Welcome To The New Age (Go F**K Yourself If You're A 41 Year Old Rapper Filmmaker)

The challenge of being 41 year old male rapper and filmmaker living across the street from a crack house in the age of the Me Too Movement

Welcome to the New Age (Go F**k Yourself if you're a 41 year old Male)

Welcome to the new age, where if you’re a

male over the age of 40 the daily mantra screamed at

you is, GO FUCK YOURSELF. Wether its trying

to find a job, trying to be a multi talented artist in

an Etsy-social media age or trying to find a date, there’s

no pity, no mercy, no reward for someone my age.

I’ve spent 23 years as a rapper, singer and performer

and wether good or bad, I’ve traveled the country doing

what I do. I’ve been on an iTunes soundtrack song with

Wyclef Jean, played the great CBGB’s where Kurt Cobain

pissed in the same shitty bathroom David Byrne took

a dump in and have been on stage alongside one of the

greatest guitarists of all time, Tom Morello. My run as

rapper and singer as far as amazing shows and performances that evoke grand applause has been pretty damn good except I don’t have a dime to show for it.

See over the last 23 years my self conscious doubting

rap rocker put his trust in many a close friend, thinking

a band or partnership was the only way I could make it.

These partnerships brought forth a catalog of songs

enough people heard to make me feel like I had a cult

following but never enough to get me the success my

professional musician friends had. I learned the hard

way nobody has your back except you.

Thus I’m now 41 sitting in an open mic with songs

the world’s barely ever heard, playing out solo with

only a backing cd. Last night became the tenth time

I’ve played out this year, the experienced talented performer

suddenly thrust into a world of lazy, crude, talentless

performers. From NJ to NY in the last three months

I’ve confronted the terrifying face of the generational

paradigm shift when it comes to musicians, APATHY.

iPhones cling to their hands as they fumble through cover

songs, iPhones cling to their hands as they barely read

half baked, degrading stand up routines with horrible

AIDS jokes, and none of it impresses. Gone suddenly

are the days where an open mic demanded respectful

rehearsal and learning to command stage presence.

The Springsteens talking ernestly to the crowd about

their life, the Bowies, Princes and Beastie Boys galvanizing

the room into a mass orgy of excited passionate energy

has been replaced by zombie crowds on iPhones using

their iPhones to record assholes performing off iPhones.

Now I know, who am I to cast stones when I’m using

a CD player but the thing is, I’m not connected to it

in determiming my stage presence and I certainly don’t

fucking hold an iPhone reading my lyrics. Last night

over 2 hours I was tortured by big black girls cursing

out the audience, nerdy white boys ripping off David

Matthews with no original accents and singers who

stopped mid song not knowing the rest. Goodbye to

class, to stagecraft, to work ethic and hello zero hour

where performers brag about the contests they’ve won

but provide no talent as evidence on why we should care

and stand up comedians make degrading AIDS jokes

about African Americans without anyone reprimanding

them for tastelessness and disrespect.

Like Bob Dylan sang in one of his best, outtake

songs, “I guess it must be up to me”. Suddenly I’ve

got to show these kids how it’s done and maybe even

pull them aside to say, “hey, when you’re doing that

thing you just did, it belittles you and the audience.”

I don’t wanta become grandpa but maybe its what

I have to start doing because nobody else is.

Kind of like calling the police on a crack house

across the street.

Now I got no problems with you smoking crack

and I’ve had good friends insist they’ve had the best

orgasm of their life smoking crack but when its 12:30 am

and I’m trying to watch “Coco” trying to figure out who

the fuck Coco is and why the great great grandfather

poisoned Hector I don’t wanta hear subwoofers blasting

bad hip hop. Nor do I wanta look out the window and

see the countless cycles of destitute downtrodden

characters waking back alongside the building alley

across the street to return minutes later as their

subwoofer enhanced escorts wait. I’d dealt with this

for five months along with the day time encounters of

being eyed suspiciously by the fucks going there in

the daytime before finally, drunkenly, calling the local

police. This was like calling a clown to do a juggling

act at 1am.

After sobering up I let the two stout intense

police officers into my apartment where I began to

dress them about my annoyed concerns with the

whore house across the street. I told them everyone

from my 71 year old father to my friends have watched

the non stop day to night traffic going on across the

street that obviously revolves around drugs and or

sex trafficking. I tell them about the fat women in

tight clothes leering at me, the sketchy strung out

witches shaking as they head down the alley and how

I was almost hit by a car that eyeballed me suspiciously.

The cops react as if I’ve been talking about how white

the wall looks.

“Something could be going on with the DEA but

if it were they probably wouldn’t even tell us”, remarks

the polypenesian cop before I realize how pointless

this exercise has been. The idiots then line up three

police SUVS attracting attention to themselves scaring

off the frequent vehicles right before leaving and allowing

the return of the same frequent vehicles I now know by

heart. The cracked out and sketchy continue being

dropped off for their hits or hand jobs and the subwoofers

ruin the rest of “Coco” where I can’t figure out what

the fuck’s going on and on goes the night.

The next day, after having the fuckhead landlord

once again ruin my life by installing noxious styrofoam

beneath me that makes me dry heave constantly, I’m

forced to flee when I discover my sneakers are gone.

Like my worn out much beloved 15 year old boots

before my worn out Adidas have been stolen from my

trunk. Wether they popped the trunk or just opened

it because the trunk decides when it wants to lock or

not lock at 23 years old, the same team of vagrants now

wearing my Camphor shoes are now wearing my faded

Perry Farrell Crazy 8’s. So I go to the police department

where fired up I lament on why no one is doing anything

about the crackhouse across the street, obviously

connected to the latest theft of my sneakers. The cop

answers strangely, as if he knows something he can’t

let me know, as if part of a conspiracy, simply telling

me to keep calling them when I see something. What

makes his answer fishy is that he knows my dress before

I even say it and professes zero interest in learning any

specific facts. Undaunted I insist on filling out a police

report to prove on paper how dangerous my neighborhood

is. Maybe or maybe not this could become part of my

evidence against the landlord whose had me living

me in a house form hell, replete with bedside Rats,

invading Orkin workers, collapsing ceilings and now

noxious gases seeping in from the vents. After a night

at my friends, where like for the last five months I get

a grilling on what the fuck is happening at my apartment

and why I’m not doing this or that, I return home

confronting the workers below. First they lie saying

air coming through the walls is making me sick but

I press on for them show me this air and explain what

air makes you dry gulch. Finally I break them down to

learn it’s sewage.

Sewage is somehow getting into my Lovecraft-like

basement from hell poisoning the vents. They say they’re

used to it as for the next ten minutes I lay on my bed

hearing all of them dry heave and dry gulch below me.

Finally I decide to call the city zoning inspector who is

bound to show up any minute. Though he may not get

rid of the fuckhead pitfalls pounding bones above my

head all night in a building where the lease specifically

prohibited dogs maybe the inspector can prove how

unsafe my house from hell is allowing for my exodus.

Last night after playing my set to great applause

and laughter I ended up coming home, drinking wine

and going to bed. Like most nights up here in Troy,

New York’s limbo I slumber alone scanning instagram

before anxiety ridden slumber. Last night I suddenly came upon

a post like most posts today that anger and terrify me

within the twisted evolution of the Me Too movement.

From a pretentious horror studio that makes

shitty, misogynistic crap came a post celebrating how

45% of their one film’s production team was women.

45%, okay, great. After the success of “Mudbound” having

a nearly all female crew and “Lady Bird” had its first

time female director Greta Gerwig nominated. It’s

all great but the problem I have with it all is that part of

is a lie.

I’m not saying women haven’t been abused or

taken advantage or that Weinstein didn’t jack off into

a coffee pot with a knife to Salma Hayek’s throat, I’m

saying it’s getting twisted.

In 1999 my first film job was being a key P.A. on

a romantic comedy in the Berkshires being directed

by its writer, a woman, backed by departments headed

by women. When new female P.A.s arrived, inexperienced

but connected to the executive producer, both quickly

took over departments with one of them, Louise, taking

advantage of my naievete and going from nobody to

producer’s assistant, sipping red wine in the rain as me

and all the men and women worked their asses off. This

was September 1999, when we had to use maps and

common sense to find locations and women didn’t give

a fuck about other women in the business. The next

month I got hired to P.A. a Showtime commercial with

my buddy, hired by a woman who was the UPM right

before my first emotional breakdown and return to film

work, working a German film produced by a woman

with an all woman A.D. department. If you can’t see

the writing between the lines then you probably should

return to tweeting about your visit to Sonic.

What I’m getting at, without taking away from the

validated, righteous Me Too movement, women’s empowerment day or solidarity, is that women for at least the last 20 years of me acting, PAing, and directing have had a powerful commanding presence on most sets I’ve worked. While I’m sure misdeeds have been perpetuated by sleazy producers on many a set, the idea that all women in the film industry are slaves or victims and all men are piles of waking scum is not only atrocious its unacceptable. What happened to Rose McGowan and Salma Hayek is unforgiveable but it’s not the

same as Uma Thurman believing she could steer a rickety old car down a bumpy Mexican road at speed she shouldn’t have been driving and crashing it into

a tree because Tarantino was directing. That accident like many accidents I’ve seen as P.A. and as semi stunt driver happened because an empowered star wanted to drive herself and a powerful director ignored the first A.D.’s advice creating an accident nobody talked about for 13 years until Uma decided it was a vital new element to the evolution of the Me Too movement.

Such evidence, viewed by any men or women with

experience in the film business, would be revoked in

a smarter, Trumpless America as being what it is,

the product of an angry misguided actress and an evil

media pumping up the Me Too movement’s volume

anyway it can. I’ve met Uma on set and she seems like

a nice person but in the end I think Tarantino being

attacked on talk shows because his films were bullied

and produced by Weinstein is like punishing every

nervous P.A. that ever bought Weinstein a bottle of

water. There are levels of consciousness and power seen

in the stark blinding grey light of every film set, levels

men and women.

I’m 41 and last year, after 18 years experience

directing films that are in stores, being an A.D. for

NBC and walking Michael Shannon to set as he spoke

to me the only words he spoke to anyone all shoot, was

resigned to setting up fifty chairs and various tables alone

on the third floor of a million dollar mansion overlooking

central park. The mansion’s owner, a Russian oligarch

producing all of Brett Ratner’s Warner Brothers films,

was the star of an outlandish birthday video Ratner was

directing several floors below me and so I had to set

up lunch for cast and crew. When it came to asking

fro help from much younger PAs, including a girl, no help

was offered, with the women in charge insisting the

female PA shouldn’t be setting up tables because she was

a girl and besides, she was needed for paperwork. Wasn’t the first time I’ve heard this on a set or pulled out my back

because empowered women didn’t want to do a “man’s

job”, a job berated upon me with lines like “don’t pussy

out” or “man up”. And in that we have the double standard

I as white male have faced for 19 years in Hollywood, that

the rights and empowerment demanded by a woman aren’t

the same as a man simply because, well, you’re a man.

Louise who had the power to get me a check helped

her producers cockblock me until my 6 foot black

rastafarrian friend waltzed into the office demanding

my money. Louise who’d I known for a year sat there

and smiled doing nothing like the female UPM at NBC who after failing to undermine me on set manipulated other

circumstances to get me fired my third week of work.

The female assistant running a studio on the Warner

Brothers didn’t even know what “locking down” meant

or how to frame a shot but she, after only one job handing

water to the director of a Harry Potter film, was deciding

wether or not my produced, award winning writer- director

had a shot in Hollywood. Like Sabine who hated her job

working for the director of “Crash”, a job like hundreds in Hollywood circa 2007 and 2009 hiring inexperienced

women like her over experienced men because “we want

someone in a skirt”. I could go on and on but of course

I can’t because no one wants to hear from a caucasian

male at 41 because part of the lie in Hollywood and

America is that we’re the 1 percent and not the guy

whose horror film is in Best Buy but just made 20 bucks

at the Cheesecake Factory and can’t even fill up his

Subaru’s gas tank.

And that’s the part of the Me Too movement that

upsets me, the misbelief that only women have suffered

in Hollywood, a cuthroat town killing mogul Thomas

Ince on board William Randolph Hearst’s yacht and

destroying Fatty Arbuckle’s career over the salacious

myth he had busted Virgina Rappe’s vagina to death

with a coke bottle. Maybe I’ve never been shown

Weinstein’s dick but hey I’m 41 and on food stamps

where many women I know with less experience are

doing much better than me in Hollywood. I’m not

going to keep bitching and am for another Patty Jenkins

directed “Wonder Woman” continuing to make the other

male directed superhero flicks look like the crap they

are the same way I love Rose McGowan and Asia

Argento bringing fire and fury to the streets of Italy

in protest. In the end what the Me Too movement

should start doing is what they do in the oscar nominated

song from “Coco”, ‘remember me”, and the millions of

other white, black, asian or whatever males who’ve

given their life to working for, defending and making films

about women, with women, the ones suffering the other side of the double standard, just as unheard because of our sex the way women are. If that day can come perhaps we’d all be actually united and not still fighting against each

other for the throne. Perhaps on that day Louise will

get hers, I’ll be on set directing the all female cast of

the female empowering political thriller no men or

woman in Hollywood wants to fund and not on Instagram

in a bed across the street from a sex ring no man other

than myself wants to do anything about.

NPR / Via npr.org

Time / Via time.com