I never really thought I’d end up voluntarily writing obits as a hobby (or habit). As for Mr. Jackson, I can only leave you with this…

Now seems like a good time to score that copy of “Off the Wall” that I’ve been meaning to pick up for a while now.

Farrah – every older kid had her poster taped up to her wall when I was a seven years old. That poster. You all know it. They sold it in comic books ads that badly suffered from the morray effect along with pin-ups of Sean Cassidy, Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, KISS and R2-D2. Farrah was in Logan’s Run. You could get an iron on t-shirt of her from that movie in similar ads. Farrah waded into the sci-fi waters once again as she faced a robot stalker in Saturn 3, the first in a long line of Alien rip-offs scattered throughout the 1980s. In addition to fending off advances from a giant robot with a tiny head, she also had to do love scenes with Kirk Douglas in that one. Harvey Keitel also appeared as Saturn 3’s human villain but the producers overdubbed his Brooklyn brogue with an English accent. That would never happen today. Farrah used to be married to Lee Majors of the Six Million Dollar Man. They were a 70s TV power couple for a while there. My sister’s boyfriend at the time wanted my sister to try to look more like Farrah. “Only if you look like Lee Majors,” was her reply. Farrah became a made for TV battered women’s icon in the mid-80s with The Burning Bed. My mother loved that movie. Farrah was wigged out on drugs on Letterman while she hyped her Playboy spread in the 1990s. Still, the American public fell in love with her in the 1970s and never fell out of love with her. She will be missed.

David Carradine and Farrah Fawcett both gone in one month. That childhood of mine is really dying one piece at a time. One request: can some pro wrestlers or B-movie actors save some seal pups from oncoming traffic so I can write about that instead of blogging obits? Please? Thanks.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Today marks the two year anniversary of the suicide and crimes of pro wrestling star Chris Benoit, the most bleak tragedy in a segment of the entertainment industry that is unusually prone to them. A few days after the incident, I wrote the following essay in an attempt to get my thoughts straight on something that was both staggering and surreal. Although I sent this piece to some editors I knew, the depressing nature of these events made me not pursue its publication with my usual tenacity. To mark this grim anniversary (as well as the recent in-ring death of Japanese wrestling icon Mitsuhara Misawa AKA Tiger Mask), here is my essay on Benoit…

Pro Wrestling’s Unsustainable Lifestyle
By Bob Calhoun
June 27, 2007

Wrestlers go crazy. That’s what they do. They live their lives walking a line between fantasy and reality. The crowd might know it’s all fake, phony, a put-on, but they react to every body slam and spine buster as if they were real. Professional wrestling is a form of theatre designed to create mass hysteria. It fosters this in the fans at home watching on the boob tube, in the fans packed into the arena screaming for blood and, mostly, in the wrestlers themselves.

I worked in pro wrestling’s bargain basement for seven years. I never paid my dues the way that Chris Benoit did and I didn’t make it to the heights of Vince McMahon’s World Wrestling Entertainment. But even in the little punk rock wrestling show that I used to grapple and announce for, I saw what the squared circle spectacle could do to a guy. It wasn’t just the bumps and bruises but it was the out of control desire to take those bumps and bruises. It was the need to be in the ring and in front of those fans even when there were only tens or hundreds of them let alone the thousands that a man like Benoit played to.

In a tour that I was involved with in 2001, we had a wrestler who had suffered from too many concussions. He was starting to black out in public. He was forgetting where he was. He was really spooking the rest of the boys. The promoter did the right thing and sent him home on a plane to be with his family. It was only a short time later before he got in the ring and started working small time indie shows again around his hometown. This wasn’t a guy who made his living from pro wrestling. He was probably lucky if he made 25 bucks from those shows he worked. Collecting concussions from wrestling was most likely going to endanger his ability to hold down his day job yet he still did it. He just couldn’t stay away.

Roddy Piper calls this “the sickness” in his autobiography, In the Pit with Piper (Berkeley Trade, 2002). He discusses it at length but never quite defines it. He just knows it’s there. And all of us who have been involved with pro wrestling at any level have felt its pull. After a while, you start wanting to become the character that you play in the ring. The day-to-day mundane inconveniences of family court, doing your taxes or filling out job applications pale in comparison to living in a world where all of your problems can be solved with a well-placed shot to your opponent’s skull. Now you take that mindset that’s already hard to resist and you add steroids, mounds of painkillers and weekly doses of head trauma to it and you have an all too often lethal chain of circumstances.

Wrestlers die. They die a lot. A March 12, 2004 USA Today article (High death rate lingers behind fun facade of pro wrestling) states that wrestlers have death rates about seven times higher than the general U.S. population and that wrestlers are 20 times more likely to die before the age of 45 than pro football players. A sampling of the wrestlers who died prematurely between 1997 and 2004 (the dates that the article examined) reads like a who’s who from our collective adolescence: “Ravishing” Rick Rude, “Mr. Perfect” Curt Hennig, Road Warrior Hawk, The British Bulldog, The Junkyard Dog, Crash Holly and of course Owen Hart, who plummeted to his death performing a botched 78 foot repel from the rafters during a 1999 pay-per-view. Since the publication of that article, the death toll has gone even higher and so often it has been without the media attention that the especially gruesome Benoit murder/suicide is getting.

Chris Benoit worked a hard, high impact style of pro wrestling. He regularly dove off of ladders or flew from the top rope and onto the cold concrete floor. His professionalism at so much self-abuse won him a rabid cult following among wrestling fans if not the crossover stardom that The Rock and Hulk Hogan have enjoyed. And pro wrestling is a hard business. There’s no off-season. There’s no time off. No vacations. These guys go at it 52 weeks a year with no breaks unless they need to rehab from an injury that’s so severe that the promotion and the wrestlers themselves have no other choice but to undergo surgery and subsequent rehab. You can only imagine what the incessant touring, house shows and TV matches can do to a grappler’s personal life if they ever even have one.

To cope with this, wrestlers pop pain pills at alarming rates, and then there’s the constant allure of recreational drugs and alcohol. On top of that, the business demands superhuman physiques that are usually only attainable through regular cycles of steroids and human growth hormone as well as the lifting of very heavy weights. Wrestlers are constantly on the road and more than a few have died crashing their cars as they drove the hundreds of miles in between scheduled bouts. Even more have been found dead in hotel rooms. Wrestlers spend a lot of time in hotel rooms.

But Chris Benoit didn’t meet the average pro wrestler’s ignominious end from a coronary in a Cozy 8. He became a real life horror show. For those who haven’t been paying attention to the cable TV news crawl, during the weekend of June 22-24th, he strangled his wife on Friday, suffocated his son on Saturday and then hung himself in his weight room on Sunday. Roid rage is getting a lot of play in the press for Benoit’s breakdown, but the magnitude of his atrocities make it hard to pin the blame on roids, wrestling or even the Mephistopheles-like Vince McMahon.

But still, you wonder what other profession would have had Benoit scrambling around the country away from his family almost every day of the year, taking chair shots, diving out of the ring and then having to slam steroids and somas just to stay on schedule. What other form of sports or entertainment has the recent track record of tragedy that seems to come so naturally to pro wrestling? Pro wrestling in its current form is an unsustainable lifestyle. While McMahon and his WWE are circling the wagons in order to deflect blame for this latest wrestler death, one can only hope that the wrestlers themselves take a good long look in the mirror or risk ending up in sports entertainment’s statistical slagheap.

Artwork: Brandi Valenza

DAVID CARRADINE has been found dead in a Bangkok hotel room. The reports of his death are getting more and more lurid. He may have hanged himself with a cord of some kind. The US Embassy in Thailand is only confirming his death right now. Reports of suicide or mysterious circumstances could just be the results of the Bangkok rumor mill. Carradine lived hard and fast but still made it to 72. In an interview in Psychotronic from the 1990s, Carradine discusses dropping acid and doing other hard drugs like it’s a regular occurrence for him. While Dennis Hopper left his days of easy ridin’ behind him, cleaned himself up and started plugging GOP candidates like both Bushes and Bob Dole at Republican conventions, Carradine lead the rebel life until the end.

Three weeks ago I posted a blog comparing my one run-in with Carradine to my more recent meeting with Bruce Dern (another frequent star of Roger Corman exploitation movies in the 1960s and 70s). I ended up casting Carradine in a bad light. I feel kind of bad about that now, or at least weird about it. On the train ride this morning I even had some thoughts of taking the thing down, but hell, it all happened (plus, it’s only a goddamned blog). And even though Carradine just sat there at his merch table and couldn’t even look up at me, I’m still a fan. I’ll still throw on Death Race 2000 (1975), Death Sport (1978) or even episodes of Kung Fu The Legend Continues every now and then. And you’ve gotta’ be a fan to love Kung Fu the Legend Continues.

Carradine has his SF Bay Area roots. Like me, he went to San Francisco State University. He dropped out and hung out with the Beatniks in North Beach. He chased his espressos with weed. He also held down a job cleaning out the brewing tanks at the Lucky Lager Brewery in San Mateo back when that cheap brew’s bottle caps had weird visual puzzles printed on them.

Carradine beat out Bruce Lee for the role of Kwai Chang Caine in TVs Kung Fu the 70s. Adding insult to injury, Lee created the concept for the show, a fact that Kung Fu’s producers seem to conveniently forget in so many DVD “making of” documentaries. Carradine became the first mainstream martial arts star without being a martial artist. When American Shaolin author Matthew Polly brought some video tapes of old Kung Fu episodes to THE actual Shaolin Temple in China, the monks all thought that the lofan (Carradine) was making fun of them with his bad technique. Bruce Lee went to Hong Kong, made kung fu classics, and became a tragic movie legend on par with James Dean. Like his father, John Carradine, David had brushes of cinematic greatness mixed together with heaps of low budget dreck and an occasional cult classic thrown in. John was in Grapes of Wrath (1940), Stagecoach (1939) and The Ten Commandments (1956) to name a few. He was also in the Astro Zombies (1968) and Blood of Ghastly Horror (1972). David was in the early Scorsese films Boxcar Bertha (1972) and Mean Streets (1973) as well as Hal Ashby’s Woody Guthrie biopic Bound for Glory (1976). He was also in Dead and Breakfast (2004). While not on the level of Bruce Lee as a cultural phenomenon, Carradine still carried enough mystique to play the title in Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies.

For whatever reason, I’m still hoping that rumors of suicide are just that and that David Carradine went the way I always thought he would: from partying just a little too hard for a man his age. While the urge to practice tai chi moves to his old how-to videos may be hard to resist, you should also make the time to check out some of Carradine’s more interesting films. Larry Cohen’s Q: The Winged Serpent (1982) comes to mind, where Carradine chews the scenery along with Michael Moriarty as a mythical Mexican flying snake god menaces New York City. Also see Lone Wolf McQuade (1983), the movie where Carradine dukes it out with none other than Chuck Norris (!) to a soundtrack by Spaghetti Western maestro Francesco De Masi. Also check out Circle of Iron (1978), another project originally created by Bruce Lee but realized by Carradine, this time posthumously. Lee came up with the concept but Carradine was cast in the picture a few years after the Enter the Dragon star’s untimely death. Although Lee may have preferred it differently, the two actors will always be linked and both will be equally missed.

You can leave a comment for David Carradine’s family on his website.