5 People Who Died During Sex: And 100 Other Terribly Tasteless Lists Paperback (8 page)

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W. B. Yeats was in the habit of trying to hypnotize hens.

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10

Killing Me Softly:

Ten Musical Moments

1968: The chairman of the People’s Republic of China, Mao Zedong, bans the popular musical
The Sound of Music
, describing it as “a blatant example of capitalist pornography.”

1975: During Christmas celebrations, the president of Equatorial Guinea, Macias Nguema, orders his army to shoot 150 political opponents in the Malabo football stadium as loudspeakers played Mary Hopkins’s “Those Were the Days.”

1978: Pop producer Phil Spector, a perfectionist in the recording studio, holds a gun to the head of Leonard Cohen to achieve the precise vocal performance he is looking for on his album
Death of a Ladies’ Man
.

1992: Five prison guards at the Boise, Idaho, Maximum Security Institution are accused of taunting death-row inmates by playing the Neil Young song “The Needle and the Damage Done” during an execution by lethal injection.

1993: A Christian radio station in Vevay, Indiana, is burgled and set ablaze. Police say their prime suspect is a caller who became irate when a DJ refused to play “Don’t Take the Girl” by Tim McGraw.

1994: In England, Dudley and District Hospital Radio ban the Frank Sinatra standard “My Way” from their airwaves because the lines “Now the end is near / And so I face the final curtain” are considered too discouraging for terminally ill patients. Other records suggested for the
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[Ten Musical Moments]

hospital danger list include Tony Bennett’s “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” (insensitive to coronary patients) and Andy Fairweather-Low’s “Wide Eyed and Legless”

(unsuitable for amputees).

1994: A Beatles tribute band loses its “George Harrison” in a tragic highway accident. The “quiet Beatle,” aka twenty-seven-year-old Duncan Bloomfield, falls out of the back of the band’s van on the highway while they travel home from a performance in London. The rest of the band drives for twenty-five miles before they realize that he is missing.

1995: In Wanganui, New Zealand, a twenty-one-year-old man claims he has a bomb and takes over the local radio station, STAR FM, demanding to hear the song

“Rainbow Connection” by Kermit the Frog.

1996: Mourners at a funeral service at All Saints, Gravesend, England, are startled when the church PA system inadvertently relays Rod Stewart’s hit “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy,” including the line “If you want my body.”

1996: An academic report called
The Effect of Country Music
on Suicide
by two American sociologists, Steven Stack and Jim Gundlach, proves a link between country music and losing the will to live. The study concludes that wherever country music is played, the suicide rate among whites is higher than average, “independent of divorce, Southernness, poverty, and gun availability.”

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Shoc 10

k of the New:

Ten Great Moments in Art

1951: An abstract painting called “Autumn Landscape” by Scottish artist William Gear wins a prize at the Festival of Britain but is later denounced by the
Daily Mail
as a

“jam pot thrown at canvas.” In the House of Commons, Conservative MP Alan Gomme-Duncan announces the end of civilization as we know it.

1961: Piero Manzoni, a leading light of the art movement
arte
povera
, exhibits a series of one-ounce cans containing his own excrement, titled “Artist’s Shit.” In June 2002, the Tate Gallery in London announces that it has purchased a tin of Manzoni’s feces for about $38,000.

1966: Hermann Nitsch, Austrian “action artist,” guts a dead lamb in London while showing a film about male genitalia. The
Times of London
calls the event a “brothel of the intellect.” The organizers are prosecuted and fined.

1971: American artist Newton Harrison stages an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, London, called “Portable Fish Farm,” in which he plans to electrocute sixty live catfish.

The show is canceled when comedian Spike Milligan makes his feelings known by lobbing a brick through the Hayward Gallery window.

1989: French/American sculptor Louise Bourgeois, whose work mostly features severed penises and huge testicles hanging singly or in pairs or bunches, exhibits a piece called “No Exit”—a stairway with two huge testicles restricting egress at the bottom—and one called
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[Ten Great Moments in Art]

“Untitled (with Foot)” in which a baby is crushed by a large testicle.

1989: Canadian sculptor Richard Gibson is tried at the Old Bailey in London and found guilty of “outraging public decency” by creating earrings from freeze-dried human fetuses. They formed part of “Human Earrings,” a mannequin head with wig. Gibson is fined $900, but the case costs $360,000 to prosecute.

1994: Christian Lemmerz, Danish artist, puts six dead pigs in a glass case so that visitors to the Esbjerg gallery can watch them change color from piggy-pink to black, via various shades of blue and gray. The artist declares it a triumph for people who value reality in art. The gallery owners declare it a triumph over their old ventilation system, which was unable to cope with the stench.

1995: Gilbert and George, British artists, display sixteen large glossy photos of themselves surrounded by a series of

“defecation motifs,” including turd circles and turd sculptures, which they call “Naked Shit Pictures,” at the South London Art Gallery. A critic describes the work as

“almost biblical.”

1998: Californian performance artist Zhang Huan takes off his clothes, smears himself with pureed hot dog and flour, then allows himself to be licked by eight dogs at San Francisco’s Asian art museum. Zhang says his aim is to

“explore the physical and psychological effects of human violence in modern society.” The exploration ceases when one of the dogs bites him on the bottom.

76

[Ten Great Moments in Art]

2005: Argentinean artist Nicola Constantino exhibits sculptures made out of her own fat, which was removed during liposuction. Four and a half pounds of the fat are transformed to two sculptures of the female naked body, which are offered for $460 each. Neither has been sold.

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Enter

10

tainment and the F-Word:

Ten Great Moments

1965: British drama critic Kenneth Tynan, in the course of a live late-night talk show, becomes the first man ever to say “fuck” on TV, when he inquires, “What exactly is wrong with the word ‘fuck’?” One hundred thirty-three shocked members of the House of Commons table four motions condemning him, and a Conservative member of Parliament insists that the fucker should be hanged.

1967: Michael Winner’s film
I’ll Never Forget What’s’isname
features Mick Jagger’s convent-educated girlfriend Marianne Faithfull saying the line, “Get out of here, you fucking bastard.”

1970: Robert Altman’s movie
M*A*S*H
, about the lives of triage doctors on the front lines of the Korean War, becomes the first Hollywood film to dare to use the F-word, although it was never in the original script.

1976: UK punk combo the Sex Pistols and a gang of suitably safety-pinned hangers-on are invited to appear on a prime-time UK TV show,
Tonight
. Presenter Bill Grundy, who hopes to inject some tension into a hitherto dull interview, quips, “You’ve got another ten seconds, say something outrageous.” Guitarist Steve Jones takes up the challenge, noting that Grundy is a “dirty bastard,” a

“dirty fucker,” and a “fucking rotter.” A nation is scandalized and Grundy loses his job.

1983: Brian de Palma’s film
Scarface
employs the F-word a record-breaking 206 times. In one scene, Tony Montana’s girlfriend asks him, “Can’t you stop saying ‘fuck’ all the time?”

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[The F-Word: Ten Great Moments]

1993: During the live televised Wimbledon tennis championships, the world’s top male tennis player, “nice”

Pete Sampras, is heard by photographers to admonish the center-court crowd, “Take that, you motherfuckers!”

1995: Martin Scorsese sets a new world record when his film
Casino
employs “fuck” 442 times—2.4 times per minute on average.

2003: At the Golden Globe Awards, U2 front man Bono describes the gong awarded for “The Hands that Built America” from the soundtrack of the film
Gangs of New
York
as “really, really fucking brilliant.”
Rolling Stone
magazine reports that, in response, eleven Republicans have sponsored a resolution demanding that broadcast regulators revoke the licenses of television stations that repeatedly air “indecent material.” Meanwhile, a bill proposed by Congressmen Doug Ose and Lamar Smith aims to completely ban from all radio and network television broadcasts the words “shit,” “piss,” “fuck,”

“cunt,” “cocksucker,” “motherfucker,” and “asshole.”

2004:Elton John, exchanging pleasantries with his host during a live morning radio show, says “fuck.” As the interviewer apologizes to his listeners, the veteran rock star asks if it is permissible to say the words “wank,”

“tits,” “bugger,” and “bollocks.”

2005: At the Live8 concert in London, in front of an estimated live worldwide TV audience of 3.5 billion people, rapper Snoop Dogg invites the crowd to join in by putting their

“motherfuckin’ hands in the air.”

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Ten Ro 10

ck & Roll Suicides

1

SISTER LUC-GABRIELLE, NÉE JEAN DECKERS,

AKA THE SINGING NUN A Belgian nun with an acoustic guitar provided the unexpected smash hit of 1963, “Dominique.” She left her convent to discover the swinging sixties, but her new career flopped and, facing bankruptcy, she took her own life by carbon monoxide poisoning in a double-suicide pact with her lesbian lover.

2

JOE MEEK, ’60S RECORD PRODUCER OF THE

TORNADOS Meek was unhealthily fixated on his idol, Buddy Holly. On the eighth anniversary of Holly’s death, Meek shot his elderly landlady, then turned the gun on himself.

3

DEL SHANNON, U.S. DOO-WOP IDOL He recorded

“Hats Off to Larry” before blowing his own hat off with a .22-caliber rifle.

4

IAN CURTIS, TWENTY-THREE-YEAR-OLD

SINGER WITH THE BRITISH BAND JOY

DIVISION He hanged himself in his kitchen on the eve of their first big U.S. tour.

5

JOHN RITCHIE, AKA SID VICIOUS The Sex Pistols bassist failed in two suicide bids while in police custody for allegedly stabbing to death his girlfriend Nancy Spungen, but successfully overdosed on heroin as soon as he was released on bail in February 1979.

6

PAUL WILLIAMS, A SINGER WITH THE

TEMPTATIONS Williams was found dead in the street,
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[Ten Rock & Roll Suicides]

having shot himself a few blocks away from the Tamla Motown hit factory where he made his name.

7

RICHARD MANUEL, A MEMBER OF THE BAND

Manuel cast a cloud over the group’s important 1986

reunion tour by hanging himself in a motel room.

8

BOBBY BLOOM An American one-hit wonder whose cultural contribution “Montego Bay” was a hit in 1970, Bloom shot himself at the age of twenty-eight.

9

KURT COBAIN In April 1994, the twenty-seven-year-old Nirvana singer, who wrote a song called “I Hate Myself and I Want to Die,” escaped from a detoxification center in Los Angeles, then shot his own face off. At the funeral service his wife, Courtney Love, read extracts from his suicide note. Days later, a sixteen-year-old girl in Turkey shot herself in a “tribute” to Kurt.

10

JEFF BUCKLEY The singer-guitarist drowned himself in 1997 in the Wolf River, near Memphis, Tennessee.

Buckley, who is said to have had a Led Zeppelin fixation, was heard singing “Whole Lotta Love” as he swam into the river.

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Ten 10

Creative Drunks

1

ERNEST HEMINGWAY The Nobel Prize–winning

writer and adventurer had an epic appetite for alcohol and women. As a war correspondent during World War II, Hemingway acquired a special alcohol ration and positioned himself on a bar stool in the Paris Ritz, conducting his affairs between Bloody Marys. He kept drinking despite a severe liver problem, but it was a self-inflicted gunshot wound that finished him off at his Idaho retreat at the age of fifty-nine.

2

RAYMOND CHANDLER Chandler took to crime-

writing after losing his regular job through drunkenness and absenteeism. He spent most of his adulthood in a drunken haze. In the words of his hard-drinking fictional detective, Philip Marlowe, “Alcohol is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine.

After that you take the girl’s clothes off.” Unlike Marlowe, Chandler was a troublesome inebriate who suffered blackouts, fell over, threatened suicide, and generally irritated his friends. Chandler’s devotion to his infirm wife Cissy kept him on the wagon for a while, but when she died in 1954, he hit the bottle and stuck to it, his health deteriorating rapidly. He died of pneumonia five years later.

3

JAMES BOSWELL His friend and mentor Samuel Johnson once advised him that “not to drink wine is a great deduction from life.” Boswell took his advice to heart, partly to relieve frequent bouts of depression and partly to stimulate his appetite for prostitutes, a “whoring rage” that led to nineteen venereal infections. After one
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[Ten Creative Drunks]

of several drunken falls, Boswell remarked in his diary,

“No man is more easily hurt with wine than I am.” He finally finished
The Life of Samuel Johnson
in 1791, between bouts of heavy drinking, and died four years later of kidney failure at the age of fifty-five.

4

DOROTHY PARKER Her poisonous reviews as drama critic in
Vanity Fair
cost her her job, but her reputation as the wittiest woman in the country gave her a permanent place at the famous hard-drinking “round table” at New York’s Algonquin Hotel. She often arrived at Algonquin lunches with a hangover that she insisted