On Thursday the body of Andrew Koenig was found hanging from a tree in a secluded Vancouver park. Koenig was best know for playing Richard "Boner" Stabone on popular sitcom Growing Pains. Some might be surprised to learn of a media-mediated personal connection. Being one those kids that banged his head off things, and I mean a lot-- double fucking kicks-- people in my family called me Boneyhead. Perhaps Sloppedbrain would have been a better moniker. In one episode of Growing Pains, Boner comes inside from shoveling snow, drinks cocoa through his ski mask and proclaims "This tastes fuzzy!". In unison my family points at me and says "that's something you would say." "Boneyhead" morphed into "Boner." Some school kids learned of this but thank god "Boner" never stuck outside of my family circle. To this day some of my close family will still call me "Bone" (boner abbreviated) on holidays. Hanging oneself in a Vancouver forest is not an unromantic suicide. My suicide fantasy involves blowing the top of my head off with a shotgun. I've obsessed over this for years. I hear the shot over and over in my head. I hear all the time, anytime when I am alone. Perchtwl. Perchtwl. Perchtwl. The one time I actually had the gun in my mouth I was on my parents' bed. That's where the family gun cabinet was. I mean have some fucking class. Gay dogs attack!

Rest in peace Mr. Koenig. To me the world is fuzzy all the time.

The death of Alexander McQueen, also by hanging, punctures a hole in the fabric of reality. Oh dear pagan gods that was terrible pun. Excuse me while I sound myself. If anyone had ever bothered to ask I would have told them McQueen was favorite designer. Not that I made it permissible for anyone to ask. Of course saying McQueen was your favorite designer was like saying Kubrick was favorite filmmaker. His contribution was like sunlight: it permeated everything and we just took it for granted. The "art" of Lady Gaga is actually a dilution of the Art of McQueen. I remember when he first emerged on the international scene. He was like gasoline: utterly punk and unrelentingly Scottish. His success was something of a fluke. In an "industry" that revolves around who you know it is imperative that at least one genuine weirdo and/or mediocrette rise to the top, ala capitalism wherein some shlub and/or distilled piggery become a billionaire, as an example of success. Opposite of mediocre, McQueen's association with fashion was just a curse. A master tailor who earned his blisters long before his stint in London's ultra conservative Savile Row, his strictly cut mens lines were the things that really thrilled me. Fashion is all about codes. McQueen's mens' lines always referenced easily recognizable historical codes, tweaking them just enough put a crack in your brain. Restraint is the touch of the truly great. I want to be restricted. Don't you? Given the laziness that typically creeps in the mens fashion, McQueen accomplishment is all the more significant. I once spent a year languishes in a rural gas station / sandwich shop to focus the blur. I would always reference McQueen to my female coworkers and they never had any idea what I was talking about let alone who despite the fact he was most famous fashion designer in the world. Like all transcendent "artists" he wasn't a human being. He was an angel from another place to remind us that our world can be different. There are no clothes in Hell.

For months now I've found myself unable to turn way from David Lynch's Interview Project. I'm not sure what Mr. Lynch's involvement is with this project, whether he is funding it, or it was initially his idea, but the skinny is a small camera crew zigzags across the USA short interviews with a cross section of everyday people. A new interview gets posted every three days.

The crew always ask the same set the questions: tell us about your life, what are you most proud of, what are your plans for the future, etc. It is interesting to get to know what things make life worth living for others; what motivates them to keep going. I would say the people are "normal" but no one is normal so that is a meaningless designation. Besides, people only tell us what they think we want to hear. To the crew's credit most the interviews are of working class and middle class people. Most of the interviewees can be roughly grouped into two psychological categories: those that are content (or choose to portray themselves as such) and those that are not content and are yearning for something else. Some of the middle and upper-middle interviewees are so boring they are painful to watch. Their lives', or at the least the way they choose to portray them, are so perfect you it makes you remember why punk rock exists. Of course these "perfect people" are clearly the inspiration of the suburbia gone bad we find in Lynch's films. Obviously, they cannot be so perfect or so boring. If they are, what's the point of their living? A minority third category that clearly emerges with its own morphology are those who are sad-n-fucked. For these folks it doesn't matter if they are content or yearning because they are, well, sad-n-fucked. Then there are the weirdos. The sad-n-fucked and the weirdos are not synonymous, but naturally there is some overlap. These types also populate Lynch's oeuvre. Not that the crew went out looking for weirdos but they don't have an aversion to speaking to people whose appearance or income level are outside the bounds of acceptable corporate discourse.

I forget about the site for a week or two and then go back and watch many episodes at once. The trouble is that everyday people for the most part really don't have interesting lives and have difficulty framing their experiences in anything other than the stock phrases of the metanarrative of their choice. Many people are recovering from substance abuse. Celebrities or cultural notables often have documentaries made about them because they are interesting or have made some or contribution to society. If you don't fall into those categories maybe a film shouldn't be made about you. A good number of the subjects are "local characters," talented, intelligent, and creative people that stayed or got stranded in their small towns. These episodes quickly devolve into minisode versions of CBS Sunday morning. Within this category of interviewee are those that obviously feel they are interesting and important when, in fact, they are not.

More interesting for me is to closely examine Lynch's introduction to each individual interview and try to decide if he approves of their life or not. Of course the "busy," canonized, hero worshiped Lynch might just have a hemorrhoid on any given day. That I could read anything into Lynch's five second intro is purely a projection on my part, but where would I be without my games. Another fun game I play is to look at the the thumbnail of the up coming interviewee and try to guess what they are going to be like. I am almost always wrong. You can't judge a person by their thumbnail is a new maxim for our social networked time.

Many of the interviews have associated discussion boards where you pretend other persons' lives are your business. Mostly pointless, the boards are always fun to cringe over when a non-working class person tries to provide insight to working class person's life. It's like a presenter at an awards show trying to reads a cue card about someone's life they obviously know nothing about.

There have been many interviews that I have enjoyed; i.e., the guy he arranged a cave to die in but then became too ill to get back to the cave to actually die there, but my favorite remains this gentleman whose alcoholic, racist, antisocial rambles where only answers that seemed to genuinely disconcert the crew:

Reading back over this this, I have to ask myself why I keep watching. What I realized is, or have deluded myself into thinking, is that Interview Project was created for persons other than me. Persons who don't know what everyday people are like. Perhaps the warped black hole of my selfishness no longer permits information about other humans. More likely Interview Project raises questions about those not interviewed? Why were they ignored / censored? What is the motivation of Interview Project? Does it have a political agenda?