The thing I love about my wife’s last name is that there are a billion things than rhyme with “Chan.”
This was part of a Jackie Chan promotional display at the crappy variety store on the ground floor of my old apartment building that I persuaded the cashier to part with, plus a photo from one of those mini Polaroid cameras that were briefly a thing in the early 2000s, before digital ended the film era for good.
In the words of the author; “It’s a zine I made while bored out of my mind at my office job in Vancouver in 1997…it’s just a bunch of cut-and-pasted* quotes from anime I found in an anime DVD catalogue, which at the time still had all of their Japanese quirky novelty and weirdness.”
Fifteen years on down the road the program descriptions are still pretty damn weird, which makes me wonder what they must be like these days. That said, if there’s anything more fucked-up than Urotsukidoji: Legend of the Overfiend out there, I don’t want to know about it.
* literally cut-and-pasted, like with glue
And so here it is; a photo of me with my face painted in Queen’s school colours. In my defence, the girl in my frosh group I had a crush on offered to paint me up and I was willing to accept pretty much any excuse for her to lay her hands on me.
This was on the cover of Golden Words; I thought it was funny because I used to drive one of these things at my old golf course summer job.
1998’s The Meat Comix, Vol. III, featuring the adventures of Doctor Reflex, Junior Cyclops, The Beards, What If Don Cornelius Was An Ibex, and Scrambles: The Octopus With Karl Marx’s Head As A Hat! The Don Cornelius strip anticipates the rise of Psy as he pitches a show named “Seoul Train” with “a bunch of kids gettin’ down to those sweet South Korean sounds!”
This zine is (mostly) the product of the twisted (in a good way!) mind of my friend A.G. Pasquella, whose stuff you should most certainly check out.
This is a printout of the comments section of my old (1998-2000) Geocities Zardoz page, which I kept because - in an exception to the first rule of the internet - the comments were by far the best part of the site. A selection of my favourites:
- its like listening to the Beatles without earmuffs!
- everybody that doesn’t understand this film but thinks he need to ridiculize Zardoz is uncommentable. It is mystic. You can never discourse on it. You can only feel it bruise your soul.
- love the movie as It is reaaly an extrapolation of currents trends/forces at work globally
- Seek not deep meaning form this celluloid cesspool.
- Obvious anti-masonic sentiment of the movie. I LOVED I !!!!!!!!
- When I was a mystic—Zardoz was one of my top favorite films.So was Exorcist II: The Heretic…But now I’m a Transhumanist and I totally disagree with the message of Zardoz.
- GREAT SITE FOR A GREAT MOVIE. I AM A PSYCHIC/METAPHYSICAL PRACTITIONER IN CANADA. I FOUND YOUR SITE INFORMATIVE AND ENTERTAINING.
- Why the website
- Connery’s Zed is the most verisimilitudinous of all!
- I hope this film comes to DVD soon. And if this weren’t such an anti-intellectual era, I’d hope for a theatrical reissue.
- I’m not sure Zardoz has changed my life, but I don’t think I will ever be quite the same, after having seen it in a rather delicate condition. I have been transmitting a negative aura on second level ever since.
- I do not know if it’s that good, but it’s certainly better than idepedance day,men in black e.t.c.
- It’s all so pregnant with meaning. My friends think me strange for such fascination.
- If Zardoz were a dessert, it would be lamp-shade icecream.
- Boorman’s masterwork…does for giant stone heads what “Deliverance” did for fiddles and sodomy.
- A brilliant meditation on the incompatibility of humanity and celluloid.
- Favourite Scene: When the flying head flies.
Toward the tail end of high school I got into this manga named Appleseed, by Masamune Shirow. And what wasn’t for a young man to like? Cute girls, giant robots, lots of shooting and just enough philosophical pixie dust sprinkled on top to make it seem, like, heavy, man.
I may or may not have written what today would be called fan fiction featuring these characters for an OAC Writer’s Craft assignment…but even if I did that wasn’t even close to being the nerdiest thing I ever did for a school assignment. That was back in grade six, when I was so into The Lord of The Rings that I signed my name on tests in English and Khuzdul.
Subheadline: “May also lie in wait in ponds, lakes and rivers”
I only went to this show once because I couldn’t hear the music over all the shooting, explosions and screaming.
An assortment of my minor hockey team photos. Based on the framing, two of these photographers must have been drunk, incompetent or both.
