Ill Communication

            MCA is gone - 1/3 of the Beastie Boys. The world knew he was sick since 2009 with throat cancer. But I thought I heard somewhere that he was recovering. It was relieving and comforting to all of us Beastie fans when they released Hot Sauce Committee Part Two, last year. We hoped he had beat back the malignant cells that formed in his throat. I enjoyed the album. I thought MCA sounded great, especially in his random lines stolen from Dylan throughout the album. This was the comeback. Right?

            On May 4^th, Adam Yauch died. The cancer had spread. Just a month prior, I had blasted Hot Sauce Committee in my apartment while cooking up some sort of delicious dinner for my wife to be greeted by when she got home from work. By the time the CD was finished, so was dinner. I put the disc back into the case to reassume its position at the tail of my ridiculously long and anally organized music collection queue. It did not enter my mind that the next time this, or any Beastie Boys album, would be played in my stereo MCA would be dead.

            I did not listen to any Beastie Boys records on May 4^th while I cooked dinner (I did post the Body Movin’ music video on Facebook with a “RIP MCA” tag, but anything more than that would have been too much). When my wife got home that night I told her that MCA died. “I know," she replied, just two words that matched the same level of sadness that I felt. Of course she knew (she always knows all of the entertainment news before me). On Facebook, in her own RIP MCA post, she commented, “Only 47 and such a huge piece of our generation’s soundtrack.” If you’re our age (32 on 5/4/2012) then you know exactly what she means.

            The Beastie Boys were never my favorite band or anything like that, but we all loved them. Their songs really do form a soundtrack to our lives. Imagine a movie being made of my 32 years on this planet, (kind of like a Forrest Gump but without that same set of mental challenges). In each era you would hear a choice Beastie’s track in the background. It’s not the foreground. It’s not out front. It’s behind the dialogue, behind the action, setting the scene and leaving you with a certain feeling.

           

Scene 1: 1986

            In November of 1986, I was in elementary school in a town on Long Island, New York. And Licensed to Ill broke. To us suburban white kids, the Beastie Boys were our introduction to rap music. My first memories of MTV include the video to “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party!)”. These three rude white kids were drinking beer, throwing things and pissing off senior citizens. They were not singing, they were shouting, over nasty music and a loud beat. To a seven year old, this was all very exciting. I can remember a dance performance at school. There were about twenty, skinny, white older kids flopping about on a stage, to “Fight For Your Right.” Were they break-dancing?

A few years later, I would leave New York and move to California with my family. When I try to think back to what childhood was like in the 1980s on Long Island, the Beastie Boys and Licensed to Ill jumps up in my mind. Maybe we were all just confused, little, suburban, white kids, equally attracted to and scared by, the black culture that came from New York City. The Beastie Boys seemed safe enough then.

Scene 2: 1992

            The Beastie Boys entered my life again in 1992, when they released Check Your Head (I don’t know how, but I totally missed Paul’s Boutique - that one won’t appear on the soundtrack). I was in middle school in the suburban desert that is Temecula, California. Things were changing - music, style and fashion, extracurricular activities. Nirvana had already kicked Michael Jackson off the top of the Billboard charts. It was the dawning of the new 90’s alternative fad. The Beastie Boys had changed too. Now they were playing their own instruments. They were still rapping, but the music now sounded much more like an alternative rock band than a New York rap crew. Their clothes changed too. And ours changed with them. All of us white kids began wearing the baggie, skater jeans, screen-printed t-shirts and beanies that we saw the Beasties wearing in the “So Whatcha Want” video. All the boys bought new skateboards. Check Your Head was inserted into every Sony Walkman.

Scene 3: 1994

            The video for “Sabotage” came out of nowhere and smacked all of us right upside the head. What was this we were watching? A movie trailer? A new mock-70s cop show? Are these the Beastie Boys in disguise? Everyone remembers this video. It inspired Halloween costume parties for the next two decades. We all rushed home from high school classes to turn on MTV and hope to catch the video.

            May, 1994. Freshman year. High School beginnings, accompanied by a new Beastie Boys’ record, Ill Communication.

Scene 4: 1997

            In 1997, I graduated from Temecula Valley High School. During that last spring semester, the old Beastie Boys’ songs made a comeback. At lunch, the student body would blast “Girls” from Licensed to Ill across the campus. The Southern California desert noon sun was shining and reflecting off sunglass lenses and the bleached blonde hair of the students, as was the unfortunate style then. This silly song from our collective childhoods was now transplanted into our self-important 17-18 year old lives. We all sang along. At night all the parties, and all the parties’ stereos would be blasting “Brass Monkey”. We all sang along. This was old school for us. Was it subconscious, regressive, motives that made us play songs from our childhood, to lead us into adulthood? Or, perhaps, to keep us from it?  

Scene 5: 1998

            Hello Nasty dropped in 1998.We all turned 18 this year. It seems extremely ridiculous (and frankly embarrassing) now, to look back at how excited we all were to get into 18 and up dance clubs in San Diego county. This shows you how exciting Temecula was for teenagers. The only important memory of my first night in an 18 and up club, the Icehouse in Escondido, was hearing “Intergalactic," the Beastie’s brand-spankin’ new track, blast throughout the black lit warehouse dance floor, and seeing friends who I had not seen since we gradated high school the summer before. We all sang along, “Inter-galactic planetary, plan-etary inter-galactic!” and it was just like we were all back together at those high school parties.

Scene 6: 2004

            One more scene to think back upon. It was Halloween night, 2004. I lived in Redondo Beach, but we were in Hermosa this night. My brother drove up all the way from Temecula to come up with my friends and me. His costume – a Beastie Boy cop from the “Sabotage” video. At one of the bars we visited that night, the prefect song flew out from the vibrating speakers – “Check it Out” off of the newest Beastie’s album, To the 5 Boroughs. As soon as the first line was rapped out by MCA, my brother took off into a wild dancing fit. I could not stop laughing. It was the type of fun that only brothers can enjoy. The Beastie Boys made that moment perfection.

Thank you, Beastie Boys. Thank you, MCA 

How to Gracefully Disappear in a Room

Is it odd that I think about Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec from time to time? Henri, the brilliant, but biologically and psychologically troubled, French post-impressionist painter, who I imagined must have been as uncomfortable out in society, alone, as I can be at times. Henri was a dwarf. I don’t know what my excuse would be. In my head, I create imagined scenes of his isolation. Inside the cabaret, fin de siècle Paris, the opening of the Moulin Rouge. Henri’s posters are what drew the crowd to this nightspot. They put the red windmill on the map, so to say. But in my meditations, Henri is left alone.

Henri Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa was born in 1864, in the South of France to an aristocratic household; his last name being a gift from the towns his relatives were the counts of. Also, Henri was born from aristocratic familial breeding traditions; his physical afflictions being a gift from the history of inter-nobility European marriages. His grandmothers were sisters. This pragmatic and perilous desire for “pure blood” and strengthened family alliances produced homozygosis in poor Henri. His torso was normal size but his legs remained child-sized. This set of crossed genetics also bestowed upon Henri, gigantic genitals. Unable to engage in the activities of other young, aristocratic, French males, Henri immersed himself in art. He fled to Paris to study art. Drawn to bohemian Montmartre, he met his first prostitute, Marie-Charlotte, apparently hired by his friends. Around this time, the Moulin Rouge opened and hired Henri to make its promotional prints. Henri always had a seat reserved for him there, and his paintings adorned the new walls. He painted all of the dancers of the Moulin Rouge. His work was shown in the Independent Artists’ Salon. But demons manifested in Henri. His alcoholism pulled him to new depths, aided by the deterioration of a rumored syphilis infection. In 1899, his mother had poor Henri institutionalized. Two years later, Henri had passed. Aged 36 years.

I imagine Henri sitting at his reserved seat. Women who may be working, women who may be kept, comparing curls in the corners. They never see poor Henri. He sees them. Above the rim of his glass, lifted by tiny hands to his tiny lips, perched high atop his seat. His cane has fallen to the floor. Henri does not want to ask anyone for help. He would rather remain invisible tonight, and deny the aristocratic attention others often crave. Henri is taking mental photographs, perhaps to recreate in his masterpiece, At the Moulin Rouge, later.

I, too, have sat alone at a bar. But this has produced few masterpieces of my own. I spent one night alone in Chicago, just to have spent one night alone in Chicago, amidst a cross-country trip and stumbled along the streets downtown, full of deep-dish pizza and Budweiser, until I found myself in a piano bar. It was crowded for a Wednesday night. I settled in at the bar, ordered another bottle of Budweiser and turned around on the stool to swallow the surroundings better.

People are strange, when you’re a stranger. The regulars lined up at the bar, swaying upon their stools, adjacent to me. I overhear their dark and lonely conversations, attempts to hide the same loneliness we are all plagued by at times. Others seated in their guarded groups, facing each other around tabletops, their backs to everyone else. All across this place. Some groups of only guys, with hungry eyes wading through the room like lost sharks. There are a few groups of only girls, who know that they are being watched from seven possible directions, simultaneously. The heterogeneous groups, men and women together, are having the most fun, laughing at something, when they are not drinking. Waitresses weave between, balancing drinks and bar food on the moon-shaped platters they hold out, above and away from their heads on their way to coalesce at the end of the bar area, to flirt and being flirted with by the inattentive bartenders, who have left me waiting for another beer.

It is really just like any other bar I have been to in my life, alone or accompanied by friends. But tonight I am the stranger. I don’t know these people. I will never know these people. What on Earth could I possibly have to say to anyone here? Or they to me? I found myself quoting Kerouac, “I had nothing to offer to anybody except my own confusion.” It probably came from reading On the Road, too many times in my younger, more impressionable years.  

Two pianos, empty for the moment, sit back to back upon a small stage waiting to be played. It is only a matter of time before the rollicking and dueling pianos will flood the whole bar, and the poly-symphonic singing of the trained professionals at the pianos and the drunken coeds at the tables will bellow and wail the clichéd lyrics of all the clichéd songs you hear at any piano bar. Let everyone else sing every tired verse of “American Pie”, and “Piano Man.” They are the type of songs should only be sung when you’re part of a group, anyway.
In this bar, on this night, invisible, I stole the scenes I will recreate later. 

My mind wandered back to At the Moulin-Rouge, its diagonal composition and, glowing, grotesque faces. Figures in black seated around worn, wooden lacquered tables take turns leaning in and laughing. Men beneath black chimney pot hats, black beards, black frock coats. Women, black from ornate collars to pointy shoes, rest under Victorian plumes. They cradle glasses of cognac and glasses of absinthe in their black velvet gloved palms. The gaslights, centered in each table, cast a ghost green glow, illuminating chins and nostrils. Each group, across this cabaret, engrossed in its own conversation as the accordion dances through the air, mingling with clove and perfume. Each group, oblivious to the existence of every other group.

  Their little tribal circles. The stories they share. The color of their jewelry, the glistening of their hair. Someone laughs loudest. Someone has always had too much. Sometimes, it is Henri who had too much. One too many tremblement de terre. He is the life of the cabaret. He is the only source of natural light in this place. The women surround him and play with his tiny ears. Twirl his miniature mustache. Pinch his thighs, just above the knee. They whisper together, rumors about his immense and distorted genitals. His legs dance in staccato steps, Three legs, counting the cane, rapping and tapping upon the floor as he stumbles beneath the frills and ruffles of can-can dresses and can-can kicks. Henri is dancing. They say he will never die. Mad with alcohol and syphilis. Cursed by the conditions of old aristocratic inbreeding traditions. They say he will never die.

 But on the night when he only wanted to disappear, Henri watches from his roost at the bar. Behind his glass. Capturing the night and its sway, and storing it somewhere far away. Sometime later he will paint this night, and carefully place himself in the scene, behind a group in the cabaret. Right in my line of sight as I raise my glass and remain invisible.