Year in Review

2011 ended up being a busy year.

Though I took a few months off between touring Impossibly Funky around after 2010, I kept trying to work that publicity angle throughout the early part of 2011. I completed my second book tour in late May/early June and, in effect, I completed book touring altogether unless I suddenly find myself with some kind of lucrative publishing deal some day. I met a lot of great people but I sure didn't sell enough books to make the trip worthwhile.

A lot of the folks I met on my travels with Impossibly Funky in 2010 and 2011 ended up writing for me in the "Revenge of Print" issue of Cashiers du Cinemart. This came out a month early in August though I have yet to get all of the old school photocopied and stapled issues out to my distributor (and, thus, out to stores). In the meantime, CdC 16 is available via a print-on-demand service.

In March I co-founded a podcast, The Projection Booth. Since then there has been a new episode (or two) available each week. Nearly all of them feature interviews with the filmmakers behind the movies covered. It's been great connecting and/or re-connecting with folks and sharing my love of some terrific films.

Doing all of the research for the show has really helped bolster my confidence and led to benefits for other work that I've done in 2011 including the piece I wrote for the new Paracinema magazine all about horror parodies of the '80s and the chapter I wrote on Airplane II: The Sequel for an upcoming book from BearManor Media.

I had a blast hanging out with Greydon Clark in April at Horror Hound and in September. I'm still hoping to work with him on his autobiography (fingers crossed). I also had a lot of fun with the fine folks at the Blue Water Film Festival. BWFF marked the fist time that Chris Gore and I ever officially met (though we were both in The People Vs. George Lucas).

Along with Horror Hound and Blue Water, I also attended the CIMMFest in Chicago in April where I got to see the premiere of Freaks in Love, the Alice Donut documentary.

If you know me, you know how much I love to travel. 2011 marked the first year I'd been to Europe since 1991, and my first time on the Iberian peninsula. Andrea and I had a blast in Barcelona. I miss it just about every day.

Please feel free to go through the archives of this blog for more fun or check out the links below. Stay tuned in 2012 for more good stuff.

Links:

• The Projection Booth podcast
• Cashiers du Cinemart 16
• Impossibly Funky
• Paracinema Magazine
• BearManor Media
• Blue Water Film Festival
• Greydon Clark
• CIMMFest
• The People Vs. George Lucas

Happy Holidays from Robocop

As a special holiday gift from me to you, I put together the songs that I used in the Robocop episode of The Projection Booth podcast into a music mix. It's a .zip file for easy download.

Here are some of the songs:

Robocop Theme - Basil Poledouris
Robocop Theme - Nintendo 8-bit version
Robocop (Who R U?) - B.O.S.E
OCP - Gama Bomb
Robocop - Sleaze Boyz
Murphy's Law - Priestess
Robocop: Streets of Detroit - Shiryu
Murphy, It's You - Al & Jon Kaplan

Download the Robocop Music Mix.

It seems that Robocop is in the air at the moment. Be sure to check out the deluxe cover story of Paracinema Magazine all about the film. Go Robo!

Paracinema 14

I'm really happy to see that my upcoming article on horror parodies of the 1980s has made the front cover of Paracinema 14. Being OCD, I went a little nuts doing the research on this one, talking to Jeff Begun of Saturday the 14th, Alfred Sole of Pandemonium, Greydon Clark of Wacko, Chris Bearde of Hysterical, and more. Stop by Paracinema.net to pre-order a copy now!

Take 5ive! - Episode #1

Dion Conflict interviews author Mike White (Cashiers du Cinemart) on his book entitled "Impossibly Funky: A Cashiers Du Cinemart Collection" in the rest room of a rep cinema in Detroit, Michigan.

CineKink Announces Dates for Ninth Annual Kinky Film Festival

NEW YORK, NY; December 1, 2011 - Scheduled for February 7-12, 2012, the ninth annual CineKink NYC will feature a specially-curated program of films and videos that celebrate and explore a wide diversity of sexuality. In addition to screenings, plans for the festival also include a short film competition, audience choice awards, a special adult entertainment showcase, presentations, parties and a gala kick-off, all to be followed by a national tour.

Billing itself as "the kinky film festival," the event is presented by CineKink, an organization dedicated to the recognition and encouragement of sex-positive and kink-friendly depictions in film and television. With offerings drawn from both the independent cinema world and the adult, works presented at CineKink NYC will range from documentary to drama, comedy to experimental, slightly spicy to quite explicit--and everything in between.

"We're once again looking to blur some boundaries and spice things up with our programming," said Lisa Vandever, Co-Founder and Director of CineKink. "Our audience has come to expect a quality selection of smart and sexy works and, judging from the films that have come in so far, the 2012 season will not disappoint!"

CineKink recently completed its 2011 national tour in Chicago, concluding a season that also saw the festival visiting Austin, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Portland and Washington, DC.

A call for entries to submit works for CineKink/2012 runs until December 12, 2011, and the festival line-up and schedule for CineKink NYC will be announced in early January.

For more information go to http://www.cinekink.com.

More Evidence....

The People vs. George Lucas came out recently on DVD. If they ever do a sequel, the clip below needs to be in it. I'm reminded of my rant about how the prequels were originally supposed to roll out and which characters were supposed to be in them. Watch it before George suppresses it.

Happy Thanksgiving

Cinema's Top Human Villains - Revised

I like the work done on the supercut "Cinema's Top Human Villains" but didn't like the song. I added Zwan's "Number of the Beast" and a handful of extra clips at the end to hopefully sate the requests from hh1edits's comments.

Here's the original:

Here's my version:

Additional villains:
Salieri from Amadeus
Henry from Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer
Amon Goeth from Schindler's List
Hans Landa from Inglourious Basterds (sic)
Pauline from Heavenly Creatures
Layne from River's Edge

Vegas

I knew that things were going to be good when we rounded the corner to our hotel (The Riviera) and saw that the Village People were playing there. That kind of made up for the Elvis show at the Aria being dark for the week.

Andrea and I went to Las Vegas from November 9-13 ostensibly to get re-re-marries on 11/11/2011. Fittingly, this is our 11th anniversary year and we had originally planned on getting married on 11/11/2001 until the date was changed on us. Long story. Let's just say that family politics were involved and we still shake our fists and gnash our teeth in anger over this one. Regardless, we were there to set the record straight and take advantage of the date. As it turned out, a lot of other couples were in Vegas with similar plans.

Our wedding was one of three that were performed within the twenty minutes we were at A Hollywood Chapel on Las Vegas Blvd. The place had it down to a science, including adding in all of the extra perks to charge people more money. "With the package you get a roll of film. If you'd like, we can give you digital pictures for $20 more..." "No, that's fine, we'll take the film." "With the package, you get the ceremony on VHS. For $30 more, we'll give you a DVD." "That's fine, we'll take the VHS."

There's no VCR in the building and the photographer was obviously using a digital camera. When we were getting ready to leave the same saleswoman told us that the officiant/minister was so nice that he bought us the upgrade. I think we were supposed to then tip him for his generosity but I think he would have been fairly surprised to hear that he'd paid $50 out of his own pocket for us. We laughed about this all day.

Weddings were in the air; one couple even got married on stage at the Village People concert that night as part of the encore. Alas, they were a hetero couple. I had hoped that the Village People might be a little more progressive than that. Maybe the boys were being on good behavior since Felipe's father was in the audience but they were posturing as very straight all evening.

I had figured that the guys going under the name "The Village People" these days would be six twentysomething dudes who might have seen Can't Stop the Music a couple times and knew the lyrics to "Macho Man" as a qualification. Surprisingly, apart from The Leather Man, all of the guys in the Village People had been in the band since 1980 or earlier.

Apart from a couple of teenagers, I think I was the youngest person there. The show was good though they didn't do as many of their original songs as I'd have liked. I had really hoped for more of a Live and Sleazy playlist with some Can't Stop the Music tunes in there too. They did some of their hits and a couple covers but I could have done for a few more hours of Village People music.

Most of our time was spent reading, walking, eating and gambling; in that order. On Thursday and Saturday I was in my glory as we got to hang out with Greydon Clark and Marly a bit.

The other high point of our weekend came just as we were leaving. We took a taxi from the hotel to the airport. The driver did the usual patter, asking us where we were from, asking about the weather and the politics happening in Michigan, and giving us a dismal forecast of the future. He seemed very down on the state of things as he and Andrea talked state funding. I almost said, "It's too early to talk politics," to try and shut him up but I'm so glad I didn't. As we went along we went past the Occupy Las Vegas camp the driver started telling us that the whole Occupy movement is actually a government-created plot to keep people busy, all headed up by a good friend of President Obama.

And then he went off the deep end.

"I'm going to tell you something that's going to blow your mind," he told us. I wished that I had started recording him because what he laid on us was an incredibly dense web of conspiracy theory nuttiness that just couldn't be topped. He told us that Barak Obama's real name was Barry Soetoro and that he had been to Mars as part of the colonization of our sister planet (via Tesla-based teleportation technology, 'natch). He spun this wild tale of Martians, the Rothchilds, and Queen Elizabeth II. When he was at a breaking point, with a straight face, I told him, "That's funny because I had heard something very similar but about Gerald Ford..." I went on to tell him a little bit of the plot outline of Mondo Ford. I hope like hell that he looked it up when he got home and believed every word of this Ricardo Fratelli classic:

The scariest thing about what this guy was spewing is that I just googled "Obama Mars Barry" and came up with two million hits.