Honey Bunny

This summer I collaborated with Vena Virago on her new dvd, Honey Bunny, a XXX fantasia concerning rabbits and art that ships next week.

Vena's alter ego, Margie Schnibbe, is an artist based in L.A. who has written and directed three porn features. Margie infuses her films with her own visual art - paintings, sculptures, comic books, textiles, etc. - blurring the boundaries between personal expression and crass commercial product. Honey Bunny takes the theme several steps further, mixing autobiographical sketches into the script, and setting the movie in an installation exhibit of Margie's work at the Circus Gallery.

In 2006, I produced a 4-screen mashup of Margie's films for Monkey Town, for which I invited Motomichi Nakamura and Adam Kendall to create motion pieces based on Margie's art. When Margie told me about this new project - a movie explicitly about art - I proposed inviting a number of video artists to rework images from the film to include in the release itself. Margie and Vivid Alt got behind the idea, so the movie now includes pieces by Skye Thortensen, Zander Reyna, Yoshi Sodeoka, William Skullmaster and Jeanne Angel, and great new music by Leisure Muffin written for the film.

Looking forward to hosting a megamix program of all of this material at Monkey Town this December...

fantastic ice cream brand

I just returned from Chang Mai, Thailand, where I saw this amazing ice cream shop, iberry.

Here's the view from the street:

By the door:

The side of the building:

The counter:

A flight of 5 mini cones:

It's an amazing brand - immaculately art directed, but extremely comfortable and laid back. Just perfect.

Superamas Big 3rd Episode

Superamas Big 3rd Episode is a musical play that is very stripped down in its staging, but extremely complex in its production. The minimalistic process is very exposed: the control booth is on one side of the stage, the dressing room on the other, and, aside from two songs, the characters lip sync throughout, pacing repeatedly through two mechanically spliced and diced scenes - the men at band rehearsal and the ladies changing for dance class. The story is fleshed out with a rock anthem (mimed), a disco scene (with a girls-only battle), a light design car crash, and video vignettes that deliver the backstory (with cameos from Peter Sellers, Peter O'Toole, Jacques Derrida, Claude Wampler and Cake).

Everything is very squeaky clean, and the process is fairly nerdy, but the with much campy gossip about the characters' tawdry sex lives, and the undressing of the ladies set on infinite loop, there is enough fizz to weather the de- and re- and deconstructions. Chewy ideas cleverly guised as polite naughty fluff.

UPDATE: A video report by OC-TV.net about Superamas Big 3rd Episode is available here: http://www.oc-tv.net/superamas,big-3rd-episode.htm

Monkey Town does Mago

Following up on our 2006 project, Bacchanale, Monkey Town has assembled a team of 50 audio artists to re-imagine the sound for Mago (2002).

Mago, from Korean director Kang Hyeon-Il and writer Jang Kyung-Ki is one of the largest-ever Korean film productions, though few souls outside of that country have experienced its unique charms. Described alternately as "dazzling and daring, mind-blowing and surreal, beautiful and horrifying" or "pretentious, vulgar, unbelievable, mind numbing, and appallingly hypocritical," the film is most notable for the acreage of epidermis employed in telling its tale. Although the Korean government is very conservative about nudity and sexuality depicted in mainstream movies, Mago escaped the ban by relentlessly and with grim precision neutralizing sex with anti-sex for the duration of the film - a monumental and alchemical artistic feat with dubious and discomfiting results.

Purportedly depicting the zen story of creation, beginning with paradise and progressing into man's destruction, Mago is a mashup of nostalgic pre-Christian Korean creation mythology and critical vignettes from this misguided modern world we call home. The visceral implication: our hospitals, cyber cafes, discos and subways are a very poor substitute for a world where 825 care-and-clothing-free elemental goddesses spend their days frolicking or in benign appreciation of the air and nakedness.

Is it art caught in the culture gap or heartless exploitation fare? As with all misfit masterworks, opinions run the gamut:

"although I don't know much about Zen or the YinYang symbol, I found the film to be unique and a very moving experience. It's like nothing I've ever seen in American cinema! 10/10"

"It's quite beautiful and surprisingly wholesome, proving that the unclothed human body is a work of art and nothing to be ashamed of."

"yet more proof that Korean cinema is a force to be reckoned with."

or

"Mago's incoherence is only outstripped by its pretentiousness. It’s like the Cremaster cycle with a dub track by Greenpeace."

"ends up feeling like being locked in a room with a snotty teenage zealot who beats you with a stick"

"One of the biggest "HUH?" movies ever made."

For this exclusive remixed presentation, Monkey Town distributed short silent clips from the film to 50 audio artists. The artists composed a new soundtrack for their clip, and the film was reassembled as a 65 minute feature. Additional edits by Sam Zimmerman. Inserts by Shu Lea Cheang.

Screenings at Monkey Town in December 2007 were feature recommendations in Time Out, Village Voice, and Flavorpill.

Semiennial 4

Twice a year at Monkey Town we put together a group program of great video art - a semiennial - of the stuff that made an impression on us in the past six months. The curatorial criteria is no more complicated than this is the best new stuff we've seen.

For this program we teamed up with Gretchen Hogue out in Portland, who hooked us up with some psuper psychedelic pselections, and Don Carroll who always has some art damaged deviants on tap. The artists in the program included:

Guy Benfield
Ondrej Brody
DisneyNASABorg
Marianna Ellenberg
Jesse England
Andrew Erdos and Organ Celebration!
Liz Haley
Michelle Handelman
Gretchen Hogue
Hooliganship
Seth Kirby
Karl Klomp
Mack MacFarland
Shana Moulton
Takeshi Murata
Melody Owen
Michael Robinson
Margie Schnibbe
Grant Worth
Jemima Wyman

The goal of this series is to present challenging video art in a format that draws an audience and holds their attention for an extended program. This is essential for art that requires *time* to be fully appreciated. The gallery format - where people walk in, crane their head around, do the rat-run around the perimeter, and walk out - is biasing video toward flat, non-narrative, every-moment-is-equal directions. We're looking to counter that by putting on a show with a DJ mindset. Art should rock! Art should turn you on! Art should put on a lampshade and make a fool of itself too.

Circus movies

I've been putting together a midnight circus show with video and live acts, finding all of the circus-, carnival-, and sideshow-themed movies easily accessible in the IMDB/Netflix age. Here's a partial list:

3 Ring Circus (1954)
Alien 51 (2004)
Angel de Fuego (1992)
At the Circus (1939)
Barnum (1986)
Berserk (1967)
Big Fish (2003)
Big Top Pee Wee (1988)
Bigger Than Barnum's (1926)
Billy Rose's Jumbo (1962)
Chad Hanna (1940)
Chapiteau (1984)
Charlie Chan at the Circus (1936)
Circus Days (1923)
Circus Maximus (1980)
Circus of Fear (1966)
Circus of Horrors (1960)
Circus Palestina (1998)
Circus Palestina (1998)
Circus World (1964)
Clown House (1988)
Colossal Sensation! (2004)
Dangerous Curves (1929)
Devil's Circus (1926)
Dual Alibi (1947)
Duffy's Irish Circus (2006)
Fifi la Plume (1965)
First International Circus Arts Festival in Budapest (2000)
Freaky Circus Guy (2005)
Geliebte Bestie (1959)
Hero of the Circus (1928)
Krrish (2006)
La Strada (1954)
Laugh, Clown, Laugh (1928)
Life Is a Circus (1960)
Mazeppa (1993)
Merry Andrew (1958)
MirrorMask (2005)
Most Astounding Circus Acts of All Time (1989)
Octopussy (1983)
Parade (1974)
Peck's Bad Boy with the Circus (1938)
Roselyne et les Lions (1989)
Santa Sangre (1989)
Sawdust and Tinsel (1953)
Starkiss: Circus Girls in India (2003)
Stoney Knows How (1982)
The Big Cage (1933)
The Big Circus (1959)
The Circus (1928)
The Clowns (1970)
The Freakmaker (1974)
The Great Wallendas (1978)
The Greatest Show on Earth (1952)
The Most Death-Defying Circus Acts of All Time (1987)
The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus (1996)
The Secret World of... Circuses & Sideshows (1998)
The Unknown (1927)
Trapeze (1956)
Vampire Circus (1972)
Viva Lo Imposible (1958)
Viva Maria! (1965)
When Night Is Falling (VHS - 1995)
You Can't Cheat an Honest Man (1939)

Bacchanale in Chicago

Making it's third festival appearance, the Monkey Town remix of Bacchanale is screening at the Chicago Underground Film Festival on August 18th, 2007. For details, visit www.cuff.org

Too(L) much video

So I went to see the end of the big Tool tour at PNC Arts Center. Where I saw Tool in '99 open for Ozzy. Which really slayed actually, the crowd was completely on board as much as they were for Ozzy. Super solid performance, lots of long abstract segues, just great.

This time around, they're sporting a stadium lightshow that completely overshadows the performers. Maynard sings the whole show unlit at the back of the stage, siloutted against a video wall. The stage is mainly dark, so the audience attention is dragged in to the screens and lights and lazers like moths to that stuff moths like. But why? The show rocks on it's own merits. No one needs to be sold on it, everyone there is already converted. Why not let the audience see you work out - it adds emotional impact. I'm guessing that the reason is the band is bored and the whistles and bells keep their interest up slogging through one of these tours.

But for me, too much video made the show pretty flat.