Journeys on the outskirts of the celebrity C-list: A product like the mRobo Ultra Bass dancing audio player is pretty marginal by any standard, so it was somewhat odd to head over to Tosy’s booth at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) only to find hundreds of people massed, mostly being polite about having to stand for 45 minutes while gruff private security with Secret Service-type earpieces barked at them from time to time (one of the press photographers on hand referred to them as “jabronis,” which seemed rather apt). Of course, even in the consumer electronics world there is a very good chance that many of those present weren’t aware of the company, which is notable for being the first Vietnamese robotics company and the makers of a ping-pong playing humanoid robot. But that’s OK. That’s not why I was there. I was there for the Bieb.

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This piece originally appeared in Deek Magazine on September 23, 2005.

Little Richard was born Richard Wayne Penniman on December 5, 1932 in Macon, Georgia. The Deep South (like most of America) was a wild place in those days. Richard’s father was a preacher and a bootlegger, selling hooch and salvation as an adherent of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church — a sect of Christianity founded by a farmer named William Miller, who once wrote a book with the unwieldy title, Evidences from Scripture and History of the Second Coming of Christ about the Year 1843.

Richard spent his youth on the dirt street where hustlers of all types would hang out in the hot, dusty Georgia afternoons, singing to snare marks and move goods. There were old men with vegetable carts, ward heelers making the rounds, soap box preachers selling religion… people hustled whatever they had to get by.

From an early age, Little Richard was too damn wild to worry what others thought about him. His queerness made him an alien in the straight world, his blackness an alien in the white world; but he possessed a sort of trickster quality and manic exuberance that he used to raise himself above racism and poverty. And his spirit was often a strain on those close to him.

“Richard would holler all the time,” his brother remembers. “I just thought he couldn’t sing anyways, just a noise, and he would get on our nerves hollerin’ and beatin’ on tin cans and things of that nature. People around would get angry upset with him yelling and screaming. They’d shout at him, ‘shut up yo’ mouth, boy’ and he would run off laughing all over.”

Little Richard, the youthful bundle of energy, grew up fast. At fourteen he ran away from home with Dr. Hudson’s Medicine Show. By fifteen he had made a name for himself as a drag queen, working for Alabama’s own Sugar Foot Sam. No parent I know would want their lovely African American boy singing in blackface or prancing around in a dress with someone called Sugar Foot, but these were the options available in the south in the forties.

In 1951, at the age of eighteen, Richard won a talent contest and was signed to a four disc deal with RCA Victor. Those songs did little, some becoming local hits before disappearing from view forever. This is not to say that Richard was not a dynamic presence; when he performed, it was obvious that he possessed a measure of greatness. But he had so far been unable to transform his greatness into either Art or Money.

Four years after his “big break,” Richard was still plugging away. He was a popular musician and had plenty of work. He was a rare talent, playing to both black and white audiences. The black crowds seemed to prefer a rawer, bluesy edge to the music; the white cats didn’t mind hearing something a little more jovial. Little Richard and his full-time band, the Upsetters, could do either. But it was proving impossible to capture that energy on record.

“Bumps” Blackwell was determined to change that. As an A&R man with Specialty Records in New Orleans, he heard promise in the tapes that Little Richard had sent him. Hoping that perhaps he might have another Ray Charles on his hands, he scheduled a session for September, 1955.

Bumps booked a room in New Orleans and the backing band that Fats Domino had been using. They spent days in the studio, jamming, trying to find the right sound. Richard was a sight: face powdered, eye liner, hair piled high onto his head. Little Richard Penniman was a pretty young man, no doubt about it. But as the session wore on, Richard’s legendary anarchic performance simply could not be captured on tape. Richard was mortified when they played the performance back and he heard how polite he sounded.

At some point, on the third day of the session, the group broke for lunch. Inside New Orleans’ legendary Dew Drop Inn, Richard spotted a piano. He started pounding the keys, out of frustration more than anything. He started playing a song he had written while washing dishes at the Greyhound station in Macon, Georgia, where he worked in between tours.

And he sang: “A wop bop a loo mop a good goddam! Tutti Frutti, loose booty / if it don’t fit, don’t force it / you can grease it, make it easy.”

The lunch crowd doubled over in laughter and Bumps realized that he had a hit on his hands. The music was perfect: joyful, exuberant, rushing with the kind of manic energy that everyone who knew Richard instantly understood. The lyrics, of course, would have to go.

Little Richard wasn’t so sure, at first, but he was working for Specialty now. Bumps got a local songwriter called Dorothy LaBostrie to sanitize the lyrics and soon enough the record was bounding up the Billboard R&B chart (which had only recently been renamed from the “Race” chart) to the number two spot, and even scored number seventeen on the Billboard Pop chart. This record jump started the career of one of America ‘s most beloved entertainers.

Little Richard remembers, “We decided that my image should be crazy and way-out, so that adults would think I was harmless. I’d appear in one show dressed as the Queen of England and in the other as the Pope.”

Rock historian James Miller, in his book Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock and Roll, 1947-1977, has what might be the last word on the subject: “Emboldened by the success of his recording, Richard intuitively grasped the issues at play. Being black and being gay, he was an outsider twice over. But by exaggerating his own freakishness, he could get across: he could evade the question of gender and hurdle the racial divide.”

A new breed of survivalist is wealthy, educated, and plans to ride out 2012 in style

Somewhere in the old Cincinnati-Dayton Defense Area that spans Southwest Ohio and Southeast Indiana sits a $1.5 million “man cave.” I made my way to the site on a warm fall morning with Google Maps and GPS coordinates supplied by my real estate advisers, Matthew and Leigh Ann Fulkerson of 20th Century Castles, LLC. Built in a decommissioned Nike missile site, the residence boasts a kitchen, four bedrooms, two baths, an exercise room, indoor swimming pool, jacuzzi, and an elevator for lowering the owner’s classic automobiles below the surface. On clear days, the doors that once exposed anti-ballistic missile for launch can be opened to let sunshine penetrate the otherwise dimly lit basement.

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Aside from publishing (Barbary Shore Publishing Company) and writing for The Verge, I also record tunes under the name South Side Sound Machine these days.

When my band Big Hurry was looking for a name, I asked my friend Lenny Bronowicz if he had any ideas. He made a list, and among the suggestions was South Side Sound Machine.

“I love it, Lenny,” I said. “But I don’t think the other guys will go for it.”

“Why?” He asked, indignant. “Is it because of the Miami Sound Machine? Why can’t more than one city have a sound machine?”

Kevin Mitnick is a liar. In fact, he wrote the book on lying (well, a book on lying, called The Art of Deception). I’m not trying to call his character into question, but the fact should be noted. In his younger days, Mitnick’s obsession with exploring telephone and computer systems allowed him to maintain a very casual relationship with the truth, one that found him impersonating cops and telephone company employees alike. His hacking was always more than just knowing his way around an operating system and exploiting security vulnerabilities — he could think on his feet and weave fictions out of thin air, which made him a natural “social engineer.” He probably spent as much time on the phone talking telephone companies and state agencies out of sensitive information as he did behind the keyboard, exploiting vulnerabilities in software.

While we can’t be certain of the extent of his exploits, an approximate list could include: breaking into computer systems owned by Sun Microsystems, DEC, NEC, Motorola, and Nokia; getting his hands on documents relating to Pacific Bell’s SAS (Switch Access Services, which could be used to wiretap phone lines); and of course a number of crimes related to his being a fugitive (including identity theft). Mitnick has always maintained that he never profited from his crimes — and there is no proof that he ever did. So how did he become “the most dangerous hacker in America?”

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It’s 8am-ish (2pm-ish in Paris) and thirty-six degrees. I’m looking forward to a new episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia tonight. That show’s good for the soul. The characters have little use for consensus reality, so they’ve gone ahead and formed their own consensus (created a new reality). Sure, their delusion is only a symptom of a bigger problem, but who cares? Most great artists are “great” because they’re nuts. It’s a cliche, but it’s true. Unless you consider the folks behind Reverend Jim great artists (except for Jimbo Belushi, of course — he’s top notch; really, really great).

But yeah, the Sunny gang… Every episode brings a new world, one that they suck everyone else into. And when they create new realities, new perceptions, it’s not the result of academia or heavy-handed anything, artsy-fartsy avante-garde bullshit, it’s the result of enthusiasm, lots and lots of enthusiasm, and naivete, bordering on the criminally stupid. They’re creating spectacles! Situations that can’t be analyzed away because they’re counter-intuitive, utterly goofy, and they defy analyses.

We could learn a thing or two from the gang. Because while the escapades they engage in turn the world upside-down, the characters responsible remain unchanged, pure. They’re the heirs of the Marx Brothers, raised in the age of Rambo.