Rant-Man's Notebook

By Jim "Rant-Man" MacQuarrie

The Circus Leaves Town...

They've taken down the bigtop and the sideshow freaks have packed up their bags and hopped the train out of town. I refer of course to the California Recall election that recently pitted Gary Coleman and Gallagher against a porn actress, a 100-year-old woman, and another 130-odd (very odd) aspiring politicians, all of them standing in the shadow of the Terminator.

If you were reading these pages a year or so ago, you probably heard me howling about the 2002 California election and begging people to vote for ANYBODY BUT DAVIS.

Told you so. Neener neener neener. If you had all listened to me, we could have been spared the recall. But did you listen? Noooooooo.

So let's talk about the recent madcap political adventure.

There's been some discussion about the politics of celebrity, and how the issues don't matter as long as you look good on television, but really, this election came down to people finally agreeing with me that anybody would be better than Gray Davis. Literally any of the 135 other candidates would probably have been an improvement, except for Cruz Bustamante (publicly acknowledged racist and totally owned by the indian gaming industry) or Peter "the watermelon" Camejo. Watermelon? It's a joke; he describes himself that way-- "Green on the outside, Red on the inside." He's a communist and makes no bones about it.

Speaking of the other candidates, I had my little brush with fame this election. I've been doing a bit of work for my brother-in-law, who now owns his own screenprinting shop (no, we're not doing any Rose Parade stuff), and one of his customers was a candidate. I got to do the setup and film separations for the Official t-shirts of the Angelyne for Governor campaign. Oy.

This woman is a piece of work, let me tell you. She's one of these Hollywood pseudo-celebrities, famous for being famous. For about the last 20 years or so, her face and gigantic mutant mammaries have been on display on a variety of billboards in Los Angeles, resulting in her nickname of "the Billboard Queen." She occasionally gets cast in B movies as "the blonde," and sometimes even gets listed in the credits as "Angelyne Billboardqueen," God save us. Given her skimpy filmography, it's not surprising she had enough time on her hands to run for governor. I'm curious about how she financed the campaign, but this is a woman who charges $2000 a day for her dog to make a personal appearance. It's a pink dog. Why anyone would pay to see it is beyond me.

Of course, after dealing with her, I can tell you that she was able to afford her gubernatorial run by being a tightwad. She's so tight she squeaks. She fought tooth and nail to get as much as she could for as little as possible. My brother-in-law is a lot softer touch than I am; I wouldn't have given her the deal she got. We ended up doing two designs for her. The first shirt features one of Angelyne's self-portraits in a hideous Keane-Manga cross-pollination gone horribly wrong. The kitsch factor is amazing. You have to see it to believe it. The second one is a black shirt with a photo of Angelyne with her pontoons restrained in a chrome-studded bra. Go figure why she didn't win..

Now, here's the best part of the whole thing: Angelyne the Billboard Queen actually thought she was a serious candidate. She couldn't articulate a platform at gunpoint, hadn't the remotest clue about any of the issues, but she still went on and on about why she should be included in the debates. We asked her if she was going to be on the thing on the Game Show channel with all the other second-tier candidates, and she replied, "no, I don't want to be part of that circus." Right, like you're so much better than that, sweetie.

Now if that isn't unintentional comedy at its finest, I don't know what is.

But now, here's the scary truth about this election: It's part of a great conspiracy. There is a secret brotherhood of men workign to take over America one Governor's Mansion at a time. Who are they? What do they have in common? One word: Predator.

That's right, the 1987 action flick starring Ah-Nuld himself. Consider this: Who was Arnold's co-star? Yep, Jesse "The Body" Ventura, former Governor of Minnesota! Who else was in this movie? Sonny Landham, former porn actor, now Republican candidate for Governor of Kentucky! And then there's Carl Weathers, member of the Big Brothers Association and the U.S. Olympic Committee, who may harbor some political aspirations of his own. Also Bill Duke, Chairperson of the Radio-TV-Film department at Howard University, and Shane Black, screenwriter of his pal Arnold's flop "The Last Action Hero," the "Lethal Weapon" movies, and the Bruce Willis-Damon Wayans flick "The Last Boy Scout." Any one of these guys could suddenly decide to run for governor of someplace. Wait and see.

Moving on to Predator 2, we find Kent McCord (former Vice President of Screen Actors Guild), Danny Glover (goodwill ambassador for the United Nations Development Program), and Rubén Blades, a graduate of Harvard Law School and political activist who ran for president of Panama in 1994; he came in third with a respectable 20% of the vote.

Of course it also starred Gary Busey, Morton Downey Jr and Maria Conchita Alonso. Make of that what you will.

In any case, let's keep an eye on this Predator conspiracy. The name is ominous enough, don't you think?

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