When Jesse “The Body” Ventura won the Minnesota governorship in 1998, it must have given other high profile bodybuilders a feeling of inadequacy that they likely hadn’t felt since they were skinny runts getting sand kicked in their faces. Less than a month after Ventura’s upset victory, Hulk Hogan announced a bid for the presidency of the United States that barely made it through a couple of talk show appearances. Hogan’s reason for running was that he was “10 times more popular” than Ventura. In 2003, when Ventura decided not to run for reelection, Arnold Schwarzenegger picked up the gubernatorial torch and became “The Governator” of California in the recall election that same year. In order to decisively one-up Ventura (his Predator co-star), Arnold won re-election in 2006 and sunk the California economy in the process. Jesse “The Body” envy can drive an oiled up muscleman to extreme levels of electoral lunacy. 

Following last week’s big announcement that Arnold won’t be running for office again, and Hulk Hogan’s signing with TNA, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Ventura is resurfacing. Those guys tend to work like that. Tonight, Ventura is returning to his old stomping grounds to host a three-hour Thanksgiving episode of the WWE’s Monday Night RAW. Like all RAW guest hosts (or all guests on any TV talk show), Jesse’s there to shamelessly plug his latest project, a Tru TV show called Conspiracy Theory that looks like a less funny version of Penn & Teller’s Bullshit!. But as he trades verbal barbs with the current WWE roster, Ventura might be rubbing elbow-drops with the future political leadership of America. After reading the tealeaves, here is my expert analysis of the political prospects of some of Vince McMahon’s top superstars…



JOHN CENA: The current WWE champ’s freakish ability to lift two wrestlers with a combined weight of over 600 pounds onto his shoulders before slamming them to the mat shows that he could probably even elevate the ailing economy of his native Massachusetts. As a candidate he’d be a dream. He supports our troops, has won an award from the Make-A-Wish Foundation and the Hollywood salute that he learned for his action movie turn as The Marine (2006) gives him a touch of the Reaganesque. However, in order to run for elected office he’d have to lose those baggy denim shorts of his. Even Arnie traded in his Terminator leather jacket and shades for a suit when he entered the political arena. Cena could become a political force in ten years when his rabid pre-adolescent fans finally become old enough to vote.

MVP: This former United States champ has been seen currying the favor of Sherri Shepherd on ABC’s The View a lot lately and that could be a smooth political move. Boosting one’s cachet with that daytime TV audience proved crucial to the success of the Schwarzenegger and Obama campaigns and Sarah Palin’s appearance on Oprah has definitely generated a lot of buzz. Although MVP has the charisma and the oratory skills for public life, he also has a conviction for burglary that could keep him from even voting in his home state of Florida let alone getting on the ballot there. While acts of burglary are often committed by our political class, most successful pols save their lawbreaking for when they are safely in office. Whereas MVP served 8 ½ years in an actual prison for crimes he committed when he was 16 years old, felonious elected officials are usually remanded to appear on Sunday morning talk shows, The Apprentice or Dancing with the Stars.



CHRIS JERICHO: Yes, this co-holder of the unified tag-team belts is Canadian but he was born in New York, so unlike Arnold, he can still run for president. His other potential negative is that he’s a bad guy who regularly refers to wrestling fans as “gelatinous tapeworms.” But remember, Jesse always played the part of the heel too and that didn’t stop him from moving into the governor’s mansion. What makes Jericho interesting in today’s polarized political landscape is that he’s a born again Christian who not only gets irony, but revels in it. Some of this may be due to his growing up in a country that already has a universal healthcare system so his faith isn’t automatically combined with a rabid belief in death panels and birther conspiracies. Jericho’s ability to maintain his Christian beliefs while still being way into to 80s metal makes him the ultimate crossover candidate.

SANTINO MARELLA: Marella provides an ethnic comedy relief that we haven’t seen since the days of Chico Marx but it’s doubtful that his clueless Guido shtick will endear him to Italian-Americans. His donning of a tight skirt and wig to win the “Miss WrestleMania” crown is equally unlikely to win the GLBT or women’s vote for him. If only Marella was really Italian instead of Canadian, he might have a legit shot at the Italy’s Parliament. If the Italians would vote in Cicciolina the porn queen or Moussolini’s granddaughter or, hell, Silvio Burlusconi, what’s to stop them catapulting Marrella into high office? Think about it Santino.



JERRY “THE KING” LAWLER: This Southern wrestling legend and longtime RAW color commentator is best known for giving a vicious piledriver to Andy Kaufman, but he’s also a two-time candidate for mayor of Memphis, Tenn. The first time Lawler ran was in 1999 (the same year that Ventura was sworn in as governor) and the second was in a special election earlier this month. Both times Lawler came up short. Although he garnered only four per cent of the vote this last time around, I wouldn’t be surprised if this river boat gambler tries to make the third time a charm. This still begs the question for Jerry: why would you want to be mayor when you’re already the king?

TRIPLE H aka HUNTER HEARST HELMSLEY: By marrying WWE heiress Stephanie McMahon, Triple H has put himself in the company of recent presidential contenders John McCain and John Kerry. Having what Rush Limbaugh would deem a “sugar daddy wife” (but only if you’re a democrat) on your arm, whether she’s the inheritor of a beer, ketchup or grappling fortune, can almost get you to the top but you still might come up short come election day. I’m sure that Stephanie McMahon-Helmsley’s winning ways with audiences will be just as much of a boon to any Triple H candidacy as Cindy McCain and Teresa Heinz-Kerry were to their husbands’ presidential aspirations. Under normal circumstances, the presidential also-ran who is married to an heiress could look forward to a long career in the senate to salve the wounds of rejection by the electorate, however certain familial circumstances may deny Triple H this booby prize…

LINDA McMAHON: She’s Triple H’s mother-in-law, Vince McMahon’s wife, former WWE CEO and candidate for Chris Dodd’s Connecticut senate seat. Like other successful businesswomen entering Republican primaries such as former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina or former eBay Pres. Meg Whitman, McMahon may be “too liberal” for the rabid tea-bagger wing of today’s GOP. 1970s wrestling king and Goldwater conservative, “Superstar” Billy Graham (a big influence on both Hogan and Ventura), has already chastised McMahon over the WWE’s penchant for “bra and panties matches” and encouraging steroid use. Graham is supporting conservative congressman Rob Simmons in the primary and you can expect Glenn Beck to do the same. On her side, Linda McMahon sports a slight lead over Dodd in recent polls as well as a $50 million war chest. Just don’t expect followers of Beck’s 9/12 Project to consider such things when drumming McMahon out of the race for a more ideologically pure candidate.

*    *    *

So tonight, Jesse “The Body” returns to the WWE to once again bask in the limelight generated by the company that put him on the national stage. Just don’t expect him to stick around too long. Jesse’s got his new cable show to think about. Hulk Hogan and Ric Flair may be beating each other bloody in a tour of Australia right now, but Ventura won’t follow his contemporaries back into the squared circle. Jesse’s always known that the hard thing in wrestling isn’t making your big comeback; it’s staying away. The same can certainly be said for politics.

The special 3-hour Thanksgiving episode of RAW with guest host Jesse "The Body" Ventura airs tonight at 8pm on the USA Network.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Happy Thanksgiving everyone. I’ll be back on December 3 with my review of Steven Seagal’s loony foray into reality television, Lawman. Special thanks to Greg Franklin for coming up with the rad title of this article.

The San Francisco Bay Guardian has a big cover story on San Francisco alt/indie pro wrestling that doesn’t contain a single mention of Incredibly Strange Wrestling. Making matters even worse, their cover image is of a Los Angeles based lucha show (Lucha VaVoom!), not a Bay Area one. While not every article on today’s Bay Area wrestling scene need mention my old dog and pony show, I felt that the Guardian’s take, promising a history of non-mainstream pro wrestling in San Francisco, was left with a gigantic hole made by its exclusion of what was the Bay Area’s most successful alternative wrestling show. (The classic Roy Shire promotion that’s mentioned in the article was mainstream wrestling in Northern California during its pre-WWE heyday.) Below is my letter to the San Francisco Bay Guardian editorial staff, pointing out their oversight followed by some additional thoughts on the article:

Dear Andre Torrez, Tony Papanikolas and SFBG editorial staff:

It was strange, maybe even incredibly strange to see an SFBG cover article touting "pro wrestling's past and present stronghold on the Bay Area" that didn't contain a single mention of Incredibly Strange Wrestling. ISW ran from 1995 until about the mid-2000s and was the first promotion to run alternative wrestling shows that played with "the politics of mainstream wrestling" in both the Fillmore and the DNA Lounge. We also had GLBT baby faces (good guys) and grown men wrestling in chicken suits long before Lucha VaVoom brought its LA based show to our old stomping grounds. A picture of ISW "softcore" champ El Homo Loco standing triumphant in the middle of our rickety ring still hangs among the framed photos of rock legends in the Fillmore's lobby. The reporting on Fog City and LVV in your two pieces was good, but any look back at SF's history of envelope-pushing pro wrestling shows without a sentence or two on ISW is wholly inadequate.

Regards,

Count Dante AKA Bob Calhoun
former Incredibly Strange Wrestling ring announcer and performer
and author of "Beer, Blood and Cornmeal: Seven Years of Incredibly Strange Wrestling"

In the Bay Guardian piece, author Tony Papanikolas reports with a sense of surprise that the Fog City Wrestling grappler Angel the Hardcore Homo “is clearly the hero in the contest, reconfiguring some of the mainstream's predictable gay panic tropes into a slapstick offensive that plays off his opponent's increasingly comical discomfort.” While Fog City Wrestling is commendable for being willing to play with the paradigm here, Papanikolas and the Guardian make it sound like this is something new when ISW was pushing El Homo Loco as it’s number one fan attraction over a decade earlier (albeit also “minstrelsy” as Papanikolas says of FCW’s Angel).

Papanikolas also notices “a sizeable number of bohemian types” while scanning the audience at an FCW show at the DNA Lounge and again seems surprised by their attendance although ISW sold out both the DNA and the Fillmore with “bohemian types” as a large part of its fan base. Papanikolas hedges a little as he writes, “San Francisco doesn't seem like the kind of community that goes in for (nonironic [sic]) professional wrestling.” The use parenthesis is his and the word “nonironic” is his only thin reference to any previous Bay Area wrestling entertainment that may or may not be ISW. And that’s always the knock by other wrestling promotions (that do make use of thematic irony whenever it suits them) against ISW – that it was ironic. It wasn’t “real” professional wrestling, whatever that is.

It’s sad that the Bay Guardian is so quick to cover up or ignore San Francisco’s homegrown, underground, subversive, DIY wrestling show. Sure we had our moments of utterly craven tastelessness (which I write about regretfully in “Beer, Blood and Cornmeal”) but we also brought matches that tackled religion, local politics and gentrification and we did more than our share of  “reconfiguring” of the “mainstream's predictable gay panic tropes.”

In closing, I leave you with this shaky footage of ISW’s gay panic trope the Cruiser dropkicking and violating an effigy of Mayor Willie Brown in front of San Francisco’s city hall while Tim Amiano, Kirk Hammett and Green Day watched from the side of the stage. It’s doubtful that the workers of Lucha VaVoom or Fog City Wrestling will ever find themselves so politically active. For those of you who feel more than slightly nervous at the sight of a white man abusing an effigy of a black politician in this age of town hall disruptions, please remember that The Cruiser was the original tea bagger, in the traditional sense of the word:

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Today marks the two year anniversary of the suicide and crimes of pro wrestling star Chris Benoit, the most bleak tragedy in a segment of the entertainment industry that is unusually prone to them. A few days after the incident, I wrote the following essay in an attempt to get my thoughts straight on something that was both staggering and surreal. Although I sent this piece to some editors I knew, the depressing nature of these events made me not pursue its publication with my usual tenacity. To mark this grim anniversary (as well as the recent in-ring death of Japanese wrestling icon Mitsuhara Misawa AKA Tiger Mask), here is my essay on Benoit…

Pro Wrestling’s Unsustainable Lifestyle
By Bob Calhoun
June 27, 2007

Wrestlers go crazy. That’s what they do. They live their lives walking a line between fantasy and reality. The crowd might know it’s all fake, phony, a put-on, but they react to every body slam and spine buster as if they were real. Professional wrestling is a form of theatre designed to create mass hysteria. It fosters this in the fans at home watching on the boob tube, in the fans packed into the arena screaming for blood and, mostly, in the wrestlers themselves.

I worked in pro wrestling’s bargain basement for seven years. I never paid my dues the way that Chris Benoit did and I didn’t make it to the heights of Vince McMahon’s World Wrestling Entertainment. But even in the little punk rock wrestling show that I used to grapple and announce for, I saw what the squared circle spectacle could do to a guy. It wasn’t just the bumps and bruises but it was the out of control desire to take those bumps and bruises. It was the need to be in the ring and in front of those fans even when there were only tens or hundreds of them let alone the thousands that a man like Benoit played to.

In a tour that I was involved with in 2001, we had a wrestler who had suffered from too many concussions. He was starting to black out in public. He was forgetting where he was. He was really spooking the rest of the boys. The promoter did the right thing and sent him home on a plane to be with his family. It was only a short time later before he got in the ring and started working small time indie shows again around his hometown. This wasn’t a guy who made his living from pro wrestling. He was probably lucky if he made 25 bucks from those shows he worked. Collecting concussions from wrestling was most likely going to endanger his ability to hold down his day job yet he still did it. He just couldn’t stay away.

Roddy Piper calls this “the sickness” in his autobiography, In the Pit with Piper (Berkeley Trade, 2002). He discusses it at length but never quite defines it. He just knows it’s there. And all of us who have been involved with pro wrestling at any level have felt its pull. After a while, you start wanting to become the character that you play in the ring. The day-to-day mundane inconveniences of family court, doing your taxes or filling out job applications pale in comparison to living in a world where all of your problems can be solved with a well-placed shot to your opponent’s skull. Now you take that mindset that’s already hard to resist and you add steroids, mounds of painkillers and weekly doses of head trauma to it and you have an all too often lethal chain of circumstances.

Wrestlers die. They die a lot. A March 12, 2004 USA Today article (High death rate lingers behind fun facade of pro wrestling) states that wrestlers have death rates about seven times higher than the general U.S. population and that wrestlers are 20 times more likely to die before the age of 45 than pro football players. A sampling of the wrestlers who died prematurely between 1997 and 2004 (the dates that the article examined) reads like a who’s who from our collective adolescence: “Ravishing” Rick Rude, “Mr. Perfect” Curt Hennig, Road Warrior Hawk, The British Bulldog, The Junkyard Dog, Crash Holly and of course Owen Hart, who plummeted to his death performing a botched 78 foot repel from the rafters during a 1999 pay-per-view. Since the publication of that article, the death toll has gone even higher and so often it has been without the media attention that the especially gruesome Benoit murder/suicide is getting.

Chris Benoit worked a hard, high impact style of pro wrestling. He regularly dove off of ladders or flew from the top rope and onto the cold concrete floor. His professionalism at so much self-abuse won him a rabid cult following among wrestling fans if not the crossover stardom that The Rock and Hulk Hogan have enjoyed. And pro wrestling is a hard business. There’s no off-season. There’s no time off. No vacations. These guys go at it 52 weeks a year with no breaks unless they need to rehab from an injury that’s so severe that the promotion and the wrestlers themselves have no other choice but to undergo surgery and subsequent rehab. You can only imagine what the incessant touring, house shows and TV matches can do to a grappler’s personal life if they ever even have one.

To cope with this, wrestlers pop pain pills at alarming rates, and then there’s the constant allure of recreational drugs and alcohol. On top of that, the business demands superhuman physiques that are usually only attainable through regular cycles of steroids and human growth hormone as well as the lifting of very heavy weights. Wrestlers are constantly on the road and more than a few have died crashing their cars as they drove the hundreds of miles in between scheduled bouts. Even more have been found dead in hotel rooms. Wrestlers spend a lot of time in hotel rooms.

But Chris Benoit didn’t meet the average pro wrestler’s ignominious end from a coronary in a Cozy 8. He became a real life horror show. For those who haven’t been paying attention to the cable TV news crawl, during the weekend of June 22-24th, he strangled his wife on Friday, suffocated his son on Saturday and then hung himself in his weight room on Sunday. Roid rage is getting a lot of play in the press for Benoit’s breakdown, but the magnitude of his atrocities make it hard to pin the blame on roids, wrestling or even the Mephistopheles-like Vince McMahon. 

But still, you wonder what other profession would have had Benoit scrambling around the country away from his family almost every day of the year, taking chair shots, diving out of the ring and then having to slam steroids and somas just to stay on schedule. What other form of sports or entertainment has the recent track record of tragedy that seems to come so naturally to pro wrestling? Pro wrestling in its current form is an unsustainable lifestyle. While McMahon and his WWE are circling the wagons in order to deflect blame for this latest wrestler death, one can only hope that the wrestlers themselves take a good long look in the mirror or risk ending up in sports entertainment’s statistical slagheap.

Artwork: Brandi Valenza

Bob Calhoun AKA Count Dante was an untrained grappler and master of ceremonies for the punk rock/lucha promotion Incredibly Strange Wrestling. His memoir of those years, "Beer, Blood and Cornmeal: Seven Years of Incredibly Strange Wrestling" is currently available through ECW Press.

DAVID CARRADINE has been found dead in a Bangkok hotel room. The reports of his death are getting more and more lurid. He may have hanged himself with a cord of some kind. The US Embassy in Thailand is only confirming his death right now. Reports of suicide or mysterious circumstances could just be the results of the Bangkok rumor mill. Carradine lived hard and fast but still made it to 72. In an interview in Psychotronic from the 1990s, Carradine discusses dropping acid and doing other hard drugs like it’s a regular occurrence for him. While Dennis Hopper left his days of easy ridin’ behind him, cleaned himself up and started plugging GOP candidates like both Bushes and Bob Dole at Republican conventions, Carradine lead the rebel life until the end.

Three weeks ago I posted a blog comparing my one run-in with Carradine to my more recent meeting with Bruce Dern (another frequent star of Roger Corman exploitation movies in the 1960s and 70s). I ended up casting Carradine in a bad light. I feel kind of bad about that now, or at least weird about it. On the train ride this morning I even had some thoughts of taking the thing down, but hell, it all happened (plus, it’s only a goddamned blog). And even though Carradine just sat there at his merch table and couldn’t even look up at me, I’m still a fan. I’ll still throw on Death Race 2000 (1975), Death Sport (1978) or even episodes of Kung Fu The Legend Continues every now and then. And you’ve gotta’ be a fan to love Kung Fu the Legend Continues.

Carradine has his SF Bay Area roots. Like me, he went to San Francisco State University. He dropped out and hung out with the Beatniks in North Beach. He chased his espressos with weed. He also held down a job cleaning out the brewing tanks at the Lucky Lager Brewery in San Mateo back when that cheap brew’s bottle caps had weird visual puzzles printed on them.

Carradine beat out Bruce Lee for the role of Kwai Chang Caine in TVs Kung Fu the 70s. Adding insult to injury, Lee created the concept for the show, a fact that Kung Fu’s producers seem to conveniently forget in so many DVD “making of” documentaries. Carradine became the first mainstream martial arts star without being a martial artist. When American Shaolin author Matthew Polly brought some video tapes of old Kung Fu episodes to THE actual Shaolin Temple in China, the monks all thought that the lofan (Carradine) was making fun of them with his bad technique. Bruce Lee went to Hong Kong, made kung fu classics, and became a tragic movie legend on par with James Dean. Like his father, John Carradine, David had brushes of cinematic greatness mixed together with heaps of low budget dreck and an occasional cult classic thrown in. John was in Grapes of Wrath (1940), Stagecoach (1939) and The Ten Commandments (1956) to name a few. He was also in the Astro Zombies (1968) and Blood of Ghastly Horror (1972). David was in the early Scorsese films Boxcar Bertha (1972) and Mean Streets (1973) as well as Hal Ashby’s Woody Guthrie biopic Bound for Glory (1976). He was also in Dead and Breakfast (2004). While not on the level of Bruce Lee as a cultural phenomenon, Carradine still carried enough mystique to play the title in Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies.

For whatever reason, I’m still hoping that rumors of suicide are just that and that David Carradine went the way I always thought he would: from partying just a little too hard for a man his age. While the urge to practice tai chi moves to his old how-to videos may be hard to resist, you should also make the time to check out some of Carradine’s more interesting films. Larry Cohen’s Q: The Winged Serpent (1982) comes to mind, where Carradine chews the scenery along with Michael Moriarty as a mythical Mexican flying snake god menaces New York City. Also see Lone Wolf McQuade (1983), the movie where Carradine dukes it out with none other than Chuck Norris (!) to a soundtrack by Spaghetti Western maestro Francesco De Masi. Also check out Circle of Iron (1978), another project originally created by Bruce Lee but realized by Carradine, this time posthumously. Lee came up with the concept but Carradine was cast in the picture a few years after the Enter the Dragon star’s untimely death. Although Lee may have preferred it differently, the two actors will always be linked and both will be equally missed.

You can leave a comment for David Carradine's family on his website.

I set up a 75-lb. TKO brand heavy bag in my garage and started sparring again. I’m feeling the effects already – my hands hurt.

My band, Count Dante and the Black Dragon Fighting Society, is backing up Thor, the Rock Warrior, bender of steel bars, destroyer of hot water bottles and singer of such metal anthems as Let the Blood Run Red and Thunder on the Tundra at Slim’s (333 11th St., SF, CA) again this coming Wednesday May 27th at 8pm. Roughly translated this means that me, Jim and The General are going to be Thor’s band for the night. We did this about a year ago and many headbangers and even lowly hipsters came away from Slim’s that night exclaiming that it was the show of the year. We’re also playing an opening set so there’s going to be a whole lotta Count Dante and the Black Dragon Society at Slim’s next Wednesday. If the appearance of the Thunder God who lives to rock wasn’t enough to draw you out on a school night, ArnoCorps is headlining. They headlined last years’ dose of Thor/Dante merged Rag-Na-Rocking and the results were historic if not truly epic.

But back to boxing: since I have to relearn an entire set’s worth of Thor’s music in a little less than two months, I’ve had to listen to a mega dose of Thor. Call it total emersion into the art of the man who brought us the classic film Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare. Last week I started boxing to the same Thor CD that I use to pick up bass riffs from and, thus, found the perfect use for Thor’s straight ahead metal. Songs such as Thunder Hawk drive me to plunge my heavy fits ever deeper into the bag’s canvas and sand mass. When I am wavering, Thor’s lyrics offer affirmation, urging me to keep my arms up and throw leather as the bag sways back in forth in a futile effort to avoid my blows. “Thunder Hawk/I am the Thunder Hawk,” Thor’s voice tells me from the CD boombox on top of my washing machine. Yes, at that moment as I double the right hook into the side of the bag as if I am sinking those blows into an opponent’s ribcage, I am the Thunder Hawk! “In the sewers and the stench/Feeling sweaty, feeling drenched.” Thor, o ancient predator, you truly understand. Thunder Hawk ends. I take a break for a minute and lift my arms above my head and take deep breaths. Knock Them Down starts with its grinding power riff. Another round begins.

“I was born a fighter/Survivor of the street/Only Rage and Fists/Kept me on my feet.” Again Jon Mikl Thor understands the pugilistic urge better than even Jack London or Norman Mailer. “Knock them Down/Oh Yeah Knock Them Down/Rub all their dirty faces into the ground.” No one says it better than Thor.

It only stands to reason that Thor’s muscle rock would be the perfect soundtrack to manly physical pursuits such as boxing, judo or weight lifting. He is the first man to hold both the Mr. USA and Mr. Canada bodybuilding titles. The question now becomes, why doesn’t Thor open a chain of Thor’s Gyms across the US and Canada? With his godlike powers, he has revived a long dead Vancouver hockey team. He has done, and continues to do, feats of strength most of us schleps can only dream of.  He has a new record label, Vulcan Sky, which has singed ArnoCorps. Your average Thor’s Gym can pump the music of Thor and other Vulcan Sky artists 24/7 and deliver us from the techo and disco usually played at your average 24 Hour Fitness. I’ll have to ask him about this at practice on Tuesday. Maybe I should write a business proposal.

You can buy tickets for next Wednesday’s show by clicking here.

Wed. May 27, 2009, 8pm
ArnoCorps
Thor
Count Dante & the Black Dragon Fighting Society
Freddie Flex & the Heavy Eric Si-Fi Show
at Slim's
333 11th St.
San Francisco, CA 94103
$12.00

Here’s a video of last year’s mayhem:

I “met” David Carradine a few years ago at the Dragon Fest martial arts convention in Glendale, Calif. It was when I was working on the “Judo” Gene LeBell book so Gene comped me in so I could spend a few minutes here and there standing around his table while he choked out his admirers. People actually walk up to him and want him to render them unconscious with one of his expertly applied sleeper holds. He gives them a patch for this that proclaims, “I was choked out by Gene LeBell.” Gene always wanted to choke me out but I protested telling him that I needed every braincell I had left to write his book. Gene usually disappointedly grumbled at this blast of logic, biding his time until he could try to show me some really painful finger locks. Unfortunately for Gene, I also needed my fingers for typing.

David Carradine was a guest at the Dragon Fest. I’d always been a fan. I watched Kung Fu as a kid. I didn’t care if his eyelids were taped. I didn’t care if his technique was a bad kind of stoner fu. I saw Death Race 2000 when I was way too young to see Death Race 2000. It was the second feature with some other, probably equally child unfriendly film that my mom and sister took me to see at the Redwood City Drive-In. My family wanted to leave once Death Race started but I put up an insane fit. The movie had David Carradine and Rocky in it for Christ’s sake plus really cool cars with teeth! In that wonderful Roger Corman produced exploitation classic, Carradine wore a black leather bondage outfit that resembled a zero budget Darth Vader (the film came out about two years before Star Wars though). Racers run over people for points. If being Kwai Chang Caine wasn’t enough, that movie sealed the deal. David Carradine was the coolest dude ever (with the notable exceptions of maybe Bruce Lee and Elvis).



At the Dragon Fest, I went up to Carradine’s table. He just sat there, slowly doing a newspaper crossword puzzle. “Hello Mr. Carradine,” I said with a kind of awe. He didn’t look up at me. He just sat there behind his folding table where he was presumably trying to move black and white stills of him wearing an obvious bald cap from old episodes of Kung Fu. He also offered a picture of him in a Chinese gi with Uma Thurman from some new Quentin Tarantino flick called Kill Bill. I tried to get through to Carradine again. “How much for an autographed still?” I queried but still nothing. Carradine couldn’t even take the time to blow smoke up my ass to get me to buy an autograph. If I were seven years old, I would’ve been crushed.

Super Con happens in San Jose every May. It's my favorite comic convention. It’s under attended but that’s what I like about it. It doesn’t draw the Hollywood heavyweights that have plagued the San Diego Comic Con recently. At Super Con, I don’t have to spend a weekend being jostled by crazy housewives looking to catch a glimpse of Hugh Jackman’s rippling abs. Super Con is mostly about the comic books – imagine that. It still has that swap meet feel of cons of yore. I scored a copy of Creepy #11 with the Frank Frazetta cover for seven bucks! That’s living. Last year, the biggest Hollywood celeb at the con was the fat guy from Lost. I don’t watch the show, so don’t write in telling me his name and his character’s name. It doesn’t matter. This year the biggest movie star to attend was Bruce Dern.

I talked to Dern for about 15 minutes. He really sold this shit out of this new Joe Dante (The Howling, Piranha) horror flick he’s in called The Hole. I mean he sold the fucker. If you’re casting a movie, put Dern in it because he will promote the living shit out of your movie.

“This is the first 3-D movie where you don’t need glasses,” he exclaimed. “The lenses for this thing cost $600 thousand a piece. We had to rent 'em!” He then leaned over his table to reel me in. “These kids find a hole under their house and in this hole is everything that anybody’s ever been afraid of. All the darkness in all the world is in this hole, only this time, that darkness is in 3-D."

I don’t know about you, but I’m sold. The Hole is scheduled for release in 2010.

I was really shocked to see the obit for former Creature Features producer Bob Shaw on SFGate.com today. This is so soon after Creature Features host Bob Wilkins passed away – way too soon. Shaw was only 56. Bob Shaw was a monster nerd who broke into television by assisting Bob Wilkins on Creature Features. Shaw helped Wilkins (along with future CF host John Stanley and ISW co-founder August Ragone) with the research into classic (and not so classic) horror and sci-fi movies. He also pieced together the crackerjack title montage of movie clips that played under the beloved Creature Features theme song during the show’s opening. "Stylishly done," were George Takei's remarks about Shaw's work when the Trek star was a guest on the show. After Creature Features, Shaw became KTVU’s resident Roger Ebert, but I always liked him better. He went out of his way to give a glowing review to Godzilla 1985 when other lazy critics were content to just let it head up their year’s worst lists. He pointed out that Pearl Harbor contained no Pacific Islanders in it but had lots of scenes of truckloads of white actors yelling “Go! Go! Go!.” He understood the artistic value of The Brain That Wouldn’t Die. I just watched Bob in the Creature Features documentary, Watch Horror Films Keep America Strong. He’s really funny in it. It’s hard to believe he’s gone.

Shaw passed away last Friday from liver failure and complications from Crohn's disease.

He was one of us, one of us (and he'd know the reason for the repeat better than anyone).

The hard times for monster men continue.

Here's some of Shaw's handiwork...

I wonder when the overlords of Amazon.com (or maybe mere hackers) will realize that my punk wrestling memoir, Beer, Blood and Cornmeal, deals with GLBT themes? I mean it has gay characters and parodies of gay characters. It also has a pic of a man’s wiener reproduced in full color (IE: He Who Cannot Be Named of the Dwarves in all of his public and pubic glory). As of right now my bestselling book is still ranked. It even cracked the wrestling book top 20 for the first time in a month or so. Of course Amazon would never think that a book on pro wrestling could possibly be gay.

Over the weekend, Amazon.com deranked a wide range of books by gay or lesbian authors and books with GLBT themes. Amazon basically classified the offending materials (many of them sci fi books with gay themes) as pornography, making them harder to find with regular Amazon searches. They deranked David Gerrold’s Martian Child for some strange reason even though the film adaptation of the book (with John Cusak) shows up on HBO Family(!) all the time, but they left his 1970s time travel opus The Man Who Folded Himself alone. In The Man Who Folded Himself, the main character creates alternate versions of himself though time displacement and ends up having gay orgies with them. He later bends the time continuum so much, that he creates a female version of himself and knocks her up. I guess that must be what made everything okay with this book and whoever did this at Amazon--he eventually procreates.

This shows the stupidity of censorship: the censors don’t bother to read or understand what it is they are censoring. I would chuckle over this when I’m through being scared. Amazon already has a disproportionate affect on what does and doesn’t get published. If we allow them to monopolize books, both through moving old fashioned hardcopy and electronic books with their kindle, they will end up monopolizing ideas. Scary stuff for any of us, readers and writers alike, but even more so for someone with a guy with a book that prominently features El Homo Loco prancing around in a pink tutu and dry humping his opponents into submission.


Here's Salon.com's Broadsheet's take on this and a link to an interview with David Gerrold. Amazon's now claiming it was a hacker who did this evidently. Still, let's keep an eye on this megacorp.

Ironically, this blog is going to be reposted on Amazon.com via RSS.

According to Glenn Beck, Michele Bachmann and other rabid right wingers, the Obama Administration is in the midst of planning Maoist style reeducation camps plucked right out of Joe McCarthy and Jack Webb’s cold war fevered imaginations. Now what about these reeducation camps? Will financial aid be available for them? Can you pay for their tuition with Pell Grants? What about scholarships? For adult reeducation camps, will you need a GED to attend? How will your SAT scores affect your chances of attending the reeducation camp of your choice? For K-12 reeducation camps, will Obama institute a reeducation camp voucher program for any parents who live in a district with lousy public reeducation camps and want to send their kids to private reeducation camps? Will these reeducation camps leave any children behind? Will they hold teachers accountable? Will reeducation camp commandants receive pay based on merit or will the teachers’ unions stand in the way? Will there be prayer in re-education camps or at least a moment of quiet contemplation where camp attendees are encouraged to contemplate the dominant protestant faith of the United States of America? What about physical education in reeducation camps? Will reeducation camps have music programs or will they only focus on the three R’s (two of which ironically don’t even begin with the letter R): reading, wRiting, and aRithmetic? Will attendees of reeducation camps pledge allegiance to the flag or will the Obama logo do?

With the rising cost of college tuition in this country (up 6% in 2006 and another 6.3% in 2007) and with only 75% of US high school students earning their high school diplomas according to The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, I applaud President Obama’s bold new reeducation policy. With so many jobs being lost in our economic downturn, if there’s one thing this country needs, it’s a reeducation.

In case you missed all the manly mayhem on Pirate Cat Radio Tuesday night, here’s a link to an MP3 of the show:
http://www.nerdnetworks.org/pcr/Noise-20090317.mp3

Holzfeuer of ArnoCorps and I, Count Dante, the Deadliest Man Alive, took over the Neat Neat Noise Show and converted it into a cavalcade of ballsiness. We interviewed Thor, the steel bending heavy metal Thunder God as well as “Judo” Gene LeBell, the man who taught Bruce Lee AND Chuck Norris how to break arms. Like Dalton from Roadhouse, this radio show had balls big enough to cum in a dumptruck. If that wasn’t enough to get you to download, we also talked to the Zombies on Crack, shamelessly plugged the World’s Deadliest Bands show at Annie’s Social Club this Saturday and spun mighty tracks by the likes of Beuregarde, Sorcery, the Junk Yard Dog, Captain Lou Albano and Thin Lizzy (it was St. Patrick’s Day).

Download that MP3, put it on your iPod, and feel the pump (as ArnoCorps would say). It will be impossible to resist. The MP3 will only be online for 2 weeks so do it now! What are you waiting for!?! Gooooooo!!!!!!

Thanks to Mike from Neat Neat Noise, Pirate Cat Radio 87.9fm, Thor, Gene LeBell and the Zombies on Crack. Don't forget to come to Annie's Social Club (Folsom at 5th, SF) this Saturday March 21st for the WORLD'S DEADLIEST BANDS III with ArnoCorps, Count Dante and the BDFS and Zombies on Crack. It's the WrestleMania of San Francisco weirdo rock shows!