Michael Jackson, the self-crowned King of Pop, is dead at the age of 50. Born an adorable, talented black boy, he died (apparently of heart failure, insert own bitter joke here) a bizarre creature somewhere between the aliens from Communion and Zombie Janice Dickinson, with a soupcon of pederasty for (as the kids say) flava. Alternately short of Money or Invincible, Black or White, Smooth Criminal or The Man, he remained a protean figure of scandal-scented mystery to his last days.
It’s just Human Nature to pursue a Pretty Young Thing, although his Monkey Business recreational tastes and pursuits brought him to the attention of the law on a regular basis. When finally confronted with the rap, he Beat It, claiming he and the boys were Just Good Friends who would Come Together in friendship. Known over the decades as a libel lawyer’s best patron (What More Can He Give?) when he felt Threatened, the eccentric musician had seemed in recent years to have turned around his notoriously aberrant behavior, although more cynical minds (like mine) figured that instead of pursuing free-range children, he’d just decided to grow his own: Blanket, Prince Michael, and Paris. Ah, the Lost Children.
I hope that, once his no-doubt vainglorious tomb is complete and he installed within it, Banksy can come up with something suitably memorable, although it’s hard to top that portrait. HIStory will judge him. Until that time, we have this, by DryHumourSteve:
Carrying on from our infamous Cthulhu Porn post (warning: CTHULHU GOATSE, THE ULTIMATE EVIL), we present the following. In case you read The Dunwich Horror, extrapolated (as is your wont) from the circumstances surrounding the conception of Wilbur Whatley, and wondered what kind of woman would do the dirty with Mister Big Himself, Cthulhu.
Encouraging hints are emerging, leading those who’ve enjoyed his fine words even as we’ve missed his fine mind for, say, the last seven or eight years, to hope that the message might yet match the medium in terms of quality. And we are all about the terms of quality, yo. One of the earliest expressions of senility in retreat came in the form of this remarkable video and article:
Christopher Hitchens Gets Waterboarded
From http://www.vf.com. How does it feel to be “aggressively interrogated”? Christopher Hitchens found out for himself, submitting to a brutal waterboarding session in an effort to understand the human cost of America’s use of harsh tactics at Guantánamo and elsewhere. VF.com has the footage. Related: “Believe Me, It’s Torture,” from the August 2008 issue
Interview conducted by David Rose and filmed by Arya Surowidjojo.
Note the opening remarks: I don’t know what Hitchens did to piss Graydon Carter off, but Toby Young is lucky he got out of there when he did, from the looks of things.
So, why did getting waterboarded so suddenly turn Hitch‘s mind from self-centered, cranky mush, to something closer to a source of intellectual insight? It’s complicated, but I have an idea.
Actually, that generally goes without saying, doesn’t it? Both parts of that sentence.
So, the idea is this: as we all know, Hitchens is infamously immoderate of appetite(s). Since pre-puberty his brain has been stewed in a tepid chemical bath of scotch, tar, nicotine, preservatives, unmentionables, Red Dye #’s 1 through 642, and whatever it is that middle-class dealers cut their drugs with. Naturally, as time went on the effects got worse, culminating in the interminable Route 66 piece aforementioned, not to mention the neaderthal reactionarianism and spittle-flecked defensiveness that have marked/marred his work ever since.
Through the (admittedly rather drastic, but hey, we’ve got to be realists in this world today, amIrite?) use of the latest in waterboarding technology, thanks to one short session, the patient’s brain is already showing signs of improvement. We at the ol’ raincoaster blog believe this to be the result of nothing less than the cleansing flushing action of a pure water near-drowning, a remarkably successful (and inexpensive) way to restore the brain itself to youth and beauty.
Waterboarding. The Cranial Neti Pot of the Future.
Were we making the terrorists smarter and younger all this time? I see a future for battle-scarred veterans; no longer dependent on a sadly-depleted GI Bill or consigned to a gloomy and inadequate Veteran’s Hospital, nor shunted to the streets, they can now use the skills they developed across the oceans in the millions of American day spas. Spa visits will never be the same.
Longtime readers of the ol’ raincoaster blog are familiar (perhaps too familiar) with my adoration of Banksy, the Birmingham Bristol street artist who is #1 on my list of “men whom I have no idea what they look like but, whatever, they could have me anyway. in daylight. on Sunday.”
And they are equally familiar with my fondness for mashups and radical YouTubeification, so the fact that I’m posting the following video, which combines all of the above, should come as no surprise to anyone but nOObs, and they should just hang out and read and watch what I tell them, dammit!
raincoaster 