Forget About It, Jake, It's Switzerland

Poland has a short but sweet walk of fame, adorned with horribly misshapen stars.

Fate has not been kind to poor ‘ol Roman Polanski.

For one thing, he was Jewish in Europe during the late 1930s, which at the time was considered something of a social faux pas. He and his parents were sent to the Krakow Ghetto and soon enough the Nazis did what they were best known for and shipped Polanski’s parents off to concentration camps – his mother died at Auschwitz and his father narrowly survived a less-infamous facility somewhere in Austria. At the age of 10, Roman escaped the ghetto and spent the rest of the war in hiding with various sympathetic Catholic families throughout Europe.

Just before I wrote this, I was clipping my toenails when a fragment of one flew up into my eye and stung like a motherfucker. I got it out of there, but my eye still hurts a little bit. That was probably the greatest tragedy of my day, while meanwhile people like Roman Polanski go through life with memories of having their families hunted down like animals. Clearly, when they were passing out personal attributes, Roman Polanski got bad luck and I got exceptionally brittle toenails.

Despite his harrowing personal tragedy during the war, Polanski was able to pull his life together and go to film school. He became a successful filmmaker in Europe and the United States, making classic movies like Rosemary’s Baby, which is sort of like Juno if you replace Michael Cera with Satan. Roughly 25 years after the Nazis destroyed his childhood, Roman Polanski was riding high on a tidal wave of fame and married to beautiful actress Sharon Tate, with whom he was expecting his first child.

And then, in 1969, while Polanski was out of the country, members of Charles Manson’s murderous “family” broke into the Polanski home and murdered his wife and unborn child.

I feel kind of bad making any sort of lighthearted statement in a blog entry that spans both The Holocaust and the Manson Family, but I think this needs to be said: If this happened in a movie – a man has his life destroyed by the Nazis only to rebuild and have it destroyed again by an infamous psychopath – you wouldn’t believe it was even possible. The chances of one man having such horribly, tragic bad luck are pretty much astronomical. Keep in mind, the Mansons weren’t specifically trying to kill Sharon Tate – they were looking for somebody else, and she just happened to be in the house when they broke in. It is perhaps the worst possible case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Several years later, Polanski drugged a 13-year-old girl and raped and sodomized her. He pled guilty to all charges and was given a 90-day gap before sentencing to allow him to complete the film project he was working on – apparently, California in the 1970s was pretty lenient on the whole “child rapists freely walking the streets” thing. Polanski, upon hearing that his forthcoming prison sentence could be quite a doozy, fled the United States for France, where he’s stayed ever since.

A few days ago, Polanski was traveling in Switzerland when the Swiss authorities arrested him on the 31-year-old warrant, proving that the one area in which they will not remain neutral is fugitive child molesters. At the moment, the Swiss and US governments are cutting through the red tape surrounding a possible extradition, while prominent members of the international film community are protesting the arrest, pointing out that Polanski has already reached a civil settlement with his victim, who does not wish to see the matter pursued any further, presumably because she has already been the center of a media circus once and has had enough of it.

I love Roman Polanski, I really do – he’s a fabulous director and Chinatown is my favorite movie. And I think that it was a really classy thing for him to reach a financial settlement with the victim and do his best to atone for what he’s done. That being said, I think it would’ve been a lot classier if he hadn’t drugged and raped a 13-year-old in the first place. Sure, in some cases it might be easier to ask for forgiveness than permission, but I feel like statutory rape is not one of them – also, according to court records he was refused permission several times, so really he’s 0 for 2 at this point.

Roman Polanski is a convicted child rapist and there’s no way around it. Yes, he’s a very talented filmmaker and he only raped one child, and that was many years ago, but no matter how much you dress them up, the words “child rapist” just don’t ever go away. He committed a crime – a particularly heinous one, really – and he should be punished for it. That’s kind of how justice works. We can’t start handing out freebies just because one of the perpetrators directed The Pianist.

Remember when Paris Hilton got sent to jail for drunk driving a few years ago? Remember how happy we all were? I wrote one of my first ever blogs about how happy I was to see a famous person paying the same price as the rest of us slobs. The fact is, Paris Hilton committed a crime and was punished for it like anyone else, in spite of the fact that she really didn’t want to be. Roman Polanski, unlike Paris Hilton, is highly intelligent, respected, and talented, but he is guilty of something far worse than climbing into his Escalade after one too many chocolate martinis.

I don’t think that Roman Polanski is going to strike again – I think that he was in a pretty weird place in his life, which manifested in the horrible things he did to that poor girl. The thing is, being in a weird place might be a suitable explanation for flipping off your boss, but it doesn’t really fly in a sex crimes trial.

Polanski still has to serve his sentence, whatever it is, if for no other reason than to prove that everyone is equal in the eyes of the law – not just ordinary citizens and celebrities we hate, but the celebrities we like, too.

Truman Capps promises that he will have a less rape and genocide related update next week.

Technical Difficulties

Hey there - I've heard from a few people who've said that the last update didn't show up correctly when they tried to view it, so I'm trying to figure out some of the problems on my end. The post will be up later than normal - sometime tomorrow afternoon and evening, most likely - but hopefully you'll be able to see it at that point.

Best And Worst Mascots

BAD: Boilermaker Special/Purdue Pete

I guess I just don’t get it.

I’d venture that the reason most schools have animal mascots is because animals have the ability to be ferocious in ways that humans forgot around the time we invented the Snuggie. In addition to all that, though, there’s each animal’s special ability – Bruins (which, apparently, are some stuck up L.A. name for bears) are strong on the ground, while Boston College’s Screaming Eagles are capable of both flight and (reportedly) screaming.

But Purdue’s mascot is a goddamn train.

Trains are not what I’d call ferocious; sure, maybe if I was a Native American seeing one for the first time in the mid 1800s I’d be a bit freaked out at first, but when you strip away all the sentimentality a train is basically a big metal caterpillar that only goes where expensive track has been laid down first.

The primary advantage to an animal-based mascot is that animals seldom become obsolete – they may go extinct, but being dead has never kept anything from being awesome (just ask Obi-Wan). Trains, on the other hand, have been solidly kicked to the curb by airlines and, to some extent, busses for the past 35 years. The fact a Greyhound, which is little more than an unsanitary serial killer factory on wheels, is a more reliable form of transportation than Amtrak is a sure sign that Purdue’s mascot is in need of some serious change.

Well… No, that’s… That’s not really a step in the right direction. That’s just a guy. And frankly, I find it slightly depressing that we’re labeling him as the symbol of Boilermakers everywhere just because he makes boilers for a living. If we identified schools based solely on what their mascots did all the time, Oregon would have just won a match against the Cal Frantic Masturbators.

This girl may be over 18, but only because Oski kept her in his basement for 10 years.

GOOD: Indianapolis Northwest High School Space Pioneers

There's no picture available for the Space Pioneers, so I took the liberty of finding the best one ever.

I’m going to be honest – when I started this list, it was just going to be me making fun of college mascots I thought were silly. But then, by pure divine happenstance, I stumbled upon this gem.

Do I even need to explain what a great mascot the Space Pioneer is? Indianapolis Northwest High School seems to have clued into the fact that by adding “space” to an otherwise ordinary word you can instantly transform it into something that inspires awe in fans and strikes fear into the hearts of one’s enemies.

Of course, the Space Pioneers could well fall victim to the same problems I’ve got with the Boilermaker Express – in 30 years, Space Pioneers could be old hat and nobody will care anymore. But I’ve got to say that the thought of facing down a football team comprised of rough and tumble veterans of the space program is one hell of a lot more intimidating than a train.

Also, if I were the coach for that program, I would make this speech in the locker room before every game.

GOOD: Michigan State University Spartans

MSU can thank the movie 300 for completely revitalizing their choice of mascot, much in the same way that the University of Oregon owes a debt of gratitude to Emilio Estevez and all the fine people who made The Mighty Ducks. Of course, while our movie shot for children who liked hockey (a decidedly narrow margin outside the Midwest), 300 appealed to just about everyone who enjoys violence and testosterone, both of which are abundantly present in college football.

BAD: Glencoe High School Crimson Tide

True story:

I first visited Glencoe High several years ago for a speech and debate tournament. This was only a few weeks after the Indian Ocean Tsunami that killed something like 200,000 people. I distinctly remember walking through the front doors of the school and looking at the graphic of a frowning wave with balled up fists and thinking, “Damn – too soon, Glencoe. Too soon.”

A wave is not especially threatening because, all tsunami destruction aside, at the end of the day it’s still just water plus energy, neither of which strikes fear into the hearts of one’s enemies unless they don’t know how to swim. Also, Glencoe’s choice of illustration doesn’t do much to help matters – it makes the wave look more like a character from Dennis the Menace than an intimidating adversary.

The other issue I have – and bear with me here, folks – is that whenever I hear the words Crimson Tide, the only thing that comes to mind is the menstrual cycle. Unlike trains and tsunamis, the menstrual cycle is very frightening to most men, but I feel like it’s almost a cheap shot to play on that sort of fear. It’s like having your mascot be Doubty (“The fightin’, naggin’ suspicion that you’ll never find true love!”) or Blasty (“That mischievous, scrappy specter of global thermonuclear holocaust!”) or Toomie (“That bulbous, lumpy mass you can feel near your lymph node!”).

Truman Capps neglected to mention the Stanford Tree because really, what more can you say about a green felt cone with googly eyes?

Safeway Observations

It's kind of a fatty S, when you think about it.

1) Safeway has a very small DVD section where you can get movies like Ghostbusters II and Space Buddies for $7. Over the course of multiple trips to Safeway, I’ve discovered that they’re selling no less than five movies featuring Tom Selleck. There’s a couple of made-for-TV movies where he plays a gruff (and, presumably, mustachioed) small town detective along with two to three different westerns. I find this interesting given the fact that I could spend all day in the Blockbuster Video next door and find perhaps two Tom Selleck movies in the whole place.

2) Furthermore, only one of the movies available at Safeway features Gene Hackman (it’s Hoosiers). This is difficult to get my head around, because experience has led me to believe that Gene Hackman has been in every movie ever made, right on down to Super-8 Russian horse porn from the 1960s. I’m serious; ask somebody to name the first ten movies they can think of and I’ll bet you anything Gene Hackman was in one of them. The reason people don’t play Six Degrees of Gene Hackman is because it’d be like playing Six Degrees of People Who Urinate On a Regular Basis – you can’t swing a cat in Hollywood without hitting Gene Hackman.

3) Next to the DVD section is a rack of Personal Distress Alarms – essentially tiny keychain sized speakers which you keep on your person and then activate when you’re in Distress. Then, (as the package gleefully explains) the device will emit a 95-decibel alarm klaxon to “signal for help and frighten away your attacker.” I have two problems with this:

i) Unless a gang of unusually skittish deer attacks you, a loud noise isn’t going to frighten away somebody who wants to beat the shit out of you bad enough to try in the first place.

ii) People already have a built in Personal Distress Alarm. It’s called Your Voice, it’s highly versatile in terms of volume and content, and it doesn’t cost $14.95.

There were only two of these left on the shelf when I was there, as though their arrival at the store had sent waves through the community of paranoid people who can’t afford guns.

4) I’ve made a resolution that at any given time there will be no more than three (3) frozen dinners in my refrigerator, in a weak attempt to purify my diet. In order to go one step further, when I hit the frozen food aisle I make a point of searching out the organic options that aren’t full of ingredients that have words like “hydrogenated,” “syrup,” or “____ dye no. 7” in them. This limits me to about one shelf, half of which is occupied by items that are chock full of mushrooms, limiting my choice to Organic Mac & Cheese. This ensures very little variety, as most of my dinners for the past two weeks have either been pasta I’ve made myself or pasta someone else has made and I’ve heated up.

5) I buy an awful lot of Yoplait (item #307 on the list of Things I Do That Make People Question My Manhood), and I’ve noticed that for the past year or so they’ve included an offer on the top of the cup to donate ten cents to breast cancer research for every foil lid that consumers mail in, up to a total of $1.5 million. I don’t understand why if Yoplait is willing to donate $1.5 million to breast cancer research they don’t just fucking donate it already instead of waiting for millions of people to mail them their garbage first. Cut out the middleman and save some lives, already!

6) Whenever the automatic sprinklers in the produce aisle go on to water the merchandise, they play the sound of a thunderclap on the store P.A. system, presumably so that people will get the impression that a rainstorm has swept in to keep Safeway’s produce delicious and fresh, the natural way. This makes me sad every time I hear it, and I can’t quite put my finger on why.

7) Safeway is a wonderful crossroads of college hipsters and crazy hobos. On any given evening late in the week, one can find a small army of Greek life types buzzing around the store in search of mixers and ping pong balls as well as homeless people who appear to be lost. On my most recent trip, I passed by a homeless man on my way to the store who was screaming profanity at the top of his lungs at the cars that passed him on the road. Fifteen minutes later he was calmly paying the checkout lady for a tall boy of Miller High Life.

8) Pop-Tarts are not located in the convenient breakfast area. I see this as a profound mistake, because I’ve never encountered a breakfast more convenient than Pop-Tarts. When you don’t want to wake up more than ten minutes before class but know you’ll be hungry if you don’t eat something, you grab a packet of Pop-Tarts and eat them while you’re walking out the door. The only way it could get more convenient would be if beautiful women hand fed them to you and then moved your jaw up and down.

Truman Capps spends far too much time at Safeway.

What Have We Learned?

"Oh, THAT'S what he's writing about tonight."

About Kanye

Big surprise - an international superstar in a field where humility is not encouraged is actually a huge asshole. Who saw that one coming? This is the guy who has referred to Jimi Hendrix and Paul McCartney as “those artists in black and white photos,” has labeled himself the voice of this generation, and is on the record as saying that if the Bible were to be written today, he’d be a character in it. No, I was not surprised in the slightest when it turned out that he was a rampaging douchetruck.

Seeing him up there grabbing the microphone and completely taking a dump on the greatest night of Taylor Swift’s life was classic Kanye. When you type “Kanye West asshole” into Facebook, 43 different groups pop up. If being an asshole was basketball, Kanye West would be Michael Jordan.* By that logic, then, this VMA debacle would have gone down in history as one of the most astounding and incredible moments in basketball history – if asshole basketball were college football, it would be The Play.

*I would be Clyde Drexler. Mike would be Superman.

None of this makes what he did okay, of course. Being generally accepted as a gigantic asshole does not make it okay to be one (something Saddam Hussein figured out the hard way). Kanye apologized on his blog (available here if you like caps lock and questionable grammar) and then did the talk show circuit to further apologize. He’s been playing it out as one grand social faux pas, which might work when you double dip at a Super Bowl party and give everybody your cold but is less effective in the face of wrenching a microphone out of the hands of a 19-year-old girl to brown nose Beyonce.

Sources say he was drinking beforehand,* which is still no excuse, but I really think the whole thing was a publicity stunt that Kanye concocted on the spot. It sure as hell got his name in the papers, but I don’t think he anticipated quite how many of his followers were going to turn on him.

*And just why would you get sauced at the Video Music Awards? I understand why people show up drunk to the annual Oregon Marching Band Banquet, but the VMAs are a multimillion dollar event specifically designed to be incredibly entertaining.

Also, Kanye was wrong - this is the greatest music video of all time.

About America

I feel certain that if I were to travel through time and grab an 1840s plantation owner, a turn of the century Klansman, and a Nazi storm trooper and then show them the comments section for any YouTube video involving black people, all three would be thoroughly shocked and disgusted by the abundance and potency of the racism contained therein.

I’m serious – look for a video of Barack Obama, or Samuel L. Jackson, or a video of Phillip Seymour Hoffman at his nephew’s bar mitzvah where there’s a black guy walking past in the background and I guarantee you there’ll be at least three posts making heavy use of the N-bomb, coupled with suggestions of long term vacations to Africa.

So imagine the Internet’s reaction when a muscular black guy jumps onstage and impugns the honor of a cute, innocent 19-year-old white girl.

Well, at least he said please.

It’s been pretty well established that Kanye is an asshole, but the Internet reaction shows that a prominent opinion is that Kanye is an asshole because he is black, not because he’s just an asshole. In this case, the racial hatred spread from YouTube all the way to Twitter, which tends to be less racist in favor of simple inanity. So many people uploaded violent and racist remarks after the VMAs that one blogger went to the trouble of tracking all of them, which after the first few lynching threats became a lot like trying to track every drunk person at an Oregon football game.

To my knowledge, this is the same America that was thrown into a moral outrage a few years ago when Michael Richards started threatening to lynch a bunch of black people at one of his comedy shows. This leads me to wonder if the thousands of racist Tweets and YouTube comments come from people who are, in fact, ardent Michael Richards supporters – people who look at the video of him threatening to stick a fork up a black guy’s ass and say, “Fuck yeah! You tell ‘em! Lousy black people!”

The other possibility is that they’re flip-floppers in the worst sense – they’ll be more than willing to publicly crucify a public figure’s racist tendencies while simultaneously harboring the same ones. I agree wholeheartedly that everybody has some prejudice, but there’s a difference between a secret, deep down distrust of people of another race and the willingness to post Internet bulletins attached to your name declaring that Kanye West is “yet another nigger with a chip on his shoulder” who should “go back to the slime pool he crawled out of.”* It implies that there’s a lot of people out there who are either adverse to introspection or think they’re immune from the laws of common decency.

*My personal favorite is steverock100’s comment: “kanye is a dirty nigger. no offense to anyone else.” This forever illustrates that no matter how heinous your statement, “no offense” absolves you from any responsibility. Joseph Goebbels actually added the words “no offense” to the end of every one of his propaganda films.

Again, Kanye West is a huge asshole. Really huge. He’s sorry now, but he’s probably going to do something assholeish again in the future, because that’s just his way. He’s drunk on massive celebrity, and for that we have free reign to make fun of him and his ego. But folks, he’s just an asshole. He doesn’t deserve to be lynched or killed in a drive by, like a lot of Twitter subscribers suggested.

About Jay Leno

In the aftermath, Kanye appeared on Leno to further apologize for what he’d done. However, this apparently wasn’t good enough for Jay, who proceeded to ask Kanye if he thought his late mother would be proud of his actions, prompting one of the awkwardest silences in late night television history,* followed by tears.

*At least since Michael Richards’ apology on Letterman – and the parallels continue.

Fuck you, Jay Leno – Kayne did a stupid, nasty thing, and while in so doing he totally opened himself up for jokes for years to come, it doesn’t justify seizing on the emotionally traumatic death of his mother to humiliate him on live television.

Perhaps Leno’s logic was that since Kanye humiliated Taylor Swift, he deserved to be humiliated himself. I think he failed to realize that an asshole for an asshole makes the whole world stink.

Truman Capps knows Styx never would have pulled a stunt like this.

5 Famous Artists Who Could Fuck You Up: Tokyo Drift

And now, the highly entertaining follow up to Sunday's entry...

#2 – Cellini

Why he was famous

Sculptures, all of them nude, most of them of dudes.

Why he could fuck you up

At 16, Cellini was involved in a brawl in Florence. Apparently, punching people in broad daylight wasn’t acceptable in Florence no matter who you were, and Cellini was forced to flee the city to escape prosecution, a trick he no doubt learned from just about every other artist on this list. In Rome, Cellini’s sculptures and flute playing abilities won him the good graces of the Pope. It was during this time that a French douchebag named Charles III led an army to capture Rome and “chastise” the Pope, presumably with a sword to the face. However, the French had failed to realize that the country they were attacking was packed right to the brim with homicidal artists, and they wouldn’t have Paul Gauguin on their side for another 300 years.

It was here that Cellini dramatically put his life on the line in defense of his homeland, like an artistically inclined Italian Jack Bauer. He shot not one but two officers of the advancing army. The first was Prince Philibert de Charlon, a commander who clearly couldn’t have put up much of a fight being as his first name sounds more like a Muppet than a conqueror.

Cellini’s second victim was Charles III, the fucking leader of the advancing army, who he claims to have killed right outside the walls of Rome. For this act of bravery, Cellini was hailed as a hero and granted a pardon for his crimes in Florence, and everyone was so excited that they pretty much forgot about the fact that Charles’ army, deprived of its leader and hungry for loot, went on to sack the bejeezus out of Rome anyway.

Having saved Rome and earned his redemption, Cellini lived the rest of his days in quiet- Nah, just kidding. He actually went on to kill two more people, one of them a Roman police officer and the other a rival goldsmith, before being sent to prison… Ten years later. For embezzlement. It’s cool, though – he escaped.

#1 – Caravaggio

Why he was famous

Dramatically reducing the population of Italy through unbridled, nonstop murder. He also painted, occasionally.

Why he could fuck you up

Many artists are defined by their work while their personal lives exist more as colorful footnotes in their biographies. Not so with Caravaggio; the most reliable record of his life comes in the form of his criminal record, which is several pages long and spans multiple cities. Mention his name to any Art History major – just look for the nearest park bench, they’re probably sleeping on it – and the first thing you’ll hear about is how his life was basically Grand Theft Auto: Renaissance.

Caravaggio was born in Milan in 1571 and was forced to flee at the age of 21 after “certain quarrels,” one of which resulted in the wounding of a police officer. The next time you and your girlfriend quarrel over whether to rent Die Hard or Maid in Manhattan, know that Caravaggio is laughing at you, along with every healthy and uninjured cop in town. By the way, get used to the words “forced to flee,” because you’re going to hear them a lot in the next few paragraphs.

Like Torrigiano and Cellini, Caravaggio fled to Rome, which was apparently a mecca for violent tempered artists on the run from the law. He arrived penniless, but his considerable talent as an artist quickly earned him commissions from wealthy families, almost all of which he spent on alcohol when he wasn’t busy engaging in his favorite hobby: street brawls. Along with his paintings, Caravaggio became famous in Rome for how much he liked to fight, and this was in a time when just about everybody would get drunk and fight for lack of anything better to do. Internet comedy would not be invented for several hundred years.

Caravaggio.

Caravaggio’s rich patrons had done a pretty good job of protecting him from the authorities when he got into trouble with the law, most likely by paying the police a few thousand ducats in order to get Caravaggio released without any of his weapons or power ups. In 1606, though, his luck ran out when he killed a former friend and was outlawed by the papal authorities who controlled Rome. Once again, Caravaggio was forced to flee the city.

He spent a few months in Naples where he painted a few pictures before moving on to the island of Malta, presumably because he’d killed all of his potential clients in Naples. In Malta, Caravaggio did some painting for the Knights of Malta, a group of badass mercenaries who were charged with defending Christianity from Muslims. In return for his work, Caravaggio was knighted and inducted into the Knights of Malta, where he hoped to use the organization’s all-around coolness to earn a pardon from the Pope, or at least drop the name to pick up chicks.

But of course, Caravaggio being Caravaggio, he fucked that plum position up in good time with another of his trademark brawls, during which he smashed through the door of a house and seriously injured a fellow knight. In Caravaggio’s defense, Scrubs was a rerun that night and he had nothing better to do.

The Knights of Malta didn’t take kindly to this, and he spent most of September 1608 in a jail cell in the Knights’ fort. Then, taking a page from The Joker’s book, he decided he was about done being in jail and walked right the hell out of the mercenary army’s impenetrable fortress, first rappelling down a wall and then disappearing from the island. Historians still aren’t sure how he did this, but the general consensus is that he hijacked Da Vinci’s helicopter.

He acquired a six star wanted level soon after.

At that point, things started to get fucked up. Caravaggio spent time in Sicily before fleeing again to Naples, believing that he was being followed by unknown assassins. Most people would write this off as paranoid delusions, but Caravaggio had the last laugh when an attempt was made on his life, which resulted in severe facial disfigurement. To this day, nobody knows who the culprit was, but based on the nature of the crime it sounds a lot like Torrigiano.

Face slashed and eager to flee another city, Caravaggio took a boat north in hopes of staying ahead of the legions of people he’d pissed off over the course of his life.

And then he fucking disappeared.

In July of 1610 word reached Rome that Caravaggio was dead from fever, but no body was ever found, and no one in Italy was willing to accept that the Chuck Norris of the Renaissance would die of something so wussy as fever. Some say he faked his own death and went to work for the U.S. government, but if that were true, Osama bin Laden would've been hanging by his underwear from the Washington Monument on September 12, 2001.

Truman Capps has now exhausted his reserves of pre-written drivel and must return to the creativity mines for Sunday's update.

5 Famous Artists Who Could Fuck You Up

A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece for submission to Cracked.com about the more badass tendencies of Renaissance artists. They passed on the article, and I now pass the comedy directly to you. It's a long piece, so I've taken the liberty of splitting it into two pieces. This has nothing to do with me copping out of writing a blog during band camp next week.

PS - Should my high school art history teacher Mr. Nickel wind up seeing this, I hope that he accepts my most heartfelt apologies for taking advantage of artistic pioneers in the pursuit of cheap laughs.

Members of the “art crowd” are generally not perceived as pinnacles of manhood, from Andy Warhol’s all out, no holds barred gayness to the fat kid in high school who sat around drawing pictures of Pokemon. Sure, they can paint a pretty picture, but when the chips are down and people are getting ready to throw punches, it’s generally acknowledged that the artist in the room is the one curled up on the floor hoping his attacker will slip in the puddle of fresh urine.

However, this was not always the case. As early as just over 100 years ago, there were plenty of artists walking the streets who you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley. Artists like…

#5 – PAUL GAUGUIN

Why he was famous

Gauguin was a pioneer of early "The Simpsons" fan art.

Gauguin was a leader of the Post-Impressionist movement whose use of bold color brought about Synthesism while simultaneously bridging the gap to the Primitavist Movement and a return to pastoral themes in artwork. Also, he got pissed at a guy and chopped off his ear.

Why he could fuck you up

Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh were arguably the original BFFs. The two first met in Paris in 1887 and quickly hit it off due to a mutual interest in Post-Impressionism and, presumably, cornholing, because less than a year later they were living together in Arles with the intention of starting an art colony. Only in France is the cover story for a gay love affair even gayer than the sum of its parts.

Sadly, not all was well in paradise. Gauguin and Van Gogh fought often over their artistic differences, fights that were fueled by Van Gogh’s unraveling mental condition and the fact that their grand artist’s colony was still just two gay dudes in a rented room.

As the winter wore on, the weather worsened and both angry men were forced to stay cooped up indoors for days at a time. Cabin fever quickly set in, and as we all learned from The Shining, that can only end with somebody waving something sharp around.

In December of 1888, tensions between the two reached a breaking point, prompting Gauguin, an experienced fencer, to grab a sword (apparently these sorts of things are just lying around in an artist’s colony) and lop off part of Van Gogh’s ear, in an event that would go on to inspire the hit film Reservoir Dogs.

Gauguin threw his sword into the river and fled the scene while Van Gogh set about tending to his mangled ear – namely by leaving the chopped off piece of ear in the care of a friendly prostitute and then falling asleep. He and Gauguin never met again, although they exchanged several letters and, experts agree, struck an deal in which Van Gogh would say he cut off his own ear to save Gauguin from police action while in return Gauguin presumably would not come back to finish the job.

The clincher? In a letter to his brother Theo some time after the attack, Van Gogh commented, “Luckily Gauguin… Is not yet armed with machine guns and other dangerous war weapons.” This would be the last time in history that the concept of an armed Frenchman did anything but make people laugh.

#4 – LEONARDO DA VINCI

Why he was famous

The Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, a terrible movie with Tom Hanks.

Why he could fuck you up

Let’s begin by saying this – Leonardo Da Vinci didn’t actually do anything particularly violent or shocking. He spent most of his life painting, being famous, and (possibly) having sex with younger men. Although to clarify, this was during the Renaissance, and back then having sex with younger men was like having an iPhone.

However, in addition to all of his artwork, Da Vinci spent a lot of time sketching out potential war weapons in his notebooks, in which he wrote down his notes backwards so that his competitors couldn’t figure out his secrets.

Apparently he thought his competitors wouldn’t understand the complexities of a cannon with 12 barrels unless they could read his notes, which most likely read “BOOM, MOTHERFUCKER!” in backwards-Italian.

That wasn’t it. Da Vinci’s notes contained diagrams of shrapnel filled cluster bombs, helicopters, and a chariot covered in whirling blades (accompanied by multiple illustrations of decapitated soldiers, just in case you thought it was a bread maker or something).

Maybe you’re saying, “Bullshit! He just drew pictures of guns and stuff! He’s not so tough!” But that’s the thing – he spent hours sitting around drawing intricate and detailed diagrams of weapons of mass destruction, accompanied by notes written in his own secret language. Imagine if you saw somebody doing that in the lunchroom at your workplace. Or in the student union. Or in a post office. Would you fuck with that guy?

And that’s just some guy; this was Leonardo Da Vinci, widely regarded as one of the smartest people who ever lived. If anybody could make this stuff work, it would have been him. If he hadn’t lost interest in all these projects, there’s a very good chance we’d be living in the United States of Da Vinci right about now.

#3 – PIETRO TORRIGIANO

Why he was famous

A whole lot of sculptures of dead saints, some of whom you might have learned about if you hadn’t kept sneaking your Game Boy into Sunday School.

Why he could fuck you up

While artists like Gauguin waited most of their lives to fuck a guy up, Torrigiano started early, and he didn’t need a sword, either.

During the Renaissance, artists became artists by participating in apprenticeships offered by older, master artists. These apprenticeships would start from an early age and continue well into young adulthood, which really helped to facilitate the whole “sex with younger men” thing a lot of artists were into back then. Torrigiano was an apprentice of one such master.

Now, by all accounts, Torrigiano was a really good sculptor, especially for his age, and he outshone all the other students taking part in the apprenticeship save for one – Michelangelo Buonarroti.

Yes, THAT Michelangelo.

This was incredibly frustrating for Torrigiano – and who can blame him? It’s like if you were taking lessons and working hard to become a really great guitar player, but Jimi Hendrix was taking lessons from the same guy. Nobody gives a shit about you, they only care about the big dog.

One day, while both students were carving sculptures, Michelangelo made a wayward snarky comment, to which Torrigiano responded by punching the young master in the face (Oregon running back LeGarrette Blount is apparently a big Torrigiano fan). But this was no ordinary punch – the teenaged sculptor hit Michelangelo so hard that his nose was flattened, permanently disfiguring him.

Unfortunately for Torrigiano, breaking an artistic genius’s nose carried a pretty heavy penalty during the Renaissance, and he was forced to discontinue his apprenticeship and flee the city before the cops showed up. This probably made a pretty big dent in his artistic progress, but not nearly as big as the dent it made in Michelangelo’s nose.

Michelangelo was not as well known for his contributions to the Renaissance's quirky romantic comedies.

After escaping trial in Florence, Torrigiano settled in Rome, where he made several sculptures on commission before he decided he was done creating art with stone and instead wanted to create pain and suffering with his fists. Thus, he gave up sculpting for a while and became a mercenary in the employ of various powerful Italian lords. The most notable of these was Cesare Borgia, the Pope’s illegitimate son (celibacy being more of a guideline than a rule back then) who led a mercenary army that conquered a good-sized chunk of Italy. No doubt legions of defeated enemy soldiers left the battlefield with their noses flattened beyond recognition.

Torrigiano spent his last years in Spain during the Inquisition, which was precisely why they were his last years. Legend has it that when he became dissatisfied with a statue of the Virgin Mary he was working on, he smashed it (most likely with his nose-breaking fist) and was thrown into Inquisitional prison for heresy. Unwilling to let the Catholics have the last laugh, he starved himself to death before they could sentence him to any sort of punishment. That’ll teach ‘em.

Meanwhile, Torrigiano’s archenemy Michelangelo outlived him by 33 years in spite of bubonic plague outbreaks and frequent warfare between Italian city-states, and went down in history as arguably the most famous artist of all time. Historians agree, however, that his nose was ugly as fuck.

Truman Capps reminds you to tune in Wednesday for the thrilling conclusion!