Home Decorating: Ed Gein Style.

What are you doing here?
Are you some sort of sick maniac?
I’ll assume that you’re at least some sort of weirdo.
If you’re anyone else then…

WARNING!
This post contains some things which could potentially fuck you all the way up forever and if that doesn’t happen, you’re at least gonna see some very disturbing images so you should probably go away right now.

Still here?
What the hell’s the matter with you?
Okay never mind.
Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Let’s just get this freakshow on the road.

Today I’ll be showing you how to decorate your house in the style of everybody’s favourite insane necrophilic serial killer Momma’s boy, Ed Gein.

First of all, you will need a house.
This was Ed Gein’s Mother’s house in Plainfield Wisconsin and when she died, it was all Ed’s.

As you can see, Ed Gein’s house was an enormous farmhouse and you should bear this in mind when you buy yours because this allows for secret spaces which will come in handy later on.
But we’ll get to that.

Now what you want to do is dive straight in and commence your secret hobby of grave robbing and your descent into absolute madness in general.
Now don’t worry because even Ed Gein had to start at the start and grave robbing can be tricky at first.

First thing’s first: You have to decide who you’re gonna dig up.
Ed Gein began with his recently deceased Mother and that really is a good choice because you have that familiarity which you won’t necessarily have later on with other dead bodies.

You should be prepared.
Get yourself a van.
Any van will do so long as it has plenty of space in the back for tools and dead bodies and it’s not gonna break down outside the police station on the way home.

Obviously, you want to be doing this kind of stuff at night but don’t just assume that because it’s night, nobody will disturb you. Always be prepared to be taking home more than one body at a time and remember that you may have to bash someone’s head in with your shovel at a moment’s notice.

You will need some basic tools:
1 x hammer.
1 x chisel.
1 x shovel.
1 x gardeners rake.
1 x torch.
1 x cigarette lighter and/or matches.
You will also need rope, heavy duty plastic bags, bed sheets, gloves and a current driver’s license.

Actually, what am I talking about.
You probably know all of this.
I’m sorry. I’m just supposed to be telling you how to decorate your house and not how to do what you already know how to do. I just got carried away there so sorry if I came across as patronising.

Anyways.
So, you have your bodies back at the house.
You will no doubt be really busy what with the exhumed dead bodies and necrophilia and everything so you may not have the time for housework but that’s okay because Ed Gein kept a very messy household.
Ed Gein and Mr. Sheen were strangers.
Pay particular attention to paying no attention to the living room because this is generally the first focus point for the cops when they turn up to arrest you because it’s close to the front door.

Cobwebs are important because this shows that you stopped caring a LONG time ago!

Never throw anything away and become a hoarder of everything and anything.
Here’s a photo of Ed Gein’s living room for reference:

As you can see, the more cluttered and messy, the better and creepier it is.
The creepy element is incredibly important for shocking the life out of your neighbours when they turn up behind the cops to see just how fucked up and far gone you’ve been for all this time.
The look on their faces will be priceless.

You should make sure that you have a fridge freezer with a lot of space so you can put your chopped off heads in because as you know, left out at room temperature, things can get pretty horrible pretty quickly and hard to handle not to mention the black ooze which is nothing short of a total bitch to get out of your clothes.

If after a while, your fridge becomes too crowded you can take a leaf from the Ed Gein home DIY manual and make human face masks which can be stored in wooden boxes on the floor.

Okay, so now you’re well on your way to incarceration for the rest of your life so why not experiment?
You’ll be completely out of your mind at this stage but you should still be capable of whatever artistic talents you may have had prior.
In your spare time you should read up on taxidermy as this is particularly useful in making dead human face masks.

For Ed Gein, making human face masks was only the start and over time he honed his artistic talents and eventually wound up making full human ‘Women Suits’. Yep, by this point, all of Ed’s marbles were rolling around in his head and he’d prance around the house dressed in these ‘suits’ getting up to all kinds of crazy deranged necrophilic schizoid shit.

Gein was also a cannibal and unsurprisingly he was very creative when it came to making bowls to eat body part stew from. Check out these skull bowls he designed:

Making body part stew can be pretty messy work and although your entire house will now be a complete rundown gruesome hovel, you don’t want to keep getting your hands dirty.
Again it’s time to consult the Ed Gein home DIY manual for instructions on making…Tanned Human skin hand gloves!

Handy things to have I’m sure you’ll agree and all joking aside, those babys will last you a lifetime!
…Although, on second thought, they probably won’t allow you to have them in the mental hospital you’re going to while you wait out the days until the state has the time to put you in the electric chair.
Still though.

Apart from the kitchen, the room you’ll no doubt spend most of your time in will be the bedroom and because you’re utterly insane, you won’t give a dead rat’s ass about the condition of the place.

Take Ed Gein’s bedroom for instance.
It’s almost as if he knew that the films “Psycho”, “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and “Silence Of The Lambs” would all be directly based on his demented life.

As we exit the house and make our way to the garage you should probably bear in mind that your cluttering and hoarding hard work has all been for nothing because your neighbours will no doubt show up in the dead of night and burn your entire house of horrors to the ground just like Ed Gein’s neighbours did to his place.

Your time on the rollercoaster is just about up Sonny Jim but before that; let’s take a look at the garage.
Your garage is where you’ll unload your bodies from the van and eventually where you’ll conduct some of your most twisted and sinister fucked up shit.
As per, make sure it’s a damned mess:

The police are well on their merry way to kicking your door down any day now and turning your lights out forever so you want to make sure that if you gotta go out, go with a horrifying sight which will shock the entire World so that fuck-ups like yourself will be stopped before they even start.

And what could do that better than a headless, hung upside down, gutted naked dead body of a Woman in the garage?
Probably nothing.

So that concludes our home decorating lesson Ed Gein style folks and I hope that it’s been of help to you.
Nobody normal likes a Mr. Messy and not a lot of people take too kindly to fucked up necrophilic cannibalistic serial killing evil sons of bitches either so in short:
Turn on that hoover once in a while.
Mop that floor every Sunday.
Clean those surfaces every two days.
Wash those windows and take out the trash whenever that bag gets near full.
But most of all…STAY AWAY FROM THAT DAMN GRAVEYARD!

Happy decorating everyone and be sure to tune in next time where I’ll be discussing just how to remove those stubborn stains.

For more information on all of the Ed Gein stuff not covered in this article, read THIS and remember,
Eddy loves ya!

Keep The Meter Running.

I read a great article the other day in The Village Voice about one of my favourite films:
“Taxi Driver”.
Directed by Martin Scorsese.

i enjoyed it so much that I’m putting it up here so you can read it too.

Keep The Meter Running.
By J. Hoberman.

Some motion pictures produce the uncanny sensation of returning the spectator’s gaze. Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver—a movie in which the most celebrated line asks the audience, “Are you talkin’ to me?”—is one such film. It came, it saw, it zapped the body politic right between the eyes.

Celebrating its 35th anniversary with a newly restored print and a two-week Film Forum run, Taxi Driver was a powerfully summarizing work. It synthesized noir, neorealist, and New Wave stylistics; it assimilated Hollywood’s recent vigilante cycle, drafting then-déclassé blaxploitation in the service of a presumed tell-it-like-itis naturalism that, predicated on a frank, unrelenting representation of racism, violence, and misogyny, was even more racist, violent, and misogynist than it allowed.

The 12th top-grossing movie of 1976, Taxi Driver was not just a hit but, like Psycho or Bonnie and Clyde, an event in American popular culture—perhaps even an intervention. Inspired by one failed political assassination (the 1972 shooting of presidential hopeful George Wallace), it inadvertently motivated another (the 1981 attempt on President Ronald Reagan). The movie further established its 33-year-old director as both Hollywood’s designated artist and, after Taxi Driver was awarded the Palme d’Or at Cannes, an international sensation—the decisive influence on neo– New Wave filmmakers as varied as Spike Lee, Wong Kar-wai, and Quentin Tarantino.

Scorsese didn’t direct Taxi Driver so much as orchestrate its elements. Lasting nearly 20 minutes and fueled by Bernard Herrmann’s rhapsodic score, the de facto overture is a densely edited salmagundi of effects—slow motion, fragmenting closeups, voluptuous camera moves, and trick camera placement—that may be the showiest pure filmmaking in any Hollywood movie since Touch of Evil. Certainly no American since Welles had so confidently presented himself as a star director. And yet Taxi Driver was essentially collaborative. It was the most cinephilic movie ever made in Hollywood, openly acknowledging Bresson, Hitchcock, Godard, avant-gardists Michael Snow and Kenneth Anger, and the John Ford of The Searchers. Moreover, the movie’s antihero, Travis Bickle—a homicidal combination of Dirty Harry and Norman Bates who describes himself as God’s Lonely Man—sprang from the brain of former film critic Paul Schrader and, as embodied for all eternity by the young Robert De Niro, all but instantly became a classic character in the American narrative alongside Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield.

Citizen of a sodden Sodom where the steamy streets are always wet with tears, among other bodily fluids, Bickle embarks each evening on a glistening sea of sleaze. Seen through his rain-smeared windshield, Manhattan becomes a movie—call it “Malignopolis”—in which, as noted by Amy Taubin in her terrific Taxi Driver monograph, “the entire cast of Superfly seems to have been assembled in Times Square” to feed Travis’s fantasies. The cab driver lives by night in a world of myth, populated by a host of supporting archetypes: the astonishing Jodie Foster as Iris, the 12-year-old hooker living the life in the rat’s-ass end of the ’60s, yet dreaming of a commune in Vermont; Harvey Keitel as her affably nauseating pimp; Peter Boyle’s witless cabbie sage; and Cybill Shepherd’s bratty golden girl, a suitably petit-bourgeois Daisy Buchanan to Travis’s lumpen Gatsby.

Brilliant and yet repellent, at times even hateful, Taxi Driver inspired understandable ambivalence. (At Cannes, the announcement that it had won the Palme d’Or was greeted with boos.) How could reviewers not be wary? Taxi Driver is nakedly opposed even to itself, as well as the culture that produced it. For Travis, all movies are essentially pornographic; had he met his creators, he would surely, as observed by Marshall Berman in his history of Times Square, consider them purveyors of “scum and filth.” It’s the slow deliberation with which this lunatic kicks over his TV and terminates his connection to social reality that signals his madness—and the filmmaker’s.

Like Werner Herzog’s Aguirre or Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, Taxi Driver is auteurist psychodrama. Not for nothing did Scorsese give himself a cameo playing a character even wiggier than Travis. Who can possibly imagine the internal fortitude or psychic cost this movie required or exacted? Certainly no one connected with Taxi Driver ever again reached such heights (or plumbed such depths), although Albert Brooks became a significant filmmaker in his own right, while Scorsese and De Niro would come close with Raging Bull and The King of Comedy—two movies that equal or surpass Taxi Driver in every way except as the embodiment of the historical spirit.

Recalling his youth, Baudelaire wrote of simultaneously experiencing the horror and the ecstasy of existence. So it is with Taxi Driver. The pagan debauchery the child Scorsese saw in Quo Vadis is played out in the Manhattan of 1975 A.D. Hysterical yet sublime, the movie crystallizes one of the worst moments in New York’s history—the city as America’s pariah, a crime-ridden, fiscally profligate, graffitifestooned moral cesspool. Scorsese ups the ante by returning endlessly to his boyhood movie realm of 42nd Street, which, in the mid-’70s, was a lurid land of triple-X-rated cinema, skeevy massage parlors, cruising pimp mobiles, sidewalks crammed with hot-pants hookers, and the customers who on any given weekday evening, according to NYPD stats, were patronizing porn-shops at the rate of 8,000 per hour.

It was while Taxi Driver was in postproduction that the Daily News ran the headline “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.” The movie is Scorsese’s hometown farewell (a love letter quite different from Woody Allen’s). Like Nero, he torches the joint and picks up his lyre. Taxi Driver is a vision of a world that already knows it is lost. A third of a century later, the Checker cabs are gone, as are the taxi garages at the end of 57th Street and the all-night Belmore cafeteria. Times Square has been sanitized, the pestilent combat zone at Third Avenue and 13th Street where Iris peddles her underage charms has long since been gentrified. New York is no longer the planet’s designated Hell on Earth. (Six years after Taxi Driver, Blade Runner would dramatize a new urban space.)

No nostalgia, though: In other aspects, the world of Taxi Driver is recognizably ours. Libidinal politics, celebrity worship, sexual exploitation, the fetishization of guns and violence, racial stereotyping, the fear of foreigners—not to mention the promise of apocalyptic religion— all remain. Taxi Driver lives. See it again. And try to have a nice day.