SLIDESHOW: 10 Shows Not to Miss This Spring >

"I like darker beer," said the actor, just before ordering an Ithaca Nut Brown Ale and a bowl of nuts to go with it. He sat beneath an elaborate wall fixture consisting of nine black rotary telephones, dressed in a blue, pinstriped button-down tucked into tailored gray pants. His hair was close-cropped, his sideburns neat and his face delicately creased with age.

"I took a tour of the Guinness factory in Dublin," Mr. Cranston continued. "They give you a little eyedrop of Guinness encased in, uh, like a plastic -- almost like a paperweight. And you can keep it as a souvenir on your desk. It's really fun."

Mr. Cranston, who recently turned 54, was in town on an epic press junket to promote Breaking Bad, AMC's twisted black comedy, which has earned him two Emmy Awards for his leading role as Walter White, a terminally ill, midlife-crisising high-school chemistry teacher-turned-meth manufacturer living in Albuquerque. The show was created by Vince Gilligan, formerly a producer on The X-Files.

Breaking Bad, the third season of which premiered on March 21, is disturbing, hilarious, touching, taboo, nauseating, edifying, awkward, anxiety-filled and, above all, masterfully written and directed, as is evidenced by the various awards and critical acclaim it has received. It is not, however, nearly as massive a hit as many of its peers (at least not yet) -- zeitgeisty, water-cooler-chatter shows like The Sopranos, Lost, True Blood and, of course, Mad Men, Breaking Bad's extraordinarily popular network-mate (widely perceived as the reason AMC has become relevant). Walter White is no Don Draper, and Mr. Cranston himself is perhaps still more well known as the fumbling father from Malcolm in the Middle, the Fox sitcom in which he appeared in 151 episodes between 2000 and 2006.

"Breaking Bad is not a sexy show," said Mr. Cranston. "It's a gritty show. It's not going to be on the cover of Vogue. Mad Men, you have the dashing Jon Hamm and all these beautiful women. The Sopranos, we're enthralled with mobsters. You know, the goombah, the goodfellas, the godfather. That's totally magazine-cover-sexy. A guy in his underwear [cooking meth] out in the middle of the desert in an RV? Not sexy."

In the season-three opener, which begins after Walter has just confessed his secret profession to his wife, Skyler, who subsequently leaves him, we first see Mr. Cranston slouched on some patio furniture in his backyard, wearing a brown robe over tighty-whities, slowly flicking lit matches into his swimming pool. With one match left in the book, he gets up, strikes it and tosses it onto a charcoal grille with the intention of burning the $500,000 in cash he'd just made off a recent meth sale -- money he needed only so that Skyler, his newborn baby and his handicapped teenage son wouldn't be left penniless when he eventually succumbed to lung cancer. As Walter gazes at the burning bills, he suddenly thrusts himself onto the flames, catches on fire, and jumps into the pool, with the grill, to salvage his fortune. You just don’t know whether to feel bad or call him an asshole.

For Mr. Cranston, the most intense moment of the entire series thus far occurred in season two, when Walter lets his young business partner’s girlfriend die in her sleep, watching idly as she chokes on her own vomit during a heroin overdose. Good times!

“What we’re doing on the show has never been done in the history of television, and that’s not hyperbole,” said Mr. Cranston. “[Vince] told me, he wants to do a series where, at the beginning, the guy is Mr. Chips. Good guy. Smart guy. Provides for his family. Never got a ticket in his life. And by the end of the series, he’s Scarface. He’s a killer. And that’s never been done before. I mean, gone are the days of Magnum P.I. He was great-looking, great car, never drank too much, never cheated on his girlfriend. It’s like, ‘What a guy!’ We don’t have that. Those days are over. So we’re in uncharted waters here, and that’s what so exciting about this era of television. It’s going places that really haven’t been discovered. I think it’s, dare I say, another golden age of television.”

Whether Breaking Bad ever gets to Mad Men proportions, Mr. Cranston is not concerned. “That’s not what I do this for anyway,” he said. But: “I think we could easily do two more years, to do a total of five seasons. We might be able to do six. I hope we’re on for as long as it takes to thoroughly examine this journey, and no longer.”

SLIDESHOW: 10 Shows Not to Miss This Spring >

jpompeo@observer.com

Last week, Attorney General Andrew Cuomo obtained a guilty plea from David Loglisci, who was the chief investment officer in the comptroller’s office during Mr. Hevesi’s tenure, from 2003 to 2006. Mr. Loglisci said that he turned over key financial decisions to Hank Morris, Mr. Hevesi’s political adviser, who allegedly collected millions in placement fees. Mr. Morris has been indicted on corruption charges.

The scandal here is not that the comptroller’s office used a middleman to help with investment decisions, nor is it that pension funds were invested with firms such as Quadrangle Group LLC and the Carlyle Group. The issue is how individuals connected with Mr. Hevesi allegedly corrupted legitimate practices for their own enrichment.

Thomas Di Napoli, who succeeded Mr. Hevesi, has installed several reforms, including a prohibition on using placement agents and lobbyists in the investment process. If Mr. Cuomo’s investigation continues to reveal flaws in the management of New York’s pension investments, they should be corrected, quickly.

It would be wrong, however, to conclude that the comptroller’s office requires drastic renovations. At the moment, New York politics and government are in more than enough disarray. The governor is a lame duck whose continued tenure remains an open question. Albany doesn’t need another distracted statewide official, which is exactly what Mr. Di

Napoli would become if he were asked to overhaul his office and duties.

Fix what’s broken, and move on.

The next step should be pretty simple: The State Lottery Commission, which is overseeing the process, should choose a new contractor from the bids it already has received.

There’s no reason to reopen the process, as some Albany hands have suggested. This process has been delayed for far too long—nearly a decade has passed since the Pataki administration unveiled plans to introduce video lottery terminals (otherwise known as slot machines) at several racetracks around the state. The Aqueduct conversion should have been up and running years ago.

Governor Paterson said on March 15 that his aide will draw up new rules for the selection process. That’s fine, as long as those rules don’t require bidders to reconstruct their bids. The governor believes the new rules will be in place within a month.

He’d better be right, because the state simply can’t afford another scandalous delay. The installation of 4,500 lottery machines at Aqueduct is expected to generate $1 million a day for the state and will create hundreds of jobs, many of which will be filled by hard-pressed residents of southeast Queens.

The fiasco at Aqueduct ought to be an object lesson for New York’s next governor. New York City prides itself as a destination for the nation’s most creative minds in a vast array of fields, from fashion to finance to arts and culture. But if the political community insists on stalling creativity and development in the interests of political patronage, good people will simply go elsewhere to get their work done. The real scandal at Aqueduct wasn’t Mr. Paterson’s crude attempt to reward potential political supporters. The real scandal has been, and continues to be, the unconscionable delay in completing a much-needed project.

New York has to find a way to get things done, whether it’s the conversion of a racetrack to a mini-casino or the construction of housing units. It took four years to build the George Washington Bridge, as the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan often pointed out. It has taken longer to put in a few thousand slot machines at Aqueduct.

That’s a scandal.

“It was a lot of Netflix, and just sitting at home searching the Internet,” recalled Mr. Martin, 30, last week, speaking by phone from his mother’s apartment in East New York, the neighborhood where he grew up. He was in town for the March 2 premiere of his new movie, Brooklyn’s Finest, directed by Antoine Fuqua; he’d flown in from L.A. just in time for the recent blizzard. “I had all this time on my hands and I had to fill it with something.”

Mr. Martin studied film at Brooklyn College; he just never had the time, or the reason, to actually create a movie until that fateful moment in Brooklyn.

He started writing. Every day. A few hours in the morning after waking up around 5 a.m., and again at night, picking up wherever he’d left off, watching as many movies as possible in between. (At the time, he said, Italian neorealism was the focus of his Netflix queue.) The idea was to win a screenwriting contest sponsored by the New York arm of the Independent Feature Project, an indie-film nonprofit organization.

Mr. Martin finished the first draft of Brooklyn’s Finest—116 pages—in under three months, just in time for the contest deadline. The prize was $10,000, more than enough to buy a new car. “I wish I could say all I was thinking about was what actors would be in my movie or what director would be perfect for it, but cars were the only thing on my mind,” he admitted. “I kept telling people, I don’t know if I should get the 2000, or this older model, or this one.”

After being notified he was one of 40 finalists, and receiving some encouraging feedback from one of the judges (“You always held the interest of the reader. I wish I had more to tell you, but I just really liked it”), Mr. Martin was certain the vintage Mustang he wanted would be his. Alas, he came in second.

But during the contest, Mr. Martin caught the attention of Brooklyn-based producer Jeanne O’Brien, who helped him sign with the Brant Rose Agency. (He’s now repped by ICM.) In the spring of 2005, he landed a gig writing for the Showtime miniseries Sleeper Cell, prompting a temporary move to L.A. He also was hired to write a sequel to the 1991 neo-noir crime thriller, New Jack City. In the meantime, his agents were busy shopping Brooklyn’s Finest, which portrays the dark and violent parallel tales of three unconnected inner-city cops, broken down by the realities of policing a dangerous Brooklyn precinct. (See our review here.)

“It’s the type of situation that could be on the brink at any moment, when a cop goes into a dangerous neighborhood and deals with tensions,” said Mr. Martin of the story. “I wanted it to be frighteningly real.”

WHEN MR. MARTIN was 18, right out of high school, he took a job as a road checker for Command Bus Company in Brooklyn. He was still working at Command in February of 2006 when it was absorbed by the M.T.A. The following year, he started a job as a subway flagger, one of the guys who sets up lights and warning signals so construction workers don’t get mowed down by passing trains.

The job, he said, was painfully tedious: “You come into work at your station, sign in, wait a few hours, play dominoes, watch TV, then you head up to the construction site, wait for the contractors and go with the other flaggers to set up the warning lights.”

After that, you pretty much just sit there.

“About 150 feet out from the station,” Mr. Martin continued, “between the local and express tracks, you’ll find a white bucket. You sit on it. There’s layering so that in case your foot moves, you don’t touch the third rail. So you just make a little setup for yourself. You’re there for six hours. Whenever a train goes by, you’ve gotta swing a light and blow your whistle. Most of us would put flashlights in our helmets. You’re not suppose to read but we’d all do it anyway.”

It was while sitting on those white buckets that Mr. Martin would work on his screenwriting, be it new projects or polishing up Brooklyn’s Finest. (New Jack City 2, he said, was almost completely written in the New York City subway system.) “It was a way I could get through that job,” he added.

By the spring of 2008, Brooklyn’s Finest had found its way into the hands of Mr. Fuqua, director of the 2001 Oscar-winning police drama Training Day.

“I got this grip on my gut,” Mr. Fuqua said. “It just seemed to have a clear voice and the characters were coming from a very real place. Like it was ripped right out of the headlines.”

Indeed, Mr. Fuqua thought the script was so good that he was certain it couldn’t have been Mr. Martin’s first; there had to be a ghostwriter involved, or something, he said. So he decided to give Mr. Martin a test: write the script for a mini-movie/music video that Jay-Z wanted him to direct. Mr. Martin turned it around in about a week, flawlessly, and Mr. Fuqua enthusiastically signed on to direct Brooklyn’s Finest, bringing with him an all-star cast, including Ethan Hawke, Richard Gere, Don Cheadle, Wesley Snipes and Ellen Barkin. (The Jay-Z video was never made.) “I’d talk to him and he’d still be on the train tracks!” said Mr. Fuqua. “I finally said, ‘You’ve gotta quit, because you’re talented and this is a big opportunity and you don’t wanna miss this experience.’”

That April, after Mr. Martin had attracted some media attention (including an appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show and an item on this newspaper’s Web site), the M.T.A. gave him a disciplinary hearing, charging he’d violated protocol by having a second job. He said he won, with the help of the union, by arguing that selling a screenplay does not employment make. The next day, he said, an M.T.A. communications officer approached him to do some press about being a transit worker in the spotlight.

“I said no; they got pissed,” Mr. Martin recalled. (That spokesman, Charles Seaton, said he was unaware at the time that Mr. Martin had just been brought up on disciplinary charges, and that he had no further interest in speaking with Mr. Martin “since he did not wish to speak with me.” He declined to comment on the hearing.)

So Mr. Martin used up his few dozen remaining vacation and sick days and quit as soon as they ran out. He was on set with Mr. Fuqua at the Van Dyke housing projects in Brownsville, Brooklyn, by mid-May; filming wrapped in August, and shortly thereafter, Mr. Martin moved to L.A.—where he now lives, about 10 minutes outside of Beverly Hills, with his wife, Maria, and 2-year-old son, Ricardo—to become a full-time screenwriter.

“It felt great,” he said.

These days, Mr. Martin spends most of his time writing and reading; his agent at ICM sometimes sends over book adaptations or screenplay rewrites. He’s completed four scripts to date, and is currently adapting a crime thriller novel for GK Films. He drives a white Chevy Malibu, though he said he misses being able to walk everywhere and take the train.

“Working for the M.T.A., I always felt like, I’ve got this thing in my way that I’ve got to fight through in order to get what I want,” he said. “Now I get to do what I love and get paid for it.”

jpompeo@observer.com

The city’s plan to allow cab-sharing on certain routes in Manhattan opens up new possibilities for chance meetings among strangers. Until now, Manhattanites saw each other as competitors for that sometimes-elusive prize, an available cab. Now, however, City Hall wants us to rethink our cab culture. For a flat fee of $3 or $4, single riders can cross paths with that cutie across the street by offering to share, er, the back seat for a few fleeting minutes.

Some worry that the plan will upset certain New Yorkers who tend to avoid contact with strangers—or even neighbors. But single New Yorkers might well avail themselves of a chance to spend a few minutes with an attractive stranger.

And if it doesn’t work out, well, there’s always another cab waiting to be hailed.

The Post reported several days ago that more than 700 former teachers—some of them retired from the City University system—collect pensions of more than $100,000 a year, and some make double that amount. Teachers collected $3.8 billion in pension checks last year from the Teachers Retirement System, a fund that lost $9 billion, or about 30 percent of its value, last year. The city contributed about $2 billion to the retirement fund last year.

It used to be that public employees, including teachers, understood that city and state pension benefits were part of a trade-off—they didn’t make as much money as they might have in the private sector, but in return, government took care of them in their retirement.

That formula, however, belongs to the age of the typewriter, the assembly line and the lunch bucket. Veteran teachers now make decent salaries—they’re not getting rich, but they’re not starving, either—and life expectancy is years higher than it was a half-century ago. Many teachers in the city still can retire at age 55 and start collecting what, for some, is a gold-plated pension, assuming they have served for 25 years or more.

The union no doubt would point out that the $100,000-per-year pensioners are not all public-school teachers—some, as noted above, were college professors—and in any case, some 70,000 retired teachers collect pensions. The scandalously high earners constitute only about 1 percent of the entire retiree population.

That’s not the point. The fact is that New York City can not afford to pay teachers traditional pension benefits, especially when they have the option to cash in at an age when most taxpayers still are a decade away from retirement. City Hall needs to get tough, and creative, in new rounds of talks with the teachers’ union. State law protects the benefits of current teachers, but going forward, the city should reward new teachers with higher salaries if they opt for a 401(k)-style benefit package, or for no pension benefit at all.

Higher salaries would broaden the pool of potential teachers at a time when many talented people are reconsidering their career paths.

In any case, the current system simply is unaffordable. Public service is an honorable and noble calling, but when taxpayers hear of these kinds of outrages—pensioners making six figures—they can hardly be blamed for thinking that teachers (some of them, anyway) are part of our intractable financial problems.

When The Observer caught up with Ms. Birkin, who lives in France, in her room at the Roger Smith Hotel on Thursday, Feb. 11, just a few hours before her second and final performance at the French Institute Alliance Francaise, the 63-year-old British-born actress, model and sex icon was breathing out of a vaporizer.

“You have to do it three hours before [performing] or else you spit like a cow when you sing,” she said.

Ms. Birkin is no longer an international sexual fantasy. She’s not the lascivious model from Antonioni’s Blowup, exposing her entirely naked body to an entirely unexpecting audience. She doesn’t get banned from the radio because she doesn’t get played on it. She owns only one of the famous Hermés Birkin bags that she inspired. It was placed in the corner of the hotel room, tattered and overflowing with papers and tissues and business cards. Only now has the humbled sexpot managed to step out of the shadow of Gainsbourg, whose songs she continued to sing even after she left him for another man in 1980.

“After leaving him, Serge’s songs were more beautiful because I sang his pain,” she said. “I was no longer the baby doll. I was no longer that little image that he wanted.” 

Ms. Birkin’s publicists circled the room informing us we’d only get another five minutes with her. They said she had to maintain her voice.

“Waiflike voice,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I’ve heard it so often.”

Sitting with her breathing mask in a shadowy corner of the hotel room, it was a far cry from Ms. Birkin’s breathy exclamation of, “Ooo-eee je t’aime,” on her famous duet with Gainsbourg, who died of a heart attack in 1991. She’s only recently started to sing her own material, which was featured for the first time on 2008’s Enfants d’Hivre, her most recent studio album.

“I’m getting older,” she said. “I was nostalgic for childhood.”

Ms. Birkin described a trip with her brother to their childhood home on the U.K.’s Isle of Wight.

“We’d found coins behind a fountain where my brother had hidden them 40 years ago,” she reminisced. “Just as we found them, some fellow came out of nowhere and said, ‘What the fuck are you doing in my garden?’ And I said, ‘It used to be ours.’ All there was to hang on to was my darling Andrew, my brother. I just wanted to express myself.”

At Ms. Birkin’s concert later that evening, she stared out as she sang, transfixed on everything and nothing in particular, walking around as if hypnotized during musical interludes, prancing about to each member of her four-piece band, leaning against the grand piano like a lounge singer from another era. Her hair was cut short, like on the cover of Melody Nelson, and she was wearing an oxford shirt and tie with a vest and baggy dress pants, all of which made her tiny frame look even more frail. Her set combined English and French songs—plenty of Gainsbourg’s as well as some of her own compositions. She unleashed an enormous smile after finishing one of them.

“You can’t imagine how nice it is to hear people applaud a song you’ve written yourself,” she said.

Luckily, the same wouldn’t be said of the vast majority of New York’s restaurants. They are subjected to fairly rigorous inspections by the Department of Health, and chefs and owners alike know that they’d better have a clean kitchen. Or else.

The system of inspections, warnings and forced closures seems to work. There have been no reports of mass poisonings or illnesses traceable to the city’s thriving restaurant business.

And yet the city is considering a new inspection regime that would give inspectors the power to issues letter grades to restaurants, and would require restaurants to display these grades prominently.

This is just wrongheaded, a scheme cooked up by some well-meaning but underemployed bureaucrat. City restaurateurs rightly complain that the letter grades will be misunderstood.

After all, the grades would be based not simply on kitchen cleanliness, but an assortment of other small violations, like burned-out light bulbs.

More to the point, however, the city simply hasn’t explained why the old system should be replaced. And let’s not forget that the proposed new system would so empower inspectors that the possibility for corruption on a mass scale can’t be ignored—the example set by our state legislators suggests that only a fool would downplay the potential for corruption in any aspect of civic life.

If there was some evidence that the old system was failing, that restaurateurs were not keeping their kitchens clean, City Hall would be justified in seeking a remedy. But no crisis exists. The system works, and should remain intact.

Governor Paterson’s decision to give a politically connected company the rights to transform the Queens racetrack into a quasi-casino represents all that is wrong with state politics.

Yet Mr. Paterson awarded this contract even as he condemned the culture of what he called “Planet Albany” while vetoing a weak new ethics bill. Sorry, Governor, but you can’t have it both ways. You can’t talk like a reformer while acting like a hack.

As even the sleepiest member of the State Legislature knows by now, the governor chose a company called Aqueduct Entertainment Group to install video lottery terminals—otherwise known as slot machines—in an effort to revive the flagging racetrack. These so-called “racinos” have the potential to deliver much-needed new revenues to the state, as the successful conversion at Yonkers Raceway has shown.

The size of that pot of gold, however, depends on how the operation is run. Nothing that we know about AEG should inspire confidence in this deal. The Rev. Floyd Flake, the Queens power broker and a former congressman, is an investor in AEG, and several friends of the Senate majority leader, Malcolm Smith, are connected to the company. Senator Smith, not surprisingly, is one of the deal’s loudest champions.

As if to emphasize that this deal was about politics, not business, Mr. Flake met with Mr. Paterson several days after the governor’s decision to talk about—guess what—this year’s gubernatorial campaign. Mr. Flake had been making friendly noises about Mr. Cuomo, the governor’s presumed primary opponent. Mr. Paterson clearly noticed.

If there is nothing to hide, and Mr. Flake insists everything is on the up and up, then AEG and the governor should welcome an investigation and a full accounting of the decision-making process. But if the process remains shrouded in mystery, voters will have every reason to conclude that this potential windfall for the state has been treated like an ordinary piece of patronage.

But that’s how things are done on Planet Albany.

Talese would go on to pioneer New Journalism, publishing such works as Thy Neighbor’s Wife and Honor Thy Father, as well as “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” in Esquire. “For individuals who were as shy and curious as myself, journalism was an ideal preoccupation, a vehicle that transcended the limitations of reticence,” he wrote in his 1996 memoir. And given Mr. Talese’s talent for exploring the boundaries of public and private life, Salinger’s self-imposed isolation would seem like fertile ground.

But looking back on Salinger’s heyday, Talese says, none of that matters. The important thing about Salinger was the printed word on the page, nothing more. Late last week, Talese spoke to The Observer’s Molly Fischer about being young in New York and excited about writing.

What was so special about the writing and maybe the mystique of Salinger was that his work for a magazine represented a kind of epoch of the printed word. What I mean is, when we think of print today, we don’t think of much, because it doesn’t have the impact. But in those days, a printed word in a magazine was preceded by word of mouth.

All of us who were young in those days, in the 1950s and ’60s—I came to New York in 1956 to stay—we all sort of thought we knew somebody who was a clerk at The New Yorker, and who would say, “Hey …”

Word got around that there was a story in the works that was going to be published soon, and we waited for it. I was in my mid-20s at the time; I’m 77 now so I’m looking back on this from a half a century’s perspective. It was still the era of Eisenhower. And yet it was a kind of beginning of a kind of identity with youth—it wasn’t a youth movement, as would happen later with the Beatles and Bobby Dylan and the war protests of the ’60s and drugs and rock ’n’ roll and all that stuff—but there was really something that gave identity to young people in the work of Salinger. A sort of an epochal time for the printed word.

I don’t remember anything before it, because I was too young to know anything before it—when Hemingway was around. It was the Sundance of the short story in those days. People really wanted to be writers. We didn’t give a shit about Oscars, it seemed to me. It was the literary word, and the printed word—it was the quintessential time for the printed word.

Salinger didn’t appeal to everyone. It was our generation. It was before civil rights, and it was before any identity with drugs. It was almost when Lenny Bruce was being prosecuted for what he was talking about from the stage—it was really the ’50s. Salinger was a person of the ’50s. He is a product of the pre-Kennedy time. I mean, that was the period of being old. It’s the last of “I like Ike” and playing golf, and here’s this new voice, and it’s a young voice.

Here comes this voice not of protest but of a most uncommon character. This young character—of the Glass family. And it really seemed to be the first legitimate young American voice on the printed page that had all the power and song of what would later be in the words of Bobby Dylan, or the Beatles, or the music of Motown. That was later stuff. This one character—that was Salinger. And the word of mouth: I’d be in the city room, and someone would tell me in the cafeteria—we had a coffee break—“Hey, I heard Salinger …”

Before Tina Brown thought of buzz, there was this buzz. I’d never heard any word of mouth on an about-to-be-published short story in some magazine—I know The New Yorker wasn’t just “some magazine,” but I don’t care. It never happened with Roth or Updike or Don DeLillo or anybody. Some Mailer stuff—“The Steps of the Pentagon”—and the New Journalism era, but that was nonfiction.

Then there was a conversation! There was a debate. Half an evening’s meal was spent discussing this. This was very much what was going on. From Chumley’s down in the Village—maybe, if you had the money, even Toots Shor’s, the old sports bar—you heard about Salinger.

Nothing was quite like it. I don’t think we had another person. And Salinger was not self-promoting—the opposite. That’s what so special. It was all about his work.

You can always drop Salinger’s name to people twice as young as my daughter, and everybody seems to know who he is. On the basis of being in print—not being in the movies. Many of the books that we think are famous are famous because of a movie. Godfather might not be famous were it not for the film.

The stories—“A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” “Love and Squalor”—I mean, I read all these stories six times when they came out. I’d read them again and again and again. They’re just beautiful.

You couldn’t dare think that voice would be something of your own voice. It was a special voice, not to be imitated—or that you could even think that you understood fully what was in that brain of his. But you loved the fact that he was saying something that you could identify with. It wasn’t that his language was so evocative—he just had control of his story and his era. He just was a new man on the planet. And he carried us away.

mfischer@observer.com