It Was a Pleasure to Burn

The titular "man" at this year's incarnation of that annual celebration of ridiculous latter-day hippiedom known as the Burning Man festival has gone up in flames. Normally, this wouldn't be a big deal, given that the very name of the gathering should clue you in to the fact that at some point, the big guy's gonna get torched -- but as it turns out, this year the fire was set somewhat unofficially, four days before its scheduled immolation date, by a 35-year-old San Francisco performing artist. (San Francisco police were no doubt immediately advised to be on the lookout for -- everyone.)

Apparently, this act of juvenile subversion is drawing attention to what some critics claim is the lack of subversion at the once-hallowed Burning Man festival. While many are furious that one idiot performance artist with a box of matches ruined what had been a very carefully planned schedule of mushroom ingestion designed to ensure maximum peakage at the appropriate time, others say that this singular act celebrates what the festival has always been about: unpredictable, unfiltered radicalism.

Those falling into the latter group are part of a growing movement of former Burning Man fans who are now fiercely critical of what they see as the recent dilution and corporatization of the annual gathering in the Nevada desert.

They say the whole thing has lost touch with its roots -- that it's "sold out" (and stop me if you've heard this one before -- a thousand times over in fact).

It goes without saying that the watering-down, no pun intended, of Burning Man was all but inevitable.

Nothing truly audacious can stand in our culture, not when our culture has become so monstrously adept at assimilating all forms of rebellion until they become completely meaningless and utterly impotent. Prepackaged, homogenized non-conformity is as close as your local Hot Topic. Agitation is fashion. Defiance is a slogan. Insurrection is product placement. The revolution is not only televised, it can be Tivoed and enjoyed at your convenience.

Anything deemed "cool" can go from internet circulation, to Cafe Press t-shirt, to MTV Spring Break, to frat boy pick-up line, to panic-inducing parental warnings on cable news in a matter of a few days.

By the time you've made the 20 minute drive to that hot new club, it's already been vacated by the very crowd from whom you learned about its existence in the first place.

Subversion, in this day and age, is almost impossible.

There's no better proof of this fact than the lengths that those determined to be rebellious now have to go to simply to make their stand. Admittedly, many of the neo-60s dingbats who attend festivals like Burning Man apparently don't know or don't care that their particular counter-culture statement has been done to death; it practically has its own uniform by this point, the same one it's had, with few variations, since the first hippie grew a beard and put on a dirty t-shirt 40 years ago. Now though, the few among our delicately oppressive society who feel that they have to stand out, even among the larger set of alleged free-spirits, are finding that they have nowhere to turn; it's literally all been done. This is what leads desperate clowns to stick rats in their pants while covering themselves with chocolate syrup, and insist that what they're doing is "art."

This is what led someone to burn the Burning Man, the symbol of counter-culture itself.

In the end though, it accomplished nothing. The Burning Man is already being rebuilt in time for tomorrow's authorized ritual of rebellion.

Life goes on, as planned.

"I Can't Lie to You About Your Chances, but You Have My Sympathies."

As far as I'm concerned, Alien remains the single greatest movie ever made.

To say that I'm a fan of Ridley Scott's 1979 masterpiece -- its look, its feel, young Sigourney Weaver in her underwear, everything -- would be to sorely downplay my absolute obsession with the film and the entire canon it inspired.

I know more worthless trivia about the Alien series than any well-adjusted person should. I own a baseball cap with the original Nostromo insignia patch. I bought the Alien Quadrilogy DVD set, which includes a better cut of the unfairly maligned 1992 David Fincher sequel. I'm looking for a full-scale M41A Pulse Rifle (in case anyone happens to be stuck on what to get me for Christmas this year). I probably bleed molecular acid by this point.

It goes without saying then that, as a diehard fan of the Alien films and decent film in general, I'll never forgive Fox for diluting and consequently destroying the entire franchise by agreeing to allow Alien vs. Predator to ever see the inside of a theater. The fucking movie was blasphemy.

And now comes Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem.

When I learned that they were actually making a sequel to the original cinematic abomination, my first thought was that somebody needed to dig up Daryl Zanuck, then jetison the bodies of both him and Rupert Murdoch and make up any story they liked.

But then I heard who was directing it -- the Brothers Strause, two visual geniuses with a love of, and a respect for, the original movie and a serious knack for bringing disturbing imagery to life.

And then I saw the new trailer.

In a surprising and truly ballsy marketing move, our first look at the new movie comes courtesy of a notorious "Red Band" trailer -- meaning that the trailer itself is R-rated. It features shocking and graphic violence, and lets the audience know right off the bat that this time around, the gloves are off and the potential for chaotic gore that made the original films so startlingly effective is back.

Whether or not Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem will be decent is anyone's guess (and note the tip of the hat to Cameron's vision of the plural Aliens, further letting you know what you're in for).

One thing's for sure though -- at least it won't be PG-13.

See the red-band trailer here.

Later Today, at the Home of Senator Larry Craig...

Listening Post

A song about lesbian longing. A singer whose voice can shatter your spine. A video that features a threesome make-out scene.

Skunk Anansie's Secretly.

And, because they're so goddamned mind-blowing -- a bonus Skunk video: Charlie Big Potato.

Imperfect Strangers

For some reason, I feel it necessary to elaborate slightly on my relationship with the woman -- initially, young girl -- I mentioned in last week's extended column (Into the Maelstrom/8.24.07). My relationship with Abby indeed began in a moment of insane passion, and lasted quite awhile after that -- longer than anyone might've expected in fact. Over time though, me being the person I was in my early to mid-20s, I hurt her and destroyed the relationship. Both of our lives went on and we attempted to remain friends, or at the very least acknowledge and respect the bond we had once forged. After 9/11, while I was in New York to cover the attack and its aftermath, I looked her up. The following is an excerpt from the full manuscript I've written (last week's wasn't), and has been posted on the memoir page for quite some time. After last week's entry, I feel like this story -- which involves Abby and I seeing each other for the first time since bumping into one another briefly at a party a year previously -- takes on new life, as it's now been given some perspective. Immediately before 9/11, I spent a month in rehab for a massive heroin addiction (Welcome to the Monkey House/6.4.07.); I had gotten out only ten days before the attacks (Five Years On: 9/11 in Two Parts/9.18.06). During my hospital stay, my wife at the time left me. I also lost 20 pounds. (Incidentally, don't read too much into my decision to write about these parts of my past; they're decent stories -- that's it.)


"God, you look like shit."

"Thanks, I thought I looked pretty good all things considered."

"You're too fucking thin," Abby says.

She kisses me on the cheek and invites me into her apartment. It's my first actual experience with what New Yorkers have the low-expectations to consider a living space. The entire place is no bigger than a walk-in closet. I make a quick sweep with my eyes, which doesn't take longer than a second or two. It's technically a studio, but somewhere along the line some architectural genius decided to throw in a piece of drywall that only comes about three-quarters of the way across the room, creating a partition which sections off a "bedroom" on the other side. The kitchen is simply a small refrigerator and a mini-stove at one end of the main space, next to the entrance. In the corner is a tiny room holding what I can see is the toilet, but there doesn't appear to be anything else in there.

"What, do you bathe in the sink?" I ask.

Abby's wrapped in a towel, her hair wet -- an affecting sight which I'm trying to ignore -- so I know she cleans herself somehow in this place. She walks back behind the partition into her pretend bedroom.

"The shower's in the closet."

"The shower's in the closet?"

"Don't start with me."

My eyes dart past a window which features a view of what I assume is the building next-door -- a brick facade that can't be more than a few feet away. So much for natural light. Besides her books and some old photographs on the precious little wall-space, there's not much in this small room that I immediately recognize from our time together. Our roller-coaster ride of a relationship.

I glance past the wall with the books and the pictures and into the bedroom, just in time to see Abby drop her towel and bend over to slide into her underwear. Most of her body is hidden by the wall, the edge of which seems to split her in half from top to bottom. I watch the curve of her side; her back and her hips; her naked ass and legs. I look away and try to put it out of my mind. Still, from an aesthetic standpoint, there's no denying that she's the only worthwhile thing to look at in this place. Abby was always all-curves, with an adorably cherubic face and curly auburn hair. This still holds true. The fact that she's never been very modest around me is something I can 't decide if I'm thankful for right now.

It dawns on me that it's been an especially overwhelming day for memories.

I want to believe that it's unintentional on my part, but I catch a glimpse of her hooking her bra behind her back as I move my eyes across the room again and onto the TV. A rerun of the X-Files is on; a show which, in addition to cigarettes, is one of Abby's avowed addictions. She emerges from the bedroom a moment later, wearing jeans and pulling a cream-colored sweater over her head. She shakes her damp hair out and bends over, patting it dry with the towel that was wrapped around her just a moment ago.

"You really think I'm too thin?" I say with a smirk.

She and I have talked on the phone a few times since my arrival in New York. She knows what led me here -- the unedited version. We've debated getting together, but this is the first time we've been face-to-face in close to a year.

"Yeah, you don't look much better than you did the last time I saw you."

"I was on drugs then," I say, remembering my last days as skinny and sick addict, before transitioning into bloated and utterly repulsive addict.

"Yes, I know. I knew then."

"No you didn't," I say incredulously.

She stands up straight -- throwing her hair back.

"Yes," she says. "I did."

She brushes past me, which in this place means a tight squeeze past a tiny bistro table that's cluttered with take-out bags. She picks up a hair-dryer perched on the edge of the stove, turns it on and begins running it across her hair.

"You did not," I mumble under my breath as I begin to explore the shoebox Abby calls home.

"I heard that -- and yes I did," I hear her say, over the steady white noise of the dryer.

This is the way it's always been with Abby: her insisting that she knows me better than I know myself -- me arguing that she doesn't, knowing full-well that she's probably right.

I scan her rickety black bookshelves. In the background, Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully are discussing how it is that a character played by Peter Boyle can know so much about a series of murders unless he actually committed them. I run my finger across the dust on one shelf; Abby never was much for keeping things spotless. I read off the titles to myself; they're mostly sci-fi paperbacks, with a smattering of Koontz and one or two books on Judaism. After our break-up, Abby jumped neck-deep into her faith in a way she never had before. Seeing the concrete proof of that now just makes me shake my head at the comically obvious implication.

Un-fucking-believable. I drive women to religion.

As I come to the end of the bookshelf, I spot a small picture of the two of us. I recognize it immediately; it was taken years ago on a quiet beach in the middle of nowhere.

There we were. Young. In love. Smiles bright against freshly-tanned skin. A glowing orange sky, kissing the blue ocean horizon in the distance behind us. I instinctively close my eyes and try to remember more of it -- almost willing myself to disappear there, if for no other reason than the fact that at that time I didn't have a care in the world.

The hair-dryer goes quiet and there's just the sound from the TV now.

"It was great to be stupid and innocent, wasn't it?" I hear Abby say.

I don't even bother to turn around with the picture in my hand -- an expression of surprise on my face. Of course she knew what I was looking at. I just smile.

"Yes it was."

I hear the hardwood floor creak under her feet as she takes the few steps needed to cross the room. When I turn around, she's right in front of me. She looks up at me, almost begrudgingly, and places her hand on the side of my face, running it down my cheek.

"Are you okay Chester?" Her pet name for me.

I exhale.

"Yeah. I am."

I close my eyes and swallow a headful of longing. I'd just about forgotten the overwhelming tenderness of a touch like this. She gives me a smile that perfectly encompasses a thousand emotions at once. This is the way it's always been with Abby.

"Come on -- let's go eat," she says.



The chill of fall has settled over the city. The leaves from the trees that line East 80th Street cascade gently down around Abby and me as we walk toward busy 2nd Avenue. I put my hands in the pockets of my long black coat, one of the recent purchases I made at the direct request of the President of the United States. It's a Friday night, and Manhattan is just beginning to come to life. The pall that's blanketed everything since the attack is starting to lift -- slowly. It's almost as if the massive hole torn in the fuselage of the city -- the one that sucked out so many lives and so much air in seconds -- is finally being filled. People are breathing again, but those breaths are still short and shallow.



Abby's eyes light up like a little girl's as the waitress puts a big plate of colorful raw fish in front of us. Her mouth opens in an adorable, wide smile. She breaks her chopsticks apart and digs in, stopping only to take a sip of sake.

"So what did the queen bitch say to you on the phone this morning that got you so riled up?" She says, her mouth half-full.

"I thought you didn't want to hear about this."

"I spent three years with you -- I'm obviously a sucker for punishment."

"Money."

"Shocking."

"She says I owe her somewhere in the neighborhood of three grand." I pause for a moment. "No wait, I take that back. I say it's somewhere in the neighborhood of three grand because I can't remember the exact figure right now. She of course knows how much it is, down to the penny." I take a swig of my Asahi. "Sent me an itemized list and everything."

"And your take on it?"

I shrug, rolling my eyes upward. Abby smiles and takes another sip of her sake. I continue.

"My take is that I'm still hoping our marriage can be salvaged. She on the other hand is handing me the tab like a waitress who wants to go the hell home."

"Sucks, chief."

Abby's lapse into what anyone else would consider wholly unladylike vernacular makes me chuckle.

"No shit," I say, taking a bite of my sashimi. I'm still not eating much these days.

In talk in between chewing. "The fucked-up thing is that she has all of our worldly possessions." I swallow hard. "I mean, she took all the furniture, all the wedding gifts, and of course my heart," I say, only half-jokingly.

"Yeah, well that's worthless."

I don't take the bait, choosing instead to zero-in on the literal meaning of Abby's words.

"Actually, you may have just hit it on the head," I say, drifting off in my own thoughts as I begin to put things together. "Love. Passion. Emotion. It's all insignificant because you can't put a price tag on it. Something's only worthwhile if you can assign a tangible value to it."

"She's that much of a hard-ass?"

"She doesn't see it that way. She sees it as being practical," I say, looking not at Abby, but through her -- to someplace very far away. "She was always more interested in the nice house than in who was living in it with her."

"You ever think that maybe she wanted both? I mean, you're easy to love but not exactly a breeze to live with."

"I always thought that was such a cop-out, the whole 'I love you but I can't live with you' thing. Maybe I was wrong."

Abby puts down her chopsticks and looks right at me. "You've been wrong about a lot of things lately," she says -- scolding.

Under the table, I brush my leg lightly against hers.

Her eyes widen. "And you're definitely wrong about that. You're not getting laid."

I smile, feigning shock.

"Oh come on. I just touched your leg for Christ's sake. I didn't mean anything by it."

"I know you."

"You know nothing," I say, still smiling -- focusing my attention on another piece of sashimi.

"I know that you'd better start coming to terms with this."

"And what's this?"

"You're heading for divorce court."

"You say that like you're glad."

She suddenly looks up at me, all humor gone from her face. "I'm sorry you're hurting Chez, but I won't lie -- of course part of me thinks you deserve this."

"I'd never have the nerve to hold that against you."

"That's because you can't."

"You're right." I nod.

Abby glances down, looking at what's left on the plate. The sudden silence between us is deafening. It seems to go on for several minutes.

"Let's just finish this up and get out of here," she finally says. "I think I want to go home."

In the time since our break-up, we've kept a tenuous friendship -- fraught with the knowledge that moments like this are always lurking just beneath the surface of any interaction. Abby loves me more than any woman ever has, and at least as much as any other human being on the planet. She also has the ability to hold a grudge longer than just about anyone.

"Come on," I say. "Please -- let's change the subject."

She pauses -- years of hurt still registering on her face. She then sits up straight, breathes in deeply, and -- as if through sheer force of will -- seems to visibly exhale the pain and anger. Her auburn curls bounce gently as she does this.

"Okay, fine."

She gathers herself and downs what's left of her sake -- a damn good amount -- in one giant gulp. She practically slams the empty bottle down on the table and wipes her mouth with her napkin.

"I changed my mind," she says. "You are getting laid. Let's get out of here -- I want to fuck."

This is the way it's always been with Abby.

The Quiet Man

Richard Jewell is dead, at the age of 44.

In a somewhat ironic, somewhat and sadly expected denouement, the announcement came from his lawyer.

For those of you who don't immediately recognize the name -- which is almost surely the way the man himself would've wanted it in the first place -- Jewell was, for 88 days in 1996, the prime suspect in the Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta, which killed one person and wounded more than a hundred others.

Jewell was a security guard at the park and found the suspicious bag containing the bomb. He warned others about it and attempted to move them out of harm's way; there's little doubt that the death toll would've been much higher had Jewell not intervened, and indeed, at first he was hailed as a hero. But then something happened -- something entirely unsurprising when you consider the grotesque nature of modern media saturation and just what's required to keep it running in a manner that's satisfying to both the unscrupulous monsters at its helm and the hungry public it supposedly serves: Richard Jewell was turned into a villain -- the perfect villain actually.

Thanks to an over-zealous and incompetent federal prosecutor and a news cycle which demanded fresh blood, no matter the cost to innocents or the truth, Jewell was judged and convicted in the public eye before all the facts were in; his life was turned upside-down and inside-out, all on live television. Richard Jewell became the sacrificial lamb on the altar of the public's insatiable, voyeuristic right to know -- and lazy journalism's bullshit supposed obligation to that demand.

At all times during the sickening media circus, Jewell maintained his innocence.

Finally, after almost 12 weeks of non-stop harassment and conjecture -- Richard Jewell was cleared of any and all wrongdoing. It would be years before America realized that the bomb had in fact been planted by right-wing psychopath and abortion clinic bomber Eric Rudolph.

But by the time the prosecutor officially apologized to Jewell -- and the media did its usual post-hoc hand-wringing and soul-searching -- the damage had already been done. Jewell's life had been ruined.

From a strictly mathematical perspective, it might have been worth the destruction of one innocent man to teach the media the crucial lesson that blood in the water provides no sanction for an unconscionable feeding frenzy -- to save the lives of the next generation of Richard Jewells.

Unfortunately, all it takes is a flip through the TV stations or a glance at a newspaper to realize that the media has learned absolutely nothing.

Imagine for a moment what kind of baseless accusations would've vomited out of the mouth of, say, Nancy Grace, had she had her own cable news show during the Jewell saga: Likely the same baseless and despicable accusations she now levels at every other untried and technically innocent person she arrogantly deems to be guilty, despite it never having been proven in a court of law.

Richard Jewell is gone, but his legacy lives on.

It's too bad the media chooses to ignore it -- particularly since, for all intents and purposes, they ended Jewell's life a decade ago.

Listening Post: Bonus Office Edition

I love The Office in ways an 8th grade vocabulary can't properly express.

The show has kept me sane at work by helping me to look at non-stop boredom and stupidity as something to laugh at, as opposed to the kind of thing that might make me want to crawl into a bathtub and drag in a toaster.

This homemade video is so unbelievably well done, it's worth watching over and over again.

Happy Humpday kids.