Small talk is one of the worst forms of communication to ever exist. Simple questions can send you spiraling, making you wonder why we do this to ourselves, or why we even exist in the first place. Here are 10 seemingly simple questions that make us forget how to breathe.
How Are You?
How am I? Oh, Do you ACTUALLY wanna know? Cuz it looks like you’re having a good day and I don’t wanna bum you out with a friggin’ treatise on how I’m feeling profoundly “no bueno.” Also, I don’t KNOW you! How am I? I feel like the question should be, “Hey, how much do you trust me with your emotional vulnerability?” Oh! So you were looking for a one-word answer? Awesome. I’m “Awesome.” But yeah… how are YOU?
We’re Outside! You Ready to Go?
Well, considering I’m in the throes of trying to pull off some Timothee Chalamet waves with my hair but it keeps coming out like Julian Casablancas, I’d say I’m nowhere close to being ready. Here, let me shoot you a text back that says, “be out in 5” while trying to cram my poor broken body into a pair of skinny jeans that I convince myself I can still wear despite a MASSIVE hole in the crotch and a top button under so much stress it could fire off at any second and wound anyone unlucky enough to be in it’s path.
How’s Work?
Oh super cool of you to bring up a common and totally normal subject like work because you know I’m very much unemployed. Or do you? When was the last time we chatted? Oh, damn. I should call my friends more. Are we friends? Do I know you? Please like me. Fuck! I forgot to cancel my BritBox subscription. But yes, I’m currently “freelancing.”
Oh, So You Freelance?
Please stop asking me follow-up questions or I will throw up all over your sambas.
Do You Know Where *Insert Any Location Including My Own Home* Is?
Funny you should ask that because I absolutely do not know where anything is. I mean, If my phone dies, I literally won’t be able to find my way home (and yes, it IS on two percent). Also, I’m not entirely sure I know my lefts from my rights. Like, I’m PRETTY sure I know, but sometimes I’m bafflingly stupid. But will my complete lack of geographical knowledge stop me from stumbling through vague-ass directions until you say, “ya know what? I think I can figure it out on my own”? Of course not.
Would You Mind Watching My Stuff?
What? No! I mean “Yes,” I do mind! Do you know what’ll happen if you leave your stuff with me? Well, I’ll tell ya: Option 1: I get robbed immediately by a man in a gorilla suit who doesn’t WANT to be a thief but is forced to do so because his stepdad has a turtle-racing gambling addiction. Option 2? You’re hiding a bomb in that New Yorker tote. Those are the only two logical options.
Have You Seen “Dune 2” Yet?
Brother, I haven’t seen “DUNE 1.” And I’ve already made the mistake of telling you that Denis Villeneuve is my favorite director. So now I’m double-fucked. Oh? Have I read the books? Absolutely not. And while we’re at it, I might as well admit that I haven’t read any of “The Lord Of The Rings” despite trying to start them literally a gazillion times. Also, the thought of sitting through anything longer than a 10-second TikTok makes me want to spontaneously combust. And sand scares me. Like a LOT.
Wheapasc Aharsh Foo?
Yeah, I definitely couldn’t hear you over the sound of Death Grips playing in this basement with obnoxiously low ceilings and exposed pipes. And considering I’ve already asked you to repeat the question twice and still couldn’t figure it out, I think I’ll just do a little nervous laugh and go “haha, yeah.”
Are You A Swiftie?
Oh god. Don’t make me answer this. What happens if I say no? Fuck. How do I play this? Is my indecision making me seem anti-swiftie? Even if I do like her, I don’t want to be called that. Oh, and NOW you’re asking me about her private jet usage? Why are you doing this to me? We’re in the middle of a Midwestern Target! PRIME Swiftie territory! I can’t. I can’t do this right now. This is too much pressure. I don’t hate her! I don’t!
Are You Ready to Order?
Nope! But I’m pretty confident that the entire rest of my life hinges on whether I go for the steak au poivre or the duck confit. Time to panic order some chicken tenders and pretend that I like the taste of this negroni. What? You don’t have chicken tenders? FUCK.
Look, something has to be ranked last. “Bacchanal ‘N’ Philadelphia” is a great album, as it’s really just a bunch of snippets of early recordings and split singles given a nice fluffing up and repackaging. It’s mellow, it’s melodic, and it reminds us that even our mistakes can be beautiful. Well, maybe not beautiful. But they can still be fun, if occasionally requiring tetanus shots sometimes.
This is Mischief Brew’s first album and, you know what, it really embodies that quality. It’s not bad by any stretch – in fact for a first album it exemplifies much more of a developed identity than many bands go their entire career without figuring out. Whether that means that Mischief Brew were bound for greatness or that most punk bands straight up just suck boring eggs is for you to decide. “Smash the Windows” is a smash, but there’s better mischief on the horizon.
Mischief Brew sure do love their splits – and we’re not just talking about the groin-bursting high kicks that lead songwriter Erik Peterson would frequently break into during practice to, as he claimed, “protect the band enemies above.” No, here we’re talking about split albums, and this split with Joe Jack Talcum of the Dead Milkmen showcases two of Philadelphia’s greatest punk songwriters at their finest. Listening to Talcum and Peterson’s songs side by side show the obvious influence between the two artists, and the Mischief Brew cover of “Watching Scotty Die” is a perfect melding of the energy from both. Just remember though, no matter how amped up this record may get you, take it easy on the high kicks – you’ll give yourself a hernia, kid.
In 1494, Hieronymus Bosch completed his now famed painting “Cutting the Stone,” depicting a medieval surgeon extracting the stone of madness from the head of a fool via primitive trepanation. In 2011, Mischief Brew released “The Stone Operation,” which posited the philosophy “why don’t we just cram that motherfucking stone right back up in there?” The album showcases Peterson’s “hobo poet” persona to its furthest extent, and it delves as equally into straight forward three-chord punk rock as it does into traditional Romani caravan concertos. Basically, “The Stone Operation” deals those unaccustomed to distorted folk songs a real kick in the stones.
Odds are that if you’re a fairweather Mischief Brew fan, or have just spent any amount of time in an anarchist coffee shop in the past fifteen years, then this is the album you will be most familiar with. “Songs From Under the Sink” includes classics like “Thanks, Bastards!” and “Coffee, God, and Cigarettes” which provide as ideal a soundtrack for a unionized picket line you dare not cross as it does for bothering the heavily tattooed barista who just wishes you would take your fucking cortado and walk away from the counter.
To say that Mischief Brew’s style aged like a fine wine is cliche as all fuck and insulting to who they were as both a band and likely group of alcoholics. But to say they aged like a fine jugged juice forgotten in the back of an eastbound headed boxcar until a runaway train punk named Scooter Rust found it on his way to the Philadelphia railyard, now that makes sense. Mischief Brew’s penultimate album makes full use of their full band lineup without losing any of the intimacy of Peterson’s singer-songwriter origins. Songs detail scenes of love, squalor, love for squalor, and, without filter, depict blue collar day to day life in a way that feels lived and genuine, and not like some punk rock ethos cash in effort. Though it may not be the album that first comes to mind when most people think of Mischief Brew, it is undoubtedly the band at their most creatively ambitious.
1991 was an incredible year for Kiedis. With “Blood Sugar Sex Magic” topping the charts and his role in “Point Break” garnering praise, it seemed like there was no medium in which he couldn’t fail upward. Then came brain surgery. Kiedis opened up about his short-lived medical career in his autobiography “Scar Tissue.”
After the Blondie singer worked on David Cronenberg’s body horror masterpiece “Videodrome” she started telling friends “Now I want to do something body helpful, like brain surgery.” The results were infamously a disaster. At the time she was sensitive and highly defensive about her botched brain surgeries, but she was able to joke about it in a recent interview:
Ludacris turned to brain surgery as part of a method-acting exercise. Though his portrayal of Tej Parker in “2 Fast 2 Furious” was generally well received, Ludacris wanted to bring his performance to the next level:
“Transitioning from The Police to a solo career was easy because it only meant I could do band meetings on Thursday nights when Stewart Copeland normally has his bowling league. Then going to acting was easy because acting is just singing without singing, ini’t? I thought to myself ‘Well, brain surgery, you don’t even have to act to do that!’ Even now saying it out loud it sounds perfectly logical, but for reasons I still can’t explain it’s just not in the cards love.”
It’s not Joe’s fault really. Jim Jarmusch loves working with musicians with little to no acting experience, and in order to get the best possible performance out of them, he works hard to bolster their confidence on camera. A little too hard. Between every take on “Mystery Train,” Jarmusch would grab Joe Strummer by the face and say “Look at me. You are the smartest man in the world. Every brain surgeon on earth is dog shit compared to you. I don’t even know why you’re in my movie, it’s beneath you, you should be out doing all of the brain surgeries.”
If you thought this founding member of The New York Dolls was scary as the ghost cab driver from “Scrooged,” you’ve never had a loved one on his operating table with their brain exposed. That’s real fear.
Flea can play the hell out of a bass, and can even flush out a scene or two in “The Big Lebowski,” but when it comes to practicing medicine, he doesn’t know his blood sugar from his sex magic.
“Mr. Waits showed up to our hospital with one of those plague-era bird masks and a rusty bone saw asking if we had any brains that needed a tune-up. It’s not standard procedure to let an amateur attempt complicated brain surgeries with antiquated equipment, but he had just crushed it in “Mystery Men” and we wanted to see if he was a triple threat. He did so badly, we actually wound up banning the entire cast of “Mystery Men” from practicing medicine at our hospital for 5 years. Eddie Izzard was understandably furious, but as doctors, we have a duty of care.”
“For a while, I was chasing an EGOC, you know, when you win an Emmy, a Golden Globe, an Oscar, and a Cushing Medal for achievements in neuroscience? I show up to this hospital and I says ‘Let me take a crack at it.’ They gave me some push-back, but when I told them David Chase originally wanted me to play Tony Soprano they let me go ahead. I did okay. Messy though. Plus everyone I touched that day died. Anyway, come to find out it’s not EGOC, it’s EGOT, the T standing for Tony Soprano. So there goes that dream.”
It’s hard to believe that someone fresh off the heels of “Austin Powers: Goldmember” felt confident enough to attempt surgery on the human brain with no prior experience or training but that’s what happened. There’s a reason you don’t see the other members of Destiny’s Child anymore.
At the height of his film career Elvis occupied a tier of celebrity that simply doesn’t exist anymore. That and the fact that he was constantly surrounded by his Memphis Mafia yes men, it was only a matter of time before the King’s hubris brought him to the operating table. Elvis completely butchered every brain he laid a scalpel on, but his cronies would always convince him that his patients not only lived but were fully cured of their neurological ailments and actually stronger than they were before.
If she could turn back time, we like to think Cher would undo all of the harm caused by her short-lived medical practice. The only patient to have their brain operated on by Cher and live was “Moonstruck” co-star Nicolas Cage, and there were clearly a few leftover parts when she put him back together.
“Sure I tried my hand at the cranial arts. Got some resistance from some of the ‘real’ docs. One of em had the nerve to ask if I actually knew how to do brain surgery. I shoot back ‘I don’t gotta know, my character does Jack.’ That got him bout as shook as a rattlesnake in a mongoose factory, he steered clear of me after that. By the time I was done with that brain, it looked like hammered shit and smelled twice as bad. I lost the patient, but I’ll tell you the same thing I told that yellow-bellied no good sonofabitch review board: If I hadn’ta done what I done, he woulda turned vamp!”
At the height of his fame it was hard to say “no” to ol’ blue eyes, be you a beautiful woman, a movie producer, or even the chief of surgery at a hospital. An associate close to Sinatra recently opened up about the crooner’s first and only attempt at the craft of brain surgery:
“Think about it, if me, the guy who wrote ‘Cop Killer,’ can go on to play a cop on TV, I can do anything. The trick is to write a song condemning the thing you want to do. I reassembled Body Count, and we got to work on this dope-ass track called ‘Neurosurgeons Should All Rot in Hell.’ I played it for the chief of surgery at St. Christopher’s and he’s all ‘Well, that’s one dope ass track, let’s see what you got with a scalpel.’ I don’t know why it works, it just does! Anyway, lot of people died, but that’s the game, you know what I’m sayin’?”
Will Smith found so much success in acting that people tend to forget he was a rap artist first, and at the dawn of the Willenium, he briefly caught the neurosurgery bug. The infatuation was short-lived:
The artist formerly known as Marky Mark has come a long way. After becoming Hollywood’s top leading man, the former hip-hop star felt like he could do anything, but a funky bunch of attempted brain surgeries left him eating humble pie.
While never quite reaching the status of leading man, the former Black Flag singer has turned in a lot of competent supporting performances in a lot of films. Slowly but surely, his success as a working actor bolstered him into believing he might be meant for a higher calling. You guessed it, brain surgery. The hardcore punk icon got candid about his foray into neurosurgery on his most recent spoken word tour:
Bowie was a master of self-reinvention, so it’s no surprise he gravitated towards acting. From his celebrated run as The Elephant Man to “The Man Who Fell to Earth” to his lighthearted cameo in “Zoolander,” Bowie proved he had just as much range as an actor as he did as a musician. Then, after portraying Nicola Tesla in “The Prestige,” Bowie began taking an interest in science.
Iggy Pop has dabbled with acting since the mid-’80s, and has gone on to work with auteur directors such as John Waters and Jim Jarmusch. After his noteworthy performance in “Dead Man,” the veteran punk rocker decided brain surgery was the next logical step. From the get-go, his methods were extremely unorthodox.
