John Waters on Leslie Van Houten(of the Manson family)....

[chefmike]

.....part one...fascinating stuff....

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-w..._b_246953.html

[Dirky]

Good article. The forthcoming book from Mr. Waters should be VERY interesting. I can't say I agree with everything he said about Van Houten's supposed 'rehabilitation'.

[chefmike]

You frequently hear Altamont referenced as the end of the Woodstock Generation and Flower Power, etc....but it was crazy Charlie and the Manson Family murders that really put the psycho-delic icing on the by then overbaked cake....

[Dirky]

It's good to see Charlie hasn't given up on his musical aspirations too.

Have you heard about this possible collaboration, Mike?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009...charles-manson

[dgs925]

Thanks for the link. Whenever one has a chance to hear John's opinion on anything, take it: whether you agree or not, the man has a way with words. I love his movies, and have read a book of his (I think it was "Shock Value") and found it most entertaining.

[chefmike]

Part two....

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-w..._b_246996.html

[chefmike]

Damn...she does kinda look like Hillary Swank...

[chefmike]

"Will there ever be a "fair" answer to how Leslie should pay for these crimes? Can you ever recover from being called "a human mutant" or a "monster" by the government, especially when you know that they were right at one time in your life? How can you feel optimistic about your own rehabilitation when you see yourself reproduced as a bald-headed dummy with an X carved in your head in Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum? How do you begin to deal with the pain of the victims' relatives when the world has turned your former image into a Halloween costume?

With patience. God knows, Leslie Van Houten has patience. Patience to not find religious fanaticism that would forgive her instantly and take away her responsibilities for her actions. Patience to know and accept that she can't take back the defiant and deluded things she was programmed to say at her first trial: "Sorry is only a five-letter word. It can't bring back anything." Or her rantings to the jury on hearing all the defendants, including herself, being sentenced to death, "You blind stupid people. Your own children will turn against you". Or the terrible thoughts she admitted to prison psychologists at the time, about how she "felt kind of bad" she didn't get to go the first night (when Sharon Tate, her unborn baby, and four other victims were brutally murdered). Or how she was "hoping if we did it again, I would get to go". Or worse. After "Tex" Watson stabbed both Leno and Rosemary La Bianca he told Leslie to "do something" and "feeling like a shark" or "a primitive animal, a wildcat who had just caught a deer" Leslie remembered, she stabbed Mrs. La Bianca sixteen times with a knife in the lower back."

[chefmike]

"I never told Leslie this, but off camera I had killed somebody, too. Accidentally. Completely accidentally. In 1970 Mink Stole and I were driving up Broadway, a Baltimore thoroughfare that is divided by a safety island. It was Sunday early afternoon, we were not on drugs or liquor, and an elderly man, without looking, stepped off the curb right in front of my car. His body flipped up and landed on the hood with his face pressed towards mine through the driver side's windshield. This image so horrified me that I have used it over and over in my later films (Tab Hunter run over in Polyester, the school teacher killed by Kathleen Turner in her car in Serial Mom, the "Fidget" character's near-death as he falls off the drive-in marquee and lands on his parents' car windshield in Cecil B. Demented). As I pulled over to the side of the road in shock, the man's body slid off the hood of my car to the street leaving indentation marks that reminded me of the "snow angels" you made as a child by lying down in snow drifts and waving your arms. "He's okay," Mink mumbled in hope. "No, he isn't," I said realistically as I heard his death rattle. A crowd gathered around the car and luckily, oh so luckily, a cop approached and said, "I saw it all happen and it wasn't your fault." What a miracle. I had long oily hair and was dressed in my usual thrift-shop-pimp-meets-hillbilly outfit and Mink was still in her "religious whore" period -- wearing all black clothing with tons of rosaries around her neck way before Goth. We looked like complete lunatics. I called my Dad to get our insurance information and he was immediately nervous -- "Is anybody hurt?" he asked. "...Well, yes... the man died," I had to admit. "Oh, my God!" I heard my poor father moan, "Now this!" "

[Dirky]

Squeaky Fromme is getting out.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/08/05/...rss_topstories