-- Quincy Jones, today on MSNBC, re: Michael Jackson

I apologize in advance for material that may seem wildly off-color in this airless climate of political correctness. I've mellowed out some since this book was published, but there are still, I think, some salient points.

Goodnight, Sweet Prince. Mama-say-Mama-sah-Mamama-qua-sah.

"I know a place where dreams are born/ and time is never planned/
It's not on any chart/you must find it with your heart/ Never never land."

- "Neverland" lyrics from the Broadway musical "Peter Pan."

JACKO, THE NO-NOSED MAN FROM MOTOWN
(A MORALITY FABLE)

"Michael as well as myself have been severely underestimated and misunderstood as human beings. I can't wait for the day when the snakes that tried to take him out get to eat their own lunch and crawl back into the holes from which they came. We know who they are and their bluff is about to be called."
-- Lisa Marie Presley (shortly before divorcing Jackson in 1995)

There are people who, over their time of celebrity, have been seemingly autonomous broadcasters of a kind of Holy Joy.
Once upon a time, there was a little boy named Michael Jackson , who was a child of incredible, other-worldly talent. Hammered into superstar condition by a merciless warlock of a father who belt-whipped his musical ambitions into the hides of his countless offspring, Michael was only six years old when his family's singing group, The Jackson Five, was signed to the Motown label. He developed an ecstatic feral bird quality in his pre-pubescent voice that transcended anything human; he possessed the kind of arm hair-raising sublimity found only in little Anglican choir boys and castrati. His big brown child animal eyes and perfectly round Byzantine afro-halo and his pre-sexual, pre-self-conscious free dancing suggested a huge pipeline into something other and better and more refined than the filthiness of real human life, with all its ill humor and defecation and smarm. Michael became very famous by the time he was only twelve, and got truckloads of mail from wildly obsessed fan-boys and fan-girls all over the world who wanted to touch him, kidnap him, steal handfuls of his hair, and tear off his clothing and rub their bodies against him.

In 1983, when Michael was in his early twenties, he electrified the entertainment world by appearing on Motown's 25th Anniversary Special with black flood pants, cryptic diamond glove and neon socks with loafers, and effortlessly "Moonwalking" across the stage like hot oil down a shingled roof. He was a revelation, like Nadia Comaneci's perfect ten, that raised everyone's pop-consciousness. Fred Astaire called young Michael on the phone the next day. Fred, all hopped up on tranques and gin martinis, crumpled and gravity-bound like a pile of wet newspaper in his hospital-style flex-o bed in some wealthy suburb like Burlingame, was watching the blizzard of inspiration that was Michael J. when he crowed to his group of wealthy golf-bastard hanger-ons, "Get me the Red Phone, the one that goes directly to the head of William Morris! I want to send that Nigro boy a shiny new dollar!"

In the next few years, Jackson became one of the few and proud to achieve a substantial stretch of documented extra-terrestrial excellence, like Barishnikov in his prime, or Michael Jordan. Much of his older dance music holds up as well as anything in the timeless lexicon of royal R&B greats, particularly those songs from the "Off the Wall" album and the subsequent "Thriller" LP. Shortly after those records broke all previous records, mega-mega-mega fame trained the deadly blue heat of its X-ray eye on young Jackson and stared him crispy.

With his new multi-millions, Michael built himself a fantasy home : Neverland Ranch, named after the land of Peter Pan, the fairy-boy who never grew up. Neverland Ranch contains a full-scale amusement park with carousels and ferris wheels, two real choo-choo trains, and an entire petting zoo. Michael invited little children from all over the world to come and play with him. Michael lo-o-oved children, because his Dad was a mean Jehovah's Witness and he never got to play or have Christmas or birthdays growing up; he only got ruthless beatings, and was forced to learn mature love ballads and complicated dance routines. Michael felt that the innocent hearts of children were keys to the magical secrets of life. "When I'm upset about a recording session, " gushed Michael in an interview, "I'll dash off on my bike and ride to the schoolyard, just to be around them."

Michael loved women, too, but in a strange, slavering, idolatrous way that made it impossible for them to love him back : Liz Taylor, Diana Ross, and later Lisa Marie Presley and Debbie Rowe, the Mother of His Children, all seemed to care very deeply for Jackson while staying at least a six-hour plane trip away from him at all times. He looked wrong with anyone too near his body. When he and Madonna were each other's dates to an awards ceremony, they looked as uncomfortable sitting next to each other as two morbidly obese people on the bus. There are some auras whose size and radiance requires miles of solitude, like a nuclear accident, and Michael's seemed to be one of them.

Michael began to get a whole shitload of plastic surgery, breaking his nose and re-shaping it so many times it ceased to look like a nose at all. There were pictures of him in particle masks, and talk of elaborate enemas. People started to wonder : was the star was a strange, fearful virgin, or merely swishy ? Why did his voice never change? Why were his closest friends chimpanzees or growth-stunted child stars such as Emmanuel Lewis? Well, thought the adoring fans, he's a lovable eccentric.

Michael kept making music, but his own image on the album covers started to become unrealistic and preposterous. First the "BAD" album came out, then the "Dangerous" album. Apparently, Michael wanted to be regarded as Bad and Dangerous, but nobody told him that he'd never look intimidating with plucked-eyebrows and rouge, and the over-accessorized buckle-and-zipper ensembles which made him look like a
rodeo dominatrix. His appearance was especially puzzling and ineffectual when compared to actual bad and dangerous musical celebrities like NWA or Public Enemy. Still, despite the slack in record sales and street credibility, things were going pretty well for young Michael.

Then, in 1993, a little kid started telling policemen intimate details about Jackson's wee-wee, and the tapestry of Michael's talented mind started to unravel before the entire world. Suddenly Jackson's eccentricities started to make sense. Ooooh! Said the world. We get it now - the merry go-round, the crying at E.T. : he's a pedophile! The tabloids went apeshit. It was too good to be true. The most famous man in the world! Even talentless joke sister La Toya turned her back on Michael, telling the press that she could "no longer be silent" about her brother's crimes. Young boys came forward to defend their pal Michael, but when they spoke of having slept in the same bed with him in a friendly "slumber-party" type of way, they ended up doing more harm than good.

Michael began wearing more and more eyeliner; his nose got even smaller. His skin, once a pleasant mocha hue, became the powdery color of meringue. He had a deep cleft hewn into his chin. He began collapsing a lot, and being rushed off to various hospitals to be treated for exhaustion, dehydration and pain-killer addiction. Michael issued many, many requests for the press to leave him alone, especially the tabloids, who seemed to regard Michael as their personal whipping-pederast.

Suddenly there were numerous, last-ditch, triple-image-spin-bypass operation attempts by his PR squad to rescue Jackson from being exclusively thought of as a noseless hermit child molester, capable of inspiring even more fear in the young than his old pet corpse pal, the Elephant Man. He married second-generation Ultra-Fame scorch-victim Lisa Marie Presley (which was at least cosmologically interesting : Elvis was also one of the most Zeus-like 22 year old songsters that ever lived; he also, for a time, possessed the lightening-bolt of superhuman Joy. The Fame smothered both men, overstimulating them into frightful husks of self-abuse: they both had to vandalize themselves, since the world could do naught but love them. Despite the difference in testosterone levels, Michael, for Lisa Marie, must have been reminiscent of Daddy), but the two of them weren't able to convince America that they were in True Love, and they divorced two years later. He publicly had 2 "babies," albeit suspiciously pale ones, with his second wife, a friendly nurse in his plastic surgeon's office, and insisted that they were achieved through some form of actual sexual intimacy, as opposed to being begot with a turkey baster for a brood-mare fee of $528,000.00, as some tabloids suggested.
On the cover photo of one of his CD singles, he wore a carpal-tunnel syndrome wrist brace as a gesture of solidarity towards "suffering children". Inside, Michael had drawn a sketch of himself at the age of 6 or 7, huddled in a corner with huge, overbright, trapped eyes, clutching a microphone for comfort, in the saccharin-precious art-style one sees of crying children in patchwork overalls painted on plates in TV Guide, with the caption : "Ask yourself: where has my childhood gone?" This was clearly a bid for more compassionate understanding by the press, but it read more like a crazily un-self-reflexive, backhanded plea for his alleged kiddie games of Doctor to continue with the blessing of the American public. It was sadly obvious that he had no idea how spooky and fucked-up the drawing looked; how utterly removed from the "normal" thinking processes of his fellow man Jackson was. It made the laughably severe image he fostered for his "BAD" album seem almost sane and workable by comparison. It was doubtful that even the uncorrupted children of Thailand (one of the last places his tours could guarantee ticket sales) could buy his all-too-sudden heterosexual progenitor act. His master plans for renewed lovability were even kookier and less understandable than what he did to his own face. What was this poor, outrageously sheltered and wealthy man thinking, in his fortress of stuffed baby toys, monkeys and pain?

None of the images Michael put forth in his previous albums were as weird or disturbing as the towering, Stalin-esque statue of Jackson draped with bullet belts featured in the promotional video for his HIStory album. Epic records pulled out all of the promotional stops and portrayed Jackson as some kind of divine totalitarian emperor-general, unveiling statues of Michael in several European cities based on the 300 foot tall Monument to Victory in Volgograd, Russia. The video featured people fainting and being dragged away, the power of the image overwhelming them. The public was confused : it seemed that after all he'd been through, Bad and Dangerous Michael still wanted to invoke our awe and fear, not our smelly, whimpering love. However, on his now-rare TV appearances, Michael, laying aside his new chrome armor, started pretending he was Jesus. He would sing with his arms out, crucifix-style, suspended above the stage in a white shirt and oversized angel wings. As he descended with his freshly ironed hair blowing back, children in white choir robes of all colors and nationalities would run to him. Actors of all ages and races would reverently touch his shoulder, and Michael, arms still spread, would regard them with tender messianic understanding. At the 1996 Brits, the British version of the Grammy Awards, Jarvis Cocker, lead singer of "Pulp," protest-crashed the stage where Michael was being lowered singing and deus ex machina-like from the rafters. Two security guards tackled Cocker, wounding three pious, singing children in the process. Cocker later issued a disgusted statement about how the music industry indulges Michael Jackson's delusion that he has the ability to heal because of his enormous wealth.

Jackson epitomizes the fullest scope of uber-fame in the United States. He's lived through the whole gauntlet : the best parts of it in his earlier years, the worst humiliating and scandalous parts in the more recent. Anything Michael does now just reads like Outsider Art - he has become as strange and isolated and deranged as anyone who ever walked or crawled through shock treatment. He's the strangest uninstitutionalized crazy person in the public eye since Howard Hughes. My fear is that now, instead of fading away like his natural skin tone, Michael will remain in the public eye, and his bids for world acceptance will just get weirder.

Back in the seventies, when a TV show started losing ratings, they would make some horrible medical thing happen to one of the cast members in order to curry audience sympathy : Laura Ingalls Wilder's sister went blind late in the Neilson death rattle of "Little House in the Prairie." Fonzie had some Evel Kneivel-style death bid a-la motorcycle, to-be-continued. The idea was to leave the audience hanging in a morbid, prurient limbo and grab that same rubbernecking interest that people have for major car accidents. This is now happening in real life, in a small way, with Michael's young, seizure-prone son, but for Michael himself, I predict that his spin-surgeons will insist he be stricken by a freak-accident related coma, in order to cause a burst of previously latent, Princess Diana-esque support for the ailing star. Thousands of fans all over the world would then feel guilty for turning their backs on him, and send him Mylar balloons and teddy bears, carnations and crayon drawings, and the entire Jackson clan; most visibly psychic media- whore LaToya (who would also be spotlight-resuscitated through the tragedy), will embark on a constant bedside vigil. LaToya would go on TV to earnestly beg the world to pray for her ailing brother. Michael would miraculously wake up after 10 days or so, and he'd really want to talk to the TV cameras about his "glimpse of the other side." In a fury of "Moonwalking Towards the Light" enthusiasm, he will be asked onto daytime talkshows, but his aggressively Old Testament, Book-of-Jeremiah-style rantings would not be copacetic with the popular desires of the New Age, and his messages would cease to be broadcast. Should all this pass, I fear that shortly afterwards, during a peaceful lull, Michael will suddenly, quietly die under really bizarre, mysterious circumstances; perhaps he'll drown in four inches of bathwater, fully made-up and dressed, or slump over on his private ferris wheel with a telltale can of silly string and a ziplock bag.

I was worried for a long time that Michael was going to die soon; nobody I knew thought that Michael could live very long, particularly in his disgraced Short-Eyes state, like Wat the no-nosed man in the King Arthur legend who lived in the woods and bit children. I had a pseudo-mystical experience where I had a strange vision of Michael's autopsy photo. Bootlegs of this would be a very hot item in many circles, that would get passed around the sicko cognoscenti in LA the same way that color xeroxes of the police shot of Kurt Cobain after his suicide secretly made the rounds. Jesus, I thought. It's the only way we'll ever know what the poor little guy really looked like under all those buckles, powder and paste.

But who has raised more money for bizarre, esoteric children's diseases than Michael? Who can blame a person for having tragic (alleged) sexual leanings, when they were getting morosely dank nookie offers from every gender of fans before they were old enough to read? Do people not see the connection between making young children - who have no idea what's going on with their own genitals - into objects of widespread, grimy adult desire, and the fact that Michael Jackson grew up to be a white faerie princess who only shines with tiny boys and monkeys? Such unwelcome attentions must have grossed-out young Michael profoundly, and rendered impossible any hope for his having "normal" relations, gay or straight, for at least this lifetime. And who, besides Michael, has provided us with more evidence that Big Fame will fuck you, fuck you, fuck you in the head until there's nothing between your ears but a sour, translucent jelly?

Run away, Michael. Go to an island and live out your days in the sunshine. Disappear before we, the world's mean-spirited publications, kill you with our obsessive, smothering need to know you better.

It has been a long, ridiculous road over here, trying to get my frakking website remade, but suffice to say the end is in sight, and pretty soon I will have something other than a chain of excuses for not looking less ridiculous.

In the meantime, we got links galore.

The Washington Post's Amy Argetsinger was kind enough to quote me in her column, the Reliable Source about Susan Boyle's meltdown....and if you want to know what I said, well....you'll have to read the article.

ALSO, there has been a rash of recent Critical Shoppers in the New York Times, most notably the extremely expensive and casual ZADIG & VOLTAIRE, and the expensively snotty DEREK LAM.

Apart from that I have been slugging away with my little meat-axe creating a new book proposal, and plotting other big, outdated ways to avoid figuring out how to maximize my Twitter potential.

And how are you?

Love, Cintra

By CINTRA WILSON
IT has been everywhere: Ads on subway walls, made to look as if spontaneously painted by vandals. Ads on plywood walls, like posters for rock concerts. On the front page of my newspaper. News of the Topshop opening has been as unavoidable as an untimely death in Hollywood: you don't seek this information, it finds you.

I tried to go last weekend, but the disco line outside, maintained by bouncer-esque security heavies and parade fencing, was reportedly 45 minutes long -- and it was raining.

When I went back midweek, the line was barely shorter, and it was still raining. Your Critical Shopper whispered in the bouncer's ear, shamefully pulled rank and swanned in past the paying customers, feeling like a cruel and dirty Bianca Jagger. Alas, despite Topshop's egalitarian -- even Third Way social democracy ethos (high-concept design, made widely affordable!) -- caste inequities are already entrenched; I left many a fuming leg warmer and flat slouch-boot in my wake.

Topshop is new only to the United States. It has been lurking in England since 1964, periodically reinventing itself. It was so unfashionable in the 1990s as to be a punch line on par with the Cosby sweater. Now, of course, it is the biggest revelation to hit the fashion world since the yo-yo.

Behold: the "shopping as disco multiplex" experience. The décor is all high-ceiling flash-trash glitz and Anglocentrism. Fake flowers hang down from the ceiling; a voyeuristic mezzanine area is visible from the first floor; exhibitionists can emerge from their dressing rooms and test-preen new items before all.

I found it ironic that the thumping soundtrack, when I walked in, was "Natural's Not in It," by Gang of Four:

The problem of leisure/What to do for pleasure/Ideal love a new

purchase

A market of the senses/Dream of the perfect life/Economic circum-

stances?

The body is good business/Sell out, maintain the interest

This set the tone: At Topshop, it is 1983 all over again, with all the shiny spandex leggings, big cheap bangles and Day-Glo Wayfarers this implies.

T-shirts are oversize and knotted into "Flashdance" shapes. One offered ersatz experience: NYC BACK STAGE 1992, in faded lettering (made in Turkey, $32). Another claimed, in a scrawled-by-teen-werewolf font, to be OUT OF CONTROL ($28).

Price tags fluctuate from lowish to highish on the three floors devoted to women's wear, but it's basically the '80s on every floor. The looks seem gleaned from "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" or "Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo," apart from selections so imprinted by early Madonna videos (white lace leggings, $44) that I diagnosed them with "Borderline" personality disorder. Everything looks so sarcastic and right-this-second trendy as to be planning for a near-immediate obsolescence. Despite my willingness to wait in the endless fitting-room line, I was unable to find one thing I really wanted to try on; I happen to know from experience that 1983 is unlikely to last forever.

But I was an anomaly. A young woman who had just tried six garments said she loved them all: "Everything fits amazingly true to size!" she gushed. Topshop has believers.

There are hideous floral prints that need only to be covered with cat hair to be the bedspread of your maiden aunt on Martha's Vineyard. I'm not talking about the Liberty prints, which have a frowzy potato-sack charm that even the daemon Kate Moss can't corrupt (Liberty smock-top, made in China, $50). We're talking tea-cozy floral: big, dopey, mauve-rose upholstery prints, lousy with the wrong kinds of butterfat and estrogen -- evoking for me, when applied to a grubby little urchin of a blouson dress, a visceral horror that could be equaled only by a Jersey cow print.

But girls who revere Topshop probably have no scarring life experiences that prejudice them against such florals. They must learn for themselves.

The problem with fashion going Back to the Future of 1983 is that for some reason, the recrudescence of trends from any year tends to embrace the unhip and the clownish. It's not what the cool people wore in 1983, but the Urkels, the Screeches, the Tiffanys, the hapless wannabes. These are cuts, prints and colors that I never liked on anyone, ever, for the simple reason that they look goofy, infantile and unflattering.

Acid-washed jeans with pleats? Only the most risible feebs wore those in 1983.

"Did you feel like Kate Moss was having a laugh at your expense?" I later asked Cornell Bar, the receptionist at my hair salon.

"Totally," said he.

Mr. Bar did, however, like Topman, the men's section, which I found to be unisexual almost unto cross-dressing. It was all very Wham! UK: Day-Glo rosaries and wrist cuffs, little Keds-style canvas shoes, à la Doris Day. A double-breasted jacket in fuchsia buffalo-plaid ($160) would not be worn by any of the men in my life, even at gunpoint. Indeed, a Pepto-Bismol pink Jackie O. duster jacket was something I could imagine only Justin Bond or Quentin Crisp wearing with any real success.

Topshop does unequivocally triumph in one area: villainous women's shoe designs. One cannot accuse it of not stealing from the best: strappy, ankle-busting platforms in all manner of beast prints were seized in spirit right from the runways of YSL and Louis Vuitton -- but costing, for waifs of slender means who must have the look, around $1,000 less.

While inarguably fetching, I did not think the shoes trustworthy. The one advantage to overpaying for shoes, I find, is that the good ones don't make your feet look like Mel Gibson crucified them.

Topshop is sure to become a browsing destination for at least one item it has in abundance: adorable, coltish young girls in skinny jeans and ankle boots. Lotharios can already be found loitering on the third floor, asking silly questions. If I were a feckless tween, by golly, I would shop my tiny brains out at Topshop.

But for severe little me, Gang of Four nailed it best:

This heaven gives me migraine/This heaven gives me migraine/This heaven gives me migraine

TOPSHOP

478 Broadway (near Broome Street); (212) 966-9455.

HODGEPODGE The megabrand Topshop aims to pull the rug out from under the luxury market by making Leger-like bandage skirts, bowler hats, pretarnished sequin gowns and other Bananarama-era hits available to a wider margin of wallets.

HOBNOB Retro-clubby, polysexual, barely legal and as spazzy as a three-day Skittles binge, the clientele is a veritable lookbook of such deathless new combos as the "frohawk and Goyard man-purse" look.

POTSHOT Those who lived through the hair-metal years the first time around will despair to see fringed pleather handbags, leggings printed to resemble acid-washed denim, and sarcastic, slut-muppet lingerie. Paris may still be burning, but Los Angeles was never no lady. Sunset Stripper apparel should go back to England where it belongs. Retirement was good enough for Whitesnake.

Salon.com, never all that financially stable to begin with, has finally slashed its A&E budget straight to the cutting-room floor. They will have an Oscar re-cap, but it will be written by someone on the staff, ending my annual tradition of a post-Oscar all-nighter that has endured, more or less, for over a decade.

Those of you outraged by the indecency of this have my blessing to complain to the editor, Joy Press.

On a brighter note, I was pleased to win Opium Magazine's Literary Death Match earlier this week, during which Opium Magazine's Todd Zuniga Twittered:

"Cintra Wilson, dressed for a funeral, used a knife to open up her enveloped story. Now going for the literary kill!"

There is also a somewhat blurry but evocative picture.

(Actually, Todd, it was a switchblade... and I was only too glad not to have to use it on the beautiful and talented Andrew Sean Greer.)

I also wrote a nice article for the Times about Brooks Brothers Black Fleece, the line designed by the inspirationally uptight Thom Browne.

So all is not a total loss, even if I didn't get to wax rhapsodic about the long-anticipated comeback of the immortal Mickey Rourke I predicted several years ago in this article, below (which once appeared in an online magazine which shall be nameless).

Hollywood may rest easy tonight, knowing I've been unfairly crowbarred in the knees... but I shall return.

Cintra

MICKEY ROURKE - EXISTENTIAL FONZIE PUNCHES THE MIRROR

Phillip Andre Rourke, Jr. was born on September 16 in 1950, but some reports claim it was 1956. He was a tough kid from Schenectady: a boxer who studied acting at the Lee Strasberg school, then went back to boxing, and is presently trying to get back into acting. At his peak, women loved him because he was better than anybody at smirking in a way that looked like his hard-on gave him terrible emotional pain. Rourke's career is notable for the heady price he paid for his eccentricities, the most expensive of which being that his credibility as an actor was labeled with a scarlet question mark. But this, by and large, is a bad rap.

Good dramatic actors, who need to access a vast color-wheel of emotion, are often intolerably volatile, hypersensitive nut-jobs in real life. To inhabit characters of dubious artistic value, it is also helpful if they aren't terribly smart. Rourke appears to have both of these drawbacks going for him; it is an equation that spells temporary magic onscreen and usually results in terrible suffering offscreen . The very same explosive emotionality which attracts Hollywood executives at the beginning of an actor's career are the seeds of the actor's own demise when he is inevitably labeled "difficult" by the unsympathetic corporate drones who run the movie business. Personal histrionics, a "difficult" reputation and a bad habit of ridiculously sleazy script choices have overwhelmed Rourke's public image to the point that nobody thinks of him as a serious actor with a wide dramatic range. Although many of his 43 movies are disposable, a look at the defining films of his career with an objective X-Ray eye reveals that his acting is a lot better than he got credit for.

Rourke broke through in 1981, Brad-Pitt-In-Thelma-And-Louise-esquely, as an arsonist in the sweaty erotic thriller Body Heat. His tough-guy posturing and glowering, pretty-boy menace made the Hollywood Beast think he might come in handy for a while.

Rourke hit his early Rourkish stride in 1982's Diner as "Boogie," the inveterate gambler-cum-playboy hairdresser. He doesn't fit in with the overall flavor of the film; all of the other actors are on a chatty 78 RPM and Rourke is on a self-consciously heavy 33. He seems to need to be too cool for the movie. As a result, he looks isolated, coming off like the one actor that wasn't dining with the other actors and demanded to eat in his own trailer. But he does have a certain gravity.
His pouty lower lip is used to great effect. There is an almost androgynous appeal to him here; he is wearing more eyeliner than Ellen Barkin. Female audiences went ape for him as a slimy, effeminate cockmaster, and so did the National Society of Film Critics, who gave him a trophy for the role.

When my friend and I were teens in 1983, we saw Rumble Fish. We had never seen a male movie star the compellingly enigmatic sexual equivalent of Mickey Rourke as "The Motorcycle Boy." We were angsty and thought we were sophisticated -- the commercial constructs of teen lust didn't work on us; we were immune to Matt Dillon. But Mickey Rourke pressed all the right teen heartache buttons - not the actor so much as the role: a soft spoken, self-loathing peer leader , poetically depressed, colorblind, half-deaf; a torturously sober and intellectual hipster, doomed to an ignominious small-town fate. Francis Ford Coppola was in his S.E. Hinton phase and nicely inspired; Rumble Fish is an art film for teenagers, and it works. Time-lapse photography skitters black and white clouds fast across the sky to vamping snare-drums, to suggest the overabundance of time in youth quickly becoming the lack of time in old age. The sad smile on Rourke's elvish, acne-scarred face reveals that the Motorcycle Boy, with his greasy hair and unfiltered cigarette, intimately knew the secrets of Man's Frailty, and it confined him to the hell of infinite pity. "That's a deep motherfucker, man," says the old black guy in the pool hall, of The Motorcycle Boy, (as we angry beatnik girls liquefied in the audience). "He's like... royalty in exile."
The role, now, is exemplary of the best use of the damaged charm of Mickey Rourke: Existential Fonzie. Sensitive, empathetic and sorrowful, with a junkie's whisper-soft voice during even the worst emotional violence.

Rourke's next big role, in The Pope of Greenwich Village (1984), is more of his tough cookie, sexy criminal schtick. The oily pompadour that is his hair in virtually every movie reaches its most outrageous elevation here.
Daryl Hannah is his dimwit aerobic instructor girlfriend whose role primarily consists of pulling her pants on and off. This film marks the beginning of a standard Rourke movie theme: a basic dislike for women, or at least the stupid female roles that always seem to disgrace his scripts. He has all the power: Daryl slaps him, he smiles that Fuck You smile, flips up the collar of his leather blazer, and walks away. She bleats "Charlie!" in her midriff leotard, he keeps walking. It seems that this role inspired Hollywood to cast Rourke whenever they needed a guy to casually and cruelly dominate whimpering, undressed females.

If any one sin could be said to be responsible for the downfall of Mickey Rourke, that sin would probably be Vanity. While managing, to his credit, not to fall into the single-character, one-dimensional tough-guy glue-trap that macho actors like DeNiro or Nicholson sunk into, Rourke suffered from a different kind of hubris: though essentially an emotionally fearless actor with commendable flair for vulnerability, naked despair and believable accents, he continually chose characters who were either fucking or fighting.

Rourke's credibility was most harmed, it seems, by his slide into mainstream softcore.

9 1/2 Weeks (1986), Rourke's recognized star-turn, features him as "John," a smirking Wall Street sadist.
He feeds Kim Basinger like a baby, he buys her toys and balloons and does cruel and nasty sex to her. The movie is grotesque; Basinger's character is shriekingly infantile, down to pigeon toes and white ankle socks, and absurdly obedient; Rourke is just creepy, and the role seems to tap into a dangerous reservoir of abject misanthropy and scumminess in the actor. It's not all his fault; Basinger comes off as so shrill, moronic and embarrassing, at a certain point you are rooting for Mickey to hit her with a belt (Basinger is said to have referred to her co-star, for unspecified reasons, as "the human ashtray.").
Rourke comes off as ugly and jaded in 91/2 Weeks in a way that suggests a deeper level of psychic disease than his character alone is responsible for. Perhaps he resented being the vehicle which brought S&M home to the office girls of America. Who could blame him.

1987 was, for kabalistic Hollywood reasons, the Year of the Rourke, with 3 of his better movies coming out one atop the other.

Angel Heart (1987) offered Rourke a meaty role and a healthy return to being 'actorly' - but his respectable performance was buried beneath the public's tittering shock at his willingness to enact "controversial," "X-rated" pumping-buttock sex shots with a thrashing Lisa Bonet.
Rourke pulls off an entirely believable Brooklyn accent, and has a very legitimate moment of bottomless despair as the Faustian plot is revealed. Angel Heart is a good example, among many, of Rourke's ability to pull off emotionally gymnastic roles; he never shrank from painful and weepy territory that fellow Tough but Pretty actors like Steve McQueen deliberately avoided. Sensationalism and soft porn robbed him, here, of what might have been real kudos for his skill.

Rourke is most universally beloved for his portrayal of Charles Bukowski's alter ego Henry Chinaski in Barfly. While a bit over-the-top, the role is funky, ugly and lovable in a way his other characters were not. Audiences must have breathed a collective sigh of relief to finally see Rourke in a role that wasn't consumed by self-loathing.
Barfly contains the closest Rourke comes, in his entire career, to is a moment of unqualified happiness, during the oft-quoted victory toast: "To my friends!"
Bukowski wrote about Rourke, giving him the name Jack Bledsoe in his roman-a-clef "Hollywood," a book about the making of Barfly. Bukowski liked Rourke, and was fairly dazzled by him. There is a good scene wherein Bledsoe (Rourke) has brought his obnoxiously fabulous Hollywood Harley Davidson crew to the set, and is introducing them to Bukowski:

"His buddies leaned against the bar, backs to the bar, facing the crowd. They each held a beer bottle, except for Jack who had a 7-Up. They were dressed in leather jackets, scarves, leather pants, boots....
Jack introduced us to each of his buddies.
'This is Blackjack Harry...'
'Hi, man...'
'This is The Scourge...'
'Hello there...'
'This is the Nightworm...'
'Hey, hey!'
'This is Dogcatcher...'
'Too much!'
'This is 3-Ball Eddie...'
'God damn...'
'This is FastFart...'
'Pleased to meet ya...'
'And Pussykiller...'
'Yeah...'
And that was it. They all seemed to be fine fellows but they looked a little on-stage..."

Starring in Prayer for the Dying (1987) gave Rourke a lifelong affection for the IRA - he bears a tattoo of their emblem.

Homeboy, 1988, which Rourke helped write, lands the actor close to himself; he plays dumb-ass, luckless boxer "Johnny Walker," a punchy, feral, kicked junkyard dog. One gets the feeling that this is a character Rourke really identifies with; turbulent, violent and rebellious in an ill-advisedly Quixotic way. He utilizes a Bill Murray, dislocated Caddyshack jaw, and a totally acceptable Southern accent. The scene with the most unctuous music involves Johnny Walker having an argument, and jumping out of a car on a bridge. He tries to beat up the car; he rails, he threatens traffic, and ends up walking drunk in driving rain in the middle of a busy road. One feels these raging moments of worthless self-sabotage are familiar Rourke territory. His co-star, flat-faced Deborah Feuer, became his wife for a little while - their chemistry seems lopsided and doomed, even onscreen.

Johnny Handsome, 1989 while a dumb movie, probably features Rourke's most moving performance. During a scene when the doctors take his bandages off, the man who was formerly a hydrocephalic monster with massive cranio-facial deformities is suddenly revealed in a post-surgery miracle as having Mickey Rourke's face. He cries with joy and gratitude. It is particularly moving when you consider that in Rourke's real life, shortly thereafter, he started out as a man with a beautiful face and ended up undergoing numerous surgeries and voluntary beatings to become unusually scary-looking. One imagines what he felt when his real bandages came off, after having lived this moment on film.

Francesco, 1989, wherein Rourke is cast in the unlikely role of St. Francis of Assisi, is notable only for a scene where the saint is rolling around naked in snow and his tattoo is visible.

Wild Orchid (1990 ) is a miserably stupid and sleazy wank film with the dubious distinction of being the place where the lives of Rourke and model Carré Otis collided head-on, like a big motorcycle accident.

Here, Rourke's outsides began to match his tumultuous insides.
His face-lift looks too fresh - he's having trouble moving his mouth, and his forehead, so expressive in Diner and Rumblefish, is way too smooth, motionless and shiny, like a balloon dipped in Clinique bronzer. He can't smirk anymore. His eyes seem pinched; his crow's feet are disturbingly gone. His eyebrows are too light, and they don't move. Eye jobs, for the first year at least, make the recipient's eyes appear smaller; they lose any roundness below during the surgical elimination of under-eye-bags. Rourke's black eyes lost their ability to transmit emotion.

The movie is wretched in that it isn't even viable as smut; there's way too much abysmally stupid "dialogue" and "plot." It boasts perhaps the worst script ever, not helped by the fact that Otis delivers lines like a one-armed UPS guy delivers aquarium tanks. The entire movie is one long wait for the smutty finish.
There is a whole lot of panting-foley, particularly during the "controversial" final scene wherein Rourke's box-browned abdominal muscles gnash and dilate while grinding into Otis' pornographically rectangular strip of pubic hair.
The legend that was "leaked" from the "set" was that the two "actors" couldn't "control themselves" during this big sex scene, and despite presence of the entire camera crew had "actual penetration." Yeh right.
What did happen was that Rourke and Otis ended up together, sharing, by all reports, a bloody kind of soul connection. "We were both really wounded kids," a now sober and "deliberately celibate" Otis recently explained to Christopher Goodwin of the London Times.

This is the period of time where Rourke stopped having anything effeminate about him at all. One wonders if the inevitable rumors that he was gay triggered some kind of barbaric, street-kid homophobia that made him kill off the sexily feminine, feline aspects of his persona.

Otis, around this time, was a Calvin Klein model, when the designer was going through his 'biker' phase; arguably inspired by the heavy Harley Davidson fetishizing-scene that was happening in Hollywood at the time, spearheaded by Rourke and Otis. I was unable to find any information on Rourke's artistic photography hobby, which flourished during this time, which primarily featured nude, black-and-white shots of Otis covered in motor oil.

In 1991, in addition to making the appalling (and double-appallingly popular) Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man, the film where Rourke's abysmal tough-guy hubris came to roost and killed all of his artistic credibility, Rourke quit acting, which he derided for being "a womanly profession," and started boxing professionally again. Whatever his loutish comments, a closer investigation suggests that he was deeply hurt by the fact that Hollywood was not a meritocracy, and that the system, media and machine alike, never recognized that he really was a good actor.
Though he won several fights, he suffered a broken cheekbone, two broken ribs, a broken toe, four broken knuckles, and a split tongue and a mashed nose. By the time he stopped boxing in 1995, he was broke, and his Beverley Hills home was repossessed for failure to make payments. He had to go back to the movies.

Rourke and Otis were deeply in love, but really, really bad for each other. They married in 1992 and divorced in 1994, but reconciled shortly thereafter. He stalked her. There was a well-publicized incident of Otis being beaten black and blue that resulted in Rourke's arrest in 1994; previous to that there was an "accidental shooting" wherein Otis took a bullet while hanging around a film set with Rourke in Arizona. Otis now claims she was strung out on heroin a good deal of that time in response to Mickey's numerous infidelities. She is now a sober, rehabilitated Buddhist and in-demand plus-size model.
Rourke has spent a good deal of time over the years groveling to get her back.

I used to see them at Gold's Gym in Hollywood a few times a week, in '95; it was the general consensus that they looked like they'd been living on nothing but Ho Ho's and bourbon for the last 18 months, and in Mickey's case, steroids. Rourke became enraged at "China Beach" star Jeff Kober for speaking to Otis during this time, and gave him a black eye in front of the gym.

In 1997, Rourke was reduced to making Another 9 1/2 Weeks, wherein 'John', the same sadist, is looking for kicks, but rubbing blondes' nipples with a straightrazor just doesn't do it for him anymore.
His face is ruined. His upper lip is freakishly swollen, his nose puffy and flat, and one cheekbone protrudes like a purple walnut from a combination of boxing and ill-advised surgeries. Like a bad portrait tattoo of himself, Rourke, at this point, is only recognizable when you squint. His voice has a strangely alcoholic, gasping lilt to it, like Jan Michael Vincent's or Harry Dean Stanton's. The producers would have been wise to replace Rourke: he has no chi left. Angie Everhardt drags him around the screen like an arthritic dog. The worthless, if artsily-shot film is a horrifying document of how Rourke's inner demons defaced him. The French, apparently, had no problem with this devolved version of Rourke, and loved him more than ever at this point.

I saw him once in the Harry Cipriani restaurant at the Sherry Netherland in NYC in 1997. He looked like his head had been sculpted out of wet cat food. He was huge and red, his face looked minced and swollen; his hair had been aggressively re-blonded, and he resembled no one so much as the apocalyptic cartoon character RanXerox; almost wholly unrecognizable.

One wonders if Rourke might have been happier if he could have stomached more bad, cartoonish, Hollywood Stallone roles like Rambo, or Russell Crowe-type roles that called for more acting, fewer fisticuffs and less sexual boasting. His magazine portraits now, puckering in thuggy gymwear and stocking cap, suggest that he has become, in real life, a character much less complex and interesting than most of those he played onscreen. He consciously and aggressively gives off the impression that he is a dumbass tough-guy; this seems to underline that he is insecure and haplessly needy. The tougher a guy looks and act, as a general rule, the more frightened he is by life's searing personal confrontations.

The gym muscles, cosmetic surgeries and box-tanning that have become Rourke's armor only suggest how thin his skin really is. This is a man crucified by an emotional volume knob that is always on 11, who, I reckon, has done more than his share of crying. Ultimately, all the available information on Rourke paints a sad picture of an incurable pussy hound who stuck his pretty face in front of fists and butchers until it wasn't pretty anymore, who fucked up the biggest love of his life by having no self control, and screwed up his career by being unable to exact a mature compromise with the contemptible Hollywood status quo.

But for an actor superficially labeled with an idiotic "Bad Boy" image, he didn't spare himself by coasting by on a ridiculous image. His heart was full of bloody holes that he generously shared with audiences, much like a cat brings headless chipmunks to the door as an act of love. He worked hard, and turned out some pearls that the swine never picked up on.

I read one report of Rourke staggering down the street in LA with several Chihuahuas, talking to himself. He got kicked out of a coffee shop for bringing his little dogs in, and without argument, went staggering off, mumbling , unable to ungrip his little dog friends long enough to buy himself coffee. Men with torrential feelings invariably become lonely monsters. One can only hope that now that nobody wants to see Mickey Rourke's vigorously clenching white ass in flagrante anymore, Hollywood can begin to appreciate and nurture his genuinely interesting and flexible talent for a certain flavor of desperate truth.

(For more information on Mickey Rourke, I recommend an excellent article: "Call of the Mild" by Jessica Berens, available on the "Simply Mickey Rourke" website)

Congratulations on your new film, which posits Sarah Palin as the victim of an organized smear campaign by the liberal media (when in fact she was attacked on the basis of being an unqualified and inarticulate pinup-girl representing a hyper-conservative Christian fringe-contingent bent on antidisestablishmentarian social-engineering, and because, for progressive, sophisticated women, she represents a hypocritical and repressive cultural atavism nearly as frightening as the idea of life under the Taliban).

HIS MOTHER FAILED TO TEACH PROPER ETIQUETTE

But you're an attractive and principled man, so I feel compelled to give you a media tip.

Shouting over your TV interviewer, sneering insults and being generally sarcastic, uncivil, venomous, bellicose, hyper-defensive, obnoxiously loud and personally dismissive toward the host interviewing you -- in lieu of having actual, intelligent answers or properly thought-out argument points -- is not an ideal strategy for promoting your ideas.

Barking, tooth-baring snarls and chest-beating may make you look like a virile "Alpha" to the straggling dregs of your depleted and elderly neocon tribe -- but, in the context of a civilized TV news show, it makes the elite demographic group who are not in jail and who have completed schooling up to or beyond the third grade regard you with the same visceral horror and dismay you might arouse if you drew a swastika on your forehead in your own fecal matter.

Not a great look, John.

Sorry.

Hugs,

Cintra

Hello Fiends:

Well, it has finally come to this.

Bipartisanship, as you may or may not remember, was at an all-time fever pitch before the November election.

Since another four years of a Republican administration was not something most of us were willing to live through without doing something extremely stupid and destructive, I was in especially vitriolic form -- which in itself was more or less stupid and destructive, in that all of the newspapers I was writing for ended up canning the Dregulator.

But, in truth, it was time to let the Dregulator go.

It was a fine woodshed -- a good place for me to cut my teeth and learn about grownup issues. Behind the scenes, though, most of the papers I wrote for never quite got over the fact that it stopped being a tabloid column, and resented that I got morbidly obsessed with creedly political shite and started quoting more from constitutional law blogs than I did from TMZ.com.

Oh whelllll.

But I like writing about political stuff, so after a certain period in the journalistic penalty box, I will probably figure out a way to channel those rants in a more productive way.

There's something fitting about the fact that the Dregulator ended right before the election, as well, given that the election turned out the way it did. If it didn't, and we were facing Cindy McCain and her Restylane SWAT team of emergency dermatologists entering the White House and installing gold-plated electric swan-boats and tiling the whole West Wing in Delft until it looked like something King Ludwig of Bavaria would have thought of if he were even more gay, more insane, more rich and taking even more Vicodin....

...then you bet your mom's fanny I wouldn't stop writing the Dregulator until they pulled my cold, dead fingers off the keyboard. I'd go down all belligerent and wrong like Charlton Heston.

But actually, I am really very happy about the election of Barack Obama. And this means that the Dregulator is allowed to die in peace.

Eventually, though, I will not be happy with Barack Obama, because this is the way of things. And then, there will be a new column altogether.

Love,

Cintra

So, here's the deal - I realize that the Dregulator and Dregublog have seemed somewhat unloved lately. Nothing could be further from the truth, I am just experiencing the usual delays in the construction of a BRAND SPANKING NEW cintrawilson.com. It's in the works.

Other than that, there's been plenty of stuff happening and I am going to link the living bejeezus out of everything.

Firstly, there have been truckloads of New York Times Critical Shopper Pieces, for beloved stores like MAC in San Francisco , the charmingly and paradigm-shiftingly funky No. 6, the East Village's own witchcraft superstore Enchantments, the sublime Oscar de La Renta, and there's probably others but I can't remember.

I also had an article in the December issue of Oprah Magazine in which the exquisite designer Gary Graham, the artist Charles Beyer and myself all went to Flatbush to go discount Christmas shopping for Mme. Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, Brad Pitt and Beyoncé. That was pretty cool, actually. I am stoked that Oprah Magazine printed it.

In any case, I'm not ignoring this website, I'm IMPROVING IT. I realize that sounds about as convincing as Joan Crawford saying, "I'm not mad at YOU, I'm mad at the DIRT," but....damn, it's TRUE, yo.

Love,

Cintra