mondojohnson

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.

I have voiced my respect for the FOX show Bones in an earlier post; commending its hyper-rational heroine and her disdain for pseudoscience. It also has a charming and ridiculously good-looking cast, and its forensics-based mystery tales are for the most part well-crafted.

But tonight the show really worked my nerves with its extraordinarily lame “product placement” for the upcoming James Cameron film, Dances With Smurfs^* Avatar. The subplot revolved around three of Bones’s male colleagues as they took turns guarding a place in the ’round-the-block line for the Avatar premiere. Many of the queue-campers were painted up like the blue critters we have seen in the film’s relentless promos, and nearly half the trailer was played as part of a scene. And to top all this nonsense off, one of the lab assistants who is willing to camp out in line is the sometimes-appearing character Colin Fisher — portrayed by Joel Moore, one of the actors in — Avatar!.

But the lamest part of all was the subplot’s mismatch with the main plot. The main plot was about vintage video-gamers, specifically those who play “Punky Pong”, a clumsy reworking of “Donkey Kong” and “Pong”. The show was asking us to believe a badly-drawn fictional video game with one part of our brain, and to believe that the characters exist in the real world of blockbuster sci-fi movies with the other. It was like hearing an untuned guitar.

[Apparently you can play "Punky Pong" yourself at the FOX website: fox.com/bones]

^* See South Park

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I’ve said it once, I’ll say it a thousand times. Joe Lieberman is a turncoat dickhead.

In case you haven’t heard, he’s promised to filibuster our only good shot at health care reform.

Can the good people of Connecticut recall him or something?