How & Where & By Means of What Footwear I Lost My Virginity on August 20, 1985

PART ONE

I was fat. Ed was ugly. Chuck was handsome and charming and rich.

The three of us acted as a tight trio at Xavier High School in Manhattan and at home in Brooklyn and, during the summers of 1984 and 85, on the bonny, bonny banks of Lake Mohawk in bucolic Sparta, New Jersey, where Chuck’s family owned a beautiful Swiss Chalet summer home.

And there was a girl there in Sparta who we called Madonna Boots.

When we met this young lady, though, nobody knew her as Madonna Boots. Her proper moniker was Melissa. Or close enough.

It was the swelter season of 1984, and we were in the thick of one of those once-an-adolescence (if you’re lucky) pop radio motherlodes that included “Sister Christian”, the theme from Ghostbusters, “Oh, Sherry” by Steve Perry, seemingly endless hit singles from The Cars’ Heartbeat City, Van Halen’s 1984, ZZ Top’s Eliminator, and Sports by Huey Lewis & the News, along with “When Doves Cry” by Prince getting played on album-rock FM stations.

“Borderline” by Madonna was everywhere, too, coming out of car radios and in stores and - much to the chafing endangerment of my dink - on video.

Amidst that soundtrack, Ed, Chuck and I first met Melissa while we were patrolling Lake Mohawk on Chuck’s zippy little speedboat.

She was driving her own boat and she was blonde and chirpy and 5-foot-3 or however tall it is girls in magazines and billboards and on TV are, and she weighed 100 pounds or whatever it is those same girls weigh, and she radiated something like I had only ever soaked up from movies where jocks and nerds spy on such creatures through shower-room peepholes.

So as this vision puttered up alongside us, Chuck, the only one capable (i.e.-worthy) of such forwardness, busted some form of move.

“Nice boat,” I think he said.

That did the trick. Melissa anchored and joined us on board.

We listened to the radio and cracked wise for a bit, and we revealed that we went to school in “The City” and she revealed that she was a cheerleader and she said we should hang out, and over the next series of weekends, we did.

Plus we were boys and she was a girl and, thus, romance, or some hormonal approximation of it, immediately simmered.

Not, of course, for Fat Me or Ugly Ed, though.

No, as is way of the Lord, the blonde cheerleader from the affluent suburbs did what came naturally and took up with the member of our troop who sported a Ralph Lauren wardrobe and a fancy waterfront getaway and an identifiably human physique.

And she fucked him. For real. A few weeks later. Right there on the bonny, bonny banks of Lake Mohawk.

That Big Event was Chuck’s first time and Melissa’s fifteenth or ninety-third or seven-hundredth or who-could-possibly-know-however-many (and that included Melissa herself).

Chuck and Melissa did date a bit, per se, but not for long.

What mattered to us was that Chuck got what Ed and I, frothing with vicarious lust, pressured him to, and Melissa got a fresh dose of feeling accomplished in the manner to which she had become prolifically accustomed.

Indeed, Sparta, New Jersey’s premier pom-pom purveyor relished her peripatetic sexual derring-do, and she really, really wanted to make sure you knew all about it.

Melissa also boasted about doing a stretch in a psychiatric facility.

Invariably, Melissa would start talking about her nut-hut stay - and the behavior that, presumably, prompted it - in sober-faced, confessional tones.

But each description rapidly escalated into off-the-rails giddiness and defiant bragging, as though she were saying: “I got caught messing with guys on campus three times last year, and then I got down to eighty pounds and then they took my shoelaces from me in the hospital, and what have you ever done, HUH?”

Some would deem this particularly female strain of adolescent mental illness.

I saw it as my “in.”

On one level, I wanted to know more about how Melissa had obtained help with her head.

I’d been itching to see a psychiatrist at least since Annie Hall aired uncut on ABC in 1978, and certainly since I’d fashioned a noose in the family garage and stood on a ladder with it secured around my neck as a means of relaxing when I was 11.

Truly driving me, though, was what I avoided catching sight of in the shower — an eighth-of-a-ton of hanging blubber slopped onto a weakling frame that was coated with cystic acne, highlighted by free-clinic wire-frame eyewear that crawled with green fungus as a result of resting on my oil-gushing, oversized face-fat.

“What I need,” I once told a friend, “is a girl who’s been blind since birth and has no feeling in her hands, arms, face or midsection. And maybe deaf, too, because I always say stuff that chicks hate.”

In lieu of hunting down any such Juanita-Got-Her-Gun-type, I took a crack at pressing the flesh once with the single looniest individual I’d ever met—in a lifetime, even then, of meeting loony individuals.

Writing was the only thing I was any good at, and I carried on all sorts of letter correspondences with friends and relatives and Howard Stern tape-traders, and even my buddy Mark’s mother, who was really into horror movies.

With this in mind, I scribbled Melissa’s address down and embarked on a bombastic mail campaign to win her scrambled head and polluted heart.

In dispatch after dispatch, I employed loopy language and obscure cultural references and I pondered politics, believing that this would dazzle my intended. And it did, I think.

The first time Melissa wrote back, the envelope included the stick from a Blow-Pop she’d eaten. I didn’t remove that thing from mouth until it simply dissolved and then I just swallowed.

Aside from scrawling countless pages on countless yellow pads (my preferred medium), I was also a big-time practitioner of the lost art of letters-on-tape.

It was a common practice once, wherein you’d talk into a recorder and then mail the cassette to somebody who’d return the gesture.

My taped missives were major undertakings, however, that included sound effects, movie clips, and original comedy bits.

The first tape-letter I sent to Melissa included news about school, a riff on how much I hated the TV show The Facts of Life but how I’d seen every single episode ever broadcast, and some musical selections.

My opening song choice was, cannily, “The Final Cut” by Pink Floyd, which still never now fails to make me wince:

“There’s a kid who had a big hallucination
Making love to girls in magazines
He wonders if you’re sleeping with your newfound faith
Could anybody love him
Or is it just a crazy dream”

Believing those words would be too subtle for Melissa, I bolstered the song’s pleas with the most ragingly controversial practice of the high PMRC-era: subliminal messaging.

Unlike Pink Floyd (again) on The Wall or accused abusers Judas Priest on Stained Class or whoever the mad genius was on the Mr. Ed theme (which, when spun in reverse, plainly states, “Someone sang a song for Satan” and “The source is the devil”) backward-masking proved beyond my lo-fi capabilities.

My solution, then, when I transferred “The Final Cut” onto cassette, was to simultaneously whisper the communiqués I wanted to implant in Melissa’s mind into a microphone so that they’d be barely audible, but still there.

This is what I said:

“I want to have sex with Mike McPadden … I want to have sex with Mike McPadden … I want to have sex with Mike McPadden … I want to have sex with Mike McPadden ….”

Over and over, I chanted that suggestion in a murmur for the duration of the song.

Left at that, such desperation comes off as kind of charming, but subsequent tapes included tunes laced with messages that don’t make me giggle upon reflection. Among them:

“I will go back to the hospital if I don’t have sex with Mike McPadden … I will go back to the hospital if I don’t have sex with Mike McPadden … I will go back to the hospital if I don’t have sex with Mike McPadden ….”

And:

“My beloved sister Ingrid will die if I don’t have sex with Mike McPadden … My beloved sister Ingrid will die if I don’t have sex with Mike McPadden … My beloved sister Ingrid will die if I don’t have sex with Mike McPadden … .”

Proud I may not be of this, but let me assure you that the subliminal-message concerns of Tipper Gore and company may well not have stemmed from nowhere.

My letters and tapes to Melissa eventually gave way to telephone chats (made by me from a pizzeria phone booth using a credit card number pilfered by Ed from somebody’s parents who’d left it out — teenagers, ain’t they just the best?). And, in time, talk turned in the direction toward which I’d been power-steering.

“I thought of you the other day,” Melissa told me. “We were watching that movie Revenge of the Nerds, and that part where the cheerleader has sex with the nerd and it’s really good, and he says that’s because nerds think about sex all the time and jocks just think about sports and so that’s why nerds are better at sex - that made me think, ‘That’s like Mike!’”

“Yes,” I said, “that’s true. Everything in Revenge of the Nerds is true.”

“And Booger reminded me of you, too,” she added.

This sent my ego through the roof of Sal’s Pizza. Booger, as played by Curtis Armstrong, is an unwashed, beer-swilling, slob - but NOT FAT!

The wedge was in place. Clearly. Now I had to get it out of my pants and into Melissa’s.

**************************

The summer of 1985 opened on two significant personal notes. It was the first time in three years that I wasn’t sentenced to summer school (due, mostly, to how easy it had been to cheat in eleventh-grade math). It also marked my introduction to gainful employment.

Courtesy of somebody’s cousin’s Irish-American organized-crime connections, I’d been hired to run elevators in a luxury apartment complex on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

What a gig that turned out to be.

After a two-hour commute from Flatbush, I manned my car from four in the afternoon until midnight. The only free time was a half-hour meal break at 5:30.

It was strictly verboten to sit, read, listen to music, or engage one’s passengers in conversation.

My days off were Tuesday and Wednesday. Sorry, but it was pretty tough to work for that particular weekend, Loverboy.

One thing kept me going: that Revenge of the Nerds conversation.

Well, that and Madonna.

Good Lord, the Material Prostitute was everywhere that summer, still pumping hits off the Like a Virgin album (”Dress You Up” being the big one come August) and getting married to Sean Penn and turning up in simultaneous issues of Playboy and Penthouse that were literally rushed to New York newsstands in the middle of the night in an attempt to scoop one another.

I know that last part because I stood outside the Kings Highway subway stop’s magazine kiosk at 3am, waiting for the trucks to pull up.

In addition, the influence of Madonna on troubled suburban adolescent females circa 1985 - particularly, it seemed, if they were blonde - cannot be underestimated.

Melissa asked me to describe, in rigorous detail, every Madonna photograph in Playboy and Penthouse. I was happy to oblige. Such talk was, I reasoned, the closest I would ever come to bona fide sexual experience.

The photos were black-and-white art modeling shots that Madonna had posed for in her early, gloriously unshaven twenties. My subsequent erections remain legendary, even in Hell.

Perusing the magazines while on the phone with Melissa, I (sort of) joked: “This is the best birthday present a boy could ever hope for!”

“That’s right,” Melissa said. “You’re birthday’s coming up. How old are you going to be?”

“Seventeen,” I answered.

“SEVENTEEN!” Melissa shrieked back. “And you’re STILL a VIRGIN?!?”

“Um, yeah.”

“God!” Melissa huffed. “That is the most puh-thetic thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Oh, I bet I could top that if I really tried…”

“Seventeen and still a virgin,” she marveled. “That is fucking lame. I can’t know anybody who’s that big a loser. I’ll fuck you.”

“Sure, sure… WAIT!”

Somehow, there was some germ of sincerity to this declaration that hit me as … legit.

She really might do me this mitzvah.

Holy FUCK!

“You’ll de-virginize me, huh?” I asked. “Well, you know, I am going to be in Sparta with Chuck and Ed on my birthday.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Melissa said. “I’ll make sure you’re not seventeen and still a virgin, which I still can’t believe is possible. But what present are you going to give me if I do it?”

“You tell me,” I said. “I make big-time elevator operator bucks now.”

“Okay,” Melissa mused, “I will fuck you if … if … [she was thinking] … if you bring me … [really hard] … if you bring me boots like Madonna wore in Desperately Seeking Susan! You know the boots I’m talking about?”

This footwear, I was familiar with.

I had seen Desperately Seeking Susan several times after having made love to the newspaper ad and the Rolling Stone cover featuring Madonna and co-star Rosanna Arquette looking luminously post-lesbian-coital.

So, yes, I knew the boots she was talking about.

“Done,” I said. “You got it. I’ll hit the Village first thing next Tuesday.”

“Good. You can fuck me if you bring me those boots. And then maybe I can be your girlfriend.”

I was dumbstruck. Freaked out. Incredulous. And — fin-fang-foom - head-over-flabby-keister in love.

And yet, really, deep down, I knew the deal.

And I knew, in a general way, where this whole mess would be going.

It stands to reason, then, that I could not get there fast enough.

**********************************

PART 2

The movie was The Bride. It starred Sting, the singer from The Police, of whom I was not a fan, and Jennifer Beals, centerpiece of the Flashdance phenomenon, which I actively despised.

The movie, obviously, was the lady’s choice.

The lady was Melissa and she was sitting right next to me, right there in the Newton Twin Theater, where National Lampoon’s European Vacation was playing next door.

She had on her Madonna boots.

And it was right there in the Newton Twin Theater that Melissa took my hand.

And held it. My hand. Her hand. This was … actually happening.

And it was there that Melissa unbuttoned her neon pink-and-white vertical-striped top a bit and put my hand down the front of it. And inside her bra.

So before I enjoyed my first tongue-intensive kiss, I touched my first tit.

Okay, the first that was not my own.

As a hefty young fella, I tragically did not lack in the shirt for sloth-generated mammary tissue.

That, of course, was the supreme shame of fat boydom: not the gut, not the love(less) handles, not the mid-winter sweats—the tits.

As a chronic masturbator, though, possessing one’s own swinging twosome provided an occasional boon. The most colorful such incident occurred for me one evening in my friend Dino’s bathroom.

Dino’s sister, no petite flower herself, had left a bra drying towel rack. It was size 38C. That seemed about right—for her, definitely but, more importantly, in this hot moment, for me.

In a flash, I put on Dino’s sister’s bra and climbed into the tub and practiced, with my left hand, under-the-cup exploration and even hooking-and-unhooking while, with my right hand, I did what I had most likely already done several times in the previous few hours.

But that was then, back when I had no hope of ever touching anybody else’s tit, and now here I was in the Newton Twin Theater … touching somebody else’s tit.

Melissa just kept looking down toward the floor, down toward her actual Madonna boots, the ones I had purchased and presented to her.

Hard-earned, came those spoils — as did, by extension, the one I was tweaking twixt my thumb and forefinger.

A few days earlier, I traipsed around the West Village on a mission. I carried with me a torn-out magazine ad for Desperately Seeking Susan (likely bearing stains produced by me) and, one by one, presented it to every clerk in every shoe shop on and around 8th Street, pointing at the boots Madonna had on and asking if they sold them.

“I swear to God they’re not for me!” I joked each time.

Expense was no limitation. The wretched elevator gig paid astronomically: $12 an hour! That’s $72 a day, $360 a week. And those were 1985 dollars, remember, plus they were untaxed because I was only 16 and I got to keep half of it (the rest went to my parents, to help fund my trip to the first of the three colleges from which I would fail out).

Alas, even Trash and Vaudeville, the boutique where I believe the boots come from in the movie, had no exact replicas of those high-heeled holy grails. But they did have a pair that came kind of close. And for only $175. And that’s in 1985 dollars.

Sold.

Melissa had opened her gift box in the car before we drove to the theater. She squealed. She loved the boots. They worked. And she remained fixated on them.

After I finished watching the movie and Melissa finished watching her own feet, she wanted to show off her Madonna boots and buy a can of Reddi-Wip to make sucking my cock more palatable. She was a mite more advanced at this business than I was.

We stopped at a 7-Eleven. This was a dream come true for me. Commingling in public with a female, yes—but also going to 7-Eleven.

We didn’t have one anywhere near Brooklyn and, as a kid, I dreamt of these mythical, fluorescent-scorched Shangri-La’s where you could work the soda fountain yourself.

It was with dizzy pride, then, that I watched Melissa strut around the 7-Eleven, flirting with the dudes from her high school behind the counter and, upon handing them the Reddi-Wip canister, boasting: “You know what THAT’s for!”

Everybody laughed. I paid for the non-dairy dessert topping. We then drove back to the township of Sparta, New Jersey, back to the bonny, bonny banks of Lake Mohawk.

Melissa parked in her parents’ driveway and led me down a path into the woods. Across the water, Chuck and Ed were … I don’t know, doing something. I ditched them earlier.

We had arrived that morning. Chuck’s father drove us to Jersey, ignorant of the fat kid in the back seat’s agenda.

After lunch, we took the boat out. By dumb coincidence, Melissa was out piloting her family’s vessel at the same time.

She pulled up next to us and—for all my previous year’s efforts, for all my bombast, for all my fevered anticipation—the moment had arrived and I could NOT actually, physically, biologically bear to face Melissa.

I knew her gift-wrapped Madonna Boots were back at the house, and I knew what the exchange rate was for them.

But then the full weight of, well, my full weight cascaded down upon my consciousness. Plus, I remembered to be Catholic.

There was no way to raise my gaze bearing those burdens.

“Hey, there, Shy Boy!” Melissa taunted. “What’s the matter shy boy? You shy? Maybe you’re too shy to go out with me tonight?”

I looked up. Hard.

****************************

The movie and the boots and the Reddi-Wip purchase behind us, Melissa and I sat close, side-by-side, atop a lakefront rock.

She leaned in and kissed me.

Another first.

“Take your pants off,” she said.

Another last.

Off came the 44-inch-waisted, gray-and-black, two-tone Sasson jeans. My RUSH: 2112 shirt, however, was staying on.

Melissa followed suit, but her top did come off.

There she was.

There IT was: Naked Lady.

Live! Nude! Girl!

Right there before my power-popping eyes.

I sat back down on the rock and felt a sharp sting in my fat ass. I pulled out a fishhook. I cracked up. Melissa didn’t.

“Don’t laugh!” she admonished. “This is serious.”

She launched into a spooky sex-trance, talking kind of crazy, and easing me back to apply her plump, pink cheerleader lips to a plump, purple part of me—no Reddi-Wip necessary.
“Oh my fuckin’ God!” she said. “Your dick is fuckin’ huge!”

I didn’t believe her. But I didn’t care, either. Would you?

Melissa hopped on top of the alleged hugeness. It hurt. Me.

I think, by some Satanic instinct, my excited excitedness aimed for the wrong hole. Yowch.

But then—ah. There it was. I think.

Melissa assured me it was “in.” I leaned sideways to peer around my massive belly and, oh, yeah. There it was. Coitus.

Ta-DAH!

Deeper into her wiggy sex trance, Melissa rocked, and rolled, pumped up and down and asked me, “How do you want to come? Fast like a fireball?”

She demonstrated fast-like-a-fireball mode.

“Or slow like a shoe store?”

She demonstrated slow-like-a-shoe-store mode.

I said “Fast!” in part because I was pretty scared and also because I thought she’d be less likely to hear me giggle over the bizarreness of “slow like a shoe store.”

So Melissa did it fast, and I used my thumb on the area I presumed was her clitoris and she said she was coming and then she shook and got off me.

“Finish up,” she said, indicating I should help myself. “I have to go look for my pants.”

I did as instructed. Melissa found her pants and I pulled up mine. As we stood there, she leaned into me, virtually drilled holes into my eyes with hers and asked, “Do you love me?”

“Yes,” I answered.

“Then say it,” she said.

“I love you,” I told her, and I wasn’t lying.

Gathering ourselves, I dropped the fishhook that had been in my ass into my wallet. That was my trophy. I grabbed the can of Reddi-Wip and we headed home.

Melissa kissed me goodnight. I told her I loved her again. “Good,” she said.

I sauntered across the bridge back toward Chuck’s house. Halfway through, I stopped, put the Reddi-Wip can in my mouth and sucked out the nitrous oxide. Ah, sweet momentary Whip-It oblivion.

Then I hurled the empty canister as hard as I could up into the air and watched it splash into the waters of Lake Mohawk.

This was atypical behavior for me, a lifelong enemy of the litterbug, but the canister, and the gesture, was symbolic.

It was finished.

***************************************

PART 3

None of us saw Melissa again until it got dark out the next night.

It was August 21st, 1985. My birthday.  I was 17. And I was not, thanks to Madonna Boots, that most pathetic thing of which a blonde cheerleader from northern New Jersey had ever heard: “a 17-year-old virgin.”

Melissa had gone to the mall or something that day, and I was eager, to say the least, for another go-round on the Sex Rock.

But, even more so, I dreamt of daring to put my arm around her in front of my friends and maybe act like she and I were possibly… a couple.

After the sun went down, I saw Melissa’s car pull up on the other side of the lake. Now the real celebration could begin.

She got out and waved at Ed, Chuck, and me as the three of us were goofing around on the hill above the boathouse.

“Come over!” I yelled.

She did.

Wow. Things were still going my way. And she wasn’t even wearing her Madonna boots anymore.

Melissa crossed the bridge, kind of sashaying all the way, and I froze. If my arm was going to go around her, she was going to have to put it there.

But she clearly had no interest in my arm. Or any other part of anything attached to me.

Except my best friend.

“I need to talk to Ed,” Melissa said.

“ED!?!” I thought.

Ed? Gawky, awkward, smelly, greasy-headed, Herman Munster Ed?

Ed, my best friend with whom I had bonded over half-assed semi-attempts at suicide while we sold sodas at Xavier High School dances?

Ed, who hated his own face so much he got a Flock of Seagulls haircut to keep most of it constantly covered up?

Melissa needed to talk to THAT Ed?

What did my girlfriend—the woman I loved—want with Ed?

And, more importantly, where was I now watching Ed walk off to with my girlfriend—the woman I loved?

Chuck asked for me: “Where are you two going?”

“Down by the boathouse,” Melissa answered. “Go away for a little while. Both of you. I need to talk to Ed alone.”

This time, it was Chuck and I who did as we were told.

We hobbled up the hill into Chuck’s rec room and I collapsed in an easy chair. Maybe the TV was on, maybe it wasn’t. We were silent.

I just sat, stupefied, contemplating what was no doubt the most scintillating surprise conversation of Ed’s life taking place down by the boathouse.

After a long, miserable while, Chuck finally spoke up.

“I’m going to go down to the boathouse to see what’s going on,” Chuck said.

I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t move.

He returned a few minutes later. Not alone. Ed was with him and, in a very real sense, Melissa was with Ed. His arm was around her shoulder, and she was holding his hand, and they were all kinds of smiles.

Some hodgepodge of conversation ensued. Chuck snapped a little at Melissa. Ed laughed. She kissed Ed and took off.

I just curled up where I was and the sweet, merciful, Catholic God whose admonitions I’d failed to heed proved he loved me anyway by pulling the plug.

Right away, I fell into a long, hard, pitch-black sleep.

***********************
Morning came. We had to go back to Brooklyn.

Ed shot me straight.

“Melissa’s my girlfriend now,” he told me. “She said you were not ready for a relationship and that she was secretly in love with me. And I’m in love with her.”

Well, that made them quite the pair, then, didn’t it?

“She wants to say goodbye to you before we leave,” Ed added. “Let’s go.”

I went.

Ed and I walked across the bridge. Melissa came out and talked to us on her dock.

“Mike,” she said. “I’m sorry this happened like this, but, you know, this is how relationships go and I think YOU actually get the best end of the deal because now you know you’re just not ready to have one. And I’ve had a lot of relationships, so I know about relationships.”

If I possessed even the most infinitesimal dollop of athletic ability, she may well have been drop-kicked into the water over that one—relationship expertise and all.

But I didn’t. I just nodded, and said, “Yeah. True. Thanks.”

She kissed Ed.

And with that, we were off.

************************************

The generosity of Chuck’s family knew no limits, and that included regularly taking Ed and me to restaurants.

He and I did not come from restaurant stock.

Brooklyn diners on occasion, yes, and heat-lamp snack bars at department stores during shopping trips to Jersey, for sure, but these folks took us to the type of class joints where Chuck’s mother once taunted him by saying, “Don’t tell me: Charles is going to have the shrimp cocktail and filet mignon!”

This mirrored my own mom’s affectionate ball-bust: “Don’t tell me: Michael’s having the K-Mart burger, Happy Fries and a Coke!”

The barbecue place Chuck’s father stopped at the day after Ed lost his virginity the day after I lost mine certainly offered no filet mignon.

Still, it was the sort of gloriously grotesque, forced fun roadside palace—replete with a blimp-sized cow on the roof and faux ranch gear everywhere else—that I had fantasized about being able to visit someday.

And here was that day.

And there I sat plowing through literal buckets of deep-fried appetizers and endless soda refills. It felt good. Every mouthful made a ripple in the void.

Then Bryan Goddamned Adams came on the sound system.

Make no mistake: I liked that Freddy-Kreuger-complexioned Canuck rocker just fine.  But what poured out was his mournful mid-tempo hit “One Night Love Affair.”

He sang:

“One night love affair
Pretendin’ it ain’t there
Oh - and now we’re left with nothin’”

Mercifully, the Build-Your-Own-Burger concoction I ordered arrived mid-way through that toe-tapper.

This enabled me to temporarily quell what was welling within me.

When it comes to anesthetics, it is hard to top a half-pound roast beef-ham-pineapple-brown gravy-barbecue-sauce-mozzarella cheeseburger.

Four inhuman gulps and I was halfway through, with no intention of relenting.

But then REO-Goddamned-Speedwagon came on the sound system.

The song was “I Can’t Find This Feeling Anymore.”

I excused myself and bee-lined for the men’s room.

Indeed, I could not fight that feeling anymore.

Cruelly, the speakers in the john were even louder and more crystal-clear than they’d been outside.

The dulcet tenor of REO frontman Kevin Cronin pummeled me:

“I can’t fight this feeling any longer
And yet I’m still afraid to let it flow
What started out as friendship
Has grown stronger
I only wish I had the strength to let it show”

The tears came hot and fast. I locked myself in a toilet stall and let them happen.

They evolved into sobbing.

Huge, heaving, 300-pound-body wracking sobs.

“And I can’t fight this feeling anymore
I’ve forgotten what I started fighting for
It’s time to bring this ship into the shore
And throw away the oars, forever”

And that prompted another feeling I could not fight anymore.

Nausea.

Not because of the clunky treacle of the lyrics—well, actually exactly because of that. I felt sick because those words felt so sickeningly real.

And then came the vomit.

Not hacking, half-coughed, hard-barfed bile, but massive, gushing, volcanic cascades of projectile puke. Brown and pink and slimy and bubbly and everywhere.

Everything I had ever swallowed—literally and figuratively—burst forth from my blubbery bowels, up through my undulating throat and rocketing out the mouth-spout that alternately gasped for air and continued to let the stomach-lining fly.

I kept crying the whole time, too.

How could I not with REO Speedwagon bombarding me? How could anybody?

“My life has been such a whirlwind since I saw you
I’ve been running round in circles in my mind
And it always seems that I’m following you, girl
‘Cause you take me to the places
That alone I’d never find”

Tears, snot, saliva, discharge, the confirmation of my every worst fear I’d ever had, the introduction of fears I hadn’t even come up with on my own.

There it all was.

Flying.

Out of me and into the bowl and onto the seat and all over the walls.

“Cause I can’t fight this feeling anymore

I’ve forgotten what I started fighting for

And if I have to crawl upon the floor

Come crashing through your door

Baby, I can’t fight this feeling anymore!”

Eventually, REO stopped and, a bit after that, I did too.

The stall was coated with countless chunky fluids of my own making. I did the best I could to wipe it clean with toilet paper. I tried to gussy myself up the same way, too.

“Everything okay?” Chuck’s dad asked upon my return.

“Yeah,” I said. “You know me. Eat hard, dump hard.”

He laughed. Chuck laughed. Ed sneered.

We three best friends then exited the Garden State, each of us now imbued with the exact same story (more or less) forever after whenever anyone would ask, “How’d you lose your virginity?”

Back behind us in Sparta, New Jersey, back along the bonny, bonny banks of Lake Mohawk, two shiny Madonna boots rested somewhere, probably deep, in the crowded confines of a blonde cheerleader’s closet.

Of late, I’ve been doing less of it for your edification and more of it for my own mercenary purposes but, still, writing has served as my full-time occupation now for nearly 20 years.

This inevitable trajectory initially arose in 1988 when the sensible decision makers at SUNY Purchase informed me that I would no longer be a full-time student.

Several years followed, then, wherein I apprenticed as a public school janitor, a Special Ed teacher’s aide, and Wall Street library flunky.

That stretch of relentless glamor culminated (via the library’s printers and copy machines) in the publication of HAPPYLAND #1 on September 13, 1991, the same Friday that Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare in 3-D opened at the Lyric Theater (and one night before I saw Mudhoney play some defunct joint in NYC’s meatpacking district where, the following weekend, I caught Nirvana. Grunge enough for ya?).

Enthused HAPPYLAND write-ups from Rick Sullivan’s Gore Gazette and Peter Bagge’s HATE (to which I would later contribute a column on my obsession with hippie songstress Natalie Merchant), along with on-air praise from Gerard Cosloy via WFMU, garnered the ’zine nifty intention just in time for the second issue, which showcases “They Call Him Flipper,” an account of Malt-Liquor-powered interracial 42nd Street misadventure that remains my personal literary “Stairway to Heaven.”

From there, The New York Press allowed me to pollute its newsprint on occasion, and I kicked off a long and fruitful (in every sense) personal and professional association with Allan MacDonell of Hustler magazine.

And then I wrote lots of other stuff—including the ongoing Mr. Skin bliss that’s highlighted in the present issue of Time Out Chicago—all the way up until what you see now.

Hi.

Every so often people ask who my favorite writers are, along with which scribes have most influenced my style and what authors I best enjoy and/or with whom I most closely identify.

The answers to such questions have little to do with my own approach to a blank page.

I read very little fiction, although I feel eternal affection for Mark Twain, James Thurber, and the first ten years or so of Martin Amis.

The writers who truly inspired me to start cranking out words (initially in the form of epic letters to recipients I am now quite sure did not even want them) were critics and essayists—chiefly: Cult Movies author Danny Peary, the Medved Brothers and their various Golden Turkey variations, and rock writer Chuck Eddy whose eruptive prose, when he first hit the Village Voice in the ’80s (gallantly praising Rush), exhilarated me the way I was William S. Burroughs would, but didn’t (and doesn’t).

Tales of Times Square by Josh Alan Friedman clearly made an apocalyptic impact, as did the aforementioned Gore Gazette and, to a less direct degree, Joe Bob Briggs.

Plus Celebrity Sleuth.

And although (despite my physique for most of my adult life) I’m no comic book guy, I did cop quite a bit from Frank Miller’s 1986 Dark Knight Returns series.

Right now, the writer (of books) whose work I most look forward to is Jimmy McDonough.

More than anything in print, though, when I write what I try to imitate and  even produce is sound.

Howard Stern, therefore, is my most direct influence, from his topics to his tone to his New York Jew comedic roots to his actual machine-gun cadence of language.

Sam Kinison’s Louder Than Hell album (and absolutely nothing he did after that) would be another.

Most profoundly, though, what I try to invoke when I write is music, and it’s even some very specific musicians and songs (and even song parts) at that.

As I whack at the keys, I primarily hear Alice Cooper, KISS (including the ‘78 Ace Frehley solo record), Black Sabbath, The Melvins, “Linda Blair” by Redd Kross and, at upbeat intervals, The Monkees and Sweet (the Sex Pistols fall somewhere in the middle, especially in the form of Johnny Rotten’s vocalizing and most especially in the form of “Bodies”).

Singularly, the moments I most often try to replicate is the opening percussiveness Meat Loaf’s “Bat Out of Hell”, along with the of pregnant blast of silence that occurs at the song’s three-minute, 34-second mark, right before the big man explodes into:

I’m gonna hit the highway like a battering ram
On a silver black phantom bike
When the metal is hot and the engine is hungry
And we’re all about to see the light
Nothing ever grows in this rotten old hole
Everything is stunted and lost
And nothing really rocks
And nothing really rolls
And nothing’s ever worth the cost

You said it, Jim Steinam via Marvin Lee Aday.

But(t) the band whose sound, look, feel, performance strategy and overall aesthetic has always exerted the deepest influence upon me is the Butthole Surfers.

And they have done this most specifically in the form of “Jimi”, the lead track from their 1988 opus (and final hour of flawlessness), Hairway to Steven.

Of course, the 7-minute, 41-second epic didn’t even have a proper name upon first release (the LP’s track listing consisted cartoons instead of words) and I’ve never seen a transcription of its baffling lyrics anywhere.

So, really, when I tell you that I attempt to channel “Jimi” when I write, I mean I do so in purely sonic terms, although the piece’s thundering, plodding, bowel-rupturing, heavily metallic sounds have always conjured palpably iconic images in my head.

What I picture, as the music rumbles, is this behemoth Viking space marauder who carries a mighty hammer reigning down his cosmic wrath on some deserving weakling(s).

And I am now confessing that that is also how I have always seen myself as I write: typing determinedly and carrying a big cosmic hammer.

It’s a ruse. But it’s mine. So that’s me.

Today, 22 years later, I made a sincere effort to copy down the actual words to “Jimi”.

However sloppily inaccurate the results are to whatever the Gibbytronix device is, in fact, pumping out, they really do fit my own delusions, both creative and … otherwise.

JIMI

[Gutteral, growling voice]

I’m soiled
Soil me
Soil everyone

Oh my
Oh
My
GOD!

I have come 10 million miles
And traveled all your earth
And with his hands
The fiery beast may consummate my birth

Locust, flies and disgusting beasts
Shall crack the ocean floor
And have given life to fiery hands
That open up the door

[Growl]
[Growl]
[Growl]
Fire away!

[High-pitched squealing helium voice]
Oh daddy, daddy!
We need help!
My mind is at an end!

[Back to Growling voice]

All hope is lost!
You’re bleeding now!
Your dreams forever flagged!

[Growl]
[Growl]
[Growl]

What do you know about reality?
I AM REALITY!

What do you know about death?
I AM DEATH!

I don’t know what you can see
[Unintelligible rants, evil laughter]

Who knows the things I’ve seen
The faces I know, the places I’ve been
I’m running now with my  [unintelligible-- sort of sounds like "lava lamp"]

[Growl]
[Growl]
[Growl]

[Back to squealing helium voice]

Oh, daddy! Please!
Don’t touch me on my penis and vagina!
Oh, daddy! Don’t touch me in my bottom!
Please daddy!
[Wailing, followed by laughter]
Crazy, crazy fucking world!
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
Crazy goddamned world!
[Laughter]
Shit
Hey!

[Growling voice]
What is so funny?
Me or my [unintelligible]?
[Gurgle] slap in the face!

[Helium voice]
Oh nooooo! Oh no!

[Growl voice]
You RANG?

And, very much in the spirit of  the storied haunts of 42nd Street and Chicago’s Loop and Downtown L.A. and The Block in Baltimore and hundreds of drive-in screens across the landscape in the glory days of grindhouse cinema, The Red Box is open all night and charges only a buck to get in on the action.

And, thus, as I did in days of yore while hopping from the Selwyn across the street to the Harris and then downtown to the Variety and then back up to Cine 42 (and so on), I’m running through my Red Box options two at a time, devising double features of the freshest fodder from our various trash film factories.

And, as is always the case, most of these movies will be overwhelmingly lame and largely worthless. But you’ve got to learn to love the sleaze-movie spelunk, not just the maniacs, bloodsucking freaks, holocausting cannibals, and medical deviates you luck into once every 10,000 trips downward.

The first-one two punch is a pretty much a blow right where it stings, but does not swell. But onward we go.

***************************************************************

BLOOD CREEK (2009)
DIRECTOR: Joel Schumacher
CAST: Dominic Purcell, Henry Cavill, Michael Fassbender, Emma Booth, Rainer Winkelvoss

My cousin is an esteemed boxing trainer who once believed—correctly—that the height of hilarity was getting you into the ring, turning his back to you, touching his shoulder with one hand, and asking: “Did I ever show you wear the horse bit me?”

When you inevitably leaned in to see, he’d swat you in the schnuts with his free fist.

And now Blood Creek (2009) arrives after a microscopic theatrical run somewhere, and it could be titled: Did I Ever Show You Wear the Horse Bit Me: The Movie.

At least as far as I’m concerned.

After an engaging opening that’s set in 1936 in which a Nazi sorcerer conjures up some black SS magic on a rural American farm, Blood Creek leaps to modern times.

We go back to that same farm, see that the same occupants that lived there 75 years ago have not aged and the movie cooks up a decent mystery as to what kind of brutality has been going on and then … and then these un-fucking-believably shitty CGI horses show up.

They gallop around, all loco-possessed by The Evil Magic Gestapo-Thing in the Celler and one of these see-through Seabiscuits bites a buy on the shoulder and pulls him out a window, and all I could think about was my cousin prankishly popping an endless succession of suckers smack in the package.

The other moment that comes to mind is The Attack of the Killer Forest Deer in The Ring 2 (2005). To be surrounded by a battalion of berserk Bambis that continually head-butt your car on an isolated road would be, in real life, entirely terrifying.

In fact, it would be seats-soakingly scary if one deer did it even. But in a movie, it looks ridiculous. There’s no way to make deer look scary on-screen, short of busting out the rubber suit from the end of Larry Fessenden’s Wendigo: A Film by Larry Fessenden.

The same proves true of horses. While out here in actuality, horses are enormously imposing beasts whose strength and hugeness stands behind their power as crowd-control tools (plus it would really suck to get trampled under even just one hoof, let along a pack of them).

But in Blood Creek, the horses are all amateurishly CGI’d up and they’re transparent and they get huge, cartoony holes blasted through them, so that these obviously computer-animated animals, so hellbent on inspiring horror, come off momentarily hilarious, then irritating, and then insulting.

And that’s pretty much the course of the movie: it kicks off pretty well, staggers, then sucks.

Curiously, Blood Creek was directed—between the Jim Carrey thriller The Number 23 (2008) and the upcoming Emma Roberts Sundance hit Twelve (2010)—by Joel Schumacher, an A-list name who you have been told to hate and despise and tar and feather and soil your pull-ups over at the mere mention of because he upset grown-men with his treatment of their favorite dress-up super-heroes.

And he did it twice, even!

(The only job I’ve ever had of which I am ashamed was a six-week stint at a “New York arts and fashion quarterly” shit-sheet called Black Book, which once befouled existence with it “101 Suggestions on How to Save Hollywood”, one of which was “Never let Joel Schumacher direct another Batman movie again. Ever!” That came from the Future Screenwriter of the Fucking Will Smith Rom-Com Hitch … and his writing partner. Because quality like that? It takes two, baby).

There are any number of Schumacher transgressions with which to be genuinely outraged and, in fact, he inspired the first truly stand-out use of “brutally” as an overkill adjective that Youngman McBeardo ever came across.

In 1985, New York magazine film critic David Denby ended his review of St. Elmo’s Fire with the line: “Directed by the brutally untalented Joel Schumacher.”

In the all-calling-for-beheadings, all-the-time world of Internet language, that line is coddling gurgle. But at the time, and in such a normally demure context, it was, indeed, brutal. And inspiring. Brutally.

Still, I’ll properly applaud Schumacher for D.C. Cab (1983) and The Lost Boys (1987) and the opening of Falling Down (1993) and that picture with the Muppets, above, and nothing else. Least of all Blood Creek.

********************************************

ASSASSINATION OF A HIGH SCHOOL PRESIDENT (2008)
DIRECTOR: Brett Simon
CAST: Mischa Barton, Reece Daniel Thompson, Bruce Willis, Patrick Taylor, Melonie Diaz

Writer-director Rian Johnson’s debut feature Brick (2005) is a subtly brilliant bending, intersecting, and dissection of two genres that results in a one-of-a-kind experience: stark film noir via high school romance.

And I must say that Brick WAS one-of-a-kind—note the past tense—because now we have Assassination of a High School President and what that means is what we have now is, specifically, Brick for Dummies.

Severe dummies. Severe, loathsome dummies. If I were in charge: dead dummies.

For whereas Brick is quiet and disquieting, understated and all-enveloping, never flinching from the seriousness with which its characters take their situations nor needing to acknowledge the bizarre language they use to communicate with one another, Assasination is all winks, japes, raspberries, text message shorthand brayed out loud (loud! LOUD!!!), and stomach-turning post-Diablo-Cody tongue-twister/panty-buncher-uppers bombarding faster than the speed of every unwelcome Twitter you ever couldn’t figure out how to delete quickly enough.

Neither film consists of dialogue that could ever possibly occur in real life. Brick’s words call to mind Daschiel Hammet and James M. Cain as filtered through Shakespearean rhythms. Assassination’s lead dick describes a situation as being “as crooked as a case of scoliosis” and adds that he’s “on it like pink rubber bands on your little sister’s braces.”

By the time we get to Principal Bruce Willis as the “Psycho Gulf War Vet” (at last, a stereotype I am not eager to embrace) with a “Mission Accomplished” sign and a picture of Eisenhower (fuckin’ Ike?) above his desk, I was waiting for someone to produce a Chinese phone book and mention something about someone having more Chins than could be found inside.

Willis, in fact, delivers not only the worst line in the movie, but the worst line of the … maybe ever. As he gets guff from a bad attitude Hot Topic chick in his office he blurts out:

“I don’t go to the strip club where you work and knock the dicks out of your mouth!”

The correct version of this ancient hack stand-up comic’s heckler comeback line is, of course, “I don’t go where you work and knock the dicks out of your mouth!”

The joke is in NOT stating where the target works. The humor comes from the IMPLICATION – e.g., strip-club, whorehouse, glory-hole, Bruce Willis’s backyard pool cabana, etc.

To have included this mummified turd of a gag as it properly exists would be lethal, but to kill what is already beyond dead by including “THE STRIP CLUB” is … well, that’s Assassination of a High School President in one handy bifurcation.

Except it’s not. Not completely. Because goddamned if halfway through I didn’t find myself getting caught up in the central mystery. And the art direction, costumes, clever set design, and sharp cinematography pulled me in even further.

But it did not pull me far (or hard) enough. Because I had seen Brick and, as Assassination grated along, sometimes successfully (even Willis turns funny by the end), there was just no un-seeing the original, superior-in-every-meaningful-scintilla version of this material.

Alas, there is one area where Assassination swamps Brick, and it’s the one that genuinely qualifies it for the bottom half of an exploitation double feature: gratuitous nudity.

Mischa Barton, whatever your opinion of her, is one of Hollywood’s most famous contemporary starlets and so it’s especially noteworthy that we see her buoyant British B-bags multiple times as she eases back in a bathtub.

First, those dark-tipped nerps bobble into sight as the hero spies on her and provides us with a long, lustful leer, and then we see the same footage twice more in flashback—even longer and more lustfully leering.

Assassination’s closing line is the ultimate groaner that anyone who is not the intended audience for this film had been dreading all along (yes, Chinatown), but the repeated presence of Mischa’s bon-bons make for an interesting paraphrase:

“Remember, you out there watching this … it’s a teen exploitation movie.”

“I was born with seven clits.”

And so, with that clam-dinger of an opening line, Bad Biology kicks off with a metaphorical bang that is followed, in short order, by a more literal one.

After explaining her mutant mons Venus, the speaker, Jennifer—played by Hollywood-worthy pretty Charlee Danielson—picks up an unsuspecting sex partner, mounts him on the floor and puts her poon-of-many-protrusions to work on him.  The guy dies, Jennifer immediately whelps out a monstrous infant and, admonishing us not to judge her, takes off in search of more carnal prey.

The cue-card-caliber acting immediately signals that we’re at least partly in amateur country, but this amusing, grotesque set-up, exactly as it plays out in Bad Biology, might work equally well for an intellectual, Cronenberg-esque venereal nightmare or a way-too-dumb dumb-joke Troma bifurcation.

As it turns out, Bad Biology contains flashes of the former and admirably works to steer clear of the latter but, at this point, the presence of a pulsating, freely ambulatory penis puppet on a naked-stripper-impaling rampage can only invoke comparisons to The House That Repackaged Sgt. Kabukiman DVDs Built.

Bad Biology’s other main protagonist is Batz (Anthony Steed), a lone nut/chronic masturbator who, at birth, suffered an accidental penis extraction and has since spent his life in pursuit of chemically conjuring a replacement appendage. In that, he’s been successful.

So Jennifer has seven clits and Batz has a berserk, hard-flopping phallus that’s three feet long with a literal mind of its own. Destiny turns on the 35mm cameras (shockingly enough) and we watch.

From there, this long-in-gestation collaboration between director Frank Henenlotter (maker of the 1982 splatter meistürwürk Basket Case), and co-screenwriter R.A. the Rugged Man (a hip-hop multi-talent who once penned a consistently interesting film column for Mass Appeal magazine), works pretty good. Enough.

The script is literate and funny, although most dialogue is delivered by performers that might clinically be deemed “non-professional.”

Moments do crop up, here and there, that invite the pondering of larger themes along the line of sex addiction and the lasting effects of pubescent body-change trauma, but we get jumped back to dirty talk and bare boobs before any of that might take hold.

Weird touches like a vagina-face photo shoot and Batz’s lair full of antique Rube Goldberg whack-off machinery laid out before perpetually porn-playing TV monitors are effectively realized.

The nudity is copious and rife with formica-funbagged Garden State pole-dancers, but when it comes to Ms. Danielson’s Crunchberry milk-spouts and volcanically voluptuous Jelena Jensen’s uproariously gratuitous shower scene, Bad Biology’s up-close anatomy lessons attain passing greatness.

And Henenlotter proves, even with resources that were likely as limited as the flimsiest Shock-O-Rama pick-up, that he remains an enormously talented, miserably underutilized director.

The dick- and pussy-P.O.V. shots immediately grab more attention, but just marvel at Henenlotter’s montages of the faces of Jennifer’s bedmates simultaneously experiencing Little and Big Deaths.

Still, Bad Biology never quite caroms into anything greater than a momentarily beguiling direct-to-DVD cheapie.

The final film exists somewhere between the exquisite Teeth (2007) and the execrable Poultrygeist (does the year even matter?), but don’t take that to mean it’s like some combination of the two, or some sort of “perfect” middle ground. Bad Biology is its own unique, fitfully memorable experience. And it’s a good. Enough.

It seems oddly, even sadly fitting that Henenlotter, who made Basket Case with ambitions of having it run on 42nd Street and then had to be satisfied with its success as an arthouse midnight attraction, now seems to be aiming to make a midnight movie, and Bad Biology turns out to be just another eye-catching title at the Red Box machine.

And that’s good. Enough.

Today’s Red Box serves as the 21st century equivalent of a row of Deuce-esque exploitation theater marquees. Frank Henenlotter is, at last, up with the B-movies where he belongs.

By all means, next time you’re at your local DVD dispenser, happily and eagerly give the man and his new movie your single dollar support.

And may there be many more.

Shit is Finished.

That’s all I can stands. I cain’t stands no more. Puked out here is the remainder of my annotated tour of that which was worst, on a communally endured cultural scale, from the previous decade.

As with the preceding five countdowns (100-81, 80-61, 60-51, 50-41, 40-30), my plan was to imbue each entry with its own vituperative condemnation, summing up what was unforgivable about each transgression and irrigating my spleen, simultaneously.

But the second half of January 2010 has placed me in a brighter spot than the first half, and I wish to write tributes to the gorgeous likes of Allen Garfield and “Bag” from the first season of Happy Days.

So here’s the rest of the wretchedness, barfed out in one bombastic bifurcation of gargantuan grievance.

Have at, and then let’s get on with things, shall we?

********************************************************************

30. “PABST! BLUE! RIBBON!”

Granted, beer and I have endured a tempestuous relationship, lo these past handful of decades.

So I do come into this dust-up with all manner of chips on my shoulder, affixed there good and stiff by piles of dried puke.

Plus, the first half of the 1990s, was all about nonstop imbibing of Rolling Rock for me, that quaint hepcat elixir of the grunge era.

But I must protest that I, at least, genuinley did like the taste of Rolling Rock and that I do believe that it is BIOLOGICALLY IMPOSSIBLE for any human throat to choke down Pabst Blue Ribbon unless it’s powered by faux-blue-collar pretensions and ironic non-irony and prescribed cornballism and desperate, ugly floundering desires to be SEEN choking down Pabst Blue Ribbon.

And, on (foamy) top of that, I never, ever heard to Rolling Rock as “RR”.

When was the last time you were able to escape mention of “P.B.R.”?

So to P.B.R. and, more pointedly, suckers down of P.B.R., I say:

“P. - U.!”

*

29. ANCHORMAN (2005).

At first, it was easy to just lob mental feces at Will Ferrell and be done with him.

After all, it was his cheerleader bit that seemed to prompt Saturday Night Live to abandon the idea of recurring characters and simply substitute entire recurring sketches—exact same construction, exact same set-ups, exact same beats, exact same punchlines, exact same everything (with the sole switch being one week’s guest host appearing in the exact same role as the previous week’s guest host).

So instead of “The Coneheads Celebrate Halloween” begetting “The Coneheads Welcome Connie’s Boyfriend to Dinner”, SNL is comprised entirely of “Gilly” pieces (to name just one offender) so identically indistinguishable from one another that they could function as some kind of minimalist art experiment—as long as it was one in which laughter is forbidden.

But back to Ferrell. At some point, he did start to make me laugh on SNL and, by the time he got to the professor character declaring love for his “llluhh-vaahhh”, I was on his side. Then came the movie Elf (2003), and I was a … if not exactly a fan, certainly a booster.

Alas, but then came way, way, way too much Will Ferrell and then he wanted us to really, really, seriously APPRECIATE his socking it to George W. Bush and then I hated him more than the first time.

And no anti-funniness that the public refuses to not fake-laugh-at better crystallizes everything despicable about lazy, stillborn Will Ferrell than the anti-funniness of Anchorman.

Still, as trite, as watery, and as dead-schticky as Anchorman is—and that is ALL Anchorman is—by far, its far most loathsome transgression is creating PEOPLE WHO QUOTE ANCHORMAN.

You hear that, you SMELLY PIRATE HOOKER!?!?

HAW! HAW!! HAWWWWWWWWW!!!!

*

28. MEN’S HATS ON WOMEN.

Hideous.

Although I have to admit the opposite would make for an intriguing fashion trend: women’s hats on men.

*

27. The terms “RED STATE” and “BLUE STATE”.
Pick your side.

Pick your “us.”

Pick your “them.”

Pick who’s going to dictate your “me.”

Pick your ass and eat it. Then die of Hepatitis A. That will serve us all better.

*

26. POKER
’Cuz it’s one way that wasted-penis-stricken pussies who live in vaginal concaves like the Upper West Side of Manhattan and Chicagoland’s Oak Park can play-act at being “GUUUUUUUUUYZ!”

Same goes for cunts of the traditional cuntish gender.

*

25. AXE BODY PRODUCTS.
Why capitalists want to sell you deodorant.

*

24. TRIUMPH OF THE PG-13.
Mr. Skin said it best. And I said it for Mr. Skin.

*

23. BILL MAHER.
Bill Maher looks like he takes snuff. And I’d like it if  Bill Maher got taken for a snuff film. Very much. Maybe even—GUFFAW!—religulously!

*

22. THE ANTI-“TORTURE PORN” POLICE
Especially this parasitic interloper who believes subjecting her child to The fucking goddamned desevered-to-be-razor-sodomized Shins is more beneficial to his development than, say, Scrapbook (2001).

*

21. TEARS FOR THE WORLD FINALLY SHITTING OUT JOE STRUMMER.
Who killed punk?

Who made it palatable for the King Midases of Feces that would eventually turn it into U2?

I will tell you who: this uniformed careerist who brought Crosby, Stills, & Nash political sloganeering to the initial Nihilism Party and used it to poison the punch (in every sense of the term), that’s who.

Weep not for the murderer Joe Strummer.

*

20. THE BIG LIE OF PORNOGRAPHY
Specifically: the enduring, unkillable, decades-old falsehood: “Women now consume porn as enthusiastically and in the same numbers as men! MAYBE EVEN MORESO!!!”

*

19. JOSS WHEDON MENSTRUATING ON THE HORROR GENRE.
Really, just Joss Whedon, period, as in the monthly visit bestowed upon any fella named Joseph who prefers you call him by the common abbreviation for “Jocelyn”.

And also because:

A. The hairdo.

B. ANY externally piss-piped being that majors in Women’s Studies is a desperate, oozing, opportunistic grotesque (for the internally-genitaled, that figure drops to the high 99-percentiles).

C. For all the self-trumpeted feminism of the (PUUUUUUUKKKKE!) “Whedonverse”, Jocelyn’s work proves that he believes in powerful heroines—as long as the source of their power is their MAXIM-ready bikini bodies.

D.  I’ve never made it through 18 consecutive of Buffy the Vampire Slayer without attempting to drive a stake throught my TV screen.

E. This simp who built a capitalist fortune on ghouls, grimness, and gruesomery wants to dictate and limit the “extremes” to which genuine horror filmmakers may dare to go.

F. Again, the hairdo.

*

17. U2.
Still. Why? FOR WHO?!?!

*

16. SHIRTS FOR GUUUUUUUUYZ!
Vomit-graphic men’s apparel with words, stencils, and general ass-wipe visuals splattered all over odd corners of any given article of clothing.

Especially non-Ed-Hardy brands that look exactly like Ed Hardy abominations worn by product-headed abominations who claim they’d never be caught dead wearing Ed Hardy.

*

16. ALT-COUNTRY
Gonad-free fake hayseedism in general, Wilco in particular.

Jeff Tweedy’s unfortunately resilient liver in super-ultra particular.

*

15. ALMOST FAMOUS.
Cameron Crud.

*

14. TEARS FOR THE WORLD FINALLY SHITTING OUT JOHN HUGHES.
I was 15 in 1984 when Sixteen Candles came out and it was followed, in rapid succession, by The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, all before my 1986 high-school graduation.

This gruesomely unamusing onslaught from the creative loins of (the once great) National Lampoon contributor John Hughes hit me, especially at the time, as cascading firebombs of class warfare propaganda.

And the privileged, moneyed, New-Wave-grooving, Mid-West suburban “heroes” of Hughes’  freakishly inappropriate fantasies (which, more freakishly, he was never called out on) certainly did not represent anything resembling any side of suicidal, prog-and-metal-listening, son-of-a-Green-Beret, Brooklynite me.

In fact, Hughes’ characters, clearly and infuriatingly, both embodied The Enemy and taught The Enemy how to be just that … The Enemy.

“I wanted a car,” sniffs Ferris Bueller in non-appreciation of his parents’ generosity, “I got a computer!”

(Consider the context: cars and computers, circa ‘86, were comparable investments.)

Somehow, I couldn’t sympathize with Master Bueller. And somehow I couldn’t swallow that that obscenely entitled skag was supposed to be The Coolest Kid in the School Called the Whole Wide World. Somehow, I only wanted to take up arms.

But I didn’t. I just … did other stuff. And, alas, like the Caucasian Nobility that Hughes only served to further empower, those shitty fucking movies and their even (way) shittier fucking soundtracks never went the fuck away.

Shit.

In fact, Hughes only grew in stature over time, especially as newer generations of dipshitticusses threw themselves into Nostalgia for Other People’s Memories.

So when John Hughes died suddenly last year, I expressed how much I wouldn’t miss him.

Oh, the moans I heard and shaming fingers I felt zinging in my direction.

But I stand unmoved. The war rages on. To quote one of Hughes’ infinitely more gifted Lampoon superiors: “It’s the slobs against the snobs.”

And I’m still breathing.

*

13. THE DIABLO CODY MOMENT
Again, let us goddamn all Nostalgia for Other People’s (Alzheimer’s Glazed) Memories.

As such, Betty Page-ling/Burlesque/Roller Derby/Rockabilly/Dita Von Vomitaciousness: each warrants blunt trauma hysterectomies for all involved.

Especially Michael Cera.

*

12. Grown men punctuating written sentences with smiley faces

*

11. DONNIE DARKO.
Dummo.

*

10. TUCKER MAX.
Tucker Max is Peter Sotos for guys who, in high school, beat up guys like Peter Sotos. And, for that matter, guys like Tucker Max.

Here it is, all you arrested-at-your-first-jerkoff losers aching for looking-glass/beer-bottle illusions/delusions of onanistic impunity: Revenge of the turds.

*

9. McSWEENEY’S.
The parents of McSweeney’s midget-mind Dave Eggers famously succumbed to fatal illnesses in the prime of their lives.

His sister, less famously, committed suicide.

Touch anything connected to this twee, oily-tendriled, diabetic anal rot made contemptible flesh, and you’ll understand members of the Family Eggers’ fatal insistence on getting away from their ultimate shame—i.e., being related to the treacle-reeking un-talent who bullet-proofs his every keystroke with juvenile irony and hyper-preening “adowableness”.

Case in point: the very title, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

Case in mortifying mega-point: the Eggers-bankrupted movie version Where the Wild Things Are (2009).

*

8. JUDD APATOW.
Mitigating factor: John Hughes died young.

Continue following that dildo’s example, Judd.

All the way. Hard. And fast.

*

7. “CELEBRITY!”
Not the Woody Allen bomb (which was from 1998, anyway). Our ENTIRE PRESENT REALITY.

*

6. PITCHFORK NATION
The Complete and Utter Goddamnable Castration of Mainstream Rock Music.

*

5. SEX AND THE CITY
Oh, wait! It turns out you ARE your fucking shoes!

*

4. MAXIM
The how-to manual for perfect male nothingness, for all-encompassing consumerist enslavement, for eruptions of false superiority emanating from volunteer lobomitization.

FUCKIN’-A RIGHTEOUS, DUDE!

*

3. Your Gushing Love and Adoration of Authority as long as it comes wrapped in a Good Negro Daddy President package.

*

2. THE DAILY SHOW
See the above category. Now see it loathsomely, utterly, toxically embodied in the smug “compassion” and “bemusement” over “what’s Good for America” in Jon Stewart’s Oxblood-Doc-Marten-inviting smirk.

Then go put on your Oxblood Doc Martens. Steel toes first.

*

1. GOING OUT TO A MOVIE.
The talking, texting, telephoning, “shush”-resistance and all-around subhumanism of modern-day movie theater audiences begs for wholesale hydrogen-bomb sterilization of this species that laughably deems itself human like no other offense that has ever existed.

The nonstop audience ruckus that once seemed so fun and funny to me on 42^nd Street throughout the ’80s and ’90s now coagulates my blood into pure fury and serves only to remind me that I was constantly drunk, high, and coked-to-the-corneas whenever I was on 42^nd Street throughout the ’80s and ’90s.

It’s not even a lack of etiquette. It’s an evolution of New Etiquette wherein full-voiced conversation, beaming cell-phone lights, and running commentary are part of what people go to the movies now to do. And put up with.

And it’s ALL people. Make no mistake. Prior to the past few years, strategic racism could spare one most interruptions of this nature.

Time was, you could enter the theater, scan the crowd and assess potential noise-and-nonsense-makers thusly:

Black teenagers? Nonstop jibber-jabber. Arguments. Doobie-passing. Will kill you if you ask them to pipe down. Will answer each in an endless series of phone calls by bellowing: “Yo! I’m at the movies! Nah, it’s ai-ight, it’s ai-aight…”

Hispanic families? Infant hysteria. Toddler hysteria. Tween hysteria. Adolescent hysteria as they set about creating more infants, toddlers, and tweens. Mami making cell phone plans for after the movie. Papi offering loud advice to the screen.

NPR-looking Caucasian couples? Might nudge each other and whisper. Will laugh loudly at absolutely nothing to prove they “get” whatever just happened on screen.

… and so on.

But now All God’s Chillen have done gotten in on the rootin’-tootin’, rompin’-stompin’ free-for-all.

Last year, when I spotted two hyper-white fratty dudes at the Last House on the Left remake, I plopped down smack in front of them, thinking … well, you know what I was thinking.

Two minutes in, it became apparent that Biff and Happy behind me intended to narrate the entire movie.

“They’re cops,” one said when the police on-screen powered up the siren in their unmarked car.

“Cops, yeah,” said the other. “Yeah, cops.”

At the Music Box Theatre—my favorite Chicago movie haunt—I can, will, and often do stand up, turn around, point at the sources of the disturbance and erupt: “SHHHHHHHHHUT UPPPPPPP, YOU!!!”

That’s largely due to of the size, weight, and capability for violence of the average Music Box Theatre attendee.

Last House was playing at the local Kerasotes multiplex and these two Jockensteins would not be so instantly intimidated.

So they talked. And I went “Shhhh!” And they kicked the back of my chair. Over and over and over again, throughout the entirety of the movie (which was sold out, meaning no switching seats, no escape).

Beginning at age four, when I stayed awake all the way through Pinocchio, going out to a movie served as the supreme pleasure in my life.

And now it is a supreme nightmare. Always. Every time. Everywhere.

Alas, a glimmer of hope occurred near decade’s end. And with that in mind, let us all now salute James Joseph Cialella who silenced a movie theater gabber the only proper and righteous way: by shooting him with a Kel-Tec .380-caliber handgun.

All hail James Joseph Cialella, the hero—the only true hero—of the decade!

January 1, 2000 to January 1, 2010. Ten years that felt like a colonic irrigation in reverse. And in the mouth.

We arrive, now, at the Top 40 of the bottom. Power up your hate-bazookas and train them alongside mine at oblivion-begging targets such as Vespa scooters, Vespa scooter drivers, Green Day, Entourage, the Matrix sequels, “alterna-“anything, and Michael Moore vs. The Passion of the Jesus.

What a dreadful decade. What a dreadful species.

Babs and Barry, youse was wrong: that these fecal abominations merely exist means that we ALL got something to be guilty of….

************************

40. THE LOVE OF 30 ROCK.
Frankly, anything that is not Tracy Morgan on 30 Rock demands to be buried up to its (no doubt, scarf-adorned) neck and get pelted into puree by 30 sizable, hefty, powerfully projected rocks—a minimum of 30 times each. And then 30 more. With 30 more rocks. And so on.

It’s not that the show itself hasn’t provided me with an occasional odd yuk—again, it does feature the mighty Tracy Morgan—but it is gimmicky, desperate to be adorable, and emptier than any of those ghastly post-Far-Side single-panel newspaper cartoons that, in fact, the show’s writers seem to graft verbatim into each episode as wretchedly unfunny cutaways.

Much is made of Alec Baldwin as the network honcho and, for certain, he can be a very amusing presence. But where Alec Baldwin belongs on TV is opposite Robert Osborne co-hosting Turner Classic Movies‘ “The Essentials”, and he’s already there.

Tina Fey, I suppose, is the core issue, and there’s no quibble as to her talent and even out-of-character likability.

But “Liz Lemon”, per se, is a worthless creation outside of embodying a mongoloid Ideal for middle-age-adjacent cunts (of any gender) who learned their lameness from Sassy and minoring in Women’s Studies and Liz Phair’s phalse claims of wanting “to be your blow job queen” and proudly being too “Lollapalooza” to ever actually go Riot Grrl, all the while en route to marriage, reproduction, and property ownership while being convinced that they are just the most hoo-larious “geek vixens” to ever try to make you think that they, personally, invented saying the words “I HEART”, and most especially when they are followed by “… BACON!”

Specific enough for you?

And, hence, disdain is officially and specifically dispensed for the adoration of this irritant where every awful, cutesy transgression gets excused and bombing clods of anti-humor that elicit natural groans get automatically converted into forced, fake, and—above all—LOUD laughter.

Just think of the dingus who plays the page. The thing where THAT comes from wins the “Best Comedy Series” Emmy every year.

And, yet, none dare call it cunt-spiracy.

*

39. The Onion A/V Club’s Annual “Best of the Year” Edition
Area Man Saddened and Revolted to Read Uniform Praise for Arcade Fire, Wes Anderson, McSweeneys. Again. And Again. And Again. And Always.

Each holiday season, it hits: the horrendous moment when one is forced to face the fact that these people who write such funny, inventive things all year long have been doing it to the sights and sounds of the most self-serious self-congratulatory, depressingly pat, and glumly predictable things all the while.

And that’s when this Onion really can make you cry.

*

38. AMERICAN IDIOT(S).
Green Day eats shit.

Their fans eat shit.

But there is a special extra-runny feces buffet reserved for True Believing Shit-Eaters in the “reevaluation” of Green Day after they issued an album of the exact same slavishly aped, anciently ineffective “punk” that comprises the totality of what these simps are capable of dumping out.

AH! But with American Idiot, Blowy Joe and the bros made sure to point out in press releases that, on this disc, they, like, really, really, really, seriously call George W. a A-hole.

By gum, even Rolling Stone magazine itself let us know on the cover that Green Day “saved” rock! What a feat!

Especially after Rolling Stone has spent all these decades slaughtering and entombing the goddamn thing.

*

37. The MATRIX sequels.
Did you see these torpid ruinations of the original?

Did I?

Does anyone remember?

No?

Well if THE MACHINES are really that merciful, I side with Joey Pants and say, “Fuck the fuck out of you, Neo!”

*

36. ALTERNADAD by NEAL POLLACK.
And anything else by Neal Pollack. And anything else preceded by the prefix “Alterna-.” And Chuck Klosterman.

*

35. ENTOURAGE.
Douchebag codification so complete that it all but obliterated the potency of the term “douchebag” while, remarkably, spawning more and more and more and more of them. Forever and ever and ever.

*

34. FAHRENHEIT 9/11 vs. THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST.
Or Keith Olbermann vs. Bill O’Reilly.

Or Al Franken vs. Rush Limbaugh.

Or Rachel Maddow vs. Glenn Beck.

Or Sarah Silverman vs. Sarah Palin.

Or Daily Kos vs. Newsmax.

Or The Daily Show vs. Fox News.

Or NPR vs. Sean Hannity.

Or Janeane Garofolo vs. Ann Coulter.

Or Whole Foods vs. Wal-Mart.

Or indie rock vs. country pop.

Or hybrids vs. NASCAR.

Or “choice” vs. “life.”

Or The Comedians of Comedy vs. The Blue Collar Comedy Tour.

Or utmost, unquestioning faith in a baffling, unread book by Charles Darwin vs. utmost, unquestioning faith in the baffling, too-closely-read Book of Genesis.

Or Bush = Hitler vs. Obama = Hitler.

Or any other easily-purchased “culture war” short-hand identifier for: “Looky! I picked a side and got on it! Thinking’s over now! Time to just swallow whole and hard and fight-fight-fight! Got to stop THEY! THEM! THOSE PEOPLE!”

However, for personal reasons, I must single out the Michael Moore vs. Mel Gibson moment.

Obviously, my sympathy is automatically inclined toward Mad Max over the lump who hires gun-toting guards to protect his Upper West Side penthouse but who makes the money to pay them by agitating so that we who can’t afford such pricey muscle also won’t be able to enjoy the same firepower.

And the whole “million-dollar working class hero” schtick was retch-inducing when John Lennon attempted it—and he was John Lennon!

Regardless, I never actually made it all the way through The Passion of the Christ because, frankly, it just doesn’t make amusing enough good on the material with which Gibson was so hilariously adept while he was in handcuffs and blowing quintuple Breathalyzer digits.

The cries of anti-Semitism against Passion invariably arose (as they always do) from the sort of Chosen and Gentile alike who bombastically mock the idea of, say, gangsta rap promoting ghetto violence.

Nonetheless, THIS extra-super-ultra-toxic material got them bellowing with righteous rage in assured horror that Gibson’s Snuff-Goes-the-Jesus saga would send goyim hordes storming into synagogues and emerging only after crafting and donning long necklaces of blood-soaked yarmulkes and tefillin.

Those same Defenders of the Allegedly Defamed—who, again, disgustedly guffaw at the theory that Grand Theft Auto might play a part in X-Box-addicted imbeciles baseball-batting real-world prostitutes—simultaneously believed that the power of the mass media could, however, do … “good.”

But they just had to get the message out … if they could only back up the work of the Disney organization in promoting a wide-release motion-picture with a billion-dollar promotional thrust that just could not possibly fail to win hearts and cleanse minds … if they could just get you to pay to see Fahrenheit 9/11.

And by “you”, I mean “me.”

And very specifically, I mean the time I was out grabbing a bite with friends several days before F-9/11 opened.

Every American with at least two functioning senses was, at that point, at least six months into the documentary’s inescapable online “controversy” campaign and at least six weeks into the inescapable TV, radio, billboard, flyers, print, online, and in-front-of your-face-at-public-urinals advertising juggernaut.

So I was sitting down to a burrito next to my pal Don and he asked: “What are you doing Friday?”

I said I had no plans and he continued: “Well … okay, good. Okay.”

Don cleared his throat a little and took on the air of a High Enlightener doing some Extremely Important Education—by speaking Very, Very Slowly and Very, Very Clearly and Very, Very Simply.

“Okay,” Don said (a third time). “There’s a movie coming out Friday called Fahrenheit 9/11 that’s very critical of President Bush.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” I said, tensing my guts for the Morally Imperative Pitch I knew was to follow.

“Well,” Don continued, “naturally the government is trying to quash it. So, uh, this organization I’m involved with, Move On, is asking people to see the movie or at least buy tickets to support it.”

“It’s not my thing, man,” I said, cutting him off.

Kindly.

Because all I wanted was to chow down and not have to Be Right.

And also because I was 35, and not 15 or 25 (or, to be honest, 34), and enjoying Don as a friend was more important to me than drilling my wrath into him by asking just HOW, exactly, the government was trying to “quash” this monstrous source of tax revenue or by pointing out that Don and “the organization” with which he was “involved” were proselytizing (very much religiously) on behalf of corporate coiffeurs and the-above-the-title brand-name’s trusty ol’ war profiteering.

So, instead of that, chow down we did and convivially discuss our favorite sorts of vaginal lips we did, too.

In peace.

Today, I remain nicely chummy with Don, although I’ve often detected an air of what I suppose is “benevolent pity” from him directed toward my savage simpleton benightedness.

For if not Don … and Move On … and Michael Moore … who WILL save my soul? Or, more importantly, THE HEART AND/OR SOUL OF AMERICA?

Who, dammit!? … YOU?

Please try. But only with cash. For I am, most assuredly, for sale.

*

33. Any element of ANA MARIE COX that isn’t breast tissue.

*

32. VESPA scooters.
Suddenly, this is acceptable big-city commuter transportation?

For … adults?

SAYS FUCKING WHO?!?!

*

31. The dreadful lack of fatal VESPA scooter accidents.
For if even one, single, solitary Vespa scooter accident doesn’t kill its driver, that, in and of itself, comprises a dreadful lack of fatality.

*

Sheesh! 30 more of these left? Well, they do get more suckadelic. Next go: Bill Maher, crocodile tears for Joe Strummer, the “Red State/Blue State” conceit, and the PABST! BLUE! RIBBON! deceit.

While you wait, commemorate our being in The Top 40 with this ageless jewel:

January 1, 2000 to January 1, 2010. Ten years that shook the septic tank. And overflowed it.

All right, we’re halfway to the bottom. Parrr-teeee!

Ten more leaps downward, with nadirs including “foodies,” what’s become of Bill Murray, horror-comedy, Aaron Sorkin, the decimation of the word “douche”, George Clooney, and more.

Always more… ever further … lower … and lower….

******************************************

50. THE WEST WING
Jingoism for pussies.

Religious zealotry for pompous liars who need the world to think they’re too “smahhht” for religion and/or zealotry.

A pacifier, shiny mobile, and comfy diaper—all in one!—for happily infantilized fools aching to believe and proselytize: “MY Good Daddy wants to SAVE America! That OTHER Bad Daddy wants to DESTROY America!”

Pornography for blank-brained adults who beamingly brandish “I VOTED!” stickers each first Tuesday in November, like children in the 1950s running around with Mickey Mouse Club ears and Davy Crockett caps (only The Mickey Mouse Club and Davy Crockett were awesome and the children had better taste and were more mature).

Codification of “patriotic” and “American” as badges and instant fall-back jargon for haughty Caucasians ever on the lookout for short-cuts to declare their Moral Perfection.

Nuclear-potent propaganda for the willfully, desperately dim, promoting the sports-modeled “Red State/Blue State” divide-and-conquer stranglehold of the Ruling Class by insisting: “Pick your side and fight-fight-fight! Because THIS is important! In fact, THIS is the ONLY THING that’s important! So fight for it! Fight-fight-fight! But only each other! Go!”

Gloss-slopped lies in plain sight declaring that something noble (and “patriotic!” and “American!”) exists among the suit-and-tie succubi whose sole life goal is to sit behind a desk and dictate to you and me what we must do—for THEM—while they are backed up by a billion gun-barrels (which THEIR hands will never touch).

And most deplorable of all: having to live with the knowledge that a mollusk exists who once giddily proclaimed: “Of course I love Battlestar Galactica! It’s ‘The West Wing in Space’!”

*

49. The word: “FOODIES.”
Worse: the half-baked, skin-wrapped, ass-mocha-foam-infused economy-sized servings of flambéed feces who identify as “foodies.”

*

48. VEGAS, BABY! VEGAS!
Hey, gang!

We’re a bunch of suburban, sports-nut, lite-beer-hoisting bro-hams who live for carrying the wicked office fun of casual Friday over into the bar at TGI Fridays.

We refer to attractive females as “talent.” In fact, one of our dawgs is so out-there, he calls them “candy”!

We rock the Springsteen, the U2, then maybe an AC/DC jam, and then maybe even some—hang on to your FM-classic-rock-formatted jock-straps—Green Day!

College was the defining blast of all blasts for us, brah.

And we ache for that broseph-hood, we need it, we ARE it, even though we’re totally into our hottie-hot-hot wives and totally awesome kids who we’re already training for NFL hugeness.

But we’re, like GUYS, now. GUY’S GUYS!

And we’re entitled to THE GOOD LIFE!

So what does that mean?

Blackberries? Blu-rays? Digi-cams? Flat-screens? Netbooks? We got ’em! Keep up on all the Gadget Guides, even while we’re piloting our sweet rides to-and-fro the ol’ cul-de-sac homestead.

In fact, especially when we’re on the road … which reminds me … heeeeeey …. ROAD TRIP!!!

And where do fucking repulsive square humps go when they really wanna … CUT LOOSE?

Where can you booze, gamble, maybe huff a little tootski, pay a bim to squirm across your fly and maybe even kiss your ding-ding in a dark room?

Well, anybody can do any and all of that ANYWHERE, but ….

Where do corporately programmed-down-to-a-cellular-level zeros go when they want just an—oooooooh!—naughty naughty taste of the WILD SIDE?

Where can we go where the old ladies will just sigh about “Oh, boys being boys….” while they run wild with our credit cards so we can have something to communally bitch about after the fact?

Where is this oozing, sickening pustule of braindead consumerism packaged as pre-fabricated rebellion?

Where is all this, just, deeee-licious vice possible while never daring to leave the all-encompassing embrace of societally sanctioned safety?

Vegas, baby.

VAAAAAAAAYYYY-GISSSSSSSS!

*
47: DJs, DJ culture, DJing as acceptable life-calling (and anything other than immediate death calling).
This rage applies exclusively to the post-Wolfman-Jack, post-Cousin-Brucie, post-Top-40 AM radio/progressive-rock FM radio definition of the term “disc jockey.”

Also excused: the dorkuses enabling wedding reception “Chicken Dances” and record-store nerds enjoying a night out, embarking on the only version of “showing off” they’re likely to ever have (forgive me: I’ve been there).

No, the DJverse in question here involves the monstrosities who “spin” at dance clubs for the gargoyles who would enter such hell-pits motivated by any reason other than court order.

Skaggier still is the DJ who hopes that, jeepers, maybe one day he or she can waft to dizzying heights of DJdom on the fumes of Samantha Ronson’s Marlboro-Red-and-vaginal-mucous breath and—maybe, just maybe—wiggle up there in the booth lording over, like … celebrities!

*

46. The post-FACTS OF LIFE fact of GEORGE CLOONEY.
Esquire magazine wants you to understand that the mere image of Hollywood entitlement at its most presumptuous, smug, disconnected, and forced-down-our-gullets bogus is the very literal—and, in fact, the only—picture of “HOW TO BE A MAN.”

“What the fuck is Esquire magazine?”, you ask.

Congratulations, you are a man.

*

45. The cooptation and corruption of the once glorious term “DOUCHE”.
Pay attention, douches:

“Douche” as epithet entered the popular lexicon in late November 1985—exactly and precisely—courtesy of Howard Stern.

That was when Stern debuted on Infinity Broadcasting’s WXRK-FM after three years on WNBC-AM.

Prior to that, “douchebag” was a popular insult tossed around for years, from rooftop to chimney, from Harlem to Bimini.

And Stern had shocked the shit out of New York airwaves by routinely referring to callers, station management, and whoever else he deemed to bless as “douchebags.”

Most famously, he rechristened his traffic reporter Donna Fiducia as “Donna Fuh-douchebag.”

Upon graduating to the FM band, Infinity’s censors informed Stern that he could no longer utter the word “douchebag” and so he shortened it to merely “douche”, which actually, in its odd-sounding objectification, proved more potent, both for comedy and mean-spiritedness.

(Similarly, “scumbag” had to be shortened to “scum”, which evolved into the more amusing “skunk.”)

Like it or not, Howard’s influence on day-to-day language has been monumental and permanently culture changing.

For 25 years, Stern broadcasted previously unimaginable topics while using previously criminal language into the daily commutes of the New Yorkers and Los Angelenos who control and shape everything we see and hear all day.

And from there arose “douche.”

It was everybody else who ruined it. Forever. Fucking douches.

44. THE OTHER HOLLYWOOD: THE UNCENSORED ORAL HISTORY OF THE PORN INDUSTRY by Legs McNeil.
Legs McNeil always struck me as the spore that suctioned itself to the mighty John Holmstrom at Punk magazine, a fact he mortifyingly proved correct via his attempts to do something, anything, on his own at Spin back in the ’80s.

I also hated his Please Kill Me oral history of first-wave New York City punk-rock, because the book’s primary purpose was to solidify and perpetuate the Rolling Stone/Rock-N-Roll Hall of Fame OFFICIAL STORY of punk’s totality.

You know it: that fucking fakery that starts with CBGB’s and the Sex Pistols forever “blowing away” Yes and ELP, reportedly “peaks”with The Clash, and then does nothing until Nirvana, and then it stops, and then there’s (bleeccch) American Idiot and then it stops again.

And, on that lying, despicable front, Please Kill Me succeeded.

And Patti Smith can go shave my armpits.

Naturally, I expected McNeil’s approach to porn to be the most warmed-over, stepped-on-jizzbag take on the topic and—surprise!—he didn’t surprise me.

Here is exactly who, by the 2005 publication of The Other Hollywood, never, ever, under any circumstances, needed to speak about pornography again: perpetually unfunny tub-a-lub Ron Jeremy, somehow less funny tub-a-lub Bill Margold, and bad-lisp-with-terrible-breast-implants Nina Hartley.

Need anyone point out which three voices are quoted most relentlessly, and uselessly, throughout the Legs McNeil opus?

Chapters rehashing Deep Throat (1972), the ultimate Abel-offs-Cain outcome of the makers of Behind the Green Door (1972), and the long, strange drip of John Holmes present amateur encapsulations of stories properly and grippingly documented by the respective tomes The Complete Linda Lovelace by Eric Danville and X-Rated: The Mitchell Brothers—A True Story of Sex, Money, and Death by David McCumber, and John Holmes: A Life Measured in Inches by Jennifer Sugar and Jill C. Nelson.

The Traci Lords story is better served by the (self-serving) Underneath It All, credited to History’s Most Spectacular jailbait herself and, hugely more amusingly, in Lights! Camera! Sex! by Christy Canyon who, make no mistake, did compose that magnificent score-settler all by her own hands and glands.

Remarkably, McNeil’s sole original contribution is an endless, endlessly boring account of FBI investigations into the skin-flick trade, with one fed after another naming Mafiosa monikers, and nobody even getting wasted—except the reader, in terms of his time and effort when it comes to anything ever authored by a grown man who’s last name is not “Diamond,” but who’d still have you refer to him as “Legs.”

*
43. The genre: HORROR-COMEDY.
Scare me or make me laugh, but don’t try to do both.

Because if you’re not Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), Fright Night (1985), Re-Animator (1985), Return of the Living Dead (1985), Night of the Creeps (1986) or TerrorVision (1986), you’re probably trying to be Evil Dead II (1987) and, from there, all contemporary horror-comedy emerges.

And it is the product of filmmakers too incompetent to make a frightening horror movie so they try to cover up with gags and it is the favorite subgenre of horror-fans-in-name-only who actually hate bona fide horror.

And none of it is good.

No, I have not seen Shaun of the Dead (2004). Stop automatically asking.

*

42. Those twee dioramas on the cover of SARAH VOWELL books.
But really: just Sarah Vowell.

41. 21st Century BILL MURRAY.
The de-evolution of a comic maestro from Meatballs (superb) and Caddyshack (sublime) to Wes Anderson (terrible) and Jim Jarmusch (the worst).

And—let us never excuse, or forget, or forgive—Zombieland.

****************************************

Christ, am I a miserable windbag! But fret not, there’s more heated gas en route, next time including Vespa scooters, 30 Rock, “alterna-”, Entourage, Michael Moore, and the annual Onion A/V Club “Best of the Year” edition.

Till then, sweet things, don’t miss:

The 100 Most Heinous Cultural Atrocities of the 2000s: #100-81

The 100 Most Heinous Cultural Atrocities of the 2000s: #80-61

The 100 Most Heinous Cultural Atrocities of the 2000s: #60-51

Wallow with me once more—won’t you?—through an annotated ranking of the lowest of the loathsome, the dankest of the despicable, the most woeful of the worst.

One hundred steps to Hades, spread out over a decade.

Come, now. Again. Then rue … forever.

***************************************

60. THE WARRIORS: ULTIMATE DIRECTOR’S CUT DVD
Filmmaker Walter Hill desecrates his surreal gang warfare meistürwürk with MS paint comic book panels which would not be okay, but would be acceptable if the DVD also included the original version.

It does not.

Instead this version, the sole one in print, contains only the cut of The Warriors that includes a grotesque Internet caricature of James Remar as Ajax underscored by the caption: “Holy shit!!! The Baseball Furies!!”

59. Ironically popped collars.

58. Non-ironically popped collars.

57. The lingering, corrosive existence of MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000.
Not to mention human mouths uttering the abbreviation “MST3K” and not being silenced by a hard cock strapped with lit sticks of dynamite.

My hard cock, to be specific.

And now, by damnable-to-ALL-Hell extension: Rifftrax.

When wondering where the very specific tones, attitudes, and reverse-logic cattle mentality of those who seek to bond by pretending to destroy via Internet comments sections comes from, look no further than the three humps at the bottom of the screen here, who negated whatever might have been worthwhile about this show because there was no button available to make them disappear and/or just shut the fuck up.

56. THE ARISTOCRATS (2005)
“Humor, like a frog, can be dissected, but the thing dies in the process.”—E.B. White

59. ALAN BALL and the Pseudo-Indie Cliché: “The only person in town with a brain is 15-years-old!”
American Beauty (1999), the first noteworthy shot-across-the-bowels from atypically void-of-imagination homosexualist Alan Ball, kicked off this dung-spawned, decade-enduring trend by garnering Best Original Screenply honors at the 2000 Academy Awards.

In the event that Thora Birch stumping and trumping her ganja-enlightened dad, ice nympho mom, and the Big Tough Military Man Next Door Who Can Not Merely Be a Krypto-Nazi But Must Also Be a Closet-Queerio was not groan-eliciting enough, Ball followed it up on HBO with Six Feet Under.

There, otherwise lovely adolescent Lauren Ambrose not only remained the sole pillar of Human Sense (emboldened, again, by weeeeeeed, man), but at the series’ end, Ball’s ball-free stand-in lives to be a thousand years old and dies the only happy, natural death of any of the characters.

Dope preens eternal.

And then came True Blood and the all-wise, all-compassionate, all-just-oodles-of-gay-yummy Sookie Stackhouse.

The character being somewhere in her 20s can only be attributed to Ball adapting the her from other source material.

For God not only “hates fangs” (again: groan or die), He also knows Ball would have naturally preferred to put himself-as-Sookie in a (junior) prom dress.

Alan: suck more man-joints and less loose joints and try to catch a little whiff of the originality for which we’ve come to rely upon you Hollywood sodomites.

The tongue-clicking, eye-rolling, entirely pubescent Moral/Intellectual/Spiritual Supremacy of Ball’s beauties irritatingly inspired numerous other faux-independent excretions.

Witness these horrors: The Virgin Suicides (2000), where Kiki Dunst dismisses her adult male psychiatrist by hissing: “You don’t know what it is to be a 13-year-old girl!”

The Battle of Shaker Heights (2003), with its tagline: “When you’re 17, every day is war!”

Charlie Bartlett (2007) which recreates Ferris Bueller, the original incarnation of this horribleness, as a JUST ADORABLE medically liberated narcotic-pusher turned priestly (but be sure: strictly multi-denominational) confessor who, during his high-school valedictory speech, assures his fellow minors: “YOU guys have ALL the answers!”

Of course, the most atrocious examples of this tantrum-as-screenwriting (pre-)school are Donnie Darko (2001) and Juno (2007) but, clearly, they each warrant their own individual entries in this piss-party, don’t you think?

58. The ironic faux-hawk.

57. The non-ironic faux-hawk.

56. Loudly declared pride in NOT being vegetarian.
Yeah. Dare to be exactly like everyone else, oh rebel rebel, but never fail to point out how this elevates you above those who aren’t.

55. JASON SCHWARTZMAN’S FACE
Has any object ever so relentlessly begged for the repeated kiss of bare knuckles?

Ah, yes: Jason Schwarzman’s colon.

54. The QUENTIN TARANTINO/ROBERT RODRIGUEZ abomination GRINDHOUSE.
Especially the 45 minutes of chicks talking followed by an admittedly pretty awesome car crash followed by another 45 minutes of chicks talking followed by a ridiculous car chase that could be stopped by just pulling the fuck over followed by the second batch of insufferably jawboning chicks besting a lifelong vehicular homicide practitioner.

But, oy, come to think of it, that dogshit came after Rob Zombie’s stiff, false Werewolf Women of the SS trailer and yet another dull turd in the weirdly ongoing multi-decade defecation that Robert Rodriguez calls a career.

I liked “Don’t!” and “Thanksgiving”, though. And Inglourious Basterds is my favorite movie of the 2000s. So … that’s something.

53. “GAY MARRY” as a verb.
As employed by people who are not nearly cool enough to have ever actually gone homo even for a minute.

Still, these Upstanding Citizens need you to know they’re “fightin’ the power” by using the term “gay marry” as a verb, as in:

“I support gay marriage and if you don’t, don’t get one, and if I was going to get one, I’d GAY MARRY [some same-gender celebrity you’ve been instructed to think is hot]! Haw-haw-haw! Love and admire and fake laugh with me, please, please, won’t you?!”

52. GOSSIP GIRL.
We exist today in a horrible through-the-looking-glass milieu wherein the admirably hairy values of the 1970s (a period that extends from 1973 all the way to the end of 1982) have been directly reversed, inverted, and turned upside down.

And the simps just go along, none the wiser, all the suckier.

I refer to our present reality in which the Omegas are the Good Guys of Animal House (1978) and the battle cry of Caddyshack (1980)—“It’s the slobs against the snobs!”—holds hard, but now one is expected to root for (and want to be) the latter of those combatants.

No locale more disgustingly crystallizes this notion than 21st century Manhattan, where puffed-up cretins reflexively revile Mayor Rudolf Giuliani while only being able to exist in the present incarnation of New York City made possible by Mayor Rudolf Giuliani.

I grew up in scary, scummy NYC of the ’70s and ’80s, punctuated by the absolute unlivable madness of the Dinkins administration.

It was during that last epoch of city-financed funerals for drug dealers and “Don’t Diss Your Sis” buttons as rape prevention that actual SUPER-CRIMINALS arose: Dart Man, Zodiac, “wilding” Wolf Packs in the park, and Whirlpool Gangs at public swimmin’-'n’-gropin’ holes.

And so, unlike the coddled Hoosiers and Buckeyes who are just so eager to feel (gosh!) Real by ditching the farm and brushing up against (sigh!) actual Puerto Ricans, I welcomed and applauded Giuliani coming down, at last, like the cleansing rain Travis Bickle longs for at the beginning of Taxi Driver, washing all the scum off the streets.

And then how I missed The Scum We Knew.

For what subsequently flooded every Gotham sidewalk crevice was a tidal wave of supermodels, vaginas-on-sticks who want to be supermodels, and testes-free femme-men aiming to be real GUUUUUUUY’S GUUUUUUYS by poking their wee peenies in the direction of supermodels.

The movie stars followed. And the “celebrity” anti-entities. And then the Retroactive Abortions That Should Be who give ALL their fucks about such pustules.

Suddenly, my beloved New York Post, legendary purveyor of the “Headless Body in Topless Bar” screamer headline, became a mere wrapper for its vile Page Six.

And so the New York City that spawned The Dictators and Ramones and Sleazoid Express and Gore Gazette and, for fuck’s sake, HAPPYLAND gave way to the New York City of Sex and the City and Perez Hilton and The Strokes and “The Hahhhmptons” and, for feces’ sake, Gossip Girl.

Back in the good old, horrific old days, the post-nuke, neo-barbarian future of the five boroughs predicted by myriad Italian Mad Max rip-offs on the order of 1990: The Bronx Warriors (1982) and After the Fall of New York (1983) positively pulsated with homicidal hatred of uptown elites—and I do mean positively.

Desire to don warpaint and storm Park Avenue castles with mass murder in mind, to force fornication upon and sexually enslave any slattern that dare deign itself “fashionista,” to firebomb Fifth Avenue preparatory academies, to thunder real pain and real sorrow and real fatality upon the real-life gargoyles who inspire Gossip Girl’s televised archetypes—that is healthy, that is proper, that is what it means to be a from New York City. From it, and of it.

So for anyone to be a Gossip Girl enthusiast means that he deserves the fates described above, too. Even more. Even worse. And, let’s hope, soon.

51. SONIC YOUTH
Somehow, these parasites continue aging, unmurdered and unmolested.

Thirty years of vampiric scammery and garnering the love of liars led to Kim Gordon and the other broad  in Sonic Youth (the gorky tall twat who pretends to play guitar) guesting on—where else?—Gossip Girl.

And why? Because it’s the projection of the innermost ideals of their own prep-school spawn.

If only the barrenness of their creativity could have transferred to their breeding organs.

I knew I should have jackbooted Kim Gordon in the ovaries that time she was outside CB’s Pizza in ’89, looking for idea(l)s to steal.

******************************************

Jeezum, what a party. Next onslaught includes The West Wing, Horror Comedy, The Other Hollywood by Legs McNeil, and Vegas, baby. Vegas.

And start at the top of the spelunk:

The 100 Most Heinous Cultural Atrocities of the 2000s: #100-81

The 100 Most Heinous Cultural Atrocities of the 2000s: #80-61

January 1, 2000 to January 1, 2010. It was a long ten years. And sucko.

Wallow with me once more—won’t you?—through an annotated ranking of the lowest of the loathsome, the dankest of the despicable, the most woeful of the worst.

One hundred steps to Hades, spread out over a decade.

Come, now. Again. Then rue … forever.

*********************************************************

80. The phrase: “IT’S FOOTBALL NIGHT IN AMERICA!!”
I hate football.

America, like Jesus to the Doobies, is just all right with me.

So I think I most detest the presumptuousness of this declaration, coupled with the rancid, disingenous pomposity of the clown doing the declaring.

“Football Night in America” is “Simpsons, Family Guy, and (when there are new episodes) Dexter Night” in my house, you saggy blowhard.

And I really, really, really fucking hate and despise football.

79. CHELSEA HANDLER.
I guarantee you: she’s a sexually anorexic virgin.

78. PARANORMAL ACTIVITY (2009).
“The door … CREAKED!”

“The bedspread wiggled … like, three whole times!”

“AAAIIIEEEEEEEEE!”

Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. Shut UP! SHUT UP!! SHUUUT UUUPPP!!!!

77. SOFIA COPPOLLA.
Sofia Coppolla behind a camera, anywhere at any time, is exactly what she was in front of one in Godfather III. And not even the really funny part at the end.

Still, this anti-talent did prompt the endlessly detestable Salon.com (remember that outpost of digital feces from the ’90s?) to hilariously run a profile under the headline: “The Coppola Clan’s Best Director?”

Fucking Roman laughs at that ludicrousness.

76. HATCHET (2006)
This shitty, (unfunny) joke-a-minute slasher spoof was simply bad.

What rendered Hatchet incalculably worse (and, in fact, memorable at all) were all the fakes describing it as “old school.”

Such claimants were legion, right up to fright legend and Hatchet headliner Robert Englund, whom I saw onstage at a Fangoria convention.

When somebody mentioned Hatchet, this otherwise total class act pumped his fist and beamed twice: “Old school! … Old school!”

It turns out Freddy Kreuger is a LIAR!

75. NO IMPACT MAN.
The real crime against our environment: I used to know this moneyed, privileged, hackneyed fraud and regularly be within sodomizing distance of him.

Alas(s), I didn’t, when I had the chance, turn him into RECTAL IMPACT MAN.

Mea gulpa.

I did chub up when they bludgeoned his wife to death on Law and Order, though.

74. Hipsters pretending to hate The Eagles.
I love you, Big Lebowski but, this, I cannot abide.

73. Over-goddamn-reaction to LET THE RIGHT ONE IN.

What starts out as—and remains, for quite a while—a remarkable, moving tone study in childhood loneliness ultimately collapses into dumb-shit revenge flick dynamics. And that’s what puts the bogusness into all the “BEST. VAMPIRE. MOVIE. EVER.” foaming over Let the Right One In.

Now make no mistake, you are not reading a knock on dumb-shit revenge flicks from this fanatical devotee of Vigilante, Tenement, the late, great Robert Ginty’s mighty Exterminator movies, and the like.

But in the context of the slow, steady sadness throughout the first two-thirds of Right One, to have it collapse into kick-ass, consequence-free adolescent murder fantasies is a cop-out and plain wrong, wrong, wrong.

I enjoy hearing the word “bluude” repeated over and over again as much as anyone, but Right One hyperbolists are directed to return to F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) and Carl Theodore Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932) and proceed forward before blasting the contents of their Swedish meatballs all over their Ikea slipcovers.

72. “LOL!”

71. “OMG!”

70. “WTF?!”

69. ROB ZOMBIE.
The goddamnable thing about Rob Zombie—terrible musician, christawful filmmaker, indirect purveyor of leather cowboy hats, cherry tattoos, work shirts with flames on them and all manner of other revolting crapola—is that he seems like one whale of a nice, interesting, savvy, and thoroughly likable fella.

So what’s with the catastrophic disconnect between the (extremely handsome) man and all the (joylessly ugly) rot he produces?

Such mysteries are not ours to successfully solve, but Rob Zombie movies and records are certainly ours to stridently avoid.

That’s easy enough when it comes to his mongoloid dance-metal but it proves quite the challenge when Zombie’s latest brainless, frenetic, celluloid toilet-dunk suddenly lighs up the multiplex.

I mean, the weekend rolls around and you’ve got to see something, right?

Particularly egregious was the lazy, boring, and infuriatingly dishonest The Devil’s Rejects (2005), which was rendered eminently more contemptible by mainstream critics deciding: “Okay this here is the semi-annual genre-related piece of shit we all decide to pump up so’s we can convince ourselves we’re, like, with it.”

The Devil’s Rejects is New York City art-school nerd Zombie playing store-bought White Trash fueled by counterfeit nihilism so clueless that his only way out is through “Free Bird”—and I mean all of fucking “Free Bird.”

And don’t forget: “Tutti-fuckin’ fruity!”

Bleccch.

68. THE DA VINCI CODE.
Like any other sane adult who actually read The Da Vinci Code—and apparently there were several trillion of us suckers (although “sane” remains entirely debatable)—I picked up this offense to language, rationality, plot, logic, and simple goddamned storytelling at an airport and slogged through it, cover to sickening cover, on a flight.

Had I not been destined for Toronto, home of the mam-nificent full-contact lap-dance emporium Zanzibar, I may well have leapt off the plane in hope that, by some odd chance, my formidable body weight would come thundering down—at maximum speed and with lethal impact—upon idiotic author Dan Brown.

To paraphrase Truman Capote (which I pronounce “Truman E. Capoat”): “That’s not writing, that’s direct defecation into my eyeballs.”

The Da Vinci Code is the worst book I have ever finished. It is also the favorite book of the stupidest individual(s)you know. Ask around.

67. LOLLAPALOOZA

It won’t stay stopped.

Of course, Perry Farrell’s touring foreskin-drippage was dead on arrival in ’91, but there’s no keeping a dillhole-cash-depriving juggernaut of such nauseating proportions buried where it belongs.

But that doesn’t mean international jihadists shouldn’t give it the ol’ Mullah-fuckin’ try.

66. SLEAZOID EXPRESS maven Bill Landis flames out, once and forever.
Goodnight, insane-horrible-awesome-pioneering-genius man.

65. ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT.
Bonus: David Cross anywhere except Mr. Show, the Chipmunks movies, or in a flaming crematorium. Not dead. Yet.

64. “ONE LESS CAR!” bicycle jackoffs.
This condemnation comes from me, a big city bicycle commuter since high-school. 

I bike because it’s fun, it’s cheap, it’s efficient, and you can park anywhere.

However, the day they invent George Jetson’s collapsible saucer-SUV is the day I retire my two-wheeler.

Until then, I want no congratulations from anyone for the fact that I prefer to pedal around.

And I’d like you to run down, and then back up over, any of my fellow bicyclists whose day-glo vest suggests otherwise.

Try to do it while I’m nearby. I’ll help.

63. Band names modeled on WHEEL OF FORTUNE’s “Before and After” puzzles.
Of REO Speedealer, The Brian Jonestown Massacre, The Mothers of Intervention, and all their contemptible cronies, somehow I most despise Tom Tom Petty.

And it ain’t out of warm feelings toward Tom Petty!

62. WINE.
Not Thunderbird. That would be “the word.”

I mean: liquid pretension.

Particularly galling were the pyramids of bottles clogging tables at every crap-ass restaurant for the 18 months or so following the release of Sideways.

No matter how much I got off on fantasizing about shattering those glass containers and using them as surprise sex-toys on the pompous fools carting them to a take-out Thai joint—and, believe me, got off on it, I did—I really do NOT want to know how to pronounce the words “pinot grigio”.

And, yet I, who has (happily) not consumed any alcohol in more than 10 years, most assuredly (unhappily) do.

61. The term “HATER”.
Especially because it is an automatic pejorative, used to dismiss conflict and end a contentious discussion, the way “WHATEVER!” was in the ’90s.

And extra especially because: In this world, during this life, who can abide he who hates not?

Infinitely more hatable is the plural: “haterz.”

That’s correct. With a “z”. That’s how you’ll see grown men and women spelling it: “haterz”.

Feel that? It’s hate, hater.

You’re welcome.

*

And the shits just keep on coming. Next dispatch will include Gossip Girl, “foodies”, Allan Ball, The Aristocrats, Jason Schwartzman’s repugnant punim, and poker (but NOT “Pokerface”—that remains my all-time #1 jam!).

While you wait, do peruse The 100 Most Heinous Cultural Atrocities of the 2000s: #100-81.

January 1, 2000 to January 1, 2010. It was a long ten years. And sucko.

Wallow with me—won’t you?—through an annotated ranking of the lowest of the loathsome, the dankest of the despicable, the most woeful of the worst.

One hundred steps to Hades, spread out over a decade.

Come, now. Rue … forever.

****************************************************************

100. DRAG ME TO HELL.

99. Phony critical adoration of DRAG ME TO HELL.

98. Dips of shit just LOVING to pronounce the word “Ray-poor.”
Tee-hee! It’s fun! It’s silly! But, like the “satire” of the man himself … it’s IMPORTANT!

97. “Dracula From Houston” by The Butthole Surfers.
My favorite band of all time somehow marries “Sweet Jane” to Smashmouth by way of Beck (the lamest of all) and bifurcates one of the very worst songs I have ever heard.

And for a Scrubs soundtrack, no less.

Seeing the original Butthole Surfers line-up perform recently—and brilliantly (neither “Dracula” nor “Pepper” made it to the set list)—renders this transgression dismissable.

Being old myself now and worried about money makes “Dracula From Houston” profoundly understandable.

But still … I never, ever, ever wanted to hear Gibby faux-cockney belt the phrase: “teach ‘em ‘ow to be cool buh jus’ a lih-ull bit FUNK-ay!”

Now, of course, there’s no un-hearing it.

96. “Pirates!”

95. “Ninjas!”

94. “Bacon!”

93. “ZOMBIES!”

92. GOONIES as a popular midnight movie attraction.
Aside from the legitimate joy of The Room, the rollicking Troll II roadshow, and the relative likability of Repo! The Genetic Opera, your local arthouse’s witching-hour schedule —once the noble realm of Eraserhead, Head, Sextette, et cetera—is now strictly the domain of drunken ’80s kiddie-kaka nostalgists.

And I assure ye that The Princess Bride, Indiana Jones jagoffery and, most offensively, Goonies is NOT good enough.

91. Sarah Palin impersonations.
Great goshers gee-willikers, wasn’t that a time last election season when EVERY good-ol’ gut-bustin’ly hilarious jokester on earth was just a-itchin’ to show off all those goshdarn rootin’-tootin’ Sarah-Palinisms dontchaknow!?

Ooh, pshaw, gee-whiz-bang, were you in on it, too?

Were you out there all a-goin’ around sayin’: “I can say ‘I can see Russia from my house!’ and hope you think I thought it up right here on the spot! Well isn’t that a fine how-da-ya-doo!?”

If you were, I hate you. Still. In perpetuity.

Great golly! Yah! Yahhh!

89. THIS AMERICAN LIFE.
Be it on radio, TV, podcast, and/or in movie theaters.

88. THIS AMERICAN LIFE host Ira Glass.
Be he anywhere on this planet, breathing.

87. GET YOUR WAR ON.
Mitigating factor: this wad quit. Take the hint, Tom Tomorrow. Really, already.

86. Heterosexual men wearing big, poofy scarves indoors.
Worse: it is still illegal to properly David Foster Wallacize them on sight.

And, to be sure, this hostility does NOT extend to our homosexualist friends.

85. Those fucking STAR WARS abortions.
Sure, you claim to hate them now and you claimed to hate them all along, but we both know you brandished a Darth Maul action figure on your dot-com desk for a while.

But you didn’t see one on mine.

84. Neo-New-Wave.
Interpol, The Editors, The Strokes, ad nauseum, remind you why all Men of Good Conscience needed to baseball-bat-prostate-examine Cure fans back in the day.

And why such procedures must be terminal when it comes to devotees of this new crap crop.

83. Steven Soderbergh.
The jet-setting, bimbo-banging big-studio “indie” multimillionaire who gave us both Che Guevera as post-Jesus/pre-Obama divine savior and Sasha Grey as NOT a dumb, 20-year-old prostitute.

I imagine Soderbergh posits himself a “moralist.”

As does, I am sure, anyone who even semi-intentionally looks like Steven Soderbergh.

Which, of course, includes Ira Glass.

82. THE DEPARTED (2007)
Hollywood pamper-puffs talking tough (and thereby naughtily tossing around real-life verboten racial slurs and, dear me, “faggot”) is never pleasant, let alone anyone’s sane idea of “entertainment.”

Hearing it through ham-powered Boston accents renders it apocalyptically unconscionable.

And never has anything been more succinctly nailed than when Ralph Wiggum observed: “The rat symbolizes obviousness!”

81. The phrase: “Tell us how you REALLY feel!”
Think I had that one flung at me a few times in the past decade?

Wait, let me put that another way.

ME: “I’ve had people say that to me quite a bit in the previous ten years.”

CRETIN: “Gee, YA THINK!?!”

*

Among the offal tumbling down in numbers 80-61: Sofia Coppola, David Cross, Rob Zombie, Lollapalooza, and the phrase: “It’s football night in America.”

World, snuff yourself.

Until then, a little hellacious music to tide you over, perpetuated by giants to whom I would normally assign the term “hellacious” as a compliment. Not this time. NOT ON THE GODAMMNED SCRUBS SOUNDTRACK!