Wish I Knew How to Quidditch You

A young George Costanza?

Maybe you've seen the ads on billboards, in bus shelters, or projected onto the insides of your eyelids.  Maybe you've seen Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, or the Other One making the rounds on the talk show circuit.  Or maybe you need only to consult your very own "Mug Life" abdomen tattoo to be reminded that today--yes, today!--marks the release of the final Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows, Part Two: Stagnetti's Revenge.

Yes, after a decade's worth of yeoman-like service at the multiplex, it's finally come time for this iteration of Harry Potter to power down, be put out to stud, and other such mixed metaphors.  It's a bittersweet day for fans, but hopefully the release of the final film in the franchise will at least provide the answers to some longstanding mysteries, like "What's the deal with the smoke monster?",  "Whatever happened to that Russian Paulie and Christopher let escape into the pine barrens?" and "So did A and X meet at this place last year, or what?"

Okay, so maybe I don't know anything about the Harry Potter franchise.  But our very own Daily Grace does...

And today, she bids a tearful adieu to the Boy Who Lived.  But if you want to avoid the waterworks, you can check in on Ms. Helbig in happier times, watching Part 1 of Deathly Hallows, or over on her Tumblr, wherein she ups her Hogwarts cosplay game considerably.

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420!!

Holla at ya boy DannyMoney, ladies and gents: it's 420 and you know what that means!

So I'm assuming some of y'all will be getting a little silly today?  A little goofy?  High as a kite?  Well if you are, My Damn Channel has a whole bunch of videos - well, the entire site, really! - that'll get you laughing on this special day that comes but once a year (just because YOU celebrate every day doesn't mean it's 420 year round!).  Here are a few of my favs:

- Not only is today 420, but a new episode of Gigi: Almost American premiered, which you can watch RIGHT HERE.  I love me some pig dog!


- HERE'S a wacky video from the master, Andy Milonakis.  It never fails to crack me up, mostly because it's so damn idiotic, which I consider possibly the HIGHEST compliment I can give.


- And while you're at it, why not watch the entire 10 episode series of Horrible People.  Sit back and let it ride!  This is seriously one of the funniest shows I've ever seen.  Probably due to the fact that it was written and directed by A.D. Miles, currently the head writer on The Jimmy Fallon Show. 

Word up!

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FAREWELL TO DANNY

This eulogy was delivered by Bruce Springsteen at Danny's funeral on April 21 in Red Bank, New Jersey:

FAREWELL TO DANNY



Let me start with the stories.

Back in the days of miracles, the frontier days when "Mad Dog" Lopez and his temper struck fear into the band, small club owners, innocent civilians and all women, children and small animals.

Back in the days when you could still sign your life away on the hood of a parked car in New York City.

Back shortly after a young red-headed accordionist struck gold on the Ted Mack Amateur Hour and he and his mama were sent to Switzerland to show them how it's really done.

Back before beach bums were featured on the cover of Time magazine.

I'm talking about back when the E Street Band was a communist organization! My pal, quiet, shy Dan Federici, was a one-man creator of some of the hairiest circumstances of our 40 year career... And that wasn't easy to do. He had "Mad Dog" Lopez to compete with.... Danny just outlasted him.

Maybe it was the "police riot" in Middletown, New Jersey. A show we were doing to raise bail money for "Mad Log" Lopez who was in jail in Richmond, Virginia, for having an altercation with police officers who we'd aggravated by playing too long. Danny allegedly knocked over our huge Marshall stacks on some of Middletown's finest who had rushed the stage because we broke the law by...playing too long.

As I stood there watching, several police oficers crawled out from underneath the speaker cabinets and rushed away to seek medical attention. Another nice young officer stood in front of me onstage waving his nightstick, poking and calling me nasty names. I looked over to see Danny with a beefy police officer pulling on one arm while Flo Federici, his first wife, pulled on the other, assisting her man in resisting arrest.

A kid leapt from the audience onto the stage, momentarily distracting the beefy officer with the insults of the day. Forever thereafter, "Phantom" Dan Federici slipped into the crowd and disappeared.

A warrant out for his arrest and one month on the lam later, he still hadn't been brought to justice. We hid him in various places but now we had a problem. We had a show coming at Monmouth College. We needed the money and we had to do the gig. We tried a replacement but it didn't work out. So Danny, to all of our admiration, stepped up and said he'd risk his freedom, take the chance and play.

Show night. 2,000 screaming fans in the Monmouth College gym. We had it worked out so Danny would not appear onstage until the moment we started playing. We figured the police who were there to arrest him wouldn't do so onstage during the show and risk starting another riot.

Let me set the scene for you. Danny is hiding, hunkered down in the backseat of a car in the parking lot. At five minutes to eight, our scheduled start time, I go out to whisk him in. I tap on the window.

"Danny, come on, it's time."

I hear back, "I'm not going."

Me: "What do you mean you're not going?"

Danny: "The cops are on the roof of the gym. I've seen them and they're going to nail me the minute I step out of this car."

As I open the door, I realize that Danny has been smoking a little something and had grown rather paranoid. I said, "Dan, there are no cops on the roof."

He says, "Yes, I saw them, I tell you. I'm not coming in."

So I used a procedure I'd call on often over the next forty years in dealing with my old pal's concerns. I threatened him...and cajoled. Finally, out he came. Across the parking lot and into the gym we swept for a rapturous concert during which we laughted like thieves at our excellent dodge of the local cops.

At the end of the evening, during the last song, I pulled the entire crowd up onto the stage and Danny slipped into the audience and out the front door. Once again, "Phantom" Dan had made his exit. (I still get the occasional card from the old Chief of Police of Middletown wishing us well. Our histories are forever intertwined.) And that, my friends, was only the beginning.

There was the time Danny quit the band during a rough period at Max's Kansas City, explaining to me that he was leaving to fix televisions. I asked him to think about that and come back later.

Or Danny, in the band rental car, bouncing off several parked cars after a night of entertainment, smashing out the windshield with his head but saved from severe injury by the huge hard cowboy hat he bought in Texas on our last Western swing.

Or Danny, leaving a large marijuana plant on the front seat of his car in a tow away zone. The car was promptly towed. He said, "Bruce, I'm going to go down and report that it was stolen." I said, "I'm not sure that's a good idea."

Down he went and straight into the slammer without passing go.

Or Danny, the only member of the E Street Band to be physically thrown out of the Stone Pony. Considering all the money we made them, that wasn't easy to do.

Or Danny receiving and surviving a "cautionary assault" from an enraged but restrained "Big Man" Clarence Clemons while they were living together and Danny finally drove the "Big Man" over the big top.

Or Danny assisting me in removing my foot from his stereo speaker after being the only band member ever to drive me into a violent rage.

And through it all, Danny played his beautiful, soulful B3 organ for me and our love grew. And continued to grow. Life is funny like that. He was my homeboy, and great, and for that you make considerations... And he was much more tolerant of my failures than I was of his.

When Danny wasn't causing chaos, he was a sweet, talented, unassuming, unpretentious good-hearted guy who simply had an unchecked ability to make good fortune and things in general go fabulously wrong.

But beyond all of that, he also had a mountain of the right stuff. He had the heart and soul of an engineer. He learned to fly. He was always up on the latest technology and would explain it to you patiently and in enormous detail. He was always "souping" something up, his car, his stereo, his B3. When Patti joined the band, he was the most welcoming, thoughtful, kindest friend to the first woman entering our "boys club."

He loved his kids, always bragging about Jason, Harley, and Madison, and he loved his wife Maya for the new things she brought into his life.

And then there was his artistry. He was the most intuitive player I've ever seen. His style was slippery and fluid, drawn to the spaces the other musicians in the E Street Band left. He wasn't an assertive player, he was a complementary player. A true accompanist. He naturally supplied the glue that bound the band's sound together. In doing so, he created for himself a very specific style. When you hear Dan Federici, you don't hear a blanket of sound, you hear a riff, packed with energy, flying above everything else for a few moments and then gone back in the track. "Phantom" Dan Federici. Now you hear him, now you don't.

Offstage, Danny couldn't recite a lyric or a chord progression for one of my songs. Onstage, his ears opened up. He listened, he felt, he played, finding the perfect hole and placement for a chord or a flurry of notes. This style created a tremendous feeling of spontaneity in our ensemble playing.

In the studio, if I wanted to loosen up the track we were recording, I'd put Danny on it and not tell him what to play. I'd just set him loose. He brought with him the sound of the carnival, the amusements, the boardwalk, the beach, the geography of our youth and the heart and soul of the birthplace of the E Street Band.

Then we grew up. Very slowly. We stood together through a lot of trials and tribulations. Danny's response to a mistake onstage, hard times, catastrophic events was usually a shrug and a smile. Sort of an "I am but one man in a raging sea, but I'm still afloat. And we're all still here."

I watched Danny fight and conquer some tough addictions. I watched him struggle to put his life together and in the last decade when the band reunited, thrive on sitting in his seat behind that big B3, filled with life and, yes, a new maturity, passion for his job, his family and his home in the brother and sisterhood of our band.

Finally, I watched him fight his cancer without complaint and with great courage and spirit. When I asked him how things looked, he just said, "what are you going to do? I'm looking forward to tomorrow." Danny, the sunny side up fatalist. He never gave up right to the end.

A few weeks back we ended up onstage in Indianapolis for what would be the last time. Before we went on I asked him what he wanted to play and he said, "Sandy." He wanted to strap on the accordion and revisit the boardwalk of our youth during the summer nights when we'd walk along the boards with all the time in the world.

So what if we just smashed into three parked cars, it's a beautiful night! So what if we're on the lam from the entire Middletown police department, let's go take a swim! He wanted to play once more the song that is of course about the end of something wonderful and the beginning of something unknown and new.

Let's go back to the days of miracles. Pete Townshend said, "a rock and roll band is a crazy thing. You meet some people when you're a kid and unlike any other occupation in the whole world, you're stuck with them your whole life no matter who they are or what crazy things they do."

If we didn't play together, the E Street Band at this point would probably not know one another. We wouldn't be in this room together. But we do... We do play together. And every night at 8 p.m., we walk out on stage together and that, my friends, is a place where miracles occur...old and new miracles. And those you are with, in the presence of miracles, you never forget. Life does not separate you. Death does not separate you. Those you are with who create miracles for you, like Danny did for me every night, you are honored to be amongst.

Of course we all grow up and we know "it's only rock and roll"...but it's not. After a lifetime of watching a man perform his miracle for you, night after night, it feels an awful lot like love.

So today, making another one of his mysterious exits, we say farewell to Danny, "Phantom" Dan, Federici. Father, husband, my brother, my friend, my mystery, my thorn, my rose, my keyboard player, my miracle man and lifelong member in good standing of the house rockin', pants droppin', earth shockin', hard rockin', booty shakin', love makin', heart breakin', soul cryin'... and, yes, death defyin' legendary E Street Band.

(video tribute to Danny at www.BruceSpringsteen.net)

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TRUSTING TALENT part two

A ROTTEN photo symphony

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COOKIN' WITH COOLIO interview

You Got Served: Cooking With Coolio By Dove ~Sheepish Lordess of Chaos~

Published Thursday, February 14, 2008

In doing his show independently on MyDamnChannel.com, Coolio is able to give an uncensored, humorous edge to the culinary arts. We caught up with the veteran rapper to chew the fat about the ways he turns soul food healthy and how he’s making true entertainment out of cooking.

AllHipHop.com: Tell us a little about how you came up with the concept for your show and how things developed.

Coolio: The concept came about from just playing around. Me and my cousin was in the kitchen one day hooking up a meal and I said, “Wow, what if we had a cooking show? It would be like this” and then we started acting it out. So we did that for a year to a year-and-a half - people would come over and if I was cooking I would pretend like I was doing a cooking show. It grew from that.

I started telling people about it, and I met this guy that was a writer - we were working on something else together - and he was interested in the cooking show. He had some people draw up some things for kitchen gear, and then he wrote an outline and we just took it from there. We shopped it for a while, and though we had a few offers, nobody wanted to let us do what we wanted to do in order to make it the way we wanted to do it. That’s how we ended up taking it to My Damn Channel, because they gave us the freedom to do it the way we wanted to.

AllHipHop.com: How do you go about creating an episode?

Coolio: That’s Elan’s job, one of our writers and producers. He came up with most of the concepts for the shows - we gave him our recipes and then he tried to come up with concepts for each show. Originally it started out as cooking and comedy, it ended up getting to be comedy and cooking. [laughs]

We started out with concepts for the first couple of episodes, and then we found out that only worked for a few of them. We scrapped some of the ideas and then we just started --freestyling stuff towards the end. After we shot the first day-and-a-half all the ideas started to grow, and then somebody would throw in an idea and it just came together.

AllHipHop.com: Are these recipes that you’ve created personally or are they family recipes?

Coolio: It’s kind of weird, I’ve changed all of my family recipes, because my mom used to cook with all of those high cholesterol ingredients and high fat ingredients. So I just took a lot of her basic recipes and added to them. I think my spaghetti is better than hers, and that was one of my favorite things that she cooked. I just made it a little bit better, I just took some of those flavors out that weren’t absolutely necessary and turned the fat and cholesterol meters down and we just came up with some good things.

Then I create as well. It’s all experimentation, it’s just like making music or doing art or making clothes. You do a model, a sample and then you let people try it and you try it. Usually if I like something everybody else is gonna like it, because I’m real critical of food. If I go to a place and buy a meal and it’s not good, I’ll never come there again.

I pick up some concepts from restaurants that I go to, I’ve even went in the kitchen and asked the chef, “What is this? How do you make this?” I’ve had a bit of formal training, I don’t have a diploma or anything, but I almost finished the whole course.

AllHipHop.com: As far as being on tour and on TV sets where you’re in trailers with catered food and in different environments where you’ve probably eaten really bad food over the years, have there been any red flags for you that said, “Hey I need to change the way I’m cooking right now?”

Coolio: Nah, not really, I got a cast iron stomach and a high metabolism and I’m regular. [laughs] My body does its job pretty well, I don’t have ulcers, stomach problems, problems with gas or anything like that. People get older and they start going through that kind of stuff. No high blood pressure or cholesterol, because I stopped eating that way when I was in my early 30’s. When I cook, or when I’m paying for something and I have a choice, I’m eating pretty healthy stuff. I eat my greens and I get it going, it’s pretty easy for me though. I’ve never had a problem with that.

AllHipHop.com: Has anyone influenced you in particular, watching them go through having high blood pressure, diabetes or things like that?

Coolio: No not really. One of the things that influenced me a lot was eating in Italy, and being in Italy for over a month and how they don’t use butter really at all. They use olive oil, so for a lot of dishes I substitute olive, sunflower or peanut oil for butter.

AllHipHop.com: How many episodes did you start out with?

Coolio: We did 10 for the first season.

AllHipHop.com: Would you entertain doing it on television or are you just really adamant about sticking with this plan [on the internet]?

Coolio: Well, I suppose at this point we’re gonna stay on the net because we have a lot of mature content. But if the money’s right and people are gonna make it worth our while, then we’ll take it to network television or to cable. It’s hilarious, but you don’t even realize that you’re watching a cooking show at some points in it. It’s like you’re watching some comedy, but then at the end when you see the finished product you realize, “Damn, he just showed me how to make some s**t! I could use this.”

AllHipHop.com: What are some other ways that people can reduce cholesterol and unnecessary fat when they cook soul food?

Coolio: You can use sugar substitutes. When recipes call for pork or beef, you can use turkey instead. It just depends on what it is you’re cooking, you look at what you’re cooking and say, “Should I use butter here or not? What kind of oil should I use? Should I use pork in my greens or smoked turkey necks?” When it comes to soul food, that’s all you can do.

I don’t do a lot of soul food. I can do soul food, but people know how to cook soul food. The people that don’t aren’t gonna try to cook soul food, they’re gonna go out and buy it from somewhere. Now if you’re talking about somebody that’s just starting out and wants to cook soul food, if they don’t know anybody that cooks it, then yeah, maybe I can give them a few tips, but for the most part I do fusion more or less.

I do Mexitalian, Blasian - which is Black and Asian - like soul rolls. Soul rolls are eggrolls but they got flavor in them. You’ve never tasted an eggroll that will taste like one of my soul rolls. I came up with that because the traditional eggroll with all of the bean sprouts, they never put enough meat in it. I just kind of flipped that whole concept, I still use cabbage, but I just added a few things to it to make it taste better, and then at the same time it’s still healthy.

AllHipHop.com: Are you calorie conscious when you create your works or are you more about watching cholesterol?

Coolio: It depends on who I’m cooking for. We’re starting a catering business - it depends on what the client calls for. One thing that I refuse to substitute is flavor though. If somebody tells me, “I like really bland food” I’m like, “Oh well you need to get another chef or caterer because I refuse to make food without flavor.” Everything I cook is well-done. I don’t cook any meat rare or medium-rare over here. But one thing about my steak is, you don’t need a knife, all you need is a fork.

AllHipHop.com: It’s hard to make buttery soft steak well-done.

Coolio: Most people try to fry their steak. The only way you can do steak on top of the oven and make it get butter soft is by smothering it. Smothering takes away a lot of the flavor as well, especially if you’re not one of those people that likes some really well seasoned foods. It depends on what you like, some people don’t like garlic and onions. I can make stuff and put garlic in it, and you’ll never know - I hide it with another flavor.

AllHipHop.com: I’m sure a lot of people are going to want to tune in and see what you’ve got going on.

Coolio: I would advise people to tune in. Just go to mydamnchannel.com, it actually airs on Monday of next week. I would advise people to check it out, you’re gonna get some insight and laugh your a** off at the same time. Then I’ll give you some ways to look at some old favorites, like caprice salad. That’s pretty basic, but I’ve actually come up with another way to do it that’s not caprice salad anymore, it’s “Coolio Caprice Salad” that’s got kick. Some people like it real plain and they want to taste the flavor of the cheese, that’s what a lot of people are going for. Especially Italians, they just put a little bit of oil on it and that’s it. But I kind of flip it.

The whole premise of my style is to help people be able to go to a regular grocery store, get a two dollar steak and make it taste like a 20 dollar prime rib. That’s my thing right there.

COOKIN' with COOLIO - episode ONE: http://www.mydamnchannel.com/Cookin_with_Coolio/Cookin_with_Coolio/1CoolioCapreseSalad_530.aspx

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