I caught up over the weekend with first time writer-director Ronald Bronstein‘s almost unbearably bleak Frownland, and still can’t seem to shake it. Bronstein describes his ‘09 film (whose title comes from the Captain Beefheart song) as “a rotten egg lobbed with spazmo aim at the spotless surface of the silver screen,” but even that fails to do justice, I think, to its no-mercy depiction of Keith Sontag’s (actor Dore Mann) spiral downward into “burbling troll-dom.”
And as hard as this might be to imagine, I think far more light creeps into the black-and-white world of David Lynch‘s Eraserhead than the colored, albeit grainy, one of Frownland. In fact, compared to the almost terminally lonely Sontag, Lynch’s social misfit Henry Spencer comes off with all the charm and poise of Rex Harrison’s Henry Higgins.
No one is particularly likable, here. In fact, the entire cast is loathsome. But. BUT…the performances are across-the-board astonishing. As The New Yorker’s Richard Brody writes, “If there?
Artist Remus Grecu was asked by Ogilvy & Mather to paint the Contemporary Beauty Ideal in the manner of the Old Masters to show how standards of beauty have changed. Drastically. The work is being showcased at the St?ɬ
From early 1997 to sometime mid-1999 I had a talkshow called The Infinity Factory that was produced at Pseudo.com, the increasingly legendary “Internet TV Network,” creative madhouse and party central of downtown New York during the high-flying Silicon Alley dotcom years. (Ondi TImoner’s new Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winning documentary, We Live in Public chronicles the rise and fall of Pseudo founder Josh Harris and it’s a fascinating film, a movie well worth going out of your way to catch. Watch my interview with Ondi here).
The Infinity Factory was taped every Sunday evening at 8pm with a few exceptions. It was produced by Vanessa Weinberg who also DJ’d and mixed the show live. Vanessa was extraordinarily in tune with how the conversations were flowing and added an intricate bed of trippy music, samples and sound loops under what were often extremely psychedelic conversations to begin with—like this episode, with Robert Anton Wilson and Genesis P-Orridge. This show dates, I think, from Fall of 1997. When it was originally netcast it was when most people still had 56k modems and the video quality was fairly awful. Don’t get me wrong, it was pretty cool to be able to do something like this back then and there was a real “pirate radio” aspect to it as well that greatly appealed to me, but in truth it looked more like flickery animation than it did actual video. And it was the size of a postage stamp. There were probably well over 100 shows, each of them around 50 minutes, but I really can’t say for sure how many there were. Most of them are probably lost.
Pseudo had several floors, first two then three, in the no-frills building where Jeff Koons and Mark Kostabi still have their art studios, on the corner of Houston and Broadway. One floor had the business people and the producer’s offices and on the floor with the studio—which is where all the parties were—Josh Harris had his own apartment in the back. Each Sunday night, I’d usually I’d see him, cigar in hand, either leaving or returning from a poker game. It was, if memory serves on the 12th floor and this building had the scariest elevator I have, ever, ever used. It was super slow and extremely rickety. If I made it up and down in one piece each week, I breathed a sigh of relief, let me tell you. When someone especially heavy was waiting for the elevator, I’d opt to use the steps, even if it was twelve long flights. Seriously, you took your life into your own hand with this elevator. I don’t know why Jeff Koons puts up with it. (Composer Gershon Kingsley, who was a guest on the show once, told me that taking that elevator and getting off at Pseudo was like entering Dante’s Inferno except that you went up instead of down. I don’t think he was joking)
The studio itself was basically set up like a radio station but with these cheapo cameras that were the size of cigarette packs on pivots that were cut with this jerry-rigged Radio Shack thumb switch with three clunky buttons. The hosts had to do this themselves—cut between cameras—in the beginning. It was really distracting when you were trying to concentrate on what someone was saying (I might be doing it here, but I don think I was). I had some fun guests on the Infinity Factory including a pre-Boing Boing David Pescovitz, Adam Parfrey of Feral House infamy, painter Paul Laffoley, my late and very missed friend Dr. Mario Pazzaglini, R.U. Sirius, Grant Morrison, Joe Coleman and Bob Wilson, who was on a couple of times. Genesis P-Orridge, Douglas Rushkoff, Howard Bloom and conspiracy theory writers Kenn Thomas and Robert Sterling were all frequent guests.
It’s nice to see these shows popping again now, after so many years, as larger HD YouTube files. These shows were taped off Manhattan Cable and probably represent the best versions around. If the master tapes do still exist, they’d be in Josh’s storage space amongst 10,000 hours of other Pseudo programming and I doubt very much they have been cataloged! On television only in New York City (and maybe later in Brooklyn) The Infinity Factory was on a fairly low number on the Time-Warner cable box, so if you were flipping channels at 10:30 on Thursday night and you lived in Manhattan, you were going to see me. This was at the time George Clooney was still on E.R. and it amused me to no end that people watching that show or MTV’s The Real World and channel surfing would—inevitably—find themselves looking at my freaky show.
The morning after it was on the Manhattan Cable for first time I was asked “What do you do for a living? I saw you on TV last night” or some variation on that theme by four people in my apartment building who had never spoken to me before. Overnight I had become as famous as… Robin Byrd or Al Goldstein!
For the first time in a very long time, an interview with Philip Austin, Peter Bergman, David Ossman and Philip Proctor, the legendary Firesign Theater. (Jan 8 & 9, 2010 shows in Whidbey Island, Washington, see www.firesigntheatre.com for more information)
(Warning: video is not for vegetarians or for folks who like to cuddle with chickens). Here’s an odd DIY chicken plucking machine built from Herrick Kimball’s book “Anyone Can Build A Whizbang Chicken Plucker.” Um, I think I’ll stick with my salad spinner.
The staggering truth: Chia Obama is a real product, and its creator—77-year-old San Francisco ad man and Chia Pet magnate Joseph Pedott, a lifelong Republican—means it to be a sincere tribute to Obama, who he says has inherited “the biggest can of worms ever put on a president.”
“I remember the Great Depression,” Pedott says. “It wasn’t very nice.” In November, after the election, Pedott was deeply worried about Obama, the first Democrat Pedott had ever voted for. With the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the banking crisis, unemployment and more, says Pedott, “it’s almost inhuman to put all that on a president.”
Neil goes on to write:
Pedott awoke one winter night with a thought. “Is it possible to take a brand that nobody thinks seriously about and do something good for the country?” And—veteran adman that he is—he started to think about how to sell it. “Can I create a commercial that will help Obama do the things that I want done? To give Americans something to hope for, hold on to.”
These may seem unduly noble aspirations for a man who sells mossy clay figurines, but for Pedott, the Chia is no joke. “It’s the biggest asset I have,” he says.
The short version of events is as follows: Pedott commissioned several prototypes—a three-president series (Washington, Lincoln, Obama), a smiling Obama and the determined Obama, and even an Obama-and-Hillary set. In March, the Chia Obama—“It’s not a ‘pet,’ ” notes Pedott—was test-marketed at Walgreens in Chicago and Tampa and was almost immediately pulled from shelves after the stores received complaints that the Chia Obama was racist (the big green ‘fro, don’t you know). Pedott was stunned and disheartened.
“All I tried to do was something positive,” he says. “I never even thought about the hair.”
Well, he certainly sounds sincere enough to me. Why wouldn’t Neil—or anyone else for that matter—take Pedott’s word at face value? Maybe, just maybe, it’s the well-intentioned folks who claim to find racism in the Chia Obama who are seeing something that’s not even there? After all, did anyone accuse the Jerry Garcia commemorative Chia of being anti-hippie? Is the Homer Simpson Chia meant to disparage baldies?
And furthermore, no one said “boo” when Pedott released the Mr. T Chia in 2000, so what gives? Even that bastion of political correctness himself, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, was amused by the Obama Chia. Haven’t we gotten past this stuff?
Apparently the president himself was delighted (“I’ve got green hair!” he said) with the tribute when presented with a Chia Obama in May: “He’s as warm as he can be,” Pedott told Neil. “I was so damn impressed.”
Now the Obama Chia, shunned by most major retailers, is being sold on television via direct response ads and the Chia Obama website.
Of course today is Friday the 13th, but there is another Friday coming soon that more Americans seem to be interested in: “Black Friday,” the ominously named sales event that takes place the day after Thanksgiving. And no, Black Friday doesn’t refer to the possibility of being stampeded to death by throngs of impatient shoppers; it’s the day when retailers hope to get “in the black” financially, as opposed to being “in the red.” For many stores, Black Friday is the day they reach profitability for the entire year, so the holiday shopping propaganda promoting big sales events is a serious matter, indeed.
Google Trends has been showing strong public interest in Black Friday sales events since Halloween, and with Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy and other stores seeing their big sales details “leaked” (yeah, right!) on websites like Black-Friday.net and others, this interest seems to be reaching a fever pitch. According to various studies, up to 50% of all shopping done during the holiday season is not for gift-giving, but rather purchases made on the bargain shopper’s own behalf. Of course it only makes sense to put off purchases of big-ticket items like flat-screen TVs and laptops until they are the cheapest they’ll be all year. This season, like Christmas 2008, the sales story that many seem to be interested in is how low Blu-ray DVD players will go in price, with predictions of several retailers offering the players for as little as $49. Target and Wal-Mart are also expected to sell Blu-ray discs for as low as $8.99.
Target seems willing to make the deepest discounts, offering shockingly low prices on many appliances, with items like pressed sandwich makers, coffee machines and slow roasters getting a markdown to—are you ready for this?—$3! The idea is to get as many shoppers as possible into stores with these low, low prices and hope that they’ll be susceptible to make many more purchases. Sounds good in theory, but $3 for a coffee maker? Clearly Target would be losing money on each and every sale. A savvy shopper would simply buy one or two items in one store and mosey on over to the next price-slashing emporium to pick up a few more, avoiding the temptation to spend money on anything he or she didn’t specifically come for.
This may sound, er, un-American, but if household penny-pinching this season is anything like 2008’s totally bust Christmas shopping spree, there may be a different meaning for Black Friday this year after all the dust settles.
Former Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker has been given an honorary degree in his home city of Sheffield. Cocker, who has also had success as a solo artist and radio producer, studied at the institution when it was Sheffield Polytechnic. Receiving his certificate at a ceremony at City Hall, the 46-year-old said: “I’m called a doctor now. Don’t worry, I won’t open a surgery.” He added: “But I guess if you are a songwriter maybe I could have some kind of musical surgery. If you had a song with a swollen chorus, or a varicose verse, or if you need a little bit of help I could try and heal your song for you.”
And while Jarvis won’t be delivering them anytime soon, “Babies” the song follows below:
