Microscope Gallery release:
SUBLIMATED VIOLENCE & VISUAL EXCESS
James Fotopoulos and Laura Parnes in person
screening together for the first time
MONDAY JANUARY 23, 7PM
Admission $6
In connection with the current exhibition “Dreamful Slumbers” drawings and videos by James Fotopoulos, we present a unique screening and visual dialogue between Fotopoulos’ 16mm film “The Nest” (2003) and the video “Blood and Guts in High School” (2006) by Laura Parnes. The two acclaimed filmmakers have never before screened together, but have over the years recognized their shared interest in themes and approaches including formal film, narrative structures and genre. In these earlier works “The Nest” and “Blood and Guts in High School” both employ stylized dialog and acting to create highly charged worlds of psychosexual drama, sublimated violence and visual excess. The two are now collaborating on a feature, Ten Ways of Doing Time, which resurrects these concepts in a prison drama with science fiction motifs that explores codes of repression and domination through the framework of the experimental narrative.
PROGRAM
“Blood & Guts in High School”
By Laura Parnes
video, color, sound, 40 minutes 2006
“Blood and Guts in High School” features actress Stephanie Vella in a series of video installations that re-imagine punk-feminist icon Kathy Acker’s book of the same title. The book received notoriety from 1978-1982 during the rise of Reagan republicanism and the emergence of punk rock. In Parnes’ interpretation, each video-chapter presents a typical scene in the life of Janie bracketed by US news events from the time period in which the book was written.
“Filmed on bare-bones sets put together in gallery spaces, the video is a model of how to bring off an ambitions project with scant resources, and also of how to respect source material while transforming it. And where Acker’s novels have a quick-hit crash-and-burn intensity, Ms. Parnes’s video floats like a shark, forever hovering, but always watching and moving.”-Holland Cotter, New York Times
“The sets are elegantly austere, the framing remarkably succinct. (Parnes’s favorite shot is a claustrophobic high-angle close-up that places Janie’s antagonist in the frame over her shoulder.) Each line of dialogue is cushioned by an arch pause. There are no interruptions; everything is given due space.” David Velasco, Artforum
“The Nest”
by James Fotopoulos
2003, 16mm, 78min, color, sound mono
Filmed in saturated colors on out-of-date film stocks with an aggressive soundtrack, the story of The Nest is told – the marriage of two young professionals unravels after an unnamed accident physically and emotional traumatizes the wife. Government agents, shadowy investigators and transgender beings appear, trying to solve the nervous-breakdown-mystery of secret alien forces that chose the couple as their target. In-camera tricks, drawings, derelict optical printing, miniatures, puppets and prosthetic makeup effects convey the dual collapse of the protagonists’ lives and the film structure as one unified entity.
“The Nest’s physiological and psychological are one and the same, perhaps making it his most nakedly emotional feature yet, and firmly positioning his narrative work in that slender alternate stream inhabited by filmmakers like Bresson, Warhol, and (in the right mood) Sokhurov. In the coolness of its surface construction, its sly wit, and the surprising heat of its emotions, The Nest suggests that other great suburban tract of the ‘80s, Don DeLillo’s White Noise, but rather than being about a toxic airborne event, The Nest simply is one.” (Spencer Parsons, Cinematexas)
“Chicago-based underground cinema whizkid James Fotopoulos (who, at age 27, has created more than 90 films and videos of varying lengths) offers up a bleak and cryptically funny assault on suburban anomie in his latest, The Nest. … Fotopoulos creeps around the edges of character and drama, conjuring moods of paranoia and dread that suggest the carefully ordered routines of daily life are a kind of opiate administered by sinister forces. Shooting in harsh 16mm color, Fotopoulos renders The Nest in a typically Spartan, forbidding style that makes it seem as though he is some extraterrestrial visitor photographing humans for the first time, interrupted only by pockets of crude, stick-figure animation and intricately layered superimpositions. Fittingly, soundtrack eschews a conventional musical score in favor of industrial sounds that form their own kind of whirring, grating symphony.” – Scott Foundas, Variety
more info www.microscopegallery.com
tel: 347.925.1433
J/M/Z – Myrtle/Broadway
L – Morgan Ave or Jefferson Street
B54 Willoughby/Myrtle stop is directly across the street
January 23rd, 2012
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
William Butler Yeats
THE SECOND COMING
1919
January 18th, 2012
Molly Ivins, Plagiarist
By Florence King
Most liberals sneer, grate, whine, scream, and picket, but Molly Ivins chuckles wisely and smiles tiredly so everyone will regard her as a lovable cynic.
The Texas columnist describes herself as “a left-wing, aging-Bohemian journalist, who never made a shrewd career move, never dressed for success, never got married, and isn’t even a lesbian, which at least would be interesting.” Actually her professional Good Ole Girl number is far more interesting than mere lesbianism. An occasional commentator on the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour, she bellies up to the gourmet crackerbarrel and delivers laid-back wisdom with the serenity of a down-home Buddha who has discovered that stool softeners really work. Watching her go through her paces is like watching Ona Munson, who played Belle Watling in Gone With the Wind, doing an imitation of Spencer Tracy playing Clarence Darrow in Inherit the Wind. That’s a lot of wind.
Besides her newspaper column, Ivins writes for MS., Mother Jones, The Progressive, Rolling Stone, and The Nation. This has given her enough material for two collections: Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She? (named for the incensed Dallas advertisers who tried to censor her), and Nothin’ But Good Times Ahead.
She rounds up the usual sentiments. On guns: “Ban the damn things. Ban them all.” On bilingualism: “It’s racist for any Texas reporter south of Lubbock not to be able to speak Spanish.” Cutting capital gains is “the dumbest kind of tax subsidy to conspicuous consumption.” Pat Buchanan’s 1992 GOP convention speech “probably sounded better in the original German,” and gays move her to trite Freudianism: “Hating them seems to be a function of being afraid that you might be one yourself.”
She’s funny on the Texas legislature’s mangled English (“Disperse with the objections”), but she ruins it with an earnest tribute to Barbara Jordan, who, being black and female, gets credit for “eloquence.” Jordan actually took her oratorical pretensions from the Saxon Witenagemot, which is why she sounds like Alfred the Great with lockjaw.
Ivins’ own English ranges from politically correct (“yeoperson”) to Texanese (“bidness” for business, “Meskin” for Mexican) to hokeynyms (“our foundin’ daddies were about the smartest sumbitches ever walked”). She scatters the text with “Sheesh!” and “Well, poop!” and lots of “y’alls,” and practices multiculturalism complete with Yiddish misspellings (“the pièce de résistance of the whole schmear”).
She also knows how to gild a lily, as I discovered in the following passage:
In her definitive work, Southern Ladies and Gentlemen, Florence King observes, “The cult of southern womanhood…requires [a female] to be frigid, passionate, sweet, bitchy, animated, and scatterbrained all at the same time…. A horrifying number of us succeed, which accounts for that popular southern female pastime, having a nervous breakdown.”
The passage as I wrote it reads: “She is required to be frigid, passionate, sweet, bitchy, and scatterbrained—all at the same time. Her problems spring from the fact that she succeeds.” Add a l’il more on there, honey, give the folks they money’s worth.
This tarted-up quotation from my 1975 book appears in Ivins’ 1988 Mother Jones article, “Magnolias and Moonshine.” My name is strewn through this article, but never where it counts. She credits me on minor observations, but when the subject is politics—her turf—she plagiarizes me.
IVINS: “Keep in mind that Southerners are so conservative they voted for Franklin Roosevelt, so isolationist they voted for Richard Nixon, so populist they voted for Barry Goldwater, so aristocratic they voted for George Wallace, and that they see nothing peculiar in any of this.”
KING: “The typical Southerner:
—Brags about what a conservative he is and then votes for Franklin D. Roosevelt.
—Or brags about what an isolationist he is and then votes for Richard Nixon.
—Or brags about what a populist he is and then votes for Barry Goldwater.
—Or brags about what an aristocrat he is and then votes for George Wallace.
—And is able to say with a straight face that he sees nothing peculiar about any of the above.”
IVINS: “The Southern passion for military service first astonished the rest of the country in 1898, when Southerners signed up in droves to avenge the Maine. It was the country’s first war since Appomattox, and for 33 years Yankees had questioned Southern loyalty.”
KING: “In 1898, the phenomenon that surprised Americans nearly as much as the explosion of the battleship Maine was the vast number of Southern men who answered the call to the colors. It was America’s first war since Appomattox, and Southern loyalty had been in question for 33 years.”
Danged if this don’t remind me of an old left-wing quotation: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”
Published in Work! September/October 1995 Issue
January 10th, 2012
