MONDAY, MARCH 21 The week kicks off with Day 4 of what history will remember as--what? Tubegate? The Battle at Chapped Lip? Operation Starve-a-Tard? Whatever its historical tag, the minute-by-minute battle over Terri Schiavo, the Florida woman whose eating-disorder-induced heart attack led to devastating brain damage and a persistent vegetative state before her feeding tube was removed per judicial ruling last Friday, held the nation in its hysterical sway like Britney with stigmata. Christians posited the Schiavo struggle as ground zero in the long-simmering epic battle over the meaning and value of human life; cynics feared the whole fuss was right-wing retaliation for Million Dollar Baby's Best Picture Oscar, timed to divert the citizenry from terrifying political appointees and a stunning new war budget. But the final word will come from the justice system, as court after court will uphold Terri Schiavo's confirmed-by-numerous friends' last wishes: Please don't feed the vegetables.
•• Meanwhile in Minnesota: Jeff Weise, a 16-year-old Native American high-school student known for his self-isolation and pro-Hitler sympathies, executed the deadliest school shooting since Columbine, fatally shooting his police-sergeant grandfather and his grandfather's girlfriend before driving to Red Lake High School, where Weise fatally gunned down eight more people--six students, a teacher, and a security guard--before turning the gun on himself. Four days from now, President Bush will phone Red Lake tribal chairman Floyd Jourdain with his condolences--a gesture blasted by other prominent tribe members as too little, too late. "[Bush] should have been the first one to reach out to the Red Lake Indian community," said Clyde Bellecourt to Reuters. "He does not have any problems flying in to restore the feeding tube to Terri Schiavo. I'm sure if this happened in some school in Texas and a bunch of white kids were shot, he would have been there."
TUESDAY, MARCH 22 In a felicitous bit of timing, nothing happened today, allowing Last Days to revisit an item forced off yesterday's roster by all those tubes and shootings: The Seattle Post-Intelligencer's five-part investigative feature on the Experience Music Project, penned by P-I pop-culture queen (and onetime Last Days switch-hitter) D. Parvaz. While the Parvaz package bears an eerie resemblence to EMPty, a Stranger feature package from June 2004, we're going to let that slide. EMP @5: A Rough Experience crunches numbers that reveal rampant bloat and a significant degree of delusion: "Early '90s concepts" foresaw a 10,000 square-foot EMP drawing an anticipated 800,000 people a year at $4-$6 a head; present reality finds the 127,000 square-foot EMP hoping for 400,000 annual visitors at $19.95 a head. (For the stoned, that means the 12-times-too-big EMP is drawing half as many attendees as expected, who are required to pay three to four times the originally conceived price.) Add a series of morale-shattering layoffs, mysterious board meetings, and at least three different employee confidentiality agreements, and you've got an exposé worth savoring, about an institution that's increasingly less worthy of fretting over.
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 23 Speaking of fretting: Today the Schiavo Rodeo kicked into high gear, as Florida Governor Jeb Bush clamped on his drama-queen crown and applied for custody of what's left of Terri Schiavo. Wisely, the courts said no, but still, this whole thing has grown into Last Days' worst media nightmare, taking the fetishistic kitten-up-a-tree/baby-down-a-well public-empathy conglomeration to its most ghoulish extreme. Still, any saga featuring a 10-year-old boy getting arrested for trying to hydrate a brain-dead anorexic can't be all bad.
THURSDAY, MARCH 24 Speaking of women in trouble: Today invaluable public intellectual Stanley Crouch continued his campaign against rampant misogyny in rap with another great editorial in the New York Daily News. "The movement that young black women and their mothers and grandmothers are bringing to challenge the spiritual bilge of the worst of hiphop is clearly the most important American cultural movement of this new century," writes Crouch, dismissing the key defense that "these images provide a way for black men at the bottom to become successful…. And anything that makes money is good--especially if it's not illegal." And while Crouch rightly bemoans the plight of young black women for whom hiphop hoochies are role models by default, there are small signs of progress: Say what you will about his readymade persona and specious MC cred, but at least the Game--the straight-outta-Compton, Dre-produced nigga-with-attitude--rejects the easy bitch-bashing of his idols, opting for a world where women exist with an easy equality, and where the dreams of Martin Luther King and Left Eye carry equal weight (which doesn't make him not ridiculous, just not an asshole).
FRIDAY, MARCH 25 Nothing happened today, including neither the death and/or medical salvation of America's "It" girl, Terri Schiavo.
SATURDAY, MARCH 26 Nothing happened today, unless you count the 58 minutes Last Days spent gaping in awe and horror at Mr. Romance, the Oxygen network's new reality show searching for the next romance-novel cover model, hosted by goose-struck male supermodel Fabio, who opens the show with a personal recollection: "People ask me, 'Fabio, can there be another Fabio?' No--but there can be another Mr. Romance." As for the competition: For fans of the male package, it's a 15-car pileup of delights. Extra weird twist: The whole thing's produced by the original Mr. Romance himself--Gene Simmons of KISS. No, we are not making that up. Yes, you must watch Mr. Romance.
SUNDAY, MARCH 27 Speaking of negligible celebrities in negligible comebacks: Today was Easter, the annual Christian holiday commemorating the alleged resurrection of Jesus, the visionary Jewish carpenter whose large heart and hideous death have fueled centuries of comforting delusion. Meanwhile in cyberspace, fellow imaginary messiah Michael Jackson sat for a live Internet interview with Jesse Jackson, during which the frail, criminally-indicted King of Pop reminded folks he's the guy who made Thriller (Jacko's self-described disco version of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite), attempted to explain his court-disrupting medical ailments (previously cited as a "serious back injury," today described as a bruised lung and ribcage suffered after a slip in the shower), and revealed himself to be a scruple-free weasel. Declaring himself the victim of a vast conspiracy, Jacko claimed to be the latest of a series of unjustly accused "black luminaries," comparing his plight to that of former South African President Nelson Mandela. Dear Michael Jackson: Making a few brilliant records whose freakish commercial success enabled you to construct and maintain a vast and intricate private world where you may or may not have indulged in criminal sexual misconduct is very, very different than remaining jailed for three decades because of your political beliefs. But nice try, desperado.
•• Speaking of men who may very soon be dead or in jail: The week ends with a man masturbating on the bus, witnessed by Hot Tipper Aurora. On a late-night ride on Metro 72, Aurora watched as a fellow rider--described as an African-American man in a beige beanie--removed The Stranger from his lap to reveal his large, hard penis, which he was earnestly jerking. "Ew," writes Aurora, who promptly alerted the bus driver and fled.
Dear Aurora: Thank you for sharing. Everyone else: Get busy. Send Hot Tips to lastdays@thestranger.com.
