The Sixth Most-Watched Person on Television

Once just a campus celebrity, now a household name: Anoop Desai may not have won “American Idol,” but his rise to pop-culture fame is far from over.

Published in Carolina Alumni Review, July-August 2009.

In their fall 2007 concert video, the UNC a capella group the Clef Hangers starred in a skit in which they purchased a lottery ticket at a Rosemary Street convenience store, won $60 million and immediately adopted a faux-lavish lifestyle: hiring underclassmen to take their tests; playing lawn tennis in plaid knickers and jaunty tam o’shanters; imbibing Chardonnay. In one scene, Anoop Desai, the then- president of and frequent soloist for the Clefs, drove up in a silver Mazda Miata with the top down, wearing fleece and jeans, while his mates struck old-money, Hyannis-Port-style poses on a front porch, the boredom of luxury on their faces.

“What’s up, man?” a safely buckled-in Desai said, with one hand on the steering wheel and the other draped around the passenger seat headrest. “Check out my new ride.”

Desai laughs at the memory of that video, and with good reason. Today he is sitting in the bar at The Franklin Hotel in Chapel Hill, where he has been given the 1,300 square-foot penthouse suite for the evening – on the house, of course. Yesterday, the 22-year-old signed autographs for 400 fans. In a few hours, wearing a pink bow tie and seersucker jacket, he will receive the key to the city on what has officially been dubbed Anoop Desai Day. He won’t be driving a Miata or even his own partially paint-chipped Camry to the festivities. He could, and maybe would prefer, to hop on the NU campus bus to get around town, but as that shuttle rolls past the window where he sits, his limousine (also comped) pulls up to the curb from the other direction.           

“We’re ready whenever you are, Anoop,” says the limo company owner, who will spend most of the day gushing over the former “American Idol” contestant like a teenager with a crush.

Desai smiles, shakes his head and wonders: How did he get to a place in his life where someone would inform him, without irony, that his limo is ready?

“That,” he says, “is just weird.”

Check out Anoop Desai’s new ride: an unexpected and often surreal journey into reality television and its attending microscopic scrutiny, with stops in all the usual places an “American Idol” finalist frequents: the village of cultural stereotypes, the valley of pop-style democracy, and that new port of 21^st century American Dreams: the land of overnight fame. Desai hopes his final destinations will include your iPod, your radio airwaves, your sports arena’s stage and your very consciousness. So step right up, ladies and gentlemen, and get your tickets.

Welcome to the celebrity education of Anoop Desai.

Getting the Blues out of the Red

Published in Carolina Alumni Review, January/February 2005

Tim Duffy ‘91 (MA) treasures the times he stood with friends in the cheese line, waiting with them for their food rations. “It’s raining,” Duffy recalled from his log-cabin recording studio in rural Hillsborough, “and you’re standing in line with all of your friends, you know, waiting for their cheese. I used to love that.”

Duffy’s friends were the bluesmen and women he met while a graduate student in folklore. Duffy, who had a work-study job at the Southern Folklife Collection, proved to be a useless cataloguer because he could not type. Instead he was sent where he most wanted to be – in the field, meeting and listening to local blues artists. He came back with a better understanding of “the beauty of human nature.”

Those friends often needed help getting by, and Duffy offered it with his 1972 Ford van. He’d pick up seven or eight of the most talented, influential and completely unknown musicians in the state, take them to get their Social Security checks cashed, to get their groceries, to pay their electric bills.

“That’s when I really learned how people without much have to make decisions,” Duffy said of the artists he met, who were living, without complaint, on no more than $5,000 a year. “What you learn is an incredible faith in the unseen world. To be living in such extreme poverty, and doing so with diabetes, and not letting that bother them …”

Fasten Your Seatbelts

A conversation with the irreverent—and irrepressible—Dan Neil, Pulitzer Prize-winning car critic for the Los Angeles Times.

published December 2004
 NC State magazine

If you didn’t know better, you might think Los Angeles Times automotive critic Dan Neil (1987 MA) was an average Joe from New Bern. He thinks minivans are sexy, wears his humility on his sleeve and would like to fix up that old car of his out back.

Then he’ll tell you he traveled to Iraq this fall to write about its burgeoning youth drag-racing scene.

There’s a reason Neil as catapulted automotive writing—that weekly section tucked in the classified ads—from dull-as-dirt doldrums to can’t-miss-it readable. He’s funny. He’s an astute cultural observer.

And this spring, he surprised the journalism cognoscenti by becoming the first auto critic to claim the Pulitzer Prize for criticism for his weekly column, Rumble Seat.

Not bad for a guy who got fired from his first newspaper job.

Neil talked with NC State contributing writer Beth McNichol about the downside of peer recognition, why cars move us and why Raleigh might be the best place to find love in an automobile.

I imagine there aren’t many automotive writers with backgrounds in creative writing [bachelor’s degree, East Carolina University] and English literature [master’s degree, NC State]. How does a guy go from Chaucer to Chevy?
Well Chaucer loved cars, and would have used them if he’d had one. The walk was long and people smelled bad.

I was just trying to make a living. I had an M.A. in English from NC State, which was a superior preparation—except if you wanted to eat. So I took this job as a copy editor at The News & Observer because I only knew how to do a couple of things. One was write and the other was read. Well, actually, at the time I wouldn’t say I was a very good writer. I worked for the Spectator for a couple of years, and wrote what I would call my first journalistic pieces. And they weren’t very good. So I was highly unpromising.

This chance came up to put together an automotive section for the classifieds department. I took that job and started writing columns that very month. When I started to do it, I realized that there was an opportunity for creative writing that maybe people hadn’t exploited before.

So you were always interested in writing about cars?
I wasn’t necessarily interested in cars. I knew that the job would give me a chance to travel. I was very provincial at the time, and I’d never had the opportunity. And I knew that if I took this job, I would be jetting all over the world to test cars. And, in fact, that’s exactly what I did.

Not a bad gig.
It was a very good gig. Because, of course, the classified advertising department wasn’t held to the high standards of journalistic ethics that the news side is, where you couldn’t take junkets. So I didn’t have to concern myself with that. I had to add pages to my passport at one point to accommodate all the entry and exit stamps I had.

John Simon, the theater critic for New York magazine, had some disparaging words about an automotive guy taking Pulitzer honors. What do you think about the idea that writing about cars is too greasy a subject for the esteemed Pulitzer?
John Simon is a very smart guy, and his comment was not without merit. He was arguing that criticism should be confined to creative arts as compared to the applied arts. However, car design, and cars in general, and architecture—which is considered to be a perfectly acceptable subject for this sort of thing—have a lot in common. They are large, industrial projects involving thousands of people, highly technical, highly market- and site-specific.

But I didn’t win it because I have this penetrating insight about automobiles. I won it because I was an entertaining writer. I kind of suspected, actually, that the Pulitzer board might be looking for a laugh. So I think it’s really more a reflection of my style than the subject matter.

That being said, you must have been surprised when you won.
I was. I really didn’t know what to think. I was surprised and honored and flattered—and embarrassed. I felt very conspicuous. I’d only been at the paper for four months. One thing about working at a newspaper—especially a big newspaper like the L.A. Times—you can walk up and down these halls, and you see very, very talented people who are just busting their asses every day, and they get no recognition, really. So for me to be so conspicuously celebrated after four months, I must confess I was a little chagrined by all that. I would just as soon win it after another year or so. But I’m not giving it back.

Has winning the award changed your daily life in any way?
It’s actually put a tremendous amount of pressure on my writing. It’s made me feel very responsible in a way that I didn’t feel before. It has imposed a creeping legitimacy on me that I would have found distasteful otherwise. So there’s that. And it’s a funny thing to be treated like, what, one of America’s premier journalists. It’s out of scale with my interior reality. And here’s the way I’ve learned to say it: If I’m so smart, how come I work so hard? If I were that smart, it would come easy. But it doesn’t come easy. It’s hard, and it’s getting harder.

I would say that since I’ve won the prize, I have not written as well as I used to. You get a little stage fright, frankly. This is the last thing that you think would happen to you as a writer, especially for someone like me, who’s never given a damn what people thought. Suddenly I do. My boss, [Times editor] John Carroll, told me that it has ruined more journalists than it has helped. It has ended more careers for one reason or another than it has really promoted. It’s a scary thought, isn’t it?

It’s sort of like the angry rock band that makes it big and has nothing to complain about anymore.
Exactly. And the dynamics are very much the same. You either start to believe your own press, which is the worst-case scenario, or you become tongue-tied, or you decide to diversify and sort of impose a kind of Peter Principle upon yourself, elevating yourself to a position for which you are not qualified. All of those things can happen, and do happen, commonly.

One of the perks of winning a Pulitzer is a check for $10,000, which is quite a sum for the average journalist. What did you do with your prize money? Did you “pimp your ride,” as the kids say?
I wish I had a good anecdote about that. My girlfriend—now my wife—came with a dowry of debt, and I paid off a lot of it. We did take our honeymoon before we got married and went to Paris a few days to and England. And I bought a dog, a Chihuahua. But I haven’t touched my car in months, my science project car. It’s a 1960 MGA. I haven’t picked up a wrench in ages. It’s a great car. Unfortunately, it’s just sitting out there, quietly rusting.

In my household, there always seems to be a car-repair or car-reality show on television, whether it’s Monster Garage or Rides. Is there a new interest in cars in our culture?
I think there’s no limit to the amount of pandering, this kind of narrowcasting, that cable is capable of. So yeah, there are a lot more shows like that on TV. However, I would wager that a smaller proportion of the population works on cars than ever before. One, modern cars are extremely hard to work on, unless you’re a trained technician. They require special tools, sophisticated equipment. The days of the shade-tree mechanic are virtually over. So a lot of this is [for] armchair mechanics. They’ll watch a show about putting big headers, drag pipes, on their truck, but they won’t actually do it, because you’d need a functioning garage. Also, I see some of this stuff being done on television, and I think, “That is so unsafe.” You see these guys getting 400 horsepower out of a 2-liter Mitsubishi engine. That’s just like a grenade. You’re just waiting for it to explode. It’s all fantasy. I mean, who among Martha Stewart’s audience actually goes out and makes the popcorn Christmas balls? Not that many.

Just as most people won’t be going out to purchase the Lamborghini that you’re test driving in a couple weeks, no matter how tantalizing your column might make it seem. You talked about how a big part of the draw of Rumble Seat is its entertainment value. Where do your references come from?
I think that if I had one contribution to make to automotive writing—and I’m not swearing that I did—it’s that I’ve tried to relate automobiles to the larger culture. Not just the society, which is to say the way people move and interact, but the culture—the way the entertain themselves, the meanings, associations and aesthetic trend that they see happening around them. I don’t know if that many people have really thought that hard about cars. But cars really are a cultural icon.

What do cars mean to people?
They are objects of desire, they are mechanical contrivances, they are utilitarian and they are anti-utilitarian in sort of the best combination. When you think about how perverse an automobile is, what do we want? We want that highest possible combination of the useful and the useless. I was just writing this story about the Dodge Magnum, which is the sort of low-slung, chop-top station wagon with a big engine in it. And it’s really old-fashioned in its way. It’s very utilitarian. And yet it looks so non-utilitarian. It’s got all of this soul, and it has an esprit about it. That’s what we look for in cars. I try to measure them across both of those axes, of usefulness and uselessness.

What kind of car embodies Raleigh’s identity?
Oh, I think the Toyota Avalon. You know, not dangerous in any particular way. It’s an easygoing car, genteel, not threatening. Not particularly exciting, but very comfortable. Very livable.

Is your ultimate car a bit more sport than that?
My ultimate car is a Mercedes-Benz 500-E wagon. That to me is everything I want—except for fuel economy. It’d be nice if it were a hybrid. But it is classic, understated, elegant, useful, stealthy and very, very fast. You know, Mercedes-Benz means something in the history of the automobile. Whereas the Toyota Scion means nothing, and people can’t even pronounce it, even though they make really great cars. I don’t need a Ferrari. I don’t need a Lamborghini. In fact, I kind of hate exotic cars. They really are just pointless displays of excess.

What do you drive now?
Test cars. I don’t own a car, like a lot of people in this business—other than my science project. The [manufacturing] companies drop off a car every week, and then come and get it and bring me another one. This week I have the Scion TC, and next week I’m driving the Lincoln Town Car armored car. We’re going to take it to the worst part of town and see if anybody will shoot at us.

In terms of the automobile, I have the perfect job. Because really, you buy a car and the buzz lasts for just about a week. And then the new wears off, and what you’ve got is car payments. See, I do that and I don’t even have a car payment. So I’m very promiscuous in my affection.

Speaking of affection, in 1996, when you were working for The News & Observer’s automotive section, you wrote a column that examined the merits of a Ford truck’s cab for hanky panky, not hauling.
When that story came out, my boss in classified advertising said, “Hey, we’re going to have to get you an editor, because you’re too much of a risk.” Because the stories I was writing would go right in the paper and no one would read them. Considering I did that for almost seven years, that was a pretty good run, and the ideal situation for a journalist. I mean, what is heaven for a journalist? Complete and unfettered access to a newspaper press. Anyway, I refused to run my stuff by anybody. So, after three or four months of what I’ve come to call “principled insubordination,” they fired me. [Neil then freelanced, contributing to the Independent Weekly, The New York Times and a number of car and travel magazines, before being hired by the Los Angeles Times.]

But it seemed like a good idea at the time, you know? It was an opportunity to talk about something that everyone has done in cars—and if they haven’t, they should rush right out and do it. It my view, it was extremely loving and tasteful. And we had our seatbelts on, so it was safe sex.

Because you seem to be an authority on such matters, I think we have to ask: What’s the best make-out car on the market today?
I’d say probably your Lincoln Town Car or other bench-seat equipped vehicles. Or the Toyota Avalon has a bench-seat option. Which, of course, is great. Bucket seats are great if you want to be alone, but if you want—well, let’s just say intimacy—you need a bench seat. Also, the smaller the car, the harder the car is to make out in. Some of your sexy sports cars, your Ferraris, you have to get out to make out.

And I would argue that the minivan is a very sexy vehicle. The minivan says to the world: “I’ve had sexual congress with the opposite sex recently, and have the proof in the screaming children. And furthermore, I’m not even trying to attract the opposite sex. I’m that secure.” In my view, your big swinging studs are driving the minivan, and your wankers are driving the sports cars. This is a point of view women intuitively understand.

Do you recommend people get tinted windows for such activities?
I just recommend they keep the sunroof closed so that truckers can’t see in.

 Copyright 2004 NC State Alumni Association

The Lights on Main Street

If you make it on Broadway,
do you have an obligation to care
about the dying farming town
where your father grew up?
William Ivey Long believes you do.

Published in Carolina Alumni Review, November/December 2004

Through the open back door of the old bungalow, the rain is falling in sheets, the kind that would make a night out at the theater in a fancy dress less appealing. But there are no Broadway shows here, no movies either. No malls, no department stores, no restaurants serving foie gras or even Filet O’ Fish. Only the land and the buildings on it, and the people who have tended it for 10 generations, and that still means everything.

William Ivey Long ‘72, gentleman farmer of this northeastern North Carolina town, takes the rain as just another design element in this little production, the mud that his guests would have to tread through nothing more than a doable inconvenience, rather like a loose string on a hem. He’s dressed more like a Dockers ad – khakis, white button-down – than as the four-time Tony-award-winning costume designer for which he is best known, and the surprising truth is that Long is more folksy than he is Fierstein.

Yes, he owns homes in Massachusetts and Manhattan, has fabulous friends named Wasserstein and Stroman. But the 48 Broadway shows he has outfitted are nothing so special as this weekend’s Ivey-Long family picnic. Chicago, The Producers – even Hairspray – are far less compelling stories than the ones set on this little rural stage five miles south of the Virginia border.

Only one stretch of pavement shines brighter than the Great White Way for Long, and it is Main Street in Seaboard, North Carolina.

The Healing Place

Can a new doctor’s office breathe life back into a dying town? A visiting professor in the College of Design and a group of NC State architecture students are trying to find out.

Published in NC State magazine, Summer 2004

Around town hall in Seaboard, they’re calling it “the doctor business.” In a small town, the word “business” often has nothing to do with retail, of course. It’s just shorthand for the details of a story that everyone already knows, an asterisk for memories.

But this doctor business, this is something different altogether—at once familiar and unusual.

Last spring, 14 young people showed up at Seaboard’s door with nary a connection to the place, let alone to its stories. Their granddaddies weren’t born in Seaboard, their money wasn’t in the solitary bank and their families had never owned a single piece of farmland nearby. They had come all the way from Raleigh, driven 97 miles, just to listen to what the 695 residents of Seaboard—which is about 1 square mile in area—had to say about their hometown.

They wanted to know: What do you want more than anything else, for yourselves, for your children? What is your vision? They wanted to know: What will keep Seaboard from becoming an asterisk itself, a dot erased from the map of North Carolina’s endangered farming communities?

Now, just over from the abandoned Seaboard High School building, two doors down from the multifunctional town hall, those NC State architecture graduate students are adding a bit of new life to downtown. They’re building tiny Seaboard a doctor’s office.

The Wait is Over

After 51 years of playing the straight newsman, National Public Radio’s Carl Kasell ‘56 is tuning in his inner ham.

Published in Carolina Alumni Review, November/December 2001

The most important piece of information you need to remember about Carl Kasell ‘56 is that he does not drink caffeine.

It seems like a trivial fact, but if you listen to National Public Radio in the mornings, you understand. If you have a job, you understand. If you have ever been forced beyond your will to rise from your slumber while crickets are chirping – whether to feed a crying baby, blow a stuffy nose or embark on a trip – you understand.

Carl Kasell is a newsman. For the NPR Uninitiated, Kasell has done one thing and done it with near perfect aplomb since 1979. He has delivered the world and the nation’s headlines seven times a day at the top of the hour to a “Morning Edition” listening audience that is larger than NBC’s “Today Show” viewing audience. Like a Pavlovian response, when you hear the Goldsboro native’s voice, you know you’re about to get your news straight up, with nary a twist.

But listen to the man’s schedule. He starts his day at 1:05 a.m. – the extra five minutes, he said, are because he likes to “sleep in.” Then he drives from his townhouse in Washington, D.C., to the NPR studios downtown, arriving at 2 a.m. to prepare for his first newscast at 5 a.m. About nine hours later, he goes home to nap. He does this every weekday, and he accomplishes this task by filling a 20-ounce gray Carolina Tar Heels thermos (complete with dried brown shellacking on the blue lid) with decaffeinated coffee.

So, yes, there are other things to know about Carl Kasell. But pretty much all of them can be traced to the fact that he is the hardest working man in radio.

What it was, was prophetic

In the cereal bowl of America’s morning hours, Kasell (pronounced “Castle”) is indeed the Raisin Bran: a regular, dependable guy doing a necessary job for more than 10 million listeners. It helps that he perpetually sounds like a 1950s sitcom-dad.

Oh, the Places You’ll Go

 You may have been wondering what to do after medical school–or perhaps you haven’t had the time to even think about it. In any case, the possibilities are endless. Let these five physicians’ tales inspire you to explore your unique career opportunities. Your future awaits you.

The New Physician, September 2001

So there he was. The Jerk, in person.

Alice Brandfonbrener had no idea when she decided to go to medical school that she would one day wind up here, rustled from her office at Northwestern University in the comfy northern suburbs and called down to Chicago’s Van Buren “L” station, to treat a case of ordinary bronchitis. Of course, this case didn’t belong to just any ordinary throat. It was Steve Martin’s, and he was filming “Planes, Trains and Automobiles,” and if she didn’t get down there right away, well … ladies and gentlemen, I bid you to consider the cinematic disaster that might have unfolded. Did you laugh at “Planes, Trains … ”? Yes? Go tell Alice: “Thank you.”

The truth is, though, that the comedian’s cough was far less interesting than what comprises the rest of Brandfonbrener’s world as a physician in performing arts medicine. No, the Columbia University medical school graduate and Northwestern University professor doesn’t serenade her patients in the examination room; in fact, she’s not very musical at all. But what she does do is ensure that actors, musicians, vocalists, dancers and the like can perform their jobs without injury.

To the untrained, it might seem like a medical catering service for prima donnas with hangnails on their pinkies. But Brandfonbrener’s expertise–which she began to develop when she became the first staff doctor for the Aspen Music Festival in 1983–is widely sought after and highly technical. She learned, she says, “to combine traditional medicine techniques with knowledge of the instruments [the musicians] were playing, the way they were being taught, the way they were trained.”

And voila–a specialization was born. One that, despite managed care’s song and dance, is thriving among performers because it’s the only medicine that understands the real demands of their professions.

“We can speak their lingo,” says Brandfonbrener, who founded the Performing Arts Medicine Association. “We can ask about the medical symptoms they have, the aches and pains, in artistic terms. We can talk to them about what they can do–and avoid doing–in terms of their talents.”

Piano players, for instance, suffer from too much finger motion. They frequently don’t know how to use the full weight of their arms on the keys, and particularly in a classical musician who practices for hours, the physical effects can be devastating.

“We’ll see a lot of students right before exams or juries, because those are the times when they’re practicing the most and at the same time dealing with a lot of the emotional tension that goes along with it,” she says.

Many of the injuries she treats come as a result of poor teaching methods or just plain inhumane training hours. She spends a great deal of time educating performers and their instructors about healthy practicing.

And the field, she says, is growing, despite those within the industry who still believe her patients are “just neurotic musicians who were making it all up. This is life to these performers; their talents are what drive them.”

The Women of Chicago Blues

Published in Urban Explorer, Winter 1999

She kept the framed posters, the wedding album, the CDs, the videotaped performances, hidden in her closet for two-and-a-half years. Now it all lies tumbling about Dawn O’Keefe Williams’ cluttered apartment, memories unfolding on the stereo, the television and the coffee table, and her future wrapped like guitar string around it all.

“I thought it would be okay to see all of this again if someone else was here,” she says, as a videotape of her husband, Emery Williams Jr. singing – emaciated, two months before his death from lung cancer in 1996 – plays on before her.

Even before she met Emery, who shared the stage with greats from Eddy Clearwater to Koko Taylor, Dawn dreamed of making a living singing the blues. Emery gave the dream focus.