Elisabeth Donnelly

I’m Adam and I’m Adamant About Living Large

Adam Yauch’s death is a massive bummer. Partially because it was cancer, something that has been wreaking havoc on my life, month after month; and just hearing about his cancer diagnosis, it didn’t sound dire, it really didn’t. (My guess is that it was too close to the lymph nodes? But what do I know.) Cancer sucks. It’s not an automatic death sentence, but it definitely is a reminder of the absolute game of chance that rules everybody’s life. Cancer can strike, kill, or be dealt with and how your body responds to it… it’s just a roll of the dice. Which is really hard.

There’s a tendency to talk about disease like “oh, they did X and Y. This is how they sinned, they deserved it.” You talk about it that way because it’s comforting, because then you won’t get a disease. It’s a spell to protect you for the future, but when it comes to cancer, nothing rational applies. All the kale in the world may help, or it may not.

I think you could argue that the Beastie Boys was the undeniable band of my generation, and to know that they won’t be Beastie Grumpy Old Men hits me in the heart. MCA always seemed like the older brother, reminding me of my cousins who had the wisdom and slightly scary affect of age, who were undeniably men with scruff, men who had sex.

I spent three weeks in Stockholm as a teenager, and I made my parents tote a copy of Hello Nasty abroad with them when they met up with me in the last week. I used Yauch’s Buddhism as a lure - “Mom, he’s Buddhist like you and he raps about it! Don’t you want me to be listening to this music?” I had to hang out with an Swedish semi-relative of mine, and we got through that mutual teenage awkwardness when he taped a Beastie Boys interview for me, and we watched it together. The Beastie Boys all made fun of the Swedish interviewer. I laughed a little bit harder than Marcus.

When I interviewed Zoe Kazan for The Exploding Girl, I got to go to the Oscilloscope offices. It was thrilling. I saw some Beasties prizes, Moon Men and Grammys, I thought about when the Beasties used their gigantic platform to talk about respecting women and how exciting that recognition was. I saw an older, still super-cute Adam Horowitz, and he looked like my dude and I was like, sweet. (Ironically, Adam Horowitz and Kathleen Hanna got married for health insurance, which is a situation I understand.) Apparently my VHS of the best of the Beastie Boys videos imprinted on me at a young age.

But I got to talk to The Exploding Girl’s director, Bradley Rust Grey, in Adam Yauch’s office. There were mandalas on the walls. Tokens of the fact that he was a serious Buddhist. The energy in the room was a good place. I felt safe. It reminded me of my mom’s math classroom in high school, where she had put quotes by Rumi and about mindfulness on the walls.

The Beastie Boys defined cool for me when I was a teenager. When they liked something, it was probably worthy. I listened to Ben Lee because of them, and I liked it. They were good tastemakers, and I think part of the reason I veered towards cultural journalism was because I wanted to share that same thrill of discovery of something new, some great way of looking at the world through art or film or whatever.



What Adam Yauch did with Oscilloscope wasn’t unexpected, considering what good taste the Beasties had. But he started a film company around 2008 - when jumping into the fray was pitting yourself as Joan of Arc against the armies - and did a good job of buying up great documentaries and challenging films (The Messenger is wonderful, Oren Moverman is a genius) and some of them even got Oscar nominations. Contextually, studios were killing their indie divisions at the same time and movies would play film festivals and just go off into oblivion. Oscilloscope was very necessary. It still is very necessary. It’s a barometer of a bunch of engaged people with fantastic taste, which is a very good part of Adam Yauch’s legacy.

Still taken from “Give Us Today Our Daily Terror,” Martijn Hendricks, 2008

I have to go to Bodega Bay, California for a wedding in September. Bodega Bay is best known for being the setting of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, although most of the buildings featured in the movie have been torn down. (Tippi Hedren still signs autographs there, though.) It’s the week after a wedding on a farm in the middle of Kentucky bourbon country, which will be fun.

These weddings are the closest thing to a vacation this year. I want to go to Paris, but instead I’ll go to California. Should we try to camp at Big Sur in between weddings? Or just hang out for the week in LA and see whether we can get jobs there? What would you do?

It is this, but also a metaphor

This week I had the pleasure of seeing Joachim Trier’s second film, Oslo, August 31st and reading The Vanishers by Heidi Julavits. They’re both worth seeking out. Oslo, August 31st is purposefully small, a day-in-the-life of a junkie, whereas The Vanishers is a batshit insane novel that’s fun to describe: when a woman gets physically attacked by her psychic mentor, she’s off on a journey to find out secrets about her dead mother. Or something. That’s actually an attempt to be succinct.

But what was funny about both works was that they were dealing with big topics - drugs and addiction, psychics and European spas (it’s a crazy book) - they were both very much fronts for what the artists were interested in. Oslo, August 31st feels very much a film about being in your thirties, as opposed to Reprise, which is one of the very best films about being in your twenties. The Vanishers is wrestling with grief through satire, with Sylvia Plath looming above everything as a benevolent ghost. It is also distressingly on target about the little wars that women wage with each other - sometimes the behavior is that of a psychic attack, but we ignore the wounds.

Oslo, August 31st may be a little bit of a masterpiece - it manages to take a selfish story and make it something about everybody, humanity, the pulse of a city. Anders Danielsen Lie is quite a good actor. There’s stuff happening on his face even when the scene is still. The Vanishers is definitely uneven, but fascinatingly so, and the writing is so good that you need a highlighter for certain sentences. It was a wonderfully maternal world, and I wondered whether Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry - or a female writing/directing team that I haven’t even heard of yet - could make a little bit of weird magic out of its words. It would be a dream, for sure.

Armando Iannucci is a comedy genius

I really don’t say that lightly. Peter Cook’s probably smiling down on him.

 

I made a list for GQ about 10 of the best insults to come out of Iannucci’s oeuvre, which includes The Thick Of It, In The Loop*, The Day Today, and I’m Alan Partridge. I didn’t know he had his own show on the BBC, too. He’s very Scottish! 

*Inside baseball, but it’s a shame In The Loop was released by the teensy IFC. Stupid economy! If a Fox Searchlight had got their hands on it, it would’ve gotten the Oscar noms it deserved, not just a token Best Screenplay. Arguably one of the best political satires ever.

Click on this and laugh in the most not safe for work way possible.