Adam Baran

My friend Jan Wandrag knew that I am somewhat obsessed with this MTV show “Life of Ryan” about a Ryan Scheckler, a twink skateboard player and what a tough tough life he has as a top player and moneymaker in the industry. Boo Hoo Twinky!! Jan made me a Richard Prince-esque collage of Ryan which I am loving. I am by no means a chicken hawk, but I could definitely change my tune for this one.

Click the Thumbnail for the full portrait.

I mean seriously, can you not just picture this kid being that kid in high school who every single person, from girls to boys to teachers to parents wants to bang in some weird metaphysical way??? He’s like the Laura Palmer of the Los Angeles Skateboarding community.

For more on Jan: www.janwandrag.com

This is a post coming about a week too late but…

Now that Leona Helmsley is dead, can someone please, please, please cover Nina Simone’s Martin Luther King Jr. tribute song, ” Why? (The King of Love is Dead),” in honor of Leona Helmsley in the same way that Elton redid his Marilyn Monroe song “Candle in the Wind,” for Princess Diana.

The title? Obviously, “Why? (The Queen of Mean is Dead.)”

Compare Nina:

to Leona:

to Suzanne Pleshette in the 1990 Leona Made-For-TV movie “The Queen of Mean”

In the hopes someone will take up my challenge, here are the lyrics to Nina’s song.

What’s gonna happen now? In all of our cities?
My people are rising; they’re living in lies.
Even if they have to die
Even if they have to die at the moment they know what life is
Even at that one moment that ya know what life is
If you have to die, it’s all right
Cause you know what life is
You know what freedom is for one moment of your life

But he had seen the mountaintop
And he knew he could not stop
Always living with the threat of death ahead
Folks you’d better stop and think
Everybody knows we’re on the brink
What will happen, now that the King is dead?

We can all shed tears; it won’t change a thing
Teach your people: Will they ever learn?
Must you always kill with burn and burn with guns
And kill with guns and burn - don’t you know how we gotta react?

But he had seen the mountaintop
And he knew he could not stop
Always living with the threat of death ahead
Folks you’d better stop and think
Everybody knows we’re on the brink
What will happen, now that the King of love is dead?

Buy Nina Simone albums HERE.

So apparently whilst I was sleeping the other night, there was a tornado in my area. Apparently my friends were woken up at 6AM to deafining thunder and lightning, and flooding the likes of which they’d never seen.

I wouldn’t know. I was sleeping comfortably in the arms of my long term lover, Ambien.

Anyway, so when I woke up - and I know this is old hat to most of you New York readers, I had no idea this had happened. There was no evidence of it on the street - they looked dry as a bone to me. I went to the subway, it was closed. Hmmm. I wonder why? I went to another subway station. Ditto. I took the F halfway across town and walked the rest of the way. It was steaming hot, and really a horrible experience. I mean, not as horrible as the Holocaust obviously, but…

Anyway, and yes, this has probably been extensively blogged, by New York magazine’s blog and elsewhere, the following day the New York post ran the funniest cover, that brightened and continues to brighten my day.

It’s got a shot of the tornado damage, with a picture of Judy Garland as Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, saying “This Ain’t Kansas!” There’s something so ludicrous and retarded about the New York Post, which obviously is the dregs of legitimate newspaper reporting, using this as their cover, and obviously that’s a recipe to win my undying love.

The New York Magazine blog was saying that Dorothy wouldn’t say “Ain’t,” that she would say, “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.” But if Dorothy was in New York she would totally say “Ain’t.”  So screw that.  It’s funny.

So tomorrow the date will be 7-7-7, also known as the luckiest day in the universe.  That is, if you find 7’s to be a lucky number, which I don’t.  When I was a kid, my lucky number was 8.  My mom once gave me a Pick Six lotto and let me fill out the numbers.  I picked 8, 18, 28, 48, 38, and probably 2 (I can’t remember totally).  Anyway the next morning I was so excited when I woke up and my mom told me that we had won!  I was really excited, thrilled for like 5 minutes until she followed up by explaining to me that we had only gotten 4 numbers right, but that we still qualified for some prize money.  I was still really convinced it would be a lot of cash, but it only turned out to be 50 bucks. Bummer.

Still, I trotted into 2nd grade and told everyone how I was going to buy a Nintendo with the money, until this little bitch Alison told me gleefully that the video game system cost $100 dollars.  I was crushed.  Luckily, Santa showed up with the Nintendo that Christmas, and I used the money to buy video games.  All’s well that ends well. 

So in honor of 7-7-7 and all things lucky here are two clips for the same song:

Lene Lovitch’s immortal new wave classic “Lucky Numbers.” 

I post both clips (one a performance, and the other the official video) because I think both are genius and the song is so good you’ll want to listen a second time.

And here’s a great recent interview with Lene for some background. I remember wanting to see her when she played Joe’s Pub a few years ago, but now I know that if she ever comes back, I’m getting a ticket.

From the NY Post:

PEACOCK KILLER IS CUCKOO: MOM
By SAMUEL GOLDSMITH, JAMIE SCHRAM and ANDY GELLER

July 3, 2007 — A Staten Island sicko who landed in the cuckoo’s nest after bashing a peacock to death is so mentally ill, his mother says, that she is relieved his victim was “a bird and not a baby.”

“He loves animals, but he’s not in his right mind,” Norma Brittain told The Post yesterday. “What if it was a child and not an animal?”

Her son, John Potts, 32, confessed to attacking the bird in the parking lot of a Burger King last Thursday, law-enforcement sources said.

“I don’t see what the big f- - -ing deal is about this bird,” sources quoted Potts as telling police. “It had negative energy. It came out of the darkness, so I kicked it.”

Potts, who lives in the woods near the Tottenville home of his mother and stepdad, Chris, was shipped off to Bellevue Hospital’s psychiatric ward for testing yesterday, following his arrest Sunday night.

His mom said her son was a schizophrenic who was treated at Staten Island’s South Beach Psychiatric Center, but went off his medication a month ago.

“This is the third incident in which he has lost control of his thinking in the last couple of years,” she said. “I just hope he gets the help he needs. He’s a danger to everyone when he’s off his medication.

“They need to force him to stay on his medication,” the worried mom added. “I love him, but he can’t be here when he’s off his medication. He thinks the CIA is after him. He’s delusional, but he’s a gentle person.”

Brittain said her son “doesn’t deserve to go to prison. He needs to be hospitalized. I dread the idea of him getting out.”

Cops said Potts showed up at his mom’s home Sunday, got into an argument with his stepdad and grabbed a shovel. “I’m going to cut your throat and smash your face,” he told his stepdad.

When his stepfather went to call 911, Potts - still carrying the shovel - ran to the nearby Raritan Bay and jumped in.

Cops coaxed him out and charged him with threatening his stepdad and killing the peacock.

Police and witnesses said Potts beat and kicked the peacock, named Chocolate, twirled it over his head by its neck and repeatedly smashed it on the ground.

“He yelled, ‘I’m killing a vampire,’ ” said Felicia Finnegan, 19, a Burger King employee who witnessed the attack.

“It was shocking. It was sick and horrible. I was very scared,” she said. “I don’t think he should be on the streets the way he is.”

Chocolate became the pet of 6-year-old Danielle Francheschi when he wandered into the family’s yard 2½ weeks ago.

George Burke, who owns a nearby estate that has horses and peacocks, said he believes the bird is one of five baby peacocks he gave to a friend.

Burke said Potts had done odd jobs for him, including painting the fence.

jamie.schram@nypost.com

Which is weirder to you - the story of this nutbag peacock killer or the story of a family who named their pet peacock Chocolate?  That’s not a good name for a peacock!

So my friend Jeremy linked me to this article this morning that I find extremely bizarre and somewhat hilarious. The pictures are my little add-on btw.

From the AP

Man beats stray peacock he mistook for vampire

July 2, 2007
NEW YORK — A peacock that roamed into the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant was attacked by a man who vilified it as a vampire, animal-control authorities said.

Beaten so fiercely that most of its tail feathers fell out, the bird was euthanized, said Richard Gentles of the city’s Center for Animal Care and Control. ”It’s just unbelievable,” Gentles said.

The peacock, a male several years old, wandered into the lot in Staten Island and perched on a car hood Thursday. Employees were feeding it when the man appeared.

The man seized the bird by the neck, hurled it to the ground and started kicking and stomping it. ”He was going crazy,” said worker Felicia Finnegan, 19.

Asked what he was doing, she said, the attacker explained, ” ‘I’m killing a vampire!’ ”

Police were looking for the attacker. It was unclear how the bird got to the lot.

end article

Ironically it was this the man who police later found out killed the peacock:

JK, yall! So I guess I’m trying to figure this whole thing out. I mean, the first and clearest explanation is that the attacker was a total schizophrenic nut job, or that he was high as a kite on speed or ‘roids (a’la Chris Benoit). That seems to make the most sense. The presence of our right brain or left brain, (whichever is the one that stops us when we get the sudden impulse to do crazy stuff like say “Hi Fatty” to a small child or smoosh pudding into the face of a stranger on the subway - is it just me?), keeps most people from killing peacocks and mistaking them for vampires. Obviously most of us know that vampires don’t exist, and that peacocks do exist, and are peacocks, not vampires. Okay the picture below does kinda make it look like the peacock is a vampire:

But okay, if he really thought the peacock was a vampire, and this happened during the day - then he’s really lying, because everyone knows that if a vampire was exposed to the sun it would instantly vaporize in a pile of dust. I could see if it happened at night, but still even if it did happen at night, the fact that he killed it with his bare hands shows that he knew it wasn’t a vampire, because you can only kill vampires with sun or a stake to the heart.

Another theory is that maybe, when the man said the peacock was a “vampire,” he meant it metaphorically. Maybe in the same way that people, (okay, me) call certain people witches or succubuses, this man felt that peacocks were beings who steal the lifeforce of another being. For instance, I know that the creepy old guys who cruise me at Pheonix are not literally “trolls,” but the metaphor is apt, because trolls want to steal my life-force (aka you know what) and are old, craggly, and not attractive. By the way, everything I know about trolls I learned from Ernest Scared Stupid.

Maybe the man and the peacock had a past. Maybe the peacock lived near the man and would come over to his house everyday and eat out of the man’s well-tendered garden, that he’d spent blood, sweat and tears to create. Maybe the man had a bumper crop that was swiftly eaten by the peacock and the man was so distraught and angry that he rode around looking for the peacock and when he found it, the word that best described it was “Vampire.” Happy Fourth of July! Isn’t America Great!

At this point it’s anybody’s guess what the hell happened, and my guess is, we’ll have to wait and see how this story plays out in la media, if you know what I mean. But I’ll be here to update you every step of the way. In the meantime, what’s your thoughts on the matter? Please send additional theories to mail@adambaran.net and I’ll post the best ones.