News
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Thursday, January 23, 2014
Breaking: 10 Year Old Girl Arrested For Wasting America's Time
Here’s a pic of the arrest.
And this ‘baguette in happier times.
I haven’t been this proud of law enforcement since The Fred “The Dorf” Dorfman tribute back in ’84.
Friday, December 20, 2013RIP Al Goldstein
A sincere rest-in-peace to the one of a kind publisher of the infamous 1960s/1970s-era Screw magazine and all around cantankerous New York Jew bastard, Al Goldstein. Goldstein passed away at the age of 77 on Thursday.
Goldstein was a true New York original. The raging iconoclastic, bombastic child of a postwar post-1950s repressed sexuality turned into a pathological id of horny teen rebellion. The kind of self destruction we don’t see any more. The kind of honesty that’s impossible in our hyper-aware media culture of Redditized memes and comic book movie assembly-line Seacrestization.
No country for Al Goldstein in a land of Chris Hardwicks and Katy Perrys.
Today society celebrates the safe kind of rebellion. The know nothings and babble-ons who churn the TMZ machine. Miley’s twerk routines and the occasional redneck wisecrack on Duck Dynasty.
Ambulatory marionettes on talk shows spouting the latest plug for Papa Johns pizza or pop songs with titles straight out of a Deepak Chopra self-help book.
No risks. No real voices speaking actual truth to real power.
The real originals are being driven out of the collective. Dismissed from the conversation for upending the multimedia vertically integrated apple cart.
But Al Goldstein was that asshole that wouldn’t play along with the system. He destroyed his life. His wives. His liver. Everyone he knew and came into contact with.
But it was a glorious self destruction.
Pure.
Noble, even.
I watched his late night New York cable show Midnight Blue for many a moon back in the 1990s. He ranted about his ex-wives. He would spend twenty minutes trashing a restaurant for giving him an undersized pastrami sandwich. Or celebrate a spare rib.
He was a dick.
There’s no denying that Goldstein was a son of a bitch, a raging misogynist and a self-destructive clown. But Screw Magazine also published artists like Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman and was pushing the bounds of bad taste and first amendment freedom years before Larry Flynt.
Take a moment to honor a unique, outrageous rabble rouser who lived his life pure in the truth of his own convictions.
In our digitally interconnected hyperlinked world that smoothes out all the wrinkles of dissent, that mines any hint of authentic subculture, we won’t see too many Al Goldsteins come our way again.
Thursday, December 19, 2013Mr. Biggs Mourns the Death of His Namesake, Ronnie Biggs (RIP)
Long time ‘bag hunter Mr. Biggs, stalker of the Stokke, writes in with a eulogy for the actual Mr. Biggs, longtime fugitive from the great train robbery, Ronnie Biggs.
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Ronnie Biggs was best known for his infamous British train heist in 1963, where he and his gang made off with about $50 million in today’s currency.
He was caught but managed to escape prison, living out his days as a Brazilian playboy. He was featured in the Sex Pistols’ quasi-documentary “The Great Rock and Roll Swindle”. The Sex Pistols compared their band to a Rock and Roll Heist where, they too, made off with millions.
Thus, my namesake, (Ronny)Biggs, is an obscure reference dating back to my 90s So-Cal punk days.
The Guardian has a pretty good obit here.
And I expect all of you to be familiar with The Great Rock and Roll Swindle. Especially if you’re at all into music or pop culture. Truly a work of genius.
Ronnie Biggs, you will be missed. I doff my fedora to you, with outstretched index and middle fingers.
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Tuesday, November 5, 2013Breaking: Drunk Frenchbags Steal and Molest a Llama
The latest from France:
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A pack of blitzed French school chums snatched Serge the llama from a circus and led the surprisingly agreeable beast on a late-night journey aboard the city of Bordeaux’s tram system.
The llama-nappers posted pictures of themselves with Serge on Twitter, leading to their arrests on misdemeanor theft charges. They’ll likely get a wrist-slapping fine.
“I had two or three glasses too much. Let’s say I was happy,” one of the animal liberators, Mathieu, 20, told the Sud-Ouest newspaper.
The lifelong pals broke into the Franco-Italian Circus looking to grab a zebra, but that animal wasn’t cooperative.
Serge, however, was more than game for some wild-and-woolly, late-night action.
“We were afraid that [Serge] would be rough, but he was very gentle,” Mathieu said. “We petted him and he followed us onto the street.”
The blotto buddies baptized Serge with booze and renamed him “Kuzco,” after the Inca ruler in Disney’s cartoon “The Emperor’s New Groove.”
“[Serge] was happy and proud [to be temporarily free],” Mathieu said.
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You almost earned some nottabags, Frenchbags, but then you had to go all “Emperor’s New Groove.” The only proper name for a sex llama is Falkor.
Wednesday, October 30, 2013Breaking: Greasy Chefbag Guy Fieri Screams at his Hairdresser
Longtime HCwDB (without the HC) clown Guy Fieri got into a screaming hissy fit/fight with his personal hairdresser.
I guess the douchespikes didn’t turn out with proper spung.
Monday, October 14, 2013Miley Cyrus Objects to 70 Year Old Jewish Men
Hollywood something-or-other and future addict Miley Cyrus critiques Hollywood’s Jewish hegemony:
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“With magazines, with movies, it’s always weird when things are targeted for young people yet they’re driven by people that are like 40 years too old. It can’t be like this 70 year old Jewish man that doesn’t leave his desk all day, telling me what the clubs want to hear. I’m going out, I know what they want to hear. I know when you’re in a club, what makes everyone go crazy and when the time is where everyone’s like ‘alright I’m going go get a drink.’ I know when people walk off the dance floor and I know what’s driving it so I’ve got to be the one doing it because they’re just not in on what 20 year olds are doing.”
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Well crap me with a diaper full of poo. If a cranky, no-longer-young Jewish guy can’t critique youth culture, then what the hell am I doing all day?
In the immortal words of The Wire’s Clay Davis, sheeeeeeeiiiiiitttttt.
Tuesday, July 23, 2013Breaking: Anthony Weiner To Star in Marvel's Upcoming 2014 Superhero Film "Carlos Danger"
You don’t come to HCwDB for timely news, I get it. But this story is too hilarious not to pass on.
Old crotch-packer friend of internet douchetrolls everywhere and current New York mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner continues to hang out and party in internet sex chat rooms like it’s 1997. Not only that but he hits on the internet ladiez as his alter-ego, Carlos Danger.
Tragically, this story was “broken” by old nemesis of the site, The Dirty. Led by its resident douchenozzle, Nik Ritchie, The Dirty is hoping to get renewed life as a witless husking vortex of party pics and suck.
Someday I’ll publish “Niks” emails to HCwDB begging for links back when it was “Dirty Scottsdale” and he was stealing all his pics from my site. But that’s neither here nor there. To paraphrase Kirk/Spock, Nik Ritchie is, and forever will be, a douche.
In the meantime, commence Weiner/Spitzer jokes like we’re all twelve years old, and carry onward until dawn.
Wednesday, July 17, 2013Framing Cain
What is an image? Is it simply a photographic capture? An event frozen in a moment in time?
No.
An image is filled with flickering, flowing movements across the mind’s eye. Underneath the eyelid. In between each blink. A ziggy zaggy bobbing weaving jumpy confluence of images from past and present moving in and out of frame. Over and under. From image to image. From viewer to viewed. Like a darting dotted line. From you to your family. To your friends.
Then back again.
A wibbley wobbley timey wimey river dance of meaning cutting across multiple fields of understanding. Over to your smartphone jumps our little running meaning blob. Onto your Twitter feed. Over to the blogs you read. And then back again.
And wait! What’s happened! The image has changed!
Oh sure, it’s the same image that you saw before. But suddenly you see it differently. It holds different meaning. It has taken on the forms and shapes of a dancing, jumping, hypertext latticework that you never noticed before.
Fields of Foucauldian power play out not only in the text or the visual cues, but across the margins. Fights break out. Conceptual swordfighters do battle. First left handed. Then right. Like Inigo Montoya and the Man in Black, ideologies are contested even as meanings change. Debates over sexuality. Gender roles. What defines the stereotypes of race. How we understand class.
Those who think things are always certain, always fixed, well, they end up dead from Iocane powder.
Think of Trayvon Martin’s hoodie. A substitute for black skin employed by an aging, terrified, white power structure caught in the whirlwinds of a changing world that they no longer understand. Erectile dysfunction and fading libidos seek out revenge on the potency of black youth by demanding that the image of the hoodie-wearing teenager be recontextualized as reasonable threat. George Zimmerman’s profiling now socially justified by a jury of clueless buffoons who never looked inward to contest the biases they’ve been fed after two decades of fear mongering in mass media “news” entertainment.
And that’s how images are contested. Medium is context, as Marshall McLuhan and Roland Barthes taught us in the 1960s. Images travel achronologically back and forward through time. They move across mediums and circle in and out of texts past and present. They transverse a shmorgasboard car wash of cultural framings, debates, discussions, and interactions informed by every piece of stimuli you acquire on your daily journey through our pastoral digital paradise.
The image is always alive.
As one who has long written a blog dedicated to the reclaiming, and contestation of the meaning of images that circulate in the public sphere, I have a thing or two to say about this controversy over Rolling Stone’s cover story on the Boston bomber this week.
Over the past seven years, I have efforted to highlight the absurdity of spectacle in contemporary pop culture. I do this by framing the inherent douchey ridiculousness of an increasingly adderal-stimulated generation raised on hyperlink digital social networking. When sexual competition is heightened by increasing wireless connection speeds and rapidly morphing and mutating social spheres of influence in the digital realm, the result is digital people. Douchebags.
Douchebags are simply the peacocking body spectacle of male display competing the only way it can in the age of vine, instagram, and facebook. By turning the body into a corporeal hyperlink. A repository of meaning brought by the spectator. Ideally, for our douchebag, the target spectator is both the hot chick and the surrounding spectatorial lens.
Tattoos are written on skin just like any accompanying text brought to bear on an image. The contextualization of douche spectacle.
But, whether douchebag or photograph, an image is never just an image. An image is a contested landscape. It is a mirror. A repository. A link in a chain.
For what is the real threat to the social paradigm that this Rolling Stone cover represents? The unconstrained image. The image that resists easy categorization.
Those upset that Rolling Stone dared to present a bomber as a good looking teenager fail to understand the complexity of the critique. Those outraged at a cover image of a terrorist presented as everyday kid are overcome by the need to frame, to justify, to wish away the bomber terrorist as simply an alien that can never be comprehended.
But this is a form of cowardice.
The image that upsets the grand narrative taking place in the hive mind, that forces the individual to challenge base assumptions, can only be perceived as a threat. But the threat is not what the image depicts. It is what the image represents in challenging the larger protective cocoon of mass media reassurance.
An incongruous image such as the one seen here ruptures the latticework of good/evil that so many prefer to reside in. It punctures the safety of visual clarity. It reveals the intertextual structures of meaning imposed on each of us daily in our saturated world of smartphones and smart TVs, digital car screens and flashing electric billboards telling us, in the immortal words of John Carpenter’s They Live, to sleep.
This is why Rolling Stone’s cover image is so revolutionary. And so necessary. In one simple image of a young man, the power of imagery itself to resist easy answers and simplified paradigms is revealed. The Wizard behind the curtain reveals the emdedded biases at work in how we hope to reduce the complexity of the real world to an easy cartoon narrative.
But Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is not Wile E. Coyote. He is real. But for us to comprehend that complexity requires a conceptual awakening. An awakening that makes so many so uneasy. Not because of what it tells them about Dzhohkhar Tsarnaev. But because of what it tells them about themselves.
For a life without the easy answer of the constrained image is not an easy life to live.
One image, re-contextualized in a forum where so many have been celebrated for artistic achievements (Rolling Stone’s cover) destabilizes the very human desire to turn a human being who commits heinous acts into an inhuman monster. Here is Dzhohkar as a young adult, and not the spawn of satan. So the people are outraged. How dare a murderer be shown as anything other than a monster?
This is the power, and the threat, of the truth revealed. When Dzhohkar appears as folky pop singer, the bobbleheads lose the power of clear demarcation between the normative and the deviant. Instead of the Satanic overlord of hate rendered inhuman and monstrous, the us/them binary is shattered by Dzhohkar the Human Teenager. This challenges simplified understandings of the events of the Boston bombing and reminds us of the uncontrollable and unpredictable threat of a world unconstrained.
Without frame there is only the savagery of nature. This challenge, in the form of the Dzhokhar innocent/evil paradox, is delivered in context with larger constructions of false consciousness. How do we conceive of celebrity, youth, beauty, and the public sphere itself? Through easy, mass produced imagery that tell us that this over here is “good” and this over here is “evil.”
The controlled image is the tool by which reassurance is sold.
And that knowledge of the artificiality of the media industry to sell easy narratives is what’s really threatening to so many about the Rolling Stone cover.
Judging by the hysteria, this knowledge of the graphic power of imagery cannot be allowed to exist because it cannot be constrained into soothing narratives of pictorial reassurance. It is far easier to picture Hitler like this then it is to accept that Hitler played with babies, had a girlfriend and loved his dog.
To accept the complexity of those who do evil acts is to accept the possibility of evil acts within all of us.
To accept that Dzhokhar could look happy, healthy, youthful and beautiful is to humanize that which does not deserve an act of humanization. For evil must be monstrous and alien to the normal hierarchy of celebrity in which Rolling Stone usually traffics.
But is precisely for these reasons that the cover is so important. So critical to reminding us of the power of evil to transform the mundane, everyday college boy into a terrorist.
And that, of course, is the point.
Tuesday, July 9, 2013Breaking: Anna Benson is a Psychopath
Remember Kris and Anna Benson? Yeah, me neither.
Apparently he’s a (not very douchey) athlete of some kind, and she’s a hottie. Or make that a Bleeth.
As there’s marital bliss. And then there’s entering your husband’s home with a gun and a bulletproof vest and demanding money.
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Former “Baseball Wives” star Anna Benson — the estranged wife of ex-pitcher Kris Benson — was arrested this morning in Georgia … after allegedly raiding Kris’ apartment with a gun and a metal baton, all while wearing a bulletproof vest.
According to law enforcement, Kris—who filed for divorce last year—reported that Anna showed up in a rage last night after being forced by the court to vacate their marital home. Kris says Anna arrived and immediately whipped out an “expandable metal baton,” threatening to hit him.
But it didn’t stop there … Kris told police Anna then pulled out a handgun and demanded money. She must have been expecting Kris to pull a gun on her too … because she was allegedly wearing a bulletproof vest at the time of the alleged assault.
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Lesson learned: Not all hot chicks are worth it, kids.
Wednesday, July 3, 2013Breaking: Someone Was In Public With Someone Else
So this is apparently some “famous” porn star named “Stoya” with a formerly famous 90s alt-rock dude who took his name from iconic pop culture icons of earlier generations as an ironic statement on the very mass culture pablum that he himself now partakes in.
So they were together.
And they walked down the street.
And this is news because famous.
I’m like TMZ, bitches!! Take that, lawyer Harvey Levin!!
I post this pic because I like to keep up with current pop culture baubles in the news.
Actually, no. No I don’t.
I think contemporary TMZ-infused pop culture is a circus of ridiculousness, a reality show without end, point, interest, narrative, conflict, nor cultural resonance.
Not since the Paris Hilton-Lindsey Lohan frenemy war of 2007, which I will grant was rather enjoyable, has any of this idiocy held sway to me.
I enjoy mocking the anonybags and the real world hotts who cohabit in their toxic orbit.
Other than that, Hollywood is a silly place.
