by Mark Bibbins, Editor

An Autopsy of an Era

That’s how it was then, a knife
through cartilage, a body broken. Animal
and animal as mineral ash. A window smashed.
The collective howl as a general alarm
followed by quiet.

Boot-black night,
halogen hum. Tape snaking through
a stealth machine. Later, shattered glass
and a checkpoint charm — the clasp
of a tourist-trap bracelet. An arm. A trinket.

Snap goes the clamshell. The film
in the braincase preserving the sense
of the drench, the angle of the leash,
the connecting collar. A tracking long-shot.
The descent of small-town darkness.

The Numbers

I’m making a strudel of bluebirds.
A pied piper is playing a strange song
to the sound of a shredder that’s going non-stop,
each ordinal number is isolated, each receipt
gets eaten. Each is made safe.
The dish is hot from the oven.
The mesmerizing sound lulls like a candle
on a table makes a mirror of the eye.
A knife draws a line down the center.
This is mine. This is yours.
There is no way out.
Every language gets speckled with references
to what it is to be after: shredded,
sleeping — eyes closed, home-schooled
to ignore what you don’t want to see.
Now, down the disposal the feathers,
the unfed, the crust crumbs,
the monogrammed small plates stamped I
for Idiocy. Mine and yours.
After the fall of the wall I felt anything
was possible. History would no longer exist.

The mic goes out.
The sound softens.
The books burn down to embers, then ash.
The fever hospital closes for lack
of a solution to the seven deadly sins: betrayal
for one, intolerance for two,
greed for three, cruelty for four, large cars
for five, war for six. Suicide for seven
when it kills more than one.

Mary Jo Bang is the author of six books of poems including Elegy, which won the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award, and The Bride of E (2009). She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis. Her translation of Dante’s Inferno, with illustrations by Henrik Drescher, will be published by Graywolf Press in 2012.

You may contact the editor of The Poetry Section at poems@theawl.com.

Would you like to read more? Visit our vast archive of poetry!

“Has there been any indication that Barack Obama does not believe in the ‘old-fashioned bourgeois virtues?’ Has the man been anything but bourgeois to a fault? Has he not believed in ‘order’ so deeply he’s sacrificed his presidency to its maintenance? Has he not been so ‘self-disciplined’ that he’s regularly accused of being robotic? Let’s leave aside the inflammatory rhetoric of ‘personal responsibility’: Has Barack Obama ever been accused of being late? And if not, where the hell does ‘punctuality’ come from?”
 — Yowch. The Times David Brooks gets severely beaten down for writing a sentence that is “either frankly racist or frankly forgiving of racism.”

In the almost unbearable breadth of its offerings on the subjects of napping puppies, curious baby sloths and farting iguanas, YouTube is something more than a miracle — the vast triviality of all those acres of lush, stunning webshit is too wicked, too beautiful to have originated upstairs. There’s a kind of freaky groupthink to the YouTube-memes that boil up, tornado-like, from YouTube’s flat and desolate interior, but there’s something great about those, too, and compromises are to be expected when you’re talking about something that functions as an illustrated psychic septic system for the entire Internet. The comments section — home to the most dead-certain and dread-inducing almost-humans ever to pass judgment on whether or not a 30-second video is or isn’t “a gay retard” — is a Category Five barfstorm more or less without exception, of course, and most of what’s there to see on the site is astonishingly useless. But when it comes to YouTube’s basement, or the part of it right above phone-cammed high school fights and Four Loko chug-vids, you have to turn to the first-person webcam stuff.

I’ve watched literal hours of YouTube footage on beavers — they’re very industrious and forward-thinking; I find them admirable — but I can’t watch more than 30-odd seconds of the direct-to-camera videos that make up somewhere between 30 and 140 percent of YouTube’s content. One in particular is on my mind as I sit down to write this, although I’ve blocked a lot of it from my memory. Still, I remember mirthless, mocking, painfully fake laughter — it was the first thing the guy did. I remember a big face, smooth and smirking and mortadella-pink and belonging to a pudgy somebody between the ages of 15 and 40, and then it rocks back in some sick desk chair and this mocking laughter comes out of it. I remember, I think, a Jason Witten jersey. There was definitely a Cowboys hat. And this was, definitely — so very definitely — a Cowboys fan. And since he was laughing at everyone watching his video — the first thing he did was lord some weird thing over his audience! — we can figure that it was probably Week 4, some years ago. It’s hard to say when, but it’s also not important.

It’s not important because it could’ve been recorded at any time during the eight or so years, but also because its awfulness was so fearsomely perfect and totally terrible and timeless and transcendent and if you are not there with me yet I should say that I fucking hate it, and hate that it’s in my head. But there, behind my eyelids and staring into a webcam in some wall-to-walled bedroom — fully dipped in logo wear like a sixth grader on the Friday before a big game, pink and hammish and gutting out that painfully fake laugh — is pretty much the ur-Cowboy Fan. The alpha and the omega of the NFL’s least-loved fan base, but also just some goony butthead — I am not using that colloquially, he looked like a giant pink butt-cheek — chuckling into a webcam over a victory that no one remembers and that, as near as I could tell, didn’t even seem to please him that much. I want to find this video and plug it in. But I also really do not. Anyway, it’s not really necessary that you see it. If you follow the NFL, you already know what this person looks like — you may have another face or painful laugh in your mind, but you have one. And if you don’t follow the NFL, you’ve seen this guy, too — on CNN or at work or ruining your happy hour from down the bar. You know this person, and I highly doubt that you like him very much. He’s a Cowboys fan, and he’s a specific and recognizable kind of American male, and wow do you ever not want to talk to this guy — he’s got wing breath like whoa, for one thing, and there is a bottomless sinkhole of self-doubt and fear underneath all that loud-voiced braggadocio. Do not let him get drunk.

I don’t know that there’s any way to prove that Cowboys fans are America’s most disliked sports fans. They may not even be the most unpopular NFL fans — Jets fans can be almost impossibly loutish, Eagles fans will straight-up vomit at you if they think you’re within range, and Raiders fans dress like they’re in Gwar, are almost certainly concealing some sort of homemade sword. What sets Cowboys fans apart, at least in my imagination, is also what makes that man-tadella in the YouTube video so tough to take — a sense that, somewhere along the line, the fan existence on display there is somehow both more loathsomely needy and less pleasurable than the usual sports-fan transference transaction. That awful, awful chuckling — an unmistakable attempt at gloaty laughing-at — is tough to take not just because that’s kind of a dick way to start a communication, but because it feels so brittle and false and desperate. It’d be poignant if it weren’t for, you know, everything I just described above.

The Cowboys have one win in six games, and will play much of the rest of the season without quarterback Tony Romo, who broke his collarbone against the Giants on Monday Night. They’re among the top teams in the NFL in offense (fifth in total offense) and defense (10th in yards-allowed), and have suffered some terrible luck thus far and are one of a few NFL teams — the Chargers, who are 2–5 and rank first in the NFL in both categories, jump out as another — currently far underperforming their actual, um, performance. The Cowboys roster is as talented as ever, and the players on it as implausibly, brayingly brash as if they were cruising towards an undefeated season. There might be something affecting about this particular bit of deluded athlete vainglory, if it weren’t manifesting in confused bluster from the same guys who author elaborate on-field celebrations after making middling plays in lopsided losses. The sort of pump-it-up-when-you-don’t-even-mean-it defiance that can look almost admirable when it’s coming from a hopeless case like the Buffalo Bills.

But it’s Dallas, and it’s the Cowboys, and so it’s different. Head coach Wade Phillips, who resembles a cheerful old baby when the team is going well and appears to be a nice enough man, looks heartsick at his press conferences. The team is now and for the near future in the hands of affable, ridiculous backup quarterback Jon Kitna, a confident, born-again 38-year-old pick-chucker who has claimed to have concussions healed instantaneously by divine intervention and who has the tiny, depthless eyes of a stuffed animal. Columnists are calling for mass firings, which of course is what columnists do. The team can’t win at its billion-dollar home stadium, which more and more has the feel of a haunted space casino by the end of games. It’s not a good scene, in short.

The Cowboys are talented enough — and Phillips’s interesting defensive scheming protean and creative enough — to be fun to watch when everything’s working right, but the team is fundamentally a preening, steroidal bully with a weak chin. That the team hasn’t been a serious postseason threat since Jimmy Johnson and Barry Switzer presided over rosters that, if Jeff Pearlman’s book on the Cowboys 1990s dynasty is to be believed, were essentially unusually violent years-long episodes of “Oz” barely matters, really. It certainly doesn’t matter to me, and it seems not to have punctured the grandiosity of a fan base that has apparently modeled itself on Jones, a noxious oilman whose self-importance astounds even by noxious-oilman standards. Thus the more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger fan-tweets announcing that BoysFan17 has come to the regrettable conclusion that Coach Phillips “must step down.” Thus Jones’s peremptory, dead-serious quotes to the media refusing to comment further on the team’s future plans, delivered with the solemnity and don’t-have-time-for-this peevishness of a prosecutor at a war crimes tribunal.

But while there’s something bleakly comic about the fact that the Cowboys and their fans are the last ones to get this particular joke, there’s something more deeply bleak about it all that casts a faint chill over even those of us who enjoy a good Cowboys loss. Propelled by inherited and incautiously worn pride, heroically misplaced priorities and an inability or unwillingness to look themselves in the eye, the Cowboys and their more stereotypical fans have found themselves in a position that’s uncomfortably familiar to anyone paying attention to things other than YouTube in 2010. That is: bellies full, pockets flush, but somehow and suddenly also profoundly, painfully powerless to do anything about anything, and unwilling or unable to admit that anything’s amiss. As their on-paper mastery leads to defeat after defeat, as their owner rattles vainly around his personal monument to phallocratic plu-Texan excess — the new Cowboys Stadium cost $1.2 billion, roughly $325 million of it public funds; a Cowboys Stadium pizza costs $60 — and as the team continues to rejoice in its confounding and stubborn mediocrity, the Cowboys start to look a lot like… well, America’s Team. But America circa-now, the hacked-off and incoherent and aggrieved-to-the-bone America that rages its willfully un-understood impotence from every screen, everywhere. It’s not anything worth laughing at, really, but it does at least give a sense of why that man-ham’s YouTube chuckles rang so sickly false. He’s not in on the joke, but he’s not unaware of it.

And the picks… it’d be funny if after all that I picked the Cowboys to win, I guess. I think they will win, actually, but I don’t see Jon Kitna quarterbacking any team to a comfortable win over any other team. Dude’s like Brett Favre, with the stubbly vanity replaced by devout, clean-shaven self-belief and the interceptions doubled in frequency and intensity. I had a good week last week, but am notably less confident about this week’s picks. It’s been two weeks since I really watched a game, so I’m picking on my own crummy instincts at this point. As ever, the coin flips are by Garey G. Ris, and the lines are by Sportsbook.com.

Week 7 (And Overall): David Roth: 10–4 (46–52–6); Al Toonie The Lucky Canadian Two-Dollar Coin: 7–7 (46–51–5)

Sunday, October 31
• Washington at Detroit (-2.5), 1:00 pm — DR: Washington; ATTLCTDC: Detroit
• Buffalo at Kansas City (-7.5), 1:00 pm — DR: Buffalo; ATTLCTDC: Buffalo
• Denver at San Francisco (-1), 1:00 pm — DR: Denver; ATTLCTDC: Denver
• Miami at Cincinnati (-1.5), 1:00 pm — DR: Miami; ATTLCTDC: Miami
• Green Bay at New York Jets (-6), 1:00 pm — DR: New Jersey J;ATTLCTDC: Green Bay
• Carolina at St. Louis (-3), 1:00 pm — DR: St. Louis; ATTLCTDC: St. Louis
• Jacksonville at Dallas (-6.5), 1:00 pm — DR: Jacksonville; ATTLCTDC: Dallas
• Tennessee at San Diego (-3.5), 4:05pm — DR: Tennessee; ATTLCTDC: San Diego
• Tampa Bay at Arizona (-3), 4:15 pm — DR: Tampa Bay; ATTLCTDC: Arizona
• Minnesota at New England (-6), 4:15 pm — DR: New England; ATTLCTDC: New England
• Seattle at Oakland (-2.5), 4:15 pm — DR: Oakland; ATTLCTDC: Seattle
• Pittsburgh at New Orleans (PICK), 8:20 pm — Weird note on this one: for the picks we do at the Wall Street Journal’s Daily Fix page, my co-writer and I put our predictions up against something called AccuScore, which simulates each game 10,000 times and projects a score. AccuScore has this game ending in a 23.6 to 23.6 tie. DR: Pittsburgh; ATTLCTDC: New Orleans

Monday, November 1
• Houston at Indianapolis (-5.5), 8:30 pm — DR: Indianapolis; ATTLCTDC: Houston

David Roth co-writes the Wall Street Journal’s Daily Fix, contributes to the sports blog Can’t Stop the Bleeding and has his own little website. And he tweets!

Photo by suzismini, from Flickr.

“I didn’t ask Kendrick to leave the race, nor did Kendrick say that he would,” is the statement just sent out by Bill Clinton’s press office. For those not playing along, he means Kendrick Meek, the Democratic Senate candidate in Florida, who’s not winning against an Independent (Charlie Crist) and a Tea Party candidate running as a Republican (Marco Rubio). He does know that this was in the Times today, I assume: “Matt McKenna, Mr. Clinton’s spokesman, said the former president had concluded that Mr. Meek’s candidacy was struggling and was urging him to drop out and endorse Charlie Crist.”

Egos, Eggheads and Erections in the Steel Cage of American Politics: A History of the Celebrity Candidate

by Mike Edison

I want to be President of the United States. In fact I have already written my acceptance speech. The first thing I’ll be doing is announcing that I am bringing back Prohibition.

After I’ve had my little joke, I’ll let everyone know what I actually plan to do is legalize all drugs, nationalize the brothels and mandate a life-sentence for any captain of industry who is complicit in polluting the planet. Yeah, I’m a one-term kind of guy. But it’s not my time. Not yet.

This year brings us the usual Fall harvest of liars, cheats and whores, plus an over-hyped bumper crop of creationist kooks, gay-bashers, progressive paranoiacs, fear-mongers and reality-stars-in-training. But what we seem to be missing is that rarified strain of political beast: the candidate that was famous before he or she ran for office.

So today, instead of piling on the anti-auto-eroticist, the wrestling promoter and the facial-hair fiasco, I thought I would rock and regale you with bedtime stories of the heroes and villains of yesteryear, the bright lights who have all done their part to make America the whoopee cushion of global politics.

Actors are egomaniacs, so I guess it isn’t surprising that so many of them have had the calling to serve: Clint Eastwood became mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea, the dude from the “Love Boat” became a US congressman.

As you well know, early leading the pack of bad actors turned politicians is President Ronald Reagan, previously famous for co-starring with Bonzo the Chimp. But you have got to hand it to incomprehensible strongman Arnold Schwarzenegger for proving once and for all that you can never underestimate the stupidity of the American public. What qualifications did he have? He was Reagan’s hand-picked something or other in charge of physical education, and even then you knew he was a pig, a juiced-up, stoned, ass-grabbing ape.

Oddly, Arnold’s alien-hunts-humans-in-the-jungle opus Predator launched the political campaigns of two other thespians. Pro-wrestler Jesse Ventura became a credit to grapplers everywhere when he became the Governor of Minnesota, running on the remains of Ross Perot’s Reform Party and, and among other libertarian follies, advocating the legalization of prostitution. (It should be noted here that Minnesotans are not without a sense of humor — in 2008, after a contentious Gore v. Bush recount and court battle, former “Saturday Night Live” funnyman Al Franken became anointed as their new bleeding heart US Senator.)

The lesser-known Sonny Landham, who played Billy in Predator, spent 31 months in a federal pen for making threatening calls to his ex-wife, a conviction that was eventually overturned on appeal. He ran for Governor of Kentucky in the Republican Party in 2003, railing against the Kentucky Family Court, convinced that it was run for the benefit of lawyers rather than families or children, and demanding mandatory sentences for men or women who bring false charges against their spouses. His political ambition was monkey-wrenched when it was revealed that he had a brief career as a porn star in the 1970s (who could forget Hot Shots?).

And then there was tough guy Tom Laughlin, famous for playing Billy Jack, the Native American kung-fu master who battled bikers on the big screen in drive-in classics like Born Losers, but who was ultimately best captured in the Mad Magazine satire (“Billy Jock”) where everyone fell asleep waiting for him to get angry enough to fight. He ran for President as both a Democrat (1992) and a Republican (2004), never making much of a showing in the one or two primaries for which he qualified.

Comedian Pat Paulsen, formerly a star on the “Smother Brothers Comedy Hour,” ran for President six times beginning in 1968, mostly based on lame jokes and double-talk.
“I’ve upped my standards,” he declared: “Now, up yours.” In 1996 he finished second in the New Hampshire primary. He collected 921 votes — bested only by the winner, Bill Clinton, who pulled in 76,754. Paulsen died in 1997, but according to his website, he ran again in 2008. His son, Monty, has announced he’ll be seeking the Oval Office in 2012.

Comedian and actor Al Lewis, best known for playing batty old vampire Grandpa on the Munsters, and by far the most charming of this lot, ran a great campaign for governor of New York at the age of 88. He had a long history of political protests, beginnging at age 17 in 1927 (!!!), working against the convictions of Sacco and Venzetti, the Italian immigrants framed for murder. Later he joined anti-war rallies, and marched for Bobby Seale and the Black Panthers. Though he described himself as an anarchist, he was the Green Party’s candidate in 1998 (against the wishes of some upstate party members who said he was “too Jewish”), espousing a pro-marijuana agenda and insisting that he be listed on the ballot as “Grandpa Al Lewis,” arguing that this was how his future constituents knew him. His request was handed back to him by the Board of Elections. Despite this scoffing setback, his total of 52,533 votes topped the number needed to secure a place on the ballot (50,000), besting left-wing wonk Ralph Nader’s previous effort for the Greens, and hence guaranteeing the Party an automatic ballot line for the next four years.

Jerry Springer is the oddball of this group, and probably the only true visionary, moving in the opposite direction, from politics to in-your-face fame: He was the mayor of Cleveland, the thirty-third biggest city in the United States, and rose to become the standard bearer for sleazoid television. And why not? Sex and politics go together like soup and a sandwich. When Bill and Hillary first came to office there was a feeling of Hey, finally a first couple that actually still had sex. Not with each other, but at least they were both interested in women. (OK, that was a cheap shot — everyone knows Hillary is way too uptight to be gay.)

But no matter what strange bedfellows it makes, politics is ultimately a cocksucking business, so it is no surprise when professionals get in the ring. To wit, porn star Mary Carey, the fetching ingenue and star of Filthy Whore and Lesbian Big Boob Bangaroo II, who ran in the 2003 California gubernatorial rat race, which started with a recall, and eventually delivered the Terminator to high office. Unfortunately, past the It-Gets-Weirder-Every-Day news flashes she enjoyed at first, no one gave a good goddam, even in a state known for its loosey-goosy value system and flagging moral inventory. Still, she placed tenth in a field of 135, right behind child-star-turned-satire candidate Gary Coleman, who collected 14,242 votes, not a bad showing for a D-list reality show wannabe who wasn’t tall enough to ride Space Mountain (rest his soul), and Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt, who scored 17,458 votes — representing a less-than-rousing one-half of one percent of all ballots cast.

To see porno-turned-politics on a truly professional level, we need to travel all the way to Italy and the insatiable Cicciolina, who won a seat in the Italian Parliament in 1987, and would continue to make hardcore porn films while in office. In 1990, during the build-up to the first Gulf War, she selflessly offered to “make love with Saddam Hussein to achieve peace in the Middle East.”

Incidentally, Mary Carey ran for Governor again in 2006, announcing her candidacy soon after acquiring brand new teeth and super-deluxe breast implants. She dropped out early to take care of her mother, who had attempted suicide by jumping off a building, but she still harbors political ambitions and hopes to be President one day. Which is, as stated ever–so-coyly by Wikipedia, “contingent upon her reaching the age of 35, the minimum age requirement for United States presidents.” She’ll turn that trick in 2015.

Thanks to a slew of late-inning snoozers, Norman Mailer’s literary legacy is still swinging in the balance, but in 1969 he was in top form, and probably the smartest man ever to run for mayor of New York, on a double-bill with Jimmy Breslin, who was running for President of the City Council. It was an odd pairing, considering Mailers’s hyper-intellectual proclivity for scrawling two-page paragraphs of spectacular, pyrotechnic but ultimately confusing prose, and Breslin, an old school, round-heeled city beat journalist, probably the best newspaperman in the history of New York City and therefore the world, who could find a story just walking down the street, and whose style was model of brevity and quickness, all lightning jabs before the knock-out punch. On a good day Breslin could make Hemingway’s most-pugilistic efforts seem like a Yes concert.

That was a classic New York City story of blue-collar angst colliding with left-wing idealism, but their campaign, fueled by booze and anger, was fatally marred by infighting and the weight of Mailer’s humongous ego. In the end, their admirable “No More Bullshit” platform — unfortunately unprintable in the newspapers that covered the election — earned them no more than a sliver of the vote.

Better than these two, though, I’d have to rate Hunter Thompson’s campaign for Sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado, as the best-ever journalist-on-the-ballot bid. Demanding decriminalization of drugs and the re-naming of Aspen to “Fat City” to deter investors, Thompson shaved his head and began calling the crew-cut wearing Republican running against him “my long-haired opponent.” He lost by a narrow margin. One can only dream of the ripple effect “Sheriff Hunter Thompson” would have had on law enforcement everywhere.

Off the top of my head, I can think of almost as many politicians who play instruments with TV talk show bands as part of a “See, I Can Have Fun, Too” strategy as I can musical fops who pose as political provocateurs. Who can forget Bill Clinton’s ape-like Blues Brothers routine, performed for toothy talk show host Arsenio Hall, who shucked and jived along with the future prez as if he were the reincarnation of Big Jay McNeely?But at least Bill was a populist Southern Democrat, a white politician who was a friend to black Americans, and deserved some respect — if not for his thoroughly mediocre sax playing, then for his big-tent politics.

More recently we’ve had to endure bass-thumping Right-to-Lifer, former preacher Mike Huckabee, who is, honestly (just watch the tapes), a far more competent musician than the aforementioned 60s leftovers. But what I want to know is: What the fuck was he doing on Leno, sitting in like he was mutherhumping Duck Dunn? Huckabee hates women, hates gays, hates minorities, represents a group that has come down on the wrong side of every single shred of civil rights legislation since Lincoln freed the slaves, and yet there was Kevin Eubanks, guitar player and leader of the Tonight Show band, highly regarded in the African-American community as a purveyor of smooth-jazz and all that is urban and hip, gleefully playing along and high-fiving the fuck-faced Huckabee. In other words, Uncle Tomming it for Boss Leno and the NBC suits. Guilty by association is the rest of the band who shilled for this douchebag.

John Kerry also plays guitar and was once in a band, but nobody cared.

Generally speaking, beyond the blather, musicians don’t run for office, but there are a few exceptions. Sonny Bono (not to be confused with the other, sillier Bono, who has bigger world-saving ambitions), had a career as a US congressman from California which came to a sudden halt when he skied face-first into a tree, taking to the grave forever the answer to the musical question: How come a guy who used to wear tie-die and fringe and make hippy-dippy pop music — and presumably equally sticky love to Cher, the dyslexic daughter of an Armenian refugee and a Cherokee Indian — turned into a raging Republican?

Kinky Friedman’s run for George Bush’s old stomping ground, the Texas governor’s office, seemed to have legs, at least for a little while, running on the slogan “How Hard Could It Be?” But he came out fourth place in a crowd of six.

The most entertaining of them all was former Dead Kennedy’s frontman Jello Biafra, who ran for mayor of San Francisco in 1979, finishing a close fourth behind Sister Boom Boom, the drag queen nun. Part of his new-world utopia would have required businessmen to wear clown suits to work. Twenty-one years later, a jury found him liable for fraud and malice and ordered him to pay $200,000 in overdue royalties to his former bandmates. Inexplicably, donning a clown suit was not part of the settlement.

And then there were the animals. Mickey Mouse has always faired well, most recently receiving 400 write-in votes in Florida in the 2004 election, making him complicit in stealing the White House from Al Gore. Marvel Comics anti-hero Howard the Duck’s ’76 bid was a classic. But the star of this menagerie was clearly Pigasus, a cute pink porker whom the Yippies ran for president in 1968. His candidacy came to an abrupt end when he was arrested protesting the Democratic National convention in Chicago that year. (Seriously, they arrested a pig, you can look it up.) Admittedly, Pigasus was an unknown, but one can only ponder the tidal flood of voters a superstar like Arnold Ziffle could have oinked and snorted into the ballot box.

Mike Edison is the former publisher of High Times, the former editor-in-chief of Screw magazine, and a professional wrestler of no small repute. He is the author of 28 pornographic novels and the outrageous memoir I Have Fun Everywhere I Go — Savage Tales of Pot, Porn, Punk Rock, Pro Wrestling, Talking Apes, Evil Bosses, Dirty Blues, American Heroes, and the Most Notorious Magazines in the World.

Here is everything you need to know about what this day is like.

A man who indecently exposed himself to a woman ended up being bitten by her dog. The victim, aged in her 60s, was walking her pet in Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucestershire, when she was approached by the flasher. A police spokesman said the man exposed himself and the terrier growled.

Okay, great, right? “Dog Devours Dong.” “Terrier Tears Todger.” “Canine Chomps Cock.” All easy enough, right? Except NO, the dog had to go and bite the guy on the fucking arm. What can I do with that? NOTHING. There’s a saying in blogland, “If it don’t penis bleed, it don’t penis lead.” I mean, it’s barely even a one-liner this way. What the hell is going on out there? I am so ready for the weekend it is, like this post, not even funny. Grrrr.

I guess it doesn’t “get better” for Christine O’Donnell after high school, eh Dan Savage?

by Sean McTiernan

Horror movies are rarely beautiful. The gore can be impressive, the atmosphere can be expertly created, the cinematography but the movies are rarely allowed to be beautiful. Dust Devil is beautiful. And not just because they shot it in a desert. It’s a great piece of horror, a great western and a great piece of cinematic achievement all at once. Not bad for a demon in a cowboy hat.

Look no further than the opening scene. It manages to set up the movie both expressively and economically, in a fashion reminiscent of noir classic Murder By Contract. A woman is driving in the South African desert. She picks up a mysterious hitchhiker. She brings him back to her house. As they are having sex, he snaps her neck. The next morning we see the murder was only the beginning. The stranger has covered the house in occult symbols painted with the woman’s blood and viciously disfigured her corpse. Then he calmly drives away as the camera pulls back revealing the house in flames. He’s done this before.

Dust Devil is the story of a demon who wanders the South African bush, finding miserable people on the verge of the abyss and delivering them the ecstasy of being pushed in. It is also about the man who pursues him. All of this happens in a way that is so ethereal and strange you’ll swear you’ve dreamt it.

There is a lot going on in this movie. Some have said there is, in fact, a little too much going on. And to be fair, the movie does seem to be undecided as to whether it’s a commentary on South African politics, a meditation on despair or an exploration of spirituality. This makes it sound like a thematic car crash of Southland Tales proportion. It’s not. Because of its mesmeric, hypnotic pacing and aesthetic, these elements play off each other. Though war is mentioned throughout the film, it is never an overtly political movie. The emphasis is always on the misery of conflict.

Dust Devil initially seems completely random and more concerned with delivering a mood than a cogent story. Then the third act comes and everything, everything that seemed insignificant or even like filler, starts paying off. Not only does the film have its own logic, the logic works. It’s a movie that you want to watch several times. Fortunately, it’s a movie that is also a pleasure to watch.

The Dust Devil himself is enigmatic character. He’s not a lovable pun-merchant or a faceless, violent shape. When he first appears, you have the sinking feeling he’s going to be a wise-cracking cowboy. He’s not. He just kills miserable people and acts appropriately. He’s a frighteningly bullish and efficient killer and exudes a palpable sense of danger. The sinister calm with which he approaches his vocation is almost Beiber-like in its inhuman creepiness. His savagery is uncompromising.

If Dust Devil were a song, it’d be “Mind Playing Tricks On Me” by the Geto Boys. Both are understated, beautiful meditations on loneliness which use pure brutality and gallows humor to make their point heard. Both exist in genres rarely taken seriously but neither could be bested by any so-called “great works” in their efforts to convey the sad, soul-emptying sensation of being in a environment of violence and risk. And both give you exactly the amount of space you need to pour yourself into them and feel the same sort of creeping dread the as their characters.

This is the last fictional movie director Richard Stanley made. Between this and Hardware, he has created a cinematic legacy far greater than many who have had more chances to be bold and make a mark. Although the 17 year gap makes it seem unlikely, let’s hope he does get the opportunity to make another feature. Movies as rare, blood-thirsty and beautiful as Hardware and Dust Devil are in short supply.

Sean McTiernan has a blog and a Twitter. So does everyone though. He also has a podcast on which he has a nervous breakdown once an episode, minimum. In other words: it’s great for the gym.

AP BREAKING: Official says US investigating whether suspicious packages were dry run for mail bomb plot.Fri Oct 29 16:55:21 via TweetDeck

Michael van Poppel
mpoppel

One juror doesn’t think so, though eleven did, and so there will be a retrial in the case “of a teen hustler charged with fatally stabbing WABC newsman George Weber in an S&M; hookup gone bad.” (via)