Uncanny My Ass: Penetrating the Performative Object

Just thought I should bump this up for them that are thinking "Friday night on Halloween weekend and nothing to do. What's happening in LA that's cool and "with it?" -- better check "DougH on the Go!"

Found and recovered video and cinema featuring ventriloquist dummies and related simulacra, featuring LIVE IN PERSON Marnie Weber and David Liebe Hart!!! Only $5!

Friday October 30, 2009, 8PM
The Echo Park Film Center
1200 N. Alvarado St
Los Angeles, CA 90026

Scroll down or click here for more details.
Image: Michael Redgrave and Hugo in Dead of Night

Outsider Holiday Music Again Again

I received a request to re-upload these compilations of unusual seasonal recodings (songpoems, celebrities, novelty, developmentally different, amateur, etc) again but it turns out some of the links are still live so I'll just repost those here..

"You may order your pastels from Alaska,
Imported, as the Igloo, in review"
- Evelyn Christmas (songpoem, Vol 2 track 4)

Download Outsider XMAS Vol 1
Download Outsider XMAS Vol 2

Tracklists in Comments



Images from Silent Night Deadly Night 5: The Toymaker

I Love You You Big Dummy

CCCP-SCC
The Coalition for Cinema Conservation and Preservation – Southern California Chapter

In conjunction with The Echo Park Film Center

Announces a one night only event – Friday October 30th 2009 at 8 PM

Uncanny My Ass: Penetrating the Performative Object

Join Hugo, Woody, Conky, Hugo, Chip, Marcy, and many others for a selection of found and recovered video and cinema featuring ventriloquist dummies, marionettes, sock-puppets, Resusci-Annie, crash test dummies, and anything else we can scare up.

Featuring special live IN PERSON appearances by Los Angeles artist, musician & filmmaker Marnie Weber (Party Boys, Spirit Girls) presenting her new short film “The Sea of Silence” and David Liebe Hart and His Puppet Friends (Junior Christian Science Bible Lesson Show; Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!) performing songs from a new original musical detailing the history of LA’s Pacific Electric Red Line!

The rest of the evening will be given over to a survey of ventriloquist dummies (and related simulacra) in popular culture, including excerpts from classic horror films “Dead of Night” and “Devil Doll” the “Conky” episode of Trailer Park Boys, and classic ventriloquist routines including a rare puppeteer-free video of Christian ventriloquy legend Little Marcy, and much more!

PLUS Legendary door prize raffles, Halloween refreshments, Surprise special guests and MORE!

The Echo Park Film Center
1200 N. Alvarado St
Los Angeles, CA 90026
(the blue building at the corner of Alvarado and Sunset)
phone 213 484-8846
www.echoparkfilmcenter.org

Friday October 30th 2009 at 8 PM

For Those with a Jonestown Jones

No sooner had I put my audio sampler up on my under-construction website than I get an email from one Fielding M. McGehee III of The Jonestown Institute asking me about the track entitled Jonestown (white night/white noise mix) created primarily from electronically processed recordings of Rev Jim Jones. I had never heard of the Jonestown Institute, but tracked them down easily enough - it turns out "Mac" is the spouse of Rebecca Moore, whose two sisters - higher-ups in the Peoples Temple organization - died at Jonestown, and whose book Understanding Jonestown and Peoples Temple was published by Praeger in March.


Their website is a huge and remarkable resource of information about Jones, Jonestown, and Peoples Temple, and they were very involved with the excellent documentary "Jonestown - The Life & Death of Peoples Temple." So when Mac asked me to write a short blurb about the Jonestown (white night/white noise mix) track and for their annual online journal The Jonestown Report, I was flattered, and jumped at the chance. The piece was actually the soundtrack for a painting, as seen above, and one of many works that I've produced concerning the episode in Guyana. One of my early essays for Art issues. - entitled The Aesthetics of Paranoia - also dealt with the legacy of Jonestown, and conspiracy consciousness in general. The new edition of the Jonestown report is online now, and features an extensive section on the Peoples Temple LP He's Able. My short essay is here.

"Thought Styling" and "Thought Stylist" are Registered Trademarks of the Buck Burns Center for Temporary Issues

"Even if you’ve heard of the Yes Men, “high profile” might seem a stretch for a pair of media hackers with a healthy Internet following and a moderately successful documentary to their names (or their pseudonyms). But just moments into their new film, The Yes Men Fix the World (previewing at the Hammer on October 21), you are jolted into a different perspective — as Yes Man Andy Bichlbaum nervously prepares to go live on BBC television in front of 300 million viewers, posing as a representative of Dow Chemicals, to announce long-overdue reparations to the victims of the Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal, India, in 1984. Within a couple hours, Dow’s stock value had plunged $2 billion.

Fix the World documents several more of the group’s two-pronged subterfuge — taking exploitative commodification to logical extremes, grisly (Vivoleum — a new energy source) or ridiculous (the Halliburton Survivaball, an inflatable disaster-survival suit resembling a bloated tick); or using their mistaken identities to demonstrate the concrete possibility that corporations can “Dow the right thing.” Which is, of course, an impossibility. No matter what the Supreme Court says, corporations are not people, and they don’t have consciences. Recent findings indicate that corporations are, in fact, a malevolent, parasitical, conceptual organism from a nearby star system, bent on the destruction of the human body, mind and spirit. The hapless primates that organize themselves into corporate enclaves are helpless pawns — if only corporations didn’t dangle such shiny things just out of our reach!

Beneath the hilarity and satirical incisiveness of the Yes Men’s antics lurks an awareness of this reality. Audience reaction shots focus on bored lackies breaking out in relieved, conspiratorial grins. By the time New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin responds to the Yes-Men-as-HUD with a rambling allegory about “a well-dressed lie chasing the naked truth,” it seems like everyone’s in on the gag — they just don’t know how to get out. The best art is always about dislocation, whether it’s a picture of a bison on the wall of a cave or an upside-down urinal rejected by an avowedly unjuried art show."

Read the rest of True Lies II: The Yes Men fix the world here.

The Yes Men Fix the World opens locally at the Laemmle Sunset 5 and Playhouse 7 on November 6

"Thought Styling" and "Thought Stylist" are Registered Trademarks of the Buck Burns Center for Temporary Issues

25 Minutes of Jim Pyke's Life He'll Never Get Back

I just ran across this flattering but inexplicable blog entry from last January, in which Jim Pyke of Ann Arbor reads my essay from the Gary Panter Picturebox book... aloud... in its entirety. The really unnerving thing is that this was Jim's last blog entry, after which pajkossy appears to have gone dormant. Welcome to the Mouth of Madness, Jim.

Bees in a Shop Vac

Bees in a Shop Vac, Bees in a Shop Vac, Bees in a Shop Vac, Right On!

There's Always Time for Jar Jar Binks

I should be writing, but you gotta prioritize and when its a question of sharing a poop-walk photo of a reflected shopping-cart dude as the aorta of Jar Jar Binks, I think we all know what goes on the back burner.

South from Arcata with Bears & Fabio

Well, I thought I'd be blogging daily about the Stone Summer Theory Seminar, but there was no time, and then with the Viking wedding in Arcata and all and most of my pictures still on the laptop and back to teaching and art writing, you're all just going to have to wait to find out "What Do Artists Know?" In the meantime here are some shots from the roadtrip back from Arcata - about 14 hours straight.







Images: First five at Redcrest CA - Bear signage at Redcrest Redwood Gifts; Marnie Weber & Welcome Bear; Outside and inside the Eternal Tree House; Christian Cummings and Fabio, Apricot Tree Restaurant, Firebaugh CA