[music] Welcome to The Virtual Memories Show. I'm your host, Gil Roth, and you are listening to a weekly podcast about books and life. Not necessarily in that order. You can subscribe to the show on iTunes, and you can find past episodes, get on our email list, and make a donation to the show at our website, chimeraobscura.com/vm. You can also find us on Twitter at vmspod@facebook.com/virtualmemoriesshow, and at virtualmemoriespodcast.tumblr.com. This is the last interview episode of the year. I'm going to take next week off, because frankly, I don't want to post one on Christmas Eve, and I don't think any of you want to listen to one on Christmas Eve. It'll be a brand new episode on New Year's Eve, but that'll be a little different format than what you're used to. I think you're going to enjoy it. Our guest this time around, our final interview for 2014, is Kip Freedman. If his name sounds familiar, it might be because I interviewed his brother, the great artist Drew Freedman, a few months ago. Kip has a new book out, Barracuda in the Attic, from Fantagraphic Books, and it's a memoir about his childhood and, well, growing up Freedman. See, Kip's dad is the great writer Bruce J. Freedman, and in addition to Drew, Kip's other brother is Josh Allen Freedman, who's a pretty accomplished writer and musician in his own right, and their mother Ginger was an actress and a casting coach. The book throughout is this really affectionate look back at their lives together in the '60s and '70s in New York and Long Island, as well as covering various trips of theirs to California and neat celebrity stories that Kip shares with us. It has some really wonderful passages about New York City and that era. That's what really stuck with me, and also as the youngest brother, I was a younger brother of two. I sympathized with Kip's following his sibling's lead, getting into trouble and getting a crash course and pop culture of his time from his older bros. Barracuda in the Attic is a really delightful book, especially if you pair it with the memoir that Kip's dad published in 2011, Lucky Bruce. I'm sure a lot of people wonder about what it would be like to grow up in a family like that filled with so many creative people, and Kip's book really covers both the mundane and the magical aspects of that sort of life. Now, Kip works primarily as a bar mitzvah photographer in Wisconsin, really, but he was just out of New York City to do a few readings from Barracuda and to get a canich or two. We met up at the office of the hotel where he was staying, which was a little quieter than the second avenue of Delhi where I interviewed Drew last September. It was a good conversation, and I really got a good feeling for who Kip is as a person and where Barracuda in the Attic comes from, it comes from a very good place. And now, the virtual memories conversation with Kip Friedman. So you're writing for the Huffington Post, how did that come about? Well, I wrote my childhood memoir, Barracuda in the Attic, and the whole process of writing a memoir was fascinating, and it was kind of learning as I went. And I wanted to let other people know the story behind the Barracuda and how I arrived at writing these stories. I only touch upon it in the essays, but it's an interesting process, and I also liked to encourage other people to tell their stories, so it was kind of a teachable moment, I guess. And that piece was printed, it was called Norman Mailer Bit My Dad and other childhood memories. Now, you come from a achieved artistic family. Your father's a renowned writer, your mother's an acting coach, one of your brothers who we interviewed earlier is a great cartoonist, another one is a really good nonfiction essentially. Somewhat fiction? Josh is a good writer. Good writer. It's an autobiographical novel, or creative nonfiction. That's Henry Miller called Tropic of Cancer, the autobiographical novel, or novel in the form of autobiography, who wasn't sure which applied better. But what was it like kind of throwing your hat in the ring and taking a stab at writing yourself? Well, when I first wanted to write my story, it was more of a gift, I guess, to my dad to let him know how I felt about a special time in my life when I moved in with him when I was about sixteen. My parents had just divorced. I was not sure where I was going to live. My mother had a new boyfriend, and my older brother Drew said, "Why don't you move in with dad?" Drew had a room at my mother's new apartment, but I'd like to thank you also for thinking about me and my well-being. My dad, thankfully, let me move in, and we live like two bachelors for about a year and a half before I went off to college in Madison, Wisconsin. During the year and a half, it was really a magical experience. We had a lot of adventures together. I went traveling with him on business trips around the country, met a lot of writers, got to see what his life was like as a writer, hung out, watched Nick's games, went out to dinner with Peter Faulk and saw Nick's game and went to, what's that sports bar, the classic sports bar guy's name? "Too Short." "Too Short." We went to "Too Short" with Peter Faulk. It was just a fun time, and then I went to college and went on with my life. It was a coming-of-age period. He was actually transitioning in his life, too. This was his lonely guy, period of his life, where he was writing his lonely guy, essays that became the lonely guy's book of life and a movie. I'd like to think it was like courtship of Eddie's father time for me or Aunt Mayne. We were both together at this pivotal time, and so I wrote a story about it, and after that was published, it was such an addictive feeling getting it published, getting praise, getting a contact from an editor at Harper Collins, the book publisher. It just made me think, "I've got other stories to tell about my childhood. I'll go back further, look deeper," and sure enough, it was opening up a cabinet and finding all these lost treasures, and I just went from there. How long was the book? How long did it take you to write the book? It took about five years from the first story. It's not a linear progression of stories. They're all separate essays on different subjects in my childhood, so the same characters appear throughout, but at different periods, and I go back and forth in time, but I stick to the subject of each story. For instance, that first story was about that year and a half I lived with my dad, but then I thought about a period earlier in our life when our family was all together, and my father caught a barracuda off the aisle of Bimini while trying to do an interview with Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. for the Saturday Evening Post. He didn't get the interview, but he still wrote a story, but he did capture a barracuda, and I remember it arriving, and so that's what stood out in my mind, and it came to the house, and I marveled at its dark eyes and its incisors that reminded me of Lon Chaney Sr. in a silent horror movie that we saw pictures of in Famous Monsters of Film Land magazine. I used to love looking at this barracuda, it was scary, and it was in his attic, and that's what brought me back to what his little salon writing space in the attic was like, and I tried to piece that back together again, and wrote Barracuda in the attic, which is the title of my book. Did your dad help you in terms of helping to edit that stuff at least, or at least give you some input of, "Oh, this is something else that was in the attic, or did he pretty much kind of step back and let you write what you wrote?" Did you check with him? Did you fact check, I guess? Every story I wrote was given a readover, a lookover by every member of my family, including my dad, but just for more like fact checking purposes, my father's very encouraging from day one. He's always encouraged me to write. I used to be a newspaper reporter, and I think he wanted me to continue writing, and I'd gotten into different directions. But he didn't actually give me advice while writing any of these stories. It was more like, more or less minor fact checking. He has a habit of giving me tips if I use a word that maybe isn't accurate or the correct word, if you will. You've heard that expression block, that metaphor, I think that's a common thing in the New Yorker. He'll say you're better than that. You don't need to say something collapsed like a deck of cards. It's like too pedestrian. He said, "You're better than that." Other than that, he just kind of was hands off and let me do my thing. Whenever our story was published, because there was published in various venues before it became a book, he would congratulate me and say, "Nice job," and that's all I needed to want to continue. Was there a sense of intimidation? Did you feel any sense of it in terms of, "Wow, I'm going to actually try and enter the ring with an area of the rest of my family's established itself in?" I never felt metaphors. No, thank you. Block that metaphor. I never felt any intimidation factor. I never felt anything but support. It's only when actually the prospect of being published by Harper Collins that I started to get a little nervous, had this one story published and I thought, "Hot damn, they're going to send me a great big advance and I'll be able to live in English countryside and write for a year in seclusion and be like a writer, professional writer." That didn't happen after that one story. After that, I had to actually roll up my sleeves and get to work and think more deeply about what I was doing. It's a very lonely thing to write these stories. You can have all the support you want from your wife. My wife was very loving and supportive. My family was very encouraging, but in the end, it's you alone sitting there at your typewriter or computer thinking. I had my own method which was I knew I wanted to be faithful to the subject of each story. One story is about our obsession with comic books. My brother Drew and I used to go to comic book conventions and hotels and convention halls in the early '70s. I think they're called comic cons. These were like Drew's sports heroes, these artists that were from Marvel and DC. They didn't really mean anything to me, but Drew was so obsessed with it that I was swept along with him and I would go with him and he would tell me that's not a very good artist, but Frank Frisetta is like a god or some of the other Jack Kirby types. Then I did a story about our obsession with finding the scariest horror movies on Broadway and 42nd Street, we used to go to Last House on the Left or Texas. Boy, you had the inadvertent trip to see Night of the Living Dead and I laughed my ass off over when I read it. Back in 1968, Josh, my oldest brother, saw a notice for a double feature of horror movies. Some of my report Washington, I think, in Long Island and convinced my father to take us. We used to go see movies on weekends. And the first film was Doctor Who in the Dialects with Peter Cushion. This really can't be innocuous, not even really a horror film, but then the second film was Night of the Living Dead. I was seven and... Which I only got around to watching this year for the first time. Right. There were five people in the audience. It was like two in the afternoon, we were just finished watching this really can't be science fiction, didn't know what we were expecting. And all of a sudden, we saw bodily organs being eaten and children cutting into their mothers with trowels and just cannibalism, it was just a gore fest in the '19s. We had no idea. And my father looked at us in the seats and said, "Come on, we should get going boys." And I think it was Drew, by the way, Josh, that said, "No, I think we should stay." And we did. Somehow convinced him. Yeah, and we all sat through it. And that's, I think, what led us to look for fright fest that matched Night of the Living Dead. It was kind of hard to, we did see Texas Chainsaw Massacre years later, which same effect, sitting cold in the seats, sweating profusely, and just sheer horror and gore. I didn't think anything could match Night of the Living Dead, but five years later, Texas Chainsaw Massacre came very close. As a 12-year-old. I'm sure as a 12-year-old. These are very appropriate films for seven-year-olds and 12-year-olds. I was laughing because we were watching last night a Mel Brooks AFI lifetime achievement induction, and my wife always laughs over the fact that my parents took me to see History of the World Part 1 when I was nine in the theater and realized, "Yeah, it seemed like a good idea. There was some historic significance. It was basically a Mel Brooks dirty comedy, and my parents just, "Oh, come on, bring the kids. It'll be great." Sometimes they don't have quite the most appropriate idea of what we were at. Well, I've been told that I had, it didn't have the most conventional upbringing. To me, it seemed normal, natural. I mean, we went to the theater a lot. Last night I was doing a reading at KGB Bar on 85 East 4th Street for my new book, and I remembered that the Play Steambath, my dad's play, was performed at the Truck and Warehouse Theater at 79 East 4th Street, literally the next building over. So I prefaced my remarks by saying, "I'm so happy to be at the KGB Bar. It really has special meaning to me." And then I proceeded to read my story, which was, "The first time I saw a naked woman was when I saw my dad's play Steambath at the Truck and Warehouse Theater when I was nine." And I proceeded, so that got a nice laugh. Your pop culture reflects the entire book, and it's a book about childhood. We should point out it's pretty much covering your early years up till a year before you leave for college. With both of your brothers, pop culture really reflects what they do in terms of their work and their art. How do you feel that filtered down to you and both your day-to-day and what you're writing about and doing now? I was always the quiet observer with the big eyes. I didn't really talk much. I just listened and watched. I didn't have to do much. My brothers did it all for me. I was pretty much swept along. It was like resistance is futile. You will enjoy horror movies. You will go to comic book conventions. You will watch old B movies and learn to love Tor Johnson and Plan 9 from outer space. Champ-powered must be worshiped. You will go and enjoy underground comics by Arts Bigoman. We went and saw Buffalo Bob Howdy Duty Revival at the old Fillmore East in 1970 or 1971 right before it closed. We were a bunch of kids and all these stoned hippies were sitting in the audience with a mushroom cloud of pot in the air. We were getting second-hand high from all this smoke, and then we looked at all these art crumb comic books at head shops right next door. That was part of my childhood. My father, too. That was his career. He was in magazines. He was a popular writer in a lot of magazines. We went to this bookstore that we called the Back Issues Store, which was a place where old magazines and comic books were kept in Midtown Manhattan, and it was like a warehouse. We were brought there every few months or so to go barreling through and searching for old mad magazines and Dell comics and DCs and marbles from the 50s and 60s. I just learned to enjoy pop culture by osmosis. If Chiller Theatre was on at 11 o'clock at night, Josh would come in the room and we'd watch it. Most of Frankenstein was coming in from New Jersey at one in the morning on some channel line with rabbit ears, and my TV said Josh would come in. We just watched it. We used to watch old reels of the three stooges. We'd get movies from the Back Issues of Famous Monsters. We'd mail away for stuff. It was just our childhood. Everybody was a bit of a ham, and we loved pop culture. Is your son's relationship to pop culture mirror you guys at all on the slightest, or is it just a different generation and a different way of consuming that stuff? My son is a 24, and as far as he's concerned, anyone older than him is a dinosaur, including his dad. I was in a coffee shop just now before this and realized I was probably the oldest guy in there by at least 10 years, which is a little daunting, but until some older guy came in with his kid. I'm like, "Oh, thank God," but at the time at 42, I was like, "Yeah, I don't think there's anyone here over like 28 years old." I did my best, though, to encourage my son Max to enjoy old movies. He thinks black and white movies are boring. He'll probably be mad at me for saying that, but he's slowly coming around, and I actually appreciate a lot of what he enjoys. Mark Marin. My podfather. Yeah, podfather. He's a big fan of his podcasts, and a few others. Louis C. K. loves, and I've actually learned a lot from my son on a lot of cool stuff, especially comedians that are out there, otherwise I have no idea who they were. Now, let me ask about the book. You mentioned Harper Collins earlier, but the book was actually published by Fantagraphics, which is mainly known for comics and graphic novels. How did it wind up there? Fantagraphics has been sort of like the Friedman family house organ, I guess. Gary Groth is the founder of Fantagraphics and the late Kim Thompson. Drew and Josh used to collaborate together. Drew is the artist Josh, did some of the writing, and they had a lot of their early cartoon panels published by Fantagraphics in the late '70s, early '80s, and so as Fantagraphics grew, they were familiar with my brother's works. So when I came around and started writing stories and I reached out to Gary Groth about, I don't know, three, four years ago, it was like he was waiting for me. Oh, well. It's like, what took so long? How's your brothers? How come they're working it together anymore? He knew all about us. And how's your dad? I love his work. So, it was bizarre. I've been told that to get a book published, to get a book deal, it's stressful to say the least. I think I emailed him one day and then two days later I got a response, "Yeah, sounds good. We'll send you the contract." And I said, "Okay, that's the way it should be." Fantastic. Sounds good. They've been great, by the way. Cool. Was there a sense of pride in adding a Kip book to the Friedman Library? I have been working on these stories for five years in the attic of my house. And behind me sits a bookshelf with all Friedman books, most of my fathers. My mother is an acting teacher, as you mentioned earlier, and she has had several books published. All of Drew's books are there, and Josh's books. There was no Kip Friedman on the bookshelf. So, yes, it's gratifying to have my name sandwiched between my other family members. It feels like, in a way, I'm accepted that I'm part of the family and living up to the legacy. Not only that, but now I have two books, actually, because one of my stories appeared in an anthology by Ducks.org, Ducks-D-U-C-T-S. They are a literary webzine, Charles Salzberg and Jonathan Kravitz, and they publish their second anthology. I've had two stories published in there, so I now have two books, and I'll definitely squeeze in more space on my bookshelf among my family members. That leads to the question of how did you end up with a real job, given the career paths of your siblings and your parents? You know, my father, it was so prolific for, like, 40 years, 50 years in his writing career, maybe even longer. People would wonder, you've written maybe 200, 300 short stories, probably a dozen screen plays, about eight, 10 novels, a number of plays, maybe half a dozen plays or more. And he never seemed to be working. That was his secret. I mean, my dad was at a lanes, he was traveling around seeing movies, he liked pop culture, too, and took us everywhere, Nick's Games, Yankee Stadium. It was just fun. Everything was an adventure for my father. But you never really saw him writing, and yet this stuff kept on being published. I think some of his making it seem effortless, maybe to the public, rubbed on all of us. We agonize, literally, while we're working on it, as you know. But you want to not let him see you sweat. So I've always been very busy doing many things. I think we're always the happiest when we're multitasking. I'm a photographer, I've done about 300 bar and bat mitzvahs. I also have done marketing and public relations for many years. I was a marketing director. Actually, it's only when I quit my full-time job that I was able to concentrate on writing these stories that appear to my book. Raises the question of Judaism in the family. I know Drew had mentioned not being bar mitzvahs when I spoke to him. I seem to recall from an interview that you haven't either. Do you consider yourself a sort of cultural Jew as opposed to practicing Jew, or is there a Jewiness to what you do and who you are? We grew up in the New York area in Great Neck, Manhattan. I thought everybody was Jewish. When we saw blondes, they were like exotic, like they were from another country, literally. I thought they were from Sweden. They were like rare creatures. Judaism never really came out. I think my father at one point, perhaps, may have mentioned, if he liked to be bar mitzvahs certainly, but it wasn't like he was twisting our arms. You give three young men the opportunity to not be bar mitzvahs, or to study and spend Sundays with the Hebrew school. I've heard stories from friends who have likened it to Catholic school with, I won't get too detailed into it, but with rulers and putting people on arms. And Rabbi's friends are much nicer than that when I was a kid, trust me. A lot of my friends are rabbis, they're wonderful people, but still there was dark shadows in the afternoon and there was the playground and playing basketball, rabbinical school, studying alaf bets, and get to that. Now, it's sort of ironic that none of us have had bar mitzvahs, and yet I've been to over three hundred bar mitzvahs. I think it's like a divine intervention of some sort, a Jewish curse, or maybe not a Jewish... It's a mitzvah, exactly. But I used to go to the bar mitzvahs with my camera, and I would sit in the pew, and I'd hold the Bible to Torah, and we'd stand up and sit down, and then I'd sneak in my New Yorker and put it inside the Bible and read it and sit up, and people would look at me a little funny. And finally, I said, "This is ridiculous. I'm not even... I'm just reading the New Yorker." Well, the service is going on. I shouldn't be saying this, by the way. And then I finally had to go out to the foyer, "You can't go wrong when you tell the family when you're done. Your daughter did such a great job. She really read well. She was beautiful." What are they gonna say? "She fainted, didn't you notice?" No, that hasn't happened yet, so far I've been pretty lucky. And raising your kid, Jewishly at all, or when I was 24 now, but, you know, did you... Well, because I work for about 14 years as the marketing director at the Jewish Community Center of Milwaukee, my son attended Jewish day camp for about 14 years, and Jewish sleep away camp in Eagle River, Wisconsin for about three years, and that's where he got his Judaism, because they're very active in their Shabbat services, but with... It's almost like a hippie version of Shabbat. They're all of tie-dye and guitars, and they say... I've been to those. Yeah, it's addictive, and it's fun, and he was doing the blessings, you know, by the time he was done. But I'm in an interfaith marriage. My wife is not Jewish, and my mother-in-law and her second husband would come and they do the Lord's Prayer at our dinner table, and they'd ask my son Max to do it. So Max had always politely declined. Then once Max said, "Okay, I'll do it. He's about nine," and he started, and he went, "Borokha, tada, noi alohino, malefalung." You know, and then my... And he went, "Amen," and looked at me and winked, and my mother-in-law and her husband looked like their jaw dropped like, "What the hell just happened?" They never asked him to do the prayer again. Nice. Now, were there stories you've decided to omit from this in the process? Were there things that would have maybe hurt members of the family, or just things that wouldn't have fit the context of what you were writing? Well, there's one story I did write, and I was tempted to put in about a housekeeper, Mrs. Sullivan, who raised me from birth. She was very pivotal in our lives. But for a number of reasons that I chose not to include a part of it, which is I wasn't able to verify a lot of her history with family members. It was a little spotty. She was like a surrogate mother to us, to me, especially being the youngest. So I decided to omit that story. There were some other personal issues. There's a tone to the stories. It's somewhat light-hearted. It's not like I'm taking the sharp knives out and trying to get back at anybody. This is a love story, a love letter to my family. It was a way of saying I paid attention. This was special to me. It's a memoir. So it wasn't my goal to settle scores or to write off entire members of the family or have lawsuits or other horror stories you hear with some memoirs. It was just to share with other people what was special to me, and maybe they would appreciate it. Even the depictions of the divorce and the family breaking down, none of it is in the worst experience of my life, sort of framing. Everything is there, and this is how you grew and found something else out of it. Yeah. Well, my parents on again off again marriage is sort of a subplot throughout the book. It wasn't traumatic. It was just part of the landscape. We lived in New York together. They were separated, but we saw them all the time and went back and forth. They were cordial. And then the divorce proceedings, apparently, they were cordial. The judge was like, "Why are you going to divorce?" It seemed to get along pretty well. It's like there's a lot more couples together that should be divorced than you guys are, but it is what it is, and so I don't really hold any trauma. It's not like post-traumatic stress disorder or anything. In my mind, I'm pretty lighthearted. I thought they're not happy together. Why should they be? As long as they're happy, I was happy. Maybe you'd get a different take from one or two of my brothers, but as far as I'm concerned, if that's what they wanted, I was cool with it. In the book, you mentioned that your dad didn't give you any direct advice about writing. Was there anything you learned from reading his work over the years, or were there other writers in particular who informed the style in which you're right? I mentioned the tone of all the stories, light-hearted, almost whimsical, dealing with serious subjects, but in the way I looked at the world. The one writer who comes to mind is Gene Shepherd, who wrote the Christmas story. This is like a Jewish, neurotic, New York version of the Christmas story. I've read a lot of writers. I don't know if I can really identify one writer. My father is probably my biggest influence, just again by osmosis. He's such a great storyteller. The few things he did teach me, if you want to call it teaching, is he said specificity, authenticity. I went with that, give details. The more specific you are, the more honest it sounds, and it's real, and people can understand it. They can see a picture in their mind while you're telling the story. He was very encouraging to maybe even alter, embellish, make things bigger and more special than they were. Everything seemed special growing up with him, whether it was the Chinese dumplings at the restaurant, or everything could be a launching point for another story, and that's something we were all encouraged to do. Is there a symbolic aspect of the barracuda in the attic? Given that that's where he was writing, and a lot of his writing does seem to chew over aspects of his life and recast them, was there an intention in that image? I've been asked, was there really a barracuda in the attic, or was it symbolic of something more meaningful, deeper, maybe a dark family secret? As you know, I told you this, my dad caught a barracuda and put it in his attic. In the story, I describe it as being, it wasn't like the 400 pound blue Marlon that Santiago and the old man had seen it caught Hemingway's old man in the sea, but it was a respectable sized barracuda nonetheless. I guess you could say that's a metaphor for my father in relation to Hemingway. Hemingway was the big Marlon, and my dad was more like the sleek barracuda kind of making his way quietly through the Gulf Stream. I thought about that afterward, it's literally a barracuda, but that did cross my mind as a metaphor for kind of where my dad fit in the feeding order of fish in the sea. No insult. I mean a barracuda is a great creature. I was marveled at it. I thought it was amazing. So yeah, I guess you could say there's a bit of a symbolism to that. And you left New York in the late '70s for college and never moved back here. What's the city mean to you as somebody who did live here but is now essentially a tourist? I have never really enjoyed all of the different neighborhoods, types of foods, buildings, the entire central part, more than after I left. When I lived here, the city seemed very provincial and small. People you see on the streets, it would say hi, everybody knew each other, but I was kind of in my own neighborhoods, Upper West Side. I didn't really know the whole city, but we were comfortable in our own little bubble of Manhattan of 9 million people. Coming back now, I walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, I go to different neighborhoods throughout the city. I love walking through the city. I really just enjoy seeing the new buildings that spring up. What they did with the High Line is amazing. I've been up to the north end of Central Park and that's an area I used to avoid because you just didn't walk that far. But now, as a photographer, I just love walking around and taking pictures and discovering different foods, Koreatown, I knew it was there. My father had a Korean girlfriend in the '70s. We discovered Korean food when I was pretty young, but now I just dig just all those lights and all those foreign names. You feel like you're in Korea. It's just amazing. You're in New York City and you're in Korea. What's your favorite food when you come back to New York? What do you have to have every time you come here? They go to foods, there's no particular order, but I'll just say last night I had pizza in the Lower East Side at a great pizzeria. Then I had Italian ricotta cheesecake adirinatis, wonderful Italian bakery that I've been to every few years. I had a bowl of udon, Japanese noodles, soba soup with seafood because my wife was feeling a little sick. I have to have rainbow cookies which are these little petty fors that my grandmother used to bring us. When I was a child, it's a tradition every time I go to New York, I have to have these rainbow cookies. They're like the color of Italian flag, I guess. With marzipan, different layers, a green layer, a yellow layer, and a red layer. I mentioned pizza. That should be the first. Then, of course, there's bagels and locks at Barney Greengrass. That's a go-to. Actually, when I go there, I usually have a little argument with one of the guys at the front counter over what's a pretzel or some kind of obscure femmer about Jewish Yiddish food. And we'll disagree. My son will say, "Dad, they own the restaurant. You're arguing with them what a pretzel is?" I say, "I know I'm right." "We're Jews. We have to argue." "Yeah." This morning, I went to Jonas Schimmel and had a kinesh, and I asked the guy, it was like eight in the morning, "What do you recommend?" He said, "We've got 15 of them." He said, "These just came out of the oven. Have one of these." I said, "Fine." It was great. The book also has a great anecdote about your dad completely melting down around Clyde Frazier. You're still a Nick fan after all these years in the walkie area. I haven't been a Nick fan since what Clyde Frazier was traded to the Cleveland Cavaliers on my 17th birthday, which is a day that will live in infamy. I'm sure a lot of other die-hard Nick fans would agree. That was like... Particularly Walt. Well, Walt too, but he's now the color commentator for the Nick's, so he still is involved with them. But to me, that was the equivalent of the Boston Red Sox trading Babe Ruth to the Yankees. Walt Clyde was Michael Jordan and Joe Dee and everyone combined. He was the God to me because he was so cool. He never showed emotion. He could hit him in the eye and he'd just roll over and act like he was at the opera. I love Walt Clyde Frazier, and someday I hope to meet him. He's just a hero and I would probably have the same reaction my dad did. I got to see him before Nick game a couple of years ago. I was taking an advertiser of mine, we had a conference in the city. He was from Toronto, this pal of mine, and we went about an hour and a half early to the garden. We're sitting there and I said, "Sam, it was Clyde Frazier up-headed." He just completely plots, melted down. He went over and got an autograph, and Clyde was polite, got a picture, but it was one of those moments of, "Oh dear God, that's Clyde Frazier." There's certain guys who just, we saw Mackin wrote earlier in the day and whatever John Mackin wrote. But Clyde, that's- You got to be kidding. Well, it was funny as my dad saw Clyde a few years later at Elaine's, and he walked up to him, and Clyde, when a high voice said, "Where are the action at?" Then the waiter at Elaine said, "You are the action." So my dad loves that story. Now two last questions, how did you get into photography and who were you reading? One day I was, I saw a photographer walk by with a framed photograph while I was working at the Jewish Community Center of Milwaukee about 1995, and I stopped him. I said, "I got a photographer." He said, "Why yes, I am." I hired him to take pictures for us at the Jewish Community Center, and in that process, he noticed I was a pretty good photographer in the newsletter, and he said, "Would you like to be a wedding photographer? I could train you." And I said, "No." And about six months later, when money was a little tight, I had a young child at the time. I said, "I went back to him." I said, "You're still interested in teaching me?" He said, "Sure." So I was sort of like an apprentice while working full-time, so I went and shot weddings with him, and he taught me bracketing, lighting, how to be in the right place to take the right picture, just the nuts and bolts. Very cut and dry. I'm not talking high-end artistic. I was an artist. It was more like a working wedding photographer and bar mitzvah photographer, so I was comfortable. I had a natural eye, I think. So I went and shot weddings for about seven years with a studio. I was a lead photographer, probably shot about a hundred weddings. And at a certain point, I quit because I wasn't being paid that much because I was working for him. I did it by myself while working full-time, and then I finally quit my full-time job and became a full-time photographer, and now I've done over 300 bar mitzvahs. But I worked part-time. So I still do occasional photo gigs. I was asked to do a bris this morning, but I'm in New York City, so I can't do a bris. And, by the way, I have no idea why anyone would want a picture of a bris, but I will give them every picture from soup to nuts. As it were. Now, your second question. Who are you reading? Right now, I'm reading a wonderful book, I forget the author's name, but the book is called Winter's Bone, and there was a movie version of it made with Jennifer Lawrence. Yeah. My wife loved that. I haven't seen it yet. It takes place in the Ozarks, and it's such, it's like Faulkner only you can follow it. It's beautifully written, very descriptive, as my dad would say, you know, the specificity and authenticity. It's a powerful book. I love it. I look forward to reading more books by this author whose name escapes me. He's been nominated for Penn Award. Oh, look at my book, we'll make sure we get reference to him. I love this book, Winter's Bone, I love the movie, the book is even better. And I'm also reading Anton Chekhov, who is perhaps the finest short story writer I've ever read, including my dad. I hope we'll have you back for a sequel or follow-up book to Barracuda. Is there anything in the offing at this point now that you've had the publishing bug? I have the publishing bug. Now I've been told a contributing writer at the Huffington Post. It's rather open-ended. So I have a number of stories that I'm working on that are more current, dealing with other things, post-freedmen. Fiction at all, or mainly— Some of it is fiction. I actually have a—it's satire, it's things that have happened to me later in life of issues. It's the same vein. You know, it's kind of looking at it in kind of a more of a whimsical way, but dealing with serious topics. So I think I'll be continuing to write it, I'm addicted. I think an awesome thing. Thanks for coming on the show. I appreciate your time, and everybody should pick up Barracuda in the attic. Thank you, Gil. And that was Kip Friedman. Go check out his first book, Barracuda in the attic, from Fantagraphics Books. I think you'll have fun with it. Kip's now a writer for the Huffington Post, as he mentioned, so visit that site and look him up. Kip with two P's, by the way, and Friedman is F-R-I-E-D-M-A-N. You should look up his brothers and his dad's work also, Bruce J. Friedman, Drew Friedman, and Josh Allen Friedman. And if you've got a bar or a bot mitzvah, or another special event in the Milwaukee area, look Kip up on photosbykip.com. And that's it for this week's virtual memory show. Like I said, no new episode next week, but come back on New Year's Eve for a special year end podcast. Now do me a favor and go to iTunes and post a review of the show or hit up our website, chimeraobscura.com/vm, and make a donation to this ad-free podcast. If you've got ideas for guests, drop me a line at groth@chymeraobscura.com. You can find that over on our website, too. I'm planning to stick to a weekly schedule in 2014. So that means I'm going to need 50-52 guests. I hope you can help me out with that. Also, if you can, help the show build some traction by telling your friends about it. I'd love to find more listeners who care about books and conversation and, well, you know, all those things that sort of seem to drift away from us nowadays. Until next time, I am Gil Roth, and you are awesome. Keep it that way. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]
