I met Justin and Josh from Motion City Soundtrack at Honda Civic Tour, Tom Cruise sat two rows from me in a movie, and I somewhat met the lead singer of Phantom Planet.
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Have you met any celebrities?
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More On Meeting Celebrities--and Being One
It has been about nine months since I last posted at this thread on the subject of "meeting celebrities." So...let me add:
------------------------------------------------
My life, like comedian, critic and commentator, Clive James's, has been richly social, but not in the world of celebrities and media. I have read a great deal, but nothing like the quantity that Clive James has consumed. James says that most of his listening was to the authors behind the books he read; in my case, until I retired in 1999, most of my listening was to people in the raw: individuals, groups, communities. For a host of reasons--the expansion of universities, of suburbs and of telecommunications, to name three--the kind of face-to-face intellectual-artistic life that was exemplified in coteries in the past, and that flourished in other twentieth-century cities before WW1, simply no longer exists or so James sees it. I agree, but not all the way. I feel as if Ive done an aweful lot of face-to-face stuff in my life--so much so that by the age of 60 I felt that it was time to document some of it in memoirs. I would never be a celebrity, indeed I had no desire to be one.
James's answer to the intellectual-artistic bereavement that he finds in western society are his books themselves, as is my own memoirpartly. Here is the café, the former place of the intellectual-artist; he has created it in his mind; it is a convocation of voices that respond to one another across the barriers of language, outlook, expressive form and, most of all, time. Over the decades and beginning while at university in the 1960s, I was driven away from academic institutions of higher learning and toward a more journalistic approach, to a plain speech and a style of writing that was not as esoteric as an MA thesis or a PhD dissertation. Direct observation and the necessity to entertain was absolutely crucial for Jamesand for me. I would never have surived in classrooms had these qualities not surfaced insensibly over the first half-a-dozen years of my teaching experience from 1967 to 1973. Yes, in many ways, I became a celebrity, but in the micro-world of schools.
Not in the mass media eye, as James was and with his immense success, I settled for a more modest achievement in the world of the school and the college. Like James, I wrote essays, reviews, sketches and squibs for students; I also wrote in longer and more conventionally prestigious forms, but always in styles that had been honed by the whetstone of conversation, but without the accruing prestige that James accumulated.
Writing for the student and for the popular press, even at a much less successful and prestigious level of everyday journalism than James, demands both simplicity and compression, and compression, if it is of good quality, makes language glow. I felt, as the years went on, that some light was finally being emitted from the marks on the page that I was putting down. The stylistic models that James and I emulated were much different. However different, they each could "pour a whole view of life, a few cupfuls at a time, into the briefest of paragraphs." James highest hero, "the voice behind the books voices" and one of several exceptions to his rule of writing only about twentieth-century figures, was Tacitus.
It was Tacitus who wrote the sentence, says James, out of which the entire volume Cultural Amnesia grew: "They make a desert and they call it peace." James heard the line quoted as a young man and "saw straight away that a written sentence could sound like a spoken one, but have much more in it."
My Tacitus, was Gibbon and Gibbon saw his history as a continuation of Tacitus work. I felt James and I were on a similar track. I would like to think that my memoirs are what James book Cultural Amnesia was to the reviewer in The Nation; namely, less a collection of great figures than of great sentences. But alas and alack, this is not the case. That same reviewer, William Deresiewicz, went on to say, reading Cultural Amnesia feels like having a conversation with the most interesting person in the world: You're not saying much, but you just want to keep listening anyway. Well, Im not sure I have had such a conversation in yearsas a talker or a listenerexpect in books. But James is, for me, one of my many, one of my crucial, mentors.
The reason James is such a good talker is that he's such a good listener. He means it literally when he says that the book took forty years to write, because its quotations are the harvest of the notebooks he has kept for all that time, and the notebooks are the harvest of his insatiable reading. Forty years of talking tired me out as did forty years of listening. Forty years of my note-taking has resulted, for me, in a small study filled with files that annoy my wife who has a penchant for the tidy and the clean, the orderly and the useful. It is a penchant I share with her but in a different modus operandi, modus vivendi. Forty years of reading and note-taking gave me an even greater appetite for print after I retired from full-time, part-time and casual-work in the years 1999 to 2005.
Ever since running into Tacitus, says James, he has been a connoisseur of aphorisms and aphorists--of writing that is both conversational and compressed and of the kinds of minds that produce it. It's no coincidence that he is also a connoisseur of music. "Echoes of a predecessor's rhythm, pace and melody are rarely accidental": That sentence contains four terms that sound like they refer to music, but it's about writing. Rhythm is central to James's understanding of style, and so are "echoes"--that is, memory. He is himself an incandescent and virtually habitual aphorist.
I, too, went down this road but not quite as passionately as James, for I was not in the media spotlight that he was, a spotlight where the aphorism is one of the kings of the sound-bite and the clever turn of phrase. I did collect quotations in my many notebooks, but clever turns of phrase and jokes always slightly eluded me. As I approach my sixtieth year, I found there was just too much to copy into notebooks; there was too much thatwas useful. By then my computer directory began to come in handy. I did not have had to transcribe an entire book, entire articles, paragraphs or sentences. the internet and the computer saved an immense pile of paper and pleased my wife, a person who had become, also by the age of sixty, the crucial person in my life....this post is getting far too long...and I apologize to readers who prefer small chunks of print. -Ron
It has been about nine months since I last posted at this thread on the subject of "meeting celebrities." So...let me add:
------------------------------------------------
My life, like comedian, critic and commentator, Clive James's, has been richly social, but not in the world of celebrities and media. I have read a great deal, but nothing like the quantity that Clive James has consumed. James says that most of his listening was to the authors behind the books he read; in my case, until I retired in 1999, most of my listening was to people in the raw: individuals, groups, communities. For a host of reasons--the expansion of universities, of suburbs and of telecommunications, to name three--the kind of face-to-face intellectual-artistic life that was exemplified in coteries in the past, and that flourished in other twentieth-century cities before WW1, simply no longer exists or so James sees it. I agree, but not all the way. I feel as if Ive done an aweful lot of face-to-face stuff in my life--so much so that by the age of 60 I felt that it was time to document some of it in memoirs. I would never be a celebrity, indeed I had no desire to be one.
James's answer to the intellectual-artistic bereavement that he finds in western society are his books themselves, as is my own memoirpartly. Here is the café, the former place of the intellectual-artist; he has created it in his mind; it is a convocation of voices that respond to one another across the barriers of language, outlook, expressive form and, most of all, time. Over the decades and beginning while at university in the 1960s, I was driven away from academic institutions of higher learning and toward a more journalistic approach, to a plain speech and a style of writing that was not as esoteric as an MA thesis or a PhD dissertation. Direct observation and the necessity to entertain was absolutely crucial for Jamesand for me. I would never have surived in classrooms had these qualities not surfaced insensibly over the first half-a-dozen years of my teaching experience from 1967 to 1973. Yes, in many ways, I became a celebrity, but in the micro-world of schools.
Not in the mass media eye, as James was and with his immense success, I settled for a more modest achievement in the world of the school and the college. Like James, I wrote essays, reviews, sketches and squibs for students; I also wrote in longer and more conventionally prestigious forms, but always in styles that had been honed by the whetstone of conversation, but without the accruing prestige that James accumulated.
Writing for the student and for the popular press, even at a much less successful and prestigious level of everyday journalism than James, demands both simplicity and compression, and compression, if it is of good quality, makes language glow. I felt, as the years went on, that some light was finally being emitted from the marks on the page that I was putting down. The stylistic models that James and I emulated were much different. However different, they each could "pour a whole view of life, a few cupfuls at a time, into the briefest of paragraphs." James highest hero, "the voice behind the books voices" and one of several exceptions to his rule of writing only about twentieth-century figures, was Tacitus.
It was Tacitus who wrote the sentence, says James, out of which the entire volume Cultural Amnesia grew: "They make a desert and they call it peace." James heard the line quoted as a young man and "saw straight away that a written sentence could sound like a spoken one, but have much more in it."
My Tacitus, was Gibbon and Gibbon saw his history as a continuation of Tacitus work. I felt James and I were on a similar track. I would like to think that my memoirs are what James book Cultural Amnesia was to the reviewer in The Nation; namely, less a collection of great figures than of great sentences. But alas and alack, this is not the case. That same reviewer, William Deresiewicz, went on to say, reading Cultural Amnesia feels like having a conversation with the most interesting person in the world: You're not saying much, but you just want to keep listening anyway. Well, Im not sure I have had such a conversation in yearsas a talker or a listenerexpect in books. But James is, for me, one of my many, one of my crucial, mentors.
The reason James is such a good talker is that he's such a good listener. He means it literally when he says that the book took forty years to write, because its quotations are the harvest of the notebooks he has kept for all that time, and the notebooks are the harvest of his insatiable reading. Forty years of talking tired me out as did forty years of listening. Forty years of my note-taking has resulted, for me, in a small study filled with files that annoy my wife who has a penchant for the tidy and the clean, the orderly and the useful. It is a penchant I share with her but in a different modus operandi, modus vivendi. Forty years of reading and note-taking gave me an even greater appetite for print after I retired from full-time, part-time and casual-work in the years 1999 to 2005.
Ever since running into Tacitus, says James, he has been a connoisseur of aphorisms and aphorists--of writing that is both conversational and compressed and of the kinds of minds that produce it. It's no coincidence that he is also a connoisseur of music. "Echoes of a predecessor's rhythm, pace and melody are rarely accidental": That sentence contains four terms that sound like they refer to music, but it's about writing. Rhythm is central to James's understanding of style, and so are "echoes"--that is, memory. He is himself an incandescent and virtually habitual aphorist.
I, too, went down this road but not quite as passionately as James, for I was not in the media spotlight that he was, a spotlight where the aphorism is one of the kings of the sound-bite and the clever turn of phrase. I did collect quotations in my many notebooks, but clever turns of phrase and jokes always slightly eluded me. As I approach my sixtieth year, I found there was just too much to copy into notebooks; there was too much thatwas useful. By then my computer directory began to come in handy. I did not have had to transcribe an entire book, entire articles, paragraphs or sentences. the internet and the computer saved an immense pile of paper and pleased my wife, a person who had become, also by the age of sixty, the crucial person in my life....this post is getting far too long...and I apologize to readers who prefer small chunks of print. -Ron
i used to tour with a lot of bands that are or were really big... so i've met and/or been friends with a lot of famous musicians... i haven't really talked to a lot of famous actors/actresses, but i have met a bunch... i have also met a few politicians... i think the two coolest groups i ever got to meet were the ramones and squeeze... i also did some work with carlos alomar, who is david bowie's guitarist... that was awesome... he had a lot of awesome stories.
Don Rickles was on the studio lot the other day. He looked busy and was surrounded by people, so I didn't want to bug him. Just smiled and nodded and went on my way as we're supposed to do when at the studio.
I've previously mentioned a couple of Oscar nominees that I've spoken to, but I thought of two more, each foreign-born.
I've had conversations with Nacho Vigalondo (Spanish actor, writer, director, producer, and Oscar nominee) and more recently with Vilmos Zsigmond, from Hungary, who won the cinematography Oscar for Close Encounters of the Third Kind. For a guy who filmed aliens, he was very down to earth. We talked about iPods.
I've had conversations with Nacho Vigalondo (Spanish actor, writer, director, producer, and Oscar nominee) and more recently with Vilmos Zsigmond, from Hungary, who won the cinematography Oscar for Close Encounters of the Third Kind. For a guy who filmed aliens, he was very down to earth. We talked about iPods.
Oh goody, what a year I've had since I made this depressing post! Met loads of golfers this year.
Had a conversation with Phil Mickleson and most of the European Ryder Cup team including Graeme McDowall (nice guy, spent some time coaching my son), Ian Poulter, Darren Clarke, Monty.
Back in NY, I ran into:
Lucy Liu at Century 21, DiCaprio at Pinkberry, P. Diddy getting into a limo, Derek Jeter at Serendipity, Chris Cuomo at a Starbucks and Gordon Ramsey at his restaurant.
I'm good friends with Jarah Mariano (VS model). I met her during college at Pace. At first I thought she would be snobby but she is very cool.
Here in the Bay:
At some Warriors games: Jessica Alba, Barry Bonds, Delroy Lindo and Kate Hudson.
At a Giants game: Robin Williams and Jerry Rice.
Oh and duh, I saw Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson a few years back up in Napa. They weren't being filmed but I saw the Napa part on their show. Nick was really nice, Jessica...not so much.
Lucy Liu at Century 21, DiCaprio at Pinkberry, P. Diddy getting into a limo, Derek Jeter at Serendipity, Chris Cuomo at a Starbucks and Gordon Ramsey at his restaurant.
I'm good friends with Jarah Mariano (VS model). I met her during college at Pace. At first I thought she would be snobby but she is very cool.
Here in the Bay:
At some Warriors games: Jessica Alba, Barry Bonds, Delroy Lindo and Kate Hudson.
At a Giants game: Robin Williams and Jerry Rice.
Oh and duh, I saw Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson a few years back up in Napa. They weren't being filmed but I saw the Napa part on their show. Nick was really nice, Jessica...not so much.
Being a journalist, the list could could on for a very long time.
Celebrities I've met while not on the clock? Let's see.
Jackie Chan. Pele. Ran into both of them in Singapore.
Vince Neil, Chris O'Donnel, Frank Thomas, Jenna Jameson, Ron Jeremy and Angel Boris are some from Vegas.
Bill Murray, John Lithgow and Ralph Cirella (from the Howard Stern show) in NYC.
Eddie Van Halen and Sammy Hagar after a concert in Las Cruces, NM.
Jason Bonham in Myrtle Beach. Brett Hull in Duluth, Minn. Tim Duncan, Steve Kerr in San Antonio. Ronny Cox in Albuquerque.
And that's about it off the top of my head.
Celebrities I've met while not on the clock? Let's see.
Jackie Chan. Pele. Ran into both of them in Singapore.
Vince Neil, Chris O'Donnel, Frank Thomas, Jenna Jameson, Ron Jeremy and Angel Boris are some from Vegas.
Bill Murray, John Lithgow and Ralph Cirella (from the Howard Stern show) in NYC.
Eddie Van Halen and Sammy Hagar after a concert in Las Cruces, NM.
Jason Bonham in Myrtle Beach. Brett Hull in Duluth, Minn. Tim Duncan, Steve Kerr in San Antonio. Ronny Cox in Albuquerque.
And that's about it off the top of my head.
John de Lancie (played Q on Star Trek). I had no idea who the guy was, at the time, in 2002. I was part of the Juneau, AK Mac User Group, and the MacWorld cruise ship came to Juneau. The only thing I said to him was, "How do you like your salmon cooked sir?". He said, "You know best."
Later the leader of the MUG said, "Mr. de Lancie said that was the best salmon he has ever eaten.."
Unfortunately, Juneau no longer has a MUG. Their former Website had pictures of the BBQ.
I did meet "The Missing Manual" guy at that MacWorld cruise BBQ, ummm... let me think, ummm... can't think of his name.
Later the leader of the MUG said, "Mr. de Lancie said that was the best salmon he has ever eaten.."
Unfortunately, Juneau no longer has a MUG. Their former Website had pictures of the BBQ.
I did meet "The Missing Manual" guy at that MacWorld cruise BBQ, ummm... let me think, ummm... can't think of his name.
i met lou ferrigno at megacon 2006 he is kind of a jerk, i was trying to ask a question and he just wanted the cash. i even tore up the pic b/c of that.
I live on Stanford campus(my dad is a professor there) so everyone on my street is either current or retired faculty. A few years ago, after coming home from my grandmothers house for fathers day dinner we noticed a lot people standing around the street and we just figured someone was having a party. Then we noticed several guys dressed identically like each other.
Turns out that those guys were Secret Service and the Clintons were having drinks with one of our neighbors. Apparently one of them was Chelseas advisor and this also being stanford graduation day there were here for her graduation. Even though this was a public place the security detail was nice and let everyone meet and greet the former first family since the street is pretty safe so I got to meet all the Clintons
Turns out that those guys were Secret Service and the Clintons were having drinks with one of our neighbors. Apparently one of them was Chelseas advisor and this also being stanford graduation day there were here for her graduation. Even though this was a public place the security detail was nice and let everyone meet and greet the former first family since the street is pretty safe so I got to meet all the Clintons
I have met alot of celebs that I cant even count .... but the last one I met was Rachel Leigh Cook. She came to my school to campaign from Barack Obama.
She was cool enough to let me snap a pic of her really quick ... She was so down to earth that I felt like she was a regular student and yeah, she is really hot , even without makeup.
Bigger version here --> http://i35.tinypic.com/23ts3dk.jpg
She was cool enough to let me snap a pic of her really quick ... She was so down to earth that I felt like she was a regular student and yeah, she is really hot , even without makeup.
Bigger version here --> http://i35.tinypic.com/23ts3dk.jpg
Saw Gary Busey coming out of a building awhile ago. Looks just as crazy in person. Danny Bonaduce was in Hollywood when we were there for a concert. Looks less crazy in person.
I met Tony Atlas when I worked at Winn-Dixie in the early 80's and I unfortunately met Chris Benoit a week before he killed his family and himself. He was at a store in Peachtree city with his son.
Okay.. I'll jump in.
First, the usual Trek lot: Shatner, Nimoy, Takei, Wheaton. Mark Alaimo (Gul Dukat), Susie Plaxton.
Next, 'toons. Lou and Erica Scheimmer (think Filmation)
Musicians. Neil Finn (Crowded House), Ottmar Leibert, Joe Elliot, Garth Brooks, Bond, George Lynch, Ice Cube, Ice T, and a few not-so-big musicians.
Oh yeah.. forgot.. Michael Jackson at Disneyland when I was 5, and he was black.
Funnily enough, I haven't met any actors in my time living in Vegas (adult or otherwise).
Athletes. Too may professional bowlers to name. Lebron James and Chris Paul this past weekend. Shannon Grant, Paul Roos (Aussie Rules football).
Business. I had the pleasure on more than a few occasions to visit Warren Buffet at his house. Honestly, he's just a local in Omaha, despite being the now #1 richest guy in the US.
BL.
First, the usual Trek lot: Shatner, Nimoy, Takei, Wheaton. Mark Alaimo (Gul Dukat), Susie Plaxton.
Next, 'toons. Lou and Erica Scheimmer (think Filmation)
Musicians. Neil Finn (Crowded House), Ottmar Leibert, Joe Elliot, Garth Brooks, Bond, George Lynch, Ice Cube, Ice T, and a few not-so-big musicians.
Oh yeah.. forgot.. Michael Jackson at Disneyland when I was 5, and he was black.
Funnily enough, I haven't met any actors in my time living in Vegas (adult or otherwise).
Athletes. Too may professional bowlers to name. Lebron James and Chris Paul this past weekend. Shannon Grant, Paul Roos (Aussie Rules football).
Business. I had the pleasure on more than a few occasions to visit Warren Buffet at his house. Honestly, he's just a local in Omaha, despite being the now #1 richest guy in the US.
BL.