Some real spit during this conversation last month between J. Cole and Angie Martinez (Most kids my age loved Jenny McCarthey, but at 15, I was into Angie–Rap City ya’ll!!).
For the whole, a good interview, but I got a little annoyed every time she joked about the conversation being “too depressing.” Worth a listen though, if you don’t have time for that, at least check out the Letterman appearance he’d made the night before. For all the goofy shit that Grantland posts on its website, I don’t remember one mention of this performance. I guess it was not entertaining enough.
It’s been almost 4 years since Patrice O’Neal’s death in 2011.
I met him twice at the Punchline in San Francisco, when I was a (mostly) open mic comedian. The first time I saw him perform, I was so blown away at the realness of his set, that I could not have a coherent conversation with the guy. The deadpan expression he had his face indicated that I was sounding like a fanboy, as I found it hard to express how important it was to hear him say the very things I’d only begun recently to think.
My homie Greg Edwards got me on the guest list a couple of years later, when he opened up for Patrice, and I was shocked when he remembered me and started a conversation (maybe it helped that I had a cute woman with me–a platonic friend but he didn’t know that).
He fucked the whole room up, and I knew he was killing it because my girl was crying she was laughing so hard. All those dark and sinister thoughts you’ve ever considered were brought to light by Patrice’s stand-up. He was the truth because he spoke the truth. There was this clever and twisted insight to his jokes–which really just seemed like commentary. Whether you like him or not, the fact was that if you watched the man work, you were never the same afterwards. The man understood human nature like no other comic I’d encountered.
About a year and a half ago, I was looking up some of his shit on Youtube and I randomly ran into some of his podcast archives online. There are only 15 episodes (at most) of this show he ran with Dante Nero called, “The Black Phillip Show.”
It was a relationship advice show that went way beyond anything you could imagine. Feminists would probably regard the show as some misogynistic “Dear Abby” shit, but it was more like some Dr. Phil (hence the name of the show).
Every show, there would be at least one female guest on, and Patrice would just eviscerate these women with his passionate logic.
It’s worth checking out for sure
He’ll really fuck you up with his logic. For example, Patrice has this special ratings scale for women that I attempted my senior year in high school. Now I thought back then (1997) that I was doing some revolutionary shit by creating a chart that graded on a 10 point spectrum. the categories were (don’t laugh) LEGS (3 points) , T & A (4 points), and face(3 points).
Stupid system right? It definitely wasn’t clever by any means, and certainly not worth the crap I took when girls at my school found out they were on a list (kinda like when I made a top 25 in junior high).
Well Mr. O’Neal’s system is slightly more sophisticated than that without the mini categories.
His scale is 1-30. 1-10 is for ugly chicks with 1 being the ugliest ugly chick, and 10 being the hottest an ugly chick can be.
An 11-20 rating was reserved for average to averagely good looking women, or as he calls them “alright looking bitches.” An alright looking alright bitch” is 11, a “fine ass alright bitch” would get a 20.
21-30 is the highest raking group reserved for “fine ass bitches.” An ugly ass fine bitch gets relegated to a score of 21, while a 30 is given to what men usually call dime pieces.
The whole point of his scale it to lend perspective on what we observe as a woman’s beauty. A 1-10 scale is highly restrictive. With only 10 points to give a grade, a lot of women get lumped into a really high or really low grade because of the need to jam them into a rating.
There are not as many perfect looking women (by conventional standards) out there as people would like to believe. The same can be said of the least aesthetically pleasing women out there in the world. Most women fall in between and that area of gray is a lot larger than a 1-10 scale can provide.
Hearing Patrice explain this during one of his stand-up shows, revealed the errors in my thinking about the opposite sex. It made me think of every girl I’d been physical with, and made me adjust how I thought about (handled) them. Say what you will about the guy, he will make you think.
He was honest, he was brave, and he was really fucking funny. The comedy world needs more comics like Patrice O’Neal; people who are capable of making an audience laugh and think. A lot of comics get on the mic and simply jerk off, wasting everyone’s time in the process because they lack a point of view.
But not Patrice; he didn’t have a whole of time in the mainstream spotlight, but he made use of every minute. I still go back from time to time and pull up his podcasts on Youtube–just to have something different to listen to when I fall asleep. The guy just had a firm handle on what it meant to be human, and he wasn’t afraid to talk about it. He was that dude.
Cowboys and Cowboys fans have nothing to be ashamed of. They should be proud of the season that they had. No matter what the scoreboard read yesterday, it was a success. Big ups to my people out in Dallas who never gave up on the team.
Boko Haram for killing 2,000 villagers in Nigeria this week, and the international media for not giving that news nearly the amount of press as #JeSuisCharlie. Just a terrible week in international news, dudes shooting up kosher markets in France, cartoonists getting capped in their offices, and some jerk-off throwing his five year old daughter off a bridge in Florida.
When my homie invited me to go see Die Hard at the Alamo Drafthouse, I immediately said “hell yeah.”
Then I thought, “Wait a minute. There is an Alamo Drafthouse in Dallas?” Well alright then.
I was excited about seeing it on the big screen because of the above posted trailer. I was in 4th grade when the movie initially came out. I had watched my fair share of Moonlighting, with Willis and Cybil Shephard. Plus the elevator shaft scene had me so hyped as a kid. I would slide down the railing on the stairs of my mom’s apartment and allow myself to fall and catch the bottom–recreating the scene in my head.
One night, there was a double feature, I think the opening movie was Lethal Weapon. While my mother was getting ready, I decided to get one last “Die Hard!” reenactment before we left. Feeling extra hype, I took off from the top of the railing, and lunged for the top of the railing instead of the bottom.
POW!! POW!! POW!!!!
Fireworks went off inside my head from hitting the concrete. My head was banging, but there was no way I was missing the movie. I didn’t say much the rest of the night and actually fell asleep before Die Hard even got underway.
Thinking back on it, I probably had a concussion and probably should not have gone to sleep. It is crazy to think that I could have died in my sleep and my mom would have been clueless as to what happened. Can you imagine the investigation after the autopsy showing I’d had some blunt trauma to my head? Would they have believed my mother or would they have thrown her in the clink?
Back to the present day. We buy our tickets and walk into the theater. In front of every seat is an orange tip cap gun, which to me seems a little insensitive considering the current climate in this country. I jokingly told my buddy that I wasn’t going anywhere near my cap gun, and privately plotted my escape just in case someone brought a real gun. I wasn’t going to be a victim of the “Die Hard” shooter if things went down. Maybe it was the weed causing the paranoia, or maybe it was just paranoia. But seeing a “shoot ’em up” movie suddenly made me uneasy. The police officers in New York had just been killed and I was on edge. Things have gotten so weird that nothing hardly surprises me anymore (especially when it happens in Florida).
I calmed down once the movie started though. There is barely 15 minutes of exposition before they jump right into the action. I’d forgotten just how funny the movie is. There is a self awareness in every action scene that allows the actors to deliver their lines in a tongue in cheek fashion. Even the the scenes where people get capped are funny–not in an over the top way, but there is at least an acknowledgment of absurdity throughout.
Carl Winslow is in the movie,and my favorite character is the nerdy black guy (who could have easily been the inspiration for Steve Urkel) who is a wiz at computer hacking, “Well looky here. The police have themselves and RV!!!” The best part for me was when McClane says “Yippee Cayyeee Muthafucka!!!” and the audience clapped.
Despite the goofy CB dialogue between John McClane and Carl Winslow, and the pregnant secretary drinking champagne, I’d say this movie is pretty flawless as an action flick. I bet it was a fun movie to make.
This is really funny to me for a number of reasons. I think Luther Vandross is one of the backup singers. I wasn’t crazy about this album growing up (I preferred Station to Station and the Berlin Trilogy albums), but this and Fame still stand up. I’m sure if this video were my introduction to Bowie I would not have been such a big fan of his.
Beyond the patio glass,
into the courtyard
where she walked her dog.
The dog that I’d grown to love–
the dog that had eaten a whole eighth of cannabis,
went catatonic then pissed down his own leg.
I stared out at them both
from inside her apartment,
watching her
Watching it
poop in the grass,
knowing that this would come to an end
much sooner than she wanted.
Knowing that I would miss her
miss him,
and miss this;
but also knowing it was best for everyone to move on.
I was not ready.
And to look back on things now,
I’m not sure I will ever be.
Nuclear Polio Vaccination 