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There's nowhere to hide You're all locked inside As you act dead in silence I rage with my violence
Macabre, "Killing Spree"
Over the last couple of years, I have watched the homicidechic epidemic flourish, a trend that I put away, like childish things, many years ago. Ten years ago, when it was at its peak, a friend of mine silk-screened t-shirts with images of various killers, and I remember being fired from a job for wearing the shirt that featured a glow-in-the dark photograph of the cannibal-masochist Albert Fish above the words "He Cooked Children and Ate Them." Loving the killer at that time had a certain camp cachet, best characterized by John Waters in his 1981 book Shock Value. "The more hideous the crime, the more intriguing it becomes. If you're going to be rotten, do it well, we say, and do it with style." Although Waters has since re-evaluated the shock value of being a crime-hag, the fad continues, in increasingly dubious forms.
Killer trading cards are being feverishly circulated-which often feature cartoons of crime victims in push-up bras-and a board game was recently manufactured: "Jeffrey Dahmer invites you over for cocktails. Miss a turn." Serial killers and multiple murderers have also achieved an unprecedented vogue among filmmakers, musicians and other (in Leonard Cohen's words) "lousy little poets."
Cohen's lousy little poets want to "sound like Charlie Manson/ even when they're dancing," and it is Manson who is riding the crest of this recent wave. Manson's image is ubiquitous in certain film and music circles-that hair, those clock-stopping eyes peer from magazine and album covers and from Axl Rose's underdeveloped chest. His songs and words have been recycled among musicians staging what journalist Mike Rubin has deemed the "Man(son) of the year competition," and he corresponds with several artists, among them musician/spoken-word bore Henry Rollins, who, ironically, has for several years been staging a disquieting public psychodrama over the murder of his best friend. Even the mainstream media have jumped (back) on the bandwagon: last year on Turning Point, Diane Sawyer staged a family reunion and interviewed Manson and two of his followers-the now dowdy and contrite Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten.
In the sixties, Manson was the antithesis of...