I Have A Dark Footish

My friend Simon Max Hill is a hard-working casting agent who has been casting Portlandia, Nike spots, and other important television from his seat in Portland,OR.  He’s also an enthusiast of dancing, robots, and being a super weird generator of ideas at all times.  On Tuesday, he announced that it was my responsibility to make a sock puppet music video, and by Thursday I had it up.

  Here’s Dark Footish covering the Smiths.  And to the nice lady who said “Oh, this is great, I hope there’s more!”- it currently has 22 views.  I am the gothic Naomi Campbell of Youtube, I don’t get out of my coffin for fewer than 100 views.

Update: Four years later and we’re up to 140 views, only 410 fewer than a video of Bloodmeadow cracking her neck.

Lichtenstein Brushstrokes!

There is this Lichtenstein sculpture garden in Millenial Walk in Singapore that is a relative of another garden installed in Philadelphia in 1996. Here is a view of  one of six Lichtenstein sculptures from the sculpture garden outside my hotel.

Here it is up close.

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Here it is up close and personal.

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I am in Singapore, I have a camera and some free time. I like art.

It’s convenient to me that they have art right outside the mall. People seem to ignore it, because there’s two Lacoste stores within a mile, and everybody wants to go there. Also, if you are not used to being in ninety degree weather with 80 percent humidity in November, being outside where the sculpture is could kill you. I risked death, but as you can tell, it was hell on my hair.

There is sometimes a kind of paradoxical high level/low quality of service. I was in a drugstore, looking for hair products, and a well-dressed lady followed me around, letting me know that she was there to fulfill my every whim and passing fancy- however, it became clear that this was not the case when a furry hippopotamus change purse caught my eye that had to be un-Swif-tacked from the display, and when I asked her about it she deflated and resisted, and then finally turned around dejectedly to get scissors. So, she was playing Watch The Giant Freaky American To See If She Steals Something And We Can Cut Her Hands Off. I am not sure what kind of criminal mastermind I would have to be to say, I can go into a crowded store in a country with very severe criminal punishment policies, where I could be fined for spitting on the sidewalk and chewing gum in public, and where I am a foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier than anyone else, and steal this hippopotamus change purse with impunity. But I’m not even close to that level.

Update: Portland has acquired a Lichtenstein brushstroke, and we stuck it in front of our modern art museum:

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More about Lichtenstein on Artsy.com!

Here’s a cool write up they did on his career, and they asked me to link to their article, because I am a respected art historian type person!  Totally!

Update: I have now visited Lichtenstein Brushstrokes in Portland, New Orleans, Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles, because everyone needs a hobby

Eliza Rickman’s Start with Goodbye

I have known a creepily lifelike doll named Eliza Rickman for several years, and today she released a video for her song, Start With Goodbye. It’s composed of forced perspective vignettes with taxidermied animals.  Please enjoy it.

New Year Photos

Photo by Jonathan Saunders
Photo by Jonathan Saunders

Jonathan Saunders took this picture of me this week, largely because neither of us had anything better to do.  He’s shot George Carlin, Bernie Madoff, Don Imus, and me.  He’s an expert marksman, an artist, and a real weirdo.  Check out his photo blog at www.iliketotellstories.com.

 

Halloween 2013: God Save the Queen!

virginia jones as Queen Victoria costume goth

This year I decided to find a new “sexy” costume, so I went with the dowager Queen Victoria. She wore mourning black for forty years after the death of her beloved consort Prince Albert.  She was the first Royal to be photographed, and believed that cosmetics were for prostitutes and actresses. Is there really a difference?

The high point of my Halloweek was visiting Emo Philips, and he seemed very pleased to meet Sexy Queen Victoria.

virginia jones as queen victoria photographed by evan ballinger

Happy Halloween, everyone!

CATFACE Attack- Or, How Can This Entire Forever 21 Be The Same Thing?

cat face designs forever 21

I stopped into Forever 21 to see how cheap jeans could possibly get ($7!). That’s not a clearance price. These pants were designed into a seven dollar price point.

Let’s talk about how you make a seven dollar jean. So, it’s an in-house label, so there’s no retail markup. OK, it’s made in Bangladesh. They move the fiber content to hit the lowest duty possible. The fabric costs about a buck a yard. So, if we can accept a loss leader margin of 20%, then we can get labor at about a buck fifty. Buttons, labels and shit are a quarter. You’re never going to wear seven dollar jeans. You’re just buying them because they’re seven dollars. Leave them there. Nobody has ever seen them outside of the store. They suck.

Catface

Next, I saw some t-shirts with a tiger on them. Dresses with a tiger.  And tanks.  More cat t-shirts.  Then leopards.  A cougar.  What might have been a lynx.  Catfaces.

 Twenty catfaces were seen in the wild at the Los Cerritos Forever 21.  20% of the items for sale had some kind of catface on them.

It was as if every Forever 21 designer, in every category, was told that if their product for back-to-school didn’t have catfaces, they would be killed.

TREND REPORT: MANDATORY CATFACE

I can picture a poor designer mussing their trendy haircut and crying, “Look, I didn’t want to make a catface sweater, but I have a family!”

Now, just coming from the Fuck Yeah Fest, a ten year event based in Los Angeles, the only city with so little self-awareness it would name something that, it’s evident that young women’s fashion is pretty homogeneous.

Fast Fashion

Forever 21, Urban Outfitters, and H&M all make several lines a season, and, due to identical trend research, they tend to all look the same.  Looking around the festival, you can see the options: short jean shorts, floral rompers, circle shirts, crop tops, short dresses with the waist between the waist and the armpit, and maxi dresses.  That’s it.  Those are the only things available.  There wasn’t one pair of low-rise denim shorts.  Not one, even though they were ubiquitous a few years ago.

A month ago when I went to So You Think You Can Dance, it was all dresses who were short in the front, and long in the back, schlong dresses that don’t look good on anyone.  Also, lace and the color hot salmon.  These things are gone now.  It’s not that girls are scared of wearing last month’s clothes so much as the things they wear deteriorate by their next period.

Anyway, if you find yourself with the back-to-school crowd, they may look like a bit like a National Geographic special.

Hooray!

Les Savy Fav at FYFFest: Things That Happened

The fat man came onstage in a poncho.  He took it off and spoke to us about free love.

The fat man was wearing a tie-dyed top, which he raised and began to soulfully fuck his own belly button with his finger.

The fat man took the top off to reveal a silver unitard, which he grabbed his crotch through.  He left the stage to clamber up a tree.

The fat man climbed into a tree and hung upside down in a silver unitard.

The fat man asked for all the lights to be turned off, and asked for flashlights.  He put one in his crotch.

The fat man got down to his underpants and sang to us.  He stood onstage with the unitard pulled down to his knees and danced under the lights, his sweaty torso gleaming in the lights.

The fat man draped himself in a beige dress, which he pulls up to his tits.

The fat man produced an 8 foot ladder.

The fat man sat onstage and decorated himself in 3/8” black electrical tape.

The fat man started to climb the ladder.  A roadie tried to steady the ladder while the fat man got on the top rung and was shooed away.  He stood on top of the ladder, singing majestically, while I worried that he would fall off.

The fat man tried to jump off the ladder and land on his feet, but had to tuck and roll.  He lays, grandiose and Dionysian, upon the stage and didn’t stop singing.

The fat man produces a tiny striped sweater.   He starts trying to put the sweater on.  The armpit rips out but he gets into it.

The fat man produced a box of toilet paper and threw it to the crowd, so that we could pitch it through the air in arcing parabolas, shedding twisted paper paths.  I caught one but I throw it too straight and it doesn’t unravel much.  I think this is because I never threw footballs.  The empty box that used to hold the toilet paper is also passed around the audience, apropos of nothing, until it hits a girl in the head and we drop it.  I am impressed that one forcefully thrown bog roll lands on the top of the giant truss that forms the top of the stage rig.  It’s a beautiful moment but I also reflect on the fact that all of the bathrooms will be out of toilet paper by the last show, and we could have used it.

The fat man announced that it was the last song.  I was caught admiring the tendrils of toilet paper everywhere and missed the moment when he laid the folded-up ladder on top of the crowd, climbed atop it, and made rowing motions until the people below began transporting him through the crowd.  I walked over to where it was happening and was amused by the sea of people taking photographs of the event.  We could probably make a 360 degree hologram of it at this point in composite.

It was amazing.