His lectures were memorable performances, sometimes wandering from one digression into another, Diderot-style, without quite losing the thread, and sometimes piercing right to the heart of the matter with a perfect bon mot. Some of Sarris’ practiced witticisms have stuck with me ever since, like his description of the director of “L’Avventura” and “Red Desert” — whom he largely admired! — as “Antoni-ennui,” or his quip about the soon-to-be-forgotten leading man of Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey”: “Keir Dullea, gone tomorrow.”

But don’t let me mislead you: Sarris was of course overarchingly serious, probably the most analytical and theoretical of the titanic film critics who dominated the New York media conversation in the 1960s and for some time thereafter. Others included Pauline Kael, Sarris’ longtime rival, along with John Simon (once described by Sarris as “the greatest critic of the 19th century”), Stanley Kauffmann and the leading feminist critic Molly Haskell, who became Sarris’ wife. It was precisely the fact that Sarris possessed such a wide-ranging intelligence that made his injections of humor so effective. When I consider his passions and obsessions — he always looked for points of connection between avant-garde or art-house cinema and Hollywood movies; he loved the French New Wave but also claimed to have watched “Gone With the Wind” 48 times — I am forced to conclude that those afternoons in the Columbia auditorium shaped my thinking and viewing life more than I’ve ever realized.

It’s almost impossible, at this point in the 21st century, to imagine the world in which the feud between Sarris, then at the alternative-minded Village Voice, and Kael, who reviewed for the literary-establishment New Yorker, had so much resonance for so many people. In a sense, they were both victorious. Kael’s personal, emotional, deceptively casual direct address, and her focus on sensual or visceral pleasure, has become the basis for nearly all published movie criticism, and a lot of other things besides. (Kael was, in effect, a blogger long before the concept existed.) Sarris’ baby, an Americanized adaptation of Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut’s “auteur theory” — the idea that the director is the true author of a motion picture, and the one person who can lend it artistic unity — is now a bedrock assumption in almost all discussions about movies, even in the case of studio-produced mass entertainments where it’s clearly not adequate.

On the other hand, Kael and Sarris both lived long enough to repent of previous dogmas, and to see movies and movie criticism (as they understood those things) swamped by a tsunami of cultural and technological change. Shortly before her death in 2001, Kael reportedly told a friend, “When we championed trash culture, we had no idea it would become the only culture.” Sarris suffered the indignity of being laid off by the New York Observer three years ago, during the great collapse of print media, and told a New York Times reporter at the time that his pugnacious earlier self had been “a solipsist and a narcissist and much too arrogant” (almost exactly the terms Kael might have selected, way back when).

I often find myself in disagreement with Sarris about particular films and directors. Like him, I’m something of a formalist with a weakness for chilly, clinical construction, but I think his views on Hitchcock (enthusiastically pro) and Kubrick (largely anti) are completely backward. Sometimes his writing from the ’60s and ’70s can seem stilted from this distance, especially in comparison to Kael’s freewheeling jazz rhythms. Here he is, recounting his famous decision to see “2001″ a second time, while stoned:

I must report that I recently paid another visit to Stanley Kubrick’s “2001″ while under the influence of a smoked substance that I was assured by my contact was somewhat stronger and more authentic than oregano. (For myself, I must confess that I soar infinitely higher on vermouth cassis, but enough of this generation gap.)

But what comes through in that passage, as throughout his work, as in those Columbia lectures that so mesmerized me, is a fundamental curiosity about movies and the world and an openness to experience. Sarris got baked and went to see “2001″ again and changed his mind about it, something that very few critics are willing to do in public. (In that same 2009 Times interview, Sarris said that he apologized to Billy Wilder, late in the latter’s life, for undervaluing his movies.) He saw cinema as a potentially transcendent art form, capable of delivering an experience that was intellectual, sensual and even spiritual. Whatever his flaws as a person or a critic, Sarris’ work ennobled the movies, and as long as that possibility of transcendence lingers on the screen, he will not be forgotten.

His books contained powerful ideas, even when they seemed to deal in the most fanciful topics. In a genre famous for escapist concepts, Bradbury refused to use the escape hatch. His books told us about ourselves, even as they ranged widely over the universe. Can you fit that on the headstone?

“I’m in shock,” relates author John Scalzi, president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, in a phone call from Book Expo America in New York. “He was the last of the greats, the last connection to the Golden era. You think of Clarke, Heinlein Asimov and Bradbury. To have him gone is closing the door, for the culture of science fiction and the literature of science fiction.”

“We won’t ever forget,” adds novelist Neil Gaiman, who in an eerie coincidence recorded the audiobook version of his contribution to a forthcoming Bradbury tribute book — “Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury” — just yesterday. Other tributes have poured in from writers, editors, actors and celebrities, the very range of the response testifying to how many lives Bradbury touched and the scope of his influence.

Bradbury first captured the imagination of the younger generation, teenagers and college students, but soon even the professors took notice, assigning “Fahrenheit 451″ alongside Hemingway and Faulkner. And for good reason. Bradbury was much more than a teller of high-tech tales. No science fiction author of his generation had a more polished or more poetic prose style — a skill that stood out all the more given the slapdash sentences of his pulp fiction contemporaries. But Bradbury’s greatest skill was his ability to inspire readers to reflect deeply on our society and values, even when his books dealt with Mars or the future or some other tried-and-true genre concept.

With book burnings and repression of ideas still part of our daily news, Bradbury’s most famous novel has much to teach us even today. You may remember “Fahrenheit 451″ — or the celebrated film François Truffaut made from it — for the disturbing scenes of “firemen” whose job is no longer to put out blazes but to start them, consigning all literary works to the flames. But Bradbury’s story has other lessons to teach us. What you may have forgotten about “Fahrenheit 451″ is that communities only started burning books after they had lost interest in reading and the exchange of ideas. Their immersion in entertainment compromised their engagement as citizens. That lesson may be even more timely in modern America, where flames are hardly necessary to undermine our political and civic institutions.

Bradbury lived up to his ideals in other ways. He was a longtime champion of book culture and reading. “Libraries raised me,” Mr. Bradbury once commented. “I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries.” He often spoke at libraries and campaigned to keep them open and well funded.

Bradbury started his writing career at the bottom. At age 14, he managed to convince comedian George Burns to look at some his writing, and placed some of it on the popular Burns and Allen radio show. Bradbury’s first piece, “Pendulum,” published in Super Science Stories in 1941, earned him just $15. But Bradbury was both ambitious and prolific — he leaves behind more than two dozen books and over 600 short stories — and conquered markets for sci-fi that few of his peers could match. He moved from Weird Tales to Mademoiselle, and from there on to Harper’s and the New Yorker, a path that anticipated the later evolution and legitimization of the whole sci-fi category.

Despite his status as a science fiction guru and futurist, Bradbury was ambivalent about technology, and sometimes decidedly hostile to innovation. Don’t be fooled by the Jaguar in his garage; Bradbury never learned to drive a car. In a 2001 interview with Salon, he derided video games as “male ego crap.” When Yahoo approached him about putting his works online, his pithy response was: “To hell with you and to hell with the Internet.”

Are you surprised? Not if you have paid attention to Bradbury’s stories, which reveal more apprehension than admiration about technocracy and future-tripping. What you may not know is that some of Bradbury’s most moving writing is about the past, and drew on his own Midwest childhood in Waukegan, Ill., where he was born in 1920. His books “Dandelion Wine” and “Something Wicked This Way Comes” contain some of the most poignant explorations of youth and small-town America in our nation’s literature.

That’s how I would like Bradbury to be remembered: as a connecting point between the richness of the past and the promise of the future, celebrating both, but always with caution, sometimes with firmness and outspoken views. Yes, his legacy includes one seminal book, but even more, he told us why we should cherish all the other books too, and he kept us vigilant against those who wish to destroy or marginalize our literary heritage. While others fought for their place in the library, he fought for the entire building, and the broader culture and openness it represented. We can honor him with words of praise, but even better would be to continue to uphold these same ideals now that he’s gone.

And love. Ray always spoke of it. Love of possibilities and imagination. Love of language, the rolling of phrases off tongue and pen. Also hope, without which, love is sterile.

Ray Douglas Bradbury was born in 1920, in Illinois, but at age 13 became a lifelong resident of Los Angeles, graduating from L.A. High School in 1938 … exactly 30 years before I did. Among many early influences on a fertile young imagination was the (way cool, to a child) fact that one ancestress had been executed as a witch in Salem, Mass., in the 1600s. He described the lasting impressions left by early Lon Chaney films, or when a stage magician touched him on the nose with an electric sword, commanding him to “live forever!” Like my own father, he nurtured his love of writing in free public libraries and while hawking newspapers on Depression-era street corners. And, as did many authors who followed, he got his start writing stories for mimeographed fan publications, climbing gradually upward while honing his craft.

Sometimes luck can strike like lightning. When Ray got the celebrated British expatriate  writer Christopher Isherwood to take a look at the manuscript for “The Martian Chronicles,” the resulting review launched Bradbury … well … not out of poverty, not yet, but into a career. One that later took him through Hollywood, scripting films like “Moby Dick,” as well as into television and punditry, all while helping raise four daughters and penning one luminous book after another, exploring the edges of the barely plausible.

But I’m not here to write a biography. This is an appreciation and, hence, in keeping with Ray’s own style, let me give way to impulse. To passion.

Indeed, I referred earlier to Ray’s fervent dedication to love and hope and the power of words that yank at us, compelling empathy. But there was another emotion that he would evoke, from time to time. One that always left a lasting impression on audiences, when he gave one of his popular lectures.

Onstage, Ray Bradbury could wax eloquently and vociferously angry at one thing, at one human trait — cynicism. The lazy habit of relishing gloom. The sarcastic playground sneer that used to wound him, and all other bright kids, punishing them for believing, fervently, in a better tomorrow.

Ray had one word for it. Treason. Against a world and humanity that has improved, prodigiously, inarguably, fantastically more than any other generation ever improved, and not just with technological wonders, but in ethics and behavior, at last taking so many nasty habits that our ancestors took for granted — like racism or sexism or class prejudice — and, if not eliminating them, then at least putting them in ill repute. Ray spoke of the way violence has declined, worldwide, long before Harvard professor Steven Pinker clarified the case, in his recent book “The Better Angels of our Nature.”

Yes, Bradbury’s stories and novels often plunged fearlessly into dark, foreboding themes. The world ends in “The Illustrated Man” and we decline into Big Brother levels of dystopia by the unusual path of liberal political correctness in “Fahrenheit 451.” We are reminded of villainy in “Something Wicked This Way Comes.” After reading “All Summer in a Day,” the reader knows with utter clarity, how basic is the tendency toward cruelty, and that childhood is neither pure nor innocent.

Could anyone reconcile this chain of chillers with overall optimism?  Ray did. Human beings are fretful creatures, he said. Our skulking worries often cause us to shine light in dismal corners, and thus help us to do better! To be better.

Good literature has that power.  Indeed, science fiction offers writers a chance to create that most potent work, of which “Fahrenheit 451″ is a prime example. The self-preventing prophecy that so shakes up readers that millions of them gird themselves to prevent the nightmare from ever coming true. That’s power.

Moreover, even someday, when we’ve tamed our surface selves, growing up in our fair interactions and behaviors, partaking of a mature civilization, there will still endure, below the patina, a roiling, molten species, fevered with impulses and wild dreams. Far from becoming pallid beings, we’ll love to tell ghost stories by firelight and shiver at the touch of chill fingers up the spine. Why would we ever give that up?

Ray Bradbury saw optimistic progress and dark fantasy as partners, not opposites. On camera, during the moon landings, he could not stay in his seat! And he demanded that others get out of theirs. Long before Peter Finch did it in “Network,” Ray demanded that viewers stand up, step outside and shout!  Only, instead of cynical resentment, he insisted that we “get” what had just happened, how we had – all of us – just become a bit more like gods.

Those who yawn at such achievements, he denounced, calling them “ingrates.” And ingratitude he deemed one of the lowest human vices.

Ray was grateful, always, for what life had allowed a geeky youngster to do. I am thankful that he was my friend. And we who love both words and freedom of the mind should all feel gratitude today. For all those wonderful words.

Summer, who was strikingly beautiful, made some very steamy — some would say X-rated — music, most memorably with her first hit, 1975’s “Love to Love You Baby.” With Summer’s groans, moans and gasps powering the track, it broke new ground in its sexual explicitness. Promoted by her record company in explicitly sexual terms, and giving performances that made Tina Turner’s look tame, Summer soon found herself tagged the “Linda Lovelace of pop music.” She had seen this coming. In fact, she had not wanted to be the singer on that track, and agreed only to record the demo, and only then in a blackened studio where she sang, imagining that she was Marilyn Monroe giving herself over to orgasmic ecstasy. After producer Moroder convinced her to let him use her vocal, her record label president, seeing its bedroom potential, demanded a long-playing version that left the media debating whether the singer came 22 or 23 times. Rock critic Robert Christgau poked fun at the record with a review that consisted of three questions, “Did you come yet? Huh? Did you come yet?” Other reviews were more disparaging. But “Love to Love You Baby,” like much of her music, put female desire front and center in a way that it wasn’t in most rock music. Indeed, Summer’s music is inseparable from second-wave feminism’s emphasis on women’s sexual empowerment.

There is so much to say about Summer, who could have been a full-fledged personality had she not been pigeon-holed and dismissed as a disco tart. I was once on a radio program with her and, believe me, she was nobody’s fool. She described the “star-making machinery” as well as anyone. After she had already became famous she told Rolling Stone that her career sometimes felt like “this monstrous, monstrous force, this whole production of people and props that you’re responsible for, by audiences and everything that rules you until you take it upon yourself to be a machine… And at some point a machine breaks down.” Fame, she observed, diminished her, making her feel like nothing so much as a “commodity.” After falling into a debilitating depression and attempting suicide, she took control of her life again through Christianity.

In a way, I think one hears Summer confront her own commodification on her marvelous record “Bad Girls.” Although the music in the final, released version suggests otherwise, Summer isn’t celebrating prostitution on “Bad Girls.” Rather, she is confronting what she shares with those streetwalkers. “Now, you and me are just the same,” she sings.  And if Summer sounds unusually exuberant as she yells out to a john, “Hey, mista, have you got a dime?” perhaps it’s because Summer understood what it meant to be made into a commodity and reduced to a seductive whisper. Tellingly, in a television interview some years later, Summer noted that “Bad Girls” marked the moment when she stopped being an object and became a subject. Let’s hope that in her death she inspires more writing that fully acknowledges the intelligent subjecthood of this disco diva and kick-ass rock and roller.

It was a lesson we never let go of. As Margalit Fox’s superb New York Times obituary for Maurice Sendak notes, his “books were essential ingredients of childhood for the generation born after 1960 or thereabouts, and in turn for their children.”

That would be me. And my children.

As they were read unto me, I read unto them — each line reading with the intonation and emphasis passed down intact from parent to child — “And it was still hot!” It’s very simple: If the parent likes the book, or even better, liked the book as a child, then the child will receive a more vivacious reading of the text, which in turn impels the child to clamor to hear the treasured work read over and over again. Maurice Sendak planted an immortal virus in the culture, a self-fulfilling prophecy of rumpus, an affirmation that the child’s-eye view of the world made total sense. I thank him dearly for it.

Eighty-three is not a bad age at which to pass away, and while I feel regret at how the world is made less by his absence, my real sense of sadness after hearing the news of Sendak’s death came from the memories welling up of reading his works to my children.

My kids are too big now to fit alongside their father in the easy chair in which we conducted our pre-bedtime reading rituals. The easy chair itself has departed. Now we crack jokes while watching “Community” from the living room couch, their long arms and legs spread akimbo in every direction. Sure, we made a point of seeing the movie together, and agreed it was faithful to the original spirit, but it only served to evoke the spirit of those readings; it did not duplicate the experience.

In mere months, one child will be off to college, while the other increasingly exchanges incomprehensible YouTube in-jokes with his peers. Meanwhile, “Where the Wild Things Are” gathers dust on the bookshelf, safe from the culling that sent so many lesser works to the library or Goodwill (so long, “Magic Schoolbus”! Adios, Berenstein Bears!), but still a relic now of a childhood gone.

On Facebook, a friend of my sister’s recalled that when her mother read “Where the Wild Things Are” she would always sing the tequila song during the wild rumpus scene, “and I argued with her every time that this was not actually in the book.”

I felt another twinge. The anecdote struck a chord with me (and not just because tequila has been my rumpus-stimulant-of-choice for decades). That kind of mock argument between parent and child — where the parent is purposely provoking the child into a rote reaction — is an exercise in call-and-response harmony that binds the family tighter, just as did the ritual of reading and rereading the classic texts. We’re more sophisticated now, the jokes and arguments are more layered and complex, the call-and-response has lost its childlike simplicity. I even felt regret — why didn’t I sing “Tequila!” when I had the chance? What a missed opportunity!

I suspect (hope) that if Sendak, who didn’t seem like the kind of guy who suffered fools easily, was still around, he would scoff at all the nostalgia. There is, after all, always another generation of fresh young minds ready to be seduced by dreams of airplanes made of bread dough and kingly dominion over ominous beasts.

Guess the only thing left to do is get me some grandchildren, and propagate the virus some more. This time I’ll sing Tequila! Sendak might be gone, but “Where the Wild Things Are” will never leave us. I look forward to reading it a few more times.

Adam Yauch: I was reading a lot about Native American and other religions and checking out different things. Then I was in Kathmandu about two years ago, and I met some people who were Tibetan Studies majors living there. I was just hanging out with them; went to a couple of monasteries and Tibetan people’s houses and started getting into Tibetan culture a little bit. And I went and saw the Dalai Lama speak when he was in America for the Arizona teachings. I have studied a lot of different things; Buddhism is fairly new to me.

Jerry Granelli: Buddhism made sense to you?

Adam Yauch: It just seemed like Buddhism, especially Tibetan Buddhism, because that’s mainly what I’ve been exposed to, was a real solid organization of teachings to point someone in the right direction. Some real well thought out stuff. But I don’t know, like, every last detail about Buddhism. [laughter]

Jerry Granelli: Even the Buddha didn’t. Most of the teachings are somebody asking him a question. You know, not just some kind of solo performance or something.

Amy Green: Do you feel like the Dalai Lama is the main Tibetan teacher that you connect with?

Adam Yauch: I think the Dalai Lama is an amazing individual, but I think that Tibetans in general are really centered in the heart, coming from a real warm place. Real compassion. I think that all of the years that Tibet spent focused on Buddhism kind of affected the collective consciousness of Tibet and just kinda stayed in. It’s so deeply inlaid in the culture. It’s the closest thing that I’ve seen on the planet, as one culture, that really … the most advanced culture mentally, as opposed to our, uh, physical advancement.

Jerry Granelli: As somebody who has played music all of my life and been a Buddhist now for 24 years, I’m interested in the way you compose. Can you relate that to meditation or to non-aggression, which is the foundation of Buddhism.

Adam Yauch: I guess what I do is visualize the way that the music should feel or what it should represent. In meditation or whatever, just hanging out and listening, I work on visualizations of what that music represents or feels like to me and then when it comes time, it just pretty much comes out, somehow. It just comes through.

So that’s the main way that I compose. There’s no set way of starting with music and then working on lyrics, or starting with lyrics and then working with music. It is kind of random when it comes together and just playin’ around to see what works. But the main part of it is that visualization. Just knowing what the music feels like. Not necessarily what it sounds like.

J. Anthony Granelli: As a musician I find that I’m constantly dealing with my mind, the same kind of stuff that meditation brings up. I was wondering if meditation has affected your own relationship to music? Have they worked together in any way?

Adam Yauch: Not Buddhism exclusively, because, as I said, I’ve studied different things. But I think that as you start understanding the nature of reality in a different way, it affects everything that you do. Music is one of the main things I do — it totally affects that. But it probably also affects the way I walk down the street or what I’m thinking about while I’m doing my laundry. It just kind of affects your whole perception and thinking process … or non-thinking process…. [laughter] or watching yourself think, or something like that.

Amy Green: Do you practice any formal meditation practice?

Adam Yauch: Yeah. I spend a little time in the morning and at night, just bringing stuff into perspective from the day or setting up what’s going to happen the next day. And doing visualizations. Things like that.

Amy Green: Practices that you have received from teachers?

Adam Yauch: My main teacher is not Buddhist. The guy who mostly taught me pretty much picked up whatever he has just through meditation. He lived by himself off in a log cabin somewhere for years and gained a lot of understanding about the nature of reality. He’s been my main teacher. So he’s not coming from any specific religious background; he’s just coming from his own understanding.

To me Buddhism was kind of like an afterthought. I still think it’s amazing, but I learned most of what I’ve been learning, kind of getting me going in a direction, from this friend of mine — his name is Quentin. And then I started reading some Buddhist books and just kind of went, “Oh yeah, this makes sense.” It’s slightly different wording and different context, but it’s real similar to the stuff I’ve been working with.

So even the bodhisattva vow is something that I had taken to my self, a bunch of years before I had read about it in Buddhism. And then when I started learning about it in Buddhism, I thought, [says in thick New York accent, like a '30's gangster] “Yeah…that makes sense. Look, they got that all figured out there.”

J. Anthony Granelli: “Someone wrote it down!”

Adam Yauch: Buddhism just seems like a very logical, organized approach.

Jerry Granelli: I hear spirituality in your music. There’s a caring in the music. It’s not just about “fuck you.” How was your environment in your life growing up? That had to have had an affect.

Adam Yauch: Actually, I was really … I’m an only child. [Jerry: "Yah"... gestures thumbs up] You are, too? I just lucked into a really amazing set of parents. They are really cool and supportive. All the way through. You know, a lot of people you meet wind up with a lot of things that they have to deal with in their life because of stuff their parents have thrown at them. I somehow managed to side-step that one, for the most part.

Jerry Granelli: We were talking earlier about Burroughs. Who were your poets? What did you listen to or read?

Adam Yauch: Lyrically, I was influenced by stuff like Bad Brains and Minor Threat, which were “hardcore” bands that really set a tone for being able to play really loud, powerful music and have the lyrics be really positive. There is this sheer power, but without negativity.

Before that, I had always thought of positive lyrics having to be in this nice little happy music, and hard loud powerful music being about really negative stuff. To this day, the Bad Brains were probably the “hardest” that have ever played music. They took like, whatever, Coltrane, and combined that with punk and the precision of classical or jazz players. It’s the most powerful music ever, and the most positive lyrics, really about unity and stuff.

J. Anthony Granelli: Yeah, there is a seriously spiritual message in their thing. I’ve always found that.

Adam Yauch: Yeah. So that totally affected my music. ‘Cause when I was 15-16 years old, I was going to see those bands every night, like Bad Brains and Minor Threat. That’s what mainly affected my way of thinking about music. Then I forgot about it for a bunch of years. I went and got drunk and made some stupid music. [laughter] But… nothin’ wrong with that! No regrets there. It’s not anything “bad.” It was “stupid,” but it was fun bein’ “stupid.” Nothin’ wrong with bein’ “stupid.” [laughs]

Amy Green: On the latest album, you stand alone with more solo raps than ever before and say things that are very personal. There is a quality of talking about your own path and the idea of a “path” in general. Saying things that are important to you. Did you make a clear decision to step forward on your own?

Adam Yauch: I’ve just been building up my confidence in doing that over the last few albums. On “Paul’s Boutique,” there’s a song where I am starting to say what I’m feeling spiritually. It’s called “A Year and a Day,” but the lyrics to that song aren’t on the lyric sheet and I’m using a real distorted mic, so it’s not really clear. And I got a lot of positive feedback from people. I was kind of taking a big risk for myself doing that, just in terms of my own confidence, but I got a lot of positivity on that. Then there were a lot of positive lyrics on “Check Your Head.” That kind of thing goes back and forth: when I hear that people are into it, it makes me feel more confident. So, that’s kind of the route it’s been going.

Amy Green: It’s interesting the way you appear to be opening up in that way, while at the same time, this tremendous tidal wave of commercial success is happening and you are riding on that. You must have all kinds of crazy, different energy, a lot of aggression coming at you. I read that you’re going around “incognito” a lot.

Adam Yauch: That’s just tryin’ to have a good time, you know? Everybody loves a good disguise now an’ then! (laughter)

Amy Green: That’s just for fun?

Adam Yauch: Yep. (Laughs) Actually, you can learn a huge amount about yourself and other people by being in disguise. It’s actually an amazing thing. We were just doing it as a goof, but you put on some outfit and it totally affects the way people perceive you. In turn, by the way that people perceive you and act differently toward you, it makes you act differently towards them. Throw on a cowboy hat and some cowboy boots or some other look and it makes you really understand yourself and the way people act a lot better. We would put on some stupid disguises and go out to a night club and just talk to people and goof around, and you learn so much—how much people have set ideas about you or how much you have set ideas about yourself.

Amy Green: You don’t feel like you have to protect yourself or hold back from being out the world? Defend yourself?

Adam Yauch: Sometimes I’m not able to really communicate with a lot of people openly, because it takes so much. Especially when you’re doing a gig or something, you have a huge amount of attention focused on you. Everybody is there and they are all excited about it. You go on stage and put out all your energy doing a performance, and then come back and there are fifty or sixty people that just need five minutes of your time. And sometimes, you just gotta’ totally shut down, because you don’t have that kind of energy to put out. It is an issue that I’m dealing with in myself lately, getting over a kind of guilt factor in my mind of not being able to always give people what they want, specifically.

Amy Green: Oh, that’s okay…. [laughter] It seems that bodhisattva vow and path have something to do with going beyond the idea of what you think you should do to be a good person, and into doing what is actually appropriate for you to do. That helps others.

Adam Yauch: Yeah. It’s just understanding exactly what “bodhisattva” and “path” are, I think. Because, the bottom line, I think, of the bodhisattva path is doing what most benefits the totality of the universe, of all that is. And when you put yourself out there in a way that you aren’t really functional, then that is not going to most benefit the universe. You know, it’s just trying to get a feel, in your heart, for what’s going to most benefit the interconnectedness of all that is.

Amy Green: Well said!

Adam Yauch: [Looks around, looks behind him.] Where did THAT come from? (laughs)

Jerry Granelli: Keep that! Keep that!

Adam Yauch: I do think that’s an important issue. It’s something that I think about. I think that’s what a lot of “wrathful deities” are about; that sometimes, if there’s a little kid going to stick his hand in the oven and he is going to get burned, you gotta’ scream at him or smack him, or something. But, you’re not doing it out of anger. You’re doing it out of love. That’s the thing to keep track of: the motivation behind what you are putting out. If my motivation is clear, what I’m saying is, “I can’t talk to you right now. I don’t have time to do that.” My motivation isn’t to be rude to that person. That’s the key.

I do think that is a misconception of what the bodhisattva vow is. Because a lot of people just mess themselves up by feeling like they have to “do” stuff for other people, all of the time, even when that’s not working for them personally. They have to include themselves in that overall picture of benefitting everyone. They have to include themselves as “beings”, and know that by being in their strongest place, that that is how they can most benefit the universe, most of the time. Being a bodhisattva is about strengthening yourself, so you can go on. Benefit where the benefit is needed. Come from a strong place in yourself and you really help people.

Amy Green: Have you met many people who identified themselves to you as Buddhists, or people who have tuned into that thinking particularly?

Adam Yauch: Especially since we’ve been writing a lot of more positive lyrics and the music is going in a real positive direction, I wind up meeting a lot of really incredible people. Sometimes I’ll meet kids who’ll say, “Yeah! My mom is a Buddhist. I was raised as a Buddhist. I was raised in this Tibetan community,” or whatever. Some people just say that they like the lyrics, or that the lyrics strike them well. That feels good. That’s like the biggest compliment in the world; that just makes me feel like cryin’. Sometimes, when people come up to me and tell me that the lyrics, somehow, helped them or made them feel good, it’s just like, “Damn…” [looks down, pauses, obviously moved] What was the question again? [laughs]

Amy Green: Do you see a lot of suffering? There’s numbed, white people style suffering, probably around you. Rap came out of a more physical, violent suffering. The ghetto. Very immediate kind of suffering…

Adam Yauch: Not originally, though. Early on, hip-hop music was really positive, most of it. Early on, most of the lyrics were about unity and bringing different cultures together. Then around ’86, it became a real powerful vehicle. Chuck D of Public Enemy just brought it into a whole different ballpark when he started using it as a vehicle to let people know about the oppression of blacks. He was using it for a combined thing: a voice directly to black youth culture in America and bringing unity and power into that, which was totally needed.

It just switched around—right then—because it was so powerful what Chuck D was doing with it. I think it’s really important that that happened. So many people are unaware of the oppression that still goes on to this day of blacks, all of the time. He brought some whole new perspectives on that for a lot of people. Myself included. Affected my thinking a lot.

Jerry Granelli: Your generation of musicians, same as J. Anthony’s, making whatever kind of music you want to call it, is fighting the same battle, in some way.

Adam Yauch: It’s kinda cool when you KNOW, when you get a feel for right where that boundary is, to push, then you just, (whistles) “PHEW…” That’s definitely fun.

J. Anthony Granelli: How did you guys make the progression from a hardcore style into more rap?

Adam Yauch: I think both those forms of music have the same kind of feeling behind them, but they’re coming from different cultures. Hardcore or punk is coming from white, western culture, or whatever. Hip hop is coming from African descent, black American music.

So a lot of hip-hop groups just started coming downtown, and were playing at the clubs, and we were all listening to a lot of hip-hop. We would be hangin’ out at the punk clubs and they’d be playing hip-hop records, too. So we just kinda started gettin’ into rhyming, because we were really into it. Then we hooked up with Russell Simmons, somehow, who is a manager of a lot of hip-hop groups. We started going and playing to more black audiences, going up and gettin’ on at The Fever, The Encore and places like that.

So we crossed-over like that. At first when we started rhyming, we were still rhyming in the downtown, hardcore-type scene. Then we started doing gigs with hip-hop groups, like opening up for Kurtis Blow, and we just disappeared from the hardcore scene for a while. Then later it just kind of came back together and started becoming more like one thing. The hardcore and the rap started coming together.

J. Anthony Granelli: And then you made another shift back into playing more instrumental.

Adam Yauch: When we were working on “Paul’s Boutique,” the second album, we started listening to a lot of funk and jazz stuff, looking for samples. We were trying to find records to sample and just listening to that kind of playing gets you back into the “playing” frame of mind. So right around when we finished Paul’s Boutique, we started jamming and playing again. I guess that around ’89. We started trying to play funk, and kinda’ wound up with somethin’ else. But that’s what we were trying to do. (laughs)

Amy Green: Has the energy changed? What is the difference in what it takes out of you to be playing in front of 200 people or…I don’t know how big it gets…THOUSANDS.

Adam Yauch: Yeah. You get more amped off it, with the huge crowds. But sometimes you’re in a little room and everybody is going wild. The energy is ALL in there. I just jumped on and played a song at CBGB’s the other night, with this friend of mine’s band. The Cro-Mags were playing and they asked me to get up and play. We did a cover of a Bad Brains song, and everyone was just going wild at “CB’s.” And I was remembering that feeling; it is just this LITTLE room and everybody is bouncing off the walls. So it is different now, I guess it’s different. (laughs)

Amy Green: How big is it getting now?

Adam Yauch: Well, we just did the Lollapolooza Tour. That’s real big, but that’s a bunch of bands drawing the people in. That’s not just us. I think the biggest it got would be close to 47,000 people. And that’s an AMAZING feeling. That’s like, “WHHHHHAAAAA….” just seeing them going ALL that way back. But that’s not just us pulling in [laughing] that kind of number. [laughter] That’s 15 bands.