I swear, who comes up with this cockamamie shit? Of all the things going on in the world some group of hippies has to go and make a day where you’re supposed to say hello to total strangers. What the fuck kind of commune are these poor souls living in? You say hello to some random stranger on my streets and you’re likely to: a) be arrested for propositioning a transexual hooker; b) get stabbed in the eye with a dirty kitchen utensil; or c) initiate a bizarre series of events that will likely end in an underground scenario involving Mr. Merlin whipping your bare behind and giving you a Gummi bear for being a good little submissive. So no, I’m not going to run out and offer up willy-nilly unsolicited salutations for no apparent good or unprofitable reason whatsoever. But what I will do is use it as a half-ass excuse to retrieve something from the past of jackass that never quite made the cyber leap to online infamy: the varied tagline introductions to the old television show, first and foremost Johnny Knoxville’s “Human Cannonball” burst onto the basic cable scene. Anyway, someone let me know when it’s “World Go Fuck Yourself Day.” That’s got Hallmark fun written all over it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Hello_Day

Our friend David Harris sent this over the other day. After I watched I replied, “I don’t get it.” Apparently Cliver didn’t get it either because his response was, “Good, neither did I.” But there are some big old dicks in this, so check it out.

Let me just say that I loved the time we spent filming the closer to jackass number two. I know some viewers were mystified by the orchestrated wonder of it all, but those really were the best of times—especially after all those quality months spent working and traveling together. There was a real sense of family and spirits were running fine, damn fine. And once we came to the end of the production rainbow for this song and dance number, well, it was rather bittersweet knowing that all would soon be over and done with. At times, yes, the song itself bordered on dreadfully monotonous throughout the days on set (not to mention that a few of the guys couldn’t hold a tune to save a drowning orphan’s life), but the lyrics still found a sentimental home to squat within. Johnny Knoxville made it no secret that he didn’t exactly want to stop filming then, and by god I didn’t really want the crazy train to pull into the station either. Stop down and return to reality? Fuck that. Before I bust out the box of Kleenex, though, what I really miss about the professional Hollywood set life is having everything lit so goddamn beautifully. Day to day jackass crap was obviously never about high production value (even the term “low” would be putting it politely), but hot damn, what a difference several thousand dollars in lighting and expert lighters will do—at least for me, a lowly and lazy still photographer, that is. This day with Steve-O was especially nice, what with the warm tones, scintillating blues, and gold-plated league of synchronized swimming women.

(photo by Sean Cliver; Hollywood, CA; 2006)

For the handful of you who might actually be wondering why there haven’t been very many new installments of the jackassworld mail lately, the dip is directly proportionate to the decline in viewer mail that has graced our postal box recently. Fortunately for you, I have had time to sit around and hypothesize about the decline since there hasn’t been anything to open and have concocted a few theories. Is the drop associated with the election fever that recently swept our nation? Doubtful. Is it the fault of the crashing stock market and our blossoming recession? Perhaps, but since a good deal of our mail comes from overseas, that theory doesn’t totally hold water. Or, is it simply the fact that we ran out of clever bumper stickers that said juvenile things like “fart” and “poo”? Personally, and somewhat ironically, I think it was the stickers that broke the proverbial camel’s back. Then again, maybe I was wrong about my second theory and all of our U.S. fans did their banking at Washington Mutual and CitiBank.

Nevertheless, in the past month, we have received two packages—both special in their own way. One made the 8000 mile journey (approximately 13000 km for our metric friends) all the way from Iran. Community member, Sima, sent us a box from the Middle East, and Mr. Knoxville opened it himself. You’ll be able to see his cameo once we get some more material together for the next installment. Oh… and rest assured that I will have some dumbass throw prepared to cut to his clip like, “Take it away, Johnny!” Or, maybe even, “Whadda you have for us, Johnny?”

We also received a box from Allison in Wisconsin, which I absolutely need to mention now, because if I don’t, her gift (see photo) will soon be completely inedible. She says that she came upon the recipe while checking out Dave Carnie’s “Faces of Broccoli” link of the day in late October. A thousand jackass thanks to Allison! Now that we have a documented picture of her gift, I’ll let the boys in the office finally dig in. I know they’ve been waiting patiently.

Lastly, if you or any of your friends will be sending mail to the Los Angeles area and are interested in it potentially being featured on the world famous jackassworld website, please address it to:

jackassworld.com
7510 W. Sunset Blvd. #600
Los Angeles, CA 90046-3408

There’s at least a couple people who bemoan the death of Big Brother. Apparently skateboarding needs “something like that.” It’s true, skateboarding can appear to be a bit too serious—a bit too cool, if you will—at times. Which is comical when you think about the skateboard industry as just a bunch of men riding around on a wooden toy. And they’re worried about their image?

Imagine if there was a hopscotch industry. “Hopscotch Magazine!” Photos of all these dudes looking all hard with their flashy clothes and diamonds on their fingers. Pulling up to the hopscotch park in a dope Hummer with dubs. Bus bench ads with the hopscotch xgames gold medal winner. Shit would be dope, dude.

Fortunately there are still people who ride skateboards and realize how fucking retarded it is. Some of those people are in the Midwest and they call themselves “Beez.”

I first read about the Beez videos in The Skateboard Mag a few issues ago. So I made some inquiries and was eventually contacted by Russ Clark, the head Bee himself. He kindly sent me a DVD. And I must say, this is not your usual skateboard video. Like the original review I read about it, I don’t really know what to say other than, “Delightful.” I haven’t seen anything like this since the Tiltmode video. If you’re sick of the usual flippity-flippy-huck-myself-off-a-cliff skate video, than this is for you. Even if you don’t skate, you’ll enjoy this video. Do yourself a favor.

Extra bonus review notes: One of the Beez fellas has a cat named Gary. That makes three cats named Gary. Mine, the Beez Gary, and Birdo from Consolidated’s Gary. The Beez Gary was originally named Doug, but one night Russ was staying at Doug’s house and Doug kept him up all night. In the morning, an unrested Russ complained about his sleepless night and mistakenly referred to the cat “Gary.” My Gary was named Gary because I thought he was a girl and Gary is one of the stupidest names on the planet.

The name “Beez” comes from a story about two of Russ’ childhood friends. Nerd brothers, apparently. They were in the backyard when they… here I’ll let Russ tell the story:

“The Beez name comes from a story about two nerds I knew in high school. They weren’t totally socially awkward, but they were definitely ‘indoor kids’ (one of them was afraid of deer). I’ll try to make it concise:

Basically, these two nerds are hanging out in a backyard. They simultaneously spot a swarm of bees, turn to each other, and scream “BEEEEEEEEEEEEES!” in an involuntarily shrill, girlish tone. Sprinting toward the front yard, they first had to navigate a three-foot-wide, 15-foot-long corridor with an incredibly sharp turn at the end. The new black top driveway was slick as ice, and they barreled out of the turn and onto the driveway at the wrong trajectory, and with way too much momentum. Almost immediately after reaching what they thought was a safe zone, they were both about to eat shit, big time. One of them hits the ground face first, pinning his glasses between his face and the driveway, pushing pieces of the broken lenses into his face. Both were on the ground, stunned by the fall. One of them had a bloody face with broken glass sticking out of it. Yet, they were both laughing hysterically.

“That story seemed to match part of what we’re interested in. Just charging at something recklessly, for the most stupid and pointless reasons. A moment of pure, ridiculous chaos that’s performed seriously, but with silly (and often painful) results.”

You can get the DVD at http://beez.wiskate.com for $10 (shipping included). Do it.

Of all the early lessons to be learned from our sordid experiences on the first season of jackass, the one rule we really just couldn’t seem to get a handle on was that you can’t count on nature. Time and time again Mother Earth attempted to school us on this principle, yet we still got that fanciful quixotic hair up our ass to take another bumbling run at it.

Our strained relationship first began with the innocent “Bread Suit,” a seemingly uncomplicated plan to have Johnny Knoxville layered in slices of bread and sent out to confront the “ravenous” fowl that frequent the few urban watering holes in and around Los Angeles. Shared by all were Hitchcockian visions of feathered fiends descending en masse to feast upon the bread (and hopefully a wee bit of Knoxville as well), but in reality the assorted pigeons, ducks, and geese simply turned a blind bird eye and regarded his intrusion with nothing more than ignoble curiosity. As fate would have it, though, the “Bread Suit” just so happened to be our inaugural shoot with a formal production crew of seasoned MTV veterans, and more than a few eyebrows were seen raised that afternoon with the silent question, “Who the fuck are these fools?” with regard to our exceedingly pathetic first impression. From that day forth, the term “Bread Suit” went on to represent the code word for any jackass shoot that ran aground in a tanker of abysmal failure.

The one saving grace is that a blown shoot with most any creature other than a human could usually be salvaged with a redeeming visual novelty. Take the “Abe Lincoln Beard of Leeches” for example. In treatment form the idea sounded highly probable: “Suited up in a Lincoln-like black ensemble, Johnny Knoxville has living leeches applied to the lower regions of his face. Once a glistening, blood-engorged beard is suckered in place, Johnny then recites the Gettysburg Address.” In actuality, though, the leeches didn’t want anything to do with Knoxville’s blood and refused to latch on for any duration of time. With the original concept rapidly going up in figurative flames, he resorted to lying on the floor as everyone took turns throwing gobs of leeches onto his face (along with a few vain attempts at stuffing them down the front of his pants). Johnny then sprinted the final improvisational distance by cramming a fistful of the non-compliant parasites into his mouth. Although this wasn’t exactly what we imagined happening with the skit, everyone was quite pleased with the horrifying outcome.

Since we seemed to be having a particularly difficult time in getting wild species to cooperate with our silly whims, we then attempted to employ “trained” animals in hopes of a more favorable result. While this route did afford us a relatively larger selection of exotic critters to play with, it too proved to be a relative farce at times (and a costly one at that). Our budget took several critical hits before we learned that animal trainers will tell you just about anything to lure you into their menageries. Case in point, the first attempt at “Bunny vs. Dog” with Chris Pontius, when a wrangler assured us on the phone that his attack dogs were top-notch and vicious as all hell. On location, however, we were dismayed to find that his definition of “vicious” extended no further than heated barking and the sporadic nibble before turning tail and bolting from the big pink bunny. The $6000 day wasn’t a total waste, though, because we did film a show opener with Knoxville lying beneath an elephant and a bit where he had his costumed bottom sniffed by a roly-poly grizzly bear.

This isn’t to say that all of our affairs with the outside world were of the “Bread Suit” variety on jackass. Once we finally hooked up with Manny Puig, a man blessed with the ability to commune with some of nature’s most deadly creatures and live to tell about it in the show Extreme Contact, our environmental luck finally turned up a notch. If nothing else, at least we weren’t slumming on the fringes of the wild anymore. With Manny’s assistance, our cast was able to frolic with hammerhead sharks, venomous rattlesnakes, poisonous jellyfish, wild alligators, and full-blown wriggling earthworms, the overall basis of which launched the premise for Wildboyz, a show starring the remarkably dynamic and bite-worthy duo of Chris and Steve-O.

I should note, however, that the “Bread Suit” was met with moderate success in the streets of Amsterdam, where the pigeons proved to be of a much more experimental and open-minded generation. Fucking hippies.

Watch more jackass here:

everything jackass

Well this certainly brings new meaning to the terms “Hershey Highway” and “Fudge Tunnel” don’t it? But then, who’s butthole is shaped like that? It looks like a taco? Or the inside of a vagina? Then again it’s English and English people are all fucked up all over the place. I guess they have taco shaped anuses. That’s the closest you’re going to get to a taco in England because Mexican food gets worser and worser the further you are from Mexico. I saw a “mexican” restaurant in London and boy did I laugh my ass off. If I had known about their taco-shaped fundaments, I would have stepped in and ordered a butthole. Anyway, funny idea, poor execution. I give it a C-. See me after class.

While dredging my hard drive yesterday for Dimitry Elyashkevich’s sweat-soaked moment of dream fulfillment, I stumbled across this other arty angle of Bam Margera and Johnny Knoxville. Doesn’t take much to pick out the veteran professional here what with his ever savvy eye for the camera no matter where it may be. Not to discredit Bam, of course, who I think was just as nervous as Dimitry about keeping his dance steps in uniform line. Well, that or maybe the horse that was about to treat him and Ryan Dunn like a pair of wishbones on Thanksgiving Day.

(photo by Sean Cliver; Hollywood, CA; 2006)

Part 8 of the jackassworld road trip, in which our tourist trap visitors—Wee Man, Chris Pontius, Danger Ehren, Preston Lacy, Dave England, Mike Kassak, Loomis Fall, JxPx Blackmon, Scott Manning, Dimitry Elyashkevich, Mike G., Rick Kosick, and Sean Cliver—hit up a few local Santa Cruz skate parks before arriving at the mystery decision to stop at the world famous Mystery Spot. Things get even more mysterious in San Jose, though, when Cliver takes his computer out to the Blank Club for a late night live webcast to amuse 20 or so random people living in various parts of the world.

(Music: Smut Peddlers “Do The Flop”, Joe Mora and Sign of the Fox “It’s So Good”)

Watch all Road Trip clips here:

the jackassworld road trip fall 2008: video archive

jackassworld road trip fall 2008: blog archive

Yet again I must express my sincere wonder at how some of this shit never skidded onto the assorted jackass television series DVDs. A close accompaniment to “Duck Hunting” with Raab Himself, “Skeet Shooting” is another paintballin’ welt-fest in which Johnny Knoxville and Ryan Dunn escape relatively unscathed while Raab is lit up like a backwoods Christmas tree. But whereas “Duck Hunting” found a respectable digital rest home, “Skeet Shooting” all but disappeared into that mucky green moat of Arasapha Farms. A shame, because I’m pretty sure Jeff Tremaine spent a long time crafting those matching bull’s eyes on Raab’s sick ass cheeks.