“If the Jews control the media, why don’t we give ourselves better press?” Jon Stewart quipped recently on The Daily Show. If Jewish conspiracy theory is central to modern anti-Semitism, jokes about Jewish power are increasingly a staple of Jewish irreverence. The latest example is Marc Levin’s documentary Protocols of Zion, produced by HBO and opening today in New York, Los Angeles, and other U.S. cities. (The film will also air on HBO in the spring.) A Swiftian satire, the documentary takes as its modest proposal the premise that Jews conspired to bring about 9/11.

Jews who think that humor and anti-Semitism are as unkosher a mix as milk and meat need not fear: Protocols of Zion is no Life Is Beautiful. Unlike director Roberto Benigni, Levin carefully sets his story in a historical context rather than in a land of make-believe. He links the resurgence of anti-Semitism after 9/11 to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the notorious forgery purporting to be the Jewish master plan to rule the world that the Russian secret police composed 100 years ago. Long ago exposed as a fake, The Protocolshas been translated into countless languages. Along with Mein Kampf, it’s the acme of Western anti-Semitic literature. Levin uses excerpts of The Protocols to make sense of an improbable journey that takes him, as narrator, to West Palm Beach, Fla., where senior citizens struggle with voting machines and lament voting for Pat Buchanan for president in 2000, and to a tête-à-tête with Larry David, who manages to steal the scene through the other end of a telephone without being heard.

Riding the wave of Jewish satireFor all its shtick, Protocols isn’t slapstick. Among its more trenchant moments is a meeting with Walid Rabah, publisher of the Arab Voice Newsletter of Patterson, N.J., who after 9/11 cut and pasted (with a glue stick) excerpts of The Protocols into his publication to suggest that the Jews were somehow responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center. Levin also interviews Pastor Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, who calls Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ“the Michelangelo portrait of this generation.” And he visits neo-Nazi leader Shaun Walker, who shows off SS bolted boots that he pulls out of a box labeled “Aryan Wear: the Sole of Our People.”

None of this is revelatory—most of us know that subcultures like these are out there. But typically, Jews try to erase smears rather than air them. Recently, for example, the Anti-Defamation League got The Protocolsremoved from Wal Mart’s online catalogue, and the Jewish Web log jewschool.com successfully campaigned to remove the anti-Semitic Web site jewwatch.com from Google’s search engine.

Yet as Lenny Bruce teaches (along with First Amendment scholars), ideas and speech gain strength when they’re driven underground. Mockery, on the other hand, zaps them. Think of Bruce’s routine about finding a note in his basement that takes full responsibility for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ—”Signed, Morty.” Sure, Levin is handing a mike to a racist skinhead when he puts Shaun Walker on camera. But in prompting Walker to describe his preference for tan boots instead of the traditional black, he is also pricking the bigot’s balloon.

Levin has company among Jewish satirists in going after conspiracy theorists at the moment. In literature, music, film, and television, examples abound that would make Lenny Bruce plotz. Check out this Jewish apparel Web site, jewishfashionconspiracy.com, which puts the “racy” back into “conspiracy,” by selling “Jews for Jeter” and “Happy Madonnakah” T-shirts. I’m part of the movement: Co-author and conspirator David Deutsch and I recently published The Big Book of Jewish Conspiracies. In the book, we posed as historians purporting to divulge the secret history of the world, toured the greatest hits of Jew hatred—Jesus-killing, blood libel, well-poisoning—and fetched up at a meeting with the contemporary Elders of Zion. Their names are Alan Dershowitz, Noam Chomsky, and Soupy Sales, and they can’t decide whether to start a “Museum of Conspiratorial Intolerance” or a reality TV show called When Anti-Semites Attack!

The new wave of satire coincides with the general resurgence of global anti-Semitism, which includes the myth that 4,000 Jews employed at the World Trade Center somehow knew to stay home from work on 9/11. So, are the satirists making the classic Jewish move of striking a blow against intolerance by playing disaster for laughs? I don’t think so. At the release party for my book, Jewish waitresses served Bloody Libels (“a Bloody Mary with more screaming”), DJs played klezmer break beats, and a German television crew chased after the queen of Jewish conspiracy theory herself, Monica Lewinsky. Satire seemed to be about revelry, not politics.

Or maybe Levin’s film is less about saving Jews from the Mel Gibsons of the world than about spinning out a fantasy—the fantasy that today’s American Jewish community could ever act in accordance with one master plan. Back in the day, Jews spoke Yiddish, married within the tribe, and lived close together. And still the old joke was: Two Jews, three opinions. Nowadays, with intermarriage rates rising and synagogue affiliation falling, Jewish conspiracy satire gives us the illusion of a shared cosmic mission. Imagine 4,000 Jews acting in unison to do anything! To do so—even in the most darkly ironic way—is to hearken back to a world in which we were still outsiders together.

A toast, then: Let’s lift a bloody libel—not “to life,” but “to Morty.”

The man himself is, as expected, all energy and geeky cool. Between obscure references and funny voices, he explains his latest creation, Dollhouse. Doe-eyed Buffy-vet Eliza Dushku plays Echo, a member of an underground group whose personalities are wiped clean and replaced so that they may be hired out as saviors, lovers or killers. The trailer for the new show reveals certain recurring, very Whedonesque themes—a fantastic narrative infused with the mythical, complicated issues of identity, and, of course, complex female characters, a subject he isn’t shy about.

“Since Buffy [2003], we’ve taken a giant eight-year leap back into the stone age,” says Whedon. “In the 1930s everything was Rosalind Russell and Katherine Hepburn, who were very interesting to watch. These women were replaced [in films] by a dim-witted blonde with very little to offer,” he says as the conversation turns to Marilyn Monroe, whose face, ironically, is depicted on a mural just outside his office. “Television, then, became the place where women could be interesting and funny.”

Television is certainly Whedon’s primary canvas, but not his only one. At 44, he is an Oscar-nominated screenwriter (Toy Story), a comic book author (Buffy Season Eight from Dark Horse), and the engine behind several hugely successful online media projects including Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog—oh yeah, and he’s also pretty much Yoda to the thousands who treat their annual trip to Comic-Con like a religious pilgrimage.

Whedon doesn’t underplay the extent to which his attitude towards of pop culture is critical to his success. “I take storytelling very seriously,” he explains. “Anything that affects the culture is worth studying. Dynasty affects the culture, but fuck that shit. That shit is ghastly. But I still want to figure out the connection between that show and American culture.” It’s no wonder his stuff inspires academics. “BuffyStudies” is an official phenomenon, gleefully deconstructing with critical papers like “Imaginary Para-Sites of the Soul: Vampires and Representations of ‘Blackness’ and ‘Jewishness’ in the Buffy/Angelverse” and “Community, Language, and Postmodernism at the Mouth of Hell.”

My theory? The Los Angeles-born “Chosen One,” Buffy Summers (played by Sarah Michelle Gellar), is secretly a member of the tribe. Though sidekick Willow Rosenberg is the official Jewess, Whedon’s gone on record saying that Kitty Pryde of X-Men comics, a tiny, brilliant, brown-haired teenager who fought monsters while wearing a Star of David, was his biggest influence in the creation of Buffy.

“She’s the prototypical ‘I-am young-and-slightly-confused-and-different-from-everyone-else’ character and she’s my absolute archetypical role model and I met her when I was just the right age.”

As writer of Astonishing X-Men, Whedon insisted on bringing Kitty back and made her the de facto protagonist of his 2004 run. “When my friend and I were literally scouring our Marvel Comics for girls to have crushes on, it was like, ‘You can have this girl from Swamp Thing. . .’ but I’m from the Upper West Side and Kitty was every girl I went to school with—only nice.”

Strangely, Kitty’s ethnicity largely eluded Whedon. A college girlfriend actually had to explain to him the difference between a WASP and a Jew. “I’m from Riverdale where everyone is Jewish,” he quips. “The fact is, I was raised in an agnostic household in a largely Jewish neighborhood, but I finished high school in England where we had to go to church everyday. . . .The Christian mythos was ingrained in me—either the story of Christ or the story of Spider Man is in there.”

At the rate the Whedonverse is expanding, the name Buffy Summers could someday make that short list of archetypes, right between Jesus H. and Peter Parker. We’ll see how Echo fares.

Enter the FreeDarko collective, who, for four years, have been building an online community of basketball fans and troubadours of the human spirit dedicated to capturing the complex characters who drive the game. Last fall, they released a book, which we recently named the best book of the year 5769. It seemed like a good time for a little one-on-one with the mastermind behind the Web site, book and sports counterculture, Bethlehem Shoals—né Nathaniel Friedman.

For those who don’t know about FreeDarko, can you tell us how the collective came together?

The quick and dirty version of it is: A couple of friends of mine from college just started watching a lot of basketball in the summer of 2000. Then we got a fantasy league, and in the fantasy league, we started leaving these large comments on our message board. This was when people didn’t start blogs with the goal of taking over the South of Italy or whatever…There was another guy in our fantasy league who I’d known from when I was in high school and he was in college at the same time, and then another friend of mine who I’d known previously though weird online tape-trading stuff…And we just all started writing. It was only to amuse ourselves—to pretend we were starting some sort of cult or had some sort of higher calling.

When I read the book, one of the first things I thought of after I read the introduction was that Seinfeld joke (not to turn myself into a caricature by beginning with a Seinfeld reference), that when you root for a sports team you’re pretty much rooting for ‘laundry.’ The players change teams so seamlessly, owners will move a franchise from one city to another if they get a bigger arena, the players will leave the team and sign with a rival if they pay them a nickel more, and really it’s just the uniforms that you end up rooting for. Yet for some reason, so many fans keep this fierce allegiance to their home team.

No man. You shouldn’t just root for your team because it’s in your city. You should root for a team because something that they are doing is resonating with you, and when they stop doing that, you have no reason to keep rooting for them if you don’t want to.

That used to be called jumping on a bandwagon, though, no?

I think it would be jumping on the bandwagon if I rooted for teams that were good. But I don’t think anyone is going to accuse me of jumping on the bandwagon when I religiously follow the Atlanta Hawks. You know what I mean? The bandwagon thing is based on this idea that you have no loyalty or you just like what’s popular or what’s successful. And, if all of a sudden what you’re liking isn’t at all popular or successful and your reasons for liking them are kind of oblique, then you can’t really level that same criticism. That’s why I think people say things to me like, ‘You must have never been an actual fan, because this makes no sense.’ And I’m like, ‘What you’re doing makes no sense to me and looks like kind of boring.’ And this sort of comes back to this whole question, ‘Oh, are journalists supposed to be fans?’ And I think the common answer is, ‘Well, they’re just not supposed to pull for anyone.’ But no, I think journalists have a variety of players and teams and configurations of players they end up attached to or attracted to.

Do you think basketball lends itself to this kind of analysis?

I think there is a similar sort of selective fandom that happens with basketball and people who aren’t otherwise into sports. I think that there is this way to appreciate basketball that intersects with being outside mainstream American culture, or lends itself to the snideness-slash-braininess in a way that other sports don’t.

There was a period after the ABA/NBA merger when basketball was a wild kind of carnivalesque. The culture seems a lot more corporate these days. Are there any signs that things may be changing?

I really like the new Nike Hyperize commercial just because that’s the kind of thing where I feel like if someone asked me, ‘Do you want to make a commercial?’ I’d say, ‘Sure, let’s just get a bunch of young players, make them rap, combine multiple strains of late ‘80s, early ‘90s hip-hop into one world and then make a bunch of inside jokes about those genres and then make Kevin Durant wear an Africa medallion.’ That’s why I love that commercial so much, because it seems like they were just like, ‘OK, let’s just make the craziest commercial we can think of that only half the people who see it are going to get.’ I mean that’s what I love about that commercial—is that there’s like a sliding scale of how much of it makes any sense to anyone.

What commercial do you think typifies the antithesis: the urge to sell the players as bland symbols of ‘the will to win’?

I think ‘Brand Jordan’ for better or worse often falls into that trap …Like the last one I guess they did where it’s like player’s eye view. It’s like a commercial that basically shows you what it’s like to be on the floor. It’s just actually like if you were running with them, like with Chris Paul in a fast break like, this is what you would see. It’s a really cool commercial visually; it’s just all it does is basically reinforce the fact that Chris Paul, Joe Johnson, Carmelo Anthony and Rip Hamilton are very good basketball players.

Another one I didn’t like was the LeBron commercial where it was just him sort of reciting his accomplishments and dribbling. He dribbled. He changed uniforms, and then he was like, ‘I’m not done yet.’ It was just sort of this very bland idea of ‘excellence.’ (This is something we had to work on with the LeBron James essay [in the book]. We didn’t want to get this sense of him this exceptional, somewhat otherworldly and isolated figure.) It’s funny, like people talk about how LeBron is boring as a public figure, but Jordan himself was hardly the most interesting public figure…I mean the personality for Jordan was Spike Lee.

It’s funny you mention Spike Lee, because I think he’s also probably the person that’s done the best job at channeling LeBron as well. In the Kobe/ESPN doc he did this year, LeBron comes across as so funny, so quirky, so off-the-wall.

Wait, do you mean the public commercials?

No, no I mean Kobe Doin’ Work.

Oh yeah… I didn’t actually didn’t see that.

Yeah, it’s just great stuff. Like when Kobe and LeBron are in the Olympics together and they’re sharing the same locker room. Kobe’s trying to fit in and going out of his way to be one of the guys by participating in all the locker room shenanigans, but it all looks so forced. And meanwhile LeBron—it just comes natural to him.

I think that’s one of the reasons why I didn’t like that Nike puppet campaign—not only because it was weird (the LeBron puppet sounded like LeBron and the Kobe one sounded nothing like Kobe), but it was also because you could imagine a goofy puppet LeBron running around and acting silly, but the idea of Kobe walking around showing off his rings and stuff—I think people assume Kobe Bryant would just be sitting on the couch quietly reading.

Yeah, if LeBron harassed him or whatever.

Yeah, that would’ve been hilarious. It’s sort of hard for Nike to figure out how to market Kobe, because—and I think everyone realizes now—Kobe is this kind of, I don’t want to say weird guy… I mean he is a weird guy…. And if you want to get into what makes him interesting, it gets really, really weird and creepy and confusing really fast.

What element of his personality would you like to see highlighted a little bit more?

I would honestly like to highlight his dorkiness. Kobe loves graphic novels and science fiction movies. He has sort of lived in this weird bubble his entire life and lived all over the place. He’s an awkward kind of geeky guy who’s maybe a little over-analytical. I don’t know. I just feel like he’s got an ego, so he wants his commercials to be grandiose.

So, how would you do it?

Man, you’re putting me on the spot.

But it’s a fun question, though, no? Pretend you were shooting a Kobe/LeBron commercial.

It’s pretty easy with LeBron, whereas name me one Kobe campaign that was convincing. It certainly wasn’t the one where he was like sitting in a garden writing poetry in Italian. It certainly isn’t the one where he just lifts a lot of weights and jumps over a car. And, you know, you also can’t do anything about how so many people hate Kobe. He’s not Iverson. Iverson’s polarization was actually good for his image; it’s what drove his image, but that doesn’t work for Kobe. So, it’s tough to say.

I’m not backing down here. Suppose you were hired to do a branding campaign with Kobe and LeBron.

Well, this is actually funny. I think I heard a story once. I think it was in New Orleans for the All-Star game, and all of the players did Habitat For Humanity stuff through the warm-ups. Apparently, Kobe was very serious about being able to get the nails out that no one else could. Like [ESPN basketball writer] Henry Abbott couldn’t get a nail out, and like Kobe is like, ‘Let me try that’ and makes sure he can get it out and makes sure everybody sees it. But he also really badly wanted to finish the house. OK, maybe Kobe and LeBron are in the gym and maybe it’s a reprise of the old Bird/Jordan one-on-one [McDonalds commercial], and on Kobe’s side of the court, there are all of these spots taped for him to take jumpers from and he has all these charts and stuff. Meanwhile, LeBron is bouncing the ball off the top of the gym and doing dunks and then shooting no-look three-pointers over his back, and then they meet at half-court and are like, ‘Alright, you ready?’ Or something dumb like that.

The Ebb and Flow of An Acting Paragon

in the distance, the perfect turquoise of the andaman sea drifts calmly towards an impossibly white shore as I approach the resort villa of 39-year old Scottish actor Ewan McGregor on the island of Phuket in southern Thailand. The island’s natural splendor makes it easy to lose track of the fact that you’re at the site of one of the earth’s most devastating natural disasters. Moreover, the resort itself conspires in the bewildering feeling of amnesia—its awe-inspiring trees aren’t even indigenous to the region, but were trucked in from Bangkok to replace the ones the tsunami destroyed just six years ago. McGregor has savored the time he’s spent here shooting The Impossible, a Spanish-financed drama about the 2004 tsunami, without forgetting its recent history.
McGregor jettisoned to international celebrity status with his breakthrough portrayal of junkie-cad Mark Renton in Danny Boyle’s 1996 instant classic, Trainspotting, and has managed to retain it ever since even while churning out films that are the farthest thing from popcorn fare. Despite a move to Hollywood, two reality television shows, and a certain performance in which he uttered the words, “Use, the force, Luke,” he’s generally managed to preserve his indie integrity while maintaining scandal-free celebrity status. In other words, he’s one of the few A-listers in the world who’s never been accused of being an a-hole.
It’s early in the morning when McGregor answers the door of his cream-colored villa, numbered 006, wearing khaki shorts and a sleeveless white tee. Having once seriously contended for the role of James Bond, McGregor shrugs and quips: “I almost made it to 007.”
He invites me in and pours me a cup of coffee. As he hands it to me, I notice the giant dagger-pierced heart tattoo with the names of his wife (French production designer Eve Mavrakis, whom he married in 1995) and three daughters on it. He is excited to be seeing his family when the cast and crew go on Christmas vacation next week.
It’s been a busy year for McGregor—highlighted by the release of the lauded Roman Polanski political thriller, The Ghost Writer, and the gay prison satire/romance, I Love You Phillip Morris, co-starring Jim Carrey. Since August, he’s spent the bulk of his time in Thailand where he’s been filming The Impossible (a working title that will be referred to henceforth as such). Helmed by The Orphanage director Juan Antonio Bayona and slated for a 2012 release, The Impossible tells the story of a vacationing family caught, with tens of thousands of strangers, in the mayhem of the devastating tidal wave. McGregor stars opposite Naomi Watts (the two also co-starred in 2005’s Stay), and he’s looking forward to his first acting role as a father. Yet what initially drew him to The Impossible was the story’s simplicity and brutality. “There’s a line in the script when Lucas [his character’s eldest son] looks at his mother’s wounds and says, ‘Mom, I can’t see you like that.’ It just devastated me.”
Despite the fact that this is McGregor’s first day off in god knows how long, he’s incredibly present. He listens to questions carefully and after a brief pause for thought, looks me right in the eyes when he responds—so much so that it feels rude every time I turn away to jot down notes. He’s also particularly chipper today: “Not a cloud in the sky. It’s the most beautiful day since I can’t remember,” he says, gazing towards his beachfront view—rich turquoise as far as the eye can see. Apparently, rains have slowed shooting on The Impossible, the skies resembling his native Crieff, Scotland more than Southern Thailand. McGregor has been using the downtime to teach himself how to play the bagpipes.
An antique bicycle leans against the wall, a couple of VW toy miniatures stand on a shelf, and two books rest on the night table next to his bed. Curiously, both are titled Life: one is Keith Richards’ recently published memoir, the other, Life: A User’s Manual. It’s not hard to imagine his assistant unwittingly fetching him the latter and the warm-hearted McGregor keeping it around—even after procuring Richards’ memoir—just to avoid hurting his feelings.
As we finish our coffee he asks me if I’d like to go for a ride.
“Sure,” I say, thinking we’re about to hop on one of his beloved Moto Guzzis.
As we exit his villa, he turns to me and says: “I can’t believe we’ve been talking an entire hour and you haven’t yet asked me what it’s like to kiss Jim Carrey.”

*  *  *

It turns out The Impossible’s insurance doesn’t cover the actor’s dangerous hobby, so we climb into an SUV and cruise along a winding highway engulfed by trees and wildflowers whose sagging limbs look burdened by all the recent rain. McGregor stares off into the brush wistfully, practically unbothered when a grazing elephant comes into view. “Honestly? I can’t wait to get back to L.A.,” he says.
McGregor plans to take February and March off just to be at home. “I fantasize about doing the school run, taking the kids to ballet practice, riding my motorcycles.” McGregor’s well-known circumnavigations of the globe by motorcycle with best friend Charley Boorman—once latitudinally, the other longitudinally—were the basis of his surprisingly, well, “real” reality shows, Long Way Round and Long Way Down Twice. But lately, he tells me, “I dress up our poodle Sid with a pair of goggles, put him into a sidecar, and ride about town. People literally hang out of their cars with iPhones taking pictures.” McGregor and his family moved to L.A. a little over two years ago from London, where he got his start. “I always thought I’d live there for the rest of my life, but I think there’s something quite freeing about living in Los Angeles—as opposed to London, which I find constricting.”
If Los Angeles has been good for McGregor’s state of mind, it’s been even better for him professionally. The move came after the actor’s two biggest flops, The Island (2005) and Deception (2008), and, at least in hindsight, helped get his career back on track. This past year’s The Ghost Writer and I Love You Phillip Morris are among the greatest cinematic achievements in his 17-year career of over 40 films, together representing fertile ground for understanding McGregor’s place in the industry as he turns 40.
In The Ghost Writer, McGregor plays an unnamed writer who makes a living anonymously producing other people’s memoirs. After a surprise hit penning the life story of a magician, he finds himself hired to complete the memoir of a former British Prime Minister (Pierce Brosnan) who’s been in hiding as the public clamors for him to be brought to justice for the tortures and secret kidnappings that happened under his watch. Ostensibly a morality tale in which the ghost takes responsibility for his increasing culpability in the Prime Minister’s mythology, McGregor’s role also speaks to his versatility as an actor. Just as a ghostwriter figuratively becomes an entirely different person with each film, so too does McGregor.
Unlike some actors, he doesn’t exploit a formula once it’s proven to be successful, and hence, his roles have very little in common. He’s a cinematic chameleon who cuts across every possible archetype and genre, working with Hollywood pillars like George Lucas and Ron Howard, auteur-types like Polanski or Woody Allen and avant-garde artistes like Todd Haynes and Mike Mills (with whom McGregor worked on the forthcoming low-budget film, Beginners).
“I like that people think my career is diverse,” he tells me. “But I do think big budget Hollywood movies don’t have the space to explore complexities of life that smaller films do because they’re so financially-driven. If somebody’s going to put up $300 million for a film, they’re going to want it back so they don’t want to put anything in the film that’s going to marginalize anybody. So it becomes harder and harder to make any complex statement or exploration.”
McGregor’s most impressive recent performance, possibly also his greatest comedic role to date, is that of Phillip in I Love You Phillip Morris. The twisted comedy has his character wooed and won only to discover he’s become tangled in a web of lies. McGregor is quick to give his lead the props: “Jim Carrey can manufacture comedy into moments. When I try, it’s just fucking terrible. What I can do is understand when moments are already funny and play to that.” Think of the slow build to Phillip’s realization that Steven had a fellow inmate beaten to a pulp in his honor, McGregor’s pause and ebullient welling up: “That is the most romantic thing that anyone ever did for me.” Think of the subtle, seemingly unconscious way Phillip touches the shoulder of the hulking black cop standing next to him when he finds out Steven has AIDS. Without McGregor’s Phillip, I Love You might’ve felt like a Liar Liar reboot. But because McGregor so endears his character to us, we can sympathize with him for taking back Steven—and it is our ability to identify so profoundly with Phillip’s suffering (to “love” him), which makes the film’s final twist so powerful.
I Love You is based on a true story and when McGregor tells me about meeting the real Phillip prior to shooting, I sense an opportunity to talk “process” with him. I ask McGregor how meeting Phillip affected his construction of the character, but he changes the subject and asks me whether I’ve seen Banksy’s Exit Through the Gift Shop. To be sure, McGregor takes his craft very seriously, but it doesn’t usurp his identity the way it might for other actors. Ultimately, he’s a bloke from Crieff who’d rather talk about a French Peugeot 10-speed he re-built from spare parts bought on eBay than speculate on overarching principles of his career trajectory. “I’ve always been very simple. If I read a script and I like the story and characters, then that’s it. It’s difficult to think of a thread through the work.”
We drive back to McGregor’s resort and head to its seaside Bamboo Bar for lunch.
“What’s good here?” I ask him, gazing vulture-like at a whole fish sizzling on the grill.
Taking in a deep breath of sea breeze, McGregor smiles and replies, “What isn’t?”
A waitress arrives at our table and McGregor orders spaghetti with seafood and a watermelon juice. Lunch feels like a motorcycle trip around the globe as we whiz from an elephant charging at him in Botswana (McGregor mimicking the pachyderm’s wily approach), to his experiences with UNICEF (he’s now an honorary ambassador) in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Mongolia, and to his observations about the notorious ping pong girls of Bangkok (“It’s basically a talent show for the vagina,” he explains).

*  *  *

When you call to mind images of the other great leading males of McGregor’s generation, it’s almost impossible to separate them from their iconic costumes: Heath Ledger in clown regalia, Will Smith in a black suit and Ray-Bans, Johnny Depp in pirate getup—but for McGregor, his trademark look may very well be nakedness. (Call to mind Brad Pitt’s most iconic moment as Tyler Durden in Fight Club and at least he’s wearing jeans.) McGregor’s done the full monty routine in Trainspotting, The Pillow Book (1996), Velvet Goldmine (1998), and Young Adam (2003). His propensity to expose himself is so part of his show biz identity that a joke about his character’s “huge talent” in Moulin Rouge (2001) pays off with greater dividends.
Sex and sexuality have always been connected with McGregor’s persona—especially expressions which push against societal and cinematic convention. The comic Louis C.K. has a bit about never having had a single gay inclination in his life, but still wanting to blow Ewan McGregor: “Jesus Christ, he’s fucking gorgeous. I just catch myself daydreaming… I wanna fuck the shit out of his face.”
I’m thinking about all of this because McGregor has just pulled down his shorts. He’s changing into a pair of Diesels during our photo shoot with him. It is at that moment that I realize that if nothing else comes out of this interview, at least I’ve learned with utmost certainty that I am, in fact, straight.
I crack a joke about all the cameos his wiener has made and, characteristically, he philosophizes: “It’s all about life. We’re naked at the end of the day and we’re sometimes naked in the middle of the day—if we’re lucky. It’s just part of life.” He sits down on the beach and continues his train of thought: “It started with Pillow Book. When Peter Greenaway was casting me. He said, ‘You’d have to be naked. Do you have a problem with that?’ [I answered], ‘No.’ ‘Simulated sex with a woman?’ ‘No.’ ‘Simulated sex with a man?’ ‘No.’ The rest, as they say, is history.”
I ask if he ever fears his work will be cheapened by it being associated with the sexually shocking.
“In reality, sex is awkward messiness and if you can somehow communicate that awkward messiness then, I think, it becomes more shocking in its mundaneness,” he replies.
McGregor cites a scene in Young Adam in which a petty domestic squabble arises between his character and one played by Emily Mortimer, who comes in from the rain and is angered to find that her under-employed lover has spent the day making custard. Stripping off her wet clothes, the argument heats up and transforms into an incredible custard-filled love scene: “It’s really mad!” McGregor exhorts. “He grabs a cane from the fireplace and starts smacking her with it. It’s brutal, yet properly erotic. Yes, it’s graphic sex, but there’s something else going on in it.”
He elaborates: “It may seem like I’m obsessed with sex, but it’s actually the opposite. I’m not very interested in watching people have sex; that’s why it’s so important to do something honest and true if you’re going to do it at all. In Young Adam, for instance, the sex scenes are used to chart my character’s moral decline. That’s why it’s important that they get more and more unusual as the film moves forward.”
McGregor rubs his chin pensively: “I’m getting older and the actresses stay younger. I don’t want to become Clint Eastwood, where his love interest is 50 years younger than him. You never want them [the female co-stars] to feel like you’re taking advantage of the situation. Anyhow, sex scenes are terribly exposing and rarely of any use in learning about character.”
I resist the urge to cue the violin as recent co-stars Scarlett Johansson, Michelle Williams, and Eva Green traipse through my mind.
“And the directors are always pushing you in these really strange ways, saying, ‘Let’s just see where it goes,”’ he adds. “I like it when the sex is more choreographed, like, ‘Let’s first roll over and think out every move like it’s a dance routine.’ Then, it’s somehow easier to do.”
It strikes me that McGregor’s attitudes towards sex scenes are representative of his attitude towards the creative process, in general. Despite his predilection for arthouse fare, acting is not a wandering, subjective exploration, but a purposeful fulfillment of the drama he inherits from the page. When the Flaunt photographer asks McGregor to pose with an old book he’s been reading about how to play the bagpipes, the actor resists. In hindsight, McGregor wasn’t just being difficult—he just didn’t understand what such a photo would communicate. Over the course of our shoot with him, McGregor showed an incredible willingness to do just about whatever it took—climbing rock formations, trees, jumping into the sea, running along the edge of algae-infested pool in a nearby abandoned hotel—to get the photos we needed. For the actor, concocting an elaborate truth is always easier than telling a simple lie.

*  *  *

From the looks of things, the recent rains have kept the tourists away, which suits McGregor just fine. We have the jagged shoreline and its little inlets almost entirely to ourselves. The breeze has cooled and a fiery sunset has begun to appear in the horizon. We climb a few giant limestone rocks in our path, the waves of the Andaman crashing against them and then receding. From behind a Casuarina tree, a 10-foot high Buddha smiles, embedded within a cliff. I realize I’m probably one of the few people in the world with some sense of what it’s like to be stranded on a desert isle with Ewan McGregor.
As we walk along the beach, McGregor’s eyes keep coming back to the horizon. He points in the direction from which the tsunami came and says, “I can’t wrap my head around the thousands of deaths.” Since August, he’s met so many people who have lost family and loved ones, but who still remain optimistic. He tells me about a friend he’s made named “Jing” who lost his entire family to the disaster and now runs a bar, poignantly named “Memories,” that McGregor likes to frequent on weekends. “It’s always on your mind when you’re here. Everywhere you look reminds you of it. You’re swimming and you’re thinking: ‘This is the scene.’ But ultimately, it’s beautiful here. It’s like being in New York after 9/11. You can still enjoy New York, right?”
It’s impossible to fathom that such wondrous beauty could also be the source of such devastation and misery. But the tsunami changed everything here. It added new meaning to the Thai people’s perpetual, nervous giggle. It makes it hard to look at those limestone rocks jutting out from the beach and not think of tombstones. Or to look at that Buddha’s face staring towards the sea and not find his smile tragic-comic.
A silence comes over us.
“You’re not going to ask me what it was like to kiss Jim Carrey?”
“What was it like to kiss Jim Carrey?” I reply.
“It was very nice to kiss Jim Carrey,” he says. “Firm, gentle, and prickly.”

As you might recall, Bill Ayers became the McCain campaign’s unlikely “October surprise” during the 2008 Presidential Election. The retired Professor of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago was the guy Sarah Palin was referring to when she claimed our now-Pres “palled around with terrorists.” The truth is that Obama and Ayers hardly knew each other and that while not a “terrorist,” Ayers was a former member of The Weathermen, the left-wing group notorious during the late-‘60s and early-‘70s for bombings targeting the U.S. Capitol and The Pentagon, among other locations, as well as countless armed robberies. Taking their name from a line from Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” (“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”), this militant faction of the Students for a Democratic Society sought nothing less than the end of the Vietnam War, the violent overthrow of capitalism, and the establishment of a more humane society. As if you needed another reminder of how narcissistic and irrelevant your life was.

Not wanting to lose touch with the values that animated much of his early life, but desiring more pragmatic results, Ayers went on to become a teacher, a writer, and a widely respected educational reformer, somehow managing to establish a new public identity. But all that was ignored when Ayers was cast as Obama’s Willie Horton. Not wanting to feed the media frenzy, Ayers stayed quiet during the election, but afterwards was steadfast in his refusal to recant his militant days with The Weathermen. He made clear that he regretted the carelessness, stupidity, and dogmatism that suffused much of his behavior, and wished that he and his comrades had been more thoughtful and flexible in their political activities. But the Oprah-style apology never came.

What did come was a volume on teaching in comic book form. Ayers probably could have exploited the moment with a tell-all memoir about his relationship with Obama and his brief moment as the Republican Party’s boogeyman, but instead chose a project which, while likely less financially lucrative, might generate more positive results. To be sure, To Teach: The Journey, In Comics (Teachers College Press) was born out of Ayers’ love of the comic book medium, but also his desire to capitalize on his newfound exposure and communicate the ways that teaching at its best can be both profoundly intellectual and ethical work.

The book was based on Ayers’ 1993 memoir, To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher, and is a collaboration with comic book artist Ryan Alexander-Tanner, who effectively helps Ayers transform the prose of a scholar into sequential narrative. It’s no easy task, as representing Ayers’ calls for curriculum changes and re-thinking of standardized testing require an altogether different artistic challenge than, say, representing Captain America doing battle with Red Skull. Alexander-Tanner appears as a character on-and-off within the narrative, at one point lightly teasing Ayers for pontificating about his educational theories, and at another, jocularly representing Ayers standing on a soapbox. Such flourishes call attention to the very process of mythmaking and underscore the book’s central theme of the disorienting, whirlwind journey that teaching can be. Ayers, as represented in the comic, is both humbled by the absurdity that is the contemporary educational system, yet unflinching in his vision of what needs to be done. It’s as if Art Spiegelman’s interlocutor found himself inside the world of Paulo Freire’sPedagogy of the Oppressed.

The book, ostensibly the story of a year inside a kindergarten classroom, and set against the backdrop of Ayers’ pedagogical philosophy, is a fascinating read given Ayers’ larger political narrative and recent cultural moment. It’s virtually impossible, for instance, not to feel twinges of irony juxtaposing a man who helped organize the bombing of police stations with one organizing learning games with “Bingo the Turtle,” or witnessing a man who spent much of his early adulthood being spied on by the F.B.I. now monitored by elementary school administrators. That being said, as I read To Teach: The Journey, In Comics, I never felt I was doing so for irony’s sake. When Ayers tells us that we should see teachers not as “masters and commanders” but as “explorers on a voyage of discovery and surprise,” I can’t help but wonder whether this is how he’d also like us to view the “historical Ayers”—as someone who may have gotten lost at times and veered off course, but who could never resist the inexorable pull of the sea.

Perhaps, then, it’s a good thing that Kwanzaa has all but vanished from the local greeting card store. But what led to its disappearance? And where did it go? As recently as 1993, Kwanzaa was America’s fastest-growing holiday. I recall a chilly December evening of that year when on the campus of Brown University my girlfriend and I took a study break and paid a visit to the campus’ Third World Center. We used to go there a lot–mostly when we detected the distinct aroma of free ethnic food. We waded through a throng of students of color to the buffet table, gathered some fried plantains and okra on a tiny paper plate and found some room in the corner to take in the scene. We knew that Kwanzaa honored African heritage, and soon learned that it meant “first fruits” in Swahili. The place was packed and the music was booming–A Tribe Called Quest (of course)–while red, black and green-clad bodies bobbed their heads in sync. That year Ben & Jerry’s began making sweet potato ice cream, J.C.Penny offered Kwanzaa products in stores nationwide, local news stations wished their viewers a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and Happy Kwanzaa, and Hallmark printed 12 different varieties of Kwanzaa-themed cards.

Fifteen years later, I publish an irreverent Jewish culture magazine called Heeb and immediate circles supply me with more anecdotal information about lower back pain than they do about Kwanzaa observance, but I still can’t help but notice not noticing Kwanzaa at the greeting cards store. Certainly people are still celebrating the holiday, but clearly corporate America no longer seeks to capitalize on Kwanzaa the way it once did. At a time when a black man can be elected President, the powers-that-be seem to be saying African-Americans are much more ready embrace the de facto American civic religion, Christianity.

Multiculturalism was supposed to highlight our differences in radical ways, not transform them into different flavors of ice cream. But I worry about how Kwanzaa’s disappearance will get understood. In a few years (if not already), Americans will probably remember it the way they remember parachute pants or the Rubik’s cube–the irony, that removing Kwanzaa from the aisles of greeting card stores might end up forever enshrining it as a pop cultural relic. Meanwhile, the meanings of Christmas and Hanukkah continue to be contested and questioned as they reside in the marketplace, Whether it’s gone because nobody knew how to sell it, or because nobody wanted to buy it, Kwanzaa is now nowhere to be found.

At the time, I was an adjunct professor at New York University teaching undergraduate courses in philosophy. But, when I picked up my SONY DX-1000, pointed it at Jonathan, and pressed record, I felt like a filmmaker. When I wasn’t at NYU, I was filming Jonathan in Paramus, NJ in our childhood home, in a hospital room (where he spent about half of his time), or at my apartment in Manhattan. I wasn’t capturing him on video because I thought he would die. Although today I am grateful to have so much footage of my brother, when the camera was recording, it never crossed our minds that we were creating an archive for posterity’s sake. In our minds, we were creating a narrative for art’s sake.

A little background: Jonathan was a musician, a punk rocker to be more specific. He founded a garage rock band in 1999 called “The Physicals,” started calling himself “Johnny Physical,” and baptized the other members of the band: “Nick Fiction,” “Danny Animal,” and “Frankie Lines.” The Physicals were voted the best band on campus at Tufts University in the spring of 2000, and the members’ monikers were soon used more than their real names. So, long before my brother was the subject of my film narrative, he was the subject of his own narrative, one in which the line between life and art had already been blurred.

It felt perfectly natural to capture Jonathan’s crisis on camera. He was used to being the center of attention and, more importantly, to performing a particular part of himself for the sake of art. At first it was odd how Johnny Physical adapted to his new stage. Less than two weeks after he started chemotherapy treatment at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, when his blood counts were still perilously low, he performed an acoustic show for the other patients, which was advertised on the hospital bulletin boards as “Johnny Physical Plugged.” I was in the front row with my video camera as he wheeled his I.V. machine into the day room and broke into a new song he had written called “Chemotherapy.” His hair shaved close, he was somewhere between Iggy Pop and Pee Wee Herman as he roared: “Chemotherapy, chemotherapy, it’s what they’re telling me.”

A few months into his treatment, Jonathan developed a strange ringing in his ears and lost sensation in the tips of his fingers, but this didn’t discourage him from taking up the piano. He practiced into the wee hours of the night, falling in love with the instrument as well as with the works of the German romantic composers Schubert and Schumann. I shot a recital that he gave less than a year later.

The Physicals’ first record had been called “Get Physical With the Physicals.” In this spirit, Jonathan and I planned to turn the footage we were capturing into a concert video called “Physical Therapy.” In it, we would include footage from his acoustic show, from his jam session with Art Garfunkel (who heard about Johnny Physical and paid him a surprise visit in the hospital), and from his appearance as the “pinhead” at Joey Ramone’s annual birthday bash at CBGB (a hero of Jonathan’s since he was a teenager, Joey died of lymphoma in 2001). Slowly but surely, the legend of Johnny Physical grew. ARI-UP of the influential ‘70s punk band The Slits, also paid him a surprise visit in the hospital and Johnny would soon count 2001 Miss USA Candice Kruger andSports Illustrated swimsuit cover girl Yamila among his legion of admirers.

Jonathan’s prognosis deteriorated but shooting of the film continued. Jonathan recorded an album of Johnny Cash covers when he could barely speak. He composed songs on an OmniChord OM-300 when he couldn’t hold a guitar. When even that became impossible, he simply made sounds into a tape recorder he kept at his bedside—a kind of verbal notebook. I captured all of it on video.

A week before Jonathan’s last visit to the intensive care unit, he was paid a visit by Albert Maysles, who at the time was shooting footage for a Bill Moyers documentary about death. Albert planned to interview Jonathan for 20 minutes. He left after he ran out of tape, two and a half hours later. Albert noticed a newspaper item from the Tufts Daily of Jonathan making out with “groupie 36,000.” Jonathan tried to explain Johnny Physical to Albert, but told him that he’d have to see our film to fully understand.

Jonathan passed away in June of 2002, over three years ago. At first, all I could do was stare at the stacks of digital tapes as they collected dust on my desk. Then, slowly but surely, I started watching the raw footage, tape by tape, logging time code, and mapping out sequences on a yellow legal pad. I realized that in addition to being about the power of music to transfigure experience, they were also about the camera’s power. Looking at his arm for a clean vein for the next syringe, he was Sid Vicious searching for an angry fix. When the chemo started to make its way through his arm, he was Lou Reed rushing on a run. And, yes, on a very (very) rare occasion he was Joey Ramone meeting a nurse that he could go for. The Physicals had performed for crowds of hundreds when Jonathan was healthy, but the camera gave him an audience of infinite possibility. For the last year and a half of his life, in cold examining rooms, miserable waiting rooms, lonely hospital rooms, he was never just a patient. He was a rock ‘n’ roll legend.

Albert Maysles was kind enough to grant me permission to use the tapes he had captured of Jonathan. My good friend Edet Belzberg agreed to executive produce. And in February, I will enter an editing studio to start working on my first short film. I want the film to unfold like a Physical song: fast, urgent, darkly comic, and fiercely unsentimental. Until someone discovers a cure for cancer, films about the disease will inevitably be sad. But this film, as you might have guessed by now, isn’t really about cancer at all.

For more information about Johnny Physical, check outwww.johnnyphysical.com