Drama King

You know Andy Cohen from your television. Not his face, necessarily, but his body of work: the runny-mascara reality empire to which the women in your life have become passionately addicted. The man is responsible for a lot of television. Some critically adorned (Top Chef), some culturally malignant (the delirious, multi-city Real Housewives hen party), and then some plenty popular but unremarkable beyond the circus tent of Andy's home network, Bravo. As the head of programming—Andy has puppeteered each of the many dozen reality shows Bravo has put out in the past seven or eight years—he's gotten his prints on huge chunks of pop culture. And along the way, the face of Andy Cohen has become increasingly inseparable from the kind of television he makes.

A few years ago, having recognized this—Andy's presence in those series, that they all seemed to breathe the same air—Bravo asked Andy to produce a new kind of television: his own show. Where he would step in front of the camera to confront, and more generally vibe with, the creatures of his own creation: Housewives, Hollywood stylists, designers of anything you can get paid millions to design. (All while Andy, his guests, and the zealous studio audience drain cocktails.) The result, Watch What Happens Live, has transmuted into a celeb-studded, five-nights-a-week 11-p.m. mainstay of volatile looseness—the only live talk show in late night and, I'd suggest, the most primitively authentic thing on television. As people in TV will tell you, there's stuff that can happen on a live show with booze and famous people that doesn't happen anywhere else.

See, Andy adores famous people, probably more than anything. It's tough to find a famous person he doesn't have history with—either a unidirectional infatuation or a forged friendship from his twenty years on the scene. But he's also eager to ask the kinds of brazen questions fans of celebrities most shamelessly want to ask. Secrets, gossip, regrets. It's prying but innocent and ingenuous, and guests seem to appreciate the candor. It helps, too, that they know the score, and are perfectly willing to give up the goods.

In the beginning, WWHL guests were famous friends of Andy's—prized pals he'd accumulated, in real life, over the years. They hung out in an audience-less studio and indulged his silly questions, played his made-up games. But as Bravo grew to become synonymous with Andy's specific brand of ubiquitous, deliberately gaudy reality TV (The Millionaire Matchmaker, The Rachel Zoe Project, Fashion Hunters), the famous people who loved Bravo shows (and, in particular, loved WWHL's self-aware chatter about those shows) were suddenly approaching Andy straight-out. And so after the move to five nights a week last January, instead of just filling the slate with Andy-friends and other popular "Bravolebrities," the roster of guests grew to include Jerry Seinfeld, Pharrell, Ralph Fiennes, Rachel Maddow, Mark Ruffalo, Larry King, Meryl Streep, John Mayer, Dan Rather, and a long list of others. (Rather took his first-ever on-air shot of whiskey at Andy's prodding.)

Here's something else that started happening around the time the show moved to five nights a week: Men were tuning in to WWHL in big numbers. Men who were maybe paying half-attention while their wives and girlfriends cackled at Flipping Out or a Real Housewives of New Jerseyreunion but who closed the laptop and locked in for WWHL.

"It happens all the time now," Andy told me in September. "Yesterday, for example, I volunteered at Cantor Fitzgerald, did this 9/11 charity day. And I walked onto the trading floor, which is like being in the locker room of a football team or something—there's a lot of testosterone. And every one of those guys knew who I was and had watched my show."

"I said this the other night on the show; I basically spoke directly to the straight men," he said. " ‘I know you're watching. I met you on my book tour. You come up to me everywhere I go. And I've figured out why you like me: I show a bunch of boobs and asses and good-looking women. I get your wives and girlfriends playing drinking games. I get 'em wound up, I get 'em drunk, and just when they're at the point where' "—he snaps—" ‘I'm off the air.' "

"You're their fluffer," I said.

"I'm their fluffer!"

***

A bunch of times this fall, I sat with the audience of eighteen in the "clubhouse" of WWHL. The set is a replica of the den in Andy's apartment. It's like that scene in Wayne's World when Wayne and Garth see Wayne's basement on the soundstage for the first time. It's gotta be a little heady. You can read a history of the show in the tchotchkes he's got on his shelves. Gifts from guests (a Justin Bieber doll, a Housewife's former breast implant), photos of Andy with '70s songstresses, a framed Lite-Brite of the St. Louis arch. "I feel like I'm in my home, like we're doing the show for party guests at my apartment," Andy says. "I still don't feel like I'm on TV."

It had been a not-so-secret dream of Andy's since he was a kid to be not just in television but on television. As a closeted teen in St. Louis, Andy watched a lot of TV: sitcoms and sportscasts and news hourlies and soap operas. He internalized the whole of it. Inside the box existed glamour, mass presence, fame, and influence; life was good inside the box.

Andy made a play to get on TV after a college internship at CBS News. A producer told him he had a good face, a good voice, abundant energy—but that his wandering eye might be a problem. What fucking wandering eye? Nobody'd ever mentioned anything about a wandering eye. His mom insisted the producer was nuts, and Andy believed her. But he doubled down on producing, and made morning-show segments for over a decade at CBS before eventually moving to Bravo. Takeaway: There was unsatisfied ambition. But after four years, the network recognized that Andy, having gotten pretty great at making stars, was becoming one, too.

"I'd worked with Andy on the little aftershows and Housewives reunions, and he was a stone-cold television talent," recalls executive producer Michael Davies. "He was the kind of person you spend your career looking for."

Each of the WWHL shows I attended was different, but the pre-game was pretty much the same—the audience members huddled up drinking in the lobby, swapping stories of how they scored invitations (it's a tougher ticket than you'd ever imagine; a pair of seats recently went for eighteen grand at auction, "something that's  happening quite a lot these days," Andy says), and then squeezing in on sawed-off benches behind the cameras. In that little space, on those little-kid benches in the studio, mouthing the words to One Direction singles, female audience members (and just as many men) have trouble controlling themselves as they wait for Andy to arrive. I saw a representative sample of guests—Bravolebrities, actors, musicians—but no one generated the same kind of physical anticipation as the host.

One show I attended that was pretty great: Liam Neeson and Ethan Hawke. Liam's a friend of Andy's. In fact, Andy gets serious during one of our conversations, discussing the moment when the network first approached him about the show, which happened to coincide with the death of Liam's wife, Natasha Richardson: "A friend of mine had just passed away, and I was in this state of shock. Here I was getting the biggest opportunity of my life, right at this moment when everything had been recalibrated in terms of what was important to me." So there's real history between Andy and Liam; it's nice to watch them together.

Ethan, on the other hand, is new to WWHL, but there's easy chemistry. Soon it's time for a game called Plead the Fifth. Andy asks you three tough questions; you can plead the Fifth on one. This is the part of the show that generates news. No pre-interview, no editing—gotta answer it live or suffer the antagonism of host and audience.

First question: "A Reality Bites edition of the little gamelet ‘Marry, Shag, Kill.' " Janeane Garofalo. Winona Ryder. Renée Zellweger.

Um, pass.

Second question, Andy asks Ethan who the most difficult star he's ever worked with is, and Ethan, after some knuckle-chewing, says: "Okay, you wanna know? I mean, this is the truth, hand on the Bible: William Hurt is a son of a bitch. I mean, holy shit." The third answer's pretty good, too. If he had to eat any co-star (à la Alive, that plane-crash movie Hawke did in the early '90s), who would it be? He has a seventh-grader's grin: "Angelina Jolie. That's pretty easy." (Later, while filming the web-only aftershow—where Andy asks more textured questions that would feel out of place in the snap-snap of the live show—Ethan calls Jolie "the kind of woman people write novels about...a major-league woman.")

At the commercial break, though, Ethan's all regrets. "Dammit, I should've said I'd eat the dog from White Fang." He's especially banged up about Hurt: "Man, I shouldn't have said that."

"He won't see it," Andy says.

"He's gonna be in the back of a cab on the way to the airport and he's gonna get a little snippet of it."

Andy makes a face like it'll never happen, and then they're back.

Andy asks Liam some questions, too. "Rumor has it that you are unequivocally the most well-endowed person in Hollywood. True or false?"

Liam: "Well, I'm told that Willem Dafoe and myself are kinda..." He does his hands like a tight horse race.

Andy: "Neck and neck?"

Liam: "Yeah."

Ethan: "The appropriate term is head to head.

***

I get a handful of pre-show exchanges with Andy, and in each instance, while juggling his makeup lady's preening and my questions, he's checking two things on his phone: popular questions for guests submitted via Twitter and Facebook—"People watching the show dictate what we're talking about"—and St. Louis Cardinals scores.

Andy has invariably said that his Cardinals fandom was the only thing growing up that "didn't scream G-A-Y." And this isn't, like, an actress's convenient glomming onto the Lakers. Andy fixates on Cardinals gamecasts like Philip Roth characters lean into the radio in the '40s and '50s parts of his novels. His dream guest? Cardinals third baseman David Freese. Before Andy threw out a first pitch at Busch, three separate guests—Jerry Seinfeld, Bob Costas, and Matthew Broderick—offered the same advice: Whatever you do, don't stand on the mound, and don't bounce it. Andy ended up way high and way outside, he says: "the gayest pitch in the history of baseball."

One night, Andy's running through the show's lineup, deep in prep for guests Donnie Wahlberg and Jenny McCarthy. He's all lit up—a harkening to adolescent Andy.

"Jenny McCarthy was the one I thought could turn me straight," he tells me. "I thought that if I could just get my shot with her, it could happen."

Andy and some of his producers talk through a game he's gonna play that night, Dare or Dare. Donnie just has to guess whether Jenny'll do the first thing or do the second instead.

"Do you think she'll show me her tits?" Andy asks a young producer.

She shrugs, and then shakes her head.

"Can I say, ‘Can I feel your boobs?' "

She scrunches her face. "Maybe you can say touch..."

"But I'm gay."

"Yeah, but I don't want you to ‘feel' my boobs," she says.

"But it's Jenny McCarthy!"

In the end, Andy just has Jenny lick his face. Also, after confessing the whole turn-me-straight fantasy on-air, she's totally inspired: "You have no idea how good I'd go down on you," she says. "I have a masculine energy," she adds during a break. "But! Then I have fun bags, too."

Before they go out there together, before his 2-D teen dream presents in the body of a pretty bangin' 40-year-old, he knots his tie around his neck in his dressing room, yawns ("I usually don't catch a second wind until 10:56"), and conjures what I imagine to be a freeze-frame image on his big-backed Sony Trinitron of Singled Out-era Jenny.

"Man, I wanted to fuck her."

***

The line for Andy's West Village book signing spills out of the store and onto the sidewalk. For such a dependably present and responsive force on social media and live television, he doesn't do meet-and-greets all that often. This is the rare opportunity to see Andy in person, a chance to face-to-face with "the neighborhood celebrity," as one woman describes him. (And this in a downtown neighborhood with plenty of more famous residents.) It happens not just in New York or L.A., but when I went up to Boston with him, too—that recognizability, and, like, waaay-down-the-sidewalk recognizability. He belongs to a lot of people, it's proprietary—that's how they feel.

The reason WWHL is important above all else, I'd argue, is that same super-real quality that generates the enthusiasm for Andy. The newness. The way the things that feel fully recognizable and ubiquitous—that is, reality television and late-night talk show—are, in Andy's hands, combined and made not just fresh, but completely new. How we feel like we're seeing some of these people as we can't see them anywhere else.

Quick: Name the current Real World cycle; how many seasons of Idol are we now—six, nine? Is Survivor still on? Those shows, and all of the reality-TV photocopies they spawned, have become untethered to their beginnings. And so, cut like a bundle of balloons, they all sort of just float around, indistinguishable from one another. You watch any reality show, you're watching the same show. ("I'd like to think," Andy has said, "that were he alive today, Warhol would be painting the Housewives.")

***

But WWHL positions itself differently, sorta next-generation. After all, live is different. Live, late night, booze: even differenter. Live, late night, with reality stars and non-reality-TV stars (who are, though, living in a reality-TV-seeming reality we pay a whole lot of attention to) who come on and act super-real. Just big-time makeup, some lady wraps, bottomless cocktails, and Andy. It's the new thing in real.

When the line hooks through the front door at the signing, a pair of assistants hand out plastic cups of something called a Corpse Reviver No. 2 and Andy's favorite, "Fresquila." "Like a Prayer" plays dutifully; Andy ended his book's dedication, "And of course to Madonna. Just because." A Miami Housewife, camera-ready, cuts the line and surprises Andy. He does seem surprised. And not as happy to see her as she is to see him. (This seems to be a common dynamic between Andy and many of the Bravolebrities: The adoration is mutual, but unbalanced. In many cases it seems Andy loves them like people love their pets, whereas the stars seem to love him like pets love the human who's rescued them from the pound.)

"I feel a weird kinship with them, 'cause I actually feel responsible," he says. On-air, Andy is skilled at maintaining a legit allegiance to his Housewives—and all guests, more generally—while simultaneously winking at the audience. "I think on my show or at the reunions, I can sense if the camera's on me, and if they're getting my response. And I feel like through my expressions, it's fairly clear what I'm thinking. But at the end of the day, first and foremost, I'm always an enthusiast."

The conservatively suited man in front of me in line looks like Guy Pearce. He bounces on his toes and preps with his partner. "We've been together thirteen years, married for three, and three kids," the guy, Mike, tells me. "But thirty minutes a night, Andy is my fantasy husband."

Mike is an assistant principal at a high school. He pulls mints from his bag, pops a couple, and confesses, "I don't act this way with anyone else, about anything else."

When it's his turn, Andy stands—he's wearing flip-flops, for some reason—and Mike explains to Andy that he is his fantasy boyfriend.

Andy: "I'm your boyfriend?"

Mike: "No, this is my boyfriend. Husband. You're my fantasy boyfriend."

Andy: "So I'm your free pass?"

Mike: "Oh, 100 percent. I just brought Steve along to keep me in line. My best friend said she was less nervous about me meeting Obama, 'cause at least I'd be able to act appropriately with him."

Andy starts inscribing the title page, while Mike straightens his face and thanks Andy for what he's done for the LGBT community, especially for young people. Andy lifts his pen and thanks Mike in the eyes. Then Mike pulls out some things that had been squirrelled away in his assistant-principal brief—a mazel sweatshirt, mainstay WWHL paraphernalia—and Andy poses for a series of photos. In one, Andy rests his head, doe-eyed, on Mike's shoulder. "You know, I worked out an extra half hour this morning," Mike says. "Had to."

When it's my turn, I hand Andy my copy of the memoir, Most Talkative. It's a totally entertaining book. Energetic anecdotes from his wide-eyed proximity to the making of pop. He clacked out a manuscript, without assistance from a ghostwriter, in four months last fall. And yet the book feels written by two people—one whose seriousness about news and the business of TV is unmistakably that of an executive and one who's pure junkie, pure fan. The slivered contact ridge between those two halves is where WWHL exists, how it comes off.

Andy's excited to see me. Not for any particular reason except that he knows what to expect—I'm not gonna catch him off guard with a strange request. He shows me some of the gifts he's been given tonight. Jack Spade cuff links. A hat rainbowed in sequins like Funfetti cake. A letter, enumerated as a series of fifteen thank-yous. Thank you for keeping your hair salt-and-peppered. Thank you for helping me come out. Near the bottom, the guy mentions that he worked out twice that morning in anticipation of their meeting.

"These workouts are a thing," I say.

"I guess it's a thing!"

Andy fills the title page with thick, runaway lines, like a Keith Haring sketch. Thought bubbles, motion lines, a signature, and finally: Don't make me look like a douchebag!

10 Essentials: Tommy Fazio

PROJECT president and fashion director Tommy Fazio is out to change the scope of trade shows. After working as fashion director at Nordstrom and as an executive at Bergdorf Goodman, Calvin Klein, and Simon Spurr, Fazio's first order of business since taking over PROJECT in November is to make PROJECT feel less like a traditional tradeshow and more like a retail floor.

"We're taking a highly merchandised approach," Fazio said. "I want to create this really compelling destination where innovation, commerce, and service converge, and I want to bring a really strong editorial point of view to the show through trend forecasting and helping the newer, younger brands with how they should present their clothes to the retailer."

Starting today, PROJECT NYC will be held for the first time at Pier 92, and Fazio is looking to implement his vision even more fully at PROJECT Vegas in February. We spoke with the fashion world veteran about his daily uniform, his favorite book, and what he drinks to keep himself energetic and health

1. Prada Navy sport coat
"Two years ago I was in Milan and I lost my luggage. I was on my way to Fashion Week and I needed a navy sport coat, so I ran to the Prada store, slipped one on, and it was like putting on something you've had your entire life. It's a very simple two-button navy sport coat, and it's lightweight wool, so you can wear it up until it's really hot in the summer. It's become the staple of my wardrobe; I never leave home without it."

2. Raleigh Denim Jones Original
"The Jones Original style are the most comfortable skinny jeans made in America. It's raw, unwashed selvedge, and it's the most well-crafted jean I've ever had on my body. I've worn raw denim from a lot of different brands, but you know how when you wear raw denim, it's sometimes really stiff and uncomfortable? This one is cut so that it's not like that at all, and somehow it doesn't turn your hands and chairs blue."

3. Thom Browne white oxford
"I've been wearing Thom Browne white oxfords for about 10 years now, and I probably wear a white oxford five out of seven days of the week. These shirts are all about craftsmanship, quality, and comfort, and you can dress them up or wear them sporty."

4. Hermes blanket
"I've had it for 10 years, and it goes back and forth from bed to sofa, depending on where I am. It's like my security blanket."

5. The Tipping Point
"Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point sits next to my bed every day. It's an inspirational book, and it kind of drives me in my career. It motivates me to keep pushing forward and to try new things and take chances in life. I've circled my favorite line several times: 'You never know unless you try."

6. L.L.Bean camo tote bag
"When you carry the L.L.Bean camo tote bag everyone is like, 'Oh my god, that bag is so chic, what is it?' And you're like, 'It's L.L.Bean. It's $22.' Everyone thinks its Trussardi or something because it looks so good. I have many versions of it all over my house, including one with the GQ logo and one with my initials on it. That is just a carryall that you can pack up to go to work, to the gym, or as a carry-on on an airplane."

7. Smythson writing folder
"My Smythson is black leather grain, and it has a notebook inside and a place for your business cards and pen. It goes everywhere with me—even if I go to dinner I bring it, because if I have an idea, I write it down. I also started last year to print out my week's calendar and put it in the folder, because sometimes I'd rather look at paper than at my phone."

8. Henry
"My number-one essential in my life is my English Cocker Spaniel, Henry. He comes to work with me every day and he's super, super personal—he's like a human. He sits on the chair next to me, and sometimes I think he makes decisions for me."

9. Organic Avenue shots
"When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I do is I walk Henry, and the second thing I do is go to Organic Avenue and have a ginger and wheatgrass shot, every morning. The ginger helps to keep you from getting a cold and it gives me a lot of energy, and the wheatgrass is great for clarity and it has great essential minerals and vitamins."

10. Max at Chelsea Barber
"I couldn't live without Max. I've had a shaved head for almost 18 years now, and Max has been my barber for 10 of them. I was walking through Chelsea one day and I thought, 'You know, I'm not going to go all the way across town to get my head shaved.' I walked in and this young, lovely gentleman said 'You're next,' and I sat down and it was the perfect, perfect shave. I've never stopped going back, and I sometimes go twice a week."

My Prized Possession

Abdul Abasi
Co-owner, Nepenthes NY

Abdul's prized possession:
Maison Martin Margiela Line 22 Shoes

"Several years ago while on summer vacation in Paris, I stopped by the Maison Martin Margiela boutique and discovered the most interesting pair of dress shoes I'd ever seen. They were from Margiela's Line 22 and I loved their punk sensibility: a black patent leather upper liberally sprayed with an iridescent bronze treatment and laced with thin purple ribbons. I was hooked—until I saw the price tag, which was not college-student friendly. So regretfully, I settled on a German army version of the same shoe; it was beautiful, but not the one I'd fallen in love with. A few months later, a friend spotted the shoes at an NYC designer consignment store—and selling for considerably less. As soon as he told me, I was there trying them on. Amazingly, they fit perfectly. I bought them and subsisted on pasta and PB and J for a few weeks. To this day, the fascination and beauty of the shoe hasn't waned."

Siki Im
Designer, Siki Im

Im's prized possession:
German train conductor pants

"I bought these conductor pants in a vintage store in Cologne, Germany when I was 16. I love their fit and the details on them. They have a button fly, which is the only kind I wear, and they're baggy—back in the day, I used to skate in them because I wasn't into skate clothing. I was very careful to make sure they didn't get too much wear."

Richard Haines
Illustrator, What I Saw Today

Haines's prized possession: Church's suede wingtips

"These chocolate suede wingtips are from Church's. They're the color of powdered truffles, only these last much longer—31 years, to be exact. They were a gift from the first Perry Ellis men's show I worked on as a designer. Today, they give me the same jolt of sexiness and style as they did back then—A testament to their quality and good design."

Mordechai Rubinstein
Photographer, Mister Mort
Rubinstein's prized possession: Banana Republic brown fedora

"As Chassidim, we start wearing a fedora (usually in black) three months before our bar mitzvah at age 13. The winter before my bar mitzvah, I was at South Street Seaport with a friend and we happened into Banana Republic. This hat was on sale there for $19.99 or $29.99 and, while it wasn't black, it was really talking to me. I knew I'd get in trouble if I wore it to Yeshiva, but I had to have it and it fit my tiny head perfectly. I'll never forget wearing it outside while my buddy (also around 12) chomped on a cigar. Who were we kidding, trying to act all grown-up? Thanks, Banana and Nat Sherman, for the moment."

Robert Geller
Designer, Robert Geller 
Geller's prized possession: Creative Growth for Everyone T-shirt

"It must have been three or four years ago when Stella Ishii, the founder of the News  fashion showrooms in NYC told me about this project she was working on, called Creative Growth for Everyone. It's a line that features screen-printed images from artists from the Creative Growth Art Center, a non-profit for adult artists with developmental, mental, and physical disabilities. I was really blown away by how cool the designs were. For the lookbook shoot, she asked a couple of designers to wear them and she gave me the one that I wore. That was the first time I wore it, and there haven't been many days since when I've taken it off. This T-shirt wouldn't be my oldest friend, but it's definitely my closest. Over the years, it has become super-thin, and the color is fading into these great sepia tones that you can only get from a lot of wear and sunlight. It's just the right kind of oversized, and it's so light it feels like wearing nothing at all. Back in April 2009, when I opened my first pop-up store on the Lower East Side, I managed to get a white paint all over it during the build-out. At first, I was a little bummed, and then I just turned it inside out and kept wearing it every day. You can still see traces of the paint, but it's always a reminder of that time—my first Robert Geller retail experience—which was really exciting for me."

Jared Flint
Art Director, Park & Bond
Flint's prized possession:
Astros Nolan Ryan T-shirt

"I have no idea why I still have this shirt. It's about 15 or 16 years old, and it's huge. Like, XXXL huge. It's from a summer baseball league I played in toward the end of high school in California. It's survived dozens of moves through Indiana, Hawaii, Kansas, and even Brooklyn. I never wear it. Never. But I never throw it out—it always makes the cut. Anyone with a Manhattan-sized closet realizes the premium on space, yet I've always employed a resigned reticence to toss this one in the trash (and there's no way I would bequeath this Astros muumuu to anyone.) So, while prized Dunks and the Hundreds shirts were long ago picked up by the local Salvation Army, this piece of shit stays around. I've got two theories as to why it's survived:

1) It's my Rosebud. A reminder of carefree days in California, tossing baseballs around and getting Slurpee's, with nothing to worry about except how to score some beer for the weekend and other clichéd scenes from Dazed and Confused.
2) After somehow making the first couple of moves out of my parent's house, I've developed an unconscious and begrudging respect for this behemoth of cotton. It's the Bird to my Magic, if you will. I'd like to think the real answer lies somewhere in the middle."

Christopher Bastin
Creative Director, Gant Rugger
Bastin's prized possession:
Gant Rugger for ACL & Co. handloom madras shirt

"This madras shirt is from a collaboration I did with Michael Williams of A Continuous Lean. I'd been reading A Continuous Lean since the beginning, and immediately knew Michael Williams was 'one of those dudes'—he had me at 'Americana,' so to speak. I was a rookie in the New York scene when I first met him, and when he asked if I wanted to do a collaboration, it was the first sign to me that we were on to something good with Rugger. It's a very special project to me. I had this vintage Gant shirt in the archives that I knew would be perfect in madras. Till this day, it's one of the nicest madras checks we've done. I've worn the crap out of it, but I stashed away two of the prototypes in my closet, so I'm good for another ten years. It also keeps me from becoming too chubby—huge bonus."

Pick Up a Few Unconventional Between-the-Sheets Techniques from Jason Sudeikis

Quick: Name two actors who are not in Movie 43.
Yul Brynner and Olivia Wilde. And that's on purpose.

I assume, from the breast count (two pairs) in the (two-minute) trailer, that we should expect gratuitous nudity?
I know I am not naked in this film. But in this day and age you can count on at least boobs, and sometimes even the penis. The penis shows up more and more.

And are you poised to show that?
Uh, male frontal nudity for comedy's sake? I don't think so. I've never been a shirt-off, pants-off kind of comedy guy.

What about for drama's sake?
Well, it would be very dramatic for me. Because my parents still go see all my movies. But just because they go see everything I'm in doesn't mean they need to see everything that's in me.

I heard you on Marc Maron's podcast talking about how you almost joined Blue Man Group pre-SNL, which is mind-blowing.
Yes! I was in Las Vegas, performing with Second City at the time. I had sort of lost a little bit of love for the art form of sketch comedy and made friends with the Blue Man Group guys. So I auditioned—and really went for it, too. The acting was easy, but the drumming was like not having my lines memorized. I was sweating cobalt blue.

Do you get a pang of sadness when you see the show now?
No, I still love it. I just think it's so funny and so smart and relevant. You know, I did feel a little bit like a boob when the geniuses at Arrested Development—and I mean that sincerely—made Tobias so fascinated with it. I was kind of like, "Aw, man. That was me." One hundred percent. But I like to think Mitch Hurwitz and the Arrested gang, in the back of their heads, were like, "No, it's a cool show."

For Valentine's Day, could you give our readers some tips on how to land a fiancée like Olivia Wilde?
Oh boy. First off, when she's speaking, keep your eyes open. Also say "please" and "thank you"—that was very helpful. And most important: Just mean what you say and say what you mean.

That's very genuine. Recently, Olivia joked that you guys had sex like Kenyan marathon runners. So you guys wear short shorts and numbers on your backs?
Yep, and we have a guy who gives us little cups of water. To be honest, she was misquoted. If there's any legitimacy in entertainment journalism, I'd be remiss if I didn't correct it: The actual quote was "We fuck like Kenyan marathon runners."

Oh, sorry. Yes. Totally different.
Things get lost in the translation. But everything after, from the word sex on, is accurate. When we're both done, we tear through a little piece of tape. And you gotta put Band-Aids on your nipples, otherwise you're really raw.

The Beyoncé Outtakes

 

Beyoncé had so much to say in GQ's February cover story. And now, in the wake of that piece (not to mention news of her upcoming Super Bowl reunion with Destiny 's Child and performance at Obama's second inauguration), so do her fans. With the Twittersphere on fire about the GQ article and great Terry Richardson photos, let it never be said that we are not listening. When we read Tweets like this—

Michelle Janaye @michellejanaye
I would love to know what @msamywallace left #out of her cover story on Beyonce http://gqm.ag/Vlccu2 #LetMeSeeYourNotebook. #journostuff

—we got out our notebooks and got busy. Herewith, some outtakes from our interview that address some of the concerns of Beyonce's public:

From Twitter:
Bigg-EE @EASports_21
I'm confused didn't beyonce just have a baby? Why do she still look amazing perfect body nd perfect face. Jay-Z your lucky

bee$h. @BigBEESH
Beyonce & Jay Z have a beautiful relationship.

Lily @LilyZiegler
Beyonce & Jay Z = coolest couple in the world.

@_SHEdanie
Why does Beyoncé never where her wedding ring, what's the point then? You're married, you should where you're wedding ring.

From the GQ Interview:
"I was independent before I met my husband, and we have such a natural chemistry and a genuine relationship, and it's based on the things that relationships are supposed to be based on. I've seen, growing up, when a woman or a man in a relationship—it doesn't matter which one—doesn't feel confident, they feel a bit trapped. Your self-worth is determined by you. You don't have to depend on someone telling you who you are."

--------

From Twitter:
Brazzers @Brazzers
I totally forgot that Beyonce is totally a MILF now.

Sin Jensen @blasianbabe_
Beyonce is the definition of a perfect woman

From the GQ interview:
"When I gave birth, that was the first time I truly let go and surrendered. And it taught me how amazing that feels... Giving birth made me realize the power of being a woman. I have so much more substance in my life.  And expressing that excitement and that sensuality and the connection I have with my husband—I'm a lot more comfortable with that now. I actually feel like my child introduced me to myself."






---------





From Twitter:
Realyze @Realyze4
Idc what nobody say Beyonce baby didn't come from her, she faked the pregnancy

Dee @DeeThicke
She probably had a surrogate pregnancy RT @_anadina: the million dollar question. RT @TheOnlyReed: Was beyonce really pregnant?

Anadina M @_anadina
I truly don't believe beyonce carried her child, but what do I know.

From the GQ interview:
"I felt like I kind of had to protect my mother, because when people made up the silliest rumor about me not really being pregnant She was there when I went through all of those things. And my sister.  They were very, very defensive.  It's not personal to me, and it comes along with the job, but the lack of respect—people  will just go too far sometimes."

-------

From Twitter:
Beyonce Lite @BeyonceLite
"I am so proud to announce the first original Destiny's Child music in eight years!" - Beyoncé http://www.beyonce.com/news/destinys-child-love-songs ...

Stephhh. @_stephhhIV
Destiny's Child is going to reunite midway through Beyoncé's Super Bowl performance.

Kristen James @_krissyj
The Super Bowl just got SO much better! Two Words: Destiny's Child! http://bit.ly/UEO5mf

From the GQ interview:
The members of Destiny's Child "were my family, and still are my family.  Unlike solo artists that started out, my foundation is being in a group and being with other women that needed—we needed each other so much. I mean, it's harmony.  And we were super tight.  We could walk into a room and not give each other the key and sing in perfect harmony. It gives me chills. So that union, that unity, that sisterhood, it is how I grew up.

-------

From Twitter:
Martin @thisisfail
Before Beyonce sleeps, she watches the show she did the night before, critiques and writes notes to improve others. #Virgo

Head HoncheauX @JAiiNDeauX
Get a Virgo "@JoelGreen: I want a woman with the work ethic of Beyonce"

From the GQ interview:
"Because I'm a Virgo, I will think myself into a crazy frenzy, and I will re-think and re-think and figure out, you know, way too many things."

---------

From Twitter:
cabbie richards @therealcabbie
A look into the Big Brother machinery of @beyonce by @msamywallace for @GQMagazine. Also, the photos are FIRE.

From an outtake that didn't make the GQ story:
Ed Burke, Beyonce's visual director and the co-director of her new film, knows precisely when his boss first realized she needed to exert more control over her realm. It was in 2005, he says, when MTV shot a bunch of footage of her, but later wouldn't let her use it. "Back in the day, MTV used to do all the B-roll for making a video," Burke says. "They did that, and used it for whatever they shot it for." But he says that when Beyonce asked to use the footage for her own purposes, MTV told her "she had to pay. She goes, 'But it's my image.' That's where it all started."

Beyonce hired Burke, a Brit who trained to be a teacher, not a filmmaker, as a full-time videographer. Early on, he wasn't entirely sure what she wanted him to do. "I will always remember one day, I was sitting in the back of the car, filming, and Bey and Angie, her cousin, were sitting in the front seat, talking about life, and Bey looked round, and goes, 'Oh, you don't have to film this.'  And I said, 'Well, how do I know if it's going to be good?'  And Angie laughed, and goes, 'He's got a point.' From then on, the access has been incredible, to the point where every facet of her life I've shot."

Here's the way it works now: If MTV or Access Hollywood or anyone else wants some footage of Beyonce and Beyonce thinks it's a good idea, Burke shoots it and lets them borrow it. "It's a win-win," Burke says. "They get better access—that's what we tell them—because I'm in the dressing room, where they would never be," he says. But Beyonce owns the footage. Same with still photos.

--------

From Twitter:
Beyonce De @BeyonceDe1
New Teaser For Beyoncé's HBO Documentary Has Bey Showing Off Her Bare Baby Bump http://on.vh1.com/Vss63n @VH1Music arac1l1 1yla

Courtney Pugh @CourtPugh
RT @jwilphotos: So I guess Beyonce is gonna be a daily topic until Super Bowl Sunday -> then her HBO documentary is 2 weeks later lol!

Raina K @discoparties
this article is funny cuz last week i made a joke about beyonce making a doc about herself called beyonce, starring beyonce

Raina K @discoparties
written & directed by beyonce, produced by beyonce, sound edited by beyonce, catered by beyonce, etc...

From an outtake that didn't make the GQ story:
Michael Lombardo, HBO's programming president, says when Beyonce's agents first pitched him and revealed that she was co-director, "my first response to myself was, 'Okay, that doesn't sound like something we normally would do.  It sounds a little bit like it's probably going to be a fluff piece,'" Lombardo recalls. "We have a long history at HBO in the documentary world and in the music world, and, the notion of any person of note being responsible for the editorial choices in a story about themselves is something I approach with some degree of cynicism." But after he watched the 90-minute film, he says, "I was entranced. I couldn't get it out of my head."

This was confusing, Lombardo admits, because what Beyonce had created was neither a concert film like Lady Gaga's 2011 ode to her Monster's Ball tour nor a warts-and-all, hard-hitting documentary. "It's some of that but not quite any of that," he says. "You feel the struggle of someone who has been handled for so long searching to find the part of her that she can disclose to the public. That vulnerability of someone searching for the comfort place where they're willing to be more than the image that has been fed to us—I was incredibly moved by that. Yeah, it's a brand play, it's an image play. It might be the most astute sort of self-packaging that we've ever seen. But I dare anybody to tune in and turn it off."

The Best Place to Eat Right Now Is In... A) a hospital B) a car wash C) an arcade D) a ballpark E) all of the above

Michelin-worthy taco trucks. Locavore-Popsicle stands. Foie gras carts. Gourmet cuisine is popping up everywhere. But does the fennel-crusted Berkshire pork belly suffer when it's served near an emergency room? Brett Martin set off on a cross-country search for the most delicious food in the most unlikely places.

And so here we are, under the arc lights, under the Southern California stars, on a picture-perfect summer evening in America. The kids are arriving, headlights swinging slowly down La Brea, down Beverly. They're cruising, looking for parking, checking out the scene at the car wash and gas station on the corner.

I myself am driving a brand-new bright red Ford F-150 pickup truck. This feels important. If you've never been in one of these monsters, it's hard to describe how mighty and right it makes you feel. You understand why men who drive trucks drive like assholes: (a) There's a good chance that, despite mirrors the size of a normal human car's hubcaps, they simply don't see other vehicles. (b) In some larger, existential sense, all other vehicles have ceased to exist. Driving an F-150 makes you want to run over smaller, lesser cars. It makes you want to invade smaller, lesser countries.

Paddled

Finding my way in Beijing was tougher than I'd ever imagined. But sharpening my skills at a local youth academy for ping-pong—a game at which I'd dominated friends back home for years—seemed like an opportunity not to suck. So what if it meant beating up on little kids at the school and old men in the park? This would be my key to assimilation. Nice plan—but then I stared down the pre-teen pong machines and got my first real taste of China's national pastime.

On my first day at Shichahai Sports School, the elite athletic academy in Beijing, Coach Chang introduces me to his ping-pong class. "We have a new American student," he says, peering out from behind the prescription sunglasses he wears indoors. As all eyes turn toward me, I feel a rush of nerves. It's like day one of kindergarten again, only this time I have chest hair. "He claims he's been playing for more than ten years," Chang goes on, "but from what I've seen, it looks more like ten days." The class erupts into high-pitched giggles.

We're lined up in one of the school's three basement ping-pong halls, a huge gymnasium with 27 tables, a Chinese flag hanging on the wall, and video cameras mounted everywhere. ("For security," says Coach Chang.) Whereas most students attend Shichahai after distinguishing themselves at smaller regional schools around the country, I just walked in the front door mid-semester and paid the exorbitant $25-a-class foreigners' rate. (Chinese students pay $1,500 to $5,000 a year for morning academic classes and twice-a-day ping-pong lessons, plus room and board.) I enrolled knowing I'd be one of the older students. I didn't realize it'd be by a factor of three. Flanking me are two dozen gangly 9-to-12-year-olds in bright jerseys, hiked-up shorts, and near-identical buzz cuts, yet I'm the one who looks foolish.

You could call it karma. I have a history of cruelty when it comes to ping-pong. As a kid, I'd trounce my little brothers so badly over our family's table that they'd cry. When I lived in a group house in D.C. after college, I'd plant myself at an end of the table my girlfriend bought me for my birthday and pick off challengers one by one. It wasn't their fault. I simply operated at a higher level, unleashing slices and cross-slams and sidespins unfit for social settings. I took it seriously too, chatting away while ahead but getting real quiet and whispering to myself when the score tightened. Eventually, friends stopped accepting my invitations, roommates made excuses. Most people know a ping-pong jerk, and all my life, that was me.

When I left the comfort of D.C. for a job in Beijing last summer, ping-pong seemed like a natural in. The sport was everywhere, and I figured the history of "ping-pong diplomacy" that led to the re-opening of relations with the U.S. in 1971 might lend my presence some much-needed gravitas. It also seemed like a rare opportunity to not suck. Moving to a new country, especially China, is an exercise in crippling humiliation. Hailing a cab, asking directions, ordering food, even attempting to digest that food (with occasional ugly results)—every activity reinforces one's ridiculousness. Even friendly encouragement—Chinese people tend to lavish praise on foreigners for their Mandarin, no matter how shoddy—can feel infantilizing. I especially feared the challenge of making and keeping Chinese friends. Ping-pong would be my salvation. It would not only help me meet Chinese people, it would earn me their respect. Whereas in the U.S. ping-pong enjoys about the same esteem as dodgeball, China puts its champions on prime time. I'd prove I was more than just a big-nosed idiot foreigner—I was a big-nosed idiot foreigner who could excel at a sport they revere. If ping-pong could make Chinese people like Nixon, I just might have a shot, too.

My first opponent at Shichahai, a smiley kid named Wang, stands eye-level with my chest. On the orders of Coach Chang, we edge up to a nearby table and start rallying. Though rallying couldn't be less accurate. Wang serves. The ball bounces over the net and hits my side of the table. I strike it with my paddle, it springs over the net, and does not hit his side of the table. It doesn't hit anything. This must happen 25 times in a row. The physics are all wrong. It's like instead of a paddle I'm holding a pancake.

I get ushered off to a side table, where an older coach named Zhang is making like a human ball machine. Standing at one end of the table, he draws balls from a bucket and sends them skimming over the net. Each serve travels at the same speed, same angle, same rhythm. A student, hunched over like a wrestler, returns them in perfect metronomic time. All at once ping-pong looks like a sport.

When it's my turn to rotate in, Zhang begins by correcting my grip. I use the traditional "handshake" hold, same as most Americans, and the paddle hangs loosely in my fingers. I expected to learn the "pen" grip used by many Chinese players (and Americans trying to look cool). No need to switch, Zhang explains, but he moves my thumb in a way that keeps the racket locked against my hand, and bends my wrist sideways to make the paddle an extension of my arm's line. My forehand stroke now looks like a robot ninja salute.

Coach Zhang serves to me. Using my new stroke, I don't hit the ball so much as graze it. The ball topspins its way down, the table exerting its own gravitational pull. Zhang serves until the bowl is empty, and another student steps up to drill. "Good!" Zhang says in English, giving a thumbs up. I feel gleeful, if also condescended to by his big English "Good!" But mostly gleeful.

The floor is littered with hundreds of balls. Drenched in sweat, I get down on my hands and knees to collect them, and as I crawl an errant shot smacks me in the face. I stand up and prepare for the next lesson. Coach Zhang says we're doing forehands again. "What about backhand?" I say. "Maybe after another eight or ten classes," he says. Some of these students have been training since they learned to walk. "No rush."

As the weeks progress, my classroom humiliations don't disappear so much as take on subtler forms. I arrive one morning during my second month to find two kids facing the wall. I ask Coach Zhang why. "They were being stupid," he says. After several minutes, they receive the second part of their punishment: They are forced to drill with me.

Another day, I come to class with a cold. When I line up with the rest of the students, Coach Chang tells me to stand on the other side of the room, lest I contaminate China's future. Most of the students at Shichahai go on to regular high schools and universities, many of which recruit for ping-pong, but the best ones graduate to Beijing's youth squad, the Beijing team, and, in a handful of cases, the national team. It's entirely possible that I've been getting wrecked by a future Olympian.

That thought consoles me when, playing a match against a little guy with a massively out-of-proportion head, I can't seem to score. The old moon gravity is back, and every ball I strike flies over the far edge. Just one point, I tell myself, one point and I'll be happy. I'm losing 10-0, when the kid deliberately serves the ball off the table: A charity point, another student later explains, to give me face. I lose 11-1.

Still, I feel my game improving. Intention and results start to align, at least during drills. Whatever muscles are engaged by bending down for hours while swinging your arm back and forth are getting stronger. But bad habits linger. I plant my feet. I don't twist. I flick my wrist lazily instead of building spin into my stroke. It feels like I need to re-learn everything daily. Try as I might, I'm not a child. "My son is easier to teach than you because he is a blank slate," Coach Chang says, referring to his 6-year-old. "He can't do much, but everything he does, he does right. You try hard, but you do everything wrong." To prove it, he parks his son in front of a table and starts a cross-shot forehand drill. The kid might as well be playing patty cake; he doesn't miss.

Explanations of Chinese ping-pong dominance range from the pseudoscientific to the cultural to the systematic; while Europeans and Americans are big and strong, Asians are quick and nimble, I am frequently told by Chinese ping-pong enthusiasts. (Never mind Yao Ming or the 2012 Olympic gold medal-winning, world record-setting weightlifter Zhou Lulu.) The Chinese also think strategically, says Chang—something he says I would understand if I read classics like The Water Margin or The Art of War. Then there's China's vast ping-pong infrastructure, a network of local, city, provincial, and national training centers that teach players using the same methods and promise their best players a life of wealth (some make close to $1 million a year) and fame (top players like Ma Long and Ma Lin are household names). Since 1988, when table tennis became an Olympic sport, Chinese players have won 24 out of 28 possible gold medals.

But China's greatest strength may be its sheer numbers. Teodor Gheorghe, the coach of the U.S. women's Olympic ping-pong team, remembers visiting China with the Romanian team in 1970 and hearing a Guangdong official lament that the province had "only 5 million players." "You can imagine how we were shocked," Gheorghe says. Unlike soccer or basketball, ping-pong doesn't require much space or equipment—just a table, two paddles, and a net (or lacking that, a row of bricks). Just as no one can throw a baseball quite like an American boy or dribble a soccer ball like a Brazilian kid, your average Chinese child grows up knowing his or her way around the table.

The Shichahai students and I get along, but in the same way they might get along with an intelligent dog. When they demand to see a one-dollar bill, I thumb one from my wallet and point out George Washington. "He's America's Mao," one of them informs the others. They ask me about the U.S.—mostly the prices of things, like iPhones—and I tell them as much as I can before they stop listening and start curiously stroking my arm hair.

One day, I rally with a tiny kid who looks like he's about to fall asleep. He serves lazily, his body limp and his eyes almost fully closed. I start mimicking him, and he laughs. Bingo. I finally have a plan.

We play matches at the end of class in which students rotate from table to table, each facing everyone else at least once. My first opponent is a kid with a bruise on his face where a classmate kicked him the other day. (They're cool now, he assures me.) I serve the first ball normally. On my second serve, though, I suddenly pull in my chin, puff out my cheeks, and bug out my eyes. He panics and hits it into the net. Next serve, I cross my eyes. His return sails off the end of the table. My strategy is working. I keep it up, flashing a goofy yokel overbite, rolling my eyes back into my head, and making farting sounds as I serve. He still wins the game, but I've discovered my secret weapon—my crane kick. The next game, I'm up against a stringy kid who can't stop laughing when I pretend to fall asleep while serving. It's the first match I've won.

This should probably count as cheating, but it feels like a breakthrough. I've turned my disadvantage—my ridiculousness in these kids' eyes—into an edge. I've out-10-year-olded the 10-year-olds. Later, when discussing my progress with Coach Zhang, I guiltily confess my clown strategy. To my surprise, he smiles and nods with approval. "That's wisdom," he says.

···

After several weeks of classes, I'm ready to face my first real-world test: Beijing's pensioners. It's a clear spring day—the sun actually looks like the sun, not a dull yellow moon—so I bike to a park on Houhai, a man-made lake in central Beijing, where I know I can find some pickup pong. The park is strewn with track-suited seniors engaged in a tableau of Chinese exercises. A slack-faced woman glumly rotates a giant yellow wheel, one of many pieces of public exercise equipment installed in the run-up to the Olympics. A man is draped across two railings doing full-torso sit-ups. Another in Coke-bottle glasses and a beanie pads around with his arms frozen in mid-air like he's wearing a pair of invisible water wings.

When I approach the ping-pong tables—two marble slabs resting on blue steel bars—heads turn. I'm not the first foreigner this crowd has seen, but I may be the first with his own racket case and balls. A man in a fake fur hat asks to see my paddle. He holds it by the face and taps the handle against his head, judging the quality of the wood by its sound. "How much did it cost?" he asks. Twenty-five yuan at a supermarket, I say. "The quality isn't good," he says. (A coach at Shichahai was not impressed: "Supermarket—banana, orange, apple," he said, in English. "Not ping pong.") The man in the fur hat shows me his racket. The padding on one side is fresh—he just replaced it himself—the other side is bare wood, with a deep indent where his knuckle has worn it down over three decades. "This one was three-and-a-half yuan," he says. Not only will I crush you, he implies, I will do it affordably.

A husky lady in a pink puffy vest is playing a gray-maned gentleman in orange socks and shiny black sneakers. She insists I take her place. The man, Mr. Jiao (paddle: 500 yuan), serves. He flips the ball into the air with his open-palmed free hand, the sphere nearly grazing the bare branches of the trees above us, and then clips it over the net with a stomp of his foot, perfectly timed to disguise the sound of the ball against the paddle, so I don't know whether he's hitting it with the racket's soft side or its hard side. Sometimes he gets fancy and tosses the serve from behind his back. His moves would seem more ridiculous if they didn't work so well.

Athletes always want to compare their sports to chess—fencing is chess with swords, boxing is chess with concussions. But to a greater extent than any game I know, ping-pong really is like chess, and the reason is spin. Every ball requires a split-second calculation, as the player identifies its spin and responds with the appropriate counter-spin. "In chess, you can predict the next three or four steps," Coach Zhang says. "In ping-pong, the possibilities are endless."

Mr. Jiao's spin jujitsu puts me on the defensive from the start, and he wins the first game. I get more aggressive, trying to fight spin with force, and, with the help of several strong gusts of wind, I win the second. The third is tied 10-10 and goes into extra points. He beats me with a shot that nicks the table, or, in Mandarin, a "scrape-side-ball." After weeks of getting destroyed by children, a close loss to an adult feels like a victory. We shake hands. "You don't speak very fluently," he says. I take the honesty as a compliment.

If there's one thing you learn playing American sports as a kid, it's that everyone gets a trophy. But after three months of ping-pong training, I still have nothing to show for my efforts except a wilted ego and a blister on my thumb. So when I hear there's a local tournament scheduled for early May, I sign up. The site is North Riverside Park, home to one of the city's swankier public ping-pong facilities (i.e. it has real nets). The tournament seems like the perfect chance to prove how far I've come. But first, I undertake a Rocky-style training montage.

The Shichahai classes have raised my game, but don't offer much individual attention. I need a mentor, I tell a ping-pong buddy I met at Houhai. He says he knows just the guy.

When I shake hands with Coach Deng at his ping-pong shop across town, he has just eaten, so we sit and talk—I bring a friend along to help translate—while he digests. He's bald and round and speaks with the rasp of a lifetime smoker, or perhaps just a lifetime Beijing resident. He's not a ping-pong player himself, he explains; he creates ping-pong players. "Any player I stand behind, he will win," he says, lighting a cigarette.

Between drags, he dispenses advice for the tournament. First, clothes: Wear a warm shirt for the morning, and a light shirt for the afternoon—if I make it that far. Food: "The night before, eat noodles," he says. "But only eat till you're 60 percent full." The morning of? "Noodles," he says, but this time only till I'm 50 percent full. (After hearing all about China's "Three Represents," "Four Modernizations," and five-year plans, I've gotten used to numerical specificity.) I should also be sure to bring a snack to the tournament, Coach Deng says, preferably two chocolate wafers. For lunch, I should eat noodles, followed by one more chocolate wafer in the afternoon.

I take this down, and we set off for a basement ping-pong club nearby. Inside, it looks like a fallout shelter. A long fluorescent lamp flickers above two tables. Posters of ping-pong greats hang on the walls. This, I tell myself, is where champions are made. We rally. He tests me with some tricky spin and notes my reactions, or lack thereof. Something feels off. I can't concentrate. It's like everything I learned, I've since unlearned. I can tell he's disappointed, and this makes me perform even worse.

After a while, we break and I ask him what he thinks. "Let's start with your strengths," he says. "Your strength is you enjoy yourself." I wait for more. "Your weaknesses," he goes on—and then proceeds to list every aspect of the game: My grip is wrong, my stroke is flimsy, I don't rotate my torso, my feet don't move. The last few months suddenly feel pointless. He gestures to one of his friends, who plays ping-pong like I imagine Bruce Lee would. "He is in the sky," Deng says. "You are on the ground."

I ask what this means for the tournament. "Eighty percent of the people there will be better than you," he says. "You can barely play." Getting to a level where I could compete, he said, would take three years of practice, two sessions a week.

He then inflicts what might be my worst humiliation yet. We play a game, and he lets me win. I don't actually win—he just deliberately loses points, knocking balls way off the table or into the net. I might score points here and there, is the implication, but only because he allows me to. "I wanted to encourage you," he says afterward, grinning. Whatever his intent, the effect is the opposite. After months of being treated like a moron, this—the suggestion that I would celebrate when I know he threw the game, an act that wouldn't fool a pre-schooler—is the final insult. We don't see each other again.

···

The day of the tournament, I get up at 6 a.m. and bike over to the park. An hour before the games begin, the fenced-in ping-pong area is already bustling, each table flanked by competitors warming up. I rally with a man named Su, who used to work in the railway industry. He asks where I'm from, and I tell him the U.S. "You have about 200 hundred years of history, right?" he says. "Right," I say, "a bit more." He seems unimpressed.

I draw a number to see who I face first. When I spot my opponent, I'm encouraged. Phenotype aside, he could be my grandfather. The refs call our number, and we start rallying. His shots are simple, unadorned—a positive sign. Finally it's time to start. The old man serves.

At least I think he's served. My paddle misses the ball completely. Suddenly it's my first day at Shichahai and I'm getting aced. The next shot caromes off my paddle into tomorrow. It takes me several points to understand what's going on. He's got some wacky sidespin I've never encountered, and I'm not sure how to return it. I try working out the geometry in my head—if it's spinning this way, then I have to move my paddle like... By the time I calibrate, he's applying different torque, and I fail to return that shot, too. I don't even think to make a farting noise.

I'd like to say this is where I discover a spiritual reserve deep inside me or bust out some secret move I've been practicing but haven't quite mastered, only to pull ahead in a blazing comeback of furious glory. Because if that's not what happens, why even tell the story? What I actually feel as the points slip away—sorry—is the weight of failure far heavier than any single game of ping-pong deserves. A year of fears and disappointments, from language flailings to job concerns to What am I even doing here? glom together in a stomach-pit of anxiety. Months of training have produced the same results as if I'd spent that time playing Wii Tennis—possibly worse.

At least it's over fast. I lose two games in a row, 11-4 and 11-6. My opponent, victorious, comes over to shake my hand. His name is Han. He's 66. He says he's glad to see young people playing, since most of them just waste hours with video games these days. I ask how playing now is different from when he was younger. "I'm a lot slower now," he says. I empathize.

While we're chatting, the lady in charge of the tournament hands me a blue jersey with the league's acronym: DSBHQYX. (It stands for desheng binhe qiuyou xiehui, or "Victory Riverside Ball Friends Society.") It's supposed to be for the winners, but she says I should wear it anyway because people will want to take photos with me. No matter that I may be the worst player to swing a paddle on this court in its three-year history, I still receive special treatment. I wear it anyway.

···

A few days after the tournament, I take Coach Chang out to dinner at a restaurant that serves Chinese and Western food. He brings his wife and son, who, he reminds me, could thump me at a table. He tells me about the 20-plus years he spent teaching ping-pong in Japan, and the way it opened up Japanese society to him—from professors to politicians to industry leaders. I tell him I'm not sure ping-pong has done the same for me in China. As much as I've played, I still feel as if I'm treated as a combination clown-mascot-business opportunity.

Then again, that's what I am. It seems like an American tendency to insist we're exceptional, but then travel abroad with limited cultural knowledge and language ability and expect to be treated the same as everyone else. This attitude also presumes that the greatest sign of respect from a Chinese person is for him to pretend you're Chinese, too. That idea might make sense in the U.S., where for many—including many Chinese—assimilation is the goal. You can become American. But radical acceptance doesn't exist in China, I found, and to expect it is to misunderstand the place.

I try and articulate all this to Coach Chang. He looks at me through his tinted lenses. "You're white," he says. "Sorry." When he first moved to Japan, he had trouble being accepted. But once he spoke Japanese fluently and had lived there for a few years, he was just like everyone else. That's not going to happen for me, he says. No matter what you do, your accomplishments are always the numerator over the dominator of your foreignness.

There's a phrase among expats in China: LBH, or "loser back home." It refers to someone who gets undue attention here, particularly from Chinese women, but in his native country has no friends. When it comes to ping-pong, I'm the opposite: I was a winner back home. I left home in order to lose. Any self-help guru will tell you losing is instructive: It teaches patience and grace. It puts victory in context. It inspires greater effort next time. And while patience and grace may not be the first words that come to mind when I look back on a year of regular linguistic mishaps, irregular bathroom runs, and being out-ponged by people half my height (including 6-year-olds and 60-year-olds), these small failures have reacquainted me with both. They've also shown that sometimes, when facing long odds, it's not just OK to give up, it's important to. As Coach Deng said when I asked him if I had a chance at becoming a ping-pong champion: "Next life."

A Reading Man's Guide to Dirty Books

Chicks may like to read about sex. But guys? You won't catch us hunkering down under the bedsheets with soft-core sensation of the year Fifty Shades of Grey.   We require, you know, pictures. Right?  Tom Bissell,  a connoisseur of the finest literary smut since before the age of consent, is here to tell you otherwise.

John Updike
Couples (1968)

No. 1
John Updike
Couples (1968)

When I was in the sixth grade, I got my hands on a hardcover copy of John Updike's Couples. A few adults in my orbit—teachers, parents, friends of parents—took note. For them, "John Updike" wasn't a name so much as a signifier of literary urbanity. So I'd sit there before class, in Catholic school, reading Couples, which is filled with scenes involving "fumbly dripping genitals," astonished that my teacher wasn't rushing over to pull the book from my hands and douse me with a fire extinguisher. No one, I realized with a thrill,has any idea what's actually in this thing.

Soon after I finished Couples, I read another Updike novel, Rabbit Is Rich (1981):"To stick your tongue in just as far as it would go while her pussy tickles your nose. No acne in that crotch. Heaven." Hang on. Crotches can have acne? Good to know! If I ever have children of my own, I'll be planting the dirtiest Updike novels I can find in all my home's high-traffic areas. The best way to encourage reading, especially in these digital times, is to remind young people how sexually diabolical good writing can be.

Nicholson Baker
The Fermata (1994)

No. 2
Nicholson Baker
The Fermata (1994)

Nicholson Baker's The Fermata is probably the most good-natured sexy novel of our time, despite its having one of the most potentially sinister and disturbing setups imaginable. Its narrator, Arno Strine, has been blessed with the ability to freeze time, producing what he calls "the Fold," through which he alone is free to move and loiter. (A fermata is, technically speaking, a pause in a piece of music.) In another writer's hands, this planet-stilling conceit might make for some nifty hunk of Inception-like sci-fi, but Baker uses it to explore the inner terrain of imagination, male desire, and loneliness, for what Arno likes to do while in the Fold is take women's clothes off, touch them a little, and masturbate.

It helps that Baker is among our greatest living prose stylists, able to describe a time-frozen woman's breast as a "hot heavy ostrich egg" and the female anus as "discrete, singular, clearly bounded, focused, in contrast to the bounteous plied gyno-confusion of the vadge." Baker is particularly good on ejaculation, coming up with so many ways to describe the grand event ("I released one-liners of sperm up her forearm"; "I would send forth four gray stripes of fatherhood") that he might well be the Picasso of come. The best passage in the book describes the difference between male and female urine discharge, the latter falling from between a woman's legs "confusedly, in a stegosaurian fan." There is more loving, observant detail in this passage than  E. L. James has managed in 1,600 pages.

Alan Hollinghurst
The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

No. 3
Alan Hollinghurst
The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

Alan Hollinghurst's The Swimming-Pool Library was once described by none other than Nicholson Baker as containing an "initially kind of disgusting level of homosexual sex"; yet Baker also ranked it high among the finest first novels he'd ever read. As a non-gay man, I don't find the level of homosexual sex contained in the book disgusting. If anything, I find it conceptually overwhelming. The Swimming-Pool Library is like a gelateria of erotic variability: interracial, intergenerational, rough, soft, quickies, hardies, scaries, get-the-fuck-off-me's—The Swimming-Pool Library goes everywhere, sexually speaking, provided no women dwell there.

Hollinghurst's story is primarily concerned with two men: William, who is pretty and young and brilliant, and Charles, who is old and rich and desperate. William and Charles need each other emotionally and intellectually but not sexually. They meet while seeking out anonymous sex at a public restroom in London, during which Charles has heart trouble and William saves him. Hollinghurst is a tender and lyrically fussy writer, which means his sex scenes can be astonishingly sad and mournful. When one of William's lovers gets undressed, Hollinghurst takes the time to notice "the red blotch of an insect bite in the tender, creased skin at his waistband."

It's been said that repressing homosexuals created Proust, whereas liberating them created Cabaret. Maybe so, but it also created The Swimming-Pool Library, an immensely sexy gay novel every straight man owes it to himself to read.

Nic Kelman
girls (2003)

No. 4
Nic Kelman
girls (2003)

Nic Kelman's girls feels like a drug-fueled sex party's bleak days-long hangover. Yes, Fifty Shades of Grey plays around with bondage themes, but girls explores the far more insidious bondage of being a man with a brain—and by "brain" I mean the primitive Neanderthal brain that hastened our escape from the savanna by telling our loping ancestors to fuck whatever they felt like fucking. Reading girls is like wandering around a strange city at night with money in your pocket, loose women on your mind, and great black wings flapping in your chest.

There aren't really any sustained characters in girls; it's told mostly in a second-person "you" that floats between various rich older men involved with various young—sometimes alarmingly so—women. The women, moreover, tend to be sex workers, as in the book's opening vignette, which involves a businessman in Korea deciding to summon to his room a prostitute who turns out to be younger than he anticipated. As the man begins to touch the girl, he notices "how clumsy" his fingers are, "how enormous, how ugly. Like a gorilla's."

This is not a misogynistic book, though its characters are often misogynists. Nevertheless, girls mixes up vividly detailed sex scenes with episodes of sociosexual horror so successfully that I imagine many women could read it only by turning the pages with tongs. The distinct type of misogyny Kelman's most interested in cataloging is, at any rate, less a hatred of women than a hatred of human existence itself.

Kelman doesn't shrink from the more nightmarish aspects of sex. One older man swings a teenage girl around so that her "little breasts" meet his "hungry mouth," and as he stuffs his fingers into her, he notes that she "couldn't have weighed more than a hundred and five pounds"—a line that made me nearly physically ill. But if I'm honest, I must also admit the line triggered an awful kind of animal arousal, too. Kelman's prose cracks right through the soft shale of what we think sex writing should properly address and shows us the petroleum darkness agush at fathoms the civilized mind no longer cares to explore.

James Salter
A Sport and a Pastime (1967)

No. 5
James Salter
A Sport and a Pastime (1967)

It's somewhat shocking to realize that James Salter's A Sport and a Pastime was published within a decade of the final relaxation of American censorship. The book's sex scenes are so raw, sad, and beautiful that its prose seems to exist outside aesthetic time. These pages could have been written yesterday or pulled from a steamer trunk sealed tight for a hundred years at the bottom of the ocean.

Salter's nameless narrator, a man wandering around provincial France sometime in the early 1960s, meets another young American, named Phillip Dean. After a few brief, ghostly scenes involving the two, Dean wanders off to take up with Anne-Marie, a poor and somewhat plain 18-year-old French girl. Soon enough, Salter's narrator is watching the young lovers court, fall in love, undress, have sex, and drift apart. Much of what the narrator tells involves experiences he has no direct access to. As a result, the book feels like an innovatively triangulated hybrid of memoir, novel, and dream.

Salter's prose is the functional equivalent of sex, thrumming and disassociated and suddenly hard and breathless when it chooses to pounce and linger: "The trains are running on time. Along the empty streets, yellow headlights of a car occasionally pass.... With a touch like flowers, she is gently tracing the base of his cock, driven by now all the way into her, touching his balls, and beginning to writhe slowly beneath him in a sort of obedient rebellion."

The great mistake most writers make in writing about sex is approaching it as though it merits special attention. It doesn't. It simply merits the same attention one would give weather, a face, a tree. Describing the sexual act requires no specialist vocabulary, no raising or lowering of diction, and absolutely no euphemism, which is a tool of the craven. In that sense, A Sport and a Pastime could be the aspiring writer's how-to guide. Its sex scenes, most of which are brief, are so rich with conflicted emotion and churning ambivalence that no one who's ever been young and in love will be able to read it without wincing, as when Dean notes Anne-Marie's bad breath or her homely "shopgirl's" face moments after making love to her. Isn't at least half of what makes sex sex what we're thinking while having it? Not all those thoughts are kind. Some, in fact, are privately cruel. Intimacy with another human being is nothing if not being constantly aware of how easily you could hurt them.

I'm not sure that fans of Fifty Shades of Grey even want to read about sex. With all due respect to Sue (and Sue's husband), I think the book's success is more about its modernization of the Harlequin-romance formula—a kind of de-vampirized, harder-edged Twilight. It's not about sex so much as it is about tunneling into the densely protected heart of a Dark Unavailable Man. Or maybe the Grey books' zillions of readers just want to be abused, and the flog that comes down on their backs is one of nerve-deadening prose.

A hot literary sex scene is, above all else, truthful about sex as it's felt and experienced by actual human beings. A bad literary sex scene is cynical—a commercial for impossible sensations. Writers who write about sex effectively unprivatize privacy; they remind a reader that he or she is not alone in kink or quirk. To write about sex well, you have to be brave. To read about sex well, though, you have to be honest. You have to be willing to be turned on, and you have to be willing to be disgusted; you also have to understand the difference between being turned on and being disgusted. That's the nutshell history of  censorship: turned-on people claiming to be disgusted.

Reading about sex takes two of our most private selves—the sexual self and the reading self and makes a two-backed beast of them. It allows you to wander into a library and discover an orgy. It makes you smarter and more attentive and might even make you a better lover. Once again, gentlemen: Read to the lady, why don't you.

Ben Affleck: Filmmaker of the Year 2012

After he directed a couple of good movies, you probably thought: Eh, Boston crime flicks? Big deal—he barely left his backyard. But now, thanks to his globe-trotting, Oscar-caliber Argo—a gripping period thriller slash pitch-perfect showbiz satire— there's no denying it: Ben Affleck is a world-class filmmaker. He explains to Chris Heath how he hit rock bottom and reinvented himself as Hollywood's newest heavyweight

"I'm a little bit scattered and frazzled," Ben Affleck declares. His third movie as a director, Argo, is a few weeks from opening, and he has been doing all he can to help it on its way. These days, he explains, he's reluctant to push himself too far to promote movies where he is just an actor—some reasons for this may become clear later on—but when he is the director, everything's different. "I direct a movie," he says, "and I'll stand out there in a chicken outfit with one of those twirling signs: FIVE DOLLARS OFF CHICKEN IF YOU SEE ARGO."

Perhaps it's in that spirit—sign-twirling salesman in a chicken suit—that Affleck initially engages with today's conversation. Never mind that Argo, based on the unbelievable-but-true tale of how the CIA set up a fake Hollywood science-fiction B movie in an attempt to smuggle six Americans out of Iran during the embassy crisis of 1979, is plenty good enough to prosper on its own merits. Its director—and its star—is also prepared to do whatever he must, which these days tends to require his acquiescence in the telling of a simple, three-part story about Ben Affleck's life so far: the rise, the fall, and then the unexpected reemergence as Hollywood's latest actor turned director with the golden touch.

All three parts of that story are, broadly speaking, true, but the full tale is a lot stranger and crazier and, at times, much more brutal. And as we begin to linger on some of the more extraordinary details, Affleck becomes increasingly animated. It feels as though it's been a while since he has really talked this through, and that he might still have as much to work out about what happened to him as anyone else.
Ben Affleck was a child actor, if not exactly a child star. His big success was a long-running educational science TV series called The Voyage of the Mimi, in which he was inquisitive and smart and keen and a little dorky. Acting was all he ever wanted to do, a delicate ambition to hold in a family with a father who had once wished for the same. "I lived with this tremendous fear of failure," Affleck says, "because my father was a playwright and a director, and I think he did a couple of things as a child as an actor as well, and he...he failed, basically. Not just being an alcoholic and stuff. He didn't do what he said he was going to do. He worked with guys who later became famous, like James Woods and Dustin Hoffman, and he wasn't successful. And that wasn't going to be me."

Affleck explicitly connects some of the missteps he would make later in his career to this fear of failure. "That definitely drove me," he says. "It drove me and drove me and drove me." But if it hurt, it also helped. "I have it to blame for some choices of working for money," he reflects, "and I have it to thank for not giving up."

Affleck became friends with Matt Damon when he was 8. Damon was 10. At that age, a two-year gap is huge and an unlikely one to have bridged. Damon's bicycle was too big for Affleck to ride, he remembers, and Damon could simply blow him away on the basketball court. But there was something that balanced everything out. "I was littler and I was younger, but I had done acting," he says, "and that's something that Mattwanted to do. That's the thing I had." He was happy to share it. Affleck introduced Damon to his New York agent, who was pleased to sign up Damon, too: "He had the perfect look—blond-sweet-all-American-boy kind of face." After that, the two of them would travel down from Boston together to fail at the same auditions—for The Mickey Mouse Club, Batman & Robin—and would share lots of intense-young-actor talk, planning out careers they hadn't yet earned any reason to expect. "I remember," says Affleck, laughing at their presumption, "we both decided that the ideal career to have was Robert Duvall's."

After the usual years of struggle came the miracle of Good Will Hunting. "It was a product of a time in one's life that is actually kind of magical—when you've become capable and have yet to realize that you're fallible and that you're going to die," Affleck reflects. In the movie, Damon was the lead—the instinctive math genius who may or may not learn to cherish and use his talent—and Affleck was the kindhearted storytelling manual-laborer friend who, for his comrade to soar free, would have to be left behind. Much of what the two of them put into the screenplay was drawn from their own lives, but it took Affleck a while to realize that some people also assumed that this overall dynamic was true. "Like 'Here's the lovable dim friend who's along for the ride' or something," he says. "And Matt was a math genius! I didn't even realize it for a long time, because it was such a positive experience. It was only two years later I had a conversation with a girl in the business, she said something along the lines of, 'I thought you were the dim-witted friend—you're pretty bright.' I was shocked. I had this moment of profound reflection: Does everybody think this about me?"
fake-teeth-getting part of my career.' " Affleck seems unsure to this day whether this choice counts as an iniquitous compromise or as common sense and a free upgrade. "I guess I'm torn between my vanity and my principles still."

More big roles followed. Exactly how and when the tide turned against Affleck is complicated, but certainly one of the first markers was his second Michael Bay movie, Pearl Harbor. "The problem was," he says, "that Michael just wanted to make Armageddon putting it in an aircraft carrier in World War II. You can put it almost anywhere, but you can't put it in the Second World War." Still, Pearl Harbor is one of those movies that, while remembered as something of a fiasco, was actually a significant international hit. And so Affleck, who deferred his usual fee but got a share of the profits, presumably made a fortune.

"Yeah, it worked out pretty well," he says evenly. "Yeah. Although I feel like I earned every penny. I remember someone doing a joke that said, 'That movie Pearl Harbor is the worst thing that happened to America since Pearl Harbor.' "

What are the chances of you ever making a third movie with Michael Bay?

"Uh, I don't have any interest in engaging in that sort of speculation."

The truly grim years were 2003 and 2004. One factor surely was that all five movies he released in that period (Daredevil, Gigli, Paycheck, Jersey Girl, and Surviving Christmas) were disasters of one kind or another. But it was also because the public simultaneously seemed to lap up and obsess over—and yet be disdainful of—every unremarkable aspect of his relationship with Jennifer Lopez. I had remembered a vague sense that he went through a particularly rough period, but reading back through the coverage of him in daily newspapers, it's shocking how casually poisonous it was. Here are some representative comments from respectable newspapers in that period:

There is something unbearably smug and self-satisfied about Ben Affleck.... In the history of Hollywood, has any person in his position made more wrong choices over an extended period of time?... Affleck's got a big-man-on-campus, aren't-I-fabulous vibe to him, a yappy confidence in interviews that suggests no one thinks Ben Affleck is quite as funny and charming as Ben Affleck does.... And they say we don't torture people.... Neither Lopez nor Affleck has a scintilla of the talent, epochal hold on us or enduring iconic status of their illustrious predecessors.... It's time to put Ben Affleck out of our misery.

I read two particularly blunt examples out loud to Affleck. One is: At the risk of generalizing, there may not be a person on the planet who is more socially acceptable to hate. The other: It is fashionable at the moment to loathe Ben Affleck. To be honest, the guy makes it easy.

"It's as mean-spirited a thing as it is kind of permissible to say in an editorial capacity," Affleck says in response to the second. That one comes from The Boston Globe. "My hometown paper."

Looking back, whatever Affleck's real or perceived shortcomings, the viciousness of what was said about him now looks like a kind of collective lunacy. "At the time, I knew on some level, 'This is insane,' " he says. No one on the planet was more socially acceptable to hate? Really? "What was that guy's name who killed his wife and dumped her off the side of a boat?" He supplies the answer himself. "Peterson. I remember thinking he actually gets slightly better treatment than I do in the press. At least they had to say 'alleged killer.' Unfortunately there's an aspect of that that's like one of those fights you see on YouTube where one of them falls down and then a bunch of people who were standing around come over and kick the person. They don't know them, they have no involvement in the fight, but they recognize a moment that they can get a free shot in, and for some people it's just too much to resist. And that was definitely me at that point. I was the guy. I was the designated person to loathe."

He's still trying to work out exactly what it was all about. "The amount of venom—I must have touched some specific little place in the consciousness," he says. "I don't believe I didn't deserve any negative judgment for anything, but it was just way out of whack." He couldn't recognize in himself the person he was suddenly assumed to be. "People decided that I was the frat guy, even though I've never been inside a fraternity, or the guy who beat them up at school, even though that wasn't me at all." There was also something about the way the public saw him and Lopez, as though they were each simultaneously unworthy of the other, both making some kind of laughably terrible mistake, some kind of humiliating blunder that involved race and gender and class and talent, so that both were acting in a way that was inauthentic, that was a shameful betrayal of who they really were. The notion that they might be two people who just happened to have fallen in love was given short shrift. (About Lopez they were, if anything, even harsher. Affleck mentions how glad he was when Lopez appeared recently on American Idol so that the public finally had a chance to see that she was a perfectly pleasant person.)


Part of the contempt centered around a perception that they were courting this kind of attention, deliberately living out a romance in public and for publicity. Affleck suggests that he and Lopez emerged as a famous celebrity couple at the exact moment that the market for celebrity-gossip magazines exploded; that they were caught in the crossfire, and also blamed for the public's simultaneous desire for and revulsion over all this endless coverage. Though Affleck and Lopez did do an unbearably cloying joint TV interview on Dateline, and probably updated the world about their ongoing romance in more detail than they needed to, there's little evidence that they went looking for what they received. "The most pernicious illusion, myth, was that this is something that this guy wants," says Affleck. " 'He's wanting this much coverage.' That's the most unappealing thing that you can say about somebody. And I knew how disastrous it was. It was the last thing I wanted, and I could tell it was damaging me, and I tried to get away from it, but there was still this idea: This is what this guy wants, he's a shallow guy, a camera whore or whatever. And there was no convincing people that that wasn't the case." The more he speaks about all of this, the more it's clear that, once reawakened, the torment—and his bewilderment over what overtook him—is still fresh.

He does concede some mistakes. "There were ways I did contribute to it, still kind of naively. Like these car dealerships would often say, 'Hey, do you want to drive around a car? Go take it as long as you like. You can drive this Rolls-Royce for nothing, for free.' The Boston kid in me thought, 'This is great! What a deal! I can just drive this car around. Let my friends drive it.' But then this image of a young guy in a Rolls-Royce was very off-putting to people. Probably be off-putting to me now if I saw it. And I didn't quite have the wherewithal to be smart about that at the time."

By the end of it all, Affleck had a series of failed movies, a failed relationship, and some of the worst press anyone has ever earned for doing little more than acting and being famous and occasionally showing a little clumsiness at both. He was left feeling battered by it all, an experience that he says "was really bad for me in all kinds of different ways, particularly in terms of my emotional life, my sense of self."

Did you strategize how to deal with it, or did you just run away for a while?

"I think I just ran away. You can only handle so much. I moved for a while to this place in Georgia that I have, was able to get away, by and large, from stuff. Come up with a plan for how to do something with my life that doesn't put me in the crosshairs of this sort of thing."

···

Affleck decided that he wanted to direct a movie. The last time he had directed anything was as a student in California: a precociously themed short about a film director who goes mad. "About how people who are creative are indulged," says Affleck. "And they can do anything outrageous just because they are successful." He didn't write the script, but he did come up with the title: I Killed My Lesbian Wife, Hung Her on a Meathook, and Now I Have a Three Picture Deal at Disney.

Now he wanted to direct a real feature film. At the time he had little optimism about how, even if he managed to pull it off, a movie directed by Ben Affleck would be welcomed. "I just assumed it would be received poorly," he says, "because it seemed the way that people wanted to talk about me." But Gone Baby Gone, a modestly budgeted dark thriller adapted from a Dennis Lehane book and starring his brother, Casey, was received warmly. "Nobody went to the movie, but we got pretty decent reviews."

Back then, there was another measure of success or failure that stuck in his head. He had never thought of Gone Baby Gone as the first step in a bold new career, but somebody told him that about 80 percent of the members of the Directors Guild of America only ever make one movie, and when he heard that he was determined not to be one of them. "The first day of The Town was one of the most satisfying days of my career," he says. "For better or worse, I'm going to have made two movies." The Town was a tale of crime and love in Boston, and this time Affleck directed himself in the lead role. Affleck says that The Town tested poorly in previews, and so it came as a surprise when it was not only acclaimed but a substantial commercial hit. Now, with the early enthusiasm surrounding Argo, Affleck suddenly seems to be reinvented as someone who can do little wrong.

When asked what he may be good at as a director, Affleck talks about allowing actors a freedom to relax and time to succeed, and about having the patience to edit performances meticulously, and about looking out for the kind of special moments he cherished when he watched movies ("...that great moment where Brando turns around and looks at Martin Sheen...this incredible moment in Glory where Denzel is getting whipped and looks up...") and building a movie around them, and about a focus on a kind of simplicity ("My movies are unadorned, they're not particularly fancy, I think they're kind of workmanlike in some ways, focusing on the writing and the acting"), and most of all about the pure amount of effort he puts in. "I appreciate the fact that I get to do it, and I work really, really hard. I went into it thinking, 'I'm new at this,' but I also went into it with a healthy sense that I needed to succeed, and the one thing I could control was to work as hard or harder than anyone else."
Why did you need to succeed?

"It just felt like life or death to me."

···

Our conversation takes place on the top floor of the Beverly Hilton, chosen because it is where a key scene in Argo was filmed. During the shoot, this room was full of actors dressed as bad-science-fiction aliens for a press event intended to drum up authentic-seeming publicity for the fake film whose production is devised as cover to smuggle the six Americans out of Iran. Today there are just the two of us, seated at a very small table in a large empty room. Hotel staff periodically come by to inquire when everyone else will be arriving.

As we talk, Affleck eats a burger. On the way here, he was caught in Los Angeles tra c and suddenly realized that he was alongside the TMZ Hollywood Tour and that he had been spotted. He gamely waved to the passengers and clearly was as charming as the situation required. ("Very cool guy, drove right up next to the bus and said hi to everyone," someone aboard later tweeted.) But Affleck tells me that it soon got awkward, because the tra c forced the two vehicles to shuffle forward together, and the TMZ host began to bombard him with family questions. Eventually he turned off into a store's parking lot, not because it was somewhere he wanted to go but because it was somewhere they wouldn't.

Soon he'll be returning to the family they were asking about: "There's going to be three maniacs screaming and running around the house." Affleck explains how skillfully his older children—he has 6- and 3-year-old daughters as well as a baby son born earlier this year—are learning to stretch out the bedtime ritual by increments, day by day. "But it's sweet," he says, "and washes away all the other stuff."

Affleck is married to Jennifer Garner. They got together at the end of that period when everything was at its lowest. "It was a really, really good thing that happened to me around the time that it was nice to have something good happen," he says. "And she's just a great woman and a great friend." As well as, he says, a stellar mother: "She has such wise and certain stewardship over these three characters that I love so much."

Which presumably allows you to sweep in to be hero dad.

"Oh, believe me, I'm always trying to sweep in and be hero dad, give them things they're not allowed to have, just completely pander to them. 'Have you had dessert yet?' 'You guys want to watch TV?' "

···

Affleck is not without ego, but he seems sincere about the fact that he considers his directing career only in its early days and that there is much more he can learn. To this end he is currently giving himself a methodical education, a process triggered by the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die and his realization that he'd seen far too few. (His favorite discovery so far has been the work of John Cassavetes: "I totally ripped off The Killing of a Chinese Bookie for the L.A. sections of Argo.")

That's also the reason why he took the latest of his now occasional acting roles for another director in Terrence Malick's To the Wonder. Affleck is well aware that the result may not be to everyone's taste. "I understand it got booed quite thoroughly at [the Venice Film Festival]," he says. "Honestly, you have to want to see that movie—there's hardly any talking. It's a tone poem. If you don't want to see that, you should not go." Affleck had a fair idea of what he was getting involved in because when he met Malick for lunches and dinners beforehand, Malick would tell him things like, "Just more and more I'm more interested in silences"—which is a slightly unusual thing to say to an actor you're about to cast in a movie. Malick also told Affleck he wanted him to be like Gary Cooper, but when Affleck showed Malick some Gary Cooper tapes he'd put together, Malick was horrified. "Oh, no no no! He's just rattling on!" Malick exclaimed. This wasn't the Gary Cooper of Malick's memory: "Gary Cooper, he just stares off."

They filmed for eight weeks in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. "The experience of it seemed half-crazy in that we didn't really have dialogue, so I didn't really know what was happening. Then I realized that he was accumulating colors that he would use to paint with later in the editing room. My character doesn't really do that much. It was kind of a wash for me in terms of learning something as an actor, because Terry uses actors in a different way—he'll [have the camera] on you and then tilt up and go up to a tree, so you think, 'Who's more important in this—me or the tree?' But you don't ask him, because you don't want to know the answer."

Anyway, Affleck didn't take the job for that—he took the job because he wanted to learn from Malick as a director, and this he did: ways of using natural light, being nimble enough to just jump out of a van and start filming. More skills stored up for all the movies he hopes to make.

One film he is developing—"It's not ready; it's not good enough yet"—is about the Boston gangster Whitey Bulger and will star Matt Damon. (Affleck and Damon regularly confer about work. Damon and his wife and four kids live very close to Affleck in the same Los Angeles neighborhood and get together for barbecues and such.) Affleck is also working on an adaptation of Stephen King's The Stand, struggling to condense its epic nature into a manageable form. "Right now we're having a very hard time," he says. "But I like the idea—it's like The Lord of the Rings in America. And it's about how we would reinvent ourselves as a society. If we started all over again, what would we do?"
You can hear his calm and satisfaction when he talks about things like this, as though he has finally found himself a life with the kinds of problems he wants to have. In his head he has a notion that he should direct four movies in the next ten years. With maybe the occasional acting job in between.

"I'm in a place where I feel a bit more like I felt after Good Will Hunting, but with a sort of added perspective," he says. "I feel like I've gone round a loop once. And for this lap, it's more measured. I'm not the most loathsome man in the world. I've dropped to number nine."