotchety ex-Pope who lives upstairs from the new, young Pope who comes from the wrong side of the tracks. They would get on each others nerves, challenge each others divine authority, but ultimately learn an important lesson at the end of each episode.The ex-Pope would be played by Malcolm McDowell. The new Pope would be played by John Leguizamo. The butler would be a gay black man because, of course he would. Cue, HIJINKS!

If Benedict had to move though, where would he go? Back to Germany? That’s no fun, even if they are the only major European economy not teetering on the brink of collapse. He should go somewhere new, like India or Monte Carlo or the Caymans. Some place interesting where he can gamble and hide money and exploit class differences for personal gain. It’s better than living out the rest of your days surrounded by a bunch of Italians, I’ll tell you that much.

5) What are you gonna do next?

Joe Flacco went to Disney World after he won Super Bowl XLVII. What will Josef Ratzinger do after he finishes Pope Benedict XVI? First thing he will do, I imagine, is try not to die. He’s no Frank Lautenberg, mind you, but homeboy’s old as hell. It’s only a matter of time really. Still, the soon-to-be ex-Pope should take some time to figure out what he loves to do and what he’s really good at, then dedicate his remaining years to those pursuits. Isn’t that what we all wrestle with when we encounter life-changing events and think about our future? He’s just a man, like the rest of us, so I’m sure his struggles are no different.

Personally, I think he should either go into the human sex trafficking auction business (like at the end of TAKEN on that boat with the fat Arab sheik) or become a magician who specializes in card tricks. What better professions to take advantage of Josef Ratzinger’s proficiency at gambling with innocent young people’s lives and shuffling around pedophile priests until they disappear in plain sight.

What, you really thought I’d write 1200 words about Pope Benedict XVI (nee Cardinal Josef Ratzinger) without getting to the Great 20th Century Diddler Cover-Up? It’s like you don’t even know me.

Manhattan is such an interesting place. Crammed with buildings and littered with people, the island moves like a sailboat anchored in a cross current. Up and down on the avenues, side to side with the streets. It’s constantly moving yet it goes nowhere. It stays right where it’s always been, and is exactly what it’s always represented.

Manhattan’s people take immense personal pride in these seemingly contradictory ideas of indefatigable vivaciousness and stolid permanence. They see all the potential, all the opportunity, and the truly ambitious want nothing more than to leave their mark on Manhattan. Jim was here. Janet did that. Invariably, of course, it is Manhattan that leaves its mark on them. When they finally leave Manhattan–and they all almost certainly do, eventually–the path their lives have taken is signposted by their time on the island. Jim’s dad didn’t have his heart attack in 1989. He had it when Jim was living in the West Village, in that one-bedroom apartment above the cafe that kept changing its name. Janet didn’t have a baby in 1994. She was 28-weeks pregnant during that awful July and her place didn’t A/C and she was trying to get her tea shop off the ground but who in their right minds wants to drink hot tea during a heatwave! Manhattan becomes the subject of their anecdotes, replacing the events.

The great irony of all this is just how much Manhattan’s people take her for granted. This is an oft-cited behavioral quirk and one that is not novel in any way, but no one in Manhattan looks up. The city is one of the few places in the world where the skyline is as impressive from within as it is from the outside. New architecture mingles with old, quiet spaces tuck into busy places, green spaces pop up out of the asphalt. There’s no end to the examples of Manhattan urban beauty. And still, its people have their heads down in their phones, on a swivel in search (or fear) of oncoming taxis, or locked and fixed on the next goal in front of them. Gonna make their mark today!

That’s what makes what I saw this morning so neat. On 37th and Park Ave, traffic was stopped. Cars, bikes, pedestrians. Avenue-side traffic had the green light and they were stopped too. As I came up to the intersection from the uptown direction, I looked around to see what the hold-up was. There, almost all the way across the four lanes of Park Ave traffic, was a line of 5-yr old boys and girls neatly bundled up, backpacks cinched snugly,  holding onto a rope being kept taught by the teachers at either end who were shepherding their little students on a little field trip.

It was one of the cutest things I’d ever seen. Like puppies playing with ducklings stuck in a fireman’s boot kind of cute. Everyone within sight of it had stopped to recognize the moment. Not just to let the little kids pass, but to watch and appreciate and remember.

That’s when I understood why nobody looks up in Manhattan. The buildings never change. Sure, they’re beautiful and majestic, but they’re always gonna be there (9/11 excepted, obviously). That’s the permanent Manhattan, the one everyone wants to leave their mark on. These little kids trundling along to a museum or bookstore or a playground, completely unaware of the magnitude and scope of everything surrounding them, that is the living breathing Manhattan. The one that leaves it’s mark on you.

I just wish I had gotten there a minute earlier, so I could have taken a picture of it with my phone. Like everyone else was.

I received a letter in the mail a few months ago from the Louisiana Department of Revenue claiming that I failed to pay sufficient taxes on income I earned while shooting I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell back in the summer of 2008. I was shocked both at the letter’s tardiness (it’s been TWO YEARS) and, after reviewing the Louisiana tax code, it’s factual correctness. I immediately sent in a check for the past due amount and it cleared about a month later.

Well, yesterday I got another letter in the mail from the Louisiana Department of Revenue. This time threatening dire consequences if I did not remit payment immediately. Fearing they might throw the book at me and levy some heinous, draconian punishment like forcing me to live there, I called the customer service number on the letterhead this morning.

It was busy. I called again. Busy again. I called twenty minutes later. Still busy. Busy??? What kind of public agency only has a single phone line?!? It’s not like I was trying to call the Office of the Registrar for Left-Handed Pedophiles. I was calling the Department of Revenue!

The Department of Revenue is, I would gather, one of the state’s more important public agencies. Sure, Louisiana regularly ranks amongst the country’s poorest states, but that can’t possibly mean they are so poor that they can afford only a single phone line?! Can it?

I’d call the Louisiana Office of Public Relations to find out, but it’s lunchtime there right now and they’re probably all at a casino chain-smoking over a buffet plate.

I guess technically I’ve met another neighbor, if telephone calls count. He left a note on my windshield about the insensitivity with which I park my GMC Yukon on our crowded narrow cul de sac. He signed the note with his initials and a phone number with no area code. What do you call that? Aggressively passive aggressive? I tracked him down through Google and Facebook. He didn’t pick up the first time I dialed. I hung up and immediately called again. This time he picked up. I told him who I was and, in typical Hollywood fashion, he started apologizing and equivocating and rationalizing. He explained his reasons for putting the note on my car, none of which considered the possibility that maybe I park my car as tightly and politely as possible and that it is the circumstances that have changed between the time I parked my car and the time he actually laid eyes on it.

It took me awhile to figure out which one of my neighbors he was until one morning I recognized his voice while I was walking my dog and he was walking his kids to school. He was the guy from the second floor apartment in the building on the corner. Through observation and a couple brief conversations with my swinging, middle-aged neighbors, I have come to discover that Damian–that’s what the ‘D’ stood for at the bottom of his note–is a freelance woodworker who lives out of a 1-bedroom apartment with no air conditioning and works out of a 4-door Honda station wagon with no hubcaps. He is a single father with partial custody of two seemingly adorable little kids for whom he makes room in his station wagon by moving turpentine and varnish cans from the front seats to the trunk, because of course those things never explode from prolonged exposure to heat when they are properly stowed. It should be no surprise that he smokes like a chimney whether he’s in the house, on the street, or in his fume-choked automobile.

But perhaps worst of all, he is the guy who likes to sit out on his stoop during primetime and practice his rhythm guitar. Not lead guitar or bass guitar where you might get some melody or some phat, walking bass licks. Nope, he likes to strum out a bunch of chords and repetitive atonal harmonies, right in the middle of House.

Normally I am all for having interesting neighbors with quirky habits. It makes for more entertaining living. But normally I like to watch my shows in peace, and Guitar Zero has made that a daily impossibility. Lucky for him, the primetime television season is over. I was mere days away from marching down the hill, snatching his guitar from him, soaking it in turpentine, and using it as a torch to light his car on fire.

Harsh? Probably. Justified? Definitely.

The substance of Current Life Issues, as best I remember, broke down something like this:

Week 1: Alcohol

Week 2: Drugs

Week 3: Sex

Week 4-15: CONSEQUENCES

The CONSEQUENCES phase had two parts. The first was a fear-mongering recitation of the ways in which any combination of the topics from Weeks 1-3 could ruin your life. Alcohol and Drugs? Death by DUI. Drugs and Sex? Death by AIDS. Alcohol and Sex? Rape. Alcohol and Drugs and Sex? Death by Rape. If you were one of the lucky few to dabble in one or the other and escape your dance with death, you graduated to the second part and had a baby.

The last half of the semester was consumed by babies. Five pound babies. Made of flour. You were put into pairs with a member of the opposite sex, given a 5lb bag of flour, assigned a gender for your baby, and told that you had to “dress” and name him or her in a fashion appropriate to their gender. One or both of you were required to have your flour baby with you AT ALL TIMES.

Like any group project at any middle school, the burden each person in the group carried was inversely proportional to their popularity. Couples whose individual popularity sat at relative equilibrium shared the responsibility equally. Or neglected it equally. For pairs in significant popularity imbalance, one person did the majority of the work. Being Oakland in the late 80s/early 90s, this meant lots of Chinese flour babies named after New Kids on the Block and members of various Bay Area sports teams.

My baby mama and I were in the same general popularity strata, so we put in roughly the same amount of minimal effort to get a good grade. The only aspect of the project we spent a lot of time on was naming our baby girl. My partner wanted to name our baby ‘Kelly’ because she LOVED that new show Beverly Hills 90210 and her last name was Taylor. I strenuously objected on two grounds: 1) I’ll be goddamned if any child of mine gets named after some girly soap-drama, and 2) I’ll be goddamned if any child of mine doesn’t have my last name. I told her to pick another name. She chose Brenda. I told her to stop being a retard and she told me to pick a better name then! I chose Moonbeam.

Moonbeam!? Let me explain. Right around this time, I woke up to the world around me. World events, irony, politics, sarcasm. They came alive to me around the time I had to take this class. I’ve been called an “old soul” my whole life, so I want to ascribe this early awakening to that aspect of my personality. In reality, though, I think it had more to do with cable television and that Cher video on the deck of an aircraft carrier where she straddles a 105-mm gun in a fishnet body suit. It’s the only explanation I can come up with for why I was so amused by the fact that our fake baby was a “flour child.”

Get it, FLOUR child! Yeah, I know, gayer than a George Michael concert. But when you’re 12 and your adolescent brain has made that connection, there’s not a chance in hell you’re going to let go of it. Hence, Moonbeam.

My partner wanted no part of it. All her arguments were valid. It was “stupid.” We would get “made fun of.” No one would “get what the hell I was talking about.” So we compromised and, after much negotiation, became the proud fake-parents of little Moonfrye Parker Taylor. She got the surname, I got Moonfrye. It was totally worth it, too. Who doesn’t love Punky Brewster?

Of course no one ever learned anything from the Flour Baby assignment. Who in their right mind is going to internalize the lessons of alcohol-soaked unprotected sex when they come in the guise of a 5lb bag of baking goods? Babies have immediate needs. They emote. They respond to negative and positive energy. Unlike their “all-purpose” substitutes, babies do not thrive at the bottom of a backpack, or stuffed haphazardly into a locker. When you bring your baby home for the first time, you are supposed to bond with it, not resist the urge to toss it up in the air and hit it with an aluminum baseball bat.

It’s no wonder so many people–no matter how otherwise mature they seem in the rest of their lives–have children before “they are ready.” They’ve done nothing to prepare for it. I would have included myself in that group if I’d had a kid before yesterday, when my mother finally got home from the hospital.

TO BE CONTINUED…

That’s the goal of higher education, isn’t it? To expose young people with a thirst for knowledge and experience to people and places and things they would never ordinarily confront? We all want our lives to look something like this I think

and college is what’s supposed to propel us on that trajectory through our twenties until we achieve another level of wisdom in our thirties, upon having children before we are ready and getting married because there is nowhere else to take a relationship after 5 years once you’ve moved in together and bought a dog and a car together.

I was very much on that path until I settled into a well-paying paralegal job right out of college that required long hours and very little critical thinking. My first assignment was to put 75,000 printed out emails in chronological order and remove the duplicates. It took four months and a piece of my spirit. A year later, I was charged with assembling the Plaintiffs and Defendants trial exhibits from a previous case into binders for review. Each side had 2500 exhibits. By this time I’d earned enough leeway in my position to make certain executive decisions. It was up to me, and me alone, to determine which set would go in blue binders and which set would go in black binders. The Defendants exhibits would go in the black binders, I decided, because the Defendants were bad and black is the bad guy color. This project took two months to complete and culminated in a knockdown, drag out scream fest in my manager’s office during my review when she told me the main reason I wasn’t getting a full raise was because the exhibit binder project took longer than it should have. Shit like this went on for close to four years.

You’d think at some point I might start to question my intelligence, my competence. Start questioning the wisdom of my post-college decision making. You’d be wrong. I reverted back to my pre-college ways. I grew more intractable with subjective issues of good vs. bad, right vs. wrong, smart vs. dumb. Because I’d graduated in four years from a good school and I was smarter than most everyone I worked with, I didn’t just think I knew everything…I KNEW I knew everything. The fact that my intellect was stagnating and my intellectual curiosity had all but disappeared never dawned on me. Until I realized what the hell I was doing about a year and a half before I quit and went to law school, my trajectory looked like the S&P 500 after Black Monday.

That was five years ago. I’ve spent much of the intervening time on a personal intellectual reclamation project. Questioning assumptions. Trying things I’d once hated. Watching, listening, and reading things I’d previously refused to watch, hear, or read. I’ve been remarkably successful, I think. My head is screwed on pretty straight for a guy who still cannot shake the innate sense of awesomeness that roils around inside him. One of the only things that has not changed since those early days, however, is my absolute disgust with olives, pickles, and Brussels sprouts. Although, now that I think about it, even that’s not true.

At Thanksgiving a few months ago, I changed my mind about Brussels sprouts. For the longest time I’ve loathed the sight and the smell of those vial cabbage nuggets with their yellow mucus-colored centers and teenage mutant ninja turtle green shells. I’d see them on a restaurant menu and immediately pronounce that establishment the last place on earth at which I would choose to sit down to a meal. I’d hearken back to adolescence, my parents’ marriage unraveling around them, when one night my father decides to take a stand against the chaos and insists that my sister and I FINISH YOUR DAMN BRUSSELS SPROUTS WITH LEMON BUTTER SAUCE AND DON’T THINK ABOUT GETTING UP FROM THE TABLE UNTIL YOU DO!

The Brussels sprouts smelled like rotting human flesh. The lemon butter sauce smelled like anti-tetanus ointment I had to use years earlier when I pinched my little hand in a rusted folding beach chair I’d perched atop a stack of tires at Sears Point Raceway to get a better view of my uncle racing. The smell and the taste were so bad not even my dog would eat them when we cajoled him under the kitchen table and sneaked the turd pearls down to him. He was a yellow lab mix who would ordinarily eat anything besides grapes that you put in front of him. He sniffed the smegma-colored garden dingleberries only once and scurried out from under the table with his haunches down and his tail between his legs like we’d tricked him into a trip to the vet.

I had Brussels sprouts only one time after that–at a dinner party thrown by a girlfriend’s mother about ten years later. These were steamed, but not sauced, and their texture engaged my gag reflex with nearly every bite. Of the 7 or 8 generously spooned onto my plate, I managed to force down 1.25 of them. They were enough to ruin the rest of the dinner for me. It should be no shock that this dinner, at the nadir of my Black Monday arrogance and ignorance, was the beginning of the end for that relationship.

Fast forward to November 2007 and The (New) Girlfriend and I have decided to spend Thanksgiving in DC with her best friend from back home and her husband. They’ve become good friends of both of ours, so it took the sting out of being unable to go back to California for a home-cooked Thanksgiving. After the pleasantries, the “can I take your coats” and “what can I get you to drink”, I ask our hosts, “so what’s for dinner?” They run through the menu going from biggest to littlest until they land, with a thud, on Brussels sprouts. My face dropped noticeably. “Don’t worry,” they tell me, “you’ll like these. Even our little nephew who doesn’t eat anything green unless its candy likes these.” To say I was skeptical is to say only half of it.

Dinner rolls around two hours later and there they sit. A large rustic bowl filled with Mother Nature’s shit grenades. Fittingly, the bowl ends up right in front of me, staring me down, mocking my provincial refusal to consider them. Our friend watched me reject them. “Try it Nils. I promise you’ll like them. They’re sauted in butter with bacon and onions and a little garlic.” Well, hello nurse. I can think of very little that does not taste good when combined with butter, bacon, onions, and garlic. I’d eat out a dead hooker if she were lightly cooked with those ingredients. I scooped out a few sprouts and quickly popped one in my mouth just to get it over with. I took a bite and chewed. Then I took another. And another. Each bite was an explosion of flavor. Buttery, bacony, oniony, garlicky flavor. I was flabbergasted. Surely these were some other kind of sprout. There’s no way Brussels could have just up and changed their sprout recipe after all these years. “No,” they assured me, “those are good ol’ fashioned Brussels sprouts.” I had four or five more.

I was converted and my gastronomic IQ took off like the price of Google stock. Maybe someday the same thing will happen for me with pickles and olives, although I doubt it. I know what’s good and I know what I like, and those two things are neither.