Bored games: I Vant To Bite Your Finger

Fuck Monopoly and Scrabble and Operation and all that, the only board game I wanted to play as a kid was I Vant To Bite Your Finger. It took about five minutes and was dependent on random luck, but you got to stick your finger in a vampire's mouth and hope he didn't bite down. If he did, it would leave a red mark on your finger.

When I say it out loud like that, it sounds dumb, but it could get damn stressful. Nobody wanted a bloody finger.

Too funny to live

When I'm 14 and watching UHF, I laughed so hard at Weird Al's Rambo pisstake, especially the bit where the bad guy is shooting at him while he slowly gets his bow and arrow out, and then it pulls back to show they're centimetres apart. I laughed so hard I think I died, and everything that has happened since is just a dying dream of a 14-year-old boy who's seen the funniest thing he will ever see. Everything since is the delusions of an adolescent mind in one last burst of fake reality.

Sorry about the mess.

Grandad's boxes

My Grandad died 35 years ago, but I still have three pieces of chunky wood that he crafted into something for me. One of them is a big, blue toy car that I always thought of as a gangster's car, another is a lockable two-litre silver box that has always been home to my action figures.

And the third is a brown wooden box that has a faded patch on the front where there used to be a sticker that came free with the British Crisis comic book (it said 'STICK IT'). It also used to have a lid, but that vanished over the years too.

It's also the perfect size for two piles of American comic books. It's about 10cm deep, so I can get about 100 in there, and I've always put my very favourite comics in there.

For the past two decades, that's mainly been a lot of Grant Morrison comics, especially The Invisibles. I need to keep them safe, because I spent too much time reading them on the beach, drunk as fuck, and they're beaten to hell by saltwater and sentimentality. They've lived in Grandad's box since the 90s.

I still love the Morrison, like all good people, but maybe it's time for some re-evaluation as to what my favourite comics are, and which deserve a place in that box of awesome. Flex Mentallo is probably staying in there, but I haven't cracked open those Invisibles for a while. Maybe it's time to work out what's really important.

All of Grandad's boxes and toys are still sturdy and in excellent shape. They could use a bit of paint, but they're solid as hell. I hope that he would like that I still put my favourite things inside them.

Salo at the store

The other day, I was in one of the last places in town to sell DVDs, and sitting there on the shelf, like it wasn't no thing, in between copies of Salem's Lot and San Andreas, was Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, the Pier Paolo Pasolini masterpiece based on the funtime writings of the Marquis de Sade.

It was genuinely a bit shocking to see it there, because it was straight-up banned from screening in New Zealand for more than 20 years - I went to the first screening after the ban lifting ages ago, and that showing still feels like a nightmare, in all the best ways. And there it was, in the local mall shop.

I thought about grabbing the copy and taking it home for myself, but knew I'd never be watching it again. It really is a powerful, breath-taking movie, especially that detached finale, but I don't think I ever need to see it again, to be honest.

Besides, I do like the idea of somebody finding it in the shop and giving it a go without knowing anything about it - it only cost $5, what's the harm? Watching Salo without knowing what you're in for. That would be an experience I couldn't deny anybody.

Somewhere in space and time

Somewhere out there in the grim and optimistic post-War age, notorious gossip hound Kenneth Anger is taking a break from the satanism and puts some snappy pop music on the soundtrack over his underground art movie, and it works like gangbusters, influencing Scorsese in his use of music, who goes on to influence nearly every other filmmaker in the world. Anger's films are full of half-naked motorcyclists and full-frontal magickal rituals and aren't for everybody, but his ear for a good tune takes over the world.

It's never Bouncing Boy

I used to dream I could fly, like Superman or Zenith, and could soar over the clouds. Sometimes I had real trouble just hovering a few feet off the ground, and sometimes I'd take high to the sky.

I don't really dream of that anymore, but I do often have dreams where I'm Speedball, falling down to earth, and then bouncing off the ground like a hyper-rubber ball, leaping off tall shit and rebounding around city streets, ricocheting through the urban landscape.

I don't know what my brain is trying to tell me here - Freud thought flying was a metaphor for sex, but he thought everything was a metaphor for sex, so bouncing probably means I need to masturbate more often or something.

It's fucking fun, whatever it means. Speedball had the best power.

The Sergio Clause

I made a few hundred bucks by offloading some generally average comic books at a market day over the weekend, and then totally undid all my good work by buying a bloody big box of Groo comics.

They were stunningly cheap, and included issues going back to the earliest Pacific days. but the lovely wife rightfully pointed out that I'd completely missed the point of going to this thing to get rid of some comics. I had to activate the Sergio Clause - of course I was going there to thin out the collection and make some room in our rapidly shrinking house-space, and of course I wasn't going to add to the pile, unless there were a bunch of Sergio Aragones comics, because everyone needs more Sergio Aragones comics in their life.

Luckily, my pal Nik was there and was able to confirm that the Sergio Clause is a real thing, so I think I got away with it this time.

Kubrick v Scorsese

I can't tell you how many times I've watched this video while slightly-less-than-four-drinks drunk, and the bit where Travis Bickle is walking in the howling wind to Radiohead, a man alone in an existential void, gets me every time.

No mercy!

I am 100% ideologically opposed to the death penalty - the lovely wife and I frequently disagree over the whole idea - but I seriously think people who steal the free CDs from the British music mags in the local library should be fuckin' shot.