| A Pussy With A Screenplay In His Hand: Understanding “Shoot ‘Em Up” |
Note: I don’t usually write about things that I hate, because there’s really nothing productive that can come out of talking shit on the Internet. But for Shoot ‘Em Up, I will make a special exception, on the grounds that if I even convince one person not to see this movie, I might be able to stop some injustice in the world from going down.
What you may not garner from a glance at at the poster, or even by watching the relatively tame trailer, is that Shoot ‘Em Up is a completely fucked up, misogynistic, self-indulgent, hateful, and downright retarded piece of shit. Let me explain. There’s nothing innately wrong with gratuitous violence. For example: Quentin Tarantino, John Woo, Park Chan-wook and Takashi Miike are just a handful of modern filmmakers who employ over-the-top cinematic violence in clever, intelligent, and emotionally resonant ways. It can even be fun to watch violence-filled popcorn movies that have no real artistic credibility, which is exactly how I approached Shoot ‘Em Up as I entered the theater– prepared to share some thrills and a few laughs with my friends. Then, the lights dimmed. continue reading |
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Lekman understands the glory of sentimentality. Going beyond camp, Lekman takes the trite into a place of transcendence. One of his classic hits, the Rocky Dennis EP, revisits the well-treaded ground of Peter Bogdanovich’s 1985 drama Mask, the true story of an (otherwise) normal southern Californian teenager who suffers from a severely disfiguring bone disorder. As if that weren’t bad enough, his mom is a struggling alcoholic biker played by Cher. The film itself is an undeniable tear-jerker, and a poignant, well-crafted one at that. Lekman’s suite of songs, the first one written from the perspective of the film’s unfortunate teenage hero, are just as moving as the seminal melodrama, and even more complex in their layers of emotional intrigue. Jens’s songs are about unrequited love, nostalgia, romantic vignettes, Sweden, anarchism, first kisses and wild fantasies. He’s been compared to Morrissey, but I think that’s because Morrissey is, like, the nightmare doppelgänger of Jens Lekman. He’s more like a less apprehensive Stuart Murdoch, or Stephin Merritt without the ‘tude. And he has an amazing new album coming out in the U.S., called Night Falls Over Kortedala, where he turns all epic 70’s disco-orchestral. Check it out when it hits stores October 9th!
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Johnny Rogers and Shalo P. are San Francisco Art Institute expatriates touring California right now with their video art cabaret act, The New Jedi Order. With the aid of a projector, an olde thyme iBook, a ghetto blaster and a Coby DVD player, these two shifty-eyed geniuses are wreaking havoc on the west coast. I was lucky enough to see their performance in the comfort of my own living room last night.
Like Animal Charm on crack, NJO’s videos are mash-ups of pop culture references strangely familiar and hauntingly foreign. Footage from a buggy video game console flashes on the screen in between clips of news footage and blurry 3-D animations. They draw links between Home Alone and 9/11, Lord of the Rings and “Twin Peaks”, LensCrafters commercials and cultural dissonance. Johnny and Shalo themselves preform brief sketches while the videos play, as characters like “Professor Post-Morrissey” or “Gandalf bin Laden”. Johnny channels the video for Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence” (as seen in the header picture for this post), accompanied by a distorted MIDI version of the song. At one point, a makeshift rave breaks out.
It’s an all around good time! If you get a chance to check them out, they’re preforming at Cinefile tomorrow night, in Santa Cruz on Thursday, and San Francisco this weekend. You can check out the schedule here. |
I have known the aging to gripe at the prospect of something turning from contemporary to nostalgic. How many early 40-somethings rolled their eyes when the aesthetic of the 1980s came back into vogue, declaring it a period of history so dark it wasn’t worth recalling– not even ironically? Because it hit so close to home for them, there was no way they could understand the inherent value of New Wave music so cheap that it was priceless, the quaintness of high school films so unrealistic that they became classics, the unrelenting hodge-podge of weird fashion, or the alluring mystery of a decade’s muddled values only a few steps removed from our own cultural confusion. It must have been hard for those who couldn’t escape the apparent idiocy that the youth was now electing to celebrate to understand what anyone could see in that decade. Now they have something else to complain about. In the past few years, the signs and symbols of the another decade have crept back into our consciousness, as every day of George W.’s reign puts distance between ourselvesand the day-glo 90’s. I know I’m not the only one who’s been enthusiastically revisiting the biker shorts and youthful optimism of “Beverly Hills 90210″ as the early seasons have begun to creep into the DVD market. White-framed sunglasses are all the rage, and artists like Paper Rad are exploiting strangeness of early 90’s tech-art for all that it’s worth. It was on an amazing DVD compilation called Cartune Xprez, which features some of Paper Rad’s animations, that I came across the work of video artist Shana Moulton.
Shana Moulton clearly understands the allure of 90’s imagery. Her static, staged short films use a palette of pastel neons to portray the sinister and hysterical implications of a new age sensibility that screams “early 90’s”. But Moulton’s work is far from a base parody of antiquated new age trends– it just uses that eerily familiar imagery as a foil for commentary on our alienating, rapidly changing culture. There is a sense of muffled frustration here. Moulton is like a less explicit Miranda July, casting herself as a quiet woman trying to find inner peace in all the wrong places. But that doesn’t mean you can’t laugh at the Lisa Frank-esque world Moulton has painted herself within, or take delight in her vigorous chugging of a glass of Crystal Light. Says Moulton, “I aim to create worlds in which the goofily fantastic and the humiliatingly banal brush against each other and where the body’s boundaries can be expanded to include strange fantasy worlds through the infinite capacity of the mind.” So just relax, plug in your electric waterfall, and enjoy the videos.  |
Now look at an assortment of random recent photos after the jump! continue reading |
Ashley Goldberg is a Los Angeles-based artist who makes unbearably cute illustrations that are shockingly cheap, writes a blog about it, and draws the raddest pictures of bearded men. She makes dozens of drawings like the ones above of adorably sleepy-eyed gents with beards and moustaches of all different varieties. Her work is being shown right now at Gallery Revisited in Silver Lake, along with new work from Michael C. Hsiung, who I recently posted about. Hsiung harbors his own glorious fascination with bearded dudes– often of the moncale-sporting merman variety. Beards forever! Check out the show before it ends on September 1st– they’ve got some great stuff up. I swung by the opening on Saturday and took some pictures, which you can check out after the jump. |
The following photos are from a remote desert valley, creepy Palmdale gift shops, a Teena Marie show, a Ryan Trecartin movie that was shot in our living room, a local park, Ooga Booga, and a neighbor’s backyard house party. Click on the jump to see them all. Enjoy! |
[subscribe to the podcast in iTunes] My friend Ben from high school goes by the name Dog Tones when he’s spinning vinyl, which is quite frequently these days. Ben is the general manager of UC Davis’ radio station, KDVS, and somehow finds time to host his own show on the station, Thee Funk Terminal. When I make a podcast, all I do is lump a bunch of good songs into one big file. Ben, fancy-pants that he is, took the time to layer and sample from a plethora of sources, resulting in a truly rich aural experience. To give you some insight into the mind of Dog Tones, here is dream he had last night, starring Snoop Dogg:
Check out the track listing after the jump! continue reading |
