Entry Two Hundred Thirty-Four.
Friday, 2020.10.16, 12:17 PM central time.
"Cult classic" films - and more nostalgia.
Current Mood:  Still introspective and obviously .
Current Scent:  Ombré Leather by Tom Ford.

Hello, everyone.

This morning I was presented, via a Facebook ad, with the opportunity to buy a Blu-Ray box set of the splatter/gore works of Herschell Gordon Lewis.  This immediately reminded me of the old film Doctor Gore, which Lewis' friend, Pat Patterson, directed.  It's a really crappy film - horribly directed, terribly performed, and unintentionally quite funny.  I find it enormously enjoyable.

The funny thing is... that ad sent me on a mental nostalgia spiral.  I started thinking about my younger days, back in the 80s and early 90s, trying to find and watch as many "cult classic" films as I could.  I still love them; Peter Jackson's Bad Taste is still my favorite film of all time, and I remember with joy the "Duohouse Pilgrimage" party that my friend Kevin "Wink" Winkler and I had in 1990s, at which we showed Bad Taste, Ozone: Attack of the Redneck Mutants, and Heathers.

When my parents and I would visit St. Peters to visit my grandparents, sometimes we would go to St. Louis to buy light gear or records for EKG Mobile Music (my first DJ company, 1989-2002).  This usually included a trip to the University City Loop, a special part of St. Louis where we would go to Vintage Vinyl and pass by Ziezo (clothing store), Blueberry Hill (a great restaurant), and the Tivoli Theatre, where I would usually grab their flyers for forthcoming movie showings.  I never went into the Tivoli, but oh, how I wanted to.  Those Tivoli flyers were the means by which I found out about such films as Frank Henenlotter's Basket Case 2, Richard Linklater's Slacker, and Peter Greenaway's The Thief, the Cook, His Wife and Her Lover.  If memory serves, they even had midnight showings of Eraserhead!

Later on in the late 90s, my old friend DJ TMJ and I would hang out and watch cult flicks.  We were both huge fans of Kevin Smith and Quentin Tarantino, but we would also occasionally introduce each other to more obscure cinematic jewels.  I remember having a get-together at my house for people to come watch Slime City, Street Trash, Frankenhooker, and probably Braindead or Meet the Feebles.  God, how wonderful!  I also remember that on at least one of those nights, everybody else cancelled or had better plans, so it was just Tim (TMJ) and I hanging out watching movies in my garage.  Ha!!

These days, I still chat with Tim and Kevin on occasion.  Tim still lives in Oklahoma, but Kevin moved away decades ago, and currently lives in Colorado.  I haven't been to the University City Loop since 1994, but I occasionally look at it online to see which businesses are still around, and I still plan to go up there and hopefully see a movie at the Tivoli before I die.  That's an earnest "bucket list" item for me.

Sadly, as many of you know, a lot has changed in my life since those early days.  (How can it be that even the late 1990s were 20 years ago?)  I've gained a bit of weight, a significant amount more muscle, a couple of tattoos, and maybe a few wrinkles.  I've had my heart broken so many times that it's irreparably scarred.  I've gotten married and I've had a couple of sons, one of whom is now a teenager.  My grandpa died in 2004, then my mom in 2007, then my dad in 2010, then my grandma in 2013.  I don't know if I'll ever DJ "in-person" at a venue again, although I perform at least once a week (on average) online.  Oh, yeah, and I'm currently living in what I believe to be only the first year of a pandemic which has killed over 200,000 Americans so far.

Although my life has had a lot of "downs" to go along with the "ups," I still feel tremendously lucky to have had the life that I've had.  However, I would be lying if I said that there aren't days when I yearn to be back with my old friends, all gathered around a TV with some popcorn, watching crazy and occasionally shitty old films, and just chilling out.

I'm not going to say whether or not I bought the Herschell Gordon Lewis set... but I will say that if I did, then I got a hell of a deal on fourteen classic gore flicks.

What I will tell you is that I've got to be going... I've got some I Am God (preworkout) and Hype Reloaded (nitric oxide booster) hitting my bloodstream, and I'm going to go do a bit of weightlifting while I watch Brian De Palma's 1974 classic Phantom of the Paradise for the first time ever.  (Seriously... I've owned it on DVD for over a decade, and I've still never gotten around to watching it.)

So, if you'll excuse me...

Thanks as always,

Badger