Snobbin: Beautiful Trash in the Pop Culture Gutter

One of the most obnoxious things I have ever done was on Halloween, perhaps in 1995 or 1996. I was sixteen or seventeen years old. Dressed in cheap store-bought monster masks, wearing old jeans and sneakers, my friend Bill and I prowled the streets of my hometown. We terrorized churches, children, and old ladies. We were equal opportunity in those days, relying on our innate sense of indecency. We creepy-crawled that town. Like that scene in Pink Flamingos , when the furniture ejects people because of the sheer badness of  Divine and her twisted family, we meant to be as evil as possible. We ignored the comments that we were too old to be trick or treating. It did not matter that both of us were over six feet tall and Bill weighed over two hundred pounds. We just wanted more candy. We weren't going to take no lip. Forget about the razor blades in the candy, bub. I don't want any more sweet tarts. The mission was fraught with peril. Weirdness abounded at every corner. We gri...

I'm listening to Chris Bell and feeling really underwhelmed by graduate school today. So I figured now was as good of a time as any to flex my fiction writing muscles and post another installment of my sojourn into fiction writing -- " "The Jukebox Played An Old Sad Song." I feel that some of this story might seem a tad cliched, or intentionally pulpy, but I am going with it. Writing is an unrewarding task sometimes, but most of the time I can't imagine doing anything else.  One of these times I will put up revisions. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- He grabbed a pool cue from a corner rack. The bar was somewhat of a dive with dirty concrete floors and cracked brown wall panels covered by decades old beer signs. The only new embellishments included new lights over the pool tables and large screen led televisions with 24 hour sports blaring. The pool cue he grabbed was one of the old ones; it had so...

Those who have spent any time around me know that I have never been a fan of Progressive rock. At first mention of genre stalwarts like Yes, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, and King Crimson, I clam up, only to have apoplectic fits of rage later at home while jamming out to the Dead Boys. And don't even get me started on Rush -- I could write an entire blog post on their fan base alone. Yet when it comes to horror movie soundtracks, I rave endlessly about the merits of bands like Goblin who epitomize the genre in every way, except for the fact that they made the music (mostly) for the best Dario Argento films, including Suspiria and Deep Red . Their intelligent and intricate, yet propulsive, themes make these great films even better. In fact, those who question Argento's ability as a director must admit that his choice of music is integral to the horror and suspense he creates. Goblin is a huge part of that. Their pieces move the films along by providing tension and drama at oppo...