When K. Balachander saw me for the first time, he booked me for three films and asked me to learn Tamil first.
After the first three or four years of me taking rap seriously, it started to look more promising. I started booking shows and more people were playing my music, so I starting believing this could actually work for me.
I think I was 10 when I did my first community play, and then I started booking bigger roles in these plays, and people were telling me and my parents that I was talented. And I was like, 'Well, this is something I wanna do.'
I'm so flattered that at 69, people are booking me and finding me on Instagram.
I think when Kevin Nash put himself on the booking committee and then gave me my first loss, that was beginning of the end.
Tom Ford gave me high heels for the baby. They're a little kitten heel with a velvet rope that you tie. It's like a collection piece. I have to put it on the bookshelf, framed.
I picked up 'On Moral Fiction' in the bookstore and looked up myself in the index, but I didn't read it through. I try not to read things that depress me.
I'm totally into new age and self-help books. I used to work in a bookstore and that's the section they gave me, and I got way into it. I just loved the power of positive thinking, letting yourself go.
I grew up around food and in a restaurant, so it never dawned on me that this was a thing to do; it just was. Then I found it as a profession in my mid-twenties after years of bad decisions and depression. The first step was going to the bookstore and learning about this craft. Then applying in kitchens and just getting to work.
There is that romanticized idea of what a bookstore can be, what a library can be, what a shop can be. And to me, they are that. These are places that open doors into other worlds if only you're open to them.
My parents didn't know much science; in fact, they didn't know science at all. But they could recognize a science book when they saw it, and they spent a lot of time at bookstores, combing the remainder tables for science books to buy for me. I had one of the biggest libraries of any kid in school, built on books that cost 50 cents or a dollar.
It should be said upfront that I totally dig people who work in bookstores and libraries. They love books, and I love books, and that is all I really need to know. If they are friendly to me, then we are clearly soul mates.
Age about 30, I stopped looking up my books in bookstores. Paying attention to the marketplace isn't a healthy thing for me.
It's like, boom! - I've got a girlfriend. It turned out to be a good thing because it made me a rapper.
Much as my Boomer friends will hate me for saying this, Kanye West is the New Dylan. Not only do Kanye's best lyrics match Dylan's prescience, highly inventive word-play and genius for storytelling, his indefatigable cockiness eerily channels Muhammad Ali.
My favorite team is the Bengals. In Idaho, we didn't really have a home team. But my parents are from Ohio, and when I was a little kid, my aunts and uncles would send me Boomer Esiason T-shirts and Ickey Woods mini-footballs, so I got hooked on those guys.
I remember back in the early '70s, when I had a disastrous Grand Prix, my wife, Lynn, said to me, 'Don't worry, you're going to be a late boomer.' That's what she said to me, and I've always held that thought.
In 'Boomerang,' they didn't have a script at all, they just told me to come up with some stuff.
I would happily help to turn the stone being thrown at me into a boomerang.
The Internet is a boon for hypochondriacs like me.
