Hello Bloglin. It’s been a minute since I checked in with you. Would that I could, but I have been oh-so-busy updating my Facebook status with Outkast one-liners (thanks to the super fantastic Big Boi for Dummies mixtape that got posted here last week or so):

“I call it lemonheeeeaaaad delight: when you lick off all the yellow and you sellllllll the white.”

The result of which is me thinking in southern-rap, super-complex slant-rhyme meter. Again with the Smilerag updates:

“You busy sippin’ purple drank by the ounce / I’m busy buyin’ my girl a purple house. // It’s really not ‘hood tellin’ people that you’re hard / it’s super way good having sprinklers in your yard.”

Yeah, so, needless to say, my absence has been a productive one. Sho’ Nuff.

Today I’d like to talk to you about books. I actually don’t know if this is a Book Recommendation or a Niche Fetish post: I have a hard time with it, mostly because collecting rad picturebooks is a problem of mine. I love them. And! I recently had chance to have a birthday, and after about 8 or 9 years of using the internet for everything everywhere ever, my family is finally getting the hang of using my Amazon Wishlist. So I scored an Incan pyramid of radness, and I figured I’d share it with you. Because I think you will like it.

As has been noted here before, I am a firm believer in Pulp, Trash, Drug Pulp, Gay/Lesbian Pulp Trash, Crime Noir Drug Gay, Gay Pulp…you name it. This scene—whatever we wanna call it (though nothing will top Ghost Drone…I actually want to rename my grandma that, so I can love her and her name equally)—is a hugely deep and rich chasm into which we—you and me—can all jump. Headfirst. Some of the best paintings, ideas, taglines, logo treatments, and type show up in the darnedest places while flipping through this stuff, and it makes it all the more juicy to know/think that the artists probably made, like, $20 bucks for a finished work of art. They’re the real heroes.

True Crime: Detective Magazines 1924-1969 (Taschen) [Internal Spread]
“The Gutter Waits for Girls Like Me” & “Wild Daughters of Satan”

Dope Menace: The Sensational World of Drug Paperbacks 1900-1975 (Feral House) [Internal Spread]

When I’m not looking at book covers that are intended to evoke transcendent scenarios of gay criminal drug abuse, I am thinking about Frankenstein. As a matter of fact, Gay Crime, Frankenstein, and Big Trouble in Little China can be more or less called the unholy trinity of things that I think about. My family knows this, and so they threw down the gauntlet.

Universal Studios Monsters: A Legacy of Horror (Universe) [Internal Spread]

(I picked this spread because if I didn’t write for a blog that has Freaks, Horror, Secret Societies & The Occult as an official category, I would want to write for a blog that had Monsters, Madmen, and Freaks of Science. So there.)

In that same vein, and to go along with the Ray Harryhausen book I scooped up for Christmas…

Famous Monster Movie Art of Basil Gogos (Vanguard) [Internal Spread]

Seriously. I wanna play Jenga with Gogos, WM Stout, and Frank Frazetta. Throw in Big Daddy Roth and that’s 4 wheels on the bus.

I got a few others, but I think they’ll bore you unless I can treat them right. Give them in-depth hard-hitting analysis. I will do that later. Today, I’ll leave you with:

Trashfiend: Disposable Horror Fare of the 1960s & 1970s (Headpress) [Internal Spread]
See: Young Co-Eds Abducted & Entombed by a Deathshead Killer!
See: Victims Stripped of Their Flesh by Man-Eating Bloodworms!
See: Two-Headed Monstrosities on a Blood-Spattered Rampage!

This is one of those books that I bet Greg has already. It’s more or less a Beckett for the kind of weird shit we’re always talking about here. I highly recommend it (it is so choice). I also have Cinema Sewer (vols 1 and 2!!) that is more or less right up Mars and Crook’s alley—not to mention a certain Mondork—but, well, that’s next time.

Happy Halloween. For Life.

- Hateball