When you’re a writer or an editor, you’re always trying to balance what you want and what your audience wants. When both align, the results can be greatness. This story is about what happens when they don’t.

I graduated from college on January, 21^st, 1983. Our commencement speaker on that cold and wet day was Alexander Cockburn, the radical columnist for The Nation and The Village Voice. He urged the 25 or so mid-term degree recipients to use their talents to change the world, to speak truth to power, to be true to higher values.

I honestly don’t remember much of that day, because my car had broken down on the way to the ceremony, and my girlfriend and I hitched a ride with a van-load of hippies. If not for that contact high, I might have stayed truer to those ideals, and my first job might have worked out differently.

With the ceremony over, I headed down to New York, where I’d share an apartment in the West Village with my brother. We were squeezed into a tiny tenement floor-through. Our neighbor on one side was a devout buddhist who chanted non-stop. A guy whose job it was to play the mascot at New York Cosmos soccer games lived on the other side. The city had briefly gone mad for football, and he’d leave for work wearing his matted Bugs Bunny suit. Graduation was on a Friday. I was due at work first thing Monday morning.

My job was to help create and shape a new magazine called Blip, one of the earliest national publications¹ devoted to video games (I actually started with issue two.) Even better, it was published by Marvel Comics, which was tentatively stepping into a world beyond print. It might be too much to say that this was one of the earliest hints to the company moving into the now-sprawling Marvel Cinematic Universe, but fight me on that assertion.

I was already addicted to video games. In college–and this was actually part of my senior thesis–I’d spent hours jamming quarters into the coin slots of our local arcade. Way too many hours, but somehow that qualified me for the job. Blip would give me the opportunity to spend time in the seedy, coin-operated warrens of New York City, and get paid for it. What could be better?

A lot. Part of what we were supposed to do was tie in with Marvel’s characters, who were just beginning to be featured in games for the earliest Atari and Mattel home consoles. The problem was the comic book company’s entrenched editors.² They hated the idea of gaming, seeing it as a threat to their own medium. Maybe they were right, but they were openly hostile, something that really hurt: I loved comic books, and had drawn my own all through middle and high school. I idolized the Marvel creators. Most of them wouldn’t even talk to me.

Blip was not good. The blog Retro Injection described the magazine as “the very definition of ‘wrong place, wrong time.’” And wrong attitude. My boss was a truly talented and incredibly hard-working editor who’d been a legend in educational publishing. We almost immediately came into existential conflict. I felt like he wanted to push the “video games as teaching devices” model–as if hand/eye coordination was a PhD-level skill–and I saw this as our death knell, the most dopey idea in the history of publishing. No true gamer would be fooled by this positioning. No kid wanted to be told that their joystick was a form of schoolwork.

Blip lasted seven issues, and by the end, I felt like I was making some headway with the Marvel editors. I was given permission to write an eight-page insert featuring Marvel characters playing games. In Blip #7, I got to feature The Hulk and work with the great Al Milgrom, who’d worked on the truly cosmic incarnation of Captain Marvel created by his childhood friend, Jim Starlin. I was so proud and happy to see that little story published.

But just before that issue hit the newsstands, Blip was cancelled and I was out of a job. It was a relief to get to suck on my own terms. Still, for six months, I earned my living playing video games. I had my own office, filled with the latest consoles and cartridges. The comic folks didn’t want much to do with me, but the mailroom guys–who I became friends with–made my office such a hangout that I was reprimanded. “Do you really care about this job,” my boss asked me. I did, of course–but I didn’t care much for the job we were doing.

Blip lacked two things that I’ve grown to see as iron-clad requirements for this kind of journalism: authority–having an audience that sees you as credible–and authenticity, which means your readers see you as one of them. Ten years later, I’d put that lesson to good use when I helped relaunch Mountain Bike magazine, which had itself been very Blip-like in its failure to understand who it was being written for. That project succeeded.

Sometimes the best thing about a job is that it teaches you what not to do. Blip may have been game-over from day one–but it helped me ultimately get to something close to boss level. I’m grateful for that.

Update: Blip #1 goes for $200 on eBay. I can’t even…

Links and Notes:

• Here all seven issues of Blip, courtesy The Internet Archive.

• The 1982 Pac-Man championships.

1 The first was “Electronic Games,” which appeared in early 1981. It survived well into the 1990s.

2 Stan Lee, pictured above with what are almost certainly a bunch of fabricated quotes, was by then not really a force at Marvel. He’d been exiled to the west coast, and was years away from his cameo career in the MCU movies. I’d also like to say here that Lee was not what he claimed to be and deserves little, if any, credit for the actual creation of the comic company’s legendary characters (that honor goes to Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko.)

STAY IN SCHOOL, son. That’s what the cowboy–the cowboy–said. I was in fourth grade, and to be honest, until John Wayne spoke those words to me, I never thought that not going to school was an option. Now, with the possibility of playing hooky suggested by The Duke himself, a whole world of exploring New York City was about to open up, a world that would eventually lead me to feeling confident enough to show up at the offices of the local newspapers as a teenager looking for work.

Here’s how I remember it: I was selected to meet John Wayne after writing an essay in a contest that included fourth graders from all over New York. Other contemporary sources say the chosen kids came from a pool of New York Daily News delivery boys, but from my perspective, that’s not possible. I delivered the News’ Queens-based rival, The Long Island Press. (If you know the answer–young authors or kids with paper routes–please correct me in the comments.) It was Thursday, January 10, 1972. The day had been wet, but temperatures were mild, so I walked with my mom -she never took the subway - from Penn Station, uptown and east to Radio City Music Hall, where the world premiere of The Cowboys was being held.

Since the movie–considered one of Wayne’s best–was about how an aging cattleman helped turn a dozen feral frontier boys into men, it made sense that the publicity team at Warner Bros. engineered a way to pack the theater with the city kids. There were throngs of us, most dressed for tbe occasion, crowding Sixth Avenue, waiting to get in. I’d never been inside Radio City, and this visit would end up defining, for me, what a movie palace was supposed to look like. The sad era of slicing and dicing theaters into multiplexes was just beginning, and would be described as “the latest thing” by Mel Lebewitz, of the movie distributor Northwest Cinema Corporation, later that year. The grand cinema palaces around Times Square had already begun to succumb–reduced to dark and sticky porn strongholds–but New York’s great theaters, like Radio City and RKO Keith’s, in Queens, had yet to fall (Radio City would stop showing movies in 1979, transforming into a stage-show venue. Keith’s–the Queens equivalent of Radio City, where I saw my first James Bond movie and the absurdist/terrible comic, Soupy Sales–would trifurcate in 1976, and never recover; it stopped showing movies in the 1990s, and was torn down in fits and starts, finally being totally razed around 2020.)

The Cowboys told the story of a cattle drive. Wayne’s character is an aging rancher who needs to get his livestock from Texas to the southern border. The rancher’s name is William Anderson, and he’s tough and heroic and fair-minded and–especially–paternal, in a tan-your-hide sort of way. With a gold rush on, Anderson’s usual band of ranch hands refuse the dangerous trip, and Anderson enlists the help of eleven boys, aged between 11 and 16. The journey is hard. Do they make it? Of course. But Anderson himself doesn’t. He’s murdered, with sadistic glee, by Asa Watts, a cold-blooded bandit played by Bruce Dern, at the end of act two, and it is the loss of the old man that finally propels the boys into adulthood, and finishing their journey.

I can’t tell you how shocking seeing John Wayne die felt. That wasn’t supposed to happen! The act of villainy nearly destroyed Bruce Dern’s career. You can’t kill John Wayne–even on celluloid–and expect to get away with it. On the screen, Wayne spits at Dern, calling him a “miserable wretch.” Off-screen, the elder actor told his antagonist that “America will hate you for this.” Dern’s career wasn’t ruined, but he did report that people would harass him in the street for what “he’d” done, and at one point received death threats. Dern would spend the rest of his career typecast, playing weasels and blackguards. That’s a John Wayne movie for you: though it doesn’t reflect, and actually grossly distorts, historic reality, there’s no cinematic body of work more consistent in its myth-making. Kill a god, pay the price, which is exactly what makes The Cowboys such good story-telling. In these days of cinematic universes–where offing a main character is seen mostly as a way to create buzz, rather than advance a plot, and there’s nearly always a resurrection that makes everything better by act three, or (even more lucrative) the sequel–The Cowboys reminds us that good writing is unafraid writing.

Sitting stunned in the audience didn’t last long, because as the credits rolled, Wayne himself–in a suit and tie–strode up to the stage, and we kids were ushered into a receiving line. It took a while, but as I got closer, I could tell that each brief encounter between school kid and star was the same: a quick handshake, and Wayne saying something, though I couldn’t quite make it out until I got closer. But as he grasped my hand, his words became clear: Stay in school, son. Stay in school. I was led off the stage in a state of excited bewilderment. You mean I had a choice? (Wayne’s reverse permission gave me the confidence, as I got into middle school, to skip class and take the subway to Shea Stadium to watch the New York Mets play then-common afternoon games, and ultimately to brave the trip to Manhattan in order to ask for jobs at the local newspapers. So here we are, thanks to John Wayne.)

A lot of people consider The Cowboys to be Wayne’s last great movie. “‘The Cowboys’ Proves that Old Dusty Britches Can Act” wrote critic Rex Reed in the next morning’s Daily News. And after getting over the shock of seeing the Wayne character’s early exit from the cinematic prairie, the film left a deep impression on me. Nearly every kid in the room, I’m guessing, and maybe especially those like me, who had an absent father, who dreamed of adventure, who needed a hero, was able to relate to at least one of the orphans (there was even a Jewish one) and to Wayne’s sagebrush bar mitzvah: teamwork, cows, horses, and a little vengeance.

The movie still holds up. I forgot that it featured a pretty amazing cast–including the incredible character actor and Wayne’s oratorical equal Roscoe Lee Brown–and a really moving story. But I’m still mad at Bruce Dern.

Links and Notes:

Rex Reed, who died in May, 2026, was flamboyant and sometimes deliciously mean. His 2002 New York Observer account of Minelli’s wedding is one of the greatest pieces of journalism ever produced (here’s a link, but be warned that there are tons of ads and really unproductive formatting.) You might also want to check out this remembrance of him from The Hollywood Reporter. My personal favorite incarnation of Reed was when he played–as this post aptly describes–“the Simon Cowell” of the cocaine-soaked, Dadaist 1970s TV talent contest, “The Gong Show.”

The Cowboys: IMDB and a New York Times review,

A list of dead Marvel Cinematic Universe characters. How many times can a cheap plot gimmick be used?

“While I’ll never completely agree with the old chestnut ‘never meet your idols,’ I’d now had evidence of how it could go really badly.”–Neko Case, in her memoir “The Harder I Fight, the More I Love You.”

Trigger warning: this is a true story and some might think I’m posting it out of sadness. That’s not the case. I’m actually bemused by the whole tragic incident, because it really is an indicator that the cosmos are, if not against us, then totally capricious. Here goes:

One of my heroes as a young journalist was Jimmy Breslin, the late columnist for The New York Daily News. His coverage of the “Son of Sam” murders–the mass killer was assassinating teenagers in my Queens neighborhood, then sending Breslin letters about it–made me want to be a newspaper reporter, and the old-fashioned kind: macho, crusading, debauched, and so trusted that even a serial murderer would write to him. What’s not to aspire to?

My first job in the business, at age 15, was at Breslin’s paper. I took the train into Manhattan one day after school, walked down 42nd Street and entered the absolutely gorgeous News building, with its giant globe in the lobby.1 I snuck up to the newsroom, and asked the first person I saw for a job. I was hired on the spot, like in the movies, as what was then called a “copy boy” (later a “news clerk.”) I delivered a lot of coffee, though the best part of the job was getting to go to baseball games and then dash back to the newsroom with film around the seventh inning so it could be developed and printed in the next day’s early editions. I also had my first drink in a bar, at Louis’ East, the tabloid hangout tucked into the shadow of the News’ headquarters. The reporters at the bar didn’t care if I was 15–they saw me learning what the bottom of a shot glass looked like as a teachable moment.

But Breslin. It took me a long while to approach him, but I screwed up the nerve and told him how I’d been inspired by his work. His response? “Get the fuck out of here, never talk to me again.”

******

My grandfather, Murray Brenner, died of a heart attack on Election Day, 1971. He was 63. I knew that he passed away while volunteering at a Brooklyn polling place. What I didn’t know, and what my mom only recently told me, was that just before he collapsed, Murray had angry words with Breslin. According to my mom, the reporter was trying to bluster his way into the facility, pushing past voters and volunteers. My grandfather, mom recalled, told Breslin to wait his turn. The future Pulitzer Prize winner spewed some choice words at Murray, who’d grown up in desperate poverty and made his living as a much-less-than-smooth operator. Neither tough guy was willing to back down. They stepped outside, began to square off, but within moments, without a punch being thrown, Murray collapsed, dead of a massive coronary.

I don’t know what happened after that. But none of this changes that fact that Breslin was a great writer, a “deadline artist,” as a 2018 HBO documentary put it. He was arrogant, egotistical, and had the kind of combination of literary and reportorial chops most of us can only aspire to.

So my brilliant, shithead of an idol killed my grandfather. It’s so messed up that I find it hilarious. It maybe helps a little that Breslin was an asshole to almost everyone, and not just to multiple generations of my family! It was part of his brand. So, for the five or six people who read this and want to make me their idol, don’t. It’ll only break your heart. And possibly bury your grandpa.

More info:

•Neko Case’s memoir, “The Harder I Fight, the More I Love You.”

•The Essential Writings of Jimmy Breslin, publisher’s page.

•A really good set of sideburn trimmers.

This is a quote that was often repeated to me by one of my writing teachers. I’d been discussing it with a friend who–like me, and maybe like you–is facing the modern productivity issues brought on by technical transformation, social media, and the virtual collapse of print media. It’s sort of a version of “publish or perish,” but more romantic.

The teacher was named Bob Phelps. I studied with him at the New School in lower Manhattan in the 1980s. Though Bob was only in his 60s, he seemed much older because of his severe Parkinsonism. He was a legend in New York literary circles, having edited biographies of Colette and Cocteau, as well as co-founding Grove Press in the 1950s.

Bob took a liking to me, and he encouraged me to write fiction and to quit my rather crappy post-college editing job and travel; of course, he recommended France. “You have to go,” he said, and he was emphatic enough that his affliction seemed to vanish at that moment; no tremors in his body or voice.

One of the most wonderful things about Bob was his relationship with his wife, the well-known abstract expressionist painter Rosemary Beck. They occupied a three-story brownstone a bit south of Union Square. Their living situation was the definition of Bohemia-via-Greenwich Village. The top floor was his, for his writing, his entertaining - often young men such as myself (Bob liked young men...) and Rosemary wasn’t allowed. But that was fine; she had the first floor; it was for her own work, painting, and entertaining, and Bob wasn’t allowed. The middle floor was for the two of them, and they met at least once each day - for a post-lunch martini - in that space (I may be overstating and/or idealizing the arrangement. Memory is like that.)

I couldn’t imagine a more perfect literary, cosmopolitan life. Bob passed away in 1989 at 66; Rosemary outlived him and continued to paint until her death in 2003. I can’t tell you exactly what Bob taught me about writing - or anything, really. But I can say for certain that I learned a lot. And I did quit my crap job editing what was probably the world’s first–and worst–video game magazine and go to France (more on that ridiculous foray into technology “journalism” in another column.)

There’s a lot more to know about Bob Phelps, including his lovely and passionate correspondence with the author James Salter (“A Sport and a Pastime” is Salter’s most famous novel; Salter also wrote the screenplay for a very weird skiing drama, starring Robert Redford and Gene Hackman, called “Downhill Racer.”) The book that collects the Phelps//Salter correspondence is called “Memorable Days,” and it was written by Michael Dirda and edited by John McIntyre.

Here are some additional links about Bob (and if you know where that quote came from–Bob said it was F. Scot Fitzgerald, but I haven’t been able to find any attribution–please tell me.)

“I Wanted to Be Robert Phelps,” by Michael Dirda

“Dawn of a Literary Friendship,” by John McIntyre

“My First Guide to Writing Fiction,” by Derek Alger