Art: Modern art is dead. Or is it the other way around?

Finally, a Beatles reunion! The above untitled 1968 group portrait comes from the brush of underground filmmaker Curt McDowell, the man behind such porn-tastic provocations as 1975's Thundercrack, 1974's Stinkybutt (billed somewhat cryptically as "The film that caused Sheri Milbradt to lose 40 pounds"), and the unforgettable 1972 classic Siamese Twin Pinheads. A long-time collaborator with rebel film icon George Kuchar, Mr. McDowell died of AIDS in 1987.

These two works are poster-sized obits of punk Svengali Malcolm McLaren and actress Nicole Kidman by the NYC-based artist Adam McEwen. Here's the artist discussing the fauxbituaries with Interview magazine:

I'm not really interested in celebrities so much-the works are more homages. But the person must be famous so the reader knows that the person is still alive. I'm interested in that brief second when you aren't sure whether Bill Clinton is alive or dead. I only need that moment in order to disorient them enough to sneak through to some other part of the brain-to achieve that split second of turning the world upside down. The obituaries aren't about celebrity. They are more mournful, more melancholy. In a way, they are accounts of certain people's actions taken in an attempt to make their lives better. My first more McEwen one was Malcolm McLaren. I still had a job writing obituaries for The Daily Telegraph then.

Link Proliferation: “Paradise on Earth.”

"Hunky vampires or Barack Obama."

By way of McNally Jackson's blog, which I bite from every week or so 'cause it's awesome, comes a jeremiad about the rise of what the autho dismisses as middle brow escapist genre lit amongst college kids.

From the article:

n 1969, when Alice Echols went to college, everybody she knew was reading "Soul on Ice," Eldridge Cleaver's new collection of essays. For Echols, who now teaches a course on the '60s at the University of Southern California, that psychedelic time was filled with "The Autobiography of Malcolm X," "The Golden Notebook," the poetry of Sylvia Plath and the erotic diaries of Anaïs Nin.

Forty years later, on today's college campuses, you're more likely to hear a werewolf howl than Allen Ginsberg, and Nin's transgressive sexuality has been replaced by the fervent chastity of Bella Swan, the teenage heroine of Stephenie Meyer's modern gothic "Twilight" series. It's as though somebody stole Abbie Hoffman's book -- and a whole generation of radical lit along with it.

Last year Meyer sold more books than any other author -- 22 million -- and those copies weren't all bought by middle-schoolers. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the best-selling titles on college campuses are mostly about hunky vampires or Barack Obama. Recently, Meyer and the president held six of the 10 top spots. In January, the most subversive book on the college bestseller list was "Our Dumb World," a collection of gags from the Onion. The top title that month was "The Tales of Beedle the Bard" by J.K. Rowling. College kids' favorite nonfiction book was Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers," about what makes successful individuals. And the only title that stakes a claim as a real novel for adults was Khaled Hosseini's "A Thousand Splendid Suns," the choice of a million splendid book clubs.

Here we have a generation of young adults away from home for the first time, free to enjoy the most experimental period of their lives, yet they're choosing books like 13-year-old girls -- or their parents. The only specter haunting the groves of American academe seems to be suburban contentment.

I'm honestly conflicted by this article. Mostly I want to dismiss the writer's smug assumptions about the value of genre lit and deflate the self-important image of the '60s as a sort of golden age of intellectualism. Honestly, are college students really all the worse off because we read about Obama's vision for a liberal tomorrow instead of swallowing Cleaver's theories that the rape of white women is a legitimate weapon in the race struggle?

On the other hand, this news is slightly grimace inducing. I'm reminded of Pauline Kael's sad quote: "When we championed trash culture we had no idea it would become the only culture."

What Horror Movie are We Today?

Today we're Primeval.

From the UK-based Sky News wire: 'Monster Crocodile' Bites Girl's Head Off

A crocodile has bitten off a 10-year-old girl's head after knocking over the canoe she was travelling in.

She was on her way to a floating school on the Agusan Marsh in the Philippines when the huge reptile capsized the boat, the provincial government said.

The girl fell into the water during the attack on Saturday, but her headless body was not discovered until two days later.

A classmate who was with her was rescued by a man who had been escorting the pair in another boat, said Ruel Hipulan, head of the private group which runs the school.

"It's a monster crocodile," he said. Witnesses said the crocodile was about 30ft (nine metres) long.

Martians Go Home!

Music video goodness with a "Space Invaders" twist from Röyksopp.



Portrait of the Dictator as Young Man

I first met Kim Jong Il in October 1959. He was a senior at the elite Namsan Senior High School, and I was a 27-year-old professor of Russian at the Pyongyang University of Education.

Kim Hyun Sik was the infamous North Korean dictator's private Russian tutor for more than 20 years. Over at AlterNet, Hyun Sik presents an extended portrait of the early years of the now possibly insane tyrant.

From the article, on Jong Il's installation as commander in chief of the armed forces:

A short while later, Kim Jong Il was named the commander in chief of the Korean People’s Army. And a big sign inscribed with Kim Jong Il’s words, “A world without North Korea need not survive,” was duly installed at the exhibition hall, the nation’s flagship display of achievements in industry, technology, engineering, and agriculture.

On the eugenic policies of Jong Il:

Living under a totalitarian regime requires a daily suspension of disbelief. Nowhere is that more true today than in North Korea, where otherwise ethical people contort themselves into untenable moral positions because they’ve bought into the oft-repeated notion that their country is “Paradise on Earth.” Simply to survive in North Korea, citizens must believe they are living in a chosen land. And when ideological indoctrination morphs into reality, the dictator need not even be nearby to spread fear. Not if average people will do his bidding for him.

All of which is bad news for those who don’t fit into Kim Jong Il’s ideal of a healthy, vital citizenry. In the people’s paradise that is North Korea, disabled -- even short -- people are considered subhuman. In 1989, Pyongyang hosted the World Festival of Youth and Students. In preparing for the international gathering, the entire nation was encouraged to outdo South Korea’s hosting of the Summer Olympic Games the year before. Pyongyang’s event had to be bigger and more glamorous. One such method was to purify the revolutionary capital of Pyongyang of disabled people.

Six months before the festival, the government rounded up all disabled residents of Pyongyang and sent them away from the capital to remote villages. The majority were clockmakers, seal engravers, locksmiths, and cobblers who made their living in the city. Overnight, they were forcibly deprived of the lives they had known.

. . .

My friend, a well-connected physician at the time, told me that he had been ordered by the Communist Party to pick out the shortest residents of Pyongyang and South Pyongan province. Against his conscience, he went out to those areas and had local party representatives distribute propaganda pamphlets. They claimed that the state had developed a drug that could raise a person’s height and was recruiting people to receive the new treatment. In just two days, thousands gathered to take the new drug.

My friend explained how he picked out the shortest among the large group. He told the crowd that the drug would best take effect when consumed regularly in an environment with clean air. The people willingly, and without the slightest suspicion, hopped aboard two ships -- women in one, men in the other. Separately, they were sent away to different uninhabited islands in an attempt to end their “substandard” genes from repeating in a new generation. Left for dead, none of the people made it back home. They were forced to spend the rest of their lives separated from their families and far from civilization.

On Kim Hyun Sik life now:

Thirty years have passed since I last saw Kim Jong Il. Upon leaving Pyongyang, I spent some 10 years in South Korea. And now I am living in the United States, the land of my so-called mortal enemy.

. . .

In 1991, during a stint as a visiting professor in Moscow, I was approached by a South Korean agent. He brought me incredible news. He could arrange a meeting with my older sister, who had fled to the South during the Korean War and later moved to Chicago. Arranged by South Korea’s national intelligence agency, it would be the first time we had seen each other in more than 40 years. All that time, we thought the other was dead. I was overcome with emotion. She begged me to come back to the United States with her and become a minister -- our mother’s dying wish for me. Although I could not return with my sister, it was one of the happiest moments of my life.

Our joy was short-lived. Another agent who had allowed us to use his house as a meeting spot was, in fact, a double agent working for the North. I received instructions from the government to return home the very next day. But I knew very well I couldn’t; I would be killed as a traitor. I anguished over what my failure to appear would mean for my family back in Pyongyang. It’s bad enough for a soldier or a student to defect. But I knew intimate details of the ruling family’s inner circles. Surely they would view my betrayal as a personal insult.

I never returned to North Korea, and I never saw my family again. A few years later, I heard from a well-placed South Korean minister that my family had been sent to a gulag and murdered, the innocent victims of my treasonous crime. To this day, I know nothing of the details of their deaths, or whether they blamed me as they perished.

Music: Hey, you got black death vomit in my party punch! Well you got party punch in my black death vomit!

The Handsome Furs video for their tune "I'm Confused" updates Poe's famous "Masque" with a mini-movie about a hipster house party that goes fatally pear-shaped when a man infected with some insanely contagious malady arrives and starts spreading the love.

Enjoy.


Handsome Furs "I'm Confused" from Sarah Marcus on Vimeo.

Comics: "Who needs rape when there's Hostess Fruit Pies!"

One last bit of Watchmen follow-up. From artist Elan'Rodger Trinidad comes the fruit-filled goodness of "Presidential Trouble".

Movies: Who watches about three-fourths of the Watchmen?

One of the great myths of modern art is that truly important and valuable works should piss off their audiences. If you wanted to provide a "big bang" moment for modernism and all that followed, you could do a lot worse than selecting the audience riot at the 1913 premiere of Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring." Not only did this establish an audience revolt as the sign that a modern composer had made it (making Steve Reich, by virtue of his 1973 "Four Organs" inspired audience uprising at Carnegie Hall, the last composer to truly make the big leagues), but it helped establish a trope that has sustained generations of artists and hacks alike: a energetic boo is the applause of the ignorant.

I bring this up because when I say that several Courtesans walked out of Watchmen, the eagerly anticipated Snyder adaptation of the landmark funny book by Messrs Moore and Gibbons, I suspect that many will envision something heroic. Several of you will imagine that Snyder's film assaulted the smug assumptions of these complacent consumers who, used to being spoon-fed by the Hollywood dream machine, stormed off in an indignant huff when Snyder and Co. called them on their shit.

But, in actuality, it was considerably less energetic than all that. The Courtesans who abandoned the film did not resemble irate partisans at a barricade. In fact, they didn't even have the brittle self-conscious hauteur of those who perceive an unjust slight. Instead, they left in a slouch that called to mind the shuffle of a middle-aged man who, realizing that his eyes are growing slightly tired, decides that bed holds far more interest then the book he's reading.

This was not an energetic boo, but a barely suppressed yawn. In a way, it is a testament to the film's power that none of these retreating Courtesans were angry. I've seen Courtesans walk out on movies before and the leaving parties almost always announce, at great volume and length, their intention to seek full financial restitution from the management of Loews Theaters. Not this time. Placidly, almost accidentally, they filed out, checking their watches, stretching their legs, playing with their iPhones. One half expected them to rub sleep from their eyes.

While I did stay through the whole thing, I sympathize slightly with the Courtesans on this one. In the final analysis, the most interesting thing about the flick is that it ever got made. Insomuch as this is an interesting sociological milestone with regards to the relative weighting of mass cult genres in the balance sheets of your major media outlets, it deserves a passing mention. Doubly so in that, after becoming the poster child for how much excitement and buzz a movie can get out a cult property, the nearly $40 to $50 million dollar bath Warner Bros looks like they might take on it may make Watchmen the last exemplar of the "if you can win the fanboys, you win Joe and Jane Doe" school of greenlighting. Otherwise, the signal feature of the Watchmen film is how relentless average and unnecessary it is.

Like a proficient tribute band, the Watchmen flick is essentially a mash note to its source material that, at best, makes you think about how good the original is. This relationship to its source, and not any of the much analyzed plot alterations, is the truly significant difference between the film in and the book. The Watchmen graphic novel had a fairly complicated relationship to all the things that inspired it. Moore and Gibbons don't hate superheroes in the way Warren Ellis claims to, but I think it is fair to say that Moore and Gibbons question just what role these heroes have in understanding the conservative Reagan/Thatcher turn of the 1980s. If their affection for the capes-and-cowl set is complicated, their contempt for the logic of mutual assured destruction is not and Moore and Gibbons' disgust at 1980s culture is almost Swiftian in its virulence. Finally, they're too much the artists to just pour out some lefty cri de couer and call it a day. Instead, they invested most of his characters (the women excepted, I feel) with multiple facets. The disgusting neo-fascists at The New Frontiersman are racist jackbooted dillweeds, but they are also fairly spot on about what is happening behind the scenes. The psychopathic Rorschach is the only member of the troupe that is willing to lay down his life for the idea that humanity should not be blindly manipulated, even for the supposed greater good. This sort of thing is a repeated refrain and leaves the reader faced with a spectacle of people who are neither all good, nor all evil, struggling to make moral decisions in an infinitely complex world.

By contrast, Watchmen the movie is about how absolutely cool everything in the Watchmen graphic novel was. Where Gibbons's artistic choices were dictated by a need to communicate a morally conflicted and ambiguous story to the reader, Snyder's visuals were dictated by a need to show how great the work of Gibbons was. Often, this results in nothing more interesting or damaging than slavish loyalty. Where it goes truly wrong is in those moments where Snyder decides to really cut loose. It is these sections that Snyder reveals that he knows the Watchmen more by legend than engagement with the text. Whenever Snyder comes across an instance of restraint in the comic, he can't resist taking it over the top. The 300-style battles are an example of this. The fight sequences in the comics, for example, are not only less violent, but character specific. Rorschach is a ruthless ambusher, the Comedian is a bully, and so on. In the flick, everybody busts into crazy Zack-attack slo-mo action. Not only does it get tiresome fast, but it actually levels some of the story. Though we're told in the comic that the Comedian's assassin would have to been quite strong to toss his butt out a window, I've always felt that the absence of a fully visualized fight left open the question of how the Comedian would have done in a fight against somebody other than unarmed civilians, a half-naked and unsuspecting teammate, a preggers woman, or VC retreating before the might of Dr. Manhattan. In the flick, everybody is a kung-fu master and they just go ape whenever they get their fight on.

This might seem like a small point, but the effect piles up. Take the motivations of Dr. Manhattan: In the comic Dr. Manhattan is frustratingly hazy on whether or not, from his god's-eye view of the world, free will exists or not. At some points he seems to be making decisions and weighing options, but at other points he seems to be telling the other characters that all action has already been determined. Free will, fate? Don't worry, Snyder will work it all out for you. In the flick, the issue of predetermination is taken off the table and Manhattan's complicity in Veidt's plan becomes a simple matter of duplicity and persuasion. Finally, in the final scene of the film, Snyder plays the pathetic and heartbreakingly real acceptance Specter II gives her mother with all the emotional tidiness of one of those "Hey kids, we sure had fun today, but there's nothing funny about attempted rape" post-show edu-justifications they used to tack on the end of 1980s commercial/toons. The comic ends with perhaps the neatest statement of the book's relationship to superheros, metaphorically rendered as the relationship between Sally and Laurie: Laurie knows her mom is hopelessly screwed-up and delusional, but she can love her anyway. The movie plays the whole thing out as if Sally's relationship to the past was rational and all is understood and forgiven.

(Recently, despite overwhelming evidence from the director's incessant "I just want to be a loyal as possible to text" comments and the resulting film, a new critical camp has arrived claiming that Snyder's work is a Starship Troopers style provocation. (Like the final great battle in The Hobbit, new competing camps seem to keep arriving on the scene.) I can't see how this position could be defended at all and, perhaps more importantly, it wouldn't matter. The approach to Starship Troopers - adding a Naziploitation gloss – helped underscore the way in which the source material replicated the fascist fascination with force and regimentation that it attempted to critique. Snyder's Valentine to the comic book has no such critical distance. RE: The widely criticized sex scene in the Archie craft, Nite Owl's fetish for superheroics is established in the source text. Making a clumsy and overly lurid scene around it doesn't give us any more insight into it. It just makes the same critical point, but in a more heavy-handed manner.)

I don't want to make Watchmen sound worse than it is. It doesn't belong in the first rank of cape-and-cowl flicks, but it is far better than drek like Daredevil or the lame Fantastic Four flicks. It is competently made, reliably engaging, and occasionally thrilling. The plot changes and cuts are handled smartly and you'd have to be a pretty rabid fanboy to get fussy about that. Watchmen is a solid flick. But with such strong material, shouldn't it be more than just solid? In fact, the only real flaw is with the flick is that, unlike the graphic novel, it doesn't stride its medium like a colossus.

Music: It's the most wonderful time of the year.

For those overseas readers not hip to the oft opaque and confusing aspects of America's public culture, today is perhaps the most important secular holiday in the US calendar.

That's right! This March 10th, shops are shuttered, all but the most essential services are shut down, schools are quiet, and even non-violent offenders are given their traditional one-day leave to join their families in celebration.

For this single day out of the whole year, we leave our homes and meet our neighbors in the streets. People share traditional American fare, like Jell-O and pimento cheese-spread finger sandwiches. We laugh and we cry. Some of us will pour out a little of our malt beverages out for the dawgs who couldn't join us.

Then, as night rolls in, we all wrap ourselves up in toilet paper and do a violent dance called the Kirk.

Why? Oh, foolish not-Americans. It's because today marks the vinyl reissue of the classic '90s garage revival landmark The Mummies Play Their Own Records, by none other than the Mummies!

Second only importance only to Klaus Schaffenberger Day, The Mummies Play Their Own Records Vinyl Reissue Day is a joyous occasion, not unlike the UK's Happy Boiled Meat Day or France's own semi-annual Festival of Burning Peugeots.

Enough jibber jabber! Let's get to celebrating!

Here's the Mummies doing the song I married my wife to (by which I mean, this is the song I had in my head when the organist was playing "Tis a Gift to Be Simple"): "Stronger Than Dirt."


the mummies- stronger than dirt (funtastic) from rob downs on Vimeo.

And here's the Mummies classic "You Must Fight to Live (On the Planet of the Apes)":


the mummies- you must fight to live on the planet of the apes (funtastic) from rob downs on Vimeo.

Happy The Mummies Play Their Own Records Vinyl Reissue Day!

Mad science: The stench of fear.

From Science Daily, Rice U psych researcher Denise Chen claims that humans can smell fear in the sweat of other humans.

When threatened, many animals release chemicals as a warning signal to members of their own species, who in turn react to the signals and take action. Research by Rice University psychologist Denise Chen suggests a similar phenomenon occurs in humans. . .

"Our findings provide direct behavioral evidence that human sweat contains emotional meanings," Chen said. "They also demonstrate that social smells modulate vision in an emotion-specific way."

I don't know what I find more interesting, the conclusion that human sweat contains olfactory data that can alter the cognitive performance of our other senses or the description of how a determined researcher can collect the sweat of scared people.

Chen and graduate student Wen Zhou collected "fearful sweat" samples from male volunteers. The volunteers kept gauze pads in their armpits while they were shown films that dealt with topics known to inspire fear.

This study follows on the heels of a previous study by Chen in which she found olfactory exposure to "fearful sweat" increased concentration and accuracy in language-based exercises.

Movies: The kids are all fright.

Director Narciso Ibáñez Serrador's otherwise brilliant 1976 flick Who Can Kill a Child? starts off with a near fatal misstep: a tedious montage of Twentieth Century atrocities, all played out under a droning and pedantic voice, that informs us that children – won't somebody please think of the children! – are the real victims of the foolish violence of the adult world. We get footage of the Holocaust and the Vietnam War, among other things. Of course, there's no mention of the uncounted number of children that died in Spain's Civil War or the estimated 31,000 children forcibly taken into government custody and brought up in Spain's state-run indoctrination camps during Franco's reign (which had ended a year prior to the flick, so continuing fear of reprisals seems a less likely explanation for the omission than good ol' moral cowardice). First and foremost, this unnecessary lecture is painfully trite. The death of every victim in any of these various violent infernos of ideologically-driven stupidity is tragic. Did we need Serrador to remind us of this? Second, the montage is meant to serve as a sort of exposition for what follows, suggesting that we're going to see a Spartacus Jr. political revolt against oppression. While the idea is, in and of itself, not a bad premise for a story. (In fact, one of my favorite punk bands made a brilliant, if short, career out of just that premise.) The problem is that it doesn't apply to the movie Serrador made in any meaningful way as the director relies entirely on a supernatural explanation for what happens in the flick. Last, and by no means least, it serves as a sort of smart-ass answer to the question posed in the title. Who can kill a child? Apparently everybody. It seems to happen all the time. To be fair, even Serrador admits, in the interview provided in the special features of the DVD edition I watched, that he regrets opening with the montage. He feels that it should have come at the end of the flick. Rather, it should have stayed on the cutting room floor.

The first 10 minutes or so are awfully stupid, but survive the browbeating intro and you'll be treated to one of the few genuine gems of 1970s era Euro-horror. Uncanny and unsettling, stylish and well constructed, grotesque but ultimately humane, Who Can Kill a Child? partakes of the genre- and taste-punishing ethos of the best of grindhouse era horror from over the pond without demanding its viewers to dumb down or sacrifice solid storytelling for vapid stylistic flourishes.

The plot is simple, but well played. A British couple, the angular and excitable Tom and the very preggers Evelyn, are on holiday in Spain. Despite Ev's 'bout-to-pop-ness, Tom is determined that they avoid the crowds and make their way to a remote island he visited as a student researcher many years ago. Tom and Evelyn rent a boat and make their way out to the island only to find it semi-deserted. A handful of creepily silent kids watch the docks and roam the streets, but otherwise the island's principle town seems dead. Now, the average French couple or pair of vacationers from Italy would perhaps decide that a town completely devoid of adult life was a bad sign and get worried. But Brits don't give up on vacations. Mustn't grumble, after all. T & E go to find grub and shelter and, after some odd encounters with the local children, end up in a local hotel.

I don't think it quite qualifies as a spoiler to say that the children, evidencing some sort of hive mind telepathy, have off all the adults in the town and taken over. Tom learns this when he sees a handful of kids using an old man as a piñata. Literally. Only instead of a stick, they're using a sickle. Shocked and confused, Tom tries to keep a lid on things until he can think of a way out (another display of the Brits' stiff upper lip approach to demonic children and other disasters). After all, these are Spanish children – perhaps trussing up an on old man and taking whacks at him with an edged weapon is simply something these swarthy types do. It's Spain after all. Half Moor, isn't it? Barely even European. Sadly, Tom's "what problem?" approach is undermined by the appearance of a local adult who has been holed up in the hotel. Senor Exposition explains that, one night, the children just poured out into the streets. Laughing all the while, as if it were a big game, the children went from building to building and slaughtered all the adults.

The rest of the movie involves Tom and Ev's desperate and violent effort to escape the island while the children, moving in otherworldly unison, try to stop them.

The visuals are gorgeous. The film's got an overexposed, sun-bleached look that reminded me of Hooper's superlative Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The empty streets and faded buildings, though shot with a clean and almost workman-like efficiency, give the flick as strange sense of alienation. This mysterious island of children is part of the same Spanish sun-oppressed landscape one gets glimpses off behind the melting clocks and distorted humanity of a Dali painting. By keeping his children silent and cryptic, in the best Village of Damned tradition, Serrador doesn't allow his flick to suffer from crappy child acting. Instead, he uses his evil children as a swarm. The monster children in this movie have the same overwhelming and relentless malevolence we get from Hitchcock's birds. One particular scene in which a silent mass of hive-minded children slowly descend on a small seaside home in an eerily organized fashion is a standout that will imprinted in my brain for ages.

The acting is low key and somewhat silted, but way that starts out as charming and becomes a significant part of the emotional heft of the flick. It's somewhat like watching the cast of one of those PBS Mystery Brit-imports suddenly take a turn towards the weird and Lovecraftian. Ultimately, underplaying the whole thing works wonders. Tom and Evelyn always seem a little wooden, like to people playing at a marriage. As a viewer, you wonder whether this is just slightly lifeless acting. But, when the fit hits the shan, so to speak, their marriage proves to be a bit of a sham, in a painfully polite and earnest way. Tom and Ev care about one another, they want to do well by one another, and when they chips are down, they want to escape together. What they don't do is love one another. In one key scene, the couple is trapped in a cell, temporarily safe but also hopeless surrounded. The two protag's collapse, one on a plank bed and the other leaning against a wall until he slowly slides into a seated position on the floor. The viewer waits for Tom to get up and comfort his wife. But that moment doesn't come. More so than any of the violence or gore, it’s a devastating moment. Even the film's most horrific moment, in which viewers are treated to a truly novel and horrific interpretation of the term "inside job," is underplayed to great effect.

Even with it's lame intro, I highly recommend Who Can Kill a Child?. It is hard to imagine a better fusion of Euro-horror technique and classic "weird tale" style storytelling. Good stuff.