the commune, 6/18/07: You'll learn to love it or die trying

The Simple Life: Century Regional Detention Center Cancelled After Five Episodes

Los Angeles, CA

Junior Bacon

Hilton is seen here exiting the detention center and getting mentally psyched up for a new career as a nineteenth century pub boxer.

he early run of hotel heiress and all around well respected young lady Paris Hiton’s highly-anticipated new series The Simple Life: Century Regional Detention Center hit an unexpected blip this week, with Hilton walking off the set of this groundbreaking new creative enterprise. A Hitlon spokesperson cited “creative differences” between Hilton and the detention center officials who are producing the show in conjunction with the Los Angeles County courts.

“When I heard the courts had ordered 23 episodes, I knew this was going to be a big hit,” explained media buttsniff Margo Philsbury. “Talk about a fish out of water! Previous seasons of The Simple Life really failed to go for the gusto like this one did. I mean, Paris Hilton? In jail? Can you just imagine it?”

“C’mon, she’s so pretty. She’s like a princess,” explained Sheriff Lee Baca, who facilitated Hilton’s temporary departure from the show. “Or whatever they call it. Hostess? Heiress? Celebutante? Is that a real world now? You don’t put people like that in jail. Then all the kids would want to go to jail, they’d be skateboarding in public and carjacking and shit just to get in and live the glamorous life of an inmate like Miss Hilton.”

The public’s anticipation of the new series was sky-high leading up to its June 3rd debut, with MTV Video Awards host Sarah Silverman devoting a sizeable portion of her opening monologue to wishing the hotel heiress well in her latest endeavor. Audience members, however, couldn’t tell if Silverman was being ironic or post-ironic, also known as “sincere.”

Meanwhile, rumors abounded that Simple Life co-star Nicole Richie was working on a heroin possession deal to possibly continue the series without Hilton’s involvement.

“I heard they wanted Paris to eat this grody food, like she was in prison or something,” jawed Hilton friend and fellow What-The-Fuck-Are-You-Famous-For celebrity Richie. “And she was like ‘no way’ and they were like ‘you weigh 75 pounds, you’re gonna die if you don’t eat’ and she was like ‘I’d rather die than eat chicken fried steak, gross!’ and they were like ‘okay you can go home.’”

Hilton had landed the deal for the new series after wowing audiences with her performance last September, when a drunken Hilton was pulled over for weaving like an African-American hairdresser and reportedly told the police it was only because all she’d had for dinner was a martini. Other guest appearances in January and February cemented her position as America’s favorite excuse to not pay attention to Iraq, leading to a new deal for the show’s unexpected sixth season.

Hotel maids, restaurant owners and taxi cab drivers alike applauded the move, hoping it would mean Hilton would stop pissing everywhere.

Disaster was averted on Friday, when Hilton acceded to the producers’ demands that she honor her contract, returning to the set in a spirited mood, boisterously vocal about her enthusiasm for the project. The show’s production was immediately resumed, thrilling fans of lesbian shower scenes and mind-numbing rot the world over.

the commune news is not responsible for Paris Hilton. the commune news is not responsible for Paris Hilton. the commune news is not responsible for Paris Hilton. Ivana Folger-Balzac could teach the heiress a thing or two about avoiding jail time, but still lags a distant third to Hilton and that chick who invented the headache excuse among the nation’s most-hated women. Give it a year though, we here at the commune really believe in Ivana.

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the commune Sells Out

As of this writing it’s been about one week since our building burned down. You may have seen it on your local evening news, or read about it in Fire! magazine, if such a thing exists. I can’t say I have many regrets about it, although I would have preferred to have been given mouth-to-mouth resuscitation by a female firefighter. So I do have regrets, I suppose.

The whole “everything I own completely destroyed” comes at a pretty pivotal time in the commune history, as I was quite on the fence about whether or not to continue my fruitless Don Quixote-like pursuit of informing the public of the conspiracies around them, or to just retire and dedicate my life to hot-tubbin’. I’ve long begun to suspect that the Internet is nothing more than a passing fad, and short of creating a MySpace site for the commune, there is no way to distinguish one’s self on the worldwide web. So to summarize, I’ve decided to take the commune to a quarterly pamphlet publishing routine.

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As the commune started as a pamphlet, some might say we’ve taken a step back. I prefer to think of it as walking all the way around the earth until you wind up back in the exact same spot where you once stood. It’s nothing personal against our readers or our staff, although there are a few of you who will one day get what’s coming to you, nothing personal, it’s just that I’ve poured way too much of my time and money into this anonymous enterprise and I don’t believe we’ve affected nearly enough readers. If only the truth were more contagious, or I could infect everyone in the world with some kind of computer-born virus. This would not cause death or pain, this theoretical virus, but spread the love and joy that humanity can overcome the darkest things about itself; and possibly cause some rectal itching, who can say with theoretical computer-born viruses? This has been my dream. But as with all dreams, it must come to an end when we wake.

This is not the end of the commune—not by far. I mean, it is for you, sure, but not the end for the commune staff, myself chiefly among them. We’ve all become close friends, and I’m sure they will have little problem doing the exact same work we do now with no office, an unprofessional outlet for their work, and absolutely no paychecks, not even coupons or Bagelbucks. They’re dedicated like that, and it’s not because they’re stupid, no matter what you might have overhead me saying loudly while drinking it up. If anything, our low-budget guerrilla-style reporting will bring this family closer together. Particularly Raoul Dunkin, who most definitely needs to be brought closer together with force. I’ve already bought the perfect van to act as our new office, and as soon as I find out for sure who survived the fire we will all make our way south to Mexico, where publishing costs for pamphlets are simply insane.

It’s been rough for them all, this news I have yet to tell them, but we’ll take it in stride. I’m not saying we will never publish on the Internet again, and if Emile Zender, lifelong subscriber to all things commune, deems it worth his time, he’s welcome to transfer our smaller publications to the website version, which he is inheriting. And basically, as our last note, I think covering Paris Hilton going to prison pretty much finalizes all the news we could ever hope to report. What’s more important than wealthy people being jailed for driving felonies? The world has turned upside-down and on its ear. Which reminds me, I promised the gang we could Van Twister a few minutes ago. It’s like Twister, but in a van. So enjoy this, what may be our final commune. And if Ivana Folger-Balzac asks you where everyone disappears to when she gets back from her vacation, tell her we all died in the fire. I would wink at you, but this is text. Thanks for all the fond memories and however many years of loyal readership.

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The Roof is on Fire

The most important thing we need to get clear right now is that Omar Bricks did not set the commune’s roof on fire. When historians tell the story of the commune and why the whole goddamned building probably burnt down, they’d better not turn to the Bricks Excuse as a convenient solution to their own damned laziness. This has happened all too often already. Every last piece of furniture from the offices of our downstairs neighbors at Crochet! magazine goes missing one day, then turns up on eBay being sold in a “Readymade Office” auction by somebody called chxdigbrx, and all of a sudden I’m a prime suspect. Or somebody takes apart Red Bagel’s new car, piece by piece, rebuilds it in his office, then wipes out into the hallway tearing mid-office donuts in the middle of the night and nobody bothers to look beyond the suspect whose wallet was found on the floorboards. Do you have any idea how many wallets I have? I can’t keep track of that shit. It was probably still there from the time I tried to fit Bagel’s car in the elevator as a surprise birthday present. Use your heads, people.

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Any armchair Columbo worth his weight in assfat can see that the roof fire was obviously the work of Crochet! operatives. Do you think it’s any coincidence that the fire was started on the roof, insuring that it’ll hit our floor first, long before it ever gets to those Crochet! bastards and their precious fire-fuel-free empty offices? I think not. And who but those diabolical Crochet! skunks would think to plan it so deviously and so perfectly, to make it look like my roof-mounted potato cannon and homemade generator were the culprits? Hell, they almost had me convinced, that’s how good they are. When I was up there last night, shooting potatoes out into the Flatbush night and reveling in the sweet music of airborne, starchy chaos, at first I thought it was cool as hell when the cannon started shooting those flaming spuds. Hell yeah! It wasn’t part of the design, no, but some of life’s greatest gifts are happy accidents like that, like the time I figured out you can sharpen your knives just by tying them to shoelaces and dragging them behind your bumper while tearing ass around the neighborhood.

But I hadn’t shot more than seven or eight beautifully flammable taters arching out into the night sky before I realized those Crochet! bastards had somehow snuck in behind me, probably while I was trying to hit that hot air balloon, and had set the whole goddamned roof on fire. I got a few more shots off, no use in wasting a perfectly good potato cannon that wasn’t likely to survive the fire, before I discovered the much more important fact that my shoes were on fire. Time to go.

I didn’t sleep all that well last night, since I’d really liked those shoes. But the day just went from bad to worse when I got to work this morning and noticed that the building was still on fire. Everyone at the commune offices was still going about business as usual, and nobody had called the fire department because we aint a bunch of lousy snitches. The Crochet! staff was gone, big surprise there. Funny how they always seem to know when the building’s on fire or dangerously brimming over with asbestos and radon.

I imagine we’re going to have to evacuate at some point, once the fire sprinklers run out of water. They can’t last too much longer, since we turn them on all the time when it’s hot. I can’t say I’ll be sad to go, all those gay-assed solar panels Ramrod Hurley had installed on the roof smell like tofu when they burn, so it smells like healthy death in here. I’ve spent most of the morning throwing shit out the windows to save it from the fire. Okay, I’ve been throwing shit at the people below evacuating the building, but you can bet your ass none of those computers or fax machines or things are going to burn up in the fire, either. That’s called multi-tasking.

Hold up, the rest of the staff has been playing hide-and-seek in the smoke and apparently I’m it now. I want to see how long they’ll hide if I just leave and don’t tell anybody. Wish me luck. Bricks out.

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Quote of the Day

“We’ll meet again. You might say that’s impossible, since people can only meet once, but they haven’t factored in my patented time machine and early-onset Alzheimer’s.”
—Capt. Don Spacegain, Year 3054

Fortune 500 Cookie

Now’s the perfect time to launch your alternative news website. Thursday’s haul proves your friend’s theory that the Halloween is really the only lucrative time for trick-or-treating. For your information, he’s going to shoot his old woman down ‘cause he caught her messing ‘round with some other man; you don’t need to know everything. Lucky son of a bitch.

Try again later.

Top 5 Reasons You Won’t Have to Kick Around the commune For Anymore

1.	It’s expensive to run state of the art website and Dippin’ Dots franchise at the same time
2.	You assholes simply refused to spell our name appropriately in lowercase letters
3.	All of this was for date with girl at Blockbuster; she don’t work there no more
4.	Less writing and online publishing leaves more time to hang out at coffee shop writing thinly veiled autobiographic novel
5.	You never loved us

Democrats Celebrate Iraq Funding Bill Reverse-Victory

Good day and good-bye, at least according to the rumors around here at the commune rubble. It matters not to me that we may not publish again, since I’m focusing my time and energy on a very lucrative weight loss research project starting up next week, and wouldn’t have time to continue reviewing movies anyway. And since my dwarf mage Welchy reached level 10 last week on World of Warcraft, I haven’t had much time to review new movies either. So I thought I would say sayonara with a different kind of column, Orson’s favorite movies of all time. What’s that? Movies I like? That’s correct. They are few, but they exist. Let’s see the “they” to which I’m referring.

The Great Muppet Caper
There has never been a wiser move in all of Hollywood than to team up Charles Grodin with felt-headed puppets. Never. I challenge you to find one. Grodin is a daring jewel thief who attempts to manipulate Miss Piggy with a romantic relationship. Yes, you read that right. Simply for the tantalizing daydreams I’ve had about how Charles Grodin would get busy with a pig puppet, if that involves Frank Oz’s hand at all or not, this movie ranks very highly in my list. And like all Muppet movies, the human are not at all curious why these somewhat inarticulate animal puppets are welcomed rather than scorned by society, a great commentary on the generation gap of the 1960s and 1970s, though a bit dark for the taste of most.

Yojimbo
Akira Kurosawa’s samurai epic has been remade many times, but too many remakes miss the exceptional subtlety and style of Kurosawa. This movie is not as excellent as it is because it is a tightly-plotted story of a samurai in feudal Japan playing two greedy sides against each other; it’s brilliant because without telling us, Kurosawa has staged the timeless story of a collection of insane Japanese men who have taken up residence in the old west. When Sergio Leone remade this tale as A Fistful of Dollars, he unwittingly sapped all the brilliance out of it by staging it in the old west where it was originally set in Kurosawa’s version. The fact the main character has no name is a subtle testament to the fact everyone is completely out of their minds in this movie and that’s why they think they’re samurai. A searing and subversive indictment of everyone who goes to see a movie and expects the characters to be in full possession of their faculties. Toshiro Mifune was a god among actors with hyperactive attention deficit disorder.

THX-1138
Before George Lucas decided it was more fun to make money than cutting social commentary films, he made THX-1138, and we’re all the better for it. Contrary to Lucas’ opinion he was making a sharp attack on the drug-abusing rule-following fascism of pre-1960s culture, he was actually making a critical symphony that mocked white America’s subtle hatred of itself. Not only are very few of the actors in the movie black at all, but the lead actor, Robert Duvall, can only escape the dirty world of which he’s part and the dull silver automatons who enforce the law by crossing the longest expanse of pure white ever seen on screen. Fascinating. So only by running toward something even whiter can we at least be safe from our basic whiteness? No wonder people complained so loudly about the low-key racism in the Star Wars prequels. Lucas definitely has issues.

Paris on Fire
There is no better film alive than Paris on Fire. No, this has nothing to do with Hilton heiresses. Quite simply, Paris on Fire is the most damning fire safety film ever made in the French New Wave vein. The acting is excellent as Marie Chevalier plays “Woman Woken By Fire Alarm,” trying for the entire length of the film to find a way out of her burning house only to find fire behind every door. She tries each door several times, and while some audiences might find these repeated scenes fairly boring, they’re actually morons because it makes a pointed statement about the repetitive nature of trying to avoid burning to death in general. Paris on Fire makes the bold statement that, no matter how any of us might die, we are truly burning to death, slowly but surely, and we should probably enjoy it. Fucking genius.

Is that all there is? Possibly. I know it’s not for me, as I have that research thing starting next week. I will miss these little chats we’ve had, but I suppose it’s all for naught, as we’re but burning to death slowly over along period of time. So enjoy.