Sean Penn on AIDS, telethons, and his long running feud with Stallone

"The last time I did a telethon was more than twenty years ago when AIDS hit the public consciousness big time. But there were still a lot of misconceptions about the disease, and I couldn't idly stand by watching heroin junkies die sharing needles as they wore condoms for protection, so I rallied the Hollywood troops and we set out to do some good.

The hour is upon us for another Sean Pean anecdote. Shall we proceed?

Now at the time I was embroiled in a massive feud with that peacocking son of a gun Sylvester Stallone. He dissed Shanghai Surprise, and I did an interview with Variety magazine and called Cobra a low-rent Beverly Hills Cop with all the charm of a ruptured anus. 

Hell, I don't even remember how it started, but the name calling was getting out of hand quicker than a hackeysack at a Burmese leper colony. We were doing drive bys on each other's houses, throwing eggs at the front door, and pulling knock and run manoeuvres. 

Old school tinsel town beef for the burger, Wally, there's nothing quite like it.

Anyway, I was answering the phones that night in the studio, taking pledges and generally doing my bit to rid the world of AIDS and the Italian Stallion thought it would be funny to prank call the hotline, donating money in the name of Phil McCracken and Amanda Blomiov, all the while giggling to himself in that thick as soup goombah accent like some retarded water buffalo.

Now don't get me wrong ... I like a good laugh as much as the next guy. Are you a piece of string? No, I'm a frayed knot! Ha ha ha!! But AIDS is no joke, son. 

So I hopped in the convertible and sped over to Stallone's pad in the hills and kicked through his front door cowboy style. He knew what he did was wrong, and started whimpering like strawberry shortcake leeking out her first period in a 7-11 bathroom on Figueroa. I chased him up the stairs then started pounding the steroid chomping fucker like a cleaver through week old meat.

People think Stallone finally brought some thespian chops to his role as the beleaguered half deaf Sheriff Freddy Heflin in Cop Land, but I can assure you that the dim-witted and dribbly persona you saw on-screen was no act. That spicy meatball fuck was still reeling from a thermonuclear beatdown from yours truly.

I guess what I'm saying is that some topics just aren't suitable for jokes. AIDS, for one, and mostly stuff of a sexual nature. Except this joke: What do 9 out of 10 people enjoy? Gang rape! James Rebhorn told me that one back in '93. Keep on truckin' Wally."

Sean Penn on Billy Bob Thornton

“Wally, I've dealt with plenty of deluded hacks during my tenure as a Hollywood chancer romancer and disco dancer. Ever since Tarantino made Reservoir Dogs on the cheap, every mentally disturbed shitbag armed with a camcorder has gone the Orson Welles route. 

Back in the early 1990s there was an up and coming actor/director in Hollywood, who despite being some banjo-strummin' bucktooth yahoo with a beer gut the size of Nebraska still somehow managed to smash some primo cooch in his day. 

He also has three names, the true hallmark of many a crazy sociopathic fuck. Lou Diamond Phillips, Lee Harvey Oswald, Sarah Jessica Parker. The list is endless.

I'm talking of course about Billy Bob Thornton.

That squeal-like-a-pig hillbilly shithead approached me about a film he was working on about some windowlicker armed with a scythe who goes all samurai on some poor fucker, but instead of being a gentleman about it he decided to try and alpha male me, talking about how great his film was, how everyone wanted in on it, etc etc, carrying on like Don King Viagra-ed up in a Saigon whorehouse, but the fact of the matter was this Waylon Jennings-listening nutcase couldn't have got laid in a vagina storm.

But then he started up about all the fine Hollywood trim he was pounding, insinuating ol' Sean here was picking up stinky seconds.

Well hot damn I wasn't about to sit around listening to this chodeslapping redneck try to son me about whatever poontang he may or may not have been up in, so I went to town on his stupid cornpone ass, throwing jabs and hooks like Leon Spinks in his prime.

It wasn't Billy Bob Thornton, it was Billy Bob Thought you were hot shit but you just got served motherfucker.

People think that Thornton's dribbly affectations of being retarded in Sling Blade were a fine display of acting, but the truth was that his cousin-fuckin' cornbelt ass was still reeling from a gorilla style thumping from your boy SP."

Sean Penn on Vince Vaughn

“Wally, I've said it before but it bears repeating... I'd rather be hated for who I am than loved for who I'm not. Vive la difference, as they say in Israel.

Anyway, I've had to deal with my fair share of grumpy downriver motherfuckers during my time in the spotlight. 

For instance when I was directing Into The Wild with the talented Emile Hirsch, there was a co-actor of his, a squareheaded douchebag with the cojones to question my on-set methods even though he spent his career playing second fiddle to a talentless creep like Owen Wilson and getting gangbanged by Jennifer Aniston.

I'm talking of course about Vince Vaughn.

So this bargain bin Ray Liotta motherfucker starts coming on strong like King tittyfucking Kong, trying to tell me how to frame this shot here, set up the lighting on that scene there, on and on til the break of dawn until I snapped like a Kit Kat on LSD and beat his stupid ass so hard he looked like one of Rosie O’Donnell’s tampons. It was the balled-fist equivalent of Chow Yun Fat bursting into a Hong Kong tea room with a pair of sawn off shotguns.

I told Vaughn that he better go cry into his banana daiquiri and nurse his wounds and think about how he was just on the business end of a world class Sean Penn smackdown.

I've towered over Hollywood for more than twenty years like Jack Palance in a midget factory, and wasn't about to let some johnny come lately start calling the shots on my own film.”

Sean Penn on Jennifer Jason Leigh

"Trust me Wally, I could Scheherazade the living bejeesus out of the information superhighway with tales of crazy strumpets all up in my shit like undigested kernels of sweetcorn.

For instance, back when I was in short pants filming Fast Times at Ridgemont High, there was one young chica that was always throwing herself at me like Hindus under the bus at the Ratha Yatra festival.

I'm talking about Jennifer Jason Leigh. 

Hot damn, she was one crazy lady, always purring at me suggestively with those big banjo eyes, stroking my leg between takes and generally looking to get scribbled on with white ink by the almighty Penn.

She was some primo trim back then and would probably still trap a thick one now post-Jaeger bombs, but I've been around the world like Lisa Stansfield and seen more shit than an on-call proctologist at a curry festival, and best believe I can spot damaged goods. Poor JJ was crying out for a daddy figure, probably cos her own pops was some type of cold emotionally unavailable douchebag.

But like Sir Mix-A-Lot once said, "don't call me dada!"...I got no time for crazy girls with their Freudian fucknuttery. She got the message and soon moved on from her fixation with me and started up with Forrest Whitaker. 

God damn he wrecked that shit son, imagine an F18 stealth fighter jet smashing through a side of beef. It was unseemly.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that having some basketcase all on your jock like genital herpes ain't no thing to be boasting about to all and sundry like a Dickensian town crier with ADHD. Think of it like Pizza Hut - we've all been there, and it's nothing to get too excited about really."

Sean Penn on TLC and emotionally charged incidents of arson

"Understanding: it begins with U. When someone burns down a house, Wally, it’s always an attempt to ‘light up’ a path for better dialogue between them and the homeowner. That individual was obviously not in a good place, and no I don’t mean Wisconsin. 

Now ... I've had some dealings with emotionally scarred firebugs before, so let me break it down like retarded enzymes. 

Time for another Sean Penn tale. Let’s go.

The year was 1994. I had just finished up on Carlito’s Way and was taking a well deserved break from the pitfalls of Hollywood before I threw myself into my next critically acclaimed role as Ray Poncelet in Dead Man Walking.

I was sitting at home pouring myself a single malt and leafing through some scripts when the phone rang. It was none other than Lisa ‘Left Eye’ Lopes from girl supergroup TLC. I had contacted her through a mutual agent weeks earlier, offering to dip my Penn in her ink once we wrapped on Carlito.

But no, this wasn’t a booty call, she was struggling with demons. Not like Keanu in Constantine, I mean the demons of drugs, drink and a lifetime of regrets.

Left eye was having a crisis: her relationship with Andre Rison was falling apart quicker than a staircase made of diarrhoea. He was going upside her head and generally acting like a complete douchebag and if there’s one thing that drives me mad aside from the foreign policy of the US government in Central and Latin America it’s a motherfucker that likes beating on women.

Anyway, I told her the best thing to do is to take something of his and burn it. It's what the   Native Americans used to do following the death of a loved one to help them pass through from this realm into the next. I told her that I did this with some of Madonna's brassieres back when we went splitsville, and I found the whole experience to be healing.

Jesus, even Usher wrote a song about this very process.

Unfortunately the crazy bitch decided to do this inside the house and ended up torching the entire mansion. She phoned me back and asked for advice on how to put the fire out before it spread and I told her to not go chasing waterfalls but stick to the rivers and the lakes that she’s used to. HAHA! Well, she never called me again."

When Sean Penn met the Beastie Boys and David Lee Roth

"Hot damn Wally, I don’t know where you found that relic but let me assure you...this was a night to remember, as 80s fruity funkanauts Shalamar once sang. 

In fact they might have even been at the same party, I forget! All that disco dandruff floating around buddy, quite frankly my memory ain’t what it used to be.

Anyway, what I do recall is meeting the Beastie Boys when they were opening for Madonna on her US tour back in 1985. 

You gotta remember kids, this was a different time and place. Crack was cool and the Cold War was on like donkey kong. Wang Chung were a force to be reckoned with in the pop charts and I was married to Madonna for fuck’s sake! 

 

So we were all hanging out, getting loaded and shooting dice at an afterparty for the Spies Like Us premiere somewhere in the Bowery. Some idiot on the door let Dave Lee Roth in, and he was clinging to me all night like an autistic child with his mum at a fun fair, out his mind on Quaaludes and mumbling about going solo. 

I was hanging with Ad-Rock and the crew by the bar, and I believe that’s when the photo in question was taken. Yauch was going crazy that night, downing jaeger bombs and getting into fights with anyone about anything. 

He bitchslapped Eric Stoltz for making jokes about Gorbachev and Perestroika. Then he headbutt the construction worker from the Village People, screaming “Free Nelson Mandela!” before he smashed a bottle of Jack Daniels across the bar and started swinging at the one dressed as an Indian chief. The other two were later seen screaming "WHY MCA?!" on the corner of 14th and Madison.

Things got a little hazy after this.

Next thing I knew it was morning, the sun peeking through the Manhattan skyline like a rapist through curtains. I was in the courtyard below, face in down in a rosebush and covered in what I hope was my own vomit. Fuggin New York, it always brings the worst out in people.

So I stumbled back into the party…which was still going strong. Chevy Chase was naked on one of the tables, dancing to ‘Like A Virgin’ with an ashtray as a codpiece. Judd Nelson and the rest of the Breakfast Club were cheering him on, stuffing dollar bills up his ass crack while Ringwald did lines of blow off her own tits. It was insane.

I found Yauch and the rest of the Beasties upstairs chilling with Dave Lee Roth and Steve Guttenberg. I asked them what the fuck happened, they start laughing and tell me that at some point last night I bet everyone in the room a thousand bucks I could fly.

Before anyone said anything I ran and jumped out the window, smashing through glass and landing in the garden below. 

'What the fuck?!' I asked Mike D. 'Why didn’t you assholes stop me??!'

Dave Lee Roth just looked at me and said: 'Sean bro, I bet them all TWO thousand bucks you could do it!'

So I checked into rehab a few days later."

Literary Review with Cookie Monster: Lush Life by Richard Price

Me was big fan of The Wire at time, even if now it is favourite programme of working mothers, liberals and hipsters. So me always keen to read novels of writers on that show.

However, after bad experience with George Pelecanos book me not so sure. Pelecanos, he average to terrible writer with no verbal flair and tin ear for speech of black characters. 

Anyway, me decide to read some Richard Price next. Lots of white people call him Lord of Urban Fiction, whatever that mean. White people usually wrong about many things, but me give it a go anyway.

Bad idea. Mr Price, he worse than Pelecanos. This book Lush Life terrible in places and downright offensive in others.

Now, me must make clear that me think Price is gifted writer, but he more concerned here with writing social document about New York than actual novel.

Many critics, they like Price. They call him modern day Balzac. Honestly me think he less Balzac and more ballsack. Ha! Ha! Many critics also from New York just like Price, so me think they enjoy hearing about themselves and their big bad city. New Yorkers always very self absorbed and myopic bunch.

Critics like to talk about gritty realism of Lush Life and fantastic dialogue. Dennis Lehane, also crime novelist who write on The Wire, he say Price write best dialogue of anybody today. Me think Lehane need to read more.

Anyway, this book he write has many clichés of crime fiction genre. Price write about divorced and worldweary cop. He write about sassy female partner of ethnic background with balls of steel but heart of gold.

But he also cram in vignettes of social history, immigration and gentrification to remind reader that New York is cosmopolitan, vibrant and also greatest city on earth.

Me think you can’t dust sugar onto shit then call it cookie. The whole book like episode of CSI guest written by Studs Terkel.

And me also find his portrayal of black people in Lush Life offensive like Heckle and Jeckle cartoon.

They say ridiculous things like “gotta get dat cheese, partna” and me wonder if this meant to be urban gangster or capitalist mouse.

Me also wonder why it is middle age white man who write about black people that celebrated as Lord Of Urban Fiction while black writers ignored by mainstream press unless they Colson Whitehead.

Maybe Price, he watch re-runs of In Living Color or Good Times and think this how black people talk. Me not sure. And when me hear white critic talk about how authentic this is, it leave bad taste in mouth like three day old cookie. Not good.

So me give Price 2 cookies out of 5. Then me eat one cookie because me hungry. It hard work reading Lush Life.