B-Movie Review: 'SpaceCamp' (1986)

You know exactly what America needed right after the Challenger disaster? A movie about goofball teenagers accidentally being sent into space by a robot that hacked into the NASA mainframe. 

By: Jimbo X

JimboXAmerican@gmail.com

@Jimbo___X

If you're looking for reasons why NASA ain't doing much of shit anymore, Jan. 28, 1986 is your answer.

That morning, the Challenger space shuttle exploded shortly after takeoff, killing all seven people on board. Strangely enough, one of the people who was originally slated to be onboard was the bitch who played Big Bird on Sesame Street, and the only reason why she wasn't was because NASA couldn't find a helmet big enough to fit her big fluffy head.

The administration didn't even bother launching anything for another three years, which coupled with the collapse of the Soviet Union, pretty much ended the great Space Race. Business picked up a little in the 1990s, but when history repeated itself with the Columbia disaster in 2003, NASA more or less packed it up and hasn't tried to do anything ambitious with live crew members since.

Pictured: something no one has ever fapped to.

Now, I wasn't around back then, but to say the Challenger disaster really fucked with people back in '86 would be an understatement. For 30 years the space program had been one of the nation's greatest symbols of pride, a testament to American technology and our engineering ingenuity. When those seven people got blown the fuck out (literally), all of a sudden we had to come to grips with the fact that - maybe - we weren't the mechanical masterminds and aerospace whizzes we thought we were. Remember, this happened right around the same time Japan started to eat us alive with electronics tariffs while rice burner sales slowly began eclipsing American-made rides. For three decades we thought our superior intellect and unparalleled craftsmanship would give us an eternal leg up on our Asiatic competitors, but as soon as the panels started flying off the shuttle, all of a sudden we just knew we weren't the industrial (or aeronautical) titans we had convinced ourselves we were. 

Which, naturally, made the timing of SpaceCamp about as unfortunate as finding poison gas Pokemon Go monsters running around at Holocaust memorials. 

In the mid-1980s, Patrick Bailey and Larry Williams wrote a book about the U.S. Space Camp in Huntsville, Ala. (more on that in just a bit.) ABC Pictures thought the premise of kids getting accidentally launched into space and having to learn to work together to survive interstellar death was a dandy idea for a feature and groundwork on the feature film began in 1985. A June 1986 release date was targeted, with the filmmakers expecting it to be the family-comedy breakout hit of the summer.

To say the Challenger disaster put the brakes on the project is kinda' like saying the JFK assassination kinda' hurt Kennedy's chances of re-election. Since the film was almost 100 percent done at the time of the shuttle explosion, the studio felt it was too late to yank the plug on the $25 million movie, so despite the deluge of bad publicity, the film was released as planned that summer. 

Pictured: something everybody has fapped to.

To the surprise of absolutely no one, the movie was a colossal box office dud, failing to earn back even $10 million. Thanks to endless repeats on Saturday afternoon cable throughout the 1990s, however, the film has since gone on to become something of a minor '80s cult classic, with enough people having seen it to garner at least one or two passing gags on Family Guy.

But does the movie have any sort of intrinsic value beyond rudimentary nostalgia? Well, how's about we fire up our old VHS cassette and see for ourselves ...

The movie opens with a little girl in a cornfield wishing on a shooting star. She says it's like John Glenn is winking at her from space and shes' destined to become an astronaut. Well, flash forward 20 years and she's all grown up and played by Kate Capshaw and married to Tom Skerrit. She's pissed because she just got turned down for an astronaut gig because she's a woman (probably) and has to operate a junior cadet space camp alongside her hubby for the summer.

The kids show up and it's your usual grab-bag of multi-ethnic teens (and LULZ a plenty when they assign the Asian kid to the yellow team.) So we get some exposition on the history of the space camp (it's a real place in Mobile, Ala.) and then we're introduced to Kathryn, this dorky girl (played by Lea Thompson) who knows everything about the lead space camp woman and kinda' idolizes her. And of course, the token black kid yells a lot, and displays several tendencies that suggest he is literally mentally retarded. We also meet Tish (played by Kelly Preston) who looks like your basic valley girl and says her dream is to become an extra-terrestrial dis jockey. Then this annoying ass white guy named Kevin (played by Tate Donovan) pretends he's the Asian guy so he can be on the same team with Tish, prolly because he wants to hump her and stuff.

The adults show off the shuttle simulator and here's where Jinx - the film's iconic robot - makes his debut. The crew refer to it as a "$27 million handyman" while the kids simply refer to it as "an extra-terrestrial midget." Then this one little kid (played by Joaquin Phoenix, back when he was trying to convince everybody to call him "Leaf" instead) starts complaining about how badly he wants to move up from the cub scout program to the teen cadets, while the  girls talk about the size of all the boys' hands (get it, because it's an allusion to their penis sizes!) Kathryn and Tish start to bond and as it turns out, Tish is actually something of a savant with an encyclopedic memory of everything, including piloting controls, for some unexplained reason. She then tries to convince Kathryn to let her give her a makeover while "Walk of Life" plays in the background.

Holy shit, the black kid says his big plan is to open the first outer space McDonalds. Then Kevin tells him "not to take any of this shit seriously," because this is an edgy family-friendly adventure-comedy, that's why.

And it's still not as high as his brother River was in 1986.

The little kid hides Jinx in the closet and the older kids start bullying him. Then he hears somebody say "shit" and the robot starts talking about solid waste disposal. The kids quickly realize Jinx literally does anything you tell it to and after a series of contradictory orders, it malfunctions. So, yeah, I guess that makes it the world's first autism-bot. The little kid repairs Jinx, so now it says "yo, man" as a greeting, then calls all the older kids "jerk-offs" and "monkey-glutes" for messing with him. He attempts to convince the robot to not take things so literally, but since it's a robot, it clearly don't give a fuck what some eight-year-old thinks.

Time for a montage of cadets testing out equipment. Man, those blue tee shirts are bitchin'!

Kathryn the nerd girl can't figure out how the gyroscope stabilization thing works (you know, that giant, spinning hamster ball thing from The Lawnmower Man) and feels bad. Kevin tries to reassure her and gives her a ride out to the lake in his jeep to look at the stars. His pick-up line: "so, you're really into this space stuff, huh?" She talks about watching the sky as a kid and how she couldn't wait to grow up. The romantic tension is so taut, even my fucking TV is sweating right now.

Jinx tells the adults the two kids snuck out and they catch Kathryn and Kevin making out by the waterfront. Kate Capshaw gives 'em a stern talking to and says she sees a lot of herself in Kathryn and that she has a lot of potential and she better not screw this up. Then the little kid starts crying, because he wishes he was in space instead of on Earth. Goddamn at the angst, eh? So Jinx takes over the control room and starts talking with NASA's mainframe. He LITERALLY puts the kid in the astronaut database, because he takes everything literally, remember?

Later, the kids go through a mechanical spacewalk simulator and rush through a power failure drill. Kevin does a Cheech and Chong impersonation when the adults tell him to take over. And he keeps telling more bad jokes while they simulate crashing and burning. 

Naturally, Kate chews the kids out for not taking all this make-believe space shit serious enough. Meanwhile, Jinx is still finagling with the NASA super computer to put an eight-year-old aboard the next shuttle. And OOPS! Jinx unwittingly manages to convince the computer to LAUNCH while the kids are doing a test run inside it! Despite the fact it just sentenced half a dozen tenth graders to certain death, Jinx rationalizes his actions by declaring he and the little kid are "friends forever" and that by causing a thermal curtain failure, he's actually giving the kid everything he's ever dreamed of. 

Thankfully, Kate's character remains aboard, so naturally, she screams "we're going to explode!" when the shuttle starts taking off, because that sure as sugar won't scare the dookie out of a bunch of 14-year-olds already crying their eyes out. So, to avoid a very Challenger-esque mishap, ground control has no choice but to send Kate and the kids into orbit. 

After some stock footage plays, the kids continue to panic and say very adult words like "shit" and "goddamn." Still, they can't help but "ooo" and "aww" when the window panels open and the see the curvature of the Earth. And just like that, the pants-pissing horror of literally two minutes ago is supplanted by joy and mirth as the kids point out Africa and the Swiss Alps.

Huh. Who'd thunk the people who made Mega Man would've had a direct line to NASA headquarters?

Back on terra forma, Tom Skeritt says the president wouldn't believe him if he told them they just launched his wife and five kids into space, so NASA - rather realistically - decides to keep this one mum. Now, as to how D.O.D. radar, civilian aerospace monitoring systems, Soviet detection modules and everybody within a 50 mile radius of the goddamn launch site wouldn't realize a shuttle just took off with no explanation nor warning, of course, is never diegetically addressed. In orbit, the kids realize they have 12 hours worth of air, but oh shit, they're going to need at least 13 to survive re-entry. So they decide to hook up with a space station that's conveniently right beside them to get more oxygen. And of course, Kevin the comedian is still making jokes about 7-11, despite the fact there's a 99.999999 percent chance he'll be dead as shit in half a day's time.

The kids eat some tube food and come up with this convoluted plan to communicate with ground control by Morse Code. Kate puts on a space suit and seals up a loose hatch. Then she does a full suit space walk and is absolutely awestruck looking at the Earth. As in, it literally sounds like she's orgasming while looking at it. Unfortunatley, she doesn't have a jetpack and can't reach this satellite thingy she's trying to get to. So - naturally - they put the little kid in a space suit to save her. Of course, he starts freaking out once he's out there, but then Kevin starts doing an Obi-Wan Kenobi impersonation and that inspires the little twat to rescue his adult supervisor "using the force."

I ain't bullshitting you when I tell you the rescue sequence goes on for about 20 minutes. The kid eventually lets go of a sandbag anchor and goes flying off into space and Kate isn't even that concerned at first. Shockingly, the greenscreen effects aren't that bad for a mid-80s production. Of course, she manages to save him, because the idea of leaving a child to suffocate all alone in the vacant nothingness of space is probably too much for a PG-13 movie. 

The black kid is tasked with connecting the oxygen tubes to the shuttle. Kate lets him know if they connect the wrong tubes, the whole thing is going to explode. He and Kathryn bicker back and forth whether the red wire or the yellow wire is the right one. Anyhoo, the black kid was right, which means that if the nerdy white girl had the final say, she would've been responsible for a sextuple fatality space explosion. The moral of the story? Never trust women with math.

God damn it, now Kate gets hit by the runaway sandbag and the little kid has to rescue her. A bunch of dudes smoking cigarettes at NASA headquarters tell them to get out of there, but the crew says "fuck that" and do a manual override to open the cargo doors. Kevin takes the lead as shit gets real and he pulls her back into the pod. Now the nerdy girl is kvetching to Kevin about not being as good a captain as he is - you know, right in the middle of a life or death struggle for space survival. Kate, who is still passed out from spinning around in space for so long, is wrapped in duck tape to keep from floating around the shuttle bumping into things and the kids decide to land in the middle of the desert because ... well, I don't know why, to be honest.

Now Jinx relays the Morse Code back to NASA (remember that plot point from like 45 minutes ago?) and Tom says he is going to "treat him to a can of oil" for his good work (even though the entire situation is solely the result of his up-fuckery.) He then lets them know about an alternate landing site in the desert, then Annie wakes up. The kids prepare for re-entry. The nerdy girl takes the controls and has to stabilize the craft. Hey, just like that exercise she couldn't do in the movie's first act! She has a flashback of Annie's pep talk from earlier, and re-entry begins. Unfortunately, it's too little too late and they all crash and die. Nah, just bullshitting 'ya, they survive unscratched. Everybody celebrates not getting blown to smithereens and that, kiddos, is all she wrote ... no Goonies-esque post-climax character resolutions or  resolved subplots or nothing, just the shuttle hitting the tarmac and the credits a-scrollin'. 

The most advanced artificial intelligence lifeform ever designed, and the government is using it as a janitor at a kids' summer camp. Welcome to Reagan's America.

You know, I always wanted to see a sequel with everybody at NASA losing their jobs for child endangerment and Jinx being declared an enemy of the state for hijacking federal I.T. Alas, fortune never smiled upon us, and regrettably (well, no, not really) we never got ourselves a SpaceCamp 2: Space Harder. 

If you're looking for the definition of "a mediocre movie," I think SpaceCamp is the perfect bellwether. It's not good, it's not bad, it's just kinda' there. About half the movies you'll watch in your lifetime will be better than this, and about half the movies you'll watch in your lifetime will be worse. It's the most average movie I've ever seen - one sans any notable qualities, nor any notable defects. It exists in an impenetrable sac of absolute, total and perfect unremarkableness ... being asked to give an opinion on the overall objective quality of the movie is akin to being asked to write an essay on how water tastes.

I don't hate SpaceCamp, I don't love SpaceCamp, I can't find anything to praise SpaceCamp for and I can't find anything to condemn SpaceCamp for. It's a movie forever vacuum-sealed in its own meager existence, and in that, assigning it any kind of value judgement is pointless. Some of you may really, really like the flick and some of you may really, really dislike it, but being the peculiar jumble of particles and protoplasm I am, I just can't muster enough psychological energy to describe the film as anything other than "meh."

Really, all I can tell you is that the name of the guy who directed it was "Harry Winer," which is really, really phonetically close to sounding like "hairy wiener." And according to the iMDb, the original ending had the kids being rescued by a Russian shuttle, which ... hold on to your panties, M. Night ... was manned by a bunch of Soviet children. And, perhaps most importantly of all, that I still would like to fuck Kelly Preston, preferably missionary style. 

And in a nutshell, that's all I've got to say about SpaceCamp ... and just as a general rule of life, be wary of anybody who's got any more to say about it than that. 

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Book Review: "American Psycho" by Bret Easton Ellis (1991)

Yeah … there was a lot of stuff that didn’t make it into the movie. A WHOLE LOT. [READER DISCRETION, STRONGLY ADVISED.]

“In what follows, I will describe a particularly interesting and highly recognisable type of child. The children I will present all have in common a fundamental disturbance which manifests itself in their physical appearance, expressive functions and, indeed, their whole behaviour. This disturbance results in severe and characteristic difficulties of social integration. In many cases the social problems are so profound that they overshadow everything else. In some cases, however, the problems are compensated by a high level of original thought and experience. This can often lead to exceptional achievements in later life. With the type of personality disorder presented here we can demonstrate the truth of the claim that exceptional human beings must be given exceptional educational treatment, treatment which takes account of their special difficulties. Further, we can show that despite abnormality human beings can fulfil their social role within the community, especially if they find understanding, love and guidance. There are many reasons for describing in detail this type of abnormally developing child. Not the least of them is that these children raise questions of central importance to psychology and education.”

-- Hans Asperger, “Autistic Psychopathy in Children” (1944)

“An accident has happened. An ambulance is parked at the curb. A pile of 

intestines lies on the sidewalk in a pool of blood. I buy a very hard apple at a Korean deli 

which I eat on my way to meet Jean who, right now, stands at the Sixty-seventh Street 

entrance to Central Park on a cool, sunny day in September. When we look up at the 

clouds she sees an island, a puppy dog, Alaska, a tulip. I see, but don’t tell her, a Gucci 

money clip, an ax, a woman cut in two, a large puffy white puddle of blood that spreads 

across the sky, dripping over the city, onto Manhattan.”

-- Patrick Bateman, “American Psycho” (1991)

Like most folks I’ve talked to, I thought the “American Psycho” film adaptation from 2000 starring Batman himself was pretty good -- not great, but certainly not terrible, either. It was a solid, above average film, but all in all, I thought it felt way toned down from whatever it was originally sketched out to be. It was like watching one of the later “Friday the 13th” movies, when you just knew all of the good stuff get censored out on the first submission to the MPAA.

With rumblings of a TV series remake and, if you can believe it, a new musical featuring the dulcimer tones of Duncan motherfucking Sheik, it dawned on me a few months back that, hey, I had never actually read the book the 2000 flick was based on.

Needless to say, unless the next adaptation is rated NC-17 times twenty, ain’t nothing going to do this source material justice.

The book begins with our protagonist, Ivy-league-educated Wall Street investment banker Patrick Bateman, on a dinner date. With everybody at the table talking about Reagan and AIDS, Bateman decides to let everyone know what his platform is, which is really a jumble of conflicting political rhetoric. Later, he tries to have sex with his friend’s fiancée (who’s zonked out of her mind on anti-depressants) and she tells him he needs to get a hair plug. Distraught, Bateman returns to his luxurious apartment, where he proceeds to beat off while thinking about half a dozen different women.

Then, Bateman gives us a downright autistic description of his home entertainment system, wardrobe and daily vitamin regiment. He and his pals meet up to tell some HIV jokes, but ever the sensitive type. Bateman admonishes one of his friends for his anti-Semitic comments.

Bateman has dinner with a Georgia businessman, describing all of the songs played at the restaurant, as well as its menu offerings, in excessive detail. This is a recurring theme throughout the book, which, in hindsight, seems to paint the main character as someone with criminal autistic psychopathy. At a club, Bateman plugs some headphones into his ears while his buddies buy coke. He tells a waitress she’s “an ugly bitch” and informs her that he wishes to play in her blood under his breath.

At his office, Bateman recounts that morning’s episode of the Patty Winters Show, which irony of ironies, was about autism. After displaying his encyclopedic knowledge of  furniture catalog prices, he asks his secretary out on a date (he forces her to wear high heels for the event, naturally.) At the gym, he avoids fat girls, calls West End guys “faggots” and talks about how much he hates breast reduction surgery. Before heading home, he returns his VHS rental copies of “Body Double” and “She-Male Reformatory.” He lets us know he’s whacked off to the power-drill kill scene in the former.

Pat buys some lesbo mags, which causes him to have an inexplicable nosebleed. He goes on a tirade about how much he hates Iranians and he refers to his date as  “restaurant whore.” During dinner scenes, he always tells us how much the food costs. He lets us know he hates smoking, but just to piss off his date, he smokes her cigs when she walks out of the room. He argues with the Chinese operators of a dry-cleaning business, and tells one of his apartment neighbors that his sack of bloody clothing is actually chocolate syrup.

During dinner, Pat talks about how much he admires Ed Gein while all of his pals say really misogynistic things about “hard bodies.” Meanwhile, Pat waxes nostalgic on the last Patty Winters episode. On another double date, Pat fantasizes about killing the couple and mutilating a child with acid.

At home, Pat watches XXX movies on Diet Pepsi and Halcion. He tells us he buys his music on “all three formats” and argues against condom “receptor rips.” At the video store, he experiences a panic attack (symptomatic of sensory integration disorder, perhaps?) and rents “Body Double” for the 37th time.

We get our first kill of the tome when Pat decides to beat a homeless man and his dog to death on the street. He then gives us a Wikipedia-worthy overview of the Genesis discography and discusses how much he enjoyed a recent episode of the Patty Winters Show on toddler murderers.

He tells us how much he hated going to a U2 concert in New Jersey (hey, this Pat guy may not be so bad after all!) and reveals his plans to torture gerbils with hydrochloric acid. He defiles a “Les Mis” poster with vomit and lets us know his all-time favorite CD is “The Return of Bruno” by Bruce Willis.

A Patty Winters show on juggling Nazis makes Pat clap before his TV set, and he is utterly disgusted by a gay colleague’s advances. He retaliates by going out and killing a gay old man and his dog, and picking up two hookers for a lengthy night of sexual horror.

For those of you that have seen the film and wonder what exactly Pat did to them, well … be careful what you ask for.

"A half hour later I’m hard again. I stand up and walk over to the armoire, where, next to the nail gun, rests a sharpened coat hanger, a rusty butter knife, matches from the Gotham Bar and Grill and a half-smoked cigar; and turning around, naked, my erection jutting out in front of me, I hold these items out and explain in a hoarse whisper, “We’re not through yet…” An hour later I will impatiently lead them to the door, both of them dressed and sobbing, bleeding but well paid. Tomorrow Sabrina will have a limp. Christie will probably have a terrible black eye and deep scratches across her buttocks caused by the coat hanger. Bloodstained Kleenex will lie crumpled by the side of the bed along with an empty carton of Italian seasoning salt I picked up at Dean & Deluca."

At a company Christmas party, Pat talks about wanting to hear the Talking Heads, and he and his girlfriend Evelyn leave to go buy cocaine and have unisex bathroom trysts. At another dinner, he talks about Uzis while everybody else at the table is discussing furs.

Prior to sex, he tells one of many conquests that he once beat up a homeless woman requesting bus fare to Iowa because “she was too ugly to rape.” He then butches one of his colleagues with an axe, probably because he said he enjoyed Iggy Pop’s new commercial sound.

He and a dinner date talk about whether or not Patrick Swayze has become too cynical. Then, he nail guns her to the living room floor, maces her until she pukes and orally rapes her … then he saws off her left arm and proceeds to bash her face in with it.

After another Wikipedia article (this time, on Whitney Houston), a detective shows up and interrogates Pat about his missing colleague. Let loose, Pat tells us he hates summer because of the re-runs; he then drugs two girls’ drinks and forces them to make out in front of him. After rough sex, he butchers one and electrocutes and mutilates the other. Without giving away too much, let’s just say the passage includes the terms “areolas” and “pair of pliers” used quite frequently.

At a department store, one of Pat’s gay suitors causes a scene. Pat then heads to the zoo, where he calls a janitor the “n-word,” feeds quarters to seals and stabs a five-year-old in the throat. Pretending to be a doctor, he intentionally guards the kid so he’ll bleed to death. Ever the bleeding heart, Pat later said he regretted the slaying -- after all, how much fun is it when the person you kill has no history to eradicate?

More fun follows. He makes a hooker’s head into a Jack O Lantern and he mercilessly pummels two hookers. He saws the lips off one and mutilates the other with acid before decapitating her and literally skullfucking her on camera. He finishes off the other lass by melting her eyeballs with a lighter and yanking her innards out through her mouth.

Using a makeshift trap, he captures a humongous sewer rat. After describing the new wave of HDTVs (considering the book came out in 1991, that’s really ahead of the curve, when you think about it), he does some coke, ties up his latest victim, spreads brie on her womanly parts and … well, you can paint your own portrait here, I suppose.

At a Halloween party, Pat dresses up as a “serial killer,” complete with suspiciously realistic-looking blood-drenched apparel. He feeds Evelyn a chocolate coated urinal cake and breaks up with her, because he feels she is emotionally unstable.

You know what this book has been lacking thus far? A graphic description of cannibalistic acts!

“A few of her intestines are smeared across one wall and others are mashed up into balls that lie strewn across the glasstop coffee table like long blue snakes, mutant worms. The patches of skin left on her body are blue-gray, the color of tinfoil. Her vagina has discharged a brownish syrupy fluid that smells like a sick animal, as if that rat had been forced back up in there, had been digested or something. I spend the next fifteen minutes beside myself, pulling out a bluish rope of intestine, most of it still connected to the body, and shoving it into my mouth, choking on it, and it feels moist in my mouth and it’s filled with some kind of paste which smells bad. After an hour of digging, I detach her spinal cord and decide to Federal Express the thing without cleaning it, wrapped in tissue, under a different name, to Leona Helmsley.”

Pat then makes human sausage, while humming the tune to some cartoon he can’t recall. With a .357, he guns down a few random bystanders. Since his silencer failed, the cops are alerted and start chasing him down. From there, the book switches to a third-person narrative. Pat guns down a cabbie, officer and hotel clerk . Cue a Wikipedia article on Huey Lewis and the News.

After beating off to the Patty Winters Show twice, Pat visits his mom in her retirement villa. He works out, letting us know he keeps sliced vaginas in his locker. In terms of an explanation for his behaviors, the closest the book ever gets is a brief passage where Pat insinuates he may have experienced some abuse at a boarding school. The quote below, from the tail-end of the book, is more or less Pat’s only attempt at a mea culpa:

“I simply am not there. It is hard for me to make sense on any given level. Myself is fabricated, an aberration. I am a noncontingent human being. My personality is sketchy and unformed, my heartlessness goes deep and is persistent. My conscience, my pity, my hopes disappeared a long time ago (probably at Harvard) if they ever did exist. There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it, I have now surpassed. I still, though, hold on to one single bleak truth: no one is safe, nothing is redeemed. Yet I am blameless. Each model of human behavior must be assumed to have some validity. Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do? My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape. But even after admitting this—and I have, countless times, in just about every act I’ve committed—and coming face-to-face with these truths, there is no catharsis. I gain no deeper knowledge about myself, no new understanding can be extracted from my telling.”

Pat then beats up his new girlfriend, because she won’t go to Aspen with him. Then he gets robbed by Iranians (the irony!) and says an ATM machine told him to feed it stray cats and that a park bench once followed him home. The book ends with Pat, at another ritzy restaurant, glaring at a sign reading “this is not an exit.”

I really don't feel like getting full of myself and giving you what is undoubtedly the nine billionth dissertation about the book being an allegory for consumer excess and corporate America misogyny, so I'll keep my post-read thoughts brief.

Whether you want to read "American Psycho" as an allegory for Reaganomics or a general criticism of the 80s as a whole, it's ultimately a rich character portrait of a rather unsavory maniac, whose diction and obsession with minute details so eerily mimics those of actual psychopaths that you kinda' have to wonder why this thing isn't praised as some kind of forensic psychology masterpiece. The same way "The Yellow Wallpaper" retroactively became a landmark work of fiction about postpartum depression, I think it's only a matter of time before scholars reflect on "American Psycho" is a pioneering tome about hyper-violent autism.

By now, you should know whether or not "American Psycho" is your personal cup 'o tea. If you have a taste for really gross and violent stuff and you don't mind a bit of a scattershot narrative, you'll probably enjoy the book quite a great deal. And if the sight of a nosebleed makes you cringe, and you think stealing a kiss constitutes sexual assault?

Yeah, you'll want to steer miles clear of this one, I am afraid...

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Book Review: "Free" by Chris Anderson (2009)

As the costs of digital distribution fall toward zero, how can companies and content creators turn profits? According to the former "WIRED" editor and current drone manufacturer...they can't. 

In "Free: the Future of a Radical Price," Chris Anderson -- the former WIRED EIC -- doesn't take long at all to establish the book's central thesis: that, with the proliferation of the Internet and digital distribution channels, we're now living in an epoch in which a deflationary economy anchored around bits has completely triumphed over the old world order of inflationary economies anchored around atoms -- that being, tangible, real-world goods.

With a net annual deflation rate of about 50 percent, Anderson postulates that all cyberspace goods are destined to halve in price every single year. Citing Monty Python, the decline of transistor prices, early Jell-O advertising gimmicks and the pioneering "freebie" promotions of King Gillette -- who, it is perhaps worth noting, penned a weird-ass urban supremacist manifesto/unrealized "Bioshock" game called "The Human Drift" in 1894 -- Anderson feels that it's only natural that online-centric manufacturers and retailers today would flock towards new wave "freemiums" to sustain their own operations.

Via direct cross-subsidies -- "loss leaders" like popcorn generating revenue in lieu of fundamentally free films and ongoing annuities, like "free" phones with two-year subscriber contracts replacing point-of-sale streams -- Anderson argues that there is already a template readily available for online companies to base their own "free" models upon. In fact, Anderson rattles off several variations for us, including segmented markets -- basically, a "progressive tax" that allows women to get free drinks at clubs and kids to eat free at Sunday buffets -- tiered content (Flickr vs. Flickr Pro is the example he uses in the book) and even emerging "non-monetary markets" like zero-cost "gift economy" distribution networks (read: free Wiki articles) and even "labor exchange" relationships (which Anderson illustrates in the book with the example of porn sites that give you free nudity in exchange for helping them figure out CAPTCHA puzzles.)

Early, early on in "Free," Anderson introduces to something he calls the "Five Percent Rule" -- that being, this idea that just five percent of online service users will offset the business losses of 95 percent of the same online services's users not paying anything at all. And then, he immediately brings up how piracy murder-death-killed the music industry, providing us with the first of many, many in-text contradictions that should make us wonder a plenty about Mr. Anderson's allegedly beneficial "free-to-all" Tao. Furthermore, his citing of negative pricing business models -- like bands playing clubs to perform and gyms in Europe that, as long as you don't miss any weekly visits, have free memberships -- seem more like fanciful asides than genuine advice for start-up operations.

From there, Anderson gives us a history of "free," letting us know, for some reason, that the Catholic Church once condemned interest rates and that the Koran has a decisively anti-usury bent. He goes on for a bit about Paul Ehrlich's wrong-ass predictions, Kroptokin's "Mutual Aid," the Dunbar Number and New York's  Raines Law, before seguing into a passage about ASCAP and BMI and how the Haber-Bosch Process lead to the "Green Revolution" of the 1960s. If you're wondering what this stuff has to do with "freemium" business models -- well, that makes two of us, naturally.

After some shit about "corn economies" and "disposable cultures," he says that America fully embraced the "Law of Conservation of Attractive Profits" sometime in the 1950s, indicating a shift from resource processing to service jobs. Today's "symbolic analysts," he tells us, are nothing more than yesterday's farmers and manufacturers in pursuit of scarcity.

Comparing The Village Voice to The Onion, he describes how free woks as an "evolutionary stable strategy." He later rephrases the statement, with the sardonic aphorism "you can't fall off the floor."

From there, it is aside city for a good fifty pages. We learn about Kopelman's "Penny Gap," The Sample Lab! International Model, a 2007 French union lawsuit against Amazon, Mead's Compound Learning Curve and some dude named John Draper, who is perhaps most notable for having the nickname "Captain Crunch." Then, Anderson makes the somewhat controversial claim that piracy actually creates user dependency, which in turn, lowers adoption costs. Which, fittingly enough, is a great transition point to a conversation about the positive aspects of de-monetization.

The Internet, described by Anderson as a "liquidity machine," allows individuals to make money by shrinking markets. You see, free turns "$1 billion industries" into "$1 million industries" by wealth redistribution, which in turn creates more efficient markets. Of course, with lower entry barriers, he lets us know its pretty goddamn hard to turn a profit under such a system, and that more often than not, the model just results in the rich getting richer, but uh...free is still somehow good, I think?

Anderson then rattles off a fairly agreeable list as to why paid content is deader than Elvis, and then gives us a primer on impression models. Interestingly, he uses the video game market as his case study for industries that have "benefit" from freemium models, and praises Derek Webb for his "data-mining" approach to fan outreach. Oh, and he kind of glosses over how selling visitor data to third parties has become something of a monetization model, but SHHH!

With "quasi-currencies" like views and Facebook likes taken into consideration, Anderson said the market for "free" was about $300 billion in 2009 dollars. As such, he said that more and more organizations find themselves competing in non-monetary markets, where "attention" and "reputation" are considered as good as actual revenue. Except, uh, people aren't actually making money off this shit, which is the gigantic elephant turd in the punch bowl Anderson doesn't have the bait and tackle to come out and tell us.

In China and Brazil, he talks about how piracy culture has led to some innovative underground markets -- chiefly, an emerging "fake receipt" economy. And then, he lets us know that the "walls" between editorial and business boards in the journalism industry have been yanked down, and as such, we're all the worse for it.

Giving us some bullshit about "the tragedy of the commons," he tells us that many content creators will now have to look for indirect revenue streams -- like consulting, lecturing and blogs -- to stay afloat financially. Even heavy hitters like Facebook and YouTube have ongoing revenue problems, he said: pretty much putting a big, fat ~ next to his ENTIRE goddamn argument, he lets us know that, in a recession, "free can't be the only model" if organizations want to survive.

Below are Anderson's Ten Principles of Abundance Thinking, with my thoughts in red.

1. Digital things will ultimately be free. (which means unless you can't eat it or print it out yourself, you're pretty much in a fucked market.)
2. Products of physical goods make core products free by selling other stuff. (also, you can make more money if you work more than one job, too.)
3. Selling upgrades to free products can combat piracy. (except for when it doesn't, which is all the fucking time.) 
4. Free opens the door to charging consumers. (too bad he never explicitly tells us how to make that leap, though) 
5. You can sell around free services. (which means you're working two jobs, only one of which involves you actually getting paid for something.) 
6. You HAVE to be "free" before your competitors. (but what happens when ALL of your competitors are giving away stuff for free, though?)
7. Eventually, you will be competing with free, anyway. (oh, OK. But wait, how am I supposed to be making money off this shit again?)
8. You need to stop metering things that are too cheap to meter. (which under a free model, is your ENTIRE model.) 
9. Value will always migrate to the next higher layer when free becomes the norm. (so what's the FUCKING point of even being free to begin with?)
10. You should always manage for abundance, not scarcity. (translation: learn to deal with being poor.) 

Personally, I prefer Biggie's "Ten Crack Commandments," but I guess there is more sagacity in that top ten than asininity, I will admit. Then again, the fundamental rub with Anderson's entire shtick is that, compared to free, ANY financial gain is automatically profitable, so really -- what's the point with all this, again?

When I picked up "Free," I was expecting a fairly conventional primer on how upstarts could leverage temporarily free, entry-level services into more sustainable revenue models. Instead, what I got was some bullshit about how free boasts visibility and facilitates future user adoption, conveniently leaving out how a service would successfully shift from free to paid models in between. Free, this asshole keeps telling us, will pave the way to truly lucrative business models in the future, but he never even gets anywhere close to establishing a solid system for services to make that very transition. The shit icing on the turd cake was when he used journalism as a case study of sorts; you see, journalists, in the absence of traditional papers, can still make money as consultant editors for non-professional, hyper-local websites, he cheerily tells us. Of course, he never brings up the abject failure of AOL's Patch service, which was more or less that very model.

I'm not sure if I want to call Anderson an opportunist -- or better yet, a piss-poor speculator -- but "Free" is a book that feels far, far removed from reality. Maybe his ideas would gel in very, very small commerce sectors, but the tips and tactics outlined in this book aren't going to save any upstart business from insolvency. Really, the core thesis of "Free" can be summed up as "don't plan on making money, so that if you incidentally make money, it'll be awesome."

That's not a business strategy, Mr. Anderson. Hell, that's not even a halfway viable business ideal. There are some interesting ideas in "Free," but nothing that has any import on today's e-commerce world, I am afraid.

But at the end of the day, I will at least give some of Anderson's theories about "free" products some praise. After all, I picked up my copy of the book -- irony of ironies -- because a local retailer just wanted to get rid of surplus copies on the shelves.

That's right: I didn't pay a single cent for "Free." And to be honest? I still feel like I paid too much for it.

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PROPAGANDA REVIEW: “My Twisted World” by Elliot Rodger

It’s easily the best manifesto written by a homicidal, World of Warcraft-obsessed misogynist you’ll read in 2014!

“Why do things have to be this way? I’m sure that is the question everyone will be asking after the Day of Retribution is over. They will all be asking why, indeed, why? That is the question I’ve had for everyone throughout all my years of suffering. Why was I condemned to live a life of misery and worthlessness while other men were able to experience the pleasures of sex and love with women? Why do all things have to be this way? I ask all of you.”

For those of you still wondering why Elliot Oliver Robertson Rodger decided to hop in his BMW and start popping caps in assorted white girl asses -- this, after already stabbing three men to death -- “My Twisted World” is pretty much his dual-use raison d’etre/mea culpa. Alike Anders Breivik’s 77-corpse marketing campaign for “2038: A European Declaration of Independence,” I think its pretty safe to assume the whole reason the world’s most famous incensed virgin embarked upon his killing spree was just to build publicity for this flimsy tirade, which serves as something of a combination autobiography and blueprint for global female enslavement. Granted, it’s a challenging literary thematic -- acting as both heartwarming coming-of-age treatise and genocidal strategy guide -- but then again, it’s not like he can pen anything worse than “Atlas Shrugged” here. Oh, and by examining his batshit ramblings, there may indeed be an opportunity to understand how he went from snobby dickhead to snobby dickhead mass killer, which in turn, would allot society a greater knowledge of how to prevent similar mayhem from happening in the future. And like I said before, this shit has to be better than anything Ayn Rand’s fingers threw up, so there’s an automatic positive for us right there.

Rodger begins his manifesto by discussing his early childhood. He was born July 24, 1991 in London, where he lived until the age of 5. His dad, Peter, was a photographer/wannabe filmmaker who came from an old money family; his father, George, was a famed British photog, who is probably best known for taking pictures of concentration camp bodies and nude Zulu warriors. Mama Rodger was a Chinese film set nurse who was born in Malaysia. There’s a pretty good chance, Elliot tells us, that she got boned by George Lucas, too.

So, Elliot goes to a private school and watches “The Land Before Time” with his grandmother. By the time he is four, he has already visited six different countries. His sister Georgia is born when he’s about five, so the family decides to relocate to California. Elliot fondly recalls playing with girls in elementary school (apparently, the last time any females paid him any attention), and cites being kicked off the Jurassic Park ride at Universal Studios for being too short as the first of many, many injustices he would encounter in his lifetime.

For Christmas, he receives his first home video game console, a Nintendo 64.

“Of course, while playing these video games, my innocent happy self knew nothing of the significant role video games would play during a large portion of my life,” he writes. “And the sanctuary such games would provide for me from the cruelties of this world.”

So, his parents split up and Daddy Rodger monkeys around in Morocco for awhile and gets remarried. Meanwhile, Elliot remains in California with his mother, playing Pokemon with his friends and attending the red carpet premiere of the first “Star Wars” prequel.”

He talks about the joy of finding a Charizard trading card, people making fun of him for being short, and trying to get into the skateboarding subculture. “This was the start,” he said, “of an obsession to copy everything the supposed ‘cool kids’ were doing.” He starts collecting Beanie babies as a secret hobby, while spending his afternoons playing “Banjo and Kazooie” and “Golden Eye.”

He receives a PS2 for Christmas claims to get awesome at hacky sack, and begins submerging himself into the Internet as a substitute for actual human bonds. “Joining chatrooms through AOL temporarily filled in the social void for a few weeks,” he writes “This will definitely not be the first time I would try to fill in that void with the Internet.”

Then he gets an Xbox, and starts playing “Diablo 2” a lot. Then, he begins visiting an online game café called Planet Cyber, where he’s exposed to porn for the first time.

“Finding out about sex,” Rodger states, “was just the beginning of my horrific downfall.”

He rambles on for a few pages about “Halo 2,” and then he talks about his obsession with “World of Warcraft.”

 “I was so immersed in the game that I no longer cared what people thought about me," he wrote. “I only saw school as something that took time away from WoW.”

So, his step mama gives birth, and he tells us that even though he’s a teenager, he’s still kinda’ afraid of the dark. He gets backstage passes to see the third “Star Wars” prequel early, but since he’s in the eighth grade now, he lets us know that nobody gives a shit about that nerdy stuff anymore.

“Avatar: the Last Air Bender” becomes his favorite TV show, and he recounts his masturbatory habits. Ever shameful of beating off to standard pornography, he said he used regular websites as spanking fodder instead.

While Daddy Rodger is out making the documentary “Oh My God,” his son remains in self-imposed isolation. “My only social interaction was with my online friends,” Elliot painfully recollects.

WoW expansion packs get released, and he talks at length about how cool it was to have a teacher in high school that was into video games. How nice, Elliot said, it felt to actually have a real human being to talk to about stuff.

At this point, Elliot’s jealousy of “cool kids” starts boiling over. He recalls watching “Alpha Dog,” and cheering when the main character died. He got to hang out with people, and go to parties, and make out with chicks, Rodger writes: his death was well deserved.

Then, Rodger starts formulating these grandiose “Logan’s Run”-like plans to abolish sex as a human activity. So invested in his out-there, totalitarian fantasies that he tells us that he temporarily quits playing WoW to focus on his despotic, sci-fi visions.

He writes about using Facebook “stalking accounts” to spy on classmates, and brushes up on artificial insemination technologies at Barnes and Noble. His parents, finally beginning to suspect something ain’t right with this boy, make him see a “life coach,” but unsurprisingly, it has little impact on reshaping Rodger’s general outlook. He gets back on the Warcraft, and drives around late at night, listening to “Two is Better than One” over and over again. Huh…and you thought Seung Hui Cho had shitty taste in music!

Rodger tells us he gets into the work of George R.R. Martin, and decides to move to Santa Barbara -- primarily, because that’s the setting of “Alpha Dog,” and he presumably thought if he moved there, he, too, would find himself fully absorbed into the same sex-soaked social life that a fictitious movie character was. Yeah, I know the movie was technically based on a true story, but still.

He reads “The Secret” and some other "Law of Attraction” shit, and starts taking Karate classes. None of them appear to have done him any good. Instead, he sinks deep into the fantasy world of “Game of Thrones.”

“Each week I looked forward to the next episode,” he writes, “and each episode gave me a small hint of joy in my otherwise bleak life.”

So, he starts attending classes at Santa Barbara City College, and let us know that he really, REALLY doesn’t like his Hispanic suitemates. He attends the premiere of the first “Hunger Games” movie (for which his daddy was an assistant director) and a private Katy Perry concert, and tells us how much he hates the fact that kids richer than he was were in attendance. After reading “Power of Your Subconscious Mind,” he does what any level-headed person would do: he starts buying lottery tickets en masse, believing that the power of positive thought would lead to him hitting the jackpot, and thusly, make everybody like him.

During a pity party, he gets drunk and spills win on his laptop. Afterwards, he makes his mama buy him a new one. His parents make him go see a psychiatrist, and that’s when he first starts thinking about his fateful “Day of Retribution.”

He begins purchasing handguns, and spends virtually all of his free-time holed up, by himself, in his bedroom. With only his mass hatred of all of humanity to keep him company, he then begins thinking up shit like this:

“I concluded that woman are flawed. There is something mentally wrong with the way their brains are wired, as if they haven’t evolved from animal-like thinking. They are incapable of reason or thinking rationally. They are like animals, completely controlled by their primal, depraved emotions and impulses. That is why they are attracted to barbaric, wild, beast-like men. They are beasts themselves…when I came to this brilliant, perfect revelation, I felt like everything was now clear to me, in a bitter, twisted way, I am one of the few people on this world who had the intelligence to see this. I am like a god, and my purpose is to exact ultimate Retribution on all of the impurities I see in the world.”

Then, he starts visiting the recently shamed-out-of-existence website PUAHATE.COM, which is dedicated to disgruntled patrons of alleged “pick up artists.” With nothing left to live for, he said his original plan was to strike on Halloween 2013, but there were too many Po-Po out and about. He ends up seeing more counselors, and makes one last ditch effort to get laid before turning 22, but he winds up getting his ass kicked in a street fight instead. He spends Halloween getting drunk in his mama’s hot tub, all by his lonesome. Funny how no one seems to be pinning the blame on alcoholism as a  potential catalyst for the murders, no?

He recounts the sorrow he felt watching a couple make out on a golf course, which more than anything else in the manifesto, comes closest to giving us a “breaking point” moment.

“There were lots of other people there as well, for it was quite a unique sunset. All of them must have had thoughts of admiration towards the couple, and thoughts of contempt towards me because I was all alone and unwanted. I have lived such an unnatural life, devoid of love, sex and pleasure. Watching sunsets was one of the few joys I had left, and now that too was taken from me. How can I enjoy a sunset anymore, knowing that other men get to enjoy them with their beautiful girlfriends at their side? There was no more life for me to live.”

He targets Valentine’s Day 2014 as the original date of attack, but then bumps it up to April 26. What did his grandiose plan consist of, you may be wondering? Well, here’s what his ideal mass murder endeavor would’ve resembled:

“On the day before the Day of Retribution, I will start the First Phase of my vengeance. Silently killing as many people as I can around Isla Vista by luring them into my apartment through some form of trickery. The first people I would have to kill are my two housemates, to secure the entire apartment for myself as my personal torture and killing chamber. After that, I will start luring people into my apartment, knock them out with  hammer, and slit their throats. I will torture some of the good looking people before I kill them, assuming that the good looking people had the best sex lives. All of that pleasure they had in life, I will punish by bringing them pain and suffering. I have lived a life of pain and suffering, and it was time to bring the pain to people who actually deserve it. I will cut them, flay them, strip all the skin off their flesh and pour boiling water all over them while they are still alive, as well as any other form of torture I could possibly think of. When they are dead, I will behead them and keep their heads in a bag, for their heads will play a major role in the final phase.”

All right, so round one of the Elliot Rodger murder parade would basically be the first “Hellraiser” movie. That’s all fine and dandy, but what non-Cenobite-themed mass mayhem would he have liked to hoist upon the masses?

“The Second Phase will take place on the Day of Retribution itself, just before the climactic massacre. The Second Phase will represent my War on Women. I will punish all females for the crime of depriving me of sex. They have starved me of sex for my entire youth, and gave that pleasure to other men. In doing so, they took many years of my life away. I cannot kill every single female on earth, but I can deliver a devastating blow that will shake all of the core of their wicked hearts. I will attack the very girls who represent everything I hate in the female gender. The hottest sorority of UCSB. After doing a  lot of extensive research within the last year, I found out that the sorority with the most beautiful girls is Alpha Phi Sorority. I know exactly where their house is, and I’ve set outside it in my car to stalk them many times. Alpha Phi sorority is full of hot beautiful blonde girls, the kind of girls I’ve always desired but was never able to have because they all looked down on me…I will sneak into their house at around 9:00 a.m. on the Day of Retribution, just before all of the partying starts, and slaughter every single one of them with my guns and knives. If I have time, I will set the whole house on fire. Then we shall see who the superior one really is!”

After that, he said he would’ve killed his entire step-family, and gone “Death Race 2000” on the streets of Isla Vista, trying to splatter as many pedestrians as he could en route to his final act:

“Once I reach Del Playa Street, I will dump the bag of severed heads I had saved from my previous victims, proclaiming to everyone how much I’ve made them all suffer. Once they see all of their friend’s heads roll onto the street, everyone will fear me as the powerful god I am. I will then start massacring everyone on Del Playa Street. I will pull up next to a house party and fire bullets at everyone partying on the front yard. I will specifically target the good looking people, and all the couples. After I have destroyed a house party, I will continue down Del Playa, destroying everything and everyone. When I see the first police car come to their rescue, I will drive away as fast as I can, shooting and ramming anyone in my path…to end my own life, I will quickly swallow all of the Xanax and Vicodin pills I have left, along with an ample amount of hard liquor. Immediately after imbibing the mixture, I will shoot myself in the head with two of my handguns simultaneously. If the gunshots don’t kill me, the deadly drug mixture eventually will. I will not suffer being captured and sent to prison.”

Prior to the attack, he uploads several YouTube videos, stating if just ONE girl would have contacted him, he probably would’ve cancelled the massacre. Alas, no one did (surprisingly, going on cryptic, eugenicist rants isn’t the best way to win over the fairer sex) and due to a head cold, he postpones his attack until May 24. Apparently, somebody WAS concerned by his videos, since the Po-Po showed up at his doorstep one day. Alas, they didn’t search his room, which Rodger said would’ve “ruined everything.” So, uh, who do we want to blame more for the massacre with that info in mind: the callous women of Santa Barbara who wouldn’t even give a horribly depressed young man one evening of social discourse, or the lackadaisical law enforcement, who with just a bit of authoritative, intrusive force, could’ve foiled all of Rodger’s plans right then and there?

He concludes the book with a passage about his highfalutin scheme to totally eradicate the female population. He wants to round up all of the Earth women into concentration camps, where a few well be kept in underground sex bunkers, you know, just to keep the species going. It’s a simple hypothesis, really: if there’s no women, there’s no sex, right? Uh…not according to at least one movie I can think of, anyway…

And of course, that brings us to the tirade’s literal final word:

“All I ever wanted was to love women, and in turn to be loved by them back. Their behavior towards me has earned my hatred, and rightfully so! I am the true victim in all of this. I am the good guy. Humanity struck at me first by condemning me to experience so much suffering. I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t want this. I didn’t start this war. I wasn’t the one who struck first. But I will finish it by striking back. I will punish everyone. And it will be beautiful. Finally, at long last, I can show the world my true worth.”

Boy oh boy, did Elliot ever show us what-for, no? After gunning and stabbing six people to death (interestingly enough, killing more men than he executed women folk), his manifesto spread like wildfire over the Interwebs, with cyber-feminists the world over slamming it for promoting misogynistic violence. Instead of capturing our hearts, Rodger’s lengthy diatribe did little more than momentarily rankle the very people it was intended to influence. Instead of dying a hero of the men’s rights movement, he just wound up being remembered as a rich, delusional pansy who killed a whole bunch of innocent people because he couldn’t get laid. That in mind, I cant imagine a more inglorious epitaph than the one Elly-boy penned for himself, really.

I suppose you can gleam some truths from the tirade, though. For one, it really demonstrates the HATE + ISOLATION + HOPELESSNESS = MASS DEATH hypothesis quite well, with Rodger blaming his own romantic failures on the totality of society, and then falling into Internet seclusion instead of engaging in any sort of pro-social bonds with anyone. Feeling that he would never be accepted, he fell in love with his grandiose murder fantasies instead, ultimately reaching a point of such depression that he decided the only satiation he could ever get out of existence was to take himself out of it altogether, with a couple of collateral bodies thrown in for good measure.

Gender-targeted, isolation-based mass murders really aren’t anything new, you know, as residents of Montreal and Killeen, Tex. can obviously tell you. Alas, no one really seems to address how Rodger’s mentality could have been altered before he started dreaming about shooting up frat houses -- instead, most Internet commentators and politico talking heads have just been yammering on and on about the poisonous “misogyny” underlying the murders, and how the ideology must be completely eradicated to prevent future killings.

I hate to tell you hens this, but after reading Elliot’s own turgid bio, it wasn’t misogyny that drove him to murder. Instead, it was a social climate that he thought bred alienation and discouraged interaction between the two sexes. Elliot didn’t kill because he wanted to rape, he killed because he was denied a true romantic bond with another human being, that glorious interpersonal state of affairs we endlessly celebrate in song and film.

He wanted to love, and he wanted someone to love him. The culture at large -- perhaps inadvertently, or perhaps not -- denied him that.

And that rejection, he carefully rationalized, was just something he decided was worth killing for one day.

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Book Review: “Undisputed Truth” by Mike Tyson with Larry Sloman (2013)

Iron Mike’s tell-all autobiography is every bit as crazy as you’d imagine it to be. But what’s even more shocking is just how insightful and enlightening a read it ultimately turns out to be.

“Whenever the last trumpet shall sound, I will present myself before the sovereign judge with this book in my hand, and loudly proclaim, thus have I acted; these were my thoughts; such was I. With equal freedom and veracity have I related what was laudable or wicked, I have concealed no crimes, added no virtues; and if I have sometimes introduced superfluous ornament, it was merely to occupy a void occasioned by defect of memory: I may have supposed that certain, which I only knew to be probable, but have never asserted as truth, a conscious falsehood. Such as I was, I have declared myself; sometimes vile and despicable, at others, virtuous, generous and sublime; even as thou hast read my inmost soul: Power eternal! assemble round thy throne an innumerable throng of my fellow-mortals, let them listen to my confessions, let them blush at my depravity, let them tremble at my sufferings; let each in his turn expose with equal sincerity the failings, the wanderings of his heart, and, if he dare, aver, I was better than that man.”

-- Jean Jacques Rousseau,

“The Confessions,” 1782

"This book is dedicated to all the outcasts -- everyone who has ever been mesmerized, marginalized, tranquilized, beaten down and falsely accused. And incapable of receiving love."

-- Mike Tyson,

"Undisputed Truth," 2013

I don’t think anyone other than Mike Tyson himself can fully grasp the unbearable guilt that willed “Undisputed Truth” into existence. His almost 600-page autobiography is less a standard recounting of his life as it is a typed confession, a laundry list of the sordid deeds that both nourished his monstrous ego and rattled the most decent part of his soul to its breaking point. Reading “Undisputed Truth” is like watching a flooded vessel explode from the inside out -- the only thing more tragic than the sight is its sickly beauty, the kind of destruction so spectacular you can’t help but stare at it in awed amazement. Your personal opinion of Mr. Tyson probably won’t be altered by the contents of the book -- if you think he’s a megalomaniacal fruitcake now, you’ll still hold such as self-evident -- but after reading the tome, you'll at least partially understand Tyson’s demeanor and attitude. His stories herein may not absolve him of his many, many debaucheries and disgraces throughout his lifetime, but the the book does do something almost as astounding: it actually allows you to rationalize his actions and doings, and eventually come to empathize with one of the most universally despised public figures of the last quarter century.

The book -- which was essentially ghostwritten by “Private Parts” scribe Larry Sloman -- begins with Tyson discussing his 1991 rape case against Desiree Washington, and how he tried to do some Santeria rituals to sway the outcome of the trial. He then starts recalling his childhood, growing up in Brownsville, New York, in the late 1970s.

Folks, all I can say is that after reading about Mike’s childhood, nearly everything he went on to do in life -- no matter how depraved or disgusting -- is kinda’ understandable. He claims to have been doing home invasions at the age of 10 and spending much of his elementary school years living in abandoned buildings -- perhaps its worth noting that he says that he never actually "attended" school in the traditional sense, arriving only to eat breakfast and lunch before playing hooky.

Up until the age of 15, he said he slept in the same bed with his mom, even while she had sex with men. On one occasion, he recalls her scalding one of her lovers with boiling water, and watching his mom pop his pustules with a blowtorch afterward. His after-school activities consisted mostly of scaring pigeons off roofs as a gofer for local drug runners and snatching gold chains off subway passengers. At the tender age of 11, he was fist fighting grown men (his mentor, he claims, was some dude that used to shadowbox while high on weed), constantly getting the shit beat out of him by his mother (who loaded him up on Thorazine to control him) and robbing special ed students for gambling money. Perpetually in trouble with the law, he said he basically had a "time share" at the local juvenile detention center.

Eventually, Mike was sent to the Tryon School for Boys, where he was taught how to box by Bobby Stewart -- a guard that had a proclivity for engaging in fisticuffs with the center's underage residents. Displaying impressive raw talent, Tyson was then sent to live with elderly boxing trainer Cus D'amato -- a paranoid socialist that hated Ronald Reagan and was so fearful that International Boxing Commission goons would plant drugs on him that he sewed his own jacket pockets shut.

Training with Cus and Teddy Atlas, Mike Tyson said his fascination with pugilism began to flourish after watching the first Ray Leonard/Roberto Duran bout. Patterning himself after Muhammad Ali, a young Tyson said that he spent his teen years reading Tolstoy, Adam Smith and Nietzsche (so he could better understand "the hearts of men") and absorbing all of D'amato's aphorisms -- including the battle cry of making all his opponents "causes a lie" before the opening bell sounded. Battling a major eating addiction, he said one of the hardest parts of his regiment was abstaining from sexual activity; as such, he describes his life as revolving around "training and jerking off" for several years.

As a junior amateur, a 14-year-old Tyson was battling 22-year-old men. After his mother's death, Tyson returned to Brownsville, and mourned her passing by smoking PCP and going on a robbing spree. In Dec. 1982, Tyson experienced his first loss at the U.S. Amateur Championships. He was 16, while his opponent was nearly a decade older.

Tyson talks about his shortcomings at the 1984 Summer Olympics, and we get a role call of his first 8 professional fights -- all knockout wins, by the way. He recalls hanging out in the New York social scene, meeting people like Raul Julia and Drew Barrymore, the celebrity that impressed him most being former WWF Champion Bruno Sammartino.

Tyson discusses his early philosophy on boxing, parroting D'amato's famed "the way you fight your fights is the way you live your life" quip, as well as describing how he feels his opponent's "spirit" prior to a fight -- before the bout even starts, he claimed to have been able to tell whether or not a competitor was "a pussy," or "oh shit, he's coming here to fight." He had an undercard bout scheduled at Madison Square Garden once; after it was cancelled, he gleefully talks about visiting a whorehouse to celebrate.

D'amato then dies, and Mike talks about speaking to a photograph of him, and how being at the bank reminded him of his mentor and always made him weep. "I fight my heart out, give it my best," he said. "But when it's over, there's no Cus to tell me how I did, no mother to show my clippings to."

From there, Mike's handlers becomes a trifecta of individuals -- Steve Lott, Jimmy Jacobs and Bill Cayton. As Mike keeps chalking up more victories, he continues to party with prostitutes, go out on lavish drinking sprees in upstate New York and steal quotes from his biggest idols; among them, football great Jim Brown and Apocalypse...as in, Apocalypse, the X-Men villain.

On Nov. 22, 1986, Tyson defeats Trevor Berbick to claim his first World Heavyweight boxing championship -- at the age of 20, making him the youngest such champ in the sport's history. Even more impressive? He said that he was "leaking" from a bad case of the clap throughout the entire bout. On the precipice of international stardom, he recalls a foreboding quote from Lenin: "freedom is a very dangerous thing. We should ration it very closely."

Immediately after winning his first belt, Tyson said he found himself torn between his dual lives in high society and his old Brownsville stomping grounds. He recalls hanging out with Rick James and Carlton Banks at bars and having sex with groupies while literally wearing his championship strap; he also talks about trekking to his home turf, where he would buy sneakers for the homeless and pass out $25,000 a night like Robin Hood. The money he got from doing an anti-drug PSA, he said, was used to fund the coke distributing operations of his childhood friends.

Tyson continues to tear through challengers left and right: Tony Tucker, Tyrell Biggs, Michael Spinks, Larry Holmes. The last one, he said, was revenge on behalf of his childhood icon, Muhammad Ali. He encounters Barbara Streisand, and tells her how sexy he thinks her nose is.

Tyson then marries sitcom star Robin Givens, whom he said had a "Herdipus complex." He pays for the funeral of famed pimp Iceberg Slim, and Jimmy Jacobs passes away. Drama with Givens and her mother begins almost instantly, with Tyson alleging that their goal was to either goad him into a pricey divorce or take over his finances by having him locked up in a mental institution. Meanwhile, Tyson gets into a series of street brawls with a guy named Mitch Green, and after an infamous 20/20 interview, he and Givens officially call it quits. He says the president of his bank held a party the day Givens and her mom was officially taken off his bank account -- "fuck them bitches," the pres allegedly stated.

After the divorce, Tyson took his man-ho exploits to dizzying new heights. Waxing poetically, he said his excesses were borne of a broken heart -- "love leaves a black mark " on it, he said. He hooks up with fight promoter Don King, whom he calls "a reptilian motherfucker" who hates whites and an individual guilty of "contaminating his barometer." Mike visits Mexico, and he's upset that there are people in the world that actually live in conditions worse than his as a child. "That shame of being poor gave me more pain in life than anything," he said.

As a PR stunt, he was baptized in an event which featured Reverend Jesse Jackson. Immediately afterwards, Tyson said he went back to his hotel and nailed a choir girl. He then recounts tales of punking out Kennan Ivory Wayans, Brad Pitt and Wesley Snipes, and this one time he showed Frank Bruno his pubic hair.

Prior to a bout against Carl Williams, Tyson experiences his first of MANY HIV scares, and talks about being so upset with Don King this one time, he ended up kicking him in the head. That actually becomes something of a recurring motif throughout the book -- every time Don gets the shit beat out of him, feel free to do a shot, kids.

Then we come to Tyson's 1990 bout against James "Buster" Douglas in Japan. He says that he lost because he was too busy banging Japanese maids and that Douglas got a slow count on a previous knockdown. Following his first pro loss, he returns to the Catskills, and spends some time with D'amato's widowed wife, Camille. His sister dies, his first son is born, and he trains for a bout against Razor Ruddock. Tyson accuses King of placing Thorazine in his food, and making him watch Nazi documentaries when all he wanted to do was watch cartoons.

Then we come to a lengthy passage about the Desiree Washington rape trial. All you need to know there is that Tyson had arguably the shittiest defense team anyone has ever had, and most likely, ever will have.

Before going to Indiana for a five year prison stay, we're introduced to Daddy Tyson, an absolutely impossible deacon-pimp who once drove all the way from New York to North Carolina and back to retrieve a shotgun to shot a dude that pissed him off once. His pa, whom said "all I know is pimping and the bible," dies shortly thereafter, and Tyson recounts his years behind bars.

Alongside another inmate, Tyson said he cooked up a grandiose commissary scheme using fan-sent money. He reads the work of Che, Mao and Arthur Ashe while having furtive sex with visitors sporting crotchless undergarments, and other inmates pay Mike to listen to his friends on the West Coast have sex over a phone line. He ends up having an affair with an in-house drug counselor (even getting her knocked up), while receiving visits from the likes of James Brown and Tupac -- whom once tried to start an impromptu concert during one of his visitation stays. In a lot of ways, the book does seem to read like a Bizarro version of "Forrest Gump" at times.

And so, Tyson is released early, and one of the first things he does is buy some lion cubs, whom proceed to piss and shit all over Don King's townhouse. By now, keeping up with all of Tyson's out-of-wedlock kids is sort of like following the Dewey Cox life story; after chalking up some easy wins over the likes of Buster Mathis and Frank Bruno, the first Tyson/Holyfield bout is arranged, and Mike blames that particular loss on the following things: Evander kept headbutting him, his opponent was probably on steroids and the referee was most likely drunk.

Mike remarries, and he continues to ho it up, anyway. Holyfield/Tyson II goes down -- the infamous "ear biting" fiasco -- and Tyson claims referee Mills Lane was biased and didn't call a couple of pre-chew headbutts on Holyfield's behalf. Riots ensue, and Tyson gets banned by the NSAC for an entire year.

Shortly after the bout, Tyson gets in a motorcycle wreck, tries to stab Don King with a fork and is diagnosed with dysthymic disorder. He makes a mint off an appearance at WrestleMania, claiming that his erroneous promos about "Cold Stone" Steve Austin could simply be attributed to the fact that he had munchies at the time of the interviews.

Owing $13 million in back taxes, Tyson ultimately winds up with a 2-year prison sentence in Maryland. He receives visits from JFK, Jr., whom he said was largely responsible for his early release. After doing some community service at Tent City, Tyson is reinstated, and he beats up a less-than-impressive gallery of tomato cans, like Orlin Norris (whom he said used to stare at him from the crowd at press conferences, Clubber Lang style) and Julius Francis, whom was actually paid by a U.K. newspaper to place an ad on the bottom of the boxing shoes he wore heading into the bout.

More lawsuits follow, and after reading a book about Alexander the Great, Tyson starts walking around in the desert while high. He threatens to eat the children of Lennox Lewis, beats up some more cans, and talks about using the Whizzinator to cheat on pre-fight drug screenings. Apparently, he forgot to do that for his Andrew Golota bout, though.

From there, he starts incorporating the terms "convicted rapist" and "Zoloft" into his fight promos, and he gets accused of raping a K-Mart employee. After 9/11, his Las Vegas compound is raided -- Tyson alleges that a well-known, yet curiously unnamed, boxer was trying to set him up by sending his girlfriend over to claim to be kidnapped. Despite the incident, Tyson says that he would later go on to smoke weed with the mysterious fighter, as something of an peace offering.

He hangs out in Europe for awhile, stating that sex clubs in Germany are too much, even for himself. Then, he travels to Jamaica and fears that he contracts AIDS from a Cuban prostitute. That last one kinda' resulted in his divorce, surprisingly.

In the build-up to his 2002 Lennox Lewis bout, he said that he did numerous promotional stops -- including the one that predicated the infamous "leg-biting" brawl" -- while high on coke. Referring to his infamous "Until you love me" post-scrap statements, he said he was simply channeling his mother, and her colorful way with terms such as "punk white boy." He said that he did at least one interview with Rita Cosby while completely strung out on Maui Wowie.

After his loss to Lenox, Tyson pretty much bottoms out. He said he started hanging out drug dens, with 20 girlfriends at a time. It was around this time that he got his Maori-inspired face tattoo; he said he wanted to cover up his own face, which he hated, with anything. His original idea, he recalled, involved hearts.

After a facile bout against Clifford Etienne (who is quite possibly the only athlete in the world to ever have a life story more gloriously fucked up than Mike's), Tyson talks about getting into a fight with Don King in Florida, in which he chased him across I-95 while carrying a half pound brick of weed in his pocket. He beats up some Puerto Rican fans, declares bankruptcy (he said his staffers had to Google what "Chapter 11" meant) and said he had to start eating Frosted Flakes and Twizzlers for dinner...while still having lavish shopping sprees at Rodeo Drive retailers.

After flirting with never-to-transpire K1 bouts against Bob Sapp and Jerome Le Banner, Tyson recalled visiting Michael Jackson, whom he said was hanging out with some straight up "thug kids." He then loses fights to Danny Williams and Kevin McBride, pretty much spelling the end of his boxing career.

Post-retirement, Tyson starts doing drugs and alcohol like crazy, while hanging out with a lot of rich Jewish people. He starts seeing a counselor named Marilyn Murray in 2005, who explains to him how he's "an egomaniac addicted to chaos." Tyson likes her so much, he said he wanted her to move to Russia with him.

He then takes a Eurasian tour, where he claims to have turned the Romanian mafia onto cocaine. He talks about how smart the call girls in Chechnya are, and recalls taking several arduous "cocaine dumps" in Portugal and Amsterdam. He soon starts passing out at strip clubs (where he said dancers hopped up on"sissy drugs" like MDMA stole his fried chicken) and begins experimenting with both morphine drips and Cialis.

In 2006, he gets busted for coke in Phoenix, and gets sent to a rehab facility in L.A. for sex addiction and drug use. He works on his "mother issues" and stars in a 2008 documentary (which he said opened his eyes to the "Greek tragedy" of his own existence) and balloons all the way up to 360 pounds. At the time, he meets a new lover named Kiki, who gets sent to jail while pregnant with Tyson's child.

Shortly thereafter, Tyson said he falls back into "cocaine hell," where he gorges himself on coke, hookers and cookies nonstop. At the time, he recalled having just $7,000 in his bank account, when he owed at least $8,000 a month in child support payments. His child Exodus dies, and he has to bury his own kid using fan-sent contributions. He winds up marrying Kiki in Vegas, noting that their pastor looked like one-time WWF manager Slick.

He gets sent to an extremely shitty rehab center, where patients live in a glorified trailer park and he accuses his counselor of stealing his eight ball. As lackluster as it was, you can't argue with its results, though; he said he spent half a day there, and has only had one cocaine relapse since.

Tyson converts to veganism shortly thereafter, and makes appearances on Oprah and the Italian version of "Dancing with the Stars." At one point, he was scheduled to star in a satirical HBO program called "Da Brick," but sadly, it never really came together. Between the filming of "The Hangover" and its sequel, he said he lost nearly 100 pounds.

On a trip to Mecca, Tyson has some profound thoughts about the afterlife, stating that he would much rather burn in hell with his friends than commingle with strangers in heaven. He gets inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame, makes guest appearances on "How I Met Your Mother" and "Law and Order," and starts doing a one-man show in Vegas, from which the title of the book is derived. Ironically, his first stop on a 2013 national tour of "Undisputed Truth" was in Indianapolis, the same city where he was imprisoned for nearly half a decade. He revisits the facility and reflecting upon his current lot in life, makes the following observation: "I won't make much money, but I can do what I love to do. And just by doing what you love to do, out of love, good things happen."

Towards the tail end of the book, Tyson discusses starting his charitable organization, and heckling Mitt Romney at the Pac/Marquez IV bout with some street kids. Stating that self-destruction is in his genetic code (he compares his parents to two deep roller pigeons -- as Hannibal Lector told us all those years ago, the offspring of such pairings have an unfortunate tendency to splatter themselves on pavement), he now goes to bed at 7 pm, constantly assailed by the fear that his wife and children will leave him. "Dying on your shield," he concludes, "is a sucker's game."

Of all things, Tyson elects to close the book by talking about famous love letters throughout history. He compares Robin Givens to Napoleon's distant lover, and said that a suicide pact letter sent by Heinrich von Kleist to Henriette Vogel always makes Kiki cry. His life, he said, has been "one foot in heaven" and "one foot in hell." It's a fitting closing simile, no doubt, for a man whose entire life has been a mad swing between polar extremes; from untold wealth to unfathomable poverty, from international glory to virtual bankruptcy, from disciplined asceticism to maddening excess.

I've read a lot of books from 2013, and I'd have to say that this one has probably been my favorite. Like the bleakest epic poem you could ever read or the most dizzying near-crash experience once could imagine, "Undisputed Truth" is a traumatic, no-holds-barred descent into the pit of one's greatest fears, a tome that not only confronts a platoon of personal demons, but actually revels in the one-by-one admission of past sins.

Mike Tyson's life story is about the quest for greatness, the individual will to survive and the fallibility of our desires. As such, "Undisputed Truth"is really about a different kind of fighter; not the multimillionaire celebrity that boxes on Pay-Per-View, but the guilt-ridden, conscience burdened brawler that, whether we'd like to admit it or not, resides in all of our souls. Mike's story is so distressing, and exhilarating then, for obvious reasons; it's because his story, for better or worse, just so happens to be our story, as well.

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