Cartoonist Jim Woodring is one of the Northwest's greatest artistic geniuses. Why he isn't more hugely popular (although he IS fairly well known) is beyond me. If you haven't seen a Woodring painting in real life, well...you're missing out. His watercolor kung fu is mighty powerful. I keep asking him to show with me again, but he's been so successful selling stuff off his site that he keeps turning me down, drat him. But lucky us- he has a blog, and it's just as wonderfully surreal as you'd hope.

Also- I have discovered someone put Roq La Rue up as a contender on Hipster Battle Royale. I'm not doing too good- a Lamborgini and a fancy yacht have whipped my ass...but I did beat a pair of boots, so that's nice. It's a pretty funny site.

Update: Hey, WAIT A MINUTE, I'm on there too! As in me personally, and I'm losing BIG TIME, though I'm doing better than Giovanni Ribisi, Matt Drudge, and Diddy's iPod. Dang, those Boing Boing posts are paying off!

Readers of Thumbmonkey know I'm seriously into horror- but only of a certain kind, a horror snob, if you will. I enjoy everything from elegant Dark Victoriana to cheeseball camp. The only stuff I don't care for are real life serial killers and stupid horror. By stupid horror, I mean stuff that sucks because the people who made it (movie, book, ect) just did it to make a buck and churned out garbage (most current teen slasher movies). On Purpose Stupid is a whole other deal though...like the majority of psychotronic films and giant mutant animal flicks. Granted, the creators might not consider thier work "stupid", but what I'm referring to work that has a demented ernestness and imaginative quality (even if the budget appears to be five dollars) as well as a sense of fun behind the horror aspects.
Speaking of stupid- we rented "Monster Club" last night staring Vincent Price as a vampire who bites a horror author. In gratitude for the author's "donation" Vincent offers to get him some new material for his next book, and takes him to his hangout, the Monster Club, where all the denizens of the night hang out and listen to really shitty early 80's "New Wave" bands in what looks like a chinese restaurant. It also features a werewolf MC (who can't open his mouth very much because his dime store fangs keep threatening to fall out, and has to talk through his teeth ala Heston.) Vincent then recounts 3 stories of HORROR, including one about a Shadmoch (don't ask) who can kill people by whistling and looks a bit like Nick Cave (not in a good way) and a story about a boy whos dad is Dracula. Actually, the scariest part of the movie is the segments that take place in the club, where they have bands play whole ENTIRE songs (like "Sucker For Your Love"- geddit? Ho ho!) that seem to last an embarrassing eternity, while "monsters" dance along- the monsters being people in regular clothes with the worst, low rent masks imaginable. So, stupid, but good stupid.
I'm not really sure what my point was, I just wanted to post the picture for "Hillbillies In A Haunted House". Nice gorilla suit.