Johnny Lewis. (Getty Images)

Johnny Lewis, a 28-year-old actor known for his role as Kip "Half Sack" Epps on FX's Sons of Anarchy, has died. Los Angeles authorities tell TMZ that Mr. Lewis is also their only suspect in the murder of 81-year-old Catherine Davis, from whom the actor rented a room.

TMZ reports on the awful scene discovered after cops arrived at Ms. Davis's Los Feliz home:

According to our law enforcement sources, 28-year-old Lewis was found in a driveway Wednesday morning in the Los Feliz neighborhood -- and the elderly woman who owned the home was found dead inside ... the victim of a homicide. Investigators say they believe Lewis beat the woman to death.

Mr. Lewis, who once dated pop star Katy Perry and also starred in films such as AVPR: Aliens vs Predator--Requiem and The Runaways, also allegedly attacked two men at the scene with his bare hands and a 2X4. TMZ reports the actor seemed "phenomenally strong" and may have been on PCP or meth at the time of his death.

The Los Angeles Times reported that Catherine Davis was indeed bludgeoned to death.

It isn't clear whether Johnny Lewis died while trying to flee the scene or committed suicide.

Lady Gaga, not thinking of the children. (Screengrab)

James Molinaro may know who Lady Gaga is but he probably isn't aware of her fandom, the "little monsters," and how they might react to an NY1 report that Mr. Molinaro referred to the pop star as a "slut" while launching an anti-drug campaign Monday night.

The performer's fans are fiercely loyal and may not take well to the Staten Island Borough President's characterization of their idol, whom Mr. Molinaro said was part of a celebrity culture that promotes drug use, among other things.

As reported by NY1, Mr. Molinaro said that to him, the artist formerly known as Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta is "not an actress, she is a slut in the pure--in the pure meaning of the word."

A photo published with NY1's brief account of Mr. Molinaro's remarks showed the Staten Island pol gesturing at a board with the legend, "STOP glorifying drug use in the media" and displaying what appeared to be photos of Lady Gaga toking up during a recent stage performance in Amsterdam. The performer can be seen destroying our nation's youth in the concert video below.

False advertising

While this endeavor was entertaining the first time around, we're not sure how well it's going to play with the Weed Van, a cross-country vehicle with lots of druggy imagery on the outside and actual pot smokers "Kush" and "Dro" on the inside. The biggest problem with these Mary Pranksters is their non-buzzable product: despite costing $5 a (lolli)pop, the candy you buy from the weed van is made out of hemp oil, and will not get you high.

ANIMAL filmed their trip with the two businessmen to see how they operated:

Rolling in the Weed Van from ANIMALNewYork.com on Vimeo.

Sorry, but what is the world coming to when you can't even get high off of candy given to you by strangers riding around in a drug van? Who themselves are smoking weed? That's just bad advertising, that's what that is.

Photo credit Twitter

In last week’s installment of her Vice column, “Amphetamine Logic,” Wild child blogger Cat Marnell announced that her time at the hipster web mag was coming to an end.

“I’m writing my last columns,” Cat Marnell explained when we reached her late Friday afternoon .“I almost feel addicted to them, like I could go on forever.”

However, Ms. Marnell, who celebrated her 30^th birthday earlier this week, is ready for her next venture. She said she has become a perfectionist. “I’ve  just got to do it right. When you are writing weird, it’s make it good or go home, you know?” Ms. Marnell noted she scrapped this week’s column because she wasn’t happy with it and missed her deadline.

“I miss my deadlines all the time, and my editor just has to deal with me like Jane did.” Ms. Marnell was the Beauty Editor at xoJane.com until June. Ms. Marnell said she still talks to Jane Pratt all the time, and they plan to have dinner soon.

“I love her, she’s the great love of my life,” Ms. Marnell said of her erstwhile mentor.

But, even though she readily admits she's difficult to deal with, Ms. Marnell said she has enjoyed a great working relationship with Vice EIC Rocco Castoro.

“I mean, I’m a nightmare person to have work for you,” she said. “Half the time they give me edits and I don’t accept them and they are cool with that.”

“Rocco is very empathetic. He’s not happy that I have missed my deadline like multiple times. He’s offered to get me help if it’s a substance issue. He’s manly, I’ve never had a male editor-in-chief.”

To illustrate Mr. Castoro's testosterone quotient, Ms. Marnell told us about how he invited her to an upcoming Vice BBQ by texting her pictures of tomatoes and cucumbers (“so cute!”) to entice her. “He was like, you need to come to my backyard and grill meat.”

Ms. Marnell is preparing her book proposal, which she described as 80 percent done and said she hopes to have finished by next week. She noted that she should have already finished it this summer and said her agent, Byrd Leavell (who reps Tucker Max) of the Waxman Leavell Agency is mad at her for taking so long.

She originally thought her book, which she described as The Devil Wears Prada meets The Basketball Diaries was going to be an addiction memoir. Instead, she now sees it “not as a druggy book, but more about how it worked out.”

“As soon as I said, 'Fuck it,' things started working out for me,” she said. Accordingly, Ms. Marnell said she has adopted a new motto, which she got from a wheelchair advertisement on the side of a bus: “If you can’t stand up, stand out.”

Although known for her drug use, Ms. Marnell believes her writing and progress towards some semblance of sobriety is often overlooked.

“I go to parties, but I don’t really party that much. I’m not, like, Charlie Sheening,” Ms. Marnell said.

As proof of her newfound moderation, Ms. Marnell pointed out she hasn’t smoked PCP in a month.

“I’ve been working really hard at being a better person, but it’s not something I’m writing about.”

Bath salts: do not ingest

Are you tired about hearing about the new synthetic drug bath salts yet? We're glad to have clarified that the brand of white crystallized substituted cathinones--paging Walter White!--were not actually bath salts.  (For awhile we were plagued with images of getting arrested at Bath & Body Works while on a perfectly innocent shopping sojourn.)

At the same time, it seems like the press is reaching with this one, especially since the drug seemed to be contained within bored teenagers in flyover states and INSANE PEOPLE. (See: Spin's "expose" on the topic, and the aftermath.)

That being said, we can't pretend like the epidemic of bath salts-- a designer drug that produces a cocaine/amphetamine/LSD-like high, or as one person who was offered it recently related to The Observer, "makes you feel like an animal"--is just going to disappear off the news cycle because we want it to. (Our magical thinking made Khat trend stories go away, right?)

In fact, the bath salt chickens have finally come home to roost in New York, turning vague rumors of people who pee on art and cannibals in Florida into a NYC reality.

The first tip-off was a press release last week from Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara. Working with the New York DEA, the U.S. Attorney was charging four individuals allegedly involved in the manufacturing and distribution of bath salts in Florida.
From the press release:

Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara stated: “The charges we are announcing today as part of ‘Operation Log Jam’ are great examples of law enforcement working together across the nation to wield the law’s might against a new, emerging danger to our citizenry, especially our children. The drugs may be synthetic but the danger is very real. As alleged, these defendants marketed their highly toxic synthetic marijuana as aromatic herbs, making it sound completely harmless, when in fact, it is a dangerous drug that can have serious health consequences. It is also an illegal drug, and as these defendants now know, marketing and distributing it can lead to serious consequences of a different sort.”

Still, the arrests happened in Florida, not in New York, so we felt safe from whatever "Operation Log Jam" was. But it turns out Attorney Bharara was not kidding about those "different sort" of serious consequences: On July 24th, a 49-year-old man named Daniel Avery destroyed a headshop in Watertown, NY with a baseball bat, claiming that the store sold his son the bath salts that caused the boy to O.D.

"You fucking sold my kid bath salts and I’ll kill you," Mr. Avery said in a voice message left at Tebbs Smokeshop. Later the grieving father allegedly broke down the store's glass door and smashed $640 worth of merchandize with a small blue Yankees bat.

Conclusion: Bath salts sound terrifying. Stay away at all costs.

Thomas and James in The Last Ride.

On a frosty New Year’s Day in 1953, a life of genetic back trouble and spinal pain exacerbated by drugs, alcohol and self-abuse took their toll on a man in a white cowboy hat, slumped in the back seat of a powder blue Cadillac Eldorado convertible. Hank Williams died, holding a guitar and a notebook of unfinished song lyrics. The king of country music was 29 years old. He was on his way to a comeback, traveling from Montgomery, Ala., to sold-out shows in West Virginia and Canton, Ohio, in a blinding snowstorm, with a high-school dropout who didn’t even know who he was in the driver’s seat. The Last Ride, carefully directed by Harry Thomason and skillfully written with chords and spaces for humming and breathing by Howie Klausner and Dub Cornett, hauntingly and sensitively negotiates the final three days in the life and death of a legendary character of mythic proportions, warts and all.

This two-character odyssey, filmed in Arkansas with accuracy and a keen dedication to detail (a movie house they pass is showing Monkey Business with Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers and an early appearance by a curvaceous blonde named Marilyn Monroe) clearly envisions what happened in the claustrophobia of the car, the gas stations, the taverns and the hotel room where a trusting friendship reluctantly developed between the man who called himself by the alias “Mr. Wells” and by his recording pseudonym “Luke the Drifter,” and the young garage mechanic called Silas Combs he hires to drive him. This may be artistic license (the real driver was a 17-year-old Auburn University freshman, not a grease monkey with a father in prison) but the relationship is true. The boy is played by newcomer Jesse James, who matches scene by scene the charismatic multidimensional star performance by Henry Thomas. Yes, the same Henry Thomas who struck cherubic lightning as the boy who befriended everybody’s favorite Martian 30 years ago in Steven Spielberg’s E.T. He’s done a lot of firm, impressive work since then, but nothing as wrenching and understated as this. He makes it less of a fable about a dying, burned-out icon and more of a personal time-share during the last 48 hours of a damaged life. As two strangers who come together through fate on a holiday weekend and learn to care about each other as human beings, the two leads lend a harmonic balance to a pair of disparate lives as well as the questionable facts at the end of the road. Tanked up on Falstaff, coughing up blood from lung disease and chain-smoking unfiltered butts, and firing guns at slow pokes on the highway as the boy gets hauled in by the highway patrol and his “boss” gets him out of trouble, I found watching them a poignant experience.

A phony Hollywood version of Hank Williams’s life, controlled by his widowed second wife, was filmed before, in 1964, as Your Cheatin’ Heart. George Hamilton played the Grand Ole Opry star whose biggest problem seemed to be an allergy to fan clubs. The songs were by Hank Williams Jr., who added a musical patina no imitator could approximate. One problem with the revised realism of The Last Ride is the soundtrack, consisting of modern versions of the Hank Williams classics, two by Jett Williams, his daughter, born five days after his death. The original recordings would have brought the era to life with more force. Another caveat: I wonder why, if he was such a hillbilly icon, not one person on the road from Alabama to Ohio recognizes him from his television shows and album covers.

Still, it’s a fascinating film that I enjoyed thoroughly. The Last Ride doesn’t come with a break-the-bank budget and full-page marketing displays, but it is well worth looking for if you’re in the mood for a movie that is captivating, an evocation of a time when the South and its music were on the cusp of change, and just a little bit different. It’s satisfying and sincere in ways most of the big-budget junk currently taking up space on summer marquees never dreamed of.

rreed@observer.com

THE LAST RIDE

Running Time 103 minutes

Written by Howard Klausner and Dub Cornett

Directed by Harry Thomason

Starring Henry Thomas, Jesse James and Fred Dalton Thompson

3/4

Baldwin and Crusie in Rock of Ages. (David James)

As rock musicals go, Rock of Ages can’t go fast enough. This sloppy freak show is two minutes shy of two solid hours of screaming swill, without a shred of freshness, insight, cleverness or coherence to be detected within a two-mile radius. It’s based on a noisy Broadway jukebox joke that was never much to write home about in the first place, but it still had a soupçon of humor and banal charm, both of which are bewilderingly missing on the screen. The fact that the show is still running testifies to the confounding disregard for taste and intelligence rampant among today’s mass-market audiences. I haven’t seen a movie this bad since Battlefield Earth and Howard the Duck.

There is no plot, but you can write the outline for the one that’s missing on your fingernail. Stupid girl from Oklahoma boards a Greyhound bus for drug-addicted, sex-crazed Hollywood to become a rock star and meets a janitor who also wants to be a rock star. She ends up stripping, he ends up in a boy band, and the story ends up in the hopper with the rest of the clichés. The two-minute story threatens to drag on for years, populated by amplified wack jobs shrieking lyrics that cannot be translated and spitting dialogue so filthy it can’t be repeated. The director is a fraud named Adam Shankman (Hairspray) who is so inept he has a hard time figuring out if there’s any film in the camera. Hollywood blackmail comes in all sizes, but I shudder to think what it took to trap otherwise respectable people like Alec Baldwin, Tom Cruise, Paul Giamatti and Catherine Zeta-Jones into this kind of unsalvageable garbage.

Hate sets in early. Sherrie from Tulsa (rock singer Julianne Hough) boards the Greyhound and all of the other passengers burst into song, including the children. Arriving in the middle of a parody of the Sunset Strip in the 1980s, her suitcase full of Twisted Sister albums is immediately stolen, but the prancing drug dealers and prostitutes are as cheerful and friendly as extras on The Donna Reed Show. In minutes, a janitor and wannabe rock icon (singer Diego Boneta, eons away from star status) lands Sherrie a job in the Bourbon Room, a cross between the old Whiskey a Go-Go and the noxious Viper Room where River Phoenix took the cab. It’s a hellhole, run by a fat, greasy cretin in a long Cher wig (Alec Baldwin) and threatened with police raids and foreclosure warnings by the new mayor’s wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones), who dedicates herself to cleaning up the crime and vice that has taken Los Angeles captive. She organizes church groups to shut down the Bourbon and destroy the career of Stacie Jaxx, an alcoholic, terminally stoned, oversexed dope fiend played by a half-nude, tattooed Tom Cruise with extended nipples, black fingernail polish, a pet baboon who mixes his drinks and a lot of hair below his belly button that would, back in the day, have caused a riot at the Hays Office. It’s supposed to be a “brave” example of a fearless actor doing a stretch, but he looks more like an androgynous addict at the New Orleans Mardi Gras who has been spending entirely too much time in the wrong kind of massage parlors.

Between a barrage of unspeakable assaults on the eardrums by groups called Arsenal and Concrete Balls, the mayor’s wife, who reveals she once spent the night with Stacie Jaxx unconscious from drugs and multiple orgasms and never got over it, sings “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” while the mayor is getting spanked by his S&M secretary. “Listen up,” says Mr. Baldwin, preparing his teenybopper clientele for Stacie Jaxx to turn the Bourbon Room into a Xanadu of “sweat, ear-shattering music and puke—so let’s get going!” Ms. Zeta-Jones remembers the night he made her “feel like a woman”, covered with Cool Whip and Wild Turkey. Ms. Hough tells the rock superstar, “When my hamster died, your music really, really helped me through.” The audience at the screening I attended was laughing so hard I missed a lot of the sub-mental dialogue, but who could miss Alec Baldwin, in the lowest point and most embarrassing mistake of his career, bellowing “I just vomited—in my pants. It came out of my ass.” The filthy, disgusting script is by three people who should remain nameless, but I can hardly believe one of them is Justin Theroux, a good actor who would do the world a favor if he dropped his laptop off the top of the Chrysler Building. Mary J. Blige drops by to offer sage advice (“It’s not fame and fortune you came to L.A. looking for—it’s love. And love left this place a long time ago!”) Tom Cruise gets a reporter from Rolling Stone pregnant and ends up on the toilet floor covered in condoms. It’s about as entertaining as an iron lung.

I can understand the perverse temptation to make money by appealing to the base instincts of an ever-increasing audience of fools, but this assault on the IQ is where people with self-respect should draw the line. Rock of Ages is so bad it makes Burlesque look like an underappreciated masterpiece.

rreed@observer.com

ROCK OF AGES

Running Time 123 minutes

Written by Justin Theroux, Chris D’Arienzo, Allan Loeb and Chris D’Arienzo (musical book)

Directed by Adam Shankman

Starring Julianne Hough, Diego Boneta and Tom Cruise

0/4

Protesters in Union Square (Getty Images)

Over the weekend, 14 people were arrested during Occupy Wall Street protest in Union Square. The participants were demonstrating against Commissioner Ray Kelly and police brutality, and friends told us to avoid the area at all costs.

"The police are really jumpy today," The Observer was advised.

But protesters had another group to contend with: the burnouts, skaters, and drug dealers who spend their days in the Square, and didn't appreciate the extra heat OWS brought to their stomping grounds.

Bucky Turco from Animal interviewed some of the Union Square regulars on Friday, including a skateboarder who was screaming "They smell like wild piss!"

We had our own interaction with a local around 5:00 p.m., when we were walking down 15th st. and Irving Plaza. A young man approached us.

"Have you been over there," the dread-locked kid asked us, shifting his backpack so he could point over to the square. "It's nuts."

We had heard about the protests...were they really out of control?

"Yeah!" The young man exclaimed. "Especially when you are tripping on acid. I just had to like, get out of there before I started to feel bad about things."

Fair enough. "Feeling bad about things" is certainly not in the OWS credo.

The individual smiled, looked around and then asked how to get to Second Avenue. We told him, and he went scampering off. Five minutes later, he was back.

"I forgot the directions," he admitted.

"Just go straight," we advised. "You'll get there eventually."

If you thought the Linsanity merchandising gravy chain had slowed down, think again.

Former correctional officer, narrative genius, luxury car hobbyist, and "Stay Schemin" poet Rick Ross—who, as it happens, is performing in New York this Tuesday night—Tweeted an Instagram'd picture a few moments ago, detailing the recent shopping excursion he took a colleague on:

The fruits borne by this trip? They are, technically, herbs:

Yes, Jeremy Lin now has a marijuana strain named after him, one that appears to be sold in an undisclosed (but fairly reputable-looking, judging by the handiwork on the label) marijuana dispensary. Wonder if he's going to file for trademark infringement?

Either way, the Jeremy Lin/Linsanity gravy train continues to ride strong, if not, now, slightly hungrier for something to eat, possibly covered in actual gravy. Or some movie popcorn. Either/or.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Sen. Charles Schumer's history with trying to destroy supposedly fun things is quite storied. In some cases, these attempts seem as well-intentioned as they are common sense. In others, they can appear as political plays to capitalize on the ages-old fear that Something Will Make Young People Crazy, Drug-Addled Freaks, with Sen. Schumer's name attached. Surely, whether he gets inhalable caffine, there's plenty more like these to come. Until then, we humbly submit a hit list of those bodega-peddled evils which Sen. Schumer has attempted to—successfully or otherwise—rid the world of.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek