mondojohnson

James St. James, you are a talented writer.  Exploiting a brutal murder is SO beneath you.  Raise your game and find some morality!  You and the geniuses at World of Wonder should issue a press release stating that you will no longer glamorize that psychopath and his pathetic crime.

(This post was written in angry response to James’s excitement about a new Belgian musical about the Drano killer, whose name I will not mention again. The sadistic murderer is due to be released soon, to the fame-seeking delight of the post-Warhol crowd.  Please shun him, and boycott his planned autobiography.)

Some hip asshole writer played into the hands of unimportant psychopath Michael Alig, who is inexplicably being released from prison sometime soon.  The author, an aging nobody who fancies himself some kind of edgy culture critic, has bought Alig’s sudden discovery of remorse (timed to coincide with his release…  I feel a reality show pitch coming).

But Alig’s remorse is definitely calculated.  You can be certain that he has spent the previous years of his laughable sentence doing extensive market analysis of current trends in nightlife and the fame industry generally. He has been plotting his post-prison return to celebrity from the minute he was locked up.

And his plotted return will be, I fear, tremendously successful. He has, I’m sure, thought out all the angles to win over the post-punk, outrage-seeking “intelligensia”… Aspiring musicians will no doubt clamor to be photographed with him.

I don’t think he’ll wear his trademark outfits again. I suspect he will embrace the bloated, creepy ex-con look — it’s more disturbing. He’ll drink a lot, but in a calculated way, to cultivate social contacts and to encourage speculation that he is violating parole, maybe even lapsing into his old murderous ways.  He will revel in it all, the good and the bad.  For a psychopath, the only bad press is no press.  They must be forever noticed.

I believe that Alig should be shunned as completely as O.J. was. Everyone should boycott any event, promoter or artist that is even remotely attached to him.  Press items about him should be rare and unglamorous… writers and reporters should avoid using his name if possible.  In a perfect world, the next published reference to Alig will be in his obituary.  Let’s hope it’s soon, and by his own hand.  He is a brutal, soulless, psychotic killer who has never felt the slightest tinge of remorse for the murder.

We’ve gotta draw the line somewhere. A Michael Alig “welcome back!” party must never find a venue, and those kids who dress up like characters from “Party Monster” must never be photographed or talked about.

I know both James St. James, the author of “Party Monster”, and Fenton and Randy, the directors of both the original documentary and the subsequent all-star version of “Party Monster…” — I actually think that “Party Monster” was genius, a terrifying and campy story but ultimately a moral one. I do worry, however, that they will see the release of Alig as an opportunity for press buzz, parties, interviews, et. al. My dead friend Dean Johnson used to correspond with Alig in prison, the letters mostly talked about how they could return to dominance in club culture. Dean was happy to explore future options with Alig, it might get him some ink!  They were desperate fame whores plotting their return to semi-stardom.  But least Dean was talented, and deeply conflicted about his obsessive need to be famous (as he brilliantly expressed in the Velvet Mafia song “Dharmageddon”…).

We have done a good job shunning OJ. It is no longer possible to think of him as a great athlete or a good-natured comic actor. He’s the guy who cut his wife’s head off.

Alig is that kind of guy.  A pathetic, power-seeking psychotic loser. He is not Francine Fishpaw; he is not some kind of hip anti-hero.

Commit to the shunning! Remember the insane, torturous murder of Angel Melendez.

I have learned via gawker.com and TMZ that Axl Rose remains a touchy überpriss all these years after Appetite for Destruction rocked our worlds.

At a recent Guns ‘n Roses show in Canada, Axl (or his people) instructed security personnel to forbid audience members from wearing Slash-related gear. Fans were told to remove offending baseball caps, and to turn their Slash t-shirts inside out. TMZ reported that a few conscientious metalheads called “bullshit” and went home.

The witty folks at gawker.com managed to sum up my feelings exactly:

I don’t know, but Slash was an essential component of Axl Rose, and until they reunite, nobody’s going to give a shit about Guns N’ Roses, and Slash is already doing quite fine on his own, so Axl Rose: suck an egg. TEAM SLASH. Related: Paradise City is still the best song EVAH. Eveh? EVAH!

Related to Gawker‘s “Related” item: In my salad days, on the brink of rock stardom, I was privileged to hang out backstage at the Giants Stadium concert at which much of the Paradise City video was filmed. GNR were just exploding — they were the opener at an amazing triple bill with Deep Purple and Aerosmith. I witnessed one of Axl’s legendary hissy fits first-hand; the newbie rockstar had to be whisked away like a Chinese emperor.

Me in my salad days.

Slash, on the other hand, hung around like a regular earthling. He chilled out next to me on a side-stage scaffolding to watch Deep Purple, still dripping with sweat from the GNR set. He was focused intently on the music, and he never once pulled any rockstar attitude. He was more interested in rocking out to a great band than in basking in the considerable ass-kissery that was swirling around. He treated me like just another musician.

TEAM SLASH, indeed. I’ve made it my slogan for the website this week.

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In horrified recognition of the Supreme Court’s ruling that corporations are entitled to the same free speech as individuals, I direct you to the excellent film The Corporation (by Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott and Joel Bakan).

The film takes the bogus “corporations-have-the-same-rights-as-individuals” argument and dissects it like a frog in bio lab. The most depressingly humorous sequence in the movie takes this argument to its logical conclusion — if the corporation is the same as an individual, then it is subject to psychiatric diagnosis. By the standards of the DSM-IV, the corporation is conclusively shown to be suffering from psychosis.

To paraphrase Barney Frank — speaking in a different context — corporations are not created by God, they are created by greedy men. Thus they should be subject to human regulation, and not entitled to the “inalienable rights” due to those of us who didn’t ask to be born.

*Sigh*. We are entering yet another dark era. Enjoy the film, and get pissed.

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• Court Eases Business, Union Election Spending Rule (abcnews.go.com)

If this doesn’t capture the zeitgeist of 2009, then nothing does.