good movies

So, a really quick list of some stuff to check out:

Super

Defendor

Special

These first three are all about "everyman" superhero types, regular people who "become" superheroes.

"Super" features Rainn Wilson (Dwight from "The Office") as a married man wronged by his wife's drug dealer, with whom she runs away.  The story takes a decidedly dark turn when Wilson's character decides to fight crime in all it's forms with a pipe wrench and a twisted sense of right and wrong.  Also starring is Ellen Page, who has probably the funniest scene in the movie, the most awkward scene in the movie, and meets a grisly end.  Highly recommended.  Favorite quote: "SHUTUP CRIME!"

"Defendor" is a different type of superhero movie, which touches more on mental illness than any type of comic book superhero stuff.  Woody Harrelson stars as Arthur Poppington, a construction worker by day and vigilante by night.  His arsenal is that of a 10 year old boy and includes marbles, bees, and a WWI trench club.  He is on a mission to find "Captain Industry", the individual who he believes is responsible for his mother's death.  The story makes you initially laugh at Harrelson's character for how woefully unprepared he is to actually fight any real criminal, however as the film progresses you sympathize more and more for the man-child who's only real talent is sticking to his principles and attempting to avenge the death of his mother.  Very good film, sad at the end, also highly recommended.

"Special" is a superhero movie dealing primarily with mental illness.  A medical study leaves one of it's participants believing he has super powers like the ability to fly, read minds, and run through walls (when in fact he is definitely not flying, and is running into rather than through walls).  The film follows him as he attempts to fight crime, and as the pharmaceutical company who created the drug attempts to catch him so that he doesn't create bad publicity for them.  It's an interesting film, although I didn't like it as much as the two prior.  Something about it's sort of meandering feel and the fact that you're watching somebody who is honestly just delusional is almost like watching a mentally disturbed homeless person (which the main character ends up looking like eventually) sort of crash around and battle invisible monsters is kind of depressing. 

The Bridge

The Bridge is an exceptional documentary about the people who chose to end their life by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.  The film makers set up cameras and monitored the bridge for a year in 2005 to 2006 I believe and captured 24 suicides on film.  Just the footage itself is shocking, and fairly disturbing, but the interviews with family and friends of the people who jumped add a completely different dimension.  After viewing the movie you get the impression that if you put enough people next to a really tall thing that's easy to jump off of then a certain percent of those people are just gonna jump.  Very strange to see people calmly talking on a cell phone, then hang up, climb over the guard railing and just lean forward and let go.  Definitely check it out if you can find it. 

Fritz the Cat


Fritz the Cat is a 1972 R-rated animated film by Ralph Bakshi.  It's lewd, there's lots of drug use, and it just feels very 70s in a funky sort of way.  I won't describe the story because it's very trippy and bounces around a lot, but the animation is unforgettable and some of the characters are characters that could never be portrayed the same way again (think of creating an animated movie today and making all the black characters crows, or all the cops pigs).  All in all Fritz the Cat is just plain fun to watch, and as long as you're not a "square", you'll enjoy it.

Das all for now, catch you cats on the flip side. 

#1: Begotten (1990)

Begotten is by far the sickest, and weirdest movie I have ever seen.  No other movie even comes close.  The movie has no dialogue, save the chirping of crickets, and various grunting noises.  Begotten features a guy who looks much like Leatherface from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre (who is supposed to represent Jesus Christ) giving birth for 2 hours.  At one point, Jesus gets raped with a shovel for about 15 minutes.  Clearly this is not an easy movie to get through.  If you are looking for the all time, unbeatable, sickest, weirdest, most difficult to watch movie, Begotten is for you.

#2: Tetsuo The Iron Man (1989)

Tetsuo the Iron Man ranks high on my personal list of SUPER FUCKING WEIRD.  This hallucinatory film centers on a man who somehow becomes infected with a disease/virus/weird shit which slowly turns him more and more metal.  It is unclear whether he intentionally gave himself this condition (there are scenes of A man inserting what looks like hribar into his leg, but, at least to me, it does not really verify that this is Tetsuo) or whether it was caused by him being hit by a car.  Our titular character is waiting for the subway sometime after the incident with the car and sitting on a bench with a woman.  There is a strange square shape in his cheek, and he notices that her handbag has some weird tentacle things coming out of it.  Eventually he stands up and runs away, all the while with the woman chasing after him.  She chases him for quite some time in a very weird, punk rock sort of high speed montage that makes the viewer feel like they're on speed or some shit.  As he is running away, he starts his transformation.  Later in the film, Tetsuo is with who I believe is the same woman who was chasing him, and is probably 90% metal.  She wants to get busy, but he's ashamed because he's a metal freak.  He hides in a room and she pounds on the door and demands to let her see him, saying that she doesn't mind weird shit.  He opens the door, walks into the hall, and the viewer is shown one of the most bizarre, disturbing, memorable and potentially shocking scenes ever put to film.  Tetsuo towers over the woman on the floor, almost in a fighting stance, screaming/crying while what used to be his dick (which has now become a gigantic spinning drill with a GWAR sort of a look to it) spins and spins as he cries and the woman screams in terror.  After this memorable scene there's...stuff...I don't want to ruin it for anyone who's going to see it.  Suffice it to say, Tetsuo the Iron Man just gets stranger from there, finishing in the most awesome ending to a movie that I personally have seen, and I say this due to the movie's ability to absolutely embrace the character of Tetsuo, or rather what he becomes at the end of the film.

#3: Caligula

This movie is all the more horrific because all the events which we witness are true.  Gaius Caligula Caesar was well known to the authors of antiquity as the mad emperor of Rome, to quote GWAR, "Whose purges consumed thousands on his blazing altar of syphilis."  We can start off by saying that this movie is a porn.  The very first scene of the movie features Caligula's uncle Tiberius having a great big syphilitic orgy with a bunch of midgets, freaks, and deformities of nature.  Once Caligula takes over, things only get worse.  He appoints his horse as counsel of Rome.  He leads out his legions to an invasion of Briton, but then has them attack a field of papyrus cane instead.  But the worst part is saved for a Roman general named Proculus, and his wife Livia.  Loudly saying, "In the name of the Senate, and the People of Rome, I Caligula Caesar command it", he slaps a lump of lard on the ass of Proculus and FISTS THE SHIT OUT OF HIM, leaving him prostrated and bleeding.  Leaning over the body of his defiled wife, Caligula then goes on to say, "You can see how I have exhausted myself to make your wedding holy."  There is not much else you can say about Caligula, except "Let's see if Proculus can brighten our day!"

#4: El Topo (1970)

This movie, made by Alejandro Jodorowsky, features a black clad, bearded gunslinger named El Topo (which is Spanish for 'The Mole') riding around on a horse with his little naked son in search of the four gunslingers of magic, who live at the 4 corners of the desert.  The movie has very little dialogue and is made up of very haunting, disturbing and surreal images.  What really got me about this movie was the sounds coming out of my speakers.  The high pitched mechanical squealings and the sound of a screaming rodent caused my pet boxer to run out of the other room to check out our speakers.  She was really stressed out.  I would say the movie has an epic feel to it, although the agenda of El Topo remains totally unclear.  There are no words of explanation to suggest why El Topo is riding around with his little naked son killing people, but there are plenty of dead rotting bodies laying all over the desert, which look like they stink.  The end.

#5: August Underground's Mordem

This movie is the ultimate in gore, and only its lack of surrealism and straightforward progression keeps it from being placed higher on the list.  The uploader claimed it to be an actual snuff film, and I had to look it up after I saw it.  The effects are that realistic.  I was nearly convinced.  This is 2 hours of guaranteed wincing, even for those viewers with a stomach strong enough to get past the first 10 minutes.  You'll never forget it.

#7: Guinea Pig II: Flowers of Flesh and Blood (1989)

This movie is the strangest and goriest of a 6 part movie series called "Guinea Pig".  The rest of them are pretty mundane, but this one is really "out there".  It starts off with a guy with blacked out teeth and a samurai helmet kidnapping with the use of chloroform some random Japanese girl.  He ties this girl up to a bed and starts talking about how the highest form of human beauty is really to be found not merely on the skin but on the innards and viscera of the human being.  He refers to this as the making of bright red blossoms and then saws off her arm.  Then he saws off her leg.  Then he saws off her lips.  The whole time, he is making these fucked up speeches about flowers, and at the end of the movie he shows you the remains of past victims who are maggot and worm covered, and just generally really disgusting.  The director of the movie, Kazuhito Kuramoto, was actually investigated by Japanese police for making a snuff film.  He had to prove that all of his effects were faked by recreating them on the spot.  The dialog and explanations are the 2 main factors keeping this film from ranking higher than 7 on this list.

#8: Johnny Got His Gun (1971)

This is probably the most psychologically disturbing movie on this list.  In terms of gore and action, there is not really that much.  The movie is an anti-war film made in 1971, based on the 1938 novel of the same name by anti-war writer and activist Dalton Trumbo.  It is about a World War 1 Soldier named Joe Bonham who is hit by an artillery shell resulting in a total loss of all his limbs, and his face.  Joe manages to survive this ordeal, and is therefore kept alive as a medical curiosity by U.S. Army doctors, who assume wrongfully that the nature of his injuries have caused his brain to die as well.  Unbenownkst to anyone, Joe's mind is alive and well, but with no way to communicate to the outside world, he has no choice but to retreat into a world of memories, where he does not have to deal with things such as the giant rat shown gnawing on his stumps.  This movie was also the inspiration for the Metallica song and video "One", the first track on "Injustice for All."

#9: Trash Humpers (2007)

Trash humpers is a stupid movie.  Probably the stupidest movie that I have ever seen.  Undeniably, though it is very weird.  No one who has seen it can deny that.  If it was even creative in the slightest, I would have placed it higher on this list.  The fact of the matter is that it's just retards humping trash cans for 2 hours, and the worst part is that it won the DOX Award at the Copenhagen International Documentary Festival.  If you've seen 5 minutes of Trash Humpers, you've essentially seen the entire movie.  I sat through the entire 2 hours.  Afterwards I thought to myself, "Well, that is 2 hours of my life that I can never get back."

#10: Eraserhead (1977)

Probably the most well known of all the weirdest directors, David Lynch set the bar high for himself when he made this movie.  It took 5 years to produce and destroyed his marriage in the process.  At the end of the day, it's actually about the strength of a father's love, but the trick to understand that involves actually watching the movie!  Between the horrors of his inudstrial surroundings, his nightmarish relationship, and the screams of his mutant and eraser-shaped-head mutant-child, the saga of Henry Spencer is not likely to make anything but the strongest impression on its viewers.

#11: May (2002)

May Dove Canady is a weird, unpopular kid who has a lazy eye.  The troubled childhood she suffers as a result is the cause of her creating her only friend, a glass encased doll named Suzie.  Her mother tells her "if you can't find a friend, make one."  This advice is taken literally by May, who spends the later part of the movie removing all the "perfect" parts of her friends and then sewing them into an upgraded friend, the Frankenstein-esque Amy.  To bring Amy to life she gouges out her lazy eye and inserts it into her beloved creation, bringing her to life as the credits roll.  I found myself, in spite of it all, to be strangely attracted to May.  Not altogether surprising, hopefully to the composer of this list. 

#12: Jacob's Ladder (1990)

In this film, a Vietnam war veteran named Jacob Singer (played by Tim Robbins) is finding his life become a series of unending nightmares.  As a result of being administered a mind control drug referred to as "Ladder" during his tour in Vietnam he starts having flashbacks of a terrifying and potent nature.  The movie opens with Jacob and his soldier buddies sitting in the Mekong Delta smoking a fat joint.  It is implied that that is how they got the drug.  Anyways, the enemy attacks, the whole troop goes crazy, and they basically start tearing each other to pieces.  Jake takes a bayonet in the guts and the movie flashes to his adult life in NYC.  I tried to watch this film on acid at a friend's house in '98.  A group of us tried to watch it and we got just about to the part with the creepy old lady on the subway before we shut it off.  In any case, Jake gets the job as a postal worker and marries a demonic mexican.  He finds himself being attacked by malevolent and strange creatures who seem to be in some way connected to the government and the drug given to him and his buddies in Vietnam all those years ago.  This movie has a surprise ending which I do not wish to give away, and to describe it further would be to risk that.  What I can say for sure is that I do not recommend watching this movie on acid.  The events of this movie are partially modelled on reality.  The CIA did a series of experiments very similar to this called MKUltra in the 1960s.

#13: Subconscious Cruelty (2000)

This movie sets its own limits and then succeeds in breaking them.  An ambitious project.  The main character is attempting to transform himself a la Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment by committing himself to the creation of the most sublimely terrible act of which he can conceive.  He will murder a woman who's just given birth - but not before he kills the baby right in front of the young mother's eyes.  This culminating event actually serves only to introduce us to the realm of the truly surreal. 
There comes a point in these sort of movies where explanation runs dry, where language itself becomes a barrier.  Some things are too strange to be adequately described, like a strong LSD esperience.  The director (Karim Hussain) did an excellent job of spotting that key moment in Subconscious Cruelty. 

#14: Un Chien Andalou (1929)

Produced in 1929 by the father of surrealism, Salvador Dali, Un Chien Andalou (The Andalusian Dog) features a dream-like sequence in which a woman's eye is slit open - juxtaposed with a similarly shaped cloud obscuring the moon, which is moving in the same direction as the knife's through the eye.  This grabbed my attention quite fast, and I found the literal exhibition of the French phrase "ants in the palms" (meaning that someone is itching to kill) to be creative in the most disturbing fashion.  Whether or not the movie actually means anything or even has a plot is a matter of personal opinion. 

#15: When The Wind Blows (1986)

Imagine that the whole world's gone crazy, that science has opened Pandora's box, and that our planet is only a bomb or two away from becoming a desolate wasteland.  If you succeed then you'll find yourself in the setting of this movie.  Two elderly British people are stuck in their home, tucked neatly away in the center of a radioactive fallout zone.  The sight of people who reminded me of my parents, being consumed by radiation from the inside out, and hearing the music of Roger Waters as it's soundtrack was one of the saddest things I've ever seen in my entire life.  This is not a movie I'll be viewing a second time. 

#16: Last House on the Left (1972)

Back in the day, before he'd permanently ruined his reputation as a serious director of horror movies with crap like the movie Scream, Wes Craven directed one of the most brutal and shocking movies of it's (or any other) time.  Mari Collingwood is a young girl who plans to celebrate her 17th birthday attending a concert with her friends.  On her way, she hears on the radio of a recent prison escape involving a violent set of offenders and serial killers.  After the show, they run into them randomly while trying to score some weed.  They are taken out to the woods near Mari's own home, forced to piss in their pants, and shot in the head in one of the most saddening acts of brutality ever put on screen.  The gang ends up at the Collingwood's home, asking for permission to spend the night.  One of them has Mari's peace medal, given to her earlier that day as a birthday present.  Her parents figure out what has taken place based on that and exact a bloody awful revenge.  The mother gnaws off the one guy's johnson.  Jesus...

#17: Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975)

The Marquis de Sade is an author remembered chiefly for his attempt to create a literal chronologue of every known perversion.  In this movie, director Pier Paolo Pasolini places some of the worst ones on the screen and into cinematic history.  It's the story of four wealthy and corrupt fascist libertines, who spend their post-Mussolini days kidnapping and torturing a total of eighteen different teenage boys and girls.  They proceed to spend the next 120 days subjecting them to the most extreme and yet sublime sadistic urges boiling in their twisted souls.  This film is rated the 65th scariest movie ever made by the Chicago Film Critics Association in 2006, and this in spite of the fact that it's not even typically considered a horror film.  Pier Pasolini, who created it was murdered shortly before its release.  A tragic footnote to a tragic movie. 

#18: Naked Lunch (1991)

The fusion of perhaps the strangest book ever written turned into cinema by perhaps the strangest director ever to make a movie (David Cronenberg of Videodrome fame) has bequeathed to us what essentially amounts to a Rorschach test of a movie, whose plot is every bit as open to interpretation as an ink blot spilled on a white card.  After an exterminator manages to become addicted to the chemical he uses to kill bugs, he accidentally kills his wife and becomes involved in a secret government plot (orchestrated by giant bugs) in an islamic part of a town in Africa.  He receives the good news from his bug agent.  Said agent is a wrinkly vagina with beetle wings.  Enough said.

#19: The Plague Dogs (1982)

Based on the book of the same name by Watership Down author Richard Adams, this animated feature is definitely number 1 on the "cartoons not to be shown to children" list.  Not all cartoons are made for kids and this one soundly proves it.  Rouf and Snitter are two dogs being experimented on by the military who have managed to escape.  They become fugitive, hunted to the bitter end, to purge the threat of the bubonic plague they've been intentionally infected with.  The fun is over after the first half hour or so.  After that, we're treated to the sight of the two accidentally blowing half a hunter's face off with a shotgun, and grotesquely consuming his corpse.  The end of the movie is so depressing that it cast a shadow on my entire day.  I'm 31. Do NOT rent this movie for your children.  You've been warned.

#20: Aguirre, The Wrath of God (1972)

Starting today, I will be posting a short review/summary of the top 20 must crazy, sad, fucked up, strange, or just plain bizarre movies.  A new movie will be posted every day until I reach No 1, at which point new content will have already been created.  So here we go,

This film is the most well-known of the creations of Werner Herzog, who may be recognizable to some of you as the father of Julien in Harmony Korine's "Julien Donkey Boy", and also as the narrator of "Grizzly Man".  The plot involves a troupe of Spanish Conquistadores in the 1500s searching for the fabled city of gold, El Dorado, in the Andes Mountains of South America.  The film starred the strange and volatile Klaus Kinski as the leader Aguirre.  The soundtrack of the movie is very surreal, and the movie features highly experimental camera techniques, as well as a final scene which features Kinski alone in a raft full of chickens after his entire party has now died, gliding down the river hoping to overthrow Pizarro.  Werner Herzog is one of the "weird director" prototypes, among others such as David Lynch, Harmony Korine, and Crispin Glover, and whose films have influenced the work of many of the makers of the movies on this list.

Plantin' Time

It's that time of the year folks, spring is here and it's time to officially start your gardenin'.

[Howto] germinate your seeds:

For starters, your seeds should be less than 2 years old.  You will need a starting medium, specifically a wet paper towel works very well, and a container that can retain moisture.  In our case a ziploc bag will work just fine.  The reason to use a soil-less starting medium is to insure that the seeds and seedlings are not killed by too much salt, which is usually found in soil or various soil-less mixes.  The key when using paper towel is to transfer the babies just after they have had a chance to break the hull of the seed and begin to form a stem. The perfect time to transplant is when the seeds have 2 visible leaves forming.  There are 3 key factors to germination: moisture, heat, and salinity.  Sunlight is not a key factor to germinating seeds due to the fact that you are attempting to imitate a wet underground environment. 

If you use this process you will be able to germinate nearly any seed, and save money on going to the plant store. 

So get out there and start plantin!

Psychotic Fugue: Reefer Madness in Today's World

I don't remember graduatin'.
And my first sexual experience--
l don't remember that either.


- But, man, l will never forget
the first time l smoked...


that sweet, sweet chiva.


- Half Baked


The first recorded human usage of cannabis took place in the twenty-eighth century B.C.,
when the Emperor Shen - Nung taught the cultivation of hemp for fiber, but its use goes back much farther then that. Archaelogical digs at the Non Nak Tha site in Thailand have yielded pipes made of animal bones, used by guys just like us to get high at 4:20 in the afternoon at least as early as 15,000 B.C. I had a buddy in high school who made a bowl out of a deer antler. Tasted like bacon when we used it. Gross.

The Latin names of what most of us just call weed are Cannabis sativa and Cannabis
indica. Cannabis ruderalis, or ditch- weed, has also been known on occasion to produce
strains with some potency. The cannabis family has been a part of human culture for many centuries, as mentioned earlier, as both an intoxicant and a medicine. It has been called by as many names as can be expected for something that old, including bhang, ganja, kif, asa, dagga, muggles, tea, loveweed, Mary Jane, and reefer. All of them refer to the same thing, an extremely pleasant and safe high that has proven a blessing to people all over the world, and all throughout history.

The chemical responsible for most of the psychoactive effects of cannabis is called THC, an abbreviation for Delta - 9 - tetrahydrocannabinol. THC exerts its effects on the human brain by imitating an endogenous neurotransmitter named anandamide, which is a Sanskrit word meaning "eternal bliss". This neurotransmitter was actually discovered in the process of conducting research on the effects of cannabis of the human brain. THC belongs to a family of chemicals known as cannabinoids, of which more then 400 can be found in Cannabis sativa. They are not considered similar to any other family of drugs, as they target their own neurotransmitter, but their effects have been compared anecdotally to both depressants and hallucinogens.

In today's world, the use of cannabis is a contentious topic, especially for those of us who
live in the United States. Cannabis has been off - limits for American consumers since the
year 1937, when the first commissioner of the newly formed Federal Bureau of Narcotics,
Harry Anslinger, succeeded in passing the Marijuana Tax Act. This bill was the culmination
of an attempt on the part of the federal government to increase its own power, using the
demonization of cannabis to spearhead a smear campaign of unusual vigor and savagery.
Movies like Reefer Madness and High on the Range portrayed cannabis as the worst
menace currently facing the American populace. Newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst once published an article claiming that "if the hideous monster Frankenstein ever came face to face with the monster marijuana, he would drop dead of fright". Even racism got involved, as cannabis was first introduced to the US by Mexican migrant workers in the late 19th century. These new immigrants were not very popular, and neither was their new drug. It was believed that cannabis gave the Mexicans an "unholy strength, and a bloodthirsty nature. The term "marijuana" was introduced as an attempt to link public perceptions of the drug to the dark - skinned underclass, a perception strengthened exponentially by the use of cannabis by black jazz musicians of the 1930's. We are still suffering today from the results of the public buying into these lies and false assumptions.

In my own life, I have been smoking cannabis from the age of 14 onwards, and I plan to
continue until the day I die.

In my next blog, I will be discussing what in my opinion is the second most influential entheogen of all time, LSD - 25. Feel free to offer feedback or enter into dialogue. Untill next time.

Renaissance of the Paleolithic - An Introduction

Terence McKenna said in Food of the Gods that the study of ethnobotany was to him, the quest for the original Tree of Knowledge.  The magical plant that bequeathed unto man the Promethean gift of self awareness.  This is an idea that has held a fascination to me my whole life.

     I remember the first time I ever came across LSD in a book, S.E. Hinton's That Was Then, This Is Now.  The character who takes it, a 14 year old hippie kid named M&M, has this terrible hallucination where he envisions himself inside his own stomach, being devoured by carnivorous colors.  Sounds awful, right? It was obviously meant as a warning.  A description of something no sane kid, of course, would ever want to put himself through.  But I just remember being very curious.  I was reminded of the NeverEnding Story, when Atreyu had to face the mirror test.  I felt that if you could go through an experience like that and NOT be driven insane, that ultimately you would be better for it.

    At the age of 12, I was starting to become a real person, and I felt inside me a need for a ritual that would allow me to grasp my adulthood.  Native American cultures have used combinations of plant based concoctions and fasting to send their young warriors on Vision Quests of manhood for thousands of years.  They provided personal and powerful rites of passage for the young, a solitary talk with God that gave them something I believe we are lacking in American culture today- a sense of communion with the natural world and an understanding of one's place in it.  And the question remains.  What is today's young warrior to do, when he feels the need for vision quest stirring within him?  In today's fear driven and highly propagandized world, there is currently no safe outlet for him to pursue vis-a-vis hallucinogenic ritual.  My contention is that there should be.

    I took a very reckless approach with using entheogens in my youth, primarily because there was no trusted and informed source of guidance available to me.  Which is not to say that many of the most beautiful and life changing experiences of my life were not induced by these compounds.  Undoubtedly they have been.  But I was fortunate to be strong enough. Some of my experiences were, in fact, as terrifying or worse then anything fictional written by S.E. Hinton, or anyone else for that matter.  It is my intention, on this site, to make them available to others.  My hope is that they will prove valuable as a source of vicarious knowledge.

    Since my first hallucinogenic experience, with Datura stramonium at the age of 14, I have had literally thousands of trips.  I have taken them with the help of every ally I could find.  By now this includes absolutely every commonly used entheogen, as well as some that are quite strange and obscure.  I have decided to start with the most common of all, Cannabis sativa(and indica).  It will be the subject of my next post.  If you've made it this far, thanks for reading.  Come back anytime.        

Hello,

This is the first post.  This blog's purpose is to educate about botany and to be a place to speak my mind.

Over and Out