After his conviction, he decided to give up his career as a drug trafficker and pursue something slightly less risky — like acting — so he joined Chicago’s famous Second City improv troupe. The rest is history.

Here’s a link to the original Chicago Tribune article on the Smoking Gun.

Happy Groundhog Day everybody!

Learn more about tortured artists here.

Before he conjured up Gollum, J.R.R. Tolkien had to live through World War I.

Damn liberal guilt. Shouldn’t you be out hugging a tree or saving a dolphin or some shit?

Actually, no, you shouldn’t. The truth is, you are empirically justified in feeling more creative than your conservative counterparts. There is solid science to back you up.

In the landmark study “Creativity and Conservatism,” Stephen J. Dollinger, a psychologist at Southern Illinois University, assessed the creative aptitude of 426 undergraduates. He found that left-leaning students — or pinkos, ideologues, and America haters in talk-radio speak — unequivocally performed better than right-wing students in creative activities spanning visual art, literary art, and performing art.

To assess these skills, Dollinger asked participants to finish drawings that had already been started by an artist. Each drawing was rated for its creativity by three separate MFA students. The researcher also asked participants to take photos and write essays about each photo. These works were judged objectively by psychologists.

In the end, the judges largely agreed on the creative merit of the finished products, and the results showed that students who held favorable views on liberal issues — marriage equality, multiculturalism, reproductive rights, and whatnot — produced the most creative work. Meanwhile, those who held favorable views on conservative issues — pre-marital virginity, literal interpretations of the Bible, the death penalty, and other such niceties — produced art of a less inspired variety. Or crap in pedestrian speak.

This isn’t new research, by the way. Dollinger’s study was conducted in 2006 and published the following year on the research portal Science Direct. It followed a similarly revealing study that showed conservatives tend to eschew artwork that’s too abstract or challenging and instead prefer simplistic works (hence Thomas Kinkade and the films of M. Night Shyamalan). In other words, not only do GOPers make bad art, they also make bad art lovers.

Dollinger theorized that such reduced creativity could be the result of a greater threat-induced anxiety among conservatives (e.g., feeling threatened by the ambiguity of creative tasks), or conservatives’ inclination to follow convention and devalue imagination.

Mind you, Dollinger’s findings have surprised pretty much no one, with the exception of Karl Rove, who I hear is preparing a live rebuttal to air on Fox News. (Okay, not really.) But then why should we be surprised that the conservative mindset is one wholly lacking in creativity or artistic inspiration? Let us consider, for a moment, the kind of world most conservatives would prefer to live in. First of all, it would be a world devoid of homosexuals, so you can kiss theater goodbye. Ditto for sculpture and commercial photography. It would also be an all-white world, which rules out decent music, and a world that prohibits women from entering the workforce, so literature and dance would be out the window, too. What’s left? You guessed it: Ted Nugent and Craig T. Nelson.

To be fair, conservatives have, on occasion, contributed great things to the creative community. The late Johnny Ramone, for instance, was a bona fide Bush-loving, NRA-touting right-winger who still managed to be the greatest guitarist who ever walked the planet. And let’s be honest: Moby is further to the left than an ecology major at Evergreen State College, and that hasn’t exactly turned him into a creative genius. Statistical anomalies, after all, are part and parcel with the scientific method. Also, it’s worth pointing out that Dollinger found only a 5 percent creative variance between conservatives and liberals, but the results were still substantial enough to “support the presumption from a number of disciplines that conservatism and creativity are in some opposition,” as he put it.

Fortunately for conservatives with creative ambitions, all hope is not lost. Science may be against them, but let us never underestimate a conservative’s talent for ignoring science.

It’s cheaper than paint. And sexier.

Bigger Than Jesus: a shrine at Japan’s now-defunct John Lennon Museum

On December 8, 1980, John Lennon was shot to death outside the Dakota apartment building on New York’s Upper West Side.

Lennon’s murder sparked a deluge of worldwide grief on an unprecedented scale. Sales of his music soared in the months following his death. Meanwhile, some thirty thousand fans gathered in Lennon’s hometown of Liverpool, while separate memorials were organized at various locations around the planet. (This despite the fact that no actual funeral for Lennon was ever held.) Mourning fans gathered for days outside the Dakota, chanting and singing Beatles songs until Yoko Ono complained to authorities that the noise was keeping her up at night.

When the dust finally settled, there was little doubt that Lennon’s death would instantly transform the consummate Eggman from respected artist to revered deity. In fact, no other dead musical figure, with the possible exception of Elvis Presley, has so rapidly achieved calendar-ready status in the vast pantheon of Western pop culture.

And yet, ironically, the one person who had hoped to avoid such a fate was Lennon himself, who just three days before his death criticized the idol-worshiping culture vampires who seemed so determined to turn him into a musical martyr. “What they want is dead heroes like Sid Vicious and James Dean,” Lennon griped in his final interview with Rolling Stone magazine. “I’m not interested in being a dead fucking hero. So forget ‘em.”

In that same interview, Lennon also expressed a strong desire to break free of his culturally imposed image as the former Beatle turned renegade peacenik. And at the young age of forty, he still believed he had “plenty of time” to explore new territory. Sadly, it took only the actions of one deranged fan to show him otherwise.

Every year on the anniversary of John Lennon’s death, hundreds of doe-eyed fans converge on Central Park’s Strawberry Fields to celebrate his life and remember his music. In doing so, they also mythologize a man whose last request was that we not turn him into a myth. Imagine that.

The tortured writer Charlotte Bronte just bought Tortured Artists on her iPad.

The good news is Tortured Artists (Adams Media Corp., 2012) makes the perfect gift for any anyone who is interested in the creative process.

Looking for a Christmas gift for that temperamental, difficult-to-shop-for writer in your life? Sure, you could get your scribe loved-one another book of depressing French poetry she’ll never read, but why add insult to injury?

Tortured Artists is a great, affordable gift for artists and creative individuals of all types. The book consists of short, easy-to-read profiles of history’s most disturbed, depressed, and despondent painters, musicians, writers, actors, and filmmakers. Each story highlights the role that pain and suffering played in the artist’s work. Did you know that Frankenstein was inspired by a volcanic eruption? Or that Walt Disney created Mickey Mouse as an act of revenge? It’s all in Tortured Artists — a fun and inspiring examination of pain, suffering, and creative triumphs.

Tortured Artists is a fun, easy read — and it’s  loaded with fascinating facts about art history. Even non-alcoholic writers will appreciate it.

So please don’t waste another minute thinking about this. There are bigger things to worry about. Pick up Tortured Artists on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or wherever books are sold. It’s available in e-book form, too, if you want to be that way.

Master filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock comes back from the dead just to kill Anthony Hopkins, who looked ridiculous in Hitchcock makeup.

Modern Hollywood has unleashed upon the world two ridiculous-looking biopics of the master thrillmeister Alfred Hitchcock. The first debuted on HBO and features Toby Jones in the lead role. The second, which opened in theaters this weekend, stars Sir Anthony Hopkins, who is typically one of our finest actors.

The problem? Physically speaking, Alfred Hitchcock was a true one-of-a-kind (a silhouette of the man’s head became a logo, for Christ’s sake), which essentially means that no living bankable actor could play him without first donning a fat suit and a ton of facial prosthetics. Decked out in several inches of Hitchcock makeup, Jones resembles Don Rickles after an industrial accident, while Hopkins looks more like a bloated Klingon who’d eaten too much gagh.

Considering the logistical impossibility of casting a name actor who actually looks like Alfred Hitchcock, the classier thing for producers would have been to not make either of these movies. But then that would go against Hollywood’s inability to resist mining its own past for ideas.

Modern-day directors love a good tale of a tortured artist — almost as much as they love crappy makeup.