I’m another Fort Wayne expat. (Escapee?) I’m so happy that you’re doing well and you’ve found a medium where the quality of your readers might just rise to the level of your work.

Great piece on Zevon.

Brian

I wasn’t planning to buy the book, now I think I shall.

And, as an aside, I love the title, because I’ve been a valet.

TK

The book also reminded me of the anger I felt when Zevon’s good friend Hunter Thompson committed suicide. I believe people in extremis do have a right to plan their own departure, but you don’t get to do it with your wife on the phone and your grandson in the next room. Zevon’s behavior was often reprehensible, but at least there’s a sense that he tried to make amends up until the very end.

As for Lileks, I enjoy his writing about pop culture but think he went over the deep end with his political stuff after 9/11. (“The terrorists are coming to Minneapolis to kill MY CHILD!!!!!”)

The Reporting-in-My-Jammies-and-Slippers crowd are always the first to go in a newspaper reorg. He must have seen it coming and will probably land safely. I don’t begrudge him that.

This just in: Lileks’ (rumored) salary for the Daily Quirk — $92,000. Wow. Can newspaper management BE any worse?

That’s McClatchy for you. They got severe indigestion buying up Knight-Ridder, which forced them to sell off their crown jewel and top moneymaker to Avista.

(By the way: Save a copy of that Rake piece; The Rake itself’s about to go under.)

Each to his own taste, I suppose. I saw Zevon once (the Agora, Columbus, ’79) at the insistence of an advertising buddy who extoled his live performances. Hmmm…

Then I found out my buddy had a hand in promoting the concert, so I knew HIS motives and was even less impressed. But, he had a good crowd that night, so I’m sure he was loved.

So what you have here, from the few records of his I’m familiar with, a minute or so watching his mortal remains propped up on Letterman, and the half-hour or so I spent skimming the book in Borders, was an occasionally witty and entertaining, and often obnoxious and arrogant, f***up who never quite got his life together.

And he got drunk and punched his wife in the face. How avant-garde, how postmodern, how creative, what an example to any artiste. The stuff of which legend is made, no doubt.