Diary of a Low Budget Superhero

One benefit of having our Internet bundled with phone and cable is that I get a lot of "true crime" shows on channels I never even knew existed. Oh yes, if you didn't know this about me already, I'm a major crimes junkie. I guess the term, as corny as it sounds, is crime buff. Had my education gone another way, I would be more than a mere buff; rather, you could have been reading the diary of a crackerjack criminal psychologist right now, man. Alas, it was not meant to be. Save for a few courses in criminology and psychology, the bulk of my "education" in the subject of crime and the criminal mind has been more a post-grad endeavor. Self-taught, you might say.

Follow up:

My bookshelf is chockablock with non-fiction. There's some corporate crime in there, you know, chronicles of terrible events where innocent consumers were led towards doom by careless manufacturers, lives senselessly cut short by toxins, poisons or negligence. Love Canal, Three Mile Island, the Dalkon Shield. There's a few single-incident stories, tragedies in which a seemingly harmless person got totally caught up in a runaway series of events that led to a crime of passion, or money, or both. But mostly I've got book after book on serial killers, those nightmare-dwelling deviants that etch their three-part-names in blood across every decade. All kinds of writings. I've got first-person accounts by survivors (I Am The Central Park Jogger, A Reason to Live), chronicles of the events by professionals who were part of the process (My Life among the Serial Killers, Helter Skelter, Mindhunter etc) and well-researched recounts by third party writers (Deviant, Victim, Portrait of a Killer). Any time you want to pull back the curtain and stare into the abyss, they're there. Charlie Manson, Lizzie Borden, the BTK Killer, Ted Bundy, the Zodiac Killer, Gacy, Gein, Dahmer and Jack the Ripper.

Oh if you enjoy the drama series "Criminal Minds" you may want to pick up Mindhunter by John Douglas. That guy friggin' rules. He was one of the very early criminal profilers, I mean he was doing it before I was even born. Look him up, get the book, it's fascinating.

In addition to all these books, there's the "true crime" shows. I'm of two minds about these shows. You know the ones I mean. Those sixty turgid minutes of late-nite programming that rehash tales of murder.

First of all, the format is the same, to the point where I can't tell them apart. This has been going on for many years at this point. First, there's that opening chord of doomed music, then it turns all plinky on the piano. This is followed by dramatic zooms on fuzzy photos of the victim and the suspect while the event is summarized by a somber narration that is as serious-sounding as it is goofily-penned. Then a swooping swell for the show's title, then they get into it with a statement identifying the time, date and location. All this must, apparently, occur before the story unfolds, which is visually enhanced by more zooms on the same fuzzy photos and random, useless shots of street corners, traffic, people walking around, empty interrogation rooms and of course, this is all interspersed with interview clips of the detectives, the survivors and a whole load of experts.

Some of the experts you wanna just slap around with a dead fish. Just a little, until they get fishy enough to understand that they suck. Aphrodite Jones comes to mind. She needs to just go away. Aphrodite writes terrible, awful books about the sensational high-profile crimes that people can't look away from; when the Charlie Sheen thing goes off the rails, this bloodsucker will be right there putting out some piece of crap book about it. Why anyone publishes them, I don't know, and I wish she would stop showing up in these true crime shows.

Some of these shows have just got the facts wrong, man. For instance, one of them told a version of the Black Dahlia story that had so many errors I wondered if Aphrodite Jones had been involved. To the point of putting up a photo of the victim that isn't her. What they used was just a photo of a girl that was found in the belongings of Dr. George Hodel, a photo that people WONDERED and DEBATED about whether or not it was the young Elizabeth Short, found mutilated in two pieces in LA in 1947. That particular show made mad leaps across logic in many areas, ignoring evidence in some places and manufacturing it elsewhere, including showing that photo repeatedly. It isn't her! WTF?! (As for Dr. Hodel, one theory pins that murder plus a few dozen other murders on him. That this theory is that of his son, who wrote two books about it, leaves the case still wide open as far as I am concerned.)

Some of these shows are accidentally funny. I was TRYING to watch one the other nite, it may have been 48 Hours, I don't know. But I couldn't concentrate on the story because the suspect's name was Happy. OK, I mighta gotten into Joe's little baggie of funny stuff a bit, so MAYBE it wasn't quite as funny as I thought it to be. But HAPPY? Come on! It meant copy like, "Police questioned Happy about the sex tape." And "If Happy wanted privacy, he was careless."

"Happy's on the run."

BWA HA HA!

Of all the many true crime shows, you know which one takes the proverbial cake? City Confidential. I once interviewed Monty and the other guys from a perfect Boston pop band called The Irresponsibles. One of the nuggets of brilliance released by these guys was called The Ballad of Lobster Boy. Now, I didn't know at the time that we both were fans of City Confidential. I knew the story, though, and I knew the song. If I had thought that elements of the song rang familiar before I questioned the band about it, their explanation of the song's origin erased all doubt. Turned out that the guys had been watching the City Confidential episode about Grady Stiles. Grady was a sideshow act in a circus and his attraction was a deformity in his hands where the fingers were fused together, hence the name Lobster Boy. And he was also a mean little fucker, so somebody up and shot him. City Confidential had some seriously funny copy, both grammatically and in other ways. They relied heavily on simile and metaphor, for one thing. How could I forget lines like, "The media was attracted to the Lobster Boy story like a tornado to a trailer park." I guess it struck the band as funny as it had struck me, only they penned a song about it. It's fucking awesome, it's...well you know what, I didn't really have a point when I started, and so I can't think of a better way out of this essay than to leave you with a song.

Ballad of Lobster Boy. Why did he have to die?

http://www.myspace.com/74601343/music/songs/Lobster-Boy-23752768