| Jesse Spears’ Art Class Magic |
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I was taking a dump and flipping through Vanity Fair’s annual “New Establishment” list of the world’s most powerful people, and to my complete and utter shock I discovered myself in the article! Within the top ten, no less. |
Seven years ago this week, the engineer behind the world’s most notorious airliner hijacking vanished into obscurity. Despite the world’s biggest military superpower (arguably) putting forth their best efforts to find him, and despite a standing $52 million reward offered to anyone who can provide information leading to his capture, Osama bin Laden is still out there.
But it doesn’t matter if he’s alive or dead, or if those fuzzy recordings of cryptic bearded men are really him, because he’s more of a symbol than a human being these days. He plays an important role in the neo-con narrative: the supreme villain– he gives Bush something tangible to rhetorically define himself in opposition to. In reality, we know they’re more like two sides of the same coin– two men on religious crusades who see the collateral damage in their wake as justifiable means to some impossible end. To quote Charlie Kaufman, “You explore the notion that cop and criminal are really two aspects of the same person. See every cop movie ever made for other examples of this.” Yes, the Bush years are the deadly byproduct of hack Hollywood screenwriting. Making bin Laden the black king on his chimerical chess board (with Hussein as the reluctant queen?), Bush has been able to keep the game going as long as bin Laden remains unfound– after all, what better reason is there for American to continue living in fear than the possibility of bin Laden’s return? But as Bush’s time runs out, he’s finally preparing to fight the big boss: NPR reported yesterday that the military has entered Pakistan and intends to “hammer al Qaeda before the November election.” We’ll just have to keep tuning in to Fox News to see how this chapter in the Bush saga plays out! Before there was bin Laden, the face of skyjacking was D. B. Cooper. So much the same and so much the opposite of Osama, the man calling himself Dan Cooper performed a vanishing act of his own on– literally– a dark and stormy night in 1971. In a freshly ironed shirt and a dark suit with a mother of pearl tie clip, he boarded a Boeing 727 and nonchalantly passed a note to a stewardess demanding $200,000 in $20 bills and four parachutes. After releasing the flight’s passengers at the Seattle-Tacoma Airport, Cooper drank a bourbon and had meals delivered for the crew while the FBI acquiesced with this anonymous terrorist’s demands, and the plane took off for Reno, Nevada with four crew members left aboard. Somewhere above the southern forests of Washington, Cooper closed the crew in the cockpit and parachuted into the night, with no light to guide his fall, never to be heard from again. Naturally, there was a manhunt. In fact, the FBI made Cooper their top priority. Private investigators, boy scouts, adventure hunters, and mystery buffs have poured over the facts for almost four decades, and yet no one has ever been able to find D. B. Cooper– dead, or alive. Just over $5,000 of the loot was found in 1980, decaying on a nearby riverbed, but none of the other bills have ever been recorded as having passed through the treasury. D. B. Cooper is a folk hero. People root for him. They hope he survived, and that he’s living the good life on a beach in Mexico. They like him because he was clever and polite, and because he didn’t hurt anyone, but I think most interestingly because, as Leonard Nimoy noted, “He did it for money– not a cause.” Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is a concept with capitalist undertones smoldering beneath its surface. Skyjackers in the 60s were frequently re-directing American airliners to Havana for a variety of reasons, often pulling off their schemes without a hitch– but such daring feats of transnational border-crossings became mere punchlines and nuisances in the eyes of the public. Were those desperate Cuban skyjackings more or less justifiable as acts of the “pursuit of happiness” than the D.B. Cooper incident? Are we more likely to forgive people who step outside the bounds of the law to manipulate economic systems rather than political ones?
D.B. Cooper, the vanishing skyjacker, the Robin Hood of the 70s, and Osama bin Laden, the phantom menace of the 00’s, hidden in caves or buried underground or living lives of luxury, or maybe never existing at all, just characters in a couple of equal but opposite narratives about taking over the skies and then disappearing into thin air. + Read more about D.B. Cooper in truTV’s 12-part analysis |
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I’m going on vacation for a week. I’ll be in Tennessee at The Appalachian Institute of Jurassic Being and Nothingness. I’ll fill you all in when I get back! Until then, enjoy surfing through Cyberspace without me! |
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Jesse Spears (pictured on the top right, smelling a buttercup) is one of my favorite artists. In addition to the blog she uses to document her endless creative output (Long Live Cartoon!) she also keeps a personal blog called Carnage Knockout, filled with sublime ephemera: snapshots of plants and pets, 911 calls, bubble wrap, and lists: like, “Things I Don’t Understand,” and “People I Want To Meet.” It was on Carnage Knockout that I first came across Wendy Morgan’s godly music video for the Gnarls Barkley song “Going On.” Wendy Morgan is a Canadian commercial and music video director who’s made some great ad spots for Ikea, Girls Inc., and MTV Canada that are often bizarre or bemusing and occasionally even tackle the ungraspable nuances of Canadian national identity. Truthfully, Wendy’s MTV commercials are too good for MTV… though, who knows, maybe in topsy-turvy Canada, that sad vestige of a former pop culture powder-keg has managed to retain some semblance of watchability. Regardless of MTV’s contemporary significance, its legacy lives on in cyberspace as the music video medium continues to thrive on a newly global scale– thanks in no small part to directors like Morgan. She’s crafted unaffected, imaginative videos for bands like The Unicorns and Dragonette– bands which don’t get any significant air time on the highly corporatized cable networks, but are now finding a home on the information superhighway. I thought it would be fun to interview Wendy Morgan, but even more fun to let Jesse Spears do most of the work, since she loves the “Going On” video so much. Jesse came up with a bunch of questions, and I threw in a couple of my own, and we e-mailed them off to the jet-setting filmmaker, whose blog is replete with images from Jamaica, Barcelona, Italy and France. I’m enormously grateful to Wendy for humoring us by responding to this interview, and to Jesse for conducting it. I’ll pass things over to Ms. Spears for a proper introduction:
1. What was the crew like for the filming of the “Going On” video? Like, how big was the crew, and how long did it take and stuff.? We shot for two days, prepped for probably five days, the crew was around 20 or so people I think, it felt pretty small in reality. The producer was Jannie McInnes of Revolver Films, the cinematographer was Max Goldman, who makes a ton of great videos, and I think he’s amazing. 2. How did you come up with the story of dancing Jamaican kids finding a portal to an alternate dimension? Well, the original story that was written was: we do a musical-style approach with singing and dancing that takes place in Africa. But it made more sense to go to Jamaica, and I love dancehall style dancing, but you’ll notice there are no obvious Jamaican references or locations. I wanted it to be a nether world. The song sounded like dancing and celebration to me and lyrically, it talks about going on. I imagined the farthest you can possibly go is another dimension, so we’ll go there. |
Inspired by 20 years of the highly reputable MIX NYC festival, Rudy Bleu, Kent Martin and Irinia Contreras have taken it upon themselves to establish MIX LA, a festival of queer experimental short film. The festival itself will be taking place next spring, but the group is throwing a warm-up event next Saturday: the MIX LA Summer Picnic!
Come on out and have a picnic with your video art-loving pals– it’s free! And there’s an epic dance performance, and a sex toy fashion show. What more could you ask for?
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Even though he won the fancy Turner Prize in 1999 and the Caméra d’Or at Cannes earlier this year, I’d never heard of Steve McQueen until I found myself flipping through the photos from Yohji Yamamoto’s latest men’s collection runway show. Perhaps the venerable Japanese designer was following the fashion world’s recent shift towards self-congratulatory open-mindedness (i.e. Vivienne Westwood’s creepy muscle-bear runway model, or Italian Vogue’s much-lauded all-black issue– which was promptly followed by a return to the vanilla status quo), or perhaps Yamamoto simply decided that at the age of 65 he can pretty much do whatever the hell he wants, but in any case, the runway was strutted by a hodgepodge of highly unusual models. Amongst the de facto mop-topped pixies and intimidatingly high-cheekboned youngsters, the audience was treated to a handful of grandfatherly models (including one with a gimp leg) and– in the words of style.com writer Tim Blanks– the “defiantly chunky” British artist Steve McQueen.
I can’t help but think that Yamamoto had some irony in mind when he chose the handsomely robust McQueen as his proxy for a statement on the politics of body size: after all, McQueen’s much-acclaimed debut feature, Hunger, is all about using the human body as a political weapon. Centering on the final weeks in the life of of imprisoned IRA member Bobby Sands, McQueen’s film examines the passion and struggle that fueled the 1981 Irish Hunger Strike. The film has been ruffling a few feathers in the UK over its seemingly sympathetic portrayal of Sands, but McQueen himself refuses to take sides. Confronted by a reporter who baits, “I would argue, [Sands] comes out looking heroic,” McQueen responds, “Not for me … If he’s in a movie, people walk around thinking he’s heroic. It doesn’t matter what he’s doing in the movie, he will be thought of as heroic. That’s the movies. You put anyone in a movie, and people think that person’s heroic.” In fact, Steve McQueen has built a reputation for not taking a position on his own work. 1993’s Bear, the silent short film that put him on the map, depicts a naked wrestling match between two black men (one of whom is McQueen). “Narrative and visual contexts, however, are absent,” wrote David Frankel in ArtForum, “this nude wrestling match has neither origin nor outcome, and happens in seeming darkness. What remains is the play of the men’s feelings - there is smiling and laughter, but also challenge, caution, tension, alarm, and a certain erotic buzz as the sparring goes through its phases.” Pulling the viewer into the film’s all-around ambiguity by forcing them to watch it in a completely darkened gallery room, McQueen doesn’t clarify any of the questions he raises, leaving his audience to construct their own point of view.
McQueen’s unyielding distance from his own work has always stood in stark contrast to the indulgent autobiography of his “Young British Artist” contemporaries like Tracey Emin, who became a press darling when she was shortlisted for the Turner Prize with her hopelessly self-absorbed work “My Bed” in 1999, the year McQueen won. “His victory was greeted by the London Evening Standard with a cover photo of Tracey Emin ‘not winning the Turner Prize.’ McQueen was tucked away on page five,” wrote Iain Aitch on GettingIt.com. McQueen finally found himself in the public spotlight in 2007 with a work which, like Hunger, raises questions about the problematic position of the human body in modern politics. Selected by the semi-governmental Imperial War Museum to act as the nation’s official “War Artist,” McQueen’s resulting piece, Queen and Country, is simply a series of postage stamps depicting 98 armed service members who have died in Iraq. In a time in which images of the war dead have been banned in the media, when governments choose to sweep the idea of these unwanted corpses from an unpopular war under the rug, the UK’s Royal Mail service has quietly refused to turn McQueen’s work into real commemorative stamps– even after an outpouring of public support for the project.
That McQueen has been able to cause such controversy by doing something so benign– something that isn’t explicitly pro-war or anti-war, and might actually honor these casualties– demonstrates the beauty of McQueen’s detached perspective. Placing himself in opposition to the self-centered delusion fostered by micro-blogging, reality television and tabloid minutiae, McQueen steps away from himself and acts as an apolitical provocateur, presenting uncomfortable questions and allowing the audience to take their own positions. Also, he’s adorable! Let’s hope he continues to pursue a career in modeling– I can definitely picture him as the new face of Dior Homme. |
Graphic designer Max Erdenberger created the dazzling seizure-inducing animation in Gnarls Barkley’s “Run” video, writes the always-enlightening art & design blog Viewers Like You, and just released a series of beautiful posters promoting environmental responsibilty. Originally commissioned by eco-clothing brand NAU’s philanthropic arm, Partners for Change, the posters never saw the light of day until Erdenberger came up with a unique solution to a very modern problem: how do you justify the unavoidably copious carbon emissions of a cross-country move? “I already pay about $400 a year to make my family a carbon neutral family,” says Erdenberger, who recently moved 950 miles from smoggy L.A. to the great outdoors of the Pacific Northwest. “The move is an especially nasty polluter.” So the designer decided to dust off his eye-popping eco-loving posters and sell them to fund the offset of his recent carbon-emission shopping spree. “The carbon offsetting I will do with the proceeds involves calculating how much carbon is generated while transporting all our stuff in a truck, flying our family of 3 in a jet, and transporting both of our cars on the back of a semi truck. Then, selecting a organization that funds the planting of trees, and promoting alternative energy.” The series of five posters are available for purchase on imagekind.com, with a plethora of size and paper type options to display your devotion to ecological sustainability (and good graphic design!) however you see fit. Max also recommends checking out your own carbon impact and joining the community at WeCanSolveIt.org. |
Before you say anything, just stop. I know. You’re sick of Japanese horror movies– you’ve had them crammed down your throat all decade, and you’ve reached critical mass. As if their movie of the week compositions, cliché dialogue, and gaping plot holes weren’t enough, you’ve been tricked into sitting through their even duller American incarnations time after mind-numbing time. You’ve been led through the same creepy hallways and past the same undead toddlers by a parade of WB stars trying to make inroads and talented actresses slumming it for a paycheck (we may forgive you, Naomi Watts and Jennifer Connelly, but we’ll never forget).  But Exte: Hair Extensions is different! It’s a parody of J-Horror– but that’s oversimplifying matters, for this is no Scary Movie. Hair Extensions uses the horror-comedy genre as a convenient vehicle with which to deliver a diverse assortment of pure entertainment, ranging from the surface story about bloodthirsty hair extensions to an emotionally fraught drama about child abuse, to a glimpse into one adorably optimistic girl’s (Kill Bill and Battle Royale’s Chiaki Kuriyama) dream of hair salon superstardom, and the bizarre indulgences of a necrophiliac hair fetishist. Plus, there’s a musical number. And perhaps because it’s infused with that undefinable Japanese-weird quality, it all holds together– without resorting to cheap titillation or humdrum poop jokes.
Sion Sono, the poet-turned-auteur behind Hair Extensions, never appears in public without a black fedora, and is also responsible for a film which I count among my personal favorites: 2002’s absurdly cryptic, teeny-bopper-fearing existential gorefest Suicide Club. There too, he uses J-horror as a facade to delve into more interesting ideas, ruminating on Internet obsession, the breakdown of familial relations, media saturation and late-capitalist pop music. And he doesn’t fail to deliver on the awesomely inappropriate musical number in that film, either. Like his more famous contemporary Takashi Miike (who, incidentally, never appears in public without sunglasses), Sono works inside the skeleton of genre limitations, but seems more interested in having fun and experimenting than making sense or delivering a happy ending. Luckily for us, whoever keeps financing their projects doesn’t seem to mind. |
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Emerging from an angsty, melancholy, Bright Eyes-heavy bout of introspection in my last year of high school, I had the good fortune of catching an intimate Dr. Dog show at one small venue in UC Davis’ myriad of coffee shops. Like a dark cloud parting to reveal the big bright shining sun, Dr. Dog guitar-plucked their way into my teenage soul that night, and has remained one of my favorite bands ever since. So when the chance came to do an interview with co-lead singer Scott McMicken for Mean magazine, I leapt at the opportunity. After attending an awkward industry-only midday peformance in Hollywood, I met Scott in the parking lot of the Roosevelt Hotel and we spoke for a blissful hour and a half of matters great and small. The meat of that interview will be published in the upcoming August issue of Mean (along with my interviews of Six Feet Under creator Alan Ball, Towelhead star Summer Bishil, and my first sneaker column). In preparation of Dr. Dog’s amazing new album, Fate, which hits shelves tomorrow, my editor has given me permission to post some excerpts from the remainder of my rambling conversation with Scott McMicken here. Enjoy!
Download: “The Old Days” from the new album, Fate Have you ever thought about creating a Dr. Dog musical? That would be really awesome. We did this album, Psychedelic Swamp a long time ago, and we’ve always had dreams to make it a traveling piece of theater. There’s a real strong narrative throughout the album and it would be pretty easy and really fun to try and make it into a sort of low-budget theater production. But even a movie of that… Is Psychedelic Swamp available anywhere? I’ve tried to find it before and haven’t had any luck. No, it’s not. The problem is… we would have put it out already, but the concept on the album is that we didn’t make it, we got it in the mail. So the packaging is an envelope with our address on it. The idea is that we got it—this cassette tape—from this dude who used to live on earth, but escaped into this psychedelic parallel universe, as an effort to escape all the problems he was having on earth. And when he got there, initially he was like, “Wow, this is awesome! Everything is so weird, and everything is upside down, with psychedelic aesthetics—nothing is predictable!” But over time, as he gained his frame of reference there, he realized that the same problems persist and there’s no real escape other than accepting and dealing with these issues that you have in your life. So he wants to make this album and send it back to earth to spread that message, like, “I’ve made this mistake, I thought I could escape but now I’m just trapped here. Everything’s the same.” And he appeals to us, saying, “Can you be the band that’s going to translate this music into modern American pop music, so that the message is understood?” He’s becoming so detached from reality the more he’s there, his ability to communicate and his way of going about representing information is becoming more and more garbled and detached and that’s why it sounds like a very psychedelic album.
The reason we haven’t put it out yet is because before we do that, I want to do what he’s asking us to do, which is to take all the music and re-record it as a live rock band with no psychedelic elements whatsoever. Very straightforward, immediate delivery, just like he wants it to be—a translation of his psychedelic mess. So when we do that, we’ll put ‘em both together and it’ll be like a double album. Have you ever hopped a train? No… I want to. My friends do that. I have a few friends who live that way, riding around on the rails, and there’s something about it that’s very romantic. The three people I know who do it, it’s not a big social thing—they’re not with a huge group of people. Most of the time they’re on their own, so it seems kinda cool. Dangerous—very dangerous. Probably very uncomfortable. In truth, I’ll probably never ever do that, but I certainly like the idea of that. All I can picture are horror stories of getting sucked under and your legs get chopped off. |
