A perfect conduit

Jan. 28, 2014


“...he is the perfect conduit: just sophisticated enough to talk to sophisticates, just hayseed enough to seem astounded by what they tell him.”

--Nora Ephron in a January 1967 profile of Johnny Carson published in the New York Post

Vanity Fair published a really good story on Johnny Carson's rise in this month's issue. I've always heard about the massive impact Carson had on American culture, but never quite got it myself until now. 

The article included part of the snappy Nora Ephron quote excerpted above, starting at "just sophisticated enough..." -- I found the beginning of it thanks to a search on Google Books. It explains the Iowa-born, Nebraska-bred Carson's appeal perfectly.

Here is another interesting stat, from another VF article published this month: At its peak, Johnny Carson's Tonight Show had an audience of more than 15 million viewers per night. At the moment, Leno's Tonight Show has around 3.7 million viewers.


"It's very difficult to know where to be."

Dec. 27, 2013
We find ourselves having that conversation about getting older and how much London has changed and how much New York City has changed. 

"But the world's changed," says Blanchett. "It's very difficult to know where to be. I used to live with people about whom I thought, Why have you completely pulled up stakes and gone to the coast? Couldn't you have just moved to the suburbs? Or quit your job? 

It's like going dry, I imagine. Because sometimes life is so fast and so absolute that the only way you can change things is by actually shifting your life utterly and totally to a different hemisphere. You can't partially change. There's no semi-revolution."

-- From a candid and refreshingly well-written interview (less focus on clothes, more on personality, culture, and atmosphere) with Cate Blanchett in the January 2014 issue of Vogue magazine.

"No one likes to admit they're being helped."

Dec. 2, 2013


"No one likes to pay out money. No one likes to admit that they're being helped. Very few people like to admit that other people have made a contribution to their success."

-- This entire 60 Minutes segment from 1975 on the late Hollywood agent Sue Mengers is fascinating (I've been reading up on her after this LA Times article about the Broadway play based on her career.) I especially liked what she said in the excerpt above, about why agents and marketers and their ilk get a bad rap.

At its core, business is where people hustle to get paid for the value they add to the world. If you're someone who is comfortably on salary in some established industry, it can be easy to forget that.

Back in her day, Mengers clearly hustled to get her 10%, and blazed the trail for a lot of modern consultants in the process. That woman knew how to give good phone. (And her manicure was on point.)

Also, the whole pace and tone of 60 Minutes in the 1970s was good stuff. Straightforward interviews, some of them over a glass of wine, edited together to run under 10 minutes. No fancy graphics or artsy camerawork. Simple and effective.

"Some sort of anger"

Oct. 20, 2013

"When Obama brushed dirt off his shoulder during the 2008 presidential campaign in an obvious reference to Jay’s song ('Dirt Off Your Shoulder'), Jay was amazed. 'I was like, This is not happening in the world...growing up, if you had ever told a black person from the hood you can be president, they’d be like, I could never. If you had told me that as a kid, I’d be like, Are you out of your mind? How?' 

When I asked him if the only way black kids thought they could get out of the projects was by being a rapper or a basketball player, Jay said, 'Exactly. That’s the only thing we saw.' 

...But he added, 'The middle class has been eliminated; it’s so hard to make a living now. There’s a bigger gap between the haves and have-nots, and that’s what creates the problem. It’s going to bring some sort of anger, it’s going to boil over, and there’s going to be a conflict. Everyone has to participate in this American Dream, and if everyone’s not participating, then there’s a problem.'

'It’s not cool—the trajectory that this is going. We have to figure out how to include everyone.'"

-- The whole Jay-Z profile in the November 2013 issue of Vanity Fair is good, and fortunately it's all available to read online. This is just one standout bit.

(And you can see the video of President Obama dusting his shoulders off back in 2008 here.)

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