Snobbin: Beautiful Trash in the Pop Culture Gutter

Jeremiah and I rented the Lost House some time in 2001 because we wanted a bigger place that would hold us and our friend, Matt. The place was too big, so we had to get a roommate. Eventually, Jeremiah's cousin moved into a room in our house that was not that bigger than a closet. Another guy  moved in upstairs with Mat, and maybe I will discuss him in more detail in a future post. Needless to say the guy was a mess and caused us more stress than you could ever imagine.  We decorated the house in Punk and Industrial Chic, taping flyers, newspaper clippings, and comic strips to the dirty walls. It soon resembled  a larger version of my bedroom in high school. Much to my mother's dismay, I covered the walls of my room with clippings and pictures from floor to ceiling, tacking up whatever took my fancy from punk ads to clippings from old books. My room was on the second floor of the house, which earlier had been converted from an attic, so the lower half of the wall had pa...

I moved in that summer, not prepared for a hot, festering several months in a strange, small house that had seen its share of drunken, college parties. I moved in with three other guys who I had known awhile: Dave, Joe, and Jeremiah. We were a motley crew: a punk rock English major, a brusque music major, a science major, and an opinionated psychology major. I was the progressive English major that flirted with anarchism, like a less obnoxious version of Rik from The Young Ones . In some ways, we resembled that troupe, except with far less humor.   Joe was a more conservative psychology major who liked to argue. We were both from the same hometown and had honed our friendship as outsiders. Dave majored in teaching music; he was the authoritarian taskmaster that wanted to keep us in line. Jeremiah, the science major, added a new flavor to our little group of outsiders. We met Jeremiah when he took a room in the house the previous January. He and I would move into another house, T...

I never expected Mondo Weirdo to be a black and white art film, drifting between imagery of sadism, sex, and violence. The title made me think it would be like Mondo Cane or other documentaries in the Mondo subgenre, cataloging practices that shock western audiences. Instead, Mondo Weirdo documents a young girl's discoveries of the violent world around her to an industrial soundtrack. Equal parts snuff film, hardcore pornography, and gore vehicle, it is not for the faint of heart. Once I discovered it was directed by Carl Andersen, an associate of transgressive filmmaker, Jorg Buttgereit, best known for Nekromantik , another extreme film, I realized that it was attempting to break taboos and challenge audience perceptions rather than shock. However, its short running time of less than an hour might still be too long for many to stomach.