If you follow me on Twitter, or are friends with me on Facebook, I’ve made it no secret how deeply the death of MCA a.k.a. Adam Yauch has affected me over the last two days. Adam was one of my heroes – right up there with Kerouac, Ginsberg, Jim Carroll, and Joe Strummer. I’ve loved the music of The Beastie Boys since I was 14 years old (my first two Beastie albums were Licensed To Ill, and Hello Nasty, which features “I Don’t Know” – a heart-breakingly enlightened MCA solo piece with Yuka Honda). They were a band that’s been with me for 15 years; a band I never grew tired of, whose music continued to blow me away, even as their hair began to turn grey. If you missed Hot Sauce Committee, Part Two last summer and you love the Beasties, I highly recommend buying it. The album hinted what we could have anticipated if MCA had survived his fight with cancer: 3 elder statesmen of hip-hop who refused to take themselves seriously as age seemed to catch up. In addition to jokes at their own expense about pushing 50 and still rhyming, they continued to evolve musically and came full circle with brilliant tracks like the Jimmy Cliff by way of Paul’s Boutique song “Don’t Play No Game That I Can’t Win” featuring Santigold, and the rambunctious, sonic dance track, “Make Some Noise”.

I remember watching MCA’s video message in 2009, announcing the diagnosis that would eventually claim his life, and couldn’t help but feel worried. Optimistic at the early detection, but worried. This man was just more to me than a music icon.

On November 23rd, 1999, The Beastie Boys released The Sounds of Science – their greatest hits anthology. It was my 16th birthday; I was confused and aimless. Actually, for a month and a half, I had been contemplating suicide. What led me to such thinking I can only describe as a mix of things that – when you’re 16 – seemed epic and unmanageable. But what kept me from moving forward on any impulses was my slim hope that my problems were not a be-all, end-all. Anyway, the minute The Sounds of Science came out, I bought it and fell in love with it (as I did with all the Beastie albums). Included in the 2-disc set was a 40-page booklet where the Beastie Boys included notes and stories about their songs. Attached to the song “Bodhisattva Vow”, MCA included an essay about his conversion to Buddhism and the personal headaches he created during production on Ill Communication in order to meet the Dalai Llama for the first time.

This essay served as the first exposure I ever had to Buddhism, the one faith – if any – to which I’ve felt any spiritual connection.

Adam’s words about falling over himself to meet His Holiness were both humble and passionate. It was shortly after his first meeting that he became more impassioned to the cause of Tibet, and recorded “Bodhisattva Vow” as a hip-hop tribute to his faith and his mentor. This was when MCA, the humanitarian, was born. MCA, the obnoxious party boy, was now pledging to save the world. If nothing else, but because it was his duty as a human being.

“Whoa.” 16 year old me thought.

Obviously, I didn’t off myself. Obviously, Adam’s words and lyrics had an impact on me that got me through a rough year. In the months after purchasing Sounds, I would continue to tell myself through that shitty, shitty time: “If I can just make it to the end of this school year, I’ll be fine.” But, Adam also showed me: we can all change. Nothing is permanent in this world; nothing is finite. The guy who will fight for his right to party can, 10 years later, “Say a little something that is long overdue/The disrespect to women has got to be due./To all the mothers, and the sisters, and the wives, and friends/I want to offer my love and respect to the end.”

“Bodhisattva Vow” is a very simple song that pledges love and gratitude to the present-day existence had by all sentient beings. In the wake of MCA’s death, it – along with “I Don’t Know” – takes on a very sobering weight about the limited time we have as human beings. It’s not about touchy-feely self-love; it’s about recognizing that life is an opportunity, not a death sentence. Because: you don’t know why you’re here; you don’t know what’s going to make you happy; but what you do know is that sitting around and being uninvolved in the world around you is not going to give any answers.

Adam Yauch taught me that a better tomorrow exists. And, just because you live to see that tomorrow, that doesn’t mean you have to change anything about yourself because you’re older, or that money and success is going to lead to happiness. You should always grow. You should always be open to the world around you. You should always care, and stop to help out when you can. You are not what the world wants you to be; you are only what you choose to be.

Over the last two days, I’ve come to a realization: I loved Adam Yauch. Maybe it was only the idea of him, since I never had the privilege of meeting him. But I loved him, as much as I could. He was a role model and a teacher; a buddha. He was an MC that always left me speechless. He was the only one of my self-destructive idols that showed me life and happiness exists after 23 years old. And it was going to be awesome. On Friday morning, someone I loved very much was taken from me; and as it goes, I will need time to accept it and move on.

As I’ve said – on repeat all weekend – I love you and will miss you, MCA. Your death is one of the saddest things I have experienced since my grandfather, and before that my father, died. But I will never forget what you taught me. I pledge to pass it on in my words and actions to those around me. And maybe, just maybe, I might unknowingly touch some loner kid’s life out there the way you touched mine.

Goodbye, Adam. I love you. Namaste.

“I give thanks for this world as a place to learn/
And for this human body that I know I’ve earned.”

-“Bodhisattva Vow”

“It’s not so simple as I try to wish,/
But then again what is?/
There is no other worthy quest,/
So on I go.

I don’t know./
Who does know?/
There is no/
Where to go.”

-“I Don’t Know”

I first stumbled across Conversations with Other Women while doing a random search on Netflix.  The film seemed interesting enough to gather dust on my queue for over a year: a man and a woman with a past meet-up at a wedding and re-explore their failed relationship.  Sadly, I’ve been kicking around a similar script idea in my head since I moved to New York (this is why you don’t dick around, kids).

While the film’s dialogue is smart, it sounds and feels like it’d be much better as a play than a film.  This sentiment is amplified by the filmmaker’s choice to shoot and edit the entire thing in split screen.  My guess is that Hans Canosa’s intention was to experiment with the character’s memories of each other when younger and recollection of past events.  While he does find some moments of great storytelling, the effect is more jarring than daring.  I found myself distracted more often than not, and even annoyed, since the split screen rarely embodies a single shot that let’s the viewer ease into the world of the film.  And more so, that seems to only highlight that the script is heavy on dialogue, light on dramatic action, and gets you wondering why not just make it a play?  The story and characters are interesting enough.

Both Aaron Eckhart and Helena Bonham Carter are great; Tom Lennon and Olivia Wilde get a lot out of their limited screen time as well.  By the film’s end, you get what Conversations with Other Women is really all about – regrets, hope, possible redemption.  I wanted to like it a lot more than I did, but seriously – 84 minutes of a goddamn split screen?

Bonus post! Why? Because the post I had scheduled for today wasn’t ready yet. As you might expect, this provoked me to spend the night sobbing into a bottle of Dr. Pepper, and calling my ex-girlfriend from kindergarten multiple times (Allison, I’m sorry). Anyway, because I did feel inclined to write about something on the QT – and since this is, technically, a blog – then I can’t begin to recommend one of my more recent favorite graphic novels, The Alcoholic by Jonathan Ames. It’s a sweet, tragic, hilarious tale of the things a man can do while drunk and the ponderings that are left with him the morning after. Lord knows: who hasn’t woken up the next day after a wild night out to discover he spent $20 on 3 bags of Family Size Dorito’s and has 3 text messages from a girl in Wisconsin (true story). Anyway, The Alcoholic by Jonathan Ames. Enjoy readers.

I was first introduced to David Sedaris via his humor pieces in Esquire magazine. I’ve loved his columns and stories since I was 18. The video above should show you why.

Like any antisocial latchkey kid, I went through a collectibles phase. Collectibles were the friends that you played catch with, because you certainly couldn’t ask that from your dead dad. My obsessions were the standard stuff that any 7 to 13 year old boy could love: Star Wars action figures, classic Superman comic books, bootlegs of the Necromonicon that were supposed to help you tell your dead dad you finally got a “B” in math class. But the one thing that always fascinated me in my routine trips to any flea market or antique store were the “lost” baseball cards of Diatemacia. Widely considered one of the most coveted baseball card series in the world, I could never afford a set (a loose pack of “decent condition” cards alone is valued at $2,000). But they are, in a word, unreal.

Diatemacia, in case you’ve never heard, is a lost religion that originated in the American South, sometime between 1860-1890. Not much information on it can even be found on the internet, but we can be glean a bit from the newspaper ribbon in which the cards came packaged. Founded by a wealthy denim producer, Graham Carmichael, Diatemacians believed that the world would one day come to an end, but then be reborn. On the day of rebirth, believers would be “cleansed” by the Divine Babysitter and spend eternity in paradise, contemplating and correcting the errors of mankind. Non-believers would go about their lives as if nothing had ever happened. Except that all male Non-believers would be given enhanced sexual libidos. Because Diatemacians believe that ignorance breeds ineffectiveness, they felt that people of low intelligence had a tendency to also massively reproduce. Diatemacians believe that these people should not be punished for that instinct, but they should learn how to moderate it. That’s why these new libidos will drive men to stick their dicks into literally anything it could fit into: tree knobs, mailbox slots, a hole in their shoe, phonographs, radiators, bath tub faucets, garden hoses, etc. Because God is merciful and wise, he would never make a Non-believer bring any kind of sexual assault or crime upon another Non-believer. On the contrary: around other people, a male Non-believer is no more attracted to a man or woman than he was before the world ended. However, leave him alone in a room full of lamps with no lightbulbs… be careful when you walk back in there.

From what I could gather, Diatemacians valued style and common sense. In their Holy Book of Holy, dozens of chapters are dedicated to the sacrament of a full handlebar mustache. Not to mention they seem surprisingly progressive for a niche religion, preaching that the beauty of woman was should be judged by how many employees she managed.

The baseball cards were originally marketed towards the children of faithful Diatemacians. Carmichael acknowledged that the gravitas of the faith could be easily lost on kids, so he set out to create an extension of the Holy Book of Holy for a younger audience. The cards featured the patron saints of Diatemacia, who received their sainthood at birth. From there, the Saints were groomed for their destiny as spiritual leaders of their faith. Children could spend months collecting and trading a single series of cards, all of which – when assembled together – told the story of each of the 12 Saints in full. Amongst them was Saint Irma of Birmingham who brought industry to Southern farming, and was also believed to be President Ulysses S. Grant secret night-night storyteller.

Today, the market value of these cards alone makes a single pack worth owning – that is if you can find or afford it. In a recent auction in Laos, a pack of cards from a 1933 12th series sold for $500,000. It was one of the few packs today not owned by Vincent J. Pestonschraud, the last practicing Diatemacian left in this country. Pestonschraud is the great-great grandchild of Carmichael himself, and a noted recluse. His estate can be found in a swamp ranch outside of Jacksonville, Florida. His property is rumored to not be far from the burial ground of his somewhat famous grandfather. Thousands of journalists, fans, and “wanna-be” converts have tried to reach out to Prestonschraud over the years, but he refuses to associate with a world that is doomed to fail. In a statement that his lawyer released in 1995, he famously wrote “You’ll never get my grandfather’s baseball cards, you secular basset hounds. Not for all the tea in China, or $300 – which is what all of that tea is worth. The cards will die here on my property and my corpse with them. Any of you ‘Smithsonians’ try to raid my house to take them, will be met with an unpleasant doom – far worse than what God has waiting for you.”

So apparently, I missed that it was Freddie Mercury’s 65th birthday last month (thanks adulthood).  Google released this sick Google Doodle of the Queen classic, “Don’t Stop Me Now”, which coincidentally taps into everything I dreamed of in pre-adolescence: 1) One day becoming a cultural icon, 2) imagining the world as an 8-bit video game, and 3) owning a large collection of full-bodied, Roman onesies.

Thanks for everything, Freddie.  We miss you.

Travis Chester sat at his plastic play table, alternating between his onward stare directions: exposed brick wall, blank news paper, exposed brick wall, blank news paper, etc. etc. He fingered his favorites red crayon, his head rested on his left palm. He was waiting for his first idea. But it wasn’t coming.

“Ugh! Dammit.”

Travis took a sip from his Grover monster apple juice box. He swished the natural sugars in his cheek, gulped them down. Another thirty seconds of nothing, which led him to crumble the box and throw across the room in a rage,

“Bukowski was so wrong! Drinking does nothing to make great art. Fuck him, and Dylan Thomas!”

The afternoon was turning into a great disappointment for Travis. Here he was: five years old, and he had failed to write the Great American Novel. His dreams as a fetus were quickly slipping away, and he felt powerless against the will of nature. “There is nothing more frustrating,” he would later tell his therapist – Mr. Bill, the stuffed giraffe – “than the disconnect between genius and art.” Yes, other children of his age worried about naps, but Travis was, “So fucking above it.”

Travis was your typical tortured kindergarten artist. He’d known he was genius when Mrs. Jane, his teacher, told him that his finger painting of a dog was “so pretty”. But it was of course after discovering the works of Berenstein and Goose that he knew he wanted to be a writer. But, like all good talent, he struggled. When he couldn’t write, he’d lie in his rocket bed for hours – clutching Killer, his plush T. Rex, and listening to the Raffi track, “When’s It’s Raining, I’m Sad” on his iPod. His mother would get concerned for obvious reasons, but then reminded herself that she fell in love with Travis’s father because of his “soft soul”. Hard for her to believe that 15 years ago, she saw James’s performance as a dancing tree ghost in The Wooster Group’s production of My Fair Lady, and their lives had never been the same. Travis had inherited James’s own introvert and sensitive tendencies. This revelation drove to cancel that order of Gummy Prozac she’d put in for her son, all while wistfully thinking, “He’s going to enchant some wonderful young girl one day!” For his birthday, she’d already bought him a Jackson Pollock color-by-the-numbers coloring book. Anything to encourage Travis’s creativity!

But none of that was going to help Travis now. His afternoon nap was upon him; and then, it would be snack time. And then, mommy came home from yoga, and daddy would eventually be home from his job selling ad space for New York Magazine; “If I don’t write something in the next 10 minutes, this whole afternoon is fucked.”

Travis took a deep breath. Told himself to stop freaking out. Just write. He pressed his crayon to the paper. “No judgments.” he thought. Out it flowed:
“Cat dog cookie house Flower sun 123456 fish wheel kitty meow meow tiger lion yellow”

“Oh my God,” Travis thought in a moment of clarity, “I’m brilliant.”

1. Bill
2. Marcia
3. Philip Seymour Hoffman
4. Max
5. Angela
6. Felix
7. Captain Picklepaws
8. Jasper
9. Johnny Appleseed, The Otter
10. Johnny Appleseed II, The Otter Strikes Back
11. Theodore Roosevelt
12. Minerva
13. Agnes
14. Frenchie
15. Lady Dumerville
16. Countess Contessa of Chesapeake Bay
17. Adolf
18. Julian
19. Samantha
20. Gina
21. Tina
22. Martin Landau
23. Thomas P. Cardinalstein
24. Edgar W. Pritchettberger
25. Frank
26. Myron Von Thiesel Von Thiesel
27. Wayne Jarvis Beau Derek
28. Jonathan Hinklebottom
29. Patrick T. Hachachachacha
30. Jim

Call it a hangover from my week-long obsession with football (my fantasy teams, more or less, did terribly on Sunday – thanks for asking), but I spent my Sunday night trying to not pay attention to what was happening between the Steelers and the Colts. Instead, I caught up with The Sound of Young America and stumbled upon their last episode with Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophyscist badass and director of the Hayden Planetarium here in New York. I’d seen Tyson previously on Real Time with Bill Mahr, and found myself equally blown away by his dialogue then as I was in his TSOYA interview; see the link below…

The Sound of Young America

Part of what I find so engaging about him is his ability to make abstract concepts accessible, and also that he makes progressive thought actually sound like a good thing. I’m so gaga over this guy that I’ll also throw in a Q&A he did back in 2009 and how he answered the subject of the 2012 Apocalypse. Enjoy readers…

“I got my first taste when I was five. It was my parents; they were addicts, so I became an addict. Products of your environment really happen, folks. I remember the first time I tasted a Baja Supreme Gordita. It tasted like rainbows in my mouth were rolling my soul in glitter. After that first, I was able to walk away from it fine. I knew I wanted it, but I was protected from it. Cuz, y’know, I was a kid. But you get older, you strike out, and you realize that hunger never goes away. It actually gets worse – that Taco Bell hunger.

They call being addicted to Taco Bell “riding the horse train” cuz most people believe the food is made outta horse. And I guess, if that were true, then I rode every filly in that ranch. Some days were better than others. You wake up at 7 in the morning, and the first thing your brain is screaming for is cinnamon sticks. You don’t just want to eat it, you want to rub them on your face. Because you actually believe that all that stuff will take your problems away: your mammoth obesity, your shortness of breath, the complete lack of respect that people have for you because you can name the release date of Half-Life 4, but you don’t know what Libya is. But you believe and tell yourself, “I just need to eat 25 Grilled Stuffed Burritos and it’ll all even out. I get that in me, and I can go to my job at True Value and get through the day.” The worst days came when I was about 10 years in. I was a tester. That’s when they pay you to show up at the regional Taco Bell headquarters and you eat all the off-menu items they’re developing out of lab in Colorado somewhere: The Super-Cheesy Queso Bandito Chalupa, The Mega Mexican Uber-Beef Double Fried Taco, The Spicy Crackin’ Super Lime Chicken Salad drizzled in Ranchero sauce (pig fat). You don’t go there because you want to be there, you go there because things have gotten bad enough that you need to be there.

Is any of this getting through to you folks? Any of this shit scaring you? Good. Because it should. You can come back from it, but you’ve got to work. You’ve got to want it. You should be willing to learn what an apple tastes like, and that not everything has to washed down with a Mountain Dew. There’s this thing called water that’ll do the same thing and won’t cause your heart to hurt. Folks, use me as the example. I want to help you. Join me when I say, ‘God, grant me the strength to accept the things I cannot change, and the courage to stop myself from ordering a 9th Nacho Supreme.’ “