The Life and Times of Tim

Have you ever seen a movie or TV show -- or even read a book? -- where you think to yourself "This was created just for me!"

That's how I feel about the HBO animated series "The Life and Times of Tim." Steve Dildarian, the genius behind this hilarious show, must have said "I wonder what kinda show Mr NYC would like to see?" -- and then created it. Watching this show is like looking into a surreal, dark version of my life. I don't know how anyone else but me can really enjoy it. (Seriously.)

To whit: Tim (no last name) is a skinny, underemployed loser who lives in NYC with his ball-busting girlfriend and has dopey friends. (This is basically my life except that my wife is an angel and my friends are much smarter than me.) Anyway, each episode -- which consists of two fifteen-minute stories -- has the goodhearted, weak, go-along-to-get-along Tim falling into all sorts of bizarre entanglements that always end horribly. Tim is basically a guy who wants to earn his keep, hang with his girlfriend and his pals, and enjoy life. Unfortunately bad stuff keeps happening to him, and his attempts to deal with it are always well-meaning and disastrous.

What I love about this show is that, for all the craziness, the show's humor has a wry intelligence. And all of the characters -- his girlfriend Amy, his friends Rodney and Stu, his black hooker Debbie, his crazy boss -- are well developed and interesting. Whether its faking a seizure in a bar so that it will help a horny young doctor score chicks or baking a "condolence casserole" or going to Cincinnati on a business trip with an insane co-worker, the situations in this show are as bizarre and original as you're likely to see anywhere. You just have to watch it for yourself. Check out the clip below.

"The Life and Times of Tim" airs Fridays at 9:30 on HBO. The second season has two more episodes left and you can get season one on Netflix. If you want to see the funniest show in a long time, you should check it out.

Interview: Paul Krassner, Legendary Satirist and Founder of "The Realist"

If your life encompassed most of the 20th and all of the 21st centuries (so far) – and you knew and worked with people like Ken Kesey, Lenny Bruce, Kurt Vonnegut, Groucho Marx, John Lennon and Yoko Ono (amongst others) – you might think you’ve lived an interesting, even exciting life. 

But what if you changed the culture? What if you changed history? Then you’ve had more than an exciting life – you’re a flat-out legend.

And that moniker certainly applies to Paul Krassner.

A native of NYC, Paul was a child music prodigy who, as a young man in 1958, switched to journalism and founded the The Realist, the first truly great satirical magazine. A generational cousin to Mad magazine (where Paul used to work), The Realist went even further in mocking the hypocrisies of American social mores. Extreme and unflinching, it published things like the "Disneyland Memorial Orgy" poster and "The Parts That Were Left Out of the Kennedy Book", a vicious mocking of the Warren Report. Long before provocateurs like Frank Zappa and Howard Stern were shocking the culture, long before Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show were showing America its hypocrisies, Paul Krassner and The Realist were leading the charge and showing them how it's done.

Paul’s work, however, went far beyond satire. Thanks to Paul, almost three years before Roe v. Wade, Paul helped changed the New York state laws against abortion, ensuring a woman of her full reproductive rights. He was also a founding member of the Yippees and the Merry Pranksters which would have alone sealed his legendary fate.

These days, truth is stranger than fiction, and satire seems to be reality. That’s why it was so great for Paul Krassner to answer a few of Mr NYC’s questions about his life, his career, NYC, and the crazy culture that he exposed and shaped.

You were a child musical prodigy, playing the violin on stage at Carnegie Hall in 1939 at the age of six. Tell us a little bit about your upbringing in NYC, and how you made the leap from music to satirical journalism? 

Actually, the birth of such morphing occurred during that event in the middle of the “Vivaldi Concerto in A Minor.” I had been performing by rote until my left leg started itching. Balancing on that foot, I scratched the leg with my right foot without missing a note. I woke up to the sound of the audience laughing, and I opened my eyes. I could play the violin with technique, but I had a passion for making people laugh. It was to become the path of my life, starting in Astoria. I went to Long Island High School where I played on the baseball team, elected president of the Student Court — my first official act was to subpoena the new principal — and I wrote, produced, directed and acted in the senior play. In City College, I performed stand-up comedy, using my violin as a prop. I hadn’t touched it for several years, but now I took it out of the closet. 

The satirical magazine you founded in 1958, The Realist, was far ahead of its time. It was brash, rude, irreverent, and held nothing that was precious. Did you view the magazine and yourself as free speech crusaders, as speaking truth to power -- or were you just trying to be funny and outrageous?

I had been writing freelance scripts for Mad magazine, and the editor assigned their artists, though he rejected a few of my submissions because they were “too adult.” I complained to the publisher, Bill Gaines. He told me that since Mad’s circulation had reached over a million, he intended to keep aiming the magazine at teenagers. I said, “I guess you don’t want to change horses in midstream.” He replied, “Not when the horse has a rocket up its ass.” That was the precise moment I decided to publish a satirical magazine for grown-ups. There were none in America. I had no role models, and no competition, just an open field mined with taboos waiting to be exploded.

We seem to be living in surreal times that go beyond satire. What do you feel the legacy of The Realist is and what is the place of satire in the 21st century?

The more control by government, religion, propaganda, the more truth in satire is needed. My credo of The Realist was to communicate without compromise. The slogan was “Irreverence is our only sacred cow.” There were no labels of journalism or satire in order not to alert the readers from discerning their own pleasure.

In an intellectual property class I took several years ago, we discussed the infamous 1967 "Disneyland Memorial Orgy" poster (showing Disney characters in explicit sexual situations) that the Disney company then sued over and suppressed on intellectual property grounds. Can you tell us a little more about the background of this poster, this historic case, and your thoughts on "intellectual property?" Is it just another form of censorship and corporate greed?

When Walt Disney died, the libido of his characters were freed. The Disney attorneys considered suing me but didn’t because they knew that parody wasn’t against the law. I assigned Wally Wood, a Mad magazine artist, to draw a black-and-white two-page spread in The Realist, and then I published it as a poster. In 2005, an anonymous Disney employee painted a larger poster in authentic colors. You can see it on my website, paulkrassner.com.

You knew or were friends with a number of legendary cultural figures, among them Lenny Bruce, Kurt Vonnegut, and John Lennon. Telling us about them briefly is impossible but can you, briefly, tell us how you got to know each of these guys and how they impacted your life?

Steve Allen was the first subscriber to The Realist. He sent several gift subscriptions to friends including Lenny Bruce, who then sent several gift subs to his friends. Malthusian approach that peaked with 100,000 circulation in 1967. Playboy hired me to edit Lenny’s autobiography. He advised me to drop the violin prop. He wrote some things for The Realist. So did Kurt Vonnegut, who also wrote an introduction to one of my books. Realist readers John Lennon and Yoko Ono visited me. Lennon was absentmindedly holding on to a joint. I asked, “Do the British use the expression, to bogart a joint, or is that only an American term — you know, derived from the image of a cigarette dangling from Humphrey Bogart’s lip?” He replied, "In England, if you remind somebody else to pass a joint, you lose your own turn."

Are there any other famous or interesting people you knew who you'd like to tell us about?

Groucho Marx. On a visit to L.A. in 1968, I was invited to a comedic pro-acid movie, “Skidoo,” in production by director Otto Preminger, who had been turned on by Tim Leary. Groucho played a Mafia chief named God. Having read The Realist, he asked if I could get some that’s pure LSD, and also would I accompany on his first such trip. And we did. At one point he told me about one of his favorite contestants on the show: “He was an elderly gentleman with white hair, but quite a chipper fellow. I asked him what he did to retain his sunny disposition. 'Well, I'll tell you, Groucho,’ he says, 'every morning I get up and I make a choice to be happy that day.'” You were always a crusader for personal freedoms and the joys of pot smoking. Today, gay marriage is legal and recreational marijuana is becoming legal everywhere. Do you feel that the culture is finally catching up to you -- and do you feel you deserve credit for making the culture more tolerant? I didn’t think in my lifetime that legalized-pot, same-sex marriage, African-American president – they wouldn’t happen, yet they did – although the Trump administration tries to make a U-turn back in my lifetime to those reactionary taboos. My favorite bizarre claim was Attorney Jeff Sessions’ utterance that “Good people don’t smoke marijuana.” He also stated about the Ku Klux Klan, “I thought those guys were okay until I learned they smoked pot.” Yikes!

This is a blog about New York City. What was the NYC of your childhood like and how do you feel about the city today?

Well, I loved living in New York, walking around growing up and never learning to drive, being innumerable times on WBAI — a guest of three different programs hosted by Bob Fass, Steve Post, and Larry Josephson — but in 1971, after my first marriage broke up, I moved to San Francisco invited by Stewart Brand to co-edit with Ken Kesey, “The Last Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog.” I continued publishing The Realist and got my own talk show on ABC-FM. I would visit New York two or three times a year to perform at the Village Gate, see old Yippie friends, writers, artists, my parents, ex-wife and our daughter. The latter stayed with me each summer, eventually all the time.

Tell us something about Paul Krassner that we might not know?

In the ‘60s when abortion was illegal, I published an anonymous interview with Dr. Robert Spencer, a humane abortionist, promising that I would go to prison sooner than reveal his identity. I became an underground abortion referral service. When Dr. Spencer retired, he gave me another such physician to refer. In 1969 Bronx DA (later judge) Burton Roberts told me that his staff found that abortionist’s financial records showing all the money I received but he offered to grant me immunity from prosecution if I cooperated with the grand jury. He extended his and as a gesture of trust. “That’s not true,” I said, refusing to shake hands. If I had ever accepted any money, I'd have no way of knowing that he was bluffing. The DA was angry, but he finally had to let me go.

Attorney Gerald Lefcourt (later president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers) filed a suit on my behalf, challenging the constitutionality of the abortion law. He pointed out that the DA had no power to investigate the violation of an unconstitutional law, and he couldn't force me to testify. In 1970, I became the only plaintiff in the first lawsuit to declare the abortion laws unconstitutional in New York State “Later, various women’s groups joined the suit,” Lefcourt recalls, “and ultimately the New York legislature repealed the criminal sanctions against abortion, prior to the Supreme Court decision in Roe vs. Wade.” I had morphed from a satirist to an activist. 

Finally, how do you want your life and work to be remembered?

Laughter from the satire I felt urged to share on Earth.

Thanks Paul! You’ll be remembered for that and lots more!

Review: "Times Square" (1980)

The 1980s remains the Golden Age of "teen flicks" -- movies like Fast Times at Ridgemont High, 16 Candles, The Breakfast Club, Back to the Future, Weird Science, Pretty in Pink, Heathers, Say Anything ... and many others defined what it meant to be a teenager in the Age of Reagan. These movies remain classics for those of us kids raised in that decade, time capsules of youth in a time before the Internet, smartphones, and social media.

My personal favorite is Pump Up the Volume which came out in 1990. The story of an angry, depressed teen who broadcasts a pirate radio show from his bedroom was, in many ways, a perfect ending, a coda, for the '80s teen flicks era. Ironically Pump Up the Volume was directed by Allan Moyle who, in many ways, kicked off the decade of teen flicks ten years earlier with Times Square, his 1980 debut about two teenage runaways in NYC.  

Starring Trini Alvarado and an actress named Robin Johnson (who had a brief career in the '80s before vanishing completely), Times Square is about a rebellious teenager named Nicky (Johnson) who winds up in a mental hospital with another teenager girl named Pamela (Alvarado). Nicky appears to be an orphan but Pamela is the daughter of a wealthy commissioner who is trying to gentrify Times Square. Together they escape the hospital and begin raising hell around the city, calling themselves the Sleaze Sisters. They throw TVs out of windows onto the the street, they steal, they work and perform music in a strip club, and they just act crazy. A nighttime DJ named Johnny LaGuardia, played by the brilliant Tim Curry, follows their exploits on air and discovers that one of them is the same person, Zombie Girl, who used to send him letters about how miserable she was. Johnny tracks them down, as Pamela's father desperately tries to find his daughter as well. Eventually, after several twists and turns, the Sleaze Sisters wind up performing a concert above a marquee in Times Square for their fellow teenage misfits, their rebellion embraced by the whole city. 

Times Square is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a great movie. It's not even really a good one. But it has a great spirit, a lot of life to it. The performances are raw, intense, the characters believable. Johnson is really good, and Alvarado is good as a good girl gone bad. The biggest problem is Tim Curry as the DJ -- he's not in a lot of the movie which is a shame since Curry is such a great actor, and LaGuardia is a compelling character. 

Also, as you might imagine, it's a lot of fun to see a movie set largely on the street of NYC forty years ago. It really was a different city back then -- it looked different, it felt different, it's totally uncognizable from today.

But the angst, the emotion, the rebelliousness of Times Square -- and what it means to be a teenager -- remains quite relevant today. 

"The Life and Times of Tim" Revisited

Eight years ago I blogged about a hilarious, obscure cable cartoon show called "The Life and Times of Tim" about a sad sack who lives with his girlfriend in NYC, has a crummy job and awful friends, and finds the world totally bewildering and scary and overwhelming.

As I said at the time, it felt like this show had been created just for me. It's viciously funny, its sense of humor is, well, like mine, and Tim even looks like me! 

The show only lasted for about three seasons and vanished into the cultural ether but it's great to see that, years later, this classic show is getting some revisionist love.

Best of all, you can find many of the episodes on YouTube so click here if you want to laugh your ass off about a guy who is, in too many painful ways to count, a lot like your friend, Mr NYC. 

Who's Tim Keller?

There's an interesting phenomenon in American life that's as old as the republic itself: the mega-preacher. The Man of God as celebrity. The superstar of faith. The be-attitude with attitude. The light mocking the darkness. The Voice ...

From John Brown, Father Coughlin, and Billy Graham to the likes of Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker to Rick Warren and Joel Osteen, our most famous preachers know how to move a crowd, whip up a religious fervor, and bring us closer to Him. There's always been a political element to these folks too, and lately most of these mega-preachers have become associated with what's called the Religious Right. But they're not just political. Most of these guys are self-help gurus, and people look to them for "answers." They try to help people navigate this harsh, mean world and make sense of the senseless.

And they build HUGE churches, stadiums really, where literally THOUSANDS of people flock each week like it's a football game. It's really mind-blowing.

Most New Yorkers assume this is a scene to be found in the South or the Sun Belt -- and that's mostly true. But what if you heard that such a scene exists right here in NYC? And perhaps most shockingly, it's to be found in the beating heart, the ground zero, the epicenter, the very headquarters of the liberal elite?

'Tis true. Yes, you heard me right -- Sarah Palin has a friend on the Upper West Side.

Meet Tim Keller. For the last twenty years, he's been preaching his stern, conservative version of the Gospel at Redeemer Presbytarian Church. And he's got an enormous following of New Yorkers who come to hear him preach every week. He's so popular that he has to have multiple services every day to accommodate everybody. Forget Cardinal Dolan or Reverend Al or even Rabbi Shmuli or whatever his name is-- Tim Keller is the Voice of NYC.

You must read this fascinating article about him in this week's New York magazine. Who knew a guy like this existed or was so popular in this town?

What's amazing about Keller is that his "hook", the thing that gives him such a following is that he preaches less about social issues and more about what he sees as the sins of over-achievment -- mainly that people strive to be overachievers because they desperately want to fill up the emptiness of their souls. It's an interesting idea and, in these tough economic times, needless to say, many people are questioning the ethos of unbridled capitalism, of greed, or more more more ... stuff. It's an interesting article, and he's an interesting guy, so I suggest you read it and come to your own conclusions.