Warning: Files below contain offensive and adult humor.   

Ode to Will

Ode to Sischo

Ode to Noah

Ode to Chadwick

Ode to Tommy

Ode to Adam

Ode to Cline

Ode to Jake

Here’s a Christmas gem for you–Tom Waits’ adaptation of a Charles Bukowski piece. If this doesn’t make you noggy, I don’t know what will. Cheers to you!

The nadir of journalism, a depth that has been pursued since man first picked up a Bic, has finally been achieved.  TMZ’s story, which was published today, characterized troubled actress Lindsey Lohan and the recently deceased rapper, Heavy D, as “Morgue Buddies.”  The paragraphs of copy under the unbelievable headline continued to make light of Heavy D’s untimely death and his subsequent entry into the morgue where Lohan is performing her community service.

Reaching the lowest of the low has been attempted by countless hacks and organizations over the years, but TMZ has positioned itself to be the epitome of slime journalism since first coming onto the scene in 2005. With this one headline and story, they have finally achieved the polar opposite of greatness.

After the momentous occasion, the TMZ offices went wild with jubilation. Runt tyrant/publisher Harvey Levin did a cartwheel. The wannabe hipster, longhaired Nancyboy said, “Cool.”  The graphic t-shirt wearing buffoon with excessive hair gel fainted.  Frick and Frack that stand in back, made out.  All of the other bottom-feeding, nobody, turds threw stacks of paper in the air and hugged in triumph. As a show of solidarity, the hordes of scum videographers that stalk L.A. and any other places where a celebrity may appear, put down their cameras and celebrated with a moment of silence.

That moment of silence was stunning and beautiful.

Once it was over, the cameras whirred back to life and the embarrassing, cruel, irresponsible, and hateful quest for attention continued.

In honor of Halloween (and since I paid WordPress $20 to use audio files), I’m posting “The Curse of the No-See-Um” as a podcast.  Forgive the poor production quality. It was done in one noteless take, speaking into the hidden microphone on my computer. If you want to hear a topnotch podcast, seek out Marc Maron’s WTF. It is primo entertainment. (Click below for audio file.)

 The Curse of the No-See-Um

I saw this a few nights ago on Tosh.0 and it’s definitely worth sharing for anyone who missed it. Nice work from the guys at the UCB Midnight Show.  (R rated).

My dear friend Eric Nelson snapped this picture of me in September of 2000.  It was my first day in NYC and I spent a lot of time gawking up at buildings and taking predictable pictures.  We were part of a small documentary film crew and that day we shot inside the World Trade Center Complex, mostly footage of hordes of commuters unloading from the PATH trains below, and up in the Top of the World observation area in the South Tower.  It was an incredible location and everyone was accommodating and gracious.  The views were unforgettable.  I ended up living in New Jersey for a while and there were several drunken evenings when I relied on those looming towers on the horizon to lead me back to my homebound train.  I made it every time and I am still thankful.  Cheers.

While eating recently with my son, I activated Pandora from my phone to give us some dinner music. I usually force a Steely Dan or Dixieland station on him, but that night I opted for kid’s music for some variety.  After a few harmless selections, it came on. I paused in mid-bite as female Chipmunks started singing a cover of Beyonce’s, “Single Ladies.”  For the record, I’ve never liked Alvin or any of his Chipmunk cohorts, even as a kid.  They are annoying and to call them entertaining or funny cheapens every other form of media that is entertaining or funny. And now girl Chipmunks–the Chipettes–were singing a Beyonce song.  A song about moving on after a breakup and dancing up on a dude in a club, from the perspective of a woman taunting her ex with her current slutty availability. Her basic sentiment to her ex was this: if you enjoyed having sex with me and my feminine plumbing so darned much, then you should have proposed marriage.  Now that some other random guy wants to enjoy me and my plumbing, you can’t be resentful.

Cuz if you liked it then you should have put a ring on it
If you liked it then you shoulda put a ring on it
Don’t be mad once you see that he want it
If you liked it then you shoulda put a ring on it

Turns out it’s a part of a Chipmunks movie and there’s even a video. What creative team thought this was a cute idea? Supposedly, having the vocals come out of the computer-generated mouths of skanky, dancing rodents makes it fun and silly.  I can’t imagine how much David Cross and Jason Lee were paid to be in these movies.

For as long as I can remember, my older brother and I have always maintained a different relationship with farts. Farts were not dirty secrets to us—they were hilarious and needed to be shared and enjoyed by everyone.  They were gifts from within and were often a crude yet effective means of communication. When you sleep on twin beds in the same room, a verbal “good morning” is not necessary; your butts have already done the talking. Our farts were greetings.

Over 20 years ago I created a “Fart Tape” for David when he was leaving home for college. It was the best going-away present I could offer as an immature freshman in high school.

I researched foods that would make me gassy, and expelled dozens and dozens of farts into the microphone of my boom box during a lively three days of recording. (I would thank a high school friend here but he may wish to distance himself from such hijinks now that we’re adults.)

The finished tape became legendary. My high school soccer team listened to it before our games for inspiration; my brother and his friends played it as background music during drinking games in their dorm rooms. Inexplicably, someone stole it from him one night and we never heard the Fart Tape again. I like to imagine that it was adopted by a special type of person who enjoyed it all these years and maybe even passed it down to his twisted little children.

Though disgusting and taboo, farts are a secret amusement for most guys. That is why I decided to recreate the tape for David’s birthday this year. As a grown man with a wife and young son, farting into a computer feels undeniably crass.  Alas, a man must sometimes sacrifice his very dignity in deference to artistic expression. The final product contains 23 selections with names like, “Chainsaw Massacre,” “Rev the Motorcycle,” and “Saturday Morning Workshop.”

Below are a few tracks for your listening pleasure. All selections are authentically ass-produced. You, Lunaphyte visitor, now have a chance to enjoy the CD for yourself should you need a novelty gift for a birthday or over the holidays. The CD costs $7.99 plus $2 for shipping and handling. Email lunaphytemerch@yahoo.com to place an order. (PayPal coming soon!) $1 of every order will go to environmental charities.

Click here for samples:

Chainsaw Massacre

Rev the Motorcycle

Deterioration in C Minor

Last month, on June 20^th, we lost Ryan Dunn in a fatal car accident.

Ryan Dunn was a recognizable member of the Jackass crew, the twisted bunch of guys made famous on MTV and the follow-up hit movies for their daredevil stunts, gross-out potty humor and ridiculous pranks. I never knew Ryan, but I’ve known guys like him and have maybe even followed some of the same questionable paths that he did during wild and disordered parts of my own life.  Do you need to know someone to offer a eulogy? I don’t think so. Besides, I feel like I did know him, or at least part of him.

Ryan represented the crazy kid in all of us, the kid who refuses to grow up and shave his face every day.  The kid who chooses not to jump off his skateboard and into the company car, who refuses to cover his tattoos with dress shirts, who stays late at the bar instead of heading home to brush his teeth and set his alarm clock. Ryan was that kid we couldn’t be, the kid who never sold out to adulthood, and now that kid is gone.

Sure, there are other kids left on the playground, other Jackass guys who can keep the fun going. But it will never be the same now that they’ve lost a member of the club. Now there is a scar, an absence, a gaping hole that’s left when a tight group of buddies loses one of its own. Where once there was only silliness, now there’s the serious, sober, gut-punch of reality, there’s danger and mortality laced into the mix. The survivors have to look at the stakes differently.

Over the years I’ve seen many of those Jackass episodes and parts of the movies. Trying to recollect certain stunts that featured Ryan are tricky—in my mind, those shows offer a parade of indistinct, blurry images  with faceless guys wiping out on their skateboards, rolling port-a-potties, bullfighting, diving into excrement, and ritualistically vandalizing their own bodies, all to hilarious effect. Somehow. But Dunn always stood out to me as a normal guy surrounded by loons and wild men. Of someone thoughtful and sincere behind the zany act. Like, I don’t know—someone nice.

Yet, let’s chew on the bitter truth for a moment. Ryan survived a wild youth and made it to a place where he should’ve known better. He was 34 years old. Out closing the bar on a Tuesday night. According to eyewitnesses and bar receipts, it is estimated that he had 11 drinks prior to getting in his car.  His blood alcohol content was  0.19, twice the legal limit for Pennsylvania, drunk no matter where you live.  Less than a mile from the bar, Ryan’s Porsche skidded out of control and launched from the road into a bank of trees. Police have estimated that the car was going upwards of 130 mph at the time of the crash. Upon impact, the vehicle caught fire and Ryan and his passenger, friend Zachary Hartwell, died there in the engulfed vehicle.

A few days after his death, costar and best friend Bam Margera provided some haunting background information.  He admitted that Ryan Dunn was considered the front runner in a “death pool” that the gang had created to place probability on who would die first. He also had an eerie on-air premonition where he mentioned that Dunn would die in a car accident. Coincidentally, Ryan had been involved in a car accident with Bam Margera at the very same spot in 1996, where he flipped a car 8 times. But everyone survived.

Maniac driver–high blood alcohol content—late night on a curvy road. Replay those variables enough times and bad news is sure to happen sooner or later. These variables and calculations are gauged by drunk drivers every night. Am I OK to drive? I think I’m OK. I know this road. Many of us have done it, and we’ve all been lucky.  There is unanimous consternation that someone with apparent compassion and intelligence could make such a foolish lapse in judgment. But no matter the intelligence level, alcohol muddies what we consider right and wrong and how we calculate risk.

Alas, Ryan Dunn is gone and we’re left to ponder the loss. The Jackass crew gets to mourn in public and face the self-righteous critic in all of us.  And ultimately, the kid inside of us grows up a little more and turns affectionately to the relative safety that he is still learning to embrace.

Let’s face it: your growing kid is the attraction now. You, the adult, have become boring. You may have gained five pounds or grown a moustache, but the stages of your development are largely invisible.  You hardly ever change. And the lame stories you tell about work and other mundane specifics of your life are so dull that you can hardly bear their meaninglessness even as you’re telling them. You hold no entertainment value whatsoever.  You’re not the star, anymore; you’re simply the driver on the film crew, a conveyance. You know who people are spending money to see.

Truly, a lot can happen between visits, especially with a young child. At Thanksgiving he’s crawling, and by Memorial Day he is running around like a wild animal. He’s growing with tremendous fluctuations in height and weight, looks, vocabulary, hair length and color, demeanor, sleeping habits—it’s like a new child with each visit.

Your family is different now, too. The people that you love and have known you for your entire life, the ones that celebrated your achievements and sheltered you through untold personal storms, are now spoiling your kid and must be stopped.  Yes, they spoiled you the same way but it’s less acceptable with your own child.

There were frequent times during the visit when my mom, grandmother, and aunt all gathered tightly around our son. Imagine a small football huddle with a confused kid in the middle of it.  They are not menacing people, but boy can they hover. Foster’s spoiling came in the form of mass feedings. They would descend on him, stuffing him full of fruit and candy like chefs fattening up a prized goose for a fois gras cook-off.

It was hard to watch. My wife and I would take turns protecting him and shielding his mouth from more food, swatting away grapes and berries like elite shot-blockers. It got the best of his digestive system and eventually fruit was going through him like was a walking juicer.

By the end of the visit, the ladies in my family began to listen to our pleas for moderation. They trusted our direction and honored our authority as the parents of the young superstar. As they each began to bond with him, they learned that there were other ways to earn his affection other than through gorgings.  He likes to sword fight with sticks, stomp in puddles, and can spend hours at a time throwing rocks.  Hand him his blue blankie and he will become serene and suck his thumb and melt in your lap. He is sweet and thoughtful. Listen closely, because his wit is quick. To watch loved ones bond with your child on his level is a precious thing to witness, and is an act that changes everyone for the better.