Ritual # 1.

Segueing neatly from last week’s post into a bit of shameless self-promotion, this seems a fitting moment to alert you to the fact that I actually utilised the previously quoted passage from ‘Satan’s Slaves’ as part of the text accompanying a new musical [or, perhaps I should just say, “sound”] venture that I threw online a couple of months ago.

In essence, Count Dracula’s Great Love aims to combine sounds from the past with some recorded in the present, mixing and manipulating the two in an attempt to conjure and explore the mysteries, aesthetics and atmospheric resonances of particular times and places long gone. Realised at least partially via the means of a trusty VHS player, assorted boxes with knobs on and a digital four-track, the project’s initial instalment mines the darker side of the American South-West in the early 1970s, and can be sampled either via the link above or through the embedded box below. If you dig it, or get something out of it, please spread the word.

Five Years.(My Brain Hurts a Lot.)

So you know what the date was, when I hit that “create new weblog” button and made my first post here?

February 9th 2009.

Yes, to save you counting on your fingers, that's FIVE YEARS, as of last week.



I'll try to keep the self-indulgent self-reflection to a minimum, but basically I think things have developed pretty well since then. Certainly my knowledge and appreciation of cinema and pulp culture has increased massively since I first started trying to write about it, if nothing else. (I'm none too proud of some of the earlier posts on this blog, and there are some more recent ones that are full of inaccuracies and mistaken assumptions that are slightly embarrassing too, but hey, it’s all a learning process, right?)

Early in this site’s life, we were lucky enough to be picked out for a mention on Blogger's daily 'blogs of note' index, which caused a pretty huge spike in interest and seemed to put us on the map, readership-wise. Since then, ‘Breakfast in the Ruins’ has accumulated over 500 blogger 'followers', at least some of whom hopefully aren’t dead accounts or robots of some kind, and nearly half a million individual page-views, only about two thirds of which have been people searching for "nude vampires" or "[name of actress] + naked".

So, basically: I’m incredibly happy that at least some people seem to read this thing and appreciate what I’m doing with it. Thank you readers.

Anyway, by way of celebrating this chronological landmark, here’s something everyone’s sure to enjoy: a COMPETITION!

Yes, that’s right, a competition! Here’s how things are going to work:

Below are eight mysterious screengrabs, all culled from the vast collection of images I’ve amassed whilst working on this blog over the years, each of them taken from a film listed in the side-bar to your right.

If you think you can figure out where at least some of these images originated, you can email your entry to me at breakfastintheruins ( at ) googlemail.com, and if you do good, I will put some slightly shabby prizes in the post to you.

Yes, that’s right, I will actually put some things in an envelope, take it down to the post office and pay for the stamps, even if you live far away in a foreign country! That’s how much I love you all.

Details of prizes, deadline etc. are to be found below, but first let’s get on with the guessing. Here are images 1 to 8:

01:

02:

03:

04:

05:

06:

07:

08:

So there ya go. Best guesses please!

Not-so-glittering prizes potentially up for grabs are as follows:

1. A copy of Anchor Bay’s 2004 Jess Franco Collection box set (8 Discs, PAL Region 2, details here.)

2. A copy of the UK version of Anchor Bay’s 2007 Mario Bava Collection Volume # 1 box set (5 discs, PAL Region 2, details here.)

3. A random grab-bag of ‘70s pulp sci-fi paperbacks (exact contents yet to be confirmed, but there’ll definitely be some Moorcock, E.R. Burroughs and Robert E. Howard in there!)

4. A random grab-bag of DVDs (again, contents yet to be confirmed, but I can guarantee some plenty weird stuff that sticks within the kinda remit covered here, with quality ranging from recently released Blu-ray/DVD combos through to ancient, grungy bootlegs… can also throw in some VHS too if you want some.)

To be honest, I’m not sure whether the task I have set above will prove to be infernally difficult or foolishly simple, or whether anyone will even care enough to enter, so how’s this for a prize distribution scheme:

If I only receive one decent entry, the winner can take their pick or have the lot. If I get two decent entries, winners can choose two each with the highest scorer picking first. If I get three or four good entries, you get one each, with winners picking in order of highest score, and so on. I hope that sounds fair.

Judge’s discretion applies with regards to what constitutes a “decent entry”, but definitely don’t be discouraged from entering if you don’t have an answer for all eight images, because I’m guessing very few people will get them all right.

Deadline for entries will be… oh, I dunno – how does Monday 17th March strike you? Alright with everyone? Good.

(Oh, and one final note: please be a sport and DON’T enter if you happen to be under 18 years of age. No offense intended you understand, and I'm sure you possess perfectly grown up sensibilities, but some of the DVDs offered as prizes contain strong adult content, and getting busted for posting dirty movies to minors is something I can probably live without, y’know what I mean?)

Right! So good luck, and let the best man win. Or best woman, or whatever. Um… I’ve never done one of these before, can you tell?

Anyway, even if you don’t give a damn, thanks again for sticking with me readers, and I hope I will continue to meet whatever twisted expectations bring you to this weblog long into the future.

Stuff that has happened.

Sorry once again for falling off the posting wagon a bit – I’ve been running myself ragged trying to finish off my ‘best records of last year’ list on the other blog, and also doing some freelance work that’s been cutting into my writing time, but I’m back on top of things now and have lotsa good stuff lined up for the coming months.

Before that though, a couple of things worth a quick mention…

1.

In case you’ve not seen it elsewhere, exciting news about the rejuvenated Hammer sorting out their back catalogue! Now finally I can stop bitching about how rights issues etc have made it near impossible to see some of their best films and how difficult it is to actually find a copy of ‘Curse of Frankenstein’ etc, and instead just sit back and play the waiting game. (They’ve put up a new weblog keeping track of restoration developments here, if yr interested.)

Who knows, what with this, Kino’s Jean Rollin releases and Eureka’s new Repo Man disc, I might even have to bite the bullet and invest in a blu-ray player. I mean, don’t get me wrong, as a natural luddite I’m still inherently suspicious of all this HD business and believe that movies should be flat, as nature intended. But, y’know – extras, deleted scenes, nice picture quality, booklets full of pointless essays, cool stuff – I’m easily won over. I can always plug it in with a scart and watch stuff in glorious SD, just to be awkward.

2.

At the other end of the scale, it will probably come as little surprise to learn that we here at Breakfast in the Ruins are pretty bummed out about this whole SOPA/PIPA nonsense. Not being a US citizen, there’s not much I can do to directly influence such matters, but.. those of you who are don’t need me to tell you to go do what you need to do, I’m sure. I considered trying to take the blogs down for a day, but as that would prove a fairly awkward manoeuvre within the blogger structure, thought in the end I’d just do my bit by sitting on my arse and not posting anything for another day.

Hopefully the kind of ‘internet wars’ we’ve seen subsequently won’t escalate further, but let’s just say that, personally, I’m pretty narked about the whole business simply because up until yesterday I had links to a couple of dozen obscure, commercially unavailable movies all ready to go, now leading to dead pages. So, just in case I hadn’t made up my mind which side I was on yet, the copyrights lobby just entered my little universe by way of cancelling a whole season of forthcoming movie nights – way to win those hearts & minds guys, although frankly I guess they gave up on that sorta thing a few years ago when they took to throwing people in the slammer for listening to pop songs, as opposed to, say, rethinking their business practices to respond to a changing world, just like their predecessors have had to do for generations.

Purely in terms of movies, whilst I of course believe we should do everything our disposable income allows to support independent DVD labels and anyone else who’s out there treating marginal cinema with the respect it deserves, there’s still a vast universe of forgotten, whacked out stuff that no one’s ever gonna bother throwing on a disc, with only networks of fans to keep it alive and… y’see where I’m going with this, I’m sure, and the metaphorical producer is in the metaphorical control room making neck-slicing ‘wrap it up’ type motions at this point, so, uh, yeah - Damn The Man, and so forth, and GOODNIGHT!

'80s Apocalypse.

Just a quick plug, in case anyone's interested: the webzine Platform did an interview with me last month about my weirdo punk band thing, and they were nice enough to ask me to write a follow up piece about some of my favourite beserk/trashy '80s movies.

As has frequently been pointed out (most recently/persuasively by the endlessly wonderful House of Self-Indulgence blog), not every movie made during the 1980s can truly be claimed as an '80s MOVIE. A slippery distinction, but y'know what I mean. Naturally it is the latter category that I chose to concentrate on. I also tried to pick some titles that aren't already gigantic cult movie touchstones (hence no "Repo Man", no "Liquid Sky", no "Return of the Living Dead" etc), and, with the exception of "Times Square", I've veered more towards the crazy-ass exploitation side of things gather than going for, uh... actual great, life-changing films and so forth. Also a slippery distinction, and one I would usually seek to avoid on this site, but... practicality, y'know?

My final short-list boiled down to: Fulci's "The Black Cat", "Times Square", "Night of the Comet", "Savage Streets", "Vicious Lips", "Demons" and "1990: The Bronx Warriors", and my enthusiastic 200 word summation of each can be found here: http://readplatform.com/space-age-thrills-2/.

Petitionage.

It has come to my attention that over the past forty eight hours, this blog’s number of followers has nearly tripled. Which is… cool. Apparently Blogger has selected me as a ‘blog of note’. That was nice of them – cheers to whoever was responsible.

I hope that some of you new readers like what I’m doing enough to stick around. It’s all fairly self-explanatory I suppose. There are films, which I watch, and talk about. There are books, which are mainly things I’ve found in charity shops that appeal to me because they have striking/exciting/weird cover designs, although recently I’ve started writing short pieces about authors whose work I’ve actually been reading too (in a genre fiction context at least). Sometimes I might post videos of short films or trailers of note; sometimes I may do other things, who knows. But that’s basically yr lot. Music I do on my other blog.

Anyway, the point of this post was initially going to be to draw people’s attention to the banner above, which I initially saw on Celluloid Highway the other day. I can't be bothered to figure out how to make the image link to the petition as stated, but here's a link.

I guess it’s fair to say it’s probably something like the 500, 000th most important issue one could conceivably sign a petition about, but still, when it comes to causes I can whole-heartedly get behind, “getting old horror movies shown on the BBC again” probably ranks up there with eliminating world hunger, restricting international arms trading and letting the children boogie.

Because, well… I won’t launch into my standard diatribe about how TV’s become so worthless I don’t even own one anymore, but man, up until a few years ago, the BBC used to show some GREAT stuff late on Saturday nights. In fact, it’s stuff I first saw in that magic slot after Newsnight Review that is perhaps chiefly responsible for turning me into an active fan of horror/cult films, rather than just a passive ‘yeah, they’re pretty cool’ consumer. It was on late night TV that I first saw “Psychomania”, Michael Reeves’ “The Sorcerers”, John Gilling’s “The Night Caller”, Anthony Balch’s “Horror Hospital”, “Incense For The Damned”, “Plague Of The Zombies”, the list goes on – all fantastic films, many of which are unavailable on domestic DVD to this day. And even when nothing especially mind-blowing turned up, the opportunity take in as much of “Lust For A Vampire” or “Scream And Scream Again” as I could before I drifted off to sleep is one that all lonely, penniless young people should be able to avail themselves of after the pubs close on a weekend.

Despite the subsequent digital TV ‘revolution’, there’s now nowhere that shows this stuff, or anything remotely comparable re: worthwhile old movies. Surely digging ‘em out of the vaults can’t be any more expensive than buying in more shitty made-for-TV thrillers from America? How else will our children learn about ritual decapitation, the occult properties of graveyard toads and whether or not Joan Collins stands a chance against a psychopathic Santa Claus?

So, er, yeah. You get the picture.

“Happy…? Long ago I knew what it meant to be happy..”

Incongruous as it may seem for a blog mainly dedicated to horror and weirdness, Shaun of The Celluloid Highway has seen fit to bestow a Happy 101 award upon Breakfast In The Ruins. Thanks dude, much appreciated!

It’s another of those chain letter blog award things that I just can’t say no to, and the rules are pretty straight forward: list ten things that bring me joy, and designate ten favoured blogs to pass the award on to.

Right, this shouldn’t take long…

JOY:

1. The Ramones.

2. Fuzz pedals! And dissonant, crazed guitar noise in all its many and varied forms.

3. John Carpenter! Just, y’know, for everything… but, recently, for this in particular.

4. A fucking good loaf of bread! As made in a bakery, by a baker. Can’t beat it.

5. Betty & The Werewolves!

6. The fact that I have tickets to see Jonathan Richman play in a pub down the road from my house in a couple of months!

7. The fact that there are hundreds of Japanese delinquent girl gang movies out there, and I’ve only seen, like, one!

8. Booze! You don’t think I watch all these movies sober, do you? Real ale, half decent red wine or a straight glass of single malt – beyond that, I’m not fussy.

9. H.P. Lovecraft! Where would I be without the formative influence of this reclusive old bigot and his strange imaginings? Happy and successful and not scribbling weird junk on the internet, probably.

10. Godzilla! It makes me so happy every time he lumbers across the screen like a big doofus with a hangover, looking for breakfast, wishing life would just stop fucking with him for a minute.

11. Barbara Steele! The one and only.


12. ‘Black Hole’ by Charles Burns and ‘Hate’ by Peter Bagge! Two comic books I never tire of looking at. Probably best not think too hard, re: why.

13. All Ages Records, on Pratt Street NW1, and Up the Video Junction in Camden Market! undoubtedly the two best shops in London when it comes to serving my particular cultural needs, and I only recently discovered they’re both run by the same people! God bless them and their friendly, endlessly enthusiastic, cool band starting, exemplary shop-keeping ways – long may I continue to give them my money in exchange for neat stuff.

How many’s that? Thirteen? Shit, close enough.

BLOGS:

Last time I had one of these awards, I tried to do non-film related blogs, so, this time around, ten of my favourite film blogs:

Acidemic
Bangalore Film Society
Cavalcade of Perversions
Cult Movie Reviews
Die, Danger, Die, Die, Kill!
House of Self-Indulgence
Lost Video Archive
Love Train For The Tenebrous Empire
Monster Movie Music
Quiet Cool

They're all pretty super.

Rampant Egomania Beckons.

It seems that for the first time thus far in my weblogging career, I have been nominated by receive one of those chain blog award thingys – a ‘Kreativ Blogger’ award, courtesy of Hans, whose excellent blog Quiet Cool would be getting one right back from me, were it not for the fact that would start some sort of mutual appreciation feedback loop. Anyway, many thanks to Hans, and needless to say, his writing on film is really excellent and has helped bring more than a few previously unknown classics to my attention over the past few months. I particularly appreciate the way in which Quiet Cool recognises art and exploitation cinema as flipsides of the same coin and treats both with equal respect – an idea close to my heart, and one that I’d like to see more film fans/writers take on board.

Here’s the deal:

The Rules:

1. Thank the person who nominated you for this award.
2. Copy the logo and place it on your blog.
3. Link to the person who nominated you for this award.
4. Name 7 things about yourself that people might find interesting.
5. Nominate 7 Kreativ Bloggers.
6. Post links to the 7 blogs you nominate.
7. Leave a comment on each of the blogs letting them know they have been nominated.

For the seven blogs I’m nominating, I should point out firstly that since the award has been given to this, my film/books/weirdness blog, rather than my music blog, I’ll thus highlight some of the blogs I follow in that general area, rather than the many great music blogs I also enjoy.

Thinking about it, I guess that many of my favourite non-music crit blogs – If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, Final Girl, A Journey Round My Skull, Monster Movie Music etc. – are already extremely popular, and probably don’t need any cheerleading from the likes of me. Also, much of my favourite film-writing is to be found on sites that, in addition to being equally well-known, aren’t blogs at all (crazy stuff, huh?). In particular, Keith Allison and his comrades at Teleport City are at least partially responsible for helping to revive my enthusiasm for cult film, as is Joseph A. Ziemba at the hopefully-soon-to-be-resurrected Bleeding Skull.

So, with that in mind, I thought it might be interesting to venture beyond the realm of movie blogs and give a shout out to some of the more unusual sites that may be found on the blogroll to your right – blogs that, in one way or another, have helped expand my horizons and regularly planted thoughts in my head that I otherwise would never have thunk. Here goes;


SEVEN BLOGS (in alphabetical order):

Another Nickel In The Machine

From the birth of the cocaine trade in the Chinatown underworld of Billy ‘Brilliant’ Chang, to the Ku-Klux Klan marching through Battersea, to the jazz age outrages of Elvira Blarney and ‘Snakehips’ Johnson, to Keith Moon’s memorable last words, “Another Nickel”s meticulously researched and copiously illustrated posting reveal astounding hidden histories lurking behind the façade of the city I call home that would make the most lurid pulp novelists go weak at the knees.

Beyond the Implode

Ok, so I suppose this one is sort-of a music blog, in that most of the posts use music as a jumping off point, but in reading Beyond The Implode you’re liable to learn a lot less about music and a lot more about…. well, I’m not sure to be honest – this and that. But whatever Mr. Beyond The Implode sees fit to bang on about, he does so in a style that’s the very embodiment of the kind of effortlessly entertaining guttersnipe gonzo ranting that used to make the British music press the envy of the world, before it all went to shit and they decided to sack anyone who was any good. Or something like that. Anyway, the continued existence of this kind of discourse, roaming free unshackled from the niceties of word counts or editorial direction, makes me happy.

Carrie White Burns In Hell

I like the anonymity of this video blog’s presentation, and the complete lack of commentary. It seems to be run by a guy called Joe, but beyond that…. just take a deep breath, press play, and enter another world. Visit every few days and repeat. Enough in the archives to keep you going for months, assuming the great Youtube purge of ’09 hasn’t claimed back too much ground.

Caustic Cover Critic

For anyone with even the faintest interest in the aesthetics of book design, JRSM runs just about the best one-stop-shop for such things imaginable, with content ranging from praise for the genuinely good to scorn for the lazy and bad to general ‘?!?!?!’ for the unspeakable oddities of the Print-On-Demand sector, and plenty of nice vintage design and eye-boggling pulp covers to enjoy too – so fun for all the family really, assuming your family all like looking at books. Oh, and in addition to that, JRSM’s recent end of year book round up actually managed to pique my interest in some contemporary authors with whom I was unfamiliar – quite an achievement, as I’m usually pretty curmudgeonly when it comes to people trying to persuade me to read any literary fiction published after about 1976.

Cotton Candy Truant

Dusty S. says of her blog: “COTTON CANDY TRUANT is a blog for fiends of quivering pop culture of the past, exploitation flicks, and deep fried fun.” What more can I add? It’s a rolling parade of awesome from an era when American pop culture was really something worth digging, and I dig it.

Freedom School Records

I only found this neat pulps/comix focused blog over the xmas holidays, so it’s a bit of a new one to me. In fact, I didn’t even notice until today that it’s the work of Mike Hunchback, of Norton Records fame! Sadly the blog is pretty sparsely updated, but we’re talking quality over quantity here, and every post is a veritable eye-gasm (if you will) of ‘60s underground comix, Weird Tales, EC horror titles, some totally killer sleaze and horror paperbacks and, well, All The Good Stuff basically. Clearly Mike Hunchback’s position as a man of impeccable aesthetic taste isn’t limited to just putting out all those killer Sonics and Hasil Adkins reissues.

The Guild of Scientific Troubadours

Grant Balfour is a great and noble man, and such qualities are naturally reflected in his current venture, The Guild of Scientific Troubadours, delivering a steady diet of news flashes from the laboratories, observatories and research expeditions of the world, presented with an eye to the more humanistic and artistic aspects of science, not to mention a healthy love of weirdness, that even a science illiterate swine like me can appreciate. Distant galaxies! Strange and frightening sea creatures! Frozen Viking DNA! It’s all here. AND ALSO: songs – wonderful, dreamy psychedelic pop songs – inspired by it all, one a month, and commended to your attention.

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As to “Seven things about yourself that people might find interesting”? Are you kidding? Strip away my various cultural obsessions and hobby-horses and I’m probably as dull an individual as you could ever have the misfortune to meet, having spent my life thus far studiously avoiding the possibility of doing anything noteworthy.

I enjoyed Hans’ run-down of cinema-related life anecdotes though, and thinking about it, I’ve got some good ones, so I’ll try to put something together for a future post.