An unhealthy and unwarranted look into the twisted life and dubious career of Shane Simmons – dark writer, morbid historian, obsessive collector and sick mind
There’s no nice way to say this. Corpses crap themselves, and steps must be taken. You don’t want a group of mourners standing around a casket with a “Who farted?” expression on their faces, only to realize, after exchanging accusatory glances, that the perpetrator was the one in the box. That’s not a final memory anybody wants of mom or dad or aunt Josephine.
Funeral science has, through much trial and error no doubt, developed the A.V. plug. It’s a plastic device that’s half screw, half butt plug, and is used to stop up one or more holes that might develop some unfortunate leakage before a corpse is safely planted in the ground. I know about these sorts of things because I’m morbid, but I’m not an expert. So when the A.V. plug came up as a recent topic of discussion, I felt compelled to ask around.
No, not these.
ACTUAL TRANSCRIPT OF THE SORT OF CONVERSATION THAT HAPPENS IN MY HOUSE:
Me (in all seriousness): Do you know what the A.V. stands for in A.V. plug?
Her: There’s two holes down there.
Me: Ah. I was hoping it stood for something classy like “alimentary viscera.”
Her: I’m eating.
Me (shutting up): Right.
Recent research (and by “research” I mean “roaming around the dark corners of the web looking for sick and twisted things”) led me to my new favourite website, The Order of the Good Death. It’s run by Los Angeles funeral director Caitlin Doughty, who is the author of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory and creator of the hilarious video series, Ask a Mortician.
I’ve long been aware of how the monopoly of modern funeral rites is ruining death for everyone, and it’s nice to see groups advocating alternatives a mere fifty-two years since Jessica Mitford wrote The American Way of Death, exposing the gouging that goes on in the industry.
I know this sort of thing is not everyone’s cup of tea, but it warms my cold jaded heart that the web provides such valuable information resources about the nitty-gritty that goes on behind the scenes whenever somebody’s loved one (or unloved one) snuffs it. Including what gets shoved up their ass.
I highly recommend you take time out from watching funny YouTube cat videos to watch some of Caitlin’s funny YouTube death videos. Spoiler alert: there’s a funny cat in some of them.
Caitlin Doughty and friend.
Pardon the shameless plug. Plug? Get it? Haw!
♦
There are only three days left in The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes StoriesKickstarter campaign. All goals have been met, but if you want to get your copies ahead of the rest of the world, this is your last chance.
Unsurprisingly, I’m now officially a terrorist. Oh sure, the NSA and various other American alphabet-soup agencies are quick to label everyone a terrorist for anything these days. Left the toilet seat up? Terrorist. Didn’t replace the bog roll after using the last strip? Terrorist. Didn’t wash your hands after going to the bathroom? Terrorist (this one I agree with).
But now it’s Scotland Yard that’s designated me a terrorist. Why? Because I watched the James Foley beheading video recently released by ISIS as a warning against American military intervention in Syria. According to The Yard, merely watching this video can be considered an arrestable act of terrorism. I wish they’d tipped me off in advance, because I only found out about this decree five minutes too late when doing further research on the incident. Oopsie.
So why, exactly, did I go have a look at this horrible, brutal execution that’s so readily available on the Internet? I mean, other than the fact that I’m a morbid, twisted, sick fuck (obviously). Well, it seems I don’t like major media outlets offering me the latest justification for war while refusing to show me the specifics because it might offend my delicate sensibilities. I also don’t like governments telling me to avert my eyes and take their word for it when they try to sell me on a new war on a new front. They always place the ugly specifics of executions and war crimes on a need-to-know basis. Well, as it turns out, I’m a taxpayer in a democracy. So I need to know. I also need to not be patronized, condescended to, or subjected to state propaganda. But they do a lot of that just the same.
As I’ve mentioned via social media in the past, I have a checkered past with the Four Word Film Review site. They turned down some of the very best material I wrote for them. But I still like the format. Four words can convey a lot about a film. Here’s my four-word film review of the James Foley decapitation video:
Overproduced. Anticlimactic money shot.
Am I making light of the murder of a journalist? Nope. I wish the western news media would pay more attention to real journalists, out in the field, in war zones, getting killed in the line of duty. But they’re too busy pointing the camera at themselves in nice safe studios. You know them, these pretenders who aren’t real journalists, but play ones on TV. Posers like Anderson Cooper, Don Lemon, Jake Tapper, Wolf Blitzer and anyone who’s ever appeared on Fox News in any capacity whatsoever.
Look around on the Internet and you can find some truly horrific stuff to watch. I’ve written about it in past blog posts, and have already offered the various Islamic extremist groups my critique on their methods when it comes to documenting their own war crimes. I’ve offered no criticism about how they actually execute their fight against The Great Satan because I don’t know shit about IEDs. But I know a lot about film, so once again I have to speak my mind and explain to them, as patiently as I can, why their latest snuff film left me cold.
Okay, jihadists, listen up. I appreciate that you took some of my last round of notes on your decapitation videos seriously. I see a real effort to improve here. You got yourself a better camera. You bought a tripod. The video quality is very nice. So is the lighting (although, let’s face it, it’s the desert, so natural light is kinda plentiful). The audio is crisp, clear. Even the subtitles are well done and spelled correctly (Hong Kong film studios, take note!) But, sorry to say, you didn’t quite nail it this time. I know you thought you hit it out of the park, but this is only a second draft. And I have more notes.
First off, we’re not watching your snuff film to see a recap of Obama speeches. Admittedly, I find presidential speeches pretty scary. I see one, and I immediately flashback to the ‘80s when Ronald Reagan used to pre-empt The A-Team damn near every week with more bullshit. Troubling times. But most political speeches amount to little more than a talking head. We’re here to see heads roll, not talk.
And therein lies my most important note. The beheading. All this build-up and you tastefully cut away from the actual act. Tastefully cut away? For fucksake, you’re ISIS! You’re the guys al-Qaeda thinks are over the top! And you cut away from the deed like it’s a fade-out from a 1948 Hollywood love scene? Look, I would expect you to cut away from a love scene because sex and nudity and love aren’t exactly your cup of tea. But the execution of an infidel? You own that shit. It’s your thing.
I thought the point of this video was to warn America, to threaten all Americans everywhere, to strike fear into their hearts. Trust me on this one, if you’re going to shock America, you have to come up with something more gruesome than, say, any given episode of Game of Thrones. You know, like the one with the duel? And the teeth? And the squishy-squashy skull? That was AWESOME! This…this was not awesome.
Here’s your other problem: Because you didn’t show it, everybody in the conspiracy community thinks you faked it. They’ve gone through your video, bloodless frame by bloodless frame, and they’re calling bullshit. This is not your desired response, I’m sure. You want their reaction to be along the lines of one alternative news-media reporter who referred to the victim being “killed in the most brutal way imaginable.” Okay, clearly he either doesn’t have much imagination or he’s never read any history. He should look up scaphism some time (AKA The boats). Now that’s brutal. And another means of execution from your neck of the desert, I believe. See? You’ve excelled at brutality for thousands of years, so what’s with the no-budget found-footage mockumentary editing? I just don’t get it. Unless the conspiracy community is right and this is some false-flag op meant to escalate tension in the middle east and push for more conflict and military engagement, thereby diverting public attention from an impending global economic collapse.
Nah. I think you just fucked it up. I wouldn’t want to go believing the conspiracy theorists, because the fake reporters on CNN and Fox keep assuring me those people are CRAZY. And the mainstream media triple checks all of their facts and never lies about anything.
♦
Also something in the news I just HAD to mention. Did you hear the one about the high-school student who got arrested for turning in a creative-writing class assignment with a fantastical reference to shooting a dinosaur with a gun? Obviously, everybody is required to lose their shit when any student mentions guns or shooting them. Because, well, think of the poor dinosaurs! That’s probably how they went extinct. I think I heard something about Noah shooting them and dumping them overboard when the last two dinosaurs made a light snack of the last two dodo birds. Something like that. I’ll have to double check my text book from that old Intelligent Design 101 class I sat in on.
If a teenager can get busted by the cops for writing something this innocuous as a school assignment, I’d hate to think what they would have done to me in grade three. I used to write some seriously hardboiled shit back when I was eight – gruesome detective fiction full of tawdry murders and crimes of passion. Then, for art class, I’d draw some mermaids with exposed breasts and my big black dog with an anatomically correct big red penis.
They’d probably sentence me to death by lethal injection – which, depending on which state is botching your execution, could be more brutal than most beheadings. Keep at it Oklahoma, and some day you might get your “humane” executions to last as long as the good old days of scaphism.
Five years ago I was in Alaska to take in the sights. It was a nature vacation, full of mountains and glaciers and forests. And there was also plenty of majestic wildlife to behold. Killer whales and humpbacks, bald eagles and spawning salmon. There was even a random black bear taking a swim in a river.
Nothing, however, compared to the dolphins. I saw them on the return trip, as our ship sailed back down the coast between the endless series of islands that keep the Pacific at bay and maintain calm river-like waters for much of the run between Skagway and Vancouver. One morning they appeared at starboard, racing the bow as it cut through the sea, leaping out of the water every few seconds.
I ran down to our stateroom to grab a camera. Although I was destined to get no pictures of the airborne dolphins (their leaps being too quick, too fleeting), it was while I was in that cabin that I got treated to the best view I could hope for. I just happened to look out the window at precisely the right moment to see a dolphin fly out of the waves, just a few feet from the glass, and hang there, perfectly boxed in the panoramic frame as it matched the speed of the ship exactly. It was a beautiful, magic moment in my life. It was over in less than two seconds flat, and I’ll never forget it – even though that memory has now been ruined forever.
The internet can taint anything. Between tweeting and retweeting, Facebook sharing and your run-of-the-mill “Hey, check this out” emails, nothing wholesome and decent and beautiful is safe anymore. No longer will I associate dolphins with that split instant of precisely framed wonder in a northern coastal corner of British Columbia. When I think of dolphins, I’ll think of this.
Aquatic auto-erotic necrophilic inter-species exhibitionist bestiality aside, it’s his self-satisfied “O” face that really troubles me. Nobody needs to see this kind of moment of intimacy. Not from a dolphin, not from any species. What happens in the aquarium should stay in the aquarium, and I curse the smart-phone photographer for sharing this with the web. And then I curse everyone else on the web for sharing it – myself included. I can’t unsee this, and now, neither can you.
I hereby declare this video clip to officially be, now and in the foreseeable future, The Worst Thing on the Internet. And I know whereof I speak. I’ve see those two girls and their one cup and everything they put in it. I’ve seen those three guys and their one hammer reducing the number of guys by a factor of one. And, obviously, I’ve seen my fair share of Islamic-Fundamentalist execution videos. How could I not? They’re ubiquitous on the web. Like funny-cat videos. It’s getting so a coptic cab driver can’t even drive around with a crucifix hanging from his rearview mirror without inspiring an inpromptu flashmob of decapitation enthusiasts, each armed with their own knife and recording device.
I have to take a moment out, however, to provide some constructive criticism here. I know there are all sorts of middle-eastern countries in radical upheaval. The blood is running in the streets and camera technology is rolling in the hands. But Syria, a word if you will…
Syria, seriously, you have got to get some sort of whetstone to sharpen your knives. I’ve got shit to do. I can’t spend an extra five minutes on every decapitation video while you try to hack through some infidel’s spine with a rusty spoon. It’s all about pacing. And our attention spans in the west are very short, especially when we’re trying to be horrified. That’s why every Saw film had to open with a gruesome kill right off the bat. We don’t want to wait around for plot development while we’re jonesing for a cheap thrill. And we certainly can’t invest any more of our precious internet porn-surfing time watching you commit brutal murder. Not unless there’s a clever twist ending. Again, like a Saw film. Learn from them.
Let me play executive producer for a moment and give you and all the other assorted radicals some notes on your little iPhone snuff films. First of all, mix it up a bit. Does it always have to be a decapitation? They’re so predictable. Guy with knife goes for the neck, saw saw saw, cut cut cut, head comes off, show it to the delighted crowd of spectators. It’s 2013. Decapitations are soooo early twenty-first century. Time marches on, so up your game. Have you looked into disembowelings for example? Quicker in execution, slower in payoff, but they can be quite showy. Real crowd pleasers so long as the crowd stands upwind.
Second, do your research. And I don’t just mean you should improve your decapitation methodology (which, let’s face it, needs work). But crack open a history book if you haven’t already burned them all and read about the fun and games they got up to in the middle ages. I’m not saying you have to reinvent the anal pear (and you probably would have to reinvent it if you wanted one because I can’t remember the last time I saw an anal pear for sale at Walmart, and they usually have EVERYTHING). But back then, they knew how to throw a gruesome execution with only common household items. Remember, when in doubt, go pyre. It’s always a home run with the fans, and warm on those chilly desert nights.
Third, you need to upgrade your digital technology. I don’t care if you have the latest iPhone or iWhatever. That shit’s fine for selfies, but you’re shooting snuff. You need a wider aspect ratio. Invest in a real digital camera that’s actually designed to shoot home movies (and snuff). I know the iPhone is convenient and Apple seems to go hand-in-hand with crimes against humanity, but the end results speak for themselves. Someone is giving their life for your movie. Sure, they’re an infidel who lies with dogs for not acknowledging the one true god as you define him and is therefore beneath contempt. But show the teensiest bit of respect and at least shoot the murder well.
Which brings me to my final point, so I really need you to focus here, because I can’t stress this enough. You cannot hold a camera steady while you’re shouting Allahu Akbar at the top of your lungs in a religious fervour. Look, I get it. I appreciate your passion. It’s what makes you a cinéma vérité artiste. But let’s face it, God may be great and all, but he makes for a shitty tripod. The dude can perform miracles, but one miracle he can’t seem to do is turn your arm into a Steadicam while you’re in bloodlust mode. So skip the high-volume worship mantra during your money shot and shoot silent. If you really think the film is missing something after you screen a rough cut, you can always ADR it and loop your voice in with the chorus of other Allahu Akbars, okay? I know you don’t want to feel left out in the moment. The blood is pumping in your veins and spurting from the open arteries of your victim, and you want to participate. But respect your art. Get your shot list. Celebrate later.
Remember, I say this not as a film critic, but as a fan of cinema in general. The future of the mondo-gonzo genre of filmmaking lies in your blood and entrail-soaked hands. Do us proud.
It’s Halloween, the happiest holiday of the year. For ghouls like me, at least. But when it comes to my traditional gorging on horror movies, I’m going to have dip into my own personal collection. Again. The seasonal offerings at theatres are sparse and lame. Ever since the Saw franchise packed it in, we can’t even count on one of those showing up every October like clockwork.
One of the only genre releases in the offing is just another damn remake. And even for a remake, it already feels old. “You Will Know Her Name,” declared all the posters in the ad campaign that started before the glut of summer movies began months ago. I would look at those posters, some of them damn near ten feet long, dangling from the rafters of the local multiplex, and think, “No, actually. No they won’t.”
I’m sorry, I don’t think we’ve met. And you are…?
I knew the film in question was yet another version of Carrie, not some more intriguingly titled terror called You Will Know Her Name (I might have gone to see THAT). But I, unlike, it seems, Hollywood, also knew that the target demographic hasn’t even heard of the original 1976 movie starring Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie. They probably haven’t even heard of the 2002 television remake, since they would have been infants at the time and nobody was watching NBC back then either.
But they went ahead with their ill-advised ad campaign regardless. And if anybody knows Carrie White’s name now, it’s because they saw it etched on her box-office tombstone. Not a twist ending by anyone’s reckoning. From what I hear, it’s a bland, uninspired and incorrectly cast remake. At least the TV remake had Angela Bettis and Patricia Clarkson, who are both odd enough to bring the creepy. And it had my brother-in-law, Jeremy, as editor. Even at a whopping 132 minutes, it worked, the performances were solid, and the key massacre scene took advantage of what modern special effects could offer. I still fondly remember the high angle shot of the water on the floor rippling away from Carrie’s feet before she proceeded to electrocute everyone. Nice touch.
For the record, I begged (BEGGED) Jeremy to cut that awful coda that had Carrie survive her confrontation with Mother and go on the lam with her buddy, presumable to have a series of Incredible-Hulkesque adventures as they travelled from town to town getting into wacky misadventures due to Carrie’s unfortunate tendency to wig out and commit mass telekinetic murder. But it wasn’t his call. Obviously, somebody had the delusional idea that this TV movie might serve as a pilot for a regular show. The Nielsen people quashed that dream in a hurry.
Start the counter, because eventually we’ll have to endure yet another remake (or bad-idea sequel) of the classic Stephen King story. Carrie is still a marketable name, provided you actually mention that name a few times when you’re trying to build hype for your movie. Seriously, ad-campaign monkeys, if you need me to tell you how to do your job, drop me a line. I’m here to help.
♦
Being of unsound mind and sick sensibilities, I like to follow weird crime stories. Not the kind of boring hot-blonde-chick-goes-missing-in-tropical-paradise crap that CNN likes to beat to death over the course of weeks and months of non-stop coverage. I’m intrigued by the seriously what-the-fuck cases out there. And if it has a Canadian connection, all the better.
Witness all those single running-shoe-clad feet that have been washing up on shore in the Vancouver region for years. That case is awesome! Less so if you’re the owner of one of those wayward unidentified and unmatched feet, but otherwise it ranks a solid ten on the intrigue-o-metre.
Then there’s the truly creepy story of Elisa Lam, the 21-year-old student from Vancouver (yeah, that place again). When the story first broke in February of this year, the news media picked it up and showed some of the footage of her acting strange in an elevator, just a matter of minutes before she would wind up drowned in a rooftop water tower of the infamous Cecil Hotel in L.A. Read more about the Cecil Hotel if you have any doubt that some places seem to naturally draw evil bizarro shit like a magnet. More recently, the whole video has been released, but don’t expect the nightly news to show it to you. Four minutes is too much time to take out of their nightly schedule. It might interfere with the sports-highlights reel.
Elisa was only discovered weeks later when tenants of the hotel complained that the water was an odd colour and tasted funny. Setting the inadvertent liquid-cannibalism aside and ignoring the fact that it was effectively impossible for her body to wind up where it did, least of all if it was a suicide, the creepiness factor rises exponentially when you look at the unexpurgated security cam footage. Way outdoing any of the “found footage” horror movies that have infested the genre since Blair Witch in 1999, knowing where this unsettling video ultimate leads makes it absolutely spine chilling.
Unsurprisingly, the L.A.P.D. didn’t bother to come up with any sort of satisfying or logical conclusion and they’ll never solve the case, just file it away. Morbid armchair detectives will continue to mull over the clues for a long time to come, adding it to the list of horrors that have revolved around the Cecil.
Yeah yeah, I know Halloween is supposed by be about fun frights and silly spookiness. But if you want to see the face of real horror, follow the links. If you dare.
I get asked what I’m working on. Often. It’s something I don’t like to talk about because usually I’m so excited by a project, I don’t want to curse it by speaking about it out loud. That or I’m so deathly bored by it, I can’t even muster enough energy to describe my crushing sense of apathy. After my last long, grueling contract early this year, I gave myself time off for good behaviour and have been wallowing in a strict regimen of movies and video games.
Which isn’t to say I’ve been completely idle. I managed to option off a couple of screenplays, albeit for a token-dollar fee to friends. That means all I need to do is option off the rest of my 99,998 feature-length screenplays on similar terms and it’ll have been a pretty successful year for Eyestrain Productions. I’m sure I have another 50,000 or 60,000 screenplays lying around in a drawer somewhere, but I might have to hustle to write the rest before the Christmas break.
Then there were the meetings with government funding agencies that had me doing a song and tap dance as I tried to explain the contents of a film proposal that had already been overwritten and overexplained in all the documents they demand to see before they even sat down to chat. No word yet if it did any good.
And finally, If you’ve been reading the blog long enough, you may remember I’ve been settling my aunt’s estate since early 2008. Ten inheritors, eleven tax returns, and two and a half years later, I’m done. The estate is finally closed. I’d tell you all the gory details, but at this late stage I can’t muster enough energy to describe my crushing sense of apathy. Or my euphoric relief. All I can say is that at the end of the day, I much prefer writing about dead people than handling their finances.
The battered, bruised and badly coffee stained file case I’ve been dragging around on estate business for years. It, and a brimming banker’s box of financial records, are now ready to be retired. The contents are scheduled for an intense date with the cross-cut shredder.
Every time a celebrity dies, the movie-night crowd knows to brace themselves for something from their filmography — assuming it was someone connected in some way, shape or form to the movie biz. I hate being predictable like that, but I just have to face facts. I’m a star-fucker necrophile, and I’m not likely to change my ways at this stage of the game. Despite my pathological determination to expose the Wednesday night guinea pigs to forgotten B-movies every time some obscure cult actor kicks off (Vampira, anyone?), I make no apologies for this past Wednesday.
Comic book author/legend Harvey Pekar died this week. And I always felt he was something of a kindred spirit. Not because we had both been at San Diego at the same time, hawking our independent-comic publications, or because we’re both cynical depressives who married our own groupies. But because Paul Giamatti played Harvey in the movie adaptation of American Splendor and everyone says I look like Paul Giamatti. Paul looked a lot like Harvey in the movie, so I guess that means I kinda look like Harvey Pekar by one degree of separation. Lucky me, I know.
So obviously I had to run American Splendor on Wednesday. Now that that’s out of the way, I figure next Wednesday I can run another biopic — something like The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Because I totally look like Brad Pitt too. I swear, it’s like looking in a mirror. A broken mirror covered with toothpaste spittle in a steamy bathroom.
For all my Italian-speaking readers (hey, Morena!) there’s a new article about Longshot Comics by Maria Caro over at ziguline. My understanding of what was said is limited to the power of free online translation sites. Not always the best way to grasp the nuances of what’s being said, if my own words from the comic’s introduction, interpreted and bounced back at me through the filter, are any indication.
“Like many other ideas, came to me in mind while I was under the shower… I found myself in feet on the platform of ceramics, knot and insaponato. Not tried of figurarvi the scene, is not a beautiful image. Me I was some there, with struck on struck that liberations in my head bloomed, and nothing paper and pen in order to annotate them.”
Following the Italian edition of The Long and Unlearned Life of Roland Gethers, folks in Italy love me almost as much as the Germans do. All I need to do now is get big in Japan and I’ll have won the former-axis-power trifecta. That should be easy enough once I redo the Longshot art so all the dots have giant eyes. Before that happens, however, there may be other Longshot translations in the works. Details will be blogged about when there’s official paperwork.
Oh right, it was Oscar weekend. Usually I look forward to the Oscars like Christmas, but this year the ceremony was so boring I fell into a coma sometime in the back half. Probably during one of the segments where a bunch of non-nominated actors get up and directly address the nominees and tell them how much they complete them and shit. My synapses back fired and my brain shut down, throwing me into a merciful stupor I’ve only recently awakened from. Which is a good thing because, as I understand it, they’re now handing out Oscars to people for playing a sassy southern belle who gives people whut-fer. I remember, the last ten thousand times I saw that role in a movie, thinking they should totally dispense Oscars for it. That way, every woman in Hollywood could get one. And even some of the men.
I guess the real fallout from Sunday is that everyone still has their tits in a knot over the exclusion of Farrah Fawcett from the Oscar obituary death knell. Each year they always seem to skip two or three people, claiming time constraints. Right. Because there was no way to trim that virtually endless show by three seconds so they could slip Farrah into the montage. They already had to shave three indispensable seconds off of one of the interpretive dance numbers so they could include Michael Jackson. I’ll buy their argument that Farrah was more of a TV actress rather than a movie person, but then where the fuck was Dan O’Bannon, you Academy weasels? You include a publicist and a writer for Variety, but you skip the guy who wrote Alien and gave the world Return of the Living Dead, the first ever zombie comedy? Just remember, there would be no Alien franchise, no Zombieland, no Shaun of the Dead without the work of the master.
Queuing up to be the next dead celebrity snubbed at the Academy Awards is Corey Haim. They say it was drugs but I suspect that, like me, he watched the Oscars and then failed to come out of his resulting boredom-induced coma. Hmm, yeah. That’s a distinct possibility. Maybe we should look into… Nah, fuck it, it was drugs.
Never before, in the history of dead celebrities, have I heard such a collective shrug of “Meh, figures,” from the general public. Chris Farley’s overdose came as more of a shock. This is the part, during any sort of pseudo obituary, where you’re supposed to say nice things about the dead person. Okay, let me dig deep here. Um, there were early indications that he had real charm and charisma and acting ability. And then he pissed it all away. I tried. That’s all I could muster. Because I met him a couple of times, and I saw the train wreck for myself.
It was ten years ago, and he was back in Montreal living with his mom and trying to get his shit together. He was shooting Universal Groove with some friends of mine — a movie that ended up in post production longer than Night of the Ghouls (Cue Triumph the Insult Comic Dog voice, “I keed! I keed!”). I was an extra in the café scene, but I probably don’t even appear in any of the footage. For the record, I was the extra talking to my buddy Dave, who was a CREDITED extra.
One of my closest friends had been drafted to be the Corey-wrangler. It was his job to drive him around town, help him shop for the necessities of life, and generally keep him out of trouble. Prior to meeting him for myself, I’d been treated to a litany of descriptive terms for The Corey, many of them colourful. I remember a number of nouns along the lines of “loser” and “dumbass” often coupled with adjectives like “fucking.”
I was formally introduced to Corey at a nightclub in my neighbourhood. The place was a bit of a dive. More recently, it’s been heavily renovated to resolve its perpetual rat infestation. Corey would hang out there because they gave him free food. The staff and owners of the club resented every complimentary mouthful Corey ate, but places like that consider freebies to celebrities a necessary evil in order to generate some buzz about their establishment. The buzz usually goes something like this:
Squealing excitable girl: “Ooo! I saw Corey Haim at Club Generika last night. He was eating french fries.”
Less excitable girl: “Corey who?”
“You know, one of the Coreys!”
“Which one? There’s so many.”
“The Canadian one, silly!”
“Corey Hart?”
“Um yeah, I think so. Wait, no, the other one. The Lost Boys one who used to hang out with the other Corey before the court order.”
“I think my sister rented one of his videos once. At Blockbuster. From the dollar shelf. I was gonna watch it, but then I had to take it back because I didn’t want a late fee. Was he cute and stuff?”
“…No. Not really. He looked kinda old and tired.”
Yeah, I met him. And no, as a matter of fact, he wasn’t dreamy. He looked about ten years older than he was (I’m being generous here because he’s dead now — in fact, it was more like twenty years older) and he was dressed in a stylish fashion that suggested he was actually shooting for a Mickey Rourke look — from before the Mickey Rourke career resurgence.
I shook his hand. I remember he had a thumb ring and I thought something along the lines of, “Oh fer chrissake, he has a thumb ring.” And then…
Oops. It appears my “I met Corey Haim” anecdote has come to an abrupt and expected end. Because that’s all I remember about meeting him. There was a conversation. I think one of my movie scripts that was bouncing around town at the time came up. I don’t even remember which one. I just knew I didn’t want Corey Haim attached to it and promptly ignored the suggestion that I should slip him a copy. Cruel, I know, but at this point his career was more in the toilet than it was even during his recent reality-show stint playing himself as a drug-addled loser. I went home about twenty minutes later. Then I probably watched some television and went to bed.
Breaking news: Michael Jackson is still dead. We’re all freaked out at losing one of the giant icons of the music industry, and one of the very few superstars in the world who actually justified the use of the term “superstar.” Hint: if you won last season’s American Idol, you ARE NOT a superstar, not matter what Ryan Seacrest’s hyperbole tells you. Jackson was an ubiquitous pop culture icon all my life, and it will be weird living in a world where he isn’t around making the world weirder.
The toxicology results are still weeks away, but the autopsy is complete and, as promised, it was a real show-stopper. I called in some favours and got the scoop on the most shocking revelations from the coroner’s report. The bullet points are as follows:
* Malformed conjoined fetus discovered in abdomen indicates that they were really The Jackson Six back in the ’70s.
* Wasn’t a real zombie for the Thriller album, but had been the genuine article since Bad.
* Surgical mask was actually a retractable third eyelid.
* Face was a removable façade worn on a timeshare deal with La Toya.
* 8.75% not of this Earth.
* Navel transplanted to form chin cleft.
* First nose inverted and reattached to form the lining of his mangina.
* Extra nipples plentiful, but original two inexplicably missing.
* Bone structure was actually that of Joseph Merrick.
* Sex: male.
Fascinating revelations all. Some surprising, some fairly obvious, but all destined to become the stuff of medical journal legend.
On the brighter side of things, judging from the reduced amount of news media coverage, Iran’s problems have ceased to exist. Hurray! Good job, Iran! I knew you could sort it all out on your own.
If you’ve read more than, say, three of my blog entries, then you’ll know I’m morbidly obsessed with celebrity deaths. So waking up yesterday morning, there was a special treat waiting for me on the CNN ticker. CNN, of course, considers itself far too classy to name the cause of death in this case. For that, I had to go searching the internet rumor mill. And I could scarcely believe what the early reports were claiming. Ever since the day Elvis was found dead on the toilet, I’ve been waiting for a major celebrity to find a way to depart this Earth in a more embarrassing way. And at last, pay dirt.
Somewhere out there, there has be somebody who put down David Carradine/Thailand/autoerotic asphyxiation on their celebrity dead pool and just hit the trifecta jackpot.
Now, it’s not like autoerotic asphyxiation is all that uncommon. Any coroner will tell you it happens all the time. But most people only know it as the ultimate fate of Fox Mulder. Fictional characters aside, this cause of death is frequently swept under the rug, even in official reports. Authorities often find it easier and less-shameful to label it suicide, figuring they’re sparing the deceased and their family the embarrassment of calling it what it is: death by tragic masturbation accident.
But for the first time ever, some respectable media outlets were quick to bluntly state the facts. That pleasantly surprised me, because I’m not a fan of euphemisms. Many called it as they saw it and drew the obvious conclusions from the circumstances surrounding Caradine’s death. Others, not so much. My favourites are the ones that referred to the rope found around his “neck and body.” For “body” read “penis.” Creepy as it may be to picture a 72-year-old man pleasuring himself with a combination of asphyxia and masturbation in a Thailand hotel closet, the dodging of the facts that’s been going on in some corners has only served to raise all sorts of unfounded questions concerning suicide or foul play. And I don’t know what’s accomplished by that, other than creating a completely unnecessary mystery over something that’s merely a tad tawdry.
Personally, I’ve only been left with one real question. Who the hell goes to Thailand to masturbate? You go to Thailand for the underage prostitutes. And if you really really need to get in a bit of autoerotic asphyxiation to relieve the monotony of sex with children, then you pay one of the underaged prostitutes a couple of bucks to keep an eye on you in case you start to choke.
Okay, fine. Carradine was in Thailand shooting a movie. It’s not like he was an Australian on a sex holiday or something. But you see how easy it is to start speculating a lot of weirdness when there are inconsistent reports in the media? I’ll swear here and now to knock that shit off. Let David’s memory only be tainted by the compromising position his body was found in, not by the innuendo and misleading statements of asshole bloggers. Or cable news channels.
More death talk at Eyestrain Productions? Well, what do you expect from the writer of Ashes to Ashes?
This is a big one for me though, because Patrick McGoohan was somewhat of a personal hero of mine. My admiration began in high school, when PBS started running ads about some old British spy show from the ’60s they were bringing back. It was called The Prisoner and it looked seriously demented. And I couldn’t wait. When it finally aired, I watched it religiously week after week, and then would spend most of history class the next day discussing what it all meant with my friend Ron. He was the only other person I knew who was into the show and wanted to know the answers to all those mystifying questions concerning why Number Six resigned, and who Number One might be. If you’ve ever seen the show, you can image how bamboozled we were after the last episode, probably the most ambiguous hour in television history.
“I got away with murder on that one,” McGoohan told me years later.
A little over a decade ago, I had a couple of phone conversations with Patrick in regards to a bit of film biz work. And yes, I can call him “Patrick” because we were on a first name basis. He told me so the second time we spoke. I remember the conversation vividly because I was talking to my hero — the star, co-creator, and frequent writer/director of The Prisoner — and also because I was secretly recording it. Shh! Don’t tell anyone.
“Hello, Mr. McGoohan, it’s Shane Simmons calling,” I said.
“The name’s Patrick,” he insisted in that voice that could intimidate paint off a wall. “The only one who calls me Mr. McGoohan is my wife.”
After talking shop, his screenplay for a proposed Prisoner feature film came up. Although the possibility of a big-screen remake of The Prisoner continues to be bandied about to this day, back then the project was meant to be a direct continuation of the cult classic series. It was to be a final story to wrap it all up, answering many questions and posing many more. And Patrick knew I’d read the draft in progress.
“What did you think? Critique me!” he demanded.
I think I crapped my pants a little bit. Why the hell was Patrick McGoohan asking me what I thought about the conclusion of his magnum opus? Whatever I stammered was probably completely lame, but it was nice of him to ask. Terrifying but nice. Then we moved on to more comfortable subjects that involved him badgering me about when I was going to get married.
I heard about his health issues for awhile after that. I never expected him to last another ten years, but he was a tough old Irishman. I still fondly remember my conversations with him as my favourite celebrity encounter. To this day, Patrick McGoohan remains my hero, The Prisoner remains my favourite TV show of all time, and the Hollywood remake remains unproduced. And may it always remain so.
As for that ITV remake for British television that just wrapped, well… I guess we’ll just have to see.
*
Speaking of remakes, this is the best one I’ve seen in years. Whoever this girl is, she plots better than Lucas.
Never before, in the history of dead celebrities, have I heard such a collective shrug of “Meh, figures,” from the general public. Chris Farley’s overdose came as more of a shock. This is the part, during any sort of pseudo obituary, where you’re supposed to say nice things about the dead person. Okay, let me dig deep here. Um, there were early indications that he had real charm and charisma and acting ability. And then he pissed it all away. I tried. That’s all I could muster. Because I met him a couple of times, and I saw the train wreck for myself.
One down.
A little over a decade ago, I had a couple of phone conversations with Patrick in regards to a bit of film biz work. And yes, I can call him “Patrick” because we were on a first name basis. He told me so the second time we spoke. I remember the conversation vividly because I was talking to my hero — the star, co-creator, and frequent writer/director of The Prisoner — and also because I was secretly recording it. Shh! Don’t tell anyone.
Eyestrain Productions 