Crap

Crap, Double Crap

A few days passed and I've been negligent in my blogging. There was quite a few articles and opinionated things I was going to discuss...

• The fact I just finished "The Underminer" and found it hilarious yet terrifying real.
  
• The fact that I bought the new iDN Mag from Uwajimaya and have been turned onto all these great new euro-bands (and the Morr label).
  
• The fact that I saw a Leigh Bowerey documentary and found him to be completely original (even 20 years ago) and we're sorely missing that element of whimsey and outrage that was the 80's.
  
• The fact that Ann Coulter had an explosion on the Cover of Time as looking like an insect in drag herself.
  
• The fact they've just elected a really super scary uber conservative ex-nazi Pope to really make sure we go back to the dark ages.
  
• The fact that RIchard Florida just published a new book "Flight of the Creative Class" where he goes on to discuss the impact of our unfriendly and near-fascist immigration policies (along with hating any minority for that matter) and our bloated arts community is still cow-towing to conservatives for funds.
  

No - I was going to write all about those things, but then I got forwarded this article and find myself dealing with alot of questions and issues, which immediately came after reading the Senate outcome of HB1515. As much as I don't want to lapse into a trail of expletives and hurl things at pictures of various bigoted, stupid senators from Hok-wee-uhmm (wherever that is) - I am on the verge of forming a cultural fatwa on the scary individual who got this whole mess turned up... Ken Hutcherson. He probably had more impact on the Senators than Microsoft, but that he had this impact on Microsoft is terrifying to say the least. Previous zealots (Phelps, Falwell, Roberson) are rhetorical and simply do the money dance for the cameras... This guy could walk into a corporate office and change a policy, like the Gestapo coming into a place of business and doing pretty much the same thing in prewar Germany. Chilling... Maybe I'm overreacting and the allusion is a bit extreme - but something about this powerplay is bigger and deeper than we're seeing at the moment. But then again - now MS is lying and saying he didn't have an impact. Indeed.

Well - I thank the god I believe in (the nice one that accepts all people) that I have a Mac.

There's more interesting debate here and hereif you're interested.

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!

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.

See more progress on: make a film

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...

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...

On the Papal Visit

On the Papal Visit

I suppose the pope's passing should get some merit - as I think this is one of those insane spectacles I'd never really thought I'd live to see. 4 million people descended on Rome, which never had any preparation for such an onslaught. The fervor that pulled people in is the same fervor that I find charming in a mosiac-your-house-in-a-religious-theme-but-entirely-with-dried-macaroni-kind-of-way, interesting, but something I'd never really do. I'm not religious and I tend to be more agnostic in my thoughts about spirituality (you can't define it in testements, torahs or stone tablets), but I can see and understand why people either love or hate him. He preached peace and then in the same breath condemned gays and unmarried women seeking abortions. He's part of a corporate lineage of religious business, inlfuencing millions and policies that still impact a woman's right to choose, safe-sex education and gay marriage, yet have not been elected by the same body of people (it just happens after much politcking). Don't even get me started in the creepy way it dealt with it's peodophilia problem (sweep it under the rug and transfer the offending priests to some other parish where they're free to do it all again. Rinse, repeat, repent).
I guess though as raised a Lutheran, I'm ambivelent. I have no grudge because the way history went down in the 13th century, Martin Luther saw the same ridiculous structure and posted his famous resignation letter to the catholic church. That's why I can't understand why people drag their dogme around with them like rabid knights on crusades still. Although - someone the other day at work said that anger brings you closer to godliness (because it's what makes you true to your emotion and sense of morality). Given that most moral compasses these days point to alot of self-justification, I don't agree. I 'd like to think that compassion, either within or outside of religion is what trancends us.