Blame it on the rising temperatures, the bitter end of our Obama Era honeymoon—or maybe it’s just the fact that they’re getting ready to take away our fucking cigarettes—but it seems like everyone is in a particularly bad mood this week. Suddenly everyone has a very loud bone to pick with someone, whether it be Sarah Palin taking a bold stand against humor or Bret Michaels picking a fight with the totally not awesome, definitely not hot Tony Awards set-piece that said, “Whassa going on?” to his face. That sense of pent-up anger and growing hate has become so pervasive, why, it’s even started creeping into our summertime fun vacation spots like the Holocaust Museum! But seriously, folks, what the fuck is wrong with you? Why’s everybody so angry lately? Is it endemic of some larger social problem, or is it (to flatter ourselves a bit) just the poisonous influence of our own cynicism? Perhaps we would all do well to try and redirect our efforts toward engendering charity and goodwill, rather than always focusing on the negative… But nah, that sounds like a lot of work for a bunch of assholes who won’t appreciate it anyway. Fuck it. Let’s just do some Friday Buzzkills.
Besides, you know, you could go your whole life trying to bring some semblance of happiness to the world, seeking only to entertain and maybe even inspire, and you'd still end up with your bones picked clean by the buzzards of prurient interest, some of them even handfed by people you thought were your loved ones. Witness the increasingly Grand Guignol-esque sideshow developing around the late David Carradine, whose already-horrifying death last week has slowly but surely developed into a tale from the crypt for ghouls both malignant and well-intentioned as details continue to creep out from ill-informed sources, and speculation as to its actual cause continues to build.
Not helping matters any: Carradine’s all-too-happy-to-help ex-wives, who are currently in the “sell embarrassing stories to TMZ” stage of grief, and have recently become the chief suppliers of all the sordid details of their late lover’s “sexual deviancy.” On the heels of last week’s Smoking Gun post of the divorce filings from Carradine’s most recent ex, Marina Anderson (which accused Carradine of practicing “deviant sexual behavior which was potentially deadly,” as well as engaging in “an incestuous relationship with a very close family member”), this week Carradine’s third ex-wife Gail Jensen gave TMZ approximately 40 percent of its non-“Whose Butt Is That?”/”Kate Gosselin Is A Bitch” content by telling them all about Carradine’s “Christ-like obsession with auto-erotica”—a story based not, incidentally, on his belief that auto-erotica would heal the sick and feed the poor, but on the one time that she came home and found him tied up in, as Chris Cornell would dub it, his "Jesus Christ pose."
Because refusing to feed the tabloid machine with defamatory private details of your late ex-husband’s life is a luxury no one can afford right now—and especially when it would be totally déclassé to serve an amuse-bouche of awfulness like that without an abominable aperitif—Jensen all-too-happily “dropped more personal bombshells” in yet another interview, this time with NY Daily News’ Patricia Towle, claiming that Carradine would make frequent trips to the hardware store and “spend days planning to construct elaborate sexual devices.” However, she later clarified that what she meant was that Carradine loved being tied up—but “it was never sexual.” Glad we got that cleared up before people jumped to the wrong conclusions!
And just because the world is full of people who know that the price of personal liberty is eternal vigilance (by rubbernecking opportunists), TMZ also asked the owner of adult store Susie’s Delights, where Carradine was reportedly a regular, to plug her store by way of sharing with the world the “David Carradine Sex Toy Shopping List,” a bounty that included “women’s lingerie, stockings, a few pieces of bondage equipment, and three bondage DVDs.” You know, for Journalism. According to the owner, Carradine placed the order a few weeks before his death, and talked to her “for almost an hour,” during which he revealed that “he was upset because he felt his wife was unhappy with him.” (Because if you can’t unburden yourself to the owner of the sex shop you frequent, who can you unburden yourself to?) [*Guilty, complicit sigh.*] Yup. This entire story has officially turned into one long episode of CSI: Miami that not even a well-timed joke from that commenter with the David Caruso shtick can save…
Thank goodness then that that No. 1 Stephen Sondheim fan God rarely forgets to send in the clowns—much-needed merrymakers like formerly tolerated actor-turned-slightly-classier-version-of-Michael Lohan, Jon Voight, who this week appeared at a Republican fundraiser and accused President Obama of being a “soft-spoken Julius Caesar” who wants to take all the world’s leaders to a playground, where they’ll swing on the swing-sets and play doctor behind the slide until the UN catches them and threatens to tell their mothers. Or something. Then, the next day, Voight managed to make Bill O’Reilly look like a sober voice of reason by telling Fox's immovable object that he is convinced that Obama is a closet Marxist whose inability to respond to Kim Jong Il—by doing, uh, “something”—has put us all in danger, and predicting that we're headed toward an unparalleled economic disaster. All of this, of course, is based on quotes Voight pulled from “Soviet news agency” Pravda (which, in actuality, has basically become the National Enquirer of Kremlin-disseminated propaganda) and the kind of deep understanding of economics and foreign relations that can only be gleaned by starring in films like Baby Geniuses 2 and doing whatever it takes to get your estranged liberal daughter to notice you, even if it means decrying you in public, because at least that would mean you’re talking again.
Anyway, thank you, Mr. Voight, for not only providing some comic relief in these otherwise somber times, but for proving that it’s not just liberals who are prone to offering fuzzy, reactionary solutions to the world’s problems based solely on the fact that they have ready access to a microphone. If nothing else, it makes for a nice counterbalance with the typically humorless statements released by GLAAD this week, who recently launched a campaign against the upcoming Bruno: The Search For Curly’s Gay Panic by calling it “problematic in many places and outright offensive in others,” and demanding that the filmmakers add a disclaimer to the beginning letting the audience know that most homosexuals do not use babies as “man magnets” or participate in cage matches just so they can pull down their opponents’ pants and give them a big ol' homo kiss.
Yes, good thing that GLAAD always knows just how to pick its battles, because otherwise, how would all of those middle-American dumbfucks know that what they’re laughing at is in actuality an outlandish spoof about homophobia, and not a cinema vérité documentary about wacky gays? Yes, better to presume everyone’s stupidity right up front with a condescending title card (“WARNING: SATIRE”), which will certainly cause those minds to open up and hearts to grow 10 sizes too big within all of the misguided members of the paying audience who somehow think Bruno is an accurate representation of the entire gay culture. If only there were some way to convey the idea that this film is, in fact, an act of parody perpetrated by a known provocateur—say, with a months-long marketing campaign, or an insanely popular film and/or television show that established his particular form of comedy years ago. But yeah, probably better to be ridiculously prudish about it. After all, that strategy has seemed to work pretty well for the people who hate gays, right?
The again, maybe GLAAD is right: We’ve long since established that we’re all basically children, unable to sit still through “grown-up” movies unless they involve superheroes or other properties we’re already familiar, which is why almost every movie currently in development is a remake or based on some fetishized version of your childhood intended to pat you on the head, rub your tummy, and make you feel like you’re back in footy pajamas and you don’t have to face the big, scawwy world because every day is Saturday morning. That means that not only are we getting a new Schwarzenegger-less Conan The Barbarian from remake “master” Marcus Nispel to bring about the lamentations of the women (and everyone else), we’re also in serious talks to take former “thespian” Liam Neeson, shove a cigar in his mouth, and ask him to play “Hannibal” in the big, dumb, and loud update of The A-Team from Smokin’ Aces director Joe Carnahan.