Fact

FACT: Well it’s always best to start at the beginning and Corey Feldman’s beginning came on July 16,1971 in Reseda, California.

OPINION: In Corey Feldman’s case, it’s best to start at the beginning, and finish at some crack house with Corey Haim.

FACT: Corey was raised by parents Bob and Sheila and he shared life with brothers Eden and Devin and sisters Mindy and Brittnie. OPINION: Sharing one life between four siblings was difficult, but Corey was always generous like that. _

FACT: In 1974 Corey landed his first commercial for McDonalds gift cer- tificates followed by one for Welch’s grape juice. As a child Corey appeared in over 80 commercials. OPINION: You ever try cashing a McDonalds gift certificate at the bank? Corey did.

FACT: In 1979 Corey got his first big

by Stephan MacLEOD

role on television as Regi Tower in the short-lived series The Bad News Bears.

OPINION: The problem with The Bad News Bears was that there were not nearly enough actual bears in the show.

FACT: This year was also the start of Corey’s movie career with the film Time After Time. In this film H.G. Wells travels into the future to stop Jack the Ripper, and save the woman who will become his wife. OPINION: Ah, man not another H.G. Wells travelling through time to catch Jack the Ripper movie! I’m sick of Hollywood always making movies about shit like that.

FACT: While at this time Corey remained mainly on television with numerous tv-movies and_ guest appearances, his voice at least did go on in the movies. In 1981 he provid- ed the voice of Young Copper in the

Disney movie The Fox and _ the

Hound.

OPINION: Most people don’t realize that in order for an actor to do the voice of a cartoon character, they have to watch the video for Aha’s “Take on Me” until they are trans- formed into a world of animation.

FACT: Corey’s next physical appear-

-ance in a movie didn’t come until

1984 when he played Pete in the first Gremlins movie.

OPINION: The puppets used in that movie are amazing. You’d almost think that Corey Feldman’s character was a real person.

FACT: This was followed in 1985 with a small part in Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning. OPINION: The only scary movie with guys in hockey masks is The Mighty Ducks.

FACT: But 1985 was a good year for Corey as he landed his first major

and Opinion

movie role as Mouth in the Speilberg hit The Goonies.

OPINION: After I saw Goonies, | started a gang with a stupid fat kid and a deformed retard in the hopes of finding pirate gold. A family of crim- inals caught on to our plan and killed the fat kid and the retard. I ended up joining the family of criminals because you can make a lot more money stealing shit than looking for pirate gold in sewers. The moral of the story is never get fat.

FACT: With Goonies, Corey’s movie career was off and running and 1986 brought him the hit movie Stand By Me_ which Corey’s acting talent in playing an emotionally troubled youth, Teddy Duchamp.

OPINION: Emotionally troubled youths would be less emotionally troubled if grownups weren’t always frightening them with make believe characters like the Tooth Fairy, Santa Clause, and Michael Jackson.

served to showcase

A Review of A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Re-Examined as a Grotesque Crippling Disease and Other Cultural Revelations by Randy McDONALD

Book: A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Re-Examined as a_ Grotesque Crippling Disease and Other Cultural Revelations.

Author: Cintra Wilson

Publisher: Viking,

There are a few ways to deal with the vast and dizzying popular culture industry that has managed to colonize the. Western collective con-

sciousness with J.Lo’s MTV not-—

Clothes, Céline Dion’s frozen fetus, and the remarkable ego of Hollywood. You can ignore it all, or you can treat pop culture as a mass of kitsch that can be enjoyed by any postmodernist maintaining the proper

fun-inducing/taste-preserving — dis- tance from the actual material. And then, there are those like columnist Cintra Wilson, in A ~ Massive Swelling, who find popular culture and its leading stars to be thoroughly and inhumanly gruesome and would prefer nothing short of a Stalinist purge of the whole rotten edifice. Wilson, a Salon.com colum- nist and published playwright and screenwriter, dissects each of her top- ics — Michael Jackson’s apparent aspirations for the transhuman, the worrisome and growing popularity of radical cosmetic surgery, the com- modification of juvenile sexuality in boy bands — with a relentlessly sav-

age wit that is positively cathartic. Isn’t there something terribly wrong with North American society when Las Vegas, the capital of unthinking airbrushed Middle-American kitsch, is an incredibly popular tourist desti- nation? How can media celebrities get away with behaviour of divaesque cruelty and selfishness? Doesn’t the loathing of ordinary peo- ple for their bodies and their willing- ness to absorb all manner of unnatu- ral substances in beauty’s name sug- gest something frightening about the modern mind? Why do we put up with the selfish egotism and blind consumeristic lust of the “over privi- leged [who] act like they are the only

three-dimensional entities in the world and everyone else is an amus- ing finger puppet”?

In short, in just under 240 pages of scintillating neo-Swiftian prose, Wilson asks how we human beings got saddled with a destructive popular culture that exists for no rea- son. Even if you don’t agree with Wilson—and I certainly disagree with her on a few point, some of them quite major — reading A Massive Swelling feels quite fun. When I set this book down on my desk, complet- ed, for the first time, I felt like I had just emerged from an oddly liberating experience that had radically rede- fined my perspective on the world.

L17]