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My final NYT Prototype column: Wah-wah!

Saturday, August 6th, 2011

With a Flip of a Knob, He Heard the Future

The path to the invention of the wah-wah pedal — which lets an electric guitar take on aspects of the human voice — shows the twists and turns of the creative process.

By Amy Wallace

Originally appeared in the New York Times on August 7, 2011

DEL CASHER has done a lot of impressive things with his guitar over the last 50 years. He has performed with Gene Autry, Lawrence Welk, and Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. He’s appeared, strumming, in movies with Elvis Presley and Jerry Lewis. He’s been a featured player on dozens of film and TV soundtracks.

But there is one accomplishment that Mr. Casher, now 73, wishes more people knew about: his role in the invention of the wah-wah pedal.

The story of this device, which enables an electric guitar to take on aspects of the human voice — and which helped define the sounds of rock stars like Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton — is complicated. But that very complexity drives home a point: While it is easier — and more romantic — to talk about innovation as the domain of lone inventors who hit pay dirt while tinkering in solitude, creativity is more often than not a collaborative, and messy, affair. As such, Mr. Casher’s story seems an apt one to tell in this, my last Prototype column.

“There’s a lot of players in this whole thing,” and a brilliant engineer named Brad Plunkett was one of them, says Mr. Casher, who is Click to continue »

Posted in New York Times | No Responses »
Tags: genius, LA Culture

Profile of James Ellroy in LA Magazine

Monday, September 20th, 2010

The Ladies’ Man

Can true love tame James Ellroy, the Demon Dog of L.A. fiction?

By Amy Wallace

Los Angeles magazine, September 2010

James Ellroy is sitting in a corner booth at the Pacific Dining Car, the 6th Street steak joint, brooding about women. It’s the perfect place for it. The last time L.A. fiction’s Demon Dog, as Ellroy likes to be called, recited wedding vows, he was right here in this windowless cave of a room. On October 4, 1991, he married his second wife, the writer and critic Helen Knode. The bride wore a peach pink ’40s vintage dress and “looked stunningly cougarlike and hip/feral,” Ellroy recalls in his new memoir, The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women. The groom wore a kilt, and his eyes darted around too much. There were steaks off the menu and a custom wedding cake.

When it came time to toast, Ellroy “threw out a mock-impromptu rock song, replete with lurid lyrics,” he writes. “Helen whooped and busted me to the guests. ‘That’s a retread, Big Dog! You wrote that for one of your ex-bitches!’ ” Knode pirouetted, prompting whistles from the male guests, and then quoted Doris Lessing: “Marriage is sex and courage.”

“Helen said it in this room: ‘Sex and courage.’ And it’s entirely true,” Ellroy tells me now. At 62 he is tall, even when seated, and almost gaunt from daily devotion to his elliptical machine. He has a clean-shaven skull and a manic glare that burns through his wire-rim glasses. His voice is reverent, if only for a beat. Pushing aside his Caesar salad (he’s eaten only the filet mignon off the top), he lets loose a tirade that somehow manages to sound both fond and furious: “The food here sucks Chihuahua dicks! Shih tzu dicks! Yorkie dicks!”

What led Ellroy’s second marriage to disintegrate—the overwork, the competition, the neglect, the “don’t ask, don’t tell” open relationship—occupies a large chunk of The Hilliker Curse, which is due out this month from Knopf. Has Knode vetted it? The answer is no. None of the women in the book have, but for one. Click to continue »

Posted in Los Angeles Magazine | No Responses »
Tags: genius

GQ: The Comedian’s Comedian’s Comedian

Sunday, August 15th, 2010

He’s a boxer, a Buddhist, a hoops junkie, and a kind of Yoda to every funny person born since 1965 (Sandler, Silverman, Apatow, Gervais, Baron Cohen…). Amy Wallace survives a rare sparring session with Garry Shandling, the reclusive master of American comedy

By AMY WALLACE

Originally appeared in GQ August 2010

Toward the end of February, in the first-class cabin of a United flight from Hawaii to Los Angeles, the only man on the planet who has hosted late-night talk shows, appeared on late-night talk shows, and created an iconic TV series that parodied a late-night talk show encountered the man who had just been famously ousted from a late-night talk show.

Garry Shandling was in 1A. Conan O’Brien and his family were three rows back. The two men are close friends, and their unexpected proximity made Shandling happy—so happy, he says, that he asked a flight attendant to deliver O’Brien a present. “Mr. Shandling can’t finish his cookie, and he thought you might want to have the rest,” the woman told O’Brien, presenting the crumb-littered plate. Minutes later, Shandling looked up—way up—to see the six-foot-four-inch redhead planted in front of him, an exaggerated scowl on his face.

“This is the way you treat me, with the broken cookies?” O’Brien asked Shandling, his voice slightly raised to make sure the comedy could be heard over the jet engines. “When I let you get in line with me and my wife and get your ticket ten minutes earlier? This is what you do?”

“Let me see if I understand this correctly,” Shandling responded, almost yelling. “I, out of the generosity of my heart, offer you food. And you have the nerve to walk up to my aisle and harass me and heckle me in front of this passenger”—Shandling nodded to the stranger in 1B—”who I don’t know?”

O’Brien turned to Shandling’s stunned neighbor, who will surely be dining out on this story for the rest of his life. “I’m sorry you have to sit next to him,” O’Brien said. “You know, if you call ahead and you find out Garry’s on the plane, they will allow you to switch seats.” Click to continue »

Posted in GQ | No Responses »
Tags: genius, Hollywood Players

Physicist Taps Pop Culture to Explain New Theory of Time – Wired

Monday, December 21st, 2009

Originally appeared in Wired Magazine January, 2010

BY: Amy Wallace

Sean Carroll’s office at Caltech is a jumble of brainy flotsam. There are books with titles like Differential Forms in Algebraic Topology; five empty champagne bottles, one for each of his students who’s earned a PhD; and a NASA-approved blow-up beach ball of the universe. And on the physicist’s computer screen is a graph of the narrative progression of the time-bending movie Memento. “Memento does this combination of flashbacks and reverse chronology,” he says excitedly. “The later scenes are played in reverse chronology, the earlier scenes are played in ordinary chronology, and they meet up.”

In January, Carroll will release his own pop take on the complexities of time with his much-anticipated debut book, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time. Armchair Einsteins will geek out on his audacious thesis. He argues that our perception of time is informed by entropy — the level of disorder in a system — and that the movement from low to high entropy as the universe expands establishes the direction in which time flows. Furthermore, he posits that our cosmos may be a relatively young member of a large family and that in some of our sibling universes time runs in the opposite direction. Some others, he argues, don’t experience time at all; once a universe cools off and reaches maximum entropy, there is no past or present.

Abstract enough for you? That’s where Carroll’s common touch comes in. His writing is accessible and peppered with cultural references — quotes from Dumb and Dumber and Slaughterhouse-Five, for instance. But don’t be fooled by his mass-market approach: Carroll isn’t afraid to wade into topics that have befuddled even name-brand physicists. Though we may deal daily with time’s quotidian realities — deadlines and bus schedules and aging — most of us have trouble thinking about how it might exist outside our own experience of it. “We’re so used to the arrow of time that it’s hard to conceptualize time without the arrow,” he writes. “We are led, unprotesting, to temporal chauvinism.”

Posted in Wired | No Responses »
Tags: genius