CUT SKOOL CUZ YOU LIKE, "FUCK SKOOL"

My spring midterms will be over next week and I'll have about one solid month of packed bowls, tanned bodies and ignored alarm clocks to glide me through the eternally awesome Richmond summer before I head to Mexico for four weeks of drinking, studying and lingual embarrassment. I hereby swear to do my damnedest to utilize that first month, prior to dodging kidnappers and pretending not to notice narco "activities,"to churn out my first honest-t0-god printed on paper zine since the infamously gay-titled "Your Words are Bullets" virgin and only issue from way back in like 2002 (maybe). So look forward to that, if you're into that kind of thing. Meaning me and my opinions and a thousand euphemisms for tits n' ass. In the meantime, here are some tits n' ass for you to ogle because my "feminist" girlfriend is playing Zelda in the other room and fuck school.

THIS WEEK IN NETFLIX

"Defendor"

This is pretty much the same movie as the incredible "Mirage Man" except not Chilen and not not starring Woody Harrelson. I think this one is actually Canadian, but it could have easily taken place in Detroit. Were you aware that Detroit sucks? Were you aware that this movie made me cry a little bit? Were you aware that it is perfectly acceptable for a grown man to cry over the story of a mental retard who thinks he's a superhero seeking vengeance against the imaginary villain who killed his mom, even though she actually just died because she was a junkie? Well, consider yourself aware-ed.


"Daisies"

1966 surrealist freak-fest from Czech New Wave staple Vera Chytilová. Her name has at least one or two more weird punctuation marks above some letters, but my computer doesn't even understand Eastern European chicken-scratch so those punctuation marks unfortunately "do not compute." This film is pretty much the working definition of avant-garde in fluid form, so Chuck Norris fans beware. Imagine living inside of a Rauschenberg piece with two frustratingly fit but extremely obnoxious upper-class pixies following you around and chirping like birds. Sounds like a nightmare, I know, but give this one a try if you've got the mental balls for it. Often misinterpreted as a proto-feminist experiment, I personally think it's more about the uselessness of lazy, spoiled bourgeois trifles (i.e. the kind of art school twats who probably love this movie) in light of the greater good of mighty Socialist productive society(!!), although I do feel like not liking this movie would somehow make me a misogynist. Worth considering: is it weird to be extremely turned on by scenes of cute girls making huge sloppy messes and smearing cake all over each others' faces, or scenes where they just sit around and eat tons of food? Is there something wrong with me?


"Sheitan"

The French horror new wave was pretty on-point there for a while, and I feel like this little nut-kicker gets unfairly overlooked by most people who should appreciate this kind of thing. A bit of the standard "city kids get fucked with in the countryside" formula, but refreshingly skewed by a particularly manic sensibility, some truly great shot composition, an unreasonably hot temptress and enough bizarro shit to make "Gummo" fans scratch their heads and glance around for the exits. Vincent Cassel is unrecognizable and totally incredible, especially considering the fact that he is an A-list international superstar who is basically just goofing around with the French equivalent of the Day by Day dudes. It may sound redundant, but the scene where they chicken-fight with thuggish melungeons in an eerie green hot spring is totally creepy.

I'M A MESS

There is no good reason for a 28-year-old man to get as shamefully inebriated as I did last night. My last semi-clear memory is walking into Aladdin's sometime between the hours of 1 and 2 am. The guy at the counter took one look at me and said "you can't bring that bike in here" to which I responded "what if I just bring my bike in here?" to which he immediately and confusingly responded "ok." Having successfully shattered his defenses with my unmistakable gift for debate, I confidently sauntered over to the counter and ordered my usual, a falafel pita with onion rings. After counting out the dollar bills slowly and carefully and paying the man, I sat down to complete a crossword puzzle with the assistance of two genuinely thugged out black dudes. They were helpful at first but eventually lost interest when they noticed I was just drunkenly filling in "words" like SLAIT and THRASHE so they started talking to some girl who looked younger than me about her 13-year-old son. By the time my food was ready, she had given both of them her number and I was ready to ride my girlfriend's bike home (I still have no idea where my own bike could possibly be locked up). Unable to locate her or anyone else because I forgot that I had a cellphone, I ended up sitting in the darkness of my balcony eating my falafel, alone and confused.
It seems like this past month or so since my best friend and #1 warrior Superchill passed on to that great big catnip field in the sky, I have been falling to pieces. Not in an overwhelming nervous breakdown type of way that alienates your friends and makes them avoid your phone calls, but more in a subtle way where I just sit around all day not doing any of the things I need to do and then get so shitfaced at night that I spend a very loud and probably very obnoxious half hour boozily explaining to my friend that "the past is meaningless" and then making fun of everything that everyone in the world has ever liked just because the one thing that I liked more than anything else was taken away from me. Not very constructive, I know. I'm working on it.
On the plus side I've been having some pretty amusing mornings based around piecing together the forgotten moments of the previous evening's shamble through my apartment in search of somewhere to lay my clouded head. Like some amnesiac detective who is unaware that an outside world even exists, I shuffle around the apartment between the hours of 9 and 11 am trying to figure out why my shoes are in the bathroom, why my passport is in the freezer and how exactly I apparently created something edible from the baffling ingredients of egg noodles, brown sugar, sliced tomatoes (I was wielding a knife?!?!) and soy milk. Why are there ants on the television? Why is one sock on the porch? Why is my girlfriend in such a great mood? Did we have sex? Did I even brush my teeth? Do I even know where my toothbrush is? Yikes.
I'm a mess. And it's getting old. Starting tomorrow (not today; hangover) things are going to need to change around here. And by "here" I mean "inside of me, personally." No more boozing away the pain instead of utilizing my usual creative outlets, this blog included. I hereby guarantee a new and improved schedule of updates that will keep you entertained and informed. And by "you" I of course mean "me." Does anyone even read this thing? Well, no matter. Starting tomorrow, the new GET MUMMY will launch onto the unsuspecting blogosphere a whole new world of shit that no one cares about. I hope you're ready. And by "you're" I mean "I'm."

ILL SHIT, SONS

Some ill shit has gone down and continues to go down over this past weekend and this shitty week of midterms, so I haven't had much time for or interest in updating. But rest assured that I will soon fire off a review of this total fucking gem.



this is some next level shit.

VAHLINTHINEZ

REVENGE OF NETFLIX FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE OF DOOM ON DEATH MOUNTAIN 2

"The House of the Devil"

If you remember the 80's like I remember the 80's, then you don't remember much of shit. You and I probably both have somewhat comparable mental menageries of personal and most likely weird childhood moments, cultural frameworks and maybe just a little bit of adult concern seepage. An onion basket of images, sounds, smells and nausea, all crystallized into a fragmented broken windowpane overlooking the spotty, subconscious past. A bicycle ride downtown to the army surplus store for those MREs that I somehow found delicious, much to the confusion of a father who had no other choice than to eat them during a stint in Vietnam that he still refuses to talk about. The girl who lived next door that my older brother and his friends forced to eat dog food one afternoon, and who my parents caught sneaking onto our back porch two nights later to secretly eat some more. You know, crazy 80's cul-de-sac shit. Everything else is just a messy Pollock painting of family moments, Christmases, treehouses, Lego competetitions, injuries, lies and "fibs." The overall culture of the 80's itself is a blur around the edges, but one that somehow still penetrates my memories like Roman Polanski penetrates shiny European baby-pussy. Maybe one of my oldest and most prominent memories of the decade that oversaw the initial forging and tempering of my young molten soon-to-be-awesomeness would be the evening which, like dozens of others before and after it, began with my parents going out to the kind of function they could still enjoy together while my brother and I were young enough to be successfully handled by the high school girl with questionable morals from just across the street. In fact, the only thing that set this evening apart was the fact that I pooped in my pants because I was too afraid to go upstairs and use the bathroom by myself. I never asked my marginally-responsible babysitter to take me upstairs because I was embarassed to be afraid. I never told either her or my brother that I pooped my pants because I was embarassed to be a pants-pooping maniac who already had shame issues at much too young of an age. So I just kept my distance from the two of them for the rest of the night (poop smells) and would occasionally have to walk backwards out of a room so that they wouldn't notice what I was convinced must be the huge visible lump in the back of my pants. UNFORGIVABLE. Another noteworthy moment from that night was much earlier, before my messy brown downfall, when my neighbor showed me the article in the newspaper about the slasher icons Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees. At the time, just the photograph of Freddy in the paper bugged me out for the rest of the night. I was terrified. Fast-forward 20 odd years and I've got the horror palette of Rob Zombie's wettest dreams. And that's why I love "House of the Devil." I'm not saying anything else. Watch this one if you have even a passing interest in subtle horror. I know that sounds crazy but wikipedia that shit. "Subtle horror." It exists! This is a surprisingly convincing slice of solid gold homage right here, and if you don't get a Pavlovian boner for the babysitter's best friend's hair then your 80's childhood was sadly less stocked with confusing-to-a-young-man older babes than mine was. Sorry, man. Get over it. What are you, 30?

DON'T STEREOTYPE MY THING, YO

Puerto Ricans are loud. I realize that sounds extremely stereotypical and uneducated but those things don't concern me because it also happens to be true. I don't personally know any Puerto Ricans on an intimate level (however you want to interpret that) and I haven't spent enough time in the predominantly Puerto Rican neighborhoods of the majestic nightmare that is New York City to mean "Puerto Ricans are loud" in the Jerry Seinfeld sense of anglocentric befuddlement. It's a stereotype that I never really knew existed. But over the recent Christmas/New Year holiday my girlfriend and I spent two weeks in Puerto Rico and I am telling you right now that those fuckers are loud. All the time. Music is omnipresent and inevitably BLARING, be it the pounding goofy gangsterism of reggaeton or the classier leanings of some laid-back salsa. No matter the tune, the undeniable fact is that some tune will always be present. It pours out of open car windows, the doorways of high apartment balconies and tiny boomboxes on the laps of street dudes. Then there are the fireworks. Ubiquitous throughout the holiday season, celebratory explosions would shoot randomly from the streets into the skies with absolutely no warning. As in: directly from the streets and straight up into powerlines. At all hours of the day and night. The people themselves are in a seemingly constant state of chatter; boisterous, proud and admittedly pleasing to the ears. Spanish is a tight language and the particular dialect in Puerto Rico was so singular and fast-flowing that it rendered my limited talents in español basically useless. Everyone patiently suffered my stumbling through one incomplete sentence and immediately responded in English so masterfully learned that my shame was plugged in and amplified so much that Space could observe it. The Moon knows I'm a terrible bi-linguist.
The experience as a whole was solid. Old San Juan is a bonafied good time punctuated by epic colonial forts and the kind of architecture that makes you want to drink mohitos in the cobblestone streets all day, wearing an ice cream white suit & a panama hat, grabbing the asses of some possible prostitues and maybe drunkenly waving a gun around while some guy follows you and plays a horn. No one was doing that and I can't imagine why anyone would be, but that's what I wanted to do. The beaches in San Juan and the surrounding area are probably not the nicest on the island, but they did the trick for me. And I never tire of laughing at German accents or bonering over THICK LATIN CULOS. The tiny island of Vieques was a mixed bag; the southern town of Esperanza was a sloppy tumble of gross U.S.tourists thankfully salvaged by its incredible ocean views and the surrounding beaches that sort of changed my limited understanding of what "paradise" could actually mean to a person as broke as myself. The northern town of Isabel II was a differenct experience altogether; we spent the 2 days following the New Year there and were greeted by a gaggle of stumbling amiable zombies, wasted from 2 days of opulent rum consumption. They wandered around glassy-eyed and smiling, stopping occasionally in doorways to dance by themselves whether there was music playing nearby or not, and engaging my girlfriend and I in some of the most entertaining and warm conversations either of us has probably ever had with a total stranger, booze-influenced or otherwise.
I went to Puerto Rico with zero expectations and left with probably a lot less insight than I should have gleaned, but my overall impression is that of a genuine and welcoming place that deserves much more time and inquiry than I was able to grant it. The culture-shock was more of a slow burn than a jarring confrontation, its impact most likely softened further by the fact that I was reading Werner Herzog's "Conquest of the Useless" while I was there. Herzog was struggling with his own concepts of human nature in relation to the necessity and interpretation of art while slogging through the armpits of South America. I was trying to get a tan and eat as many plaintains as possible while floating around in the friendly rat-tail of the Caribbean. I imagine that's part of why he has spent his life as a cinematic Indiana Jones and I'm sitting in the school library listening to Tangerine Dream and avoiding my Spanish homework.
Different strokes, I guess.