As part of my ongoing effort to keep the public informed about celebritykind, I frequently visit the homes of famous people. Sylvester Stallone lives in a faux-Mediterranean castello high above Beverly Hills with a Rocky statue guarding the pool. Robert Redford’s Napa Valley residence is, like the actor himself, a vision of weathered grandeur. Singer Josh Groban has a suit rack in his master bedroom that rotates like a dry cleaner’s.
Nobody, however, had a house like Nick Nolte’s. The actor’s Malibu home burned to the ground today after an electrical malfunction set his private office ablaze. Flames spread to the kitchen and living room and soon a plume of black smoke mushroomed above Zuma Beach. The L.A. County Fire Department is estimating the damage at $3 million.
We are told – in fact, it is part of my job to tell you – that celebrities are just like the rest of us. But that wasn’t the case with the way Nolte lived here. For starters, it wasn’t just one house but six separate houses on a six-acre compound by the Pacific. Nolte moved into a small pink house there shortly after 48 HRS and he slowly amassed a whole subsection of the neighborhood. The property’s guesthouse and a two-story brick structure where Nolte slept had belonged at different times to Tommy Chong and Don Henley.
As I wrote in a Premiere magazine profile of Nolte shortly after my visit, “After you spend a little time here, with the jasmine blooming and the gulls crying and the barefoot houseguests breezing in and out (there are always houseguests), you get the sense that Nolte isn’t just of Malibu, but rather that he is Malibu. On Nolte’s refrigerator, there’s a photocopied newspaper image of one of the local kids, `an actor of some renown,’ Nolte deadpans, on a recent trip to Baghdad. Above it, someone has written SEAN PENN WILL LEAD!”
The interview that day, which started at 10 am, was supposed to go an hour. But as day turned into night and Nolte kept talking, I lost track of time. Part of it was there was simply so much to see. In a room off his bedroom, Nolte (at that time, at least) maintained a Frankenstein-style science chamber to monitor the condition of his blood. Under a giant cardboard cutout of Jesus, which Nolte plucked from the set of Lorenzo’s Oil, the actor kept IV drip bags, hospital-grade oxygen canisters and flat-panel computer screens flickering with data about white and red cell counts and who knows what else.
Nolte asked that day if he could have a drop of my blood. I declined. But he delighted in telling me about others who had taken the dare. Director Ang Lee’s blood was “fascinating,” he told me, saying he’d never seen anything shimmer like that. “You watch white cells surround bacteria. You see the death of things. It’s better ‘n television. His blood was glorious.” When I asked Lee afterwards about the experience, the director said, “It was the most gothic feeling I ever had.”
Over in Nolte’s artist’s studio was a different kind of wonderworld. The actor was concerned at that time about dendrite growth in the brain. Specifically in his brain as well as his son, Brawley’s. Dendrites are the connections between brain cells that indicate learning and Nolte wanted his family’s dendrites to be growing like Sea Monkeys.
Nolte flashed a crooked smile and gestured to a now-popular Japanese arcade contraption known as Dance Dance Revolution. It blinked with colorful lights atop booming speakers and there was a light-up dance floor. Nolte fired it up and said, “We all have hand-eye coordination but not eye-foot. This machine challenges you to find a whole new set of learning muscles.”
Just being at Nolte’s house was doing that for me. Toward the end of the night, we were sitting in the living room in the main house that caught fire today. The lights were off. There were cherubs on the ceiling. Chinese furniture. Copulating Japanese figurines. Didgeridoos in a giant urn. Nolte talked about why he quit drugs and about that really bad hair day when he was caught on Pacific Coast Highway by the cops a few years earlier. Then he said he wanted to show me something. We walked in the darkness to yet another structure and into a room, mostly empty except for Oriental rugs that blanketed the floors and walls.
“I love this house and I love this room,” Nolte told me, “and this is where I’m going to die. And then after I’m dead, this is where they’ll bring my casket and where I’ll rest in peace.”
Tonight that room is probably gone. But Nolte is still with us, and with a mind like his, snapping with connections and full of ideas on how to live, he’s probably already worked out a backup plan.

As part of a regular feature on the analog world, I give you the obituary of Martin K. Tytell, typewriter wizard extraordinaire. Mr. Tytell takes with him the mysteries of the Royal, the Underwood and the Olivetti. Read about him here.

I had the opportunity to take a test flight yesterday on Emirates’ sparkling new double-decker Airbus 380, one of the world’s largest planes. The plane flew a jug-shaped loop around LAX, mostly over Catalina and the Channel Islands, while the 250 of us aboard –including astronaut Buzz Aldrin — got to play with the cool stuff inside.

It’s a very very big airplane and after waiting for a couple hours for it to arrive from San Francisco at our little private runway at LAX, they let us climb onboard.

The plane has everything: wireless internet, 1200 video channels, games you can play with other passengers via your console and live cameras from the tail, wing and underside that let you see where you’re flying. Watching it, you feel disembodied from the experience, especially since the plane is so quiet, but it’s a cool feature. Here’s a little video of what that looks like: Airbus Navigation Screen

Once we reached cruising altitude, the captain said we could walk around, asking that we not stay in one place longer than 15 minutes. As we filed up the spiral staircase in the rear, the crew was handing out glasses of Dom Perignon.

We were pretty hungry, though, and I made the mistake of reaching for some of this sushi when I got to the upstairs bar. Someone very forcefully said, “Sir, that is only for display. It’s been sitting around since yesterday.” I hate display sushi.

But I love the weird business class “shanty town” just beyond the bar.

It’s a very strange visual — little cubbies with chairs that flip back electronically into flat beds. There are flat screens, too, and holders for all sorts of drinks. I’d be fine flying to Dubai in one of these.

Then again, there’s first class. Fourteen private wood-paneled cabins, each with a stocked fridge, a basket of food. I stole a Hershey bar and a copy of Harvard Business Review. The big draw, though, is the shower. Yes, shower.

You book it for 20 minutes and inside there’s a heated floor, shampoos and other products and the full-sized shower itself. The plane carries only an extra 130 gallons of water which means the showers can only last five minutes. All that for $14,000 a seat.

After about two hours, we arrived back at LAX where they gave us a swag bag with things like a tiny model of the planet in a black velvet box. I would have preferred a voucher for a free round trip ticket somewhere.

I asked members of Upod, the group I run for professional writers and editors, to send links to their blogs and websites and send they did. If you take a look here, you’ll see how talented and productive a community it is. Among the many, many (which represents only about a tenth of the total Upod community), there are writing vodka makers, vodka-drinking taste makers, thrillists, banterists and someone who ambushes the unfashionable in Central Park. As we say in the group, In Pod We Trust.

My cousin Leah’s boyfriend’s mom has an interesting take on Obama’s Berlin speech in today’s NYT. You may recall Leah’s photo from a few days ago — the one that made Obama look like the guy from Jack-in-the-Box.

Change Germans Can’t Believe In

I have an essay in the August issue of Reader’s Digest on learning to play the mandolin as an adult. It’s one of my favorite stories. Doing the photoshoot at McCabe’s Music Shop in Santa Monica with Lori Stoll made up for the humiliation of having to play in front of actual human beings (including my family) as described in the story. Click here to read it.

My cousin Leah, who recently moved to Berlin, sends this shot she took at the Obama rally yesterday. The teleprompter was in the way of The One’s head but there’s something cool about it, like one of those old doctored Kremlin photos. Click on photo for a better view.

BoingBoing posted thoughts on this cool recording device:

Olympus TP-7 telephone recording device

“A friend of mine, a journalist, recently emailed to tell me he likes the Olympus WS-110 digital voice recorder I recently recommended.

He said:I just wanted to thank you for guiding me to try the Olympus WS-110 digital voice recorder for interviews, using ffmpegx to convert the audio to MP3, and then Listen & Type to transcribe.
I’ve been using all three for a couple of weeks now, and have been very happy with the results. The recorder in particular has been great: tiny in size, it holds more hours of audio than I could ever need, and has been able to clearly record both sides of an interview.

Being able to store interviews on my computer as MP3 files is also a great benefit.

A few days ago, I bought a very useful accessory for the WS-110: The Olympus TP-7 Telephone Recording Device. You simply stick it in your ear, and make the phone call. It does a great job of recording both ends of a conversation. It will work with any recorder, not just the WS-110. It also comes with various jack adaptors.
For the first time in my life, I feel like I’m really set to record interviews.

Olympus TP-7 Telephone Recording Device ($16.99 at Amazon.com)”

Having interviewed many famous people over the years, much of my knowledge about life comes from them. For example, I recently interviewed Alanis Morrisette, a woman as thoughtful as she is talented. She also knows something about automobiles. At the height of the mania on her Jagged Little Pill tour, she realized certain dashboard instruments do not work as well when you are a major celebrity. Says Alanis (in an interview for Angeleno):

“I remember being on tour and people throwing their bodies on the windshield of the car as we were driving. All I could think was, ‘What do you do? Windshield wipers don’t work for that.”

This is amusing, though a colostomy bag would have been a nice touch. Vanity Fair “Cover”