The Offline Report

As told to Marc Maron : YYM: Interesting that you say that. The other thing that I believe deeply is that um we're all capable of both the most vile acts in the world as well as the most trancendental ah, human achievements. Right? And it's not that there are good people and bad people. No we ARE the people. We contain that. And depending on how we happen to be born or constructed or nurtured these different aspects will come out. ... and so if there's anything I can do in music it's not to say I'm playing for good ppl or bad ppl or rich ppl or poor ppl or green ppl or purple ppl Rather it's to actually celebrate the deepest of what, you know, humans, are. It's our humanity. You know.. Let's forget all the names and categories and whatever When we're sitting in a room together we are one and with the vibrations in the air molecules that the sounds are making it's touching all of our skins and entering into us ... It turns whatever is th...

"...because life doesn't happen to you, it happens for you. How do I know this? I don't. But I'm making sound, and that's the important thing. That's what I'm here to do." Yes it's Jim Carrey all right. Sometimes I think that's the only thing that's important, really, you know? Is just, letting each other know we're here, you know? Reminding each other that we're part of a larger self. ...I used to think Jim Carrey is all that I was.... just a flickering light a dancing shadow the great nothing mascarading as something you can name. Seeking shelter in caves and foxholes, dug out hastily. An archer, searching for his target in the mirror. Wounded only by my own arrows. Begging to be enslaved. Pleading for my chains. Blinded by longing. And tripping, over paradise. CAN I GET AN AMEN? You didn't think I could be serious, did ya? I don't think you understand who you're dealing with! I have no limits. He ...

Former San Francisco sports columnist Joan Ryan has a new book out, the result of over 100 interviews, on team chemistry. "Intangibles: Unlocking the Science and Soul of Team Chemistry" to be released next week. Here's a teaser, describing the transformation of Aubrey Huff: When the Giants signed Aubrey Huff as a free agent before the 2010 season, they were gambling on a player who had a dubious reputation within the game. It seemed surprising that general manager Brian Sabean and manager Bruce Bochy, each attuned to harmony in the clubhouse, would welcome such an edgy character. Huff had serious doubts of his own, wondering if he had any chance of being accepted, and by the 2011 season, he had begun to wear out his welcome. More recently, Huff found himself uninvited to a planned reunion of the 2010 team because of his incendiary Twitter comments on politics and gender. But for a few months in what became a World Series championship season, Huff’s persona underwent a p...

The late Edmund Morris' new biography on Thomas Edison is electrifying, no pun intended. I finished a fifth of it before I reached the cash register it was so hard to put down. Particularly interesting is his early home-schooled education in civil engineering, among a set of very well-balanced cross section of subjects. Here is a comment Morris made on C-Span as he was researching the biography, marveling at Edison's imaginativeness : "So, this guy was talking to Edison about this subject and Edison said, if this theory is correct and we are indeed all composed - all matter consists of atoms. He said, I suppose it be possible for me to take a few atoms of myself and transfer those atoms to a rose. And then I could retrieve those atoms and put them back into myself and thereby acquire some of the sensibility of a rose." -------------------------------- Further Reading: An Inventor’s Life That Was Incandescent Any Way You Look at It:     nytimes.com This w...

In 1988 then-unknown Sheryl Crow, after striking out getting signed on her own with the big record labels, auditioned for and was hired to be a backup singer on Michael Jackson's "Bad" concert tour. She described in 2013 the tour to the New York Times' Jon Perales in a TimesTalk as "an amazing training ground." She said she witnessed there the coinciding traits of high-octane performances, like those given by Jackson on the tour, and "fragility." She calls the quality that performers who clear that threshold, the quality those performers embody, she described as their "divinity." She was careful to say pain and divinity are not the same thing. "You can go on youtube you can see the greatest artists in the world Eric Clapton playing um George Harrison you can go back and see old films of Ella and um Billy Holiday, and you can see these people in their pain in their divinity um not that the two are the same. It's that fragile sp...