Exploiting the Archive: Stephen Baldwin Wants to Bring Jesus Into Your Sex Life
It can be a strange experience re-reading articles you wrote long ago and only half-remember, if that. You’re mortified by the jokes that don’t work and tortured sentence construction and pleasantly surprised by unexpectedly eloquent or incisive turns of phrase. It’s your voice, all right, but in an earlier, more embryonic form.
That’s how I felt revisiting my Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club article on Stephen Baldwin’s The Unusual Suspect: My Calling to the New Hardcore Movement of Faith, a hilariously terrible tribute to faith at its most extreme, Poochy-like and over the top.
I can't say I'm too excited about Run the Jewels' new line-up.
Baldwin’s surfer dude take on how, actually, Jesus was the ultimate extreme athlete, who pulled off the ultimate trick by coming back from the dead and defeating that way bogus Satan dude by martyring himself for humanity, gave me plenty to work with. When it comes to embarrassing passages and unintentional hilarity the memoir of rad faith offers an embarrassment of riches but re-reading almost a decade after I turned it in, I kind of wish I could go back and edit some stuff out. That’s one of the nice things about running your own site: if I want to change anything on Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place (which I just accidentally typed as Nathan Rabin’s Happy Faith, which I see as an amusing Freudian slip but Baldwin would no doubt interpret as a sign from Jesus) I can do so in a heartbeat.
If the recently engaged Justin Bieber and Hailey Baldwin do end up getting married, then our boy Stevie B, will find himself in the curious and simultaneously enviable and unenviable position of being the father-in-law of one of the biggest and most obnoxious pop stars/international playboys around.
Will Stevie and Justin B join forces to share their extreme brand of skateboard-intensive Christianity? Will Stevie B be able to convince his son in law to spare a few million to build the world’s biggest combined church/skateboard ramp, or, on a more modest scale, a few dollars so he can buy a sandwich and maybe spend a night in a cheap hotel, just so he can bathe and get off the streets for a while?
If The Unusual Suspect: My Calling to the New Hardcore Movement of Faith is any indication, when Stevie B met his sonny boy to be, he could very well have asked him, “How’s your sex life?” since in his memoir, the Usual Suspects star boasts about springing that provocative query as often as possible as a way of establishing that sex becomes infinitely hotter when you bring Jesus into the bedroom and make the Beast with two backs with the Savior of mankind looking on in approval like Michael Jackson in that popcorn-eating gif.
Then again, I suspect even a man as shameless and ridiculous as Stevie B would think better of asking the man shtupping his daughter how things are going in what scripture refers to as “The Bone Zone” but you never know. He's a real character, that Stevie B.
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