| While the World Falls Apart, Read the New Issue |
This is a few weeks belated, but there’s a new issue of Mean magazine on newsstands everywhere! This issue arrives accompanied by a series of web-only short films that bring the standard celebrity photo shoots alive in a world of mindfucking WTF moments: Sir Ben Kingsley becomes Minor Threat’s Ian MacKaye, SNL’s Bill Hader flips out like Harvey Keitel in Abel Ferrara’s cult classic, Bad Lieutenant, and the insanely funny Anna Faris tap dances on an endless sea of her own tears. Next Monday will see the premiere of the latest video on Mean’s site, with Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks of Zack and Miri Make a Porno ruminating on the complexities of sex in a video by American History X auteur Tony Kaye. This is my final issue of Mean as associate editor, as I’ve decided to go freelance and focus my concentration on writing (and acting, and filmmaking… I’m just putting editorial work on the sidelines, for now). I’ve got four articles in the issue, including interviews with Six Feet Under/True Blood creator, Alan Ball; the talented and beautiful Summer Bishil, who stars in Ball’s latest feature film, Towelhead; and Scott McMicken– the lead singer of my favorite band in the world, Dr. Dog (whose conversation was so ramblingly awesome and captivating that I posted the leftover bits here). Also, I wrote the column about sneakers and which ones you should buy to craft your consumer identity, but in a fun way! So check it out, before the coming police state or post-apocalyptic looters sweep it off your the shelves at your local Barnes & Noble. |
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. |
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The 16th issue of Mean magazine is on newsstands across the country today! I’ve got five articles in the new issue– which is partially why I’ve been so absent from the online world lately. I had a lot of fun this issue! I got to interview one of my favorite artists, Matt Furie; my junior high school literary hero, Chuck Palahniuk– who ended up asking for a JPEG of my dick; fascinating documentarian Marina Zenovich, who made a film about Roman Polanski’s convoluted sex scandal; and some really exciting fashion designers– Danish freak-folk threesome Hui-Hui and RISD wunderkind Katie Gallagher. You can pick up Mean at Borders, Virgin Megastore, and Barnes & Noble all over the U.S. and Canada. |
I like to dance. I wouldn’t say I’m “good” at dancing, and neither will I feign humility by dubbing myself a “bad” dancer. Can’t we just do away with such arbitrary dichotomies? But I think it’s not overly self-aggrandizing to call my dancing style an entertaining one. Regardless of what people think of my seismic spasms, I have fun when I’m flailing about, and that’s all that matters. Below, you will find two videos that document a wide range of my bodily movements. On the left, I’m a robot performing a “tragic love/hate story” with my mad scientist master. My slick, sensual co-star Alex runs the blog Meccanik Dancing, a weekly chronicle of thrilling dance routines filmed in his bedroom. On the right, I’m a pixelated electronic rock star spinning behind a turntable in a British cell phone commercial. Try and spot my blurry performance! You can read more about that strange experience in an earlier post that featured a teal blazer and a horrifying haircut. For bonus points, check out my 2005 submission to Learning to Love You More, the Miranda July/Harrell Fletcher cyberspace art project that has recently been made into an IRL book. I made a video of myself dancing for one of the many participatory assignments that comprise the site. You can also see me dancing in the streets of Echo Park for a Lavender Diamond video. Hey, I’ve got a pretty impressive resume here– Cirque Du Soleil, here I come! |
I’ve been working at Mean magazine since October, and my first issue as Associate Editor is about to hit newsstands! I’ve got three articles in the issue: two interviews with fashion designers Luella Bartley and Peter Jensen, and a write-up on the insanely cool digital-only re-issue label, Anthology Recordings. The issue also includes rad conversations with two of my favorite bands– ELO and Goblin– along with pieces on designer Brian Lichtenberg and Xiu Xiu, Devendra Banhart’s artwork, Totally Radd!! trading cards, an illustration by Alexa Shapiro, and much more. While you’re at it, check out the Mean website, which I’ve spent the last week completely redesigning. Issue 15 comes out March 18th, and you can pick it up at your local Borders or Barnes & Noble, among other fine retailers. In other news from my crazy-busy work life: I booked an Orbit commercial recently! I can’t wait to see the spot, which promises to be hilarious– it comes from the uber-creative duo known as The Perlorian Borthers, a director/art director team responsible for some of the most entertaining commercials I’ve ever seen. I’ll write more about that one when it starts appearing between commercials breaks on Girlicious and Cavemen. In the meantime, check out my
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Here’s a query. What does a “Daft Punk-esque” British rock star wear on stage? If your answer was, “A shabby teal suit jacket, a fat aqua necktie, and a dress shirt with rainbow-striped sleeves that extend past his fingertips,” you’d be absolutely correct! At least according to the wardrobe ladies on the European cell phone commercial I shot last weekend. You see, somebody thought I made a convincing-enough British tehcno-rock star (due mainly to the goofy David Silver spin I pulled out during the audition– thanks Brian Austin Green!) and cast me in a European cell phone commercial. So I spent last Saturday night pretending to DJ on a giant boat-shaped stage parked in the middle of a fake street on the Paramount backlot in front of 350 extras who were doing The Wave with expertly-choreographed precision. I’ve got another query for you: what does the aforementioned British rock star’s hair look like? |
Apparently, half of me is wheatpasted on city streets throughout L.A., New York, and San Francisco. I had a little surreal moment the other day in my friend Andrew’s car– we were on our way home from getting man-icures in Beverly Hills (more on that later), when I gazed out the window upon these strange, strange ads. “Oh, it’s me,” I said. My Lacanian mirror stage in the marketing world. It’s a trendy viral marketing campaign for the 2009 Toyota Matrix, where I guess the idea is you’re supposed to buy a new car that will enable you to explore your dark, edgy side– my own dark side, apparently, is a furry. The website, yourotheryou.com, is a bizarre game that allows you to play an interactive prank on a friend. You give them a bunch of personal information about someone you know, and they end up getting creepy phone calls for five days. It’s kind of like a web 2.0 version of The Game, but it just wants to sell you a car. I’m currently playing this automated prank on one of my friends, so I’ll report back on what happens. |
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Paul Thomas Anderson is one of my favorite filmmakers. Watching Magnolia at the age of 12 was a major turning point in my adolescent development, and single-handedly inspired my desire to become a filmmaker. I was lucky enough to work as a P.A. on the set of There Will Be Blood last August, after harassing Anderson at a rare public Q&A earlier in the year. I spent a lot of time on a dusty ranch near Palmdale operating the air conditioning unit, assisting the video assistant, and lugging buckets of fake oil from place to place. It was an intense, fascinating experience, and gave me an amazing first-hand perspective of the day-to-day realities of filmmaking.
I saw the completed film for the first time in its entirety on Monday night, and I’ve been slowly processing it ever since. As one can tell from the trailer alone, Blood is a complete departure from Anderson’s signature style, in both content and form. The distancing from his earlier work is deliberate, a definite attempt to approach filmmaking with a different aesthetic and with a fresh set of talent. Leaving the comfort zone payed off in spades: Blood is a precisely crafted minimalist masterpiece. In fact, I was surprised just how minimal it was, especially for a film that runs two and a half hours long and spans thirty years of California history. There was even less dialogue than had been laid out in the already sparse script, and several scenes of zealous theatricality had been toned down or removed entirely. By taking away the frog rain, pop songs, prosthetic dicks and decadent dialogue of his earlier films, Anderson has allowed himself to focus entirely on a careful study of the film’s anti-hero, Daniel Day Lewis’ magnificently callous Daniel Plainview.  Don’t get me wrong– I absolutely love the sugary opulence of the aforementioned filmic devices in Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and Punch-Drunk Love. I can’t get enough of Anderson’s magical realism, ADD ensembles and whimsical distractions– but with Blood he proves that beneath the surface-level bustle and embellishment, there is an undeniably epic foundation of cinematic talent at work. I wouldn’t call There Will Be Blood perfect: most glaringly for me, at least on the first viewing, were a few unexpected moments of misplaced humor that dampened the impact of crucial moments. I’d also be interested to know if Anderson was satisfied with trimming the film down to a “mere” 158 minutes, or if we’ll ever see a Coppola-esque four hour director’s cut. While it may not be a masterpiece, Blood is a terrific film– undoubtedly one of the best of the year– and an important step in Anderson’s slowly blooming canon of work.  On the technical side, Robert Elswit’s photography is gorgeous, and the monumentally unnerving score by Radiohead guitarist Johnny Greenwood brings the film to a place of transcendence. Nothing needs to be said of Daniel Day-Lewis’ brilliance– I can’t imagine anyone else taking home the Oscar this year– but it’s worth mentioning that Paul Dano really turned it out in a difficult role, skillfully portraying a preacher with major delusions of grandeur. Young Dillion Freasier was impressive as Daniel Day-Lewis’ melancholy progeny, especially for a non-show biz kid– Freasier was cast on location in Marfa, Texas. The Hollywood Reporter has a well-written review that’s worth a read, and for fellow P.T. Anderson devotees, there’s always Cigarettes and Red Vines. |
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Yesterday I went to the mysterious compound in the City of Industry where they’ve filmed every McDonald’s commercial since 1978. It’s a full-sized fake McDonald’s with a deluxe basement storage unit that houses every kind of McDonald’s wardrobe and furniture you can imagine. I was there to work as an extra in a pair of McDonald’s commercials. Much like Nicolas Cage in Adaptation, I took on dual roles for these spots. I played both an indistinguishable McDonald’s uniform-wearing blur (as seen above), as well as a fuzzy customer languidly pretending to eat stale french fries across the room. In one of those many weird, unfortunate (but not for me) and unfair (for other people) twists of capitalism, I was paid exponentially more than minimum wage to pretend I was doing the ultimate minimum wage job. I walked back and forth, picked up burger-less Big Mac containers and put them down, operated unplugged McFlurry machines, and mimed as if I were checking the empty deep frier. They had a food artist on hand to ensure that the featured meals looked irresistibly delicious. For the first spot, his task was a relatively easy one. There was no eating involved, as the star of the ad (a well-dressed, middle-aged Asian-American) simply had to gaze at his food reverently, portraying the wonder and admiration that McDonald’s food inspires in a man, without actually taking a bite.
The star had to express unbridled excitement for hours, chomping down on those unholy concoctions– at least until the director yelled “Cut!”, at which point a man whose job it was to hold a bucket just out of frame would catch the masticated faux-burger in his receptacle and the food artist would deliver his next inedible work of art. Now, that actor really did deserve to be making far more than minimum wage for what he was doing. Me and Dane Cook– not so much. But when you get down to it, how can you dislike a corporation that provided so many great childhood memories? McDonald’s needs to exist in our world, as the video below clearly proves. I’m lovin’ it!
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Now look at an assortment of random recent photos after the jump! continue reading |
To escape the purgatory of background work on “The Suite Life of Zack and Cody”, I spent my free time yesterday reading Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye. It’s this crazy scandalous story from the 1920s about a couple of French teenagers who start fooling around and discover the joys of sex. Their curiosity ultimately leads them on an unscrupulous sex-starved rampage involving all kinds of gleeful debauchery, from water sports to egg-adled masturbation to non-consensual erotic asphyxiation. It’s delightfully filthy, and perhaps the perfect remedy for anyone hoping to briefly escape the the subtle whitewashing of Disney Channel hegemony. The episode I was in yesterday was buried in layers of Disney Channel self-reference: Zack and Cody’s high school decides to put on a theatrical production of High School Musical, the Disney Channel musical TV-movie (and unfortunate cultural sensation) about a high school putting on a musical, which stars Ashley Tisdale, who also stars in “The Suite Life”. However, Ashley Tisdale’s character on “The Suite Life” is unable to land the role of Sharpay Evans (played by Tisdale in the TV movie), because no one seems to think she looks like Ashley Tisdale. So meta! Added to that, Mark Indelicato, the little gay boy from “Ugly Betty”, plays a musical theater-obsessed drama queen who lands the role of Ryan Evans, the musical theater-obsessed drama queen in High School Musical. Of course, because this is Disney– just as in the real High School Musical– any reference to homosexuality is relegated to the realm of not-so-subtle implications, where flamboyant hats and exaggerated dances stand in for character development. Not that I expect a serious gay storyline during a guest spot on one brief episode of “The Suite Life”, but the single-dimensional writing of his character recalled an incident which I experienced on the “Suite Life” set last summer: An obviously uninterested Dylan Sprouse was rehearsing a scene for the third or fourth time, when an A.D. became exasperated at his cardboard delivery. “Alright, let’s do this again. Why don’t we try acting this time?” he said. Dylan flipped around and shouted, “Why don’t you try not being so gay, Jeff.” The A.D. had no answer to that. |
