Today Is Brought To You By The Letter A.

A is for…

ASIA
I’m totally crushing on her and here’s why:

1. She’s hot.

2. I’m no medical doctor, but I’m pretty sure she’s crazy.

3. She’s a Virgo…just like me.

4. She’s not afraid to show some skin…and I can certainly get behind that level of dedication to her craft!

Peep this quote from her commentary on Scarlet Diva:

“I grew this enormous bush, ’cause I thought it would sell the movie in Japan. ‘Cause the Japanese really like hair. Hairy…uh…female genitals. So I…uh, actually saw the movie in Japan…I don’t know if it was because of the bush or they just liked the manga-like story…I think it’s for the bush.”

Homegirl knows what the people want and she’s not afraid to give it to ’em!

Here’s a screen shot of Asia in Scarlet Diva. You can’t see it here kids, but believe me, it is awesomely enormous! If you’re curious about the bush all you have to do is rent the movie (or just Goggle: Asia Argento bush…it works…I’m pretty sure Asia hates wearing clothes) and you’ll see what all of Japan went bananas for!

A also stands for something else! It stands for the alias of one of the best bloggers out there. He actually reminded me of Asia’s birthday with his post on Saturday. I’m totally crushing on him today as well. His name is….

ARBOGAST
While I’m not sure about the enormity of his bush, I do know that ARBOGAST ON FILM is essential reading for movie and pop culture enthusiasts of all ages! And here’s why:

1. I’ve never seen him so I don’t know if he’s hot, but he is mysterious…and that counts for something.

2. Again, I’m no medical doctor, but I’m pretty sure he’s a genius.

3. I’m not sure what his astrological sign is…like I said, he’s a mystery. I guess that’s not really a reason but I was going for consistency here, people.

4. He’s not afraid to give the people what they want either…but he never panders to the lower tastes and desires of others or exploits his reader’s weaknesses. Seriously, you need to make a daily pilgrimage to his blog…There’s The One You Might Have Saved Blog-a-Thon, The Kill Face Chronicles, and more reviews and musings of a madman than you can shake a severed limb at!

If you don’t believe me it will be your loss, turkeys! Hell, even Stacie Ponder over at Final Girl says, “Arbogast rules,” and you can’t argue with that.

So, that’s not all the letter A stands for today…it also stands for:

THE AWESOMEST!

‘Cause both Asia and Arbogast totally get the full on 5 Spaghetti Cat rating!

You two kooky kids rock my world! And that’s the truth!

Damn Nazis!

I’ve always had a weird fascination with Nazis…wait, not in a Todd Bowden kind of way, but in a…a…I don’t know what kind of way. I’ve just been interested in Nazis. I’m not talking about skinheads or Neo-Nazis, but the old school Nazis…the “comic book Nazi” that would get his ass handed to him by Captain America or the “horror movie Nazi” that turned into a werewolf and rode a motorcycle or something.

You know, the Nazis I grew up with. They weren’t so scary to a young, non Jewish, boy growing up in the Seventies. I understood that they were the “bad guys” who were wrong and evil…but they just looked so amazing. They had scars and monocles…they smoked with fancy cigarette holders and had the most amazing uniforms…even at a young age, the fastidious Virgo in me could appreciate their attention to detail…or maybe I’m just kind of gay.

Want to hear a Mr. Canacorn fun fact? I remember making my mother a card in Elementary School for Christmas. It said “Merry Christmas” across the top and underneath I drew a snowman…wearing a Kaiser Helmet?! Wait, it gets weirder…standing next to the snowman was none other than Adolph Hitler.

What the fuck, right? I don’t even remember my mother being surprised or asking me why I would draw Hitler and his frosty Nazi friend on a Christmas card. Shit, I don’t know why either. I was also really into drawing Ziggy at the time and she never asked me about that….I wonder if she still has that card…

Anyway, as I got older, Nazis got really cool in a creepy way….not in a totally depressing concentration camp, “We hate the Jews,” kind of way…but in a unrealistic, fantasy, Nazisploitation kind of way.

They were into all sorts of occult shit and freaky experiments! And, get this, according to all the comic books I was reading, they created NAZI GORILLAS and a goddamned NAZI FRANKENSTEIN’S MONSTER!

HOLY FUCK! What’s worse than regular Nazis? NAZI GORILLAS and NAZI MONSTERS!

In addition to being gorillas, the Nazis of WWII have also been zombies, werewolves, and all kinds of psychotronic beasties in popular culture. They were the living, breathing manifestation of evil that resides in every man…and for young boys, there’s nothing more alluring than the bad guy….and nobody has done bad guy as good as those damn Nazis.

Those who know me know I’m not some Nazi-freak who collects memorabilia and atrocity photos or a delusional Holocaust denial idiot…I’m just a guy that’s a sucker for a sharp dressed villain that maybe turns into a werewolf or is a talking gorilla or whatever.

In my image search for this blog I came across an interesting article that seemed to mirror what I’ve been talking about…I thought I’d share a snippet with you guys:

“This, I believe, is the cause of the fetish: the human attraction towards evil. The Devil not only gets the best tunes, but, in the case of the Nazis, the best costumes, the best generals, the best weapons, the best iconography and even the most powerful-sounding language. From Göttermorgen to Götterdämmerung, it is the blackest story ever told, and it’s still being told everywhere. And some boys will always want to play the baddy.”
–GUY WALTERS

Well, that’s about all I have to say about Nazis…but I’d like to share one more Nazi image…here’s a piece of original art that hangs in my office:

It’s by Daniel Johnston. It has Captain America knocking the crap out of the Red Skull while Superman and Batman get all concerned in the background. It might be hard to read the word balloons, so this is what it says:

SUPERMAN: Hey, don’t you think you’re hitting him a little too hard?
BATMAN: Do you know him from somewhere?
CAPTAIN AMERICA: Well I just don’t care anymore.
RED SKULL: AHHGH!

Pretty cool.

A Big Ass Turd In My Hand.

A few weeks ago I offered to write a movie review for a friend’s website. No big deal, right? I have all this free time and I love talking about movies, so writing a review should be a piece of cake! I emailed my buddy:

ME: If you ever need a Richard Dreyfuss to your Robert Shaw, I’d be
willing to help out doing a guest review or something. I’m out of school
for a while, so whatever.

BUDDY: What do you wanna review? anything in mind?

ME: Creatures From The Abyss (aka Plankton) would be a cool one to
review….I don’t know, you could give me an assignment, just like J. Jonah
Jameson.

BUDDY: Yeah, go ahead. I actually have seen that recently. It came in a 3 pack
with The Dark, and The Being.

That last email was on Feb. 4th. I never started the review. I kept telling myself, I just didn’t have the time right now and I’d get to it….then I get this email on the 7th.

BUDDY: how’s the review going?

OH FUCK! He was serious….and I need to get working on this damn review…so I shot him back a little white lie.

ME: Started working on my review…I hope to have it to you by next weekend if that’s okay. Don’t feel obligated to use it if you feel it doesn’t fit in…

BUDDY: Hope to have it by next weekend? Jesus, who are you Frank Fuckin’ Herbert? Crank that motherfucker out and we’ll get along fine. Do you have a way to grab screengrabs from it? I have the disc if you don’t. Feel free to come up with funny captions if you want. Rib will change em if they really suck. That’s the hardest part to write I think, but no joke is really too stupid.

Screengrabs? Oh, man, the panic was really building…..calm the fuck down and just go watch the movie…first, email your buddy back…play it cool…use a little humor…

ME: It’s up to 15 pages, typed, double spaced at this point…actually, I just started re-watching it yesterday. I don’t have a way to do screengrabs…so that will have to be up to you guys.

BUDDY: Don’t worry about the review being perfect, I don’t. I’ve read your blogs, which are good, so think of it like that. If you wanna contribute reviews semi-regularly afterward, that’s fine. Obviously, you’re free to be obscene, which is fun.

His last email calmed my nerves some. I have found my voice in AWESOMENESS… and really do enjoy writing my little blog. I guess the thing is, the blog is for me. Sure, I obviously write to be read by others, but ultimately, I just post stuff for my own selfish enjoyment. By offering my writing to someone else I was really putting myself out there. This isn’t some paper for school (which I agonize over…just ask The Wife), this was for someone else’s website.

Let me stop here and stress one thing: I AM A VIRGO.

“Astrologers broadly agree that the following are the characteristics of Virgo:
The Virgo is prone to being overly proud, fussy, nervous, pedantic, petty, self-conscious, harsh, paranoid, scared of being sick, aloof, calculating, hard-edged, overly critical, judgmental, pretentious, snobby, nervous, timid, compulsive, folds under pressure, a perfectionist, stubborn, and conservative.” -Astrologers

…and that’s the absolute fucking truth. I am my own worse critic…as I assume most people are, but I’m really, really hard on myself. Well, it was time to get to work! I watched CREATURES FROM THE ABYSS armed only with a pad of paper, a pen, and my pretentious (yet self-conscious) wit.

After the film I was left with these:

Two pages filled with cryptic references to Clint Howard, Alec Holland, Joey Silvera, PRIVATE MEDIA GROUP and other not so obscure people and places….and then there’s 100s of word combinations like: swank bar glass chrome sectional, slapping method, Dadaist manifesto, Julie looks dead but still hot, extreme caviar birthing, and my favorite: “Not a fish pedophile.”

What in the hell am I supposed to do with that?! Get to writing, that’s what, Canacorn!

So I sat my ass at the computer and wrote…and wrote…and wrote…and 1,350 words later I was left with this:

A BIG ASS TURD IN MY HAND.

Or so I thought.

I emailed my buddy the review on Feb. 16th and waited for his critique. Man, was I nervous…I mean, I’m about to be judged on my opinions of a shitty horror movie and how I decided to express my feelings about said shitty horror movie by a guy who has lived and breathed shitty horror movies a good decade longer than I have. All I could picture was J. Jonah Jameson ripping me and my review to shreds.

Well…I did hear back from my buddy…and he liked it…he said it was great. Uh, wow…So not too shabby for my first go…and I got lucky by having an easy editor.

Here’s the trailer:

So, enough is enough…here’s the link to my 1st online review:

PLANKTON

Soundtrack to my life…

This morning I decided it was finally time to make a soundtrack section in my vinyl collection. I’ve been toying with the idea for a couple of weeks now and I took on the challenge this morning. I know all record collectors have very specific ways of filing their LPs (even if that means just tossing them around in no particular order…shudder), but I’m a hard and fast “alphabetical order” kind of Virgo….so making a section, any kind of section goes against my nature. It’s all, alpha by artist and alpha by title if it’s a soundtrack or compilation, all the time.

Last year I tried to pull out all my soundtracks and snap a picture of them for an old blog…it looked like this:

It was a total pain in the ass and I neglected to pull out at least 10 additional titles….the alpha order system was not helping me find all my soundtracks and it was getting harder and harder to avoid doubling up on certain titles (I am an addict)….and I just kept buying more (again, I am an addict). So here’s what I got myself into this morning:

That’s about 125 lps…all soundtracks for movies or teevee.

Well, that’s not totally true. I ran into a little problem with certain LPs. Look close at this picture:

Going clockwise:
THE HORN MEETS THE HORNET by Al Hirt….It has the Green Hornet Theme plus other themes like, Get Smart, King Kong (ABC-TV Series), Tarzan, Batman, and a few others.

SUPERMAN AND OTHER GALACTIC HEROES by Meco…Side one is Superman stuff but side two has The Boy Wonder, The Caped Crusader, Lord Of The Jungle, and The Amazing Amazon.

SUN RA VS. DAN AND DALE…This is all crazy Batman themed songs.

HEFTI IN GOTHAM CITY by Neal Hefti….again, all Bat-tastic songs.

So what’s the problem? How do I file these by title or even by a specific soundtrack when the first two have multiple themes? I settled on putting the last two in the B’s for Batman and filed Al in the G’s for the Green Hornet and Meco in the S’s for Superman. This may not seem like a big deal to you, but they’re not your records…and you don’t have to worry about finding them.

Okay, enough complaining. While pulling out all these gems I found some cool ones to share with you.

Not one, but two DAWN OF THE DEAD soundtracks! The first comes with a cool ZOMBI poster and has the amazing score by Goblin and the second has unreleased music from the film…like:

THE GONK!

Peep these:

The 12″ for DR. DETROIT by Devo! God, I loved this movie as a kid!

Even though THE EXORCIST II stank, the Ennio Morricone score fucking rules! Listen:

Man, that track gives me goosebumps every time!

Anyway, I’m glad i have a soundtrack section and I’ll probably do some more sharing with you kids in the future…but until then, I gotta’ find me a copy of DR. DETROIT on dvd, stat!