Art Thieves Steal The Turd

mboldened by the recent broad-daylight swiping of legendary Norwegian artist Edvard Munch’s famous paintings The Scream and Madonnas from Oslo, Norway’s Munch Museum (which is a terrible place to wander into stoned, but a hilarious name for a museum regardless of whether you pronounce it “Munch� or “Munk�), thieves in New York this week made off with The Turd, a controversial piece of conceptual art that was until very recently housed in the Museum of Modern Art in downtown Manhattan.

Upon hearing that there had been a daring daylight heist at the MoMA, terrified museum officials initially feared the worst.

“I almost shit my pants,� admitted curator Vaughn Cammels. “They could have made off with a Van Gogh, Monet or Picasso, priceless artworks which never could have been replaced. Those first few seconds were like a mini-nightmare.�

The missing piece, valued by museum officials as “impossible to sell,� consisted of a white porcelain turd on a dinner plate. Some museum employees were relieved to find out that R.H. Hiddelstein’s obscure piece of protest art from 1982 had been stolen, rather than one of the museum’s many easier-to-appreciate masterworks. Though understandably distraught over the theft, many have been looking at the bright side, pointing out that they can finally clean that spot on the wall. For years, few had dared to move The Turd, because none could tell if it was really porcelain or just a real turd painted white.

When asked what police were doing to catch the crooks, police chief Harold Almney insisted that the case had been given appropriate priority and that the police would start at nothing to bring these crooks to justice.

“The Turd is a crucial piece in understanding the development of modern sculpture,� explained art historian Checky Brazelton. “Without it, we would never have been blessed with any of the several related masterpieces that followed, including Bradnell’s Lung Chunk or Dolenski’s Snot on Toast. This is a major loss for the art community.�

“The what?� queried a surprised Lindsay Sommers, an intern at the MoMA. “Somebody stole that thing? I was using it as an ashtray on my breaks.�

Irregardless of the opinion of some part-time art critics, the artist Hiddelstein has been distraught since learning of the theft, vowing not to rest and planning to leave work on his latest sculpture-in-progress, the man-sized Shithead, on hiatus until the bandits can be brought to justice.

“You cannot understand my pain unless you have ever lost a child,� explained Hiddelstein after this reporter suggested he could knock out another piece comparable to The Turd if given twenty minutes and a plate of bran muffins. When asked if he wasn’t just being pretentious, Hiddelstein answered with a piece of interpretive dance that was way over the commune’s head.

When asked why the thieves left numerous priceless works of art hanging on the walls while making off with Hiddelstein’s obscure piece, authorities speculate that the thieves may have been either huge Hiddelstein fans, complete art novices, or just absolute morons. Others have speculated that the thieves came for a Van Gogh or Monet, but panicked when the non-silent alarms went off and grabbed The Turd in a hurry on their way out the door, so as not to leave empty-handed. However, a thorough inspection of the dumpsters outside surrounding buildings failed to lend credence to this theory.

“This is the new face of modern art theft,� explained face of modern art theft expert Carson Faulkner. “It’s brash, in-your-face, and usually pretty stupid. No longer are we living in the days of your father’s art thief, a suave motherfucker squeezing in through some high window with suction cups sewn into his gloves, limboing his way through a maze of laser tripwires and slipping a priceless masterpiece out if its frame using a high-tech black-market silica spray. Now it’s just a couple of retards barging in with a shotgun and making off with whatever’s easiest to carry, even if it’s a worthless piece of modern shwag or the trashcan over by the men’s room. It’s sad, really.�

Until new leads materialize, local authorities are scanning art auction listings for mention of the sculpture, and keeping an eye on eBay in case the thieves get really desperate. While there are several turds currently for sale on the auction site, and liberal examples of bad modern art, none yet appear to be the missing piece.

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In the interest of full disclosure, I'll start this story off by saying I don't know how I got to Las Vegas. These things just happen, and you either roll with the punches or you pull on a t-shirt that says "BIG, WHINY BITCH" and play the part. Since I was already wearing a pretty stellar Midnight Run tee, I decided to do Vegas like I'd gone there on purpose.

First thing's first, I've got to say the 9/11 tribute at New York, New York that you've been hearing about is a definite can't-miss. Every night at 9:11pm they fly a remote-control plane into the "twin towers" wing of the hotel and set off a shitload of fireworks and explosives, and Omar Bricks isn't ashamed to admit he got a little choked up standing on the sidewalk with all the other Vegas losers, clapping and cheering as the hydraulic towers went down and they shot some spare change and clothing fragments into the crowd and some of those Cirque du Soleil freaks did backflips off the roof. Leave it to Vegas to remind us what it's all about.

As far as the other casinos go, I still say the Mirage hasn't been the same since Roy had his nuts bit off by that tiger. Now they're advertising "Sigfried & Roy's Secret Garden and Dolphin Habitat," which sounds like about as much wild fun as a hysterectomy. I do understand the pussy move to less-threatening stage animals, but I don't think it's working out too hot since when I wandered into the show, one of the dolphins had just pulled Roy into the tank and was thrashing the shit out of him while Sigfried half-heartedly slapped at the beast with an oar. Funny shit, but probably not what Roy'd had in mind when they cracked open the full-body cast before the show.

I hear they're thinking of trying out ground sloths next, since that's one of the only animals Roy isn't afraid of now, but I'll bet you ten bucks one of those things finds its way into their hotel suite in the middle of the night and beats the shit out of Roy in slow-motion while he's sleeping. I tried to get the Mirage to give me odds on that, but they're not taking any more Roy-abuse action until he gets out of the hospital, out of respect and all that noise. But I'm thinking the Luxor might take my bet, those Egyptian hardasses have held a grudge against the Mirage ever since the Luxor-Mirage employee rumble back in 1998. I think they're understandably upset since the gaming commission ruled that they couldn't keep the Mirage employees as slaves after winning the rumble.

Speaking of the Luxor, I spent the better part of one night trying to sneak into the hotel pyramid's elevator, since I heard the crazy fuckin' thing goes sideways, down into the center of the earth. You know Omar Bricks had to see how that shit goes down. Too bad for the lame-ass truth: Turns out they guard that thing like the Pentagon men's room, you can't even get in without a room key or a much better grasp of the Vulcan neck pinch than I can take credit for. I won't lie and say it's the first pyramid Omar Bricks has been thrown out of, but at least in this one they let me out on the ground floor.

I've always thought that Vegas is basically large-scale mini-golf with beer, though they'll usually kick you off of the mini-golf course for bringing in hookers. Advantage: Vegas, there. This time I decided to test my theory and golf the strip, like in that video with the guy who sings like Elmer Fudd. You kind of have to make up your own par, since it's not posted, or if it is, the sign's been plastered over with titty posters and plans to build a new casino on the sidewalk in front of some existing casino. That's the downside of a town with no rules: the course etiquette blows.

Now nobody would claim Omar Bricks is a world-class golfer, maybe the class of the commune offices, but that's like winning a beauty pageant in a burn ward. Mainly I just swing hard and wait to laugh, if you hit the ball hard enough, something funny is almost guaranteed to happen. Especially if you're blindfolded, sounds are even funnier when you have to imagine who's making them. So I don't know where this cop got off suggesting that I was the one who hit a golf ball into the penthouse at Caesar's Palace. If I had that kind of aim, I'd be shanking that shit on ESPN. Not to mention having Nike paying the big bucks to put their logo on every piece of clothing I'm wearing and shaving it into my hair, like Tiger Woods. I don't know how golfers get away with that shit; if porn stars had those kind of commercial cajones they'd have condom brand logos tattooed on their balls.

Long story short, I had just hit a nine iron up the Eiffel Tower at the Paris when a cop asked me if I had a permit to hit golf balls into a crowded hotel. The dude scared the shit out of me since I'd just been ignoring him standing there; I thought he wanted an autograph or advice on grips. I showed him my ski pass from Vail Mountain, which usually gets the job done since most people don't like to read. But this guy was some kind of bookworm freak and he figured out the pass didn't say anything about playing the Bellagio fountain as a water hazard, so I spent the rest of the day ducking the cops and hitting the casinos in an oversized Ronald Reagan mask.

If you do go to Vegas some time soon I'd recommend checking out the Treasure Island boat show, if you can throw a baseball hard enough you can spend your Saturday night being chased by guys dressed up as pirates, which is good for at least a few months of local fame. A word to the wise though: those phony fucks don't hold themselves to any kind of real pirates' code when it comes to street fighting, and they're not above calling in some hard-hitting showgirls when the going gets rough. Bricks out.

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The gaudiest fad of the 1950's had to be the 3D movie. The early 50's were a desperate time for Hollywood studios, as audiences were staying at home on their big fat asses in record numbers and movies were faring poorly in competition with television and communist witch hunts. Studio execs were willing to try anything to get more people into the theaters, even toying with the notion of making films that weren't big fetid balls of dung. But before they could go that far, the studio heads at Universal discovered that they'd accidentally made the same movie twice.

Universal had bankrolled The Hungry Jungle, which featured a young Charles Bronson running like hell away from man-eating tigers for two hours, and at the same time they had inadvertently financed D.A. Steuben's cannibal tiger picture Run Like Blood. Rather than shelling out promotional funds for both films to wastefully compete against each other, the studio decided to play both of them, simultaneously, on the same screen. That way they could cover up their gaffe while boasting twice as many stars running away from twice as many man-eating tigers in one movie. Like I said, these were desperate times and it should be noted that back then, guys couldn't hold their liquor.

Unfortunately the "movie" didn't make any sense when played this way, but this was only a minor setback. A young Universal intern soon discovered that thanks to poor quality control each of the films was tinted a slightly different color, and if you watched the composite film while wearing a pair of the red and blue "Wacky Glasses" given away free in boxes Oat Shmote kids' cereal, it came out kind of sort-of in 3D. The intern was thanked for his input, then immediately fired since he was obviously stealing from the studio to be able to afford drugs that good.

The idea stuck though, and the composite film Hung Like a Jungle was released in 3D as a promotional gimmick in 1952. The movie was a gigantic hit, with the 3D technology making audiences sicker than a dog on a Ferris wheel, an experience many filmgoers petrified by the boring 1950's seemed to enjoy. All summer long, audiences suffered through a kind of nausea they wouldn't experience again until The English Patient was released in 1996. The trend caught on like wildfire, and fifteen more films were released in 3D during the next three days, most of them soft-core pornos. Unfortunately for Hollywood, 3D movies were soon banned since public health officials couldn't be convinced that hundreds of moviegoers spending two hours drenched in their own vomit was just good clean fun.

Deprived of 3D cheesecake by The Man's uptight cronies, American youths in the 50's were eager for a new thing to come along and waste their time. Thanks to Australian DUI king Chuckie Dubing, they didn't have to wait long. Dubing discovered the boomerang while pulling the body of a dead aborigine off the hood of his car during a drunken one-man rally race through the outback one night in 1953. The strange crooked stick struck Dubing's fancy, and he extrapolated that it must be a hunting stick used to kill wild game birds in the bush. Dubing further extrapolated that its crooked design must allow the stick to curve in the air and return to its thrower, and this is the concept he sold to Wham-o later that year. In actuality, the aborigine was just carrying it because he wanted to show his family the funny crooked stick he had found under a tree.

Regardless, Wham-o mass-produced copies of the stick as a children's toy, and within a year millions of "boomerangs" (the name came from Dubing's approximation of the sound the aborigine made hitting his car) had been sold despite the fact that nobody anywhere had ever had one fly back to them after being thrown. Wham-o deserves a great deal of credit, however, for recognizing that few would risk appearing physically inept by claiming that the boomerang just flew kind of lopsided and herky-jerky into your neighbor's bay window every time you threw it.

Probably the only 1950's fad that ended up being worth three-quarters of a damn was the PEZ dispenser. The candies themselves had been around in Europe for twenty years, sold hilariously to American tourists who didn't know PEZ was the German word for piss. It wasn't until 1952, however, that Germany got revenge on America for kicking their evil little asses by marketing the PEZ candy in irresistible dispensers with the heads of popular political figures on top. Before long, Americans couldn't help themselves but eat candy out of Franklin Roosevelt's neck, making true Hitler's cryptic vow from 1941 that nobody had understood at the time. Eventually over the years, political bitterness died down and American children were eating candy out of Henry Winkler and Kermit the Frog's necks as well, continuing a bizarre tradition that rivals any of the crazy shit the Orient ever dreamt up.

That'll have to do for the 50's, although I wanted to go into how they pulled the first batch of Silly Putty out of a Yak's ass; there just isn't time. Keep an eye peeled for future columns, when we'll take a look at how other generations wasted their time between wars and the occasional worthwhile dance craze.

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