Story #5 "Feed me" - Tricky

"Feed me when I'm hungry, drink me 'til I'm dry. The dream of yesterday becomes another lie."

Trip hop had this moment in the 90's that started in Bristol and made its way across the pond and gave birth to such stars as Portishead, Morcheeba, Zero 7, Massive Attack and the star to break out of that group, Tricky. Note, I'm not writing a history of trip hop here, I'm just finding a few standouts. There were many others including Supreme Beings of Leisure from here in L.A. and Superagua down in Brazil who are still one of my favorites. There are plenty of others.

Here's the thing about Tricky. Besides being hilarious in The Fifth Element, he's fantastic in general as an artist. The guy's music had an impact in culture, especially British culture. Tricky is like David Bowie to me in that respect. Those artists are rare. Plus anyone who helped Martina Topley Bird is a mensch but his first couple albums were an important soundtrack in my life as a youngish pup growing up in Pittsburgh.

"Feed Me" is one of those songs where the syncopated drums and loops and echoes threaten to overtake you in the best way possible.

I can tell you exactly where I was when I started writing the story that would become "Feed Me." I was in an ad agency in New York City, around 2006 or 2007, close to Radio City Music Hall. The people I was working with had no idea at that moment, but I planned to resign a week or two later to move and work Montreal as I had received an offer and was just waiting on the work visa. But at the time I was working on a project as usual and sitting in a room sharing a power adapter. When the people found out that night they took me out for a night on the town as if I were a sailor about to ship out.

A drink got invented that night which was Blueberry Stoly and a twist of lime. We gave it a French name (of course) L'imperatif, which is the same thing in English as an imperative, or an obligation as in "you are obligated to drink this drink until you walk home slanted from Murray Hill to the Soho Grand Hotel sideways. The best thing for drunkenness is fresh air. By the way, it tastes horrible like a rancid Flintstones vitamin.

Anyway-- I was taking a break from writing TV scripts when someone forwarded me a link to a website that took stock of the last meals people ate before they were executed. Most of those meals were comfort foods: friend chicken, fast food, Taco Bell, pizza, what have you. The thing about the meals is they were quite large. Almost as if the condemned were getting their fill of the best the world had to offer, while at the same time, holding out the hope that they might get a stay of execution while they were eating. It was morbidly fascinating.

I was so inspired by the website, a "what if," spark appeared and that spark was "What if a Michelin Chef was on death row, and asked another chef to prepare him his last meal?" I particularly loved the idea of a chef butchering people because they did not like his work. It doesn't take a psychiatrist to realize this was a nice way of my projecting what I thought of the bosses who weren't fans of my TV scripts which is one more reason why I left to work in Montreal.

Their loss, my gain.

I wrote three pages that evening and then we knocked off work and I got sent off with style and then life happened and the story collected dust until just a few years ago when I picked it up and finished the rest in one weekend. I think that time where it lay fallow was necessary as I was able to add a bunch of life experience that might not have been there otherwise.

AA-Sides and B-Sides is available on iBook as well as Amazon and also Kobo and Nook. You can preview a nice chunk of it, too. Hope you'll consider buying if you like what you see. Here's what the cover looks like.

While I'm on a tangent:

Since the show "Good Eats" started I've been a fan of Alton Brown. Despite my last name, I am not related to him.* But I feel a certain affinity for him because he is one of those people who has managed to bubble up to the mainstream without compromising his personality. Note that this is not the same as having to make artistic compromises; there will always be compromises, but Alton seems genuine when it comes to how he approaches his craft.

When I lived in Atlanta, I had a dentist named Donald Brown who worked in Buckhead. He was a fantastic dentist. When we first met and he heard my last name, he quipped "Wow, our ancestors must have been real busy." I don't know if it's still the case, probably not, but at one point Brown was the sixth most common last name in America.

I've had a lot of nicknames. And I've hated almost all of them. I was called Bad Leroy Brown, and Downtown Brown which were annoying, as if people chose whatever first came to their mind. I find the people who know me the least tend to shorten my first name to "Ev." I mean, it's two syllables. It really doesn't need to be shortened. But you know, people do what they do.

But it's a funny thing, when you meet someone with your last name, you always feel like you should be related in some way even if you know this is unrealistic, especially when it's such a common name.

I have to give credit to one person assigned me a nickname I accepted, and that was Encyclopedia Brown. I loved those books growing up. And Nicole Rieder who benighted me that nickname is a great person and a fantastic artist. I still have her painting to this day.