RIP renfro

so brad renfro's death on tuesday -- undoubtedly drug-related -- is totally bumming me out. to me, he will perhaps always stand out as one of the more fucked up celebrities. pretty much all of his recent roles, in fact, required him to play characters not unlike himself. he took the helm, along with ethan embry, of one of my all-time fave episodes of law and order: criminal intent. he played a psychotic, bullied, airport security worker who moonlighted as a comic book artist and serial killer/rapist. dude was a good actor, don't get me wrong, but even through the efficient melodrama of CI it was play to see that his turmoil was real. ahhh, renfro, remember that time you and a buddy got drunk and stole a yacht? the time you got caught copping heroin on skid row? i'm not trying to glamorize a life that ended tragically young, but seriously, the obsession with celebrities-gone-bad has some misplaced attention on the women of the industry. renfro's antics always earned media attention, sure, but in a kind of one-sentence-in-the-newspaper kind of way.

in light of a new show to watch -- celebrity rehab with dr. drew -- i've been giving some thought to the crisis state of drug abuse in the entertainment industry. while on one hand it makes perfect sense to me that certain creative types might be drawn to experimentation, regular use, etc etc, and these routines, coupled with money and access, make addiction almost a sure thing...i still can't help but think that most of these people are just bullshitters with little incentive to exercise self-control. hey assholes -- ever hear my man bruce springsteen? 'they say you gotta stay hungry'? anyway, celebrity rehab: so one of the guests is alec baldwin, and he's been sober for over a year now, and while i DO understand that recovery is a long process, and i DO respect the fact that this man has a long and well-documented history of definite abuse, and i DO get that just because someone is sober does not necessarily mean that they're thinking like a sober person dry drunk syndrome etc), i CANNOT respect his decision to enter rehab where he knows he is going to be placed in close quarters with crazytown frontman SHIFTY SHELLSHOCK.

shifty shellshock may very well be the walking, talking embodiment of cocaine. everything about him screams 'awful choices' rather than 'let's do a few bumps and party our asses off'. the mohawk that has little regard for his receding hairline? tattoos that rival only travis barker in their late-90's iconography? the fact that he chose 'shifty shellshock' for a name? baldwin, you're fucked. if you really feel the need to enter rehab a year after sobriety -- if that's how insecure you currently feel in your own recovery -- mark my words, by the end of this program's 'season', you will be smoking rocks in some hidden nook of the pasadena recovery center with a man who looks like 1997 took a huge, leathery, nu-rap dump into a pair of jnco's.

i won't waste your time with more personal attacks on this show's participants because i do truly believe that at least a few of 'em could benefit from some sort of treatment. like jeff conaway, who seriously almost scared me straightedge last week. ugh, chills. anyway, it's just a shame that renfro's just pretty much been a side note since he peaked at age 14 or whatever. i guess the injustice of the horrible things that we do to ourselves is sinking in, when i think about how i can never look forward to another renfro episode of law and order (you know dick wolf loves to recycle those character actors), yet i WILL have to tolerate the release of another crazytown album. in conclusion, kids, for the sake of renfro stay off of heroin. and if you think you might have the desire and motivation to pen lyrics such as 'come and dance with me, the smartest thing you ever did was take a chance with me' and cover your body like head to fucking toe with sick tribes...stay off coke.

weekend viewing

predator 2: last week i was in chicago for an archaeology conference, which was pretty awesome. the first night i was in town, i sat down at a random table of archaeologists and found one to be familiar. turns out we had a latin class together like five years ago, and i'm still impressed that i remembered him because that 8 am course, taken during my final semester of college, was embarrassingly punctuated by many a trip to the bathroom to puke as i was kind of in a party zone. anyway, this former classmate of mine reminded me of a sight that i rather enjoyed while i was an undergdrad. there was this girl, i never spoke to her, never knew her name, but she was awesome becuase her hairstyle can only be described as predator dreads.

so, yeah, yesterday i saw this was coming on so i watched it. for little more than the above association. i really don't have anything new to add to predator thought, i guess. danny glover danny glover danny glover.

squirm: this 1976 flick is AMAZING. big-city dude goes to visit his girlfriend in her sleep southern town, only to find that the whole place is infested with carniverous worms. this movie was clearly a huge influence for the decade-later bigger budget kevin bacon vehicle TREMORS; and i love me some tremors. anything that helped that movie get born is deserving of my love. it also lent quite a bit to arachnaphobia; lots of foul shower scenes. and a classic 'hick' who the worms cannot take down, but they do gnaw through his face, and when he rises up to 'get' people like a still-living zombie, the only thing he'd say is 'now YOU gonna be a worm-face!' i mean this had potential to be at least mildly, mildly disturbing but someone decided that, nope, that was not to be the tone of squirm. kudos. like, for real.

2008 should be epic...

...and this is how i know. when i awoke and turned on the tv, the first thing that came on was indeed terminator 2 and it had just started. immediately after that i realized that my thesis show is not even two months away, so this means some 'limits' being put in place. until now, grad school was, among other things, a pretty good justification for what most might call low-grade functional alcoholism. not so anymore! until this shit goes up on FEBRUARY 26, i will be largely laying low. today i broke it to my grad-school drinking pal that this was the case. he was crushed, of course -- who wouldn't be, i'm fun as shit -- but what can ya do. anyhow, yeah, thesis show coming up. i will be posting various deets of this as it approaches. come and buy my shit!

terminator 2: burning questions

ok, in 'terminator 2', it is indicated that in the future, both the risen machines and the revolutionaries have access to the sort of time-travel technology that makes it possible to send a terminator back in time. so refined is this technology that at least one side is able to send a force back to a very specific time -- hence, two opposing, and naked, terminators being birthed from lightining-spheres in random spots in LA at the exact same time. great. i get it.

i know what follows would render the need to make terminator 2 pretty pointless, which would be awful. but still...why not just send one terminator just a little further back in time? this is the obvious comment that will inevitably come up, and yeah, sure. why not? or is that just a waste of a terminator? if john connor only needs protection from, like, bobby budnik and being influenced to smoke weed because he's listening to too much GnR, i guess he can handle that on his own?...so, yeah, if someone's not specifically trying to kill him, this might suggest that yep, arnold's a waste of space. on the flipside, however, why would melted-metal terminator not just go a little further back in time?

what i gleaned from this, then, after much thought, is as follows: the revolutionaries, in the future, will clearly have a better grasp of time travel. not so much perhaps, of cyborgenics (or whatever), but SHIT, if you can time travel, and do so more accurately than a robot that's trying to kill you...you MUST have a leg up. somehow.

i haven't seen t3; frankly, i am hesitant because i know t2 can't be topped, and i don't want to ruin this solid run for myself. i first saw the original terminator when i was 4, and i'm pretty sure that's the reason why i'm an insomniac to this day. i am disclaiming because i really am curious if and how time travel is addressed in post-t2 sequels/fanfic/etc. anyway, time travel inconsistencies aside, holy SHIT i am glad this movie exists. it definitley cuts me to the core.

CHRONIC NIGHTMARES THE ZINE

people who know me will argue that i loved the 90's more than most. a few weeks ago, roomie dan managed to dredge up a vhs that features a greatest live performances episode of my old staple, mtv's 120 minutes. while there was a lot of pointing and laughing at the tv set -- i mean, everyone looked soooo bad in like 1994 or whatever -- the tables eventually turned when other roomie stacie called me out on being 'frozen in time' and totally dressing like one of the girls in luscious jackson. ok, fair enough. true. although i could largely give a shit, one aesthetic i never, ever wanted to hit was the classic, old navy swathed, baggy-panted, mousy-haired, sort-of-looking-like-a-hippie-but-not-really TURD. i remember kara warning me about this a few years ago, and the warning stemmed from her admonishing me for dressing all 90's. i have to accept the facts. i look like an extra from 'airheads'. at BEST.

getting back to the roots that i apparently can't leave behind, i decided to resurrect a hobby that was semi-entrenched in 90's culture. i am launching a zine. when i was a freshman in high school, my older sister created one herself that was called the singlet. it proliferated throughout the lehigh valley and our town in jersey, and it was awesome. my own contributions were usually dumb drawings of crying punks or anything with lots of blood and for some reason i made a dumb fake russian comic strip for a while. not sure what that was all about in retrospect, but at any rate, i really liked doing that shit!

anyway, i just finished laying out and photocopying the first issue of CHRONIC NIGHTMARES today. each issue, i've decided, will be a single short story, fiction or nonfiction, whatever. the first issue is titled 'the hair' and, um, let's just say that it might hold the interest of anyone who has a zit-popping fetish. anyone else who reads it might puke, but hey, it's free! i'll probably be distributing it at a few bars, venues, etc....ideally, places where semi-literary degenerates hang out. i will also be posting the content on this blog so anyone who is NOT a degenerate can have access to the fruits of my imagination, as well. obviously, feedback will be very welcome, even if your 'feedback' consists of shaking me like a baby and yelling 'GET A GRIP, IT'S 2007.' that's cool, i guess.

the creep

looking at old photos today and found this one, taken last summer when italy won the world cup. i was in pompeii working at the time, and for a small town that place when totally apeshit. it was awesome. the picture above really si pretty indicative of the general vibe, which is to say it's like the gates of hell themselves opened up, but, like, FUN hell, not bad hell. there was a town-sanctioned rave complete with giant speakers blasting some techno remix of 'we are the champions'; there were fires and motorcycles and feral dogs everywhere. one of my coworkers, in a drunken celebratory frenzy, hopped on the back of a fruit truck that had been re-assigned to the role of PARTY TRUCK and had to find his way back to pomeii from some other town. there was a guy giving away free hotdogs; there was a girl passing around a bottle of sardinian fire water, which kind of made me want to die but, you know, WHEN IN ROME. or something. anyway, there were actually two kinda of bad-hell things that happened that night, but neither had permanent repercussions. the first, shockingly, involved fireworks. anyone who's been to southern italy knows of the local penchant for explosives; this night was like a motherfucking showcase. upon leaving the bar where we watched the game that night, my pal aims and i walked right into an in-session firework party, which consisted of a senile man lighting shit and throwing them backwards over his shoulder. i took one to the back, whicvh was more starling than anything, although it did toast my shirt a bit. whatever. aims, however, took one to the FACE, and it could habe been gnarly but it totally wasn't! after she recovered we all made sure she got an extra hit of that sardinian firewater and then we partook in aforementioned rave, where i then got pinned down by a group of four 16-year-old italian lads, two of whom licked my face. normally, i'd be all about this sort of young-man-ness, but these kids were pretty rough. anyway, i wriggled out of their slimy hands, and when i got home i found that one of them had unzipped my pants! i mean, i was pretty wasted, so i guess the possibility remains that i just forgot to zip after pissing in an alley, but i gotta save face, ya know?

anyway: being in winning world cup country when world cup is won: HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. yep.

when i turned rotten

talkin' bout shaving...a little while ago during a semi-serious beer-drinking session, the conversation turned to middle school awkwardness and typical female rites of passage, such as shaving one's legs for the first time. i remember this particular event very clearly because it was minorly traumatic. it was the summer before fifth grade, and i secured a manual razor and hit the showers. pretty much the first thing i did was slice the shit out of my knees -- both knees. shaving wounds being so superficial that you often don't even feel them still bleed a lot, though, and when i was ten, this accident was the first i'd had involving water and blood. of course i thought my injuries were, like, infinitely worse than they actually were; the water helped turn the shower into a scene out of carrie and the fact that i felt no pain was really distressing, since i could only assume that i must have inflicted such intense nerve damage upon myself that i had lost all below-the-knee sensitivity. after my mom assured me that, no, an entire vein had NOT fallen out of my leg, i began to chill the fuck out. something had changed, though. maybe i can chalk that moment up to the very instance that i became my own biggest problem, the most unintentionally destructive thing in my life; maybe there's something to be said for shedding a little blood being a metaphor for loss of innocence. whatever the case, after that moment, not only did i think i was tough for some reason -- i also thought i was a total badass who knew that the world was a bloody, godless, scary place. yeeaaaahhhh.

anyway, summer carried on and my knee wounds began to heal. i also got better at shaving. on one memorable evening, as i was still rocking some crucial scabs, my older sister and i accompanied our mom to a bible school recital in which our younger sister was performing. because of my preadoloescent crisis of faith very shortly before this event, church was probably not the greatest place for me to be. the older sis and i parted from the herd and made our way to the choir loft, where we were gloriously the only spectators. we had a great view of the church, for sure; down on the altar, we could see the twenty or so kids in the first-grade vbs class, with our baby sis front and center, the tallest kid in her age bracket by a foot. i can't emphasize enough how freakishly large she was compared to the other kids; she was easily a focal point, and this fact we exploited. when she was little, she would do anything we encouraged; in this case, she chose to imitate various obscene gestures we directed her way from the balcony, where we remained invisible to the audience. somewhere in the video archives of suburban new jersey home movies, i like to think that some parent has a tape of a tall, gangly kid breaking the choreography of her scheduled bible school performance to flip off some unseen hecklers and snarl and gesture through the entire performance.