Every night, while watching whatever with Mrs. Blue, I pick skin off of the pad of my big toe and/or finger tips until there is barely a yellowed layer left. 7 out of 10 times I bleed, and go to the bathroom for a band-aid. Dress the wound to the sound of Mrs. Blue's perfunctory "Babe!" while the Great British Baking Show echoes through the screen door, letting any passers by know that we are Normal People participating in Normal Nightly Brain-Rot, with a couple'a cats to boot.

I've learned to hop on one foot to the bathroom once the bleeding starts, lest I be chastised for the thousandth time for leaving candle-drip stains along the carpet. I have tasted my own blood so many times it has come to be as Ritual as the daily gulp of dill pickle juice. Its flavor is so familiar that I often wonder whether a stranger's gore would shock the palette, or instill the notion that we are all truly One under the sun? I have no interest in drinking anyone else's blood to find out. Makes me think of AIDS or rabies or The Craft. Fairuza Balk's monster mouth. 

I've picked my toes for as long as I can remember. Switching to vaping, and now toying with lowering the nicotine content, has exacerbated the shit out of it. I have to watch out if I wear open-toed shoes in public. If waiting at the DMV, I'm sure to absentmindedly repulse like the basement dweller I could and should have become. Don't bleed on people, people. Don't leave a mess to be mopped.

All this is to say that I need to grow up. I'm 35 and almost married. I tried reading something that well-adjusted, principled, well-meaning people read (The Argonauts) and threw it across the room. I spent $16 on it at a Parnassus Books! Am I supposed to care as much as Nelson does about the cultural and ethical repercussions of every instinct-based decision I make? To be a walking mirror? Is that how the good people live? The wisened ones? It must be exhausting (though I am a cis white male so take all this in brackets and apocryphalia and blarney. Consider me Divine, eating shit).

Sometimes I tear a particularly long piece of calloused big toe skin off with my teeth. It is very satisfying to masticate and swallow.

But what about the quantum conundrum that happens when 8d light codes penetrate dna via retina retention and deliver false signals of gene propagation, resulting in the activation of reprogramming protocols biased towards ascension due to the entity self-identifying as deity?

Review: MOUNTAINHEAD by New Juche

Here I sit in my Compacty Blacky's (black version of tighty whiteys, you're welcome), last night's sweat breeding a gummy, urine-colored layer of film over my body. I must have rolled around a lot in fevered dream convulsions, and I also happened to finish New Juche's slim book before bed. It feels apt that my body appears to have come to blows with venereal phantoms throughout the night, since Mountainhead is a hypersexual masterpiece of venomous propulsion.

It is part autofiction, travelogue, memoir, incantation, and exorcism. A journal of a man I grew to fear and respect, full of prose so vivid I could feel the soil of Southeast Asia clogging my veins. There are pictures, as well, to help orient you. Juche explores this landscape not as an expat or an observer, he inserts himself primordially, assimilating with orifices of the living and the dead. Trees, animals, mushrooms, and prostitutes.

New Juche is exploring this humid continent as a deviant despot, but one with a Freudian compassion and beautiful lack of control. A lack of control only for the sensual bounds that most humans don't even attempt to explore. In a normal person-to-person transactional sense, Juche is a blessed, if frenzied compatriot.

Pod and I not only tolerated, but derived a curious pleasure from washing Martin's exhausted body and laying it down carefully on his cot...We would fold his leathery wings behind him in silence...Martin's skin would become damp, and then cursed with a froth of creamy soap...which fell away like scales...I was especially gentle and respectful with the papery skin that covered his thighs, and the wooden, vegetable quality of his kneecaps...When Martin is dead, I thought, we'll roll dice made from his kneecaps.

In ascending the mountain with Juche, I had the youthful urge many times to drop the job, the fiancee, the cats, walk the earth like Jules and assimilate with foreign and dangerous fauna. This is a dangerous book if you are of a certain constitution that flirts with arrested development and nihilism. Juche slowly expatriates himself from humanity and I am not certain what he found on the mountain, even though he narrates his journey exquisitely, because this is literature so personal and fevered that I came to tears. All while Juche came on the world, jism as a sort of language, as if his penis was constantly mourning.

I nuzzle and rub my face in the mud as a passionate apology and feel blood pump sparingly but steadily into my penis, not because of the soil or the rain, or the sensation of it on my face and eyes or in my mouth, but out of the satisfaction I derive from my virtuoso gesture of sensitive capitulation. And then there is that visceral spasm that my language has yet to capture, that draws from the liberation attained through abject behavior, and the Great Warm Ecstasy that one feels absolutely beside one in these moments (do you know these moments?), like a giant bubble that could be leapt into, but only ever recedes like the object of desire in a dream. And you'll agree that my harmony is the touchstone, my attribute, and that the danger and hunger I bravely endure are real and necessary, and have qualified my ascension.

This might even be a harmful book for young, explorative minds. If I had read this in my teens, I might've continued on the path of pain that I eventually veered from before it was too late. But then again, what options do Generation Z, or whatever they are called, have? The sacred is evaporating, burning up, empty overgrown tracts to fornicate upon (mentally or otherwise) are peopled and walled in. We ain't in Walden anymore.

New Juche is buttressed in extinction, and I imagine he will die there before the Main Event, crying and smiling and masturbating as it all burns away in front of his eyes. He seems to be alive and well right now, and I need more.

Review of: Thunderbird and the Ball of Twine (a Folk Tale) by Juli Kearns

https://auditorsounds.bandcamp.com

I came across Juli Kearns by way of her Website, a large part of which is dedicated to the analysis of film. Specifically, it was her very in-depth screeds on the works of Stanley Kubrick that captured my imagination (I believe she is also part of the documentary Room 237). In many of these, she goes into frame-by-frame dissections, picking apart small continuity discrepancies and inferring pounds of meaning and discordant connections throughout the films that the reader can choose to believe or not. Much of her film writing can come across as conspiratorial, or "seeing things that aren't there," but the mere density of her analysis, combined with inventiveness and creativity in her writing, make it obvious that she possesses a passionate and complex mind.

So, browsing around her website, I was intrigued to find that she was also an author of literary fiction. I bought the only book available on Kindle at the moment (I'm going through a purge, promised myself not to buy any more real books until I offload an armful), which happens to be Thunderbird and the Ball of Twine (a Folk Tale).

I was not let down by Kearns' imagination, but was surprised by how much I came to care about all of the characters (not just the two protagonists, every one of 'em). The story, without getting into spoiler land, follows Odile and Johnnie, two interestingly-named young adults. They are both artists in the midst of toxic relationships and are searching for themselves in a world full of anxieties, minor revelations, ennui and pain (much like all of as are, or were at one time or another). The sighting of a U.F.O leads to a car crash that unites these characters, spinning them into a web of frightening and hilarious situations.

The prose style is occasionally dense, but always alive and bristling with energy. It can go from chunks of stream-of-consciousness, ala Woolf, to dialogue-heavy jousts like the best of detective fiction. There are also small lyrical miracles that electrified my arm hair. The reader in me wanted more, the writer in me wanted advice.

Here are some quotes that I highlighted:

He didn't question the situation as he felt behind it one of those question marks that should be allowed a generous length of highway to straighten its story out as time thought best.

All it takes is a little patience and people will automatically assume you are clever without your having uttered a single word.

...those thousands of books in his apartment, a sarcophagus of collective mind, a majority of the writers dead yet still speaking continually whether he opened the covers of the books or not, the letters were there, those squiggle snakes of symbols representing thought, breath of thought, ideas, stories, awaiting rebirth in yet another mind, waiting to partake of human existence again, to wake inside another brain, a body with all its jingle jangle hormones and electrical charges, waiting to find form in muscle, bone, flesh and blood again.

"Where are you going? Cliff asked. "I thought we had plans to make plans to do something today."

"They don't think about what they're doing, they just do it. That's one of the big problems with humans, we think too much. Free will killed our instincts, we have to plan. Free will is why people need motivation and inspiration and animals don't. Birds and butterflies don't need motivation seminars to go south for the winter. A salmon doesn't need encouragement to swim upstream to its death. Success at being a salmon is built in. We've been incapacitated by thought."

"Maybe every aspiring artist or writer should first have to prove that they can sell their share of snake oil."

Post apocalyptic scenarios demand at least one survivor make sense or insensibility of civilization's husk else the cinema will be still life.

Being that she was a skeptic, she was surprised, when she thought about it, that she believed one hundred percent in so much that was unknown, a veritable infinity of unknown. How could she be a skeptic and believe one hundred percent in the unknown?

Lights rise in the theater and one person would realize that gold flash as a caution light, even a warning to not proceed, don't enter the crosswalk now, maybe never, while another would see green, go, an urgent and personal message to make for the Swiss hills where the flowers dance around lakes of chocolate and there is more than enough cowbell for everyone, and even beyond, to the Himalayas and Mt. Everest, where the illumination is received that melt glaciers aren't lemons but an opportunity for the best water park slide there ever was.

One could try to rise above the life of the senses but the archaeologists and anthropologists would be appeased with fish bones and clam shells at trail's end.

Most minor characters in Thunderbird and the Ball of Twine (a Folk Tale) are more interesting that some main characters in other novels I've read. Each offers a fully-realized view of the world, some strange, some deranged, some prophetic. I cried, I laughed, I will remember portions of this story forever. 

Juli Kearns' work deserves to be read by everyone that loves serious literature. I purchased her most recent novel, The Rhetoric of Streets from her Lulu.com page, and can't wait for a new glimpse into her fascinating mind. 

https://auditorsounds.bandcamp.com

Still buying media

All my music (under LePro and Auditor monikers) can be found here

MUSIC!

Incel Rhyme

CHAD made a CUCK out of CHUCK
and a BUCK was ENOUGH for a FUCK
cuz his BUFF manly NUTS made her BLUSH
so they CRUSHED in the LUSH bed of CHUCK
bed of TEARS many YEARS not a SMEAR
did APPEAR really DEAR it is CLEAR
Chuck's GEAR was a MERE little QUEER
little GUY for his WIFE to DERIDE
and CHASTISE in the NIGHT while she LIE
in a Y with a VIBE 'tween her THIGHS

Wanna read some porn?

I published some short erotica stories a while back. If that intrigues you; if you like tentacle monsters,   funhouse rooms full of johnsons, or general cuckoldry, check THESE BOOKS out.

‘Possession’ and the Fear of Reality Crumbling Beneath Our Feet

Originally published here: https://addictedtohorrormovies.com/2016/07/24/possession-and-the-fear-of-reality-crumbling-beneath-our-feet/

‘Possession’ and the Fear of Reality Crumbling Beneath Our Feet (Review)

When I think about horror movies that resemble bad acid trips, a few pop into mind. Most of which aren’t considered “horror” in the traditional sense of the word. I’m talking Beyond the Black Rainbow, Enter the Void, Suspiria, pretty much anything by Lynch… you get the idea. But the grand wizard of them all in my opinion is 1981’s Possession, a film that I have been watching at least once a month since I saw it for the first time a few years ago. 

That first viewing, whew! Let me tell you something about how fragile our minds are. I was surfing my usual web haunts for something new, something I had never seen before. Something twisted and surreal and, most importantly, scary.

I forget where I heard about Possession, probably Reddit. I was directed to a Youtube link, and there, like the black magic that is this age of iffy ‘intellectual rights,’ was the entire movie—free for anyone to enjoy or suffer through depending on their constitution. I promptly untangled my HDMI cable, rammed it in to my computer port (giggity), and relaxed on the couch with a beer and some reheated pizza. 

Now, I thought that I was going to be getting a nice little movie about Isabelle Adjani getting possessed by some serpent-like entity (judging from the title, the cast, and the cover art), but holy hell was I wrong! One of the great things about going into a movie blind is that you increase the chances of having your mind blown.

The fact that I was a few beers in when I started the movie might have contributed to this, but I was thrown completely off guard within the first five minutes. Sam Neill is in an adversarial mood upon meeting his wife outside of a rundown apartment block that looks eerily like the Ludovico Medical Facility in A Clockwork Orange.

The first thing that threw me was the acting. It was theatrical, over the top, but full of passion. Every. Single. Moment. Was. Intense. As fuck! I had to let some light into my living room by pushing the blackout curtains to the side (I like to keep my hovel as dark as possible when it’s cinema time!). 

Throughout the film, I kept having the nagging suspicion that my mundane reality was an illusion, and that I was living in some sort of bubble that would eventually pop and everyone that I encountered would be as full of verve and spite and life as the characters in Possession were. I know that sounds insane, but I have had the exact same feeling before—during terrible drug experiences.

I have looked upon friends that I have known my entire life and thought that they were aliens out to harvest my mind. I have come to conclusions regarding reality that made me question whether every single memory of mine was a fabrication. 

To me, this is true Cosmic Horror. The stuff that really scares me. Losing my mind and my sense of reality. The thought that everything I know about the world is false, and that reality is hostile. Possession scared the utter crap out of me. Not just because of the tense atmosphere, amazing acting, and splendid creature effects, but because it portrays a world that is just slightly off-kilter; A heightened reality that resemble ours, but with something horrific writhing under the surface. 

I completely doubt that this movie will have the same effect on you; but I can guarantee that it will, at the least, be a very disorienting experience. I don’t want to spoil anything for you, so I suggest finding the movie any way you can.

If you are ready for it…

Rating: 5/5

A Look Back At ‘The Blair Witch Project’ In Preparation for 2016’s ‘Blair Witch’

Originally published here: https://addictedtohorrormovies.com/2016/08/01/a-look-back-at-the-blair-witch-project-in-preparation-for-2016s-blair-witch/

A Look Back At ‘The Blair Witch Project’ In Preparation for 2016’s ‘Blair Witch’

Looking back, the world seemed like a much more innocent place in 1999. Which is, of course, a rose-tinted fallacy. Still, things were much different. Not everybody had the internet, for one thing. Which is why The Blair Witch Project could succeed in fooling much of the populace into believing that the film was real. With a genius ad campaign that took advantage of the infantile World Wide Web, and a believable documentary about the search for the missing college kids, many of us entered the theaters believing that we were about to see literal ‘found footage.’

Since a new addition to the Blair Witch saga is about to be released nationwide, I decided to revisit the original film for the first time in many years. I was delighted and surprised to find that it still holds up as my second favorite found footage film (the top spot goes to a Japanese film from 2005 called Noroi: The Curse). 

The first thing that struck me on this re-watch of TBWP was the refreshingly lackadaisical approach to narrative cohesion. Compared to many current found footage films aimed at short attention spans (leaving few, if any, questions unanswered), the viewer is forced to do a little work if he/she wants to catch everything. There is a shot near the beginning of the film of Mikey pulling in to Heather’s driveway (it is obvious that they have known each other for a while, as Heather jokingly refers to him as, ‘Mr. Punctuality’), followed by a shot of Heather meeting him for the first time outside his mothers house. Despite this chaotic chronology, we get to know the characters surprisingly well on their first day of shooting. Heather is the dominant force, Josh is the wacky stoner, and Mikey is the innocent.

TBWP uses some classic horror film techniques to achieve its power. There is some excellent foreshadowing, such as a crying baby yelling “no no no” when Mommy starts telling a story about the mysterious witch in the woods. One interview subject even spoils the ending of the movie (guy in the yellow hat). Does this detract from the power of the final shot? Not in the least.

TBWP even has memorable minor characters, which you won’t find in many found footage films these days. Even more impressive is the fact that most of them are non-actors. Case in point: Mary Brown. This hauntingly disturbed woman was played by a production assistant.

Many of the things that make TBWP succeed would not work well today. For instance, while cell phones were prevalent in the late 90’s, they were not the all powerful machines they are now. In fact, GPS would have solved all of the trio’s problems in TBWP, so it will be interesting to see how that is handled in the upcoming Blair Witch film. 

Usually, in horror films, we question the actions of the characters because there is usually an obvious way out. Don’t go upstairs, go out the outside, leave the light on, etc. But there is no way out in TBWP. These people are trapped in the middle of the woods without a clue. A headstrong (bordering on annoying, many would say) person like Heather has to be the MC for this film to remain credible. She remains rational for much longer than anyone else in the film, and much longer than many of us would if we were in her shoes. If she wasn’t leading the group aimlessly though the woods with the hope of redemption being right around the next bend, then we wouldn’t have a film.

Something that many people have a problem with when it comes to found footage films is the question of why a character would keep holding a camera while being attacked by some malevolent force. Refreshingly, TBWP has more “turn the camera off” talk than any other found footage film I’ve seen. The guys are constantly berating Heather for filming their terror. And her excuse is as simple as it is sensible. At one point Mike says, “We’re not making a film about us getting lost, were making a film about a witch.”

Heather pauses for a second, then says, “I got a camera…”

Later, Josh expounds on why Heather refuses to stop filming the tragic events. “It’s not quite reality. It’s like a totally filtered reality. It’s like you can pretend everything’s not quite the way it is.” Indeed.

The biggest thing that I took away from watching TBWP for the umpteenth time is this: More directors need to keep their actors in the dark about what is going to happen to them! The actors in TBWP were pretty much stranded in the forest without much food for much of the production. They didn’t know what kinds of tricks the crew were going to pull on them in the middle of the night. The disorienting feeling that the cast feels is contagious, and we, as viewers, feel just as lost and helpless as Heather, Josh, and Mike. Would abandoning your cast in the middle of the woods with barely any food fly these days? Let’s hope so.

Judging from the trailer for the new Blair Witch film, we look to be in for a more dirty, bloody, and loud experience than the original. There are a few reviews out that are quite positive, and I, for one, am very excited. Let’s just hope that the subtlety and nuance of TBWP isn’t completely replaced with tired jump scares and excessive gore. 

Creepy Indie Movie ‘Flytrap’ Will Keep You Guessing

Originally published here: https://addictedtohorrormovies.com/2016/08/31/creepy-indie-movie-flytrap-will-keep-you-guessing-review/

Directed/Written By: Stephen David Brooks

Starring: Jeremy Crutchley, Ina-Alice Kopp, Jonah Blechman

What a surprising little gem this turned out to be! 

I have always subscribed to the notion that one doesn’t need a huge budget and big-name stars in order to make a compelling movie, and Stephen David Brooks and co. have created a smart, scary, moving, and often times hilarious film with meager means. 

This film brings to mind a number of influences, not all of them cinema-related. Think After Hours as written by H.P. Lovecraft and directed by David Lynch. I don’t want to spoil too much of the story (because it is such a good one that you really should go in blind), but it involves a man that unwittingly encounters problem after problem. There are cosmic forces at work here, which we see hints of throughout the movie, but the real terror is in the mundane details of the “American Dream” lifestyle that Flytrap so deftly dismembers. 

That’s right, not only is this indie gem a thrilling ride, it also has some things to say. Throughout the film I detected subtle and not so subtle jabs at gender roles, the vapidness of Hollywood, and the nuclear family. There is more going on beneath the surface than first appears, and I cant wait to give Flytrap another watch. 

Flytrap works because of the tight script, the dedication of the actors to a strange and engrossing premise, and a synchronicity between the camera work and the score. You can tell that Brooks is a craftsman that takes a lot of care when composing each shot, and choosing where to place the creepy piano/string music. The movie also manages to tell a story using a single location as well as the original Saw did. 

The only reason I am deducting a point is due to a somewhat disappointing ending. Don’t get me wrong, it doesn’t just END (expecting you to “leave the rest to your imagination”, a lazy and hackneyed thing that too many directors like to do these days), but it does leave a few questions unanswered. It just makes me wish that there had been a slightly bigger budget, because I wanted to see more of this world! 

I highly recommend seeing Flytrap when it gets a general release, especially if you are a fan of my two favorite “L’s” – Lynch and Lovecraft.

4/5 Stars