"I'm a collector, I collect anything I find
I never throw anything away that's mine
And I'd collect you too if I was given half a chance
And trap you under the glass and add my autograph..."
Index - Steven Wilson
Don't Worry, Be Happy
by a very pissed off (and justifiably so) Cory Udler
The fucking guy had 30 copies of “Three On A Meathook” on VHS. Take a second with that happy horseshit. 30 copies “NFS” (not for sale). The fuck does any human being need 30 copies of any fucking movie for? I love Judas Priest’s “Turbo” album. I may be the only person on earth who does. I would hope that if I had 30 copies of “Turbo” displayed on a shelf in my house that someone would care enough about me to have me committed. Or put down.
They’re called “collectors”. They’re fucking psychotic. For those of you not aware (and if you are one of those who is not aware I’m envious of you) there is/was a huge underground market for collectors of VHS tapes. Horror and exploitation, kung fu, porn, screwball comedy, all genres. As an example, Chester Turner’s “Tales From The Quadead Zone” on VHS sold for something around a quadzillion dollars. I love Chester Turner to death, but this had nothing to do with the “art” value of his movie. This was just a weird competition between young people with obvious expendable income. So, what the fuck is “Quadead Zone” and who is Chester Turner? Chester was a low (no) budget filmmaker from Chicago in the mid 1980’s. He made two films, “Black Devil Doll From Hell” and “Tales From The Quadead Zone”. The first film had modest distribution but, not unlike every single fucking distribution story you will hear from any filmmaker at any level, he got fucked by the distributor and decided with his next film to do it all himself. Duplication, box art, tape labels, everything. Chester and Shirley Jones, the lead in both films, would take copies of the movie and drive them around to various video stores and sell them that way. No middle man, no worries about where your cut was going, he handled it all. Chester, like most of us, had a life and couldn’t drive coast to coast selling a weird horror movie on VHS to every Podunk, jerkwater, mom and pop video store along the way. So, the movie became a thing of legend due to only regional and limited release and availability. Chester dropped out of sight soon after and wasn’t heard from for decades. Louis Justin from Massacre Video spent an incredible amount of time and effort tracking Chester down a few years ago. His company released special editions of all of Chester’s movies and even laid down some dough for Chester to make “Tales From The Quadead Zone 2”. Anyway, this isn’t an article about Chester Turner, so moving on.
I never ditched my VHS tapes. As a matter of fact, I’m a bit of a VHS
collector myself. I don’t build shelves and display, however. I’m
broke as fuck and VHS tapes are never more than a dollar so for me it’s
functionality. I watch them. Sometimes more than once. I have a
stupid collection of Three Stooges VHS tapes that I’ve been collecting
since I was about 8. I also have every KISS VHS ever released and a
wide selection of other hard rock and heavy metal tapes. Yeah, I’m a
fucking goober and I totally understand that. I also totally understand
that this may seem like a contradictory statement. I can assure you
it’s not. I’ll let you in on where I’m going here.
A few
months ago I sat down to write an article about how nobody’s happy with
anything anymore. In a day and age where everything is convenient,
nobody’s happy. At all. Ever. But, I didn’t know what I wanted to say
so I watched “Death Wish 4” instead. But after an interaction online
with a vinyl collector I finally had my inspiration.
 |
| Cory and the Kiddo |
I wanted to
buy my daughter, who is turning 2 in a few weeks, this rad Thomas The
Train station play set. It has all the trains and it whistles and
shit. It’s cool and she loves that show. So, to surprise everyone, I
was ditching a few vinyl albums I didn’t listen to anymore and that I
didn’t like the sound of on my stereo. One guy wanted them so, being a
novice vinyl seller, I went to the post office to ask the best way to
package them. The woman walked me through it and I sent them off.
During the shipping, the inserts had slipped into the adhesive on the
box and tore some of it off upon opening. This motherfucker lost his
fucking shit. He posted at least 12 pictures with a four paragraph rant
on a social media page dedicated to vinyl collectors about it. Then
sent me every single picture along with an even longer rant including
about how I “ruined his day” and how he “missed a Derby party” because
he wanted to open the albums up but was now too upset to go. Now, any
rational person would look at this response and just chalk it up to
“fucker’s insane”, but I didn’t. Not this time. Most other times I
would and just go on about my shit. But this struck a chord. I QUICKLY
refunded his money and apologized. I’m pretty sure the opening of the
package to the money refunded was somewhere in the 15-30 minute range. I
told him to just keep the albums because now every time I’d go to
fucking play them I’d think about this delightful interaction. The
packaging was fucked up, I refunded him, situation cool.
It wasn’t the
fact that I sold him the albums for $20 less than I paid, even though I
only played them once, and then refunded his money and therefore don’t
have enough to buy my daughter the Thomas The Train station for her 2nd
birthday and also now don’t have the albums, either. It was the fact
that something so fucking trivial as a vinyl record’s inner sleeve being
damaged could cause this much distress to someone. What would it take
to make you post 12 pictures and a four paragraph rant on social media
because something “ruined your day”? A death of a loved one. A cancer
diagnosis. Your house burned down. Everyone would understand. Those
are extremely traumatic, and in situations like that sometimes people
are under so much distress that they cannot properly express
themselves. But a vinyl record inner sleeve is torn? The cover had
some adhesive stuck to it? Ok, you send the guy a picture of it, just a
“thought I’d let you know” sort of thing and hope the dude’s stand up
enough to say, “Oh, fuck, dude, I’m sorry, do you need a refund?”. That
is the proper way to react to that situation. The proper way to react
to the police shooting your dog is to post 12 pictures and a four
paragraph rant on social media.
When your day is ruined by a
damaged Guns N Roses album you need to take a long hard look in the
fucking mirror and reevaluate your priorities. But this is our world.
Everyone’s offended by everything and if something doesn’t exactly meet
your expectations, never mind how overblown they may be, that’s cause
for outrage.
I have a copy of KISS’s seminal 1975 breakthrough
album, “ALIVE!”, on vinyl. It’s a piece of shit. It never had an inner
sleeve to protect the albums. The cover is warped and torn and someone
wrote “C. Vine. 1963” in the upper right hand corner. There are other
pen marks and scribbles all over it. The cool thing was is that it
came with the original tour book insert. It sounds like hell. But I
just had it on the other day. Scratchy and loaded with pops but doesn’t
skip anywhere on the two discs. I have no intentions of upgrading it.
Ever. This is my copy of “ALIVE!”. To me, it’s almost like someone in
your life. You know at the core you love them or care about them and
can overlook their shortcomings. Just like my copy of “ALIVE!”. Put
that in a fucking greeting card.
Instead of lamenting the fact
that I don’t have and will probably never have $30 to drop on a new
vinyl of “ALIVE!”, I instead embrace the one I have. Pleased with the
fact that I’m able to listen to it on a decent turntable. Starving
children in Russia don’t have such luxuries. But I do. I’m a lucky
guy.
But nobody’s happy and nobody feels “lucky” anymore. My
wife and I tried having children for somewhere in the neighborhood of 8
years. We tried everything. And by everything I mean every single
fucking thing we could come up with to have a baby. Neither of us was
diagnosed with any reproductive issues. We just couldn’t for whatever
reason. We put our names on a list for adoption in 2010. We waited.
And waited. We went through every miserable inch of the waiting
process. At Christmas 2012, we told our families that our adoption shit
was up for renewal at the end of 2013 and we weren’t going to go
through it. We were 37 years old and finishing this chapter in our
lives. In April of 2013 we found out about Adelaide Marie. Today I can
tell you, I’m a very lucky guy. I have a beautiful, funny, healthy,
active, smart 2 year old baby girl that I wake up to every day and lay
down to sleep every night. It’s been an amazing profound change in my
life and even on bad days I am extremely grateful and happy and
content. It takes a lot for me to lose my shit. But when I do, it’s
for a good reason. Normally because I’m being disrespected or ignored.
When I’m made to feel like I’m less than you, I’m done. But, my vinyl
album shows up with a bit of damage and THAT is enough to ruin my day? I
spent every single day of 8 years wondering what my future was. What
was I doing? Was I going to make any difference to any one, anywhere at
any time? What was I going to leave the world? My “career” wasn’t
anything to celebrate.
In August of 2012 a close friend of mine
from childhood on contacted me. She was pregnant and was in no
position to keep the baby. Abortion wasn’t an option for her. Not that
she was opposed to it, just wasn’t an option for her in this
situation. She wanted my wife and I to adopt the baby. We went through
all of the legalities between the states we lived in, made phone calls
to lawyers, the whole shmear. She lost the baby at the end of her first
trimester. We were devastated. I was working at a tv station for
people who didn’t like me. The feeling was mutual. I was fucking
lost. We felt worse for her as that is an overwhelming wave of emotions
to go through. We just had the one. Disappointment. We were used to
that, we knew how to handle that one. We couldn’t imagine what she was
going through. When she found out about Adelaide she sent us a KISS
onesie that I now have tucked away in a box for her when she’s older. I
know what it’s like to have your fucking day ruined. I also know what
it feels like to be a “lucky” guy.
Nobody’s fucking happy with
anything. Star Wars trailer is released? We hate the “ball droid”.
Faith No More has a new album out after 45 years? Jim Martin’s riffs
aren’t on it. And everyone has an opinion, and everyone can’t wait for
you to hear it, no matter how insane, hateful, racist, sexist, ignorant,
insignificant, childish or vile it may be. In a time when information
is basically fed directly into your central nervous system without you
having to do more than push a screen with a finger everyone’s an idiot
and nobody’s interested in any sort of actual communication. I go days
without going on social media. I have to. I’ve also whittled down my
social media pages to heavy metal, The Three Stooges, KISS and a select
group of actual friends or people I like. I had to. Especially when I
decided to walk away from doing movies.
In October of 2012 I
premiered the third movie in my trilogy of “Incest Death Squad”
projects. I also said I wasn’t doing anything in 2013 and I didn’t. My
daughter arrived midway through 2013 and it wasn’t until February of
2014 that I came up with the idea to do another movie. This one,
however, I was going to do on a timeline. I set a release date before I
even had the script done. This was my Roger Corman experiment. We
shot the entire thing in 3 days. Two 9 hour days, one 6 hour day.
During the filming I decided that this was it for me. I spent more time
putting out drama fires than I did actually DIRECTING a movie. I no
longer felt the burning passion to make movies. I did 5 movies and one
short in 6 years. Basically by myself. This was an experiment in many
ways. To see if I could do a movie on a timeline and to see if this was
really how I wanted to use the tiny bit of free time I actually have.
That movie answered all my questions and since then I have distanced
myself completely from any “scene” I wasn’t really a part of in the
first place. Why? Because I, like everyone else, wasn’t happy with how
the scene was going. Everything I watched I found lazy, boring,
contrived or cliché. I also saw how people weren’t in this because they
had a burning desire to tell stories or be creative. Many people were
doing it because they wanted to be famous, or rich, or a convention
darling. It’s high school for people with tattoos and Fulci shirts.
Instead, I put my focus on my family and my day to day life. I also
poured myself into my newest podcast dedicated to The Three Stooges.
The only one on earth, I might add. Movies just don’t fit into my life
at this point. I started writing this article 2 weeks ago. It isn’t
taking so long because I’m stuck for something to say, it’s because I
get about an hour a day to myself and sometimes that hour is spent
staring at a wall because my brain is fucking oatmeal.
 |
| Cory and the IDS. |
I did
movies for me and me only. I also tried to make it an experience that
those who acted in would be proud of. I have no money. Let me say that
one more time, just so it sinks in. I HAVE NO MONEY. Every one of
these movies I have done for less than $3,000. I can do that because I
write, do all of the pre production, DP, direct, edit, design the DVDs,
all of it, solo. Solo nobody knows I’ve even made movies. I never
believed anyone when they would tell me they liked the movies. I still
don’t. I appreciate that hopefully someone got something out of them,
but I don’t believe anyone when they tell me they actually liked what I
did. So now, movies are in my past. I am using this article as a way
to sort of dip my toes back into the writing waters. I do my Stoogecast
podcast for me, also. I get to dive into amazing books about the team
and the bit players. I get to interview those who knew the Stooges
best, family. I am helping a local metal band with some of their
promotional efforts. I’m doing a music video for another metal band.
That’s about all I can take on right now. I have no room for fucking
squat else, that includes people. Especially those who are nothing more
than vapid drama.
An author I highly respect went on a social
media rant about the new Mad Max movie, transitioning that venom into a
new Star Wars assassination. I posted a cute little meme of an old guy
in a Native American headdress that said, “Now get off my lawn”. A
little levity. The picture was funny. I save it on my phone for when I
need a little pick me up. He went off. A caps lock and exclamation
point bukkake about how I’m “so original” and “did you come up with that
all by yourself?”. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s being talked down
to. Especially by someone who isn’t any better of a human being than I
am. Unfriend, block. I have no time anymore. And this guy is older
than me. Why are you fucking flipping out about Mad Max and Star Wars?
Grow up.
It’s this sort of thing that really makes me wonder
what sort of world we’re living in. For days now I’ve been seeing
articles and posts about Louis CK’s Saturday Night Live monologue. I
haven’t watched Saturday Night Live in 15 years, and I couldn’t pick
Louis CK out of a police lineup. That shit has nothing to do with me,
yet people who haven’t been in Saturday Night Live’s “demo” for 20 years
feel the need to chime in. Why? Why the fuck do you even care? Do
you know what has nothing to do with me? American Idol. It never has.
I’ve never watched an episode. It’s cancelled. That has zero bearing
on my life. It was never meant for me, never a part of my life. Now
that it’s going away I can honestly say I won’t notice. Just like the
Mad Max movie, the Ninja Turtles movie, Baby Metal, etc, etc. It is not
meant for me, I’m not the target audience, it has no place in my life
and therefore I ignore it, pay it no mind and focus on my life and the
shit I love.
 |
| Sean Yseult |
At some point you have to step back and realize
that the world is no longer yours. Frank Henenlotter said that to me
once. He also said he was happy that he lived in the world he lived
in. That really stuck with me. I grew up in a time where me and my
three friends, all of us under the age of 18, drove to Minneapolis
together to see White Zombie. We were high the entire time up, the
entire show, the entire way home. No GPS, no phones, no Facebook,
nothing. Just us and a determination to have fun. We couldn’t tape the
show with an IPad and post it to YouTube. But guess what? The show
still happened and I will never forget it. I still have the vision of
crucified clowns descending from the ceiling of the auditorium as Rob
Zombie stalked the stage with a huge hose spitting thick smoke while
“Blood, Milk and Sky” swirled in the background. And all of us agreed
that night that we’d all love to have a relationship with Sean Yseult. I
was at a Ghost and King Dude show in Chicago in the pit. I may be 39
but fuck you youngsters there. I know how to work in a pit. There was a
guy with his IPad filming King Dude and another guy with a Ghost vinyl
IN THE PIT. That was a new one. I went to King Diamond and sat in the
balcony. The guy in front of me propped his IPhone up on the railing
and taped the entire show. I took about 20 pictures (all at once) but
for some reason I still remember every single stitch of that show.
People can’t live life unless it’s through a screen.
Back to
the collectors. I follow a Star Wars collecting group on Facebook,
mainly because it brings back good memories of the toys of my youth.
Someone posted a picture of his garage which was loaded, floor to
ceiling, with Star Wars shit. He even commented that he has about “4 of
each figure” and isn’t sure what he’s going to do once the garage is
full. Maybe build a pole shed. Fuck. You’re a sick man, my friend.
They have shows dedicated to your mental illness. Hoarders: Buried
Alive. Granted, it’s cooler to be buried in Jabba The Hut figures than
petrified cat shit and McDonalds bags, but still. He also pointed out
that “nothing is for sale”. Two parts, why do you need that shit and
why did you feel the need to put that out into the world? Collectors
are just like that neighbor you have who doesn’t have a pot to piss in
or a window to throw it out of. Their kids eat processed fish sticks 7
nights a week and they never take a family vacation. But that
motherfucker’s got an Escalade. Just to show you that he’s better than
you. Same with the dipshit hoarding 30 copies of “Three On A
Meathook”. Ooooh, you’d like to have one of these, wouldn’t you? I
have 30 of them. That’s 30 of them you can never have. It’s complete
insanity. But, I’m also a firm believer in that this rampant assholism
isn’t anything new, it’s just that information travels so fast now
directly into the palm of your hand. These fucking maniacs have always
been around. Now they just have a way to rub more people’s nose in
their opinions, psychosis and unfiltered weirdness.
I have to wrap this up. I could go on for another year.
My
point is, collectors are assholes. The worst. Especially vinyl
collectors. They have the rarest albums and have no plans to enjoy them
further than taking a picture of it and posting it to a group so they
can be the envy of others for a few moments.
Nobody’s happy
with anything. I’m sorry, your opinion fucking sucks and doesn’t matter
to anyone but you. Keep it to yourself. And when you throw it out
there for the world you can’t expect everyone to pat you on the head,
hand you a participation trophy and tell you you’re a good boy. If you
lash out at someone for calling you out on your bullshit, you need to
grow up and look in the mirror and realize that maybe your thinking
isn’t right. I know, it’s hard. But it’s worth it. And it’s really
the only thing that matters. Self awareness.
I am thoroughly
enjoying not making movies. I haven’t watched a horror movie in 8
months. Well, not counting “Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein”. I will not
watch “The Babadook”, it’s been way too jizzed over and really doesn’t
seem like anything I’d like.
We all need to take a fucking step
back and realize that our dog and pony show isn’t original, it isn’t
funny, it isn’t important. You’re not special. Your opinion isn’t any
better or more correct than anyone else’s. So just keep it to yourself,
or risk people knocking you back into your place.
And please,
for fuck’s sake, just enjoy things. If you didn’t like Mad Max do the
world a favor. Shhhh. It’s going to be ok. It’s just a movie. And a
movie probably not meant for you anyway.
Now, get off my lawn.
