In part because I’m in fuck the Dodgers mode, full-on—
—the Tubi offering My Dinner with Andre is what I watched while Game Seven of the World Series played out. As a kind of intellectual, I deeply treasure the famously low-budget film, even if 85 percent of the theater and philosophy talk went high over my head.
Until Saturday night I had only consumed Dinner once, at 16.
Back then, the Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory showcase struck me as basic, but only in the best way: Two men talking. Tight.
I was blind to the filmmaking in this conversation which was shot in a recreation of Manhattan’s Cafe des Artistes. Every bit of the acting and writing escaped my comprehension. Dinner struck me like verité, a word I did not know in 1982.
But on a Portland Oregon Saturday night circa 2025—35 years into telling stories for a living—I was floored by the simple brilliance of what director Louis Malle did with the camera.
My Pasadena-centric younger son is going to school up north. He texted me from a San Francisco bar in the middle of my movie, but late in his ballgame. A little later I fell asleep, waking up to text midnight congratulations.
My kid knows I’m not engaged with the Series, and it’s awkward. We’ve walked the Dodger Stadium field perimeter, wearing our South Pasadena Little League t-shirts on Jackie Robinson Day.
Sleep was elusive after the texts. In these opening moments of Daylights Savings Time I found myself ruminating on a food conversation from the aughts with Dodgers star Andre Ethier, my SF child’s very first favorite player.
New Angeles is a monthly magazine that I edited for year. The gig came a year or so after exiting the weekly alternative LA CityBeat, as fun a sinking ship as one could ever be aboard. Routinely fun like… British punk-rock veteran Mick Farren was a staff meeting regular. Stuff like that. The newspaper and the magazine shared ownership.
This work paid a click higher than loose feces. But ownership let me do almost anything I wanted. The product ended up having a specific and legit LA sensibility. Art director Matt Ansoorian made some beautiful covers, like this Johnny Angel roller derby joint.
Such a fun job. Such shitty wages.
The only magazine I’ve ever edited was devoted to LA east of La Cienega. As much Dodgers stuff as possible got crammed into New Angeles. I’d run over to the stadium clubhouse, fishing for the right story. This was that 2008 squad of Manny Ramirez, Matt Kemp, and Andre Ethier. Mannywood Manny was at this point completely leaning into his quirky image and not to be seen here by these eyes. Kemp was preparing to have his entire career trajectory thrown off by a whirlwind relationship with Rhianna.
Didn’t see him, either.
But Andre Ethier was in the clubhouse, sitting at his locker, methodically getting dressed in the manner that pro athletes do. I approached the young left fielder, thinking that my older children would actually enjoy this work story.
What all Andre got asked I cannot tell you. I just introduced myself and launched in.
Affable and articulate, Andre Ethier was no Barry Bonds. When I’d collaborated with Bonds on that autobiography I sold for a million dollars—and which chicken-shit Bonds backed out of—we never did click on a conversational level. A lot of that failure falls on me, it took years to realize.
Amid the Dodgers and reporters I learned that the left fielder was newly married as well as putting on a clinic for the El Segundo Little League. Ethier had also begun working with the Union Rescue Mission, near his downtown home.
Andre told me that he was one of seven children. Growing up in Phoenix, he was fed by a mother with good taste, a woman who made meals with exceptional care. This had rubbed off on Andre, and as soon as the Vancouver Canadians began giving him per diem he was on a tour of the best minor-league town restaurants he could afford.
Living in 2009 downtown Los Angeles and working in Echo Park, the Arizonan was in food fan heaven. Our Q&A was mad different from the win-streak queries going on all about us.
Andre Ethier and I didn’t talk long and he never stopped dressing. I asked him to write something, for New Angeles. After that we did a phone interview that I turned into a first-person narrative. People loved the piece in print. Next thing you knew, Ethier was writing reviews on MLB.com. The foodie outfielder became part of his identity. Here Ethier is behind the grill in 2021.
Conversation is so powerful.
I have a special sub-genre of my cinema consumption called Films I Saw While Too Young to Comprehend. There are so many. Decades worth, arguably. Reds is the iconic example. My Dinner with Andre, too, is an all-timer.
It’s remarkable that Shawn thinks of the project as having been on the cusp of transformative history and nearly not made.
The single hill-I’m-dying-on demand made of my mother by Young Donnell was cable television. We absolutely had to have cable, even though most of my town had it not. Our apartment was a bonified craphole, but we had damn sure were having Showtime.
My oft-impoverished single mom managed to get a few piano lessons into me, along with a few grade-school Spanish lessons. She took me big University of Michigan theatrical productions. Greatest of all the cultural advantages my mum went above and beyond to give me was cable TV. And My Dinner with Andre opened up more possibility for chatting than my previous lifetime of discussion.
Still, I remain uncertain of exactly how I will talk about these Dodgers with my boy.
Of Oregon and Africa
On the subject of being downloaded, I just learned that Naeem Inayatullah and Elizabeth Dauphinee’s Narrative Global Politics is available for download. I think about elements of this writing quite a lot, especially when I am back in Portland.
Routledge is charging $51 for a copy.
My kid and I both enjoy the occasional beverage at the Dodger bar called Shortstop. It’s in Echo Park, the last place I resided before making my way back up north. A few cool conversations came though whilst amongst the coyotes of Echo Park. (Forgive the shit photography.)
And there’s the interview with my Echo Park homey Roger Guenveur Smith, the celebrated actor.
This is some illuminating LA shit. Buy me a drink sometime and I will share that Beverly Hills-Basquiat event backstory.
Echo Park is a character in my LA narrative. This weekend, LAPD officers outside of our favorite Sunset Boulevard Dodgers bar previewed all of our futures.
This could very well have been where my boy celebrating l, were he not presently getting a Northern California education.
All cops are bastards because the “non-violent” ones are complicit in their silence. The cover-up is on par with the crimes.
For a very long time I kinda believed I was kept alive by your approving eyes. Now I understand that food does that. Shelter does that.
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