McBeardo’s Darkest Shame: I WAS A SECRET VOTER IN THE 2010 MID-TERM ELECTIONS!
A decade of “political atheism”* comes crashing to a halt by means of one of those phony-baloney electronic Chicago ballot machine-a-magigs. DON’T LET IT HAPPEN TO YOU!
P.J. O’Rourke has functioned as one of my primary cultural heroes ever since I first heard his name and learned that he was associated with the National Lampoon. That moniker just seems so ordained from on high to have to belong to a genius comedy writer—an idea that Mr. O’Rourke more than lived up to by way of the two high-water marks of 20th century humor in print: The National Lampoon 1964 Yearbook Parody (which he co-edited with Doug Kenney) and, of course, Foreigners Around the World.
O’Rourke’s political awakening from teenage Marxist to right-wing Libertarian also mirrors my own, in addition to that of anyone else I would actually ever want to engage in a discussion of such any topic nearly as abominable as politics.
Like you—like everyone—I very much prefer the exclusive (if possible) company of those with whom I’m already in rabid agreement.
There are just not as many of us as there are of you.
BACK IN BEARDNESS
McBeardo Reopens, So Open Your Openings
TWENTY years ago—that’s two-ZERO, youngsters—I commenced small-press publishing by way of a noxious mimeograph titled HAPPYLAND.
Back then, any such effort required bulky replicating machinery, scissors, Sharpies, Scotch tape, staples, glue sticks, glossy periodicals to cut up, and messes of postage stamps.
It was an enormous ache in the keister and, thus, only attracted those (of us) superhumanly determined to make a signature dent in the collective hoo-hah of the day.
Those were the times.
So You Wanna Sniff the Panties of the Future Ex-Wife of a Rock & Roll Star?
HOW I CAME TO INHALE THE LINGERIE FUMES OF A NOT-YET-FORMER MRS. TODD RUNDGREN WHEN I WAS 14
For Erik W.
Breast of luck,
MM
**************
January 1983
The great AM radio raconteur Paul Harvey could relate this epic brush with rock greatness as God intended: laying out tension and suspense, building up to the knockout punchline, the big 
twist, the “well, I’ll be…” revelation.
Alas, the rest of my larger story is that I am not Paul Harvey, nor God, so I must lead with the lede and deliver the load up front.
This is it: when I was 14, I spent a Saturday afternoon in the company of ’70s rock superstar Todd Rundgren. I ate a cheeseburger platter. He smoked marijuana. I also sniffed his future ex-wife’s panties. But not in that order.
Most crucially, I had no idea “Todd” was Todd Rundgren that day, nor for years to follow. I remained clueless even after I went back to his warehouse-proportioned Soho loft where dozens upon dozens of electric guitars hung from the ceiling and gigantic synthesizers cluttered corners.
The loft’s coolest feature to me was a framed Cat People poster on the wall, autographed by director Paul Schrader. I had seen the movie recently and immediately thought of star Nastassja Kinski’s full-frontal panther pelt exposure.
If Todd’s bathroom had been equipped with an actual door, rather than just a cloth curtain (in such high bohemian style), I 
might have relived that imagery during some alone time, accompanied by olfactory memories of his future wife’s used undergarments which, as noted, I had enjoyed a snootful of earlier in the day, back in my friend Kevin Kilgallen’s bathroom in Brooklyn.
This occasion for this outing, in fact, was an assignment from Kevin’s freshman photography class. He and I had attended Our Lady Help of Christians from age six until graduating eighth grade the previous spring. Kevin then had the sense to attend the legitimately progressive Edward R. Murrow High School in Midwood, where first-year requirements included creative arts courses such as photography, while I caved in to post-disastrous-report-card pressure from my Green Beret/Vietnam vet father and opted for the Jesuit military academy Xavier High School on the other side of the river.
MADONNA BOOTS
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.
Butthole Surfers Lyrics & My Own Psyche, Semi-Deciphered
How I Write the Way I Write
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.”
Red Box Double Feature #1: BLOOD CREEK (2009) and ASSASINATION OF A HIGH SCHOOL PRESIDENT (2008)
Like it or leave present reality: The Red Box is the 21st Century Deuce, our modern day equivalent of a row of rundown, lit-up theater marquees advertising the latest and most lurid low-budget exploitation offerings.
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.
REVIEW: Frank Henenlotter’s BAD BIOLOGY (2009)
BAD BIOLOGY (2009)
DIRECTOR: Frank Henenlotter.
CAST: Charlee Danielson, Anthony Sneed, Mark Wilson, Tina Krause, Jelena Jensen.
SITE: http://www.myspace.com/badbiology
“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. Read More
The 100 Most Heinous Cultural Atrocities of the 2000s: #30-1
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? Read More
The 100 Most Heinous Cultural Atrocities of the 2000s: #40-31
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….
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The 100 Most Heinous Cultural Atrocities of the 2000s: #50-41
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….
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