Lollapalooza is God, And God Is Blackout Drunk

Sup guys. I'm new here, so allow me to introduce myself. My name is Cory O'Brien, and this is what most of my days are like:

     Lollapalooza was hardly an hour old, and a gangly boy in a muddy yellow t-shirt had already become an object lesson in collision physics. In the midst of the mob he was safe enough, bobbing as he was in a sea of people animated by a tsunami of bass, but take the crowd away and he became a newborn wildebeest with half the requisite number of legs. I could tell you what music we were listening to when this happened, but you've got the whole rest of the internet for that. Instead I am going to tell you about the crowd, because the crowd is where I found the agents of the gods.

     More accurately, they found me. My friend and I were a little sick of having all the hollows of our anatomy vibrated in four-four time while strangers cheerfully attempted to feed us their elbows, so we retreated to the relative safety of the port-a-potties, where the only danger was hepatitis. I wasn't too jazzed about locking myself in a closet full of other people's shit, so I opted to wait outside. I found a few square inches of lightly-trampled grass to call my own, and began juggling to pass the time. This was my first mistake...

Muscles, Fire, Guns, the New Frontier and Inner City Savages! - the Right Wing Mythology of Eighties' Action Films

By Jimi Thaule

"We train young men to drop fire on people, but their commanders won't allow them to write "fuck" on their airplanes because it's obscene!"

Colonel Walter E. Kurtz - Apocalypse Now

The eighties was the last decade of the Cold War, a decade dominated by the presidency of Ronald Reagan and his second term vice president George Bush – elected as Reagan's successor in 1988. Another significant feature of the decade was the American action film, which had its golden age in the eighties and nearly died out once the Cold War ended. As the nineties and the Clinton years progressed action films were reduced to action comedies, and only recently have we seen a resurgence of the type of action films we saw in the eighties – in particular with Stallones' tribute film the Expendables and its anticipated sequel.

There have been rumors that Expendables 2 would be rated PG13 to ensure Chuck Norris' involvement. Chuck Norris of course is known for his right wing conservative christian politics as well as his involvement in several classic action films – notably the Missing in Action series. While wholesale slaughter seems to be fine with conservatives, blasphemy is not.

Before turning to politics Reagan was an actor, and while he mostly starred in b-comedies it seems fitting that the decade dominated by his policies would also see a great number of films espousing conservative ideals and myths. Some of them far to the right of even the most conservative Republican.

Let's take a look at the action films of the eighties, to which Expendables plays loving tribute. While the action film is as old as the Tinsel Town itself eighties action was unique in its portrayal of steroid enhanced muscle men fighting small wars single handedly, and espousing conservative values. We're talking Sylvester Stallone, Charles Bronson, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Chuck Norris of course -as well as Jean Claude VanDamme, Dolph Lundgren and many others. In order to understand the action film of the eighties we have to start about a decade earlier, with Clint Eastwood and his lauded interpretation of the role "Dirty" Harry Callahan in 1971 - a movie that spawned a handful of sequels and changed the face of action films forever.

The Cult of Personality: Charlie Sheen, Layne Staley, Tiger Blood In Our Veins

The past day I've been on a jag about reality art. Well, I've been on about it for a lot longer than that, but I've been tracking down a particular pattern the past few days. So check it out.

Maybe it began from working on Clark the past few months. The levels of fiction within reality within fiction with that project are getting downright absurd, to the point that I don't think I could coherently explain it. (Which is alright, since I haven't coherently explained anything since 95 when that kid gave me this tab of paper and asked me if I wanted to "take a ride." No clue how I would fit on a piece of paper that small but...)

Here's the second episode of Clark. There were 8 in season one so if you like it, watch the other ones before we revamp them in surround sound and work Jabba the hut into the background of every scene so we can say it was "DIGITALLY REMASTERED." Cause so far it wasn't "mastered" at all. (As Kool Keith sagely said, "I get real raw. Change arrangements on your face.")



But maybe it was also watching I'm Still Here. Maybe it was the realization I've had for years that there are layers within layers when it comes to persona, especially when it is embodied in media, and those that know how to dance between the layers are the real enigmas, manifesting the trickster archetype of our times. We think of Andy Kaufman. We think of Hunter S Thompson, or maybe Crispin Glover. Ego, in its classical rather than common sense, is more or less unchanging. The "feeling" of being me, the eye that perceives me, seems more or less the same now as it did back in 95. Persona, though? That's as mutable as the contexts we are immersed in. And media, like myth, adds halls of mirrors.

There are many other versions of these tragicomedies that are less self-apparent than Kauffman or Hunter. For instance, there was the seemingly sudden explosion of "grunge" music into the mainstream, an explosion which carried all of these misfit outsider artists into the limelight, so they could dance like puppets on David Letterman.  (Who has either been gaffed by almost every single trickster I mentioned above - for example - or who has secretly orchestrated quite a few reality-art pieces. I'm guessing the latter, either way it's the gap-toothed douchebag act that he pulls off so well whenever a guest does something unexpected that makes it work. "David Letterman, meet Clark!")

Grunge "Fashion"

It's not like they wore flannel originally to be stylish. It was cold, they were broke as fuck, and junk is expensive. The things that made grunge "cool" was how raw and outsider it was, though of course as usual the moment it became marketable, the end was nigh. It was surreal for me, even back in the 90s when I was a wee lad, I felt some kind of unease, an inkling of the surreal, seeing a heroin-infused, already nearly skeletal Layne Staley openly singing one of his suicide notes on MTV award shows and late night broadcast television. Kurt Cobain was the same story, and I'm not sure how different the core myth is from Janice, or Hendrix, or Morrison, or... So my thing is, when these guys are playing through networks of corporate shills, does no one listen to lyrics? Of course not, they know what they're into. I'm not saying that anyone could have gone out there and said, "So uh. Hey Layne...all this talk about blowing your brains out and shooting heroin, I guess you're not feeling so good, huh?" Or if they did, that it'd create his "come to Jesus moment." Like, "Wow! I guess you're right. I've been pretty depressed, huh? And you're all feeding off of it!"

No. No one is going to say that. And in a culture where we are spending billions on a war on drugs with one hand, with the other, we're shilling Junkhead which gets about as explicit as you possibly can. (Remember the days when Jim Morrison caused a stir by saying "higher" on the Ed Sullivan show? Me either.)

I mean, I'm all for legalizing many drugs for a variety of reasons, I'm just saying that our cultural hypocrocy is palapable. Always look to the bottom line. Who does the war on drugs benefit? And who does the idolization of outsider-drug-culture-rock-star myth benefit?

The so-called "majors" saw an opportunity to market to disaffected youth through the voices of some other disaffected youth, and fuck the body count. Which is the least of the issue in regard to corporate interest, as we've discussed on this blog many times before. I'm certainly not trying to moralize. It is only inevitable that some talented and some truly insane or tragically scarred individuals would try to play hopscotch into the public mind. For some of us, it might be our only ticket to a brief moment of "living the dream" before we've got to pay the toll. As I've said before, in the end the mob will only be satisfied to see your bloody sacrifice. But first, for a time, you can be King For A Day. You know the deal: today, virgins and feasts. All the kids can project their angst and suffering on you. Tomorrow, the volcano will have you, and they can grow up and get to work.
(Shortly after writing this, Alice In Chains bassist Mike Starr died.)



There's a train-wreck in effect right now that brings this to light. Yeah, you've probably heard about it.

Charlie Sheen's brilliantly insane rants on national TV are making Tom Cruise's couch hopping seem like light calisthenics, and Mel Gibson just seems like a bellicose retard by comparison. I normally could give a damn about pop or mainstream culture, and the tabloids are clearly bastions of high-order thinking, but I can't take my eyes off this particular train wreck, though it's not quite like rubbernecking at an accident.

No, it's simply because it is making me laugh so hard that I'm crying. Maybe I'm just a cruel hearted asshole, but the lines this guy is dropping are almost as good as the ones he's been snorting up his nose.

I always thought Charlie Sheen was a no-talent hack riding the coattails of his father, who is by all rights an incredibly talented - and multifaceted - actor. I honestly never gave him much thought. Now I'm beginning to wonder if he just missed his calling: he's been trying to do mainstream sit com schlock when he should be doing Gonzomentary improv. Finally he is heeding that creative calling, to be the jester-lunatic- now that he's got the platform to leverage. And watch us sacrifice him on the altar when his time comes. (Not that he's not sticking his own head on the block and screaming "DO IT!" Joaquin Phoenix or River Phoenix? We'll see...)