Thursday, April 14, 2005

Shaw-nuh

It's Pronounced "Shaw-Nuh"


And because this has been a Rock-n-Roll week - my coworker Mark forwarded this hilarious life-illustrating-art gem: the real New Romantic 80's band that the Office's(UK) Ricky Gervais was in: Seona Dancing.

I don't think he's the bottom one with crimped hair, and I am hardly one to through stones for the totally 80's-ness of having crimped hair and that euro-fey fashion, but mine never made it to vinyl (just bad yearbook pictures)... Also - Gervais went onto manage Suede, so there's more to the man than brilliant comic timing I guess. Oh and hey - they were big in the Phillipines also!

Wednesday, April 13, 2005

Giant Shoutout

Giant Shoutout


In honor of the Giant premiere (first gig ever!), I am giving a shout-out courtesy of recent photo's from the first fateful and memorable Joy Division gig:

"“It’ll be interesting to see how many people claimed to be there on the night though. I’d really like to meet other people who genuinely were there, but this could end up a bit like the Sex Pistols at the Free Trade Hall which everyone seems to claim to have witnessed.”

You can see the collection here...

I'm sure we'll be saying the same about Giant (altho' no suicides - please!!) Good luck tonight to Giant! You can see their gig here...

J.D.

Working out the particulars with iDVD

I fooled around with iDVD over the weekend. Using the short dogme film we created as my test. I want to do something that I can easily assemble in 2 minutes but looks quality and not something I slammed together. The tools are incredibly cheap and easy, but at the same time, I want to make it look well worn. As Jonathan Caouette proved to us – you can use simple Mac tools and have it be festival-ready. I will commit to writing a script this weekend for a short and then seeing if I can grab some motley volunteers to help me impliment it.

Tuesday, April 12, 2005

Quick Shout Out For Giant

Quick Giant Shout Out


Here's a quick plug for anyone reading this (yes, all three of you) and in the Seattle Metro area: My friend's band (Allen and Lyle) are going to premiere on Wednesday April 13th at 9:00pm, at the Rebar.



Check them out via their oh-so-slick website...



And yes, it's also the same day that we're finally getting folks together for the book club (so I can cross that off one of my 43 things... So far, my choices that I'm going to bring: this Safran Foer, this Albo, and maybe, just maybe, this classic since he just died...

Monday, April 11, 2005

My Appropriation

My Appropriation


Today Salon ran an interesting tirade on Gwen Stefani's use of Harajuku Girls as props in videos and overall entourage. Of course, the reviewer felt the fetishation a cold and commodofied parasitic relationship between the innocent Harajuku street freaks and the evil Stefani empire that's built on pushing designer denim and a clothing line (appropriately named l.a.m.b, as in easily led as a...). Yeah - it's probably not the bigger of all evils (pole-dancing as liberation and other vapid arguments at whatever-wave feminism Camille Paglia is surfing), but Gwen is doing the gosh-these-Japanese-girls-are-just-like-manga-robots kind of wink to audience. She knows they are a prop and nothing more... So they do ridiculous pantomime bows and make with the stereotypes so whitey in Omaha will relate somehow. Oddly enough however, the Harajuku teens - ones that I've also photographed when I went to Japan - play and perform for the camera. These are girls who want to perform as larger than life comic book stereotypes (bloody nurse, evil victorian dollie, sexy blade-runner teen). And contrary to the parallels the writer makes to the other NYT photo essay that was highlighting Japanese teenage girls, these are not the demure teens the Danish photographer Hellen van Meene was focusing on. Those were schoolgirls being stopped in the street and thrown into whatever western-fixated gaze the viewer wants to initiate. These particular girls however (the Harajuku gang) are ones that are staging their own music videos. They design their own costumes and make their own stories. Which is probably why Gwen really has it all wrong (she'd be singing back up if they would allow her).

cosplayzuku5
Originally uploaded by Wickidboy.


Speaking of feminist backlashes - Andrea Dworkin died?! First the pope (on one extreme puritanical end) and now Dworkin. I had been just reading about her biography, how it was frenzied and paranoid (alas - I did not know she had been raped in a Parisian Hotel a few years ago) but recalling the essays in college that we read and watched Not a Love Story in the interests of staring a dialogue (but more to shock anyone who didn't have any position on pornography before). She was someone that caused lefties, gays and artists to just shudder - killjoy, irritant and brimestone preacher of extremes. She and Catherine McKinnon had single handedly dismanteled the constitution in the interests of what would later become known as the "greater good"... She'd give the right wing a good stereotype of the left wing gone heretic, and she'd be the stereotype of an unfunny feminist. In alot of ways though - her extreme views, born out of alot of terrible shit in her own life, gave way to modern sexuality because everyone I knew in the 90's were quickly running from the repression and shame that both the left and right could instill. I remember her affect on liberties gave way to how people personally felt about pornography (moving beyond good vs evil paradigms and soviet-like extremism that she had fostered a decade before). Art would become more provacative and transgressive in an effort to push boundaries (Madonna, Bruce La Bruce, and Pedro Almodovar notwithstanding). People started to open up to sexuality as discourse because it was almost as if the crazy person in the room had made some extreme claim that got everything thinking. I guess you don't really know your monsters until you see them and their body of work... Like Susie Bright acknowledges, she's someone who clearly defined the opposition, someone who didn't join, felt probably shunned, had anger in her life as the core of her being. At least we can say she had an impact...