A couple of months ago, I posted about the movies of Estus Pirkle. He was the amazingly insane preacher responsible for three movies. One describes hell, one describes heaven and the other describes the imminent communist take over of America unless we all accept Jesus Christ as our personal savior.

This movie is, of course, the 1971 classic If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?

The basic plot involves pastor Estus Pirkle preaching to his flock about the coming communist invasion. He claims that within two years, because of our Godless ways, God will turn His back on us and the communists will take over, killing all of the Christians. I’m not sure why some Christians really want God to be a complete asshole.

He then foretells this invasion. Through the use of flash-forwards, we jump from Pirkle’s little church to the near future where very southern men with bad Russian(?) accents terrorize the God-fearing (and sort of bored looking) believers.

One minute Pirkle is telling us about the Godless ways of television and the violence in cartoons and the next we’re shown a scene where a small child has stakes driven into his ears by a communist soldier who looks kind of like Quentin Tarantino, so that he can no longer hear about Jesus.

Other memorable moments include the mild, but surreal school room scene where the communist leader asks the kids to pray to Jesus for candy, but when Jesus doesn’t deliver the goods, who else can? Our glorious leader Fidel Castro can give us candy! See that here.

And don’t forget about the gunning down of church-goers, the beheading of a child (watch his head bounce across the ground!).

There’s also a scene where a farmer’s children are forced to hold him by a rope, suspended over pitchforks until their little arms give out and they drop him to his death while some creepy guy who looks suspiciously like Drew Carey giggles. Cute!

Remember, this is an exploitation film.

But how do I go about reviewing something like this? The quality of such a film is acceptably bad. It was directed by Ron Ormond after he turned Christian. Prior to seeing the light, he produced such gems as Please Don’t Touch Me and Monster and the Stripper. This movie is bad. The shots are bad, the acting is bad and the writing is bad. Everything about it is bad. But this isn’t something you can really judge on quality.

You can’t really judge it on content either. You know you’re not going to agree with it. Pirkle claims that everything he says is either scriptural or based upon what communists have done to Christians in other countries. It’s fairly doubtful if either are true.

So let’s judge it on entertainment value. That alone makes it all worth while. It is a messed up movie made by a guy who really did believe that the commies were going to take over. I guess that’s something to keep in mind, right? He really did think he was doing us all a favor.

As we all know, the commies didn’t take over come 1973, so a year later the Pirkle/Ormond team made Burning Hell. I hope to see this one next, though it might be a while since I’ve yet to buy it.

Shortly thereafter, Pirkle and Orman went their separate ways. Orman made two more Christian films (Grim Reaper and 39 Stripes – both of which are pretty available at some cult DVD stores online).

There is another film called The Believer’s Heaven, but I’ve not been able to track this down at all. A few clips have surfaced on YouTube, but that’s it.

You can see the full version of If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? here. I strongly suggest you do. You can also visit my other post about this for more clips (the last two on that post are the most fun).

So go ahead and watch it and let me know what you think. Ryan, Smartz and I watched it last week and it was appreciated by all.

All of his films were shown at churches and pretty much no where else. This one was also called Blood with Flow Like Water. A poster for it is here.

When I was a wee fellow and my parents would take me on vacation, we’d always see these stickers on the sides of RVs depicting which states they’ve driven through.

This reminded me of that:

Also, this is how many states I’ve ridden though. I’m far from completing the whole US on a scooter, as you can see, but not bad.

I checked to see if they still make those RV stickers. They do. But they look really crappy now. See?

Now, personally, I don’t care what people put on the side of their whatevers, but I do like the old stickers better.

And I wish there were something like that for scooter/motorcycles. On a motorcycle, I’m not sure where you’d put it. But on a scooter, you’ve got a lot of choices. I’d put mine on my glovebox.

As for hitting the other states, well many would be taken care of in a “quick” east coast tour. That would leave the south and a few random states here and there.

The Cannonball Run coast-to-coast scooter “race” will be happening again in 2010. They’re still trying to figure out the route, but of the two that they seem to be talking about most, I’d be able to pick some up that way, especially if they do the one from Seattle to Daytona.

A dream trip that I’ve been kicking around, which would take care of almost all of them is what I’ve dubbed “The Bow Tie.” It goes from Seattle to Miami, then from Miami to Portland (Maine), then from Portland, Maine to San Diego, then from San Diego to Seattle, creating what would basically appear to look sort of bow tie-ish. See?

It’s got very little to do with what the trip would eventually look like. Think of it as a rough draft of something I’d love to do and probably will eventually.

Those are the states that I’ve ridden through. Here are the states that I’ve driven through:

It’s much more complete, but then, I’ve had more than a year or so to do it.

Now… if only I could get back on the road!

The PA Tourism board sort of went out on a limb in this one. It’s a short film about a guy named Peter Arthur (get it – PA) whose parents took him to Pennsylvania Dutch country when he was 12 and the waitress at a diner served him the best piece of shoefly pie ever and he fell in love with her.

He blows off a job interview (in the middle of it) to buy a scooter and search for her.

His travels take him to Gettysburg and there’s a tiny little song about riding a scooter through Gettysburg, which is fun because I’ve done that a ton of times! Though never looking for a girl. Probably. Who can remember?

Anyway, the short is cute and fun and quirky. Not really sure it accomplishes what they wanted it to accomplish (whatever that was… tourism, I guess), but it’s cute and fun and quirky, so no big loss.

Check it out here: PAStories.com

Collecting songs for the Road Trip mix CD (which has, incidentally, taken on the name Hot Sun Beating on a Blacktop) has got me thinking about the road.

The weather becoming absolutely amazing has also done its fair share of it (though Scoot 66 was plagued with horrible, crappy weather – everything but hail).

Being without a car means that the scooter is my only transportation. This turns the scooter into something of a necessity rather than recreation. That doesn’t mean it’s as unfun to ride as it is to drive, of course. It just means that when I’m riding, it’s usually not specifically for fun – it’s to get somewhere I have to be. It’s way better than driving or taking the bus, but still, the point isn’t just riding.

Anyway, all this has me itching for the road.

A recent development that I’m not really going to share at this point might indicate that travel is on my horizon.¹ However, it also may not be, which is a real tease. I would love to get back on the road for a bit. I realize that I can’t go out like I did last spring and summer and I’m almost okay with that. A week or so would be great. Very, very great.

1. Ew! I sound like a horoscope. [↩]

On Monday I posted about my troubles making a mix CD of road trip songs. In it I mentioned that I had an idea concerning a “new” (for me) way to make a mix.

I’ve been kicking around this idea for some time now and I think it’s pretty do-able.

When I was a kid, I’d make mixtapes for pretty much everyone, lots of folks did. The mixtape was an art in and of itself. Many folks didn’t just slap a bunch of songs on a 90 minute tape, they added funny samples from movies, weird sounds, bits of strange songs.

The tapes were great, because they had two beginnings and two endings (side one – side two). You were basically making two mixes – some songs were “side one” songs, while others couldn’t be anything but “side two” songs. A song that could close out side one, usually wouldn’t work as a closer for side two, the final end of the mix. Your opening song wouldn’t work anywhere but the opening.

Mixtapes were made with care and creativity – even the ones with only songs on them. Generally mix CDs (and especially the newest entry in the field of mixes, the playlist) are not.

Mix CDs and especially playlists are just, as the latter’s name implies, a list of songs. And in the weird, overly-copyrighted world we live in, a list of songs pre-approved by what’s available on iTunes or the contracts of some streaming audio service. These don’t count.

My mix CDs, like the mixtapes of my youth, are put together with quite a bit of thought. I try my best to use versions of songs that most folks haven’t heard – remixes, demos, bootlegged live versions – you generally can’t get stuff like this off of iTunes. I also do my best to throw in a variety of songs. Who wants a mix where every song sounds like same?

Right, but to my idea. Okay, so when it comes down to it, my mix CDs are still just a list of songs. Sure, maybe I’ll include a sneaky bonus track, but still: list of songs. So my idea is to take the idea of a “podcast” and turn it into a mixtape.

Now, I pretty well hate the term “podcast.” I realize it’s only named that because of the iPod and because it sounds like “broadcast.” Still, hate it like I hate the term “twitter” and especially “tweeting” (the verb form of “twitter”). I’m old and cranky. Essentially, a podcast is just a long mp3 file. Some are just talking, but some are basically like a radio show – like a mixtape with too much talk and not enough rock.

That’s where my idea comes in. What if I made a mixtape like I used to and then recorded it onto two big mp3 files (one for each side of the tape)? Would anyone listen to it? Are we to the point where if we can’t very easily skip over a track we don’t like, we don’t want the medium? I really don’t know.

But it’s worth a try.

When I said that I’d make a mixtape, I didn’t actually mean a tape. I don’t have a tape deck and, with the exception of mixtapes, I never liked the cassette. What I do have is a computer with a few audio editing programs and almost enough know-how to use them.

And so I will. I’ll use these audio editing programs to make two long audio files, each “side” less than 40 minutes long (so as to be able to put them on an 80 minute CD-R). With the medium now a completely blank slate, like a blank tape, I can fill it however I see fit.

It’ll still be a list of songs, of course, but it won’t just be a list of songs.

I’ll have more about it and will be putting it up on my blog in a couple of weeks as one of my In Between Mixes (which, yes, will make a total of five for the year).

Stay tuned.

No matter what he’s in…

The road trip mix is probably the most popular themes for a mix CD/tape ever. Pretty much everyone has made one at some point or another. Of course, for a “true” road songs mix CD, you need songs about the road. Thankfully, musicians spend a lot of time on the road and tend to write songs about it, so we’re never at a loss for material.

I haven’t made a road trip mix in years (seven or eight, I’d bet). Lately, I’ve been kicking around a mix CD idea and the road trip mix played into that (more one that idea at another time). I sat down yesterday and wrote down a handful of songs that I knew I’d want to include.

For me, Dag Nasty’s “Dag Nasty” is a must (“I just wanna ride, so drive. I don’t care where we’re going to. Just go, just drive. I don’t care if we ever come back here….”). And Springsteen’s got about a billion of them, though “Racing in the Streets” was the one I wanted to use.

I came up with a few others, maybe four, but then that was it. What the hell, right? With all these songs about the road, why couldn’t I come up with something?

So I hit up Google. Countless ideas. Everybody from NPR to the Art of the Mix is weighing in on this. Hell, even the US government has a list of road songs.

But nothing fit. I didn’t get it, these are road songs. They’re exactly what I’m looking for. You slap 20 of these songs in pretty much any random order onto a CD-R and you’ve got yourself 80 minutes of sing-a-long road tripping fun.

It just didn’t fit for me. And I’m not sure that it will.

That leaves me wondering “why?”

One thing that I’ve always done is made mixes. My mixes, however, are usually really specific. “Bruce Springsteen’s songs about Mary” and “Happy Cure Songs” are easy to do. That’s specific. I did a mix of covers. That’s easy as pie. But a mix of road songs – that’s something different.

Also, and this is probably most important, I don’t drive. I ride. There’s a difference. In a car, you can listen to music all you want, but on a scooter, you can’t (or at least, you shouldn’t and I don’t). Road trips in a car are community events. They’re loud and exciting and full of antics. The sing-a-long songs are perfect for this.

My trips are solitary. They’re quiet. On a road trip in a car, you bounce on down the road. In a scooter, you glide. It’s smooth. There’s nothing like it.

Aside from the Dag Nasty song, all of the songs I was picking were smooth songs. They weren’t necessarily sad songs or even slow songs, but they had a fluid quality to them that those 70’s rock anthems you’d normally associate with a mix CD of road songs don’t have.

So my mix of road songs is very much a work in progress and more than likely will be a long time coming.

One of the songs I picked was Grandaddy’s “I’m on Standby.” Here’s why I picked it.