Apr 2014 *
Well, here I am. Belatedly hopping on the intro train, as it leaves the station (and hopefully not fumbling my grasp on the rail, and spectacularly flailing for a few seconds, before crashing with a sickening thud onto the rails, and lying in a crumpled heap, wondering what's worse, the embrassment at the fall, or white-hot shoot pain of my fractured physical self...).
Basic facts - I'm a Geordie - technically that makes me English, but really I'm Geordie first and foremost. I live in New Zealand with Mrs M, and the three little M's - daughters all. Can't leave the house without tripping over hobbits, elves, and whatnot. It's a bloody pain when you're putting the bins out, I can tell you. The scenery is breathtaking, though - I've been here for more than a decade, and I'm still blown away when I look out of the window.
Oh, and we also have our very own white trash - The Bogans!
https://tvnz.co.nz/seven-sharp/makes-bogan-video-5519288
Me and pop-culture:
I was born the day after The King died, and sadly, rather than being The King Reborn, I have neither the musical ability, smoldering looks, money, or killer side-burns, that made a generation of ladies wet their pants and scream.
My formative years, in terms of pop-culture at least, were the eighties - a decade which has left an indelible mark on my psyche. A chance purchase of The Incredible Hulk #297 ignited an uhealthy interest of comic books (bear in mind that in the UK at the time comics were not at all cool outside a sub-culture of nerds, geeks and later goths), augmenting (with adamantuium, naturally) an already strong love of reading. Flights of fancy were further extended by film and TV. I love the escapism, and imagination.
I inherited my love of films, and the wide range of trivia that's lodged in my grey matter, from my dad. He introduced me to the world of 'so bad it's good', B-movies, and so on. He also gave me a good grounding in good-good stuff as well, and I'm one of the few people I know who likes films that are black & white, and even ones with subtitles! I'm a fan of pretty much anything, as long as it's entertaining. He also introduced me to a world of music that went beyond the pop crap of the day, and non-superhero comics - the likes of Robert Crumb, and so on.
I've never been the most social (I met my wife in a fit of uncharacteristically sociality), always on (or slightly off) the fringe of the social groups. Generally, that guy in the background who doesn't talk much to others and gets tongue-tied around girls was me. Other factors left me feeling like the man of a thousand faces, but never knowing which one was the real me. Not until recently, anyway.
Hmmm. This shouldn't be a sob story - that's uncalled for.
Me and trash:
I think my love of trash started back in the '50s, (although I don't look old enough). There's just something about that decade that just screams trash and sleaze to me. I think it's born of several factors, amongst which are chiefly:
1. The cracking veneer of respectability. People have always had dirty little secrets, but the explosion of TV, lurid magazines and the like, seemed to start breaking through in the fifties. The nuclear family of Mom, Pop, Junior and the chick seemed so outwardly proper, but just behind the facade Mom was screwing the negro gardener, Pop was hiring rent boys, Junior was mainlining H, and the chick was banging the biker gang.
2. The birth of Rock & Roll, the Beat generation, the burgeoning civil rights movement - times were starting to change, and people were starting to take risks - this echoed through art as well as society.
There are more, but that's perhaps something for another post, but I say there's no denying the influence had on trash luminaries - in cinema John Waters and David Lynch, literature James Ellroy, comics Daniel Clowes and Charles Burns, music Frank Zappa & The Mothers - all seem to have this '50s style, with the trashy uderbelly becoming exposed.
What I really vibe to is Exploitation cinema - not every kind, but it's just what I want to watch. Chop-socky, Bruceploitation, Blaxploitation, Revenge films, Zombie films, Gang films... I love 'em. I love the cheapness, the trashyness, the grittiness, the bad acting and FX, the killer soundtracks and lurid titles. Man, I'm getting shivers just thinking about it.
I tend go through stages of just being into one sub-genre, then I move onto the next - I've been on a horror kick for about 18 months, but at the minute, I've a hankering for Urban Violence - hence my role as the Vigilante Man.
Like many others, I'd love to create. I have a thousand ideas - from kernal to fully fledged - jostling for space in my cranium, and a million scraps of paper and Word docs cluttering up my space, both real and virtual, with a scribble or a doodle on. Some (admittedly few) I think are genuine contenders for being actually good, most are rubbish, and several have mated with each other and left bastard hybrid ideas gestating in my think-box. These thoughts cover a wide range of media - e.g. I have an entire comic-book universe, complete from 1930s - present day curdling away in there, next to a hundred film ideas, a soap opera (based on my and the wife's families), paintings, a prose & animated homage to Lovevraft, a LOtR rip-off fantasy trilogy, and many, many more. All share the fact that they'll probably never see the light of day, because I have a strong tendency toward self-doubt and procrastination.
I also do a fine line in voices - probably should have been a voice actor in cartoons, but, hey I got a steady job and a family to feed!
What do I want from this site?
A cool place to hang out online, with like-minded guys and gals. To find out new shit, to get some sweet recs, and generally have a good bit of craic. And hopefully I can contribute something similar to others. That would be nice. If nothing else, I reckon I'll get your word-count-per-post average up!
So that's me in a (large) nutshell. A comic-book nerd, poor(ish) social skills, trivia buff, and tenuous connection to Elvis. I'm like a latter day Clarence Worley, though I haven't married a call-girl, shot a pimp, found a suitcase full of coke, been chased by Sicillians, or lost an eye in a gunfight with police in a Hollywood director's hotel suite. I do love a Sonny Chiba Triple Feature, though...
https://archive.org/details/TheStreetFighterTrilogy
Basic facts - I'm a Geordie - technically that makes me English, but really I'm Geordie first and foremost. I live in New Zealand with Mrs M, and the three little M's - daughters all. Can't leave the house without tripping over hobbits, elves, and whatnot. It's a bloody pain when you're putting the bins out, I can tell you. The scenery is breathtaking, though - I've been here for more than a decade, and I'm still blown away when I look out of the window.
Oh, and we also have our very own white trash - The Bogans!
https://tvnz.co.nz/seven-sharp/makes-bogan-video-5519288
Me and pop-culture:
I was born the day after The King died, and sadly, rather than being The King Reborn, I have neither the musical ability, smoldering looks, money, or killer side-burns, that made a generation of ladies wet their pants and scream.
My formative years, in terms of pop-culture at least, were the eighties - a decade which has left an indelible mark on my psyche. A chance purchase of The Incredible Hulk #297 ignited an uhealthy interest of comic books (bear in mind that in the UK at the time comics were not at all cool outside a sub-culture of nerds, geeks and later goths), augmenting (with adamantuium, naturally) an already strong love of reading. Flights of fancy were further extended by film and TV. I love the escapism, and imagination.
I inherited my love of films, and the wide range of trivia that's lodged in my grey matter, from my dad. He introduced me to the world of 'so bad it's good', B-movies, and so on. He also gave me a good grounding in good-good stuff as well, and I'm one of the few people I know who likes films that are black & white, and even ones with subtitles! I'm a fan of pretty much anything, as long as it's entertaining. He also introduced me to a world of music that went beyond the pop crap of the day, and non-superhero comics - the likes of Robert Crumb, and so on.
I've never been the most social (I met my wife in a fit of uncharacteristically sociality), always on (or slightly off) the fringe of the social groups. Generally, that guy in the background who doesn't talk much to others and gets tongue-tied around girls was me. Other factors left me feeling like the man of a thousand faces, but never knowing which one was the real me. Not until recently, anyway.
Hmmm. This shouldn't be a sob story - that's uncalled for.
Me and trash:
I think my love of trash started back in the '50s, (although I don't look old enough). There's just something about that decade that just screams trash and sleaze to me. I think it's born of several factors, amongst which are chiefly:
1. The cracking veneer of respectability. People have always had dirty little secrets, but the explosion of TV, lurid magazines and the like, seemed to start breaking through in the fifties. The nuclear family of Mom, Pop, Junior and the chick seemed so outwardly proper, but just behind the facade Mom was screwing the negro gardener, Pop was hiring rent boys, Junior was mainlining H, and the chick was banging the biker gang.
2. The birth of Rock & Roll, the Beat generation, the burgeoning civil rights movement - times were starting to change, and people were starting to take risks - this echoed through art as well as society.
There are more, but that's perhaps something for another post, but I say there's no denying the influence had on trash luminaries - in cinema John Waters and David Lynch, literature James Ellroy, comics Daniel Clowes and Charles Burns, music Frank Zappa & The Mothers - all seem to have this '50s style, with the trashy uderbelly becoming exposed.
What I really vibe to is Exploitation cinema - not every kind, but it's just what I want to watch. Chop-socky, Bruceploitation, Blaxploitation, Revenge films, Zombie films, Gang films... I love 'em. I love the cheapness, the trashyness, the grittiness, the bad acting and FX, the killer soundtracks and lurid titles. Man, I'm getting shivers just thinking about it.
I tend go through stages of just being into one sub-genre, then I move onto the next - I've been on a horror kick for about 18 months, but at the minute, I've a hankering for Urban Violence - hence my role as the Vigilante Man.
Like many others, I'd love to create. I have a thousand ideas - from kernal to fully fledged - jostling for space in my cranium, and a million scraps of paper and Word docs cluttering up my space, both real and virtual, with a scribble or a doodle on. Some (admittedly few) I think are genuine contenders for being actually good, most are rubbish, and several have mated with each other and left bastard hybrid ideas gestating in my think-box. These thoughts cover a wide range of media - e.g. I have an entire comic-book universe, complete from 1930s - present day curdling away in there, next to a hundred film ideas, a soap opera (based on my and the wife's families), paintings, a prose & animated homage to Lovevraft, a LOtR rip-off fantasy trilogy, and many, many more. All share the fact that they'll probably never see the light of day, because I have a strong tendency toward self-doubt and procrastination.
I also do a fine line in voices - probably should have been a voice actor in cartoons, but, hey I got a steady job and a family to feed!
What do I want from this site?
A cool place to hang out online, with like-minded guys and gals. To find out new shit, to get some sweet recs, and generally have a good bit of craic. And hopefully I can contribute something similar to others. That would be nice. If nothing else, I reckon I'll get your word-count-per-post average up!
So that's me in a (large) nutshell. A comic-book nerd, poor(ish) social skills, trivia buff, and tenuous connection to Elvis. I'm like a latter day Clarence Worley, though I haven't married a call-girl, shot a pimp, found a suitcase full of coke, been chased by Sicillians, or lost an eye in a gunfight with police in a Hollywood director's hotel suite. I do love a Sonny Chiba Triple Feature, though...
https://archive.org/details/TheStreetFighterTrilogy
You seem to have a solid foundation in trash, which makes you a perfect fit for this site, Vigilante Man. I haven't ventured much into the 50s, but anything leading up into the 60s has got to be legit. The 40s were all about class (almost boring in some ways), until the 50s came out with space age, mutant bugs and science-gone-wrong for the most part, essentially the ancestor/prototype of modern b-movies. It's the decade when Little Richard went all tuttie frutti on the world, and he was a real trash legend himself! He was a gay black man singing rock and roll, getting arrested for sexual misconducts, and doing enough drugs to hit rock bottom and come out of it again. Not to mention he inspired John Waters in many ways...
Vent your ideas more often. You ought to know that Trash Epics is going to evolve into a production company sooner or later, and I can't produce all the content myself. Take some stories and hell, maybe we can get some other users on here (when we have enough willing users) to make some of your stories into a reality. That is, unless you want to do it yourself.